INTERGLACIAL EPOCHS. 293 



cable confusion — appearances which are well shown in many 

 places, as, for instance, in the neighbourhood of Elbing in 

 Prussia, near Domitz in Mecklenburg-Schwerin, and again and 

 again in Mark Brandenburg. 



I have drawn attention elsewhere 1 to certain remarkable 

 facts connected with the distribution of interglacial beds in 

 North America, and have pointed out that the researches of our 

 fellow -labourers in the States and Canada have proved that 

 American interglacial deposits occur in the same peculiar 

 manner as our own : — they are absent or very rarely met with 

 in the regions north of the great lakes, and they increase in 

 importance as they are followed south. Mr. G-. Jennings Hinde 

 has recently described some very interesting and important 

 sections, which are exposed upon the shores of Lake Ontario. 2 

 These sections show no fewer than three separate beds of till 

 with intervening stratified deposits, the lower one of which 

 has yielded many plant -remains and freshwater organisms. 

 The section extends continuously along the shores of the lake 

 for a distance of nine miles and a half, and the fossiliferous 

 interglacial beds attain a thickness of 140 feet. Occasionally 

 they are violently contorted and confused, and in one place the 

 overlying till cuts down into them to a depth of more than 100 

 feet, the breach occupied by the till being about 450 yards in 

 breadth. Yet throughout the greater part of the section this 

 overlying till rests apparently quite conformably upon the 

 stratified deposits, which then show perfectly horizontal and 

 undisturbed bedding. Here, then, we have a case where one 

 and the same ice -sheet has ploughed out incoherent strata, 

 driving a deep and broad trench through them, although here 

 and there it has allowed them to escape with only severe 

 crumpling, contortion, and confusion, while in yet other places 

 it seems to have rolled its bottom-moraine quietly over their 

 surface in such a way as to leave the beds apparently unde- 

 nuded and undisturbed. 



The same geologist writes me that " up to the present time 



1 Great Ice Age, p. 466. 2 Canadian Journal, April 1877. 



