PHYSICAL CONDITIONS— PLEISTOCENE. 357 



brick-clay. Such we might suppose would be the kind of treat- 

 ment to which interglacial deposits in Northern and North- 

 western Europe would be subjected during the closing glacial 

 epoch. And the conditions would be very much the same in 

 those portions of Central and Southern Europe which were 

 exposed to the intensity of glacial and fluvio- glacial action. 

 Even in regions that were neither glaciated nor swept by 

 torrents and floods, we might yet reasonably expect to find the 

 interglacial deposits frequently overlaid and obscured by super- 

 ficial accumulations, formed at a time when the cold of winter 

 was severer than at present. Now the mode of occurrence, the 

 state of preservation, and the present distribution of the inter- 

 glacial deposits, are precisely such as from the foregoing con- 

 siderations we might have anticipated. Eecalling certain 

 evidence brought forward in preceding chapters, we may observe 

 that in every instance in which relics and remains of the more 

 characteristic Pleistocene mammalia and of Palaeolithic man 

 have been detected in countries where the glacial and fluvio- 

 glacial accumulations of the last glacial epoch are strongly 

 developed, they invariably occur either in or underneath the 

 latter. In the more highly-glaciated regions, such as Scotland 

 and Scandinavia, the interglacial beds appear as mere patches, 

 more or less crumpled, confused, and abruptly truncated by the 

 till that overlies them. Farther south, in the lower- lying 

 regions of England and Northern Germany, where the ice flowed 

 with an equable motion, the beds occur in a less patchy form 

 under the boulder-clay, but they continue to give evidence of 

 the enormous crushing weight to which they have been sub- 

 jected. 



It may be remembered that, during the latter part of the 

 latest interglacial epoch, Wales and Ireland were submerged to 

 a depth of at least 1200 feet, and that Scotland likewise was 

 covered by a sea which overflowed the land up to 500 feet or 

 thereabout above the present tide -mark. We know that this 

 period of submergence must have endured for a long time, from 

 the fact that the beds of sand which were then accumulated 



