MODIFICATION OF THEORY EXAMINED. 129 



The summers may not indeed have been warmer than 

 they are now ; the winters, however, were certainly 

 much more genial." * 



This, be it observed, is a description of a condition 

 of things which existed during an Interglacial Period 

 belonging, not to the close, but to the very climax of 

 the Glacial Epoch. For, immediately preceding and 

 succeeding this Period, almost the whole of Northern 

 Europe was enveloped in one continuous sheet of ice. 

 " But if," continues Professor J. Geikie, " the evidence 

 of such a climate having formerly obtained be very 

 weighty, not less convincing are the proofs, supplied 

 by the Pleistocene deposits, of extreme conditions. 

 Think what must have been the state of Middle and 

 Northern Europe when Palaeolithic man hunted the 

 reindeer in Southern France, and when the Arctic 

 willow and its congeners grew at low levels in Central 

 Europe. Keflect upon the fact that in the very same 

 latitude in France, where at one time the Canary 

 laurel and the fig-tree flourished, the pine, the spruce, 

 and northern and high-alpine mosses at another time 

 found a congenial habitat. Bear in view, also, that 

 the land and fresh-water molluscs testify in like 

 manner to the same strongly - contrasted climate. 

 Besides those that tell of more equable and genial 

 conditions than the present, there are species now 

 restricted to the higher Alps and northern latitudes 

 that formerly abounded in Middle Europe, and their 

 shells occur commingled in the same deposits with the 

 remains of lemmings, marmots, reindeer, and other 

 northern and mountain-loving animals." f 



But more convincing still is another range of facts, 

 some of which have been adduced by Mr. Wallace 



* "Prehistoric Europe," p. 540. 

 f Ibid, p. 541. 



K 



