372 



THE GEOLOGIST. 



even in those countries which the storm had spared. Thus in France, where 

 palms and a tropical vegetation flourished before, by reason of the change of 

 temperature, only northern plants would be produced, or those which we see 

 there now. 



" Tor the same reason the animals of hot cKmates of which we find the bones 

 would have ceased to appear there, and to multiply. It might be objected that 

 the cause being destroyed and the snow melted, the eifect ought to cease, and 

 the temperature to return to what it previously was. Truly, if this thaw had 

 been universal ; but it is not so, mtness the polar ices and all the glaciers of 

 the mountains; witness also the colder aspect of ail the uppermost strata of the 

 earth, — a reduction of temperature which may have dated from this very 

 cataclysm. 



" What would tend also to prove, up to a certain point, these deluges of 

 snow are the skeletons of mammoths found in Siberia with their flesh. Suffo- 

 cating them on the spot at the moment when they were full of life, that snow, 

 since transformed into solid ice, could alone accomplish such a result. One 

 can comprehend, too, how these animals, flying from the sudden and violent 

 storm, were arrested by the sea, and when entirely covered by the snow, since 

 frozen and hardened, their bodies have been, so to speak, eternalized, for 

 they would have been able to endure for millions of years still in the same state, if 

 the amelioration of the temperature or some fortuitous circumstance had not 

 brought about the melting of the ice which enveloped them. Hence the quan- 

 tity of their bones which still covers Nova Zembla and a part of Siberia, bones 

 so well preserved that the ivory of their tusks is esteemed nearly equal to new. 

 It is then perhaps at the bottom of some glacier, under some avalanche, or in one 

 of the enormous blocks of polar ice that we shall find antediluvian man ; and it 

 will not be merely his bones that we shall see, but the man entire, such as he was 

 when, put to sleep by the cold, death surprized him, and the icy preserving 

 winding sheet enveloped him like a fly in amber. 



" The world will treat this as a revery ; but how many fertile foresights, 

 which our fathers had treated as fables, have been realized ? How many others 

 rejected in our incredulity will be manifest truths to our descendants ? Leav- 

 ing here the speculative, and returning to the positive, we regard this deluge 

 of snow as the result of a sudden cause which has not yet entirely ceased. 

 The polar ices and our glaciers date not from the creation of the globe, 

 and many ages have elapsed before the earth received these icy showers. 

 Moreover, at the end of the snowy cataclysm, and even after the great 

 breaking up of the ice and the deluge which followed it, the elaciers were 

 more considerable and extended much farther than in our time. Blocks of ice 

 broken out by the waves and from seas remote floated within sight of our 

 coasts. Stranded by the tempest, or by the heaving of the waves, they 

 covered entire regions even in the temperate zone. In their melting they have 

 left on the soil those masses of granite, of sandstone, and other rocks which 

 arc called erratic blocks ; masses too ponderous to have been brought where 

 we now find them by the effort of a mere current of water. 



" The position alone of these blocks would prove that they had been placed 

 there not by a simple horizontal impulsion, but by a perpendicular action, that 

 is to say, by a successive sinking, or a movement from abore to below. 



" Placed in the interior of the iceberg, or pediaps on its surface, each block, 

 in ]n-o}iortion as the ice melted, sunk nearer to the ground or upon another 

 block before it had taken there its erect position. It is then on the soil, 



or on llrst sunken block that the second finds a basis where we now see it, 

 as upon a ]icdcstal. 



"Out" knows not otherwise how to explain these superpositions of stones, 

 for no hunuiu force could have raised them, and one cannot comprehend 



