EOKEIGIT I5s"TELLIGENCE. 



145 



the only other agent that has affected the country on a great scale is gla- 

 cier ice. All the lakes lie direct!}' in the courses of the ancient glaciers. 

 The basin of the Lake of Geneva is 950 French feet deep near its eastern 

 end, and was scooped out by the great glacier of the Rhone, the ice of 

 which, from data supplied by Cliarpentier, was, as it issued from the valley, 

 3,550 feet thick to the bottom of the lake. This great weight of ice ground 

 out the hollow of the lake, which gradually shallows towards Geneva, 

 where the glacier thinned and the grinding power was lessened. Where 

 the same glacier abutted on the Jura, the ice-current was arrested, and it 

 flowed to the aST.E. and S.AY. ; and where the ice was thickest and heaviest 

 above the Lake of Neuchatel, it ground out the hollow in which the lake 

 lies. 



The lakes of Thun and Brienz lie in the course of the great Aar glacier, 

 those of Zug and the Four Cantons in that of Altorf, the Lake of Zurich 

 lies in that of the Linth, the Lake of Constance in the course of the pro- 

 digious glacier of the Rhine Valleys, the numerous little rock-basin lakes 

 near Ivrea in the line of the glacier of the Yal d'Aosta, and those of Mag- 

 giore, Lugano, and Como, in the courses of the two gigantic glacier-areas 

 that drained the mountains between Monte Hosa and the Sondrio. 



The sizes of the lakes and their depths were then shown to be, in several 

 cases, proportional to the magnitude of the glaciers that ground out the 

 basins in which they lie, and the circumstance as to A^ hether the pressure 

 of ice was broadly diffused, or vertical as in narrow valle3'S. 



Finally, it was shown that rock-basins holding lakes are always exceed- 

 ingly numerous in and characteristic of all countries that have been exten- 

 sively glaciated. Lakes are comparatively few in the southern half of 

 North America, but immediately south and north of the great lakes and 

 the St. Lawrence, tlie whole country" is moutonnee and striated, and is also 

 covered with a prodigious number of rock-basms holding water. The same 

 is the case in the North of Scotland, the whole area of which has been 

 moulded by ice ; and east of the Scandinavian chain, in another intensely 

 glaciated region, the country is covered by innumerable lakes. 



FOEEIGi^ INTELLIGENCE. 



M. MelleviUe, the Vice-President of the Societe Academique of Laon, 

 has published an account in the 'Revue Archeologique ' of an object of 

 human workmanship found in the lignites of that neighbourhood. 



Starting on the basis that man was contemporaneous with the great 

 carnivora and herbivora, and that objects of his workmanship are found 

 with their bones, he goes on to make out that the beds containing them 

 differ from the diluvium as much in the materials of which they are formed 

 as in the fossils they contain, and that they are more ancient than it as 

 they are everywhere covered by it. Those deposits belong to that geolo- 

 gical age, which immediately preceded the present era ; whilst it is ad- 

 mitted that the diluvium marks the commencement of the recent or his- 

 toric period. The ultimate consequence he deduces from the published 

 observations on this subject is, that there are two stone-ages — the first 

 ante-historic, corresponding to the epoch of the formation of the lacustrine 

 beds of the Somme, and characterized by large implements entirely of 

 flints chipped but never ground ; the other by far more finished and vari- 

 ous products, indicating a more advanced art and established relations 



YOL. V. TJ 



