150 



ISLAND LIFE 



PAKT T 



Europe, and especially of our own country, for evidence of 

 this kind, not only is such evidence completely wanting, but 

 the facts are of so definite a character as to satisfy most 

 geologists that it can never have existed ; and the same 

 may be said of temperate North America and of the Arctic 

 regions generally. 



In his carefully written paper on " The Climate Con- 

 troversy" the late Mr. Searles Y. Wood, Jun., remarks on 

 this point as follows : " Now the Eocene formation is 

 complete in England, and is exposed in continuous section 

 along the north coast of the Isle of Wight from its base to 

 its junction with the Oligocene (or Lower Miocene ac- 

 cording to some), and along the northern coast of Kent 

 from its base to the Lower Bagshot Sand. It has been 

 intersected by railway and other cuttings in all directions 

 and at all horizons, and pierced by wells innumerable; 

 while from its strata in England, France, and Belgium, 

 the most extensive collections of organic remains have 

 been made of any formation yet explored, and from nearly 

 all its horizons, for at one place or another in these three 

 countries nearly every horizon may be said to have yielded 

 fossils of some kind. These fossils, however, whether they 

 be the remains of a flora such as that of Sheppey, or of a 

 vertebrate fauna containing the crocodile and alligator, 

 such as is yielded by beds indicative of terrestrial condi- 

 tions, or of a molluscan assemblage such as is present in 

 marine or fluvio-marine beds of the formation, are of 

 unmistakably tropical or sub-tropical character through- 

 out ; and no trace whatever has appeared of the inter- 

 calation of a glacial period, much less of successive inter- 

 calations indicative of more than one period of 10,500 

 years' glaciation. Nor can it be urged that the glacial 

 epochs of the Eocene in England were intervals of dry 

 land, and so have left no evidence of their existence 

 behind them, because a large part of the continuous 

 sequence of Eocene deposits in this country consists of 

 alternations of fluviatile, fluvio-marine, and purely marine 

 strata ; so that it seems impossible that during the ac- 

 cumulation of the Eocene formation in England a glacial 

 period could have occurred without its evidences being 



