372 
THE GEOLOGIST. 
even m those connlries wliich the storm luad spared. Tlius in Prance, wliere 
pahns and a tropical vcgrlation flourished before, by reason of the cliange of 
temperature, only northern plants would be produced, or those which we see 
there now. 
" Por the same reason the animals of hot climates of whicli we find the bones 
would have ceased to appear there, aud to multiply. It might ])e objected that 
the cause being destroyed and the snow melted, the effect 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, witness the polar ices and all the glaciers of 
the mountains ; witness also the colder aspect of aU the uppermost strata of the 
cartli, — 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. Suifo- 
cating them on the spot at the moment when they were full of life, that snow, 
since transformed into solid ice, could alone accomplish sucli 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 stiU covers ISIova 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 sec, but the man entire, such as lie 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 revcry; but how many fertile foresights, 
Avhich our fathers had treated as fables, have ])een realized 't How many others 
rejected in our incredulity will be manifest truths to our descendants ? Leav- 
ing here the sijeculative, and returning to the positive, we regard this deluge 
of snow as the residt 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 cla])sed 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 glaciers 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, aud other rocks which 
are called rrratic 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 above to below. 
" Placed in the interior of the iceberg, or perhaps on its surface, each block, 
in proportion as the ice melted, sunk nearer to the ground or upon another 
block which before it had taken there its erect position. It is then on the soil, 
or on the first sunken block that the second finds a basis where we now see it, 
as upon a pedestal. 
" One knows not otherwise how to explain these superpositions of stones. 
for no human 
aud one caimot comprehend 
