rOEEIGN INTELLIGENCE. 
145 
the only other agent that has affected the country on a great scale is gla- 
cier ice. All the lakes lie directly 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 Charpentier, 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 N.E. and S.W. ; and where the ice was thickest and heaviest 
above the Lake of JN^euchatel, 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 Ehine Yalleys, the numerous little rock-basin lakes 
near Ivrea in the line of the glacier of the Val d'Aosta, and tliose of Mag- 
giore, Lugano, and Como, in the courses of the two gigantic glacier-areas 
that drained the mountains between ]\Ionte Rosa 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 wliich they lie, and the circumstance as to whether the pressure 
of ice was broadly diffused, or vertical as in narrow valleys. 
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. La\^Tence, the whole country is moutonnee and striated, and is also 
covered with a prodigious number of rock-basins 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 anotlier intensely 
glaciated region, the country is covered by innumerable lakes. 
FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE. 
M. Melleville, 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 tico stone-ages — the first 
ante-historic, corresponding to the epocli 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 finislied and vari- 
ous products, indicating a more advanced art and established relations 
YOL. V. TJ 
