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POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
THE ICE AGE. — CLIMATE AND TIME. 
By ROBERT HUNT, E.R.S. 
I T is exceedingly difficult for the untrained observer to 
realise the fact, that there was a period, extending over 
long centuries of time, during which the mountains of the 
British Isles were covered with perpetual snow, and the valleys 
deeply filled with fields of ice ; — when the temperate sea, which 
now, with its warm water, laves our shores, was a frozen mass, 
until far west, and south of Ireland, it broke up into icebergs, 
which, floating away into the Atlantic Ocean carried the arctic 
climate yet further southward. Yet the investigations of the 
geologist have elucidated no more satisfactory truth than this. 
That there was a period in the history of the Earth’s mutations 
when an ice-sheet was spread over all northern continental 
Europe, forming an immense glacier in the Baltic, which 
flowed — as glaciers flow — into the North Sea, and found its 
outlet to the Atlantic by the English Channel ; — when the 
mountain ranges of Scotland were buried in a frozen mass ; — 
when all northern England and Wales was swept by Scandi- 
navian ice ; and, when even the southern and south-western 
counties were within the influences of a constant temperature 
below that of frozen water. This was the period which is 
generally distinguished as the Glacial Epoch, but which a 
recent writer* has, with much terseness, termed the Great Ice 
Age. At what period of time did this arctic climate prevail ? 
Evidence has lately been afforded, especially by the examina- 
tion of the caves at Settle, that man existed during, or perhaps 
previous to this glacial age. In the history of man this time, 
to use Professor Ramsay’s words, “ though lost in the far back- 
ward abysm of time,” yet in a geological sense so little pre- 
ceded our own day, that the larger contours of hill and valley 
as they yet stand, were already in existence, and probably all 
the forms of mollusca now living even then inhabited the 
northern seas.f 
* James Geikie. f “ The Old Glaciers of Switzerland and North Wales/' 
