GLACIAL EPOCH UPON THE EARLY HISTORY OP MANKIND. 71 
= log. 195,500,000-5-4251 
8-82911468-5-4251 
= 0-0019504 
1-004501 
0-0045 
or 41 per thousand • or 9 persons on an average have been horn per 
thousand more than have died in every successive year since the 
Deluge, which works out to 92 per thousand in every ten years.* 
[One may add that the average excess of births at the present 
time in such European nations as publish returns — namely, all the 
Central and Western ones and three of the Balkan States — is 10-74 
per thousand per year.]t 
Professor Wright has also indicated that the sudden melting of 
the ice heaped up in Europe and America during the Glacial Epoch, 
where now there is none, would have raised the level of the ocean 
everywhere 250 feet, and so have produced a world-wide flood. 
But this melting itself, as our Secretary has through his own and 
similar researches shown, was produced by a gradual subsidence of 
the land surfaces, which itself caused the overflowing at least of 
those vast belts of land that now lie hundreds of fathoms beneath 
the sea. 
Rev. A. Irving, D.Sc. — The Victoria Institute is to be congra- 
tulated on the two papers bearing on the relation of the Glacial Epoch 
to the early life-conditions of Primeval Man, which have come before 
it in the present session. Here, where geology meets history, every- 
thing has a double interest — the scientific and the human ; and 
the usefulness of Professor Wright’s paper is the greater, when it is 
taken in connection with the bibliography of the “ Literature of the 
Niagara Falls,” which is appended to it, in which I am glad to see 
that the work of my friend Professor J. W. Spencer holds a 
conspicuous place. The fresh and breezy style of Dr. Wright’s 
paper, as he brushes aside the cobwebs of accumulated geologic 
* The idea of my equations I owe to an article that appeared in the 
French review, Les Mondes, in 1863. 
+ Calculated from the tables in Bartholomew’s Handy Reference Atlas. 
F 
fog. (i + A) 
X 
1 
X 
