72 REV. PROF. G. F. WRIGHT, ON THE INFLUENCE OF THE 
dogma on the Glacial Epoch and on geologic time generally, is not 
its least meritorious feature. It seems to me that, to any one not 
obstinately committed to the views of a school, it must be difficult 
to refuse to accept most of, if not all, Dr. Wright's conclusions. His 
remarks on what has recently come to light in connection with the 
ancient civilisations of Central Asia far back in the remote past, and 
the relations in which they stood to other primeval portions of 
the great Human Family, seem to me to add to the human interest 
of the subject ; and the more so, when we recollect that on the 
other side of the great Thianshan range another ancient civilisation 
— that of Tibet — was developed, upon which, no doubt, much new 
light will soon be thrown, as experts get to work upon the 
magnificent Tibetan library recently presented by the Master of St 
John’s College to the University of Cambridge. 
When we piece together the results put forward in the present 
paper with those obtained by the Belgian explorers and those 
described by Professor Hermann Credner for North Germany 
(Elemente cler Geologie, 10th ed., 1906), we get such a complete 
picture of the combined action of ice and water in influencing the 
conditions of life of Primeval Man, as perhaps had never been given 
before to the scientific world. It is no longer a question of “ Ice or 
Water 1 ” (which are, after all, only two different physical conditions 
of one and the same substance essentially*), but rather a contempla- 
tion of the vastness of results achieved by variations of temperature 
over vast portions of the surface of our planet, as these have been 
determined by regional oscillations of level of the lithosphere acting 
during long periods of time. Dr. Wright’s work, carried on in the 
free scientific atmosphere of the New World, seems to have eman- 
cipated his mind from that slavish literalism in the interpretation of 
the prehistoric records of humanity, of which a former President of 
the Victoria Institute (the late Sir Gabriel Stokes, F.E.S.) used to 
speak with a sort of contempt, and of which we have had recent 
reminders in the correspondence-columns of the Guardian newspaper, 
in connection with the Creation-story of Genesis 1. The concluding 
paragraphs of Dr. Wright’s paper justify the remark, that the last 
word of science on the “ Noachian Deluge ” has not yet been 
* That is to say, they are one and the same chemical body ± 80 
Centigrade thermal units per unit of mass. 
