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reason to believe that it was universal or local, is another tiling ; and in 
the periods with which we are now dealing there is not a sweeping away 
of all the animal life which lived there at any one time. It is better to 
receive a simple explanation than to try and explain obscure phenomena by 
reference to violent shiftings of the axis of the earth. The persistence in 
the forms of life would offer a difficulty in accepting such a theory. The 
alterations in the magnetic pole is another thing. Those changes are too 
rapid to depend upon the great changes of the axis of the earth. With 
regard to the question of the solid nucleus that has been referred to, the 
friction between the solid nucleus and the crust would be too great to allow 
us to entertain any such opinion as that at all. It was brought forward 
some years ago, and it was shown by mathematicians at the time that it 
was an impossibility, and it would not help us in the present case, because 
it cannot be shown that the changes coincide with those climatal variations 
we have to explain. The simple explanation of wood being found in flint 
is, that there were plants on adjoining land, and fragments were washed 
into the cretaceous sea, and the part of the chalk in which they were 
embedded was replaced by flint. With regard to the palaeocrystic 
ocean, the manner in which the ridges are formed is this : when you have 
a large ice sheet formed on the water, and that sheet contracts by the 
reduction of temperature, you have to allow a metre in every thousand for 
contraction, which amounts to a considerable quantity when you are dealing 
with the great fields of ice in the Northern seas. After this chasm has been 
formed the water between the walls of ice freezes, and then comes another 
change of temperature ; expansion thrusts the ice walls together, and squeezes 
the newly-formed ice out. This, happening year after year, causes those 
great hummocky ridges which have been spoken of.* There is no doubt 
about elevation often being local, because many elevations which we have 
been able to observe are local. In New Zealand there was a clean cut, 
which could be traced right across the country. In South America it has 
also occurred. With regard to the question raised by the Duke of Argyll as 
to whether those gravels are exclusively of river origin, I can only say that 
the gravels I referred to are known by their contents to be of river origin, 
If his Grace had mentioned any particular group of implement-bearing 
gravels which he thought were not of river origin, then I might have dis- 
cussed the question. I fully allow the probability of the existence of con- 
temporaneous marine beds containing human remains, but in this paper 
have dwelt chiefly on the bearing of the admitted fact of sea-gravels at high 
elevations on the question of the antiquity of man. With regard to the 
shattered flints, almost all flints of this kind (referring to specimen 
exhibited) are shattered by surface action, — the action of changes of tem- 
perature due to frost and sun. 
The meeting then adjourned. 
* Nordenskiold, op. cit, 
