138 
FOURTEENTH REPORT. 
sarily warm the land but a warm sun certainly mnst do so to the end 
that the snowline would be elevated and glaciation be made less possible. 
It would seem that this one point must be sufficient to exclude increase 
of the sun’s heat as the cause of the low ocean level at the time of wide- 
spread glaciation. 
As to terrestrial heat, Frankland argued that glaciation resulted at 
what might be called a critical stage of slow earth-cooling. He conceded 
that very warm oceans would lift the snow-line and render glaciation 
impossible; and he claimed also that oceans as cool as ours today would 
furnish so little atmospheric moisture to be precipitated as snow that 
the glaciers would be no longer fed and would shrink to the dimensions 
observed today. This is very hard to accept in view of the abundance 
of precipitation which most of our lands enjoy. The mountain glaciers 
now in existence all over the world do not seem to be seriously limited 
by lack of snow, but they are very sharply limited by altitude. How- 
ever, between these two stages he introduced a third wherein there was 
an oceanic temperature higher than the present, but not too high, and 
by greater evaporation and resulting greater cloudiness and precipitation 
lie thought to get a lowering of the snow line sufficient to account for the 
phenomena of the Glacial Epoch. 
All this is rather ancient history to the geologist of today and need 
not have been mentioned except for the fact that the first and second 
propositions referred to at the beginning of this paper would have 
supplied Professor Frankland with a seemingly important additional 
resource. Under those propositions a large amount of terrestrial crust 
was supposed to have been removed and the new-formed ocean-beds were 
but highly heated material with water pouring down upon them from 
the continental plateaux, the water cooling the new beds at the expense 
of its own liquid condition. For some time after such an event we 
should have to picture to ourselves oceans with hot floors gradually 
cooling. At the outset the ocean level instead of being low would be 
absent. At the same time the amount of heat reaching the land-surfaces 
from the interior would be no greater than it was before, and cloudiness 
and precipitation would doubtless be excessive. Slowly, the ocean must 
cool, its level rising as evaporation diminished. We may agree with 
Frankland that the enveloping of the earth in vast volumes of warm 
vapor, the atmosphere being more dense accordingly, must necessarily 
give higher temperatures over all lands. While the high differential 
altitude of the land would have a decided refrigerating effect, it is not 
at all likely that the then elevated line of perpetual snow would be 
reached by anything like the mean level of the lands which were covered 
with ice in the Glacial Epoch. When the water did ultimately condense 
again and come to the present oceanic depths we should reach condi- 
tions like the present ones, which Frankland considered to have termin- 
ated the glaciation. Now on the way from the initial hot state to the 
present cool one, he would have argued, there would supervene a stage 
wherein there would be altitude enough of the lands above the sea to 
permit, and at the same time atmospheric moisture and cold enough to 
produce, glaciation in the higher latitudes and higher altitudes. Here 
we should have our paradox again, the Glacial Epoch being dependent 
upon oceanic heat for its origin and oceanic cold for its termination. 
Frankland cited Forbes’ table of the altitudes of snow-line in Scan- 
