i88o.] 
399 
A nalyses of Booh. 
consequence, if glaciation was due to a temporary decrease in 
the sun’s radiant heat, it must have occurred simultaneously in 
both hemispheres, as was concluded by our late friend Mr. Belt, 
from his geological researches. It need scarcely be said, how- 
ever, that Dr. Haughton utterly disagrees with Mr. Belt as con- 
cerning the cause of the Ice Age. Our author, in passing, notes 
the absence of all evidence of glaciation in Siberia. Whether 
this absence extends to all parts of that vast region, and whether 
future research may not somewhatjmodify our conclusions in this 
respeCt, are perhaps open questions. But what if, during the 
Glacial epoch, north-eastern Asia was mainly under water ? It 
seems, even since what may be called historical times, to have 
been undergoing a gradual elevation. 
As factors in the climatic peculiarities of earlier geological 
ages, Dr. Haughton calls attention to two points often over- 
looked, viz., the large quantity of carbonic acid in the atmo- 
sphere during Palaeozoic times, and the excess of watery vapour 
in the Miocene period. Both these bodies, especially the former, 
have a much greater power than oxygen and nitrogen in arresting 
the passage of non-luminous heat. It is scarcely too much to 
say that if the atmosphere were equal in this respeCt to carbonic 
acid, frost would be unknown outside the Polar regions. 
As regards the origin of life upon our globe Dr. Haughton 
rejeCts, with well-merited ridicule, the wild hypothesis which 
seeks to derive organic existence from an aerolite, — the “ moss- 
covered fragment” of some disrupted world. As we pointed 
out on a former occasion, this assumption merely postpones the 
difficulty, — “ lengthens out the disease,” like FalstafT’s loans, 
unless we can explain how life took its rise in that other world. 
.Our author sees nothing unphilosophical in the assumption that 
organisms may have been produced from lifeless matter, under 
peculiar, Divinely-arranged, conditions. 
Dr. Haughton’s views on the future of our globe do not agree 
with the expectations of poets and orators. He shows that ulti- 
mately Mother Earth will become an airless and waterless orb, 
revolving on its own axis in the same length of time as she 
revolves round the sun, one hemisphere being scorched with in- 
tolerable heat and the other pinched with unceasing frost, — -a 
counterpart, in fa<ft, of the moon. Indeed the author is not, in 
the stridt sense of the term, a Uniformitarian. He contends — 
and what geologist can contradict him ? — that the earth has al- 
ready experienced many marked changes of climate. But such 
changes will scarcely be denied by the ordinary Uniformitarian, 
who simply holds, in opposition to the Catastrophist, that the 
organic population of the globe has not been completely extir- 
pated some eight or ten times, being then, after a “ period of 
repose,” succeeded by a fresh creation. We find in the work 
before us no evidence to conned Dr. Haughton with this latter 
school. 
VOL. II. (THIRD SERIES). 2 F 
