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Gorman has done him perfect justice. (Hear, hear, from Mr. Callard.) 
It is now open for those present to offer remarks upon the paper. 
The Honorary Secretary. — Before the discussion commences, I have 
to read a communication* from Professor Boyd Dawkins : — 
“ Sir, — May I ask you to be kind enough to read the following note to the 
Victoria Institute, as, unfortunately, I am compelled by my engagements in 
* The following communication was also received from T. L. Strange, Esq., 
lately a Judge of the High Court of Madras : — 
“ The question raised by Mr. Callard is assuredly indissolubly linked with 
a circumstance of great influencing importance, to which he has given no 
consideration in his paper. The osseous remains, the antiquity of which is 
to be judged of, belong to all climes, assembled together in the same region, 
raising the inevitable inference that the locality where the several species of 
animals they belong to have flourished, must have had transitions of climate 
of a nature to correspond with the necessities of their existence. The lion, 
tiger, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, and hyena could not have occupied Britain 
but with the condition of tropical heat indispensable to their being ; nor 
could the hairy mammoth and the reindeer have lived there without arctic 
cold. The animals of the temperate zone were also in the land, as now 
possessed by them. Other very apparent indications of these climatic 
changes exist, where coal, the product of plants of tropical growth, and ice, 
to a thickness of 3,000 feet, as shown by Mr. Geikie, have predominated in 
one and the same portion of the globe, as in Scotland. 
“It would be natural to infer that such changes must be the result of 
fixed law, and not arising merely from the combination of adventitious 
circumstances, and that they must consequently be recurrent, the temperature, 
through invariable operating causes, gradually altering between the extremes 
of heat and cold. Mr. Geikie’s observation that the glacial visitation has 
occurred several times, supports the idea of regular recurrent law. 
“It should also be the case that the supposed law should be of universal 
prevalence, and not confined to any one portion of the globe, — that every 
part of the earth passes from a torrid to a frigid climate, incurring also every 
intermediate grade of temperature. Accordingly, coal, requiring tropical 
heat for its production, is found within eight degrees of the North Pole, or 
as far as our explorers have been able to force their way in that direction, 
and traces of the prevalence of ice have been discovered in tropical regions. 
Professor Agassiz found at the embouchure of the Amazon, or in the latitude 
of the equator, proofs of the deposition of some vast glacier, which he 
presumed had stretched from the Andes to the Atlantic, and concluded that 
that sea, in the said quarter, had at one time been as much blocked with 
ice as is the Polar Sea. Mons. Du Chaillu, to his intense astonishment, 
observed what appeared to him indubitable erratic boulders in equatorial 
Africa ; and I and others have seen similar boulders scattered over the 
elevated table-lands of Mysore and Bellary, borno thither, apparently, from 
the great chain of mountains that runs from above Bombay to Cape Comorin, 
along the western coast of India. One such well-known boulder lias been 
arrested at St. Thomas’s Mount, the artillery station, within eight or nine 
miles of Madras. 
“ To convert such a climate as exists at the poles into one such as there 
is at the equator, and vice versa, it is obvious that the direction of the sun’s 
rays has so to be altered towards the parts to be thus affected, as would 
create the great heat to be introduced at one time, and the intense cold to be 
substituted at another. In other words, there must be that change in the 
