39 
I cannot refrain from quoting further the remarkable con- 
cluding paragraph of Eobert Chambers^ who_, in his paper 
on Ice and Water/"’ says : — “ On the whole subject of the 
Superficial Formation^ I am disposed to make one concluding 
remark. I desire to refer to the broad fact, that, in the 
regions of the earth where soil can least be dispensed with, 
there should have been a peculiar agency at work, which 
secured the very general diffusion of soft matters over the 
hard surface. The warm parts of the world have large 
growth from little soil ; but if the parts north and south of the 
fortieth parallels had been left to only such influences as the air 
and water, they might have been so meagerly furnished 
with the needful matrix for vegetation, that little population 
could have there existed. As it is, v/e have clays, and sands, 
and gravels, and mixtures of all three, spread in deep beds, 
very generally over the temperate regions, so as to insure 
ample material for the agriculturalist to work upon. In the 
present state of the subject of final causes, I suppose it would 
be held as rash to say that all this was a matter of design ; 
but I feel at least inclined to say that, if it was not from a 
premeditated plan of the Almighty Creator of the worlds, it 
looks marvellously like one, just as the existence of coal and 
other minerals does, and I do not see that we can be far and 
fatally wrong if we feel thankful for it accordingly. 
Thus, the origin and histo’^y of the gravel beds appear to 
lead irresistibly to the conclusion that the implements (if 
a constituent part of gravel) had a geological, and not an 
antiquarian, origin. And this conclusion is supported by an 
inspection of the exposed section of the gravel bed, which 
shows that the implements and gravel are similar in the 
nature of the stone, — are embedded in the same matrix, — 
show the same kind of fracture, and have been subject to the 
same forces, both in kind and degree, as the angular cliert 
gravel in which they are found. Thus, we must infer that 
the implements do constitute a true part of the gravel itself, 
and that the natural agents which split and fractured the mass 
of the gravel, also split and fractured the selected pieces of 
chert, which have been dignified by the name of implements. 
If, on the other hand, we come to the conclusion that these 
fractured pieces of chert are implements made by human 
hands, then we cannot escape from the inference, that men 
existed in great numbers before the formation of the present 
cultivated soil, and before the final close of glacial catastrophe. 
Ice and Water: a Review of the Superficial Formation^ p. 41. 
