486 
GEOLOGICAL FEATURES OF OUR GLOBE. 
observed similar deposits, and adds, “ From tbe perfect state 
of tbe bark and tbe position of the trees, so far from tbe sea, 
there can be but little doubt that they grew originally in 
that country”; * he sawed one through, it appeared very close 
grained, and so immensely heavy that he could only carry a 
very small piece of it away ; these are very interesting facts ; 
when those hills were formed, which are three hundred feet 
high, the water must have stood fully that height upon them, as 
well as on the main land of Siberia ; whether drifted there or 
deposited by icebergs, it seems clear there was, at any rate, 
an elevation of fully three hundred feet of ocean greater than 
there is now, by which the icy hills of Siberia were floated, 
and finally stranded as the waters of that ocean retired ; it is 
evident, both from the fossil remains of the mammoth in 
Britain, and those of tropical trees and plants, as well as the 
grooved hills, that the same waters flowed over the British 
Islands, floated the icebergs which grooved its mountains, and 
deposited those erratic boulders, which still attest the fact. 
This must have been the glacial period of which geologists 
speak and it is evident that it suddenly succeeded a warmer, if 
not a tropical one, in those parts. It does not seem probable 
that it could have been a gradual change, otherwise those 
huge mammoths packed in ice, would not have been pre- 
served in such a perfect state, but would have been more or 
less decomposed when entombed ; the destruction of life and 
the formation of those icebergs must have been simultaneous. 
The glacial theory as now held, which is supposed to have 
totally destroyed animal and vegetable life over a large 
portion of the earth's surface, and continued for such an 
immense period, far exceeding the Bible or any other chro- 
nology, causing plants and animals to forsake the frozen 
regions and migrate to the equator, seems far more difficult 
to account for, than any discrepancy which is fancied to exist 
between the pages of Scripture and those of the book of 
nature ; geologists assume their glacial theory as a fact, but 
assign no possible cause ; Holy Writ asserts the fact of a 
* The discovery of the N. W. passage, H. M. S. “Investigator,” Captain 
R. M’Clure, page 209. 
