i 877 «] The Loess of the Rhine and the Danube. 89 
covered them with a mantle of false-bedded sands and 
gravel. The evidences of this debacle were insisted upon 
by the last generation of geologists, and they are to be found 
everywhere over the south of England ; but of late years 
they have been almost ignored, Prof. Prestwich being, I 
think, the only one who still advocates the old theory. 
After being thus broken, the icy barrier soon closed up 
again, and the great lake was reformed, and this time was 
much more permanent, and probably existed until the com- 
munication between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean 
was cut through. 
The areas with which this paper has had especially to deal 
are at an altitude of more than 500 feet, and no traces of the 
debacle could be expected, though I think there is evidence 
of the more gradual lowering of the upper part of the first 
lake in the separation of the loess into two divisions, as at 
Wurzberg. It is to the first rising of the waters that I attri- 
bute the destruction of the mammoth and the woolly rhino- 
ceros, and probably of palaeolithic man in Europe. The 
evidence is perhaps not so conclusive with regard to palaeo- 
lithic man, but as concerns the two great quadrupeds it is 
clear and decisive. I can find nowhere in Europe a trace of 
their existence after the first rise of the waters. In the 
great debacle their bones were carried and spread out over 
the low grounds along with the lowland gravel, and doubtless 
often carried unto the top of low-lying patches of boulder 
clay, but in these cases they are broken, single, or rolled. 
And in the valley of the Rhone, as the great advance of the 
Alpine glaciers preceded by a long time the culmination of 
the ice of the Atlantic and Pyrenees, and the destruction of 
the great mammals did not take place until the approach 
of the latter event, there are apparent proofs of their post- 
glacial existence, but the evidence only shows that they lived 
after the culmination of the Alpine ice, not after that of the 
Glacial period. The evidence of the latter is not the glacia- 
tion of the rocks of the Rhone above Lyons, but the gravels 
and clays spread out in the same area by the great lake when 
there was a high ridge of ice to the southward and that of 
the Alps had shrunk back. 
Probably palaeolithic man, the mammoth, and the woolly 
rhinoceros survived through the culmination of the Glacial 
period in Asia, though the two quadrupeds soon afterwards 
became extinCL Mr. Boyd Dawkins and Sir John Lubbock 
have given cogent reasons for supposing that the Eskimos 
are the descendants of palaeolithic man, and they still sur- 
vive in north-eastern Asia. I found evidence when I crossed 
