344 Glacial Period in the [July, 
lower than now. The theory is the same as has been pro- 
posed to account for the similar outspreads of sheets of 
gravel and drift in other parts of the world in the Glacial 
period, and the same objection is to be made to it — the 
absence of marine remains. In the case of New Zealand, 
the drift has not been found to contain even the broken and 
worn sea shells that in Europe occur in some cases where 
ice had advanced on the land from the sea, bringing some 
of the productions of the latter with it. 
If the theory is correCt, the land must have sunk 
nearly 2000 feet, to allow of the formation of the Canter- 
bury Plains. As it was slowly sinking and rising again, 
every portion of the area submerged would become a sea 
beach, and pass through the different stages of shallow and 
deep water ; that at the present sea-level to a depth of about 
2000 feet. As the land emerged, these stages would again 
be passed through. Along these successive coast-lines 
there would be bays and promontories, estuaries and sand 
banks, rocky cliffs and pebbly beaches. We have evidence, 
as Captain Hutton has shown to us, that the mollusks 
never left the shores. What then has become of their re- 
mains ? We may grant that there must have been much 
destruction of the old sea beds during the rise of the land, 
but there ought to be some exceptions from that devastation, 
and not total and supreme annihilation. The beds them- 
selves have not been destroyed ; there are sheets of gravels, 
sands, and clays, lying as they are supposed to have been 
spread out during the submergence, but they contain no 
marine organism. Contrast these with the pre-glacial beds 
in the same districts, as, for instance, the clays and sands 
on the coast at Wanganui and Oamaru. These teem with 
sea shells, yet the unconsolidated sands and gravels of which 
they consist have passed through all the vicissitudes of the 
Glacial period. In Europe it is the same ; the pre-glacial 
marine beds at Cromer and elsewhere, often of loose sand, 
are full of marine shells. We have also in Europe the post- 
glacial raised beaches, as in Scotland, up to 50 feet, and in 
Norway up to 600 feet above the sea-level, and these are 
>ften so crowded with marine shells, that in Norway they 
1 ave been worked for many years for burning into lime. 
We cannot believe that no life existed in these seas, for 
we know that it abounds both in the ArCtic and Antarctic 
regions up to the foot of the great ice-sheet. Dr. Hooker 
states that along the shores of the Victoria Barrier 
the soundings were invariably charged with diatoma- 
ceous remains, that the water and the ice of the South 
