354 
Superficial Gravels and Clays . 
lJ uly, 
the Carpathians, and the mountains of Armenia were likely 
the ranges on which many animals and plants found 
security, and which formed centres of dispersion in post- 
diluvial times. The ethnologist now finds on some of these 
mountains remnants of diverse peoples, and the naturalist 
animals and plants preserved there and absent from inter- 
mediate tradts of country. 
The non-occurrence of human bones along with the flint- 
implements and the remains of the great mammals in the 
British Isles suggests that the palaeolithic people of these 
parts escaped, at least for a time, from the rising waters. 
Their numbers may have been few, and they may have 
lingered for a time, and more gradually have died out on 
the hill tops to which they fled, or they may have taken to 
canoes and rafts and tried to reach more southern shores 
across the great waste of water that surrounded them. 
Some of the palaeolithic people of Central Europe may 
have escaped into Italy, but that country was probably in- 
habited by a different and a hostile race, the ancestors of 
neolithic man who spread over central Europe when the 
great floods abated ; finding the land covered with a fertile 
soil, freed from the great carnivores and without inhabi- 
tants to contest their occupation of the country. Possibly 
the ancestors of the Basques lived to the south of the 
Pyrenees in the Glacial epoch, and spread in like manner 
into Southern France in early post-diluvial times. 
C. Middle Sands and Gravels . — The Middle Sands and 
Gravels were spread out, according to this theory, by the 
sudden and torrential discharge of the pent-up waters, 
caused by the breaking away of the ice dam between the 
Pyrenees and the Alps. The course of the flood across the 
south of England was from the north until the water was 
lowered, and the rushing torrents confined to the valleys, 
the direction of which they then followed. In the Thames 
Valley, as soon as the height of the water fell to the level 
of the water-shed to the north, the rush would be down the 
valley or from the west ; though until it was lowered to 
below 200 feet above the sea, some of the flood would escape 
southward through the low pass between the Wey and the 
Arun. 
The materials that the flood would find on the surface, in 
a loose and unconsolidated state, would be varied and nu- 
merous. Over all the chalk area there would be the flints 
left during the long subaerial denudation to which the chalk 
