Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

CAUSED BY CONTINENTAL ICE-SHEETS?2 29

been observed. If cones and mounds of gravel and great erratics like those that sprinkle so wide an area in Northern America and Northern Europe had occurred, they would hardly have failed to arrest the attention of explorers. Middendorff does, indeed, mention the occurrence of trains of large erratics which he observed along the banks of some of the rivers, but these, he has no doubt, were carried down by river-ice. The general character of the ‘tundras’ is that of wide, flat plains, covered for the most part with a grassy and mossy vegetation, but here and there bare and sandy. Frequently nothing intervenes to break the monotony of the landscape... . It would appear, then, that in Northern Asia representatives of the glacial deposits which are met with in similar latitudes in Europe and America do not occur. The northern drift of Russia and Germany ; the 4sar of Sweden ; the kames, eskers, and erratics of Britain; and the iceberg-drift of Northern America haye, apparently, no equivalent in Siberia, Consequently we find the great river-deposits, with their mammalian remains, which tell of a milder climate than now obtains in those high latitudes, still lying undisturbed at the surface.” *

Think of the significance of all this. There is no Drift in Siberia ; no “till,” no “ bowlder-clay,” no stratified masses of gravel, sand, and stones. There was, then, no Drift age in all Northern Asia, up to the Arctic Circle !

How pregnant is this admission. It demolishes at one blow the whole theory that the Drift came of the ice. For surely if we could expect to find ice, during the socalled Glacial age, anywhere on the face of our planet, it would be in Siberia. But, if there was an ice-sheet there, it did not grind up the rocks ; it did not striate them ; it did not roll the fragments into bowlders and pebbles ; it rested so quietly on the face of the land that, as Geikie tells us, the pre-glacial deposits throughout Siberia, with their mammalian remains, are still found “lying undis-

* “The Great Ice Age,” p. 460, published in 1873.