Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

CAUSED BY CONTINENTAL ICE-SHEETS? 33

to our own time, of innumerable tropical plants that can not stand for one instant the breath of frost, and whose fossilized remains are found in the rocks prior to the Drift? As they lived through the Glacial age, it could not have been a period of great and intense cold. And this conclusion is in accordance with the results of the latest researches of the scientists :—

“Tn his valuable studies upon the diluvial flora, Count

Gaston de Saporta concludes that the climate in this period was marked rather by extreme moisture than extreme

cold.”

Again: where did the clay. which is deposited in such gigantic masses, hundreds of feet thick, over the continents, come from? We have seen (p. 18, ate) that, according to Mr. Dawkins, “no such clay has been proyed to have been formed, etther in the Arctic regions, whence the ice-sheet has retreated, or in the districts forsaken by the glaciers.”

If the Arctic ice-sheet docs not create such a clay now, why did it create if centuries ago on the plains of England or Illinois ?

The other day I traveled from Minnesota to Cape May, on the shore of the Atlantic, a distance of about fifteen hundred miles. At scarcely any point was I out of sight of the red clay and grayel of the Drift: it loomed up amid the beach-sands of New Jersey ; it was laid bare by railroad-cuts in the plains of New York and Pennsylvania ; it covered the highest tops of the Allechanies at Altoona; the farmers of Ohio, Indiana, IIlinois, and Wisconsin were raising crops upon it; if was everywhere. If one had laid down a handful of the Wisconsin Drift alongside of a handful of the New Jersey deposit, he could scarcely haye perceived any difference between them.