Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

50 THE DRIFT.

Mr. Geikie says :

“ Below a deposit of till, at Woodhill Quarry, near Kilmaurs, in Ayrshire (Scotland), the remains of mammoths and reindeer and certain marine shells haye several times been detected during the quarrying operations. . . . Two elephant-tusks were got at a depth of seventeen and a half feet from the surface. . . . The mammalian remains, obtained from this quarry, occurred in a peaty layer between two thin beds of sand and gravel which lay beneath a mass of ‘till,’ and rested directly on the sandstone rock.” =

And again :

“Remains of the mammoth have been met with at Chapelhall, near Airdrie, where they occurred in a bed of laminated sand, underlying ‘till.’ Reindeer-antlers have also been discovered in other localities, as im the valley of the Endrick, about four miles from Loch Lomond, where an antler was found associated with marine shells, near the bottom of a bed of blue clay, and close to the underlying rock—the blue clay being covered with twelve feet of tough, stony clay.” f

Professor Winchell says :

“Buried tree-trunks are often exhumed from the glacial drift at a depth of from twenty to sixty feet from the surface. Dr. Locke has published an account of a mass of buried drift-wood at Salem, Ohio, forty-three feet below the surface, imbedded in ancient mud. The museum of the University of Michigan contains several fragments of well-preserved tree-trunks exhumed from wells in the vicinity of Ann Arbor. Such occurrences are by no means uncommon. The encroachments of the waves upon the shores of the Great Lakes reveal whole forests of the buried trunks of the white cedar.” {

These citations place it beyond question that the Drift came suddenly upon the world, slaughtering the animals,

* “The Great Ice Age,” p. 149. + Ibid., p. 150, + Winchell, “Sketches of Creation,” p. 259.