Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

THE DRIFT A GIGANTIC CATASTROPHE. 55

taining an immense sandstone block, eight feet six inches in length, with a width of two feet eight inches, and a thickness of three feet four inches.

Discussing the subject, Mr. Lubbock says :

“We must feel that a body of water, with power to move such masses as these, must have been very different from any floods now occurring in those valleys, and might well deserve the name of a cataclysm. . . . But a flood which could bring down so great a mass would certainly have swept away the comparatively light and moyable gravel below. We can not, therefore, account for the phenomena by aqueous action, because a flood which would deposit the sandstone blocks would remove the underlying gravel, and a flood which would deposit the gravel would not remove the blocks. The Deus ex machind has not only been called in most unnecessarily, but when examined turns out to be but an idol, after all.”

Sir Jobn thinks that floating ice might have dropped these blocks ; but then, on the other hand, M. C. d’Orbigny observes that all the fossils found in these beds belong to fresh-water or land animals. The sea has had nothing to do with them. And D’Orbigny thinks the Drift came from cataclysms.

M. Boucher de Perthes, the first and most exhaustive investigator of these deposits, has always been of opinion that the drift-gravels of France were deposited by violent cataclysms.*

This yiew seems to be confirmed by the fact that the grayel-beds in which these remains of man and extinct animals are found lie at an elevation of from eighty to two hundred feet above the present water-levels of the valleys.

Sir John Lubbock says :

Our second difficulty still remains—namely, the height at which the upper-level gravels stand above the

* “Mém. Soe. d’Em. l’Abbeville,” 1861, p. 475.