Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

30 THE DRIFT.

turbed on the surface” ; and he eyen thinks that the great mammals, the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros, “ may have survived in Northern Asia down to a comparatively recent date,” * ages after they were crushed out of existence by the Drift of Europe and America.

Mr. Geikie seeks to account for this extraordinary state of things by supposing that the climate of Siberia was, during the Glacial age, too dry to furnish snow to make the ice-sheet. But when it is remembered that there was moisture enough, we are told, in Northern Enrope and America at that time to form a layer of ice from one to three miles in thickness, it would certainly seem that enough ought to haye blown across the eastern line of European Russia to give Siberia a fair share of ice and Drift. The explanation is more extraordinary than the thing it explains. One third of the water of all the oceans must have been carried up, and was circulating around in the air, to descend upon the earth in rain and snow, and yet none of it fell on Northern Asia! And as the line of the continents separating Europe and Asia had not yet been established, it can not be supposed that the Drift refused to enter Asia out of respect to the geographical lines.

But not alone is the Drift absent from Siberia, and, probably, all Asia ; it does not extend even over all Europe. Louis Figuier says that the traces of glacial action “are observed in all the north of Europe, in Russia, Iceland, Norway, Prussia, the British Islands, part of Germany in the north, and even in some parts of the south of Spain.” + M. Edouard Collomb finds only a “a shred” of the glacial evidences in France, and thinks they were absent from part of Russia !

* “The Great Ice Age,” p. 461. + “The World before the Deluge,” p. 451.