Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

40 THE DRIFT.

great plains of coarse gravel, dotted with gray grarite bowlders.*

In the United States Professor Winchell shows that the drift-deposits extend to the Gulf of Mexico. At Jackson, in Southern Alabama, he found deposits of pedbles one hundred feet in thickness. +

Tf there are no drift-deposits except where the great ice-sheet ground them out of the rocks, then a shroud of death once wrapped the entire globe, and all life ceased.

But we know that all life,—vegetable, animal, and human,—is derived from pre-glacial sources ; therefore animal, vegetable, and human life did not perish in the Drift age ; therefore an ice-sheet did not wrap the world in its death-pall; therefore the drift-deposits of the tropics were not due to an ice-sheet ; therefore the driftdeposits of the rest of the world were not due to icesheets : therefore we must look elsewhere for their origin. There is no escaping these conclusions. Agassiz himself says, describing the Glacial age :

“ All the springs were dried up ; the rivers ceased to

flow. To the movements of a numerous and animated creation succeeded the silence of death.”

If the verdure was covered with ice a mile in thickness, all animals that lived on vegetation of any kind must have perished ; consequently, all carnivores which lived on these must have ceased to exist ; and man himself, without animal or vegetable food, must have disappeared for ever.

A writer, describing Greenland wrapped in such an icesheet, says :

* “Travels in Africa,” p. 188. + “Sketches of Creation,” pp. 222, 228