codiles then
inhabited England. Yet on the north side of the Alps, extending from
Switzerland to Vienna, and also south of the Alps near Genoa, there is a
deposit of finely-stratified sandstone several thousand feet in thickness,
quite destitute of organic remains, but containing in several places in
Switzerland enormous blocks either angular or partly rounded, and composed
of oolitic limestone or of granite. Near the Lake of Thun some of the
granite blocks found in this deposit are of enormous size, one of them
being 105 feet long, ninety feet wide, {68} and forty-five feet thick! The
granite is red, and of a peculiar kind which cannot be matched anywhere in
the Alps, or indeed elsewhere. Similar erratics have also been found in
beds of the same age in the Carpathians and in the Apennines, indicating
probably an extensive inland European sea into which glaciers descended
from the surrounding mountains, depositing these erratics, and cooling the
water so as to destroy the mollusca and other organisms which had
previously inhabited it. It is to be observed that wherever these erratics
occur they are always in the vicinity of great mountain ranges; and
although these can be proved to have been in great part elevated during the
Tertiary period, we must also remember that they must have been since very
much lowered by denudation, of the amount of which, the enormously thick
Eocene and Miocene beds now forming portions of them is in some degree a
measure as well as a proof. It is not therefore at all improbable that
during some part of the Tertiary period these mountains may have been far
higher than they are now, and this we know might be sufficient for the
production of glaciers descending to the sea-level, even were the climate
of the lowlands somewhat warmer than at present.[13]

_The Weight of the Negative Evidence._--But when we proceed to examine the
Tertiary deposits of other parts of {69} Europe, and especially of our own
country, for evidence of this kind, not only is such evidence completely
wanting, but the facts are of so definite a character as to satisfy most
geologists that it can never have existed; and the same maybe said of
temperate North America and of the Arctic regions generally.

In his carefully written paper on "The Climate Controversy" the late Mr.
Searles V. Wood, Jun., remarks on this point as follows: "Now the Eocene
formation is complete in England, and is exposed in continuous section
along th