V.—Traces of a Great Post-Glacial Flood

Extract

What is the burden of all these facts? Why, assuredly that the shells found in our higher marine drifts, or at least in nearly all of them, far from bespeaking conditions of climate such as can alone be fairly described as Glacial, on the contrary, speak to us of a time when the general temperature was perhaps somewhat lower than it is now, but when the North Sea and North Atlantic were filled with open water, and bathed a land where the Mammoth and the Rhinoceros could find abundant food, where the Oak and the Pine flourished, and where the rivers could sustain such molluscs as the Cyrena fluminalis. This conclusion destroys at once the basis of those who have argued that our high-level marine drifts were left where they are found by ice—either by floating bergs or a creeping ice-foot. But apart from the general conclusion which the particular collocation of shells enables us to make, quite a number of facts may be collected going to show the impossibility of ice having been the motive power which deposited such beds as those at Moel Tryfaen.