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 ice-sheet, says

[1.  “Travels in Africa,” p. 188.

2.  “Sketches of Creation,” pp. 222, 223.]

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“The whole interior seems to be buried beneath a great depth of snow and ice, which loads up the valleys and wraps over the hills.  The scene opening to view in the interior is desolate in the extreme—­nothing but one dead, dreary expanse of white, so far as the eye can reach—­no living creature frequents this wilderness—­neither bird, beast, nor insect.  The silence, deep as death, is broken only when the roaring storm arises to sweep before it the pitiless, blinding snow."[1]

And yet the glacialists would have us believe that Brazil and Africa, and the whole globe, were once wrapped in such a shroud of death!

Here, then, in conclusion, are the evidences that the deposits of the Drift are not due to continental ice-sheets: 

I. The present ice-sheets of the remote north create no such deposits and make no such markings.

II.  A vast continental elevation of land-surfaces at the north was necessary for the ice to slide down, and this did not exist.

III.  The ice-sheet, if it made the Drift markings, must have scored the rocks going up-hill, while it did not score them going down-hill.

IV.  If the cold formed the ice and the ice formed the Drift, why is there no Drift in the coldest regions of the earth, where there must have been ice?

V. Continental ice-belts, reaching to 40° of latitude, would have exterminated all tropical vegetation.  It was not exterminated, therefore such ice-sheets could not have existed.

VI.  The Drift is found in the equatorial regions of the world.  If it was produced by an ice-sheet in those regions, all pre-glacial forms of life must have perished; but they did not perish; therefore the ice-sheet could not

[1.  “Popular Science Monthly,” April, 1874, p. 646.]

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have covered these regions, and could not have produced the drift-deposits there found.

In brief, the Drift is not found where ice must have been, and is found where ice could not have been; the conclusion, therefore, is irresistible that the Drift is not due to ice.

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CHAPTER VII.

THE DRIFT A GIGANTIC CATASTROPHE.

IN the first place, the Drift fell upon a fair and lovely world, a world far better adapted to give happiness to its inhabitants than this storm-tossed planet on which we now live, with its endless battle between heat and cold, between sun and ice.