Here are phenomena which no ice-sheet, though it were a thousand miles thick, can explain; here is heat, not ice; combustion, not cold; and yet all these phenomena are but the results which we have seen would naturally follow the contact of the earth with a comet.

But while, in this particular case, the size of the comet, or its more fiery nature, melted the surface of the globe, and changed the very texture of the solid rocks, we find in the geological record the evidences of repeated visitations when Drift was thrown upon the earth in great quantities; but the heat, as in the last Drift Age, was not great enough to consume all things.

In the Cambrian formation, conglomerates are found, combinations of stones and hardened clay, very much like the true “till.”

In the Lower Silurian of the south of Scotland, large blocks and bowlders (from one foot to five feet in diameter)

[1.  Dana’s “Text-Book,” p. 156.]

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are found, “of gneiss, syenite, granite, etc., none of which belong to the rocks of that neighborhood.”

Geikie says: 

“Possibly these bowlders may have come from some ancient Atlantis, transported by ice."[1]

The conglomerates belonging to the Old Red Sandstone formation in the north of England and in Scotland, we are told, “closely resemble a consolidated bowlder drift."[2]

Near Victoria, in Australia, a conglomerate was found nearly one hundred feet in thickness.

“Great beds of conglomerate occur at the bottom of the Carboniferous, in various parts of Scotland, which it is difficult to believe are other than ancient morainic débris.  They are frequently quite unstratified, and the stones often show that peculiar blunted form which is so characteristic of glacial work."[3]

Professor Ramsay found well-scratched and blunted stones in a Permian conglomerate.

In the north of Scotland, a coarse, bowlder-conglomerate is associated with the Jurassic strata.  The Cretaceous formation has yielded great stones and bowlders.  In the Eocene of Switzerland, erratics have been found, some angular and some rounded.  They often attain great size; one measured one hundred and five feet in length, ninety feet in breadth, and forty-five feet in height.  Some of the blocks consist of a kind of granite not known to occur anywhere in the Alps.

Geikie says: 

“The occurrence in the Eocene of huge ice-carried blocks seems incomprehensible when the general character of the Eocene fossils is taken into account, for these have a somewhat tropical aspect.  So, likewise, the appearance of ice-transported blocks in the Miocene is a sore puzzle,

[1.  “The Great Ice Age,” p. 478.

2.  Ibid., p. 479.

3.  Ibid.]

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as the fossils imbedded in this formation speak to us of tropical and sub-tropical climates having prevailed in Central Europe."[1]