[1.  “Smithsonian Contributions,” vol. xv.

2.  “The Great Ice Age,” p. 492.

3.  Agassiz, “Geological Sketches,” p. 209.

4.  “The Great Ice Age,” p. 150.

5.  “Illustrations of Surface Geology,” “Smithsonian Contributions.”]

{p. 50}

Mr. Geikie says: 

“Below a deposit of till, at Woodhill Quarry, near Kilmaurs, in Ayrshire (Scotland), the remains of mammoths and reindeer and certain marine shells have several times been detected during the quarrying operations. . . .  Two elephant-tasks were got at a depth of seventeen and a half feet from the surface. . . .  The mammalian remains, obtained from this quarry, occurred in a peaty layer between two thin beds of sand and gravel which lay beneath a mass of ‘till,’ and rested directly on the sandstone rock."[1]

And again: 

“Remains of the mammoth have been met with at Chapelhall, near Airdrie, where they occurred in a bed of laminated sand, underlying ‘till.’  Reindeer-antlers have also been discovered in other localities, as in the valley of the Endrick, about four miles from Loch Lomond, where an antler was found associated with marine shells, near the bottom of a bed of blue clay, and close to the underlying rock—­the blue clay being covered with twelve feet of tough, stony clay."[2]

Professor Winchell says

“Buried tree-trunks are often exhumed from the glacial drift at a depth of from twenty to sixty feet from the surface.  Dr. Locke has published an account of a mass of buried drift-wood at Salem, Ohio, forty-three feet below the surface, imbedded in ancient mud.  The museum of the University of Michigan contains several fragments of well-preserved tree-trunks exhumed from wells in the vicinity of Ann Arbor.  Such occurrences are by no means uncommon.  The encroachments of the waves upon the shores of the Great Lakes reveal whole forests of the buried trunks of the white cedar."[3]

These citations place it beyond question that the Drift came suddenly upon the world, slaughtering the animals,

[1.  The Great Ice Age,” p. 149.

2.  Ibid., p. 150.

3.  Winchell, “Sketches of Creation,” p. 259.]

{p. 51}

breaking up the forests, and overwhelming the trunks and branches of the trees in its masses of débris.

Let us turn to the next question:  Was it an extraordinary event, a world-shaking cataclysm?

The answer to this question is plain:  The Drift marks probably the most awful convulsion and catastrophe that has ever fallen upon the globe.  The deposit of these continental masses of clay, sand, and gravel was but one of the features of the apalling event.  In addition to this the earth at the same time was cleft with great cracks or fissures, which reached down through many miles of the planet’s crust to the central fires and released the boiling rocks