SECTION AT JOINVILLE.

[1.  “The Great Ice Age,” p. 149.

2.  Ibid., p. 149.

3.  “Prehistoric Times,” p. 370.]

{p. 55}

an immense sandstone block, eight feet six inches in length, with a width of two feet eight inches, and a thickness of three feet four inches.

Discussing the subject, Mr. Lubbock says: 

“We must feel that a body of water, with power to move such masses as these, must have been very different from any floods now occurring in those valleys, and might well deserve the name of a cataclysm. . . . But a flood which could bring down so great a mass would certainly have swept away the comparatively light and movable gravel below.  We can not, therefore, account for the phenomena by aqueous action, because a flood which would deposit the sandstone blocks would remove the underlying gravel, and a flood which would deposit the gravel would not remove the blocks.  The Deus ex machinâ has not only been called in most unnecessarily, but when examined turns out to be but an idol, after all.”

Sir John thinks that floating ice might have dropped these blocks; but then, on the other hand, M. C. d’Orbigny observes that all the fossils found in these beds belong to fresh-water or land animals.  The sea has had nothing to do with them.  And D’Orbigny thinks the Drift came from cataclysms.

M. Boucher de Perthes, the first and most exhaustive investigator of these deposits, has always been of opinion that the drift-gravels of France were deposited by violent cataclysms.[1]

This view seems to be confirmed by the fact that the gravel-beds in which these remains of man and extinct animals are found lie at an elevation of from eighty to two hundred feet above the present water-levels of the valleys.

Sir John Lubbock says: 

“Our second difficulty still remains—­namely, the height at which the upper-level gravels stand above the

[1.  “Mém.  Soc. d’Em. l’Abbeville,” 1861, p. 475.]

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present water-line.  We can not wonder that these beds have generally been attributed to violent cataclysms."[1]

In America, in Britain, and in Europe, the glacial deposits made clean work of nearly all animal life.  The great mammalia, too large to find shelter in caverns, were some of them utterly swept away, while others never afterward returned to those regions.  In like manner palæolithic man, man of the rude and unpolished flint implements, the contemporary of the great mammalia, the mammoth, the hippopotamus, and the rhinoceros, was also stamped out, and the cave-deposits of Europe show that there was a long interval before be reappeared in those regions.  The same forces, whatever they were, which “smashed” and “pounded” and “contorted” the surface of the earth, crushed man and his gigantic associates out of existence.[2]