equal area such as we have assigned, the equatorial zone, judging from what we know of the present globe, would be then uninhabitable, and the animals would be compelled to migrate in search of sheltering forests, refreshing fields, and waters, towards the parallels of France and Germany. And as the progress of desiccation now, is spreading the sandy deserts nearer and nearer to the Mediterranean shores, so the same cause acting with proportionably greater power on the hotter and drier primeval globe, would compel its gigantic tribes to roam towards the polar circles. Here accordingly they existed at the period of the deluge, here they perished, and found sepulture, some in the diluvial gravel, and others in the ice which immediately invested the poles when the circumfluent waters chilled the surface of the sphere.

That these circumpolar ices formerly descended on our globe into latitudes much lower than at present, involving diluvian gravel in their mass, may be inferred from the huge ruins of diluvian glaciers in Denmark, as well as from the carcasses of fossil animals found entire in Siberia.

As to the former fact, Professor Esmark has adduced satisfactory proofs of immense fields of ice having formerly existed in Norway, in places where no perennial ice is any longer to be found. Near Stavanger church in Lat. 58° 58', there is a remarkable glacier-dyke or rampart of gravel, close to the sea, in a district where only a few heaps of perpetual snow, in hollows of the mountains, lie sloping to the north-east, at from 2000 to 3000 Rhenish feet above the level of the sea. The length of the rampart across the valley from mountain to mountain is 2250 feet, its perpendicular height above the plain 100. It consists of coarse gravel and sand, mixed with a great many huge blocks of gneiss, the prevailing rock of the mountain. The Professor thinks this dike could have

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been formed only by masses of ice, which at one time filled up the whole valley, and by their pressure hollowed out the bottom into its series of 3 lakes. On the plain below, there is no trace of gravel carried down from that dike, which must have occurred if it had been accumulated by water alone. Indeed, not only the dike itself, but the whole horizontal surface exhibits proofs that there has been a glacier here, for the plain exactly resembles those adjoining to the glaciers presently existing between Londfiord and Lomb in Guldbrandsal, where the Professor had recently travelled. A skilful mineralogist who accompanied him, was so struck with the similarity between the two, that immediately on seeing that at Lomb, he exclaimed that the dike at Stavenger must also be a glacier-dike. The principal glacier in the valley of Boredhus descends from 3000 feet above the sea to 1400, with a moraine or dike of earth and stones in front, from 600 to 800 feet broad. Mr. Esmark concludes that the Norwegian mountains were anciently covered with ice down to the level of the sea, and therefore that the sea itself must have been frozen.

The facts and observations just detailed, seem adequate to prove that the events of the deluge involved such a change in the terraqueous constitution, as rendered the surface of the globe much colder and moister than it had previously been. These causes reached their maximum at that disastrous era, and have ever since been gradually but slowly abating, as I shall endeavour to show in the sequel. Meanwhile, it may be proper to notice a few prominent facts, indicative of the great and sudden fall of temperature in northern regions.

And, in the first place, the almost incredible number of bones of fossil elephants found in northern Siberia, which betray no marks of having been rolled or transported from a distance, attest the existence on its plains, of huge herbivorous animals at that distant epoch. These demonstrate that a

vigorous vegetation clothed countries now covered with frost a great part of the year, where even in summer, sterilising cold and humidity perpetually reign, and where at present the rein-deer can hardly pick up from beneath the snow its scanty mouthful of moss.

Pallas says that from the Don (the Tanais) to Tchutskoinoss, there is scarcely a river, on the banks of which, bones of the ancient elephant may not be found. They are imbedded in, or loosely cov ered with diluvial matter, intermixed with a few marine productions. But the most extraordinary fact, one perfectly accordant, however, with our principles, is that of all places in the world most thickly stored with elephants' bones, are certain islands of the Icy sea, to the north even of Siberia, opposite the shore, which separates the mouth of the Lena from that of the Indigirska. The Liaikof isles are in a great measure formed of bones of the elephant, rhinoceros, buffalo, &c., mixed with sand and fossil wood. There is indeed no canton of Siberia whose soil does not teem more or less with elephants' bones.

Whether these animals in their living state were covered with woolly hair at the roots of their long hair, like that whose carcass was disengaged so entire from a field of ice on the banks of the Lena in 1803, that the dogs and white bears fed upon its flesh, or whether they had naked skins, like existing elephants, still they must have required an enormous supply of vegetable food. Their gigantic companions, the rhinoceros, hippopotamus, mastodon, and tapir, also imply the existence of luxuriant herbage to satiate their voracious appetites. The fresh carcass manifestly shows that the animal perished along with its kindred, in a sudden revolution, accompanied by a sudden change of climate, which prevented the rapid decomposition of its flesh and their bones, which must have taken

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place had the hot climate continued which raised their vegetable food. Every hypothesis," says Baron Cuvier, "of a gradual cooling of the earth, or a slow variation in either the inclination or the position of the axis of the globe, is inadmissible."

At the present day, neither the oak, the hazel, the elder, the plane, nor the wild apple can endure the Siberian winters. These trees disappear in the neighbourhood of the Uralian mountains, even on the banks of the river Tobol, a prodigious distance southwards of the elephants' graves. The lime and the ash cease about the Irtysh; the pine which in Norway reaches the parallel of 70°, does not in Siberia pass the 60th degree. The silver fir goes no further than 58°. At 60° potatos are no larger than peas, and the cabbage grows no head. On the eastern side of the Lena, even the Pinus cembra, or Siberian cedar, the most hardy of trees, becomes quite dwarfish, though it still preserves its proportions. The pyrus baccata or wild pear of Daooria yields merely a tasteless fruit, of the size of a cherry. In Western Siberia on the Obi, agriculture disappears at the 60th degree of latitude. Thus threefifths of Siberia are not susceptible of any culture.*

Secondly, the ruins of vegetable life buried in our frozen circumpolar strata, clearly attest the genial climate which prevailed, and cherished their growth on the primeval earth.

Mr. König of the British Museum who has drawn up an excellent report on the rock specimens collected by Captain Parry, during his northern voyage of discovery performed in the years 1819 and 1820, gives us the following interesting information concerning Melville Island:

"The principal formation of the island appears to be the floetz sandstone, with the subordinate one of coal and ironstone. The two specimens of sandstone, containing the above mentioned fossils, trilo

* Malte Brun, Geography, vol. II. Book 37.

bite and joints of the stem of an encrinus, are pretty similar in appearance to those others brought from Melville Island, which abound with the vegetable remains characteristic of the coal sandstone. These are for the most part merely impressions, and filmy carbonaceous remnants of leaves (or fronds with ovate-lanceolate leaflets) and stems which, by their regularly placed oval marks, indicate that the prototypes belonged to the arborescent ferns, which we observe in such great abundance in the coal sandstone of more southern latitudes; a proof that the hyperborean region where they occur, at one time displayed the noble scene of a luxuriant and stately vegetation. There is also among the specimens of sandstone from the same place, one bearing the impression of a thin, longitudinally striated stem, not unlike that of some reed."—Journal of Science, vol. XV. p. 20.

In the first fasciculus of Sternberg's Flora of a former world, there are thirteen figures of different unknown trees, many of which belong to the family of palms. All the genera enumerated in that valuable work, are met with in the coal-fields of Scotland and England, and one of them has been observed in a piece of sandstone brought from Melville Island by the discovery ships. The Calamythis pseudo-bambusia, represented by Sternberg, Table XIII. Fig. 3, is so completely like, in the jointed arrangement of its stem, &c. to the palmæ figured in 2, 5, and 6, of the travels of Prince Newied in Brazil, that although the species cannot be determined, there is a perfect resemblance in the generic characters.

Two of the enigmatic phenomena belonging to the primeval globe, for which no probable hypothesis has hitherto been offered, seem therefore to be directly deducible, or rather spontaneously flow, from the principles of terraqueous distribution pre