latest researches of the scientists:--

"In his valuable studies upon the diluvial flora, Count Gaston de
Saporta concludes that the climate in this period was marked rather
by extreme moisture than extreme cold."

Again: where did the clay, which is deposited in such gigantic
masses, hundreds of feet thick, over the continents, come from? We
have seen (p. 18, _ante_) that, according to Mr. Dawkins, "no such
clay has been proved to have been formed, _either in the Arctic
regions, whence the ice-sheet has retreated_, or in the districts
forsaken by the glaciers."

If the Arctic ice-sheet does not create such a clay now, why did it
create it centuries ago on the plains of England or Illinois?

The other day I traveled from Minnesota to Cape May, on the shore of
the Atlantic, a distance of about fifteen hundred miles. At scarcely
any point was I out of sight of the red clay and gravel of the Drift:
it loomed up amid the beach-sands of New Jersey; it was laid bare by
railroad-cuts in the plains of New York and Pennsylvania; it covered
the highest tops of the Alleghanies at Altoona; the farmers of Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin were raising crops upon it; it was
everywhere. If one had laid down a handful of the Wisconsin Drift
alongside of a handful of the New Jersey deposit, he could scarcely
have perceived any difference between them.

{p. 34}

Here, then, is a geological formation, almost identical in character,