"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: