"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.]

{p. 56}

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]

But in Siberia, where, as we have seen, some of the large mammalia
were caught and entombed in ice, and preserved even to our own day,
there was no "smashing" and "crushing" of the earth, and many escaped
the snow-sheets, and their posterity survived in that region for long
ages after the Glacial period, and are supposed only to have
disappeared in quite recent times. In fact, within the last two or
three years a Russian exile declared that he had seen a group of
living mammoths in a wild valley in a remote portion of that