Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

4 THE DRIFT.

“The lowest member is invariably a tough, stony clay, called ‘till’ or ‘hard-pan.’ Throughout wide districts stony clay alone occurs.” *

“Jt is hard to say whether the till consists more of stones or of clay.” +

This “till,” this first deposit, will be found to be the strangest and most interesting.

In the second place, although the Drift is found on the earth, it is unfossiliferous. That is to say, it contains no traces of pre-existent or contemporaneous life.

This, when we consider it, is an extraordinary fact :

Where on the face of this life-marked earth could such amass of material be gathered up, and not contain any evidences of life? It is as if one were to say that he had collected the detritus of a great city, and that it showed no marks of man’s life or works.

“T would reiterate,” says Geikie,} “that nearly all the Scotch shell-bearing beds belong to the very close of the glacial period ; only in one or two places have shells ever been obtained, with certainty, from a bed in the true till of Scotland. They occur here and there in bowlder-clay, and underneath bowlder-clay, in maritime districts ; but this clay, as I have shown, is more recent than the tillin fact, rests upon its eroded surface.”

“The lower bed of the drift is entirely destitute of organic remains.” *

Sir Charles Lyell tells us that even the stratified drift is usually devoid of fossils :

“Whatever may be the cause, the fact_is certain that over large areas in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, I might add throughout the northern hemisphere, on both sides of the Atlantic, the stratified drift of the glacial period is very commonly devoid of fossils.” ||

* “Great Ice Age,” Geikie, p. 7. + Ibid., p. 9. t Ibid., p. 342. # Rey. O. Fisher, quoted in ‘“ The World before the Deluge,” p. 461. | ‘ Antiquity of Man,” third edition, p. 268.