In Ireland, as shown by Professors Hull and Harkness, the inter-glacial beds, called by them the “manure gravels,” contain numerous fragments of shells indicating a more genial climate than prevailed when the boulder clays lying above and below them were formed.[119] In Sweden inter-glacial beds of freshwater origin, containing plants, have been met with by Herr Nathorst and also by Herr Holmström.[120] In North America Mr. Whittlesey describes inter-glacial beds of blue clay enclosing pieces of wood, intercalated with beds of hard pan (till). Professor Newberry found at Germantown, Ohio, an immense bed of peat, from 12 to 20 feet in thickness, underlying, in some places 30 feet, and in other places as much as 80 feet, of till, and overlying drift beds. The uppermost layers of the peat contain undecomposed sphagnous mosses, grasses, and sedges, but in the other portions of the bed abundant fragments of coniferous wood, identified as red cedar (_Juniperus virginiana_), have been found. Ash, hickory, sycamore, together with grape-vines and beech-leaves, were also met with, and with these the remains of the mastodon and great extinct beaver.[121] _Inter-glacial Beds of England._—Scotland has been so much denuded by the ice sheet with which it was covered during the period of maximum glaciation that little can be learned in this part of the island regarding the early history of the glacial epoch. But in England, and more especially in the south-eastern portion of it, matters are somewhat different. We have, in the Norwich Crag and Chillesford beds, a formation pretty well developed, which is now generally regarded as lying at the base of the Glacial Series. That this formation is of a glacial character is evident from the fact of its containing shells of a northern type, such as _Leda lanceolata_, _Cardium Groènlandicum_, _Lucina borealis_, _Cyprina Islandica_, _Panopæa Norvegica_, and _Mya truncata_. But the glacial character of the formation is more strikingly brought out, as Sir Charles Lyell remarks, by the predominance of such species as _Rhynchonella psittacea_, _Tellina calcarea_, _Astarte borealis_, _Scalaria Groènlandica_, and _Fusus carinatus_.