It is in the Alpine Lands that we encounter the most striking evidence of glacial conditions anterior to the epoch of maximum glaciation. The famous breccia of Hötting has already been referred to as of interglacial age. From the character of its flora, Ettinghausen considered this accumulation to be of Tertiary age. The assemblage of plants is certainly not comparable to the well-known interglacial flora of Dürnten. According to the researches of Dr. R. von Wettstein,[CY] the Hötting flora has most affinity with that of the Pontic Mountains, the Caucasus, and southern Spain, and implies a considerably warmer climate than is now experienced in the Inn Valley. This remarkable deposit, as Dr. Penck pointed out some ten years ago, is clearly of interglacial age. His conclusions were at once challenged, on the ground that the flora had a Tertiary and not a Pleistocene facies; consequently, it was urged that, as all glacial deposits were of Pleistocene age, this particular breccia could not be interglacial. But in this, as in similar cases, the palæontologist's contention has not been sustained by the stratigraphical evidence, and Dr. Penck's observations have been confirmed by several highly-competent geologists, as by MM. Böhm and Du Pasquier. The breccia is seen in several well-exposed sections resting upon the moraine of a local glacier which formerly descended the northern flanks of the Inn Valley, opposite Innsbruck, where the mountain-slopes under existing conditions are free from snow and ice. Nor is this all, for certain erratics appear in the breccia, which could only have been derived from pre-existing glacial accumulations, and their occurrence in this accumulation at a height of 1150 metres shows that before the advent of the Hötting flora the whole Inn Valley must have been filled with ice. The plant-bearing beds are in their turn covered by the ground-moraine of a later and more extensive glaciation. To bring about the glacial conditions that obtained before the formation of the breccia, the snow-line, according to Penck, must have been at least 1000 metres lower than now; while, to induce the succeeding glaciation, the depression of the snow-line could not have been less than 1200 metres. These observations have been extended to many other parts of the Alps, and the conclusion arrived at by Professor Penck and his colleagues, Professor Brückner and Dr. Böhm, is briefly this--that the maximum glaciation of those regions did not fall in the "first" but in the "second" Alpine glacial epoch. [CY] _Sitzungsberichte d. Kais. Acad. d. Wissensch. in Wien, mathem.-naturw. Classe_, Bd. xcvii. Abth. i., 1888.