The first thing which impresses us is the extremely fragmentary distribution of the Miocene and Pliocene beds. Not, however, that they are uncommon nor yet of small extent. On the contrary they are scattered over America and Eurasia--and all the rest of the globe for that matter--like the spots on a leopard, or the warts on a toad's back, till it becomes one of the unsearchable mysteries of the science how these innumerable patches can be got down under the ocean to receive their load of sediment, without deluging the surrounding regions in a similar manner. But then, to be sure, fresh-water lakes will answer the same purpose, and are particularly indicated when the proportion of plants and terrestrial animals is =in excess= of the true marine fossils. And so enormous fresh-water basins are described here and there, with the great mammals crowding about their margins in their zeal to become fossilized, that the mountain tops may be saved from going under once more--or perhaps I should say to enable the modern writers to get some of these strata puckered up to their full height before these "late" Tertiary deposits were made. This mountain making business is another affair that geologists would like to have take place on the installment plan, but unfortunately it seems to have been nearly all postponed till the very close of "geological time." This arrangement of fresh-water lakes saves the central Rocky Mountain region from going down again beneath the deep. But it cannot save the Alps, Juras and Appennines in Europe, nor parts of the Himalayas, and I know not what other mountains in Asia, nor the coast region of California and Oregon in America, to say nothing of large parts of the Andes in South America, with regions in Africa and Australia. But what is the use of trying to figure out the amount of our earth which has been under the ocean since "Middle Tertiary times," and thus since Man was upon it? To save the northern half of Europe with all of Canada from again going under at the close of the "Tertiary period," geologists have spread out their continental ice sheets, and have asked them to do duty instead of water. But this is hardly sufficient, for the "upper" or "later" part of the so-called "Glacial" deposits are clearly stratified; and so they either invoke a "=flood vast beyond conception=," as Dana does in America for the "final event in the history of the glacier," or, as others prefer, the whole region is baptized again. As Dawson says in his "Meeting-Place of Geology and History," "=No geological event is better established than the post-Pliocene submergence.="