[Footnote EQ: Prestwich's Geology, vol. ii, pp. 471, 472.] Speaking a little later of taking the present rates of river erosion as a standard to estimate the chronology of the Glacial period, the same high authority remarks: "It no more affords a true and sufficient guide than it would be to take the tottering paces and weakened force of an old man as the measure of what that individual was, and what he could do, in his robust and active youth. It may be right to take the effects at present produced by a given power as the known quantity, a, but it is equally indispensable, in all calculations relative to the degree of those forces in past times, to take notice of the unknown quantity, x, although this, in the absence of actual experience, which cannot be had, can only be estimated by the results and by a knowledge of the contemporaneous physical conditions. It may be a complicated equation, but it is not to be avoided.[ER] [Footnote ER: Prestwich's Geology, vol. ii, pp. 520, 521.] "In this country and in the north of France broad valleys have been excavated to the depth of from about eighty to a hundred and fifty feet in glacial and post-glacial times. Difficult as it is by our present experience to conceive this to have been effected in a comparatively short geological term, it is equally, and to my mind more, difficult to suppose that man could have existed eighty thousand years or more, and that existing forms of our fauna and flora should have survived during two hundred and forty thousand years without modification or change."[ES] [Footnote ES: Ibid., p. 533.]