For it now appears that there was no glacial _epoch_. Our early ideas inculcated by text-books at school received a rude shock when it appeared that the glacial _epoch_ was not, as we had been led to believe, a polar phenomenon at all, but a local affair which on the face of it had nothing to do with the pole. For investigation has disclosed that instead of emanating from the pole southward, it proceeded from certain centres, descending thence in all directions, north as much as south. Thus there was a centre in Norway in 65° N. lat. and another in Scotland in 56° N. In North America there were three—the Labradorian in latitude 54° N., the Kerwatin to the northwest of Hudson’s Bay in latitude 62° N., and the Cordilleran along the Pacific coast in latitude 58° N. On the other hand, northern Siberia, the coldest region in the world, was not glaciated. That the ice flowed off these centres proves them to have been higher than the sides. But we have further evidence of their then great height from the fact that dead littoral shells have been dredged from 1333 fathoms in the North Atlantic, and the prolongation under water of the fiords of Norway and of land valleys in North America witness to the same subsidence since. But evidence refuses to stop here. The Alps were then more glaciated than they are now. So was Kilimanjaro and Ruwenzori on the equator; and finally at the same time more ice and snow existed round about the south pole than is the case to-day. Now this is really going too far even for the most ardent believers in the force of eccentricity. For if the astronomic causes postulated were true, they must have produced just the opposite action at the antipodes, to say nothing of the crux of being equally effective at the equator. The theory lies down like the ass between two burdens. Whichever load it chooses to saddle, it must perforce abandon the other. So it turns out that the Ice Age was not an Ice Age at all but an untoward elevation of certain spots, and is to be relegated to the same limbo of exaggeration of a local incident into a world-wide cataclysm as the deluge. That some geologists will still cling to their former belief I doubt not; for as the philosophic old lady remarked: “There always have been two factions on every subject. Just as there are the suffragists and anti-suffragists now, so there were slaveholders and the anti-slavery people in my time; and even in the days of the deluge, there were the diluvians who were in favor of a flood and the antediluvians who were opposed to it.” A tale which has a peculiarly scientific moral, as in science _anti_ and _ante_ seem often interchangeable terms.