The great revolution begins with the gathering of snows on the mountains. The Alps and Pyrenees had now, we saw, reached their full stature, and the gathering snows on their summits began to glide down toward the plains in rivers of ice. The Apennines (and even the mountains of Corsica), the Balkans, Carpathians, Caucasus, and Ural Mountains, shone in similar mantles of ice and snow. The mountains of Wales, the north of England, Scotland, and Scandinavia had even heavier burdens, and, as the period advanced, their sluggish streams of ice poured slowly over the plains. The trees struggled against the increasing cold in the narrowing tracts of green; the animals died, migrated to the south, or put on arctic coats. At length the ice-sheets of Scandinavia met the spreading sheets from Scotland and Wales, and crept over Russia and Germany, and an almost continuous mantle, from which only a few large areas of arctic vegetation peeped out, was thrown over the greater part of Europe. Ten thousand feet thick where it left the hills of Norway and Sweden, several thousand feet thick even in Scotland, the ice-sheet that resulted from the fusion of the glaciers gradually thinned as it went south, and ended in an irregular fringe across Central Europe. The continent at that time stretched westward beyond the Hebrides and some two hundred miles beyond Ireland. The ice-front followed this curve, casting icebergs into the Atlantic, then probably advanced up what is now the Bristol Channel, and ran across England and Europe, in a broken line, from Bristol to Poland. South of this line there were smaller ice-fields round the higher mountains, north of it almost the whole country presented the appearance that we find in Greenland to-day. In North America the glaciation was even more extensive. About four million square miles of the present temperate zone were buried under ice and snow. From Greenland, Labrador, and the higher Canadian mountains the glaciers poured south, until, in the east, the mass of ice penetrated as far as the valley of the Mississippi. The great lakes of North America are permanent memorials of its Ice-Age, and over more than half the country we trace the imprint and the relics of the sheet. South America, Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand had their glaciated areas. North Asia was largely glaciated, but the range of the ice-sheet is not yet determined in that continent.