But
the age has gone by in which it could seriously be suggested that
the boulders strewn along the east of Scotland--fragments of rock
whose home we must seek in Scandinavia--were brought by the
vikings as ballast for their ships. Even the more serious
controversy, whether the scratches and the boulders which we find
on the face of Northern Europe and America were due to floating
or land ice, is virtually settled. Several decades of research
have detected the unmistakable signs of glacial action over this
vast area of the northern hemisphere. Most of Europe north of the
Thames and the Danube, nearly all Canada and a very large part of
the United States, and a somewhat less expanse of Northern Asia,
bear to this day the deep scars of the thick, moving ice-sheets.
Exposed rock-surfaces are ground and scratched, beds of pebbles
are twisted and contorted hollows are scooped out, and
moraines--the rubbish-heaps of the glaciers--are found on every
side. There is now not the least doubt that, where the great
Deinosaurs had floundered in semi-tropical swamps, where the figs
and magnolias had later flourished, where the most industrious
and prosperous hives of men are found to-day, there was, in the
Pleistocene period, a country to which no parallel can be found
outside the polar circles to-day.
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