Page:Excavations at the Kesslerloch.djvu/79

Rh climate than at present, and that when the temperature changed it was forced back to the Scotch mountains.

The young Swedish naturalist and his discoveries hare led us away from Mid-Europe, and we must now return for a few moments to a locality in Upper Swabia, north of the Lake of Constance, as discoveries of the reindeer age were made there some years ago which throw considerable light on the contents of the Kesslerloch. They were fully described by Professor Fraas in the 'Württembergische naturwissenschäftliche Jahreshefte' for 1867, and a somewhat shorter notice of them, also by Professor Fraas, was given translated into English in the 'Geological Magazine' for 1866, p. 546. The reader is therefore referred to these two accounts; but it may perhaps be well to mention a very few facts respecting the place. Schussenried is a small hamlet to the south of the rise forming the watershed in South Germany to the north and the south: the streams on the south running into the Rhine, those on the north into the Danube. Under a considerable depth of peat near this village there was a bed, of four or five feet thick, of what Professor Fraas calls tufa sand, or loose tufa, beneath which was the relic-bed, also four or five feet thick, containing a very large quantity of reindeer-horns, and of tools and implements made from them, also of flint and stone implements. One of the reindeer-horns has upon its palm certain indefinite etchings, but by no means distinct enough to be called a drawing. This was shown to me by Professor Fraas when at Stuttgard on my return from Switzerland. It is somewhat singular that almost everything, whether needle or scraper or any other tool, found here was either broken or unfinished, so that it appears as if this accumulation had been merely a rubbish-heap of rejected implements. Together with these there were several species of Hypnum, which, according to Professor Schimper of Strassburg, who has paid much attention to mosses, consist entirely of northern or high Alpine forms. It will be seen that the objects found at Schussenried bear a great similarity to those from the Kesslerloch.

Sufficient has now been said to show that an Arctic climate at one time extended not merely over a great part of France, but also over Middle Europe. It appears to me that only those who are resolved not to be convinced can doubt the evidence of Aquitaine, of Thayngen, and of Sohussenried.