Page:The evolution of worlds - Lowell.djvu/240

202 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 fjords 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