Page:Transactions NZ Institute Volume 10.djvu/43

Rh 1869 the writer visited the great Tasmau Glacier on the eastern flank of Mount Cook, which then, as the Cashmere head of the Indus is represented to do, issued from under the terminal foot of the glacier in one grand foaming fountain, boiling up to a height of 60 to 80 feet, "coming from under an arch, lofty, gloomy and Avernus-like, a large ready-formed river, whose colour was that of the soil collected at its source, rolling along immense masses of ice, and whirling them against the rocks with the noise of distant cannon." Some years previously, when the ice had retreated nearly half a mile, the river issued in two streams from under the lateral moraine on either side of the glacier. A local glacial period was commencing, the operations of which became suspended since the amount of ice borne off by the antarctic current diminished again to its normal quantity, as it has done lately, and dry seasons have returned in Australia threatening ruin to the farmers and graziers.

The more the subject is considered, and the effects observed of such agencies, the less necessary does it appear to call in the aid of extraordinary ones of which no traces are visible.

Had there been a general ice-sheet covering New Zealand, its ancient littoral marine fauna which still exist, its moas, and other apterous birds must all have perished, and whence came again those forms of life from which they were developed? It is scarcely to be conceived that this far island of the sea, situated in the latitude it is, would be proposed to have been included in the narrow zone amidst universal ice, the crowded Alsatia where ape-like men contended with men-like apes and divers other creatures with their respective congeners, in the dire struggle for existence that took place within its limited precincts, when the weakest, the least able to consider and provide against the exigencies of the situation, perished.

It is not enough to have events so stupendous, and others still more startling, declared to have taken place at distances of time so enormous that the consideration of them leaves but an indefinite impression upon the mind, merely stated as facts, and related with an air of acknowledged authenticity, as the stories of the reign of Henry VIII., by Mr. Froude.

Instead of engaging the attention of enquirers or allaying their scruples, such facetious proposals are scarcely even calculated to afford as much amusement as the extension of Mr. Darwin's paradox, in the allusion to the correlation of old maids, mice, and roast beef.

In his anxiety to prove the non-miraculous origin of the universe and all things therein, Professor Haëckel assumes a tone of contemptuous pity towards those persons who refuse to profess their absolute faith in the irrational dogma that the primordial forms were endowed with life and the power of propagation of their own instance. Considering that "what we