a small south-western corner (about Torquay and Bournemouth) was completely covered by one enormous mass of glaciers, as is still the case with almost the whole of Greenland.  The ice sheet, grinding slowly over the hills and rocks, smoothed and polished and striated their surfaces in many places till they resembled the roches moutonnees similarly ground down in our own day by the moving ice rivers of Chamouni and Grindelwald.  Now, since these great glaciations have occurred at various intervals in the world’s past history, they must depend upon some frequently recurring cause.  Such a cause, therefore, Dr. Croll began ingeniously to hunt about for.

He found it at last in the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit.  This world of ours, though usually steady enough in its movements, is at times decidedly eccentric.  Not that I mean to impute to our old and exceedingly respectable planet any occasional aberrations of intellect, or still less of morals (such as might be expected from Mars and Venus); the word is here to be accepted strictly in its scientific or Pickwickian sense as implying merely an irregularity of movement, a slight wobbling out of the established path, a deviation from exact circularity.  Owing to a combination of astronomical revolutions, the precession of the equinoxes and the motion of the aphelion (I am not going to explain them here; the names alone will be quite sufficient for most people; they will take the rest on trust)—­owing to the combination of these profoundly interesting causes, I say, there occur certain periods in the world’s life when for a very long time together (10,500 years, to be quite precise) the northern hemisphere is warmer than the southern, or vice versa.  Now, Dr. Croll has calculated that about 250,000 years ago this eccentricity of the earth’s orbit was at its highest, so that a cycle of recurring cold and warm epochs in either hemisphere alternately then set in; and such cold spells it was that produced the Great Ice Age in Northern Europe.  They went on till about 80,000 years ago, when they stopped short for the present, leaving the climate of Britain and the neighbouring continent with its existing inconvenient Laodicean temperature.  And, as there are good reasons for believing that my old master and his contemporaries lived just before the greatest cold of the Glacial Epoch, and that his immediate descendants, with the animals on which they feasted, were driven out of Europe, or out of existence, by the slow approach of the enormous ice sheet, we may, I think, fairly conclude that his date was somewhere about B.C. 248,000.  In any case we must at least admit, with Mr. Andrew Lang, the laureate of the twenty-five thousandth century, that

    He lived in the long long agoes;
    ’Twas the manner of primitive man.