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Updated: June 11, 2025
From its primal source in the Archaean rock, up through all the vast series of sedimentary rocks to our own time, what vicissitudes and transformations it has passed through; how many times it has died, so to speak, and been reborn from the rocks; how many times the winds and the rains have transported it, and infused invisible, life-giving gases into it; how many of the elements have throbbed with life, climbed and bloomed in trees, walked or flown or swam in animals, or slumbered for thousands upon thousands of years beneath the great ice-sheet of Pleistocene time!
Glacial State of Sweden in the Pleistocene Period. Scotland formerly encrusted with Ice. Its subsequent Submergence and Re-elevation. Latest Changes produced by Glaciers in Scotland. Remains of the Mammoth and Reindeer in Scotch Boulder Clay. Parallel Roads of Glen Roy formed in Glacier Lakes. Comparatively modern Date of these Shelves.
In its vegetal aspect, also, as we saw, the modern landscape was determined by the Pleistocene revolution. A great scythe slowly passed over the land. When the ice and snow had ended, and the trees and flowers, crowded in the southern area, slowly spread once more over the virgin soil, it was only the temperate species that could pass the zone guarded by the Alps and the Pyrenees.
The last 200 feet or so of deposits we call the Pleistocene or Quaternary; the rest are known as the Tertiary strata.
Nevertheless, looking to a remotely future epoch, there can, I think, be little doubt that all the more modern MARINE formations, namely, the upper pliocene, the pleistocene and strictly modern beds, of Europe, North and South America, and Australia, from containing fossil remains in some degree allied, and from not including those forms which are only found in the older underlying deposits, would be correctly ranked as simultaneous in a geological sense.
Brown calls them extinct species, which may mislead some readers, but he merely meant extinct in England. See also Jeffreys, "Brit. I long ago suggested the hypothesis, that in the basin of the Thames there are indications of a meeting in the Pleistocene period of a northern and southern fauna. With these are occasionally associated the reindeer.
The strata next below the Pleistocene gravels and cave deposits are ascribed to the "Pliocene age" older than these are the "Miocene" and the "Eocene," and then you come to the Chalk, a good white landmark separating newer from older strata.
There is still another probable cause of a vast change in the temperature of central Europe in comparatively modern times, to which no allusion has yet been made; namely, the conversion of the great desert of the Sahara from sea into land since the commencement of the Pleistocene period.
My reluctance in 1846 to regard the fossil human bone as of Pleistocene date arose in part from the reflection that the ancient loess of Natchez is anterior in time to the whole modern delta of the Mississippi. It has now risen more than 200 feet above its pristine level.
Consider the prodigious vicissitudes of climate during the pleistocene period, which includes the whole glacial epoch, and note how little the specific forms of the inhabitants of the sea have been affected. On the theory of descent, the full meaning of the fossil remains from closely consecutive formations, being closely related, though ranked as distinct species, is obvious.
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