to get an answer to one strange question, and we have found a
group of questions stranger still, and got them answered too. But so
it is always in science. We know not what we shall discover. But
this, at least, we know, that it will be far more wonderful than we
had dreamed. The scientific explorer is always like Saul of old, who
set out simply to find his father's asses, and found them--and a
kingdom besides.

I should have liked to have told you more about this bygone age of
ice. I should have liked to say something to you on the curious
question--which is still an open one--whether there were not two ages
of ice; whether the climate here did not, after perhaps thousands of
years of Arctic cold, soften somewhat for a while--a few thousand
years, perhaps--and then harden again into a second age of ice,
somewhat less severe, probably, than the first. I should have liked
to have hinted at the probable causes of this change--indeed, of the
age of ice altogether--whether it was caused by a change in the
distribution of land and water, or by change in the height and size
of these islands, which made them large enough, and high enough, to
carry a sheet of eternal snow inland; or whether, finally, the age of
ice was caused by an actual change in the position of the whole
planet with regard to its orbit round the sun--shifting at once the
poles and the tropics; a deep question that latter, on which
astronomers, whose business it is, are still at work, and on which,
ere young folk are old, they will have discovered, I expect, some
startling facts. On that last question, I, being no astronomer,
cannot speak. But I should have liked to have said somewhat on
matters on which I have knowledge enough, at least, to teach you how
much there is to be learnt. I should have liked to tell the student
of sea-animals--how the ice-age helps to explain, and is again
explained by, the remarkable discoveries which Dr. Carpenter and Mr.
Wyville Thompson have just made, in the deep-sea dredgings in the
North Atlantic. I should have liked to tell the botanist somewhat of
the pro-glacial flora--the plants which lived here before the ice,
and lasted, some of them at least, through all those ages of fearful
cold, and linger still on the summits of Snowdon, and the highest
peaks of Cumberland and Scotland. I should have liked to have told
the lovers of zoology about the animals which lived before the ice-