Scotland.—In the Island of Arran, Mr. E. A. Wunsch and Mr. James Thomson found a bed of conglomerate which they considered of Permian age, and probably of glacial origin. This conglomerate enclosed angular fragments of various schistose, volcanic, and limestone rocks, and contained carboniferous fossils.
Ireland.—At Armagh, Ireland, Professor Hull found boulder beds of Permian age, containing pebbles and boulders, sometimes 2 feet in diameter. Some of the boulders must have been transported from a region lying about 30 miles to the north-west of the locality in which they now occur. It is difficult to conceive, says Professor Hull, how rock fragments of such a size could have been carried to their present position by any other agency than that of floating ice. This boulder-bed is overlaid by a recent bed of boulder clay. Professor Ramsay, who also examined the section, agrees with Professor Hull that the bed is of Permian age, and unquestionably of ice-formation.[174]
Professor Ramsay feels convinced that the same conclusions which he has drawn in regard to the Permian breccia of England will probably yet be found to hold good in regard to much of that of North Germany.[175] And there appears to be some ground for concluding that the cold of that period even reached to India.[176]
South Africa.—An ancient boulder clay, supposed to be either of Permian or Jurassic age, has been extensively found in Natal, South Africa. This deposit, discovered by Dr. Sutherland, the Surveyor-General of the colony, is thus described by Dr. Mann:—
“The deposit itself consists of a greyish-blue argillaceous matrix, containing fragments of granite, gneiss, graphite, quartzite, greenstone, and clay-slate. These imbedded fragments are of various size, from the minute dimensions of sand-grains up to vast blocks measuring 6 feet across, and weighing from 5 to 10 tons. They are smoothed, as if they had been subject to a certain amount of attrition in a muddy sediment; but they are not rounded like boulders that have been subjected to sea-breakers. The fracture of the rock is not conchoidal, and there is manifest, in its substance, a rude disposition towards wavy stratification.”
“Dr. Sutherland inclines to think that the transport of vast massive blocks of several tons’ weight, the scoring of the subjacent surfaces of sandstone, and the simultaneous deposition of minute sand-grains and large boulders in the same matrix, all point to one agency as the only one which can be rationally admitted to account satisfactorily for the presence of this remarkable formation in the situations in which it is found. He believes that the boulder-bearing clay of Natal is of analogous nature to the great Scandinavian drift, to which it is certainly intimately allied in intrinsic mineralogical character; that it is virtually a vast moraine of olden time; and that ice, in some form or other, has had to do with its formation, at least so far as the deposition of the imbedded fragments in the amorphous matrix are concerned.”[177]
In the discussion which followed the reading of Dr. Sutherland’s paper, Professor Ramsay pointed out that in the Natal beds enormous blocks of rock occurred, which were 60 or 80 miles from their original home, and still remained angular; and there was a difficulty in accounting for the phenomena on any other hypothesis than that suggested.
Mr. Stow, in his paper on the Karoo beds, has expressed a similar opinion regarding the glacial character of the formation.[178]
But we have in the Karoo beds evidence not only of glaciation, but of a much warmer condition of things than presently exists in that latitude. This is shown from the fact that the shells of the Trigona-beds indicate a tropical or subtropical condition of climate.
Arctic Regions.—The evidence which we have of the existence of a warm climate during the Permian period is equally conclusive. The close resemblance of the flora of the Permian period to that of Carboniferous times evidently points to the former prevalence of a warm and equable climate. And the existence of the magnesian limestone in high latitudes seems to indicate that during at least a part of the Permian period, just as during the accumulation of the carboniferous limestone, a warm sea must have obtained in those latitudes.