40 Mr. Henry Walker's Lecture:
THE SOUTHERN GROUP OF THE ILFORD ANIMALS.—GLACIAL
ESSEX.
Some of the Ilford animals evidently form a Northern
and Arctic group. The warmly-clad mammoth, or woolly
elephant, the fleecy rhinoceros, and the brown bear may
be taken as examples.* If their presence as the native
inhabitants of the land denotes, as it undoubtedly does,
the reign of a semi-Arctic climate in Essex, where shall we
find in the landscapes around us the traces and memorials
of an age of snow and ice—of a long-enduring age of
glaciers and an all-enveloping ice-sheet, of icebergs and
icefloes ! The answer, as we shall see, is not far to seek.
The Essex hills and plateaux have lately yielded some
strange secrets to the explorer. Time was, and not long
ago, when the well-known steep of Muswell Hill in
Middlesex, one of the leafy "northern heights of London,"
stood in solitary and mysterious glamour, the only known
monument of the great Glacial Period near our metropolis.
But to-day the records of the rocks around us are more
plainly read. We need not now leave these homely Essex
landscapes to find memorials of the Age of Ice in Britain.
They are so near to us as to have been long overlooked
for those remoter spots of Glacial Britain where "distance
lends enchantment to the view." Let us ascend any of the
hills north and south of Epping which reach a height of three
hundred feet. We lift a patch of the green turf, and what
do we see beneath? The sight is no longer incredible.
We look upon the moraine of a long-vanished British
glacier, lying where it was left ages ago—a moraine as real
as any that underlie the glaciers of Switzerland and
Norway to-day, or the wider-spreading ice-sheet of Green-
land. The glacier itself has gone, but here lie its remains,
too solid and substantial to disappear with the climate
which gave the glacier birth. The strangely commingled
wreck and debris of rocks, and fossils, and masses of earth
brought here from distant areas, are all before us; they
stretch for many a mile beneath the grass.
* The musk-ox and the reindeer should also be taken into account,
inasmuch as they are found in the Thames Valley, though not at Ilford.