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Briefly, then, the geologist assures us that when the cold of the Glacial Age was at its maximum glaciers streamed down from all the mountains of Scotland, Wales, and Northern England; that the ice was thick enough to overtop all the smaller hills, and on the plains it united in one great sea of ice some thousands of feet in thickness, that it stretched as far south as the latitude of London, England. But that to the west the ice streamed out across, the Irish Sea, the islands to the west of Scotland, and ended far out into what is now the Atlantic.<23> But these glaciers, vast as they were, were very small compared with the glaciers that streamed out from the mountains of Norway and Sweden. These great glaciers invaded England to the southwest, beat back the glacier ice of Scotland from the floor of the North Sea, overran Denmark, and spread their mantle of bowlder clay far south into Germany.

REDUCING AGENTS.--The distinction between reducing agents and fluxes (too often ignored) is an important one. Fluxes yield slags; reducing agents give buttons of regulus or of metal. The action of a reducing agent is the separation of the oxygen or sulphur from the metal with which it is combined. For example, the mineral anglesite (lead sulphate) is a compound of lead, sulphur, and oxygen; by carefully heating it with charcoal the oxygen is taken away by the charcoal, and a regulus of lead sulphide remains. If the regulus be then fused with metallic iron the sulphur is removed by the iron, and metallic lead is left. The charcoal and the iron are reducing agents. But in defining a reducing agent as one which removes oxygen, or sulphur, from a metallic compound so as to set the metal free, it must be remembered that sulphur itself will reduce metallic lead from fused litharge, and that oxygen will similarly set free the metal in fused lead sulphide. There is no impropriety in describing sulphur as a reducing agent; but it is absurd to call oxygen one. Some confusion will be avoided if these substances and those which are opposite to them in property be classed as oxidising and de-oxidising, sulphurising, and de-sulphurising agents. Most oxidising agents also act as de-sulphurisers.

In sea-urchins we often find two creatures superficially indistinguishable, but the one is a female with large ovaries and the other is a male with equally large testes. Here the physiological difference does not affect the body as a whole, but the reproductive organs or gonads only, though more intimate physiology would doubtless discover differences in the blood or in the chemical routine (metabolism). In a large number of cases, however, there are marked superficial differences between the sexes, and everyone is familiar with such contrasts as peacock and peahen, stag and hind. In such cases the physiological difference between the sperm-producer and the ovum-producer, for this is the essential difference, saturates through the body and expresses itself in masculine and feminine structures and modes of behaviour. The expression of the masculine and feminine characters is in some cases under the control of hormones or chemical messengers which are carried by the blood from the reproductive organs throughout the body, and pull the trigger which brings about the development of an antler or a wattle or a decorative plume or a capacity for vocal and saltatory display. In some cases it is certain that the female carries in a latent state the masculine features, but these are kept from expressing themselves by other chemical messengers from the ovary. Of these chemical messengers more must be said later on.

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