1841 1882] ICE-ACTION 165 



glaciers, and perhaps attributed much to icebergs which Letter 5 1 1 

 ought to be attributed to glaciers. On the other hand, 



^5 **^ 



Agassiz seems to me mad about glaciers, and apparently 

 never thinks of drift ice. 



I did see one clear case of former great extension of a 

 glacier in T. del Fuego. 



To J. Geikie. Letter 512 



The following letter was in reply to a request from Prof. James Geikie 

 for permission to publish Mr. Darwin's views, communicated in a previous 

 letter (Nov. 1876), on the vertical position of stones in gravelly drift 

 near Southampton. Prof. Geikie wrote (July I5th, 1880): "You may 

 remember that you attributed the peculiar position of those stones to 

 differential movements in the drift itself arising from the slow melting 

 of beds of frozen snow interstratified into the gravels. ... I have found 

 this explanation of great service even in Scotland, and from what I have 

 seen of the drift-gravels in various parts of southern England and 

 northern France, I am inclined to think that it has a wide application." 



Down, July igth, 1880. 



Your letter has pleased me very much, and I truly feel it 

 an honour that anything which I wrote on the drift, etc., 

 should have been of the least use or interest to you. Pray 

 make any use of my letter 1 : I forget whether it was written 

 carefully or clearly, so pray touch up any passages that you 

 may think fit to quote. 



All that I have seen since near Southampton and else- 

 where has strengthened my notion. Here I live on a chalk 

 platform gently sloping down from the edge of the escarp- 

 ment 2 to the south (which is about 800 feet in height) to 

 beneath the Tertiary beds to the north. The 3 beds of the 

 large and broad valleys (and only of these) are covered with 

 an immense mass of closely packed broken and angular 

 flints ; in which mass the skull of the musk-ox [musk- 

 sheep] and woolly elephant have been found. This great 

 accumulation of unworn flints must therefore have been made 

 when the climate was cold, and I believe it can be accounted 

 for by the larger valleys having been filled up to a great 



1 Professor James Geikie quotes the letter in Prehistoric Europe, 

 London, 1881 (p. 141). Practically the whole of it is given in the Life 

 and Letters, III., p. 213. 



2 Id est, sloping down from the escarpment which is to the south. 



3 From here to the end of the paragraph is quoted by Prof. Geikie, 

 loc. tit., p. 142. 



