INDUSTRIAL PROGRESS DURING THE YEAR 1875. cix 



be so bold as to affirm that an uninterrupted glacier could 

 ever have extended from Shap Fells to the coast of Holder- 

 ness, and borne along the blocks of granite through the whole 

 distance without any help from the floating power of water. 

 The supposition involves difficulties tenfold greater than 

 are implied in the phenomena it pretends to account for. 

 The glaciers descending from the Alps have an enormous 

 transporting power, but there is no such transporting power 

 in a great sheet of ice expanding over a country without 

 mountains and nearly at a dead level." 



Campbell, the author of " Frost and Fire," who has de- 

 voted, he tells us, thirty-three years to the study of glacial 

 phenomena in both continents, and long held the hypothesis 

 of Agassiz, believing that all Northern Europe had been 

 buried beneath an ice-cap, has been led by further studies in 

 Russia and in North America to reject this view, and declares 

 that from the Caucasus to the Rocky Mountains he sees no 

 evidence of an ice-cap. He adds concisely that " the glacial 

 traces in North America seem to indicate the transfer of 

 oceans with their systems of circulation from one part of the 

 world to another by the elevation and depression of the 

 land." 



Kinahan, of the Geological Survey of Ireland, has made 

 known in the western parts of Galway and Mayo a series 

 of crystalline rocks which may be compared with those of 

 our Appalachian belt. They consist of bedded granites and 

 gneissic and hornblendic strata, quartzites, limestones, mica- 

 ceous and talcose schists, serpentines, steatites, etc., and are 

 divided by the author into three groups, the united thick- 

 ness of which is estimated at over 10,000 feet. They are 

 wholly without fossils, and are penetrated by granitic and 

 other intrusive rocks. Being overlaid by fossiliferous strata 

 of Silurian (Llandovery) age, it is conjectured by Kinahan 

 that they may be altered Cambro-Silurian rocks. The sim- 

 ilar crystalline schists of Donegal, as long since pointed out 

 by the writer, are partly Huronian and partly Montalban. 

 The hasty generalizations and misinterpretations through 

 which in so many regions geologists have incorrectly re- 

 ferred crystalline strata like these to paleozoic or* more re- 

 cent times [Record, 1872, p. xxxvii.], have recently received 

 a further illustration in Carinthia, where, on the authority 



