I902, The British Associatio7i in Belfast, 271 



Mr. G, W. IvAMPivUGH said they were all under a deep debt of grati- 

 tude to iVIr. Wright for his address with reference to the organisms of the 

 Boulder clay. They knew how devoted he was in his work, and if they 

 did not quite agree with his conclusion it did not diminish their appre- 

 ciation of his labours in that field of inquiry. With this statement he 

 would go on to criticise. Mr Wright's conclusions were that the Boulder 

 clay beds were marine because of the presence of the little organisms 

 they contained. In his view Boulder clay was not in the strict sense of 

 the term sediment ; it was rehash of beds already in existence. They 

 had the Boulder clay in this neighbourhood made up largely of the 

 characteristic rock over which the breaking-up agency passed, and they 

 must expect to find in it the same class of organisms. The general 

 study of the drifts showed them that Boulder clay was derived from the 

 action of an ice sheet. Some of the areas referred to by Mr. Wright 

 as instances in support of his theory came within the area of the work 

 of the Geological Survey last year^ and in the Dublin beds wherever 

 they found shells they also found fragments of Ailsa Craig eurite. They 

 wefe only beginning with the Belfast area, but already they had come 

 across similar phenomena. On the top of Divis Mountain, the Belfast 

 Naturalists' Field Club had found a fragment of Ailsa Craig eurite, where 

 Mr. Wright had discovered traces of Foraminifera. The other evidence 

 of the glaciation of this region one could scarcely find time to refer to, 

 but the main point he would make was that the arrangement of the 

 drifts was incompatible with the marine theory. The body of evidence 

 in favour of the glacial origin of these deposits was so weighty that they 

 need not hesitate to accept it. 



Prof. W. Boyd Dawkins said Mr. Wright had drifted into a very 

 complicated and extremely important question. He quite disagreed 

 with Mr. Ivamplugh. It was for him much easier to believe that clay 

 containing marine materials had been accumulated under marine condi- 

 tions than to imagine that it had been deposited on the land from melting 

 ice. There were several difficulties in the way of the land ice theory. 

 The first that had to be met was the motive force. Where did the vast 

 field of ice get its motive force from so that it could override elevations 

 up to 1,300 feet } It seemed to him there was no evidence of any such 

 motive power that could bring ice all the distance from Scandinavia to 

 Ireland. The next difficulty was if the glaciation was from the sea to 

 the land then the land would be glaciated from the sea. But that was 

 not what they found ; they found that the conformation of the rocks 

 showed glaciation from the higher to the lower levels. This difficulty 

 so far had never been grappled with by any one belonging to the land 

 glaciation school. Then the organisms were as perfect as they could be, 

 Would this be so if they were to suppose that such delicate things as 

 those were fished up from the bottom of seas and carried by the 

 stupendous impact of masses of ice to the elevation of 2,000 feet ? 

 He was not one who shared the views of the younger school of geolo- 

 gists and chipped away the views of Lyell and others as of no account. 



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