386 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



persed by icebergs, or borne as freight to these localities, by slowly 

 moving glaciers. 



Let me ask, then, how could such rending asunder of mighty 

 masses of rock and the general phenomena I have described, be the 

 result of the action of icebergs in tlieir passage south over a sinl-ing 

 continent? The conviction can scarcely escape the mind of the 

 observer, that at least very many of these enormous masses must 

 have been detached from their original beds before the country 

 went down into the sea : for icebergs of supposed power sufficient 

 to quarry them, would require a very great depth of water, the 

 pressure of which would assist the rocky bottom in resisting frac- 

 ture. And no known currents have power to drive icebergs against 

 submarine hills with such force as to separate large masses of rock 

 from them. And if their motion might be supposed to have often 

 been accelerated by violent winds, which they could not materially 

 have been, as their principal bulk was below the reach of such im- 

 aginary aids — this supposition would be against the argument that 

 those floating bodies have produced the parallel boulder striae on 

 the rocky floor of the country. 



I lay it down, therefore, as a self-evident conclusion — that, ice- 

 bergs driven by any known currents, could never have ascended 

 such long and steep planes as those which the lofty hills of Cam- 

 den and Mount Desert present to the north ; for in the atten)pt, 

 their bulk would often have been shattered and lessened, and their 

 freight of boulder materials, frequently unlike the formations over 

 which they were passing, deposited where the bergs had foun- 

 dered. 



That, the idea of a sinking country in this case, conforming in 

 its proces.s of submergence to the passage of such ice mountains, 

 is wholly inadequate and untenable in theory. 



That, icebergs floating in a liquid whose density was but a little 

 greater th;in tliat of their own composition, could not have broken 

 down the southern brows of the lofty hills of the coast. 



That, these hills could not have been crushed as jMr. Hugh Mil- 

 ler suggests in a supposed case mentioned in the "Cruise of the 

 Betsey," by bergs turning backivards in their journey south, upon 

 those hills, and operating against them as submarine battering- 

 rams ; for in that case, the bergs would have given away before 

 the granite would have yielded. 



That, icebergs could not have originated the striae at the south- 

 ern bases of the highest hills of the coast. 



