1865.] SIR R. I. MURCHISON ON GLACIERS. 29 



has ever existed there. Nor, again, has ice ever acted on the sides 

 of the steep mountains of Murcia, where deep excavations and 

 denudations are seen upon the grandest Alpine scale. 



If we transport ourselves from those southern climes to the 

 northern latitudes of the Ural mountains, where doubtless ice and 

 snow formerly prevailed to a greater extent than now, we do not 

 there find any proof whatever of the action of glaciers ; for the hills 

 are much too low to have given propulsion to such masses. On 

 the contrary, we know that great blocks of hard rocks have been 

 transported to the foot of these hills from Lapland and Scandinavia, 

 when, during the glacial period, a vast Arctic Sea watered the 

 flanks of the Ural mountains, and when most parts of that low 

 chain could then have been only slightly elevated above the waters. 

 And yet on the sides of this chain, where no glaciers have ever so 

 acted as to produce erosion, we meet with both longitudinal and 

 transverse deep fissures in some of which lakes, and in others 

 rivers, occur. Thus, all along the eastern flank of the Ural moun- 

 tains we find a succession of depressions filled with water, without 

 a trace, on the sides of the bare and hard rocks which subtend 

 these lakes, of any former action of glaciers. Then, as to deep 

 valleys in which rivers flow, let us take two out of the examples 

 along the western flank of this chain, on which my companions 

 De Verneuil and Keyserling, and myself, have specially dwelt in our 

 work on Russia. The Serebrianka River, as it issues from a network 

 of metamorphic schists, quartz-rocks, and marbles of Silurian age, 

 exhibits on its rugged banks the extrusion of much igneous 

 matter. This agency has split up the stratified deposits ; and the 

 necessarily accompanying movements have caused great openings, 

 including the cavity in which the river flows. Or, when the geo- 

 logical traveller passes from the valley of the Serebrianka to that of 

 its recipient, the Tchussovaya, still more is he struck with wonder- 

 ment at the unquestionable evidences, amidst intensely dislocated 

 rocks, of the ruptures by which the deep narrow chasm has been 

 formed in hard crystalline rocks, in which a lazy stream flows, 

 which, not descending from any altitude, has had no excavating 

 power whetever, and, like our own meandering Wye, has flowed 

 on through clefts in limestone during the whole historic and pre- 

 historic period, without deepening its bed.* 



* For a full description of the abrupt gorge of the Tchussovaya, see 

 ' Russia and the Ural Mountains/ vol. i, p. 352 et seq. 



