264^ P roceed'mrjs of the Royal Society of Victoria. 



de[)osit.s of glacial nature beloDging to the Pleistocene age. 

 To a]3ply the term to both formations tended to confusion. 

 He was one of those who believed that till was not a 

 Moraine jn-ofonde, but owed its origin to Moraine matter, 

 redistributed par-tly by aqueous action, and the boulders 

 contained in it were mostly the result of icebergs which had 

 broken away from glaciers and deposited the debris in the 

 clay. Still less was he inclined to believe that these 

 particular formations were instances of a ground Moraine, 

 and he doubted that they necessarily indicated that there 

 had l)een glaciers on the very spot where they had been 

 found. With regard to the , striated pebbles, no one 

 could have the smallest doubt as to their being striated, 

 and having been striated by glacial action. They were 

 evidently striated-glaciated pebbles. He very much 

 doubted, however, that they had been scratched by 

 any rocks where they were now found. So far as 

 his memory served him, the Upper Mesozoic sandstones 

 wei-e particularly soft, and incapable of scratching these 

 pebbles, and he therefore imagined that they must neces- 

 sarily have come from a very considerable distance — 

 probably from the Alpine regions of either New South 

 Wales or Victoria— and 5iot from the neighbourhood where 

 they v/ere now found. These remarks ap)plied to the 

 upper till, or, as he would call it, the upper glacial formation. 

 With i-egai-d to the lower glacial formation, he was not 

 very well acquainted with the nature of the Silurian rocks 

 in the neighbourhood, but unless they contained quartzites 

 very abundantly, he did not know of any rock likely to be 

 capable of imparting the stride to these pebbles in the 

 Silurian area. He believed that these pebbles, although no 

 doubt glaciated, had been brought- from a considerable 

 distance by alluvial and other action. As to the stride on 

 the Silurian rocks, he would be very sorrj^ indeed to insult 

 their friends' powers of observation, by implying that thej'' 

 could possibly have made a mistake if the}' had had the 

 opportunity of observing them upon an extended scale ; but 

 considering that they liad not had such an opportunity, but 

 had only found the strise here and there in small patches, he 

 would venture to ask them whether the}' might not have 

 mistaken the unequal wearing of the edges of the rock. 

 He understood from the paper that these grooves were not 

 found in the Mesozoic sandstone, but only in connection 

 with the lower drift on the Silurian rocks, and he was 



