1894. NOTES AND COMMENTS. 415 



" In April, I visited the spot again, excepting to find that the 

 boulders had been driven along the shore by the fierce storms which 

 had raged along that coast since my previous visit, and intending to 

 make note of their dispersal and the distance to which they had 

 travelled. I found, however, that the keel and a portion of the lower 

 part of the wreck remained, and that the surrounding pool was 

 greatly deepened and extended. Through the deep clear water I saw 

 the heap of ballast, which had been undermined and was settling 

 down into the depths, being already far below the level of the 

 surrounding sand. When the last of the timber shall have yielded 

 to the axe and the waves, the sand will soon level up the hole caused 

 by the scour round the obstructing mass, and this heap of Scandi- 

 navian boulders will lie buried in the sand till some exceptional storm 

 shall shift the banks, and expose them again, and perhaps transport 

 them along the shore. 



" Had this vessel been thrown on a hard rocky shore instead, the 

 ballast would have started at once with the other boulders on the 

 shore, and been scattered, according to size and form, along the coast. 

 As it was, however, these have got buried deep in sand, and preserved 

 till, perhaps, the habit of using such boulders for ballast shall have 

 been given up, and then, washed out by the accidents of weather, of 

 coast destruction, and of shifting sand, they will appear among the 

 fallen fragments of a boulder-clay cliff, and be appealed to in proof 

 of its origin. 



" How many ships with Scandinavian ballast have been wrecked 

 along our eastern coast ever since the time of the Vikings ? How 

 many hundred tons of such boulders are still travelling round our 

 shores ? " 



At a meeting of the Geologists' Association of London, on 

 May 4, Mr. W. W. Watts read a paper on behalf of Mr. A. C. G. 

 Cameron, " On some boulders of chalk in the Boulder-clay of 

 Huntingdonshire." These masses were of large size, and were 

 evidently torn from the original mass, and were [in no way " recon- 

 structed " chalk. It was pointed out that one of these masses was 

 considerably more than half-a-mile long, about a quarter of a mile 

 wide, and of unascertained thickness. Upon it, the greater part of 

 the village of Catworth was built, the inhabitants of which derived 

 an abundant supply of water from wells sunk into the mass, this 

 commodity being difficult to obtain by those living on the surrounding 

 surface of boulder-clay. Such a block of chalk as this raises similar 

 interesting questions to the travelled blocks of Professor Hughes. 

 But in this case we cannot invoke the Vikings. As was pointed out 

 at the meeting of the Association, it is difficult to imagine the ice- 

 force necessary to tear away from the parent rock so prodigious a 

 mass of chalk, leaving out of the question the quantity of ice 

 necessary to lift and transport such a mass bodily over the 

 country. 



