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case of the maritime elevations of West Cumberland. But even 

 when they attained to very large dimensions, and perhaps for a 

 long time after the increasing severity of the cold had led to the 

 confluence of many of the larger streams that reached the low 

 grounds, there is still every reason to believe that their movements 

 were on the whole downhill and seaward, and everywhere radial to 

 the main centres of high land. If this epoch of repeated arctic 

 conditions was one of very long duration (? 200,000 years) as there 

 seems many good reasons for believing was the case, it will enable 

 us to account easily for many of the more striking results of glacial 

 action, our lake-basins for example, and especially for the origin of 

 those remarkable parallel rock-furrows and grooves (many of them 

 almost entitled tobe termed valleys) that are ploughed out of the solid 

 rock here and there over large areas in the north. These parallel 

 furrows, many of them fifty feet or more in depth, hundreds of yards in 

 width, and sometimes a quarter of a mile or more in length, run side by 

 side over a large area around Appleby and Penrith, where their form 

 has long attracted attention, without hitherto meeting with a satis- 

 factory explanation. Many of the hill shaded maps of the Ordnance 

 Survey shew these features remarkably well. They are, I believe, 

 simply deep glacial grooves ploughed out of the solid rock by 

 prolonged erosion, accomplished by the ice in the earlier periods 

 of glacial action, when the local ice moved as a mass of confluent 

 glaciers outward from the Lake District toward the sea. Their 

 direction is quite different from the course taken by the ice during 

 the comparatively-short period of maximum glaciation presently to 

 be referred to. 



It was at this earlier period, I believe, that vast quantities of the 

 Lake Country and of the Edenside rocks, disintegrated and loosened 

 by prolonged weathering in late Pliocene times, were swept by the 

 same seaward-flowing ice out into the low ground of Edenside, and 

 left, may be in the form of vast moraines, in the maritime districts 

 near where is now Carlisle. Along with these tough and durable 

 rocks must also have been transported the debris of such rocks as 

 the Skidda Slate, and the like, in quantities proportionate to the 

 areas then exposed directly to glacial action. But these, except in 



