144 PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF QUEENSLAND. 



Put plainly the case was this : — I asserted three things : 

 first that the Brandon Beds lay beneath the Chalky Boulder 

 Clay, and were consequently anterior to the culmination of 

 the Glacial Period ; secondly that the said Chalky Boulder 

 Clay was the product of land ice and not of floating icebergs ; 

 thirdly that the Brandon Beds contained remains of man in 

 the fhnt implements I obtained in several, and the broken 

 bones and old hearth I found in one place. I may here add 

 that I found what I believed to be the site of an old tool 

 factory of this age, and Professor Marr writes me that a party 

 of (now penitent) geologists have recently spent some days in 

 detailed examination of the locality, and their results confirm 

 my vicM's. It did not take ten minutes to refute them forty 

 years ago ! " ' 



Lrf^oldng back to those early days I now feel sure that I 

 was at that time the only man alive who could have deciphered 

 the evidence. I am too old (and too far away) to be suspected 

 of immodesty in so sajdng, but if you recall my very peculiar 

 and special training you will see why I make the statement, 

 and also the reason why I have burdened this paper with so 

 many reminiscences. It is not I but the ferment I set up that 

 }natters : I was only the imrecognised enzyme. 



It might seem a jDcrfectly easy elementary problem to 

 prove that one bed lay atop of another when they were before 

 your eyes. But it wasn't. Whitaker and Hughes and Harmer 

 (to cite a few) were competent field geologsts and skilful 

 mappers of beds, of wide experience, yet they failed to read 

 the sections aright ; and if they were nonplussed M^hat was the 

 fate of those whose scientific profundity would not enable 

 them to distinguish between a cryptogam and a cryptogram ? 



Take the above three friends of mine. How came it that 

 they failed to recognise my Boulder Clay in many cases — 

 they who had mapped so much of it ? It was largely owing 

 to the reflex of the misleading theory of the marine origin of 

 the boulder-clay. • Clearly icebergs must in their melting 

 moments shed their dr}^ tears indiscriminatelj' ; the seeds of 

 future marine boulder-clays (to change the metaphor) must 

 fall, some upon good soil, some upon stony ground, and some 

 by the wayside ; there could be no connection between the 

 stones in the clay and the rocks upon which they fell, if the 

 berg were travelling high up above the outcrops of different 

 Idnds of rock. " Chalk to chalk " was not written in the 

 iceberg's burial service. 



