¥905-6.] Is BELIEF IN A GLACIAL PERIOD JUSTIFIED? 285 
some agency other than ice, must have directed the original formation 
of valleys of this type.” Similarly Mr. J. Geikie says, ‘‘he cannot see his 
way to account for the vertical cliffs surrounding cirques, by invoking 
ice action,’ while Mr. Jukes Brown refers to a cirque he saw in Egypt, 
where ice action is impossible-and which he calls a rain gorge. 
Murchison says; regarding fidrds, ‘‘Where in any icy track, is there 
evidence that any glacier has by its advance, excavated a single foot of 
solid rock? In their advance glaciers striate and polish, but never ex- 
eavate rocks. The plain and unmistakable geological conclusion, is that 
wherever the earth’s crust was broken up from beneath, it necessarily 
underwent great transverse cracks, which opened into fissures and caverns. 
_ The true origin of all such great transverse fidérds or cafions, or in short 
of all abrupt fissures in hard rocks, into which bays of the sea enter, or 
in which rivers flow, must be referred to original breaks in the crust, of 
which the waters have taken advantage and have found the most natural 
issue.” 
ae Now as to Greenland, to judge from the period during which we 
have records, it seems clear, that while the land has been rising from 
the sea, it has been growing colder, glaciers have increased and ice has 
encroached upon the old dwellings and hunting grounds of the Esquimaux, 
which in many places are no longer habitable. Dr. O. A. L. Mérch exam- 
ined a collection of shells from North Greenland, found them partly be- 
longing to species still living there and partly to more southern forms. 
Dr. Rink speaking of Jacobshavn fidrd says, early maps show it as a sound 
uniting the north Atlantic with Baffin’s Bay. It is now known only as a 
deep fidrd, filled with huge icebergs. Tradition amongst the Greenlanders 
is that formerly it was less obstructed with ice and good hunting ground. 
This is proved by numerous remains of old dwellings. Walrus no longer 
enter the fidrd, even the bear is scarce, but bones in Kitchen Middens 
prove that those animals were once abundant. It is difficult to 
conceive how it would be possible to secure such a surface slope, as 
would move ice from the Laurentian highlands 700 miles away over 
the prairies, or which could traverse the deep basin of the Baltic and 600 
miles to the south of it, which would fill the North Sea and overwhelm 
Great Britain in its icy folds and transport Finnish and Swedish ice 
to Central Russia and the Carpathians without at the same time so com- 
pletely burying the whole country in ice, as to prevent any boulders from 
falling upon it from exposed rocks? There are no moraines in Greenland 
except where the Nunataks or exposed rocks project above the ice. Where 
it is unbroken like those districts traversed by Nansen, there are no mo- 
raines. Ice moving over level ground would have no crevasses, by which 
surface blocks could be dropped into the glacier and therefore there 
