Association of American Geologists and Naturalists. 163 
Mr. C. stated that he would here offer a few brief remarks upon the 
bearing of the facts he had submitted upon the question of the results 
of aqueo-glacial action in past times, and especially in the effects pro- 
duced upon subjacent rocks by the stranding of icebergs. It was with 
much diffidence that he dissented from the opinion entertained by some 
eminent geologists, that this circumstance had any agency in produ- 
cing the’ parallel grooves constituting so remarkable a feature in the 
rocks of New England. Even assuming that in a former era the drift- 
ing masses of ice had pursued an uniformly direct course from north 
to south, though this might explain the general distribution of erratic - 
blocks and bowlders, yet it appeared to him highly improbable that their 
grounding, and then being driven forward by the combined forces of 
wind and sea, could ever have produced the furrows in question. There 
is no reason why the oscillatory or semi-gyratory movement, should 
not then have followed such an accident as it does now, in which case, 
as at present, the tendency would be rather to obliterate all such marks, 
(had they previously existed,) and form a deep hollow if passing over 
a yielding surface, or a confused. scratching and grinding down of.a 
rocky one. It had been shown, however, that the icebergs of the 
present day pursue a very irregular course, and although their general 
progress is truly from north to south, or the reverse, yet impelled by 
varying winds and currents, they deviate widely both east and west of 
@ meridional line. Did not this fact in some measure explain the dif- 
ference pointed out by Prof. Hitchcock as apparently existing between 
the line of diréction observable in the distribution of bowlders, and that 
of the diluvial scratches? It had been suggested, that at the period 
when the drift was deposited there was no Gulf Stream to affect the 
course of floating ice, but while this may be very true, it does not fol- 
low that there were no currents whatever. It struck him that to as- 
sume the production-of our parallel groovts by the action of stranded . 
ice, was to presuppose a state of Sen meena circumstan- 
ces amounting to a physical impossibility. 
Not only must it be taken for granted that there were no currents, or 
at least but one from the pole to the equator, and. only one perennial 
wind blowing in the same direction, but the floating masses must either 
have been of such nicely balanced proportions, and melted with such 
uniform regularity, and the waves must have struck them so exactly from 
the same quarter, as to have prevented any change of position ; or they 
must have been in such numbers and so closely packed as to preclude 
wae oscillatory movement. 
- Was. it essential to the explanation of the phenomena of drift, to 
assume that the distribution of bowlders, and the production of our so- 
called diluvial seratches, were entirely the result of contemporaneous 
