58 PROCEEDINGS OF THE ASSOCIATION OF 



a gradual melting away of the mass, he would not now pause to 

 inquire.) depositing bowlders through its course, and by the strand- 

 ing and grinding of large masses of Avhich into beds of sedimentary 

 matter or drift, were occasioned the singular contortions visible in 

 portions of the clay strata? 



If it could be shown that a sudden and violent rush of waters from 

 the polar region had taken place, sweeping over the whole northern 

 portion of this hemisphere, bearing along with it large islands of ice, 

 denuding the hills and filling the valleys with drift, and eventually 

 subsiding almost as rapidly as it poured southward, — would not this 

 induce a" belief that the remarkable, large, bowl-shaped cavities 

 described in Professor Hitchcock's able memoir on the drift of New 

 England, as existing on Cape Cod and elsewhere, might have been 

 formed by the stranding and grinding of large islands of ice down 

 into the recently deposited drift ? It occurred to Mr. C. at once, 

 when these excavations were alluded to by Professor Hitclicock, in 

 connection with ice, that they might have originated in this manner, 

 rather than from the deposition of matter around the melting ice, as 

 suggested by that gentleman, — or they may have been produced 

 by a combination of these two operations ; the grinding and settling 

 down of the stranded berg, excavating a hollow, while the earthy 

 materials contained in it would be piled up around the sides as it dis- 

 solved. If we supposed a very large berg, of the pinnacled character, 

 to have been left aground by the subsidence of the paroxysmal flood, 

 and divided into several smaller ones, each forming a separate 

 crateriform bed for itself, we should then readily comprehend the 

 production of such a group of these cavities as was described by 

 Prof Hitchcock. Whether these suggestions were borne out by the 

 geological features of the dritt in general, was left for those to deter- 

 mine whose observation had been more specially directed to a study 

 of those phenomena. Mr. Couthouy observed that he would merely 

 repeat, that in relation to the production of diluvial, or to speak more 

 correctly, glacial furrows, he had no preconceived views of his own 

 to support ; but that when he first heard them attributed to the grating 

 of icebergs along the bottom, he was convinced, by the recollection 

 of what he had personally witnessed of the action of ice nnder such 

 circumstances at the present day, that this never would have pro- 

 duced such results. The parallelism and uniform direction of the 

 stria?, appeared to him conclusive of a different agency in their 

 formation. He felt persuaded that no person who had once seen 

 the actual movements of a stranded iceberg, would ever afterwards 

 entertain for a moment, the idea that such a cause would produce 

 the furrows imder consideration. He also thought it veiy problem- 

 atical whether icebergs would, by their stranding, and being irregu- 

 larly pushed forward by wind and wave, produce moraines, having 

 much if any afiinity with those resulting from the slow, regular 

 advance of the Alpine glaciers. 



He offered these suggestions with no small hesitation, fully sensible 

 how presumptuous it might seem in him to venture a difl'erence in 



