PERMIAN ICE 229 



a tumble-down house will give plenty of them ; and 

 then as to old localities for the fragments, independ 

 ently of not having cakes which have been eaten, who 

 the dickens, in such places, can say what rocks are 

 beneath the sprawl of New Reds? Lyell, however, 

 took a much more serious view of the matter, and with 

 that eager enthusiasm so characteristic of him, threw 

 himself into it, and endeavoured to master all the 

 evidence. He asked Ramsay to go over the ground 

 with him, and the request was readily granted. Lyell 

 is brimful of these Permian glaciers, Ramsay wrote to 

 Aveline ; and after taking the author of the Principles 

 of Geology over the ground, he tells in his diary how 

 at dinner Lyell, who had been ruminating on the 

 subject for some days, at last declared that to his mind 

 and eye the breccias told of river-ice rather than of 

 glaciers and icebergs. This dinner took place on the 

 eve of another continental journey, which Ramsay had 

 planned for the purpose of comparing some of the 

 more notable breccias of Germany with those which 

 he had been studying in England. Starting with 

 Mrs. Ramsay at the beginning of August, they made 

 their way by Heidelberg to Eisenach, spent some 

 ten days there examining the Rothliegendes and other 

 formations of Thuringia, and made a brief visit to 

 Berlin. 



The revision of some of the Survey work in Wales 

 was a subject that had lain very near to Ramsay s 

 heart for some years before the time at which this 

 narrative has arrived. We have seen how imperfect 

 he knew the maps of South Wales to be, owing to the 

 want of any proper subdivisions among the older 

 Palaeozoic formations. At the time when that ground 

 was mapped the importance of such subdivisions had 



