CHAP. XIIT. GLACIAL PERIOD IN SCOTLAND. 241 



extinct animals, and the signs they afford of a state of phy 

 sical geography departing widely from the present, or to 

 the era of the implement-bearing alluvium of St. Acheul, we 

 might expect to find Scandinavia overwhelmed with glaciers, 

 and the country uninhabitable by man. At a much remoter 

 period the same country was in the state in which Greenland 

 now is, overspread with one uninterrupted coating of conti 

 nental ice, which has left its peculiar markings on the highest 

 mountains. This period, probably anterior to the earliest 

 traces yet brought to light of the human race, may have 

 coincided with the submergence of England, and the accumu 

 lation of the boulder-clay of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Bedford 

 shire, before mentioned. It has already been stated that the 

 syenite and some other rocks of the Norfolk till (p. 218) 

 seem to have come from Scandinavia, and there is no era 

 when icebergs are so likely to have floated them so far south 

 as when the whole of Sweden and Norway were enveloped 

 in a massive crust of ice ; a state of things the existence of 

 which is deduced from the direction of the glacial furrows, 

 and their frequent unconformity to the shape of the minor 

 valleys. 



Glacial Period in Scotland. 



Mr. Eobert Chambers, after visiting Norway and Sweden, 

 and comparing the signs of glacial action observed there 

 with similar appearances in the Grampians, came to the con 

 clusion that the Highlands both of Scandinavia and Scotland 

 had once been ; moulded in ice,' and that the outward and 

 downward movement and pressure of the frozen mass had 

 not only smoothed, polished, and scratched the rocks, but 

 had, in the course of ages, deepened and widened the valleys, 

 and produced much of that denudation which has commonly 

 been ascribed exclusively to aqueous action. The glaciation 



R 



