138 SURVEY OF THE SNOWDON REGION CHAP, v 



and walked across the hills to Llanberis. Splendid 

 examples of glacial action.' Chambers had come 

 purposely to see the evidence of glaciers in the Welsh 

 valleys, and to compare it with what he was now 

 familiar with in Scotland. It looks as if this visit of 

 his had really for the first time turned his companion's 

 eyes from the rocks themselves to the study of the 

 manner in which they have been worn and striated by 

 ice. Ramsay seems to have been still much in the 

 state of mind so well described by himself a few years 

 later. '.We recollect well the unbelief and ridicule 

 that greeted the announcements of Agassiz and Buck- 

 land in 1840-41, that glaciers once occupied the greater 

 valleys of the Highlands of Scotland and of Wales, 

 and how sceptics and shallow wits, whose geology 

 perhaps rarely extended beyond the precincts of turn- 

 pike roads, attributed the grooving and striation of 

 the rocks to cart-wheels and hob-nailed boots, and the 

 ice-polished rock surfaces to the sliding of the caudal 

 corduroys of Welshmen on the rocks, to slickensides 

 and sea- waves, and to every cause, indeed, but the true 



one.' 1 



By the i5th November, however, he had been 

 led to recognise everywhere the peculiar smoothing 

 and polishing produced by moving ice ; for on that 

 date, with regard to the summit of the tower -like 

 precipice referred to in the citation above, he remarks 

 that this summit ' is, as usual, well grooved with glacial 

 undulations.' Yet it is noteworthy that these are the 

 only allusions to glaciation in the jottings of his first 

 year's work in North Wales. He had evidently not 

 yet realised the nature and force of the proofs of 



1 Review by A. C. R. of fifth edition of Lyell's Elementary Manual of 

 Geology in the Edin. New Phil. Journ. April 1856, p. 317 (see postea^ p. 238). 



