2CO 



NATURE 



[Dec. 29, 1887 



LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 



[The Editor does not hold himself responsible for opinions 

 expressed by his correspondents. Neither can he under- 

 take to return, or to correspond with the writers of, 

 rejected manuscripts. No notice is taken of anonymous 

 communications. 



{The Editor urgently requests correspondents to keep their 

 letters as short as possible. The pressure on his space 

 is so great that it is impossible otherwise to insure the 

 appearance even of communications containing interesting 

 and novel facts. 



"The Conspiracy of Silence." 



Will you allow me a word on "The Great Lesson" by the 

 Duke of Argyll? It is especially what is said about Darwin's 

 coral-island theory in the following lines, to which I wish to 

 refer : — "All the acclamations with which it was received were 

 as the shouts of an ignorant mob. It is well to know that the 

 plebiscites of science may be as dangerous and as hollow as those 

 of politics. The overthrow of Darwin's speculation is only 

 beginning to be known. . . . Reluctantly, almost sulkily, and 

 with a grudging silence as far as public discussion is concerned, 

 the ugly possibility has been contemplated as too disagreeable to 

 be much talked about." 



The terms "ignorant mob," "sulkily," and "grudging 

 silence," as used above, cannot readily be forgotten if forgiven 

 by men of science on this side of the Atlantic any more than by 

 their brethren in England. 



I am unable to see anything sulky or silent in the exposition 

 of Mr. Murray's coral-island theory of over three pages in length, 

 which was published and sent to all the scientific world in 

 Nature, vol. xxii. p. 351 ; nor in the many articles in the current 

 literature and recent geological text-books that have since ap- 

 peared. In this country no large text-book of geology has been 

 issued since 1880 ; but Mr. John Murray's work has been fairly 

 discussed, and, so far as I know, has always been recognized. 

 Here at Williams College, for example, the views of Mr. Murray 

 referred to have been expounded each year in the course in 

 geology since 1880. One may, I take it, differ from the Duke 

 of Argyll in accepting or rejecting, wholly or in part, any theory, 

 without laying himself open to the charges quoted above. Of 

 anything like sulkiness or grudging silence I have yet to see or 

 hear the first evidence. There is indeed a "great lesson" in 

 the article by the Duke of Argyll, but it is hardly the one he 

 intended to give. Samuel F. Clarke. 



Williams College, Williamstown, Mass., December 5. 



During the now returned biennial expedition to our northern- 

 most boundary of the west coast of Greenland, the leader of the 

 Expedition, the clever naval officer, Mr. Care Ryder, has 

 measured a progress or a flow of the great glaciers = 99 feet per 

 diem or in twenty-four hours during the summer, and = 30-35 

 feet in twenty- four hours during winter months." 



This, no doubt, will interest many of your Alpine readers. 



Joseph Prestwich. 



Shoreham, Sevenoaks, December 17. 



"Darwin's Life and Letters" are now public property, 

 and as reference to vol. iii. p. 242, shows — what nearly every 

 scientific man knew — that the late Sir Wyville Thomson was dis- 

 tinctly anti-Darwinian in his views, it follows that the Duke of 

 Argyll's inferences as to his reasons for urging Mr. Murray's 

 withdrawal of the "new coral-reef theory" paper from the 

 Royal Society of Edinburgh is illogical, not to say absurd. In 

 justice to Sir Wyville's memory and in support of Mr. Bonney's 

 surmise (Nature, November 24, p. 77) 1 wish to state that, 

 talking with Sir Wyville about "Murray's new theory," I asked 

 what objection he had to its being brought before the public ? 

 The answer simply was : he considered that the grounds of the 

 theory had not as yet been sufficiently investigated or sufficiently 

 corroborated, and that therefore any immature, dogmatic publi- 

 cation of it would do less than little service either to science or 

 to the author of the paper. 



An Old Pupil of Wyville Thomson's. 



December 17. 



Greenland Glaciers. 



I HAVE received a letter from Prof. Steenstrup, of Copen- 

 hagen, which gives further interesting information respecting the 

 extraordinarily rapid advance of the Greenland glaciers, and 

 corroborates the opinion I expressed in the paper I recently 

 read before the Geological Society, that the rate of advance 

 during the Glacial period may have been far more rapid than 

 that generally assumed, and that that period should be much 

 shortened. Prof. Steenstrup states :— 



"Meantime the difference between the Alpine data and the 

 Greenland data seems to have grown greater and greater. 



"The Mammoth and the Flood." 



In the notice which you have given of my book, which you 

 are good enough to say is, apart from its theories, a valuable 

 work of reference, I should have been more gratified if you had 

 devoted a little space either to stating my arguments or to re- 

 futing them, instead of indulging in a rhetorical wail over my 

 backsliding from the orthodox ways of uniformity. 



The theories for which I am responsible have been accepted 

 by so many men in the first rank in science in both hemispheres 

 that I am naturally anxious to have them seriously and severely 

 discussed, and I think your critic would allow that I have justi- 

 fied my hope that this will be the case by converging upon my 

 inferences an unusual array of facts. 



It was assuredly quite time that someone who disbelieves in 

 " authority in science" should raise a strong protest against the 

 extravagant position which the English school of geology has 

 taken up on this question of uniformity, an extravagance of 

 which students in other branches of science are hardly aware. 



The head of the Geological Survey in this country, speaking 

 not long ago with all the authority and responsibility which 

 surround a President of the British Association, committed 

 himself to the following statement : — " From the Laurentian 

 epoch down to the present day, all the physical events in the 

 history of the earth have varied neither in kind nor in intensity 

 from those of ivhich we now have experience. " 



This was not the opinion of an irresponsible and eccentric 

 student, but of the official mouthpiece of English geology, and 

 with one notable exception — namely, Prof Prestwich — it has 

 remained, so far as I know, without protest or repudiation, 

 while Prof. Prestwich himself has been treated as a heretic for 

 the views he has so courageously and ably maintained. 



My book is meant to challenge the doctrine of uniformity as 

 generally held by English geologists, and which as held here is 

 largely repudiated both in America and on the Continent. 



In regard to its many arguments, I cannot defend them in a 

 letter, but I can shortly examine the only one to which your 

 critic directs attention, and which happens to be a very crucial 

 one. 



This is the explanation of the existence of a series of mam- 

 moths buried in the tundras of Siberia, throughout its entire 

 length, with their soft parts intact. This fact, which has been 

 known for a century, compelled Cuvier long ago to adopt a 

 conclusion which I have simply accepted and enlarged. I state 

 it shortly in the following extract from my work : — "The facts 

 compel us to admit that when the mammoth was buried in 

 Siberia the ground was soft and the climate genial, and that 

 immediately afterwards the same ground became frozen, and the 

 same ciimate became Arctic, and that they have remained so to 

 this day, and this not gradually and in accordance with some 

 slowly continuous astronomical or cosmical changes, but sud- 

 denly and /^r ^rt/Z/^w. " I also argue that the only way I can 

 explain the existence of a chain of such carcasses buried many 

 feet deep in continuous beds of gravel and clay is by the opera- 

 tion of one cause only, and that a flood of water on a large 

 scale. 



Your critic, who I can hardly think has read the part of my 

 book dealing with this issue, says that the carcasses are found in 

 ice. The fact is, they are mver fouttd in ice, as the Russian 

 explorers have so well shown. The reference to ice in the 

 account of the discovery of the famous Adam's mammoth has 

 been shown by Baer to have been altogether misunderstood, and 

 nothing is more clear than that they are found buried deep in 

 hard frozen gravel and clay. 



Secondly, he urges a view which was generally held fifty 

 years ago, but which has been completely dissipated by the 

 elaborate researches of the Russian naturalists, especially the 

 geologist Schmidt, and which I quote at length— namely, that 

 the carcasses have in some way been floated down by the Sibe- 

 rian rivers and buried in their warp. As Schrnidt shows, the 



