THE " GREAT ICE AGE." 115 



not without physical danger, many other glaciers in Swit- 

 zerland and the Tyrol, and afterwards practically studied 

 the subject in Norway, Nortfl^Wales, and wherever else an 

 opportunity offered, reading in the meantime much of its 

 special literature ; but, like many others, confining my read- 

 ing chiefly to authors who start with living glaciers and 

 describe their doings most prominently. "When, however, 

 I read the first edition of Mr. Geikie's " Great Ice Age," 

 immediately after its publication, his mode of presenting 

 the phenomena, bottom upwards, suggested a number of 

 reflections that had never occurred before, leading to other 

 than the usual explanations of many glacial phenomena, 

 and correcting some errors into which I had fallen in 

 searching for the vestiges of ancient glaciers. As these 

 suggestions and corrections may be interesting to others, as 

 they have been to myself, I will here state them in outline. 

 The most prominent and puzzling reflection or conclu- 

 sion suggested by reading Mr. Geikie's description of the 

 glacial deposits of Scotland was, that the great bulk of 

 them are quite different from the deposits of existing gla- 

 ciers. This reminded me of a previous puzzle and disap- 

 pointment that I had met in Norway, where I had observed 

 such abundance of striation, such universality of polished 

 rocks and rounded mountains, and so many striking exam- 

 ples of perched blocks, with scarcely any decent vestiges of 

 moraines. This was especially the case in Arctic Norway. 

 Coasting from Trondhjem to Hammerfest, winding round 

 glaciated islands, in and out of fjords banked with glaciated 

 rock-slopes, along more than a thousand miles of shore line, 

 displaying the outlets of a thousand ancient glacier valleys, 

 scanning eagerly throughout from sea to summit, landing 

 at several stations, and climbing the most commanding 

 hills, I saw only one ancient moraine that at the Oxfjord 

 station described in " Through Norway with Ladies." * 



* The terminal moraine at the Oxfjord station, which I have al- 

 ready mentioned as the only ancient example of an ordinary moraine 

 that I have seen in Arctic Norway, "was, of course, a special object 

 of interest to me. Further observation showed that it does not 

 merely consist of the heap of stones I noticed in 1856, which appears 

 like a disturbed talus cut through and heaped up at its lower part, 



