66 COUNTRY ESSAYS. 



night, so the fragment of ice under the traveller's foot points to 

 the mighty power which, in a period of time scarcely appreci- 

 able to the aeons of geology, could transform the face of this 

 rugged country at will, bid lakes gather and streams run in 

 unaccustomed channels, and then in a peaceful mood invite 

 man man, that pigmy and ephemera to speculate here on 

 her bygone paroxysms and perversities. 



The simplicity of this explanation, however, does not find 

 favour with all geologists. As philosophers may be roughly 

 divided into Aristotelians and Platonists, so those who refuse to 

 see glacial action in the present aspects of Scotland are com- 

 pelled to invoke the aid of the sea. The present condition of 

 the landscape round Glen Roy, say these, does not answer to 

 the theory of ice-barriers. Beyond the Roads themselves, 

 which the sea could produce as easily as could a lake, the 

 indispensable barriers, it is asserted, have left no wreck to tell 

 of their existence. No trace exists of the once mighty mounds 

 of rock, or sand, or gravel, which must have restrained the 

 lacustrine waters. To this reasoning any one who has followed 

 my footsteps, much more any one who has inspected Glen Roy 

 for himself, will at once reply that the difficulty only exists on 

 paper solvitur ambulando. If the mounds themselves, which 

 once acted as barriers to the lake, do not remain, their ruins, 

 as I have striven to show, tell the tale in mute yet scarcely 

 mistakable accents. " There can be no doubt," says Professor 

 Nicol,* "that the sea was at one time there, over all the 

 mountains and up every glen. Besides, there are other proofs 

 of the presence of the sea. Above all, I find in Strath Spey, 

 not thirty miles from Glen Roy, terraces less extensive indeed, 

 but similar in all essential points, and in a locality where lakes 

 cannot have existed. I can therefore no longer doubt that 

 these famed roads are as Darwin and Robert Chambers 



* The Geology and Scenery of the North of Scotland, p. 76. Edinburgh : 

 Oliver & Boyd, 1866. 



