GRINDING POWER OF GLACIERS. 



moraine prof onde, can believe that the glacier merely slides over the 

 surface of the rock without causing any abrading action. Though 

 I cannot allow that Mr. Taylor's long residence in the Arctic regions 

 — principally, I presume, in the vicinity of Arksut Fjord — enables 

 him to come so positively to the conclusion he does, which is only 

 the old theoretical opinion of some geologists, derived from the 

 comparatively puny glaciers of the Alps; yet even there he must 

 have seen the stream laden with clay, pouring from under every 

 glacier, and choking up the neighbouring fjord, and shoaling cm n 

 the open sea around. Where can this mud have come from, if not 

 from the country underlying the glacier, and the great inland ice 

 of the interior of Greenland ; and if from these — as undoubtedly it 

 has— how can any one, with these well-known facts before his eves, 

 declare that the glacier has little or no abrading power ? Mr. Tayler, 

 even when wishing to prove the contrary, states a fact which entirely 

 cuts the ground from beneath his feet. " It is true," he says, " that 

 boulders and debris, borne along by the ice, scratch, polish, and grind 

 the rocks to a considerable extent ; but, though strong as a trans- 

 porting agency, ice alone has but little excavating power ; it is like 

 the soft wheel of the lapidary — the hard matter it carries with it 

 does the polishing." Exactly so. It is to the geologist a matter of 

 the most supreme indifference whether it is the ice of the glacier 

 itself, or the moraine profonde, invariably accompanying it, which 

 does the abrasion of the underlying rocks, so long as it is done. And 

 that even Mr. Tayler, in contradiction of his own doctrine, seems to 

 allow. Some opponents of the doctrine of ice-abrasion, who even 

 allow less power to the glacier than Mr. Tayler, always lose sight of 

 the long period during which the glacier must have been acting to 

 form these long fjords or inlets of the sea as they now exist. This 

 allowed — and there is no geologist who will doubt that though the 

 glacial period is but of yesterday in geological time, viewed in the 

 light of human chronology, it is so incalculably distant that it would 

 be vain to attempt to calculate the date of that epoch, and even 

 allowing that the glacier pouring down the Norwegian, British 

 Columbian, or Greenland valley of that date, only removed every 

 year by means of the sub-glacier stream, one inch of rock or other 

 Bubcumbent stratum — it requires but a very moderate number of 

 yea rs to excavate the broadest and deepest fjord in the world. At 

 that time the coast was higher than now, and it is the lowering of 

 the coast, combined with the deepening of the valley, that has con- 

 verted what was once a glacier-vulley into a fjord or inlet of the sea. 

 The great error of the catastrophiets is, that their method of thought 

 has led 1 hem uncoiiseioiisly Inexpert the slow and uniform action of 



