64 FILLING UP OF FJORDS. 



the forces of nature — acting from the beginning until now under 

 the control of one uniform unchanged and unchangeable law — to act 

 as rapidly as their " cataclysms " and other prodigious " catastrophes 

 of nature." Mr. Tayler is especially, I think, a little unreasonable 

 in disowning the abrading power of ice, because, in the eighteen 

 years or so during which he was a witness of its power, he did not 

 see it " hollow out " a fjord, and complete it ready for use ! After 

 all, the Eoman poet, who eighteen hundred years ago saw the rain- 

 drops splashing on the pavement of Tomi, had a clearer idea of the 

 effect of the slow, but constant, action of the forces of nature than 

 some geologists in later times — " Gutta cavat lapidem, non vi, sed 

 scepe cadendo." Therein lies the whole theory of ice and river action. 

 When we see a smoothly-gliding river excavate cations thousands of 

 feet in depth through the solid rock, surely it would be inconsistent 

 to deny that an ice-river flowing over the same spot for thousands of 

 years, may, assisted by a huge file, in the shape of the moraine 

 profonde, which it carries along with it on its under-surface, and 

 the sub-glacial river to carry off part of the debris thus worn, do 

 something approaching to this? 



If the advocates of the non-abrading power of ice will not allow 

 that glaciers can convert a valley in course of time into a deep glen, 

 and that then, by the aid of an oscillation of the coast, the sea enters 

 and the glacier floats away in icebergs, and its former bed now 

 becomes the fjord through which they sail, I cannot expect them to 

 give in their adhesion to Professor Eamsay's views regarding the 

 excavation of lake-basins by means of glaciers. 1 On the contrary, 

 this view of that distinguished geologist, while gaining many con- 

 verts, has been violently attacked both in this country and on the 

 Continent, yet, I venture to think, without being at all shaken in its 

 main points. Already it has been extensively adopted; and only 

 recently an eminent American naturalist — Professor Newberry, of 

 New York — has applied it to account for the formation of the great 

 American lakes. 2 Yet Professor Ramsay's theory requires much 

 more of ice than is required of it by mine. 



3. Filling up of Fjords. — When Mr. Tayler sa3's that, "instead of 

 glaciers excavating fjords, they are continually tilling them up," he 

 must not expect me to follow him ; for here, again, he loses the 

 thread of his arguments with a confusion of ideas which renders it 



1 ' Quarterly Journal, Geological Society,' vol. xviii. p. 185 (1862 . 



2 'Annals of the New York Lyceum of Natural History' (1869). Prof. 

 Nordenskjold, while agreeing that glaciers exercise an abrading influence, does 

 not, however, coincide with Prof. Ramsay's theory of the formation of lake-basins 

 (Nordenskjold, I. c, p. 365). 



