

MODERN GEOLOGY 



been submerged beneath the sea. During the latest of 

 these submergences icebergs deposited the bowlders 

 now scattered here and there over the land. Nothing 

 could be simpler or more clearly uniformitarian. And 

 even the catastrophists, though they met Lyell ami- 

 cably on almost no other theoretical ground, were in- 

 clined to admit the plausibility of his theory of erratics. 

 Indeed, of all Ly ell's nonconformist doctrines, this 

 seemed the one most likely to meet with general ac- 

 ceptance. 



Yet, even as this iceberg theory loomed large and 

 larger before the geological world, observations were 

 making in a different field that were destined to show 

 its fallacy. As early as 1815 a sharp-eyed chamois- 

 hunter of the Alps, Perraudin by name, had noted the 

 existence of the erratics, and, unlike most of his com- 

 panion hunters, had puzzled his head as to how the 

 bowlders got where he saw them. He knew nothing of 

 submerged continents or of icebergs, still less of up- 

 heaving mountains ; and though he doubtless had heard 

 of the Flood, he had no experience of heavy rocks 

 floating like corks in water. Moreover, he had never 

 observed stones rolling uphill and perching themselves 

 on mountain-tops, and he was a good enough uniform- 

 itarian (though he would have been puzzled indeed 

 had any one told him so) to disbelieve that stones in 

 past times had disported themselves differently in 

 this regard from stones of the present. Yet there the 

 stones are. How did they get there ? 



The mountaineer thought that he could answer that 

 question. He saw about him those gigantic serpent- 

 streams of ice called glaciers, " from their far foun- 

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