414 NINETEENTH CENTURY. PT. iir. 



was convinced, therefore, that they must have been carried 

 by ice, and that huge glaciers must once have come down 

 from the high Alps right across Switzerland, filling the lake 

 of Geneva with ice, and carrying these blocks with them, as 

 modern glaciers do now in the Swiss valleys. 



This was a marvellous history, for it showed that all the 

 lower land of Switzerland must once have been buried in 

 ice, but other facts afterwards came to light which were more 

 wonderful still. In 1840 Professor Agassiz came over to 

 visit Great Britain, and when he went to Scotland with Dr. 

 Buckland his practised eye discovered at once in the High- 

 lands glacial scratchings, remains of moraines, and blocks 

 which had been carried by ice; and soon it became evi- 

 dent that these were not confined to Scotland, for Dr. 

 Buckland recognised them again in Wales and the North of 

 England, where moraines and erratic blocks are to be seen 

 in all parts of the country. So that here, too, in our little 

 island, there must have been at one time huge glaciers as 

 large as those now found in the Alps. 



Nor was this all ; for when once geologists knew where 

 to look for these signs of glaciers, it began to be discovered 

 little by little that parts of all the northern countries of 

 Europe, Norway, Sweden, Russia, Germany, Switzerland, 

 Northern Italy, England, and even on the other side of the 

 Atlantic, Canada and North America, have been smoothed 

 and scratched ; and huge erratic (or wandering) blocks have 

 been scattered over them, showing that in very remote ages 

 (yet still while very nearly the same kinds of plants and 

 animals as now were living upon the globe), the temperate 

 parts of our northern hemisphere must have been intensely 

 cold, causing a large part of these countries to be covered 

 with great fields of ice, as Greenland is in the present day. 



