IV THE ICE AGE AND ITS WORK 73 



altogether untenable, and that the original explanation 

 of Venetz and Charpentier was the true one. Sir Charles 

 Lyell, who had first adopted the iceberg theory, gave it 

 up on examining the country in 1857 and ascertaining 

 that the facts were correctly stated by the Swiss geolo- 

 gists ; and there is at the present day no writer of the 

 least importance who denies this. Sir Henry Howorth, 

 who is one of the strongest opponents of what he considers 

 the extreme views of modern glacialists, gives a full 

 summary of the facts as to the old Rhone glacier from 

 Charpentier. He states that between Martigny and St. 

 Maurice the moraine debris on each side of the valley 

 shows the glacier to have reached a height of 3,000 feet 

 above the river ; farther on, where the valley widens over 

 the Lake of Geneva, it sank to 2,600 feet, while on the 

 Jura itself it seems to have been again raised to 3,000 

 feet at its highest point ^ ; and he quotes Charpentier's 

 general conclusion : — 



" It goes without saying that not only all the valleys of the Yalais 

 were filled with ice up to a certain height, but that all lower Swit- 

 zerland in which we find the erratic debiis of the Rhone valley must 

 have been covered by the same glacier. Consequently all the 

 country between the Alps and the Jura, and between the environs 

 of Geneva and those of Soleure, has been the bed of a glacier." 

 And then, after quoting the observations of Agassiz on 

 the same phenomena and of those of North America, he 

 gives his own conclusions in the following words : — 



" It is plain to those who would look without prejudice that the 

 rounded and mammilated surfaces, the scratched, polished, and 

 grooved rocks, and a great number of the phenomena which 

 accompanied the distribution of the boulders and the drift, are con- 

 sistent only with the fact that in the last geological age there was 

 an immense development of glaciers which occupied not only the 

 high ranges of the Alps and the Dovref jeld, but the secondary ranges 

 and lower heights of the continents of Europe and North America. 

 This conclusion seems sujDported by every form of converging evi- 

 dence, and is apparently beyond the reach of cavil. So far there 

 is no question at issue." ^ 



^ These figures are almost certainly incorrect, as the upper surface 

 of the glacier must have had a considerable downward slope to produce 

 motion. The recent work of M. Falsan, La Periode Glaciaire, gives 

 the thickness as about 3,800 feet at the head of the lake and 

 3,250 feet at Geneva. 



- The Glacial Nightmare ami the Flood, p. 208. 



