634 EEroRT— 1886. 



flanks of the North Welsh mountains. This great moraine, filled with far-travelled 

 northern erratics, is heaped up in hummocks and irregular ridges, and is in many 

 places as characteristically developed as anywhere in America. It has none of 

 the characters of a sea-beach, although often containing broken shells brought 

 from the Irish Sea. It may be followed from the extreme end of the 

 Lleyn Peninsula (where it is full of Scotch granite erratics"), in a north-easterly 

 direction, through Carnarvonshire, past Moel Tryfan, and along the foot of the 

 mountains east of Menai Strait to Bangor, where it goes out to sea, reappearing 

 further east at Conway and Colwyn. It turns south-eastward at Denbighshire, 

 going past St. Asaph and Ilalkin Mountain. In Flintshire it turns southward, and 

 is magnificently developed on the eastern side of the mountains, at an elevation of 

 over 1,000 feet between Minera and Llangollen, south-west of which place it enters 

 England. There is evidence that where the ice-sheet abutted against Wales it was 

 about 1,350 feet in thickness. This is analogous to the thickness of the ice-sheet 

 in Pennsylvania, where the author had previously shown that it was about 1,000 

 feet in thickness at its extreme edge and 2,000 feet thick at points some eight 

 miles back from its edge. The transport of erratics coincides with the direction 

 of strife in Wales as elsewhere, and is at right angles to the terminal moraines. 



The complicated phenomena of the glaciation of England, the subject of a 

 voluminous literature and discordant views, had been of high interest to the author, 

 and had led him to redouble his efl'orts toward its solution. He had found that it 

 was possible to accurately map the glaciated areas, to separate the deposits made 

 by land-ice from those due to icebergs or to torrential rivers, and to trace out a 

 series of terminal moraines both at the edge of the ice-sheet and at the edge of its 

 confluent lobes. Perhaps the finest exhibition of a terminal moraine in England 

 is in the vicinity of Ellesmere, in Shropshire. A great mass of drift several 

 miles in width, and full of erratics from Scotland and from Wales, is here heaped 

 into conical hills which enclose ' kettleholes ' and lakes, and have all the characters 

 of the ' kettle moraine ' of Wisconsin. Like the latter, the Ellesmere moraine 

 here divides two great lobes of ice, one coming from Scotland, the other from 

 Wales. This moraine may be traced continuously from Ellesmere eastward, 

 through Madeley, Macclesfield, to and along the western flank of the Pennine 

 chain, marking throughout the southern edge of the ice-sheet of Northern 

 England. From Macclesfield the same moraine was traced northward past 

 Stockport and Staleybridge to Burnley, and thence to Skipton, in Yorkshire. 

 North-east of Burnley it is banked against the Boulsworth Hills up to a height of 

 1,300 feet, in the form of mounds and hummocks. South and east of this long 

 moraine no signs of glaciation were discovered, while north and west of it there 

 is every evidence of a continuous ice-sheet covering land and sea alike. The strife 

 and the transport of boulders agree in proving a southerly and south-easterly 

 direction of ice-movement in Lancashire and Cheshire. 



From Skipton northward tbe phenomena are more complicated. A tongue of 

 ice surmounted the watershed near Skipton and protruded down the valley of the 

 Aire as far as Bingley, where its terminal moraine is throvni across the valley like 

 a great dam, reminding one of similar moraine dams in several Pennsylvanian 

 valleys. A continuous moraine was traced around this Aire glacier. Another 

 greater glacier, much larger than this, descended AVensleydale and reached the 

 plain of York. The most complex glacial movements in Eugland occurred in the 

 mountain region about the Nine Standards, where local glaciers met and were 

 overpowered by the greater ice-sheet coming down from Cumberland. The ice- 

 sheet itself was here divided, one portion going southward, the other, in company 

 with local glaciers and laden with the well-known boulders of the ' Shap granite,' 

 being forced eastward across Stainmoor Forest into Durham and Yorkshire, finally 

 reaching the North Sea at the mouth of the Tees. The terminal moraine runs 

 eastward through Kirkby Ravensworth toward Whitby, keeping north of the 

 Cleveland Hills, and all eastern England south of Whitby appears to be non- 

 glaciated. On the other hand, all England north of Stainmoor Forest and the 

 river Tees, except the very highest points, was smothered in a sea of solid ice. 



There is abundant evidence to prove that the ice-lobe filling the Irish Sea was 



