The Chalky and other Clays of Eastern England. 457 



true of the eastern boundary of the Chalky Clay is true also of 

 its southern, western, and northern boundaries. The same con- 

 clusion follows from the complete absence of any shells or other 

 marine debris from the Chalky Clay, showing it to have been an 

 inland product of the denudation of local beds ; and the evidence 

 seems clear that whatever mixed and distributed the clay, the 

 work itself was done on the spot. 



Let us now examine the clay a little more closely. 



The local stony rubble in the so-called Glacial clays of Eastern 

 England is dispersed irregularly throughout the matrix. As has 

 been frequently noted, the prevailing rock fragments in any district 

 depends upon the substratum, but in every district known to me 

 the rocks of other districts are represented. This means that what- 

 ever force or engine mixed the clays as we find them, it must 

 have been one that could take up fragments of rock from the 

 north and east and west, and move them in directions opposite and 

 contrary to each other. The great cauldron in which the clay was 

 mingled must have been occupied by some vei'y powerful mobile 

 machinery, which did not move in direct lines, but could move in 

 various directions, and thus bring together and mix together the 

 debris from the four points of the compass in one common medley, 

 and having done so, could distribute it in the fashion we see it 

 distributed now. What force or machinery was competent to effect 

 this extraordinary work ? 



A considerable number of geologists unhesitatingly attribute the 

 formation and its distribution to ice, and, in fact, point to this clay 

 and instance it as one of the most remarkable proofs of ice-action in 

 this country. I absolutely traverse this position : not only does 

 it seem to me that the Chalky Clay was not distributed by ice, 

 but I would go further and say that I cannot understand 

 how ice in any shape can have formed and distributed it ; 

 and it is a very remarkable fact that those who have chiefly 

 championed the cause of ice in this particular instance, are those 

 who have never seen ice at work at all in Nature, while those who 

 have so seen and studied it are unanimous, or almost unanimously 

 of opinion, that nowhere in Nature is ice-work of the kind postulated 

 to be found now going on anywhere. 



The champions of ice have invoked it in several forms. Some of 

 them invoke a foreign ice-sheet coming partly from Durham and 

 partly from Scandinavia. This is supposed to be necessitated as 

 a postulate by the presence in these clays of the foreign stones 

 whose provenance has been deduced from Durham and Scandinavia 

 respectively. We shall have more to say to this when we consider 

 the foreign stones. At present we are dealing with the local ones 

 only, and their distribution. Suppose that we can postulate such 

 a foreign ice-sheet coming down, say, in Lincolnshire and the 

 Fenland and their borders, what is the work which it must have 

 been capable of doing when it reached England in order to explain 

 the Chalky Clay. This vast, almost rigid, mass of ice pressed on 

 from behind, it is presumed, by some tremendous vis a tergo, and 



