The Chalky and other Clays of Eastern England. 459 



how can we possibly explain the collecting of stones from the east 

 and the west, and the north, from areas entirely outside these local 

 glaciers and their influence, and their distributing the mixed 

 products far and wide right over the very areas supposed to have 

 been occupied by the local glaciers ? 



Again, if the country were more or less blanketed by ice, either 

 by a foreign ice-sheet or local glaciers, whence could the stones 

 have been derived at all ? There are no high mountains in Eastern 

 England whose peaks would have projected above the ice, and been 

 broken and weathered off to supply materials in this fashion. If the 

 ice produced the disintegration, it must have been by digging up and 

 excavating its own bed, and not in the fashion in which moraines 

 are formed. Now this process of excavating a bed of rock under- 

 neath a moving mass of very heavy ice is not only mechanically 

 incredible, but it is quite unsupported by any facts known to me, 

 and is quite repudiated by Professor Bonney and others whose 

 experience of ice is very much greater and more intimate than 

 mine ; and here we have to do, not with a local phenomenon 

 occupying a few square yards or acres, but with a stupendous one 

 involving the digging out and removing of wide stretches of rock, 

 not in the form of mud or powder, but in some cases of great 

 lumps and blocks of chalk and oolitic rock, over a wide area. 

 Whether the ice postulated be foreign ice or native ice, it is 

 equally impossible to understand how it could work in this fashion. 



If we turn to the stones themselves, we shall have our view 

 confirmed. True glacier -rubbed stones acquire a very curious 

 contour, that is, so far as I know, never present in these chalk 

 lumps of the Chalky Clay. In the case of all soft stones like chalk, 

 they are rubbed down on two sides into flat cakes, so as to have 

 two parallel faces, which are much scratched and furrowed, having, 

 in fact, been used by the glacier as the "skid" of a coach is used. 

 These are the real products of ice ruhbing on soft stones, as known 

 to myself in glacier districts, but such stones are markedly absent 

 here. The stones in the Chalky Clay, etc., are as polygonal as those 

 made by the stone-breakers on the highway, differing from such 

 stones only in the fact that they range in size from dust up to 

 masses many scores of feet long, and also in having their surface 

 smoothed and their angles blunted. These are in no sense glacier 

 stones. It is true that occasionally some are found which are 

 scored and scratched, but those who appeal to these sporadic stones 

 forget that whatever drove the clay along, if the movement were 

 quick and two stones rubbed against each other, scratches or marks 

 of rubbing must have ensued in such soft materials as chalk. 

 Those who have examined the debris of such catastrophes as the 

 Holm forth flood, etc., have noticed how invariably some of the 

 stones are scored and scratched. It has been said that such stones 

 are very scarce in shingles made by seas and rivers. Of course 

 they are, because these shingles are formed of smoothed hard stones, 

 like flint and chert and quartzite, which cannot scratch each other 

 easily, but only rub each other down. Where a number of angular 



