460 Sir n. II. Eoworth— 



stones, such as ballast, lie on a beach, anil are examined after a gale, 

 scratches and groovings can always be found. Professor Hughes, 

 in an admirable paper published by the Cambridge Philosophical 

 Society, has shown to how many adventitious causes such scratches 

 can be traced ; and " it is a long way to Loch Awe " when we 

 invoke an ice-sheet or local icebergs to account for a few scratches 

 on soft chalk stones, which are themselves otherwise absolutely 

 different to true glacier stones, and have been clearly rolled and 

 had their angles blunted by some other cause than ice. If the 

 smaller lumps are difficult to explain by glacier action, a fortiori, 

 as I have before argued, are the large masses, such as those in the 

 contorted drift near Cromer, at Ely, in Rutlandshire, and the 

 great masses of oolite in Lincolnshire, not only detached from their 

 matrix but underlain by other so-called glacial deposits, and this, 

 according to the land-ice hypothesis, all done under the tremendous 

 pressure of such a heavy foot as its own gravid mass. It must be 

 remembered also that among these very large transported rocks 

 are, in some cases, great lumps of clay and of stratified sand, 

 which have been moved en masse, and if moved under an ice-sheet 

 must have been pounded and kneaded into a mere medley, and not 

 had their lines of stratification intact. In these cases, at all events, 

 the portage of the soft boulders must have been under the heavy 

 foot of the ice, and not on its back. 



Let us turn to another argument. In all glaciers known to me, 

 the glacier products are distributed in a certain definite way, which 

 at every point is different to that of the clays of Eastern England. 

 Instead of being deposited in enormously thick masses near the 

 focus of distribution, and gradually thinning out, glaciers deposit 

 their greatest burdens at their furthest point in the form of 

 mounds and ramparts and moraines. To a glacier it is indifferent 

 whether a stone is big or small ; big and little travel together, nor do 

 we find the whole country, irrespective of its contour, as we do in 

 this case, mantled and covered with continuous sheets of clay, which 

 differs in texture and in aspect from all moraine matter known to me. 



It was apparently the absence of anything like moraines which 

 so impressed the late Professor Carvill Lewis, one of the most 

 aggressive champions of glacial action, that he absolutely repudiated 

 the presence of traces of ice in any form in East Anglia. If the ice 

 here were an ice-sheet, we may well ask where is its great terminal 

 moraine ? and, if it were in the form of local glaciers, where are 

 their lateral and terminal moraines? — where are the mounds and 

 heaps of heterogeneous moraine stuff invariably present where 

 glaciers have been at work ? 



Again, how are we to explain by ice the distribution of this clay 

 in many places over perfectly horizontal layers of finely laminated 

 sand and gravel, with the laminas intact and undisturbed, as if the 

 clay had been simply laid down on the sands by some gentle 

 fingered agency ? This is quite inconsistent with a moving mass 

 of hard heavy ice, which would have kneaded and pounded the 

 materials into a mass of what the American farmers call " muck." 



