Glacial Gravels, etc., of Eastern England. 535 



felt in. Eastern England, where no sophistication of the evidence 

 enables us to apply such a division or any other yet suggested, and 

 no one has been more emphatic in pointing this out than Mr. 

 Horace Woodward. Speaking of the quadripartite division of 

 Messrs. Wood and Harmer, he says (in reference to the area around 

 Fakenham) : "I have been at a loss to find the persistence of any 

 of the above 0bur divisions." The beds have " frequent and often 

 very abrupt changes in litbological characters," etc., etc. 



Every geologist known to me of any repute, and working in 

 Eastern England, now repudiates the notion that it is possible 

 to apply any of the plausible divisions which have been suggested 

 to the surface beds of Eastern England ; while most of thetn would 

 agree with Professor Judd in his remarks on Leicestershire, Kut- 

 land, etc., that the sands and gravels pass horizontally into 

 boulder-clay, and reject any classification of the beds based upon 

 the alternation of clay with sand. The fact is, not only do the 

 clays and sands run into each other and interlock, but the clays 

 frequently contain pockets and lenticular masses of sand, in many 

 cases of laminated sands with shells, while the sands contain similar 

 patches of boulder-clay, showing they were contemporary or 

 virtually so. Although the tripartite division has not been adopted, 

 the term Middle Sands still figures largely in the literature of these 

 deposits, and occupies a notable place in the index to the Quarterly 

 Journal of the Geological Society. 



The geologists of the Survey now generally separate the so-called 

 glacial beds of Eastern England into two series, contrasted sharply 

 by their matrix and texture, namely, the boulder-clays and the sands, 

 etc. While the clays are treated as the remnant of some entirely 

 hypothetical moraine profonde, the sands, which are often stratified 

 and current-bedded, and which cannot therefore be attributed to this 

 fantastic product of Oloudlaud, are assigned to the action of water. 

 By some this water is supposed to have flowed from the glaciers or 

 ice-sheets in the form of subglacial streams, and by others, who 

 still maintain a tripartite or multiple division, to mark Interglacial 

 climates. 



First, a word or two on a critical difficulty for the Glacialists, 

 suggested by the existence of sands and clays in separate and 

 intercalated layers. Every true glacier moraine known to me 

 consists of a perfectly heterogeneous mass of clay, sand, and 

 stones, or of sand and stones mixed in the greatest confusion 

 and quite unsorted. A glacier, or any great mass of solid ice, 

 is incapable, by any known process, of sifting and separating 

 the ingredients in its moraines into sands and clays. Whatever 

 virtues we attribute to ground moraines, we cannot well suppose 

 that the glacier could" separate them into the two great constituents 

 of the so-called glacial beds. If the sands and the clays were once 

 mixed in a common mass of so-called " glacier muck," they must 

 have been sifted by something, and that something is shown by the 

 laminee and current-bedding of the sands to have been water and 

 not ice. Water is, in fact, invoked to account for the sands by the 



