Glacial Gravels, etc., of Eastern England. 539 



occasion. At present it will suffice to draw the same negative con- 

 clusion from the sands that we have already drawn in regard to 

 the clays. 



In my former paper I examined every feature of these clays 

 in succession, and endeavoured to show that in no single one 

 do these clays support the notion that they were formed or dis- 

 tributed by ice ; but, on the contrary, when critically examined, their 

 texture, contents, mode of occurrence, etc., are absolutely incon- 

 sistent with ice in any form having had to do with them. 



If this be so with the clays, a fortiori is it so with the so-called 

 Middle Sands. These sands are stratified, laminated, and false- 

 bedded ; they present all the features of subaqueous deposition and 

 arrangement, and it is universally concluded that they were, in 

 fact, deposited by water. The champions of the Ice Age save their 

 consistency, as I have said, by postulating that the sands were either 

 distributed and laid down by subglacial streams or during an 

 Interglacial, temperate period. I have already discussed the latter 

 issue. In regard to the former let me add one further argument. 

 These sands and sandy gravels are distributed in a most erratic 

 fashion — sometimes, but rarely, in the valleys, sometimes capping 

 the hills, sometimes on the slopes. How subglacial streams could 

 run about the country, irrespective of its drainage and surface 

 contour, uphill and downhill, and deposit these beds as we find 

 them, passes all belief. The fact is, that directly the Glacialist has 

 secured his ice-sheet, and covered the land with it, he considers 

 that he is entitled to postulate any kind of mechanical absurdity 

 as having occurred under its shelter — to believe in the moving 

 about under a portentous weight of hundreds of feet thick of 

 slippery clay, and sliding pebbles, and disintegrated sands, as of ice, 

 ground moraine ; the running about of water up and down the 

 country, contrary to and in spite of gravity. These are samples of 

 what is commonly supposed to have occurred in the far-off days 

 when ice was everywhere. In fact, with the intervention of these 

 entirely imaginary ice-sheets we are naturally transported to an 

 entirely imaginary world, and entirely imaginary operations of 

 Nature. 



While the ultra- Glacialists admit the deposition of the so-called 

 Middle Sands by water, there is one feature developed locally in 

 them which many of the prophets of ice attribute directly to ice- 

 action in the form of floating bergs, or of the melting of sub- 

 terranean ice, namely, the contortions which occur in the so-called 

 contorted drift, and the curves and twists of the laminar beds of 

 sand, etc. Upon these I must add a few words. I have spent many 

 scores of days on the coasts and in the sand and chalk pits of East 

 Anglia, and have drawn a good many sections there. Many a time have 

 I wondered how it was possible for any human being who realizes 

 what a grounded berg is like, and the kind of mechanical work it 

 can do, to suppose that it could possibly fashion the tony-continuous, 

 beautifully modelled curves into which the sandy laminai have 

 been arranged, many of them extending for hundreds of yards 



