540 Sir II II. Hou-orlh— 



without any breach in the continuity of their graceful lines, in 

 many cases twisted into various ser pen ti form curves, which are 

 often reversed. How a solid, heavy mass of ice, pounding 

 down upon soft debris, marked by delicate lines and laminae, 

 or pushing over it, could avoid pounding it into what the Americans 

 call "muck," or could in any way arrange the curved laminae 

 of the contorted drift as we see it in the cliffs of Norfolk, is a 

 stupendous mystery to myself and perhaps to many other people. 

 How it would be possible, again, to either create or maintain such 

 curves and lines by the collapse of portions of soft beds in con- 

 sequence of the local melting of buried layers of ice, as some others 

 have argued, is equally confusing. The unsophisticated student who 

 has drunk at these orthodox geological wells should suspend his 

 judgment on these conclusions until he has actually seen the gigantic 

 swirls and figures of f curves, which are so frequeut in the Cromer 

 cliffs, or mapped out carefully a series of the layers all arranged in 

 concentric curves round some lenticular or other nucleus, of which 

 examples occur at every few yards in the cliffs. The fact is, such 

 reasoning as I am criticizing is the despairing death-song of 

 Uniformity as understood by some of Lyell's scholars. 



Not less impossible to attribute to ice-action, as we have shown in 

 previous papers, is the presence in some of these contorted beds of 

 great masses, not only of solid chalk, but of loose and soft materials, 

 of pockets of sand or lumps of shale, which have been taken up and 

 redeposited with their fine laminae undisturbed, and the shells in 

 them unbroken and transferred as boulders into the beds in question. 

 That grounded bergs or coast-ice should have performed this kind 

 of work, is as credible to some of us as that Nasmyth's hammer 

 should have come down on a raspberry sandwich and left the 

 indigestible layers intact. I claim to have shown that in no single 

 respect do the so-called Middle Sands, so far as I know them, 

 either testify to the action of ice in any form or to the existence of 

 glacial conditions when they were deposited, nor to the existence 

 of Interglacial periods : conclusions which I share in, as far as East 

 Anglia is concerned, with one of the ablest and most experienced 

 prophets of Neo-Glacialism, Mr. Carvell Lewis. 



Having dealt with the post-Tertiary clays and sands, we still have 

 to consider another set of beds, associated with them in Eastern 

 England and marked, like them, by the presence of foreign 

 stones. These are the beds of gravel and shingle (for the most 

 part clean-washed), and consisting, with the exception of the 

 comparatively small proportion of erratics they contain, of smooth 

 flint and quartzite pebbles of a lenticular or flat, oval shape, and 

 occurring in many cases as caps to the hills or on their flanks. 

 Many of these were formerly treated as gravels formed in subglacial 

 streams or by interglacial rivers. 



The opinion has been gradually gaining ground lately, however, 

 owing to the admirable work of Prestwich, Searles Wood, Monckton, 

 and others, that the pebbles in these shingle and gravel beds were 

 all formed and smoothed as we find them long before the so-called 



