118 Prof. Hughes, [Mar. 9, 



by material carried from adjoining lands where glaciers crept 

 down valleys to the sea. That cannot have been a country totally 

 covered with ice and snow, for the glaciers must have passed 

 through regions where rocks were exposed and broken up into 

 fragments which fell upon the ice. They must have been long 

 glaciers, for there are no scratched stones in short glaciers, in which 

 there is not sufficient time for the fragments to get into the 

 crevasses and work their way down to the stony mass where alone 

 strise could be produced. 



Besides this there must have been land on which ferns and 

 other such plants grew. 



It is clearly therefore incorrect to speak of the glaciation of 

 South-eastern Australia. All that has been proved is that some- 

 where to the south of Australia there was land with glaciers from 

 the end of which icebergs carrying clay and scratched stones 

 drifted north. When the water was too shallow to float them they 

 touched the bottom and grooved the rocks on which they grounded. 

 Afterwards when the subsidence of the area had gone on and the 

 water was deeper they melted and dropped their loads over a sea 

 bottom covered with the debris carried down by torrents from 

 lands which had not so severe a climate. Far from being a 

 district of ice and snow, South Australia was then deep down 

 beneath the waters of the sea, with probably a compensating 

 elevation of the land in the adjoining regions. 



Sir John Lubbock 1 has pointed out that an examination of the 

 form of continents suggests a great and comparatively recent 

 submergence of the Southern hemisphere. The long pear-shaped 

 promontories pointing south, whether continuous as in the case of 

 Africa or interrupted as in the case of Australia, are according to 

 this view only the backbones of continents plunged deeper and 

 deeper under the water as we follow them to the south. This 

 implies some great earth movement affecting nearly the whole 

 southern hemisphere. But local conditions must have determined 

 what exact effect should follow in each area. For instance if there 

 were an upheaval of 25,000 feet along some transverse fold, would 

 it make no difference whether that affected a portion of the earth's 

 surface which was 20,000 feet deep under water, or already 20,000 

 feet above the sea level ? These are far within observed heights 

 and depths. 



Again, supposing any pull upon earth's crust, of such a kind as 

 men have had in their minds when speculating upon the dragging 

 of the waters of the ocean from one hemisphere to another, were to 

 tend to pull a portion of the surface out of place would it make no 

 difference that the trough in which there had been a sea 20,000 feet 



1 Nature, 1887. Geographical Journal, Dec. 1896. 



