278 Revieivs — Sir H. H. Hoivorth — Ice or Water. 



slain, and he clears away the corpses by declaring all known glacial 

 theories to be inadequate. After this slaughter grim and great, h© 

 turns aside to discuss air, wind, and water, rain, rivers, and sea, as 

 agents of denudation or deposition, afterwards subjecting ice to- 

 a very rigid cross-examination as to its boasted powers as an eroder 

 and excavator. He then tells us what subterranean forces can do 

 as fashioners of the earth's surface, informing us by the way that 

 eorries and cirques are due to subterranean movements no less than the 

 breached craters of Auvergne and even the complete one of Cotopaxi 

 (vol. i, p. 535). In the second volume he brings forward " some 

 a priori arguments against the Great Ice Age," which, however, 

 prove to be mainly discussions of the supposed evidence of ice- 

 action in the Permian breccias of the Midlands, the Gondwana, 

 Series of India, and similar deposits in Australia, Tasmania, and 

 South Africa. None of these, he maintains, allows us to think that 

 the "Ice King ever took such a liberty as to put his arms round the 

 waist of our mother earth." If, then, we cannot attribute the 

 transport of these blocks to ice, we are driven to seek some other 

 cause. He next examines the biological evidence for the so- 

 called Ice Age and the Interglacial Periods, besides that for the 

 alleged southern frontier of the Drift beds and their rock materials, 

 and maintains these materials to be derivative, which, in a certain 

 sense, is indisputable. Next he discusses the bearing of the external 

 features of the Drift on the theory of an Ice Age, and concludes 

 the volume with a description of the Arctic regions in Glacial 

 times, maintaining the ice in these to be now about at its maximum. 

 The present work has all the characteristics of its predecessors. 

 No pains have been spared in searching the literature of the subject. 

 Whether we accept the authoi''s conclusions or not, we owe him 

 a debt of gratitude for bringing together in a readily accessible 

 form such a mass of information ; though, as the work may remain 

 for some time incomplete, we should have been grateful had each 

 volume been provided with an index, or at least with a much fuller 

 table of contents. The author also would have done well had he 

 prevailed on some geological friend to read over his proofs, for 

 typographical errors, notwithstanding a considerable table of errata, 

 are still rather too numerous. These trifling blemishes, however, 

 cannot detract from the value of "Ice or Water" as a book of 

 reference. But, great as this undoubtedly is, the work, we think, 

 has the defects of its qualities. Though professing to be an appeal 

 to induction, its methods are forensic rather than strictly scientific. 

 Advocates and philosophers alike often reason inductively, but with 

 this difference : the one selects and groups his facts so as to sustain 

 his case ; the other, after placing all, so far as he can, in right 

 perspective, draws from them the inferences which seem the most 

 accordant. At least, this is the true inductive method, though we 

 cannot say that it is always followed by enthusiastic glacialists, 

 whom we gladly leave to the author's tender mercies. Again, his 

 method of conducting his case occasionally reminds one of that 

 eminent advocate who, some sixty years ago, won the sobriquet of 



