80 Professor Percy Kendall—Glacier Lake Channels. 
Lancashire (12); the western edge of the Pennines from Rochdale to 
North Staffordshire, besides many districts in the North of Scotland. 
I have personally examined the great majority of these to the 
number of several hundreds of individual channels and on lines of 
country extending to much more than a thousand miles. When 
these are plotted upon or are compared with the maps wherewith 
various authors have illustrated their conclusions (deduced from 
other classes of facts) respecting the course of the old ice-sheets, it is 
found that with few exceptions.the channels are in the positions that 
would, upon such a theoretical basis, be assigned to channels draining 
lakes dammed up by the ice-margins. More than this, they exhibit 
a consistent fall towards the ice-free country. To regard this 
correspondence as merely fortuitous would surely be to rack ‘‘ the 
long arm of coincidence’’ to dislocation point. One may start from 
Edinburgh and follow an early continuous succession of channels (not, 
however, of the same period), all sloping in the line of route, almost 
to the Wash, and if, as I suspect, the through-valley at the common 
source of the Little Ouse and the Waveney at Lopham’s Ford, near 
Diss, be an overflow channel from the time when the Hessle Clay 
ice-front stood about Cromer, then the final release of the East Coast 
drainage must have been by the Straits of Dover. 
To such an orderly and consistent system of drainage I know in all 
the areas enumerated but one unexplained and at present unexplainable 
exception, namely, the channel at Moor Close Plantation, Robin 
Hood’s Bay. Itis a depression quite shallow and innocent-looking 
at the upper end, but rapidly deepening into an extremely fine 
gorge. By the irony of fate, not only did this escape my scrutiny 
when working over the Cleveland district, although I crossed its 
evanescent upper end several times, but, oddly enough, Professor 
Bonney’s itinerary indicates that he traversed its length, yet neither 
he nor I noticed that 2¢ slopes the wrong way and outfalls below the 
level of any possibly related system. 
I summarize the principal objections to Professor Bonney’s 
explanation of these remarkable channels as relics of a very ancient 
drainage system possibly antedating the Cretaceous period :— 
1. Their restriction to the glaciated parts of our country. 
2. Their ‘railway-cutting’ contours prove them to have been 
produced by large volumes of water. 
3. The evidence of their production at a very recent epoch. 
4. The way in which they traverse watersheds and their indifference 
to the geological structure of the country. 
5. The continuity of the direction of their ‘ fall’ through wide tracts 
of country. 
6. The discontinuity of the slope where wide gaps occur in the 
sequence. 
7. The occurrence of aligned sequences along the face of escarp- 
ments and along both sides of a river valley. 
8. The occurrence of many parallel channels trenching a single spur. 
9. Their occurrence in glacial deposits, though this goes more 
against the date than the mode of formation. 
10. The rarity of any infilling of boulder-clay. 
