Br. Nils Olof Hoist — The Ice Age in England. 443 



English Channel up to a height of some 500 feet, as here accepted, 

 may be regarded as comparatively small. 



The view here expressed lays no claim to novelty. In 1908 

 A. L. Rutot upheld the necessity of supposing a ' lac hesbayen ' in 

 ■which the ' limon hesbayen ' or loam must have been deposited ; he 

 has moreover printed a sketch-map indicating the limits of the 

 Hesbayan lake, 1 certainly quite unlike the limits of the glacial 

 freshwater basin postulated above ; and Eutot himself, as he told me, 

 had his predecessors. 



The deposition of the loam cannot have required a particularly 

 long time. In England I have not succeeded in finding any place 

 where the yearly deposit was clearly enough shown to be estimated. 

 On the other hand, in Belgium and Northern France there are many 

 places in which it has been possible to make such an estimate. There 

 the thickness of the yearly deposit -varies between 1 cm. and 4 cm., 

 and there is only one locality in which I have found it less than 1 cm. 

 Let us now apply to the deposit of loam in England the last-mentioned 

 figure, which is the same as I have been accustomed to use in Sweden 

 when attempting to make merely a rough estimate of the time of 

 formation of the late-glacial clays in that country. If, further, we 

 take the previously given figure of 20 feet (or 6 metres) as close 

 upon the greatest thickness of the ' late-glacial ' loam in the Thames 

 valley, then we reach a result of only 600 years as the approximate 

 period for the deposition of this loam. 



Before leaving the deposits which belong to the glacial period of 

 depression we may with a few words contribute to a clear com- 

 prehension of the angular gravel (the so-called ' coombe rock', 

 'rubble drift', or 'head'). The upper, most angular, gravel is 

 regarded as in large part deposited when the 'late-glacial' basin 

 was emptied. This must have been a somewhat rapid process. The 

 loam, as previously remarked, has not been rehandled to any great 

 extent. It is not sandy on the surface, and the gravel itself shows 

 that it was not exposed to the work of the waves for any lengthy 

 period. It may here be worth referring to Prestwich's remarks on 

 the 80 feet of rubble and gravel at Sangatte, especially with reference 

 to the upper 20 to 25 feet in which there is a " preponderance of 

 angular flints". Following a similar opinion to that expressed by 

 Roderick Murchison, he sums up his view concerning the deposit 

 in question in this well-considered verdict : 2 " The action which led 

 to the accumulation of this Drift was sudden, powerful, tumultuous, 

 not of long continuance, and suddenly arrested." This is indeed 

 " hitting the nail on the head " in very few words: 



The 'creeping-soil' theory has, as is well known, been applied 

 more than once to the interpretation of the angular gravel. But it is 

 altogether out of the question thus to explain a piling up of from 

 20 to 25 feet or still more of such gravel. Besides, if nothing more 

 was required for this formation than the winter cold of the Ice Age 



1 A. Eutot, 1908. "Les deux grandes provinces quaternaires de la France" : 

 Bull. Soc. pr^hist. France, 1908, p. 8. 



2 J. Prestwich, op. cit., 1851, p. 276. 



