364 Reviews— Sir H. Howorth’s Glacial Nightmare, 
govern the movements of ice, while the geological phenomena to 
be explained refuse to be equated with it. This is partially acknow- 
ledged by the principal apostles of the ice-theory. They admit that 
ice as we know it in the laboratory, or ice as we know it in glaciers, 
acts quite differently to the ice they postulate, and produces different 
effects; but we are bidden to put aside our puny experiments which 
- can be tested, and turn from the glaciers which can be explored and 
examined, to the vast potentiality of ice in shape of portentous ice- 
sheets beyond the reach of empirical tests, and which we are told 
acted quite differently to ordinary ice. That is to say, they appeal 
from sublunary experiments to a@ priori arguments drawn from a 
transcendental world. Assuredly this is a curious position for the 
champions of uniformity to occupy. In regard to it I will quote 
a fable already utilized by Hugh Miller. A wolf, says Plutarch, 
peeping into a hut where a company of shepherds were assembled, 
saw them regaling themselves with a joint of mutton. ‘Ye gods!’ 
he exclaimed, ‘ what a clamour they would have raised if they had 
caught me at such a banquet.’ 
“T hold that the Glacial Theory, as ordinarily taught, is based, 
not upon induction, but upon hypotheses, some of which are incapable 
of verification, while others can be shown to be false, and it has all 
the infirmity of the science of the Middle Ages. This is why I 
have called it a Glacial Nightmare. Holding it to be false, I hold 
further that no theory of modern times has had a more disastrously 
mischievous effect upon the progress of Natural Science. It is not 
merely in the domain of geology that its baneful influence will 
be felt. We cannot take up a text-book in which the profounder 
problems of biology are treated, problems like the distribution of 
animals and plants, the pedigree of life, the origin and beginnings 
of the human race, without being impressed with its influence as a 
LACLOF Gym eee cul tens Geert 
“What then is shortly the burden of the following argument ? 
I admit completely, that the position maintained by Charpentier in 
his work on Glaciers is unassailable, first, because it makes no appeal 
to any occult and hidden forces underlying the movements of ice, but 
proves the existence of greater glaciers formerly by comparing and 
equating the ruins they have left with the ruins made by existing 
glaciers. Secondly, because it is consistent with all the geological 
facts that we can summon to test it by. On the other hand, I not 
only disbelieve in, but I utterly deny, the possibility of ice having 
moved over hundreds of miles of level country, such as we see in 
Poland and Russia, and the prairies of North America, and dis- 
tributed the drift as we find it there. I further deny its capacity to 
mount long slopes, or to traverse uneven ground except when under 
the impulse of gravity. I similarly deny to it the excavating and 
denuding power which has been attributed to it by those who claim 
it as the excavator of lakes and valleys, and I altogether question the 
legitimacy of arguments based upon a supposed physical capacity 
which cannot be tested by experiment, and which is entirely based 
upon hypothesis. This means that I utterly question the prime 
postulate of the glacial theory itself.” 
