48 Correspondence — Sir H. H. Howorth. 



anchors." Is this supposed to be argument ? If Mr. Harker thinks 

 that the big stones, which were on the beach a thousand years ago, 

 when the Vikings were about, have not been ground into small 

 ones by this time, he is probably singular in his views, but 

 apart from this most ballast is simply gravel. He next alleges 

 the fact that the sea is invading the land on this coast. How the 

 fact that the coast is a retiring coast affects the relative position of 

 the beach as between high-water and low-water I know not. Does 

 Mr. Harker think that when the sea invades the land, to the extent 

 of a hundred yards, say, it leaves its old beach behind. Again, he 

 says, " there is no port in Holderness " : what has that to do with 

 it ? It was probably because there was no port there that the whole 

 fleet of pirate ships which attacked Northumbria in 793 was lost 

 on this very coast, and that many others were similarly lost at other 

 times. Again, he bids me remember that a couple of the boulders 

 in question were found at Cambridge. This I learnt after I wrote 

 my first paper, and I am bound to say that it immediately struck 

 me as a fact not for me to digest, but for the champions of the 

 North Sea ice-sheet to take to heart. Does Mr. Harker postulate 

 a Norwegian ice-sheet in Cambridgeshire? else how does he 

 account for these stones? That Cambridge and all the Fenland 

 was not ravaged in every direction by the Vikings when the 

 country round the Wash was virtually a lake J do know, and I need 

 not draw the necessary inference. The sporadic character of the 

 finds is surely a lesson in itself to be coupled with the admission 

 made by Mr. Harker, that the stones about which we are discussing 

 have not been found inland in Yorkshire, and only on the shores 

 If an ice-sheet or icebergs brought them, and others like them, to 

 Cromer and Cambridge, how is this to be explained ? Again, I 

 would seriously ask if any human being who has seen ice at work, 

 either in glaciers or icebergs, ever saw anything less like ice-moved 

 stones than these rounded water-worn boulders? Ice carries a con- 

 siderable part of its great stones intact and unweathered on its 

 back from end to end without rolling or rubbing them, and then 

 deposits them with the boulders made by its own streams in 

 moraines or in detached blocks at its terminus and sides, and does 

 not select one or two special points easily accessible to boats and 

 ships, and there only leave a few choice specimens of loater-worn 

 stones mixed with a vastly greater proportion of stones which have 

 confessedly come from the opposite direction ! 



I must repeat, in conclusion, that the question is too important to 

 be settled by a few flippant sentences. My position is that on every 

 gi'ound, a -priori and empirical, the evidence goes to show that it 

 is impossible to attribute the ti-ansport of these stones to an ice-sheet 

 or icebergs from Scandinavia, as Mr. Harker argued in his well- 

 known Yorkshire Memoir, and as I presume from his ambiguous 

 phrases he argues still. If he can suggest a more reasonable and 

 simple explanation of the presence of these stones where they have 

 been found than mine, I will gladly accept it. Hitherto he has 

 failed to do so : hence these tears ! H. H. Howobth. 



