260 Sir H. Howorth — Recent Changes of Level. 



I would apply precisely the same explanation to the so-called 

 Scandinavian boulders of Eastern England ; these boulders have 

 been the mainstay of those who have argued in favour of a North 

 Sea ice-sheet, which is supposed to have filled up the whole area 

 between Scandinavia and Britain. 



In my recent book on the Glacial Nightmare, I have advanced a 

 number of arguments against this theory. Professor Bonney has 

 recently added a new and striking one, based upon the difficulty 

 such an ice-sheet would have in traversing the hollow trough which 

 runs down the western coast of Scandinavia; these do not, however, 

 exhaust all the arguments. If a portentous ice-sheet, loaded with 

 various kinds of stone, had come all the way from Scandinavia to 

 Britain, we should expect to find traces of its terminal moraine, 

 and we should certainly expect to find not only a few scattered 

 stones on the beach in Yorkshire or East Anglia, but large numbers 

 of them inland, not only in England, but more especially in Scotland. 

 It must be remembered also that the most characteristic of these 

 stones, if not all of them, come not from the part of Norway 

 opposite Britain, but the Christiania Fjord. This is A'^ery em- 

 phatically maintained by the late Prof. Carvill Lewis and the 

 Northern geologists, whence it is most difficult to see how an ice- 

 sheet could have travelled to Britain at all. 



The fact is, the whole theory of a North Sea ice-sheet, in so far 

 as it is based on these boulders, is a stupendous test and trial of 

 human credulity. I believe these stones to be like those from the 

 English Channel, merely ballast which has been thrown overboard, 

 or left by some wrecked ships. I may say that my very acute friend 

 Professor Hughes, of Cambridge, shares this opinion, and since I 

 wrote this has published his views in " Nature," which I feel to be 

 a very important support to my contention. He tells me that he 

 once entered the hull of a wrecked ship on the coast of East Anglia 

 which was being broken by the waves, and which contained in its 

 hold ballast consisting of foreign primitive rocks. This seems to 

 me to be a very useful instance of an occurrence which must have 

 been very frequent indeed on this much exposed coast, and which 

 furnishes a reasonable key to a problem which has mystified many 

 people, and grateful to those who believe in sobriety as a potent 

 factor in scientific reasoning, and who have not been led captive by 

 the charming but delusive rhetoric of Agassiz and his scholars. 



Having discussed the interfering factor involved in the foreign 

 stones on the Yorkshire and Hampshire coast, let us now turn 

 more directly to the meaning of the raised beaches. 



They are generally taken to mean that the beaches represent the 

 level at which the sea once stood, and we are asked to concede that 

 these beaches prove a former submergence of the land up to the 

 point where they occur. That they do mean this is clear enough, 

 but it seems to me that this is not all. The really interesting 

 question is not whether the sea once reached up to the level of 

 these beaches, but whether its presence there was lasting and con- 

 tinued or merely transient and ephemeral. Do the beaches mark 



