372 Sir S. H. Soioorth — Boulders on the Yorkshire Coast. 



obtained by postulating a considerable slope to the ice surface is 

 equally plain and equally admitted. How this slope is to be 

 obtained, however, no one has yet explained, nor can I see how 

 it could exist without burying every available land surface in 

 Scandinavia, in the Laurentian Highlands, etc., etc., under deep ice. 

 If the land surfaces were so buried it is impossible to understand 

 whence the boulders could be derived, for they only come from 

 exposed rocks, and to explain how it is that the higher parts of 

 the Dovrefelds, etc., are not ice-marked. These are merely samples 

 of the many difficulties which many inquirers have raised, and which 

 I have tried to condense and focus in my recent books. These 

 books, not having been written by an official geologist, and therefore 

 lacking official inspiration, have probably not been read by my 

 critics. Perhaps they will favour the readers of the Geological 

 Magazine with some adequate reply to them now. 



But I must not content myself with a priori arguments, un- 

 answerable though they may be. I want to ask my two critics 

 how an ice-sheet in the North Sea is consistent with the splintered 

 and pinnacled Lofoden Islands? — a question Matthew Williams long 

 ago asked, and which has been strongly urged in a long letter 

 I have received on the subject from Professor Bonney ; or with 

 the facts so eloquently put forward by Pettersen, the most competent 

 observer who has written on the geology of North Norway, and 

 who has shown that the inland ice of Northern Scandinavia did not 

 even reach the string of islands lining its western coasts, much less 

 invade and cross the North Sea. It is no iise adopting the attitude 

 of the ostrich towards facts like these. The ostrich is a very poor 

 geologist, although some people think that he can thrive on boulders 

 and gravel. 



Again, if a Scandinavian ice-sheet reached G-reat Britain, how is 

 it there are no boulders here from the western coasts of Norway at 

 all? How is it that the few boulders which have been recognised 

 as Scandinavian by Scandinavian geologists, who know their own 

 rocks well, come not from Western Norway, but from the famous 

 " Viken " — whence the Vikings got their name, and whence they 

 sailed ; and that in order to reach Northern England on the back or 

 imder the foot of an ice-sheet, that ice-sheet must not only have 

 meandered like a serpent and ignored the lines of least resistance, 

 without any assignable cause, but have cut right through and across 

 the main ice-sheet which was presumably being shed in sporadic 

 fashion by the great Dovrefelds ? The whole position is so grotesque, 

 when brought face to face with elementary facts, that 1 can only 

 explain the logic of its champions on the supposition that the ice 

 they appeal to is not frozen water but composed of brain dust. 



One of my ci-itics thinks he disposes of me by the statement that 

 tlie so-called glacial beds of East Yorkshire are not heterogeneous 

 masses of mixed mud, sand, clay, and gravel, but are assorted and 

 sifted. Of course they are, and that is why these beds have nothing 

 to do with glaciers or with ice in any form. Every moraine and 



