Sir H. H. Howorth — Boulders on the Yorkshire Coast. 373 



every ice deposit known to myself, except in some very local cases, 

 is a heterogeneous mass, and is not assorted in this way ; and 

 human ingenuity has hitherto been bafHed in trying to show how 

 a great moving mass of very nearly rigid ice can sift sands and 

 gravels and tough clays apart from each other and deposit them 

 successively in the way these beds are laid down. Of course, if we 

 go to the moon for our cheese instead of to some farm, where we can 

 examine the process of making it step by step, we can postulate 

 anything as to the process, but the result must be moonshine and 

 nothing but moonshine ! 



Lastly, as to the provenance of the Yorkshire boulders : here, 

 unfortunately, we diifer absolutely about the facts. I have spent 

 months on the coasts of Yorkshire and East Anglia, and have 

 examined hundreds of boulders there, but I am bound to say I have 

 never had the luck to find an unmistakable Scandinavian one. 



There ai'e vast numbers of boulders from the sandstones and the 

 limestones of the Carboniferous series, and a large number from the 

 basaltic and other dykes which cross and permeate those beds. 

 Mr. Lamplugh, who has collected and tabulated hundreds of the 

 boulders, says that those from the Carboniferous beds, including 

 the dykes, form about ninety per cent, of the whole. I do not know 

 anyone who has brought these boulders from Scandinavia. Nor do I 

 know anyone who has ventured to suggest that the Oolitic, Liassic, 

 and Cretaceous pebbles (which I have collected in considerable 

 numbers) have come across the sea either. These latter everybody 

 known to me attributes to the local beds. As to the Carboniferous 

 boulders and their parentage, Mr. Lamplugh says: "With the 

 definite and well-known trail of the Shap granite and Brockram 

 erratics to guide us, we need feel no uncertainty as to the quarter 

 whence the Carboniferous rocks have been derived. It is clearly the 

 elevated region lying to the north-westward, 80 or 100 miles away, 

 which has been the main contributor, and the route must in most, 

 if not all cases, have been down Teesdale, and thence south-eastward 

 along the coast." 



Let us put aside all these admittedly English boulders, therefore, 

 and limit ourselves to the primitive stones, which in the various 

 collections made by Mr. Lamplugh formed respectively 34; 2; 5-7; 

 2 ; 3 ; 4 ; and 1 per cent, only of the whole. 



It was these primitive boulders only which were sent for 

 examination to Mr. Harker. Of them he says, "that the bulk of 

 the specimens selected and submitted to him, of granitic, gneissic, 

 and other crystalline rocks, might have been derived, so far as 

 their individual character is concerned, either from Scandinavia or 

 from the Scottish Highlands." This is assuredly a very important 

 admission ; made by Mr. Harker, not when engaged in a polemic 

 ■with a man of Gath like myself, but when calmly summing up the 

 evidence in the Transactions of the Geological Society of the West 

 Eiding of Yorkshire, new series, vol. xi. 



Among the boulders just named are some of Shap granite, which 

 are unmistakable, and others which are apparently derived from the 



