374 Sir IT. II. Hoivorth — Boulders on the Yorkshire Coast. 



altered beds in contact with the Shap granite and from the Cheviots. 

 Notwithstanding this concurrent evidence about the British deri- 

 vation of the immense proportion of the boulders, Mr. Harker 

 proceeds to argue, apparently on purely fantastic grounds, that the 

 primitive boulders which may have come from Scotland really came 

 from Scandinavia. He says that " the movements of the ice and the 

 consequent directions of transport render this conclusion probable." 

 This is assuredly putting aside empirical methods in favour of a 

 priori and fantastic ones with a vengeance. Let us translate the 

 argument into a syllogism : " Because more than nine-tenths of 

 the Yorkshire boulders, including a great many primitive ones, are 

 known to have come from the north-west, therefore it is 'probable 

 that the stones of doubtful origin found among the other tenth came 

 from the north-east.'^ Could he or I put an inconsequent argument 

 more clearly ? 



There still remain a few boulders — a very few — which, so far as 

 our present evidence goes, were apparently derived from Viken, in 

 Norway ; but even here Mr. Harker speaks with a dogmatism which 

 is unusual in science. "When we remember how long it took to 

 discover the rock in situ from which the picrite boulders in Anglesea 

 were derived, it is a very unsafe thing to assert dogmatically that 

 a particular kind of crystalline rock does not occur in any part of 

 Cumberland or Scotland, and must have come from Norway. I have 

 the authority of one petrologist, quite as distinguished and more 

 experienced than Mr, Harker, who is as sceptical as I can be 

 about these ex cathedra judgments. Jt is noteworthy, by the way, 

 as Mr. Harker admits, that while boulders of augite porphyry like 

 that found at Laurveg have occm-red on the Yorkshire coast, none 

 have occurred there of the elseolite syenites which are associated 

 with the augites in Norway. 



But granting that some of these stones may have come from 

 Norway — 



A distinguished Norwegian geologist, belonging to the Geological 

 Survey of that country, who wrote a paper in the Quart. Journ. 

 Geol. Soc. on the East Anglian boulders, tells us that out of the 

 many he saw only two seemed to him to be of Norwegian origin. 



But let us turn to Mr. Harker himself. In his appendix to Mr. 

 Lamplugh's second and third papers he only mentions two as similar 

 to the augite syenites of Southern Norway ; to these he adds two 

 more in a subsequent paper. He also mentions two boulders of 

 saussurite gabbro whose provenance seems to be equally established 

 as from the same district ; and this is all. If this be all, Mr. Harker 

 has assuredly been making a voyage to one of Swift's regions of 

 cloudland when he speaks of hundreds of Scandinavian boulders as 

 having been found in as many yards of the Yorkshire coast. As 

 a matter of fact, those he has described amount to six, all told ; 

 and to explain these six boulders he would fill up the North Sea 

 with ice and then make it travel by a labyrinthine path which 

 might have puzzled the Minotaur himself. I prefer to think that 

 his six boulders, if really Norwegian, were brought by another 



