478 Correspondence — Mr. R. M. Deeley. 



be met at all. Passing over his travesty of my argument, which. 

 I suppose is not to be taken seriously, I find nothing in his article 

 that does not evade the point. He first suggested that the records 

 of Norwegian boulders on our East coast were due to observers 

 having been deceived by material artificially transported. There- 

 upon I pointed out the well-known fact that such boulders ai-e found 

 imbedded in the Holderness clays, as well as on the beach. Of 

 this he takes no explicit notice, but proceeds to shift his ground 

 and throw doubt on the identification of the rocks in question. 

 If Sir Henry will submit some of the disputed boulders to his 

 eminent but anonymous petrological friend, the testimony of the 

 latter will no doubt receive due weight ; meanwhile, though a 

 hundred witnesses may depose that they have not seen Scandinavian, 

 boulders in Yorkshire, the jury will listen rather to the evidence of 

 one or two who have seen and investigated the matter. 



St. John's College, Cambridge. Att^rfd TTAT^TnrTi 



August \Uh, 1894. ALFRED UARKEK. 



GLACIAL GEOLOGY. 



SiK, — Tn your issue for August last Sir Henry H. Howorth, replying 

 to a short letter in which I criticized an article of his you had 

 printed, remarks : " I hope Mr. Harker and Mr. Deeley will continue 

 to face the issues between, us, and not be content, as others have 

 been, with fuhninating more or less testy protests, and then retiring 

 from the field." It is clear that your correspondent here refers to 

 a discussion which took place in the pages of " Nature " between 

 himself and Dr. Alfred Russell Wallace. In that discussion Sir 

 Henry H. Howorth, to discredit his opponent's views, denied the 

 correctness of a statement made by Dr. Wallace. In reply. Dr. 

 Wallace showed that Sir Henry H. Howorth had, in his " Glacial 

 Nightmare," taken the same view as Dr. Wallace ; and as Sir Henry 

 H. Howorth would not admit that he had played fast and loose with 

 his facts, Dr. Wallace very properly refused to further discuss the 

 matter with him. Is it proper to call this retiring from the field 

 with more or less testy protests ? In my letter I charged Sir Henry 

 H. Howorth with having misrepresented the teaching of two letters, 

 one written by Prof. Bonney aud the other by Prof. Hughes. In 

 his reply we have no word of explanation or apology for this, or 

 even reference to it ; but instead an attack, delivered quite beside 

 the mark, intended to throw discredit upon me. He also sneers at 

 " English official geologists " as a body, so I can, at any rate, con- 

 gratulate myself upon being in excellent company. 



In face of the discussions which have already taken place — dis- 

 cussions in which it has been pointed out that, as far as is known, 

 ice in bulk is plastic (that it has no yield-point in the sense that steel 

 or even clay has, and that, therefore, so long as there is an upper 

 slope to the ice the ice must move) — it would be useless to try to 

 make the matter clearer in a letter. However, I will quote again 

 from Sir Henry H. Howorth by way of illustration. He requires 



