Sir H. II . Hotcorth — Erratic Boulders in Drift. 129 



and where the ice probably moves en masse, it ceases to denude 

 altogether, having made for itself a virtually frictionless route to 

 travel over, just as a river only denudes in its torrential parts. If 

 an angular stone falls down a crevasse and reaches the bottom, and 

 if being held by the ice it is pressed against the polished bed of the 

 glacier, it will no doubt, if hard enough, score and scratch it with any 

 of its projecting angles or edges, just as emery paper will scratch 

 a piece of polished brass. How, on the other hand, the polished and 

 smooth bed of the glacier is to sci'atch and score the loose stone in the 

 ice — that is to say, how the polished brass plate is to scratch the 

 emery paper — I do not see at all. It may rub off some of its projections, 

 but how a smooth surface can scratch anything passes my com- 

 prehension. Occasionally two angular loose stones may press 

 against each other under a glacier and scratch each other, but 

 this must be a very unusual occurrence, and the best proof of it 

 is what has been remarked over and over again, namely, the 

 comparatively small number of scratched stones in true living 

 moraines, the workshops which the glacial theorist carefully avoids. 

 This is not all. The great majority of the stones from the Eastern 

 Counties on which I have seen scratches are the native soft rocks. 

 The number of hard crystalline boulders of foreign origin on which 

 I have noticed scratches is very small indeed. In all cases the 

 scratches have occurred on stones more or less rolled, and in the 

 case of the polygonal chalk bouldera not only on rolled boulders 

 but on boulders with polished facets. These scratches were 

 cei'tainly made contemporaneously with or subsequently to the 

 rolling which destroyed the angles and polished the surface of the 

 stones. If so, how could ice be the agent which produced them. 

 We cannot well postulate an ice-sheet in Norfolk and Suffolk 

 dragging in to itself rounded and polished stones from the open 

 waters of the North Sea, where the boulders were being rolled and 

 smoothed in order to give them a few finishing touches. The 

 process seems absurd. The fact is, these scratched stones have 

 become a fetish. The glacialist naturally wants to find if he can 

 a simple and ready test of the work of ice, and he has jumped at 

 this particular test as a very convenient one, when as a matter of 

 fact it is no test at all. He has followed a false scent in 

 supposing that the scratches on loose stones have any analogy to the 

 scorings and groovings on the smooth beds and side- walls of glaciers, 

 which they have not. The very fact of there being a considerable 

 number of scratched stones in a bed of clay or sand is a proof 

 that that bed is unlike a moraine, and not that it is like it. 

 The many bruised faces and black eyes which are to be seen in 

 Clare Market are not, as some glacialists would argue, the results of 

 the battle of Waterloo — where there were many wounds inflicted, 

 but not many of that kind. To sum up this part of the case, there 

 is no single feature known to me in the foreign boulders of Eastern 

 England, any more than there is in the domestic and native ones, to 

 justify us in attributing them to the handiwork of ice. They are 

 simply a number of more or less waterworn boulders, such as occur 



DBCADB IV. TOL. lY. — NO. III. 9 



