158 Sw H, K. Hoicorth — Erratic Boulders in Drift. 



collect the debris from the low-lying Fen country, over which the 

 ice would be passing fathoms deep ? 



And where are the terminal moraines they left? Even if, as 

 some allege, it is not reasonable to expect such terminal moraines in 

 the case of widespreading and all-overwhelming ice-sheets — although 

 much is made of such supposed terminal moraines in Germany and 

 America — where are the terminal moraines of the glaciers which are 

 supposed to have oome from Durham and from Derbyshire, and from 

 many districts nearer still ? Where are the concentric mounds ? 

 Where is there a trace of true moraine stuff — that incongruous 

 mixture of sand, clay, gravel, and stones — to be found among these 

 sorted beds ? These beds ar^ not heterogeneous, but are sorted in 

 regard to contents, and sorted also in so many places in regard to 

 locality, and spread, not as glaciers spread their burdens, which 

 throw them down at the end of their journey in great mounds and 

 ramjmrts, but distributed like a warm and beneficent blanket over 

 the wounded and torn surface of the country, all smoothed down to 

 levels of beautiful curvatui-e, and as unlike the kind of thing at the 

 mouths of Norwegian and Swiss mountain valleys as a heretic is 

 unlike a geologist. 



Lastly, to revert to an argument already used in former papers. 

 Having come to Eastern England with their foreign stones, how 

 did these glaciers proceed to gather from the east and from the 

 west Chalk and Oolite and Lias fragments, and to mix them with 

 their own burden of stones, to sort them so that they got smaller 

 as we go farther south, and to imbed them here in gravel, there 

 in clay, there, again, in sand, and then to redistribute them. To 

 appeal to ice as the performer of this kind of legerdemain is to 

 do in effect what the peasants in outlandish places still do, and 

 to call in Eobin Hood, or Mr. Labouchere, or the Devil, or anybody 

 else that seems likely to have done otherwise impossible things. 

 Either the possibility or the probability should be proved, or this 

 kind of speculation should be banished from serious scientific works 

 and memoirs, and especially from memoirs which have an official 

 sanction. 



I have tried to show that the drift beds of Eastern England in 

 everj'^ feature known to myself, stand at the antipodes of glacial 

 deposits, and yet the same cry will go on until this generation 

 is extinct. It is very difficult even for Africans to break their 

 fetishes. How much more difficult for official and other influential 

 geologists to tell the world they have been leading them a " wild- 

 goose chase " for fifty years. If they are not likely to listen to 

 the Philistine from the other side of the hedge, they might, at least, 

 listen to one prophet, whose advocacy of the Gi-lacial theory has been 

 otherwise extravagant. Professor Carvill Lewis, speaking of the area 

 which has alone occupied us in these papei's so far, and which on 

 his maps he entirely excludes from his Glacial area, says : " I 

 think that by far the larger part of England was not covered by 

 land-ice" (" Glacial Geology of Great Britain," p. 20). 



Speaking specifically of the counties of Lincolnshire, Norfolk, 



