214 Sir H. H. Hoicorth — Water verms Ice. 



Water loaded witli stones can score and tear the surface of a country 

 and can make striae on boulders. Water in great volume, and moving 

 headlong, can sweep with it great banks of clay and loam, and throw 

 them down in heterogeneous disorder. These are the principal ear- 

 marks of phenomena supposed to be especially glacial. On the other 

 hand, water, and water alone, so far as we know, can roll angular 

 stones into subangular and rounded boulders. Water alone can sift 

 out and separate clays and gravels and sands according to their 

 several specific gravities. Water alone can traverse a country and 

 pick up as it passes along the debris it meets on the way and mix 

 it together, and then, when arrested, or from some other cause, 

 break sporadically in various directions, carrying its load hither and 

 thither. Water coming from different directions can bring the 

 tribute of different districts into the same cauldron. Water in great 

 masses and moving rapidly can traverse a country irrespective of 

 its surface formation, and mantle it over with continuous beds of 

 softly outlined contour, leaving a great load under the lea of some 

 obstruction, and sweeping clean the places where its current forms 

 a " race." Water drops its load according to its specific gravity, 

 the heavy burden generally first and the light one later. Water can 

 mix tender shells with other and harder materials and carry both 

 together, and lay them down together. Water can take up great 

 masses of soft materials and redeposit them without breaking their 

 continuity. It is continually removing masses of turf and bog in 

 this way. Water alone can, so far as we know, arrange beds and 

 sands in long continuous fine laminas, marked by every variety of 

 gentle curve. Water alone can take up masses of clay and lay 

 them down on stratified sands without breaking up their layers of 

 stratification. Every difficulty which we have criticized as in- 

 consistent with the handiwork of ice disappears if we admit water 

 as the alternative postulate. This was seen and conceded by the 

 great masters of old days, Sedgwick and Conybeare, Hopkins and 

 Murchison. It is said in light and airy fashion that these men had 

 not our materials to work upon, nor our powers of generalization. 

 I wonder in what single respect these old men fell behind when 

 facing great dynamic problems like the one we are discussing. 

 What men now living can claim the tremendous experience, grasp 

 and knowledge, the clear vision and unflinching logic, of some of 

 the greatest of these old heroes ? 



But we ai'e told they lived before the sun of geology had really 

 risen. These old men, it is true, had not realized that modern geology 

 would become a deductive and not an inductive inquiry, like every 

 other science, nor could they know that its real corner-stone was not 

 to be finally laid until Hamsay formulated, from the Chair of the 

 Geological Section of the British Association, that splendid product 

 of modern scientific logic, namely, the dictum that Nature had never, 

 either in kind or degree, exceeded her present methods or employed 

 greater and more far-reaching powers. This is the shorter 

 Catechism of the New Faith, which is to dissipate that of the older 

 Prophets. Francis Baron Lord Verulam, let me take off my cap to 



