Sir S. H. Soicorth — Water versus Ice. 215 



thee ! What dost thou think of at least one science as it is taught 

 in the end of the nineteenth century ? I am not alone in my protest. 

 What a remarkable thing it is to read in the pages of so ardent 

 a Glacialist as Mr. Carvill Lewis, for instance, when, having told 

 us the great Chalky Boulder-clay occurs only in non-glaciated 

 areas (p. 216), he despairingly asks if it be not due to torrents 

 of water rushing westwards and bearing cakes of ice ? (p. 233, note). 



That water could do what is needed, I know no one who disputes. 

 That it could do what ice could not do, some of us think we have 

 shown ; but the necessary conditions are, that it must not be water 

 acting in a normal way, but in very large quantities and moving 

 very boisterously, and this is the crux that is so hard to face by the 

 patrons of scholastic science, and hence why those who claim 

 to explain phenomena by adequate and not inadequate causes are 

 not answered seriously, but are remitted to ridiculous references to 

 Noah and his Ark, and treated to other absurdities of a despairing 

 logic. Even the good souls who feel that to water we must 

 eventually turn for the greater part of our explanation are constrained 

 to put themselves in a straight jacket and to try to make a pail of 

 water do that which requires a reservoir, and this entirely because Lyell 

 or Eamsay or some Pope has issued an encyclical De Uniformitate. 



Thus one school of geologists invokes a general and long- 

 continued submergence, during' which fleets of icebergs were floating 

 about the whole land, and travelling between Shakespeare's birth- 

 place and Tennyson's, and between the land of Burns and that of 

 Cowper. Such a submergence, proceeding gently and lasting long, 

 is supposed to in some way square better with the tender feelings of 

 Uniformitarians ; and as one submergence is not enough and fails 

 to account for the phenomena, others postulate, with the greatest 

 sang froid, several elevations and sinkings to the extent of 1,000 feet 

 or more, as if they were the most ordinary occurrences in Nature, 

 and as if these good Uniformitarians were not living on an island 

 which, so far as we can judge by the evidence, has not moved 

 either up or down for at least 2,000 years. So long as the 

 movement is exceedingly slow, so long as there is nothing spasmodic or 

 cataclysmic in it, it is thought to be consistent with the eternal laws 

 of Nature, however wild and extravagant is the postulate. Hence the 

 readiness with which the theory of submergence, qualified by ice- 

 bergs as the cause of the surface phenomena of these islands, has 

 found so much favour. Let us analyze it a little. There is no 

 scalpel so effective in dissipating a geological tumour as a little 

 analytical sifting of details. 



In the first place, if we are to account for the Chalky Clay by 

 a submergence, we must carry the submergence as far west at least 

 as Warwickshire, and we must put the whole country under water 

 from the Tees to the Thames. 



If the phenomena of the distribution of the boulders are to be 

 explained by the portage by icebergs, then it also follows that 

 Mount Sorrel and the other high ground in Leicestershire, as well 

 as the Chalk Downs of East Angiia and Lincolnshire, must have 



