216 Sir H. E. Howorth — Water versus Ice. 



been completely submerged. If so, how is it possible for the icebergs 

 to have got their loads of native stones at all, for the whole country 

 available for stones would be submerged, and floating bergs cannot 

 collect stones from the sea-bottoms over which they are floating. 

 Nor could such bergs get the stones on their backs, for icebergs are 

 merely the terminal feet of glaciers which have calved off, and, as 

 we have shown, there were no glaciers in Charnwood Forest and 

 there are no remains of ice-action there. So much for the local 

 boulders : now for the strangers. How were icebergs to collect 

 their load of stones in Cleveland and Lower Durham, when Eastern 

 England was submerged at least a thousand feet ? But these stones, 

 like those from the Cliristiania Fjord, are mostly rounded boulders or 

 subangular blocks. They must have been rolled and worn by some 

 force before they vrere picked up and scattered. How could icebergs 

 collect them ? 



Having collected them, how could they proceed to scatter them 

 over the wide area of the Chalky Clay and its associated beds, and 

 leave them not in heaps, but sporadically ; and how could these 

 icebergs come down upon Eastern England from almost every point 

 of the compass? On the banks of Newfoundland, in Bafifins Bay, in 

 the South Pacific, wherever, in fact, we have streams and fleets of 

 icebergs depositing loads of stones, they all have a uniform route. 

 Nor can we see why, if the march of the old icebergs were divergent, 

 the boulders from Norway should occur nowhere on the British 

 coasts except between Eobin Hood's Ba}^ and Cromer. 



Nor, again, can we see how by any possible means icebergs could 

 either get hold of or move about or transplant the enormous cakes of 

 chalk, oolite, etc., many hundreds of yards in length, whose portage 

 has been attributed to them, or underlay them with soft drifted sand 

 and clay. If they were foreign bergs floating in, how could they by 

 any means take up and detach these monster boulders. They could 

 not get them on their back, and it is impossible to understand how 

 they could get them attached to their feet. Floating bergs cannot 

 get frozen to anything. What applies to the bergs, applies also to 

 shore-ice. Shore-ice will, no doubt, move stones along shore, and 

 sometimes push masses of stone up sloping beaches, but shore-ice 

 cannot perform the feat of taking up great masses of chalk and 

 depositing them in beds of loamy sand with their laminations intact. 

 Besides, shore-ice implies a shore, and how is it possible to have 

 a shore at Cromer or in Mid-Lincolnshire where the postulate is, that 

 the whole country was submerged a thousand feet deep. Nor are 

 there any traces of old beaches or shores to be found where these great 

 stony masses occur. Floating or shore-ice, therefore, seems out of 

 the question as a cause of the boulder formations of Eastern England. 

 Let us, then, turn to the supposed handiwork of the sea during a 

 prolonged submergence. Does the eastern half of England look in 

 the least like an old sea-bottom. If it were submerged for any con- 

 siderable time, where are the marine debris, the shells, etc. There is 

 literally not a single specimen known to me, for. as we have seen, the 

 shells once supposed to be glacial shells in certain local maritime 



