220 Sir E. B. Eoworth— Water versus Ice. 



Uniformity, whicli claims the manifold rents and twists and con- 

 tortions of thick beds of hard crystalline rocks, faulted and fissured 

 and fractured as they so often are, as the effects of the repetition 

 of raindro]DS and the diurnal erosion of river and tide, has no 

 claim. 



Those who would concede this, either wholly or in part, as 

 a general conclusion, nevertheless bid me produce direct evidence 

 that such throes and dislocations took place in a period so recent 

 as the Pleistocene. This is not unreasonable, although the men 

 who champion the cause of ice absolutely refuse to explain the 

 competency of ice to do the particular work they attribute to it. 



I am now, of course, limiting myself entirely to the problem 

 presented by the surface beds of Eastern England. That problem, 

 as it presents itself elsewhere, I hope on another occasion to face. 

 Now in regard to the area at present under discussion, I have 

 already shown in these pages, by a very considerable accumula- 

 tion of evidence, that during the Pleistocene period a vast and 

 extraordinary folding, twisting, and breakage of the strata did 

 occur whicli operated over all the district, so far as we know, occupied 

 by Secondary and Tertiary beds, from the great Chalk escarpment 

 in the west, as far as Denmaiic and Scania in the east; and this 

 view is supported not only by a heretic like myself, but by highly 

 respected foreign geologists like Koeppen and others. If this be 

 maintainable, then I have surely met the challenge of those who 

 ask for proofs of great dislocations in this area in Pleistocene times. 

 If it be not maintainable, then I should be very grateful indeed to 

 anyone who will answer the arguments I have used, and which 

 have been used by better men than myself, and refute the points 

 I have quoted. 



This particular dislocation seems, in the main, in this area to have 

 involved some lateral compression or some east-and-west tellurial 

 wave, by which the beds were thrown into folds ranging north and 

 south, raising a series of round-backed wolds, and causing a corre- 

 sponding series of deep depressed valleys between them. The 

 extent of these depressions can be measured partly by the depth 

 at which the land is now submerged below the sea-level between 

 England and Denmark, over an area on which the Mammoth and 

 its companions roamed; and, secondly, by the well borings at 

 Yarmouth, Boston, etc., in Eastern England, and by others in 

 Holland, which prove to what a depth below the sea-level the 

 furmer land surface was lowered at this time. The depression 

 was filled up by drift- beds, all dating from our period. The 

 evidence of these wells seems to me to be crucial and critical. 



I have also shown in the same paper that the movement here 

 referred to was not a gradual and continuous movement. I am 

 not a great believer in general movements of the earth's crust over 

 large areas which are gradual and continuous. The earth's crust is 

 not like dough, under the influence of yeast. Its movements, when 

 we can follow them, are general Ij? spasmodic and rapid, and involve 

 breakage and tearing, and the evidence in this case, as I have tried 



