222 Sir H. H. Hoivorth — Water versus Ice. 



local debris. They would end not as ice-deposited debris could 

 have ended, by a great series of concentric ramparts and moraines, 

 but by the deposit gradually thinning out. As they swept along 

 in places, rough rubble, made of chalky and oolitic fragments, 

 scoring them occasionally, and generally polishing them by 

 rubbing them together as we notice the tide rubs the shingle 

 together when it grates upon our ears, when one great loaded wave 

 after another retires down a shelving slope, and it would not, like 

 ice, carry big stones and little together, but sort them as we find 

 them sorted, the biggest specimens being, in the main, nearest to 

 the parent beds. 



As we have seen, the materials were not ready made ; the dis- 

 location of the strata provided the local angular rubble ; the pebbles, 

 shingles, and sands were already there in the shingle beds and sands 

 of Tertiary age, while the clays were also bare and ready to be 

 churned. It needed only a powerful instrument, powerful and 

 3^et light-fingered. Such an instrument is the one I have here 

 quoted, not for the first time. I know of no other capable of doing 

 the work, and for the existence and potency of which there is such 

 a preponderance of evidence, -and in the effective phrase of Euclid 

 I would say, until some champion can furnish a better cause, 

 Q.E.D. 



I have limited myself in this paper entirely to the deposits of 

 South-Eastern England and the maritime bordei-s of the North Sea 

 on both sides of the water. It is necessary to point out to gome 

 English geologists that the phenomenon to be explained is not 

 a parochial one and limited to these islands. The same kind of 

 stones which have come to Britain from the Christiania Fjord have 

 also been found in Holland. The same disturbance and rearrange- 

 ment of the Crag sands which have caused so much false reasoning 

 in East Anglia have occurred, but on a vastly greater scale, in 

 Holland, where these sands are not only found in greater depths 

 but in the form of the so-called Campinian Sands, distributed over 

 a much wider area, and which no stretch of the imagination could 

 suppose were ice deposits nor the deposits of subglacial streams, 

 since they uniformly mantle whole provinces with more or less 

 homogeneous sands, and gradually thin out. I hope to have more 

 to say to them on another occasion. 



At present I would content myself with saying that I hold 

 this inrush of water from the north and north-east to have been the 

 real dynamical cause of the effects which have been so persistently 

 attributed to ice. When this inrush i-eached the loose sands of the 

 Crag it rearranged them ; when it reached the Lincolnshire and 

 Norfolk wolds it passed over them or through their gaps, and took 

 with it the chalky debris which it met on their exposed sides, 

 leaving none on their eastern flanks because there was no debris 

 available there. Thus it laid down chalkless clays and loams on one 

 side of the wolds and chalky ones on the other. The same cause 

 would explain the peculiar distribution of the Mount Sorrel boulders. 



The North Sea inrush did not do all the work. It could not and 



