Sir H. S. Hoicorth — Water versus lee. 223 



did not bring the limestone and millstone grits of Derbyshire into 

 Eastern England, nor scatter boulders from Shap over the Yorkshire 

 plain, nor the quartzite pebbles of Warwickshire over a large part of 

 the South-Eastern Counties. These were the effects of separate 

 impulses, which I shall not shrink from discussing on another 

 occasion, but which I do not wish to confuse the present issue with. 

 In one respect only must I say something of them. There is 

 no more treacherous phenomenon in the world for the young 

 geologists than the various mounds, ramparts, etc., of soft 

 materials which occur in certain districts, and which simulate 

 in a measure the external contours of glacial moraines, just as 

 chalk and water so often in London simulate milk. These are 

 generally seized upon greedily as most patent evidences of glacial 

 action, and are at once labelled moraines, and pass as such 

 into the ephemeral textbooks of our science. It is forgotten that 

 by far the greatest number of mounds and ridges now being 

 formed are being formed by the sea or by torrential waters, 

 and wherever two opposing rushes take place it is inevitable that 

 mounds and banks should occur, and the contours of these mounds 

 will depend largely on the rapidity with which they are formed. 

 Now we have in Eastern England examples of such mounds which 

 have been called moraines on the slightest possible grounds, and 

 which I believe to have been the result of the North Sea rush 

 meeting with an impulse from the west or with some obstacle. 



Such mounds and ridges occur in one or two isolated places 

 in Eastern England, notably in Hunstanton Park in Norfolk, in 

 Lincolnshire, and in Holderness. They have been treated as glacial 

 moraines ; I do not know on what grounds, unless it be on the easy 

 ground that every mound, however formed and whatever it contains, 

 must be a moraine. These particular mounds bear no relation known 

 to me to any possible glaciers, but do bear a very near relation to the 

 mounds and ramps formed by rapid currents converging from 

 different directions upon the same spot. 



In regard to the mounds at Hunstanton Mr. Carvill Lewis, a very 

 strong glacialist champion, says : — " I visited the so-called esker in 

 the Park near Hunstanton. I saw in an open field a long hill of 

 gravel resembling a kame in its narrow ridge-like form, but not 

 resembling one in that the characteristic knobs and kettle-holes 



were absent It turned at right angles, and continued 



as a narrow gravelly ridge in an E. and W. direction for one-third 

 of a mile .... it consists, at least in its upper part, of water- 

 worn coarse gravel and sand. This last looked like sea sand, not 

 kame sand. Contortions with a little clay in them were seen in 

 some parts of the cutting. I have never seen such contortions in 

 kames, although they are common in marine drifts. Finally, in the 

 sand 1 found many fragments of marine shells. Shells never occur in 

 kames, and he concludes that the mound is not a kame but a portion of 

 an old sea-beach. It is close to the sea, only 50 feet above it, and bends 

 in an arch quite unlike a kame, but just as a beach might, keeping 

 parallel to the present sea-beach. One part is parallel to the Wash, 

 another part to the sea, and it stands just on the point between the 



