Si)' H. R. Uoworth — Water versus Ice. 225 



glacialists to account for the distribution of the English so-called 

 glacial gravels ; or, rather, by those glacialists who realize that 

 gravels can only be moved by torrential waters, and that I'ivers do 

 not run up and down hills and lay down gravel on the hill-tops as 

 well as the valley-bottoms. Thus, Lewis attributes the distribution 

 of the so-called cannon-shot gravel to the action of a powerful 

 current, and he quotes the apposite fact in proof of it that the stones 

 frequently have their longer axes vertical and the flints are often 

 quite unwoi'n ; and he accounts for the flinty gravels of the 

 Midlands by the bursting of a series of lakes, thus causing a number 

 of debacles (op. cit., p. 234). 



How ready these champions of Uniformity are to go to Saturn 

 for their unproved, untested, and absolutely hypothetical machinery ! 

 Another feature of the drift-beds has also, in my humble view, 

 been distorted to prove a quite preposterous position by the 

 orthodox geologists. Because valleys very often have their flanks 

 fringed by so-called glacial beds, it has been argued that they 

 were once entirely filled up with this material, and that all of 

 it has been removed by subsequent denudation, leaving only 

 these marginal beds. How this denudation was brought about in 

 a district where no denudation whatever, or virtually none, now takes 

 place, where every stream is raising its own bed, and where the 

 materials of this portentous denudation were carried to, we are not 

 told. The fact is, that the phenomena in question are the most 

 patent evidence of a great rush of waters which scoured the valley 

 bottoms, but left a marginal terrace or series of terraces of debris 

 just as every flood does, and swept along the greater part of its 

 load, choked and jammed the greater part of it in the upper reaches 

 of the valleys. The theory that these valleys have been cut down 

 or carved out of the so-called glacial beds is absolutely at issue with 

 every serious fact except the most superficial one, and has entirely 

 reversed the course of geological reasoning on the subject. 



From every point of view, therefore, I claim to have shown that 

 the old geologists are right and that the new ones are wrong on 

 this issue, and that it was water and not ice which laid down the 

 surface beds and gave a final contour to the surface of Eastern 

 England and of Holland. 



In disputing, as I have so persistently done, the extravagant 

 claims of the glacialists, I have really done so in the interests of 

 a rational uniformity. I do not doubt that in former days the 

 mountains of Scotland, Cumberland, and Wales may have nursed 

 glaciers, and that these glaciers could do and did similar work to 

 modern glaciers. What I deny is the potency of those glaciers to 

 distribute the result of their handiwork over the flat lands of Eastern 

 England. I also deny the capacity of ice to travel over hundreds 

 of miles of level or undulating country from Scandinavia to the 

 Carpathians and to Norfolk, and to perform work conti-ary to the 

 proved capacity and nature of ice. I affirm that the geological facts 

 refuse to be correlated with such a hypothesis, but everywhere 

 speak of a great diluvial movement. 



DECADE IV. VOL. IV. NO. V. 15 



