454 Professor Hull — On the Glaciation of Norimy. 



volleys of brilliant verbiage with the view to his utter annihilation. 

 On no former occasion has this been exemplitied more fully 

 than in his essay on " The Surface Contour of Scandinavia and 

 Finland " in the Geological Magazine for August last, p. 355. 

 In this he has, as he himself says, undertaken " the hazardous 

 work" of overthrowing the Glacial theory as applied to 

 Scandinavia in the face of the evidence which has served to 

 convince the great majority of observers, of the highest eminence 

 and competency, of which amongst those living Professor James 

 Geikie may be considered the chief exponent. In such a case 

 Sir H. Howorth is another Athanasius contra mundum. Under the 

 influence of his perfervidum ingenium and facile rhetoric the North 

 Sea ice-sheet dissolves, and if it does not become the baseless fabric 

 of a vision, is left as " a very ricketty cripple." Can any state be 

 more deplorable ! Glacialists have all been deceived. The North 

 Sea never was packed with ice, stretching to the British shores, and 

 the mammillated rock-surfaces — their parallel grooves and strise — 

 are deceptions practised by that sad mimic Dame Nature to entrap 

 credulous geologists, who ought to have known that such phenomena 

 are due to " the continued beating, and wearing, and washing of the 

 rocky surfaces of a rising land, assisted possibly in part by shore-ice, 

 and the movement of ice hummocks and gravel, etc." ^ So it all goes 

 for nothing that similarly mammillated and striated surfaces have been 

 observed by numerous naturalists, from Agassiz, Charpentier, and 

 James Forbes downwards, lining the valleys of the Alps, Caucasus, 

 Himalayas, aye, and of Scandinavia itself; for it appears, according 

 to our author, that the inference regarding the mode of formation 

 applied to these is inapplicable in the case of the rocky coasts of 

 Norway. There ice has been the sculptor ; here it has been wave- 

 action and the rest, with "shore-ice" thrown in: but where are we 

 to draw the line ? 



Such views, coming from so respected a source, filled me with 

 amazement. It required several perusals to make it certain that 

 I myself was not the victim of a hallucination. I had persuaded 

 myself that if any deduction in theoretical geology had been 

 placed upon an unassailable basis it was that of a Scandinavian 

 ice-sheet, which had filled the North Sea and impinged upon our 

 coast. If such were not the case, and the North Sea ice is only 

 a "very ricketty cripple," will Sir H. Howorth explain the re- 

 markable deflection which the glacial stri(B undergo when traced 

 towards the eastern coast from the interior Highlands and Uplands 

 of Scotland ? What other agency than that of a mer de glace 

 blocking the seaward path could have caused the old glacier-ice 

 to change its course to the right hand and to the left, and to traverse 

 the Orkneys and Shetlands in a north-westerly direction ? Surely 

 not the unresisting waters of an open sea, even if studded with 

 some floating ice ! Perhaps this is a problem which may not have 

 presented itself to the mind of the author of the essay ; but, 



1 Pa2:e 356. 



