3806 Sir H. H. Howorth—North Norfolk Geology— 
would merely act as a mass of considerable ponderability, pressing on - 
its bed like the very strata press which Mr. O. Fisher appealed to, and 
which Mr. Reid in his case rejects as impossible, with one considerable 
element to its disadvantage. While it was possible for Mr. O. Fisher 
_ to appeal to differential effects on the subjacent chalk caused by 
a differential pressure of the superjacent strata he has piled up at 
different levels, how is it possible to make such an appeal in. the case 
of an ice-sheet whose pressure would necessarily be equable and not 
differential, for its depth and slope would be uniform if it were made 
in accordance with what the facts require? How, then, could it 
produce breakages and dislocations in one place and in another pass 
over fine layers of sand without disturbing them ? These are a prior? 
objections, the kind of objections which would occur even to a school- 
boy, and which ought to be faced before any such theory is applied 
to explain concrete facts. 
Let us, however, turn to these concrete facts. What are the 
phenomena which the ice-sheet is supposed to explain? First the 
meandering and wave-like curves of the chalk in certain places. 
How is an ice-sheet moving molecularly to bend a solid intractable 
material like chalk into the sinuous and serpentinous folds we find here ? 
It is not merely the formation of these serpentinous folds that has to 
be explained, however, but if the ice-sheet came from the sea it is 
their existence at right angles to the line of march of the postulated 
monster that has to be explained. It is for those who make the 
appeal to show its reasonableness. Let us now turn from the contour 
of the chalk to the mode in which its broken masses occur. The 
explanation of these masses of transported chalk cannot be separated 
from that of the loose beds in which they lie as they are exposed in 
the Norfolk cliffs. 
It is not long ago since the phenomena presented by the contorted 
drifts in the Norfolk cliffs were deliberately and positively ascribed 
to the action of ice. It was ice which had contorted the drift, it 
was ice which had detached and redeposited the chalk cakes; ice was 
everywhere, in fact. 
The case looks very different now. The first explanation to go 
was the biological evidence. Everyone, I believe, now agrees with 
Mr. Horace Woodward that the so-called glacial shells in the drifts 
on the Norfolk coast are derivative—that they are the fragmentary 
and remanié contents of the underlying Crag beds, which have been 
further broken during the portage and then distributed through the 
superimposed clays and sands, and that there are no glacial shells, 
properly so called, to be found in Norfolk. This view some of us 
have maintained for a long time, and the champions of the older view 
that the shells are true glacial shells, which finds a prominent place in 
some of the Survey Memoirs on East Anglia, are now reduced to quite 
a small fraction of their former number. 
Secondly, in regard to the contorted sands and clays which form the 
great mass of the drifts in the Norfolk cliffs, it was a heavy blow to the 
older and wilder school of glacialists when an American glacialist in 
whose acumen they greatly trusted and whose leadership they gladly 
followed, namely Mr. Carvell Lewis, threw over the whole hypothesis 
