The Chalk and its Dislocations. 307 
in so far as it was directed to explain these East Anglian drifts. He 
adopted virtually the same views which had long been held about 
them by other geologists who had the misfortune to be English and to 
have spent months in their close study instead of making a mere casual 
and rapid visit in a general survey of the glacial phenomena of the 
world, quite in the American motor-car style of scientific exploration. 
He declared quite frankly that he saw nothing in these contorted 
drifts that had any resemblance to ice action of any kind, and more 
recent visitors and critics have said the same. These sorted and 
laminated clays, these sorted and finely laminated sands, tossed and 
twisted into huge and re-entering curves, have not a single feature in 
common with the heterogeneous so-called ‘muck’ (a mixture of clay, 
sand, and stones) which forms the staple contents of moraines or other 
ice deposits, and in every cubic inch they bear the unmistakable 
impress of water action upon them. 
It is in the midst of these laminated and twisted and curled clays 
and sands, all witnessing the action of water in every cubic inch, that 
we find deposited the cakes and vast polygonal masses of chalk of 
which I have spoken earlier; and it has been no small proof of the 
temerity of the glacial prophets that, notwithstanding this patent fact, 
they should not have shrunk from explaining the detachment of these 
great masses from their matrix, and their portage to their present 
surroundings, by means of ice of whose presence the soft matrix in 
which the chalk masses are embedded does not present a trace, but 
whose structure and contents are entirely inconsistent with ice action. 
Many of the more reasonable glacialists admit this fully. 
Although they have been stunned and baffled by the overwhelming 
case against them in regard to the sandy and clayey matrix of the 
chalk masses, the writers in question still hold on, however, to their 
Deus ex machina in respect to these latter, as if it were possible to 
attribute the two phenomena, which occur together in an inseparable 
conjunction, to two entirely different forces acting in an entirely 
different way and producing entirely different results. The critical 
test 1s simple enough. 
Granting that at the time when the drifts were deposited the chalk 
over the greater part of Norfolk was lying horizontally in an unbroken 
condition at a much lower level than it is now, which I have shown 
strong reason for concluding, how was an ice-sheet when moving over 
it molecularly at a snail’s pace to break this continuous chalk, and 
detach from the matrix, the great polygonal masses, the angular 
fragments, and long ribbons of table-like chalk found in the cliffs ? 
As Ihave shown at great length elsewhere, modern glaciers do not 
break up their beds, although they sometimes traverse beds that had 
been dislocated and broken by other forces long before the glaciers 
were there. 4 fortiori would the quite hypothetical ice-sheets fail in 
such work, since their motion was ex hypothesi so much more slow and 
so much more molecular in character than that of icebergs, for they 
had no slopes to give them impulse and their dynamical energy would 
virtually be reduced to zero when they were planted on flat or uneven 
surfaces. 
We must remember that, whatever the cause, the broken chalk in 
