308 Sir H. H. Howorth—WNorth Norfolk Geology— 
most cases shows no signs of crushing or pounding, but only of actual 
fracture by impact. ‘The masses of chalk are angular, and have raw 
and unworn edges, the result of forcible tearing and not of crushing, 
and the chalk with its layers of flint are quite intact from end to end 
on the chalk cakes. It defies every suggestion available to me how 
these vast polygons with torn sides and edges (not detached along lines 
of bedding or of old joints, but right across the solid chalk and the 
flints it contains) should have resulted from any form of pressure, 
whether perpendicular or acting laterally. It is even more difficult to. 
understand how the long fragile thin slabs and tables of chalk I call 
chalk cakes (which are in places still covered by their original covering 
of Crag), which haye irregular edges, and have their lower surfaces. 
with great pieces scooped out as if bitten out by some primeval ogre, 
could have been detached by any instrument of the character and 
mode of motion of an ice-sheet. 
If the case for causing the breakage and dislocation in question is 
hopeless when it is an ice-sheet passing directly over the surface of 
the chalk itself which is postulated, how much more so does it. 
become hopeless when the chalk was covered over and padded with a 
widespread soft cushion of Crag sands and clays, through which it. 
would be impossible for the requisite dynamical forces to be conveyed. 
at all, much less conveyed without disturbing the lamination of the 
superincumbent Crag beds ? 
The breakage and detachment of the chalk masses and chalk cakes. 
from their matrix is not, however, the only puzzle in these cases which 
seems utterly to baffle all the ingenuity of the orthodox geologists to. 
deal with it. A much greater difficulty exists in explaining the removal, 
the lifting up to great heights, and the redeposition as we find them 
in the contorted drifts of these cliffs, of these masses and cakes of chalk. 
There is a small school of glacialists who have absolutely forsworn 
all appeals to elementary physics, who have argued that vast 
sheets of ice moving very slowly over enormous distances of flat or 
uneven ground can not only break up their beds but drag up out of 
their sockets the débris they have formed, like a dentist drags teeth 
out of our unwilling gums. This tooth-drawing process is a postulate 
quite after the fashion of glacialist logic. JI have examined and 
criticized it at length in my two last works. What I wish to say 
here is that even if small angular boulders or polygonal blocks could 
be thus extracted from the beds on which they le by a mass of ice. 
which is meanwhile pressing down on them with the weight of many 
tons to the yard (a process like that of a man lifting into mid-air the 
chair on which he is sitting), it is surely beyond the reach of the. 
wildest credulity to suppose this could be done with cakes of chalk 
several hundred yards long, or vast polygonal masses in which chalk 
quarries have actually been opened. ‘I'he whole process. seems a 
mechanical nightmare, and it passes human understanding how men 
have dared to enunciate it as a rational scientific explanation of their 
difficulties. ‘The mere dragging out of their matrix and detachment 
of the chalk masses, however, is not all that has to be explained. 
They have been carried in some cases far from their original site, and. 
in all cases seem to have been carried some distance and redeposited. 
