Sir H. H. Eoworth — Rpply to Mr. Juhes-Broime. 503 



This is certainly a sublime heiglit from which I never addressed 

 anybody. The language compels me to say, much to my distaste, 

 that for many years past I have spent my holidays in trying to 

 explore the so-called Glacial beds in Scotland, Eastern and Western 

 England, Holland, North Germany, Denmark, the Scandinavian 

 Peninsula, Finland, and Switzerland. It is possible, but it is not 

 probable, that Mr. Jukes-Browne has studied them in the field in 

 as many aspects and for as many years as I have. 



Two lessons, inter alia, this examination has taught me, namely, 

 the extreme difficulty of disentangling the history of these beds, and 

 the impossibility of any individual explorer doing so unless, and 

 until, he has mastered not only the facts in the field, which are 

 comparatively easy to collect, but the vast and intricate literature 

 dealing with the suliject. I am not alone in this view. It is now 

 some years since I paid my first visit to the Cromer Cliffs with two 

 distinguished geological friends who knew them well. When we 

 had finished our examination, and had concluded, as many others 

 have concluded before, that the riddles they enshrine are not solved 

 by any current theory about them, one of my friends, a geological 

 surveyor, went on to say that what we needed far more than a 

 continual accession of disintegrated facts, where facts are so abundant, 

 was a sifting of the enormous literature relating to the so-called 

 Glacial beds, so that we might marshal the testimony of tlie 

 hundreds of observers and get rid of the personal equation which 

 underlies them. I thought this a sensible remark, and I have 

 probably devoted as much time to the very dreary work as anybody. 

 One result will appear in the course of a few weeks in a work of 

 900 closely packed pages on what I have ventured to call the 

 Glacial Nightmare. Another result I have tried to present in the 

 pages of the Geological Magazine. Mr. Jukes-Browne affects to 

 despise this kind of work, and yet I have no doubt he agrees with 

 me that any man deserves condemnation who in these days, when 

 so many busy hands and eyes are at work, ventures to publish as 

 his own what others have published long before and consequently 

 that no one has a right to publish a fact until he has taken great 

 pains to find out that it is new and of some importance, as well 

 as true. 



What I have done, and shall continue to do, in any geological 

 excursions I may make, is, not only to report my own limited 

 experience in the field, but also to bring together, as far as my bad 

 health and mortgaged time will allow, the varying and contradictory 

 testimony of other explorers, many of them better men than myself, 

 and to try and equate their testimony with some positive conclusion. 

 In many cases it is impossible to re-examine the sections, since they 

 are effaced, and if they were not, my own observations would not, 

 in my eyes, be of greater authority than those testified to by others, 

 whose judgment I respect. We all need checking, and all our 

 testimony needs sifting, and nowhere more so than when stupendous 

 issues depend upon the I'esult. 



1 hold it to be of very great importance, not merely on the question 



