C. Davison— Creeping of Soil-cap by Frost. 259 
I have now briefly indicated a few of the innumerable matters of 
interest most prominent during a course up part of the great Rhone 
valley and across the various schists and other formations to the 
centre of the Western Alpine mass. I could go on, could keep my 
unfortunate geologist hard at work, week after week, over this 
hastily surveyed ground. But I should be writing a book! 
With regard to fossil remains. Switzerland is so bad a hunting 
ground that, unless a specialist: wishing for details of a particular 
formation, the paleontologist will grow discontented. But for the 
history of mountain formation, and—pace Heim—metamorphism, 
not a spot in this wonderful country but tells its story of one or 
other. 
And now I basely desert my traveller! If a scrambler, I advise 
him either to take the Weiss-Thor pass and sleep at the Riffel Hotel, 
or descend by the new Weiss-Thor pass which I first found in 1849, 
to Macugnaga. Whence, should the proposed excursion of the 
Geologists’ Association to Naples take place, he might join those who 
may have crossed the Simplon at Vogogna. If no mountaineer, he 
must even ride or walk down to Stalden by the way he came. 
Somehow or other he will I trust get home after much enjoyment. 
The geologist will find excellent official geological maps with 
memoirs and a large scale ordinary map (Siegfried) =5455 at Mon. 
Rouge’s, a leading bookseller in Lausanne. But it would avoid 
possible delay to bespeak them. 
TV.—On THE CREEPING OF THE SorILcAP THROUGH THE ACTION 
or Frost. 
By Cuartes Davison, M.A., 
Mathematical Master at King Edward’s High School, Birmingham. 
1. The object of this paper is to show how the soilcap, or its 
upper portion, may creep down an inclined surface through the 
action of frost. The subject has also been discussed by Mr. W. C. 
Kerr in a valuable memoir, ‘On the action of frost in the arrange- 
ment of superficial earthy material,” ! published in May, 1881. I 
Fig. 
reproduce here one of the figures given by Mr. Kerr, as I cannot 
better describe the nature of the phenomenon which it is the aim of 
_ this paper to consider. 
“ During the Centennial Exhibition [at Philadelphia], Market 
Street was extended westward ..... and a hill of some twenty 
t American Journal of Science, 3rd ser. vol, xxi. pp. 845-358. 
