678 
England, and half of Germany and Russia with similar icy sheets, 
on the surfaces.of which all the northern boulders might have been 
shot off. But even were such hypotheses granted, without we also 
build up former mountains of infinitely greater altitude than any 
which now exist, we have no adequate centres for the construc- 
tion of enormous glaciers which imagination must create in many 
regions to account for the phenomena. The very idea which records 
the existence of these vast former sheets of ice is at variance with 
all that is most valuable in the works of Charpentier, Venetz, and 
Agassiz, whose data, as carefully eliminated from Alpine pheeno- 
mena alone, would naturally teach us never to extend their appli- 
eation when those conditions are absent, viz. the mountain chain, by 
the very presence of which the pheenomena are explained. 
But though the Alpine glacial theory be new, the scratches and 
polished surfaces of rocks are by no means of recent observation. 
Many Swedish miners, from the days of Tilas and Bergman, failed 
not to remark how their mountain sides were furrowed, and in our 
own times, Sefstrom* of Sweden, and Bohtlingk of Russia, have not 
only narrowly traced them over wide regions, but have endeavoured 
to account for them. The first of these authors remarked that nearly 
all the hard rocks of this country had a “ worn or weather side,” and 
a highly escarped or “lee side,” the former being exposed to the 
North and the latter to the South; and having further shown that 
the detritus had generally been carried from N. to S., he called the 
worn face the “ weather side,’ and the higher and jagged extremity 
of such ridges the “lee side.” Extending his observations to many 
hundred places, he divided these scratches into what he calls normal 
and side furrows, showing that in the latter there are frequent aber- 
rations from the persistent courses of the former. Although he had 
been at first disposed to think, from the data in a given country 
around Falun, that the normal lines were invariably from N. to S., 
he afterwards discovered that in large tracts of the South of Sweden 
the direction was from N.W. to S.E., and in others, particularly along 
the coasts of Norway, from N.E. to S.W.; all these facts being re- 
corded on a map, which is a most valuable document. 
_ Since Sefstrom’s work was published, M. Bohtlingk, a young 
Russian naturalist of great promise, but, alas! prematurely carried 
to the grave, extended his researches to the northern territories of 
Russia. Observing that the dominant direction of the scratches 
in parts of the governments of Olonetz and Archangel was from 
N. to &., and that along the edges of the Bothnian Gulf their 
course was from W. to E., he passed the summit level of Rus- 
sian Lapland, and fourid that there the drift had no longer been 
transported from N. to S., or from N.W. to S.E., but, on the con- 
trary, from S.E. to N.W.; or, in other words, that the blocks of 
Lapland had been carried northwards into the shores of the Polar 
Sea. In a recent letter to Mr. Lyell, read before this Society, Pro- 
fessor Nordenskiold has accurately recorded the phenomena of this 
* See Taylor’s Scientific Memoirs, vol. iii. p. 81. 
