Sir H. H. Koworth — The Scandinavian Ice-sheet. 9 



there is only one force which seems competent to account for the 

 portage in question, and which also accounts for the other correlated 

 phenomena, and that is water on a great scale moving rapidly — 

 such a mass of water as would be sped along if North Central 

 Sweden were to be rapidly upheaved and discharge in all directions 

 the waters that once covered it. 



Another word with regard to the distribution of these stones. If 

 we want a good test of whether a large mass of scattered angular 

 boulders or erratics were distributed by land-ice or water, we shall 

 find it in this fact, that whereas water in moving along sorts out 

 the stones it carries, according to their weight and size, dropping 

 the big ones first and the lesser ones afterwards, a mass of moving 

 ice like a glacier does not sort them at all ; it carries on its broad 

 back a stone as big as a house just as easily and just as far as it 

 carries a pebble. This can be tested in any Alpine valley. Now, 

 if we apply this test to Scandinavia, we must conclude that the 

 stones were carried by water; a few very big ones were no doubt 

 carried a long way, as they would naturally be by a vast torrential 

 flood, but the great mass of them are arranged roughly according 

 to their specific gravity, getting smaller as we go farther away from 

 their place of origin. 



Let us now turn to another feature of the so-called glacial deposits 

 of Sweden which seems to me quite inconsistent with the so-called 

 ice-sheet theory. This is the distribution of the marls and limey 

 clays, of which a beautiful map has been published by the Swedish 

 surveyors. If we examine them, and also note the blocks of Baltic 

 limestone which occur in Sweden, we shall find that we establish 

 at least two centres of distribution : one from the Silurian lime- 

 stones of Gothland, notably from the district of which KinnekuUe 

 is the focus, and the other in the district north-east of the Malar 

 lake, from which the limestone has apparently been recently and 

 violently stripped, leaving only a small insular piece near Gefle, but 

 of which the remains both in the form of powdered limestone and of 

 blocks and boulders occur over a wide area. 



What I am urging is, that anyone who will examine the two areas 

 just named, where the Silurian debris occurs, will realize how 

 desperately difficult or impossible it is to account for this particular 

 phenomenon by ice action of any kind, and how unmistakably it 

 points to a great breakage of the surface and the distribution of the 

 debris by water. 



It seems to me that whenever we apply a really critical analysis 

 to the separate facts and factors of the problem as presented by the 

 surface of Scandinavia, we are met by the same stupendous diffi- 

 culties in attributing them to ice action. Nor would the idea 

 have dominated men as it has if they had not for so long done 

 homage to the Baal of a spurious Uniformity and the notion that 

 Nature never acts in a violent and spasmodic way. The great 

 argument of all, however, remains, and I have pressed it in season 

 and out of season. It is not a geological one but a physical one, 

 not based on fantastic speculation but upon precise mechanical laws, 



