6 Sir H. H. Howorth — The Scandinavian Ice-sheet. 



cannot be separated from the aberrant course followed by many of 

 the Swedish boulders, and described, inter alios, by Professor James 

 Geikie in the following paragraph. He says : " Dr. Tornebohm 

 and Professor Hogborn have shown that the glacier-carried erratics 

 of Jemtland demonstrate that the ice has passed fi'om east to 

 west — that is, right against the slope of the land ; and, according to 

 Keilhan, similar blocks which could only have come fi-om Sweden 

 are now found in Trondhjems Fiord ; while Pettersen has recorded 

 similar facts in connection with the glacial phenomena of Northern 

 Norway. The most remarkable circumstance in connection with 

 some of these blocks consists in the fact that they occur at a con- 

 siderably greater height than the rock from which they have been 

 derived. Thus, at Areskutan, Tornebohm found blocks at a height 

 of 4,500 feet which could not possibly have come from any place 

 higher than 1,800 feet." (" Great Ice Age," 3rd edition, p. 424.) 



I cannot understand the process by which these strise are supposed 

 to have been made, and these blocks to have been moved, by 

 a great ice-sheet culminating, not on the mountains, but in the low- 

 lands far away to the east of tbe mountains, and moving, not along 

 the lines of easiest descent and of least resistance, but marching 

 right across the high range of mountains. It seems to me as likely 

 a process as that the Ehone glacier should have climbed up Mont 

 Blanc in preference to flowing down the Ehone valley ; and the 

 phenomena in question seem to me to be only consistent with 

 a great and serious alteration in the surface contour of the country, 

 accompanied by some widespread diluvial movement either after 

 or coincident with the making of the strise and dispersion of the 

 boulders. 



Let us now turn to other characteristics of the boulders and 

 erratics, which are such a prominent feature in the surface beds of 

 Sweden and Norway. The Northern Glacial geologists differ from 

 our own in one important particular, namely, in discriminating 

 between the different materials which foi'm their surface beds. 

 They would be surprised if they came to England and saw how 

 it is the fashion here to describe as glacial, beds consisting entirely 

 of rolled gravels or boulders, often intercalated with pockets and 

 layers of stratified sands and false-bedded brickeai'ths : beds quite 

 different to true moraine materials, which are heterogeneous, un- 

 sorted, and consist of a mixed mass of mud, sand, and stones, chiefly 

 angular and unrolled. 



In Sweden the rolled and rounded gravels and boulders are 

 directly attributed to the action of water, not water running in 

 so-called subglacial streams, which by our geologists are supposed 

 capable of travelling to and fro everywhere, irrespective of the 

 contour of the country, but to submarine submergence. I cannot 

 understand how these millions of boulders of all sizes and materials 

 should have been manufactured in the transcendental and largely 

 imaginary boulder mills which are postulated as having underlaid 

 the ice-sheet. A great proportion of them are composed of rocks 

 which are not found rising and beetling above the general level of 



