208 



Greenwood — On Valley Terraces. 



most conspicuously traced up and down the main valley, wliilst 

 on looking across the eastern valley a much higher but less dis- 

 tinctly marked one appeared on it." (See woodcut, copied from 

 Dr. Hooker's work). In fact, the terraces have nothing to do 

 with lakes. They are all the remains of ancient alluvial plains 

 as we should call them, or of "river haughs," as the Scotch would 

 call them; and "the lowest very little above the river" is a river 

 haugh now in actual formation from the yearly floods of the river, 

 and from the waste and erosion of the terraces above it. And all 

 these terraces are at this moment on their way to the alluviums 

 below, to the delta of the Granges, to the bay of Bengal, and to the 



Diagram of the Glacial Terraces at tlie Fork of tlie Yangma Valley (copied, slightly reduced 

 in size, from Dr. Hooker's Himalayan Journals, vol. i. p. 219). 



Indian Ocean, under convoy of rain and rivers, as much as the run of 

 every other hill-side is on its way to the valley below, and from the 

 valley below to the sea at the end of the valley. The terraces are 

 for a time arrested by the hard gorges ; but as the hard gorges go, the 

 terraces go. So far Dr. Hooker's facts and my theories agree. At page 

 222, ibid., Dr. Hooker tells us that, " being familiar with sea ice and 

 berg transport during my voyages in the south polar regions," his 

 theory is that semitropical Indian land must have been formed under a 

 polar sea ; and that once upon a time " a glacial ocean stood high on the 

 Himalaya, made fiords of the valleys, and floated bergs laden with 

 blocks from the lateral guUeys, which the winds and currents would 

 deposit along certain lines." 



Yet if I wished for facts in favour of the present erosive powers of 

 subaerial agents, against that of ancient glacial sea, Dr. Hooker is the 

 witness that I should call. I might quote from almost every page of 

 his journey to the Donkia Pass. Thus in vol. ii. page 41, he talks of 

 " the prevalence of land-slips which descend sometimes 300 feet carry- 

 ing devastation along their course. They are caused by the melting of 

 the snow-beds or by the action of the rains on the rocks. This pheno- 



