H. H. Howorth—Traces of a Great Post-Glacial Flood. 119 
Mr. Mellard Reade makes similar remarks in regard to the Lanca- 
shire drift shells. Thus he says, “The association of the various 
species, distributed entirely without order through the clays, shows 
that they could not possibly have lived together on the same bottom, 
some being peculiar to sand, others to mud, some to rock, others to 
shingle, some requiring deep water and others shallow; so that the 
conclusion is irresistibly forced upon us that they must have been to 
a large extent transported” (Journ. Geol. Soc., vol. xxx. p. o2). 
The question then arises, What could have been the transporting | 
cause? Forbes does not hesitate to say that this mixture “indicates 
the action of some disturbing influence—of having been accumulated 
far above the level of the then existing sea, through the agency of an 
iceberg, as suggested by Mr. Darwin; or through the agency of a wave 
of translation, such as Sir Roderick Murchison has shown to play so 
important a part in producing the phenomena of the Scandinavian and 
Russian drifts; or, possibly, by the combined action of both causes. 
That such propelling forces derived from afar,” he says, “ were 
powerful agents of disturbance at the period under consideration, 
is also rendered probable by the fact that the chief localities of 
stratified glacial beds, containing undisturbed testacea evidently an 
situ, as, for instance, great beds of Pecten islandica, Panopea arctica, 
and even such delicate forms as Nucule, Telling, and Lucine, in the 
position in which they lived, and with both valves connected, are to 
be found in the Clyde district (where this fact was noted by Mr. 
Smith), in localities sheltered to the North by mountain ridges, which 
were anciently islands in the glacial sea. These islands had saved. 
many tracts of sea from the disturbing influence of icebergs [? ice- 
bergs, H.H.H.] and great advancing waves, the course of which, from 
the North, is indicated by the protected beds; for it is worthy of 
note that the glacial beds in the Northern districts of Scotland, which 
had no such protecting barriers to defend them—as, for instance, those 
at Wick—present the same disturbed and unstratified conditions and 
similar rolled and broken fossils with those so characteristic of the 
glacial beds around the Irish Sea” (op. cit. pp. 384-5). With this, 
save the introduction of ice, I most cordially agree. The introduction 
of ice as a co-ordinate factor with a translating wave of waters seems, 
as I have tried to show, to be very contrary to the evidence. The 
fact is, the more the problem is faced the more certain does it 
become that nothing but a wave of waters is competent to produce 
the effects we find. Such a wave moving up the rocky inlets on the 
Swedish and Norwegian coast would take up and carry along shells 
from various depths, the whole being sifted of gravel by their light 
weight, and carried clean and mixed as we find them at Uddevalla 
and elsewhere. Such a wave explains why the shells are only found 
on the coasts and not inland, and generally on coasts where the 
water would be throttled by land on either side, and be therefore 
forced to climb up to greater heights than elsewhere. It would 
leave these debris of the sea as its own high-water mark, a high- 
water mark which would be at different heights in different locali- 
ties, according as it had room to spread or no. This removes the 
