H. H. Eoworth — Traces of a Great Pod-Glacial Flood. 435 



of angular drift distributed in bands and patches at different altitudes. 

 In accounting for such, facts the advocate of the tidal action of the 

 sea meets with insurmountable difficulties at the very threshold of 

 his position. Instead of rounded pebbles of the last-forined detritus 

 of the South-East of England, he sees both on this side and on the 

 other side of the Channel near Calais, that where there is a true 

 water-worn beach, it lies between local drifts in which all is frag- 

 mentary and tumultuous ; and hence he is not authorized to appeal 

 to the mere forms of the escarpments of chalk or to insulated pyra- 

 mids or outliers of that rock as proofs that the sea, as we now under- 

 stand its action, could have produced any such results " {id. p. 394). 

 Mr. Belt speaks in the same strain and says, " There is this insuper- 

 able objection to the theory of marine submergence, that over the 

 whole district {i.e. Devon and Cornwall) no marine beaches and not 

 a single marine organism has been found excepting within a few feet 

 of the present sea-level. Nor can sea-shells have once existed in 

 the deposits and been since destroyed ; for mammalian remains and 

 land shells and freshwater shells are preserved, and any agency that 

 would have obliterated the traces of the one, would not have spared the 

 others" (Journ. Geol. Soc. vol. xxxii. p. 84). These extracts will 

 suffice, for I take it we are merely killing the dead in arguing against 

 the marine origin of the Angular drift. I am not aware that it has 

 been suggested that this drift was distributed by ice action ; but if 

 any one should suppose so, I think the following sentence from 

 Murchison's paper just quoted will be conclusive. He says that we 

 have not " in discussing the question of the Wealden denudation and 

 the formation of its local drift, the power of invoking the agency 

 of ice, as in the more northern tracts of England and Scotland 

 and over large portions of Ireland. Here we cannot appeal to 

 terrestrial or sea-borne ice, to get rid of the difficulty of tumultuous 

 accumulation, by supposing that icebergs impinged upon alluvial 

 matter. For no one has yet ventured to suggest, that the heights of 

 Butser, Hind Head, or Leith Hill were the abodes of glaciers, nor 

 has any one detected appearances in the drift within or without the 

 Wealden area which can be considered to have resulted from the 

 mechanical action of ice ; still less have any species of arctic shells 

 or far-transported blocks ever been observed within the area affected " 

 {op. cit. p. 395). Mr. J. Evans, following Sir Charles Lyell, argues 

 in a paper on the Flint Implements of Hants and Wilts, that the 

 large blocks of sandstone in the gravel and on the shore near Hill 

 Head in Hampshire were transported by ice action, adding, " that 

 the chalk flints in the gravel, which must have travelled a distance 

 of at least twelve miles, and some of which are, nevertheless, 

 entirely fresh and unrolled, testify to a similar means of transport " 

 (Journ. Geol. Soc. vol. xx. p. 193). In my view these facts, instead 

 of requiring the predicate of ice action to explain them, testify most 

 powerfully in favour of a translating flood of water. 



We will now turn to a theory which has monopolized attention 

 for some years past, and which has the imprimatur of some good 

 names, among them of my most accomplished friend just named, 



