Vol. 6c. I anniversary address. lxxiii 



.. 



be added that in this first of his glacial papers he noticed the 

 occurrence of striated pavements in the Boulder-Drift, and adduced 

 them to show that, although the ice had exerted enormous erosive 

 power on solid rock, it had also sometimes flowed over its floor of 

 detritus. 



He must have spent a singularly-busy time during the next two 

 years, scouring Ireland from one end to the other in search of the 

 traces of the vanished ic e-sheets; for on March 14th, 1866, he read 

 his admirable aud classic paper, ' Xotes on the General Glaciation 

 of Ireland,' which for the first time gathered together and discussed 

 the striking evidence which that country presents of having been 

 the seat of a continuous mass of land-ice. He was now able to 

 embody on a map the results of his journeys, combined with those 

 already obtained by other observers, and to show the chief centres 

 of dispersion and the directions in which the ice streamed outward 

 to the sea. He was probably the first geologist in these islands to 

 realize that, although the mountains undoubtedly helped to accumu- 

 late the ice, they were not indispensably necessary for the formation 

 of a thick ice-covering for he showed that the great central plain 

 of Ireland had undoubtedly been buried under such an icy mantle, 

 which streamed outward in different directions. Reviewing the 

 whole subject, and impartially balancing the arguments for the 

 various explanations that had been proposed, he once more demon- 

 strated the overwhelming evidence in favour of the action of laud- 

 ice as the origin of the glaciation and of the Boulder-Drift. 



Yet Maxwell Close was no bigoted partizan. He admitted the 

 submergence of the country and the action of floating ice during 

 part of the Glacial Period. In 1874 he called attention to the 

 high-level shell-gravels which had long been known to lie upon 

 the hill-slopes near Dublin up to heights of 1000 and 1200 feet. 

 He believed that these deposits, shells included, had been trans- 

 ported to their present positions by floating ice when the land was 

 sunk to such depths beneath the sea. He thought that they had 

 come from somewhere to the north-west, and from the character 

 of the few and highly-fragmentary shells he inferred that they 

 pointed to the former existence of rather more boreal conditions 

 than those which now obtain in the region. 



In association with Mr. G. H. Kinahan, Close published in 

 1872 a more detailed account of the glaciation of the district of 

 Iar-Connaught, between Castlebar and Galway Bay. Mr. Kinahan 

 had been engaged in the mapping of that region by the Geological 



vol. lx. f 



