1 82 [Proc. B. N. F. C.i 



else. Then just visible beyond the others is Slieve Bearnagh, 

 which proudly 



" Lifts to heaven 

 Her diadem of towers," 

 piled by the hand, not of man, but of nature. But Slieve 

 Bearnagh, like Lord Nelson, deserves, and shall one day have, 

 "a gazette all to herself." 



As one looks abroad from this quoin of vantage upon the 

 sea of mountains the old controversy is revived between the 

 Elevationists and the Denudationists, and the question is 

 naturally asked — Were these heights shot up by the force of 

 subterranean fires from below, or do their summits represent 

 the original surface-level of the strata which has been slowly 

 carved out by the unceasing action of running water, frost, and 

 sand ? As we look southward over the gravel banks that line 

 the Kilkeel River we may incline to the latter view, and agree 

 that, though the forces of an earlier period may have been more 

 potent, they were yet the same in kind, though not necessarily 

 in degree, that operate at present. There was a time when 

 those hills were more rugged and the valleys deeper than they 

 are now. During the height of the great ice age, had we stood 

 here, what should we have seen ? Far away in the western 

 horizon, where now rise the hills that divide Derry from 

 Tyrone, we should have seen, had the perpetual fog and cloud 

 permitted us, the glistening summit of a vast dome of hardened 

 snow, such as now covers Greenland, and which is supposed to 

 have stretched out on all sides till it met the great snow field 

 of Scotland, whose edge curved in a line round the outer 

 Hebrides, and the lesser one of the North of England and the 

 Cumberland mountains. The officers of the Geological Survey 

 assure us that all the ice-marks here point to a glaciation from 

 the west-north-west, breasting against and flowing round the 

 Mourne Mountains ; and what would then have been their lee 

 side, about Annalong, is piled thick with glacial debris. Our 

 own eyes have informed us that the ice wave reached to the 

 rocks at our feet, and went clean over the polished hummock 



