32 Proceedings. 



The small mammal and the minute crustacean occurring- 

 both above and below the Keuper marls, may it not be 

 hoped that the mammal may be added to the fossil fauna 

 of Cheshire ? The discovery points to a recurrence of 

 conditions, and supports the view expressed in 1847, ^7 

 the late Professor Edward Forbes, that the beds now called 

 Rhaetic are really part of the Trias. This view was also 

 held by the late Sir Philip Egerton, on the evidence of the 

 fish remains." 



Mr. Henry H. Howorth, M.P., F.S.A., read an 

 elaborate paper on the history and present position of the 

 theory of glacier motion, in which, after reviewing the 

 various hypotheses which have been put forward to account 

 for the phenomena, he arrived at the conclusion that 

 Forbes's theory is in the main the right one, and that 

 glaciers move down the valleys much as a river flows. A 

 discussion ensued, in which Dr. BOTTOMLEY, Professor 

 Osborne Reynolds, Professor Schuster, Professor 

 Dixon, and Mr. Harry Grimshaw took part, the general 

 conclusion being that while glaciers are viscous and move 

 by gravity, the various phenomena are explainable by a 

 combination of the several physical conditions on which the 

 various theories have been based. Professor REYNOLDS 

 supposed that all who have lived in the neighbourhood of a 

 glacier must have known that it flowed down the valley, 

 and there is no doubt that it flows under deformation, by 

 gravity ; and any one may have noticed from the bending of 

 ice at the edge of a pond that ice is plastic. Dr. SCHUSTER 

 agreed in general with Professor REYNOLDS. In his own 

 observations on glaciers he had been more struck by the 

 irregularities of the motion than by the regularity — and, in 

 fact, the motion is very uneven, and only regular on the 

 average. With regard to the origin of the curious glacier 

 crystals, it was urged that the difficulties are largely those 

 of crystal formation generally. In this view Dr. BOTTOMLEY 



