﻿XCii PEOCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. [May I908, 



These novel and startling views in British geology met ^Yith a 

 cool reception from the general body of geologists here. They 

 were violently opposed and sarcastically ridiculed at the Society's 

 Meetings when they were communicated, and for some years they 

 met with but little acceptance. Nevertheless, they undoubtedly 

 quickened the general interest in the subject, and set a number of 

 geologists hunting for traces of glaciers among the higher hills 

 of the British Isles. Lyell found a fine group of well-preserved 

 moraines nestling in the recesses of the Porfarshire hills, not far 

 from his paternal estate.^ James David Porbes, who had made 

 himself familiar with the Swiss glaciers and published in 1843 

 his classic volume on ' Travels through the Alps,' brought to light 

 the striking glaciation of the Cuillin Hills of Skye.^ Charles 

 Maclaren found traces of glaciers among the glens of Argyllshire,^ 

 and Charles Darwin called attention to those which have been left 

 in the mountain-group of North Wales."* 



But even the geologists who were ready to admit the former 

 presence of glaciers among the hills of Britain could not, for the 

 most part, persuade themselves to accept Agassiz's contention that 

 vast sheets of ice once spread over the low grounds of these islands. 

 They had, however, to account somehow for the dispersion of the 

 erratic blocks, and they preferred to do so by supposing that the 

 land was partly submerged in a sea over which icebergs carried and 

 dropped the boulders. They even applied the same solution to the 

 case of Switzerland. It seemed to them more credible that not 

 only the British Isles, but the centre of the European Continent, 

 should have been first submerged for many hundreds of feet under 

 an icy sea and then re-elevated, than that land-ice could ever have 

 been massive enough, not merely to form vast glaciers among the 

 valleys of the Alps, but to advance from the mountains across the 

 plains, carrying a vast burden of stones and soil.^ 



^ His account of them was communicated to the Society and appears in 

 the same volume of the Proceedings with the papers of Agassiz and Buckland, 

 p. 337. 



2 Edin. New Phil. Journ. vol. xl (1845-46) p. 76. 



^ Ibid. p. 125. 



^ Pl»l. Mag. vol, xxi (1842) p. 180. 



5 It will be remembered that, among others, Lyell once held this view of 

 European submergence. It was expressed in the first and subsequent editions 

 of his 'Elements of Geology ' (1838) p. 136, but he afterwards abandoned it in 

 face of the accumulating evidence against it. See the 6th edition of the same 

 work (1865) p. 142. 



