﻿Vol. 64.] ANNIVERSAKY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. XClii 



The printed records of the Geological Society, among their other 

 interesting chronicles, show how long and how obstinately some 

 erroneous beliefs have been held and defended even by the scientific 

 leaders of their day. For many years after the visit of Agassiz 

 and after the recognition of moraines and glacier-borne boulders 

 in many parts of this country, the old notion still had strenuous 

 advocates that the drift and erratic blocks could not be satisfactorily 

 accounted for without the help of sudden upheavals of the sea- 

 bottom, whereby vast waves were generated which swept across 

 the land with destructive vehemence. Some geologists of note 

 held this view, and yet also admitted the contemporaneous agency 

 of floating ice. Thus, in 1846, Murchison, after a journey in 

 Scandinavia, communicated to the Geological Society a paper in 

 which, while admitting the co-operation of icebergs in the distri- 

 bution of the northern erratics, as he had already done in his 

 ' Eussia & the Ural Mountains,' he still stoutly maintained that 

 the transport of the drift and the great erosion of the rocky surface 

 of the country had been effected by ' powerful currents or waves 

 of translation caused by sudden heaves of the Scandinavian 

 continent ' (Q. J. vol. ii, p. 349). 



This convulsionist creed received strong support from two 

 Cambridge mathematicians. In 1847 Whewell gave to the Society 

 a paper bearing the title ' On the Wave of Translation in connection 

 with the IS'orthern Drift.' ^ In this communication he stated that 

 he looked upon the drift as ' an irresistible proof of paroxysmal 

 action,' and he proceeded to offer a mathematical demonstration of 

 the truth of this belief. Assuming a mass of water 4500 cubic 

 miles in dimension to be suddenly upraised to the extent of a tenth 

 of a mile, or a mass .of sea 45,000 square miles in area and a 

 tenth of a mile in depth to be raised through a tenth of a mile, he 

 reasoned (op. cit. p. 231) that 



* if we suppose a sea-bottom 450 miles long by 100 miles broad, which is ^V of 

 a mile below the surface of the water, to be raised to the surface by paroxysmal 

 action, we shall have the force which we require for the distribution of the 

 northern drift, on the numerical assumptions which hare been made/ 



Hopkins returned to the subject in 1851, when he read to 

 the Society a paper ' On the Granitic Blocks of the South 

 Highlands of Scotland.' By this time he had come to realize 

 in some degree the strength of the proofs in favour of the view 

 that glaciers and floating ice had been concerned in the transport 



1 Q. J. iii, 227. 



