the posf 

 ified no 



68 iScieniific Intelligence. 



crushed under a pressure of 308*4 lbs. on the square inch, and he 

 concludes that if a glacier is over 710 feet in thickness the ice at 

 the under surface must be crashed by the incumbent weight 

 Professor Philips also made some experiments on the crushing of 

 ice, and he came to the conclusion that the height of a crashing 

 column of ice is between 1000 and 1500 feet, and concluded ma 

 that if a glacier were to exceed this in thickness the ice would lose 

 its solidity.* Whether the height of a crushing column of ice be 

 710, or 1000, or 1500 feet is of no consequence whatever as regards 

 ossible thickness of a glacier. No doubt a piece of ice solid- 

 pressure would be crushed to powder were it 

 placed under a glacier 1000 feet in thickness or so; but after 

 being crushed it would resolidify, and would then probably be 

 able to sustain a pressure of 2000 feet of ice. This follows as a 

 necessary consequence from the property of regelation. There is 

 as yet, so far as I am aware, no known limit to the amount of 

 pressure which ice may sustain. There probably is a limit ; but 

 what that limit is has not yet been determined. Canon Mosely 

 says that " there is no glacier alleged to have so great a depth as 

 710 feet." The Humboldt glacier in North Greenland, according 

 to Dr. Kane, has a depth of more than three times 710 feet. And 

 Dr. Hayes found in Baffin's Bay icebergs (which are just pieces 

 broken off the ends of glaciers) aground in about half a mile of 

 water. And on the antarctic continent we have reasons for be- 

 lieving that the ice is in some places over a mile in thickness.f 



3. 071 Eozoon Canadense; by Prof. Wm. Kixg, S.C.D., and 

 Thos. H. Rownet, Ph.D., of the Queen's Univ. in Ireland, and the 

 Queen's College, Galway. 42 pp. Hvo, with three colored plates, 

 (Proc. R. Irish Acad, .Tnlv 12. IROO). Professors King and Row- 

 ney have here discusMd niicw tin nature of the so-called Eozoon, 

 'with many additional ipl.scrvarions. and ar<Tue for their former con- 

 clusion, that the Eo/oon is of ininiral origin alone. The closing 

 paragraph of the memoir, here cited, gives some idea of their view. 



Finally, to subscribe to the organic origin of "Eozoon," the 

 chemist must become a believer in 5'Mr/si-aTchymy, and in (^'^^^'^ 

 oceanic precipitations unknown in nature. The mineralogut must 

 assume certain obscure and insufficiently tested bodies to consist 

 of calcite : he must be inappreciative of the various allomorphs ot 

 serpentine, and of pseudomorphic phenomena ; and consider every 

 imbedded crystalline body— "tuberculated," or *' segmented"- 

 " cylindrically shaped," or with angles rounded off— to be there- 

 mams of an organism. The palaeontologist, besides slighting all he 

 knows of the circumstances of petrifaction, must accept as a " fo*^" 

 a production never found in rocks that ought to contain it. Even 

 the zoologist must believe to be a ''nummuline foraminifer" what 

 18 structurally an Impossihilitas Naturae, in having a "canal sys- 

 tem ^^ and "skeleton" that often "nm wiW without either " cham- 

 bers or a "cell wall"; and in being seldom otherwise than wcon- 

 cetvably the result of pseudopodial tubulation. 



* Paper on Glacial Striation read before the Geological Section of the British 



