Yol. 52.] COL. H. W. FEILDEN ON" KOLGUEV ISLAND. 55 



melted snow and rain-water, but when they approach the shore- 

 bluffs their erosive powers are greatly increased. Not only is there 

 a wearing-out action, but there is an actual eating-back force, so that 

 in the last few hundred yards of their course the stream drops, say, 

 50 to 60 feet, and cuts out a broad ravine with very steep banks on 

 either side. It was in ravines of this nature that I obtained the 

 chief facilities for examining sections. We find that all these 

 streams in the last part of their course, and when almost on a level 

 with the beach, run over stones and boulders which have been 

 washed out of the surrounding mud-beds. An examination of these 

 stones, which are of every shape and form from angular fragments 

 to rounded and polished blocks, shows that a large proportion are 

 ice- scratched. The medley of rocks represented is remarkable, 

 granites and gneisses, limestones Silurian and Carboniferous, grits, 

 quartzites, porphyries, a variety indeed so great that it would take 

 a trained petrologist to enumerate them. Even the ordinary 

 observer cannot fail to perceive that an immense land-surface has 

 been put under contribution to supply such a diversity of rocks. 

 These boulders vary in size from that of a walnut to large di- 

 mensions. One that lay in a stream-bed a few miles north of the 

 Gobista River was a huge block of very hard yellow sandstone, 

 polished, scored, and striated. Along its major axis it had deep 

 flutings cut into it, and in addition it was transversely scratched. 

 It measured 15 feet in length, 9 feet in breadth, and 6 feet in 

 height. When we look around to the mud-and-clay cliffs we see here 

 and there stones and boulders of the same character as those that 

 strew the stream-bed sticking out of the banks, or resting on the talus 

 ready to slide down and join the others below; we also observe that 

 these erratics do not exhibit the slightest tendency to form lines of 

 horizontal deposit in the beds. My opinion is that all have been 

 dropped from floating ice intermittently and tranquilly. The 

 matrix of clay around them shows no signs of disturbance ; on 

 falling from the ice-rafts they have sunk gently into the yielding 

 mass, and now they lie throughout the beds looking like currants in 

 a cut loaf. 



I have no altogether satisfactory explanation to advance for the 

 presence of such immense numbers of ice-scratched stones as occur 

 in these sedimentary beds of Kolguev. The action of an ice- 

 sheet cannot be invoked at Kolguev; yet, seeing that the ice- 

 scratched stones throughout the Kolguev Beds must in the aggre- 

 gate amount to millions, one naturally asks, where were they 

 manufactured? Undoubtedly stones frozen into the bottom of 

 floating ice become scratched and polished when stranded on shores 

 where there is sufficient rise and fall to admit of the ice-rafts 

 grating. I have seen this process of manufacture going on. 1 It 

 is, however, difficult to conceive a train of circumstances which 

 admitted of erratics being transported in floe-ice to some rocky 



1 Quart. Journ. Geol. Sec. vol. xxxiv. (1878) p. 566. 



