Yol. 52.] COL. H. W. FEILDEN ON KOLGUEV ISLAND. 57 



exposed thickness of some of the beds, all of which are (in my 

 ■opinion) sedimentary, afford proof of their marine origin. 



Mr. Edgar Smith has been good enough to carefully examine and 

 name the specimens which I collected, with the following result : — 

 Natica affinis (Gmelin) or N. groenlandica, Beck ; fragments of 

 gasteropod (Sipho ? sp.) ; Saxicava arctica (Linn.) ; Astarte com- 

 pressa (Montagu) ; Astarte borealis (Chemn.) ; My a arenaria, Linn. ; 

 fragments of My a. sp. 



I am unable to advance any satisfactory theory, either for the 

 paucity of the molluscan remains in the Kolguev Beds, or for the 

 greater part of what I found being fragmentary. I was un- 

 successful in finding the remains of any marine vertebrate and 

 equally so in discovering drift-wood in the beds ; the latter, it 

 will be remembered, is abundant in the glacio-marine deposits of 

 Grinnell Land. 



It may be interesting to compare, and contrast if need be, the 

 Kolguev boulder-clays with the deposits which bear the same name 

 in England and Scotland. To a certain extent all those that we have 

 at home are fragmentary when compared with the boulder-bearing 

 beds of Kolguev, which we may safely assume are 50 miles in 

 length by 40 in width, with a thickness of not less than 250 

 feet, probably far more, all lying in one undisturbed mass, without 

 the slightest sign of a basement or interrupting rock. Moreover, I 

 met with no deposit in Kolguev precisely similar to what is called 

 'till' in Scotland. I mean by 'till' a firm, tough, tenacious, 

 strong clay ; in the words of Prof. James Geikie, ' so tough indeed 

 does it often become that engineers would much rather excavate 

 the most obdurate rocks. . . . But till has neither crack nor joint — it 

 will not blast, and to pick it to pieces is a very slow and laborious 

 process.' x On the other hand, there are many deposits in Britain 

 called ' Boulder Clays ' which are in no degree superior in toughness 

 to those of Kolguev, for instance those of the Yorkshire coast ; the 

 Chalky Boulder Clays of Norfolk may be also cited as another 

 •example. I am inclined to think that the tenacity or the reverse 

 of Boulder Clays depends greatly on the nature of the rocks from 

 which they have been derived. By these remarks I do not wish 

 to imply the impossibility of Till or Boulder Clay being formed as a 

 moraine profonde under an ice-sheet ; I merely suggest that many 

 Boulder Clays in this country and in other parts of the world may 

 have been deposited under water, and that the transport of their 

 included ice-scratched stones may be due to floating ice. It is sugges- 

 tive that all the glacial deposits which I have met with in Arctic and 

 Polar lands, with the exception of terminal moraines now forming 

 above sea-level, in areas so widely separated as Smith's Sound, 

 Grinnell Land, Northern Greenland, Spitsbergen, Novaya Zemlya, 

 and Arctic Norway, should be glacio-marine beds. Throughout this 

 broad expanse of the Arctic regions I have come across no beds 

 that could be satisfactorily assigned to the direct action of land- 



1 James Geikie, ' Great Ice Age,' p. 10, London, 1874. 



