302 PROF. W. MORRIS DAVIS ON [Aug. 1909,. 



glacial period somewhat deepened, widened, smoothed, and striated the minor 

 outlines of the mountains and valleys, and excavated many rock-bound lake- 

 basins, but on a grand scale did not effect any great changes in the pre-existing 

 larger contours of the country' (1881, p. 322). 



At an earlier date Ramsay's attention was chiefly given to demon- 

 strating that glaciers had occupied rather than eroded the 

 valleys of "Wales. Thus he wrote that in the Snowdon mass, 



'six vast hollows have been scooped out by time, forming the wild upland 

 valleys [of the cwms above-named] in some of which the signs of glacier ice 

 are perhaps even more striking than in the Pass of Llanberis itself (1859, 

 pp. 424r-25) ; 



and again, 



' after many a visit, I came to the doubtful inference, that a glacier probably 

 at one time covered the whole bottom of the cwrn' [Clogwyn] (1859, p. 431). 



This is evidently not the language of one who regarded the cwms 

 as chiefly the work of glacial erosion. On a later page (p. 441) a 

 small deepening of the Pass of Llanberis by ice is implied, but 

 throughout Ramsay's writings the measure of ice-erosion recognized 

 around Snowdon is very small. 



It should, however, be remembered that at the time of Ramsay's 

 earlier writing it was still a question whether mountains and 

 valleys were chiefly the result of disorderly upheavals, or whether 

 mountains were produced by the erosion of valleys in a broadly 

 uplifted mass. The long discussion that resulted in the establish- 

 ment of the latter view for the Lake District and for the Scottish 

 Highlands, as well as for "Wales, was carried on at a time when it 

 was hardly imagined that glaciers played a large part in valley- 

 erosion ; Ramsay himself, one of the first to recognize glaciers as 

 important eroding agents, regarded lake-basins as their chief work. 

 Indeed, the whole tendency of the classic discussions on mountain- 

 sculpture by Ramsay and others has been to give the impression 

 that the mountains and valleys of Wales and of the other rugged 

 areas of Great Britain might be taken as types of normal mountain- 

 and valley-forms, except for such small changes as have been 

 produced by 



' somewhat deepening, widening, smoothing, and striating the minor outlines.' 



Surely an observer with this impression in mind, and at the same 

 time unfamiliar with the forms of non-glaciated mountains and 

 mistrustful of the theoretical discussions regarding cycles of erosion, 

 would not find much evidence of glacial sculpture in Wales ; he 

 would have no standard normal features with which to compare 

 the abnormal Welsh features. 



Another cause that may have contributed in some degree to the 

 same end is the prevailing absence of figures in text-books and of 

 pictures elsewhere representing normally sculptured mountains. 

 Such mountains are, indeed, unfamiliar forms in art ; and the 

 artist and the lover of mountains have good reason to congratulate 

 themselves that all mountains are not of the simple, normally eroded 



