ANCIENT GLACIERS IN EASTERN HEMISPHERE. 139 



same general direction, yet with less regard to the minor 

 inequalities of the ground. During these two stages many 

 glaciers must have debouched upon the sea-coast, with the 

 consequent production of icebergs, which floated off with 

 loads of boulders and dispersed them in the random fash- 

 ion which is a necessary characteristic of transport by 

 floating ice. 



" With a further accentuation of the cold conditions 

 the discharge of bergs from terminal fronts which advanced 

 into the extremely shallow seas surrounding the British 

 shores would be quite inadequate to relieve the great press 

 of ice, and a further coalescence of separate elements must 

 have resulted. In the case of enclosed seas — as, for exam- 

 ple, the Irish Sea — the continued inthrust of glacier-ice 

 would expel the water completely ; and the conjoined ice- 

 masses would take a direction of flow the resultant of the 

 momentum and direction of the constituent elements. In 

 other cases — as, for example, in the North Sea — extraneous 

 ice approaching the shores might cause a deflection of the 

 flow of the native glaciers, even though the foreign ice 

 might never actually reach the shore. 



" To such a system of confluent glaciers, and to the 

 separate elements out of which they grew, and into which, 

 after the culmination, they were resolved, I attribute the 

 whole of the phenomena of the English and Welsh drift. 

 And only at one or two points upon the coast, and raised 

 but little above the sea-level, can I recognise any signs 

 of marine action. 



" The Pre-glacial Level of the Land. — There is very lit- 

 tle direct evidence bearing upon this point. In Norfolk 

 the famous forest bed, with its associated deposits, stands at 

 almost precisely the level which it occupied in pre-glacial 

 times. At Sewerby, near Flamborough Head, there is an 

 ancient beach and ' buried cliff ' which the sea is now de- 

 nuding of its swathing of drift deposits, and its level can 

 be seen to be almost absolutely coincident with the present 



