126 THE ICE AGE W NORTH AMERICA. 



nomena of striation which we have just described. One can 

 but admire the enthusiasm with which the old defenders of 

 the iceberg theory dwelt upon the capacity of icebergs and 

 shore-ice to polish, groove, and scratch the surfaces over 

 which they moved. Sir Charles Lyell tells us, in the ac- 

 count of his first visit to America, how he stood at the foot 

 of a cliff at Cape Blomidon, Nova Scotia, transfixed at the 

 sight of recent furrows which were the exact counterpart of 

 the grooves of ancient date which he had elsewhere described. 

 So extensive were these, that they seemed for the moment 

 to render the glacial theory unnecessary : 



As I was strolling along the beach at the base of these ba- 

 saltic cliffs, collecting minerals, and occasionally recent shells 

 at low tide, I stopped short at the sight of an unexpected phe- 

 nomenon. The solitary inhabitant of a desert island could 

 scarcely have been more startled by a human foot-print in the 

 sand, than I was on beholding some recent furrows on a ledge 

 of sandstone under my feet, the exact counterpart of those 

 grooves of ancient date which I have so often described in this 

 work, and attributed to glacial action. After having searched 

 in vain at Quebec for such indications of a modern date, I had 

 despaired of witnessing any in this part of the world. I was 

 now satisfied that, whatever might be their origin, those before 

 me were quite recent. 



The inferior beds of soft sandstone which are exposed at 

 low water at the base of the cliff at Cape Blomidon, form a 

 broad ledge of bare rock, to the surface of which no sea-weed 

 or barnacles cau attach themselves, as the stone is always wear- 

 ing away slowly by the continual passage of sand and gravel, 

 washed over it from the talus of fallen fragments which lies at 

 the foot of the cliff on the beach above. The slow but con- 

 stant undermining of the perpendicular cliff forming this 

 promontory, round which the powerful currents caused by the 

 tide sweep backward and forward with prodigious velocity, 

 must satisfy every geologist that the denudation by which the 

 ledge in question has been exposed to view is of modern date. 

 Whether the rocks forming the cliff extended so far as the 

 water's edge, ten, fifty, or one hundred years ago, I have no 



