232 On the Alpine Glacier, Iceberg, [No. 159. 



In colour, extent, and position, the regur resembles the Tchdrnoi 

 Zem covering the plains of Russia; and in apparent want of stratifi- 

 cation that fine yellowish-grey loam called Loess, which covers great 

 part of the basin of the Rhine in beds sometimes 300 feet thick. 

 The regur, however, contains no fossils except such present fresh- 

 water and terrestrial shells as are washed into it. If we suppose the 

 regur to be the deposit of annual inundations from ancient glaciers 

 (which Mr. Lyell takes to be the origin of the Loess) charged with 

 the impalpable mud of their moraines, we must examine the Ghauts 

 and Vindhyas, or even the Himalayas below the influence of pre- 

 sent glaciers, for the usual signs of glacial action. The soil now 

 washed down from these mountains, I need hardly observe is reddish 

 and sandy, very different from the deep black or bluish black regur : 

 but this difficulty may be perhaps got over by supposing the vast forests 

 which clothed them during the warm ante- glacial period to have 

 perished with the mammoths they shaded, and to have been ground 

 down by glacial action with the felspathic, silicious, calcareous, and 

 ferruginous particles of the subjacent rocks. 



If we suppose it to be a deposit from former great inland lakes, in 

 most cases we shall have to raise up rock barriers, not now in existence, 

 to separate them from the sea and the adjacent lower lands, to sink 

 them again ; and, in fact, to change the entire physical configuration of 

 the country. If it be considered a deposit thrown down on a sea bottom 

 from melted icebergs, we ought to see in it large angular fragments of 

 distant rocks, which no observations as yet show to be the case. 



The non-fossiliferous character of the regur is common to the mud 

 of the Nile, and may be regarded as indicative of the great trituration 

 the debris composing it has undergone ; and probably that chemical 

 and other causes have combined to prevent fossilization in this soft 

 mud. 



Rock-basins, Rock-basins, the giant's caldrons of the Swedes, are 

 seen occasionally on the summits of table-lands in Southern India, as 

 for instance near the Kurnool frontier, with Baugapilly, and in other 

 localities both in granitic and hypogenic rocks, and in the diamond sand- 

 stone and limestone in situations above the present action of running 

 water; but when we see them in the fact of being excavated by water 

 alone in the rocky beds of the principal rivers of India during these 

 periodical rises and falls— conditions favourable to their production — 



