GLACIERS NEAR BELLARY. 21 7 



club and look upwards. This phenomenon, says Professor Geikie in " Prehistoric 

 Europe," must be attributed to precisely the same cause as that which produced 

 the roches moutonnes. And then as to perched blocks the place is full of them. 

 One need not climb the rocks to see them, they are visible from the roof of the 

 club. Some look like magnified eggs resting here and there on their ends ; 

 others seem like packs of wool or bales of cotton poised in such a manner that 

 you could well imagine you could push them down. I have not seen any striae, 

 but there are plenty of ruts and parallel grooves visible. 



" I think I have said sufficient to show that a glacier once descended from the 

 Copper Mountains and passed over Bellary splitting, grinding, and pulverising all 

 before it. Ice is the only force in nature known to me that could possibly have 

 split and broken off the boulders and rolled them into the shape and position in 

 which we find them. But there is yet another evidence which I will mention in 

 proof that a very cold climate once prevailed in Bellary. Colonel Douglas Mac- 

 Neile was sinking a well in his compound last year, and when he got down to 

 the granite 40 feet below the surface, he found an arctic lichen embedded in the 

 rock. The Colonel was kind enough to send it to me, and the fossil is now itl 

 my possession. Now we know that arctic moss does not grow on solid granite 

 40 feet beneath the surface, neither does that variety of moss grow above the 

 surface in this present climate. Ergo, Bellary was once as cold as Greenland, 

 and the rock which is now covered by 40 feet of gravel was once uncovered. In 

 fact it is difficult for even human imagination to grasp the enormous age of Bellary 

 and the extraordinary climatic changes which must have taken place. In conclu- 

 sion, I would remark that Mr. Bruce Foote's heroic statement that he " never met 

 the ghost of a trace of glacial action " is enough to take one's breath away. Such 

 notions are evidently preconceived. They are very previous." 



Dr. Fox assumes the existence of a glacial period at some time convenient 

 to his hypothesis, but which is unknown to geologists. He postulates the 

 existence of a huge glacier to produce the present appearance of the granite rocks 

 in the neighbourhood. Not knowing the great tendency of granitic rocks to be cut 

 up by great joint planes due to shrinkage on cooling, and their equally great 

 tendency to weather concentrically along the faces of all the joint planes, he calls in 

 a"deusex machin& " in the shape of ice, to cause the cracks and displace and 

 round the blocks produced by the joint planes which he persists in calling boulders, 

 i.e., water rolled masses. For his glacier he has forgotten to provide a gathering 

 ground of sufficient size and elevation — the Copper Mountain, even if a plateau, 

 instead of a narrow ridge, could never have supplied such a vast ice-river as would 

 have been required to convert the Bellary fort hill into a gigantic roche moutonne. 

 To have got the vis-a-tergo to move such a gigantic glacier such a long distance 

 a mountain many thousand feet higher than the Copper Mountain was required 

 and this even if his glacial period be conceded to him. If it be denied him, he 

 would, in the latitude of Bellary, have had to provide a mountain some 20,000 

 feet high to hold a sufficiently large snowfield to produce his big glacier and 

 to supply the ice stream with the power to move some 7 miles out into the 

 plain and attack a big hill some 450 feet high and convert it into a gigantic 

 toche moutonne ! He would also have had to arrange conditions to prevent his 

 glacier from melting long before it got down to the level of the Bellary plain which 



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