MR DAVID MILNE HOME ON THE BOULDER-CLAY OF EUROPE. ' 677 



The low-lying, flat country of Elgin is, to say the least, most unfavourable for the 

 glacier theory; and the Isle of Man is, from the absence of mountains, equally 

 unfavourable. 



The facts and views set forth in the preceding paragraphs, show that the 

 materials of the boulder-clay have been disturbed, intruded on, pushed forward, 

 and heavily pressed on by some extraneous agent ; and if it be allowed that these 

 materials, when so acted on, formed a sea-bottom, very little doubt can exist that 

 floating ice was the agent. 



7. But it will be asked, whether similar effects are now observable in the 

 Arctic regions, where there are icebergs and floes drifted about by the winds and 

 currents ? Can it be shown that they do work on the sea-bottom or shores at all 

 analogous to the appearances presented by our boulder-clay and drift-beds ? 



In all the channels and estuaries of the Arctic regions, we know that the sea 

 is constantly covered with floating ice in every variety of form. As icebergs, they 

 often strand in places where the sea is 1200 feet deep. On one occasion, the 

 keeper of the lighthouse at Belle Isle, near the mouth of the St Lawrence, in 

 latitude 50°, counted no less than 496 icebergs, some of them 200 feet high and 

 half-a-mile long. About 100 of them were stranded, or were grating over the 

 submarine banks* 



It is not difficult to conceive what must be the effect on a sea-bottom, what- 

 ever the materials, of icebergs having a size greater than the hill of Arthur Seat. 

 Soft materials would be so disturbed and ploughed through, that any appearance 

 of regular bedding would be obliterated, testacea would be crushed, whilst hard 

 fragments of rock would be pushed forward and rounded by the enormous friction. 



This inference as to the disturbance and tearing up of the sea-bottom is con- 

 firmed by Dr Sutherland, a surgeon in one of the Arctic expeditions. He says 

 that in Davis' Straits, the icebergs, by their action on the sea-bottom, produce 

 "whole rafts of submarine forests' 1 '' of sea- weed, which float on the surface of the 

 sea; and when the sea-bottom in these straits is dredged, little else than "broken 

 shells" are brought up.f 



The disturbance and dislocation of the submarine beds where icebergs abound, 

 is further evidenced by the large amount of muddy sediment raised, discolouring 

 the sea not only to the surface, but for many miles round. | 



Messrs Dease and Simpson, in the account they give of their Arctic 

 discoveries in the year 1838, describe a long low spit, composed of gravel and 

 coarse sand, in some places more than a quarter of a mile wide, the formation of 

 which they did not hesitate to attribute to the action of floating ice — -judging 

 by what they saw done by ice. 



* See a short paper on this subject by Principal Dawson, of Montreal, in the " Canadian 

 Naturalist. " 



| Lond. Geolog. Journal, vol. ix. p. 306. £ De La Beche, Geolog. Observer, p. 266. 



