372 Scientific Intelligence. — Hydrography. 



lineated. For this purpose the proposal of Captain Allen to effect 

 in his own person a survey of such lands, accompanied by a com- 

 petent officer of the Royal Engineers,* is well worthy of our country, 

 and I hope will be ordered by her Majesty's Government. — (Sir 

 Roderick Murchisori s Address to the Royal Geographical Society, 

 vol. xxii., p. 15.) 



8. Arctic Glaciers. — As, doubtless, large portions of our continents 

 were under water when vast erratic blocks were transported to great 

 distances by icebergs and deposited on what are now plains of terra 

 firma, so these must have proceeded from ice-clad continents. 

 Among others, I have laboured' with my associates to shew how all 

 the higher portions of Scandinavia and Lapland constituted a 

 glacial centre in a former icy period which sent off its stone-bear- 

 ing ice vessels to what is now the dry land of Germany, then a 

 sea bottom. Dr Rink now comes out with a demonstration, that in 

 the present period all the vast continent of Greenland, as far as is 

 known, is one vast interior of ice, through which the rocks scarcely 

 protrude, and though of no great altitude, is yet sufficiently high in 

 its central parts to afford a slight incline in the general and onward 

 march for the enormous ice-field, until, protruding its arms into deep 

 and long lateral fronds, huge bergs are in certain favouring spots 

 broken off from the parent mass, and calve (as the Danes term their 

 launch), before they sail away into Davis Straits and southwards. 



9. Alpine, Norwegian, Himalayan, Snowdon, Cambrian, and 

 Highland Glaciers. — The glaciers which have been observed in the 

 Alps, Norway, and Himalayan mountains, are separate ice streams, 

 which fill valleys, and radiate from certain lofty centres, carrying 

 with them the materials out of which their moraines are formed. And 

 in some of our insular tracts, such as Snowdon and the Cumbrian 

 mountains, we can easily explain how such glaciers must there also 

 have acted from similar centres, and have scratched and polished the 

 shoulders of the valleys as they descended. But as several authors 

 have observed, and as Mr Robert Chambers has well shewn, in a re- 

 cent memoir,f replete with good new observations on the west coast 

 of the Highlands, there are many lofty tracts in Scotland, as well as 

 in Norway and other countries? Striation seems to be quite indepen- 

 dent of the outline of the ground, thus indicating a grand and general 

 movement of ice. 



It is to countries which present such phenomena that the memoir 

 of Dr Rink forcibly applies ; and it leads us to imagine that there 

 was a period when Scotland, particularly all the Highlands, was ana- 



* Steps were taken a few months ago to carry out this project, and General 



Sir J. Burgoyne, with whom I consulted, was quite prepared to furnish the 



requisite engineer officer, hut the season was considered too far advanced. I 



.1 the Government will sanction the execution of the enterprise next 



winter or spring. 



1 1 Li. n. New Phil. Journal, April 1853, p. 229. 



