in Scotland and Parts of England. 261 



tain inclination, by the mutual pressure of its parts." In 

 the eagerness to give up this view of a possible cause, the 

 very fact of the glacial abrasion of Scandinavia has been also 

 given up by many, as if the two things had been essentially 

 connected. At least, we have for some years heard little of 

 the abrasion either of that region or of America. Most 

 geologists seem to be content to regard the phenomena, in 

 the reduced or restricted form in which they contemplate 

 them, as capable of being produced by floating icebergs 

 which had grazed the bottom of the sea in their voyage 

 southward, when the land in that quarter was submerged, or 

 by these agents joined to ice-floes and masses of detritus 

 carried along by powerful currents. 



I must profess myself unable to see the force of the logic 

 which demands that certain phenomena should be regarded 

 as non-existent, or reduced to some fraction of their actual 

 extent, because one theory of the mode of operation of their 

 assumed cause has been found untenable. Be the value or 

 fate of the Dilatation Theory what it may, it can make no 

 change in the fact, that all over Scandinavia, below a certain 

 elevated point, the rocky surface, wherever it has been duly 

 protected and is now exposed, or even in some instances 

 where it has been exposed for ages, is found to be worn or 

 shorn down to a flowing outline, is polished, furrowed, and 

 striated, exactly as we see that the surfaces of elevated valleys 

 in the Alps are worn, polished, and striated by the glaciers 

 moving in them at the present day. This fact still remains 

 to be accounted for; and if one line of speculation on its 

 cause shall fail, the right course, I apprehend, is to look out 

 for another. 



It is remarkable that Professor Forbes himself has been 

 far from giving countenance to any such consequence of the 

 refutation of the Dilatation Theory. 



It is, however, far more remarkable that the prevalent 

 theories of English geologists on this subject are all based 

 on data for which no tangible proof has ever been, or perhaps 

 could be, adduced. One speaks of " large islands and bergs 

 of floating ice which came from the north, and, as they 

 grounded on the coast and on shoals, pushed along all'the 



