212 
THE GEOLOGIST. 
gether to be assigned, I believe, to atmospberic agency, eitber in this 
or any of the numerous instances of crushed strata on moors. Most 
of our stream-valleys, doubtless, owe their present features to the 
softening of the climate and the final melting down of ice ; a tran- 
sition not wholly insignificant in its effects even here, when we regard 
those escarpments of deposits, whether marine or glacier-formed, 
which tower loftily along many of their lines, sometimes on one side, 
sometimes on the other, and individually faced, perhaps, by a gentle 
verdant slope, that, with the gurgling brook below, seems to Inde, as 
it were, under a calm disguise, all the tumult of the past. One of 
these escarpments on the line of the Pennington Beck is crested by 
hummocks " of boulder clay, so artificial in form that tradition 
holds them as the site of an ancient castle, a half-encircling hollow, 
apparently water-formed, answering for the remains of the castle- 
ditch. I have an impression that geologists familiar with the phe- 
nomena of the period, would experience little difficulty in assigning 
this (together with much of the physical aspect of that truly inter- 
esting vicinity) entirely to glaciation and its subsequent modifying 
agencies. Almost every stone and pebble about the place is wonder- 
fully grooved and striated. 
The other features of our stream-valleys are the stripes or terraces 
which at various elevations and distances mark the former river-pos- 
sessions, inasmuch as when tried by the spirit-level, they are found 
to be on an extremely gentle incline, thus aff*ording additional evi- 
dence that all our brooks have been rivers, and our rivers mighty 
streams. Deposits of river-gravels occur at some heights above the 
present brooks, as in the vale of Newlaud before alluded to. There 
deposits of dark gravels and sands lie in underneath the hillside 
boulder clay, while the latter appears to have been scooped out by the 
flow and wash of the down-passing current, into a true overhanging 
river-bank, 50 feet above the bed of the present stream. 
Boulder day. — In slightly sketching out the position of the boulder 
clay in Furuess, what knowledge I have of the nature and composi- 
tion of that deposit is mainly derived from the teaching of the admi- 
rable memoir before referred to, ' On the Phenomena of the Glacial 
Drift of Scotland,' aided by the close examination of numberless 
specimens obtained from many localities. Its stones and boulders 
rounded, angular, flattened, smoothed, striated, seldom of remote trans- 
portation, disposed without stratification in a more or less clayey ma- 
terial, are the characters by which it may be distinguished here. But 
there are other peculiarities of the boulder clay in Furness for which 
the above work somewhat prepares the student. These are the bars, 
thin seams, or beds of gravels and sands, which very frequently are 
found running through it. These are neither fluviatile nor marine ; 
they precisely resemble in lithological character the true boulder clay 
in which they occur : the stones, in some instances at least, have 
scarcely lost their striation, and clearly owe their stratified disposal 
to the percolation of water. In fact, such beds must have been 
