KENDALL : PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 
181^ 
determined by a formula what magnitude of waves would propel 
rocks of given dimensions, and what displacement of mountains 
would produce such waves, continues " And thus, the great 
" mass of the Northern drift, inasmuch as no considerable part of 
" its transfer can be accounted for by any minute causes or languid 
" operations of water, is an irresistible e\4dence of paroxi smal 
action ; and of a scale which may be judged from the conclusion 
" at which we have arrived : — an elevation of 45,000 square miles 
" of sea-bottom through 500 feet." With great self-restraint he 
omits to add " Q.E.D." 
The cataclysmal origin of the Drift furnished the principal 
argument advanced by Sedgwick against the " long wa}' in a long 
while " uniformitarian doctrines of Lvell. 
This, the last of the catastrophes, has made a strenuous 
struggle for existence and, when the Diluvial theory was reluctant- 
ly abandoned in favour of ice-action of some kind, its upholders 
compromised the matter by invoking a Great Submergence that 
would bring ice-bergs freighted with boulders from distant sources 
floating over the Pennine Chain and other hill regions. This 
hypothesis, while making liberal provision for the area of marine 
deposition, was parsimonious to a fault in the matter of breeding 
grounds for the glaciers ; however, in 1858, the Great Submergence 
was a compromise acceptable to all except a few stahAarts like 
Murchison who stood out for the old tradition. 
Sir Archibald Geikie, in 1864, published a most notable 
contribution on Glacial Geolog}^ to the Glasgow Geological 
Society, in which he set forth with the clearness and precision 
that characterise all his writings a weighty, and one would have 
thought irresistible, array of facts and arguments in support of 
his contention that land ice had been the agent oiierative in 
the Lowlands. 
The first serious blow struck in England at the submergence 
was, I am gratified to think, administered in 1872 by Mi\ Tidde- 
man in his famous paper on the " Evidences for Ice-sheet in North 
Lancashire and adjacent parts of Yorkshire and Westmoreland." 
This was followed two years later by an equally admirable paper 
by Goodchild in which, dealing with an area slightl}^ overlapping 
that dealt with by Mr. Tiddeman, he showed that the whole 
of the glacial phenomena could be ascribed to the action of land ice. 
