2T6 Rev. T. G. Ronney — Formation of Cirques. 
depth, liow are the excavated materials removed ? When there is 
mucli pressure from the ice behind, that in front may be forced uphill 
for a short distance, and a sort of scooping action maintained ; but 
I fail to see how this could happen with Mr. Helland’s theory. 
3. The size of some of the cirques appears to me also a fatal 
objection. The walls of the cirques in the Alps and Pyrenees, like 
tliose described by bim, are often 2000' or 3000' high. Indeed one 
might almost call those of the Creux de Champs double that ; for 
the precipiees (as I well know) rise with inaccessible steepness, 
interrupted by mere ledges. from the floor of the cirque to the very 
crest of the Diablerets. Does Mr. Heiland seriously mean to say 
that “a small isolated glacier” lias settled almost vertically down- 
wards on the site of this cirque, deepening its bed by a thousand 
yards, — and that too beneath its neve, where the erosive power is 
weakest ? 
I am content to ask any one to replace the material removed from 
one of these great cirques, to clap a glacier on some accidental hollow 
on the mountain, and then to consider if the problem proposed is 
mechanically possible. We should want the “ rotatory glaciers — 
whirlpools of ecstatic ice — like whirling dervishes,” which Mr. Buskin 
long ago suggested, to perfonn work like this. 
4. But suppose for one moment we are not staggered by this 
feat of excavation. Suppose we imagine a thousand yards of rock 
dug almost vertically out of the mountain -side. Are we not then 
forced to admit one of the followiug alternatives? If this energetic 
glacier was limited to the immediate vicinity of the cirque, then 
the floor of this part of the valley ought to be lower than that 
further down ; in other words, there should always be a deep lake 
beneath the walls of the cirque (which there is not) : or eise the 
valley must have been immensely deepened and modified, almost 
excavated, by the glacier. It is this latter alternative which I 
understand Mr. Heiland to accept ; it is this which in my first 
paper I endeavoured to show was inevitable ; and it is exactly this 
which is not only unsupported but even opposed by the evidence 
of the Alps and of every mountain x - egion which I have seen. 
As I have endeavoured again and again to show in arguing against 
the applieation of the theory of glacial excavation to the greater 
Alpine lakes, we have in the valleys little or no indication of any 
but the most superficial effects of glacihl erosion. These valleys 
commonly have the characteristic forms of river action. In the 
Yal Sesia, Yal Bregaglia, in the valley of the Dranse and many 
more, I have traced glacial marks almost down to the present 
torrent bed, where the valley itself exhibits the most characteristic 
forms of fluviatile erosion. The contours also of the valley below 
Gavarnie are those of river, not of glacial erosion. If then the 
erosive effect of glaciers is so slight that it is ditficult to credit them 
with the greater Alpine lakes, how can we attribute to them cirques, 
which occur just at the point where they are feeblest, where the con- 
nexion with the formation of the whole valley is most inseparable ? 
Last!}', Mr. Heliand objects to my theory “ that the part of the 
