20 
J. G. ANDERSSON, 
(Schwed. Südpolar-Exp. 
This is a process which in some of the great ‘stone-rivers’ in the Falkland 
Islands must have taken an enormous time. I fear that the extreme glacialists will 
see in it a danger to this universal application of their beloved theory to all cases 
of scratching and grooving. I have known too much of the action of ice to have 
the slightest doubt of its power; but I say that ice had no hand whatever in the 
production of these grand ‘moraines’ in the Falkland Islands. 
In the West Highlands of Scotland, and in many other parts of the world, I 
have often noticed that when a hill of such a rock as clay-slate comes down with 
a gentle slope, the outcrop of the vertical or highly inclined slates covered with a 
thick layer of vegetable soil or drift containing embedded blocks and boulders de- 
rived from higher levels, the slates are frequently finst slightly bent downwards, 
then abruptly curved and broken, and frequently the lines of the fragments of the 
fractured beds of slate can be traced for a yard or two in the soil-cap gradually 
becoming parallel with its surface, and passing down in the direction of its line of 
descent. These movements are probably extremely slow; I well remember many 
years ago observing a case somewhere in the West of Scotland, where a stream 
had exposed a fine section of the soil-cap with the lines of broken down and 
crushed slate-beds carried far down the slope. The whole effect was so graphi- 
cally one of vigorous and irresistible movement, that I examined carefully some 
cottages and old trees in hope of finding some evidence of twisting or other irre- 
gular dislocations, but there appeared to be none such; the movement, if it were 
sufficiently rapid to make a sign during the life of a cottage or a tree, evidently 
pervaded the whole mass uniformly. 
It seems to me almost self-evident that wherever there is a slope, be it ever 
so gentle, the soil-cap must be in motion, be the motion ever so slow; and that it 
is dragging over the surface of the rock beneath the blocks and boulders which 
may be embedded in it; and frequently piling these in morain-like masses, where 
the progress of the earth-glacier is particularly arrested as at the contracted mouth 
of a valley, where the water percolating through among them in time removes the 
intervening soil. As the avalanche is the catastrophe of ice-movement, so the land- 
slip is the catastrophe of the movement of the soil-cap. 
As I have already said, I should be the last to undervalue the action of ice, 
or to doubt the abundant evidences of glacial action; but of this I feel convinced, 
that too little attention has been hitherto given to this parallelseries of phenomena, 
which in many cases it will be found very difficult to discriminate; and that these 
phenomena must be carefully distinguished and discriminated before we can fully 
accept the grooving of rocks and the accumulation of moraines as complete evidence 
of a former existence of glacial conditions.»" 
" Thomson, The Atlantic. Vol. II. P. 245 — 249. 
