APPLICATION OF THIS VIEW TO NORTHERN EUP.OPE. 
537 
Whilst, however, we think that large portions of superficial drift have so acted as 
to produce precisely the same effects as glaciers, both upon the subjacent and late- 
rally adjacent rocks over which they travelled, we would carefully avoid falling into 
the error of some persons, who, advocating the general icy theory, have endeavoured 
to bring all the detrital phenomena into one category. We think, that wherever 
from the latitude of the mountains and their altitude, glaciers may naturally have 
existed, the glacialists are there fully entitled to apply those doctrines which they 
have been taught by a study of the Alps. Thus in reference to the coldest and 
highest regions of Scandinavia and Lapland, we can see no sort of objection to 
their once having been the seat of glaciers, whose feet extended to the lower sur- 
rounding regions, then covered by the sea. It is, therefore, quite consistent with 
modern observations, that masses of ice detached from time to time in the form of 
floating icebergs, should have carried their loads, in the manner observed by many 
navigators, to great distances before they dropped them. In a word, the blocks of 
the plains of Prussia and Russia with reference to Scandinavia are, we contend, 
precisely analogous to the coarse detrital matter observed by Capt. Sir James Ross, 
and which floating northwards in icebergs from the Antarctic pole, has actually been 
strewed over the bottom of those seas at the distance of hundreds of miles from the 
source of its origin. An elevation of the bottom of that ocean would, in truth, offer 
to us an Antarctic Russia and Poland. The direction in which the Scandinavian 
boulders have been transported, is to us a distinct proof, that their propulsion was 
due to the upheaval of a chain which in its elevation must have forced off excentric 
currents that carried with them or drifted the broken materials on its flanks, often 
lodging them in the form of long “ osars,” or by impelling forwards ice-floes con- 
taining other blocks in such currents. In this operation there must necessarily 
have been a combination of the agencies of ice with powerful currents of water and 
half-frozen detritus, and we can very readily believe, how such masses grating over 
the slopes of the northern crystalline rocks, then forming the bottom ot the sea ad- 
jacent to the elevated chain, may have occasionally produced marks ot abrasion, 
scoring and polish like those to which we have alluded. By such operations we may 
figure to ourselves how some of the low and hard rocks on the southern shores of 
Finland, Sweden and Russian Lapland, were scored and abraded— always, however, 
in the dominant direction of the great current ; and whilst the very distantly trans- 
ported blocks were carried to their present habitats by floats of ice, we can also 
suppose, how a large proportion of the mud, sand and gravel was the residue ot great 
