216 The Great Ice Age and Origin of the “ Till” [April, 
reading in the meantime much of its special literature ; 
but, like many others, confining my reading chiefly to 
authors who start with living glaciers and describe 
their doings most prominently. When, however, I read 
the first edition of Mr. Geikie’s “ Great Ice Age,” imme- 
diately after its publication, his mode of presenting the 
phenomena, bottom upwards, suggested a number of reflec- 
tions that had never occurred before, leading to other than 
the usual explanations of many glacial phenomena, and 
correcting some errors into which I had fallen in searching 
for the vestiges of ancient glaciers. As these suggestions 
and corrections may be interesting to others, as they have 
been to myself, I will here state them in outline. 
The most prominent and puzzling reflection or conclusion 
suggested by reading Mr. Geikie’s description of the glacial 
deposits of Scotland was, that the great bulk of them are 
quite different from the deposits of existing glaciers. This 
reminded me of a previous puzzle and disappointment that 
I had met in Norway, where I had observed such abundance 
of striation, such universality of polished rocks and rounded 
mountains, and so many striking examples of perched blocks, 
with scarcely any decent vestiges of moraines. This was 
especially the case in ArCtic Norway. Coasting from 
Trondhjem to Hammerfest, winding round glaciated islands, 
in and out of fjords banked with glaciated rock-slopes, along 
more than a thousand miles of shore line, displaying the 
outlets of a thousand ancient glacier valleys, scanning 
eagerly throughout from sea to summit, landing at several 
stations, and climbing the most commanding hills, I saw 
only one ancient moraine — that at the Oxfjord Station described 
in Chap. 6 of “ Through Norway with a Knapsack.” 
But this negative anomaly is not all. The ancient glacial 
deposits are not only remarkable on account of the absence 
of the most characteristic of modern glacial deposits, but 
in consisting mainly of something which is quite different 
from any of the deposits actually formed by any of the 
modern glaciers of Switzerland or any other country within 
the temperate zones. 
I have seen nothing either at the foot or the sides of any 
living Alpine or Scandinavian glacier that even approximately 
represents the “ till ” or “ boulder clay,” and have met with 
no note of this very suggestive anomaly by any writer on 
glaciers. Yet these are vast deposits, covering thousands 
of square miles even of the limited area of the British Isles, 
and which constitute the main evidence upon which we 
base all our theories ^respecting the existence and the vast ex- 
tent and influence of the “ Great Ice Age.” 
