180 The America)} Geolixjist. March, 1895 
EDITORIAL COMMENT. 
Glacial Gkolocjv of Grfat Bkitain and Theland. 
Subsequent to our too short notice of the posthumous v()l- 
unie by Prof. Henry Carvill Lewis, bearing this title, as given 
in the Amehican Gkologist for last October (page25B), we 
have received from Prof. Percy F. Kendall, editor of the GUi- 
ridltstx' Ma(/azine, the following more full notes and estimates 
of this very important work. Prof. Kendall writes: 
Many causes conspired to defer the publication of tliis work until 
geologists in America and Europe had begun to despair of its e\er see- 
ing the light. The delay has not been an tuimixed evil, for Ihoiigli 
many of the observations made and the conclusions arrived at original- 
ly by the late Prof. Carvill Lewis have in tlieir [mbiication been antici- 
pated by other wtirkers, yet scientific opinion in England is now far bet- 
ter prepared to accord them a sympathetic reception than it would have 
beon had they, as was intended, been given to the world within a year 
or so of his lamented death. In no other branch of geological encpiiry 
has the growth of ojjinion been so rapid as in that regjirding the causes 
and conditions of the glaciation of the liritish isles. 
When, after a hasty survey of the British glacial phenomena, Agassi/, 
and Huckland made an emphatic pronouncement in favor of the view 
that land ice on a vast scale had operated to produce the cirecls they 
noted. g(H)logists soon ranged themselves in two sharply antagonistic 
camps. Whereas some accepted in their entirety the new views, others, 
comprising the older and perhaps more cautious reasoners. still adhered 
to the time-honored catastrophic doctrine of ••great waves of transla- 
tion. "" Opinion for a long time oscillated l>etween these two extremes, 
l^ut by degrees an apparent position of rest was fouiul in the suggestion 
of some impartial observers who. recognizing, on the one hand, the irri'- 
fragal)le testimtuiy of striated siM'faces, the evidence ot persistent car- 
riage in one direction of erratics, and the existence of well defined 
moraines, and. on the other, the e(|ually incontestable occurrence of 
marine shells in drift deposits at high altitudes, accepted the glacial 
hypothesis as ;in (wplanation of the former set of phenomena, while for 
the latter they accounted by a great submergence of the land. This 
view, in c(nirsp of time, completely supplaiUed the older theory of great 
waves of translation, upon which so much mathematical skill was 
brought to bear, and it came to be regarded as one of the articles of the 
creed of scientific orthodoxy. 
After CroU i)ublished his luminous eliihoration of the eccentricity 
theoi'y of the cause of the Ice age, evidence of intei'glacial epo(;hs was 
sought far and wide. The occurrenci; of beds of sand or gravel in tlie 
dri ft was acce[)ted ;is ijisofiicio ])roof of a w;irm epoch, .-ind l he existence 
of shells in t hem was regarded .-is adilitional es idence. To this ide.-i, 
howeser, though all un witt iiigl\ , ('roll himself gaxc the tii'st blow b\' 
