British Drift Theories. — Upham. 27") 
tion and origin as those found in the delta of the Mississippi? 
In many respects these mounds resemble the mudlumps des- 
cribed by Hilgard,* and their existence at the present time 
may be due to the sandy nature of the materials forming their 
body and the rapid growth of the marsh to the south, pro- 
tecting them from the active erosion of the sea. The gas 
associated with the Mississippi mudlumps appears to be car- 
buretted hydrogen, but in Jefferson county the gas is purely 
hydrogen sulphide. No salt wells occur in the vicinity of 
these mounds, although they occur at various places south 
and east of Beaumont. 
BRITISH DRIFT THEORIES. 
By Warren Upham, Somerviile, Mass. 
The attention and general approval which have been ac- 
corded by English and Scottish reviewers to the recent book 
by Sir Henry H. Howorth.f which sets aside the glacial the- 
ory, and substitutes for it the debacle theory, earliest thought 
out and long ago abandoned by geologists, seem surprising 
to American readers, since a most wonderful and unique but 
gentle agency of formation of the drift is by these authors 
discarded in favor of a still more strange and extravagantly 
violent hypothesis. Among the latest and most important of 
these British estimates of Sir Henry's work, we note three 
carefully written long articles, each of 20 pages or more. 
which have appeared in the Scottish Review for September, 
1898, the Edinburgh Review of the same date, and the Quar- 
terly Review for January, 1894. The first of these is by I). 
Gath Whitley, and the other two are anonymous. It is 
further to be remarked that the magazines containing these 
two articles are very venerable, being in each case in the 
CLXXVllltb volume. On this question we may perhaps say that 
they are conservative, but more properly that they seek to re- 
vive an old opinion which had its day at the beginning of 
*Ibid, p. :ii;t. 
\ Re vie wed in the American Geologist, vol. xn, pp. 181-187, Sept., 
L893. 
