Glaciers and Glacial Radiants — Claypole . 85 
led boulders indicating a movement of ice from the northwest. 
Erratics of Finland granite lie scattered over the great plain on 
which stands the city of St. Petersburgh. 
How incompatible with the theory of a vast polar ice-cap are 
the observed phenomena in this part of Europe may be seen at 
once on reading the following passage from Sir Charles Lyell’s 
“Elements of Geology” (p. 149,1865). 
“The signs of glacial action in Norway and in Sweden consist 
chiefly of furrowed and polished rock-surfaces, of moraines and 
erratic blocks. The direction of the erratics as that of the fur¬ 
rows has usually been conformable to the course of the princi¬ 
pal valleys; but the lines of both sometimes radiate outwards in 
all directions from the highest land in a manner which is only 
explicable by the hypothesis of a general envelope of continental 
ice like that of Greenland. Some of the far-transported blocks 
have been carried from the central parts of Scandinavia towards 
the polar regions; others southward to Denmark; some south- 
westwards to the coast of Norfolk in England; others south¬ 
eastward to M Germany, Poland and Russia. Sir Roderick 
Murchison and his fellow-labourers, M. de Verneuil and Count 
Keyserling, have shown in the map illustrating their great work 
on the geology of Russia how this drift ‘proceeded eccentrically 
from a common central region. 7 
“It appears from their observations that the blocks scattered 
over large districts of Russia and Poland agree precisely in 
mineral character with rocks of the mountains of Lapland and 
Finland while the masses of gneiss, syenite, porphyry and trap 
strewn over the low sandy countries of Pomerania, Holstein and 
Denmark are identical in their composition with the mountains 
of Norway and Sweden. 
“It is found to be the general rule in Russia that the smaller 
blocks are carried to greater distances from their place of origin 
than the larger, the distance being in some cases 800 or even 
1,000 miles and the direction from the N. W. or from the 
Scandinavian mountains over the low lands and seas to the 
south-east.” 
Obviously we have here no evidence of the portentous polar 
ice-cap. All the observations point in a different direction and 
indicate an ice-radiant in the north-west of Europe in Norway 
and Sweden of immense gathering power from which the ice 
