Correspondence. 
209 
Having been brought up in America under the constant assertions, 
plausibly maintained, that the glaciers were great diggers, the proof of 
which I failed to see in the Alps, where I saw no glaciers pushing against 
their moraines, and with the above quoted description by Dr. Geikie before 
me, I was dazed by what I saw in Norway. At first I fully concurred 
with Dr. Geikie, and had the glacier shrunken back 200 feet before my 
arrival, I could have added nothing to the knowledge of the dynamics of 
this glacier. I will repeat what I saw, and have figured: **“Svartisen 
glacier, at the head of Holands fjord, descends to within sixty feet of the 
sea, where it ends in a morainic lake of considerable size, the northern 
side of which is filled with the glacier. The water of the lake rises, in 
part, to the level of the ice, or over it, where the waves of the lake are 
depositing sand upon its surface. The glacier being unable to advance, 
the lateral pressure, has forced up an anticlinal ridge, or rather dome in 
the ice, to a hight of fifteen feet, along whose axis there has been a frac¬ 
ture and fault. Upon this uplifted dome rests the undisturbed sand 
stratified in perfect conformity to the surface, which was formerly just 
below the surface of the lake. As the ice about the line of fracture melts, 
the sand falls over and leaves a sand cone, of which there were examples 
—one at the end of the lake, and two in the centre—but the nuclei of the 
mounds were of solid ice. By this lifting process, pockets of loose clayey 
sand were thrown on top of the morainic matter, producing thus the ap¬ 
pearance of having been ploughed up by the glacier to even several yards 
beyond its termination, which has not been the case.” 
Had these evanescent domes not been there I should have reported the 
ploughing action of the glacier, and Dr. Geikie does not report having 
seen them. The shells had been brought into the disturbed boulderless 
part of the moraine by the action of the waves of the lake upon the marine 
deposits described by Dr. Geikie. 
In many places in Norway I have seen glaciers advancing against both 
rock and morainic barriers, and when the ice is high enough it simply 
flows over upon itself. It is a question of physics which will yield—the 
huge mass of earth and rock or the semiplastic ice of the tongue which 
ought to form the plough-share of the glacier. The surprise at finding 
the above and previously undescribed results made me careful not to 
underrate the amount of ploughing that might have occured here. 
If the Norwegian snow-fields, which are the largest in Europe, are too 
insignificant to build up by inductive reasoning the theory of glacial 
geology, how much more so are the snow-fields of the Alps. Still I will 
be rash enough to appeal to the Alps of forty-five years ago or more, when 
the glaciers were yet advancing against their moraines, and to the names 
of Forbes, Collomb and Charles Martins, and even to that of Charpentier, 
to show the harmony of my conclusions with those of other observers who 
have had my own favorable opportunities for investigation, and not to 
speculation of what glaciers can do, or ought to do, unless supported by 
observed facts. 
**Giacial Erosion in Norway and High Latitudesby J. W. Spencer, Am*Nat. 1888. 
