GLACIAL PERIOD. 
29 
leading to their existence could not have been 
local; they must have been cosmic. When 
Switzerland was bridged across from range to 
range by a mass of ice stretching southward 
into Lombardy and Tuscany, northward into 
France and Burgundy, the rest of Europe could 
not have remained unaffected by the causes 
which induced this state of things. 
It was this conviction which led me to seek 
for the traces of glaciers in Great Britain. I 
had never been in the regions I intended to 
visit, but I knew the forms of the valleys in 
the lake-country of England, in the Highlands 
of Scotland, and in the mountains of Wales 
and Ireland, and I was as confident that I 
should find them crossed by terminal moraines 
and bordered by lateral ones, as if I had already 
seen them. 
The reader must not suppose, when I describe 
these walls formed of the debris of the glacier 
as consisting of boulders, stones, pebbles, sand, 
and gravel, a rough accumulation of loose ma¬ 
terials indiscriminately thrown together, that 
we find the ancient moraines presenting any 
such appearance. Time, which mellows and 
softens all the wrecks of the past, has clothed 
