Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

18 tif HE DRIFT.

stones are decidedly in the minority, and indeed a close search will often fail to show them. Clearly, then, the till is not of the nature of a terminal moraine. Hach stone in the ‘till’ gives evidence of having been subjected to a grinding process. . . .

“We look in vain, however, among the glaciers of the Alps for such a deposit. The scratched stones we may occasionally find, but where is the clay? . . . It is clear that the conditions for the gathering of a stony clay like the ‘till’ do not obtain (as far as we know) among tke Alpine glaciers. There is too much water circulating below the ice there to allow any considerable thickness of such a deposit to accumulate.” *

But it is questionable whether the glaciers do press with a steady force upon the rocks beneath so as to score them. Asarule, the base of the glacier is full of water ; rivers flow from under them. The opposite picture, from Professor Winchell’s “Sketches of Creation,” page 223, does not represent a mass of ice, hugging the rocks, holding in its grasp great gravers of stone with which to cut the face of the rocks into deep grooves, and to deposit an even coating of rounded stones and clay over the face of the earth.

On the contrary, here are only angular masses of rock, and a stream which would certainly wash away any clay which might be formed.

Let Mr. Dawkins state the case:

“The hypothesis upon which the southern extension is founded—that the bowlder-clays have been formed by ice inelting on the land—is open to this objection, that no similar clays have been proved to have been so formed, either in the Arctic regions, where the ice-sheet has retreated, or in the districts forsaken by the glaciers in the Alps or Pyrenees, or in any other mountain-chain. .. -

“The English bowlder-clays, as a whole, differ from

* “The Great Ice Age,” pp. 70-72.