Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

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THE DRIFT A GIGANTIC CATASTROPHE. 53

generally unstratified, which has often been forcibly 1nDENTED into the bed beneath it, sometimes exhibiting slickensides at the junction. There is evidence of this lower member having been pushed or dragged over the surface, from higher to lower levels, in @ plastic condition ; on which account he has named it ‘The Trail’.” *

Now, all these details are incompatible with the idea of ice-action. What condition of ice can be imagined that would smash rocks, that would beat them like a maul, that would indent them?

And when we pass from the underlying rocks to the “till” itself, we find the evidences of tremendous force exerted in the wildest and most tumultuous manner.

When the clay and stones were being deposited on those crushed and pounded rocks, they seem to have picked up the detritus of the earth in great masses, and whirled it wildly in among their own material, and deposited it in what are called “the intercalated beds.” It would seem as if cyclonic winds had been at work among the mass. While the “till” itself is devoid of fossils, “the intercalated beds” often contain them. Whatever was in or on the soil was seized upon, carried up into the air, then cast down, and mingled among the “till.”

James Geikie says, speaking of these intercalated beds :

“They are twisted, bent, crumpled, and confused often in the wildest manner. Layers of clay, sand, and gravel, which were probably deposited in a nearly horizontal plane, are puckered into folds and sharply curved into vertical positions. I have seen whole beds of sand and clay which had all the appearance of having been pushed forward bodily for some distance, the bedding assuming the most fantastic appearance. .. . The intercalated beds are everywhere cut through by the overlying ‘till, and

* “Journal of the Geological Society and Geological Magazine.”