V.—Mr. Harkee and Mr. Debley on the Scandinavian Ice-Sheet

Mr. Deeley tells your readers that he has recently been to the summit of Mont Blanc, and has been studying the difference between névé and glacier ice. This is interesting; but we thought that a great many people had done the same thing during the last hundred years, and we thought that one of them, Forbes, had studied the famous Mountain and the phenomenoninquestion to good effect, not in a casual visit to the Alps, but in the course of many years of patient labour. Among other things we also thought he had shown that in a viscous body like ice, the slope of the upper surface necessary to make it begin to move is the same as the slope which, would be required to induce motion in the ice if its bed were inclined at an angle. He further collected considerable evidence to show what the least angle is upon which ice will begin to move. This is the slope, the least slope, available. It is nothing less than astounding to me that anyone should venture to postulate a Scand in avian ice-sheet in the North Sea until he had considered this necessary factor, and how it would operate.The Scand in avian ice-sheet was, I believe, the invention of Croll, who, sittinginhis arm-chair and endowed with a brilliant imagination, imposed upon sober science this extraordinary postulate. He did not dream of testing it by an examination of the coasts of Norway, or even of Britain, but put it forward apparently as a magnificent deduction. All deductions untested by experiment are dangerous. Thus it came about that the great monster which is said to have come from Norway, goodness knows by what mechanical process, speedily dissolved away on the application of inductive methods. Of course it still maintained its hold upon that section, of geologists who dogmatiseinprint a great deal about the Glacial period before they have ever seen a glacier at work at all; but I am speaking of those who have studied the problem inductively. First Mr. James Geikie, a disciple of Croll, was obliged to confess that this ice-sheet, which is actually said to have advanced as far as the hundred-fathom line in the Atlantic, and there presented a cliff of ice like the Antarctic continent, never can have reached the Faroes, which had an ice-sheet of their own. Next Messrs. Peach and Home were constrained to admit that no traces of it of any kind occur in the Orkneys, or in Eastern Scotland. They still maintained its presence in the Shetlands; however, this was upon evidence which is somewhat extraordinary. I do not mean the evidence as to the direction of the striation, which was so roughly handled by Mr. Milne-Home, but I mean the evidence they adduce that the boulders found on the islands are apparently all local ones, and that, contrary to the deposits of glaciers, they diminish in number as we recede from the matrix whence they were derived.