Narrative of the surveying voyages of his majesty's ships Adventure and Beagle (vol.3)

ADDENDA. 625 nels, and over rocky shoals ; — each part of the surface being exposed for centuries, as the country was elevated, to this action ? Would not the fragments of rock embedded in the ice grate in a direct path over the surface, regardless of ininor inequalities? and would not the fragments themselves be grooved and scored in one direction? Can we for one moment believe it possible that boulders, either in water or in the thickest mud, could be driven over a rugged surface, or along a per- pendicular face of solid rock, with such enormous velocity as with their points to groove and scratch it, and nevertheless not to be rolled over and over, like a stone descending a mountain, but to be marked with parallel lines of abrasion, equally with the fixed, underlying mass ? It appears to me that we assuredly can make no such admission. Travellers in the Arctic regions tell us that the drift-ice, with its irresistible power, can force up the gravel and sand into mounds (see Geograph. Journal, vol. viii., p. 221), and drive before it great boulders, and even ships, and masses of ice, high and dry on the beach. What then would be the effect of a few pebbles, or a single fragment, between such masses of ice and a steep coast- wall of rock ? Would not scratches " horizontal, or nearly so" be formed, " indicating (to use Sir James Hall's words) that grinders had been pressed against the rock;" as if" independently of their gravity" ? In this explanation only vercs causes are introduced, and reasons can be assigned, for the belief that these causes have been in action in these districts. On the theory of debacles, it still remains to be proved that rocks can be thus scooped and furrowed, or hills scarped although I am far from affirming they cannot, — and scratched, I presume, they certainly would be. With respect to Sweden, where the land is now rising, and where ice even still is a transporting agent, it is undoubt- edly the part of the geologist, to endeavour by long and laborious research to account for the phenomena by these real agencies. For to introduce, before it is absolutely forced on us, the hypothesis of a deluge of mud ar.d stones, fifteen hundred feet deep in Sweden, or three thousand in North America, which rushing over the country, rounded the northern fronts of the hills, and rolling by their eastern and western flanks, left them marked witli oblique furrows, is to violate, as it appears to me, every rule of inductive philosophy. Page 297. With reference to the embedment of tne Siberian animals with their flesh, I have mentioned in a note, the case of ice described as rising from the bottom of the sea, off the coast of Greenland. Messrs. Dease and Simpson, during their late memorable journey along the shores of the Arctic ocean, speaking of one part {Geograph, Journal., vol. viii., p. 218) VOL. III. 2 Q**