he general appearance of the dried
sea-bottom would be a dreary and lifeless waste of sands, gravels,
loose boulders, and boulder-bearing clays; and wherever a boss of
bare rock still stood up, it would be found ground down, and probably
polished and scored by the ponderous icebergs which had lumbered over
it in their passage out to sea.

In a word, it would look exactly as vast tracts of the English,
Scotch, and Irish lowlands must have looked before returning
vegetation coated their dreary sands and clays with a layer of brown
vegetable soil.

Thus, and I believe thus only, can we explain the facts connected
with these boulder pebbles. No agent known on earth can have stuck
them in the clay, save ice, which is known to do so still elsewhere.

No known agent can have scratched them as they are scratched, save
ice, which is known to do so still elsewhere.

No known agent--certainly not, in my opinion, the existing rivers--
can have accumulated the vast beds of boulders which lie along the
course of certain northern rivers; notably along the Dee about
Aboyne--save ice bearing them slowly down from the distant summits of
the Grampians.

No known agent, save ice, can have produced those rounded, and
polished, and scored, and fluted rochers moutonnes "sheep-backed
rocks"--so common in the Lake district; so common, too, in Snowdon,
especially between the two lakes of Llanberis; common in Kerry; to be
seen anywhere, as far as I have ascertained, around the Scotch
Highlands, where the turf is cleared away from an unweathered surface
of the rock, in the direction in which a glacier would have pressed
against it had one been there. Where these polishings and scorings
are found in narrow glens, it is, no doubt, an open question whether
some of them may not be the work of water. But nothing but the
action of ice can have produced what I have seen in land-locked and
quiet fords in Kerry--ice-flutings in polished rocks below high-water
mark, so large that I could lie down in one of them. Nothing but the
action of ice could produce what may be seen in any of our mountains-
-whole sheets of rock ground down into rounded flats, irrespective of
the lie of the beds, not in valleys, but on the brows and summits of
mountains, often ending abruptly at the edge of some sudden cliff,
where the true work of water, in the shape of rain and frost, is
actually destroying the previous work of ice, and fulfi