Chapter 4

And that I propose to do in my next paper, when I speak of the pebbles in the street.

Meanwhile I wish you to face fairly the truly grand idea, which all I have said tends to prove true--that all the soil we see is made by the destruction of older soils, whether soft as clay, or hard as rock; that rain, rivers, and seas are perpetually melting and grinding up old land, to compose new land out of it; and that it must have been doing so, as long as rain, rivers, and seas have existed. "But how did the first land of all get made?" I can only reply: A natural question: but we can only answer that, by working from the known to the unknown. While we are finding out how these later lands were made and unmade, we may stumble on some hints as to how the first primeval continents rose out of the bosom of the sea.

And thus I end this paper. I trust it has not been intolerably dull. But I wanted at starting to show my readers something of the right way of finding out truth on this and perhaps on all subjects; to make some simple appeals to your common sense; and to get you to accept some plain rules founded on common sense, which will be of infinite use to both you and me in my future papers.

I hope, meanwhile, that you will agree with me, that there is plenty of geological matter to be seen and thought over in the neighbourhood of any town.

Be sure, that wherever there is a river, even a drain; and a stone quarry, or even a roadside bank; much more where there is a sea, or a tidal aestuary, there is geology enough to be learnt, to explain the greater part of the making of all the continents on the globe.

II. THE PEBBLES IN THE STREET

If you, dear reader, dwell in any northern town, you will almost certainly see paving courts and alleys, and sometimes--to the discomfort of your feet--whole streets, or set up as bournestones at corners, or laid in heaps to be broken up for road-metal, certain round pebbles, usually dark brown or speckled gray, and exceedingly tough and hard. Some of them will be very large--boulders of several feet in diameter. If you move from town to town, from the north of Scotland as far down as Essex on the east, or as far down as Shrewsbury and Wolverhampton (at least) on the west, you will still find these pebbles, but fewer and smaller as you go south. It matters not what the rocks and soils of the country round may be. However much they may differ, these pebbles will be, on the whole, the same everywhere.

But if your town be south of the valley of the Thames, you will find, as far as I am aware, no such pebbles there. The gravels round you will be made up entirely of rolled chalk flints, and bits of beds immediately above or below the chalk. The blocks of "Sarsden" sandstone--those of which Stonehenge is built--and the "plum-pudding stones" which are sometimes found with them, have no kindred with the northern pebbles. They belong to beds above the chalk.

Now if, seeing such pebbles about your town, you inquire, like a sensible person who wishes to understand something of the spot on which he lives, whence they come, you will be shown either a gravel- pit or a clay-pit. In the gravel the pebbles and boulders lie mixed with sand, as they do in the railway cutting just south of Shrewsbury; or in huge mounds of fine sweet earth, as they do in the gorge of the Tay about Dunkeld, and all the way up Strathmore, where they form long grassy mounds--tomauns as they call them in some parts of Scotland--askers as they call them in Ireland. These mounds, with their sweet fresh turf rising out of heather and bog, were tenanted-- so Scottish children used to believe--by fairies. He that was lucky might hear inside them fairy music, and, the jingling of the fairy horses' trappings. But woe to him if he fell asleep upon the mound, for he would be spirited away into fairyland for seven years, which would seem to him but one day. A strange fancy; yet not so strange as the actual truth as to what these mounds are, and how they came into their places.

Or again, you might find that your town's pebbles and boulders came out of a pit of clay, in which they were stuck, without any order or bedding, like plums and raisins in a pudding. This clay goes usually by the name of boulder-clay. You would see such near any town in Cheshire and Lancashire; or along Leith shore, near Edinburgh; or, to give one more instance out of hundreds, along the coast at Scarborough. If you walk along the shore southward of that town, you will see, in the gullies of the cliff, great beds of sticky clay, stuffed full of bits of every rock between the Lake mountains and Scarborough, from rounded pebbles of most ancient rock down to great angular fragments of ironstone and coal. There, as elsewhere, the great majority of the pebbles have nothing to do with the rock on which the clay happens to lie, but have come, some of them, from places many miles away.

Now if we find spread over a low land pebbles composed of rocks which are only found in certain high lands, is it not an act of common sense to say--These pebbles have come from the highlands? And if the pebbles are rounded, while the rocks like them in the highlands always break off in angular shapes, is it not, again, an act of mere common sense to say--These pebbles were once angular, and have been rubbed round, either in getting hither or before they started hither?

Does all this seem to you mere truism, my dear reader? If so, I am sincerely glad to hear it. It was not so very long ago that such arguments would have been considered not only no truisms, but not even common sense.

But to return, let us take, as an example, a sample of these boulder clay pebbles from the neighbourhood of Liverpool and Birkenhead, made by Mr. De Rance, the government geological surveyor:

Granite, greenstone, felspar porphyry, felstone, quartz rock (all igneous rocks, that is, either formed by, or altered by volcanic heat, and almost all found in the Lake mountains), 37 per cent.

Silurian grits (the common stones of the Lake mountains deposited by water), 43 per cent.

Ironstone, 1 per cent.

Carboniferous limestone, 5 per cent.

Permian or Triassic sandstones, i.e. rocks immediately round Liverpool, 12 per cent.

Now, does not this sample show, as far as human common sense can be depended on, that the great majority of these stones come from the Lake mountains, sixty or seventy miles north of Liverpool? I think your common sense will tell you that these pebbles are not mere concretions; that is, formed out of the substance of the clay after it was deposited. The least knowledge of mineralogy would prove that. But, even if you are no mineralogist, common sense will tell you, that if they were all concreted out of the same clay, it is most likely that they would be all of the same kind, and not of a dozen or more different kinds. Common sense will tell you, also, that if they were all concreted out of the same clay, it is a most extraordinary coincidence, indeed one too strange to be believed, if any less strange explanation can be found--that they should have taken the composition of different rocks which are found all together in one group of mountains to the northward. You will surely say--If this be granite, it has most probably come from a granite mountain; if this be grit, from a grit-stone mountain, and so on with the whole list. Why--are we to go out of our way to seek improbable explanations, when there is a probable one staring us in the face?

Next--and this is well worth your notice--if you will examine the pebbles carefully, especially the larger ones, you will find that they are not only more or less rounded, but often scratched; and often, too, in more than one direction, two or even three sets of scratches crossing each other; marked, as a cat marks an elder stem when she sharpens her claws upon it; and that these scratches have not been made by the quarrymen's tools, but are old marks which exist--as you may easily prove for yourself--while the stone is still lying in its bed of clay. Would it not be an act of mere common sense to say--These scratches have been made by the sharp points of other stones which have rubbed against the pebbles somewhere, and somewhen, with great force?

So far so good. The next question is--How did these stones get into the clay? If we can discover that, we may also discover how they wore rounded and scratched. We must find a theory which will answer our question; and one which, as Professor Huxley would say, "will go on all-fours," that is, will explain all the facts of the case, and not only a few of them.

What, then, brought the stones?

We cannot, I think, answer that question, as some have tried to answer it, by saying that they were brought by Noah's flood. For it is clear, that very violent currents of water would be needed to carry boulders, some of them weighing many tons, for many miles. Now Scripture says nothing of any such violent currents; and we have no right to put currents, or any other imagined facts, into Scripture out of our own heads, and then argue from them as if not we, but the text of Scripture had asserted their existence.

But still, they may have been rolled hither by water. That theory certainly would explain their being rounded; though not their being scratched. But it will not explain their being found in the clay.

Recollect what I said in my first paper: that water drops its pebbles and coarser particles first, while it carries the fine clayey mud onward in solution, and only drops it when the water becomes still. Now currents of such tremendous violence as to carry these boulder stones onward, would have carried the mud for many miles farther still; and we should find the boulders, not in clay, but lying loose together, probably on a hard rock bottom, scoured clean by the current. That is what we find in the beds of streams; that is just what we do not find in this case.

But the boulders may have been brought by a current, and then the water may have become still, and the clay settled quietly round them. What? Under them as well as over them? On that theory also we should find them only at the bottom of the clay. As it is, we find them scattered anywhere and everywhere through it, from top to bottom. So that theory will not do. Indeed, no theory will do which supposes them to have been brought by water alone.

Try yourself, dear reader, and make experiments, with running water, pebbles, and mud. If you try for seven years, I believe, you will never contrive to make your pebbles lie about in your mud, as they lie about in every pit in the boulder clay.

Well then, there we are at fault, it seems. We have no explanation drawn from known facts which will do--unless we are to suppose, which I don't think you will do, that stones, clay, and all were blown hither along the surface of the ground, by primeval hurricanes, ten times worse than those of the West Indies, which certainly will roll a cannon a few yards, but cannot, surely, roll a boulder stone a hundred miles.

Now, suppose that there was a force, an agent, known--luckily for you, not to you--but known too well to sailors and travellers; a force which is at work over the vast sheets of land at both the north and south poles; at work, too, on every high mountain range in the world, and therefore a very common natural force; and suppose that this force would explain all the facts, namely--

How the stones got here;

How they were scratched and rounded;

How they were imbedded in clay;

because it is notoriously, and before men's eyes now, carrying great stones hundreds of miles, and scratching and rounding them also; carrying vast deposits of mud, too, and mixing up mud and stones just as we see them in the brick-pits,--Would not our common sense have a right to try that explanation?--to suspect that this force, which we do not see at work in Britain now, may have been at work here ages since? That would at least be reasoning from the known to the unknown. What state of things, then, do we find among the highest mountains; and over whole countries which, though not lofty, lie far enough north or south to be permanently covered with ice?

We find, first, an ice-cap or ice-sheet, fed by the winter's snows, stretching over the higher land, and crawling downward and outward by its own weight, along the valleys, as glaciers.

We find underneath the glaciers, first a moraine profonde, consisting of the boulders and gravel, and earth, which the glacier has ground off the hillsides, and is carrying down with it.

These stones, of course, grind, scratch, and polish each other; and in like wise grind, scratch, and polish the rock over which they pass, under the enormous weight of the superincumbent ice.

We find also, issuing from under each glacier a stream, carrying the finest mud, the result of the grinding of the boulders against each other and the glacier.

We find, moreover, on the surface of the glaciers, moraines superieures--long lines of stones and dirt which had fallen from neighbouring cliffs, and are now travelling downward with the glaciers.

Their fate, if the glacier ends on land, is what was to be expected. The stones from above the glacier fall over the ice-cliff at its end, to mingle with those thrown out from underneath the glacier, and form huge banks of boulders, called terminal moraines, while the mud runs off, as all who have seen glaciers know, in a turbid torrent.

Their fate, again, is what was to be expected if the glacier ends, as it commonly does in Arctic regions, in the sea. The ice grows out to sea-ward for more than a mile sometimes, about one-eighth of it being above water, and seven-eighths below, so that an ice-cliff one hundred feet high may project into water eight hundred feet deep. At last, when it gets out of its depth, the buoyancy of the water breaks it off in icebergs, which float away, at the mercy of tides and currents, often grounding again in shallower water, and ploughing the sea-bottom as they drag along it. These bergs carry stones and dirt, often in large quantities; so that, whenever a berg melts or capsizes, it strews its burden confusedly about the sea-floor.

Meanwhile the fine mud which is flowing out from under the ice goes out to sea likewise, colouring the water far out, and then subsiding as a soft tenacious ooze, in which the stones brought out by the ice are imbedded. And this ooze--so those who have examined it assert-- cannot be distinguished from the brick-clay, or fossiliferous boulder-clay, so common in the North. A very illustrious Scandinavian explorer, visiting Edinburgh, declared, as soon as he saw the sections of boulder-clay exhibited near that city, that this was the very substance which he saw forming in the Spitzbergen ice- fiords. {3}

I have put these facts as simply and baldly as I can, in order that the reader may look steadily at them, without having his attention drawn off, or his fancy excited, by their real poetry and grandeur. Indeed, it would have been an impertinence to have done otherwise; for I have never seen a live glacier, by land or sea, though I have seen many a dead one. And the public has had the opportunity, lately, of reading so many delightful books about "peaks, passes, and glaciers," that I am bound to suppose that many of my readers know as much, or more, about them than I do.

But let us go a step farther; and, bearing in our minds what live glaciers are like, let us imagine what a dead glacier would be like; a glacier, that is, which had melted, and left nothing but its skeleton of stones and dirt.

We should find the faces of the rock scored and polished, generally in lines pointing down the valleys, or at least outward from the centre of the highlands, and polished and scored most in their upland or weather sides. We should find blocks of rock left behind, and perched about on other rocks of a different kind. We should find in the valleys the old moraines left as vast deposits of boulder and shingle, which would be in time sawn through and sorted over by the rivers. And if the sea-bottom outside were upheaved, and became dry land, we should find on it the remains of the mud from under the glacier, stuck full of stones and boulders iceberg-dropped. This mud would be often very irregularly bedded; for it would have been disturbed by the ploughing of the icebergs, and mixed here and there with dirt which had fallen from them. Moreover, as the sea became shallower and the mud-beds got awash one after the other, they would be torn about, re-sifted, and re-shaped by currents and by tides, and mixed with shore-sand ground out of shingle-beach, thus making confusion worse confounded. A few shells, of an Arctic or northern type, would be found in it here and there. Some would have lived near those later beaches, some in deeper water in the ancient ooze, wherever the iceberg had left it in peace long enough for sea-animals to colonise and breed in it. But the 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 fulfilling the rule laid down (I think by Professor Geikie in his delightful book on Scotch scenery as influenced by its geology), that ice planes down into flats, while water saws out into crags and gullies; and that the rain and frost are even now restoring Scotch scenery to something of that ruggedness and picturesqueness which it must have lost when it lay, like Greenland, under the indiscriminating grinding of a heavy sheet of ice.

Lastly; no known agent, save ice, will explain those perched boulders, composed of ancient hard rocks, which may be seen in so many parts of these islands and of the Continent. No water power could have lifted those stones, and tossed them up high and dry on mountain ridges and promontories, upon rocks of a totally different kind. Some of my readers surely recollect Wordsworth's noble lines about these mysterious wanderers, of which he had seen many a one about his native hills:

As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie Couched on the bald top of an eminence, Wonder to all who do the same espy By what means it could thither come, and whence; So that it seems a thing endued with sense: Like a sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself.

Yes; but the next time you see such a stone, believe that the wonder has been solved, and found to be, like most wonders in Nature, more wonderful than we guessed it to be. It is not a sea-beast which has crawled forth, but an ice-beast which has been left behind; lifted up thither by the ice, as surely as the famous Pierre-a-bot, forty feet in diameter, and hundreds of boulders more, almost as large as cottages, have been carried by ice from the distant Alps right across the lake of Neufchatel, and stranded on the slopes of the Jura, nine hundred feet above the lake. {4}

Thus, I think, we have accounted for facts enough to make it probable that Britain was once covered partly by an ice-sheet, as Greenland is now, and partly, perhaps, by an icy sea. But, to make assurance more sure, let us look for new facts, and try whether our ice-dream will account for them also. Let us investigate our case as a good medical man does, by "verifying his first induction."

He says: At the first glance, I can see symptoms a, b, c. It is therefore probable that my patient has got complaint A. But if he has he ought to have symptom d also. If I find that, my guess will be yet more probable. He ought also to have symptom e, and so forth; and as I find successively each of these symptoms which are proper to A, my first guess will become more and more probable, till it reaches practical certainty.

Now let us do the same, and say--If this strange dream be true, and the lowlands of the North were once under an icy sea, ought we not to find sea-shells in their sands and clays? Not abundantly, of course. We can understand that the sea-animals would be too rapidly covered up in mud, and too much disturbed by icebergs and boulders, to be very abundant. But still, some should surely be found here and there.

Doubtless; and if my northern-town readers will search the boulder- clay pits near them, they will most probably find a few shells, if not in the clay itself, yet in sand-beds mixed with them, and probably underlying them. And this is a notable fact, that the more species of shells they find, the more they will find--if they work out their names from any good book of conchology--of a northern type; of shells which notoriously, at this day, inhabit the colder seas.