Charles Maclaren found unequivocal traces of an ancient glacier.

But the collateral evidences would lead us into a field quite as wide as that into which we have made our brief excursion, and are now preparing to leave. The following interesting extract from Mr. Kingsley's Glaucus, with which we conclude, may at once show how rightly to read these, and what very amusing reading they form. It is thus we find Mr. Kingsley accounting, in light and graceful dialogue, for the formation of a profoundly deep lochan of limited area, that opens its blue eye to the heavens amid the rough wilderness of rocks and hills that encircle the gigantic Snowdon.

"You see the lake is nearly circular. On the side where we stand the pebbly beach is not six feet above the water, and slopes away steeply into the valley behind us, while. before us it shelves gradually into the lake; forty yards out, as you know, there is not ten feet of water, and then a steep bank, the edge whereof we and the big trout know well, sinks suddently to unknown depths. On the opposite side, that vast flat-topped wall of rock towers up shoreless into the sky seven hundred feet perpendicular. The deepest water of all, we know, is at its very foot. Right and left two shoulders of down slope into the lake. Now turn round, and look down the gorge. Remark that the pebble bank on which we stand reaches some fifty yards downward. You see the loose stones peeping out everywhere. We may fairly suppose that we stand on a dam of loose stones, a hundred feet deep.

"But why loose stones? and if so, what matter and what wonder? There are rocks cropping out everywhere down the hill-side.

"Because, if you will take up one of these stones, and

crack it across, you will see that it is not of the same stuff as those said rocks. Step into the next field and see. That rock is the common Snowdon slate which we see everywhere. The two shoulders of down right and left are slate, too; you can see that at a glance. But the stones of the pebble bank are a close-grained, yellow-spotted Syenite; and where,-where on earth did these Syenite pebbles come from? Let us walk round to the cliff on the opposite side and see.

"Now mark. Between the cliff-foot and the sloping down is a crack, ending in a gully: the nearer side is of slate, and the further side the cliff itself. Why, the whole cliff is composed of the very same stone as the pebble ridge.

"Now, my good friend, how did these pebbles get three hundred yards across the lake? Hundreds of tons, some of them three feet long, — who carried them across? The old Cimbri were not likely to amuse themselves by making such a breakwater up here in No-man's-land, two thousand feet above the sea; but somebody or something must have carried them, for stones do not fly, nor swim either. "Let our hope of a solution be in John Jones, who carried up the coracle. Hail him, and ask what is on the top of that cliff. So? Plains, and bogs, and another linn.' Very good. Now, does it not strike you that the whole. cliff has a remarkably smooth and plastered look, like a hare's run up an earth bank? And do you see that it is polished thus only over the lake? that as soon as the cliff abuts on the downs right and left, it forms pinnacles, caves, broken angular boulders? Syenite usually does so in our damp climate, from the weathering effect of frost and rain; why has it not done so over the lake? On that part something (giants perhaps) has been scrambling up

and down on a very large scale, and so rubbed off every corner which was inclined to come away, till the solid core of the rock was bared. And may not these mysterious giants have had a hand in carrying the stones across the lake?... Really, I am not altogether jesting. Think awhile what agent could possibly have produced either one or both of these effects?

"There is but one; and that, if you have been an Alpine traveller, much more if you have been a chamoishunter, you have seen many a time (whether you knew it or not) at the very same work."

"Ice! Yes: ice. Hrymin, the frost-giant, and no one else. And if you look at the facts, you will see how ice may have done it. Our friend John Jones's report of plains and bogs, and a lake above, makes it quite possible that in the ice-age (glacial epoch, as the big-word mongers call it), there was above that cliff a great neve or snowfield, such as you have seen often in the Alps at the head of each glacier. Over the face of this cliff a glacier had crawled down from that neve, polishing the face of the rock in its descent; but the snow, having no large and deep outlet, has not slid down in a sufficient stream to reach the vale below, and form a glacier of the first order, and has therefore stopped short on the other side of the lake, as a glacier of the second order, which ends in an ice-cliff hanging high upon the mountain-side, and kept from farther progress by daily melting. If you have ever gone up the Mer-de-Glace to the Tacal, you saw a magnificent specimen of the sort on your right hand, just opposite the Tacal, in the Glacier de Trelaporte, which comes down from the Aiguille de Charmoz."

"This explains our pebble ridge. The stones which the glacier rubbed off the cliff beneath it, it carried for

wards slowly, but surely, till they saw the light again in the face of the ice-cliff, and dropped out of it under the melting of the summer sun, to form a huge dam across the ravine; till, the 'ice-age' past, a more genial climate succeeded, and neve and glacier melted away; but the 'moraine' of stones did not, and remains to this day, the dam which keeps up the waters of the lake.

"There is my explanation. If you can find a better, do; but remember always that it must include an answer to, 'How did the stones get across the lake?””

RECENT GEOLOGICAL DISCOVERIES.*

PREPARATIONS FOR THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION MEETING AT ABERDEEN IN 1859.

THE gentlemen of the hammer and chisel must immediately prepare a Reform Bill, and reädjust their nomenclature and classification. Both are uncouth and barbarous, as well as unscientific. Recent discoveries have unsettled almost every one of the characters and tests of the age of rocks. Old Werner's Transition class, though founded to some extent on facts, has been long ago discarded. But will hardness or crystalline structure, or the absence even of organic remains, hitherto described as the grand features of the primitive class of rocks, now bear to be trusted as essentialia of classification! Every summer's ramble multiplies proofs to the contrary. The mere vicinity of a trap-vein, squirted from its boiling caldron below, among the most sedimentary strata, has often baked them into hard crystalline masses, and converted mudbanks charged with shells into beautiful granular marble, as may be seen at Strath, in Skye, under the overlying igneous rocks of the Cuchullins. And perhaps the time is not far distant when it may be difficult to find in the crust of the globe any assemblage of rocks in which organisms may not be detected, although heat, for the most part, has

* See Introductory Résumé, p. 30.