On the Physical Properties of Ice in connection with the History of the Glacial Period

Abstract

When I found myself committed to read a paper before you to-day, I was in this difficulty, that I, not being a geologist, had to address a Society of Geologists. Under these circumstances, it seemed to be all that I could do to select some subject, which, though not a geological subject, is of the utmost importance to geologists, in their attempts to unfold the past history of the globe; and I thought it might be of interest to pass in review some of the properties of ice, to which, as a geological agent, very great effects are now attributed. The subject was suggested to me by a passage in the address delivered by the late Professor Phillips to the Geological Section of the British Association at the Bradford meeting. Professor Phillips says: “One is almost frozen to silence in presence of the vast sheets of ice which some of my friends, (followers of Agassiz), believe themselves to have traced over the mountains and vales of a great part of the United Kingdom, as well as over the kindred regions of Scandinavia. One shudders at the thought of the innumerable icebergs, with their loads of rock, which floated in the once deeper North Sea, and above the hills of the three Ridings of Yorkshire, and lifted countless blocks of Silurian stone from lower levels, to rest on the precipitous limestones round the sources of the Ribble. “Those who, with Professor Ramsay, adopt the glacial hypothesis in its full extent, and ...