Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/259

Rh extinct animals, and the signs they afford of a state of physical geography departing widely from the present, or to the era of the implement-bearing alluvium of St. Acheul, we might expect to find Scandinavia overwhelmed with glaciers, and the country uninhabitable by man. At a much remoter period the same country was in the state in which Greenland now is, overspread with one uninterrupted coating of continental ice, which has left its peculiar markings on the highest mountains. This period, probably anterior to the earliest traces yet brought to light of the human race, may have coincided with the submergence of England, and the accumulation of the boulder-clay of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Bedfordshire, before mentioned. It has already been stated that the syenite and some other rocks of the Norfolk till (p. 218) seem to have come from Scandinavia, and there is no era when icebergs are so likely to have floated them so far south as when the whole of Sweden and Norway were enveloped in a massive crust of ice; a state of things the existence of which is deduced from the direction of the glacial furrows, and their frequent unconformity to the shape of the minor valleys.

Mr. Robert Chambers, after visiting Norway and Sweden, and comparing the signs of glacial action observed there with similar appearances in the Grampians, came to the conclusion that the Highlands both of Scandinavia and Scotland had once been 'moulded in ice,' and that the outward and downward movement and pressure of the frozen mass had not only smoothed, polished, and scratched the rocks, but had, in the course of ages, deepened and widened the valleys, and produced much of that denudation which has commonly been ascribed exclusively to aqueous action. The glaciation