Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/283

Rh is about 850 feet high; for in that case the remarkable persistency and integrity of the roads and deltas, before described, must have been impaired.

We have seen (p. 244) that fifty miles to the south of Lochaber, the glacier formations of Lanarkshire with marine shells of arctic character have been traced to the height of 524 feet. About fifty miles to the south-east in Perthshire are those stratified clays and sands, near Killiecrankie, which were once supposed to be of submarine origin, and which in that case would imply the former submergence of what is now dry land to the extent of 1,550 feet, or several hundred feet beyond the highest of the parallel roads. Even granting that these laminated drifts may have had a different origin, as above suggested (p. 246), there are still many facts connected with the distribution of erratics and the striation of rocks in Scotland which are not easily accounted for without supposing the country to have sunk, since the era of continental ice, to a greater depth than 525 feet, the highest point to which marine shells have yet been traced.

After what was said of the pressure and abrading power of a general crust of ice, like that now covering Greenland, it is almost superfluous to say that the parallel roads must have been of later date than such a state of things, for every trace of them must have been obliterated by the movement of such a mass of ice. It is no less clear, that as no glacier-lakes can now exist in Greenland, so there could have been none in Scotland, when the mountains were covered with one great crust of ice. It may, however, be contended, that the parallel roads were produced when the general crust of ice first gave place to a period of separate glaciers, and that no period of deep submergence ever intervened in Lochaber after the time of the lakes. Even in that case, however, it is difficult not to suppose that the Glen Roy country participated in the downward movement which sank part of Lanarkshire 525