Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 42.djvu/183

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HE accompanying map, prepared for Prof. Wright's new work on Man and the Glacial Period from data furnished by the latest investigations in Great Britain, embodies a vast amount of information, and for the most part tells its own story. It is largely the outcome of the work of the late Prof. Carvill Lewis, whose untimely death left his large collection of English notes still unpublished. But, in response to the interest aroused by him, a society embracing the most active geologists of northern England was formed to follow out and complete his work. The president of this society is Prof. Percy F. Kendall, now of Leeds, who prepared the chapter on the glacial geology of Great Britain for Prof. Wright's book, and who has furnished the principal data for the construction of this map. We are glad to be informed also that the field notes of Prof. Lewis, under the joint editorship of Rev. Dr. Crosskey, of Birmingham, and Prof. Kendall, are soon to be published by Mrs. Lewis in England.

Prof. Lewis was the first one to attempt a careful delineation of the boundary of glacial action in England and Ireland, as he was one of the first to do this work in the United States. Soon after Profs. Cook and Smock, of New Jersey, had published their map of the terminal moraine in New Jersey, Profs. Lewis and Wright took up the task of following it out through Pennsylvania. The results of their work there are embodied in Volume Z of the Geological Report of that State. Upon completing this work the two professors, by previous arrangement, divided the work of exploration—Prof. Wright carefully surveying the line westward to the Mississippi River, and with more or less care to Alaska, while Prof. Lewis went to England to do the work of which we have spoken there. Last year Prof. Wright also went to England, at the request of those who were following up Prof. Lewis's work there, and went over a large part of the most important ground under their lead; hence an unusual degree of confidence can be placed in the results which have been for the first time systematically presented in this map and the accompanying description. Space will permit us to give but the very briefest summary of the conclusions respecting English glacial geology, some of which are really revolutionary.

In the first place the investigations demonstrate beyond controversy that the glacial phenomena in the British Isles are the product of land ice, and not of floating ice. This may not seem very important to American geologists, who are all of one mind, but in England it means a good deal, where there are many who still cling to the old idea that icebergs and not glaciers