Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 44.djvu/701

Rh of the grinding can often be seen to be proportional to the pressure and motion of the advancing glacier. I recently noticed in the marshy alluvial plain above Derwentwater a projecting rock which has been ground down to so regular a curve as to look like a portion of an enormous globe buried in the earth. By rough measurement and estimate this rock was about two hundred and fifty feet across, and twenty or thirty feet high. It was formed of hard slate, with numerous quartzite veins, the whole ground down to a uniform spherical surface. It had evidently once been an island in the lake, having a much broader base now hidden by the alluvium, and may originally have been one of those abrupt craggy rocks a few hundred feet high, which, owing to their superior hardness or tenacity, resisted ordinary denudation, and which, when above the old ice-level, form those numerous "pikes" which add so much to the wild and picturesque scenery of the district. Looking at such rocks as this, with outlines so utterly unlike any that are produced in similar formations by subaërial denudation—and they are to be seen by scores in all glaciated regions—we can not but conclude that the ice tool has done more than merely rub off the angles and minor prominences, and that it has really ground away rocky hills to an unknown but very considerable extent; and this conclusion is, as we shall see, supported by a very large amount of confirmatory evidence. It may be noted that ice-ground rocks usually show the direction in which the ice has moved, by the side opposed to the motion being more completely smoothed than the lee side, which often retains some of its ruggedness, having been protected partly by the ice overriding it and partly by the accumulation of its own débris. Where such rocks occur in the higher parts of valleys the smooth side always looks up the valley from which the glacier has descended. In the more open parts of valleys, or in high coombs or cirques, where two or more small ravines meet and where the ice may have been embayed and have acquired a somewhat rotary motion, the rocks are seen to be ground down on all sides into smooth mammillated mounds or hummocks, showing that the ice has been forced into all the irregularities of the surface. An example on a small scale is to be seen in Cwm Glas, on the north side of Snowdon, above the fine moraine already mentioned, and in many other places around the same mountain. On the whole, considering their abundance in all glaciated regions, and the amount of information they give as to the direction and grinding power of ice, these rounded rocks afford one of the most instructive indications of the former presence of glaciers; and we must also agree with the conclusinconclusion [sic] of Darwin (in a paper written after studying the phenomena of ice-action in North Wales, and while fresh from his observations of glaciers and icebergs in the