Page:Whymper - Scrambles amongst the Alps.djvu/393

 to assert, in the face of a well-ascertained fact like this, that the pools and small tarns lying in rock-basins (which are numerous in almost all mountainous countries) owe their existence to the excavating power of glacier, merely because glacier has passed over the spots which they occupy; and, to say the least, to be injudicious to apply terms like "scooping out" to the rounding and polishing-up of the beds of such pools, because those terms convey an impression that is entirely erroneous. The hollows in which such pools are found would necessarily have been obliterated, not deepened, if the glaciers had worked for a greater length of time.

Professor Ramsay holds the directly contrary opinion. Unless I am entirely mistaken in regard to his ideas, he supposes that the beds of almost all pools, tarns, and lakes, which lie in true rock-basins, have been scooped out or excavated by glaciers. As a rule he does not consider that these lakes occupy hollows which were formed either entirely or in part through upheaval or subsidence, (either or both), or antecedent erosion, but that the lake-basins are simply holes which glaciers have dug out. How or in what way the glaciers did the work, I have not the most remote idea. I turn the Professor's pages over and over without gaining the slightest clue. But I gather from the Proceedings of the Geological Society,