but
lying loose together, probably on a hard rock bottom, scoured clean
by the current. That is what we find in the beds of streams; that is
just what we do not find in this case.

But the boulders may have been brought by a current, and then the
water may have become still, and the clay settled quietly round them.
What? Under them as well as over them? On that theory also we
should find them only at the bottom of the clay. As it is, we find
them scattered anywhere and everywhere through it, from top to
bottom. So that theory will not do. Indeed, no theory will do which
supposes them to have been brought by water alone.

Try yourself, dear reader, and make experiments, with running water,
pebbles, and mud. If you try for seven years, I believe, you will
never contrive to make your pebbles lie about in your mud, as they
lie about in every pit in the boulder clay.

Well then, there we are at fault, it seems. We have no explanation
drawn from known facts which will do--unless we are to suppose, which
I don't think you will do, that stones, clay, and all were blown
hither along the surface of the ground, by primeval hurricanes, ten
times worse than those of the West Indies, which certainly will roll
a cannon a few yards, but cannot, surely, roll a boulder stone a
hundred miles.

Now, suppose that there was a force, an agent, known--luckily for
you, not to you--but known too well to sailors and travellers; a
force which is at work over the vast sheets of land at both the north
and south poles; at work, too, on every high mountain range in the
world, and therefore a very common natural force; and suppose that
this force would explain all the facts, namely--

How the stones got here;

How they were scratched and rounded;

How they were imbedded in clay;

because it is notoriously, and before men's eyes now, carrying great
stones hundreds of miles, and scratching and rounding them also;
carrying vast deposits of mud, too, and mixing up mud and stones just
as we see them in the brick-pits,--Would not our common sense have a
right to try that explanation?--to suspect that this force, which we
do not see at work in Britain now, may have been at work here ages
since? That would at least be reasoning from the known to the
unknown. What state of things, then, do we find among the highest
mountains; and over whole countries which, though not lofty, lie far
enough north or south to