ery illustrious
Scandinavian explorer, visiting Edinburgh, declared, as soon as he
saw the sections of boulder-clay exhibited near that city, that this
was the very substance which he saw forming in the Spitzbergen ice-
fiords. {3}

I have put these facts as simply and baldly as I can, in order that
the reader may look steadily at them, without having his attention
drawn off, or his fancy excited, by their real poetry and grandeur.
Indeed, it would have been an impertinence to have done otherwise;
for I have never seen a live glacier, by land or sea, though I have
seen many a dead one. And the public has had the opportunity,
lately, of reading so many delightful books about "peaks, passes, and
glaciers," that I am bound to suppose that many of my readers know as
much, or more, about them than I do.

But let us go a step farther; and, bearing in our minds what live
glaciers are like, let us imagine what a dead glacier would be like;
a glacier, that is, which had melted, and left nothing but its
skeleton of stones and dirt.

We should find the faces of the rock scored and polished, generally
in lines pointing down the valleys, or at least outward from the
centre of the highlands, and polished and scored most in their upland
or weather sides. We should find blocks of rock left behind, and
perched about on other rocks of a different kind. We should find in
the valleys the old moraines left as vast deposits of boulder and
shingle, which would be in time sawn through and sorted over by the
rivers. And if the sea-bottom outside were upheaved, and became dry
land, we should find on it the remains of the mud from under the
glacier, stuck full of stones and boulders iceberg-dropped. This mud
would be often very irregularly bedded; for it would have been
disturbed by the ploughing of the icebergs, and mixed here and there
with dirt which had fallen from them. Moreover, as the sea became
shallower and the mud-beds got awash one after the other, they would
be torn about, re-sifted, and re-shaped by currents and by tides, and
mixed with shore-sand ground out of shingle-beach, thus making
confusion worse confounded. A few shells, of an Arctic or northern
type, would be found in it here and there. Some would have lived
near those later beaches, some in deeper water in the ancient ooze,
wherever the iceberg had left it in peace long enough for sea-animals
to colonise and breed in it. But t