posing them to have been brought by ice, during a general submergence of the country, from some other hydrographical basin.
But in some of the pits at St. Acheul there are seen in the beds No. 4, fig. 21, not only well-rounded tertiary pebbles, but great blocks of hard sandstone, of the kind called in the south of England 'greyweathers,' some of which are three or four feet and upwards in diameter. They are usually angular, and when spherical owe their shape generally to an original concretionary structure, and not to trituration in a river's bed. These large fragments of stone abound both in the higher and lower level gravels round Amiens and at the higher level at Abbeville. They have also been traced far up the valley above Amiens, wherever patches of the old alluvium occur. They have all been derived from the tertiary strata which once covered the chalk. Their dimensions are such that it is impossible to imagine a river like the present Somme, flowing through a flat country, with a gentle fall towards the sea, to have carried them for miles down its channel, unless ice cooperated as a transporting power. Their angularity also favours the supposition of their having been floated by ice, or rendered so buoyant by it as to have escaped much of the wear and tear which blocks propelled along the bottom of a river channel would otherwise suffer. We must remember that the present mildness of the winters in Picardy and the north-west of Europe generally is exceptional in the northern hemisphere, and that large fragments of granite, sandstone, and limestone are now carried annually by ice down the Canadian rivers in latitudes farther south than Paris.[1]
Another sign of ice agency observed by me in many pits at St. Acheul, and of which Mr. Prestwich has given a good
- ↑ Principles of Geology, 9th ed. p. 220.
