Recollect what I said in my first paper: that water drops its
pebbles and coarser particles first, while it carries the fine clayey
mud onward in solution, and only drops it when the water becomes
still. Now currents of such tremendous violence as to carry these
boulder stones onward, would have carried the mud for many miles
farther still; and we should find the boulders, not in clay, 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.
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