Nothing but the
action of ice could produce what may be seen in any of our mountains-
-whole sheets of rock ground down into rounded flats, irrespective of
the lie of the beds, not in valleys, but on the brows and summits of
mountains, often ending abruptly at the edge of some sudden cliff,
where the true work of water, in the shape of rain and frost, is
actually destroying the previous work of ice, and fulfilling the rule
laid down (I think by Professor Geikie in his delightful book on
Scotch scenery as influenced by its geology), that ice planes down
into flats, while water saws out into crags and gullies; and that the
rain and frost are even now restoring Scotch scenery to something of
that ruggedness and picturesqueness which it must have lost when it
lay, like Greenland, under the indiscriminating grinding of a heavy
sheet of ice.
Lastly; no known agent, save ice, will explain those perched
boulders, composed of ancient hard rocks, which may be seen in so
many parts of these islands and of the Continent. No water power
could have lifted those stones, and tossed them up high and dry on
mountain ridges and promontories, upon rocks of a totally different
kind. Some of my readers surely recollect Wordsworth's noble lines
about these mysterious wanderers, of which he had seen many a one
about his native hills:
As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie
Couched on the bald top of an eminence,
Wonder to all who do the same espy
By what means it could thither come, and whence;
So that it seems a thing endued with sense:
Like a sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf
Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself.
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