_Ireland._—At Armagh, Ireland, Professor Hull found boulder beds of Permian age, containing pebbles and boulders, sometimes 2 feet in diameter. Some of the boulders must have been transported from a region lying about 30 miles to the north-west of the locality in which they now occur. It is difficult to conceive, says Professor Hull, how rock fragments of such a size could have been carried to their present position by any other agency than that of floating ice. This boulder-bed is overlaid by a recent bed of boulder clay. Professor Ramsay, who also examined the section, agrees with Professor Hull that the bed is of Permian age, and unquestionably of ice-formation.[174] Professor Ramsay feels convinced that the same conclusions which he has drawn in regard to the Permian breccia of England will probably yet be found to hold good in regard to much of that of North Germany.[175] And there appears to be some ground for concluding that the cold of that period even reached to India.[176] _South Africa._—An ancient boulder clay, supposed to be either of Permian or Jurassic age, has been extensively found in Natal, South Africa. This deposit, discovered by Dr. Sutherland, the Surveyor-General of the colony, is thus described by Dr. Mann:— “The deposit itself consists of a greyish-blue argillaceous matrix, containing fragments of granite, gneiss, graphite, quartzite, greenstone, and clay-slate. These imbedded fragments are of various size, from the minute dimensions of sand-grains up to vast blocks measuring 6 feet across, and weighing from 5 to 10 tons. They are smoothed, as if they had been subject to a certain amount of attrition in a muddy sediment; but they are not rounded like boulders that have been subjected to sea-breakers. The fracture of the rock is not conchoidal, and there is manifest, in its substance, a rude disposition towards wavy stratification.” “Dr. Sutherland inclines to think that the transport of vast massive blocks of several tons’ weight, the scoring of the subjacent surfaces of sandstone, and the simultaneous deposition of minute sand-grains and large boulders in the same matrix, all point to one agency as the only one which can be rationally admitted to account satisfactorily for the presence of this remarkable formation in the situations in which it is found. He believes that the boulder-bearing clay of Natal is of analogous nature to the great Scandinavian drift, to which it is certainly intimately allied in intrinsic mineralogical character; that it is virtually a vast moraine of olden time; and that ice, in some form or other, has had to do with its formation, at least so far as the deposition of the imbedded fragments in the amorphous matrix are concerned.”[177]