for the stones and clay and sand to gather behind it. One may notice
the same kind of action upon the bed of a stream, where the sediment
tends to collect in the rear of prominent stones and boulders. And we
can hardly fail to have observed further that the sediment of a river
often arranges itself under the action of the current in long banks,
which run parallel to the course of the water. Underneath the ice-sheet
the stones, sand, and clay behaved in the same way. Behind projecting
rocks in sheltered nooks and hollows, they accumulated, while in
places exposed to the full sweep of the ice-stream they were piled up
and drawn out into long parallel banks and ridges, the trend of which
coincided with that of the ice-flow. The presence of confused and
irregular patches and lenticular beds of sand, clay, and gravel in the
till is not difficult to understand when we know that there is always
more or less water flowing on underneath a glacier. Such streams must
assort the débris, and roll angular fragments into rounded stones and
pebbles; but the materials thus assorted in layers will ever and anon
be crushed up so as to be either partially or wholly obliterated by the
slowly moving glacier.
As the stones and clay were derived from the underlying rocks, it is no
wonder that the colour of the till should vary. In the Silurian tracts
it is pale yellowish, or bluish grey, and the stones consist chiefly
of fragments of Silurian rocks, all blunted and smoothed, and often
beautifully polished and striated. When we get into the Red Sandstone
region of the low-grounds the colour of the clay begins by-and-by to
change, and fragments of red sandstone become commingled with the
Silurian stones, until ere long the colour of the deposit is decidedly
red, and sandstone fragments abound. Everywhere the stones show that
they have been carried persistently in one direction, and that is _out
from the watershed, and down the main valleys_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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