"The facts point conclusively to the action in the British Isles of a series of glaciers radiating outward from the great hill chains or clusters, and, as the refrigeration progressed, becoming confluent and moving though in the same general direction, yet with less regard to the minor inequalities of the ground. During these two stages many glaciers must have debouched upon the sea-coast, with the consequent production of icebergs, which floated off with loads of boulders and dispersed them in the random fashion which is a necessary characteristic of transport by floating ice. "With a further accentuation of the cold conditions the discharge of bergs from terminal fronts which advanced into the extremely shallow seas surrounding the British shores would be quite inadequate to relieve the great press of ice, and a further coalescence of separate elements must have resulted. In the case of enclosed seas--as, for example, the Irish Sea--the continued inthrust of glacier-ice would expel the water completely; and the conjoined ice-masses would take a direction of flow the resultant of the momentum and direction of the constituent elements. In other cases--as, for example, in the North Sea--extraneous ice approaching the shores might cause a deflection of the flow of the native glaciers, even though the foreign ice might never actually reach the shore. "To such a system of confluent glaciers, and to the separate elements out of which they grew, and into which, after the culmination, they were resolved, I attribute the whole of the phenomena of the English and Welsh drift. And only at one or two points upon the coast, and raised but little above the sea-level, can I recognise any signs of marine action. "_The Preglacial Level of the Land._--There is very little direct evidence bearing upon this point. In Norfolk the famous forest bed, with its associated deposits, stands at almost precisely the level which it occupied in preglacial times. At Sewerby, near Flamborough Head, there is an ancient beach and 'buried cliff' which the sea is now denuding of its swathing of drift-deposits, and its level can be seen to be almost absolutely coincident with the present beach. Mr. Lamplugh, whose description of the 'Drifts of Flamborough Head,'[BN] constitutes one of the gems of glacial literature, considers that there is clear evidence that the land stood at this level for a long period. The beach is covered by a rain-wash of small extent, and that in turn by an ancient deposit of blown sand, while the lowest member of the drift series of Yorkshire covers the whole. Mr. Lamplugh thinks that the blown sand may indicate a slight elevation of the land; but the beach appears to me to be the storm beach, and the reduction in the force of the waves such as would result from the approach of an ice-front a few miles to the seaward would probably produce the necessary conditions. [Footnote BN: Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, vol. xlvii.]