Moreover, when we come to examine the face of the rocks on which the Drift came, we do not find them merely smoothed and ground down, as we might suppose a great, heavy mass of ice moving slowly over them would leave them. There was something more than this. There was something, (whatever it was,) that fell upon them with awful force and literally _smashed_ them, pounding, beating, pulverizing them, and turning one layer of mighty rock over upon another, and scattering them in the wildest confusion. We can not conceive of anything terrestrial that, let loose upon the bare rocks to-day, would or could produce such results. Geikie says: "When the 'till' is removed from the underlying rocks, these almost invariably show either a well-smoothed, polished, and striated surface, or else a _highly confused, broken, and smashed_ appearance."[2] Gratacap says: "'_Crushed ledges_' designate those plicated, overthrown, or curved exposures where parallel rocks, as talcose schist, usually vertical, are bent and fractured, _as if by a maul like force, battering them from above_. The strata are oftentimes tumbled over upon a cliff-side like a row of books, and rest upon heaps of fragments broken away by the strain upon the bottom layers, or _crushed_ off from their exposed layers."[3] The Rev. O. Fisher, F. G. S., says he "Finds the covering beds to consist of two members--a lower one, entirely destitute of organic remains, and [1. "Geological Survey of Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota," p. 147. 2. "The Great Ice Age," p. 73. 3. "Popular Science Monthly," January, 1878, p. 326.] {p. 53} generally unstratified, which has often been _forcibly_ INDENTED _into the bed beneath it_, sometimes exhibiting slickensides at the junction. There is evidence of this lower member having been pushed or dragged over the surface, from higher to lower levels, _in a plastic condition_; on which account he has named it 'The Trail'."[1] Now, all these details are incompatible with the idea of ice-action. What condition of ice can be imagined that would _smash_ rocks, that would beat them like a maul, that would _indent_ them? And when we pass from the underlying rocks to the "till" itself, we find the evidences of tremendous force exerted in the wildest and most tumultuous manner. When the clay and stones were being deposited on those crushed and pounded rocks, they seem to have picked up the _detritus_ of the earth in great masses, and whirled it wildly in among their own material, and deposited it in what are called "the intercalated beds." It would seem as if cyclonic winds had been at work among the mass. While the "till" itself is devoid of fossils, "the intercalated beds" often contain them. Whatever was in or on the soil was seized upon, carried up into the air, then cast down, and mingled among the "till." James Geikie says, speaking of these intercalated beds: