Do I mean that there were ever glaciers here? No, I do not. There have
been glaciers in Scotland in plenty. And if any Scotch boy shall read
this book, it will tell him presently how to find the marks of them far
and wide over his native land. But as you, my child, care most about
this country in which you live, I will show you in any gravel-pit, or
hollow lane upon the moor, the marks, not of a glacier, which is an ice-
river, but of a whole sea of ice.
Let us come up to the pit upon the top of the hill, and look carefully at
what we see there. The lower part of the pit of course is a solid rock
of sand. On the top of that is a cap of gravel, five, six, ten feet
thick. Now the sand was laid down there by water at the bottom of an old
sea; and therefore the top of it would naturally be flat and smooth, as
the sands at Hunstanton or at Bournemouth are; and the gravel, if it was
laid down by water, would naturally lie flat on it again: but it does
not. See how the top of the sand is dug out into deep waves and pits,
filled up with gravel. And see, too, how over some of the gravel you get
sand again, and then gravel again, and then sand again, till you cannot
tell where one fairly begins and the other ends. Why, here are little
dots of gravel, six or eight feet down, in what looks the solid sand
rock, yet the sand must have been opened somehow to put the gravel in.
You say you have seen that before.
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