cussion of the problems of the ice age, and to register again his opposition to the views generally held by American geologists. Many of the arguments used closely resembled those of his former papers and may be reviewed here for the last time.
He regarded the phenomena of the boulder clay and drift in eastern America as due to the action of local glaciers, drift ice and the agency of cold northern currents. Against the theory of a universal glacier he again argued on the ground that such suppositions were not warranted by the facts.
For the supposition that such immense mountain chains existed and have disappeared, he found no warrant in geology, and for such an 'unexampled astronomical cause of refrigeration 'as the earth's passing into a colder portion of space, he found no evidence in astronomy. He agreed with Lyell in regarding the theory of the varying eccentricity of the earth as expounded by Croll as insufficient; moreover, it seemed to him physically impossible that a sheet of ice, such as that supposed, could move over an uneven surface, striating it in directions uniform over vast areas and often different from the present inclination of the surface.
He was further influenced in his opinion by the work of Hopkins, who showed, apparently, that only the sliding motion of glaciers could polish or erode rock surfaces, and the internal changes in their mass—the result of weight—could have little or no effect. Glaciers, moreover, he argued could not have transported the boulders great distances and lodged them upon the hill tops, and the universal glacier would, moreover, have no gathering ground for its materials. The huge feldspar boulders from the Laurentide Hills, stranded at Montreal Mountain at a height of six hundred feet above the sea and from fifty to sixty miles further southwest, and which must have come from little, if any, greater elevation and from a direction nearly at right angles to that of the glacial striæ, were against the ice-sheet theory, as were also the large boulders scattered through the marine stratified clays and sands, and the occurrence of marine fossils in the lower part of the drift in the true till near Portland, Maine, and at various points on the St. Lawrence in Canada.
To substantially these views Dawson held to the very last. In his 'Ice Age in Canada' (1893) he is found still combating vigorously the idea that all northern Europe and America were covered by a mer, de glace moving to the southward and outward to the sea, and which moved not only stones and clay to immense distances, but glaciated and
