the land in Pleistocene times, for these valleys opened suddenly into a sea of considerably greater depth. A word of explanation is still required as to the meaning of the extremely flat rock-bottom, for one might have expected more of a U-shaped or V-shaped valley, unless the period of stationary sea-level were very long.
Owing to the great rush of water from Dartmoor during floods, and the enormous amount of coarse gravel swept down, the erosive power of these streams is very great. This was greatly exaggerated during the Glacial Epoch, to which the formation of the tin- ground and of the flat bottom belong. The melting of the snow in spring must have caused far more severe floods than we now see, and these floods must have brought down large quantities of river-ice heavily charged with boulders of hard and angular metamorphic rocks, such as would erode and trench in a way that does not now happen. Thus as the river changed its course or swung from side to side according to the varying amount of water, the ice-laden water must have had an erosive power more like that of a Canadian river in spring than like anything we now see in Britain. The wide and deep flat-bottomed trench need not have taken any enormous length of time to form, for river-ice and anchor-ice were constantly at work removing the loose material and laying bare the rock-face so that it could be again attacked.
