I have dwelt thus at length on the glaciers of Great Britain because
they have been the subject of my personal investigations. But the Scotch
Highlands and the mountains of Wales and Ireland are but a few of the
many centres of glacial distribution in Europe. From the Scandinavian
Alps glaciers descended also to the shores of the Northern Ocean and the
Baltic Sea. There is not a fiord of the Norway shore that does not bear
upon its sides the tracks of the great masses of ice which once forced
their way through it, and thus found an outlet into the sea, as in
Scotland. Indeed, under the water, as far as it is possible to follow
them through the transparent medium, I have noticed in Great Britain and
in the United States the same traces of glacial action as higher up, so
that these ancient glaciers must have extended not only to the
sea-shore, but into the ocean, as they do now in Greenland. Nor is this
all. Scandinavian boulders, scattered upon English soil and over the
plains of Northern Germany, tell us that not only the Baltic Sea, but
the German Ocean also, was bridged across by ice, on which these masses
of rock were transported. In short, over the whole of Northern Europe,
from the Arctic Ocean to the northern borders of its southern
promontories, we find all the usual indications of glacial action,
showing that a continuous sheet of ice once spread over nearly the whole
continent, while from all the mountain-ranges descended those more
limited glacial tracks terminating frequently in transverse moraines
across the valleys, showing, that, as the general ice-sheet broke up and
contracted into local glaciers, every cluster or chain of hills became a
centre of glacial dispersion, such as the Alps are now, such as the
Jura, the Highlands of Scotland, the mountains of Wales and Ireland, the
Alps of Scandinavia, the Hartz, the Black Forest, the Vosges, and many
others have been in ancient times.
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