Note Footnote 5: — Chapter VII

Not only must the circumstances in hand be explained, but other circumstances must be found to be such as we should expect if the cause assigned really operated. Take, for example, the case of Erratic blocks or boulders, huge fragments of rock found at a distance from their parent strata. The lowlands of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the great central plain of Northern Europe contain many such fragments. Their composition shows indubitably that they once formed part of hills to the northward of their present site. They must somehow have been detached and transported to where we now find them. How? One old explanation is that they were carried by witches, or that they were themselves witches accidentally dropped and turned into stone. Any such explanation by supernatural means can neither be proved nor disproved. Some logicians would exclude such hypotheses altogether on the ground that they cannot be rendered either more or less probable by subsequent examination.5 The proper scientific limit, however, is not to the making of hypotheses, but to the proof of them. The more hypotheses the merrier: only if such an agency as witchcraft is suggested, we should expect to find other evidence of its existence in other phenomena that could not otherwise be explained. Again, it has been suggested that the erratic boulders may have been transported by water. Water is so far a vera causa that currents are known to be capable of washing huge blocks to a great distance. But blocks transported in this way have the edges worn off by the friction of their passage: and, besides, currents strong enough to dislodge and force along for miles blocks as big as cottages must have left other marks of their presence. The explanation now received is that glaciers and icebergs were the means of transport. But this explanation was not accepted till multitudes of circumstances were examined all tending to show that glaciers had once been present in the regions where the erratic blocks are found. The minute habits of glaciers have been studied where they still exist: how they slowly move down carrying fragments of rock; how icebergs break off when they reach water, float off with their load, and drop it when they melt; how they grind and smooth the surfaces of rocks over which they pass or that are frozen into them: how they undercut and mark the faces of precipices past which they move; how moraines are formed at the melting ends of them, and so forth. When a district exhibits all the circumstances that are now observed to attend the action of glaciers the proof of the hypothesis that glaciers were once there is complete.