The old and somewhat vexed subject of the methods of transportation of material by land- and sea-ice is again brought up in this paper, a subject on which there is so voluminous a literature that any attempt to add to it must have the support of the strongest reasons. It is, therefore, with some temerity that I attempt the description of a set of facts which appears to contain a key to some of the well-known problems of ice-action. Of all the phenomena of glacial deposits, perhaps the most puzzling are the occurrences of shelly drifts of marine origin in a great variety of circumstances, both as to height and as to composition. The great discussions of the past as to whether they indicated submergence, or merely an upthrust-action of the ice, can only be said to have been suspended and not concluded. The subject of this paper is a series of deposits on the Antarctic shores which point to an explanation of the origin of many of these shelly drifts and the peculiar circumstances in which they occur. In South Victoria Land we had the good fortune to see these shelly deposits at an early stage of their evolution, a stage now only possible in polar lands with a severe climate. The occurrence of raised marine muds, resting upon ice, was reported by the first Expedition that wintered in the Ross Sea, the British National Antarctic Expedition of 1901-1904. They were described by Mr. H. T. Ferrar, the geologist