REVIEWS. 75 



Still the deposit is very decidedly a boreal one in its shells, and in its mechanical 

 phenomena, the most decidedly boreal of the group. Every rock- surface on which 

 it rests is grooved and striated ; almost every softer pebble which it encloses is 

 scratched and furrowed, usually in the line of its longer axis ; all its larger shells 

 exist as broken fragments, often rounded as if by attrition, and bearing in their 

 lines and scratches marks of the same agents that dressed the rocks and scored the 

 pebbles nay, the very substance and colour of its prevailing clays show that it is 

 mainly composed of the dressings of the rocks on which it rests all giving evidence, 

 apparently, of a time when our half- foundered country sat from eight hundred to a 

 thousand feet lower in the water than it does now, and vast packs of grinding ice- 

 bergs went careering over what are now its lower hills and its higher table-lands." 



The third and newest of the drift-beds, well developed on the borders, of 

 the Clyde, is thus introduced to his hearers by Mr. Miller 



" I had the pleasure of laying open, two years ago, at Fairlie, on the Ayrshire 

 coast, a virgin deposit, unknown before, in which I found continuous scalps of 

 Pecten Islandicus still occupying the place in which they had lived and died, and 

 with their upper valves covered with large balani, such as we now dredge up from 

 the outer limits of the laminarian zone, and all fresh and unbroken. Huge Pano- 

 pace were there sticking fast in an unctuous clay, with their open siphuncular ends 

 turned upwards ; and entire specimens of Cyprina [slandica and Modiola modi- 

 O/MS, with their valves still connected by the sorely decayed ligament. Tellina 

 proximo, was abundant, but reduced in size to little more than half the Gamrie di- 

 mensions. I found Astarte eliiptica the prevailing Astarte ; and groups of younger 

 Cyprinae huddled together in the character which they do not now assume on our 

 coast of gregarious shells. No crushing iceberg had passed over this deposit ; a 

 grooved and polished rock of old red sandstone lies beneath, overlaid by a thin 

 stratum of red clay, apparently derived from it, but the higher-lying gray stratum 

 in which the shells occur had a different origin ; it is simply the partially consoli- 

 dated mud of a quiet sea-bottom, and, though its group of organisms manifest deci- 

 dedly the boreal character, I cannot doubt that they lived at a time when, either 

 from some change in the currents of the coast, or from the elevation of the protect- 

 ing islands outside, an effect of a general rising of the land, the sea was no longer 

 an exposed one. They, in all probability, mark that later stage of the wintry period 

 to which the last-formed group of our local glaciers belonged, and in which our 

 gradually -emerging country presented, age after age, a broader and yet broader 

 area, won from the deep." 



We cannot part company with Mr. Miller without expressing our sense 

 of the obligations under which he has placed his fellow-labourers in 

 geology ; not more by his valuable contributions to their common pursuit, 

 than by the example he has set them of what may be accomplished by 

 sturdy independence of mind and vigorous use of the means at our own 

 disposal. So far as we know, Mr. Miller owes his present high position in 

 the estimation of geologists to his own unaided exertions, and to his 

 freedom from pretence ; and we sincerely hope that his younger fellow- 

 labourers in science may imitate, not only his zeal in the pursuit of science, 

 but also his manly independence and uprightness of character. We take 

 our leave of his Address with pleasure and regret pleasure caused by its 

 perusal, and regret occasioned by its brevity. 



