Transactions. ■ 93 



For the majority of persons, especially those who are encom- 

 passed continually by the strain and struggle of modern city life, 

 nothing is better than to give free rein to a Natural History 

 hobby. Nothing so completely forces one into patience, so 

 utterly contiasts the clamorous bustle of man's work-a-day 

 notions with the deep silent sustained movement of all Nature's 

 processes, as to get gradually and everlastingly in love with 

 some one group of creatures, whom you cannot hurry, who will 

 not be the slaves of your human precision, but into whose beau- 

 tiful and orderly existence the more deeply you gaze the more 

 captivated you become, while the riddles of their being may 

 eventually help you to solve the riddle of you own. In the 

 words of Goethe, whose intuition nearly a century ago led him to 

 detect and expound the law of development in plants whicli we 

 to-day are accepting as the basis of botany, let us remember tliat 

 " Nature is always true, always serious, always severe ; she is 

 always right, and the errors and faults are always those of man. 

 Him who is incapable of appreciating her, she despises ; and 

 only to the apt, tlie pure, and tiie true does she resign herself and 

 reveal her secrets." 



II. Tlie Arctic Shell-beds of the Clyde. (Abstract.) 



By Mr R. W. Macfadzean. 



In this paper Mr Macfadzean refers chiefly to the post- 

 tertiary deposits at Garvel Park, Greenock, where the surface of 

 the Old Red Sandstone crops up in a series of ridges with deep 

 hollows between, and tiie post-tertiary clays lie in these hollows 

 reposing on the denuded sui'face of the boulder clay, and near the 

 level of present low water. The whole deposit is from 20 to 30 

 feet thick, and may be divided into several strata, only distin- 

 guishable from each other by their contents, for they glide into 

 one another without any perceptible break, and suggest the idea 

 that they are the result of one continuous though varied marine 

 action. There is first a layer of fine clay containing no shells, 

 over which lies the shell bed, in which the chief interest is centred. 

 The fossils preserved in it are perfect in outline, and the bivalves 

 such as Astarte Sulcata, Cyprina Islandica, and Pecten Islandicus, 

 are mostly found with the right and left valves in the juxta- 

 position of life. They are of a more arctic character than the 

 inhabitants of the present seas ; and with the exception of some 



