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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 contrasts 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 which we 
to-day are accepting as the basis of botany, let us remember that 
“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, the pure, and the true does she resign herself and 
reveal her secrets.” 
Il. The Arctic Shell-beds of the Clyde. (Abstract.) 
By Mr R. W. Macrapzean. 
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 the post-tertiary clays lie in these hollows 
reposing on the denuded surface 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 
