131 



Mayer had offered to purchase the vakiable Faussett Museum of Saxou 

 Antiquities which had been offered to the Trustees of the British 

 Museum for £680, but which they refused to purchase. 



Mr. William Ferguson, F.L.S., F.G.S., &c., read a Paper 



ON THE RAISED BEACHES OF THE FRITH OF CLYDE ; 

 WITH NOTICES OF THE DISCOVERY OF NUMEROUS 

 ANCIENT CANOES IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF 



GLASGOW. 



The more recent of the geological changes, which the surface of our 

 earth has undergone, are not the least puzzling. There are evidences 

 of changes and counter-changes, oscillations of the surface, elevation, 

 depression, and elevation again, which are wondrously perplexing, and 

 complicate the study of recent geology to a very great degree. Whether 

 this arises from the greater number of the observed facts relating to 

 this period, as compared with the older eras, or whether it is, that these 

 recent periods have been subjected to a greater variety of disturbing 

 influences than the others, it would be hard to determine. It is at any 

 rate true, that much greater unanimity prevails among geological 

 ■writers in their theories of the earlier deposits, their reconstructions of 

 the aspects the earth presented during their continuance, and the 

 circumstances under which their inhabitants existed and perished, than 

 does with respect to almost all that comes within the range of the post 

 tertiary division of the science. The veil has been lifted, with some 

 apparent degree of truth, from off the various systems, which, one after 

 another, have each been once " the present." We recognize a Silurian 

 period, characterized by a profusion of zoophytes, shells, and cuttle 

 fishes, with the latter of which probably the trilobite disputed jDre- 

 eminence, the whole system presenting us with but very meagre 

 evidence of vertebrated inhabitants. The labours of Hugh Miller have 

 restored the forms and habits of the families of mail-clad fishes which 

 predominate in the old red sand-stone period ; and the carboniferous 

 system has once more, in imagination, waved its forests of palms and 

 gigantic tree ferns and towering reeds before our delighted gaze. The 

 lands and seas of the various gi'oups which succeed have been re-peopled, 

 and their terrible reptiles and mammoth quadrupeds have been pour- 

 trayed. And all this has been done with a striking degree of unanimity, 

 going far to vouch for the truthfulness of the conclusions arrived at. 

 But the period of the drift, and the boulders, and the sea beaches, is 

 still, in the extremest sense of the term, " Debateable land," and from 



