376 THE FOSSILIFEROUS 
are yielding their organisms,— Dumfries, Galloway, and Peebles- 
shire their graptolites, and Girvan and its neighborhood its tri- 
lobites and its shells. The shores of the Solway near Kirkcud- 
bright are furnishing, though still inadequately, their fossils of 
the Upper Silurian; and it seems not improbable that the Gir- 
van locality may be yet found to furnish characteristic speci- 
mens of all the various deposits of the Lower Silurian, from 
those emphatically ancient beds beneath which only a single 
organism has yet been detected, up to those superior deposits 
of the Lower division in which the Dudley Trilobite (Caly- 
mene Blumenbachit) occurs, and which Sir Roderick Murchi- 
son regards as occupying the same, or nearly the same, horizon 
as the Upper Caradoc. I am informed by our accomplished 
brother member, Professor Wyville Thomson, that in a recent 
visit to Girvan, he found, in an ancient Conglomerate to the 
south of the town, specimens of a small lingula and olenus, 
identical, so far as he could judge from their state of keeping, 
with the fossils of unquestionably the same genera which mark, 
in the sister kingdom, the primeval zone of life. It would be 
interesting to find in our own country, as has already been 
found in North America, England, and Scandinavia, a base 
line,— representative, apparently, of the earliest age of organ- 
ized being,— from whence to commence the geologic history of 
what our fathers used to term, without quite knowing all that 
was implied in the epithet, o/d Scotland. But whether this 
base line of the oldest fossiliferous system be found in our 
country or no, the system itself, especially as developed within 
the southern and western districts, must be held to possess a 
peculiar interest, from the circumstance that, though some of 
its more curious fossils have not yet been found in the amply 
developed and well-sought Silurians of England, they occur in 
those of Bohemia on the one hand, and of Canada West and 
the United States on the other. They thus form in the gen- 
