DEPOSITS OF SCOTLAND. 399 
still lives in the Frith of Forth,— which furnished me in the 
course of last summer with two specimens, that, from their 
appearance, must have died within the twelvemonth, — seems 
to be a greatly less abundant shell in the locality now than dur- 
ing the ages of the old-coast line, and appears, unless, indeed, 
it has been hitherto strangely missed by our dredgers, to be 
dying out. The old sea-bottom at Queensferry, little more 
than half an acre in extent, furnished me with full three dozen 
specimens, though in a state more or less broken, — an extra- 
ordinary number for what has been well described in the history 
of the Mollusea as one of our rarest British shells. Of these 
recent shells of the ancient coast line we find older and newer 
beds. The Scrobicularia of Portobello, for instance, were the 
inhabitants of a muddy estuary, which ran along what is now 
the flat, winding, willow-skirted valley that runs inland towards 
the village of Easter Duddingstone ; but ere the last upheaval 
of the land they must have been dead for ages; for how can 
we otherwise interpret their position in the brick-clay, with from 
six to eight feet of an argillaceous deposit, of apparently slow 
formation, resting over them. The Pholas bed of the Lones 
of Fern exists in similar conditions. It, too, was deeply silted 
over ere the last rise of the land; whereas the shells of Gran- 
ton, and of many other localities on the coast, must have been 
beach-shells at the time of the upheaval; and not a few of them 
were, mayhap, living scarce half a year before. In some of 
these old estuary deposits, — such as that of Portobello, —we 
find interesting remains of the aboriginal trees of the country, 
— boles of oak, birch, alder, the Scotch fir, and the yew, — with 
handfuls of sorely blackened hazel-nuts, and the trunks and 
branches of a dwarfish hawthorn, converted into a glossy sub- 
stance, nearly resembling jet. They yield us curious glimpses 
of those mighty woods which covered the country ere it had 
become a home of man, or during those earlier ages of his in- 
