Geoloffical features of the District of Buchan. 49 



of the geological formations, running not east and west, but north-east 

 and south-west, not right, but diagonally across the country. We have 

 thus lias at Cromarty, and a lower oolite near Elgin. May it not be 

 possible that all we want to complete the remaining members of the 

 series, is simply to be able to carry out our section into the Moray Frith? 

 Such an hypothesis receives confirmation from the fact, that in the 

 neighbourhood of Elgin, are beds containing wealden fossils, "which," 

 says Nicol, " we are led to suspect are not original formations, but frag- 

 ments of more extensive beds, perhaps drifted to this place."* The 

 diluvial clay containing lias fossils at Blackpots, also may indicate a 

 formation beneath the water of the bay. By referring to the geological 

 map of England, it will be seen that the greensand accompanies the 

 chalks lying on the west of it, and on the east of the lias, to the shore of 

 the channel. Our patch of it at Cruden, might form part of the termina- 

 tion of a similar stripe, unless it too can be accounted for in the same way 

 as the Moray wealdons, by supposing it a drifted fragment from the north. 

 May we then fairly infer, that at one period the space now occupied 

 by the Moray Frith, contained a perfect sequence of the secondary forma- 

 tions? That first, the soft chalk strata suiTered denudation by the ordinary 

 action of north-easterly gales, currents, and drift-ice, and that the roll of 

 the German ocean piled up its debris in the shape of these water-worn 

 flint boulders, along its successive ancient shores, and that the wealden 

 and oolite of Elgin, and lias of Blackpots, followed in the same course ? 



That part of this theory applicable to the lias of Blackpots, Mr. Miller 

 states thus, in his description of that deposit : — 



" There had probably existed to the west or north-west of the deposit, 

 perhaps in the middle of the open bay formed by the promontory on which 

 it rests, — for the small proportion of other than liassic materials which it 

 contains, serves to show that it could be derived from no great distance, 

 — an outlier of the lower lias. The icebergs of the cold glacial period, pi'O- 

 pelled along the submerged land by some arctic current, or caught up by 

 the gulf stream, gradually gi-ated it down, as a mason's labourer grates 

 down the surface of the sandstone slab he is engaged in polishing: and the 

 comminuted debris, borne eastward by the current, was cast down here." 

 At Blackpots, the lias fossils occur in clay containing few other 

 boulders. At Boyndie, farther west, the flint boulders cover the shore ; 

 and at Delgaty, ten miles inland, they occur in great abundance, along 

 with boulders of (juartz rock, but no fossils except their own. It would 

 therefore appear that we owe the flint boulders and the lias boulders to 

 different periods. And as the chalk overlies the lias, it may be that its 

 denudation was completed, and its fossils thrown up upon the higli 

 grounds of the interior, previous to the formation of the boulder clay, 

 containing the fossils of the lias. Although apparently not here, the 

 boulder clay has in other places, (as on the banks of the Tliorsa, in 

 Caithness,) been found to contain " fragments of chalk-flints, and also 



» V. 193. 

 Vol. III.— No. 1. 4 



