S92 Proceedings of the Werner'ian Society. 



Lonach in Loch Lomond, twenty-two feet above the present le- 

 vel of the sea at Dunbarton, in which were some species appa- 

 ivntly new to conchologists, and several echini. In 1821, in an 

 account read to the Society of remains of the elephant found in 

 an alluvial bed near to Kilmarnock, it was noticed that these re- 

 mains were accompanied by sea-shells of the same species as 

 those living in the present sea. In 1824, Mr Blackadder, land- 

 siirveyor, laid before the Society a paper, an abstract of which 

 appeared in the 5th volume of the Society's Memoirs, on what 

 he calls the Superficial Strata of the Forth district. He there 

 mentions common sea-shells of the Forth as occurring at Pol- 

 maise, below Stirling, at Grangemouth, and other places near 

 the shores of the Forth ; and also some instances of their oc- 

 ciirrcnce far from the present natural habitat of these shells, 

 but everywhere above the present sea level. Mr Blackadder 

 of Edinburgh, a few years ago, described in a memoir laid be- 

 fore the Society the bed of sea-shells considerably above the 

 present level of the Frith at Wardie and Newhaven. And 

 within these few months, Mr Maclarcn, in a well known perio- 

 dical, " The Scotsman," describes a portion of the shell bed be- 

 tween Leith and Portobello, and Dr R. Thomson, in his inte- 

 resting new journal, " The Records of General Science," gives 

 several additional particulars regarding the shell bed on the 

 banks of the Clyde. From these details, it probably follows, ei- 

 ther that at some former period the waters of the Clyde and 

 Forth were considerably higher than they are at present, or that 

 the land has risen. 



2. Newest Floetz-Trap of Werner. — Werner, from the fact 

 of trap-rocks resting upon sands, clays, marls, &c., inferred that 

 these rocks were of comparatively recent formation. He fur- 

 ther conjectured, that these very generally distributed rocks, 

 were deposited from the waters of a deluge which overspread 

 the surface of the globe. A similar opinion is now prevalent 

 among geologists ; but with this difference, that modern geolo- 

 gists refer the formation of these rocks to igneous, not to aqueous, 

 agency, and the rising of the water to a rising of the land. 



3. Coal Formation. — Professor Jameson explained, that all 

 the chief geological characters of the old and the new coal for- 

 mations in Scotland had been amply and satisfactorily made out 



