466 Scientific Notices-^Zoology. [June, 



any shell-fish should be found at some distance from the sea, 

 and fit for use, is somewhat wonderful and astonishing."* 



When Dr. Hibbert was recently in Shetland, he was led by 

 this curious passage to make inquiry on the spot regarding these 

 cockles, but could procure no information on the subject; and 

 the surface of the soil being covered to some depth by drifted 

 sand precluded further investigation. 



Prof. Wallace, it may be mentioned, found oyster shells in 

 Bagshot Heath, too recent in appearance to be characterized as 

 fossil, of which the origin is not known ;t and modern experi- 

 ment has proved that shell-fish may be transferred from salt 

 to fresh water with impunity, though it is difficult to believe that 

 the ingenuity of our ancestors exerted itself in providing such 

 articles of luxury in such a way. The fact observed and related 

 by Mr. Witham, therefore, of live cockles being found at a dist- 

 ance so considerable from the sea, and at such a height above 

 its level, can only be accounted for by the retrocession of the 

 ocean — or by supposing some great convulsion to have submerged 

 the land, and left these evidences of its effects. In any view, the 

 discovery is interesting, and similar occurrences will probably 

 lead to a modification of the prevailing theories. If the shells 

 in question had not been found alive, it might have been conjec- 

 tured that they had been deposited there at a very distant 

 period, by one of those catastrophes which are supposed to have 

 changed the bed of the ocean, or floated its astonished inhabi- 

 tants over the land, and an unknown and mysterious antiquity 

 thus assigned to sheila which might have been alive shortly 

 before. That similar circumstances have, on more occasions 

 than one, misled observers, we have little doubt. We have seen 

 specimens of shells from the banks of Lochlomond, which seem, 

 from their appearance, to be in this predicament ; and instead 

 of supposing that these were the remains of animals which had 

 been left there when Lochlomond joined the eastern and western 

 seas, we should conjecture that they had recently lived and died 

 in the very lake on the banks of which they were found. 



In the paper, by Mr. J. Adamson, which gave an account of 

 the shells thus found, and which is printed in the Wernerian 

 Transactions, vol. iv. p. 334, that gentleman says, that " the 

 shells begin to appear about half-way between the highest and 

 lowest, or the winter and summer surfaces of the water, which 



• A Brief Description of Orkney, Zetland, Pightland-Firth, and Caithness, &c. 

 By John Brand, pp. 115, 116. Edinburgh, ITOl. 



+ [Is it not more probable that these oysters were fossils belonging to the Upper Marine 

 Formation, of which the Bagshot sand foims a member ? For although Mr. Warburton 

 states that the shelly matter of the fossil shells which certain beds in the Bagshot sand 

 contain has altogether perished, yet in the corresponding deposits of the crag in Suffolk, 

 and the upper marine formation in the Isle of Wight, many of the shells can scarcely be 

 distinguished from recent ones. All these deposits, it will be remembered, agree with 

 the upper marine formation of the Paris basin. — E. W. B.] 



