312 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 



winter was becoming deeply green, as the phosphorescence of 

 spring was deepening into the emerald glow of summer. On 

 the north-west the Ochils rose up huge masses of cloudlike 

 shadow, overtopped here and there by the greater Grampians 

 behind. Naturally, however, we gazed longest at the wide 

 expanse of landscape, stretching from the foot of the hill we 

 stood upon away over the broad lowlands of Midlothian — 

 the Firth, of Forth gleaming bright in the sunlight, the 

 higher lands of Fife dominated by the peaks of the East 

 and West Lomonds — and beyond them on to the far horizon, 

 broken by one solitary blue hill, which we supposed to be 

 one of the Grampians of Forfarshire, more than sixty miles 

 from us. Over this fair landscape the greater mass of the 

 ice of Scotland streamed outwards in a sheet greater in depth 

 than the hill we stood upon was high, and wider in extent 

 than the whole range of country we could take in at one 

 view. To imagine in any adequate degree the aspects of 

 that time, or of the scenes which took place in the area 

 before us, we felt ourselves utterly unable, and that here as 

 elsewhere in geology, " reason could lead where imagination 

 dare not follow," and we could only conclude, in Dr Croll's 

 own words, that " this broad plain — extending from almost 

 the Southern to the Northern Highlands — was the great 

 channel through which the ice of the interior of Scotland 

 found an outlet into the North Sea. If the depth of the ice 

 in the Firth of Forth, which forms the southern side of this 

 great broad hollow, was at least 1900 feet, it is not probable 

 that its depth in its northern side, formed by the valley of 

 Strathmore and the Firth of Tay, which lay more directly in 

 the path of the ice from the North Highlands, could have 

 been less. Here we have one vast glacier, more than 60 

 miles broad and 1900 feet thick, coming from the interior of 

 the country." * 



One other paragraph from '* Climate and Time " will fitly 

 close this note. On the question — Why the ice of Scotland 

 was of such enormous thickness, Dr CroU says: "The 

 enormous thickness of the ice in Scotland has been a matter 

 of no little surprise. It is remarkable how an island, not 

 * *' Climate and Time," \\ 441, 



