328 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 



of the scenery on the Bay of Luce. This terrace slopes 

 gradually upward to near a height of 100 ft., where the 

 Silurian rocks (Permian on the west of Loch Ryan) crop up 

 here and there in abrupt faces, as if eroded by the waves of 

 an ancient sea. From this height down smaller terraces 

 and escarpments can here and there be distinguished. Above 

 the higher beach there are also stratified sands and gravels 

 spread over flattened tracts or exposed in gravel pits dug iu 

 the fragmentary escarpments. At the period of the 100-fc. 

 beach broad sandy flats with shingle banks stretched seawards 

 along the bay like those at its north end or at Sandhead no^. 

 The fullest exposure of this sandy ancient sea-bottom is in 

 the great escarpment just mentioned, though good sections 

 are also opened up by some of the streams, as at Kilstay. 

 Just as the land was rising from the sea then, so it had been 

 rising before. From the height of 75 ft. upwards for 20 ft. 

 or more the stratified sands and gravels in places contain 

 conglomerates of the Queensberry series, Cairnsmuir granites, 

 and other erratics, from the Luce valley, apparently, among 

 the more local and less rounded greywacke and felstoie 

 boulders first seen by me in what had been then or • shortly 

 before a strait between Kilstay and Clanyard Bay. At the 

 height of 100 ft., near the Howe, there is a large mass of 

 old shore gravel, part of which is exposed. Tlie tract between 

 ISTew England Bay and Port Nessock, as also that between 

 Loch Ryan and Luce Bay, were then completely under water, 

 and their materials are those of the same terrace. But here 

 is the main point, — man inhabited the land both north and 

 south of the strait between Clanj^ard and Kilstay at the 

 close of the period when great icebergs were stranding on our 

 shores and glaciers were ceasing to leave their debris at 

 the mouths of the local valleys. It is questionable if the 

 straits themselves, like another further south (between the 

 Tarberts), were not partly scoured out by ice, though they 

 were preglacial river channels. At the time of the 100-ft. 

 beach, however, though this was in the recent period (?), and 

 long after the recognised boulder clays had clad the hillsides, 

 the ice age had hardly closed when man was leaving his 

 javelin-heads and hammer-stones on the shores of that time, 



