The Raised Sea-Bottom of Fillyside. 219 
boulder clay upon which the raised beach rested. It was 
a strong, stiff, almost rock-like mass, and came out from 
under the raised beach deposit, and is washed over by every 
tide and storm of the present day; and I could not doubt 
that it was also exposed in the same way during the times 
of the raised beach, and that the spores were then washed 
out of it and mingled with the shells and other life remains 
and buried with them in the bed then forming. But the 
primary source was the spore coals and fire-clays of the 
Midlothian Coal-Measures, which had suffered denudation 
in the Glacial period from iceberg, glacier, or ice-sheet, and 
in tracing their descent from their origin in Carboniferous 
times to the time when they turned up in the washings 
of sands or muds from Fillyside, with all the changes of 
scenes and circumstances through which they passed, “ reason 
led,” as Professor Playfair says, “where imagination dared 
not follow.” Still it was a pleasure to attempt it. 
First, in the warm atmosphere of the Carboniferous forest 
Lepidodendroid trees flourished luxuriantly, enjoying a sub- 
tropical sunshine which ripened their cones as summer 
mellowed into autumn, till they opened their scale-like 
bracts and gave birth to the matured spores which were to 
carry on the vegetable life of the world down the course of 
time. Some would by circumstances be elected to everlasting 
life, while many and those among others would be castaways 
and become buried in clay or turned into coal, and be lost 
for a long time, even measured geologically, eons upon ons 
past reckoning. But a time did come in which they were 
restored to the light of day by the resurrectionary forces 
of Glacial times tearing up the rock-fast places they were 
immured in and breaking the bands which held them 
and setting them free, not, however, to fructify and bring 
forth plants after their Carboniferous kind, but to be 
reburied in boulder-clay, shovelled aside into a colder grave, 
and with maimed funeral rites, utterly unlike the dainty 
burial they had in congenial Carboniferous times. But 
this second burial was not final; a more gentle resurrec- 
tion awaited them in the more genial times of the raised 
beaches, and the clay which held them in durance this time 
