CHAP. xin. REPORT BY HUGH MILLER. 171 



boulder clay of Caithness. Hugh Miller had said 

 that he "had never found in the boulder clay the 

 slightest trace of an organism that could be held to 

 belong to itself," and he "became somewhat sceptical 

 regarding the very existence of boulder fossils. I must 

 now state, however," he says, " that my scepticism has 

 thoroughly given way ; and that, slowly yielding to the 

 force of positive evidence, I have become an assured 

 believer in the comminuted recent shells of the boulder 

 clay, as in the Belemnites of the Oolite and Lias, or 

 the ganoid Ichthyolites of the Old Red Sandstone."* 

 Hugh Miller then refers to the numerous marine shells 

 found by Dick on the banks of the Thurso river, and 

 in the- boulder clay along the burn at Freswick. 



Dick went on with his observations. On the 27th 

 October 1848, he thus began his letter to Hugh 

 Miller: 



"The whole affair is settled. Scepticism may go 

 sneak with the moles and the bats, into holes and 

 corners. It was no mud eruption no temporary flood 

 of ocean brine that laid down the blue clay and 

 marine shells in Freswick Burn. No! It was the 

 ocean itself, wide and broad as poor auld Scotland, 

 when the proudest pinnacles of Dunnet Head lay far 

 beneath its billows. 



" In my last note to you, I said that I must go and 

 see the eastern side of Dunnet Head, chafed by the 

 boisterous waves of the rude Pentland Firth. Monday, 



" Rambles of a Geologist," in Cruise of the Betsy, pp. 311-15. Ed. 1873 



