THE PARALLEL ROADS OF GLEN ROY 219 



planation of them given by the country people in his 

 time. They thought that the roads "were designed for 

 the chase, and that the terraces were made after the spots 

 were cleared in lines from wood, in order to tempt the 

 animals into the open paths after they were roused, in 

 order that they might come within reach of the bowmen 

 who might conceal themselves in the woods above and 

 below." 



In these attempts of "the country people" we have 

 an illustration of that impulse to which all scientific 

 knowledge is due — the desire to know the causes of 

 things; and it is a matter of surprise that in the case 

 of the parallel roads, with their weird appearance chal- 

 lenging inquiry, this impulse did not make itself more 

 rapidly and energetically felt. Their remoteness may per- 

 haps account for the fact that until the year 1817 no sys- 

 tematic description of them, and no scientific attempt at 

 an explanation of them, appeared. In that year Dr. Mac- 

 Culloch, who was then President of the Geological So- 

 ciety, presented to that society a memoir, in which the 

 roads were discussed, and pronounced to be the margins 

 of lakes once embosomed in Glen Roy. Why there 

 should be three roads, or why the lakes should stand at 

 these particular levels, was left unexplained. 



To Dr. MacCulloch succeeded a man, possibly not so 

 learned as a geologist, but obviously fitted by nature 

 to grapple with her facts and to put them in their proper 

 setting. I refer to Sir Thomas Dick- Lauder, who pre- 

 sented to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, on the 2d of 

 March, 1818, his paper on the Parallel Roads of Glen 

 Roy. In looking over the literature of this subject, which 

 is now copious, it is interesting to observe the differentia- 



