308 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 



for it is difficult to keep the mind in a purely blank state on 

 any subject on which one thinks a good deal as represen- 

 tative of a chaotic period of death and darkness, introductory, 

 mayhap, to the existing scene of things. 



After, however, I had begun to mark the invariable con- 

 nection of the clay, as a deposit, with the dressed surfaces on 

 which it rests, and the longitudinal linings of the pebbles and 

 boulders which it incloses, and to associate it, in consequence, 

 with an ice-charged sea and the Great Gulf Stream, it seemed 

 to me extremely difficult to assign a reason why it should be 

 thus barren of remains. Sir Charles Lyell states, in his " Ele- 

 ments," that the " stranding of ice-islands in the bays of Ice- 

 land since 1835 has driven away the fish for several succes- 

 sive seasons, and thereby caused a famine among the inhabi- 

 tants of the country ;" and he argues from the fact, " that a 

 sea habitually infested with melting ice, which would chill 

 and freshen the water, might render the same uninhabitable 

 by marine mollusca." But then, on the other hand, it is 

 equally a fact that half a million of seals have been killed in 

 a single season on the meadow-ice a little to the north of New- 

 foundland, and that many millions of cod, besides other fish, 

 are captured year] yon the shores of that island, though grooved 

 and furrowed by ice-floes almost every spring. Of the seal 

 family it is specially recorded by naturalists, that many of 

 the species "are from choice inhabitants of the margins of 

 the frozen seas towards both poles ; and, of course, in locali- 

 ties in which many such animals live, some must occasionally 

 die." And though the grinding process would certainly have 

 disjointed, and might probably have worn down and partial- 

 ly mutilated, the bones of the amphibious carnivora of the 

 boulder period, it seems not in the least probable, judging 

 from the fragments of loose-grained sandstone and soft shale 

 which it has spared, that it would have wholly destroyed 

 them. So it happened, however, that from North Berwick 



