Notes on some liaised Beaches in the West of Scotland. 235 



Diargiii of the river, and rested on a bed of gravel fifteen 

 inches thick. Above them was a bed of loam, nine or ten 

 feet thick, surmounted by sand. The' entire depth of the 

 situation of the canoes below the surface was seventeen feet, 

 being just about the present low-water level. 



A ninth canoe was discovered about 1852 at some little 

 distance down the river opposite Kelvinhaugh. 



These canoes are formed generally of one piece of wood, 

 and are merely trunks of trees hollowed out. Some of them, 

 liowever, are fashioned with a little more care, and have a 

 square stern of separate boards let into grooves in the main 

 log. 



I believe that since 1852 several more of these canoes 

 have been exhumed, but I have not been able to obtain the 

 particulars of their discovery. 



I must now offer, in conclusion, some remarks on the 

 period of the changes indicated by these various phenomena, 

 as well as upon the appearance whicli the locality of Glasgow 

 may have presented when such beaches as that of Sauchie- 

 hall Street were formed. 



First of all, I must clearly distinguish between the period 

 when these raised beaches were formed, and that in which 

 the canoes came to be embedded. For this latter it seems to 

 me to be enough to require that both banks of the Clyde at 

 Glasgow presented somewhat the appearance at the period to 

 which these canoes refer us, that the same banks from Dum- 

 barton to Helensburgh do at the present day. We find there 

 at high tide a noble expanse of water, but when the tide is 

 low, the inland ocean is converted into a vast plain of mud, 

 obviously the detritus carried down by the river. Every 

 flood helps to narrow the fens farthest up, and to add to the 

 mud-banks below ; and time alone, in addition to the causes 

 now in operation, is all that is required to convert the wide 

 area of shallow water into rich alluvial soil. The process 

 has only been a little more rapid on the site of the Green 

 and the lower parts of Glasgow and neighbourhood. Let us 

 imagine then that in these early ages the flat lands now 

 adjacent to the river, much of which has been heightened 

 artificially, were low plains covered with water at high tide. 



