Mr Hugh Miller on Bonlder-Glaciation. 171 



of a street when the stones have been raised for a partial 

 repair. The materials of the pavements are about as various 

 as the scattered contents of the till. And having travelled 

 different distances, with different usage, some are more angular 

 than others. 



While the general slope of the pavements is seawards and 

 southwards, such of the individual boulders as are best 

 striated have more or less of the usual cant towards the ice. 

 But they are modified by their pavement-grouping (Fig. 5). 

 The smaller stones that are fitted in among the others have 

 escaped striation altogether; others, rising a little higher, 

 have been brushed atop; while others, again, have been 

 planed off as flat and as square- edged as a laundry-maid's 

 iron. The stones that have escaped striation altogether form 

 perhaps the greater number of the whole. And it must by 

 no means be overlooked that some of these boulder-groups 

 upon the Fillyside shore are simply trains of boulders con- 

 fusedly huddled together and unstriated : and that it is only 

 in places that their arrangement is really so workmanlike as 

 in Fig. 5. One large patch of stones on the westmost side, 

 which, unlike the others, is broad enough to measure fully 

 70 yards across, and has only one straight edge, has been so 

 lightly passed over that it was only after some search that I 

 found any signs of surface-glaciation at all. On the whole, 

 these boulder-pavements deserve to rank among the most 

 singular glacial phenomena in the country.^ 



Conclusions. 



The four general conclusions to which these observations 

 — backed by others extending over some hundreds of square 

 miles — lead, may be stated, to a considerable extent, in the 

 words of Maclaren and Hugh Miller, of whose early obser- 

 vations they can profess to be only an extension. 



^ I have not observed tlie appearance of which Mr Eobert Chambers speaks 

 (my father makes no allusion to it), of a hollow on the pavements, as if some 

 great wheel had run eastwards and left a slight track. One cannot but 

 remark, liowever, upon the singular prevalence of straight lines among these 

 boulder groups, that gives the whole series some resemblance, from a distance, 

 to the hollows and crests of a roadway deeply marked with ruts. 



