1008 REPORT—1885. 
with the-rocks and fossils of the upper greensand abound in your boulder-clays of 
Aberdeenshire and Banffshire. 
Of the vast periods of the Tertiary we have left to us, either in the Highlands 
or Scandinavia, but few and insignificant relics in the form of stratified deposits. 
In our beautiful Western Isles and in Antrim the lava poured out im successive 
streams, during enormous periods of time, from the lofty voleanic cones of the 
earlier Tertiary epoch, has here and there buried patches of lake-mud, or river- 
gravel, or ancient soils. But everywhere, alike in the Highlands and in Scandi- 
navia, we behold the most impressive evidences of the sub-aerial waste, and of the 
elevation that promoted this waste during the Tertiary epoch. Among such 
evidences we may reckon the circumstance that all traces of the vast deposits of 
the Secondary periods have been relentlessly stripped away from the country, except 
where buried deeply by gigantic earth-throes, or sealed up under massive lava- 
streams, 
Down to post-glacial times Scotland, and what are now its outlying islands, 
remained united with Scandinavia. I need not remind you how, during the glacial 
period, they were the scene of a similar succession of events; while from their then 
far more elevated mountain-summits streams of ¢lacier-ice flowed down and relieved 
the mantle of snow which enveloped them. 
But at a very recent geological period, and indeed since the appearance of man 
in this part of our globe, the separation of the two areas, so long united, was 
brought about. In the district now constituting the North Sea, which separates 
the two countries, great faults, originating in the Tertiary epoch, appear to have 
let down wide tracts of the softer Secondary strata among the harder crystalline 
rock-masses. The numerous changes of level, of which we find such abundant 
evidence around the shores of this sea, facilitated the wearing away of the whole 
of these softer Secondary deposits, except the slight fringes that remain along the 
shores of Sutherland, Ross, and Cromarty, on the one hand, and the isolated 
patches forming Scania, Jutland, and the surrounding islands on the other. Little 
could the Vikings, as they sailed over this shallow sea, have imagined that their 
predecessors in these regions were able to roam on foot from Norroway to 
Suderey ! 
It is almost impossible to over-estimate the effects produced by the several 
denudations to which Scandinavia and the Scottish Highlands have been succes- 
sively subjected. In that which occurred during the later Tertiary periods, almost 
every portion of the non-crystalline rocks that rose above the sea-level was either 
entirely removed or converted into level plains, which, covered with drift deposits, 
now form districts like Scania and Denmark. Where, as in the great central 
valley of Scotland, hard volcanic masses are associated with the softer sedimentary 
rocks, the former are left rising as picturesque crags, standing boldly up above the 
general level, while the latter are worn down and buried under drift. In the 
west of Scotland a chain of volcanic mountains, with summits towering to the 
height of from ten to fifteen thousand feet, have been reduced by this same denu- 
dation to basal-wrecks, the highest portions of which attain to but little more than 
3,000 feet above the sea-level ! 
During the great elevation and denudation which marked the Neocomian 
period, thousands of feet of strata must have been removed over wide areas, as is 
proved by the wonderful overlap of the Cretaceous beds on all the older strata. 
Of the enormous sub-aerial waste which went on in these Northern Alps during 
the Newer Paleozoic periods we have impressive evidence in the vast masses of 
the Old Red Sandstone and Carboniferous rocks—themselves only a series of frag- 
ments that have survived the later denudations—for these rocks are built up of 
the materials derived from our Northern Alps. 
The Torridon Sandstone is the monument, and a very striking monument too, of 
another and still earlier period of enormous denudation. The thousands of feet of 
conglomerate and sandstone of which it is made up consist of the disintegrated 
crystals of granites and gneisses that have been swept away. 
When we penetrate towards the axis of this eroded mountain-chain, the proofs 
