180 fieports and Proceedings. 
surface in one unbroken and continuous course.—Mr. J. Plant said 
that evidences of glaciation on the western side of the Pennine Chain 
were not numerous, as the Millstone-grit and the Coal-measures 
were too soft to allow a retention of markings made upon them. 
There was a better chance of striations retaining their permanency 
on limestone and igneous rocks, and it was mostly upon them that 
markings had been preserved.—Mr. J. Dickinson said that supposed 
glacial action had long been under his consideration, and he did 
not believe that these striations were formed in any such way as Mr. 
Aitken and others supposed. It was only a few months since, when 
in the Agecroft Colliery, near Manchester, that he took from the 
roof a piece of shale, which was common enough, showing scratch- 
ings on one side, which, had they been seen at the surface, would have 
been considered by ninety-nine of every hundred geological observers 
as glacial striations. He laid a specimen of the shale upon the table, 
and said that acres of shale more deeply striated could be got, 
and striations as fine as those at Clitheroe were often enough found 
on the face of faults. He believed that all these markings were due 
to an origin different to that which had been attributed to them. 
He thought that geologists took too contracted a view of the subject; 
they should go back to that lone time called ‘the beginning,’ when 
matter was created, probably billions of years ago, when matter was 
assimilating and forming, and before it was broken up into this earth 
and planets. ‘Till they could take a grand view of the subject such 
as that, they would only go on groping with little details which could 
never be satisfactorily explained—Mr. Aitken said that in intro- 
ducing his paper he did not contemplate a new theory, and he 
certainly could not grasp the comprehensive view suggested by Mr. 
Dickinson.— Mr. Chatwood said that he should like to learn Mr. 
Dickinson’s ideas as to the formation of striations on the surface. 
Mr. Dickinson said that he held a view which was entirely in ac- 
cordance with the Mosaic account of the creation, and it corresponded 
with every observation he had made in geology. In the remotest 
past, when the materials of which the earth and the planets were 
composed were a soft pulpy mass, gradually hardening into the strata 
as they now were, there were leakings from some strata across the 
faces of others below. We had the hemispheres formed by coal- 
basins, and the drawing off from the stratum formerly above the 
present surface had left marks as plainly behind it as the smoke 
from a chimney.—Mr. Plant said that the piece of shale shown by 
Mr. Dickinson ‘was simply a piece of ‘slicken-sides.—_Mr. Joseph 
Whittaker read a paper On the Outcrop of the Lower Coal-measure 
fiocks on Boulsworth and Gorple, together with observations on the 
origin of some rock-basins thereon. He explained that there was a 
very large number of detached large blocks of gritstone on the moors 
in the neighbourhood of Boulsworth, and that one of them was a very 
fine ‘logan.’ Many of these stones had large holes on their surface 
and sides, peculiar to the gritstone; and long examination of those 
holes had led him to believe that they were made by atmospheric 
causes, and not by the Druids, as many persons supposed.—Mr. 
