674 JAMES GEIKIE 



in its favor, this sliould not be hard to recognize. Where, one might 

 ask, are those convenient bars or banks behind which the stagnant 

 water is supposed to have accumulated ? 



That none of these explanations can be accepted as sufficient 

 to account for the phenomena of our peat-bogs in general is shown 

 by the mere fact that the buried forests are not confined to the peat 

 of lowlying and gently undulating ground — to situations, namely, 

 where the drainage might possibly have been disturbed by one or 

 other of the causes suggested. On the contrary, they occur just as 

 constantly in the peat covering mountain slopes and hilltops, where 

 owing to the form of the ground, interruptions of the drainage could 

 not possibly take place. Moreover, the nearly constant occurrence, 

 throughout the peat of low grounds and high grounds ahke, of at 

 least two buried forests, obviously points to the operation of some 

 widely acting recurrent cause. 



Conclusions similar to mine were subsequently advocated by the 

 late Professor Blytt, who, after a careful study of the peat-mosses of 

 Norway, was convinced that these gave evidence of a well-marked 

 alternation of wet and relatively dry climatic conditions having 

 obtained after the low grounds of that country had been vacated 

 by the great inland ice of the Glacial Period.^ I need only add 

 that the phenomena of successive "buried forests" have long been 

 recognized almost everywhere in the peat-bogs of northern and 

 northwest Europe. The occurrence of these trees, however, has been 

 variously interpreted — some authors upholding views that are 

 practically the same as those I ventured to set forth so many years 

 ago, while others would attribute the origin of the peat-mosses to 

 the overthrow of the trees by the various causes already referred to. 



When we come to inquire into the relation of our Scottish peat- 

 mosses to the glacial deposits, we have no difficulty in discovering 

 that they are of later date than the epoch of "District Ice- Sheets 

 and Mountain- Valley Glaciers." This is proved by the fact that 

 the peat with its buried trees overspreads the fluvio-glacial gravels 

 and moraines of that epoch. It would appear, then, that the oldest 

 of our inland peat-mosses occupy the same geological horizon as 



' Essay on the Immigration of the Norwegian Flora during Alternating Rainy 

 and Dry Periods, 1876. 



