Edinburgh Geological Society. 563 
are no beds containing marine shells which appear to have lived and 
died upon the spot. In the rare cases in which marine shells are found 
at all, they are generally broken, or so grouped as regards littoral and 
deep-water species as to show that they were dead shells when they 
came to be drifted and embedded where they now are. The sub- 
mergence, therefore, of our mountain contours under a glacial sea must 
have been a submergence essentially transitory in its character, whilst 
the extreme recency of both the submergence and of the re-submergence, 
belonging as both do to the times of the existing fauna, compels us to 
face the supposition of movements which have been relatively very rapid. 
This is where the shoe pinches, and where accordingly the Uniformitarian 
hypothesis makes vigorous exertions to betake itself to some convenient 
slipper. Placing one foot upon ice in the form of glaciers, and the other 
foot upon ice in the form of an assumed ‘‘ ice cap” or ‘‘ice sheet,”’ it tries 
to walk among the relics of this swelling sea without hearing its voice 
or looking at its waves. The stones and boulders which its ice-rafts 
scattered over the land—those which these rafts, stranding upon rocks 
which were then reefs and shoals, have in melting let down upon spots 
which are now peaks and pinnacles—all these are ascribed to glaciers 
or to an ice cap. Those who daily look upon these boulders in the 
curiously balanced and perilous position in which they are often placed, 
or those who study the facts of their distribution in the labours of Mr. 
Milne Home’s Boulder Committee, will be able to appreciate the 
futility of ascribing that position and distribution to glaciers. Glaciers 
have had their own appropriate effects, which are quite distinguishable 
and absolutely distinct. A glacier isa frozen river in a rocky bed, and 
with rocky banks: Upon those banks, and at its. termination where it 
ceases to flow, its lateral and its terminal moraines may occasionally 
leave or occasionally deposit fragments of rock in the position of 
perched boulders. But this is not and cannot be the normal action of 
a glacier. The remains which they have left are conspicuous in the 
Highlands, especially in all the larger glens which could form the beds 
of glaciers of considerable size. I know no better example of the 
peculiar manner in which they transport and deposit material, than the 
example to be seen in the valley of the Teith, from Callander to 
Dunblane. The eagle eye of our great national poet, Robert Burns— 
so sensitive to every aspect of nature—had caught, without knowing 
the cause, the peculiar moulding of the surface which adds such a 
charm to that part of the scenery of the Teith, and it is the moraine 
mounds of an ancient glacier that he has immortalized in his beautiful 
song, ‘‘ Ye Banks and Braes 0’ Bonnie Doon.’”’ But glaciers cannot 
have distributed boulders where they never themselves existed, and for 
one perched boulder in the Highlands, which can be accounted for by 
the lateral moraines of a glacier, there are hundreds of thousands 
which lie where no glacier can ever have placed them, because they 
are places where no glacier can ever have been generated. Turning, 
then, to the other alternative of an ice cap—that is to say, the passage 
of a mass of ice higher than the highest of our mountains, and bury- 
ing the whole of them deeply out of sight—I must repeat the opinion 
I have often before expressed: first, that there is no proof that it ever 
existed ; and, secondly, that if it ever did exist, there is no proof that 
