566 Reviews — Geological Society of Glasgow. 



the President of the Institute of Civil Engineers. If we were 

 directly seeking for coal, the question would evidently be one for 

 the adjoining landowners. If it were simply an ordinary scientific 

 experiment, it might be left to those specially interested in the 

 subject ; but our object is to obtain information which, while it must 

 certainly increase our scientific knowledge, may confer an incalcu- 

 lable benefit on large areas in which mineral wealth is at present an 

 unknown quantity. None of our supporters have subscribed with 

 the idea or intention of any personal gain whatever ; and it is to 

 minds thus constituted, — who will give ' hoping for nothing again,' 

 — that we must look for helj) to finish our work. 



"The Diamond Company have consented 'at less than half their 

 published tariff' to endeavour to bore 200 feet more at £2 a foot, 

 solely on the ground that it is a scientific, and not a commercial, 

 undertaking. And, by the aid of their superior machinery and 

 appliances, we have now a better prospect of boring 2,000 feet than 

 we had of boring 1,000 under the old system." 



III. — ^Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow. 

 Vol. IV. Part 3. 1874. 



THIS part contains brief notices of the proceedings of the Society 

 for the year 1872-3, with an account of the Conversazione 

 held in December, 1872, at which a fine collection of g-eological 

 specimens were exhibited by different members ; abstracts of three 

 papers, including the President's Address for 1874 ; and nine papers 

 printed in full, most of which bear upon some interesting points of the 

 geology and palaeontology of the west of Scotland. Of the non-local 

 papers, Mr. J. Geikie contributes a "Note on the Occurrence of 

 Erratics at Higher Levels than the Eock Masses from which they 

 have been derived," and considers an explanation of this curious 

 problem may be eventually found in certain phenomena which have 

 been observed in Alpine glaciers, such as stated by the late Prof. J. 

 Forbes, "the tendency of glaciers to reject impurities, and the 

 undoubted fact that stones are always found near or upon the 

 surface of the ice." "It is enough to know," says Mr. Geikie, 

 " that stones introduced into the body of a glacier, whether from 

 above or below, tend to rise upwards in the ice, as the glacier flows 

 on its way. Let us suppose a mountainous country, such as Scot- 

 land, covered with a wide ice-sheet, or series of confluent glaciers, 

 and endeavour in imagination to follow the course of some hypo- 

 thetical boulder which has been introduced by friction into the ice 

 at the bottom of some valley in the interior of the country. As the 

 ice creeps outwards, the stone gradually rises, the path which it 

 follows sloping at a less angle than the bed over which the ice 

 flows. Did no obstruction intervene, it is evident that the boulder, 

 while it rose through the body of the ice, would be at the same time 

 travelling gradually to lower levels than the point from which it 

 originally set out. . . . But then we know that countless obstacles 

 intervened to impede the flow of the massive ice-sheets of the Glacial 

 epoch ; and with every such obstruction the glacier masses must 



