296 Reports and Proceedings. 



He specially noticed Mr. Cadell's observations witli reference to the 

 influence of the traps. His own feeling was that, especially as 

 regarded the coals that underlay and were associated with the trap 

 in the west part of the Charleston field, he could not think there 

 was any evidence, although the coals were poor, that they had been 

 altered or burned by the influence of these igneous masses. On the 

 contrary, in a number of cases, especially in the sinking of one pit 

 which he mentioned, they found a mass of coal lying in the very 

 heart of some of these traps. — 2. On the Lower Silurian Eocks of 

 the neighbourhood of Galashiels ; illustrated vTith typical specimens 

 of the fossils found in these rocks. By Charles Lapworth, Esq.^ 



Glasgow Geological Society. — I. Ordinary meeting, March 

 3rd ; Edward Wiinch, Esq., Vice-president, in the chair. 



Mr. Thos. Barclay exhibited pieces of the branches of silicified 

 palm trees, which he had collected for the society's museum during a 

 recent visit to Lower Egypt. They were obtained in the neighbour- 

 hood of Cairo, where there exists the remains of an extensive 

 forest, which during the Tertiary period had become submerged, and 

 the vegetable matter having decomposed slowly, its substance had 

 been replaced by silex, with which the waters had been charged. 

 The specimens displayed the vegetable structure as perfectly as in 

 the original plant. 



Mr. John Young read a paper " On the occurrence of the remains 

 of Carboniferous fishes in certain thin beds of indurated shale that 

 lie between sheets of igneoas trap, composing the Kilpatrick range 

 of hills at Auchentorlie, near Bowling." His attention was first 

 directed to this shale by the late Mr. Alexander Currie, of Bowling, 

 and in one of its layers he had since discovered scales, teeth, and 

 eoprolites of at least two genera of Carboniferous fishes — Palceonis- 

 cus and Amblypterus. It crops out upon the hill-side, at an elevation 

 of 600 feet above sea-level — being on nearly the same geological 

 horizon, and lying between the same beds of trap as the seam of 

 peaty coal and shale beds formerly discovered by Mr. Currie, and 

 described by him in a paper published a few years ago in the Trans- 

 actions of the society. Mr. Young referred to the satisfactory 

 evidence afibrded by the discovery of these coal and shale beds in 

 clearly establishing the Carboniferous age of that long chain of 

 Trappean hills which stretch along the north-western border of our 

 coalfields from Ardrossan to near Stirling. Mr. Young also read a 

 paper " On a supposed old river- channel, buried und'er recent drifts, 

 extending from Kilsyth to the Clyde." Criticising Mr. Croll's paper, 

 published in the Transactions of the Edinburgh Geological Society, 

 (see Geological Magazine for May, p. 233,) he confined his remarks 

 to the western division of the basin, namely, that extending from 

 Kilsyth to the Clyde, for the purpose of showing that this deep 

 trough could not have been scooped out by river action, nor could it 



* This paper has appeared in the Geological Maqazinb, See the I^ umbers for 

 May and June of this year, pp. 204 and 279. 



