1865,] BllYCE- — BEDS BENEATH BOtJLDER-CLAY. 217 



discriminate tlie several layers with great exactness, and to designate 

 them in many cases by appropriate descriptive terms. Any Scotch 

 geologist would at once recognize the true old Boulder-clay by Lam- 

 berton's running description on the section furnished me — " Yery 

 hard and stiff, causing great labour to the workmen, with divisions 

 in it as smooth as if they had been made so by a trowel." These 

 smooth markings in the Boulder-clay are most characteristic of it ; 

 they are, in fact, of the nature of " Slickensides," and doubtless due 

 to the displacement of the mass by horizontal or slightly inclined 

 thrusts. Now all the men, who had been connected with the quarry 

 at any of the times when fossils were found, agreed in placing them 

 below the " hard and tough Till," which was never known by them 

 to contain anything but large and small stones, and in referring 

 them to the two beds below it, the sand and clay over the gravel — 

 that is, the beds Nos. 3 and 4. Of these the sand-bed No. 4 was 

 stated to be most irregular in its development, occurring rather in 

 " nests " than as a continuous bed under the Till throughout the 

 whole extent of the workings. This bed, indeed, even through the 

 limited extent to which I traced it in searching for shells, varied 

 much : it seemed thinning out southwards, while noi'thwards it in- 

 creased in thickness from 6 to 18 inches. This bed was the chief re- 

 pository of the shells, the clay below it that of the Elephant-remains ; 

 between them, and partly imbedded in the clay, the horn of the 

 Reindeer, with a portion of the skull attached, was found, further 

 forward in the cutting, and later than the Elephants' bones, but the 

 geological horizon was exactly the same*. The account of the dis- 

 covery in the ' Ayr Advertiser, ' already alluded to, refers the Elephant- 

 remains to the same bed, and thus confirms the statements of the 

 men and Lamberton's section. 



The account is as follows : — 



" The tusk was found between a stratum of extremely dingy, 

 dark-coloured clay, that lay incumbent above it, and a stratum of 

 gravel with rolled stones immediately below it, on which it lay ; 

 and some sea-shells of that kind called clam-shells were also found 

 in the same place, but which fell at once into powder on being 

 exposed to the air"t' 



The expression " same place " here probably does not refer to the 

 same stratum, but to the immediate neighbourhood ; the clay-bed is 

 but 9 inches thick, and shells now taken out of our clays stand ex- 

 posure to the air perfectly. It is, therefore, most probably the sand- 

 bed that is indicated. Lamberton places the shells in the sand-bed, 

 and affirms that the more sand there was the more numerous were 

 the shells. That several shells were taken out of the beds, and stood 



* The letters «, b, on the section mark the positions of the Elepliant-remains 

 and shells exhumed as the workings advanced, 1810-1825; c, that of the Eein- 

 deer-horns and skull, 1831. 



t The rest of the account is much the same as that given by Mr. Bald ; it 

 describes tlie size of the tusks, and notices the highly offensive smell of tlie earth 

 as indicating that one or more carcases had been deposited in the spot. Tlie 

 'Ayr Advertiser' appeared weekly, and was at this time the only journal pub- 

 lished in the county. It is still a respectable and ably conducted paper. 



