1815.] SMITH ON SCOTCH BOULDERS. 33 



below Holy wells, a celebrated Crag locality, I observed a patch of 

 crag on the upper part of a somewhat lofty portion of the bank of 

 the river, and went ashore to examine it. I had not long searched 

 the mass, which consisted chiefly of broken shells, ere I found a 

 heavy nodule, which I soon recognised as the tympanic bone of a 

 Cetacean. It is nearly perfect, having only a portion about an inch 

 in length broken from one end of it. Its fractured extremity exhibits 

 the following characters : — The central portion is of the colour of 

 ferruginous clay ; there is next a band of dark ferruginous stain, and 

 exterior to the last a layer of an ochrey colour, somewhat darker 

 than the central portion, and which is easily chipped from the dark- 

 coloured layer ; innumerable minute indentations are visible upon 

 its surface, more particularly upon the involuted portion. The 

 colour of the different layers observed in my specimen is undoubt- 

 edly derived from a ferruginous infiltration ; the texture is that of 

 exceedingly dense bone, — a solidity appropriate to the function of the 

 organ to which it belongs, and very unlike the texture of some co- 

 prolitic (?) bodies I possess from the Crag, which exhibit somewhat 

 similar concentric bands, but a decidedly crystalline fracture, parti- 

 cularly in the dark-coloured bands. 



The long diameter of my fossil is three and a quarter inches, the 

 short diameter two inches, and its average thickness at the fractured 

 extremity is three-quarters of an inch. On comparing my specimen 

 with the description of similar fossils by Professor Owen, in his Ap- 

 pendix* to Professor Henslow's paper, read before the Society 

 Dec. 13, 1843, I have no hesitation in deciding that it is the tym- 

 panic bone of BalcBna definita. 



Professor Henslow, in the paper above referred to, says, " It seems 

 t-o me not a little remarkable that all these specimens should have 

 been procured within a very narrow compass, for I found none be- 

 yond the limits of two contiguous indentations in the cliff, a short 

 distance to the north of Felixstow." I have therefore forwarded this 

 communication to the Society, merely for the purpose of contributing 

 a new locality in which a cetacean remain has been met with. 



8. On the Scratched Boulders and Rocks of the Coal-field of Scot- 

 land, By James Smith, Esq., F.G.S., of Jordan Hill. 



The phaenomenon of scratched boulders has of late attracted atten- 

 tion from its supposed connexion with glacial action ; but before the 

 researches of Professor Agassiz had excited so nmch interest on the 

 subject, it had been but little attended to. When he visited Scotland 

 in 1 840, with the object of searching for proofs of the former exist- 

 ence of glaciers in that country, and their connexion with the erratic 

 blocks and the so-called diluvium or till, his attention was imme- 

 diately arrested by the striae which were observed upon some of the 

 blocks. He however admitted to me then, as he has since done in 



* Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, vol. i. p. 38. 

 VOL. II. — PART I. I> 



