Vol. 52.] BOULDERS FROM THE KOLGUEV BEDS. 63 



some other organism. D contained a rather light grey silty clay ; 

 fragments of garnet were rather commoner in this, and one or two 

 rounded prisms of a slightly ferruginous rutile. E contained a fine- 

 grained quartzose sand. This proved to be wholly composed of 

 mineral fragments, mainly quartz ; possibly a few chips were from 

 flint. Garnet, colourless mica, glauconite, iron oxide, and sponge- 

 spicules were fairly common. In all these samples the fragments 

 are mostly angular or subangular, a rounded grain, which some- 

 times is rather larger in size than the rest, only occasionally being 

 found. The materials bear a general resemblance to those forming 

 the Glacial drift of East Anglia. 



Discussion. 



Mr. Mark asked the Author whether there was distinct strati- 

 fication of the Kolguev Clays. The glacio-marine clays at the end 

 of the Malaspina glacier, and those upraised in the Chaix Hills 

 through that glacier, were well stratified and contained well- 

 preserved shells, as described by I. C. Eussel. He called attention 

 to a paper by Torell (' Sveriges Geologiska Undersokning,' 1878), 

 in which the termination of the Scandinavian ice-sheet was carried 

 to Tcheskaya Bay. If it were continued north in the same direction, 

 the ice passing over Lapland, the White Sea, and the Kaninskaia 

 Peninsula might carry eastward Archaean, Devonian, and Car- 

 boniferous fragments, such as were stated by Prof. Bonney to occur 

 in the Kolguev Clays. 



Mr. Trevor-Battte remarked that he was naturally very glad to 

 find that Col. Eeilden's recent observations supported the views 

 which he had himself expressed in the Geological Appendix to his 

 lately published work, ' Ice-bound on Kolguev/ Actual obser- 

 vation on the spot was worth much theory at a distance ; and he 

 ventured to believe that no one in that room, if he had had similar 

 opportunities of investigating the Kolguev deposits — the absence of 

 any continuity of rock in situ, the astonishing variety of ice-scratched 

 erratics, the composition and relations of sand and clay, the indefinite 

 lines of strata between these, the presence of immense isolated 

 spherical and striated boulders, and the presence of mollusca — could 

 hesitate to believe that these all had been dropped from floating ice, 

 or that the symmetrically conical shape of those isolated hills which he 

 had described in his book was due to later erosion by the sea. The 

 secondary elevation of the island above the waves was interestingly 

 emphasized by (i) the absence from the island of the Arctic hare and 

 the lemming; by (ii) the absence of Saxifraga oppositifolia, Mertensia 

 rnaritima — animals and plants of wide Arctic distribution; and, 

 further, by the absence of Ledum palustre, a striking feature of the 

 opposite mainland. 



Mr. Boulger pointed out the contrast offered by the deposits on 

 the islands of Solovetsk and Anzersk to those described by the Author 

 in that in the former islands there is nothing but a granitoid gneiss, 

 apparently of Scandinavian origin, in boulders embedded, with some 



