Vol. 62.] GLACIAL PERIOD IN ABERDEENSHIRE, ETC. 29 



the railway in 1858. At that time I sent a notice of it to the 

 Geological Society, 1 in which I termed it an outlier of Lias, 

 but it is neither more nor less than a huge transported mass of clay, 

 and is enveloped in Glacial Drift of a different colour. Judging 

 from the character of the ammonites and other fossils which it 

 contains plentifully, it has probably been derived from some bed 

 belonging to the horizon of the Oxford Clay. It is much wasted on 

 the outside, and partly mixed with the Glacial Drift surrounding 

 it, but its full extent in some directions is hardly yet known. 



Fossiliferous fragments from the Lias, the Oolite, and other 

 Secondary rocks are found here and there over the country eastward, 

 from Elgin and Speymouth across "Banffshire, on to the coast of 

 Aberdeen, beside Peterhead. Near Maud railway-station, in the 

 north of Aberdeenshire, there is a small farm called At herb. 

 Mr. John Milne, the former tenant of that farm, is a man with the 

 eye of a hawk for all manner of curious stones. He made a wonderful 

 collection from the fields around it. Many of the pieces found by 

 him are of a fine-grained grey sandstone containing Oolitic fossils ; 

 but what is still more interesting, he got several fragments of the 

 Pipe-B,ock, one of the characteristic Cambrian beds of the North- 

 Western Highlands. I have myself found a small piece of shale, 

 containing the impression of an ammonite and other fossils, em- 

 bedded in the Boulder-Clay of a railway-cutting a mile or two south 

 of Ellon, which is tbe farthest point in a south-easterly direction 

 where such have been obtained. 



Fragments of the Gamrie sandstone and conglomerate have been 

 carried eastward along the coast towards Fraserburgh, and may be 

 seen at various places along that line, and at the northern base of 

 Mormond Hill. 



The fossiliferous Greensand debris, which occurs at Moreseat in 

 Aberdeenshire, proves to be also transported, probably from the 

 north-west, and is embedded in Glacial Drift. 2 The Chalk-flints 

 found so plentifully in that quarter have also, I suspect, been 

 brought from the Moray Firth by the same glacial agency. 



These flints, as I have said, are found chiefly along a belt of 

 country running across the north of Aberdeenshire in an east-and- 

 west direction, terminating at the coast near Peterhead, and may 

 have been shed off along the southern border of one of the streams 

 of ice which brought so great a quantity of other debris from the 

 Moray Basin. They are generally most plentiful at the surface, 

 except where covered by peat. Frequently they are mixed up with 

 some gritty earth or glacial mud, or have some of it beneath them : 

 but, at the western extremity of the district where they occur, they 

 are covered in some places by Boulder-Clay of a later date, containing 

 ice-scratched stones. This I observed near Delgaty many years ago, 

 in 1858 : it shows that there has been a recurrence of glaciation 

 after the flints were laid down. 



1 Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. vol. xv (1859) p. 131. 



2 See the Beport of the Committee on Cretaceous Fossils in Aberdeenshire, 

 Rep. Brit. Assoc. 1897 (Toronto) pp. 333 et seqq. 



