MR DAVID MILNE HOME ON THE BOULDER-CLAY OF EUROPE. 657 



" Down the whole of the west coast, from Cape Wrath to the Mull of Canty re, 

 one long expanse of ice filled up the fiords, and stretched out into the Atlantic. 

 From the uplands of Wigtown and Galloway, the icy stream swept down into the 

 valley of the Sol way, and onward for Ireland. From the hills that border the 

 lonely valley of Liddesdale, far away into the blue Cheviots, the same universal 

 mantle of ice threw its folds athwart the hills and dales of the north of England." 

 (" Glacial Drift." P. 84.) 



The following passages in a later publication by Mr Geikie (" Scenery and 

 Geology of Scotland," 1865) may also be referred to : — 



" The massive ice of the great Highland area came down into Strathmore, 

 and kept steadily southward in such force as to mount over the chain of the 

 Sidlaws, and even it would seem over the Ochils, until it went out to sea by the 

 basin of the Forth." (P. 300). 



Referring to Scotch boulder-clay or till, Mr Geikie says, that " land ice has 

 now given us the clue to the history of this remarkable superficial deposit, as 

 will be afterwards pointed out; its internal structure, and its striated stones, 

 show it to be the result of the abrasion carried on by the ice-sheet, as it moved 

 over the land." (P. 183). 



" The high grounds of the interior receive a constant accession of snow ; and 

 the accumulated mass, pressing down the valleys, goes out to sea in long wide 

 walls of ice." " The moraine-rubbish of this great ice-sheet gathers into the 

 thick deposit known as boulder-clay." (P. 345). 



The Rev. R. B. Watson, in a paper on the " Drift-beds of Arran," read in 

 this Society in January 1864, says, that the phenomena indicated the existence 

 not of glaciers merely, but of a massive ice-cake, " more universal than even in 

 Southern Greenland now. Beneath this ice-cake the soil, and all of life it sup- 

 ported, would be gradually harried away to the sea ; any traces of it left being 

 nests of debris niched into corners, ground over and disturbed in every conceiv- 

 able way by the ice above." (P. 537 " Roy. Soc. Trans." vol. xxiii.) " This being 

 so, we are entitled to say that the boulder-clay is the result of land glaciation." 

 (P. 538). 



Dr Bryce of Glasgow, shortly after the publication of Mr Watson's paper, 

 went to Arran to examine the sections described in it ; and he concurs in holding 

 that the circumstances proved " for the boulder-clay an origin on land" (" Lond. 

 Geol. Journal" for 1864, p. 211.) 



The most recently published paper on boulder clay, with which I am 

 acquainted, is by the Rev. Dr Thomas Brown, who read in this Society an 

 account of the "Arctic Shell-clay of Elie and Errol." In this instructive paper he 

 has a chapter on boulder-clay, which he says, both at Elie and Errol, lies beneath 

 the Arctic shell-clay, and rests immediately on the rock. He states his opinion 

 of its origin thus: — " It would seem that this lowest deposit, so long an enigma, 



