MANCHESTER GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 
175 
those which have been found on the Friths of the Forth and the 
Tay. With regard to the flora of these submerged beds, he re- 
marked that they presented an assemblage of nearly the same 
species of forest trees and plants as those which now exist on 
the surface of the earth, although, in many places, differing 
widely from the present vegetable products of the localities in 
which they are found ; as, for example, in the Western Isles of 
Scotland, where large forest trees are found submerged beneath 
a soil which seems incapable of producing anything of the same 
magnitude at the present day. So far as he had been able to 
learn, no remains of the palm, nor indeed of any tropical, or 
even of any marine, plant, had ever been found in the forest 
beds of Great Britain. One very constant and characteristic 
stratum under these beds, whether on the coast or inland, was a 
soft clay, more or less greasy, and of different colours froui 
bluish to grey or brownish. This stratum was frequently of 
great depth ; and, if the entombed trees and other hard-wooded 
plants grew where they were now found, no fitter soil could be 
imagined for the nutrition of oaks and other forest trees, from 
its containing all the requisite inorganic elements, of alumina, 
silex, and lime, for the growth of the largest timber. The ani- 
mal remains found in the submerged forests were not very plen- 
tiful. They consisted chiefly of the bones of terrestrial mam- 
malia ; viz. of the gigantic elk, the red deer, fallow deer, bos urus 
or aurochy bos bovis or common ox, tusks of the horse ; and also of 
the hippopotamus, bear, and canine species ; and the heads and 
tusks of a species of boar. As for those animal remains which 
had been found at Kirkdale and Plymouth, and which were now 
ascertained to have belonged to the elephant, the rhinoceros, the 
hysena, the hippopotamus and tiger, he considered it highly pro- 
bable that those animals belonged to the geological era of those 
forests, or that they were extinct very shortly before that period. 
From considering the present position of the submarine beds 
and the coverings of sand, drifted pebbles^ and silty clay, with 
