500 Proceedings of the Royal Society 
land, Scandinavia, and Switzerland. It is a more or less local 
accumulation of angular, subangular, and striated and smoothed 
stones and boulders, set in a matrix of hard gritty earth and clay. 
Its composition, its position with regard to the configuration of the 
ground, — sheltering as it does in the lee of rocks, whose polished 
faces look in the opposite direction, — and the mode of its distribution 
mark it out as the moraine du fond of the old mer de glace. Every 
stone it contained belonged to the islands, not a single fragment of 
any rock foreign to the Faroes occurring in it. 
3. Erratics and Morainic debris are scattered about everywhere, 
and mark the retreat and gradual disappearance of the ice-sheet. 
Many of these erratics attain a large size, some measuring upwards 
of 20 feet across. Hot one of them is foreign to Faroe. Few well- 
marked terminal moraines in the valleys were observed, partly owing 
to the fact that great quantities of debris have fallen from the cliffs, 
and tended to obscure the glacial debris heaps, and partly because 
they have suffered much from the action of torrents and freshets. 
Here and there, however, mounds of morainic origin are conspicuous 
enough. 
4. The Rock-basins are next described, and their origin assigned 
to the grinding action of the glaciers. They are numerous upon the 
land, and seem to be as common a feature of the fiords of Faroe as 
they are of the Scottish and Norwegian sea-lochs. 
The latter part of the paper discusses the origin of the valleys 
and fiords, which is ascribed partly to subaerial erosion and partly 
to glacial excavation. The origin of the main water-parting of the 
islands also comes in for discussion, and considerable space is devoted 
to the consideration of such topics as present atmospheric and 
marine erosion in the islands. The paper concludes with some 
account of the peat with its remains of small trees, and a description 
of a number of typical rock specimens. 
3. By special permission of the Society, there was read a 
Meteorological Note by Mr Alexander Wallace. Communi- 
cated by Professor Piazzi Smyth. 
On Monday, March 1, 1880, a strong breeze from the S. W., marked 
at 1 o’clock p.m. in meteorological observation, as equal to 15 miles 
