754 
Proceedings of the Royal Society 
leads to the conclusion that at the time those forests flourished, the 
British area formed a portion of the European Continent, and 
enjoyed a more genial climate than at present. The buried forest 
of the Tay is covered by the Carse-clays which are indubitably of 
estuarine or estuarine-marine formation. Consequently they show 
us that the continental conditions during which the great forests 
extended themselves had now passed away ; more than this, we 
may infer from the appearances presented by the Carse-clays and 
correlative river deposits of the Tay and the Earn that the climate 
had now become less genial. The river-gravels referred to are more 
or less coarse tumultuous deposits extending over broad areas, and 
when they are followed into the Highlands they are actually found 
in close association with torrential debris and morainic accumula- 
tions. Again, the Carse-clays have all the appearance of those 
flood-loams and clays which are deposited by water bowing from 
snowfields and glaciers; and now and again they contain isolated 
stones and boulders which could only have been carried down to 
sea by river-ice. So that, at the time the clays of the Carse of 
Cowrie were accumulated, it would appear that local glaciers occupied 
some of the Highland glens, while our rivers had often a torrential 
character, and swept down to their estuaries immense quantities of 
fine silt, “the flour of rocks.” Thus, as it seems to me, we have 
more or less distinct evidence in the Carse-deposits of the Tay and 
Earn of marked geographical and climatic changes. 
Eeturning now to the Carse-accumulations of the Forth, we 
encounter very much the same appearances, but certain evidence is 
wanting. Thus we have not yet encountered any ancient buried 
forest underlying the Carse-clays of Ealkirk and Stirling, which can 
be considered as the equivalent of the buried forest of the Tay valley . 
But we have every evidence to show that an arboreal vegetation 
similar to that which now forms our forests, clothed the hill-slopes 
and valley-bottoms in the region drained by the Forth, at the time 
the Carse-clays began to form. We have proof also of torrential 
and flooded rivers, and of the wholesale destruction of trees. No 
geologist who has studied the Carse-beds of the Forth can doubt 
that those accumulations occupy an old valley, the bottom of which 
is under the present level of the sea. Nor does it take much 
imagination to picture to one’s self the conditions which must have 
