of Edinburgh, Session 1883-84. 
841 
Nicol remarked : — “ When it is considered that these masses must 
have been carried upwards of 40 miles in a direct line, floating ice 
seems the only agent to which their transportation can be ascribed ” 
{Lond. Geol. Soc. Journal, vol. v. p. 23). He adds : — ‘‘ Some of these 
Pentland Hill boulders are of kinds of rock which I have never seen 
in Scotland. On one hill, 1500 to 1600 feet high, I found these 
travelled stones particularly abundant, and apparently increasing in 
number from below upwards. In some places they appeared to form 
broad bands, running nearly in straight lines from H.H.W. to 
S.S.E., — and without any reference to the present declivity of the 
ground, — except becoming more numerous towards the summit of 
the ridge ” {Sixth Report, p. 26). 
A number of rock surfaces occur on the Pentlands with striee. 
Mr James Croll, of the Scotch Geological Survey, describes one of 
these on the very summit of Allermuir Hill, at a height of 1617 feet 
above the sea. On examining the striae he says he had no ‘‘ diffi- 
culty in determining that the ice which effected them came from 
the west. On the summit of the hills we found patches of boulder 
clay in hollow basins of the rock. Of one hundred pebbles collected 
from the clay, every one, with the exception of three or four com- 
posed of hard quartz, presented a flattened and ice-worn surface, 
and forty-four were distinctly stratified. A number of these stones 
must have come from the Highlands to the H.W.” {Fifth Report, 
P.82). 
In like manner. Professor Geikie, in his interesting Memoir on the 
Geology of the Neighbourhood of Edinburgh, observes that “ boulder 
clay lies along the H. W. flanks of the Pentlands, rising to a level of 
at least 1300 feet. When the clay has been removed, we usually 
find the rocks below polished, grooved, and scratched, in a direction 
nearly E. and W. or E.S.E. and W.S.W. The parallelism of the 
striations throughout the present district shows that the floating ice 
must have moved in a pretty uniform direction ; and that it was 
from the west, is rendered clear, by the striation of the western 
faces of the hills, by the great depth of drift on their eastern sides, 
and by the fact that the transported boulders, when traceable to 
their parent rock, have been carried from W. to E. The drift in 
this district indicates a period of slow submergence, which went 
on until probably every hill had sunk far below the sea-level, and 
when ice-borne blocks from the snow-covered islets of Isla or the 
