1888-89.] The Duke of Argyll on Bodies of Organic Origin. 47 
quarried and exported for uses connected with potteries in England. 
To the north of Ballichulish, again, it rises to the summit of a 
high mountain in the ranges which terminate in Ben Nevis. This 
quartzite ridge not being the one nearest the shores of the Linneh 
Loch, hut a ridge behind, is concealed from the eye in passing 
from Oban to Fort William. But it is visible from the passage 
between Lismore and the Morven shore. I never observed it at 
all until the present year, when the illumination of a setting 
sun, and the foil of a dark cloud behind, revealed some high 
and jagged peaks of a pure white, recalling the special scenery 
of Loch Torridon, of Loch Assynt, and Loch Maree. Now in 
all these southern masses of quartzite, so far as I have examined 
them myself, and so far as I know from others, no vestige has 
been seen of the annelid rods or presumed tubes of the western 
quartzite. In three places I have had special opportunities of 
observing it. First, on the western side of the island of Jura, where 
an extensive series of raised beaches, too little known to geologists, 
have collected together an immense assemblage of the rolled and 
weathered fragments of the quartzite, and where, from its reddish 
colour, any white worm tubes such as I have referred to in similar 
rocks in Sutherland, would be specially conspicuous; secondly, on two 
of the islets of white quartzite which belong to my own property in 
Lismore, and which I have examined with some care; and lastly, on 
the prolongation of the same beds south of Ballichulish, at a spot 
where the rock has been worked and quarried for commercial uses. 
In all these places, so far as I could see, no annelid tubes are to be 
seen. It looks as if they had been squeezed out under enormous 
pressure, or obliterated by some other of the unknown causes which 
seem to have had the same effect in many other cases of strata once 
full of the remains of organic life. 
I now come to the special subject of my communication to the 
Society to-day. It was the result of a fresh visit made this last 
autumn to the wonderful escarpment sections of Western Ross, in Loch 
Torridon and Loch Kishorn, that I was led to think over and over 
again whether a closer search might not reveal a survival elsewhere of 
the organic remains of the quartzite. It was the well-known generalisa- 
tion of Murchison, from the section of country across the county of 
Sutherland from east to west, that the great mass of mica-schists, and 
