PROCEEDINGS—PERTHSHIRE SOCIETY OF NATURAL SCIENCE. C1X 
right out into the centre of the basin. Life is present in this sea 
also, but of a much more complex order, thus showing how far we 
have advanced in time. Stretched along the shore, and half-covered 
by the sand and mud, lies a tangle of branching seaweed, among 
which crustaceans crawl about, while in the waters themselves swim 
spined and mail-clad fishes. The most remarkable feature of this 
landscape, however, remains to be noticed. Stretching away to the 
east, a succession of low conical hills rises out of the shallow sea, and 
from some of these, streams of molten and glowing lava flow down 
into the water, where they mingle with the beds of sand and gravel. 
Sometimes a fresh outburst takes place, and showers of volcanic dust 
and fragments are shot up into the air, to fall down again on the 
slopes of the hill and in the water beyond. 
Scene number three brings us very much nearer our own period. 
The solid features of the land have already assumed the main out¬ 
lines of their present form. The shallow sea of the last picture has 
retired, and has left in its place the sands and gravel, now the sandstones 
and conglomerates of Strathmore. The volcanoes have gradually 
died out, and have left in their place the sheets of lava and beds of 
volcanic ash of which the Sidlaws and Ochils are built up. None 
of these features are visible, however, at the time of which I am 
now speaking. They are there, but they are entirely hidden under 
a vast expanse of Arctic ice. As far as the eye can reach, nothing 
is to be seen but one undulating sheet of white, save in the far north, 
where one or two black peaks stand out like monuments to mark 
where the giant Grampians lie buried. The whole mass of ice is 
moving slowly down towards the German Ocean, and in doing so 
is tearing the rough features from the surface of the land with a 
resistless and mighty force; but on the upper surface of the ice-sheet, 
where we are supposed to stand, there is no indication of any motion 
or work of destruction. All is death-like silence and stillness. 
Scene number four brings us to the confines of geologic with historic 
—or more correctly, pre-historic—times. The ice has melted from 
off the hills and the lower valleys, and only in the upper valleys are 
glaciers still to be found. Vast accumulations of debris—the grindings 
of the rocks left by the ice—still cover the floors of the valleys, but 
are being eaten into and re-distributed by the swollen rivers that flow 
down from the upper glaciers. The Carse of Gowrie is filled by an 
estuary, or arm of the sea, whose waters stretch from the foot of 
Kinnoull Hill to the slopes of the Ochils, and in the midst of which 
Moncreiffe Hill stands out as a long peninsula. In the still and 
muddy waters savage men ply about in small canoes hollowed out of 
the trunks of trees, and watch for the herds of deer and wild cattle 
that come down through the forest to drink at the river. 
Here I will close the picture, as we have reached the period 
when the filling in of details leads us on to more controversial ground. 
I have depicted these few scenes, not in the pretence that they con¬ 
tain anything original, but simply to show to the uninitiated how even 
a slight acquaintance with the geological structure and history of 
one’s country seems almost to supply us with a new sense, and makes 
each mountain outline, each crag, nay, even each stone eloquent 
K 
