REVIEWS. 
75 
Still the deposit is very decidedly a boreal one in its shells, and in its mechanical 
phenomena, the most decidedly boreal of the group. Every rock-surface on which 
it rests is grooved and striated; almost every softer pebble which it encloses is 
scratched and furrowed, usually in the line of its longer axis 5 all its larger shells 
exist as broken fragments, often rounded as if by attrition, and bearing in their 
lines and scratches marks of the same agents that dressed the rocks and scored the 
pebbles—nay, the very substance and colour of its prevailing clays show that it is 
mainly composed of the dressings of the rocks on which it rests—all giving evidence, 
apparently, of a time when our half-foundered country sat from eight hundred to a 
thousand feet lower in the water than it does now, and vast packs of grinding ice¬ 
bergs went careering over what are now its lower hills and its higher table-lands.” 
The third and newest of the drift-beds, well developed on the borders of 
the Clyde, is thus introduced to his hearers by Mr. Miller— 
“ I had the pleasure of laying open, two years ago, at Fairlie, on the Ayrshire 
coast, a virgin deposit, unknown before, in which I found continuous scalps of 
Pecten Islandicus still occupying the place in which they had lived and died, and 
with their upper valves covered with large balani, such as we now dredge up from 
the outer limits of the laminarian zone, and all fresh and unbroken. Huge Pano- 
pace were there sticking fast in an unctuous clay, with their open siphuncular ends 
turned upwards; and entire specimens of Cyprina Islandica and Modiola modi¬ 
olus, with their valves still connected by The sorely decayed ligament. Tellina 
proxima was abundant, but reduced in size to little more than half the Gamrie di¬ 
mensions. I found Astarte elliptica the prevailing Astarte ; and groups of younger 
Cyprinas huddled together in the character—which they do not now assume on our 
coast—of gregarious shells. No crushing iceberg had passed over this deposit; a 
grooved and polished rock of old red sandstone lies beneath, overlaid by a thin 
stratum of red clay, apparently derived from it, but the higher-lying gray stratum 
in which the shells occur had a different origin ; it is simply the partially consoli¬ 
dated mud of a quiet sea-bottom, and, though its group of organisms manifest deci¬ 
dedly the boreal character, I cannot doubt that they lived at a time when, either 
from some change in the currents of the coast, or from the elevation of the protect¬ 
ing islands outside, an effect of a general rising of the land, the sea was no longer 
an exposed one. They, in all probability, mark that later stage of the wintry period 
to which the last-formed group of our local glaciers belonged, and in which our 
gradually-emerging country presented, age after age, a broader and yet broader 
area, won from the deep.” 
We cannot part company with Mr. Miller without expressing our sense 
of the obligations under which he has placed his fellow-labourers in 
geology; not more by his valuable contributions to their common pursuit, 
than by the example he has set them of what may be accomplished by 
sturdy independence of mind and vigorous use of the means at our own 
disposal. So far as we know, Mr. Miller owes his present high position in 
the estimation of geologists to his own unaided exertions, and to his 
freedom from pretence; and we sincerely hope that his younger fellow- 
labourers in science may imitate, not only his zeal in the pursuit of science, 
but also his manly independence and uprightness of character. We take 
our leave of his Address with pleasure and regret—pleasure caused by its 
perusal, and regret occasioned by its brevity. 
