resent
an appearance in no degree more ancient at the present time than they
did when first enveloped by the clay. In East and West Lothian too, and
in the neighborhood of Edinburgh, I had detected in it occasional
organisms of the Mountain Limestone and the Coal Measures; but these,
not less surely than its Liasic fossils in Moray, and its Old Red
ichthyolites in Cromarty and Ross, belonged to an incalculably more
ancient state of things than itself; and--like those shrivelled
manuscripts of Pompeii or Herculaneum, which, whatever else they may
record, cannot be expected to tell aught of the catastrophe that buried
them up--they throw no light whatever on the deposit in which they
occur. I at length came to regard the boulder-clay--for it is difficult
to keep the mind in a purely blank state on any subject on which one
thinks a good deal--as representative of a chaotic period of death and
darkness, introductory, mayhap, to the existing scene of things.

After, however, I had begun to mark the invariable connection of the
clay, as a deposit, with the dressed surfaces on which it rests, and the
longitudinal linings of the pebbles and boulders which it incloses, and
to associate it, in consequence, with an ice-charged sea and the Great
Gulf Stream, it seemed to me extremely difficult to assign a reason why
it should be thus barren of remains. Sir Charles Lyell states, in his
"Elements," that the "stranding of ice-islands in the bays of Iceland
since 1835 has driven away the fish for several successive seasons, and
thereby caused a famine among the inhabitants of the country;" and he
argues from the fact, "that a sea habitually infested with melting ice,
which would chill and freshen the water, might render the same
uninhabitable by marine mollusca." But then, on the other hand, it is
equally a fact that half a million of seals have been killed in a single
season on the meadow-ice a little to the north of Newfoundland, and that
many millions of cod, besides other fish, are captured yearly on the
shores of that island, though grooved and furrowed by ice-floes almost
every spring. Of the seal family it is specially recorded by
naturalists, that many of the species "are from choice inhabitants of
the margins of the frozen seas towards both poles; and, of course, in
localities in which many such animals live, some must occasionally die."
And though the grinding process would certainly have disjointed, and
might probably have w