orn down and partially mutilated, the bones of the
amphibious carnivora of the boulder period, it seems not in the least
probable, judging from the fragments of loose-grained sandstone and soft
shale which it has spared, that it would have wholly destroyed them. So
it happened, however, that from North Berwick to the Ord Hill of
Caithness, I had never found in the boulder-clay the slightest trace of
an organism that could be held to belong to itself; and as it seems
natural to build on negative evidence, if very extensive, considerably
more than mere negative evidence, whatever the circumstances, will
carry, I became somewhat skeptical regarding the very existence of
boulder-fossils,--a skepticism which the worse than doubtful character
of several supposed discoveries in the deposit served considerably to
strengthen. The clay forms, when cut by a water-course, or assailed on
the coast by some unusually high tide, a perpendicular precipice, which
in the course of years slopes into a talus; and as it exhibits in most
instances no marks of stratification, the clay of the talus--a mere
re-formation of fragments detached by the frosts and rains from the
exposed frontage--can rarely be distinguished from that of the original
deposit. Now, in these consolidated slopes it is not unusual to find
remains, animal and vegetable, of no very remote antiquity. I have seen
a human skull dug out of the reclining base of a clay-bank once a
precipice, fully six feet from under the surface. It might have been
deemed the skull of some long-lived contemporary of Enoch,--one of the
accursed race, mayhap,

"Who sinned and died before the avenging flood."

But, alas! the laborer dug a little further, and struck his pickaxe
against an old rybat that lay deeper still. There could be no mistaking
the character of the champfered edge, that still bore the marks of the
tool, nor that of the square perforation for the lock-bolt; and a rising
theory, that would have referred the boulder-clay to a period in which
the polar ice, set loose by the waters of the Noachian deluge, came
floating southwards over the foundered land, straightway stumbled
against it, and fell. Both rybat and skull had come from an ancient
burying-ground, that occupies a projecting angle of the table-land
above. I must now state, however, that my skepticism has thoroughly
given way; and that, slowly yielding to the force of positive evidence,
I have become as assured a believer i