order to examine what are known to geologists as the Pleistocene deposits of the Kyles, my attention was directed to a deep excavation which had just been opened for the construction of a gas tank in the middle of the town of Rothesay. It was rather more than twenty feet in depth, and passed through five different layers of soil. First, passing downwards, there occurred about eighteen inches of vegetable mould, and then about seven feet of a partially consolidated ferruginous gravel, which rested on about eighteen inches more of peat moss,—once evidently a surface soil, like the overlying one, though of a different character, abounding in what seemed to be the fragments of a rank underwood, and containing many hazelnuts. Beneath this second soil there lay fully nine feet of finely stratified sea-sand; and under all, a bed of arenaceous clay, which the workmen penetrated to the depth of about two feet, but, as they had attained to the required depth of their excavation, did not pass through. And this bed of clay, at the depth of fully twenty feet from the surface, abounded in sea-shells, not existing in the petrified condition, but, save that they had become somewhat porous and absorbent, in their original state. Not a few of them retained the thin brown epidermis, unchanged in color; and the gaping and boring shells, whose nature it is to burrow in clay and sand, and which were present among them in two well-marked species, occupied, as shown by their position, the place in which they had lived and died. Now, of these ancient deep-lying shells, though a certain portion of them could be recognized as still British, there were proportionally not a few that no longer live within the British area;-in vain might the conchologist cast dredge for them in any sea that girdles the three kingdoms; and the whole, regarded as a group,

differ from any other that exists in Europe in the present day. Ere, however, I pass on to decipher the record. which they form, or translate into words the strange old pre-historic facts with which they are charged, let me briefly refer to the overlying deposits, and the successive periods of time which they seem to represent.

The upper layer of vegetable mould here fully exhausts the historic period. And yet the fine old town of Rothesay is not without its history. The ancient ivy-clad castle of the place is situated scarce a minute's walk from the excavation; the same stratum of vegetable mould lies around that forms the upper layer in the pit, furnishing rich footing to shrub and tree; and its great moat, deserted long since by the waters, was excavated of old in the ferruginous gravel. And yet, though compared with the age of the gravel-bed on which it stands, the date of its erection is as of yesterday: history fails to trace its origin; we only know that it was already an important stronghold in the days of Haco of Norway, one of whose captains besieged and took it, that Robert III. of Scotland died broken-hearted within its walls, and that it still furnishes with his second title the heir-apparent of the British throne. On many other parts of the coast, though apparently not here, this gravel-bed contains shells, all of which, unlike those of the arenaceous clay beneath, still live around our shores, and most of which occurred, ere the last upheaval of the land, as dead shells on the beaches of the old coast line. The old line itself, against which the sea seems to have stood for ages ere the final upheaval, is present here immediately behind the town, in an eminently characteristic form. Its precipices of rough conglomerate still exhibit the hollow lines, worn of old by the surf, and occupy such places in relation to the build

ings below as prove that even the oldest erections of the town, with the first beginnings of the castle, were all raised on one of its wave-deserted beaches. But the annals of Rothesay, notwithstanding their respectable antiquity, or even such memorials of human origin in the neighborhood as altogether extend beyond the memory of history, advance but comparatively a little way towards the period of the old coast line and the last upheaval. When, in the times of Julius Cæsar, Diodorus Siculus wrote his big gossipping history, St. Michael's Mount, in Cornwall, was connected with the mainland at low water as it is now, a fact good in evidence to show that since that age the respective levels of land and water have not altered in Britain. The old coast line must have been already upheaved when Cæsar landed in the island. And yet, though, as shown by its profound caves and deeply excavated hollows, the sea must have beaten against it during an immensely protracted period of depression, there existed a previous period of upheaval, represented by the layer of moss at the bottom of the gravel, when the land must have stood considerably higher over the sea-level than it does now. In many localities around the shores of Britain and Ireland, the moss-bed which so often underlies the bed of old coast gravel is found to run out under the sea to depths never laid bare by the tide; and yet, at least as low as the sea ever falls, it is found bearing its stumps and roots of bushes and trees of existing species, that evidently occupy the place in which they had originally grown and decayed. These submerged mosses, as they are termed, occur along the sides of the Friths of Tay and Forth, and in at least one locality on the southern side of Moray Frith; on the west coast they lie deep in lochs and bays; they occur on various parts of the coasts

of Ireland; and off the shores of Erris and Tyrawly have furnished a basis for strange legends regarding an enchanted land, which once in every seven years raises its head above the water, green with forests and fields, but on which scarce any one has succeeded in landing. They occur also on the English shores, in one interesting instance in the immediate neighborhood of that St. Michael's Mount which, from the description of the Sicilian historian, furnishes a sort of negative measure of the period during which the gravel bed immediately over them was elevated. "On the strand of Mount's Bay, midway between the piers of St. Michael's Mount and Penzance, on the 10th of January, 1757," says Borlase, in his "Natural History of Cornwall," "the remains of a wood, which anciently must have covered a large tract of ground, appeared. The sands had been drawn off from the shore by a violent sea, and had left several places, twenty yards long and ten wide, washed bare, strewed with stones like a broken causeway, and wrought into hollows somewhat below the rest of the sands. This gave me an opportunity of examining the following parts of the ancient trees: -In the first pool part of the trunk appeared, and the roots in their whole course, eighteen feet long and twelve wide, were displayed in a horizontal position. The trunk at the fracture was ragged; and beside the level range of the roots which lay round it was part of the body of the tree, just above where the roots divided. Of what kind it was there did not remain enough positively to determine. The roots were pierced plentifully by the teredo or auger worm. Thirty feet to the west we found the remains of another tree the ramifications extended ten feet by six; there was no stock in the middle; it was therefore part of the under or bottom roots of the tree, pierced also by the

teredo, and of the same texture as the first. Fifty feet to the north of the first tree we found part of a large oak: it was the body of a tree three feet in diameter; its top inclined to the east.. We traced the body of this tree, as it lay shelving, the length of seven feet; but to what further depth the body reached we could not discern, because of the immediate influx of water as soon as we had made a pit for discovery. It was firmly rooted in earth six inches from the surface of the sand. Not so fixed was the stock of a willow tree, with the bark on, one foot and a half in diameter, within two paces of the oak. The timber was changed into a ruddy color; and hard by we found part of a hazel-branch, with its glossy bark on. The earth in all the tried places appeared to be a black, cold marsh, filled with fragments of leaves of the Juncus aquaticus maximus. The place where I found the trees was three hundred yards below full sea-mark. The water is twelve feet deep upon them when the tide is in." It will be seen from this description, and it agrees with that of our submerged forests of the period generally, that the trees which grew on this nether soil, when the level of the land stood considerably higher than it does now, were exactly those of our present climate, a fact borne specially out by the numerous hazel-nuts which the deposit almost everywhere contains. The hazel is one of the more delicate indigenous trees of the country. It was long ago remarked in Scotland by intelligent farmers of the old school, that "a good nut year was always a good oat year;' and that "as the nut filled the oat filled." And now our philosophical botanists confirm the truthfulness of the observation embodied in these proverbial sayings, by selecting the hazel as the indigenous plant which most nearly resembles in its constitution the hardier cereals. It rises

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