eisure
moments had been devoted. His design was to combine the results of
all his labors among the different rock formations of Scotland into
one grand picture of the geological history of our country. For
this end he had explored a large part of the Scottish counties,
anxious that his statements should rest as far as possible upon the
authority of his own personal investigations. His knowledge of the
geology of the country was thus far more extensive than was
generally supposed. We may refer particularly to that branch of it
on which he bestowed the unremitted attention of his closing
years,--the palaeontological history of the glacial beds,--that
strange and as yet almost unknown period that ushered in the
existing creation. He studied it minutely along the shores of the
Moray Firth, on the east coast of Scotland, along the shores of
Fife and the Lothians, and on the coast of Ayrshire and the Firth
of Clyde. This last summer he made a tour through the centre of the
island, and obtained boreal shells at Buchlyvie in
Stirlingshire,--the _omphalos_ of Scotland. The importance of this
discovery, in connection with those he had previously made in
following out the same chain of evidence, can only be appreciated
by those who have paid some attention to geology. We may state
briefly that it proves the central area of Scotland to have been
submerged beneath an icy sea, and icebergs to have grated along
over what is now the busy valley of the Forth and Clyde, while the
waters were tenanted by shells at present found only in the
Northern Ocean. A large part of his work is written, though it is
to be feared that much knowledge, amassed in the course of its
preparation, has perished with him. In particular, there were whole
sections of his Museum understood only by himself. Every little
fragment had its story, and contributed its quota of evidence to
the truth of his descriptions. There is, perhaps, but another mind
in Britain,--that of Sir Philip Egerton,--that can catch up the
thread, and read off, though with difficulty, the meaning of those
carefully arranged fragments. Yet, even with such aid, much must
long, if not forever, remain dark and obscure. The work on which he
was more immediately engaged at the time of his death was partly
theological, pa