it did, that I had discovered the period of its re-formation. CHAPTER VI. Organisms of the Boulder-clay not unequivocal--First Impressions of the Boulder-clay--Difficulty of accounting for its barrenness of Remains--Sir Charles Lyell's reasoning--A Fact to the contrary--Human Skull dug from a Clay-bank--The Author's Change of Belief respecting Organic Remains of the Boulder-clay--Shells from the Clay at Wick--Questions respecting them settled--Conclusions confirmed by Mr. Dick's Discoveries at Thurso--Sir John Sinclair's Discovery of Boulder-clay Shells in 1802--Comminution of the Shells illustrated--_Cyprina islandica_--Its Preservation in larger Proportions than those of other Shells accounted for--Boulder-clays of Scotland reformed during the existing Geological Epoch--Scotland in the Period of the Boulder-clay "merely three detached groups of Islands"--Evidence of the Subsidence of the Land in Scotland--Confirmed by Rev. Mr. Cumming's conclusion--High-lying Granite Boulders--Marks of a succeeding elevatory Period--Scandinavia now rising--Autobiography of a Boulder desirable--A Story of the Supernatural. For the greater part of a quarter of a century I had been finding organisms in abundance in the boulder-clay, but never anything organic that unequivocally belonged to its own period. I had ascertained that it contains in Ross and Cromarty nodules of the Old Red Sandstone, which bear inside, like so many stone coffins, their well laid out skeletons of the dead; but then the markings on their surface told me that when the boulder-clay was in the course of deposition, they had been exactly the same kind of nodules that they are now. In Moray, it incloses, I had found, organisms of the Lias; but _they_ also testify that they present 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.