Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/269

Rh The remainder is still preserved in the museum at Edinburgh, but by exposure to the air it has shrunk considerably. In 1817, two other tusks and some bones of the elephant, as we learn from the same authority (Mr. Bald), were met with, three and a half feet long and thirteen inches in circumference, lying in an horizontal position, seventeen feet deep in clay, with marine shells, at Kilmaurs, in Ayrshire. The species of shells are not given.

In another excavation through the Scotch boulder clay, made in digging the Clyde and Forth Junction Railway, the antlers of a reindeer were found at Croftamie, in Dumbartonshire, in the basin of the river Endrick, which flows into Loch Lomond. They had cut through twelve feet of till with angular and rounded stones, some of large size, and then through six feet of underlying clay, when they came upon the deer's horns, eighteen feet from the surface, and within a foot of the sandstone on which the till rested. At the distance of a few yards, and in the same position, but a foot or two deeper, were observed marine shells, Cyprina islandica, Astarte elliptica, A. compressa, Fusus antiquus, Littorina littorea, and a Balanus. The height above the level of the sea was between one hundred and one hundred and three feet. The reindeer's horn was seen by Professor Owen, who considered it to be that of a young female of the large variety, called by the Hudson's Bay trappers the carabou.

The remains of elephants, now in the museums of Glasgow and Edinburgh, purporting to come from the superficial deposits of Scotland have been referred to Elephas primigenius. In cases where tusks alone have been found unaccompanied by molar teeth, such specific determinations may be uncertain; but if any one specimen be correctly