Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/72

54 other skeletons of whales were found at Blair Drummond, between the years 1819 and 1824, seven miles up the estuary above Stirling, also at an elevation of between twenty and thirty feet above the sea. Near two of these whales, pointed instruments of deer's horn were found, one of which retained part of a wooden handle, probably preserved by having been enclosed in peat. This weapon is now in the museum at Edinburgh.

The position of these fossil whales and bone implements, and still more of an iron anchor found in the Carse of Falkirk, below Stirling, shows that the upheaval by which the raised beach of Leith was laid dry extended far westward probably as far as the Clyde, where, as we have seen, marine strata containing buried canoes rise to a similar height above the sea.

The same upward movement which reached simultaneously east and west from sea to sea was also felt as far north as the estuary of the Tay. This may be inferred from the Celtic name of Inch being attached to many hillocks, which rise above the general level of the alluvial plains, implying that these eminences were once surrounded by water or marshy ground. At various localities also in the silt of the Carse of Gowrie iron implements have been found.

The raised beach, also containing a great number of marine shells of recent species, traced up to a height of fourteen feet above the sea by Mr. W. J. Hamilton at Elie, on the southern coast of Fife, is doubtless another effect of the same extensive upheaval. A similar movement would also account for some changes which antiquaries have recorded much farther south, on the borders of the Solway Frith; though in this case, as in that of the estuary of the Forth, the conversion of sea into land has always been referred