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XXX—Memoir of Rev. John Fleming, D.D., F.R.S.E.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 January 2013

Alexander Bryson Esq.
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Extract

If it be true that “there is a history in all men's lives, figuring the nature of the times deceased,” how much more worthy of record the lives of those who have left an impress upon their age, who have corrected popular errors, have made clear much that was obscure, and, from the force and fulness of truth in them, have become the great teachers of their time. The histories of such lives figure more than the “times deceased,”—they teach us how to occupy our time; and though these earnest men are dead, their works are yet living epistles, ever speaking to those “who have ears to hear.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of The Royal Society of Edinburgh , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , 1861 , pp. 655 - 680
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Society of Edinburgh 1861

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References

page 655 note * King Henry IV., Second Part, Act iii. Scene. 1.

page 663 note * While Fleming never denied the existence of raised sea-beaches, he refused to believe that the layers of shells and marine debris occurring along our west coast were, in any of the cases which he had examined, true raised sea-beaches or sea-bottoms; but that the character and arrangement of the marine contents of the deposits clearly indicated that they owed their origin to some violent effort. Thus, in the instance first noticed and described by Mr R. Chambers, occurring at Granton Quarry, he found all the materials of a raised sea-beach, but how were they arranged ? The shells whose natural habitat was different were confusedly huddled together; the boulders also, which had long lain on the beach, and been rounded by the action of the waves, were there, with the limpets adhering to them; but these, in many instances, were discovered attached to the under surface of the stones, or lying with their cavities empty and upturned when the stones were removed, clearly showing that they had died in this position—a position in which they certainly could not have lived.

On a closer examination of the materials, it was found that the stones had a general inclination towards the north-west, showing that the wave—for it was now evident that it was a storm-raised beach—had come in that direction, and that the catastrophe producing the phenomena had been short-lived, as the returning waves had been unable to affect the sand which forms the large proportion of the bed, so as to enable the stones to regain the horizontal position which gravity required. In the case also of the so-called raised sea-beach at Fillyside, described by Hugh Miller, Fleming noticed that the molluscs here also were often found firm in the boulder clay, when the large boulders to which they were attached were removed—evidence of the origin of the bed which the strongest advocate of raised sea-beaches was unable to gainsay.

page 666 note * See Aristotle's System, Linnean Transactions, vol. xvi. p. 24.