TS Sa ee eer eres oor ee as cae a A iia i } 1 Sieh Sees ARB AS eS PEA Seo =) SO 4ayeeergy { TEU it ' ' i = —— = — + ith a Ht j iets iii vie WHEE WEN HH * ) PTD ew S oe cow si we sD DL es ee - —_, ‘ =— sé a ——— “= : poco ———— mn Cet tee oe ere SS. oe ee — = F ae ecg a ne STE eet te Sena nmnnman on meer arenes Tee of Hibrary of the Museum OF COMPARATIVE ZOOLOGY, AT HARVARD COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, MASS. Founded by private subscription, in LS6L. LDA IDWIt I IYO YO Deposited by Alex. Agassiz from the Library of te AGASSIZ. pee Phan Ls ‘a ee +s | We enrypaAydozoy ' MANDUOD PAY D0. ‘Tsidsap yl) Roy pup PUPZPSUAODD Oe oS 8 Oe ee “@ NOILOIS PuULrpors fo 2uapspung PY PW en Ama rented pee sere Lg uonmusay APPA pane enses<-=-ee— THE OLD RED SANDSTONE; NEW WALKS IN AN OLD FIELD. TO WHICH IS APPENDED A SERIES OF GEQLOGICAL PAPERS, READ BEFORE THE ROYAL PHYSICAL SOCIETY OF EDINBURGH. Bx HUGH MILLER, LL.D., AUTHOR OF “THE FOOTPRINTS OF THE OREATOR,” “THE TESTIMONY OF THE ROCKS,” ETC. ETO. ILLUSTRATED WITH NUMEROUS ENGRAVINGS. A NEW, IMPROVED, AND ENLARGED EDITION. BOSTON: GOULD AND-LINCOLN; 59 WASHINGTON STREET. NEW YORK: SHELDON, BLAKEMAN & CO. CINCINNATI: GEORGE S. BLANCHARD. orvad GG. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1858, by GOULD & LINCOLN, in the Clerk’s office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. STTREOTYPED AT THE BOSTON STEREOTYPE FOUNDRY, Printed by G. C. Rand & Co. No, 3 Cornnill. AMERICAN PUBLISHERS’ NOTICE TO THE NEW AND ENLARGED EDITION. “Huan Mriiier’s ‘ Old Red Sandstone,’ to a beginner, is worth a thousand didactic treatises,” said Sir Roderick Impey Murchison in his Address before the British Geological Society. ‘No geolo- gist can peruse it without instruction and delight,” said Professor Benjamin Silliman in his American Journal of Science. Of the work thus commended by the highest authorities on both sides of the Atlantic, the American publishers now have the pleasure of presenting to the public a new and greatly improved edition. Geology is emphatically a growing science, and in the hands of no master did it ever grow more rapidly, or to better purpose, than in Hugh Miller’s. It thus happened that as edition after edition of his work was called for, he had new facts, new arguments, and new conclusions, wherewith to enrich its pages. Some of these were pre- sented in the prefaces to the successive editions, others were incor- porated with the text, and others took the form of notes. Since Mr. Miller’s death, a new edition has been given to the public by Mrs. Miller, with a preface from her own pen, notes by other hands, additional plates, and a large amount of new matter selected from Mr. Miller’s unpublished writings. The present American edition is re-printed from that; but, to avoid encumbering the volume, the IV AMERICAN PUBLISHERS’ NOTICE. substance of what is important in the several prefaces alluded to, is incorporated with this. “The Old Red Sandstone” was Hugh Miller’s first geological work, and was first published in 1841. In 1842, a second edition was called for. This contained about fifteen pages of new matter, referring chiefly to the least known portion of the Old Red system — that middle formation to which the organisms of Balruddery and Carmyle belong. A print (Plate x1.) illustrative of this portion of the work was also added, and one or two conjectures were made to give place to the facts at which they pointed. A third edition was issued in 1846. In the preface to that edition, Mr. Miller announced that the bold prediction made by him in the first, —that the ichthyolites of the Old Red Sandstone would be found at least equal to those of all the geological formations united, at the death of Cuvier,— was already more than fulfilled. For, while Cuvier had enumerated but ninety-two species of fossil fishes in all, Agassiz had already, in 1846, enumerated one hundred and five in the Old Red Sandstone alone,—a formation which had been regarded as poorer in organisms than any other. The catalogue of species in that formation, as determined and arranged by Agassiz, Was given in this edition. Many additions to the volume in the form of notes were also made, and in several instances the text was modified. It had been stated in the first two editions that a gradual increase of size was observable in the progress of ichthyolitic life, aud that the Old Red System exhibited, in its successive formations, this gradation of bulk, beginning with an age of dwarfs, and ending with an age of giants. When the third edition was issued, it had been ascertained that there were giants among the dwarfs; the re- mains of one of the largest fishes found anywhere in the system had AMERICAN PUBLISHERS’ NOTICE. Vv been discovered in its lowest formation. By the positive proof thus furnished, Mr. Miller was convinced that the theory of a gradual progression in size, from the earlier to the later Paleozoic forma- tions, though based originally on no inconsiderable amount of negative evidence, must be permitted to drop. The fourth, fifth, and sixth editions were mainly if not wholly re- prints of the third. The seventh, which has just been issued under the supervision of Mrs. Miller, and is re-printed in the present vol- ume, contains large and interesting additions. While the text and notes of Mr. Miller are preserved without the slightest change or revision, some notes have been appended by a friend of Mrs. Miller, with the view of drawing attention to whatever modifications of opinion he may himself have recorded in his later works, or may have been known to express verbally in conversation with his friends. In addition to these, three or four notes have been fur- nished by the Rev. W. 8. Symonds, who is described as a well- known geologist intimately acquainted with the Silurian and Old Red of his own neighborhood in the south-west of England. Several new figures have also been added, taken either from specimens in Mr. Miller’s own unique collection, or from those in the possession of others, which it is known he had asked permission to copy. These present the fossils to which they relate in new and striking aspects. They are those on Plates ix., x., xu, and xiv., and on pages 54 and 267. But the most important additions to the volume are from the pen of Hugh Miller himself. They consist of the Geologival Papers read by him before the Royal Physical Society of Edinburgh. These papers have been selected by Mrs. Miller from the mass of her husband’s unpublished writings; and, while they add greatly to P =? ? é ro) VI AMERICAN PUBLISHERS NOTICE. the size of the volume, they add to its value no less. In each and all, the characteristics of their author’s genius are abundantly dis- played. The first paper presents a succinct summary of those evidences drawn from geology in favor of revealed religion, which it formed the chief portion of his peculiar mission to originate and establish. In the second is given a sketch of the early progress of general geologic knowledge in Scotland, together with a delightful account of his exploration of the valley of the Girvan. It is ger- mane to the subject of the twelfth chapter of “The Old Red Sandstone.” The paper on the Marbles of Assynt furnishes fine illustrations of Mr. Miller’s sagacity as a geologist, and of his unri- valled powers of description. The concluding paper presents a comprehensive survey of the Fossiliferous Deposits of Scotland. In preparing this volume for the press, the publishers have varied in some few instances from the arrangement of the Edinburgh edi- tion. The four new plates which in that edition were appended to the Notes, have, with a view to convenience in this, been distributed through the body of the work at the points where they seemed most properly to belong. This arrangement made it necessary to re- number the old plates. One of the new cuts has been connected with a note in which it is specifically mentioned; and several foot- notes, most of them by Mr. Symonds, have been transferred from the body of the work to the “ Notes” at the end. These changes, it is believed, constitute a decided improvement. With the exception of these, and the abridgment of the multiplied prefaces, the present edition is a reprint of the new Edinburgh edition. Boston, April, 1858. TO RODERICK IMPEY MURCHISON, Esq., F.R.S., Erc., PRESIDENT OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. In the autumn of last year, I sat down to write a few geo- logical sketches for a newspaper; the accumulated facts of twenty years crowded upon me as I wrote, and the few sketches have expanded into a volume. Permit me, honored Sir, to dedicate this volume to you. Its imperfections are doubtless many, for it has been produced under many disadvan- tages ; but it is not the men best qualified to decide regarding it whose criticisms I fear most; and | am especially desirous to bring it under your notice, as of all geologists the most thor- oughly acquainted with those ancient formations which it pro- fesses partially to describe. [ am, besides, desirous it should be known, and this, I trust, from other motives than those of vanity, that, when prosecuting my humble researches in ob- scurity and solitude, the present President of the Geological Society did not deem it beneath him to evince an interest in the results to which they led, and to encourage and assist the inquirer with his advice. Accept, honored Sir, my sincere thanks for your kindness. Smith, the father of English Geology, loved to remarx that he had been born upon the Oolite—the formation whose various deposits he was the first to distinguish and describe, and from which, as from the meridian line of the geographer, the geological scale has been graduated on both s:des. I[ (vii) Vill DEDICATION. have thought of the circumstance when, on visiting in my native district the birthplace of the author of the Silurian System, I found it situated among the more ancient fossilifer- ous rocks of the north of Scotland—the Lower Formation of the Old Red Sandstone spreading out beneath and around it, and the first-formed deposit of the system, the Great Con- glomerate, rising high on the neighboring hills. It is unques- tionably no slight advantage to be placed, at that early stage of life, when the mind collects its facts with greatest avidity, and the curiosity is most active, in localities where there is much to attract observation that has escaped the notice of others. Like the gentleman whom I have now the honor of addressing, I too was born on the Old Red Sandstone, and first broke ground as an inquirer into geological fact in a for- mation scarce at all known to the geologist, and in which there still remains much for future discoverers to examine and describe. Hence an acquaintance, I am afraid all too slight, with phenomena which, if intrinsically of interest, may be found to have also the interest of novelty to recommend them, and with organisms which, though among the most an- cient of things in their relation to the world’s history, will be pronounced new by the geological reader in their relation to human knowledge. Hence, too, my present opportunity of subscribing myself, as the writer of a volume on the Old Red Sandstone, Honored Sir, With sincere gratitude and respect, Your obedient humble Servant, HUGH MILLER. EDINBURGH, May 1, 1841. AUTHOR’S PRFACE. Nearty one third of the present volume appeared a few months ago in the form of a series of sketches in the Wit- ness newspaper. A portion of the first chapter was submitted to the public a year or two earlier, in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal. ‘The rest, amountiag to about two thirds of the whole, appears for the first time. Every such work has its defects. The faults of the pres- ent volume — faults all too obvious, I am afraid — would have been probably fewer had the writer enjoyed greater leisure. Some of them, however, seem scarce separable from the na- ture of the subject: there are others for which, from their opposite character, I shall have to apologize in turn to oppo- site classes of readers. My facts would, in most instances, have lain closer had I written for geologists exclusiveiy, and there would have been less reference to familiar phenomena. And had I written for only general readers, my descriptions of hitherto undescribed organisms, and the deposits of little- (ix) x PREFACE. known localities, would have occupied fewer pages, and would have been thrown off with, perhaps, less regard to minute detail than to pictorial effect. May I crave, while ad- dressing myself, now to the one class, and now to the other, the alternate forbearance of each ? Such is the state of progression in geological science, that the geologist who stands still for but a very little, must be content to find himself left behind. Nay,so rapid is the prog- ress, that scarce a geological work passes through the press in which some of the statements of the earlier pages have not to be modified, restricted, or extended in the concluding ones. The present volume shares, in this respect, in what seems the common lot. In describing the Coccosteus, the reader will find it stated that the creature, unlike its contem- porary the Pterichthys, was unfurnished with arms. Ere arriving ‘at such a conclusion, I had carefully examined at least a hundred different Coccostei ; but the positive evidence of one specimen outweighs the negative evidence of a hun- dred; and I have just learned from a friend in the north, (Mr. Patrick Duff, of Elgin,) that a Coccosteus lately found a‘ Lethen-bar, and now in the possession of Lady Gordon Cumming, of Altyre, is furnished with what seem uncouth, paddle-shaped arms, that project from the head.* All that I * As these paddle-shaped arms have not been introduced by Agas- 3iz into his restoration of the Coccosteus, their existence, at least as arms, must still be regarded as problematical. There can be no doubt, PREFACE. xl have given of the creature, however, will be found trie to the actual type; and that parts should have been omitted will surprise no one who remembers that many hundred belem- nites had been figured and described ere a specimen turned up in which the horny prolongation, with its enclosed ink-bag, was found attached to the calcareous spindle ; and that even yet, after many thousand trilobites have been carefully exam- ined, it remains a question with the oryctologist, whether this crustacean of the earliest periods was furnished with legs, or creeped on an abdominal foot, like the snail. I owe to the kindness of Mr. Robertson, Inverugie, the specimen figured in Plate V., fig. 7, containing shells of the only species yet discovered in the Old Red Sandstone of Scotland. They occur in the Lower Forrnation of the system, in a quarry near Kirkwald, in which the specimen figured, with several others of the same kind, was found by Mr. Robertson, in the year 1834. In referring to this shell, page 90, I have spoken of it as a delicate bivalve, much resem- bling a Venus; drawing my illustration, naturally enough, when describing the shell of an ocean deposit, rather from among marine, than fluviatile testacea. I have since submit- ted it to Mr. Murchison, who has obligingly written me that he * can find no one to say more regarding it than that it is however, that they existed as plates of very peculiar form, and greatly resembling paddles, and that they served in the economy of the animal some still unaccounted for purpose. Xil PREFACE. very like a Cyclas.” He adds, however, that it must be an ocean production notwithstanding, seeing that all its contem- poraries in England, Scotland, and Russia, whether shells or fish, are unequivocally marine. With the exception of two of the figures in Plate X., the figures of the Cephalaspis and the Holoptychius, and one of the sections in the Frontispiece, section 2, all the prints of the volume are originals. To Mr. Daniel Alexander, of Ed- inburgh, —a gentleman, who to the skill and taste of the superior artist, adds no small portion of the knowledge of the practical geologist, —I am indebted for several of the draw- ings ; that of fig. 2 in Plate V., fig. 1 in Plate VL, fig. 2 in Plate VIII, and figs. 3 and 4 in plate X. Iam indebted to another friend for fig. 1,in Plate VII. Whatever defects may be discovered in any of the others, must be attributed to the untaught efforts of the writer, all unfamiliar, hitherto, with the pencil, and with by much too little leisure to acquaint himself with it now. CONTENTS. CHAPTER 1). PAGH The Working-man’s true Policy. — His only Mode of acquiring Power. — The Exercise of the Faculties essential to Enjoy- ment. — No necessary Connection between Labor and Unhap- piness. — Narrative. — Scenes in a Quarry.— The two dead Birds. — Landscape. — Ripple Markings on a Sandstone Slab. — Boulder Stones. — Inferences derived from their water-worn - Appearance. — Sea-coast Section. — My first discovered Fossil. —Lias Deposit on the Shores of the Moray Frith. — Belem- nite. — Result of the Experience of half a Lifetime of Toil. — Advantages of a Wandering Profession in Connection with the Geology of a Country. — Geological Opportunities of the Stone-Mason. — Design of the present Work. : : 1-14 CHAPTER’ ff. The Old Red Sandstone. — Till very lately its Existence as a dis- tinct Formation disputed.—Still little known.—Its great Importance in the Geological Scale. — Illustration, —The b (xiii) XIV CONTENTS. PAGE North of Scotland girdled by an immense Belt cf Old Red Sandstone. — Line of the Girdle along the Coast. — Marks of vast Denudation. — Its Extent partially indicated by Hills on the western Coast of Ross-shire.—The System of great Depth in the North of Scotland. — Difficulties in the Way of estimating the Thickness of Deposits. — Peculiar Formation of Hill. — Illustrated by Ben Nevis. — Caution to the Geologi- cal Critic. — Lower Old Red Sandstone immensely developed in Caithness. — Sketch of the Geology of that County. —Its strange Group of Fossils.— their present Place of Sepulture. — Their ancient Habitat. — Agassiz. ——- Amazing Progress of Fossil Ichthyology during the last few Years. — Its Nomen- clature. — Learned Names repel unlearned Readers. — Not a great deal in them, : , ‘ . ° . ° 15-34 - CHAPTE HoT Lamarck’s Theory of Progression illustrated. — Class of Facts which give Color to it.— The Credulity of Unbelief.— M. Maillet and his Fish-birds. — Gradation not Progress. — Geo- logical Argument.— The Present incomplete without the Past. — Intermediate Links of Creation. — Organisms of the Lower Old Red Sandstone. — The Pterichthys. —Its first Dis- covery. — Mr. Murchison’s Decision regarding it. — Confirmed by that of Agassiz. — Description. — The several Varieties of the Fossil yet discovered. — Evidence of violent Death in the Attitudes in which they are found. —The Coccosteus of the Lower Old Red.— Description. — Gradations from Crustacea to Fishes. — Habits of the Coccosteus. — Scarcely any Conception too extravagant for Nature to realize, . 35-64 CONTENTS. XV CHAPTER IV. PAGE The Elfin-fish of Gawin Douglas. — The Fish of the Old Red Sandstone scarcely less curious. — Place which they occu- pied indicated in the present Creation by a mere Gap. — Fish divided into two great Series, the Osseous and Cartilagi- nous. — Their distinctive Peculiarities. — Geological Ilustra- tion of Dr. Johnson’s shrewd Objection to the Theory of Soame Jenyns. — Proofs of the intermediate Character of the Ichthyolites of the Old Red Sandstone. — Appearances which first led the Writer to deem it intermediate. — Confirmation by Agassiz. — The Osteolepis.— Order to which this Ichthy- olite belonged. — Description. — Dipterus. — Diplopterus. — Cheirolepis. — Glyptolepis, : , ; : - ‘ 55-78 CHAPTER V. The Classifying Principle and its Uses. — Three Groups of Ich- thyolites among the Organisms of the Lower Old Red Sand- stone. — Peculiarities of the Third Group. — Its Varieties. — Description of the Cheiracanthus. — Of two unnamed Fossils of the same Order. — Microscopic Beauty of these ancient Fish. — Various Styles of Ornament which obtain among them. — The Molluses of the Formation. — Remarkable chief- ly for the Union of modern with ancient Forms which they exhibit. — Its Vegetables. — Importance and Interest of the Record which it furnishes, : ; ‘ , , 4 79-94 CHAPTER Y¥Ff. The Lines of the Geographer rarely right Lines. — These last, Xvi | CONTENTS. PaAGo however, always worth looking at when they occur. — Strik- ing Instance in the Line of the Great Caledonian Val- ley. — Indicative of the Direction in which the Volcanic Agencies have operated.— Sections of the Old Red Sand- stone furnished oy the granitic Eminences of the Line. — Illustration. — Lias of the Moray Frith. — Surmisings regard- ing its original Extent. — These lead to an exploratory Ram- ble. — Narrative. — Phenomena exhibited in the Course of half an Hour’s Walk. — The little Bay. — Its Strata and their Organisms, . ‘ ° ° 30a ‘ , ; 95-108 CHAPTER VII. Further Discoveries of the Ichthyolite Beds. — Found in one Locality under a Bed of Peat. — Discovered in another be- neath an ancient Burying-ground.—JIn a third underlying the Lias Formation.—In a fourth overtopped by a still older Sandstone Deposit. — Difficulties in ascertaining the true Place of a newly-discovered Formation. — Caution against drawing too hasty Inferences from the mere Circum- stance of Neighborhood.—The Writer receives his first Assistance from without. — Geological Appendix of the Messrs. Anderson, of Inverness. — Further Assistance from the Re- searches of Agassiz. — Suggestion. — Dr. John Malcolmson. — His extensive Discoveries in Moray.—He submits to Agassiz a Drawing of the Pterichthys. — Place of the Ich- thyolites in the Scale at length determined. — Two distinct Platforms of Being in the Formation to which they be- long, . . : . . : . ; . . 109-124 CONTENTS. XVil CHAPTER VIII. PAGE Upper Formations of the Old Red Sandstone. — Room enough for each and to spare. — Middle, or Cornstone Formation. — The Cephalaspis its most characteristic Organism. — Descrip- tion. — The Den of Balruddery richer in the Fossils of this middle Formation than any other Locality yet discovered. — Various Contemporaries of the Cephalaspis. — Vegetable Im- pressions. — Gigantic Crustacean. — Seraphim. — Ichthyodo- rulites. — Sketch of the Geology of Forfarshire. —Its older Deposits of the Cornstone Formation. —The Quarries of Carmylie. — Their Vegetable and Animal Remains. — The Up- per Formation. — Wide Extent of the Fauna and Flora of the earlier Formations. — Probable Cause, = ; . 125-150 CHAPTER IX. Fossils of the Upper Old Red Sandstone much more imperfect- ly preserved than those of the Lower. — The Causes obvious. — Difference between the two Groups, which first strikes the Observer, a difference in size. — The Holoptychius a character- istic Ichthyolite of the Formation. — Description of its huge Scales. — Of its Occipital Bones, Fins, Teeth, and general Ap- pearance. — Contemporaries of the Holoptychius. — Sponge-like Bodies. — Plates resembling those of the Sturgeun. — Teeth of various forms, but all evidently the teeth of fishes. — Lime- stone Band and its probable Origin. — Fossils of the Yellow Sandstone. — the Pterichthys of Dura Den. — Member of a Fam- b* XVili CONTENTS. PAGE ily peculiarly characteristic of the System. — No intervening Formation between the Old Red Sandstone and the Coal Meas- ures. — The Holoptychius contemporary for a time with the Megalichthys. — The Columns of Tubal-Cain, . . 151-172 CHAPTER. A. Speculations in the Old Red Sandstone, and their Character. — George, first Earl of Cromarty. — His Sagacity as a Naturalist at fault in one instance. — Sets himself to dig for Coal in the Lower Old Red Sandstone. — Discovers a fine Artesian Well. — Value of Geological Knowledge in an economic view. — Scarce a Secondary Formation in the Kingdom in which Coal has not been sought for. — Mineral Springs of the Old Red Sandstone. — Strathpeffer. — Its Peculiarities whence derived. — Chalybeate Springs of Easter Ross and the Black Isle. — Petrifying Springs. — Building-Stone and Lime of the Old Red Sandstone. -—Its various Soils, fea : P - 173-189 CHAy +B as. Geological Physiognomy. — Scenery of the Primary Formations ; Gneiss, Mica Schist, Quartz Rock.— Of the Secondary ; the Chalk Formations, the Oolite, the New Red Sandstone, the Coal Measures. — Scenery in the Neighborhood of Edinburgh. — Aspect of the Trap Rocks. — The Disturbing and Denuding Agencies. — Distinctive Features of the Old Red Sandstone. — Of the Great Conglomerate. — Of the Ichthyolite Beds. — The CONTENTS. X1x PAGE Burn of Eathie. — The Upper Old Red Sandstones. — Scene in Moray, 7 . > . . . o . . . 190-210 CHAPTER Zit. The two Aspects in which Matter can be viewed; Space and Time. — Geological History of the Earlier Periods. — The Cam- brian System.—Its Annelids.— The Silurian System. — Its Corals, Encrinites, Molluscs, and Trilobites. — Its Fish. — These of a high Order, and called into Existence apparently by Myri- ads. — Opening Scene in the History of the Old Red Sand- stone a Scene of Tempest. — Represented by the Great Con- glomerate. — Red a prevailing Color among the Ancient Rocks contained in this Deposit.— Amazing Abundance of Animal Life. — Exemplified by a Scene in the Herring Fishery. — Plat- form of Death. — Probable Cause of the Catastrophe which ren- dered it such, : : ; : r : = 211-225 CHAPTER XIII. Successors of the exterminated Tribes. — The Gap slowly filled. — Proof that the Vegetation of a Formation may long survive its Animal Tribes. — Probable Cause.—Immensely extended Period during which Fishes were the Master-existences of our Planet. — Extreme Folly of an Infidel Objection illustrated by the Fact. — Singular Analogy between the History of Fishes as Individuals and as a Class. — Chemistry of the Lower For- mation.— Principles on which the Fish-enclosing Nodules XX CONTENTS. PAGE were probably formed. — Chemical Effect of Animal Matter in discharging the Color from Red Sandstone. — Origin of the prevailing tint to which the System owes its Name. — Suc- cessive Modes in which a Metal may exist. — The Restorations of the Geologist void of Color. — Very different Appearance of the Ichthyolites of Cromarty and Moray, . ° - 226-242 CHAPTER XT: The Cornstone Formation and its Organisms. — Dwarf Vegeta- tion. — Cephalaspides. — Huge Lobster. — Habitats of the ex- isting Crustacea. — No unapt representation of the Deposit of Balruddery, furnished by a land-locked Bay in the neighbor- hood of Cromarty. — Vast Space occupied by the Geological Formations. — Contrasted with the half-formed Deposits which represent the existing Creation. — Inference. — The formation of the Holoptychius. — Probable origin of its Siliceous Limestone. — Marked increase in the Bulk of the Existences of the Sys- tem. — Conjectural Cause. — The Coal Measures. — The Lime- stone of Burdie House. — Conclusion, . 3 . - 2438-259 IcHTHYOLITES OF THE OLD Rep SanpstoneE—from Agassiz’s ‘Poissons Fossiles,”’ G cs B . . . - 261-264 Nores . : é . q ‘ ; : : . 265 APPENDIX 3 4 x : : = : =: «808 EXPLANATIONS OF THE SECTIONS AND PLATES. SECTION I. ReprEsENTs the Old Red System of Scotland from its upper beds of Yellow Quartzose Sandstone to its Great Conglomerate base. a. Quartzose Yellow Sandstone. %. Impure concretionary limestone enclosing masses of chert. ec. Red and variegated sandstones and conglomerate. These three deposits constitute an upper formation of the system, characterized by its peculiar group of fossils. (See Chapter IX.) d. Deposit of gray fissile sandstone which constitutes the middle formation of the system, characterized also by its peculiar organic group. (See Chapter VIII.) e. Red and variegated sand- stones, undistinguishable often in their mineral character from the upper sandstones, c, but in general less gritty, and containing fewer pebbles. f. Bituminous schists. g. Coarse gritty sandstone. h. Great Conglomerate. These four beds compose a lower formation of the system, more strikingly marked by its peculiar organisms than even the other two. (See Chapters II. WI.IV.and V.) Inthe section this lower formation is represented as we find .it developed in Caithness and Orkney. In fig. 5 it is represented as developed in Cromarty, where, though the fossils are identical with those of the more north- ern localities, at least one of the deposits, f, is mineralogically differ- (xxi) Xxil_ EXPLANATIONS OF THE PLATES. ent — alternating beds of sandstone and clay, these last enclosing limestone nodules, taking the place of the bituminous schists. pecrTrON “It. The Old Red System of England and Wales, as given in the general Section of Mr. Murchison, with the Silurian Rocks beneath and the carboniferous limestone above. 7. The point in the geological scale at which vertebrated existences first appear. The three Old Red Sandstone formations of this section correspond in their characteristic fossils with those of Scotland, but the proportions in which they are developed are widely different. The tilestones seem a comparatively narrow Stripe in the system in England; the answering formation in Scotland, e, f, g, A, is of such enormous thickness, that it has been held by very superior geologists to contain three distinct formations —e, the New Red Sandstone, f, a representative of the Coal Meas- ures, and g, h, the Old Red Sandstone. SECTION III. Interesting case of extensive denudation from existing causes on the northern shore of the Moray Frith. (See pages 198 and 199.) The figures and letters which mark the various beds correspond with those of fig. 5, and of the following section. The “ fish-bed,” No. 1, represents what the reader will find described in pp. 221-225 as the * platform of sudden death.” SECTION. iF. Illustration of a fault in tae Burn of Eathie, Cromartyshire. (See pages 204 and 205.) EXPLANATIONS OF THE PLATES. XXiil Prate I.— Fig. 1, Restoration of upper side of the elongated spe- cies of Pterichthys, (P. oblongus,) referred to in page 47. Fig. 2, Pterichthys Milleri. Fig. 3, Part of tail of elongated species, showing portions of the original covering of rhomboidal scales. Fig. 4, Tu- bercles of Péerichthys magnified. Puate II. — Fig. 2, Restoration of under side of Pterichthys obd- iongus. Fig. 1, A second specimen of Pterichthys Milleri. Fig. 3, Portion of wing, natural size. Puate II.— Fig. 1, Coccosteus cuspidatus. Fig. 2, Impression of inner surface of large dorsal plate. Fig. 3, Abdominal lozenge-shaped plate. Fig. 4, Portion of jaw, with teeth. Puate IV.— Fig. 1, Restoration of Osteolepis major. Fig. 2, Scales from the upper part of the body magnified. Fig. 3, Large defensive scale which runs laterally along all the single fins. Fig. 4, Under side of scale, showing the attaching bar. Fig. 5, Enamelled and punctulated jaw of the creature. Fig. 6, Magnified portion of fin, showing the enamelled and punctulated rays. Puate V.—Fig. 1, Dipterus macrolepidotus. This figure serves merely to show the place of the fins and the general outline of the ichthyolite. All the specimens the writer has hitherto examined fail to show the minuter details. Fig. 2, Glyptolepis leptopterus. ‘ Fig. 3, Single scale of the creature, showing its rustic style of ornament. Fig. 4, Scale with a nail-like attachment. Fig. 5, Under side of scale. Fig. 6, Magnified portion of fin, Fig. 7, Shells of the Old Red Sandstone. Puatge VI.—Fig. 1, Cheirolepis Cummingie. Fig. 2, Magnified scales. Fig. 3, Magnified portion of fin. XX1V EXPLANATIONS OF THE PLATES. Prare VII. —Fig. 1, Cheiracanthus microlepidotus. Fig. 2, Magni- fied scales. Figs. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, Vegetable impressions of the Old Red Sandstone. Puate VIII.— Fig. 1, Diplacanthus longispinus. Fig. 2, Diplacan- thus striatus. Fig. 3, Magnified scales of fig 1. Fig. 4, Spine of fig. 2, slightly magnified. Pruatr IX.— Restoration of Coccosteus, incomplete, found in Mr. Miller’s Museum after his death. (Seventh Edinburgh edition, 1858.) Puiate X.— Restoration of Cephalaspis, from several specimens lately found in Forfarshire. (Seventh Edinburgh edition, 1858.) Pratt XI.—Fig. 1, One of the tail flaps of the gigantic Crusta- cean of Forfarshire. Fig. 2, Reticulated markings of Carmylie. Prats XII. — Parka decipiens, from a specimen in the private col- lection of Lord Kinnaird, at Rossie Priory. (Seventh Edinburgh edi- tion, 1858.) Prate XIII.— Fig. 1, Cephalaspis Lyellii, copied from Lyell’s El- ements of Geology. Fig. 2, Holoptychius Nobilissimus, copied on a greatly reduced scale from Murchison’s Silurian System. Fig. 3, Scale of Holoptychius, natural size. Fig. 4, Tooth of ditto, also natural size. These last drawn from specimens in the collection of Mr. Patrick Duff, of Elgin. Prate XIV.—Figure of a Holoptychius, found some time ago in Dura Den, Fifeshire, and now in the possession of a private collector in Dundee. (Seventh Edinburgh edition, 1858.) NEW WALKS IN AN OLD FIELD; OR, THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. CHAPTER I. The Working-man’s True Policy.— His only Mode of acquiring Power. — The Exercise of the Faculties essential to Enjoyment. — No necessary Connection between Labor and Unhappiness. — Narra- tive. — Scenes in a Quarry. — The two dead Birds. — Landscape. — Ripple Markings on a Sandstone Slab. — Boulder Stones. — Infer- ence derived from their water-worn Appearance. — Sea-coast Sec: tion. — My first discovered Fossil. — Lias Deposit on the Shores of the Moray Frith. — Belemnite. — Result of the Experience of half a Lifetime of Toil.— Advantages of a Wandering Profession in Connection with the Geology of a Country. — Geological Opportu- nities of the Stone-Mason. — Design of the present Work. My advice to young working-men, desirous of bettering their circumstances, and adding to the amount of their en- joyment, is a very simple one. Do not seek happiness in what is misnamed pleasure ; seek it rather in what is termed study. Keep your consciences clear, your curiosity fresh, and embrace every opportunity of cultivating your minds. You will gain nothing by attending Chartist meetings. The fellows who speak nonsense with fluency at these assemblies, and deem their nonsense eloquence, are totally unable to help either you or themselves ; or, if they do succeed in helping 1 2 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. themselves, it will be all at your expense. Leave them to harangue unheeded, and set yourselves to occupy your lei- — sure hours in making yourselves wiser men. Learn to make a right use of your eyes: the commonest things are worth looking at—even stones and weeds, and the most familiar arimals. Read good books, not forgetting the best of all: there is more true philosophy in the Bible than in every work of every sceptic that ever wrote; and we would be all mis- erable creatures without it, and none more miserable than you. You are jealous of the upper classes; and perhaps it is too true that, with some good, you have received much evil at their hands. It must be confessed they have hitherto been doing comparatively little for you, and a great deal for themselves. But upper and lower classes there must be, so long as the world lasts; and there is only one way in which your jealousy of them can be well directed. Do not let them get ahead of you in intelligence. It would be alike unwise and unjust to attempt casting them down to your own level, and no class would suffer moré in the attempt than your- selves; for you would only be clearing the way, at an im- mense expense of blood, and under a tremendous pressure of misery, for another and perhaps worse aristocracy, with some second Cromwell or Napoleon at their head. Society, however, is in a state of continual flux:.some in the upper classes are fro‘n time to time going down, and some of you from time to time mounting up to take their places — always the more steady and intelligent among you, remember; and if all your minds were cultivated, not merely intellectually, but morally also, you would find yourselves, as a body, in the possession of a power which every charter in the world could not confer upon you, and which all the tyranny or in- justice of the world could not withstand, THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 3 I intended, however, to speak rather of the pleasure to be derived, by even the humblest, in the pursuit of knowledge, than of the power with which knowledge in the masses is invariably accompanied. For it is surely of greater impor- tance that men should receive accessions to their own happi- ness, than to the influence which they exert over other men. There is none of the intellectual, and none of the moral fac- ulties, the exercise of which does not lead to enjoyment. nay, it is chiefly in the active employment of these that all enjoyment consists; and hence it is that happiness bears so little reference to station. It is a truth which has been often told, but very little heeded or little calculated upon, that though one nobleman may be happier than another, and one laborer happier than another, yet it cannot be at all pre- mised of their respective orders, that the one is in any de- gree happier than the other. Simple as the fact may seem, if universally recognized, it would save a great deal of use- less discontent, and a great deal of envy. Will my humbler readers permit me at once to illustrate this subject, and to introduce the chapters which follow, by a piece of simple narrative ? I wish to show them how possible it is to enjoy much happiness in very mean employments. Cowper tells us that labor, though the primal curse, “has been softened into mercy ;” and I think that, even had he not done so, 1 would have found out the fact for myself. It was twenty years, last February, since I set out a little before sunrise to make my first acquaintance with a life of labor and restraint, and I have rarely had a heavier heart than on that morning. I was but a slim, loose-jointed boy at the time — fond of the pretty intangibilities of romance, and of dreaming when broad awake; and, woful change! I was now going to work at what Burns has instanced in his “ Twa 4 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. Dogs” as one of the most disagreeable of all employments — to work in a quarry. Bating the passing uneasiness occas sioned by a few gloomy anticipations, the portion of my life which had already gone by had been happy beyond the com- mon lot. I had been a wanderer among rocks and woods — a reader of curious books when I could get them —a gleaner of old traditionary stories; and now I was going to exchange all my day-dreams, and all my amusements, for the kind of life in which men toil every day that they may be enabled to eat, and eat every day that they may be enabled to toil ! Tne quarry in which I wrought lay on the southern shore of a noble inland bay, or frith, rather, with a little clear stream on the one side, and a thick fir wood on the other. It had been opened in the Old Red Sandstone of the district, and was overtopped by a huge bank of diluvial clay, which rose over it in some places to the height of nearly thirty feet, and which at this time was rent and shivered, wherever it pre- sented an open front to the weather, by a recent frost. A heap of loose fragments, which had fallen from above, blocked up the face of the quarry, and my first employment was to clear them away. The friction of the shovel soon blistered my hands; but the pain was by no means very severe, and I wrought hard and willingly, that I might see how the huge strata below, which presented so firm and un- broken a frontage, were to be torn up and removed. Picks, and wedges, and levers were applied by my brother-work- men; and simple and rude as I had been accustomed to re- yard these implements, I found I had much to learn in the way of using them. They all proved inefficient, however ; and the workmen had to bore into one of the inferior strata, and employ gunpowder. The process was new to me, and | deemed it a highly amusing one: it had the merit, too, of THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. a being attended with some such degree of danger as a boating or rock excursion, and had thus an interest independent of its novelty. We had a few capital shots: the fragments flew in every direction; and an immense mass of the diluvium came toppling down, bearing with it two dead birds, that ina recent storm had crept into one of the deeper fissures, to die in the shelter. I felt a new interest in examining them. The one was a pretty cock goldfinch, with its hood of vermilion, and its wings inlaid with the gold to which it owes its name, as unsoiled and smooth as if it had been preserved for a mu- seum. ‘The other, a somewhat rarer bird, of the woodpecker tribe, was variegated with light blue and a grayish yellow. I was engaged in admiring the poor little things, more disposed to be sentimental, perhaps, than if I had been ten years older, and thinking of the contrast between the warmth and jollity of their green summer haunts, and the cold and darkness of their last retreat, when I heard our employer bidding the workmen lay by their tools. I looked up, and saw the sun sinking behind the thick fir wood beside us, and the long, dark shadows of the trees stretching downwards towards the shore. This was no very formidable beginning of the course of life | had so much dreaded. To be sure, my hands were a little sore, and I felt nearly as much fatigued as if I had been climbing among the rocks ; but I had wrought and been use- ful, and had yet enjoyed the day fully as much as usual. It was no small matter, too, that the evening, converted, by a rare transmutation, into the delicious * blink of rest?’ which Burns so truthfully describes, was all my own. I was as light of heart next morning as any of my brother-workmen. There had been a smart frost during the night, and the rime lay white on the grass as we passed onwards through the 1 ¥* 6 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. fields; but the sun rose in a clear atmosphere, and the day mellowed, as it advanced, into one of those delightful days of early spring, which give so pleasing an earnest of whatever is mild and genial in the better half of the year. All the workmen rested at midday, and I went to enjoy my half- hour alone on a mossy knoll in the neighboring wood, which commands through the trees a wide prospect of the bay and the opposite shore. ‘There was not a wrinkle on the water, nor a cloud in the sky, and the branches were as moyeless in the calm as if they had been traced on canvas. Froma wooded promontory that stretched half way across the frith, there ascended a thin column of smoke. It rose straight as the line of a plummet for more than a thousand yards, and then, on reaching a thinner stratum of air, spread out equally on every side, like the foliage of a stately tree. Ben Wevis rose to the west, white with the yet unwasted snows of win- ter, and as sharply defined in the clear atmosphere, as if all its sunny slopes and blue retiring hollows had been chiselled in marble. A line of snow ran along the opposite hills; all above was white, and all below was purple. ‘They reminded me of the pretty French story, in which an old artist is de- scribed as tasking the ingenuity of his future son-in-law, by giving him, as a subject for his pencil, a flower-piece com- posed of only white flowers, of which the one half were to bear their proper color, the other half a deep purple hue, and yet all be perfectly natural; and how the young man resolved the riddle, and gained his mistress, by introducing a transpar- ent purple vase into the picture, and making the light pass through it on the flowers that were drooping over the edge. I returned to the quarry, convinced that a very exquisite pleasure may be a very cheap one, and that the busiest em ployments may afford leisure enough to enjoy it. THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 7 The gunpowder had loosened a large mass in one of the inferior strata, and our first employment, on resuming our la- bors, was to raise it from its bed. I assisted the other work- men in placing it on edge, and was much struck by the ap- pearance of the platform on which it had rested. The en- tire surfaze was ridged and furrowed like a bank of sand that had been left by the tide an hour before. I could trace every bend and curvature, every cross hollow and counter ridge of the corresponding phenomena; for the resemblance was no half resemblance — it was the thing itself; and I had observed it a hundred and a hundred times, when sailing my little schoon- er inthe shallows left by the ebb. But what had become of the waves that had thus fretted the solid rock, or of what element had they been composed? I felt as completely at fault as Rob- inson Crusoe did on his discovering the print of the man’s foot on the sand. The evening furnished me with still further cause of wonder. We raised another block in a different part of the quarry, and found that the area of a circular depression in the stratum below was broken and flawed in every direction, as if it had been the bottom of a pool recently dried up, which had shrunk and split in the hardening. Sev- eral large stones came rolling down from the diluvium in the course of the afternoon. They were of different qualities from the Sandstone below, and from one another; and, what was more wonderful still, they were all rounded and water- worn, as if they had been tossed about in the sea, or the bed of a river, for hundreds of years. There could not, surely, be amore conclusive proof that the bank which had enclosed them so long could not have been created on the rock on which it rested. No workman ever manufactures a half-worn article, and the stones were all half-worn! And if not the bank, why then the sandstone underneath ? I was lost in conjecture, 8 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. and found I had food enough for thought that evening, with- out once thinking of the unhappiness of a life of labor. The immense masses of diluvium which we had to clear away rendered the working of the quarry laborious and ex- pensive, and all the party quitted it in a few days, to make trial of another that seemed to promise better. The one we lef. is situated, as I have said, on the southern shore of an in- land bay —the Bay of Cromarty; the one to which we re- moved has been opened in a lofty wall of cliffs that overhangs the northern shore of the Moray Frith. I soon found | was to be no loser by the change. Not the united labors of a thousand men for more than a thousand years could have fur- nished a better section of the geology of the district than this range of cliffs. It may be regarded as a sort of chance dis- section on the earth’s crust. We see in one place the pri- mary rock, with its veins of granite and quartz, its dizzy preci- pices of gneiss, and its huge masses of hornblende; we find the secondary rock in another, with its beds of sandstone and shale, its spars, its clays, and its nodular limestones. We dis- cover the still little known but highly interesting fossils of the Old Red Sandstone in one deposition ; we find the beautifully preserved shells and lignites of the Lias in another. There are the remains of two several creations at once before us. The shore, too, is heaped with rolled fragments of almost every variety of rock, — basalts, ironstones, hypersthenes, por- phyries, bituminous shales, and micaceous schists. In short, the young geologist, had he all Europe before him, could hardly choose for himself a better field. I had, however, no one to tell me so at the time, for geology had not yet travelled so far north; and so, without guide or vocabulary, I had to grope my way as I best might, and find out all its wonders for myself. But so slow was the process, and so much was I THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 9 a seeker in the dark, that the facts contained in these few sen- tences were the patient gatherings of years. In the course of the first day’s employment, I picked upa nodular mass of blue limestone, and laid it open by a stroke of the hammer. Wonderful to relate, it contained inside a beautifully finished piece of sculpture —one of the volutes apparently of an Ionic capital; and not the far-famed walnut of the fairy tale, had I broken the shell and found the little dog lying within, could have surprised me more. Was there another such curiosity in the whole world? I broke open a few other nodules of similar appearance, — for they lay pretty thickly on the shore, — and found that there might. In one of these there were what seemed to be the scales of fishes, and the impressions of a few minute bivalves, prettily striated ; in the centre of another there was actually a piece of decayed wood. Of all Nature’s riddles these seemed to me to be at once the most interesting, and the most difficult to expound. I treasured them carefully up, and was told by one of the workmen to whom I showed them, that there was a part of the shore about two miles farther to the west, where curiously shaped stones, somewhat like the heads of boarding-pikes, were occasionally picked up; and that in his father’s days the country people called them thunderbolts, and deemed them of sovereign efficacy in curing bewitched cattle. Our employer, on quitting the quarry for the building on which we were to be engaged, gave all the workmen a half-holiday. [ employed it in visiting the place where the thunderbolts had fallen so thickly, and found it a richer scene of wonder than I could have fancied in even my dreams. What first attracted my notice was a detached group of low lying skerries, wholly different in form and color from the sandstone cliffs above, or the primary rocks a little farther to 10 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. the west. I found them composed of thin strata of limestone, alternating with thicker beds of a black slaty substance, which, as I ascertained in the course of the evening, burns with a powerful flame, and emits a strong bituminous odor. The layers into which the beds readily separate are hardly an eighth part of an inch in thickness, and yet on every layer there are the impressions of thousands and tens of thousands of the various fossils peculiar to the Lias. We may turn over these wonderful leaves one after one, like the leaves of a her- barium, and find the pictorial records of a former creation in every page. Scallops, and gryphites, and ammonites, of almost every variety peculiar to the formation, and at least some eight or ten varieties of belemnite ; twigs of wood, leaves of plants, cones of an extinct species of pine, bits of charcoal, and the scales of fishes; and, as if to render their pictorial appear- ance more striking, though the leaves of this interesting volume are of a deep black, most of the impressions are of a chalky whiteness. I was lost in admiration and astonishment, and found my very imagination paralyzed by an assemblage of wonders, that seemed to outrival, in the fantastic and the extravagant, even its wildest conceptions. I passed on from ledge to ledge, like the traveller of the tale through the city of statues, and at length found one of the supposed aerolites I had come in quest of, firmly imbedded in a mass of shale. But I had skill enough to determine that it was other than what it had been deemed. A very near relative, who had been a sailor in his time on almost every ocean, and had visit- ed almost every quarter of the globe, had brought home one of these meteoric stones with him from the coast of Java. It was of a cylindrical shape and vitreous texture, and it seemed to have parted in the middle when in a half-molten state, and to have united again, somewhat awry, ere it had cooled enough THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. ll to have lost the adhesive quality. But there was nothing organic in its structure, whereas the stone I had now found was organized very curiously indeed. It was of a conical form and filamentary texture, the filaments radiating in straight lines from the centre to the circumference. Finely-marked veins like white threads ran transversely through these in its upper half to the point, while the space below was occupied by an internal cone, formed of plates that lay parallel to the base, and which, like watch-glasses, were concave on the un- der side, and convex on the upper. I learned in time to call this stone a belemnite, and became acquainted with enough of its history to know that it once formed part of a variety of cut- tle-fish, long since extinct. My first year of labor came to a close, and I found that the amount of my happiness had not been less than in the last of my boyhood. My knowledge, too, had increased in more than the ratio of former seasons; and as I had acquired the skill of at least the common mechanic, [ had fitted myself for independence. ‘The additional experience of twenty years has not shown me that there is any necessary connection be-~ tween a life of toil and a life of wretchedness; and when I have found good men anticipating a better and a happier time than either the present or the past, the conviction that in every period of the world’s history the great bulk of mankind must pass their days in labor, has not in the least inclined me to scepticism. My curiosity, once fully awakened, remained awake, and my opportunities of gratifying it have been tolerably ample. I have been an explorer of caves and ravines —a loiterer along sea-shores —a climber among rocks —a laborer in quarries. My profession was a wandering one. I remember passing direct, on one occasion, from the wild western coast 12 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. of Ross-shire, where the Old Red Sandstone leans at a high angle against the prevailing Quartz Rock of the district, to where, on the southern skirts of Mid-Lothian, the Mountain Limestone rises amid the coal. I have resided one season on a raised beach of the Moray Frith. I have spent the season immediately following amid the ancient granites and contort- ed schists of the central Highlands. In the north I have laid open by thousands the shells and lignites of the Oolite ; in the south I have disinterred from their matrices of stone or of shale the huge reeds and tree ferns of the Carboniferous pe- riod. I have been taught by experience, too, how neces- sary an acquaintance with geology of both extremes of the kingdom is to the right understanding of the formations of either. In the north, there occurs a vast gap in the scale. The Lias leans unconformably against the Old Red Sand- stone; there is no Mountain Limestone, no Coal Measures, none of the New Red Marls or Sandstones, Under or Upper. There are at least three entire systems omitted. But the upper portion of the scale is well nigh complete. In one locality we may pass from the Lower to the Upper Lias, in another from the Inferior to the Great Oolite, and onward to the Ox- ford Clay and the Coral Rag. We may explore, in a third locality, beds identical in their organisms with the Wealden of Sussex. Ina fourth we find the flints and fossils of the Chalk. The lower part of the scale is also well nigh com- plete. The Old Red Sandstone is amply developed in Moray, Caithness, and Ross ; and the Grauwacke, in its more ancient unfossiliferous type, rather extensively in Banffshire. But to acquaint one’s self with the three missing formations, — to complete one’s knowledge of the entire scale by filling up the hiatus, — it is necessary to remove to the south. The geology of the Lothians is the geology of at least two thirds THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 13 of the gap, and perhaps a little more ;—the geolcgy of Ar- ran wants, it is supposed, only the Upper New Red Sandstone to fill it entirely. One important truth I would fain press on the attention of my lowlier readers. There are few professions, however humble, that do not present their peculiar advantages of ob- servation ; there are none, | repeat, in which the exercise of the faculties does not lead to enjoyment. I advise the stone- mason, for instance, to acquaint himself with Geology. Much of his time must be spent amid the rocks and quarries of widely separated localities. The bridge or harbor is no soon- er completed in one district, than he has to remove to where the gentleman’s seat, or farm-steading is to be erected in an- other; and so, in the course of a few years, he may pass over the whole geological scale, even when restricted to Scot- land, from the Grauwacke of the Lammermuirs, to the Wealden of Moray, or the Chalk-flints of Banffshire and Aberdeen ; and this, too, with opportunities of observation, at every stage, which can be shared with him by only the gen- tleman of fortune, who devotes his whole time to the study. Nay, in some respects, his advantages are superior to those of the amateur himself. The latter must often pronounce a formation unfossiliferous when, after the examination of at most a few days, he discovers in it nothing organic ; and it will be found that half the mistakes of geologists have arisen from conclusions thus hastily formed. But the working-man, whose employments have to be carried on in the same forma- tion for months, perhaps years, together, enjoys better oppor- tunities for arriving at just decisions. There are, besides, a thousand varieties of accident which lead to discovery — floods, storms, landslips, tides of unusual height, ebbs of ex- traordinary fall: and the man who plies his labor at all seae 2 l4 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. sons in the open air has by much the best chance of profiting by these. There are formations which yield their organisms slowly to the discoverer, and the proofs which establish their place in the geological scale more tardily still. I was ac- quainted with the Old Red Sandstone of Ross and Cromarty for nearly ten years ere | had ascertained that it is richly fossiliferous — a discovery which, in exploring this formation in those localities, some of our first geologists had failed to anticipate. I was acquainted with it for nearly ten years more ere I could assign to its fossils their exact place in the scale. In the following chapters I shall confine my observations chiefly to this system and its organisms. To none of the others, perhaps, excepting the Lias of the north of Scotland, have I devoted an equal degree of attention; nor is there a formation among them which, up to the present time, has re- mained so much a terra incognita to the geologist. The space on both sides has been carefully explored to its upper and lower boundary ; the space between has been suffered to remain well nigh a chasm. Should my facts regarding it— facts constituting the slow gatherings of years —serve as stepping-stones laid across, until such time as geologists of greater skill, and more extended research, shall have bridged over the gap, I shall have completed half my design. Should the working-man be encouraged by my modicum of success to improve his opportunities of observation, I shall have ae- complished the whole of it. It cannot be too extensively known, that nature is vast and knowledge limited; and that no individual, however humble in place or acquirement, need despair of adding to the general fund. CHAPTER IL. The Old Red Sandstone. — Till very lately its Existence as a distinct Formation disputed. — Still little known. —Its great Importance in the Geological Scale. — Illustration. —'The North of Scotland gir- dled by an immense Belt of Old Red Sandstone. — Line of the Gir- dle along the Coast. — Marks of vast Denudation. — Its Extent par- tially indicated by Hills on the Western Coast of Ross-shire. —'The System of Great Depth in the North of Scotland. — Difficulties in the way of estimating the Thickness of Deposits. — Peculiar Formas tion of Hill. — Illustrated by Ben Nevis. — Caution to the Geological Critic. — Lower Old Red Sandstone immensely developed in Caith- ness. — Sketch of the Geology of that County. — Its strange Grour. of Fossils. — Their present place of Sepulture.— Their ancient Habitat. — Agassiz. — Amazing Progress of Fossil Ichthyology dur- ing the last few Years. — Its Nomenclature. — Learned Names repel unlearned Readers. — Not a great deal in them. “ Tue Old Red Sandstone,” says a Scottish geologist, in a digest of some recent geological discoveries, which appeared a short time ago in an Edinburgh newspaper, “ has been hith- erto considered as remarkably barren of fossils.”” The re- mark is expressive of a pretty general opinion among geolo- gists of even the present time, and I quote it on this account. Only a few years have gone by since men of no low standing in the science disputed the very existence of this formation — system rather, for it contains at least three distinct formations ; and but for the influence of one accomplished geologist, the celebrated author of the Silurian System, it would have been probably degraded from its place in the scale altogether. “You must inevitably give up the Old Red Sandstone,” said an ingenious foreigner to Mr. Murchison, when on a visit to England about four years ago, and whose celebrity among his (16) 16 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. own countrymen rested chiefly on his researches in the more ancient formations, — “* you must inevitably give up the Old Red Sandstone: it isa mere local deposit, a doubtful accu- mulation huddled up in a corner, and has no type or represen- tative abroad.” ‘* 1 would willingly give it up if nature would,” was the reply ; ‘¢ but it assuredly exists, and I cannot.’’” Ina recently published tabular exhibition of the geological scale by a continental geologist, I could not distinguish this system at all. There are some of our British geologists, too, who still regard it as a sort of debatable tract, entitled to no inde- pendent status. ‘They find, in what they deem its upper beds, the fossils of the Coal Measures, and the lower graduating apparently into the Silurian System; and regard the whole as a sort of common, which should be divided as proprietors used to divide commons in Scotland half a century ago, by giving a portion to each of the bordering territories. Even the better informed geologists, who assign to it its proper place as an independent formation, furnished with its own organisms, contrive to say all they know regarding it in a very few paragraphs. Lyell, in the first edition of his admi- rable elementary work, published only two years ago, devotes more than thirty pages to his description of the Coal Measures, and but two anda half to his notice of the Old Red Sandstone. * * As the succinct notice of this distinguished geologist may serve as a sort of pocket map to the reader in indicating the position of the system, its three great deposits, and its extent, I take the liberty of transferring it entire. ‘OLD RED SANDSTONE. ‘‘Tt was stated that the Carboniferous formation was surmounted by one called the ‘New Red Sandstone,’ and underlaid by another called the Old Red, which last was formerly merged in the Carbonifer- ous System but is now found to be distinguishable by its fossils. The THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 17 It will be found, however, that this hitherto neglected sys- tem yields in importance to none of the others, whether we take into account its amazing depth, the great extent to which it is developed both at home and abroad, the interest- ing links which it furnishes in the zoological scale, or the vast period of time which it represents. There are localities in which the depth of the Old Red Sandstone fully equals the elevation of Mount /a cae (ae cK wr, hl i) At) EA Re rms ue Ti roy 1 Wee Wari <5, we Aug ; ayar Pe pie Pee aly b s Oe ay, i igh: THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 137 of Forfarshire. (See Plate XI., fig. 1.) It is a terminal flap* — one of several divisions — curiously fretted by scale- like markings, and bearing on its lower edge a fringe, cut into angular points, somewhat in the style of the Vandyke edgings of a ruff or the lacings of a dead-dress. It may be remarked, in passing, that our commoner lobsters bear, on the corresponding edge, fringes of strong, reddish-colored hair. The form altogether, from its wing-like appearance, its feathery markings, and its angular points, will suggest to the reader the origin of the name given it by the Forfarshire workmen. With another such flap spreading out in the con- trary direction, and a periwigged head between them, we would have one of the sandstone cherubs of our country churchyards complete. There occur among the other organisms of Balruddery numerous ichthyodorulites—fin-spines, such as those to which I have called the attention of the reader in describing the thorny-finned fish of the lower formation.t But the ich- thyodorulites of Balruddery differ essentially from those of Caithness, Moray, and Cromarty. ‘These last are described on both sides, in every instance, by either straight, or slightly curved lines; whereas one of the describing lines in a Bal- ruddery variety is broken by projecting prickles, that re- semble sharp, hooked teeth set in a jaw, or, rather, the entire ichthyodorulite resembles the sprig of a wild rose-bush, bearing its peculiar aquiline shaped thorns on ove of its sides. Buckland, in his Bridgewater Treatise, and Lyell, in his Elements, refer to this peculiarity of structure in ichthy- odorulites of the latter formations. The hooks are invariably ranged on the concave or posterior edge of the spine, and were employed, it is supposed, in elevating the fin. Another ichthyodorulite of the formation resembles, in the Gothic * See Note H 2. * See Note G 2. 138 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. cast of its roddings, those of the Diplacanthus of the Lower Old Red Sandstone described in pages 84 and 85 of the present volume, and figured in Plate VIII., fig. 2, except that it was proportionally stouter, and traversed at its base by lines running counter to the strize that furrow it longitudinally. Of the other organisms of Balruddery I cannot pretend to speak with any degree of certainty. Some of them seem to have belonged to the Radiata; some are of so doubtful a character that it can scarce be determined whether they took their place among the forms of the vegetable or animal king- doms. One organism in particular, which was at first deemed the jointed stem of some plant resembling a calamite of the Coal Measures, was found by Agassiz to be the slender limb of acrustacean. A minute description of this interesting de- posit, with illustrative prints, would be of importance to sci- ence: it would serve to fill a gap in the scale. The geologi- cal pathway, which leads upwards to the present time from those ancient formations in which organic existence first began, has been the work of well nigh as many hands as some of our longer railroads: each contractor has taken his part; very extended parts have fallen to the share of some, and admirably have they executed them ; but the pathway is not yet complete, and the completion of a highly curious portion of it awaits the further labors of Mr. Webster, of Balruddery. A considerable portion of the rocks of this middle forma- tion in Scotland are of a bluish-gray color: in Balruddery, they resemble the mudstones of the Silurian System ; they form at Carmylie the fissile, bluish-gray pavement, so well known in commerce as the pavement of Arbroath; they occur as a hard, micaceous building-stone in some parts of Fifeshire ; in others they exist as beds of friable, stratified THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 139 clay, that dissolve into unctuous masses where washed by the sea. In England, the formation consists, throughout its entire depth, of beds of red and green marl, with alternating beds of the nodular limestones, to which it owes its name, and with here and there an interposing band of indurated sandstone. The Cornstone formation is more extensively developed in Forfarshire than in any other district in Scotland; and from this circumstance the result of the writer’s observations re- garding it, during the course of a recent visit, may be of some little interest to the reader. About two thirds the en- tire area of this county is composed of Old Red Sandstone. It forms a portion of that great belt of the system which, ex- tending across the island from the German Ocean to the Frith of Clyde, represents the southern bar of the huge sandstone frame in which the Highlands of Scotland is set. The Gram- pians run along its inner edge —composing part of the pri- mary nucleus which the frame encloses: the Sidlaw Hills run through its centre in a line nearly parallel to these, and separated from them by Strathmore, the great valley of An- gus. The valley and the hills thus form, if I may so express myself, the mouldings of the frame — mouldings somewhat resembling the semi-recta of the architect. There is first, reckoning from the mountains downwards, an immense con- cave curve — the valley; then an immense convex one — the hills; and then a half curve bounded by the sea. The illus- tration may further serve to show the present condition of the formation: it is a frame much worn by denudation, and — just as in a bona fide frame — it is the higher mouldings that have suffered most. Layer after layer has been worn down on the ridges, exactly as on a raised moulding we may see the gold leaf, the red pigment, and the whiting, all ground 14* 140 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. dawn to the wood; while in the hollow moulding beside it, on the contrary, the gilt is still fresh and entire. We find in the hollows the superior layers of the frame still overlying the inferior ones, and on the heights the inferior ones laid bare. To descend in the system, therefore, we have to climb a hill —to rise in it, we have to descend into a valley. We find the lowest beds of the system any where yet discovered in the county on the moory heights of Carmylie; its newer de- posits may be found on the sea-shore, beside the limeworks of Hedderwick, and in the central hollows of Strathmore. The most ancient beds in the county yet known belong, as unequivocally shown by their fossils, to but the middle forma- tion of the system. They have been quarried for many years in the parish of Carmylie; and the quarries, as may be supposed, are very extensive, stretching along a moory hill-side for considerably more than a mile, and furnishing employment to from sixty toa hundred workmen. ‘The eye is first caught, in approaching them, as we surmount a long, flat ridge, which shuts them out from the view of the distant sea, by what seems a line of miniature windmills, the sails flaring with red lead, and revolving with the lightest breeze at more than double the rate of the sails of ordinary mills. These are employed —a lesson probably borrowed from the Dutch —in draining the quarries, and throw up a very con- siderable body of water. The line of the excavations resem- bles a huge drain, with nearly perpendicular sides — a conse- quence of the regular and well-determined character of the joints with which the strata are bisected. The stone itself is a gray, close-grained fissile sandstone, of unequal hardness, and so very tough and coherent — qualities which it seems to owe in part to the vast abundance of mica which it con- tains— that it is quite possible to strike a small hammer THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 141 through some of the larger flags, without shattering the edges of the perforation. Hence its value for various purposes which common sandstone is too brittle and incoherent to serve. It is extensively used in the neighborhood as a roofing slate; it is employed, too, in the making of water cisterns, grooved and jointed as if wrought out of wood, and for the tops of lobby and billiard tables. I have even seen snuff- boxes fashioned out of it, as a sort of mechanical feat by the workmen, —a purpose, however, which it seems to serve only indifferently well,— and single slabs of it cut into tolerably neat window frames for cottages. It is most extensively used, however, merely as a paving-stone for lobbies and lower ‘floors, and the footways of streets. When first deposited, and when the creatures whose organic remains it still preserves careered over its numerous platforms, it seems to have existed as a fine, muddy sand, formed apparently of disintegrated grauwacke rocks, analogous in their mineral character to the similarly colored grauwacke of the Lammermuirs, or of pri- mary slates ground down by attrition into mud, and mixed up with the pulverized fragments of schistose gneiss and mica schist. I was first struck, on descending among the workmen, by the comparative abundance of the vegetable remains. In some parts of the quarries almost every layer of the strata is covered by carbonaceous markings—jirregularly grooved stems, branching out into boughs at acute angles, and that at the first glance seem the miniature semblances of the trunks of gnarled oaks and elms, blackened ina morass, and still retaining the rough bark, chapped into furrows : oblong, leaf- like impressions, too, and impressions of more slender form, that resemble the narrow, parallel edged leaves of the sea- grass weed. I observed, in particular, one large bunch of 142 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. r:band-like leaflets converging into a short stem, so that the whole resembled a scourge of cords; and I would fain have detached it from the rock, but it lay on a mouldering film of clay, and broke up with my first attempt to remove it. A stalk of sea-grass weed pluck2d up by the roots, and com- pressed in a herbarium, would present a somewhat similar appearance. Among the impressions there occur irregularly shaped patches, reticulated into the semblance of polygonal meshes. They remind one of pieces of ill-woven lace ; for the meshes are unequal in size, and the polygons irregular. (See Plate XL, fig. 2.) When first laid open, every mesh is filled with a carbonaceous speck ; and from their supposed resemblance to the eggs of the frog, the workmen term them puddock spawn. They are supposed by Mr. Lyell to form the remains of the eggs of some gasteropodous mollusc of the period. Isaw one flagstone, in particular, so covered with these reticulated patches, and so abundant, besides, in vegeta- ble impressions of both the irregularly furrowed and grass- weed-looking class, that I could compare it to only the bottom of a ditch beside a hedge, matted with withered grass, strewed with blackened twigs of the hawthorn, and mottled with detached masses of the eggs of the frog.* All the larger vegetables are resolved into as pure a coal as the plants of the Coal Measures themselves—the kind of data, doubtless, on which unfortunate coal speculators have often earned dis- appointment at large expense. None of the vegetables themselves, however, in the least resemble those of the car- boniferous period. The animal remains, though less numerous, are more interesting. They are identical with those of the Den of Balruddery. Isaw, in the possession of the superintend- ent of the quarries, a well-preserved head of the Cephalas- * See Note I, Plate XII. 142* PLATE XII. PARKA DECIPIENS. The above engraving is from a specimen in the private collection of Lord Kinnaird, at Rossie Priory. ; ‘ww he at Raa a ee I a cf ee ay a) yar “ a tp a OY | : AS We) I vol et aK x ae “i ; ne — aes — oe ; ae = ——e Ge ered ep ae ' ‘ re ; : Kini 9? a a) ‘ Lf ny ae wa ; ' ‘As ae) We ‘ad i~ wn > 4 ’ SUA ae ag we oP we ; | wltitt ys * ay We, lL ve } Ate orn ies : ah ih 5 Te ime § Ui ' ; / ii ‘ 4 & has a fy 6. : ta Wee > : . ‘ us u olen ed H ir ) wi, als 4 Ad ” if ays “vy ag ahh i | ‘hee mindy Te fe) “im ~ bye is , a? Les ya + pA bby ie Y Regt ogy Beihai ae ia THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 143 pis Lyellii. The crescent-shaped horns were wanting, and the outline a little obscure; but the eyes were better marked than in almost any other specimen I have yet seen, and the circular star-like tubercles which roughen the large occipital buckler, to which the creature owes its name, were tolerably well defined. I was shown the head of another individual of the same species in the centre of a large slab, and nothing could be more entire than the outline. The osseous plate still retained the original brownish-white hue of the bone, and its radiated porous texture; and the sharp crescent-shaped horns were as sharply defined as dur- ing the lifetime of the strangely organized creature which they had defended. In both specimens the thin angular body was wanting. Like almost all the other fish of the Old Red Sandstone, the bony skeleton of the Cephalaspis was external —as much so as the shell of the crab or lobster: it presented at all points an armor of bone, as complete as if it had been carved by the ivory-turner out of a solid block; while the internal skeleton, which in every instance has dis- appeared, seems to have been composed of cartilage. I have compared its general appearance to_a saddler’s cutting- knife ;—I should, perhaps, have said a saddler’s cutting- knife divested of the wooden handle — the broad, bony head representing the blade, and the thin angular body the iron stem usually fixed in the wood. No existence of the present crea- tion at all resembles the Cephalaspis. Were we introduced to the living creatures which now inhabit the oceans and riv- ers of Mars and Venus, we could find nothing among ther. more strange in appearance, or more unlike our living acquaintances of the friths and streams than the Cephalas- pides of Carmylie. (See Note F.) I observed, besides, in the quarry, remains of the huge 144 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. crustacean of Balruddery. The plates of the Cephalaspis retain the color of the original bone; the plates of the crusta- cean, on the contrary, are of a deep red tint, which contrasts strongly with the cold gray of the stone. ‘They remind one, both in shape and hue, of pieces of ancient iron armor, fretted into semi-elliptical scales, and red with rust. I saw with one of the workmen what seemed to have been the continuous tail-flap of an individual of very considerable size. It seemed curiously puckered where it had joined to the body, much in the manner that a gown or Highlander’s kilt is puckered where it joins to the waistband ; and the outline of the whole plate was marked by what I may venture to term architectural elegance. The mathematician could have described it with his ruler and compasses. The superintendent pointed out to me another plate in a slab dressed for a piece of common pavement. It was a regularly formed parallelogram, and had obviously composed one of the jointed plates which had cov- ered the creature’s body. I could not so easily assign its place to yet a third plate in the possession of the Rey. Mr. Wilson, of Carmylie. It is colored, like the others, and like them, too, fretted into minute scales, but the form is exactly that of a heart — not such a heart as the anatomist would draw, but such a heart, rather, as we see at times on valen- tines of the humbler order, or on the ace of hearts in a pack of cards. Possibly enough it may have been the breastplate of this antique crustacean of the Cornstones. ‘The spawn of our common blue lobster is composed of spherical black grains, of nearly the size of mustard-seed. It struck me as not very improbable that the reticulated markings of the flag- stones of Carmylie may have been produced by the minute - eggs of this fossil crustacean, covered up by some hastily deposited layer of mingled mud and sand, and forced into the THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 145 polygonal form by pressing against each other, and by the weight from above. (See Note [.) The gray fissile bed in which these organisms occur was perforated to its base on two several occasions, and in different parts of the quarries—in one instance, merely to ascertain its depth ; in the other, in the course of excavating a tunnel. In the one case it was found to rest on a bed of trap, which seemed to have insinuated itself among the strata with as little disturbance, and which lay nearly as conformably to them as the greenstone bed of Salisbury Crags does to the alternating sandstones and clays which both underlie and overtop it. In the other instance the excavators arrived at a red, aluminous sandstone, veined by a purplish-colored oxide of iron. The upper strata of the quarry are overlaid by a thick bed of grayish-red conglomerate. Leaving behind us the quarries of Carmylie, we descend the hill-side, and rise in the system as we lower our level and advance upon the sea. For a very considerable distance we find the rock covered up by a deep-red diluvial clay, largely charged with water-worn boulders, chiefly of the older pri- mary rocks, and of the sandstone underneath. ‘The soil on the higher grounds is moory and barren—a consequence, in great part, of a hard, ferruginous pan, which interposes like a paved floor between the diluvium and the upper mould, and which prevents the roots of the vegetation from striking downwards into the tenacious subsoil. From its impervious character, too, it has the effect of rendering the surface a bog for one half the year, and an arid, sun-baked waste for the other. It seems not improbable that the heaths which must have grown and decayed on these heights for many ages, may have been main agents in the formation of this pavement ot barrenness. Of all plants, they are said to contain most iron 15 146 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. According to Fourcroy, a full twelfth part of the weight of oak, when dried, is owing to the presence of this almost uni- versally diffused metal ; and the proportion in our common heaths is still larger. It seems easy to conceive how that, as generation after generation withered on these heights, and were slowly resolved into a little mossy dust, the minute me- tallic particles which they had contained would be carried downwards by the rains through the lighter stratum of soil, till, reaching the impermeable platform of tenacious clay be- neath, they would gradually accumulate there, and at length bind its upper layer, as is the nature of ferruginous oxide, into a continuous stony crust. Bog iron, and the clay iron- stone, so abundant in the Coal Measures, and so extensively employed in our iron-works, seem to have owed their accu- mulation in layers and nodules to a somewhat similar process, through the agency of vegetation. But I digress. The rock appears in the course of the Elliot, a few bna- dred yards above the pastoral village of Arbirlot. We find it uptilted ona mass of claystone amygdaloid, that has here raised its broad back to the surface amid the middle shales and sandstones of the system. The stream runs over the intruded mass; and where the latter terminates, and the sandstones lean against it, the waters leap from the harder te the softer rock, immediately beside the quiet parish burying- ground, in a cascade of some eight or ten feet. From this point, for a full mile downwards, we find an almost continuous section of the sandstone —stratum leaning against stratum —inan angle of about thirty. The portion of the system thus exhibited must amount to many hundred yards in vertical extent; but as I could discover no data by which to deter- mine regarding the space which may intervene between its Towest stratum and the still lower beds of Carmylie, I could THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 147 form no guess respecting the thickness of the whole. Ina bed of shale, about a quarter of a mile below the village, I detected several of the vegetable impressions of Carmylie, especially those of the grass-weed looking class, and an im- perfectly preserved organism resembling the parallelogrami- cal scale of a Cephalaspis. The same plants and animals seem to have existed on this high platform as on the Carmy- lie platform far beneath. A little farther down the course of the stream, and in the immediate neighborhood of the old weather-worn tower of the Ouchterlonies, there occurs what seems a break in the strata. The newer sandstones seem to rest unconformably on the older sandstones which they overlie. The evening on which I explored the course of the Elliot was drizzly and un- pleasant, and the stream swollen by a day of continuous rain, and so I could not examine so minutely as in other circum- stances I would have done, or as was necessary to establish the fact. In since turning over the Elements of Lyell, how- ever, | find, in his section of Forfarshire, that a newer deposit of nearly horizontal strata of sandstone and conglomerate lies unconformably, in the neighborhood of the sea, on the older sandstones of the district; and the appearances ob- served near the old tower mark, it is probable, one of the points of junction—a point of junction also, if I may be so bold as venture the suggestion, of the formation of the Holoptychius nobilissimus with the formation of the Cepha- laspis —of the quartzose conglomerate with the Cornstones. In my hurried survey, however, I could find none of the scales or plates of the newer ichthyolite in this upper deposit, though the numerous spherical markings of white, with their cen- trical points of darker color, show that at one time the organ- isms of these upper beds must have been very abundant. 148 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. We pass to the upper formation of the system. Over the belt of mingled gray and red there occurs in the pyramid a second deep belt of red conglomerate and variegated sand- stone, with a band of lime a-top, and over the band a thick belt of yellow sandstone, with which the system terminates.* Thus the second pyramid consists mineralogically, like the first, of three great divisions, or bands; its two upper belts belonging, like the three belts of the other, to but one forma- tion—the formation known in England as the Quartzose Conglomerate. It is largely developed in Scotland. We find it spread over extensive areas in Moray, Fife, Roxburgh, and Berwick shires. In England, it is comparatively barren in fossils ; the only animal organic remains yet detected in it being a single scale of the Holoptychius found by Mr. Murch- ison; and though it contains vegetable organisms in more abundance, so imperfectly are they preserved, that little else can be ascertained regarding them than that they were land * There still exists some uncertainty regarding the order in which the upper beds occur. Mr. Duff, of Elgin, places the limestone band above the yellow sandstone; Messrs. Sedgwick and Murchison assign it an intermediate position between the red and yellow. ‘The respec- tive places of the gray and red sandstones are also disputed, and by very high authorities; Dr. Fleming holding that the gray sandstones overlie the red, (see Cheek’s Edinburgh Journal for February, 1831,) and Mr. Lyell, that the red sandstones overlie the gray, (see Elements of Geology, first edit., pp. 99-100.) The order adopted above consorts best with the results of the writer’s observations, which have, how- ever, been restricted chiefly to the north country. He assigns to the limestone band the middle place assigned to it by Messrs. Sedgwick and Murchison, and to the gray sandstone the inferior position as- signed to it by Mr. Lyell; aware, however, that the latter deposit has not only a coping, but also a basement, of red sandstone — the basement forming the upper member of the lower formation. THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 149 plants, but not identical with the plants of the Coal Measures.* In Scotland, the formation is richly fossiliferous, and the re- mains belong chiefly to the animal kingdom. It is richly fos- siliferous, too, in Russia, where it was discovered by Mr. Murchison, during the summer of last year, spread over areas many thousand square miles in extent. And there, as in Scotland, the Holoptychius seems its most characteristic fossil. The fact seems especially worthy of remark. The organ- isms of some of the newer formations differ entirely, in widely separated localities, from their contemporary organ- isms, just as, in the existing state of things, the plants and animals of Great Britain differ from the plants and animals of Lapland or of Sierra Leone. A geologist who has ac- quainted himself with the belemnites, baculites, turrilites, and sea-urchins of the Cretaceous group in England and the north of France, would discover that he had got into an en- tirely new field among the hippurites, spherulites, and num- mulites of the same formations, in Greece, Italy, and Spain ; nor, in passing the tertiary deposits, would he find less strik- ing dissimilarities between the gigantic, mail-clad megatheri- um and huge mastodon of the Ohio and the La Plate, and the monsters, their contemporaries, the hairy mammoth of Sibe- ria, and the hippopotamus and rhinoceros of England and the Continent. In the more ancient geological periods, ere the seasons began, the case is essentially different; the con- temporary formations, when widely separated, are often very unlike in mineralogical character, but in their fossil contents they are almost always identical. In these earlier ages, the atmospheric temperature seems to have depended more on the internal heat of the earth, only partially cooled down from its original state, than on the earth’s configuration or the in- fluence of the sun. Hence a widely spread equality of 15 * * See Note K. 150 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. climate —a greenhouse equalization of heat, if I may so speak ; and hence, too, it would seem, a widely spread Fauna and Flora. The greenhouses of Scotland and Sweden pro- duce the same plants with the greenhouses of Spain and Italy ; and when the world was one vast greenhouse, heated from below, the same families of plants, and the same tribes of animals, seem to have ranged over spaces immensely more extended than those geographical circles in which, in the present time, the same plants are found indigenous, and the same animals native. The fossil! remains of the true Coal Measures are the same to the westward of the Alleghany Mountains as in New Holland, India, Southern Africa, the neighborhood of Newcastle, and the vicinity of Edinburgh. And I entertain little doubt that, on a similar principle, the still more ancient organisms of the Old Red Sandstone will be fcund to bear the same character all over the world. CHAPTER IX. Fossils of the Upper Old Red Sandstone much more imperfectly pre- served than those of the Lower. —The Causes obvious. — Differ- ence between the two Groups, which first strikes the Observer, a Difference in Size. — The Holoptychius a characteristic Ichthyolite of the Formation. — Description of its huge Scales. — Of its Oc- cipital Bones, Fins, Teeth, and General Appearance. — Contempo- raries of the Holoptychius. —Sponge-like Bodies. — Plates resem- bling those of the Sturgeon.— Teeth of various Forms, but all evidently the Teeth of Fishes. — Limestone Band, and its probable Origin. — Fossils of the Yellow Sandstone. — The Pterichthys of Dura Den. — Member of a Family peculiarly characteristic of the System. — No intervening Formation between the Old Red Sand- stone and the Coal Measures. — The Holoptychius contemporary for a time with the Megalichthys. —The Columns of Tubal Cain. Tue different degrees of entireness in which the geologist finds his organic remains, depend much less on their age than on the nature of the rock in which they occur; and as the arenaceous matrices of the Upper and Middle Old Red Sand- stones have been less favorable to the preservation of their peculiar fossils than the calcareous and aluminous matrices of the Lower, we frequently find the older organisms of the system fresh and unbroken, and the more modern existing as mere fragments. A fish thrown into a heap of salt would be found entire after the lapse of many years; a fish thrown into a heap of sand would disappear in a mass of putrefac- tion in a few weeks; and only the less destructible parts, such as the teeth, the harder bones, and perhaps a few of the scales, would survive. Now, limestone, if I may so speak, is the preserving salt of the geological world; and the con- (151) 152 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. servative qualities of the shales and stratified clays of the Lower Old Red Sandstone are not much inferior to those of lime itself; while, in the Upper Old Red, we have merely beds of consolidated sand, and these, in most instances, ren- dered less conservative of organic remains than even the common sand of our shores, by a mixture of the red oxide of iron. The older fossils, therefore, like the mummies of Egypt, can be described well nigh as minutely as the exist- ences of the present creation; the newer, like the compara- tively modern remains of our churchyards, exist, except in a few rare cases, as mere fragments, and demand powers such as those of a Cuvier or an Agassiz to restore them to their original combinations. But cases, though few and rare, do occur in which, through some favorable accident con- nected with the death or sepulture of some individual exist- ence of the period, its remains have been preserved almost entire ; and one such specimen serves to throw light on whole heaps of the broken remains of its contemporaries. The single elephant, preserved in an iceberg beside the Arctic Ocean, illustrated the peculiarities of the numerous extinct family to which it belonged, whose bones and huge tusks whiten the wastes of Siberia. The human body found in an Irish bog, with the ancient sandals of the country still at- tached to its feet by thongs, and clothed in a garment of coarse hair, gave evidence that bore generally on the degree of civilization attained by the inhabitants of an entire district in a remote age. In all such instances, the character and ap- pearance of the individual bear on those of the tribe. In at- tempting to describe the organisms of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, where the fossils lie as thickly in some localities as herrings on our coasts in the fishing season, I felt as if I had whole tribes before me. In describing the fossils of the THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 153 Upper Old Red Sandstone, I shall have to draw mostly from single specimens. But the evidence may be equally sound so far as it goes. The difference between the superior and inferior groups of the system which first strikes an observer, is a difference in the size of the fossils of which these groups are composed. The characteristic organisms of the Upper Old Red Sand- stone are of much greater bulk than those of the Lower, which seem to have been characterized by a mediocrity of size throughout the entire extent of the formation. The largest tchthyolites of the group do not seem to have much exceeded two feet or two feet and a half in length; its smaller average from an inch to three inches. A jaw in the possession of Dr. Traill—that of an Orkney species of Platygnathus, and by much the largest in his collection — does not exceed in bulk the jaw of a full-grown coal-fish or cod ; his largest Coccosteus must have been a considerably smaller fish than an ordinary- sized turbot; the largest ichthyolite found by the writer was a Diplopterus, of, however, smaller dimensions than the ich- thyolite to which the jaw in the possession of Dr. Trail] must have belonged; the remains of another Diplopterus from Gamrie, the most massy yet discovered in that locality, seem to have composed the upper parts of an individual about two feet and a half in length. The fish, in short, of the lower ocean of the Old Red Sandstone —and I can speak of it throughout an area which comprises Orkney and Inverness, Cromarty, and Gamrie, and which must have included about ten thousand square miles—ranged in size between the stickleback and the cod; whereas some of the fish of its upper ocean were covered by scales as large as oyster-shells, and armed with teeth that rivalled in bulk those of the croco- dile. They must have been fish on an immensely larger 154. THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. scale than those with which the system began. There have been scales of the Holoptychius found in Clashbennie which measure three inches in length by two and a half in breadth, and a full eighth part of an inch in thickness. There occur occipital plates of fishes in the same formation in Moray, a full foot in length by half a foot in breadth. The fragment of a tooth still attached to a piece of the jaw, found in the sandstone cliffs that overhang the Findhorn, measures an inch in diameter at the base. A second tooth of the same forma- tion, of a still larger size, disinterred by Mr. Patrick Duff from out the conglomerates of the Scat-Craig, near Elgin, and now in his possession, measures two inches in length by rather more than an inch in diameter. (See Plate XIIL, fig. 4.) There occasionally turn up in the sandstones of Perthshire ichthyodorulites that in bulk and appearance resemble the teeth of a harrow rounded at the edges by a few months’ wear, and which must have been attached to fins not inferior in general bulk to the dorsal fin of an ordinary-sized porpoise. In short, the remains of a Patagonian burying-ground would scarcely contrast more strongly with the remains of that bat- tle-field described by Addison, in which the pygmies were an- nihilated by the cranes, than the organisms of the upper formation of the Old Red Sandstone contrast with those of the lower.* Of this upper formation the most characteristic and most abundant ichthyolite, as has been already said, is the Holop- * I have permitted this paragraph to remain as originally written, though the comparatively recent discovery of a gigantic Holoptychius (?) in the Lower Old Red Sandstone of Thurso, by Mr. Robert Dick of that place, (see introductory note,) bears shrewdly against its general line of statement. But it will at least, serve to show how large an 154* PLATE Xi. aren rive + ie ety i os genie gee. Lat! a THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 155 tychius. ‘The large scales and plates, and the huge teeth, belong to this genus. It was first introduced to the notice of geologists ina paper read before the Wernerian Society in May, 1830, by Professor Fleming, and published by him in the February of the following year, in Cheek’s Edinburgh Journal. Only detached scales and the fragment of a tooth had as yet been found; and these he minutely described as such, without venturing to hazard a conjecture regarding the character or family of the animal to which they had belonged. They were submitted some years after to Agassiz, by whom they were referred, though not without considerable hesita- tion, to the genus Gyrolepis ; and the doubts of both natural- ists serve to show how very uncertain a guide mere analogy proves to even men of the first order, when brought to bear on organisms of so strange a type as the ichthyolites of the Old Red Sandstone. At this stage, however, an almost entire specimen of the creature was discovered in the sandstones of Clashbennie, by the Rev. James Noble, of St. Madoes, a gen- tleman who, by devoting his leisure hours to Geology, has extended the knowledge of this upper formation, and whose name has been attached by Agassiz to its characteristic fossil, now designated the Holoptychius nobilissimus. His speci- men at once decided that the creature had been no Gyrolepis, but the representative of a new genus not less strangely organized, and quite as unlike the existences of the present times as any existence of all the past. So marked are the amount of negative evidence may be dissipated by a single positive fact, and to inculcate on the geologist the necessity of cautious induc- tion. An individual Holoptychius of Thurso must have been at least thrice the size of the Holoptychius of the Upper Old Red formation, as exhibited in the specimen of Mr. Noble, of St. Madoes. 16 156 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. peculiarities of the Holoptychius, that they strike the com- monest observer. The scales are very characteristic. ‘They are massy ellipti- cal plates, scarcely less bulky in proportion to their extent of surface than our smaller copper coin, composed internally of bone, and externally of enamel, and presenting on the one side a porous structure, and on the other, when well pre- served, a bright, glossy surface. ‘The upper, or glossy side, is the more characteristic of the two. I have placed one of them before me. Imagine an elliptical ivory counter, an inch and a half in length by an inch in breadth, and nearly an eighth part of an inch in thickness, the larger diameter forming a line which, if extended, would pass longitudinally from head to tail through the animal which the scale covered. On the upper or anterior margin of this elliptical counter, imagine a smooth selvedge or border three eighth parts of an inch in breadth. Beneath this border there is an inner border of detached tubercles, and beneath the tubercles large undu- lating furrows, which stretch longitudinally towards the lower end of the ellipsis. Some of these waved furrows run un- broken and separate to the bottom, some merge into their neighboring furrows at acute angles, some branch out and again unite, like streams which enclose islands, and some break into chains of detached tubercles. (See Plate XII, fig. 3.) No two scales exactly resemble one another in the minuter peculiarities of their sculpture, if I may so speak, just as no two pieces of lake or sea may be roughened after exactly the same pattern during a gale; and yet in general appear- ance they are all wonderfully alike. Their style of sculpture is the same —a style which has sometimes reminded me of the Runic knots of our ancient north country obelisks. Such was the scale of the creature.* The head, which was small, * See Note L. PLATE XIV, FIGURE OF HOLOPTYCHIUS. 156* THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 157 compared with the size of the body, was covered with bony plates, roughened after a pattern somewhat different from that of the scales, being tubercled rather than ridged; but the tubercles present a confluent appearance, just as chains of hills may be described as confluent, the base of one hill running into the base of another. The operculum seems to have been covered by one entire plate—a peculiarity ob- servable, as has been remarked, among some of the ichthy- olites of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, such as the Diplop- terus, Dipterus, and Osteolepis. And it, too, has its fields of tubercles, and its smooth marginal selvedge, or border, on which the lower edges of the upper occipital plates seem to have rested, just as, in the roof of a slated building, part of the lower tier of slates is overtopped ana covered by the tier above. The scales towards the tail suddenly diminish at the ventral fins to about one fourth the size of those on the upper part of the body; the fins themselves are covered at their bases, which seem to have been thick and fleshy like the base of the pectoral fin in the cod or haddock, with scales still more minute ; and from the scaly base the rays diverge like the radii of a circle, and terminate in a semicircular out- line. The ventrals are placed nearer the tail, says Agassiz, than in any other ganoid fish. (See Plate XIIL., fig. 2.) But no such description can communicate an adequate con- ception to the reader of the strikingly picturesque appearance of the Holoptychius, as shown in Mr. Noble’s splendid speci- men. There is a general massiveness about the separate portions of the creature, that imparts ideas of the gigantic, independently of its bulk as a whole; just as a building of moderate size, when composed of very ponderous stones, has a more imposing effect than much larger buildings in which the stones are smaller. The body measures a foot across, by 16 * 158 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. two feet and a half in length, exclusive of the tail, which ts wanting; but the armor in which it is cased might have served a crocodile or alligator of five times the size. It lies on its back, on a mass of red sandstone; and the scales and plates still retain their bony color, slightly tinged with red, like the skeleton of some animal that had lain for years in 2 bed of ferruginous marl or clay. The outline of the occipi- tal portion of the specimen forms a low Gothic arch, of an intermediate style between the round Saxon and the pointed Norman. This arch is filled by two angular, pane-like plates, separated by a vertical line, that represents, if I may use the figure, the dividing astragal of the window; and the under jaw, with its two sweeping arcs, or branches, constitutes the frame. All of the head which appears is that under portion of it which extends from the upper part of the belly to the snout. The belly itself is thickly covered by huge carved scales, that, from their massiveness and regular arrangement, remind one of the flags of an ancient stone roof. The carv- ing varies, as they descend towards the tail, being more in the ridged style below, and more in the tubercled style above. So fairly does the creature lie on its back, that the ventral fins have fallen equally, one on each side, and, from their semicircular form, remind one of the two pouch holes ina lady’s apron, with their laced flaps. The entire outline of the fossil is that of an elongated ellipsis, or rather spindle, a little drawn out towards the caudal extremity. The places of all the fins are not indicated, but, as shown by other speci- mens, they seem to have been crowded together towards the lower extremity, like those of the Glyptolepis, an ichthyolite which, in more than one respect, the Holoptychius must have resembled, and which, from this peculiarity, presents a brush- like appearance — the head and shoulders representing the THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 159 handle, and the large and thickly clustered fins the spreading bristles.* Some of the occipital bones of the Holoptychius are very curious and very puzzling. There are pieces rounded at one of the ends, somewhat in the manner of the neck joints of our better known quadrupeds, and which have been mistaken for vertebree; but which present evidently, at the apparent joint, the enamel peculiar to the outer surface of all the plates and scales of the creature, and which belonged, it is proba- ble, to the snout. There are saddle-shaped bones, too, which have been regarded as the central occipital plates of a new species of Coccosteus, but whose style of confluent tubercle belongs evidently to the Holoptychius. The jaws are exceed- ingly curious. They are composed of as solid bone as we usually find in the jaws of mammalia; and the outer surface, which is covered in animals of commoner structure with por- tions of the facial integuments, we find polished and japanned, and fretted into tubercles. The jaws of the creature, like those of the Osteolepis of the lower formation, were naked jaws ; it is, indeed, more than probable that all its real bones were so, and that the internal skeleton was cartilaginous. A row of thickly-set, pointed teeth ran along the japanned edges of the rnouth — what, in fish of the ordinary construction, would be the lips; and inside this row there was a second and widely-set row of at least twenty times the bulk of the other, and which stood up over and beyond it, like spires in a city over the rows of lower buildings in front. A nearly similar disposition of teeth seems also to have characterized the * There are now six species of Holoptychius enumerated — H. An- dersoni, H. Flemingii, H. giganteus, H. Murchisoni, H. nobilissimus, and H. Omaliusii. 160 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. Holoptychius of the Coal Measures, but the contrast in size was somewhat less marked. One of the most singularly formed bones of the formation will be found, I doubt not, when perfect specimens of the upper part of the creature shall be procured, to have belonged to the Holoptychius. \t is a huge ichthyodorulite, formed, box-like, of four nearly rectangular planes, terminating in a point, and ornamented on two of the sides by what, in a work of art, the reader would at once term a species of Chinese fretwork. Along the centre there runs a line of lozenges, slightly truncated where they unite, just as, in plants that exhibit the cellular texture, the lozenge-shaped cells may be said to be truncated. At the sides of the central line, there run lines of half loz- enges, which occupy the space to the edges. Each lozenge is marked by lines parallel to the lines which describe it, somewhat in the manner of the plates of the tortoise. The centre of each is thickly tubercled ; and what seems to have been the anterior plane of the ichthyodorulite is thickly tuber- cled also, both in the style of the occipital plates and jaws of the Holoptychius. This curious bone, which seems to have been either hollow inside, or, what is more probable, filled with cartilage, measures, in some of the larger specimens, an inch and a half across at the base on its broader planes, and rather more than half an inch on its two narrower ones.* Geologists have still a great deal to learn regarding the contemporaries of the Holoptychius nobilissimus. The lower portion of that upper formation to which it more * This bone has been since assigned by Agassiz to a new genus, of which no other fragments have yet been found, but which has been named provisionally Placothorax paradoxus. THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 161 especially belongs—the portion represented in our second pyramid by the conglomerate and sandstone bar—though unfavorable to the preservation of animal remains, represents assuredly no barren period. It has been found to contain bodies apparently organic, that vary in shape like the sponges of our existing seas, which in general appearance they some- what resemble, but whose class, and even kingdom, are yet to fix.* It contains, besides, in considerable abundance, * These organisms, if in reality such, are at once very curious and ‘very puzzling. They occur in some localities in great abundance. A piece of Clashbennie flagstone, somewhat more than two feet in length, by fifteen inches in breadth, kindly sent me for examination by the Rey. Mr. Noble, of St. Madoes, bears no fewer than twelve of them on its upper surface, and presents the appearance of a piece of rude sculpture, not very unlike those we sometimes see in country churchyards, on the tombstones of the times of the Revolution. All the twelve vary in appearance. Some of them are of a pear shape — some are irreg- ularly oval—some resemble short cuts of the bole of a tree — some are spread out like ancient manuscripts, partially unrolled — one of the number seems a huge, though not over neatly formed acorn, an apprentice mason’s first attempt — the others are of a shape so irreg- ular as to set comparison and description at defiance. They almost all agree, however, when cut transversely, in presenting flat, elliptical arcs as their sectional lines— in haying an upper surface compara- tively smooth, and an under surface nearly parallel to it, thickly cor- rugated — and in being all coated with a greasy, shining clay, of a deeper red than the surrounding stone. I was perhaps rather more confident of their organic character after I had examined a few mere- ly detached specimens, than now that I have seen a dozen of them together. It seems at least a circumstance to awaken doubt, that though they occur in various positions on the slab — some extending across it, some lying diagonally, some running lengthwise — the cor- rugations of their under surfaces should run lengthwise in all — fur- rowing them in every possible angle, and giving evidence, not appar- 162 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. though in a state of very imperfect preservation, scales that differ from those of the Holoptychius, and from one another. One of these, figured and described by Professor Fleming in Cheek’s Edinburgh Journal, bearing on its upper surface a mark like a St. Andrew’s cross, surrounded by tubercled dot- tings, and closely resembling in external appearance some of the scales of the common sturgeon, ‘‘ may be referred with some probability,” says the Professor, ‘to an extinct species of the genus Accipenser.* The deposit, too, abounds ently to the influences of an organic law, internal to each, but of the operation of some external cause, acting on the whole in one direction. * May I crave the attention of the reader to a brief statement of fact? I have said that Professor Fleming, when he minutely de- scribed the scales of the Holoptychius, hazarded no conjecture regard- ing the generic character of the creature to which they had belonged ; he merely introduced them to the notice of the public as the scales of some “‘ vertebrated animal, probably those of a fish.” I now state that he described the scales of a contemporary ichthyolite as bearing, in external appearance, a ‘‘ close resemblance to some of the scales of the common sturgeon.” It has been asserted, that it was the scales of the Holoptychius which he thus described, “referring them to an extinct species of the genus Accipenser ;’’? and the assertion has been extensively credited, and by some of our highest geological authori- ties. Agassiz himself, evidently in the belief that the professor had fallen into a palpable error, deems it necessary to prove that the Holoptychius could have borne ‘‘no relation to the Accipenser or stur- geon.” Mr. Murchison, in his Silurian System, refers also to the sup- posed mistake. The person with whom the misunderstanding seems to have originated is the Rey. Dr. Anderson, of Newburgh. About a twelvemonth after the discovery of Professor Fleming in the sand- stones of Drumdryan, a similar discovery was made in the sandstones of Clashbennie by a geologist of Perth, who, on submitting his new found scales to Dr. Anderson, concluded, with the Doctor, that they THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 163 in teeth, various enough in their forms to indicate a corre- spon ling variety of families and genera among the ichthyolites to which they belonged. Some are nearly straight, like those of the Holoptychius of the Coal Measures ; some are bent, like the beak of a hawk or eagle, into a hook-form ; some incline first in one direction, and then in the opposite one, could be no other than oyster shells ; though eventually, on becoming acquainted with the decision of Professor Fleming regarding them, both gentlemen were content to alter their opinion, and to regard them as scales. The Professor, in his paper on the Old Red Sand- stone in Cheek’s Journal, referred incidentally to the oyster shells of Clashbennie—a somewhat delicate subject of allusion; and in Dr. Anderson’s paper on the same formation, which appeared about seven years after, in the New Journal of Professor Jameson, the geological world was told, for the first time, that Professor Fleming had de- scribed a scale of Clashbennie similar to those of Drumdryan, (i. e., those of the Holoptychius,) as bearing a “close resemblance to some of the scales on the common sturgeon,” and as probably referable to some “extinct species of the genus Accipenser.” Now, Professor Fleming, instead of stating that the scales were at all similar, had stated very pointedly that they were entirely different; and not only had he described them as different, but he had also figured them as dif- ferent, and had placed the figures side by side, that the difference might be the better seen. To the paper of the Professor, which con- tained this statement, and to which these figures were attached, Dr. Anderson referred, as “read before the Wernerian Society ;’’ — he quoted from it in the Professor’s words — he drew some of the more important facts of his own paper from it — in his late Essay on the Geology of Fife he has availed himself of it still more largely, though with no acknowledgment; it has constituted, in short, by far the most valuable of all his discoveries in connection with the Old Red Sandstone, and apparently the most minutely examined; and yet, so completely did he fail to detect Professor Fleming’s carefully drawn distinction between the scales of the Holoptychius and those of its con- temporary that when Agassiz, misled apparently by the Doctor’s own 164 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. like nails that have been drawn out of a board by the car- penter at two several wrenches, and bent in opposite angles at each wrench ; some are bulky and squat, some long and slender; and in almost all the varieties, whether curved or straight, squat or slim, the base is elegantly striated like the flutings of the column. In the splendid specimen found in statement, had set himself to show that the scaly giant of the forma- tion could have been no sturgeon, the Doctor had the passage in which the naturalist established the fact transferred into a Fife news- paper, with, of course, the laudable intention of preventing the Fife public from falling into the absurd mistake of Professor Fleming. There seems to be something rather inexplicable in all this; but there can be little doubt Dr. Anderson could satisfactorily explain the whole matter without once referring to the oyster shells of Clashbennie. It is improbable that he could have wished or intended to injure the reputation of a gentleman to whose freely-imparted instructions he is indebted for much the greater portion of his geological skill — whose remarks, written and spoken, he has so extensively appropriated in his several papers and essays — and whose character is known far be- yond the limits of his country, for untiring research, philosophic dis- crimination, and all the qualities which constitute a naturalist of the highest order. Dr. Johnston, of Berwick, in his History of British Zovphytes, (a work of an eminently scientific character,) justly ‘as- cribes to the labors and writings ”’ of Professor Fleming ‘‘ no small share in diffusing that taste for Natural History which is now abroad.” And as an interesting corroboration of the fact, I may state, that Dr. Malcolmson, of Madras, lately found an elegant Italian translation of Fleming's Philosophy of Zotlogy, high in repute among the elite of Rome. Lest it should be supposed I do Dr. Anderson injustice in these remarks, I subjoin the grounds of them in the following extracts from professor Fleming’s paper in Cheek’s Journal, and from the paper in Jameson's New Edinburgh Journal, in which the Doctor purports to give a digest of the former, without once referring, however, to the periodical in which it is to be found : — “In the summer of 1827,” says Dr. Fleming, “I obtained from THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 165 the sandstones of the Findhorn, the tooth is still attached to a portion of the jaw, and shows, from the nature of the attachment, that the creature to which it belonged must have been a true fish, not a reptile. The same peculiarity is ob- servable in two other very fine specimens in the collection of Mr. Patrick Duff, of Elgin. Both in saurians and in toothed Drumdryan quarry, to the south of Cupar, situate in the higher strata of yellow sandstone, certain organisms, which I readily referred to the scales of vertebrated animals, probably those of a fish. The largest (see Plate IL., fig. 1, ‘figure of a scale of the Holoptychius’) was one inch and one tenth in length, about one inch and two tenths in breadth, and not exceeding the fiftieth of an inch in thickness. The part which, when in its natural position, had been imbedded in the cuticle, is comparatively smooth, exhibiting, however, in a very dis- tinct manner, the semicircularly parallel layers of growth with obso- lete diverging striz, giving to the surface, when under a lens, a reticu- lated aspect. The part naturally exposed is marked with longitudinal, waved, rounded, anastomosing ridges, which are smooth and glossy. The whole of the inside of the scale is smooth, though exhibiting with tolerable distinctness the layers of growth. The form and structure of the object indicated plainly enough that it had been a scale, a conclusion confirmed by the detection of the phosphate of lime inits composition. Atthis period I inserted a short notice of the occurrence of these scales in our provincial newspaper, the Fife Her- ald, for the purpose of attracting the attention of the workmen and others in the neighborhood, in order to secure the preservation of any other specimens which might occur. “Nearly a year after these scales had been discovered, not only in the upper, but even in some of the lower beds of the Yellow Sand- stone, I was informed that oyster shells had been found in a quarry in the Old Red Sandstone at Clashbennie, near Errol, in Perthshire, and that specimens were in the possession of a gentleman in Perth. Interested in the intelligence, I lost no time in visiting Perth, and was gratified to find that the supposed oyster shells were, in fact, similar to those which I had ascertained to occur in a higher part of the series. 17 166 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. cetacez, such as the porpoise, the teeth are inserted in sockets. In the ichthyolites of this formation, so far as these are illus- trated by its better specimens, the teeth, as in existing fish, are merely placed flat upon the jaw, or inshallow pits, which seem almost to indicate that the contrivance of sockets might be afterwards resorted to. Immediately over the sandstone The scales were, however, of a larger size, some of them exceeding three inches in length, and one eighth of an inch in thickness. Upon my visit to the quarry, I found the scales, as in the Yellow Sand- stone, most abundant in those parts of the rock which exhibited a precciated aspect. Many patches a foot in length, full of scales, have occurred ; but as yet no entire impression of a fish has been obtained. ‘Another scale, DIFFERING FROM THOSE ALREADY NOTICED, (see Plate IL., fig. 3, ‘figure of an oblong tubercled plate traversed diagonally by lines, which, bisecting one another a little above the centre, resembles a St. Andrew's cross, and marked on the edges by Saintly radiating lines,’) is about an inch and a quarter in length, and an inch in breadth. In external appearance it bears a very close resemblance to some of the scales on the common sturgeon, and may, with some probability, be referred to an extinct species of the genus Accipenser.’’ — (Cheek’s Edinburgh Journal, Feb. 1831, p. 85.) ‘Dr. Fleming, in 1830,” says Dr. Anderson, “read before the Wernerian Society a notice ‘on the occurrence of scales of vertebrated animals in the Old Red Sandstone of Fifeshire.’ These organisms, as described by him, occurred in the Yellow Sandstone of Drum- dryan and the Gray Sandstone of Parkhill. From the former locality scales of a fish were obtained. . «© . »« + «© «© «© «© « « The same paper (Professor Fleming’s) contains a notice of sIMILAR SCALES in the Old Red Sandstone of Clashbennie, near Errol, in Perthshire, ovr or wuicH is described as bearing ‘a very close re- semblance to some of the scales on the common sturgeon, and may with some probability be referred to an extinct species of the genus Accipenser.’’’ — (Professor Jameson's Edin. New Phil. Journal, Oct. 1837, p 138.) THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 167 and conglomerate belt in which these orgznisms occur, there rests, as has been said, a band of limestone, and over the limestone a thick bed of yellow sandstone, in which the sys- tem terminates, and which is overlaid in turn by the lower beds of the carboniferous group. The limestone band is unfossiliferous, and resembling, in mineralogical character, the Cornstones of England and Wales, it has been described as the Cornstone of Scotland; but the fact merely furnishes one illustration of many, of the inadequacy of a mineralogical nomenclature for the purposes of the geologist. In the neighborhood of Cromarty the lower formation abounds in beds of nodular limestone, identical in appearance with the Cornstone;— in England similar beds occur so abundantly in the middle formation, thur it derives its name from them ;—in Fife they occur in the upper formation exclusively. ‘Thus the formation of the Coccosteus and Dipterus is a cornstone formation in the first locality ; that of the Cephalaspis and the gigantic lobster in the second ; that of the Holoptychius nobilissimus in the third. We have but to vary our field of observation to find all the for- mations of the system Cornstone formations in turn. The limestone band of the upper member presents exactly similar appearances in Moray as in Fife. It is in both of a yellowish green or gray color, and a concretionary structure, consisting of softer and harder portions, that yield so unequally to the weather, as to exhibit in exposed cliffs and boulders a brecci- ated aspect, as if it had been a mechanical, not a chemical deposit ; though its origin must unquestionably have been chemical. It contains minute crystais of galena, and abounds mw masses of a cherty, siliceous substance that strikes fire with steel, and which, from the manner in which they are incorporated with the rock, show that they must have been 168 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. formed along with it. From this circumstance, and from the general resemblance it bears to the deposits of the thermal waters of volcanic districts which precipitate siliceous mixed with calcareous matter, it has been suggested, and by no mean authority, that it must have derived its origin from hot springs. The bed is several yards in thickness ; and as it appears both in Moray and in Fife, in localities at least a hundred and twenty miles apart, it must have been formed, if formed at all, in this manner, at a period when the volcanic agencies were in a state of activity at no great distance from the surface. The upper belt of yellow stone, the terminal layer of the pyramid, is fossiliferous both in Moray and Fife — more richly so in the latter county than even the conglomerate belt that underlies it, and its organisms are better preserved. It was in this upper layer, in Drumdryan quarry, to the south of Cupar, that Professor Fleming found the first-discovered scales of the Holoptychius. At Dura Den, in the same neighborhood, a singularly rich deposit of animal remains was laid open a few years ago, by some workmen, when em- ployed in excavating a water-course fora mill. The organ- isms lay crowded together, a single slab containing no fewer than thirty specimens, and all in a singularly perfect state of preservation. ‘The whole space excavated did not exceed forty square yards in extent, and yet in these forty yards there were found several genera of fishes new to Geology, and not yet figured nor described —a conclusive proof in itself that we have still very much to learn regarding the fossils of the Old Red Sandstone. By much the greater portion of the remains disinterred on this occasion were preserved by a lady in the neighborhood ; and the news of the discovery spread- ing over the district, the Rev. Dr. Anderson, of Newburgh, THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 169 was fortunately led to discover them anew in her possession. The most abundant organism of the group was a variety of Pierichthys — the sixth species of this very curious genus now discovered in the Old Red Sandstones of Scotland ; and as the Docto1 had been lucky enough to find out for himself, some years before, that the scales of the Holoptychius were oyster shells, he now ascertained, with quite as little assistance from without, that the Pterichthys must have been surely a huge beetle. As a beetle, therefore, he figured and described it in the pages of a Glasgow topographical publication — Fife Il- lustrated. ‘True, the characteristic elytra were wanting, and some six or seven tubercle plates substituted in their room ; nor could the artist, with all his skill, supply the crea- ture with more than two legs; but ingenuity did much for it, notwithstanding ; and by lengthening the snout, insect-like, into a point — by projecting an eye, insect-like, on what had mysteriously grown into a head — by rounding the body, in- sect-like, until it exactly resembled that of the large “ twilight shard” — by exaggerating the tubercles seen in profile on the paddles until they stretched out, insect-like, into bristles — and by carefully sinking the tail, which was not insect-like, and for which no possible use could be discovered at the time — the Doctor succeeded in making the Pterichthys of Dura Den a very respectable beetle indeed. In a later publication, an Essay on the Geology of Fifeshire, which appeared in Sep- tember last in the Quarterly Journal of Agriculture, he states, after referring to his former description, that among the higher geological authorities some were disposed to regard the crea- ture as an extinct crustaceous animal, and some as belonging to a tribe closely allied to the Chelonia. Agassiz, as the writer of these chapters ventured some months ago to pre- dict, has since pronounced it a fish —a Pterichthys specifica'ly tT a 176 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. different from the five varieties of this ichthyc lite which occur in the lower formation of the system, but generically the same. I very lately enjoyed the pleasure of examining the bona fide ichthyolite itself —one of the spec-mens of Dura Den, and apparently one of the more entire —in the collec- tion of Professor Fleming. Its character as a Pterichthys { found very obvious; but neither the Professor nor myself was ingenious enough to discover in it any trace of the beetle of Dr. Anderson.* Is it not interesting to finu this very curious genus in both the lowest and highest fossiliferous beds of the system, and constituting, like the Trilobite genus of the Silurian group, its most characteristic organism ?t The Trilobite has a wide geological range, extending from the upper Cambrian rocks to the upper Coal Measures. But though the range of the genus is wide, that of every individual species of which it consists is very limited. ‘The Trilobites of the upper Coal Measures differ from those of the Mountain Limestone ; * This interesting ichthyolite has since been regarded by Agassiz as the representative of a distinct genus, to which he gives the name Pamphractus. As exhibited in his restoration, however, it seems to differ litt's, if at all, (if I may venture the suggestion,) from a Pter- ichthys viewed on the upper side. In Agassiz’s beautiful restoration of Pterichthys, and his accompanying prints of the fossils illustrative of that genus, it is, with but one doubtful exception, the under side of the animal that is presented; and hence a striking difference ap- parent between his representations of the two genera, which would scarce obtain had the upper, not the under side of Pterichthys been exhibited. In verification of this remark, let the reader who has ac- cess to the Monographie Poissons Fossiles compare the restoration of Pamphractus (Old Red, Tab. VL., fig. 2) with the upper side of Pter- tchthys, as figured in this volume, Plate I., fig. 1, making, of corrse, the due allowance for a difference of species. +t See Note M. THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. ¥i5 these again, with but one exception, from the Trilobites of the upper Silurian strata; these yet again from the Trilobites of the underlying middle beds; and these from the Trilobites that occur in the base of the system. Like the coins and medals of the antiquary, each represents its own limited period; and the whole taken together yield a consecutive record. But while we find them merely scattered over the later formations in which they occur, and that very sparingly, in the Silurian System we find them congregated in such vast crowds, that their remains enter largely into the compo- sition of many of the rocks which compose it. The Trilobite is the distinguishing organism of the group, marrying, if I may so express myself, its upper and lower beds; and what the Trilobite is to the Silurian formations, the Pterichthys seems to be to the formations of the Old Red Sandstone ; with this difference, that, so far as is yet known, it is restricted to this system alone, occurring in neither the Silurian System below, nor in the Coal Measures above. I am but imperfectly acquainted with the localities in which the upper beds of the Old Red Sandstone unde lie the lower beds of the Coal Measures, or where any grada on of character appears. The upper yellow sandstone bel is extensively developed in Moray, but it contains no trace of carbonaceous matter in even its higher strata, and no ot er remains than those of the Holoptychius and its contempora- ries. The system in the north of Scotland differs as muc from the carboniferous group in its upper as in its lower rocks; and a similar difference has been remarked in Fife where the groups appear in contact a few miles to the west of St. Andrew’s. In England, in repeated instances, the junction, as shown by Mr. Murchison, in singularly instructive sections, is well marked, the carboniferous limestones resting Liz THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. conformably on the Upper Old Red Sandstone. No other system interposed between them. There is a Rabbinical tradition that the sons of Tubal- Cain, taught by a prophet of the coming deluge, and unwil- ling that their father’s arts should be lost in it to posterity, erected two obelisks of brass, on which they inscribed a record of his discoveries, and that thus the learning of the family survived the cataclysm. The flood subsided, and the obelisks, sculptured from pinnacle to base, were found fast fixed in the rock. Now, the twin pyramids of the Old Red Sandstone, with their party-colored bars, and their thickly crowded inscriptions, belong to a period immensely more remote than that of the columns of the antediluvians, and they bear a more certain record. I have, perhaps, dwelt too .ong on their various compartments ; but the Artist by whom they have been erected, and who has preserved in them so wonderful a chronicle of his earlier works, has willed surely that they should be read, and I have perused but a small por- tion of the whole. Years must pass ere the entire record can be deciphered ; but, of all its curiously inseribed sen- tences, the result will prove the same — they will all be found to testify cf the Infinite Mind. CHAPTER X. Speculations in the Old Red Sandstone, and their Character.— George, first Earl of Cromarty. — His Sagacity as a Naturalist at fault in one Instance. — Sets himself to dig for Coal in the Lower Old Red Sandstone. — Discovers a fine Artesian Well. — Value of Geological Knowledge in an economic View. — Scarce a Secondary Formation in the Kingdom in which Coal has not been sought for. — Mineral Springs of the Lower Old Red Sandstone. — Strathpef- fer.—Its Peculiarities whence derived. — Chalybeate Springs of Easter Ross and the Black Isle. — Petrifying Springs. — Building- Stone and Lime of the Old Red Sandstone. — Its various Soils. Tuere has been much money lost, and a good deal won, in speculations connected with the Old Red Sandstone. The speculations in which money has been won have consorted, if I may so speak, with the character of the system, and those in which money has been lost have not. Instead, how- ever, of producing a formal chapter on the economic uses to which its various deposits have been applied, or the unfor- tunate undertakings which an acquaintance with its geology would have prevented, I shall throw together, as they occur to me, a few simple facts illustrative of both. George, first Earl of Cromarty, seems, like his namesake and contemporary, the too celebrated Sir George M’Kenzie, of Roseavoch, to have been a man of an eminently active and inquiring mind. He found leisure, in the course of a very busy life, to write several historical dissertations of great research, and a very elaborate Synopsis Apocalyptica. Hes the author, too, of an exceedingly curious letter on the “* Sec- ond Sight,” addressed to the philosophic Boyle, which con- (173) 174 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. tains a large amount of amusing and extraordinary fact; and his description of the formation of a peat-moss in the central Highlands of Ross-shire has been quoted by almost every naturalist who, since the days of the sagacious nobleman, has written on the formation of peat. His life was extended to extreme old age; and as his literary ardor remained un- diminished till the last, some of his writings were produced at a period when most other men are sunk in the incurious indifferency and languor of old age. And among these later productions are his remarks on peat. He relates that, when a very young man, he had marked, in passing on a journey through the central Highlands of Ross-shire, a wood of very ancient trees, doddered and moss-grown, and evidently pass- ing into a state of death through the last stages of decay. He had been led by business into the same district many years after, when in middle life, and found that the wood had entirely disappeared, and that the heathy hollow which it had covered was now occupied by a green, stagnant morass, un- varied in its tame and level extent by either bush or tree. In his old age he again visited the locality, and saw the green surface roughened with dingy-colored hollows, and several Highlanders engaged in it in cutting peat in a stratum several feet in depth. What he had once seen an aged forest had now become an extensive peat-moss. Some time towards the close of the seventeenth century he purchased the lands of Cromarty, where his turn for mi- nute observation seems to have anticipated — little, however, to his own profit—some of the later geological discoveries. There is a deep, wooded ravine in the neighborhood of the town, traversed by a small stream, which has laid bare, for the space of about forty yards in the opening of the hollow, the gray sandstone and stratified clays of the inferior fish THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 175 bed. The locality is rather poor in ichthyolites, though I have found in it, after minute search, a few scales of the Osteolepis, and on one occasion one of the better marked plates of the Coccosteus ; but in the vegetable impressions peculiar to the formation it is very abundant. These are invariably car- bonaceous, and are not unfrequently associated with minute patches of bitumen, which, in the harder specimens, present a coal-like appearance ; and the vegetable impressions and the bitumen seem to have misled the sagacious nobleman into the oelief that coal might be found on his new property. He accordingly brought miners from the south, and set them to bore for coal in the gorge of the ravine. ‘Though there was probably a register kept of the various strata through which they passed, it must have long since been lost; but from my acquaintance with this portion of the formation, as shown in the neighboring sections, where it lies uptilted against the granitic gneiss of the Sutors, I think I could pretty nearly restore it. ‘They would first have had to pass for about thirty feet through the stratified clays and shales of the ichthyolite bed, with here and there a thin band of gray sandstone, and here and there a stratum of lime; they would next have had to penetrate through from eighty to a hundred feet of coarse red and yellow sandstone, the red greatly predom- inating. They would then have entered the great conglom- erate, the lowest member of the formation; and in time, if they continued to urge their fruitless labors, they would arrive at the primary rock, with its belts of granite, and its veins and huge masses of hornblende. In short, there might be some possibility of their penetrating to the central fire, but none whatever of their ever reaching a vein of coal. Froma curious circumstance, however, they were prevented from ascertaining, by actuel experience, the utter barrenness of the formation. 176 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. Directly in the gorge of the ravine, where we may see the partially wooded banks receding as they ascend from the base to the centre, and then bellying over from the centre to the summit, there is a fine chalybeate spring, sur- mounted by a dome of hewn stone. It was discovered by the miners when in quest of the mineral which they did not and could not discover, and forms one of the finest speci- mens of a true Artesian well which I have any where seen. They had bored to a considerable depth, when, on withdraw- ing the kind of auger used for the purpose, a bolt of water, which occupied the whole diameter of the bore, came rushing after, like the jet of a fountain, and the work was prosecuted no further; for, as steam-engines were not yet invented, no pit could have been wrought with so large a stream issuing into it; and as the volume was evidently restricted by the size of the bore, it was impossible to say how much greater a stream the source might have supplied. The spring still con- tinues to flow towards the sea, between its double row of cresses, at the rate of about a hogshead per minute —a rate considerably diminished, it is said, from its earlier volume, by some obstruction in the bore. The waters are not strongly tinctured — a consequence, perhaps, of their great abundance ; but we may see every pebble and stock in their course envel- oped by a ferruginous coagulum, resembling burnt sienna, that has probably been disengaged from the dark red sand- stone below, which is known to owe its color to the oxide of iron. A Greek poet would probably have described the inci- dent as the birth of the Naiad ; in the north, however, which, in an earlier age, had also its Naiads, though, like the fish of the Old Red Sandstone, they have long since become extinct the recollection of it is merely preserved by tradition, as a cu rious, though by no means poetical fact, and by the name of THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. Tri the well, which is still known as the well of the coal-heugh — the old Scotch name for a coal-pit. Calderwood tells us, in his description of a violent tempest which burst out immedi- ately as his persecutor, James VI., breathed his last, that in Scotland the sea rose high upon the land, and that many ** coal-heughs were drowned.” There is no science whose value can be adequately esti- mated by economists and utilitarians of the lower order. Its true quantities cannot be represented by arithmetical figures or monetary tables ; for its effects on mind must be as surely taken into account as its operations on matter, and what it has accomplished for the human intellect as certainly as what it has done for the comforts of society or the interests of com- merce. Who can attach a marketable value to the discov- eries of Newton? I need hardly refer to the often-quoted remark of Johnson; the beauty of the language in which it is couched has rendered patent to all the truth which it conveys. *¢ Whatever withdraws us from the power of the senses,” says the moralist — ‘* whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future, predominate over the present, advances us in the dig- nity of thinking beings.” And Geology, in a peculiar man- ner, supplies to the intellect an exercise of this ennobling character. But it has, also, its cash value. The time and money squandered in Great Britain alone in searching for coal in districts where the well-informed geologist could have at once pronounced the search hopeless, would much more than cover the expense at which geological research has been prosecuted throughout the world. There are few districts in Britain occupied by the secondary deposits, in which, at one time or another, the attempt has not been made. It has been the oc2asion of enormous expenditure in the south of Eng- land among the newer formations, where the coal, if it at all 18 178 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. occurs, (for we occasionally meet with wide gaps in the scale,) must be buried at an unapproachable depth. It led in Scotland —in the northern county of Sutherland —to an unprofitable working for many years of a sulphureous lignite of the inferior Oolite, far above the true Coal Measures. The attempt I have just been describing was made in a locality as far beneath them. ‘There is the scene of another and more modern attempt in the same district, on the shores of the Moray Frith, in a detached patch of Lias, where a fossilized wood would no doubt be found in considerable abundance, but no continuous vein even of lignite. And it is related by Dr. Anderson, of Newburgh, that a fruitless and expensive search after coal has lately been instituted in the Old Red Sandstone beds which traverse Strathearn and the Carse of Gowrie, in the belief that they belong not to the Old, but to the Mew Red Sandstone — a formation which has been suc- cessfully perforated in prosecuting a similar search in various parts of England. All these instances — and there are hun- dreds such — show the economic importance of the study of fossils. 'The Oolite has its veins of apparent coal on the coast of Yorkshire, and its still more amply developed veins —one of them nearly four feet in thickness — on the eastern coast of Sutherlandshire ; the Lias has its coniferous fossils in great abundance, some of them converted into a lignite which can scarce be distinguished from a true coal; and the bitu- minous masses of the Lower Old Red, and its carbonaceous markings, appear identical, to an unpractised eye, with the impressions on the carboniferous sandstones, and the bitumi- nous masses which they, too, are occasionally found to enclose. Nor does the mineralogical character of its middle beds dif- fer 1n many cases from that of the lower members of the New Red Sandstone. I have seen the older rock in the north THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 179 of Scotland as strongly saliferous as any of the newer sand- stones, of well nigh as bright a brick-red tint, of as friable and mouldering a texture, and variegated as thickly with its specks and streaks of green and buff-color. But in all these instances there are strongly characterized groups of fossils, which, like the landmarks of the navigator, or the findings of his quad- rant, establish the true place of the formations to which they belong. Like the patches of leather, of scarlet, and of blue, which mark the line attached to the deep-sea lead, they show the various depths at which we arrive. The Earls of Suth- erland set themselves to establish a coal-work among the chambered univalves of the Oolite, and a vast abundance of its peculiar bivalves. The coal-borers who perforated the Lias near Cromarty passed every day to and from their work over one of the richest deposits of animal remains in the kingdom —a deposit full of the most characteristic fossils ; and drove their auger through a thousand belemnites and ammonites of the upper and inferior Lias, and through gryph- ites and ichthyodorulites innumerable. The sandstones of Strathearn and the Carse of Gowrie yield their plates and scales of the Holoptychius, the most abundant fossil of the Upper Old Red; and the shale of the little dell in which the first Earl of Cromarty set his miners to work. contains, as I have said, plates of the Coccosteus and scales of the Osteole- pis — fossils found only in the Lower Old Red. Nature, in all these localities, furnished the index, but men lacked the skill necessary to decipher it.* I may mention that, inde- * There occurs in Mr. Murchison’s Silurian System a singularly amusing account of one of the most unfortunate of all coal-boring enterprises; the unlucky projector, a Welsh farmer, having set him- self to dig for coal in the lowest member of the system, at least six 180 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. pendently of their well-marked organisms, there is a simple test through which the lignites of the newer formations may be distinguished from the true coal of the carboniferous sys- tem. Coal, though ground into an impalpable powder, re- tains its deep black color, and may be used as a black pig- ment; lignite, on the contrary, when fully levigated, assumes a reddish, or, rather, umbry hue. I have said that the waters of the well of the coal-heugh are chalybeate —a probable consequence of their infiltration through the iron oxides of the superior beds of the formation, and their subsequent passage through the deep red strata of formations beneath the only one at which the object of his search could have been found. Mr. Murchison thugsrelates the story : — «‘ At Tin-y-coed I found a credulous farmer ruining himself in ex- cavating a horizontal gallery in search of coal, an ignorant miner being his engineer. The case may serve as a striking example of the coal-boring mania in districts which cannot by possibility contain that mineral; and a few words concerning it may, therefore, prove a sal- utary warning to those who speculate for coal in the Silurian Rocks. The farmhouse of Tin-y-coed is situated on the sloping sides of a hill of trap, which throw off, upon its north-western flank, thin beds of black grauwacke shale, dipping to the west-north-west at a high an- gle. The color of the shale, and of the water that flowed down its sides, the pyritous veins, and other vulgar symptoms of coal-bearing strata, had long convinced the farmer that he possessed a large hid- den mass of coal, and, unfortunately, a small fragment of real anthra- cite was discovered, which burnt like the best coal. Miners were sent for, and operations commenced. To sink a shaft was imprac- ticable, both from the want of means, and the large volume of water. A slightly inclined gallery was therefore commenced, the mouth of which was opened at the bottom of the hill, on the side of the little brook which waters the dell. I have already stated that, in many cases, where the intrusive trap throws off the shale, the latter pre- serves its natural and unaltered condition to within a certain distance THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 18] the inferior bed. There could be very curious chapters writ- ten on mineral springs, in their connection with the formations through which they pass. Smollett’s masterpiece, honest old Matthew Bramble, became thoroughly disgusted with the Bath waters on discovering that they filtered through an ancient burying-ground belonging to the Abbey, and that much of their peculiar taste and odor might probably be owing to the **10tten bones and mouldering carcasses”’ through which they were strained. Some of the springs of the Old Red Sandstone have also the churchyard taste, but the bones and carcasses through which they strain are much older than those of the Abbey burying-ground at Bath. The bitumen of the trap; and so it was at Tin-y-coed, for the level proceeded for 155 feet with little or no obstacle. Mounds of soft black shale attest- ed the rapid progress of the adventurers, when suddenly they came to a ‘change of metal.’ They were now approaching the nucleus of the little ridge; and the rock they encountered was, as the men in- formed me, ‘ as hard as iron,’ viz., of lydianized schist, precisely anal- ogous to that which is exposed naturally in ravines where all the phenomena are laid bare. The deluded people, however, endeavored to penetrate the hardened mass, but the vast expense of blasting it put a stop to the undertaking, not, however, without a thorough con- viction on the part of the farmer, that, could he but have got through that hard stuff, he would most surely have been well recompensed, for it was just thereabouts that they began to find ‘small veins of coal.’ It has been before shown, that portions of anthracite are not unfrequent in the altered shale, where it is in contact with the intru- sive rock. And the occurrence of the smallest portion of anthracite is always sufficient to lead the Radnorshire farmer to suppose that he is very near ‘El Dorado.’ Amid all their failures, I never met with an individual who was really disheartened ; a frequent exclama- tion being, ‘O, if our squires were only men of syyit, we should have as fine coal as any in the world!’ ”” — (Silurian System, Part L., p- 328.) 18 * 182 } THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. of the strongly impregnated rocks and clay-beds of this for mation, like the bitumen of the still more strongly impreg:- nated limestones and shales of the Lias, seems to have had rather an animal than vegetable origin. ‘The shales of the Eathie Lias burn like turf soaked in oil, and yet they hardly contain one per cent. of vegetable matter. Ina single cubic inch, however, I have counted about eighty molluscous organisms, mostly ammonites, and minute striated scallops ; and the mass, when struck with the hammer, still yields the heavy odor of animal matter in a state of decay. The lower fish-beds of the Old Red are, in some localities, scarcely less bituminous. ‘The fossil scales and plates, which they enclose burn at the candle; they contain small cavities filled with a strongly scented, semi-fluid bitumen, as adhesive as tar, and as inflammable ; and for many square miles together the bed is composed almost exclusively of a dark-colored, semi-calca- reous, semi-aluminous schist, scarcely less fetid, from the great quantity of this substance which it contains, than the swine-stones of England. Its vegetable remains bear but a small proportion to its animal organisms; and from huge ac- cumulations of these last decomposing amid the mud of a still sea, little disturbed by tempests or currents, and then sud- denly interred by some widely spread catastrophe, to ferment and consolidate under vast beds of sand and conglomerate the bitumen* seems to have been elaborated. These bitu- minous schists, largely charged with sulphuret of iron, run far into the interior, along the flanks of the gigantic Ben We- * «In the slaty schists of Seefeld, in the Tyrol,” say Messrs. Sedg- wick and Murchison, “there is such an abundance of a similar bitu- men, that it is largely extracted for medicinal purposes.” — (Geoh Trans. for 1829, p. 134.) THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 183 vis, and through the exquisitely pastoral valley of Strathpef- fer. The higher hills which rise over the valley are formed mostly of the great conglomerate — Knockferril, with its vit- rified fort—the wooded and precipitous ridge over Brahan —and the middle eminences of the gigantic mountain on the north; but the bottom and the lower slopes of the valley are occupied by the bituminous and sulphureous schists of the fish-bed, and in these, largely impregnated with the peculiar ingredients of the formation, the famous medicinal springs of the Strath have their rise. They contain, as shown by chem- ical analysis, the sulphates of soda, of lime, of magnesia, common salt, and, above all, sulphuretted hydrogen gas— elements which masses of sea-mud, charged with animal matter, would yield as readily to the chemist as the medicinal springs of Strathpetfer. Is it not a curious reflection, that the commercial greatness of Britain, in the present day, should be closely connected with the towering and thickly spread forests of arboraceous ferns and gigantic reeds — vegetables of strange form and uncouth names— which flourished and decayed on its surface, age after age, during the vastly ex- tended term of the carboniferous period, ere the mountains were yet upheaved, and when there was as yet no man to till the ground? Is it not a reflection equally curious, that the invalids of the present summer should be drinking health, amid the recesses of Strathpeffer, from the still more ancient mineral and animal debris of the lower ocean of the Old Red Sandstone, strangely elaborated for vast but unreckoned peri- ods in the bowels of the earth? The fact may remind us of one of the specifics of a now obsolete school of medicine, which flourished in this country about two centuries ago, and which included in its materia medica portions of the human frame. Among these was the flesh of Egyptian mummies, 184 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. impregnated with the embalming drugs —the dried muscles and sinews of human creatures who had walked in the streets of Thebes or of Luxor three thousand years ago. The commoner mineral springs of the formation, as might be anticipated, from the very gen2ral diffusion of the oxide to which it owes its color, are chalybeate. There are dis- tricts in Easter-Ross and the Black Isle in which the traveller scarcely sees a runnel by the way-side that is not half choked up by its fox-colored coagulum of oxide. ‘Two of the most strongly impregnated chalybeates with which I am acquainted gush out of a sandstone bed, a few yards apart, among the woods of Tarbat House, on the northern shore of the Frith of Cromarty. They splash among the pebbles with a half- gurgling, half-tinkling sound, in a solitary but not unpleasing recess, darkened by alders and willows; and their waters, after uniting in the same runnel, form a little, melancholy looking lochan, matted over with weeds, and edged with flags and rushes, and which swarms in early summer with the young of the frog in its tadpole state, and in the after months with the black water-beetle and the newt. ‘The circumstance is a somewhat curious one, as the presence of iron as an ox- ide has been held so unfavorable to both animal and vegeta- ble life, that the supposed poverty of the Old Red Sandstone in fossil remains has been attributed to its almost universal diffusion at the period the deposition was taking place. Were the system as poor as has been alleged, however, it might be questioned, on the strength of a fact such as this, whether the iron militated so much against the living existences of the formation, as against the preservation of their remains when dead. Some of the springs which issue from the ichthyolite beds along the shores of the Moray Frith are largely charged, not THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 185 with iron, like the well of the coal-heugh, or the springs of Tarbat House, nor yet with hydrogen and soda, like the spa of Strathpeffer, but with carbonate of lime. When employed for domestic purposes, they choke up, in a few years, with a stony deposition, the spouts of tea-kettles. On a similar principle, they plug up their older channels, and then burst out in new ones; nor is it uncommon to find among the cliffs little hollow recesses, long since divested of their waters by this process, that are still thickly surrounded by coral-like in- crustations of moss and lichens, grass and nettle-stalks, and roofed with marble-like stalactites. I am acquainted with at least one of these springs of very considerable volume, and ded- icated of old to an obscure Roman Catholic saint, whose name it still bears, (St. Bennet,) which presents phenomena not un- worthy the attention of the young geologist. It comes gush- ing from out the ichthyolite bed, where the latter extends, in the neighborhood of Cromarty, along the shores of the Moray Frith ; and after depositing in a stagnant morass an accumu- lation of a grayish-colored and partially consolidated traver- tin, escapes by two openings to the shore, where it is absorbed among the sand and gravel. A storm about three years ago swept the beach several feet beneath its ordinary level, and two little moles of conglomerate and sandstone, the work of the spring, were found to occupy the two openings. Each had its fossils — comminuted sea-shells, and stalks of hardened moss; and in one of the moles I found imbedded a few of the vertebral joints of a sheep. It was a recent formation on a small scale, bound together by a calcareous cement fur- nished by the fish-beds of the inferior Old Red Sandstone, and composed of sand and pebbles, mostly from the granitic gneiss of the neighboring hill, and organisms, vegetable and animal, from both the land and the sea. 186 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. The Old Red Sandstone of Scotland has been extensively employed for the purposes of the architect, and its limestones occasionally applied to those of the agriculturist. As might be anticipated in reference to a deposit so widely spread, the quality of both its sandstones and its lime is found to vary exceedingly in even the same beds when examined in differ- ent localities. Its inferior conglomerate, for instance, in the neighborhood of Cromarty, weathers so rapidly, that a fence built of stones furnished by it little more than half a century ago, has mouldered in some places into a mere grass-covered mound. The same bed in the neighborhood of Inverness is composed of a stone nearly as hard and quite as durable as granite, and which has been employed in paving the streets of the place —a purpose which it serves as well as any of the igneous or primary rocks could have done. At Redcastle, on the northern shore of the Frith of Beauly, the same con- glomerate assumes an intermediate character, and forms, though coarse, an excellent building stone, which, in some of the older ruins of the district, presents the marks of the tool as sharply indented as when under the hands of the work- man. Some of the sandstone beds of the system are strongly saliferous; and these, however coherent they may appear, never resist the weather until first divested of their salt. ‘The main ichthyolite bed on the northern shore of the Moray Frith is overlaid by a thick deposit of a finely-tinted yellow sandstone of this character, which, unlike most sandstones of a mouldering quality, resists the frosts and storms of winter, and wastes only when the weather becomes warm and dry. A few days of sunshine affect it more than whole months of high winds and showers. ‘The heat crystallizes at the surface the salt which it contains; the crystals, acting as wedges, throw off minute particles of the stone ; and thus, mechani- THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 187 cally at least, the degrading process is the same as that to which sandstones of a different but equally inferior quality are exposed during severe frosts. In the course of years, however, this sandstone, when employed in building, loses its salt; crust after crust is formed on the surface, and either forced off by the crystals underneath, or washed away by the rains; and then the stone ceases to waste, and gathers on its weathered inequalities a protecting mantle of lichens.* The most valuable quarries in the Old Red System of Scotland yet discovered, are the flagstone quarries of Caithness and Car- mylie. ‘The former have been opened in the middle schists of the lower, or Tilestone formation of the system ; the latter, as I have had occasion to remark oftener than once, in the Cornstone, or middle formation. The quarries of both Car- mylie and Caithness employ hundreds of workmen, and their flagstones form an article of commerce. ‘The best building- stone of the north of Scotland — best both for beauty and durability — is a pure Quartzose Sandstone furnished by the upper beds of the system. ‘These are extensively quarried in Moray, near the village of Burghead, and exported to all parts of the kingdom. The famous obelisk of Forres, so * When left to time the process is a tedious one, and, ere its accom- plishment, the beauty of the masonry is always in some degree de- stroyed. The following passage, from a popular work, points out a mode by which it might possibly be anticipated, and the waste of sur- face prevented : — “ A hall of which the walls were constantly damp. though every means were employed to keep them dry, was about to be pulled down, when M. Schmithall recommended, as a last resource, that the walls should be washed with sulphuric acid, (vitriol.) I¢ was done, and the deliquescent salts being decomposed by acid, the walls dried, and te hall was afterwards free from dampness.”’ — (Ree- reations in Science.) 188 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. interesting to the antiquary —which has been described by some writers as formed of a species of stone unknown in the district, and which, according to a popular tradition, was transported from the Continent— is evidently composed of this Quartzose Sandstone, and must have been dug out of one of the neighboring quarries. And so coherent is its tex- ture, that the storms of, perhaps, ten centuries have failed to obliterate its rude but impressive sculptures. The limestones of both the upper and lower formations of the system have been wrought in Moray with tolerable suc- cess. In both, however, they contain a considerable per centage of siliceous and argillaceous earth. The system, though occupying an intermediate place between two metal- liferous deposits, — the grauwacke and the carboniferous limestone, — has not been found to contain workable veins any where in Britain, and in Scotland no metallic veins of any kind, with the exception of here and there a few slender threads of ironstone, and here and there a few detached crys- tals of galena. Its wealth consists exclusively in building and paving stone, and in lime. Some of the richest tracts of corn land in the kingdom rest on the Old Red Sandstone — the agricultural valley of Strathmore, for instance, and the fertile plains of Easter-Ross: Caithness has also its deep, corn-bearing soils, and Moray has been well known for cen- turies as the granary of Scotland. But in all these localities the fertility seems derived rather from an intervening subsoil of tenacious diluvial clay, than from the rocks of the system. Wherever the clay is wanting, the soilis barren. In the moor of the Milbuy, — atract about fifty square miles in extent, and lying within an hour’s walk of the Friths of Cromarty and Beauly, — a thin covering of soil rests on the sandstones of the THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 189 lower formation. And so extreme is the barrenness of this moor, that notwithstanding the advantages of its semi-insular situation, it was suffered to lie as an unclaimed common until about twenty-five years ago, when it was parcelled out among the neighboring proprietors. 19 CHAPTER XI. Geological Lhys'ognomy.—Scenery of the Primary Formations; Gneiss, Miva Schist, Quartz Rock. — Of the Secondary; the Chalk Formations, the Oolite, the New Red Sandstone, the Coal Measures. — Scenery in the Neighborhood of Edinburgh.— Aspect of the Trap Rocks. — The Disturbing and Denuding Agencies. — Distinc- tive Features of the Old Red Sandstone. — Of the Great Conglom- erate. — Of the Ichthyolite Beds. — The Burn of Eathie.— The Upper Old Red Sandstones. — Scene in Moray. PuysioGNomy is no idle or doubtful science in connection with Geology. The physiognomy of a country indicates, almost invariably, its geological character. There is scarce a rock among the more ancient groups that does not affect its peculiar form of hill and valley. Each has its style of land- scape; and as the vegetation of a district depends often on the nature of the underlying deposits, not only are the main outlines regulated by the mineralogy of the formations which they define, but also in many cases the manner in which these outlines are filled up. The coloring of the landscape is well nigh as intimately connected with its Geology as the drawing. The traveller passes through a mountainous region of gneiss. The hills, which, though bulky, are shapeless, raise their huge backs so high over the brown, dreary moors, which, unvaried by precipice or ravine, stretch away for miles from their feet, that even amid the heats of midsummer the snow gleams in streaks and patches from their summits. And yet so vast is their extent of base, and their tops so truncated, that they seem but half-finished hills notwithstanding — hills interdicted somehow in the forming, and the work stopped ere the upper (190) THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 191 stories had been added. He pursues his journey and enters a district of micaceous schist. The hills are no longer truncated, or the moors unbroken; the heavy ground-swell of the former landscape has become a tempestuous sea, agitated by powerful winds and conflicting tides. The picturesque aud somewhat fantastic outline is composed of high, sharp peaks, bold, craggy domes, steep, broken acclivities, and deeply ser- rated ridges ; and the higher hills seem as if set round witha framework of props and buttresses, that stretch out on every side like the roots of an ancient oak. He passes on, and the landscape varies; the surrounding hills, though lofty, pyram- idal, and abrupt, are less rugged than before; and the ra- vines, though still deep and narrow, are walled by ridges no longer serrated and angular, but comparatively rectilinear and smooth. But the vegetation is even more scanty than for- merly ; the steeper slopes are covered with streams of debris, on which scarce a moss or lichen finds root ; and the conoidal hills, bare of soil from their summits half way down, seem so many naked skeletons, that speak of the decay and death of nature. All is solitude and sterility. The territory is one of Quartz rock. Still the traveller passes on: the mountains sink into low swellings; long rectilinear ridges run out towards the distant sea, and terminate in bluff; precipitous headlands. The valleys, soft and pastoral, widen into plains, or incline in long-drawn slopes of gentlest declivity. The streams, hitherto so headlong and broken, linger beside their banks, and then widen into friths and estuaries. The deep soil is covered by a thick mantle of vegetation — by forest trees of largest growth, and rich fields of corn ; and the soli- tude of the mountains has given place to a busy population. He has left behind him the primary regions, and entered on one of the secondary districts. 192 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. And these less rugged formations have also their respective styles— marred and obliterated often by the Plutonic agency, which imparts to them in some instances its own character, and in some an intermediate one, but in general distinctly marked, and easily recognized. ‘The Chalk presents its long inland lines of apparent coast, that send out their rounded headlands, cape beyond cape, into the wooded or corn-covered plains below. Here and there, there juts up at the base of the escarpement a white, obelisk-like stack; here and there, there opens into the interior a narrow, grassy bay, in which noble beeches have cast anchor. There are valleys without streams ; and the landscape a-top is a scene of arid and un- even downs, that seem to rise and fall like the sea after a storm. We pass on to the Oolite: the slopes are more gen- tle, the lines of rising ground less continuous, and less coast- like; the valleys have their rivulets, and the undulating sur- face is covered by a richer vegetation. We enter on a dis- trict of New Red Sandstone. Deep, narrow ravines intersect elevated platforms. ‘There are lines of low precipices, so perpendicular and so red, that they seem as if walled over with new brick; and here and there, amid the speckled and mouldering sandstones, that gather no covering of lichen, there stands up a huge, altar-like mass of lime, mossy and gray, as if it represented a remoter antiquity than the rocks around it. ‘The Coal Measures present often the appearance of vast lakes frozen over during a high wind, partially broken afterwards by a sudden thaw, and then frozen again. Their shores stand up around them in the form of ridges and moun- tain chains of the older rocks; and their surfaces are grooved into flat valleys and long lines of elevation. Take, as an in- stance, the scenery about Edinburgh. The Ochil Hills and the Grampians form the distant shores of the seeming lake THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 193 or basin on the one s:de, the range of the Lammermuirs and the Pentland group on the other; the space between is ridged and furrowed in long lines, that run in nearly the same direc- tion from north-east to south-west, as if, when the binding frost was first setting in, the wind had blown from off the northern or southern shore. But whence these abrupt, precipitous hills that stud the landscape, and form, in the immediate neighborhood of the city, its more striking features? They belong —to return tc the illustration of the twice-frozen lake — to the middle peri- od of thaw, when the ice broke up; and, as they are com- posed chiefly of matter ejected from the abyss, might have characterized equally any of the other formations. Their very striking forms, however, illustrate happily the operations of the great agencies on which, in the secondary and transi- tion deposits, all the peculiarities of scenery depend. The molten matter from beneath seems to have been injected, in the first instance, through rents and fissures among the car- boniferous shales and sandstones of the district, where it lay cooling in its subterranean matrices, in beds and dikes, like metal in the moulds of the founder; and the places which it occupied must have been indicated on the surface but by curves and swellings of the strata. The denuding power then came into operation in the form of tides and currents, and ground down the superincumbent rocks. The injected masses, now cooled and hardened, were laid bare; and the softer framework of the moulds in which they had been cast was washed from their summits and sides, except where long ridges remained attached to them in the lines of the current, as if to indicate the direction in which they had broken its force. Every larger stone in a water-course, after the tor- rent fed by a thunder shower has just subsided, shows on the I9* 194 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. same principle, its trail of sand and shingle piled up behind it. The outlines of the landscape were modified yet further by the yielding character of the basement of sandstone or shale on which the Plutonic beds so often rest. The base ment crumbled away as the tides and waves broke against it. The injected beds above, undermined in the process, and with a vertical cleavage, induced by their columnar tendency, fell down in masses that left a front perpendicular as a wall. Each bed came thus to present its own upright line of preci- pice ; and hence — when they rise bed above bed, as often occurs — the stair-like outline of hill to which the trap rocks owe their name; hence the outline of the Dalmahoy Crags, for instance, and of the southern and western front of Salis- bury Crags. In all the sedimentary formations the peculiarities of sce- nery depend on three circumstances — on the Plutonic agen- cies, the denuding agencies, and the manner and proportions in which the harder and softer beds of the deposits on which these operated alternate with one another. There is an union of the active and the passive in the formation of landscape ; that which disturbs and grinds down, and that which, accord- ing to its texture and composition, affects, if | may so speak, a peculiar style of being ground down and disturbed ; and it is in the passive circumstances that the peculiarities chiefly originate. Hence it is that the scenery of the Chalk differs from the scenery of the Oolite, and both from that of the Coal Measures. The Old Red Sandstone has also its pecu- liarities of prospect, which vary according to its formations, and the amount and character of the disturbing and denuding agencies to which these have been exposed. Instead, how- ever, of crowding its varicus, and, in some instances, diszim- ilar features into one landscape, I shall introduce to the reader THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 195 a few of its more striking and characteristic scenes, as ex- hibited in various localities, and by different deposits, begin- ning first with its conglomerate base. The great antiquity of this deposit is unequivocally indi- cated by the manner in which we find it capping, far in the interior, in insulated beds and patches, some of our loftier hills, or, in some instances, wrapping them round, as with a caul, from base to summit. It mixes largely, in our northern districts, with the mountain scenery of the country, and im- parts strength and boldness of outline to every landscape in which it occurs. Its island-like patches affect generally a bluff parabolic or conical outline; its loftier hills present rounded, dome-like summits, which sink to the plain on the one hand in steep, slightly concave lines, and on the other in lines decidedly convex, and a little less steep. The moun- tain of boldest outline in the line of the Caledonian Valley (Mealforvony) is composed externally of this rock. Except where covered by the diluvium, it seems little friendly to vegetation. Its higher summits are well nigh as bare as those of the primary rocks; and when a public road crosses its lower ridges, the traveller generally finds that there is no paving process necessary to procure a hardened surtace, for his wheels rattle over the pebbles embedded in the rock. On the sea-coast, in several localities, the deposit presents strik- ing peculiarities of outline. The bluff and rounded preci- pices stand out in vast masses, that affect the mural form, and present few of the minuter angularities of the primary rocks. Here and there a square buttress of huge proportions leans against the front of some low-browed crag, that seems little to need any such support, and casts a length of shadow athwart its face. There opens along the base of the rock a line of rounded, shallow caves, or what seem rather the open- 196 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. ings of caves not yet dug, and which testify of a period when the sea stood about thirty feet higher on our coasts than at present. A multitude of stacks and tabular masses lie grouped in front, perforated often by squat, heavy arches ; and stacks, caverns, buttresses, crags, and arches, are all alike mottled over by the thickly-set and variously colored pebbles. There is a tract of scenery of this strangely marked character in the neighborhood of Dunottar, and two other similar tracts in the far north, where the hill of Nigg, in Ross-shire, declines towards the Lias deposit in the Bay of Shandwick, and where, in the vicinity of Inverness, a line of bold, precipitous coast runs between the pyramidal wooded eminence which occupies the south-eastern corner of Ross, and the tower-like headlands that guard the entrance of the Bay of Munlochy. In the latter tract, however, the conglom- erate is much less cavernous than in the other two.* The sea-coast of St. Vigeans, in Forfarshire, has been long celebrated for its romantic scenery and its caves; and though it belongs rather to the conglomerate base of the up- per formation than to the great conglomerate base of the lower, it is marked, from the nature of the materials — ma- terials common to both— by features indistinguishable from those which characterize the sea-coasts of the older deposit. Its wall of precipices averages from a hundred to a hundred and eighty feet in height—no very great matter compared with some of our northern lines, but the cliffs make up for their want of altitude by their bold and picturesque combina- tions of form; and I scarce know where a long summer’s day could well be passed more agreeably than among their wild and solitary recesses. The incessant lashings of the sea have ground them down into shapes the most fantastic. Huge stacks, that stand up from anid the breakers, are here and * See Note N. THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 197 there perforated by round, heavy-browed arches, and cast the morning shadows inland athwart the cavern-hollowed preci- pices behind. The never-ceasing echoes reply, in long and gloomy caves, to the wild tones of the sea. Here a bluff promontory projects into the deep, green water, and the white foam, in times of tempest, dashes up a hundred feet against its face. There a narrow strip of vegetation, spangled with wild flowers, intervenes between the beach and the foot of the cliffs that sweep along the bottom of some semicircular bay ; but we see, from the rounded caves by which they are stud- ded, and the polish which has blunted their lower angularities, that at some early period the breakers must have dashed for ages against their bases. ‘The Gaylet Pot, a place of inter- est, from its very striking appearance, to more than geologists, is connected with one of the deep-sea promontories. We see an oblong hollow in the centre of a corn-field, that borders on the cliffs. It deepens as we approach it, and on reaching the edge we find ourselves standing on the verge of a precipice about a hundred and fifty feet in depth, and see the waves dashing along the bottom. On descending by a somewhat precarious path, we find that a long, tunnel-like cavern com- municates with the sea,and mark, through the deep gloom of the passage, the sunlight playing beyond; and now and then a white sail passing the opening, as if flitting across the field of a telescope. The Gaylet Pot seems originally to have been merely a deep, straight cave, hollowed in the line of a fault by the waves ; and it owes evidently its present appear- ance to the falling in of the roof for about a hundred yards, at its inner extremity. We pass from the conglomerate to the middle and upper beds of the lower formation, and find scenery of a different character in the districts in which they prevail. The aspect is 198 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. less bold and ruzged, and affects often long horizontal lines, that stretch away without rise or depression, amid the surround- ing inequalities of the landscape for miles and leagues, and that decline to either side, like roofs of what the architect would term a low pitch. The ridge of the Leys in the east- ern opening of the Caledonian Valley, so rectilinear in its outline, and so sloping in its sides, presents a good illustration of this peculiarity. The rectilinear ridge which runs from the Southern Sutor of Cromarty far into. the interior of the country, and which has been compared in a former chapter to the shaft of a spear, furnishes another illustration equally apt.* Where the sloping sides of these roof-like ridges decline, as in the latter instance, towards an exposed sea- coast, we find the slope terminating often in an abrupt line of rock dug out by the waves. It is thus a roof set on walls, and furnished with eaves. A ditch just finished by the labor- er presents regularly sloping sides; but the little stream that comes running through gradually widens its bed by digging furrows into the slopes, the undermined masses fall in and are swept away, and, in the course of a few months, the sides are no longer sloping, but abrupt. And such, on a great scale, * The valleys which separate these ridges form often spacious friths and bays, the frequent occurrence of which in the Old Red Sandstone constitutes, in some localities, one of the characteristics of the system. Mark in a map of the north of Scotland, how closely friths and estu- aries lie crowded together between the counties of Sutherland and In- verness. In a line of coast little more than forty miles in extent, there occur four arms of the sea—the Friths of Cromarty, Beauly, and Dornoch, and the Bay of Munlochy. The Frith of Tay and the Basin of Montrose are also semi-marine valleys of the Old Red Sand- stone. Two of the finest harbors in Britain, or the world, belong to it — Milford Haven, in South Wales, and the Bay of Cromarty. THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 199 has been the process through which coast-lines that were originally paved slopes have become walls of precipices. The waves cut first through the outer strata; and every stratum thus divided comes to 28th faces — a perpen- dicular face in the newly-formed line of precipice, and another horizontal face lying parallel to it, along the shore. One half the severed stratum seems as if rising out of the sea, the other half as if descending from the hill: the geologist who walks along the beach finds the various beds presented in duplicate —a hill-bed on the one side, and a sea-bed on the other. There occurs a very interesting instance of this arrangement in the bold line of coast on the northern shore of the Moray Frith, so often alluded to ina previous chapter, as extending between the Southern Sutor and the Hill of Eathie; and which forms the wall of a por- tion of the roof-like ridge last described. The sea first broke in a long line through strata of red and gray shale, next through a thick bed of pale-yellow stone, then through a con- tinuous bed of stratified clays and nodular limestone, and, last of all, through a bed, thicker than any of the others, of indurated red sandstone. The line of cliffs formed in this way rises abruptly for about a hundred yards on the one hand ; the shore stretches out for more than double the same space on the other; on both sides the beds exactly correspond ; and to ascend in the line of the strata from the foot of tne cliffs, we have either to climb the hill, or to pass downwaras at low ebb to the edge of the sea. The section is of interest, not onl- from the numerous organisms, animal and vegetable, which its ichthyolite beds contain, but from the illustration which it also furnishes of denudation to a vast extent from causes still in active operation. A line of precipices a hun- dred yards in height, and more than two miles in length, has 200 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. been dug out of the slope by the slow wear of the waves, in the unreckoned course of that period during which the present sea was bounded in this locality by the existing line of coast. (See Frontispiece, sect. 3.) I know nota more instructive walk for the young geologist than that furnished by the two miles of shore along which this section extends. Years of examination and inquiry would fail to exhaust it. It presents us, I have said, with the numer- ous organisms of the Lower Old Red Sandstone ; it presents us also, towards its western extremity, with the still more numerous organisms of the Lower and Upper Lias; nor are the inflections and faults which its strata exhibit less instruc- tive than its fossils or its vast denuded hollow. I have climbed along its wall of cliffs during the height of a tempestuous winter tide, when waves of huge volume, that had begun to gather strength under the night of the Northern Ocean, were bursting and foaming below; and as the harder pebbles, up- lifted by the surge, rolled by thousands and tens of thousands along the rocky bettom, and the work of denudation went on, I have thought of the remote past, when the same agents had first begun to grind down the upper strata, whose broken edges now projected high over my head on the one hand, and lay buried far under the waves at my feet on the other. Almost all mountain chains present their abrupter escarpements to the sea, though separated from it in many instances by hundreds of miles —a consequence, it is probable, of a similar course of denudation, ere they had attained their present altitude, or the plains at their feet had been elevated over the level of the ocean. Had a rise of a hundred feet taken place in this northern district in the days of Cesar, the whole upper part of the Moray Frith would have been laid dry, and it would now have seemed as inexplicable that this roof-like ridge THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 201 should present so rugged a line of wall to the distant sea, as that the Western Ghauts of India should invariably turn their steepest declivities to the basin of the Indian Ocean, or that, from the Arctic Circle to the southern extremity of Patagonia, the huge mountain-chain of America should elevate its dizzy precipices in the line of the Pacific. Let us take another view of this section. It stretches be- tween two of the granitic knobs or wedges to which I have had such frequent occasion to refer— the Southern Sutor of Cromarty, and the Hill of Eathie; and the edges of the strata somewhat remind one of the edges of a bundle of deals laid flatways on two stones, and bent towards the middle by their own weight. But their more brittle character is shown by the manner in which their ends are broken and uptilted against the granitic knobs on which they seem to rest; and towards the western knob the whole bundle has been broken across from below, and the opening occasioned by the fracture forms a deep, savage ravine, skirted by precipices, that runs far into the interior, and exhibits the lower portion of the system to well nigh its base. Will the reader spend a very few minutes in exploring the solitary recesses of this rocky trench —it matters not whether as a scene-hunter or a geologist? We pass onwards along the beach through the middle line of the denuded hollow. The natural rampart that rises on the right ascends towards the uplands in steep slopes, lined horizontally by sheep-walks, and fretted by mossy knolls, and churchyard like ridges—or juts out into abrupt and weathered crags, crusted with lichens and festooned with ivy — or recedes into bosky hollows, roughened by the sloe-thorn, the wild-rose, and the juniper; on the left the wide extent of the Moray Frith stretzhes out to the dim horizon, with its vein-like cur- rents, and its undulating lines of coast; while before us we 20 202 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. see, far in the distance, the blue vista of the Great Valley, with its double wall of jagged and serrated hills, and directly in the opening, the gray, diminished spires of Inverness. We reach a brown mossy stream, of just volume enough to sweep away the pebbles and shells that have been strewed in its course by the last tide; and see, on turning a sudden angle, the precipices cleft to their base by the ravine that has yielded its waters a passage from the interior. We enter along the bed of the stream. A line of mural precipices rises on either hand — here advancing in ponderous overhanging buttresses, there receding into deep, damp recess es, tapestried with ivy, and darkened with birch and hazel. A powerful spring, charged with lime, comes pouring by a hundred different threads over the rounded brow of a beetling crag, and the decaying vegetation around it is hardening into stone. The cliffs vary their outline at every step, as if assum- ing in succession all the various combinations of form that constitute the wild and the picturesque ; and the pale hues of the stone seem, when brightened by the sun, the very tints a painter would choose to heighten the effect of his shades, or to contrast most delicately with the luxuriant profusion of bushes and flowers that wave over the higher shelves and crannies. A colony of swallows have built from time immemorial under the overhanging strata of one of the lofiier precipices; the fox and badger harbor in the clefts of the steeper and more inac- cessible banks. As we proceed, the dell becomes wilder and more deeply wooded ; the stream frets and toils at our feet — here leaping over an opposing ridge — there struggling in a pool — yonder escaping to the light from under some broken fragment of cliff. There is a richer profusion of flowers, a thicker mantling of ivy and honeysuckle ; and after passing a semicircular inflection of the bank, that waves THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 203 from base to summit with birch, hazel, and hawthorn, we find the passage shut up by a perpendicular wall of rock about thirty feet in height, over which the stream precipitates itself, in a slender column of foam, into a dark, mossy basin. The long arms of an intermingled clump of birches and ha- zels stretch half way across, tripling with their shade the ap- parent depth of the pool, and heightening in an equal ratio the white flicker of the cascade, and the effect of the bright patches of foam which, flung from the rock, incessantly 1evolve on the eddy. Mark now the geology of the ravine. For about half way froin where it opens to the shore, to where the path is ob- structed by the deep mossy pool and the cascade, its precip- itous sides consist of three bars or stories. There is first, reckoning from the stream upwards, a broad bar of pale red; then a broad bar of pale lead color; last and highest, a broad bar of pale yellow; and above all, there rises a steep green slope, that continues its ascent till it gains the top of the ridge. The middle, lead-colored bar is an ichthyolite bed, a place of sepulture among the rocks, where the dead lie by myriads. ‘The yellow bar above isa thick bed of saliferous sandstone. We may see the projections on which the sun has beat most powerfully covered with a white crust of salt; and it may be deemed worthy of remark, in connection with the circumstance, that its shelves and crannies are richer in vege- tation than those of the other bars. The pale red bar below is composed of a coarser and harder sandstone, which forms an upper moiety of the arenaceous portion of the great con- glomerate. Now mark, further, that on reaching a midway point between the beach and the cascade, this triple-barred line of precipices abruptly terminates, and a line of preci- pices of coarse conglomerate as abruptly begins. I occa- 204 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. sionally pass a continuous wall, built at two different periods ‘and composed cf two different kinds of materials: the one half of it is forraed of white sandstone, the other half of a dark-colored basalt; and the place where the sandstone ends and the basalt begins is marked by a vertical line, on the one side of which all is dark colored, while all is of a light color on the other. Equally marked and abrupt is the vertical line which separates the triple-barred from the conglomerate cliffs of the ravine of Eathie. The ravine itself may be described as a fault in the strata; but here is a fault, lying at right an- gles with it, cn a much larger scale: the great conglomerate on which the triple bars rest has been cast up at least two hundred feet, and placed side by side with them. And yet the surface above bears no trace of the catastrophe. Denud- ing agencies of even greater power than those which have hollowed out the cliffs of the neighboring coast, or whose operations have been prolonged through periods of even more extended duration, have ground down the projected line of the upheaved mass to the level of the undisturbed masses be- side it. Now, mark further, as we ascend the ravine, that the grand cause of the disturbance appears to illustrate, as it were, and that very happily, the manner in which the fault was originally produced. The precipice, over which the stream leaps at one bound into the mossy hcllow, is com- posed of granitic gneiss, and seems evidently to have intrud- ed itself, with much disturbance, among the surrounding conglomerate and sandstones. A few hundred yards higher up the dell, there is another much loftier precipice of gneiss, round which we find the traces of still greater disturbance ; and, higher still, yet a third abrupt precipice of the same rock. ‘The gneiss rose, trap-like, in steps, and carried up the sandstune before it in detached squares. Each step has its THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 255 answering fault immediately over it; and the fault where the triple bars and the conglomerate meet is merely a fault whose step of granitic gneiss stopped short ere it reached the sur. face. But the accompanying section (see Frontispiece, sect. 4) will better illustrate the geology of this interesting ravine, than it can be illustrated by any written description. I may remark, ere taking leave of it, however, that its conglomer- ates exhibit a singularly large amount of false stratification at an acute angle with the planes of the real strata, and that a bed of mouldering sandstone near the base of the system may be described, from its fissile character, as a tilestone.* * There is a natural connection, it is said, between wild scenes and wild legends; and some of the traditions connected with this roman- tic and solitary dell illustrate the remark. ‘Till a comparatively late period, it was known at many a winter fireside as a favorite haunt of the fairies —the most poetical of all our old tribes of spectres, and at one time one of the most popular. I have conversed with an old woman, who, when a very little girl, had seen myriads of them dan- cing, as the sun was setting, on the further edge of the dell; and with a still older man, who had the temerity to offer one of them a pinch of snuff at the foot of the cascade. Nearly a mile from where the ravine opens to the sea, it assumes a gentler and more pastoral char- acter ; the sides, no longer precipitous, descend towards the stream in green, sloping banks; and a beaten path, which runs between Crom- arty and Rosemarkie, winds down the one side and ascends the other. More than sixty years ago, one Donald Calder, a Cromarty shop- keeper, was journeying by this path shortly after nighttall. The moon, at full, had just risen; but there was a silvery mist sleeping on the lower grounds, that obscured her light; and the dell, in all its extent, was so overcharged by the vapor, that it seemed an immense, overfiooded river winding through the landscape. Donald had reached its farther edge, and could hear the rush of the stream from the deep obscurity of the abyss below, when there rose from the op- posite side a strain of the most delightful music he had ever heard. 20 * 206 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. I know comparatively little of the scenery of the middle, or Cornstone formation. Its features in England are bold and striking; in Scotland, of a tamer and more various char- acter. The Den of Balruddery is a sweet, wooded dell, marked by no characteristic peculiarities. Many of the seeming peculiarities of the formation in Forfarshire, as in Fife, may be traced to the disturbing trap. The appearance exhibited is that of uneven plains, that rise and fall in long, undulating ridges —an appearance which any other member of the system might have presented. We find the upper for- mation associated with scenery of great, though often wild He staid and listened. The words of a song, of such simple beauty that they seemed without effort to stamp themselves on his memory, came wafted in the music; and the chorus, in which a thousand tiny voices seemed to join, was a familiar address to himself — ** Hey, Donald Calder ; ho, Donald Calder.’ ‘There are nane of my Navi- ty acquaintance,’ thought Donald, “who sing like that. Wha can it be?” He descended into the cloud; but in passing the little stream the music ceased; and on reaching the spot on which the singer had seemed stationed, he saw only a bare bank sinking into a solitary moor, unvaried by either bush or hollow in which the musi- cian might have lain concealed. He had hardly time, however, to estimate the marvels of the case, when the music again struck up, but on the opposite side of the dell, and apparently from the very knoll on which he had so recently listened to it. The conviction that it could not be other than supernatural overpowered him; and he hurried homewards under the influence of a terror so extreme, that, unfortunately for our knowledge of fairy literature, it had the effect ef obliterating from his memory every part of the song except the chorus. The sun rose as he reached Cromarty; and he found that, instead of having lingered at the edge of the dell for only a few min- utes — and the time had seemed no longer — he had spent beside it the greater part of the night. f The fairies have deserted the Burn of Eathie ; but we have proof, THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 207 beauty ; and nowhere is this more strikingly the case than in the province of Moray, where it leans against the granitic gneiss of the uplands, and slopes towards the sea in long plains of various fertility, deep and rich, as in the neighborhood of Elgin, or singularly bleak and unproductive, as in the far- famed “‘ heath near Forres.” Let us select the scene where quite as conclusive as the nature of the case admits, that when they ceased to be seen there it would have been vain to have looked for them any where else. There is a cluster of turf-built cottages grouped on the southern side of the ravine; a few scattered knolls, and a long, partially wooded hollow, that seems a sort of covered way leading to the recesses of the dell, interpose between them and the nearer edge, and the hill rises behind. Ona Sabbath morning, nearly sixty years ago, the inmates of this little hamlet had all gone to church, all except a herd-boy and a little girl, his sister, who were lounging beside one of the cottages; when, just as the shadow of the garden dial had fallen on the line of noon, they saw a long cavalcade ascending out of the ravine through the wooded hollow. It winded among the knolls and bushes; and, turning round the northern ga- ble of the cottage beside which the sole spectators of the scene were stationed, began to ascend the eminence towards the south. The horses were shaggy, diminutive things, speckled dun and gray; the riders, stunted, misgrown, ugly creatures, attired in antique jerkins of plaid, long gray cloaks, and little red caps, from under which their wild, uncombed locks shot out over their cheeks and foreheads. The boy and his sister stood gazing in utter dismay and astonishment, as rider after rider, each one more uncouth and dwarfish than the one that had preceded it, passed the cottage and disappeared among the brushwood, which at that period covered the hill, until at length the entire rout, except the last rider, who lingered a few yards be- hind the others, had gone by. ‘ What are ye, little mannie? and where are ye going?” inquired the boy, his curiosity getting the better of his fears and his prudence. ‘Not of the race of Adam,” said the creature, turning for a moment in his saddle; *‘ the People of Peace shall never more be séen in Scotland.” 208 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. the Findhorn, after hurrying over ridge and shallow, amid combinations of rock and wood, wildly picturesque as any the kingdom affords, enters on the Jower country, with a course less headlong, through a vast trench scooped in the pale red sandstone of the upper formation. For miles above the junction of the newer and older rocks the river has beea toiling in a narrow and uneven channel, between two upright walls of hard gray gneiss, thickly traversed, in every com- plexity of pattern, by veins of a light red, large grained granite. The gneiss abruptly terminates, but not so the wall of precipices. A lofty front of gneiss is joined to a lofty front of sandstone, like the front walls of two adjoining houses ; and the broken and uptilted strata of the softer stone show that the older and harder rocks must have invaded it from below. A little farther down the stream, the strata as- sume what seems, in a short extent of frontage, a horizontal position, like courses of ashlar in a building, but which, when viewed in the range, is found to incline at a low angle towards the distant sea. Here, as in many other localities, the young geologist must guard against the conclusion, that the rock is necessarily low in the geological scale which he finds resting against the gneiss. ‘The gneiss, occupying a very different place from that on which it was originally formed, has been thrust into close neighborhood with widely separated forma- tions. The great conglomerate base of the system rests over it in Orkney, Caithness, Ross, Cromarty, and Inverness ; and there is no trace of what should be the intervening grau- wacke. The upper formation of the system leans upon it here. We find the Lower Lias uptilted against it at the Hill of Kathie —the great Oolite on the eastern coast of Suther- land; and as the flints and chalk fossils of Banff and Aber- deen are found lying immediately over it in these counties, THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 209 it is probable that the denuded members of the Cretaceous group once rested upon it there. The fact that a deposit should be found lying in contact with the gneiss, furnishes no argument for the great antiquity or the fundamental charac- ter of that deposit; and it were well that the geologist who sets himself to estimate the depth of the Old Red Sandstone, or the succession of its various formations, should keep the circumstance in view. That may be in reality but a small and upper portion of the system which he finds bounded by the gneiss on its under side, and by the diluvium on its upper. We stand on a wooded eminence, that sinks perpendicu- larly into the river on the left, in a mural precipice, and de- scends with a billowy swell into the broad, fertile plain in front, as if the uplands were breaking in one vast wave upon the low country. There is a patch of meadow on the oppo- site side of the stream, shaded by a group of ancient trees, gnarled and mossy, and with half their topmost branches dead and white as the bones of a skeleton. We look down upon them from an elevation so commanding, that their up- permost twigs seem on well nigh the same level with their interlaced and twisted roots, washed bare on the bank edge by the winter floods. A colony of herons has built from time immemorial among the branches. There are trees so laden with nests that the boughs bend earthwards on every side, like the boughs of orchard trees in autumn; and the bleached and feathered masses which they bear —the cradles of suc- ceeding generations — glitter gray through the foliage in con- tinuous groups, as if each tree bore on its single head all the wigs of the Court of Session. The solitude is busy with the occupations and enjoyments of instinct. The birds, tall and stately, stand by troops in the shallows, or wade warily, as the fish glance by, to the edge of the current, or rising, with 210 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. the slow flap of wing and sharp creak peculiar to the tribe, drop suddenly into their nests. The great forest of Darna- way stretches beyond, feathering a thousand knolls, that re- flect a colder and grayer tint as they recede, and lessen, and present on the horizon a billowy line of blue. The river brawls along under pale red cliffs, wooded a-top. It is through a vast burial-yard that it has cut its way —a field of the dzad so ancient, that the sepulchres of Thebes and Luxor are but of the present day in comparison — resting-places for the recently departed, whose funerals are but just over. These mouldering strata are charged with remains, scattered and detached as those of a churchyard, but not less entire in their parts — occipital bones, jaws, teeth, spines, scales — the dust and rubbish of a departed creation. ‘The cliffs sink as the plain flattens, and green, sloping banks of diluvium take their place; but they again rise in the middle distance into an abrupt and lofty promontory, that, stretching like an im- mense rib athwart the level country, projects far into the stream, and gives an angular inflection to its course. There ascends from the apex a thin, blue column of smoke — that of alime-kiln. That ridge and promontory are composed of the thick limestone band, which, in Moray as in Fife, separates the pale red from the pale yellow beds of the Upper Old Red Sandstone; and the flattened tracts on both sides show how much better it has resisted the denuding agencies than either the yellow strata that rests over it, or the pale red strata which it overlies. CHAPTER XU. The two Aspects in which Matter can be viewed; Space and Time. — Geological History of the Earlier Periods. — The Cambrian Sys- tem. — Its Annelids. — The Silurian System. — Its Corals, Encrin- ites, Molluscs, and Trilobites. —Its Fish. — These of a high Order, and called into Existence apparently by Myriads. — Opening Scene in the History of the Old Red Sandstone a Scene of Tempest. — Represented by the Great Conglomerate. — Red a prevailing Color among the Ancient Rocks contained in this Deposit. — Amazing Abundance of Animal Life. — Exemplified by a Scene in the Her- ring Fishery. — Platform of Death. — Probable Cause of the Catas- trophe which rendered it such. “THERE are only two different aspects,” says Dr. Thomas Brown, ‘‘ in which matter can be viewed. We may consider it simply as it exists in space, or as it exists in time. As it exists in space we inquire into its composition, or, in other words, endeavor to discover what are the elementary bodies that coexist in the space which it occupies; as it exists in time, we inquire into its susceptibilities or its powers, or, in other words, endeavor to trace all the various changes which have already passed over it, or of which it may yet become the subject.” | Hitherto I have very much restricted myself to the consid- eration of the Old Red Sandstone as it exists in space — to the consideration of it as we now find it. I shall now attempt presenting it to the reader as it existed in tzme— during the succeeding periods of its formation, and when its existences lived and moved as the denizens of primeval oceans. It is one thing to describe the appearance of a forsaken and des- (211) B19 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. ert country, with its wide wastes of unprofitable sand, its broken citadels and temples, its solitary battle-plains, and its gloomy streets of cavernel and lonely sepulchres ; and quite another to record its history during its days of smiling fields, populous cities, busy trade, and monarchical splendor. We pass from the dead to the living—from the cemetery, with its high piles of mummies and its vast heaps of bones, to the ancient city, full of life and animation in all its streets and dwellings. Two great geological periods have already come to their close ; and the floor of a widely-spread ocean, to which we can affix no limits, and of whose shores or their inhabitants nothing is yet known, is occupied to the depth of many thou- sand feet by the remains of bygone existences. Of late, the geologist has learned from Murchison to distinguish the rocks of these two periods —the lower as those of the Cambrian, the upper as those of the Silurian group. The lower— rep- resentative of the first glimmering twilight of being — of a dawn so feeble that it may seem doubtful whether in reality the gloom had lightened — must still be regarded as a period of uncertainty. Its ripple-marked sandstones, and its half coherent accumulations of dark-colored strata, which decom- pose into mud, show that every one of its many plains must have formed in succession an upper surface of the bottom of the sea; but it remains for future discoverers to determine regarding the shapes of life that burrowed in its 00ze, or ca reered through the incumbent waters. In one locality it would seem as if a few worms had crawled to the surface, and left their involved and tortuous folds doubtfully impressed on the stone. Some of them resemble miniature cables, care- lessly coiled; others, furnished with what seem numerous legs, remind us of the existing Nereidina of our sandy THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 213 shores — those red-blooded, many-legged worms, resembling elongated centipedes, that wriggle with such activity among the mingled mud and water, as we turn over the stones under which they had shelterzd. Were creatures such as these the lords of this lower ocean? Did they enter first oa the stage, in that great drama of being in which poets and philosophers, monarchs and mighty conquerors, were afterwards to mingle as actors? Does the reader remember that story in the Ara- bian Nights, in which the battle of the magicians is described ? At an early stage of the combat a little worm creeps over the pavement; at its close two terrible dragons contend in an atmosphere of fire. But even the worms of the Cambrian System can scarce be regarded as established. The evidence respecting their place and their nature must still be held as involved in some such degree of doubt as attaches to the researches of the antiquary, when engaged in tracing what their remains much resemble —the involved sculpturings of some Runic obelisk, weathered by the storms of a thousand winters. There is less of doubt, however, regarding the existences of the upper group of rocks—the Silurian. The depth of this group, as estimated by Mr. Murchison, is equal to double the height of our highest Scottish mountains ; and four distinct platforms of being range in it, the one over the other, like stories in a building. Life abounded on all these platforms, and in shapes the most wonderful. The pe- culiar encrinites of the group rose in miniature forests, and spread forth their sentient petals by millions and tens of millions amid the waters; vast ridges of corals peopled by their innumerable builders, — numbers without number, —rose high amid the shallows; the chambered shells had become abundant — the simpler testacea still more so; ex- tinct forms of the graptolite, or sea-pen, existed by myriads ; 21 214 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. ana the formation had a class of creatures in advance of the many-legged annelids of the other. It had its numerous family of trilobites, — crustaceans nearly as high in the scale as the common crab, — creatures with crescent-shaped heads, and jointed bodies, and wonderfully constructed eyes, which, like the eyes of the bee and the butterfly, had the cornea cut into facets resembling those of a multiplying glass. Is the reader ac- quainted with the form of the common Chiton of our shores — the little boat-shaped shell-fish, that adheres to stones and rocks like the limpet, but which differs from every variety of limpet, in bearing as its covering a jointed, nota continuous shell ? Suppose a chiton with two of its terminal joints cut away, anda single plate of much the same shape and size, but with two eyes near the centre, substituted instead, and the animal, in form at least, would be no longer a chiton, but a trilobite. There are appearances, too, which lead to the inference that the habits of the two families, though representing different orders of being, may not have been very unlike. The chiton attaches itself to the rock by a muscular sucker or foot, which, extend- ing ventrally along its entire length, resembles that of the slug or the snail, and enables it to crawl like them, but still more slowly, by a succession of adhesions. ‘The locomotive powers of the trilobite seem to have been little superior to those of the chiton. If furnished with legs at all, it must have been with soft rudimentary membranaceous legs, little fitted for walking with; and it seems quite as probable, from the peculiarly shaped under margin of its shell, formed, like that of the chiton, for adhering to flat surfaces, that, like the slug and the snail, it was unfurnished with legs of any kind, and crept on the abdomen. The vast conglomerations of trilobites for which the Silurian rocks are remarkable, are regarded as further evidence of a sedentary condition Like THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. BES Ostree, Chitones, and other sedentary animals, they seemed to have adhered together in vast clusters, trilobite over trilo- bite, in the hollows of submarine precipices, or on the flat, muddy bottom below. And such were the master existences of three of the four Silurian platforms, and of the greater part of the fourth, if, indeed, we may not regard the cham- bered molluscs, their contemporaries, — creatures with their arms clustered round their heads, and with a nervous system composed of a mere knotted cord,—as equally high in the scale. Werise to the topmost layers of the system,— to an upper gallery of its highest platform, — and find nature mightily in advance. Another and superior order of existences had sprung into being at the fiat of the Creator— creatures with the brain lodged in the head, and the spinal cord enclosed ina vertebrated column. Inthe period of the Upper Silurian, fish properly so called, and of very perfect organization, had become denizens of the watery element, and had taken precedence of the crusta- cean, as, at a period long previous, the crustacean had taken pre- cedence of the annelid. In what form do these, the most ancient beings of their class, appear? As cartilaginous fishes of the higher order. Some of them were furnished with bony pal- ates, and squat, firmly-based teeth, well adapted for crushing the stone-cased zoophytes and shells of the period, fragments of which occur in their fecal remains ; some with teeth that, like those of the fossil sharks of the later formations, resem- ble lines of miniature pyramids, larger and smaller alternats ing ; some with teeth sharp, thin, and so deeply serrated that every individual tooth resembles a row of poniards set upright against the walls of an armory ; and these last, says Agassiz, furnished with weapons so murderous, must have been the pirates of the period. Some had their fins guarded with long 216 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. spines, hooked like the beak of an eagle; some with spines of straighter and more slender form, and ribbed and furrowed longitudinally like columns ; some were shielded by an armor of bony points; and some thickly covered with glistening scales. If many ages must have passed ere fishes appeared, there was assuredly no time required to elevate their lower into their higher families. Judging, too, from this ancient deposit, they seem to have been introduced, not by individu- als and pairs, but by whole myriads. ‘‘ Forthwith the sounds and seas, each creek and bay, With fry innumerable swarmed ; and shoals Of fish, that with their fins and shining scales Glide under the green wave in plumps and sculls, Banked the midsea.” . The fish-bed of the Upper Ludlow Rock abounds more in osseous remains than an ancient burying-ground. The stratum, over wide areas, seems an almost continuous layer of matted bones, jaws, teeth, spines, scales, palatal plates, and shagreen- like prickles, all massed together, and converted into a sub- stance of so deep and shining a jet color, that the bed, when ** first discovered, conveyed the impression,” says Mr. Murch ison, “ that it enclosed a triturated heap of black beetles.” And such are the remains of what seem to have been the first existing vertebrata. Thus, ere our history begins, the exist- ences of two great systems, the Cambrian and the Silurian, had passed into extinction, with the exception of what seema few connecting links, exclusively molluscs, that are found in England to pass from the higher beds of the Ludlow rocks into the Lower or Tilestone beds of the Old Red Sandstone.* * “Upwards of eight hundred extinct species of animals have been described as belonging to the earliest, or Protozoic and Silurian period, THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 217 The exuvie of at least four platforms of being lay entombed - furlong below furlong, amid the gray, mouldering mudstones, the harder arenaceous beds, the consolidated clays, and the eoncretionary limestones, that underlay the ancient ocean of the Lower Old Red. The earth had already become a vast sepulchre, to a depth beneath the bed of the sea equal to at ieast twice the height of Ben Nevis over its surface. The first scene in the Tempest opens amid the confusion and turmoil of the hurricane — amid thunders and lightnings, the roar of the wind, the shouts of the seamen, the rattling of cordage, and the wild dash of the billows. The history of the period represented by the Old Red Sandstone seems, in what now forms the northern half of Scotland, to have opened ina similar manner. The finely-laminated lower Tilestones of England were deposited evidently in a calm sea. During the contemporary period in our own country, the vast space which now includes Orkney and Lochness, Dingwall, and Gamrie, and many a thousand square mile besides, was the scene of a shallow ocean, perplexed by powerful currents, and agitated by waves. A vast stratum of water-rolled pebbles, varying in depth from a hundred feet to a hundred yards, remains in a thousand different localities, to testify of the dis- turbing agencies of this time of commotion. The hardest masses which the stratum encloses, — porphyries of vitreous fracture that cut glass as readily as flint, and masses of quartz that strike fire quite as profusely from steel, — are yet polished and ground down into bullet-like forms, not an angu- and of these only about one hundred are found also in the overlying Devonian series; while but fifteen are common to the whole Palzo- zoic period, and not one extends beyond it.’’—(M. de Verncuil and Count D’Archiac, quoted by Mr. D. T. Ansted. 1844.) 21 * 218 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. lar fragment appearing in some parts of the mass for yards together. The debris of our harder rocks rolled for centuries in the beds of our more impetuous rivers, or tossed for ages along our more exposed and precipitous sea-shores could not present less equivocally the marks of violent and prolonged attrition than the pebbles of this bed. And yet it is surely dificult to conceive how the bottom of any sea should have been so violently and so equally agitated for so greatly ex- tended a space as that which intervenes between Mealforvony in Inverness-shire and Pomona in Orkney in one direction, and between Applecross and Trouphead in another —and for a period so prolonged, that the entire area should have come to be covered with astratum of rolled pebbles of almost every variety of ancient rock, fifteen stories’ height in thickness. The very variety of its contents shows that the period must have been prolonged. A sudden flood sweeps away with it the accumulated debris of a range of mountains; but to blend together, in equal mixture, the debris of many such ranges, as well as to grind down their roughnesses and angularities, and fill up the interstices with the sand and gravel produced in the process, must be a work of time. I have examined with much interest, in various localities, the fragments of ancient rock inclosed in this formation. Many of them are no longer to be found in situ, and the group is essentially dif- ferent from that presented by the more modern gravels. On the shores of the Frith of Cromarty, for instance, by far the most abundant pebbles are of a blue schistose gneiss: frag- ments of gray granite and white quartz are also common ; and the sea-shore at half ebb presents at a short distance the ap- pearance of a long belt of bluish gray, from the color of the prevailing stones which compose it. ‘The prevailing color of the conglomerate of the district, on the contrary, is a deep THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. - 219 red. It contains pebbles of small-grained, red granite, red quartz rock, red feldspar, red porphyry, an impure red jasper, red hornstone, and a red granitic gneiss, identical with the well-marked gneiss of the neighboring Sutors. This last is the only rock now found in the district, of which fragments occur in the conglomerate. It must have been exposed at the time to the action of the waves, though afterwards buried deep under succeeding formations, until again thrust to the surface by some great internal convulsion, of a date compar- atively recent.* The period of this shallow and stormy ocean passed. The bottom, composed of the identical conglomerate which now forms the summit of some of our loftiest mountains, sank throughout its wide area to a depth so profound as to be little affected by tides or tempests. During this second period there took place a vast deposit of coarse sandstone strata, with here and there a few thin beds of rolled pebbles. The general subsidence of the bottom still continued, and, after a * The vast beds of unconsolidated gravel with which one of the later geological revolutions has half filled some of our northern val- leys, and covered the slopes of the adjacent hills, present, in a few localities, appearances somewhat analogous to those exhibited by this ancient formation. There are uncemented accumulations of water- rolled pebbles, in the neighborhood of Inverness, from ninety to a hundred feet in thickness. But this stratum, unlike the more ancient one, wanted continuity. It must have been accumulated, too, under the operation of more partial, though immensely more powerful agen- cies. There is a mediocrity of size in the enclosed fragments of the old conglomerate, which gives evidence of a mediocrity of power in the transporting agent. In the upper gravels, on the contrary, one of the agents could convey from vast distances blocks of stone eighty and a hundred tons in weight. A new cause of tremendous erergy had cnme into operation in the geological world. 220 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. deposit of full ninety feet had overlain the conglomerate, the depth became still more profound than at first. A fine, semi- calcareous, semi-aluminous deposition took place in waters perfectly undisturbed. And here we first find proof that this ancient ocean literally swarmed with life—that its bottom was covered with miniature forests of alge, and its waters darkened by immense shoals of fish. In middle autumn, at the close of the herring season, when the fish have just spawned, and the congregated masses are breaking up on shallow and skerry, and dispersing by myri- ads over the deeper seas, they rise at times to the surface by a movement so simultaneous, that for miles and miles afound the skiff of the fisherman nothing may be seen but the bright glitter of scales, as if the entire face of the deep were a blue robe spangled with silver. I have watched them at sunrise at such seasons on the middle of the Moray Frith, when, far as the eye could reach, the surface has been ruffled by the splash of fins, as if a light breeze swept over it, and the red light has flashed in gleams of an instant on the millions and ‘tens of millions that were leaping around me, a handbreadth into the air, thick as hail-stones in a thunder-shower. The amazing amount of life which the scene included, has im- parted to it an indescribable interest. On most occasions the inhabitants of ocean are seen but by scores and hundreds ; for in looking down into their green twilight haunts, we find the view bounded by a few yards, or at most a few fathoms ; and we can but calculate on the unseen myriads of the sur- rounding expanse by the seen few that occupy the narrow space visible. Here, however, it was not the few, but the myriads, that were seen—the innumerable and inconceiva- ble whole —all palpable to the sight as a flock on a hill-side ; or, at least, if all was not palpable, it was only because sense THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 221 has its limits in the lighter as well as in the denser medium — that the multitudinous distracts it, and the distant eludes it, and the far horizon bounds it. If the scene spoke not of in- fiLity in the sense in which Deity comprehends it, it spoke of it in at least the only sense in which man can compre- hend it. Now, we are much in the habit of thinking of such amaz- ing multiplicity of being — when we think of it at all — with reference to but the later times of the world’s history. We think of the rernote past as a time of comparative solitude. We forget that the now uninhabited desert was once a popu- lous city. Is the reader prepared to realize, in connection with the Lower Old Red Sandstone — the second period of vertebrated existence — scenes as amazingly fertile in life as the scene just described— oceans as thoroughly occupied with being as our friths and estuaries when the herrings con- gregate most abundantly on our coasts? There are evi- dences too sure to be disputed that such must have been the case. I have seen the ichthyolite beds, where washed bare in the line of the strata, as thickly covered with oblong, spin- dle-shaped nodules as I have ever seen a fishing bank coy- ered with herrings; and have ascertained that every individ- ual nodule had its nucleus of animal matter — that it was a stone coffin in miniature, holding enclosed its organic mass of bitumen or bone—its winged, or enamelled, or thorn- covered ichthyolite. At this period of our history, some terrible catastrophe in- volved in sudden destruction the fish of an area at least a hundred miles from boundary to boundary, perhaps much more. The same platform in Orkney as at Cromarty is strewed thick with remains, which exhibit unequivocally the marks of violent death. The figures are contorted, contract- 299 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. ed, curved; he tail in many instances is bent round to the head; the spines stick out; the fins are spread to the full, as in fish that die in convulsions. The Pterichthys shows its arms extended at their stiffest angle, as if prepared for an enemy. ‘The attitudes of all the ichthyolites on this platform are attitudes of fear, anger, and pain. The remains, too, appear to have suffered nothing from the after attacks of pre- daceous fishes; none such seem to have survived. The rec- ord is one of destruction at once widely spread and total, so far as it extended. There are proofs that, whatever may have been the cause of the catastrophe, it must have taken place in a sea unusually still. The scales, when scattered by some slight undulation, are scattered to the distance of only a few inches, and still exhibit their enamel entire, and their peculiar fineness of edge. ‘The spines, even when separated, retain their original needle-like sharpness of point. Rays, well nigh as slender as horse-hairs, are enclosed unbroken in the mass. Whole ichthyolites occur, in which not only all the parts survive, but even the expression which the stiff and threatening attitude conveyed when the last struggle was over. Destruction must have come in the calm, and it must have been of a kind by which the calm was nothing dis- turbed. In what could it have originated? By what quiet but potent agency of destruction were the innumerable exist- ences of an area perhaps ten thousand square miles in extent annihilated at once, and yet the medium in which they had lived left undisturbed by its operations? Conjecture lacks footing in grappling with the enigma, and expatiates in un- certainty over all the known phenomena of death. Diseases of mysterious origin break out at times in the animal king- dom, and well nigh exterminate the tribes on which they fall. The present generation has seen a hundred millions of the THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 223 human family swept away by a disease unknown to our fathers. Virgil describes the fatal murrain that once depop- ulated the Alps, not more as a poet than as a historian. The shell-fish of the rivers of North America died in such vast abundance during a year of the present century, that the ani- mals, washed out of their shells, lay rotting in masses beside the banks, infecting the very air. About the close of the last century, the haddock well nigh disappeared, for several sea- sons together, from the eastern coasts of Scotland; and it is related by Creech, that a Scotch shipmaster of the period sailed for several leagues on the coast of Norway, about the time the scarcity began, through a floating shoal of dead haddocks.* But the ravages of no such disease, however * T have heard elderly fishermen of the Moray Frith state, in con- nection with what they used to term ‘the haddock dearth” of this period, that, for several weeks ere the fish entirely disappeared, they acquired an extremely disagreeable taste, as if they had been boiled in tobacco juice, and became unfit for the table. For the three fol- lowing years they were extremely rare on the coast, and several years more elapsed ere they were caught in the usual abundance. The fact related by Creech, a very curious one, I subjoin in his own words ; it occurs in his third Letter to Sir John Sinclair: ‘* On Friday, the 4th December, 1789, the ship Brothers, Captain Stewart, arrived at Leith from Archangel, who reported that, on the coast of Lapland and Norway, he sailed many leagues through immense quantities of dead haddocks floating on the sea. He spoke several English ships, who reported the same fact. It is certain that haddocks, which was the fish in the greatest abundance in the Edinburgh market, have scarcely been seen there these three years. In February, 1790, three haddocks were brought to market, which, from their scarcity, sold for 7s. 6d.” The dead haddocks seen by the Leith shipmaster were floating by thousands; and most of their congeners among what fishermen term “the white fish,” suck as cod, ling, and whiting, also float when 224 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. extensive, could well account for some of the phenomena of this platform of death. It is rarely that disease falls equally on many different tribes at once, and never does it fall with instantaneous suddenness; whereas in the ruin of this platform from ten to twelve distinct genera seem to have been equally involved; and so suddenly did it perform its work, that its victims were fixed in their first attitude of ter- ror and surprise. I have observed, too, that groups of ad- joining nodules are charged frequently with fragments of the dead; whereas the bodies of fish whose bowels and air-bladders are comparatively small and tender, lie at the bottom. The herring fish- erman, if the fish die in his nets, finds it no easy matter to buoy them up; and if the shoal entangled be a large one, he fails at times, from the great weight, in recovering them at all, losing both nets and her- rings. Now, if a corresponding difference obtained among fish of the extinct period—if some rose to the surface when they died, while others remained at the bottom — we must, of course, expect to find their remains in very different degrees of preservation — to find only scattered fragments of the floaters, while of the others many may oc- cur comparatively entire. Even should they have died on the same beds, too, we may discover their remains separated by hundreds of miles. The haddocks that disappeared from the coast of Britain were found floating in shoals on the coasts of Norway. The remains of an immense body of herrings, that weighed down, a few seasons since, the nets of a crew of fishermen, in a muddy hollow of the Moray Frith, and defied the utmost exertions of three crews united to weigh them from the bottom, are, I doubt not, in the muddy hollow still. On a principle thus obvious it may be deemed not improbable that the ichthyolites of the Lower Old Red Sandstone might have had numerous contemporaries, of which, unless in some instances the same accident which killed also entombed them, we can know noth- ing in their character as such, and whose broken fragments may yet be found in some other locality, where they may be regarded as char- acteristic of a different formation. THE OLD RED SANI'S TONE. 9235 same variety of ichthyolite; and the circumstance seems fraught with evidence regarding both the original habits of the creatures, and the instantaneous suddenness of the de- struction by which they were overtaken. They seem, like many of our existing fish, to have been gregarious, and to have perished together ere their crowds had time to break up and disperse. Fish have been found floating dead in shoals beside sub- marine volcanoes — killed either by the heated water, or by mephitic gases. ‘There are, however, no marks of volcanic activity in connection with the ichthyolite beds—no marks, at least, which belong to nearly the same age with the fossils. The disturbing granite of the neighboring eminences was not upheaved until after the times of the Oolite. But the volcano, if such was the destroying agent, might have been distant; nay, from some of the points in an area of such immense extent, it must have been distant. ‘The beds abound, as has been said, in lime; and the thought has often struck me that calcined lime, cast out as ashes from some distant crater, and carried by the winds, might have been the cause of the wide- ly-spread destruction to which their organisms testify. I have seen the fish of a small trouting stream, over which a bridge was in the course of building, destroyed in a single hour, for a full mile below the erection, by the few troughfuls of lime that fell into the water when the centring was removed. 22 CHAPTER XIIL. Successors of the exterminated Tribes. — The Gap slowly filled. — Proof that the Vegetation of a Formation may long survive its Animal Tribes. — Probable Cause. —Immensely extended Period during which Fishes were the Master-existences of our Planet. — Extreme Folly of an Infidel Objection illustrated by the Fact. — Singular Analogy between the History of Fishes as Individuals and as a Class. — Chemistry of the Lower Formation. — Principles on which the Fish-enclosing Nodules were probably formed. — Chemical Effect of Animal Matter-in discharging the Color from Red Sandstone. — Origin of the prevailing tint to which the Sys- tem owes its Name. — Successive Modes in which a Metal may ex- ist. — The Restorations of the Geologist void of Color. — Very dif- ferent Appearance of the Ichthyolites of Cromarty and Moray. Tue period of death passed, and over the innumerable dead there settled a soft, muddy sediment, that hid them from the light, bestowing upon them such burial as a November snow-storm bestows on the sere and blighted vegetation of the previous summer and autumn. For an unknown space of time, represented in the formation by a deposit about fifty feet in thickness, the waters of the depopulated area seem to have remained devoid of animal life. A few scales and plates then begin to appear. The fish that had existed out- side the chasm seem to have gradually gained upon it, as their numbers increased, just as the European settlers of America have been gaining on the backwoods, and making themselves homes amid the burial-mounds of a race extinct for centuries. For a lengthened period, however, these finny settlers must have been comparatively few — mere squatters in the waste. In the beds of stratified clay in which their (226) THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 227 remains first occur, over what we may term the densely crowded platform of violent death, the explorer may labor for hours together without finding a single scale. It is worthy of remark, however, that this upper bed abounds quite as much in the peculiar vegetable impressions of the formation as the lower platform itself. An abundance equally great occurs in some localities only a few inches over the line of the exterminating catastrophe. Thickets of ex- actly the same alge, amid which the fish of the formation had sheltered when living, grew luxuriantly over their graves when dead. The agencies of destruction which annihilated the animal life of so extended an area, spared its vegetation ; just as the identical forests that had waved over the semi- civilized aborigines of North America continued to wave over the more savage red men, their successors, long after the original race had been exterminated. ‘The inference deduci- ble from the fact, though sufficiently simple, seems in a geo- logical point of view a not unimportant one. The flora of a system may long survive its fauna; so that that may be but one formation, regarded with reference to plants, which may be two or more formations, regarded with reference to ani- mals. No instance of any such phenomenon occurs in the later geological periods. The changes in animal and vege- table life appear to have run parallel to each other from the times of the tertiary formations down to those of the coal; but in the earlier deposits the case must have been different. The animal organisms of the newer Silurian strata form es- sentially different groups from those of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, and both differ from those of the Cornstone divis- ions; and yet the greater portion of their vegetable remains seem the same. ‘The stem-like impressions of the fucoid bed of the Upper Ludlow Rocks cannot be distinguished from 228 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. those of the ichthyolite beds of Cromarty and Ross, nor these again from the impressions of the Arbroath pavement, or the Den of Balruddery. Nor is there much difficulty in con- ceiving how the vegetation of a formation should come to sur- vive its animals. What is fraught with health to the exist- ences of the vegetable kingdom, is in many instances a deadly poison to those of the animal. The grasses and water- lilies of the neighborhood of Naples flourish luxuriantly amid the carbonic acid gas which rests so densely over the pools and runnels out of which they spring, that the bird stoops to drink, and falls dead into the water. The lime that destroys the reptiles, fish, and insects of a thickly inhabited lake or stream, injures not a single flag or bulrush among the millions that line its edges. ‘The two kingdoms exist under laws of life and death so essentially dissimilar, that it has become one of the common-places of poetry to indicate the blight and decline of the tribes of the one by the unwonted luxuriancy of the productions of the other. Otway tells us, in describ- ing the horrors of the plague which almost depopulated London, that the ‘ destroying angel stretched his arm” over the city, «Till in th’ untrodden streets unwholesome grass Grew of great stalk, and color gross, es A melancholic poisonous green.” The work of deposition went on; a bed of pale yellow saliferous sandstone settled, tier over tier, on a bed of strati- fied clay, and was itself overlaid by another bed of stratified clay in turn. And this upper bed had also its organisms. The remains of its sea-weed still spread out thick and dark amid the foldings of the strata, and occasionally its clusters of detached scales. But the circumstances were less favora- THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 229 ble to the preservation of entire ichthyolites than those under which the organisms of the lower platform were wrapped up in their stony coverings. The matrix, which is more micaceous than the other, seems to have been less conservative, and the waters were probably less still. The process went on. Age succeeded age, and one stratum covered up another. Gener- ations lived, died, and were entombed in the ever-growing depositions. Succeeding generations pursued their instincts by myriads, happy in existence, over the surface which covered the broken and perishing remains of their predecessors, and then died and were entombed in turn, leaving a higher plat- form, and a similar destiny to the generations that succeeded Whole races became extinct, through what process of destruc- tion who can tell? Other races sprang into existence through that adorable power which One only can conceive, and One only can exert. An inexhaustible variety of design expatiated freely within the limits of the ancient type. ‘The main con- ditions remained the same —the minor details were dissimilar. Vast periods passed ; a class low in the scale still continued to furnish the master existences of creation; and so immensely extended was the term of its sovereignty, that a being of lim- ited faculties, if such could have existed uncreated, and wit- nessed the whole, would have inferred that the power of the Creator had reached its extreme boundary, when fishes had been called into existence, and that our planet was destined to be the dwelling-place of no nobler inhabitants. If there be men dignified by the name of philosophers, who can nold that the present state of being, with all its moral evil, and all its physical suffering, is to be succeeded by no better and happier state, just because “all things have continued as they were ”’ for some five or six thousand years, how much sounder and more conclusive would the inference have been which 22 * 230 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. could have been based, as in the supposed case, on a period perhaps a hundred times more extended ? There exist wonderful analogies in nature between the geological history of the vertebrated animals as an order, and the individual history of every mammifer — between the his- tory, too, of fish as a class, and that of every single fish. “It has been found by Tiedemann,” says Mr. Lyeli, * that the brain of the foetus in the higher class of vertebrated ani- mals assumes in succession the various forms which belong to fishes, reptiles, and birds, before it acquires those additions and modifications which are peculiar to the mammiferous tribes.” ‘In examining the brain of the mammalia,” says M. Serres, “at an early stage of life, you perceive the cerebral hemispheres consolidated, as in fish, in two vesicles isolated one from the other; at a later period you see them affect the configuration of the cerebral hemispheres of reptiles ; still later, again, they present you with the forms of those of birds; and finally, at the era of birth, the permanent forms which the adult mammalia present.” And such seems to have been the history of the vertebrata as an order, as cer- tainly as that of the individual mammifer. The fish preceded the reptile in the order of creation, just as the crustacean had preceded the fish, and the annelid the crustacean. Again, though the fact be somewhat more obscure, the reptile seems to have preceded the bird. We find, however, unequivocal traces of the feathered tribes in well-marked foot-prints im- pressed on a sandstone in North America, at most not more modern than the Lias, but which is generally supposed to be of the same age with the New Red Sandstone of Germany and our own country. In the Oolite — at least one, perhaps two formations later — the bones of the two species of mammif- erous quadrupeds have been found, apparently of the marsu- THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 231 pial family ; and these, says Mr. Lyell, afford the only exam- ple yet known of terrestrial mammalia in rocks of a date an- terior to the older tertiary formations. The reptile seems to have preceded the bird, and the bird the mammiferous ani- mal. ‘Thus the feetal history of the nervous system in the in- dividual mammifer seems typical, in every stage of its prog- ress, of the history of the grand division at the head of which the mammifer stands. Agassiz, at the late meeting of the British Association in Glasgow, mentioned an analogous fact. After describing the one-sided tail of the more ancient fish, especially the fish of the Old Red Sandstone, — the sub- jects of his illustration at the time, —he stated, as the result of a recent discovery, that the young of the salmon in their foetal state exhibit the same unequally-sided condition of tail which characterizes those existences of the earlier ages of the world. The individual fish, just as it begins to exist, pre- sents the identical appearances which were exhibited by the order when the order began to exist. Is there nothing won- derfulin analogies such as these — analogies that point through the embryos of the present time to the womb of Nature, big with its multitudinous forms of being? Are they charged with no such nice evidence as a Butler would delight to con- template, regarding that unique style of Deity, if I may so ex- press myself, which runs through all his works, whether we consider him as God of Nature, or Author of Revelation ? In this style of type and symbol did He reveal himself of old to his chosen people ; in this style of allegory and para- ble did He again address himself to them, when he sojourned among them on earth. The chemistry of the formation seems scarce inferior in interest to its zoology; but the chemist had still much to do for Geology, and the processes are but imperfectly known. Bae THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. There is no field:in which more laurels await the philosophi- cal chemist thanthe geological one. I have said that all the calcareous nodules of the ichthyolite beds seem to have had originally their nucleus of organic matter. In nine cases out of ten the organism can be distinctly traced ; and in the tenth there is almost always something to indicate where it lay — an elliptical patch of black, or an oblong spot, from whicn the prevailing color of the stone has been discharged, and a lighter hue substituted. Is the reader acquainted with Mr. Pepys’s accidental experiment, as related by Mr. Lyell, and recorded in the first volume of the Geological Transactions ? It affords an interesting proof that animal matter, in a state of putrefaction, proves a powerful agent in the decomposition of mineral substances held in solution, and of their conse- quent precipitation. An earthen pitcher, containing several quarts of sulphate of iron, had been suffered to remain undis- turbed and unexamined in a corner of Mr. Pepys’s laboratory for about a twelvemonth. Some luckless mice had mean- while fallen into it, and been drowned; and when it at length came to be examined, an oily scum, and a yellow, sulphu- reous powder, mixed with hairs, were seen floating on the top, and the bones of the mice discovered lying at the bottom ; and it was found, that over the decaying bodies the mineral components of the fluid had been separated and precipitated in a dark-colored sediment, consisting of grains of pyrites and of sulphur, of copperas in its green and crystalline form, and of black oxide of iron. The animal and mineral mat- ters had mutually acted upon one another; and the metallic sulphate, deprived of its oxygen in the process, had thus cast down its ingredients. It would seem that over the putrefying bodies of the fish of the Lower Old Red Sandstone the water nad deposited in like manner, the lime with which it was THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 93a charged; and hence the calcareous nodules in which we find their remains enclosed. The form of the nodule almost in- variably agrees with that of the ichthyolite within; it is a coffin in the ancient Egyptian style. Was the ichthyolite twisted half round in the contorted attitude of violent death ? the nodule has also its twist. Did it retain its natural pos- ture ? the nodule presents the corresponding spindle form. Was it broken up, and the outline destroyed? the nodule is flattened and shapeless. In almost every instance the form of the organism seems to have regulated that of the stone. We may trace, in many of these concretionary masses, the operations of three distinct principles, all of which must have been in activity at one and the same time. They are wrapped concentrically each round its organism: they split readily in the line of the enclosing stratum, and are marked by its alternating rectilinear bars of lighter and darker color; and they are radiated from the centre to the circumference. Their concentric condition shows the chemical influences of the decaying animal matter; their fissile character and par- allel layers of color indicate the general deposition which was taking place at the time; and their radiated structure testifies to that law of crystalline attraction, through which, by a wonderful masonry, the invisible but well-cut atoms build up their cubes, their rhombs, their hexagons, and their pyramids, and are at once the architects and the materials of the structure which they rear. Another and very different chemical effect of organic mat- ter may be remarked in the darker colored arenaceous de- posits of the formation, and occasionally in the stratified clays and nodules of the ichthyolite bed. In a print-work, the whole web is frequently thrown into the vat and dyed of one color; but there afterwards comes a discharging process; 234 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. some chemical mixture is dropped on the fabric; the dye disappears wherever the mixture touches; and in leaves, and sprigs, and patches, according to the printer’s pattern, the cloth assumes its original white. Now the colored deposits of the Old Red Sandstone have, in like manner, been subject- ed to a discharging process. The dye has disappeared in oblong or circular patches of various sizes, from the eighth of an inch to a foot in diameter; the original white has taken its place ; and so thickly are these speckles grouped in some of the darker-tinted beds, that the surfaces, where washed by the sea, present the appearance of sheets of cal- ico. The discharging agent was organic matter; the ‘uncol- ored patches are no mere surface films, for, when cut at right angles, their depth is found to correspond with their breadth, the circle is a sphere, the ellipsis forms the section of an egg- shaped body, and in the centre of each we generally find traces of the organism in whose decay it originated. I have repeatedly found single scales, in the ichthyolite beds, sur- rounded by uncolored spheres about the size of musket bul- lets. It is well for the young geologist carefully to mark such appearances—to trace them through the various in- stances in which the organism may be recognized and iden- tified, to those in which its last vestiges have disappeared. They are the hatchments of the geological world, and indi- cate that life once existed where all other record of it has perished.* * Some of the clay-slates of the primary formations abound in these circular, uncolored patches, bearing in their centres, like the patches of the Old Red Sandstone, half obliterated nuclei of black. Were they, too, once fossiliferous ? and do these blank erasures remain so testify to the fact? I find the organic origin of the patches in the THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 235 It is the part of the chemist to tell us by what peculiar ac- tion of the organic matter the dye was discharged in these spots and: patches. But how was the dye itself procured ? From what source was the immense amount of iron derived, which gives to nearly five sixths of the Old Red Sandstone the characteristic color to which it owes its name? An ex- amination of its lowest member, the great conglomerate, suggests a solution of the query. I have adverted to the large proportion of red-colored pebbles which this member con- Old Red Sandstone remarked by Professor Fleming as early as the year 1830, and the remark reiterated by Dr. Anderson, of Newburgh, in nearly the same words, but with no acknowledgment, ten years later. The following is the minute and singularly faithful description of the Professor : — “On the surface of the strata in the lower beds, circular spots, nearly a foot in diameter, may be readily perceived by their pale yel- low colors, contrasted with the dark red of the surrounding rock. These spots, however, are not, as may at first be supposed, mere su- perficial films, but derive their circular form from a colored sphere to which they belong. This sphere is not to be distinguished from the rest of the bed by any difference in mechanical structure, but merely by the absence of much of that oxide of iron with which the other portion of the mass is charged. The circumference of this colored sphere is usually well defined; and at its centre may always be ob served matter of a darker color, in some cases disposed in concentric layers, in others of calcareous and crystalline matter, the remains probably of some vegetable or animal organism, the decomposition of which exercised a limited influence on the coloring matter of the sur - rounding rock. In some cases [ have observed these spheres slightly compressed at opposite sides, in a direction parallel with the plane of stratification — the result, without doubt, of the subsidence or con- traction of the mass, after the central matter or nucleus had ceased to exercise its influence.” —-(Cheek’s Edinburgh Journal, Feb. 1831, p- 82.) 236 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. tains, and, among the rest, to a red granitic gneiss, which must heve been exposed over wide areas at the time of its deposition, and which, after the lapse of a period which ex- tended from at least the times of the Lower Old Red to those of the Upper Oolite, was again thrust upwards to the surface, to form the rectilinear chain of precipitous eminences to which the hills of Cromarty and of Nigg belong. This rock is now almost the sole representative, in the north of Scot- land, of the ancient rocks whence the materials of the -Old Red Sandstone were derived. It abounds in hematic iron ore, diffused as a component of the stone throughout the entire mass, and which also occurs in it in ponderous insulated blocks of great richness, and in thin, thread-like veins. When ground down, it forms a deep red pigment, undistin- guishable in tint from the prevailing color of the sandstone, and which leaves a stain so difficult to be effaced, that shep- herds employ it in some parts of the Highlands for marking their sheep. Every rawer fragment of the rock bears its heematic tinge; and were the whole ground by some mechan- ical process into sand, and again consolidated, the produce of the experiment would be undoubtedly a deep red sand- stone. In an upper member of the lower formation — that immediately over the ichthyolite beds— different materials seem to have been employed. A white, quartzy sand and a pale-colored clay form the chief ingredients; and though the ochry-tinted coloring matter be also iron, it is iron existing in a different condition, and in a more diluted form. ‘The oxide deposited by the chalybeate springs which pass through the lower members of the formation, would give to white sand a tinge exactly resembling the tint borne by this upper member. The passage of metals from lower to higher formations, THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 237 and from one combination to another, constitutes surely a highly interesting subject of inquiry. The transmission of iron in a chemical form, through chalybeate springs, from deposits in which it had been diffused in a form merely me- chanical, is of itself curious; but how much more so its pas- sage and subsequent accumulation, as in bog-iron and the iron of the Coal Measures, through the agency of vegetation ! How strange, if the steel axe of the woodman should have once formed part of an ancient forest ! — if, after first exist- ing asa solid mass in a primary rock, it should next have come to be diffused as a red pigment in a transition conglom- erate — then as a brown oxide in a chalybeate spring — then as a yellowish ochre in a secondary sandstone —then as a component part in the stems and twigs of a thick forest of arboraceous plants — then again as an iron carbonate, slowly accumulating at the bottom of a morass of the Coal Meas- ures—then as a layer of indurated bands and nodules of brown ore, underlying a seam of coal—and then, finally, that it should have been dug out, and smelted, and fashioned, and employed for the purpose of handicraft, and yet occupy, even at this stage, merely a middle place between the trans- migrations which have passed, and the changes which are yet to come. Crystals of galena sometimes occur in the nodu- lar limestones of the Old Red Sandstone; but I am afraid the chemist would find it difficult to fix their probable genealogy. In at least one respect, every geological history must of necessity be unsatisfactory ; and, ere I pass to the history of the two upper formations of the system, the reader must per- mit me to remind him of it. There have been individuals, it has been said, who, though they could see clearly the forms of objects wanted, through some strange organic defect, the 23 238 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. faculty of perceiving their distinguishing colors, however well marked these might be. The petals of the rose have appeared to them of the same sombre hue with its stalk ; and - they have regarded the ripe scarlet cherry as undistinguisha- ble in tint from the green leaves under which it hung. The face of nature to such men must have for ever rested under a cloud; and a cloud of similar character hangs over the pic- torial restorations of the geologist. The history of this and the last chapter is a mere profile drawn in black, an outline without color—in short, such a chronicle of past ages as might be reconstructed, in the lack of other and ampler ma- terials, from tombstones and charnel-houses. I have had to draw the portrait from the skeleton. My specimens show the general form of the creatures I attempt to describe, and not a few of their more marked peculiarities ; but many of the nicer elegancies are wanting; and the ‘complexion to which they have come” leaves no trace by which to discover the complexion they originally bore. And yet color is a mighty matter to the ichthyologist. The ‘“ fins and shining scales,” “the waved coats, dropt with goid,” the rainbow dyes of beauty of the watery tribes, are connected often with more than mere external character. It is a curious and in- teresting fact, that the hues of splendor in which they are bedecked are, in some instances, as intimately associated with their instincts — with their feelings, if I may so speak — as the blush which suffuses the human countenance is asso- ciated with the sense of shame, or its tint of ashy paleness or of sallow with emotions of rage, or feelings of a panic ter- ror. Pain and triumph have each their index of color among the mute inhabitants of our seas and rivers. Poets themselves have bewailed the utter inadequacy of words to describe the varying tints and shades of beauty with which the agonies of THE OLD RED SANDSTONE, 239 death dye the scales of the dolphin, and how every various pang calls up a various suffusion of splendor.* Even the common stickleback of our ponds and ditches can put on its colors to picture its emotions. ‘There is, it seems, a mighty amount of ambition, and a vast deal of fighting sheerly for conquests’ sake, among the myriads of this pygmy little fish * The description of Falconer must be familiar to every reader, but I cannot resist quoting it. It shows how minutely the sailor poet must have observed. Byron tells us how “Parting day Dies like the dolphin, whom each pang imbues With a new color, as it gasps away, The last still loveliest, till — tis gone, and all is gray.” Falconer, in anticipating, reversed the simile. The huge animal, struck by the “ unerring barb” of Rodmond, has been drawn on board, and «On deck he struggles with convulsive pain ; But while his heart the fatal javelin thrills, And flitting life escapes in sanguine rills, What radiant changes strike the astonished sight ! What glowing hues of mingled shade and light! Not equal beauties gild the lucid West With parting beams o’er all profusely drest ; Not lovelier colors paint the vernal dawn, When Orient dews impearl the enamelled lawn; Than from his sides in bright suffusion flow, That now with gold empyreal seem to glow; Now in pellucid sapphires meet the view, And emulate the soft celestial hue; Now beam a flaming crimson on the eye, And now assume the purple’s deeper dye. But here description clouds each shining ray — What terms of art can Nature’s powers display ?” 240 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. which inhabit our smaller streams; and no sooner does an individual succeed in expelling his weaker companions from some eighteen inches or two feet of territory, than straight way the exultation of conquest converts the faded and freckled olive of his back and sides into a glow of crimson and bright green. Nature furnishes him with a regal robe for the occasion. Immediately on his deposition, however, — and events of this kind are even more common under than out of the water,— his gay colors disappear, and he sinks into his original and native ugliness.* But of color, as I have said, though thus important, the ichthyologist can learn almost nothing from Geology. The perfect restoration of even a Cuvier are blank outlines. We just know by a wonderful accident that the Siberian ele- phant was red. A very few of the original tints still remain among the fossils of our north country Lias. The ammonite, * «In the Magazine of Natural History,’ says Captain Brown, in one of his notes to White's Selhorne, “* we have a curious account of the pugnacious propensities of these little animals. ‘ Having at vari- ous times,’ says a correspondent, ‘ kept these little fish during the spring and part of the summer months, and paid close attention to their habits. I am enabled from my own experience to vouch for the facts I am about to relate. I have frequently kept them in a deal tub, about three feet two inches wide, and about two feet deep. Whenthey are put in for some time, probably a day or two, they swim about in a shoal, apparent- ly exploring their new habitation. Suddenly one will take possession of the tub, or, as it will sometimes happen, the bottom, and will instant- ly commence an attack upon his companions; and if any of them venture to oppose his sway, a regular and most furious battle ensues. They swim round and round each other with the greatest rapidity, biting, (their mouths being well furnished with teeth,) and endeavor- ing to pierce each other with their lateral spines, which, on this occa- sion, are projected. I have witnessed a battle of this sort which lasied THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 241 when struck fresh from the surrounding lime, reflects the pris- matic colors, as of old; a huge Modiola still retains its tinge of tawny and yellow; and the fossilized wood of the forma- tion preserves a shade of the native tint, though darkened into brown. But there is considerably less of color in the fossils of the Old Red Sandstone. I have caught, and barely caught, in some of the newly disinterred specimens, the faint and evanescent reflection of a tinge of pearl; and were I ac- quainted with my own collection only, imagination, borrowing from the prevailing color, would be apt to people the ancient oceans, In which its forms existed, with swarthy races exclu- sively. But a view of the Altyre fossils would correct the impression. They are enclosed, like those of Cromarty, in nodules of an argillaceous limestone. The color, however, from the presence of iron, and the absence of bitumen, 1s different. It presents a mixture of gray, of pink, and of several minutes before either would give way; and when one does submit, imagination can hardly conceive the vindictive fury of the conqueror, who, in the most persevering and unrelenting way, chases his rival from one part of the tub to another, until fairly exhausted with fatigue. From this period an interesting change takes place in the conqueror, who, from being a speckled and greenish-looking fish, assumes the most beautiful colors ; the belly and lower jaws becoming a deep crimson, and the back sometimes a cream color, but gener- ally a fine green, and the whole appearance full of animation and spirit. I have occasionally known three or four parts of the tub taken possession of by these little tyrants, who guard their ter- ritories with the strictest vigilance, and the slightest invasion brings on invariably a battle. A strange alteration immediately takes place in the defeated party: his gallant bearing forsakes him, his gay colors fade away, he becomes again speckled and ugly, and he hides his disgrace among his peaceable compan- ions.’”’ 23 * 242 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. brown ; and on this ground the fossil is spread out in strongly contrasted masses of white and dark red, of blue, and of pur- ple. Where the exuviz lie thickest, the white appears tinged with delicate blue —the bone is but little changed. Where they are spread out more thinly, the iron has pervaded them, and the purple and deep red prevail. Thus the same ich- thyolite presents, in some specimens, a body of white and plum-blue attached to fins of deep red, and with detached scales of red and of purple lying scattered around it. I need hardly add, however, that all this variety of coloring is, like the unvaried black of the Cromarty specimens, the. result, merely, of a curious chemistry. CHAPTER XIV. The Cornstone Formation and its Organisms. — Dwarf Vegetation. — Cephalaspides. — Huge Lobster. — Habitats of the existing Crusta- cea. — No unapt representation of the Deposit of Balruddery, fur- nished by a land-locked Bay in the neighborhood of Cromarty. — Vast Space occupied by the Geological Formations. — Contrasted with the half-formed Deposits which represent the existing Crea- tion. — Inference. — The formation of the Holoptychius. — Probable origin of its Siliceous Limestone. — Marked increase in the Bulk of the Existences of the System. —Conjectural Cause.— The Coal Measures. — The Limestone of Burdie House. — Conclusion. THE curtain rises, and the scene is new. The myriads of the lower formation have disappeared, and we are surrounded, on an upper platform, by the existences of a later creation. There is sea all around, as before; and we find beneath a dark-colored, muddy bottom, thickly covered by a dwarf vege- tation. The circumstances differ little from those in which the ichthyolite beds of the preceding period were deposited ; but forms of life, essentially different, career through the green depths, or creep over the ooze. Shoals of Cephalas- pides, with their broad, arrow-like heads, and their slender, angular bodies, feathered with fins, sweep past like clouds of crossbow bolts in an ancient battle. We see the distant gleam of scales, but the forms are indistinct and dim: we can merely ascertain that the fins are elevated by spines of vari- ous shape and pattern; that of some the coats glitter with enamel; and that others — the sharks of this ancient period — bristle over with minute thorny points. A huge crustacean, of uncouth proportions, stalks over the weedy bottom or bur- rows in the hollows of the banks. (243) 244 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. Let us attempt bringing our knowledge of the present to bear upon the past. The larger crustacea of the British seas abound most on iron-bound coasts, where they find sheltering places in the deeper fisures of sea-cliffs covered up by kelp and tangle, or under the lower edges of detached boulders, that rest unequally on uneven platforms of rock, amid for- ests of the rough-stemmed cuvy. We may traverse sandy or muddy shores for miles together, without finding a single crab, unless a belt of pebbles lines the upper zone of beach, where the forked and serrated fuci first appear, or a few weed-covered fragments of rock here and there occur in groups on the lower zones. In this formation, however, the bottom must have been formed of mingled sand and mud, and yet the crustacea were abundant. How account for the fact? There is, in most instances, an interesting conformity between the character of the ancient rocks, in which we find groups of peculiar fossils,and the habitats of these existences of the present creation which these fossils most resemble. The fisherman casts his nets in a central hollow of the Moray Frith, about thirty fathoms in depth, and draws them up feul with masses of a fetid mud, charged with multitudes of that curious purple-colored zodphyte the sea-pen, invariably an inhabitant of such recesses. The graptolite of the most ancient fossiliferous rocks, an existence of unequivocally the same type, occurs in greatest abundance in a finely-levigated mudstone, for it, too, wasa dweller in the mud. In like man- ner, we may find the ancient Modiola of the Lias in habitats analogous to those of its modern representative the muscle, and the encrinite of the Mountain Limestone fast rooted to its rocky platform, just as we may see the Helianthoida and Ascidicida of our seas fixed to their boulders and rocky skerries. But is not analogy at fault in the present instance ? THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 245 Quite the reverse. Mark how thickly these carbonaceous impressions cover the muddy-colored and fissile sandstones of the formation, giving evidence of an abundant vegetation. We may learn frorn these obscure markings, that the place in which they grew could have been no unfit habitat for the crustaceous tribes. There is a little, land-locked bay on the southern shore of the Frith of Cromarty, effectually screened from the easterly winds by the promontory on which the town is built, and but little affected by those of any other quarter, from the proxim- ity of the neighboring shores. The bottom, at low ebb, pre- sents a level plain of sand, so thickly covered by the green grass-weed of our more sheltered sandy bays and estuaries, chat it presents almost the appearance of a meadow. The roots penetrate the sand to the depth of nearly a foot, binding it firmly together; and as they have grown and decayed in it for centuries, it has acquired, from the disseminated particles of vegetable matter, a deep leaden tint, more nearly ap- proaching to black than even the dark gray mudstones of Balruddery. Nor is this the only effect: the intertwisted fibres impart to it such coherence, that, where scooped out into pools, the edges stand up perpendicular from the water, like banks of clay; and where these are hollowed into cave- like recesses, —and there are few of them that are not so hollowed, — the recesses remain unbroken and unfilled for years. The weeds have imparted to the sand a character different from its own, and have rendered it a suitable hab- itat for numerous tribes, which, in other circumstances, would have found no shelter in it. Now, among these we find in abundance the larger crustaceans of our coasts. The brown edible crab harbors in the hollows beside the pools; occasion- ally we may find in them an overgrown lobster, studded with 246 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. parasitical shells and zoophytes— proof that the creature, having attained its full size, has ceased to cast its plated cov- ering. Crustaceans of the smaller varieties abound. Her- mit crabs traverse the pools, or creep among the weed; the dark green and the dingy, hump-backed crabs occur nearly as frequently; the radiata cover the banks by thousands. We find occasionally the remains of dead fish left by the re- treating tide; but the living are much more numerous than the dead ; for the sand-eel has suffered the water to retire, and yet remained behind in its burrow ; and the viviparous blenny and common gunnel still shelter beside their fuci- covered masses of rock. Imagine the bottom of this little bay covered up by thick beds of sand and gravel, and the whole consolidated into stone, and we have in it all the conditions of the deposit of Balruddery —a mud-colored, arenaceous deposit, abounding in vegetable impressions, and enclosing numerous remains of crustaceans, fish, and radiata, as its characteristic organisms of the animal kingdom. There would be but one circumstance of difference: the little bay abounds in shells ; whereas no shells have yet been found in the mudstones of Balruddery, or the gray sandstones of the same formation, which in Forfar, Fife, and Moray shires represent the Cornstone division of the system. Ages and centuries passed, but who can sum up their num- ber? In England, the depth of this middle formation greatly exceeds that of any of the other two; in Scotland, it is much less amply developed; but in either country it must rep- resent periods of scarce conceivable extent. I have listened to the controversies of opposite schools of geologists, who, from the earth’s strata, extract registers of the earth’s age of an amount amazingly different. One class, regarding the geological field as if under the influence of those principles THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 247 of perspective which give to the cottage in front more than the bulk and altitude of the mountain behind, would assign to the present scene of things its thousands of years, but to all the extinct periods united merely their few centuries ; while with their opponents, the remoter periods stretch out far into the bygone eternity, and the present scene seems but a nar- row strip running along the foreground. Both classes appeal to facts ; and, leaving them to their disputes, I have gone out to examine and judge for myself. The better to compare the present with the past, I have regarded the existing scene merely as a formation — not as superficies, but as depth; and have sought to ascertain the extent to which, in different localities, and under different circumstances, it has overlaid the surface. The slopes of an ancient forest incline towards a river that flows sluggishly onwards through a deep alluvial plain, once an extensive lake. A recent landslip has opened. up one of the hanging thickets. Uprooted trees, mingled with bushes, lie at the foot of the slope, half buried in broken masses of turf; and we see above a section of the soil, from the line of vegetation to the bare rock. There is an under belt of clay, and an upper belt of gravel, neither of which contains any thing organic ; and overtopping the whole we may see a dark- colored bar of mould, barely a foot in thickness, studded with stumps and interlaced with roots. Mark that narrow bar: it is the geological representative of six thousand years, A stony bar of similar appearance runs through the strata of the Wealden: it, too, has its dingy color, its stumps, and its interlacing roots; but it forms only a very inconsiderable portion of one of the least considerable of all the formations - and yet who shall venture to say that it does not represent a period as extended as that represented by the dark bar in the 248 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. ancient forest, seeing there is not a circumstance of difference between them ? We descend to the river side. The incessant action of the current has worn a deep channel through the leaden-colored silt; the banks stand up perpendicularly over the water, and downwards, for twenty feet together, — for such is the depth of the deposit, — we may trace layer after layer of reeds, and flags, and fragments of driftwood, and find here and there a few fresh-water shells of the existing species. In this locality, six thousand years are represented by twenty feet. The depth of the various fossiliferous formations united is at least fifteen hundred times as great. | We pursue our walk, and pass through a morass. Three tiers of forest trees appear in the section laid open by the stream, the one above the other. Overlying these there is a congeries of the remains of aquatic plants, which must have grown and decayed on the spot for many ages after the soil had so changed that trees could be produced by it no longer; and over the whole there occur layers of mosses, that must have found root on the surface after the waters had been drained away by the deepening channel of the river. The six thousand years are here represented by that morass, its three succeeding forests, its beds of aquatic vegetation, its bands of moss, and the thin stratum of soil which overlies the whole. Well, but it forms, notwithstanding, only the mere beginning of a formation. Pile up twenty such mo- rasses, the one over the other; separate them by a hundred such bands of alluvial silt as we have just examined a little higher up the stream; throw in some forty or fifty thick beds of sand to swell the amount; and the whole together will but barely equal the Coal Measures, one of many formations. But the marine deposits of the present creation have been, THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 249 perhaps accumulating more rapidly than those of our lakes, forests, or rivers? Yes, unquestionably, in friths and estua- ries, in the neighborhood of streams that drain vast tracts of country, and roll down the soil and clay swept by the winter rains from thousands of hill-sides; but what is there to lead to the formation of sudden deposits in those profounder depths of the sea, in which the water retains its blue transparency all the year round, let the waves rise as they may? And da we not know that, along many of our shores, the process of accumulation is well nigh as slow as on the land itself? The 2xisting creation is represented in the little land-locked bay, where the crustacea harbor so thickly, by a deposit hardly three feet in thickness. In a more exposed locality, on the opposite side of the promontory, it finds its representative in a deposit of barely nine inches. It is surely the present scene of things that is in its infancy! Into how slender a bulk have the organisms of six thousand years been compressed ! History tells us of populous nations, now extinct, that flour- ished for ages: do we not find their remains crowded into a few streets of sepulchres? °Tis but a thin layer of soil that covers the ancient plain of Marathon. I have stood on Ban- nockburn, and seen no trace of the battle. In what lower stratum shall we set ourselves to discover the skeletons of the wolves and bears that once infested our forests? Where shall we find accumulations of the remains of the wild bisons and gigantic elks, their contemporaries? They must have existed for but comparatively a short period, or they would surely have left more marked traces behind them. When we appeal to the historians, we hear much of a re- mote antiquity in the history of man: a more than twilight gloom pervades the earlier periods; and the distances are exaggerated, as objects appear large ina fog. We measure, 24 250 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. too, by a minute scale. There is a tacit reference to the threescore and ten years of human life; and its term of a day appears long to the ephemera. We turn frora the histo- rians to the prophets, and find the dissimilarity of style indi- cating a different speaker. Ezekiel’s measuring-reed is grad- uated into cubits of the temple. The vast periods of the short-lived historian dwindled down into weeks and days. Seventy weeks indicated to Daniel, in the first year of Darius, the time of the Messiah’s coming. Three years and a half limit the term of the Mohammedan delusion. Seventeen years have not yet gone by since Adam first arose from the mould ; nor has the race, as such, attained to the maturity of even early manhood. But while prophecy sums up merely weeks and days, when it refers to the past, it looks forward into the future, and speaks of a thousand years. Are scales of unequally graduated parts ever used in measuring different portions of the same map or section — scales so very une- qually graduated, that, while the parts in some places expand to the natural size, they are in others more than three hun- dred times diminished? If not,— for what save inextricable confusion would result from their use, — how avoid the con- clusion, that the typical scale employed in the same book by the same prophet represents similar quantities by correspond- ing parts, whether applied to times of outrage, delusion, and calamity, or set off against that long and happy period in which the spirit of evil shall be bound in chains and dark- ness, and the kingdom of Christ shall have come? And if such be the case —if each single year of the thousand years of the future represents a term as extended as each single year of the seventeen years of the past—if the present scene of things be thus merely in its beginning — should we at all wonder to find that the formation which represents it has laid down merely its few first strata ? THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 951 The curtain again rises. A last day had at length come to the period of the middle formation; and in an ocean roughened by waves, and agitated by currents, like the ocean which flowed over the conglomerate base of the system, we find new races of existences. We may mark the clumsy bulk of the Holoptychius conspicuous in the group ; the shark family have their representatives as before ; a new variety of the Pterichthys spreads out its spear-like wings at every alarm, like its predecessors of the lower formation ; shoals of fish of a type more common, but still unnamed and unde- scribed, sport amid the eddies; and we may see attached to the rocks below substances of uncouth form and doubtful structure, with which the oryctologist has still to acquaint himself. The depositions of this upper ocean are of a mixed character: the beds are less uniform and continuous than:at a greater depth. In some places they consist exclusively of sand- stone, in others of conglomerate ; and yet the sandstone and conglomerate seem, from their frequent occurrence on the same platform, to have been formed simultaneously. The transporting and depositing agents must have become more partial in their action than during the earlier period. ‘They had their foci of strength and their circumferences of com- parative weakness; and while the heavier pebbles which composed the conglomerate were in the course of being de- posited in the foci, the lighter sand which composes the sand- stone was settling in those outer skirts by which the foci were surrounded. At this stage, too, there are unequivocal marks, in the northern localities, of extensive denudation. The older strata are cut away in some places to a considerable depth, and newer strata of the same formation deposited unconforma- bly over them. There must have been partial upheavings and depressions, corresponding with the partial character of 252 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. the depositions ; and, as a necessary consequence, frequent shiftings of currents. The ocean, too, seems to have les- sened its general depth, and the bottom to have lain more ex- posed to the influence of the waves. And hence one cause, added to the porous nature of the matrix, and the diffused oxide, of the detached, and, if I may so express myself, churchyard character of its organisms. Above the blended conglomerates and sandstones of this band a deposition of lime took place. Thermal springs, charged with calcareous matter slightly mixed with silex, seem to have abounded, during the period which it represents, over widely-extended areas ; and hence, probably, its origin. An increase of heat from beneath, through some new activity imparted to the Plutonic agencies, would be of itself sufficient to account for the formation. Ihave resided in a district in which almost every spring was charged with calcareous earth ; but in cisterns or draw-wells, or the utensils in which the housewife stored up for use the water which these supplied, no deposition took place. With boilers and tea-kettles, how- ever, the case was different. The agency of heat was brought to operate upon these ; and their sides and bottoms were covered, in consequence, with a thick crust of lime. Now, we have but to apply the simple principles on which such phenomena occur, to account for widely-spread_ precipi- tates of the same earth by either springs or seas, which at a lower temperature would have been active in the forma- tion of mechanical deposits alone. The temperature sunk gradually to its former state; the purely chemical deposit ceased ; the waters became populous as before with animals of the same character and appearance as those of the up- per conglomerate; and layer after layer of yellow sand- stone, to the depth of several hundred feet, were formed as THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 253 the period passed. With this upper deposit the system terminated. - Though fish still remained the lords of creation, and fish of apparently no superior order to those with which the ver- tebrata began at least three formations earlier, they had mightily advanced in one striking particular. If their organ- ization was in no degree more perfect than at first, their bulk at least had become immensely more great. The period had gone by in which a mediocrity of dimension characterized the existences of the ancient oceans, and fish armed offen- sively and defensively with scales and teeth scarcely inferior in size to the scales and teeth of the gavial or the alligator, sprung into existence. It must have been a large jaw and a large head that contained, doubtless among many others, a tooth an inch in diameter at the base. I may remark, in the passing, that most of the teeth found in the several forma- tions of the system are not instruments of mastication, but, like those in most of the existing fish, mere hooks for penetrating slippery substances, and thus holding them fast. The rude angler who first fashioned a crooked bone, or a bit of native silver or copper, into a hook, might have found his invention anticipated in the jaws of the first fish he drew ashore by its means; and we find the hook structure as com- plete in the earlier ichthyolites of the Old Red Sandstone as in the fish that exist now. The evidence of the geologist is of necessity circumstantial evidence, and he need look for none other; but it is interesting to observe how directly the separate facts bear, in many examples, on one and the same point. The hooked and slender teeth tell exactly the same story with the undigested scales in the foecal remains alluded to in an early chapter. In what could this increase in bulk have originated? Is there a high but yet comparatively medium temperature in 24* 954 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. which animals attain their greatest size, and corresponding gradations of descent on both sides, whether we increase the heat until we reach the point at which life can no longer exist, or diminish it until we arrive at the same result from intensity of cold? The line of existence bisects on both sides the line of extinction. May it not probably form a curve, descending equally from an elevated centre to the points of bisection on the level of death? But whatever may have been the cause, the change furnishes another instance of analogy between the progress of individuals and of orders. The shark and the sword-fish begin to exist as little creatures of a span in length; they expand into monsters whose bodies equal in hugeness the trunks of ancient oaks; and thus has it been with the order to which they belong. The teeth, spines, and palatal bones of the fish of the Upper Ludlow Rocks are of almost microscgpic minuteness ; an invariable mediocrity of dimension characterizes the ichthyolites of the Lower Old Red Sandstone ; a marked increase in size takes place among the existences of the middle formation ; in the upper the bulky Holoptychius appears; the close of the sys- tem ushers in the still bulkier Megalichthys ; and low in the Coal Measures we find the ponderous bones, buckler-like scales, and enormons teeth of another and immensely more gigantic Holoptychius—a creature pronounced by Agassiz the largest of all osseous fishes.* We begin with an age of dwarfs — we end with an age of giants. ‘The march of Nature is an onward and an ascending march ; the stages are slow, but the tread is stately; and to Him who has commanded, * There have been fish scales found in Burdie House five inches in length, by rather more than four in breadth. Of the gigantic Holop- tychius of this deposit we have still much to learn. The fragment of a jaw, in the possession of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, which THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 255 and who overlooks it, a thousand years are as but a single day, and a single day as a thousand years.* We have entered the Coal Measures. For seven forma- tions together—from the Lower Silurian to the Upper Old Red Sandstone —our course has lain over oceans without a visible shore, though, like Columbus, in his voyage of dis- covery, we have now and then found a little floating weed, to indicate the approaching coast. ‘The water is fast shallow- ing. Yonder passes a broken branch, with the leaves still unwithered ; and there floats a tuft of fern. Land, from the mast-head! land! land !—a low shore, thickly covered with vegetation. Huge trees, of wonderful form, stand out far into the water. There seems no intervening beach. A thick hedge of reeds, tall as the masts of pinnaces, runs along the deeper bays, like water-flags at the edge of a lake. A river of vast volume comes rolling from the interior, darkening the water for leagues with its slime and mud, and bearing with it, to the open sea, reeds, and fern, and cones of the pine, and immense floats of leaves, and now and then some bulky tree, undermined and uprooted by the current. We near the coast, and now enter the opening of the stream. A scarce penetrable phalanx of reeds, that attain to the height and well nigh the bulk of forest trees, is ranged on either hand. The bright and glossy stems seem rodded like Gothic col- umns; the pointed leaves stand out green at every joint, tier above tier, each tier resembling a coronal wreath or an an- cient crown, with the rays turned outwards; and we see a-top _ belonged to an individual of the species, is 184 inches in length; and itis furnished with teeth, one of which, from base to point, measures five inches, and another four and a half. * See, on this subject, the introductory note to the present edition, and note p. 164. 256 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. what may be either large spikes or catkins. What strange forms of vegetable life appear in the forest behind! Can that be a club-moss that raises its slender height for more than fifty feet from the soil? Or can these tall, palm-like trees be actually ferns, and these spreading branches mere fronds? And then these gigantic reeds!—are they not mere varieties of the common horse-tail of our bogs and mo- tasses, magnified some sixty or a hundred times? Have we arrived at some such country as the continent visited by Gulli- ver, in which he found thickets of weeds and grass tall as woods of twenty years’ growth, and lost himself amid a forest of corn, fifty feet in height? The lesser vegetation of our own country, reeds, mosses, and ferns, seems here as. if viewed through a microscope: the dwarfs have sprung up into giants, and yet there appears to be no proportional increase in size among what are unequivocally its trees. Yonder is a group of what seem to be pines—tall and bulky, ’tis true, but neither taller nor bulkier than the pines of Norway and America; and the club-moss behind shoots up its green, hairy arms, loaded with what seems catkins above their top- most cones. But what monster of the vegetable world comes floating down the stream — now circling round in the eddies, now dancing on the ripple, now shooting down the rapid? It resembles a gigantic star-fish, or an immense coach-wheel, divested of the rim. There is a green, dome-like mass in the centre, that corresponds to the nave of the wheel, or the body of the star-fish ; and the boughs shoot out horizontally on every side, like spokes from the nave, or rays from the central body. The diameter considerably exceeds forty feet ; the branches, originally of a deep green, are assuming the golden tinge of decay; the cylindrical and hollow leaves stand out thick on every side, like prickles of the wild rose on the red, fleshy, lance-like shoots of a year’s growth, that will THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 257 be covered, two seasons hence, with flowers and fruit. That strangely formed organism presents no existing type among all the numerous families of the vegetable kingdom.* There is an amazing luxuriance of growth all around us. Scarce can the current make way through the thickets of aquatic plants that rise thick from the muddy bottom ; and though the sunshine falls bright on the upper boughs of the tangled forest beyond, not a ray penetrates the more than twilight gloom that broods over the marshy platform below. The rank steam of decaying vegetation forms a thick blue haze, that partially obscures the underwood ; deadly lakes of car- bonic acid gas have accumulated in the hollows; there is silence all around, uninterrupted save by the sudden splash of some reptile fish that has risen to the surface in pursuit of its prey, or when a sudden breeze stirs the hot air, and shakes the fronds of the giant ferns or the catkins of the reeds. The wide continent before us is a continent devoid of animal life, save that its pools and rivers abound in fish and mollus- ca, and that millions and tens of millions of the infusory tribes swarm in the bogs and marshes. Here and there, too, an insect of strange form flutters among the leaves. It is more than probable that no creature furnished with lungs of the more perfect construction could have breathed the at- mosphere of this early period, and have lived. Doubts have been entertained whether the limestone of Burdie House belongs to the Upper Old Red Sandstone or to the inferior Coal Measures. And the fact may yet come to be quoted as a very direct proof of the ignorance which ob- tained regarding the fossils of the older formation, at a time when the organisms of most of the other formatioas, both above and below it, had been carefully explored. The Lime- stone of Burdie House is unequivocally and most character- isticaily a Coal Measure limestone. It abounds in vegetable * See Note O. 258 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. remains of terrestrial or lacustrine growth, and these, too, the vegetables common to the Coal Measures — ferns, reeds, and club-mosses. One can scarce detach a fragment from the mass, that has not its leaflet or seed-cone enclosed, and in a state of such perfect preservation, that there can be no possibility of mistaking its character. If in reality a marine deposit, it must have been formed in the immediate neighbor- hood of a land covered with vegetation. The dove set loose by Noah bore not back with it a less equivocal sign that the waters had abated. Now, in the Upper Old Red Sandstone none of these plants occur. The deposit is exclusively an ocean deposit, and the remains in Scotland, until we arrive at its inferior and middle formations, are exclusively animal re- mains. Its upper member, “ the yellow sandstone,” says Dr. Anderson, of Newburgh, “ does not exhibit a single particle of carbonaceous matter —no trace or film of a branch hay- ing been detected in it, though, if such in reality existed, there are not wanting opportunities of obtaining specimens in some one of the twenty or thirty quarries which have been opened in the county of Fife in this deposit alone.” No two bordering formations in the geological scale have their boun- daries better defined by the character of their fossils than the Old Red Sandstone and the Coal Measures. We pursue our history no further. Its after course is com- paratively well known. ‘The huge sauroid fish was succeed- ed by the equally huge reptile—the reptile by the bird — the bird by the marsupial quadruped; and at length, after races higher in the scale of instinct had taken precedence in succession, the one of the other, the sagacious elephant ap- peared, as the lord of that latest creation which immediately preceded our own. How natural does the thought seem which suggested itself to the profound mind of Cuvier, when indulging in a similar review! Has the last scene in the THE OLD RED SANDSTONE 259 series arisen, or has Deity expended his infinitude of resource, and reached the ultimate stage of progression at which per- fection can arrive? The philosopher hesitated, and then de- cided in the negative, for he was too intimately acquainted with the works of the Omnipotent Creator to think of limit- » ing his power; and he could, therefore, anticipate a coming period in which man would have to resign his post of honor to some nobler and wiser creature — the monarch of a better and happier world. How well it is, to be permitted to indulge in the expansion of Cuvier’s thought, without sharing in the melancholy of Cuvier’s feeling —to be enabled to look for- ward to the coming of a new heaven and a new earth, not in terror, but in hope —to be encouraged to believe in the sys- tem of unending progression, but to entertain no fear of the degradation or deposition of man! The adorable Monarch of the future, with all its unsummed perfection, has already passed into the heavens, flesh of our flesh, and bone of our bone, and Enoch and Elias are there with him — fit repre- sentatives of that dominant race, which no other race shall ever supplant or succeed, and to whose onward and upward march the deep echoes of eternity shall never cease to respond. i. ae ey ae t ey teas i ee hire ys # is ate ’ x A Mu Woes > j i. aie h ; fret : ' a ag a : cH x aes Neri ‘oe J ¥ ' a é < ‘ " » ~ i vt j » ey ie A ands Pit tes: opel Sarto Olah hod aI. Balnieg uate 9 ola eh MLS dod dete oh evi ek a Ad raya ie Satire a AD orreiit bx — aS) Lom es ee a’ = . heleup cio bowie “VST dey LOR AS Witerdir eb al ut & hee wethod a, \ ial (ee as ; a Oh Wee a: - hh Te ‘ 7 } +) ‘¢ ooo} » ont ar : day & Vwi fh 7 > wW , $5 i ‘a] ~ is | oon { > A a | Ao P ‘ ‘ ie 4 ' 2 = * “4 ¢ Hay ¥ 5 ¥ : t 7 Ld %% is . 0. eis ¢ ~ ig tt id @ . hy _ atm rh < 7 . . ICHTHYOLITES OF THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. FROM AGASSIZ’S “POISSONS FOSSILES.” *,* The synonymes here — now supplanted, however — with the rames of a few doubtful or fictitious species, are given in Italics ; — the former opposite the names ultimately adopted, the latter immedi- ately under the names of the determined species. Acanthodes pusillus. Actinolepis tuberculatus. Asterolepis Asmusii. — Syn. Chelonichthys Asmusii. - apicalis. “ granulata. - Heeninghausii. ™ Malcolmsoni. ¢ minor. — Syn, Chelonichthys miner. ornata. _ speciosa. = concatenatus. “ depressus. Bothriolepis favosa. — Syw. Glyptosteus favosus. a ornata - <= rettculatus. Byssacanthus arcuatus. = crenulatus. 3 levis. Cephalaspis Lewisii. ‘ Lloydii. Lyellii. =" rostratus. 20 262 ICHTHYOLITES OF THE Cheiracanthus microlepidotus. 6 minor. 2. Murchisoni. Cheirolepis Cummingia, “6 Traillii. a Uragus. - splendens. - untlateralis. Chelyophorus pustulatus. & Verneuilii. Cladodus simplex. Climatius reticulatus. Coccosteus cuspidatus. - decipiens. — Syx. Jatus. - maximus. oY oblongus. Cosmacanthus Malcolmsoni, Cricodus incurvus. — Syn. Dendrodus incureus Ctenacanthus ornatus. < serrulatus. Ctenodus Keyserlingii. = marginalis. - parvulus, 66 Worthii. " radiatus. - serratus. Ctenoptychius priscus, Dendrodus latus. “ minor. “ sigmoides - strigatus. ee tenuistriatus, Diplacanthus crassispinus. . longispinus. se striatulus, “ striatus. Diplopterus affinis. OLD RED SANDSTONE. 263 Diplopterus oorealis. — Syn. Agassizii. 5 macrocephalus. Dipterus macrolepidotus. = arenaceus. “ brachypygopterus. ‘6 macropygopterus. “6 Valenciennesit. Glyptelepis elegans. as leptopterus. es microlepidotus. Glyptopomus minor. — Syn. Platygnathus minor. Haplacanthus marginalis. Holoptychius Andersoni. = Flemingii. “ giganteus. = Murchisoni. ss nobilissimus. : és Omaliusii. Homacanthus arcuatus. Homothorax Flemingii. Lamnodus biporcatus. — Syn. Dendrodus biporcatus. “ hastatus. —Sxn. Panderi. Dendrodus hestutus, compressus. 6 sulcatus. Narcodes pustilifer. Naulas sulcatus. Odontacanthus crenatus. — Syn. Ctenoptychius crenatus. “ heterodon. Onchus heterogyrus. ‘© semistriatus. “ subleyvis. Osteolepis arenatus. 66 macrolepidotus “ major. 6 microlepidotus. = intermedius. < nanus. Pamphractus Anderson. 264 ICHTHYOLITES OF THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. Pamphractus hydrophilus. — Syn. Pterichthys hydrophalus Parexus recurvus. Phyllolepis concentricus. Placothorax paradoxus. Platygnathus Jamesoni. iy paucidens. Polyphractus platycephalus. Psammosteus arenatus. — Syn. Placosteus arenatus. “6 meandrinus. “ “6 meandrinus. - paradoxus. ‘ Psammolepis paradoxus. ts undulatus. ‘ Placosteus undulatus. Pterichthys arenatus. “ cancriformis. id cornutus. _ major. “ Milleri. “2 * — Tatus. a oblongus. ns productus. 6 testudinarius. Ptychacanthus dubius. Stagonolepis Robertsoni. Nhe S . NOTE A, Pace 18. In the last edition of his “ Elements” (1855), Sir Charles Lyell has considerably altered and amplified this description, for which he has been to a large extent indebted to the discoveries and pub- lications of Mr. Miller. See “ Elements of Geology,” chap. xxvi. NOTE B, Pace 40. « And in the latter formation [Coal Measures] the first reptiles appear.” This statement requires now to be slightly modified, in consequence of the discovery in 1851, by Mr. Patrick Duff of Elgin, of a true reptile (Telerpeton Elginse) in the Upper Old Red of Morayshire. The fact is referred to in “ The Testimony of the Rocks,” pages 46 and 104. See also Lyell’s “ Elements ” for a figure and description of the creature. The argument follow- ing the above quotation is not, however, in any way affected by this discovery. It is right, however, to add, that up to a very recent period, Mr. Miller was known to have expressed some doubts as to whether the rock in which the Telerpeton was found did not belong to a much higher formation than the Old Red Sand- stone. NOTE C, PAGE 54. For a more minute description of the head-plates of the Coc- costeus, see “ Foot-Prints of the Creator,’ pages 73 and 74. See also Plate ix. 266 NOTES. NOTE D, PaGe 72. See “F oot-Prints of the Creator,” pages 75-80, where the struc- ture of the head of the Osteolepis is fully described and figured. NOTE E, Pace 93. In “The Testimony of the Rocks” the flora of the Old Red is treated at great length. See pages 433-462. See also, on the same subject, ‘ Foot-Prints of the Creator,” pages 209-222. NOTE E, (No. 2) PAGE 126. The genus Cephalaspis (Agas.) has been confounded with the Pteraspis (Kner.). Cephalaspis rostratus is a Pteraspis ; and Professor Huxley and Mr. Salter describe Cephalaspis Lewisii and Lloydii as Pteraspides. Sir P. de Grey Egerton has determined two new species of Cephalaspis (C. Salweyt and C. Murchisoni). — Proce. Geol. Soc., August, 1857. NOTE F, Paq@es 128 anv 143. Sixteen years ago, when “The Old Red Sandstone” was writ- ten, the Cephalaspis was little understood. Since then, however, a few specimens have been found in the neighborhood of Ar- broath, which demonstrate that the animal was provided with a large and powerful tail, and with equally powerful pectorals, so that its impetus need not have been, as here stated, “ compara- tively slow.” It is now also well ascertained that the peculiar “cutting-knife ” or “ bolt”-like shape of the head, so generally noticeable in the earlier specimens, was the result of accident. A single cephalic shield of bone, thickly covered with discoidal bony plates of beautiful workmanship, was bent round the whole of the upper portion of the creature’s head, including the sides, somewhat after the fashion of a lady’s bonnet shade; with this difference, that, instead of the pointed ends, or “ horns,” being fastened, as in the case of the bonnet, they projected freely back- NOTES. 267 wards in the fish. It was altogether, therefore, an armature of defence, and not partly of offence, as hinted at in the text. Of this Mr. Miller had long been quite aware, and, in consequence, had expressed himself approvingly of the restoration figured in Plate x. An Arbroath specimen, in the possession of Mr. Powrie of Res- wallie, which shows the head in profile, has the cephalic shield bent round in the manner described. In the large majority of in- stances, however, the fish being found lying on its belly, the curva- ture of the shield has yielded to the pressure of the overlying stone, and the appearance of the head is consequently that of a perfectly flat crescent, as represented in Plate xiii. fig. 1. NOTE G, Paces 129 anv 137,—‘' Middle Empire.” Here, and elsewhere in these pages, the Forfarshire gray beds are spoken of as constituting the middle portion of the formation. BALRUDDERY SPINES. In “ The Testimony of the Rocks,” mem ON remarks, that “the evidence on the ; point is certainly not so conclusive as I deemed it fifteen years ago” (p. 452); and again (p. 455), “ It must, however, be stated, on the other hand, that the crustaceans of the gray tilestones of Forfar and Kin- cardine not a little resemble those of the upper Silurian and red tilestone beds of England; and that, judging from the ichthyodorulites found in both, their fishes must have been at least generically allied. The crusta- ceans of the upper Silurian of Lesma- hagow, too, seem certainly much akin to those of the Forfarshire tilestones.” The spines figured in the accompany- ing cut, when compared with those in Sir R. Murchison’s “ Siluria,” may help the scientific reader to determine the question. ADDITIONAL Note, By Rey. W. 8. Symonps. — In Worcester- eye however, pages 452-455, Mr. Miller 268 NOTES. shire, in the neighborhood of Kidderminster, the Cephalaspis Lyeilii. has been detected in beds that appear to be intermediate between the Tilestones and Cornstones and associated with other fossils sup- posed to be characteristic of the Tilestones. Mr. Roberts of Kidder- minster has found the Pterygotus of the Kington Tilestones and the Picraspis of Mr. Banks in the same Gray Sandstones and Corn- stones which contain Cephalaspis Lyell and Pteraspis ornatus. I exhibited these fossils at a meeting of the Geological Society of Lon- don, April 1857, in the presence of Sir P. Egerton, Sir R. Murchison and Sir C. Lyell. NOTE H, Paces 133 anv 187. The correctness of the term “ tail-flap,” used by Mr. Miller when describing a peculiar-looking plate of the Balruddery lob- ster, has been questioned. Sir Charles Lyell and Mr. Page both believe it to have been a jaw-foot. Several fine specimens of this organism have been sent up to Mr. Salter of the Jermyn Street Museum, London, whose decision will probably definitely settle the matter NOTE H, (No. 2) Pace 135. By Rev. W. S. SYMONDS. Near Ludlow, Hereford, and several other localities, the Upper Ludlow fish-bed has been traced over an extensive area; but in several places the fishes appear to be absent, and their places supplied by large Crustaceans, chiefly Pterygotus. Himantopterus, Eurypterus, and Pterygotus, have been found by Mr. Banks asso- ciated with Pteraspides and Lingula cornea; while Mr. Roberts has Pieraspis and Pterygotus in the same beds as Cephalaspis Lyeilii. The Pterygotus of Kidderminster seems identical with the Scotch Seraphim. NOTE I, Paces 142 Anp 145. This organism Mr. Miller had some time ago definitely con- cluded to be vegetable. See “The Testimony of the Rocks,” p. NOTES. 269 448, where he says, —“‘ There now seems evidence enough to con- clude that they are the remains, not of the eggs of an animal, but of the seed of a plant.” ADDITIONAL Note, By Rey. W. S. Symonps. — These fossils — Parka decipiens —now known to be the seeds of a plant, are abundant in the Kidderminster beds. See also Plate xi. NOTE K, Pace 149. For recent additions made to the flora and fauna of the English and Irish Old Red Sandstone, see Siluria, in “ Lyell’s Elements ” and “ The Geological Journal,” vol. xii. NOTE L, Pace 156. See “The Testimony of the Rocks,” pages 247 and 248. See also Plate xiv NOTE M, Pace 170. See, in connection with this remark, the quotations in note G. May not the fact here mentioned of the Pterichthys occurring in the Caithness and Fifeshire beds, and not in the Forfarshire, be another argument for the greater antiquity of the latter ? NOTE N, Pace 196. From the tenor of the remarks at p. 453 of “ The Testimony of the Rocks,” it will be seen that Mr. Miller had come latterly to regard the conglomerate of the south of the Grampians as the analogue of that of Caithness. In November 1856 he decidedly expressed this as his matured opinion, in conversation with the writer. NOTE 0, PAGE 257. The organism here referred to is now ascertained to have been a root, and not an independent plant, — the root, namely, of the Sigillaria. See “The Testimony of the Rocks,” pages 65-7. 270 NOTES. NOTE BY THE REY. W. S. SYMONDS. A Pterichthys has been discovered by Mr. Baxter of Worcester in the yellow sandstone of the Clee Hill district, Salop. This yellow sandstone is below the carboniferous limestone of the Clees, and is the equivalent of the Cyclopterus Hibernicus sand- stones of Ireland and the Dura Den beds of Scotland. The Pter- ichthys has not before been discovered in England, and is there- fore an important addition to the Upper Old Red fossils of Eng- land. A new species of Eurypterus has also been described by the Rev. W. S. Symonds, in the “ Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal,” October 1857, from the Upper Cornstones of Hereford- shire. apd a sea Sips jaa GEOLOGICAL PAPERS READ BEFORE THE. ROYAL PHYSICAL SOCIETY OF EDINBURGH. CON PIN TS. GEOLOGICAL EVIDENCES IN FAVOR OF REVEALED RELIGION. .. 303 ON THE ANCIENT GRAUWACKE ROCKS OF SCOTLAND. ..... 3815 ON RED SANDSTONE, MARBLE, AND QUARTZ DEPOSITS OF ASSYNT. 343 ON THE CORALS OF THE OOLITIC SYSTEM. -......e..4-s 363 ON THE FOSSILIFEROUS DEPOSITS OF SCOTLAND. ....... 374 GEOLOGICAL EVIDENCES IN FAVOR OF REVEALED RELIGION. TuE following treatise was read by Mr. Mitier, on taking the chair, for the first time, as President of the Society, on 7th January, 1852:— : GENTLEMEN, — You have done me the honor of electing me, by a unanimous vote, to be one of the Presidents of the Royal Physical Society. I little thought, some two-and-thirty years ago, when, rather in obedience to a native instinct than with any ulterior object, I sought to acquaint myself with geological phenomena, that there awaited me any such honor. For, una- ware at the time that there even existed such a science as Ge- ology, or that the field which it opens has its many laborers, some of whom meet with less, and some with more success in their labors, I could not so much as imagine that distinction was to be achieved by studying the forms and structures of the strange organisms which I laid open amid rocks and in quar- ries, or in inquiring into the circumstances in which they had lived and died, or into the causes to which, in ages long gone by, they had owed their entombment in the stone. But it seems to be one of the characteristics of a true science, that it should promise little and perform much; and that for those who devote themselves to it simply for its own sake, it should 304 GEOLOGICAL EVIDENCES reserve a class of favors of a purely exterior character, rarely vouchsafed to the suitors who make court to it for that dowry of the extrinsic and the adventitious which it occasionally brings. It certainly 7s one of the characteristics of geological science, though in a far higher sense than that to which I have adverted, that it promises little and performs much. It contrasts strongly in this respect with those purely mental sciences still properly taught in our higher schools,—for they constitute the true gymnastics of mind, but, like other gymnastics, are to be regarded, not as actual work, but simply as a preparation for it. The use of the dumb-bells opens the chest and strengthens the muscles; but it is left to labor of quite another kind to supply the wants of the present, or to provide for the necessities of the future. And such appears to be the sort of relation borne by the purely mental to the natural sciences. How very different, however, the prospects which they seemed to open to the curious inquirer in the earlier ages of their history, or even in the earlier history of individual minds among ourselves! Mental science must have appeared to many of us, when we first approached it, as a magnificent gateway, giving access to a vast province, in which not only all knowledge regarding the nature of mind was to be acquired, but in which also, through the study of the intellectual faculties, we were to be introduced to the best possible modes of acquiring all other knowledge. But have we not been disappointed in our hopes? nay, from the doubts and uncertainties conjured up by the nice dialectics of the science, have we not had eventually to cast ourselves for escape on the simple instincts of our nature ? and, ultimately, have we not gained well nigh as little through the process, so impera- tively demanded by the metaphysician, of turning the mind upon itself, instead of exercising it on things external to it, as if we had been engaged in turning the eye upon itself, instead IN FAVOR OF REVEALED RELIGION. 305 of directing it on all the objects which it has been specially framed to see,— among the rest, on other eyes, and the pecu- liarities of their structure? In both natural and physical science, on the contrary, have we not often found, that while the promise has been slight, the fulfilment has been ample far eyond the reach of anticipation? When the boy James Watt was playing, as Arago tells the story, with the steam of the family tea-kettle,—now marking how its expansive force raised the lid of the utensil, and now how, condensed into water, it trickled powerlessly adown the sides of the cold china cup, which he had inverted over it,— who could have imagined that in these simple processes there lay wrapped up the princi- ple of by far the mightiest agent of civilization which man has yet seen,—an agent that, in a century after the experiment of the boy, would have succeeded in giving a new character to the arts both of peace and of war? Or who could have sur- mised, when, at nearly the same period, the Philadelphian printer was raising for the first time his silken kite in the fields, that there was an age coming in which, through a know- ledge of laws hitherto unknown, but whose existence he was then determining, man would be enabled to bind on_ his thoughts to the winged lightning, and to send them, with an instantaneousness that would annihilate time and space, across land and sea? Nor in that geological branch of natural sci- ence to which, with the cognate branches, our Society has specially devoted itself, has performance in proportion to pre- vious promise been less great. When it was first ascertained by the father of English geology, William Smith,—a man not yet more than twelve years dead, —that the Oolitic beds of England have always a uniform order of succession, and that this uniformity is attended by a certain equally uniform succession of groups of fossils, could it be once inferred that he was laying hold of a principle which, in the course of a 26* 306° GEOLOGICAL EVIDENCES single age, was destined marvellously to unlock the past history of our planet, and to acquaint us with God’s doings upon it, as the Creator of all, for myriads of ages ere he had first breathed the spirit of life into human nostrils, or man had become a living soul? It is one of the great marvels of our day, that through the key furnished by geologic science we can now peruse the history of past creations more clearly, and arrive at a more thorough and certain knowledge of at least the struct- ural peculiarities of their organisms, than we can read the early histories of the old dynasties of our own species, that flourished and decayed on the banks of the Euphrates or of the Nile, or ascertain the true character of the half-forgotten tyrants with whom they terminated, or from whom they began. It seems scarce possible that, in at least the leading facts of geologic history, we shall witness any very considerable change. There is no truth more thoroughly ascertained than that the great Tertiary, Secondary, and Paleozoic divisions represent in the history of the globe, periods as definitely dis- tinct and separate from each other as the modern from the ancient history of Europe, or the events which took place pre- vious to the Christian era from those that date in the subsequent centuries which we reckon from it. All over the globe, too, in the great Paleozoic division, the Carboniferous system is found to overlie the system of the Old Red Sandstone, and that, in turn, the widely developed Silurian system. It is not less cer- tain, that in the Secondary division, the Triassic deposits are overlaid by the Oolitic ones, and both by the Cretaceous ; nor yet, that in the Tertiary division, the beds of the Pliocene, with their large per centages of existing shells, as exemplified in the Red and Coraline Crags, belong to a greatly later period than that old Eocene age represented by the extinct shells and strange mammals of the Paris basin and the London clay. There is no human history more definitely ranged into centu- IN FAVOR OF REVEALED RELIGION. 507 ries than the geological into periods and epochas ; nor is the certainty less great, or the chance of transposition in any degree less slight in the one case than in the other. For, respecting at least the main geologic systems, their order of succession, and the organisms which they contain, the evidence is as positive and conclusive as it is regarding any piece of human history whatever. There are, however, certain geologic inferences very extensively adopted, which are founded rather on nega- tive than on positive evidence ; and these must of necessity, be subject, during the course of discovery, to modification and change. And we find resting mainly on this department of the negative,—I should, perhaps, rather say of the assump- tive, —two of the extremer schools of the present day, — that school which, founding on a certain progressive rise, in the course of the geologic periods, from lower to higher types, both animal and vegetable, would infer that what we term creation is in reality but development,—the low, in the lapse of un- measured ages, having passed, it is alleged, into the high ; and another school, represented by at least one very masterly geolo- gist, which teaches that there has been no upward progress in creation, but that the earth, in all the periods of its history represented by the geologic systems, must have existed under the same great conditions in which it now exists, and have pro- duced, mingled with inferior forms, plants of the same superior classes, and, if we except man himself, animals of the same high divisions of the vertebrata. What, however, are the positive facts with which, as geolo- gists, we are called on to deal? In the Tertiary Flora we find great abundance of true dicotyledonous trees, —in its Fauna, frequent forms of the mammals, which, in at least the later ages of the division, are of high types. We pass into the great Secondary division, and find trees as abundant in its Flora, in at least some of the middle deposits, as in any of the Tertiary 308 GEOLOGICAL EVIDENCES beds; but we have not yet succeeded in detecting among them a single dicotyledonous tree of the higher sub-classes, and only a few dicotyledonous leaves. ‘They are all coniferous gymno- sperme, chiefly of the pine and araucarian families; and in the Fauna associated with them, we find that the prevailing forms are reptilian. The reptile occupied as large a place in these Secondary periods as that occupied by the mammal in the Tertiary ones. So far, indeed, as we yet definitely know, there existed during these herpetological ages only two species of mammals, —a small marsupial and small insectivorous ani- mal. Again, in the Flora of the Paleozoic division, we still find the pine and the araucarian, mixed, however, with extra- ordinary vegetable types, some of which have become wholly obsolete, and some of which are linked by but faint analogies to aught that now exists; but which, generally speaking, seem to be, though high representatives of their kind, of a kind in itself not high. In the Fauna of the period, down till at least the base of the middle Paleozoic system, fishes seem the dom- inant forms, — fishes, many of them of great size, formidably armed, and uniting in their organization, reptilian to the ordi- nary ichthyic peculiarities, but in not a few of their number destitute of an internal skeleton of bone. True, during these ages the reptile also existed, but in such scanty proportions, that while the Coal Measures have yielded their ichthyie re- mains by thousands and tens of thousands, they have yielded to the sedulous search of the geologist only three reptiles and the trace of a fourth; and, while in single platforms of the Old Red Sandstone there are perhaps as many fishes entombed as are at present living on all the fishing banks of the country, the entire system has furnished the remains of but one reptile (if, indeed, the lacertian of Spynie in reality belong to it), and the foot-tracks of a few others. In the Lower Paleozoic forma- tions, the trace of even the fish becomes untrequent, and the IN FAVOR OF REVEALED RELIGION. 309 dominant organisms are crustaceans and molluscs. Now, such being the ascertained facts of our science, we are, I think, jus- tified in still holding against the disciples of the one school to which I have referred, that there has been progress in creation from a lower to a higher level. So far as there exists any evi- dence on the subject at all, we must hold that, in at least the group, the Paleozoic existences were of a lower and humbler order than those of the Secondary ages, and those of the Secondary ages of a lower and humbler order than those of the periods of the Tertiary. As shown by the vertebrate remains of the geologic epochs, the balance, which greatly preponderated in the times of the Tertiary in favor of the mammals, greatly preponderated in the times of the Second- ary in favor of the reptiles, and in the long evanished Palxo- zoic ages, in favor of the fishes. And so now, as before, these three great periods may be properly described as the periods of the fish, the reptile, and the mammal; nor do the late excep- tional cases, in which traces of reptiles have been found among the Paleozoic fishes, or of mammals among the Secondary rep- tiles, interfere more with the justness of such designations than the existence in New Zealand of one small indigenous mam- mal of the rat family, among its some fifty or sixty ornithic species, interferes with the propriety of designating it a land of birds, or the existence among the some forty-six pouched spe- cies of Australia of a few mammals that are not pouched, with the propriety of designating it a land of marsupials. Let us be content, then, as geologists, to found our deductions, until our science shall have provided us with a new class of facts, on the facts which we already possess. No sooner were we intro- duced, through the discovery of his grace the Duke of Argyll, to a small Tertiary deposit in the island of Mull, than we found that it yielded in abundance leaves of the buckthorn and the plane. No sooner had our boulder clays and drift gravels begun 310 GEOLOGICAL EVIDENCES to exhibit their organisms, than we found that what they sub- mitted to our examination were tusks of the elephant and the mastodon, and bones of the rhinoceros, the ox, and the deer. If trees of the same dicotyledonous class as the plane and the buckthorn occurred in our Secondary or Paleozoic periods, in at least aught approaching to the recent or Tertiary propor- tions, how is it that amid their fossil woods, though they have yielded their specimens by thousands, not a single dicotyledon- ous specimen, save of the gymnosperme, has yet been found ? Or if the great Paleozoic period indeed abounded in mam- mals, such as the elephant and the deer, how is it that, while in the Paleozoic deposits of even our own neighborhood and country we have met with the remains of fishes by tens of thousands, and of molluses by millions, all the Paleozoic sys- tems of the world have hitherto failed to present us with a single mammalian tooth or bone? Or even if in these ancient deposits a few dicotyledonous woods or mammalian fragments were, after the search of years, to be found, what could we infer regarding the proportions in which either dicotyledons or mam- mals had existed in the periods which the deposits represented, save from the proportions in which we found their remains occurring in them? Nay, do we not find Sir Charles Lyell setting his imprimatur on an exactly similar style of induction as that upon which we found, when, in determining the various formations of the Tertiary division, he has recourse to his prin- ciple of per centages? He would assuredly not deem that a Pliocene or Miocene deposit among whose numerous organ- isms he had failed to find an existing plant or shell. In the geologic, as in other departments, ““ What can we reason but from what we know.” The gulf between mental and geologic science is still too broad, and perhaps too carelessly surveyed on the theologic IN FAVOR OF REVEALED RELIGION. 311 side, to permit us to judge of the influence which the discov- eries of the geologist are yet to exercise on the ethical depart- ments of literature. We can, however, already see that the vastly extended knowledge of God’s workings of old which the science communicates, must exercise no slight influence upon certain departments of natural theology, and give a new tone to those controversies regarding the evidences of our faith which the Church has ever and anon to maintain with the world. Geology has already put an end to that old fiction of an infinite series of beings which the atheist was wont to substitute in his reasonings for the great First Cause through which all exists; nor does it leave other than very unsolid ground to the men who would fain find an equivalent for the exploded infinite series of their predecessors in a developing principle. Nay, I would ask such of the gentlemen whom I now address as have studied the subject most thoroughly, whether, at those grand lines of division between. the Palzo- zoic and Secondary, and again between the Secondary and Tertiary periods, at which the entire type of organic being alters, so that all on the one side of the gap belongs to one fashion, and all on the other to another and wholly different fashion,— whether they have not been as thoroughly impressed with the conviction that there existed a Creative Agent to whom the sudden change was owing, as if they themselves had witnessed the miracle of creation? Further, may we not hold that that acquaintance with bygone creations, each in suc- cession of a higher type than the one which preceded it, which geology enables us to form, must soon greatly affect the state of arguments employed on the skeptical side, which, framed on the assumption that creation is but a “singular effect, —- an effect without duplicate, — have urged, that from that one effect only can we know aught regarding the producing Cause? Knowing of the Cause but from the effect, and having expe- 312 GEOLOGICAL EVIDENCES rience of but one effect, we could not rationally hold, it has been argued, that that producing Cause could have originated effects of a higher or more perfect kind. The creation which it had produced we knew; but, having no other measure of its power, we could not, it was contended, regard it as competent to the production of a better or nobler creation, or, of course, hold that it could originate such a state of things as that perfect future state which Faith delights to contemplate. Now, it has been well said of the author of this ingenious sophism, — by far the most sagacious of the skeptics, — that if we admit his premises, we will find it difficult indeed to set aside his con- clusions. And how, in this case, does geology deal with his premises? By opening to us the history of the remote past of our planet, and introducing us, through the present, to former creations, it breaks down that s¢ngularity of effect on which he built, and for one creation gives us many. It gives us exactly that which, as he truly argued, his contemporaries had not, — an experience in creations. And let us mark how, applied to each of these in succession, his argument would tell. ‘There was a time when life, animal or vegetable, did not exist on our planet, and when all creation, from its centre to its cireumfer- ence, was but a creation of dead matter. To what effect in that early age would have been the argument of Hume? Sim- ply to this effect would it have borne, — that, though the pro- ducing Cause of what appeared was competent to the formation of earths, metals, and minerals, it would be unphilosophic to deem it adequate to the origination of a single plant or animal, —even to that of a spore or of a monad. Ages pass by, and the Paleozoic creation is ushered in, with its tall araucarians and pines, its highly organized fishes, and its reptiles of a com- paratively low standing. And how now, and with what effect, does the argument apply? It is now found that in the earlier creation the producing Cause had exerted but a portion of its IN FAVOR OF REVEALED RELIGION. 313 power, and that it could have done greatly more than it actually did, seeing that we now find it to be a Cause adequate to the origination of vitality and organization in two great types, — the vegetable and the animal,—as exemplified in pines and araucarians, in fishes and in reptiles. But still confining our- selyes with cautious skepticism within the limits of our argu- ment, we continue to hold that, as fishes of a high, and reptiles of a low order, with trees of the cone-bearing family, are the most perfect specimens of their respective classes which the producing Cause has originated, it would be unphilosophic to hold, in the absence of proof, that it would originate aught higher or more perfect. And now, as yet other ages pass . away, the creation of the great Secondary division takes the place of the vanished Paleozoic; and we find in its few dico- tyledonous plants, in its reptiles of highest standing, and in its some two or three comparatively humble mammals, that in the previous, as in the earlier creation, the producing Cause had been, if I may so express myself, working greatly under its strength, and that in this third creation we have a still higher display of its potency. With some misgivings, how- ever, we again apply our argument. And now yet another creation, — that of the Tertiary period, with its noble forests of dicotyledonous trees, and its sagacious and gigantic mam- mals, —rises upon the scene ; and, as our experience in crea- tion has now become very considerable indeed, and as we have seen each in succession higher than that which preceded it, we find that, notwithstanding our assumed skepticism, we had, — compelled by one of the most deeply-seated instincts of our nature,— been secretly anticipating the advance which the new state of things actually realizes. But, applying the argu- ment yet once more, we at least assume to hold, that as the sagacious elephant is the highest example of animal life pro- duced by the originating Cause, it would be unphilosophic to 27 314 GEOLOGICAL EVIDENCES deem it capable of producing a higher example; and, while we are thus reasoning, man appears upon creation, —a crea- ture immeasurably superior to all the others, and whose very nature it is to make use of his experience of the past for his guidance in the future. And if that only be solid experience or just reasoning which enables man truly to anticipate the events which are to come, and so to make provision for them, and if that experience be not solid, and that reasoning not just, which would serve but to darken his discernment, and prevent him from correctly predicating the cast and complex- ion of coming events, what ought to be his decision regarding an argument which, had it been employed in each of the van- ished creations of the past, would have had but the effect of arresting all just anticipation regarding the creation imme- diately succeeding, and which, thus reversing the main end and object of philosophy, would render the philosopher who clung to it less sagacious in divining the future than even the ordinary man? But, in truth, the existing premises, wholly altered by geologic science, are no longer those of Hume. The foot-print of his unhappy illustration does not now stand alone. Instead of one, we see many foot-prints, each in ad- vance of and on a higher level than the print immediately behind it ; and, founding at once on an acquaintance with the past, extended throughout all the periods of the geologist, and on that instinet of our nature whose peculiar function it is to anticipate at least one creation more, we must regard the expec- tation of “a new heavens and new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness,” as not unphilosophic, but as, on the contrary, altogether rational, and fully according to experience. ON THE ANCIENT GRAUWACKE ROCKS OF SCOTLAND. PART FIRST— HISTORICAL. “From Portpatrick on the west coast, to St. Abb’s Head on the east,” says Dr. James Hutton, in his far-famed Theory of the Earth, “there is a tract of schistus mountains, in which the strata are generally much inclined, or approaching to the vertical situation; and in these inclined strata,” he adds, “geologists allege there is not to be found any vestige of or- ganized body.” But the opinion can be “ proved,” he further states, “to be erroneous.” He himself, indeed, though he had been occasionally employed in examining the rocks of this “south Alpine country of Scotland” for more than forty years, had failed to find in them any traces of the organic; but his distinguished friend Sir James Hall, when travelling, in the summer of 1792, between Noblehouse and Crook, had de- tected sea-shells in “an Alpine limestone” by the wayside, at Wrae Hill, in the parish of Broughton, and thus demon- strated, as the limestone is intercalated with the schistus rocks, the fossiliferous character of the deposit. Even geo- logists had not yet become paleontological; and we find Sir James, in a passage quoted in the “ Theory,” describing the shells which he had detected simply as “forms of cockles.” 316 ON THE ANCIENT GRAUWACKE He was greatly more exact, however, in his appreciation of the mechanical peculiarities of the deposit; and his descrip- tion of those strange convolutions of the strata which give to the south of Scotland its series of axial lines, and its repeti- tions of beds and bands that come ever and anon to the sur- face, and continue to render the place of at least its nether groups of rock so obscure, is still approvingly referred to by our higher geologists. To account for these strange foldings, Sir James, in his paper in the “ Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh,” on the Vertical Position and Convo- lutions of certain Strata, and their relations with Granite, broached that theory of lateral pressure applied by some un- known force outside the area of the foldings themselves, which is still regarded as the best yet originated on this subject; and illustrated it by his famous experiments of the bands of vari- ously-tinted clays, and the layers of differently-colored cloths, which he succeeded in pressing, by the application of lateral force, from a horizontal into a convoluted position. His paper did not appear in its completed form until the year 1812 ; but as his theory had been originated more than twenty years previously, when, on visiting, in the company of Dr. Hutton and Professor Playfair, a portion of the east coast of Ber- wickshire, he found no fewer than “sixteen distinct bend- ? ings of the strata in the course of about six miles,” and as, long ere the publication of his view and experiments, they were well known to his scientific friends, I refer to them at this early stage in my brief sketch of the history of geologi- eal discovery in our Scottish Grauwacke. Dr. Hutton had described the “ Alphine Schistus” of the South of Scotland as belonging to the Primary class of rocks, and founded an argument for his theory on the fact that, in direct opposition to the belief of geologists regarding the de- posits of this special division, they yet do contain fossils. In ROCKS OF SCOTLAND. 317 1805, Professor Jameson published his “ Mineralogical De- scription of Dumfriesshire ;” and to him must be assigned the merit of first determining that these ancient schists belong, not to the Primary, but to what Werner has termed the Transition or Grauwacke Series. He states in this work, that he had traced these Transition rocks in Scotland “ from the northern extremity of the Pentland Hills, which is about six miles distant from the shores of the Frith of Forth, to Lang-robie, in Dumfriesshire, about three miles from the Sol- way Frith.” We find him, too, giving very correctly the other limits of the system as developed in our southern counties, and classifying with much precision the mechanical and min- eralogical peculiarities of the rocks which compose it. But when he comes to speak of its organisms, he is content to dis- cuss the subjects in a single sentence, founded apparently, from its vague generality, less on his own observations in the field which he describes, than on the general conclusions of his master, Werner. After stating that “ Transition or Grau- wacke slates contain petrifactions,’ whereas “ primitive clay slate” does not, he goes on to say that the “ petrifactions found in transition rocks are of animals and plants of the lower orders, that probably no longer exist on the face of the earth.” An anonymous critic, who in the succeeding year, 1806, re- viewed his work in a London periodical (the “ Literary Jour- nal,”) and who was evidently acquainted with the Grauwackes of Dumfriesshire, took up the subject, and regretted that the Professor had not been more specific. “Our author might have added,” we find him saying, “that vegetable petrifactions are very common in the Grauwacke slates of Dumfriesshire. The omitting of this circumstance is rather unaccountable,” it is added, “as he could not possibly have avoided making the observation. He has been very properly punished for the omission. The assertion that Grauwacke contains petri- 2t* dls, ON THE ANCIENT GRAUWACKE factions has been denied, and our author has been challenged to produce a single petrifaction in the Grauwacke of Dum- friesshire. To us, who know perfectly well that vegetable petrifactions are very common in that Grauwacke, this chal- lenge appears not a little bold.” Thus far the reviewer. He seems to have observed for himself, but not very correctly. Mr. Harkness tells us, in a paper which appeared in the “ Geological Journal” for 1851, that though the Dumfries Grauwackes contain’ their thick bands of anthracite, of ap- parently vegetable origin, there has been detected in them no vegetable remains whatever. They abound, however, in graptolites ; and it was probably these leaf-like zoophytes, whose nature is still so imperfectly understood, that caught the eye of the reviewer, and constituted his “ vegetable petri- factions.” The Grauwacke of Scotland does, however, con- tain vegetable impressions apparently fucoidal ; though they are far from common in any of the rocks which I have yet seen, and yield no characters by which they can be distin- guished from the simpler fuccids of the Old Red Sandstone. In one of the specimens now on the Society’s table, derived from the shales of Girvan, there occurs a fucoidal stem of this latter description, associated with graptolites of the double- sided genus diprion,—a genus never found, it is said, save in the Lower Silurian. In 1808, Professor Jameson published that third volume of his “System of Mineralogy, in which he fully developed his geological views, and described in language that has since become obsolete, the character and order of succession of the various formations. The work, however, added nothing to the previous knowledge of our Scotch Grauwacke, save per- haps, a very curious hypothesis regarding its convoluted strata, framed evidently to meet the theories of Hutton and Sir James Hall. “Very striking curvatures sometimes oe- ROCKS OF SCOTLAND. 319 eur,’ said the Professor, “in Transition or Grauwacke slate. The waved and concentric circular appearances are the effects of crystallization, whereas other curved and angular appear- ances seem to be connected with the mode of deposition of the strata, and may be traced either to inequalities of the fundamental rock, or to irregularities in the deposition of the strata themselves.” We do not now expect so much from erystallization; nor, when we see fossils spread out on a ver- tical plane, do we try to believe that, in defiance of the law of gravitation, they had pasted themselves there of old, as one pastes prints upon a screen; but as a fossil theory may be in some instances scarce less curious than a fossil plant or animal, the use of the extract will, I trust, be forgiven me. About four years after the publication of Professor Jameson’s work, the late Mr. Thomas Allen of this city read a very able paper before the Edinburgh Royal Society, on the Transition Rocks of Werner, in which we find reference made to their fossiliferous character in our southern Highlands. But there are no new localities given. Over the one discovery of Sir James Hall at Wrae Hill our Scotch geologists seem to have hybernated for more than forty years. In truth, the ereat controversy which then divided them into Plutonists and Neptunians seems to have operated unfavorably on the pro- gress of general discovery. In looking over our book-shelves for some wanted volume, we soon come to find that we have eyes for only it, and that all the other volumes fail to attract notice or attention. And such seems to have been the case with not a few of our Scotch geologists; they went out to search among the shelves of that great geologic library in which the early histories of the globe are stored up, for what- ever could be made to tell in favor of their own hypothesis, or to militate against that of their neighbors ; and, engrossed by this one object, they seem to have been indifferently suited 320 ON THE ANCIENT GRAUWACKE for the accomplishment of any other. In the various notices of our Scotch Grauwacke which cccur in the Transactions of the Edinburgh scientific societies during the years in which the battle raged between the two schools, I do not find trace of a single discovery worthy of being introduced into a his- tory of the system. Curious observers, however, outside the area of the conflict, seem to have been now and then finding in the deposit occasional traces of the organic. I have been told by the late Mr. William Laidlaw (the trusted friend of Sir Walter Scott), whose acquaintance I had the pleasure of forming early in 1839, that on two several occasions, many years before, he had found minute bivalves, and what he deemed vegetable impressions, in the Grauwacke slates of Peebleshire. The second notice of fossils in our Grauwacke at all defi- nite in its details, and which intimated original discovery, oc- curred long after the first, — at a time when geology had made rapid strides towards the position which it at present occu- pies, — and was of a peculiar interest to Edinburgh geologists, from the near neighborhood of the locality which it indicated to the Scottish metropolis. In 1839, Mr. Charles Macklaren published his “ Geology of Fife and the Lothians;” and in that ingenious work,— equally remarkable for the boldness of its theories and the truthfulness of its observation, — geo- logists were first told that there exist fossils in the Grau- wacke slate of the Pentlands. The organisms of the older rocks are not unfrequently restricted to a single stratum: even in the Lower Old Red Sandstone one may pass along sections of the strata many hundred feet in thickness, with- out detecting a trace of aught organic, and then find in some thin layer, perhaps not a foot in thickness, the fucoids, or fishes, or minute bivalves, of the formation, congregated by hundreds and thousands; and in the Scotch Grauwacke this ROCKS OF SCOTLAND. 321 peculiar arrangement obtains in a still more marked degree. The organisms of a wide district of country are confined often to a single layer, occupying scarce half an inch, in a section thousands of feet in vertical extent. And such seems to be the arrangement among the ancient slates of the Pentlands. Mr. Maclaren found his fossils near Deerhope-foot, at the side of a small stream that falls into the North Esk; and he describes them, in the portion of his work devoted to the geology of the Pentland range, as of two kinds. In one, fragments of what seem minute trilobites are congregated together in thin layers; in the other, there are the dis- tinctly marked impressions of what appear to be orthocer- atites. I owe two of those Pentland fossils to the kindness of Mr. Maclaren. The one, apparently a portion of an or- thoceratite, exhibits a side view of what seem to be five of.the septa; the other greatly resembles that curious and still but imperfectly understood vegetable of the Coal Measures, Stern- bergia approximata ; but it is in all probability not a vegetable, but an animal organism, — very possibly an orthoceratite also. One of these specimens bears on the label the date of its dis- covery (7th of April 1834),— a date five years anterior to that of the publication of Mr. Maclaren’s volume, and forty- two years posterior to the discovery of Sir James Hall. The fact that by much the greater part of half a century should have intervened between the first and second discoveries of organic remains in our Grauwackes,— for, waving the claim of Mr. Laidlaw, whose discovery seems never to have been re- corded, and can now be associated with neither locality nor date, Mr. Maclaren’s 7s decidedly the second,—is a fact of itself sufficient to show that our Scotch schools were in those days not zealously paleontological; and we know from other sources, that arguments were sought after within their pre- cincts, with much more avidity than fossils. But the error 322 ON THE ANCIENT GRAUWACKE has been seen and in part corrected; and the future of Scotch Geology bids fair to be characterized by the doing of more and the saying of less. In the same year in which Mr. Maclaren published his “ Geology of Fife and the Lothians,” the “Silurian System” of Sir Roderick Murchison appeared,—one of those great works which form eras in the history of science, and from which, as from the charts of some distinguished voyager, after explorers have learned to shape their course aright, and to recognize as familiar and easily definable, tracts previously un- named and unknown. In both the old world and the new, the great divisions first laid down in this work by Sir Rode- rick have been detected and identified, and an introductory book added to the organic history of our planet, from the rich and varied materials which they supply. For, however, sev- eral years after its publication, our Scottish Grauwacke con- tinued to remain a terra incognita, as before ; for though there appeared from time to time truthful descriptions of the de- posit itself, its place in the scale was still doubtful. Two years after (1841), Mr. James Nicol,—now Professor of Ge- ology in Queen’s College, Cork — produced his Prize Essay on the Geology of Peeblesshire ; and to an accurate descrip- tion of the mineralogical components of the Grauwacke of that county added a new locality for its fossils, in Grierston, near Traquair, where, in a slate quarry, there occur thin but continuous layers of graptolites, often in a state of the most exquisite keeping. Some of the finest Scottish specimens of this ancient organism which I have yet seen I have derived from this Grierston deposit. We also find Mr. Nicol refer- ring, in his Essay, to that limestone quarry of Wrae Hill in which Sir James Hall had found his fossil shells ; but its lime, when he wrote, had been exhausted, or so covered up by the rubbish of the workings, that its organisms could be ROCKS OF SCOTLAND. 323 detected no longer. “It strikes one as a melancholy reflec- tion,” we find him saying, “ when leaving this deserted quarry, where the wild whistle of the mountain sheep shows how seldom their solitude is invaded, that these relics of former creations, which, if preserved to science, might have added an interesting page to the world’s history, should have thus perished by the hand of man at so recent a period, after hay- ing remained safely stored up in the cabinet of nature for so many ages, and throughout so many awful revolutions.” I may here add, however, that shells have since been detected in the limestones of the Wrae Hill, both by Mr. Nicol him- self, and by Mr. Robert Chambers, and the discovery of Sir James fully verified. In 1842, one of the members of our Royal Physical Society, Mr. William Rhind, published his brief but interesting treatise on the “Geology of Scotland.” And in referring, in a general notice, to our Grauwacke de- posits, we find him stating, that the “formation” to which they belong “ corresponds to some of the beds of the Cambrian ”? system, as existing in Wales ;” and that in graptolites discov- ered in the Grauwacke slates of Innerleithen, “the first in- dications of organized fossils appear.” He adds, that “ dis- tinct specimens of these lay before him as he wrote, which had been presented to him by the discoverer, Mr. James Nicol.” In 1845, Mr. Nicol published his “Guide to the Geology of Scotland,’—a work which I have ever since carried about with me in my geologic rambles, and which, in every instance in which its author has described from his own observations, I have found correct. In this useful work we find him again referring to the graptolites of Grierston and the shells of Wrae Hill; and, further, briefly intimating yet another Grauwacke locality rich in fossils, though he was evi- dently in doubt regarding its true place in the scale. “In a limestone below the coal near Girvan,” he remarks, “ Silu- 324 ON THE ANCIENT GRAUWACKE rian fossils are said to occur,’ —a circumstance not unfre- quent,” it is added, “in the Mountain Limestone of Scotland.” No one, however, is now more thoroughly convinced than Pro- fessor Nicol, that the Silurian organisms of Girvan are not organisms of the Carboniferous series; that, on the contrary, they definitely determine the place and age of the deposits in which they cecur as Lower Silurian; and further, that they throw more light on the history of this ancient system, in its development in the southern Highlands, than the fossils of all our other Scottish localities put together. In January 1848, Mr. Nicol, at that time Assistant. Secre- tary of the London Geological Society, read before that body a paper on the Silurian Rocks of the Valley of the Tweed, which was afterwards published in the Journal of the Society. Even at a period so recent he could properly state, in his intro- duction, “that there is perhaps no extensive formation in the British islands of which we possess less certain geological knowledge than of the rocks constituting the great mountain chain which crosses the southern counties of Scotland from east to west.” His paper, however, served to add considerably to the little previously known regarding the deposit. Among the fossils by which it was illustrated, Mr. Salter recognized the fragments of five genera of trilobites, and an equal number of genera of shells, chiefly brachipods, all of a character indi- cative of the Lower Silurian group. About the same time a collection made from the Grauwackes of the shores of Kirk- cudbright was submitted to the London Geological Society by Lord Selkirk, and was found to be of an Upper Silurian char- acter; indeed, as appeared from the identity of some of the fossils, of the age of the Wenlock shale. In the May of the same year in which Professor Nicol submitted his paper to the public, the subject was still further elucidated in a valuable memoir, by Mr. Carrick Moore, Secretary to the Geological ROCKS OF SCOTLAND. 3825 Society, on the Silurian Rocks of Ayr and Wigtonshire, which added yet further to our knowledge of the fossils of these an- cient rocks, and in which, in its published form, the first Scot- tish Maclurea was figured and described, though somewhat doubtfully, from the imperfect state of keeping of the specimen, and under another name. At the meeting of the British Asso- ciation held in this city in 1850, Professor Sedgwick read a paper on the Geological Structure and Relations of the Fron- tier Chain of Scotland, which derived a peculiar value from the previous labors of that great geologist in the older Silurian rocks of England, and in which he divided our Grauwackes, though with much hesitation, especially with respect to both the earlier and later beds, into five great divisions, — four of them belonging to the Lower, and the fifth probably, as he stated, to the Upper Silurian. In comparing the Scottish with the Cambrian chains, he remarked that the lowest and oldest fossils of both appear to be graptolites ; and in a paper on the Graptolites of the Black Slates of Dumfriesshire, by Mr. R. Harkness, which appeared in the “ Geological Journal” of last year, we find a minute description, accompanied by good figures, of these earliest inhabitants of what is now Scotland. They are judged to have been zodphites, akin in some of their forms to our modern Pennatuladz, and in others, it is supposed, to the Sertularia; but the relationship of these last is deemed less clear. It is, I suspect, remote in both cases. Some of my Girvan specimens of Graptolithus foliaceus,— one of the species deemed akin to the Pennatuladz, — exhibit the central axis prolonged beyond its double row of cells, but, unlike our common sea-pen (Pennatula phosphorea), always at the upper end; and in specimens of Graptolithus tenuis, derived from the same neighborhood, and which is one of the species regarded as akin to the Sertularia, though some of the stems seem fringed on both sides with short, oblique, alternate cells, somewhat 28 326 ON THE ANCIENT GRAUWACKE resembling those of the common Sertularia halecina, we find, on examination, that they are in reality restricted to one side, and that the apparent fringes of the other are but mere notches in the stem. In one respect, however, judging from the rocks in which we usually find them, these organisms must have re- sembled the sea-pens. ‘There is a deep submarine ravine, which runs for some distance along one of the middle reaches of the Moray Frith, and at the steep edges of which the water deepens suddenly from about twelve to about thirty fathoms. The bottom on either side is gravelly and hard, whereas the ravine is charged with a dark adhesive mud, abounding in fish bones, and which intimates to the sense of smell, when brought to the surface, that there must have entered into its composition no small portion of organized matter. Now, this muddy ravine abounds with sea-pens. When not a specimen can be procured on the hard ground on either side, the fisherman’s lines, when his boat drifts across the hollow, becomes charged with them: every muscle bait brings up attached to it what the fishers of the Frith term its “sea-tree ;” so that specimens may be pro- cured by the hundred. And from the dark-colored, finely- grained, semi-bituminous character of the slates in which the graptolites chiefly occur, it is apparent that they also loved a muddy habitat. T have now to refer to but two other papers on our Scotch Grauwacke. In 1849, Professor Nicol made the Silurian deposits of the south-east of Scotland the subject of yet another very able memoir, in which he specified several new localities for its fossils, and added to the previous list at least one new fossil more,—a hitherto undescribed species of Graptolite. He bestowed much care, too, in ascertaining the general direc- tion of the beds and mountain ranges of our southern High- lands; and found it coincident, on an average drawn from no fewer than sixty-six several observations, with the direction of ROCKS OF SCOTLAND. 327 the continuous band of clay-slate which, running diagonally from sea to sea, reclines, at a steep angle on the northern side of the great Lowland valley of Scotland, against the flanks of the Grampians. And,—to conclude the purely historical por- tion of my subject, — in 1851 Sir Roderick Murchison contrib- uted a paper on the Silurian Rocks of the South of Scotland, accompanied with descriptions and figures of its characteristic fossils (especially of those of the Girvan deposits), which gives us to know, on certainly the highest authority, that whilst the true place of those apparently older members of the Lower Silurian system in Scotland which, represented by what are the first and second of Professor Sedgwick’s five great divisions, is, as the Professor himself observes, exceedingly doubtful, there can be scarce any doubt entertained, that in the deposits of Girvan and Kirkcudbright we possess the analogues and representatives of the middle and upper members of the Lower Silurians of England, and the lowest member of its Upper Silurians. For many years we have been accustomed to regard our Scotch Grauwackes and Grauwacke slates as remarkable for their paucity in organisms. Sir Roderick seems, on the contrary, to have been struck by their abundance, and the dis- tinctness with which they tell the story and exhibit the charac- ter of the deposits which inclose them. “ Fossils abound,” says this first of geologists, in describing Mulloch Hill, in the neigh- borhood of Girvan, “and for the most part their shells are so well preserved, that great was my astonishment when I cast my eye over the surfaces of this rock, and thought of the long time which had elapsed before such unequivocal and really beautiful Silurian types had been made known in Scotland.” The perusal of Sir Roderick’s paper greatly excited my curi- osity. I had visited, nearly seven years before, — guided by the descriptions of his “ Silurian System,” —the rich deposits of middle England, the Wenlock limestones and shales of 328 ON THE ANCIENT GRAUWACKE Dudley, and the Upper Ludlow and Armistry deposits of Sedgley and its neighborhood; and I was now desirous to de- cipher, under his guidance, the characters of those added pages to the geologic history of our country, from which his paper had led me to expect so much. And, availing myself of a pause in my professional labors, towards the close of last May, when the two General Assemblies were sitting, and when all our abler clergy were speaking articles in the form of speeches, and so rendering it unnecessary that I should write any, I set out, in the middle of a tract of very delightful weather, for Girvan. PART SECOND — DESCRIPTIVE. As the traveller passes downward along the valley of the Gir- van, the scenery, which had been. hitherto of a pleasing but purely Lowland character, begins to assume somewhat bolder features. ‘The hills on either side heighten into heath-covered mountain ranges ; and we remember that Scotland has its south- ern as certainly as its northern Highlands. “The mountain- ous country in the south-western borders of Scotland,” says Sir Walter Scott, in one of his novels, “is called Wieland, though totally different from the much more mountainous and more extensive district of the north, usually accented Highland.” The bottom of the valley, however, which these hills overlook, is of a soft and pastoral character, with perhaps more of wood than is common in a Lowland valley, but laid out into rich fields that recline along the lower slopes, and occupied by a quiet stream,—the Girvan. Within a few miles of where it opens into the sea, we see on its northern side, high over field and meadow, a steep prominent range of gray crags, that at once remind us of those pale-tinted mural rocks of Silurian Lime- stone which form so striking a feature in the scenery of Dudley ROCKS OF SCOTLAND. 329 and its neighborhood. And they, teo, like the English preci- pices, are composed of a Silurian Limestone, rich in fossils. Far beneath, however, and in what at first seems an inferior position, we see rising among the trees the peculiar groups of buildings, with their tall chimneys and long armed engines, that indicate a coal-producing district, and mark on a sloping hill-side, immediately over a thick wood, a slim column of smoke ascending out of the ground, — where one of the seams beneath has been burning for years, — like the smoke of some subordi- nate volcano. The valley of the Girvan forms a deep and very irregular basin, composed of Silurian rocks, but occupied for several miles by a small though not unproductive patch of the Coal Measures, which abuts unconformably against the older deposits, and lies so low in the system as to be overlaid by the Mountain Limestone. The explorer, in passing down- wards, should strike off to the north from the public road at the pleasant village of New Dailly, and rise on the hill-side, after crossing the stream and passing the Castle of Dalquhar- ran, towards the older rocks, turning first, however, by the way, to visit the coal-workings immediately above the Castle, and then, a little further on, to examine, in a chance opening among the trees, the overlying fossils of the Carboniferous Limestone. He would do well, however, if desirous to economize time, and make himself sure of seeing all in the district that is worthy of being seen, to secure the services of Mr. Alexander M‘Cal- lum, the ingenious fossil collector of Girvan, under whose guid- ance he will learn more in a day than he could perhaps find out for himself in a week. Under the intelligent direction of Mr. M‘Callum, whose services Sir Roderick Murchison has deemed worthy of special acknowledgment in his paper, I struck up from the coal-works and overlying limestone and shale, in which well known fossils, such as Productus giganteus and Producius Martini, may be detected, and reached the steep 28* 330 ON THE ANCIENT GRAUWACKE side of a rocky hill overhung by wood, in which several quar- ries have been opened, chiefly for the repair of roads. The rock, a dingy, olive-tinted sandstone, which in color and quality reminded me of some of the Caradoc sandstones, abounds in fossils, — at one place, where a deeply-shaded and rarely-trod- den road has been cut into it, chiefly corals, apparently of the species Favosites fibrosus. But though, from their light color, conspicuous on the dark rock, their state of keeping is usually bad. In a deserted quarry a little further on I found the Silurian forms in great abundance, — trilobites, orthoceratites, crinoidal stems, brachipods of the ancient genera orthis, and atrypa, a large Maclurea, a bellerophon, casts of what seem to be turritella, a large trochus, and corals of the genus petraia, and of another more composite genus which was wholly unfa- miliar to me, but which I find figured by Murchison as a nidulites. I found in this quarry a unique-looking univalve, somewhat resembling a trochus, which, if not encrusted by some mat-like coral, that has imparted to it a style of orna- ment not its own, must be new; and the remains of more tril- obites, shells, and corals, than I had at one time supposed all the Grauwacke deposits of the south of Scotland could have furnished. The place, long deserted apparently by the quar- rier, —rich in mosses and herbaceous plants that love the shade, and shut in on every side by a thick wood, — is one in which the geologist might profitably pass many hours in a sol- itude not unfavorable to thought, and rarely indeed interrupted by the foot of man. On ascending yet further towards the hill-top, and exchang- ing for the gloom of the wood a lone and somewhat dreary heath, I found the organic remains of the rock becoming still more numerous. Shells occur in beds and layers ; and not in the rich limestone beds of Dudley have I seen them lie more thickly. The stone here is of a firmer texture than in the ROCKS OF SCOTLAND. 831 quarry, and, where unweathered, of a darker gray; and, as the organisms which it encloses yield more readily on expo- sure than the surrounding matrix, they exist upon the surface as mere darkened casts, but in the fresh fracture are of a pearly white. And here, also, trilobites and corals occur among the shells. One of the old workings occurs in renew the undertaking.’ the neighborhood of the parish church, where a large block, operated upon by the saw, may still be seen in the hollow whence it was excavated. The marble here is of the dark gray variety, streaked and veined with red; but, as shown by the dressed surfaces of the mass left behind by the workers, it seems but indifferently suited to resist the action of the weather, in at least a climate such as that of Assynt. In little more than a quarter of a century the marks of the tool have almost entirely disappeared from the stone; and the sparry substance which fills the red veins has sunk considerably beneath the level of the darker portions which it traverses. At the other old working, near Ledbeg, about six miles higher up the valley, the white and gray varieties of marble occur ; and bare rounded masses may be seen from the road, rising . over the brown heath or peaty soil, like those wasted and par- tially soiled wreaths of snow that mottle at midsummer the upper zones of our higher hills. It formed a subject of com- plaint to the workmen, that the rock in this locality is so traversed by cracks and flaws, that they failed to procure from it blocks at once solid throughout, and of a size sufficient for such purposes as the manufacture of table-slabs or large chim- ney-lintels; and I have been informed that the noble proprie- irix of the county at the time,—the late Countess Duchess of Sutherland,— desirous to procure for the ancient family seat of Dunrobin a fine specimen of the native marble of the dis- trict, in the form of a chimney-piece for one of the public rooms, had to content herself, instead, from this cause, with simply a chimney-piece for one of the smaller bed-rooms. As the workings, however,— prosecuted for but a short time,— were’ but mere scratchings of the surface, it is probable that 30* 304 ON THE RED SANDSTONE, MARBLE, the masses at a greater depth are greatly more sound, and that—as is common in marbles—what occurs as a flaw within the influence of the percolating rains and penetrating frosts, may exist, removed beyond their reach, as merely a streak or vein. I find it stated by Mr. Carmichael, in an elab- orate essay on the Limestone Quarries of Scotland, which re- ceived the prize of the Highland Society, that no real marble has ever been found in this country,—no stone, at least, fitted to stand what he terms the three criteria of a true marble, viz., susceptibility of a high polish, chemical composition, and compact homogeneous structure. He states that Sutherland marble leaves three per cent. of residuum when subjected to the testing muriatic acid, whereas Carrara marble leaves none ; and that every attempt to polish Scotch marbles has shown them to be “ coarse, dissimilar in their texture, full of flaws, and of a dull lustre, even when smoothed to the best advan- tage.” To the flaws of the Assynt- marble I have already re- ferred as probably of a surface character; with regard to its chemical composition, I may venture to remark, that a marble may surely be less pure by three per cent. than that of Car- rara, and yet be a real marble notwithstanding; and with respect to the polish of which the Sutherland marble is suscep- tible, it may be enough to state, that though pieces which I attempted polishing for myself are, as may be seen from speci- mens on the Society’s table, dull in their lustre, those beside them, which I submitted to a marble cutter, bear quite as high a gloss as most of the finely variegated marbles of the Conti- nent. Above this great limestone bed there occurs a second more than equally great deposit of quartz rock, generally of a white color, but in some of its strata tinged with red. It is truly a vast formation; forming, though laid along the surface at a low angle, by much the greater part of some of the loftiest AND QUARTZ DEPOSITS OF ASSYNT. 3090 hills of the country,—such as Glasveen, Ben-Uie, and Ben- more. Even where most indurated, it is everywhere, like the resembling bed which underlies the limestone, purely mechan- ical in its structure,— an indurated, indestructible sandstone, in short ; and how very indurated and indestructible it is, the gray and hoary nakedness of the massive eminences composed of it serves very conclusively to show. It never resolves into soil: the only tracts of soil which occur over it are of a peaty character, formed simply through the agency of water, and of that low vegetation which, in a weeping climate, water can of itself sustain. Where the hill-sides, formed of this deposit, rise steeply, they admit of no covering at all,—not even of a crust of moss or of lichen; and their summits gleam white and bright to the summer sun, as if overlaid by a continuous layer of snow. I may add that, from its great durability, it bears with singular distinctness, in this region, marks of the old gla- cial action. High above the sorely weathered limestones, that retain not a trace on their surface save of the recent storms that last washed them, we find the white quartz rock still as smoothly polished, as distinctly grooved, as sharply lined and furrowed, as if the great ice-river which produced the phenom- ena had grated over them but yesterday. This upper deposit of quartz enters largely into the composition of some of the wildest and most desolate scenery of Assynt. In looking up the dark narrow lake which takes its name from the district, we see the broad bases and naked storm-riven summits of Benmore and the neighboring mountain Glasveen, forming the back-ground of the landscape. The ancient castle of Ardvyo- rack, and the old mansion-house of Eddrachalda,—both broken and roofless ruins, situated within a few hundred yards of each other,— the one shattered by lightning, the other scathed by fire,— comprise, from one interesting point of view, the only human dwellings visible in the prospect: solitude broods 306 ON THE RED SANDSTONE, MARBLE, around; the distant hills, bald, verdureless, and hoary, seem the hills of a worn-out and desolate planet, and harmonize well with the deserted ruins and the dark, lonely lake beneath; and altogether so impressive and unique is the scene, that, when I first looked upon it through the lurid haze of a stormy evening, it seemed suggestive of universal death and extinc- tion, and the lifeless old age of creation. According to the poet,— %& “The sun’s eye had a lightless glare ; The earth with age was wan.” I have already referred to M’Culloch’s supposed organisms of the bed of quartz rock which underlies the Limestone. Other supposed organisms of, as has been thought, a less equivocal character, also occur in the deposit, though I failed to detect them in this neighborhood, where, however, they are said to be found, though more rarely than on the northern coast of Sutherland, on the shores of Loch Eriboll. I visited that locality in the previous year, mainly that I might acquaint myself with what at the time were deemed the most ancient of Scottish fossils,— these supposed organisms; but though, un- der the intelligent guidance of Mr. Clark, of Eriboll, I suc- ceeded in finding them, I found the evidence regarding both their place and character of a very unsatisfactory kind. They occur not 7 situ, but in detached boulders spread over a lime- stone district, though derived apparently from the neighboring quartz rock. Unlike, however, the quartz rock of Assynt, the stone yields to the weather, in consequence, it would seem, of a considerable admixture of iron in its composition. In break- ing open a boulder, we see an oxydized, discolored ring run- ning parallel to its outer surface; and it is almost always in the discolored ring that the supposed fossils occur. They are small tubular bodies, from one to three lines in length, by about half a line in breadth, of a grayish or brownish-white AND QUARTZ DEPOSITS OF ASSYNT. 357 color, non-calecareous,— for they do not effervesce on the appli- cation of the most powerful acids,—and containing usually a brown oxydized substance in their interior. In the better, at least more distinct, specimens, they somewhat resemble frag- ments of serpula, or those segments of dentalia which one oc- casionally finds in the boulder-clay of Caithness; but they are in all probability not the remains of either annelid or mollusc, but mere effects of the oxydization, under peculiar circumstan- ces, that has discolored the matrix in which they lie. Iron pins or nails we find not unfrequently represented on sea- beaches where wrecks have taken place, or near some dock- yard or harbor, by mere oxydized tubes, hollow within; and it is not improbable that to minute, pin-like crystals of some min- eral or metal now represented by only the oxydized substance enclosed within the hollow, do these little tubes owe their ori- gin. I at least wholly failed to satisfy myself that they are organic in their character; nor do I suppose that they would be by any means the oldest of Scottish fossils, even if they were. This upper quartz rock forms the highest and most modern deposit of the marble districts. Taking the summit of Ben- more as its apex, a shaft sunk on the top of that noble hill, to the depth of perhaps eight or ten thousand feet, would pass in succession through the first or upper quartz, through the lime- stone with its associated marbles and flagstones, through the second or lower quartz, through the red sandstone, with its conglomerate beds; and finally, it would reach the uncon- formable gneiss, on which the whole system rests; for as one system must these four great deposits be regarded. Where, among the other systems of Scotland, I ask, are we to seek for its analogue and representative ? Let me first remark, that the Lower Old Red Sandstone of the east coast of Scotland, as developed in Inverness, Ross, 308 ON THE RED SANDSTONE, MARBLE, Cromarty, Sutherland, Caithness, and the Orkney Islands, con- sists of exactly the same number of great divisions as this system of the western coast. That subordinate Red Sand- stone of the western system which has been colored as Old Red in every geological map of Scotland ever published, and which extends, in an interrupted belt, from Eilan Garbh, be- yond Cape Wrath, to the Island of Rum, a distance of more than a hundred and twenty miles, corresponds in place to the Great Conglomerate of the east coast,—a deposit equally con- tinuous. The lower quartz bed which overlies the red sand- stone we find occupying exactly the place of a thick arenaceous bed, by which, on the east coast, the Great Conglomerate is overlaid. The stratified limestones, with their associated flag- stones and marbles, occupy exactly the place of the flagstones and associated limestones of Caithness, and the stratified, semi- calcareous, nodule-bearing clays of Cromarty and Ross. And, finally, we see the vast upper quartz deposit of the west occu- pying exactly the place of that thick deposit of sandstone, red, white, and yellow, which overlies the ichthyolitic flagstones and stratified clays of the east, and which may be found immensely developed in the Ward-hill of Hoy, and in the promontories of Dunnet-head, Cannisbay, and Tarbet-ness. Bed for bed, the two systems correspond not only in number, but in charac- ter and place; for even the quartz-rock beds that are altered most cannot be regarded as other than indurated beds of quart- zose sandstone. Let me further remark, that both systems rest unconformably on the same ancient rock,—the fundamental gneiss of the country. Were the systems not indentical, we would have to account for the curious fact, that, resting on ap- parently the same rock, the number, character, and relative position of their beds should also be the same,—a contingency, regarded simply as such, that would exhaust many chances. Why, for instance, should the stratified limestone and flagstone AND QUARTZ DEPOSITS OF ASSYNT. 359 bed, which occupies, in Caithness and elsewhere on the east coast, the second place in the system reckoned from the top downwards, and the third from the bottom upwards, occupy exactly the same place in Assynt, and not the place of any of the other beds? Or why should the red, rough-grained sand- stone, with its included pebbles, which occupies the first place in the system of the east coast reckoning upwards, occupy also the first place, reckoning upwards, in that of the west coast, and not the place of any of the three beds which overlie it? Or, further, why should the place of the two great sandstone beds of the east-coast system, in their position as second and fourth, be occupied in the west-coast system by arenaceous beds also second and fourth in the series, instead of being occupied by beds not arenaceous? The number of the chances against such thorough coincidences as that exemplified here, regarded simply as chances, are so great, that they will be found to occur in no two British systems not indentical. The probability, so to speak, that an unaltered system which in one locality is fossiliferous in one of its beds and non-fossilif- erous in any of the others, should in another locality be slightly altered in all its beds, and, in consequence, non-fossiliferous in them all, is a probability which must be regarded as having many more chances in its favor. Let me also remark, that the Old Red system of the east coast, which rests, as I have said, on the unconformable gneiss, is overlaid in several localities, as at Eathie and Shandwick, by beds of the Liassic formation. A wide gap occurs in the geo- logic scale in these northern districts: the Carboniferous, Per- mian, and Triassic systems, are wanting; and along the northern side of the Moray Frith generally the Old Red Sandstone forms the immediate base of the Lias,—a formation which, though it barely appears on the edge of the land there, is apparently largely developed under the bed of the German 360 ON THE RED SANDSTONE, MARBLE, Ocean. And it is worthy of being noted, as bearing on our question, that the Scottish Lias of the Atlantic holds —as at Broadford and Applecross — exactly the same relation to the Red Sandstone of the west coast that the Scottish Lias of the German Ocean does to the Old Red Sandstone of the east. Both Red Sandstone deposits may be equally described as resting on the gneiss and overlaid by the Lias. Further, I may be permitted to ask, to what system known to the geolo- gist does the Red Sandstone of our north-western coasts belong, if not to the Old Red System? Quartz rock, in all its various modifications, from a purely mechanical to-a purely crystalline stone, is of common occurrence in what are known as the primary districts; a bed of mica-schist is not unfre- quently found to pass almost imperceptibly, by gradually dropping its mica, into a true quartz rock; nor are such tran- sitions unfrequent in gneiss deposits; but the only true Red Sandstone I ever yet met in a so-called primary district is the Red Sandstone of the north-western coast of Scotland. It must represent, with the overlying quartzose and calcareous beds, an enormously extended period. Where, among the pri- mary rocks of the southern Highlands, for instance, or of any other region, shall we look for the deposits representative of the same age? Regarded as primary, it forms an intercalated period in the geologic history of this north-western tract of country, which we find unrepresented in every other district. I may add, that the quartz-rock formation, which runs diago- nally athwart the kingdom in detached patches, from Islay on the west to Banff and Aberdeen shires on the east, and which holds geologically a middle position between the gneiss and the mica-schist, is an altogether different deposit from the quartz- rock of Assynt. Both Dr. M’Culloch and the late Mr. Cunningham of Edin- burgh have stated, that a great formation of gneiss in the AND QUARTZ DEPOSITS OF ASSYNT. 361 northern parts of Sutherland is found overlaying its quartz rock ; and “this relation of quartz rock of undoubted mechani- eal origin to highly crystalline gneiss is a fact,’ remarks Professor James Nicol, in his “ Guide to the Geology of Scot- land,” “of considerable importance, though merely what might have been anticipated on the metamorphic theory.” I visited, two years ago, the district near Whiton Head, in which the sections occur that are said most thoroughly to demonstrate this superiority of the gneiss to the quartz rock, but was pre- vented from examining them by a tract of wet and very boisterous weather. There seems, however, to be a link want- ing in the evidence, in its bearing on the matter specially in hand,—the position of the Assynt deposits. The gneiss of the Moin,—a dreary waste, that stretches between Loch Eriboll and the Kyle of Tongue,— does seem to overlie the quartz rock of Whiton Head, just as in many other localities genuine gneiss holds, on the small scale, a superior position to genuine quartz rock; but it has, perhaps, still to be shown that the quartz rock here is at all of the same age, or occupies rela- tively the same place, as that which in Assynt overlies the calcareous flagstones, and forms the summit of Ben More. The nearest Red Sandstone to the gneiss and underlying quartz rock of Whiton Head is that. of Craig na Vrechan, at Tongue ; and ?¢ very decidedly overlies the gneiss. But this special point I do not profess to have examined. In conelusion let me remark, that while, from the reasons adduced, I have been led to conclude that the sandstone deposit of the west of Sutherland, with its associated quartz rock and limestone beds, represents the Lower Old Red Sand- stone of the eastern coast, I do not regard the conclusion as founded on other than merely a strong probability. In specu- lating on the true place of a deposit in which fossils do not occur, and whose stratigraphical relations to the well-known 31 362 SANDSTONE, MARBLE AND QUARTZ DEPOSITS. fossiliferous rocks cannot be traced, we must, I suspect, be con- tent with simply the probable. For my own part, the occur- rence in one of the flagstones of Strongchrubie, of the spine of a Cheiracanthus, or of a few scales of Dipterus, or of the plates of a Coccosteus, would satisfy me more thoroughly than all the arguments ever derived from mineralogical character, or from the occurrence, in a certain order, of certain peculiarly marked beds. But while I must regard the identity of the Red Sandstone of the north-eastern and north-western coasts of Scotland as by no means fully established, I am at least strongly of opinion that, as they are essentially the same in their aspect, order, and components, they represent also the same period in the history of the globe. From finding the strata of the Old Red Sandstone upturned against our primary moun- tains, and truncated atop, and from those detached fragments of the system which occur as insulated hills far in the High- land interior, I was led to conclude, many years ago, that this deposit had at one time overlaid all the primary rocks of Scotland, from the southern flanks of the Grampians to the northern boundary of Sutherland,—a conclusion to which Sir Charles Lyell, in the later editions of his “ Elements,” has approvingly referred, as coincident with views on the subject entertained by himself. And these arenaceous rocks of Assynt, with their associated limestones and marbles, I must regard as in all probability a portion of this once continuous system, hardened by metamorphic action, and which having, in consequence, resisted the denuding agencies that swept away the contemporary beds, still continue to wrap over the con- torted and broken gneisses and granites of the district, and to form its most elevated mountains. ‘It is the surviving frag- ment of a covering of which almost all the other portions have crumbled away piecemeal and disappeared. ON THE CORALS OF THE OOLITIC SYSTEM OF SCOTLAND. Corals are extremely rare in the Lias. Messrs. Milne- Edwards and Haime figure, in their elaborate “ Monograph of the British Fossil Corals,” only three Liassic species, two of them exceedingly minute Zurbinolide, and the third appar- ently a Cyathophyllum, of doubtful lineage, and very probably, it is stated, a misplaced palzozoic specimen. In the Lias of the eastern coast of Scotland, at Eathie, Nigg, and Shandwick, I have not succeeded, after the search of years, in finding a single coral; in that of Skye, however, I have been more fortunate. When examining, nearly eight years ago, the Liasic deposit at Broadford, — by far the most extensive development of this formation in Scotland, for it runs across the island from sea to - sea, in a belt from two to four miles in breadth,—I came, near the base of the formation, and at a little distance from where it leans against the so-called Old Red Sandstone of Slate, on what seemed to be a dark-colored bed of concretionary limestone, of very irregular surface, and varying from three to four feet in thickness. ‘The seeming concretionary masses were separated by what appeared to be a gray, indurated mud, which wrapped them round, concealing their true character; but where the edge of the bed was exposed to the lashings of the surf, the 364 7 ON THE CORALS OF THE hardened mud had been washed away from the calcareous nuclei; and I was not a little surprised to find, that the seem- ing concretions were massive corals, apparently all of one species, and evidently of the family Astreide. The masses in this unique bed, each a corallum, are of irregular form, but usually flat and oblong, and vary in size, from nine or ten inches in length by six or eight in breadth, to from three to four inches in length by from two or three in breadth ; while in thickness they vary from about two-and-a-half inches to less than an inch. They are thickly covered on all sides by shal- low polygonal calices, irregular both in size and form, for they vary from nearly half an inch to little more than a line and a-half in breadth, and -present from four to six sides. The dividing walls are thin, and not prominent, and each calice is traversed by from thirty to sixty septa of unequal size. A coral of the Inferior Oolite, Jsastrea tenuistriata, resembles this Tsastrea of the Lias more closely than any other fossil species yet figured ; but in the Oolitic Isastrea the calices seem to be more equal in size, and more regular in form; and, from the smallness and fragmentary character of the specimen given in the monograph, I was unable to determine whether it possessed what seemed to be the most marked characteristic of the Skye coral. In all the other species of Isastrea I have yet seen, each corallum has a determinate base, from which the coralites radiate ; whereas in the Liassic species they seem congregated together on all sides of the corallum (which appears to have had no base), like the cells in a honeycomb, and even cover wen-like protuberances on the general surface, in a way that precludes the possibility of their having radiated from any common axis or centre. The history of this coral bed of Skye, so unique in the Lias, seems to be simply as follows: In what is now the Inner Hebrides, as in other parts of the British islands, the Liassie OOLITIC SYSTEM OF SCOTLAND. 365 deposit appears to have been a muddy one, and unfavorable, in consequence, to the growth of corals. Comparatively early in _the period, however, a pause took place in the process of deposi- tion , massive corals began to form at the bottom of a clear sea; the term of rest was protracted for ages; as one corallum died, another formed over it, until at length the bed had becomie sey- eral feet thick, and then the deposit suddenly returned to its old conditions. An arenaceous mud began to be cast down, which insinuated itself into all the interstices of the bed, as the run lime of the medizval builders insinuated itself among the loose stones with which they filled up the interior portions of their walls. In circumstances so ungenial the coralites died; stratum after stratum, — not a few of these richly charged with the peculiar shells of the Lias,— ammonites, belemnites, and the characteristic gryphea incurva,— were heaped over them to the depth of several hundred feet. In a few of the overlying strata the same coral again appeared, but only in small and unfrequent specimens; and, so far as we yet know, not until the times of the Lower Oolite did corals in any considerable abundance again live in the seas of the Scottish Oolitic system. The Lower Oolite, as developed in the neighborhood of Helmsdale, on the north-eastern coast of the kingdom, is com- paratively rich in corals; at least, if species be not numerous, individual specimens are far from rare. I stated to the Society on a previous occasion, that on examining, some years since, a heap of materials collected along the beach in that neighbor- hood for burning into lime, I found that about two-thirds of the whole consisted of fossil wood, and the remaining third of a massive fossil coral. This coral, also an Isastrea, is of great size: I have seen specimens which a strong man could scarce raise from the ground ; and a specimen on the table of the Society, selected, however, rather for its fine form than for its bulk, measures full eighteen inches in length, by about a foot 31* = 366 ON THE CORALS OF THE in height. Its coralites, unlike those of the Liassic species, are very tall, extending in some specimens from the base to the upper surface. Its calices, however, are considerably smaller, and of more equal size, averaging about two lines across. ‘Their walls, which are thick and well-defined, stand up abruptly, with mural erectness, over the central depression, which varies from a line to a line and a-half in depth. They are divided by from twenty to twenty-four septa, of which, however, more than the one-half are rudimentary, leaving but from four to eight of their number to meet in the centre of the visceral cavity. In the thickness of its walls and the character of its septa, this Helmsdale Isastrea greatly resembles the /sastrea oblonga of the superior Oolite, —-a species which has been found hitherto only at Tilsbury, Wiltshire. It also resembles, however, though in aless degree, Jsastrea Richardsoni, —a coral of the Lower Oolite ; but it is possibly a new species. I have found in the same beds, though much more rarely, what seemed to be a different species of Isastrea, though closely allied to the one described. ‘The corallum, massive like that of the other, is always greatly smaller. The calices, however, are considera- bly larger, and rather thinner in the walls, which do not stand up so abruptly over the central hollows ; the septa vary from about twenty to twenty-four in number; and, where they meet in the centre, they rise in many of the calices into a protu- berant knob, like the termination of a true columella, which, however, like all the other species of the extinct genus Isastrea, it wants. A Thamnastrea is also found in the same beds, but always hitherto in a state of bad keeping. Unlike any of the Oolitic Thamnastrea figured by Messrs. Milne-Edwards and Haime, the corallum forms a mere incrustation on rocks and stones of older deposits than the Oolite, and is in some speci- mens less than half a line in thickness; the calices are small and shallow, and rather thickly set. The circular elevation, OOLITIC SYSTEM OF SCOTLAND. 367 which corresponds in this genus to the inclosing wall of Isas- trea, is very apparent in weathered specimens, but, as in Thamnastrea Lyellii, only faintly visible in those that are less worn ; while, as in the species Zhamnastrea scita, the colum- ella, if it at all possessed one, was rudimentary. I have usually found this species encrusting masses of indurated Old Red Sandstone of the flagstone formation, which must have been as ancient a looking rock in the times of the Oolite as it is now, and, when laid open by the waves along the beach, must have exhibited its ichthyolitic remains in their present state of keeping. In fine, in its rocks and stones this beach of the Oolite on what is now the eastern coast of Sutherland must have resembled that of the neighboring county of Caithness in the present day. And, as on the latter shore, as we approach the line of extreme ebb, we find rolled masses of dark gray flagstone, partially covered with pale-colored nulliporite en- crustations, there would have been found, had there been an inquiring eye to prosecute the search, similar dark gray masses, bearing their encrustations of Thamnastrea, along the old shores of the Oolite. But while the framework of the scenery must have been thus the same in both eras, and the same incalculably ancient sea must have broken in both against the same old fossil-bear- ing rocks, how entirely different must not the vital scenery of the two periods have been! Where we now see microscopic Lepralia and dwarfish Sertularia, huge Isastrea, embroidered by their flower-like polypes, and wide-spreading sheets of Thamnastrea, similarly mottled, must have gleamed white through the green depths of the water, as their existing repre- sentatives may be seen gleaming from the quiet recesses of tropical lagoons in the present day ; the ammonite and belem- nite must have careered over and around them amid the sheen of ganoidal scales ; and, where the seal now disports, the plesio- 368 ON THE CORALS OF THE saurus must have gambolled, and the goggle-eyed ichthyosaurus have darted along the tracts now traversed by the porpoise and the whale. Phe Oolitic deposits in the neighborhood of Helmsdale con- sist mainly of beds of a laminated, dark-colored, arenaceous shale (charged with ammonites and belemnites, serpula and ter- ebratula), which alternate with beds of a rough conglomerate, formed chiefly, as has been already intimated, of Old Red Sandstone materials. The corals, especially those of the genus Isastrea, occur both in the shales and the conglomerates; but it is amid the rocky masses of which the latter are composed that they seem to have grown; and in the shale we not unfrequently find them overturned, as if they had been torn with violence from their proper habitats on some stony ridge or hard bottom, and buried head-downwards in the mud. Corals, apparently of two different species, occur at Brora, but in so defective a state of keeping, that little else can be said regarding them than that they are said to belong to the genus Thecosmilia. In both, the corallum is composite and dendroid; but in the one the branches strike off at more acute angles than in the other. Its calices, too, are more rounded at their edges, and its septa less simple, more flexuous, and more prominently denticulated. So imperfect is their state of preservation, that neither species exhibits the exterior coating or epitheca characteristic of the genus. The place in the system in which they occur is higher than that of the beds at Helmsdale, but not higher than the base of the Great Oolite. And such are all the corals of the Oolitic system in Scotland with which the explorations of years have brought me acquainted. The other subject to which I purpose directing for a brief space the attention of the Society has a connection, rather in- cidental than direct, with the fossil corals of our country. On first acquainting myself, about ten years ago, with the massive OOLITIC SYSTEM OF SCOTLAND. 369 Isastrea of Helmsdale, whose resemblance to Jsastrea oblonga I have pointed out, I remarked that not a few of the larger specimens had been perforated, apparently in the recent state, by circular openings, resembling those made by our recent pho- lade, and which were usually filled up by a grayish-colored grit, identical with that which formed the uniting cement of the conglomerate in which the corals occurred. I at once attrib- uted their formation to lithodomous shells of the QOolite, and ventured to describe, in the Witness for 1843, one of my first- found specimens as “a curious fragment of coral perforated by an ancient pholas.” “The cavtiy,” I continued in my description, “exactly resembles those cavities of the existing lithodomous shells which fretted so many of the calcareous masses that lay scattered on the beach on every side of the specimen; but it is shut firmly up by the coarse gritty sandstone in which the coral itself had lain buried; and a fragment of carbonized wood lies embedded in the entrance. The cave is curtained across by a wall of masonry immensely more ancient than that which con- verted into a prison the cave of the Seven Sleepers.” Several years, however, elapsed from this time ere I succeeded in de- tecting the shells by which the cavities had been formed; and not until two years ago did I find specimens sufficiently entire to admit, and that still but imperfectly, of description. They seem to have been slim wedge-shaped bivalves, greatly resem- bling modiola, but belonging evidently to the genus Lithodomus. Sir Roderick Murchison, in his great work on the Geology of Russia, figures a Lithodomus of the Oolite of that country un- der the specific name Lithodomus Hramanus ; but it is a greatly smaller shell than the Scotch one, measuring little more than a quarter of an inch in length; whereas the Helmsdale spe- cies measures, in my larger specimens, two inches and a line in length. The Russian species, however, in proportion to its general size, seems to have been a massier and broader shell. 370 ON THE CORALS OF THE An Oolitic bivalve figured in the same work as Mytilus vicin- alis, very much resembles, both in size and form, save that it also is proportionally a massier shell, one of my smaller speci- mens. Some of the larger masses of the Helmsdale Isastrea are much fretted by this busy excavator. In one of the smaller fragments of coral on the table we find the fossil re- mains of three individual shells that had burrowed in it, and the cell of a fourth; and in the massive corallum beside it there are no fewer than four-and-twenty of these excavations now filled with grit, but doubtless once tenanted by a borer a-piece. If, as is probable, it was living at the time when the excavators were at work within it, and possessed, what is more questionable, the sense of feeling, it must have been wofully subject to stomach complaints and fits of griping in the bowels. Though these lithophagi of the Oolite occur chiefly in the corals of the period, they are not exclusively restricted to them. I have found them, though rarely, in Old Red flagstones of the conglomerate, and have ascertained that, had there been nat- uralists in those days to differ and dispute, the question might as certainly have been raised as now, whether the stone-boring shells made their way into the masses which they inhabited by mechanical means, or through the agency of some acidulous solvent. The corals, in their recent state, were of course cal- careous, and, in consequence, dissolvable by an acid; and the flagstones which the borers usually selected also contain a good deal of calcareous earth; but their prevailing material is so largely aluminous and quartzose, that it seems scarce likely that a mere solvent could have perforated them. I venture in conclusion, two general remarks. First, the corals of the Oolitic system in Scotland, massive in size, and occurring in some localities in very considerable abundance, resemble in these respects no recent corals of the higher lati- tudes. The corals of the higher latitudes are, we find, either OOLITIC SYSTEM OF SCOTLAND. 871 diminutive or few. Groups of large corals are characteristic of the intertropical seas, or at least of seas of either hemisphere that border on the tropics. I have seen an Isastrea of Helms- dale that measured about two feet and a half in length by about eighteen inches in breadth, and which, as I have said, a strong man could scarce raise from the ground; and arborescent masses of Thecosmila annularis have been found in the Coral Rag of England, that measured from a foot and a-half to two feet in height. There occur no such corals now in seas which lie be- tween the fiftieth and sixtieth degrees of latitude, whether to the south or north of the equator. And though I would not found much on one or two exceptional species, I do think that, seeing we would at once pronounce a similar group of re- cent corals to be the product of seas greatly warmer than our own, we might, I think, be permitted to infer, — reasoning from what we know, —that the Oolitic seas of what is now Scotland were of a higher temperature than our Scottish seas of the present day; and that, in short, in the corals of the Scotch Oolite we have one of many evidences that in this early period these northern regions enjoyed a greatly more genial climate than they do now. I may add, however, that in the same beds, mingled with fronds of cycas and zamia, and the stems of gigantic horsetails,—all now the productions of a warm cli- mate, and that seem to give evidence to the same fact as the corals, — there occur numerous fragments, and occasionally whole trunks, of fossil pines, that apparently testify, by their annual rings of small size, indicative of slow growth, to a cli- mate as ungenial and severe as that of Sweden or Norway. The evidence which they yield can, however, be scarce said to be of a conflicting character with that of the corals and the cycadites. If the Oolitic land was a lofty one, a very few miles might have served to separate a genial from a severe climate ; and the pines might have been brought down by rivers from Bic ON THE CORALS OF THE an elevated and bleak interior, as different in its temperature and productions from the sea-coast, as the pine-covered sides of the Alps, where they rise towards the snow line, are differ- ent in their temperature and productions from the rich vine- bearing valleys which they overlook. I remark, in the second place, that the occurrence in the Oolite of those boring shells of which I have laid specimens before the Society is not without interest, as in some measure illustrative of that unity of plan on which the Creator has wrought in all the geologic periods, and which serves so strik- ingly to indicate the identity of the Worker. Those four mas- ter ideas embodied in the animal kingdom which furnished Cuvier with his principles of classification, each forming the centre of a great division, seem to have been equally the master ideas of all the geologic creations. So far as we know, animal life existed at all times, when it existed at all, in its four master types, and no more; and these in the Oolitic ages, — life radi- ating round a centre, as in the Isastrea, — life lodged within a series of rings, as in the annelids and the crustacea, — life combined with a duality of corresponding parts, as in the cut- tle-fishes and the clams, — and life associated with a brain and vertebral column, as in fishes and reptiles,— were not less prominently developed than now. Had a Cuvier then existed to write the history of animated nature, the various classes would have occupied very different proportional spaces in his “ Animal Kingdom ” from that occupied by those of the present time ; but the master divisions, — vertebrata, mollusca, articu- lata, and radiata, — would have been the same. For of all the creations, I repeat, in the leading idea there has been no change. Two of these we find exemplified before us in single specimens, — those in which the lithodomi lie sepultured in cavities hollowed in Isastrea; and we are enabled to trace this identity of idea into yet minuter ramifications, when we thus OOLITIC SYSTEM OF SCOTLAND. 373 find that, along these old Oolitic shores of Scotland, as along the shores of our country in the present day, the rocks were inhabited by their hermit shells, — the Hdomites of the mollus- cous world, as a modern naturalist poetically terms them, — that spent silent lives in excavating for themselves cells in the stone, in which they watched in patience for the food brought them by wavelet and current, and which, like the cells of so many other anchorites and recluses, were ultimately to prove their sepulchres. The idea that stones and rocks should be thus inhabited is an idea old as eternity: it must have had be- ing as an idea ere the existence of rock, or coral, or molluscous life; for He from whom it emanated saw the end from the beginning, and makes no accessions to his fund of thought; and to be permitted thus to trace it towards its source, and to detect it embodied in a creation whose last surviving organism perished myriads of ages ago, enables us in some degree to conceive of the fact, and to conceive also of the fixed character, of that Master Existence, the Author of all, who said, in a long pos- terior age, when revealing Himself to man, “I am the Lord; I change not.” 32 THE FOSSILIFEROUS DEPOSITS OF SCOTLAND. Tue following address was read by Mr. Mruuer, on his resign- ing the President’s Chair of the Society : — GENTLEMEN, —It is customary for the retiring President, in taking leave of the chair, to address the members on some general subject connected with the objects which our Society has been instituted to carry out; and in conforming to the practice, I shall take the liberty of stating, as briefly as possi- ble, the results at which I have arrived, in recently arranging the specimens of a collection perhaps more adequately repre- sentative of the Geology of Scotland than any other that has yet been made. There are other collections which, though more partial in their character, excel it in particular depart- ments; but none which I have yet seen sweep so completely the entire seale of our Scottish formations; and as such of its divisions as are most defective indicate, negatively at least, by the blanks on their partially filled shelves, the deposits on which we have still to direct our energies, it may be well that your attention should be specially called to these, as fields in which work has still to be done, and in which the reward of fresh and interesting discovery awaits the patient laborer. J am not sure THE FOSSILIFEROUS DEPOSITS OF SCOTLAND. 379 that we need warmly congratulate ourselves on the fact,— but certainly a fact it is,— that the geologic section of our Society is in no danger of exhausting its work at home for a very consid- erable time tocome. We have still much to do in acquainting ourselves with the extinct productions of our country in those remote pre-Adamic periods of its history when it existed, now as a group of Pleistocene islands,— now as a land covered by the Oolitic forests, and washed by seas tenanted by the ammo- nite and the nautilus,— now, ere yet its existing mountains had arisen from the abyss, as a series of dark plains and steaming morasses, brown with the rank and dusky vegetation of the Carboniferous period,— now as an extended sea-bottom, muddy or arenaceous, swum over by the strange ganoids of the Old - Red Sandstone, and with here and there a minute island, green with, so far as it is yet known, the earliest ferns and the oldest trees,— and now as the bottom of a sea profounder still,—a sea without visible shore, inhabited by the minute brachipods and unique crustaceans of the earlier Silurian ages. That history of Scotland which, omitting the human period as too modern, stretches backwards from the recent shells of the old- coast line to the olenus and lingula beds of Girvan, and which is still unwritten, save in the rocks, will give our younger members work enough thoroughly to decipher and transcribe for perhaps a quarter of a century to come. On first setting myself, about fourteen years ago, to add to my collection a set of Silurian fossils, I had to content myself with specimens derived chiefly from England and America. All the organisms detected at that time in the great Silurian deposits of Scotland,— though Sir James Hall had found shells in the Wrae Hill limestone nearly half a century previous, and Mr. Charles Maclaren in the Silurians of the Pentlands at least six years previous;— would scarce have half-filled a single shelf. Now, however, our old obstinate Grauwackes 376 THE FOSSILIFEROUS are yielding their organisms,— Dumfries, Galloway, and Peebles- shire their graptolites, and Girvan and its neighborhood its tri- lobites and its shells. The shores of the Solway near Kirkcud- bright are furnishing, though still inadequately, their fossils of the Upper Silurian; and it seems not improbable that the Gir- van locality may be yet found to furnish characteristic speci- mens of all the various deposits of the Lower Silurian, from those emphatically ancient beds beneath which only a single organism has yet been detected, up to those superior deposits of the Lower division in which the Dudley Trilobite (Caly- mene Blumenbachit) occurs, and which Sir Roderick Murchi- son regards as occupying the same, or nearly the same, horizon as the Upper Caradoc. I am informed by our accomplished brother member, Professor Wyville Thomson, that in a recent visit to Girvan, he found, in an ancient Conglomerate to the south of the town, specimens of a small lingula and olenus, identical, so far as he could judge from their state of keeping, with the fossils of unquestionably the same genera which mark, in the sister kingdom, the primeval zone of life. It would be interesting to find in our own country, as has already been found in North America, England, and Scandinavia, a base line,— representative, apparently, of the earliest age of organ- ized being,— from whence to commence the geologic history of what our fathers used to term, without quite knowing all that was implied in the epithet, o/d Scotland. But whether this base line of the oldest fossiliferous system be found in our country or no, the system itself, especially as developed within the southern and western districts, must be held to possess a peculiar interest, from the circumstance that, though some of its more curious fossils have not yet been found in the amply developed and well-sought Silurians of England, they occur in those of Bohemia on the one hand, and of Canada West and the United States on the other. They thus form in the gen- DEPOSITS OF SCOTLAND. 377 eral history of the globe a connecting link between deposits considerably more than four thousand miles apart. I may add that, during the last few years, I have been able to place in my little museum, beside its Silurian fossils of America and Eng- land, a not less ample collection of the Silurian fossils of our own country, which, though still inadequate, contains several rare organisms, with which, so far as is yet known, the English deposits could not have supplied me. Still, however, much remains to be done in this curious field. I was shown only a few weeks ago, by a gentleman from the neighborhood of Les- mahagow, a fossil crustacean, derived, he said, from the Grau- wacke of that neighborhood, which, so far as I could judge, in its rather indifferent state of preservation, is new to Scotland, and which very considerably resembles that Hymenocaris of North Wales which Sir Roderick describes in his “ Siluria” as a true primordial fossil. And where the crustacean occurs, it is more than probable that other organisms will yet be found. The Lower Old Red Sandstone of Scotland has been more thoroughly wrought out than perhaps any of the other forma- tions of the country, and it occupies, in consequence, a larger space in my collection. I have not yet found fossils in the Great Conglomerate, which forms its base; nor, perhaps, could organisms, save of the most robust structure, be expected in a rock formed of great water-rolled pebbles, which, ere they could have assumed their present rounded forms, must have been tossed by the storms of ages. In the pebbles themselves, how- ever, we have curious glimpses afforded us of the old metamor- phic rocks of Scotland; which were, we find, considerably different in the group from the rocks of similar origin that in the present age of the world compose our great Highland nu- cleus. The schistose gneisses, now the prevailing metamorphic rocks of the kingdom,—for they occupy nearly ten thousand square miles of its area,—were then but feebly developed, 32* 378 THE FOSSILIFEROUS compared with its many-colored porphyries, its granites, and its quartz-rocks. In the Forfarshire Conglomerate, the prevailing rocks are hard porphyries, of an -infinite variety of hue, and indistinguishable in their composition from the porphyries of Ben Nevis and Glencoe; in the Conglomerate of Cromarty and Ross, a decaying granite, red like that of Peterhead, but as finely grained as that of Aberdeen, blent with red quartz- rock and red granitic gneiss, is the prevailing stone; in that of Orkney, as exhibited in the neighborhood of Stromness, the prevailing rock is also a red granite, somewhat larger in its grain, and more durable, than the Cromarty one. The stone which composes many of these inclosed pebbles can no longer be found in sttw; and a good representative collection of at least the classes of the rocks which they exemplify would serve to show the nature of the framework of that ancient unknown land to whose existence the Great Conglomerate bears evi- dence; and which —as over many thousand square miles the pebbles present the worn and rolled character—must have been exposed, zone after zone, during a protracted period of gradual depression, to the incessant wear of the ocean. ‘The Conglomerate seems to have been exposed in an after period to intense heat. We find many of its hardest pebbles bent and indented, as if they had been reduced to the consistency of dough, or distorted by miniature faults, which scored their lines of fracture with the ordinary slicken-sided markings, when they were in a state viscid enough to re-unite. The fact would have been deemed a great one during the heat of the controversy waged in this city between the antagonistic schools of Hutton and Werner; but it is not less interesting now, when it can be looked at more quietly ; and so I have given to a series of the pebbles which illustrate it a place in my collection. Above the upper beds of the Great Conglomerate, at distan- ces varying from forty to a hundred and sixty feet, the fishes DEPOSITS OF SCOTLAND. 379 of the Lower Old Red Sandstone appear,—curious, as the most ancient ganoids known to the geologist, and further, from the circumstance that, while the still older placoids of the Up- per Silurian system exist merely as detached teeth, spines, and shagreen points, these Old Red fishes exhibit in the better specimens the entire outline of the original animals, with not a few of their anatomical peculiarities. It is from this formation that our knowledge of the oldest skulls, of the oldest vertebral columns, and of the oldest pelvic and thoracic arches, anywhere preserved, is to be derived. With the fish we sometimes find associated, though not often, specimens illustrative of what seems to be our most ancient terrestrial F lora,— club-mosses, — reed-like casts and impressions, streaked longitudinally, like the interior of the calamite, but apparently without joints,— what appear to be ferns,— and, in at least one unique specimen, | a true wood of the araucarian family,—the oldest which has yet presented its structure to the microscope. In some locali- ties, such as Cromarty, Thurso, and perhaps Moray, the various ichthyic species of the formation seem to have been pretty nearly ascertained and collected: for several years I have not succeeded in discovering from the several Cromarty deposits a single new species; and my friend Mr. Dick, though permanently resident on the spot, has had a similar experience at Thurso. Species of the rarer kinds may, however, long elude very assiduous search, and yet turn up at last; and in the course of the present twelvemonth I have received from a tract of shore near Cromarty, which I have walked over many hundred times, an ichthyic species,— the Diplacanthus crassis- pinus,— of which my collection had possessed no previous specimen. I owe it to the kindness of Miss Catherine Allar- dyce,— a lady who, to a minute knowledge of not a few other branches of natural science, adds an intimate acquaintance _with the fossils of our northern formations, and whose skill in 380 THE FOSSILIFEROUS zoophytology the late lamented Dr. Landsborough has ac- knowledged in his interesting “ History of British Zodphytes.” Further, it is worthy of remark that, just as the naturalist can- not now acquaint himself with all the animals or plants of Scotland in any single locality, so all the fossil species of any one formation cannot be exhausted in any one limited field or district, but must be sought for in various districts ere the list can be regarded as tolerably complete. The old Devonian spe- cies of fishes, like those of the present day, seem to have had their favorite haunts and feeding or spawning grounds, and must now be sought for where they congregated of old. The Diplacanthus striatus, for instance, is one of the commonest of the Cromarty Old Red fishes, and the Dipterus and Asterolepis very rare; whereas at Thurso, Mr. Dick, after years of explo- ration, never found a single spine of Diplacanthus, but not a few noble specimens of Asterolepis, and finely preserved skulls and jaws of Dipterus. And in a neigboring locality, Bannis- kirk, Dipterus is the prevailing fish, and may be found by scores. Again, the Old Red of Caithness generally is poor in specimens of Pterichthys,— the rocks of Thurso have not yet furnished a single specimen; whereas in those of Moray the genus is not rare; and in a quarry a few miles to the north- east of Stromness it is more abundant than any of its contem- poraries. I mention these facts to show how necessary it is to the Palzontologist who sets himself to exhaust the organisms of a formation within even a single country, that he should either be a sedulous traveller, or have a widely-located circle of friends engaged with him as fellow-laborers in the work. No ichthyic species of this Lower formation of the old Red Sandstone has yet been detected in Scotland to the south of the Grampians. In the great belt of Old Red which traverses the island diagonally, from the coasts of Kincardine and Forfar- shire on the east, to those of Renfrew and Ayr on the west, DEPOSITS OF SCOTLAND. 381 the fossils, — restricted very much to the gray sandstones of the deposit,—are of an entirely different group. Here, as in the immensely developed Cornstones of England, the pre- vailing and most characteristic organism is the Cephalaspi's ; which has now been found in Forfar and Kincardineshires by Sir Charles Lyell, Mr. Webster, and others; in Sterlingshire by our ingenious brother member Mr. Alexander Bryson; and in Ayr by the late Dr. Brown of Longfine ;—all the specimens, however, in the same gray beds of micaceous sandstone, repre- sented by what is known as the Arbroath pavement, which, like the red deposits that lie over and under them, run from side to side of the kingdom. While the fossils of the Lower Old Red Sandstone are more adequately represented in my collection than those of any other Scottish formation, the fos- sils of this Middle Old Red are almost the least adequately represented. And in this respect it resembles every other col- lection yet made, except that of Mr. Webster, now, I under- stand, in the possession of Lord Kinnaird. There is perhaps no Scottish formation in which the Palontologist has still so much to do as in this Middle Old Red Sandstone. Our respec- ted President Dr. Fleming called attention, a full quarter of a century ago, to some of its plants, and again took up the sub- ject no further back than last year, in an interesting paper read before our Society; and Agassiz has figured and described some of its fishes, and more partially and incidentally, at least one of its crustaceans. But much still remains to be done. From what I have seen of Mr. Webster’s collection, I should infer that materials have been already accumulated sufficient for the restoration of its great crustacean, —one of the most gigantic of its family, whether recent or extinct; and, as the Den of Balruddery has furnished of itself nearly a hundred specimens of Cephalaspis (still a comparatively rare ichthyo- lite elsewhere), most of which are now in the hands of Lord 382 THE FOSSILIFEROUS Kinnaird, it would be well that some ichthyologist had access to the collection, in order to determine whether in Scotland, as in England, we have more than one species of this singular genus. Dr. Fleming found in this Middle Old Red formation an apparent fern, with kidney-shaped leaflets; and it yielded several years ago, near Clockbriggs, in Forfarshire, a large spe- cimen of Lepidodendron, which exhibits the internal structure. I owe a fragment of this fossil to an intelligent geologist, Mr. William Miller, banker, Dundee ; but so imperfect is its state of preservation, that, though it presents to the microscope the large irregularly-polygonal cells of its genus, it bears none of the nicer specific marks which might serve to distinguish it from the several greatly more modern species which occur in the Coal Measures. Above this Middle formation lies the Upper Old Red Sand- stone, with its peculiar group of organisms, chiefly fishes. And of it, too, much remains to be known. Save that it has not yet produced a Coccosteus,—a genus which seems restricted to the oldest ichthyic group of the system,—its fishes more resemble those of the Lower than of the Middle Old Red. It has its three species of Pierichthys, its Diplopterus, and appar- ently its Dipterus ; and its Celacanths, chiefly of the Holopty- chian genus, represent not inadequately the Celacanths of the genera Asterolepis and Glyptolepis, which occur chiefly, though not exclusively, in the Lower formation. The two formations appear, however, to have no species in common. In looking over the fine collection of Mr. Patrick Duff, derived chiefly from the Scat Craig, in the neighborhood of Elgin, I found only a single ill-preserved gill-cover,— seemingly that of a Dipterus, — which I could not at once determine to be specifi- cally different from aught produced by the inferior deposit. Rocks of this Upper formation have not yet been detected in Scotland to the north of the Moray Frith ; and its richest Brit- DEPOSITS OF SCOTLAND. 383 ish deposits are to be found in Moray, Perthshire, Fife, Ber- wickshire, and Ayr. In the collection of fishes from Dura Den, exhibited four years ago before the British Association, then assembled at Edinburgh, I saw several Celacanths that have not yet been described; and a good deal has still to be done in fixing and restricting some of the genera of the forma- tion already named and figured. It will be found, for instance, that Agassiz’s genus Placothorax, and his two species Coccos- teus maximus and Pterichthys major, will ultimately all resolve themselves into the latter species alone, — Pterichthys major ; of which, by the way, vast numbers have recently been found, though in a broken state, in the Upper Old Red Sandstone of the “Yieads of Ayr.” We may of course expect, however, to see more species and genera added to the group than subtracted from it. I must mention, ere concluding this part of my sub- ject, a curious fact connected with the flora of the formation. When visiting last spring the Museum of Economic Geology in Jermyn-street, under the friendly guidance of the late Pro- fessor Edward Forbes, he pointed out to me an interesting group of plants, in a fine state of keeping, which had been derived from the Old Red Sandstone of Ireland, The genera seemed identical with those of the Coal Measures, but all the species were different. I marked, among the others, an ele- gant Cyclopterus, — Cyclopterus Hibernicus, — of which Sir Roderick Murchison figures a single pinna in his recently pub- lished “ Siluria.” The Professor also introduced me to the only ichthyic organism that had been found in the Irish deposit, with the plants, a ganoidal fish, apparently a Celacanth, and very much of the type of those of the Upper formation, though I failed to identify the species with any of those already known, Professor Forbes, in return, visited my collection here only a few weeks ago; and, in a fern of this Upper deposit, laid open by our ingenious member, Mr. John Stewart, in Prestonhaugh 384 THE FOSSILIFEROUS quarry near Dunse, he recognized his Irish Cyclopterus. As Mr. Stewart found the Scotch specimen associated with plates of Pterichthys major and scales of Holoptychius Nobilissimus,— two of the most characteristic ichthyolites of the Upper forma- tion, — there can be no hesitation in assigning to it its place in the scale ; and, of course, its position as an Upper Old Red fossil in Scotland may be held to determine that of the inter- esting group to which it is found to belong on the Irish side of the channel. With respect to the true place of that deposit of pale quart- zose sandstone which overlies the Upper Old Red in Moray, and has become famous in geology for its reptilian foot-tracks, its unique Sfagonolepis, and its well-marked curious little reptile the Zelerpeton Elginense, we are not yet provided with any determining evidence. No species common to the Upper Old Red and this rock has yet been discovered in either deposit. Mr. Patrick Duff, to whose labors we owe both the Stagono- lepis and the Telerpeton, is in possession (with the exception of the reptilian foot-prints detected by Captain Brickendon) of all the few fossils found in the superior rock, and of a very ample collection of those of the underlying one; but I have seen nothing in the two sets in the least resembling each other. The late Dr. Mantell supposed, indeed, he had traced a con- siderable resemblance between the scales of Stagonolepis and those of a ganoid of Dura Den,—the Glyptopomus. They bear, however, a much closer resemblance to the scales of the JZys- triosaurus Muenstere, a reptile of the Lias of Munich, ef which I exhibited a good print to this Society about three years ago, the use of which I owed to the kindness of Sir Charles Lyell. When visiting a quarry in this northern deposit sev- eral years since, I was informed by the workmen that they frequently came upon foot-tracks like those found by Captain Brickendon. The only other remains of the deposit is that of DEPOSITS OF SCOTLAND. 385 the reptile Telerpeton ; and, when we take into account the fact that in this northern locality outliers of the Lias and Oolite are not unfrequently found resting conformably on the Old Red Sandstone, and that the vertebrate organisms of these deposits are preponderatingly reptilian, it seems at least as probable that it belongs to that Secondary period of the world’s history during which reptiles were abundant, as to that middle Palao- zoic period during which, though fishes were largely developed, reptiles were exceedingly rare. But the final determination of the point must be regarded as awaiting the researches of the future. The Carboniferous deposits in Scotland have, from their economic importance, been longer wrought than those of any of its other systems, and yet all their fossils, animal and vege- table, are still far from being adequately known. During the last few years I have found the remains of both plants and ani- mals in Carboniferous deposits, not many miles removed from our Scottish capital, that have still to be figured and named ; and much remains to be done in the work of restoring from suites of specimens organisms of the system, both vegetable and animal, already known in part. It is only within the last two or three years that trace of reptiles has been detected in our Scotch Coal Measures. The Prabatrachus colet of Owen has been found in the coal-field near Carluke ; and the foot- prints of a much larger reptile detected in our Dalkeith coal- field by Mr. Henry Cadell, the experienced and intelligent mineral surveyor of his Grace the Duke of Buccleuch. I refer to these interesting facts to indicate the direction in which there is encouragement to press our researches. We have hitherto had little experience in Scotland of that style of exhaustive research of which the Palzontographical Society of England is presenting us with so admirable an example. Curiously enough, however, old David Ure, one of our earliest collectors 33 386 THE FOSSILIFEROUS of the carboniferous fossils, gave, in his “ Natural History of Rutherglen,” published more than sixty years ago, an example of this exhaustive style, perhaps as complete as was possible at the time. He seems to have figured, and, after a sort, des- cribed, every fossil of both the Coal and the Mountain Lime- stone, which he succeeded in disinterring during what, in an age in which there were few to sympathize in his labors, must have been a very sedulous course of research. The magnifi- cent sections of our neighborhood give peculiar facilities in ex- ploring the Coal Measures and their contents, — facilities which geologists who have resided for a season amid the soil-covered flats of central England would well know how to appreciate. There are few finer sections of the Coal deposits anywhere in Britain than those laid open along the shores of Granton, Mus- selburgh, and Prestonpans; and the section of the Mountain Limestone exposed in the ravine at Dryden is, so far as I have yet seen, the most extensive in Scotland. By those who hold, as is done by some of the geologists of our western capital, that this formation is wanting as a base to the Scottish Coal-field, a visit to this section might be found very instructive. It does not exhibit that great thickness of limestone for which the cor- responding formation in England is so remarkable, but presents, for several hundred feet together, in its encrinal bands, inter- calated amid shales and sandstone, evidence of a marine origin; and its upper calcareous beds, laden with spirifers and producta, and of very considerable thickness, show that a tolerably pro- found sea must have covered the field shortly ere the formation of our older beds of workable coal. My collection contains no specimens of the New Red Sand- stone of Scotland,—the scene of those discoveries of the late Dr. Duncan of Ruthwell from which that division of geologie science known as Ichnology took its rise. Nor are at least sets of its specimens to be found in any of the Scotch museums DEPOSITS OF SCOTLAND. 387 I have yet seen; but as Sir William Jardine is understood to be still engaged in figuring and describing its various footprints, —the only traces of former existence which it has been found to contain, — we bid fair to be acquainted, at no distant date, with all that it produces. It could be wished, however, that we had the result of Sir William’s labors conveyed to us in that cheap but yet adequate form of outline engraving in which Pro- fessor Hitchcock has figured the foot-tracks, reptilian or orni- thologic, of the New Red Sandstones of the Connecticut. In the Lias and Oolite of Scotland a good deal still remains to be accomplished. Some of their richest deposits lie scat- tered among the inner Hebrides, and along lochs and creeks of the Western Highlands, rarely visited by the tourist, and far from inns; and this difficulty of access has served to lock up in these solitudes many a curious fossil, that may be regarded as held in safe keeping, to reward the enterprise of our younger geologists. My collection contains not a few curious specimens, derived from these Hebridean recesses during a desultory voy- age in the Free Church yacht Betsey, made about ten years ago, — reptilian remains, fossil wood, and the teeth of placoidal fishes from the Oolite of Eigg, and pinnae, ammonites, and massive corals from the Lias of Pabba and Skye. It may serve to show that we are no more to argue an entire identity of the Oolitic deposits of Scotland with those of England, than of its Silurian with the Silurians of that country, — that corals, which are of exceeding rarity and minute size in the English Lias, form entire beds of great extent and several feet in thick- ness in the Lias of Skye. I can, however, only indicate the locale of some of the deposits in which these rarities may be found, —simply referring, in the passing, to the localities already indicated by Sir Roderick Murchison in his earlier papers, — such as the Oolites in the neighborhood of Portree, the Oolitic beds of Raza, and the Liassic strata of Applecross; as also to 388 THE FOSSILIFEROUS the curious fresh-water or estuary deposit of Loch Staffin, des- cribed in the “ Geological Journal” for 1851, by the late Pro- fessor Edward Forbes. ‘There is a patch of Lias on the shores of Loch Aline, exceedingly rich in some of the characteristic organisms of the formation, which I would fain have examined with some care, but wanted the necessary opportunity. From deposits partially overflown by the Trap of Mull, and which crop out along the eastern shores of that Island, I have exhumed specimens that bear in the group an Oolitic aspect; and in spending a few hours in the Island of Pabba, when the yacht, my home for the time, was cruising in the offing, I found in it such promise of a rich fossil harvest, that when a young friend, —Mr. Archibald Geikie,—requested me last year to point out to him some one or two centres from which I thought he might best acquaint himself with our Scottish Lias of the west- ern coast, 1 ventured to recommend the latter island, and the southern portion of the neighboring Bay of Broadford, as two of the most promising. Mr. Geikie,—in whom our Society may, I trust, recognize a future member, — found his way to Pabba, — introduced himself to the sole family resident on the island, — slept, I believe, in a barn,— lived on potatoes and milk, —and brought away with him an interesting suite of fos- sils. And after this manner must the Hebrides,and the Western Highlands be explored. ‘The Oolitic beds of the eastern coast are considerably more accessible than those of the west. The Lias of Eathie, near Cromarty, is one of the richest deposits in animal remains which I have anywhere seen; and it has yielded several unique fossils, — such as the broad-spiked leaf- lets of some ancient tree attached to a stem of a twelvemonth’s growth, that yields to the microscope, in a prepared section, the a well-marked coniferous tissue, — cones of unique structure, frond of Zamia of an undescribed species, — numerous am- monites in a fine state of preservation, —and one of the com- DEPOSITS OF SCOTLAND. 389 pletest sets of Liassic belemnites yet collected. What have been deemed corresponding deposits, which, however, I am disposed to refer to a higher horizon, occur in the neighborhood of the northern Sutor; and near the base of one of these, at Caanrie, there is a seam of coal or lignite very much resembling that of Brora, and flanked by a bed of fresh water shells and Perna, the last identical in species, so far as I have been able to deter- mine the point, with that of the Perna bed described by the late Mr. Robertson of Woodside as flanking the Brora seam. Above the coal there occurs a rubbly stratum, also like one at Brora, charged with vast numbers of the Belemnite sulcatus ; and in an upper stratum I found a well-marked specimen of Ammonites perarmatus ; likewise a species of the Brora coal- field. In short, I am disposed to hold, — both from the identity of many of its fossils, and its general appearance, — that this supposed Liassic deposit is in reality an Oolitic one, and that its coal occupies a horizon not much removed from that of the coal at Brora. J may here mention, that the Lias of Eathie was the scene, only two years ago, of a disastrous coal-boring speculation, on which much good money was expended. The unlucky speculator, —an industrious and respectable man, whom I would fain have dissuaded from an undertaking so hopeless, but who, as he had no faith in geology, simply thanked me for my advice, and wrought on,—dug a wide pit in the Liassic shales, to the depth of more than a hundred feet, and found in abundance ammonites and belemnites, with a few well-preserved vertebral joints of Ichthyosaurus, and unfortunately here and there fragments of cone-bearing trees, with their trunks con- verted into jet, but, of course, no coal. The hole was made large and deep enough to prove the sepulchre of several hun- dred pounds; but I console myself by reflecting that the inev- itable expense of the excavating operations was incurred in defiance of all that I could say; and I would now urge on my 33* 390 THE FOSSILIFEROUS friends the anti-geologists, that they should much rather attempt making shillings by lecturing against the science, than run the risk of losing the shillings already made by becoming mzners in its despite. The Oolite of Sutherland, — famous for containing the only seam of coal in this formation, at least in Britain, which could have been wrought for years without much positive loss, — was elaborately described many years ago by Sir Roderick Murchi- son, in a memoir that gave rich earnest of his after contribu- tions to geologic science. It is impossible, however, to exhaust a great formation otherwise than slowly ; and not a few fossils have been added of late years to the list appended to Sir Rod- erick’s memoir. It is from the vegetable organisms of this deposit that we can now form our most adequate conceptions of the Oolitic Flora of Scotland. As in England and America, it had its numerous cycadacexw, — its ferns of simple undivided frond, unique in their venation, but resembling in their forms the hart’s-tongue genus (Scolopendra), its thuyites, its pines; and though they occupied a scarce appreciable space in the group, its dicotyledonous plants. When, after glancing over some of the vegetable productions of the system, such as its cyca- dace, now restricted to the warmer climates, or over its mas- sive corals, which attained to a size seldom rivalled in the pres- ent state of things, save in the intertropical seas, I have then examined some of its woods externally gnarled, and stunted, and marked internally by minute annual rings, as small as those of a Scotch fir or Norwegian pine that had grown on some exposed hill-side, it has occurred to me that some of the Oolitic districts in what is now Scotland must have had their lofty mountain ranges, which, while a genial climate prevailed at their bases, rose, mayhap, to nearly the snow-line, and bore on their bleak ridges the stunted slow-growing trees. The frame- work of this ancient land was composed —as we learn from DEPOSITS OF SCOTLAND. 391 its conglomerates, and in some instances from the fragments of rock still locked fast amid the roots of its trees —of Old Red flagstones, identical with those of Caithness, and evidently bear- ing at the time marks of as high an antiquity as they do now. Many of these flagstone masses, sorely water-rolled, occur in an Oolitic paste; and we find in strange neighborhoods shells of the Oolite inclosed in the paste, and fishes of the Old Red in the pebbles which it envelops. I have found a pebble which bore inside an Old Red Osteolepis encrusted with an Oolitic Thamnastrea ; and another pebble occupied by an Old Red fucoid that was partially perforated by an Oolitic lithodomus shell. It is surely not uninteresting thus to catch, as it were, glimpses, through the high antiquity of a Secondary age, of a Paleozoic age vastly more ancient still,—to see long with- drawing vistas opening, through the remote times of the Oolite, into the incalculably more remote times of the Lower Old Red Sandstone. Those outliers of the Weald, or rather of a fresh-water or estuary Oolite, which occur in Morayshire, are adequately rep- resented in only a few local collections, — the completest set of these fossils which I have yet seen being that in the possession of Mr. Patrick Duff of Elgin, who, living in the immediate neighborhood of the rich deposits at Linksfield, and animated by an ever fresh zeal for the interests of natural science, has been concentrating his exertions for years on these detached deposits, and on the not less rich formations of the Old Red Sandstone on which they rest. Their organisms, — constitut- ing a link in the geologic history of Scotland which no other locality has yet supplied, — consist of the dorsal spines of a new species of Hybodus,— the teeth of an Acrodus and Spen- onchus,—the scales, and, at least in one instance, an entire specimen, of a Lepidotus, which Agassiz has identified as the Lepidotus minor of the English Weald, — bones and teeth of 392 THE FOSSILIFEROUS Plesiosaurus, a well-marked chelonian femur, — shells, both marine and fresh-water, such as Unio Planorbis Paludina, — what seem to be an Astarte and a small Ostrea,— and whole strata formed of a minute Cyprus. ‘There are appearances connected with the Linksfield deposit that date from a compar- atively recent period, which are at least as extraordinary as aught that the beds themselves contain. They form there a small hill, about from forty to fifty feet in height, and several hundred feet in extent either way ; while beneath lies a thick deposit of the Old Red cornstones, wrought in this locality for lime. Interposed, however, between this hill of the Weald and the calcareous cornstones, there is a bed of the ordinary boul- der clay of the district, charged not only with the fragments of the rock on which is lies, but also of the well-marked Wealden strata which overlie it; and, more curious still, the cornstone bears on its surface, so far as the quarriers have yet penetrated, the ordinary glacial markings characteristic of the boulder clay. It would seem as if during the glacial period this hill had been so shifted or raised from its foundations, that the agent, what- ever its nature, which during the icebergal period dressed and grooved the rock-surfaces of the country, was enabled to dress and groove the cornstone on which the hill now rests. The appearances, — suggestive of the operations of some incalcula- bly enormous force, — are suited to remind one of that sublime simile employed by Milton, in describing the effect of the stroke under which the rebel angel reeled and fell : — “As if on earth Winds underground, or waters forcing way Sidelong, had pushed a mountain from his seat, Half-sunk, with all its pines.” With these detached outliers we take leave in Scotland of the Secondary formations, in their character as original deposits, * 4s DEPOSITS OF SCOTLAND. 393 whose strata still occur in the order in which they were first laid down. We find, however, in Banff and Aberdeenshires, and more partially in Caithness, remains of the Cretaceous system, occurring in some localities in the character of re-for- mations. A deposit at Moreseat, near Cruden, elaborately des- cribed by Mr. William Ferguson, late of Glasgow, seems to be almost exclusively a re-formation of the Greensand; and on the Hill of Dudwick, near Ellon, there are vast accumulations of flints, in which the Rev. Mr. Longmuir of Aberdeen, who has carefully explored the locality, detected many of the char- acteristic Cretaceous fossils furnished by the chalk of England. I have examined beds of gravel a few miles to the south of Peterhead, in which there occurs merely a per centage, thougha not inconsiderable one, of these chalk flints; but I have been in- formed by our ingenious corresponding member, Mr. Peach, with whom I saw several of the Cretaceous organisms of the locality, that, had I set myself to examine in a different direc- tion, more to the north and west, I would have found thick gravel beds composed of chalk flints almost exclusively. The best collections yet made of the organisms of this denuded sys- tem, of which only the broken fragments survive, are those of Mr. Longmuir, representative of the Scottish Chalk, and of Mr. Ferguson, representative of the Scottish Greensand. Both are inadequately represented in my collection; and what it possesses I owe chiefly to the kindness of Mr. Longmuir, and to that of Mr. Dick, the original discoverer of the Chalk in Caithness, where it oocurs, however, merely in detached frag- ments in the boulder clay. Much need not be expected from the organic remains of a deposit so broken and scattered. I have seen in its flints, however, finer and more delicately pre- served specimens of a Flustra, that not a little resembles our existing Flustra foliacea, than any I have yet succeeded in detecting in those of England; and the group, however frag- 394 THE FOSSILIFEROUS mentary and incomplete, must be regarded as possessing a cer- tain interest of its own, in its character as a portion of the fos- sil records of a country whose later geologic history, like her civil one both late and early, is meagre in its authentic materi- als, and, in consequence, unsatisfactory in its details. With but one baiting place,—that furnished by his Grace the Duke of Argyle’s discovery of Miocene leaf-beds in the Island of Mull,— we have to stride, in Scotland, wholly across the Tertiary divisions, and find our first footing on the deposits of the Pleistocene. I have not yet seen the leaf-beds repre- sented in any collection, save the great British one in Jermyn Street. They must, however, be regarded as possessing pecu- liarly a Scotch interest, not merely from the glimpse which they yield us of those old dicotyledonous forests of our country which succeeded, after the lapse of unreckoned ages, the conif- erous forests of the Oolite, but also from the circumstance of their irrefragably demonstrating that, up till a comparatively late period, Scotland had its great outbursts of Trap. They par- ticularly invite the attention of Booksellers, Travelling Agents, Teachers, School Commit- tees, Librarians, Clergymen, and professional men generally (to whom a liberal discount is uniformly made), to their extensive stock. 29> To persons wishing copies of Text-books, tor examination, they will be forwarded, per mail or otherwise, on the reception of one half the price of the work desired. og@™ Orders from any part of the country attended to with ‘aith- fulness and dispatch. pe é ( 10) “3 en \ IMPORTANT NEW WORKS. THE TESTIMONY OF THE ROCKS: or, Geology in its Bearings on the two Theologies, Natural and Revealed. By HucH MILLER. ‘“ Thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field.”” — Job. With numerous elegant illustrations, 12mo, cloth, $1.25. The completion of this important work employed the last hours of the lamented author, and may be considered his greatest and in fact his life work. MACAULAY ON SCOTLAND. A Critique. By Hucu Mutter, Author of ‘‘ Footprints of the Creator,’ &c. 16mo, flexible cloth, 25c. When we read Macaulay’s last volumes, we said that they wanted nothing but the fiction to make an epic poem; and now it seems that they are not wanting even in that.— PuRITAN RECORDER. He meets the historian at the fountain head, tracks him through the old pamphlets and newspapers on which he relied,and demonstrates that his own authorities are against him.—BostTon TRANSCRIPT. THE GREYSON LETTERS. Selections from the Correspondence of R. E. H. Greyson, Esq. 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The great bulk of that work, together With the heavy style of its literary exe:ution, nust necessarily prevent its republication in this country. At the same time, the Christ‘an puti's: in America will expect some memoir of a poet whose hymns and sacred melodies hare deen tri light of every household. This work, it is confi- dently hoped, will fully satisfy the publi: ‘i¢rrr:; Mis prepared by one who has already won distin- guished laurels in this department 07 Jiterafr“! (=) GOUULO AND. LINCOLN, 59 WASHINGTON STREET, BOSTON, Would call particular attention to the following valuable works described in their Catalogue of Publications, viz.: Hugh Miller’s Works. : Bayne’s Works. Walker’s Works. Miall’s Works. Bungener’s Work. Annnal of Scientific Discovery. Knight’s Knowledge is Power. Krummacher’s Suffering Saviour, Banvard’s American Histories. The Aimwell Stories. ifewcomb’s Works. Tweedie’s Works. Chambers’s Works. Harris’? Works. Kitto’s Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature. Mrs. Knight's Life of Montgomery. Kitto’s History of Palestin Wheewell’s Work. Wayland’s Works. Agassiz’s Works. AMUN Testimony of Roop, a ccans — — — — = ee a+ aaa ey = acon > oom — moon —_— ~~ so —- — = om: —— 7 vues + mes oe peasy oer oneed cents (sks ORR —~ on anne poet apes = peered a proses na ae mene dy be on «ee cove enw —— ss semee ete SOS a eee —_ i ant p> mentee? ao See a er se —— —= cee ee oats mel nema ~—* —-. a oT) aa Sf re — peer = ne a — anes poner cece one) amma | eee = Sane Sa at, ae man red 2 UMEDA rt —_ ren ==-° — — cares aes cename eens eet amie aoe eee > oe eres tS ore ——s — — oe = --- — aeeey — ~ - = ere — — —- rene —_ 5 ee — — — ae — >; seen be ~ wees — — net es oe = pee < ome lowe the wee —— ats hu rene ee — — i i a HUTTE | re ght fea i se. t a7 vi te nt oe ht MA Rae TE “@ 1 ! 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