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[Illustration: Sections]




                                 THE

                         OLD RED SANDSTONE;

                                 OR,

                     NEW WALKS IN AN OLD FIELD.


                                 BY

                            HUGH MILLER,

            AUTHOR OF "FOOT-PRINTS OF THE CREATOR," ETC.



                ILLUSTRATED WITH NUMEROUS ENGRAVINGS.


                   FROM THE FOURTH LONDON EDITION.


       BOSTON: GOULD AND LINCOLN, 59 WASHINGTON STREET. 1851.


            STEREOTYPED AT THE BOSTON STEREOTYPE FOUNDRY.

             Printed by G. C. Rand & Co. No. 3 Cornhill.




                             DEDICATION.


                                 TO

           RODERICK IMPEY MURCHISON, Esq., F. R. S., Etc.,

                PRESIDENT OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY.

In the autumn of last year, I sat down to write a few geological
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 disadvantages; but it is not the men best qualified to decide
regarding it whose criticisms I fear most; and I am especially
desirous to bring it under your notice, as of all geologists the
most thoroughly acquainted with those ancient formations which it
professes partially to describe. I 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 obscurity 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 remark 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 sides. I 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
fossiliferous 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 Conglomerate,
rising high on the neighboring hills. It is unquestionably 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 formation
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 ancient 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.




PREFACE.


Nearly one third of the present volume appeared a few months ago
in the form of a series of sketches in the _Witness_ newspaper. A
portion of the first chapter was submitted to the public a year or
two earlier, in _Chambers's Edinburgh Journal_. The rest, amounting
to about two thirds of the whole, appears for the first time.

Every such work has its defects. The faults of the present
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 nature of the subject:
there are others for which, from their opposite character, I shall
have to apologize in turn to opposite classes of readers. My facts
would, in most instances, have lain closer had I written for
geologists exclusively, 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-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 addressing 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 progress, 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 contemporary 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 hundred; and
I have just learned from a friend in the north, (Mr. Patrick Duff,
of Elgin,) that a Coccosteus lately found at Lethen-bar, and now in
the possession of Lady Gordon Gumming, of Altyre, is furnished with
what seem uncouth, paddle-shaped arms, that project from the head.[A]
All that I have given of the creature, however, will be found true
to the actual type; and that parts should have been omitted will
surprise no one who remembers that many hundred belemnites 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 examined, 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.

[Footnote A: As these paddle-shaped arms have not been introduced by
Agassiz into his restoration of the _Coccosteus_, their existence, at
least as arms, must still be regarded as problematical. There can be
no doubt, 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.]

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 Formation 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 99,[B] I have spoken of it as a delicate bivalve, much
resembling 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 submitted it to Mr. Murchison,
who has obligingly written me that he "can find no one to say more
regarding it than that it is very like a _Cyclas_." He adds,
however, that it must be an ocean production notwithstanding, seeing
that all its contemporaries in England, Scotland, and Russia, whether
shells or fish, are unequivocally marine.

[Footnote B: Page 90 of the present edition.]

With the exception of two of the figures in Plate IX., 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 Edinburgh,--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 drawings; that of fig. 2 in Plate V., fig. 1 in
Plate VI., fig. 2 in Plate VIII., and figs. 3 and 4 in plate IX. I am
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.




AMERICAN PUBLISHERS' NOTICE.


The publishers take pleasure in presenting to the American reader
this interesting work of Hugh Miller, in which are restored to our
view some of the phenomena which occurred in the earlier formations
of the crust of the earth, belonging to those inconceivably remote
ages when living things first appeared;--a work so scientific, and
yet so illustrated with familiar objects and scenes, as to be well
understood by those little versed in Geology. The grand conclusions
which the author deduces from apparently trifling circumstances that
every one has noticed a hundred times, without being the wiser,
illustrate the difference between the philosopher and the common
observer; and the simple and pictorial style in which they are
delineated renders the work peculiarly fascinating.

This is a reprint of the fourth English edition, without additions
or alterations, excepting the omission of the prefatory Notes to
the second and third editions. In the first of these, the author
states that he had added about fifteen pages to the first edition,
chiefly relating to that middle formation of the system to which
the organisms of Balruddery and Carmylie belong, the representative
of the Cornstones in England. Some matters there given as merely
conjectural were also replaced by ascertained facts. In the
latter, he announces that the somewhat bold prediction made by him
in the first edition, in 1841, 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. Cuvier enumerated ninety-two species of fossil
fishes; Agassiz, 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. In this edition was given the list
of species, as determined and arranged by Professor Agassiz. Many
additions in the shape of notes were also made.

In the first two editions it was stated that there was a gradual
increase of size observable in the progress of ichthyolic life, and
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. Since then, it has been ascertained that there
were giants among the dwarfs. The remains of one of the largest fish
found any where, has been discovered in its lowest formation; whereby
he was convinced that the theory of a gradual progression in size,
from the earlier to the later Palæozoic formations, though based
originally on no inconsiderable amount of negative evidence, must be
permitted to drop. On this fact he has based his incontrovertible
argument against the "development theory" in his more recent work,
already given to the American Public, "Foot-Prints of the Creator."

Boston, _January_, 1851.




CONTENTS.



CHAPTER I.

  PAGE

  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.--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.--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 Opportunities of the
    Stone-Mason.--Design of the present Work,                       1-14

CHAPTER II.

  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 girdled by an immense Belt of 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 Geological 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 Nomenclature.--Learned Names repel
    unlearned Readers.--Not a great deal in them,                  15-34

CHAPTER III.

  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.--Geological
    Argument.--The Present incomplete without the Past.--Intermediate
    Links of Creation.--Organisms of the Lower Old Red
    Sandstone.--The _Pterichthys_.--Its first Discovery.--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,                                             35-54

CHAPTER IV.

  The Elfin-fish of Gawin Douglas.--The Fish of the Old Red
    Sandstone scarcely less curious.--Place which they occupied
    indicated in the present Creation by a mere Gap.--Fish divided
    into two great Series, the Osseous and Cartilaginous.--Their
    distinctive Peculiarities.--Geological Illustration of
    Dr. Johnson's shrewd Objection to the Theory of Soame
    Jenyns.--Proofs of the intermediate Character of the
    Ichthyolites of the Old lied Sandstone.--Appearances which
    first led the Writer to deem it intermediate.--Confirmation by
    Agassiz.--The _Osteolepis_.--Order to which, this Ichthyolite
    belonged.--Description.--_Dipterus._--_Diplopierus._--
    _Cheirolepis._--_Glyptolepis_,                                 55-78

CHAPTER V.

  The Classifying Principle and its Uses.--Three Groups
    of Ichthyolites among the Organisms of the Lower Old
    Red Sandstone.--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 Molluscs of the Formation.--Remarkable chiefly for
    the Union of modern with ancient Forms which they exhibit.--Its
    Vegetables.--Importance and Interest of the Record which it
    furnishes,                                                     79-94

CHAPTER VI.

  The Lines of the Geographer rarely right Lines.--These last,
    however, always worth looking at when they occur.--Striking
    Instance in the Line of the Great Caledonian Valley.--Indicative
    of the Direction in which the Volcanic Agencies have
    operated.--Sections of the Old Red Sandstone furnished by the
    granitic Eminences of the Line.--Illustration.--Lias of the Moray
    Frith.--Surmisings regarding its original Extent.--These lead to
    an exploratory Ramble.--Narrative.--Phenomena exhibited in the
    Course of half an Hour's Walk.--The little Bay.--Its Strata and
    their Organisms,                                              95-108


CHAPTER VII.

  Further Discoveries of the Ichthyolite Beds.--Found in one
    Locality under a Bed of Peat.--Discovered in another beneath
    an ancient Burying-ground.--In 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 Circumstance of Neighborhood.--The
    Writer receives his first Assistance from without.--_Geological
    Appendix_ of the Messrs. Anderson, of Inverness.--Further
    Assistance from the Researches of Agassiz.--Suggestion.--Dr.
    John Malcolmson.--His extensive Discoveries in Moray.--He
    submits to Agassiz a Drawing of the _Pterichthys_.--Place of the
    Ichthyolites in the Scale at length determined.--Two distinct
    Platforms of Being in the Formation to which they belong,    109-124

CHAPTER VIII.

  Upper Formations of the Old Red Sandstone.--Room enough, for each
    and to spare.--Middle, or Cornstone Formation.--The Cephalaspis
    its most characteristic Organism.--Description.--The Den of
    Balruddery richer in the Fossils of this middle Formation than
    any other Locality yet discovered.--Various Contemporaries
    of the _Cephalaspis._--Vegetable Impressions.--Gigantic
    Crustacean.--_Seraphim._--Ichthyodorulites.--Sketch of the
    Geology of Forfarshire.--Its older Deposits of the Cornstone
    Formation.--The Quarries of Carmylie.--Their Vegetable and Animal
    Remains.--The Upper 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 imperfectly
    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
    characteristic Ichthyolite of the Formation.--Description of its
    huge Scales.--Of its Occipital Bones, Fins, Teeth, and general
    Appearance.--Contemporaries of the _Holoptychius_.--Sponge-like
    Bodies.--Plates resembling 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 Sandstone and the Coal
    Measures.--The _Holoptychius_ contemporary for a time with the
    _Megalichthys_,--The Columns of Tubal-Cain,                  151-172

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 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,                           173-189

CHAPTER XI.

  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 Burn of
    Eathie.--The Upper Old Red Sandstones.--Scene in Moray,      190-210

CHAPTER XII.

  The two Aspects in which Matter can be viewed; Space and
    Time.--Geological History of the Earlier Periods.--The Cambrian
    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
    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 Herring Fishery.--Platform of Death.--Probable Cause
    of the Catastrophe which rendered it such,                   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
    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 System owes its Name.--Successive 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 XIV.

  The Cornstone Formation and its Organisms.--Dwarf
    Vegetation.--_Cephalaspides._--Huge Lobster.--Habitats of
    the existing Crustacea.--No unapt representation of the
    Deposit of Balruddery, furnished 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 Creation.--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,                                     243-259

  Ichthyolites of the Old Red Sandstone--from Agassiz's "Poissons
    Fossiles,"                                                   261-288


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, _b._ Impure concretionary limestone
enclosing masses of chert, _c._ 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
sandstones, 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. III. IV. and V.) In the
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 northern localities, at least one of the deposits, _f_, is
mineralogically different--alternating beds of sandstone and clay,
these last enclosing limestone nodules, taking the place of the
bituminous schists.


SECTION II.

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. _i._ 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, h_, 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 Measures, 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 197 and 198.) 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 IV.

Illustration of a fault in the Burn of Eathie, Cromartyshire. (See
pages 204 and 205.)


EXPLANATIONS OF THE PLATES.

Plate I.--Fig. 1, Restoration of upper side of the elongated species
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, Tubercles of _Pterichthys_ magnified.

Plate II.--Fig. 2, Restoration of under side of _Pterichthys
oblongus_. Fig. 1, A second specimen of _Pterichthys Milleri_. Fig.
3, Portion of wing, natural size.

Plate III.--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.

Plate 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.

Plate 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.

Plate VI.--Fig. 1, _Cheirolepis Cummingiæ_. Fig. 2, Magnified scales.
Fig. 3, Magnified portion of fin.

Plate VII.--Fig. 1, _Cheiracanthus microlepidotus_. Fig. 2,
Magnified scales. Figs. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, Vegetable impressions of
the Old Red Sandstone.

Plate VIII.--Fig. 1, _Diplacanthus longispinus_. Fig. 2,
_Diplacanthus striatus_. Fig. 3, Magnified scales of fig. 1. Fig. 4,
Spine of fig. 2, slightly magnified.

Plate IX.--Fig. 1, One of the tail flaps of the gigantic Crustacean
of Forfarshire. Fig. 2, Reticulated markings of Carmylie.

Plate X.--Fig. 1, _Cephalaspis Lyellii_, copied from Lyell's
_Elements 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.



DIRECTIONS TO THE BINDER.

  Sheet of Sections to front Title-Page.
  Plate  I. to front page 44
        II.  "   "    "   46
       III.  "   "    "   48
        IV.  "   "    "   66
         V.  "   "    "   72
        VI.  "   "    "   78
       VII.  "   "    "   82
      VIII.  "   "    "   84
        IX.  "   "    "  136
         X.  "   "    "  154




                     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.--Narrative.--Scenes in a Quarry.--The two
dead Birds.--Landscape.--Ripple Markings on a Sandstone
Slab.--Boulder Stones.--Inference derived from their water-worn
Appearance.--Sea-coast Section.--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
Opportunities 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 enjoyment, 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 themselves, it will
be all at your expense. Leave them to harangue unheeded, and set
yourselves to occupy your leisure 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
animals. Head 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 miserable 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 more
in the attempt than yourselves; for you would only be clearing the
way, at an immense 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 from 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 injustice of
the world could not withstand.

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 importance that men should receive accessions
to their own happiness, than to the influence which they exert over
other men. There is none of the intellectual, and none of the moral
faculties, 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 premised of their respective orders, that the one is
in any degree happier than the other. Simple as the fact may seem,
if universally recognized, it would save a great deal of useless
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, I
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, woeful change! I was now going to work at what Burns
has instanced in his "Twa Dogs" as one of the most disagreeable of
all employments--to work in a quarry. Bating the passing uneasiness
occasioned by a few gloomy anticipations, the portion of my life
which had already gone by had been happy beyond the common 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!

The 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 presented 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 unbroken a frontage, were to be torn
up and removed. Picks, and wedges, and levers were applied by my
brother-workmen; and simple and rude as I had been accustomed to
regard 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 I deemed it a highly amusing one: it had
the merit, too, of 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 in a 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 museum. 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 I 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 useful, 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 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 moveless in the calm as if they
had been traced on canvas. From a 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 Nevis
rose to the west, white with the yet unwasted snows of winter, 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 described as tasking the ingenuity of his
future son-in-law, by giving him, as a subject for his pencil, a
flower-piece composed 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 transparent 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 employments may afford leisure enough to enjoy it.

The gunpowder had loosened a large mass in one of the inferior
strata, and our first employment, on resuming our labors, was to
raise it from its bed. I assisted the other workmen in placing it
on edge, and was much struck by the appearance of the platform on
which it had rested. The entire surface 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 schooner in
the 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 Robinson 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. Several
large stones came rolling clown 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 a more 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, and found I had
food enough for thought that evening, without 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 expensive, and all the party
quitted it in a few days, to make trial of another that seemed to
promise better. The one we left is situated, as I have said, on
the southern shore of an inland bay--the Bay of Cromarty; the one
to which we removed has been opened in a lofty wall of cliffs that
overhangs the northern shore of the Moray Frith. I soon found I was
to be no loser by the change. Not the united labors of a thousand men
for more than a thousand years could have furnished a better section
of the geology of the district than this range of cliffs. It may be
regarded as a sort of chance dissection on the earth's crust. We see
in one place the primary rock, with its veins of granite and quartz,
its dizzy precipices 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 discover
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, porphyries, 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 T was the process, and so much was I a seeker in
the dark, that the facts contained in these few sentences were the
patient gatherings of years.

In the course of the first day's employment, I picked up a 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. I 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 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
herbarium, 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 appearance 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 visited 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
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 under 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 cuttle-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, I had fitted myself for independence. The
additional experience of twenty years has not shown me that there
is any necessary connection between 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 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 contorted 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 period. I have been taught by experience,
too, how necessary 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 Sandstone; 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
Oxford Clay and the Coral Rag. We may explore, in a third locality,
beds identical in their organisms with the Wealden of Sussex. In a
fourth we find the flints and fossils of the Chalk. The lower part of
the scale is also well nigh complete. 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 of the gap, and
perhaps a little more;--the geology of Arran wants, it is supposed,
only the Upper New lied 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 observation; there are
none, I 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 sooner completed in one district, than he has to remove to
where the gentleman's seat, or farm-steading is to be erected in
another; and so, in the course of a few years, he may pass over
the whole geological scale, even when restricted to Scotland, 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 gentleman 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 formation for months, perhaps years,
together, enjoys better opportunities 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 extraordinary fall: and the man who plies his labor at all
seasons 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 acquainted with the
Old Red Sandstone of Ross and Cromarty for nearly ten years ere I
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 remained 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 accomplished 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 II.


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 girdled by
an immense Belt of 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 Geological 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
Nomenclature.--Learned Names repel unlearned Readers.--Not a great
deal in them.

"The 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 hitherto considered as
remarkably barren of fossils." The remark is expressive of a pretty
general opinion among geologists 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 own countrymen rested
chiefly on his researches in the more ancient formations,--"you must
inevitably give up the Old Red Sandstone: it is a mere local deposit,
a doubtful accumulation huddled up in a corner, and has no type or
representative abroad." "I would willingly give it up if nature
would," was the reply; "but it assuredly exists, and I cannot." In
a 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 independent
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 admirable elementary
work, published only two years ago, devotes more than thirty pages to
his description of the Coal Measures, and but two and a half to his
notice of the Old Red Sandstone.[C]

[Footnote C: 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.

"It was stated that the Carboniferous formation was surmounted by one
called the 'New lied Sandstone,' and underlaid by another called the
Old Red, which last was formerly merged in the Carboniferous System,
but is now found to be distinguishable by its fossils. The Old Red
Sandstone is of enormous thickness in Herefordshire, Worcestershire,
Shropshire, and South Wales, where it is seen to crop out beneath the
Coal Measures, and to repose on the Silurian Rocks. In that region,
its thickness has been estimated by Mr. Murchison at no less than ten
thousand feet. It consists there of--

"1st. A quartzose conglomerate, passing downwards into chocolate-red
and green sandstone and marl.

"2d. Cornstone and marl, (red and green argillaceous spotted
marls, with irregular courses of impure concretionary limestone,
provincially called Cornstone, mottled red and green; remains of
fishes.)

"3d. Tilestone, (finely laminated hard reddish or green micaceous or
quartzose sandstones, which split into tiles; remains of mollusca and
fishes.)

"I have already observed that fossils are rare in marls and
sandstones in which the red oxide of iron prevails. In the Cornstone,
however, of the counties above mentioned, fishes of the genera
Cephalaspis and Onchus have been discovered. In the Tilestone,
also, Ichthyodorulites of the genus Onchus have been obtained,
and a species of Dipterus, with mollusca of the genera Avicula,
Area, Cucullæa, Terebratula, Lingula, Turbo, Trochus, Turritella,
Bellerophon, Orthoceras, and others.

"By consulting geological maps, the reader will perceive that, from
Wales to the north of Scotland, the Old Red Sandstone appears in
patches, and often in large tracts. Many fishes have been found in
it at Caithness, and various organic remains in the northern part of
Fifeshire, where it crops out from beneath the Coal formation, and
spreads into the adjoining northern half of Forfarshire; forming,
together with trap, the Sidlaw Hills and valley of Strathmore. A
large belt of this formation skirts the northern borders of the
Grampians, from the sea-coast at Stonehaven and the Frith of Tay to
the opposite western coast of the Frith of Clyde. In Forfarshire,
where, as in Herefordshire, it is many thousand feet thick, it
may be divided into three principal masses--1st. Red and mottled
marls, cornstone, and sandstone; 2d. Conglomerate, often of vast
thickness; 3d. Tilestones, and paving-stone, highly micaceous, and
containing a slight admixture of carbonate of lime. In the uppermost
of these divisions, but chiefly in the lowest, the remains of fish
have been found, of the genus named by M. Agassiz Cephalaspis, or
buckler-headed, from the extraordinary shield which covers the
head, and which, has often been mistaken for that of a trilobite
of the division Asaphus. A gigantic species of fish, of the genus
Holoptychius, has also been found by Dr. Fleming in the Old Red
Sandstone of Fifeshire."--Lyell's _Elements_, pp. 452-4.]

It will be found, however, that this hitherto neglected system 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 interesting links which it furnishes in the
zoölogical 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 Ætna over the level of the sea,
and in which it contains three distinct groups of organic remains,
the one rising in beautiful progression over the other. Let the
reader imagine a digest of English history, complete from the times
of the invasion of Julius Cæsar to the reign of that Harold who was
slain at Hastings, and from the times of Edward III. down to the
present day, but bearing no record of the Williams, the Henrys, the
Edwards, the John, Stephen, and Richard, that reigned during the
omitted period, or of the striking and important events by which
their several reigns were distinguished. A chronicle thus mutilated
and incomplete would be no unapt representation of a geological
history of the earth in which the period of the Upper Silurian would
be connected with that of the Mountain Limestone, or of the limestone
of Burdie House, and the period of the Old Red Sandstone omitted.

The eastern and western coasts of Scotland, which lie to the north
of the Friths of Forth and Clyde, together with the southern flank
of the Grampians and the northern coast of Sutherland and Caithness,
appear to have been girdled at some early period by immense
continuous beds of Old Red Sandstone. At a still earlier time, the
girdle seems to have formed an entire mantle, which covered the
enclosed tract from side to side. The interior is composed of what,
after the elder geologists, I shall term primary rocks--porphyries,
granites, gneisses, and micaceous schists; and this central nucleus,
as it now exists, seems set in a sandstone frame. The southern bar
of the frame is still entire: it stretches along the Grampians from
Stonehaven to the Frith of Clyde. The northern bar is also well nigh
entire: it runs unbroken along the whole northern coast of Caithness,
and studs, in three several localities, the northern coast of
Sutherland, leaving breaches of no very considerable extent between.
On the east, there are considerable gaps, as along the shores of
Aberdeenshire.[D] The sandstone, however, appears at Gamrie, in the
county of Banff, in a line parallel to the coast, and, after another
interruption, follows the coast of the Moray Frith far into the
interior of the great Caledonian valley, and then running northward
along the shores of Cromarty, Ross, and Sutherland, joins, after
another brief interruption, the northern bar at Caithness.

[Footnote D: The progress of discovery has shown, since this passage
was written, that these gaps are not quite so considerable as I had
supposed. The following paragraph, which appeared in July, 1843, in
an Aberdeen paper, bears directly on the point, and is worthy of
being preserved:--

"ARTESIAN WELL.

"The greatest of these interesting works yet existing in Aberdeen has
just been successfully completed at the tape-works of Messrs. Milne,
Low, and Co., Woolmanhill. The bore is 8 inches in diameter, and 250
feet 9 inches deep. It required nearly eleven months' working to
complete the excavation.

"In its progress, the following strata were cut through in
succession:--

    6 feet vegetable mould.
   18  "   gray or bluish clay.
   20  "   sand and shingle, enclosing rolled stones of various sizes.
    6  "   light blue clay.
    3  "   rough sand and shingle.
  115  "   Old Red Sandstone conglomerate, composed of red clay,
             quartz, mica, and rolled stones.
   74  "   alternating strata of compact, fine-grained Red Sandstone,
             varying in thickness from 1 to 7 feet, and clay, varying
             from 6 inches to 12 feet thick.
    8  "   9 inches, mica-slate formation, the first two feet of which
              were chiefly a hard, brown quartzose substance, containing
              iron, manganese, and carbonate of lime.
  -----------
  250 feet, 9 inches.

"The temperature of the water at the bottom of the well, when
completed, was found to be within a fraction of 50° Fahrenheit, and
the average temperature of the locality, deduced from twenty-three
years' observation, by the late George limes, F. R. S., is 47°
1: hence, nearly 3 degrees of increase appear as the effects of
central heat. The supply of water obtained is excellent in quality,
and sufficient in quantity for all the purposes of the works. Such
an opportunity of investigating the geology of the locality can
but rarely occur; and, in the present instance, the proprietor
and managers afforded every facility to scientific inquirers for
conducting examinations. To make the bearings of the case clear
and simple, the following is quoted from Mr. Miller's work on the
Old Red Sandstone. [The writer here quotes the above passage, and
then proceeds.] Mr. Miller will be glad to learn, that though the
convulsions of nature have shattered the 'frame' along the shores
of Aberdeenshire, yet the fragments are not lost, as will be seen
from the section above described; they are here reposing _in situ_
under the accumulated debris of uncounted ages--chiefly the 'boulder
clay,' and sedimentary deposits of the Dee and Don, during a period
when they mingled their waters in the basin in which Aberdeen now
stands. The primary rocks--the settings--our granites, of matchless
beauty stand out in bold relief a mile or two westward from the
sea-coast. Within this year or two, the 'Old Red' has been discovered
at Devanha, Union Grove, Huntly Street, Glenburnie, Balgownie, and
various other localities to the northward. Hence it may reasonably
be inferred, that our fragment of the 'frame' envelops the primary
rocks under our city, and along the coast for a considerable distance
between the Dee and the Buchaness."--_Aberdeen Constitutional_.]

The western bar has also its breaches towards the south; but it
stretches, almost without interruption, for about a hundred miles,
from the near neighborhood of Cape Wrath to the southern extremity
of Applecross; and though greatly disturbed and overflown by the
traps of the inner Hebrides, it can be traced by occasional patches
on towards the southern bar. It appears on the northern shore of
Loch Alsh, on the eastern shore of Loch Eichart, on the southern
shore of Loch Eil, on the coast and islands near Oban, and on the
east coast of Arran. Detached hills and island-like patches of
the same formation occur in several parts of the interior, far
within the frame or girdle. It caps some of the higher summits in
Sutherlandshire; it forms an oasis of sandstone among the primary
districts of Strathspey; it rises on the northern shores of Loch
Ness in an immense mass of conglomerate, based on a small-grained,
red granite, to a height of about three thousand feet over the
level; and on the north-western coast of Ross-shire it forms three
immense insulated hills, of at least no lower altitude, that rest
unconformably on a base of gneiss.

There appear every where in connection with these patches and
eminences, and with the surrounding girdle, marks of vast denudation.
I have often stood fronting the three Ross-shire hills[E] at sunset
in the finer summer evenings, when the clear light threw the shadows
of their gigantic, cone-like forms far over the lower tract, and
lighted up the lines of their horizontal strata, till they showed
like courses of masonry in a pyramid. They seem at such times as if
colored by the geologist, to distinguish them from the surrounding
tract, and from the base on which they rest as on a common pedestal.
The prevailing gneiss of the district reflects a cold, bluish hue,
here and there speckled with white, where the weathered and lichened
crags of intermingled quartz rock jut out on the hill-sides from
among the heath. The three huge pyramids, on the contrary, from
the deep red of the stone, seem flaming in purple. There spreads
all around a wild and desolate landscape of broken and shattered
hills, separated by deep and gloomy ravines, that seem the rents
and fissures of a planet in ruins, and that speak distinctly of a
period of convulsion, when upheaving fires from the abyss, and ocean
currents above, had contended in sublime antagonism, the one slowly
elevating the entire tract, the other grinding it down and sweeping
it away. I entertain little doubt that, when this loftier portion of
Scotland, including the entire Highlands, first presented its broad
back over the waves, the upper surface consisted exclusively, from
the one extremity to the other--from Benlomond to the Maidenpaps of
Caithness--of a continuous tract of Old Red Sandstone; though, ere
the land finally emerged, the ocean currents of ages had swept it
away, all except in the lower and last-raised borders, and in the
detached localities, where it still remains, as in the pyramidal
hills of western Ross-shire, to show the amazing depth to which
it had once overlaid the inferior rocks. The Old Red Sandstone
of Morvheim, in Caithness, overlooks all the primary hills of the
district, from an elevation of three thousand five hundred feet.

[Footnote E: Suil Veinn, Coul Beg, and Coul More.]

The depth of the system, on both the eastern and western coasts
of Scotland, is amazingly great--how great, I shall not venture
to say. There are no calculations more doubtful than those of the
geologist. The hill just instanced (Morvheim) is apparently composed
from top to bottom of what in Scotland forms the lowest member of
the system--a coarse conglomerate; and yet I have nowhere observed
this inferior member, when I succeeded in finding a section of it
directly vertical, more than a hundred yards in thickness--less than
one tenth the height of the hill. It would be well nigh as unsafe
to infer that the three thousand five hundred feet of altitude
formed the real thickness of the conglomerate, as to infer that the
thickness of the lead which covers the dome of St. Paul's is equal to
the height of the dome. It is always perilous to estimate the depth
of a deposit by the height of a hill that seems externally composed
of it, unless, indeed, like the pyramidal hills of Ross-shire, it
be unequivocally a hill dug out by denudation, as the sculptor digs
his eminences out of the mass. In most of our hills, the upheaving
agency has been actively at work, and the space within is occupied
by an immense nucleus of inferior rock, around which the upper
formation is wrapped like a caul, just as the vegetable mould or
the diluvium wraps up this superior covering in turn. One of our
best known Scottish mountains--the gigantic Ben Nevis--furnishes an
admirable illustration of this latter construction of hill. It is
composed of three zones or rings of rock, the one rising over and
out of the other, like the cases of an opera-glass drawn out. The
lower zone is composed of gneiss and mica-slate, the middle zone
of granite, the terminating zone of porphyry. The elevating power
appears to have acted in the centre, as in the well-known case of
Jorullo, in the neighborhood of the city of Mexico, where a level
tract four square miles in extent rose, about the middle of the last
century, into a high dome of more than double the height of Arthur's
Seat.[F] In the formation of our Scottish mountain, the gneiss and
mica-slate of the district seem to have been upheaved, during the
first period of Plutonic action in the locality, into a rounded
hill of moderate altitude, but of huge base. The upheaving power
continued to operate--the gneiss and mica-slate gave way a-top--and
out of this lower dome there arose a higher dome of granite, which,
in an after and terminating period of the internal activity, gave
way in turn to yet a third and last dome of porphyry. Now, had the
elevating forces ceased to operate just ere the gneiss and mica-slate
had given way, we would have known nothing of the interior nucleus
of granite--had they ceased just ere the granite had given way, we
would have known nothing of the yet deeper nucleus of porphyry; and
yet the granite and the porphyry would assuredly have been there.
Nor could any application of the measuring rule to the side of the
hill have ascertained the thickness of its outer covering--the gneiss
and the mica schist. The geologists of the school of Werner used to
illustrate what we may term the anatomy of the earth, as seen through
the spectacles of their system, by an onion and its coats: they
represented the globe as a central nucleus, encircled by concentric
coverings, each covering constituting a geological formation. The
onion, through the introduction of a better school, has become
obsolete as an illustration; but to restore it again, though for
another purpose, we have merely to cut it through the middle, and
turn downwards the planes formed by the knife. It then represents,
with its coats, hills such as we describe--hills such as Ben Nevis,
ere the granite had perforated the gneiss, or the porphyry broken
through the granite.

[Footnote F: It is rarely that the geologist catches a hill in
the act of forming, and hence the interest of this well-attested
instance. From the period of the discovery of America to the middle
of the last century, the plains of Jorullo had undergone no change of
surface, and the seat of the present hill was covered by plantations
of indigo and sugar-cane, when, in June, 1759, hollow sounds were
heard, and a succession of earthquakes continued for sixty days,
to the great consternation of the inhabitants. After the cessation
of these, and in a period of tranquillity, on the 28th and 29th of
September, a horrible subterranean noise was again heard, and a
tract four square miles in extent rose up in the shape of a dome or
bladder, to the height of sixteen hundred and seventy feet above
the original level of the plain. The affrighted Indians fled to
the mountains; and from thence looking down on the phenomenon, saw
flames issuing from the earth for miles around the newly-elevated
hill, and the softened surface rising and falling like that of an
agitated sea, and opening into numerous rents and fissures. Two
brooks which had watered the plantations precipitated themselves into
the burning chasms. The scene of this singular event was visited by
Humboldt about the beginning of the present century. At that period,
the volcanic agencies had become comparatively quiescent; the hill,
however, retained its original altitude; a number of smaller hills
had sprung up around it; and the traveller found the waters of the
engulfed rivulets escaping at a high temperature from caverns charged
with sulphureous vapors and carbonic acid gas. There wore inhabitants
of the country living at the time who were more than twenty years
older than the hill of Jorullo, and who had witnessed its rise.]

If it be thus unsafe, however, to calculate on the depth of deposits
by the altitude of hills, it is quite as unsafe for the geologist,
who has studied a formation in one district, to set himself to
criticise the calculations of a brother geologist by whom it has been
studied in a different and widely-separated district. A deposit in
one locality may be found to possess many times the thickness of the
same deposit in another. There are exposed, beside the Northern and
Southern Sutors of Cromarty, two nearly vertical sections of the
coarse conglomerate bed, which forms, as I have said, in the north of
Scotland, the base of the Old Red System, and which rises to so great
an elevation in the mountain of Morvheim. The sections are little
more than a mile apart; and yet, while the thickness of this bed in
the one does not exceed one hundred feet, that of the same bed in the
other somewhat exceeds two hundred feet. More striking still--under
the Northern Sutor, the entire Geology of Caithness, with all its
vast beds, and all its numerous fossils, from the granitic rock of
the Ord hill, the southern boundary of the county, to the uppermost
sandstones of Dunnet-head, its extreme northern corner, is exhibited
in a vertical section not more than three hundred yards in extent.
And yet so enormous is the depth of the deposit in Caithness, that
it has been deemed by a very superior geologist to represent three
entire formations--the Old Red System, by its unfossiliferous,
arenaceous, and conglomerate beds; the Carboniferous System, by its
dark-colored middle schists, abounding in bitumen and ichthyolites;
and the New Red Sandstone, by the mottled marls and mouldering
sandstones that overlie the whole.[G] A slight sketch of the Geology
of Caithness may not be deemed uninteresting. This county includes,
in the state of greatest development any where yet known, that
fossiliferous portion of the Old Red Sandstone which I purpose first
to describe, and which will yet come to be generally regarded as an
independent formation, as unequivocally characterized by its organic
remains as the formations either above or below it.

[Footnote G: Dr. Hibbert, whose researches among the limestones
of Burdie House have been of such importance to Geology, was of
this opinion. I find it also expressed in the admirable geological
appendix affixed by the Messrs. Anderson to their _Guide to the
Highlands and Islands of Scotland_. "No beds of real coal," say these
gentlemen, "have been discovered in Caithness; and it would thus
appear that the middle schistose system of the county, containing the
fossil fish, is in geological character and position intermediate
between the Old and New Red Sandstone formations, but not identical
with the Carboniferous Limestone, or the true Coal Measures, although
probably occupying the place of one or other of them."--p. 198.]

The county of Sutherland stretches across the island from the
German to the Atlantic Ocean, and presents, throughout its entire
extent,--except where a narrow strip of the Oolitic formation runs
along its eastern coast, and a broken belt of Old Red Sandstone tips
its capes and promontories on the west,--a broken and tumultuous
sea of primary hills. Scarce any of our other Scottish counties are
so exclusively Highland, nor are there any of them in which the
precipices are more abrupt, the valleys more deep, the rivers more
rapid, or the mountains piled into more fantastic groups and masses.
The traveller passes into Caithness, and finds himself surrounded by
scenery of an aspect so entirely dissimilar, that no examination of
the rocks is necessary to convince him of a geological difference of
structure. An elevated and uneven plain spreads around and before
him, league beyond league, in tame and unvaried uniformity,--its many
hollows darkened by morasses, over which the intervening eminences
rise in the form rather of low moory swellings, than of hills,--its
coasts walled round by cliffs of gigantic altitude, that elevate the
district at one huge stride from the level of the sea, and skirted by
vast stacks and columns of rock, that stand out like the advanced
pickets of the land amid the ceaseless turmoil of the breakers. The
district, as shown on the map, presents nearly a triangular form--the
Pentland Frith and the German Ocean describing two of its sides,
while the base is formed by the line of boundary which separates it
from the county of Sutherland.

Now, in a geological point of view, this angle may be regarded as a
vast pyramid, rising perpendicularly from the basis furnished by the
primary rocks of the latter county, and presenting newer beds and
strata as we ascend, until we reach the apex. The line from south
to north in the angle--from Morvheim to Dunnet-head--corresponds
to the line of ascent from the top to the bottom of the pyramid.
The first bed, reckoning from the base upwards,--the ground tier
of the masonry, if I may so speak,--is the great conglomerate. It
runs along the line of boundary from sea to sea,--from the Ord of
Caithness on the east, to Portskerry on the north; and rises, as it
approaches the primary hills of Sutherland, into a lofty mountain
chain of bold and serrated outline, which attains its greatest
elevation in the hill of Morvheim. This great conglomerate bed, the
base of the system, is represented in the Cromarty section, under the
Northern Sutor, by a bed two hundred and fifteen feet in thickness.
The second tier of masonry in the pyramid, and which also runs in a
nearly parallel line from sea to sea, is composed mostly of a coarse
red and yellowish sandstone, with here and there beds of pebbles
enclosed, and here and there deposits of green earth and red marl. It
has its representative in the Cromarty section, in a bed of red and
yellow arenaceous stone, one hundred and fourteen feet six inches in
thickness. These two inferior beds possess but one character,--they
are composed of the same materials, with merely this difference, that
the rocks which have been broken into pebbles for the construction
of the one, have been ground into sand for the composition of the
other. Directly over them, the middle portion of the pyramid is
occupied by an enormous deposit of dark-colored bituminous schist,
slightly micaceous, calcareous, or semi-calcareous,--here and there
interlaced with veins of carbonate of lime,--here and there compact
and highly siliceous,--and bearing in many places a mineralogical
character difficult to be distinguished from that at one time deemed
peculiar to the harder grauwacke schists. The Caithness flagstones,
so extensively employed in paving the footways of our larger towns,
are furnished by this immense middle tier or belt, and represent
its general appearance. From its lowest to its highest beds it
is charged with fossil fish and obscure vegetable impressions;
and we find it represented in the Cromarty section by alternating
bands of sandstones, stratified clays, and bituminous and nodular
limestones, which form altogether a bed three hundred and fifty-five
feet in thickness; nor does this bed lack its organisms, animal and
vegetable, generically identical with those of Caithness. The apex of
the pyramid is formed of red mouldering sandstones and mottled marls,
which exhibit their uppermost strata high over the eddies of the
Pentland Frith, in the huge precipices of Dunnet-head, and which are
partially represented in the Cromarty section by an unfossiliferous
sandstone bed of unascertained thickness; but which can be traced for
about eighty feet from the upper limestones and stratified clays of
the middle member, until lost in overlying beds of sand and shingle.

I am particular, at the risk, I am afraid, of being tedious, in thus
describing the Geology of this northern county, and of the Cromarty
section, which represents and elucidates it. They illustrate more
than the formations of two insulated districts: they represent also
a vast period of time in the history of the globe. The pyramid, with
its three huge bars, its foundations of granitic rock, its base
of red conglomerate, its central band of dark-colored schist, and
its lighter tinted apex of sandstone, is inscribed from bottom to
top, like an Egyptian obelisk, with a historical record. The upper
and lower sections treat of tempests and currents--the middle is
"written within and without" with wonderful narratives of animal
life; and yet the whole, taken together, comprises but an earlier
portion of that chronicle of existences and events furnished by the
Old Red Sandstone. It is, however, with this earlier portion that my
acquaintance is most minute.

My first statement regarding it must be much the reverse of the
borrowed one with which this chapter begins. _The fossils are
remarkably numerous, and in a state of high preservation._ I have
a hundred solid proofs by which to establish the truth of the
assertion, within less than a yard of me. Half my closet walls are
covered with the peculiar fossils of the Lower Old Red Sandstone;
and certainly a stranger assemblage of forms have rarely been
grouped together;--creatures whose very type is lost, fantastic and
uncouth, and which puzzle the naturalist to assign them even their
class;--boat-like animals, furnished with oars and a rudder;--fish
plated over, like the tortoise, above and below, with a strong armor
of bone, and furnished with but one solitary rudder-like fin; other
fish less equivocal in their form, but with the membranes of their
fins thickly covered with scales;--creatures bristling over with
thorns; others glistening in an enamelled coat, as if beautifully
japanned--the tail, in every instance among the less equivocal
shapes, formed not equally, as in existing fish, on each side the
central vertebral column, but chiefly on the lower side--the column
sending out its diminished vertebræ to the extreme termination of
the fin. All the forms testify of a remote antiquity--of a period
whose "fashions have passed away." The figures on a Chinese vase or
an Egyptian obelisk are scarce more unlike what now exists in nature,
than the fossils of the Lower Old Red Sandstone.

Geology, of all the sciences, addresses itself most powerfully to
the imagination, and hence one main cause of the interest which it
excites. Ere setting ourselves minutely to examine the peculiarities
of these creatures, it would be perhaps well that the reader should
attempt realizing the _place_ of their existence, and relatively
the _time_--not of course with regard to dates and eras, for the
geologist has none to reckon by, but with respect to formations. They
were the denizens of the same portion of the globe which we ourselves
inhabit, regarded not as a tract of country, but as a piece of ocean
crossed by the same geographical lines of latitude and longitude.
Their present place of sepulture in some localities, had there been
no denudation, would have been raised high over the tops of our
loftiest hills--at least a hundred feet over the conglomerates which
form the summit of Morvheim, and more than a thousand feet over the
snow-capped Ben Wyvis. Geology has still greater wonders. I have seen
belemnites of the Oolite--comparatively a modern formation--which
had been dug out of the sides of the Himalaya mountains, seventeen
thousand feet over the level of the sea. But let us strive to carry
our minds back, not to the place of sepulture of these creatures,
high in the rocks,--though that I shall afterwards attempt minutely
to describe,--but to the place in which they lived, long ere the
sauroid fishes of Burdie House had begun to exist, or the corallines
of the mountain limestone had spread out their multitudinous arms
in a sea gradually shallowing, and out of which the land had already
partially emerged.

A continuous ocean spreads over the space now occupied by the British
islands: in the tract covered by the green fields and brown moors
of our own country, the bottom, for a hundred yards downwards,
is composed of the debris of rolled pebbles and coarse sand
intermingled, long since consolidated into the lower member of the
Old Red Sandstone; the upper surface is composed of banks of sand,
mud, and clay; and the sea, swarming with animal life, flows over
all. My present object is to describe the inhabitants of that sea.

Of these, the greater part yet discovered have been named by Agassiz,
the highest authority as an ichthyologist in Europe or the world, and
in whom the scarcely more celebrated Cuvier recognized a naturalist
in every respect worthy to succeed him. The comparative amount of
the labors of these two great men in fossil ichthyology, and the
amazing acceleration which has taken place within the last few years
in the progress of geological science, are illustrated together,
and that very strikingly, by the following interesting fact--a fact
derived directly from Agassiz himself, and which must be new to the
great bulk of my readers. When Cuvier closed his researches in this
department, he had named and described, for the guidance of the
geologist, ninety-two distinct species of fossil fish; nor was it
then known that the entire geological scale, from the Upper Tertiary
to the Grauwacke inclusive, contained more. Agassiz commenced his
labors; and, in a period of time little exceeding fourteen years, he
has raised the number of species from ninety-two to sixteen hundred.
And this number, great as it is, is receiving accessions almost every
day. In his late visit to Scotland, he found eleven new species, and
one new genus, in the collection of Lady Gumming of Altyre, all
from the upper beds of that lower member of the Old Red Sandstone
represented by the dark-colored schists and inferior sandstones of
Caithness. He found forty-two new species more in a single collection
in Ireland, furnished by the Mountain Limestone of Armagh.

Some of my humbler readers may possibly be repelled by his names;
they are, like all names in science, unfamiliar in their respect to
mere English readers, just because they are names not for England
alone, but for England and the world. I am assured, however,
that they are all composed of very good Greek, and picturesquely
descriptive of some peculiarity in the fossils they designate.
One of his ichthyolites, with a thorn or spine in each fin, bears
the name of _Acanthodes_, or thorn-like; another with a similar
mechanism of spines attached to the upper part of the body,
and in which the pectoral or hand-fins are involved, has been
designated the _Cheiracanthus_, or thorn-hand; a third covered with
curiously-fretted scales, has been named the _Glyptolepis_, or
carved-scale; and a fourth, roughened over with berry-like tubercles,
that rise from strong osseous plates, is known as the _Coccosteus_,
or berry-on-bone. And such has been his principle of nomenclature.
The name is a condensed description. But though all his names mean
something, they cannot mean a great deal; and as learned words
repel unlearned readers, I shall just take the liberty of reminding
mine of the humbler class, that there is no legitimate connection
between Geology and the dead languages. The existences of the Old
Red Sandstone had lived for ages, and had been dead for myriads of
ages, ere there was Greek enough in the world to furnish them with
names. There is no working-man, if he be a person of intelligence
and information, however unlearned, in the vulgar acceptation of the
phrase, who may not derive as much pleasure and enlargement of idea
from the study of Geology, and acquaint himself as minutely with its
truths, as if possessed of all the learning of Bentley.




CHAPTER III.


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.--Geological Argument.--The
Present incomplete without the Past.--Intermediate Links of
Creation.--Organisms of the Lower Old lied Sandstone.--The
_Pterichthys_.--Its first Discovery.--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.

Mr. Lyell's brilliant and popular work, _The Principles of Geology_,
must have introduced to the knowledge of most of my readers the
strange theories of Lamarck. The ingenious foreigner, on the strength
of a few striking facts, which prove that, to a certain extent,
the instincts of species may be improved and heightened, and their
forms changed from a lower to a higher degree of adaptation to
their circumstances, has concluded that there is a natural progress
from the inferior orders of being towards the superior; and that
the offspring of creatures low in the scale in the present time,
may hold a much higher place in it, and belong to different and
nobler species, a few thousand years hence. The descendants of the
_ourang-outang_, for instance, may be employed in some future age in
writing treatises on Geology, in which they shall have to describe
the remains of the _quadrumana_ as belonging to an extinct order.
Lamarck himself, when bearing home in triumph with him the skeleton
of some huge salamander or crocodile of the Lias, might indulge,
consistently with his theory, in the pleasing belief that he had
possessed himself of the bones of his grandfather--a grandfather
removed, of course, to a remote degree of consanguinity, by the
intervention of a few hundred thousand _great-greats_. Never yet
was there a fancy so wild and extravagant but there have been men
bold enough to dignify it with the name of philosophy, and ingenious
enough to find reasons for the propriety of the name.

The setting-dog is _taught_ to set; he squats down and points at the
game; but the habit is an acquired one--a mere trick of education.
What, however, is merely acquired habit in the progenitor, is
found to pass into instinct in the descendant: the puppy of the
setting-dog squats down and sets _untaught_--the educational trick
of the parent is mysteriously transmuted into an original principle
in the offspring. The adaptation which takes place in the forms and
constitution of plants and animals, when placed in circumstances
different from their ordinary ones, is equally striking. The
woody plant of a warmer climate, when transplanted into a colder,
frequently exchanges its ligneous stem for a herbaceous one, as if
in anticipation of the killing frosts of winter; and, dying to the
ground at the close of autumn, shoots up again in spring. The dog,
transported from a temperate into a frigid region, exchanges his
covering of hair for a covering of wool; when brought back again to
his former habitat, the wool is displaced by the original hair. And
hence, and from similar instances, the derivation of an argument,
good so far as it goes, for changes in adaptation to altered
circumstances of the organization of plants and animals, and for the
unprovability of instinct. But it is easy driving a principle too
far. The elasticity of a common bow, and the strength of an ordinary
arm, are fully adequate to the transmission of an arrow from one
point of space to another point a hundred yards removed; but he would
be a philosopher worth looking at, who would assert that they were
equally adequate for the transmission of the same arrow from points
removed, not by a hundred yards, but by a hundred miles. And such,
but still more glaring, has been the error of Lamarck. Fie has argued
on this principle of improvement and adaptation--which, carry it as
far as we rationally may, still leaves the vegetable a vegetable, and
the dog a dog--that, in the vast course of ages, inferior have risen
into superior natures, and lower into higher races; that molluscs and
zoöphytes have passed into fish and reptiles, and fish and reptiles
into birds and quadrupeds; that unformed, gelatinous bodies, with an
organization scarcely traceable, have been metamorphosed into oaks
and cedars; and that monkeys and apes have been transformed into
human creatures, capable of understanding and admiring the theories
of Lamarck. Assuredly there is no lack of faith among infidels;
their "vaulting" credulity o'erleaps revelation, and "falls on the
other side." One of the first geological works I ever read was a
philosophical romance, entitled _Telliamed_, by a M. Maillet, an
ingenious Frenchman of the days of Louis XV. This Maillet was by
much too great a philosopher to credit the scriptural account of
Noah's flood; and yet he could believe, like Lamarck, that the whole
family of birds had existed at one time as fishes, which, on being
thrown ashore by the waves, had got feathers by accident; and that
men themselves are but the descendants of a tribe of sea-monsters,
who, tiring of their proper element, crawled up the beach one sunny
morning, and, taking a fancy to the land, forgot to return.[H]

[Footnote H: Few men could describe better than Maillet. His
extravagances are as amusing as those of a fairy tale, and quite as
extreme. Take the following extract as an instance:--

"Winged or flying fish, stimulated by the desire of prey, or the
fear of death, or pushed near the shore by the billows, have fallen
among reeds or herbage, whence it was not possible for them to resume
their flight to the sea, by means of which they had contracted
their first facility of flying. Then their fins, being no longer
bathed in the sea-water, were split, and became warped by their
dryness. While they found, among the reeds and herbage among which
they fell, any aliments to support them, the vessels of their fins,
being separated, were lengthened and clothed with beards, or, to
speak more justly, the membranes, which before kept them adherent
to each other, were metamorphosed. The beard formed of these warped
membranes was lengthened. The skin of these animals was insensibly
covered with a down of the same color with the skin, and this down
gradually increased. The little wings they had under their belly,
and which, like their wings, helped them to walk in the sea, became
feet, and served them to walk on land. There were also other small
changes in their figure. The beak and neck of some were lengthened,
and those of others shortened. The conformity, however, of the first
figure subsists in the whole, and it will be always easy to know it.
Examine all the species of fowls, large and small, even those of
the Indies, those which are tufted or not, those whose feathers are
reversed, such as we see at Damietta--that is to say, whose plumage
runs from the tail to the head--and you will find species of fish
quite similar, scaly or without scales. All species of parrots, whose
plumages are so different, the rarest and the most singular-marked
birds, are, conformable to fact, painted like them with black, brown,
gray, yellow, green, red, violet color, and those of gold and azure;
and all this precisely in the same parts where the plumages of those
birds are diversified in so curious a manner."--_Telliamed_, p. 224,
ed. 1750.]

"How easy," says this fanciful writer, "is it to conceive the change
of a winged fish, flying at times through the water, at times through
the air, into a bird flying always through the air!" It is a law of
nature, that the chain of being, from the lowest to the highest form
of life, should be, in some degree, a continuous chain; that the
various classes of existence should shade into one another, so that
it often proves a matter of no little difficulty to point out the
exact line of demarcation where one class or family ends, and another
class or family begins. The naturalist passes from the vegetable
to the animal tribes, scarcely aware, amid the perplexing forms of
intermediate existence, at what point he quits the precincts of the
one to enter on those of the other. All the animal families have, in
like manner, their connecting links; and it is chiefly out of these
that writers such as Lamarck and Maillet construct their system.
They confound gradation with progress. Geoffrey Hudson was a very
short man, and Goliath of Gath a very tall one, and the gradations
of the human stature lie between. But gradation is not progress; and
though we find full-grown men of five feet, five feet six inches, six
feet, and six feet and a half, the fact gives us no earnest whatever
that the race is rising in stature, and that at some future period
the average height of the human family will be somewhat between ten
and eleven feet. And equally unsolid is the argument, that from a
principle of gradation in races would deduce a principle of progress
in races. The tall man of six feet need entertain quite as little
hope of rising into eleven feet as the short man of five; nor has the
fish that occasionally flies any better chance of passing into a bird
than the fish that only swims.

Geology abounds with creatures of the intermediate class: there
are none of its links more numerous than its connecting links; and
hence its interest, as a field of speculation, to the assertors of
the transmutation of races. But there is a fatal incompleteness in
the evidence, that destroys its character as such. It supplies in
abundance those links of generic connection, which, as it were,
marry together dissimilar races; but it furnishes no genealogical
link to show that the existences of one race derive their lineage
from the existences of another. The scene shifts, as we pass from
formation to formation; we are introduced in each to a new _dramatis
personæ_; and there exist no such proofs of their being at once
different and yet the same, as those produced in the _Winter's Tale_,
to show that the grown shepherdess of the one scene is identical with
the exposed infant of the scene that went before. Nay, the reverse
is well nigh as strikingly the case, as if the grown shepherdess had
been introduced into the earlier scenes of the drama, and the child
into its concluding scenes.

The argument is a very simple one. Of all the vertebrata, fishes
rank lowest, and in geological history appear first. We find their
remains in the Upper and Lower Silurians, in the Lower, Middle,
and Upper Old Red Sandstone, in the Mountain Limestone, and in
the Coal Measures; and in the latter formation the first reptiles
appear. Fishes seem to have been the master existences of two great
systems, mayhap of three, ere the age of reptiles began. Now fishes
differ very much among themselves: some rank nearly as low as worms,
some nearly as high as reptiles; and if fish could have risen into
reptiles, and reptiles into mammalia, we would necessarily expect to
find lower orders of fish passing into higher, and taking precedence
of the higher in their appearance in point of time, just as in the
_Winter's Tale_ we see the infant preceding the adult. If such be
not the case--if fish made their first appearance, not in their
least perfect, but in their most perfect state--not in their nearest
approximation to the worm, but in their nearest approximation to
the reptile--there is no room for progression, and the argument
falls. Now it is a geological fact, that it is fish of the higher
orders that appear first on the stage, and that they are found to
occupy exactly the same level during the vast period represented by
five succeeding formations. There is no progression. If fish rose
into reptiles, it must have been by sudden transformation--it must
have been as if a man who had stood still for half a lifetime should
bestir himself all at once, and take seven leagues at a stride. There
is no getting rid of miracle in the case--there is no alternative
between creation and metamorphosis. The infidel substitutes
progression for Deity; Geology robs him of his god.

But no man who enters the geological field in quest of the wonderful,
need pass in pursuit of his object from the true to the fictitious.
Does the reader remember how, in Milton's sublime figure, the body
of Truth is represented as hewn in pieces, and her limbs scattered
over distant regions, and how her friends and disciples have to
go wandering all over the world in quest of them? There is surely
something very wonderful in the fact, that, in uniting the links
of the chain of creation into an unbroken whole, we have in like
manner to seek for them all along the scale of the geologist;--some
we discover among the tribes first annihilated--some among the
tribes that perished at a later period--some among the existences
of the passing time. We find the present incomplete without the
past--the recent without the extinct. There are marvellous analogies
which pervade the scheme of Providence, and unite, as it were,
its lower with its higher parts. The perfection of the works of
Deity is a perfection entire in its components; and yet these are
not contemporaneous, but successive: it is a perfection which
includes the dead as well as the living, and bears relation, in its
completeness, not to time, but to eternity.

We find the organisms of the Old Red Sandstone supplying an important
link, or, rather, series of links, in the ichthyological scale,
which are wanting in the present creation, and the absence of which
evidently occasions a wide gap between the two grand divisions
or series of fishes--the bony and the cartilaginous. Of this,
however, more anon. Of all the organisms of the system, one of the
most extraordinary, and the one in which Lamarck would have most
delighted, is the _Pterichthys_, or winged fish, an ichthyolite which
the writer had the pleasure of introducing to the acquaintance of
geologists nearly three years ago, but which he first laid open to
the light about seven years earlier. Had Lamarck been the discoverer,
he would unquestionably have held that he had caught a fish almost
in the act of wishing itself into a bird. There are wings which want
only feathers, a body which seems to have been as well adapted for
passing through the air as the water, and a tail by which to steer.
And yet there are none of the fossils of the Old Red Sandstone which
less resemble any thing that now exists than its _Pterichthys_. I
fain wish I could communicate to the reader the feeling with which I
contemplated my first-found specimen. It opened with a single blow
of the hammer; and there, on a ground of light-colored limestone,
lay the effigy of a creature fashioned apparently out of jet, with a
body covered with plates, two powerful looking arms, articulated at
the shoulders, a head as entirely lost in the trunk as that of the
ray or the sun-fish, and a long, angular tail. My first-formed idea
regarding it was, that I had discovered a connecting link between
the tortoise and the fish--the body much resembles that of a small
turtle; and why, I asked, if one formation gives us sauroid fishes,
may not another give us chelonian ones? or if in the Lias we find
the body of the lizard mounted on the paddles of the whale, why not
find in the Old Red Sandstone the body of the tortoise mounted in
a somewhat similar manner? The idea originated in error; but as it
was an error which not many naturalists could have corrected at the
time, it may be deemed an excusable one, more especially by such of
my readers as may have seen well-preserved specimens of the creature,
or who examine the subjoined prints. (Nos. I. and II.) I submitted
some of my specimens to Mr. Murchison, at a time when that gentleman
was engaged among the fossils of the Silurian System, and employed
on his great work, which has so largely served to extend geological
knowledge regarding those earlier periods in which animal life first
began. He was much interested in the discovery: it furnished the
geologist with additional data by which to regulate and construct
his calculations, and added a new and very singular link to the
chain of existence in its relation to human knowledge. Deferring to
Agassiz, as the highest authority, he yet anticipated the decision
of that naturalist regarding it, in almost every particular. I had
inquired, under the influence of my first impression, whether it
might not be considered as a sort of intermediate existence between
the fish and the chelonian. He stated, in reply, that he could
not deem it referrible to any family of reptiles; that, if not a
fish, it approached more closely to the Crustacea than to any other
class; and that he had little doubt Agassiz would pronounce it to
be an ichthyolite of that ancient order to which the _Cephalaspis_
belongs, and which seems to have formed a connecting link between
crustacea and fishes.[I] The specimens submitted to Mr. Murchison
were forwarded to Agassiz. They were much more imperfect than some
which I have since disinterred; and to restore the entire animal from
them would require powers such as those possessed by Cuvier in the
past age, and by the naturalist of Neufchatel in the present. Broken
as they were, however, Agassiz at once decided from them that the
creature must have been a fish.

[Footnote I: The aborigines of South. America deemed it wonderful
that the Europeans who first visited them should, without previous
concert, agree in reading after the same manner the same scrap of
manuscript, and in deriving the same piece of information from
it. The writer experienced on this occasion a somewhat similar
feeling. His specimens seemed written in a character cramp enough
to suggest those doubts regarding original meaning which lead to
various readings; but the geologist and the naturalist agreed in
perusing them after exactly the same fashion--the one in London, the
other in Neufchatel. Such instances give confidence in the findings
of science. The decision of Mr. Murchison I subjoin in his own
words--his numbers refer to various specimens of _Pterichthys_: "As
to your fossils 1, 2, 3, we know nothing of them here, (London,)
except that they remind me of the occipital fragments of some of
the Caithness fishes. I do not conceive they can be referrible to
any reptile; for, if not fishes, they more closely approach to
crustaceans than to any other class. I conceive, however, that
Agassiz will pronounce them to be fishes, which, together with the
curious genus _Cephalaspis_ of the Old Red Sandstone, form the
connecting links between crustaceans and fishes. Your specimens
remind one in several respects of the _Cephalaspis_."]

[Illustration: _PLATE I._]

I have placed one of the specimens before me. Imagine the figure
of a man rudely drawn in black on a gray ground, the head cut off
at the shoulders, the arms spread at full, as in the attitude of
swimming, the body rather long than otherwise, and narrowing from
the chest downwards, one of the legs cut away at the hip-joint, and
the other, as if to preserve the balance, placed directly under
the centre of the figure, which it seems to support. Such, at a
first glance, is the appearance of the fossil. The body was of very
considerable depth, perhaps little less deep proportionally from back
to breast than the body of the tortoise; the under part was flat;
the upper rose towards the centre into a roof-like ridge; and both
under and upper were covered with a strong armor of bony plates,
which, resembling more the plates of the tortoise than those of the
crustacean, received their accessions of growth at the edges or
sutures. The plates on the under side are divided by two lines of
suture, which run, the one longitudinally through the centre of the
body, the other transversely, also through the centre; and they would
cut one another at right angles, were there not a lozenge-shaped
plate inserted at the point where they would otherwise meet. There
are thus five plates on the lower or belly part of the animal. They
are all thickly tubercled outside with wart-like prominences, (see
Plate I., fig. 4;) the inner present appearances indicative of
a bony structure. The plates on the upper side are more numerous
and more difficult to describe, just as it would be difficult to
describe the forms of the various stones which compose the ribbed
and pointed roof of a Gothic cathedral, the arched ridge or hump of
the back requiring, in a somewhat similar way, a peculiar form and
arrangement of plates. The apex of the ridge is covered by a strong
hexagonal plate, fitted upon it like a cap or helmet, and which
nearly corresponds in place to the flat central plate of the under
side. There runs around it a border of variously formed plates, that
diminish in size and increase in number towards the head, and which
are separated, like the pieces of a dissected map, by deep sutures.
They all present the tubercled surface. The eyes are placed in
front, on a prominence considerably lower than the roof-like ridge
of the back; the mouth seems to have opened, as in many fishes, in
the edge of the creature's snout, where a line running along the
back would bisect a line running along the belly; but this part
is less perfectly shown by my specimens than any other. The two
arms, or paddles, are placed so far forward as to give the body a
disproportionate and decapitated appearance. From the shoulder to
the elbow, if I may employ the terms, there is a swelling, muscular
appearance, as in the human arm; the part below is flattened, so
as to resemble the blade of an oar, and terminates in a strong,
sharp point. The tail--the one leg on which, as exhibited in one
of my specimens, the creature seems to stand--is of considerable
length, more than equal to a third of the entire figure, and of an
angular form, the base representing the part attached to the body,
and the apex its termination. It was covered with small tubercled,
rhomboidal plates, like scales, (see Plate I., fig. 3;) and where the
internal structure is shown, there are appearances of a vertebral
column, with rib-like processes standing out at a sharp angle. The
ichthyolite, in my larger specimens, does not much exceed seven
inches in length; and I despatched one to Agassiz, rather more than
two years ago, whose extreme length did not exceed an inch. Such
is a brief, and, I am afraid, imperfect sketch of a creature whose
very type seems no longer to exist. But for the purposes of the
geologist, the descriptions of the graver far exceed those of the
pen, and the accompanying prints will serve to supply all that may
be found wanting in the text. Fig. 1, in Plate I., and fig. 2, in
Plate II., are both restorations--the first of the upper, and the
second of the under, part of the creature. It may, however, encourage
the confidence of the naturalist, who for the first time looks upon
forms so strange, to be informed that Plate I., with its two figures,
was submitted to Agassiz during his recent brief stay in Edinburgh,
and that he as readily recognized in it the species of the two kinds
which it exhibits, as he had previously recognized the species of the
originals in the limestone.

[Illustration: _PLATE II._]

Agassiz, in the course of his late visit to Scotland, found six
species of the _Pterichthys_[J]--three of these, and the wings of a
fourth, in the collection of the writer. The differences by which
they are distinguished may be marked by even an unpractised eye,
especially in the form of the bodies and wings. Some are of a fuller,
some of a more elongated, form; in some the body resembles a heraldic
shield, of nearly the ordinary shape and proportions; in others the
shield stretches into a form not very unlike that of a Norway skiff,
from the midships forward. In some of the varieties, too, the wings
are long and comparatively slender; in others shorter, and of greater
breadth: in some there is an inflection resembling the bend of an
elbow; in others there is a continuous swelling from the termination
to the shoulder, where a sudden narrowing takes place immediately
over the articulation. I had inferred somewhat too hurriedly, though
perhaps naturally enough, that these wings, or arms, with their
strong sharp points and oar-like blades, had been at once paddles and
spears--instruments of motion and weapons of defence; and hence the
mistake of connecting the creature with the Chelonia. I am informed
by Agassiz, however, that they were weapons of defence only, which,
like the occipital spines of the river bull-head, were erected in
moments of danger or alarm, and at other times lay close by the
creature's side; and that the sole instrument of motion was the tail,
which, when covered by its coat of scales, was proportionally of a
somewhat larger size than the tail shown in the print, which, as in
the specimens from whence it was taken, exhibits but the obscure
and uncertain lineaments of the skeleton. The river bull-head, when
attacked by an enemy, or immediately as it feels the hook in its
jaws, erects its two spines at nearly right angles with the plates
of the head, as if to render itself as difficult of being swallowed
as possible. The attitude is one of danger and alarm; and it is a
curious fact, to which I shall afterwards have occasion to advert,
that in this attitude nine tenths of the _Pterichthys_ of the Lower
Old Red Sandstone are to be found. We read in the stone a singularly
preserved story of the strong instinctive love of life, and of the
mingled fear and anger implanted for its preservation--"The champions
in distorted postures threat." It presents us, too, with a wonderful
record of violent death falling at once, not on a few individuals,
but on whole tribes.

[Footnote J: Agassiz now reckons ten distinct species of
_Pterichthys_--_P. arenatus_, _P. cancriformis_, _P. cornutus_, _P.
major_, _P. Milleri_, P. latus, _P. oblongus_, _P. productus_, _P.
testudinarius_, and _P. hydrophilus_; of these, nine species belong
to the Lower, and one--the _Pterichthys hydrophilus_--to the Upper
Old Red Sandstone.]

[Illustration: _PLATE III._]

Next to the _Pterichthys_ of the Lower Old Red I shall place its
contemporary the _Coccosteus_ of Agassiz, a fish which, in some
respects, must have somewhat resembled it. Both were covered with
an armor of thickly tubercled bony plates, and both furnished
with a vertebrated tail. The plates of the one, when found lying
detached in the rock, can scarcely be distinguished from those of the
other: there are the same marks, as in the plates of the tortoise,
of accessions of growth at the edges--the same cancellated bony
structure within, the same kind of tubercles without. The forms of
the creatures themselves, however, were essentially different. I
have compared the figure of the _Pterichthys_, as shown in some of
my better specimens, to that of a man with the head cut off at the
shoulders, one of the legs also wanting, and the arms spread to the
full. The figure of the _Coccosteus_ I would compare to a boy's kite.
(See Plate III., fig. 1.) There is a rounded head, a triangular body,
a long tail attached to the apex of the triangle, and arms thin and
rounded where they attach to the body, and spreading out towards
their termination like the ancient one-sided shovel which we see
sculptured on old tombstones, or the rudder of an ancient galley.[K]
The manner in which the plates are arranged on the head is peculiarly
beautiful; but I am afraid I cannot adequately describe them. A ring
of plates, like the ring-stones of an arch, runs along what may
be called the hoop of the kite; the form of the keystone-plate is
perfect; the shapes of the others are elegantly varied, as if for
ornament; and what would be otherwise the opening of the arch, is
filled up with one large plate, of an outline singularly elegant. A
single plate, still larger than any of the others, covers the greater
part of the creature's triangular body, to the shape of which it
nearly conforms. It rises saddle-wise towards the centre: on the
ridge there is a longitudinal groove ending in a perforation, a
little over the apex, (Plate III., fig. 2;) two small lateral plates
on either side fill up the base of the angle; and the long tail, with
its numerous vertebral joints, terminates the figure.

[Footnote K: I have since ascertained that these seeming arms or
paddles were simply plates of a peculiar form.]

Does the reader possess a copy of Lyell's lately published elementary
work, edition 1838? If so, let him first turn up the description of
the Upper Silurian rocks, from Murchison, which occurs in page 459,
and mark the form of the trilobite _Asaphus caudatus_, a fossil of
the Wenlock formation. (See _Sil. Sys._, Plate VII.) The upper part,
or head, forms a crescent; the body rises out of the concave with a
sweep somewhat resembling that of a Gothic arch; the outline of the
whole approximates to that of an egg, the smaller end terminating
in a sharp point. Let him remark, further, that this creature was a
_crustaceous_ animal, of the crab or lobster class, and then turn up
the brief description of the Old Red Sandstone in the same volume,
page 454, and mark the form of the _Cephalaspis_, or buckler-head--a
_fish_ of a formation immediately over that in which the remains
of the trilobite most abound. He will find that the fish and the
crustacean are wonderfully alike. The fish is more elongated, but
both possess the crescent-shaped head, and both the angular and
apparently jointed body.[L] They illustrate admirably how two
distinct orders may meet. They exhibit the points, if I may so speak,
at which the plated fish is linked to the shelled crustacean. Now,
the _Coccosteus_ is a stage further on; it is more unequivocally a
fish. It is a _Cephalaspis_ with an articulated tail attached to the
angular body, and the horns of the crescent-shaped head cut off.

[Footnote L: Really jointed in the case of the trilobite; only
apparently so in that of the _Cephalaspis_. The body of the
trilobite, like that of the lobster, was barred by transverse,
oblong, overlapping plates, and between every two plates there was a
joint; the body of the _Cephalaspis_, in like manner, was barred by
transverse, oblong, overlapping scales, between which there existed
no such joints. It is interesting to observe how nature, in thus
bringing two such different classes as fishes and crustacea together,
gives to the higher animal a sort of pictorial resemblance to the
lower, in parts where the construction could not be identical without
interfering with the grand distinctions of the classes.]

Some of the specimens which exhibit this creature are exceedingly
curious. In one, a coprolite still rests in the abdomen; and a common
botanist's microscope shows it thickly speckled over with minute
scales, the indigestible exuviæ of fish on which the animal had
preyed. In the abdomen of another we find a few minute pebbles--just
as pebbles are occasionally found in the stomach of the cod--which
had been swallowed by the creature attached to its food. Is there
nothing wonderful in the fact, that men should be learning at this
time of day how the fishes of the Old Red Sandstone lived, and that
there were some of them rapacious enough not to be over nice in their
eating?

The under part of the creature is still very imperfectly known:
it had its central lozenge-shaped plate, like that on the under
side of the _Pterichthys_, but of greater elegance, (see Plate
III., fig. 3,) round which the other plates were ranged. "What an
appropriate ornament, if set in gold!" said Dr. Buckland, on seeing
a very beautiful specimen of this central lozenge in the interesting
collection of Professor Traill of Edinburgh,--"What an appropriate
ornament for a lady geologist!" There are two marked peculiarities
in the jaws of the _Coccosteus_, as shown in most of the specimens,
illustrative of the lower part of the creature, which I have yet
seen. The teeth, instead of being fixed in sockets, like those of
quadrupeds and reptiles, or merely placed on the bone, like those of
fish of the common varieties, seem to have been cut out of the solid,
like the teeth of a saw or the teeth in the mandibles of the beetle,
or in the nippers of the lobster, (Plate III., fig. 4;) and there
appears to have been something strangely anomalous in the position
of the jaws--something too anomalous, perhaps, to be regarded as
proven by the evidence of the specimens yet found, but which may
be mentioned with the view of directing attention to it. "Do not
be deterred," said Agassiz, in the course of one of the interviews
in which he obligingly indulged the writer of these chapters, who
had mentioned to him that one of his opinions, just confirmed by
the naturalist, had seemed so extraordinary that he had been almost
afraid to communicate it,--"Do not be deterred, if you have examined
minutely, by any dread of being deemed extravagant. The possibilities
of existence run so deeply into the extravagant, that there is
scarcely any conception too extraordinary for nature to realize." In
all the more complete specimens which I have yet seen, _the position
of the jaws is vertical, not horizontal_; and yet the creature, as
shown by the tail, belonged unquestionably to the vertebrata. Now,
though the mouths of the crustaceous animals, such as the crab and
lobster, open vertically, and a similar arrangement obtains among the
insect tribes, it has been remarked by naturalists, as an invariable
condition of that higher order of animals distinguished by vertebral
columns, that their mouths open horizontally. What I would remark as
very extraordinary in the _Coccosteus_--not, however, in the way of
directly asserting the fact, but merely by way of soliciting inquiry
regarding it--is, that it seems to unite to a vertebral column a
vertical mouth, thus forming a connecting link between two orders of
existences, by conjoining what is at once their most characteristic
and most dissimilar traits.[M]

[Footnote M: These statements regarding the character of the teeth
and the position of the jaws of the _Coccosteus_ have been challenged
by very high authorities. I retain them, however, in this edition
in their original form, as first made nearly six years ago. In at
least two of my specimens of Coccosteus the teeth and jaw form
unequivocally but one bone--a result, it is not improbable, of some
after anchylosing process, but which still solicits inquiry as not
yet definitely accounted for. The matter of fact in the case is
certainly one which should be determined, not analogically, but on
its own proper evidence, as furnished by good specimens. As for
the remark regarding the probable position of the creature's jaws,
it was ventured on at first, as the reader may perceive, with much
hesitation, and must now be regarded as more doubtful than ever.
Its repetition here, however, will, I trust, be regarded as simply
indicative of a wish on the part of the writer, that the question
be kept open just a little longer, and that further examination
be made. There is certainly something very peculiar about the
mouth of the Coccosteus not yet understood, and singularly formed
plates, connected with it, which have not been introduced into any
restoration, and the use of which in the economy of the animal
seem wholly unknown. [1850.--I have at length found a very perfect
specimen of the nether jaw of _Coccosteus_, and am prepared to show
that it was of a character altogether unique. It had its two groups
of from six to eight teeth, (exactly where, in the human subject, the
molars are placed,) that seem to have acted on corresponding groups
in the intermaxllaries, and two other groups of from three to five
teeth placed at right angles with these, direct in the symphysis,
and that seem to have acted on each other. But though these unique
teeth of the symphysis formed a vertical line of mouth, it joined
on at right angles to a transverse line of the ordinary type, as
the upright stroke of the letter T joins on to the horizontal line
a-top.] Fourth Edition.]

I am acquainted with four species of _Coccosteus_--_C. decipiens_,
_C. cuspidatas_, _C. oblongus_, and a variety not yet named; and
many more species may yet be discovered.[N] Of all the existences of
the formation, this curious fish seems to have been one of the most
abundant. In a few square yards of rock I have laid open portions of
the remains of a dozen different individuals belonging to two of the
four species, the _C. decipiens_ and _C. cuspidatus_, in the course
of a single evening. None of the other kinds have yet been found at
Cromarty. These two differed from each other in the proportions
which their general bulk bore to their length--slightly, too, in
the arrangement of their occipital plates. The _Coccosteus latus_,
as the name implies, must have been by much a massier fish than the
other; and we find the arch-like form of the plates which covered its
head more complete: the plate representing the keystone rests on the
saddle-shaped plate in the centre, and the plates representing the
spring-stones of the arch exhibit a broader base. The accompanying
print (Plate III.) represents the _Coccosteus cuspidatus_. The
average length of the creature, including the tail, as shown in most
of the Cromarty specimens, somewhat exceeded a foot. A few detached
plates from Orkney, in the collection of Dr. Traill, must have
belonged to an individual of fully twice that length.

[Footnote N: A fifth species has been named _C. maximus._]




CHAPTER IV.


The Elfin-fish of Gawin Douglas.--The Fish of the Old Red Sandstone
scarcely less curious.--Place which they occupied indicated
in the present Creation by a mere Gap.--Fish divided into two
great Series, the Osseous and Cartilaginous.--Their distinctive
Peculiarities.--Geological Illustration 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 Ichthyolite
belonged.--Description.--_Dipterus._--_Diplopterus._--_Cheirolepis._
--_Glyptolepis._

Has the reader ever heard of the "griesly fisch" and the "laithlie
flood," described by that minstrel Bishop of Dunkeld "who gave rude
Scotland Virgil's page?" Both fish and flood are the extravagances
of a poet's dream. The flood came rolling through a wilderness of
bogs and quagmires, under banks "dark as rocks the whilk the sey
upcast." A skeleton forest stretched around, doddered and leafless;
and through the "unblomit" and "barrant" trees

    "The quhissling wind blew mony bitter blast;"

the whitened branches "clashed and clattered;" the "vile water
rinnand o'erheid," and "routing as thonder," made "hideous trubil;"
and to augment the uproar, the "griesly fisch," like the fish of
eastern story, raised their heads amid the foam, and shrieked and
yelled as they passed. "The grim monsters fordeafit the heiring with
their sellouts;"--they were both fish and elves, and strangely noisy
in the latter capacity; and the longer the poet listened, the more
frightened he became. The description concludes, like a terrific
dream, with his wanderings through the labyrinths of the dead forest,
where all was dry and sapless above, and mud and marsh below,
and with his exclamations of grief and terror at finding himself
hopelessly lost in a scene of prodigies and evil spirits. And such
was one of the wilder fancies in which a youthful Scottish poet of
the days of Flodden indulged, ere taste had arisen to restrain and
regulate invention.

Shall I venture to say, that the ichthyolites of the Old Red
Sandstone have sometimes reminded me of the "fisch of the laithlie
flood?" They were hardly less curious. We find them surrounded, like
these, by a wilderness of dead vegetation, and of rocks upcast from
the sea; and there are the foot-prints of storm and tempest around
and under them. True, they must have been less noisy. Like the
"griesly fisch," however, they exhibit a strange union of opposite
natures. One of their families--that of the _Cephalaspis_--seems
almost to constitute a connecting link, says Agassiz, between fishes
and crustaceans. They had, also, their families of sauroid, or
reptile fishes--and their still more numerous families that unite the
cartilaginous fishes to the osseous. And to these last the explorer
of the Lower Old Red Sandstone finds himself mainly restricted. The
links of the system are all connecting links, separated by untold
ages from that which they connect; so that, in searching for their
representatives amid the existences of the present time, we find
but the gaps which they should have occupied. And it is essentially
necessary from this circumstance, in acquainting one's self with
their peculiarities, to examine, if I may so express myself, the
sides of these gaps,--the existing links at both ends to which the
broken links should have pieced,--in short, all those more striking
peculiarities of the existing disparted families which we find
united in the intermediate families that no longer exist. Without
some such preparation, the inquirer would inevitably share the fate
of the poetical dreamer of Dunkeld, by losing his way in a labyrinth.
In passing, therefore, with this object from the extinct to the
recent, I venture to solicit, for a few paragraphs, the attention of
the reader.

Fishes, the fourth great class in point of rank in the animal
kingdom, and, in extent of territory, decidedly the first, are
divided, as they exist in the present creation, into two distinct
series--the osseous and the cartilaginous. The osseous embraces
that vast assemblage which naturalists describe as "fishes properly
so called," and whose skeletons, like those of mammalia, birds,
and reptiles, are composed chiefly of a calcareous earth pervading
an organic base. Hence the durability of their remains. In the
cartilaginous series, on the contrary, the skeleton contains scarce
any of this earth: it is a framework of indurated animal matter,
elastic, semi-transparent, yielding easily to the knife, and, like
all mere animal substances, inevitably subject to decay. I have
seen the huge cartilaginous skeleton of a shark lost in a mass of
putrefaction in less than a fortnight. I have found the minutest
bones of the osseous ichthyolites of the Lias entire after the lapse
of unnumbered centuries.

The two series do not seem to precede or follow one another in
any such natural sequence as that in which the great classes of
the animal kingdom are arranged. The mammifer takes precedence of
the bird, the bird of the reptile, the reptile of the fish; there
is progression in the scale--the arrangement of the classes is
consecutive, not parallel. But in this great division there is
no such progression; the osseous fish takes no precedence of the
cartilaginous fish, or the cartilaginous, as a series, of the
osseous. The arrangement is parallel, not consecutive; but the
parallelism, if I may so express myself, seems to be that of a longer
with a shorter line;--the cartilaginous fishes, though much less
numerous in their orders and families than the other, stretch farther
along the scale in opposite directions, at once rising higher and
sinking lower than the osseous fishes. The cartilaginous order of the
sturgeons,--a roe-depositing tribe, devoid alike of affection for
their young, or of those attachments which give the wild beasts of
the forest partners in their dens,--may be regarded as fully abreast
of by much the greater part of the osseous fishes, in both their
instincts and their organization. The family of the sharks, on the
other hand, and some of the rays, rise higher, as if to connect the
class of fish with the class immediately above it--that of reptiles.
Many of them are viviparous, like the mammalia--attached, it is said,
to their young, and fully equal even to birds in the strength of
their connubial attachments. The male, in some instances, has been
known to pine away and die when deprived of his female companion.[O]
But then, on the other hand, the cartilaginous fishes, in some of
their tribes, sink as low beneath the osseous as they rise above them
in others. The suckers, for instance, a cartilaginous family, are
the most imperfect of all vertebral animals; some of them want even
the sense of sight; they seem mere worms, furnished with fins and
gills, and were so classed by Linnæus; but though now ascertained to
be in reality fishes, they must be regarded as the lowest link in the
scale--as connecting the class with the class _Vermes_, just as the
superior cartilaginous fishes may be regarded as connecting it with
the class _Reptilia_.

[Footnote O: Some of the osseous fishes are also viviparous--the
"viviparous blenny," for instance. The evidence from which the
supposed affection of the higher fishes for their offspring has been
inferred, is, I am afraid, of a somewhat equivocal character. The
love of the sow for her litter hovers, at times, between that of the
parent and that of the epicure; nor have we proof enough, in the
present state of ichthyological knowledge, to conclude to which side
the parental love of the fish inclines. The connubial affections of
some of the higher families seem better established. Of a pair of
gigantic rays (_Cephaloptera giorna_) taken in the Mediterranean,
and described by Risso, the female was captured by some fishermen;
and the male continued constantly about the boat, as if bewailing
the fate of his companion, and was then found floating dead.--See
Wilson's article Ichthyology, _Encyc. Brit._, seventh edition.]

Between the osseous and the cartilaginous fishes there exist some
very striking dissimilarities. The skull of the osseous fish is
divided into a greater number of distinct bones, and possesses more
movable parts, than the skulls of mammiferous animals: the skull of
the cartilaginous fish, on the contrary, consists of but a single
piece, without joint or suture. There is another marked distinction.
The bony fish, if it approaches in form to that general type which we
recognize amid all the varieties of the class as proper to fishes,
and to which, in all their families, nature is continually inclining,
will be found to have a tail branching out, as in the perch and
herring, from the bone in which the vertebral column terminates;
whereas the cartilaginous fish, if it also approach the general type,
will be found to have a tail formed, as in the sturgeon and dog-fish,
on both sides of the hinder portion of the spine, but developed much
more largely on the under than on the upper side. In some instances,
it is wanting on the upper side altogether. It may be as impossible
to assign reasons for such relations as for those which exist
between the digestive organs and the hoofs of the ruminant animals;
but it is of importance that they should be noted.[P] It may be
remarked, further, that the great bulk of fishes whose skeletons
consist of cartilage have yet an ability of secreting the calcareous
earth which composes bone, and that they are furnished with bony
coverings, either partial or entire. Their bones lie outside. The
thorn-back derives its name from the multitudinous hooks and spikes
of bone that bristle over its body; the head, back, and operculum of
the sturgeon are covered with bony plates; the thorns and prickles of
the shark are composed of the same material. The framework within is
a framework of mere animal matter; but it was no lack of the osseous
ingredient that led to the arrangement--an arrangement which we can
alone refer to the will of that all-potent Creator, who can transpose
his materials at pleasure, without interfering with the perfection
of his work. It is a curious enough circumstance, that some of the
osseous fishes, as if entirely to reverse the condition of the
cartilaginous ones, are partially covered with plates of cartilage.
They are bone within, and cartilage without, just as others are bone
without and cartilage within.

[Footnote P: Dr. Buckland, in his _Bridgewater Treatise_, assigns
satisfactory reasons for this construction of tail in sharks and
sturgeons. Of the fishes of these two orders, he states, "the former
perform the office of scavengers, to clear the water of impurities,
and have no teeth, but feed, by means of a soft, leather-like mouth,
capable of protrusion and contraction, on putrid vegetables and
animal substances at the bottom; and hence they have constantly to
keep their bodies in an inclined position. The sharks employ their
tail in another peculiar manner--to turn their body, in order to
bring their mouth, which is placed downwards beneath the head, into
contact with their prey. We find an important provision in every
animal, to give a position of ease and activity to the head during
the operation of feeding."--_Bridgewater Treatise_, p. 279, vol. i.,
first ed.]

But how apply all this to the Geology of the Old Red Sandstone?
Very directly. The ichthyolites of this ancient formation hold,
as has been said, an intermediate place, unoccupied among present
existences, between the two series, and in some respects resemble
the osseous, and in some the cartilaginous tribes. The fact reminds
one of Dr. Johnson's shrewd objection to the theory embraced by
Soame Jenyns in his _Free Inquiry_, and which was the theory also of
Pope and Bolingbroke. The metaphysician held, with the poet and his
friend, that there exists a vast and finely graduated chain of being
from Infinity to nonentity--from God to nothing; and that to strike
out a single link would be to mar the perfection of the whole.[Q]
The moralist demonstrated, on the contrary, that this chain, in
the very nature of things, must be incomplete at both ends--that
between that which does, and that which does not exist, there must
be an infinite difference--that the chain, therefore, cannot lay
hold on _nothing_. He showed, further, that between the greatest of
finite existences and the adorable Infinite there must exist another
illimitable void--that the boundless and the bounded are as widely
separated in their natures and qualities as the existent and the
non-existent--that the chain, in short, cannot lay hold on Deity. He
asserted, however, that not only is it thus incomplete at both ends,
but that we must regard it as well nigh as incomplete in many of its
intermediate links as at its terminal ones; that it is already a
broken chain, seeing that between its various classes of existence
myriads of intermediate existences might be introduced, by graduating
more minutely what must necessarily be capable of infinite gradation;
and that, to base an infidel theory on the supposed completeness of
what is demonstrably incomplete, and on the impossibility of a gap
existing in what is already filled with gaps, is just to base one
absurdity on another.[R] Now, we find the Geology of what may be
termed the second age of vertebrated existence (for the Lower Old Red
Sandstone was such) coming curiously in to confirm the reasonings
of Johnson. It shows us the greater part of the fish of an entire
creation thus insinuated between two of the links of our own.

[Footnote Q:

   "See, through this air, this ocean, and this earth,
    All matter quick, and bursting into birth;
    Above, how high progressive life may go!
    Around, how wide! how deep extend below!
    Vast chain of being! which from God began--
    Nature's ethereal, human angel, man,
    Beast, bird, fish, insect--what no eye can see,
    No glass can reach; from Infinite to thee--
    From thee to nothing. On superior powers
    Were we to press, inferior might on ours;
    Or in the full creation leave a void,
    Where, one step broken, the great scale's destroyed:
    From Nature's chain, whatever link you strike,
    Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike."

                                      _Essay on Man._
]

[Footnote R: The following are the well-stated reasonings of Dr.
Johnson, a writer who never did injustice to an argument for want of
words to express it in:--

"The scale of existence from Infinity to nothing cannot possibly
have being. The highest being not infinite must be at an infinite
distance from Infinity. Cheyne, who, with the desire inherent
in mathematicians to reduce every thing to mathematical images,
considers all existence as a cone, allows that the basis is at an
infinite distance from the body, and in this distance between finite
and infinite there will be room forever for an infinite series of
indefinable existence.

"Between the lowest positive existence and nothing, whenever we
suppose positive existence to cease, is another chasm infinitely
deep, where there is room again for endless orders of subordinate
nature, continued forever and ever, and yet infinitely superior to
nonexistence.

"To these meditations humanity is unequal. But yet we may ask, not
of our Maker, but of each other, since on the one side creation,
whenever it stops, must stop infinitely below infinity, and on the
other infinitely above nothing, what necessity there is that it
should proceed so far either way--that being so high or so low should
ever have existed. We may ask, but I believe no created wisdom can
give an adequate answer.

"Nor is this all. In the scale, wherever it begins or ends, are
infinite vacuities. At whatever distance we suppose the next order of
beings to be above man, there is room for an intermediate order of
beings between them; and if for one order, then for infinite orders,
since every thing that admits of more or less, and consequently all
the parts of that which admits them, may be infinitely divided;
so that, as far as we can judge, there may be room in the vacuity
between any two steps of the scale, or between any two points of the
cone of being, for infinite exertion of infinite power."--_Review of
"A Free Inquiry."_]

It is now several years since I was first led to suspect that
the condition of the ichthyolites of the Old Red Sandstone was
intermediate. I have alluded to the comparative indestructibility
of the osseous skeleton, and the extreme liability to decay
characteristic of the cartilaginous one. Of a skeleton in part
osseous and in part cartilaginous, we must, of course, expect, when
it occurs in a fossil state, to find the indestructible portions
only. And when, in every instance, we find the fossil skeletons
of a formation complete in some of their parts, and incomplete in
others--the entire portions invariably agreeing, and the wanting
portions invariably agreeing also--it seems but natural to conclude
that an original difference must have obtained, and that the
existing parts, which we can at once recognize as bone, must have
been united to parts now wanting, which were composed of cartilage.
The naturalist never doubts that the shark's teeth, which he finds
detached on the shore, or buried in some ancient formation, were
united originally to cartilaginous jaws. Now, in breaking open all
the ichthyolites of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, with the exception
of those of the two families already described, we find that some
of the parts are invariably wanting, however excellent the state
of preservation maintained by the rest. I have seen every scale
preserved and in its place--one set of both the larger and smaller
bones occupying their original position--jaws thickly set with
teeth still undetached from the head--the massy bones of the skull
still unseparated--the larger shoulder-bone, on which the operculum
rests, lying in its proper bed--the operculum itself entire--and all
the external rays which support the fins, though frequently fine
as hairs, spreading out distinct as the fibres in the wing of the
dragon-fly, or the woody nerves in an oak-leaf. In no case, however,
have I succeeded in finding a single joint of the vertebral column,
or the trace of a single internal ray. No part of the internal
skeleton survives, nor does its disappearance seem to have had any
connection with the greater mass of putrescent matter which must
have surrounded it, seeing that the external rays of the fins show
quite as entire when turned over upon the body, as sometimes occurs,
as when spread out from it in profile. Besides, in the ichthyolites
of the chalk, no parts of the skeleton are better preserved than
the internal parts--the vertebral joints, and the internal rays.
The reader must have observed, in the cases of a museum of Natural
History, preparations of fish of two several kinds--preparations
of the skeleton, in which only the osseous parts are exhibited,
and preparations of the external form, in which the whole body is
shown in profile, with the fins spread to the full, and at least
half the bones of the head covered by the skin but in which the
vertebral column and internal rays are wanting. Now, in the fossils
of the chalk, with those of the other later formations, down to the
New Red Sandstone, we find that the skeleton style of preparation
obtains; whereas, in at least three fourths of the ichthyolites of
the Lower Old Red, we find only what we may term the external style.
I had marked, besides, another circumstance in the ichthyolites,
which seemed, like a nice point of circumstantial evidence, to give
testimony in the same line. The tails of all the ichthyolites, whose
vertebral columns and internal rays are wanting, are unequally lobed,
like those of the dog-fish and sturgeon, (both cartilaginous fishes,)
and the body runs on to nearly the termination of the surrounding
rays. The one-sided condition of tail exists, says Cuvier, in no
recent osseous fish known to naturalists, except in the bony pike--a
sauroid fish of the warmer rivers of America. With deference,
however, to so high an authority, it is questionable whether, the
tail of the bony pike should not rather be described as a tail set on
somewhat awry, than as a one-sided tail.

All these peculiarities I could but note as they turned up before me,
and express, in pointing them out to a few friends, a sort of vague,
because hopeless, desire, that good fortune might throw me in the
way of the one man of all the world best qualified to explain the
principle on which they occurred, and to decide whether fishes may be
at once bony and cartilaginous. But that meeting was a contingency
rather to be wished than hoped for--a circumstance within the
bounds of the possible, but beyond those of the probable. Could the
working-man of the north of Scotland have so much as dreamed that he
was yet to enjoy an opportunity of comparing his observations with
those of the naturalist of Neufchatel, and of having his inferences
tested and confirmed?

The opportunity did occur. The working-man did meet with Agassiz; and
many a query had he to put to him; and never, surely, was inquirer
more courteously entreated, or his doubts more satisfactorily
resolved. The reply to almost my first question solved the enigma of
nearly ten years' standing. And finely characteristic was that reply
of the frankness and candor of a great mind, that can afford to make
it no secret, that, in its onward advances on knowledge, it may know
to-day what it did not know yesterday, and that it is content to
"gain by degrees upon the darkness." "Had you asked me the question
a fortnight ago," said Agassiz, "I could not have replied to it.
Since then, however, I have examined an ichthyolite of the Old Red
Sandstone in which the vertebral joints are fortunately impressed
on the stone, though the joints themselves have disappeared, and
which, exactly resembling the vertebra? of the shark, must have
been cartilaginous." In a subsequent conversation, the writer
was gratified by finding most of his other facts and inferences
authenticated and confirmed by those of the naturalist. I shall
attempt introducing to the reader the peculiarities, general and
specific, of the ichthyolites to which these facts and observations
mainly referred, by describing such of the families as are most
abundant in the formation, and the points in which they either
resemble or differ from the existing fish of our seas.

[Illustration: _PLATE IV._]

Of these ancient families, the _Osteolepis_, or bony-scale,
(see Plate IV., fig. 1,) may be regarded as illustrative of the
general type. It was one of the first discovered of the Caithness
fishes, and received its name in the days of Cuvier, from the
osseous character of its scales, ere it was ascertained that it
had numerous contemporaries, and that to all and each of these the
same description applied. The scales of the fishes of the Lower
Old Red Sandstone, like the plates and detached prickles of the
purely cartilaginous fishes, were composed of a bony, not of a
horny, substance, and were all coated externally with enamel. The
circumstance is one of interest.

Agassiz, in his system of classification, has divided fishes into
four orders, according to the form of their scales; and his principle
of division, though apparently arbitrary and trivial, is yet found
to separate the class into great natural families, distinguished
from one another by other and very striking peculiarities. One kind
of scale, for instance, the placoid or broad-plated scale, is found
to characterize all the cartilaginous fishes of Cuvier except the
sturgeon;--it is the characteristic of an otherwise well-marked
series, whose families are furnished with skeletons composed of mere
animal matter, and whose gills open to the water by spiracles. The
fish of another order are covered by ctenoid or comb-shaped scales,
the posterior margin of each scale being toothed somewhat like the
edge of a saw or comb; and the order, thus distinguished, is found
wonderfully to agree with an order formed previously on another
principle of classification, the Acanthopterygii, or thorny-finned
order of Cuvier, excluding only the smooth-scaled families of
this previously formed division, and including, in addition to
it, the flat fish. A third order, the Cycloidean, is marked by
simple marginated scales, like those of the cod, haddock, whiting,
herring, salmon, &c.; and this order is found to embrace chiefly
the Malacopterygii, or soft-finned order of Cuvier--an order to
which all these well-known fish, with an immense multitude of others,
belong. Thus the results of the principle of classification adopted
by Agassiz wonderfully agree with the results of the less simple
principles adopted by Cuvier and the other masters in this department
of Natural History. Now, it is peculiar to yet a fourth order, the
Ganoidean, or shining-scaled order, that by much the greater number
of the genera which it comprises exist only in the fossil state. At
least five sixths of the whole were ascertained to be extinct several
years ago, at a time when the knowledge of fossil Ichthyology was
much more limited than at present: the proportions are now found to
be immensely greater on the side of the dead. And this order seems to
have included all the semi-osseous, semi-cartilaginous ichthyolites
of the Lower Old Red Sandstone: the enamelled scale is the
characteristic, according to Agassiz's principle of classification,
of the existences that filled the gap so often alluded to as existing
in the present creation. All their scales glitter with enamel: they
bore to this order the relation that the cartilaginous fish bear
to the Placoidean order, the thorny-finned fish to the Ctenoidean
order, and the soft-finned fish to the Cycloidean order. It also
included, with the semi-cartilaginous, the sauroid fish--those master
existences and tyrants of the earlier vertebrata; and both classes
find their representatives among the comparatively few ganoid fishes
of the present creation; the one in the sturgeon family, which of
all existing families approaches nearest in other respects to the
extinct semi-cartilaginous fishes; the other in the sauroid genus
_Lepidosteus_, to which the bony pike belongs. The head, back, and
sides of the sturgeon are defended, as has been already remarked, by
longitudinal rows of hard osseous bosses--the bony pike is armed
with enamelled osseous scales, of a stony hardness. It seems a
somewhat curious circumstance, that fishes so unlike each other in
their internal framework should thus resemble one another in their
bony coverings, and in some slight degree in their structure of
tail. One of the characteristics of sauroid fishes is the extreme
compactness and hardness of their skeleton.[S]

[Footnote S: "The sauroid or lizard-like fishes," says Dr. Buckland,
"combine in the structure, both of the bones and some of the soft
parts, characters which are common to the class of reptiles. The
bones of the skull are united by closer sutures than those of
common fishes. The vertebræ articulate with the spinous processes
of sutures, like the vertebræ of saurians; the ribs also articulate
with the extremities of the spinous process. The caudal vertebræ have
distinct chevron bones, and the general condition of the skeleton is
stronger and more solid than in other fishes: the air bladder also
is bifid and cellular, approaching to the character of lungs; and in
the throat there is a glottis, as in sirens and salamanders, and many
saurians."--Note to _Bridgewater Treatise_, p. 274, first edit.]

It requires skill such as that possessed by Agassiz, to determine
that the uncouth _Coccosteus_, or the equally uncouth _Pterichthys_,
of the Old Red Sandstone, with their long articulated tails and
tortoise-like plates, were _bona fide_ fishes; but there is no
possibility of mistaking the _Osteolepis_: it is obvious to the least
practised eye that it must have been a fish, and a handsome one. Even
a cursory examination, however, shows very striking peculiarities,
which are found, on further examination, to characterize not this
family alone, but at least one half the contemporary families
besides. We are accustomed to see vertebrated animals with the bone
uncovered in one part only,--that part the teeth,--and with the rest
of the skeleton wrapped up in flesh and skin. Among the reptiles,
we find a few exceptions; but a creature with a skull as naked as
its teeth,--the bone being merely covered, as in these, by a hard,
shining enamel,--and with toes also of bare enamelled bone, would
be deemed an anomaly in creation. And yet such was the condition
of the _Osteolepis_, and many of its contemporaries. The enamelled
teeth were placed in jaws which presented outside a surface as naked
and as finely enamelled as their own. (See Plate IV., fig. 5.) The
entire head was covered with enamelled osseous plates, furnished
inside like other bones, as shown by their cellular construction,
with their nourishing blood vessels, and perhaps their oil, and
which rested apparently on the cartilaginous box, which must have
enclosed the brain, and connected it with the vertebral column.
I cannot better illustrate the peculiar condition of the fins of
this ichthyolite than by the webbed foot of a water-fowl. The web
or membrane in all the aquatic birds with which we are acquainted
not only connects, but also covers the toes. The web or membrane in
the fins of existing fishes accomplishes a similar purpose; it both
connects and covers the supporting bones or rays. Imagine, however, a
webbed foot in which the toes--connected, but not covered--present,
as in skeletons, an upper and under surface of naked bone; and a very
correct idea may be formed, from such a foot, of the condition of fin
which obtained among at least one half the ichthyolites of the Lower
Old Red Sandstone. The supporting bones or rays seem to have been
connected laterally by the membrane; but on both sides they presented
bony and finely enamelled surfaces. (See Plate IV., fig. 6.) In this
singular class of fish, all was bone without, and all was cartilage
within; and the bone in every instance, whether in the form of jaws
or of plates, of scales or of rays, presented an external surface of
enamel.

The fins are quite a study. I have alluded to the connecting
membrane. In existing fish this membrane is the principal agent
in propelling the creature; it strikes against the water, as the
membrane of the bat's wing strikes against the air; and the internal
skeleton serves but to support and stiffen it for this purpose.
But in the fin of the _Osteolepis_, as in those of many of its
contemporaries, we find the condition reversed. The rays were so
numerous, and lay so thickly, side by side, like feathers in the
wing of a bird, that they presented to the water a surface of bone,
and the continuous membrane only served to support and bind them
together. In the fins of existing fish we find a sort of bat-wing
construction; in those of the _Osteolepis_ a sort of bird-wing
construction. The rays, to give flexibility to the organ which they
compose, were all jointed, as in the soft-finned fish--as in the
herring, salmon, and cod, for example; and we find in all the fins
the anterior ray rising from the body in the form of an angular
scale: it is a strong, bony scale in one of its joints, and a bony
ray in the rest. The characteristic is a curious one.

It is again necessary, in pursuing our description, to refer for
illustration to the purely cartilaginous fishes. In at least all
the higher orders of these, furnished with movable jaws, such as
the sturgeon, the ray, and the shark, the mouth is placed far below
the snout. The dog-fish and thorn-back are familiar instances.
Further, the mouth in bony fishes is movable on both the upper and
under side, like the beak of the parrot; in the higher cartilaginous
fishes it is movable, as in quadrupeds, on the under side only. In
all their orders, too, except in that of the sturgeon, the gills
open to the water by detached spiracles, or breathing-holes; but
in the sturgeon, as in the osseous fishes, there is a continuous
linear opening, shielded by an operculum, or gill-cover. In the
Osteolepis the mouth opened below the snout, but not so far below
it as in the purely cartilaginous fishes--not farther below it than
in many of the osseous ones--than in the genus Aspro, for instance,
or than in the genus Polynemus, or in even the haddock or cod. It
was thickly furnished with slender and sharply-pointed teeth. I have
hitherto been unable fully to determine whether, like the mouths of
the osseous fishes, it was movable on both sides; though, from the
perfect form of what seems to be the intermaxillary bone, I cannot
avoid thinking it was. The gills opened, as in the osseous fishes, in
continuous lines, and were covered by large bony opercules--that on
the enamelled side somewhat resemble round japanned shields.

But while the head of the _Osteolepis_, with its appendages, thus
resembled, in some points, the heads of the bony fishes, the tail,
like those of most of its contemporaries, differed in no respect
from the tails of cartilaginous ones, such as the sturgeon. The
vertebral column seems to have run on to well nigh the extremity
of the caudal fin, which we find developed chiefly on the under
side. The tail was a one-sided tail. Take into account with these
peculiarities--peculiarities such as the naked skull, jaws, and
operculum, the naked and thickly-set rays, and the unequally
lobed condition of tail--a body covered with scales, that glitter
like sheets of mica, and assume, according to their position, the
parallelogramical, rhomboidal, angular, or polygonal form--a lateral
line raised, not depressed--a raised bar on the inner or bony side
of the scales, which, like the doubled-up end of a tile, seems
to have served the purpose of fastening them in their places--a
general clustering of alternate fins towards the tail--and the
_tout ensemble_ must surely impart to the reader the idea of a very
singular little fish. The ventral fins front the space which occurs
between the two dorsals, and the anal fin the space which intervenes
between the posterior dorsal fin and the tail. The length of the
_Osteolepis_, in my larger specimens, somewhat exceeds a foot; in the
smaller, it falls short of six inches. There exist at least three
species of this ichthyolite, distinguished chiefly, in two of the
instances, by the smaller and larger size of their scales, compared
with the bulk of their bodies, and by punctulated markings on the
enamel in the case of the third. This last, however, is no specific
difference, but common to the entire genus, and to several other
genera besides. The names are, _Osteolepis macrolepidotus_, _O.
microlepidotus_, and _O. arenatus_.[T]

[Footnote T: To these there have since been added _Osteolepis major_,
_O. intermedius_, and _O. nanus_; the two latter, however, Agassiz
regards as doubtful.]

[Illustration: _PLATE V._]

Next to the _Osteolepis_ we may place the _Dipterus_, or double-wing,
of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, an ichthyolite first introduced to
the knowledge of geologists by Mr. Murchison, who, with his friend,
Mr. Sedgwick, figured and described it in a masterly paper on the
older sedimentary formations of the north of Scotland, which appeared
in the _Transactions of the Geological Society of London_ for 1828.
The name, derived from its two dorsals, would suit equally well,
like that of the Osteolepis, many of its more recently discovered
contemporaries. From the latter ichthyolite it differed chiefly in
the position of its fins, which were opposite, not alternate; the
double dorsals exactly fronting the anal and ventral fins. (See Plate
V., fig. 1.) The _Diplopterus_, a nearly resembling ichthyolite of
the same formation, also owes its name to the order and arrangement
of its fins, which, like those of the _Dipterus_, were placed
fronting each other, and in pairs. But the head, in proportion to
the body, was in greater size than in either the _Dipterus_ or
_Osteolepis_; and the mouth, as indicated by the creature's length
of jaw, must have been of much greater width. In their more striking
characteristics, however, the three genera seem to have nearly
agreed. In all alike, scales of bone glisten with enamel; their jaws,
enamel without and bone within, bristle thick with sharp-pointed
teeth; closely-jointed plates, burnished like ancient helmets, cover
their heads, and seem to have formed a kind of outer table to skulls
externally of bone and internally of cartilage; their gill-covers
consist each of a single piece, like the gill-cover of the sturgeon;
their tails were formed chiefly on the lower side of their bodies;
and the rays of their fins, enamelled like their plates and their
scales, stand up over the connecting membrane, like the steel or
brass in that peculiar armor of the middle ages, whose multitudinous
pieces of metal were fastened together on a groundwork of cloth or
of leather. All their scales, plates, and rays present a similar
style of ornament. The shining and polished enamel is mottled with
thickly-set punctures, or, rather, punctulated markings; so that a
scale or plate, when viewed through a microscope, reminds one of the
cover of a saddle. Some of the ganoid scales of Burdie House present
surfaces similarly punctulated.[U]

[Footnote U: There exists, according to Agassiz, only a single
species of _Dipterus--D. macrelepidotus_; whereas four species of
_Diplopterus_ have been enumerated--_D. affinis_, _D. borealis_, _D.
macrocephalus_, and _D. Agassizii_. The existence of the last named,
however, as a distinct species, is regarded as problematical by the
distinguished naturalist whose name has been affixed to it.]

The _Glyptolepis_, or carved scale, may be regarded as the
representative of a family of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, which,
differing very materially from the genera described, had yet many
traits in common with them, such as the bare, bony skull, the
bony scales, the naked rays, and the unequally sided condition of
tail. The fins, which were of considerable length in proportion
to their breadth of base, and present in some of the specimens
a pendulous-like appearance, cluster thick together towards the
creature's lower extremities, leaving the upper portion bare. There
are two dorsals placed as in the _Dipterus_ and _Diplopterus_--the
anterior directly opposite the ventral fin, the posterior directly
opposite the anal. The tail is long and spreading;--the rays, long
and numerously articulated, are comparatively stout at their base,
and slender as hairs where they terminate. The shoulder-bones
are of huge dimensions, the teeth extremely minute. But the most
characteristic parts of the creature are the scales. They are of
great size, compared with the size of the animal. An individual not
more than half a foot in length, the specimen figured, (see Plate
V., fig. 2,) exhibits scales fully three eighth parts of an inch
in diameter. In another more broken specimen there are scales a
full inch across, and yet the length of the ichthyolite to which
they belonged seems not to have much exceeded a foot and a half.
Each scale consists of a double plate, an inner and an outer.
The structure of the inner is not peculiar to the family or the
formation: it is formed of a number of minute concentric circles,
crossed by still minuter radiating lines--the one described, and
the other proceeding from a common centre. (See Plate V., fig. 5.)
All scales that receive their accessions of growth equally at their
edges exhibit, internally, a corresponding character. The outer plate
presents an appearance less common. It seems relieved into ridges
that drop adown it like sculptured threads, some of them entire,
some broken, some straight, some slightly waved, (see Plate V.,
fig. 3;) and hence the name of the ichthyolite. The plates of the
head were ornamented in a similar style, but their threads are so
broken as to present the appearance of dotted lines, the dots all
standing out in bold relief. My collection contains three varieties
of this family; one of them disinterred from out the Cromarty beds
about seven years ago, and the others only a little later, though
partly from the inadequacy of a written description, through which I
was led to confound the _Osteolepis_ with the _Diplopterus_, and to
regard the _Glyptolepis_ as the _Osteolepis_, I was not aware until
lately that the discovery was really such; and under the latter name
I described the creature in the Witness newspaper several weeks ere
it had received the name which it now bears. It was first introduced
to the notice of Agassiz, in Autumn last, by Lady Cumming of Altyre.
The species, however, was a different one from any yet found at
Cromarty.[V]

[Footnote V: There are three species of _Glyptolepis_--_G. elegans_,
_G. Leptopterus_, and _G. microlepidotus_.]

The _Cheirolepis_, or scaly pectoral, forms the representative of
yet another family of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, and one which
any eye, however unpractised, could at once distinguish from the
families just described. Professor Traill of the University of
Edinburgh, a gentleman whose researches in Natural History have
materially extended the boundaries of knowledge, and whose frankness
in communicating information is only equalled by his facility in
acquiring it, was the first discoverer of this family, one variety
of which, the _Cheirolepis Traillii_, bears his name. The figured
specimen (Plate VI., fig. 1) Agassiz has pronounced a new species,
the discovery of the writer. In all the remains of this curious
fish which I have hitherto seen, the union of the osseous with
the cartilaginous, in the general framework of the creature, is
strikingly apparent. The external skull, the great shoulder-bone,
and the rays of the fins, are all unequivocally osseous; the
occipital and shoulder-bones, in particular, seem of great strength
and massiveness, and are invariably preserved, however imperfect
the specimen in other respects; whereas, even in specimens the most
complete, and which exhibit every scale and every ray, however
minute, and show unchanged the entire outline of the animal, not a
fragment of the internal skeleton appears. The _Cheirolepis_ seems
to have varied from fourteen to four inches in length. When seen in
profile, the under line, as in the figured variety, seems thickly
covered with fins, and the upper line well nigh naked. The large
pectorals almost encroach on the ventral fins, and the ventrals on
the anal fin; whereas the back, for two thirds the entire length
of the creature, presents a bare rectilinear ridge, and the single
dorsal, which rises but a little way over the tail, immediately
opposite the posterior portion of the anal fin, is comparatively
of small size. The tail, which, in the general condition of being
developed chiefly on the lower side, resembles the tails of all
the creature's contemporaries, is elegantly lobed. The scales, in
proportion to the bulk of the body which they cover, are not more
than one twentieth the size of those of the _Osteolepis_. They are
richly enamelled, and range diagonally from the shoulder to the
belly in waving lines; and so fretted is each individual scale by
longitudinal grooves and ridges, that, on first bringing it under
the glass, it seems a little bunch of glittering thorns, though,
when more minutely examined, it is found to be present somewhat
the appearance of the outer side of the deep-sea cockle, with its
strongly marked ribs and channels, the point in which the posterior
point terminates representing the hinge. (See Plate VI., fig. 2.) The
bones of the head, enamelled like the scales, are carved into jagged
inequalities, somewhat resembling those on the skin of the shark,
but more irregular. The sculpturings seem intended evidently for
effect. To produce harmony of appearance between the scaly coat and
the enamelled occipital plates of bone, the surfaces of the latter
are relieved, where they border on the shoulders, into what seem
scales, just as the dead walls of a building are sometimes, for the
sake of uniformity, wrought into blind windows. The enamelled rays of
the fins are finished, if I may so speak, after the same style. They
lie thick upon one another as the fibres of a quill, and like these,
too, they are imbricated on the sides, so that the edge of each seems
jagged into a row of prickles. (See Plate VI., fig. 3.) The jaws of
the Cheirolepis were armed with thickly-set sharp teeth, like those
of its contemporaries, the _Osteolepis_ and _Diplopterus_.[W]

[Footnote W: There have been five species of _Cheirolepis_
enumerated--_C. Cummingiæ_, _C. splendens_, _C. Traillii_, _C.
unilateralis_ and _C. Uragus_. The _Cheirolepis splendens_ and _C.
unilateralis_ Agassiz regards as doubtful.]

[Illustration: _PLATE VI._]




CHAPTER V.


The Classifying Principle, and its Uses.--Three groups
of Ichthyolites among the Organisms of the Lower Old
Red Sandstone.--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 Molluscs of the Formation.--Remarkable chiefly for
the Union of Modern with Ancient Forms which they exhibit.--Its
Vegetables.--Importance and Interest of the Record which it furnishes.

There rests in the neighborhood of Cromarty, on the upper stratum
of one of the richest ichthyolite beds I have yet seen, a huge
water-rolled boulder of granitic gneiss, which must have been a
traveller, in some of the later periods of geological change, from
a mountain range in the interior highlands of Ross-shire, more
than sixty miles away. It is an uncouth looking mass, several tons
in weight, with a flat upper surface, like that of a table; and
as a table, when engaged in collecting my specimens, I have often
found occasion to employ it. I have covered it over, times without
number, with fragments of fossil fish--with plates, and scales,
and jaws, and fins, and, when the search proved successful, with
entire ichthyolites. Why did I always arrange them, almost without
thinking of the matter, into three groups? Why, even when the mind
was otherwise employed, did the fragments of the _Coccosteus_ and
_Pterichthys_ come to occupy one corner of the stone, and those of
the various fish just described another corner, and the equally
well-marked remains of a yet different division a third corner?
The process seemed almost mechanical, so little did it employ the
attention, and so invariable were the results. The fossils of the
surrounding bed always found their places on the huge stone in
three groups, and at times there was yet a fourth group added--a
group whose organisms belonged not to the animal, but the vegetable
kingdom. What led to the arrangement, or in what did it originate?
In a principle inherent in the human mind--that principle of
classification which we find pervading all science--which gives to
each of the many cells of recollection its appropriate facts--and
without which all knowledge would exist as a disorderly and shapeless
mass, too huge for the memory to grasp, and too heterogeneous for
the understanding to employ. I have described but two of the groups,
and must now say a very little about the principle on which, justly
or otherwise, I used to separate the third, and on the distinctive
differences which rendered the separation so easy.

The recent bony fishes are divided, according to the Cuvierian system
of classification, into two great orders, the soft-finned and the
thorny-finned order--the _Malacopterygii_ and the _Acanthopterygii_.
In the former the rays of the fins are thin, flexible, articulated,
branched: each ray somewhat resembles a jointed bamboo; with this
difference, however, that what seems a single ray at bottom,
branches out into three or four rays a-top. In the latter, (the
thorny-finned order,)--especially in their anterior dorsal, and
perhaps anal fins,--the rays are stiff continuous spikes of bone,
and each stands detached as a spear, without joint or branch. The
perch may be instanced as a familiar illustration of this order--the
gold-fish of the other. Now, between the fins of two sets--shall I
venture to say orders?--of the ichthyolites of the Lower Old Red
Sandstone, an equally striking difference obtains. The fin of the
_Osteolepis_, with its surface of enamelled and minutely jointed
bones, I have already described as a sort of bird-wing fin. The
naked rays, with their flattened surfaces, lay thick together as
feathers in the wing of a bird--so thick as to conceal the connecting
membrane; and fins of similar construction characterized the families
of the _Dipterus_, _Diplopterus_, _Glyptolepis_, _Cheirolepis_,
_Holoptychius_, and, I doubt not, many other families of the same
period, which await the researches of future discoverers. But the
fins of another set of ichthyolites, their contemporaries, may be
described as bat-wing fins: they presented to the water a broad
expanse of membrane; and the solitary ray which survives in each was
not a jointed, but a continuous spear-like ray. The fins of this set,
or order, are thorny-fins, like those of the _Acanthopterygii_; the
anterior edge of each, with the exception of, perhaps, the caudal
fin, which differs in construction from the others, is composed of a
strong, bony spike. Such, with some tacit reference, perhaps, to the
similar Cuvierian principle of classification, were the distinctive
differences, on the strength of which I used to arrange two of my
groups of fossils on the granitic boulder; and the influence of the
same principle, almost instinctively exerted,--for, in writing the
previous pages, I scarce thought of its existence,--has, I find,
given to each group its own chapter.

Of the membranous-finned and thorny-rayed order of ichthyolites,
the _Cheiracanthus_, or thorny-hand, (_i. e._ pectoral,) may be
regarded as an adequate representative. (See Plate VII., fig. 1.)
The _Cheiracanthus_ must have been an eminently handsome little
fish--slim, tapering, and described in all its outlines, whether of
the body or the fins, by gracefully waved lines. It is, however,
a rare matter to find it presenting its original profile in the
stone;--none of the other ichthyolites are so frequently distorted
as the _Cheiracanthus_. It seems to have been more a cartilaginous
and less an osseous fish than most of its contemporaries. However
perfect the specimen, no part of the internal skeleton is ever found,
not even when scales as minute as the point of a pin are preserved,
and every spine stands up in its original place. And hence, perhaps,
a greater degree of flexibility, and consequent distortion. The
body was covered with small angular scales, brightly enamelled, and
delicately fretted into parallel ridges, that run longitudinally
along the upper half of the scale, and leave the posterior portion
of it a smooth, glittering surface. (See Plate VII., fig. 2.) They
diminish in size towards the head, which, from the faint stain left
on the stone, seems to have been composed of cartilage exclusively,
and either covered with skin, or with scales of extreme minuteness.
The lower edge of the operculum bears a tagged fringe, like that of
a curtain. The tail, a fin of considerable power, had the unequal
sided character common to the formation; and the slender and numerous
rays on both sides are separated by so many articulations as to
present the appearance of parallelogramical scales. The other fins
are comparatively of small size. There is a single dorsal placed
about two thirds the entire length of the creature adown the back;
and exactly opposite its posterior edge is the anterior edge of the
anal fin. The ventral fins are placed high upon the belly, somewhat
like those of the perch; the pectorals only a little higher. But
it is rather in the construction of the fins, than their position,
that the peculiarities of the _Cheiracanthus_ are most marked. The
anterior edge of each, as in the pectorals of the existing genera
_Cestracion_ and _Chimæra_, is formed of a strong, large spine. In
the _Chimæra borealis_, a cartilaginous fish of the Northern Ocean,
the spine seems placed in front of the weaker rays, just, if I may
be allowed the comparison, as, in a line of mountaineers engaged in
crossing a swollen torrent, the strongest man in the party is placed
on the upper side of the line, to break off the force of the current
from the rest. In the _Cheiracanthus_, however, each fin seems to
consist of but a single spine, with an angular membrane fixed to
it by one of its sides, and attached to the creature's body on the
other. Its fins are masts and sails--the spine representing the mast,
and the membrane the sail; and it is a curious characteristic of
the order, that the membrane, like the body, of the ichthyolite, is
thickly covered with minute scales. The mouth seems to have opened
a very little under the snout, as in the haddock; and there are no
indications of its having been furnished with teeth.[X]

[Footnote X: There have been three species of _Cheiracanthus_
determined--_C. microlepidotus_, _C. minor_, and _C. Murchisoni_.]

[Illustration: _PLATE VII._]

An ichthyolite first discovered by the writer about three years
ago, and introduced by him to the notice of Agassiz during his
recent visit to Edinburgh, but still unfurnished with a name,[Y]
is a still more striking representative of this order than even
the _Cheiracanthus_. It must have been proportionally thick and
short, like some of the tropical fishes, though rather handsome
than otherwise. (See Plate VIII., fig. 1.) The scales, minute, but
considerably larger than those of the _Cheiracanthus_, are of a
rhomboidal form, and so regularly striated--the striæ converging
to a point at the posterior termination of each scale--that, when
examined with a glass, the body appears as if covered with scallops.
(See Plate VIII., fig. 3.) It seems a piece of exquisite shell-work,
such as we sometimes see on the walls of a grotto. There are two
dorsals--the posterior, immediately over the tail, and directly
opposite the anal fin; the anterior, somewhat higher up than the
ventrals; and all the fins are of great size. The anterior edge of
each is formed of a strong spine, round as the handle of a halbert,
and diminishing gradually and symmetrically to a sharp point. Though
formed externally of solid bone, it seems to have been composed
internally of cartilage, like the bones of some of the osseous
fishes--those of the halibut, for instance; and the place of the
cartilage is generally occupied in the stone by carbonate of lime.
The membrane which formed the body of the fin was covered, like that
of the _Cheiracanthus_, with minute scales, of the same scallop-like
pattern with the rest, but of not more than one sixth the size
of those which cover the creature's sides and back. Imagine two
lug-sails stiffly extended between the deck of a brigantine and her
two masts, the latter raking as far aft as to form an angle of sixty
degrees with the horizon, and some idea may be formed of the dorsals
of this singular fish. They were lug-sails, formed not to be acted
upon by the air, but to act upon the water. None of my specimens show
the head; but, judging from analogies furnished by the other families
of the group, I entertain little doubt that it will be found to be
covered, not by bony plates, but by minute scales, diminishing, as
they approach the snout, into mere points. In none of the specimens
does any part of the internal skeleton survive.

[Footnote Y: Now determined to be a species of _Diplacanthus_--_D.
longispinus_.]

[Illustration: _PLATE VIII._]

My collection contains the remains of yet another fish of this group,
which was unfurnished with a name only a few months ago, but which I
first discovered about five years since. (See Plate VIII., fig. 2.)
It is now designated the _Diplacanthus_; and, though the smallest
ichthyolite of the formation yet known, it is by no means the least
curious. The length from head to tail, in some of my specimens, does
not exceed three inches; the largest fall a little short of five. The
scales, which are of such extreme minuteness that their peculiarities
can be detected by only a powerful glass, resemble those of the
_Cheiracanthus_; but the ridges are more waved, and seem, instead
of running in nearly parallel lines, to converge towards the apex.
There are two dorsals, the one rising immediately from the shoulder,
a little below the nape, the other directly opposite the anal fin.
The ventrals are placed near the middle of the belly. There is a
curious mechanism of shoulder-bone involved with a lateral spine and
with the pectorals. The creature, unlike the _Cheiracanthus_, seems
to have been furnished with jaws of bone: there are fragments of bone
upon the head, tubercled apparently on the outer surface; and minute
cylinders of carbonate of lime running along all the larger bones,
where we find them accidentally laid open, show that they were formed
on internal bases of cartilage. But the best marked characteristic
of the creature is furnished by the spines of its fins, which are
of singular beauty. Each spine resembles a bundle of rods, or,
rather, like a Gothic column, the sculptured semblance of a bundle
of rods, which finely diminish towards a point, sharp and tapering
as that of a rush. (See Plate VIII., fig. 4.)[Z] The rest of the fin
presents the appearance of a mere scaly membrane, and no part of the
internal skeleton appears. Perhaps this last circumstance, common
to all the ichthyolites of the formation, if we except the families
of the _Coccosteus_ and _Pterichthys_, may throw some light on the
apparently membranous condition of fin peculiar to the families
of this order. What appears in the fossil a mere scaly membrane
attached to a single spine of bone, may have had in the living
animal a cartilaginous framework, like the fins of the dog-fish and
thorn-back, that are amply furnished with rays of cartilage--though,
of course, all such rays must have disappeared in the stone, like the
rest of the internal skeleton. Unquestionably, the caudal fin of the
two last described fossils must have been strengthened by some such
internal framework; for, as they differ from the other fins, in being
unprovided with osseous spines, they would have formed, without an
internal skeleton, mere pendulous attachments, altogether unfitted to
serve the purposes of instruments of motion. There may be found in
the bony spines of all this order direct proof that, had there been
an internal skeleton of bone, it would have survived. The spines run
deep into the body, as a ship's masts run deep into her hulk; and we
can see them standing up among the scales to their termination, in
such bold relief, that, from a sort of pictorial illusion, they seem
as if fixed to the creature's sides, and foreshortened, instead of
rising in profile from its back or belly. (See Plate VIII., fig. 1.)
The observer will of course remember, that, in the living animal,
the view of the spine must have terminated with the line of the
profile, just as the view of a vessel's mast terminates with the
deck, though the mast itself penetrates to the interior keel. Now, it
must be deemed equally obvious, that, had the vertebral column been
of bone, not of cartilage, instead of exhibiting no trace, even the
faintest, of having ever existed, it would have stood out in as high
relief as the internal buts or stocks of the spines. And such are the
general characteristics of a few of the ichthyolites of this lower
formation of the Old Red Sandstone--a few of the more striking forms,
sculptured, if I may so speak, on the middle compartment of the
Caithness pyramid. It would be easy rendering the list more complete
at even the present stage, when the field is still so new that almost
every laborer in it can exhibit genera and species unknown to his
brother laborers. The remains of a species of _Holoptychius_ have
been discovered low in the formation, at Orkney, by Dr. Traill;
similar remains have been found in it at Gamrie. In its upper beds
the specimens seem so different from those in the lower, that, in
extensive collections made from the inferior strata of one locality,
Agassiz has been unable to identify a single specimen with the
specimens of collections made from the superior strata of another,
though the genera are the same. Meanwhile there are heads and hands
at work on the subject; Geology has become a Briareus; and I have
little doubt that, in five years hence, this third portion of the Old
Red Sandstone will be found to contain as many distinct varieties
of fossil fish as the whole geological scale was known to contain
fifteen years ago.[AA]

[Footnote Z: Agassiz reckons four species of _Diplacanthus_--_D.
crassispinus_, _D. longispinus_, _D. striatulus_, and _D. striatus_.]

[Footnote AA: This prediction has been already more than
accomplished. At the death of Cuvier, in 1832, there were but
ninety-two species of fossil fish known to the geologist; Agassiz now
enumerates one hundred and five species that belong to the Old Red
Sandstone alone; and if we include doubtful species, on which he has
not authoritatively decided--some of which, however, were included in
the list of Cuvier--one hundred and fifty-one.]

There is something very admirable in the consistency of style which
obtains among the ichthyolites of this formation. In no single fish
of either group do we find two styles of ornament--in scarce any
two fishes do we find exactly the same style. I pass fine buildings
almost every day. In some there is a discordant jumbling--an
Egyptian Sphinx, for instance, placed over a Doric portico; in all
there prevails a vast amount of timid imitation. The one repeats
the other, either in general outline or in the subordinate parts.
But the case is otherwise among the ichthyolites of the Old Red
Sandstone; nor does it lessen the wonder, that their nicer ornaments
should yield their beauty only to the microscope. There is unity of
character in every scale, plate, and fin--unity such as all men of
taste have learned to admire in those three Grecian orders from which
the ingenuity of Rome was content to borrow, when it professed to
invent--in the masculine Doric, the chaste and graceful Ionic, the
exquisitely elegant Corinthian; and yet the unassisted eye fails to
discover the finer evidences of this unity: it would seem as if the
adorable Architect had wrought it out in secret with reference to
the Divine idea alone. The artist who sculptured the cherry-stone
consigned it to a cabinet, and placed a microscope beside it; the
microscopic beauty of these ancient fish was consigned to the
twilight depths of a primeval ocean. There is a feeling which at
times grows upon the painter and the statuary, as if the perception
and love of the beautiful had been sublimed into a kind of moral
sense. Art comes to be pursued for its own sake; the exquisite
conception in the mind, or the elegant and elaborate model, becomes
all in all to the worker, and the dread of criticism or the appetite
of praise almost nothing. And thus, through the influence of a power
somewhat akin to conscience, but whose province is not the just
and the good, but the fair, the refined, the exquisite, have works
prosecuted in solitude, and never intended for the world, been found
fraught with loveliness. Sir Thomas Lawrence, when finishing, with
the most consummate care, a picture intended for a semi-barbarous,
foreign court, was asked why he took so much pains with a piece
destined, perhaps, never to come under the eye of a connoisseur. "I
cannot help it," he replied; "I do the best I can, unable, through a
tyrant feeling, that will not brook offence, to do any thing less."
It would be perhaps over bold to attribute any such overmastering
feeling to the Creator; yet certain it is, that among his creatures
well nigh all approximations towards perfection, in the province in
which it expatiates, owe their origin to it, and that Deity in all
his works is his own rule.

The _Osteolepis_ was cased, I have said, from head to tail, in
complete armor. The head had its plaited mail, the body its scaly
mail, the fins their mail of parallel and jointed bars; the entire
suit glittered with enamel; and every plate, bar, and scale was
dotted with microscopic points. Every ray had its double or treble
punctulated row, every scale or plate its punctulated group; the
markings lie as thickly in proportion to the fields they cover,
as the circular perforations in a lace veil; and the effect,
viewed through the glass, is one of lightness and beauty. In the
_Cheirolepis_ an entirely different style obtains. The enamelled
scales and plates glitter with minute ridges, that show like thorns
in a December morning varnished with ice. Every ray of the fins
presents its serrated edge, every occipital plate and bone its
sculptured prominences, every scale its bunch of prickle-like ridges.
A more rustic style characterized the _Glyptolepis_. The enamel of
the scales and plates is less bright; the sculpturings are executed
on a larger scale, and more rudely finished. The relieved ridges,
waved enough to give them a pendulous appearance, drop adown the
head and body. The rays of the fins, of great length, present also a
pendulous appearance. The bones and scales seem disproportionately
large. There is a general rudeness in the finish of the creature,
if I may so speak, that reminds one of the tattooings of a savage,
or the corresponding style of art in which he ornaments the handle
of his stone-hatchet or his war-club. In the _Cheiracanthus_, on
the contrary, there is much of a minute and cabinet-like elegance.
The silvery smoothness of the fins, dotted with scarcely visible
scales, harmonized with a similar appearance of head; a style of
sculpture resembling the parallel etchings of the line-engraver
fretted the scales; the fins were small, and the contour elegant. I
have already described the appearance of the unnamed fossils--the
seeming shell-work that covered the sides of the one--its mast-like
spines and sail-like fins; and the Gothic-like peculiarities that
characterized the other--its rodded, obelisk-like spines, and the
external framework of bone that stretched along its pectorals.

Till very lately, it was held that the Old Red Sandstone of Scotland
contained no mollusca. It seemed difficult, however, to imagine a sea
abounding in fish, and yet devoid of shells. In all my explorations,
therefore, I had an eye to the discovery of the latter, and on two
several occasions I disinterred what I supposed might have formed
portions of a cardium or terebratula. On applying the glass, however,
the punctulated character of the surface showed that the supposed
shells were but parts of the concave helmet-like plate that covered
the snout of the _Osteolepis_. In the ichthyolite beds of Cromarty
and Ross, of Moray, Banff, Perth, Forfar, Fife, and Berwickshire, not
a single shell has yet been found; but there have been discovered of
late, in the upper beds of the Lower Old Red Sandstone in Orkney,
the remains of a small, delicate bivalve, not yet described or
figured, but which very much resembles a _Venus_. (See Plate V.,
fig. 7.) In the Tilestones of England, so carefully described by
Mr. Murchison in his _Silurian System_, shells are very abundant;
and the fact may now be regarded as established, that the Tilestones
of England belong to a deposit contemporaneous with the ichthyolite
beds of Caithness and Cromarty. They occupy the same place low in
the base of the Old Red; and there is at least one ichthyolite
common to both,[AB] and which does not occur in the superior strata
of the system in either country--the _Dipterus macrolepidotus_. The
evidence that the fish and shells lived in the same period, and
represent, therefore, the same formation, may be summed up in a
single sentence. We learn from the Geology of Caithness that this
species of _Dipterus_ was unquestionably contemporary with all
the other ichthyolites described;--we learn from the Geology of
Herefordshire that the shells were as unquestionably contemporary
with it.[AC] These--the shells--are of a singularly mixed character,
regarded as a group, uniting, says Mr. Murchison, forms at one time
deemed characteristic of the more modern formations,--of the latter
secondary, and even tertiary periods,--with forms the most ancient,
and which characterize the molluscous remains of the transition
rocks. Turbinated shells and bivalves of well nigh the recent type
may be found lying side by side with chambered Orthoceratites and
Terebratula.[AD]

[Footnote AB: _Silurian System_, part ii. p. 599.]

[Footnote AC: In Russia, too, as shown by the recent discoveries of
Murchison, the Old Red fishes of Caithness, and the Old Red shells of
Devonshire, may be found lying embedded in the same strata.]

[Footnote AD: _Silurian System_, part i. p. 183.]

The vegetable remains of the formation are numerous, but obscure,
consisting mostly of carbonaceous markings, such as might be formed
by comminuted sea-weed. (See Plate VII.) Some of the impressions
fork into branches at acute angles, (see figs. 4, 5, and 6;) some
affect a waved outline, (see figs. 7 and 8;) most of them, however,
are straight and undivided. They lie in some places so thickly in
layers as to give the stone in which they occur a slaty character.
One of my specimens shows minute markings, somewhat resembling the
bird-like eyes of the Stigmaria Ficoides of the Coal Measures;--the
branches of another terminate in minute hooks, that remind one of the
hooks of the young tendrils of the pea when they first begin to turn.
(See fig. 3.) In yet another there are marks of the ligneous fibre;
when examined by the glass, it resembles a bundle of horse-hairs
lying stretched in parallel lines; and in this specimen alone have
I found aught approaching to proof of a terrestrial origin. The
deposition seems to have taken place far from land; and this lignite,
if in reality such, had probably drifted far ere it at length became
weightier than the supporting fluid, and sank.[AE] It is by no means
rare to find fragments of wood that have been borne out to sea by the
gulf stream from the shores of Mexico or the West Indian Islands,
stranded on the rocky coasts of Orkney and Shetland.

[Footnote AE: The organism here referred to has been since slit by
the lapidary, and the sections carefully examined. It proves to be
unequivocally a true wood of the coniferous class. The following
is the decision regarding it of Mr. William Nicol, of Edinburgh,
confessedly one of our highest living authorities in that division
of fossil botany which takes cognizance of the internal structure cf
lignites, and decides from their anatomy their race and family:--

                                     Edinburgh, 19th July, 1815.

  Dear Sir:--I have examined the structure of the fossil wood
  which you found in the Old Red Sandstone at Cromarty, and have
  no hesitation in stating, that the reticulated texture of the
  transverse sections, though somewhat compressed, clearly indicates
  a coniferous origin; but as there is not the slightest trace of
  a disk to be seen in the longitudinal sections parallel to the
  medullary rays, it is impossible to say whether it belongs to the
  Pine or Araucarian division. I am, &c.,

                                             William Nicol.
]

The dissimilarity which obtains between the fossils of the
contemporary formations of this system in England and Scotland, is
instructive. The group in the one consists mainly of molluscous
animals; in the other, almost entirely of ichthyolites, and what
seems to have been algæ. Other localities may present us with yet
different groups of the same period--with the productions of its
coasts, its lakes, and its rivers. At present, we are but beginning
to know just a little of its littoral shells, and of the fish of its
profounder depths. These last are surely curious subjects of inquiry.
We cannot catechise our stony ichthyolites, as the necromantic lady
of the _Arabian Nights_ did the colored fish of the lake, which had
once been a city, when she touched their dead bodies with her wand,
and they straightway raised their heads and replied to her queries.
We would have many a question to ask them if we could--questions
never to be solved. But even the contemplation of their remains is
a powerful stimulant to thought. The wonders of Geology exercise
every faculty of the mind--reason; memory, imagination; and though
we cannot put our fossils to the question, it is something to be
so aroused as to be made to put questions to one's self. I have
referred to the consistency of style which obtained among these
ancient fishes--the unity of character which marked every scale,
plate, and fin of every various family, and which distinguished it
from the rest; and who can doubt that the same shades of variety
existed in their habits and their instincts? We speak of the infinity
of Deity--of his inexhaustible variety of mind; but we speak of it
until the idea becomes a piece of mere common-place in our mouths. It
is well to be brought to feel, if not to conceive of it--to be made
to know that we ourselves are barren-minded, and that in Him "all
fulness dwelleth." Succeeding creations, each with its myriads of
existences, do not exhaust Him. He never repeats Himself. The curtain
drops, at his command, over one scene of existence full of wisdom
and beauty; it rises again, and all is glorious, wise, and beautiful
as before, and all is new, Who can sum up the amount of wisdom
whose record He has written in the rocks--wisdom exhibited in the
succeeding creations of earth, ere man was, but which was exhibited
surely not in vain? May we not say with Milton,--

    Think not, though men were none,
    That heaven could want spectators, God want praise;
    Millions of spiritual creatures walked the earth,
    And these with ceaseless praise his works beheld?

It is well to return on the record, and to read in its unequivocal
characters the lessons which it was intended to teach. Infidelity has
often misinterpreted its meaning, but not the less on that account
has it been inscribed for purposes alike wise and benevolent. Is
it nothing to be taught, with a demonstrative evidence which the
metaphysician cannot supply, that races are not eternal--that every
family had its beginning, and that whole creations have come to an
end?




CHAPTER VI.


The Lines of the Geographer rarely right Lines.--These last,
however, always worth looking at when they occur.--Striking Instance
in the Line of the Great Caledonian Valley.--Indicative of the
Direction in which the Volcanic Agencies have operated.--Sections
of the Old Red Sandstone furnished by the Granitic Eminences of
the Line.--Illustration.--Lias of the Moray Frith.--Surmisings
regarding its Original Extent.--These lead to an Exploratory
Ramble.--Narrative.--Phenomena exhibited in the course of half an
hour's Walk.--The little Bay.--Its Strata and their Organisms.

The natural boundaries of the geographer are rarely described by
right lines. Whenever these occur, however, the geologist may
look for something remarkable. There is one very striking example
furnished by the north of Scotland. The reader, in consulting a map
of the kingdom, will find that the edge of a ruler, laid athwart the
country in a direction from south-west to north-east, touches the
whole northern side of the great Caledonian Valley, with its long,
straight line of lakes; and onwards, beyond the valley's termination
at both ends, the whole northern side of Loch Eil and Loch Linnhe,
and the whole of the abrupt and precipitous northern shores of the
Moray Frith, to the extreme point of Tarbat Ness--a right line of
considerably more than a hundred miles. Nor does the geography of the
globe furnish a line better defined by natural marks. There is both
rampart and fosse. On the one hand we have the rectilinear lochs and
lakes, with an average profundity of depth more than equal to that
of the German Ocean, and, added to these, the rectilinear lines of
frith; on the other hand, with but few interruptions, there is an
inclined wall of rock, which rises at a steep angle in the interior
to nearly two thousand feet over the level of the Great Canal, and
overhangs the sea towards its northern termination, in precipices of
more than a hundred yards.[AF]

[Footnote AF: The valley of the Jordan, from the village of Laish
to the southern extremity of the Dead Sea, furnishes another very
remarkable instance of a geographical right line.]

The direction of this rampart and fosse--this Roman wall of Scottish
geological history--seems to have been that in which the volcanic
agencies chiefly operated in upheaving the entire island from the
abyss. The line survives as a sort of foot-track, hollowed by the
frequent tread of earthquakes, to mark the course in which they
journeyed. Like one of the great lines in a trigonometrical survey,
it enables us, too, to describe the lesser lines, and to determine
their average bearing. _The volcanic agencies must have extended
athwart the country from south-west to north-east._ Mark in a map
of the island--all the better if it be a geological one--the line
in which most of our mountain ranges stretch across from the German
Ocean to the Atlantic,--the line, too, in which our friths, lochs,
and bays, on both the eastern and western coasts, and especially
those of the latter, run into the interior. Mark, also, the line
of the geological formations, where least broken by insulated
groups of hills--the line, for instance, of the Old Red Sandstone
belt, which flanks the southern base of the Grampians--the nearly
parallel line of our Scottish Coal-field, in its course from sea
to sea--the line of the Grauwacke, which forms so large a portion
of the south of Scotland--the line of the English Coal-field, of
the Lias, of the Oolite, of the Chalk--and how in this process of
diagonal lining, if I may so speak, the south-eastern portion of
England comes to be cut off from the secondary formations altogether,
and, but for the denudation of the valley of the Weald, would have
exhibited only tertiary depositions. In all these lines, whether of
mountains, lakes, friths, or formations, there is an approximation to
parallelism with the line of the great Caledonian valley--proofs that
the upheaving agency from beneath must have acted in this direction
from some unknown cause, during all the immensely extended term of
its operations, and along the entire length of the island. It is a
fact not unworthy of remark, that the profound depths of Loch Ness
undulated in strange sympathy with the reeling towers and crashing
walls of Lisbon, during the great earthquake of 1755; and that the
impulse, true to its ancient direction, sent the waves in huge
furrows to the north-east and the south-west.

The north-eastern portion of this rectilinear wall or chain runs,
for about thirty miles, through an Old Red Sandstone district. The
materials which compose it are as unlike those of the plain out of
which it arises, as the materials of a stone dike, running half-way
into a field, are unlike the vegetable mould which forms the field's
surface. The ridge itself is of a granitic texture--a true gneiss.
At its base we find only conglomerates, sandstones, shales, and
stratified clays, and these lying against it in very high angles.
Hence the geological interest of this lower portion of the wall.
As has been shrewdly remarked by Mr. Murchison,[AG] in one of his
earlier papers, the gneiss seems to have been forced through the
sandstone from beneath, in a solid, not a fluid form; and as the
ridge a-top is a narrow one, and the sides remarkably abrupt--an
excellent wedge, both in consistency and form--instead of having
acted on the surrounding depositions, as most of the south country
traps have done that have merely issued from a vent, and overlaid
the upper strata, it has torn up the entire formation from the very
bottom. Imagine a large wedge forced from below through a sheet of
thick ice on a river or pond. First the ice rises in an angle, that
becomes sharper and higher as the wedge rises; then it cracks and
opens, presenting its upturned edges on both sides, and through comes
the wedge. And this is a very different process, be it observed,
from what takes place when the ice merely cracks, and the water
issues through the crack. In the one case there is a rent, and water
diffused over the surface; in the other, there is the projecting
wedge, flanked by the upturned edges of the ice; and these edges, of
course, serve as indices to decide regarding the ice's thickness,
and the various layers of which it is composed. Now, such are the
phenomena exhibited by the wedge-like granitic ridge. The Lower
Old Red Sandstone, tilted up against it on both sides, at an angle
of about eighty, exhibits in some parts a section of well nigh two
thousand feet, stretching from the lower conglomerate to the soft,
unfossiliferous sandstone, which forms in Ross and Cromarty the upper
beds of the formation. There is a mighty advantage to the geologist
in this arrangement. When books are packed up in a deep box or chest,
we have to raise the upper tier ere we can see the tier below, and
this second tier ere we can arrive at a third, and so on to the
bottom. But when well arranged on the shelves of a library, we have
merely to run the eye along their lettered backs, and we can thus
form an acquaintance with them at a glance, which in the other case
would have cost us a good deal of trouble. Now, in the neighborhood
of this granitic wedge, or wall, the strata are arranged, not like
books in a box,--such was their original position,--but like books
on the shelves of a library. They have been unpacked and arranged by
the uptilting agent; and the knowledge of them, which could only have
been attained in their first circumstances by perforating them with
a shaft of immense depth, may now be acquired simply by passing over
their edges. A morning's saunter gives us what would have cost, but
for the upheaving granite, the labor of a hundred miners for five
years.

[Footnote AG: See _Transactions of the London Geological Society_ for
1828, p. 354.]

By far the greater portion of the life of the writer was spent within
less than half an hour's walk of one of these upturned edges. I have
described the granitic rock, with reference to the disturbance it has
occasioned as a wedge forced from below, and with reference to its
rectilinear position in the sandstone district which it traverses,
as a stone wall running half-way into a field. It may communicate a
still corrector and livelier idea to think of it as a row of wedges,
such as one sometimes sees in a quarry when the workmen are engaged
in cutting out from the mass some immense block, intended to form a
stately column or huge architrave. The eminences, like the wedges,
are separated; in some places the sandstone lies between--in others
there occur huge chasms filled by the sea. The Friths of Cromarty
and Beauly, for instance, and the Bay of Munlochy, open into the
interior between these wedge-like eminences;--the well-known Sutors
of Cromarty represent two of the wedges; and it was the section
furnished by the Southern Sutor that lay so immediately in the
writer's neighborhood. The line of the Cromarty Frith forms an
angle of about thirty-five degrees with that of the granitic line
of wedge-like hills which it bisects; and hence the peculiar shape
of that tongue of land which forms the lower portion of the Black
Isle, and which, washed by the Moray Frith on the one side, and by
the Frith of Cromarty on the other, has its apex occupied by the
Southern Sutor. Imagine a lofty promontory somewhat resembling a
huge spear thrust horizontally into the sea--a ponderous mass of
granitic gneiss, of about a mile in length, forming the head, and
a rectilinear line of the Old Red Sandstone, more than ten miles
in length, forming the shaft; and such is the appearance which
this tongue of land presents, when viewed from its north-western
boundary, the Cromarty Frith. When viewed from the Moray Frith,--its
south-western boundary,--we see the same granitic spear-head, but
find the line of the shaft knobbed by the other granitic eminences of
the chain.

Now on this tongue of land I first broke ground as a geologist.
The quarry described in my introductory chapter, as that in which
my notice was first attracted by the ripple markings, opens on the
Cromarty Frith side of this huge spear-shaft; the quarry to which
I removed immediately after, and beside which I found the fossils
of the Lias, opens on its Moray Frith side. The uptilted section of
sandstone occurs on both sides, where the shaft joins to the granitic
spear-head, but the Lias I found on the Moray Frith side alone. It
studs the coast in detached patches, sorely worn by the incessant
lashings of the Frith; and each patch bears an evident relation,
in the place it occupies, to a corresponding knob or wedge in the
granitic line. The Northern Sutor, as has been just said, is one of
these knobs or wedges. It has its accompanying patch of Lias upheaved
at its base, and lying unconformably, not only to its granitic
strata, but also to its subordinate sandstones. The Southern Sutor,
another of these knobs, has also its accompanying patch of Lias,
which, though lying beyond the fall of the tide, strews the beach,
after every storm from the east, with its shales and its fossils.
The hill of Eathie is yet another knob of the series, and it, too,
has its Lias patch. The granitic wedges have not only uptilted the
sandstone, but they have also upheaved the superincumbent Lias,
which, but for their agency, would have remained buried under the
waters of the Frith, and its ever accumulating banks of sand and
gravel. I had remarked at an early period the correspondence of the
granitic knobs with the Lias patches, and striven to realize the
original place and position of the latter ere the disturbing agent
had upcast them to the light. What, I have asked, was the extent of
this comparatively modern formation in this part of the world, ere
the line of wedges were forced through from below? A wedge struck
through the ice of a pond towards the centre breaks its continuity,
and we find the ice on both sides the wedge; whereas, when struck
through at the pond edge, it merely raises the ice from the bank, and
we find it, in consequence, on but one side the wedge. Whether, have
I often inquired, w T ere the granitic wedges of this line forced
through the Lias at one of its edges, or at a comparatively central
point? and about ten years ago I set myself to ascertain whether I
could not solve the question. The Southern Sutor is a wedge open to
examination on both its sides;--the Moray Frith washes it upon one
side, the Cromarty Frith on the other. Was the Lias to be found on
both its sides? If so, the wedge must have been forced _through_ the
formation, not merely _beside_ it. It occurs, as I have said, on the
Moray Frith side of the wedge; and I resolved, on carefully exploring
the Frith of Cromarty, to try whether it did not occur on that side
too.

With this object I set out on an exploratory excursion, on a
delightful morning of August, 1830. The tide was falling; it had
already reached the line of half ebb; and from the Southern Sutor
to the low, long promontory on which the town of Cromarty is built,
there extended a broad belt of mingled sand-banks and pools,
accumulations of boulders, and shingle, and large tracts darkened
with algæ. I passed direct by a grassy pathway to the Sutor, the
granitic spear-head of a late illustration,--and turned, when I
reached the curved and contorted gneiss, to trace through the broad
belt left by the retiring waters, and in a line parallel to what I
have described as the shaft of the huge spear, the beds and strata
of the Old Red Sandstone in their ascending succession. I first
crossed the conglomerate base of the system, here little more than
a hundred feet in thickness. The ceaseless dash of the waves, which
smooth most other rocks, has a contrary effect on this bed, except
in a few localities, where its arenaceous cement of base is much
indurated. Under both the Northern and Southern Sutors the softer
cement yields to the incessant action, while the harder pebbles
stand out in bold relief; so that, wherever it presents a mural
front to the breakers, we are reminded, by its appearance, of the
artificial rock work of the architect. It roughens as the rocks
around it polish. Quitting the conglomerate, I next passed over a
thick bed of coarse reel and yellow sandstone, with here and there a
few pebbles sticking from its surface, and here and there a stratum
of finer-grained fissile sandstone inserted between the rougher
strata: I then crossed over a strata of an impure grayish limestone,
and a slaty clay, abounding, as I long afterwards ascertained, in
ichthyolites and vegetable remains. There are minute veins in the
limestone (apparently cracks filled up) of a jet black bituminous
substance, resembling anthracite; the stratified clay is mottled
by layers of semi-aluminous, semi-calcareous nodules, arranged like
layers of flint in the upper Chalk. These nodules, when cut up and
polished, present very agreeable combinations of color; there is
generally an outer ring of reddish brown, an inner ring of pale
yellow, and a central patch of red, and the whole is prettily veined
with dark-colored carbonate of lime.[AH] Passing onwards and upwards
in the line of the strata, I next crossed over a series of alternate
beds of coarse sandstone and stratified clay, and then lost sight of
the rock altogether, in a wide waste of shingle and boulder-stones,
resting on a dark blue argillaceous diluvium, sometimes employed
in that part of the country, from its tenacious and impermeable
character, for lining ponds and dams, and as mortar for the
foundations of low-lying houses, exposed in wet weather to the
sudden rise of water. The numerous boulders of this tract have their
story to tell, and it is a curious one. The Southern Sutor, with its
multitudinous fragments of gneiss, torn from its sides by the sea,
or loosened by the action of frosts and storms, and rolled down its
precipices, is only a few hundred yards away;--its base, where these
lie thickest, has been swept by tempests, chiefly from the east, for
thousands and thousands of years; and the direct effect of these
tempests, regarded as transporting agents, would have been to strew
this stony tract with those detached fragments. The same billow that
sends its long roll from the German Ocean to sweep the base of the
Sutor, and to leap up against its precipices to the height of eighty
and a hundred feet, breaks in foam, only a minute after, over this
stony tract; which has, in consequence, its sprinkling of fragments
of gneiss, transported by an agency so obvious. But for every one
such fragment which it bears, we find at least ten boulders that have
been borne for forty and fifty miles in the opposite direction from
the interior of the country--a direction in which no transporting
agency now exists. The tempests of thousands of years have conveyed
for but a few hundred yards not more than a tithe of the materials
of this tract; nine tenths of the whole have been conveyed by an
older agency over spaces of forty and fifty miles. How immensely more
powerful, then, or how immensely protracted in its operation, must
that older agency have been!

[Footnote AH: A concretionary limestone of the Old Red system in
England, variegated with purple and green, was at one time wrought as
a marble.--_Silurian System_, Part i. p. 176.]

I passed onwards, and reached a little bay, or, rather, angular
indentation of the coast, in the neighborhood of the town. It was
laid bare by the tide, this morning, far beyond its outer opening;
and the huge, table-like boulder, which occupies nearly its centre,
and to which, in a former chapter, I have had occasion to refer,
held but a middle place between the still darkened flood-line that
ran high along the beach, and the brown line of ebb that bristled
far below with forests of the rough-stemmed tangle. This little
bay, or inflection of the coast, serves as a sort of natural wear
in detaining floating drift-weed, and is often found piled, after
violent storms from the east, with accumulations, many yards in
extent, and several feet in depth, of kelp and tangle, mixed with
zoöphytes and mollusca, and the remains of fish killed among the
shallows by the tempest. Early in the last century, a large body
of herrings, pursued by whales and porpoises, were stranded in it,
to the amount of several hundred barrels; and it is said that salt
and cask failed the packers when but comparatively a small portion
of the shoal were cured, and that by much the greatest part of them
were carried away by the neighboring farmers for manure. Ever since
the formation of the present coast-line, this natural wear has been
arresting, tide after tide, its heaps of organic matter, but the
circumstances favorable to their preservation have been wanting:
they ferment and decay when driven high on the beach; and the next
spring-tide, accompanied by a gale from the west, sweeps every
vestige of them away; and so, after the lapse of many centuries,
we find no other organisms among the rounded pebbles that form the
beach of this little bay, than merely a few broken shells, and
occasionally a mouldering fish-bone. Thus very barren formations may
belong to periods singularly rich in organic existences. When what is
now the little bay was the bottom of a profound ocean, and far from
any shore, the circumstances for the preservation of its organisms
must have been much more favorable. In no locality in the Old Red
Sandstone with which I am acquainted have such beautifully preserved
fossils been found. But I anticipate.

In the middle of the little bay, and throughout the greater part of
its area, I found the rock exposed--a circumstance which I had marked
many years before, when a mere boy, without afterwards recurring
to it as one of interest. But I had now learned to look at rocks
with another eye; and the thought which first suggested itself to
me regarding the rock of the little bay was, that I had found the
especial object of my search--the Lias. The appearances are in
some respects not dissimilar. The Lias of the north of Scotland is
represented in some localities by dark-colored, unctuous clays, in
others by grayish black sandstones, that look like indurated mud,
and in others by beds of black fissile shale, alternating with bands
of coarse, impure limestone, and studded between the bands with
limestone nodules of richer quality and finer grain. The rock laid
bare in the little bay is a stratified clay, of a gray color tinged
with olive, and occurring in beds separated by indurated bands of
gray, micaceous sandstone. They also abound in calcareous nodules.
The dip of the strata, too, is very different from that of the beds
which lean against the gneiss of the Sutor. Instead of an angle of
eighty, it presents an angle of less than eight. The rocks of the
little bay must have lain beyond the disturbing, uptilting influence
of the granitic wedge. So thickly are the nodules spread over the
surface of some of the beds, that they reminded me of floats of
broken ice on the windward side of a lake after a few days' thaw,
when the edges of the fragments are smoothed and rounded, and they
press upon one another, so as to cover, except in the angular
interstices, the entire surface.

I set myself carefully to examine. The first nodule I laid open
contained a bituminous looking mass, in which I could trace a
few pointed bones and a few minute scales. The next abounded in
rhomboidal and finely enamelled scales, of much larger size and more
distinct character. I wrought on with the eagerness of a discoverer
entering for the first time in a _terra incognita_ of wonders. Almost
every fragment of clay, every splinter of sandstone, every limestone
nodule, contained its organism--scales, spines, plates, bones, entire
fish; but not one organism of the Lias could I find--no ammonites,
no belemnites, no gryphites, no shells of any kind: the vegetable
impressions were entirely different; and not a single scale,
plate, or ichthyodorulite could I identify with those of the newer
formation. I had got into a different world, and among the remains of
a different creation; but where was its proper place in the scale?
The beds of the little bay are encircled by thick accumulations
of diluvium and debris, nor could I trace their relation to a
single known rock. I was struck, as I well might, by the utter
strangeness of the forms--the oar-like arms of the _Pterichthys_ and
its tortoise-like plates--the strange, buckler-looking head of the
_Coccosteus_, which, I suppose, might possibly be the back of a small
tortoise, though the tubercles reminded me rather of the skin of the
shark--the polished scales and plates of the _Osteolepis_--the spined
and scaled fins of the _Cheiracanthus_--above all, the one-sided
tail of at least eight out of the ten or twelve varieties of fossil
which the deposit contained. All together excited and astonished
me. But some time elapsed ere I learned to distinguish the nicer
generic differences of the various organisms of the formation. I
found fragments of the _Pterichthys_ on this morning; but I date
its discovery, in relation to the mind of the discoverer, more than
a twelvemonth later.[AI] I confounded the _Cheiracanthus_, too,
with its single-spined, membranous dorsal, with _Diplacanthus_
ichthyolite, furnished with two such dorsals; and the _Diplopterus_
with the _Osteolepis_. Still, however, I saw enough to exhilarate
and interest: I wrought on till the advancing tide came splashing
over the nodules, and a powerful August sun had risen towards the
middle sky; and were I to sum up all my happier hours, the hour would
not be forgotten in which I sat down on a rounded boulder of granite,
by the edge of the sea, when the last bed was covered, and spread out
on the beach before me the spoils of the morning.

[Footnote AI: I find, by some notes, which had escaped my notice when
drawing up for the _Witness_ newspaper the sketches now expanded
into a volume, that in the year 1834 I furnished the collection of
a geological friend, the Rev. John Swanson, minister of the parish
of Small Isles, in the Outer Hebrides, with a well-marked specimen
of the _Pterichthys Milleri_. The circumstance pleasingly reminds me
of the first of all my early acquaintance, who learned to deem the
time not idly squandered that was spent in exploring the wonders of
bygone creations. Does the minister of Small Isles still remember
the boy who led him in quest of petrifactions--himself a little boy
at the time--to a deep, solitary cave on the Moray Frith, where
they lingered amidst stalactites and mosses till the wild sea had
surrounded them unmarked, barring all chance of retreat, and the dark
night came on?]




CHAPTER VII.


Further Discoveries of the Ichthyolite Beds.--Found in one
Locality under a Bed of Peat.--Discovered in another beneath
an ancient Burying-ground.--In 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 circumstance of Neighborhood.--The Writer
receives his first Assistance from without.--_Geological Appendix_
of the Messrs. Anderson, of Inverness.--Further Assistance from the
Researches of Agassiz.--Suggestions.--Dr. John Malcolmson.--His
Extensive Discoveries in Moray.--He submits to Agassiz a Drawing of
the _Pterichthys_.--Place of the Ichthyolites in the Scale at length
determined.--Two distinct Platforms of Being in the Formation to
which they belong.

I commenced forming a small collection, and set myself carefully to
examine the neighboring rocks for organisms of a similar character.
The eye becomes practised in such researches, and my labors were soon
repaid. Directly above the little bay there is a corn-field, and
beyond the field a wood of forest trees; and in this wood, in the
bottom of a water-course, scooped out of the rock through a bed of
peat, I found the stratified clay charged with scales. A few hundred
yards farther to the west there is a deep, wooded ravine cut through
a thick bed of red diluvial clay. The top of the bank directly
above is occupied by the ruins of an ancient chapel, and a group of
moss-grown tombstones; and in the gorge of this ravine, underlying
the little field of graves by about sixty feet, I discovered a still
more ancient place of sepulture--that of the ichthyolites. I explored
every bank, rock, and ravine on the northern or Cromarty Frith side
of the tongue of land, with its terminal point of granitic gneiss, to
which I have had such frequent occasion to refer, and then turned to
explore the southern, or Moray Frith side, in the rectilinear line
of the great valley. And here I was successful on a larger scale. A
range of lofty sandstone cliffs, hollowed by the sea, extends for
a distance of about two miles between two of the granitic knobs
or wedges of the line--the Southern Sutor and the hill of Eathie.
And along well nigh the entire length of this range of cliffs, I
succeeded in tracing a continuous ichthyolite bed, abounding in
remains, and lying far below the Lias, and unconformable to it. I
pursued my researches, and in the sides of a romantic precipitous
dell, through which the Burn of Eathie--a small, mossy stream--finds
its way to the Moray Frith, I again discovered the fish-beds running
deep into the interior of the country, with immense strata of a pale
yellow sandstone resting over them, and strata of a chocolate red
lying below. But their place in the geological scale was still to fix.

I had seen enough to convince me that they form a continuous convex
stratum in the sandstone spear-shaft, covering it saddle-wise
from side to side, dipping towards the Moray Frith on the south,
and to the Cromarty Frith on the north--that, as in a _bona
fide_ spear-shaft, the annual ring or layer of growth of one
season is overlaid by the annual rings of succeeding seasons, and
underlaid by those of preceding ones; so this huge semi-ring of
fossiliferous clays and limestones had its underlying semi-ring
of Red Sandstone, and its overlying semi-rings of yellow, of red,
and of gray sandstone. I knew, besides, that beneath there was a
semi-ring of conglomerate, the base of the system; and that, for
more than two hundred yards upwards, ring followed ring in unbroken
succession--now sandstone, now limestone, now stratified clay. But
though intimately acquainted with these lower rocks for more than a
hundred fathoms from their base upwards, and with the upper rocks
on both sides the ichthyolitic bed for more than a hundred feet,
there was an intervening hiatus, whose extent at this period I found
it impossible to ascertain. And hence my uncertainty regarding the
place of the ichthyolites, seeing that whole formations might be
represented by the occurring gap. On the Moray Frith side, where
the sections are of huge extent, a doubtful repeat in the strata at
one point of junction, and an abrupt fault at another, cuts off the
upper series of beds to which the organisms belong, from the lower
to which the great conglomerate belongs. On the Cromarty Frith side
the sections are mere detached patches, obscured at every point by
diluvium and soil; and, in conceiving of the whole as a continuous
line, with the Lias a-top and the granite group at the bottom, I was
ever reminded of those coast-lines of the ancient geographers, where
a few uncertain dots, a few deeper markings, and here and there a
blank space or two, showed the blended results of conjecture and
discovery--whether they give a _Terra Incognita Australia_ to the one
hemisphere, or a North-Western passage to the other. The ichthyolites
in a section so doubtful might be regarded as belonging to either
the Old or the New Red Sandstone--to the Coal Measures, or to the
Mountain Limestone. All was uncertainty.

One remark in the passing: it may teach the young geologist to be
cautious in his inferences, and illustrate, besides, those gaps
which occur in the geological scale. I had now discovered the
ichthyolite beds in five different localities; in one of these--the
first discovered--there is no overlying stratum; it seems as if
the bed formed the top of the formation: in all the others the
overlying stratum is different, and belongs to distant and widely
separated ages. We cut in one locality through a peat moss--part of
the ruins, perhaps, of one of those forests which covered, about the
commencement of the Christian era, well nigh the entire surface of
the island, and sheltered the naked inhabitants from the legions of
Agricola. We find, as we dig, huge trunks of oak and elm, cones of
the Scotch fir, handfuls of hazel-nuts, and bones and horns of the
roe and the red deer. The writer, when a boy, found among the peat
the horn of a gigantic elk. And, forming the bottom of this recent
deposit, and _lying conformably to it_, we find the ichthyolite
beds, with their antique organisms. The remains of oak and elm
leaves, and of the spikes and cones of the pine, lie within half
a foot of the remains of the _Coccosteus_ and _Diplopterus_. We
dig in another locality through an ancient burying-ground; we pass
through a superior stratum of skulls and coffins, and an inferior
stratum, barren in organic remains, and then arrive at the stratified
clays, with their ichthyolites. In a third locality we find these in
junction with the Lias, and underlying its lignites, ammonites, and
belemnites, just as we see them underlying, in the other two, the
human bones and the peat moss. And in yet a fourth locality we see
them overlaid by immense arenaceous beds, that belong evidently, as
their mineralogical character testifies, to either the Old or the
New Red Sandstone. The convulsions and revolutions of the geological
world, like those of the political, are sad confounders of place
and station, and bring into close fellowship the high and the low;
nor is it safe in either world,--such have been the effects of the
disturbing agencies,--to judge of ancient relations by existing
neighborhoods, or of original situations by present places of
occupancy. "Misery," says Shakspeare, "makes strange bedfellows."
The changes and convulsions of the geological world have made strange
bedfellows too. I have seen fossils of the Upper Lias and of the
Lower Old Red Sandstone washed together by the same wave, out of
what might be taken, on a cursory survey, for the same bed, and then
mingled with recent shells, algæ, branches of trees, and fragments of
wrecks on the same sea-beach.

Years passed, and in 1834 I received my first assistance from
without, through the kindness of the Messrs. Anderson, of Inverness,
who this year published their Guide to the _Highlands and Islands
of Scotland_--a work which has never received half its due measure
of praise. It contains, in a condensed and very pleasing form, the
accumulated gleanings, for half a lifetime, of two very superior
men, skilled in science, and of highly cultivated taste and literary
ability; whose remarks, from their intimate acquaintance with every
foot-breadth of country which they describe, invariably exhibit
that freshness of actual observation, recorded on the spot, which
Gray regarded as "worth whole cart-loads of recollection." But
what chiefly interested me in their work was its dissertative
appendices--admirable digests of the Natural History, Antiquities,
and Geology of the country. The appendix devoted to Geology,
consisting of fifty closely printed pages,--abridged in part from the
highest geological authorities, and in much greater part the result
of original observation,--contains, beyond comparison, the completest
description of the rocks, fossils, and formations of the Northern
and Western Highlands, which has yet been given to the public in a
popular form. I perused it with intense interest, and learned from
it, for the first time, of the fossil fishes of Caithness and Gamrie.

There was almost nothing known, at the period, of the oryctology of
the older rocks--little, indeed, of that of the Old Red Sandstone,
in its proper character as such; and with no such guiding clew
as has since been furnished by Agassiz, and the later researches
of Mr. Murchison, the writer of the appendix had recorded as his
ultimate conclusion, that "the middle schistoze system of Caithness,
containing the fossil fish, was intermediate in geological character
and position between the Old and New Red Sandstone formations." The
ichthyolites of Gamrie he described as resembling those of Caithness;
and I at once recognized, in his minute descriptions of both, the
fossil fish of Cromarty. The mineralogical accompaniments, too,
seemed nearly the same. In Caithness, the animal remains are mixed
up in some places with a black bituminous matter like tar. I had but
lately found among the beds of the little bay a mass of soft adhesive
bitumen, hermetically sealed up in the limestone, which, when broken
open, reminded me, from the powerful odor it cast, and which filled
for several days the room in which I kept it, of the old Gaulish
mummy of which we find so minute account in the Natural History of
Goldsmith. The nodules which enclosed the organisms at Gamrie were
described as of a sub-crystalline, radiating, fibrous structure. So
much was this the case with some of the nodules at Cromarty, that
they had often reminded me, when freshly broken, though composed of
pure carbonate of lime, of masses of asbestos. The scales and bones
of the Caithness ichthyolites were blended, it was stated, with the
fragments of a "supposed tortoise nearly allied to trionyx;" one of
the ichthyolites, a _Dipterus_, was characterized by large scales,
a double dorsal, and a one-sided tail; the entire lack of shells
and zoöphytes was remarked, and the abundance of obscure vegetable
impressions. In short, had the accomplished writer of the appendix
been briefly describing the beds at Cromarty, instead of those of
Caithness and Gamrie, he might have employed the same terms, and
remarked the same circumstances--the striated nodules, the mineral
tar, the vegetable impressions, the absence of shells and zoöphytes,
the large-scaled, and double-finned ichthyolites--the peculiarities
of which applied equally to the _Dipterus_ and _Diplopterus_--and
the supposed tortoise, in which I once recognized the _Coccosteus_.
It was much to know, that this doubtful formation--for as doubtful
I still regarded it--was of such considerable extent, and occurred
in localities so widely separated. I corresponded with the courteous
author of the appendix, at that time General Secretary to the
Northern Institution for the Promotion of Science and Literature,
and Conservator of its Museum; and, forwarding to him duplicates of
some of my better specimens, had, as I had anticipated, the generic
identity of the Cromarty ichthyolites with those of Caithness and
Gamrie fully confirmed.

My narrative is, I am afraid, becoming tedious; but it embodies
somewhat more than the mere history of a sort of Robinson Crusoe in
Geology, cut off for years from all intercourse with his kind. It
contains, also, the history of a formation in its connection with
science; and the reader will, I trust, bear with me for a few pages
more. Seasons passed; and I received new light from the researches
of Agassiz, which, if it did not show me my way more clearly,
rendered it at least more interesting, by associating with it one
of those wonderful truths, stranger that fictions, which rise ever
and anon from the profounder depths of science, and whose use, in
their connection with the human intellect, seems to be to stimulate
the faculties. I have often had occasion to refer to the one-sided
condition of tail characteristic of the ichthyolites of the Old Red
Sandstone. It characterizes, says Agassiz, the fish of all the more
ancient formations. At one certain point in the descending scale
Nature entirely alters her plan in the formation of the tail. All
the ichthyolites above are fashioned after one particular type--all
below after another and different type. The bibliographer can tell
at what periods in the history of letters one character ceased to
be employed and another came into use. Black letter, for instance,
in our own country, was scarce ever resorted to for purposes of
general literature after the reign of James VI.; and in manuscript
writing the Italian hand superseded the Saxon about the close of
the seventeenth century. Now, is it not truly wonderful to find an
analogous change of character in that pictorial history of the past
which Geology furnishes? From the first appearance of vertebrated
existences to the middle beds of the New Red Sandstone,--a space
including the Upper Ludlow rocks, the Old Red Sandstone in all
its members, the Mountain Limestone, with the Limestone of Burdie
House, the Coal Measures, the Lower New Red, and the Magnesian
Limestone,--we find only the ancient or unequally lobed type of
tail. In all the formations above, including the Lias, the Oolite,
Middle, Upper, and Lower, the Wealden, the Green-Sand, the Chalk,
and the Tertiary, we find only the equally-lobed condition of tail.
And it is more than probable, that, with the tail, the character of
the skeleton also changed; that the more ancient type characterized,
throughout, the semi-cartilaginous order of fishes, just as the more
modern type characterizes the osseous fishes; and that the upper line
of the Magnesian Limestone marks the period at which the order became
extinct. Conjecture lacks footing in grappling with a revolution
so extensive and so wonderful. Shall I venture to throw out a
suggestion on the subject, in connection with another suggestion
which has emanated from one of the first of living geologists? Fish,
of all existing creatures, seem the most capable of sustaining high
degrees of heat, and are to be found in some of the hot springs of
Continental Europe, where it is supposed scarce any other animal
could live. Now, all the fish of the ancient type are thickly covered
by a defensive armor of bone, arranged in plates, bars, or scales,
or all the three modes together, as in the _Osteolepis_ and one
half its contemporaries. The one-sided tail is united invariably
to a strong cuirass. And it has been suggested by Dr. Buckland,
that this strong cuirass may have formed a sort of defence against
the injurious effects of a highly heated surrounding medium. The
suggestion is, of course, based purely on hypothesis. It may be
stated, in direct connection with it, however, that in the Lias--the
first richly fossiliferous formation overlying that in which the
change occurred--we find, for the first time in the geological
system, decided indications of a change of seasons. The foot-prints
of winter are left impressed amid the lignites of the Cromarty Lias.
In a specimen now before me, the alternations of summer heat and
winter cold are as distinctly marked in the annual rings as in the
pines or larches of our present forests; whereas in the earlier
lignites, contemporary with ichthyolites of the ancient type, either
no annual rings appear, or the markings, if present, are both faint
and unfrequent. _Just ere winter began to take its place among
the seasons, the fish fitted for living in a highly heated medium
disappeared:_ they were created to inhabit a thermal ocean, and died
away as it cooled down. Fish of a similar type may now inhabit the
seas of Venus, or even of Jupiter, which, from its enormous bulk,
though greatly more distant from the sun than our earth, may still
powerfully retain the internal heat.

I still pursued my inquiries, and received a valuable auxiliary in a
gentleman from India, Dr. John Malcolmson, of Madras--a member of the
London Geological Society, and a man of high scientific attainments
and great general knowledge. Above all, I found him to possess, in
a remarkable degree, that spirit of research, almost amounting to a
passion, which invariably marks the superior man. He had spent month
after month under the burning sun of India, amid fever marshes and
tiger jungles, acquainting himself with the unexplored geological
field which, only a few years ago, that vast continent presented,
and in collecting fossils hitherto unnamed and undescribed. He had
pursued his inquiries, too, along the coasts of the Red Sea, and far
upwards on the banks of the Nile; and now, in returning for a time
to his own country, he had brought with him the determination of
knowing it thoroughly as a man of science and a geologist. I had the
pleasure of first introducing him to the ichthyolites of the Lower
Old Red Sandstone, by bringing him to my first-discovered bed, and
laying open, by a blow of the hammer, a beautiful _Osteolepis_. He
was much interested in the fossils of my little collection, and at
once decided that the formation which contained them could be no
representative of the Coal Measures. After ranging over the various
beds on both sides the rectilinear ridge, and acquainting himself
thoroughly with their organisms, he set out to explore the Lower Old
Red Sandstones of Moray and Banff, hitherto deemed peculiarly barren,
but whose character too much resembled that of the rocks which he had
now ascertained to be so abundant in fossils, not to be held worthy
of further examination. He explored the banks of the Spey, and found
the ichthyolite beds extensively developed at Dipple, in the middle
of an Old Red Sandstone district. He pursued his researches, and
traced the formation in ravines and the beds of rivers, from the
village of Buckie to near the field of Culloden; he found it exposed
in the banks of the Nairn, in the ravines above Cawdor Castle, on the
eastern side of the hill of Rait, at Clune, Lethen-bar, and in the
vale of Rothes--and in every instance low in the Old Reel Sandstone.
The formation hitherto deemed so barren in remains proved one of
the richest of them all, if not in tribes and families, at least in
individual fossils; and the reader may form some idea of the extent
in which it has already been proved fossiliferous, when he remembers
that the tract includes as its extremes Orkney, Gamrie, and the
north-eastern gorge of the great Caledonian Valley. The ichthyolites
were discovered in the latter locality in the quarry of Inches, three
miles beyond Inverness, by Mr. George Anderson, the gentleman to
whose geological attainments, as one of the authors of the _Guide
Book_, I have lately had occasion to refer.

I had now corresponded for several years with a little circle of
geological friends, and had described in my letters, and in some
instances had attempted to figure in them, my newly-found fossils.
A letter which I wrote early in 1838 to Dr. Malcolmson, then at
Paris, and which contained a rude drawing of the _Pterichthys_,
was submitted to Agassiz, and the curiosity of the naturalist was
excited. He examined the figure, rather, however, with interest
than surprise, and read the accompanying description, not in the
least inclined to scepticism by the singularity of its details. He
had looked on too many wonders of a similar cast to believe that
he had exhausted them, or to evince any astonishment that Geology
should be found to contain one wonder more. Some months after, I
sent a restored drawing of the same fossil to the Elgin Scientific
Society. I must state, however, that the restoration was by no
means complete. The paddle-like arms were placed further below
the shoulders than in any actual species; and I had transferred,
by mistake, to the creature's upper side, some of the plates of
the _Coccosteus_. Still the type was unequivocally that of the
_Pterichthys_. The secretary of the Society, Mr. Patrick Duff, an
excellent geologist, to whose labors, in an upper formation of
the Old Red Sandstone, I shall have afterwards occasion to refer,
questioned, as he well might, some of the details of the figure,
and we corresponded for several weeks regarding it, somewhat
in the style of Jonathan Oldbuck and his antiquarian friend,
who succeeded in settling the meaning of two whole words, in an
antique inscription, in little more than two years. Most of the
other members looked upon the entire drawing, so strange did the
appearance seem, as embodying a fiction of the same class with
those embodied in the pictured griffins and unicorns of mythologic
Zoölogy; and, in amusing themselves with it, they bestowed on its
betailed and bepaddled figure, as if in anticipation of Agassiz,
the name of the draughtsman. Not many months after, however, a
_bona fide_ _Pterichthys_ turned up in one of the newly discovered
beds of Nairnshire, and the Association ceased to joke, and began
to wonder. T merely mention the circumstance in connection with a
right challenged, at the late meeting of the British Association at
Glasgow, by a gentleman of Elgin, to be regarded as the original
discoverer of the _Pterichthys_. I am, of course, far from supposing
that the discovery was not actually made, but regret that it should
have been kept so close a secret at a time when it might have stood
the other discoverer of the creature in such stead.

The exact place of the ichthyolites in the system was still to fix.
I was spending a day, early in the winter of 1839, among the nearly
vertical strata that lean against the Northern Sutor. The section
there presented is washed by the tide for nearly three hundred yards
from where it rests on the granitic gneiss; and each succeeding
stratum in the ascending order may be as clearly traced as the
alternate white and black squares in a marble pavement. First there
is a bed of conglomerate two hundred and fifteen feet in thickness,
"identical in structure," say Professor Sedgwick and Mr. Murchison,
u with the older red conglomerates of Cumberland and the Island of
Arran,[AJ] and which cannot be distinguished from those conglomerates
which lean against the southern flank of the Grampians, and on which
Dunnottar Castle is built. Immediately above the conglomerate there
is a hundred and fourteen feet more of coarse sandstone strata, of
a reddish yellow hue, with occasionally a few pebbles enclosed, and
then twenty-seven feet additional of limestone and stratified clay.
There are no breaks, no faults, no thinning out of strata--all the
beds lie parallel, showing regular deposition. I had passed over
the section twenty times before, and had carefully examined the
limestone and the clay, but in vain. On this occasion, however, I was
more fortunate. I struck off a fragment. It contained a vegetable
impression of the same character with those of the ichthyolite beds;
and after an hour's diligent search, I had turned out from the
heart of the stratum plates and scales enough to fill a shelf in a
museum--the helmet-like snout of an Osteolepis, the thorn-like spine
of a _Cheiracanthus_, and a _Coccosteus_ well nigh entire. I had at
length, after a search of nearly ten years, found the true place of
the ichthyolite bed. The reader may smile, but I hope the smile will
be a good-natured one; a simple pleasure may be not the less sincere
on account of its simplicity; and "little things are great to little
men." I passed over and over the strata, and found there could be no
mistake. The place of the fossil fish in the scale is little more
than a hundred feet above the top, and not much more than a hundred
yards above the base of the great conglomerate; and there lie over it
in this section about five hundred feet of soft, arenaceous stone,
with here and there alternating bands of limestone and beds of clay
studded with nodules--all belonging to the inferior Old Red Sandstone.

[Footnote AJ: Different in one respect from the conglomerates of
Arran. It abounds in rolled fragments of granite, whereas in those
of Arran there occur no pebbles of this rock. Arran has now its
granite in abundance; the northern locality has none; though, when
the conglomerates of the Lower Old Red Sandstone were in the course
of forming, the case was exactly the reverse.]

The enormous depth of the Old Red Sandstone of England has been
divided by Mr. Murchison into three members, or formations--the
division adopted in his _Elements_ by Mr. Lyell, as quoted in an
early chapter. These are, the lowest, or Tilestone formation, the
middle, or Cornstone formation, and the uppermost, or Quartzose
conglomerate formation. The terms are derived from mineralogical
characters, and inadequate as designations, therefore, like that of
the Old Red Sandstone itself, which, in many of its deposits, is
not _sandstone_, and is not _red_. But they serve to express great
natural divisions. Now the Tilestone member of England represents,
as I have already stated, this Lower Old Red Sandstone formation of
Scotland; but its extent of vertical development, compared with that
of the other two members of the system, is strikingly different in
the two countries. The Tilestones compose the least of the three
divisions in England; their representative in Scotland forms by much
the greatest of the three; and there seems to be zoölogical as well
as lithological evidence that its formation must have occupied no
brief period. _The same genera occur in its upper as in its lower
beds, but the species appear to be different._ I shall briefly state
the evidence of this very curious fact.

The seat of Sir William Gordon Camming, of Altyre, is in the
neighborhood of one of the Morayshire deposits discovered by Mr.
Malcolmson; and for the greater part of the last two years Lady
Gordon Gumming has been engaged in making a collection of its
peculiar fossils, which already fills an entire apartment. The object
of her Ladyship was the illustration of the Geology of the district,
and all she sought in it on her own behalf was congenial employment
for a singularly elegant and comprehensive mind. But her labors have
rendered her a benefactor to science. Her collection was visited,
shortly after the late meeting of the British Association in Glasgow,
by Agassiz and Dr. Buckland; and great was the surprise and delight
of the philosophers to find that the whole was new to Geology. All
the species, amounting to eleven, and at least one of the genera,
that of the _Glyptolepis_, were different from any Agassiz had ever
seen or described before. The deposit so successfully explored by
her Ladyship occurs high in the lower formation. Agassiz, shortly
after, in comparing the collection of Dr. Traill (a collection
formed at Orkney) with that of the writer, (a collection made at
Cromarty,) was struck by the specific identity of the specimens. In
the instances in which the genera agreed, he found that the species
agreed also, though the ichthyolites of both differed specifically
from the ichthyolites of Caithness, which occur chiefly in the upper
beds of the formation, and from those also of Lady Cumming of Altyre,
which occur, as I have said, at the top. And in examining into the
cause, it was found that the two collections, though furnished by
localities more than a hundred miles apart, were yet derived, if
I may so express myself, from the same low platform, both alike
representing the fossiliferous base of the system, and both removed
but by a single stage from the great unfossiliferous conglomerate
below. Thus there seem to be what may be termed two stories of
being in this lower formation--stories in which the groups, though
generically identical, are specifically dissimilar.[AK]

[Footnote AK: Since this period, however, several species identical
with those of Cromarty have been found in the Morayshire deposits.]




CHAPTER VIII.


Upper Formations of the Old Red Sandstone.--Room, enough for each
and to spare.--Middle, or Cornstone Formation.--The _Cephalaspis_
its most characteristic Organism.--Description.--The Den of
Balruddery richer in the Fossils of this middle Formation than
any other Locality yet discovered.--Various Contemporaries
of the _Cephalaspis_.--Vegetable Impressions.--Gigantic
Crustacean.--_Seraphim._--Ichthyodorulites.--Sketch of the Geology
of Forfarshire.--Its older Deposits of the Cornstone Formation.--The
Quarries of Carmylie.--Their Vegetable and Animal Remains.--The
Upper Formation.--Wide Extent of the Fauna and Flora of the earlier
Formations.--Probable Cause.

Hitherto I have dwelt almost exclusively on the fossils of the Lower
Old Red Sandstone, and the history of their discovery: I shall
now ascend to the organisms of its higher platforms. The system
in Scotland, as in the sister kingdom, has its middle and upper
groups, and these are in no degree less curious than the inferior
group already described, nor do they more resemble the existences
of the present time. Does the reader remember the illustration of
the pyramid employed in an early chapter--its three parallel bars,
and the strange hieroglyphics of the middle bar? Let him now imagine
another pyramid, inscribed with the remaining and later history of
the system. We read, as before, from the base upwards, but find the
broken and half-defaced characters of the second erection descending
into the very soil, as in those obelisks of Egypt round which the
sands of the desert have been accumulating for ages. Hence a hiatus
in our history for future excavators to fill; and it contains
many such blanks, every unfossiliferous bar in either pyramid
representing a gap in the record. Three distinct formations the
group undoubtedly contains--perhaps more; nor will the fact appear
strange to the reader who remembers how numerous the formations are
that lie over and under it, and that its vast depth of ten thousand
feet equals that of the whole secondary system from top to bottom.
Eight such formations as the Oolite, or ten such formations as the
Chalk, could rest, the one over the other, in the space occupied by a
group so enormous. To the evidence of its three distant formations,
which is of a very simple character, I shall advert as I go along.

The central or Cornstone division of the system in England is
characterized throughout its vast depth by a peculiar family of
ichthyolites, which occur in none of the other divisions. I have
already had occasion to refer to the _Cephalaspis_. Four species of
this fish have been discovered in the Cornstones of Hereford, Salop,
Worcester, Monmouth, and Brecon;[AL] "and as they are always found,"
says Mr. Murchison, "in the same division of the Old Red System,
they have become valuable auxiliaries in enabling the geologist to
identify its subdivisions through England and Wales, and also to
institute direct comparisons between the different strata of the
Old Red Sandstone of England and Scotland." The _Cephalaspis_ is
one of the most curious ichthyolites of the system. (See Plate X.,
fig. 1.) Has the reader ever seen a saddler's cutting knife?--a tool
with a crescent-shaped blade, and the handle fixed transversely in
the centre of its concave side. In general outline the _Cephalaspis_
resembled this tool--the crescent-shaped blade representing the head,
the transverse handle the body. We have but to give the handle
an angular, instead of a rounded shape, and to press together the
pointed horns of the crescent, till they incline towards each other,
and the convex, or sharpened edge, is elongated into a semi-ellipse,
cut in the line of its shortest diameter, in order to produce the
complete form of the _Cephalaspis_. The head, compared with the body,
was of great size--comprising fully one third the creature's entire
length. In the centre, and placed closely together, as in many of the
flat fish, were the eyes. Some of the specimens show two dorsals,
and an anal and caudal fin. The thin and angular body presents a
jointed appearance, somewhat like that of a lobster or trilobite.
Like the bodies of most of the ichthyolites of the system, it was
covered with variously formed scales of bone; the creature's head
was cased in strong plates of the same material, the whole upper
side lying under one huge buckler--and hence the name _Cephalaspis_,
or buckler-head. In proportion to its strength and size, it seems
to have been amply furnished with weapons of defence. Such was the
strength and massiveness of its covering, that its remains are found
comparatively entire in arenaceous rocks impregnated with iron, in
which few other fossils could have survived. Its various species, as
they occur in the Welsh and English Cornstones, says Mr. Murchison,
seem "not to have been suddenly killed and entombed, but to have
been long exposed to submarine agencies, such as the attacks of
animals, currents, concretionary action," &c.; and yet, "though much
dismembered, the geologist has little difficulty in recognizing even
the smallest portions of them." Nor does it seem to have been quite
unfurnished with offensive weapons. The sword-fish, with its strong
and pointed spear, has been known to perforate the oaken ribs of the
firmest built vessels; and, poised and directed by its lesser fins,
and impelled by its powerful tail, it may be regarded either as an
arrow or javelin flung with tremendous force, or as a knight speeding
to the encounter with his lance in rest. Now there are missiles
employed in Eastern warfare, which, instead of being pointed like
the arrow or javelin, are edged somewhat like the crooked falchion
or saddler's cutting-knife, and which are capable of being cast
with such force, that they have been known to sever a horse's leg
through the bone; and if the sword-fish may be properly compared to
an arrow or javelin, the combative powers of the _Cephalaspis_ may be
illustrated, it is probable, by a weapon of this kind--the head all
around its elliptical margin presenting a sharp edge, like that of
a cutting-knife, or falchion. Its impetus, however, must have been
comparatively small, for its organs of motion were so: it was a bolt
carefully fashioned, but a bolt cast from a feeble bow. But if weak
in the assault, it must have been formidable when assailed. "The
pointed horns of the crescent," said Agassiz to the writer, "seem
to have served a similar purpose with the spear-like wings of the
_Pterichthys_,"--the sole difference consisting in the circumstance,
that the spears of the one could be elevated or depressed at
pleasure, whereas those of the other were ever fixed in the warlike
attitude. And such was the _Cephalaspis_ of the Cornstones--not only
the most characteristic, but in England and Wales almost the sole
organism of the formation.

[Footnote AL: _Cephalaspis Lewisii_, _C. Lloydii_, _C. Lyellii_, and
_C. rostratus_.]

Now of this curious ichthyolite we find no trace among the fossils
of the Lower Old Red Sandstone. It occurs neither in Orkney nor
Cromarty, Caithness nor Gamrie, Nairnshire nor the inferior
ichthyolite beds of Moray. Neither in England nor in Scotland is it
to be found in the Tilestone formation, or its equivalent. It is
common, however, in the Old Red Sandstone of Forfarshire; and it
occurs at Balruddery, in the Gray Sandstones which form on both
sides the Tay, where the Tilestone formation seems wanting, the
apparent base of the system. It is exclusively a medal of the middle
empire.

In the last-mentioned locality, in a beautifully wooded dell, known
as the Den of Balruddery, the _Cephalaspis_ is found associated
with an entire group of other fossils, the recent discovery of Mr.
Webster, the proprietor, who, with a zeal through which geological
knowledge promises to be materially extended, and at an expense of
much labor, has made a collection of all the organisms of the Den yet
discovered. These the writer had the pleasure of examining in the
company of Mr. Murchison and Dr. Buckland: he was afterwards present
when they were examined by Agassiz; and not a single organism of the
group could be identified on either occasion, by any member of the
party, with those of the lower or upper formations. Even the genera
are dissimilar. The fossils of the Lias scarce differ more from
those of the Coal Measures, than the fossils of the Middle Old Red
Sandstone from the fossils of the formations that rest over and under
them. Each formation has its distinct group--a fact so important
to the geologist, that he may feel an interest in its further
verification through the decision of yet another high authority. The
superior Old Red Sandstones of Scotland were first ascertained to be
fossiliferous by Professor Fleming, of King's College, Aberdeen,[AM]
confessedly one of the first naturalists of the age, and who,
to his minute acquaintance with existing forms of being, adds an
acquaintance scarcely less minute with those forms of primeval life
that no longer exist. He it was who first discovered, in the Upper
Old Red Sandstones of Fifeshire, the large scales and plates of that
strikingly characteristic ichthyolite of the higher formation, now
known as the _Holoptychius_--of which more anon; and, unquestionably,
no one acquainted with his writings, or the character of his mind,
can doubt that he examined carefully.

[Footnote AM: The Upper Old Red Sandstones of Moray were ascertained
to be fossiliferous at nearly the same time by Mr. Martin, of the
Anderson Institution, Elgin. There is a mouldering conglomerate
precipice termed the _Scat-Craig_, about four miles to the south of
the town, more abundant in remains than perhaps any of the other
deposits of the formation yet discovered; and in this precipice
Mr. Martin first commenced his labors in the lied Sandstone of the
district, and found it a mine of wonders. It is a place of singular
interest--a rock of sepulchres; and its teeth, scales, and single
bones occur in a state of great entireness; though, ere the deposit
was formed, the various ichthyolites whose remains it contains seem
to have been broken up, and their fragments scattered. Accumulations
of larger and smaller pebbles alternate in the strata; and the
bulkier bones and teeth are found invariably among the bulkier
pebbles, thus showing that they were operated upon by the same laws
of motion which operated on the inorganic contents of the deposit.
At a considerably later period the fossils of the upper group were
detected in the precipitous and romantic banks of the Findhorn, by
Dr. Malcolmson, of Madras, when prosecuting his discoveries of the
organisms of the lower formation. He found them, also, though in less
abundance, in a splendid section exhibited in the Burn of Lethen, a
rivulet of Moray, and yet again in the neighborhood of Altyre. The
Rev. Mr. Gordon, of Birnie, and Mr. Robertson, of Inverugie, have
been also discoverers in the district. To the geological labors
of Mr. Patrick Duff, of Elgin, in the same field, I have already
had occasion incidentally to refer. The patient inquiries of this
gentleman have been prosecuted for years in all the formations of the
province, from the Weald of Linksfield, with its peculiar lacustrine
remains--lignites, minute fresh-water shells, and the teeth, spines,
and vertebræ of fish and saurians--down to the base of the Old Red
Sandstone, with its _Coccostei_, _Dipteri_, and _Pterichthyes_. His
acquaintance with the organisms of the _Scat-Craig_ is at once more
extensive and minute than that of, perhaps, any other geologist;
and his collection of them very valuable, representing, as it does,
a formation of much interest, still little known. Mr. Duff is at
present engaged on a volume descriptive of the Geology of the
province of Moray, a district extensively explored of late years, and
abundant in its distinct groups of organisms, but of which general
readers have still much to learn; and from no one could they learn
more regarding it than from Mr. Duff. It is still only a few months
since the Upper Old Red Sandstones of the southern districts of
Scotland were found to be fossiliferous; and the writer is chiefly
indebted for his acquaintance with their organisms to a tradesman of
Berwickshire, Mr. William Stevenson, of Dunse, who, on perusing some
of the geological articles which appeared in the Witness newspaper
during the course of the last autumn, sent him a parcel of fossils
disinterred from out the deep belt of Red Sandstone which leans to
the south in that locality, against the grauwacke of the Lammermuirs.
Mr. Stevenson had recently discovered them, he stated, near
Preston-haugh, about two miles north of Dunse, in a fine section of
alternating Sandstone and conglomerate strata that lie unconformably
on the grauwacke. They consist of scales and occipital plates of the
_Holoptychius_, with the remains of a bulky, but very imperfectly
preserved ichthyodorulite; and the coarse, arenaceous matrices which
surround them seem identical with the red gritty Sandstones of the
Findhorn and the _Scat-Craig_,]

Now, a few years since, I had the pleasure of introducing Professor
Fleming to the Organisms of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, as they
occur in the neighborhood of Cromarty; and, notwithstanding his
extensive acquaintance with the upper fossils of the system, he
found himself, among the lower, in an entirely new field. His
knowledge of the one group served but to show him how very different
it was from the other. With the organisms of the lower he minutely
acquainted himself; he collected specimens from Gamrie, Caithness,
and Cromarty, and studied their peculiarities; and yet, on being
introduced last year to the discoveries of Mr. Webster at Balruddery,
he found his acquaintance with both the upper and lower groups
stand him in but the same stead that his first acquired knowledge
of the upper group had stood him a few years before. He agreed
with Agassiz in pronouncing the group at Balruddery essentially a
new group. Add to this evidence the well weighed testimony of Mr.
Murchison regarding the three formations which the Old Red Sandstone
contains in England, where the entire system is found continuous, the
Cornstone overlying the Tilestone, and the Quartzose conglomerate the
Cornstone; take into account the fact that, there, each formation has
its characteristic fossil, identical with some characteristic fossil
of the corresponding formation of Scotland--that the Tilestones of
the one, and the lower group of the other, have their _Dipterus_
in common--that the Cornstones of the one, and the middle group of
the other, have their _Cephalaspis_ in common--that the Quartzose
conglomerate of the one, and the upper group of the other, have their
_Holoptychius_ in common; and then say whether the proofs of distinct
succeeding formations can be more surely established. If, however,
the reader still entertain a doubt, let him consult the singularly
instructive section of the entire system, from the Carboniferous
Limestone to the Upper Silurian, given by Mr. Murchison, in his
_Silurian System_, (Part II., Plate XXXI., fig. 1,) and he will find
the doubt vanish. But to return to the fossils of the Cornstone group.

The characteristic fossil of this deposit, the _Cephalaspis_, occurs
in considerable abundance in Forfarshire, and in a much more entire
state than in the Cornstones of England and Wales. The rocks to
which it belongs are also developed, though more sparingly, in
the northern extremity of Fife, in a line parallel to the southern
shores of the Tay. But of all the localities yet known, the Den of
Balruddery is that in which the peculiar organisms of the formation
may be studied with best effect. The oryctology of the Cornstones
of England seems restricted to four species of the _Cephalaspis_.
In Fife, all the organisms of the formation yet discovered are
exclusively vegetable--darkened impressions of stems like those
of the inferior ichthyolite beds, confusedly mixed with what seem
slender and pointed leaflets drawn in black, and numerous circular
forms, which have been deemed the remains of the seed-vessels of
some unknown sub-aerial plant. "These last occur," says Professor
Fleming, the original discoverer, "in the form of circular flat
patches, not equalling an inch in diameter, and composed of numerous
smaller contiguous circular pieces;" the _tout ensemble_ resembling
"what might be expected to result from a compressed berry, such
as the bramble or the rasp." In Forfarshire, the remains of the
_Cephalaspis_ are found associated with impressions of a different
character, though equally obscure--impressions of polished surfaces
carved into seeming scales; but in Balruddery alone are the vegetable
impressions of the one locality, and the scaly impressions of the
other, together with the characteristic ichthyolites of England and
Forfarshire, found associated with numerous fossils besides, many of
them obscure, but all of them of interest, and all of them new to
Geology.

One of the strangest organisms of the formation is a fossil lobster,
of such huge proportions, that one of the average sized lobsters,
common in our markets, might stretch its entire length across the
continuous tail-flap in which the creature terminated. And it is a
marked characteristic of the fossil, that the terminal flap should
be continuous; in all the existing varieties with which I am
acquainted, it is divided into angular sections. The claws nearly
resembled those of the common lobster; their outline is similar;
there is the same hawk-bill curvature outside, and the inner sides of
the pincers are armed with similar teeth-like tubercles. The immense
shield which covered the upper part of the creature's body is more
angular than in the existing varieties, and resembles, both in form
and size, one of those lozenge-shaped shields worn by knights of the
middle ages on gala days, rather for ornament than use, and on which
the herald still inscribes the armorial bearing of ladies who bear
title in their own right. As shown in some of the larger specimens,
the length of this gigantic crustacean must have exceeded four feet.
Its shelly armor was delicately fretted with the forms of circular or
elliptical scales. On all the many plates of which it was composed we
see these described by gracefully waved lines, and rising apparently
from under one another, row beyond row. They were, however, as much
the mere semblance of scales as those relieved by the sculptor on the
corslet of a warrior's effigy on a Gothic tomb--mere sculpturings
on the surface of the shell. This peculiarity may be regarded as
throwing light on the hitherto doubtful impressions of the sandstone
of Forfarshire--impressions, as has been said, of smooth surfaces
carved into seeming scales. They occur as impressions merely, the
sandstone retaining no more of the original substance of the organism
than the impressed wax does of the substance of the seal; and the
workmen in the quarries in which they occur, finding form without
body, and struck by the resemblance which the delicately waved
scales bear to the sculptured markings on the wings of cherubs--of
all subjects of the chisel the most common--fancifully termed them
_Seraphim_. They have turned out, as was anticipated, to be the
detached plates of some such crustacean as the lobster of Balruddery.

The ability displayed by Cuvier in restoring, from a few broken
fragments of bone, the skeleton of the entire animal to which
the fragments had belonged, astonished the world He had learned
to interpret signs as incomprehensible to every one else as the
mysterious handwriting on the wall had been to the courtiers of
Belshazzar. The condyle of a jaw became in his hands a key to
the character of the original possessor; and in a few mouldering
vertebræ, or in the dilapidated bones of a fore-arm or a foot, he
could read a curious history of habits and instincts. In common
with several gentlemen of Edinburgh, all men known to science, I
was as much struck with the skill displayed by Agassiz in piecing
together the fragments of the huge crustacean of Balruddery, and
in demonstrating its nature as such. The numerous specimens of Mr.
Webster were opened out before us. On a previous morning I had
examined them, as I have said, in the company of Mr. Murchison and
Dr. Buckland; they had been seen also by Lord Greenock, Dr. Traill,
and Mr. Charles M'Laren; and their fragments of new and undescribed
fishes had been at once recognized with reference to at least their
class. But the collection contained organisms of a different kind,
which seemed inexplicable to all--forms of various design, but so
regularly mathematical in their outlines that they might be all
described by a ruler and a pair of compasses, and yet the whole were
covered by seeming scales. There were the fragments of scaly rhombs,
of scaly crescents, of scaly circles, with scaly parallelograms
attached to them, and of several other regular compound figures
besides. Mr. Murchison, familiar with the older fossils, remarked the
close resemblance of the seeming scales to those of the _Seraphim_
of Forfarshire, but deferred the whole to the judgment of Agassiz; no
one else hazarded a conjecture. Agassiz glanced over the collection.
One specimen especially caught his attention--an elegantly
symmetrical one. It seemed a combination of the parallelogram and
the crescent: there were pointed horns at each end; but the convex
and concave lines of the opposite sides passed into almost parallel
right lines towards the centre. His eye brightened as he contemplated
it. "I will tell you," he said, turning to the company--"I will tell
you what these are--the remains of a huge lobster." He arranged
the specimens in the group before him with as much apparent ease
as I have seen a young girl arranging the pieces of ivory or
mother-of-pearl in an Indian puzzle. A few broken pieces completed
the lozenge-shaped shield; two detached specimens, placed on its
opposite sides, furnished the claws; two or three semi-rings, with
serrated edges, composed the jointed body; the compound figure,
which but a minute before had so strongly attracted his attention,
furnished the terminal flap; and there lay the huge lobster before
us, palpable to all. There is homage due to supereminent genius,
which nature spontaneously pays when there are no low feelings of
envy or jealousy to interfere with her operations; and the reader may
well believe that it was willingly rendered on this occasion to the
genius of Agassiz.

[Illustration: _PLATE IX._]

The terminal flap of this gigantic crustacean was, as I have said,
continuous. The creature, however, seems to have had contemporaries
of the same family, whose construction in the divisions of the
flap resembled more the lobsters of the present day; and the
reader may see in the subjoined print the representation of a very
characteristic fragment of an animal of this commoner type, from
the Middle Sandstones of Forfarshire. (See Plate IX., 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
contrary 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. But the ichthyodorulites 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 Balruddery variety is broken by projecting prickles, that
resemble 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 one of its sides. Buckland,
in his _Bridgewater Treatise_, and Lyell, in his _Elements_, refer
to this peculiarity of structure in ichthyodorulites 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 cast of its roddings, those of the
_Diplacanthus_ of the Lower Old Red Sandstone described in pages 125
and 126 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 striæ 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 kingdoms. 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 a crustacean. A minute description of this interesting deposit,
with illustrative prints, would be of importance to science: it would
serve to fill a gap in the scale. The geological 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 formation 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 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 regarding it, during the
course of a recent visit, may be of some little interest to the
reader. About two thirds the entire area of this county is composed
of Old Red Sandstone. It forms a portion of that great belt of the
system which, extending 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 Grampians run
along its inner edge--composing part of the primary 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 Angus. 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 concave curve--the valley;
then an immense convex one--the hills; and then a half curve bounded
by the sea. The illustration 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 down 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 deposits 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 formation 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 to a 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 considerable body of water. The line of the
excavations resembles a huge drain, with nearly perpendicular
sides--a consequence 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 contains--that it is quite
possible to strike a small hammer 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 primary 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--irregularly grooved stems, branching oat into boughs
at acute angles, and that at the first glance seem the miniature
semblances of the trunks of gnarled oaks and elms, blackened in a
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
riband-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 plucked up
by the roots, and compressed 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 IX., 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. I saw one flagstone, in particular, so covered with
these reticulated patches, and so abundant, besides, in vegetable
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
disappointment at large expense. None of the vegetables themselves,
however, in the least resemble those of the carboniferous period.

The animal remains, though less numerous, are more interesting. They
are identical with those of the Den of Balruddery. I saw, in the
possession of the superintendent of the quarries, a well-preserved
head of the _Cephalaspis 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 during 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 disappeared, 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 creation at all resembles the _Cephalaspis_.
Were we introduced to the living creatures which now inhabit the
oceans and rivers of Mars and Venus, we could find nothing among them
more strange in appearance, or more unlike our living acquaintances
of the friths and streams, than the _Cephalaspides_ of Carmylie.

I observed, besides, in the quarry, remains of the huge crustacean
of Balruddery. The plates of the _Cephalaspis_ retain the color of
the original bone; the plates of the crustacean, 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 covered the creature's body. I could not so easily assign
its place to yet a third plate in the possession of the Rev. 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 valentines 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
flagstones 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 polygonal form by pressing
against each other, and by the weight from above.

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 primary 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 of barrenness. Of all plants, they are said to contain most
iron. According to Fourcroy, a full twelfth part of the weight of
oak, when dried, is owing to the presence of this almost universally
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 metallic 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 beneath, 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 ironstone, so abundant
in the Coal Measures, and so extensively employed in our iron-works,
seem to have owed their accumulation 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 hundred yards
above the pastoral village of Arbirlot. We find it uptilted on
a 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 to 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--in an
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 determine regarding the space which
may intervene between its lowest stratum and the still lower beds
of Carmylie, I could form no guess respecting the thickness of
the whole. In a 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 imperfectly
preserved organism resembling the parallelogramical scale of a
_Cephalaspis_. The same plants and animals seem to have existed on
this high platform as on the Carmylie 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 unpleasant, and the stream swollen by a day of
continuous rain, and so I could not examine so minutely as in other
circumstances I would have done, or as was necessary to establish
the fact. In since turning over the _Elements_ of Lyell, however, I
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 observed 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
_Cephalaspis_--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 centrical points of darker
color, show that at one time the organisms of these upper beds must
have been very abundant.

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 sandstone, with a band of lime
a-top, and over the band a thick belt of yellow sandstone, with
which the system terminates.[AN] 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 formation--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. Murchison; 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 plants, but not identical with the
plants of the Coal Measures. In Scotland, the formation is richly
fossiliferous, and the remains belong chiefly to the animal kingdom.
It is richly fossiliferous, 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.

[Footnote AN: 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 respective 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, however, 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 assigned 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 fact seems especially worthy of remark. The organisms of some of
the newer formations differ entirely, in widely separated localities,
from their contemporary organisms, 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 acquainted 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 entirely new
field among the hippurites, sphærulites, and nummulites of the same
formations, in Greece, Italy, and Spain; nor, in passing the tertiary
deposits, would he find less striking dissimilarities between the
gigantic, mail-clad megatherium and huge mastodon of the Ohio and
the La Plate, and the monsters, their contemporaries, the hairy
mammoth of Siberia, 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 contemporary
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 influence of the sun. Hence a widely spread
equality of 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 produce 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 found to bear the same character all over the
world.




CHAPTER IX.


Fossils of the Upper Old Red Sandstone much more imperfectly
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 characteristic Ichthyolite
of the Formation.--Description of its huge Scales.--Of its Occipital
Bones, Fins, Teeth, and General Appearance.--Contemporaries of the
_Holoptychius_.--Sponge-like Bodies.--Plates resembling 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 Sandstone and the Coal Measures.--The
_Holoptychius_ contemporary for a time with the _Megalichthys_.--The
Columns of Tubal Cain.

The 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 Sandstones 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 putrefaction 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 conservative 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, rendered
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 existences of the present creation; the newer, like
the comparatively 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 connected with the death or sepulture
of some individual existence 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 attached 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 appearance of the individual bear on those of the tribe. In
attempting 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 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 Sandstone 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 ichthyolites 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 ichthyolite to which the jaw
in the possession of Dr. Traill 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 crocodile. They must have been fish on an immensely larger
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
formation, 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 X., 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 battle-field
described by Addison, in which the pygmies were annihilated by the
cranes, than the organisms of the upper formation of the Old Red
Sandstone contrast with those of the lower.[AO]

[Footnote AO: 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 amount of negative evidence may be dissipated
by a single positive fact, and to inculcate on the geologist the
necessity of cautious induction. 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.]

[Illustration: _PLATE X._]

Of this upper formation the most characteristic and most abundant
ichthyolite, as has been already said, is the _Holoptychius_. The
large scales and plates, and the huge teeth, belong to this genus.
It was first introduced to the notice of geologists in a 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 hesitation, to the genus _Gyrolepis_; and the
doubts of both naturalists 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 gentleman 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 specimen 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
peculiarities of the _Holoptychius_, that they strike the commonest
observer.

The scales are very characteristic. They are massy elliptical 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 preserved, 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
undulating furrows, which stretch longitudinally towards the lower
end of the ellipsis. Some of these waved furrows run unbroken 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 X., 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 appearance
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, 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 observable, as has
been remarked, among some of the ichthyolites of the Lower Old Red
Sandstone, such as the _Diplopterus_, _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 and 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 outline. The ventrals are placed
nearer the tail, says Agassiz, than in any other ganoid fish. (See
Plate X., fig. 2.)

But no such description can communicate an adequate conception
to the reader of the strikingly picturesque appearance of the
_Holoptychius_, as shown in Mr. Noble's splendid specimen. 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 two feet and a half in length, exclusive of the tail,
which is 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 a bed of ferruginous marl
or clay. The outline of the occipital 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 carving 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 in a 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 specimens, 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 handle, and the large and thickly clustered fins the spreading
bristles.[AP]

[Footnote AP: There are now six species of _Holoptychius_
enumerated--_H. Andersoni_, _H. Flemingii_, _H. giganteus_, _H.
Murchisoni_, _H. nobilissimus_, and _H. Omaliusii_.]

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 vertebræ; 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 probable, 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 exceedingly 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 portions
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 mouth--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
_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_. It 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 lozenges, 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 tubercled 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.[AQ]

[Footnote AQ: 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_.]

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 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
somewhat resemble, but whose class, and even kingdom, are yet to
fix.[AR]

[Footnote AR: 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 Rev. 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 irregularly 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 irregular 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 having
an upper surface comparatively smooth, and an under surface nearly
parallel to it, thickly corrugated--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 merely 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 corrugations of their under surfaces should
run lengthwise in all--furrowing them in every possible angle, and
giving evidence, not apparently 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.]

It contains, besides, in considerable abundance, 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 dottings, 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_."[AS]

[Footnote AS: May I crave the attention of the reader to a brief
statement of fact? I have said that Professor Fleming, when he
minutely described the scales of the _Holoptychius_, hazarded no
conjecture regarding 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 authorities. 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 sturgeon." Mr. Murchison, in his
_Silurian System_, refers also to the supposed mistake. The person
with whom the misunderstanding seems to have originated is the Rev.
Dr. Anderson, of Newburgh. About a twelvemonth after the discovery
of Professor Fleming in the sandstones 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 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 Sandstone 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 described 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 different, and had placed the figures side by side, that the
difference might be the better seen. To the paper of the Professor,
which contained 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 contemporary, that when Agassiz, misled apparently
by the Doctor's own statement, had set himself to show that the scaly
giant of the formation could have been no sturgeon, the Doctor had
the passage in which the naturalist established the fact transferred
into a Fife newspaper, 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 beyond the limits of his
country, for untiring research, philosophic discrimination, and all
the qualities which constitute a naturalist of the highest order.
Dr. Johnston, of Berwick, in his _History of British Zoöphytes_,
(a work of an eminently scientific character,) justly "ascribes 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 Zoölogy_, 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 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 II., 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
distinct manner, the semicircularly parallel layers of growth with
obsolete diverging striæ, giving to the surface, when under a lens,
a reticulated 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 in its composition. At this period I inserted a short notice of
the occurrence of these scales in our provincial newspaper, the _Fife
Herald_, 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
Sandstone, 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. 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 Sandstone, most abundant in those parts
of the rock which exhibited a brecciated 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 II.,
fig. 3, '_figure of an oblong tubercle 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 faintly
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 Drumdryan 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, one of which is described as bearing '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_.'"--(_Professor Jameson's Edin. New Phil.
Journal_, Oct. 1837, p. 138.)]

The deposit, too, abounds in teeth, various enough in their forms to
indicate a corresponding 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, like nails that have
been drawn out of a board by the carpenter 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
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 observable in two other very
fine specimens in the collection of Mr. Patrick Duff, of Elgin. Both
in saurians and in toothed cetaceæ, such as the porpoise, the teeth
are inserted in sockets. In the ichthyolites of this formation, so
far as these are illustrated by its better specimens, the teeth, as
in existing fish, are merely placed flat upon the jaw, or in shallow
pits, which seem almost to indicate that the contrivance of sockets
might be afterwards resorted to. Immediately over the sandstone and
conglomerate belt in which these organisms occur, there rests, as has
been said, a band of limestone, and over the limestone a thick bed
of yellow sandstone, in which the system 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,
that 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 formations 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 brecciated aspect, as if it had been a mechanical, not
a chemical deposit; though its origin must unquestionably have
been chemical. It contains minute crystals of galena, and abounds
in 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 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 employed
in excavating a water-course for a mill. The organisms 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 spreading over the
district, the Rev. Dr. Anderson, of Newburgh, was fortunately led
to discover them anew in her possession. The most abundant organism
of the group was a variety of _Pterichthys_--the sixth species of
this very curious genus now discovered in the Old Red Sandstones of
Scotland; and as the Doctor 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 Illustrated_.
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 creature 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,
insect-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 September 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 creature 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 predict,
has since pronounced it a fish--a _Pterichthys_ specifically
different from the five varieties of this ichthyolite 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 specimens of Dura Den, and apparently one of the
more entire--in the collection of Professor Fleming. Its character as
a _Pterichthys_ I found very obvious; but neither the Professor nor
myself was ingenious enough to discover in it any trace of the beetle
of Dr. Anderson.[AT]

[Footnote AT: 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 little, if at all, (if I may venture
the suggestion,) from a Pterichthys 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 apparent 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 access to the _Monographic Poissons
Fossiles_ compare the restoration of _Pamphractus_ (Old Red, Tab.
VI., fig. 2) with the upper side of _Pterichthys_, as figured in this
volume, Plate I., fig. 1, making, of course, the due allowance for a
difference of species.]

Is it not interesting to find 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? 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; 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 composition 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 underlie the lower beds of the
Coal Measures, or where any gradation of character appears. The
upper yellow sandstone belt is extensively developed in Moray, but
it contains no trace of carbonaceous matter in even its higher
strata, and no other remains than those of the _Holoptychius_ and
its contemporaries. The system in the north of Scotland differs
as much 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 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 unwilling 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 long 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 portion of the whole. Years must pass ere the entire record
can be deciphered; but, of all its curiously inscribed sentences, the
result will prove the same--they will all be found to testify of 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 lied
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.--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.

There 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, however, of producing a formal chapter on the economic uses
to which its various deposits have been applied, or the unfortunate
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_. He is the author, too, of an exceedingly
curious letter on the "Second Sight," addressed to the philosophic
Boyle, which contains 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 undiminished 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 passing 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, unvaried 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 minute 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 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 carbonaceous,
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 belief 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 uplifted 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 predominating. They
would then have entered the great conglomerate, 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. From a
curious circumstance, however, they were prevented from ascertaining,
by actual experience, the utter barrenness of the formation.

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, surmounted 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 specimens of
a true Artesian well which I have any where seen. They had bored to
a considerable depth, when, on withdrawing 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 continues 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 enveloped by a ferruginous coagulum, resembling burnt
sienna, that has probably been disengaged from the dark red sandstone
below, which is known to owe its color to the oxide of iron. A Greek
poet would probably have described the incident 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 curious, though by no means poetical
fact, and by the name of 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
immediately 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 estimated 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 commerce. Who can attach a marketable
value to the discoveries 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 dignity
of thinking beings." And Geology, in a peculiar manner, 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 occasion of enormous expenditure in the south of England among
the newer formations, where the coal, if it at all 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 New Red Sandstone--a formation which has been
successfully perforated in prosecuting a similar search in various
parts of England. All these instances--and there are hundreds
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 bituminous 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 bituminous
masses which they, too, are occasionally found to enclose. Nor does
the mineralogical character of its middle beds differ in many cases
from that of the lower members of the New Red Sandstone. I have seen
the older rock in the north of Scotland as strongly saliferous as
any of the newer sandstones, 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 quadrant, 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 Sutherland 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 gryphites 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 _Osteolepis_--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.[AU] I may mention that, independently
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 system. Coal, though ground into an
impalpable powder, retains its deep black color, and may be used as
a black pigment; lignite, on the contrary, when fully levigated,
assumes a reddish, or, rather, umbry hue.

[Footnote AU: 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 himself to dig for coal in the lowest member of the
system, at least six formations beneath the only one at which the
object of his search could have been found. Mr. Murchison thus
relates the story:--

"At Tin-y-coed I found a credulous farmer ruining himself in
excavating 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 salutary 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 angle. 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 hidden mass of coal, and, unfortunately, a small fragment
of real anthracite was discovered, which burnt like the best coal.
Miners were sent for, and operations commenced. To sink a shaft was
impracticable, 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 preserves its natural and unaltered condition to within a
certain distance 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 attested 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 informed me, '_as hard as iron_,' viz., of lydianized
schist, precisely analogous 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 conviction 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 intrusive 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 exclamation being, 'O, if our squires
were only men of _spirit_, we should have as fine coal as any in the
world!'"--(_Silurian System_, Part I., p. 328.)]

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 the inferior bed.
There could be very curious chapters written 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 "rotten 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 strongly impregnated rocks and clay-beds of this
formation, like the bitumen of the still more strongly impregnated
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. In a 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-calcareous, 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
accumulations of these last decomposing amid the mud of a still sea,
little disturbed by tempests or currents, and then suddenly interred
by some widely spread catastrophe, to ferment and consolidate under
vast beds of sand and conglomerate, the bitumen[AV] seems to have
been elaborated. These bituminous schists, largely charged with
sulphuret of iron, run far into the interior, along the flanks
of the gigantic Ben Nevis, and through the exquisitely pastoral
valley of Strathpeffer. The higher hills which rise over the valley
are formed mostly of the great conglomerate--Knockferril, with its
vitrified 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 chemical 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
Strathpeffer. 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 extended 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 periods 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, 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.

[Footnote AV: "In the slaty schists of Seefeld, in the Tyrol,"
say Messrs. Sedgwick and Murchison, "there is such an abundance
of a similar bitumen, that it is largely extracted for medicinal
purposes."--(_Geol. Trans. for 1829_, p. 134.)]

The commoner mineral springs of the formation, as might be
anticipated, from the very general diffusion of the oxide to which it
owes its color, are chalybeate. There are districts 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
oxide has been held so unfavorable to both animal and vegetable 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 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 incrustations 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 dedicated of old to an obscure Roman Catholic saint,
whose name it still bears, (St. Bennet,) which presents phenomena
not unworthy the attention of the young geologist. It comes gushing
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 accumulation of a
grayish-colored and partially consolidated travertin, 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 furnished 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.

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 different 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 conglomerate 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 workman. 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, mechanically 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.[AW] The most valuable quarries in the Old Red System of
Scotland yet discovered, are the flagstone quarries of Caithness
and Carmylie. 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 Carmylie 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 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 texture, that
the storms of, perhaps, ten centuries have failed to obliterate its
rude but impressive sculptures.

[Footnote AW: When left to time the process is a tedious one, and,
ere its accomplishment, the beauty of the masonry is always in some
degree destroyed. The following passage, from a popular work, points
out a mode by which it might possibly be anticipated, and the waste
of surface 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.)
It w T as done, and the deliquescent salts being decomposed by
acid, the walls dried, and the hall was afterwards free from
dampness."--(_Recreations in Science._)]

The limestones of both the upper and lower formations of the system
have been wrought in Moray with tolerable success. In both, however,
they contain a considerable per centage of siliceous and argillaceous
earth. The system, though occupying an intermediate place between
two metalliferous 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 crystals 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 centuries 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 soil is barren. In the moor of the Milbuy,--a tract
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 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.




CHAPTER XI.


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
Burn of Eathie.--The Upper Old Red Sandstones.--Scene in Moray.

Physiognomy 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 landscape; 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 stories had been added. He pursues his
journey, and enters a district of micaceous schist. The hills are no
longer truncated, or the t moors unbroken; the heavy ground-swell
of the former landscape has become a tempestuous sea, agitated by
powerful winds and conflicting tides. The picturesque and somewhat
fantastic outline is composed of high, sharp peaks, bold, craggy
domes, steep, broken acclivities, and deeply serrated ridges; and
the higher hills seem as if set round with a 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, pyramidal, and abrupt, are less rugged than
before; and the ravines, 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 formerly; 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 solitude 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.

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 uneven
downs, that seem to rise and fall like the sea after a storm. We
pass on to the Oolite: the slopes are more gentle, the lines of
rising ground less continuous, and less coast-like; the valleys have
their rivulets, and the undulating surface is covered by a richer
vegetation. We enter on a district 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 mountain chains of the older rocks; and their surfaces
are grooved into flat valleys and long lines of elevation. Take, as
an instance, the scenery about Edinburgh. The Ochil Hills and the
Grampians form the distant shores of the seeming lake or basin on
the one side, 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 direction from north-east to south-west,
as if, when the binding frost w r as 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 to the illustration of the
twice-frozen lake--to the middle period of thaw, when the ice broke
up; and, as they are composed 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 transition
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 carboniferous 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 if 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
torrent fed by a thunder shower has just subsided, shows, on the
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 basement 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 precipice; 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 Salisbury Crags.

In all the sedimentary formations the peculiarities of scenery depend
on three circumstances--on the Plutonic agencies, 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, according to its texture and composition, affects, if I 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 peculiarities 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, however, of crowding its various, and, in some instances,
dissimilar features into one landscape, I shall introduce to the
reader a few of its more striking and characteristic scenes, as
exhibited in various localities, and by different deposits, beginning
first with its conglomerate base.

The great antiquity of this deposit is unequivocally indicated
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 imparts 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
mountain 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 surface, for his wheels rattle over the pebbles embedded
in the rock. On the sea-coast, in several localities, the deposit
presents striking peculiarities of outline. The bluff and rounded
precipices 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 openings 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 conglomerate 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 upper formation than
to the great conglomerate base of the lower, it is marked, from
the nature of the materials--materials 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 combinations 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 amid the breakers, are
here and there perforated by round, heavy-browed arches, and cast
the morning shadows inland athwart the cavern-hollowed precipices
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 studded, 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 interest, 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 communicates 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
appearance 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 less bold and
rugged, and affects often long horizontal lines, that stretch away
without rise or depression, amid the surrounding 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 eastern 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.[AX]
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 laborer 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, 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 present two
faces--a perpendicular 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
in a previous chapter, as extending between the Southern Sutor and
the Hill of Eathie; and which forms the wall of a portion 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 continuous 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 the cliffs, we have
either to climb the hill, or to pass downwards at low ebb to the edge
of the sea. The section is of interest, not only 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 hundred yards in height, and more than two miles in
length, has 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.)

[Footnote AX: The valleys which separate these ridges form often
spacious friths and bays, the frequent occurrence of which in
the Old lied 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 estuaries lie crowded together
between the counties of Sutherland and Inverness. 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 Sandstone. Two of the finest
harbors in Britain, or the world, belong to it--Milford Haven, in
South Wales, and the Bay of Cromarty.]

I know not a 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 numerous 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 instructive 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, uplifted by the surge,
rolled by thousands and tens of thousands along the rocky bottom, 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
Cæsar, 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 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 between 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 stretches out
to the dim horizon, with its vein-like currents, and its undulating
lines of coast; while before us we 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 recesses, 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 assuming 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 loftier precipices; the fox and badger harbor in the
clefts of the steeper and more inaccessible banks. As we proceed,
the deli 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 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 hazels stretch half way across, tripling with their shade the
apparent 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 revolve on the eddy.

Mark now the geology of the ravine. For about half way from where
it opens to the shore, to where the path is obstructed by the deep
mossy pool and the cascade, its precipitous 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 is a 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 vegetation 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
conglomerate. 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 precipices of coarse
conglomerate as abruptly begins. I occasionally pass a continuous
wall, built at two different periods, and composed of two different
kinds of materials: the one half of it is formed 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 angles with it,
on 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. Denuding 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 beside 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 hollow, is composed of
granitic gneiss, and seems evidently to have intruded 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
sandstone before it in detached squares. Each step has its 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 surface. 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 conglomerates 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.[AY]

[Footnote AY: There is a natural connection, it is said, between
wild scenes and wild legends; and some of the traditions connected
with this romantic 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 dancing, 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 character; the sides, no longer precipitous,
descend towards the stream in green, sloping banks; and a beaten
path, which runs between Cromarty 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 nightfall. 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, overflooded 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 opposite side a strain of the most delightful
music he had ever heard. 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 Navity 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
musician 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 of 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
minutes--and the time had seemed no longer--he had spent beside it
the greater part of the night.

The fairies have deserted the Burn of Eathie; but we have proof,
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. On a 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
gable 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 behind
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 seen in Scotland."]

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 character. 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 formation associated
with scenery of great, though often wild 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 the
Findhorn, after hurrying over ridge and shallow, amid combinations
of rock and wood, wildly picturesque as any the kingdom affords,
enters on the lower 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 been toiling in a narrow and uneven channel, between two upright
walls of hard gray gneiss, thickly traversed, in every complexity 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
assume 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 formations. 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
grauwacke. The upper formation of the system leans upon it here. We
find the Lower Lias uptilted against it at the Hill of Eathie--the
great Oolite on the eastern coast of Sutherland; and as the flints
and chalk fossils of Banff and Aberdeen are found lying immediately
over it in these counties, 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 character 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 perpendicularly into the
river on the left, in a mural precipice, and descends 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 opposite 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 uppermost 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 succeeding
generations--glitter gray through the foliage in continuous 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 the slow flap of wing and sharp creak
peculiar to the tribe, drop suddenly into their nests. The great
forest of Darnaway stretches beyond, feathering a thousand knolls,
that reflect 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 dead 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 immense 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 a lime-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 XII.


The two Aspects in which. Matter can be viewed; Space and
Time.--Geological History of the Earlier Periods.--The Cambrian
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 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 Herring Fishery.--Platform of
Death.--Probable Cause of the Catastrophe 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 consideration 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 _time_--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 desert country, with its wide wastes of unprofitable
sand, its broken citadels and temples, its solitary battle-plains,
and its gloomy streets of caverned 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 thousand 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--representative 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 decompose 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 ooze,
or careered 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, carelessly coiled; others,
furnished with what seem numerous legs, remind us of the existing
Nereidina of our sandy 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 sheltered. Were creatures such as these the lords of
this lower ocean? Did they enter first on 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 _Arabian 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 peculiar 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; extinct forms of
the graptolite, or sea-pen, existed by myriads; and 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 acquainted 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, inbearing as its covering a jointed, not a
continuous shell? Suppose a chiton with two of its terminal joints
cut away, and a 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, extending vent rally 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 _Ostreæ_, _Chitones_, and other sedentary
animals, they seemed to have adhered together in vast clusters,
trilobite over trilobite, 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 chambered 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. We rise 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 in a vertebrated column. In the
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 crustacean, as, at a period long
previous, the crustacean had taken precedence 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 palates, and squat, firmly-based teeth, well
adapted for crushing the stone-cased zoöphytes and shells of the
period, fragments of which occur in their fœcal remains; some with
teeth that, like those of the fossil sharks of the later formations,
resemble lines of miniature pyramids, larger and smaller alternating;
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 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 individuals 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 mid sea."

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 substance of so deep and shining
a jet color, that the bed, when "first discovered, conveyed the
impression," says Mr. Murchison, "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 existences of two great systems, the Cambrian and the Silurian,
had passed into extinction, with the exception of what seem a 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.[AZ] The exuviæ 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 concretionary 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
least twice the height of Ben Nevis over its surface.

[Footnote AZ: "Upwards of eight hundred extinct species of animals
have been described as belonging to the earliest, or Protozoic and
Silurian period, and of these only about one hundred are found also
in the overlying Devonian series; while but fifteen are common to
the whole Palæozoic period, and not one extends beyond it."--(_M. de
Verneuil and Count D'Archiac_, quoted by Mr. D. T. Ansted. 1844.)]

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 in a 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 Loch Ness, 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 disturbing 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 angular 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 difficult to conceive how the bottom of any sea
should have been so violently and so equally agitated for so greatly
extended 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 a stratum
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 different 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: fragments of gray
granite and white quartz are also common; and the sea-shore at half
ebb presents at a short distance the appearance 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 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 comparatively recent.[BA]

[Footnote BA: The vast beds of unconsolidated gravel with which one
of the later geological revolutions has half filled some of our
northern valleys, 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 agencies. 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 energy had come into operation in the geological
world.]

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 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 algæ, 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 myriads over the deeper seas,
they rise at times to the surface by a movement so simultaneous, that
for miles and miles around 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 imparted 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 surrounding
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 inconceivable 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 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
infinity in the sense in which Deity comprehends it, it spoke of it
in at least the only sense in which man can comprehend it.

Now, we are much in the habit of thinking of such amazing
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 remote
past as a time of comparative solitude. We forget that the now
uninhabited desert was once a populous 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 congregate
most abundantly on our coasts? There are evidences 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, spindle-shaped nodules as I have ever
seen a fishing bank covered with herrings; and have ascertained
that every individual 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 involved
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, contracted, curved; the 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 predaceous fishes;
none such seem to have survived. The record 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 disturbed. In what could it have originated? By what quiet
but potent agency of destruction were the innumerable existences 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 uncertainty over all the known phenomena of
death. Diseases of mysterious origin break out at times in the animal
kingdom, and well nigh exterminate the tribes on which they fall. The
present generation has seen a hundred millions of the human family
swept away by a disease unknown to our fathers. Virgil describes the
fatal murrain that once depopulated 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
animals, 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 seasons 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.[BB]

[Footnote BB: I have heard elderly fishermen of the Moray Frith
state, in connection 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 following 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," such as cod, ling, and whiting, also float when
dead; whereas the bodies of fish whose bowels and air-bladders are
comparatively small and tender, lie at the bottom. The herring
fisherman, 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 herrings. 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 occur 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 nothing in their character as such, and whose broken fragments
may yet be found in some other locality, where they may be regarded
as characteristic of a different formation.]

But the ravages of no such disease, however 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 terror and surprise. I have observed, too, that groups
of adjoining nodules are charged frequently with fragments of the
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 destruction 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 submarine
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 widely-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.




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 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 System owes its Name.--Successive Modes in which
a Metal may exist.--The Pest orations of the Geologist void of
Color.--Very different Appearance of the Ichthyolites of Cromarty and
Moray.

The 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 outside
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 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 exactly the same algæ, 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 deducible from the fact,
though sufficiently simple, seems in a geological 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 animals._ No instance of any such phenomenon occurs in the later
geological periods. The changes in animal and vegetable 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 essentially different groups from those
of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, and both differ from those of the
Cornstone divisions; 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 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 conceiving how the vegetation of
a formation should come to survive its animals. What is fraught
with health to the existences 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 describing 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,
    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 stratified 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 favorable 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. Generations 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 platform, and a similar destiny to the generations
that succeeded. Whole races became extinct, through what process
of destruction 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 conditions 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 limited faculties, if such could
have existed uncreated, and witnessed 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 hold 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 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 history, too, of fish as
a class, and that of every single fish. "It has been found by
Tiedemann," says Mr. Lyell, "that the brain of the fœtus in the
higher class of vertebrated animals 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 certainly 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
impressed 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 mammiferous quadrupeds have been found, apparently of
the marsupial family; and these, says Mr. Lyell, afford the only
example yet known of terrestrial mammalia in rocks of a date anterior
to the older tertiary formations. The reptile seems to have preceded
the bird, and the bird the mammiferous animal. Thus the fœtal history
of the nervous system in the individual mammifer seems typical, in
every stage of its progress, 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 subjects of his
illustration at the time,--he stated, as the result of a recent
discovery, that the young of the salmon in their fœtal 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, presents the identical appearances which
were exhibited by the order when the order began to exist. Is there
nothing wonderful in 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 contemplate, regarding
that unique _style_ of Deity, if I may so express 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
parable 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. There is no field in which
more laurels await the philosophical chemist than the 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 which 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 consequent precipitation. An earthen pitcher, containing
several quarts of sulphate of iron, had been suffered to remain
undisturbed and unexamined in a corner of Mr. Pepys's laboratory for
about a twelvemonth. Some luckless mice had meanwhile fallen into
it, and been drowned; and when it at length came to be examined, an
oily scum, and a yellow, sulphureous 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 matters 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 had deposited, in like manner, the lime with
which it was charged; and hence the calcareous nodules in which we
find their remains enclosed. The form of the nodule almost invariably
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 posture? 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 parallel 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 matter may be
remarked in the darker colored arenaceous deposits 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: 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 subjected 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 calico. The
discharging agent was organic matter; the uncolored 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, surrounded by uncolored spheres about the size of musket
bullets. It is well for the young geologist carefully to mark such
appearances--to trace them through the various instances in which the
organism may be recognized and identified, to those in which its last
vestiges have disappeared. They are the hatchments of the geological
world, and indicate that life once existed where all other record of
it has perished.[BC]

[Footnote BC: 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 to testify to the fact? I find the organic
origin of the patches in the 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
yellow colors, contrasted with the dark red of the surrounding rock.
These spots, however, are not, as may at first be supposed, mere
superficial 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 observed 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 surrounding rock. In some cases I 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 contraction of the mass, after the central
matter or nucleus had ceased to exercise its influence."--(_Cheek's
Edinburgh Journal_, Feb. 1831, p. 82.)]

It is the part of the chemist to tell us by what peculiar action 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
examination 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 contains, and, among the rest,
to a red granitic gneiss, which must have been exposed over wide
areas at the time of its deposition, and which, after the lapse of a
period which extended 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 Scotland, of the ancient
rocks whence the materials of the Old Red Sandstone were derived. It
abounds in hæmatic 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, undistinguishable in
tint from the prevailing color of the sandstone, and which leaves a
stain so difficult to be effaced, that shepherds employ it in some
parts of the Highlands for marking their sheep. Every rawer fragment
of the rock bears its hæmatic tinge; and were the whole ground by
some mechanical process into sand, and again consolidated, the
produce of the experiment would be undoubtedly a deep red sandstone.
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, 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 mechanical, is of itself curious; but how
much more so its passage 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 existing as a solid
mass in a primary rock, it should next have come to be diffused as
a red pigment in a transition conglomerate--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 Measures--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 transmigrations which have passed, and the changes which
are yet to come. Crystals of galena sometimes occur in the nodular
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 permit 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 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 undistinguishable 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 pictorial 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
materials, 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 gold," the rainbow dyes of beauty of
the watery tribes, are connected often with more than mere external
character. It is a curious and interesting 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 associated with the sense of shame, or its tint of ashy paleness
or of sallow with emotions of rage, or feelings of a panic terror.
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 death dye the scales of
the dolphin, and how every various pang calls up a various suffusion
of splendor.[BD] 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 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.[BE]

[Footnote BD: 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?"
]

[Footnote BE: "In the _Magazine of Natural History_" says Captain
Brown, in one of his notes to White's _Sellorne_, "we have a curious
account of the pugnacious propensities of these little animals.
'Having at various 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. When they are put in for some time, probably a day or two, they
swim about in a shoal, apparently exploring their new habitation.
Suddenly one will take possession of the tub, or, as it will
sometimes happen, the bottom, and will instantly 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 endeavoring to pierce each other
with their lateral spines, which, on this occasion, are projected.
I have witnessed a battle of this sort which lasted 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 generally 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 territories 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 companions.'"]

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 elephant was red. A very few
of the original tints still remain among the fossils of our north
country Lias. The ammonite, when struck fresh from the surrounding
lime, reflects the prismatic colors, as of old; a huge Modiola still
retains its tinge of tawny and yellow; and the fossilized wood of the
formation 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 acquainted 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 exclusively. 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, is different. It presents a
mixture of gray, of pink, and of brown; and on this ground the
fossil is spread out in strongly contrasted masses of white and
dark red, of blue, and of purple. Where the exuviæ 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 ichthyolite
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 Crustacea.--No unapt representation of the
Deposit of Balruddery, furnished 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 Creation.--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 vegetation. The circumstances diner 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 _Cephalaspides_,
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 various 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
burrows in the hollows of the banks.

Let us attempt bringing our knowledge of the present to bear upon
the past. The larger crustaceæ of the British seas abound most on
iron-bound coasts, where they find sheltering places in the deeper
fissures 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 forests of the rough-stemmed cuvy. We may
traverse sandy or muddy shores for miles together, without rinding
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 those
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 foul with masses of
a fetid mud, charged with multitudes of that curious purple-colored
zoophyte 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, was a dweller in the mud. In
like manner, 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 Ascidioida of our
seas fixed to their boulders and rocky skerries. But is not analogy
at fault in the present instance? 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 from 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 proximity of the neighboring
shores. The bottom, at low ebb, presents a level plain of sand, so
thickly covered by the green grass-weed of our more sheltered sandy
bays and estuaries, that 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 approaching 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 habitat 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;
occasionally we may find in them an overgrown lobster, studded with
parasitical shells and zoöphytes--proof that the creature, having
attained its full size, has ceased to cast its plated covering.
Crustaceans of the smaller varieties abound. Hermit 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 retreating 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 number? 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 represent 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 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 narrow 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 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 morasses, 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, perhaps,
accumulating more rapidly than those of our lakes, forests, or
rivers? Yes, unquestionably, in friths and estuaries, 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 do we not know that, along many of our shores, the
process of accumulation is well nigh as slow as on the land itself?
The existing 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 flourished 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 Bannockburn, 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 remote antiquity
in the history of man: a more than twilight gloom pervades the
earlier periods; and the distances are exaggerated, as objects appear
large in a fog. We measure, 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 from the historians
to the prophets, and find the dissimilarity of style indicating a
different speaker. Ezekiel's measuring-reed is graduated 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 unequally graduated, that, while the parts in some places expand
to the natural size, they are in others more than three hundred times
diminished? If not,--for what save inextricable confusion would
result from their use,--how avoid the conclusion, that the typical
scale employed in the same book by the same prophet represents
similar quantities by corresponding 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 darkness, 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 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 undescribed,
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 sandstone, 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 comparative weakness; and
while the heavier pebbles which composed the conglomerate were in
the course of being deposited in the foci, the lighter sand which
composes the sandstone 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 unconformably over them. There
must have been partial upheavings and depressions, corresponding
with the partial character of the depositions; and, as a necessary
consequence, frequent shiftings of currents. The ocean, too, seems
to have lessened its general depth, and the bottom to have lain more
exposed 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. I have
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,
however, 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 precipitates of the same earth by either springs
or seas, which at a lower temperature would have been active in
the formation 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 upper conglomerate; and
layer after layer of yellow sandstone, to the depth of several
hundred feet, were formed as 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 vertebrata
began at least three formations earlier, they had mightily advanced
in one striking particular. If their organization 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
offensively 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 formations 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 complete
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 fœcal
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 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 microscopic 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 system ushers in the
still bulkier Megalichthys; and low in the Coal Measures we find the
ponderous bones, buckler-like scales, and enormous teeth of another
and immensely more gigantic _Holoptychius_--a creature pronounced
by Agassiz the largest of all osseous fish.[BF] 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, and who overlooks
it, a thousand years are as but a single day, and a single day as a
thousand years.[BG]

[Footnote BF: There have been fish scales found in Burdie House
five inches in length, by rather more than four in breadth. Of the
gigantic _Holoptychius_ of this deposit we have still much to learn.
The fragment of a jaw, in the possession of the Royal Society of
Edinburgh, which belonged to an individual of the species, is 18½
inches in length; and it is furnished with teeth, one of which, from
base to point, measures five inches, and another four and a half.]

[Footnote BG: See, on this subject, the introductory note to the
present edition, and note p. 154.]

We have entered the Coal Measures. For seven formations
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 discovery, we have now and then found a
little floating weed, to indicate the approaching coast. The water
is fast shallowing. 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 columns; the pointed leaves stand out green at
every joint, tier above tier, each tier resembling a coronal wreath
or an ancient crown, with the rays turned outwards; and we see a-top
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
morasses, magnified some sixty or a hundred times? Have we arrived
at some such country as the continent visited by Gulliver, 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 topmost 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 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 carbonic 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 mollusca, 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 atmosphere 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 obtained regarding the fossils of
the older formation, at a time when the organisms of most of the
other formations, both above and below it, had been carefully
explored. The Limestone of Burdie House is unequivocally and
most characteristically a Coal Measure limestone. It abounds in
vegetable 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 neighborhood 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 remains. 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 having 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 boundaries 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 comparatively
well known. The huge sauroid fish was succeeded 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 appeared, 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 series
arisen, or has Deity expended his infinitude of resource, and reached
the ultimate stage of progression at which perfection can arrive? The
philosopher hesitated, and then decided in the negative, for he was
too intimately acquainted with the works of the Omnipotent Creator to
think of limiting 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 forward to the coming of a new heaven
and a new earth, not in terror, but in hope--to be encouraged to
believe in the system 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 representatives 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.




ICHTHYOLITES OF THE OLD RED SANDSTONE.

FROM

AGASSIZ'S "POISSONS FOSSILES."



∵ The synonymes here--now supplanted, however--with the names of a
few doubtful or fictitious species, are given in _Italics_;--the
former opposite the names ultimately adopted, the latter immediately
under the names of the determined species.


  Acanthodes pusillus.
  Actinolepis tuberculatus.
  Asterolepis Asmusii.--Syn. _Chelonichthys Asmusii_.
     "        apicalis.
     "        granulata.
     "        Hœninghausii.
     "        Malcolmsoni.
     "        minor.--Syn. _Chelonichthys minor_.
     "        ornata.
     "        speciosa.
     "        _concatenatus_.
     "        _depressus_.

  Bothriolepis favosa.--Syn. _Glyptosteus favosus_.
     "         ornata    "       "       _reticulatus_
  Byssacanthus arcuatus.
     "         crenulatus.
     "         lævis.

  Cephalaspis Lewisii.
     "        Lloydii.
     "        Lyellii.
     "        rostratus.

  Cheiracanthus microlepidotus.
     "          minor.
     "          Murchisoni.
  Cheirolepis Cummingiæ.
     "        Traillii.
     "        Uragus.
     "        _splendens_.
     "        _unilateralis_.
  Chelyophorus pustulatus.
     "         Verneuilii.
  Cladodus simplex.
  Climatius reticulatus.
  Coccosteus cuspidatus.
     "       decipiens.--Syn. _latus_.
     "       maximus.
     "       oblongus.
  Cosmacanthus Malcolmsoni.
  Cricodus incurvus.--Syn. _Dendrodus incurvus_.
  Ctenacanthus ornatus.
     "         serrulatus.
  Ctenodus Keyserlingii.
     "     marginalis.
     "     parvulus.
     "     Worthii.
     "     _radiatus_.
     "     _serratus_.
  Ctenoptychius priscus.

  Dendrodus latus.
     "      minor.
     "      sigmoides.
     "      strigatus.
     "      tenuistriatus.
  Diplacanthus crassispinus.
     "         longispinus.
     "         striatulus.
     "         striatus.
  Diplopterus affinis.
  Diplopterus borealis.--Syn. _Agassizii_.
     "        macrocephalus.
  Dipterus macrolepidotus.
     "     _arenaceus_.
     "     _brachypygopterus_.
     "     _macropygopterus_.
     "     _Valenciennesii_.
  Glyptolepis elegans.
     "        leptopterus.
     "        microlepidotus.
  Glyptopomus minor.--Syn. _Platygnathus minor_.

  Haplacanthus marginalis.
  Holoptychius Andersoni.
     "         Flemingii.
     "         giganteus.
     "         Murchisoni.
     "         nobilissimus.
     "         Omaliusii.
  Homacanthus arcuatus.
  Homothorax Flemingii.

  Lamnodus biporcatus.--Syn. _Dendrodus biporcatus_.
     "     hastatus.--Syn. _Panderi. Dendrodus hastatus, compressus_.
     "     sulcatus.
  Narcodes pustilifer.
  Naulas sulcatus.

  Odontacanthus crenatus.--Syn. _Ctenoptychius crenatus_.
     "          heterodon.
  Onchus heterogyrus.
     "   semistriatus.
     "   sublævis.
  Osteolepis arenatus.
     "       macrolepidotus
     "       major.
     "       microlepidotus.
     "       _intermedius_.
     "       _nanus_.

  Pamphractus Andersoni.
  Pamphractus hydrophilus.--Syn. _Pterichthys hydrophilius_.
  Parexus rccurvus.
  Phyllolepis concentricus.
  Placothorax paradoxus.
  Platygnathus Jamesoni.
     "         paucidens.
  Polyphractus platycephalus.
  Psammosteus arenatus.--Syn. _Placosteus arenatus_.
     "        mæandrinus.   "         "   _mæandrinus_.
     "        paradoxus.    "   _Psammolepis paradoxus_.
     "        undulatus.    "   _Placosteus undulatus_.
  Pterichthys arenatus.
     "        cancriformis.
     "        cornutus.
     "        major.
     "        Milleri.
     "        latus.
     "        oblongus.
     "        productus.
     "        testudinarius.
  Ptychacanthus dubius.

  Stagonolepis Robertsoni.


THE END.


ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY.



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can afford to be without it. A very copious and accurate index gives
one all needed aid in his inquiries."--_Phil. Christian Chronicle._

"One of the most useful books of the day. Every page of it contains
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"It is precisely such a work as will be hailed with pleasure by the
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of each year, a properly digested record of its progress in useful
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"There are few works of the season whose appearance we have noticed
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the remarkably thorough, patient and judicious manner in which they
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all the friends of solid and useful learning."--_New York Tribune._


FOOT-PRINTS OF THE CREATOR;

-- OR --

THE ASTEROLEPIS OF STROMNESS.

BY HUGH MILLER.

WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS.

FROM THE THIRD LONDON EDITION.--WITH A MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR

BY LOUIS AGASSIZ.

"In its purely geological character, the 'Foot-prints' is not
surpassed by any modern work of the same class. In this volume,
Mr. Miller discusses the development hypothesis, or the hypothesis
of natural law, as maintained by Lamarck, and by the author of the
4 Vestiges of Creation,' and has subjected it, in its geological
aspect, to the most rigorous examination. He has stripped even of its
semblance of truth, and restored to the Creator, as governor cf the
universe, that power and those functions which he was supposed to
have resigned at its birth. * * * The earth has still to surrender
mighty secrets,--and great revelations are yet to issue from
sepulchres of stone. It is from the vaults to which ancient life
has been consigned that the history of the dawn of life is to be
composed."--_North British Review._

"Scientific knowledge equally remarkable for comprehensiveness
and accuracy; a style at all times singularly clear, vivid, and
powerful, ranging at will, and without effort, from the most natural
and graceful simplicity, through the playful, the graphic, and the
vigorous, to the impressive eloquence of great thoughts greatly
expressed; reasoning at once comprehensive in scope, strong in
grasp, and pointedly direct in application,--these qualities combine
to render the 'Foot-prints' one of the most perfect refutations
of error, and defences of truth, that ever exact science has
produced."--_Free Church Magazine._

Dr. Buckland, at a meeting of the British Association, said he had
never been so much astonished in his life, by the powers of any
man, as he had been by the geological descriptions of Mr. Miller.
That wonderful man described these objects with a facility which
made him ashamed of the comparative meagerness and poverty of his
own descriptions in the "Bridgewater Treatise," which had cost him
hours and days of labor. He would give his left hand to possess such
powers of description as this man; and if it pleased Providence to
spare his useful life, he, if any one, would certainly render science
attractive and popular, and do equal service to theology and geology.

"The style of this work is most singularly clear and vivid, rising
at times to eloquence, and always impressing the reader with the
idea that he is brought in contact with great thoughts. Where it is
necessary, there are engravings to illustrate the geological remains.
The whole work forms one of the best defences of Truth that science
can produce."--_Albany State Register._

"The 'Foot-Prints of the Creator' is not only a good but a great
book. All who have read the 'Vestiges of Creation' should study the
'Foot-Prints of the Creator.' This volume is especially worthy the
attention of those who are so fearful of the skeptical tendencies
of natural science. We expect this volume will meet with a very
extensive sale. It should be placed in every Sabbath School Library,
and at every Christian fireside."--_Boston Traveller._

"Mr. Miller's style is remarkably pleasing; his mode of popularising
geological knowledge unsurpassed, perhaps unequalled; and the deep
vein of reverence for Divine Revelation pervading all, adds interest
and value to the volume."--_New York Com. Advertiser._

"The publishers have again covered themselves with honor, by giving
to the American public, with the Author's permission, an elegant
reprint of a foreign work of science. We earnestly bespeak for this
work a wide and free circulation, among all who love science much and
religion more."--_Puritan Recorder._

"The book indicates a mind of rare gifts and attainments, and
exhibits the workings of poetic genius in admirable harmony with
the generalizations of philosophy. It is, withal pervaded by a
spirit of devout reverence and child-like humility, such as all men
delight to behold in the interpreter of nature. We are persuaded
that no intelligent render will go through the chapters of the
author without being instructed and delighted with the views they
contain."--_Providence Journal._

"Hugh Miller is a Scotch geologist, who, within a few years, has not
Only added largely to the facts of science, but has stepped at once
among the leading scientific writers of the age, by his wonderfully
clear, accurate, and elegant geological works. Mr. Miller, taking the
newly-discovered Asterolepis for his text, has produced an answer
to the 'Vestiges of Creation,' a work which has been more widely
circulated, perhaps, than any other professedly scientific book ever
printed. Mr. Miller (and there is no doubt of this) completely upsets
his opponent--exposing his incompetency, ignorance, and sophistry,
with a clearness, ease, and elegance that are both astonishing and
delightful. Throughout the entire geologic portion, the reasoning is
markedly close, shrewd, and intelligible--the facts are evidently at
the finger's end of the author--and the most unwilling, cautious, and
antagonistic reader is compelled to yield his thorough assent to the
argument."--_Boston Post._

GOULD AND LINCOLN, PUBLISHERS, BOSTON.


FOOT-PRINTS OF THE CREATOR.

NOTICES OF THE PRESS.

"This is a very rich and valuable book. It is rich in the treasures
of scientific knowledge, which are interwoven in an argument,
remarkably clear, in a style graceful, vigorous, graphic, and
of great power--rendering it a most perfect refutation of the
atheistical error propagated in the work entitled, the 'Vestiges of
Creation.'"--_Philad. Christian Observer._

"Around the name of Hugh Miller already gathers the halo of a most
pure and grateful fame. Receiving his geological education among the
rocks of the quarry, where he labored for fifteen years; writing in
a style of peculiar simplicity and elegance, and devoting the exact
knowledge derived from walking in the Creator's 'foot-prints' to
the cause of true religion, the proudest devotees of science have
taken pleasure in doing him honor, have delighted to listen to his
teachings, and rejoiced to aid in their promulgation."--_Springfield
Republican._

"This is one of the most remarkable and deeply profound works of the
present age. The author's name will not be soon forgotten, in the
scientific world,--and his productions will not fail to be read and
admired, wherever true science is promulgated. He is most remarkably
clear, concise, and powerful, in his arguments; profound in his
researches, and conclusive in his reasoning."--_New York Farmer and
Mechanic._

"There is poetry and philosophy combined in this work. The author
had a mind which revelled, so to speak, in the beauties and wonders
of science. From a child, almost, he delighted in the works of
nature.... He has gone from one step to another, till now he is
justly esteemed as among the great Geologists of the world. It is
a book in which the man of science will delight, but it is also
one which the general reader will peruse with instruction and
satisfaction."--_Baltimore Patriot._

"The publishers are entitled to the thanks, not only of scientific
men but of christians, in this country, for presenting this work to
the American public."--_Christian Secretary._

"A remarkable work by a remarkable man. Mr. Miller is self-made, and
has elevated himself, by the force of his genius, from the position
of an ordinary laborer in a stone quarry, to that of one of the
first Geologists of the age. For careful investigation, accuracy,
fullness, and beauty of description, combined with a proper estimate
of the true claims of science, and a high reverence for sacred
things, he is not surpassed by any writer on natural science at the
present day. All who have taken any interest in the discussion of
geological topics, and 'particularly their connection with the Sacred
Writings, will read this volume with admiration and advantage. Its
subject, spirit, style, and manner of publication, all commend it;
and it is destined to an extensive circulation. It is one of the
noblest and most admirable contributions lately made to Science and
Christianity."--_Christian Herald._

"Within a few days, this enterprising house has re-published one of
the most charming scientific works of 'modern times--a work which,
from the simple love of truth which pervades it, its clearness,
authenticity, and wonderful revelations, may be called a work of
genius, as appropriately as a fine poem. It is entitled 'Foot-Prints
of the Creator.'"--_Willis' Rome Journal._

"A work so beautifully written, filled with such curious, new, and
interesting facts, and breathing in every page the purest philosophy
and Christianity, could scarcely meet with adequate praise, in
a limited space. It should be added to the library of every
one."--_Washington Union._

"We have never read a work of the kind with so much interest. Its
statements of fact and its descriptions are remarkably clear. From
minute particulars it leads us on to broad views of the creation;
and the earth becomes the witness of a succession of miracles, as
wonderful as any recorded in the Scriptures."--_Christian Register._

"This splendid work should be read by every man in our land. We
recommend the study of this science to our young men; let them
approach it with open, and not unfaithful breasts,--for amid our
mountains, grand and tall, our boundless plains, and flowing
rivers, vast and virgin fields for exploration yet present
themselves."--_Scientific American._

"This is one of the most able and learned works which has ever been
issued from the American press. The North British Review says 'That
in its geological character it is not surpassed by any modern work of
the same class.' The style of the work is clear, rich, and strong;
its statements of truth are plain and accurate, and its arguments
are presented with masterly force. Its author, Hugh Miller, is a
man of very superior talents and attainments."--_New York Christian
Messenger._

"The author resembles Burns, in the freshness, and vigor, and
enthusiasm of genius; and had he ventured into the realm of poetry,
the greatest of Scottish bards might have welcomed his company.
We hope the volume may be widely circulated, especially among
intelligent Christians.... This work is written in a bold and
eloquent style, and though penetrating to the inner shrine of the
Geological temple, and necessarily dealing with hard words and harder
things, it will secure many readers."--_Christian Chronicle._

GOULD AND LINCOLN, PUBLISHERS, BOSTON.


THE OLD RED SANDSTONE;

OR

NEW WALKS IN AN OLD FIELD.

BY HUGH MILLER,

FROM THE FOURTH LONDON EDITION--ILLUSTRATED

A writer, in noticing Mr. Miller's "First Impressions of England and
the People," in the New Englander, of May, 1850, commences by saying,
"We presume it is not necessary formally to introduce Hugh Miller to
our readers; the author of 'The Old Red Sandstone' placed himself,
by that production, which was first, among the most successful
geologists, and the best writers of the age. We well remember with
what mingled emotion and delight we first read that work. Rarely
has a more remarkable book come from the press.... For, besides the
important contributions which it makes to the science of Geology,
it is written in a style which places the author at once among the
most accomplished writers of the age.... He proves himself to be
in prose what Burns has been in poetry. We are not extravagant in
saying that there is no geologist living who, in the descriptions of
the phenomena of the science, has united such accuracy of statement
with so much poetic beauty of expression. What Dr. Buckland said was
not a mere compliment, that 'he had never been so much astonished in
his life, by the powers of any man, as he had been by the geological
descriptions of Mr. Miller. That wonderful man described these
objects with a felicity which made him ashamed of the comparative
meagerness and poverty of his own descriptions, in the Bridgewater
Treatise, which had cost him hours and days of labor.' For our own
part we do not hesitate to place Mr. Miller in the front rank of
English prose writers. Without mannerism, without those extravagances
which give a factitious reputation to so many writers of the day,
his style has a classic purity and elegance, which remind one of
Goldsmith and Irving, while there is an ease and a naturalness in the
illustrations of the imagination, which belong only to men of true
genius."

"The excellent and lively work of our meritorious, self-taught
countryman, Mr. Miller, is as admirable for the clearness of its
descriptions, and the sweetness of its composition, as for the purity
and gracefulness which pervade it."--_Edinburgh Review._

"A geological work, small in size, unpretending in spirit and manner;
its contents, the conscientious narration of fact; its style, the
beautiful simplicity of truth; and altogether possessing, for a
rational reader, an interest superior to that of a novel."--_Dr. J.
Pye Smith._

"This admirable work evinces talent of the highest order, a deep and
healthful moral feeling, a perfect command of the finest language,
and a beautiful union of philosophy and poetry. No geologist can
peruse this volume without instruction and delight."--_Silliman's
American Journal of Science._

"Mr. Miller's exceedingly interesting book on this formation is
just the sort of work to render any subject popular. It is written
in a remarkably pleasing style, and contains a wonderful amount of
information."--_Westminster Review._

"In Mr. Miller's charming little work will be found a very graphic
description of the Old Red fishes. I know not of a more fascinating
volume on any branch of British geology."--_Mantell's Medals of
Creation._

Sir Roderick Murchison, giving an account of the investigations
of Mr. Miller, spoke in the highest terms of his perseverance and
ingenuity as a geologist. With no other advantages than a common
education, by a careful use of his means, he had been able to give
himself an excellent education, and to elevate himself to a position
which any man, in any sphere of life, might well envy. He had seen
some of his papers on geology, written in a style so beautiful and
poetical as to throw plain geologists, like himself, in the shade.

GOULD AND LINCOLN, PUBLISHERS. BOSTON.


THE POETRY OF SCIENCE;

OR, STUDIES OF THE PHYSICAL PHENOMENA OF NATURE


BY ROBERT HUNT,

AUTHOR OF "PANTHEA," "RESEARCHES ON LIGHT," ETC.


NOTICES OF THE PRESS.

"We know of no work upon science which is so well calculated to lift
the mind from the admiration of the wondrous works of creation to the
belief in, and worship of, a First Great Cause. * * * One of the most
readable epitomes of the present state and progress of science we
have perused."--_Morning Herald, London._

"The design of Mr. Hunt's volume is striking and good. The subject is
very well dealt with, and the object very well attained; it displays
a fund of knowledge, and is the work of an eloquent and earnest
man."--_The Examiner, London._

"This book richly deserves the attention of the public. Its object,
as may be surmised from the title, is to paint the poetical aspect
of science, or rather to show that the deeper one investigates
the mysteries of nature--whether in the formation of a continent,
in the orbit of a star, or in the color of a flower--the more
awakened will be his wonder and his veneration, and the more call
will there be upon his highest powers of the intellect and the
imagination."--_Boston Post._

"It was once supposed that poetry and science were natural antipodes;
and lo! they now are united in loving bonds. Mr. Hunt has certainly
demonstrated that the divinest poetry lies hidden in the depths of
science, and needs but a master spirit to evoke it in shapes of
beauty."--_Christian Chronicle._

"It may be read with interest, by the lovers of nature and of
science."--_N. Y. Tribune._

"It is written in a style not unworthy of the grandeur of the
subject."--_N. Y. Eve. Post._

"The author, while adhering to true science, has set forth its
truths in an exceedingly captivating style."--_New York Commercial
Advertiser._

"We are heartily glad to see this interesting work re-published in
America. It is a book that is a book."--_Scientific American._

"From the arcana of science especially, has the author gleaned
what may be properly termed her poetry, which will make the
book one of the most interesting character to the intelligent
reader."--_Christian Herald._

"It is really a scientific treatise, fitted to instruct and enlarge
the mind of the reader, but at the same time it invests the subjects
it describes with the radiance of the imagination, and with the
charming association of poetry. The book well deserves the title it
bears, and is a beautiful illustration of the poetic interest that
belongs to many of the discussions of the science."--_Providence
Journal._

"It is one of the most readable, interesting, and instructive works
of the kind, that we have ever seen."--_Philadelphia Christian
Observer._

14 In this admirable production, Mr. Hunt offers a beautiful
epitome of the physical phenomena of Nature, in which, from their
ultimate facts, he leads his reader by inductive processes, to the
contemplation of vast eternal truths. Though full of information, the
facts cited in his pages are not collected solely because they are
such, but with true philosophical acumen, to build up the edifice;
and if curious or rare, they are selected merely to strengthen the
position in which they are placed."--_Washington Union._

"We anticipate a wide circulation for it in this country."--_Albany
State Register._

"The scientific compass of the volume is large, and its execution is
exceedingly fine and interesting."--_Zion's Herald._

"We noticed this eloquent work, while it was in the course of
publication. It is now out in beautiful style, and makes with the
notes, which are full and as valuable as the text, a volume of
nearly four hundred pases. The publishers could not have done the
poets of the land a better service, than by thus supplying them with
exhaustless materials, collected from all branches of science, and
admirably arranged for their more substantial structure."--_Watchman
and Reflector._

"Here we have an illustration of the true and beautiful, and how that
they are always one. The mysterious laws of nature, and the phenomena
by which they are manifested, are brought before the reader in a way
that enchants and improves. There is poetry in science, as no one may
deny, after he reads this book."--_Baltimore Patriot._

GOULD AND LINCOLN, PUBLISHERS, BOSTON.


THE EARTH AND MAN:

_Lectures on Comparative Physical Geography, in its Relation to the
History of Mankind._

By Arnold Guyot, Prof. Phys. Geo. & Hist., Neuchatel.

_Translated from the French_, by Prof. C. C. Felton.--_With
Illustrations._

12mo. Price $1.25.

"Those who have been accustomed to regard Geography as a merely
descriptive branch of learning, drier than the remainder biscuit
after a voyage, will be delighted to find this hitherto unattractive
pursuit converted info a science, the principles of which are
definite and the results conclusive; a science that embraces the
investigation of natural laws and interprets their mode of operation;
which professes to discover in the rudest forms and apparently
confused arrangement of the materials composing the planets' crust, a
new manifestation of the wisdom which has filled the earth with its
riches. * * * To the reader we shall owe no apology, if we have said
enough to excite his curiosity and to persuade him to look to the
book itself for further instruction."--_North American Review._

"The grand idea of the work is happily expressed by the author, where
he calls it the geographical march of history. * * * The man of
science will hail it as a beautiful generalization from the facts of
observation. The Christian, who trusts in a merciful Providence, will
draw courage from it, and hope yet more earnestly for the redemption
of the most degraded portions of mankind. Faith, science, learning,
poetry, taste, in a word, genius, have liberally contributed to the
production of the work under review. Sometimes we feel as if we were
studying a treatise on the exact sciences; at others, it strikes the
ear like an epic poem. Now it reads like history, and now it sounds
like prophecy. It will find readers in whatever language it may be
published; and in the elegant English dress which it has received
from the accomplished pen of the translator, it will not fail to
interest, instruct and inspire.

We congratulate the lovers of history and of physical geography, as
well as all those who are interested in the growth and expansion of
our common education, that Prof. Guyot contemplates the publication
of a series of elementary works on Physical Geography, in which these
two great branches of study which God has so closely joined together,
will not, we trust, be put asunder."--_Christian Examiner._

"A copy of this volume reached us at too late an hour for an
extended notice. The work is one of high merit, exhibiting a wide
range of knowledge, great research, and a philosophical spirit of
investigation. Its perusal will well repay the most learned in such
subjects, and give new views to all, of man's relation to the globe
he inhabits."--_Silliman's Journal, July, 1849._

"These lectures form one of the most valuable contributions to
geographical science that has ever been published in this country.
They invest the study of geography with an interest which will, we
doubt not, surprise and delight many. They will open an entire new
world to most readers, and will be found an invaluable aid to the
teacher and student of geography."--_Evening Traveller._

"We venture to pronounce this one of the most interesting and
instructive books which have come from the American press for many
a month. The science of which it treats is comparatively of recent
origin, but it is of great importance, not only on Recount of its
connections with other branches of knowledge, but for its bearing
upon many of the interests of society. In these lectures it is
relieved of statistical details, and presented only in its grandest
features. It thus not only places before us most instructive facts
relating to the condition of the earth, but also awakens within us a
stronger sympathy with the beings that inhabit it, and a profounder
reverence for the beneficent Creator who formed it, and of whose
character it is a manifestation and expression. They abound with the
richest interest and instruction to every intelligent reader, and
especially fitted to awaken enthusiasm and delight in all who are
devoted to the study either of natural science or the history of
mankind."--_Providence Journal._

"Geography is here presented under a new and attractive phase;
it is no longer v dry description of the features of the earth's
surface. The influence of soil scenery and climate upon character,
has not yet received the consideration due to it from historians and
philosophers. In the volume before us the profound investigations of
Humboldt, Ritter and others, in Physical Geography, are presented in
a popular form, and with the clearness and vivacity so characteristic
of French treatises on science. The work should be introduced into
our higher schools."--_The Independent, New York._

"Geography is here made to assume a dignity, not heretofore attached
to it. The knowledge communicated in these Lectures is curious,
unexpected, absorbing."--_Christian Mirror, Portland._


CONTRIBUTIONS TO THEOLOGICAL SCIENCE.

BY JOHN HARRIS, D.D.



I. THE PRE-ADAMITE EARTH.

NOTICES OF THE PRESS.

"At As we have examined every page of this work, and put forth our
best efforts to understand the full import of its varied and rich
details, the resistless impression has come over our spirits, that
the respected author has been assisted from on high in his laborious,
but successful undertaking. May it please God yet to aid and uphold
him, to complete his whole design; for we can now see, if we mistake
not, that there is great unity as well as originality and beauty in
the object which he is aiming to accomplish. If we do not greatly
mistake, this long looked for volume, will create and sustain a
deep impression in the more intellectual circles of the religious
world."--_London Evangelical Magazine._

"The man who finds his element among great thoughts, and is not
afraid to push into the remoter regions of abstract truth, be he
philosopher or theologian, or both, will read it over and over, and
will find his intellect quickened, as if from being in contact with a
new and glorious creation."--_Albany Argus._

"Dr. Harris states in a lucid, succinct, and often highly eloquent
manner, all the leading facts of geology, and their beautiful harmony
with the teachings of Scripture. As a work of paleontology in its
relation to Scripture, it will be one of the most complete and
popular extant. It evinces great research, clear and rigid reasoning,
and a style more condensed and beautiful than is usually found in a
work so profound. It will be an invaluable contribution to Biblical
Science."--_New York Evangelist._

"He is a sound logician and lucid reasoner, getting nearer to the
groundwork of a subject generally supposed to have very uncertain
data, than any other writer within our knowledge."--_New York Com.
Advertiser._

"The elements of things, the laws of organic nature, and those
especially that lie at the foundation of the divine relations to man,
are here dwelt upon in a masterly manner."--_Christian Reflector,
Boston._


II. MAN PRIMEVAL;

OR THE CONSTITUTION AND PRIMITIVE CONDITION OF THE HUMAN BEING.

WITH A FINE PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR.

NOTICES OF THE PRESS.

"It surpasses in interest its predecessor. It is an able attempt
to carry out the author's grand conception. His purpose is to
unfold, as far as possible, the successive steps by which God is
accomplishing his purpose to manifest His All-sufficiency. * * *
The reader is led along a pathway, abounding with rich and valuable
thought, going on from the author's opening propositions to their
complete demonstration. To students of mental and moral science, it
will be a valuable contribution, and will assuredly secure their
attention."--_Christian Chronicle, Philadelphia._

"It is eminently philosophical, and at the same time glowing and
eloquent. It cannot fail to have a wide circle of readers, or to
repay richly the hours which are given to its pages."--_New York
Recorder._

"The reputation of the author of this volume is co-extensive with
the English language. The work before us manifests much learning and
metaphysical acumen. Its great recommendation is, its power to cause
the reader to think and reflect."--_Boston Recorder._

"Reverently recognizing the Bible as the fountain and exponent of
truth, he is as independent and fearless as he is original and
forcible; and he adds to these qualities consummate skill in argument
and elegance of diction."--_N. Y. Com. Advertiser._

"His copious and beautiful illustrations of the successive laws
of the Divine Manifestation, have yielded us inexpressible
delight."--_London Eclectic Review._

"The distribution and arrangement of thought in this volume, are
such as to afford ample scope for the author's remarkable powers of
analysis and illustration. In looking with a keen and searching eye
at the principles which regulate the conduct of God towards man, as
the intelligent inhabitant of this lower world, Dr. Harris has laid
down for himself three distinct, but connected views of the Divine
procedure: First, The End aimed at by God; Second, the Reasons for
the employment of it. In a very masterly way does our author grapple
with almost every difficulty, and perplexing subject which comes
within the range of his proposed inquiry into the constitution and
condition of Man Primeval."--_London Evangelical History._


III. THE FAMILY;

ITS CONSTITUTION, PROBATION AND HISTORY.

[IN PREPARATION.]


CLASSICAL STUDIES.

ESSAYS ON

ANCIENT LITERATURE AND ART.

_With the Biography and Correspondence of Eminent Philologists._

By Barnas Sears, President of Newton Theol. Institution, B. B.
Edwards, Prof. Andover Theol. Seminary, and C. C. Felton, Prof.
Harvard University. 12mo. Price $1.25.

SECOND THOUSAND.

"The collection is a most attractive one, and would be acceptable in
any circumstances. The discourses, particularly those of Jacobs, are
written in words that burn. A general could not exhort his troops
with more energy and spirit, than are used by the German Professor
in stimulating the youth before him to labor in the acquisition of
classical learning. The biographical portions of the book, naturally
less exciting, no less tend to the same end."--_London Lit. Examiner,
by John Forster, Esq._

"This elegant book is worthy of a more extended notice than our
limits at present will permit us to give it. Great labor and care
have been bestowed upon its typographical execution, which does
honor to the American press. It is one of the rare beauties of
the page, that not a word is divided at the end of a line. The
mechanical part of the work, however, is its least praise. It is
unique in its character--standing alone among the innumerable books
of this book-making age. The authors well deserve the thanks of the
cultivated and disciplined portion of the community, for the service
which, by this publication, they have done to the cause of letters.
The book is of a high order, and worthy of the attentive perusal of
every scholar. It is a noble monument to the taste, and judgment,
and sound learning of the projectors, and will yield, we doubt
not, a rich harvest of fame to themselves, and of benefit to our
literature."--_Christian Review._

"It is refreshing, truly, to sit down with such a book as this. When
the press is teeming with the hasty works of authors and publishers,
it is a treat to take up a book that is an honor, at once, to the
arts and the literature of our country."--_New York Observer._

"This is truly an elegant volume, both in respect to its literary and
its mechanical execution. Its typographical appearance is an honor
to the American press; and with equal truth it may be said, that the
intrinsic character of the work is highly creditable to the age. It
is a novel work, and may be called a plea for classical learning. To
scholars it must be a treat 3 and to students we heartily commend
it."--_Boston Recorder._

"This volume is no common-place production. It is truly refreshing,
when we are obliged, from week to week, to look through the mass of
books which increases upon our table, many of which are extremely
attenuated in thought and jejune in style, to find something which
carries us back to the pure and invigorating influence of the master
minds of antiquity. The gentlemen who have produced this volume
deserve the cordial thanks of the literary world."--_New England
Puritan._

"We heartily welcome this book as admirably adapted to effect a
most noble and much desired result. We commend the work to general
attention, for we feel sure it must do much to awaken a zeal for
classical studies, as the surest means of attaining the refinement
and graceful dignity which should mark the strength of every
nation."--_New York Tribune._

"We make no classical pretensions, or we might say more about the
principal articles in this volume; but it needs no such pretensions
to commend, as we heartily do, a book so full of interest and
instruction as the present, for every reader who is at nil imbued
with a love of literature."--_Salem Gazette._

"This book will do good in our colleges. Every student will want a
copy, and many will be stimulated by its perusal to a more vigorous
and enthusiastic pursuit of that higher and more solid learning which
alone deserves to be called 4 classical.' The recent tendencies have
been to the neglect of this, and we rejoice in this timely effort of
minds so well qualified for such a work."--_Christian Reflector._

"The volume is, in every way, a beautiful affair of its kind, and we
hazard nothing in recommending it to the literary world."--_Christian
Secretary, Hartford._

"The design is a noble and generous one, and has been executed with
a taste and good sense, that do honor both to the writers and the
publishers."--_Prov. Journal._


CHAMBERS'S

CYCLOPÆDIA OF ENGLISH LITERATURE.

A SELECTION OF THE CHOICEST PRODUCTIONS OF ENGLISH AUTHORS, FROM
THE EARLIEST TO THE PRESENT TIME: CONNECTED BY A CRITICAL AND
BIOGRAPHICAL HISTORY.

EDITED BY ROBERT CHAMBERS.

ASSISTED BY ROBERT CARRUTHERS AND OTHER EMINENT GENTLEMEN.

_Complete in two imperial octavo volumes, of more than fourteen
hundred pages of double column letterpress, and upwards of three
hundred elegant illustrations._

_This valuable work has now become so generally known and
appreciated, that there need scarcely be any thing said in
commendation, except to those who have not yet seen it._

_The work embraces about One Thousand Authors, chronologically
arranged and classed as Poets, Historians, Dramatists, Philosophers,
Metaphysicians, Divines, etc., with choice selections from their
writings, connected by a Biographical, Historical, and Critical
Narrative; thus presenting a complete view of English Literature,
from the earliest to the present time. Let the reader open where he
will, he cannot fail to find matter for profit and delight, which,
for the most part, too, repeated perusals will only serve to make
him enjoy the more. We have indeed infinite riches in a little room.
No one, who has a taste for literature, should allow himself, for a
trifling consideration, to be without a work which throws so much
light upon the progress of the English language. The selections are
gems--a mass of valuable information in a condensed and elegant form._

EXTRACTS FROM COMMENDATORY NOTICES.

_From W. H. Prescott, Author of "Ferdinand and Isabella."_ "The plan
of the work is very judicious. * * * It will put the reader in the
proper point of view, for surveying the whole ground over which he is
travelling. * * * Such readers cannot fail to profit largely by the
labors of the critic who has the talent and taste to separate what is
really beautiful and worthy of their study from what is superfluous."

"I concur in the foregoing opinion of Mr. Prescott."--_Edward
Everett._

"It will be a useful and popular work, indispensable to the library
of a student of English literature."--_Francis Wayland._

"We hail with peculiar pleasure the appearance of this work, and more
especially its republication in this country at a price which places
it within the reach of a great number of readers."--_North American
Review._

"This is the most valuable and magnificent contribution to a sound
popular literature that this century has brought forth. It fills
a place which was before a blank. Without it, English literature,
to almost all of our countrymen, educated or uneducated, is an
imperfect, broken, disjointed mass. Much that is beautiful--the
most perfect and graceful portions, undoubtedly--was already
possessed; but it was not a whole. Every intelligent man, every
inquiring mind, every scholar, felt that the foundation was missing.
Chambers's Cyclopædia supplies this radical defect. It begins with
the beginning; and, step by step, gives to every one who has the
intellect or taste to enjoy it a view of English literature in
all its complete, beautiful, and perfect proportions."--_Onondaga
Democrat, N. Y._

"We hope that teachers will avail themselves of an early opportunity
to obtain a work so well calculated to impart useful knowledge, with
the pleasures and ornaments of the English classics. The work will
undoubtedly find a place in our district and other public libraries;
yet it should be the 'vade mecum' of every scholar."--_Teachers'
Advocate, Syracuse, N. Y._

"The work is finely conceived to meet a popular want, is full of
literary instruction, and is variously embellished with engravings
illustrative of English antiquities, history, and biography. Tire
typography throughout is beautiful."--_Christian Reflector._ Boston.

"The design has been well executed by the selection and concentration
of some of the best productions of English intellect, from the
earliest Anglo-Saxon writers down to those of the present day. No one
can give a glance at the work without being struck with its beauty
and cheapness."--_Boston Courier._

"We should be glad if any thing we can say would favor this design.
The elegance of the execution feasts the eye with beauty, and the
whole is suited to refine and elevate the taste. And we might ask,
who can fail to go back to its beginning, and trace his mother-tongue
from its rude infancy to its present maturity, elegance, and
richness?"--_Christian Mirror, Portland._

∵ The Publishers of the AMERICAN Edition of this valuable work desire
to state that, besides the numerous pictorial illustrations in the
English Edition, they have greatly enriched the work by the addition
of fine steel and mezzotint engravings of the heads of Shakspeare,
Addison, Byron; a full length portrait of Dr. Johnson, and a
beautiful scenic representation of Oliver Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson.
These important and elegant additions, together with superior paper
and binding, must give this a decided preference ever all other
editions.


FOR SCHOOL AND FAMILY LIBRARIES.


CHAMBERS'S MISCELLANY

OF USEFUL AND ENTERTAINING KNOWLEDGE,

TEN VOLUMES, ELEGANTLY ILLUSTRATED.



The design of the Miscellany is to supply the increasing demand for
useful, instructive, and entertaining reading, and to bring all the
aids of literature to bear on _the cultivation of the feelings and
understanding of the people_--to impress correct views on important
moral and social questions--to furnish an unobtrusive friend and
guide, a lively fireside companion, as far as that object can be
attained through the instrumentality of books.

This work is confidently commended to Teachers, School Committees,
and all others interested in the formation of "School Libraries,"
as the very best work for this purpose. Its wide range of subjects,
presented in the most popular style, makes it exceedingly interesting
and instructive to all classes. The most flattering testimonials
from distinguished school teachers and others, expressing an earnest
desire to have it introduced into all school libraries, have been
received by the publishers.

_From George B. Emerson, Esq., Chairman of the Book Committee of
the Boston Schools._--"I have examined with a good deal of care
'Chambers's Miscellany of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge,'
particularly with reference to its suitableness to form parts of a
library for young persons. It is, indeed, a library in itself, and
one of great value, containing very choice selections in history,
biography, natural history, poetry, art, physiology, elegant fiction,
and various departments of science, made with great taste and
judgment, and with the highest moral and philanthropic purpose. It
would be difficult to find any miscellany superior or even equal to
it; it richly deserves the epithets 'useful and entertaining,' and
I would recommend it very strongly, as extremely well adapted to
form parts of a library for the young, or of a social or circulating
library, in town or country."

_From the Rev. John O. Choules, D. D._--"I cannot resist the desire
which I feel to thank you for the valuable service which you have
rendered to the public by placing this admirable work within the
reach of all who have a desire to obtain knowledge. I am not
acquainted with any similar collection in the English language
that can compare with it for purposes of instruction or amusement.
I should rejoice to see that set of books in every house in our
country. I cannot think of any method by which a father can more
materially benefit his children than by surrounding them with good
books; and if these charming and attractive volumes can be placed in
the hands of the young, they will have their tastes formed for good
leading. I shall labor to see the Miscellany circulated among my
friends, and shall lose no opportunity to commend it every where."

"They contain an excellent selection of historical, scientific, and
miscellaneous articles in popular style, from the best writers of the
language. The work is elegantly printed and neatly illustrated, and
is sold very cheap."--_Independent Democrat, Concord, N. H._

"It is just the book to take up at the close of a busy day; and
especially will it shed a new charm over autumn and winter in-door
scenes."--_Christ. World, Boston._

"The information contained in this work is surprisingly great; and
for the fireside, and the young particularly, it cannot fail to prove
a most valuable and entertaining companion."--_New York Evangelist._

"We are glad to see an American issue of this publication, and
especially in so neat and convenient a form. It is an admirable
compilation, distinguished by the good taste which has been shown in
all the publications of the Messrs. Chambers. It unites the useful
and the entertaining."--_New York Commercial Advertiser._

"It is an admirable compilation, containing interesting memoirs and
historical sketches, which are useful, instructive, and entertaining.
Every head of a family should supply himself with a copy for the
benefit of his children."--_Corning Journal._

"The enterprising publishers deserve the thanks of every lover of
the beautiful and true, for the cheap and tasteful style in which
they have spread this truly valuable work before the American
people."--_People's Advocate, Pa._

"It is filled with subjects of interest, intended for the instruction
of the youthful mind, such as biography, history, anecdotes, natural
philosophy, &c."--_New Orleans Bee._


Valuable School Books.


=THE ELEMENTS OF MORAL SCIENCE.= By Francis Wayland, D.D. President
of Brown University, and Professor of Moral Philosophy. Fortieth
Thousand. 12mo. cloth. Price $1.25.

∵ This work has been extensively and favorably reviewed and adopted
as a class-book in most of the collegiate, theological, and
academical institutions of the country.

_From Rev. Wilbur Fisk, President of the Wesleyan University._

"I have examined it with great satisfaction and interest. The work
was greatly needed, and is well executed. Dr. Wayland deserves the
grateful acknowledgments and liberal patronage of the public. I need
say nothing further to express my high estimate of the work, than
that we shall immediately adopt it as a text-book in our university."

_From Hon. James Kent, late Chancellor of New York._

"The work has been read by me attentively and thoroughly, and I think
very highly of it. The author himself is one of the most estimable of
men, and I do not know of any ethical treatise, in which our duties
to God and to our fellow-men are laid down with more precision,
simplicity, clearness, energy, and truth."

"The work of Dr. Wayland has arisen gradually from the necessity of
correcting the false principles and fallacious reasonings of Paley.
It is a radical mistake, in the education of youth, to permit any
book to be used by students as a text-book, which contains erroneous
doctrines, especially when these are fundamental, and tend to vitiate
the whole system of morals. We have been greatly pleased with the
method which President Wayland has adopted; he goes back to the
simplest and most fundamental principles; and, in the statement of
his views, he unites perspicuity with conciseness and precision.
In all the author's leading fundamental principles we entirely
concur."--_Biblical Repository._

"This is a new work on morals, for academic use, and we welcome
it with much satisfaction. It is the result of several years'
reflection and experience in teaching, on the part of its justly
distinguished author; and if it is not perfectly what we could wish,
yet, in the most important respects, it supplies a want which has
been extensively felt. It is, we think, substantially sound in its
fundamental principles; and being comprehensive and elementary in its
plan, and adapted to the purposes of instruction, it will be gladly
adopted by those who have for a long time been dissatisfied with the
existing works of Paley."--_The Literary and Theological Review._


=MORAL SCIENCE, ABRIDGED,= by the Author, and adapted to the use of
Schools and Academies. Twenty-fifth Thousand. 18mo, half cloth. Price
25 cents.

The more effectually to meet the desire expressed for a cheap
edition, the present edition is issued at the reduced price of 25
cents per copy, and it is hoped thereby to extend the benefit of
moral instruction to all the youth of our land. Teachers and all
others engaged in the training of youth, are invited to examine this
work.

"Dr. Wayland has published an abridgment of his work, for the use of
schools. Of this step we can hardly speak too highly. It is more than
time that the study of moral philosophy should be introduced into
all our institutions of education. We are happy to see the way so
auspiciously opened for such an introduction. It has been not merely
abridged, but also re-written. We cannot but regard the labor as well
bestowed."--_North American Review._

"We speak that we do know, when we express our high estimate of Dr.
Wayland's ability in teaching Moral Philosophy, whether orally or by
the book. Having listened to his instructions, in this interesting
department, we can attest how lofty are the principles, how exact
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       *       *       *       *       *


Transcriber Note

Two incidences of Ben Wevis (pp. 6 and 182) were changed to Ben
Nevis. Ben Wyvis on page 31 was left unchanged as there is a
peak with that name! Some minor typos were corrected. Duplicate
Advertisements from the front of the book were deleted!

To avoid splitting paragraphs by Plate images, text was moved. Due
to the length of some paragraphs and the footnotes they reference,
the following paragraphs were split to accommodate placement of their
footnotes nearer to their anchors.

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