THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY From the collection of Julius Doerner, Chicago Purchased, 1918. 551 I Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2015 https://archive.org/details/oldredsandstoneOOmill FOOT-PRINTS OF THE CREATOR; on THE AS TEE OLE PIS OF STROMNESS. BY HUGH MILLER. WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS. FROM THE THIRD LONDON E D I T I O N. — W I T II 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 'Vestiges of Creation, 1 and has subjected it, in its geological aspect, to the most rigorous examination. He lias stripped even of its semblance of truth, and restored to the Creator, as governor of 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 rev- elations 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 vigor- ous, to the impressive eloquence of great thoughts greatly expressed; reasoning at once comprehensive in scope, strong in grasp, and pointedly direct in application, — these qual- ities 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 meagreness and poverty of his own descriptions in the " Bridge- water 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 vol- ume is especially worthy the attention of those who ai*e so fearful of the skeptical tenden- cies 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 knowl- edge unsurpassed, perhaps unequalled ; and the deep vein of reverence for Divine Revela- tion 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 philosophv. 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 reader 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 anv other profes- sedly scientific book ever printed. Mr. Miller (and there is no doubt of this) completely upsets his opponent — exposing his incompetency, ignorance, and sophistrv, with a clear- ness, 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 antago- nistic reader is compelled to yield his thorough assent to the argument."— Boston Post. GOULD AND LINCOLN, PUBLISHERS, BOSTON. THE OLD RED SANDSTONE; NEW WALKS IN AN OLD FIELD. BY HUGH MILLEB, 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 neces- sary formally to introduce Hugh Miller to our readers ; the author of ' The Old Red Sand- stone' 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 Geol- ogy, 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 meagreness and pov- erty 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 ele- gance, 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." — Silli- man'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 Redfishes. I know not of a more fascinating volume on any branch of British geology."— MantelVs 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 advan tages 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. LIBRARY OF THE ■ot/(tt< S Gitei I THE OLD RED SANDSTONE; OR, NEW WALKS IN AN OLD FIELD. HUGH MILLER, AUTHOR OF "FOOT-PRINTS OF THE CREATOR, 7 ' ETC. ILLUSTRATED WITH NUMEROUS ENGRAVINGS. FROM THE FOURTH LONDON EDITION. BOSTON: GOULD AND LINCOLN, 5 9 WASHINGTON STREET. 1851 . STE11E0TYPED AT THE BOSTON STEREOTYPE FOUNDRY. Printed by G. C. Rand & Co. No. 3 Conihill. * 1 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 specifi- cally dissimilar.* * Since this period, however, several species identical with those of Cromarty have been found in the Morayshire deposits. THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 125 CHAPTER VIII. Upper Formations of the Old Red Sandstone. — Room, enough for each and to spare. — Middle , or Cornstone Formation. — The Cepha- laspis 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 For- farshire. — 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 dis- covery : 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 his- tory for future excavators to fill ; and it contains many such blanks, every unfossiliferous bar in either pyramid represent- 11 * 126 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. ing 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 Eng- land 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 Cepha- laspis. Four species of this fish have been discovered in the Cornstones of Hereford, Salop, Worcester, Monmouth, and Brecon ;* u and as they are always found," says Mr. Murch- ison, " in the same division of the Old Hed 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 sys- tem. (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 * Cephalaspis Letvisii, C. Lloydii, C. Lyettii, and C. rostratus. THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 127 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 Ceph- alaspis. 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, cur- rents, 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 128 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 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 formida- ble when assailed. " The pointed horns of the crescent," said Agassiz to the writer, 16 seem to have served a similar purpose with the spear-like wings of the Ptericlithys^ — the sole difference consisting in the circumstance, that the spears of the one could be elevated or depressed at pleasure, where- as those of the other were ever fixed in the warlike attitude. And such was the Ccphalaspis of the Cornstones — not only the most characteristic, but in England and Wales almost the sole organism of the formation. 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 Eng- land nor in Scotland is it to be found in the Tilestone forma- tion, or its equivalent. It is common, however, in the Old Red Sandstone of Forfarshire ; and it occurs at Balruddery, THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 129 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 Cephalasjns 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 col- lection of all the organisms of the Den yet discovered. These the writer had the pleasure of examining in the com- pany 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 Sand- stone 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,* confessedly one of the first * The Upper Old Red Sandstones of Moray were ascertained to be fossiliferous at nearly the same time by Mr. Martin, of the Ander- son 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 130 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 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 Fifershire, the large scales and plates of that strikingly characteristic ichthyolite of the higher formation, now known as the Holoplychius — of which more anon ; and, unquestionably, no one acquainted with his writings, or the character of his mind, can doubt that he examined carefully. 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 ich- thyolites whose remains it contains seem to have been broken up, and their fragments scattered. Accumulations of larger and smaller peb- bles 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 dis- trict. To the geological labors of Mr. Patrick Duff, of Elgin, in the same field, I have already had occasion incidentally to refer. The pa- tient 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 vertebra) of fish and saurians — down to the base of the Old Red Sandstone, with its Coccostei, Dipteri> and Pterichthyes. THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 131 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, 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 forma- tion of much interest, still little known. Mr. Dufi is at present en- gaged 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 acquaint- ance with their organisms to a tradesman of Berwickshire, Mr. Wil- liam 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 re- mains of a bulky, but very imperfectly preserved ichthyodorulite ; and the coarse, arenaceous matrices which surround them seem iden- tical with the red gritty Sandstones of the Imdhorn and the Scat- Craig, 132 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 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. Murch- ison regarding the three formations which the Old Red Sand- stone 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 com- mon — 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 Holopty chins in common ; and then say whether the proofs of distinct succeeding formations can be more surely established. If, however, the reader still enter- tain 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 Cejihalaspis, 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 devel- THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 133 oped, 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 re- mains of the seed-vessels of some unknown sub-aerial plant. " These last occur," says Professor Fleming, the original dis- coverer, u in the form of circular flat patches, not equalling an inch in diameter, and composed of numerous smaller con- tiguous 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 differ- ent character, though equally obscure — impressions of pol- ished 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 charac- teristic ichthyolites of England and Forfarshire, found asso- ciated 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 en- tire length across the continuous tail-flap in which the crea- ture terminated. And it is a marked characteristic of the fossil, that the terminal flap should be continuous ; in all the 12 134 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 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, THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 135 to be the detached plates of some such crustacean as the lob- ster 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 vertebrae, or in the dilap- idated bones of a fore-arm or a foot, he could read a curious history of habits and instincts. In common with several gen- tlemen 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 com- passes, and yet the whole were covered by seeming scales. There were the fragments of scaly rhombs, of scaly cres- cents, 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 Ser- 136 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. aphim 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 contem- plated 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 atten- tion, furnished the terminal flap ; and there lay the huge lob- ster 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. 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 construc- tion 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 LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSiTY OF ILLINOIS THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 137 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 con- trary direction, and a periwigged head between them, we would have one of the sandstone cherubs of our country churchyards complete. There occur among the other organisms of Balruddery numerous ichthyodorulites — fin-spines, such as those to which I have called the attention of the reader in describing the thorny-finned fish of the lower formation. But the ich- thyodorulites of Balruddery differ essentially from those of Caithness, Moray, and Cromarty. These last are described on both sides, in every instance, by either straight, or slightly curved lines ; whereas one of the describing lines in a Bal- ruddery variety is broken by projecting prickles, that re- semble sharp, hooked teeth set in a jaw, or, rather, the entire ichthyodorulite resembles the sprig of a wild rose-bush, bearing its peculiar aquiline shaped thorns on one of its sides. Buckland, in his Bri&gewater Treatise, and Lyell, in his Elements, refer to this peculiarity of structure in ichthy- odorulites of the latter formations. The hooks are invariably ranged on the concave or posterior edge of the spine, and were employed, it is supposed, in elevating the fin. Another ichthyodorulite of the formation resembles, in the Gothic 12* 138 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 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 striae that furrow it longitudinally. Of the other organisms of Balruddery I cannot pretend to speak with any degree of certainty. Some of them seem to have belonged to the Radiata ; some are of so doubtful a character that it can scarce be determined whether they took their place among the forms of the vegetable or animal king- doms. One organism in particular, which was at first deemed the jointed stem of some plant resembling a calamite of the Coal Measures, was found by Agassiz to be the slender limb of a crustacean. A minute description of this interesting de- posit, with illustrative prints, would be of importance to sci- ence : it would serve to fill a gap in the scale. The geologi- cal pathway, which leads upwards to the present time from those ancient formations in which organic existence first began, has been the work of well nigh as many hands as some of our longer railroads : each contractor has taken his part ; very extended parts have fallen to the share of some, and admirably have they executed them ; but the pathway is not yet complete, and the completion of a highly curious portion of it awaits the further labors of Mr. Webster, of Balruddery. A considerable portion of the rocks of this middle forma- tion in Scotland are of a bluish-gray color : in Balruddery, they resemble the mudstones of the Silurian System ; they form at Carmylie the fissile, bluish-gray pavement, so well known in commerce as the pavement of Arbroath ; they occur as a hard, micaceous building-stone in some parts of Fifeshire ; in others they exist as beds of friable, stratified THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 139 clay, that dissolve into unctuous masses where washed by the sea. In England, the formation consists, throughout its entire depth, of beds of red and green marl, with alternating beds of the nodular limestones, to which it owes its name, and with here and there an interposing band of indurated sandstone. The Cornstone formation is more extensively developed in Forfarshire than in any other district in Scotland ; and from this circumstance the result of the writer's observations re- garding it, during the course of a recent visit, may be of some little interest to the reader. About two thirds the en- tire area of this county is composed of Old Red Sandstone. It forms a portion of that great belt of the system which, ex- tending across the island from the German Ocean to the Frith of Clyde, represents the southern bar of the huge sandstone frame in which the Highlands of Scotland is set. The Gram- pians run along its inner edge — composing part of the pri- mary nucleus which the frame encloses : the Sidlaw Hills run through its centre in a line nearly parallel to these, and separated from them by Strathmore, the great valley of An- gus. The valley and the hills thus form, if I may so express myself, the mouldings of the frame — mouldings somewhat resembling the semi-recta of the architect. There is first, reckoning from the mountains downwards, an immense con- cave curve — the valley ; then an immense convex one — the hills ; and then a half curve bounded by the sea. The illus- tration may further serve to show the present condition of the formation: it is a frame much worn by denudation, and — just as in a bona fide frame — it is the higher mouldings that have suffered most. Layer after layer has been worn down on the ridges, exactly as on a raised moulding we may see the gold leaf, the red pigment, and the whiting, all ground 140 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 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 de- posits may be found on the sea-shore, beside the limeworks of Hedderwick, and in the central hollows of Strathmore. The most ancient beds in the county yet known belong, as unequivocally shown by their fossils, to but the middle forma- tion of the system. They have been quarried for many years in the parish of Carmylie ; and the quarries, as may be supposed, are very extensive, stretching along a moory hill-side for considerably more than a mile, and furnishing employment to from sixty 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 con- siderable body of water. The line of the excavations resem- bles a huge drain, with nearly perpendicular sides — a conse- quence of the regular and well-determined character of the joints with which the strata are bisected. The stone itself is a gray, close-grained fissile sandstone, of unequal hardness, and so very tough and coherent — qualities which it seems to owe in part to the vast abundance of mica which it con- tains — that it is quite possible to strike a small hammer THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 141 through some of the larger flags, without shattering the edges of the perforation. Hence its value for various purposes which common sandstone is too brittle and incoherent to serve. It is extensively used in the neighborhood as a roofing slate ; it is employed, too, in the making of water cisterns, grooved and jointed as if wrought out of wood, and for the tops of lobby and billiard tables. I have even seen snuff- boxes fashioned out of it, as a sort of mechanical feat by the workmen, — a purpose, however, which it seems to serve only indifferently well, — and single slabs of it cut into tolerably neat window frames for cottages. It is most extensively used, however, merely as a paving-stone for lobbies and lower floors, and the footways of streets. When first deposited, and when the creatures whose organic remains it still preserves careered over its numerous platforms, it seems to have existed as a fine, muddy sand, formed apparently of disintegrated grauwacke rocks, analogous in their mineral character to the similarly colored grauwacke of the Lammermuirs, or of pri- mary slates ground down by attrition into mud, and mixed up with the pulverized fragments of schistose gneiss and mica schist. I was first struck, on descending among the workmen, by the comparative abundance of the vegetable remains. In some parts of the quarries almost every layer of the strata is covered by carbonaceous markings — 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 142 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 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 com- pressed in a herbarium, would present a somewhat similar appearance. Among the impressions there occur irregularly shaped patches, reticulated into the semblance of polygonal meshes. They remind one of pieces of ill-woven lace ; for the meshes are unequal in size, and the polygons irregular. (See Plate 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 spaivn. 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 vegeta- ble impressions of both the irregularly furrowed and grass- weed-looking class, that I could compare it to only the bottom of a ditch beside a hedge, matted with withered grass, strewed with blackened twigs of the hawthorn, and mottled with detached masses of the eggs of the frog. All the larger vegetables are resolved into as pure a coal as the plants of the Coal Measures themselves — the kind of data, doubtless, on which unfortunate coal speculators have often earned dis- appointment at large expense. None of the vegetables themselves, however, in the least resemble those of the car- boniferous period. The animal remains, though less numerous, are more interesting. They are identical with those of the Den of Balruddery. I saw, in the possession of the superintend- ent of the quarries, a well-preserved head of the Cephalas- THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 143 pis Lyellii. The crescent-shaped horns were wanting, and the outline a little obscure ; but the eyes were better marked than in almost any other specimen I have yet seen, and the circular star-like tubercles which roughen the large occipital buckler, to which the creature owes its name, were tolerably well defined. I was shown the head of another individual of the same species in the centre of a large slab, and nothing could be more entire than the outline. The osseous plate still retained the original brownish-white hue of the bone, arid its radiated porous texture ; and the sharp crescent-shaped horns were as sharply defined as dur- ing the lifetime of the strangely organized creature which they had defended. In both specimens the thin angular body was wanting. Like almost all the other fish of the Old Red Sandstone, the bony skeleton of the Cephalaspis was external — as much so as the shell of the crab or lobster : it presented at all points an armor of bone, as complete as if it had been carved by the ivory-turner out of a solid block ; while the internal skeleton, which in every instance has dis- appeared, seems to have been composed of cartilage. I have compared its general appearance to a saddler's cutting- knife ; — I should, perhaps, have said a saddler's cutting- knife divested of the wooden handle — the broad, bony head representing the blade, and the thin angular body the iron stem usually fixed in the wood. No existence of the present crea- tion at all resembles the Cephalaspis. Were we introduced to the living creatures which now inhabit the oceans and riv- ers of Mars and Venus, we could find nothing among them more strange in appearance, or more unlike our living acquaintances of the friths and streams, than the Cephalas- pides of Carmylie. I observed, besides, in the quarry, remains of the huge 144 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. crustacean of Balruddery. The plates of the Cejphalaspis retain the color of the original bone ; the plates of the crusta- cean, on the contrary, are of a deep red tint, which contrasts strongly with the cold gray of the stone. They remind one, both in shape and hue, of pieces of ancient iron armor, fretted into semi-elliptical scales, and red with rust. I saw with one of the workmen what seemed to have been the continuous tail-flap of an individual of very considerable size. It seemed curiously puckered where it had joined to the body, much in the manner that a gown or Highlander's kilt is puckered where it joins to the waistband ; and the outline of the whole plate was marked by what I may venture to term architectural elegance. The mathematician could have described it with his ruler and compasses. The superintendent pointed out to me another plate in a slab dressed for a piece of common pavement. It was a regularly formed parallelogram, and had obviously composed one of the jointed plates which had cov- ered the creature's body. I could not so easily assign its place to yet a third plate in the possession of the Rev. Mr. Wilson, of Canny lie. It is colored, like the others, and like them, too, fretted into minute scales, but the form is exactly that of a heart — not such a heart as the anatomist would draw, but such a heart, rather, as we see at times on valen- tines of the humbler order, or on the ace of hearts in a pack of cards. Possibly enough it may have been the breastplate of this antique crustacean of the Cornstones. The spawn of our common blue lobster is composed of spherical black grains, of nearly the size of mustard-seed. It struck me as not very improbable that the reticulated markings of the flag- stones of Carmylie may have been produced by the minute eggs of this fossil crustacean, covered up by some hastily deposited layer of mingled mud and sand, and forced into the THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 145 polygonal form by pressing against each other, and by the weight from above. The gray fissile bed in which these organisms occur was perforated to its base on two several occasions, and in different parts of the quarries — in one instance, merely to ascertain its depth ; in the other, in the course of excavating a tunnel. In the one case it was found to rest on a bed of trap, which seemed to have insinuated itself among the strata with as little disturbance, and which lay nearly as conformably to them as the greenstone bed of Salisbury Crags does to the alternating sandstones and clays which both underlie and overtop it. In the other instance the excavators arrived at a red, aluminous sandstone, veined by a purplish-colored oxide of iron. The upper strata of the quarry are overlaid by a thick bed of grayish-red conglomerate. Leaving behind us the quarries of Carmylie, we descend the hill-side, and rise in the system as we lower our level and advance upon the sea. For a very considerable distance we find the rock covered up by a deep-red diluvial clay, largely charged with water-worn boulders, chiefly of the older pri- mary rocks, and of the sandstone underneath. The soil on the higher grounds is moory and barren — a consequence, in great part, of a hard, ferruginous pan, which interposes like a paved floor between the diluvium and the upper mould, and which prevents the roots of the vegetation from striking downwards into the tenacious subsoil. From its impervious character, too, it has the effect of rendering the surface a bog for one half the year, and an arid, sun-baked waste for the other. It seems not improbable that the heaths which must have grown and decayed on these heights for many ages, may have been main agents in the formation of this pavement of barrenness. Of all plants, they are said to contain most iron. 13 146 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. According to Fourcroy, a full twelfth part of the weight of oak, when dried, is owing to the presence of this almost uni- versally diffused metal ; and the proportion in our common heaths is still larger. It seems easy to conceive how that, as generation after generation withered on these heights, and were slowly resolved into a little mossy dust, the minute me- tallic particles which they had contained would he carried downwards by the rains through the lighter stratum of soil, till, reaching the impermeable platform of tenacious clay be- neath, they would gradually accumulate there, and at length bind its upper layer, as is the nature of ferruginous oxide, into a continuous stony crust. Bog iron, and the clay iron- stone, so abundant in the Coal Measures, and so extensively employed in our iron-works, seem to have owed their accu- mulation in layers and nodules to a somewhat similar process, through the agency of vegetation. But I digress. The rock appears in the course of the Elliot, a few hun- dred 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 deter- mine regarding the space which may intervene between its lowest stratum and the still lower beds of Carmylie, I could THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 147 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 im- perfectly preserved organism resembling the parallelogrami- cal scale of a Cephalaspis. The same plants and animals seem to have existed on this high platform as on the Carmy- lie platform far beneath. A little farther down the course of the stream, and in the immediate neighborhood of the old weather-worn tower of the Ouchterlonies, there occurs what seems a break in the strata. The newer sandstones seem to rest unconformably on the older sandstones which they overlie. The evening on which I explored the course of the Elliot was drizzly and un- pleasant, and the stream swollen by a day of continuous rain, and so I could not examine so minutely as in other circum- stances I would have done, or as was necessary to establish the fact. In since turning over the Elements of Lyell, how- ever, 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 ob- served near the old tower mark, it is probable, one of the points of junction — a point of junction also, if I may be so bold as venture the suggestion, of the formation of the Holoptychius nobilissimus with the formation of the Cepha- laspis — of the quartzose conglomerate with the Cornstones. In my hurried survey, however, I could find none of the scales or plates of the newer ichthyolite in this upper deposit, though the numerous spherical markings of white, with their cen- trical points of darker color, show that at one time the organ- isms of these upper beds must have been verv abundant. 148 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. We pass to the upper formation of the system. Over the belt of mingled gray and red there occurs in the pyramid a second deep belt of red conglomerate and variegated sand- stone, with a band of lime a- top, and over the band a thick belt of yellow sandstone, with which the system terminates.* Thus the second pyramid consists mineralogically, like the first, of three great divisions, or bands ; its two upper belts belonging, like the three belts of the other, to but one forma- tion — the formation known in England as the Quartzose Conglomerate. It is largely developed in Scotland. We find it spread over extensive areas in Moray, Fife, Roxburgh, and Berwick shires. In England, it is comparatively barren in fossils ; the only animal organic remains yet detected in it being a single scale of the Holoptychius found by Mr. Murch- ison ; and though it contains vegetable organisms in more abundance, so imperfectly are they preserved, that little else can be ascertained regarding them than that they were land * There still exists some uncertainty regarding the order in which the upper beds occur. Mr. Duff, of Elgin, places the limestone band above the yellow sandstone ; Messrs. Sedgwick and Murchison assign it an intermediate position between the red and yellow. The respec- tive places of the gray and red sandstones are also disputed, and by very high authorities ; Dr. Fleming holding that the gray sandstones overlie the red, (see Cheek's Edinburgh Journal for February, 1831,) and Mr. Lyell, that the red sandstones overlie the gray, (see Elements of Geology, first edit., pp. 99-100.) The order adopted above consorts best with the results of the writer's observations, which have, how- ever, been restricted chiefly to the north country. He assigns to the limestone band the middle place assigned to it by Messrs. Sedgwick and Murchison, and to the gray sandstone the inferior position as- signed to it by Mr. Lyell ; aware, however, that the latter deposit has not only a coping, but also a basement, of red sandstone — the basement forming the upper member of the lower formation. THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 149 plants, but not identical with the plants of the Coal Measures. In Scotland, the formation is richly fossiliferous, and the re- mains belong chiefly to the animal kingdom. It is richly fos- siliferous, too, in Russia, where it was discovered by Mr. Murchison, during the summer of last year, spread over areas many thousand square miles in extent. And there, as in Scotland, the Holoptychius seems its most characteristic fossil. The fact seems especially worthy of remark. The organ- isms of some of the newer formations differ entirely, in widely separated localities, from their contemporary organ- isms, just as, in the existing state of things, the plants and animals of Great Britain differ from the plants and animals of Lapland or of Sierra Leone. A geologist who has ac- quainted himself with the belemnites, baculites, turrilites, and sea-urchins of the Cretaceous group in England and the north of France, would discover that he had got into an en- tirely new field among the hippurites, sphosrulites, and num- mulites of the same formations, in Greece, Italy, and Spain ; nor, in passing the tertiary deposits, would he find less strik- ing dissimilarities between the gigantic, mail-clad megatheri- um and huge mastodon of the Ohio and the La Plate, and the monsters, their contemporaries, the hairy mammoth of Sibe- ria, and the hippopotamus and rhinoceros of England and the Continent. In the more ancient geological periods, ere the seasons began, the case is essentially different ; the con- temporary formations, when widely separated, are often very unlike in mineralogical character, but in their fossil contents they are almost always identical. In these earlier ages, the atmospheric temperature seems to have depended more on the internal heat of the earth, only partially cooled down from its original state, than on the earth's configuration or the in- fluence of the sun. Hence a widely spread equality of 13* 150 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. climate — a greenhouse equalization of heat, if I may so speak ; and hence, too, it would seem, a widely spread Fauna and Flora. The greenhouses of Scotland and Sweden pro- duce the same plants with the greenhouses of Spain and Italy; and when the world was one vast greenhouse, heated from below, the same families of plants, and the same tribes of animals, seem to have ranged over spaces immensely more extended than those geographical circles in which, in the present time, the same plants are found indigenous, and the same animals native. The fossil remains of the true Coal Measures are the same to the westward of the Alleghany Mountains as in New Holland, India, Southern Africa, the neighborhood of Newcastle, and the vicinity of Edinburgh. And I entertain little doubt that, on a similar principle, the still more ancient organisms of the Old Red Sandstone will be found to bear the same character all over the world. THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 151 CHAPTER IX. Fossils of the Upper Old Red Sandstone much more imperfectly pre- served than those of the Lower. — The Causes obvious. — Differ- ence between the two Groups, which first strikes the Observer, a Difference in Size. — The Holoptychius a characteristic Ichthyolite of the Formation. — Description of its huge Scales. — Of its Oc- cipital Bones, Fins, Teeth, and General Appearance. — Contempo- raries of the Holoptychius. — Sponge -like Bodies. — Plates resem- bling those of the Sturgeon. — Teeth of various Forms, but all evidently the Teeth of Fishes. — Limestone Band, and its probable Origin. — Fossils of the Yellow Sandstone. — The Pterichthys of Dura Den. — Member of a Family peculiarly characteristic of the System. — No intervening Formation between the Old Red Sand- stone and the Coal Measures. — The Holoptychius contemporary for a time with the Megalichthys. — The Columns of Tubal Cain. 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 Sand- stones have been less favorable to the preservation of their peculiar fossils than the calcareous and aluminous matrices of the Lower, we frequently find the older organisms of the system fresh and unbroken, and the more modern existing as mere fragments. A fish thrown into a heap of salt would be found entire after the lapse of many years ; a fish thrown into a heap of sand would disappear in a mass of putrefac- tion in a few weeks ; and only the less destructible parts, such as the teeth, the harder bones, and perhaps a few of the scales, would survive. Now, limestone, if I may so speak, is the preserving salt of the geological world ; and the con- 152 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. servative qualities of the shales and stratified clays of the Lower Old Red Sandstone are not much inferior to those of lime itself ; while, in the Upper Old Red, we have merely beds of consolidated sand, and these, in most instances, ren- dered less conservative of organic remains than even the common sand of our shores, by a mixture of the red oxide of iron. The older fossils, therefore, like the mummies of Egypt, can be described well nigh as minutely as the exist- ences of the present creation ; the newer, like the compara- tively modern remains of our churchyards, exist, except in a few rare cases, as mere fragments, and demand powers such as those of a Cuvier or an Agassiz to restore them to their original combinations. But cases, though few and rare, do occur in which, through some favorable accident con- nected with the death or sepulture of some individual exist- ence of the period, its remains have been preserved almost entire ; and one such specimen serves to throw light on whole heaps of the broken remains of its contemporaries. The single elephant, preserved in an iceberg beside the Arctic Ocean, illustrated the peculiarities of the numerous extinct family to which it belonged, whose bones and huge tusks whiten the wastes of Siberia. The human body found in an Irish bog, with the ancient sandals of the country still at- tached to its feet by thongs, and clothed in a garment of coarse hair, gave evidence that bore generally on the degree of civilization attained by the inhabitants of an entire district in a remote age. In all such instances, the character and ap- pearance of the individual bear on those of the tribe. In at- tempting to describe the organisms of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, where the fossils lie as thickly in some localities as herrings on our coasts in the fishing season, I felt as if I had whole tribes before me. In describing the fossils of the THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 153 Upper Old Red Sandstone, I shall have to draw mostly from single specimens. But the evidence may be equally sound so far as it goes. The difference between the superior and inferior groups of the system which first strikes an observer, is a difference in the size of the fossils of which these groups are composed. The characteristic organisms of the Upper Old Red Sand- stone are of much greater bulk than those of the Lower, which seem to have been characterized by a mediocrity of size throughout the entire extent of the formation. The largest 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 Blatygnathus, and by much the largest in his collection — does not exceed in bulk the jaw of a full-grown coal-fish or cod ; his largest Coccosteus must have been a considerably smaller fish than an ordinary- sized turbot ; the largest ichthyolite found by the writer was a Diplopterus, of, however, smaller dimensions than the ich- thyolite to which the jaw in the possession of Dr. Traill must have belonged ; the remains of another Diphpterus from Gamrie, the most massy yet discovered in that locality, seem to have composed the upper parts of an individual about two feet and a half in length. The fish, in short, of the lower ocean of the Old Red Sandstone — and I can speak of it throughout an area which comprises Orkney and Inverness, Cromarty, and Gamrie, and which must have included about ten thousand square miles — ranged in size between the stickleback and the cod ; whereas some of the fish of its upper ocean were covered by scales as large as oyster-shells, and armed with teeth that rivalled in bulk those of the croco- dile. They must have been fish on an immensely larger 154 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. scale than those with which the system began. There have been scales of the HoloptycJiius found in Clashbennie which measure three inches in length by two and a half in breadth, and a full eighth part of an inch in thickness. There occur occipital plates of fishes in the same formation in Moray, a full foot in length by half a foot in breadth. The fragment of a tooth still attached to a piece of the jaw, found in the sandstone cliffs that overhang the Findhorn, measures an inch in diameter at the base. A second tooth of the same forma- tion, of a still larger size, disinterred by Mr. Patrick Duff from out the conglomerates of the Scat-Craig, near Elgin, and now in his possession, measures two inches in length by rather more than an inch in diameter. (See Plate 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 bat- tle-field described by Addison, in which the pygmies were an- nihilated by the cranes, than the organisms of the upper formation of the Old Red Sandstone contrast with those of the lower.* Of this upper formation the most characteristic and most abundant ichthyolite, as has been already said, is the Holop- * I have permitted this paragraph to remain as originally written, thongh the comparatively recent discovery of a gigantic Hobptychius (?) 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 PLATE A' . GpTixdasFpis J.ijJIn Agetss THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 155 tycJiius. 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 hesita- tion, to the genus Gyrolepis ; and the doubts of both natural- ists serve to show how very uncertain a guide mere analogy proves to even men of the first order, when brought to bear on organisms of so strange a type as the ichthyolites of the Old Red Sandstone. At this stage, however, an almost entire specimen of the creature was discovered in the sandstones of Ciashbennie, by the Rev. James Noble, of St. Madoes, a gen- tleman who, by devoting his leisure hours to Geology, has extended the knowledge of this upper formation, and whose name has been attached by Agassiz to its characteristic fossil, now designated the Holoptychius nobilissimus. His speci- men at once decided that the creature had been no Gyrolepis, but the representative of a new genus not less strangely organized, and quite as unlike the existences of the present times as any existence of all the past. So marked are the amount of negative evidence may be dissipated by a single positive fact, and to inculcate on the geologist the necessity of cautious induc- tion. An individual Holoptychius of Thurso must have been at least thrice the size of the Holoptychius of the Upper Old Red formation, as exhibited in the specimen of Mr. Noble, of St. Madoes. 156 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. peculiarities of the Holoptycliius, that they strike the com- monest observer. The scales-are very characteristic. They are massy ellipti- cal plates, scarcely less bulky in proportion to their extent of surface than our smaller copper coin, composed internally of bone, and externally of enamel, and presenting on the one side a porous structure, and on the other, when well pre- served, a bright, glossy surface. The upper, or glossy side, is the more characteristic of the two. I have placed one of them before me. Imagine an elliptical ivory counter, an inch and a half in length by an inch in breadth, and nearly an eighth part of an inch in thickness, the larger diameter forming a line which, if extended, would pass longitudinally from head to tail through the animal which the scale covered. On the upper or anterior margin of this elliptical counter, imagine a smooth selvedge or border three eighth parts of an inch in breadth. Beneath this border there is an inner border of detached tubercles, and beneath the tubercles large undu- lating furrows, which stretch longitudinally towards the lower end of the ellipsis. Some of these waved furrows run un- broken and separate to the bottom, some merge into their neighboring furrows at acute angles, some branch out and again unite, like streams which enclose islands, and some break into chains of detached tubercles. (See Plate X., fig. 3.) No two scales exactly resemble one another in the minuter peculiarities of their sculpture, if 1 may so speak, just as no two pieces of lake or sea may be roughened after exactly the same pattern during a gale; and yet in general appear- ance they are all wonderfully alike. Their style of sculpture is the same — a style which has sometimes reminded me of the Runic knots of our ancient north country obelisks. Such was the scale of the creature. The head, which was small, THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 157 compared with the size of the body, was covered with bony plates, roughened after a pattern somewhat different from that of the scales, being tubercled rather than ridged ; but the tubercles present a confluent appearance, just as chains of hills may be described as confluent, the base of one hill running into the base of another. The operculum seems to have been covered by one entire plate — a peculiarity ob- servable, as has been remarked, among some of the ichthy- olites of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, such as the Diplop- terus, Dipterus, and Osteolepis. And it, too, has its fields of tubercles, and its smooth marginal selvedge, or border, on which the lower edges of the upper occipital plates seem to have rested, just as, in the roof of a slated building, part of the lower tier of slates is overtopped 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 out- line. 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 con- ception to the reader of the strikingly picturesque appearance of the Holopty chius, as shown in Mr. Noble's splendid speci- men. There is a general massiveness about the separate portions of the creature, that imparts ideas of the gigantic, independently of its bulk as a whole ; just as a building of moderate size, when composed of very ponderous stones, has a more imposing effect than much larger buildings in which the stones are smaller. The body measures a foot across, by 14 158 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 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 occipi- tal portion of the specimen forms a low Gothic arch, of an intermediate style between the round Saxon and the pointed Norman. This arch is filled by two angular, pane-like plates, separated by a vertical line, that represents, if I may use the figure, the-dividing astragal of the window ; and the under jaw, with its two sweeping arcs, or branches, constitutes the frame. All of the head which appears is that under portion of it which extends from the upper part of the belly to the snout. The belly itself is thickly covered by huge carved scales, that, from their massiveness and regular arrangement, remind one of the flags of an ancient stone roof. The carv- ing varies, as they descend towards the tail, being more in the ridged style below, and more in the tubercled style above. So fairly does the creature lie on its back, that the ventral fins have fallen equally, one on each side, and, from their semicircular form, remind one of the two pouch holes 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 speci- mens, they seem to have been crowded together towards the lower extremity, like those of the Glyptolepis, an ichthyolite which, in more than one respect, the Holoptychius must have resembled, and which, from this peculiarity, presents a brush- like appearance — the head and shoulders representing the THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 159 handle, and the large and thickly clustered fins the spreading bristles.* Some of the occipital bones of the Holoptychius are very- curious and very puzzling. There are pieces rounded at one of the ends, somewhat in the manner of the neck joints of our better known quadrupeds, and which have been mistaken for vertebrae ; but which present evidently, at the apparent joint, the enamel peculiar to the outer surface of all the plates and scales of the creature, and which belonged, it is proba- ble, to the snout. There are saddle-shaped bones, too, which have been regarded as the central occipital plates of a new species of Coccosteus, but whose style of confluent tubercle belongs evidently to the Holoptychius. The jaws are exceed- ingly curious. They are composed of as solid bone as we usually find in the jaws of mammalia ; and the outer surface, which is covered in animals of commoner structure with por- tions of the facial integuments, we find polished and japanned, and fretted into tubercles. The jaws of the creature, like those of the Osleolepis 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 * There are now six species of Holoptychius enumerated — H. An- dersuni, H. Flemingii, H. giganteus, H. Murchisoni, H. nobilissimus, and H. Omaliusii. 160 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. Holoptycliius 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 Holoptycliius. 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 loz- enges, which occupy the space to the edges. Each lozenge is marked by lines parallel to the lines which describe it, somewhat in the manner of the plates of the tortoise. The centre of each is thickly tubercled ; and what seems to have been the anterior plane of the ichthyodorulite is thickly tuber- cled also, both in the style of the occipital plates and jaws of the Holoptycliius. This curious bone, which seems to have been either hollow inside, or, what is more probable, filled with cartilage, measures, in some of the larger specimens, an inch and a half across at the base on its broader planes, and rather more than half an inch on its two narrower ones.* Geologists have still a great deal to learn regarding the contemporaries of the Holoptycliius nohilissimus. The lower portion of that upper formation to which it more * This bone has been since assigned by Agassiz to a new genus, of which no other fragments have yet been found, but which has been named provisionally Placothorax paradoxus. THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 161 especially belongs — the portion represented in our second pyramid by the conglomerate and sandstone bar — though unfavorable to the preservation of animal remains, represents assuredly no barren period. It has been found to contain bodies apparently organic, that vary in shape like the sponges of our existing seas, which in general appearance they some- what resemble, but whose class, and even kingdom, are yet to fix.* It contains, besides, in considerable abundance, * These organisms, if in reality such, are at once very curious and very puzzling. They occur in some localities in great abundance. A piece of Clashbennie flagstone, somewhat more than two feet in length, by fifteen inches in breadth, kindly sent me for examination by the 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 irreg- ularly oval — some resemble short cuts of the bole of a tree — some are spread out like ancient manuscripts, partially unrolled — one of the number seems a huge, though not over neatly formed acorn, an apprentice mason's first attempt — the others are of a shape so irreg- ular as to set comparison and description at defiance. They almost all agree, however, when cut transversely, in presenting flat, elliptical arcs as their sectional lines — in having an upper surface compara- tively smooth, and an under surface nearly parallel to it, thickly cor- rugated — and in being all coated with a greasy, shining clay, of a deeper red than the surrounding stone. I was perhaps rather more confident of their organic character after I had examined a few mere- ly detached specimens, than now that I have seen a dozen of them together. It seems at least a circumstance to awaken doubt, that though they occur in various positions on the slab — some extending across it, some lying diagonally, some running lengthwise — the cor- rugations of their under surfaces should run lengthwise in all — fur- rowing them in every possible angle, and giving evidence, not appar- 14* 162 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. though in a state of very imperfect preservation, scales that differ from those of the Holopty chius, and from one another. One of these, figured and described by Professor Fleming in Cheek's Edinburgh Journal, bearing on its upper surface a mark like a St. Andrew's cross, surrounded by tubercled dot- tings, and closely resembling in external appearance some of the scales of the common sturgeon, " may be referred with some probability," says the Professor, " to an extinct species of the genus Accipenser * The deposit, too, abounds ently to the influences of an organic law, internal to each, but of the operation of some external cause, acting on the whole in one direction. * May I crave the attention of the reader to a brief statement of fact ? I have said that Professor Fleming, when he minutely de- scribed the scales of the Holopty chius, hazarded no conjecture regard- ing the generic character of the creature to which they had belonged ; he merely introduced them to the notice of the public as the scales of some " vertebrated animal, probably those of a fish." I now state that he described the scales of a contemporary ichthyolite as bearing, in external appearance, a " close resemblance to some of the scales of the common sturgeon." It has been asserted, that it was the scales of the Holopty chius which he thus described, " referring them to an extinct species of the genus Accipenser and the assertion has been extensively credited, and by some of our highest geological authori- ties. Agassiz himself, evidently in the belief that the professor had fallen into a palpable error, deems it necessary to prove that the Holopty chius could have borne "no relation to the Accipenser or stur- geon." Mr. Murchison, in his Silurian System, refers also to the sup- posed mistake. The person with whom the misunderstanding seems to have originated is the Rev. Dr. Anderson, of Newburgh. About a twelvemonth after the discovery of Professor Fleming in the sand- stones of Drumdryan, a similar discovery was made in the sandstones of Clashbennie by a geologist of Perth, who, on submitting his new found scales to Dr. Anderson, concluded, with the Doctor, that they THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 163 in teeth, various enough in their forms to indicate a corre- sponding variety of families and genera among the ichthyolites to which they belonged. Some are nearly straight, like those of the Holoptychius of the Coal Measures ; some are bent, like the beak of a hawk or eagle, into a hook-form ; some incline first in one direction, and then in the opposite one, could be no other than oyster shells ; though eventually, on becoming acquainted with the decision of Professor Fleming regarding them, both gentlemen were content to alter their opinion, and to regard them as scales. The Professor, in his paper on the Old Red Sand- stone in Cheek's Journal, referred incidentally to the oyster shells of Clashbennie — a somewhat delicate subject of allusion ; and in Dr. Anderson's paper on the same formation, which appeared about seven years after, in the New Journal of Professor Jameson, the geological world was told, for the first time, that Professor Fleming had de- scribed a scale of Clashbennie similar to those of Drumdryan, (i. e., those of the Holoptychius,) as bearing a " close resemblance to some of the scales on the common sturgeon," and as probably referable to some " extinct species of the genus Accipenser." Now, Professor Fleming, instead of stating that the scales were at all similar, had stated very pointedly that they were entirely different ; and not only had he described them as different, but he had also figured them as dif- ferent, and had placed the figures side by side, that the difference might be the better seen. To the paper of the Professor, which con- tained this statement, and to which these figures were attached, Dr. Anderson referred, as " read before the Wernerian Society ; " — he quoted from it in the Professor's words — he drew some of the more important facts of his own paper from it — in his late Essay on the Geology of Fife he has availed himself of it still more largely, though with no acknowledgment; it has constituted, in short, by far the most valuable of all his discoveries in connection with the Old Red Sandstone, and apparently the most minutely examined ; and yet, so completely did he fail to detect Professor Fleming's carefully drawn distinction between the scales of the Holoptychius and those of its con- temporary, that when Agassiz, misled apparently by the Doctor's own 164 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. like nails that have been drawn out of a board by the car- penter at two several wrenches, and bent in opposite angles at each wrench ; some are bulky and squat, some long and slender ; and in almost all the varieties, whether curved or straight, squat or slim, the base is elegantly striated like the flutings -of the column. In the splendid specimen found in statement, had set himself to show that the scaly giant of the forma- tion could have been no sturgeon, the Doctor had the passage in which the naturalist established the fact transferred into a Fife news- paper, with, of course, the laudable intention of preventing the Fife public from falling into the absurd mistake of Professor Fleming. There seems to be something rather inexplicable in all this ; but there can be little doubt Dr. Anderson could satisfactorily explain the whole matter without once referring to the oyster shells of Clashbennie. It is improbable that he could have wished or intended to injure the reputation of a gentleman to whose freely-imparted instructions he is indebted for much the greater portion of his geological skill — whose remarks, written and spoken, he has so extensively appropriated in his several papers and essays — and whose character is known far be- yond the limits of his country, for untiring research, philosophic dis- crimination, and all the qualities which constitute a naturalist of the highest order. Dr. Johnston, of Berwick, in his History of British Zoophytes, (a work of an eminently scientific character,) justly " as- cribes to the labors and writings " of Professor Fleming " no small share in diffusing that taste for Natural History which is now abroad." And as an interesting corroboration of the fact, I may state, that Dr. Malcolmson, of Madras, lately found an elegant Italian translation of Fleming's Philosophy of Zoology, high in repute among the elite of Rome. Lest it should be supposed I do Dr. Anderson injustice in these remarks, I subjoin the grounds of them in the following extracts from professor Fleming's paper in Cheek's Journal, and from the paper in Jameson's New Edinburgh Journal, in which the Doctor purports to give a digest of the former, without once referring, however, to the periodical in which it is to be found : — "In the summer of 1827," says Dr. Fleming, " I obtained from THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 165 the sandstones of the Findhorn, the tooth is still attached to a portion of the jaw, and shows, from the nature of the attachment, that the creature to which it belonged must have been a true fish, not a reptile. The same peculiarity is ob- servable in two other very fine specimens in the collection of Mr. Patrick Duff, of Elgin. Both in saurians and in toothed Drumdryan quarry, to the south of Cupar, situate in the higher strata of yellow sandstone, certain organisms, which I readily referred to the scales of vertebrated animals, probably those of a fish. The largest (see Plate II., fig. 1, 1 figure of a scale of the Holoptychius ') was one inch and one tenth in length, about one inch and two tenths in breadth, and not exceeding the fiftieth of an inch in thickness. The part which, when in its natural position, had been imbedded in the cuticle, is comparatively smooth, exhibiting, however, in a very dis- tinct manner, the scmicircularly parallel layers of growth with obso- lete diverging stria?, giving to the surface, when under a lens, a reticu- lated aspect. The part naturally exposed is marked with longitudinal, waved, rounded, anastomosing ridges, which are smooth and glossy. The whole of the inside of the scale is smooth, though exhibiting with tolerable distinctness the layers of growth. The form and structure of the object indicated plainly enough that it had been a scale, a conclusion confirmed by the detection of the phosphate of lime in its composition. At this period I inserted a short notice of the occurrence of these scales in our provincial newspaper, the Fife Her- aid, for the purpose of attracting the attention of the workmen and others in the neighborhood, in order to secure the preservation of any other specimens which might occur. "Nearly a year after these scales had been discovered, not only in the upper, but even in some of the lower beds of the Yellow Sand- stone, I was informed that oyster shells had been found in a quarry in the Old Red Sandstone at Clashbennie, near Errol, in Perthshire, and that specimens were in the possession of a gentleman in Perth. Interested in the intelligence, I lost no time in visiting Perth, and was gratified to find that the supposed oyster shells were, in fact, similar to those which I had ascertained to occur in a higher part of the series. 166 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. cetacese, such as the porpoise, the teeth are inserted in sockets. In the ichthyolites of this formation, so far as these are illus- trated by its better specimens, the teeth, as in existing fish, are merely placed flat upon the jaw, or in shallow pits, which seem almost to indicate that the contrivance of sockets might be afterwards resorted to. Immediately over the sandstone The scales were, however, of a larger size, some of them exceeding three inches in length, and one eighth of an inch in thickness. Upon my visit to the quarry, I found the scales, as in the Yellow Sand- stone, most abundant in those parts of the rock which exhibited a 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, 1 figure of an oblong tubercle plate traversed diagonally by lines, wkichf 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 Accipemer." — {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 Hed Sandstone of Fifeshire.' These organisms, as described by him, occurred in the Yellow Sandstone of Drum- dryan and the Gray Sandstone of Parkhill. From the former locality scales of a fish were obtained The same paper (Professor Fleming's) contains a notice of similar scales in the Old Red Sandstone of Clashbennie, near Errol, in Perthshire, one of which is described as bearing * a very close re- semblance to some of the scales on the common sturgeon, and may with some probability be referred to an extinct species of the genus Accipenser. — {Professor Jameson's Edin. New Phil. Journal, Oct. 1837, p. 138.) THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 167 and conglomerate belt in which these 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 sys- tem terminates, and which is overlaid in turn by the lower beds of the carboniferous group. The limestone band is unfossiliferous, and resembling, in mineralogical character, the Cornstones of England and Wales, it has been described as the Cornstone of Scotland ; but the fact merely furnishes one illustration of many, of the inadequacy of a mineralogical nomenclature for the purposes of the geologist. In the neighborhood of Cromarty the lower formation abounds in beds of nodular limestone, identical in appearance with the Cornstone ; — in England similar beds occur so abundantly in the middle formation, 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 Holoplychius nobilissimus in the third. We have but to vary our field of observation to find all the for- mations of the system Cornstone formations in turn. The limestone band of the upper member presents exactly similar appearances in Moray as in Fife. It is in both of a yellowish green or gray color, and a concretionary structure, consisting of softer and harder portions, that yield so unequally to the weather, as to exhibit in exposed cliffs and boulders a brecci- ated aspect, as if it had been a mechanical, not a chemical deposit ; though its origin must unquestionably have been chemical. It contains minute 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 168 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. formed along with it. From this circumstance, and from the general resemblance it bears to the deposits of the thermal waters of volcanic districts which precipitate siliceous mixed with calcareous matter, it has been suggested, and by no mean authority, that it must have derived its origin from hot springs. The bed is several yards in thickness ; and as it appears both in Moray and in Fife, in localities at least a hundred and twenty miles apart, it must have been formed, if formed at all, in this manner, at a period when the volcanic agencies were in a state of activity at no great distance from the surface. The upper belt of yellow stone, the terminal layer of the pyramid, is fossiliferous both in Moray and Fife — more richly so in the latter county than even the conglomerate belt that underlies it, and its organisms are better preserved. It was in this upper layer, in Drumdryan quarry, to the south of Cupar, that Professor Fleming found the first- discovered scales of the Holoptychius. At Dura Den, in the same neighborhood, a singularly rich deposit of animal remains was laid open a few years ago, by some workmen, when em- ployed in excavating a water-course for a mill. The organ- isms lay crowded together, a single slab containing no fewer than thirty specimens, and all in a singularly perfect state of preservation. The whole space excavated did not exceed forty square yards in extent, and yet in these forty yards there were found several genera of fishes new to Geology, and not yet figured nor described — a conclusive proof in itself that we have still very much to learn regarding the fossils of the Old Red Sandstone. By much the greater portion of the remains disinterred on this occasion were preserved by a lady in the neighborhood ; and the news of the discovery spread- ing over the district, the Rev. Dr. Anderson, of Newburgh, THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 169 was fortunately led to discover them anew in her possession. The most abundant organism of the group was a variety of 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 Holoplychius were oyster shells, he now ascertained, with quite as little assistance from without, that the Pterichthys must have been surely a huge beetle. As a beetle, therefore, he figured and described it in the pages of a Glasgow topographical publication — Fife Il- lustrated. True, the characteristic elytra were wanting, and some six or seven tubercle plates substituted in their room ; nor could the artist, with all his skill, supply the crea- ture with more than two legs ; but ingenuity did much for it, notwithstanding ; and by lengthening the snout, insect-like, into a point — by projecting an eye, insect-like, on what had mysteriously grown into a head — by rounding the body, in- sect-like, until it exactly resembled that of the large u twilight shard " — by exaggerating the tubercles seen in profile on the paddles until they stretched out, insect-like, into bristles — and by carefully sinking the tail, which was not insect-like, and for which no possible use could be discovered at the time — the Doctor succeeded in making the Pterichthys of Dura Den a very respectable beetle indeed. In a later publication, an Essay on the Geology of Fifeshire, which appeared in Sep- tember last in the Quarterly Journal of Agriculture, he states, after referring to his former description, that among the higher geological authorities some were disposed to regard the crea- ture as an extinct crustaceous animal, and some as belonging to a tribe closely allied to the Chclonia. Agassiz, as the writer of these chapters ventured some months ago to pre- dict, has since pronounced it a fish — a Pterichthys specifically 15 170 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 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 lona fide ichthyolite itself — one of the specimens of Dura Den, and apparently one of the more entire — in the collec- tion 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.* 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 Trilolite 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 Trilohites of the upper Coal Measures differ from those of the Mountain Limestone ; * This interesting ichthyolite has since been regarded by Agassiz as the representative of a distinct genus, to which he gives the name Pamphractus, As exhibited in his restoration, however, it seems to differ little, if at all, (if I may venture the suggestion,) from a Pter- ichthys viewed on the upper side. In Agassiz' s beautiful restoration of Pterichthys, and his accompanying prints of the fossils illustrative of that genus, it is, with but one doubtful exception, the under side of the animal that is presented ; and hence a striking difference ap- parent between his representations of the two genera, which would scarce obtain had the upper, not the under side of Pterichthys been exhibited. In verification of this remark, let the reader who has ac- cess to the Monographic Poissons Fossiles compare the restoration of Pamphractus {Old Red, Tab. VI., fig. 2) with the upper side of Pter- ichthys, as figured in this volume, Plate I., fig. 1, making, of course, the due allowance for a difference of species. THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 171 these again, with but one exception, from the Trilobites of the upper Silurian strata ; these yet again from the Trilobites of the underlying middle beds ; and these from the Trilobites that occur in the base of the system. Like the coins and medals of the antiquary, each represents its own limited period ; and the whole taken together yield a consecutive record. But while we find them merely scattered over the later formations in which they occur, and that very sparingly, in the Silurian System we find them congregated in such vast crowds, that their remains enter largely into the compo- sition of many of the rocks which compose it. The Trilobite is the distinguishing organism of the group, marrying, if I may so express myself, its upper and lower beds ; and what the Trilobite is to the Silurian formations, the Ptericlithys 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 contempora- ries. 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 172 THE OLD KED SANDSTONE. conformably on the Upper Old Red Sandstone. No other system interposed between them. There is a Rabbinical tradition that the sons of Tubal- Cain, taught by a prophet of the coming deluge, and unwil- ling that their father's arts should be lost in it to posterity, erected two obelisks of brass, on which they inscribed a record of his discoveries, and that thus the learning of the family survived the cataclysm. The flood subsided, and the obelisks, sculptured from pinnacle to base, were found fast fixed in the rock. Now, the twin pyramids of the Old Red Sandstone, with their party-colored bars, and their thickly crowded inscriptions, belong to a period immensely more remote than that of the columns of the antediluvians, and they bear a more certain record. I have, perhaps, dwelt too 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 por- tion of the whole. Years must pass ere the entire record can be deciphered ; but, of all its curiously inscribed sen- tences, the result will prove the same — they will all be found to testify of the Infinite Mind. THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 173 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. — Strathpef- fer. — Its Peculiarities whence derived. — Chalybeate Springs of Easter Ross and the Black Isle. — Petrifying Springs. — Building- Stone and Lime of the Old Red Sandstone. — Its various Soils. 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, how- ever, of producing a formal chapter on the economic uses to which its various deposits have been applied, or the unfor- tunate undertakings which an acquaintance with its geology would have prevented, I shall throw together, as they occur to me, a few simple facts illustrative of both. George, first Earl of Cromarty, seems, like his namesake and contemporary, the too celebrated Sir George M'Kenzie, of Roseavoch, to have been a man of an eminently active and inquiring mind. He found leisure, in the course of a very busy life, to write several historical dissertations of great research, and a very elaborate Si/7iopsis Apocalyptic a. He is the author, too, of an exceedingly curious letter on the 44 Sec- ond Sight," addressed to the philosophic Boyle, which con- 15 * 174 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. tains a large amount of amusing and extraordinary fact ; and his description of the formation of a peat-moss in the central Highlands of Ross-shire has been quoted by almost every naturalist who, since the days of the sagacious, nobleman, has written on the formation of peat. His life was extended to extreme old age ; and as his literary ardor remained un- diminished till the last, some of his writings were produced at a period when most other men are sunk in the incurious indifferency and languor of old age. And among these later productions are his remarks on peat. He relates that, when a very young man, he had marked, in passing on a journey through the central Highlands of Ross-shire, a wood of very ancient trees, doddered and moss-grown, and evidently pass- ing into a state of death through the last stages of decay. He had been led by business into the same district many years after, when in middle life, and found that the wood had entirely disappeared, and that the heathy hollow which it had covered was now occupied by a green, stagnant morass, un- varied in its tame and level extent by either bush or tree. In his old age he again visited the locality, and saw the green surface roughened with dingy-colored hollows, and several Highlanders engaged in it in cutting peat in a stratum several feet in depth. What he had once seen an aged forest had now become an extensive peat-moss. Some time towards the close of the seventeenth century he purchased the lands of Cromarty, where his turn for mi- nute observation seems to have anticipated — little, however, to his own profit — some of the later geological discoveries. There is a deep, wooded ravine in the neighborhood of the town, traversed by a small stream, which has laid bare, for the space of about forty yards in the opening of the hollow, the gray sandstone and stratified clays of the inferior fish THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 175 bed. The locality is rather poor in ichthyolites, though I have found in it, after minute search, a few scales of the Osteolepis, and on one occasion one of the better marked plates of the Coccosteus ; but in the vegetable impressions peculiar to the formation it is very abundant. These are invariably car- bonaceous, and are not unfrequently associated with minute patches of bitumen, which, in the harder specimens, present a coal-like appearance ; and the vegetable impressions and the bitumen seem to have misled the sagacious nobleman into the 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 uptiited against the granitic gneiss of the Sutors, I think I could pretty nearly restore it. They would first have had to pass for about thirty feet through the stratified clays and shales of the ichthyolite bed, with here and there a thin band of gray sandstone, and here and there a stratum of lime ; they would next have had to penetrate through from eighty to a hundred feet of coarse red and yellow sandstone, the red greatly predom- inating. They would then have entered the great conglom- erate, the lowest member of the formation ; and in time, if they continued to urge their fruitless labors, they would arrive at the primary rock, with its belts of granite, and its veins and huge masses of hornblende. In short, there might be some possibility of their penetrating to the central fire, but none whatever of their ever reaching a vein of coal. From a curious circumstance, however, .they were prevented from ascertaining, by actual experience, the utter barrenness of the formation. 176 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. Directly in the gorge of the ravine, where we may see the partially wooded banks receding as they ascend from the base to the centre, and then bellying over from the centre to the summit, there is a fine chalybeate spring, sur- mounted by a dome of hewn stone. It was discovered by the miners when in quest of the mineral which they did not and could not discover, and forms one of the finest speci- mens of a true Artesian well which I have any where seen. They had bored to a considerable depth, when, on withdraw- ing the kind of auger used for the purpose, a bolt of water, which occupied the whole diameter of the bore, came rushing after, like the jet of a fountain, and the work was prosecuted no further ; for, as steam-engines were not yet invented, no pit could have been wrought with so large a stream issuing into it ; and as the volume was evidently restricted by the size of the bore, it was impossible to say how much greater a stream the source might have supplied. The spring still con- tinues to flow towards the sea, between its double row of cresses, at the rate of about a hogshead per minute — a rate considerably diminished, it is said, from its earlier volume, by some obstruction in the bore. The waters are not strongly tinctured — a consequence, perhaps, of their great abundance ; but we may see every pebble and stock in their course envel- oped by a ferruginous coaguium, resembling burnt sienna, that has probably been disengaged from the dark red sand- stone below, which is known to owe its color to the oxide of iron. A Greek poet would probably have described the inci- dent as the birth of the Naiad ; in the north, however, which, in an earlier age, had also its Naiads, though, like the fish of the Old Red Sandstone, they have long since become extinct, the recollection of it is merely preserved by tradition, as a cu- rious, though by no means poetical fact, and by the name of THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 177 the well, which is still known as the well of the coal-heugh — the old Scotch name for a coal-pit. Calderwood tells us, in his description of a violent tempest which burst out immedi- ately as his persecutor, James VI., breathed his last, that in Scotland the sea rose high upon the land, and that many " coal-heuglis were drowned." There is no science whose value can be adequately esti- mated by economists and utilitarians of the lower order. Its true quantities cannot be represented by arithmetical figures or monetary tables ; for its effects on mind must be as surely taken into account as its operations on matter, and what it has accomplished for the human intellect as certainly as what it has dene for the comforts of society or the interests of com- merce. Who can attach a marketable value to the discov- eries of Newton ? I need hardly refer to the often-quoted remark of Johnson ; the beauty of the language in which it is couched has rendered patent to all the truth which it conveys. " Whatever withdraws us from the power of the senses," says the moralist — " whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future, predominate over the present, advances us in the dig- nity of thinking beings." And Geology, in a peculiar man- ner, supplies to the intellect an exercise of this ennobling character. But it has, also, its cash value. The time and money squandered in Great Britain alone in searching for coal in districts where the well-informed geologist could have at once pronounced the search hopeless, would much more than cover the expense at which geological research has been prosecuted throughout the world. There are few districts in Britain occupied by the secondary deposits, in which, at one time or another, the attempt has not been made. It has been the occasion of enormous expenditure in the south of Eng- land among the newer formations, where the coal, if it at all 178 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. occurs, (for we occasionally meet with wide gaps in the scale,) must be buried at an unapproachable depth. It led in Scotland — in the northern county of Sutherland — to an unprofitable working for many years of a sulphureous lignite of the inferior Oolite, far above the true Coal Measures. The attempt I have just been describing was made in a locality as far beneath them. There is the scene of another and more modern attempt in the same district, on the shores of the Moray Frith, in a detached patch of Lias, where a fossilized wood would no doubt be found in considerable abundance, but no continuous vein even of lignite. And it is related by Dr. Anderson, of Newburgh, that a fruitless and expensive search after coal has lately been instituted in the Old Red Sandstone beds which traverse Strathearn and the Carse of Gowrie, in the belief that they belong not to the Old, but to the New Red Sandstone — a formation which has been suc- cessfully perforated in prosecuting a similar search in various parts of England. All these instances — and there are hun- dreds such — show the economic importance of the study of fossils. The Oolite has its veins of apparent coal on the coast of Yorkshire, and its still more amply developed veins — one of them nearly four feet in thickness — on the eastern coast of Sutherlandshire ; the Lias has its coniferous fossils in great abundance, some of them converted into a lignite which can scarce be distinguished from a true coal ; and the bitu- minous masses of the Lower Old Red, and its carbonaceous markings, appear identical, to an unpractised eye, with the impressions on the carboniferous sandstones, and the bitumi- nous masses which they, too, are occasionally found to enclose. Nor does the mineralogical character of its middle beds dif- fer in many cases from that of the lower members of the New Red Sandstone. I have seen the older rock in the north THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 179 of Scotland as strongly saliferous as any of the newer sand- stones, of well nigh as bright a brick-red tint, of as friable and mouldering a texture, and variegated as thickly with its specks and streaks of green and buff-color. But in all these instances there are strongly characterized groups of fossils, which, like the landmarks of the navigator, or the findings of his quad- rant, establish the true place of the formations to which they belong. Like the patches of leather, of scarlet, and of blue, which mark the line attached to the deep-sea lead, they show the various depths at which we arrive. The Earls of Suth- erland set themselves to establish a coal-work among the chambered univalves of the Oolite, and a vast abundance of its peculiar bivalves. The coal-borers who perforated the Lias near Cromarty passed every day to and from their work over one of the richest deposits of animal remains in the kingdom — a deposit full of the most characteristic fossils; and drove their auger through a thousand belemnites and ammonites of the upper and inferior Lias, and through gryph- ites and ichthyodorulites innumerable. The sandstones of Strathearn and the Carse of Gowrie yield their plates and scales of the Holopty chins, the most abundant fossil of the Upper Old Red ; and the shale of the little dell in which the first Earl of Cromarty set his miners to work, contains, as I have said, plates of the Coccosteus and scales of the Osteole- pis — fossils found only in the Lower Old Red. Nature, in all these localities, furnished the index, but men lacked the skill necessary to decipher it.* I may mention that, inde- * There occurs in Mr. Murchison's Silurian System a singularly amusing account of one of the most unfortunate of all coal-boring enterprises ; the unlucky projector, a Welsh farmer, having set him- self to dig for coal in the lowest member of the system, at least six 180 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. pendently of their well-marked organisms, there is a simple test through which the lignites of the newer formations may be distinguished from the true coal of the carboniferous sys- tem. Coal, though ground into an impalpable powder, re- tains its deep black color, and may be used as a black pig- ment ; lignite, on the contrary, when fully levigated, assumes a reddish, or, rather, umbry hue. I have said that the waters of the well of the coal-heugh are chalybeate — a probable consequence of their infiltration through the iron oxides of the superior beds of the formation, and their subsequent passage through the deep red strata of formations beneath the only one at which the object of his search could have been found. Mr. Murchison thus relates the story : — " At Tin-y-coed I found a credulous farmer ruining- himself in ex- cavating a horizontal gallery in search of coal, an ignorant miner being his engineer. The case may serve as a striking example of the coal-boring mania in districts which cannot by possibility contain that mineral ; and a few words concerning it may, therefore, prove a sal- utary warning to those who speculate for coal in the Silurian Rocks. The farmhouse of Tin-y-coed is situated on the sloping sides of a hill of trap, which throw off, upon its north-western flank, thin beds of black grauwacke shale, dipping to the west-north -west at a high an- gle. The color of the shale, and of the water that flowed down its sides, the pyritous veins, and other vulgar symptoms of coal-bearing strata, had long convinced the farmer that he possessed a large hid- den mass of coal, and, unfortunately, a small fragment of real anthra- cite was discovered, which burnt like the best coal. Miners were sent for, and operations commenced. To sink a shaft was imprac- ticable, both from the want of means, and the large volume of water. A slightly inclined gallery was therefore commenced, the mouth of which was opened at the bottom of the hill, on the side of the little brook which waters the dell. I have already stated that, in many cases, where the intrusive trap throws off the shale, the latter pre- serves its natural and unaltered condition to within a certain distance THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 181 the inferior bed. There could be very curious chapters writ- ten on mineral springs, in their connection with the formations through which they pass. Smollett's masterpiece, honest old Matthew Bramble, became thoroughly disgusted with the Bath waters on discovering that they filtered through an ancient burying-ground belonging to the Abbey, and that much of their peculiar taste and odor might probably be owing to the " 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 trap ; and so it was at Tin-y-coed, for the level proceeded for 155 feet with little or no obstacle. Mounds of soft black shale attest- ed the rapid progress of the adventurers, when suddenly they came to a * change of metal.' They were now approaching the nucleus of the little ridge ; and the rock they encountered was, as the men in- formed me, ( as hard as iron,' viz., of lydianized schist, precisely anal- ogous to that which is exposed naturally in ravines where all the phenomena are laid bare. The deluded people, however, endeavored to penetrate the hardened mass, but the vast expense of blasting it put a stop to the undertaking, not, however, without a thorough con- viction on the part of the farmer, that, could he but have got through that hard stuff, he would most surely have been well recompensed, for it was just thereabouts that they began to find ' small veins of coal' It has been before shown, that portions of anthracite are not unfrequent in the altered shale, where it is in contact with the intru- sive rock. And the occurrence of the smallest portion of anthracite is always sufficient to lead the Radnorshire farmer to suppose that he is very near < El Dorado.' Amid all their failures, I never met with an individual who was really disheartened ; a frequent exclama- tion being, 4 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.) 16 182 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. of the strongly impregnated rocks and clay-beds of this for- mation, like the bitumen of the still more strongly impreg- nated limestones and shales of the Lias, seems to have had rather an animal than vegetable origin. The shales of the Eathie Lias burn like turf soaked in oil, and yet they hardly contain one per cent, of vegetable matter. 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-calca- reous, semi-aluminous schist, scarcely less fetid, from the great quantity of this substance which it contains, than the swine-stones of England. Its vegetable remains bear but a small proportion to its animal organisms ; and from huge ac- cumulations of these last decomposing amid the mud of a still sea, little disturbed by tempests or currents, and then sud- denly interred by some widely spread catastrophe, to ferment and consolidate under vast beds of sand and conglomerate, the bitumen* seems to have been elaborated. These bitu- minous schists, largely charged with sulphuret of iron, run far into the interior, along the flanks of the gigantic Ben We- * « In the slaty schists of Seefeld, in the Tyrol," say Messrs. Sedg- wick and Murchison, " there is such an abundance of a similar bitu- men, that it is largely extracted for medicinal purposes." — (GeoL Trans, for 1829, p. 134.) THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 183 vis, and through the exquisitely pastoral valley of Strathpef- fer. The higher hills which rise over the valley are formed mostly of the great conglomerate — Knockferril, with its vit- rified fort — the wooded and precipitous ridge over Brahan — and the middle eminences of the gigantic mountain on the north ; but the bottom and the lower slopes of the valley are occupied by the bituminous and sulphureous schists of the fish-bed, and in these, largely impregnated with the peculiar ingredients of the formation, the famous medicinal springs of the Strath have their rise. They contain, as shown by chem- ical analysis, the sulphates of soda, of lime, of magnesia, common salt, and, above all, sulphuretted hydrogen gas — elements which masses of sea-mud, charged with animal matter, would yield as readily to the chemist as the medicinal springs of Strath pefFcr. Is it not a curious reflection, that the commercial greatness of Britain, in the present day, should be closely connected with the towering and thickly spread forests of arboraceous ferns and gigantic reeds — vegetables of strange form and uncouth names — which flourished and decayed on its surface, age after age, during the vastly ex- tended term of the carboniferous period, ere the mountains were yet upheaved, and when there was as yet no man to till the ground ? Is it not a reflection equally curious, that the invalids of the present summer should be drinking health, amid the recesses of StrathpefTer, from the still more ancient mineral and animal debris of the lower ocean of the Old Red Sandstone, strangely elaborated for vast but unreckoned peri- ods in the bowels of the earth ? The fact may remind us of one of the specifics of a now obsolete school of medicine, which flourished in this country about two centuries ago, and which included in its materia medica portions of the human frame. Among these was the flesh of Egyptian mummies, 184 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. impregnated with the embalming drugs — the dried muscles and sinews of human creatures who had walked in the streets of Thebes or of Luxor three thousand years ago. The commoner mineral springs of the formation, as might be anticipated, from the very general diffusion of the oxide to which it owes its color, are chalybeate. There are dis- tricts in Easter-Ross and the Black Isle in which the traveller scarcely sees a runnel by the way-side that is not half choked up by its fox-colored coagulum of oxide. Two of the most strongly impregnated chalybeates with which I am acquainted gush out of a sandstone bed, a few yards apart, among the woods of Tarbat House, on the northern shore of the Frith of Cromarty. They splash among the pebbles with a half- gurgling, half-tinkling sound, in a solitary but not unpleasing recess, darkened by alders and willows ; and their waters, after uniting in the same runnel, form a little, melancholy looking loclian, matted over with weeds, and edged with flags and rushes, and which swarms in early summer with the young of the frog in its tadpole state, and in the after months with the black water-beetle and the newt. The circumstance is a somewhat curious one, as the presence of iron as an ox- ide has been held so unfavorable to both animal and vegeta- ble life, that the supposed poverty of the Old Red Sandstone in fossil remains has been attributed to its almost universal diffusion at the period the deposition was taking place. Were the system as poor as has been alleged, however, it might be questioned, on the strength of a fact such as this, whether the iron militated so much against the living existences of the formation, as against the preservation of their remains when dead. Some of the springs which issue from the ichthyolite beds along the shores of the Moray Frith are largely charged, not THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 185 with iron, like the well of the coal-heugh, or the springs of Tarbat House, nor yet with hydrogen and soda, like the spa of Strathpeffer, but with carbonate of lime. When employed for domestic purposes, they choke up, in a few years, with a stony deposition, the spouts of tea-kettles. On a similar principle, they plug up their older channels, and then burst out in new ones ; nor is it uncommon to find among the cliffs little hollow recesses, long since divested of their waters by this process, that are still thickly surrounded by coral-like in- crustations of moss and lichens, grass and nettle-stalks, and roofed with marble-like stalactites. I am acquainted with at least one of these springs of very considerable volume, and ded- icated of old to an obscure Roman Catholic saint, whose name it still bears, (St. Bennet,) which presents phenomena not un- worthy the attention of the young geologist. It comes gush- ing from out the ichthyolite bed, where the latter extends, in the neighborhood of Cromarty, along the shores of the Moray Frith ; and after depositing in a stagnant morass an accumu- lation of a grayish-colored and partially consolidated traver- tin, escapes by two openings to the shore, where it is absorbed among the sand and gravel. A storm about three years ago swept the beach several feet beneath its ordinary level, and two little moles of conglomerate and sandstone, the work of the spring, were found to occupy the two openings. Each had its fossils — comminuted sea-shells, and stalks of hardened moss ; and in one of the moles I found imbedded a few of the vertebral joints of a sheep. It was a recent formation on a small scale, bound together by a calcareous cement fur- nished by the fish-beds of the inferior Old Red Sandstone, and composed of sand and pebbles, mostly from the granitic gneiss of the neighboring hill, and organisms, vegetable and animal, from both the land and the sea. 16* 186 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. The Old Red Sandstone of Scotland has been extensively employed for the purposes of the architect, and its limestones occasionally applied to those of the agriculturist. As might be anticipated in reference to a deposit so widely spread, the quality of both its sandstones and its lime is found to vary exceedingly in even the same beds when examined in differ- ent localities. Its inferior conglomerate, for instance, in the neighborhood of Cromarty, weathers so rapidly, that a fence built of stones furnished by it little more than half a century ago, has mouldered in some places into a mere grass-covered mound. The same bed in the neighborhood of Inverness is composed of a stone nearly as hard and quite as durable as granite, and which has been employed in paving the streets of the place — a purpose which it serves as well as any of the igneous or primary rocks could have done. At Redcastle, on the northern shore of the Frith of Beauly, the same con- glomerate assumes an intermediate character, ' and forms, though coarse, an excellent building stone, which, in some of the older ruins of the district, presents the marks of the tool as sharply indented as when under the hands of the work- man. Some of the sandstone beds of the system are strongly saliferous ; and these, however coherent they may appear, never resist the weather until first divested of their salt. The main ichthyolite bed on the northern shore of the Moray Frith is overlaid by a thick deposit of a finely-tinted yellow sandstone of this character, which, unlike most sandstones of a mouldering quality, resists the frosts and storms of winter, and wastes only when the weather becomes warm and diy. A few days of sunshine affect it more than whole months of high winds and showers. The heat crystallizes at the surface the salt which it contains ; the crystals, acting as wedges, throw off minute particles of the stone ; and thus, mechani- THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 187 cally at least, the degrading process is the same as that to which sandstones of a different but equally inferior quality are exposed during severe frosts. In the course of years, however, this sandstone, when employed in building, loses its salt ; crust after crust is formed on the surface, and either forced off by the crystals underneath, or washed away by the rains; and then the stone ceases to waste, and gathers on its weathered inequalities a protecting mantle of lichens.* The most valuable quarries in the Old Red System of Scotland yet discovered, are the flagstone quarries of Caithness and Car- mylie. The former have been opened in the middle schists of the lower, or Tilestone formation of the system ; the latter, as I have had occasion to remark oftener than once, in the Cornstone, or middle formation. The quarries of both Car- mylie and Caithness employ hundreds of workmen, and their flagstones form an article of commerce. The best building- stone of the north of Scotland — best both for beauty and durability — is a pure Quartzose Sandstone furnished by the upper beds of the system. These are extensively quarried in Moray, near the village of Burghead, and exported to all parts of the kingdom. The famous obelisk of Forres, so * When left to time the process is a tedious one, and, ere its accom- plishment, the beauty of the masonry is always in some degree de- stroyed. The following passage, from a popular work, points out a mode by which it might possibly be anticipated, and the waste of sur- face prevented : — " A hall of which the walls w r ere 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." - (Rec- reations in Science.) 188 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. interesting to the antiquary — which has been described by some writers as formed of a species of stone unknown in the district, and which, according to a popular tradition, was transported from the Continent — is evidently composed of this Quartzose Sandstone, and must have been dug out of one of the neighboring quarries. And so coherent is its tex- ture, that the storms of, perhaps, ten centuries have failed to obliterate its rude but impressive sculptures. The limestones of both the upper and lower formations of the system have been wrought in Moray with tolerable suc- cess. In both, however, they contain a considerable per centage of siliceous and argillaceous earth. The system, though occupying an intermediate place between two metal- liferous deposits, — the grauwacke and the carboniferous limestone, — has not been found to contain workable veins any where in Britain, and in Scotland no metallic veins of any kind, with the exception of here and there a few slender threads of ironstone, and here and there a few detached crys- tals of galena. Its wealth consists exclusively in building and paving stone, and in lime. Some of the richest tracts of corn land in the kingdom rest on the Old Red Sandstone — the agricultural valley of Strathmore, for instance, and the fertile plains of Easter-Ross : Caithness has also its deep, corn-bearing soils, and Moray has been well known for cen- turies as the granary of Scotland. But in all these localities the fertility seems derived rather from an intervening subsoil of tenacious diluvial clay, than from the rocks of the system. Wherever the clay is wanting, the 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 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 189 lower formation. And so extreme is the barrenness of this moor, that notwithstanding the advantages of its semi-insular situation, it was suffered to lie as an unclaimed common until about twenty-five years ago, when it was parcelled out among the neighboring proprietors. 190 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. CHAPTER XI. Geological Physiognomy. — Scenery of the Primary Formations ; Gneiss, Mica Schist, Quartz Hock. — Of the Secondary ; the Chalk Formations, the Oolite, the New Red Sandstone, the Coal Measures. — Scenery in the Neighborhood of Edinburgh. — Aspect of the Trap Rocks. — The Disturbing and Denuding Agencies. — Distinc- tive Features of the Old Red Sandstone. — Of the Great Conglom- erate. — Of the Ichthyolite Beds. — The Burn of Eathie. — The Upper Old Red Sandstones. — Scene in Moray. 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 land- scape ; and as the vegetation of a district depends often on the nature of the underlying deposits, not only are the main outlines regulated by the mineralogy of the formations which they define, but also in many cases the manner in which these outlines are filled up. The coloring of the landscape is well nigh as intimately connected with its Geology as the drawing. The traveller passes through a, mountainous region of gneiss. The hills, which, though bulky, are shapeless, raise their huge backs so high over the brown, dreary moors, which, unvaried by precipice or ravine, stretch away for miles from their feet, that even amid the heats of midsummer the snow gleams in streaks and patches from their summits. And yet so vast is their extent of base, and their tops so truncated, that they seem but half-finished hills notwithstanding — hills interdicted somehow in the forming, and the work stopped ere the upper THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 191 stories had been added. He pursues his journey, and enters a district of micaceous schist. The hills arc 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 ser- rated 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, pyram- idal, and abrupt, are less rugged than before ; and the ra- vines, though still deep and narrow, are walled by ridges no longer serrated and angular, but comparatively rectilinear and smooth. But the vegetation is even more scanty than for- merly ; the steeper slopes are covered with streams of debris, on which scarce a moss or lichen finds root ; and the conoidal hills, bare of soil from their summits half way down, seem so many naked skeletons, that speak of the decay and death of nature. All is solitude and sterility. The territory is one of Quartz rock. Still the traveller passes on : the mountains sink into low swellings ; long rectilinear ridges run out towards the distant sea, and terminate in bluff, precipitous headlands. The valleys, soft and pastoral, widen into plains, or incline in long-drawn slopes of gentlest declivity. The streams, hitherto so headlong and broken, linger beside their banks, and then widen into friths and estuaries. The deep soil is covered by a thick mantle of vegetation — by forest trees of largest growth, and rich fields of corn ; and the soli- tude of the mountains has given place to a busy population. He has left behind him the primary regions, and entered on one of the secondary districts. 192 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. And these less rugged formations have also their respective styles — marred and obliterated often by the Plutonic agency, which imparts to them in some instances its own character,, and in some an intermediate one, but in general distinctly marked, and easily recognized. The Chalk presents its long inland lines of apparent coast, that send out their rounded headlands, cape beyond cape, into the wooded or corn-covered plains below. Here and there, there juts up at the base of the escarpement a white, obelisk-like stack ; here and there, there opens into the interior a narrow, grassy bay, in which noble beeches have cast anchor. There are valleys without streams ; and the landscape a-top is a scene of arid and un- even downs, that seem to rise and fall like the sea after a storm. We pass on to the Oolite : the slopes are more gen- tle, the lines of rising ground less continuous, and less coast- like ; the valleys have their rivulets, and the undulating sur- face is covered by a richer vegetation. We enter on a dis- trict of New Bed Sandstone. Deep, narrow ravines intersect elevated platforms. There are lines of low precipices, so perpendicular and so red, that they seem as if walled over with new brick ; and here and there, amid the speckled and mouldering sandstones, that gather no covering of lichen, there stands up a huge, altar-like mass of lime, mossy and gray, as if it represented a remoter antiquity than the rocks around it. The Coal Measures present often the appearance of vast lakes frozen over during a high wind, partially broken afterwards by a sudden thaw, and then frozen again. Their shores stand up around them in the form of ridges and moun- tain chains of the older rocks ; and their surfaces are grooved into flat valleys and long lines of elevation. Take, as an in- stance, the scenery about Edinburgh. The Ochil Hills and the Grampians form the distant shores of the seeming lake THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 193 or basin on the one 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 direc- tion 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 peri- od of thaw, when the ice broke up ; and, as they are com- posed chiefly of matter ejected from the abyss, might have characterized equally any of the other formations. Their very striking forms, however, illustrate happily the operations of the great agencies on which, in the secondary and transi- tion deposits, all the peculiarities of scenery depend. The molten matter from beneath seems to have been injected, in the first instance, through rents and fissures among the car- boniferous shales and sandstones of the district, where it lay cooling in its subterranean matrices, in beds and dikes, like metal in the moulds of the founder ; and the places which 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 tor- rent fed by a thunder shower has just subsided, shows, on the 17 194 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. same principle, its trail of sand and shingle piled up behind it. The outlines of the landscape were modified yet further by the yielding character of the basement of sandstone or shale on which the Plutonic beds so often rest. The base- ment crumbled away as the tides and waves broke against it. The injected beds above, undermined in the process, and with a vertical cleavage, induced by their columnar tendency, fell down in masses that left a front perpendicular as a wall. Each bed came thus to present its own upright line of preci- pice ; and hence — when they rise bed above bed, as often occurs — the stair-like outline of hill to which the trap rocks owe their name ; hence the outline of the Dalmahoy Crags, for instance, and of the southern and western front of Salis- bury Crags. In all the sedimentary formations the peculiarities of sce- nery depend on three circumstances — on the Plutonic agen- cies, the denuding agencies, and the manner and proportions in which the harder and softer beds of the deposits on which these operated alternate with one another. There is an union of the active and the passive in the formation of landscape ; that which disturbs and grinds down, and that which, accord- ing to its texture and composition, affects, if 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 pecu- liarities of prospect, which vary according to its formations, and the amount and character of the disturbing and denuding agencies to which these have been exposed. Instead, how- ever, of crowding its various, and, in some instances, dissim- ilar features into one landscape, I shall introduce to the reader THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 195 a few of its more striking and characteristic scenes, as ex- hibited in various localities, and by different deposits, begin- ning first with its conglomerate base. The great antiquity of this deposit is unequivocally indi- cated by the manner in which we find it capping, far in the interior, in insulated beds and patches, some of our loftier hills, or, in some instances, wrapping them round, as with a caul, from base to summit. It mixes largely, in our northern districts, with the mountain scenery of the country, and im- parts strength and boldness of outline to every landscape in which it occurs. Its island-like patches affect generally a bluff parabolic or conical outline ; its loftier hills present rounded, dome-like summits, which sink to the plain on the one hand in steep, slightly concave lines, and on the other in lines decidedly convex, and a little less steep. The moun- tain of boldest outline in 'the line of the Caledonian Valley (Mealforvony) is composed externally of this rock. Except where covered by the diluvium, it seems little friendly to vegetation. Its higher summits are well nigh as bare as those of the primary rocks ; and when a public road crosses its lower ridges, the traveller generally finds that there is no paving process necessary to procure a hardened surface, for his wheels rattle over the pebbles embedded in the rock. On the sea-coast, in several localities, the deposit presents strik- ing peculiarities of outline. The bluff and rounded preci- pices stand out in vast masses, that affect the mural form, and present few of the minuter angularities of the primary rocks. Here and there a square buttress of huge proportions leans against the front of some low-browed crag, that seems little to need any such support, and casts a length of shadow athwart its face. There opens along the base of the rock a line of rounded, shallow caves, or what seem rather the open- 196 THE OLD KED SANDSTONE. ings of caves not yet dug, and which testify of a period when the sea stood about thirty feet higher on our coasts than at present. A multitude of stacks and tabular masses lie grouped in front, perforated often by squat, heavy arches ; and stacks, caverns, buttresses, crags, and arches, are all alike mottled over by the thickly-set and variously colored pebbles. There is a tract of scenery of this strangely marked character in the neighborhood of Dunottar, and two other similar tracts in the far north, where the hill of Nigg, in Ross-shire, declines towards the Lias deposit in the Bay of Shandwick, and where, in the vicinity of Inverness, a line of bold, precipitous coast runs between the pyramidal wooded eminence which occupies the south-eastern corner of Ross, and the tower-like headlands that guard the entrance of the Bay of Munlochy. In the latter tract, however, the conglom- erate is much less cavernous than in the other two. The sea-coast of St. Vigeans, in Forfarshire, has been long celebrated for its romantic scenery and its caves ; and though it belongs rather to the conglomerate base of the up- per formation than to the great conglomerate base of the lower, it is marked, from the nature of the materials — ma- terials common to both — by features indistinguishable from those which characterize the sea-coasts of the older deposit. Its wall of precipices averages from a hundred to a hundred and eighty feet in height — no very great matter compared with some of our northern lines, but the cliffs make up for their want of altitude by their bold and picturesque combina- tions of form ; and I scarce know where a long summer's day could well be passed more agreeably than among their wild and solitary recesses. The incessant lashings of the sea have ground them down into shapes the most fantastic. Huge stacks, that stand up from amid the breakers, are here and THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 197 there perforated by round, heavy-browed arches, and cast the morning shadows inland athwart the cavern-hollowed preci- pices behind. The never-ceasing echoes reply, in long and gloomy caves, to the wild tones of the sea. Here a bluff promontory projects into the deep, green water, and the white foam, in times of tempest, dashes up a hundred feet against its face. There a narrow strip of vegetation, spangled with wild flowers, intervenes between the beach and the foot of the cliffs that sweep along the bottom of some semicircular bay ; but we see, from the rounded caves by which they are stud- ded, and the polish which has blunted their lower angularities, that at some early period the breakers must have dashed for ages against their bases. The Gaylet Pot, a place of inter- est, from its very striking appearance, to more than geologists, is connected with one of the deep-sea promontories. We see an oblong hollow in the centre of a corn-field, that borders on the cliffs. It deepens as we approach it, and on reaching the edge we find ourselves standing on the verge of a precipice about a hundred and fifty feet in depth, and see the waves dashing* along the bottom. On descending by a somewhat precarious path, we find that a long, tunnel-like cavern com- municates with the sea, and mark, through the deep gloom of the passage, the sunlight playing beyond ; and now and then a white sail passing the opening, as if flitting across the field of a telescope. The Gaylet Pot seems originally to have been merely a deep, straight cave, hollowed in the line of a fault by the waves ; and it owes evidently its present appear- ance to the falling in of the roof for about a hundred yards, at its inner extremity. We pass from the conglomerate to the middle and upper beds of the lower formation, and find scenery of a different character in the districts in which they prevail. The aspect is 17* 198 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. less bold and rugged, and affects often long horizontal lines, that stretch away without rise or depression, amid the surround- ing inequalities of the landscape for miles and leagues, and that decline to either side, like roofs of what the architect would term a low pitch. The ridge of the Leys in the east- ern opening of the Caledonian Valley, so rectilinear in its outline, and so sloping in its sides, presents a good illustration of this peculiarity. The rectilinear ridge which runs from the Southern Sutor of Cromarty far into the interior of the country, and which has been compared in a former chapter to the shaft of a spear, furnishes another illustration equally apt.* Where the sloping sides of these roof-like ridges decline, as in the latter instance, towards an exposed sea- coast, we find the slope terminating often in an abrupt line of rock dug out by the waves. It is thus a roof set on walls, and furnished with eaves. A ditch just finished by the labor- er presents regularly sloping sides ; but the little stream that comes running through gradually widens its bed by digging furrows into the slopes, the undermined masses fall in and are swept away, and, in the course of a few months, the sides are no longer sloping, but abrupt. And such, on a great scale, * The valleys which separate these ridges form often spacious friths and bays, the frequent occurrence of which in the Old 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 estu- aries lie crowded together between the counties of Sutherland and In- verness. In a line of coast little more than forty miles in extent, there occur four arms of the sea — the Friths of Cromarty, Beauly, and Dornoch, and the Bay of Munlochy. The Frith of Tay and the Basin of Montrose are also semi-marine valleys of the Old Red Sand- stone. Two of the finest harbors in Britain, or the world, belong to it — Milford Haven, in South Wales, and the Bay of Cromarty. THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 199 has been the process through which coast-lines that were originally paved slopes have become walls of precipices. The waves cut first through the outer strata ; and every stratum thus divided comes to present two faces — a perpen- dicular face in the newly-formed line of precipice, and another horizontal face lying parallel to it, along the shore. One half the severed stratum seems as if rising out of the sea, the other half as if descending from the hill : the geologist who walks along the beach finds the various beds presented in duplicate — a hill-bed on the one side, and a sea-bed on the other. There occurs a very interesting instance of this arrangement in the bold line of coast on the northern shore of the Moray Frith, so often alluded to in a previous chapter, as extending between the Southern Sutor and the Hill of Eathie ; and which forms the wall of a por- tion of the roof-like ridge last described. The sea first broke in a long line through strata of red and gray shale, next through a thick bed of pale-yellow stone, then through a con- tinuous bed of stratified clays and nodular limestone, and, last of all, through a bed, thicker than any of the others, of indurated red sandstone. The line of cliffs formed in this way rises abruptly for about a hundred yards on the one hand ; the shore stretches out for more than double the same space on the other ; on both sides the beds exactly correspond ; and to ascend in the line of the strata from the foot of 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 ichtbyolite beds contain, but from the illustration which it also furnishes of denudation to a vast extent from causes still in active operation. A line of precipices a hun- dred yards in height, and more than two miles in length, has 200 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE been dug out of the slope by the slow wear of the waves, in the unreckoned course of that period during which the present sea was bounded in this locality by the existing line of coast. (See Frontispiece, sect. 3.) I know 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 numer- ous organisms of the Lower Old Red Sandstone ; it presents us also, towards its western extremity, with the still more numerous organisms of the Lower and Upper Lias ; nor are the inflections and faults which its strata exhibit less instruc- tive than its fossils or its vast denuded hollow. I have climbed along its wall of cliffs during the height of a tempestuous winter tide, when waves of huge volume, that had begun to gather strength under the night of the Northern Ocean, were bursting and foaming below ; and as the harder pebbles, up- lifted by the surge, rolled by thousands and tens of thousands along the rocky 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 Coesar, the whole upper part of the Moray Frith would have been laid dry, and it would now have seemed as inexplicable that this roof-like ridge THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 201 should present so rugged a line of wall to the distant sea, as that the Western Ghauts of India should invariably turn their steepest declivities to the basin of the Indian Ocean, or that, from the Arctic Circle to the southern extremity of Patagonia, the huge mountain-chain of America should elevate its dizzy precipices in the line of the Pacific. Let us take another view of this section. It stretches be- tween two of the granitic knobs or wedges to which I have had such frequent occasion to refer — the Southern Sutor of Cromarty, and the Hill of Eathie ; and the edges of the strata somewhat remind one of the edges of a bundle of deals laid flatways on two stones, and bent towards the middle by their own weight. But their more brittle character is shown by the manner in which their ends are broken and uptilted against the granitic knobs on which they seem to rest ; and towards the western knob the whole bundle has been broken across from below, and the opening occasioned by the fracture forms a deep, savage ravine, skirted by precipices, that runs far into the interior, and exhibits the lower portion of the system to well nigh its base. Will the reader spend a very few minutes in exploring the solitary recesses of this rocky trench — it matters not whether as a scene-hunter or a geologist ? W T e 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 cur- rents, and its undulating lines of coast ; while before us we 202 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. see, far in the distance, the blue vista of the Great Valley, with its double wall of jagged and serrated hills, and directly in the opening, the gray, diminished spires of Inverness. We reach a brown, mossy stream, of just volume enough to sweep away the pebbles and shells that have been strewed in its course by the last tide ; and see, on turning a sudden angle, the precipices cleft to their base by the ravine that has yielded its waters a passage from the interior. We enter along the bed of the stream. A line of mural precipices rises on either hand — here advancing in ponderous overhanging buttresses, there receding into deep, damp recess- es, tapestried with ivy, and darkened with birch and hazel. A powerful spring, charged with lime, comes pouring by a hundred different threads over the rounded brow of a beetling crag, and the decaying vegetation around it is hardening into stone. The cliffs vary their outline at every step, as if assum- ing in succession, all the various combinations of form that constitute the wild and the picturesque ; and the pale hues of the stone seem, when brightened by the sun, the very tints a painter would choose to heighten the effect of his shades, or to contrast most delicately with the luxuriant profusion of bushes and flowers that wave over the higher shelves and crannies. A colony of swallows have built from time immemorial under the overhanging strata of one of the loftier precipices ; the fox and badger harbor in the clefts of the steeper and more inac- cessible 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 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 203 from base to summit with birch, hazel, and hawthorn, we find the passage shut up by a perpendicular wall of rock about thirty feet in height, over which the stream precipitates itself, in a slender column of foam, into a dark, mossy basin. The long arms of an intermingled clump of birches and ha- zels stretch half way across, tripling with their shade the ap- parent depth of the pool, and heightening in an equal ratio the white flicker of the cascade, and the effect of the bright patches of foam which, flung from the rock, incessantly 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 ob- structed by the deep mossy pool and the cascade, its precip- itous sides consist of three bars or stories. There is first, reckoning from the stream upwards, a broad bar of pale red ; then a broad bar of pale lead color ; last and highest, a broad bar of pale yellow ; and above all, there rises a steep green slope, that continues its ascent till it gains the top of the ridge. The middle, lead-colored bar is an ichthyolite bed, a place of sepulture among the rocks, where the dead lie by myriads. The yellow bar above 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 vege- tation than those of the other bars. The pale red bar below is composed of a coarser and harder sandstone, which forms an upper moiety of the arenaceous portion of the great con- glomerate. Now mark, further, that on reaching a midway point between the beach and the cascade, this triple-barred line of precipices abruptly terminates, and a line of preci- pices of coarse conglomerate as abruptly begins. I occa- 204 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. sionally pass a continuous wall, built at two different periods, and composed 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 an- gles 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. Denud- ing agencies of even greater power than those which have hollowed out the cliffs of the neighboring coast, or whose operations have been prolonged through periods of even more extended duration, have ground down the projected line of the upheaved mass to the level of the undisturbed masses be- side it. Now, mark further, as we ascend the ravine, that the grand cause of the disturbance appears to illustrate, as it were, and that very happily, the manner in which the fault was originally produced. The precipice, over which the stream leaps at one bound into the mossy hollow, is com- posed of granitic gneiss, and seems evidently to have intrud- ed itself, with much disturbance, among the surrounding conglomerate and sandstones. A few hundred yards higher up the dell, there is another much loftier precipice of gneiss, round which we find the traces of still greater disturbance ; and, higher still, yet a third abrupt precipice of the same rock. The gneiss rose, trap-like, in steps, and carried up the sandstone before it in detached squares. Each step has its THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 205 answering fault immediately over it ; and the fault where the triple bars and the conglomerate meet is merely a fault whose step of granitic gneiss stopped short ere it reached the sur- face. But the accompanying section (see Frontispiece, sect. 4) will better illustrate the geology of this interesting ravine, than it can be illustrated by any written description. I may remark, ere taking leave of it, however, that its conglomer- ates exhibit a singularly large amount of false stratification at an acute angle with the planes of the real strata, and that a bed of mouldering sandstone near the base of the system may be described, from its fissile character, as a tilestone.* * There is a natural connection, it is said, between wild scenes and wild legends ; and some of the traditions connected with this roman- tic and solitary dell illustrate the remark. Till a comparatively late period, it was known at many a winter fireside as a favorite haunt of the fairies — the most poetical of all our old tribes of spectres, and at one time one of the most popular. I have conversed with an old woman, who, when a very little girl, had seen myriads of them dan- cing, as the sun was setting, on the further edge of the dell ; and with a still older man, who had the temerity to offer one of them a pinch of snuff at the foot of the cascade. Nearly a mile from where the ravine opens to the sea, it assumes a gentler and more pastoral char- acter ; the sides, no longer precipitous, descend towards the stream in green, sloping banks ; and a beaten path, which runs between Crom- arty and Rosemarkie, winds down the one side and ascends the other. More than sixty years ago, one Donald Calder, a Cromarty shop- keeper, w r as journeying by this path shortly after nightfall. The moon, at full, had j list 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 op- posite side a strain of the most delightful music he had ever heard. 18 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. I know comparatively little of the scenery of the middle, or Cornstone formation. Its features in England are bold and striking; in Scotland, of a tamer and more various char- acter. The Den of Balruddery is a sweet, wooded dell, marked by no characteristic peculiarities. Many of the seeming peculiarities of the formation in Forfarshire, as in Fife, may be traced to the disturbing trap. The appearance exhibited is that of uneven plains, that rise and fall in long, undulating ridges — an appearance which any other member of the system might have presented. We find the upper for- mation associated with scenery of great, though often wild He staid and listened. The words of a song, of such simple beauty that they seemed without effort to stamp themselves on his memory, came wafted in the music ; and the chorus, in which a thousand tiny voices seemed to join, was a familiar address to himself — "Hey, Donald Calder ; ho, Donald Calder." u There are nane of my Navi- ty acquaintance," thought Donald, "who sing like that. Wha can it be ? " He descended into the cloud ; but in passing the little stream the music ceased ; and on reaching the spot on which the singer had seemed stationed, he saw only a bare bank sinking into a solitary moor, unvaried by either bush or hollow in which the musi- cian might have lain concealed. He had hardly time, however, to estimate the marvels of the case, when the music again struck up, but on the opposite side of the dell, and apparently from the very knoll on which he had so recently listened to it. The conviction that it could not be other than supernatural overpowered him ; and he hurried homewards under the influence of a terror so extreme, that, unfortunately for our knowledge of fairy literature, it had the effect 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 min- utes — 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, THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 207 beauty ; and nowhere is this more strikingly the case than in the province of Moray, where it leans against the granitic gneiss of the uplands, and slopes towards the sea in long plains of various fertility, deep and rich, as in the neighborhood of Elgin, or singularly bleak and unproductive, as in the far- famed " heath near Forres." Let us select the scene where quite as conclusive as the nature of the case admits, that when they ceased to be seen there it would have been vain to have looked for them any where else. There is a cluster of turf-built cottages grouped on the southern side of the ravine ; a few scattered knolls, and a long, partially wooded hollow, that seems a sort of covered way leading to the recesses of the dell, interpose between them and the nearer edge, and the hill rises behind. 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 ga- ble of the cottage beside which the sole spectators of the scene were stationed, began to ascend the eminence towards the south. The horses were shaggy, diminutive things, speckled dun and gray ; the riders, stunted, misgrown, ugly creatures, attired in antique jerkins of plaid, long gray cloaks, and little red caps, from under which their wild, uncombed locks shot out over their cheeks and foreheads. The boy and his sister stood gazing in utter dismay and astonishment, as rider after rider, each one more uncouth and dwarfish than the one that had preceded it, passed the cottage and disappeared among the brushwood, which at that period covered the hill, until at length the entire rout, except the last rider, who lingered a few yards be- hind the others, had gone by. " What are ye, little mannie ? and where are ye going ? " inquired the boy, his curiosity getting the better of his fears and his prudence. "Not of the race of Adam," said the creature, turning for a moment in his saddle; "the People of Peace shall never more be seen in Scotland." 208 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. the Findhorn, after hurrying over ridge and shallow, amid combinations of rock and wood, wildly picturesque as any the kingdom affords, enters on the 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 com- plexity of pattern, by veins of a light red, large grained granite. The gneiss abruptly terminates, but not so the wall of precipices. A lofty front of gneiss is joined to a lofty front of sandstone, like the front walls of two adjoining houses ; and the broken and uptilted strata of the softer stone show that the older and harder rocks must have invaded it from below. A little farther down the stream, the strata as- sume what seems, in a short extent of frontage, a horizontal position, like courses of ashlar in a building, but which, when viewed in the range, is found to incline at a low angle towards the distant sea. Here, as in many other localities, the }^oung geologist must guard against the conclusion, that the rock is necessarily low in the geological scale which he finds resting against the gneiss. The gneiss, occupying a very different place from that on which it was originally formed, has been thrust into close neighborhood with widely separated forma- tions. The great conglomerate base of the system rests over it in Orkney, Caithness, Ross, Cromarty, and Inverness ; and there is no trace of what should be the intervening gran* wacke. 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 Suther- land ; and as the flints and chalk fossils of Banff and Aber- deen are found lying immediately over it in these counties, THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 209 it is probable that the denuded members of the Cretaceous group once rested upon it there. The fact that a deposit should be found lying in contact with the gneiss, furnishes no argument for the great antiquity or the fundamental charac- ter of that deposit; and it were well that the geologist who sets himself to estimate the depth of the Old Red Sandstone, or the succession of its various formations, should keep the circumstance in view. That may be in reality but a small and upper portion of the system which he finds bounded by the gneiss on its under side, and by the diluvium on its upper. We stand on a wooded eminence, that sinks perpendicu- larly into the river on the left, in a mural precipice, and de- scends with a billowy swell into the broad, fertile plain in front, as if the uplands were breaking in one vast wave upon the low country. There is a patch of meadow on the oppo- site side of the stream, shaded by a group of ancient trees, gnarled and mossy, and with half their topmost branches dead and white as the bones of a skeleton. We look down upon them from an elevation so commanding, that their up- permost twigs seem on well nigh the same level with their interlaced and twisted roots, washed bare on the bank edge by the winter floods. A colony of herons has built from time immemorial among the branches. There are trees so laden with nests that the boughs bend earthwards on every side, like the boughs of orchard trees in autumn ; and the bleached and feathered masses which they bear — the cradles of suc- ceeding generations — glitter gray through the foliage in con- tinuous groups, as if each tree bore on its single head all the wigs of the Court of Session. The solitude is busy with the occupations and enjoyments of instinct. The birds, tall and stately, stand by troops in the shallows, or wade warily, as the fish glance by, to the edge of the current, or rising, with 18* 210 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. the slow flap of wing and sharp creak peculiar to the tribe, drop suddenly into their nests. The great forest of Darna- way stretches beyond, feathering a thousand knolls, that re- flect a colder and grayer tint as they recede, and lessen, and present ou 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 im- mense rib athwart the level country, projects far into the stream, and gives an angular inflection to its course. There ascends from the apex a thin, blue column of smoke — that of 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. THE OLD KED SANDSTONE. 211 CHAPTER XII. The two Aspects in which. Matter can be viewed ; Space and Time. — Geological History of the Earlier Periods. — The Cambrian Sys- tem, — Its Annelids. — The Silurian System. — Its Corals, Encrin- ites, Molluscs, and Trilobites. — Its Fish. — These of a high Order, and called into Existence apparently by Myriads. — Opening Scene in the History of the Old Red Sandstone a Scene of Tempest. — Represented by the Great Conglomerate. — Red a prevailing Color among the Ancient Rocks contained in this Deposit. — Amazing Abundance of Animal Life. — Exemplified by a Scene in the Her- ring Fishery. — Platform of Death. — Probable Cause of the Catas- trophe which rendered it such. " There are only two different aspects," says Dr. Thomas Brown, u in which matter can be viewed. We may consider it simply as it exists, in space, or as it exists in time. As it exists in space we inquire into its composition, or, in other words, endeavor to discover what are the elementary bodies that coexist in the space which it occupies ; as it exists in time, we inquire into its susceptibilities or its powers, or, in other words, endeavor to trace all the various changes which have already passed over it, or of which it may yet become the subject." Hitherto I have very much restricted myself to the consid- eration of the Old Red Sandstone as it exists in space — to the consideration of it as we now find it. I shall now attempt presenting it to the reader as it existed in 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 des- 212 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. ert country, with its wide wastes of unprofitable sand, its broken citadels and temples, its solitary battle-plains, and its gloomy streets of 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 thou- sand feet by the remains of bygone existences. Of late, the geologist has learned from Murchison to distinguish the rocks of these two periods — the lower as those of the Cambrian, the upper as those of the Silurian group. The lower — rep- resentative of the first glimmering twilight of being — of a dawn so feeble that it may seem doubtful whether in reality the gloom had lightened — must still be regarded as a period of uncertainty. Its ripple-marked sandstones, and its half coherent accumulations of dark-colored strata, which decom- pose into mud, show that every one of its many plains must have formed in succession an upper surface of the bottom of the sea ; but it remains for future discoverers to determine regarding the shapes of life that burrowed in its ooze, or ca- reered through the incumbent waters. In one locality it would seem as if a few worms had crawled to the surface, and left their involved and tortuous folds doubtfully impressed on the stone. Some of them resemble miniature cables, care- lessly coiled ; others, furnished with what seem numerous legs, remind us of the existing Nereid ina of our sandy THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 213 shores — those red-blooded, many-legged worms, resembling elongated centipedes, that wriggle with such activity among the mingled mud and water, as we turn over the stones under which they had 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 Ara- bia?! Nights, in which the battle of the magicians is described ? At an early stage of the combat a little worm creeps over the pavement ; at its close two terrible dragons contend in an atmosphere of fire. But even the worms of the Cambrian System can scarce be regarded as established. The evidence respecting their place and their nature must still be held as involved in some such degree of doubt as attaches to the researches of the antiquary, when engaged in tracing what their remains much resemble — the involved sculpturings of some Runic obelisk, weathered by the storms of a thousand winters. There is less of doubt, however, regarding the existences of the upper group of rocks — the Silurian. The depth of this group, as estimated by Mr. Murchison, is equal to double the height of our highest Scottish mountains; and four distinct platforms of being range in it, the one over the other, like stories in a building. Life abounded on all these platforms, and in shapes the most wonderful. The pe- culiar encrinites of the group rose in miniature forests, and spread forth their sentient petals by millions and tens of millions amid the waters ; vast ridges of corals peopled by their innumerable builders, — numbers without number, — rose high amid the shallows ; the chambered shells had become abundant — the simpler testacea still more so ; ex- tinct forms of the graptolite, or sea-pen, existed by myriads ; 214 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 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 ac- quainted with the form of the common Chiton of our shores — the little boat-shaped shell-fish, that adheres to stones and rocks like the limpet, but which differs from every variety of limpet, 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, extend- ing 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 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 215 Ostrece, Chitones, and other sedentary animals, they seemed to have adhered together in vast clusters, trilobite over trilo- bite, in the hollows of submarine precipices, or on the flat, muddy bottom below. And such were the master existences of three of the four Silurian platforms, and of the greater part of the fourth, if, indeed, we may not regard the cham- bered molluscs, their contemporaries, — creatures with their arms clustered round their heads, and with a nervous system composed of a mere knotted cord, — as equally high in the scale. 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 crusta- cean, as, at a period long previous, the crustacean had taken pre- cedence of the annelid. In what form do these, the most ancient beings of their class, appear ? As cartilaginous fishes of the higher order. Some of them were furnished with bony pal- ates, and squat, firmly-based teeth, well adapted for crushing the stone-cased zoophytes and shells of the period, fragments of which occur in their faecal remains ; some with teeth that, like those of the fossil sharks of the later formations, resem- ble lines of miniature pyramids, larger and smaller alternat- ing ; some with teeth sharp, thin, and so deeply serrated that every individual tooth resembles a row of poniards set upright against the walls of an armory ; and these last, says Agassiz, furnished with weapons so murderous, must have been the pirates of the period. Some had their fins guarded with long 216 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. spines, hooked like the beak of an eagle ; some with spines of straighter and more slender form, and ribbed and furrowed longitudinally like columns ; some were shielded by an armor of bony points ; and some thickly covered with glistening scales. If many ages must have passed ere fishes appeared, there was assuredly no time required to elevate their lower into their higher families. Judging, too, from this ancient deposit, they seem to have been introduced, not by individu- als and pairs, but by whole myriads. " Forthwith, the sounds and seas, each creek and bay, With fry innumerable swarmed ; and shoals Of fish, that with their fins and shining scales Glide under the green wave in plumps and sculls, Banked the 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 sub- stance of so deep and shining a jet color, that the bed, when 44 first discovered, conveyed the impression," says Mr. Murch- ison, 44 that it enclosed a triturated heap of black beetles." And such are the remains of what seem to have been the first existing vertebrata. Thus, ere our history begins, the exist- ences of two great systems, the Cambrian and the Silurian, had passed into extinction, with the exception of what 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. * * «* Upw r ards of eight hundred extinct species of animals have been described as belonging to the earliest, or Protozoic and Silurian period, THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 217 The exuvise 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. 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 Eed 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 Lochness, Dingwall, and Gamrie, and many a* thousand square mile besides, was the scene of a shallow ocean, perplexed by powerful currents, and agitated by waves. A vast stratum of water-rolled pebbles, varying in depth from a hundred feet to a hundred yards, remains in a thousand different localities, to testify of the dis- turbing agencies of this time of commotion. The hardest masses which the stratum encloses, — porphyries of vitreous fracture that cut glass as readily as flint, and masses of quartz that strike fire quite as profusely from steel, — are yet polished and ground down into bullet-like forms, not an angu- and of these only about one hundred are found also in the overlying Devonian series ; while but fifteen are common to the whole Palaeo- zoic period, and not one extends beyond it." — (M. de Verneuil and Count D'Archiac, quoted by Mr. D. T. Ansted. 1844.) 19 218 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. lar fragment appearing in some parts of the mass for yards together. The debris of our harder rocks rolled for centuries in the beds of our more impetuous rivers, or tossed for ages along our more exposed and precipitous sea-shores, could not present less equivocally the marks of violent and prolonged attrition than the pebbles of this bed. And yet it is surely difficult to conceive how the bottom of any sea should have been so violently and so equally agitated for so greatly ex- tended a space as that which intervenes between Mealforvony in Inverness-shire and Pomona in Orkney in one direction, and between Applecross and Trouphead in another — and for a period so prolonged, that the entire area should have come to be covered with 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 dif- ferent from that presented by the more modern gravels. On the shores of the Frith of Cromarty, for instance, by far the most abundant pebbles are of a blue schistose gneiss : frag- ments of gray granite and white quartz are also common ; and the sea-shore at half ebb presents at a short distance the ap- pearance of a long belt of bluish gray, from the color of the prevailing stones which compose it. The prevailing color of the conglomerate of the district, on the contrary, is a deep THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 219 red. It contains pebbles of small-grained, red granite, red quartz rock, red feldspar, red porphyry, an impure red jasper, red hornstone, and a red granitic gneiss, identical with the well-marked gneiss of the neighboring Sutors. This last is the only rock now found in the district, of which fragments occur in the conglomerate. It must have been exposed at the time to the action of the waves, though afterwards buried deep under succeeding formations, until again thrust to the surface by some great internal convulsion, of a date compar- atively recent.* The period of this shallow and stormy ocean passed. The bottom, composed of the identical conglomerate which now forms the summit of some of our loftiest mountains, sank throughout its wide area to a depth so profound as to be little affected by tides or tempests. During this second period there took place a vast deposit of coarse sandstone strata, with here and there a few thin beds of rolled pebbles. The general subsidence of the bottom still continued, and, after a * The vast beds of unconsolidated gravel with which one of the later geological revolutions has half filled some of our northern val- leys, and covered the slopes of the adjacent hills, present, in a few localities, appearances somewhat analogous to those exhibited by this ancient formation. There are uncemcnted accumulations of water- rolled pebbles, in the neighborhood of Inverness, from ninety to a hundred feet in thickness. But this stratum, unlike the more ancient one, wanted continuity. It must have been accumulated, too, under the operation of more partial, though immensely more powerful agen- cies. There is a mediocrity of size in the enclosed fragments of the old conglomerate, which gives evidence of a mediocrity of power in the transporting agent. In the upper gravels, on the contrary, one of the agents could convey from vast distances blocks of stone eighty and a hundred tons in weight. A new cause of tremendous energy had come into operation in the geological world. 220 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. deposit of full ninety feet bad overlain the conglomerate, the depth became still more profound than at first. A fine, semi- calcareous, semi-aluminous deposition 4ook 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 algae, and its waters darkened by immense shoals of fish. In middle autumn, at the close of the herring season, when the fish have just spawned, and the congregated masses are breaking up on shallow and skerry, and dispersing by myri- ads over the deeper seas, they rise at times to the surface by a movement so simultaneous, that for miles and miles 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 im- parted to it an indescribable interest. On most occasions the inhabitants of ocean are seen but by scores and hundreds ; for in looking down into their green twilight haunts, we find the view bounded by a few yards, or at most a few fathoms ; and we can but calculate on the unseen myriads of the sur- rounding expanse by the seen few that occupy the narrow space visible. Here, however, it was not the few, but the myriads, that were seen — the innumerable and inconceiva- ble whole — all palpable to the sight as a flock on a hill-side ; or, at least, if all was not palpable, it was only because sense THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 221 has its limits in the lighter as well as in the denser medium — that the multitudinous distracts it, and the distant eludes it, and the far horizon bounds it. If the scene spoke not of in- finity in the sense in which Deity comprehends it, it spoke of it in at least the only sense in which man can compre- hend it. Now:, we are much in the habit of thinking of such amaz- ing multiplicity of being — when we think of it at all — with reference to but the later times of the world's history. We think of the remote past as a time of comparative solitude. We forget that the now uninhabited desert was once a popu- lous city. Is the reader prepared to realize, in connection with the Lower Old Red Sandstone — the second period of vertebrated existence — scenes as amazingly fertile in life as the scene just described — oceans as thoroughly occupied with being as our friths and estuaries when the herrings con- gregate most abundantly on our coasts ? There are evi- dences too sure to be disputed that such must have been the case. I have seen the ichthyolite beds, where washed bare in the line of the strata, as thickly covered with oblong, spin- dle-shaped nodules as I have ever seen a fishing bank cov- ered with herrings ; and have ascertained that every individ- ual nodule had its nucleus of animal matter — that it was a stone coffin in miniature, holding enclosed its organic mass of bitumen or bone — its winged, or enamelled, or thorn- covered ichthyolite. At this period of our history, some terrible catastrophe in- volved in sudden destruction the fish of an area at least a hundred miles from boundary to boundary, perhaps much more. The same platform in Orkney as at Cromarty is strewed thick with remains, which exhibit unequivocally the marks of violent death. The figures are contorted, contract- 19* 222 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. ed, 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 stifTest angle, as if prepared for an enemy. The attitudes of all the ichthyolites on this platform are attitudes of fear, anger, and pain. The remains, too, appear to have suffered nothing from the after attacks of pre- daceous fishes ; none such seem to have survived. The rec- ord is one of destruction at once widely spread and total, so far as it extended. There are proofs that, whatever may have been the cause of the catastrophe, it must have taken place in a sea unusually still. The scales, when scattered by some slight undulation, are scattered to the distance of only a few inches, and still exhibit their enamel entire, and their peculiar fineness of edge. The spines, even when separated, retain their original needle-like sharpness of point. Rays, well nigh as slender as horse-hairs, are enclosed unbroken in the mass. Whole ichthyolites occur, in which not only all the parts survive, but even the expression which the stiff and threatening attitude conveyed when the last struggle was over. Destruction must have come in the calm, and it must have been of a kind by which the calm was nothing dis- turbed. In what could it have originated ? By what quiet but potent agency of destruction were the innumerable exist- ences of an area perhaps ten thousand square miles in extent annihilated at once, and yet the medium in which they had lived left undisturbed by its operations ? Conjecture lacks footing in grappling with the enigma, and expatiates in un- certainty over all the known phenomena of death. Diseases of mysterious origin break out at times in the animal king- dom, and well nigh exterminate the tribes on which they fall. The present generation has seen a hundred millions of the THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 223 human family swept away by a disease unknown to our fathers. Virgil describes the fatal murrain that once depop- ulated the Alps, not more as a poet than as a historian. The shell-fish of the rivers of North America died in such vast abundance during a year of the present century, that the ani- mals, washed out of their shells, lay rotting in masses beside the banks, infecting the very air. About the close of the last century, the haddock well nigh disappeared, for several sea- sons together, from the eastern coasts of Scotland ; and it is related by Creech, that a Scotch shipmaster of the period sailed for several leagues on the coast of Norway, about the time the scarcity began, through a floating shoal of dead haddocks.* But the ravages of no such disease, however * I have heard elderly fishermen of the Moray Frith state, in con- nection with what they used to term " the haddock dearth" of this period, that, for several weeks ere the fish entirely disappeared, they acquired an extremely disagreeable taste, as if they had been boiled in tobacco juice, and became unfit for the table. For the three fol- lowing years they were extremely rare on the coast, and several years more elapsed ere they were caught in the usual abundance. The fact related by Creech, a very curious one, I subjoin in his own words ; it occurs in his third Letter to Sir John Sinclair : " On Friday, the 4th December, 1789, the ship Brothers, Captain Stewart, arrived at Leith from Archangel, who reported that, on the coast of Lapland and Norway, he sailed many leagues through immense quantities of dead haddocks floating on the sea. He spoke several English ships, who reported the same fact. It is certain that haddocks, which was the fish in the greatest abundance in the Edinburgh market, have scarcely been seen there these three years. In February, 1790, three haddocks were brought to market, which, from their scarcity, sold for 7s. Gd." 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 224 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. extensive, could well account for some of the phenomena of this platform of death. It is rarely that disease falls equally on many different tribes at once, and never does it fall with instantaneous, suddenness ; whereas in the ruin of this platform from ten to twelve distinct genera seem to have been equally involved ; and so suddenly did it perform its work, that its victims were fixed in their first attitude of ter- ror and surprise. I have observed, too, that groups of ad- joining nodules are charged frequently with fragments of the dead ; whereas the bodies of fish whose bowels and air-bladders are comparatively small and tender, lie at the bottom. The herring fish- erman, if the fish die in his nets, finds it no easy matter to buoy them up ; and if the shoal entangled be a large one, he fails at times, from the great weight, in recovering them at all, losing both nets and her- rings. Now, if a corresponding difference obtained among fish of the extinct period — if some rose to the surface when they died, while others remained at the bottom — we must, of course, expect to find their remains in very different degrees of preservation — to find only scattered fragments of the floaters, while of the others many may oc- cur comparatively entire. Even should they have died on the same beds, too, we may discover their remains separated by hundreds of miles. The haddocks that disappeared from the coast of Britain were found floating in shoals on the coasts of Norway. The remains of an immense body of herrings, that weighed down, a few seasons since, the nets of a crew of fishermen, in a muddy hollow of the Moray Frith, and defied the utmost exertions of three crews united to weigh them from the bottom, are, I doubt not, in the muddy hollow still. On a principle thus obvious it may be deemed not improbable that the ichthyoiites of the Lower Old Red Sandstone might have had numerous contemporaries, of which, unless in some instances the same accident which killed also entombed them, we can know noth- ing in their character as such, and whose broken fragments may yet be found in some other locality, where they may be regarded as char- acteristic of a different formation. THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 225 same variety of ichthyolite ; and the circumstance seems fraught with evidence regarding both the original habits of the creatures, and the instantaneous suddenness of the de- struction by which they were overtaken. They seem, like many of our existing fish, to have been gregarious, and to have perished together ere their crowds had time to break up and disperse. Fish, have been found floating dead in shoals beside sub- marine volcanoes — killed either by the heated water, or by mephitic gases. There are, however, no marks of volcanic activity in connection with the ichthyolite beds — no marks, at least, which belong to nearly the same age with the fossils. The disturbing granite of the neighboring eminences was not upheaved until after the times of the Oolite. But the volcano, if such was the destroying agent, might have been distant ; nay, from some of the points in an area of such immense extent, it must have been distant. The beds abound, as has been said, in lime ; and the thought has often struck me that calcined lime, cast out as ashes from some distant crater, and carried by the winds, might have been the cause of the wide- ly-spread destruction to which their organisms testify. I have seen the fish of a small trouting stream, over which a bridge was in the course of building, destroyed in a single hour, for a full mile below the erection, by the few troughfuls of lime that fell into the water when the centring was removed. 226 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 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 Sys- tem owes its Name. — Successive Modes in which a Metal may ex- ist. — The Pest orations of the Geologist void of Color. — Very dif- ferent 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 out- side the chasm seem to have gradually gained upon it, as their numbers increased, just as the European settlers of America have been gaining on the backwoods, and making themselves homes amid the burial-mounds of a race extinct for centuries. For a lengthened period, however, these finny settlers must have been comparatively few — mere squatters in the waste. In the beds of stratified clay in w T hich their THE OLD KED SANDSTONE. 227 remains first occur, over what we may term the densely crowded platform of violent death, the explorer may labor for hours together without finding a single scale. It is worthy of remark, however, that this upper bed abounds quite as much in the peculiar vegetable impressions of the formation as the lower platform itself. An abundance equally great occurs in some localities only a few inches over the line of the exterminating catastrophe. Thickets of ex- actly the same algae, amid which the fish of the formation had sheltered when living, grew luxuriantly over their graves when dead. The agencies of destruction which annihilated the animal life of so extended an area, spared its vegetation ; just as the identical forests that had waved over the semi- civilized aborigines of North America continued to wave over the more savage red men, their successors, long after the original race had been exterminated. The inference deduci- ble from the fact, though sufficiently simple, seems in a geo- logical point of view a not unimportant one. The flora of a system may long survive its fauna ; so that that may be but one formation, regarded loith reference to plants, ivliich may be two or more formations, regarded with reference to ani- mals. No instance of any such phenomenon occurs in the later geological periods. The changes in animal and vege- table life appear to have run parallel to each other from the times of the tertiary formations down to those of the coal ; but in the earlier deposits the case must have been different. The animal organisms of the newer Silurian strata form es- sentially different groups from those of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, and both differ from those of the Cornstone divis- ions ; and yet the greater portion of their vegetable remains seem the same. The stem-like impressions of the fucoid bed of the Upper Ludlow Rocks cannot be distinguished from 228 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. those of the ichthyolite beds of Cromarty and Ross, nor these again from the impressions of the Arbroath pavement, or the Den of Balruddery. Nor is there much difficulty in con- ceiving how the vegetation of a formation should come to sur- vive its animals. What is fraught with health to the exist- ences of the vegetable kingdom, is in many instances a deadly poison to those of the animal. The grasses and water- lilies of the neighborhood of Naples flourish luxuriantly amid the carbonic acid gas which rests so densely over the pools and runnels out of which they spring, that the bird stoops to drink, and falls dead into the water. The lime that destroys the reptiles, fish, and insects of a thickly inhabited lake or stream, injures not a single flag or bulrush among the millions that line its edges. The two kingdoms exist under laws of life and death so essentially dissimilar, that it has become one of the common-places of poetry to indicate the blight and decline of the tribes of the one by the unwonted luxuriancy of the productions of the other. Otway tells us, in describ- ing the horrors of the plague which almost depopulated London, that the " destroying angel stretched his arm " over the city, " Till in th' untrodden streets unwholesome grass Grew of great stalk, and color gross, A melancholic poisonous green." The work of deposition went on ; a bed of pale yellow saliferous sandstone settled, tier over tier, on a bed of strati- fled clay, and was itself overlaid by another bed of stratified clay in turn. And this upper bed had also its organisms. The remains of its sea-weed still spread out thick and dark amid the foldings of the strata, and occasionally its clusters of detached scales. But the circumstances were less favora- THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 229 ble to the preservation of entire ichthyolites than those under which the organisms of the lower platform were wrapped up in their stony coverings. The matrix, which is more micaceous than the other, seems to have been less conservative, and the waters were probably less still. The process went on. Age succeeded age, and one stratum covered up another. Gener- ations lived, died, and were entombed in the ever-growing depositions. Succeeding generations pursued their instincts by myriads, happy in existence, over the surface which covered the broken and perishing remains of their predecessors, and then died and were entombed in turn, leaving a higher plat- form, and a similar destiny to the generations that succeeded. Whole races became extinct, through what process of destruc- tion who can tell ? Other races sprang into existence through that adorable power which One only can conceive, and One only can exert. An inexhaustible variety of design expatiated freely within the limits of the ancient type. The main con- ditions remained the same — the minor details were dissimilar. Vast periods passed ; a class low in the scale still continued to furnish the master existences of creation ; and so immensely extended was the term of its sovereignty, that a being of lim- ited faculties, if such could have existed uncreated, and wit- nessed the whole, would have inferred that the power of the Creator had reached its extreme boundary, when fishes had been called into existence, and that our planet was destined to be the dwelling-place of no nobler inhabitants. If there be men dignified by the name of philosophers, who can 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 61 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 20 230 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. could have been based, as in the supposed case, on a period perhaps a hundred times more extended ? There exist wonderful analogies in nature between the geological history of the vertebrated animals as an order, and the individual history of every mammifer — between the his- tory, too, of fish as a class, and that of every single fish. " It has been found by Tiedemann," says Mr. Lyell, " that the brain of the foetus in the higher class of vertebrated ani- mals assumes in succession the various forms which belong to fishes, reptiles, and birds, before it acquires those additions and modifications which are peculiar to the mammiferous tribes." " In examining the brain of the mammalia," says M. Serres, " at an early stage of life, you perceive the cerebral hemispheres consolidated, as in fish, in two vesicles isolated one from the other ; at a later period you see them affect the configuration of the cerebral hemispheres of reptiles ; still later, again, they present you with the forms of those of birds ; and finally, at the era of birth, the permanent forms which the adult mammalia present." And such seems to have been the history of the vertebrata as an order, as cer- tainly as that of the individual mammifer. The fish preceded the reptile in the order of creation, just as the crustacean had preceded the fish, and the annelid the crustacean. Again, though the fact be somewhat more obscure, the reptile seems to have preceded the bird. We find, however, unequivocal traces of the feathered tribes in well-marked foot-prints im- pressed on a sandstone in North America, at most not more modern than the Lias, but which is generally supposed to be of the same age with the New Red Sandstone of Germany and our own country. In the Oolite — at least one, perhaps two formations later — the bones of the two species of mammif- erous quadrupeds have been found, apparently of the marsu- THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 231 pial family ; and these, says Mr. Lyell, afford the only exam- ple yet known of terrestrial mammalia in rocks of a date an- terior to the older tertiary formations. The reptile seems to have preceded the bird, and the bird the mammiferous ani- mal. Thus the foetal history of the nervous system in the in- dividual mammifer seems typical, in every stage of its prog- ress, of the history of the grand division at the head of which the mammifer stands. Agassiz, at the late meeting of the British Association in Glasgow, mentioned an analogous fact. After describing the one-sided tail of the more ancient fish, especially the fish of the Old Eed Sandstone, — the sub- jects of his illustration at the time, — he stated, as the result of a recent discovery, that the young of the salmon in their foetal state exhibit the same unequally-sided condition of tail which characterizes those existences of the earlier ages of the world. The individual fish, just as it begins to exist, pre- sents the identical appearances which were exhibited by the order when the order began to exist. Is there nothing won- derful 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 con- template, regarding that unique style of Deity, if I may so ex- press myself, which runs through all his works, whether we consider him as God of Nature, or Author of Revelation ? In this style of type and symbol did He reveal himself of old to his chosen people ; in this style of allegory and para- ble did He again address himself to them, when he sojourned among them on earth. The chemistry of the formation seems scarce inferior in interest to its zoology ; but the chemist had still much to do for Geology, and the processes are but imperfectly known. 232 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. There is no field in which more laurels await the philosophi- cal 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 conse- quent precipitation. An earthen pitcher, containing several quarts of sulphate of iron, had been suffered to remain undis- turbed and unexamined in a corner of Mr. Pepys's laboratory for about a twelvemonth. Some luckless mice had mean- while fallen into it, and been drowned ; and when it at length came to be examined, an oily scum, and a yellow, sulphu- reous powder, mixed with hairs, were seen floating on the top, and the bones of the mice discovered lying at the bottom ; and it was found, that over the decaying bodies the mineral components of the fluid had been separated and precipitated in a dark-colored sediment, consisting of grains of pyrites and of sulphur, of copperas in its green and crystalline form, and of black oxide of iron. The animal and mineral mat- ters had mutually acted upon one another ; and the metallic sulphate, deprived of its oxygen in the process, had thus cast down its ingredients. It would seem that over the putrefying bodies of the fish of the Lower Old Red Sandstone the water had deposited, in like manner, the lime with which it was THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 233 charged ; and hence the calcareous nodules in which we find their remains enclosed. The form of the nodule almost in- variably agrees with that of the ichthyolite within ; it is a coffin in the ancient Egyptian style. Was the ichthyolite twisted half round in the contorted attitude of violent death ? the nodule has also its twist. Did it retain its natural pos- ture ? the nodule presents the corresponding spindle form. Was it broken up, and the outline destroyed ? the nodule is flattened and shapeless. In almost every instance the form of the organism seems to have regulated that of the stone. We may trace, in many of these concretionary masses, the operations of three distinct principles, all of which must have been in activity at one and the same time. They are wrapped concentrically each round its organism : they split readily in the line of the enclosing stratum, and are marked by its alternating rectilinear bars of lighter and darker color ; and they are radiated from the centre to the circumference. Their concentric condition shows the chemical influences of the decaying animal matter ; their fissile character and par- allel layers of color indicate the general deposition which was taking place at the time ; and their radiated structure testifies to that law of crystalline attraction, through which, by a wonderful masonry, the invisible but well-cut atoms build up their cubes, their rhombs, their hexagons, and their pyramids, and are at once the architects and the materials of the structure which they rear. Another and very different chemical effect of organic mat- ter may be remarked in the darker colored arenaceous de- posits of the formation, and occasionally in the stratified clays and nodules of the ichthyolite bed. In a print-work, the whole web is frequently thrown into the vat and dyed of one color ; but there afterwards comes a discharging process : 20* 234 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. some chemical mixture is dropped on the fabric ; the dye disappears wherever the mixture touches ; and in leaves, and sprigs, and patches, according to the printer's pattern, the cloth assumes its original white. Now the colored deposits of the Old Red Sandstone have, in like manner, been subject- ed to a discharging process. The dye has disappeared in oblong or circular patches of various sizes, from the eighth of an inch to a foot in diameter ; the original white has taken its place ; and so thickly are these speckles grouped in some of the darker-tinted beds, that the surfaces, where washed by the sea, present the appearance of sheets of cal- ico. The discharging agent was organic matter; the uncol- ored patches are no mere surface films, for, when cut at right angles, their depth is found to correspond with their breadth, the circle is a sphere, the ellipsis forms the section of an egg- shaped body, and in the centre of each we generally find traces of the organism in whose decay it originated. I have repeatedly found single scales, in the ichthyolite beds, sur- rounded by uncolored spheres about the size of musket bul- lets. It is well for the young geologist carefully to mark such appearances — to trace them through the various in- stances in which the organism may be recognized and iden- tified, to those in which its last vestiges have disappeared. They are the hatchments of the geological world, and indi- cate that life once existed where all other record of it has perished.* * Some of tlie 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 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 235 It is the part of the chemist to tell us by what peculiar ac- tion of the organic matter the dye was discharged in these spots and patches. But how was the dye itself procured ? From what source was the immense amount of iron derived, which gives to nearly five sixths of the Old Red Sandstone the characteristic color to which it owes its name ? An ex- amination of its lowest member, the great conglomerate, suggests a solution of the query. I have adverted to the large proportion of red-colored pebbles which this member con- Old Red Sandstone remarked by Professor Fleming as early as the year 1830, and the remark reiterated by Dr. Anderson, of Newburgh, in nearly the same* words,, but with no acknowledgment, ten years later. The following is the minute and singularly faithful description of the Professor : — " On the surface of the strata in the lower beds, circular spots, nearly a foot in diameter, may be readily perceived by their pale yel- low colors, contrasted with the dark red of the surrounding rock. These spots, however, are not, as may at first be supposed, mere su- perficial films, but derive their circular form from a colored sphere to which they belong. This sphere is not to be distinguished from the rest of the bed by any difference in mechanical structure, but merely by the absence of much of that oxide of iron with which the other portion of the mass is charged. The circumference of this colored sphere is usually well defined ; and at its centre may always be ob- served matter of a darker color, in some cases disposed in concentric layers, in others of calcareous and crystalline matter, the remains probably of some vegetable or animal organism, the decomposition of which exercised a limited influence on the coloring matter of the sur- rounding rock. In some cases 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 con- traction of the mass, after the central matter or nucleus had ceased to exercise its influence." — {Cheek's Edinburgh Journal, J? eh. 1831, p. 82.) 236 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. tains, 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 ex- tended from at least the times of the Lower Old Red to those of the Upper Oolite, was again thrust upwards to the surface, to form the rectilinear .chain of precipitous eminences to which the hills of Cromarty and of Nigg belong. This rock is now almost the sole representative, in the north of Scot- land, of the ancient rocks whence the materials of the Old Red Sandstone were derived. It abounds in haematic iron ore, diffused as a component of the stone throughout the entire mass, and which also occurs in it in ponderous insulated blocks of great richness, and in thin, thread-like veins. When ground down, it forms a deep red pigment, undistin- guishable in tint from the prevailing color of the sandstone, and which leaves a stain so difficult to be effaced, that shep- herds employ it in some parts of the Highlands for marking their sheep. Every rawer fragment of the rock bears its hsematic tinge ; and were the whole ground by some mechan- ical process into sand, and again consolidated, the produce of the experiment w T ould be undoubtedly a deep red sand- stone. In an upper member of the lower formation — that immediately over the ichthyolite beds — different materials seem to have been employed. A white, quartzy sand and a pale-colored clay form the chief ingredients ; and though the ochry-tinted coloring matter be also iron, it is iron existing in a different condition, and in a more diluted form. The oxide deposited by the chalybeate springs which pass through the lower members of the formation, would give to white sand a tinge exactly resembling the tint borne by this upper member. The passage of metals from lower to higher formations, THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 237 and from one combination to another, constitutes surely a highly interesting subject of inquiry. The transmission of iron in a chemical form, through chalybeate springs, from deposits in which it had been diffused in a form merely me- chanical, is of itself curious ; but how much more so its pas- sage and subsequent accumulation, as in bog-iron and the iron of the Coal Measures, through the agency of vegetation ! How strange, if the steel axe of the woodman should have once formed part of an ancient forest ! — if, after first exist- ing as a solid mass in a primary rock, it should next have come to be diffused as a red pigment in a transition conglom- erate — then as a brown oxide in a chalybeate spring — then as a yellowish ochre in a secondary sandstone — then as a component part in the stems and twigs of a thick forest of arboraceous plants — then again as an iron carbonate, slowly accumulating at the bottom of a morass of the Coal Meas- ures — then as a layer of indurated bands and nodules of brown ore, underlying a seam of coal — and then, finally, that it should have been dug out, and smelted, and fashioned, and employed for the purpose of handicraft, and yet occupy, even at this stage, merely a middle place between the trans- migrations which have passed, and the changes which are yet to come. Crystals of galena sometimes occur in the nodu- lar limestones of the Old Red Sandstone ; but I am afraid the chemist would find it difficult to fix their probable genealogy. In at least one respect, every geological history must of necessity be unsatisfactory ; and, ere I pass to the history of the two upper formations of the system, the reader must per- mit me to remind him of it. There have been individuals, it has been said, who, though they could see clearly the forms of objects, wanted, through some strange organic defect, the 238 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. faculty of perceiving their distinguishing colors, however well marked these might be. The petals of the rose have appeared to them of the same sombre hue with its stalk ; and they have regarded the ripe scarlet cherry as undistinguisha- ble in tint from the green leaves under which it hung. The face of nature to such men must have for ever rested under a cloud ; and a cloud of similar character hangs over the pic- torial restorations of the geologist. The history of this and the last chapter is a mere profile drawn in black, an outline without color — in short, such a chronicle of past ages as might be reconstructed, in the lack of other and ampler ma- terials, from tombstones and charnel-houses. I have had to draw the portrait from the skeleton. My specimens show the general form of the creatures I attempt to describe, and not a few of their more marked peculiarities ; but many of the nicer elegancies are wanting ; and the " complexion to which they have come " leaves no trace by which to discover the complexion they originally bore. And yet color is a mighty matter to the ichthyologist. The " fins and shining scales," " the waved coats, dropt with gold," the rainbow dyes of beauty of the watery tribes, are connected often with more than mere external character. It is a curious and in- teresting fact, that the hues of splendor in which they are bedecked are, in some instances, as intimately associated with their instincts — with their feelings, if I may so speak — as the blush which suffuses the human countenance is asso- ciated with the sense of shame, or its tint of ashy paleness or of sallow with emotions of rage, or feelings of a panic ter- ror. Pain and triumph have each their index of color among the mute inhabitants of our seas and rivers. Poets themselves have bewailed the utter inadequacy of words to describe the varying tints and shades of beauty with which the agonies of THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 239 death dye the scales of the dolphin, and how every various pang calls up a various suffusion of splendor.* Even the common stickleback of our ponds and ditches can put on its colors to picture its emotions. There is, it seems, a mighty amount of ambition, and a vast deal of fighting sheerly for conquests' sake, among the myriads of this pygmy little fish * The description of Falconer must be familiar to every reader, but I cannot resist quoting it. It shows how minutely the sailor poet must have observed. Byron tells us how "Parting day Dies like the dolphin, whom each pang imbues "With a new color, as it gasps away, The last still loveliest, till — tis gone, and all is gray." Falconer, in anticipating, reversed the simile. The huge animal, struck by the " unerring barb " of Rodmond, has been drawn on board, and *' On deck he struggles with convulsive pain ; But while his heart the fatal javelin thrills, And flitting life escapes in sanguine rills, What radiant changes strike the astonished sight ! What glowing hues of mingled shade and light ! Not equal beauties gild the lucid West With parting beams o'er all profusely drest ; Not lovelier colors paint the vernal dawn, When Orient dews impearl the enamelled lawn ; Than from his sides in bright suffusion flow, That now with gold empyreal seem to glow ; Now in pellucid sapphires meet the view, And emulate the soft celestial hue ; Now beam a flaming crimson on the eye, And now assume the purple's deeper dye. But here description clouds each shining ray — What terms of art can Nature's powers display ? " 240 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. which inhabit our smaller streams ; and no sooner does an individual succeed in expelling his weaker companions from some eighteen inches or two feet of territory, than straight ^ way the exultation of conquest converts the faded and freckled olive of his back and sides into a glow of crimson and bright green. Nature furnishes him with a regal robe for the occasion. Immediately on his deposition, however, — and events of this kind are even more common under than out of the water, — his gay colors disappear, and he sinks into his original and native ugliness.* But of color, as I have said, though thus important, the ichthyologist can learn almost nothing from Geology. The perfect restoration of even a Cuvier are blank outlines. We just know by a wonderful accident that the Siberian ele- phant was red. A very few of the original tints still remain among the fossils of our north country Lias. The ammonite, * "In the Magazine of Natural History" says Captain Brown, in one of his notes to White's Se^orne, " we have a curious account of the pugnacious propensities of these little animals. ' Having at vari- ous times/ says a correspondent, ' kept these little fish during the spring and part of the summer months, and paid close attention to their habits. I am enabled from my own experience to vouch for the facts I am about to relate. I have frequently kept them in a deal tub, about three feet two inches wide, and about two feet deep. When they are put in for some time, probably a day or two, they swim about in a shoal, apparent- ly exploring their new habitation. Suddenly one will take possession of the tub, or, as it will sometimes happen, the bottom, and will instant- ly commence an attack upon his companions ; and if any of them venture to oppose his sway, a regular and most furious battle ensues. They swim round and round each other with the greatest rapidity, biting, (their mouths being well furnished with teeth,) and endeavor- ing to pierce each other with their lateral spines, which, on this occa- sion, are projected. I have witnessed a battle of this sort which lasted THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 241 when struck fresh from the surrounding lime, reflects the pris- matic colors, as of old ; a huge Modiola still retains its tinge of tawny and yellow; and the fossilized wood of the forma- tion preserves a shade of the native tint, though darkened into brown. But there is considerably less of color in the fossils of the Old Red Sandstone. I have caught, and barely caught, in some of the newly disinterred specimens, the faint and evanescent reflection of a tinge of pearl ; and were I ac- quainted with my own collection only, imagination, borrowing from the prevailing color, would be apt to people the ancient oceans, in which its forms existed, with swarthy races exclu- sively. But a view of the Altyre fossils would correct the impression. They are enclosed, like those of Cromarty, in nodules of an argillaceous limestone. The color, however, from the presence of iron, and the absence of bitumen, is different. It presents a mixture of gray, of pink, and of several minutes before either would give way ; and when one does submit, imagination can hardly conceive the vindictive fury of the conqueror, who, in the most persevering and unrelenting way, chases his rival from one part of the tub to another, until fairly exhausted with fatigue. From this period an interesting change takes place in the conqueror, who, from being a speckled and greenish-looking fish, assumes the most beautiful colors ; the belly and lower jaws becoming a deep crimson, and the back sometimes a cream color, but gener- ally a fine green, and the whole appearance full of animation and spirit. I have occasionally known three or four parts of the tub taken possession of by these little tyrants, who guard their ter- ritories with the strictest vigilance, and the slightest invasion brings on invariably a battle. A strange alteration immediately takes place in the defeated party : his gallant bearing forsakes him, his gay colors fade away, he becomes again speckled and ugly, and he hides his disgrace among his peaceable compan- ions. ' " 21 242 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. brown ; and on this ground the fossil is spread out in strongly contrasted masses of white and dark red, of blue, and of pur- ple. Where the exuviae lie thickest, the white appears tinged with delicate blue — the bone is but little changed. Where they are spread out more thinly, the iron has pervaded them, and the purple and deep red prevail. Thus the same ich- thyolite presents, in some specimens, a body of white and plum-blue attached to fins of deep red, and with detached scales of red and of purple lying scattered around it. I need hardly add, however, that all this variety of coloring is, like the unvaried black of the Cromarty specimens, the result, merely, of a curious chemistry. THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 243 CHAPTER XIV. The Cornstone Formation and its Organisms. — Dwarf Vegetation. — Cephalaspides. — Huge Lobster. — Habitats of the existing Crusta- cea. — No unapt representation of the Deposit of Balruddery, fur- nished by a land-locked Bay in the neighborhood of Cromarty. — Vast Space occupied by the Geological Formations. — Contrasted with the half-formed Deposits which represent the existing Crea- tion. — Inference. — The formation of the lloloptychius. — Probable origin of its Siliceous Limestone. — Marked increase in the Bulk of the Existences of the System. — Conjectural Cause. — The Coal Measures. — The Limestone of Burdie House Conclusion. The curtain rises, and the scene is new. The myriads of the lower formation have disappeared, and we are surrounded, on an upper platform, by the existences of a later creation. There is sea all around, as before ; and we find beneath a dark-colored, muddy bottom, thickly covered by a dwarf vege- tation. The circumstances 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 Cephalas- pides, with their broad, arrow-like heads, and their slender, angular bodies, feathered with fins, sweep past like clouds of crossbow bolts in an ancient battle. We see the distant gleam of scales, but the forms are indistinct and dim : we can merely ascertain that the fins are elevated by spines of vari- ous shape and pattern ; that of some the coats glitter with enamel ; and that others — the sharks of this ancient period — bristle over with minute thorny points. A huge crustacean, of uncouth proportions, stalks over the weedy bottom, or bur- rows in the hollows of the banks. 244 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. Let us attempt bringing our knowledge of the present to bear upon the past. The larger Crustacea: of the British seas abound most on iron-bound coasts, where they find sheltering places in the deeper fisures of sea-cliffs covered up by kelp and tangle, or under the lower edges of detached boulders, that rest unequally on uneven platforms of rock, amid for- ests of the rough-stemmed cuvy. We may traverse sandy or muddy shores for miles together, without 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 man- ner, w r e may find the ancient Modiola of the Lias in habitats analogous to those of its modern representative the muscle, and the cncrinite 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 ? THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 245 Quite the reverse. Mark how thickly these carbonaceous impressions cover the muddy-colored and fissile sandstones of the formation, giving evidence of an abundant vegetation. We may learn 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 proxim- ity of the neighboring shores. The bottom, at low ebb, pre- sents a level plain of sand, so thickly covered by the green grass-weed of our more sheltered sandy bays and estuaries, 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 ap- proaching to black than even the dark gray mudstones of Balruddery. Nor is this the only effect : the intertwisted fibres impart to it such coherence, that, where scooped out into pools, the edges stand up perpendicular from the water, like banks of clay ; and where these are hollowed into cave- like recesses, — and there are few of them that are not so hollowed, — the recesses remain unbroken and unfilled for years. The weeds have imparted to the sand a character different from its own, and have rendered it a suitable hab- itat for numerous tribes, which, in other circumstances, would have found no shelter in it. Now, among these we find in abundance the larger crustaceans of our coasts. The brown edible crab harbors in the hollows beside the pools ; occasion- ally we may find in them an overgrown lobster, studded with 21* 246 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. parasitical shells and zoophytes — proof that the creature, having attained its full size, has ceased to cast its plated cov- ering. Crustaceans of the smaller varieties abound. Her- mit crabs traverse the pools, or creep among the weed ; the dark green and the dingy, hump- backed crabs occur nearly as frequently ; the radiata cover the banks by thousands. We find occasionally the remains of dead fish left by the re- treating tide ; but the living are much more numerous than the dead ; for the sand-eel has suffered the water to retire, and yet remained behind in its burrow ; and the viviparous blenny and common gunnel still shelter beside their fuci- covered masses of rock. Imagine the bottom of this little bay covered up by thick beds of sand and gravel, and the whole consolidated into stone, and we have in it all the conditions of the deposit of Balruddery — a mud-colored, arenaceous deposit, abounding in vegetable impressions, and enclosing numerous remains of crustaceans, fish, and radiata, as its characteristic organisms of the animal kingdom. There would be but one circumstance of difference : the little bay abounds in shells ; whereas no shells have yet been found in the mudstones of Balruddery, or the gray sandstones of the same formation, which in Forfar, Fife, and Moray shires represent the Cornstone division of the system. Ages and centuries passed, but who can sum up their num- ber ? In England, the depth of this middle formation greatly exceeds that of any of the other two ; in Scotland, it is much less amply developed ; but in either country it must rep- resent periods of scarce conceivable extent. I have listened to the controversies of opposite schools of geologists, who, from the earth's strata, extract registers of the earth's age of an amount amazingly different. One class, regarding the geological field as if under the influence of those principles THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 247 of perspective which give to the cottage in front more than the bulk and altitude of the mountain behind, would assign to the present scene of things its thousands of years, but to all the extinct periods united merely their few centuries ; while with their opponents, the remoter periods stretch out far into the bygone eternity, and the present scene seems but a nar- row strip running along the foreground. ' Both classes appeal to facts ; and, leaving them to their disputes, I have gone out to examine and judge for myself. The better to compare the present with the past, I have regarded the existing scene merely as a formation — not as superficies, but as depth; and have sought to ascertain the extent to which, in different localities, and under different circumstances, it has overlaid the surface. The slopes of an ancient forest incline towards a river that flows sluggishly onwards through a deep alluvial plain, once an extensive lake. A recent landslip has opened up one of the hanging thickets. Uprooted trees, mingled with bushes, lie at the foot of the slope, half buried in broken masses of turf ; and we see above a section of the soil, from the line of vegetation to the bare rock. There is an under belt of clay, and an upper belt of gravel, neither of which contains any thing organic ; and overtopping the whole we may see a dark- colored bar of mould, barely a foot in thickness, studded with stumps and interlaced with roots. Mark that narrow bar : it is the geological representative of six thousand years. A stony bar of similar appearance runs through the strata of the Wealden : it, too, has its dingy color, its stumps, and its interlacing roots ; but it forms only a very inconsiderable portion of one of the least considerable of all the formations ; and yet who shall venture to say that it does not represent a period as extended as that represented by the dark bar in the 248 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. ancient forest, seeing there is not a circumstance of difference between them ? We descend to the river side. The incessant action of the current has worn a deep channel through the leaden-colored silt ; the banks stand up perpendicularly over the water, and downwards, for twenty feet together, — for such is the depth of the deposit, — we may trace layer after layer of reeds, and flags, and fragments of driftwood, and find here and there a few fresh- water shells of the existing species. In this locality, six thousand years are represented by twenty feet. The depth of the various fossiliferous formations united is at least fifteen hundred times as great. We pursue our walk, and pass through a morass. Three tiers of forest trees appear in the section laid open by the stream, the one above the other. Overlying these there is a congeries of the remains of aquatic plants, which must have grown and decayed on the spot for many ages after the soil had so changed that trees could be produced by it no longer; and over the whole there occur layers of mosses, that must have found root on the surface after the waters had been drained away by the deepening channel of the river. The six thousand years are here represented by that morass, its three succeeding forests, its beds of aquatic vegetation, its bands of moss, and the thin stratum of soil which overlies the whole. Well, but it forms, notwithstanding, only the mere beginning of a formation. Pile up twenty such mo- rasses, the one over the other ; separate them by a hundred such bands of alluvial silt as we have just examined a little higher up the stream ; throw in some forty or fifty thick beds of sand to swell the amount ; and the whole together will but barely equal the Coal Measures, one of many formations. But the marine deposits of the present creation have been, THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 249 perhaps, accumulating more rapidly than those of our lakes, forests, or rivers ? Yes, unquestionably, in friths and estua- ries, in the neighborhood of streams that drain vast tracts of country, and roll down the soil and clay swept by the winter rains from thousands of hill-sides ; but what is there to lead to the formation of sudden deposits in those profounder depths of the sea, in which the water retains its blue transparency all the year round, let the waves rise as they may ? And 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 flour- ished for ages : do we not find their remains crowded into a few streets of sepulchres ? 'Tis but a thin layer of soil that covers the ancient plain of Marathon. I have stood on Ban- nockburn, and seen no trace of the battle. In what lower stratum shall we set ourselves to discover the skeletons of the wolves and bears that once infested our forests ? Where shall we find accumulations of the remains of the wild bisons and gigantic elks, their contemporaries ? They must have existed for but comparatively a short period, or they would surely have left more marked traces behind them. When we appeal to the historians, we hear much of a re- mote antiquity in the history of man : a more than twilight gloom pervades the earlier periods ; and the distances are exaggerated, as objects appear large in a fog. We measure, 250 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. too, by a minute scale. There is a tacit reference to the threescore and ten years of human life ; and its term of a day appears long to the ephemera. We turn from the histo- rians to the prophets, and find the dissimilarity of style indi- cating a different speaker. EzekiePs measuring-reed is grad- uated into cubits of the temple. The vast periods of the short-lived historian dwindled down into weeks and days. Seventy weeks indicated to Daniel, in the first year of Darius, the time of the Messiah's coming. Three years and a half limit the term of the Mohammedan delusion. Seventeen years have not yet gone by since Adam first arose from the mould ; nor has the race, as such, attained to the maturity of even early manhood. But while prophecy sums up merely weeks and days, when it refers to the past, it looks forward into the future, and speaks of a thousand years. Are scales of unequally graduated parts ever used in measuring different portions of the same map or section — scales so very une- qually graduated, that, while the parts in some places expand to the natural size, they are in others more than three hun- dred times diminished ? If not, — for what save inextricable confusion would result from their use, — how avoid the con- clusion, that the typical scale employed in the same book by the same prophet represents similar quantities by correspond- ing parts, whether applied to times of outrage, delusion, and calamity, or set off against that long and happy period in which the spirit of evil shall be bound in chains and dark- ness, and the kingdom of Christ shall have come ? And if such be the case — if each single year of the thousand years of the future represents a term as extended as each single year of the seventeen years of the past — if the present scene of things be thus merely in its beginning — should we at all wonder to find that the formation which represents it has laid down merely its few first strata ? THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 251 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 Ptericlithys spreads out its spear-like wings at every alarm, like its predecessors of the lower formation ; shoals of fish of a type more common, but still unnamed and unde- scribed, sport amid the eddies ; and we may see attached to the rocks below substances of uncouth form and doubtful structure, with which the oryctologist has still to acquaint himself. The depositions of this upper ocean are of a mixed character : the beds are less uniform and continuous than at a greater depth. In some places they consist exclusively of sand- stone, in others of conglomerate ; and yet the sandstone and conglomerate seem, from their frequent occurrence on the same platform, to have been formed simultaneously. The transporting and depositing agents must have become more partial in their action than during the earlier period. They had their foci of strength and their circumferences of com- parative weakness ; and while the heavier pebbles which composed the conglomerate were in the course of being de- posited in the foci, the lighter sand which composes the sand- stone was settling in those outer skirts by which the foci were surrounded. At this stage, too, there are unequivocal marks, in the northern localities, of extensive denudation. The older strata are cut away in some places to a considerable depth, and newer strata of the same formation deposited unconforma- bly over them. There must have been partial upheavings and depressions, corresponding with the partial character of 252 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. the depositions ; and, as a necessary consequence, frequent shiftings of currents. The ocean, too, seems to have les- sened its general depth, and the bottom to have lain more ex- posed to the influence of the waves. And hence one cause, added to the porous nature of the matrix, and the diffused oxide, of the detached, and, if I may so express myself, churchyard character of its organisms. Above the blended conglomerates and sandstones of this band a deposition of lime took place. Thermal springs, charged with calcareous matter slightly mixed with silex, seem to have abounded, during the period which it represents, over widely-extended areas ; and hence, probably, its origin. An increase of heat from beneath, through some new activity imparted to the Plutonic agencies, would be of itself sufficient to account for the formation. 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, how- ever, the case was different. The agency of heat was brought to operate upon these ; and their sides and bottoms were covered, in consequence, with a thick crust of lime. Now, we have but to apply the simple principles on which such phenomena occur, to account for widely-spread precipi- tates of the same earth by either springs or seas, which at a lower temperature would have been active in the forma- tion of mechanical deposits alone. The temperature sunk gradually to its former state ; the purely chemical deposit ceased ; the waters became populous as before with animals of the same character and appearance as those of the up- per conglomerate ; and layer after layer of yellow sand- stone, to the depth of several hundred feet, were formed as THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 253 the period passed. With this upper deposit the system terminated. Though fish still remained the lords of creation, and fish of apparently no superior order to those with which .the ver- tebrata began at least three formations earlier, they had mightily advanced in one striking particular. If their organ- ization was in no degree more perfect than at first, their bulk at least had become immensely more great. The period had gone by in which a mediocrity of dimension characterized the existences of the ancient oceans, and fish armed offen- sively and defensively with scales and teeth scarcely inferior in size to the scales and teeth of the gavial or the alligator, sprung into existence. It must have been a large jaw and a large head that contained, doubtless among many others, a tooth an inch in diameter at the base. I may remark, in the passing, that most of the teeth found in the several forma- tions of the system are not instruments of mastication, but, like those in most of the existing fish, mere hooks for penetrating slippery substances, and thus holding them fast. The rude angler who first fashioned a crooked bone, or a bit of native silver or copper, into a hook, might have found his invention anticipated in the jaws of the first fish he drew ashore by its means ; and we find the hook structure as com- plete in the earlier ichthyolites of the Old Red Sandstone as in the fish that exist now. The evidence of the geologist is of necessity circumstantial evidence, and he need look for none other ; but it is interesting to observe how directly the separate facts bear, in many examples, on one and the same point. The hooked and slender teeth tell exactly the same story with the undigested scales in the foecal remains alluded to in an early chapter. In what could this increase in bulk have originated ? Is there a high but yet comparatively medium temperature in 22 254 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. which animals attain their greatest size, and corresponding gradations of descent on both sides, whether we increase the heat until we reach the point at which life can no longer exist, or diminish it until we arrive at the same result from intensity of cold ? The line of existence bisects on both sides the line of extinction. May it not probably form a curve, descending equally from an elevated centre to the points of bisection on the level of death ? But whatever may have been the cause, the change furnishes another instance of analogy between the progress of individuals and of orders. The shark and the sword-fish begin to exist as little creatures of a span in length ; they expand into monsters whose bodies equal in hugeness the trunks of ancient oaks ; and thus has it been with the order to which they belong. The teeth, spines, and palatal bones of the fish of the Upper Ludlow Rocks are of almost 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 sys- tem ushers in the still bulkier Megalichthys ; and low in the Coal Measures we find the ponderous bones, buckler-like scales, and enormons teeth of another and immensely more gigantic Holoptychius — a creature pronounced by Agassiz the largest of all osseous fish.* We begin with an age of dwarfs — we end with an age of giants. The march of Nature is an onward and an ascending march ; the stages are slow, but the tread is stately ; and to Him who has commanded, * There have been fish scales found in Burdie House five inches in length, by rather more than four in breadth. Of the gigantic Holop- tychius of this deposit we have still much to learn. The fragment of a jaw, in the possession of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, which THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 255 and who overlooks it, a thousand years are as but a single day, and a single day as a thousand years.* We have entered the Coal Measures. For seven forma- tions together — from the Lower Silurian to the Upper Old Red Sandstone — our course has lain over oceans without a visible shore, though, like Columbus, in his voyage of dis- covery, we have now and then found a little floating weed, to indicate the approaching coast. The water is fast shallow- ing. Yonder passes a broken branch, with the leaves still unwithered ; and there floats a tuft of fern. Land, from the mast-head ! land ! land ! — a low shore, thickly covered with vegetation. Huge trees, of wonderful form, stand out far into the water. There seems no intervening beach. A thick hedge of reeds, tall as the masts of pinnaces, runs along the deeper bays, like water-flags at the edge of a lake. A river of vast volume comes rolling from the interior, darkening the water for leagues with its slime and mud, and bearing with it, to the open sea, reeds, and fern, and cones of the pine, and immense floats of leaves, and now and then some bulky tree, undermined and uprooted by the current. We near the coast, and now enter the opening of the stream. A scarce penetrable phalanx of reeds, that attain to the height and well nigh the bulk of forest trees, is ranged on either hand. The bright and glossy stems seem rodded like Gothic col- umns ; the pointed leaves stand out green at every joint, tier above tier, each tier resembling a coronal wreath or an an- cient crown, with the rays turned outwards ; and we see a-top belonged to an individual of the species, is 18i 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. * See, on this subject, the introductory note to the present edition, and note p. 154. 256 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. what may be either large spikes or catkins. What strange forms of vegetable life appear in the forest behind ! Can that be a club-moss that raises its slender height for more than fifty feet from the soil ? Or can these tall, palm-like trees be actually ferns, and these spreading branches mere fronds ? And then these gigantic reeds ! — are they not mere varieties of the common horse-tail of our bogs and mo- rasses, magnified some sixty or a hundred times? Have we arrived at some such country as the continent visited by Gulli- ver, in which he found thickets of weeds and grass tall as woods of twenty years' growth, and lost himself amid a forest of corn, fifty feet in height? The lesser vegetation of our own country, reeds, mosses, and ferns, seems here as if viewed through a microscope : the dwarfs have sprung up into giants, and yet there appears to be no proportional increase in size among what are unequivocally its trees. Yonder is a group of what seem to be pines — tall and bulky, 'tis true, but neither taller nor bulkier than the pines of Norway and America ; and the club-moss behind shoots up its green, hairy arms, loaded with what seems catkins above their top- most cones. But what monster of the vegetable world comes floating down the stream — now circling round in the eddies, now dancing on the ripple, now shooting down the rapid ? It resembles a gigantic star-fish, or an immense coach-wheel, divested of the rim. There is a green, dome-like mass in the centre, that corresponds to the nave of the wheel, or the body of the star-fish ; and the boughs shoot out horizontally on every side, like spokes from the nave, or rays from the central body. The diameter considerably exceeds forty feet ; the branches, originally of a deep green, are assuming the golden tinge of decay ; the cylindrical and hollow leaves stand out thick on every side, like prickles of the wild rose on the red, fleshy, lance-like shoots of a year's growth, that will THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 257 be covered, two seasons hence, with flowers and fruit. That strangely formed organism presents no existing type among all the numerous families of the vegetable kingdom. There is an amazing luxuriance of growth all around us. Scarce can the current make way through the thickets of aquatic plants that rise thick from the muddy bottom ; and though the sunshine falls bright on the upper boughs of the tangled forest beyond, not a ray penetrates the more than twilight gloom that broods over the marshy platform below. The rank steam of decaying vegetation forms a thick blue haze, that partially obscures the underwood ; deadly lakes of car- bonic acid gas have accumulated in the hollows ; there is silence all around, uninterrupted save by the sudden splash of some reptile fish that has risen to the surface in pursuit of its prey, or when a sudden breeze stirs the hot air, and shakes the fronds of the giant ferns or the catkins of the reeds. The wide continent before us is a continent devoid of animal life, save that its pools and rivers abound in fish and mollus- ca, and that millions and tens of millions of the infusory tribes swarm in the bogs and marshes. Here and there, too, an insect of strange form flutters among the leaves. It is more than probable that no creature furnished with lungs of the more perfect construction could have breathed the at- mosphere of this early period, and have lived. Doubts have been entertained whether the limestone of Burdie House belongs to the Upper Old Red Sandstone or to the inferior Coal Measures. And the fact may yet come to be quoted as a very direct proof of the ignorance which ob- tained regarding the fossils of the older formation, at a time when the organisms of most of the other formations, both above and below it, had been carefully explored. The Lime- stone of Burdie House is unequivocally and most character- istically a Coal Measure limestone. It abounds in vegetable 22* 258 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. remains of terrestrial or lacustrine growth, and these, too, the vegetables common to the Coal Measures — ferns, reeds, and club-mosses. One can scarce detach a fragment from the mass, that has not its leaflet or seed-cone enclosed, and in a state of such perfect preservation, that there can be no possibility of mistaking its character. If in reality a marine deposit, it must have been formed in the immediate neighbor- hood of a land covered with vegetation. The dove set loose by Noah bore not back with it a less equivocal sign that the waters had abated. Now, in the Upper Old Red Sandstone none of these plants occur. The deposit is exclusively an ocean deposit, and the remains in Scotland, until we arrive at its inferior and middle formations, are exclusively animal re- mains. Its upper member, " the yellow sandstone," says Dr. Anderson, of Newburgh, " does not exhibit a single particle of carbonaceous matter — no trace or film of a branch hav- ing been detected in it, though, if such in reality existed, there are not wanting opportunities of obtaining specimens in some one of the twenty or thirty quarries which have been opened in the county of Fife in this deposit alone." No two bordering formations in the geological scale have their boun- daries better defined by the character of their fossils than the Old Red Sandstone and the Coal Measures. We pursue our history no further. Its after course is com- paratively well known. The huge sauroid fish was succeed- ed by the equally huge reptile — the reptile by the bird — the bird by the marsupial quadruped ; and at length, after races higher in the scale of instinct had taken precedence in succession, the one of the other, the sagacious elephant ap- peared, as the lord of that latest creation which immediately preceded our own. How natural does the thought seem which suggested itself to the profound mind of Cuvier, when indulging in a similar review ! Has the last scene in the THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 259 series arisen, or has Deity expended his infinitude of resource, and reached the ultimate stage of progression at which per- fection can arrive ? The philosopher hesitated, and then de- cided in the negative, for he was too intimately acquainted with the works of the Omnipotent Creator to think of limit- ing his power; and he could, therefore, anticipate a coming period in which man would have to resign his post of honor to some nobler and wiser creature — the monarch of a better and happier world. How well it is, to be permitted to indulge in the expansion of Cuvier's thought, without sharing in the melancholy of Cuvier's feeling — to be enabled to look for- ward to the coming of a new heaven and a new earth, not in terror, but in hope — to be encouraged to believe in the sys- tem of unending progression, but to entertain no fear of the degradation or deposition of man ! The adorable Monarch of the future, with all its unsummed perfection, has already passed into the heavens, flesh of our flesh, and bone of our bone, and Enoch and Elias are there with him — fit repre- sentatives of that dominant race, which no other race shall ever supplant or succeed, and to whose onward and upward march the deep echoes of eternity shall never cease to respond. 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 immedi- ately under the names of the determined species. Acanthodes pusillus. Actinolepis tuberculatus. Asterolepis Asmusii. — Syn. ChelonicJithys Asmasii, " apicalis. " granulata. " Hceninghausii. " Malcolmsoni. 1 minor. — Syn. ChelonichtJiys minor* " ornata. " speciosa. " concatenatus. u depressiis. Bothriolepis favosa. — Syn. Ghjptosteus favosits. " ornata " " reticulatus Byssacanthus arcuatus. " crenulatus. " locvis. Cephalaspis Lewisii. " Lloydii. " LyeUii. *' rostratus. 262 ICHTHYOLITES OF THE Cheir acanthus microlepidotus. " minor. " Murchisoni. Cheirolepis Cummingise. " Traillii. " Uragus. " splendens. w unilateralis . Chelyophorus pustulatns. M Yerneuilii. Cladodus simplex. Climatius reticulatus. Coccosteus cuspidatus. " decipiens. — Syn. latus. " maximus. " oblongus. Cosmacanthus Malcolmsoni. Cricodus incurvus. — Syn. Dendrodus incurvus* Ctenacanthus ornatus. " serrulatus. Ctenodus Keyserlingii. '* margin alis. " parvulus. " Worthii. " radiatus. " serratus. Ctenoptychius priscus. Dendrodus latus. " minor. " sigmoides. " strigatus. " tenuistriatus. Diplacarithus crassispinus. " longispinus. " striatulus. " striatus. Diplopterus affinis. OLD RED SANDSTONE. 263 Diploptems borealis. — Syn. Agassizii. " macrocephalus. Dipterus macrolepidotus. " arenaceas. " brachypygopierus. u macropygopterus. " Valenciennesii. Glyptolepis elegans. (i leptopterus. " microlepidotus. Glyptopomus minor. — Syn. Platygnathus minor. Haplacanthus marginalis. Holoptychius Andersoni. t " Fleniingii. " giganteus. " Murchisoni. " nobilissimus. " Omaliusii. Homacanthus arcuatus. Hemothorax Flemingii. Lamnodus biporcatus. — Syn. Dendrodus biporcatus. " hastatus. — Syn. Panderi. Dendrodus hastatus, compressus. " sulcatus. Narcodes pustilifer. N aulas sulcatus. Odontacanthus crenatus. — Syn. Ctenoptychius crenatus. " heterodon. Onchus heterogyrus. " semistriatus. " sublsevis. Osteolepis arenatus. " macrolepidotus " major. " microlepidotus. " intermedins. " nanus. Pamphr actus Andersoni. 288 ICHTHYOLITES OF THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. Pamphr actus hydrophilus. — Syn. Pierichthys hydrophihis, Parexus rccurvus. Phyllolepis concentricus. Placothorax paradoxus. Platygnathus JamesonL " paucidens. Polyphractus platycephalus. • Psammosteus arenatus. — Syn. Placosteus arenatus. " mseandrinus. " " mceandrinus. «' paradoxus. " Psammolepis paradoxus. " undulatus. " Placosteus undulatus. Pterichthys arenatus. " cancriformis. 11 cornutus. " major. " Milleri. " latus. " oblongus. u productus. " testudinarius. Ptychacanthus dubius. Stagonolepis Robertsoni. THE END. ANNUAL OP SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. NOTICES OF THE PRESS. " Nothing which has transpired in the scientific world during the pas! year, seems to have escaped the attention of the industrious editors. We do not b ,o pronounce the work a highly valuable one to the man of Science." — Boston Js. "This is a highly valuable work. We have here brought • ' 1 in a volume of mode- rate size, «*J1 the leading discoveries and inventions whic: ve distinguished the past year. Like the hand on the dial-plate, 'it marks the pi ogress of the age.' The plan has our wannest wishes for its eminent success." — Ckv'sivip. rimes. " A most acceptable volume." — Transcript. "The work will prove of unusual interest and value." — Traveller. " We have in our possession the ledger of progress for 1849, exhibiting to us in a con- densed form, the operations of the world in some of the highest business transactions. To say that its execution has been worthy of its aim is praise sufficient." — Springfield Re- publican. "To the artist, the artisan, the man of letters, it is indispensable, and the general reader will find in its pages much valuable material which he may look for elsewhere in vain." — B:ston Herald. M We commend it as a standard book of reference and general information, by those who are so fortunate as to possess it." — Saturday Rambler. " A body of useful knowledge, indispensable to every man who desires to keep up with the progress of modern discovery and invention."— Boston Courier. " Must be a most acceptable volume to every one, and greatly facilitate the diffusion of useful knowledge." — Zioitfs Herald. "A nost valuable and interesting popular work of science and art." — Washington Na- tional hit el lig oncer. " A lich collection of facts, and one which will bo eagerly read. The amount of informa- tion contained within its pages is very large." — Evening Gazette. "Such a key to the progress and facts of scientific discovery will be everywhere wel- comed." — Neio York Commercial Advertiser. "A most valuable, complete, and comprehensive summary of the existing facts of sci- ence ; it is replete with interest, and ought to have a place in every well appointed li- brary." — Worcester Spy. " We commend it to all who wish what has just been found out ; to all who would like to discover something themselves, and would be glad to know how : and to all who think they have invented something, and are desirous to know whether any one else has been before hand with them." — Puritan Recorder. "This is one of the most valuable works which the press has brought forth during the present year. A greater amount of useful and valuable information cannot be obtained from any book of the same size within our knowledge." — Washington Union. "This important volume will prove one of the most acceptable to our community that has appeared for a long time." — Providence Journal. "This is a neat volume and a useful one. Such a book has long been wanted in Amer- ica. It should receive a wide-spread patronage."— Scientific American, New York. "It meets a want long felt, both among men of science and the people. No one who feels any interest in the intellectual progress of the age, no mechanic or artisan, who as pires to excel in his vocation, 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 some useful in formation, and there will be no waste of time in its study."— Norfolk Democrat. " It is precisely such a work as will be hailed with pleasure by the multitude of intelli gent readers who desire to have, at the close of each year, a properly digested record of its progress in useful knowledge. The project of the editors is an excellent one, and de 3erves and will command success." — North American, Philadelphia. "Truly a most valuable volume."— Charleston (S.C.) Courier. " There are few works of the season whose appearance we have noticed with more sin- cere satisfaction than this admirable manual. The exceeding interest of the subjects to which it is devoted, as well as the remarkably thorough, patient and judicious manner in which they are handled by its skilful editors, entitle it to a warm reception by all the friends of solid and usefullcarning."— JYYw York Tribune. FOOTPRINTS OF THE CREATOR; OR THE ASTEROLEPIS OF STROMNESS. BY HUGH MILLEE. WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS. PEOM THE THIRD LONDON E D I T I O N. — W I T H A MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOB BY LOUIS AGASSIZ. " In its purely geological character, the Toot-prints' is not surpassed hy any modern work of the same olass. 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 rev- elations 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 vigor- ous, to the impressive eloquence of great thoughts greatly expressed; reasoning at once comprehensive in scope, strong in grasp, and pointedly direct in application, — these qual- ities combine to render the 1 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 as tonished 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 meagreness and poverty of his own descriptions in the " Bridge- water 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 vol- ume is especially worthy the attention of those who are so fearful of the skeptical tenden- cies 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 knowl- edge unsurpassed, perhaps unequalled; and the deep vein of reverence for Divine Kevela- tion 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 anv other profes- sedly 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 clear- ness, ease, and elegance that are both astonishing and delightful. Throughout the entire geologic portion, the reasoning is markedly close, shrewd, "and intelligible — the facts arc evidently at the finger's end of the author — and the most unwilling, cautious, and antago- nistic 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 > ears ; 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 remark- ably clear, concise, and powerful, in his arguments ; profound in his researches, and conclu- sive 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. . . . lie 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 instruct- ion 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 feAv days, this enterprising house has republished one of the most charming scientific works of 'modern times — a work which, from the simple love of truth which per- vades 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 3'oung men; let them approach it with open, and not unfaithful breasts, — for amid our mountains, grand and tali, 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 1 That in its geological character it is not surpassed bv anv 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 attain- ments."— 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 wel- comed his company. We hope the volume mav 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; OK NEW WALKS IN AN OLD FIELD. BY HUGH MILLER. FROM THE FOURTH LONDON EDITION — ILLU8TRAT t> A writer, in noticing Mr. Miller's u First Impressions of England and the People," in the New Englander, of May, 1850, commences by saying, "We presume it is not neces- sary formally to introduce Hugh Miller to our readers ; the author of ' The Old Red Sand- stone ' placed himself, hy 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 Geol- ogy, 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. Ruckland 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 meagreness and pov- erty 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 ele- gance, 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 counti yman, 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; it3 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 mora* 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. "Silli- man'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 Redfishes. I know not of a more fascinating volume on any branch of British geology."— MantelVs 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 advan tages 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. u We know of no work upon science which is so well calculated to lift the mind from the admiration 0 f 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 tho 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."— Mew 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 phe- nomena 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 philo- sophical 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 stvle, and makes with the notes, which are full and as valuable as the text, a volume of nearlv 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. u 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 E A 11 T II A N 1) M A N : Lectures on Comparative Physical Geography, in it? Relation to the IKstory of JilarJcind. By Arnold Guvot, Pro'f. Phy». Geo. & Hist., Nouchatel. Translated from the French, by Prof. C. C. Felton. — With Illustrations. 12mo. Price $1.25. 4t Those who have been accustomed to regard Geography as a merely descripi 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 j a science that embraces the investiga- tion of natural laws and interprets their mode of operation ; which professes to dis- cover in the rudest forms and apparently confused arrangement of the materials com- posing the planets' crust, a new manifestation of the wisdom which has filled ths 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 i{ the geographical march of history. * * * The man of science will hail it as a beauti- ful generalization from the facts of observation. The Christian, who trusts in a mer ciful Providence, will draw courage from it, and hope yet more earnestly for the redemption of the most degraded portions of mankind. Faiih, 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 intelli- gerr: reader, and especially fitted to awaken enthusiasm and delight in all who aro devoted .c 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 his- torians and philosophers. In the volume before us the profound investigations of Hum- boldt, Ritter and others, in Physical Geography, arc 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, Ncio York. u Geography is hero made to assutno a dignity, not heretofore attached to it. The knowledge communicated ia these Lectures is curious, unexpected, absorbing. "-- Christian Mi?'rcr, Portland. CONTRIBUTIONS TO THEOLOGICAL SCIENCE. BY JOHN HARRIS, D . D . I. THE PRE- AD AMITE EARTH. NOTICES OF THE PRESS. {t As we have examined every page of this work, and put forth our best efforts to un- derstand 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 labo- rious, 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 Evan- gelical 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 con- tact 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 Scrip- ture. 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 he 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 man- ner." — 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 stu- dents 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 can- not 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 lan- guage. 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 in- dependent 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. u His copious and beautiful illustrations of the successive laws of the Divine Mani- festation, 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 look- ing 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 lor 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 eomes within the range of his proposed inquiry into the constitution and condition >f Man Primeval." — London Evangelical History. III. THE FAMILY; ITS CONSTITUTION, PROBATION AND HISTORY. rirv T PHE^ ATI \TI f ■>• ] 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. 11 Tho collection is a most attractive one, and would be acceptable in any circum- stances. 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 tho youth before him to labor in the acqui- sition of classical learning. The biographical portions of the book, naturally lesi 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 typo- graphical execution, which docs honor to tho 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 noblo 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 13 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 credit- able 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, wnen we are obliged, from week to week, to look through the mas3 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, anJ 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 wo 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 CYCLOPAEDIA OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. A SELECTION OP THE CHOICEST PRODUCTIONS OF ENGLISH AUTHORS, FROM THB 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 JBio graphical, Historical, and Critical Narra- tive ; thus presenting a complete view of English Literature, from the earliest to the present time. Let the reader open rohcre he will, he cannot fail to find matter fur 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 vie w, for survey- ing 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 litera- ture 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 unedu- cated, 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. Eveiy intelligent man, every inquiring mind, every scholar, felt that the foundation was missing. Chambers's Cyclopaedia supplies this radical defect. It be- gins 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, Sijracuse, N. F. "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, his- tory, 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 ihe whole is suited to refine and ele- vate the taste. And we might ask, who can fail to go back to its beginning, and traco 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 en cravings of the heads of Shakspearc, Addison, Byron ; a lull length portrait of Dr. Johnson, and a beautiful scenic representation of Oliver Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson. These impor- tant 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 flat- tering 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 lan- guage 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 ele- gantly printed and neatly illustrated, and is sold very cheap." — Independent Dem- ocrat, 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 fire- side, and the young particularly, it cannot fail to prove a most valuable and enter- taining 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 val- uable 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. l)ctlttabk Srijool 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 FisJc, President of the WMeran Univeriity. u t 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, lata Chancellor of New York. ** The work has been read by me attentively and thoroughly, and I think very highly cf It The author himself is one of the most" estimable of men, and I do not know of *ny ethical treatise, in which our duties to God and to our fellow-men arc laid down with mn»'e 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 ed'jfa- tion 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 "Way- land 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 Rex>ository. " This is a new work on morals, for academic use, and we welcome it with much satis- faction. 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 in- struction to all the youth of our land. Teachers and all others en.jaged 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." — JYorth American Review. " We speak that we do know, when we express our high estimate of Dr. Wayland's lbility 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 and severe the argumentation, how appropriate and strong the illustrations •which characterize his system and enforce it on the mind." — The Christian Witness. " The work of which this volume is an abridgment, is well known as one of the best and most complete works on Moral Philosophy extant. The author is well known as one