[AY]There is a natural connection, it is said, between wild scenes and wild legends; and some of the traditions connected with this romantic and solitary dell illustrate the remark. Till a comparatively late period, it was known at many a winter fireside as a favorite haunt of the fairies—the most poetical of all our old tribes of spectres, and at one time one of the most popular. I have conversed with an old woman, who, when a very little girl, had seen myriads of them dancing, as the sun was setting, on the further edge of the dell; and with a still older man, who had the temerity to offer one of them a pinch of snuff at the foot of the cascade. Nearly a mile from where the ravine opens to the sea, it assumes a gentler and more pastoral character; the sides, no longer precipitous, descend towards the stream in green, sloping banks; and a beaten path, which runs between Cromarty and Rosemarkie, winds down the one side and ascends the other. More than sixty years ago, one Donald Calder, a Cromarty shop-keeper, was journeying by this path shortly after nightfall. The moon, at full, had just risen; but there was a silvery mist sleeping on the lower grounds, that obscured her light; and the dell, in all its extent, was so overcharged by the vapor, that it seemed an immense, overflooded river winding through the landscape. Donald had reached its farther edge, and could hear the rush of the stream from the deep obscurity of the abyss below, when there rose from the opposite side a strain of the most delightful music he had ever heard. He staid and listened. The words of a song, of such simple beauty that they seemed without effort to stamp themselves on his memory, came wafted in the music; and the chorus, in which a thousand tiny voices seemed to join, was a familiar address to himself—"Hey, Donald Calder; ho, Donald Calder." "There are nane of my Navity acquaintance," thought Donald, "who sing like that. Wha can it be?" He descended into the cloud; but in passing the little stream the music ceased; and on reaching the spot on which the singer had seemed stationed, he saw only a bare bank sinking into a solitary moor, unvaried by either bush or hollow in which the musician might have lain concealed. He had hardly time, however, to estimate the marvels of the case, when the music again struck up, but on the opposite side of the dell, and apparently from the very knoll on which he had so recently listened to it. The conviction that it could not be other than supernatural overpowered him; and he hurried homewards under the influence of a terror so extreme, that, unfortunately for our knowledge of fairy literature, it had the effect of obliterating from his memory every part of the song except the chorus. The sun rose as he reached Cromarty; and he found that, instead of having lingered at the edge of the dell for only a few minutes—and the time had seemed no longer—he had spent beside it the greater part of the night.The fairies have deserted the Burn of Eathie; but we have proof, quite as conclusive as the nature of the case admits, that when they ceased to be seen there it would have been vain to have looked for them any where else. There is a cluster of turf-built cottages grouped on the southern side of the ravine; a few scattered knolls, and a long, partially wooded hollow, that seems a sort of covered way leading to the recesses of the dell, interpose between them and the nearer edge, and the hill rises behind. On a Sabbath morning, nearly sixty years ago, the inmates of this little hamlet had all gone to church, all except a herd-boy and a little girl, his sister, who were lounging beside one of the cottages; when, just as the shadow of the garden dial had fallen on the line of noon, they saw a long cavalcade ascending out of the ravine through the wooded hollow. It winded among the knolls and bushes; and, turning round the northern gable of the cottage beside which the sole spectators of the scene were stationed, began to ascend the eminence towards the south. The horses were shaggy, diminutive things, speckled dun and gray; the riders, stunted, misgrown, ugly creatures, attired in antique jerkins of plaid, long gray cloaks, and little red caps, from under which their wild, uncombed locks shot out over their cheeks and foreheads. The boy and his sister stood gazing in utter dismay and astonishment, as rider after rider, each one more uncouth and dwarfish than the one that had preceded it, passed the cottage and disappeared among the brushwood, which at that period covered the hill, until at length the entire rout, except the last rider, who lingered a few yards behind the others, had gone by. "What are ye, little mannie? and where are ye going?" inquired the boy, his curiosity getting the better of his fears and his prudence. "Not of the race of Adam," said the creature, turning for a moment in his saddle; "the People of Peace shall never more be seen in Scotland."
[AY]There is a natural connection, it is said, between wild scenes and wild legends; and some of the traditions connected with this romantic and solitary dell illustrate the remark. Till a comparatively late period, it was known at many a winter fireside as a favorite haunt of the fairies—the most poetical of all our old tribes of spectres, and at one time one of the most popular. I have conversed with an old woman, who, when a very little girl, had seen myriads of them dancing, as the sun was setting, on the further edge of the dell; and with a still older man, who had the temerity to offer one of them a pinch of snuff at the foot of the cascade. Nearly a mile from where the ravine opens to the sea, it assumes a gentler and more pastoral character; the sides, no longer precipitous, descend towards the stream in green, sloping banks; and a beaten path, which runs between Cromarty and Rosemarkie, winds down the one side and ascends the other. More than sixty years ago, one Donald Calder, a Cromarty shop-keeper, was journeying by this path shortly after nightfall. The moon, at full, had just risen; but there was a silvery mist sleeping on the lower grounds, that obscured her light; and the dell, in all its extent, was so overcharged by the vapor, that it seemed an immense, overflooded river winding through the landscape. Donald had reached its farther edge, and could hear the rush of the stream from the deep obscurity of the abyss below, when there rose from the opposite side a strain of the most delightful music he had ever heard. He staid and listened. The words of a song, of such simple beauty that they seemed without effort to stamp themselves on his memory, came wafted in the music; and the chorus, in which a thousand tiny voices seemed to join, was a familiar address to himself—"Hey, Donald Calder; ho, Donald Calder." "There are nane of my Navity acquaintance," thought Donald, "who sing like that. Wha can it be?" He descended into the cloud; but in passing the little stream the music ceased; and on reaching the spot on which the singer had seemed stationed, he saw only a bare bank sinking into a solitary moor, unvaried by either bush or hollow in which the musician might have lain concealed. He had hardly time, however, to estimate the marvels of the case, when the music again struck up, but on the opposite side of the dell, and apparently from the very knoll on which he had so recently listened to it. The conviction that it could not be other than supernatural overpowered him; and he hurried homewards under the influence of a terror so extreme, that, unfortunately for our knowledge of fairy literature, it had the effect of obliterating from his memory every part of the song except the chorus. The sun rose as he reached Cromarty; and he found that, instead of having lingered at the edge of the dell for only a few minutes—and the time had seemed no longer—he had spent beside it the greater part of the night.
The fairies have deserted the Burn of Eathie; but we have proof, quite as conclusive as the nature of the case admits, that when they ceased to be seen there it would have been vain to have looked for them any where else. There is a cluster of turf-built cottages grouped on the southern side of the ravine; a few scattered knolls, and a long, partially wooded hollow, that seems a sort of covered way leading to the recesses of the dell, interpose between them and the nearer edge, and the hill rises behind. On a Sabbath morning, nearly sixty years ago, the inmates of this little hamlet had all gone to church, all except a herd-boy and a little girl, his sister, who were lounging beside one of the cottages; when, just as the shadow of the garden dial had fallen on the line of noon, they saw a long cavalcade ascending out of the ravine through the wooded hollow. It winded among the knolls and bushes; and, turning round the northern gable of the cottage beside which the sole spectators of the scene were stationed, began to ascend the eminence towards the south. The horses were shaggy, diminutive things, speckled dun and gray; the riders, stunted, misgrown, ugly creatures, attired in antique jerkins of plaid, long gray cloaks, and little red caps, from under which their wild, uncombed locks shot out over their cheeks and foreheads. The boy and his sister stood gazing in utter dismay and astonishment, as rider after rider, each one more uncouth and dwarfish than the one that had preceded it, passed the cottage and disappeared among the brushwood, which at that period covered the hill, until at length the entire rout, except the last rider, who lingered a few yards behind the others, had gone by. "What are ye, little mannie? and where are ye going?" inquired the boy, his curiosity getting the better of his fears and his prudence. "Not of the race of Adam," said the creature, turning for a moment in his saddle; "the People of Peace shall never more be seen in Scotland."
I know comparatively little of the scenery of the middle, or Cornstone formation. Its features in England are bold and striking; in Scotland, of a tamer and more various character. The Den of Balruddery is a sweet, wooded dell, marked by no characteristic peculiarities. Many of the seeming peculiarities of the formation in Forfarshire, as in Fife, may be traced to the disturbing trap. The appearance exhibited is that of uneven plains, that rise and fall in long, undulating ridges—an appearance which any other member of the system might have presented. We find the upper formation associated with scenery of great, though often wildbeauty; 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 wherethe Findhorn, after hurrying over ridge and shallow, amid combinations of rock and wood, wildly picturesque as any the kingdom affords, enters on the lower country, with a course less headlong, through a vast trench scooped in the pale red sandstone of the upper formation. For miles above the junction of the newer and older rocks the river has been toiling in a narrow and uneven channel, between two upright walls of hard gray gneiss, thickly traversed, in every complexity of pattern, by veins of a light red, large grained granite. The gneiss abruptly terminates, but not so the wall of precipices. A lofty front of gneiss is joined to a lofty front of sandstone, like the front walls of two adjoining houses; and the broken and uptilted strata of the softer stone show that the older and harder rocks must have invaded it from below. A little farther down the stream, the strata assume what seems, in a short extent of frontage, a horizontal position, like courses of ashlar in a building, but which, when viewed in the range, is found to incline at a low angle towards the distant sea. Here, as in many other localities, the young geologist must guard against the conclusion, that the rock is necessarily low in the geological scale which he finds resting against the gneiss. The gneiss, occupying a very different place from that on which it was originally formed, has been thrust into close neighborhood with widely separated formations. The great conglomerate base of the system rests over it in Orkney, Caithness, Ross, Cromarty, and Inverness; and there is no trace of what should be the intervening grauwacke. The upper formation of the system leans upon it here. We find the Lower Lias uptilted against it at the Hill of Eathie—the great Oolite on the eastern coast of Sutherland; and as the flints and chalk fossils of Banff and Aberdeen are found lying immediately over it in these counties,it is probable that the denuded members of the Cretaceous group once rested upon it there. The fact that a deposit should be found lying in contact with the gneiss, furnishes no argument for the great antiquity or the fundamental character of that deposit; and it were well that the geologist who sets himself to estimate the depth of the Old Red Sandstone, or the succession of its various formations, should keep the circumstance in view. That may be in reality but a small and upper portion of the system which he finds bounded by the gneiss on its under side, and by the diluvium on its upper.
We stand on a wooded eminence, that sinks perpendicularly into the river on the left, in a mural precipice, and descends with a billowy swell into the broad, fertile plain in front, as if the uplands were breaking in one vast wave upon the low country. There is a patch of meadow on the opposite side of the stream, shaded by a group of ancient trees, gnarled and mossy, and with half their topmost branches dead and white as the bones of a skeleton. We look down upon them from an elevation so commanding, that their uppermost twigs seem on well nigh the same level with their interlaced and twisted roots, washed bare on the bank edge by the winter floods. A colony of herons has built from time immemorial among the branches. There are trees so laden with nests that the boughs bend earthwards on every side, like the boughs of orchard trees in autumn; and the bleached and feathered masses which they bear—the cradles of succeeding generations—glitter gray through the foliage in continuous groups, as if each tree bore on its single head all the wigs of the Court of Session. The solitude is busy with the occupations and enjoyments of instinct. The birds, tall and stately, stand by troops in the shallows, or wade warily, as the fish glance by, to the edge of the current, or rising, withthe slow flap of wing and sharp creak peculiar to the tribe, drop suddenly into their nests. The great forest of Darnaway stretches beyond, feathering a thousand knolls, that reflect a colder and grayer tint as they recede, and lessen, and present on the horizon a billowy line of blue. The river brawls along under pale red cliffs, wooded a-top. It is through a vast burial-yard that it has cut its way—a field of the dead so ancient, that the sepulchres of Thebes and Luxor are but of the present day in comparison—resting-places for the recently departed, whose funerals are but just over. These mouldering strata are charged with remains, scattered and detached as those of a churchyard, but not less entire in their parts—occipital bones, jaws, teeth, spines, scales—the dust and rubbish of a departed creation. The cliffs sink as the plain flattens, and green, sloping banks of diluvium take their place; but they again rise in the middle distance into an abrupt and lofty promontory, that, stretching like an immense rib athwart the level country, projects far into the stream, and gives an angular inflection to its course. There ascends from the apex a thin, blue column of smoke—that of a lime-kiln. That ridge and promontory are composed of the thick limestone band, which, in Moray as in Fife, separates the pale red from the pale yellow beds of the Upper Old Red Sandstone; and the flattened tracts on both sides show how much better it has resisted the denuding agencies than either the yellow strata that rests over it, or the pale red strata which it overlies.
The two Aspects in which. Matter can be viewed; Space and Time.—Geological History of the Earlier Periods.—The Cambrian System,—Its Annelids.—The Silurian System.—Its Corals, Encrinites, Molluscs, and Trilobites.—Its Fish.—These of a high Order, and called into Existence apparently by Myriads.—Opening Scene in the History of the Old Red Sandstone a Scene of Tempest.—Represented by the Great Conglomerate.—Red a prevailing Color among the Ancient Rocks contained in this Deposit.—Amazing Abundance of Animal Life.—Exemplified by a Scene in the Herring Fishery.—Platform of Death.—Probable Cause of the Catastrophe which rendered it such.
"Thereare only two different aspects," says Dr. Thomas Brown, "in which matter can be viewed. We may consider it simply as it exists, in space, or as it exists in time. As it exists in space we inquire into its composition, or, in other words, endeavor to discover what are the elementary bodies that coexist in the space which it occupies; as it exists in time, we inquire into its susceptibilities or its powers, or, in other words, endeavor to trace all the various changes which have already passed over it, or of which it may yet become the subject."
Hitherto I have very much restricted myself to the consideration of the Old Red Sandstone as it exists inspace—to the consideration of it as we now find it. I shall now attempt presenting it to the reader as it existed intime—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 desertcountry, with its wide wastes of unprofitable sand, its broken citadels and temples, its solitary battle-plains, and its gloomy streets of caverned and lonely sepulchres; and quite another to record its history during its days of smiling fields, populous cities, busy trade, and monarchical splendor. We pass from the dead to the living—from the cemetery, with its high piles of mummies and its vast heaps of bones, to the ancient city, full of life and animation in all its streets and dwellings.
Two great geological periods have already come to their close; and the floor of a widely-spread ocean, to which we can affix no limits, and of whose shores or their inhabitants nothing is yet known, is occupied to the depth of many thousand feet by the remains of bygone existences. Of late, the geologist has learned from Murchison to distinguish the rocks of these two periods—the lower as those of the Cambrian, the upper as those of the Silurian group. The lower—representative of the first glimmering twilight of being—of a dawn so feeble that it may seem doubtful whether in reality the gloom had lightened—must still be regarded as a period of uncertainty. Its ripple-marked sandstones, and its half coherent accumulations of dark-colored strata, which decompose into mud, show that every one of its many plains must have formed in succession an upper surface of the bottom of the sea; but it remains for future discoverers to determine regarding the shapes of life that burrowed in its ooze, or careered through the incumbent waters. In one locality it would seem as if a few worms had crawled to the surface, and left their involved and tortuous folds doubtfully impressed on the stone. Some of them resemble miniature cables, carelessly coiled; others, furnished with what seem numerous legs, remind us of the existing Nereidina of our sandyshores—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 theArabian Nights, in which the battle of the magicians is described? At an early stage of the combat a little worm creeps over the pavement; at its close two terrible dragons contend in an atmosphere of fire. But even the worms of the Cambrian System can scarce be regarded as established. The evidence respecting their place and their nature must still be held as involved in some such degree of doubt as attaches to the researches of the antiquary, when engaged in tracing what their remains much resemble—the involved sculpturings of some Runic obelisk, weathered by the storms of a thousand winters. There is less of doubt, however, regarding the existences of the upper group of rocks—the Silurian.
The depth of this group, as estimated by Mr. Murchison, is equal to double the height of our highest Scottish mountains; and four distinct platforms of being range in it, the one over the other, like stories in a building. Life abounded on all these platforms, and in shapes the most wonderful. The peculiar encrinites of the group rose in miniature forests, and spread forth their sentient petals by millions and tens of millions amid the waters; vast ridges of corals peopled by their innumerable builders,—numbers without number,—rose high amid the shallows; the chambered shells had become abundant—the simpler testacea still more so; extinct forms of the graptolite, or sea-pen, existed by myriads;and the formation had a class of creatures in advance of the many-legged annelids of the other. It had its numerous family of trilobites,—crustaceans nearly as high in the scale as the common crab,—creatures with crescent-shaped heads, and jointed bodies, and wonderfully constructed eyes, which, like the eyes of the bee and the butterfly, had the cornea cut into facets resembling those of a multiplying glass. Is the reader acquainted with the form of the commonChitonof our shores—the little boat-shaped shell-fish, that adheres to stones and rocks like the limpet, but which differs from every variety of limpet, inbearing as its covering a jointed, not a continuous shell? Suppose a chiton with two of its terminal joints cut away, and a single plate of much the same shape and size, but with two eyes near the centre, substituted instead, and the animal, in form at least, would be no longer a chiton, but a trilobite. There are appearances, too, which lead to the inference that the habits of the two families, though representing different orders of being, may not have been very unlike. The chiton attaches itself to the rock by a muscular sucker or foot, which, extending vent rally along its entire length, resembles that of the slug or the snail, and enables it to crawl like them, but still more slowly, by a succession of adhesions. The locomotive powers of the trilobite seem to have been little superior to those of the chiton. If furnished with legs at all, it must have been with soft rudimentary membranaceous legs, little fitted for walking with; and it seems quite as probable, from the peculiarly shaped under margin of its shell, formed, like that of the chiton, for adhering to flat surfaces, that, like the slug and the snail, it was unfurnished with legs of any kind, and crept on the abdomen. The vast conglomerations of trilobites for which the Silurian rocks are remarkable, are regarded as further evidence of a sedentary condition, LikeOstreæ,Chitones, and other sedentary animals, they seemed to have adhered together in vast clusters, trilobite over trilobite, in the hollows of submarine precipices, or on the flat, muddy bottom below. And such were the master existences of three of the four Silurian platforms, and of the greater part of the fourth, if, indeed, we may not regard the chambered molluscs, their contemporaries,—creatures with their arms clustered round their heads, and with a nervous system composed of a mere knotted cord,—as equally high in the scale. We rise to the topmost layers of the system,—to an upper gallery of its highest platform,—and find nature mightily in advance.
Another and superior order of existences had sprung into being at the fiat of the Creator—creatures with the brain lodged in the head, and the spinal cord enclosed in a vertebrated column. In the period of the Upper Silurian, fish properly so called, and of very perfect organization, had become denizens of the watery element, and had taken precedence of the crustacean, as, at a period long previous, the crustacean had taken precedence of the annelid. In what form do these, the most ancient beings of their class, appear? As cartilaginous fishes of the higher order. Some of them were furnished with bony palates, and squat, firmly-based teeth, well adapted for crushing the stone-cased zoöphytes and shells of the period, fragments of which occur in their fœcal remains; some with teeth that, like those of the fossil sharks of the later formations, resemble lines of miniature pyramids, larger and smaller alternating; some with teeth sharp, thin, and so deeply serrated that every individual tooth resembles a row of poniards set upright against the walls of an armory; and these last, says Agassiz, furnished with weapons so murderous, must have been the pirates of the period. Some had their fins guarded with longspines, hooked like the beak of an eagle; some with spines of straighter and more slender form, and ribbed and furrowed longitudinally like columns; some were shielded by an armor of bony points; and some thickly covered with glistening scales. If many ages must have passed ere fishes appeared, there was assuredly no time required to elevate their lower into their higher families. Judging, too, from this ancient deposit, they seem to have been introduced, not by individuals and pairs, but by whole myriads.
"Forthwith, the sounds and seas, each creek and bay,With fry innumerable swarmed; and shoalsOf fish, that with their fins and shining scalesGlide under the green wave in plumps and sculls,Banked the mid sea."
"Forthwith, the sounds and seas, each creek and bay,With fry innumerable swarmed; and shoalsOf fish, that with their fins and shining scalesGlide under the green wave in plumps and sculls,Banked the mid sea."
The fish-bed of the Upper Ludlow Rock abounds more in osseous remains than an ancient burying-ground. The stratum, over wide areas, seems an almost continuous layer of matted bones, jaws, teeth, spines, scales, palatal plates, and shagreen-like prickles, all massed together, and converted into a substance of so deep and shining a jet color, that the bed, when "first discovered, conveyed the impression," says Mr. Murchison, "that it enclosed a triturated heap of black beetles." And such are the remains of what seem to have been the first existing vertebrata. Thus, ere our history begins, the existences of two great systems, the Cambrian and the Silurian, had passed into extinction, with the exception of what seem a few connecting links, exclusively molluscs, that are found in England to pass from the higher beds of the Ludlow rocks into the Lower or Tilestone beds of the Old Red Sandstone.[AZ]The exuviæ of at least four platforms of being lay entombed furlong below furlong, amid the gray, mouldering mudstones, the harder arenaceous beds, the consolidated clays, and the concretionary limestones, that underlay the ancient ocean of the Lower Old Red. The earth had already become a vast sepulchre, to a depth beneath the bed of the sea equal to at least twice the height of Ben Nevis over its surface.
[AZ]"Upwards of eight hundred extinct species of animals have been described as belonging to the earliest, or Protozoic and Silurian period, and of these only about one hundred are found also in the overlying Devonian series; while but fifteen are common to the whole Palæozoic period, and not one extends beyond it."—(M. de Verneuil and Count D'Archiac, quoted by Mr. D. T. Ansted. 1844.)
[AZ]"Upwards of eight hundred extinct species of animals have been described as belonging to the earliest, or Protozoic and Silurian period, and of these only about one hundred are found also in the overlying Devonian series; while but fifteen are common to the whole Palæozoic period, and not one extends beyond it."—(M. de Verneuil and Count D'Archiac, quoted by Mr. D. T. Ansted. 1844.)
The first scene in theTempestopens amid the confusion and turmoil of the hurricane—amid thunders and lightnings, the roar of the wind, the shouts of the seamen, the rattling of cordage, and the wild dash of the billows. The history of the period represented by the Old Red Sandstone seems, in what now forms the northern half of Scotland, to have opened in a similar manner. The finely-laminated lower Tilestones of England were deposited evidently in a calm sea. During the contemporary period in our own country, the vast space which now includes Orkney and Loch Ness, Dingwall, and Gamrie, and many a thousand square mile besides, was the scene of a shallow ocean, perplexed by powerful currents, and agitated by waves. A vast stratum of water-rolled pebbles, varying in depth from a hundred feet to a hundred yards, remains in a thousand different localities, to testify of the disturbing agencies of this time of commotion. The hardest masses which the stratum encloses,—porphyries of vitreous fracture that cut glass as readily as flint, and masses of quartz that strike fire quite as profusely from steel,—are yet polished and ground down into bullet-like forms, not an angularfragment appearing in some parts of the mass for yards together. The debris of our harder rocks rolled for centuries in the beds of our more impetuous rivers, or tossed for ages along our more exposed and precipitous sea-shores, could not present less equivocally the marks of violent and prolonged attrition than the pebbles of this bed. And yet it is surely difficult to conceive how the bottom of any sea should have been so violently and so equally agitated for so greatly extended a space as that which intervenes between Mealforvony in Inverness-shire and Pomona in Orkney in one direction, and between Applecross and Trouphead in another—and for a period so prolonged, that the entire area should have come to be covered with a stratum of rolled pebbles of almost every variety of ancient rock, fifteen stories' height in thickness. The very variety of its contents shows that the period must have been prolonged. A sudden flood sweeps away with it the accumulated debris of a range of mountains; but to blend together, in equal mixture, the debris of many such ranges, as well as to grind down their roughnesses and angularities, and fill up the interstices with the sand and gravel produced in the process, must be a work of time. I have examined with much interest, in various localities, the fragments of ancient rock inclosed in this formation. Many of them are no longer to be found in situ, and the group is essentially different from that presented by the more modern gravels. On the shores of the Frith of Cromarty, for instance, by far the most abundant pebbles are of a blue schistose gneiss: fragments of gray granite and white quartz are also common; and the sea-shore at half ebb presents at a short distance the appearance of a long belt of bluish gray, from the color of the prevailing stones which compose it. The prevailing color of the conglomerate of the district, on the contrary, is a deepred. It contains pebbles of small-grained, red granite, red quartz rock, red feldspar, red porphyry, an impure red jasper, red hornstone, and a red granitic gneiss, identical with the well-marked gneiss of the neighboring Sutors. This last is the only rock now found in the district, of which fragments occur in the conglomerate. It must have been exposed at the time to the action of the waves, though afterwards buried deep under succeeding formations, until again thrust to the surface by some great internal convulsion, of a date comparatively recent.[BA]
[BA]The vast beds of unconsolidated gravel with which one of the later geological revolutions has half filled some of our northern valleys, and covered the slopes of the adjacent hills, present, in a few localities, appearances somewhat analogous to those exhibited by this ancient formation. There are uncemented accumulations of water-rolled pebbles, in the neighborhood of Inverness, from ninety to a hundred feet in thickness. But this stratum, unlike the more ancient one, wanted continuity. It must have been accumulated, too, under the operation of more partial, though immensely more powerful agencies. There is a mediocrity of size in the enclosed fragments of the old conglomerate, which gives evidence of a mediocrity of power in the transporting agent. In the upper gravels, on the contrary, one of the agents could convey from vast distances blocks of stone eighty and a hundred tons in weight. A new cause of tremendous energy had come into operation in the geological world.
[BA]The vast beds of unconsolidated gravel with which one of the later geological revolutions has half filled some of our northern valleys, and covered the slopes of the adjacent hills, present, in a few localities, appearances somewhat analogous to those exhibited by this ancient formation. There are uncemented accumulations of water-rolled pebbles, in the neighborhood of Inverness, from ninety to a hundred feet in thickness. But this stratum, unlike the more ancient one, wanted continuity. It must have been accumulated, too, under the operation of more partial, though immensely more powerful agencies. There is a mediocrity of size in the enclosed fragments of the old conglomerate, which gives evidence of a mediocrity of power in the transporting agent. In the upper gravels, on the contrary, one of the agents could convey from vast distances blocks of stone eighty and a hundred tons in weight. A new cause of tremendous energy had come into operation in the geological world.
The period of this shallow and stormy ocean passed. The bottom, composed of the identical conglomerate which now forms the summit of some of our loftiest mountains, sank throughout its wide area to a depth so profound as to be little affected by tides or tempests. During this second period there took place a vast deposit of coarse sandstone strata, with here and there a few thin beds of rolled pebbles. The general subsidence of the bottom still continued, and, after adeposit of full ninety feet had overlain the conglomerate, the depth became still more profound than at first. A fine, semi-calcareous, semi-aluminous deposition took place in waters perfectly undisturbed. And here we first find proof that this ancient ocean literally swarmed with life—that its bottom was covered with miniature forests of algæ, and its waters darkened by immense shoals of fish.
In middle autumn, at the close of the herring season, when the fish have just spawned, and the congregated masses are breaking up on shallow and skerry, and dispersing by myriads over the deeper seas, they rise at times to the surface by a movement so simultaneous, that for miles and miles around the skiff of the fisherman nothing may be seen but the bright glitter of scales, as if the entire face of the deep were a blue robe spangled with silver. I have watched them at sunrise at such seasons on the middle of the Moray Frith, when, far as the eye could reach, the surface has been ruffled by the splash of fins, as if a light breeze swept over it, and the red light has flashed in gleams of an instant on the millions and tens of millions that were leaping around me, a handbreadth into the air, thick as hail-stones in a thunder-shower. The amazing amount of life which the scene included, has imparted to it an indescribable interest. On most occasions the inhabitants of ocean are seen but by scores and hundreds; for in looking down into their green twilight haunts, we find the view bounded by a few yards, or at most a few fathoms; and we can but calculate on the unseen myriads of the surrounding expanse by the seen few that occupy the narrow space visible. Here, however, it was not the few, but the myriads, that were seen—the innumerable and inconceivable whole—all palpable to the sight as a flock on a hill-side; or, at least, if all was not palpable, it was only because sensehas its limits in the lighter as well as in the denser medium—that the multitudinous distracts it, and the distant eludes it, and the far horizon bounds it. If the scene spoke not of infinity in the sense in which Deity comprehends it, it spoke of it in at least the only sense in which man can comprehend it.
Now, we are much in the habit of thinking of such amazing multiplicity of being—when we think of it at all—with reference to but the later times of the world's history. We think of the remote past as a time of comparative solitude. We forget that the now uninhabited desert was once a populous city. Is the reader prepared to realize, in connection with the Lower Old Red Sandstone—the second period of vertebrated existence—scenes as amazingly fertile in life as the scene just described—oceans as thoroughly occupied with being as our friths and estuaries when the herrings congregate most abundantly on our coasts? There are evidences too sure to be disputed that such must have been the case. I have seen the ichthyolite beds, where washed bare in the line of the strata, as thickly covered with oblong, spindle-shaped nodules as I have ever seen a fishing bank covered with herrings; and have ascertained that every individual nodule had its nucleus of animal matter—that it was a stone coffin in miniature, holding enclosed its organic mass of bitumen or bone—its winged, or enamelled, or thorn-covered ichthyolite.
At this period of our history, some terrible catastrophe involved in sudden destruction the fish of an area at least a hundred miles from boundary to boundary, perhaps much more. The same platform in Orkney as at Cromarty is strewed thick with remains, which exhibit unequivocally the marks of violent death. The figures are contorted, contracted,curved; the tail in many instances is bent round to the head; the spines stick out; the fins are spread to the full, as in fish that die in convulsions. ThePterichthysshows its arms extended at their stiffest angle, as if prepared for an enemy. The attitudes of all the ichthyolites on this platform are attitudes of fear, anger, and pain. The remains, too, appear to have suffered nothing from the after attacks of predaceous fishes; none such seem to have survived. The record is one of destruction at once widely spread and total, so far as it extended. There are proofs that, whatever may have been the cause of the catastrophe, it must have taken place in a sea unusually still. The scales, when scattered by some slight undulation, are scattered to the distance of only a few inches, and still exhibit their enamel entire, and their peculiar fineness of edge. The spines, even when separated, retain their original needle-like sharpness of point. Rays, well nigh as slender as horse-hairs, are enclosed unbroken in the mass. Whole ichthyolites occur, in which not only all the parts survive, but even the expression which the stiff and threatening attitude conveyed when the last struggle was over. Destruction must have come in the calm, and it must have been of a kind by which the calm was nothing disturbed. In what could it have originated? By what quiet but potent agency of destruction were the innumerable existences of an area perhaps ten thousand square miles in extent annihilated at once, and yet the medium in which they had lived left undisturbed by its operations? Conjecture lacks footing in grappling with the enigma, and expatiates in uncertainty over all the known phenomena of death. Diseases of mysterious origin break out at times in the animal kingdom, and well nigh exterminate the tribes on which they fall. The present generation has seen a hundred millions of thehuman family swept away by a disease unknown to our fathers. Virgil describes the fatal murrain that once depopulated the Alps, not more as a poet than as a historian. The shell-fish of the rivers of North America died in such vast abundance during a year of the present century, that the animals, washed out of their shells, lay rotting in masses beside the banks, infecting the very air. About the close of the last century, the haddock well nigh disappeared, for several seasons together, from the eastern coasts of Scotland; and it is related by Creech, that a Scotch shipmaster of the period sailed for several leagues on the coast of Norway, about the time the scarcity began, through a floating shoal of dead haddocks.[BB]
[BB]I have heard elderly fishermen of the Moray Frith state, in connection with what they used to term "the haddock dearth" of this period, that, for several weeks ere the fish entirely disappeared, they acquired an extremely disagreeable taste, as if they had been boiled in tobacco juice, and became unfit for the table. For the three following years they were extremely rare on the coast, and several years more elapsed ere they were caught in the usual abundance. The fact related by Creech, a very curious one, I subjoin in his own words; it occurs in his thirdLetter to Sir John Sinclair: "On Friday, the 4th December, 1789, the shipBrothers, Captain Stewart, arrived at Leith from Archangel, who reported that, on the coast of Lapland and Norway, he sailed many leagues through immense quantities of dead haddocks floating on the sea. He spoke several English ships, who reported the same fact. It is certain that haddocks, which was the fish in the greatest abundance in the Edinburgh market, have scarcely been seen there these three years. In February, 1790, three haddocks were brought to market, which, from their scarcity, sold for 7s. 6d."The dead haddocks seen by the Leith shipmaster were floating by thousands; and most of their congeners among what fishermen term "the white fish," such as cod, ling, and whiting, also float when dead; whereas the bodies of fish whose bowels and air-bladders are comparatively small and tender, lie at the bottom. The herring fisherman, if the fish die in his nets, finds it no easy matter to buoy them up; and if the shoal entangled be a large one, he fails at times, from the great weight, in recovering them at all, losing both nets and herrings. Now, if a corresponding difference obtained among fish of the extinct period—if some rose to the surface when they died, while others remained at the bottom—we must, of course, expect to find their remains in very different degrees of preservation—to find only scattered fragments of the floaters, while of the others many may occur comparatively entire. Even should they have died on the same beds, too, we may discover their remains separated by hundreds of miles. The haddocks that disappeared from the coast of Britain were found floating in shoals on the coasts of Norway. The remains of an immense body of herrings, that weighed down, a few seasons since, the nets of a crew of fishermen, in a muddy hollow of the Moray Frith, and defied the utmost exertions of three crews united to weigh them from the bottom, are, I doubt not, in the muddy hollow still. On a principle thus obvious it may be deemed not improbable that the ichthyolites of the Lower Old Red Sandstone might have had numerous contemporaries, of which, unless in some instances the same accident which killed also entombed them, we can know nothing in their character as such, and whose broken fragments may yet be found in some other locality, where they may be regarded as characteristic of a different formation.
[BB]I have heard elderly fishermen of the Moray Frith state, in connection with what they used to term "the haddock dearth" of this period, that, for several weeks ere the fish entirely disappeared, they acquired an extremely disagreeable taste, as if they had been boiled in tobacco juice, and became unfit for the table. For the three following years they were extremely rare on the coast, and several years more elapsed ere they were caught in the usual abundance. The fact related by Creech, a very curious one, I subjoin in his own words; it occurs in his thirdLetter to Sir John Sinclair: "On Friday, the 4th December, 1789, the shipBrothers, Captain Stewart, arrived at Leith from Archangel, who reported that, on the coast of Lapland and Norway, he sailed many leagues through immense quantities of dead haddocks floating on the sea. He spoke several English ships, who reported the same fact. It is certain that haddocks, which was the fish in the greatest abundance in the Edinburgh market, have scarcely been seen there these three years. In February, 1790, three haddocks were brought to market, which, from their scarcity, sold for 7s. 6d."
The dead haddocks seen by the Leith shipmaster were floating by thousands; and most of their congeners among what fishermen term "the white fish," such as cod, ling, and whiting, also float when dead; whereas the bodies of fish whose bowels and air-bladders are comparatively small and tender, lie at the bottom. The herring fisherman, if the fish die in his nets, finds it no easy matter to buoy them up; and if the shoal entangled be a large one, he fails at times, from the great weight, in recovering them at all, losing both nets and herrings. Now, if a corresponding difference obtained among fish of the extinct period—if some rose to the surface when they died, while others remained at the bottom—we must, of course, expect to find their remains in very different degrees of preservation—to find only scattered fragments of the floaters, while of the others many may occur comparatively entire. Even should they have died on the same beds, too, we may discover their remains separated by hundreds of miles. The haddocks that disappeared from the coast of Britain were found floating in shoals on the coasts of Norway. The remains of an immense body of herrings, that weighed down, a few seasons since, the nets of a crew of fishermen, in a muddy hollow of the Moray Frith, and defied the utmost exertions of three crews united to weigh them from the bottom, are, I doubt not, in the muddy hollow still. On a principle thus obvious it may be deemed not improbable that the ichthyolites of the Lower Old Red Sandstone might have had numerous contemporaries, of which, unless in some instances the same accident which killed also entombed them, we can know nothing in their character as such, and whose broken fragments may yet be found in some other locality, where they may be regarded as characteristic of a different formation.
But the ravages of no such disease, however extensive, could well account for some of the phenomena of this platform of death. It is rarely that disease falls equally on many different tribes at once, and never does it fall with instantaneous, suddenness; whereas in the ruin of this platform from ten to twelve distinct genera seem to have been equally involved; and so suddenly did it perform its work, that its victims were fixed in their first attitude of terror and surprise. I have observed, too, that groups of adjoining nodules are charged frequently with fragments of thesame variety of ichthyolite; and the circumstance seems fraught with evidence regarding both the original habits of the creatures, and the instantaneous suddenness of the destruction by which they were overtaken. They seem, like many of our existing fish, to have been gregarious, and to have perished together ere their crowds had time to break up and disperse.
Fish, have been found floating dead in shoals beside submarine volcanoes—killed either by the heated water, or by mephitic gases. There are, however, no marks of volcanic activity in connection with the ichthyolite beds—no marks, at least, which belong to nearly the same age with the fossils. The disturbing granite of the neighboring eminences was not upheaved until after the times of the Oolite. But the volcano, if such was the destroying agent, might have been distant; nay, from some of the points in an area of such immense extent, it must have been distant. The beds abound, as has been said, in lime; and the thought has often struck me that calcined lime, cast out as ashes from some distant crater, and carried by the winds, might have been the cause of the widely-spread destruction to which their organisms testify. I have seen the fish of a small trouting stream, over which a bridge was in the course of building, destroyed in a single hour, for a full mile below the erection, by the few troughfuls of lime that fell into the water when the centring was removed.
Successors of the exterminated Tribes.—The Gap slowly filled.—Proof that the Vegetation of a Formation may long survive its Animal Tribes. Probable Cause.—Immensely extended Period during which Fishes were the Master-existences of our Planet.—Extreme Folly of an Infidel Objection illustrated by the Fact.—Singular Analogy between the History of Fishes as Individuals and as a Class.—Chemistry of the Lower Formation.—Principles on which the Fish-enclosing Nodules were probably formed.—Chemical Effect of Animal Matter in discharging the Color from Red Sandstone.—Origin of the prevailing tint to which the System owes its Name.—Successive Modes in which a Metal may exist.—The Pest orations of the Geologist void of Color.—Very different Appearance of the Ichthyolites of Cromarty and Moray.
Theperiod of death passed, and over the innumerable dead there settled a soft, muddy sediment, that hid them from the light, bestowing upon them such burial as a November snow-storm bestows on the sere and blighted vegetation of the previous summer and autumn. For an unknown space of time, represented in the formation by a deposit about fifty feet in thickness, the waters of the depopulated area seem to have remained devoid of animal life. A few scales and plates then begin to appear. The fish that had existed outside the chasm seem to have gradually gained upon it, as their numbers increased, just as the European settlers of America have been gaining on the backwoods, and making themselves homes amid the burial-mounds of a race extinct for centuries. For a lengthened period, however, these finny settlers must have been comparatively few—mere squatters in the waste. In the beds of stratified clay in which theirremains first occur, over what we may term the densely crowded platform of violent death, the explorer may labor for hours together without finding a single scale.
It is worthy of remark, however, that this upper bed abounds quite as much in the peculiar vegetable impressions of the formation as the lower platform itself. An abundance equally great occurs in some localities only a few inches over the line of the exterminating catastrophe. Thickets of exactly the same algæ, amid which the fish of the formation had sheltered when living, grew luxuriantly over their graves when dead. The agencies of destruction which annihilated the animal life of so extended an area, spared its vegetation; just as the identical forests that had waved over the semi-civilized aborigines of North America continued to wave over the more savage red men, their successors, long after the original race had been exterminated. The inference deducible from the fact, though sufficiently simple, seems in a geological point of view a not unimportant one.The flora of a system may long survive its fauna; so that that may be but one formation, regarded with reference to plants, which may be two or more formations, regarded with reference to animals.No instance of any such phenomenon occurs in the later geological periods. The changes in animal and vegetable life appear to have run parallel to each other from the times of the tertiary formations down to those of the coal; but in the earlier deposits the case must have been different. The animal organisms of the newer Silurian strata form essentially different groups from those of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, and both differ from those of the Cornstone divisions; and yet the greater portion of their vegetable remains seem the same. The stem-like impressions of the fucoid bed of the Upper Ludlow Rocks cannot be distinguished fromthose of the ichthyolite beds of Cromarty and Ross, nor these again from the impressions of the Arbroath pavement, or the Den of Balruddery. Nor is there much difficulty in conceiving how the vegetation of a formation should come to survive its animals. What is fraught with health to the existences of the vegetable kingdom, is in many instances a deadly poison to those of the animal. The grasses and water-lilies of the neighborhood of Naples flourish luxuriantly amid the carbonic acid gas which rests so densely over the pools and runnels out of which they spring, that the bird stoops to drink, and falls dead into the water. The lime that destroys the reptiles, fish, and insects of a thickly inhabited lake or stream, injures not a single flag or bulrush among the millions that line its edges. The two kingdoms exist under laws of life and death so essentially dissimilar, that it has become one of the common-places of poetry to indicate the blight and decline of the tribes of the one by the unwonted luxuriancy of the productions of the other. Otway tells us, in describing the horrors of the plague which almost depopulated London, that the "destroying angel stretched his arm" over the city,
"Till in th' untrodden streets unwholesome grassGrew of great stalk, and color gross,A melancholic poisonous green."
"Till in th' untrodden streets unwholesome grassGrew of great stalk, and color gross,A melancholic poisonous green."
The work of deposition went on; a bed of pale yellow saliferous sandstone settled, tier over tier, on a bed of stratified clay, and was itself overlaid by another bed of stratified clay in turn. And this upper bed had also its organisms. The remains of its sea-weed still spread out thick and dark amid the foldings of the strata, and occasionally its clusters of detached scales. But the circumstances were less favorableto the preservation of entire ichthyolites than those under which the organisms of the lower platform were wrapped up in their stony coverings. The matrix, which is more micaceous than the other, seems to have been less conservative, and the waters were probably less still. The process went on. Age succeeded age, and one stratum covered up another. Generations lived, died, and were entombed in the ever-growing depositions. Succeeding generations pursued their instincts by myriads, happy in existence, over the surface which covered the broken and perishing remains of their predecessors, and then died and were entombed in turn, leaving a higher platform, and a similar destiny to the generations that succeeded. Whole races became extinct, through what process of destruction who can tell? Other races sprang into existence through that adorable power which One only can conceive, and One only can exert. An inexhaustible variety of design expatiated freely within the limits of the ancient type. The main conditions remained the same—the minor details were dissimilar. Vast periods passed; a class low in the scale still continued to furnish the master existences of creation; and so immensely extended was the term of its sovereignty, that a being of limited faculties, if such could have existed uncreated, and witnessed the whole, would have inferred that the power of the Creator had reached its extreme boundary, when fishes had been called into existence, and that our planet was destined to be the dwelling-place of no nobler inhabitants. If there be men dignified by the name of philosophers, who can hold that the present state of being, with all its moral evil, and all its physical suffering, is to be succeeded by no better and happier state, just because "all things have continued as they were" for some five or six thousand years, how much sounder and more conclusive would the inference have been whichcould have been based, as in the supposed case, on a period perhaps a hundred times more extended?
There exist wonderful analogies in nature between the geological history of the vertebrated animals as an order, and the individual history of every mammifer—between the history, too, of fish as a class, and that of every single fish. "It has been found by Tiedemann," says Mr. Lyell, "that the brain of the fœtus in the higher class of vertebrated animals assumes in succession the various forms which belong to fishes, reptiles, and birds, before it acquires those additions and modifications which are peculiar to the mammiferous tribes." "In examining the brain of the mammalia," says M. Serres, "at an early stage of life, you perceive the cerebral hemispheres consolidated, as in fish, in two vesicles isolated one from the other; at a later period you see them affect the configuration of the cerebral hemispheres of reptiles; still later, again, they present you with the forms of those of birds; and finally, at the era of birth, the permanent forms which the adult mammalia present." And such seems to have been the history of the vertebrata as an order, as certainly as that of the individual mammifer. The fish preceded the reptile in the order of creation, just as the crustacean had preceded the fish, and the annelid the crustacean. Again, though the fact be somewhat more obscure, the reptile seems to have preceded the bird. We find, however, unequivocal traces of the feathered tribes in well-marked foot-prints impressed on a sandstone in North America, at most not more modern than the Lias, but which is generally supposed to be of the same age with the New Red Sandstone of Germany and our own country. In the Oolite—at least one, perhaps two formations later—the bones of the two species of mammiferous quadrupeds have been found, apparently of the marsupialfamily; and these, says Mr. Lyell, afford the only example yet known of terrestrial mammalia in rocks of a date anterior to the older tertiary formations. The reptile seems to have preceded the bird, and the bird the mammiferous animal. Thus the fœtal history of the nervous system in the individual mammifer seems typical, in every stage of its progress, of the history of the grand division at the head of which the mammifer stands. Agassiz, at the late meeting of the British Association in Glasgow, mentioned an analogous fact. After describing the one-sided tail of the more ancient fish, especially the fish of the Old Red Sandstone,—the subjects of his illustration at the time,—he stated, as the result of a recent discovery, that the young of the salmon in their fœtal state exhibit the same unequally-sided condition of tail which characterizes those existences of the earlier ages of the world. The individual fish, just as it begins to exist, presents the identical appearances which were exhibited by the order when the order began to exist. Is there nothing wonderful in analogies such as these—analogies that point through the embryos of the present time to the womb of Nature, big with its multitudinous forms of being? Are they charged with no such nice evidence as a Butler would delight to contemplate, regarding that uniquestyleof Deity, if I may so express myself, which runs through all his works, whether we consider him as God of Nature, or Author of Revelation? In this style of type and symbol did He reveal himself of old to his chosen people; in this style of allegory and parable did He again address himself to them, when he sojourned among them on earth.
The chemistry of the formation seems scarce inferior in interest to its zoology; but the chemist had still much to do for Geology, and the processes are but imperfectly known.There is no field in which more laurels await the philosophical chemist than the geological one. I have said that all the calcareous nodules of the ichthyolite beds seem to have had originally their nucleus of organic matter. In nine cases out of ten the organism can be distinctly traced; and in the tenth there is almost always something to indicate where it lay—an elliptical patch of black, or an oblong spot, from which the prevailing color of the stone has been discharged, and a lighter hue substituted. Is the reader acquainted with Mr. Pepys's accidental experiment, as related by Mr. Lyell, and recorded in the first volume of theGeological Transactions?It affords an interesting proof that animal matter, in a state of putrefaction, proves a powerful agent in the decomposition of mineral substances held in solution, and of their consequent precipitation. An earthen pitcher, containing several quarts of sulphate of iron, had been suffered to remain undisturbed and unexamined in a corner of Mr. Pepys's laboratory for about a twelvemonth. Some luckless mice had meanwhile fallen into it, and been drowned; and when it at length came to be examined, an oily scum, and a yellow, sulphureous powder, mixed with hairs, were seen floating on the top, and the bones of the mice discovered lying at the bottom; and it was found, that over the decaying bodies the mineral components of the fluid had been separated and precipitated in a dark-colored sediment, consisting of grains of pyrites and of sulphur, of copperas in its green and crystalline form, and of black oxide of iron. The animal and mineral matters had mutually acted upon one another; and the metallic sulphate, deprived of its oxygen in the process, had thus cast down its ingredients. It would seem that over the putrefying bodies of the fish of the Lower Old Red Sandstone the water had deposited, in like manner, the lime with which it wascharged; and hence the calcareous nodules in which we find their remains enclosed. The form of the nodule almost invariably agrees with that of the ichthyolite within; it is a coffin in the ancient Egyptian style. Was the ichthyolite twisted half round in the contorted attitude of violent death? the nodule has also its twist. Did it retain its natural posture? the nodule presents the corresponding spindle form. Was it broken up, and the outline destroyed? the nodule is flattened and shapeless. In almost every instance the form of the organism seems to have regulated that of the stone. We may trace, in many of these concretionary masses, the operations of three distinct principles, all of which must have been in activity at one and the same time. They are wrapped concentrically each round its organism: they split readily in the line of the enclosing stratum, and are marked by its alternating rectilinear bars of lighter and darker color; and they are radiated from the centre to the circumference. Their concentric condition shows the chemical influences of the decaying animal matter; their fissile character and parallel layers of color indicate the general deposition which was taking place at the time; and their radiated structure testifies to that law of crystalline attraction, through which, by a wonderful masonry, the invisible but well-cut atoms build up their cubes, their rhombs, their hexagons, and their pyramids, and are at once the architects and the materials of the structure which they rear.
Another and very different chemical effect of organic matter may be remarked in the darker colored arenaceous deposits of the formation, and occasionally in the stratified clays and nodules of the ichthyolite bed. In a print-work, the whole web is frequently thrown into the vat and dyed of one color; but there afterwards comes a discharging process:some chemical mixture is dropped on the fabric; the dye disappears wherever the mixture touches; and in leaves, and sprigs, and patches, according to the printer's pattern, the cloth assumes its original white. Now the colored deposits of the Old Red Sandstone have, in like manner, been subjected to a discharging process. The dye has disappeared in oblong or circular patches of various sizes, from the eighth of an inch to a foot in diameter; the original white has taken its place; and so thickly are these speckles grouped in some of the darker-tinted beds, that the surfaces, where washed by the sea, present the appearance of sheets of calico. The discharging agent was organic matter; the uncolored patches are no mere surface films, for, when cut at right angles, their depth is found to correspond with their breadth, the circle is a sphere, the ellipsis forms the section of an egg-shaped body, and in the centre of each we generally find traces of the organism in whose decay it originated. I have repeatedly found single scales, in the ichthyolite beds, surrounded by uncolored spheres about the size of musket bullets. It is well for the young geologist carefully to mark such appearances—to trace them through the various instances in which the organism may be recognized and identified, to those in which its last vestiges have disappeared. They are the hatchments of the geological world, and indicate that life once existed where all other record of it has perished.[BC]