rance
of the rounded masses in which these lay, they must have presented as
ancient an appearance in the times of the Lower Oolite as they do now;
and the glimpse which they lent of so remote an antiquity, through the
medium of an antiquity which, save for the comparison which they
furnished the means of instituting, might be well deemed superlatively
remote, I have felt singularly awe-inspiring and impressive. Macaulay
anticipates a time when the traveller from some distant land shall take
his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to survey the ruins of St.
Paul's. In disinterring from amid the antique remains of the Oolite the
immensely more antique remains of the Old Red Sandstone, I have felt as
such a traveller would feel if, on setting himself to dig among the
scattered heaps for memorials of the ruined city, he had fallen on what
had been once the Assyrian Gallery of the British Museum, and had found
mingling with the antiquities of perished London the greatly older and
more venerable antiquities of Nineveh or of Babylon. The land of the
Oolite in this northern locality must have been covered by a soil
which,--except that from a lack of the boulder clays it must have been
poorer and shallower,--must have not a little resembled that of the
lower plains of Cromarty, Caithness, and Eastern Ross. And on this
Palaeozoic platform, long exposed, as the Oolitic Conglomerates
abundantly testify, to denuding and disintegrating agencies,--a platform
beaten by the surf where it descended to the sea level, and washed in
the interior by rivers, with here a tall hill or abrupt precipice, and
there a flat plain or sluggish morass,--there grew vast forests of
cone-bearing trees, tangled thickets of gigantic equisetaceae, numerous
forms of Cycas and Zamia, and wide-rolling seas of fern, amid whose open
spaces club mosses of extinct tribes sent forth their long, creeping
stems, spiky and dry, and thickly mottled with pseudo-spore-bearing
catkins.

The curtain drops over this ancient flora of the Oolite in Scotland; and
when, long after, there is a corner of the thick enveloping screen
withdrawn, and we catch a partial glimpse of one of the old Tertiary
forests of our country, all is new. Trees of the high dicotyledonous
class, allied to the plane and the buckthorn, prevail in the landscape,
intermingled, however, with dingy funereal yews; and the ferns and
equisetae that rise in the darker openings of the wood approach to the
ex