ld Red Sandstone ichthyolites fully ten years ere I
learned to know them. In forming a temporary harbour, at which we boated
the stones we had been quarrying, I struck my pick into a slaty
sandstone bed, thickly mottled in the layers by carbonaceous markings.
They consisted, I saw, of thin rectilinear stems or leaves, much broken
and in a bad state of keeping, that at once suggested to me layers of
comminuted _Zostera marina_, such as I had often seen on the Cromarty
beach thrown up from the submarine meadows of the Firth beyond. But
then, with magnificent ammonites and belemnites, and large well-marked
lignites, to be had in abundance at Eathie just for the laying open and
the picking up, how could I think of giving myself to disinter what
seemed to be mere broken fragments of _Zostera_? Within, however, a few
feet of these carbonaceous markings there occurred one of those
platforms of violent death for which the Old Red Sandstone is so
remarkable--a platform strewed over with fossil remains of the firstborn
ganoids of creation, many of which still bore in their contorted
outlines evidence of sudden dissolution and the dying pang.

During the winter of this year--for winter at length came, and, my
labours over, three happy months were all my own--I had an opportunity
of seeing, deep in a wild Highland glen, the remains of one of our old
Scotch forests of the native pine. My cousin George, finding his pretty
Highland cottage on the birch-covered tomhan situated too far from his
ordinary scenes of employment, had removed to Cromarty; and when his
work had this year come to a close for the season, he made use of his
first leisure in visiting his father-in-law, an aged shepherd who
resided in the upper recesses of Strathcarron. He had invited me to
accompany him; and of the invitation I gladly availed myself. We struck
across the tract of wild hills which intervenes between the Cromarty and
Dornoch Firths, a few miles to the west of the village of Invergordon;
and after spending several hours in toiling across dreary moors,
unopened at the time by any public road, we took our noon-day
refreshment in an uninhabited valley, among broken cottage walls, with a
few furrowed patches stretching out around us, green amid the waste. One
of the best swordsmen in Ross had once lived there; but both he and his
race had been lost to Scotland in consequence of the compelled
emigration so common in the Highlands during the last two ages;