s_ and Belemnite _elongatus_, and found, detached on
the surface of the bed, a fragment of a singularly large Belemnite, a
full inch and a quarter in diameter, the species of which I could not
determine.

Returning by the track we came, we reach the bottom of the bay, which we
find much obscured with sand and shingle; and pass northwards along its
side, under a range of low sandstone precipices, with interposing grassy
slopes, in which the fertile Oolitic meniscus descends to the beach. The
sandstone, white and soft, and occurring in thick beds, much resembles
that of the Oolite of Sutherland. We detect in it few traces of fossils;
now and then a carbonaceous marking, and now and then what seems a thin
vein of coal, but which proves to be merely the bark of some woody stem,
converted into a glossy bituminous lignite, like that of Brora. But in
beds of a blue clay, intercalated with the sandstone, we find fossils in
abundance, of a character less obscure. We spent a full half-hour in
picking out shells from the bottom of a long dock-like hollow among the
rocks, in which a bed of clay has yielded to the waves, while the strata
on either side stand up over it like low wharfs on the opposite side of
a river. The shells, though exceedingly fragile,--for they partake of
the nature of the clayey matrix in which they are imbedded,--rise as
entire as when they had died among the mud, years, mayhap ages, ere the
sandstone had been deposited over them; and we were enabled at once to
detect their extreme dissimilarity, as a group, to the shells of the
Liasic deposit we had so lately quitted. We did not find in this bed a
single Ammonite, Belemnite, or Nautilus; but chalky Bivalves, resembling
our existing Tellina, in vast abundance, mixed with what seem to be a
small Buccinum and a minute Trochus, with numerous rather equivocal
fragments of a shell resembling an Oiliva. So thickly do they lie
clustered together in this deposit, that in some patches where the
sad-colored argillaceous ground is washed bare by the sea, it seems
marbled with them into a light gray tint. The group more nearly
resembles in type a recent one than any I have yet seen in a secondary
deposit, except perhaps in the Weald of Moray, where we find in one of
the layers a Planorbis scarce distinguishable from those of our ponds
and ditches, mingled with a Paludina that seems as nearly modelled after
the existing form. From the absence of the more characteristic she