of a field. The Old Red platform is
mottled by the outliers of a comparatively modern time: the sepulchral
mounds of later races, that lived and died during the reptile age of the
world, repose on the surface of an ancient burying-ground, charged with
remains of the long anterior age of the fish; and over all, as a general
covering, rest the red boulder-clay and the vegetable mould. Mr. Duff,
in his valuable "Sketch of the Geology of Moray," enumerates five
several localities in the neighborhood of Elgin in which there occur
outliers of the Weald; though, of course, in a country so flat, and in
which the diluvium lies deep, we cannot hold that all have been
discovered. And though the outliers of the Oolite have not yet been
ascertained to be equally numerous, they seem of greater extent; the
isolated masses detached from them by the denuding agencies lie thick
over extensive areas; and in working out the course of improvement which
has already rendered Elginshire the garden of the north, the ditcher at
one time touches on some bed of shale charged with the characteristic
Ammonites and Belemnites of the system, and at another on some
calcareous sandstone bed, abounding with its Pectens, its Plagiostoma,
and its Pinnae. Some of these outliers, whether Wealden or Oolitic, are
externally of great beauty. They occur in the parish of Lhanbryde, about
three miles to the east of Elgin, in the form of green pyramidal
hillocks, mottled with trees, and at Linksfield, as a confluent group of
swelling grassy mounds. And from their insulated character, and the
abundance of organisms which they inclose, they serve to remind one of
those green pyramids of Central America in which the traveller finds
deposited the skeleton remains of extinct races. It has been suggested
by Mr. Duff, in his "Sketch,"--a suggestion which the late
Sutherlandshire discoveries of Mr. Robertson of Inverugie have tended to
confirm,--that the Oolite and Weald of Moray do not, in all probability,
represent consecutive formations: they seem to bear the same sort of
relation to each other as that mutually borne by the Mountain Limestone
and the Coal Measures. The one, of lacustrine or of estuary origin,
exhibits chiefly the productions of the land and its fresh waters; the
other, as decidedly of marine origin, is charged with the remains of
animals whose proper home was the sea. But the productions, though
dissimilar, were in all probability contemporary, just as th