laceous Deposit of
Blackpots--Pipe-laying in Scotland--Fossils of Blackpots Clay--Mr.
Longmuir's Description of them--Blackpots Deposit a Re-formation of
a Liasic Patch--Period of its Formation.

I lingered on the hill-side considerably longer than I ought; and then,
hurrying downwards to the beach, passed eastwards under a range of
abrupt, mouldering precipices of red sandstone, to the village. From the
lie of the strata, which, instead of inclining coastwise, dip towards
the interior of the country, and present in the descent seawards the
outcrop of lower and yet lower deposits of the formation, I found it
would be in vain to look for the ichthyolite beds along the shore. They
may possibly be found, however, though I lacked time to ascertain the
fact, along the sides of a deep ravine, which occurs near an old
ecclesiastical edifice of gray stone, perched, nest-like, half-way up
the bank, on a green hummock that overlooks the sea. The rocks, laid
bare by the tide, belong to the bed of coarse-grained red sandstone,
varying from eighty to a hundred and fifty feet in thickness, which lies
between the lower fish-bed and the great conglomerate, and which, in not
a few of its strata, passes itself into a species of conglomerate,
different only from that which it overlies, in being more finely
comminuted. The continuity of this bed, like that of the deposit on
which it rests, is very remarkable. I have found it occurring at many
various points, over an area at least ten thousand square miles in
extent, and bearing always the same well-marked character of a more
thoroughly ground-down conglomerate than the great conglomerate on which
it reposes. The underlying bed is composed of broken fragments of the
rocks below, crushed, as if by some imperfect rudimentary process, like
that which in a mill merely breaks the grain; whereas, in the bed above,
a portion of the previously-crushed materials seems to have been
subjected to some further attritive process, like that through which, in
the mill, the broken grain is ground down into meal or flour.

As I passed onwards, I saw, amid a heap of drift-weed stranded high on
the beach by the previous tide, a defunct father-lasher, with the two
defensive spines which project from its opercles stuck fast into little
cubes of cork, that had floated its head above water, as the
tyro-swimmer floats himself upon bladders; and my previous acquaintance
with the habits of a fishing