rom those of the present scene of things,--the existences of
a happier and more finished creation? My business to-day, however, was
with the fossils which the deposit now contains,--not with those which
it may ultimately form.

The Blackpots clay is of a dark-bluish or greenish-gray color, and so
adhesive, that I now felt, when walking among it, after the softening
rains of the previous night and morning, as if I had got into a bed of
bird-lime. It is thinly charged with rolled pebbles, septaria, and
pieces of a bituminous shale, containing broken Belemnites, and
sorely-flattened Ammonites, that exist as thin films of a white chalky
lime. The pebbles, like those of the boulder-clay of the northern side
of the Moray Frith, are chiefly of the primary rocks and older
sandstones, and were probably in the neighborhood, in their present
rolled form, long ere the re-formation of the inclosing mass; while the
shale and the septaria are, as shown by their fossils, decidedly Liasic.
I detected among the conchifers a well-marked species of our northern
Lias, figured by Sowerby from Eathie specimens,--the _Plagiostoma
concentrica_; and among the Cephalopoda, though considerably broken,
the _Belemnite elongatus_ and _Belemnite lanceolata_, with the _Ammonite
Koenigi_ (_mutabilis_),--all Eathie shells. I, besides, found in the
bank a piece of a peculiar-looking quartzose sandstone, traversed by
hard jaspedeous veins of a brownish-gray color, which I have never
found, in Scotland at least, save associated with the Lias of our
north-eastern coasts. Further, my attention was directed by Dr. Emslie
to a fine Lignite in his collection, which had once formed some eighteen
inches or two feet of the trunk of a straight slender pine,--probably
the _Pinites Eiggensis_,--in which, as in most woods of the Lias and
Oolite, the annual rings are as strongly marked as in the existing firs
or larches of our hill-sides.[11] The Blackpots deposit is evidently a
re-formation of a Liasic patch, identical, both in mineralogical
character and in its organic remains, with the lower beds of the Eathie
Lias; while the fragments of shale which it contains belong chiefly to
an upper Liasic bed. So rich is the dark-colored tenacious argil of the
Inferior Lias of Eathie, that the geologist who walks over it when it is
still moist with the receding tide would do well to look to his
footing;--the mixture of soap and grease spread by the ship-carpenter
on his launch