the Boulder-clay Red Sandstone
accounted for--Hard-pan how formed--A reformed Garden--An ancient
Battle-field--Antiquity of Geologic and Human History
compared--Burn of Killein--Observation made in boyhood
confirmed--Fossil-nodules--Fine Specimen of _Coccosteus
decipiens_--Blank strata of Old Red--New View respecting the Rocks
of Black Isle--A Trip up Moray and Dingwall Friths--Altered color
of the Boulder-clay--Up the Auldgrande River--Scenery of the great
Conglomerate--Graphic Description--Laidlaw's Boulder--_Vaccinium
myrtillus_--Profusion of Travelled Boulders--The Boulder _Clach
Malloch_--Its zones of Animal and Vegetable Life.

The ravine excavated by the mill-dam showed me what I had never so well
seen before,--the exact relation borne by the deep red stone of the
Cromarty quarries to the ichthyolite beds of the system. It occupies the
same place, and belongs to the same period, as those superior beds of
the Lower Old Red Sandstone which are so largely developed in the cliffs
of Dunnet Head in Caithness, and of Tarbet Ness in Ross-shire, and which
were at one time regarded as forming, north of the Grampians, the
analogue of the New Red Sandstone. I paced it across the strata this
morning, in the line of the ravine, and found its thickness over the
upper fish-beds, though I was far from reaching its superior layers,
which are buried here in the sea, to be rather more than five hundred
feet. The fossiliferous beds occur a few hundred yards below the
dwelling-house of Rose Farm. They are not quite uncovered in the ravine;
but we find their places indicated by heaps of gray argillaceous shale,
mingled with their characteristic ichthyolitic nodules, in one of which
I found a small specimen of Cheiracanthus. The projecting edge of some
fossil-charged bed had been struck, mayhap, by an iceberg, and dashed
into ruins, just as the subsiding land had brought the spot within reach
of the attritive ice; and the broken heap thus detached had been shortly
afterwards covered up, without mixture of any other deposit, by the red
boulder-clay. On the previous day I had detected the fish-beds in
another new locality,--one of the ravines of the lawn of Cromarty
House,--where the gray shale, concealed by a covering of soil and sward
for centuries, had been laid bare during the storm by a swollen runnel,
and a small nodule, inclosing a characteristic plate of Pterichthys,
washed out