n6 The Scottish Naturalist. 



minute crustaceans. The other was not labelled, but contained 

 several of the commonest shells of the Dron beds. Curiously, 

 a few days since, when Dr. Anderson, of Kinnoull, kindly 

 showed me some fossils of the late Doctor's collecting, I was 

 struck with the identity of the writing attached to those, and 

 the word " cypris," on the Rossie specimen. I had particularly 

 noticed the latter writing. Other evidence of Dr. Anderson's 

 acquaintance with Dron, I think, may be seen on the late 

 Doctor's geological map in the beautiful monograph of Dura 

 Den, where the colour representing the Old Red Sandstone 

 is carried to within a short distance of Dron, when the paper 

 is left white. This is curiously suggestive. The Rev. John 

 Anderson, D.D., of Kinnoull, informs me that he distinctly 

 remembers the visits of his father, the late Rev. Dr. Anderson, 

 of Newburgh, to Dron — on one occasion accompanied by the 

 celebrated microscopist, Dr. Quekett — and of the Dr.'s asser- 

 tion that some of the beds appeared in part to be composed of 

 the remains of the minute crustacean cypris, and that he was 

 sure the late Dr. had brought the beds into notice some- 

 where. 



In a letter, dated ioth April, 1875, to Dr. Buchanan White, 

 Dr. Lauder Lindsay writes as follows : "It is several years 

 since I visited the glen and collected a suite of its fossils. At 

 the time I was puzzled by their character occurring in the Old 

 Red Sandstone area of Strathearn, and I thought of drawing 

 up an account of the locality and its produce for one of the 

 geological societies or journals. But .... Mr. Sadler 

 sent me a cutting from an old Fifeshire newspaper containing 

 Dr. Anderson's views. My present conclusion is that Dron is 

 a patch of carboniferous strata, cut off from the Fife coal-fields 

 by the Ochils." 



The fossils of Dron are not, so far as I have been able to dis- 

 cover, very numerous in species nor in very good preservation, 

 but Cyprididae abound in many of the layers. " Fossil forms, 

 under the generic names of Cypris, Cypridea, Cypridina, Cy- 

 prella, and Cypridclla, occur in all rocks from the Lower Coal- 

 measures upwards" (Page's "Handbook of Geological Terms"). 

 If this be correct, it gives a strong Carboniferous feature to these 

 beds, seeing that they must in that case be more modern than 

 the Old Red. Cypridina occurs in supposed Upper Devonian 

 of Saxony and Nassau, but Professor Page believes this to be 

 the base of the Carboniferous. 



