The Scottish Naturalist. 117 



There are in Fife 2000 feet of Lower Carboniferous rocks, con- 

 sisting: in their lower series of "a vast thickness of whitish fine- 

 grained sandstones, bituminous shales, a few thin seams of coal, 

 mussel-bands or shell-limestone, ironstones, and fresh-water lime- 

 stones abounding in cyprides" (Page). The Geological Survey's 

 Memoirs give the following as the Lower Carboniferous series 

 of south of England — near Bristol on Avon : " Lower series 

 enclosing many alternations of limestones and shales, the former 

 often black, brown, yellowish, sometimes impure, and in one 

 part charged with fish remains and cyprides in abundance — 500 

 feet." I believe several of the bands at Dron would yield fish 

 remains in tolerable abundance could they be properly worked, 

 for minute teeth and scales are scattered through the material ; 

 and on one occasion I exhumed, in very mouldering condition, 

 what would, I doubt not, otherwise have been an almost perfect 

 specimen. The isolated scales represent the ganoid and, I be- 

 lieve, placoid orders ; one of them greatly resembles Holypty- 

 chius. There was, however, a fragment of jaw, showing six 

 teeth of what was thought to be theyfr/^-dentition of the sauroid 

 fish Rhizodus. The more common shells bear an estuary 

 aspect, but imperfect specimens of Spirifer were obtained. A 

 shale-slab bore a vegetable impression, and another showed 

 small, but well defined, ripple-marks. 



This, thus far, is the list of fossils from Dron, important or 

 unimportant as they may be judged to be. I concluded, from 

 the lithological character of the beds, that they were not Old 

 Red, and I now, from this small group of fossils and their geo- 

 logical and geographical position, believe them to be Lower 

 Carboniferous. Cyprides are found in most rocks above Old 

 Red Sandstone, but Rhizodus is a carboniferous genus. The 

 immediate neighbourhood of the Old Red Sandstone suggests 

 an almost impossibility of this being Upper Carboniferous, 

 seeing that 2000 feet of Lower Carboniferous and 200 feet of 

 Mountain Limestone exist in Fife, and should, in that case, 

 exist underneath, whilst Upper Carboniferous itself is 2500 feet 

 in thickness. There is, moreover, an absence of the fossils that 

 one might expect in the Upper series. That these rocks are 

 Lower Carboniferous a good deal affirms, while little or nothing 

 negatives this view. On seeing the very imperfect fossils, Mr. 

 Somervail, of the Edinburgh Geological Society, suggested that 

 they possibly bear some anomalous characters, and that the 

 beds may be found to be passage-beds between Old Red and 



