n8 The Scottish Naturalist. 



Carboniferous. More will be reported of the fossils, I trust, in 

 the next issue of the Scottish Naturalist. 



The isolation of the Dron beds is at least curious, and perhaps 

 even a little perplexing, when one finds it necessary to cross the 

 Ochils and to reach Mid-Lothian before a similar rock appears, 

 unless, as I have for some time suspected, the beds through 

 which the bore has lately passed at Dunning are identical with 

 them. Even though such should be the case, it is still curious 

 that the depth of the valley should contain Carboniferous rocks, 

 whilst the high lands on either side exhibit undoubted Old 

 Red Sandstone. One can just imagine a great anticlinal curve 

 bringing the Fife rocks right over the hills into the valley, 

 whence they may have extended one can never tell whither ; 

 but that one item, denudation, has performed a wondrous work 

 during our " fifty millions " of years. Or, we may perhaps 

 imagine a series of local changes, so that now a lake or an 

 estuary deposited the cypris and fish-beds, and now a sub-marine 

 accumulation entombed the spiriferce. This latter theory is, 

 I think, less likely than that of greater continuity and subse- 

 quent denudation. In this denudation, wherever a synclinal 

 curve carried the upper beds low down, there they might per- 

 chance be left. Whether the Dron beds are of local deposition 

 or local protection, they are worthy of the greatest consideration. 

 They are a volume of no common interest in the wonderful 

 history of the past. They are an evidence, at the very feet of 

 volcanic hills, of quiet lakes, or widely spreading estuaries, 

 reposing for unnumbered thousands of years, and of briny waters 

 that usurped the places of lakes and rivers, to be for still 

 another giant stride of time the recorder of a chapter in the 

 mundane history. The Carboniferous era must have witnessed 

 conditions that have no parallel in the present world — condi- 

 tions that have had no equals in any subsequent period in the 

 peculiar distribution of land and water, of widely-spreading 

 estuaries and shallow seas, of swamp and verdant woodland, 

 moorland and lake, not once and for aye, but coming and going, 

 now with one state of things and now another, shifting through 

 decades of centuries like the scenes in a panorama. The joy, 

 sweetest and deepest, to be derived from any geological expedi- 

 tion is that of the association of long-lost times, and scenes, and 

 conditions, and existences, with our poor human efforts. Why 

 men should scorn to indulge in anything imaginative, and 

 declare that such weaknesses are a sure sign of the absence of 



