The Scottish Naturalist. 119 



""science," I could never understand. I believe that science 

 should fill us brimful of poetry, for poetry reads, in a loftier 

 manner, everything superhuman, and those who dare not indulge 

 in such "useless" reveries are the veriest slaves to the science, 

 and all their " knappings of chuckie stanes " but the ticking of a 

 clock or the clicking of type in the compositor's stick — mechan- 

 ical indices of something else. The spirit of the Geological 

 Record is as superior to its words and sentences as the soul is 

 to the body ; and the feeling of reverence cannot be too deep, 

 as one turns the pages so sublimely written by an omnipotent 

 Creator. The geologist who feels at the cliff as the stone-breaker 

 feels at his trade is no fortunate brother. The response in the 

 following beautiful lines should ring for ever round the earnest 

 hammer : — 



" What sea, receding from what former world, 

 Consigned these tribes to stony sepulchres ? 

 Bewilder'd sage ! proclaim thy wisdom folly, 

 And where thy Reason fails let Faith begin : 

 The rocks have sacred secrets of their own, 

 That teach the wise humility and praise."* 



As I have before hinted, I have for some time believed that 

 the rocks of Dunning may be equivalent to those of Dron. It 

 can be no great marvel to find Carboniferous rocks at Dunning 

 if such exist at Dron ; but it would be somewhat startling to find 

 that Dunning possessed " Upper " Carboniferous, since Dron 

 possesses " Lower," the more so when one has found undoubted 

 Old Red on every hand, within easy distance of Dunning. 



If the Dunning explorers had been assured that they were 

 cutting through genuine Carboniferous rocks they would doubt- 

 less have gone on all the merrier, notwithstanding Geology's 

 assertion that there is a difference between "upper" and "lower" 

 coal-measures, and that the latter contains, over the hills, only 

 a " few thin seams of coal," a great many such layers as those 

 of Dron, and is, altogether, 2,000 feet in thickness. "It is 

 reported," says Hugh Miller, in his "Old Red Sandstone," "by 

 Dr. Anderson of Newburgh, that a fruitless and expensive search 

 after coal has lately been instituted in the Old Red Sandstone 

 beds which traverse Strathearn and the Carse of Gowrie, in the 

 belief that they belong, not to the Old, but to the New Red 

 Sandstone." The following is from a recent •" Perthshire 

 Constitutional": "The first experiments we know of were 



* Dr. John Anderson. 



