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strengthen his hypothesis that these rocks, too, are of the same pre-Cambrian age 

 as the other rocks in the axial chain of which they form links. Any way large 

 modification of the conclusions to which both Sir R. Murchison and the Ordnance 

 Surveyors came as to the purely volcanic character of these rocks seems necessary 

 here as it has been found to be elsewhere. Any way, too, the speculation as to 

 their origin (containing as it does a high degree of probability), is an exceedingly 

 interesting one. We may be, and I cannot help but think that it is very likely 

 that we are, standing on what, in its unaltered condition, formed the surface of 

 hills and valleys of a dry ground ages before the slates and shales and sandstones 

 of the old Longmynds were being laid down at the bottom of Cambrian seas ; we 

 are taken back in thought to a period when, so far as the record of the rocks can 

 guide us, life had not as yet dawned upon this planet, to a dim distance separated 

 probably from the age of the lowly Trilobites of the Silurians by an interval of 

 time as vast as divides that long past day from our own. 



