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Brownrigfi; near Penrith, he was anxious to see whether any further 

 light could be thrown upon their true nature by observations made 

 upon similar rocks in other parts. In the case of the subject of 

 the paper now referred to there was — perhaps I might almost 

 venture to say that in some minds there is still — some doubt as to 

 the precise position of these beds in the North of Scotland, 

 whether they were the equivalents in time of the true Old Red, or 

 whether they did not represent the equivalents of some of these 

 Red Rocks that form the surface rock of so large a portion of 

 Edenside. The conclusions he arrived at were embodied in a 

 communication to the Geological Society in November, 1864. 



Some time after Harkness had written the papers on the New 

 Red rocks of the Basin of the Solway that have already been 

 referred to. Sir Roderick Murchison decided to pay that part of 

 the kingdom a visit, with a view to making a personal examination 

 of the various sections already described. Accordingly in the * • 

 of 1865, Harkness went with him to each of the principal localities 

 described, and explained his views to Sir Roderick on the spot. 

 We have evidence that one result of this joint expedition was that 

 Harkness was induced to make some important modifications in 

 the scheme of classification that his previous independent investi- 

 gations had led him to accept. The question at issue was, where 

 the line dividing the Secondary Rocks from the Palaeozoic should 

 be drawn. Many observers had been hard at work with this same 

 object in view for years past ; but, as I shall have occasion to 

 remark presently, some of these geologists had collected fossils 

 from Carboniferous rocks stained red — like the sandstones that 

 emerge from beneath our New Red all over Edenside — and, 

 because these rocks were similar in colour to the New Red itself, 

 they were regarded as of the same age. Then, when it was 

 observed that the fossils got from these supposed New Red rocks 

 were wonderfully like the fossils from the Carboniferous series 

 while it was known that the fossils from the higher parts of the 

 New Red — the equivalents in time of some of the rocks around 

 Carlisle — had closer affinities with the so-called Secondary Rocks, 

 it became evident that, if the character of included fossils was to 



