TRANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. 85 



most beds of the Upper Old Red formation in Scotland, which are usually of a pale or 

 light yellow colour, the vegetable remains again becomestrongly carbonaceous, but their 

 state of preservation continues bad — too bad to admit of their determination of either 

 species or genera; and not until we rise a very little beyond the system do we find 

 the remains of a Flora either rich or well-preserved. But very remarkable is the 

 change which at this stage at once occurs. We pass at a single stride from great 

 poverty to great wealth. The suddenness of the change seems suited to remind one 

 of that experienced by the voyager when, after traversing for many days some wide 

 expanse of ocean, unvaried save by its banks of floating sea- weed, or where, occa- 

 sionally and at wide intervals, he picks up some leaf-bearing bough, or marks some 

 fragment of drift- weed go floating past, he enters at length the sheltered lagoon of 

 some coral island, and sees all around the deep green of a tropical vegetation de- 

 scending in tangled luxuriance to the water's- edge — tall, erect ferns, and creeping 

 Lycopodiaceae ; and the Pandanus, with its aerial roots and its screw-like clusters of 

 narrow leaves ; and high over all, tall Palms, with their huge pinnate fronds, and 

 their curiously aggregated groups of massive fruit. 



" In this noble Flora of the coal-measures much still remains to be done in Scotland. 

 Our Lower Carboniferous rocks are of immense development ; the limestones of 

 Burdie House, with their numerous terrestrial plants, occur many hundred feet 

 beneath our mountain limestones ; and our list of vegetable species peculiar to these 

 lower deposits is still very incomplete. Even in those higher carboniferous rocks 

 with which the many coal-workings of the country have rendered us comparatively 

 familiar, there seems to be still a good deal of the new and the unknown to repay 

 the labour of future explorers. It was only last year that Mr. Gourlie, of this city, 

 added to our fossil Flora a new Volkmannia from the coal-field of Carluke ; and I 

 detected very recently in a neighbouring locality, though in but an indifferent state 

 of keeping, what seems to be a new and very peculiar fern. There is a Stig- 

 maria, too, on the table, very ornate in its sculpture, of which I have now found 

 three specimens in a quarry of the coal-measures near Portobello, that has still to 

 be figured and described. In this richly-ornamented Stigmaria the characteristic 

 areolae present the ordinary aspect ; each, however, forms the centre of a sculptured 

 star, consisting of from eighteen to twenty rays, or rather the centre of a sculptured 

 flower of the Composite order, resembling a garden daisy. The minute petals — if 

 we are to accept the latter comparison — are ranged in three concentric lines, and 

 their form is irregularly lenticular. Even among the vegetable organisms already 

 partially described and figured, much remains to be accomplished in the way of 

 restoration. The detached pinnae of a fern, or a few fragments of the stems of Ulo- 

 dendron or Sigillaria, give very inadequate ideas of the plants to which they had 

 belonged in their state of original entireness." 



Exhibition of Fossil Plants of the Old Red Sandstone of Caithness. Col- 

 lected by John Miller of Thurso. 

 These plants, chiefly collected from the upper portion of the Caithness flags near 

 Thurso, appeared to be the same as those described in detail by Mr. Hugh Miller. 

 Some of the specimens were of considerable dimensions and great beauty. 



On the Relations of the Crystalline Rochs of the North Highlands to the Old 

 Red Sandstone of that Region, and on the recent discoveries of Fossils in 

 the former by Mr. Charles Peach. By Sir Roderick I. Murchison, 

 Director-General of the Geological Survey. 



Having referred to his earliest publications relating to the Old Red Sandstone, in 

 1826 and 1827 (associated in the latter year with Prof. Sedgwick), the author 

 explained how the classification originally proposed by his colleague and himself had 

 been extended and improved by the researches of Mr. Hugh Miller. Having stated 

 that his matured and condensed views, showing the true equivalents of the Old Red 

 Sandstone to be the Devonian rocks of other countries, were given in his last publi- 



