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Higher up, this busy, babbling, yet musical companion, conios 

 tumbling headlong over Lilliputian falls, forming at the foot deep and 

 glassy pools. The upper stratum of this deU or ravine, which ever you 

 please to name it, is bordered throughout its -whole length with beech, 

 elm, poplar, and hazel, whilst the primrose, hyacinth, harebell, and 

 cuckoo pint, with other flowers, peep over the margin, either listening 

 to the music of the busy brook, or watching the operations of inquisi- 

 tive geologists, who, with noisy hammer, chauce disturb the quiet of 

 their retreat. 



On entering on an examination of this bed, you first find the stream 

 cutting its way through a series of soft unctuous red marls ; but, pro- 

 ceeding onwards, the red marly shales are raised by the upthrow of 

 underlying rock, which here appears from underneath. The formation 

 rises a few feet above on the west side of the stream ; following its 

 course you come to a conflux of two streams, one running from the 

 eastward, and the other northwardly, meeting almost at right angles. 

 Taking the one trending northward, you soon observe the character 

 change ; large boulders intersect the ravine, the sides rise higher, the 

 rocks protruding from the banks are sharp and jagged, the stream flows 

 over large flat surfaces formed by slabs of deep blue shales, and these 

 alternating, altering only in their position, you come to where the dis- 

 turbance has so raised the level as to occasion a miniature waterfall ; 

 from the confluence to this point the stream has been cutting through 

 the Silurian shales, the old red having turned eastwardly at the junc- 

 tion. Returning back and proceeding up the stream running eastwardly, 

 we find a repetition of red shaley rocks in places hard and untractable ; 

 others shaley, soft, and unctuous ; the latter alternating in bands. For 

 a short distance the stream cuts through the old red entirely, but 

 afterwards it appears to have selected the junction of the two formations 

 for its course, the right bank being formed of the dark blue shales of 

 the Silurian, and the left of the old red ; and so singularly arbitrary 

 appears this line of demarcation, that the boulders with which the bottom 

 is strewn are pretty evenly divided between the two characteristics. At 

 one point the old red rises on the light side perpendiculaily to about 

 twenty feet, where we have a section of the following alternations : under 

 the alluvium a stratum of red shales, fractured aud weather worn, 

 arenaceous, exceedingly brittle, aud with apparently veiy little if any 

 argillaceous matter to blend them together ; then follows a band of stiif 

 blue marls, or rather clays, underneath ; another bed or stratum of the 

 upper shales, which is underlaid by a band of yellow aud red shales of 

 about two feet in thickness, all resting on a substratum of red rock, 

 the upper part shaley aud much mottled in bauds, the lower solid aud 



