272 REVIEWS LAND AND FRESHWATER SHELLS, ETC. 



price that will bring it within the reach of those of modest means, and 

 as Mother Nature is not a fastidious tutor, bestowing her favours — like 

 some of her children — on those only who can show the passport of wealth, 

 we say again " enter thou," and remember, as has been well and truly 

 sung — 



I care not, fortune, what you do deny, 



You cannot rob me of free nature's grace. 

 You cannot shut tbe windows of the sky, 



Through which Aurora shows her brightening face. 

 You cannot bar my constant feet to trace 

 The woods and lawns by living streams at eve. 



G. 8. T. 



The Crocodilian Remains found in the Elgin Sandstones, icith Remarks 

 on the Ichnites of Cummingstone. By T. H. Huxley, F.R.S. Geological 

 Survey Memoir, 58pp., and fifteen large 4to. plates. Stanford. Price 

 14s. 6d. 1877. 

 This work forcibly illustrates the value of palseontological research 

 in determining the age of any series of stratified rocks. In the north of 

 Scotland on the east side of the Moray Firth, the coast between Burghead 

 and Stotfield Head, a distance of nine miles, is composed of yellowish 

 sandstones, which extend inland to the town of Elgin ; they rest upon 

 the Old Red Sandstone, which in turn reposes further south on 

 metamorphosed Lower Silurian strata. The Elgin Sandstones have 

 yielded a few organic remains ; some of these Agassiz in 1845 referred to 

 a fish which he named Stagonolepis Robertsoni ; but when better and 

 more complete specimens were afterwards obtained, it was suspected by 

 Dr. Gordon, of Elgin, and others, that the scales and bones which they 

 had found must belong to animals of higher organisation than fishes ; 

 many footprints were also noted on the Elgin Sandstones, and undoubted 

 specimens of a small quadrupedal vertebrated animal were found, which 

 Dr. Mantell named Telerpeton Elginense. Up to 1858, however, no one 

 suspected that these beds could be of other than Devonian age ; in that 

 year all the specimens were entrusted to Professor Huxley for examina- 

 tion, and he not only found that the Stagonolepis was really a crocodilian 

 reptile and not a fish, but that there were associated with it bones of at 

 least one other reptile, which he named Hyperodapedon Gordoni. From his 

 examination of the last-named fossil, Professor Huxley wrote in 1858 : 

 " Its marked affinity with certain Triassic reptiles, when taken together 

 with the resemblance of Stagonolepis to Mesozoic Crocodilia, leads me to 

 require the strongest stratigraphical proof before admitting the Palaeozoic 

 age of the beds in which it occurs." About ten years later, remains of 

 Hyperodapedon turned up in the undoubtedly Triassic beds of Coton End, 

 in Warwickshire, in similar beds at Sidmouth in Devon, and in Central 

 India ; Sir R. Murchison then wrote in the fourth edition of his 

 " Siluria," (1867,) " to such fossil evidence as this the field geologist must 

 bow ; and instead, therefore, of any longer connecting these reptiliferous 

 sandstones of Elgin and Ross with the Old Red Sandstones beneath them, 

 I willingly adopt the view established by such fossil evidence, and con- 



