THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 7 
The gunpowder had loosened a large mass in one of the 
inferior strata, and our first employment, on resuming our la- 
bors, was to raise it from its bed. I assisted the other work- 
men in placing it on edge, and was much struck by the ap- 
pearance of the platform on which it had rested. The en- 
tire surfaze was ridged and furrowed like a bank of sand that 
had been left by the tide an hour before. I could trace every 
bend and curvature, every cross hollow and counter ridge of 
the corresponding phenomena; for the resemblance was no 
half resemblance — it was the thing itself; and I had observed 
it a hundred and a hundred times, when sailing my little schoon- 
er inthe shallows left by the ebb. But what had become of the 
waves that had thus fretted the solid rock, or of what element 
had they been composed? I felt as completely at fault as Rob- 
inson Crusoe did on his discovering the print of the man’s foot 
on the sand. The evening furnished me with still further 
cause of wonder. We raised another block in a different 
part of the quarry, and found that the area of a circular 
depression in the stratum below was broken and flawed in 
every direction, as if it had been the bottom of a pool recently 
dried up, which had shrunk and split in the hardening. Sev- 
eral large stones came rolling down from the diluvium in the 
course of the afternoon. They were of different qualities 
from the Sandstone below, and from one another; and, what 
was more wonderful still, they were all rounded and water- 
worn, as if they had been tossed about in the sea, or the bed 
of a river, for hundreds of years. There could not, surely, be 
amore conclusive proof that the bank which had enclosed them 
so long could not have been created on the rock on which it 
rested. No workman ever manufactures a half-worn article, 
and the stones were all half-worn! And if not the bank, 
why then the sandstone underneath ? I was lost in conjecture, 
