10 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 
the west. I found them composed of thin strata of limestone, 
alternating with thicker beds of a black slaty substance, which, 
as I ascertained in the course of the evening, burns with a 
powerful flame, and emits a strong bituminous odor. The 
layers into which the beds readily separate are hardly an 
eighth part of an inch in thickness, and yet on every layer 
there are the impressions of thousands and tens of thousands 
of the various fossils peculiar to the Lias. We may turn over 
these wonderful leaves one after one, like the leaves of a her- 
barium, and find the pictorial records of a former creation in 
every page. Scallops, and gryphites, and ammonites, of almost 
every variety peculiar to the formation, and at least some eight 
or ten varieties of belemnite ; twigs of wood, leaves of plants, 
cones of an extinct species of pine, bits of charcoal, and the 
scales of fishes; and, as if to render their pictorial appear- 
ance more striking, though the leaves of this interesting 
volume are of a deep black, most of the impressions are of a 
chalky whiteness. I was lost in admiration and astonishment, 
and found my very imagination paralyzed by an assemblage 
of wonders, that seemed to outrival, in the fantastic and the 
extravagant, even its wildest conceptions. I passed on from 
ledge to ledge, like the traveller of the tale through the city 
of statues, and at length found one of the supposed aerolites I 
had come in quest of, firmly imbedded in a mass of shale. 
But I had skill enough to determine that it was other than 
what it had been deemed. A very near relative, who had 
been a sailor in his time on almost every ocean, and had visit- 
ed almost every quarter of the globe, had brought home one 
of these meteoric stones with him from the coast of Java. It 
was of a cylindrical shape and vitreous texture, and it seemed 
to have parted in the middle when in a half-molten state, and 
to have united again, somewhat awry, ere it had cooled enough 
