18 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE, 
the one rising in beautiful progression over the other. Let 
the reader imagine a digest of English history, complete 
from the times of the invasion of Julius Cesar to the reign 
of that Harold who was slain at Hastings, and from the times 
of Edward IIL down to the present day, but bearing no 
record of the Williams, the Henrys, the Edwards, the John, 
Stephen, and Richard, that reigned during the omitted period, 
or of the striking and important events by which their sev- 
eral reigns were distinguished. A chronicle thus mutilated 
and incomplete would be no unapt representation of a geo- 
1ogical history of the earth in which the period of the Upper 
Silurian would be connected with that of the Mountain Lime- 
stone, or of the limestone of Burdie House, and the period 
of the Old Red Sandstone omitted. 
The eastern and western coasts of Scotland, which lie to 
Fifeshire, where it crops out from beneath the Coal formation, and 
spreads into the adjoining northern half of Forfarshire ; forming, to- 
gether with trap, the Sidlaw Hills and valley of Strathmore. A 
large belt of this formation skirts the northern borders of the Gram- 
pians, from the seacoast at Stonehaven and the Frith of Tay to the 
opposite western coast of the Frith of Clyde. In Forfarshire, where, 
as in Herefordshire, it is many thousand feet thick, it may be divided 
into three principal masses — Ist. Red and mottled marls, cornstone, 
and sandstone; 2d. Conglomerate, often of vast thickness; 8d. Tile- 
stones, and paving-stone, highly micaceous, and containing a slight 
admixture of carbonate of lime. In the uppermost of these divisions, 
but chiefly ir the lowest, the remains of fish have been found, of the 
genus named by M. Agassiz Cephalaspis, or buckler-headed, from 
the extraordinary shield which covers the head, and which has often 
been mistaken for that of a trilobite of the division Asaphus. A 
gigantic species of fish, of the genus Holoptychius, has also been 
found by Dr. Fl2ming in the Old Red Sandstone of Fifeshire.” — 
Lyell’s Elements, tp. 452-4. (See Note A.) 
