THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 27 
any where yet known, that fossiliferous portion of the Old 
Red Sandstone which I purpose first to describe, and which 
will yet come to be generally regarded as an independent 
formation, as unequivocally characterized by its organic 
remains as the formations either above or below it. 
The county of Sutherland stretches across the island from 
the German to the Atlantic Ocean, and presents, throughout 
its entire extent, — except where a narrow strip of the Oolitic 
formation runs along its eastern coast, and a broken belt of 
Old Red Sandstone tips its capes and promontories on the 
west,—a broken and tumultuous sea of primary hills. 
Scarce any of our other Scottish counties are so exclusively 
Highland, nor are there any of them in which the precipices 
are more abrupt, the valleys more deep, the rivers more 
rapid, or the mountains piled into more fantastic groups and 
masses. ‘The traveller passes into Caithness, and finds him- 
self surrounded by scenery of an aspect so entirely dissimilar, 
that no examination of the rocks is necessary to convince him 
of a geological difference of structure. An elevated and un- 
even plain spreads around and before him, league beyond 
league, in tame and unvaried uniformity, — its many hollows 
darkened by morasses, over which the intervening eminences 
rise in the form rather of low moory swellings, than of hills, 
— its coasts walled round by cliffs of gigantic altitude, that 
elevate the district at one huge stride from the level of the 
sea, and skirted by vast stacks and columns of rock, that 
schistose system of the county, containing the fossil fish, is in geologi- 
eal character and position intermediate between the Old and New 
Red Sandstone formations, but not identical with the Carboniferous 
Limestone, or the true Coal Measures, although probably occupying 
the place of one or other of them.’ — p. 198 
