30 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 
districts: they represent also a vast period of time in the 
history of the globe. The pyramid, with its three huge bars, 
its foundations of granitic rock, its base of red conglomerate, 
its central band of dark-colored schist, and its lighter tinted 
apex of sandstone, is inscribed from bottom to top, like an 
Egyptian obelisk, with a historical record. The upper and 
lower sections treat of tempests and currents —the middle is 
“ written within and without”? with wonderful narratives of 
animal life ; and yet the whole, taken together, comprises but 
an earlier portion of that chronicle of existences and events 
furnished by the Old Red Sandstone. It is, however, with 
this earlier portion that my acquaintance is most minute. 
My first statement regarding it must be much the reverse 
of the borrowed one with which this chapter begins. The 
fossils are remarkably numerous, and in a state of high pres- 
ervation. Ihave a hundred solid proofs by which to estab- 
lish the truth of the assertion, within less than a yard of me. 
Half my closet walls are covered with the peculiar fossils of 
the Lower Old Red Sandstone ;- and certainly a_ stranger 
assemblage of forms have rarely been grouped together ; — 
creatures whose very type is lost, fantastic and uncouth, and 
which puzzle the naturalist to assign them even their class ; 
_— boat-like animals, furnished with oars and a rudder ;— fish 
plated over, like the tortoise, above and below, with a strong 
armor of bone, and furnished with but one solitary rudder- 
like fin; other fish less equivocal in their form, but with the 
membranes of their fins thickly covered with scales ; — crea- 
tures bristling over with thorns ; others glistening in an enam- 
elled coat, as if beautifully japanned — the tail, in every in- 
stance among the less equivocal shapes, formed not equally, 
as in existing tish, on each side the central vertebral column, 
but chiefly or the lower side — the column sending cat its 
