THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 3l 
diminished vertebre to the extreme termination of the fin. 
All the forms testify of a remote antiquity —of a period 
whose ‘* fashions have passed away.” ‘The figures on a 
Chinese vase or an Egyptian obelisk are scarce more unlike 
what now exists in nature, than the fossils of the Lower Old 
Red Sandstone. 
Geology, of all the sciences, addresses itself most power- 
fully to the imagination, and hence one main cause of the 
interest which it excites. Ere setting ourselves minutely to 
examine the peculiarities of these creatures, it would be per- 
haps well that the reader should attempt realizing the place of 
their existence, and relatively the time —not of course with 
regard to dates and eras, for the geologist has none to reckon 
by, but with respect to formations. ‘They were the denizens 
of the same portion of the globe which we ourselves inhabit, 
regarded not as a tract of country, but as a piece of ocean 
crossed by the same geographical lines of latitude and longi- 
tude. Their present place of sepulture in some localities, 
had there been no denudation, would have been raised high 
over the tops of our loftiest hills—at least a hundred feet 
over the conglomerates which form the summit of Morvheim, 
and more than a thousand feet over the snow-capped Ben 
Wyvis. Geology has still greater wonders. I have seen 
belemnites of the Oolite— comparatively a modern forma- 
tion — which had been dug out of the sides of the Himalaya 
mountains, seventeen thousand feet over the level of the sea. 
But let us strive to carry our minds back, not to the place 
of sepulture of these creatures, high in the rocks, — though 
that I shall afterwards attempt minutely to describe, — but to 
the place in which they lived, long ere the sauroid fishes of 
Burdie House had begun to exist, or the corallines of the 
mountain limestone had spread out their multitudinous arms 
