THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 105 
ried away by the neighboring farmers for manure. Ever 
since the formation of the present coast-line, this natural wear 
has been arresting, tide after tide, its heaps of organic matter, 
but the circumstances favorable to their preservation have 
been wanting: they ferment and decay when driven high on 
the beach; and the next spring-tide, accompanied by a gale 
from the west, sweeps every vestige of them away ; and so, 
after the lapse of many centuries, we find no other organisms 
among the rounded pebbles that form the beach of this little 
bay, than merely a few broken shells, and occasionally a 
mouldering fish-bone. Thus very barren formations may 
belong to periods singularly rich in organic existences. When 
what is now the little bay was the bottom of a profound 
ocean, and far from any shore, the circumstances for the 
preservation of its organisms must have been much more 
favorable. In no locality in the Old Red Sandstone with 
which I am acquainted have such beautifully preserved fos- 
sils been found. But I anticipate. 
In the middle of the little bay, and throughout the greater 
part of its area, I found the rock exposed —a circumstance 
which I had marked many years before, when a mere boy, 
without afterwards recurring to it as one of interest. But I 
had now learned to look at rocks with another eye; and the 
thought which first suggested itself to me regarding the rock 
of the little bay was, that I had found the especial object of 
my search—the Lias. The appearances are in some re- 
spects not dissimilar. The Lias of the north of Scotland is 
represented in some localities by dark-colored, unctuous 
clays, in others by grayish black sandstones, that look like 
indurated mud, and in others by beds of black fissile shale, 
alternating with bands of coarse, impure limestone, and 
studded between the. bands with limestone nodules of richer 
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