110 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 
rock, and ravine ‘on the northern or Cromarty Frith side of 
the tongue of land, with its terminal point of granitic gneiss, 
to which I have had such frequent occasion to refer, and then 
turned to explore the southern, or Moray Frith side, in the 
rectilinear line of the great valley. And here I was success- 
ful on a larger scale. A range of lofty sandstone cliffs, hol- 
lowea by the sea, extends for a distance of about two miles 
between two of the granitic knobs or wedges of the line — 
the Southern Sutor and the hill of Eathie. And along well 
nigh the entire length of this range of cliffs, I succeeded in 
tracing a continuous ichthyolite bed, abounding in remains, 
and lying far below the Lias, and unconformable to it. I pur- 
sued my researches, and in the sides of a romantic precipi- 
tous dell, through which the Burn of Eathie —a small, mossy 
stream — finds its way to the Moray Frith, I again discovered 
the fish-beds running deep into the interior of the country, with 
immense strata of a pale yellow sandstone resting over them, 
and strata of a chocolate red lying below. But their place in 
the geological scale was still to fix. 
I had seen enough to convince me that they form a contin- 
uous convex stratum in the sandstone spear-shaft, covering 
it saddle-wise from side to side, dipping towartls the Moray 
Frith on the south, and to the Cromarty Frith on the north — 
that, as in a bona fide spear-shaft, the annual ring or layer of 
growth of one season is overlaid by the annual rings of suc- 
ceeding seasons, and underlaid by those of preceding ones; 
so this huge semi-ring of fossiliferous clays and limestones 
had its underlying semi-ring of Red Sandstone, and its over- 
lying semi-rings of yellow, of red, and of gray sandstone. 1 
knew, besides, that beneath there was a semi-ring of conglom- 
erate, the base of the system; and that, for more than two 
hundred yards upwards, ring followed ring in unbroken 
