Pe THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 
tion: in all the others the overlying stratum is different, and 
belongs to distant and widely separated ages. We cut in one 
locality through a peat moss — part of the ruins, perhaps, of 
one of those forests which covered, about the commencement 
of the Christian era, well nigh the entire surface of the island, 
and sheltered the naked inhabitants from the legions of Agric- 
ola. We find, as we dig, huge trunks of oak and elm, cones 
of the Scotch fir, handfuls of hazel-nuts, and bones and horns 
of the roe and the red deer. The writer, when a boy, found 
among the peat the horn of a gigantic elk. And, forming 
the bottom of this recent deposit, and lying conformably to it, 
we find the ichthyolite beds, with their antique organisms. 
The remains of oak and elm leaves, and of the spikes and 
cones of the pine, lie within half a foot of the remains of 
the Coccosteus and Diplopterus. We dig in another locality 
through an ancient burying-ground ; we pass through a supe- 
rior stratum of skulls and coffins, and an inferior stratum, 
barren in organic remains, and then arrive at the stratified 
clays, with their ichthyolites. In a third locality we find 
these in junction with the Lias, and underlying its lignites, 
ammonites, and belemnites, just as we see them underlying, in 
the other two, the human bones and the peat moss. And in 
yet a fourth locality we see them overlaid by immense arena- 
ceous beds, that belong evidently, as their mineralogical 
character testifies, to either the Old or the New Red Sand- 
stone. The convulsions and revolutions of the geological world, 
like those of the political, are sad confounders of place and 
station, and bring into close fellowship the high and the low ; 
nor is it safe in either world, — such have been the effects of 
the disturbing agencies, — to judge of ancient relations by 
existing neighborhoods, or of original situations by present 
places of occupancy. ‘ Misery,” says Shakspeare, ‘* makes 
