THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 113 
strange bedfellows.” The changes and convulsions of the 
geological world have made strange bedfellows too. I have 
seen fossils of the Upper Lias and of the Lower Old Red Sand- 
stone washed together by the same wave, out of what might 
be taken, on a cursory survey, for the same bed, and then 
mingled with recent shells, algee, branches of trees, and frag- 
ments of wrecks on the same sea-beach. 
Years passed, and in 1834 I received my first assistance 
from without, through the kindness of the Messrs. Anderson, 
of Inverness, who this year published their Guide to the 
Highlands and Islands of Scotland —a work which has 
never received half its due measure of praise. It contains, 
in a condensed and very pleasing form, the accumulated 
gleanings, for half a lifetime, of two very superior men, 
skilled in science, and of highly cultivated taste and literary 
ability; whose remarks, from their intimate acquaintance 
with every foot-breadth of country which they describe, inva- 
riably exhibit that freshness of actual observation, recorded 
on the spot, which Gray regarded as “ worth whole cart-loads 
of recollection.”” But what chiefly interested me in their 
work was its dissertative appendices — admirable digests of 
the Natural History, Antiquities, and Geology of the country. 
The appendix devoted to Geology, consisting of fifty closely 
printed pages, — abridged in part fronr the highest geological 
authorities, and in much greater part the result of original 
observation, — contains, beyond comparison, the completest 
description of the rocks, fossils, and formations of the North- 
ern and Western Highlands, which has yet been given to the 
public in a popular form. I perused it with intense interest, 
and learned from it, for the first time, of the fossil fishes of 
Caithness and Gamrie. 
There was almost nothing known, at the period, of the 
