130 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 
naturalists of the age, and who, to his minute acquaintance 
with existing forms of being, adds an acquaintance scarcely 
less minute with those forms of primeval life that no longer 
exist He it was who first discovered, in the Upper Old Red 
Sandstones of Fifeshire, the large scales and plates of that 
strikingly characteristic ichthyolite of the higher formation, 
now known as the Holopltychius — of which more anon ; and, 
unquestionably, no one acquainted with his writings, or the 
character of his mind, can doubt that he examined carefully. 
the formation yet discovered ; and in this precipice Mr. Martin first 
commenced his labors in the Red Sandstone of the district, and found 
it a mine of wonders. It is a place of singular interest —a rock of 
sepulchres ; and its teeth, scales, and single bones occur in a state of 
great entireness ; though, ere the deposit was formed, the various ich- 
thyolites whose remains it contains seem to have been broken up, and 
their fragments scattered. Accumulations of larger and smaller peb- 
bles alternate in the strata; and the bulkier bones and teeth are 
found invariably among the bulkier pebbles, thus showing that they 
were operated upon by the same laws of motion which operated on 
the inorganic contents of the deposit. At a considerably later period 
the fossils of the upper group were detected in the precipitous and 
romantic banks of the Findhorn, by Dr. Malcolmson, of Madras, when 
prosecuting his discoveries of the organisms of the lower formation. 
He found them, also, though in less abundance, in a splendid section 
exhibited in the Burn of Lethen, a rivulet of Moray, and yet again in 
the neighborhood of Altyre. The Rey. Mr. Gordon, of Birnie, and 
Mr. Robertson, of Inverugie, have been also discoverers in the dis- 
trict. To the geological labors of Mr. Patrick Duff, of Elgin, in the 
same field, [have already had occasion incidentally to refer. The pa- 
tient inquiries of this gentleman have been prosecuted for years in all 
the formations of the province, from the Weald of Linksfield, with its 
peculiar lacustrine remains — lignites, minute fresh-water shells, and 
the teeth, spines, and vertebre of fish and saurians — down to the base 
of the Old Red Sandstone, with its Coccostei, Dipteri, and Pterichthyes. 
