140 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 
dawn to the wood; while in the hollow moulding beside it, on 
the contrary, the gilt is still fresh and entire. We find in the 
hollows the superior layers of the frame still overlying the 
inferior ones, and on the heights the inferior ones laid bare. 
To descend in the system, therefore, we have to climb a hill 
—to rise in it, we have to descend into a valley. We find 
the lowest beds of the system any where yet discovered in 
the county on the moory heights of Carmylie; its newer de- 
posits may be found on the sea-shore, beside the limeworks 
of Hedderwick, and in the central hollows of Strathmore. 
The most ancient beds in the county yet known belong, as 
unequivocally shown by their fossils, to but the middle forma- 
tion of the system. They have been quarried for many 
years in the parish of Carmylie; and the quarries, as may 
be supposed, are very extensive, stretching along a moory 
hill-side for considerably more than a mile, and furnishing 
employment to from sixty toa hundred workmen. ‘The eye 
is first caught, in approaching them, as we surmount a long, 
flat ridge, which shuts them out from the view of the distant 
sea, by what seems a line of miniature windmills, the sails 
flaring with red lead, and revolving with the lightest breeze 
at more than double the rate of the sails of ordinary mills. 
These are employed —a lesson probably borrowed from the 
Dutch —in draining the quarries, and throw up a very con- 
siderable body of water. The line of the excavations resem- 
bles a huge drain, with nearly perpendicular sides — a conse- 
quence of the regular and well-determined character of the 
joints with which the strata are bisected. The stone itself is 
a gray, close-grained fissile sandstone, of unequal hardness, 
and so very tough and coherent — qualities which it seems 
to owe in part to the vast abundance of mica which it con- 
tains— that it is quite possible to strike a small hammer 
