THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 147 
form no guess respecting the thickness of the whole. Ina 
bed of shale, about a quarter of a mile below the village, I 
detected several of the vegetable impressions of Carmylie, 
especially those of the grass-weed looking class, and an im- 
perfectly preserved organism resembling the parallelogrami- 
cal scale of a Cephalaspis. The same plants and animals 
seem to have existed on this high platform as on the Carmy- 
lie platform far beneath. 
A little farther down the course of the stream, and in the 
immediate neighborhood of the old weather-worn tower of 
the Ouchterlonies, there occurs what seems a break in the 
strata. The newer sandstones seem to rest unconformably 
on the older sandstones which they overlie. The evening on 
which I explored the course of the Elliot was drizzly and un- 
pleasant, and the stream swollen by a day of continuous rain, 
and so I could not examine so minutely as in other circum- 
stances I would have done, or as was necessary to establish 
the fact. In since turning over the Elements of Lyell, how- 
ever, | find, in his section of Forfarshire, that a newer deposit 
of nearly horizontal strata of sandstone and conglomerate 
lies unconformably, in the neighborhood of the sea, on the 
older sandstones of the district; and the appearances ob- 
served near the old tower mark, it is probable, one of the 
points of junction—a point of junction also, if I may be so 
bold as venture the suggestion, of the formation of the 
Holoptychius nobilissimus with the formation of the Cepha- 
laspis —of the quartzose conglomerate with the Cornstones. 
In my hurried survey, however, I could find none of the scales 
or plates of the newer ichthyolite in this upper deposit, though 
the numerous spherical markings of white, with their cen- 
trical points of darker color, show that at one time the organ- 
isms of these upper beds must have been very abundant. 
