148 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 
We pass to the upper formation of the system. Over the 
belt of mingled gray and red there occurs in the pyramid a 
second deep belt of red conglomerate and variegated sand- 
stone, with a band of lime a-top, and over the band a thick 
belt of yellow sandstone, with which the system terminates.* 
Thus the second pyramid consists mineralogically, like the 
first, of three great divisions, or bands; its two upper belts 
belonging, like the three belts of the other, to but one forma- 
tion—the formation known in England as the Quartzose 
Conglomerate. It is largely developed in Scotland. We 
find it spread over extensive areas in Moray, Fife, Roxburgh, 
and Berwick shires. In England, it is comparatively barren 
in fossils ; the only animal organic remains yet detected in it 
being a single scale of the Holoptychius found by Mr. Murch- 
ison; and though it contains vegetable organisms in more 
abundance, so imperfectly are they preserved, that little else 
can be ascertained regarding them than that they were land 
* There still exists some uncertainty regarding the order in which 
the upper beds occur. Mr. Duff, of Elgin, places the limestone band 
above the yellow sandstone; Messrs. Sedgwick and Murchison assign 
it an intermediate position between the red and yellow. ‘The respec- 
tive places of the gray and red sandstones are also disputed, and by 
very high authorities; Dr. Fleming holding that the gray sandstones 
overlie the red, (see Cheek’s Edinburgh Journal for February, 1831,) and 
Mr. Lyell, that the red sandstones overlie the gray, (see Elements of 
Geology, first edit., pp. 99-100.) The order adopted above consorts 
best with the results of the writer’s observations, which have, how- 
ever, been restricted chiefly to the north country. He assigns to the 
limestone band the middle place assigned to it by Messrs. Sedgwick 
and Murchison, and to the gray sandstone the inferior position as- 
signed to it by Mr. Lyell; aware, however, that the latter deposit 
has not only a coping, but also a basement, of red sandstone — the 
basement forming the upper member of the lower formation. 
