184 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 
impregnated with the embalming drugs —the dried muscles 
and sinews of human creatures who had walked in the streets 
of Thebes or of Luxor three thousand years ago. 
The commoner mineral springs of the formation, as might 
be anticipated, from the very gen2ral diffusion of the oxide 
to which it owes its color, are chalybeate. There are dis- 
tricts in Easter-Ross and the Black Isle in which the traveller 
scarcely sees a runnel by the way-side that is not half choked 
up by its fox-colored coagulum of oxide. ‘Two of the most 
strongly impregnated chalybeates with which I am acquainted 
gush out of a sandstone bed, a few yards apart, among the 
woods of Tarbat House, on the northern shore of the Frith 
of Cromarty. They splash among the pebbles with a half- 
gurgling, half-tinkling sound, in a solitary but not unpleasing 
recess, darkened by alders and willows; and their waters, 
after uniting in the same runnel, form a little, melancholy 
looking lochan, matted over with weeds, and edged with flags 
and rushes, and which swarms in early summer with the 
young of the frog in its tadpole state, and in the after months 
with the black water-beetle and the newt. ‘The circumstance 
is a somewhat curious one, as the presence of iron as an ox- 
ide has been held so unfavorable to both animal and vegeta- 
ble life, that the supposed poverty of the Old Red Sandstone 
in fossil remains has been attributed to its almost universal 
diffusion at the period the deposition was taking place. Were 
the system as poor as has been alleged, however, it might be 
questioned, on the strength of a fact such as this, whether 
the iron militated so much against the living existences of 
the formation, as against the preservation of their remains 
when dead. 
Some of the springs which issue from the ichthyolite beds 
along the shores of the Moray Frith are largely charged, not 
