192 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 
And these less rugged formations have also their respective 
styles— marred and obliterated often by the Plutonic agency, 
which imparts to them in some instances its own character, 
and in some an intermediate one, but in general distinctly 
marked, and easily recognized. ‘The Chalk presents its long 
inland lines of apparent coast, that send out their rounded 
headlands, cape beyond cape, into the wooded or corn-covered 
plains below. Here and there, there juts up at the base of the 
escarpement a white, obelisk-like stack; here and there, 
there opens into the interior a narrow, grassy bay, in which 
noble beeches have cast anchor. There are valleys without 
streams ; and the landscape a-top is a scene of arid and un- 
even downs, that seem to rise and fall like the sea after a 
storm. We pass on to the Oolite: the slopes are more gen- 
tle, the lines of rising ground less continuous, and less coast- 
like; the valleys have their rivulets, and the undulating sur- 
face is covered by a richer vegetation. We enter on a dis- 
trict of New Red Sandstone. Deep, narrow ravines intersect 
elevated platforms. ‘There are lines of low precipices, so 
perpendicular and so red, that they seem as if walled over 
with new brick; and here and there, amid the speckled and 
mouldering sandstones, that gather no covering of lichen, 
there stands up a huge, altar-like mass of lime, mossy and 
gray, as if it represented a remoter antiquity than the rocks 
around it. ‘The Coal Measures present often the appearance 
of vast lakes frozen over during a high wind, partially broken 
afterwards by a sudden thaw, and then frozen again. Their 
shores stand up around them in the form of ridges and moun- 
tain chains of the older rocks; and their surfaces are grooved 
into flat valleys and long lines of elevation. Take, as an in- 
stance, the scenery about Edinburgh. The Ochil Hills and 
the Grampians form the distant shores of the seeming lake 
