208 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 
the Findhorn, after hurrying over ridge and shallow, amid 
combinations of rock and wood, wildly picturesque as any 
the kingdom affords, enters on the Jower country, with a 
course less headlong, through a vast trench scooped in the 
pale red sandstone of the upper formation. For miles above 
the junction of the newer and older rocks the river has beea 
toiling in a narrow and uneven channel, between two upright 
walls of hard gray gneiss, thickly traversed, in every com- 
plexity of pattern, by veins of a light red, large grained 
granite. The gneiss abruptly terminates, but not so the wall 
of precipices. A lofty front of gneiss is joined to a lofty 
front of sandstone, like the front walls of two adjoining 
houses ; and the broken and uptilted strata of the softer stone 
show that the older and harder rocks must have invaded it 
from below. A little farther down the stream, the strata as- 
sume what seems, in a short extent of frontage, a horizontal 
position, like courses of ashlar in a building, but which, when 
viewed in the range, is found to incline at a low angle towards 
the distant sea. Here, as in many other localities, the young 
geologist must guard against the conclusion, that the rock is 
necessarily low in the geological scale which he finds resting 
against the gneiss. ‘The gneiss, occupying a very different 
place from that on which it was originally formed, has been 
thrust into close neighborhood with widely separated forma- 
tions. The great conglomerate base of the system rests over 
it in Orkney, Caithness, Ross, Cromarty, and Inverness ; and 
there is no trace of what should be the intervening grau- 
wacke. The upper formation of the system leans upon it 
here. We find the Lower Lias uptilted against it at the Hill 
of Kathie —the great Oolite on the eastern coast of Suther- 
land; and as the flints and chalk fossils of Banff and Aber- 
deen are found lying immediately over it in these counties, 
