THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 217 
The exuvie of at least four platforms of being lay entombed 
- furlong below furlong, amid the gray, mouldering mudstones, 
the harder arenaceous beds, the consolidated clays, and the 
eoncretionary limestones, that underlay the ancient ocean of 
the Lower Old Red. The earth had already become a vast 
sepulchre, to a depth beneath the bed of the sea equal to at 
ieast twice the height of Ben Nevis over its surface. 
The first scene in the Tempest opens amid the confusion 
and turmoil of the hurricane — amid thunders and lightnings, 
the roar of the wind, the shouts of the seamen, the rattling 
of cordage, and the wild dash of the billows. The history 
of the period represented by the Old Red Sandstone seems, in 
what now forms the northern half of Scotland, to have opened 
ina similar manner. The finely-laminated lower Tilestones 
of England were deposited evidently in a calm sea. During 
the contemporary period in our own country, the vast space 
which now includes Orkney and Lochness, Dingwall, and 
Gamrie, and many a thousand square mile besides, was the 
scene of a shallow ocean, perplexed by powerful currents, and 
agitated by waves. A vast stratum of water-rolled pebbles, 
varying in depth from a hundred feet to a hundred yards, 
remains in a thousand different localities, to testify of the dis- 
turbing agencies of this time of commotion. The hardest 
masses which the stratum encloses, — porphyries of vitreous 
fracture that cut glass as readily as flint, and masses of 
quartz that strike fire quite as profusely from steel, — are yet 
polished and ground down into bullet-like forms, not an angu- 
and of these only about one hundred are found also in the overlying 
Devonian series; while but fifteen are common to the whole Palzo- 
zoic period, and not one extends beyond it.’’—(M. de Verncuil and 
Count D’Archiac, quoted by Mr. D. T. Ansted. 1844.) 
21 * 
