THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 221 
has its limits in the lighter as well as in the denser medium — 
that the multitudinous distracts it, and the distant eludes it, 
and the far horizon bounds it. If the scene spoke not of in- 
fiLity in the sense in which Deity comprehends it, it spoke 
of it in at least the only sense in which man can compre- 
hend it. 
Now, we are much in the habit of thinking of such amaz- 
ing multiplicity of being — when we think of it at all — with 
reference to but the later times of the world’s history. We 
think of the rernote past as a time of comparative solitude. 
We forget that the now uninhabited desert was once a popu- 
lous city. Is the reader prepared to realize, in connection 
with the Lower Old Red Sandstone — the second period of 
vertebrated existence — scenes as amazingly fertile in life as 
the scene just described— oceans as thoroughly occupied 
with being as our friths and estuaries when the herrings con- 
gregate most abundantly on our coasts? There are evi- 
dences too sure to be disputed that such must have been the 
case. I have seen the ichthyolite beds, where washed bare 
in the line of the strata, as thickly covered with oblong, spin- 
dle-shaped nodules as I have ever seen a fishing bank coy- 
ered with herrings; and have ascertained that every individ- 
ual nodule had its nucleus of animal matter — that it was 
a stone coffin in miniature, holding enclosed its organic mass 
of bitumen or bone—its winged, or enamelled, or thorn- 
covered ichthyolite. 
At this period of our history, some terrible catastrophe in- 
volved in sudden destruction the fish of an area at least a 
hundred miles from boundary to boundary, perhaps much 
more. The same platform in Orkney as at Cromarty is 
strewed thick with remains, which exhibit unequivocally the 
marks of violent death. The figures are contorted, contract- 
