258 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 
remains of terrestrial or lacustrine growth, and these, too, 
the vegetables common to the Coal Measures — ferns, reeds, 
and club-mosses. One can scarce detach a fragment from 
the mass, that has not its leaflet or seed-cone enclosed, and 
in a state of such perfect preservation, that there can be no 
possibility of mistaking its character. If in reality a marine 
deposit, it must have been formed in the immediate neighbor- 
hood of a land covered with vegetation. The dove set loose 
by Noah bore not back with it a less equivocal sign that the 
waters had abated. Now, in the Upper Old Red Sandstone 
none of these plants occur. The deposit is exclusively an 
ocean deposit, and the remains in Scotland, until we arrive at 
its inferior and middle formations, are exclusively animal re- 
mains. Its upper member, “ the yellow sandstone,” says Dr. 
Anderson, of Newburgh, “ does not exhibit a single particle 
of carbonaceous matter —no trace or film of a branch hay- 
ing been detected in it, though, if such in reality existed, 
there are not wanting opportunities of obtaining specimens 
in some one of the twenty or thirty quarries which have been 
opened in the county of Fife in this deposit alone.” No two 
bordering formations in the geological scale have their boun- 
daries better defined by the character of their fossils than the 
Old Red Sandstone and the Coal Measures. 
We pursue our history no further. Its after course is com- 
paratively well known. ‘The huge sauroid fish was succeed- 
ed by the equally huge reptile—the reptile by the bird — 
the bird by the marsupial quadruped; and at length, after 
races higher in the scale of instinct had taken precedence in 
succession, the one of the other, the sagacious elephant ap- 
peared, as the lord of that latest creation which immediately 
preceded our own. How natural does the thought seem 
which suggested itself to the profound mind of Cuvier, when 
indulging in a similar review! Has the last scene in the 
