ROCKS OF SCOTLAND. 321 
peculiar arrangement obtains in a still more marked degree. 
The organisms of a wide district of country are confined often 
to a single layer, occupying scarce half an inch, in a section 
thousands of feet in vertical extent. And such seems to be 
the arrangement among the ancient slates of the Pentlands. 
Mr. Maclaren found his fossils near Deerhope-foot, at the 
side of a small stream that falls into the North Esk; and 
he describes them, in the portion of his work devoted to the 
geology of the Pentland range, as of two kinds. In one, 
fragments of what seem minute trilobites are congregated 
together in thin layers; in the other, there are the dis- 
tinctly marked impressions of what appear to be orthocer- 
atites. I owe two of those Pentland fossils to the kindness 
of Mr. Maclaren. The one, apparently a portion of an or- 
thoceratite, exhibits a side view of what seem to be five of.the 
septa; the other greatly resembles that curious and still but 
imperfectly understood vegetable of the Coal Measures, Stern- 
bergia approximata ; but it is in all probability not a vegetable, 
but an animal organism, — very possibly an orthoceratite also. 
One of these specimens bears on the label the date of its dis- 
covery (7th of April 1834),— a date five years anterior to 
that of the publication of Mr. Maclaren’s volume, and forty- 
two years posterior to the discovery of Sir James Hall. The 
fact that by much the greater part of half a century should 
have intervened between the first and second discoveries of 
organic remains in our Grauwackes,— for, waving the claim 
of Mr. Laidlaw, whose discovery seems never to have been re- 
corded, and can now be associated with neither locality nor 
date, Mr. Maclaren’s 7s decidedly the second,—is a fact of 
itself sufficient to show that our Scotch schools were in those 
days not zealously paleontological; and we know from other 
sources, that arguments were sought after within their pre- 
cincts, with much more avidity than fossils. But the error 
