330 ON THE ANCIENT GRAUWACKE 
side of a rocky hill overhung by wood, in which several quar- 
ries have been opened, chiefly for the repair of roads. The 
rock, a dingy, olive-tinted sandstone, which in color and quality 
reminded me of some of the Caradoc sandstones, abounds in 
fossils, — at one place, where a deeply-shaded and rarely-trod- 
den road has been cut into it, chiefly corals, apparently of the 
species Favosites fibrosus. But though, from their light color, 
conspicuous on the dark rock, their state of keeping is usually 
bad. In a deserted quarry a little further on I found the 
Silurian forms in great abundance, — trilobites, orthoceratites, 
crinoidal stems, brachipods of the ancient genera orthis, and 
atrypa, a large Maclurea, a bellerophon, casts of what seem to 
be turritella, a large trochus, and corals of the genus petraia, 
and of another more composite genus which was wholly unfa- 
miliar to me, but which I find figured by Murchison as a 
nidulites. I found in this quarry a unique-looking univalve, 
somewhat resembling a trochus, which, if not encrusted by 
some mat-like coral, that has imparted to it a style of orna- 
ment not its own, must be new; and the remains of more tril- 
obites, shells, and corals, than I had at one time supposed all 
the Grauwacke deposits of the south of Scotland could have 
furnished. The place, long deserted apparently by the quar- 
rier, —rich in mosses and herbaceous plants that love the 
shade, and shut in on every side by a thick wood, — is one in 
which the geologist might profitably pass many hours in a sol- 
itude not unfavorable to thought, and rarely indeed interrupted 
by the foot of man. 
On ascending yet further towards the hill-top, and exchang- 
ing for the gloom of the wood a lone and somewhat dreary 
heath, I found the organic remains of the rock becoming still 
more numerous. Shells occur in beds and layers ; and not in 
the rich limestone beds of Dudley have I seen them lie more 
thickly. The stone here is of a firmer texture than in the 
