336 ON THE ANCIENT GRAUWACKE 
the remote ages of primeval life, with other and widely-distant 
regions of the globe. I have said, that the limestone cliffs of 
this deposit are singularly picturesque. At one point we find 
them traversed by a broad dyke of compact greenstone, which 
has been followed by the quarrier into the very bowels of the 
hill; and so, for several hundred feet together, we can see the 
yawning rent in the earth’s surface which it had so lately filled, 
with its corresponding angles and its answering protuberances 
and inflections, existing as it must have existed when first torn 
asunder by the convulsion to which it owed its origin, and ere 
the molten matter had come boiling through it from the abyss. 
It is a wild recess, tapestried by mosses and overhung by brush- 
wood ; and, from where it opens into the richly fossiliferous 
rock, in which lie entombed by millions the organisms of per- 
haps the earliest creation, the eye glances adown a noble val- 
ley, bosky with green woods, and checkered with smiiing 
fields, and marks, where it opens to the broad Atlantic, a busy 
sea-port town, or rests far beyond on the dim cloud-like Ailsa. 
When I last stood in its opening, at the close of a long sum- 
mer’s day delightfully spent, the broad sun, then resting on the 
far horizon, was casting its last red gleam on bush, and crag, 
and brown hill-top, and the deep slant shadows of evening 
lay stretched along the bottom of the valley. And then, as 
the light declined, the moon, in her first quarter, began to show 
her slender form through the dappled cloudlets, like a silver 
scimitar, and I saw her brightening image as I passed, reflected 
on the stiller pools of the Girvan. How widely different must 
not the scene have been when those organisms of the rock lived 
at the bottom of their old Paleozoic ocean, and the light of 
that sun and moon,—mayhap the only unchanged objects on 
which the eye rested,— was caught by the many-sided eyes 
of the trilobite, or guided the carnivorous orthoceratite to its 
prey! Let me indulge for a brief space, ere I conclude, in an 
