386 THE FOSSILIFEROUS 
of the carboniferous fossils, gave, in his “ Natural History of 
Rutherglen,” published more than sixty years ago, an example 
of this exhaustive style, perhaps as complete as was possible 
at the time. He seems to have figured, and, after a sort, des- 
cribed, every fossil of both the Coal and the Mountain Lime- 
stone, which he succeeded in disinterring during what, in an 
age in which there were few to sympathize in his labors, must 
have been a very sedulous course of research. The magnifi- 
cent sections of our neighborhood give peculiar facilities in ex- 
ploring the Coal Measures and their contents, — facilities which 
geologists who have resided for a season amid the soil-covered 
flats of central England would well know how to appreciate. 
There are few finer sections of the Coal deposits anywhere in 
Britain than those laid open along the shores of Granton, Mus- 
selburgh, and Prestonpans; and the section of the Mountain 
Limestone exposed in the ravine at Dryden is, so far as I have 
yet seen, the most extensive in Scotland. By those who hold, 
as is done by some of the geologists of our western capital, that 
this formation is wanting as a base to the Scottish Coal-field, a 
visit to this section might be found very instructive. It does 
not exhibit that great thickness of limestone for which the cor- 
responding formation in England is so remarkable, but presents, 
for several hundred feet together, in its encrinal bands, inter- 
calated amid shales and sandstone, evidence of a marine origin; 
and its upper calcareous beds, laden with spirifers and producta, 
and of very considerable thickness, show that a tolerably pro- 
found sea must have covered the field shortly ere the formation 
of our older beds of workable coal. 
My collection contains no specimens of the New Red Sand- 
stone of Scotland,—the scene of those discoveries of the late 
Dr. Duncan of Ruthwell from which that division of geologie 
science known as Ichnology took its rise. Nor are at least 
sets of its specimens to be found in any of the Scotch museums 
