DEPOSITS OF SCOTLAND. 391 
its conglomerates, and in some instances from the fragments of 
rock still locked fast amid the roots of its trees —of Old Red 
flagstones, identical with those of Caithness, and evidently bear- 
ing at the time marks of as high an antiquity as they do now. 
Many of these flagstone masses, sorely water-rolled, occur in an 
Oolitic paste; and we find in strange neighborhoods shells of 
the Oolite inclosed in the paste, and fishes of the Old Red in 
the pebbles which it envelops. I have found a pebble which 
bore inside an Old Red Osteolepis encrusted with an Oolitic 
Thamnastrea ; and another pebble occupied by an Old Red 
fucoid that was partially perforated by an Oolitic lithodomus 
shell. It is surely not uninteresting thus to catch, as it were, 
glimpses, through the high antiquity of a Secondary age, of a 
Paleozoic age vastly more ancient still,—to see long with- 
drawing vistas opening, through the remote times of the Oolite, 
into the incalculably more remote times of the Lower Old Red 
Sandstone. 
Those outliers of the Weald, or rather of a fresh-water or 
estuary Oolite, which occur in Morayshire, are adequately rep- 
resented in only a few local collections, — the completest set of 
these fossils which I have yet seen being that in the possession 
of Mr. Patrick Duff of Elgin, who, living in the immediate 
neighborhood of the rich deposits at Linksfield, and animated 
by an ever fresh zeal for the interests of natural science, has 
been concentrating his exertions for years on these detached 
deposits, and on the not less rich formations of the Old Red 
Sandstone on which they rest. Their organisms, — constitut- 
ing a link in the geologic history of Scotland which no other 
locality has yet supplied, — consist of the dorsal spines of a 
new species of Hybodus,— the teeth of an Acrodus and Spen- 
onchus,—the scales, and, at least in one instance, an entire 
specimen, of a Lepidotus, which Agassiz has identified as the 
Lepidotus minor of the English Weald, — bones and teeth of 
