42 -MONOGRAPH OF DUUA DEN. 



derstood representations of plants and animals. The past 

 generation actually disputed about the plastic virtues of the 

 earth, the mystic influences of matter, and fancied that in the 

 fossils they saw the sports of nature or the germs of future 

 creations. Scholastic theologians viewed with suspicion emblems 

 of living things of which they had no account to give in their 

 narrow interpretations of the sacred text ; and have sounded, 

 in many a huge foho, how the narrative of the creative week 

 was endangered by the discovery of pages which they neither 

 deciphered nor comprehended aright. 



One now smiles at the recollection of the simple and casual 

 manner in which attention was gradually awakened to these 

 interesting rehcs. We think how many must have been de- 

 stroyed through ignorance or carelessness ; how many a rich 

 fossiliferous neuk must have been exhausted, by sheer in- 

 difference to gather up the curiosities exposed to view. An 

 esteemed lady of the ancient house of Fingask, Miss Murray 

 Thriepland, and imbued with a fine taste for things of anti- 

 quarian research, was the first to place in safety, in the Perth 

 Museum, the earliest fossil relic from the quarries of Clash- 

 bennie, now figured and described by Dr. Fleming in No. 11. 

 of the New Series of the Edinburgh Journal of Natural and 

 Geographical Science for 1830. A student of St. Andrews 

 University brought to the same distinguished naturahst, in the 

 summer of 1827, a few scales on a piece of sandstone from 

 Drumdryan, a mile to the westward of Dura Den, which are 

 figured in the same paper, and noticed as probably belonging to 

 a fish of the vertebrated class. Mr. David Buist, a land-sur- 

 veyor in Perth, invited the writer to see his collection of Scot- 

 tish pebbles, cairngorms, and other crystals, in the autumn of 

 1828, when my eye was arrested by some pieces of red sand- 

 stone which were covered with large whitish scales, regarded 

 at the time as oyster shells from Coupar- Angus and Clash- 

 bennie quarries, but now better known as the appendages of 

 Holoptychius Murchisoni and //. noUissimus. While engaged 



