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la.i than Lamarckian ; especially as the author of the ' Vestiges ' 

 has so ingeniously modified and remodelled the views of the older 

 writer as to have made them in great measure his own. 



Mr. Miller opens his volume with an interesting description of a 

 visit to Orkney two years back, " while engaged in prosecuting the 

 self-imposed task of examining in detail the various fossiliferous de- 

 posits of Scotland," in the hope of ultimately acquainting himself 

 with them all. On this visit he resided for some time in the vicinity 

 of Stromness. This town stands at the bottom of the upturned geo- 

 logical deposits of the island of Orkney. " The geology of the island," 

 says the author, " owes its chief interest to the immense development 

 which it exhibits of one formation, — the Lower Old Red Sandstone, 

 — and to the extraordinary abundance of its vertebrate remains;" so 

 abundant indeed are the ichthyolites of the formation at this particu- 

 lar locality, that, as the author observes, were the trade once fairly 

 opened, these remains could be thence supplied, by the ton and by 

 the shipload, to the museums of the whole world. 



We need not be detained by the author's geological explorations 

 of this district, interesting as they are, since our business is with the 

 botanical portion of his volume ; suffice it here to say that he was re- 

 warded in his researches on the first evening of his sojourn at Strom- 

 ness, by the discovery of their principal object, in the form of a well- 

 marked bone, probably the oldest vertebrate remain yet discovered in 

 Orkney, imbedded in a grayish coloured layer of hard flag, and in 

 form closely resembling a large roofing-nail, which he figures, as 

 we believe, for the first time. " This nail-like bone formed a charac- 

 teristic portion of the Asterolepis, — so far as is yet known the most 

 gigantic ganoid of the Old Red Sandstone, and, judging from the 

 place of the fragment, one of the first." 



Passing over the reflections to which the discovery of this interest- 

 ing fragment in situ naturally give rise, we will now accompany him 

 to another locality, as interesting to the botanist as the more immedi- 

 ate vicinity of Stromness is to the palaeontologist. 



" I extended my researches, a few days after, in an easterly direc- 

 tion from the town of Stromness, and walked for several miles along 

 the shores of the Loch of Stennis, — a large lake about fourteen miles 

 in circumference, bare and treeless, like all the other lakes and lochs 

 of Orkney, but picturesque of outline, and divided into an upper and 

 lower sheet of water by two low, long promontories, that jut out from 

 opposite sides, and so nearly meet in the middle as to be connected 

 by a thread-like line of road, half mound, half bridge. ' The Loch 



