ilV HUGH MILLER. 



our young philosopher devoted this valuable interval to search 

 for certain curiously-shaped stones, which one of the quarriei-s 

 told him resembled the heads of boarding-pikes, and which, 

 under the name of thunder-boUSj were held to be a sovereign 

 remedy for cattle that had been bewitched. On the shore two 

 miles off, where he expected these remarkable bodies, he found 

 deposits quite different either from the sandstone chffs or the 

 primary rocks further to the west. They consisted of " thin 

 strata of limestone, alternating with thicker beds of ablackslaty 

 substance," which burned with a bright flame and a bitumi- 

 nous odour. Though only the eighth part of an inch thick, each 

 layer contained thousands of fossils peculiar to the Lias, — 

 scallops and gryphites, ammonites, twigs and leaves of plants, 

 cones of pine, pieces of charcoal, and scales of fishes, — the 

 impressions being of a chalky whiteness, contrasting strik- 

 ingly with their black bituminous lair. Among these frag- 

 ments of animal and vegetable life, he at last detected his 

 thunder-bolt in the form of a belemnite, the remains of a kind 

 of cuttle-fish long since extinct. 



In the exercise of his profession, which " was a wander- 

 ing one," our author advanced steadily, though slowly and 

 surely, in his geological acquirements. 



*' I remember," says he, " passing direct on one occasion from, the 

 wild western coast of Ross-shire, where the Old Red Sandstone leans at 

 a high angle against the prevailing quartz rock of the district to where, 

 on the southern skirts of Mid-Lothian, the mountain limestone rises amid 

 the coal. I have resided one season on a raised beach on the Moray 

 Frith. I have spent the season immediately following amid the ancient 

 granites and contorted schists of the central Highlands. In the north 

 I have laid open by thousands the shells and lignites of the Oolite ; in 

 the south I have disinterred from their matrices of stone or of shale the 

 huge reeds and tree ferns of the Carboniferous period. ... In the 

 north there occurs a vast gap in the scale. The Lias leans unconform- 

 ably against the Old Red Sandstone ; there is no Mountain Limestone, no 

 Coal Measures, none of the New Red Marls or Sandstones. There are 

 at least three entire systems omitted. But the upper portion of the scaie 

 is well-nigh complete. In one locality we may pass from the Lower to 



