HUGH MILLER. XUl, 



fore the day closed, a series of large stones had rolled down 

 from the clay, " all rounded and water-worn, as if they had 

 been tossed in the sea or the bed of a river for hundreds of 

 years." Was the clay which enclosed them created on the 

 rock upon which it lay 1 No workman ever manufactures a 

 lialf-worn article ! — were the ejaculations of the geologist at 

 liis alphabet 



Our author and his companions were soon removed to an 

 easier wrought quarry, and one more pregnant with interest, 

 which had been opened " in a lofty wall of cliffs that over- 

 hangs the northern shore of the Moray Frith." Here the 

 geology of the district exhibited itself in section. 



** We see in one place the primary rock, with its veins of granite and 

 quartz,— its dizzy precipices of gneiss, and its huge masses of hornblende ; 

 we find the secondary rock in another, with its bed of sandstone and 

 shale, — its spars, its clays, and its nodular limestones. We discover the 

 still little known but highly interesting fossils of the Old Ked Sandstone 

 in one deposition ; we find the beautifully preserved shells and lignites 

 of the lias in another. There are the remains of two several creations at 

 once before us. The shore, too, is heaped with rolled fragments of al- 

 most every variety of rock, — basalts, ironstones , hypersthenes, porphy- 

 ries, bituminous shales, and naicaceous schists. In short, the young geo- 

 logist, had he all Europe before him, could hardly choose for himself a 

 better field, I had, however, no one to tell me so at the time, for geo- 

 logy had not yet travelled so far north ; and so, without guide or voca- 

 bulary, I had to grope my way as I best might, and find out all its 

 wonders for myself. But so slow was the process, and so much was I 

 a seeker in the dark, that the facts contained in these few sentences were 

 the patient gatherings of years." — Old Red Sandstone,' -p-p. 9, 10. 



In this rich field of inquiry our author encountered, al- 

 most daily, new objects of wonder and instruction. In one 

 nodular mass of limestone he found the beautiful ammonite, 

 like one of the finely sculptured volutes of an Ionic capital 

 Within others, fish-scales and bivalve shells ; and in the centre 

 of another he detected a piece of decayed wood. Upon quit- 

 ting the quarry for the building upon which the workmen 

 were to be employed, the workmen received half a holiday, and 



