19: 



EVIDENCE OF THE FOSSIL FLORA 



garding tlie place of the organism in the geologic scale.* It 

 is unequivocally a fossil of the Lower (Middle) Old Red 

 Sandstone. I found it partially embedded, with many other 

 nodules half-disinterred by the sea, in an ichthyolitic deposit, 

 a few hundred yards to the east of the town of Cromarty, 

 which occurs more than four hundred feet over the Great 

 Conglomerate base of the system. A nodule that lay imme- 

 diately beside it contained a well-preserved specimen of the 

 Coccosteus Decipiens ; and in the nodule in which the lignite 

 itself is contained (fig. 64), the practised eye may detect a 



Fig. 64. 



LIGNITE OF THE LOWER (MIDDLE) OLD RED SANDSTONE. 



(One-third nat. size, linear.) 



scattered group of scales of Diplacanthus, a scarce less cha- 

 racteristic organism of the same formation. And what, asks 

 the reader, is the character of this ancient vegetable, — the 

 most ancient, by three whole formations, that has presented 

 its internal structure to the microscope ? Is it as low in 

 the scale of development as in the geological scale ? Does 

 this venerable Adam of the forest appear, like the Adam of 



* Some remarks have been made in an Appendix to the *' Natural His- 

 tory of the Vestiges of Creation" regarding this wood, and part of the 

 foregoing <;hapter, for which see Appendix* Note D. 



