GEOLOGY. 17 



the hollows we meet with sandstone, lime, and indurated 

 clay. The lime is rich in animal remains, all of the 

 earliest tribes. They belong to a later era than the 

 fossils of the Eathie lias. I have procured a few speci- 

 mens, which I must try to bring home with me 

 among the rest four varieties of bivalves and two of 

 zoophytes. I have procured, too, part of a fossil palm 

 and the joint of a flattened reed, possibly the vegetable 

 to which the south of Scotland owes its coal. But I 

 have met with neither ammonites nor belemnites. In 

 many places the basalt has overflowed the secondary 

 strata ; and in the side of an eminence, rather more than 

 a mile from town, where there is a deep section of rock, 

 it assumes the columnar form directly over a thick vein 

 of lime. You have, I dare say, never seen basaltic columns. 

 I saw them here for the first time, and wished for you, 

 that we might examine them together. So regular are 

 they, that old country people of the last age used to 

 attribute their erection to the Picts. I have seen it 

 stated in a paper by Creech, the Edinburgh bookseller, 

 and deem the fact a highly interesting one, that on 

 some occasion the furnace of a Leith glass-house having 

 been suffered to cool, it was found that the glass, in 

 passing from a fluid to a solid state, had assumed the 

 columnar form. There is a particular form of hill which 

 seems peculiar to basaltic countries, and of which there 

 are various instances in this. You have seen a superb 

 specimen in Salisbury Crags. It would seem as if, after 

 the masses had been thrown up, they had split in the 

 middle ; and that when one half of each remained stand- 

 ing, the other sunk into the abyss out of which the whole 

 had risen. Linlithgow forms, as you are aware, part of 

 the great coal-field of Scotland, and there are pits on 

 every side of it. The coal seems to have been formed 



VOL. II. 



