434 MAN OF SCIENCE. 



walk from Helmsdale, immediately below a bulwark that 

 protects the road, there is a block of pale grey Old Red 

 Flagstone enclosed in the shelly paste whose upper 

 surface measures twenty-seven feet in length by twenty 

 in breadth. The same alternations of shale and con- 

 glomerate may be seen in passing eastwards from the 

 little cottage towards Navidale, where a few of the same 

 beds are laid bare in the descending order as are un- 

 covered in the Helmsdale direction, but the shore here 

 is much roughened by detached blocks, and the section 

 not so good. They may be seen, also, in the face of that 

 portion of the old coast-line under which the road runs 

 for rather more than a mile between Helmsdale and 

 Port Gower the shale beds usually presenting a hol- 

 lowed and weakened appearance, while the conglomerate 

 stands out in bold and very rough cliffs, in some places 

 overlying, in others underlying, the shale beds. 



* I am rather inclined to hold that the fragments in 

 the Helmsdale breccia, which your Grace regards as 

 Oolitic and of a quality similar to that of the Oolite 

 strata near Dunrobin, must be in reality Old Red, as I 

 have found in many of the exposed masses fossils such 

 as Fucoids, jaws of Diplopterus, scales of Asterolepis, 

 &c., but never a single Oolitic organism, the Oolitic 

 organisms being restricted to the shelly paste which 

 connects them together. I am further of opinion that 

 the conglomerate does not represent one great break-up 

 of the system after its formation, but, as I have already 

 intimated, as many paroxysms of violence during the 

 deposition as it consists of alternating beds. 



' On passing towards the south-west after quitting 

 Port Gower we again come upon the same beds of shale 

 and conglomerate as appear at the little cottage to the 

 east, and then, rising in the scale towards the middle of 



