112 THURSO EAST. 



" We are now between the castle and the sea, and 

 look ! yonder lie the upper beds, which dip away north 

 and a little west. The underlying beds are beneath our 

 feet, for the tempests of many years have washed away 

 the upper surfaces at high- water mark ; but the under- 

 lying strata do not dip in the same direction as the 

 overlying, but nearly west, in fact a little south-west. 

 How is this ? Were the edges of the underlying beds 

 turned up before the upper were thrown down ? 



" We go on for about a gunshot, and come upon a 

 noted fault. We tread on the edges of the strata, which 

 dip apparently due east or north-east. Forty-eight 

 paces farther on we meet another fault. The strata here 

 appear to dip west. We tread again on the edges of the 

 strata. How is this ? These are the underlying beds. 

 The cliff is from eight to nine feet high, and look! yonder 

 lie the upper b$ds, which stretch unbroken out to sea. 

 The lower beds are highly charged with organic remains, 

 and so are the upper. The latter is bituminous and cal- 

 careous, and here I find stout bones, droppings, scales of 

 Holoptychius, and plates with warts on them. 



" We come to a bit burnie a little brawling noisy 

 thing in the month of April. We step across, and are now 

 on firm rock, highly calcareous, a rude, ill-cemented, 

 cross-grained piece of stuff, which, in some places, re- 

 minds me of the riddlings of lime. As we pass on, the 

 fossiliferous beds are on our right hand and on our left. 

 They are not all ' calcareous flag beds,' as described by 

 Murchison. Indeed, none of them resemble the ordinary 

 which are sawn into pavement. They are more 



