DICK'S FINDINGS. 



castle, there are numbers of these beds, some of them 

 from eight to ten feet thick. These successive beds of 

 coal consist of the remains of peat mosses, ferns, jungle, 

 cypress swamps, and forest growths. They were either 

 submerged where they grew, or were drifted into seas of 

 deposit. When compressed by the superincumbent strata 

 of sandstones, limestones, shales, mudstones, and iron- 

 stones, they formed the coal fields of every country. 

 Then, at last, the present land and the present sea took 

 their places, and man entered on the scene. 



Full of curiosity, or perhaps full of the desire for 

 knowledge, Dick proceeded, in course of time, to look 

 into the geologic formations of the ground on which he 

 lived. He dug into the rocks, inquired into the nature 

 of the soil, and found many things which excited his 

 surprise and his wonder. He found many dead things 

 under his feet dead foliage, dead ferns, dead seaweed, 

 dead fish, the dead remnants of chaos. 



Such was the subject on which Robert Dick was now 

 spending the remnants of his spare time. He not only 

 spent his days but his nights in his search for dead 

 objects. He himself was not before the public, but Hugh 

 Miller was. Hugh was the editor of the Witness news- 

 paper, in which he entered all that he knew about geolo- 

 gical matters. Accordingly Dick sent all that he dis- 

 covered during his rambles to his friend at Edinburgh. 

 Here, for instance, is a bundle of his findings, which he 

 sent to Hugh Miller on the 21st of July 1845 : 



" I send a stone, with a fossil fish in it, from "Weydale; 

 a stone from the salmon cruives in the Thurso river, with 



