HOW THE COAL BEDS 



surprising that henceforth the half mason, half sailor, 

 and poet, became a geologist. He sought for informa- 

 tion, and found it ; he found that the rocks among which 

 he laboured swarmed with the relics of a former age. 

 He pursued his investigations, and found, while working 

 in this zone of strata all around the coast, that a certain 

 class of fossils abounded ; but that in a higher zone these 

 familiar forms disappeared, and others made their ap- 

 pearance. 



" He read and learned that in other lands lands of 

 more recent formation strange forms of animal life had 

 been discovered ; forms which in their turn had disappeared, 

 to be succeeded by others, more in accordance with beings 

 now living. He came to know that he was surrounded, 

 in his native mountains, by the sedimentary deposits of 

 other ages ; he became alive to the fact that these grand 

 mountain ranges had been built up grain by grain in the 

 bed of the ocean, and the mountains had been sub- 

 sequently raised to their present level by the upheaval of 

 one part of its bed, or by the subsidence of another. . . ." 

 The Old Red Sandstone, a book which was the result 

 of Hugh Miller's researches, is a geological classic. 



There are three other regions in England and Scotland 

 where the Old Red Sandstone is conspicuous, and all of 

 them were probably old fresh-water lakes of great extent 

 in which sands accumulated. Sir Archibald Geikie has 

 named them the Welsh Lake, Lake Cheviot, Lake 

 Caledonia, Lake Arcadie, Lake Lome. There are 

 similar sandy deposits in Russia, in North America, 

 near the Catskill Mountains, and in many parts of 



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