54 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR, 



quarter in diameter, the species of which I could not deter- 

 mine. 



Returning by the track we came, we reach the bottom of 

 the bay, which we find much obscured with sand and shingle ; 

 and pass northwards along its side, under a range of low sand- 

 stone precipices, with interposing grassy slopes, in which the 

 fertile Oolitic meniscus descends to the beach. The sand- 

 stone, white and soft, and occurring in thick beds, much re- 

 sembles that of the Oolite of Sutherland. We detect in it 

 few traces of fossils ; now and then a carbonaceous marking, 

 and now and then what seems a thin vein of coal, but which 

 proves to be merely the bark of some woody stem, converted 

 into a glossy bituminous lignite, like that of Brora. But in 

 beds of a blue clay, intercalated with the sandstone, we find 

 fossils in abundance, of a character less obscure. We spent 

 a full half-hour in picking out shells from the bottom of a 

 long dock-like hollow among the rocks, in which a bed of clay 

 has yielded to the waves, while the strata on either side stand 

 up over it like low wharfs on the opposite sides of a river. 

 The shells, though exceedingly fragile, for they partake of 

 the nature of the clayey matrix in which they are embedded, 

 rise as entire as when they had died among the mud, years, 

 mayhap ages, ere the sandstone had been deposited over them ; 

 and we were enabled at once to detect their extreme dissi- 

 milarity, as a group, to the shells of the Liasic deposit we 

 had so lately quitted. We did not find in this bed a single 

 Ammonite, Belemnite, or Nautilus ; but chalky Bivalves, re- 

 sembling our existing Tellina, in vast abundance, mixed with 

 what seem to be a small Buccinum and a minute Trochus, 

 with numerous rather equivocal fragments of a shell resem- 

 bling an Oiliva. So thickly do they lie clustered together in 

 this deposit, that in some patches where the sad-coloured ar- 

 gillaceous ground is washed bare by the sea, it seems marbled 

 with them into a light gray tint. The group more nearly 



