A. SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 171 



CHAPTER XL 



I SPENT one long day in exploring the ichthyolite beds on 

 both sides the Cromarty Frith, and another long day in re- 

 newing my acquaintance with the Liasic deposit at Shand- 

 wick. In beating over the Lias, though I picked up a few 

 good specimens, I acquired no new facts ; but in re-examin- 

 ing the Old Red Sandstone and its organisms I was rather 

 more successful. I succeeded in eliciting some curious points 

 not yet recorded, which, with the details of an interesting 

 discovery made in the far north in this formation, I may be 

 perhaps able to weave into a chapter somewhat more geo- 

 logical than my last 



Some of the readers of my little work on the Old Red 

 Sandstone will perhaps remember that I described the organ- 

 isms of that ancient system as occurring in the neighbour- 

 hood of Cromarty mainly on one platform, raised rather more 

 than a hundred feet over the great Conglomerate ; and that 

 on this platform, as if suddenly overtaken by some wide- 

 spread catastrophe, the ichthyolites lie by thousands and tens 

 of thousands, in every attitude of distortion and terror. We 

 see the spiked wings of the Pterichthys elevated to the full, 

 as they had been erected in the fatal moment of anger and 

 alarm, and the bodies of the Cheirolepis and Cheiracanthus 

 bent head to tail, in the stiff posture into which they had 



