192 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR, 



too ; but I found the kiln got all, and this at a time when 

 the collector finds scarce any fossils more difficult to procure 

 than those of the Lower Old Red Sandstone. I asked one 

 of the labourers whether he did not preserve some of the 

 better specimens, in the hope of finding an occasional pur- 

 chaser. Not now, he said : he used to preserve them in the 

 days of Lady Gumming of Altyre ; but since her ladyship's 

 death, no one in the neighbourhood seemed to care for them, 

 and strangers rarely came the way. 



The first nodule I laid open contained a tolerably well- 

 preserved Cheiracanthus ; the second, an indifferent speci- 

 men of Glyptolepis ; and three others, in succession, remains 

 of Coccesteus. Almost every nodule of one especial layer near 

 the top incloses its organism. The colouring is frequently 

 of great beauty. In the Cromarty, as in the Caithness, Ork- 

 ney, and Gamrie specimens, the animal matter with which 

 the bones were originally charged has been converted into 

 a dark glossy bitumen, and the plafces and scales glitter from 

 a ground of opaque gray, like pieces of japan-work suspended 

 against a rough-cast wall. But here, as in the other Moray- 

 shire deposits, the plates and scales exist in nearly their ori- 

 ginal condition, as bone that retains its white colour in the 

 centre of the specimens, where its bulk is greatest, and is often 

 beautifully tinged at its thinner edges by the iron with which 

 the stone is impregnated. It is not rare to find some of the 

 better preserved fossils coloured in a style that reminds one 

 of the more gaudy fishes of the tropics. We see the body 

 of the ichthyolite, with its finely arranged scales, of a pure 

 snow-white. Along the edges, where the original substance 

 of the bone, combining with the oxide of the matrix, has 

 formed a phosphate of iron, there runs a delicately shaded 

 band of plum-blue ; while the outspread fins, charged still 

 more largely with the oxide, are of a deep red. The descrip- 

 tion of Mr Patrick Duff, in his " Geology of Moray," so re- 



