240 RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST. 



breadth. It seems to have been let down into the more 

 ancient formation, like the keystone of a bridge into the 

 ringstones of the arch when the work is in the act of being 

 completed, during some of those terrible convulsions which 

 cracked and rent the earth's crust, as if it had been an earthen 

 pipkin brought to a red heat and then plunged into cold 

 water. Its consequent occurrence in a lower tier of the geo- 

 logical edifice than that to which it originally belonged has 

 saved it from the great denudation which has swept from the 

 surface of the surrounding country the tier composed of its 

 contemporary beds and strata, and laid bare the grauwacke 

 on which this upper tier rested. But where it presents its 

 narrow end to the sea, as the older houses in our more an- 

 cient Scottish villages present their gables to the street, the 

 waves of the German Ocean, by incessantly charging against 

 it, propelled by the tempests of the stormy north, have hol- 

 lowed it into the Bay of Gamrie, and left the more solid grau- 

 wacke standing out in bold promontories on either side, as 

 the headlands of Gamrie and Troup. 



In passing downwards on the fishing village of Garden- 

 stone, mainly in the hope of procuring a guide to the ichthyo- 

 lite beds, I saw a labourer at work with a pick-axe, in a little 

 craggy ravine, about a hundred yards to the left of the path, 

 and two gentlemen standing beside him. I paused for a 

 moment, to ascertain whether the latter were not brother- 

 workers in the geologic field. " Hilloa ! here," shouted 

 out the stouter of the two gentlemen, as if, by some clair- 

 voyant faculty, he had dived into my secret thought ; " come 

 here." I went down into the ravine, and found the labourer 

 engaged in disinterring ichthyolitic nodules out of a bed of 

 gray stratified clay, identical in its composition with that of 

 the Cromarty fish-beds ; and a heap of freshly-broken nodules, 

 speckled with the organic remains of the Lower Old Red 

 Sandstone, chiefly occipital plates and scales, lay beside 



