242 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 



the nodules for hours without finding an ichthyolite worth 

 transferring to their bag, showed me that, without excavat- 

 ing more deeply than my time allowed, I had no chance of 

 finding good specimens. But, well content to have ascer- 

 tained that the ichthyolite bed of Gamrie is identical in its 

 composition, and, generically at least, in its organisms, with 

 the beds with which I was best acquainted, I rose to come 

 away. The object which I next proposed to myself was, to 

 determine whether, as at Eathie and Cromarty, the fossils 

 here appear not only on the hill-side, but also crop out along 

 the shore. On taking leave, however, of the geologists, I 

 was reminded by the younger of what I might have other- 

 wise forgotten, a raised beach in the immediate neighbour- 

 hood (first described by Mr Prestwich, in his paper on the 

 Gamrie ichthyolites), which contains shells of the existing 

 species at a higher level than elsewhere, -so far as is yet 

 known, on the east coast of Scotland. And, kindly con- 

 ducting me till he had brought me full within view of it, we 

 parted. The ichthyolites which I had just been laying open 

 occur on the verge of that Strathbogie district in which the 

 Church controversy raged so hot and high ; and by a com- 

 mon enough trick of the associative faculty, they now recalled 

 to my mind a stanza which memory had somehow caught 

 when the battle was at the fiercest. It formed part of a 

 satiric address, published in an Aberdeen newspaper, to the 

 not very respectable non-intrusionists who had smoked to- 

 bacco and drank whisky in the parish church at Culsalmond, 

 on the day of a certain forced settlement there, specially re- 

 corded by the clerks of the Justiciary Court. 



" Tobacco and whisky cost siller, 



And meal is but scanty at hame ; 



But gang to the stane-mason M r, 



Wi' Old Red Sandstone fish he'll fill your wame." 



Rather a dislocated line that last, I thought, and too much 



