

258 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 



the dance. And it is a greatly younger beauty than the Cam- 

 brian and mica-schist protuberances that encroach on the sea 

 on either side of it. The sheds and kilns of a tile-work oc- 

 cupy the flat terminal point of the promontory ; and as the 

 clay is valuable, in this tile-draining age, for the facility with 

 which it can be moulded into pipe-tiles (a purpose which the 

 ordinary clays of the north of Scotland, composed chiefly of 

 re-formations of the Old Red Sandstone, are what is techni- 

 cally termed too short to serve), it is gradually retreating 

 inland before the persevering spade and mattock of the la- 

 bourer. The deposit has already been drawn out into many 

 hundred miles of cylindrical pipes, and is destined to be drawn 

 out into many thousands more, such being one of the strange 

 metamorphoses effected in the geologic formations, now that 

 that curious animal the Bimana has come upon the stage ; 

 and at length it will have no existence in the country, save 

 as an immense system of veins and arteries underlying the 

 vegetable mould. Will these veins and arteries, I marvel, 

 form, in their turn, the fossils of another period, when a higher 

 platform than that into which they have been laid will be oc- 

 cupied to the full by plants and animals specifically different 

 from those of the present scene of things, the existences of 

 a happier and more finished creation ? My business to-day, 

 however, was with the fossils which the deposit now contains, 

 not with those which it may ultimately form. 



The Blackpots clay is of a dark-bluish or greenish-gray co- 

 lour, and so adhesive, that I now felt, when walking among 

 it, after the softening rains of the previous night and morn- 

 ing, as if I had got into a bed of bird-lime. It is thinly 

 charged with rolled pebbles, septaria, and pieces of a bitumi- 

 nous shale, containing broken Belemnites, and sorely-flattened 

 Ammonites, that exist as thin films of a white chalky lime. 

 The pebbles, like those of the boulder-clay of the northern 

 side of the Moray Frith, are chiefly of the primary rocks and 



