280 KAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST. 



continuity, as an extended deposit, at the bottom of the same 

 sea. But with this last and newest of the formations of the 

 Old Red Sandstone the identity of the deposits to the south 

 and north ceases. The strata which in the south overlie the 

 yellow bed of the Holoptychius represent the Carboniferous 

 period ; the overlying strata in the north represent the Ooli- 

 tic one. On the one side the miner sinks his shaft, and finds 

 a true coal, composed of the Stigmaria, Calamites, Club-mosses, 

 Ferns, and Araucarians of the Palaeozoic era ; he sinks his 

 shaft on the other side, and finds but thin seams of an im- 

 perfect lignite, composed of the Cycadese, Pines, Sphenopteri, 

 and Clathraria of the Secondary period. The flora which 

 found its subsoil in the Old Red Sandstone north of the 

 Grampians belonged to a scene of things so much more mo- 

 dern than the flora which found its subsoil in the Old Red 

 Sandstone of the south, that all its productions were green 

 and flourishing, waving beside lake, river, and sea, at a time 

 when the productions of the other were locked up, as now, 

 in sand and shale, lime and clay, the dead mummies of ages 

 long departed. 



Another thoroughly wet morning ! varied only from the 

 morning of the preceding day by the absence of wind, and 

 the greater weight of the persevering vertical rain, that leaped 

 upwards in myriads of dancing little pyramids from the sur- 

 face of every pool. I walked out under cover of my um- 

 brella, to renew my acquaintance with the outlier of the 

 "Weald at Linksfield, and ascertain what sort of section it 

 now presented under the quarrying operations of the lime- 

 burners. There was, however, little to be seen \ the bands 

 of green and blue clays, alternating with strata of fossiliferous 

 limestone, and layers of a gray shale thickly charged with 

 minute shells of Cypris, were sadly blurred this morning by 

 the trail of numerous slips from above, which had fallen dur- 

 ing the rains, and softened into mud as they rushed down- 



