RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 307 



CHAPTER VI. 



FOR the greater part of a quarter of a century I had been 

 finding organisms in abundance in the boulder-clay, but never 

 anything organic that unequivocally belonged to its own pe- 

 riod. I had ascertained that it contains in Ross and Cro- 

 marty nodules of the Old Red Sandstone, which bear inside, 

 like so many stone coffins, their well laid out skeletons of the 

 dead ; but then the markings on their surface told me that 

 when the boulder-clay was in the course of deposition, they 

 had been exactly the same kind of nodules that they are now. 

 In Moray, it incloses, I had found, organisms of the Lias ; 

 but they also testify that they present an appearance in no de- 

 gree more ancient at the present time than they did when 

 first enveloped by the clay. In East and West Lothian too, 

 and in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh, I had detected in it 

 occasional organisms of the Mountain Limestone and the Coal 

 Measures ; but these, not less surely than its Liasic fossils in 

 Moray, and its Old Red ichthyolites in Cromarty and Ross, 

 belonged to an incalculably more ancient state of things than 

 itself ; and like those shrivelled manuscripts of Pompeii or 

 Herculaneum, which, whatever else they may record, cannot 

 be expected to tell aught of the catastrophe that buried them 

 up they throw no light whatever on the deposit in which 

 they occur. I at length came to regard the boulder-clay 



