326 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 



any other deposit, by the red boulder-clay. On the previous 

 day I had detected the fish-beds in another new locality, 

 one of the ravines of the lawn of Cromarty House, where 

 the gray shale, concealed by a covering of soil and sward for 

 centuries, had been laid bare during the storm by a swollen 

 runnel, and a small nodule, inclosing a characteristic plate 

 of Pterichthys, washed out. And my next object in to-day's 

 journey, after exploring this ravine of the boulder-clay, was 

 to ascertain whether the beds did not also occur in a ravine 

 of the parish of Avoch, some eight or nine miles away, which, 

 when lying a-bed one night in Edinburgh, I remembered hav- 

 ing crossed when a boy, at a point which lies considerably out 

 of the ordinary route of the traveller. I had remarked on 

 this occasion, as the resuscitated recollection intimated, that 

 the precipices of the Avoch ravine bore, at the unfrequented 

 point, the peculiar aspect which I learned many years after 

 to associate with the ichthyolitic member of the system ; and 

 I was now quite as curious to test the truth of a sort of vig- 

 nette landscape, transferred to the mind at an immature pe- 

 riod of life, and preserved in it for full thirty years, as de- 

 sirous to extend my knowledge of the fossiliferous beds of a 

 system to the elucidation of which I had peculiarly devoted 

 myself. 



As the traveller reaches the flat moory uplands of the pa- 

 rish, where the water stagnates amid heath and moss over a 

 thin layer of peaty soil, he finds the underlying boulder-clay, 

 as shown in the chance sections, spotted and streaked with 

 patches of a grayish-white. There is the same mixture of 

 arenaceous and aluminous particles in the white as in the red 

 portions of the mass ; for, as we see so frequently exemplified 

 in the spots and streaks of the Red Sandstone formations, 

 whether Old or New, the colouring matter has been discharged 

 without any accompanying change of composition in the sub- 

 stance which it pervaded ; evidence enough that the red dye 



