266 HUGH MILLER 



hundreds of square miles, and attaining a thickness of 

 more than 10,000 feet. It had been clearly shown 

 by William Smith, the Father of English Geology, to 

 occupy a definite position beneath the Mountain Lime- 

 stone, and above the ancient ' grey wacke ' which lay 

 at the base of all the sedimentary series, and he had 

 indicated its range over England and Wales on his 

 map published as far back as 1815. In Scotland, too, 

 its existence and importance as a mere mass of rock 

 in the general framework of the country had long been 

 recognised. Ami Boue had published in 1820 an 

 excellent account of its igneous rocks, but without 

 any allusion to the organic wonders for which it was 

 yet to become famous. The extraordinary abundance 

 of its fossil fishes, where it spreads over Caithness, 

 had been made known to the world by Murchison in 

 1826, and in more detail the following year when 

 Sedgwick and he read their conjoint paper on the 

 conglomerates and other formations of the north of 

 Scotland. But it may be doubted if any of these 

 publications had found their way to Cromarty when 

 Miller was gathering his first harvest of ichthy elites 

 in the little bay within half-a-mile of the town. He 

 had passed over that beach many hundreds of times 

 in his boyhood without a suspicion of the treasures 

 wrapped up in the grey concretions that lay tossing 

 in the tideway. On breaking these stones, hoping to 

 meet with a repetition of the Liassic organisms with 

 which he had grown familiar at Eathie, he found a 

 group of forms wholly different. At each interval of 

 leisure he would repair to the spot, and, digging 

 out the nodules from their matrix of clay, would 



