The Tr lassie and Permian of Moray. 401 



of the footprints and the reptiles is thus mutually confirmatory of the 

 Upper Permian age of these rocks.' 



Mode of Origin of the Deposits. — The Permian and Trias are typical 

 'red rocks' in this area, of the same general type throughout. 

 They are yellow and white sandstones and conglomerates, strongly 

 false-bedded ; they contain scattered pebbles in lenticular patches, 

 rarely forming regular conglomerates ; the fossils are distributed in 

 the same irregular manner, never in regular beds. These are 

 emphatically the characteristics of terrestrial, not of aqueous deposits, 

 and we would suggest that throughout this great interval the district 

 was continuously a land-surface, on which all these deposits gathered 

 as drifting sand. In this way we may understand why an apparently 

 quite thin series of rocks represents so great an interval of time, and 

 yet no visible unconformity has ever been found. The Permian and 

 Triassic reptiles all appear to have been teri'estrial, except perhaps 

 Syperodapedon and Stenometopoji, which may have been river forms. 



Fig. 2. — Dreikanter from the Upper Permian of Cuttie's Hillock 

 Elgin, 200 yards north-east of ' Elginia ' Quarry. 



The emphatically ' desert ' character of the Permian in the 

 ' Dreikanter' quarry of Cuttie's Hillock has been previously described 

 and is here illustrated by a better photograph of some of the typical 

 dreikanter (Fig. 2). Finally, we may suggest that the curious 

 'cherty rock' in the Trias at Stotfield, Lossiemouth, finds its 

 nearest modern parallel in the superficial chalcedony which develops 

 over the sands in certain dry sandy regions such as the Fayum. 



' It may be observed that one of the tracks from Dumfries among the 

 •Jardine Collection in the Edinburgh Museum (middle slab in Cases 1 and 2) 

 appears to be specifically identical with Huxley's Clielichnus viegachcirus from 

 Elgin. The pair of slabs at the top of Case 8 in the same collection may 

 represent the species here figured from Cuttie's Hillock. Possibly also the 

 very large prints from Cummingstone figured by Huxley (of which several good 

 examples are preserved in the Elgin Museum) may be Jardine's Clielichnus 

 titan, but the preservation of the latter is too imperfect for close comparison. 

 DECADE VI. — VOL. I. — NO. IX. 26 



