Mr. Hutton's Notes on the New Red Sandstone, ^c. 71 



distance from the outcrop of this stratum. Butterby, near Croxdale, is 

 about two miles from it ; Lumley is rather less than two miles ; Old 

 Walker Colliery is farthest from the line, being about three miles and a 

 half; and Jarrow is the nearest, being little more than a mile and a half.* 

 The great scarcity of organic remains, in the lower beds of the 

 Magnesian Limestone, is rather singular. In the foregoing Notice, four 

 different localities have been mentioned, where Fish have occurred, all 

 in the Slaty beds of the Limestone, a few feet above the yellow Sand. . 

 Organic remains are at all times of great use to the geologist and ob- 

 server of nature ; they are, as it were, nature's own medals of the won- 

 derful changes that have taken place, upon the surface of the globe, 

 "before it was brought to its present state ; and the great importance of 

 these Fish is, the light they may throw upon the nature of the changes 

 that have taken place at the time they were buried. That the catas- 

 trophe was sudden, the forms in which they occur, and their perfect 

 preservation, sufficiently testify ; indeed, it is a generally received opi- 

 nion, that where the remains of soft bodied animals occur, with their 

 outward form perfectly preserved, and associated in families, they have 

 been suddenly overwhelmed, and entangled in the substance now form- 

 ing their stony matrix. It is a singular circumstance attending these 

 Fish, and one in which they agree with those that have been found in 

 different situations upon the Continent, that many of them are contort- 

 ed ; not that sort of twisting which might be produced by any move- 

 ment in the mass, and subsequent to the time they were enveloped, but 

 the graceful contortions of the living animal in a state of pain, as if 

 struggling against its fate. 



* Besides the places above enumerated, Brine Springs are common in the collieries of 

 Hebburn, Wallsend, and Percy Main. 



