1858.] MUECHISON ^NOETHEEN HIGHLANDS, ETC. 393 



the remarkable power of the sea-waves when lashing upon this ex- 

 posed spot in great stolms. 



The seaward or north-eastern face of these gneissose rocks sloping 

 upwards presents the most chaotic aspect, being covered with clus- 

 ters of large angular blocks — one of the largest of these being 

 perched at nearly seventy feet above the sea. Now all of them 

 have been torn out of their beds, and most of them moved up-hill 

 for a considerable number of feet, to within a few yards of the base 

 of the new lighthouse. Por my own part, I was at first incredulous 

 as to the mode of producing what my lamented friend Leopold von 

 Buch would have called a true '' Felsen Meer ;" but when Mr. 

 Stevenson brought the data before me, it was quite evident that the 

 sea had done it all. Thus, an inhabitant pointed out some of the 

 chief blocks, several of them of many tons weight, which in a great 

 storm some years back had been moved upwards on the incline jS.fteen 

 to twenty feet, to heights of fifty feet above the sea. These in their 

 upward translation had scored the rocks over which they passed, 

 just as the stones held in a glacier groove and scratch in their 

 descent ; and the freshness of the markings was quite striking. Not 

 trusting to histories of the past, and for a moment doubting even the 

 clear evidence offered by the scoring of the rugged subjacent rock, I 

 interrogated an intelligent under-officer of the lighthouse, who had 

 been two years on the spot, and ascertained that even in the pre- 

 ceding winter, and when the new lighthouse was in course of con- 

 struction, a huge mass of stone near the sea-level, of which he showed 

 the very bed out of which it had been lifted, had been wrenched out 

 of it and moved up an incline of 10° or 12° to a distance of sixteen 

 feet ! — and with this proof all scepticism vanished. 



Lastly, perceiving a singular cavernous chasm into which the 

 waves hurl up fragments of rock varying from a few inches to two 

 yards in width to a height of fifty or sixty feet above the sea, I 

 found that, being there confined as in a gullet, they are continually 

 agitated and rolled about in every great storm until most of them 

 are as much rounded and water- worn as if they were part of an 

 ordinary sea-beach, before they are shot out to the other side of the 

 chasm. 



Old Red Sandstone of the North-east of Scotland. — Let us 

 now take a rapid review of the character, dimensions, and fossil 

 contents of the Old Eed Sandstone of the North-eastern parts 

 of Scotland, where in the year 1827 the separate masses were 

 described by Sedgwick and myself as offering the fuUest and best 

 types of a series which we have since shown to constitute a natural 

 group, the equivalent of the Devonian rocks of other countries. This 

 review is the more called for now that we know the precise geolo- 

 gical relations of the base of the Old Red Sandstone of England to 

 the Upper Silurian rocks on which it rests. It is also necessary to 

 point out some features in the successive distribution of its animal 

 remains in the latter tracts and in the central counties of Scotland, 

 when compared with that northern development to which attention 

 is now particularly directed, and to show that the ichthyolitic flags of 



