428 PROFESSOR GEIKIE ON THE 
exist and to belong to the same series with the red sandstones and conglomerates 
of the north,* was first brought prominently into notice by Murcutsoy, who 
announced that fossil fishes had been found in it.t Subsequently Mr Prest- 
WICH examined its structure as shown in the coast sections. He believed that 
at Gamrie he could trace a red sandstone passing down into the schistose rocks, 
and assuming it to be the equivalent of the Old Red Sandstone of England, he 
found it covered unconformably by the conglomerates and clays among which 
the fish-bearing nodules occur. He therefore concluded that the upper fossili- 
ferous deposits “ belonged to the Carboniferous series, and most probably to be 
the representative of the Millstone Grit or Mountain Limestone.” { Dr Mat- 
COLMSON, in the course of the explorations already referred to, could find no 
passage of the red sandstone into the schistose rocks, nor any evidence of an 
unconformability in the Red Sandstone series. He recognised the Gamrie 
strata as both the lithological and paleontological equivalents of those which 
he had explored on the Spey and in Nairnshire, and he referred the whole 
without hesitation to the same Old Red Sandstone series, which included 
also the fish beds of Cromarty, Caithness, and Orkney.§ 
There is probably no section on any part of the Scottish coast-line where the 
relations of the Old Red Sandstone to the older rocks, the rapid increase and 
diminution of the conglomerates, the position of calcareous and shaly zones, 
and the abundant dislocations which the whole system has undergone, can be 
more clearly understood than in the six miles between Aberdour and the More 














Fig. 13.—Junction of Old Red Sandstone and Metamorphic Rocks near Aberdour. 
Head of Gamrie. Mr Prestwicu’s clear descriptions refer only to the western 
end of this line of section, of which as a whole, so far as I am aware, no detailed 
account has yet been given. 
* See Boué, “‘ Essai,” p. 101. 
+ “Trans. Geol. Soc.” 2d series, vol. ii. p. 363. 
+ “Trans. Geol. Soc.” (1835), 2d series, vol. v. 145. 
§ “Quart. Journal Geol, Soc.” xv. 349. Read in 1839, aa 

