REVIEWS. 



is unity of character in every scale, plate, and fin — " unity," 

 Mr. Miller says, " such as all men of taste have learned to 

 admire in those three Grecian orders from which the inge- 

 nuity of Rome was content to borrow, when it professed to 

 invent — in the masculine Doric,— the chaste and graceful 

 Ionic, — the exquisitely elegant Corinthian ; and yet the 

 unassisted eye fails to discover the first evidences of this 

 unity ; it would seem as if the adorable architect had wrought 

 it out in secret with reference to the Divine idea alone. Again 

 we will let Mr. Miller speak for himself, with reference to 

 the other fossil productions of this formation ; preferring 

 his descriptions to any abbreviated remark of our own : 



" Till very lately it was held that the Old Red Sandstone 

 of Scotland contained no mollusca. It seemed difficult, 

 however, to imagine a sea abounding in fish, and yet devoid 

 of shells. In all my explorations, therefore^ I had an eye 

 to the discovery of the latter, and on several occasions I 

 disinterred what I supposed, might have formed portions 

 of a cardium or terebratula. On applying the glass, how- 

 ever, the punctulated character of the surface showed that 

 the supposed shells were but parts of the concave helmet- 

 like plate that covered the snout of the Osteolopis. In the 

 Ichthyolite beds of Cromarty, Ross, Moray, Banif, Perth, 

 Forfar, Fife and Berwickshire, not a jsingle shell has been 

 found, but there have been discovered of late, in the upper 

 beds of the Lower Old Red Sandstone in Caithness and 

 Orkney, the remains of a small delicate bivalve, not yet 

 described or figured, but which very much resembled a 

 Venus. In the Tilestones of England, so carefully described 

 by Mr. Murchison in his work the Silurian system,'^ shells 

 are very abundant ; and the fact may now be regarded as es- 

 tablished, that the Tilestones of England belong to a depo- 

 sit contemporaneous with the Ichthyolite Beds of Caithness 

 and Cromarty. They occupy the same place low in the 



