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THE GEOLOGIST. 



iiiilierto referred to the Old Red, or Devonian formExtion, but now ascertained to 

 contain several reptillian forms, of so high an organization as to raise a doubt 

 ill the minds of many geologists whether so old a place in the series can cor- 

 rectly be assigned to it." 



Sir Roderick I. Mtjrchison delivered a discourse " On the Geological 

 Structure and Order of the Older Rocks in the Northern Counties of Scot- 

 land," in which he explained the progress which had been made in the classifi- 

 cation of the rocks of sedimentary origin in Scotland. He alluded to the great 

 leaders of Scottish geology, Hutton, Playfair, and Hall, and his immediate pre- 

 decessors, Jameson, M'Culloch, and others, and showed to how great an extent 

 the chief point on which he was to insist — the metamorphism of sedimentary 

 strata of various ages into crystalline rocks — ^liad been ably illustrated by Hut- 

 ton himself. After his day, however, mineralogy chiefly occupied the minds of 

 geologists, and comparatively little progress was made for some years in 

 geology as at present cultivated. With William Smith, however, a new era 

 arose in England, and the proofs which that sagacious man brought forward to 

 show that each sedimentary formation was characterized by organic remains 

 peculiar to it, and that there existed a regular order of superposition from the 

 older to the younger strata, were the true foundations or keystones of modern 

 geology. Sir Roderick then gave a very full account of his researches in the 

 northern counties of Scotland, and concluded by calling the attention of the 

 meeting to the progress which was being made by the Geological Survey of 

 Great Britain under his direction, and under the special management in the 

 field of his friend Professor Ramsay. Exhibiting certain sheets of maps, on 

 the six-inch scale, of the counties of Edinburgh, Haddington, and Linlithgow, 

 which explained the outcrop of the coal and limestone of these tracts, he 

 trusted that the staff' of geological surveyors at present allotted to Scotland 

 would be soon augmented, and in that case he hoped to live to see the day, if 

 maps were only provided, when all the geology of Aberdeenshire and the north 

 of Scotland might really be worked out with accuracy. The present effort was 

 chiefly confined to the application of recognized general principles of classifica- 

 tion to the elucidation of the order of the older rocks of the Highlands ; and 

 nothing more could be attempted until the country possessed maps, the north of 

 Scotland being almost the only country in Europe without an accurate map, a 

 melancholy fact, on which he insisted a quarter of a century ago, when the As- 

 sociation met in Edinburgh in 1834. On that occasion the Association, at his 

 request, memorialized the then Government ; and this state of matters was 

 being rapidly wiped away as regards all the tracts to the south of the 

 Grampians ; and he hoped that the skill and energy of his friend Colonel James 

 and the officers under him would be so warmly supported by Parliament and 

 the public that Scotland would have before long a really good topographical 

 map, without which no practically useful geological results could be worked 

 out. Sir Roderick concluded his address by impressing upon the minds of those 

 auditors who were not geologists the nature of the great difference between the 

 formerly accepted notions of the order and equivalents of the older rocks of the 

 uoyih of Scotland, and those which he desired to establish by his reform, by 

 pointing to two generalized diagrams. One of these, representing the old. 

 not ions, exhibited a great central mass of rocks, termed gneiss, mica schist, 

 ([uartz-rocks, with granites, porphyries, &c., flanked both on the east and the 

 west coasts by Old Red conglomerates and sandstones. The other, on which he 

 had ]n-cviously lectured, exhibited the succession which had been evolved out 

 of 1 hat which was previously an assemblage of crystalline rocks, distinguished 

 only \)y th(M'r mineral cliaracters, but uuclefincd by their relative position and 

 imhrthlcMl organic r(M\iaius, and in which the rocks of the north-west coast were 

 couriisiHl wliii (hose of the casi coast. 



