92 THE GEOLOGIST. 



The places I have mentioned are accessible to the tourist ; who, if he 

 has to use a little extra exertion in reaching them, will assuredly 

 consider himself well repaid for having done so. 



THE COMMOJT rOSSILS OE THE BRITISH EOCKS. 

 By S. J". Mackie, Esq., E.G.S., E.S.A., &c., &c. 



CHAPTETi II. 



The Roch — their Order and their Teachings. 



{Continued from page Qi..) 



The unstratified Plutonic rocks are considered to form, as we have 

 intimated, the common base of the stratified beds all over the globe. 

 With them, however, we have little to do in this place. Our labours 

 commence with the stratified, and we should even have excluded the so- 

 called ''Azoic," had not that term been recently subjected to con- 

 siderable restriction by the discovery of organic remains in some of its 

 members ; and, as it is still likely, by further researches, to be totally 

 absorbed into the Palaeozoic system, we append an ideal section 

 representing the sequence of formation of the most ancient groups of 

 fossiliferous rocks, with the relative position of those primordial con- 

 glomerates, flags,, and schists in which as yet no organic remains have 

 been found. Whether, at the vastly remote period at which those 

 isolated masses, still ranked as Azoic, were formed, the advent of life had 

 really not taken place on our planet, or whether those masses are the 

 few remnants of a still older stage of our world than any presented to 

 us by the recognised series of fossiliferous rocks, has yet to be determined 

 by the investigations of geologists— but in their massiveness and their 

 vast age they must ever be regarded with veneration and wonder. 



The ordinary diagrams or ideal vertical sections of the superposition 

 of the rocks have engendered to a great extent unnatural and erroneous 

 ideas of proper sequence, and has led to a prevalent impression that 

 the strata were deposited horizontally over each other, like books stacked 

 into a pile. Such, however, is far from the case; the simile would be 



