JAMES REID ON MARINE ORIGIN OF OLD RED SANDSTONE. 2 1 
the expense of another, but I do appeal to the man who likes to hear 
the cawing of his ancestral rooks to give permission to one pair of 
Ravens to occupy a tree in his park, should they be inclined to do so. 
In the meantime, until some reaction takes place in his favour, 
the Raven must remain an outlaw. Fortunately, besides being hardy 
birds, they are shy and crafty, and difficult to trap, and are therefore 
not likely to be exterminated. Long may they live to give character 
and interest to our wild corries and misty glens! I have spent many 
hours in their company, basking in sunshine, or sheltered from storm, 
among the moss-covered boulders and debris of the hill-side,— 
“ Alone, when least alone,”— 
watching them and other wild creatures who are reared amid the 
sublime grandeur of our mountain solitudes, where the peregrine, with 
a mighty rush, dashes across the sky, and the buzzard on broad up¬ 
turned wings floats among the clouds, and the wild chattering cry of 
the kestrel is heard as he havers into sight over the skyline of the 
crags; — 
“ I love not man the less, but Nature more. 
From these our interviews, in which I steal 
From all I may be, or have been before, 
To mingle with the Universe, and feel 
What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.” 
IV .—The Marine Origin of the Old Red Sandstone. 
By James Reid. 
(Read 12th April, 1894.) 
The Old Red Sandstone during the last fifty years has been 
variously regarded by geologists as of marine and of fresh-w^ater origin. 
Miller, Murchison, and the “ old geologists ” adhered to the marine 
view, while Godwin-Austen, Ramsay, and Geikie have favoured the 
theory of “ Inland fresh-water lakes or seas; ” and later, Coates and 
Macnair—in an able paper,* to which we refer—present the latter 
view in more detail than we have previously met with. 
That the geological opinion of the present day is largely in favour 
of the fresh-water origin of the Old Red Sandstone we are free to 
admit, yet we have reason to believe that a comparative examination 
of the Devonian of Europe, the formations of North America, and 
the Old Red Sandstone of Scotland will reveal the fact that evidence 
of the strongest kind exists in favour of a “ marine origin.” 
* “The Old Red Sandstone of Perthshire,” vide Transactions^ Vol. I., p. 235. 
