286 
NEW RED SANDSTONE FORMATION. 
like an extensive formation. We are therefore driven to the conclusion, that 
there were at one time extensive tracts of land of primary formation where now 
is nothing but sea. And it almost seems as if in the lapse of time a nearly total 
change of sea and land has taken place. If a chief portion of the Continent was 
once the bed of the sea—of which we think there is undoubted evidence—and 
if also a chief portion of the continent of North America was once and probably 
at the same geological era similarly situated, whjr may there not in the Atlantic 
Ocean, which now rolls its vast waves uninterruptedly from continent to con¬ 
tinent ? Why may there not have been large islands and tracts of land with 
their mountains, hills, vallies, and other phenomena, which have been worn away 
and destroyed by the powerful action of the elements which then, in all pro¬ 
bability, acted with much greater intensity than now ? And at the time the 
present dry land was gradually being raised from below the level of the sea, 
other portions of the earth’s surface may have as gradually been subsiding; of 
the one we have positive evidence, but of the other we can only have, from the 
nature of the case, negative evidence. 
Immediately prior to the deposition of the New Red Sandstone formation, 
extensive and sudden changes seem to have taken place with respect to the then 
relative position of the sea and land. The sea seems to have acted on the land 
with great turbulence and violence, and the turbid and muddy waters have 
deposited with considerable rapidity the lower beds of the New Red Sandstone 
formation. Under circumstances of this kind, where we find the hardest rocks 
have been ground down into fine debris, there is little or no probability that 
there would be any preservation of the delicate fabric of organized beings; not 
but that they may have been fully as abundant then as they were both before 
and subsequently. The waters seem to have acted with irregular degrees of 
violence, often coming apparently in floods or flushes, bearing with it a quantity 
of stones and pebbles, and then depositing upon these latter finer materials, as 
may be seen most frequently in the strata of the New Red Sandstone, in quarries 
and other localities, where the lower part of a stratum will be a kind of con¬ 
glomerate, and the upper part of it a fine-grained Sandstone. Sometimes the 
water would come with such force as to work up what had already been deposited, 
and redeposit it, so that we have pebbles of the New Red Sandstone itself, as 
well as pebbles of the older rocks occurring in its strata. At other times the 
rock has been deposited so finely that it is laminated in seams almost as thin as 
the leaves of a book ; in this case the pebbles are rare and very small. There 
would also, no doubt, be partial eddies and currents of water, accompanied with 
smoothness and stillness, to which may be owing the minute and fine grained 
appearance of the rock in some places. In many strata of the New Red Sand¬ 
stone may be traced ripple marks precisely the same as those which are formed 
