The Old Red Sandstone.--Till very lately its Existence as a distinct
Formation disputed.--Still little known.--Its great Importance in the
Geological Scale.--Illustration.--The North of Scotland girdled by
an immense Belt of Old Red Sandstone.--Line of the Girdle along the
Coast.--Marks of vast Denudation.--Its Extent partially indicated by
Hills on the Western Coast of Ross-shire.--The System of Great Depth
in the North of Scotland.--Difficulties in the way of estimating the
Thickness of Deposits.--Peculiar Formation of Hill.--Illustrated
by Ben Nevis.--Caution to the Geological Critic.--Lower Old Red
Sandstone immensely developed in Caithness.--Sketch of the Geology
of that County.--Its strange Group of Fossils.--Their present
place of Sepulture.--Their ancient Habitat.--Agassiz.--Amazing
Progress of Fossil Ichthyology during the last few Years.--Its
Nomenclature.--Learned Names repel unlearned Readers.--Not a great
deal in them.
"The Old Red Sandstone," says a Scottish geologist, in a digest of
some recent geological discoveries, which appeared a short time
ago in an Edinburgh newspaper, "has been hitherto considered as
remarkably barren of fossils." The remark is expressive of a pretty
general opinion among geologists of even the present time, and I
quote it on this account. Only a few years have gone by since men of
no low standing in the science disputed the very existence of this
formation--system rather, for it contains at least three distinct
formations; and but for the influence of one accomplished geologist,
the celebrated author of the _Silurian System_, it would have been
probably degraded from its place in the scale altogether. "You
must inevitably give up the Old Red Sandstone," said an ingenious
foreigner to Mr. Murchison, when on a visit to England about four
years ago, and whose celebrity among his own countrymen rested
chiefly on his researches in the more ancient formations,--"you must
inevitably give up the Old Red Sandstone: it is a mere local deposit,
a doubtful accumulation huddled up in a corner, and has no type or
representative abroad." "I would willingly give it up if nature
would," was the reply; "but it assuredly exists, and I cannot." In
a recently published tabular exhibition of the geological scale
by a continental geologist, I could not distinguish this system
at all. There are some of our British geologists, too, who still
regard it as a sort of debatable tract, entitled to no independent
status. They find, in what they deem its upper beds, the fossils
of the Coal Measures, and the lower graduating apparently into the
Silurian System; and regard the whole as a sort of common, which
should be divided as proprietors used to divide commons in Scotland
half a century ago, by giving a portion to each of the bordering
territories. Even the better informed geologists, who assign to it
its proper place as an independent formation, furnished with its own
organisms, contrive to say all they know regarding it in a very few
paragraphs. Lyell, in the first edition of his admirable elementary
work, published only two years ago, devotes more than thirty pages to
his description of the Coal Measures, and but two and a half to his
notice of the Old Red Sandstone.[C]
[Footnote C: As the succinct notice of this distinguished geologist
may serve as a sort of pocket map to the reader in indicating the
position of the system, its three great deposits, and its extent, I
take the liberty of transferring it entire.
"OLD RED SANDSTONE.
"It was stated that the Carboniferous formation was surmounted by one
called the 'New lied Sandstone,' and underlaid by another called the
Old Red, which last was formerly merged in the Carboniferous System,
but is now found to be distinguishable by its fossils. The Old Red
Sandstone is of enormous thickness in Herefordshire, Worcestershire,
Shropshire, and South Wales, where it is seen to crop out beneath the
Coal Measures, and to repose on the Silurian Rocks. In that region,
its thickness has been estimated by Mr. Murchison at no less than ten
thousand feet. It consists there of--
"1st. A quartzose conglomerate, passing downwards into chocolate-red
and green sandstone and marl.
"2d. Cornstone and marl, (red and green argillaceous spotted
marls, with irregular courses of impure concretionary limestone,
provincially called Cornstone, mottled red and green; remains of
fishes.)
"3d. Tilestone, (finely laminated hard reddish or green micaceous or
quartzose sandstones, which split into tiles; remains of mollusca and
fishes.)
"I have already observed that fossils are rare in marls and
sandstones in which the red oxide of iron prevails. In the Cornstone,
however, of the counties above mentioned, fishes of the genera
Cephalaspis and Onchus have been discovered. In the Tilestone,
also, Ichthyodorulites of the genus Onchus have been obtained,
and a species of Dipterus, with mollusca of the genera Avicula,
Area, Cucullæa, Terebratula, Lingula, Turbo, Trochus, Turritella,
Bellerophon, Orthoceras, and others.
"By consulting geological maps, the reader will perceive that, from
Wales to the north of Scotland, the Old Red Sandstone appears in
patches, and often in large tracts. Many fishes have been found in
it at Caithness, and various organic remains in the northern part of
Fifeshire, where it crops out from beneath the Coal formation, and
spreads into the adjoining northern half of Forfarshire; forming,
together with trap, the Sidlaw Hills and valley of Strathmore. A
large belt of this formation skirts the northern borders of the
Grampians, from the sea-coast at Stonehaven and the Frith of Tay to
the opposite western coast of the Frith of Clyde. In Forfarshire,
where, as in Herefordshire, it is many thousand feet thick, it
may be divided into three principal masses--1st. Red and mottled
marls, cornstone, and sandstone; 2d. Conglomerate, often of vast
thickness; 3d. Tilestones, and paving-stone, highly micaceous, and
containing a slight admixture of carbonate of lime. In the uppermost
of these divisions, but chiefly in the lowest, the remains of fish
have been found, of the genus named by M. Agassiz Cephalaspis, or
buckler-headed, from the extraordinary shield which covers the
head, and which, has often been mistaken for that of a trilobite
of the division Asaphus. A gigantic species of fish, of the genus
Holoptychius, has also been found by Dr. Fleming in the Old Red
Sandstone of Fifeshire."--Lyell's _Elements_, pp. 452-4.]
It will be found, however, that this hitherto neglected system yields
in importance to none of the others, whether we take into account
its amazing depth, the great extent to which it is developed both
at home and abroad, the interesting links which it furnishes in the
zoölogical scale, or the vast period of time which it represents.
There are localities in which the depth of the Old Red Sandstone
fully equals the elevation of Mount Ætna over the level of the sea,
and in which it contains three distinct groups of organic remains,
the one rising in beautiful progression over the other. Let the
reader imagine a digest of English history, complete from the times
of the invasion of Julius Cæsar to the reign of that Harold who was
slain at Hastings, and from the times of Edward III. down to the
present day, but bearing no record of the Williams, the Henrys, the
Edwards, the John, Stephen, and Richard, that reigned during the
omitted period, or of the striking and important events by which
their several reigns were distinguished. A chronicle thus mutilated
and incomplete would be no unapt representation of a geological
history of the earth in which the period of the Upper Silurian would
be connected with that of the Mountain Limestone, or of the limestone
of Burdie House, and the period of the Old Red Sandstone omitted.
The eastern and western coasts of Scotland, which lie to the north
of the Friths of Forth and Clyde, together with the southern flank
of the Grampians and the northern coast of Sutherland and Caithness,
appear to have been girdled at some early period by immense
continuous beds of Old Red Sandstone. At a still earlier time, the
girdle seems to have formed an entire mantle, which covered the
enclosed tract from side to side. The interior is composed of what,
after the elder geologists, I shall term primary rocks--porphyries,
granites, gneisses, and micaceous schists; and this central nucleus,
as it now exists, seems set in a sandstone frame. The southern bar
of the frame is still entire: it stretches along the Grampians from
Stonehaven to the Frith of Clyde. The northern bar is also well nigh
entire: it runs unbroken along the whole northern coast of Caithness,
and studs, in three several localities, the northern coast of
Sutherland, leaving breaches of no very considerable extent between.
On the east, there are considerable gaps, as along the shores of
Aberdeenshire.[D] The sandstone, however, appears at Gamrie, in the
county of Banff, in a line parallel to the coast, and, after another
interruption, follows the coast of the Moray Frith far into the
interior of the great Caledonian valley, and then running northward
along the shores of Cromarty, Ross, and Sutherland, joins, after
another brief interruption, the northern bar at Caithness.
[Footnote D: The progress of discovery has shown, since this passage
was written, that these gaps are not quite so considerable as I had
supposed. The following paragraph, which appeared in July, 1843, in
an Aberdeen paper, bears directly on the point, and is worthy of
being preserved:--
"ARTESIAN WELL.
"The greatest of these interesting works yet existing in Aberdeen has
just been successfully completed at the tape-works of Messrs. Milne,
Low, and Co., Woolmanhill. The bore is 8 inches in diameter, and 250
feet 9 inches deep. It required nearly eleven months' working to
complete the excavation.
"In its progress, the following strata were cut through in
succession:--
6 feet vegetable mould.
18 " gray or bluish clay.
20 " sand and shingle, enclosing rolled stones of various sizes.
6 " light blue clay.
3 " rough sand and shingle.
115 " Old Red Sandstone conglomerate, composed of red clay,
quartz, mica, and rolled stones.
74 " alternating strata of compact, fine-grained Red Sandstone,
varying in thickness from 1 to 7 feet, and clay, varying
from 6 inches to 12 feet thick.
8 " 9 inches, mica-slate formation, the first two feet of which
were chiefly a hard, brown quartzose substance, containing
iron, manganese, and carbonate of lime.
-----------
250 feet, 9 inches.
"The temperature of the water at the bottom of the well, when
completed, was found to be within a fraction of 50° Fahrenheit, and
the average temperature of the locality, deduced from twenty-three
years' observation, by the late George limes, F. R. S., is 47°
1: hence, nearly 3 degrees of increase appear as the effects of
central heat. The supply of water obtained is excellent in quality,
and sufficient in quantity for all the purposes of the works. Such
an opportunity of investigating the geology of the locality can
but rarely occur; and, in the present instance, the proprietor
and managers afforded every facility to scientific inquirers for
conducting examinations. To make the bearings of the case clear
and simple, the following is quoted from Mr. Miller's work on the
Old Red Sandstone. [The writer here quotes the above passage, and
then proceeds.] Mr. Miller will be glad to learn, that though the
convulsions of nature have shattered the 'frame' along the shores
of Aberdeenshire, yet the fragments are not lost, as will be seen
from the section above described; they are here reposing _in situ_
under the accumulated debris of uncounted ages--chiefly the 'boulder
clay,' and sedimentary deposits of the Dee and Don, during a period
when they mingled their waters in the basin in which Aberdeen now
stands. The primary rocks--the settings--our granites, of matchless
beauty stand out in bold relief a mile or two westward from the
sea-coast. Within this year or two, the 'Old Red' has been discovered
at Devanha, Union Grove, Huntly Street, Glenburnie, Balgownie, and
various other localities to the northward. Hence it may reasonably
be inferred, that our fragment of the 'frame' envelops the primary
rocks under our city, and along the coast for a considerable distance
between the Dee and the Buchaness."--_Aberdeen Constitutional_.]
The western bar has also its breaches towards the south; but it
stretches, almost without interruption, for about a hundred miles,
from the near neighborhood of Cape Wrath to the southern extremity
of Applecross; and though greatly disturbed and overflown by the
traps of the inner Hebrides, it can be traced by occasional patches
on towards the southern bar. It appears on the northern shore of
Loch Alsh, on the eastern shore of Loch Eichart, on the southern
shore of Loch Eil, on the coast and islands near Oban, and on the
east coast of Arran. Detached hills and island-like patches of
the same formation occur in several parts of the interior, far
within the frame or girdle. It caps some of the higher summits in
Sutherlandshire; it forms an oasis of sandstone among the primary
districts of Strathspey; it rises on the northern shores of Loch
Ness in an immense mass of conglomerate, based on a small-grained,
red granite, to a height of about three thousand feet over the
level; and on the north-western coast of Ross-shire it forms three
immense insulated hills, of at least no lower altitude, that rest
unconformably on a base of gneiss.
There appear every where in connection with these patches and
eminences, and with the surrounding girdle, marks of vast denudation.
I have often stood fronting the three Ross-shire hills[E] at sunset
in the finer summer evenings, when the clear light threw the shadows
of their gigantic, cone-like forms far over the lower tract, and
lighted up the lines of their horizontal strata, till they showed
like courses of masonry in a pyramid. They seem at such times as if
colored by the geologist, to distinguish them from the surrounding
tract, and from the base on which they rest as on a common pedestal.
The prevailing gneiss of the district reflects a cold, bluish hue,
here and there speckled with white, where the weathered and lichened
crags of intermingled quartz rock jut out on the hill-sides from
among the heath. The three huge pyramids, on the contrary, from
the deep red of the stone, seem flaming in purple. There spreads
all around a wild and desolate landscape of broken and shattered
hills, separated by deep and gloomy ravines, that seem the rents
and fissures of a planet in ruins, and that speak distinctly of a
period of convulsion, when upheaving fires from the abyss, and ocean
currents above, had contended in sublime antagonism, the one slowly
elevating the entire tract, the other grinding it down and sweeping
it away. I entertain little doubt that, when this loftier portion of
Scotland, including the entire Highlands, first presented its broad
back over the waves, the upper surface consisted exclusively, from
the one extremity to the other--from Benlomond to the Maidenpaps of
Caithness--of a continuous tract of Old Red Sandstone; though, ere
the land finally emerged, the ocean currents of ages had swept it
away, all except in the lower and last-raised borders, and in the
detached localities, where it still remains, as in the pyramidal
hills of western Ross-shire, to show the amazing depth to which
it had once overlaid the inferior rocks. The Old Red Sandstone
of Morvheim, in Caithness, overlooks all the primary hills of the
district, from an elevation of three thousand five hundred feet.
[Footnote E: Suil Veinn, Coul Beg, and Coul More.]
The depth of the system, on both the eastern and western coasts
of Scotland, is amazingly great--how great, I shall not venture
to say. There are no calculations more doubtful than those of the
geologist. The hill just instanced (Morvheim) is apparently composed
from top to bottom of what in Scotland forms the lowest member of
the system--a coarse conglomerate; and yet I have nowhere observed
this inferior member, when I succeeded in finding a section of it
directly vertical, more than a hundred yards in thickness--less than
one tenth the height of the hill. It would be well nigh as unsafe
to infer that the three thousand five hundred feet of altitude
formed the real thickness of the conglomerate, as to infer that the
thickness of the lead which covers the dome of St. Paul's is equal to
the height of the dome. It is always perilous to estimate the depth
of a deposit by the height of a hill that seems externally composed
of it, unless, indeed, like the pyramidal hills of Ross-shire, it
be unequivocally a hill dug out by denudation, as the sculptor digs
his eminences out of the mass. In most of our hills, the upheaving
agency has been actively at work, and the space within is occupied
by an immense nucleus of inferior rock, around which the upper
formation is wrapped like a caul, just as the vegetable mould or
the diluvium wraps up this superior covering in turn. One of our
best known Scottish mountains--the gigantic Ben Nevis--furnishes an
admirable illustration of this latter construction of hill. It is
composed of three zones or rings of rock, the one rising over and
out of the other, like the cases of an opera-glass drawn out. The
lower zone is composed of gneiss and mica-slate, the middle zone
of granite, the terminating zone of porphyry. The elevating power
appears to have acted in the centre, as in the well-known case of
Jorullo, in the neighborhood of the city of Mexico, where a level
tract four square miles in extent rose, about the middle of the last
century, into a high dome of more than double the height of Arthur's
Seat.[F] In the formation of our Scottish mountain, the gneiss and
mica-slate of the district seem to have been upheaved, during the
first period of Plutonic action in the locality, into a rounded
hill of moderate altitude, but of huge base. The upheaving power
continued to operate--the gneiss and mica-slate gave way a-top--and
out of this lower dome there arose a higher dome of granite, which,
in an after and terminating period of the internal activity, gave
way in turn to yet a third and last dome of porphyry. Now, had the
elevating forces ceased to operate just ere the gneiss and mica-slate
had given way, we would have known nothing of the interior nucleus
of granite--had they ceased just ere the granite had given way, we
would have known nothing of the yet deeper nucleus of porphyry; and
yet the granite and the porphyry would assuredly have been there.
Nor could any application of the measuring rule to the side of the
hill have ascertained the thickness of its outer covering--the gneiss
and the mica schist. The geologists of the school of Werner used to
illustrate what we may term the anatomy of the earth, as seen through
the spectacles of their system, by an onion and its coats: they
represented the globe as a central nucleus, encircled by concentric
coverings, each covering constituting a geological formation. The
onion, through the introduction of a better school, has become
obsolete as an illustration; but to restore it again, though for
another purpose, we have merely to cut it through the middle, and
turn downwards the planes formed by the knife. It then represents,
with its coats, hills such as we describe--hills such as Ben Nevis,
ere the granite had perforated the gneiss, or the porphyry broken
through the granite.
[Footnote F: It is rarely that the geologist catches a hill in
the act of forming, and hence the interest of this well-attested
instance. From the period of the discovery of America to the middle
of the last century, the plains of Jorullo had undergone no change of
surface, and the seat of the present hill was covered by plantations
of indigo and sugar-cane, when, in June, 1759, hollow sounds were
heard, and a succession of earthquakes continued for sixty days,
to the great consternation of the inhabitants. After the cessation
of these, and in a period of tranquillity, on the 28th and 29th of
September, a horrible subterranean noise was again heard, and a
tract four square miles in extent rose up in the shape of a dome or
bladder, to the height of sixteen hundred and seventy feet above
the original level of the plain. The affrighted Indians fled to
the mountains; and from thence looking down on the phenomenon, saw
flames issuing from the earth for miles around the newly-elevated
hill, and the softened surface rising and falling like that of an
agitated sea, and opening into numerous rents and fissures. Two
brooks which had watered the plantations precipitated themselves into
the burning chasms. The scene of this singular event was visited by
Humboldt about the beginning of the present century. At that period,
the volcanic agencies had become comparatively quiescent; the hill,
however, retained its original altitude; a number of smaller hills
had sprung up around it; and the traveller found the waters of the
engulfed rivulets escaping at a high temperature from caverns charged
with sulphureous vapors and carbonic acid gas. There wore inhabitants
of the country living at the time who were more than twenty years
older than the hill of Jorullo, and who had witnessed its rise.]
If it be thus unsafe, however, to calculate on the depth of deposits
by the altitude of hills, it is quite as unsafe for the geologist,
who has studied a formation in one district, to set himself to
criticise the calculations of a brother geologist by whom it has been
studied in a different and widely-separated district. A deposit in
one locality may be found to possess many times the thickness of the
same deposit in another. There are exposed, beside the Northern and
Southern Sutors of Cromarty, two nearly vertical sections of the
coarse conglomerate bed, which forms, as I have said, in the north of
Scotland, the base of the Old Red System, and which rises to so great
an elevation in the mountain of Morvheim. The sections are little
more than a mile apart; and yet, while the thickness of this bed in
the one does not exceed one hundred feet, that of the same bed in the
other somewhat exceeds two hundred feet. More striking still--under
the Northern Sutor, the entire Geology of Caithness, with all its
vast beds, and all its numerous fossils, from the granitic rock of
the Ord hill, the southern boundary of the county, to the uppermost
sandstones of Dunnet-head, its extreme northern corner, is exhibited
in a vertical section not more than three hundred yards in extent.
And yet so enormous is the depth of the deposit in Caithness, that
it has been deemed by a very superior geologist to represent three
entire formations--the Old Red System, by its unfossiliferous,
arenaceous, and conglomerate beds; the Carboniferous System, by its
dark-colored middle schists, abounding in bitumen and ichthyolites;
and the New Red Sandstone, by the mottled marls and mouldering
sandstones that overlie the whole.[G] A slight sketch of the Geology
of Caithness may not be deemed uninteresting. This county includes,
in the state of greatest development any where yet known, that
fossiliferous portion of the Old Red Sandstone which I purpose first
to describe, and which will yet come to be generally regarded as an
independent formation, as unequivocally characterized by its organic
remains as the formations either above or below it.
[Footnote G: Dr. Hibbert, whose researches among the limestones
of Burdie House have been of such importance to Geology, was of
this opinion. I find it also expressed in the admirable geological
appendix affixed by the Messrs. Anderson to their _Guide to the
Highlands and Islands of Scotland_. "No beds of real coal," say these
gentlemen, "have been discovered in Caithness; and it would thus
appear that the middle schistose system of the county, containing the
fossil fish, is in geological character and position intermediate
between the Old and New Red Sandstone formations, but not identical
with the Carboniferous Limestone, or the true Coal Measures, although
probably occupying the place of one or other of them."--p. 198.]
The county of Sutherland stretches across the island from the
German to the Atlantic Ocean, and presents, throughout its entire
extent,--except where a narrow strip of the Oolitic formation runs
along its eastern coast, and a broken belt of Old Red Sandstone tips
its capes and promontories on the west,--a broken and tumultuous
sea of primary hills. Scarce any of our other Scottish counties are
so exclusively Highland, nor are there any of them in which the
precipices are more abrupt, the valleys more deep, the rivers more
rapid, or the mountains piled into more fantastic groups and masses.
The traveller passes into Caithness, and finds himself surrounded by
scenery of an aspect so entirely dissimilar, that no examination of
the rocks is necessary to convince him of a geological difference of
structure. An elevated and uneven plain spreads around and before
him, league beyond league, in tame and unvaried uniformity,--its many
hollows darkened by morasses, over which the intervening eminences
rise in the form rather of low moory swellings, than of hills,--its
coasts walled round by cliffs of gigantic altitude, that elevate the
district at one huge stride from the level of the sea, and skirted by
vast stacks and columns of rock, that stand out like the advanced
pickets of the land amid the ceaseless turmoil of the breakers. The
district, as shown on the map, presents nearly a triangular form--the
Pentland Frith and the German Ocean describing two of its sides,
while the base is formed by the line of boundary which separates it
from the county of Sutherland.
Now, in a geological point of view, this angle may be regarded as a
vast pyramid, rising perpendicularly from the basis furnished by the
primary rocks of the latter county, and presenting newer beds and
strata as we ascend, until we reach the apex. The line from south
to north in the angle--from Morvheim to Dunnet-head--corresponds
to the line of ascent from the top to the bottom of the pyramid.
The first bed, reckoning from the base upwards,--the ground tier
of the masonry, if I may so speak,--is the great conglomerate. It
runs along the line of boundary from sea to sea,--from the Ord of
Caithness on the east, to Portskerry on the north; and rises, as it
approaches the primary hills of Sutherland, into a lofty mountain
chain of bold and serrated outline, which attains its greatest
elevation in the hill of Morvheim. This great conglomerate bed, the
base of the system, is represented in the Cromarty section, under the
Northern Sutor, by a bed two hundred and fifteen feet in thickness.
The second tier of masonry in the pyramid, and which also runs in a
nearly parallel line from sea to sea, is composed mostly of a coarse
red and yellowish sandstone, with here and there beds of pebbles
enclosed, and here and there deposits of green earth and red marl. It
has its representative in the Cromarty section, in a bed of red and
yellow arenaceous stone, one hundred and fourteen feet six inches in
thickness. These two inferior beds possess but one character,--they
are composed of the same materials, with merely this difference, that
the rocks which have been broken into pebbles for the construction
of the one, have been ground into sand for the composition of the
other. Directly over them, the middle portion of the pyramid is
occupied by an enormous deposit of dark-colored bituminous schist,
slightly micaceous, calcareous, or semi-calcareous,--here and there
interlaced with veins of carbonate of lime,--here and there compact
and highly siliceous,--and bearing in many places a mineralogical
character difficult to be distinguished from that at one time deemed
peculiar to the harder grauwacke schists. The Caithness flagstones,
so extensively employed in paving the footways of our larger towns,
are furnished by this immense middle tier or belt, and represent
its general appearance. From its lowest to its highest beds it
is charged with fossil fish and obscure vegetable impressions;
and we find it represented in the Cromarty section by alternating
bands of sandstones, stratified clays, and bituminous and nodular
limestones, which form altogether a bed three hundred and fifty-five
feet in thickness; nor does this bed lack its organisms, animal and
vegetable, generically identical with those of Caithness. The apex of
the pyramid is formed of red mouldering sandstones and mottled marls,
which exhibit their uppermost strata high over the eddies of the
Pentland Frith, in the huge precipices of Dunnet-head, and which are
partially represented in the Cromarty section by an unfossiliferous
sandstone bed of unascertained thickness; but which can be traced for
about eighty feet from the upper limestones and stratified clays of
the middle member, until lost in overlying beds of sand and shingle.
I am particular, at the risk, I am afraid, of being tedious, in thus
describing the Geology of this northern county, and of the Cromarty
section, which represents and elucidates it. They illustrate more
than the formations of two insulated districts: they represent also
a vast period of time in the history of the globe. The pyramid, with
its three huge bars, its foundations of granitic rock, its base
of red conglomerate, its central band of dark-colored schist, and
its lighter tinted apex of sandstone, is inscribed from bottom to
top, like an Egyptian obelisk, with a historical record. The upper
and lower sections treat of tempests and currents--the middle is
"written within and without" with wonderful narratives of animal
life; and yet the whole, taken together, comprises but an earlier
portion of that chronicle of existences and events furnished by the
Old Red Sandstone. It is, however, with this earlier portion that my
acquaintance is most minute.
My first statement regarding it must be much the reverse of the
borrowed one with which this chapter begins. _The fossils are
remarkably numerous, and in a state of high preservation._ I have
a hundred solid proofs by which to establish the truth of the
assertion, within less than a yard of me. Half my closet walls are
covered with the peculiar fossils of the Lower Old Red Sandstone;
and certainly a stranger assemblage of forms have rarely been
grouped together;--creatures whose very type is lost, fantastic and
uncouth, and which puzzle the naturalist to assign them even their
class;--boat-like animals, furnished with oars and a rudder;--fish
plated over, like the tortoise, above and below, with a strong armor
of bone, and furnished with but one solitary rudder-like fin; other
fish less equivocal in their form, but with the membranes of their
fins thickly covered with scales;--creatures bristling over with
thorns; others glistening in an enamelled coat, as if beautifully
japanned--the tail, in every instance among the less equivocal
shapes, formed not equally, as in existing fish, on each side the
central vertebral column, but chiefly on the lower side--the column
sending out its diminished vertebræ to the extreme termination of
the fin. All the forms testify of a remote antiquity--of a period
whose "fashions have passed away." The figures on a Chinese vase or
an Egyptian obelisk are scarce more unlike what now exists in nature,
than the fossils of the Lower Old Red Sandstone.
Geology, of all the sciences, addresses itself most powerfully to
the imagination, and hence one main cause of the interest which it
excites. Ere setting ourselves minutely to examine the peculiarities
of these creatures, it would be perhaps well that the reader should
attempt realizing the _place_ of their existence, and relatively
the _time_--not of course with regard to dates and eras, for the
geologist has none to reckon by, but with respect to formations. They
were the denizens of the same portion of the globe which we ourselves
inhabit, regarded not as a tract of country, but as a piece of ocean
crossed by the same geographical lines of latitude and longitude.
Their present place of sepulture in some localities, had there been
no denudation, would have been raised high over the tops of our
loftiest hills--at least a hundred feet over the conglomerates which
form the summit of Morvheim, and more than a thousand feet over the
snow-capped Ben Wyvis. Geology has still greater wonders. I have seen
belemnites of the Oolite--comparatively a modern formation--which
had been dug out of the sides of the Himalaya mountains, seventeen
thousand feet over the level of the sea. But let us strive to carry
our minds back, not to the place of sepulture of these creatures,
high in the rocks,--though that I shall afterwards attempt minutely
to describe,--but to the place in which they lived, long ere the
sauroid fishes of Burdie House had begun to exist, or the corallines
of the mountain limestone had spread out their multitudinous arms
in a sea gradually shallowing, and out of which the land had already
partially emerged.
A continuous ocean spreads over the space now occupied by the British
islands: in the tract covered by the green fields and brown moors
of our own country, the bottom, for a hundred yards downwards,
is composed of the debris of rolled pebbles and coarse sand
intermingled, long since consolidated into the lower member of the
Old Red Sandstone; the upper surface is composed of banks of sand,
mud, and clay; and the sea, swarming with animal life, flows over
all. My present object is to describe the inhabitants of that sea.
Of these, the greater part yet discovered have been named by Agassiz,
the highest authority as an ichthyologist in Europe or the world, and
in whom the scarcely more celebrated Cuvier recognized a naturalist
in every respect worthy to succeed him. The comparative amount of
the labors of these two great men in fossil ichthyology, and the
amazing acceleration which has taken place within the last few years
in the progress of geological science, are illustrated together,
and that very strikingly, by the following interesting fact--a fact
derived directly from Agassiz himself, and which must be new to the
great bulk of my readers. When Cuvier closed his researches in this
department, he had named and described, for the guidance of the
geologist, ninety-two distinct species of fossil fish; nor was it
then known that the entire geological scale, from the Upper Tertiary
to the Grauwacke inclusive, contained more. Agassiz commenced his
labors; and, in a period of time little exceeding fourteen years, he
has raised the number of species from ninety-two to sixteen hundred.
And this number, great as it is, is receiving accessions almost every
day. In his late visit to Scotland, he found eleven new species, and
one new genus, in the collection of Lady Gumming of Altyre, all
from the upper beds of that lower member of the Old Red Sandstone
represented by the dark-colored schists and inferior sandstones of
Caithness. He found forty-two new species more in a single collection
in Ireland, furnished by the Mountain Limestone of Armagh.
Some of my humbler readers may possibly be repelled by his names;
they are, like all names in science, unfamiliar in their respect to
mere English readers, just because they are names not for England
alone, but for England and the world. I am assured, however,
that they are all composed of very good Greek, and picturesquely
descriptive of some peculiarity in the fossils they designate.
One of his ichthyolites, with a thorn or spine in each fin, bears
the name of _Acanthodes_, or thorn-like; another with a similar
mechanism of spines attached to the upper part of the body,
and in which the pectoral or hand-fins are involved, has been
designated the _Cheiracanthus_, or thorn-hand; a third covered with
curiously-fretted scales, has been named the _Glyptolepis_, or
carved-scale; and a fourth, roughened over with berry-like tubercles,
that rise from strong osseous plates, is known as the _Coccosteus_,
or berry-on-bone. And such has been his principle of nomenclature.
The name is a condensed description. But though all his names mean
something, they cannot mean a great deal; and as learned words
repel unlearned readers, I shall just take the liberty of reminding
mine of the humbler class, that there is no legitimate connection
between Geology and the dead languages. The existences of the Old
Red Sandstone had lived for ages, and had been dead for myriads of
ages, ere there was Greek enough in the world to furnish them with
names. There is no working-man, if he be a person of intelligence
and information, however unlearned, in the vulgar acceptation of the
phrase, who may not derive as much pleasure and enlargement of idea
from the study of Geology, and acquaint himself as minutely with its
truths, as if possessed of all the learning of Bentley.