also piece on in the same way to the great belt of similar strata
that stretches from sea to sea across the whole breadth of Scotland.
Indeed, we may observe in the Cheviot district how long and massive
promontories of greywacké jut out from that great belt, and extend
often for miles into the areas that are covered with younger strata,
as, for example, in the Brockilaw and Wolfelee Hills. A generalised
section across the greywacké regions of the Cheviot Hills would
therefore present the appearances shown in the annexed diagram (Fig.
6), in which G represents the basement beds, I the igneous rocks, and C
the red sandstones, etc.
[Illustration: Fig. 5.--Section across Greywacké area of Oxnam Water;
G, Greywacké and Shale; C, Sandstone, etc.]
[Illustration: Fig. 6.--Diagram section across Greywacké districts of
Cheviot Hills.]
Throughout the whole of the district under review the bottom beds
are observed to dip at a high angle--the strata in many places being
actually vertical--and the edges or crops of the strata run somewhat
persistently in one direction, namely, from south by west to north
by east; or, as a geologist would express it, the beds have an
approximately south-west and north-east "strike." Now as the dip is
sometimes to north-west and sometimes to south-east, it is evident that
the rocks have been folded up in a series of rapid convolutions, and
that some of the beds must be often repeated.
From the character of the fossils which the bottom beds have yielded
we learn that the strata belong to that division of past time
which is known as the Silurian age. These fossils appear to be of
infrequent occurrence, and the creatures of which they are the relics
occupied rather a humble place in the scale of being. They are called
_graptolites_ (from their resemblance to pens), an extinct group of
hydroid zoophytes, apparently resembling the sertularians of our own
seas.
The general appearance of the Silurian strata of the Cheviots is
indicative of deposition in comparatively quiet water, but how deep
that water was one cannot say. Upon the whole, the beds look not
unlike the sediments that gather in calm reaches of the sea, such as
estuaries, betokening the presence of some not distant land from which
fine mud and sand were washed down. Another proof that some of the
strata at all events were accumulated not far from a shore-line, is
found in certain coarse bands of grit and pebbles, which are not likely
to have been formed in deep water. This evidence, however, cannot be
considered decisive, and in the present state of our knowledge all
that we can assert with anything like confidence is simply this:--That
during the deposition of the Silurian strata the whole of the Cheviot
area lay under water--existed, in short, as a muddy sea-bottom, in the
slime of which flourished here and there, in favourable spots, those
minute hydroid animals called _graptolites_.
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