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.”[38] The old red sandstone formation prevails in the north of Scotland, Herefordshire, north of Devonshire, part of Cornwall, and in Worcestershire and Shropshire. Our attention will be principally confined to Cromarty, whose romantic bay and high hills have long arrested the admiring gaze of the traveller. This was the scene of Hugh Miller’s labours and discoveries; this the great library in which he read the history of pre-Adamite ichthyolites[39] exposed not only to the light of day, but for the first time to the inspection of human eyes, by the sweat-of-brow toil of one of Scotland’s noble sons. Before we get into the hard names that must be connected with this chapter, let us hear Mr. Miller describe this library of God’s books that was so long his wonder and his study in Cromartyshire. “The quarry in which I wrought lay on the southern shore of a noble inland bay, or frith rather, with a little clear stream on the one side, and a thick fir-wood on the other. Not the united labours of a thousand men for a thousand years could have furnished a better section of the geology of this district than this range of cliffs; it may be regarded as a sort of chance dissection on the earth’s crust. We see in one place the primary rock, with its veins of granite and quartz, its dizzy precipices of gneiss, its huge masses of horneblend; we find the secondary rock in another, with its beds of sandstone and shale, its spars, its clays, and its nodular limestones. We discover the still little known, but very interesting fossils of the old red sandstone in one deposition; we find the beautifully preserved shell and lignites of the lias in another. There are the remains of two several creations at once before us. The shore, too, is heaped with rolled fragments of almost every variety of rock,—basalts, ironstones, hyperstenes, porphyries, bituminous shales, and micaceous schists. In short, the young geologist, had he all Europe before him, could hardly choose for himself a better field. I had, however, no one to tell me so at the time, for geology had not yet travelled so far north; and so, without guide or vocabulary, I had to grope my way as best I might, and find out all its wonders for myself. But so slow was the process, and so much was I a seeker in the dark, that the facts contained in these few sentiments were the patient gatherings of years.”[40]