Who, after once spending even a few hours in such a school, could avoid being a geologist? I had formerly found much pleasure among rocks and in caves; but it was the wonders of the Eathie Lias that first gave direction and aim to my curiosity. From being a mere child, that had sought amusement in looking over the _pictures_ of the stony volume of nature, I henceforth became a sober student desirous of reading and knowing it as a book. The extreme beauty, however, of the Liassic fossils made me pass over at this time, as of little interest, a discovery which, if duly followed up, would have probably landed me full in the midst of the Old Red Sandstone ichthyolites fully ten years ere I learned to know them. In forming a temporary harbour, at which we boated the stones we had been quarrying, I struck my pick into a slaty sandstone bed, thickly mottled in the layers by carbonaceous markings. They consisted, I saw, of thin rectilinear stems or leaves, much broken and in a bad state of keeping, that at once suggested to me layers of comminuted _Zostera marina_, such as I had often seen on the Cromarty beach thrown up from the submarine meadows of the Firth beyond. But then, with magnificent ammonites and belemnites, and large well-marked lignites, to be had in abundance at Eathie just for the laying open and the picking up, how could I think of giving myself to disinter what seemed to be mere broken fragments of _Zostera_? Within, however, a few feet of these carbonaceous markings there occurred one of those platforms of violent death for which the Old Red Sandstone is so remarkable--a platform strewed over with fossil remains of the firstborn ganoids of creation, many of which still bore in their contorted outlines evidence of sudden dissolution and the dying pang.