portion of the coal district in question. The whole field is prolific in organic remains. But BURDIEHOUSE LIMESTONE claims a separate notice, not only from the abundance but the very remarkable characters of the fossils contained in it, many of them met with for the first time in the progress of our sketches. This rock immediately underlies the encrinital limestone beds of Gilmerton, and is about twenty-seven feet thick, of a dark dingy color, arising from so much bituminous matter mixed up with the calcareous. The vegetable remains are very numerous, and in a state of beautiful preservation. Nowhere, indeed, in the best arranged herbarium, have we anything so graceful, so minutely and skillfully delineated, as are the figures of these plants upon the stone. There are several species of lycopodium; also stigmaria, sigillaria, equisetum, calamus, and cyclopteris, in great abundance. The fronds of the fossil sphenopteris furnish exquisite tracings of nature’s penciling. Nor are the relics belonging to the animal kingdom less remarkable for their freshness and variety. Here are the extremes of organic life, microscopic shells innumerable, with the claws, eyes, slender feelers of their occupants, all entire; and the gigantic _Megalichthys_, with a body sixty feet long, teeth of four to six inches still sparkling with luster, and scales of corresponding magnitude brightly enameled. There are also the bones and plates of another huge creature, the _Gyracanthus_, along with the jaws of sauroid fishes, measuring from a foot to a foot and half in length, thickly studded with teeth. And there, too, lovely trout-like animals, the _Palæoniscus_—with all the fins and organs and body fresh and glistering, as if ready to leap to their prey, strewed in countless myriads around. Nor is the enumeration complete as to the kind and quality of the fossils of this curious deposit: there _coprolites_ mark the habits of the predaceous monsters of the period—fæcal excrements composed of the remains of their victims—and in some places so numerous as to outweigh the calcareous matrix in which they are imbedded.