The ill luck of my new friends, who had been toiling among the nodules for hours without finding an ichthyolite worth transferring to their bag, showed me that, without excavating more deeply than my time allowed, I had no chance of finding good specimens. But, well content to have ascertained that the ichthyolite bed of Gamrie is identical in its composition, and, generically at least, in its organisms, with the beds with which I was best acquainted, I rose to come away. The object which I next proposed to myself was, to determine whether, as at Eathie and Cromarty, the fossils here appear not only on the hill-side, but also crop out along the shore. On taking leave, however, of the geologists, I was reminded by the younger of what I might have otherwise forgotten,--a raised beach in the immediate neighborhood (first described by Mr. Prestwich, in his paper on the Gamrie ichthyolites), which contains shells of the existing species at a higher level than elsewhere,--so far as is yet known,--on the east coast of Scotland. And, kindly conducting me till he had brought me full within view of it, we parted. The ichthyolites which I had just been laying open occur on the verge of that Strathbogie district in which the Church controversy raged so hot and high; and by a common enough trick of the associative faculty, they now recalled to my mind a stanza which memory had somehow caught when the battle was at the fiercest. It formed part of a satiric address, published in an Aberdeen newspaper, to the not very respectable non-intrusionists who had smoked tobacco and drank whisky in the parish church at Culsalmond, on the day of a certain forced settlement there, specially recorded by the clerks of the Justiciary Court. "Tobacco and whisky cost siller, And meal is but scanty at hame; But gang to the stane-mason M----r, Wi' Old Red Sandstone fish he'll fill your wame." Rather a dislocated line that last, I thought, and too much in the style in which Zachary Boyd sings "Pharaoh and the Pascal." And as it is wrong to leave the beast of even an enemy in the ditch, however long its ears, I must just try and set it on its legs. Would it not run better thus? "Tobacco and whisky cost siller, An' meal is but scanty at hame; But gang to the stane-mason M----r," He'll pang wi' ichth'olites your wame,-- Wi' _fish_!! as Agassiz has ca'ed 'em, In Greek, like themsel's, _hard_ an' _odd_, That were baked in stane pies afore Adam Gaed names to the haddocks and cod. Bad enough as rhyme, I suspect; but conclusive as evidence to prove that the animal spirits, under the influence of the bracing walk, the fine day, and the agreeable recounter at the fish-beds,--not forgetting the half-gill bumper,--had mounted very considerably above their ordinary level at the editorial desk.