The Cruise of the Betsey: or, A Summer Ramble Among the Fossiliferous Deposits of the Hebrides. With Rambles of a Geologist or, Ten Thousand Miles Over the Fossiliferous Deposits of ScotlandMiller, Hugh
Philosophy
The Cruise of the Betsey: or, A Summer Ramble Among the Fossiliferous Deposits of the Hebrides. With Rambles of a Geologist or, Ten Thousand Miles Over the Fossiliferous Deposits of Scotland
Miller, Hugh
Geology -- Scotland
Character of the Rocks near Gardenstone--A Defunct Father-lasher--A
Geological Inference--Village of Gardenstone--The drunken
Scot--Gardenstone Inn--Lord Gardenstone--A Tempest threatened--The
Author's Ghost Story--The Lady in Green--Her Appearance and
Tricks--The Rescued Children--The murdered Peddler and his
Pack--Where the Green Dress came from--Village of Macduff--Peculiar
Appearance of the Beach at the Mouth of the Deveron--Dr. Emslie's
Fossils--_Pterichthys quadratus_--Argillaceous Deposit of
Blackpots--Pipe-laying in Scotland--Fossils of Blackpots Clay--Mr.
Longmuir's Description of them--Blackpots Deposit a Re-formation of
a Liasic Patch--Period of its Formation.
I lingered on the hill-side considerably longer than I ought; and then,
hurrying downwards to the beach, passed eastwards under a range of
abrupt, mouldering precipices of red sandstone, to the village. From the
lie of the strata, which, instead of inclining coastwise, dip towards
the interior of the country, and present in the descent seawards the
outcrop of lower and yet lower deposits of the formation, I found it
would be in vain to look for the ichthyolite beds along the shore. They
may possibly be found, however, though I lacked time to ascertain the
fact, along the sides of a deep ravine, which occurs near an old
ecclesiastical edifice of gray stone, perched, nest-like, half-way up
the bank, on a green hummock that overlooks the sea. The rocks, laid
bare by the tide, belong to the bed of coarse-grained red sandstone,
varying from eighty to a hundred and fifty feet in thickness, which lies
between the lower fish-bed and the great conglomerate, and which, in not
a few of its strata, passes itself into a species of conglomerate,
different only from that which it overlies, in being more finely
comminuted. The continuity of this bed, like that of the deposit on
which it rests, is very remarkable. I have found it occurring at many
various points, over an area at least ten thousand square miles in
extent, and bearing always the same well-marked character of a more
thoroughly ground-down conglomerate than the great conglomerate on which
it reposes. The underlying bed is composed of broken fragments of the
rocks below, crushed, as if by some imperfect rudimentary process, like
that which in a mill merely breaks the grain; whereas, in the bed above,
a portion of the previously-crushed materials seems to have been
subjected to some further attritive process, like that through which, in
the mill, the broken grain is ground down into meal or flour.
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