to examine it; and the Doctor, though the day was still none of the best, kindly walked out with me, to bring under my notice appearances which, in the haste of a first examination, I might possibly overlook, and to show me yet another set of fossils which he kept at the works. He informed me, as we went, that the Grauwacke (Lower Silurian) deposits of the district, hitherto deemed so barren, had recently yielded their organisms in a slate quarry at Gamrie-head; and that they belong to that ancient family of the Pennatularia which, in this northern kingdom, seems to have taken precedence of all the others. Judging from what now appears, the Graptolite must be regarded as the first settler who squatted for a living in that deep-sea area of undefined boundary occupied at the present time by the bold wave-worn headlands and blue hills of Scotland; and this new Banffshire locality not only greatly extends the range of the fossil in reference to the kingdom, but also establishes, in a general way, the fossiliferous identity of the Lower Silurian deposits to the north of the Grampians with that of Peebles-shire and Galloway in the south,--so far as I know, the only other two Scottish districts in which this organism has been found. The argillaceous deposit of Blackpots occupies, in the form of a green swelling bank, a promontory rather soft than bold in its contour, that projects far into the sea, and forms, when tipped with its slim column of smoke from the tile-kiln, a pleasing feature in the landscape. I had set it down on the previous day, when it first caught my eye from the lofty cliffs of Gamrie-head, at the distance of some ten or twelve miles, as different in character from all the other features of the prospect. The country generally is moulded on a framework of primary rock, and presents headlands of hard, sharp outline, to the attrition of the waves; whereas this single headland in the midst,--soft-lined, undulatory, and plump,--seems suited to remind one of Burns's young Kirk Alloway beauty disporting amid the thin old ladies that joined with her in the dance. And it _is_ a greatly younger beauty than the Cambrian and mica-schist protuberances that encroach on the sea on either side of it. The sheds and kilns of a tile-work occupy the flat terminal point of the promontory; and as the clay is valuable, in this tile-draining age, for the facility with which it can be moulded into pipe-tiles (a purpose which the ordinary clays of the north of Scotland, composed chiefly of re-formations of the Old Red Sandstone, are what is technically termed too _short_ to serve), it is gradually retreating inland before the persevering spade and mattock of the laborer. The deposit has already been drawn out into many hundred miles of cylindrical pipes, and is destined to be drawn out into many thousands more,--such being one of the strange metamorphoses effected in the geologic formations, now that