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
The morning was showery; but it cleared up a little after ten, and we
landed to explore. We found the mill a little to the south of the
village, where a small stream descends, all foam and uproar, from the
higher grounds along a rocky channel half-hidden by brushwood; and the
Liasic bed occurs in an exposed front directly over it, coped by a thick
bed of amygdaloidal trap. The organisms are numerous; and, when we dig
into the bank beyond the reach of the weathering influences, we find
them delicately preserved, though after a fashion that renders difficult
their safe removal. Originally the bed must have existed as a brown
argillaceous mud, somewhat resembling that which forms in the course of
years, under a scalp of muscles; and it has hardened into a more
silt-like clay, in which the fossils occur, not as petrifactions, but
as shells in a state of decay, except in some rare cases, in which a
calcareous nodule has formed within or around them. Viewed in the group,
they seem of an intermediate character, between the shells of the Lias
and the Oolite. One of the first fossils I disinterred was the Gryphaea
obliquata,--a shell characteristic of the Liasic formation; and the
fossil immediately after, the Pholadomy aequalis, a shell of the Oolitic
one. There occurs in great numbers a species of small Pecten,--some of
the specimens scarce larger than a herring scale; a minute Ostrea, a
sulcated Terebratula, an Isocardia, a Pullastra, and groups of broken
serpulae in vast abundance. The deposit has also its three species of
Ammonite, existing as mere impressions in the clay; and at least two
species of Belemnite,--one of the two somewhat resembling the Belemnites
abbreviatus, but smaller and rather more elongated: while the other, of
a spindle form, diminishing at both ends, reminds one of the Belemnites
minimus of the Gault. The Red Sandstone in the centre of the village
occurs detached, like this Liasic bed, amid the prevailing trap, and may
be seen _in situ_ beside the southern gable of the tall, deserted
looking house at the hill-foot, that has been built of it. It is a soft,
coarse-grained, mouldering stone, ill fitted for the purposes of the
architect; and more nearly resembles the New Red Sandstone of England
and Dumfriesshire, than any other rock I have yet seen in the north of
Scotland. I failed to detect in it aught organic.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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