It is difficult to arrange in the mind the geologic formations of Banffshire in their character as a series of deposits. The pages of the stony record which the county composes, like those of an unskilfully-folded pamphlet, have been strangely mixed together, so that page last succeeds in some places to page first, and, of the intermediate pages, some appear at the beginning of the work, and some at the end. It is not until we reach the western confines of the county, some two or three miles short of the river Spey, its terminal boundary in this direction, that we find the beds comparatively little disturbed, and arranged chronologically in their original places. In the eastern and southern parts of the shire, rocks widely separated by the date of their formation have been set down side by side in patches, occasionally of but inconsiderable extent. Now the traveller passes over a district of grauwacke, now over a re-formation of the Lias; anon he finds himself on a primary limestone,--gneiss, syenite, clay-slate, or quartz-rock; and yet anon amid the fossils of some outlier of the Old Red. The geological map of the county is, like Joseph's coat, of many colors. I remember seeing, when a boy, more years ago than I am inclined to specify, some workmen engaged in pulling down what had been a house-painter's shop, a full century before. The painter had been in the somewhat slovenly habit of cleaning his brushes by rubbing them against a hard-cast wall, which was covered, in consequence, by a many-colored layer of paint, a full half-inch in thickness, and as hard as a stone. Taking a little bit home with me, I polished it by rubbing the upper surface smooth; and, lo! a geological map. The _strata_ of variously hued pigment, spread originally over the surface of the hard-cast wall, were cut open, by the _denudation_ of the grindstone, into all manner of fantastic forms, and seemed thrown into all sorts of strange neighborhoods. The _map_ lacked merely the additional perplexity of a few bold _faults_, with here and there a decided _dike_, in order to render it on a small scale a sort of miniature transcript of the geology of Banff; and I have very frequently found my thoughts reverting to it, in connection with deposits of this broken character. On a rough _hard-cast_ basis of granite I have laid down in imagination, as if by way of priming, coat after coat of the primary rocks,--gneiss, and stratified hornblend, and mica-schist, and quartz-rock, and day-slate; and then, after breaking the coatings well up, and rubbing them well down, and so spoiling and crumpling up the work as to make their original order considerably a puzzle, I have begun anew to paint over the rough surface with thick coatings of grauwacke and grauwacke-slate. When this part of the operation was completed, I have again begun to break up and grind down,--here letting a tract of grauwacke sink into the broken primary,--there wearing it off the surface