As the traveller reaches the flat moory uplands of the parish, where the water stagnates amid heath and moss over a thin layer of peaty soil, he finds the underlying boulder-clay, as shown in the chance sections, spotted and streaked with patches of a grayish-white. There is the same mixture of arenaceous and aluminous particles in the white as in the red portions of the mass; for, as we see so frequently exemplified in the spots and streaks of the Red Sandstone formations, whether Old or New, the coloring matter has been discharged without any accompanying change of composition in the substance which it pervaded;--evidence enough that the red dye must be something distinct from the substance itself, just as the dye of a handkerchief is a thing distinct from the silk or cotton yarn of which the handkerchief has been woven. The stagnant water above, acidulated by its various vegetable solutions, seems to have been in some way connected with these appearances. In every case in which a crack through the clay gives access to the oozing moisture, we see the sides bleached, for several feet downwards, to nearly the color of pipe-clay; we find the surface, too, when it has been divested of the vegetable soil, presenting for yards together the appearance of sheets of half-bleached linen: the red ground of the clay has been acted upon by the percolating fluid, as the red ground of a Bandanna handkerchief is acted upon through the openings in the perforated lead, by the discharging chloride of lime. The peculiar chemistry through which these changes are effected might be found, carefully studied, to throw much light on similar phenomena in the older formations. There are quarries in the New Red Sandstone in which almost every mass of stone presents a different shade of color from that of its neighboring mass, and quarries in the Old Red the strata of which we find streaked and spotted like pieces of calico. And their variegated aspect seems to have been communicated, in every instance, not during deposition, nor after they had been hardened into stone but when, like the boulder-clay, they existed in an intermediate state. Be it remarked, too, that the red clay here,--evidently derived from the abrasion of the red rocks beneath,--is in dye and composition almost identical with the substance on which, as an unconsolidated sandstone, the bleaching influences, whatever their character, had operated in the Palaeozoic period, so many long ages before;--it is a repetition of the ancient experiment in the Old Red, that we now see going on in the boulder-clay. It is further worthy of notice, that the bleached lines of the clay exhibit, viewed horizontally, when the overlying vegetable mould has been removed, and the whitened surface in immediate contact with it paired off, a polygonal arrangement, like that assumed by the cracks in the bottom of clayey pools dried up in summer by the heat of the sun. Can these