localities more than a hundred miles apart, were yet derived, if I may so express myself, from the same low platform, both alike representing the fossiliferous base of the system, and both removed but by a single stage from the great unfossiliferous conglomerate below. Thus there seem to be what may be termed two stories of being in this lower formation--stories in which the groups, though generically identical, are specifically dissimilar.[AK] [Footnote AK: Since this period, however, several species identical with those of Cromarty have been found in the Morayshire deposits.] CHAPTER VIII. Upper Formations of the Old Red Sandstone.--Room, enough for each and to spare.--Middle, or Cornstone Formation.--The _Cephalaspis_ its most characteristic Organism.--Description.--The Den of Balruddery richer in the Fossils of this middle Formation than any other Locality yet discovered.--Various Contemporaries of the _Cephalaspis_.--Vegetable Impressions.--Gigantic Crustacean.--_Seraphim._--Ichthyodorulites.--Sketch of the Geology of Forfarshire.--Its older Deposits of the Cornstone Formation.--The Quarries of Carmylie.--Their Vegetable and Animal Remains.--The Upper Formation.--Wide Extent of the Fauna and Flora of the earlier Formations.--Probable Cause. Hitherto I have dwelt almost exclusively on the fossils of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, and the history of their discovery: I shall now ascend to the organisms of its higher platforms. The system in Scotland, as in the sister kingdom, has its middle and upper groups, and these are in no degree less curious than the inferior group already described, nor do they more resemble the existences of the present time. Does the reader remember the illustration of the pyramid employed in an early chapter--its three parallel bars, and the strange hieroglyphics of the middle bar? Let him now imagine another pyramid, inscribed with the remaining and later history of the system. We read, as before, from the base upwards, but find the broken and half-defaced characters of the second erection descending into the very soil, as in those obelisks of Egypt round which the sands of the desert have been accumulating for ages. Hence a hiatus in our history for future excavators to fill; and it contains many such blanks, every unfossiliferous bar in either pyramid representing a gap in the record. Three distinct formations the group undoubtedly contains--perhaps more; nor will the fact appear strange to the reader who remembers how numerous the formations are that lie over and under it, and that its vast depth of ten thousand feet equals that of the whole secondary system from top to bottom. Eight such formations as the Oolite, or ten such formations as the Chalk, could rest, the one over the other, in the space occupied by a group so enormous. To the evidence of its three distant formations, which is of a very simple character, I shall advert as I go along.