Doubts have been entertained whether the limestone of Burdie House
belongs to the Upper Old Red Sandstone or to the inferior Coal
Measures. And the fact may yet come to be quoted as a very direct
proof of the ignorance which obtained regarding the fossils of
the older formation, at a time when the organisms of most of the
other formations, both above and below it, had been carefully
explored. The Limestone of Burdie House is unequivocally and
most characteristically a Coal Measure limestone. It abounds in
vegetable remains of terrestrial or lacustrine growth, and these,
too, the vegetables common to the Coal Measures--ferns, reeds, and
club-mosses. One can scarce detach a fragment from the mass, that has
not its leaflet or seed-cone enclosed, and in a state of such perfect
preservation, that there can be no possibility of mistaking its
character. If in reality a marine deposit, it must have been formed
in the immediate neighborhood of a land covered with vegetation. The
dove set loose by Noah bore not back with it a less equivocal sign
that the waters had abated. Now, in the Upper Old Red Sandstone none
of these plants occur. The deposit is exclusively an ocean deposit,
and the remains in Scotland, until we arrive at its inferior and
middle formations, are exclusively animal remains. Its upper member,
"the yellow sandstone," says Dr. Anderson, of Newburgh, "does not
exhibit a single particle of carbonaceous matter--no trace or film
of a branch having been detected in it, though, if such in reality
existed, there are not wanting opportunities of obtaining specimens
in some one of the twenty or thirty quarries which have been opened
in the county of Fife in this deposit alone." No two bordering
formations in the geological scale have their boundaries better
defined by the character of their fossils than the Old Red Sandstone
and the Coal Measures.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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