The neighbourhood of Edinburgh affords many facilities for the study of these rocks. They can be seen, for instance, at many points along the ridge of the Roman Camp Hill, near Dalkeith, exposed in the operations of quarrying. That ridge is formed by what is known technically as an anticlinal axis (Fig. 32); in other words, the lower beds of the coal-measures rise up here into a sort of broad wave-like undulation, round the sides of which the higher parts of the series are folded. The elevated area has either been pushed up from below, or the more level country around has subsided into two trough-like hollows, so that now the strata, which geologically speaking are lowest, come to occupy the highest ground in the district. Seated on some of the opener spots of this woody eminence the observer has a noble prospect on which to expatiate. The ground around him is rich in historic associations, and links itself to many a varied page in the annals of Scotland. The hill on which he rests is crowned by the mouldering mounds of what tradition reports to have been a Roman station, but which may perhaps belong to a still earlier era. A few hundred yards north rise the wooded slopes of Carberry Hill, where the hapless Mary surrendered to her rebel lords, and whence she was led into her own capital amid the insults of an infuriate rabble. Northward, too, lies the fatal field of Pinkie, and eastward the less deadly but not less decisive field of Prestonpans. To the west the eye can mark the grey smoke of the Scottish metropolis, with its dusky towers and its lion-shaped hill, and then the blue waving outline of the Pentlands that sweep away south and lose themselves among the distant hills which girdle in the coal-basin of Edinburgh and Haddington. The course of the Esk--that _fabulosus amnis_--passes by many a time-honoured spot, from Habbie's Howe and the scene of the Gentle Shepherd down by the haunted scenery of Roslyn, the cliffs of Hawthornden, the grounds of Newbattle, and the old Roman station of Inveresk. East, west, and south, the broad expanse of green field and clustering wood swells upward to the distant hills that encircle the landscape with a wavy line of softest blue. Northward the eye rests on the Firth of Forth with its solitary sails, bounded by the bosky heights of Fife, and opening outwards by the May Island and the Bass Rock into the far-off hazy ocean. On every side objects of historic interest lie crowded together, about which many pleasant volumes have been and might still be written. If the observer be a lover of geological science he will find an examination of the structure of the hill to impart an additional interest to the scene. From the wide panorama of hill and dale, river and sea, with all its battle-fields, castles, and abbeys, and all its memories of the olden time, let him turn into one of the quarries that indent the flanks of the hill, and try to decipher there the records of a still older history.