Author than that which would huddle the whole into a few literal days, and convert the incalculably ancient universe which we inhabit into a hastily run-up erection of yesterday. LECTURE ELEVENTH. ON THE LESS KNOWN FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND.[45] PART I. Scotland has its four fossil floras,--its flora of the Old Red Sandstone, its Carboniferous flora, its Oolitic flora, and that flora of apparently Tertiary age of which his Grace the Duke of Argyll found so interesting a fragment overflown by the thick basalt beds and trap tuffs of Mull. Of these, the only one adequately known to the geologist is the gorgeous flora of the Coal Measures,--probably the richest, in at least individual plants, which the world has yet seen. The others are all but wholly unknown; and the Association may be the more disposed to tolerate the comparative meagreness of the few brief remarks which I purpose making on two of their number,--the floras of the Old Red Sandstone and the Oolite,--from the consideration that that meagreness is only too truly representative of the present state of our knowledge regarding them; and that if my descriptions be scanty and inadequate, it is only because the facts are still few. How much of the lost may yet be recovered I know not; but the circumstance that two great floras,--remote predecessors of the existing one,--which once covered with their continuous mantle of green the dry land of what is now Scotland, should be represented by but a few coniferous fossils, a few cycadaceous fronds, a few ferns and club mosses, must serve to show what mere fragments of the past history of our country we have yet been able to recover from the rocks, and how very much in the work of exploration and discovery still remains for us to do. We stand on the further edge of the great floras of by-past creations, and have gathered but a few handfuls of faded leaves, a few broken branches, a few decayed cones.