descriptions, and the importance of the researches which it contains, it has obtained for its author a high reputation among geologists; while from the elegance and purity of its style, and the force and liveliness of its illustrations, it has received the highest praise from its more general readers.[1] Although we have been obliged, from the information which it contains of our author’s early studies, to mention the “Old Red Sandstone” as if it had been his first work; yet so early as 1830, after he had made his first fossil discoveries at Cromarty, he composed a paper on the subject, (his first published production,) which appeared as one of the chapters of a small legendary and descriptive work, entitled _The Traditional History of Cromarty_, which did not appear till 1835. This chapter, entitled “The Antiquary of the World,” possesses a high degree of interest. After describing the scene around him in its pictorial aspect, and under the warm associations, which link it with existing life, he surveys it with the cool eye of an “antiquary of the world,” studying its once buried monuments, and decyphering the alphabet of plants and animals, the hieroglyphics which embosom the history of past times and of successive creations. The gigantic Ben Wevis, with its attendant hills, rose abruptly to the west. The distant peaks of Ben Vaichard appeared in the south, and far to the north were descried the lofty hills of Sutherland, and even the Ord-hill of Caithness. Descending from the towers of nature’s lofty edifice he surveys its ruins, its broken sculptures, and its half-defaced inscriptions, as exhibited in certain Ichthyic remains of the Lower Old Red Sandstone which had then no name, and which were unknown to the most accomplished geologists. Among these he specially notices “a confused bituminous-looking mass that had much the appearance of a toad or frog,” thus shadowing forth in the morning twilight the curious _Pterichthys_, which he was able afterwards, in better specimens, to exhibit in open day. As we have already referred, with some minuteness, to the fossils which our author had at this time discovered in the great charnel-house of the old world, we shall indulge our readers with a specimen of the noble sentiments which they inspired, and of the beautiful language in which these sentiments are clothed.