The Foot-prints of the Creator : $b or, The Asterolepis of Stromness — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
The Foot-prints of the Creator : $b or, The Asterolepis of Stromness
John Stuart Mill · en
56. Fern (?) of the Lower Old Red Sandstone 219
57. Lignite of the Lower Old Red Sandstone 221
58. Internal structure of lignite of Lower Old Red Sandstone 223
STROMNESS AND ITS ASTEROLEPIS. THE LAKE OF STENNIS.
When engaged in prosecuting the self-imposed task of examining in detail
the various fossiliferous deposits of Scotland, in the hope of ultimately
acquainting myself with them all, I extended my exploratory ramble, about
two years ago, into the Mainland of Orkney, and resided for some time in
the vicinity of Stromness.
This busy seaport town forms that special centre, in this northern
archipelago, from which the structure of the entire group can be most
advantageously studied. The geology of the Orkneys, like that of
Caithness, owes its chief interest to the immense development which
it exhibits of one formation,—the Lower Old Red Sandstone,—and to the
extraordinary abundance of its vertebrate remains. It is not too much
to affirm, that in the comparatively small portion which this cluster
of islands contains of the _third_ part of a system regarded only a
few years ago as the least fossiliferous in the geologic scale, there
are more fossil fish enclosed than in _every_ other geologic system
in England, Scotland, and Wales, from the Coal Measures to the Chalk
inclusive. Orkney is emphatically, to the geologist, what a juvenile
Shetland poetess designates her country, in challenging for it a standing
independent of the “Land of Cakes,”—a “Land of Fish;” and, were the trade
once fairly opened up, could supply with ichthyolites, by the ton and the
ship-load, the museums of the world. Its various deposits, with all their
strange organisms, have been uptilted from the bottom against a granitic
axis, rather more than six miles in length by about a mile in breadth,
which forms the great back-bone of the western district of Pomona; and on
this granitic axis—fast jammed in between a steep hill and the sea—stands
the town of Stromness. Situated thus _at the bottom_ of the upturned
deposits of the island, it occupies exactly such a point of observation
as that which the curious eastern traveller would select, in front of
some huge pyramid or hieroglyphic-covered obelisk, as a proper site for
his tent. It presents, besides, not a few facilities for studying with
the geological phenomena, various interesting points in physical science
of a cognate character. Resting on its granitic base, _in front_ of
the strangely sculptured pyramid of three broad tiers,—red, black, and
gray,—which the Old Red Sandstone of these islands may be regarded as
forming, it is but a short half mile from the Great Conglomerate base
of the formation, and scarcely a quarter of a mile more from the older
beds of its central flagstone deposit; while an hour’s sail on the one
hand opens to the explorer the overlying arenaceous deposit of Hoy, and