One remark in the passing: it may teach the young geologist to be cautious in his inferences, and illustrate, besides, those gaps which occur in the geological scale. I had now discovered the ichthyolite beds in five different localities; in one of these--the first discovered--there is no overlying stratum; it seems as if the bed formed the top of the formation: in all the others the overlying stratum is different, and belongs to distant and widely separated ages. We cut in one locality through a peat moss--part of the ruins, perhaps, of one of those forests which covered, about the commencement of the Christian era, well nigh the entire surface of the island, and sheltered the naked inhabitants from the legions of Agricola. We find, as we dig, huge trunks of oak and elm, cones of the Scotch fir, handfuls of hazel-nuts, and bones and horns of the roe and the red deer. The writer, when a boy, found among the peat the horn of a gigantic elk. And, forming the bottom of this recent deposit, and _lying conformably to it_, we find the ichthyolite beds, with their antique organisms. The remains of oak and elm leaves, and of the spikes and cones of the pine, lie within half a foot of the remains of the _Coccosteus_ and _Diplopterus_. We dig in another locality through an ancient burying-ground; we pass through a superior stratum of skulls and coffins, and an inferior stratum, barren in organic remains, and then arrive at the stratified clays, with their ichthyolites. In a third locality we find these in junction with the Lias, and underlying its lignites, ammonites, and belemnites, just as we see them underlying, in the other two, the human bones and the peat moss. And in yet a fourth locality we see them overlaid by immense arenaceous beds, that belong evidently, as their mineralogical character testifies, to either the Old or the New Red Sandstone. The convulsions and revolutions of the geological world, like those of the political, are sad confounders of place and station, and bring into close fellowship the high and the low; nor is it safe in either world,--such have been the effects of the disturbing agencies,--to judge of ancient relations by existing neighborhoods, or of original situations by present places of occupancy. "Misery," says Shakspeare, "makes strange bedfellows." The changes and convulsions of the geological world have made strange bedfellows too. I have seen fossils of the Upper Lias and of the Lower Old Red Sandstone washed together by the same wave, out of what might be taken, on a cursory survey, for the same bed, and then mingled with recent shells, algæ, branches of trees, and fragments of wrecks on the same sea-beach.