fish which he professed to
restore; that the same judgment applies equally to his restoration of
_Coccosteus_; and that, instead of reproducing in his figures the true
forms of ancient Cephalaspeans, he has merely given, instead, the
likeness of things that never were "in the heaven above, or in the
earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth."

The place in the geologic scale, as certainly as the forms and
characters, of these ancient fishes, had to be determined. Mr. George
Anderson had informed me, as early as 1834, that some of them were
identical with the ichthyolites of the Gamrie deposit; but then the
place of the Gamrie deposit was still to fix. It had been recently
referred to the same geological horizon as the Carboniferous Limestone,
and was regarded as lying unconformable to the Old Red Sandstone of the
district in which it occurs; but, wholly dissatisfied with the evidence
adduced, I continued my search, and, though the process was a slow one,
saw the position of the Cromarty beds gradually approximating towards
determination. It was not, however, until the autumn of 1837 that I got
them fairly fixed down to the Old Red Sandstone, and not until the
winter of 1839 that I was able conclusively to demonstrate their place
in the base of the system, little more than a hundred feet, and in one
part not more than eighty feet, above the upper strata of the Great
Conglomerate. I had often wished, during my explorations, to be able to
extend my field of observation into the neighbouring counties, in order
to determine whether I could not possess myself, at a distance, of the
evidence which, for a time at least, I failed to find at home; but my
daily engagements in the bank fixed me down to Cromarty and its
neighbourhood; and I found myself somewhat in the circumstances of a
tolerably lively beetle stuck on a pin, that, though able, with a little
exertion, to spin round its centre, is yet wholly unable to quit it. I
acquired, however, at the close of 1837, in the late Dr. John Malcolmson
of Madras, a noble auxiliary, who could expatiate freely over the
regions virtually barred against me. He had been led to visit Cromarty
by a brief description of its geology, rather picturesque than
scientific, which had appeared in my legendary volume; and after I had
introduced him to its ichthyolitic beds on both sides of the Hill and
at Eathie, and acquainted him with their character and organisms, he set
himself to trace ou