ponding bar of deal in the framework of
the roof. Now in some of the scales I found the art of the tiler
anticipated; there were bars raised on their inner sides, to lay hold of
the skin beneath; while in others it was the art of the slater that had
been anticipated,--the scales had been slates fastened down by long
nails driven in slantwise, which were, however, mere prolongations of
the scale itself. Great truths may be repeated until they become
truisms, and we fail to note what they in reality convey. The great
truth that all knowledge dwelt without beginning in the adorable Creator
must, I am afraid, have been thus common-placed in my mind; for at
first it struck me as wonderful that the humble arts of the tiler and
slater should have existed in perfection in the times of the Old Red
Sandstone.

I had often remarked amid the fossiliferous limestones of the Lower Old
Red, minute specks and slender veins of a glossy bituminous substance
somewhat resembling jet, sufficiently hard to admit of a tolerable
polish, and which emitted in the fire a bright flame, I had remarked,
further, its apparent identity with a substance used by the ancient
inhabitants of the northern part of the country in the manufacture of
their rude ornaments, as occasionally found in sepulchral urns, such as
beads of an elliptical form, and flat parallelograms, perforated
edge-wise by some four or five holes a-piece; but I had failed hitherto
in detecting in the stone, portions of sufficient bulk for the formation
of either the beads or the parallelograms. On this visit to the
ichthyolite beds, however, I picked up a nodule that inclosed a mass of
the jet large enough to admit of being fashioned into trinkets of as
great bulk as any of the ancient ones I have yet seen, and a portion of
which I succeeded in actually forming into a parallelogram, that could
not have been distinguished from those of our old sepulchral urns. It is
interesting enough to think, that these fossiliferous beds, altogether
unknown to the people of the country for many centuries, and which, when
I first discovered them, some twelve or fourteen years ago, were equally
unknown to geologists, should have been resorted to for this substance,
perhaps thousands of years ago, by the savage aborigines of the
district. But our antiquities of the remoter class furnish us with
several such facts. It is comparatively of late years that we have
become acquainted with the yellow chalk-flin