ckly, that there were quite enough for the lime-kiln
and the geologists too; but I found the kiln got all, and this at a time
when the collector finds scarce any fossils more difficult to procure
than those of the Lower Old Red Sandstone. I asked one of the laborers
whether he did not preserve some of the better specimens, in the hope of
finding an occasional purchaser. Not now, he said: he used to preserve
them in the days of Lady Cumming of Altyre; but since her ladyship's
death, no one in the neighborhood seemed to care for them, and strangers
rarely came the way.

The first nodule I laid open contained a tolerably well-preserved
Cheiracanthus; the second, an indifferent specimen of Glyptolepis; and
three others, in succession, remains of Coccosteus. Almost every nodule
of one especial layer near the top incloses its organism. The coloring
is frequently of great beauty. In the Cromarty, as in the Caithness,
Orkney, and Gamrie specimens, the animal matter with which the bones
were originally charged has been converted into a dark glossy bitumen,
and the plates and scales glitter from a ground of opaque gray, like
pieces of japan-work suspended against a rough-cast wall. But here, as
in the other Morayshire deposits, the plates and scales exist in nearly
their original condition, as bone that retains its white color in the
centre of the specimens, where its bulk is greatest, and is often
beautifully tinged at its thinner edges by the iron with which the stone
is impregnated. It is not rare to find some of the better preserved
fossils colored in a style that reminds one of the more gaudy fishes of
the tropics. We see the body of the ichthyolite, with its finely
arranged scales, of a pure snow-white. Along the edges, where the
original substance of the bone, combining with the oxide of the matrix,
has formed a phosphate of iron, there runs a delicately shaded band of
plum-blue; while the out-spread fins, charged still more largely with
the oxide, are of a deep red. The description of Mr. Patrick Duff, in
his "Geology of Moray," so redolent of the quiet enthusiasm of the true
fossil-hunter, especially applies to the ichthyolites of this quarry,
and to those of a neighboring opening in the same bed,--the quarry of
Lethenbarn. "The nodules," says Mr. Duff, "which in their external shape
resemble the stones used in the game of curling, but are elliptical
bodies instead of round, lie in the shale on their flat sides, in a line