age in the forest. Hours had elapsed since the master had _let them
go_, but in so fine an evening the berries wouldn't, and so they were
still in the wood. I accompanied them to Sluie, and was ferried over the
river in a salmon coble. There is no point where the Findhorn,
celebrated among our Scotch streams for the beauty of its scenery, is so
generally interesting as in the neighborhood of this village; forest and
river,--each a paragon in its kind,--uniting for several miles together
what is most choice and characteristic in the peculiar features of both.
In no locality is the surface of the great forest of Darnaway more
undulated, or its trees nobler; and nowhere does the river present a
livelier succession of eddying pools and rippling shallows, or fret
itself in sweeping on its zig-zag course, now to the one bank, now to
the other, against a more picturesque and imposing series of cliffs. But
to the geologist the locality possesses an interest peculiar to itself.
The precipices on both sides are charged with fossils of the Upper Old
Red Sandstone: they form part of a vast indurated graveyard, excavated
to the depth of an hundred feet by the ceaseless wear of the stream; and
when the waters are low, the teeth-plates and scales of ichthyolites,
all of them specifically different from those of Clune and Lethenbarn,
and most of them generically so, may be disinterred from the strata in
handfuls. But the closing evening left me neither light nor time for the
work of exploration. I heard the curfew in the woods from the yet
distant town, and dark night had set in long ere I reached Forres. On
the following morning I took a seat in one of the south coaches, and got
on to Elgin an hour before noon.

Elgin, one of the finest of our northern towns, occupies the centre of a
richly fossiliferous district, which wants only better sections to rank
it among the most interesting in the kingdom. An undulating platform of
Old Red Sandstone, in which we see, largely developed in one locality,
the lower formation of the Coccosteus, and in another, still more
largely, the upper formation of the _Holoptychius Nobilissimus_, forms,
if I may so speak, the foundation deposit of the district,--the true
geologic plane of the country; and, thickly scattered over this plane,
we find numerous detached knolls and patches of the Weald and the
Oolite, deposited like heaps of travelled soil, or of lime shot down by
the agriculturist on the surface