entleman producing a spirit-flask and a glass, I pledged him and
his companion in a bumper. "Was I not sure?" he said, addressing his
friend: "I knew by the cut of his jib, notwithstanding his shepherd's
plaid, that he was a wanderer of the scientific cast." We discussed the
peculiarities of the deposit, which, in its mineralogical character, and
generically in that of its organic contents, resembles, I found, the
fish-beds of Cromarty (though, curiously enough, the intervening
contemporary deposits of Moray and the western parts of Banffshire
differ widely, in at least their chemistry, from both); and we were
right good friends ere we parted. To men who travel for amusement,
incident is incident, however trivial in itself, and always worth
something. I showed the younger of the two geologists my mode of
breaking open an ichthyolitic nodule, so as to secure the best possible
section of the fish. "Ah," he said, as he marked a style of handling the
hammer which, save for the fifteen years' previous practice of the
operative mason, would be perhaps less complete,--"Ah, you must have
broken open a great many." His own knowledge of the formation and its
ichthyolites had been chiefly derived, he added, from a certain little
treatise on the "Old Red Sandstone," rather popular than scientific,
which he named. I of course claimed no acquaintance with the work; and
the conversation went on.

The ill luck of my new friends, who had been toiling among the nodules
for hours without finding an ichthyolite worth transferring to their
bag, showed me that, without excavating more deeply than my time
allowed, I had no chance of finding good specimens. But, well content to
have ascertained that the ichthyolite bed of Gamrie is identical in its
composition, and, generically at least, in its organisms, with the beds
with which I was best acquainted, I rose to come away. The object which
I next proposed to myself was, to determine whether, as at Eathie and
Cromarty, the fossils here appear not only on the hill-side, but also
crop out along the shore. On taking leave, however, of the geologists, I
was reminded by the younger of what I might have otherwise
forgotten,--a raised beach in the immediate neighborhood (first
described by Mr. Prestwich, in his paper on the Gamrie ichthyolites),
which contains shells of the existing species at a higher level than
elsewhere,--so far as is yet known,--on the east coast of Scotland. And,
kindly conductin