ogy of the Country indicated by
the coloring of the Stone Houses--Fossils of Old Red north of the
Grampians different from those of Old Red south--Geologic
Formations at Linksfield difficult to be understood--Ganoid Scales
of the Wealden--Sudden Reaction, from complex to simple, in the
Scales of Fishes--Pore-covered Scales--Extraordinary amount of
Design exhibited in Ancient Ganoid Scales--Holoptychius Scale
illustrated by Cromwell's "fluted pot"--Patrick Duff's Geological
Collection--Elgin Museum--Fishes of the Ganges--Armature of Ancient
Fishes--Compensatory Defences--The Hermit-crab--Spines of the
Pimelodi--Ride to Campbelton--Theories of the formation of
Ardersier and Fortrose Promontories--Tradition of their
construction by the Wizard, Michael Scott--A Region of Legendary
Lore.

The prevailing yellow hue of the Elgin houses strikes the eye of the
geologist who has travelled northwards from the Frith of Forth. He takes
leave of a similar stone at Cupar-Fife,--a warmly-tinted yellow
sandstone, peculiarly well-suited for giving effect to architectural
ornament; and after passing along the deep-red sandstone houses of the
shires of Angus and Kincardine, and the gneiss, granite, hyperstene, and
mica-schist houses of Aberdeen and Banff shires, he again finds houses
of a deep red on crossing the Spey, and houses of a warm yellow tint on
reaching Elgin,--geologically the Cupar-Fife of the north. And the story
that the colored buildings tell him is, that he has been passing, though
by a somewhat circuitous route of a hundred and fifty miles, over an
anticlinal geological section,--_down_ in the scale till he reached
Aberdeen and had gone a little beyond it, and then _up_ again, until at
Elgin he arrives at the same superior yellow bed of Old Red Sandstone
which he had quitted at Cupar-Fife. Both beds contain the same
organisms. The Holoptychius of Dura Den, near Cupar, must have sprung
from the same original as the Holoptychius of the Hospital and
Bishop-Mill quarries near Elgin; and it seems not improbable that the
two beds, thus identical in their character and contents, may have
existed, ere the upheaval of the Grampians broke their continuity, as an
extended deposit, at the bottom of the same sea. But with this last and
newest of the formations of the Old Red Sandstone the identity of the
deposits to the south and north ceases. The strata which in the so