uth
overlie the yellow bed of the Holoptychius represent the Carboniferous
period, the overlying strata in the north represent the Oolitic one. On
the one side the miner sinks his shaft, and finds a true coal, composed
of the Stigmaria, Calamites, Club-mosses, Ferns, and Araucarians of the
Palaeozoic era; he sinks his shaft on the other side, and finds but thin
seams of an imperfect lignite, composed of the Cycadeae, Pines,
Sphenopteri, and Clathraria of the Secondary period. The flora which
found its subsoil in the Old Red Sandstone north of the Grampians,
belonged to a scene of things so much more modern than the flora which
found its subsoil in the Old Red Sandstone of the south, that all its
productions were green and flourishing, waving beside lake, river, and
sea, at a time when the productions of the other were locked up, as now,
in sand and shale, lime and clay,--the dead mummies of ages long
departed.

Another thoroughly wet morning! varied only from the morning of the
preceding day by the absence of wind, and the greater weight of the
persevering vertical rain, that leaped upwards in myriads of little
dancing pyramids from the surface of every pool. I walked out under
cover of my umbrella, to renew my acquaintance with the outlier of the
Weald at Linksfield, and ascertain what sort of section it now presented
under the quarrying operations of the limeburners. There was, however,
little to be seen; the bands of green and blue clays, alternating with
strata of fossiliferous limestone, and layers of a gray shade, thickly
charged with minute shells of Cypris, were sadly blurred this morning by
the trail of numerous slips from above, which had fallen during the
rains, and softened into mud as they rushed downwards athwart the face
of the quarry: and the arched band of boulder-clay which so mysteriously
underlies the deposit was, save in a few parts, wholly covered up by the
debris. The occurrence of the clay here as an inferior bed, with but the
cornstone of the Old Red beneath, and all the beds of the Weald resting
over it, forms a riddle somewhat difficult of solution; but it is
palpably not reading it aright to regard the deposit, with at least one
geologist who has written on the subject, as older than the rocks above.
It is, on the contrary, as a vast amount of various and unequivocal
evidence demonstrates, incalculably more modern; nay, we find proof of
the fact here in that very bed which has been instanced