The Old Red Sandstone or, New Walks in an Old Field

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IL The Old Rod Sandstone?Till very lately its Existence as a Distinct Formation disputed?Still little known?Its great Importance in the Geological Scale?Illustration?The North of Scotland girdled by an immense Belt of Old Red Sandstone?Line of the Girdle along the Coast?Marks of vast Denudation?Its...
More Description

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IL The Old Rod Sandstone?Till very lately its Existence as a Distinct Formation disputed?Still little known?Its great Importance in the Geological Scale?Illustration?The North of Scotland girdled by an immense Belt of Old Red Sandstone?Line of the Girdle along the Coast?Marks of vast Denudation?Its Extent partially indicated by Hills on the Vesteru Coast of Ross-shire?The System of great Depth in the North of Scotland?Difficulties in the way of Estimating the Thickness of Deposits? Peculiar Formation of Hill?Illustrated by Ben Nevis?Caution to the Geological Critic?Lower Old Red Sandstone immensely Developed in Caithness?Sketch of the Geology of that County?Its strange Group of Fossils?Their present Place of Sepulture?Their Ancient Habitat? Agassiz?Amazing Progress of Fossil Ichthyology during the last few Years?Its Nomenclature?Learned Names repel Unlearned Readers? Hot a great deal in them. The Old Red Sandstone, says a Scottish geologist in a digest of some recent geological discoveries which appeared a short time ago in an Edinburgh newspaper, has been hitherto considered as remarkably barren of fossils. The remark is expressive of a pretty general opinion among geologists of even the present time, and I quote it on this account. Only a few years have gone by since men of no low standing in the science disputed the very existence of this formation, ?system rather, for it contains at least three distinct formations; and but for the influence of one accomplished geologist, the celebrated author of the Silurian System, it would have been probably degraded from its place in the scale altogether. You must inevitably give up the Old Red Sandstone, said an ingenious foreigner to Mr Hur- chison, when on a visit to England about four years ago, and whose celebri...