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The old red sandstone or new walks in an old field / Hugh Miller
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OF SCOTLAND.

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to be the arrangement among the ancient slates of the Pent-lands. Mr Maclaren found his fossils near Deerhope-foot, atthe side of a small stream that falls into the North Esk;and he describes them, in the portion of his work devoted tothe geology of the Pentland range, as of two kinds. In one,fragments of what seem minute trilobites are congregatedtogether in thin layers ; in the other, there are the distinctlymarked impressions of what appear to be orthoceratites. Iowe two of those Pentland fossils to the kindness of MrMaclaren. The one, apparently a portion of an orthoceratite,exhibits a side view of what seem to be five of the septa;the other greatly resembles that curious and still but imper-fectly understood vegetable of the Coal Measures, Sternbergiaapproximata ; but it is in all probability not a vegetable, butan animal organism,very possibly an orthoceratite also.One of these specimens bears on the label the date of its dis-covery (7th April 1834),a date five years anterior to thatof the publication of Mr Maclaren" s volume, and forty-twoyears posterior to the discovery of Sir James Hall . The factthat by much the greater part of half a century should haveintervened between the first and second discoveries of organicremains in our Grauwackes,for, waiving the claim of MrLaidlaw, whose discovery seems never to have been recorded,and can now be associated with neither locality nor date, MiMaclarens is decidedly the second,is a fact of itself sufficient to show that our Scotch schools were in those days notzealously palaeontological; and we know from other sources,that arguments were sought after within their precincts, withmuch more avidity than fossils. But the error has been seen,and in part corrected; and the future of Scotch Geologybids fair to be characterized by the doing of more and thesaying of less.

In the same year in which Mr Maclaren published his Geology of Eife and the Lothians, the Silurian System'