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

369

logic science known as Ichnology took its rise. Nor are atleast sets of its specimens to be found in any of the Scotchmuseums I have yet seen; but as Sir William Jardine isunderstood to be still engaged in figuring and describing itsvarious footprints,the only traces of former existence 'whichit has been found to contain,-we bid fair to be acquainted,at no distant date, with all that it produces. It could bewished, however, that we had the result of Sir William slabours conveyed to us in that cheap but yet adequate formof outline engraving in which Professor Hitchcock has figuredthe foot-tracks, reptilian or ornithologic, of the New RedSandstones of Connecticut .

In the Lias and Oolite of Scotland a good deal still re-mains to be accomplished. Some of their richest depositslie scattered among the inner Hebrides , and along lochs andcreeks of the Western Highlands , rarely visited by the tourist,and far from inns ; and this difficulty of access has served tolock up in these solitudes many a curious fossil, that may beregarded as held in safe keeping, to reward the enterprise ofour younger geologists. My collection contains not a fewcurious specimens, derived from these Hebridean recessesduring a desultory voyage in the Pree Church yacht Betsey,made about ten years ago,reptilian remains, fossil wood,and the teeth of placoidal fishes from the Oolite of Eigg , andpinnae, ammonites, and massive corals from the Lias of Pabbaand Skye. It may serve to show that we are no more toargue an entire identity of the Oolitic deposits of Scotland with those of England, than of its Silurian with the Siluriansof that country,that corals, which are of exceeding rarityand minute size in the English Lias, form entire beds of greatextent and several feet in thickness in the Lias of Skye. Ican, however, only indicate the locale of some of the depositsin which these rarities may be found,simply referring, inthe passing, to the localities already indicated by Sir Roderick2 A