Course of Creation Author:JOHN ANDERSON General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1851 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER IY. THE DEVONIAN SYSTEM, OR OLD RED SANDSTONE. A Geologist requires not, like the tourist, to be told of the various conflicting roads that run among the mountains, in what precise course he is to wend his way. He will follow his own pathways, roads of nature's forming, guided by the strike and lie of the rocks rather than by the beaten tracks of every-day life. But come whither he will -- through Glentilt, Glenericht, Glenbeg, and the Spittal, Glenisla, and Clova, -- or along the Dee, the heights of Glentanner, and penetrating to the sources of the Esks -- sure we are, when he reaches by any of those passes the frontiers of the Grampians, he will pause and gaze wistfully, thoughtfully, admiringly, ere he descends, upon the magnificent prospect that stretches before him, unrivaled by any on the terraqueous globe. The Gran-pen, celtice, the shelvy or precipitous summit, Romanized into Grampius, has its own inner charms, peaceful rock-girt valleys where princes dwell, and happy as Rasselas ever trod. -- And escaped from these, what an outer world beneath, fertile, abundant, replete with everything that can charm the eye or interest the student. Looming in the far distance, the Lammer- muirs, of Silurian origin, can just be descried as a dark-blue line on the verge of the horizon; the Ochils and Lomonds, of carboniferous age, repose like islets on the pendant sky; while, in the foreground of the picture, there is the most charming variety of woodland, meadow, farmstead, town, and mansion, all as I now gaze upon them in their autumn coloring, invested with a Claud-like mellowness that speaks with...« less