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Footprints of the creator, or, The asterolepis of Stromness
Footprints of the creator or The asterolepis of Stromness Author:Hugh Miller 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: NOTES. Note A, p. 'a. (From Sir Roderick Murchison's " Silnria," p. 196.) "WHEN the first edition of this book was published, I entertained the belief, ... more »in common with my early associate Sedg- wick, and our precursor M'Culloch, that the striking mountain masses of real conglomerate and hard grit on the north-west coast of the Highlands, which rest in layers, more or less horizontal, on low and gnarled bosses of very highly inclined and ancient granitoid gneiss, were really a part of the Old Red Sandstone of Scotland. A re-examination, however, of those tracts in 1855 compelled me to abandon that view. I then saw that portions at least of these conglomerates, often in a semi-crystalline state, and resting on the oldest or granitoid gneiss of the Highlands, as around Loch Assynt, were really inferior to those quartz rocks and limestones in the prolongation of which to the north coast of Sutherland Mr 0. Peach had detected fossils, which enabled me to suggest that they belonged to the older Silurian rocks. " Since the preceding sheet was printed, and during my absence on a geological tour abroad, additional researches,undertaken at my request by Mr C. Peach, have elicited much more numerous and more perfect fossils than were previously known; and these enable me to re-affirm unhesitatingly, that the quartz rocks and limestones of the North-West Highlands are truly of Lower Silurian age. " The most striking of these fossils is the Maclurea,—a genus which as yet has alone been found in deposits of that age. One species was, indeed, figured in the first edition of this work, and has already been alluded to as occurring in the south of Scotland; but the Sutherland form being unde- scribed, will justly receive the name of M. Peachii. " The other organic remains belong to ...« less