Works - 1865 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: CHAPTER H. The Old Red Sandstone. — Till very lately its Existence as a distinct Formation disputed Still little known. — Its great Importance in the Ge... more »ological 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 Western 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 Grouj of Fossils. — Their present place of Sepulture Their ancieni Habitat. — Agassiz. — Amazing Progress of Fossil Ichthyology during the last few Years. — Its Nomenclature. — Learned Names repel unlearned Readers. — Not 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,1' said an ingenious foreigner to Mr. Murchison, whe...« less