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The Working-man's true Policy.--His only Mode of acquiring Power.--The Exercise of the Faculties essential to Enjoyment.--No necessary Connection between Labor and Unhappiness.--Narrative.--Scenes in a Quarry.--The two dead Birds.--Landscape.--Ripple Markings on a Sandstone Slab.--Boulder Stones.--Inferences derived from their water-worn Appearance.--Sea-coast Section.--My first discovered Fossil.--Lias Deposit on the Shores of the Moray Frith.--Belemnite.--Result of the Experience of half a Lifetime of Toil.--Advantages of a Wandering Profession in Connection with the Geology of a Country.--Geological Opportunities of the Stone-Mason.--Design of the present Work, 1-14

The Old Red Sandstone.--Till very lately its Existence as a distinct Formation disputed.--Still little known.--Its great Importance in the Geological 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 Group of Fossils.--their present Place of Sepulture.--Their ancient 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, 15-34

The Lines of the Geographer rarely right Lines.--These last, however, always worth looking at when they occur.--Striking Instance in the Line of the Great Caledonian Valley.--Indicative of the Direction in which the Volcanic Agencies have operated.--Sections of the Old Red Sandstone furnished by the granitic Eminences of the Line.--Illustration.--Lias of the Moray Frith.--Surmisings regarding its original Extent.--These lead to an exploratory Ramble.--Narrative.--Phenomena exhibited in the Course of half an Hour's Walk.--The little Bay.--Its Strata and their Organisms, 95-108

Speculations in the Old Red Sandstone, and their Character.--George, first Earl of Cromarty.--His Sagacity as a Naturalist at fault in one instance.--Sets himself to dig for Coal in the Lower Old Red Sandstone.--Discovers a fine Artesian Well.--Value of Geological Knowledge in an economic view.--Scarce a Secondary Formation in the Kingdom in which Coal has not been sought for.--Mineral Springs of the Old Red Sandstone.--Strathpeffer.--Its Peculiarities whence derived.--Chalybeate Springs of Easter Ross and the Black Isle.--Petrifying Springs.--Building-Stone and Lime of the Old Red Sandstone.--Its various Soils, 173-189

Geological Physiognomy.--Scenery of the Primary Formations; Gneiss, Mica Schist, Quartz Rock.--Of the Secondary; the Chalk Formations, the Oolite, the New Red Sandstone, the Coal Measures.--Scenery in the Neighborhood of Edinburgh.--Aspect of the Trap Rocks.--The Disturbing and Denuding Agencies.--Distinctive Features of the Old Red Sandstone.--Of the Great Conglomerate.--Of the Ichthyolite Beds.--The Burn of Eathie.--The Upper Old Red Sandstones.--Scene in Moray, 190-210

The two Aspects in which Matter can be viewed; Space and Time.--Geological History of the Earlier Periods.--The Cambrian System.--Its Annelids.--The Silurian System.--Its Corals, Encrinites, Molluscs, and Trilobites.--Its Fish.--These of a high Order, and called into Existence apparently by Myriads.--Opening Scene in the History of the Old Red Sandstone a Scene of Tempest.--Represented by the Great Conglomerate.--Red a prevailing Color among the Ancient Rocks contained in this Deposit.--Amazing Abundance of Animal Life.--Exemplified by a Scene in the Herring Fishery.--Platform of Death.--Probable Cause of the Catastrophe which rendered it such, 211-225

Successors of the exterminated Tribes.--The Gap slowly filled.--Proof that the Vegetation of a Formation may long survive its Animal Tribes.--Probable Cause.--Immensely extended Period during which Fishes were the Master-existences of our Planet.--Extreme Folly of an Infidel Objection illustrated by the Fact.--Singular Analogy between the History of Fishes as Individuals and as a Class.--Chemistry of the Lower Formation.--Principles on which the Fish-enclosing Nodules were probably formed.--Chemical Effect of Animal Matter in discharging the Color from Red Sandstone.--Origin of the prevailing tint to which the System owes its Name.--Successive Modes in which a Metal may exist.--The Restorations of the Geologist void of Color.--Very different Appearance of the Ichthyolites of Cromarty and Moray, 226-242

Ichthyolites of the Old Red Sandstone--from Agassiz's "Poissons Fossiles," 261-288

EXPLANATIONS OF THE SECTIONS AND PLATES.

Interesting case of extensive denudation from existing causes on the northern shore of the Moray Frith. The figures and letters which mark the various beds correspond with those of fig. 5, and of the following section. The "fish-bed," No. 1, represents what the reader will find described in pp. 221-225 as the "platform of sudden death."

Illustration of a fault in the Burn of Eathie, Cromartyshire.

EXPLANATIONS OF THE PLATES.

DIRECTIONS TO THE BINDER.

NEW WALKS IN AN OLD FIELD;

OR,

THE OLD RED SANDSTONE.

The Working-man's True Policy.--His only Mode of acquiring Power.--The Exercise of the Faculties essential to Enjoyment.--No necessary Connection between Labor and Unhappiness.--Narrative.--Scenes in a Quarry.--The two dead Birds.--Landscape.--Ripple Markings on a Sandstone Slab.--Boulder Stones.--Inference derived from their water-worn Appearance.--Sea-coast Section.--My first discovered Fossil,--Lias Deposit on the Shores of the Moray Frith.--Belemnite.--Result of the Experience of half a Lifetime of Toil.--Advantages of a Wandering Profession in Connection with the Geology of a Country.--Geological Opportunities of the Stone-Mason.--Design of the present Work.

My advice to young working-men, desirous of bettering their circumstances, and adding to the amount of their enjoyment, is a very simple one. Do not seek happiness in what is misnamed pleasure; seek it rather in what is termed study. Keep your consciences clear, your curiosity fresh, and embrace every opportunity of cultivating your minds. You will gain nothing by attending Chartist meetings. The fellows who speak nonsense with fluency at these assemblies, and deem their nonsense eloquence, are totally unable to help either you or themselves; or, if they do succeed in helping themselves, it will be all at your expense. Leave them to harangue unheeded, and set yourselves to occupy your leisure hours in making yourselves wiser men. Learn to make a right use of your eyes: the commonest things are worth looking at--even stones and weeds, and the most familiar animals. Head good books, not forgetting the best of all: there is more true philosophy in the Bible than in every work of every sceptic that ever wrote; and we would be all miserable creatures without it, and none more miserable than you. You are jealous of the upper classes; and perhaps it is too true that, with some good, you have received much evil at their hands. It must be confessed they have hitherto been doing comparatively little for you, and a great deal for themselves. But upper and lower classes there must be, so long as the world lasts; and there is only one way in which your jealousy of them can be well directed. Do not let them get ahead of you in intelligence. It would be alike unwise and unjust to attempt casting them down to your own level, and no class would suffer more in the attempt than yourselves; for you would only be clearing the way, at an immense expense of blood, and under a tremendous pressure of misery, for another and perhaps worse aristocracy, with some second Cromwell or Napoleon at their head. Society, however, is in a state of continual flux: some in the upper classes are from time to time going down, and some of you from time to time mounting up to take their places--always the more steady and intelligent among you, remember; and if all your minds were cultivated, not merely intellectually, but morally also, you would find yourselves, as a body, in the possession of a power which every charter in the world could not confer upon you, and which all the tyranny or injustice of the world could not withstand.

I intended, however, to speak rather of the pleasure to be derived, by even the humblest, in the pursuit of knowledge, than of the power with which knowledge in the masses is invariably accompanied. For it is surely of greater importance that men should receive accessions to their own happiness, than to the influence which they exert over other men. There is none of the intellectual, and none of the moral faculties, the exercise of which does not lead to enjoyment; nay, it is chiefly in the active employment of these that all enjoyment consists; and hence it is that happiness bears so little reference to station. It is a truth which has been often told, but very little heeded or little calculated upon, that though one nobleman may be happier than another, and one laborer happier than another, yet it cannot be at all premised of their respective orders, that the one is in any degree happier than the other. Simple as the fact may seem, if universally recognized, it would save a great deal of useless discontent, and a great deal of envy. Will my humbler readers permit me at once to illustrate this subject, and to introduce the chapters which follow, by a piece of simple narrative? I wish to show them how possible it is to enjoy much happiness in very mean employments. Cowper tells us that labor, though the primal curse, "has been softened into mercy;" and I think that, even had he not done so, I would have found out the fact for myself.

It was twenty years, last February, since I set out a little before sunrise to make my first acquaintance with a life of labor and restraint, and I have rarely had a heavier heart than on that morning. I was but a slim, loose-jointed boy at the time--fond of the pretty intangibilities of romance, and of dreaming when broad awake; and, woeful change! I was now going to work at what Burns has instanced in his "Twa Dogs" as one of the most disagreeable of all employments--to work in a quarry. Bating the passing uneasiness occasioned by a few gloomy anticipations, the portion of my life which had already gone by had been happy beyond the common lot. I had been a wanderer among rocks and woods--a reader of curious books when I could get them--a gleaner of old traditionary stories; and now I was going to exchange all my day-dreams, and all my amusements, for the kind of life in which men toil every day that they may be enabled to eat, and eat every day that they may be enabled to toil!

The quarry in which I wrought lay on the southern shore of a noble inland bay, or frith, rather, with a little clear stream on the one side, and a thick fir wood on the other. It had been opened in the Old Red Sandstone of the district, and was overtopped by a huge bank of diluvial clay, which rose over it in some places to the height of nearly thirty feet, and which at this time was rent and shivered, wherever it presented an open front to the weather, by a recent frost. A heap of loose fragments, which had fallen from above, blocked up the face of the quarry, and my first employment was to clear them away. The friction of the shovel soon blistered my hands; but the pain was by no means very severe, and I wrought hard and willingly, that I might see how the huge strata below, which presented so firm and unbroken a frontage, were to be torn up and removed. Picks, and wedges, and levers were applied by my brother-workmen; and simple and rude as I had been accustomed to regard these implements, I found I had much to learn in the way of using them. They all proved inefficient, however; and the workmen had to bore into one of the inferior strata, and employ gunpowder. The process was new to me, and I deemed it a highly amusing one: it had the merit, too, of being attended with some such degree of danger as a boating or rock excursion, and had thus an interest independent of its novelty. We had a few capital shots: the fragments flew in every direction; and an immense mass of the diluvium came toppling down, bearing with it two dead birds, that in a recent storm had crept into one of the deeper fissures, to die in the shelter. I felt a new interest in examining them. The one was a pretty cock goldfinch, with its hood of vermilion, and its wings inlaid with the gold to which it owes its name, as unsoiled and smooth as if it had been preserved for a museum. The other, a somewhat rarer bird, of the woodpecker tribe, was variegated with light blue and a grayish yellow. I was engaged in admiring the poor little things, more disposed to be sentimental, perhaps, than if I had been ten years older, and thinking of the contrast between the warmth and jollity of their green summer haunts, and the cold and darkness of their last retreat, when I heard our employer bidding the workmen lay by their tools. I looked up, and saw the sun sinking behind the thick fir wood beside us, and the long, dark shadows of the trees stretching downwards towards the shore.

This was no very formidable beginning of the course of life I had so much dreaded. To be sure, my hands were a little sore, and I felt nearly as much fatigued as if I had been climbing among the rocks; but I had wrought and been useful, and had yet enjoyed the day fully as much as usual. It was no small matter, too, that the evening, converted, by a rare transmutation, into the delicious "blink of rest" which Burns so truthfully describes, was all my own. I was as light of heart next morning as any of my brother-workmen. There had been a smart frost during the night, and the rime lay white on the grass as we passed onwards through the fields; but the sun rose in a clear atmosphere, and the day mellowed, as it advanced, into one of those delightful days of early spring, which give so pleasing an earnest of whatever is mild and genial in the better half of the year. All the workmen rested at midday, and I went to enjoy my half-hour alone on a mossy knoll in the neighboring wood, which commands through the trees a wide prospect of the bay and the opposite shore. There was not a wrinkle on the water, nor a cloud in the sky, and the branches were as moveless in the calm as if they had been traced on canvas. From a wooded promontory that stretched half way across the frith, there ascended a thin column of smoke. It rose straight as the line of a plummet for more than a thousand yards, and then, on reaching a thinner stratum of air, spread out equally on every side, like the foliage of a stately tree. Ben Nevis rose to the west, white with the yet unwasted snows of winter, and as sharply defined in the clear atmosphere, as if all its sunny slopes and blue retiring hollows had been chiselled in marble. A line of snow ran along the opposite hills; all above was white, and all below was purple. They reminded me of the pretty French story, in which an old artist is described as tasking the ingenuity of his future son-in-law, by giving him, as a subject for his pencil, a flower-piece composed of only white flowers, of which the one half were to bear their proper color, the other half a deep purple hue, and yet all be perfectly natural; and how the young man resolved the riddle, and gained his mistress, by introducing a transparent purple vase into the picture, and making the light pass through it on the flowers that were drooping over the edge. I returned to the quarry, convinced that a very exquisite pleasure may be a very cheap one, and that the busiest employments may afford leisure enough to enjoy it.

The gunpowder had loosened a large mass in one of the inferior strata, and our first employment, on resuming our labors, was to raise it from its bed. I assisted the other workmen in placing it on edge, and was much struck by the appearance of the platform on which it had rested. The entire surface was ridged and furrowed like a bank of sand that had been left by the tide an hour before. I could trace every bend and curvature, every cross hollow and counter ridge of the corresponding phenomena; for the resemblance was no half resemblance--it was the thing itself; and I had observed it a hundred and a hundred times, when sailing my little schooner in the shallows left by the ebb. But what had become of the waves that had thus fretted the solid rock, or of what element had they been composed? I felt as completely at fault as Robinson Crusoe did on his discovering the print of the man's foot on the sand. The evening furnished me with still further cause of wonder. We raised another block in a different part of the quarry, and found that the area of a circular depression in the stratum below was broken and flawed in every direction, as if it had been the bottom of a pool recently dried up, which had shrunk and split in the hardening. Several large stones came rolling clown from the diluvium in the course of the afternoon. They were of different qualities from the Sandstone below, and from one another; and, what was more wonderful still, they were all rounded and water-worn, as if they had been tossed about in the sea, or the bed of a river, for hundreds of years. There could not, surely, be a more conclusive proof that the bank which had enclosed them so long could not have been created on the rock on which it rested. No workman ever manufactures a half-worn article, and the stones were all half-worn! And if not the bank, why then the sandstone underneath? I was lost in conjecture, and found I had food enough for thought that evening, without once thinking of the unhappiness of a life of labor.

The immense masses of diluvium which we had to clear away rendered the working of the quarry laborious and expensive, and all the party quitted it in a few days, to make trial of another that seemed to promise better. The one we left is situated, as I have said, on the southern shore of an inland bay--the Bay of Cromarty; the one to which we removed has been opened in a lofty wall of cliffs that overhangs the northern shore of the Moray Frith. I soon found I was to be no loser by the change. Not the united labors of a thousand men for more than a thousand years could have furnished a better section of the geology of the district than this range of cliffs. It may be regarded as a sort of chance dissection on the earth's crust. We see in one place the primary rock, with its veins of granite and quartz, its dizzy precipices of gneiss, and its huge masses of hornblende; we find the secondary rock in another, with its beds of sandstone and shale, its spars, its clays, and its nodular limestones. We discover the still little known but highly interesting fossils of the Old Red Sandstone in one deposition; we find the beautifully preserved shells and lignites of the Lias in another. There are the remains of two several creations at once before us. The shore, too, is heaped with rolled fragments of almost every variety of rock,--basalts, ironstones, hypersthenes, porphyries, bituminous shales, and micaceous schists. In short, the young geologist, had he all Europe before him, could hardly choose for himself a better field. I had, however, no one to tell me so at the time, for geology had not yet travelled so far north; and so, without guide or vocabulary, I had to grope my way as I best might, and find out all its wonders for myself. But so slow T was the process, and so much was I a seeker in the dark, that the facts contained in these few sentences were the patient gatherings of years.

In the course of the first day's employment, I picked up a nodular mass of blue limestone, and laid it open by a stroke of the hammer. Wonderful to relate, it contained inside a beautifully finished piece of sculpture--one of the volutes apparently of an Ionic capital; and not the far-famed walnut of the fairy tale, had I broken the shell and found the little dog lying within, could have surprised me more. Was there another such curiosity in the whole world? I broke open a few other nodules of similar appearance,--for they lay pretty thickly on the shore,--and found that there might. In one of these there were what seemed to be the scales of fishes, and the impressions of a few minute bivalves, prettily striated; in the centre of another there was actually a piece of decayed wood. Of all Nature's riddles these seemed to me to be at once the most interesting, and the most difficult to expound. I treasured them carefully up, and was told by one of the workmen to whom I showed them, that there was a part of the shore about two miles farther to the west, where curiously shaped stones, somewhat like the heads of boarding-pikes, were occasionally picked up; and that in his father's days the country people called them thunderbolts, and deemed them of sovereign efficacy in curing bewitched cattle. Our employer, on quitting the quarry for the building on which we were to be engaged, gave all the workmen a half-holiday. I employed it in visiting the place where the thunderbolts had fallen so thickly, and found it a richer scene of wonder than I could have fancied in even my dreams.

What first attracted my notice was a detached group of low lying skerries, wholly different in form and color from the sandstone cliffs above, or the primary rocks a little farther to the west. I found them composed of thin strata of limestone, alternating with thicker beds of a black slaty substance, which, as I ascertained in the course of the evening, burns with a powerful flame, and emits a strong bituminous odor. The layers into which the beds readily separate are hardly an eighth part of an inch in thickness, and yet on every layer there are the impressions of thousands and tens of thousands of the various fossils peculiar to the Lias. We may turn over these wonderful leaves one after one, like the leaves of a herbarium, and find the pictorial records of a former creation in every page. Scallops, and gryphites, and ammonites, of almost every variety peculiar to the formation, and at least some eight or ten varieties of belemnite; twigs of wood, leaves of plants, cones of an extinct species of pine, bits of charcoal, and the scales of fishes; and, as if to render their pictorial appearance more striking, though the leaves of this interesting volume are of a deep black, most of the impressions are of a chalky whiteness. I was lost in admiration and astonishment, and found my very imagination paralyzed by an assemblage of wonders, that seemed to outrival, in the fantastic and the extravagant, even its wildest conceptions. I passed on from ledge to ledge, like the traveller of the tale through the city of statues, and at length found one of the supposed aerolites I had come in quest of, firmly imbedded in a mass of shale. But I had skill enough to determine that it was other than what it had been deemed. A very near relative, who had been a sailor in his time on almost every ocean, and had visited almost every quarter of the globe, had brought home one of these meteoric stones with him from the coast of Java. It was of a cylindrical shape and vitreous texture, and it seemed to have parted in the middle when in a half-molten state, and to have united again, somewhat awry, ere it had cooled enough to have lost the adhesive quality. But there was nothing organic in its structure, whereas the stone I had now found was organized very curiously indeed. It was of a conical form and filamentary texture, the filaments radiating in straight lines from the centre to the circumference. Finely-marked veins like white threads ran transversely through these in its upper half to the point, while the space below was occupied by an internal cone, formed of plates that lay parallel to the base, and which, like watch-glasses, were concave on the under side, and convex on the upper. I learned in time to call this stone a belemnite, and became acquainted with enough of its history to know that it once formed part of a variety of cuttle-fish, long since extinct.

My first year of labor came to a close, and I found that the amount of my happiness had not been less than in the last of my boyhood. My knowledge, too, had increased in more than the ratio of former seasons; and as I had acquired the skill of at least the common mechanic, I had fitted myself for independence. The additional experience of twenty years has not shown me that there is any necessary connection between a life of toil and a life of wretchedness; and when I have found good men anticipating a better and a happier time than either the present or the past, the conviction that in every period of the world's history the great bulk of mankind must pass their days in labor, has not in the least inclined me to scepticism.

My curiosity, once fully awakened, remained awake, and my opportunities of gratifying it have been tolerably ample. I have been an explorer of caves and ravines--a loiterer along sea-shores--a climber among rocks--a laborer in quarries. My profession was a wandering one. I remember passing direct, on one occasion, from the wild western coast of Ross-shire, where the Old Red Sandstone leans at a high angle against the prevailing Quartz Rock of the district, to where, on the southern skirts of Mid-Lothian, the Mountain Limestone rises amid the coal. I have resided one season on a raised beach of the Moray Frith. I have spent the season immediately following amid the ancient granites and contorted schists of the central Highlands. In the north I have laid open by thousands the shells and lignites of the Oolite; in the south I have disinterred from their matrices of stone or of shale the huge reeds and tree ferns of the Carboniferous period. I have been taught by experience, too, how necessary an acquaintance with geology of both extremes of the kingdom is to the right understanding of the formations of either. In the north, there occurs a vast gap in the scale. The Lias leans unconformably against the Old Red Sandstone; there is no Mountain Limestone, no Coal Measures, none of the New Red Marls or Sandstones, Under or Upper. There are at least three entire systems omitted. But the upper portion of the scale is well nigh complete. In one locality we may pass from the Lower to the Upper Lias, in another from the Inferior to the Great Oolite, and onward to the Oxford Clay and the Coral Rag. We may explore, in a third locality, beds identical in their organisms with the Wealden of Sussex. In a fourth we find the flints and fossils of the Chalk. The lower part of the scale is also well nigh complete. The Old Red Sandstone is amply developed in Moray, Caithness, and Ross; and the Grauwacke, in its more ancient unfossiliferous type, rather extensively in Banffshire. But to acquaint one's self with the three missing formations,--to complete one's knowledge of the entire scale by filling up the hiatus,--it is necessary to remove to the south. The geology of the Lothians is the geology of at least two thirds of the gap, and perhaps a little more;--the geology of Arran wants, it is supposed, only the Upper New lied Sandstone to fill it entirely.

One important truth I would fain press on the attention of my lowlier readers. There are few professions, however humble, that do not present their peculiar advantages of observation; there are none, I repeat, in which the exercise of the faculties does not lead to enjoyment. I advise the stone-mason, for instance, to acquaint himself with Geology. Much of his time must be spent amid the rocks and quarries of widely separated localities. The bridge or harbor is no sooner completed in one district, than he has to remove to where the gentleman's seat, or farm-steading is to be erected in another; and so, in the course of a few years, he may pass over the whole geological scale, even when restricted to Scotland, from the Grauwacke of the Lammermuirs, to the Wealden of Moray, or the Chalk-flints of Banffshire and Aberdeen; and this, too, with opportunities of observation, at every stage, which can be shared with him by only the gentleman of fortune, who devotes his whole time to the study. Nay, in some respects, his advantages are superior to those of the amateur himself. The latter must often pronounce a formation unfossiliferous when, after the examination of at most a few days, he discovers in it nothing organic; and it will be found that half the mistakes of geologists have arisen from conclusions thus hastily formed. But the working-man, whose employments have to be carried on in the same formation for months, perhaps years, together, enjoys better opportunities for arriving at just decisions. There are, besides, a thousand varieties of accident which lead to discovery--floods, storms, landslips, tides of unusual height, ebbs of extraordinary fall: and the man who plies his labor at all seasons in the open air has by much the best, chance of profiting by these. There are formations which yield their organisms slowly to the discoverer, and the proofs which establish their place in the geological scale more tardily still. I was acquainted with the Old Red Sandstone of Ross and Cromarty for nearly ten years ere I had ascertained that it is richly fossiliferous--a discovery which, in exploring this formation in those localities, some of our first geologists had failed to anticipate. I was acquainted with it for nearly ten years more ere I could assign to its fossils their exact place in the scale.

The Old Red Sandstone.--Till very lately its Existence as a distinct Formation disputed.--Still little known.--Its great Importance in the Geological 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 Group of Fossils.--Their present place of Sepulture.--Their ancient 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 eastern and western coasts of Scotland, which lie to the north of the Friths of Forth and Clyde, together with the southern flank of the Grampians and the northern coast of Sutherland and Caithness, appear to have been girdled at some early period by immense continuous beds of Old Red Sandstone. At a still earlier time, the girdle seems to have formed an entire mantle, which covered the enclosed tract from side to side. The interior is composed of what, after the elder geologists, I shall term primary rocks--porphyries, granites, gneisses, and micaceous schists; and this central nucleus, as it now exists, seems set in a sandstone frame. The southern bar of the frame is still entire: it stretches along the Grampians from Stonehaven to the Frith of Clyde. The northern bar is also well nigh entire: it runs unbroken along the whole northern coast of Caithness, and studs, in three several localities, the northern coast of Sutherland, leaving breaches of no very considerable extent between. On the east, there are considerable gaps, as along the shores of Aberdeenshire. The sandstone, however, appears at Gamrie, in the county of Banff, in a line parallel to the coast, and, after another interruption, follows the coast of the Moray Frith far into the interior of the great Caledonian valley, and then running northward along the shores of Cromarty, Ross, and Sutherland, joins, after another brief interruption, the northern bar at Caithness.

The western bar has also its breaches towards the south; but it stretches, almost without interruption, for about a hundred miles, from the near neighborhood of Cape Wrath to the southern extremity of Applecross; and though greatly disturbed and overflown by the traps of the inner Hebrides, it can be traced by occasional patches on towards the southern bar. It appears on the northern shore of Loch Alsh, on the eastern shore of Loch Eichart, on the southern shore of Loch Eil, on the coast and islands near Oban, and on the east coast of Arran. Detached hills and island-like patches of the same formation occur in several parts of the interior, far within the frame or girdle. It caps some of the higher summits in Sutherlandshire; it forms an oasis of sandstone among the primary districts of Strathspey; it rises on the northern shores of Loch Ness in an immense mass of conglomerate, based on a small-grained, red granite, to a height of about three thousand feet over the level; and on the north-western coast of Ross-shire it forms three immense insulated hills, of at least no lower altitude, that rest unconformably on a base of gneiss.

There appear every where in connection with these patches and eminences, and with the surrounding girdle, marks of vast denudation. I have often stood fronting the three Ross-shire hills at sunset in the finer summer evenings, when the clear light threw the shadows of their gigantic, cone-like forms far over the lower tract, and lighted up the lines of their horizontal strata, till they showed like courses of masonry in a pyramid. They seem at such times as if colored by the geologist, to distinguish them from the surrounding tract, and from the base on which they rest as on a common pedestal. The prevailing gneiss of the district reflects a cold, bluish hue, here and there speckled with white, where the weathered and lichened crags of intermingled quartz rock jut out on the hill-sides from among the heath. The three huge pyramids, on the contrary, from the deep red of the stone, seem flaming in purple. There spreads all around a wild and desolate landscape of broken and shattered hills, separated by deep and gloomy ravines, that seem the rents and fissures of a planet in ruins, and that speak distinctly of a period of convulsion, when upheaving fires from the abyss, and ocean currents above, had contended in sublime antagonism, the one slowly elevating the entire tract, the other grinding it down and sweeping it away. I entertain little doubt that, when this loftier portion of Scotland, including the entire Highlands, first presented its broad back over the waves, the upper surface consisted exclusively, from the one extremity to the other--from Benlomond to the Maidenpaps of Caithness--of a continuous tract of Old Red Sandstone; though, ere the land finally emerged, the ocean currents of ages had swept it away, all except in the lower and last-raised borders, and in the detached localities, where it still remains, as in the pyramidal hills of western Ross-shire, to show the amazing depth to which it had once overlaid the inferior rocks. The Old Red Sandstone of Morvheim, in Caithness, overlooks all the primary hills of the district, from an elevation of three thousand five hundred feet.

The depth of the system, on both the eastern and western coasts of Scotland, is amazingly great--how great, I shall not venture to say. There are no calculations more doubtful than those of the geologist. The hill just instanced is apparently composed from top to bottom of what in Scotland forms the lowest member of the system--a coarse conglomerate; and yet I have nowhere observed this inferior member, when I succeeded in finding a section of it directly vertical, more than a hundred yards in thickness--less than one tenth the height of the hill. It would be well nigh as unsafe to infer that the three thousand five hundred feet of altitude formed the real thickness of the conglomerate, as to infer that the thickness of the lead which covers the dome of St. Paul's is equal to the height of the dome. It is always perilous to estimate the depth of a deposit by the height of a hill that seems externally composed of it, unless, indeed, like the pyramidal hills of Ross-shire, it be unequivocally a hill dug out by denudation, as the sculptor digs his eminences out of the mass. In most of our hills, the upheaving agency has been actively at work, and the space within is occupied by an immense nucleus of inferior rock, around which the upper formation is wrapped like a caul, just as the vegetable mould or the diluvium wraps up this superior covering in turn. One of our best known Scottish mountains--the gigantic Ben Nevis--furnishes an admirable illustration of this latter construction of hill. It is composed of three zones or rings of rock, the one rising over and out of the other, like the cases of an opera-glass drawn out. The lower zone is composed of gneiss and mica-slate, the middle zone of granite, the terminating zone of porphyry. The elevating power appears to have acted in the centre, as in the well-known case of Jorullo, in the neighborhood of the city of Mexico, where a level tract four square miles in extent rose, about the middle of the last century, into a high dome of more than double the height of Arthur's Seat. In the formation of our Scottish mountain, the gneiss and mica-slate of the district seem to have been upheaved, during the first period of Plutonic action in the locality, into a rounded hill of moderate altitude, but of huge base. The upheaving power continued to operate--the gneiss and mica-slate gave way a-top--and out of this lower dome there arose a higher dome of granite, which, in an after and terminating period of the internal activity, gave way in turn to yet a third and last dome of porphyry. Now, had the elevating forces ceased to operate just ere the gneiss and mica-slate had given way, we would have known nothing of the interior nucleus of granite--had they ceased just ere the granite had given way, we would have known nothing of the yet deeper nucleus of porphyry; and yet the granite and the porphyry would assuredly have been there. Nor could any application of the measuring rule to the side of the hill have ascertained the thickness of its outer covering--the gneiss and the mica schist. The geologists of the school of Werner used to illustrate what we may term the anatomy of the earth, as seen through the spectacles of their system, by an onion and its coats: they represented the globe as a central nucleus, encircled by concentric coverings, each covering constituting a geological formation. The onion, through the introduction of a better school, has become obsolete as an illustration; but to restore it again, though for another purpose, we have merely to cut it through the middle, and turn downwards the planes formed by the knife. It then represents, with its coats, hills such as we describe--hills such as Ben Nevis, ere the granite had perforated the gneiss, or the porphyry broken through the granite.

If it be thus unsafe, however, to calculate on the depth of deposits by the altitude of hills, it is quite as unsafe for the geologist, who has studied a formation in one district, to set himself to criticise the calculations of a brother geologist by whom it has been studied in a different and widely-separated district. A deposit in one locality may be found to possess many times the thickness of the same deposit in another. There are exposed, beside the Northern and Southern Sutors of Cromarty, two nearly vertical sections of the coarse conglomerate bed, which forms, as I have said, in the north of Scotland, the base of the Old Red System, and which rises to so great an elevation in the mountain of Morvheim. The sections are little more than a mile apart; and yet, while the thickness of this bed in the one does not exceed one hundred feet, that of the same bed in the other somewhat exceeds two hundred feet. More striking still--under the Northern Sutor, the entire Geology of Caithness, with all its vast beds, and all its numerous fossils, from the granitic rock of the Ord hill, the southern boundary of the county, to the uppermost sandstones of Dunnet-head, its extreme northern corner, is exhibited in a vertical section not more than three hundred yards in extent. And yet so enormous is the depth of the deposit in Caithness, that it has been deemed by a very superior geologist to represent three entire formations--the Old Red System, by its unfossiliferous, arenaceous, and conglomerate beds; the Carboniferous System, by its dark-colored middle schists, abounding in bitumen and ichthyolites; and the New Red Sandstone, by the mottled marls and mouldering sandstones that overlie the whole. A slight sketch of the Geology of Caithness may not be deemed uninteresting. This county includes, in the state of greatest development any where yet known, that fossiliferous portion of the Old Red Sandstone which I purpose first to describe, and which will yet come to be generally regarded as an independent formation, as unequivocally characterized by its organic remains as the formations either above or below it.

The county of Sutherland stretches across the island from the German to the Atlantic Ocean, and presents, throughout its entire extent,--except where a narrow strip of the Oolitic formation runs along its eastern coast, and a broken belt of Old Red Sandstone tips its capes and promontories on the west,--a broken and tumultuous sea of primary hills. Scarce any of our other Scottish counties are so exclusively Highland, nor are there any of them in which the precipices are more abrupt, the valleys more deep, the rivers more rapid, or the mountains piled into more fantastic groups and masses. The traveller passes into Caithness, and finds himself surrounded by scenery of an aspect so entirely dissimilar, that no examination of the rocks is necessary to convince him of a geological difference of structure. An elevated and uneven plain spreads around and before him, league beyond league, in tame and unvaried uniformity,--its many hollows darkened by morasses, over which the intervening eminences rise in the form rather of low moory swellings, than of hills,--its coasts walled round by cliffs of gigantic altitude, that elevate the district at one huge stride from the level of the sea, and skirted by vast stacks and columns of rock, that stand out like the advanced pickets of the land amid the ceaseless turmoil of the breakers. The district, as shown on the map, presents nearly a triangular form--the Pentland Frith and the German Ocean describing two of its sides, while the base is formed by the line of boundary which separates it from the county of Sutherland.

Now, in a geological point of view, this angle may be regarded as a vast pyramid, rising perpendicularly from the basis furnished by the primary rocks of the latter county, and presenting newer beds and strata as we ascend, until we reach the apex. The line from south to north in the angle--from Morvheim to Dunnet-head--corresponds to the line of ascent from the top to the bottom of the pyramid. The first bed, reckoning from the base upwards,--the ground tier of the masonry, if I may so speak,--is the great conglomerate. It runs along the line of boundary from sea to sea,--from the Ord of Caithness on the east, to Portskerry on the north; and rises, as it approaches the primary hills of Sutherland, into a lofty mountain chain of bold and serrated outline, which attains its greatest elevation in the hill of Morvheim. This great conglomerate bed, the base of the system, is represented in the Cromarty section, under the Northern Sutor, by a bed two hundred and fifteen feet in thickness. The second tier of masonry in the pyramid, and which also runs in a nearly parallel line from sea to sea, is composed mostly of a coarse red and yellowish sandstone, with here and there beds of pebbles enclosed, and here and there deposits of green earth and red marl. It has its representative in the Cromarty section, in a bed of red and yellow arenaceous stone, one hundred and fourteen feet six inches in thickness. These two inferior beds possess but one character,--they are composed of the same materials, with merely this difference, that the rocks which have been broken into pebbles for the construction of the one, have been ground into sand for the composition of the other. Directly over them, the middle portion of the pyramid is occupied by an enormous deposit of dark-colored bituminous schist, slightly micaceous, calcareous, or semi-calcareous,--here and there interlaced with veins of carbonate of lime,--here and there compact and highly siliceous,--and bearing in many places a mineralogical character difficult to be distinguished from that at one time deemed peculiar to the harder grauwacke schists. The Caithness flagstones, so extensively employed in paving the footways of our larger towns, are furnished by this immense middle tier or belt, and represent its general appearance. From its lowest to its highest beds it is charged with fossil fish and obscure vegetable impressions; and we find it represented in the Cromarty section by alternating bands of sandstones, stratified clays, and bituminous and nodular limestones, which form altogether a bed three hundred and fifty-five feet in thickness; nor does this bed lack its organisms, animal and vegetable, generically identical with those of Caithness. The apex of the pyramid is formed of red mouldering sandstones and mottled marls, which exhibit their uppermost strata high over the eddies of the Pentland Frith, in the huge precipices of Dunnet-head, and which are partially represented in the Cromarty section by an unfossiliferous sandstone bed of unascertained thickness; but which can be traced for about eighty feet from the upper limestones and stratified clays of the middle member, until lost in overlying beds of sand and shingle.

I am particular, at the risk, I am afraid, of being tedious, in thus describing the Geology of this northern county, and of the Cromarty section, which represents and elucidates it. They illustrate more than the formations of two insulated districts: they represent also a vast period of time in the history of the globe. The pyramid, with its three huge bars, its foundations of granitic rock, its base of red conglomerate, its central band of dark-colored schist, and its lighter tinted apex of sandstone, is inscribed from bottom to top, like an Egyptian obelisk, with a historical record. The upper and lower sections treat of tempests and currents--the middle is "written within and without" with wonderful narratives of animal life; and yet the whole, taken together, comprises but an earlier portion of that chronicle of existences and events furnished by the Old Red Sandstone. It is, however, with this earlier portion that my acquaintance is most minute.

A continuous ocean spreads over the space now occupied by the British islands: in the tract covered by the green fields and brown moors of our own country, the bottom, for a hundred yards downwards, is composed of the debris of rolled pebbles and coarse sand intermingled, long since consolidated into the lower member of the Old Red Sandstone; the upper surface is composed of banks of sand, mud, and clay; and the sea, swarming with animal life, flows over all. My present object is to describe the inhabitants of that sea.

Of these, the greater part yet discovered have been named by Agassiz, the highest authority as an ichthyologist in Europe or the world, and in whom the scarcely more celebrated Cuvier recognized a naturalist in every respect worthy to succeed him. The comparative amount of the labors of these two great men in fossil ichthyology, and the amazing acceleration which has taken place within the last few years in the progress of geological science, are illustrated together, and that very strikingly, by the following interesting fact--a fact derived directly from Agassiz himself, and which must be new to the great bulk of my readers. When Cuvier closed his researches in this department, he had named and described, for the guidance of the geologist, ninety-two distinct species of fossil fish; nor was it then known that the entire geological scale, from the Upper Tertiary to the Grauwacke inclusive, contained more. Agassiz commenced his labors; and, in a period of time little exceeding fourteen years, he has raised the number of species from ninety-two to sixteen hundred. And this number, great as it is, is receiving accessions almost every day. In his late visit to Scotland, he found eleven new species, and one new genus, in the collection of Lady Gumming of Altyre, all from the upper beds of that lower member of the Old Red Sandstone represented by the dark-colored schists and inferior sandstones of Caithness. He found forty-two new species more in a single collection in Ireland, furnished by the Mountain Limestone of Armagh.

"How easy," says this fanciful writer, "is it to conceive the change of a winged fish, flying at times through the water, at times through the air, into a bird flying always through the air!" It is a law of nature, that the chain of being, from the lowest to the highest form of life, should be, in some degree, a continuous chain; that the various classes of existence should shade into one another, so that it often proves a matter of no little difficulty to point out the exact line of demarcation where one class or family ends, and another class or family begins. The naturalist passes from the vegetable to the animal tribes, scarcely aware, amid the perplexing forms of intermediate existence, at what point he quits the precincts of the one to enter on those of the other. All the animal families have, in like manner, their connecting links; and it is chiefly out of these that writers such as Lamarck and Maillet construct their system. They confound gradation with progress. Geoffrey Hudson was a very short man, and Goliath of Gath a very tall one, and the gradations of the human stature lie between. But gradation is not progress; and though we find full-grown men of five feet, five feet six inches, six feet, and six feet and a half, the fact gives us no earnest whatever that the race is rising in stature, and that at some future period the average height of the human family will be somewhat between ten and eleven feet. And equally unsolid is the argument, that from a principle of gradation in races would deduce a principle of progress in races. The tall man of six feet need entertain quite as little hope of rising into eleven feet as the short man of five; nor has the fish that occasionally flies any better chance of passing into a bird than the fish that only swims.

But no man who enters the geological field in quest of the wonderful, need pass in pursuit of his object from the true to the fictitious. Does the reader remember how, in Milton's sublime figure, the body of Truth is represented as hewn in pieces, and her limbs scattered over distant regions, and how her friends and disciples have to go wandering all over the world in quest of them? There is surely something very wonderful in the fact, that, in uniting the links of the chain of creation into an unbroken whole, we have in like manner to seek for them all along the scale of the geologist;--some we discover among the tribes first annihilated--some among the tribes that perished at a later period--some among the existences of the passing time. We find the present incomplete without the past--the recent without the extinct. There are marvellous analogies which pervade the scheme of Providence, and unite, as it were, its lower with its higher parts. The perfection of the works of Deity is a perfection entire in its components; and yet these are not contemporaneous, but successive: it is a perfection which includes the dead as well as the living, and bears relation, in its completeness, not to time, but to eternity.

Some of the specimens which exhibit this creature are exceedingly curious. In one, a coprolite still rests in the abdomen; and a common botanist's microscope shows it thickly speckled over with minute scales, the indigestible exuviae of fish on which the animal had preyed. In the abdomen of another we find a few minute pebbles--just as pebbles are occasionally found in the stomach of the cod--which had been swallowed by the creature attached to its food. Is there nothing wonderful in the fact, that men should be learning at this time of day how the fishes of the Old Red Sandstone lived, and that there were some of them rapacious enough not to be over nice in their eating?

Has the reader ever heard of the "griesly fisch" and the "laithlie flood," described by that minstrel Bishop of Dunkeld "who gave rude Scotland Virgil's page?" Both fish and flood are the extravagances of a poet's dream. The flood came rolling through a wilderness of bogs and quagmires, under banks "dark as rocks the whilk the sey upcast." A skeleton forest stretched around, doddered and leafless; and through the "unblomit" and "barrant" trees

"The quhissling wind blew mony bitter blast;"

the whitened branches "clashed and clattered;" the "vile water rinnand o'erheid," and "routing as thonder," made "hideous trubil;" and to augment the uproar, the "griesly fisch," like the fish of eastern story, raised their heads amid the foam, and shrieked and yelled as they passed. "The grim monsters fordeafit the heiring with their sellouts;"--they were both fish and elves, and strangely noisy in the latter capacity; and the longer the poet listened, the more frightened he became. The description concludes, like a terrific dream, with his wanderings through the labyrinths of the dead forest, where all was dry and sapless above, and mud and marsh below, and with his exclamations of grief and terror at finding himself hopelessly lost in a scene of prodigies and evil spirits. And such was one of the wilder fancies in which a youthful Scottish poet of the days of Flodden indulged, ere taste had arisen to restrain and regulate invention.

Fishes, the fourth great class in point of rank in the animal kingdom, and, in extent of territory, decidedly the first, are divided, as they exist in the present creation, into two distinct series--the osseous and the cartilaginous. The osseous embraces that vast assemblage which naturalists describe as "fishes properly so called," and whose skeletons, like those of mammalia, birds, and reptiles, are composed chiefly of a calcareous earth pervading an organic base. Hence the durability of their remains. In the cartilaginous series, on the contrary, the skeleton contains scarce any of this earth: it is a framework of indurated animal matter, elastic, semi-transparent, yielding easily to the knife, and, like all mere animal substances, inevitably subject to decay. I have seen the huge cartilaginous skeleton of a shark lost in a mass of putrefaction in less than a fortnight. I have found the minutest bones of the osseous ichthyolites of the Lias entire after the lapse of unnumbered centuries.

Between the osseous and the cartilaginous fishes there exist some very striking dissimilarities. The skull of the osseous fish is divided into a greater number of distinct bones, and possesses more movable parts, than the skulls of mammiferous animals: the skull of the cartilaginous fish, on the contrary, consists of but a single piece, without joint or suture. There is another marked distinction. The bony fish, if it approaches in form to that general type which we recognize amid all the varieties of the class as proper to fishes, and to which, in all their families, nature is continually inclining, will be found to have a tail branching out, as in the perch and herring, from the bone in which the vertebral column terminates; whereas the cartilaginous fish, if it also approach the general type, will be found to have a tail formed, as in the sturgeon and dog-fish, on both sides of the hinder portion of the spine, but developed much more largely on the under than on the upper side. In some instances, it is wanting on the upper side altogether. It may be as impossible to assign reasons for such relations as for those which exist between the digestive organs and the hoofs of the ruminant animals; but it is of importance that they should be noted. It may be remarked, further, that the great bulk of fishes whose skeletons consist of cartilage have yet an ability of secreting the calcareous earth which composes bone, and that they are furnished with bony coverings, either partial or entire. Their bones lie outside. The thorn-back derives its name from the multitudinous hooks and spikes of bone that bristle over its body; the head, back, and operculum of the sturgeon are covered with bony plates; the thorns and prickles of the shark are composed of the same material. The framework within is a framework of mere animal matter; but it was no lack of the osseous ingredient that led to the arrangement--an arrangement which we can alone refer to the will of that all-potent Creator, who can transpose his materials at pleasure, without interfering with the perfection of his work. It is a curious enough circumstance, that some of the osseous fishes, as if entirely to reverse the condition of the cartilaginous ones, are partially covered with plates of cartilage. They are bone within, and cartilage without, just as others are bone without and cartilage within.

It is now several years since I was first led to suspect that the condition of the ichthyolites of the Old Red Sandstone was intermediate. I have alluded to the comparative indestructibility of the osseous skeleton, and the extreme liability to decay characteristic of the cartilaginous one. Of a skeleton in part osseous and in part cartilaginous, we must, of course, expect, when it occurs in a fossil state, to find the indestructible portions only. And when, in every instance, we find the fossil skeletons of a formation complete in some of their parts, and incomplete in others--the entire portions invariably agreeing, and the wanting portions invariably agreeing also--it seems but natural to conclude that an original difference must have obtained, and that the existing parts, which we can at once recognize as bone, must have been united to parts now wanting, which were composed of cartilage. The naturalist never doubts that the shark's teeth, which he finds detached on the shore, or buried in some ancient formation, were united originally to cartilaginous jaws. Now, in breaking open all the ichthyolites of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, with the exception of those of the two families already described, we find that some of the parts are invariably wanting, however excellent the state of preservation maintained by the rest. I have seen every scale preserved and in its place--one set of both the larger and smaller bones occupying their original position--jaws thickly set with teeth still undetached from the head--the massy bones of the skull still unseparated--the larger shoulder-bone, on which the operculum rests, lying in its proper bed--the operculum itself entire--and all the external rays which support the fins, though frequently fine as hairs, spreading out distinct as the fibres in the wing of the dragon-fly, or the woody nerves in an oak-leaf. In no case, however, have I succeeded in finding a single joint of the vertebral column, or the trace of a single internal ray. No part of the internal skeleton survives, nor does its disappearance seem to have had any connection with the greater mass of putrescent matter which must have surrounded it, seeing that the external rays of the fins show quite as entire when turned over upon the body, as sometimes occurs, as when spread out from it in profile. Besides, in the ichthyolites of the chalk, no parts of the skeleton are better preserved than the internal parts--the vertebral joints, and the internal rays. The reader must have observed, in the cases of a museum of Natural History, preparations of fish of two several kinds--preparations of the skeleton, in which only the osseous parts are exhibited, and preparations of the external form, in which the whole body is shown in profile, with the fins spread to the full, and at least half the bones of the head covered by the skin but in which the vertebral column and internal rays are wanting. Now, in the fossils of the chalk, with those of the other later formations, down to the New Red Sandstone, we find that the skeleton style of preparation obtains; whereas, in at least three fourths of the ichthyolites of the Lower Old Red, we find only what we may term the external style. I had marked, besides, another circumstance in the ichthyolites, which seemed, like a nice point of circumstantial evidence, to give testimony in the same line. The tails of all the ichthyolites, whose vertebral columns and internal rays are wanting, are unequally lobed, like those of the dog-fish and sturgeon, and the body runs on to nearly the termination of the surrounding rays. The one-sided condition of tail exists, says Cuvier, in no recent osseous fish known to naturalists, except in the bony pike--a sauroid fish of the warmer rivers of America. With deference, however, to so high an authority, it is questionable whether, the tail of the bony pike should not rather be described as a tail set on somewhat awry, than as a one-sided tail.

All these peculiarities I could but note as they turned up before me, and express, in pointing them out to a few friends, a sort of vague, because hopeless, desire, that good fortune might throw me in the way of the one man of all the world best qualified to explain the principle on which they occurred, and to decide whether fishes may be at once bony and cartilaginous. But that meeting was a contingency rather to be wished than hoped for--a circumstance within the bounds of the possible, but beyond those of the probable. Could the working-man of the north of Scotland have so much as dreamed that he was yet to enjoy an opportunity of comparing his observations with those of the naturalist of Neufchatel, and of having his inferences tested and confirmed?

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