The Old Red Sandstone or, New Walks in an Old Field

The Old Red Sandstone; or, New Walks in an Old Field

Nearly one third of the present volume appeared a few months ago in the form of a series of sketches in the Witness newspaper. A portion of the first chapter was submitted to the public a year or two earlier, in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal. The rest, amounting to about two thirds of the whole, appears for the first time. Every such work has its defects. The faults of the present volumefaults all too obvious, I am afraidwould have been probably fewer had the writer enjoyed greater leisure. Some of them, however, seem scarce separable from the nature of the subject: there are others for which, from their opposite character, I shall have to apologize in turn to opposite classes of readers. My facts would, in most instances, have lain closer had I written for geologists exclusively, and there would have been less reference to familiar phenomena. And had I written for only general readers, my descriptions of hitherto undescribed organisms, and the deposits of little-known [viii] localities, would have occupied fewer pages, and would have been thrown off with, perhaps, less regard to minute detail than to pictorial effect. May I crave, while addressing myself, now to the one class, and now to the other, the alternate forbearance of each? Such is the state of progression in geological science, that the geologist who stands still for but a very little, must be content to find himself left behind. Nay, so rapid is the progress, that scarce a geological work passes through the press in which some of the statements of the earlier pages have not to be modified, restricted, or extended in the concluding ones. The present volume shares, in this respect, in what seems the common lot. In describing the Coccosteus, the reader will find it stated that the creature, unlike its contemporary the Pterichthys, was unfurnished with arms. Ere arriving at such a conclusion, I had carefully examined at least a hundred different Coccostei; but the positive evidence of one specimen outweighs the negative evidence of a hundred; and I have just learned from a friend in the north, (Mr. Patrick Duff, of Elgin,) that a Coccosteus lately found at Lethen-bar, and now in the possession of Lady Gordon Gumming, of Altyre, is furnished with what seem uncouth, paddle-shaped arms, that project from the head.[A] All that I [ix] have given of the creature, however, will be found true to the actual type; and that parts should have been omitted will surprise no one who remembers that many hundred belemnites had been figured and described ere a specimen turned up in which the horny prolongation, with its enclosed ink-bag, was found attached to the calcareous spindle; and that even yet, after many thousand trilobites have been carefully examined, it remains a question with the oryctologist, whether this crustacean of the earliest periods was furnished with legs, or creeped on an abdominal foot, like the snail. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 63923
Author: Miller, Hugh
Release Date: Nov 30, 2020
Format: eBook
Language: English