institutes and associations are restricted and intermittent in their efforts; some mode of local rating, supplemented by additional grants, would give to them all the impetus and permanence they require.

If, then, the scientific and technical education now so loudly talked of shall ever be secured and rendered effective, it must be first, by the establishment of a national and enforced system of juvenile education; secondly, by the introduction into that system of a larger amount of science, and especially of the natural sciences, than has hitherto been taught in our schools; and, thirdly, by fostering among our adult population, and especially among our young artisans, a taste for scientific and artistic pursuits, either by a system of direct rewards or by certificates of merit, which will become their passports to higher and more lucrative situations. But whether or not the present outcry be productive of practical results, we think it sufficiently obvious that, in the education of the present day, when men are dealing more and more with realities, and more and more extending their domain over to the realms of nature, that the natural sciences should hold an important, and indeed an indispensable, place.

DURA DEN-ITS PLACE IN GEOLOGY.

Ir was in the early spring of eighteen hundred and thirty or thirty-one, that, in company with a few fellow-students from St Andrews, we first visited the wooded cliffs and winding recesses of Dura Den. Our ramble had no very definite object partly to spend a holiday, partly to enjoy the free fresh breeze, and partly to witness the scenery which now and again called up the poetic raptures of our Professor of Humanity—the late Dr Thomas Gillespie. Geology had nothing to do with our excursion; and if a passing thought of science flitted at all across our minds, it never manifested itself in more than picking up a wild violet by the wayside, or a primrose from the grassy slopes of the sheltered ravine. At that time Dura Den was little known and seldom visited -its romantic beauties meeting only the eye of an occasional Sunday stroller from Cupar, a stray trout-fisher from Dundee, or a small picnic party of young ladies and elderly gentlemen from St Andrews. Now, how altered the case! The locality has a world-wide celebrity; and wherever geology is cultivated, there the name of Dura Den is a favourite and familiar word. Why this change? whence this celebrity? The answer is given in three words-Its Fossil Fishes. These fishes, wonderful in their structural

characteristics-wonderful from the vast numbers entombed in so limited a space-and wonderful from their fine state of preservation-have conferred on Dura Den not a scenic but a scientific renown; and we are not maligning our fellow "folks of Fife" when we express the conviction that the name is better known to the geologists of Europe and America, than to many of the inhabitants of the county.

To point out the geological relations of the locality-to glance at its fossil fishes, and the conditions under which they lived, died, and were preserved-and to pass in review the long ages that have elapsed since their entombment, is the object of the present chapter; and, whatever the treatment, the subject is, of itself, sufficient to command the interest of the geological inquirer. There are few fossil localities so inviting in point of scenery, or exhibiting finer rock-sections, and none more accessible than Dura Den. It is true that the quiet glen of forty years ago, with its rustic meal and flax mills, is now in part busy with water-wheels, and resonant with spinning-machinery; but enough is left to maintain its beauty. The trees are somewhat higher and hoarier, and the stream, when in flood, dashes down through its rocky course as headlong and wildly as of yore. But, though all its accessories were changed, there still rise the cliffs of yellow sandstone and variegated shales, and there sinks the watercourse, with its out-cropping strata replete with those fossil treasures which form the pursuit of the palæontologist; and for these, and these alone, though all else were gone, Dura Den would still maintain its celebrity. Exhumed during the last thirty years, they are now to be found in almost every public museum and private collection their dark enamelled forms, finely relieved by the light-yellow matrix, rendering them at once objects of beauty and of scientific interest; and Dudley is not better known for its trilobites, Whitby for its ammonites, or Kent

for its sea-urchins, than Dura Den for its fishes. Let us glance, in the first place, at the relations of the strata in which they are embedded.

Stretching from east to west, along the whole "Howe of Fife," or Stratheden, lie two main divisions of the old red sandstone-the middle conglomerates and red quartzose sandstones; and the upper fine-grained yellow sandstones and variegated shales. The former occupy the extreme "howe" or hollow of the strath; and the latter, the southern escarpment, as manifested in Kemback Hill, Drumdryan, Wemysshall Hill, and part of the Lomonds; and both series are conformable with a south-easterly dip. It is through this escarpment of soft yellow sandstones and mottled shales that several streams cut their way as they descend to the Eden, the burn of Ceres being that which has scooped out the deep, winding, picturesque dell of Dura, Starting from the railway station of Dairsie, in the northern escarpment, the excursionist passes the quarry of Lydox Mill, with its chocolate-coloured quartzose sandstones, replete with detached scales and teeth of Holoptychius nobilissimus. This is the "middle old red" of Scottish geologists. A little onward and he passes the high-perched old Gothic church and ruined episcopal castle of Dairsie; and, crossing an equally ancient bridge, with pointed arches and massive buttresses, he descends into the plain of the Eden, which is here scarcely half a mile in width, though to the west of Cupar the breadth of the main "howe" is from three to four miles. Having crossed the plain, which is here occupied by a great thickness of alluvium and graveldrift, he enters at once into the Den of Dura, with its thick-bedded yellow sandstones and mottled shales this side rising precipitous, and overhung by trees; and on that, sloping up with grassy banks, according to the windings and incuttings of the restless stream. All these yellow

on

sandstones are not alike fossiliferous, but detached scales of holoptychius and plates of pterichthys are found throughout; while in one stratum, or at most in two strata, the fishes occur in hundreds, and often overlying each other two, three, and four deep, as if they had rushed in shoals, and struggled pell-mell to escape some dreaded catastrophe. These fossiliferous beds occur at a sharp turn of the stream, immediately above the first spinning-mill; but another layer, notable for its remains of pterichthys, is now hid from research in the trough of the gigantic water-wheel. Ascending the stream for a few hundred yards above the fish-beds, the yellow sandstones are cut off by a broad dyke of greenstone, over which the water dashes in noisy and broken tumult; and thence the upper old red ceases, and the carboniferous system occupies the higher and tamer portion of the Den.

Such are the stratigraphical relations of the fish-yielding beds of Dura. They belong to the upper or "yellow" series of the old red sandstone, just as the beds of the Howe of Fife belong to the middle or "red" series, and those of the adjoining county of Forfar to the lower or "grey" series. They find their equivalents in the sandstones of Elgin and of Roxburgh, which are characterised by the same yellowish tints, and contain (though less abundantly) the same genera of fishes. By the majority of geologists they are regarded as the "uppermost old red sandstone;" but some, and especially those on the staff of the Irish Geological Survey, are inclined to view them merely as the base or lowermost portion of the carboniferous system. That they pass conformably and imperceptibly (lithologically speaking) into the carboniferous system is true; but, en masse, their yellow sandstones and red mottled shales are so dissimilar to the whitish sandstones and carbonaceous shales of the lower coal-measures, that the merest