of some peculiar mineral stratum; and not unfrequently the weathering of their unhewn blocks has led to the discovery of some fossil structure which no other process could have so delicately displayed. What magnificent polyzoa, bleached and apparent as the network of the laundress, have we witnessed on an Ayrshire roadside; what superb encrinites, relieved to the minutest ossicle, have been gathered from a Yorkshire stone-wall! Let the roadside fence along which the young geologist may travel, or on which he may seat himself to indulge in his meerschaum, never be passed without examination. It is sure to lead to a knowledge of the rocks and quarries of a district the while that the observation of its materials will help to beguile the tedium and monotony of the way.

Even where metal-heap and stone-wall may be insufficient to attract, or are altogether absent, there is always some superficial excavation by the way-field-drains, sand and gravel pits, clay-pits, and suchlike openings, which should never be passed without examination. We have seen outcrops of strata and junctions of formation laid bare by field-draining which could never have been otherwise exposed; and was it not in the gravel-pits of the Somme that Boucher de Perthes first found evidence of the contemporaneity of man and the extinct mammalia? But here comes the clay-pit-a miry affair at the best, and a capital test of the enthusiasm of amateur geologists; and down our young friend goes in search of boreal shells and star-fishes, remains of arctic birds, seals, and whales. And what a treasure often awaits him! A perfect cabinet of shells, barnacles, and star-fish within the space of a few yards, or it may be the skeleton of a seal or the first exhuming of the gigantic remains of a Northern whale. There is scarcely a clay-pit we have visited on the east coast, from the Humber to the Moray Firth; or on the west, from the Clyde to the Sol

way, but has yielded such remains, proving as clearly as if we had been witnesses of the event that these islands of ours were at a period comparatively recent in geology surrounded by boreal conditions such as now prevail along the coasts of Greenland, Spitzbergen, and northern Scandinavia. And thus the clay-pit, forbidding to the ordinary tourist, and far from attractive even to the labourer to whom it becomes a source of daily bread, presents allurements to the geologist which draw him for days and weeks to its interior, and make him quite at home where others see only dirt and discomfort. The delight in discovering a new shell, the pleasure of cutting out the skeleton of a seal, or the sensation experienced in watching the day-by-day uncovering of the gigantic bones of a whale in situ, are things that may be described to others but can be known and felt only by the working geologist. We speak from experience; and, disabled though we be, we would willingly go once more to Cupar-Muir to secure another seal, or to Stirling to watch 'the exhuming of another whale.*

Attractive, however, as may be the treasures of the claypit, our young friend has other objects before him, and he must not linger. On he goes, certainly not improved in appearance by his pokings among the clay, but all the more

* How a discovery of this kind sometimes strikes the non-geological mind may be told of Thackeray. When lecturing in Scotland, he happened to be at Cupar station on the afternoon I had exhumed my first seal from the brick-clay of Stratheden. As the men came on the platform carrying the mass of clay in which the skeleton was imbedded, one of them addressed me: "Ye'll be gaun to tak' your banes in beside you?" a question which tickled the humour of the novelist, and he became quite facetious, firing joke after joke to the great amusement of some friends who had accompanied him to the station. As I explained to him how and where the skeleton was found, his manner changed in an instant,"So this beautiful valley," he inquired, "has been once an arm of the sea; not Noah nor Deucalion? Quite clear! but how many ages ago?" And thus the seal, the sea, and the earth's changes became the sole subjects of his conversation as the train bore us away, and for the rest of our journey.

workman-like, and all the readier for the mishaps of the field, which are only unmitigated miseries to patent leather, frock-coats, and kid-gloves. As he rounds the neighbouring hill, there the new railway-cutting, like a huge plough-track, stretches before him for miles, exposing boulder-clays, polished and striated rock-surface, dykes, faults, anticlines and synclines-a perfect epitome of geology which it would take weeks to observe and volumes for the description. How clearly that dark tenacious "till" and its enclosed blocks tell their tale of ice-waste and ice-drift; waste from old land-surfaces and drift from far-off crags whose place is unmistakably indicated by the composition of these worn and rounded boulders! And how fully these underlying rocks with their polished and striated surfaces bespeak the long presence of the glacier and ice-mantle, rounding, smoothing, and furrowing these exposed British hill-sides as they do now the higher glens of the Alps or the sterile uplands of Greenland! And then what magnificent sections of the stratified rocks, their bendings and foldings, their fissures and faultings, their intersecting dykes of basalt and =interbedded greenstones! In fine, the whole internal structure and history of that hill-range is laid bare as in a diagram, and but for this railway undertaking might have been for ever unknown, and even unsuspected. Let no young geologist, as he values his own information and the progress of his science, neglect the railway in progress. We say in progress, for in a few weeks the sides of these cuttings are dressed, built up, or otherwise interfered with-destroying the details of the section, if not altogether obliterating its legibility and value. During the last thirty years these railway-cuttings and tunnellings have revealed the structure of our island in a way that centuries of mining and quarrying would have failed to accomplish, and every additional undertaking is certain either to reveal new facts or to cor

roborate former information. But our young friend has yet miles of country before him, his ultimate object being the fossils of the lime quarry that lies in the opposite hill-range. And as he crosses the intervening plain, dreary with swamp and peat-bog, he finds even there something to attract and interest where all to ordinary eyes is but a scene of sterile monotony. There, on the bleakest and blackest of the moor, the peat-diggers are busy at their thrifty trade, and as they cut through the vegetable mass that has been accumulating for untold centuries, here they stumble upon some relic of bemired red-deer, there upon some gigantic oak that could not possibly find a footing under our present climate; and not unfrequently in some situations upon the Roman plank-ways that had crossed the swamp seventeen hundred years ago, or even the traces of axe and fire by which these invaders had destroyed the forest and converted its undrained area into a quaking swamp or peat-bog. How these geologically recent but historically ancient incidents strike the young inquirer need not be told, for there, among the peat-piles, in splitting and examining, in noting remains of trees (oak, fir, alder, hazel, willow, and the like), and in gathering nuts, seed, and fragments of insects, two long summer hours are spent before he attempts the hill-brow with its fossiliferous shales and limestones, the objects for which he had originally started.

And now, in the long line of limestone quarries that encircle the hill, what treasures for his cabinet! Polyzoa, corals, encrinites, spines of cidaris, trilobites, bivalves, and univalves in hundreds are scattered over the old rubbishheaps, relieved from their matrix by weathering with a clearness which art seeks in vain to imitate, and with a delicacy of detail which no other process could excel. Not only in the old waste-heap, but in the recent workings he sees the whole tale of these marine deposits-their coral,

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encrinite, and shell growths-with a fulness that written history never attempts, and with a certainty to which it never attains. Even from the crumbling mud-rubbish beneath his feet he can, by careful washing and manipulation, extract abundant evidence of old sea-life in the microscopic foraminifera and entomostraca that occur in myriads, though unseen by the naked eye, and undreamed of by the uninformed. Let the young geologist lay it to heart and treasure it in his memory, that in the old quarry-mounds and shale-heaps of the deserted coal-mine, which other men regard as mere dirt and rubbish, there are often fossil gems to be found which he would seek for in vain in recent workings, and that these waste-piles should never be passed without a careful scrutiny, though it should subject him to the laugh and jest of the ignorant and uninitiated.

But now the level rays of a late afternoon, and the dropping of the quarry tools, amid the click and clank of which he has spent a few pleasant hours, remind our young friend that his field-day is drawing to a close. We say a few pleasant hours, for, independently of the pleasure of his pursuit, no geologist who loves his science will ever avoid a friendly word or two with the quarryman, miner, or stoneworker. The exchange of his snuff-box, a light to his pipe, a seat beside him as he takes his mid-day meal, obtains from him not only what information he can afford, but a friendly reception to those who may come after. The rudest we have ever met, if treated as a fellow-worker (and are we not all of us brother-workmen ?), had always some new information to give; and the friendly interchange of a few words not only excited his interest for the time being, but what was of greater importance, secured his attention to the preservation of any fossil relic that might be laid open by his hammer, or turned up by his pick-axe. The courtesies of life, the young geologist may depend on it, are not less