Abstract
ON Monday, the I4th instant, the Royal Society of Edinburgh held a special meeting for the purpose of hearing a discussion on the crystalline rocks of the Scottish Highlands. The subject was brought forward by the Duke of Argyll, who had found in the quartzite beds which cross Loch Fyne near Inveraray certain markings which he believed to be of organic origin. His attention was first called to some ferruginous stalk-like incrustations on the surfaces of fragments of quartzite, his impression being that these markings were the remains of plants, and were embedded in the rock. The importance of the discovery of organic remains in any of the rocks that form the Central and Southern Highlands of Scotland will at once be recognized by geologists. Since the recent work of the Geological Survey in Sutherland and Ross, and the demonstration thereby afforded that the apparent upward succession on which Murchison relied, from the base of the lowest quartzite up into the upper or eastern or younger gneisses, is deceptive, there has been, perhaps, a tendency to assume that the extraordinarily complicated structure that supervenes to the east of the quartzites and limestones of Sutherland extends across the whole of the rest of the Highlands, and that the crystalline schists of these regions are made up of all kinds of crushed and sheared igneous or sedimentary masses, out of which it may be impossible to make anything like intelligible order. But those observers who have themselves examined the schists of the central and southern counties of the Highlands are tolerably confident that such assumptions have no warrant in the actual structure of the ground. On the contrary, they regard the greater proportion of the schistose and altered rocks of these districts as unquestionably of sedimentary origin. They feel persuaded that sooner or later they will be found to yield fossils, and that any day may bring to light a series of corals, shells, graptolites, or trilobites, which will furnish a palæontological basis for settling the geological age of the rocks, and placing them in their true position with regard to the Palæozoic formations of the rest of the country.
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Supposed Fossils from the Southern Highlands . Nature 39, 300–301 (1889). https://doi.org/10.1038/039300a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/039300a0