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 The Consultant’s

Quick
Start Guide
An Action Plan
f o r Yo u r F i r s t Ye a r
in Business
Second Edition

elaine biech

ffirs.indd v 8/29/08 4:50:51 PM

ffirs.indd vii 8/29/08 4:50:53 PM
 “The best ‘cliff notes’ available for those new to consulting and an
excellent refresher reference for the experienced.”
Pamela J. Schmidt
Executive Director, ISA

“The Consultant’s Quick Start Guide” begins and ends with the best
questions available, and includes nine chapters in between of down-
to-earth, easy-to-use information, advice, and guides to starting a
successful consulting practice. By considering the chapter one ques-
tions of “assessing your consulting aptitude,” you will have a clear idea
of whether the profession is for you. And, if you answer affirmatively
and start your own business, chapter eleven “brings it all together”
by reviewing your first-year success in terms of personal, family, fun,
and financial results. This is the one book that any new or aspiring
consultant needs to quick start success.”
Barbara Pate Glacel, Ph.D.
Author, Light Bulbs for Leaders
Principal, Glacel Developing Group

“This book is a must-have guide for consultants and provides powerful

resources to help you ‘practice what you preach’ regarding the value
of planful approaches to prosperity.”
Debra A. Dinnocenzo
President, ALLearnatives
Author, 101 Tips for Telecommuters

“Elaine Biech is right on the mark with her latest release: The Consul-
tant’s Quick Start Guide. With bookshelves full of numerous ‘how-to’
titles it is refreshing to find one that really is loaded with practical,
easy-to-use information based upon Elaine’s admirable consult-
ing experience. If you are thinking of entering the consulting field
and are looking for one easy-to-use manual, pick up a copy of The
Consultant’s Quick Start Guide.”
Joseph Ruppert,
Captain, USN, retired

ffirs.indd i 8/29/08 4:50:50 PM

 “Elaine Biech has taken her many years of successful consulting exper-
tise and graciously hands it over to new and seasoned consultants
alike. Many seasoned folks would have saved a lot of time, money and
sleepless nights if they had this when they started out.”
Shirley Krsinich
Executive Talent Consultant, American Family Insurance Group

“If you really want to be a consultant, then this book is a must have. It
takes you from A to Z, answering every question you may have about
being a consultant. Like Elaine’s previous books, The Consultant’s
Quick Start Guide provides practical, useful and simple advice and
examples.”
L. A. Burke
Quality Performance Consultant, 14th Coast Guard District

“Elaine Biech has done it again! A must for every aspiring entrepre-
neur, this book takes you by the hand and walks you through both a
reality check and a process that will help you build the bridge between
what you can dream and what you can accomplish.”
Nancy A. Michaels
Executive Vice President, Great Circle Learning

“A must-read for people who are considering a career in consulting.

The book is filled with realistic and practical ideas—a great way to
learn all the tricks of the trade from one of the best!”
Vicki L. Chvala
Executive Vice President, American Family Insurance

“Anybody who wants to quit their day job to join the legions of free-
agents and consultants needs this book. There are so many facets of
the consulting business, and Elaine provides the quickest road to
plan for success. This book will dramatically reduce your learning
curve.”
Kristin Arnold
President, Quality Process Consultants, Inc.

ffirs.indd ii 8/29/08 4:50:50 PM

 “An excellent guide for the new consultant just getting started. Also
an extremely thorough checklist for the experienced consultant
undergoing a process of career reevaluation. Guaranteed to help you
answer the tough questions about how to succeed in this most chal-
lenging and rewarding of professions.”
Jack R. Snader, C.M.C.
CEO, Systema Corporation

“The Consultant’s Quick Start Guide, 2nd edition, is the best way
I know to jump-start a successful career in consulting. Clearly writ-
ten and imminently practical, this guide will save you countless hours
of arduous toil. It is a virtual ‘Vulcan mind meld’ of collected wisdom,
experience, and general business savvy. Bravo to Elaine Biech for this
innovative tool kit for the consulting profession!”
Gary Muszynski
Creative Catalyst and Consultant, One World Music

“A logical, step-by-step guide through the consulting jungle. Follow

Elaine’s lead as if your business life was depending on it!”
Linda Byars Swindling
“The Peacemaker” and coauthor, The Consultant’s Legal Guide

“Elaine Biech has done it again! For anyone considering leaving the
corporate world to become a free agent, this practical book is enor-
mously valuable. Even established consultants would do well to review
and learn from Elaine’s focused and efficient set of tools and princi-
ples. Save yourself a lot of time and effort—buy this book and use it
before, during, and after you begin your consulting practice.”
B. Kim Barnes
CEO, Barnes & Conti Associates, Inc.

“A quick start is no longer a luxury—it’s a survival strategy! Elaine

Biech’s newest comprehensive resource can save you precious time
and money when you need it the most. Learn from a ‘master’ who has
built a very successful consulting business—you won’t regret it!”
Ann Herrmann-Nehdi
CEO, Herrmann International

ffirs.indd iii 8/29/08 4:50:51 PM

 “If book titles could be lengthy, I would want to call this one: How
to Parachute into a Successful Consulting Practice Without Hitting
a Tree or Landing in a Lake. What a treat for the new or ‘wannabe’
consultant—you can think through the initial career decision, plan
for the launch of the business, and hang the proverbial shingle with
this book as your guide. The author has produced another practical,
hands-on approach!”
Ronald E. Galbraith
CEO, Management 21, Inc.

ffirs.indd iv 8/29/08 4:50:51 PM

 The Consultant’s

Quick
Start Guide
An Action Plan
f o r Yo u r F i r s t Ye a r
in Business
Second Edition

elaine biech

ffirs.indd v 8/29/08 4:50:51 PM

 About Pfeiffer
Pfeiffer serves the professional development and hands-on resource needs of
training and human resource practitioners and gives them products to do their
jobs better. We deliver proven ideas and solutions from experts in HR develop-
ment and HR management, and we offer effective and customizable tools to
improve workplace performance. From novice to seasoned professional, Pfeiffer
is the source you can trust to make yourself and your organization more
successful.

Essential Knowledge Pfeiffer produces insightful, practical,

and comprehensive materials on topics that matter the most to train-
ing and HR professionals. Our Essential Knowledge resources translate the
expertise of seasoned professionals into practical, how-to guidance on critical
workplace issues and problems. These resources are supported by case studies,
worksheets, and job aids and are frequently supplemented with CD-ROMs,
websites, and other means of making the content easier to read, understand,
and use.

Essential Tools Pfeiffer’s Essential Tools resources save time and

expense by offering proven, ready-to-use materials—including exer-
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Pfeiffer also recognizes the remarkable power of new technologies in
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on-the-go trainers and human resource professionals.

Essential resources for training and HR professionals

w w w. p f e i f f e r. c o m

ffirs.indd vi 8/29/08 4:50:52 PM

 For Shane and Thad,

for giving me

my own Quick Start

ffirs.indd vii 8/29/08 4:50:53 PM

 Copyright © 2009 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published by Pfeiffer
A Wiley Imprint
989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741 www.pfeiffer.com
Except as specifically noted below, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning,
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Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in
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Certain pages from this book are designed for use in a group setting and may be reproduced for educational/training
activities. These pages are designated by the appearance of the following copyright notice at the foot of the page:

The Consultant’s Quick Start Guide: An Action Plan for Your First Year in Business, Second Edition.
Copyright © 2009 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Reproduced by permission of Pfeiffer, an Imprint of
Wiley. www.pfeiffer.com

This notice must appear on all reproductions as printed.

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Pfeiffer also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be
available in electronic books.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Biech, Elaine.
The consultant’s quick start guide: an action plan for your first year in business / Elaine Biech.—2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-37231-9 (pbk.)
1. Consulting firms—Management. 2. Business consultants.
I. Title. II. Title: Quick start guide.
HD69.C6B5343 2009
001—dc22
2008029695

Acquiring Editor: Matthew Davis Production Editors: Michael Kay, Xenia Lisanevich
Director of Development: Kathleen Dolan Davies Editor: Beverly H. Miller
Developmental Editor: Susan Rachmeler Editorial Assistant: Lindsay Morton
Marketing Manager: Brian Grimm Manufacturing Supervisor: Becky Morgan
Printed in the United States of America
PB Printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ffirs.indd viii 8/29/08 4:50:53 PM

 Contents

Preface to the Second Edition xv

Acknowledgments xix

1 First Things First: Why Consulting? 1

Chapter Overview 1
Consulting: What Is It? 1
Why a Consulting Career? 3
Explore Your Experiences 4
Inventory Your Competencies 5
Assess Your Consulting Aptitude 8
Pull It Together: Your Initial Consulting Focus 10
Entrepreneur Attitude: Do You Have What It Takes? 12
Quick Start Action: A Baker’s Dozen Questions to
Ask a Consultant 16
Quick Start Lists 18

ix

ftoc.indd ix 8/29/08 5:24:54 PM

 2 Planning Your Consulting Future 19
Chapter Overview 19
Your Preferred Future 19
Will Consulting Lead You to Your Life Goals? 24
Professional, Financial, and Personal Considerations 29
Identify the Changes You Will Need to Make 33
Quick Start Action: Create Your Personal Expense Plan 34
Quick Start Lists 36

3 Dollars and Sense 37

Chapter Overview 37
Establish a Start-Up Budget 37
Put a Price on Your Head 43
Calculate Required Revenue 46
Quick Start Action: Setting Your Fee 52
Fill Out Financial Forms 53
So What’s It Take to Get off the Ground? 56
Quick Start Lists 58

4 Taking Care of Business 59

Chapter Overview 59
Getting Started 59
What’s in a Name? 60
Find the Best Accountant and Attorney 63
Quick Start Action: Find an Accountant and Attorney 65
Determine Your Business Structure 66

x C o n te n ts

ftoc.indd x 8/29/08 5:24:55 PM

 Explore Your Banking and Insurance Needs 76
Check Local Zoning Laws, Licenses, and Taxes 81
File Legal Documentation 82
Quick Start Action: Your First To-Do List 83
Quick Start Lists 85

5 Your Business Plan 87

Chapter Overview 87
Are Business Plans Really Necessary? 87
Write Your Plan 95
Plan to Use Your Business Plan 104
Quick Start Action: Plan a Review 105
Quick Start Lists 106

6 Make the Switch Painlessly 107

Chapter Overview 107
Gain Consulting Experience Before Leaving Your Job 107
Determine Your Transition Plan 111
Quick Start Action: Plan with Your Family 117
Quick Start Lists 119

7 Setting Up Your Office 121

Chapter Overview 121
Office Location Options 121
Set Up Your Office 125
Paper, Paper Everywhere! 128

C ontents xi

ftoc.indd xi 8/29/08 5:24:55 PM

 Quick Start Action: Preparing Forms 143
Quick Start Lists 144

8 Finding Clients 145

Chapter Overview 145
Determine Your Market Niche 145
Quick Start Action: Is There a Client Base? 150
Who’s Your Competition? 152
Identify Your First Clients 157
Land Your First Work 160
Quick Start Lists 168

9 Marketing 169
Chapter Overview 169
What Marketing Is 169
The ABCs of Marketing 170
Create Your Marketing Plan 171
Build Your Marketing Plan 175
Marketing on a Shoestring Budget 186
Write Winning Proposals 189
Track Your Clients 193
Tips to Become a Better Marketer 196
Quick Start Lists 197

10 Surviving the First Year 199

Chapter Overview 199
Take Care of Your Health 199

xii C o n te n ts

ftoc.indd xii 8/29/08 5:24:55 PM

 Manage Your Time 201
Establish Good Habits 205
Balance Your Life 206
Did You Hear the One About the Consultant . . . ?
Developing a Personal Ethics Statement 212
Quick Start Lists 213

11 So, Now What? Year Two and Beyond 215

Chapter Overview 215
Assess Your Progress 215
Quick Start Action: Review Your First Year with Your Family 218
Plan Your Next Steps 219
Bring It All Together 225
Quick Start Action: Review Your First Year with a Colleague 229
Quick Start Lists 230

Reading List 231

Electronic Resources 235

Call for Ideas 237

Call for Papers 239

About the Author 241

Index 243

C ontents xiii

ftoc.indd xiii 8/29/08 5:24:55 PM

ftoc.indd xiv 8/29/08 5:24:56 PM
 Preface to the Second
Edition

Why This Guide?

My recent book, Business of Consulting, Second Edition, provides readers with a
great deal of practical advice for establishing a consulting business. It ends with the
words, “Wish on paper, and it becomes a plan.” This book, The Consultant’s Quick
Start Guide, Second Edition, provides the paper that you may use for wishing.
The Consultant’s Quick Start Guide, Second Edition, can become your plan—
your blueprint for a consulting start-up. It includes questions to stimulate your
planning, worksheets to develop your plan, and ideas to keep you motivated and
moving forward.
The second edition of this book has been updated with statistics, dates, and
events related to consulting. New material has been added in several areas; there are
now questions for other consultants, advice on office location options (including
the option of no office at all), a list of electronic resources, and suggestions for a
discussion with your boss.

xv

fpref.indd Sec1:xv 8/29/08 5:23:12 PM

 Who Will Find This Guide Useful?
You will find this guide useful if you are thinking about trying your hand at becom-
ing a consultant. This guide walks you through several issues you must consider
in determining whether this profession is right for you. You will explore whether
you have the required skills and attributes to be a successful consultant. You will
rate yourself against other entrepreneurs. You will identify personal, professional,
and financial considerations necessary to ensure a quick start. And you will also
explore your preferred future to determine whether consulting will allow you to
achieve your professional and personal life goals.
You may also find this guide useful if you are new to the consulting profession
and want to upgrade your consulting business acumen. Perhaps you started your
practice but didn’t have time to develop a marketing plan. This guide presents ques-
tions for you to answer to create your marketing plan. New in the second edition
is an overview of the ABCs of marketing to put that task in perspective. Perhaps
you didn’t take the time to put together a business plan, and now you find yourself
heading in many directions at the same time and wondering whether there’s a bet-
ter way. The guide will walk you through the steps of developing a business plan.
Perhaps you thought consulting would lead to more control of your life, but instead
you find yourself drowning in paperwork and trying to balance a completely out-
of-control schedule. The guide shares tips, tactics, and tools to bring both your
paperwork and your schedule under control.
You will find this guide useful whether you have previously read The Business
of Consulting or not. If you have, you will be prepared for many of the activities,
assignments, and exercises you will complete in this book. And you will have read
the practical advice and the real-world examples that support them. If you have not
read The Business of Consulting, this condensed version provides a painless, fill-in-
the-blank, practical approach to setting up your consulting business. This guide will
take you through the highlights of establishing your consulting business. Neverthe-
less, you may still wish to purchase The Business of Consulting for a couple of rea-
sons. If you need some of the forms discussed in this guide, you will find them on
the CD that accompanies the other book. You may also want a more comprehensive
treatment of the topic. To purchase a copy, you can go to any bookstore; you may
order it from amazon.com; or you can purchase it directly from Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer
by calling 800/956–7739 or visiting the Web site at www.pfeiffer.com.

xvi P re fa c e to th e S e c o n d Edition

fpref.indd Sec1:xvi 8/29/08 5:23:12 PM

 How to Use This Guide
I encourage you to write directly in this book. Although you may need a note pad
to jot down some initial thoughts or to complete calculations, ample room has been
provided for you to write most of your permanent plan directly on the pages.
This book has been designed for you to begin with Chapter One and work in
order through the chapters to the end. Naturally you have your own unique needs,
so you may wish to pick and choose the chapters (as well as the activities) that seem
most pertinent to your situation. Of course, you will be the best prepared and most
assured of success if you work through the entire guide.
If you are contemplating the consulting profession, I encourage you to begin
with the activities in Chapters One and Two. They focus on planning your consult-
ing future and will help you determine whether consulting is truly for you. You may
also wish to work through those two chapters if you are already a consultant and
not enjoying it as much as you anticipated.
Chapters Three and Four are critical to ensure that you spend enough time
planning for a successful consulting practice. These chapters address business struc-
ture and revenue issues. Insurance has become more important since the first edi-
tion was published, so Chapter Four of the second edition has a list of questions
to guide discussions with potential insurance agents. You’ll also find an electronic
resource to help you unravel the insurance mystery.
Chapter Five will walk you through developing your business plan. If you are
already consulting and have skipped this step, it’s never too late to go back and plan
now. This guide’s easy-to-follow question format makes putting your thoughts and
ideas on paper as easy as possible.
Chapter Six is chock full of ideas for making the transition from an internal
job to external consulting as painless as possible. New in this second edition is a list
of suggestions for creating a discussion with your boss about your future plans.
Chapter Seven is all about your office: the whats, wheres, hows, and whys of
running an efficient office. Working out of your home may seem like the easiest
choice you have to make, but is it? Working out of your home has some definite
advantages; it also has some disadvantages. If you are consulting and have made a
decision about location, you may still want to read this chapter to determine
whether you’ve thought of everything. For example, this edition offers ideas about
planning for your technical requirements, such as electronic record keeping.

Prefac e to the Sec ond Edition xvii

fpref.indd Sec1:xvii 8/29/08 5:23:13 PM

 Chapters Eight and Nine focus on finding and acquiring clients. This infor-
mation is worth reading at any stage of your business—unless you already have
more work than you can handle. (And if that’s the case, you may want to read
Chapter Eight, “Growing Pains,” in The Business of Consulting.) Marketing is a lot
of common sense with a touch of creativity. Often simply reading someone else’s
ideas will remind you of what you knew all along but aren’t practicing. These chap-
ters will remind you again. This second edition includes a discussion of the kinds
of elements you should consider for your Web site.
Chapter Ten is a lifesaver—both figuratively and literally. Surviving your first
year of consulting is as much about the work you do as it is about the way you run
the business and the way you take care of yourself. There’s good advice here no
matter how long you’ve been in business.
Chapter Eleven helps you focus on year two. Although you will not actually
complete these exercises if you are just starting out, you may want to peek ahead to
see what you will be expected to assess about your progress. A few modifications in
the second edition to reviewing your first year with your family makes this chapter
well worth your time.
The material in this guide will no doubt stimulate other thoughts and ideas.
You may capture those thoughts at the end of each chapter on the Quick Start Lists.
Space is available for you to list the actions you’ll take based on what you read, the
ideas that were stimulated by the chapter, and the questions you need answered.
These lists summarize the actions you’ll need to take to move forward.
To assist other consultants in getting started, I will compile ideas and les-
sons learned from consultants around the world and publish them in an upcoming
Pfeiffer Consulting Annual or in a consultants’ tips book. If you are interested in
contributing, see the calls for submissions at the end of this book.
Now let’s see what we can do to get you off to a quick start.

xviii P re fa c e to th e S e c o n d Edition

fpref.indd Sec1:xviii 8/29/08 5:23:13 PM

 Acknowledgments

This book was “authored” by many wise and wonderful people, and I thank every-
one who pitched in.

• Matthew Davis, my editor, for trusting me to meet deadlines and for regu-
larly boosting my morale
• Cedric Crocker, my publisher, for wanting a second edition of this book for
the Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer family
• Susan Rachmeler, my developmental editor, for organizing, simplifying, sug-
gesting, adding, and deleting material and encouraging me in the process
• Lorraine Kohart, my assistant, for keeping the rest of the world at bay and
making up good excuses while I wrote
• Michael Kay and Xenia Lisanevich, production editors, for moving every-
thing along to ensure meeting a tight production schedule
• Mentors—all of you—for believing in me always: L. A. Burke, Vicki Chvala,
Linda Growney, Maggie Hutchison, Shirley Krsinich, Jean Lamkin, Mindy
Meads, Pam Schmidt, Judye Talbot, and Kathy Talton
• Clients, for allowing me to learn from you as we work together
October 2008 elaine biech
ebb associates inc
Norfolk, Virginia xix

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flast.indd Sec1:xx 8/29/08 5:24:12 PM
 First Things First:
Why Consulting?
1
In this chapter you will
• Define consulting
• Identify the experiences, skills, knowledge, and attributes that will
lead you to a successful consulting career
• Assess your consulting aptitude
• Identify your initial consulting focus
• Test your entrepreneurial attitude

Consulting: What Is It?

A consultant is someone who provides unique assistance or advice to someone else,
usually known as the client. The work is defined by the consultant’s expertise, the
structure in which the consultant works, and the process the consultant uses.
Expertise is based on what a consultant knows and has experienced. It can be any-
thing from gardening to the stock market; from astral projection to pig farming; from
organization development to preventing child abuse; from manufacturing to mining
emeralds. In his book Going Solo, William J. Bond (1997) identifies a list of 296 specialty
consulting fields. And his list does not include the eight I have listed in this paragraph.

c01.indd 1 8/29/08 4:53:27 PM

 The structure in which the consultant works can vary. You can work for a
firm, for example, one of the large worldwide accounting firms, all of which have
consulting branches. You could also work for a small or medium-size consulting
firm or with a partner in an office. Other possibilities are working in a virtual orga-
nization with a loosely structured relationship with other consultants across states
or even nations, working as a subcontractor to any of those I have listed, working
by yourself from a home office, or any of a dozen other structures.
The process a consultant uses usually is within one of the steps of problem
solving. For example, a consultant might help a client in these ways:

• Identify the problem: “Why aren’t our catalogue sales growing the way we
anticipated?” A consultant might identify the problem as wasteful use of
resources or a lack of repeat business.
• Identify the cause: “What is causing limited repeat business?” A consultant
might identify the cause as sales staff who are rewarded more for new than
repeat business or as employees with poor customer service skills.
• Identify the solution: “How do we ensure that our employees have the skills
they need?” A consultant might identify solutions such as hiring more highly
skilled employees, offering higher compensation to attract and retain skilled
employees, or using coaching to improve the customer service skills of cur-
rent employees.
• Implement the solution: “How can we improve our employees’ customer
service skills?” A consultant might help implement a solution by designing
and delivering customer service skills training, creating a mentoring pro-
gram that encourages on-the-job skill sharing, or establishing a monitored
customer call center that provides feedback to each employee.

To summarize, consultants’ expertise, the structure in which they work,

and the process they use define the work. And consultants’ experiences usually lead
them naturally to each of these three elements. Experience and education provide
the expertise that leads them to the field in which they specialize. Experience in
other organizations as well as the lifestyle a consultant chooses lead them to using
the right consulting structure. And experience also provides the consultant with the
process, usually based on what the consultant has used in past work or the process
the consultant’s company uses.

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 Why a Consulting Career?
No one should have to get up in the morning and go to work. Instead we should
all be able to get up and go to play. That is, we should enjoy our work so much that
it seems like play. Most of us, however, distinguish work (what we must do) from
play (what we’d rather be doing). Unfortunately, most of us get up and go to work
every morning and save what we’d rather be doing for later in the day or later in the
week. Consulting affords the opportunity for your work to be what you’d rather be
doing. How could that be? As a consultant you will have:

• The flexibility to determine when you work, where you work, with whom
you work, and what kind of work you do
• The opportunity to use the skills, experience, knowledge, and expertise that
you possess and enjoy using
• Control over how much money you will earn
• A chance to do more meaningful work, make a difference in the world,
address that greater calling that comes from within
• An opportunity to travel
• The challenge to do more complex, exciting, or difficult work, to learn
and grow
• The ability to live in a different location
Do any of these reasons resonate with you about why you would choose a consult-
ing career?
Unfortunately, even when people are given a chance to create the kind of work
they wish to pursue, they are sometimes unable to do so because there are so many
choices. This book will help you begin to narrow those choices by identifying your
experiences (opportunities for learning), your competencies (skills and knowledge),
and your aptitude (natural talents and personal qualities).
So why are you interested in a consulting career? In the next sections you will
explore the experiences, competencies, and attributes that will help define your
consulting role. Let’s begin by identifying the experiences you have had that would
lead you to pursue a consulting career.

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 Explore Your Experiences
To begin to narrow your consulting choices, examine the expertise you’ve gained
over the years. Although it’s sometimes difficult to name your own expertise, you
can easily identify experiences you’ve had. The skills and knowledge you’ve gained
from your experiences helps define your consulting role. (We will further explore
the structure you will consider in Chapter Four.)

Identify all the industries in which you have worked:

Identify all the volunteer experiences you’ve had:

Identify the organizational levels with which you have experience:

Rate your breadth and depth of experience:

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 Identify the experiences that were the most rewarding and enjoyable:

Identify the experiences that were the most negative and unpleasant and that you
wish to avoid in the future:

The experiences you’ve had provide you with a level of expertise for which clients
will pay. Later in this chapter, you will use the information you have filled in to
begin to identify your consulting focus.

Inventory Your Competencies

Everyone is very skilled or very knowledgeable about at least one thing. My plumber,
Owen, for example, is the most knowledgeable person I know about anything that
goes wrong with my plumbing. He can diagnose problems over the telephone and
is highly skilled at making a quick repair.
Identify the knowledge and information you have. For example, a computer
salesperson knows about sales and probably has also learned time management
skills; a nurse may have taken workshops and read several books to improve com-
munication skills.

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 List the things you do better than most other people:

List the things that colleagues, employers, friends, and family say that you do better
than most others:

Identify special classes, courses, or seminars you’ve taken:

List special certifications, licenses, credentials, or warrants you hold:

List the problem-solving processes in which you are competent—for example, team
building, process improvement, root cause analysis, brainstorming, force field anal-
ysis, flowcharting, or dialogue facilitating:

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 List things you know a lot about:

The skills and knowledge you already possess will help you define your consulting
role later in this chapter.

Skills and Knowledge Required of Consultants

From the following list, identify the skills and knowledge for which you require the
most improvement. Check the three or four that will make the greatest difference
as you begin your consulting role:

❏ Prospecting and marketing

❏ Diagnosing client needs
❏ Gathering data through interviews and surveys
❏ Improving processes
❏ Playing roles such as trusted adviser, change agent, or initiator
❏ Managing expectations
❏ Addressing resistance
❏ Managing and facilitating change
❏ Identifying mutual expectations
❏ Pricing projects
❏ Dealing with paperwork
❏ Analyzing business data

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 ❏ Designing materials
❏ Solving problems
❏ Building relationships
❏ Communicating with others
❏ Writing proposals and reports
❏ Conducting training
❏ Facilitating meetings
❏ Coaching managers
❏ Knowledge of intervention models
❏ Knowledge of processes

Identify how you might gain the skills and knowledge you need:

Continuing to gain skills and knowledge is an investment in yourself. Every time

you add to your knowledge base or increase your skills, you become more valuable
as a consultant.

Assess Your Consulting Aptitude

Malcolm Forbes, publisher of Forbes magazine, has been credited with saying, “Too
many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.” Consulting
takes a certain aptitude—those natural talents and personal qualities we all have.

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 It might be the ability to solve a problem methodically or the creative talent to see
the problem as a solution. Don’t underestimate your natural talents and abilities.
And if you know your weaknesses, also know that you can overcome them.

Are You a Match for the Profession?

Read the following statements. They identify the aptitude, natural talents, and per-
sonal qualities it takes to be a consultant. Check all with which you agree:

❏ I am a hard worker.
❏ I am in good health.
❏ I am a risk taker.
❏ I have a thick skin; being called a pest, “beltway bandit,” or con man does
not bother me.
❏ I am persistent.
❏ I am a big-picture person.
❏ I pay attention to details.
❏ I am an excellent communicator—oral and written.
❏ I can think critically.
❏ I am an independent self-starter.
❏ I can promote myself.
❏ I can balance logic and creativity, big picture and details.
❏ I know my limitations.
❏ I can say no easily.
❏ I am self-disciplined.
❏ I am confident.
❏ I am flexible.
❏ I am a goal setter.

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 ❏ I complete tasks.
❏ I am reliable and trustworthy.
❏ I like to work with people.

Although the number of statements you checked will not guarantee success
as a consultant, the statements you did not check point to challenges you will face as
a consultant.

Which natural talents and abilities need the most improvement and attention?

How will you adapt or acquire talents and aptitudes that aren’t natural for you?

Pull It Together: Your Initial

Consulting Focus
You have spent some time examining your experiences, your competencies, and
your natural aptitudes. Now translate that into what a client might buy:

What experiences do you possess for which a client would be willing to pay?

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 What skills and knowledge do you possess for which a client would be willing
to pay?

What natural talents and personal qualities do you possess for which a client would
be willing to pay?

To what aspects of the problem-solving process would you be likely to contribute:

identify the problem, identify the cause, identify the solution, or implement the
solution?

What can you offer that will benefit clients? Check the items on this list that fit you,
and then add several of your own.

❏ Diagnostic skills ❏ Listening skills

❏ Analytical skills ❏ Writing skills
❏ Research skills ❏ Organizational skills
❏ Investigative skills ❏ Change management experience
❏ Objectivity ❏ Flexibility
❏ Creativity ❏ New ideas
❏ Fast turnaround ❏ Meeting deadlines
❏ My publications ❏ My completed research
❏ My contacts ❏ My patents
❏ Knowledge ❏ Contacts with other experts

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 Experience with ___________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________

Expertise in _______________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________

Now take a first cut at describing your consulting work by completing the state-
ment below. Some examples follow.

I am a____________________________________________consultant who helps

my clients to _____________________________________________________ .
This benefits them _________________________________________________ .

Examples
“I am a process improvement consultant who helps my clients become more
efficient. This benefits them by reducing redundancy, increasing quality,
decreasing time spent, and reducing cost to the customer.”

“I am a Web design consultant who helps my clients define and design Web
sites. This benefits them by creating a professional-looking Web site in one-
tenth the time and at half the cost.”

Entrepreneur Attitude: Do You Have

What It Takes?
In addition to the experience, competencies, and aptitudes that make up your
expertise, you must realize that becoming a consultant means that you are joining
the entrepreneurial ranks. The Entrepreneur Attitude Survey shown here will tell
you whether you have what it takes to become an entrepreneur.

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 The Entrepreneur Attitude Survey

Instructions: Rate yourself on the following qualities. They represent the

thinking of several authors about the requirements of a successful business
owner. Spend ample time pondering these questions and answer honestly.
Rate yourself on a scale from 1 to 4 as follows:

1 = strongly disagree 3 = agree

2 = disagree 4 = strongly agree
Circle your answers
1. I usually try to take charge when I’m with others. 1 2 3 4
2. I can do anything I set my mind to. 1 2 3 4
3. I have a high tolerance for difficult situations. 1 2 3 4
4. I believe I can always influence results. 1 2 3 4
5. I am complimented on my ability to quickly
analyze complex situations. 1 2 3 4
6. I prefer working with a difficult but highly
competent person rather than a friendly,
less competent one. 1 2 3 4
7. I can fire employees who are not producing. 1 2 3 4
8. I’m willing to leave a high-paying, secure job
to start my own business. 1 2 3 4
9. I push myself to complete tasks. 1 2 3 4
10. I can work long hard hours when necessary. 1 2 3 4
11. I need to be the best at whatever I do. 1 2 3 4
12. I do not become frustrated easily. 1 2 3 4
13. I thrive on challenges. 1 2 3 4
14. I become bored easily with routine tasks. 1 2 3 4

(Continued)

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 15. I dislike being told what to do. 1 2 3 4

16. I have a higher energy level than most people. 1 2 3 4

17. I have held numerous leadership positions. 1 2 3 4

18. I have the skills and enjoy accomplishing a

complex task by myself. 1 2 3 4

19. I can change my course of action if something

is not working. 1 2 3 4

20. I am seen as a creative problem solver. 1 2 3 4

21. I can balance the big picture and details of a

business at the same time. 1 2 3 4

22. I can predict how actions today will affect

business tomorrow and in the future. 1 2 3 4

23. I need at least ____ hours of 1 = 8 hrs 2 = 7 hrs

sleep to function effectively. 3 = 6 hrs 4 = 5 or fewer hrs

24. I have at least ___ years of 1 = 1 yr 2 = 2 yrs

experience in the business 3 = 3 yrs 4 = 4 yrs
I will start.

25. Over the past three years 1 = 1–6 or more days 2 = 11–15 days
I have missed a total of ___ 3 = 6–10 days 4 = 0–5 days
days of work due to illness.

Scoring: Total the numbers you circled.

90 to 100 Go for it!
82 to 89 Good chance of success
74 to 81 Pretty risky
73 and below Better continue to collect a paycheck

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 Although this survey can give you a general picture of what it takes to be a
successful entrepreneur, only you can decide whether the move is right for you:

What did you learn about yourself?

What concerns you the most about being an entrepreneur?

What obstacles might you need to overcome? How will you do that?

What strengths will you parlay to your benefit? How will you do that?

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 Quick
TIP
If your score was not as high as you would have liked it to be, call your
local university or technical college to learn whether it offers classes in
entrepreneurship. Ask for the reading list and syllabus. If you decide you
do not wish to take such a course, you may at least want to read some
of the books from the reading list to bolster your knowledge about what
to expect.

Quick
Start AC T ION
A Baker’s Dozen Questions to Ask
a Consultant
Before you begin the next chapter, interview a consultant. Consider it your take-a-
consultant-to-lunch assignment. Gain as much information as you can about what it’s
like to be a consultant. Use the following list of questions to start (and I’m certain you
will come up with many others):

• How long have you been a consultant?

• How did you get started?
• Why did you decide to become a consultant?
• How would you describe your consulting practice and the business structure
you’ve selected?

• What do you do for clients?

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 • What’s a typical project like? A typical week?
• What are the work/life balance issues for a consultant, and how do you address
them?

• What marketing activities do you conduct?

• What’s the greatest challenge for you as a consultant? The most frustrating?
• What would you do differently if you could start your consulting practice over
again?

• How can I best prepare myself to become a consultant?

• What would you miss the most if you quit consulting?
• What should I have asked about that I didn’t?

After your interview, think about what you learned about consulting. How
has it reinforced or changed your thoughts about consulting?
Now that you have defined consulting and identified the experience, skills,
knowledge, and attributes that you have that will lead you to a successful consult-
ing career, you are ready to plan that career. Use the Quick Start Lists on the next
page to capture your thoughts before moving on to Chapter Two. You will find
Quick Start Lists at the end of each chapter. As you read future chapters and iden-
tify items you wish to remember, turn to the back of that chapter and record the
actions you want to take, the ideas you think of, and the questions for which you
want answers.

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 Quick Start L I S T S
Actions I Will Take

Ideas I Have

Questions I Have

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 Planning Your
Consulting Future
2
In this chapter you will
• Explore your preferred future
• Determine whether consulting will lead you to your professional
and personal life goals
• Identify personal, professional, and financial considerations to en-
sure a quick start
• Identify the changes you will need to make
• Create a personal expense plan

Your Preferred Future

Why do you wish to become a consultant? What is it about consulting that appeals
to you? How will consulting lead you to your preferred future? It is important to
explore why you want to become a consultant and in what ways you believe con-
sulting will lead you to your preferred future. You are about to become an entre-
preneur, and it is usually difficult to separate entrepreneurs from their businesses.
Therefore, a plan for your consulting business should begin with a plan for you
and your life. We touched on this in Chapter One. Now let’s continue by describing
your preferred future.

19

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 Describe Your Ideal Day
I remember working through this exercise twenty-two years ago in a two-week
career exploration workshop. My descriptions went something like this: “I awaken
naturally to the sound of the surf and smell of the early morning ocean breeze. I sip
a cup of gourmet coffee on the deck for half an hour as I skim the morning paper.
As inspiration overwhelms me, I move to my desk that overlooks the ocean to con-
tinue writing my latest novel. I am lost in the task and the time passes quickly until
2 p.m., when I stop for a walk along the beach. That evening I prepare for the client
with whom I will work the next day.”
At the time I was living on a dairy farm in the middle of Wisconsin with a
small income from my fledgling consulting practice and no writing experience.
I’m sure the people in the workshop with me were thinking, “Yeah, right! What
a dreamer.” Although I haven’t written any novels yet, I do have over four dozen
published books and articles to my credit, most written while gazing at the Atlantic
Ocean or Chesapeake Bay, on which I own property.

Describe Your Future

Take some time now to describe your preferred future:

Describe your ideal day. How does your day begin? How will you divide your time?
How does your day end?

Describe your surroundings. Where do you live? What do you see when you look
out your window? What kind of car do you drive?

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 Describe your perfect job. What are you doing? With whom? Where are you work-
ing? What do clients say about your work? What do colleagues say about you?

Describe the logistics more thoroughly. How much do you travel? Where? How
often? Who travels with you? What is your office like? Where is it? What’s the view
outside your office window?

Describe the results of your work. What honors or awards have you received?
What’s your annual salary? What profit does your business make? How much is in
your retirement account? Your savings account?

What do you do for pleasure daily, weekly, and annually? With whom? Where? For
what length of time? What hobbies have you tried?

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 What vacations have you taken?

What do you do when you’re alone? What are you reading? What are your day-
dreams?

What are your top five personal goals?

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

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 What are your top five professional goals?

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

What are your top three to five financial goals?

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

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 Will Consulting Lead You to Your Life Goals?
To determine whether consulting will help you reach your goals, you may begin by
ensuring that you know why you want to become a consultant.

Why Are You Considering Consulting?

You probably have many reasons for your choice. Examine the three categories
listed here and determine what part each plays in your decision. Think in terms of
percentage. Divide 100 percent among the three categories. For example, if you just
lost your job and consulting is the only answer you can see, you might rank “neces-
sity” as 100 percent. If you have always wanted to be your own boss and you see
an opportunity to consult in your present company, you might rank “personality”
as 70 percent and “opportunity” as 30 percent. Place a percentage in the blank in
front of each category that relates to your reasons.

_______ It’s a necessity: You need a way to make a living and believe consulting
offers that. Perhaps you prefer a 9-to-5 job but haven’t found one; you can’t find a
match to your expertise in your locale; your experience is too specialized for avail-
able jobs; you’re in a low-paying job and believe your expertise is worth more;
you’ve been downsized out of a job; you’ve been laid off or fired; you see the writing
on the wall and you need to take care of yourself; you’ve retired and want some-
thing to keep you busy; you want to pick up some extra cash, perhaps part time; or
other reasons that necessitate making money as a consultant. Generally the reason
is a desire for a job or the money that a job brings.

_______ You see an opportunity: You see a situation that you can exploit. Perhaps
your company uses consultants, and you know you could do what they do, make
more money, and work fewer days than you do now; you spot a trend in your field
that is creating great demand for someone with your experience and skills; you
have a special expertise for which there is a shortage; you have contacts, patents,
or published works that you think are more valuable in another venue; consulting
seems like an inexpensive and easy start-up; you want to travel; you want to live in
a different location and see consulting as a way to get you there; or you see other
unique options that could turn into business opportunities. Generally you could
continue to do the job you are doing now, but want to take the risk.

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 _______ Your personality demands it: You want to consult. You would rather have
your own business, no matter what the consequences. Perhaps you are disillusioned
with your current employer and know you could do it better yourself; big business
moves too slowly for you; you need a creative outlet; you want to make a differ-
ence and are not concerned about making as much money as you now make; you
want to be independent; you want freedom from the daily grind; you want to be
your own boss; you want to work on your own schedule in your chosen location;
or other reasons for which you cannot work for someone else any longer. Gener-
ally you want to control your own destiny no matter what the impact on your
lifestyle.

_______ Other reasons:

Your Responses and Things to Ponder

The reasons why you are considering a consulting career give you some things to
think about. If you rated “necessity” highest, chances are that you will not be in
consulting for very long. For some, consulting is just a temporary role until they
get a “real job.” You may not find that you have enough funds to satisfy both your
personal and business needs. This can be a strain on you, your family, and your con-
sulting business, making it difficult to persevere. Putting your personal savings and
assets on the line for the business will probably be uncomfortable for you.
If you rated “opportunity” highest, you probably also recognize how short
that opportunity may be. You will want to jump quickly to exploit it, but you must
first complete the planning that is required. Don’t put this book down until you
have completed the work through Chapter Five at least. Your business plan should
ensure that you have a focus on the future and help you to determine whether

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 demand is increasing, fading, or being taken over by others.
If you rated “personality” highest, you are competitive and will do almost
anything to ensure that your consulting business survives and then thrives. Your
business plan may change rapidly as you continue to see new directions you want
to go in. Don’t forget to tell those around you about your new directions. Although
you will work hard to be successful, be sure to allow time for the personal things in
your life as well.

What do you want from consulting? How will consulting support the preferred
future and lifestyle you identified earlier? Summarize what you have learned about
yourself and your desires for the future.

Your Goals and Consulting

Return to your lists of goals on pages 22 and 23 and rank-order all of the goals you
listed. List them in rank order below. Then specify how consulting will help or
hinder your ability to achieve each goal.

Rank/Goal
1.

Helps

Hinders

2.

Helps

Hinders

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 3.

Helps

Hinders

4.

Helps

Hinders

5.

Helps

Hinders

6.

Helps

Hinders

7.

Helps

Hinders

8.

Helps

Hinders

9.

Helps

Hinders

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 10.

Helps

Hinders

11.

Helps

Hinders

12.

Helps

Hinders

13.

Helps

Hinders

14.

Helps

Hinders

15.

Helps

Hinders

Examine your rank ordering and reasoning. Does consulting do more to help or
hinder you to achieve your goals? How do you feel about this?

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Other documents randomly have
different content
slug or the snail, and enables it to crawl like them, but still more
slowly, by a succession of adhesions. The locomotive powers of the
trilobite seem to have been little superior to those of the chiton. If
furnished with legs at all, it must have been with soft rudimentary
membranaceous legs, little fitted for walking with; and it seems quite
as probable, from the peculiarly shaped under margin of its shell,
formed, like that of the chiton, for adhering to flat surfaces, that, like
the slug and the snail, it was unfurnished with legs of any kind, and
crept on the abdomen. The vast conglomerations of trilobites for
which the Silurian rocks are remarkable, are regarded as further
evidence of a sedentary condition, Like Ostreæ, Chitones, and other
sedentary animals, they seemed to have adhered together in vast
clusters, trilobite over trilobite, in the hollows of submarine
precipices, or on the flat, muddy bottom below. And such were the
master existences of three of the four Silurian platforms, and of the
greater part of the fourth, if, indeed, we may not regard the
chambered molluscs, their contemporaries,—creatures with their
arms clustered round their heads, and with a nervous system
composed of a mere knotted cord,—as equally high in the scale. We
rise to the topmost layers of the system,—to an upper gallery of its
highest platform,—and find nature mightily in advance.
Another and superior order of existences had sprung into being
at the fiat of the Creator—creatures with the brain lodged in the
head, and the spinal cord enclosed in a vertebrated column. In the
period of the Upper Silurian, fish properly so called, and of very
perfect organization, had become denizens of the watery element,
and had taken precedence of the crustacean, as, at a period long
previous, the crustacean had taken precedence of the annelid. In
what form do these, the most ancient beings of their class, appear?
As cartilaginous fishes of the higher order. Some of them were
furnished with bony palates, and squat, firmly-based teeth, well
adapted for crushing the stone-cased zoöphytes and shells of the
period, fragments of which occur in their fœcal remains; some with
teeth that, like those of the fossil sharks of the later formations,
resemble lines of miniature pyramids, larger and smaller alternating;
some with teeth sharp, thin, and so deeply serrated that every
individual tooth resembles a row of poniards set upright against the
walls of an armory; and these last, says Agassiz, furnished with
weapons so murderous, must have been the pirates of the period.
Some had their fins guarded with long spines, hooked like the beak
of an eagle; some with spines of straighter and more slender form,
and ribbed and furrowed longitudinally like columns; some were
shielded by an armor of bony points; and some thickly covered with
glistening scales. If many ages must have passed ere fishes
appeared, there was assuredly no time required to elevate their
lower into their higher families. Judging, too, from this ancient
deposit, they seem to have been introduced, not by individuals and
pairs, but by whole myriads.
"Forthwith, the sounds and seas, each creek and bay,
With fry innumerable swarmed; and shoals
Of fish, that with their fins and shining scales
Glide under the green wave in plumps and sculls,
Banked the mid sea."
The fish-bed of the Upper Ludlow Rock abounds more in osseous
remains than an ancient burying-ground. The stratum, over wide
areas, seems an almost continuous layer of matted bones, jaws,
teeth, spines, scales, palatal plates, and shagreen-like prickles, all
massed together, and converted into a substance of so deep and
shining a jet color, that the bed, when "first discovered, conveyed
the impression," says Mr. Murchison, "that it enclosed a triturated
heap of black beetles." And such are the remains of what seem to
have been the first existing vertebrata. Thus, ere our history begins,
the existences of two great systems, the Cambrian and the Silurian,
had passed into extinction, with the exception of what seem a few
connecting links, exclusively molluscs, that are found in England to
pass from the higher beds of the Ludlow rocks into the Lower or
Tilestone beds of the Old Red Sandstone.[AZ] The exuviæ of at least
four platforms of being lay entombed furlong below furlong, amid
the gray, mouldering mudstones, the harder arenaceous beds, the
consolidated clays, and the concretionary limestones, that underlay
the ancient ocean of the Lower Old Red. The earth had already
become a vast sepulchre, to a depth beneath the bed of the sea
equal to at least twice the height of Ben Nevis over its surface.
[AZ] "Upwards of eight hundred extinct species of animals have been described
as belonging to the earliest, or Protozoic and Silurian period, and of these only
about one hundred are found also in the overlying Devonian series; while but
fifteen are common to the whole Palæozoic period, and not one extends beyond
it."—(M. de Verneuil and Count D'Archiac, quoted by Mr. D. T. Ansted. 1844.)

The first scene in the Tempest opens amid the confusion and
turmoil of the hurricane—amid thunders and lightnings, the roar of
the wind, the shouts of the seamen, the rattling of cordage, and the
wild dash of the billows. The history of the period represented by
the Old Red Sandstone seems, in what now forms the northern half
of Scotland, to have opened in a similar manner. The finely-
laminated lower Tilestones of England were deposited evidently in a
calm sea. During the contemporary period in our own country, the
vast space which now includes Orkney and Loch Ness, Dingwall, and
Gamrie, and many a thousand square mile besides, was the scene of
a shallow ocean, perplexed by powerful currents, and agitated by
waves. A vast stratum of water-rolled pebbles, varying in depth from
a hundred feet to a hundred yards, remains in a thousand different
localities, to testify of the disturbing agencies of this time of
commotion. The hardest masses which the stratum encloses,—
porphyries of vitreous fracture that cut glass as readily as flint, and
masses of quartz that strike fire quite as profusely from steel,—are
yet polished and ground down into bullet-like forms, not an angular
fragment appearing in some parts of the mass for yards together.
The debris of our harder rocks rolled for centuries in the beds of our
more impetuous rivers, or tossed for ages along our more exposed
and precipitous sea-shores, could not present less equivocally the
marks of violent and prolonged attrition than the pebbles of this bed.
And yet it is surely difficult to conceive how the bottom of any sea
should have been so violently and so equally agitated for so greatly
extended a space as that which intervenes between Mealforvony in
Inverness-shire and Pomona in Orkney in one direction, and
between Applecross and Trouphead in another—and for a period so
prolonged, that the entire area should have come to be covered with
a stratum of rolled pebbles of almost every variety of ancient rock,
fifteen stories' height in thickness. The very variety of its contents
shows that the period must have been prolonged. A sudden flood
sweeps away with it the accumulated debris of a range of
mountains; but to blend together, in equal mixture, the debris of
many such ranges, as well as to grind down their roughnesses and
angularities, and fill up the interstices with the sand and gravel
produced in the process, must be a work of time. I have examined
with much interest, in various localities, the fragments of ancient
rock inclosed in this formation. Many of them are no longer to be
found in situ, and the group is essentially different from that
presented by the more modern gravels. On the shores of the Frith of
Cromarty, for instance, by far the most abundant pebbles are of a
blue schistose gneiss: fragments of gray granite and white quartz
are also common; and the sea-shore at half ebb presents at a short
distance the appearance of a long belt of bluish gray, from the color
of the prevailing stones which compose it. The prevailing color of the
conglomerate of the district, on the contrary, is a deep red. It
contains pebbles of small-grained, red granite, red quartz rock, red
feldspar, red porphyry, an impure red jasper, red hornstone, and a
red granitic gneiss, identical with the well-marked gneiss of the
neighboring Sutors. This last is the only rock now found in the
district, of which fragments occur in the conglomerate. It must have
been exposed at the time to the action of the waves, though
afterwards buried deep under succeeding formations, until again
thrust to the surface by some great internal convulsion, of a date
comparatively recent.[BA]
[BA] The vast beds of unconsolidated gravel with which one of the later
geological revolutions has half filled some of our northern valleys, and covered the
slopes of the adjacent hills, present, in a few localities, appearances somewhat
analogous to those exhibited by this ancient formation. There are uncemented
accumulations of water-rolled pebbles, in the neighborhood of Inverness, from
ninety to a hundred feet in thickness. But this stratum, unlike the more ancient
one, wanted continuity. It must have been accumulated, too, under the operation
of more partial, though immensely more powerful agencies. There is a mediocrity
of size in the enclosed fragments of the old conglomerate, which gives evidence of
a mediocrity of power in the transporting agent. In the upper gravels, on the
contrary, one of the agents could convey from vast distances blocks of stone
eighty and a hundred tons in weight. A new cause of tremendous energy had
come into operation in the geological world.

The period of this shallow and stormy ocean passed. The bottom,
composed of the identical conglomerate which now forms the
summit of some of our loftiest mountains, sank throughout its wide
area to a depth so profound as to be little affected by tides or
tempests. During this second period there took place a vast deposit
of coarse sandstone strata, with here and there a few thin beds of
rolled pebbles. The general subsidence of the bottom still continued,
and, after a deposit of full ninety feet had overlain the conglomerate,
the depth became still more profound than at first. A fine, semi-
calcareous, semi-aluminous deposition took place in waters perfectly
undisturbed. And here we first find proof that this ancient ocean
literally swarmed with life—that its bottom was covered with
miniature forests of algæ, and its waters darkened by immense
shoals of fish.
In middle autumn, at the close of the herring season, when the
fish have just spawned, and the congregated masses are breaking
up on shallow and skerry, and dispersing by myriads over the deeper
seas, they rise at times to the surface by a movement so
simultaneous, that for miles and miles around the skiff of the
fisherman nothing may be seen but the bright glitter of scales, as if
the entire face of the deep were a blue robe spangled with silver. I
have watched them at sunrise at such seasons on the middle of the
Moray Frith, when, far as the eye could reach, the surface has been
ruffled by the splash of fins, as if a light breeze swept over it, and
the red light has flashed in gleams of an instant on the millions and
tens of millions that were leaping around me, a handbreadth into the
air, thick as hail-stones in a thunder-shower. The amazing amount of
life which the scene included, has imparted to it an indescribable
interest. On most occasions the inhabitants of ocean are seen but by
scores and hundreds; for in looking down into their green twilight
haunts, we find the view bounded by a few yards, or at most a few
fathoms; and we can but calculate on the unseen myriads of the
surrounding expanse by the seen few that occupy the narrow space
visible. Here, however, it was not the few, but the myriads, that
were seen—the innumerable and inconceivable whole—all palpable
to the sight as a flock on a hill-side; or, at least, if all was not
palpable, it was only because sense has its limits in the lighter as
well as in the denser medium—that the multitudinous distracts it,
and the distant eludes it, and the far horizon bounds it. If the scene
spoke not of infinity in the sense in which Deity comprehends it, it
spoke of it in at least the only sense in which man can comprehend
it.
Now, we are much in the habit of thinking of such amazing
multiplicity of being—when we think of it at all—with reference to
but the later times of the world's history. We think of the remote
past as a time of comparative solitude. We forget that the now
uninhabited desert was once a populous city. Is the reader prepared
to realize, in connection with the Lower Old Red Sandstone—the
second period of vertebrated existence—scenes as amazingly fertile
in life as the scene just described—oceans as thoroughly occupied
with being as our friths and estuaries when the herrings congregate
most abundantly on our coasts? There are evidences too sure to be
disputed that such must have been the case. I have seen the
ichthyolite beds, where washed bare in the line of the strata, as
thickly covered with oblong, spindle-shaped nodules as I have ever
seen a fishing bank covered with herrings; and have ascertained that
every individual nodule had its nucleus of animal matter—that it was
a stone coffin in miniature, holding enclosed its organic mass of
bitumen or bone—its winged, or enamelled, or thorn-covered
ichthyolite.
At this period of our history, some terrible catastrophe involved in
sudden destruction the fish of an area at least a hundred miles from
boundary to boundary, perhaps much more. The same platform in
Orkney as at Cromarty is strewed thick with remains, which exhibit
unequivocally the marks of violent death. The figures are contorted,
contracted, curved; the tail in many instances is bent round to the
head; the spines stick out; the fins are spread to the full, as in fish
that die in convulsions. The Pterichthys shows its arms extended at
their stiffest angle, as if prepared for an enemy. The attitudes of all
the ichthyolites on this platform are attitudes of fear, anger, and
pain. The remains, too, appear to have suffered nothing from the
after attacks of predaceous fishes; none such seem to have
survived. The record is one of destruction at once widely spread and
total, so far as it extended. There are proofs that, whatever may
have been the cause of the catastrophe, it must have taken place in
a sea unusually still. The scales, when scattered by some slight
undulation, are scattered to the distance of only a few inches, and
still exhibit their enamel entire, and their peculiar fineness of edge.
The spines, even when separated, retain their original needle-like
sharpness of point. Rays, well nigh as slender as horse-hairs, are
enclosed unbroken in the mass. Whole ichthyolites occur, in which
not only all the parts survive, but even the expression which the stiff
and threatening attitude conveyed when the last struggle was over.
Destruction must have come in the calm, and it must have been of a
kind by which the calm was nothing disturbed. In what could it have
originated? By what quiet but potent agency of destruction were the
innumerable existences of an area perhaps ten thousand square
miles in extent annihilated at once, and yet the medium in which
they had lived left undisturbed by its operations? Conjecture lacks
footing in grappling with the enigma, and expatiates in uncertainty
over all the known phenomena of death. Diseases of mysterious
origin break out at times in the animal kingdom, and well nigh
exterminate the tribes on which they fall. The present generation
has seen a hundred millions of the human family swept away by a
disease unknown to our fathers. Virgil describes the fatal murrain
that once depopulated the Alps, not more as a poet than as a
historian. The shell-fish of the rivers of North America died in such
vast abundance during a year of the present century, that the
animals, washed out of their shells, lay rotting in masses beside the
banks, infecting the very air. About the close of the last century, the
haddock well nigh disappeared, for several seasons together, from
the eastern coasts of Scotland; and it is related by Creech, that a
Scotch shipmaster of the period sailed for several leagues on the
coast of Norway, about the time the scarcity began, through a
floating shoal of dead haddocks.[BB]
[BB] I have heard elderly fishermen of the Moray Frith state, in connection with
what they used to term "the haddock dearth" of this period, that, for several
weeks ere the fish entirely disappeared, they acquired an extremely disagreeable
taste, as if they had been boiled in tobacco juice, and became unfit for the table.
For the three following years they were extremely rare on the coast, and several
years more elapsed ere they were caught in the usual abundance. The fact related
by Creech, a very curious one, I subjoin in his own words; it occurs in his third
Letter to Sir John Sinclair: "On Friday, the 4th December, 1789, the ship Brothers,
Captain Stewart, arrived at Leith from Archangel, who reported that, on the coast
of Lapland and Norway, he sailed many leagues through immense quantities of
dead haddocks floating on the sea. He spoke several English ships, who reported
the same fact. It is certain that haddocks, which was the fish in the greatest
abundance in the Edinburgh market, have scarcely been seen there these three
years. In February, 1790, three haddocks were brought to market, which, from
their scarcity, sold for 7s. 6d."
The dead haddocks seen by the Leith shipmaster were floating by thousands;
and most of their congeners among what fishermen term "the white fish," such as
cod, ling, and whiting, also float when dead; whereas the bodies of fish whose
bowels and air-bladders are comparatively small and tender, lie at the bottom. The
herring fisherman, if the fish die in his nets, finds it no easy matter to buoy them
up; and if the shoal entangled be a large one, he fails at times, from the great
weight, in recovering them at all, losing both nets and herrings. Now, if a
corresponding difference obtained among fish of the extinct period—if some rose
to the surface when they died, while others remained at the bottom—we must, of
course, expect to find their remains in very different degrees of preservation—to
find only scattered fragments of the floaters, while of the others many may occur
comparatively entire. Even should they have died on the same beds, too, we may
discover their remains separated by hundreds of miles. The haddocks that
disappeared from the coast of Britain were found floating in shoals on the coasts
of Norway. The remains of an immense body of herrings, that weighed down, a
few seasons since, the nets of a crew of fishermen, in a muddy hollow of the
Moray Frith, and defied the utmost exertions of three crews united to weigh them
from the bottom, are, I doubt not, in the muddy hollow still. On a principle thus
obvious it may be deemed not improbable that the ichthyolites of the Lower Old
Red Sandstone might have had numerous contemporaries, of which, unless in
some instances the same accident which killed also entombed them, we can know
nothing in their character as such, and whose broken fragments may yet be found
in some other locality, where they may be regarded as characteristic of a different
formation.

But the ravages of no such disease, however extensive, could

well account for some of the phenomena of this platform of death. It
is rarely that disease falls equally on many different tribes at once,
and never does it fall with instantaneous, suddenness; whereas in
the ruin of this platform from ten to twelve distinct genera seem to
have been equally involved; and so suddenly did it perform its work,
that its victims were fixed in their first attitude of terror and surprise.
I have observed, too, that groups of adjoining nodules are charged
frequently with fragments of the same variety of ichthyolite; and the
circumstance seems fraught with evidence regarding both the
original habits of the creatures, and the instantaneous suddenness
of the destruction by which they were overtaken. They seem, like
many of our existing fish, to have been gregarious, and to have
perished together ere their crowds had time to break up and
disperse.
Fish, have been found floating dead in shoals beside submarine
volcanoes—killed either by the heated water, or by mephitic gases.
There are, however, no marks of volcanic activity in connection with
the ichthyolite beds—no marks, at least, which belong to nearly the
same age with the fossils. The disturbing granite of the neighboring
eminences was not upheaved until after the times of the Oolite. But
the volcano, if such was the destroying agent, might have been
distant; nay, from some of the points in an area of such immense
extent, it must have been distant. The beds abound, as has been
said, in lime; and the thought has often struck me that calcined lime,
cast out as ashes from some distant crater, and carried by the winds,
might have been the cause of the widely-spread destruction to which
their organisms testify. I have seen the fish of a small trouting
stream, over which a bridge was in the course of building, destroyed
in a single hour, for a full mile below the erection, by the few
troughfuls of lime that fell into the water when the centring was
removed.
 CHAPTER XIII.
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 Pest orations of the Geologist void of Color.—Very different
Appearance of the Ichthyolites of Cromarty and Moray.

The period of death passed, and over the innumerable dead there
settled a soft, muddy sediment, that hid them from the light,
bestowing upon them such burial as a November snow-storm
bestows on the sere and blighted vegetation of the previous summer
and autumn. For an unknown space of time, represented in the
formation by a deposit about fifty feet in thickness, the waters of the
depopulated area seem to have remained devoid of animal life. A
few scales and plates then begin to appear. The fish that had existed
outside the chasm seem to have gradually gained upon it, as their
numbers increased, just as the European settlers of America have
been gaining on the backwoods, and making themselves homes
amid the burial-mounds of a race extinct for centuries. For a
lengthened period, however, these finny settlers must have been
comparatively few—mere squatters in the waste. In the beds of
stratified clay in which their remains first occur, over what we may
term the densely crowded platform of violent death, the explorer
may labor for hours together without finding a single scale.
It is worthy of remark, however, that this upper bed abounds
quite as much in the peculiar vegetable impressions of the formation
as the lower platform itself. An abundance equally great occurs in
some localities only a few inches over the line of the exterminating
catastrophe. Thickets of exactly the same algæ, amid which the fish
of the formation had sheltered when living, grew luxuriantly over
their graves when dead. The agencies of destruction which
annihilated the animal life of so extended an area, spared its
vegetation; just as the identical forests that had waved over the
semi-civilized aborigines of North America continued to wave over
the more savage red men, their successors, long after the original
race had been exterminated. The inference deducible from the fact,
though sufficiently simple, seems in a geological point of view a not
unimportant one. The flora of a system may long survive its fauna;
so that that may be but one formation, regarded with reference to
plants, which may be two or more formations, regarded with
reference to animals. No instance of any such phenomenon occurs in
the later geological periods. The changes in animal and vegetable
life appear to have run parallel to each other from the times of the
tertiary formations down to those of the coal; but in the earlier
deposits the case must have been different. The animal organisms of
the newer Silurian strata form essentially different groups from those
of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, and both differ from those of the
Cornstone divisions; and yet the greater portion of their vegetable
remains seem the same. The stem-like impressions of the fucoid bed
of the Upper Ludlow Rocks cannot be distinguished from those of
the ichthyolite beds of Cromarty and Ross, nor these again from the
impressions of the Arbroath pavement, or the Den of Balruddery.
Nor is there much difficulty in conceiving how the vegetation of a
formation should come to survive its animals. What is fraught with
health to the existences of the vegetable kingdom, is in many
instances a deadly poison to those of the animal. The grasses and
water-lilies of the neighborhood of Naples flourish luxuriantly amid
the carbonic acid gas which rests so densely over the pools and
runnels out of which they spring, that the bird stoops to drink, and
falls dead into the water. The lime that destroys the reptiles, fish,
and insects of a thickly inhabited lake or stream, injures not a single
flag or bulrush among the millions that line its edges. The two
kingdoms exist under laws of life and death so essentially dissimilar,
that it has become one of the common-places of poetry to indicate
the blight and decline of the tribes of the one by the unwonted
luxuriancy of the productions of the other. Otway tells us, in
describing the horrors of the plague which almost depopulated
London, that the "destroying angel stretched his arm" over the city,
"Till in th' untrodden streets unwholesome grass
Grew of great stalk, and color gross,
A melancholic poisonous green."
The work of deposition went on; a bed of pale yellow saliferous
sandstone settled, tier over tier, on a bed of stratified clay, and was
itself overlaid by another bed of stratified clay in turn. And this upper
bed had also its organisms. The remains of its sea-weed still spread
out thick and dark amid the foldings of the strata, and occasionally
its clusters of detached scales. But the circumstances were less
favorable to the preservation of entire ichthyolites than those under
which the organisms of the lower platform were wrapped up in their
stony coverings. The matrix, which is more micaceous than the
other, seems to have been less conservative, and the waters were
probably less still. The process went on. Age succeeded age, and
one stratum covered up another. Generations lived, died, and were
entombed in the ever-growing depositions. Succeeding generations
pursued their instincts by myriads, happy in existence, over the
surface which covered the broken and perishing remains of their
predecessors, and then died and were entombed in turn, leaving a
higher platform, and a similar destiny to the generations that
succeeded. Whole races became extinct, through what process of
destruction who can tell? Other races sprang into existence through
that adorable power which One only can conceive, and One only can
exert. An inexhaustible variety of design expatiated freely within the
limits of the ancient type. The main conditions remained the same—
the minor details were dissimilar. Vast periods passed; a class low in
the scale still continued to furnish the master existences of creation;
and so immensely extended was the term of its sovereignty, that a
being of limited faculties, if such could have existed uncreated, and
witnessed the whole, would have inferred that the power of the
Creator had reached its extreme boundary, when fishes had been
called into existence, and that our planet was destined to be the
dwelling-place of no nobler inhabitants. If there be men dignified by
the name of philosophers, who can hold that the present state of
being, with all its moral evil, and all its physical suffering, is to be
succeeded by no better and happier state, just because "all things
have continued as they were" for some five or six thousand years,
how much sounder and more conclusive would the inference have
been which could have been based, as in the supposed case, on a
period perhaps a hundred times more extended?
There exist wonderful analogies in nature between the geological
history of the vertebrated animals as an order, and the individual
history of every mammifer—between the history, too, of fish as a
class, and that of every single fish. "It has been found by
Tiedemann," says Mr. Lyell, "that the brain of the fœtus in the higher
class of vertebrated animals assumes in succession the various forms
which belong to fishes, reptiles, and birds, before it acquires those
additions and modifications which are peculiar to the mammiferous
tribes." "In examining the brain of the mammalia," says M. Serres,
"at an early stage of life, you perceive the cerebral hemispheres
consolidated, as in fish, in two vesicles isolated one from the other;
at a later period you see them affect the configuration of the
cerebral hemispheres of reptiles; still later, again, they present you
with the forms of those of birds; and finally, at the era of birth, the
permanent forms which the adult mammalia present." And such
seems to have been the history of the vertebrata as an order, as
certainly as that of the individual mammifer. The fish preceded the
reptile in the order of creation, just as the crustacean had preceded
the fish, and the annelid the crustacean. Again, though the fact be
somewhat more obscure, the reptile seems to have preceded the
bird. We find, however, unequivocal traces of the feathered tribes in
well-marked foot-prints impressed on a sandstone in North America,
at most not more modern than the Lias, but which is generally
supposed to be of the same age with the New Red Sandstone of
Germany and our own country. In the Oolite—at least one, perhaps
two formations later—the bones of the two species of mammiferous
quadrupeds have been found, apparently of the marsupial family;
and these, says Mr. Lyell, afford the only example yet known of
terrestrial mammalia in rocks of a date anterior to the older tertiary
formations. The reptile seems to have preceded the bird, and the
bird the mammiferous animal. Thus the fœtal history of the nervous
system in the individual mammifer seems typical, in every stage of
its progress, of the history of the grand division at the head of which
the mammifer stands. Agassiz, at the late meeting of the British
Association in Glasgow, mentioned an analogous fact. After
describing the one-sided tail of the more ancient fish, especially the
fish of the Old Red Sandstone,—the subjects of his illustration at the
time,—he stated, as the result of a recent discovery, that the young
of the salmon in their fœtal state exhibit the same unequally-sided
condition of tail which characterizes those existences of the earlier
ages of the world. The individual fish, just as it begins to exist,
presents the identical appearances which were exhibited by the
order when the order began to exist. Is there nothing wonderful in
analogies such as these—analogies that point through the embryos
of the present time to the womb of Nature, big with its
multitudinous forms of being? Are they charged with no such nice
evidence as a Butler would delight to contemplate, regarding that
unique style of Deity, if I may so express myself, which runs through
all his works, whether we consider him as God of Nature, or Author
of Revelation? In this style of type and symbol did He reveal himself
of old to his chosen people; in this style of allegory and parable did
He again address himself to them, when he sojourned among them
on earth.
The chemistry of the formation seems scarce inferior in interest
to its zoology; but the chemist had still much to do for Geology, and
the processes are but imperfectly known. There is no field in which
more laurels await the philosophical chemist than the geological one.
I have said that all the calcareous nodules of the ichthyolite beds
seem to have had originally their nucleus of organic matter. In nine
cases out of ten the organism can be distinctly traced; and in the
tenth there is almost always something to indicate where it lay—an
elliptical patch of black, or an oblong spot, from which the prevailing
color of the stone has been discharged, and a lighter hue
substituted. Is the reader acquainted with Mr. Pepys's accidental
experiment, as related by Mr. Lyell, and recorded in the first volume
of the Geological Transactions? It affords an interesting proof that
animal matter, in a state of putrefaction, proves a powerful agent in
the decomposition of mineral substances held in solution, and of
their consequent precipitation. An earthen pitcher, containing several
quarts of sulphate of iron, had been suffered to remain undisturbed
and unexamined in a corner of Mr. Pepys's laboratory for about a
twelvemonth. Some luckless mice had meanwhile fallen into it, and
been drowned; and when it at length came to be examined, an oily
scum, and a yellow, sulphureous powder, mixed with hairs, were
seen floating on the top, and the bones of the mice discovered lying
at the bottom; and it was found, that over the decaying bodies the
mineral components of the fluid had been separated and
precipitated in a dark-colored sediment, consisting of grains of
pyrites and of sulphur, of copperas in its green and crystalline form,
and of black oxide of iron. The animal and mineral matters had
mutually acted upon one another; and the metallic sulphate,
deprived of its oxygen in the process, had thus cast down its
ingredients. It would seem that over the putrefying bodies of the fish
of the Lower Old Red Sandstone the water had deposited, in like
manner, the lime with which it was charged; and hence the
calcareous nodules in which we find their remains enclosed. The
form of the nodule almost invariably agrees with that of the
ichthyolite within; it is a coffin in the ancient Egyptian style. Was the
ichthyolite twisted half round in the contorted attitude of violent
death? the nodule has also its twist. Did it retain its natural posture?
the nodule presents the corresponding spindle form. Was it broken
up, and the outline destroyed? the nodule is flattened and shapeless.
In almost every instance the form of the organism seems to have
regulated that of the stone. We may trace, in many of these
concretionary masses, the operations of three distinct principles, all
of which must have been in activity at one and the same time. They
are wrapped concentrically each round its organism: they split
readily in the line of the enclosing stratum, and are marked by its
alternating rectilinear bars of lighter and darker color; and they are
radiated from the centre to the circumference. Their concentric
condition shows the chemical influences of the decaying animal
matter; their fissile character and parallel layers of color indicate the
general deposition which was taking place at the time; and their
radiated structure testifies to that law of crystalline attraction,
through which, by a wonderful masonry, the invisible but well-cut
atoms build up their cubes, their rhombs, their hexagons, and their
pyramids, and are at once the architects and the materials of the
structure which they rear.
Another and very different chemical effect of organic matter may
be remarked in the darker colored arenaceous deposits of the
formation, and occasionally in the stratified clays and nodules of the
ichthyolite bed. In a print-work, the whole web is frequently thrown
into the vat and dyed of one color; but there afterwards comes a
discharging process: some chemical mixture is dropped on the
fabric; the dye disappears wherever the mixture touches; and in
leaves, and sprigs, and patches, according to the printer's pattern,
the cloth assumes its original white. Now the colored deposits of the
Old Red Sandstone have, in like manner, been subjected to a
discharging process. The dye has disappeared in oblong or circular
patches of various sizes, from the eighth of an inch to a foot in
diameter; the original white has taken its place; and so thickly are
these speckles grouped in some of the darker-tinted beds, that the
surfaces, where washed by the sea, present the appearance of
sheets of calico. The discharging agent was organic matter; the
uncolored patches are no mere surface films, for, when cut at right
angles, their depth is found to correspond with their breadth, the
circle is a sphere, the ellipsis forms the section of an egg-shaped
body, and in the centre of each we generally find traces of the
organism in whose decay it originated. I have repeatedly found
single scales, in the ichthyolite beds, surrounded by uncolored
spheres about the size of musket bullets. It is well for the young
geologist carefully to mark such appearances—to trace them through
the various instances in which the organism may be recognized and
identified, to those in which its last vestiges have disappeared. They
are the hatchments of the geological world, and indicate that life
once existed where all other record of it has perished.[BC]
[BC] Some of the clay-slates of the primary formations abound in these
circular, uncolored patches, bearing in their centres, like the patches of the Old
Red Sandstone, half obliterated nuclei of black. Were they, too, once fossiliferous?
and do these blank erasures remain to testify to the fact? I find the organic origin
of the patches in the Old Red Sandstone remarked by Professor Fleming as early
as the year 1830, and the remark reiterated by Dr. Anderson, of Newburgh, in
nearly the same words, but with no acknowledgment, ten years later. The
following is the minute and singularly faithful description of the Professor:—
"On the surface of the strata in the lower beds, circular spots, nearly a foot in
diameter, may be readily perceived by their pale yellow colors, contrasted with the
dark red of the surrounding rock. These spots, however, are not, as may at first be
supposed, mere superficial films, but derive their circular form from a colored
sphere to which they belong. This sphere is not to be distinguished from the rest
of the bed by any difference in mechanical structure, but merely by the absence of
much of that oxide of iron with which the other portion of the mass is charged.
The circumference of this colored sphere is usually well defined; and at its centre
may always be observed matter of a darker color, in some cases disposed in
concentric layers, in others of calcareous and crystalline matter, the remains
probably of some vegetable or animal organism, the decomposition of which
exercised a limited influence on the coloring matter of the surrounding rock. In
some cases I have observed these spheres slightly compressed at opposite sides,
in a direction parallel with the plane of stratification—the result, without doubt, of
the subsidence or contraction of the mass, after the central matter or nucleus had
ceased to exercise its influence."—(Cheek's Edinburgh Journal, Feb. 1831, p. 82.)

It is the part of the chemist to tell us by what peculiar action of

the organic matter the dye was discharged in these spots and
patches. But how was the dye itself procured? From what source
was the immense amount of iron derived, which gives to nearly five
sixths of the Old Red Sandstone the characteristic color to which it
owes its name? An examination of its lowest member, the great
conglomerate, suggests a solution of the query. I have adverted to
the large proportion of red-colored pebbles which this member
contains, and, among the rest, to a red granitic gneiss, which must
have been exposed over wide areas at the time of its deposition, and
which, after the lapse of a period which extended from at least the
times of the Lower Old Red to those of the Upper Oolite, was again
thrust upwards to the surface, to form the rectilinear chain of
precipitous eminences to which the hills of Cromarty and of Nigg
belong. This rock is now almost the sole representative, in the north
of Scotland, of the ancient rocks whence the materials of the Old
Red Sandstone were derived. It abounds in hæmatic iron ore,
diffused as a component of the stone throughout the entire mass,
and which also occurs in it in ponderous insulated blocks of great
richness, and in thin, thread-like veins. When ground down, it forms
a deep red pigment, undistinguishable in tint from the prevailing
color of the sandstone, and which leaves a stain so difficult to be
effaced, that shepherds employ it in some parts of the Highlands for
marking their sheep. Every rawer fragment of the rock bears its
hæmatic tinge; and were the whole ground by some mechanical
process into sand, and again consolidated, the produce of the
experiment would be undoubtedly a deep red sandstone. In an
upper member of the lower formation—that immediately over the
ichthyolite beds—different materials seem to have been employed. A
white, quartzy sand and a pale-colored clay form the chief
ingredients; and though the ochry-tinted coloring matter be also
iron, it is iron existing in a different condition, and in a more diluted
form. The oxide deposited by the chalybeate springs which pass
through the lower members of the formation, would give to white
sand a tinge exactly resembling the tint borne by this upper member.
The passage of metals from lower to higher formations, and from
one combination to another, constitutes surely a highly interesting
subject of inquiry. The transmission of iron in a chemical form,
through chalybeate springs, from deposits in which it had been
diffused in a form merely mechanical, is of itself curious; but how
much more so its passage and subsequent accumulation, as in bog-
iron and the iron of the Coal Measures, through the agency of
vegetation! How strange, if the steel axe of the woodman should
have once formed part of an ancient forest!—if, after first existing as
a solid mass in a primary rock, it should next have come to be
diffused as a red pigment in a transition conglomerate—then as a
brown oxide in a chalybeate spring—then as a yellowish ochre in a
secondary sandstone—then as a component part in the stems and
twigs of a thick forest of arboraceous plants—then again as an iron
carbonate, slowly accumulating at the bottom of a morass of the
Coal Measures—then as a layer of indurated bands and nodules of
brown ore, underlying a seam of coal—and then, finally, that it
should have been dug out, and smelted, and fashioned, and
employed for the purpose of handicraft, and yet occupy, even at this
stage, merely a middle place between the transmigrations which
have passed, and the changes which are yet to come. Crystals of
galena sometimes occur in the nodular limestones of the Old Red
Sandstone; but I am afraid the chemist would find it difficult to fix
their probable genealogy.
In at least one respect, every geological history must of necessity
be unsatisfactory; and, ere I pass to the history of the two upper
formations of the system, the reader must permit me to remind him
of it. There have been individuals, it has been said, who, though
they could see clearly the forms of objects, wanted, through some
strange organic defect, the faculty of perceiving their distinguishing
colors, however well marked these might be. The petals of the rose
have appeared to them of the same sombre hue with its stalk; and
they have regarded the ripe scarlet cherry as undistinguishable in
tint from the green leaves under which it hung. The face of nature to
such men must have for ever rested under a cloud; and a cloud of
similar character hangs over the pictorial restorations of the
geologist. The history of this and the last chapter is a mere profile
drawn in black, an outline without color—in short, such a chronicle
of past ages as might be reconstructed, in the lack of other and
ampler materials, from tombstones and charnel-houses. I have had
to draw the portrait from the skeleton. My specimens show the
general form of the creatures I attempt to describe, and not a few of
their more marked peculiarities; but many of the nicer elegancies are
wanting; and the "complexion to which they have come" leaves no
trace by which to discover the complexion they originally bore. And
yet color is a mighty matter to the ichthyologist. The "fins and
shining scales," "the waved coats, dropt with gold," the rainbow
dyes of beauty of the watery tribes, are connected often with more
than mere external character. It is a curious and interesting fact, that
the hues of splendor in which they are bedecked are, in some
instances, as intimately associated with their instincts—with their
feelings, if I may so speak—as the blush which suffuses the human
countenance is associated with the sense of shame, or its tint of
ashy paleness or of sallow with emotions of rage, or feelings of a
panic terror. Pain and triumph have each their index of color among
the mute inhabitants of our seas and rivers. Poets themselves have
bewailed the utter inadequacy of words to describe the varying tints
and shades of beauty with which the agonies of death dye the scales
of the dolphin, and how every various pang calls up a various
suffusion of splendor.[BD] Even the common stickleback of our ponds
and ditches can put on its colors to picture its emotions. There is, it
seems, a mighty amount of ambition, and a vast deal of fighting
sheerly for conquests' sake, among the myriads of this pygmy little
fish which inhabit our smaller streams; and no sooner does an
individual succeed in expelling his weaker companions from some
eighteen inches or two feet of territory, than straight way the
exultation of conquest converts the faded and freckled olive of his
back and sides into a glow of crimson and bright green. Nature
furnishes him with a regal robe for the occasion. Immediately on his
deposition, however,—and events of this kind are even more
common under than out of the water,—his gay colors disappear, and
he sinks into his original and native ugliness.[BE]
[BD] The description of Falconer must be familiar to every reader, but I cannot
resist quoting it. It shows how minutely the sailor poet must have observed. Byron
tells us how
"Parting day
Dies like the dolphin, whom each pang imbues
 With a new color, as it gasps away,
The last still loveliest, till—tis gone, and all is gray."
Falconer, in anticipating, reversed the simile. The huge animal, struck by the
"unerring barb" of Rodmond, has been drawn on board, and
"On deck he struggles with convulsive pain;
But while his heart the fatal javelin thrills,
And flitting life escapes in sanguine rills,
What radiant changes strike the astonished sight!
What glowing hues of mingled shade and light!
Not equal beauties gild the lucid West
With parting beams o'er all profusely drest;
Not lovelier colors paint the vernal dawn,
When Orient dews impearl the enamelled lawn;
Than from his sides in bright suffusion flow,
That now with gold empyreal seem to glow;
Now in pellucid sapphires meet the view,
And emulate the soft celestial hue;
Now beam a flaming crimson on the eye,
And now assume the purple's deeper dye.
But here description clouds each shining ray—
What terms of art can Nature's powers display?"
[BE] "In the Magazine of Natural History" says Captain Brown, in one of his
notes to White's Sellorne, "we have a curious account of the pugnacious
propensities of these little animals. 'Having at various times,' says a
correspondent, 'kept these little fish during the spring and part of the summer
months, and paid close attention to their habits. I am enabled from my own
experience to vouch for the facts I am about to relate. I have frequently kept them
in a deal tub, about three feet two inches wide, and about two feet deep. When
they are put in for some time, probably a day or two, they swim about in a shoal,
apparently exploring their new habitation. Suddenly one will take possession of the
tub, or, as it will sometimes happen, the bottom, and will instantly commence an
attack upon his companions; and if any of them venture to oppose his sway, a
regular and most furious battle ensues. They swim round and round each other
with the greatest rapidity, biting, (their mouths being well furnished with teeth,)
and endeavoring to pierce each other with their lateral spines, which, on this
occasion, are projected. I have witnessed a battle of this sort which lasted several
minutes before either would give way; and when one does submit, imagination
can hardly conceive the vindictive fury of the conqueror, who, in the most
persevering and unrelenting way, chases his rival from one part of the tub to
another, until fairly exhausted with fatigue. From this period an interesting change
takes place in the conqueror, who, from being a speckled and greenish-looking
fish, assumes the most beautiful colors; the belly and lower jaws becoming a deep
crimson, and the back sometimes a cream color, but generally a fine green, and
the whole appearance full of animation and spirit. I have occasionally known three
or four parts of the tub taken possession of by these little tyrants, who guard their
territories with the strictest vigilance, and the slightest invasion brings on
invariably a battle. A strange alteration immediately takes place in the defeated
party: his gallant bearing forsakes him, his gay colors fade away, he becomes
again speckled and ugly, and he hides his disgrace among his peaceable
companions.'"

But of color, as I have said, though thus important, the

ichthyologist can learn almost nothing from Geology. The perfect
restoration of even a Cuvier are blank outlines. We just know by a
wonderful accident that the Siberian elephant was red. A very few of
the original tints still remain among the fossils of our north country
Lias. The ammonite, when struck fresh from the surrounding lime,
reflects the prismatic colors, as of old; a huge Modiola still retains its
tinge of tawny and yellow; and the fossilized wood of the formation
preserves a shade of the native tint, though darkened into brown.
But there is considerably less of color in the fossils of the Old Red
Sandstone. I have caught, and barely caught, in some of the newly
disinterred specimens, the faint and evanescent reflection of a tinge
of pearl; and were I acquainted with my own collection only,
imagination, borrowing from the prevailing color, would be apt to
people the ancient oceans, in which its forms existed, with swarthy
races exclusively. But a view of the Altyre fossils would correct the
impression. They are enclosed, like those of Cromarty, in nodules of
an argillaceous limestone. The color, however, from the presence of
iron, and the absence of bitumen, is different. It presents a mixture
of gray, of pink, and of brown; and on this ground the fossil is
spread out in strongly contrasted masses of white and dark red, of
blue, and of purple. Where the exuviæ lie thickest, the white
appears tinged with delicate blue—the bone is but little changed.
Where they are spread out more thinly, the iron has pervaded them,
and the purple and deep red prevail. Thus the same ichthyolite
presents, in some specimens, a body of white and plum-blue
attached to fins of deep red, and with detached scales of red and of
purple lying scattered around it. I need hardly add, however, that all
this variety of coloring is, like the unvaried black of the Cromarty
specimens, the result, merely, of a curious chemistry.
 CHAPTER XIV.
The Cornstone Formation and its Organisms.—Dwarf Vegetation.—Cephalaspides.
—Huge Lobster.—Habitats of the existing Crustacea.—No unapt representation
of the Deposit of Balruddery, furnished by a land-locked Bay in the
neighborhood of Cromarty.—Vast Space occupied by the Geological Formations.
—Contrasted with the half-formed Deposits which represent the existing
Creation.—Inference.—The formation of the Holoptychius.—Probable origin of
its Siliceous Limestone.—Marked increase in the Bulk of the Existences of the
System.—Conjectural Cause.—The Coal Measures.—The Limestone of Burdie
House Conclusion.

The curtain rises, and the scene is new. The myriads of the lower
formation have disappeared, and we are surrounded, on an upper
platform, by the existences of a later creation. There is sea all
around, as before; and we find beneath a dark-colored, muddy
bottom, thickly covered by a dwarf vegetation. The circumstances
diner little from those in which the ichthyolite beds of the preceding
period were deposited; but forms of life, essentially different, career
through the green depths, or creep over the ooze. Shoals of
Cephalaspides, with their broad, arrow-like heads, and their slender,
angular bodies, feathered with fins, sweep past like clouds of
crossbow bolts in an ancient battle. We see the distant gleam of
scales, but the forms are indistinct and dim: we can merely ascertain
that the fins are elevated by spines of various shape and pattern;
that of some the coats glitter with enamel; and that others—the
sharks of this ancient period—bristle over with minute thorny points.
A huge crustacean, of uncouth proportions, stalks over the weedy
bottom, or burrows in the hollows of the banks.
Let us attempt bringing our knowledge of the present to bear
upon the past. The larger crustaceæ of the British seas abound most
on iron-bound coasts, where they find sheltering places in the
deeper fissures of sea-cliffs covered up by kelp and tangle, or under
the lower edges of detached boulders, that rest unequally on uneven
platforms of rock, amid forests of the rough-stemmed cuvy. We may
traverse sandy or muddy shores for miles together, without rinding a
single crab, unless a belt of pebbles lines the upper zone of beach,
where the forked and serrated fuci first appear, or a few weed-
covered fragments of rock here and there occur in groups on the
lower zones. In this formation, however, the bottom must have been
formed of mingled sand and mud, and yet the crustacea were
abundant. How account for the fact? There is, in most instances, an
interesting conformity between the character of the ancient rocks, in
which we find groups of peculiar fossils, and the habitats of those
existences of the present creation which these fossils most resemble.
The fisherman casts his nets in a central hollow of the Moray Frith,
about thirty fathoms in depth, and draws them up foul with masses
of a fetid mud, charged with multitudes of that curious purple-
colored zoophyte the sea-pen, invariably an inhabitant of such
recesses. The graptolite of the most ancient fossiliferous rocks, an
existence of unequivocally the same type, occurs in greatest
abundance in a finely-levigated mudstone, for it, too, was a dweller
in the mud. In like manner, we may find the ancient Modiola of the
Lias in habitats analogous to those of its modern representative the
muscle, and the encrinite of the Mountain Limestone fast rooted to
its rocky platform, just as we may see the Helianthoida and
Ascidioida of our seas fixed to their boulders and rocky skerries. But
is not analogy at fault in the present instance? Quite the reverse.
Mark how thickly these carbonaceous impressions cover the muddy-
colored and fissile sandstones of the formation, giving evidence of
an abundant vegetation. We may learn from these obscure
markings, that the place in which they grew could have been no
unfit habitat for the crustaceous tribes.
There is a little, land-locked bay on the southern shore of the
Frith of Cromarty, effectually screened from the easterly winds by
the promontory on which the town is built, and but little affected by
those of any other quarter, from the proximity of the neighboring
shores. The bottom, at low ebb, presents a level plain of sand, so
thickly covered by the green grass-weed of our more sheltered
sandy bays and estuaries, that it presents almost the appearance of
a meadow. The roots penetrate the sand to the depth of nearly a
foot, binding it firmly together; and as they have grown and decayed
in it for centuries, it has acquired, from the disseminated particles of
vegetable matter, a deep leaden tint, more nearly approaching to
black than even the dark gray mudstones of Balruddery. Nor is this
the only effect: the intertwisted fibres impart to it such coherence,
that, where scooped out into pools, the edges stand up
perpendicular from the water, like banks of clay; and where these
are hollowed into cave-like recesses,—and there are few of them
that are not so hollowed,—the recesses remain unbroken and
unfilled for years. The weeds have imparted to the sand a character
different from its own, and have rendered it a suitable habitat for
numerous tribes, which, in other circumstances, would have found
no shelter in it. Now, among these we find in abundance the larger
crustaceans of our coasts. The brown edible crab harbors in the
hollows beside the pools; occasionally we may find in them an
overgrown lobster, studded with parasitical shells and zoöphytes—
proof that the creature, having attained its full size, has ceased to
cast its plated covering. Crustaceans of the smaller varieties abound.
Hermit crabs traverse the pools, or creep among the weed; the dark
green and the dingy, hump-backed crabs occur nearly as frequently;
the radiata cover the banks by thousands. We find occasionally the
remains of dead fish left by the retreating tide; but the living are
much more numerous than the dead; for the sand-eel has suffered
the water to retire, and yet remained behind in its burrow; and the
viviparous blenny and common gunnel still shelter beside their fuci-
covered masses of rock. Imagine the bottom of this little bay
covered up by thick beds of sand and gravel, and the whole
consolidated into stone, and we have in it all the conditions of the
deposit of Balruddery—a mud-colored, arenaceous deposit,
abounding in vegetable impressions, and enclosing numerous
remains of crustaceans, fish, and radiata, as its characteristic
organisms of the animal kingdom. There would be but one
circumstance of difference: the little bay abounds in shells; whereas
no shells have yet been found in the mudstones of Balruddery, or
the gray sandstones of the same formation, which in Forfar, Fife, and
Moray shires represent the Cornstone division of the system.
Ages and centuries passed, but who can sum up their number?
In England, the depth of this middle formation greatly exceeds that
of any of the other two; in Scotland, it is much less amply
developed; but in either country it must represent periods of scarce
conceivable extent. I have listened to the controversies of opposite
schools of geologists, who, from the earth's strata, extract registers
of the earth's age of an amount amazingly different. One class,
regarding the geological field as if under the influence of those
principles of perspective which give to the cottage in front more than
the bulk and altitude of the mountain behind, would assign to the
present scene of things its thousands of years, but to all the extinct
periods united merely their few centuries; while with their
opponents, the remoter periods stretch out far into the bygone
eternity, and the present scene seems but a narrow strip running
along the foreground. Both classes appeal to facts; and, leaving
them to their disputes, I have gone out to examine and judge for
myself. The better to compare the present with the past, I have
regarded the existing scene merely as a formation—not as
superficies, but as depth; and have sought to ascertain the extent to
which, in different localities, and under different circumstances, it
has overlaid the surface.
The slopes of an ancient forest incline towards a river that flows
sluggishly onwards through a deep alluvial plain, once an extensive
lake. A recent landslip has opened up one of the hanging thickets.
Uprooted trees, mingled with bushes, lie at the foot of the slope,
half buried in broken masses of turf; and we see above a section of
the soil, from the line of vegetation to the bare rock. There is an
under belt of clay, and an upper belt of gravel, neither of which
contains any thing organic; and overtopping the whole we may see a
dark-colored bar of mould, barely a foot in thickness, studded with
stumps and interlaced with roots. Mark that narrow bar: it is the
geological representative of six thousand years. A stony bar of
similar appearance runs through the strata of the Wealden: it, too,
has its dingy color, its stumps, and its interlacing roots; but it forms
only a very inconsiderable portion of one of the least considerable of
all the formations; and yet who shall venture to say that it does not
represent a period as extended as that represented by the dark bar
in the ancient forest, seeing there is not a circumstance of difference
between them?
We descend to the river side. The incessant action of the current
has worn a deep channel through the leaden-colored silt; the banks
stand up perpendicularly over the water, and downwards, for twenty
feet together,—for such is the depth of the deposit,—we may trace
layer after layer of reeds, and flags, and fragments of driftwood, and
find here and there a few fresh-water shells of the existing species.
In this locality, six thousand years are represented by twenty feet.
The depth of the various fossiliferous formations united is at least
fifteen hundred times as great.
We pursue our walk, and pass through a morass. Three tiers of
forest trees appear in the section laid open by the stream, the one
above the other. Overlying these there is a congeries of the remains
of aquatic plants, which must have grown and decayed on the spot
for many ages after the soil had so changed that trees could be
produced by it no longer; and over the whole there occur layers of
mosses, that must have found root on the surface after the waters
had been drained away by the deepening channel of the river. The
six thousand years are here represented by that morass, its three
succeeding forests, its beds of aquatic vegetation, its bands of moss,
and the thin stratum of soil which overlies the whole. Well, but it
forms, notwithstanding, only the mere beginning of a formation. Pile
up twenty such morasses, the one over the other; separate them by
a hundred such bands of alluvial silt as we have just examined a
little higher up the stream; throw in some forty or fifty thick beds of
sand to swell the amount; and the whole together will but barely
equal the Coal Measures, one of many formations.
 But the marine deposits of the present creation have been,
perhaps, accumulating more rapidly than those of our lakes, forests,
or rivers? Yes, unquestionably, in friths and estuaries, in the
neighborhood of streams that drain vast tracts of country, and roll
down the soil and clay swept by the winter rains from thousands of
hill-sides; but what is there to lead to the formation of sudden
deposits in those profounder depths of the sea, in which the water
retains its blue transparency all the year round, let the waves rise as
they may? And do we not know that, along many of our shores, the
process of accumulation is well nigh as slow as on the land itself?
The existing creation is represented in the little land-locked bay,
where the crustacea harbor so thickly, by a deposit hardly three feet
in thickness. In a more exposed locality, on the opposite side of the
promontory, it finds its representative in a deposit of barely nine
inches. It is surely the present scene of things that is in its infancy!
Into how slender a bulk have the organisms of six thousand years
been compressed! History tells us of populous nations, now extinct,
that flourished for ages: do we not find their remains crowded into a
few streets of sepulchres? 'Tis but a thin layer of soil that covers the
ancient plain of Marathon. I have stood on Bannockburn, and seen
no trace of the battle. In what lower stratum shall we set ourselves
to discover the skeletons of the wolves and bears that once infested
our forests? Where shall we find accumulations of the remains of the
wild bisons and gigantic elks, their contemporaries? They must have
existed for but comparatively a short period, or they would surely
have left more marked traces behind them.
When we appeal to the historians, we hear much of a remote
antiquity in the history of man: a more than twilight gloom pervades
the earlier periods; and the distances are exaggerated, as objects
appear large in a fog. We measure, too, by a minute scale. There is
a tacit reference to the threescore and ten years of human life; and
its term of a day appears long to the ephemera. We turn from the
historians to the prophets, and find the dissimilarity of style
indicating a different speaker. Ezekiel's measuring-reed is graduated
into cubits of the temple. The vast periods of the short-lived
historian dwindled down into weeks and days. Seventy weeks
indicated to Daniel, in the first year of Darius, the time of the
Messiah's coming. Three years and a half limit the term of the
Mohammedan delusion. Seventeen years have not yet gone by since
Adam first arose from the mould; nor has the race, as such, attained
to the maturity of even early manhood. But while prophecy sums up
merely weeks and days, when it refers to the past, it looks forward
into the future, and speaks of a thousand years. Are scales of
unequally graduated parts ever used in measuring different portions
of the same map or section—scales so very unequally graduated,
that, while the parts in some places expand to the natural size, they
are in others more than three hundred times diminished? If not,—for
what save inextricable confusion would result from their use,—how
avoid the conclusion, that the typical scale employed in the same
book by the same prophet represents similar quantities by
corresponding parts, whether applied to times of outrage, delusion,
and calamity, or set off against that long and happy period in which
the spirit of evil shall be bound in chains and darkness, and the
kingdom of Christ shall have come? And if such be the case—if each
single year of the thousand years of the future represents a term as
extended as each single year of the seventeen years of the past—if
the present scene of things be thus merely in its beginning—should
we at all wonder to find that the formation which represents it has
laid down merely its few first strata?
The curtain again rises. A last day had at length come to the
period of the middle formation; and in an ocean roughened by
waves, and agitated by currents, like the ocean which flowed over
the conglomerate base of the system, we find new races of
existences. We may mark the clumsy bulk of the Holoptychius
conspicuous in the group; the shark family have their
representatives as before; a new variety of the Pterichthys spreads
out its spear-like wings at every alarm, like its predecessors of the
lower formation; shoals of fish of a type more common, but still
unnamed and undescribed, sport amid the eddies; and we may see
attached to the rocks below substances of uncouth form and
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