Transcriber's note:

 The punctuation and spelling from the original text have been faithfully preserved. Only obvious typographical errors have been corrected. 

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THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY;

Or, A Summer Ramble Among the Fossiliferous Deposits of the Hebrides. 

With

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST;

Or, Ten Thousand Miles Over the FossiliferousDeposits of Scotland. 

by

HUGH MILLER, LL. D. , Author of "The Old Red Sandstone, " "Footprints of the Creator, ""My Schools and Schoolmasters, " "The Testimony of the Rocks, " Etc. 

Boston:Gould and Lincoln, 59 Washington Street. New York: Sheldon and Company. Cincinnati: Geo. S. Blanchard. 1862. 

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1858, byGould and Lincoln, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District ofMassachusetts. 

Authorized Edition. 

By a special arrangement with the late Hugh Miller, Gould And Lincolnbecame the authorized American publishers of his works. By a similararrangement made with the family since his decease, they will alsopublish his POSTHUMOUS WORKS, of which the present volume is the first. 

Electrotyped by W. F. Draper, Andover, Mass. 

Printed by Geo. C. Rand & Avery, Boston. 

PREFACE. 

Naturalists of every class know too well how HUGH MILLER died--thevictim of an overworked brain; and how that bright and vigorous spiritwas abruptly quenched forever. 

During the month of May (1857) Mrs. Miller came to Malvern, afterrecovering from the first shock of bereavement, in search of health andrepose, and evidently hoping to do justice, on her recovery, to theliterary remains of her husband. Unhappily the excitement and anxietynaturally attaching to a revision of her husband's works proved overmuch for one suffering under such recent trial, and from an affection ofthe brain and spine which ensued; and, in consequence, Mrs. Miller hasbeen forbidden, for the present, to engage in any work of mental labor. 

Under these circumstances, and at Mrs. Miller's request, I haveundertaken the editing of "The Cruise of the Betsey, or a Summer Rambleamong the Fossiliferous Deposits of the Hebrides, " as well as "TheRambles of a Geologist, " hitherto unpublished, save as a series ofarticles in the "Witness" newspaper. The style and arguments of HUGHMILLER are so peculiarly his own, that I have not presumed to alter thetext, and have merely corrected some statements incidental to thecondition of geological knowledge at the time this work was penned. "TheCruise of the Betsey" was written for that well-known paper the"Witness" during the period when a disputation productive of much bitterfeeling waged between the Free and Established Churches of Scotland; butas the Disruption and its history possesses little interest to a largeclass of the readers of this work, who will rejoice to follow theirfavorite author among the isles and rocks of the "bonnie land, " I haveexpunged _some_ passages, which I am assured the author would haveomitted had he lived to reprint this interesting narrative of hisgeological rambles. HUGH MILLER battled nobly for his faith whileliving. The sword is in the scabbard: let it rest!

 W. S. SYMONDS. 

PENDOCK RECTORY, APRIL 1, 1858. 

CONTENTS. 

PART I. 

THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY. 

CHAPTER I. 

 Preparation--Departure--Recent and Ancient Monstrosities--A Free Church Yacht--Down the Clyde--Jura--Prof. Walker's Experiment--Whirlpool near Scarba--Geological Character of the Western Highlands--An Illustration--Different Ages of Outer and Inner Hebrides--Mt. Blanc and the Himalayas "mere upstarts"--Esdaile Quarries--Oban--A Section through Conglomerate and Slate examined--McDougal's Dog-stone--Power of the Ocean to move Rocks--Sound of Mull--The Betsey--The Minister's Cabin--Village of Tobermory--The "Florida, " a Wreck of the Invincible Armada--Geologic Exploration and Discovery--At Anchor. 15

CHAPTER II. 

 The Minister's Larder--No Harbor--Eigg Shoes--_Tormentilla erecta_--For the _Witness'_ Sake--Eilean Chaisteil--Appearance of Eigg--Chapel of St. Donan--Shell-sand--Origin of Secondary Calcareous Rock suggested--Exploration of Eigg--Pitchstone Veins--A Bone Cave--Massacre at Eigg--Grouping of Human Bones in the Cave--Relics--The Horse's Tooth--A Copper Sewing Needle--Teeth found--Man a worse Animal than his Teeth show him to have been designed for--Story of the Massacre--Another Version--Scuir of Eigg--The Scuir a Giant's Causeway--Character of the Columns--Remains of a Prostrate Forest. 31

CHAPTER III. 

 Structure of the Scuir--A stray Column--The Piazza--A buried Pine Forest the Foundation of the Scuir--Geological Poachers in a Fossil Preserve--_Pinites Eiggensis_--Its Description--Witham's Experiments on Fossil Pine of Eigg--Rings of the Pine--Ascent of the Scuir--Appearance of the Top--White Pitchstone--Mr. Greig's Discovery of Pumice--A Sunset Scene--The Manse and the Yacht--The Minister's Story--A Cottage Repast--American Timber drifted to the Hebrides--Agency of the Gulf Stream--The Minister's Sheep. 49

CHAPTER IV. 

 An Excursion--The Chain of Crosses--Bay of Laig--Island of Rum--Description of the Island--Superstitions banished by pure Religion--Fossil Shells--Remarkable Oyster Bed--New species of Belemnite--Oölitic Shells--White Sandstone Precipices--Gigantic Petrified Mushrooms--"Christabel" in Stone--Musical Sand--_Jabel Nakous_, or Mountain of the Bell--Experiments of Travellers at _Jabel Nakous_--Welsted's Account--_Reg-Rawan_, or the Moving Sand--The Musical Sounds inexplicable--Article on the subject in the North British Review. 66

CHAPTER V. 

 Trap-dykes--"Cotton Apples"--Alternation of Lacustrine with Marine Remains--Analogy from the Beds of Esk--Aspect of the Island on its narrow Front--The Puffin--Ru Stoir--Development of Old Red Sandstone--Striking Columnar character of Ru Stoir--Discovery of Reptilian Remains--John Stewart's wonder at the Bones in the Stones--Description of the Bones--"Dragons, Gorgons, and Chimeras"--Exploration and Discovery pursued--The Midway Shieling--A Celtic Welcome--Return to the Yacht--"Array of Fossils new to Scotch Geology"--A Geologist's Toast--Hoffman and his Fossil. 85

CHAPTER VI. 

 Something for Non-geologists--Man Destructive--A Better and Last Creation coming--A Rainy Sabbath--The Meeting House--The Congregation--The Sermon in Gaelic--The Old Wondrous Story--The Drunken Minister of Eigg--Presbyterianism without Life--Dr. Johnson's Account of the Conversion of the People of Rum--Romanism at Eigg--The Two Boys--The Freebooter of Eigg--Voyage resumed--The Homeless Minister--Harbor of Isle Ornsay--Interesting Gneiss Deposit--A Norwegian Keep--Gneiss at Knock--Curious Chemistry--Sea-cliffs beyond Portsea--The Goblin Luidag--Scenery of Skye. 105

CHAPTER VII. 

 Exploration resumed--Geology of Rasay--An Illustration--The Storr of Skye--From Portree to Holm--Discovery of Fossils--An Island Rain--Sir R. Murchison--Labor of Drawing a Geological Line--Three Edinburgh Gentlemen--_Prosopolepsia_--Wrong Surmises corrected--The Mail Gig--The Portree Postmaster--Isle Ornsay--An Old Acquaintance--Reminiscences--A Run for Rum--"Semi-fossil Madeira"--Idling on Deck--Prognostics of a Storm--Description of the Gale--Loch Scresort--The Minister's lost _Sou-wester_--The Free Church Gathering--The weary Minister. 123

CHAPTER VIII. 

 Geology of Rum--Its curious Character illustrated--Rum famous for Bloodstones--Red Sandstones--"Scratchings" in the Rocks--A Geological Inscription without a Key--The Lizard--Vitality broken into two--Illustrations--Speculation--Scuir More--Ascent of the Scuir--The Bloodstones--An Illustrative Set of the Gem--M'Culloch's Pebble--A Chemical Problem--The solitary Shepherd's House--Sheep _versus_ Men--The Depopulation of Rum--A Haul of Trout--Rum Mode of catching Trout--At Anchor in the Bay of Glenelg. 139

CHAPTER IX. 

 Kyles of Skye--A Gneiss District--Kyle Rhea--A Boiling Tide--A "Take" of Sillocks--The Betsey's "Paces"--In the Bay at Broadford--Rain--Island of Pabba--Description of the Island--Its Geological Structure--Astrea--Polypifers--_Gryphoea incurva_--Three Groups of Fossils in the Lias of Skye--Abundance of the Petrifactions of Pabba--Scenery--Pabba a "piece of smooth, level England"--Fossil Shells of Pabba--- Voyage resumed--Kyle Akin--Ruins of Castle Maoil--A "Thornback" Dinner--The Bunch of Deep Sea Tangle--The Caileach Stone--Kelp Furnaces--Escape of the Betsey from sinking. 159

CHAPTER X. 

 Isle Orusay--The Sabbath--A Sailor-minister's Sermon for Sailors--The Scuir Sermon--Loch Carron--Groups of Moraines--A sheep District--The Editor of the _Witness_ and the Establishment Clergyman--Dingwall--Conon-side revisited--The Pond and its Changes--New Faces. --The Stonemason's Mark--The Burying-ground of Urquhart--An old Acquaintance--Property Qualification for Voting in Scotland--Montgerald Sandstone Quarries--Geological Science in Cromarty--The Danes at Cromarty--The Danish Professor and the "Old Red Sandstone"--Harmonizing Tendencies of Science. 178

CHAPTER XI. 

 Ichthyolite Beds--An interesting Discovery--Two Storeys of Organic Remains in the Old Red Sandstone--Ancient Ocean of Lower Old Red--Two great Catastrophes--Ancient Fish Scales--Their skilful Mechanism displayed by examples--Bone Lips--Arts of the Slater and Tiler as old as Old Red Sandstone--Jet Trinkets--Flint Arrow-heads--Vitrified Forts of Scotland--Style of grouping Lower Old Red Fossils--Illustration from Cromarty Fishing Phenomena--Singular Remains of Holoptychius--Ramble with Mr. Robert Dick--Color of the Planet Mars--Tombs never dreamed of by Hervey--Skeleton of the Bruce--Gigantic Holoptychius--"Coal money Currency"--Upper Boundary of Lower Old Red--Every one may add to the Store of Geological Facts--Discoveries of Messrs. Dick and Peach. 192

CHAPTER XII. 

 Ichthyolite Beds of Clune and Lethenbarn--Limestone Quarry--Destruction of Urns and Sarcophagi in the Lime-kiln--Nodules opened--Beautiful coloring of the Remains--Patrick Duff's Description--New Genus of Morayshire Ichthyolite described--Form and size of the Nodules or Stone Coffins--Illustration from Mrs. Marshall's Cements--Forest of Darnaway--The Hill of Berries--Sluie--Elgin--Outliers of the Weald and the Oölite--Description of the Weald at Linksfield--Mr. Duff's _Lepidotus minor_--Eccentric Types of Fish Scales--Visit to the Sandstones of Scat-Craig--Fine suit of Fossils at Scat-Craig--True graveyard Bones, not mere Impressions--Varieties of pattern--The Diker's "Carved Flowers"--_Stagonolepis_, a new Genus--Termination of the Ramble. 212

CHAPTER XIII. 

SUPPLEMENTARY. 

 Supplementary--Isolated Reptile Remains in Eigg--Small Isles revisited--The Betsey again--Storm bound--Tacking--Becalmed--Medusæ caught and described--Rain--A Shoal of Porpoises--Change of Weather--The bed-ridden Woman--The Poor Law Act for Scotland--Geological Excursion--Basaltic Columns--Oölitic Beds--Abundance of Organic Remains--Hybodus Teeth--Discovery of reptile Remains _in situ_--Musical Sand of Laig re-examined--Explanation suggested--Sail for Isle Ornsay--Anchored Clouds--A Leak sprung--Peril of the Betsey--At work with Pump and Pails--Safe in Harbor--Return to Edinburgh. 233

PART II. 

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 

CHAPTER I. 

 Embarkation--A foundered Vessel--Lateness of the Harvest dependent on the Geological character of the Soil--A Granite Harvest and an Old Red Harvest--Cottages of Redstone and of Granite--Arable Soil of Scotland the result of a Geological Grinding Agency--Locality of the Famine of 1846--Mr. Longmuir's Fossils--Geology necessary to a Theologian--Popularizers of Science when dangerous--"Constitution of Man, " and "Vestiges of Creation"--Atop of the Banff Coach--A Geologist's Field Equipment--The trespassing "Stirk"--Silurian Schists inlaid with Old Red--Bay of Gamrie, how formed--Gardenstone--Geological Free-masonry illustrated--How to break an Ichthyolite Nodule--An old Rhyme mended--A raised Beach--Fossil Shells--Scotland under Water at the time of the Boulder-clays. 255

CHAPTER II. 

 Character of the Rocks near Gardenstone--A Defunct Father-lasher--A Geological Inference--Village of Gardenstone--The drunken Scot--Gardenstone Inn--Lord Gardenstone--A Tempest threatened--The Author's Ghost Story--The Lady in Green--Her Appearance and Tricks--The Rescued Children--The murdered Peddler and his Pack--Where the Green Dress came from--Village of Macduff--Peculiar Appearance of the Beach at the Mouth of the Deveron--Dr. Emslie's Fossils--_Pterichthys quadratus_--Argillaceous Deposits of Blackpots--Pipe-laying in Scotland--Fossils of Blackpots Clay--Mr. Longmuir's Description of them--Blackpots Deposit a Re-formation of a Liasic Patch--Period of its Formation. 270

CHAPTER III. 

 From Blackpots to Portsoy--Character of the Coast--Burn of Boyne--Fever Phantoms--Graphic Granite--Maupertuis and the Runic Inscription--Explanation of the _quo modo_ of Graphic Granite--Portsoy Inn--Serpentine Beds--Portsoy Serpentine unrivalled for small ornaments--Description of it--Significance of the term _serpentine_--Elizabeth Bond and her "Letters"--From Portsoy to Cullen--Attritive Power of the Ocean illustrated--The Equinoctial--From Cullen to Fochabers--The Old Red again--The old Pensioner--Fochabers--Mr. Joss, the learned Mail-guard--The Editor a sort of Coach-guard--On the Coach to Elgin--Geology of Banffshire--Irregular paging of the Geologic Leaves--Geologic Map of the County like Joseph's Coat--Striking Illustration. 291

CHAPTER IV. 

 Yellow-hued Houses of Elgin--Geology of the Country indicated by the coloring of the Stone Houses--Fossils of Old Red north of the Grampians different from those of Old Red south--Geologic Formations at Linksfield difficult to be understood--Ganoid Scales of the Wealden--Sudden Reaction, from complex to simple, in the Scales of Fishes--Pore-covered Scales--Extraordinary amount of Design exhibited in Ancient Ganoid Scales--Holoptychius Scale illustrated by Cromwell's "fluted pot"--Patrick Duff's Geological Collection--Elgin Museum--Fishes of the Ganges--Armature of Ancient Fishes--Compensatory Defences--- The Hermit-crab--Spines of the Pimelodi--Ride to Campbelton--Theories of the formation of Ardersier and Fortrose Promontories--Tradition of their construction by the Wizard, Michael Scott--A Region of Legendary Lore. 307

CHAPTER V. 

 Rosemarkie and its Scaurs--Kaes' Craig--A Jackdaw Settlement--"Rosemarkie Kaes" and "Cromarty Cooties"--"The Danes, " a Group of Excavations--At Home in Cromarty--The Boulder-clay of Cromarty "begins to tell its story"--One of its marked Scenic Peculiarities--Hints to Landscape Painters--"Samuel's Well"--A Chain of Bogs geologically accounted for--Another Scenic Peculiarity--"_Ha-has_ of Nature's digging"--The Author's earliest Field of Hard Labor--Picturesque Cliff of Boulder-clay--Scratchings on the Sandstone--Invariable Characteristic of true Boulder-clay--Scratchings on Pebbles in the line of the longer axis--Illustration from the Boulder-clay of Banff. 324

CHAPTER VI. 

 Organisms of the Boulder-clay not unequivocal--First Impressions of the Boulder-clay--Difficulty of accounting for its barrenness of Remains--Sir Charles Lyell's reasoning--A Fact to the contrary--Human Skull dug from a Clay-bank--The Author's Change of Belief respecting Organic Remains of the Boulder-clay--Shells from the Clay at Wick--Questions respecting them settled--Conclusions confirmed by Mr. Dick's Discoveries at Thurso--Sir John Sinclair's Discovery of Boulder-clay Shells in 1802--Comminution of the Shells illustrated--_Cyprina islandica_--Its Preservation in larger Proportions than those of other Shells accounted for--Boulder-clays of Scotland reformed during the existing Geological Epoch--Scotland in the Period of the Boulder-clay "merely three detached groups of Islands"--Evidence of the Subsidence of the Land in Scotland--Confirmed by Rev. Mr. Cumming's conclusion--High-lying Granite Boulders--Marks of a succeeding elevatory Period--Scandinavia now rising--Autobiography of a Boulder desirable--A Story of the Supernatural. 336

CHAPTER VII. 

 Relation of the deep red stone of Cromarty to the Ichthyolite Beds of the System--Ruins of a Fossil-charged Bed--Journey to Avoch--Red Dye of the Boulder-clay distinct from the substance itself--Variation of Coloring in the Boulder-clay Red Sandstone accounted for--Hard-pan how formed--A reformed Garden--An ancient Battle-field--Antiquity of Geologic and Human History compared--Burn of Killein--Observation made in boyhood confirmed--Fossil-nodules--Fine Specimen of _Coccosteus decipiens_--Blank strata of Old Red--New View respecting the Rocks of Black Isle--A Trip up Moray and Dingwall Friths--Altered color of the Boulder-clay--Up the Auldgrande River--Scenery of the great Conglomerate--Graphic Description--Laidlaw's Boulder--_Vaccinium myrtillus_--Profusion of Travelled Boulders--The Boulder _Clach Malloch_--Its zones of Animal and Vegetable life. 355

CHAPTER VIII. 

 Imaginary Autobiography of the _Clach Malloch_ Boulder--Its Creation--Its Long Night of unsummed Centuries--Laid open to light on a desert Island--Surrounded by an Arctic Vegetation--Undermined by the rising Sea--Locked up and floated off on an Ice-field--At rest on the Sea-bottom--Another Night of unsummed Years--The Boulder raised again above the waves by the rising of the Land--Beholds an Altered Country--Pine Forests and Mammals--Another Period of Ages passes--The Boulder again floated off by an Iceberg--Finally at rest on the Shore of Cromarty Bay--Time and Occasion of naming it--Strange Phenomena accounted for by Earthquakes--How the Boulder of Petty Bay was moved--The Boulder of Auldgrande--The old Highland Paupers--The little Parsi Girl--Her Letter to her Papa--But one Human Nature on Earth--Journey resumed--Conon Burying Ground--An aged Couple--Gossip. 375

CHAPTER IX. 

 The Great Conglomerate--Its Undulatory and Rectilinear Members--Knock Farril and its Vitrified Fort--The old Highlanders an observant race--The Vein of Silver--Summit of Knock Farril--Mode of accounting for the Luxuriance of Herbage in the ancient Scottish Fortalices--The green Graves of Culloden--Theories respecting the Vitrification of the Hill-forts--Combined Theories of Williams and Mackenzie probably give the correct account--The Author's Explanation--Transformations of Fused Rocks--Strathpetlier--The Spa--Permanent Odoriferous Qualities of an ancient Sea-bottom converted into Rock--Mineral Springs of the Spa--Infusion of the powdered rock a substitute--Belemnite Water--The lively young Lady's Comments--A befogged Country seen from a hill-top--Ben-Wevis--Journey to Evanton--A Geologist's Night-mare--The Route Home--Ruins of Craig house--Incompatibility of Tea and Ghosts--End of the Tour. 393

CHAPTER X. 

 Recovered Health--Journey to the Orkneys--Aboard the Steamer at Wick--Mr. Bremner--Masonry of the Harbor of Wick--The greatest Blunders result from good Rules misapplied--Mr. Bremner's Theory about sea-washed Masonry--Singular Fracture of the Rock near Wick--The Author's mode of accounting for it--"Simple but not obvious" Thinking--Mr. Bremner's mode of making stone Erections under Water--His exploits in raising foundered Vessels--Aspect of the Orkneys--The ungracious Schoolmaster--In the Frith of Kirkwall--Cathedral of St Magnus--Appearance of Kirkwall--Its "perished suppers"--Its ancient Palaces--Blunder of the Scotch Aristocracy--The patronate Wedge--Breaking Ground in Orkney--Minute Gregarious Coccosteus--True Position of the Coccosteus' Eyes--Ruins of one of Cromwell's Forts--Antiquities of Orkney--The Cathedral--Its Sculptures--The Mysterious Cell--Prospect from the Tower--Its Chimes--Ruins of Castle Patrick. 414

CHAPTER XI. 

 The Bishop's Palace at Orkney--Haco the Norwegian--Icelandic Chronicle respecting his Expedition to Scotland--His Death--Removal of his Remain to Norway--Why Norwegian Invasion ceased--Straw-plaiting--The Lassies of Orkney--Orkney Type of Countenance--Celtic and Scandinavian--An accomplished Antiquary--Old Manuscripts--An old Tune book--Manuscript Letter of Mary Queen of Scots--Letters of General Monck--The fearless Covenanter--Cave of the Rebels--Why the tragedy of "Gustavus Vasa" was prohibited--Quarry of Pickoquoy--Its Fossil Shells--Journey to Stromness--Scenery--Birth-place of Malcolm, the Poet--His History--One of his Poems--His Brother a Free Church Minister--New Scenery. 437

CHAPTER XII. 

 Hills of Orkney--Their Geologic Composition--Scene of Scott's "Pirate"--Stromness--Geology of the District--"Seeking beasts"--Conglomerate in contact with Granite--A palæozoic Hudson's Bay--Thickness of Conglomerate of Orkney--Oldest Vertebrate yet discovered in Orkney--Its Size--Figure of a characteristic plate of the Asterolepis--Peculiarity of Old Red Fishes--Length of the Asterolepis--A rich Ichthyolite Bed--Arrangement of the Layers--Queries as to the Cause of it--Minerals--An abandoned Mine--A lost Vessel--Kelp for Iodine--A dangerous Coast--Incidents of Shipwreck--Hospitality--Stromness Museum--Diplopterus mistaken for Dipterus--Their Resemblances and Differences--Visit to a remarkable Stack--Paring the Soil for Fuel, and consequent Barrenness--Description of the Stack--Wave-formed Caves--Height to which the Surf rises. 457

CHAPTER XIII. 

 Detached Fossils--Remains of the Pterichthys--Terminal Bones of the Coccosteus, etc. , preserved--Internal Skeleton of Coccosteus--The shipwrecked Sailor in the Cave--Bishop Grahame--His Character, as drawn by Baillie--His Successor--Ruins of the Bishop's Country-house--Sub-aërial Formation of Sandstone--Formation near New Kaye--Inference from such Formation--Tour resumed--Loch of Stennis--Waters of the Loch fresh, brackish, and salt--Vegetation varied accordingly--Change produced in the Flounder by fresh water--The Standing Stones, second only to Stonehenge--Their Purpose--Their Appearance and Situation--Diameter of the Circle--What the Antiquaries say of it--Reference to it in the "Pirate"--Dr. Hibbert's Account. 476

CHAPTER XIV. 

 On Horseback--A pared Moor--Small Landholders--Absorption of small holdings in England and Scotland--Division of Land favorable to Civil and Religious Rights--Favorable to social Elevation--An inland Parish--The Landsman and Lobster--Wild Flowers of Orkney--Law of Compensation illustrated by the Tobacco Plant--Poverty tends to Productiveness--Illustrated in Ireland--Profusion of Ichthyolites--Orkney a land of Defunct Fishes--Sandwick--A Collection of Coccostean Flags--A Quarry full of Heads of Dipteri--The Bergil, or Striped Wrasse--Its Resemblance to the Dipterus--Poverty of the Flora of the Lower Old Red--No true Coniferous Wood in the Orkney Flagstones--Departure for Hoy--The intelligent Boatman--Story of the Orkney Fisherman. 492

CHAPTER XV. 

 Hoy--Unique Scenery--The Dwarfie Stone of Hoy--Sir Walter Scott's Account of it--Its Associations--Inscription of Names--George Buchanan's Consolation--The mythic Carbuncle of the Hill of Hoy--No Fossils at Hoy--Striking Profile of Sir Walter Scott on the Hill of Hoy--Sir Walter, and Shetland and Orkney--Originals of two Characters in "The Pirate"--Bessie Millie--Garden of Gow, the "Pirate"--Childhood's Scene of Byron's "Torquil"--The Author's Introduction to his Sister--A German Visitor--German and Scotch Sabbath-keeping habits contrasted--Mr. Watt's Specimens of Fossil Remains--The only new Organism found in Orkney--Back to Kirkwall--to Wick--Vedder's Ode to Orkney. 507

THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY. 

CHAPTER I. 

 Preparation--Departure--Recent and Ancient Monstrosities--A Free Church Yacht--Down the Clyde--Jura--Prof. Walker's Experiment--Whirlpool near Scarba--Geological Character of the Western Highlands--An Illustration--Different Ages of Outer and Inner Hebrides--Mt. Blanc and the Himalayas "mere upstarts"--Esdaile Quarries--Oban--A Section through Conglomerate and Slate examined--M'Dougal's Dog-stone--Power of the Ocean to move Rocks--Sound of Mull--The Betsey--The Minister's Cabin--Village of Tobermory--The "Florida, " a Wreck of the Invincible Armada--Geologic Exploration and Discovery--At Anchor. 

The pleasant month of July had again come round, and for full five weeksI was free. Chisels and hammers, and the bag for specimens, were takenfrom their corner in the dark closet, and packed up with half a stoneweight of a fine _soft_ Conservative Edinburgh newspaper, valuable for aquality of preserving old things entire. At noon on St. Swithin's day(Monday the 15th), I was speeding down the Clyde in the Toward Castlesteamer, for Tobermory in Mull. In the previous season I had intendedpassing direct from the Oölitic deposits of the eastern coast ofScotland, to the Oölitic deposits of the Hebrides. But the weeks glidedall too quickly away among the ichthyolites of Caithness and Cromarty, and the shells and lignites of Sutherland and Ross. My friend, too, theRev. Mr. Swanson, of Small Isles, on whose assistance I had reckoned, was in the middle of his troubles at the time, with no longer a home inhis parish, and not yet provided with one elsewhere; and I concluded hewould have but little heart, at such a season, for breaking into rocks, or for passing from the too pressing monstrosities of an existing stateof things, to the old lapidified monstrosities of the past. And so mydesign on the Hebrides had to be postponed for a twelvemonth. But myfriend, now afloat in his Free Church yacht, had got a home on the seabeside his island charge, which, if not very secure when nights weredark and winds loud, and the little vessel tilted high to the long rollof the Atlantic, lay at least beyond the reach of man's intolerance, andnot beyond the protecting care of the Almighty. He had written me thathe would run down his vessel from Small Isles to meet me at Tobermory, and in consequence of the arrangement I was now on my way to Mull. 

St. Swithin's day, so important in the calendar of our humblermeteorologists, had in this part of the country its alternate fits ofsunshine and shower. We passed gaily along the green banks of the Clyde, with their rich flat fields glittering in moisture, and their lines ofstately trees, that, as the light flashed out, threw their shadows overthe grass. The river expanded into the estuary, the estuary into theopen sea; we left behind us beacon, and obelisk, and rock-perchedcastle;--

 "Merrily down we drop Below the church, below the tower, Below the light house top, "

and, as the evening fell, we were ploughing the outer reaches of theFrith, with the ridgy table-land of Ayrshire stretching away, green, onthe one side, and the serrated peaks of Arran rising dark and high onthe other. At sunrise next morning our boat lay, unloading a portion ofher cargo, in one of the ports of Islay, and we could see the Irishcoast resting on the horizon to the south and west, like a longundulating bank of thin blue cloud; with the island of Rachrin--famousfor the asylum it had afforded the Bruce when there was no home for himin Scotland, --presenting in front its mass of darker azure. On and away!We swept past Islay, with its low fertile hills of mica-schist andslate; and Jura, with its flat dreary moors, and its far-seen giganticpaps, on one of which, in the last age, Professor Walker, of Edinburgh, set water a-boil with six degrees of heat less than he found necessaryfor the purpose on the plain below. The Professor describes the viewfrom the summit, which includes in its wide circle at once the Isle ofSkye and the Isle of Man, as singularly noble and imposing; two suchprospects more, he says, would bring under the eye the whole island ofGreat Britain, from the Pentland Frith to the English Channel. We spedpast Jura. Then came the Gulf of Coryvrekin, with the bare mountainisland of Scarba overlooking the fierce, far-famed whirlpool, that wecould see from the deck, breaking in long lines of foam, and sending outits waves in wide rings on every side, when not a speck of white wasvisible elsewhere in the expanse of sea around us. And then came anopener space, studded with smaller islands, --mere hill-tops rising outof the sea, with here and there insulated groups of pointed rocks, theskeletons of perished hills, amid which the tide chafed and fretted, asif laboring to complete on the broken remains their work of denudationand ruin. 

The disposition of land and water on this coast suggests the idea thatthe Western Highlands, from the line in the interior, whence the riversdescend to the Atlantic, with the islands beyond to the outer Hebrides, are all parts of one great mountainous plane, inclined slantways intothe sea. First, the long withdrawing valleys of the main land, withtheir brown mossy streams, change their character as they clip beneaththe sea-level, and become salt-water lochs. The lines of hills that riseover them jut out as promontories, till cut off by some transversevalley, lowered still more deeply into the brine, and that exists as akyle, minch, or sound, swept twice every tide by powerful currents. Thesea deepens as the plain slopes downward; mountain-chains stand up outof the water as larger islands, single mountains as smaller ones, lowereminences as mere groups of pointed rocks; till at length, as we passoutwards, all trace of the submerged land disappears, and the wide oceanstretches out and away its unfathomable depths. The model of some Alpinecountry raised in plaster on a flat board, and tilted slantways, at alow angle, into a basin of water, would exhibit, on a minute scale, anappearance exactly similar to that presented by the western coast ofScotland and the Hebrides. The water would rise along the hollows, longitudinal and transverse, forming sounds and lochs, and surround, island-like, the more deeply submerged eminences. But an examination ofthe geology of the coast, with its promontories and islands, communicates a different idea. These islands and promontories prove tobe of very various ages and origin. The _outer_ Hebrides may haveexisted as the inner skeleton of some ancient country, contemporary withthe main land, and that bore on its upper soils the productions ofperished creations, at a time when by much the larger portion of the_inner_ Hebrides, --Skye, and Mull, and the Small Isles, --existed as partof the bottom of a wide sound, inhabited by the Cephalopoda andEnaliosaurians of the Lias and the Oölite. Judging from its components, the Long Island, like the Lammermoors and the Grampians, may have beensmiling to the sun when the Alps and the Himalaya Mountains lay buriedin the abyss; whereas the greater part of Skye and Mull must have been, like these vast mountain-chains of the Continent, an oozy sea-floor, over which the ligneous productions of the neighboring lands, washeddown by the streams, grew heavy and sank, and on which the belemnitedropped its spindle and the ammonite its shell. The idea imparted of_old_ Scotland to the geologist here, --of Scotland, proudly, aristocratically, supereminently old, --for it can call Mont Blanc a mereupstart, and Dhawalageri, with its twenty-eight thousand feet ofelevation, a heady fellow of yesterday, --is not that of a land settlingdown by the head, like a foundering vessel, but of a land whose hillsand islands, like its great aristocratic families, have arisen from thelevel in very various ages, and under the operation of circumstancesessentially diverse. 

We left behind us the islands of Lunga, Luing, and Seil, and entered thenarrow Sound of Kerrera, with its border of Old Red conglomerate restingon the clay-slate of the district. We had passed Esdaile near enough tosee the workmen employed in the quarries of the island, so extensivelyknown in commerce for their roofing slate, and several small vesselsbeside them, engaged in loading; and now we had got a step higher in thegeological scale, and could mark from the deck the peculiar character ofthe conglomerate, which, in cliffs washed by the sea, when the bindingmatrix is softer than the pebbles which it encloses, roughens, insteadof being polished, by the action of the waves, and which, along theeastern side of the Sound here, seems as if formed of cannon-shot, ofall sizes, embedded in cement. The Sound terminates in the beautiful bayof Oban, so quiet and sheltered, with its two island breakwaters infront, --its semi-circular sweep of hill behind, --its long white-walledvillage, bent like a bow, to conform to the inflection of theshore, --its mural precipices behind, tapestried with ivy, --its richpatches of green pasture, --its bosky dingles of shrub and tree, --and, perched on the seaward promontory, its old, time-eaten keep. "In onepart of the harbor of Oban, " says Dr. James Anderson, in his "PracticalTreatise on Peat Moss, " (1794), "where the depth of the sea is abouttwenty fathoms, the bottom is found to consist of quick peat, whichaffords no safe anchorage. " I made inquiry at the captain of thesteamer, regarding this submerged deposit, but he had never heard of it. There are, however, many such on the coasts of both Britain and Ireland. We staid at Oban for several hours, waiting the arrival of the FortWilliam steamer; and, taking out hammer and chisel from my bag, Istepped ashore to question my ancient acquaintance, the Old Redconglomerate, and was fortunate enough to meet on the pier-head, as Ilanded, one of the best of companions for assisting in such work, Mr. Colin Elder, of Isle Ornsay, --the gentleman who had so kindly furnishedmy friend Mr. Swanson with an asylum for his family, when there was nolonger a home for them in Small Isles. "You are much in luck, " he said, after our first greeting: "one of the villagers, in improving hisgarden, has just made a cut for some fifteen or twenty yards along theface of the precipice behind the village, and laid open the line ofjunction between the conglomerate and the clay-slate. Let us go and seeit. "

I found several things worthy of notice in the chance section to which Iwas thus introduced. The conglomerate lies uncomfortably along the edgesof the slate strata, which present under it an appearance exactlysimilar to that which they exhibit under the rolled stones and shingleof the neighboring shore, where we find them laid bare beside theharbor, for several hundred yards. And, mixed with the pebbles ofvarious character and origin of which the conglomerate is mainlycomposed, we see detached masses of the slate, that still exhibit ontheir edges the identical lines of fracture characteristic of the rock, which they received, when torn from the mass below, myriads of agesbefore. In the incalculably remote period in which the conglomerate baseof the Old Red Sandstone was formed, the clay-slate of this district hadbeen exactly the same sort of rock that it is now. Some long anteriorconvulsion had upturned its strata, and the sweep of water, mingled withbroken fragments of stone, had worn smooth the exposed edges, just as asimilar agency wears the edges exposed at the present time. Quarriesmight have been opened in this rock, as now, for a roofing-slate, hadthere been quarriers to open them, or houses to roof over; it was inevery respect as ancient a looking stone then as in the present late ageof the world. There are no sermons that seem stranger or more impressiveto one who has acquired just a little of the language in which they arepreached, than those which, according to the poet, are to be found instones; a bit of fractured slate, embedded among a mass of roundedpebbles, proves voluble with ideas of a kind almost too large for themind of man to grasp. The eternity that hath passed is an ocean withouta further shore, and a finite conception may in vain attempt to span itover. But from the beach, strewed with wrecks, on which we stand tocontemplate it, we see far out towards the cloudy horizon, many a dimislet and many a pinnacled rock, the sepulchres of successive eras, --themonuments of consecutive creations: the entire prospect is studded overwith these landmarks of a hoar antiquity, which, measuring out spacefrom space, constitute the vast whole a province of time; nor can theeye reach to the open, shoreless infinitude beyond, in which only Godexisted; and, as in a sea-scene in nature, in which headland stretchesdim and blue beyond headland, and islet beyond islet, the distance seemsnot lessened, but increased, by the crowded objects--we borrow alarger, not a smaller idea of the distant eternity, from the vastness ofthe measured periods that occur between. 

Over the lower bed of conglomerate, which here, as on the east coast, isof great thickness, we find a bed of gray stratified clay, containing afew calcareo-argillaceous nodules. The conglomerate cliffs to the northof the village present appearances highly interesting to the geologist. Rising in a long wall within the pleasure-grounds of Dunolly castle, wefind them wooded atop and at the base; while immediately at their feetthere stretches out a grassy lawn, traversed by the road from thevillage to the castle, which sinks with a gradual slope into theexisting sea-beach, but which ages ago must have been a sea-beachitself. We see the bases of the precipices hollowed and worn, with alltheir rents and crevices widened into caves; and mark, at a picturesqueangle of the rock, what must have been once an insulated sea-stack, somethirty or forty feet in height, standing up from amid the rank grass, asat one time it stood up from amid the waves. Tufts of fern and sprays ofivy bristle from its sides, once roughened by the serrated kelp-weed andthe tangle. The Highlanders call it M'Dougal's Dog-stone, and say thatthe old chieftains of Lorne made use of it as a post to which to fastentheir dogs, --animals wild and gigantic as themselves, --when the hunterswere gathering to rendezvous, and the impatient beagles struggled tobreak away and begin the chase on their own behalf. It owes itsexistence as a stack--for the precipice in which it was once includedhas receded from around it for yards--to an immense boulder in itsbase--by far the largest stone I ever saw in an Old Red conglomerate. The mass is of a rudely rhomboidal form, and measures nearly twelve feetin the line of its largest diagonal. A second huge pebble in the samedetached spire measures four feet by about three. Both have their edgesmuch rounded, as if, ere their deposition in the conglomerate, they hadbeen long exposed to the wear of the sea; and both are composed of anearthy amygdaloidal trap. I have stated elsewhere ["Old Red Sandstone, "Chapter XII. ], that I had scarce ever seen a stone in the Old Redconglomerate which I could not raise from the ground; and ere I said soI had examined no inconsiderable extent of this deposit, chiefly, however, along the eastern coast of Scotland, where its larger pebblesrarely exceed two hundred weight. How account for the occurrence ofpebbles of so gigantic a size here? We can but guess at a solution, andthat very vaguely. The islands of Mull and Kerrera form, in the presentstate of things, inner and outer breakwaters between what is now thecoast of Oban and the waves of the Atlantic; but Mull, in the times ofeven the Oölite, must have existed as a mere sea-bottom; and Kerrera, composed mainly of trap, which has brought with it to the surfacepatches of the conglomerate, must, when the conglomerate was in forming, have been a mere sea-bottom also. Is it not possible, that when thebreakwaters _were not_, the Atlantic _was_, and that its tempests, whichin the present time can transport vast rocks for hundreds of yards alongthe exposed coasts of Shetland and Orkney, may have been the agent herein the transport of these huge pebbles of the Old Red conglomerate?"Rocks that two or three men could not lift, " say the Messrs. Andersonof Inverness, in describing the storms of Orkney, "are washed about evenon the tops of cliffs, which are between sixty and a hundred feet abovethe surface of the sea, when smooth; and detached masses of rock, of anenormous size, are well known to have been carried a considerabledistance between low and high-water mark. " "A little way from theBrough, " says Dr. Patrick Neill, in his 'Tour through Orkney andShetland, ' "we saw the prodigious effects of a late winter storm: manygreat stones, one of them of several tons weight, had been tossed up aprecipice twenty or thirty feet high, and laid fairly on the greensward. " There is something farther worthy of notice in the stone ofwhich the two boulders of the Dog-stack are composed. No species of rockoccurs more abundantly in the embedded pebbles of this ancientconglomerate than rocks of the trap family. We find in ittrap-porphyries, greenstones, clinkstones, basalts, and amygdalolds, largely mingled with fragments of the granitic, clay-slate, and quartzrocks. The Plutonic agencies must have been active in the locality forperiods amazingly protracted; and many of the masses protruded at a veryearly time seem identical in their composition with rocks of the trapfamily, which in other parts of the country we find referred to muchlater eras. There occur in this deposit rolled pebbles of a basalt, which in the neighborhood of Edinburgh would be deemed considerably moremodern than the times of the Mountain Limestone, and in the Isle ofSkye, considerably more modern than the times of the Oölite. 

The sunlight was showering its last slant rays on island and loch, andthen retreating upwards along the higher hills, chased by the shadows, as our boat quitted the bay of Oban, and stretched northwards, along theend of green Lismore, for the Sound of Mull. We had just enough of dayleft, as we reached mid sea, to show us the gray fronts of the threeancient castles, --- which at this point may be at once seen from thedeck, --Dunolly, Duart, and Dunstaffnage; and enough left us as weentered the Sound, to show, and barely show, the Lady Rock, famous intradition, and made classic by the pen of Campbell, raising its blackback amid the tides, like a belated porpoise. And then twilightdeepened into night, and we went snorting through the Strait with astream of green light curling off from either bow in the calm, towardsthe high dim land, that seemed standing up on both sides like tallhedges over a green lane. We entered the Bay of Tobermory aboutmidnight, and cast anchor amid a group of little vessels. An exceedinglysmall boat shot out from the side of a yacht of rather diminutiveproportions, but tautly rigged for her size, and bearing an outriggerastern. The water this evening was full of phosphoric matter, and itgleamed and sparkled around the little boat like a northern auroraaround a dark cloudlet. There was just light enough to show that theoars were plied by a sailor-like man in a Guernsey frock, and thatanother sailor-like man, --the skipper, mayhap, --attired in a cap andpea-jacket, stood in the stern. The man in the Guernsey frock was JohnStewart, sole mate and half the crew of the Free Church yacht Betsey;and the skipper-like man in the pea-jacket was my friend the minister ofthe Protestants of Small Isles. In five minutes more I was sitting withMr. Elder beside the little iron stove in the cabin of the Betsey; andthe minister, divested of his cap and jacket, but still looking theveritable skipper to admiration, was busied in making us a rather latetea. 

The cabin, --my home for the greater part of the three following weeks, and that of my friend for the greater part of the previoustwelvemonth, --I found to be an apartment about twice the size of acommon bed, and just lofty enough under the beams to permit a man offive feet eleven to stand erect in his night-cap. A large table, lashedto the floor, furnished with tiers of drawers of all sorts and sizes, and bearing a writing desk bound to it a-top, occupied the middle space, leaving just room enough for a person to pass between its edges and thenarrow coffin-like beds in the sides, and space enough at its fore-endfor two seats in front of the stove. A jealously barred skylight openedabove; and there depended from it this evening a close lantern-lookinglamp, sufficiently valuable, no doubt, in foul weather, but dreary anddim on the occasions when all one really wished from it was light. Thepeculiar furniture of the place gave evidence to the mixed nature of myfriend's employment. A well-thumbed chart of the Western Islands layacross an equally well-thumbed volume of Henry's "Commentary. " There wasa Polyglot and a spy-glass in one corner, and a copy of Calvin's"Institutes, " with the latest edition of "The Coaster's SailingDirections, " in another; while in an adjoining state-room, nearly largeenough to accommodate an arm-chair, if the chair could have butcontrived to get into it, I caught a glimpse of my friend's printingpress and his case of types, canopied overhead by the blue ancient ofthe vessel, bearing, in stately six-inch letters of white bunting, thelegend, "FREE CHURCH YACHT. " A door opened, which communicated with theforecastle, and John Stewart, stooping very much, to accommodate himselfto the low-roofed passage, thrust in a plate of fresh herrings, splendidly toasted, to give substantiality and relish to our tea. Thelittle rude forecastle, a considerably smaller apartment than the cabin, was all a-glow with the bright fire in the coppers, itself invisible; wecould see the chain-cable dangling from the hatchway to the floor, andJohn Stewart's companion, a powerful-looking, handsome young man, withbroad bare breast, and in his shirt-sleeves, squatted full in front ofthe blaze, like the household goblin described by Milton, or the"Christmas Present" of Dickens. Mr. Elder left us for the steamer, inwhich he prosecuted his voyage next morning to Skye; and we tumbled in, each to his narrow bed, --comfortable enough sort of resting places, though not over soft; and slept so soundly, that we failed to mark Mr. Elder's return for a few seconds, a little after daybreak. I found at mybedside, when I awoke, a fragment of rock which he had brought from theshore, charged with Liasic fossils; and a note he had written, to saythat the deposit to which it belonged occurred in the trap immediatelyabove the village-mill; and further, to call my attention to a housenear the middle of the village, built of a mouldering red sandstone, which had been found _in situ_ in digging the foundations. I had butlittle time for the work of exploration in Mull, and the informationthus kindly rendered enabled me to economize it. 

The village of Tobermory resembles that of Oban. A quiet bay has itssecure island-breakwater in front; a line of tall, well-built houses, not in the least rural in their aspect, but that seem rather as if theyhad been transported from the centre of some stately city entire and atonce, sweeps round its inner inflection, like a bent bow; and anamphitheatre of mingled rock and wood rises behind. With all its beauty, however, there hangs about the village an air of melancholy. Like someof the other western coast villages, it seems not to have grown, piece-meal, as a village ought, but to have been made wholesale, asFrankenstein made his man; and to be ever asking, and never moreincessantly than when it is at its quietest, why it should have beenmade at all? The remains of the Florida, a gallant Spanish ship, lie offits shores, a wreck of the Invincible Armada, "deep whelmed, " accordingto Thompson, "What time, Snatched sudden by the vengeful blast, The scattered vessels drove, and on blind shelve, And pointed rock that marks th' indented shore, Relentless dashed, where loud the northern main Howls through the fractured Caledonian isles. "

Macculloch relates, that there was an attempt made, rather more than acentury ago, to weigh up the Florida, which ended in the weighing up ofmerely a few of her guns, some of them of iron greatly corroded; andthat, on scraping them, they became so hot under the hand that theycould not be touched, but that they lost this curious property after afew hours' exposure to the air. There have since been repeated instanceselsewhere, he adds, of the same phenomenon, and chemistry has lent itssolution of the principles on which it occurs; but, in the year 1740, ere the riddle was read, it must have been deemed a thoroughly magicalone by the simple islanders of Mull. It would seem as if the guns, heated in the contest with Drake, Hawkins, and Frobisher, had againkindled, under some supernatural influence, with the intense glow of thelost battle. 

The morning was showery; but it cleared up a little after ten, and welanded to explore. We found the mill a little to the south of thevillage, where a small stream descends, all foam and uproar, from thehigher grounds along a rocky channel half-hidden by brushwood; and theLiasic bed occurs in an exposed front directly over it, coped by a thickbed of amygdaloidal trap. The organisms are numerous; and, when we diginto the bank beyond the reach of the weathering influences, we findthem delicately preserved, though after a fashion that renders difficulttheir safe removal. Originally the bed must have existed as a brownargillaceous mud, somewhat resembling that which forms in the course ofyears, under a scalp of muscles; and it has hardened into a moresilt-like clay, in which the fossils occur, not as petrifactions, butas shells in a state of decay, except in some rare cases, in which acalcareous nodule has formed within or around them. Viewed in the group, they seem of an intermediate character, between the shells of the Liasand the Oölite. One of the first fossils I disinterred was the Gryphæaobliquata, --a shell characteristic of the Liasic formation; and thefossil immediately after, the Pholadomy æqualis, a shell of the Oöliticone. There occurs in great numbers a species of small Pecten, --some ofthe specimens scarce larger than a herring scale; a minute Ostrea, asulcated Terebratula, an Isocardia, a Pullastra, and groups of brokenserpulæ in vast abundance. The deposit has also its three species ofAmmonite, existing as mere impressions in the clay; and at least twospecies of Belemnite, --one of the two somewhat resembling the Belemnitesabbreviatus, but smaller and rather more elongated: while the other, ofa spindle form, diminishing at both ends, reminds one of the Belemnitesminimus of the Gault. The Red Sandstone in the centre of the villageoccurs detached, like this Liasic bed, amid the prevailing trap, and maybe seen _in situ_ beside the southern gable of the tall, desertedlooking house at the hill-foot, that has been built of it. It is a soft, coarse-grained, mouldering stone, ill fitted for the purposes of thearchitect; and more nearly resembles the New Red Sandstone of Englandand Dumfriesshire, than any other rock I have yet seen in the north ofScotland. I failed to detect in it aught organic. 

We weighed anchor about two o'clock, and beat gallantly out the Sound, in the face of an intermittent baffling wind and a heavy swell from thesea. I would fain have approached nearer the precipices of Ardnamurchan, to trace along their inaccessible fronts the strange reticulations oftrap figured by Macculloch; but prudence and the skipper forbade ourtrusting even the docile little Betsey, on one of the most formidablelee shores in Scotland, in winds so light and variable, and with theswell so high. We could hear the deep roar of the surf for miles, andsee its undulating strip of white flickering under stack and cliff. Thescenery here seems rich in legendary association. At one tack we boreinto Bloody Bay, on the Mull coast, --the scene of a naval battle betweentwo island chiefs; at another, we approached, on the mainland, a caveinaccessible save from the sea, long the haunt of a ruthless Highlandpirate. Ere we rounded the headland of Ardnamurchan, the slant light ofevening was gleaming athwart the green acclivities of Mull, barring themwith long horizontal lines of shadow, where the trap terraces rise stepbeyond step, in the characteristic stair-like arrangement to which therock owes its name; and the sun set as we were bearing down in one longtack on the Small Isles. We passed the Isle of Muck, with its one lowhill; saw the pyramidal mountains of Rum looming tall in the offing; andthen, running along the Isle of Eigg, with its colossal Scuir risingbetween us and the sky, as if it were a piece of Babylonian wall, or ofthe great wall of China, only vastly larger, set down on the ridge of amountain, we entered the channel which separates the island from one ofits dependencies, Eilean Chaisteil, and cast anchor in the tideway, about fifty yards from the rocks. We were now at home, --the only homewhich the proprietor of the island permits to the islanders' minister;and, after getting warm and comfortable over the stove and a cup of tea, we did what all sensible men do in their own homes when the night wearslate, --got into bed. 

CHAPTER II. 

 The Minister's Larder--No Harbor--Eigg Shoes--_Tormentilla erecta_--For the _Witness'_ Sake--Eilean Chaisteil--Appearance of Eigg--Chapel of St. Donan--Shell-sand--Origin of Secondary Calcareous Rock suggested--Exploration of Eigg--Pitchstone Veins--A Bone Cave--Massacre at Eigg--Grouping of Human Bones in the Cave--Relics--The Horse's Tooth--A Copper Sewing Needle--Teeth found--Man a worse Animal than his Teeth show him to have been designed for--Story of the Massacre--Another Version--Scuir of Eigg--The Scuir a Giant's Causeway--Character of the Columns--Remains of a Prostrate Forest. 

We had rich tea this morning. The minister was among his people; and ourfirst evidence of the fact came in the agreeable form of three bottlesof fine fresh cream from the shore. Then followed an ample baking ofnice oaten cakes. The material out of which the cakes were manufacturedhad been sent from the minister's store aboard, --for oatmeal in Eigg israther a scarce commodity in the middle of July; but they had borrowed acrispness and flavor from the island, that the meal, left to its ownresources, could scarcely have communicated; and the golden-coloredcylinder of fresh butter which accompanied them was all the island'sown. There was an ample supply of eggs too, as one not quite a conjurormight have expected from a country bearing such a name, --eggs with themilk in them; and, with cream, butter, oaten cakes, eggs, and tea, allof the best, and with sharp-set sea-air appetites to boot, we faredsumptuously. There is properly no harbor in the island. We lay in anarrow channel, through which, twice every twenty-four hours, the tidessweep powerfully in one direction, and then as powerfully in thedirection opposite; and our anchors had a trick of getting foul, andcanting stock downwards in the loose sand, which, with pointed rocks allaround us, over which the current ran races, seemed a very shrewd sortof trick indeed. But a kedge and halser, stretched thwartwise to aneighboring crag, and jammed fast in a crevice, served in moderateweather to keep us tolerably right. In the severer seasons, however, thekedge is found inadequate, and the minister has to hoist sail and makeout for the open sea, as if served with a sudden summons of ejectment. 

Among the various things brought aboard this morning, there was a pairof island shoes for the minister's cabin use, that struck my fancy not alittle. They were all around of a deep madder red color, soles, weltsand uppers; and, though somewhat resembling in form the little yawl ofthe Betsey, were sewed not unskilfully with thongs; and their peculiarstyle of tie seemed of a kind suited to furnish with new idea afashionable shoemaker of the metropolis. They were altogether theproduction of Eigg, from the skin out of which they had been cut, withthe lime that had prepared it for the tan, and the root by which the tanhad been furnished, down to the last on which they had been moulded, andthe artisan that had cast them off, a pair of finished shoes. There arefew trees, and, of course, no bark to spare, in the island; but theislanders find a substitute in the astringent lobiferous root of the_Tormentilla erecta_, which they dig out for the purpose among theheath, at no inconsiderable expense of time and trouble. I was informedby John Stewart, an adept in all the multifarious arts of the island, from the tanning of leather and the tilling of land, to the building ofa house or the working of a ship, that the infusion of root had to bethrice changed for every skin, and that it took a man nearly a day togather roots enough for a single infusion. I was further informed thatit was not unusual for the owner of a skin to give it to some neighborto tan, and that, the process finished, it was divided equally betweenthem, the time and trouble bestowed on it by the one being deemedequivalent to the property held in it by the other. I wished to call apair of these primitive-looking shoes my own, and no sooner was the wishexpressed, than straightway one islander furnished me with leather, andanother set to work upon the shoes. When I came to speak ofremuneration, however, the islanders shook their heads. "No, no, notfrom the _Witness_: there are not many that take our part, and the_Witness_ does. " I hold the shoes, therefore, as my first retainer, determined, on all occasions of just quarrel, to make common cause withthe poor islanders. 

The view from the anchoring ground presents some very striking features. Between us and the sea lies Eilean Chaisteil, a rocky trap islet, abouthalf a mile in length by a few hundred yards in breadth; poor inpastures, but peculiarly rich in sea-weed, of which John Stewart used, he informed me, to make finer kelp, ere the trade was put down by act ofParliament, than could be made elsewhere in Eigg. This islet bore, inthe remote past, its rude fort or dun, long since sunk into a few grassymounds; and hence its name. On the landward side rises the island ofEigg proper, resembling in outline two wedges, placed point to point ona board. The centre is occupied by a deep angular gap, from which theground slopes upward on both sides, till, attaining its extreme heightat the opposite ends of the island, it drops suddenly on the sea. In thenorthern rising ground the wedge-like outline is complete; in thesouthern one it is somewhat modified by the gigantic Scuir, which risesdirect on the apex of the height, _i. E. _, the thick part of the wedge;and which, seen bows-on from this point of view, resembles some vastdonjon keep, taller, from base to summit, by about a hundred feet, thanthe dome of St. Paul's. The upper slopes of the island are brown andmoory, and present little on which the eye may rest, save a few trapterraces, with rudely columnar fronts; its middle space is mottled withpatches of green, and studded with dingy cottages, each of which thismorning, just a little before the breakfast hour, had its own bluecloudlet of smoke diffused around it; while along the beach, patches oflevel sand, alternated with tracts of green bank, or both, give place tostately ranges of basaltic columns, or dingy groups of detached rocks. Immediately in front of the central hollow, as if skilfully introduced, to relieve the tamest part of the prospect, a noble wall ofsemi-circular columns rises some eighty or a hundred feet over theshore; and on a green slope, directly above, we see the picturesqueruins of the Chapel of St. Donan, one of the disciples of Columba, andthe Culdee saint and apostle of the island. 

One of the things that first struck me, as I got on deck this morning, was the extreme whiteness of the sand. I could see it gleaming brightthrough the transparent green of the sea, three fathoms below our keel, and, in a little flat bay directly opposite, it presented almost theappearance of pulverized chalk. A stronger contrast to the dingytrap-rocks around which it lies could scarce be produced, had contrastfor effect's sake been the object. On landing on the exposed shelf towhich we had fastened our halser, I found the origin of the sandinterestingly exhibited. The hollows of the rock, a rough trachyte, witha surface like that of a steel rasp, were filled with handfuls of brokenshells thrown up by the surf from the sea-banks beyond: fragments ofechini, bits of the valves of razor-fish, the island cyprina, mactridæ, buccinidæ, and fractured periwinkles, lay heaped together in vastabundance. In hollow after hollow, as I passed shorewards, I found thefragments more and more comminuted, just as, in passing along thesuccessive vats of a paper-mill, one finds the linen rags more and moredisintegrated by the cylinders; and immediately beyond the inner edge ofthe shelf, which is of considerable extent, lies the flat bay, theultimate recipient of the whole, filled to the depth of several feet, and to the extent of several hundred yards, with a pure shell-sand, thegreater part of which had been thus washed ashore in handfuls, andground down by the blended agency of the trachyte and the surf. Onceformed, however, in this way it began to receive accessions from theexuviæ of animals that love such localities, --the deep arenaceous bedand soft sand-beach; and these now form no inconsiderable proportion ofthe entire mass. I found the deposit thickly inhabited by spatangi, razor-fish, gapers, and large, well-conditioned cockles, which seemed tohave no idea whatever that they were living amid the debris of a charnelhouse. Such has been the origin here of a bed of shell-sand, consistingof many thousand tons, and of which at least eighty per cent. Was onceassociated with animal life. And such, I doubt not, is the history ofmany a calcareous rock in the later secondary formations. There arestrata, not a few, of the Cretaceous and Oölitic groups, that would befound--could we but trace their beginnings with a certainty andclearness equal to that with which we can unravel the story of thisdeposit--to be, like it, elaborations from dead matter, made through theagency of animal secretion. 

We set out on our first exploratory ramble in Eigg an hour before noon. The day was bracing and breezy, and a clear sun looked cheerily down onisland, and strait, and blue open sea. We rowed southwards in ourlittle boat, through the channel of Eilean Chaisteil, along thetrap-rocks of the island, and landed under the two pitchstone veins ofEigg, so generally known among mineralogists, and of which specimens maybe found in so many cabinets. They occur in an earthy, greenish-blackamygdaloid, which forms a range of sea-cliffs varying in height fromthirty to fifty feet, and that, from their sad hue and dull fracture, seem to absorb the light; while the veins themselves, bright andglistening, glitter in the sun, as if they were streams of watertraversing the face of the rock. The first impression they imparted, inviewing them from the boat, was, that the inclosing mass was a pitchcaldron, rather of the roughest and largest, and much begrimmed by soot, that had cracked to the heat, and that the fluid pitch was forcing itsway outwards through the rents. The veins expand and contract, herediminishing to a strip a few inches across, there widening into acomparatively broad belt, some two or three feet over; and, as welldescribed by M'Culloch, we find the inclosed pitchstone changing incolor, and assuming a lighter or darker hue, as it nears the edge orrecedes from it. In the centre it is of a dull olive green, passinggradually into blue, which in turn deepens into black; and it is exactlyat the point of contact with the earthy amygdaloid that the black ismost intense, and the fracture of the stone glassiest and brightest. Iwas lucky enough to detach a specimen, which, though scarce four inchesacross, exhibits the three colors characteristic of the vein, --its barof olive green on the one side, of intense black on the other, and ofblue, like that of imperfectly fused bottle-glass, in the centre. Thiscurious rock, --so nearly akin in composition and appearance toobsidian, --a mineral which, in its dense form, closely resembles thecoarse dark-colored glass of which common bottles are made, and which, in its lighter form, exists as pumice, --constitutes one of the linksthat connect the trap with the unequivocally volcanic rocks. The onemineral may be seen beside smoking crater, as in the Lipari Isles, passing into pumice; while the other may be converted into a substancealmost identical with pumice, by the chemist. "It is stated by theHonorable George Knox, of Dublin, " says Mr. Robert Allan, in hisvaluable mineralogical work, "that the pitchstone of Newry, on beingexposed to a high temperature, loses its bitumen and water, and isconverted into a light substance in every respect resembling pumice. "But of pumice in connection with the pitchstones of Eigg, more anon. 

Leaving our boat to return to the Betsey at John Stewart's leisure, andtaking with us his companion, to assist us in carrying such specimens aswe might procure, we passed westwards for a few hundred yards under thecrags, and came abreast of a dark angular opening at the base of theprecipice, scarce two feet in height, and in front of which there lies alittle sluggish, ankle-deep pool, half mud, half water, and matted overwith grass and rushes. Along the mural face of the rock of earthyamygdaloid there runs a nearly vertical line, which in one of thestratified rocks one might perhaps term the line of a fault, but whichin a trap rock may merely indicate where two semi-molten masses hadpressed against each other without uniting--just as currents of coolinglead, poured by the plumber from the opposite end of a groove, sometimesmeet and press together, so as to make a close, polished joint, withoutrunning into one piece. The little angular opening forms the lowertermination of the line, which, hollowing inwards, recedes near thebottom into a shallow cave, roughened with tufts of fern and bunches oflong silky grass, here and there enlivened by the delicate flowers ofthe lesser rock-geranium. A shower of drops patters from above among theweeds and rushes of the little pool. My friend the minister stoppedshort. "There, " he said, pointing to the hollow, "you will find such abone cave as you never saw before. Within that opening there lie theremains of an entire race, palpably destroyed, as geologists in so manyother cases are content merely to imagine, by one great catastrophe. That is the famous cave of Frances (_Uamh Fraingh_), in which the wholepeople of Eigg were smoked to death by the M'Leods. "

We struck a light, and, worming ourselves through the narrow entrance, gained the interior, --a true rock gallery, vastly more roomy and loftythan one could have anticipated from the mean vestibule placed in frontof it. Its extreme length we found to be two hundred and sixty feet; itsextreme breadth twenty-seven feet; its height, where the roof riseshighest, from eighteen to twenty feet. The cave seems to have owed itsorigin to two distinct causes. The trap-rocks on each side of thevertical fault-like crevice which separates them are greatly decomposed, as if by the moisture percolating from above; and directly in the lineof the crevice must the surf have charged, wave after wave, for ages erethe last upheaval of the land. When the Dog-stone at Dunolly existed asa sea-stack, skirted with algæ, the breakers on this shore must havedashed every tide through the narrow opening of the cavern, and scoopedout by handfuls the decomposing trap within. The process ofdecomposition, and consequent enlargement, is still going on inside, butthere is no longer an agent to sweep away the disintegrated fragments. Where the roof rises highest, the floor is blocked up with accumulationsof bulky decaying masses, that have dropped from above; and it iscovered over its entire area by a stratum of earthy rubbish, which hasfallen from the sides and ceiling in such abundance, that it covers upthe straw beds of the perished islanders, which still exist beneath as abrown mouldering felt, to the depth of from five to eight inches. Neveryet was tragedy enacted on a gloomier theatre. An uncertain twilightglimmers gray at the entrance, from the narrow vestibule; but allwithin, for full two hundred feet, is black as with Egyptian darkness. As we passed onward with our one feeble light, along the dark moulderingwalls and roof, which absorbed every straggling ray that reached them, and over the dingy floor, ropy and damp, the place called torecollection that hall in Roman story, hung and carpeted with black, into which Domitian once thrust his senate, in a frolic, to read theirown names on the coffin-lids placed against the wall. The darknessseemed to press upon us from every side, as if it were a dense jettyfluid, out of which our light had scooped a pailful or two, and that wasrushing in to supply the vacuum; and the only objects we saw distinctlyvisible were each other's heads and faces, and the lighter parts of ourdress. 

The floor, for about a hundred feet inwards from the narrow vestibule, resembles that of a charnel-house. At almost every step we came uponheaps of human bones grouped together, as the Psalmist so graphicallydescribes, "as when one cutteth and cleaveth wood upon the earth. " Theyare of a brownish, earthy hue, here and there tinged with green; theskulls, with the exception of a few broken fragments, have disappeared;for travellers in the Hebrides have of late years been numerous andcurious; and many a museum, --that at Abbotsford among therest, --exhibits, in a grinning skull, its memorial of the Massacre atEigg. We find, too, further marks of visitors in the single bonesseparated from the heaps and scattered over the area; but enough stillremains to show, in the general disposition of the remains, that thehapless islanders died under the walls in families, each little groupseparated by a few feet from the others. Here and there the remains of adetached skeleton may be seen, as if some robust islander, restless inhis agony, had stalked out into the middle space ere he fell; but thesocial arrangement is the general one. And beneath every heap we find, at the depth, as has been said, of a few inches, the remains of thestraw-bed upon which the family had lain, largely mixed with the smallerbones of the human frame, ribs and vertebræ, and hand and feet bones;occasionally, too, with fragments of unglazed pottery, and various otherimplements of a rude housewifery. The minister found for me, under onefamily heap, the pieces of a half-burned, unglazed earthen jar, with anarrow mouth, that, like the sepulchral urns of our ancient tumuli, hadbeen moulded by the hand, without the assistance of the potter's wheel;and to one of the fragments there stuck a minute pellet of gray hair. From under another heap he disinterred the handle-stave of a child'swooden porringer (_bicker_), perforated by a hole still bearing the markof the cord that had hung it to the wall; and beside the stave lay a fewof the larger, less destructible bones of the child, with what for atime puzzled us both not a little, --one of the grinders of a horse. Certain it was, no horse could have got there to have dropped atooth, --a foal of a week old could not have pressed itself through theopening; and how the single grinder, evidently no recent introductioninto the cave, could have got mixed up in the straw with the humanbones, seemed an enigma somewhat of the class to which the reel in thebottle belongs. I found in Edinburgh an unexpected commentator on themystery, in the person of my little boy, --an experimental philosopher inhis second year. I had spread out on the floor the curiosities ofEigg, --among the rest, the relics of the cave, including the pieces ofearthern jar, and the fragment of the porringer; but the horse's toothseemed to be the only real curiosity among them in the eyes of littleBill. He laid instant hold of it; and, appropriating it as a toy, continued playing with it till he fell asleep. I have now little doubtthat it was first brought into the cave by the poor child amid whosemouldering remains Mr. Swanson found it. The little pellet of gray hairspoke of feeble old age involved in this wholesale massacre with thevigorous manhood of the island; and here was a story of unsuspectinginfancy amusing itself on the eve of destruction with its toys. Alas, for man! "Should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, " said God to theangry prophet, "wherein are more than six score thousand persons thatcannot discern between their right hand and their left?" God's imagemust have been sadly defaced in the murderers of the poor inoffensivechildren of Eigg, ere they could have heard their feeble wailings, raised, no doubt, when the stifling atmosphere within began first tothicken, and yet ruthlessly persist in their work of indiscriminatedestruction. 

Various curious things have from time to time been picked up from underthe bones. An islander found among them, shortly before our visit, asewing needle of copper, little more than an inch in length; fragmentsof Eigg shoes, of the kind still made in the island, are ofcomparatively common occurrence; and Mr. James Wilson relates, in thesingularly graphic and powerful description of _Uamh Fraingh_, whichoccurs in his "Voyage round the Coasts of Scotland" (1841), that asailor, when he was there, disinterred, by turning up a flat stone, a"buck-tooth" and a piece of money, --the latter a rusty copper coin, apparently of the times of Mary of Scotland. I also found a few teeth;they were sticking fast in a fragment of jaw; and, taking it forgranted, as I suppose I may, that the dentology of the murderous M'Leodsoutside the cave must have very much resembled that of the murderedM'Donalds within, very harmless looking teeth they were for being thoseof an animal so maliciously mischievous as man. I have found in the OldRed Sandstone the strong-based tusks of the semi-reptile Holoptychius; Ihave chiselled out of the limestone of the Coal Measures the sharp, dagger-like incisors of the Megalichthys; I have picked up in the Liasand Oölite the cruel spikes of the Crocodile and the Ichthyosaurus; Ihave seen the trenchant, saw-edged teeth of gigantic Cestracions andSqualidæ that had been disinterred from the Chalk and the London Clay;and I have felt, as I examined them, that there could be no possibilityof mistake regarding the nature of the creatures to which they hadbelonged;--they were teeth made for hacking, tearing, mangling, --foramputating limbs at a bite, and laying open bulky bodies with a crunch;but I could find no such evidence in the human jaw, with its threeinoffensive looking grinders, that the animal it had belonged to, --farmore ruthless and cruel than reptile-fish, crocodiles, or sharks, --wasof such a nature that it could destroy creatures of even its own kind byhundreds at a time, when not in the least incited by hunger, and with noultimate intention of eating them. Man must surely have become animmensely worse animal than his teeth show him to have been designedfor; his teeth give no real evidence regarding his real character. Who, for instance, could gather from the dentology of the M'Leods the passagein their history to which the cave of Frances bears evidence?

We quitted the cave, with its stagnant damp atmosphere and its mouldyunwholesome smells, to breathe the fresh sea-air on the beach without. Its story, as recorded by Sir Walter in his "Tales of a Grandfather, "and by Mr. Wilson, in his "Voyage, " must be familiar to the reader; andI learned from my friend, versant in all the various island traditionsregarding it, that the less I inquired into its history on the spot, themore was I likely to feel satisfied that I knew something about it. There seem to have been no chroniclers, in this part of the Hebrides, inthe rude age of the unglazed pipkin and the copper needle; and manyyears seem to have elapsed ere the story of their hapless possessors wascommitted to writing; and so we find it existing in various and somewhatconflicting editions. "Some hundred years ago, " says Mr. Wilson, "a fewof the M'Leods landed in Eigg from Skye, where, having greatlymisconducted themselves, the Eiggites strapped them to their own boats, which they sent adrift into the ocean. They were, however, rescued bysome clansmen; and, soon after, a strong body of the M'Leods set sailfrom Skye, to revenge themselves on Eigg. The natives of the latterisland feeling they were not of sufficient force to offer resistance, went and hid themselves (men, women, and children) in this secret cave, which is narrow, but of great subterranean length, with an exceedinglysmall entrance. It opens from the broken face of a steep bank along theshore; and, as the whole coast is cavernous, their particular retreatwould have been sought for in vain by strangers. So the Skye-men, finding the island uninhabited, presumed the natives had fled, andsatisfied their revengeful feelings by ransacking and pillaging theempty houses. Probably the _movables_ were of no great value. They thentook their departure and left the island, when the sight of a solitaryhuman being among the cliffs awakened their suspicion, and induced themto return. Unfortunately a slight sprinkling of snow had fallen, and thefootsteps of an individual were traced to the mouth of the cave. Nothaving been there ourselves at the period alluded to, we cannot speakwith certainty as to the nature of the parley which ensued, or theterms offered by either party; but we know that those were not the daysof protocols. The ultimatum was unsatisfactory to the Skye-men, whoimmediately proceeded to 'adjust the preliminaries' in their own way, which adjustment consisted in carrying a vast collection of heather, ferns, and other combustibles, and making a huge fire just in the veryentrance of the _Uamh Fraingh_, which they kept up for a length of time;and thus, by 'one fell smoke, ' they smothered the entire population ofthe island. "

Such is Mr. Wilson's version of the story, which, in all its leadingcircumstances, agrees with that of Sir Walter. According, however, to atleast one of the Eigg versions, it was the M'Leod himself who had landedon the island, driven there by a storm. The islanders, at feud with theM'Leod's at the time, inhospitably rose upon him, as he bivouacked onthe shores of the Bay of Laig; and in a fray, in which his party had theworse, his back was broken, and he was forced off half dead to sea. Several months after, on his partial recovery, he returned, crook-backedand infirm, to wreak his vengeance on the inhabitants, all of whom, warned of his coming by the array of his galleys in the offing, hidthemselves in the cave, in which, however, they were ultimatelybetrayed--as narrated by Sir Walter and Mr. Wilson--by the track of somefootpaths in a sprinkling of snow; and the implacable chieftain, givingorders on the discovery, to unroof the houses in the neighborhood, raised high a pile of rafters against the opening, and set it on fire. And there he stood in front of the blaze, hump-backed and grim, till thewild, hollow cry from the rock within had sunk into silence, and therelived not a single islander of Eigg, man, woman, or child. The fact thattheir remains should have been left to moulder in the cave is proofenough, of itself, that none survived to bury the dead. I am inclinedto believe, from the appearance of the place, that smoke could scarcelyhave been the real agent of destruction; then, as now, it would havetaken a great deal of pure smoke to smother a Highlander. It may beperhaps deemed more probable, that the huge fire of rafter and roof-treepiled close against the opening, and rising high over it, would draw outthe oxygen within as its proper food, till at length all would beexhausted; and life would go out for want of it, like the flame of acandle under an upturned jar. Sir Walter refers the date of the event tosome time "about the close of the sixteenth century;" and the coin ofQueen Mary, mentioned by Mr. Wilson, points at a period at least notmuch earlier; but the exact time of its occurrence is so uncertain, thata Roman Catholic priest of the Hebrides, in lately showing his peoplewhat a very bad thing Protestantism is, instanced, as a specimen of itsaverage morality, the affair of the cave. The _Protestant_ M'Leods ofSkye, he said, full of hatred in their hearts, had murdered, wholesale, their wretched brethren, the _Protestant_ M'Donalds of Eigg, and sentthem off to perdition before their time. 

Quitting the beach, we ascended the breezy hill-side on our way to theScuir, --an object so often and so well described, that it might beperhaps prudent, instead of attempting one description more, to presentthe reader with some of the already existing ones. "The Scuir of Eigg, "says Professor Jamieson, in his 'Mineralogy of the Western Islands, ' "isperfectly mural, and extends for upwards of a mile and a half, and risesto a height of several hundred feet. It is entirely columnar, and thecolumns rise in successive ranges, until they reach the summit, where, from their great height, they appear, when viewed from below, diminutive. Staffa is an object of the greatest beauty and regularity;the pillars are as distinct as if they had been reared by the hand ofart; but it has not the extent or sublimity of the Scuir of Eigg. Theone may be compared with the greatest exertions of human power; theother is characteristic of the wildest and most inimitable works ofnature. " "The height of this extraordinary object is considerable, " saysM'Culloch, dashing off his sketch with a still bolder hand; "yet itspowerful effect arises rather from its peculiar form, and the commandingelevation which it occupies, than from its positive altitude. Viewed inone direction, it presents a long irregular wall, crowning the summit ofthe highest hill, while in the other it resembles a huge tower. Thus itforms no natural combination of outline with the surrounding land, andhence acquires that independence in the general landscape whichincreases its apparent magnitude, and produces that imposing effectwhich it displays. From the peculiar position of the Scuir, it must alsoinevitably be viewed from a low station. Hence it everywhere towers highabove the spectator; while, like other objects on the mountain outline, its apparent dimensions are magnified, and its dark mass defined on thesky, so as to produce all the additional effects arising from strongoppositions of light and shadow. The height of this rock is sufficientin this stormy country frequently to arrest the passage of the clouds, so as to be further productive of the most brilliant effects inlandscape. Often they may be seen hovering on its summit, and addingideal dimensions to the lofty face, or, when it is viewed on theextremity, conveying the impression of a tower, the height of which issuch as to lie in the regions of the clouds. Occasionally they sweepalong the base, leaving its huge and black mass involved in additionalgloom, and resembling the castle of some Arabian enchanter, built on theclouds, and suspended in air. " It might be perhaps deemed somewhatinvidious to deal with pictures such as these in the style theconnoisseur in the "Vicar of Wakefield" dealt with the old painting, when, seizing a brush, he daubed it over with brown varnish, and thenasked the spectators whether he had not greatly improved the tone of thecoloring. And yet it is just possible, that in the case of at leastM'Culloch's picture, the brown varnish might do no manner of harm. But ahomelier sketch, traced out on almost the same leading lines, with justa little less of the aërial in it, may have nearly the same subduingeffect; I have, besides, a few curious touches to lay in, which seemhitherto to have escaped observation and the pencil; and in theseseveral circumstances must lie my apology for adding one sketch more tothe sketches existing already. 

The Scuir of Eigg, then, is a veritable Giant's Causeway, like that onthe coast of Antrim, taken and magnified rather more than twenty timesin height, and some five or six times in breadth, and then placed on theridge of a hill nearly nine hundred feet high. Viewed sideways, itassumes, as described by M'Culloch, the form of a perpendicular butruinous rampart, much gapped above, that runs for about a mile and aquarter along the top of a lofty sloping talus. Viewed endways, itresembles a tall massy tower, --such a tower as my friend, Mr. D. O. Hill, would delight to draw, and give delight by drawing, --a tower threehundred feet in breadth by four hundred and seventy feet in height, perched on the apex of a pyramid, like a statue on a pedestal. Thisstrange causeway is columnar from end to end; but the columns, fromtheir great altitude and deficient breadth, seem mere rodded shafts inthe Gothic style; they rather resemble bundles of rods thanwell-proportioned pillars. Few of them exceed eighteen inches indiameter, and many of them fall short of half a foot; but, though lostin the general mass of the Scuir as independent columns, when we view itat an angle sufficiently large to take in its entire bulk, they yetimpart to it that graceful linear effect which we see brought out intasteful pencil sketches and good line engravings. We approached it thisday from the shore in the direction in which the eminence it stands uponassumes the pyramidal form, and itself the tower-like outline. Theacclivity is barren and stony, --a true desert foreground, like those ofThebes and Palmyra; and the huge square shadow of the tower stretcheddark and cold athwart it. The sun shone out clearly. One half theimmense bulk before us, with its delicate vertical lining, lay from topto bottom in deep shade, massive and gray; one half presented itsmany-sided columns to the light, here and there gleaming with tints ofextreme brightness, where the pitchstones presented their glassy planesto the sun; its general outline, whether pencilled by the lighter ordarker tints, stood out sharp and clear; and a stratum of white fleecyclouds floated slowly amid the delicious blue behind it. But the minuterdetails I must reserve for my next chapter. One fact, however, anticipated just a little out of its order, may heighten the interest ofthe reader. There are massive buildings, --bridges of noble span, andharbors that abut far into the waves, --founded on wooden piles; and thishugest of hill-forts we find founded on wooden piles also. It is builton what a Scotch architect would perhaps term a pile-_brander_ of the_Pinites Eiggensis_, an ancient tree of the Oölite. The gigantic Scuirof Eigg rests on the remains of a prostrate forest. 

CHAPTER III. 

 Structure of the Scuir--A stray Column--The Piazza--A buried Pine Forest the Foundation of the Scuir--Geological Poachers in a Fossil Preserve--_Pinites Eiggensis_--Its Description--Witham's Experiments on Fossil Pine of Eigg--Rings of the Pine--Ascent of the Scuir--Appearance of the Top--White Pitchstone--Mr. Greig's Discovery of Pumice--A Sunset Scene--The Manse and the Yacht--The Minister's Story--A Cottage Repast--American Timber drifted to the Hebrides--Agency of the Gulf Stream--The Minister's Sheep. 

As we climbed the hill-side, and the Shinar-like tower before us rosehigher over the horizon at each step we took, till it seemed pointing atthe middle sky, we could mark peculiarities in its structure whichescape notice in the distance. We found it composed of various beds, each of which would make a Giant's Causeway entire, piled over eachother like stories in a building, and divided into columns, vertical, ornearly so, in every instance except in one bed near the base, in whichthe pillars incline to a side, as if losing footing under thesuperincumbent weight. Innumerable polygonal fragments, --single stonesof the building, --lie scattered over the slope, composed, like almostall the rest of the Scuir, of a peculiar and very beautiful stone, unlike any other in Scotland--a dark pitchstone-porphyry, which, inclosing crystals of glassy feldspar, resembles in the hand-specimen, amass of black sealing-wax, with numerous pieces of white bugle stuckinto it. Some of the detached polygons are of considerable size; few ofthem larger and bulkier, however, than a piece of column of thischaracteristic porphyry, about ten feet in length by two feet indiameter, which lies a full mile away from any of the others, in theline of the old burying-ground, and distant from it only a few hundredyards. It seems to have been carried there by man: we find its bearingfrom the Scuir lying nearly at right angles with the direction of thedrift-boulders of the western coast, which are, besides, of rareoccurrence in the Hebrides; nor has it a single neighbor; and it seemsnot improbable, as a tradition of the island testifies, that it wasremoved thus far for the purpose of marking some place of sepulture, andthat the catastrophe of the cave arrested its progress after by far thelonger and rougher portion of the way had been passed. The dry-arm bonesof the charnel-house in the rock may have been tugging around it whenthe galleys of the M'Leod hove in sight. The traditional history ofEigg, said my friend the minister, compared with that of some of theneighboring islands, presents a decapitated aspect: the M'Leods cut itoff by the neck. Most of the present inhabitants can tell which of theirancestors, grandfather, or great-grandfather, or great-great-grandfather, first settled in the place, and where they came from; and, with theexception of a few vague legends about St. Donan and his grave, which werepreserved apparently among the people of the other Small Isles, the islandhas no early traditional history. 

We had now reached the Scuir. There occur, intercalated with thecolumnar beds, a few bands of a buff-colored non-columnar trap, described by M'Culloch as of a texture intermediate between a greenstoneand a basalt, and which, while the pitchstone around it seems nearlyindestructible, has weathered so freely as to form horizontal groovesalong the face of the rock, from two to five yards in depth. One ofthese runs for several hundred feet along the base of the Scuir, just atthe top of the talus, and greatly resembles a piazza, lacking the outerpillars. It is from ten to twelve feet in height, by from fifteen totwenty in depth; the columns of the pitch stone-bed immediately aboveit seem perilously hanging in mid air; and along their sides theretrickles, in even the driest summer weather, --for the Scuir is acondenser on an immense scale--minute runnels of water, that patterceaselessly in front of the long deep hollow, like rain from the eavesof a cottage during a thunder shower. Inside, however, all is dry, andthe floor is covered to the depth of several inches with the dung ofsheep and cattle, that find, in this singular mountain piazza, a placeof shelter. We had brought a pickaxe with us; and the dry and dustyfloor, composed mainly of a gritty conglomerate, formed the scene of ourlabors. It is richly fossiliferous, though the organisms have nospecific variety; and never, certainly, have I found the remains offormer creations in a scene in which they more powerfully addressedthemselves to the imagination. A stratum of peat-moss, mixed withfresh-water shells, and resting on a layer of vegetable mould, fromwhich the stumps and roots of trees still protruded, was once found inItaly, buried beneath an ancient tesselated pavement; and the whole gavecurious evidence of a kind fitted to picture to the imagination abackground vista of antiquity, all the more remotely ancient in aspectfrom the venerable age of the object in front. Dry ground covered bywood, a lake, a morass, and then dry ground again, had all takenprecedence, on the site of the tesselated pavement, in this instance, ofan old Roman villa. But what was antiquity in connection with a Romanvilla, to antiquity in connection with the Scuir of Eigg? Under the oldfoundations of this huge wall we find the remains of a pine forest, that, long ere a single bed of the porphyry had burst from beneath, hadsprung up and decayed on hill and beside stream in some namelessland, --had then been swept to the sea, --had been entombed deep at thebottom in a grit of Oölite, --had been heaved up to the surface, andhigh over it, by volcanic agencies working from beneath, --and hadfinally been built upon, as moles are built upon piles, by the architectthat had laid down the masonry of the gigantic Scuir, in one fiery layerafter another. The mountain wall of Eigg, with its dizzy elevation offour hundred and seventy feet, is a wall founded on piles of pine laidcrossways; and, strange as the fact may seem, one has but to dig intothe floor of this deep-hewn piazza, to be convinced that at least it_is_ a fact. 

Just at this interesting stage, however, our explorations bade fair tobe interrupted. Our man who carried the pickaxe had lingered behind usfor a few hundred yards, in earnest conversation with an islander; andhe now came up, breathless and in hot haste, to say that the islander, aRoman Catholic tacksman in the neighborhood, had peremptorily warned himthat the Scuir of Eigg was the property of Dr. M'Pherson of Aberdeen, not ours, and that the Doctor would be very angry at any man who meddledwith it. "That message, " said my friend, laughing, but looking just alittle sad through the laugh, "would scarce have been sent us when I wasminister of the Establishment here; but it seems allowable in the caseof a poor Dissenter, and is no bad specimen of the thousand little waysin which the Roman Catholic population of the island try to annoy me, now that they see my back to the wall. " I was tickled with the idea of afossil preserve, which coupled itself in my mind, through a trick of theassociative faculty, with the idea of a great fossil act for theBritish empire, framed on the principles of the game-laws; and, justwondering what sort of disreputable vagabonds geological poacherswould become under its deteriorating influence, I laid hold of thepickaxe and broke into the stonefast floor; and thence I succeeded inabstracting, --feloniously, I dare say, though the crime has not yet gotinto the statute-book--some six or eight pieces of the _PinitesEiggensis_, amounting in all to about half a cubic foot of that veryancient wood--value unknown. I trust, should the case come to a seriousbearing, the members of the London Geological Society will generouslysubscribe half-a-crown a-piece to assist me in feeing counsel. There aremore interests than mine at stake in the affair. If I be cast andcommitted, --I, who have poached over only a few miserable districts inScotland, --pray, what will become of some of them, --the Lyells, Bucklands, Murchisons and Sedgwicks, --who have poached over wholecontinents?

We were successful in procuring several good specimens of the Eigg pine, at a depth, in the conglomerate, of from eight to eighteen inches. Someof the upper pieces we found in contact with the decomposing trap out ofwhich the hollow piazza above had been scooped; but the greater number, as my set of specimens abundantly testify, lay embedded in the originalOölitic grit in which they had been locked up, in, I doubt not, theirpresent fossil state, ere their upheaval, through Plutonic agency, fromtheir deep-sea bottom. The annual rings of the wood, which are quite assmall as in a slow-growing Baltic pine, are distinctly visible in allthe better pieces I this day transferred to my bag. In one fragment Ireckon sixteen rings in half an inch, and fifteen in the same space inanother. The trees to which they belonged seem to have grown on someexposed hill-side, where, in the course of half a century, little morethan from two or three inches were added to their diameter. The _PinitesEiggensis_, or Eigg pine, was first introduced to the notice of thescientific world by the late Mr. Witham, in whose interesting work on"The Internal Structure of Fossil Vegetables" the reader may find itfigured and described. The specimen in which he studied itspeculiarities "was found, " he says, "at the base of the magnificentmural escarpment named the Scuir of Eigg, --not, however, _in situ_, butamong fragments of rocks of the Oölitic series. " The authors of the"Fossil Flora, " where it is also figured, describe it as differing veryconsiderably in structure from any of the coniferæ of the Coal Measures. "Its medullary rays, " says Messrs. Lindley and Hutton, "appear to bemore numerous, and frequently are not continued through one zone of woodto another, but more generally terminate at the concentric circles. Itabounds also in turpentine vessels, or lacunæ, of various sizes, thesides of which are distinctly defined. " Viewed through the microscope, in transparent slips, longitudinal and transverse, it presents, withinthe space of a few lines, objects fitted to fill the mind with wonder. We find the minutest cells, glands, fibres, of the original woodpreserved uninjured. _There_ still are those medullary rays entire thatcommunicated between the pith and the outside, --_there_ still the ringof thickened cells that indicated the yearly check which the growthreceived when winter came on, --_there_ the polygonal reticulations ofthe cross section, without a single broken mesh, --_there_, too, theelongated cells in the longitudinal one, each filled with minute glandsthat take the form of double circles, --_there_ also, of larger size andless regular form, the lacunæ in which the turpentine lay: every nicelyorganized speck, invisible to the naked eye, we find in as perfect astate of keeping in the incalculably ancient pile-work on which thegigantic Scuir is founded, as in the living pines that flourish green onour hill-sides. A net-work, compared with which that of the finest laceever worn by the fair reader would seem a net-work of cable, haspreserved entire, for untold ages, the most delicate peculiarities ofits pattern. There is not a mesh broken, nor a circular dot away!

The experiments of Mr. Witham on the Eigg fossil, furnish aninteresting example of the light which a single, apparently simple, discovery may throw on whole departments of fact. He sliced his specimenlongitudinally and across, fastened the slices on glass, ground themdown till they became semi-transparent, and then, examining them underreflected light by the microscope, marked and recorded the specificpeculiarities of their structure. And we now know, in consequence, thatthe ancient Eigg pine, to which the detached fragment picked up at thebase of the Scuir belonged, --a pine alike different from those of theearlier carboniferous period and those which exist contemporary withourselves, --was, some _three creations_ ago, an exceedingly common treein the country now called Scotland, --as much so, perhaps, as the Scotchfir is at the present day. The fossil trees found in such abundance inthe neighborhood of Helmsdale that they are burnt for lime, --the fossilwood of Eathie, in Cromartyshire, and that of Shandwick, in Ross, --allbelong to the _Pinites Eiggensis_. It seems to have been a straight andstately tree, in most instances, as in the Eigg specimens, of slowgrowth. One of the trunks I saw near Navidale measured two feet indiameter, but a full century had passed ere it attained to a bulk soconsiderable; and a splendid specimen in my collection, from the samelocality, which measures twenty-one inches, exhibits even _more_ than ahundred annual rings. In one of my specimens, and one only, the ringsare of great breadth. They differ from those of all the others in theproportion in which I have seen the annual rings of a young, vigorousfir that had sprung up in some rich, moist hollow, differ from theannual rings of trees of the same species that had grown in the shallow, hard soil of exposed hill-sides. And this one specimen furnishes curiousevidence that the often-marked but little understood law, which gives usour better and worse seasons in alternate groups, various in number anduncertain in their time of recurrence, obtained as early as the age ofthe Oölite. The rings follow each other in groups of lesser and largerbreadth. One group of four rings measures an inch and a quarter across, while an adjoining group of five rings measures only five-eighth parts;and in a breadth of six inches there occur five of these alternategroups. For some four or five years together, when this pine was aliving tree, the springs were late and cold, and the summers cloudy andchill, as in that group of seasons which intervened between 1835 and1841; and then, for four or five years, more springs were early andsummers genial, as in the after group of 1842, 1843 and 1844. Anarrangement in nature, --first observed, as we learn from Bacon, by thepeople of the Low Countries, and which has since formed the basis ofmeteoric tables, and of predictions and elaborate cycles of theweather, --bound together the twelvemonths of the Oölitic period inalternate bundles of better and worse: vegetation throve vigorouslyduring the summers of one group, and languished, in those of another, ina state of partial development. 

Sending away our man shipwards, laden with a bag of fossil wood, weascended by a steep broken ravine to the top of the Scuir. The columns, as we pass on towards the west, diminish in size, and assume in many ofthe beds considerable variety of direction and form. In one bed theybelly over with a curve, like the ribs of some wrecked vessel from whichthe planking has been torn away; in another they project in a straightline, like muskets planted slantways on the ground to receive a chargeof cavalry; in others the inclination is inwards, like that of ranges ofstakes placed in front of a sea-dyke, to break the violence of thewaves; while yet in others they present, as in the eastern portion ofthe Scuir, the common vertical direction. The ribbed appearance of everycrag and cliff, imparts to the scene a peculiar character; every largermass of light and shadow is corded with minute stripes; and the feelingexperienced among the more shattered peaks, and in the more brokenrecesses, seems near akin to that which it is the tendency of somemagnificent ruin to excite, than that which awakens amid the sublime ofnature. We feel as if the pillared rocks around us were like theCyclopean walls of Southern Italy, --the erections of some old giganticrace passed from the earth forever. The feeling must have beenexperienced on former occasions, amid the innumerable pillars of theScuir; for we find M'Culloch, in his description, ingeniously analyzingit. "The resemblance to architecture here is much increased, " he says, "by the columnar structure, which is sufficiently distinguishable, evenfrom a distance, and produces a strong effect of artificial regularitywhen seen near at hand. To this vague association in the mind of theefforts of art with the magnitude of nature, is owing much of thatsublimity of character which the Scuir presents. The sense of power is afertile source of the sublime; and as the appearance of power exerted, no less than that of simplicity, is necessary to confer this characteron architecture, so the mind, insensibly transferring the operations ofnature to the efforts of art where they approximate in character, becomes impressed with a feeling rarely excited by her more ordinaryforms, where these are even more stupendous. "

The top of the Scuir, more especially towards its eastern termination, resembles that of some vast mole not yet levelled over by the workmen;the pavement has not yet been laid down, and there are deep gaps in themasonry, that run transversely, from side to side, still to fill up. Along one of these ditch-like gaps, which serves to insulate the easternand highest portion of the Scuir from all its other portions, we findfragments of a rude wall of uncemented stones, the remains of anancient hill-fort; which, with its natural rampart of rock on three ofits four sides, more than a hundred yards in sheer descent, and with itsdeep ditch and rude wall on the fourth, must have formed one of the mostinaccessible in the kingdom. The masses of pitchstone a-top, though sointensely black within, are weathered on the surface into almost a purewhite; and we found lying detached among them, fragments of commonamygdaloid and basalt, and minute slaty pieces of chalcedony that hadformed apparently in fissures of the trap. We would have scrutinizedmore narrowly at the time had we expected to find anything more rare;but I did not know until full four months after, that aught more rarewas to be found. Had we examined somewhat more carefully, we mightpossibly have done what Mr. Woronzow Greig did on the Scuir abouteighteen years previous, --picked up on it a piece of _bona fide_ Scotchpumice. This gentleman, well known through his exertions in statisticalscience, and for his love of science in general, and whose tastes andacquirements are not unworthy the son of Mrs. Somerville, has kindlyinformed me by letter regarding his curious discovery. "I visited theisland of Eigg, " he says, "in 1825 or 1826, for the purpose of shooting, and remained in it several days; and as there was a great scarcity ofgame, I amused myself in my wanderings by looking about for naturalcuriosities. I knew little about Geology at the time, but, collectingwhatever struck my eye as uncommon, I picked up from the sides of theScuir, among various other things, a bit of fossil wood, and, nearly atthe summit of the eminence, a piece of pumice of a deep brownish-blackcolor, and very porous, the pores being large and round, and thesubstance which divided them of a uniform thickness. This last specimenI gave to Mr. Lyell, who said that it could not originally have belongedto Eigg, though it might possibly have been washed there by the sea, --asuggestion, however, with which its place on the top of the Scuir seemsill to accord. I may add, that I have since procured a larger specimenfrom the same place. " This seems a curious fact, when we take intoaccount the identity, in their mineral components, of the pumice andobsidian of the recent volcanoes; and that pitchstone, the obsidian ofthe trap-rocks, is resolvable into a pumice by the art of the chemist. If pumice was to be found anywhere in Scotland, we might _a priori_expect to find it in connection with by far the largest mass ofpitchstone in the kingdom. It is just possible, however, that Mr. Greig's two specimens may not date farther back, in at least theirexisting state, than the days of the hill-fort. Powerful fires wouldhave been required to render the exposed summit of the Scuir at allcomfortable; there is a deep peat-moss in its immediate neighborhood, that would have furnished the necessary fuel; the wind must have beensufficiently high on the summit to fan the embers into an intense whiteheat; and if it was heat but half as intense as that which was employedin fusing into one mass the thick vitrified ramparts of Craig Phadrigand Knock Farril, on the east coast, it could scarce have failed toanticipate the experiment of the Hon. Mr. Knox, of Dublin, by convertingsome of the numerous pitchstone fragments that lie scattered about, "into a light substance in every respect resembling pumice. "

It was now evening, and rarely have I witnessed a finer. The sun haddeclined half-way adown the western sky, and for many yards the shadowof the gigantic Scuir lay dark beneath us along the descending slope. All the rest of the island, spread out at our feet as in a map, wasbasking in yellow sunshine; and with its one dark shadow thrown from itsone mountain-elevated wall of rock, it seemed some immense fantasticaldial, with its gnomon rising tall in the midst. Far below, perched onthe apex of the shadow, and half lost in the line of the penumbra, wecould see two indistinct specks of black, with a dim halo aroundeach, --specks that elongated as we arose, and contracted as we sat, andwent gliding along the line as we walked. The shadows of two gnatsdisporting on the edge of an ordinary gnomon would have seemed vastlymore important, in proportion, on the figured plane of the dial, thanthese, our ghostly representatives, did here. The sea, spangled in thewake of the sun with quick glancing light, stretched out its blue plainaround us; and we could see included in the wide prospect, on the onehand, at once the hill-chains of Morven and Kintail, with the manyintervening lochs and bold jutting headlands that give variety to themainland; and, on the other, the variously complexioned Hebrides, fromthe Isle of Skye to Uist and Barra, and from Uist and Barra to Tiree andMull. The contiguous Small Isles, Muck and Rum, lay moored immediatelybeside us, like vessels of the same convoy that in some secure roadsteaddrop anchor within hail of each other. I could willingly have lingeredon the top of the Scuir until after sunset; but the minister, who, everand anon, during the day, had been conning over some notes jotted on apaper of wonderfully scant dimensions, reminded me that this was theevening of his week-day discourse, and that we were more than aparticularly rough mile from the place of meeting, and within, half anhour of the time. I took one last look of the scene ere we commenced ourdescent. There, in the middle of the ample parish glebe, that lookedricher and greener in the light of the declining sun than at any formerperiod during the day, --rose the snug parish manse; and yonder, --in anopen island channel, with a strip of dark rocks fringing the landwithin, and another dark strip fringing the barren Eilean Chaisteiloutside, --lay the Betsey, looking wonderfully diminutive, but evidentlya little thing of high spirit, taut-masted, with a smart rake aft, and aspruce outrigger astern, and flaunting her triangular flag of blue inthe sun. I pointed first to the manse, and then to the yacht. Theminister shook his head. 

"'Tis a time of strange changes, " he said; "I thought to have lived anddied in that house, and found a quiet grave in the burying-ground yonderbeside the ruin; but my path was a clear though a rugged one; and fromalmost the moment that it opened up to me, I saw what I had to expect. It has been said that I might have lain by here in this out-of-the-waycorner, and suffered the Church question to run its course, withoutquitting my hold of the Establishment. And so I perhaps might. It iseasy securing one's own safety, in even the worst of times, if one lookno higher; and I, as I had no opportunity of mixing in the contest, orof declaring my views respecting it, might be regarded as an unpledgedman. But the principles of the Evangelical party were my principles; andit would have been consistent with neither honor nor religion to havehung back in the day of battle, and suffered the men with whom in heartI was at one to pay the whole forfeit of our common quarrel. So Iattended the Convocation, and pledged myself to stand or fall with mybrethren. On my return I called my people together, and told them howthe case stood, and that in May next I bade fair to be a dependent for ahome on the proprietor of Eigg. And so they petitioned the proprietorthat he might give me leave to build a house among them, --exactly thesame sort of favor granted to the Roman Catholics of the island. Butmonth after month passed, and they got no reply to their petition; and Iwas left in suspense, not knowing whether I was to have a home amongthem or no. I did feel the case a somewhat hard one. The father of Dr. M'Pherson of Eigg had been, like myself, a humble Scotch minister; andthe Doctor, however indifferent to his people's wishes in such a matter, might have just thought that a man in his father's station in life, witha wife and family dependent on him, was placed by his silence in cruelcircumstances of uncertainty. Ere the Disruption took place, however, Icame to know pretty conclusively what I had to expect. The Doctor'sfactor came to Eigg, and, as I was informed, told the Islanders that itwas not likely the Doctor would permit a _third_ place of worship on theIsland: the Roman Catholics had one, and the Establishment had a kind ofone, and there was to be no more. The factor, an activemessenger-at-arms, useful in raising rents in these parts, has alwaysbeen understood to speak the mind of his master; but the congregationtook heart in the emergency, and sent off a second petition to Dr. M'Pherson, a week or so previous to the Disruption. Ere _it_ received ananswer, the Disruption took place; and, laying the whole circumstancesbefore my brethren in Edinburgh, who, like myself, interpreted thesilence of the Doctor into a refusal, I suggested to them the scheme ofthe Betsey, as the only scheme through which I could keep up unbroken myconnection with my people. So the trial is now over, and here we are, and yonder is the Betsey. "

We descended the Scuir together for the place of meeting, and entered, by the way, the cottage of a worthy islander, much attached to hisminister. "We are both very hungry, " said my friend: "we have been outamong the rocks since breakfast-time, and are wonderfully disposed toeat. Do not put yourself about, but give us anything you have at hand. "There was a bowl of rich milk brought us, and a splendid platter ofmashed potatoes, and we dined like princes. I observed, for the firsttime, in the interior of this cottage, what I had frequent occasion toremark afterwards, that much of the wood used in building in the smallerand outer islands of the Hebrides must have drifted across the Atlantic, borne eastwards and northwards by the great Gulf-stream. Many of thebeams and boards, sorely drilled by the _Teredo navalis_, are ofAmerican timber, that, from time to time, has been cast upon theshore, --a portion of it, apparently, from timber-laden vesselsunfortunate in their voyage, but a portion of it, also, with root andbranch still attached, bearing mark of having been swept to the sea bytransatlantic rivers. Nuts and seeds of tropical plants are occasionallypicked up on the beach. My friend gave me a bean or nut of the _Dolichosurens_, or cow-itch shrub, of the West Indies, which an islander hadfound on the shore sometime in the previous year, and given to one ofthe manse children as a toy; and I attach some little interest to it, asa curiosity of the same class with the large canes and the fragment ofcarved wood found floating near the shores of Madeira by thebrother-in-law of Columbus, and which, among other pieces ofcircumstantial evidence, led the great navigator to infer the existenceof a western continent. Curiosities of this kind seem still more commonin the northern than in the western islands of Scotland. "Large exoticnuts or seeds, " says Dr. Patrick Neill, in his interesting "Tour, "quoted in a former chapter, "which in Orkney are known by the name ofMolucca beans, are occasionally found among the _rejectamenta_ of thesea, especially after westerly winds. There are two kinds commonlyfound: the larger (of which the fishermen very generally makesnuff-boxes) seem to be seeds from the great pod of the _Mimosascandens_ of the West Indies; the smaller seeds, from the pod of the_Dolichos urens_, also a native of the same region. It is probable thatthe currents of the ocean, and particularly that great current whichissues from the Gulf of Florida, and is hence denominated the GulfStream, aid very much in transporting across the mighty Atlantic theseAmerican products. They are generally quite fresh and entire, and affordan additional proof how impervious to moisture, and how imperishable, nuts and seeds generally are. "

The evening was fast falling ere the minister closed his discourse; andwe had but just light enough left, on reaching the Betsey, to show usthat there lay a dead sheep on the deck. It had been sent aboard to bekilled by the minister's factotum, John Stewart; but John was at theevening preaching at the time, and the poor sheep, in its attempts toset itself free, had got itself entangled among the cords, and strangleditself. "Alas, alas!" exclaimed the minister, "thus ends our hope offresh mutton for the present, and my hapless speculation as a sheepfarmer for evermore. " I learned from him, afterwards, over our tea, thatshortly previous to the Convocation he had got his glebe, --one of thelargest in Scotland, --well stocked with sheep and cattle, which he hadto sell, immediately on the Disruption, in miserably bad condition, at aloss of nearly fifty per cent. He had a few sheep, however, that wouldnot sell at all, and that remained on the glebe, in consequence, untilhis successor entered into possession. And he, honest man, straightwayimpounded them, and got them incarcerated in a dark, dirty hole, somewhat in the way Giant Despair incarcerated the pilgrims, --a thing hehad quite a legal right to do, seeing that the mile-long glebe, with itsmany acres of luxuriant pasture, was now as much his property as it hadbeen Mr. Swanson's a few months before, and seeing Mr. Swanson's fewsheep had no right to crop his grass. But a worthy neighborinterfered, --Mr. M'Donald, of Keil, the principal tenant in the island. Mr. M'Donald, --a practical commentator on the law of kindness, --wassorely scandalized at what he deemed the new minister's gratuitousunkindness to a brother in calamity; and, relieving the sheep, hebrought them to his own farm, where he found them board and lodging onmy friend's behalf, till they could be used up at leisure. And it wasone of the last of this unfortunate lot that now contrived to escapefrom us by anticipating John Stewart. "A black beginning makes a blackending, " said Gouffing Jock, an ancient border shepherd, when his onlysheep, a black ewe, the sole survivor of a flock smothered in asnow-storm, was worried to death by his dogs. Then, taking down hisbroadsword, he added, "Come awa, my auld friend; thou and I maun e'enstock Bowerhope-Law ance mair!" Less warlike than Gouffing Jock, we werecontent to repeat over the dead, on this occasion, simply the firstportion of his speech; and then, betaking ourselves to our cabin, weforgot all our sorrows over our tea. 

CHAPTER IV. 

 An Excursion--The Chain of Crosses--Bay of Laig--Island of Rum--Description of the Island--Superstitions banished by pure Religion--Fossil Shells--Remarkable Oyster Bed--New species of Belemnite--Oölitic Shells--White Sandstone Precipices--Gigantic Petrified Mushrooms--"Christabel" in Stone--Musical Sand--_Jabel Nakous_, or Mountain of the Bell--Experiments of Travellers at _Jabel Nakous_--Welsted's Account--_Reg-Rawan_, or the Moving Sand--The Musical Sounds inexplicable--Article on the subject in the North British Review. 

There had been rain during the night; and when I first got on deck, alittle after seven, a low stratum of mist, that completely enveloped theScuir, and truncated both the eminence on which it stands and theopposite height, stretched like a ruler across the flat valley whichindents so deeply the middle of the island. But the fogs melted away asthe morning rose, and ere our breakfast was satisfactorily discussed, the last thin wreath had disappeared from around the columned front ofthe rock-tower of Eigg, and a powerful sun looked down on moist slopesand dank hollows, from which there arose in the calm a hazy vapor, that, while it softened the lower features of the landscape, left the boldoutline relieved against a clear sky. Accompanied by our attendant ofthe previous day, bearing bag and hammer, we set out a little beforeeleven for the north-western side of the island, by a road which windsalong the central hollow. My friend showed me as we went, that on theedge of an eminence, on which the traveller journeying westwards catchesthe last glimpse of the chapel of St. Donan, there had once been a rudecross erected, and another rude cross on an eminence on which he catchesthe last glimpse of the first; and that there had thus been a chain ofstations formed from sea to sea, like the sights of a land-surveyor, from one of which a second could be seen, and a third from the second, till, last of all, the emphatically holy point of the island, --theburial-place of the old Culdee, --came full in view. The unsteadydevotion, that journeyed, fancy-bound, along the heights, to gloat overa dead man's bones, had its clue to carry it on in a straight line. Itstrail was on the ground; it glided snake-like from cross to cross, inquest of dust; and, without its finger-posts to guide it, would havewandered devious. It is surely a better devotion that, instead of thuscreeping over the earth to a mouldy sepulchre, can at once launch intothe sky, secure of finding Him who once arose from one. In less than anhour we were descending on the Bay of Laig, a semi-circular indentationof the coast, about a mile in length, and, where it opens to the mainsea, nearly two miles in breadth; with the noble island of Rum risinghigh in front, like some vast breakwater; and a meniscus ofcomparatively level land, walled in behind by a semi-circular rampart ofcontinuous precipice, sweeping round its shores. There are few finerscenes in the Hebrides than that furnished by this island bay and itspicturesque accompaniments, --none that break more unexpectedly on thetraveller who descends upon it from the east; and rarely has it beenseen, to greater advantage than on the delicate day, so soft, and yet sosunshiny and clear, on which I paid it my first visit. 

The island of Rum, with its abrupt sea-wall of rock, and itssteep-pointed hills, that attain, immediately over the sea, an elevationof more than two thousand feet, loomed bold and high in the offing, somefive miles away, but apparently much nearer. The four tall summits ofthe island rose clear against the sky like a group of pyramids; itslower slopes and precipices, variegated and relieved by gracefulalternations of light and shadow, and resting on their blue basement ofsea, stood out with equal distinctness; but the entire middle space fromend to end was hidden in a long horizontal stratum of gray cloud, edgedatop with a lacing of silver. Such was the aspect of the noblebreakwater in front. Fully two-thirds of the semi-circular rampart ofrock which shuts in the crescent-shaped plain directly opposite lay indeep shadow; but the sun shone softly on the plain itself, brighteningup many a dingy cottage, and many a green patch of corn; and the baybelow stretched out, sparkling in the light. There is no part of theisland so thickly inhabited as this flat meniscus. It is composed almostentirely of Oölitic rocks, and bears atop, especially where an ancientoyster-bed of great depth forms the subsoil, a kindly and fertile mould. The cottages lie in groups; and, save where a few bogs, which it wouldbe no very difficult matter to drain, interpose their rough shag of darkgreen, and break the continuity, the plain around them waves with corn. Lying fair, green and populous within the sweep of its inaccessiblerampart of rock, at least twice as lofty as the ramparts of Babylon ofold, it reminds one of the suburbs of some ancient city lying embosomed, with all its dwellings and fields, within some roomy crescent of thecity wall. We passed, ere we entered on the level, a steep-sided narrowdell, through which a small stream finds its way from the highergrounds, and which terminates at the upper end in an abrupt precipice, and a lofty but very slim cascade. "One of the few superstitions thatstill linger on the island, " said my friend the minister, "is associatedwith that wild hollow. It is believed that shortly before a death takesplace among the inhabitants, a tall withered female may be seen in thetwilight, just yonder where the rocks open, washing a shroud in thestream. John, there, will perhaps tell you how she was spoken to on oneoccasion, by an over-bold, over-inquisitive islander, curious to knowwhose shroud she was preparing; and how she more than satisfied hiscuriosity, by telling him it was his own. It is a not uninterestingfact, " added the minister, "that my poor people, since they have becomemore earnest about their religion, think very little about ghosts andspectres: their faith in the realities of the unseen world seems to havebanished from their minds much of their old belief in its phantoms. "

In the rude fences that separate from each other the little farms inthis plain, we find frequent fragments of the oyster bed, hardened intoa tolerably compact limestone. It is seen to most advantage, however, insome of the deeper cuttings in the fields, where the surrounding matrixexists merely as an incoherent shale; and the shells may be picked outas entire as when they lay, ages before, in the mud, which we still seeretaining around them its original color. They are small, thin, triangular, much resembling in form some specimens of the _Ostreadeltoidea_, but greatly less in size. The nearest resembling shell inSowerby is the _Ostrea acuminata_, --an oyster of the clay that underliesthe great Oölite of Bath. Few of the shells exceed an inch and a half inlength, and the majority fall short of an inch. What they lack in bulk, however, they make up in number. They are massed as thickly together, tothe depth of several feet, as shells on the heap at the door of aNewhaven fisherman, and extend over many acres. Where they lie open wecan still detect the triangular disc of the hinge, with the singleimpression of the abductor muscle; and the foliaceous character of theshell remains in most instances as distinct as if it had undergone nomineral change. I have seen nowhere in Scotland, among the secondaryformations, so unequivocal an oyster-bed; nor do such beds seem to be atall common in formations older than the Tertiary in England, though theoyster itself is sufficiently so. We find Mantell stating, in hisrecent work ("Medals of Creation"), after first describing an immenseoyster bed of the London Basin, that underlies the city (for what is nowLondon was once an oyster-bed), that in the chalk below, though itcontains several species of Ostrea, the shells are diffusedpromiscuously throughout the general mass. Leaving, however, theseoysters of the Oölite, which never net inclosed nor drag disturbed, though they must have formed the food of many an extinct order offish, --mayhap reptile, --we pass on in a south-western direction, descending in the geological scale as we go, until we reach the southernside of the Bay of Laig. And there, far below tide-mark, we find adark-colored argillaceous shale of the Lias, greatly obscured byboulders of trap, --the only deposit of the Liasic formation in theisland. 

A line of trap-hills that rises along the shore seems as if it hadstrewed half its materials over the beach. The rugged blocks lie thickas stones in a causeway, down to the line of low ebb, --memorials of atime when the surf dashed against the shattered bases of the trap-hills, now elevated considerably beyond its reach; and we can catch but partialglimpses of the shale below. Wherever access to it can be had, we findit richly fossiliferous; but its organisms, with the exception of itsBelemnites, are very imperfectly preserved. I dug up from under thetrap-blocks some of the common Liasic Ammonites of the north-easterncoast of Scotland, a few of the septa of a large Nautilus, broken piecesof wood, and half-effaced casts of what seems a branched coral; but onlyminute portions of the shells have been converted into stone; here andthere a few chambers in the whorls of an Ammonite or Nautilus, thoughthe outline of the entire organism lies impressed in the shale; and theligneous and polyparious fossils we find in a still greater state ofdecay. The Belemnite alone, as is common with this robust fossil, --sooften the sole survivor of its many contemporaries, --has preserved itsstructure entire. I disinterred from the shale good specimens of theBelemnite _sulcatus_ and Belemnite _elongatus_, and found, detached onthe surface of the bed, a fragment of a singularly large Belemnite, afull inch and a quarter in diameter, the species of which I could notdetermine. 

Returning by the track we came, we reach the bottom of the bay, which wefind much obscured with sand and shingle; and pass northwards along itsside, under a range of low sandstone precipices, with interposing grassyslopes, in which the fertile Oölitic meniscus descends to the beach. Thesandstone, white and soft, and occurring in thick beds, much resemblesthat of the Oölite of Sutherland. We detect in it few traces of fossils;now and then a carbonaceous marking, and now and then what seems a thinvein of coal, but which proves to be merely the bark of some woody stem, converted into a glossy bituminous lignite, like that of Brora. But inbeds of a blue clay, intercalated with the sandstone, we find fossils inabundance, of a character less obscure. We spent a full half-hour inpicking out shells from the bottom of a long dock-like hollow among therocks, in which a bed of clay has yielded to the waves, while the strataon either side stand up over it like low wharfs on the opposite side ofa river. The shells, though exceedingly fragile, --for they partake ofthe nature of the clayey matrix in which they are imbedded, --rise asentire as when they had died among the mud, years, mayhap ages, ere thesandstone had been deposited over them; and we were enabled at once todetect their extreme dissimilarity, as a group, to the shells of theLiasic deposit we had so lately quitted. We did not find in this bed asingle Ammonite, Belemnite, or Nautilus; but chalky Bivalves, resemblingour existing Tellina, in vast abundance, mixed with what seem to be asmall Buccinum and a minute Trochus, with numerous rather equivocalfragments of a shell resembling an Oiliva. So thickly do they lieclustered together in this deposit, that in some patches where thesad-colored argillaceous ground is washed bare by the sea, it seemsmarbled with them into a light gray tint. The group more nearlyresembles in type a recent one than any I have yet seen in a secondarydeposit, except perhaps in the Weald of Moray, where we find in one ofthe layers a Planorbis scarce distinguishable from those of our pondsand ditches, mingled with a Paludina that seems as nearly modelled afterthe existing form. From the absence of the more characteristic shells ofthe Oölite, I am inclined to deem the deposit one of estuary origin. Itsclays were probably thrown down, like the silts of so many of ourrivers, in some shallow bay, where the waters of a descending streammingled with those of the sea, and where, though shells nearly akin toour existing periwinkles and whelks congregate thickly, the Belemnite, seared by the brackish water, never plied its semi-cartilaginous fins, or the Nautilus or Ammonite hoisted its membranaceous sail. 

We pass on towards the north. A thick bed of an extremely soft whitesandstone presents here, for nearly half a mile together, its front tothe waves, and exhibits, under the incessant wear of the surf, manysingularly grotesque combinations of form. The low precipices, undermined at the base, beetle over like the sides of stranded vessels. One of the projecting promontories we find hollowed through and throughby a tall rugged archway; while the outer pier of the arch, --if pier wemay term it, --worn to a skeleton, and jutting outwards with a knee-likeangle, presents the appearance of a thin ungainly leg and splay foot, advanced, as if in awkward courtesy, to the breakers. But in a winteror two, judging from its present degree of attenuation, and the yieldingnature of its material, which resembles a damaged mass of arrow-root, consolidated by lying in the leaky hold of a vessel, its perseveringcourtesies will be over, and pier and archway must lie in shapelessfragments on the beach. Wherever the surf has broken into the uppersurface of this sandstone bed, and worn it down to nearly the level ofthe shore, what seem a number of double ramparts, fronting each other, and separated by deep square ditches exactly parallel in the sides, traverse the irregular level in every direction. The ditches vary inwidth from one to twelve feet; and the ramparts, rising from three tosix feet over them, are perpendicular as the walls of houses, where theyfront each other, and descend on the opposite sides in irregular slopes. The iron block, with square groove and projecting ears, that receivesthe bar of a railway, and connects it with the stone below, representsnot inadequately a section of one of these ditches, with its ramparts. They form here the sole remains of dykes of an earthy trap, which, though at one time in a state of such high fusion that they convertedthe portions of soft sandstone in immediate contact with them into theconsistence of quartz rock, have long since mouldered away, leaving butthe hollow rectilinear rents which they had occupied, surmounted by theindurated walls which they had baked. Some of the most curiousappearances, however, connected with the sandstone, though they occurchiefly in an upper bed, are exhibited by what seem fields of petrifiedmushrooms, of a gigantic size, that spread out in some places forhundreds of yards under the high-water level. These apparent mushroomsstand on thick squat stems, from a foot to eighteen inches in height;the heads are round like those of toad-stools, and vary from one foot tonearly two yards in diameter. In some specimens we find two headsjoined together in a form resembling a squat figure of _eight_, of whatprinters term the Egyptian type, or, to borrow the illustration ofM'Culloch, "like the ancient military projectile known by the name ofdouble-headed shot;" in other specimens three heads have coalesced in atrefoil shape, or rather in a shape like that of an ace of clubsdivested of the stem. By much the greater number, however, arespherical. They are composed of concretionary masses, consolidated, likethe walls of the dykes, though under some different process, into a hardsiliceous stone, that has resisted those disintegrating influences ofthe weather and the surf, under which the yielding matrix in which theywere embedded has worn from around them. Here and there we find themlying detached on the beach, like huge shot, compared with which thegreenstone balls of Mons Meg are but marbles for children to play with;in other cases they project from the mural front of rampart-likeprecipices, as if they had been showered into them by the ordnance ofsome besieging battery, and had stuck fast in the mason-work. Abbotsfordhas been described as a romance in stone and lime; we have here, on theshores of Laig, what seems a wild but agreeable tale, of the extravagantcast of "Christabel, " or the "Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, " frettedinto sandstone. But by far the most curious part of the story remains tobe told. 

The hollows and fissures of the lower sandstone bed we find filled witha fine quartzose sand, which, from its pure white color, and theclearness with which the minute particles reflect the light, reminds oneof accumulations of potato-flour drying in the sun. It is formed almostentirely of disintegrated particles of the soft sandstone; and as we atfirst find it occurring in mere handfuls, that seem as if they had beendetached from the mass during the last few tides, we begin to marvel towhat quarter the missing materials of the many hundred cubic yards ofrock, ground down along the shore in this bed during the last century ortwo, have been conveyed away. As we pass on northwards, however, we seethe white sand occurring in much larger quantities, --here heaped up inlittle bent-covered hillocks above the reach of the tide, --therestretching out in level, ripple-marked wastes into the waves, --yonderrising in flat narrow spits among the shallows. At length we reach asmall, irregularly-formed bay, a few hundred feet across, floored withit from side to side; and see it, on the one hand, descending deep intothe sea, that exhibits over its whiteness a lighter tint of green, and, on the other, encroaching on the land, in the form of drifted banks, covered with the plants common to our tracts of sandy downs. Thesandstone bed that has been worn down to form it contains no fossils, save here and there a carbonaceous stem; but in an underlying harderstratum we occasionally find a few shells; and, with a specimen in myhand charged with a group of bivalves resembling the existing conchiferaof our sandy beaches, I was turning aside this sand of the Oölite, socuriously reduced to its original state, and marking how nearly therecent shells that lay embedded in it resembled the extinct ones thathad lain in it so long before, when I became aware of a peculiar soundthat it yielded to the tread, as my companions paced over it. I struckit obliquely with my foot, where the surface lay dry and incoherent inthe sun, and the sound elicited was a shrill, sonorous note, somewhatresembling that produced by a waxed thread, when tightened between theteeth and the hand, and tipped by the nail of the forefinger. I walkedover it, striking it obliquely at each step, and with every blow theshrill note was repeated. My companions joined me; and we performed aconcert, in which, if we could boast of but little variety in the tonesproduced, we might at least challenge all Europe for an instrument ofthe kind which produced them. It seemed less wonderful that there shouldbe music in the granite of Memnon, than in the loose Oölitic sand of theBay of Laig. As we marched over the drier tracts, an incessant _woo_, _woo_, _woo_, rose from the surface, that might be heard in the calmsome twenty or thirty yards away; and we found that where a dampsemi-coherent stratum lay at the depth of three or four inches beneath, and all was dry and incoherent above, the tones were loudest andsharpest, and most easily evoked by the foot. Our discovery, --for Itrust I may regard it as such, --adds a third locality to two previouslyknown ones, in which what may be termed the musical sand, --no unmeetcounterpart to the "singing water" of the tale, --has now been found. Andas the island of Eigg is considerably more accessible than _JabelNakous_, in Arabia Petræa, or _Reg-Rawan_, in the neighborhood of Cabul, there must be facilities presented through the discovery which did notexist hitherto, for examining the phenomenon in acoustics which itexhibits, --a phenomenon, it may be added, which some of our greatestmasters of the science have confessed their inability to explain. 

_Jabel Nakous_, or the "Mountain of the Bell, " is situated about threemiles from the shores of the Gulf of Suez, in that land of wonders whichwitnessed for forty years the journeyings of the Israelites, and inwhich the granite peaks of Sinai and Horeb overlook an arid wildernessof rock and sand. It had been known for many ages by the wild Arab ofthe desert, that there rose at times from this hill a strange, inexplicable music. As he leads his camel past in the heat of the day, asound like the first low tones of an Æolian harp stirs the hotbreezeless air. It swells louder and louder in progressive undulations, till at length the dry baked earth seems to vibrate under foot, and thestartled animal snorts and rears, and struggles to break away. Accordingto the Arabian account of the phenomenon, says Sir David Brewster, inhis "Letters on Natural Magic, " there is a convent miraculouslypreserved in the bowels of the hill; and the sounds are said to be thoseof the "_Nakous_, a long metallic ruler, suspended horizontally, whichthe priest strikes with a hammer, for the purpose of assembling themonks to prayer. " There exists a tradition that on one occasion awandering Greek saw the mountain open, and that, entering by the gap, hedescended into the subterranean convent, where he found beautifulgardens and fountains of delicious water, and brought with him to theupper world, on his return, fragments of consecrated bread. The firstEuropean traveller who visited _Jabel Nakous_, says Sir David, was M. Seetzen, a German. He journeyed for several hours over arid sands, andunder ranges of precipices inscribed by mysterious characters, thattell, haply, of the wanderings of Israel under Moses. And reaching, about noon, the base of the musical fountain, he found it composed of awhite friable sandstone, and presenting on two of its sides sandydeclivities. He watched beside it for an hour and a quarter, and thenheard, for the first time, a low undulating sound, somewhat resemblingthat of a humming top, which rose and fell, and ceased and began, andthen ceased again; and in an hour and three quarters after, when in theact of climbing along the declivity, he heard the sound yet louder andmore prolonged. It seemed as if issuing from under his knees, beneathwhich the sand, disturbed by his efforts, was sliding downwards alongthe surface of the rock. Concluding that the sliding sand was the causeof the sounds, not an effect of the vibrations which they occasioned, heclimbed to the top of one of the declivities, and, sliding downwards, exerted himself with hands and feet to set the sand in motion. Theeffect produced far exceeded his expectations; the incoherent sandrolled under and around in a vast sheet; and so loud was the noiseproduced, that "the earth seemed to tremble beneath him to such adegree, that he states he should certainly have been afraid if he hadbeen ignorant of the cause. " At the time Sir David Brewster wrote(1832), the only other European who had visited _Jabel Nakous_ was Mr. Gray, of University College, Oxford. This gentleman describes the noiseshe heard, but which he was unable to trace to their producing cause, as"beginning with a low continuous murmuring sound, which seemed to risebeneath his feet, " but "which gradually changed into pulsations as itbecame louder, so as to resemble the striking of a clock, and became sostrong at the end of five minutes _as to detach the sand_. " The Mountainof the Bell has been since carefully explored by Lieutenant J. Welsted, of the Indian navy; and the reader may see it exhibited in a finelithograph, in his travels, as a vast irregularly conical mass of brokenstone, somewhat resembling one of our Highland cairns, though, ofcourse, on a scale immensely more huge, with a steep, angular slope ofsand resting in a hollow in one of its sides, and rising to nearly itsapex. "It forms, " says Lieutenant Welsted, "one of a ridge of low, calcareous hills, at a distance of three and a half miles from thebeach, to which a sandy plain, extending with a gentle rise to theirbase, connects them. Its height, about four hundred feet, as well as thematerial of which it is composed, --a light-colored friablesandstone, --is about the same as the rest of the chain; but an inclinedplane of almost impalpable sand rises at an angle of forty degrees withthe horizon, and is bounded by a semi-circle of rocks, presentingbroken, abrupt, and pinnacled forms, and extending to the base of thisremarkable hill. Although their shape and arrangement in some respectsmay be said to resemble a whispering gallery, yet I determined byexperiment that their irregular surface renders them but ill adapted forthe production of an echo. Seated at a rock at the base of the slopingeminence, I directed one of the Bedouins to ascend; and it was not untilhe had reached some distance that I perceived the sand in motion, rolling down the hill to the depth of a foot. It did not, however, descend in one continued stream; but, as the Arab scrambled up, itspread out laterally and upwards, until a considerable portion of thesurface was in motion. At their commencement the sounds might becompared to the faint strains of an Æolian harp when its strings firstcatch the breeze: as the sand became more violently agitated by theincreased velocity of the descent, the noise more nearly resembled thatproduced by drawing the moistened fingers over glass. As it reached thebase, the reverberations attained the loudness of distant thunder, causing the rock on which we were seated to vibrate; and ourcamels, --animals not easily frightened, --became so alarmed that it waswith difficulty their drivers could restrain them. "

"The hill of _Reg-Rawan_ or the 'Moving Sand, '" says the late SirAlexander Burnes, by whom the place was visited in the autumn of 1837, and who has recorded his visit in a brief paper, illustrated by a rudelithographic view, in the "Journal of the Asiatic Society" for 1838, "isabout forty miles north of Cabul, towards Hindu-kush, and near the baseof the mountains. " It rises to the height of about four hundred feet, inan angle formed by the junction of two ridges of hills; and a sheet ofsand, "pure as that of the sea-shore, " and which slopes in an angle offorty degrees, reclines against it from base to summit. As representedin the lithograph, there projects over the steep sandy slope on eachside, as in the "Mountain of the Bell, " still steeper barriers of rock;and we are told by Sir Alexander, that though "the mountains here aregenerally composed of granite or mica, at _Reg-Rawan_ there is sandstoneand lime. " The situation of the sand is curious, he adds: it is seenfrom a great distance; and as there is none other in the neighborhood, "it might almost be imagined, from its appearance, that the hill hadbeen cut in two, and that the sand had gushed forth as from a sand-bag. ""When set in motion by a body of people who slide down it, a sound isemitted. On the first trial we distinctly heard two loud hollow sounds, such as would be given by a large drum;"--"there is an echo in theplace; and the inhabitants have a belief that the sounds are only heardon Friday, when the saint of _Reg-Rawan_, who is interred hard by, permits. " The phenomenon, like the resembling one in Arabia, seems tohave attracted attention among the inhabitants of the country at anearly period; and the notice of an eastern annalist, the Emperor Baber, who flourished late in the fifteenth century, and, like Cæsar, conqueredand recorded his conquests, still survives. He describes it as the_Khwaja Reg-Rawan_, "a small hill, in which there is a line of sandyground reaching from the top to the bottom, " from which there "issues inthe summer season the sound of drums and nagarets. " In connection withthe fact that the musical sand of Eigg is composed of a disintegratedsandstone of the Oölite, it is not quite unworthy of notice thatsandstone and lime enter into the composition of the hill of_Reg-Rawan_, --that the district in which the hill is situated is not asandy one, --and that its slope of sonorous sand seems as if it hadissued from its side. These various circumstances, taken together, leadto the inference that the sand may have originated in the decompositionof the rock beneath. It is further noticeable, that the _Jabel Nakous_is composed of a white friable sandstone, resembling that of the whitefriable bed of the Bay of Laig, and that it belongs to nearly the samegeological era. I owe to the kindness of Dr. Wilson of Bombay, twospecimens which he picked up in Arabia Petræa, of spines of Cidarites ofthe mace-formed type so common in the Chalk and Oölite, but so rare inthe older formations. Dr. Wilson informs me that they are of frequentoccurrence in the desert of Arabia Petræa, where they are termed by theArabs petrified olives; that nummulites are also abundant in thedistrict; and that the various secondary rocks he examined in his routethrough it seem to belong to the Cretaceous group. It appears notimprobable, therefore, that all the sonorous sand in the world yetdiscovered is formed, like that of Eigg, of disintegrated sandstone; andat least two-thirds of it of the disintegrated sandstone of secondaryformations, newer than the Lias. But how it should be at all sonorous, whatever its age or origin, seems yet to be discovered. There are fewsubstances that appear worse suited than sand to communicate to theatmosphere those vibratory undulations that are the producing causes ofsound: the grains, even when sonorous individually, seem, from theirinevitable contact with each other, to exist under the influence of thatsimple law in acoustics which arrests the tones of the ringing glass orstruck bell, immediately as they are but touched by some foreign body, such as the hand or finger. The one grain, ever in contact with severalother grains, is a glass or bell on which the hand always rests. And thedifficulty has been felt and acknowledged. Sir John Herschel, inreferring to the phenomenon of the _Jabel Nakous_, in his "Treatise onSound, " in the "Encyclopædia Metropolitana, " describes it as to him"utterly inexplicable;" and Sir David Brewster, whom I had the pleasureof meeting in December last, assured me it was not less a puzzle to himthan to Sir John. An eastern traveller, who attributes its productionto "a reduplication of impulse setting air in vibration in a focus ofecho, " means, I suppose, saying nearly the same thing as the twophilosophers, and merely conveys his meaning in a less simple style. 

I have not yet procured what I expect to procure soon, --sand enough fromthe musical bay at Laig to enable me to make its sonorous qualities thesubject of experiment at home. It seems doubtful whether a smallquantity set in motion on an artificial slope will serve to evolve thephenomena which have rendered the Mountain of the Bell so famous. Lieutenant Welsted informs us, that when his Bedouin first set the sandin motion, there was scarce any perceptible sound heard;--it was rollingdownwards for many yards around him to the depth of a foot, ere themusic arose; and it is questionable whether the effect could be elicitedwith some fifty or sixty pounds weight of the sand of Eigg, on a slopeof but at most a few feet, which it took many hundred weight of sand of_Jabel Nakous_, and a slope of many yards, to produce. But in thestillness of a close room, it is just possible that it may. I have, however, little doubt, that from small quantities the sound evoked bythe foot on the shore may be reproduced: enough will lie within thereach of experiment to demonstrate the strange difference which existsbetween this sonorous sand of the Oölite, and the common unsonorous sandof our sea-beaches; and it is certainly worth while examining into thenature and producing causes of a phenomenon so curious in itself, andwhich has been characterized by one of the most distinguished of livingphilosophers as "the most celebrated of all the acoustic wonders whichthe natural world presents to us. " In the forthcoming number of the"North British Review, "--which appears on Monday first, [1]--the readerwill find the sonorous sand of Eigg referred to, in an article theauthorship of which will scarcely be mistaken. "We have here, " says thewriter, after first describing the sounds of _Jabel Nakous_, and thenreferring to those of Eigg, "the phenomenon in its simple state, disembarrassed from reflecting rocks, from a hard bed beneath, and fromcracks and cavities that might be supposed to admit the sand; andindicating as its cause, either the accumulated vibration of the airwhen struck by the driven sand, or the accumulated sounds occasioned bythe mutual impact of the particles of sand against each other. If amusket-ball passing through the air emits a whistling note, eachindividual particle of sand must do the same, however faint be the notewhich it yields; and the accumulation of these infinitesimal vibrationsmust constitute an audible sound, varying with the number and velocityof moving particles. In like manner, if two plates of silex or quartz, which are but large crystals of sand, give out a musical sound whenmutually struck, the impact or collision of two minute crystals orparticles of sand must do the same, in however inferior a degree; andthe union of all these sounds, though singly imperceptible, mayconstitute the musical notes of the Bell Mountain, or the lesser soundsof the trodden sea-beach at Eigg. "

Here is a vigorous effort made to unlock the difficulty. I should, however, have mentioned to the philosophic writer, --what I inadvertentlyfailed to do, --that the sounds elicited from the sand of Eigg seem asdirectly evoked by the slant blow dealt it by the foot, as the soundssimilarly evoked from a highly waxed floor, or a board strewed over withground rosin. The sharp shrill note follows the stroke, altogetherindependently of the grains driven into the air. My omission may serveto show how much safer it is for those minds of the observant order, that serve as hands and eyes to the reflective ones, to prefer incurringthe risk of being even tediously minute in their descriptions, to thedanger of being inadequately brief in them. But, alas! for purposes ofexact science, rarely are verbal descriptions otherwise than inadequate. Let us look, for example, at the various accounts given us of _JabelNakous_. There are strange sounds heard proceeding from a hill inArabia, and various travellers set themselves to describe them. Thetones are those of the convent _Nakous_, says the wild Arab;--there mustbe a convent buried under the hill. More like the sounds of ahumming-top, remarks a phlegmatic German traveller. Not quite like them, says an English one in an Oxford gown;--they resemble rather thestriking of a clock. Nay, listen just a little longer and morecarefully, says a second Englishman, with epaulettes on his shoulder:"the sounds at their commencement may be compared to the faint strainsof an Æolian harp when its strings first catch the breeze, " but anon, asthe agitation of the sand increases, they "more nearly resemble thoseproduced by drawing the moistened fingers over glass. " Not at all, exclaims the warlike Zahor Ed-din Muhammed Baber, twirling his whiskers:"I know a similar hill in the country towards Hindu-kush: it is thesound of drums and nagarets that issues from the sand. " All we reallyknow of this often-described music of the desert, after reading all thedescriptions, is, that its tones bear certain analogies to certain othertones, --analogies that seem stronger in one direction to one ear, andstronger in another direction to an ear differently constituted, butwhich do not exactly resemble any other sounds in nature. The strangemusic of _Jabel Nakous_, as a combination of tones, is essentiallyunique. 

CHAPTER V. 

 Trap-Dykes--"Cotton Apples"--Alternation of Lacustrine with Marine Remains--Analogy from the Beds of Esk--Aspect of the Island on its narrow Front--The Puffin--Ru-Stoir--Development of Old Red Sandstone--Striking Columnar character of Ru-Stoir--Discovery of Reptilian Remains--John Stewart's wonder at the Bones in the Stones--Description of the Bones--"Dragons, Gorgons, and Chimeras"--Exploration and Discovery pursued--The Midway Shieling--A Celtic Welcome--Return of the Yacht--"Array of Fossils new to Scotch Geology"--A Geologist's Toast--Hoffman and his Fossil. 

We leave behind us the musical sand, and reach the point of thepromontory which forms the northern extremity of the Bay of Laig. Wherever the beach has been swept bare, we see it floored withtrap-dykes worn down to the level, but in most places accumulations ofhuge blocks of various composition cover it up, concealing the nature ofthe rock beneath. The long semi-circular wall of precipice which, sweeping inwards at the bottom of the bay, leaves to the inhabitantsbetween its base and the beach their fertile meniscus of land, hereabuts upon the coast. We see its dark forehead many hundred feetoverhead, and the grassy platform beneath, now narrowed to a mere talus, sweeping upwards to its base from the shore, --steep, broken, lined thickwith horizontal pathways, mottled over with ponderous masses of rock. 

Among the blocks that load the beach, and render our onward progressdifficult and laborious, we detect occasional fragments of anamygdaloidal basalt, charged with a white zeolite, consisting ofcrystals so extremely slender that the balls, with their light fibrouscontents, remind us of cotton apples divested of the seeds. Thereoccur, though more rarely, masses of a hard white sandstone, aboundingin vegetable impressions, which, from their sculptured markings, recalled to memory the Sigillaria of the Coal Measures. Here and there, too, we find fragments of a calcareous stone, so largely charged withcompressed shells, chiefly bivalves, that it may be regarded as a shellbreccia. There occur, besides, slabs of fibrous limestone, exactlyresembling the limestone of the ichthyolite beds of the Lower Old Red;and blocks of a hard gray stone, of silky lustre in the fresh fracture, thickly speckled with carbonaceous markings. These fragmentarymasses, --all of them, at least, except the fibrous limestone, whichoccurs in mere plank-like bands, --represent distinct beds, of which thispart of the island is composed, and which present their edges, likecourses of ashlar in a building, in the splendid section that stretchesfrom the tall brow of the precipice to the beach; though in the slopesof the talus, where the lower beds appear in but occasional protrusionsand land-slips, we find some difficulty in tracing their order ofsuccession. 

Near the base of the slope, where the soil has been undermined and therock laid bare by the waves, there occur beds of a bituminous blackshale, --resembling the dark shales so common in the Coal Measures, --thatseem to be of fresh water or estuary origin. Their fossils, thoughnumerous, are ill preserved; but we detect in them scales and plates offishes, at least two species of minute bivalves, one of which very muchresembles a Cyclas; and in some of the fragments, shells of Cypris lieembedded in considerable abundance. After all that has been said andwritten by way of accounting for those alternations of lacustrine withmarine remains, which are of such frequent occurrence in the variousformations, secondary and tertiary, from the Coal Measures downwards, itdoes seem strange enough that the estuary, or fresh-water lake, shouldso often in the old geologic periods have changed places with the sea. It is comparatively easy to conceive that the inner Hebrides should haveonce existed as a broad ocean sound, bounded on one or either side byOölitic islands, from which streams descended, sweeping with them, tothe marine depths, productions, animal and vegetable, of the land. Butit is less easy to conceive, that in that sound, the area covered by theocean one year should have been covered by a fresh-water lake in perhapsthe next, and then by the ocean again a few years after. And yet amongthe Oölitic deposits of the Hebrides evidence seems to exist thatchanges of this nature actually took place. I am not inclined to foundmuch on the apparently fresh-water character of the bituminous shales ofEigg;--the embedded fossils are all too obscure to be admitted inevidence; but there can exist no doubt that fresh water, or at leastestuary formations, do occur among the marine Oölites of the Hebrides. Sir R. Murchison, one of the most cautious, as he is certainly one ofthe most distinguished, of living geologists, found in a northerndistrict of Skye, in 1826, a deposit containing Cyclas, Paludina, Neritina, --all shells of unequivocally fresh-water origin, --which musthave been formed, he concludes, in either a lake or estuary. What hadbeen sea at one period had been estuary or lake at another. In everycase, however, in which these intercalated deposits are restricted tosingle strata of no great thickness, it is perhaps safer to refer theirformation to the agency of temporary land-floods, than to that ofviolent changes of level, now elevating and now depressing the surface. There occur, for instance, among the marine Oölites of Brora, --thediscovery of Mr. Robertson, of Inverugie, --two strata containingfresh-water fossils in abundance; but the one stratum is little morethan an inch in thickness, --the other little more than a foot; and itseems considerably more probable, that such deposits should have owedtheir existence to extraordinary land-floods, like those which in 1829devastated the province of Moray, and covered over whole miles of marinebeach with the spoils of land and river, than that a sea-bottom shouldhave been elevated for their production, into a fresh-water lake, andthen let down into a sea-bottom again. We find it recorded in the"Shepherd's Calendar, " that after the thaw which followed the greatsnow-storm of 1794, there were found on a part of the sands of theSolway Frith known as the Beds of Esk, where the tide disgorges much ofwhat is thrown into it by the rivers, "one thousand eight hundred andforty sheep, nine black cattle, three horses, two men, one woman, forty-five dogs, and one hundred and eighty hares, beside a number ofmeaner animals. " A similar storm in an earlier time, with a softsea-bottom prepared to receive and retain its spoils, would have formeda fresh-water stratum intercalated in a marine deposit. 

Rounding the promontory, we lose sight of the Bay of Laig, and find thenarrow front of the island that now presents itself exhibiting theappearance of a huge bastion. The green talus slopes upwards, as itsbasement, for full three hundred feet; and a noble wall of perpendicularrock, that towers over and beyond for at least four hundred feet more, forms the rampart. Save towards the sea, the view is of but limitedextent; we see it restricted, on the landward side, to the bold face ofthe bastion; and in a narrow and broken dell that runs nearly parallelto the shore for a few hundred yards between the top of the talus andthe base of the rampart, --a true covered way, --we see but the rampartalone. But the dizzy front of black basalt, dark as night, save where abroad belt of light-colored sandstone traverses it in an angulardirection, like a white sash thrown across a funeral robe, --thefantastic peaks and turrets in which the rock terminates atop, --themasses of broken ruins, roughened with moss and lichen, that have fallenfrom above, and lie scattered at its base, --the extreme loneliness ofthe place, for we have left behind us every trace of the humanfamily, --and the expanse of solitary sea which it commands, --allconspire to render the scene a profoundly imposing one. It is one ofthose scenes in which a man feels that he is little, and that nature isgreat. There is no precipice in the island in which the puffin sodelights to build as among the dark pinnacles overhead, or around whichthe silence is so frequently broken by the harsh scream of the eagle. The sun had got far adown the sky ere we had reached the covered way atthe base of the rock. All lay dark below; and the red light atop, halfabsorbed by the dingy hues of the stone, shone with a gleam so faint andmelancholy, that it served but to deepen the effect of the shadows. 

The puffin, a comparatively rare bird in the inner Hebrides, builds, Iwas told, in great numbers in the continuous line of precipice which, after sweeping for a full mile round the Bay of Laig, forms thepinnacled rampart here, and then, turning another angle of the island, runs on parallel to the coast for about six miles more. In former timesthe puffin furnished the islanders, as in St. Kilda, with a staplearticle of food, in those hungry months of summer in which the stores ofthe old crop had begun to fail, and the new crop had not yet ripened;and the people of Eigg, taught by their necessities, were bold cragsmen. But men do not peril life and limb for the mere sake of a meal, savewhen they cannot help it; and the introduction of the potato has donemuch to put out the practice of climbing for the bird, except among afew young lads, who find excitement enough in the work to pursue it forits own sake, as an amusement. I found among the islanders what wassaid to be a piece of the natural history of the puffin, sufficientlyapocryphal to remind one of the famous passage in the history of thebarnacle, which traced the lineage of the bird to one of thepedunculated cirripedes, and the lineage of the cirripede to a log ofwood. The puffin feeds its young, say the islanders, on an oily scum ofthe sea, which renders it such an unwieldy mass of fat, that about thetime when it should be beginning to fly, it becomes unable to get out ofits hole. The parent bird, not in the least puzzled, however, treats thecase medicinally, and, --like mothers of another two-legged genus, who, when their daughters get over stout, put them through a course ofreducing acids to bring them down, --feeds it on sorrel leaves forseveral days together, till, like a boxer under training, it getsthinned to the proper weight, and becomes able, not only to get out ofits cell, but also to employ its wings. 

We pass through the hollow, and, reaching the farther edge of thebastion, towards the east, see a new range of prospect opening beforeus. There is first a long unbroken wall of precipice, --a continuation ofthe tall rampart overhead, --relieved along its irregular upper line bythe blue sky. We mark the talus widening at its base, and expanding, ason the shores of the Bay of Laig, into an irregular grassy platform, that, sinking midway into a ditch-like hollow, rises again towards thesea, and presents to the waves a perpendicular precipice of redstone. The sinking sun shone brightly this evening; and the warm hues of theprecipice, which bears the name of _Ru-Stoir_, --the RedHead, --strikingly contrasted with the pale and dark tints of thealternating basalts and sandstones in the taller cliff behind. Theditch-like hollow, which seems to indicate the line of a fault, cuts offthis red headland from all the other rocks of the island, from which itappears to differ as considerably in texture as in hue. It consistsmainly of thick beds of a pale red stone, which M'Culloch regarded as atrap, and which, intercalated with here and there a thin band of shale, and presenting not a few of the mineralogical appearances of whatgeologists of the school of the late Mr. Cunningham term Primary Old RedSandstone, in some cases has been laid down as a deposit of Old Redproper, abutting in the line of a fault on the neighboring Oölites andbasalts. In the geological map which I carried with me, --not one of highauthority however, --I found it actually colored as a patch of thisancient system. The Old Red Sandstone is largely developed in theneighboring island of Rum, in the line of which the _Ru-Stoir_ seems tohave a more direct bearing than any of the other deposits of Eigg; andyet the conclusion regarding this red headland merely adds one proofmore to the many furnished already, of the inadequacy of mineralogicaltestimony, when taken in evidence regarding the eras of the geologist. The hard red beds of _Ru-Stoir_ belong, as I was fortunate enough thisevening to ascertain, not to the ages of the Coccosteus and Pterichthys, but to the far later ages of the Plesiosaurus and the fossil crocodile. I found them associated with more reptilian remains, of a character moreunequivocal than have been yet exhibited by any other deposit inScotland. 

What first strikes the eye, in approaching the _Ru-Stoir_ from the west, is the columnar character of the stone. The precipices rise immediatelyover the sea, in rude colonnades of from thirty to fifty feet in height;single pillars, that have fallen from their places in the line, andexhibit a tenacity rare among the trap-rocks, --for they occur inunbroken lengths of from ten to twelve feet, --lie scattered below; andin several places where the waves have joined issue with the precipicesin the line on which the base of the columns rest, and swept away thesupporting foundation, the colonnades open into roomy caverns, thatresound to the dash of the sea. Wherever the spray lashes, the pale redhue of the stone prevails, and the angles of the polygonal shafts arerounded; while higher up all is sharp-edged, and the unweathered surfaceis covered by a gray coat of lichens. The tenacity of the prostratecolumns first drew my attention. The builder scant of materials wouldhave experienced no difficulty in finding among them sufficient lintelsfor apertures from eight to twelve feet in width. I was next struck withthe peculiar composition of the stone; it much rather resembles analtered sandstone, in at least the weathered specimens, than a trap, andyet there seemed nothing to indicate that it was an _Old Red_ Sandstone. Its columnar structure bore evidence to the action of great heat; andits pale red color was exactly that which the Oölitic sandstones of theisland, with their slight ochreous tinge, would assume in a common fire. And so I set myself to look for fossils. In the columnar stone itself Iexpected none, as none occur in vast beds of the unaltered sandstones, out of some one of which I supposed it might possibly have been formed;and none I found: but in a rolled block of altered shale of a muchdeeper red than the general mass, and much more resembling Old RedSandstone, I succeeded in detecting several shells, identical with thoseof the deposit of blue clay described in a former chapter. Thereoccurred in it the small univalve resembling a Trochus, together withthe oblong bivalve, somewhat like a Tellina; and, spread thicklythroughout the block, lay fragments of coprolitic matter, and the scalesand teeth of fishes. Night was coming on, and the tide had risen on thebeach; but I hammered lustily, and laid open in the dark red shale avertebral joint, a rib, and a parallelogramical fragment of solid bone, none of which could have belonged to any fish. It was an interestingmoment for the curtain to drop over the promontory of _Ru-Stoir_; I hadthus already found in connection with it well nigh as many reptilianremains as had been found in all Scotland before, --for there could existno doubt that the bones I laid open were such; and still moreinteresting discoveries promised to await the coming morning, and a lesshasty survey. We found a hospitable meal awaiting us at a picturesqueold two-story house, with, what is rare in the island, a clump of treesbeside it, which rises on the northern angle of the Oölitic meniscus;and after our day's hard work in the fresh sea-air, we did ample justiceto the viands. Dark night had long set in ere we reached our vessel. 

Next day was Saturday; and it behooved my friend, the minister, --asscrupulously careful in his pulpit preparations for the islanders ofEigg as if his congregation were an Edinburgh one, --to remain on board, and study his discourse for the morrow. I found, however, no unmeetcompanion for my excursion in his trusty mate John Stewart. John had notvery much English, and I had no Gaelic; but we contrived to understandone another wonderfully well; and ere evening I had taught him to bequite as expert in hunting dead crocodiles as myself. We reached the_Ru-Stoir_, and set hard to work with hammer and chisel. The fragmentsof red shale were strewed thickly along the shore for at least threequarters of a mile; wherever the red columnar rock appeared, there laythe shale, in water-worn blocks, more or less indurated; but the beachwas covered over with shingle and detached masses of rock, and we couldnowhere find it _in situ_. A winter storm powerful enough to wash thebeach bare might do much to assist the explorer. There is a piece ofshore on the eastern coast of Scotland, on which for years together Iused to pick up nodular masses of lime containing fish of the Old RedSandstone; but nowhere in the neighborhood could I find the ichthyolitebed in which they had originally formed. The storm of a single nightswept the beach; and in the morning the ichthyolites lay revealed _insitu_ under a stratum of shingle which I had a hundred times examined, but which, though scarce a foot in thickness, had concealed from me theichthyolite bed for five twelvemonths together!

Wherever the altered shale of _Ru-Stoir_ has been thrown high on thebeach, and exposed to the influences of the weather, we find it frettedover with minute organisms, mostly the scales, plates, bones, and teethof fishes. The organisms, as is frequently the case, seemindestructible, while the hard matrix in which they are embedded hasweathered from around them. Some of the scales present the rhomboidaloutline, and closely resemble those of the _Lepidotus Minor_ of theWeald; others approximate in shape to an isosceles triangle. The teethare of various forms: some of them, evidently palatal, are mere bluntedprotuberances glittering with enamel, --some of them present the usualslim, thorn-like type common in the teeth of the existing fish of ourcoasts, --some again are squat and angular, and rest on rectilinearbases, prolonged considerably on each side of the body of the tooth, like the rim of a hat or the flat head of a scupper nail. Of theoccipital plates, some present a smooth enamelled surface, while someare thickly tuberculated, --each tubercle bearing a minute depression inits apex, like a crater on the summit of a rounded hill. We findreptilian bones in abundance, --a thing new to Scotch geology, --and in astate of keeping peculiarly fine. They not a little puzzled JohnStewart: he could not resist the evidence of his senses: they werebones, he said, real bones, --there could be no doubt of that: _there_were the joints of a backbone, with the hole the brain-marrow hadpassed through; and _there_ were shank-bones and ribs, and fishes'teeth; but how, he wondered, had they all got into the very heart of thehard red stones? He had seen what was called wood, he said, dug out ofthe side of the Scuir, without being quite certain whether it was woodor no; but there could be no uncertainty here. I laid open numerousvertebræ of various forms, --some with long spinous processes rising overthe body or _centrum_ of the bone, --which I found in every instance, unlike that of the Ichthyosaurus, only moderately concave on thearticulating faces; in others the spinous process seemed altogetherwanting. Only two of the number bore any mark of the suture whichunites, in most reptiles, the annular process to the centrum; in theothers both centrum and process seemed anchylosed, as in quadrupeds, into one bone; and there remained no scar to show that the suture hadever existed. In some specimens the ribs seem to have been articulatedto the sides of the centrum; in others there is a transverse process, but no marks of articulation. Some of the vertebræ are evidently dorsal, some cervical, one apparently caudal; and almost all agree in showing infront two little eyelets, to which the great descending artery seems tohave sent out blood-vessels in pairs. The more entire ribs I was luckyenough to disinter have, as in those of crocodileans, double heads; anda part of a fibula, about four inches in length, seems also to belong tothis ancient family. A large proportion of the other bones are evidentlyPlesiosaurian. I found the head of the flat humerus so characteristic ofthe extinct order to which the Plesiosaurus has been assigned, and twodigital bones of the paddle, that, from their comparatively slender andslightly curved form, so unlike the digitals of its cogener theIchthyosaurus, could have belonged evidently to no other reptile. Iobserved, too, in the slightly curved articulations of not a few of thevertebræ, the gentle convexity in the concave centre, which, if notpeculiar to the Plesiosaurus, is at least held to distinguish it frommost of its contemporaries. Among the various nondescript organisms ofthe shale, I laid open a smooth angular bone, hollowed something like agrocer's scoop; a three-pronged caltrop-looking bone, that seems to haveformed part of a pelvic arch; another angular bone, much massier thanthe first, regarding the probable position of which I could not form aconjecture, but which some of my geological friends deem cerebral; anextremely dense bone, imperfect at each end, which presents theappearance of a cylinder slightly flattened; and various curiousfragments, which, with what our Scotch museums have not yetacquired, --entire reptilian fossils for the purposes ofcomparison, --might, I doubt not, be easily assigned to their properplaces. It was in vain that, leaving John to collect the scatteredpieces of shale in which the bones occurred, I set myself again andagain to discover the bed from which they had been detached. The tidehad fallen, and a range of skerries lay temptingly off, scarce a hundredyards from the water's edge: the shale beds might be among them, withPlesiosauri and crocodiles stretching entire; and fain would I have swumoff to them, as I had done oftener than once elsewhere, with my hammerin my teeth, and with shirt and drawers in my hat; but a tall brownforest of kelp and tangle in which even a seal might drown, rose thickand perilous round both shore and skerries; a slight swell was feltingthe long fronds together; and I deemed it better, on the whole, that thediscoveries I had already made should be recorded, than that they shouldbe lost to geology, mayhap for a whole age, in the attempt to extendthem. 

The water, beautifully transparent, permitted the eye to penetrate intoits green depths for many fathoms around, though every objectpresented, through the agitated surface, an uncertain and fluctuatingoutline. I could see, however, the pink-colored urchin warping himselfup, by his many cables, along the steep rock-sides; the green crabstalking along the gravelly bottom; a scull of small rock-cod dartinghither and thither among the tangle-roots; and a few large medusæ slowlyflapping their continuous fins of gelatine in the opener spaces, a fewinches under the surface. Many curious families had theirrepresentatives within the patch of sea which the eye commanded; but thestrange creatures that had once inhabited it by thousands, and whosebones still lay sepulchred on its shores, had none. How strange, thatthe identical sea heaving around stack and skerry in this remote cornerof the Hebrides should have once been thronged by reptile shapes morestrange than poet ever imagined, --dragons, gorgons and chimeras! Perhapsof all the extinct reptiles, the Plesiosaurus was the mostextraordinary. An English geologist has described it, grotesquelyenough, and yet most happily, as a snake _threaded_ through a tortoise. And here on this very spot, must these monstrous dragons have disportedand fed; here must they have raised their little reptile heads and longswan-like necks over the surface, to watch an antagonist or select avictim; here must they have warred and wedded, and pursued all thevarious instincts of their unknown natures. A strange story, surely, considering it is a true one! I may mention in the passing, that some ofthe fragments of the shale in which the remains are embedded have beenbaked by the intense heat into an exceedingly hard, dark-colored stone, somewhat resembling basalt. I must add further, that I by no meansdetermine the rock with which we find it associated to be in reality analtered sandstone. Such is the appearance which it presents whereweathered; but its general aspect is that of a porphyritic trap. Be itwhat it may, the fact is not at all affected, that the shores, whereverit occurs on this tract of insular coast, are strewed with reptilianremains of the Oölite. 

The day passed pleasantly in the work of exploration and discovery; thesun had already declined far in the west; and, bearing with us ourbetter fossils, we set out, on our return, by the opposite route to thatalong the Bay of Laig, which we had now thrice walked over. The grassytalus so often mentioned continues to run on the eastern side of theisland for about six miles, between the sea and the inaccessible rampartof precipice behind. It varies in breadth from about two to four hundredyards; the rampart rises over it from three to five hundred feet; and anoble expanse of sea, closed in the distance by a still nobler curtainof blue hills, spreads away from its base: and it was along this grassytalus that our homeward road lay. Let the Edinburgh reader imagine thefine walk under Salisbury Crags lengthened some twenty times, --the lineof precipices above heightened some five or six times, --the gravellyslope at the base not much increased in altitude, but developedtransversely into a green undulating belt of hilly pasture, with hereand there a sunny slope level enough for the plough, and here and therea rough wilderness of detached crags and broken banks; let him furtherimagine the sea sweeping around the base of this talus, with the nearestopposite land--bold, bare and undulating atop--some six or eight milesdistant; and he will have no very inadequate idea of the peculiar andstriking scenery through which, this evening, our homeward route lay. Ihave scarce ever walked over a more solitary tract. The sea shuts it inon the one hand, and the rampart of rocks on the other; there occursalong its entire length no other human dwelling than a lonely summershieling; for full one-half the way we saw no trace of man; and thewildness of the few cattle which we occasionally startled in thehollows showed us that man was no very frequent visitor among them. About half an hour before sunset we reached the midway shieling. 

Rarely have I seen a more interesting spot, or one that, from its utterloneliness, so impressed the imagination. The shieling, a rudelow-roofed erection of turf and stone, with a door in the centre somefive feet in height or so, but with no window, rose on the grassy slopeimmediately in front of the vast continuous rampart. A slim pillar ofsmoke ascends from the roof, in the calm, faint and blue within theshadow of the precipice, but it caught the sunlight in its ascent, andblushed, ere it melted into the ether, a ruddy brown. A streamlet camepouring from above in a long white thread, that maintained itscontinuity unbroken for at least two-thirds of the way; and then, untwisting into a shower of detached drops, that pattered loud andvehemently in a rocky recess, it again gathered itself up into a livelylittle stream, and, sweeping past the shieling, expanded in front into acircular pond, at which a few milch cows were leisurely slaking theirthirst. The whole grassy talus, with a strip mayhap a hundred yardswide, of deep green sea, lay within the shadow of the tall rampart; butthe red light fell, for many a mile beyond, on the glassy surface; andthe distant Cuchullin Hills, so dark at other times, had all theirprominent slopes and jutting precipices tipped with bronze; while hereand there a mist streak, converted into bright flame, stretched alongtheir peaks or rested on their sides. Save the lonely shieling, not ahuman dwelling was in sight. An island girl of eighteen, more thanmerely good-looking, though much embrowned by the sun, had come to thedoor to see who the unwonted visitors might be, and recognized in JohnStewart an old acquaintance. John informed her in her own language thatI was Mr. Swanson's sworn friend, and not a _Moderate_, but one of theirown people, and that I had fasted all day, and had come for a drink ofmilk. The name of her minister proved a strongly recommendatory one: Ihave not yet seen the true Celtic interjection of welcome, --the kindly"O o o, "--attempted on paper; but I had a very agreeable specimen of iton this occasion, _viva voce_. And as she set herself to prepare for usa rich bowl of mingled milk and cream, John and I entered the shieling. There was a turf fire at the one end, at which there sat two littlegirls, engaged in keeping up the blaze under a large pot, but sadlydiverted from their work by our entrance; while the other end wasoccupied by a bed of dry straw, spread on the floor from wall to wall, and fenced off at the foot by a line of stones. The middle space wasoccupied by the utensils and produce of the dairy, --flat wooden vesselsof milk, a butter-churn, and a tub half-filled with curd; while a fewcheeses, soft from the press, lay on a shelf above. The little girlswere but occasional visitors, who had come, out of a juvenile frolic, topass the night in the place; but I was informed by John that theshieling had two other inmates, young women, like the one so hospitablyengaged in our behalf, who were out at the milking, and that they livedhere all alone for several months every year, when the pasturage was atits best, employed in making butter and cheese for their master, worthyMr. M'Donald of Keill. They must often feel lonely when night has closeddarkly over mountain and sea, or in those dreary days of mist and rainso common in the Hebrides, when nought may be seen save the fewshapeless crags that stud the nearer hillocks around them, and noughtheard save the moaning of the wind in the precipices above, or themeasured dash of the wave on the wild beach below. And yet they would doill to exchange their solitary life and rude shieling for the villagedwellings and gregarious habits of the females who ply their rurallabors in bands among the rich fields of the Lowlands, or for theunwholesome backroom and weary task-work of the city seamstress. Thesunlight was fading from the higher hill-tops of Skye and Glenelg as webade farewell to the lonely shieling and the hospitable island girl. 

The evening deepened as we hurried southwards along the scarce visiblepathway, or paused for a few seconds to examine some shattered block, bulky as a Highland cottage, that had fallen from the precipice above. Now that the whole landscape lay equally in shadow, one of the morepicturesque peculiarities of the continuous rampart came out morestrongly as a feature of the scene than when a strip of shade restedalong the face of the rock, imparting to it a retiring character, andall was sunshine beyond. A thick bed of white sandstone, as continuousas the rampart itself, runs nearly horizontally about midway in theprecipice for mile after mile, and, standing out in strong contrast withthe dark-colored trap above and below, reminds one of a belt of whitehewn work in a basalt house front, or rather, --for there occurs above asecond continuous strip, of an olive hue, the color assumed, onweathering by a bed of amygdaloid, --of a piece of dingy old-fashionedfurniture, inlaid with one stringed belt of bleached holly, and anotherof faded green-wood. At some of the more accessible points I climbed tothe line of white belting, and found it to consist of the same softquartzy sandstone that in the Bay of Laig furnishes the musical sand. Lower down there occur, alternating with the trap, beds of shale and ofblue clay, but they are lost mostly in the talus. Ill adapted to resistthe frosts and rains of winter, their exposed edges have mouldered intoa loose soil, now thickly covered over with herbage; and, but for thecircumstance that we occasionally find them laid bare by a water-course, we would scarce be aware of their existence at all. The shale exhibitseverywhere, as on the opposite side of the _Ru-Stoir_, faintimpressions of a minute shell resembling a Cyclas, and ill-preservedfragments of fish-scales. The blue clay I found at one spot where thepathway had cut deep into the hill-side, richly charged with bivalves ofthe species I had seen so abundant in the resembling clay of the Bay ofLaig; but the closing twilight prevented me from ascertaining whether italso contained the characteristic univalves of the deposit, and whetherits shells, --for they seem identical with those of the altered shales ofthe _Ru-Stoir_, --might not be associated, like these, with reptilianremains. Night fell fast, and the streaks of mist that had mottled thehills at sunset began to spread gray over the heavens in a continuouscurtain; but there was light enough left to show me that the trap becamemore columnar as we neared our journey's end. One especial jutting inthe rock presented in the gloom the appearance of an ancient portico, with pediment and cornice, such as the traveller sees on the hill-sidesof Petræa in front of some old tomb; but it may possibly appear lessarchitectural by day. At length, passing from under the long line oframpart, just as the stars that had begun to twinkle over it weredisappearing, one after one, in the thickening vapor, we reached thelittle bay of Kildonan, and found the boat waiting us on the beach. Myfriend the minister, as I entered the cabin, gathered up his notes fromthe table, and gave orders for the tea-kettle; and I spread out beforehim--a happy man--an array of fossils new to Scotch Geology. No one notan enthusiastic geologist or a zealous Roman Catholic can really knowhow vast an amount of interest may attach to a few old bones. Has thereader ever heard how fossil relics once saved the dwelling of a monk, in a time of great general calamity, when all his other relics proved ofno avail whatever?

Thomas Campbell, when asked for a toast in a society of authors, gavethe memory of Napoleon Bonaparte; significantly adding, "he once hung abookseller. " On a nearly similar principle I would be disposed topropose among geologists a grateful bumper in honor of the revolutionaryarmy that besieged Maestricht. That city, some seventy-five or eightyyears ago, had its zealous naturalist in the person of M. Hoffmann, adiligent excavator in the quarries of St. Peter's mountain, longcelebrated for its extraordinary fossils. Geology, as a science, had noexistence at the time; but Hoffmann was doing, in a quiet way, all hecould to give it a beginning;--he was transferring from the rock to hiscabinet, shells, and corals, and crustacea, and the teeth and scales offishes, with now and then the vertebræ, and now and then the limb-bone, of a reptile. And as he honestly remunerated all the workmen heemployed, and did no manner of harm to any one, no one heeded him. Onone eventful morning, however, his friends the quarriers laid bare amost extraordinary fossil, --the occipital plates of an enormous saurian, with jaws four and a half feet long, bristling over with teeth, like_chevaux de frise_; and after Hoffmann, who got the block in which itlay embedded, cut out entire, and transferred to his house, had spentweek after week in painfully relieving it from the mass, all Maestrichtbegan to speak of it as something really wonderful. There is a cathedralon St. Peter's mountain, --the mountain itself is church-land; and thelazy canon, awakened by the general talk, laid claim to poor Hoffmann'swonderful fossil as _his_ property. He was lord of the manor, he said, and the mountain and all that it contained belonged to him. Hoffmanndefended his fossil as he best could in an expensive lawsuit; but thejudges found the law clean against him; the huge reptile head wasdeclared to be "treasure trove" escheat to the lord of the manor; andHoffmann, half broken-hearted, with but his labor and the lawyer's billsfor his pains, saw it transferred by rude hands from its place in hismuseum, to the residence of the grasping churchman. The huge fossil headexperienced the fate of Dr. Chalmer's two hundred churches. Hoffmann wasa philosopher, however, and he continued to observe and collect asbefore; but he never found such another fossil; and at length, in themidst of his ingenious labors, the vital energies failed within him, andhe broke down and died. The useless canon lived on. The FrenchRevolution broke out; the republican army invested Maestricht; thebatteries were opened; and shot and shell fell thick on the devotedcity. But in one especial quarter there alighted neither shot nor shell. All was safe around the canon's house. Ordinary relics would haveavailed him nothing in the circumstances, --no, not "the three kings ofCologne, " had he possessed the three kings entire, or the jaw-bones ofthe "eleven thousand virgins;" but there was virtue in the jaw-bones ofthe Mosasaurus, and safety in their neighborhood. The French _savans_, like all the other _savans_ of Europe, had heard of Hoffmann's fossil, and the French artillery had been directed to play wide of the placewhere it lay. Maestricht surrendered; the fossil was found secreted in avault, and sent away to the _Jardin des Plantes_ at Paris, maugre thecanon, to delight there the heart of Cuvier; and the French, generouslyaddressing themselves to the heirs of Hoffmann as its legitimate owners, made over to them a considerable sum of money as its price. Theyreversed the finding of the Maestricht judges; and all save the monks ofSt. Peter's have acquiesced in the justice of the decision. 

CHAPTER VI. 

 Something for Non-geologists--Man Destructive--A Better and Last Creation coming--A Rainy Sabbath--The Meeting House--The Congregation--The Sermon in Gaelic--The Old Wondrous Story--The Drunken Minister of Eigg--Presbyterianism without Life--Dr. Johnson's Account of the Conversion of the People of Rum--Romanism at Eigg--The Two Boys--The Freebooter of Eigg--Voyage Resumed--The Homeless Minister--Harbor of Isle Ornsay--Interesting Gneiss Deposit--A Norwegian Keep--Gneiss at Knock--Curious Chemistry--Sea-cliffs beyond Portsea--The Goblin Luidag--Scenery of Skye. 

I reckon among my readers a class of non-geologists, who think mygeological chapters would be less dull if I left out the geology; andanother class of semi-geologists, who say there was decidedly too muchgeology in my last. With the present chapter, as there threatens to bean utter lack of science in the earlier half of it, and very little, ifany, in the latter half, I trust both classes may be in some degreesatisfied. It will bear reference to but the existing system ofthings, --assuredly not the last of the consecutive creations, --and to aspecies of animal that, save in the celebrated Guadaloupe specimens, hasnot yet been found locked up in stone. There have been much of violenceand suffering in the old immature stages of being, --much, from the eraof the Holoptychius, with its sharp murderous teeth and strong armor ofbone, down to that of the cannibal Ichthyosaurus, that bears the brokenremains of its own kind in its bowels, --much, again, from the times ofthe crocodile of the Oölite, down to the times of the fossil hyena andgigantic shark of the Tertiary. Nor, I fear, have matters greatlyimproved in that latest-born creation in the series, that recognizes asits delegated lord the first tenant of earth accountable to his Maker. But there is a better and a last creation coming, in which man shallre-appear, not to oppress and devour his fellow-men, and in which thereshall be no such wrongs perpetrated as it is my present purpose torecord, --"new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness. "Well sung the Ayrshire ploughman, when musing on the great truth thatthe present scene of being "is surely not the last, "--a truthcorroborated since his day by the analogies of a new science, --

 "The poor, oppressed, honest man, Had never sure been born, Had not there been some recompense To comfort those that mourn. "

It was Sabbath, but the morning rose like a hypochondriac wrapped up inhis night-clothes, --gray in fog, and sad with rain. The higher groundsof the island lay hid in clouds, far below the level of the centralhollow; and our whole prospect from the deck was limited to the nearerslopes, dank, brown, and uninhabited, and to the rough black crags thatfrown like sentinels over the beach. Now the rime thickened as the rainpattered more loudly on the deck; and even the nearer stacks andprecipices showed as unsolid and spectral in the cloud as moonlightshadows thrown on a ground of vapor; anon it cleared up for a fewhundred yards, as the shower lightened; and then there came in view, partially at least, two objects that spoke of man, --a deserted boatharbor, formed of loosely piled stone, at the upper extremity of a sandybay; and a roofless dwelling beside it, with two ruinous gables risingover the broken walls. The entire scene suggested the idea of a landwith which man had done for ever;--the vapor-enveloped rocks, --the wasteof ebb-uncovered sand, --the deserted harbor, --the ruinous house, --themelancholy rain-fretted tides eddying along the strip of brown tangle inthe foreground, --and, dim over all, the thick, slant lines of thebeating shower!--I know not that of themselves they would have furnishedmaterials enough for a finished picture in the style of Hogarth's "Endof all Things;" but right sure am I that in the hands of Bewick theywould have been grouped into a tasteful and poetic vignette. We set outfor church a little after eleven, --the minister encased in hisample-skirted storm-jacket of oiled canvas, and protected atop by agenuine _sou-wester_, of which the broad posterior rim eloped half ayard down his back; and I closely wrapped up in my gray maud, whichproved, however, a rather indifferent protection against the penetratingpowers of a true Hebridean drizzle. The building in which thecongregation meets is a low dingy cottage of turf and stone, situatednearly opposite to the manse windows. It had been built by my friend, previous to the Disruption, at his own expense, for a Gaelic school, andit now serves as a place of worship for the people. 

We found the congregation already gathered, and that the very badmorning had failed to lessen their numbers. There were a few of the maleparishioners keeping watch at the door, looking wistfully out throughthe fog and rain for their minister; and at his approach nearly twentymore came issuing from the place, --like carder bees from their nest ofdried grass and moss, --to gather round him, and shake him by the hand. The islanders of Eigg are an active, middle-sized race, withwell-developed heads, acute intellects, and singularly warm feelings. And on this occasion at least there could be no possibility of mistakerespecting the feelings with which they regarded their minister. Rarelyhave I seen human countenances so eloquently vocal with veneration andlove. The gospel message, which my friend had been the first effectuallyto bring home to their hearts, --the palpable fact of his sacrifice forthe sake of the high principles which he has taught, --his own kindlydisposition, --the many services which he has rendered them, for not onlyhas he been the minister, but also the sole medical man, of the SmallIsles, and the benefit of his practice they have enjoyed, in everyinstance, without fee or reward, --his new life of hardship and danger, maintained for their sakes amid sinking health and greatprivation, --their frequent fears for his safety when stormy nights closeover the sea, --and they have seen his little vessel driven from heranchorage, just as the evening has fallen, --all these are circumstancesthat have concurred in giving him a strong hold on their affections. 

The rude turf-building we found full from end to end, and all a-steamwith a particularly wet congregation, some of whom, neither very robustnor young, had travelled in the soaking drizzle from the fartherextremities of the island. And, judging from the serious attention withwhich they listened to the discourse, they must have deemed it fullvalue for all it cost them. I have never yet seen a congregation moredeeply impressed, or that seemed to follow the preacher moreintelligently; and I was quite sure, though ignorant of the language inwhich my friend addressed them, that he preached to them neither heresynor nonsense. There was as little of the reverence of externals in theplace as can well be imagined: an uneven earthen floor, --turf-walls onevery side, and a turf-roof above, --two little windows of four panesa-piece, adown which the rain-drops were coursing thick and fast, --apulpit grotesquely rude, that had never employed the bredcarpenter, --and a few ranges of seats of undressed deal, such were themere materialisms of this lowly church of the people; and yet here, notwithstanding, was the living soul of a Christiancommunity, --understandings convinced of the truth of the gospel, andhearts softened and impressed by its power. 

My friend, at the conclusion of his discourse, gave a brief digest ofits contents in English, for the benefit of his one Saxon auditor; and Ifound, as I had anticipated, that what had so moved the simple islanderswas just the old wondrous story, which, though repeated and re-repeatedtimes beyond number, from the days of the apostles till now, continuesto be as full of novelty and interest as ever, --"God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Himshould not perish, but have everlasting life. " The great truths whichhad affected many of these poor people to tears, were exactly thosewhich, during the last eighteen hundred years, have been active ineffecting so many moral revolutions in the world, and which mustultimately triumph over all error and all oppression. On this occasion, as on many others, I had to regret my want of Gaelic. It was mymisfortune to miss being born to this ancient language, by barely a mileof ferry. I first saw light on the southern shore of the Frith ofCromarty, where the strait is narrowest, among an old establishedLowland community, marked by all the characteristics, physical andmental, of the Lowlanders of the southern districts; whereas, had I beenborn on the northern shore, I would have been brought up among a Celtictribe, and Gaelic would have been my earliest language. Thus distinctwas the line between the two races preserved, even after thecommencement of the present century. 

In returning to the Betsey during the mid-day interval in the service, we passed the ruinous two-gabled house beside the boat-harbor. Duringthe incumbency of my friend's predecessor, it had been the public-houseof the island, and the parish minister was by far its best customer. Hewas in the practice of sitting in one of its dingy little rooms, dayafter day, imbibing whisky and peat-reek; and his favorite booncompanion on these occasions was a Roman Catholic tenant who lived onthe opposite side of the island, and who, when drinking with theminister, used regularly to fasten his horse beside the door, till atlength all the parish came to know that when the horse was standingoutside the minister was drinking within. In course of time, through thenatural gravitation operative in such cases, the poor incumbent becameutterly scandalous, and was libelled for drunkenness before the GeneralAssembly; but, as the island of Eigg lies remote from observation, evidence was difficult to procure; and had not the infatuated man gotsenselessly drunk one evening, when in Edinburgh on his trial, andstaggered, of all places in the world, into the General Assembly, hewould probably have died minister of Eigg. As the event happened, however, the testimony thus unwittingly furnished in the face of theCourt that tried him was deemed conclusive;--he was summarily deposedfrom his office, and my friend succeeded him. Presbyterianism withoutthe animating life is a poor shrunken thing: it never lies in state whenit is dead; for it has no body of fine forms, or trapping of imposingceremonies, to give it bulk or adornment: without the vitality ofevangelism it is nothing; and in this low and abject state my friendfound the Presbyterianism of Eigg. His predecessor had done it onlymischief; nor had it been by any means vigorous before. Rum is one ofthe four islands of the parish; and all my readers must be familiar withDr. Johnson's celebrated account of the conversion to Protestantism ofthe people of Rum. "The inhabitants, " says the Doctor, in his "Journeyto the Western Islands, " "are fifty-eight families, who continuedPapists for some time after the laird became a Protestant. Theiradherence to their old religion was strengthened by the countenance ofthe laird's sister, a zealous Romanist; till one Sunday, as they weregoing to mass under the conduct of their patroness, Maclean met them onthe way, gave one of them a blow on the head with a yellow stick, --Isuppose a cane, for which the Erse had no name, and drove them to thekirk, from which they have never departed. Since the use of this methodof conversion, the inhabitants of Eigg and Canna who continue Papistscall the Protestantism of Rum the religion of the yellow stick. " Now, such was the kind of Protestantism that, since the days of Dr. Johnson, had also been introduced, I know not by what means, into Eigg. It hadlived on the best possible terms with the Popery of the island; theparish minister had soaked day after day in the public-house with aRoman Catholic boon companion; and when a Papist man married aProtestant woman, the woman, as a matter of course, became Papist also;whereas, when it was the man who was a Protestant, and the woman aPapist, the woman remained what she had been. Roman Catholicism wasquite content with terms, actual though not implied, of a kind sodecidedly advantageous; and the Roman Catholics used good-humoredly tourge on their neighbors the Protestants, that, as it was palpable theyhad no religion of any kind, they had better surely come over to them, and have some. In short, all was harmony between the two Churches. Myfriend labored hard, as a good and honest man ought, to impart toProtestantism in his parish the animating life of the Reformation; and, through the blessing of God, after years of anxious toil, he at lengthfully succeeded. 

I had got wet, and the day continued bad; and so, instead of returningto the evening sermon, which began at six, I remained alone aboard ofthe vessel. The rain ceased in little more than an hour after, and insomewhat more than two hours I got up on deck to see whether thecongregation was not dispersing, and if it was not yet time to hang onthe kettle for our evening tea. The unexpected apparition of some oneaboard the Free Church yacht startled two ragged boys who weremanoeuvring a little boat a stone-cast away, under the rocky shores of_Eilean Chaisteil_, and who, on catching a glimpse of me, flungthemselves below the thwarts for concealment. An oar dropped into thewater; there was a hasty arm and half a head thrust over the gunwale tosecure it; and then the urchin to whom they belonged again disappeared. Meanwhile the boat drifted slowly away: first one little head wouldappear for a moment over the gunwale, then another, as if reconnoiteringthe enemy; but I still kept my place on deck; and at length, tired out, the ragged little crew took to their oars, and rowed into a shallow bayat the lower extremity of the glebe, with a cottage, in size andappearance much resembling an ant-hill, peeping out at its innerextremity among some stunted bushes. I had marked the place before, andhad been struck with the peculiarity of the choice that could have fixedon it as a site for a dwelling: it is at once the most inconvenient andpicturesque on this side the island. A semi-circular line of columnarprecipices, that somewhat resembles an amphitheatre turned outsidein, --for the columns that overlook the area are quite as lofty as thosewhich should form the amphitheatre's outer wall, --sweeps round a littlebay, flat and sandy at half-tide, but bordered higher up by a dingy, scarce passable beach of columnar fragments that have toppled fromabove. Between the beach and the line of columns there is a bosky talus, more thickly covered with brushwood than is at all common in theHebrides, and scarce more passable than the rough beach at its feet. Andat the bottom of this talus, with its one gable buried in the steepascent, --for there is scarce a foot-breadth of platform between theslope and the beach, --and with the other gable projected to thetide-line on rugged columnar masses, stands the cottage. The story ofthe inmate, --the father of the two ragged boys, --is such a one as Crabbewould have delighted to tell, and as he could have told better than anyone else. 

He had been, after a sort, a freebooter in his time, but born an age ortwo rather late; and the law had proved over strong for him. On at leastone occasion, perhaps oftener, --for his adventures are not all known inEigg, --he had been in prison for sheep-stealing. He had the dangerousart of subsisting without the ostensible means, and came to be fearedand avoided by his neighbors as a man who lived on them without askingtheir leave. With neither character nor a settled way of living, hiswits, I am afraid, must have been often whetted by his necessities: hestole lest he should starve. For some time he had resided in theadjacent island of Muck; but, proving a bad tenant, he had been ejectedby the agent of the landlord, I believe a very worthy man, who gave himhalf a boll of meal to get quietly rid of him, and pulled down hishouse, when he had left the island, to prevent his return. Betakinghimself, with his boys, to a boat, he set out in quest of some newlodgment. He made his first attempt or two on the mainland, where hestrove to drive a trade in begging, but he was always recognized as theconvicted sheep-stealer, and driven back to the shore. At length, aftera miserable term of wandering, he landed in the winter season on Eigg, where he had a grown-up son, a miller; and, erecting a wretched shedwith some spars and the old sail of a boat placed slantways against theside of a rock, he squatted on the beach, determined, whether he livedor died, to find a home on the island. The islanders were no strangersto the character of the poor forlorn creature, and kept aloof fromhim, --none of them, however, so much as his own son; and, for a time, myfriend the minister, aware that he had been the pest of every communityamong which he had lived, stood aloof from him too, in the hope that atlength, wearied out, he might seek for himself a lodgment elsewhere. There came on, however, a dreary night of sleet and rain, accompanied bya fierce storm from the sea; and intelligence reached the manse late inthe evening, that the wretched sheep-stealer had been seized by suddenillness, and was dying on the beach. There could be no room for furtherhesitation in this case; and my friend the minister gave instant ordersthat the poor creature should be carried to the manse. The party, however, which he had sent to remove him found the task impracticable. The night was pitch dark; and the road, dangerous with precipices, andblocked up with rough masses of rock and stone, they found whollyimpassable with so helpless a burden. And so, administering somecordials to the poor, hapless wretch, they had to leave him in the midstof the storm, with the old wet sail flapping about his ears, and thehalf-frozen rain pouring in upon him in torrents. He must have passed amiserable night, but it could not have been a whit more miserable thanthat passed by the minister in the manse. As the wild blast howledaround his comfortable dwelling, and shook the casements as if some handoutside were assaying to open them, or as the rain pattered sharp andthick on the panes, and the measured roar of the surf rose high overevery other sound, he could think of only the wretched creature exposedto the fury of a tempest so terrible, as perchance wrestling in hisdeath agony in the darkness beside the breaking wave, or as alreadystiffening on the shore. He was early astir next morning, and almost thefirst person he met was the poor sheep-stealer, looking more like aghost than a living man. The miserable creature had mustered strengthenough to crawl up from the beach. My friend has often met better menwith less pleasure. He found a shelter for the poor outcast; he tendedhim, prescribed for him, and, on his recovery, gave him leave to buildfor himself the hovel at the foot of the crags. The islanders were awarethey had got but an indifferent neighbor through the transaction, thoughnone of them, with the exception of the poor creature's son, saw whatelse their minister could have done in the circumstances. But the millercould sustain no apology for the arrangement that had given him hisvagabond father as a neighbor; and oftener than once the site of therising hovel became a scene of noisy contention between parent and son. Some of the islanders informed me that they had seen the son engaged inpulling down the stones of the walls as fast as the father raised themup; and, save for the interference of the minister, the hut, notwithstanding the permission he gave, would scarce have been built. 

On the morning of Monday we unloosed from our moorings, and set out witha light variable breeze for Isle Ornsay, in Skye, where the wife andfamily of Mr. Swanson resided, and from which he had now been absent fora full month. The island diminished, and assumed its tint of dilutingblue, that waxed paler and paler hour after hour, as we left it slowlybehind us; and the Scuir, projected boldly from its steep hill-top, resembled a sharp hatchet-edge presented to the sky. "Nowhere, " said myfriend, "did I so thoroughly realize the Disruption of last year as atthis spot. I had just taken my last leave of the manse; Mrs. Swanson hadstaid a day behind me in charge of a few remaining pieces of furniture, and I was bearing some of the rest, and my little boy Bill, scarce fiveyears of age at the time, in the yacht with me to Skye. The littlefellow had not much liked to part from his mother, and the previousunsettling of all sorts of things in the manse had bred in him thoughtshe had not quite words to express. The further change to the yacht, too, he had deemed far from an agreeable one. But he had borne up, by way ofbeing very manly; and he seemed rather amused that papa should now haveto make his porridge for him, and to put him to bed, and that it wasJohn Stewart, the sailor, who was to be the servant girl. The passage, however, was tedious and disagreeable; the wind blew a-head, and heartand spirits failing poor Bill, and somewhat sea-sick to boot, he laydown on the floor, and cried bitterly to be taken home. 'Alas, my boy!'I said, 'you have no home now: your father is like the poorsheep-stealer whom you saw on the shore of Eigg. ' This view of mattersproved in no way consolatory to poor Bill. He continued his sad wail, 'Home, home, home!' until at length he fairly sobbed himself asleep; andI never, on any other occasion, so felt the desolateness of my conditionas when the cry of my boy, --'Home, home, home!'--was ringing in myears. "

We passed, on the one hand, Loch Nevis and Loch Hourn, two fine arms ofthe sea that run far into the mainland, and open up noble vistas amongthe mountains; and, on the other, the long undulating line of Sleat inSkye, with its intermingled patches of woodland and arable on the coast, and its mottled ranges of heath and rock above. Towards evening weentered the harbor of Isle Ornsay, a quiet, well-sheltered bay, with arocky islet for a breakwater on the one side, and the rudiments of aHighland village, containing a few good houses, on the other. Half adozen small vessels were riding at anchor, curtained round, half-masthigh, with herring nets; and a fleet of herring-boats lay moored besidethem a little nearer the shore. There had been tolerable takes for a fewnights in the neighboring sea, but the fish had again disappeared, andthe fishermen, whose worn-out tackle gave such evidence of along-continued run of ill-luck, as I had learned to interpret on theeast coast, looked gloomy and spiritless, and reported a deficientfishery. I found Mrs. Swanson and her family located in one of the twobest houses in the village, with a neat enclosure in front, and a goodkitchen-garden behind. The following day I spent in exploring the rocksof the district, --a primary region with regard to organic existence, "without _form_ and void. " From Isle Ornsay to the Point of Sleat, adistance of thirteen miles, gneiss is the prevailing deposit; and in noplace in the district are the strata more varied and interesting than inthe neighborhood of Knockhouse, the residence of Mr. Elder, which Ifound pleasingly situated at the bottom of a little open bay, skirtedwith picturesque knolls partially wooded, that present to the surfprecipitous fronts of rock. One insulated eminence, a gun-shot from thedwelling-house, that presents to the sea two mural fronts of precipice, and sinks in steep grassy slopes on two sides more, bears atop a fineold ruin. There is a blind-fronted massy keep, wrapped up in a mantle ofivy, perched at the one end, where the precipice sinks steepest; while amore ruinous though much more modern pile of building, perforated by adouble row of windows, occupies the rest of the area. The square keephas lost its genealogy in the mists of the past, but a vague traditionattributes its erection to the Norwegians. The more modern pile is saidto have been built about three centuries ago by a younger son ofM'Donald of the Isles; but it is added that, owing to the jealousy ofhis elder brother, he was not permitted to complete or inhabit it. Ifind it characteristic of most Highland traditions, that they containspeeches: they constitute true oral specimens of that earliest andrudest style of historic composition in which dialogue alternates withnarrative. "My wise brother is building a fine house, " is the speechpreserved in this tradition as that of the elder son: "it is rather apity for himself that he should be building it on another man's lands. "The remark was repeated to the builder, says the story, and at oncearrested the progress of the work. Mr. Elder's boys showed me severalminute pieces of brass, somewhat resembling rust-eaten coin, that theyhad dug out of the walls of the old keep; but the pieces bore no impressof the dye, and seemed mere fragments of metal beaten thin by thehammer. 

The gneiss at Knock is exceedingly various in its composition, and manyof its strata the geologist would fail to recognize as gneiss at all. Wefind along the precipices its two unequivocal varieties, the schistoseand the granitic, passing not unfrequently, the former into a true micaschist, the latter into a pale feldspathose rock, thickly pervaded byneedle-like crystals of tremolite, that, from the style of the grouping, and the contrast existing between the dark green of the enclosedmineral, and the pale flesh-color of the ground, frequently furnishesspecimens of great beauty. In some pieces the tremolite assumes thecommon fan-like form; in some, the crystals, lying at nearly rightangles with each other, present the appearance of ancient charactersinlaid in the rock; in some they resemble the footprints of birds in athin layer of snow; and in one curious specimen picked up by Mr. Swanson, in which a dark linear strip is covered transversely bycrystals that project thickly from both its sides, the appearancepresented is that of a minute stigmaria of the Coal Measures, with theleaves, still bearing their original green color, bristling thick aroundit. Mr. Elder showed me, intercalated among the gneiss strata of alittle ravine in the neighborhood of Isle Ornsay, a thin band of abluish-colored indurated clay, scarcely distinguishable, in the handspecimen, from a weathered clay-stone, but unequivocally a stratum ofthe rock. I have found the same stone existing, in a decomposed state, as a very tenacious clay, among the gneiss strata of the hill ofCromarty; and oftener than once had I amused myself in fashioning it, with tolerable success, into such rude pieces of pottery as aresometimes found in old sepulchral tumuli. Such are a few of the rocksincluded in the general gneiss deposit of Sleat. If we are to hold, withone of the most distinguished of living geologists, that the stratifiedprimary rocks are aqueous deposits altered by heat, to how various achemistry must they not have been subjected in this district! In onestratum, so softened that all its particles were disengaged to enterinto new combinations, and yet not so softened but that it stillmaintained its lines of division from the strata above and below, thegreen tremolite was shooting its crystals into the pale homogeneousmass; while in another stratum the quartz drew its atoms apart in massesthat assumed one especial form, the feldspar drew its atoms apart intomasses that assumed another and different form, and the glittering micabuilt up its multitudinous layers between. Here the unctuous chloriteconstructed its soft felt; there the micaceous schist arranged itsundulating layers; yonder the dull clay hardened amid the intense heat, but, when all else was changing, retained its structure unchanged. Surely a curious chemistry, and conducted on an enormous scale!

It had been an essential part of my plan to explore the splendid sectionof the Lower Oölite furnished by the line of sea-cliffs that, to thenorth of the Portree, rise full seven hundred feet over the beach; andon the morning of Wednesday I set out with this intention from IsleOrnsay, to join the mail gig at Broadford, and pass on to Portree, --ajourney of rather more than thirty miles. I soon passed over the gneiss, and entered on a wide deposit, extending from side to side of theisland, of what is generally laid down in our geological maps as Old RedSandstone, but which, in most of its beds, quite as much resembles aquartz rock, and which, unlike any Old Red proper I have ever seen, passes, by insensible gradations, into the gneiss. [2] Wherever it hasbeen laid bare in flat tables among the heath, we find it bearing thosemysterious scratches on a polished surface which we so commonly findassociated on the mainland with the boulder clay; but here, as in theHebrides generally, the boulder clay is wanting. To the tract of RedSandstone there succeeds a tract of Lias, which, also extending acrossthe island, forms by far the most largely-developed deposit of thisformation in Scotland. It occupies a flat dingy valley, about six milesin length, and that varies from two to four miles in breadth. The drearyinterior is covered with mosses, and studded with inky pools, in whichthe botanist finds a few rare plants, and which were dimpled, as Ipassed them this morning, with countless eddies, formed by myriads ofsmall quick glancing trout, that seemed busily engaged in fly-catching. The rock appears but rarely, --all is moss, marsh, and pool; but in a fewlocalities on the hill-sides, where some stream has cut into the slope, and disintegrated the softer shales, the shepherd finds shells ofstrange form strewed along the water-courses, or bleaching white amongthe heath. The valley, --evidently a dangerous one to the nighttraveller, from its bogs and its tarns, --is said to be haunted by aspirit peculiar to itself, --a mischievous, eccentric, grotesquecreature, not unworthy, from the monstrosity of its form, of beingassociated with the old monsters of the Lias. Luidag--for so the goblinis called--has but one leg, terminating, like an ancient satyr's, in acloven foot; but it is furnished with two arms, bearing hard fists atthe end of them, with which it has been known to strike the benightedtraveller in the face, or to tumble him over into some dark pool. Thespectre may be seen at the close of evening hopping vigorously among thedistant bogs, like a felt ball on its electric platform; and when themist lies thick in the hollows, an occasional glimpse may be caught ofit even by day. But when I passed the way there was no fog: the light, though softened by a thin film of cloud, fell equally over the heath, revealing hill and hollow; and I was unlucky enough not to see thisgoblin of the Liasic valley. 

A deep indentation of the coast, which forms the bay of Broadford, corresponds with the hollow of the valley. It is simply a portion of thevalley itself occupied by the sea; and we find the Lias, from its lowerto its upper beds, exposed in unbroken series along the beach. In themiddle of the opening lies the green level island of Pabba, altogethercomposed of this formation, and which, differing, in consequence, bothin outline and color, from every neighboring island and hill, seems alittle bit of flat fertile England, laid down, as if for contrast'ssake, amid the wild rough Hebrides. Of Pabba and its wonders, however, more anon. I explored a considerable range of shore along the bay; butas I made it the subject of two after explorations ere I mastered itsdeposits, I shall defer my description till a subsequent chapter. It waslate this evening ere the post-gig arrived from the south, and the nightand several hours of the following morning were spent in travelling toPortree. I know not, however, that I could have seen some of the wildestand most desolate tracts in Skye to greater advantage. There was lightenough to show the bold outlines of the hills, --lofty, abrupt, pyramidal, --just such hills, both in form and grouping, as a profile inblack showed best; a low blue vapor slept in the calm over the marshesat their feet; the sea, smooth as glass, reflected the dusk twilightgleam in the north, revealing the narrow sounds and deepmountain-girdled lochs along which we passed; gray crags gleamed dimlyon the sight; birch-feathered acclivities presented against sea and skytheir rough bristly edges; all was vast, dreamy, obscure, like one ofMartin's darker pictures: the land of the seer and the spectre could nothave been better seen. Morning broke dim and gray, while we were yetseveral miles from Portree; and I reached the inn in time to see from mybed-room windows the first rays of the rising sun gleaming on thehill-tops. 

CHAPTER VII. 

 Exploration resumed--Geology of Rasay--An Illustration--Storr of Skye--From Portree to Holm--Discovery of Fossils--An Island Rain--Sir R. Murchison--Labor of drawing a Geological Line--Three Edinburgh Gentlemen--_Prosopolepsia_--Wrong surmises corrected--The Mail Gig--The Portree Postmaster--Isle Ornsay--An Old Acquaintance--Reminiscences--A Run for Rum--"Semi-fossil Madeira"--Idling on Deck--Prognostics of a Storm--Description of the Gale--Loch Scresort--The Minister's lost _Sou-wester_--The Free Church Gathering--The weary Minister. 

I breakfasted in the travellers' room with three gentlemen fromEdinburgh; and then, accompanied by a boy, whom I had engaged to carrymy bag, set out to explore. The morning was ominously hot andbreathless; and while the sea lay moveless in the calm, as a floor ofpolished marble, mountain and rock, and distant island, seemed tremulousall over, through a wavy medium of thick rising vapor. I judged from thefirst that my course of exploration for the day was destined toterminate abruptly; and as my arrangements with Mr. Swanson left me, forthis part of the country, no second day to calculate upon, I hurriedover deposits which in other circumstances I would have examined morecarefully, --content with a glance. Accustomed in most instances to takelong aims, as Cuddy Headrig did, when he steadied his musket on a restbehind the hedge, and sent his ball through Laird Oliphant's forehead, Ihad on this occasion to shoot flying; and so, selecting a large objectfor a mark, that I might run the less risk of missing, I strove toacquaint myself rather with the general structure of the district thanwith the organisms of its various fossiliferous beds. 

The long narrow island of Rasay lies parallel to the coast of Skye, like a vessel laid along a wharf, but drawn out from it as if to sufferanother vessel of the same size to take her berth between; and on theeastern shores of both Skye and Rasay we find the same Oölitic depositstilted up at nearly the same angle. The section presented on the easterncoast of the one is nearly a duplicate of the section presented on theeastern coast of the other. During one of the severer frosts of lastwinter I passed along a shallow pond, studded along the sides withboulder stones. It had been frozen over; and then, from the evaporationso common in protracted frosts, the water had shrunk, and the sheet ofice which had sunk down over the central portion of the pond exhibitedwhat a geologist would term very considerable marks of disturbance amongthe boulders at the edges. Over one sharp-backed boulder there lay asheet tilted up like the lid of a chest half-raised; and over anotherboulder immediately behind it there lay another uptilted sheet, like thelid of a second half-open chest; and in both sheets, the edges, lying innearly parallel lines, presented a range of miniature cliffs to theshore. Now, in the two uptilted ice-sheets of this pond I recognized amodel of the fundamental Oölitic deposits Rasay and Skye. The mainlandof Scotland had its representative in the crisp snow-covered shore ofthe pond, with its belt of faded sedges; the place of Rasay wasindicated by the inner, that of Skye by the outer boulder; while theice-sheets, with their shoreward-turned line of cliffs, represented theOölitic beds, that turn to the mainland their dizzy range of precipices, varying from six to eight hundred feet in height, and then, slopingoutwards and downwards, disappear under mountain wildernesses ofoverlying trap. And it was along a portion of the range of cliff thatforms the outermost of the two uptilted lines, and which presents inthis district of Skye a frontage of nearly twenty continuous miles tothe long Sound of Rasay, that my to-day's course of exploration lay. From the top of the cliff the surface slopes downwards for about twomiles into the interior, like the half-raised chest-lid of myillustration sloping towards the hinges, or the uptilted ice-table ofthe boulder sloping towards the centre of the pond; and the depressionbehind forms a flat moory valley, full fifteen miles in length, occupiedby a chain of dark bogs and treeless lochans. A long line of trap-hillsrises over it, in one of which, considerably in advance of the others, Irecognized the Storr of Skye, famous among lovers of the picturesque forits strange group of mingled pinnacles and towers; while directlycrossing into the valley from the Sound, and then running southwards forabout two miles along its bottom, is the noble sea-arm, Loch Portree, inwhich, as indicated by the name (the King's Port) a Scottish king of theolden time, in his voyage round his dominions, cast anchor. The openingof the loch is singularly majestic;--the cliffs tower high on eitherside in graceful magnificence: but from the peculiar inward slope of theland, all within, as the loch reaches the line of the valley, becomestame and low, and a black dreary moor stretches from the flat terminalbasin into the interior. The opening of Loch Portree is a palacegateway, erected in front of some homely suburb, that occupies the placewhich the palace itself should have occupied. 

There was, however, no such mixture of the homely and the magnificent inthe route I had selected to explore. It lay under the escarpment of thecliff; and I purposed pursuing it from Portree to Holm, a distance ofabout six miles, and then returning by the flat interior valley. On theone hand rose a sloping rampart, full seven hundred feet in height, striped longitudinally with alternating bands of white sandstone anddark shale, and capped atop by a continuous coping of trap, that lackednot massy tower, and overhanging turret, and projecting sentry-box;while, on the other hand, spreading outwards in the calm from the lineof dark trap-rocks below, like a mirror from its carved frame of blackoak, lay the Sound of Rasay, with its noble background of island andmain rising bold on the east, and its long mountain vista opening to thesouth. The first fossiliferous deposit which gave me occasion thismorning to use my hammer occurs near the opening of the loch, beside anold Celtic burying-ground, in the form of a thick bed of hard sandstone, charged with Belemnites, --a bed that must at one time have existed as awidely-spread accumulation of sand, --the bottom, mayhap, of someextensive bay of the Oölite, resembling the Loch Portree of the presentday, in which eddy tides deposited the sand swept along by the tidalcurrents of some neighboring sound, and which swarmed as thickly withCephalopoda as the loch swarmed this day with minute purple-tingedMedusæ. I found detached on the shore, immediately below this bed, apiece of calcareous fissile sandstone, abounding in small sulcatedTerebratulæ, identical, apparently, with the Terebratula of a specimenin my collection from the inferior Oölite of Yorkshire. A colony of thisdelicate Brachiopod must have once lain moored near this spot, like afleet of long-prowed galleys at anchor, each one with its cable of manystrands extended earthwards from the single _dead-eye_ in its umbone. For a full mile after rounding the northern boundary of the loch, wefind the immense escarpment composed from top to bottom exclusively oftrap; but then the Oölite again begins to appear, and about two milesfurther on the section becomes truly magnificent, --one of the finestsections of this formation exhibited anywhere in Britain, perhaps in theworld. In a ravine furrowed in the face of the declivity by the headlongdescent of a small stream, we may trace all the beds of the system insuccession, from the Cornbrash, an upper deposit of the Lower Oölite, down to the Lias, the formation on which the Oölite rests. The onlymodifying circumstance to the geologist is, that though the sandstonebeds run continuously along the cliff for miles together, distinct asthe white bands in a piece of onyx, the intervening beds of shale areswarded over, save where we here and there see them laid bare in someabrupter acclivity or deeper water-course. In the shale we find numerousminute Ammonites, sorely weathered; in the sandstone, Belemnites, someof them of great size; and dark carbonaceous markings, passing notunfrequently into a glossy cubical coal. At the foot of the cliff Ipicked up an ammonite of considerable size and well-markedcharacter, --the _Ammonites Murchisonæ_, first discovered on this coastby Sir R. Murchison about fifteen years ago. It measures, when fullgrown, from six to seven inches in diameter; the inner whorls, which arebroadly visible, are ribbed; whereas the two, and sometimes the threeouter ones, are smooth, --a marked characteristic of the species. Myspecimen merely enabled me to examine the peculiarities of the shelljust a little more minutely than I could have done in the pages ofSowerby; for such was its state of decay, that it fell to pieces in myhands. I had now come full in view of the rocky island of Holm, when thealtered appearance of the heavens led me to deliberate, just as I waswarming in the work of exploration, whether, after all, it might not bewell to scale the cliffs, and strike directly on the inn. It was nearlythree o'clock; the sky had been gradually darkening since noon, as ifone thin covering of gauze after another had been drawn over it; hilland island had first dimmed and then disappeared in the landscape; andnow the sun stood up right over the fast-contracting vista of the Sound, round and lightless as the moon in a haze; and the downwardcataract-like streaming of the gray vapor on the horizon showed thatthere the rain had already broken, and was descending in torrents. Wehad been thirsty in the hot sun, and had found the springs few andscanty; but the boy now assured me, in very broken English, that we wereto get a great deal more water than would be good for us, and that itmight be advisable to get out of its way. And so, climbing to the top ofthe cliffs, along a water-course, we reached the ridge, just as the fogcame rolling downwards from the peaked brow of the Storr into the flatmoory valley, and the melancholy lochans roughened and darkened in therain. We were both particularly wet ere we reached Portree. 

In exploring our Scotch formations, I have had frequent occasion, inRoss, Sutherland, Caithness, and now once more in Skye, to pass overground described by Sir R. Murchison; and in every instance have I foundmyself immensely his debtor. His descriptions possess the merit of beingtrue: they are simple outlines often, that leave much to be filled up byafter discovery; but, like those outlines of the skilful geographer thatfix the place of some island or strait, though they may not entirelydefine it, they always indicate the exact position in the scale of theformations to which they refer. They leave a good deal to be done in theway of mapping out the interior of a deposit, if I may so speak; butthey leave nothing to be done in the way of ascertaining its place. Thework accomplished is _bona fide_ work, --actual, solid, not to be doneover again, --work such as could be achieved in only the school of Dr. William Smith, the father of English Geology. I have found much toadmire, too, in the sections of Sir R. Murchison. His section of thispart of the coast, for example, strikes from the extreme northern partof Skye to the island of Holm, thence to Scrapidale in Rasay, thencealong part of the coast of Scalpa, thence direct through the middle ofPabba, and thence to the shore of the Bay of Laig. The line thus takenincludes, in regular sequence in the descending order, the whole Oöliticdeposits of the Hebrides, from the Cornbrash, with its overlyingfresh-water outliers of mayhap the Weald, down to where the Lower Liasrests on the primary red sandstones of Sleat. It would have costM'Culloch less exploration to have written a volume than it must havecost Sir R. Murchison to draw this single line; but the line once drawn, is work done to the hands of all after explorers. I have followedrepeatedly in the track of another geologist, of, however, a verydifferent school, who explored, at a comparatively recent period, thedeposits of not a few of our Scotch counties. But his labors, in atleast the fossiliferous formations, seem to have accomplished nothingfor Geology, --I am afraid, even less than nothing. So far as they hadinfluence at all, it must have been to throw back the science. Ageologist who could have asserted only three years ago ("GeognosticalAccount of Banffshire, " 1842), that the Old Red Sandstone of Scotlandforms merely "a part of the great coal deposit, " could have knownmarvellously little of the fossils of the one system, and nothingwhatever of those of the other. Had he examined ere he decided, insteadof deciding without any intention of examining, he would have foundthat, while both systems abound in organic remains, they do not possess, in Scotland at least, a single species in common, and that even theirtypes of being, viewed in the group, are essentially distinct. 

The three Edinburgh gentlemen whom I had met at breakfast were still inthe inn. One of them I had seen before, as one of the guests at aWesleyan soiree, though I saw he failed to remember that I had beenthere as a guest too. The two other gentlemen were altogether strangersto me. One of them, --a man on the right side of forty, and a superbspecimen of the powerful, six-feet two-inch Norman Celt, --I set down asa scion of some old Highland family, who, as the broadsword had goneout, carried on the internal wars of the country with the formidableartillery of Statute and Decision. The other, a gentleman more advancedin life, I predicated to be a Highland proprietor, the uncle of theyounger of the two, --a man whose name, as he had an air of businessabout him, occurred, in all probability, in the Almanac, in the list ofScotch advocates. Both were of course high Tories, --I was quite sure ofthat, --zealous in behalf of the Establishment, though previous to theDisruption they had not cared for it a pin's point, --and prepared tojustify the virtual suppression of the toleration laws in the case ofthe Free Church. I was thus decidedly guilty of what old Dr. More callsa _prosopolepsia_, --_i. E. _ of the crime of judging men by their looks. At dinner, however, we gradually ate ourselves into conversation: wediffered, and disputed, and agreed, and then differed, disputed andagreed again. I found first, that my chance companions were really notvery high Tories; and then, that they were not Tories at all; and then, that the younger of the two was very much a Whig, and the more advancedin life, --strange as the fact might seem, --very considerably a_Presbyterian_ Whig; and finally, that this latter gentleman, whom I hadset down as an intolerant Highland proprietor, was a respected writer tothe signet, a Free Church elder in Edinburgh; and that the other, hisequally intolerant nephew, was an Edinburgh advocate, of vigoroustalent, much an enemy of all oppression, and a brother contributor of myown to one of the Quarterlies. Of all my surmisings regarding thestranger gentlemen, only two points held true, --they were bothgentlemen of the law, and both had Celtic blood in their veins. Theevening passed pleasantly; and I can now recommend from experience, tothe hapless traveller who gets thoroughly wet thirty miles from a changeof dress, that some of the best things he can resort to in thecircumstances are, a warm room, a warm glass, and agreeable companions. 

On the morrow I behooved to return to Isle Ornsay, to set out on thefollowing day, with my friend the minister, for Rum, where he purposedpreaching on the Sabbath. To have lost a day would have been to lose theopportunity of exploring the island, perhaps forever; and, to make allsure, I had taken a seat in the mail gig, from the postman who drivesit, ere going to bed, on the morning of my arrival; and now, when itdrove up, I went to take my place in it. The postmaster of the village, a lean, hungry-looking man, interfered to prevent me. I had secured myseat, I said, two days previous. Ah, but I had not secured it from him. "I know nothing of you, " I replied; "but I secured it from one whodeemed himself authorized to receive the fare; was he so?" "Yes. " "Couldyou have received it?" "No. " "Show me a copy of your regulations. " "Ihave no copy of regulations; but I have given the place in the gig toanother. " "Just so; and what say you, postman?" "That you took the placefrom me, and that _he_ has no right to give a place to any one: I carrythe Portree letters to him, but he has nothing to do with thepassengers. " A person present, the proprietor or stabler of the horse, Ibelieve, also interfered on the same side; but what Carlyle terms the"gigmanity" of the postmaster was all at stake, --his whole influence inthe mail-gig of Portree; and so he argued, and threatened withal, and, what was the more serious part of the business, the person he had giventhe seat to had taken possession of the gig; and so we had to compoundthe matter by carrying a passenger additional. The incident is scarceworth relating; but the postmaster was so vehement and terrible, sodefiant of us all, --post, stabler, and simple passenger, --and so justlyimpressed with the importance of being postmaster of Portree, that, as Iam in the way of describing rare specimens at any rate, I must refer tohim among the rest, as if he had been one of the minor carnivoræ of aSkye deposit, --a cuttlefish, that preyed on the weaker molluscs, or ahungry polypus, terrible among the animalculæ. 

We drove heavily, and had to dismount and walk afoot over every steeperacclivity; but I carried my hammer, and only grieved that in some one ortwo localities the road should have been so level. I regretted it inespecial on the southern and eastern side of Loch Sligachan, where Icould see from my seat, as we drove past, the dark blue rocks in thewater-courses on each side the road, studded over with thatcharacteristic shell of the Lias, the _Gryphæa incurva_, and that thedry-stone fences in the moor above exhibit fossils that might figure ina museum. But we rattled by. At Broadford, twenty-five miles fromPortree, and nine miles from Isle Ornsay, I partook of a hospitable mealin the house of an acquaintance; and in little more than two hours afterwas with my friend the minister at Isle Ornsay. The night worepleasantly by. Mrs. Swanson, a niece of the late Dr. Smith ofCampbelton, so well known for his Celtic researches and his exquisitetranslations of ancient Celtic poetry, I found deeply versed in thelegendary lore of the Highlands. The minister showed me a fine specimenof Pterichthys which I had disinterred for him, out of my firstdiscovered fossiliferous deposit of the Old Red Sandstone, exactlythirteen years before, and full seven years ere I had introduced thecreature to the notice of Agassiz. And the minister's daughter, alittle chubby girl of three summers, taking part in the generalentertainment, strove to make her Gaelic sound as like English as shecould, in my especial behalf. I remembered, as I listened to theunintelligible prattle of the little thing, unprovided with a word ofEnglish, that just eighteen years before, her father had had no Gaelic;and wondered what he would have thought, could he have been told, whenhe first sat down to study it, the story of his island charge in Eigg, and his Free Church yacht the Betsey. Nineteen years before, we had beenengaged in beating over the Eathie Lias together, collecting Belemnites, Ammonites, and fossil wood, and striving in friendly emulation the oneto surpass the other in the variety and excellence of our specimens. Ourleisure hours were snatched, at the time, from college studies by theone, from the mallet by the other: there were few of them that we didnot spend together, and that we were not mutually the better for sospending. I at least, owe much to these hours, --among other things, views of theologic truth, that determined the side I have taken in ourecclesiastical controversy. Our courses at an after period lay diverse;the young minister had greatly more important business to pursue thanany which the geologic field furnishes; and so our amicable rivalryceased early. In the words in which an English poet addresses hisbrother, --the clergyman who sat for the picture in the "DesertedVillage, "--my friend "entered on a sacred office, where the harvest isgreat and the laborers are few, and left to me a field in which thelaborers are many, and the harvest scarce worth carrying away. "

Next day at noon we weighed anchor, and stood out for Rum, a run ofabout twenty-five miles. A kind friend had, we found, sent aboard in ourbehalf two pieces of rare antiquity, --rare anywhere, but especiallyrare in the lockers of the Betsey, --in the agreeable form of two bottlesof semi-fossil Madeira, --Madeira that had actually existed in the grapeexactly half a century before, at the time when Robespierre wasstartling Paris from its propriety, by mutilating at the neck the bustsof other people, and multiplying casts and medals of his own; and wefound it, explored in moderation, no bad study for geologists, especially in coarse weather, when they had got wet and somewhatfatigued. It was like Landlord Boniface's ale, mild as milk, hadexchanged its distinctive flavor as Madeira for a better one, and filledthe cabin with fragrance every time the cork was drawn. Old observantHomer must have smelt some such liquor somewhere, or he could never havedescribed so well the still more ancient and venerable wine with whichwily Ulysses beguiled one-eyed Polypheme:--

 "Unmingled wine, Mellifluous, undecaying, and divine, Which now, some ages from his race concealed, The hoary sire in gratitude revealed.... Scarce twenty measures from the living stream To cool one cup sufficed: the goblet crowned, Breathed aromatic fragrances around. "

Winds were light and variable. As we reached the middle of the soundopposite Armadale, there fell a dead calm; and the Betsey, more activelyidle than the ship manned by the Ancient Mariner, dropped sternwardsalong the tide, to the dull music of the flapping sail. The ministerspent the day in the cabin, engaged with his discourse for the morrow;and I, that he might suffer as little from interruption as possible, _mis_-spent it upon the deck. I tried fishing with the yacht's set oflines, but there were no fish to bite, --got into the boat, but therewere no neighboring islands to visit, --and sent half a dozenpistol-bullets after a shoal of porpoises, which, coming from the FreeChurch yacht, must have astonished the fat sleek fellows prettyconsiderably, but did them, I am afraid, no serious damage. As theevening began to close gloomy and gray, a tumbling swell came heaving inright ahead from the west; and a bank of cloud, which had been graduallyrising higher and darker over the horizon in the same direction, firstchanged its abrupt edge atop for a diffused and broken line, and thenspread itself over the central heavens. The calm was evidently not to bea calm long; and the minister issued orders that the gaff-topsail shouldbe taken down, and the storm-jib bent; and that we should lower ourtopmast, and have all tight and ready for a smart gale ahead. At halfpast ten, however, the Betsey was still pitching to the swell, with nota breath of wind to act on the diminished canvas, and with the solitarycircumstance in her favor, that the tide ran no longer against her, asbefore. The cabin was full of all manner of creakings; the close lampswung to and fro over the head of my friend; and a refractoryConcordance, after having twice travelled from him along the entirelength of the table, flung itself pettishly upon the floor. I got intomy snug bed about eleven; and at twelve, the minister, after poringsufficiently over his notes, and drawing the final score, turned intohis. In a brief hour after, on came the gale, in a style worthy of itsprevious hours of preparation; and my friend, --his Saturday's work inhis ministerial capacity well over when he had completed his twodiscourses, --had to begin the Sabbath morning early as the morningitself began, by taking his stand at the helm, in his capacity ofskipper of the Betsey. With the prospect of the services of the Sabbathbefore him, and after working all Saturday to boot, it was rather hardto set him down to a midnight spell at the helm, but he could not bewanted at such a time, as we had no other such helmsman aboard. Thegale, thickened with rain, came down, shrieking like a maniac, from offthe peaked hills of Rum, striking away the tops of the long ridgybillows that had risen in the calm to indicate its approach, and thencarrying them in sheets of spray aslant the furrowed surface, likesnow-drift hurried across a frozen field. But the Betsey, with herstorm-jib set, and her mainsail reefed to the cross, kept her weatherbow bravely to the blast, and gained on it with every tack. She had beenthe pleasure yacht, in her day, of a man of fortune, who had used, inrunning south with her at times as far as Lisbon, to encounter, on notworse terms than the stateliest of her neighbors in the voyage, theswell of the Bay of Biscay; and she still kept true to her oldcharacter, with but this drawback, that she had now got somewhat crazyin her fastenings, and made rather more water in a heavy sea than herone little pump could conveniently keep under. As the fitful gust struckher headlong, as if it had been some invisible missile hurled at us fromoff the hill-tops, she stooped her head lower and lower, like oldstately Hardyknute under the blow of the "King of Norse, " till at lengththe lee chain-plate rustled sharp through the foam; but, like a staunchFree Churchwoman, the lowlier she bent, the more steadfastly did shehold her head to the storm. The strength of the opposition served but tospeed her on all the more surely to the desired haven. At five o'clockin the morning we cast anchor in Loch Scresort, --the only harbor of Rumin which a vessel can moor, --within two hundred yards of the shore, having, with the exception of the minister, gained no loss in the gale. He, luckless man, had parted from his excellent _sou-wester_; a suddengust had seized it by the flap, and hurried it away far to the lee. Hehad yielded it to the winds, as he had done the temporalities, but muchmore unwillingly, and less as a free agent. Should any conscientiousmariner pick up any where in the Atlantic a serviceable ochre-colored_sou-wester_, not at all the worse for the wear, I give him to wit thathe holds Free Church property, and that he is heartily welcome to holdit, leaving it to himself to consider whether a benefaction to its fullvalue, deducting salvage, is not owing, in honor, to the SustenationFund. 

It was ten o'clock ere the more fatigued aboard could muster resolutionenough to quit their beds a second time; and then it behooved theminister to prepare for his Sabbath labors ashore. The gale still blewin fierce gusts from the hills, and the rain pattered like small shot onthe deck. Loch Scresort, by no means one of our finer island lochs, viewed under any circumstances, looked particularly dismal this morning. It forms the opening of a dreary moorland valley, bounded on one of itssides, to the mouth of the loch, by a homely ridge of Old Red Sandstone, and on the other by a line of dark augitic hills, that attain, at thedistance of about a mile from the sea, an elevation of two thousandfeet. Along the slopes of the sandstone ridge I could discern, throughthe haze, numerous green patches, that had once supported a densepopulation, long since "cleared off" to the backwoods of America, butnot one inhabited dwelling; while along a black moory acclivity underthe hills on the other side I could see several groups of turf cottages, with here and there a minute speck of raw-looking corn beside them, that, judging from its color, seemed to have but a slight chance ofripening. The hill-tops were lost in cloud and storm; and ever and anon, as a heavier shower came sweeping down on the wind, the interveninghollows closed up their gloomy vistas, and all was fog and rime to thewater's edge. Bad as the morning was, however, we could see the peoplewending their way, in threes and fours, through the dark moor, to theplace of worship, --a black turf hovel, like the meeting-house in Eigg. The appearance of the Betsey in the loch had been the gathering signal;and the Free Church islanders, --three-fourths of the entirepopulation--had all come out to meet their minister. 

On going ashore, we found the place nearly filled. My friend preachedtwo long energetic discourses, and then returned to the yacht, "a wornand weary man. " The studies of the previous day, and the fatigues of theprevious night, added to his pulpit duties, had so fairly prostrated hisstrength, that the sternest teetotaller in the kingdom would scarce haveforbidden him a glass of our fifty-year-old Madeira. But even thefifty-year-old Madeira proved no specific in the case. He was sufferingunder excruciating headache, and had to stretch himself in his bed, witheyes shut but sleepless, waiting till the fit should pass, --every pulsethat beat in his temples a throb of pain. 

CHAPTER VIII. 

 Geology of Rum--Its curious Character illustrated--Rum famous for Bloodstones--Red Sandstones--"Scratchings" in the Rocks--A Geological Inscription without a Key--The Lizard--Vitality broken into two--Illustrations--Speculation--Scuir More--Ascent of the Scuir--The Bloodstones--An Illustrative Set of the Gem--M'Culloch's Pebble--A Chemical Problem--The solitary Shepherd's House--Sheep _versus_ Men--The Depopulation of Rum--A Haul of Trout--Rum Mode of catching Trout--At Anchor in the Bay of Glenelg. 

The geology of the island of Rum is simple, but curious. Let the readertake, if he can, from twelve to fifteen trap-hills, varying from onethousand to two thousand three hundred feet in height; let him pack themclosely and squarely together, like rum-bottles in a case-basket; lethim surround them with a frame of Old Red Sandstone, measuring rathermore than seven miles on the side, in the way the basket surrounds thebottles; then let him set them down in the sea a dozen miles off theland, --and he shall have produced a second island of Rum, similar instructure to the existing one. In the actual island, however, there is adefect in the inclosing basket of sandstone: the basket, complete onthree of its sides, wants the fourth: and the side opposite to the gapwhich the fourth should have occupied is thicker than the two othersides put together. Where I now write there is an old dark-coloredpicture on the wall before me. I take off one of the four bars of whichthe frame is composed, --the end-bar, --and stick it on to the end-baropposite, and then the picture is fully framed on two of its sides, anddoubly framed on a third, but the fourth side lacks framing altogether. And such is the geology of the island of Rum. We find the one loch ofthe island, --that in which the Betsey lies at anchor, --and the longwithdrawing valley, of which the loch is merely a prolongation, occurring in the double sandstone bar: it seems to mark--to return to myillustration--the line in which the superadded piece of frame has beenstuck on to the frame proper. The origin of the island is illustrated byits structure: it has left its story legibly written, and we have but torun our eye over the characters and read. An extended sea-bottom, composed of Old Red Sandstone, already tilted up by previousconvulsions, so that the strata presented their edges, tier beyond tier, like roofing slate laid aslant on a floor, became a centre of Plutonicactivity. The molten trap broke through at various times, and presentingvarious appearances, but in nearly the same centre; here existing as anaugitic rock, there as a syenite, yonder as a basalt or amygdaloid. Atone place it uptilted the sandstone; at another it overflowed it; thedark central masses raised their heads above the surface, higher andhigher with every earthquake throe from beneath; till at length thegigantic Ben More attained to its present altitude of two thousand threehundred feet over the sea-level, and the sandstone, borne up frombeneath like floating sea-wrack on the back of a porpoise, reached inlong outside bands its elevation of from six to eight hundred. And suchis the piece of history, composed in silent but expressive language, andinscribed in the old geological character, on the rocks of Rum. 

The wind lowered and the rain ceased during the night, and the morningof Monday was clear, bracing, and breezy. The island of Rum is chieflyfamous among mineralogists for its heliotropes or bloodstones; and weproposed devoting the greater part of the day to an examination of thehill of Scuir More, in which they occur, and which lies on the oppositeside of the island, about eight miles from the mooring ground of theBetsey. Ere setting out, however, I found time enough, by rising sometwo or three hours before breakfast, to explore the Red Sandstones onthe southern side of the loch. They lie in this bar of the frame, --toreturn once more to my old illustration, --as if it had been cut out of apiece of cross-grained deal, in which the annular bands, instead ofranging lengthwise, ran diagonally from side to side; stratum leans overstratum, dipping towards the west at an angle of about thirty degrees;and as in a continuous line of more than seven miles there seem nobreaks or repetitions in the strata, the thickness of the deposit mustbe enormous, --not less, I should suppose, than from six to eightthousand feet. Like the Lower Old Red Sandstones of Cromarty and Moray, the red arenaceous strata occur in thick beds, separated from each otherby bands of a grayish-colored stratified clay, on the planes of which Icould trace with great distinctness ripple markings; but in vain did Iexplore their numerous folds for the plates, scales, and fucoidimpressions which abound in the gray argillaceous beds of the shores ofthe Moray and Cromarty Friths. It would, however, be rash to pronouncethem non-fossiliferous, after the hasty search of a singlemorning, --unpardonably so in one who had spent very many mornings inputting to the question the gray stratified beds of Ross and Cromarty, ere he succeeded in extorting from them the secret of their organicriches. 

We set out about half-past ten for Scuir More, through the Red Sandstonevalley in which Loch Scresort terminates, with one of Mr. Swanson'speople, a young active lad of twenty, for our guide. In passing upwardsfor nearly a mile along the stream that falls into the upper part of theloch, and lays bare the strata, we saw no change in the character ofthe sandstone. Red arenaceous beds of great thickness alternate withgrayish-colored bands, composed of a ripple-marked micaceous slate and astratified clay. For a depth of full three thousand feet, and I know nothow much more, --for I lacked time to trace it further, --the depositpresents no other variety: the thick red bed of at least a hundred yardssucceeds the thin gray band of from three to six feet, and is succeededby a similar gray band in turn. The ripple-marks I found as sharplyrelieved in some of the folds as if the wavy undulations to which theyowed their origin had passed over them within the hour. Thecomparatively small size of their alternating ridges and furrows giveevidence that the waters beneath which they had formed had been of novery profound depth. In the upper part of the valley, which is bare, trackless, and solitary, with a high monotonous sandstone ridge boundingit on the one side, and a line of gloomy trap-hills rising over it onthe other, the edges of the strata, where they protrude through themingled heath and moss, exhibit the mysterious scratchings andpolishings now so generally connected with the glacial theory ofAgassiz. The scratchings run in nearly the line of the valley, whichexhibits no trace of moraines; and they seem to have been producedrather by the operation of those extensively developed causes, whatevertheir nature, that have at once left their mark on the sides and summitsof some of our highest hills, and the rocks and boulders of some of ourmost extended plains, than by the agency of forces limited to thelocality. They testify, Agassiz would perhaps say, not regarding theexistence of some local glacier that descended from the higher groundsinto the valley, but respecting the existence of the great polarglacier. I felt, however, in this bleak and solitary hollow, with thegrooved and polished platforms at my feet, stretching away amid theheath, like flat tombstones in a graveyard, that I had arrived at onegeologic inscription to which I still wanted the key. The vesicularstructure of the traps on the one hand, identical with that of so manyof our modern lavas, --the ripple-markings of the arenaceous beds on theother, indistinguishable from those of the sea-banks on our coasts, --theupturned strata and the overlying trap, --told all their several storiesof fire, or wave, or terrible convulsion, and told them simply andclearly; but here was a story not clearly told. It summoned up doubtful, ever-shifting visions, --now of a vast ice continent, abutting on thisfar isle of the Hebrides from the Pole, and trampling heavily overit, --now of the wild rush of a turbid, mountain-high flood breaking infrom the west, and hurling athwart the torn surface, rocks, and stones, and clay, --now of a dreary ocean rising high along the hills, andbearing onward with its winds and currents, huge icebergs, that nowbrushed the mountain-sides, and now grated along the bottom of thesubmerged valleys. The inscription on the polished surfaces, with itscareless mixture of groove and scratch, is an inscription of veryvarious readings. 

We passed along a transverse hollow, and then began to ascend ahill-side, from the ridge of which the water sheds to the opposite shoreof the island, and on which we catch our first glimpse of Scuir More, standing up over the sea, like a pyramid shorn of its top. A brownlizard, nearly five inches in length, startled by our approach, ranhurriedly across the path; and our guide, possessed by the generalHighland belief that the creature is poisonous, and injures cattle, struck at it with a switch, and cut it in two immediately behind thehinder legs. The upper half, containing all that anatomists regard asthe vitals, heart, brain, and viscera, all the main nerves, and all thelarger arteries, lay stunned by the blow, as if dead; nor did itmanifest any signs of vitality so long as we remained beside it; whereasthe lower half, as if the whole life of the animal had retired into_it_, continued dancing upon the moss for a full minute after, like ayoung eel scooped out of some stream, and thrown upon the bank; and thenlay wriggling and palpitating for about half a minute more. There arefew things more inexplicable in the province of the naturalist than thephenomenon of what may be termed divided life, --vitality broken intotwo, and yet continuing to exist as vitality in both the disseveredpieces. We see in the nobler animals mere glimpses of thephenomenon, --mere indications of it, doubtfully apparent for at most afew minutes. The blood drawn from the human arm by the lancet continuesto live in the cup until it has cooled and begun to coagulate; and whenhead and body have parted company under the guillotine, both exhibit fora brief space such unequivocal signs of life, that the question arose inFrance during the horrors of the Revolution, whether there might not besome glimmering of consciousness attendant at the same time on thefearfully opening and shutting eyes and mouth of the one, and thebeating heart and jerking neck of the other. The lower we descend in thescale of being, the more striking the instances which we receive of thisdivisibility of the vital principle. I have seen the two halves of theheart of a ray pulsating for a full quarter of an hour after they hadbeen separated from the body and from each other. The blood circulatesin the hind leg of a frog for many minutes after the removal of theheart, which meanwhile keeps up an independent motion of its own. Vitality can be so divided in the earthworm, that, as demonstrated bythe experiments of Spalanzani, each of the severed parts carries lifeenough away to set it up as an independent animal; while the polypus, acreature of still more imperfect organization, and with the vivaciousprinciple more equally diffused over it, may be multiplied by its piecesnearly as readily as a gooseberry bush by its slips. It was sufficientlycurious, however, to see, in the case of this brown lizard, the leastvital half of the creature so much more vivacious, apparently, than thehalf which contained the heart and brain. It is not improbable, however, that the presence of these organs had only the effect of rendering theupper portion which contained them more capable of being thrown into astate of insensibility. A blow dealt one of the vertebrata on the headat once renders it insensible. It is after this mode the fisherman killsthe salmon captured in his wear, and a single blow, when well directed, is always sufficient; but no single blow has the same effect on theearthworm; and here it was vitality in the inferior portion of thereptile, --the earthworm portion of it, if I may so speak, --that refusedto participate in the state of syncope into which the vitality of thesuperior portion had been thrown. The nice and delicate vitality of thebrain seems to impart to the whole system in connection with it anaptitude for dying suddenly, --a susceptibility of instant death, whichwould be wanting without it. The heart of the rabbit continues to beatregularly long after the brain has been removed by careful excision, ifrespiration be artificially kept up; but if, instead of amputating thehead, the brain be crushed in its place by a sudden blow of a hammer, the heart ceases its motion at once. And such seemed to be the principleillustrated here. But why the agonized dancing on the sward of theinferior part of the reptile?--why its after painful writhing andwriggling? The young eel scooped from the stream, whose motions itresembled, is impressed by terror, and can feel pain; was _it_ alsoimpressed by terror, or susceptible of suffering? We see in the case ofboth exactly the same signs, --the dancing, the writhing, the wriggling;but are we to interpret them after the same manner? In the smallred-headed earthworm divided by Spalanzani, that in three months gotupper extremities to its lower part, and lower extremities, in as manyweeks, to its upper part, the dividing blow must have dealt duplicatefeelings, --pain and terror to the portion below, and pain and terror tothe portion above, --so far, at least, as a creature so low in the scalewas susceptible of these feelings; but are we to hold that the leaping, wriggling tail of the reptile possessed in any degree a similarsusceptibility? _I_ can propound the riddle, but who shall resolve it?It may be added, that this brown lizard was the only recent saurian Ichanced to see in the Hebrides, and that, though large for its kind, itswhole bulk did not nearly equal that of a single vertebral joint of thefossil saurians of Eigg. The reptile, since his deposition from thefirst place in the scale of creation, has sunk sadly in those parts: theex-monarch has become a low plebeian. 

We came down upon the coast through a swampy valley, terminating in theinterior in a frowning wall of basalt, and bounded on the south, whereit opens to the sea, by the Scuir More. The Scuir is a precipitousmountain, that rises from twelve to fifteen hundred feet direct over thebeach. M'Culloch describes it as inaccessible, and states that it isonly among the debris at its base that its heliotropes can be procured;but the distinguished mineralogist must have had considerably less skillin climbing rocks than in describing them, as, indeed, some of hisdescriptions, though generally very admirable, abundantly testify. I aminclined to infer from his book, after having passed over much of theground which he describes, that he must have been a man of the type sowell hit off by Burns in his portrait of Captain Grose, --round, rosy, short-legged, quick of eye but slow of foot, quite as indifferent aclimber as Bailie Nicol Jarvie, and disposed at times, like the elderlygentleman drawn by Crabbe, to prefer the view at the hill-foot to theprospect from its summit. I found little difficulty in scaling the sidesof Scuir More for a thousand feet upwards, --in one part by a routerarely attempted before, --and in ensconcing myself among thebloodstones. They occur in the amygdaloidal trap of which the upper partof the hill is mainly composed, in great numbers, and occasionally inbulky masses; but it is rare to find other than small specimens thatwould be recognized as of value by the lapidary. The inclosing rock musthave been as thickly vesicular in its original state as the scoria of aglass-house; and all the vesicles, large and small, like the retorts andreceivers of a laboratory, have been vessels in which some curiouschemical process has been carried on. Many of them we find filled with awhite semi-translucent or opaque chalcedony; many more with a pure greenearth, which, where exposed to the bleaching influences of the weather, exhibits a fine verdigris hue, but which in the fresh fracture isgenerally of an olive green, or of a brownish or reddish color. I havenever yet seen a rock in which this earth was so abundant as in theamygdaloid of Scuir More. For yards together in some places we see itprojecting from the surface in round globules, that very much resemblegreen peas, and that occur as thickly in the inclosing mass as pebblesin an Old Red Sandstone conglomerate. The heliotrope has formed among itin centres, to which the chalcedony seems to have been drawn, as if bymolecular attraction. We find a mass, varying from the size of a walnutto that of a man's head, occupying some larger vesicle or crevice of theamygdaloid, and all the smaller vesicles around it, for an inch or two, filled with what we may venture to term satellite heliotropes, some ofthem as minute as grains of wild mustard, and all of them more or lessearthy, generally in proportion to their distance from the first formedheliotrope in the middle. No one can see them in their place in therock, with the abundant green earth all around, and the chalcedony, inits uncolored state, filling up so many of the larger cavities, withoutacquiescing in the conclusion respecting the origin of the gem firstsuggested by Werner, and afterwards adopted and illustrated byM'Culloch. The heliotrope is merely a chalcedony, stained in the formingwith an infusion of green earth, as the colored waters in theapothecary's window are stained by the infusions, vegetable and mineral, from which they derive their ornamental character. The red mottlingswhich so heighten the beauty of the stone occur in comparatively few ofthe specimens of Scuir More. They are minute jasperous formations, independent of the inclosing mass; and, from their resemblance tostreaks and spots of blood, suggest the name by which the heliotrope ispopularly known. I succeeded in making up, among the crags, a set ofspecimens curiously illustrative of the origin of the gem. One specimenconsists of white, uncolored chalcedony; a second, of a richverdigris-hued green earth; a third, of chalcedony barely tinged withgreen; a fourth, of chalcedony tinged just a shade more deeply; a fifth, tinged more deeply still; a sixth, of a deep green on one side, andscarce at all colored on the other; and a seventh, dark and richlytoned, --a true bloodstone, --thickly streaked and mottled with redjasper. In the chemical process that rendered the Scuir More a mountainof gems there were two deteriorating circumstances, which operated tothe disadvantage of its larger heliotropes: the green earth, as ifinsufficiently stirred in the mixing, has gathered, in many of them, into minute soft globules, like air-bubbles in glass, that render themvalueless for the purposes of the lapidary, by filling them all overwith little cavities; and in not a few of the others, an infiltration oflime, that refused to incorporate with the chalcedonic mass, exists inthin glassy films and veins, that, from their comparative softness, havea nearly similar effect with the impalpable green earth in roughing thesurface under the burnisher. 

We find figured by M'Culloch, in his "Western Islands, " the internalcavity of a pebble of Scuir More, which he picked up on the beach below, and which had been formed evidently within one of the larger vesicles ofthe amygdaloid. He describes it as curiously illustrative of a variouschemistry; the outer crust is composed of a pale-zoned agate, inclosinga cavity, from the upper side of which there depends a group ofchalcedonic stalactites, some of them, as in ancient spar caves, reaching to the floor; and bearing on its under side a large crystal ofcarbonate of lime, that the longer stalactites pass through. In thevesicle in which this hollow pebble was formed three consecutiveprocesses must have gone on. First, a process of infiltration coated theinterior all around with layer after layer, now of one mineralsubstance, now of another, as a plasterer coats over the sides andceiling of a room with successive layers of lime, putty, and stucco; andhad this process gone on, the whole cell would have been filled with apale-zoned agate. But it ceased, and a new process began. A chalcedonicinfiltration gradually entered from above; and, instead of coating overthe walls, roof, and floor, it hardened into a group of spear-likestalactites, that lengthened by slow degrees, till some of them hadtraversed the entire cavity from top to bottom. And then this secondprocess ceased like the first, and a third commenced. An infiltrationof lime took place; and the minute calcareous molecules, under theinfluence of the law of crystallization, built themselves up on thefloor into a large smooth-sided rhomb, resembling a closed sarcophagusresting in the middle of some Egyptian cemetery. And then, the limestonecrystal completed, there ensued no after change. As shown by some otherspecimens, however, there was a yet farther process: a pure quartzosedeposition took place, that coated not a few of the calcareous rhombswith sprigs of rock-crystal. I found in the Scuir More several cellularagates in which similar processes had gone on, --none of them quite sofine, however, as the one figured by M'Culloch; but there seemed no lackof evidence regarding the strange and multifarious chemistry that hadbeen carried on in the vesicular cavities of this mountain, as in theretorts of some vast laboratory. Here was a vesicle filled with greenearth, --there a vesicle filled with calcareous spar, --yonder a vesiclecrusted round on a thin chalcedonic shell with rock-crystal, --in onecavity an agate had been elaborated, in another a heliotrope, in a thirda milk-white chalcedony, in a fourth a jasper. On what principle, andunder what direction, have results so various taken place in vesicles ofthe same rock, that in many instances occur scarce half an inch apart?Why, for instance, should that vesicle have elaborated only green earth, and the vesicle separated from it by a partition barely a line inthickness, have elaborated only chalcedony? Why should this chambercontain only a quartzose compound of oxygen and silica, and that secondchamber beside it contain only a calcareous compound of lime andcarbonic acid? What law directed infiltrations so diverse to seek outfor themselves vesicles in such close neighborhood, and to keep, in somany instances, each to his own vesicle? I can but state theproblem, --not solve it. The groups of heliotropes clustered each aroundits bulky centrical mass seem to show that the principle of molecularattraction may be operative in very dense mediæ, --in a hard amygdaloidaltrap even; and it seems not improbable, that to this law, which drawsatom to its kindred atom, as clansmen of old used to speed at themustering signal to their gathering place, the various chemistry of thevesicles may owe its variety. 

I shall attempt stating the chemical problem furnished by the vesicleshere in a mechanical form. Let us suppose that every vesicle was achamber furnished with a door, and that beside every door there watched, as in the draught doors of our coal-pits, some one to open and shut it, as circumstances might require. Let us suppose further, that for acertain time an infusion of green earth pervaded the surrounding mass, and percolated through it, and that every door was opened to receive aportion of the infusion. We find that no vesicle wants its coating ofthis earthy mineral. The coating received, however, one-half the doorsshut, while the other half remained agap, and filled with green earthentirely. Next followed a series of alternate infusions of chalcedony, jasper, and quartz; many doors opened and received some two or threecoatings, that form around the vesicles skull-like shells of agate, andthen shut; a few remained open, and became as entirely occupied withagate as many of the previous ones had become filled with green earth. Then an ample infusion of chalcedony pervaded the mass. Numerous doorsagain opened; some took in a portion of the chalcedony, and then shut;some remained open, and became filled with it; and many more that hadbeen previously filled by the green earth opened their doors again, andthe chalcedony pervading the green porous mass, converted it intoheliotrope. Then an infusion of lime took place. Doors opened, many ofwhich had been hitherto shut, save for a short time, when the greenearth infusion obtained, and became filled with lime; other doorsopened for a brief space, and received lime enough to form a fewcrystals. Last of all, there was a pure quartzose infusion, and doorsopened, some for a longer time, some for a shorter, just as on previousoccasions. Now, by mechanical means of this character, --by such anarrangement of successive infusions, and such a device of shutting andopening of doors, --the phenomena exhibited by the vesicles could beproduced. There is no difficulty in working the problem mechanically, ifwe be allowed to assume in our data successive infusions, well-fitteddoors, and watchful door-keepers; and if any one can work itchemically, --certainly without door-keepers, but with such doors andsuch infusions as he can show to have existed, --he shall have cleared upthe mystery of the Scuir More. I have given their various cargoes to allits many vesicles by mechanical means, at no expense of ingenuitywhatever. Are there any of my readers prepared to give it to them bymeans purely chemical?

There is a solitary house in the opening of the valley, over which theScuir More stands sentinel, --a house so solitary, that the entirebreadth of the island intervenes between it and the nearest humandwelling. It is inhabited by a shepherd and his wife, --the solerepresentatives in the valley of a numerous population, long sinceexpatriated to make way for a few flocks of sheep, but whose ranges oflittle fields may still be seen green amid the heath on both sides, fornearly a mile upwards from the opening. After descending along theprecipices of the Scuir, we struck across the valley, and, on scalingthe opposite slope sat down on the summit to rest us, about a hundredyards over the house of the shepherd. He had seen us from below, whenengaged among the bloodstones, and had seen, withal, that we were notcoming his way; and, "on hospitable thoughts intent, " he climbed towhere we sat, accompanied by his wife, she bearing a vast bowl of milk, and he a basket of bread and cheese. And we found the refreshment mostseasonable, after our long hours of toil, and with a rough journey stillbefore us. It is an excellent circumstance, that hospitality grows bestwhere it is most needed. In the thick of men it dwindles and disappears, like fruits in the thick of a wood; but where man is planted sparsely, it blossoms and matures, like apples on a standard or espalier. Itflourishes where the inn and the lodging-house cannot exist, and diesout where they thrive and multiply. 

We reached the cross valley in the interior of the island about half anhour before sunset. The evening was clear, calm, golden-tinted; evenwild heaths and rude rocks had assumed a flush of transient beauty; andthe emerald-green patches on the hill-sides, barred by the ploughlengthwise, diagonally, and transverse, had borrowed an aspect of softand velvety richness, from the mellowed light and the broadeningshadows. All was solitary. We could see among the deserted fields thegrass-grown foundations of cottages razed to the ground; but the valley, more desolate than that which we had left, had not even its singleinhabited dwelling: it seemed as if man had done with it forever. Theisland, eighteen years before, had been divested of its inhabitants, amounting at the time to rather more than four hundred souls, to makeway for one sheep-farmer and eight thousand sheep. All the aborigines ofRum crossed the Atlantic; and at the close of 1828, the entirepopulation consisted of but the sheep-farmer, and a few shepherds, hisservants; the island of Rum reckoned up scarce a single family at thisperiod for every five square miles of area which it contained. Butdepopulation on so extreme a scale was found inconvenient; the place hadbeen rendered too thoroughly a desert for the comfort of the occupant;and on the occasion of a clearing which took place shortly after inSkye, he accommodated some ten or twelve of the ejected families withsites for cottages, and pasturage for a few cows, on the bit of morassbeside Loch Scresort, on which I had seen their humble dwellings. Butthe whole of the once-peopled interior remains a wilderness, withoutinhabitant, --all the more lonely in its aspect from the circumstancethat the solitary valleys, with their plough-furrowed patches, and theirruined heaps of stone, open upon shores every whit as solitary asthemselves, and that the wide untrodden sea stretches drearily around. The armies of the insect world were sporting in the light this eveningby millions; a brown stream that runs through the valley yielded anincessant popling sound, from the myriads of fish that were ceaselesslyleaping in the pools, beguiled by the quick glancing wings of green andgold that fluttered over them; along a distant hill-side there ran whatseemed the ruins of a gray-stone fence, erected, says tradition, in aremote age, to facilitate the hunting of the deer; there were fields onwhich the heath and moss of the surrounding moorlands were fastencroaching, that had borne many a successive harvest; and prostratecottages, that had been the scenes of christenings, and bridals, andblythe new-year's days;--all seemed to bespeak the place a fittinghabitation for man, in which not only the necessaries, but also a few ofthe luxuries of life, might be procured; but in the entire prospect nota man nor a man's dwelling could the eye command. The landscape was onewithout figures. I do not much like extermination carried out sothoroughly and on system;--it seems bad policy; and I have not succeededin thinking any the better of it though assured by economists that thereare more than people enough in Scotland still. There are, I believe, more than enough in our workhouses, --more than enough on ourpauper-rolls, --more than enough huddled up, disreputable, useless, andunhappy, in the miasmatic alleys and typhoid courts of our large towns;but I have yet to learn how arguments for local depopulation are to bedrawn from facts such as these. A brave and hardy people, favorablyplaced for the development of all that is excellent in human nature, form the glory and strength of a country;--a people sunk into an abyssof degradation and misery, and in which it is the whole tendency ofexternal circumstances to sink them yet deeper, constitute its weaknessand its shame; and I cannot quite see on what principle the ominousincrease which is taking place among us in the worse class, is to formour solace or apology for the wholesale expatriation of the better. Itdid not seem as if the depopulation of Rum had tended much to any one'sadvantage. The single sheep-farmer who had occupied the holdings of somany had been unfortunate in his speculations, and had left the island:the proprietor, his landlord, seemed to have been as little fortunate asthe tenant, for the island itself was in the market; and a report wentcurrent at the time, that it was on the eve of being purchased by somewealthy Englishman, who purposed converting it into a deer-forest. Howstrange a cycle! Uninhabited originally save by wild animals, it becameat an early period a home of men, who, as the gray wall on the hill-sidetestified, derived, in part at least, their sustenance from the chase. They broke in from the waste the furrowed patches on the slopes of thevalleys, --they reared herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, --their numberincreased to nearly five hundred souls, --they enjoyed the averagehappiness of human creatures in the present imperfect state ofbeing, --they contributed their portion of hardy and vigorous manhood tothe armies of the country, --and a few of their more adventurous spirits, impatient of the narrow bounds which confined them, and a course oflife little varied by incident, emigrated to America. Then came thechange of system so general in the Highlands; and the island lost allits original inhabitants, on a wool and mutton speculation, --inhabitants, the descendants of men who had chased the deer on its hills five hundredyears before, and who, though they recognized some wild island lord astheir superior, and did him service, had regarded the place as indisputablytheir own. And now yet another change was on the eve of ensuing, and theisland was to return to its original state, as a home of wild animals, where a few hunters from the mainland might enjoy the chase for a month ortwo every twelvemonth, but which could form no permanent place of humanabode. Once more, a strange and surely most melancholy cycle!

There was light enough left, as we reached the upper part of LochScresort, to show us a shoal of small silver-coated trout, leaping byscores at the effluence of the little stream along which we had set outin the morning on our expedition. There was a net stretched across wherethe play was thickest; and we learned that the haul of the previous tidehad amounted to several hundreds. On reaching the Betsey, we found apail and basket laid against the companion-head, --the basket containingabout two dozen small trout, --the minister's unsolicited teind of themorning draught; the pail filled with razor-fish of great size. Thepeople of my friend are far from wealthy; there is scarce anycirculating medium in Rum; and the cottars in Eigg contrive barelyenough to earn at the harvest in the Lowlands money sufficient to clearwith their landlord at rent-day. Their contributions for ecclesiasticalpurposes make no great figure, therefore, in the lists of theSustentation Fund. But of what they have they give willingly and in akindly spirit; and if baskets of small trout, or pailfuls of spout-fish, went current in the Free Church, there would, I am certain, be a percentage of both the fish and the mollusc, derived from the Small Isles, in the half-yearly sustentation dividends. We found the supply ofboth, --especially as provisions were beginning to run short in thelockers of the Betsey, --quite deserving of our gratitude. The razor-fishhad been brought us by the worthy catechist of the island. He had goneto the ebb in our special behalf, and had spent a tide in laboriouslyfilling the pail with these "treasures hid in the sand;" thoroughlyaware, like the old exiled puritan, who eked out his meals in a time ofscarcity with the oysters of New England, that even the razor-fish, under this head, is included in the promises. There is a peculiarity inthe razor-fish of Rum that I have not marked in the razor-fish of oureastern coasts. The gills of the animal, instead of bearing the generalcolor of its other parts, like those of the oyster, are of a deep greencolor, resembling, when examined by the microscope, the fringe of agreen curtain. 

We were told by John Stewart, that the expatriated inhabitants of Rumused to catch trout by a simple device of ancient standing, whichpreceded the introduction of nets into the island, and which, it ispossible, may in other localities have not only preceded the use of thenet, but may have also suggested it: it had at least the appearance ofbeing a first beginning of invention in this direction. The islandersgathered large quantities of heath, and then tying it loosely intobundles, and stripping it of its softer leafage, they laid the bundlesacross the stream on a little mound held down by stones, with the topsof the heath turned upwards to the current. The water rose against themound for a foot or eighteen inches, and then murmured over and through, occasioning an expansion among the hard elastic sprays. Next a party ofthe islanders came down the stream, beating the banks and pools, andsending a still thickening shoal of trout before them, that, onreaching the miniature dam formed by the bundles, darted forward forshelter, as if to a hollow bank, and stuck among the slim hard branches, as they would in the meshes of a net. The stones were then hastilythrown off, --the bundles pitched ashore, --the better fish, to the amountnot unfrequently of several scores, secured, --and the young fry returnedto the stream, to take care of themselves, and grow bigger. We faredrichly this evening, after our hard day's labor, on tea and trout; andas the minister had to attend a meeting of the Presbytery of Skye on thefollowing Wednesday, we sailed next morning for Glenelg, whence hepurposed taking the steamer for Portree. Winds were light and baffling, and the currents, like capricious friends, neutralized at one time theassistance which they lent us at another. It was dark night ere we hadpassed Isle Ornsay, and morning broke as we cast anchor in the Bay ofGlenelg. At ten o'clock the steamer heaved-to in the bay to land a fewpassengers, and the minister went on board, leaving me in charge of theBetsey, to follow him, when the tide set in, through the Kyles of Skye. 

CHAPTER IX. 

 Kyles of Skye--A Gneiss District--Kyle Rhea--A Boiling Tide--A "Take" of Sillocks--The Betsey's "Paces"--In the Bay at Broadford--Rain--Island of Pabba--Description of the Island--Its Geological Structure--Astrea--Polypifers--_Gryphæa incurva_--Three groups of Fossils in the Lias of Skye--Abundance of the Petrifactions of Pabba--Scenery--Pabba a "piece of smooth, level England"--Fossil Shells of Pabba--Voyage resumed--Kyle Akin--Ruins of Castle Maoil--A "Thornback" Dinner--The Bunch of Deep Sea Tangle--The Caileach Stone--Kelp Furnaces--Escape of the Betsey from sinking. 

No sailing vessel attempts threading the Kyles of Skye from the south inthe face of an adverse tide. The currents of Kyle Rhea care little forthe wind-filled sail, and battle at times, on scarce unequal terms, withthe steam-propelled paddle. The Toward Castle this morning had such astruggle to force her way inwards, as may be seen maintained at the doorof some place of public meeting during the heat of some agitatingcontroversy, when seat and passage within can hold no more, and adisappointed crowd press eagerly for admission from without. Viewed fromthe anchoring place at Glenelg, the opening of the Kyle presents theappearance of the bottom of a landlocked bay;--the hills of Skye seemleaning against those of the mainland: and the tide-buffeted steamerlooked this morning as if boring her way into the earth, like adisinterred mole, only at a rate vastly slower. First, however, with aprogress resembling that of the minute-hand of a clock, the bowsdisappeared amid the heath, then the midships, then the quarter-deck andstern, and then, last of all, the red tip of the sun-brightenedunion-jack that streamed gaudily behind. I had at least two hoursbefore me ere the Betsey might attempt weighing anchor; and, that theymight leave some mark, I went and spent them ashore in the opening ofGlenelg, --a gneiss district, nearly identical in structure with thedistrict of Knock and Isle Ornsay. The upper part of the valley is bareand treeless, but not such its character where it opens to the sea; thehills are richly wooded; and cottages, and cornfields, with here andthere a reach of the lively little river, peep out from among the trees. A group of tall roofless buildings, with a strong wall in front, formthe central point in the landscape; these are the dismantled BereraBarracks, built, like the line of forts in the great CaledonianValley, --Fort George, Fort Augustus, and Fort William, --to overawe theHighlands at a time when the loyalty of the Highlander pointed to a kingbeyond the water; but all use for them has long gone by, and they nowlie in dreary ruin, --mere sheltering places for the toad and the bat. Ifound in a loose silt on the banks of the river, at some little distancebelow tide-mark, a bed of shells and coral, which might belong, I atfirst supposed, to some secondary formation, but which I ascertained, onexamination, to be a mere recent deposit, not so old by many centuriesas our last raised sea-beaches. There occurs in various localities onthese western coasts, especially on the shores of the island of Pabba, asprig coral, considerably larger in size than any I have elsewhere seenin Scotland; and it was from its great abundance in this bed of siltthat I was at first led to deem the deposit an ancient one. 

We weighed anchor about noon, and entered the opening of Kyle Rhea. Vessel after vessel, to the number of eight or ten in all, had beenarriving in the course of the morning, and dropping anchor, nearer theopening or farther away, each according to its sailing ability, to awaitthe turn of the tide; and we now found ourselves one of the componentsof a little fleet, with some five or six vessels sweeping up the Kylebefore us, and some three or four driving on behind. Never, exceptperhaps in a Highland river big in flood, have I seen such a tide. Itdanced and wheeled, and came boiling in huge masses from the bottom; andnow our bows heaved abruptly round in one direction, and now they jerkedas suddenly round in another; and, though there blew a moderate breezeat the time, the helm failed to keep the sails steadily full. Butwhether our sheets bellied out, or flapped right in the wind's eye, onwe swept in the tideway, like a cork caught during a thunder shower inone of the rapids of the High Street. At one point the Kyle is littlemore than a quarter of a mile in breadth; and here, in the powerful eddywhich ran along the shore, we saw a group of small fishing-boatspursuing a shoal of sillocks in a style that blent all the liveliness ofthe chase with the specific interest of the angle. The shoal, restlessas the tides among which it disported, now rose in the boilings of oneeddy, now beat the water into foam amid the stiller dimplings ofanother. The boats hurried from spot to spot wherever the quickglittering scales appeared. For a few seconds, rods would be cast thickand fast, as if employed in beating the water, and captured fish glancedbright to the sun; and then the take would cease, and the play riseelsewhere, and oars would flash out amain, as the little fleet againdashed into the heart of the shoal. As the Kyle widened, the force ofthe current diminished, and sail and helm again became things ofpositive importance. The wind blew a-head, steady though not strong; andthe Betsey, with companions in the voyage against which to measureherself, began to show her paces. First she passed one bulky vessel, then another: she lay closer to the wind than any of her fellows, glidedmore quickly through the water, turned in her stays like Lady Betty ina minuet; and, ere we had reached Kyle Akin, the fleet in the middle ofwhich we had started were toiling far behind us, all save one vessel, astately brig; and just as we were going to pass her too, she castanchor, to await the change of the tide, which runs from the west duringflood at Kyle Akin, as it runs from the east through Kyle Rhea. The windhad freshened; and as it was now within two hours of full sea, the forceof the current had somewhat abated; and so we kept on our course, tacking in scant room, however, and making but little way. A few vesselsattempted following us, but, after an inefficient tack or two, they fellback on the anchoring ground, leaving the Betsey to buffet the currentsalone. Tack followed tack sharp and quick in the narrows, with aniron-bound coast on either hand. We had frequent and delicate turning:now we lost fifty yards, now we gained a hundred. John Stewart held thehelm; and as none of us had ever sailed the way before, I had thevessel's chart spread out on the companion-head before me, and told himwhen to wear and when to hold on his way, --at what places we might runup almost to the rock edge, and at what places it was safest to give theland a good offing. Hurrah for the Free Church yacht Betsey! and hurrahonce more! We cleared the Kyle, leaving a whole fleet tide-bound behindus; and, stretching out at one long tack into the open sea, bore, at thenext, right into the bay at Broadford, where we cast anchor for thenight, within two hundred yards of the shore. Provisions were runningshort; and so I had to make a late dinner this evening on some of therazor-fish of Rum, topped by a dish of tea. But there is always rathermore appetite than food in the country;--such, at least, is the commonresult under the present mode of distribution: the hunger overlaps andoutstretches the provision; and there was comfort in the reflection, that with the razor-fish on which to fall back, it overlapped it but bya very little on this occasion in the cabin of the Betsey. Thesteam-boat passed southwards next morning, and I was joined by my friendthe minister a little before breakfast. 

The day was miserably bad: the rain continued pattering on the skylight, now lighter, now heavier, till within an hour of sunset, when it ceased, and a light breeze began to unroll the thick fogs from off thelandscape, volume after volume, like coverings from off amummy, --leaving exposed in the valley of the Lias a brown and cheerlessprospect of dark bogs and of debris-covered hills, streaked this eveningwith downward lines of foam. The seaward view is more pleasing. The deeprusset of the interior we find bordered for miles along the edge of thebay with a many-shaded fringe of green; and the smooth grassy island ofPabba lies in the midst, a polished gem, all the more advantageouslydisplayed from the roughness of the surrounding setting. We took boat, and explored the Lias in our immediate neighborhood till dusk. I hadspent several hours among its deposits when on my way to Portree, andseveral hours more when on my journey across the country to the eastcoast; but it may be well, for the sake of maintaining some continuityof description, to throw together my various observations on theformation, as if made at one time, and to connect them with myexploration of Pabba, which took place on the following morning. Therocks of Pabba belong to the upper part of the Lias; while the lowerpart may be found leaning to the south, towards the Red Sandstones ofthe Bay of Lucy. Taking what seems to be the natural order, I shallbegin with the base of the formation first. 

In the general indentation of the coast, in the opening of which theisland of Pabba lies somewhat like a long green steam-boat at anchor, there is included a smaller indentation, known as the Bay or Cove ofLucy. The central space in the cove is soft and gravelly; but on bothits sides it is flanked by low rocks, that stretch out into the sea inlong rectilinear lines, like the foundations of dry-stone fences. On thesouth side the rocks are red; on the north they are of a bluish-graycolor; their hues are as distinct as those of the colored patches in amap; and they represent geological periods that lie widely apart. Thered rocks we find laid down in most of our maps as Old Red, though I amdisposed to regard them as of a much higher antiquity than even thatancient system; while the bluish-gray rocks are decidedly Liasic. [3] Thecove between represents a deep ditch-like hollow, which occurs in Skye, both in the interior and on the sea-shore, in the line of boundarybetwixt the Red Sandstone and the Lias; and it "seems to haveoriginated, " says M'Culloch, "in the decomposition of the exposed partsof the formations at their junction. " "Hence, " he adds, "from thewearing of the materials at the surface, a cavity has been produced, which becoming subsequently filled with rubbish, and generally coveredover with a vegetable soil of unusual depth, effectually prevents a viewof the contiguous parts. " The first strata exposed on the northern sideare the oldest Liasic rocks anywhere seen in Scotland. They are composedchiefly of greenish-colored fissile sandstones and calciferous grits, inwhich we meet a few fossils, very imperfectly preserved. But theorganisms increase as we go on. We see in passing, near a picturesquelittle cottage, --the only one on the shores of the bay, --a crag of asingularly rough appearance, that projects mole-like from the sward uponthe beach, and then descending abruptly to the level of the otherstrata, runs out in a long ragged line into the sea. The stratum, fromtwo to three feet in thickness, of which it is formed, seems whollybuilt up of irregularly-formed rubbly concretions, just as some of thegarden-walls in the neighborhood of Edinburgh are built of the roughscoria of our glass-houses; and we find, on examination, that everyseeming concretion in the bed is a perfectly formed coral of the genusAstrea. We have arrived at an entire bed of corals, all of one species. Their surfaces, wherever they have been washed by the sea, are of greatbeauty: nothing can be more irregular than the outline of each mass, andyet scarce anything more regular than the sculpturings on every part ofit. We find them fretted over with polygons, like those of a honeycomb, only somewhat less mathematically exact, and the centre of every polygoncontains its many-rayed star. It is difficult to distinguish betweenspecies in some of the divisions of corals: one Astrea, recent orextinct, is sometimes found so exceedingly like another of some verydifferent formation or period, that the more modern might almost bedeemed a lineal descendant of the more ancient species. With an eye tothe fact, I brought with me some characteristic specimens of thisAstrea[4] of the Lower Lias, which I have ranged side by side with theAstreæ of the Oölite I had found so abundant a twelvemonth before in theneighborhood of Helmsdale. In some of the hand specimens, that presentmerely a piece of polygonal surface, bounded by fractured sides, thedifference is not easily distinguishable: the polygonal depressions aregenerally smaller in the Oölitic species, and shallower in the Liasicone; but not unfrequently these differences disappear, and it is onlywhen compared in the entire unbroken coral that their specificpeculiarities acquire the necessary prominence. The Oölitic Astrea is ofmuch greater size than the Liasic one: it occurs not unfrequently inmasses of from two to three feet in diameter; and as its polygons aretubes that converge to the footstalk on which it originally formed, itpresents in the average outline a fungous-like appearance; whereas inthe smaller Liasic coral, which rarely exceeds a foot in diameter, thereis no such general convergency of the tubes; and the form in one piece, save that there is a certain degree of flatness common to all, bears noresemblance to the form in another. Some of the recent Astreæ are ofgreat beauty when inhabited by the living zoöphites whose skeletonframework they compose. Every polygonal star in the mass is the house ofa separate animal, that, when withdrawn into its cell, presents theappearance of a minute flower, somewhat like a daisy stuck flat to thesurface, and that, when stretched out, resembles a small round tower, with a garland of leaves bound round it atop for a cornice. The _Astreaviridis_, a coral of the tropics, presents on a ground of velvety brownmyriads of deep green florets, that ever and anon start up from thelevel in their tower-like shape, contract and expand their petals, andthen, shrinking back into their cells, straightway became florets again. The Lower Lias presented in one of its opening scenes, in this part ofthe world, appearances of similar beauty widely spread. For milestogether, --we know not how many, --the bottom of a clear shallow sea waspaved with living Astreæ: every irregular rock-like coral formed aseparate colony of polypora, that, when in motion, presented theappearance of continuous masses of many-colored life, and when at rest, the places they occupied were more thickly studded with the livingflorets than the richest and most flowery piece of pasture the readerever saw, with its violets or its daisies. And mile beyond mile thisscene of beauty stretched on through the shallow depths of the Liasicsea. The calcareous framework of most of the recent Astreæ are white;but in the species referred to, --the _Astrea viridis_, --it is of adark-brown color. It is not unworthy of remark, in connection with thesefacts, that the Oölitic Astrea of Helmsdale occurs as a white, or, whendarkest, as a cream-colored petrifaction; whereas the Liasic Astrea ofSkye is invariably of a deep earthy hue. The one was probably a white, the other a dingy-colored coral. 

The Liasic bed of Astreæ existed long enough here to attain a thicknessof from two to three feet. Mass rose over mass, --the living upon thedead, --till at length, by a deposit of mingled mud and sand, --theeffect, mayhap, of some change of currents, induced we know nothow, --the innumerable polypedes of the living surface were buried up andkilled, and then, for many yards, layer after layer of a calciferousgrit was piled over them. The fossils of the grit are few and illpreserved; but we occasionally find in it a coral similar to the Astreaof the bed below, and, a little higher up, in an impure limestone, specimens, in rather indifferent keeping, of a genus of polypifer whichsomewhat resembles the Turbinolia of the Mountain Limestone. It presentsin the cross section the same radiated structure as the _Turbinoliafungites_, and nearly the same furrowed appearance in the longitudinalone; but, seen in the larger specimens, we find that it was a branchedcoral, with obtuse forky boughs, in each of which, it is probable, fromtheir general structure, there lived a single polype. It may have beenthe resemblance which these bear, when seen in detached branches, to theolder Caryophyllia, taken in connection with the fact that the depositin which they occur rests on the ancient Red Sandstone of the district, that led M'Culloch to question whether this fossiliferous formation hadnot nearly as clear a claim to be regarded as an analogue of theCarboniferous Limestone of England as of its Lias; and hence hecontented himself with terming it simply the Gryphite Limestone. Sir R. Murchison, whose much more close and extensive acquaintance with fossilsenabled him to assign to the deposit its true place, was struck, however, with the general resemblance of its polypifers to "those of theMadreporite Limestone of the Carboniferous series. " These polypifersoccur in only the lower Lias of Skye. [5] I found no corals in its higherbeds, though these are charged with other fossils, more characteristicof the formation, in vast abundance. In not a few of the middle strata, composed of a mud-colored fissile sandstone, the gryphites lie asthickly as currants in a Christmas cake; and as they weather white, while the stone in which they are embedded retains its dingy hue, theysomewhat remind one of the white-lead tears of the undertaker mottling ahatchment of sable. In a fragment of the dark sandstone, six inches byseven, which I brought with me, I reckon no fewer than twenty-twogryphites; and it forms but an average specimen of the bed from which Idetached it. By far the most abundant species is that not inelegantshell so characteristic of the formation, the _Gryphæa incurva_. We finddetached specimens scattered over the beach by hundreds, mixed up withthe remains of recent shells, as if the _Gryphæa incurva_ were a recentshell too. They lie, bleached white by the weather, among the valves ofdefunct oysters and dead buccinidæ; and, from their resemblance to lampscast in the classic model, remind one, in the corners where they haveaccumulated most thickly, of the old magician's stock in trade, whowiled away the lamp of Aladdin from Aladdin's simple wife. The _Gryphæaobliquita_ and _Gryphæa M'Cullochii_ also occur among these middlestrata of the Lias, though much less frequently than the other. We, besides, found in them at least two species of Pecten, with two speciesof Terebratula, --the one smooth, the other sulcated; a bivalveresembling a Donax; another bivalve, evidently a Gervillia, thoughapparently of a species not yet described; and the ill-preserved ringsof large Ammonites, from ten inches to a foot in diameter. Towards thebottom of the bay the fossils again become more rare, though theyre-appear once more in considerable abundance as we pass along itsnorthern side; but in order to acquaint ourselves with the upperorganisms of the formation, we have to take boat and explore thenorthern shores of Pabba. The Lias of Skye has its three distinct groupsof fossils: its lower coraline group, in which the Astrea described ismost abundant; its middle group, in which the _Gryphæa incurva_ occursby millions; and its upper group, abounding in Ammonites, Nautili, Pinnæ, and Serpulæ. 

Friday made amends for the rains and fogs of its disagreeablepredecessor: the morning rose bright and beautiful, with just windenough to fill, and barely fill, the sail, hoisted high, with misereconomy, that not a breath might be lost; and, weighing anchor, andshaking out all our canvass, we bore down on Pabba, to explore. Thisisland, so soft in outline and color, is formidably fenced round bydangerous reefs; and, leaving the Betsey in charge of John Stewart andhis companion, to dodge on in the offing, I set out with the minister inour little boat, and landed on the north-eastern side of the island, beside a trap-dyke that served us as a pier. He would be a happygeologist who, with a few thousands to spare, could call Pabba his own. It contains less than a square mile of surface; and a walk of littlemore than three miles and a half along the line where the waves break athigh water brings the traveller back to his starting point; and yet, though thus limited in area, the petrifactions of its shores might ofthemselves fill a museum. They rise by thousands and tens of thousandson the exposed planes of its sea-washed strata, standing out in boldrelief, like sculpturings on ancient tombstones, at once mummies andmonuments, --the dead and the carved memorials of the dead. Every rock isa tablet of hieroglyphics, with an ascertained alphabet; every rolledpebble a casket with old pictorial records locked up within. Trap-dykes, beyond comparison finer than those of the Water of Leith, which firstsuggested to Hutton his theory, stand up like fences over thesedimentary strata, or run out like moles far into the sea. The entireisland, too, so green, rich, and level, is itself a specimenillustrative of the effect of geologic formation on scenery. We find itsnearest neighbor, --the steep, brown, barren island of Longa, which iscomposed of the ancient Red Sandstone of the district, --differing asthoroughly from it in aspect as a bit of granite differs from a bit ofclay-slate; and the whole prospect around, save the green Liasic stripthat lies along the bottom of the Bay of Broadford, exhibits, true toits various components, Plutonic or sedimentary, a character ofpicturesque roughness or bold sublimity. The only piece of smooth, levelEngland, contained in the entire landscape, is the fossil-mottled islandof Pabba. We were first struck, on landing this morning, by the greatnumber of Pinnæ embedded in the strata, --shells varying from five to teninches in length, --one species of the common flat type, exemplified inthe existing _Pinna sulcata_, and another nearly quadrangular, in thecross section, like the _Pinna lanceolata_ of the Scarborough limestone. The quadrangular species is more deeply crisped outside than theflat one. Both species bear the longitudinal groove in the centre, and when broken across, are found to contain numerous smallershells, --Terebratulæ of both the smooth and sulcated kinds, and aspecies of minute smooth Pecten resembling the _Pecten demissus_, butsmaller. The Pinnæ, ere they became embedded in the original sea-bottom, long since hardened into rock around them, were, we find, dead shells, into which, as into the dead open shells of our existing beaches, smaller shells were washed by the waves. Our recent Pinnæ are allsedentary shells, some of them full two feet in length, fastened totheir places on their deep-sea floors by flowing silky byssi, --cables ofmany strands, --of which beautiful pieces of dress, such as gloves andhose, have been manufactured. An old French naturalist, the Abbe LePluche, tells us that "the Pinna with its fleshy tongue" (foot), --a rudeinefficient looking implement for work so nice, --"spins such threads asare more valuable than silk itself, and with which the most beautifulstuffs that ever were seen have been made by Sicilian weavers. " Glovesmade of the byssus of recent Pinnæ may be seen in the British Museum. Associated with the numerous Pinnæ of Pabba we found a delicately-formedModiola, a small Ostrya, Plagiostoma, Terebratula, several species ofPectens, a triangular univalve resembling a Trochus, innumerable groupsof Serpulæ, and the star-like joints of Pentacrinites. The Gryphæ arealso abundant, occurring in extensive beds; and Belemnites of variousspecies lie as thickly scattered over the rock as if they had been thespindles of a whole kingdom thrown aside in consequence of some suchedict framed to put them down as that passed by the father of theSleeping Beauty. We find, among the detached masses of the beach, specimens of Nautilus, which, though rarely perfect, are sufficiently soto show the peculiarities of the shell; and numerous Ammonites projectin relief from almost every weathered plane of the strata. These lastshells, in the tract of shore which we examined, are chiefly of onespecies, --the _Ammonites spinatus_, --one of which, considerably broken, the reader may find figured in Sowerby's "Mineral Conchology, " from aspecimen brought from Pabba sixteen years ago by Sir R. Murchison. It isdifficult to procure specimens tolerably complete. We find bits of outerrings existing as limestone, with every rib sharply preserved, but therest of the fossil lost in the shale. I succeeded in finding but twospecimens that show the inner whorls. They are thickly ribbed; and thechief peculiarity which they exhibit, not so directly indicated by Mr. Sowerby's figure, is, that while the ribs of the outer whorl are broadand deep, as in the _Ammonites obtusus_, they suddenly change theircharacter, and become numerous and narrow in the inner whorls, as in the_Ammonites communis_. 

The tide began to flow, and we had to quit our explorations, and returnto the Betsey. The little wind had become less, and all the canvas wecould hang out enabled us to draw but a sluggish furrow. The stern ofthe Betsey "wrought no buttons" on this occasion; but she had a goodtide under her keel; and ere the dinner-hour we had passed through thenarrows of Kyle Akin. The village of this name was designed by the lateLord M'Donald for a great seaport town; but it refused to grow; and ithas since become a gentleman in a small way, and does nothing. It forms, however, a handsome group of houses, pleasantly situated on a flat greentongue of land, on the Skye side, just within the opening of the Kyle;and there rises on an eminence beyond it a fine old tower, rent open, asif by an earthquake, from top to bottom, which forms one of the mostpicturesque objects I have almost ever seen in a landscape. There arebold hills all around, and rocky islands, with the ceaseless rush oftides in front; while the cloven tower, rising high over the shore, isseen, in threading the Kyles, whether from the south or north, relieveddark against the sky, as the central object in the vista. We find itthus described by the Messrs. Anderson of Inverness, in their excellent"Guide Book, "--by far the best companion of the kind with which thetraveller who sets himself to explore our Scottish Highlands can beprovided. "Close to the village of Kyle Akin are the ruins of an oldsquare keep, called Castle Muel or Maoil, the walls of which are of aremarkable thickness. It is said to have been built by the daughter of aNorwegian king, married to a Mackinnon or Macdonald, for the purpose oflevying an impost on all vessels passing the Kyles, excepting, says thetradition, those of her own country. For the more certain exaction ofthis duty, she is reported to have caused a strong chain to be stretchedacross from shore to shore; and the spot in the rocks to which theterminal links were attached is still pointed out. " It was high time forus to be home. The dinner hour came; but, in meet illustration of theprofound remark of Trotty-Veck, not the dinner. We had been in a coldModerate district, whence there came no half-dozens of eggs, or wholedozens of trout, or pailfuls of razor-fish, and in which hardcabin-biscuit cost us sixpence per pound. And now our stores wereexhausted, and we had to dine as best we could, on our last half-ounceof tea, sweetened by our last quarter of a pound of sugar. I had marked, however, a dried thornback hanging among the rigging. It had been therenearly three weeks before, when I came first aboard, and no one seemedto know for how many weeks previous; for as it had come to be a sort offixture in the vessel, it could be looked at without being seen. Butnecessity sharpens the discerning faculty, and on this pressingoccasion I was fortunate enough to see it. It was straightway takendown, skinned, roasted, and eaten; and, though rather rich inammonia, --a substance better suited to form the food of the organismsthat do not unite sensation to vitality, than organisms so high in thescale as the minister and his friend, --we came deliberately to theopinion, that on the whole, we could scarce have dined so well on one ofMajor Bellenden's jack-boots, --"so thick in the soles, " according toJenny Dennison, "forby being tough in the upper leather. " The tidefailed us opposite the opening of Loch Alsh; the wind, long dying, atlength died out into a dead calm; and we cast anchor in ten fathomswater, to wait the ebbing current that was to carry us through KyleRhea. 

The ebb-tide set in about half an hour after sunset; and in weighinganchor to float down the Kyle, --for we still lacked wind to sail downit, --we brought up from below, on one of the anchor-flukes, an immensebunch of deep-sea tangle, with huge soft fronds and long slender stems, that had lain flat on the rocky bottom, and had here and there thrownout roots along its length of stalk, to attach itself to the rock, inthe way the ivy attaches itself to the wall. Among the intricacies ofthe true roots of the bunch, if one may speak of the true roots of analga, I reckoned from eighteen to twenty different forms of animallife, --Flustræ, Sertulariæ, Serpulæ, Anomiæ, Modiolæ, Astarte, Annelida, Crustacea, and Radiata. Among the Crustaceans I found a female crab of areddish-brown color, considerably smaller than the nail of my smallfinger, but fully grown apparently, for the abdominal flap was loadedwith spawn; and among the Echinoderms, a brownish-yellow sea-urchinabout the size of a pistol-bullet, furnished with comparatively largebut thinly-set spines. There is a dangerous rock in the Kyle Rhea, theCaileach stone, on which the Commissioners for the Northern Lighthouseshave stuck a bit of board about the size of a pot-lid, which, as it isknown to be there, and as no one ever sees it after sunset, is reallyvery effective, considering how little it must have cost the country, inwrecking vessels. I saw one of its victims, the sloop of an honestMethodist, in whose bottom the Caileach had knocked out a hole, repairing at Isle Ornsay; and I was told, that if I wished to see more, I had only just to wait a little. The honest Methodist, after lookingout in vain for the bit of board, was just stepping into the shrouds, totry whether he could not see the rock on which the bit of board isplaced, when all at once his vessel found out both board and rock forherself. We also had anxious looking out this evening for the bit ofboard: one of us thought he saw it right a-head; and when some of theothers were trying to see it too, John Stewart succeeded in discoveringit half a pistol-shot astern. The evening was one of the loveliest. Themoon rose in cloudy majesty over the mountains of Glenelg, brighteningas it rose, till the boiling eddies around us curled on the darkersurface in pale circlets of light, and the shadow of the Betsey lay assharply defined on the brown patch of calm to the larboard as if it wereher portrait taken in black. Immediately at the water-edge, under a talldark hill, there were two smouldering fires, that now shot up a suddentongue of bright flame, and now dimmed into blood-red specks, and sentthick strongly-scented trails of smoke athwart the surface of the Kyle. We could hear, in the calm, voices from beside them, apparently those ofchildren; and learned that they indicated the places of twokelp-furnaces, --things which have now become comparatively rare alongthe coasts of the Hebrides. There was the low rush of tides all around, and the distant voices from the shore, but no other sounds; and, dim inthe moonshine, we could see behind us several spectral-looking sailsthreading their silent way through the narrows, like twilight ghoststraversing some haunted corridor. 

It was late ere we reached the opening of Isle Ornsay; and as it wasstill a dead calm we had to tug in the Betsey to the anchoring groundwith a pair of long sweeps. The minister pointed to a low-lying rock onthe left-hand side of the opening, --a favorite haunt of the seal. "Itook farewell of the Betsey there last winter, " he said. "The night hadworn late, and was pitch dark; we could see before us scarce the lengthof our bowsprit; not a single light twinkled from the shore; and, intaking the bay, we ran bump on the skerry, and stuck fast. The watercame rushing in, and covered over the cabin-floor. I had Mrs. Swansonand my little daughter aboard with me, with one of our servant-maids whohad become attached to the family, and insisted on following us fromEigg; and, of course, our first care was to get them ashore. We had toland them on the bare uninhabited island yonder, and a dreary enoughplace it was at midnight, in winter, with its rocks, bogs, and heath, and with a rude sea tumbling over the skerries in front; but it had atleast the recommendation of being safe, and the sky, though black andwild, was not stormy. I had brought two lanterns ashore: the servantgirl, with the child in her lap, sat beside one of them, in the shelterof a rock; while my wife, with the other, went walking up and down alonga piece of level sward yonder, waving the light, to attract notice fromthe opposite side of the bay. But though it was seen from the windows ofmy own house by an attached relative, it was deemed merely asingularly-distinct apparition of Will o' the Wisp, and so brought us noassistance. Meanwhile we had carried out a kedge astern of the Betsey, as the sea was flowing at the time, to keep her from beating in over therocks; and then, taking our few movables ashore, we hung on till thetide rose, and, with our boat alongside ready for escape, succeeded inwarping her into deep water, with the intention of letting her sinksomewhere beyond the influence of the surf, which, without fail, wouldhave broken her up on the skerry in a few hours, had we suffered her toremain there. But though, when on the rock, the tide had risen as freelyover the cabin sole inside as over the crags without, in the deep waterthe Betsey gave no sign of sinking. I went down to the cabin; the waterwas knee-high on the floor, dashing against bed and locker, but it roseno higher;--the enormous leak had stopped, we knew not how; and, settingourselves to the pump, we had in an hour or two a clear ship. The Betseyis clinker-built below. The elastic oak planks had yielded inwards tothe pressure of the rock, tearing out the fastenings, and admitted thetide at wide yawning seams; but no sooner was the pressure removed, thanout they sprung again into their places, like bows when the strings areslackened; and when the carpenter came to overhaul, he found he hadlittle else to do than to remove a split plank, and to supply a fewdozens of drawn nails. "

CHAPTER X. 

 Isle Ornsay--The Sabbath--A Sailor-minister's Sermon for Sailors--The Scuir Sermon--Loch Carron--Groups of Moraines--A sheep District--The Editor of the _Witness_ and the Establishment Clergyman--Dingwall--Conon-side revisited--The Pond and its Changes--New Faces--The Stonemason's Mark--The Burying Ground of Urquhart--An old acquaintance--Property Qualification for Voting in Scotland--Montgerald Sandstone Quarries--Geological Science in Cromarty--The Danes at Cromarty--The Danish Professor and the "Old Red Sandstone"--Harmonizing tendencies of Science. 

The anchoring ground at Isle Ornsay was crowded with coasting vesselsand fishing boats; and when the Sabbath came round, no inconsiderableportion of my friend's congregation was composed of sailors andfishermen. His text was appropriate, --"He bringeth them into theirdesired haven;" and as his sea-craft and his theology were alikeexcellent, there were no incongruities in his allegory, and no defectsin his mode of applying it, and the seamen were hugely delighted. JohnStewart, though less a master of English than of many other things, toldme he was able to follow the minister from beginning to end, --a thing hehad never done before at an English preaching. The sea portion of thesermon, he said, was very plain: it was about the helm, and the sails, and the anchor, and the chart, and the pilot, --about rocks, winds, currents, and safe harborage; and by attending to this simpler part ofit, he was led into the parts that were less simple, and so succeeded incomprehending the whole. I would fain see this unique discourse, preached by a sailor minister to a sailor congregation, preserved insome permanent form, with at least one other discourse, --of which Ifound trace in the island of Eigg, after the lapse of more than atwelvemonth, --that had been preached about the time of the Disruption, full in sight of the Scuir, with its impregnable hill-fort, and in theimmediate neighborhood of the cave of Frances, with its heaps of deadmen's bones. One note stuck fast to the islanders. In times of peril andalarm, said the minister, the ancient inhabitants of the island had twoessentially different kinds of places in which they sought security;they had the deep, unwholesome cave, shut up from the light and thebreath of heaven, and the tall rock summit, with its impregnable fort, on which the sun shone and the wind blew. Much hardship might no doubtbe encountered on the one, when the sky was black with tempest, andrains beat, or snows descended; but it was found associated with nostory of real loss or disaster, --it had kept safe all who had committedthemselves to it; whereas, in the close atmosphere of the other therewas warmth, and, after a sort, comfort; and on one memorable day oftrouble the islanders had deemed it the preferable sheltering place ofthe two. And there survived mouldering skeletons and a frightfultradition, to tell the history of their choice. Places of refuge ofthese very opposite kinds, said the minister, continuing his allegory, are not peculiar to your island; never was there a day or a place oftrial in which they did not advance their opposite claims: they areadvancing them even now all over the world. The one kind you finddescribed by one great prophet as low-lying "refuges of lies, " overwhich the desolating "scourge must pass, " and which the destroying"waters must overflow;" while the true character of the other may belearned from another great prophet, who was never weary of celebratinghis "rock and his fortress. " "Wit succeeds more from being happilyaddressed, " says Goldsmith, "than even from its native poignancy. " Ifmy friend's allegory does not please quite as well in print and inEnglish as it did when delivered _viva voce_ in Gaelic, it should beremembered that it was addressed to an out-door congregation, whoseminds were filled with the consequences of the Disruption, --that thebones of _Uamh Fraingh_ lay within a few hundred yards of them, --andthat the Scuir, with the sun shining bright on its summit, rose tall inthe background, scarce a mile away. 

On Monday I spent several hours in reëxploring the Lias of Lucy Bay andits neighborhood, and then walked on to Kyle-Akin, where I parted frommy friend Mr. Swanson, and took boat for Loch Carron. The greater partof the following day was spent in crossing the country to the east coastin the mail-gig, through long dreary glens, and a fierce storm of windand rain. In the lower portion of the valley occupied by the riverCarron, I saw at least two fine groups of moraines. One of these, abouta mile and a half above the parish manse, marks the place where aglacier, that had once descended from a hollow amid the northern rangeof hills, had furrowed up the gravel and earth before it in long ridges, which we find running nearly parallel to the road; the other group, which lies higher up the valley, and seems of considerably greaterextent, indicates where one of those river-like glaciers that fill uplong hollows, and impel their irresistible flood downwards, slow as thehour-hand of a time-piece, had terminated towards the sea. I could butglance at the appearances as the gig drove past, and point them out to afellow passenger, the Establishment minister of----, remarking, at thesame time, how much more dreary the prospect must have seemed than evenit did to-day, though the fog was thick and the drizzle disagreeable, when the lateral hollows on each side were blocked up with ice, andoverhanging glaciers, that ploughed the rock bare in their descent, glistened on the bleak hill-sides. I wore a gray maud over a coat ofrough russet, with waist-coat and trowsers of plaid; and the minister, who must have taken me, I suppose, for a southland shepherd looking outfor a farm, gave me much information of a kind I might have foundvaluable had such been my condition and business, regarding the variousdistricts through which we passed. On one high-lying farm, the grass, hesaid, was short and thin, but sweet and wholesome, and the flocks throvesteadily, and were never thinned by disease; whereas on another farm, that lay along the dank bottom of a valley, the herbage was rank andrich, and the sheep fed and got heavy, but braxy at the close of autumnfell upon them like a pestilence, and more than neutralized to thefarmer every advantage of the superior fertility of the soil. It was notuninteresting, even for one not a sheep-farmer, to learn that the lifeof the sheep is worth fewer years' purchase in one little track ofcountry than in another adjacent one; and that those differences in thesalubrity of particular spots which obtain in other parts of the worldin regard to our own species, and which make it death to linger on theluxuriant river-side, while on the arid plain or elevated hill-top thereis health and safety, should exist in contiguous walks in the Highlandsof Scotland in reference to some of the inferior animals. The ministerand I became wonderfully good friends for the time. All the seats in thegig, both back and front, had been occupied ere he had taken hispassage, and the postman had assigned him a miserable place on thenarrow elevated platform in the middle, where he had to coil himself uplike a hedgehog in its hole, sadly to the discomfort of limbs stillstout and strong, but stiffened by the long service of full seventyyears. And, as in the case made famous by Cowper, of the "softer sex"and the old-fashioned iron-cushioned arm-chairs, the old man had, asbecame his years, "'gan murmur. " I contrived, by sitting on the edge ofthe gig on the one side, and by getting the postman to take a similarseat on the other, to find room for him in front; and there, feeling hehad not to do with savages, he became kindly and conversible. We beattogether over a wide range of topics;--the Scotch banks, and Sir RobertPeel's intentions regarding them, --the periodical press ofScotland, --the Edinburgh literati, --the Free Church even: he had been aconsistent Moderate all his days, and disliked renegades, he said; andI, of course, disliked renegades too. We both remembered that, thoughcivilized nations give quarter to an enemy overpowered in open fight, they are still in the habit of shooting deserters. In short, we agreedon a great many different matters; and, by comparing notes, we made thebest we could of a tedious journey and a very bad day. At the inn atGarve, a long stage from Dingwall, we alighted, and took the roadtogether, to straighten our stiffened limbs, while the post man wasengaged in changing horses. The minister stopped short in the middle ofa discussion. We are not on equal terms, he said: you know who I am, andI don't know you: we did not start fair at the beginning, but let usstart fair now. Ah, we have agreed hitherto, I replied; but I know nothow we are to agree when you know who I am: are you sure you will not befrightened? Frightened! said the minister sturdily; no, by no man. Then, I am the Editor of the _Witness_. There was a momentary pause. "Well, "said the minister, "it's all the same: I'm glad we should have met. Giveme, man, a shake of your hand. " And so the conversation went on asbefore till we parted at Dingwall, --the Establishment clergyman wet tothe skin, the Free Church editor in no better condition; but both, mayhap, rather less out of conceit with the ride than if it had beenridden alone. 

I had intended passing at least two days in the neighborhood ofDingwall, where I proposed renewing an acquaintance, broken off forthree-and-twenty years, with those bituminous shales of Strathpeffer inwhich the celebrated mineral waters of the valley take their rise, --theOld Red Conglomerate of Brahan, the vitrified fort of Knockferrel, theancient tower of Fairburn, above all, the pleasure-grounds ofConon-side. I had spent the greater portion of my eighteenth andnineteenth years in this part of the country; and I was curious toascertain to what extent the man in middle life would verify theobservations of the lad, --to recall early incidents, revisit rememberedscenes, return on old feelings, and see who were dead and who were aliveamong the casual acquaintances of nearly a quarter of a century ago. Themorning of Wednesday rose dark with fog and rain, but the wind hadfallen; and as I could not afford to miss seeing Conon-side, I salliedout under cover of an umbrella. I crossed the bridge, and reached thepleasure-grounds of Conon-house. The river was big in flood: it wasexactly such a river Conon as I had lost sight of in the winter of 1821;and I had to give up all hope of wading into its fords, as I used to doearly in the autumn of that year, and pick up the pearl muscles that lieso thickly among the stones at the bottom. I saw, however, amid athicket of bushes by the river-side, a heap of broken shells, where someherd-boy had been carrying on such a pearl fishery as I had sometimesused to carry on in my own behalf so long before; and I felt it was justsomething to see it. The flood eddied past, dark and heavy, sweepingover bulwark and bank. The low-stemmed alders that rose on islet andmound seemed shorn of half their trunks in the tide; here and there anelastic branch bent to the current, and rose and bent again; and now atuft of withered heath came floating down, and now a soiled wreath offoam. How vividly the past rose up before me!--boyish day-dreamsforgotten for twenty years, --the fossils of an early formation of mind, produced at a period when the atmosphere of feeling was warmer than now, and the immaturities of the mental kingdom grew rank and large, like theancient Cryptogamiæ, and bore no specific resemblance to the productionsof a present time. I had passed in the neighborhood the first season Ianywhere spent among strangers, at an age when home is not a country, nor a province even, but simply a little spot of earth inhabited byfriends and relatives; and the rude verses, long forgotten, in which myjoy had found vent when on the eve of returning to that home, --a homelittle more than twenty miles away, --came chiming as freshly into mymemory as if scarce a month had passed since I had composed them besidethe Conon. [6]

Three-and-twenty years form a large portion of the short life ofman, --one-third, as nearly as can be expressed in unbroken numbers, ofthe entire term fixed by the psalmist, and full one-half, if we strikeoff the twilight periods of childhood and immature youth, and ofsenectitude weary of its toils. I found curious indications among thegrounds of Conon-side, of the time that had elapsed since I had lastseen them. There was a rectangular pond in a corner of a moor, near thepublic road, inhabited by about a dozen voracious, frog-eating pike, that I used frequently to visit. The water in the pond was exceedinglylimpid; and I could watch from the banks every motion of the hungry, energetic inmates. And now I struck off from the river-side by a narrowtangled pathway, to visit it once more. I could have found out theplace blindfold: there was a piece of flat brown heath that stretchedround its edges, and a mossy slope that rose at its upper side, at thefoot of which the taste of the proprietor had placed a rustic chair. Thespot, though itself bare and moory, was nearly surrounded by wood, andlooked like a clearing in an American forest. There were lines ofgraceful larches on two of its sides, and a grove of vigorous beechesthat directly fronted the setting sun on a third; and I had often foundit a place of delightful resort, in which to saunter alone in the calmsummer evenings, after the work of the day was over. Such was the sceneas it existed in my recollection. I came up to it this day throughdripping trees, along a neglected pathway; and found, for the open spaceand the rectangular pond, a gloomy patch of water in the middle of atangled thicket, that rose some ten or twelve feet over my head. Whathad been bare heath a quarter of a century before had become a thickwood; and I remembered, that when I had been last there, the open spacehad just been planted with forest-trees, and that some of the tallerplants rose half-way to my knee. Human lifetimes, as now measured, arenot intended to witness both the seed-times and the harvests offorests, --both the planting of the sapling, and the felling of the hugetree into which it has grown; and so the incident impressed me strongly. It reminded me of the sage Shalum in Addison's antediluvian tale, whobecame wealthy by the sale of his great trees, two centuries after hehad planted them. I pursued my walk, to revisit another little patch ofwater which I had found so very entertaining a volume three-and-twentyyears previous, that I could still recall many of its lessons; but thehand of improvement had been busy among the fields of Conon-side; andwhen I came up to the spot which it had occupied, I found but a pieceof level arable land, bearing a rank swathe of grass and clover. [7]

Not a single individual did I find on the farm who had been there twentyyears before. I entered into conversation with one of the ploughmen, apparently a man of some intelligence; but he had come to the place onlya summer or two previous, and the names of most of his predecessorssounded unfamiliar in his ears: he knew scarce anything of the old lairdor his times, and but little of the general history of the district. Thefrequent change of servants incident to the large-farm system has donescarce less to wear out the oral antiquities of the country than hasbeen done by its busy ploughs in obliterating antiquities of a morematerial cast. The mythologic legend and traditionary story have sharedthe same fate, through the influence of the one cause, which has beenexperienced by the sepulchral tumulus and the ancient encampment underthe operations of the other. I saw in the pillars and archways of thefarm-steading some of the hewn stones bearing my own mark, --an anchor, to which I used to attach a certain symbolical meaning; and I pointedthem out to the ploughman. I had hewn these stones, I said, in the daysof the old laird, the grandfather of the present proprietor. Theploughman wondered how a man still in middle life could have such astory to tell. I must surely have begun work early in the day, heremarked, which was perhaps the best way for getting it soon over. Iremembered having seen similar markings on the hewn-work of ancientcastles, and of indulging in, I daresay, idle enough speculationsregarding what was doing at court and in the field, in Scotland andelsewhere, when the old long-departed mechanics had been engaged intheir work. When this mark was affixed, I have said, all Scotland wasin mourning for the disaster at Flodden, and the folk in the work-shedwould have been, mayhap, engaged in discussing the supposed treachery ofHome, and in arguing whether the hapless James had fallen in battle, orgone on a pilgrimage to merit absolution for the death of his father. And when this other more modern mark was affixed, the Gowrie conspiracymust have been the topic of the day, and the mechanics were probablyspeculating, --at worst not more doubtfully than the historians have doneafter them, --on the guilt or innocence of the Ruthvens. It now rosecuriously enough in memory, that I was employed in fashioning one of thestones marked by the anchor, --a corner stone in a gate-pillar, --when oneof my brother apprentices entered the work-shed, laden with a bundle ofnewly sharpened irons from the smithy, and said he had just been told bythe smith that the great Napoleon Bonaparte was dead. I returned to thevillage of Conon Bridge, through the woods of Conon House. The day wasstill very bad: the rain pattered thick on the leaves, and fellincessantly in large drops on the pathways. There is a solitary, picturesque burying-ground on a wooded hillock beside the river, withthick dark woods all around it, --one of the two burying-grounds of theparish of Urquhart, --which I would fain have visited, but the swollenstream had risen high around, converting the hillock into an island, andforbade access. I had spent many an hour among the tombs. They are fewand scattered, and of the true antique cast, --roughened with death'sheads, and cross-bones, and rudely sculptured armorial bearings; and ona broken wall, that marked where the ancient chapel once had stood, there might be seen, in the year 1821, a small, badly-cut sun-dial, withits iron gnomon wasted to a saw-edged film, that contained more oxidethan metal. The only fossils described in my present chapter are fossilsof mind; and the reader will, I trust, bear with me should I produceone fossil more of this somewhat equivocal class. It has no merit torecommend it, --it is simply an organism of an immature intellectualformation, in which, however, as in the Carboniferous period, there wasprovision made for the necessities of an after time. [8] If a young manborn on the wrong side of the Tweed for _speaking_ English, is desirousto acquire the ability of _writing_ it, he should by all means begin bytrying to write it in verse. 

I passed, on my return to Dingwall, through the village of Conon Bridge;and remembering that one of the masons who had hewn beside me in thework-shed so many years before lived in the village at the time, I wentdirect to the house he had inhabited, to see whether he might not bethere still. It was a low-roofed domicile beside the river, but in thedays of my old acquaintance it had presented an appearance of greatcomfort and neatness; and as there now hung an air of neglect about it, I inferred that it had found some other tenant. I inquired, however, atthe door, and was informed that Mr. ---- now lived higher up the street. I would find him, it was added, in the best house on the right-handside, --the house with a hewn front, and a shop in it. He kept the shop, and was the owner of the house, and had another house besides, and wasone of the elders of the Free Church in Urquhart. Such was the standingof my old acquaintance the journeyman mason of twenty-three years ago. He had been, when I knew him, a steady, industrious, religiousman, --with but one exception the only contributor to missionary andBible societies among a numerous party of workmen; and he was nowoccupying a respectable place in his village, and was one of the votersof the county. Let Chartism assert what it pleases on the one hand, andToryism what it may on the other, the property-qualification of theReform Bill is essentially a good one for such a country as Scotland. Inour cities it no doubt extends the political franchise to a fluctuatingclass, ill hafted in society, who possess it one year and want itanother; but in our villages and smaller towns it hits very nearly theright medium for forming a premium on steady industry and character, andfor securing that at least the mass of those who possess it should besober-minded men, with a stake in the general welfare. In running overthe histories of the various voters in one of our smaller towns, I foundthat nearly one-half of the whole had, like my old comrade at CononBridge, acquired for themselves, through steady and industrious habits, the qualification from which they derive their vote. My companion failedto recognize in the man turned of forty the smooth-cheeked stripling ofeighteen, with whom he had wrought so long before. I soon succeeded, however, in making good my claim to his acquaintance. He had previouslyestablished the identity of the editor of his newspaper with his quondamfellow-workman, and a single link more was all the chain wanted. Wetalked over old matters for half an hour. His wife, a staid respectablematron, who, when I had been last in the district, was exactly such aperson as her eldest daughter, showed me an Encyclopædia, with coloredprints, which she wished to send, if she knew but how, to the FreeChurch library. I walked with him through his garden, and saw treesloaded with yellow-cheeked pippins, where I had once seen onlyunproductive heath, that scantily covered a barren soil of ferruginoussand, and unwillingly declining an invitation to wait tea, --for aprevious engagement interfered, --I took leave of the family, andreturned to Dingwall. The following morning was gloomy, and threatenedrain; and giving up my intention of exploring Strathpeffer, I took themorning coach for Invergordon, and then walked to Cromarty, where Iarrived just in time for breakfast. 

I marked, from the top of the coach, about two miles to the north-eastof Dingwall, beds of a deep gray sandstone, identical in color andappearance with some of the gray sandstones of the Middle Old Red ofForfarshire, and learned that quarries had lately been opened in thesebeds near Montgerald. The Old Red Sandstone lies in immense developmenton the flanks of Ben-Wevis; and it is just possible that the analogue ofthe gray flagstones of Forfar may be found among its upper beds. If so, the quarriers should be instructed to look hard for organicremains, --the broad-headed Cephalaspis, so characteristic of theformation, and the huge Crustacean, its contemporary, that disported inplates large as those of the steel mail of the later ages of chivalry. The geologists of Dingwall, --if Dingwall has yet got itsgeologists, --might do well to attempt determining the point. I found thescience much in advance in Cromarty, especially among the ladies, --itsgreat patronizers and illustrators everywhere, --and, in not a fewlocalities, extensive contributors to its hoards of fact. Just as Iarrived, there was a pic-nic party of young people setting out for theLias of Shandwick. They spent the day among its richly fossiliferousshales and limestones, and brought back with them in the evening, Ammonites and Gryphites enough to store a museum. Cromarty had beenvisited during the summer by geologists speaking a foreign tongue, butthoroughly conversant with the occult yet common language of the rocks, and deeply interested in the stories which the rocks told. The vesselsin which the Crown Prince of Denmark voyaged to the Faroe Isles hadbeen for some time in the bay; and the Danes, his companions, votariesof the stony science, zealously plied chisel and hammer among the OldRed Sandstones of the coast. A townsman informed me that he had seen aDanish Professor hammering like the tutelary Thor of his country amongthe nodules in which I had found the first Pterichthys and firstDiplacanthus ever disinterred; and that the Professor, ever and anon ashe laid open a specimen, brought it to a huge smooth boulder, on whichthere lay a copy of the "Old Red Sandstone, " to ascertain from thedescriptions and prints its family and name. Shall I confess that thecircumstance gratified me exceedingly? There are many elements ofDiscord among mankind in the present time, both at home and abroad, --somany, that I am afraid we need entertain no hope of seeing an end, in atleast our day, to controversy and war. And we should be all the betterpleased, therefore, to witness the increase of those links ofunion, --such as the harmonizing bonds of a scientific sympathy, --thetendency of which is to draw men together in a kindly spirit, and theformation of which involves no sacrifice of principle, moral orreligious. I do not think that the foreigner, after geologizing in mycompany, would have had any very vehement desire, in the event of a war, to cut me down, or to knock me on the head. I am afraid this chapterwould require a long apology, and for a long apology space is wanting. But there will be no egotism, and much geology, in my next. 

CHAPTER XI. 

 Ichthyolite Beds--An interesting Discovery--Two Storeys of Organic Remains in the Old Red Sandstone--Ancient Ocean of Lower Old Red--Two great Catastrophes--Ancient Fish Scales--Their skilful Mechanism displayed by examples--Bone Lips--Arts of the Slater and Tiler as old as Old Red Sandstone--Jet Trinkets--Flint Arrow-heads--Vitrified Forts of Scotland--Style of grouping Lower Old Red Fossils--Illustration from Cromarty Fishing Phenomena--Singular Remains of Holoptychius--Ramble with Mr. Robert Dick--Color of the Planet Mars--Tombs never dreamed of by Hervey--Skeleton of the Bruce--Gigantic Holoptychius--"Coal money Currency"--Upper Boundary of Lower Old Red--Every one may add to the Store of Geological Facts--Discoveries of Messrs. Dick and Peach. 

I spent one long day in exploring the ichthyolite beds on both sides theCromarty Frith, and another long day in renewing my acquaintance withthe Liasic deposit at Shandwick. In beating over the Lias, though Ipicked up a few good specimens, I acquired no new facts; but inre-examining the Old Red Sandstone and its organisms I was rather moresuccessful. I succeeded in eliciting some curious points not yetrecorded, which, with the details of an interesting discovery made inthe far north in this formation, I may be perhaps able to weave into achapter somewhat more geological than my last. 

Some of the readers of my little work on the Old Red Sandstone willperhaps remember that I described the organisms of that ancient systemas occurring in the neighborhood of Cromarty mainly on one platform, raised rather more than a hundred feet over the great Conglomerate; andthat on this platform, as if suddenly overtaken by some wide-spreadcatastrophe, the ichthyolites lie by thousands and tens of thousands, in every attitude of distortion and terror. We see the spiked wings ofthe Pterichthys elevated to the full, as they had been erected in thefatal moment of anger and alarm, and the bodies of the Cheirolepis andCheiracanthus bent head to tail, in the stiff posture into which theyhad curled when the last pang was over. In various places in theneighborhood the ichthyolites are found _in situ_ in their coffin-likenodules, where it is impossible to trace the relation of the beds inwhich they occur to the rocks above and below; and I had suspected foryears that in at least some of the localities, they could not havebelonged to the lower platform of death, but to some posteriorcatastrophe that had strewed with carcasses some upper platform. I hadthought over the matter many a time and oft when I should have beenasleep, --for it is marvellous how questions of the kind grow upon a man;and now, selecting as a hopeful scene of inquiry the splendid sectionunder the Northern Sutor, I set myself doggedly to determine whether theOld Red Sandstone in this part of the country has not at least its twostoreys of organic remains, each of which had been equally a scene ofsudden mortality. I was entirely successful. The lower ichthyolite bedoccurs exactly one hundred and fourteen feet over the greatConglomerate; and three hundred and eighteen feet higher up I found asecond ichthyolite bed, as rich in fossils as the first, with its thornyAcanthodians twisted half round, as if still in the agony ofdissolution, and its Pterichthyes still extending their spear-like armsin the attitude of defence. The discovery enabled me to assign to theirtrue places the various ichthyolite beds of the district. Those in theimmediate neighborhood of the town, and a bed which abuts on the Lias atEathie, belong to the upper platform; while those which appear in EathieBurn, and along the shores at Navity, belong to the lower. The chiefinterest of the discovery, however, arises from the light which itthrows on the condition of the ancient ocean of the Lower Old Red, andon the extreme precariousness of the tenure on which the existence ofits numerous denizens was held. In a section of little more than ahundred yards there occur at least two platforms of violentdeath, --platforms inscribed with unequivocal evidence of two greatcatastrophes which over wide areas depopulated the seas. In the Old RedSandstone of Caithness there are many such platforms: storey rises overstorey; and the floor of each bears its closely-written record ofdisaster and sudden extinction. Pompeii in this northern locality liesover Herculaneum, and Anglano over both. We cease to wonder why thehigher order of animals should not have been introduced into a scene ofbeing that had so recently arisen out of chaos, and over which the reignof death so frequently returned. In a somewhat different sense from thatindicated by the poet of the "Seasons, "

 "As yet the trembling _year_ was unconfirmed, And _winter_ oft at eve resumed the gale. "

Lying detached in the stratified clay of the fish-beds, there occur inabundance single plates and scales of ichthyolites, which, as they canbe removed entire, and viewed on both sides, illustrate points in themechanism of the creatures to which they belonged that cannot be soclearly traced in the same remains when locked up in stone. There is avast deal of skilful carpentry exhibited--if carpentry I may term it--inthe coverings of these ancient ichthyolites. In the commoner fish of ourexisting seas the scales are so thin and flexible, --mere films ofhorn, --that there is no particularly nice fitting required in theirarrangement. The condition, too, through which portions of unprotectedskin may be presented to the water, as over and between the rays of thefins, and on the snout and lips, obviates many a mechanical difficultyof the earlier period, when it was a condition, as the remainsdemonstrate, that no bit of naked skin, should be exposed, and when thescales and plates were formed, not of thin horny films, but of solidpieces of bone. Thin slates lie on the roof of a modern dwelling, without any nice fitting;--they are scales of the modern construction:but it required much nice fitting to make thick flagstones lie on theroof of an ancient cathedral;--_they_, on the other hand, were scales ofthe ancient type. Again, it requires no ingenuity whatever, to sufferthe hands and face to go naked, --and such is the condition of ourexisting fish, with their soft skinny snouts and membranous fins; but tocover the hands with flexible steel gauntlets, and the face with such aniron mask as that worn by the mysterious prisoner of Louis XIV. , wouldrequire a very large amount of ingenuity indeed; and the ancientichthyolites of the Old Red were all masked and gauntleted. Now thedetached plates and scales of the stratified clay exhibit not a few ofthe mechanical contrivances through which the bony coverings of thesefish were made to unite--as in coats of old armor--great strength withgreat flexibility. The scales of the Osteolepis and Diplopterus I foundnicely bevelled atop and at one of the sides; so that where theyoverlapped each other, --for at the joints not a needle-point could beinsinuated, --the thickness of the two scales equalled but the thicknessof one scale in the centre, and thus an equable covering was formed. Ibrought with me some of these detached scales, and they now lie fittedtogether on the table before me, like pieces of complicated hewn workcarefully arranged on the ground ere the workman transfers them to theirplace on the wall. In the smaller-scaled fish, such as theCheiracanthus and Cheirolepis, a different principle obtained. Theminute glittering rhombs of bone were set thick on the skin, like thosesmall scales of metal sewed on leather, that formed an inferior kind ofarmor still in use in eastern nations, and which was partially used inour own country just ere the buff coat altogether superseded the coat ofmail. I found a beautiful piece of jaw in the clay, with the enamelledtusks bristling on its brightly enamelled edge, like iron teeth in aniron rake. Mr. Parkinson expresses some wonder, in his work on fossils, that in a fine ichthyolite in the British Museum, not only the teethshould have been preserved, but also the lips; but we now know enough ofthe construction of the more ancient fish, to cease wondering. The lipswere formed of as solid bone as the teeth themselves, and had as fair achance of being preserved entire; just as the metallic rim of a toothedwheel has as fair a chance of being preserved as the metallic teeth thatproject from it. I was interested in marking the various modes ofattachment to the body of the animal which the detached scales exhibit. The slater fastens on his slates with nails driven into the wood: thetiler secures his tiles by means of a raised bar on the under side ofeach, that locks into a corresponding bar of deal in the framework ofthe roof. Now in some of the scales I found the art of the tileranticipated; there were bars raised on their inner sides, to lay hold ofthe skin beneath; while in others it was the art of the slater that hadbeen anticipated, --the scales had been slates fastened down by longnails driven in slantwise, which were, however, mere prolongations ofthe scale itself. Great truths may be repeated until they becometruisms, and we fail to note what they in reality convey. The greattruth that all knowledge dwelt without beginning in the adorable Creatormust, I am afraid, have been thus common-placed in my mind; for atfirst it struck me as wonderful that the humble arts of the tiler andslater should have existed in perfection in the times of the Old RedSandstone. 

I had often remarked amid the fossiliferous limestones of the Lower OldRed, minute specks and slender veins of a glossy bituminous substancesomewhat resembling jet, sufficiently hard to admit of a tolerablepolish, and which emitted in the fire a bright flame, I had remarked, further, its apparent identity with a substance used by the ancientinhabitants of the northern part of the country in the manufacture oftheir rude ornaments, as occasionally found in sepulchral urns, such asbeads of an elliptical form, and flat parallelograms, perforatededge-wise by some four or five holes a-piece; but I had failed hithertoin detecting in the stone, portions of sufficient bulk for the formationof either the beads or the parallelograms. On this visit to theichthyolite beds, however, I picked up a nodule that inclosed a mass ofthe jet large enough to admit of being fashioned into trinkets of asgreat bulk as any of the ancient ones I have yet seen, and a portion ofwhich I succeeded in actually forming into a parallelogram, that couldnot have been distinguished from those of our old sepulchral urns. It isinteresting enough to think, that these fossiliferous beds, altogetherunknown to the people of the country for many centuries, and which, whenI first discovered them, some twelve or fourteen years ago, were equallyunknown to geologists, should have been resorted to for this substance, perhaps thousands of years ago, by the savage aborigines of thedistrict. But our antiquities of the remoter class furnish us withseveral such facts. It is comparatively of late years that we havebecome acquainted with the yellow chalk-flints of Banffshire andAberdeen; though before the introduction of iron into the country theyseem to have been well known all over the north of Scotland. I havenever yet seen a stone arrow-head found in any of the northernlocalities, that had not been fashioned out of this hard and splinterysubstance, --a sufficient proof that our ancestors, ere they had formedtheir first acquaintance with the metals, were intimately acquaintedwith at least the mechanical properties of the chalk-flint, and knewwhere in Scotland it was to be found. They were mineralogists enough, too, as their stone battle-axes testify, to know that the besttool-making rock is the axe-stone of Werner; and in some localities theymust have brought their supply of this rather rare mineral from greatdistances. A history of those arts of savage life, as shown in therelics of our earlier antiquities, which the course of discovery serevedthoroughly to supplant, but which could not have been carried on withouta knowledge of substances and qualities afterwards lost, untilre-discovered by scientific curiosity, would form of itself anexceedingly curious chapter. The art of the gun-flint maker (and it, too, promises soon to pass into extinction) is unquestionably a curiousone, but not a whit more curious or more ingenious than the artpossessed by the rude inhabitants of our country eighteen hundred yearsago, of chipping arrow-heads with an astonishing degree of neatness outof the same stubborn material. They found, however, that though flintmade a serviceable arrow-head, it was by much too brittle for an adze orbattle-axe; and sought elsewhere than among the Banffshire gravels forthe rock out of which these were to be wrought. Where they found it inour northern provinces I have not yet ascertained. It is but a shorttime since I came to know that they were beforehand with me in thediscovery of the bituminous jet of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, and wereexcavators among its fossiliferous beds. The vitrified forts of thenorth of Scotland give evidence of yet another of the obsolete arts. Before the savage inhabitants of the country were ingenious enough toknow the uses of mortar, or were furnished with tools sufficiently hardand solid to dress a bit of sandstone, they must have been acquaintedwith the _chemical_ fact, that with the assistance of fluxes, a pile ofstones could be fused into a solid wall, and with the _mineralogical_fact, that there are certain kinds of stones which yield much morereadily to the heat than others. The art of making vitrified forts wasthe art of making ramparts of rock through a knowledge of the lessobstinate earths and the more powerful fluxes. I have been informed byMr. Patrick Duff of Elgin, that he found, in breaking open a vitrifiedfragment detached from an ancient hill-fort, distinct impressions of theserrated kelp-weed of our shores, --the identical flux which, in itscharacter as the kelp of commerce, was so extensively used in ourglass-houses only a few years ago. 

I was struck, during my explorations at this time, as I had been oftenbefore, by the style of grouping, if I may so speak, which obtains amongthe Lower Old Red fossils. In no deposit with which I am acquainted, however rich in remains, have all its ichthyolites been found lyingtogether. The collector finds some one or two species very numerous;some two or three considerably less so, but not unfrequent; some one ortwo more, perhaps, exceedingly rare; and a few, though abundant in otherlocalities, that never occur at all. In the Cromarty beds, for instance, I never found a Holoptychius, and a Dipterus only once; the Diplopterusis rare; the Glyptolepis not common; the Cheirolepis and Pterichthysmore so, but not very abundant; the Cheiracanthus and Diplacanthus, onthe other hand, are numerous; and the Osteolepis and Coccosteus morenumerous still. But in other deposits of the same formation, though asimilar style of grouping obtains, the proportions are reversed withregard to species and genera: the fish rare in one locality abound inanother. In Banniskirk, for instance, the Dipterus is exceedinglycommon, while the Osteolepis and Coccosteus are rare, and theCheiracanthus and Cheirolepis seem altogether awanting. Again, in theMorayshire deposits, the Glyptolepis is abundant, and noble specimens ofthe Lower Old Red Holoptychius--of which more anon--are to be found inthe neighborhood of Thurso, associated with remains of the Diplopterus, Coccosteus, Dipterus, and Osteolepis. The fact may be deemed of somelittle interest by the geologist, and may serve to inculcate caution, byshowing that it is not always safe to determine regarding the place orage of subordinate formations from the per centage of certain fossilswhich they may be found to contain, or from the fact that they shouldwant some certain organisms of the system to which they belong, andpossess others. These differences may and do exist in contemporarydeposits; and I had a striking example, on this occasion, of theirdependence on a simple law of instinct, which is as active in producingthe same kind of phenomena now as it seems to have been in the earlierdays of the Old Red Sandstone. The Cromarty and Moray Friths, mottledwith fishing boats (for the bustle of the herring fishers had justbegun), stretched out before me. A few hundred yards from the shorethere was a yawl lying at anchor, with an old fisherman and a few boysangling from the stern for sillocks (the young of the coal-fish) and forsmall rock-cod. A few miles higher up, where the Cromarty Frith expandsinto a wide landlocked basin, with shallow sandy shores, there was asecond yawl engaged in fishing for flounders and small skate, --for suchare the kinds of fish that frequent the flat shallows of the basin. Aturbot-net lay drying in the sun: it served to remind me that some sixor eight miles away, in an opposite direction, there is a deep-sea bank, on which turbot, halibut, and large skate are found. Numerous boats werestretching down the Moray Frith, bound for the banks of a more distantlocality, frequented at this early stage of the herring fishing byshoals of herrings, with their attendant dog-fish and cod; and I knewthat in yet another deep-sea range there lie haddock and whiting banks. Almost every variety of existing fish in the two friths has its ownpeculiar habitat; and were they to be destroyed by some suddencatastrophe, and preserved by some geologic process, on the banks andshoals which they frequent, there would occur exactly the same phenomenaof grouping in the fossiliferous contemporaneous deposits which theywould thus constitute, as we find exhibited by the deposits of the LowerOld Red Sandstone. 

The remains of Holoptychius occur, I have said, in the neighborhood ofThurso. I must now add, that very singular remains they are, --full ofinterest to the naturalist, and, in great part at least, new to Geology. My readers, votaries of the stony science, must be acquainted with themasterly paper of Mr. Sedgwick and Sir R. Murchison "On the Old RedSandstone of Caithness and the North of Scotland generally, " which formspart of the second volume (second series) of the "Transactions of theGeological Society, " and with the description which it furnishes, amongmany others, of the rocks in the neighborhood of Thurso. Calcareo-bituminous flags, grits, and shales, of which the pavingflagstones of Caithness may be regarded as the general type, occur onthe shores, in reefs, crags, and precipices; here stretching along thecoast in the form of flat, uneven bulwarks: there rising over it insteep walls; yonder leaning to the surf, stratum against stratum, likeflights of stairs thrown down from their slant position to the level; insome places severed by faults; in others cast about in every possibledirection, as if broken and contorted by a thousand antagonistmovements; but in their general bearing rising towards the east, untilthe whole calcareo-bituminous schists of which this important member ofthe system is composed disappear under the red sandstones of DunnetHead. Such, in effect, is the general description of Mr. Sedgwick andSir R. Murchison, of the rocks in the neighborhood of Thurso. Itindicates further, that in at least three localities in the range thereoccur in the grits and shales, scales and impressions of fish. And suchwas the ascertained geology of the deposit when taken up last year by aningenious tradesman of Thurso, Mr. Robert Dick, whose patientexplorations, concentrated mainly on the fossil remains of this deposit, bid fair to add to our knowledge of the ichthyology of the Old RedSandstone. Let us accompany Mr. Dick in one of his exploratory rambles. The various organisms which he disinterred I shall describe fromspecimens before me, which I owe to his kindness, --the localities inwhich he found them, from a minute and interesting description, forwhich I am indebted to his pen. 

Leaving behind us the town at the bottom of its deep bay, we set out toexplore a bluff-headed parallelogramical promontory, bounded by ThursoBay on the one hand, and Murkle Bay on the other, and which presents tothe open sea, in the space that stretches between, an undulating line ofiron-bound coast, exposed to the roll of the northern ocean. We pass twostations in which the hard Caithness flagstones so well known incommerce are jointed by saws wrought by machinery. As is common in theOld Red Sandstone, in which scarce any stratum solid enough to be ofvalue to the workmen, whether for building or paving, contains goodspecimens, we find but little to detain us in the dark coherent bedsfrom which the flags are quarried. Here and there a few glitteringscales occur; here and there a few coprolitic patches; here and therethe faint impression of a fucoid; but no organism sufficiently entire tobe transferred to the bag. As we proceed outwards, however, and thefitful breeze comes laden with the keen freshness of the open sea, wefind among the hard dark strata in the immediate neighborhood of ThursoCastle, a paler-colored bed of fine-grained semi-calcareous stone, charged with remains in a state of coherency and keeping better fittedto repay the labor of the specimen-collector. The inclosing matrix iscomparatively soft: when employed in the neighboring fences as abuilding stone, we see it resolved by the skyey influences intowell-nigh its original mud; whereas the organisms which it contains arecomposed of a hard, scarce destructible substance, --bone steeped inbitumen; and the enamel on their outer surfaces is still as glossy andbright as the japan on a _papier-maché_ tray fresh from the hands of theworkman. Their deep black, too, contrasts strongly with the pale hue ofthe stone. They consist chiefly of scales, spines, dermal plates, snouts, skull-caps, and vegetable impressions. A little farther on, in athick bed interposed between two faults, the same kind of remains occurin the same abundance, largely mingled with scales and teeth ofHoloptychius, tuberculated plates, and coprolitic blotches; and furtheron still, in a rubbly flagstone, near where a little stream comestrotting merrily from the uplands to the sea, there occurskull-plates, --at least one of which has been disinterred entire, --largeand massy as the helmets of ancient warriors. We have now reached theouter point of the promontory, where the seaward wave, as it comesrolling unbroken from the Pole, crosses, in nearing the shore, theeastward sweep of the great Gulf-stream, and then casts itself headlongon the rocks. The view has been extending with almost every step we havetaken, and it has now expanded into a wide and noble prospect of oceanand bay, island and main, bold surf-skirted headlands, and greenretiring hollows. Yonder, on the one hand, are the Orkneys, rising dimand blue over the foam-mottled currents of the Pentland Frith; andyonder, on the other, the far-stretching promontory of Holborn Head, with the line of coast that sweeps along the opposite side of the bay;here sinking in abrupt flagstone precipices direct into the tide; therereceding in grassy banks formed of a dark blue diluvium. The fields anddwellings of living men mingle in the landscape with old episcopal ruinsand ancient burying-grounds; and yonder, well-nigh in the opening of theFrith, gleams ruddy to the sun, --a true blood-colored blush, when allaround is azure or pale, --the tall Red Sandstone precipices of DunnetHead. It has been suggested that the planet Mars may owe its red colorto the extensive development of some such formation as the Old RedSandstone of our own planet: the existing formation in Mars may, at thepresent time, it is said, be a Red Sandstone formation. It seems muchmore probable, however, that the red flush which characterizes the wholeof that planet, --its oceans as certainly as its continents, --should berather owing to some widely-diffused peculiarity of the surroundingatmosphere, than to aught peculiar in the varied surface of land andwater which that atmosphere surrounds; but certainly the extensiveexistence of such a red system might produce the effect. If the rocksand soils of Dunnet Head formed average specimens of those of our globegenerally, we could look across the heavens at Mars with a disk vastlymore rubicund and fiery than his own. The earth, as seen from the moon, would seem such a planet bathed in blood as the moon at its risingfrequently appears from the earth. 

We have rounded the promontory. The beds exposed along the coast to thelashings of the surf are of various texture and character, --here tough, bituminous, and dark; there of a pale hue, and so hard that they ring tothe hammer like plates of cast iron; yonder soft, unctuous, andgreen, --a kind of chloritic sandstone. And these very various powers ofresistance and degrees of hardness we find indicated by the roughirregularities of the surface. The softer parts retire in longtrench-like hollows, --the harder stand out in sharp irregular ridges. Fossils abound: the bituminous beds glitter bright with glossyquadrangular scales, that look like sheets of black mica inclosed ingranite. We find jaws, teeth, tubercled plates, skull-caps, spines, andfucoids, --"tombs among which to contemplate, " says Mr. Dick, "of whichHervey never dreamed. " The condition of complete keeping in which wediscover some of these remains, even when exposed to the incessant dashof the surf, seems truly wonderful. We see scales of Holoptychiusstanding up in bold relief from the hard cherty rock that has worn fromaround them, with all the tubercles and wavy ridges of their sculptureentire. This state of keeping seems to be wholly owing to the curiouschemical change that has taken place in their substance. Ere theskeleton of the Bruce, disinterred entire after the lapse of fivecenturies, was recommitted to the tomb, there were such measures takento secure its preservation, that were it to be again disinterred evenafter as many centuries more had passed, it might be found retainingunbroken its gigantic proportions. There was molten pitch poured overthe bones in a state of sufficient fluidity to permeate all theirpores, and fill up the central hollows, and which, soon hardening aroundthem, formed a bituminous matrix, in which they may lie unchanged formore than a thousand years. Now, exactly such was the process of keepingto which nature resorted with these skeletons of the Old Red Sandstone. The animal matter with which they were charged had been converted into ahard black bitumen. Like the bones of the Bruce, they are bones steepedin pitch; and so thoroughly is every pore and hollow still occupied, that, when cast into the fire, they flamed like torches. In one of thebeds at which we have now arrived Mr. Dick found the occipital plates ofa Holoptychius of gigantic proportions. The frontal plates measured fullsixteen inches across, and from the nape of the neck to a little abovethe place of the eyes, full eighteen; while a single plate belonging tothe lower part of the head measures thirteen and a half inches by sevenand a half. I have remarked, in my little work on the Old RedSandstone, --founding on a large amount of negative evidence, that amediocrity of size and bulk seems to have obtained among the fish of theLower Old Red, though in at least the Upper formation, a considerableincrease in both took place. A single piece of positive evidence, however, outweighs whole volumes of a merely negative kind. From theentire plate now in my possession, which is identical with one figuredin Mr. Noble of St. Madoes' specimen, and from the huge fragments of theupper plates now before me, some of which are full five-eighth parts ofan inch in thickness, I am prepared to demonstrate that thisHoloptychius of the Lower Old Red must have been at least thrice thesize of the _Holoptychius Nobilissimus_ of Clashbennie. 

Still we pass on, though with no difficulty, over the rough contortedcrags, worn by the surf into deep ruts and uneven ridges, gnarledprotuberances, and crater-like hollows. The fossiliferous beds arestill very numerous, and largely charged with remains. We see dermalbones, spines, scales, and jaws, projecting in high relief from thesea-worn surface of the ledges below, and from the weatherworn faces ofthe precipices above; for an uneven wall of crags some thirty or fortyfeet high, now runs along the shore. We have reached what seems a largemole, that sloping downwards athwart the beach from the precipices, likea huge boat-pier, runs far into the surf. We find it composed of asiliceous bed, so intensely compact and hard, that it has preserved itsproportions entire, while every other rock has worn from around it. Forcentury after century have the storms of the fierce north-west senttheir long ocean-nursed waves to dash against it in foam; for centuryafter century have the never-ceasing currents of the Pentland chafedagainst its steep sides, or eddied over its rough crest; and yet stilldoes it remain unwasted and unworn, --its abrupt wall retaining all itsformer steepness, and every angular jutting all the original sharpnessof edge. As we advance the scenery becomes wilder and more broken: herean irregular wall of rock projects from the crags towards the sea; therea dock-like hollow, in which the water gleams green, intrudes from thesea upon the crags; we pass a deep lime-encrusted cave, with whichtradition associates some wild legends, and which, from the supposedresemblance of the hanging stalactites to the entrails of a large animalwounded in the chase, bears the name of Pudding-Gno; and then, turningan angle of the coast, we enter a solitary bay, that presents at itsupper extremity a flat expanse of sand. Our walk is still oversepulchres charged with the remains of the long-departed. Scales ofHoloptychius abound, scattered like coin over the surface of the ledges. It would seem--to borrow from Mr. Dick--as if some old lord of thetreasury, who flourished in the days of the coal-money currency, hadtaken a squandering fit at Sanday Bay, and tossed the dingy contents ofhis treasure-chest by shovelfuls upon the rocks. Mr. Dick found in thislocality some of his finest specimens, one of which--the inner side ofthe skull-cap of a Holoptychius, with every plate occupying its properplace, and the large angular holes through which the eyes looked outstill entire--I trust to be able by and by to present to the public in agood engraving. There occur jaws, plates, scales spines, --the remains offucoids, too, of great size and in vast abundance. Mr. Dick hasdisinterred from among the rocks of Sanday Bay flattened carbonaceousstems four inches in diameter. We are still within an hour's walk ofThurso; but in that brief hour how many marvels have we witnessed!--howvast an amount of the vital mechanisms of a perished creation have wenot passed over! Our walk has been along ranges of sepulchres, greatlymore wonderful than those of Thebes or Petræa, and mayhap a thousandtimes more ancient. There is no lack of life along the shores of thesolitary little bay. The shriek of the sparrow-hawk mingles from thecliffs with the hoarse deep croak of the raven; the cormorant on somewave-encircled ledge, hangs out his dark wing to the breeze; the spotteddiver, plying his vocation on the shallows beyond, dives and thenappears, and dives and appears again, and we see the silver glitter ofscales from his beak; and far away in the offing the sunlight falls on ascull of seagulls, that flutter upwards, downwards, and athwart, now inthe air, thick as midges over some forest-brook in an evening ofmidsummer. 

But we again pass onwards, amid a wild ruinous scene of abrupt faults, detached fragments of rocks, and reversed strata: again the ledgesassume their ordinary position and aspect, and we rise from lower tohigher and still higher beds in the formation, --for such, as I havealready remarked, is the general arrangement from west to east, alongthe northern coast of Caithness, of the Old Red Sandstone. The greatConglomerate base of the formation we find largely developed at PortSkerry, just where the western boundary line of the county divides itfrom the county of Sutherland; its thick upper coping of sandstone wesee forming the tall cliffs of Dunnet Head; and the greater part of thespace between, nearly twenty miles as the crow flies, is occupiedchiefly by the shales, grits, and flagstones, which we have foundcharged so abundantly with the strangely-organized ichthyolites of thesecond stage of vertebrate existence. In the twenty intervening milesthere are many breaks and faults, and so there may be, of course, recurrences of the same strata, and re-appearances of the same beds;but, after making large allowance for partial foldings and repetitions, we must regard the development of this formation, with which the twentymiles are occupied, as truly enormous. And yet it is but one of threethat occur in a single system. We reach the long flat bay of Dunnet, andcross its waste of sands. The incoherent coils of the sand-worm liethick on the surface; and here a swarm of buzzing flies, disturbed bythe foot, rises in a cloud from some tuft of tangled sea-weed; and heremyriads of gray crustaceous sand-hoppers dart sidelong in the littlepools, or vault from the drier ridges a few inches into the air. Werethe trilobites of the Silurian system, --at one period, as their remainstestify, more than equally abundant, --creatures of similar habits? Wehave at length arrived at the tall sandstone precipices of Dunnet, withtheir broad decaying fronts of red and yellow; but in vain may we plyhammer and chisel among them: not a scale, not a plate, not even thestain of an imperfect fucoid appears. We have reached the upper boundaryof the Lower Old Red formation, and find it bordered by a desert devoidof all trace of life. Some of the characteristic types of the formationre-appear in the upper deposits; but though there is a reproduction ofthe original works in their more characteristic passages, if I may sospeak, many of the readings are diverse, and the editions are all new. 

It is one of the circumstances of peculiar interest with which Geologyat its present stage is invested, that there is no man of energy andobservation who may not rationally indulge in the hope of extending itslimits by adding to its facts. Mr. Dick, an intelligent tradesman ofThurso, agreeably occupies his hours of leisure, for a few months, indetaching from the rocks in his neighborhood their organic remains; andthus succeeds in adding to the existing knowledge of palæozoic life, bydisinterring ichthyolites which even Agassiz himself would delight tofigure and describe. Several of the specimens in my possession, which Iowe to the kindness of Mr. Dick, are so decidedly unique, that theywould be regarded as strangers in the completest geological museumsextant. It is a not uncurious fact, that when the Thurso tradesman waspursuing his labors of exploration among rocks beside the PentlandFrith, a man of similar character was pursuing exactly similar labors, with nearly similar results, among rocks of nearly the same era, thatbound, on the coast of Cornwall, the British Channel. When the one washammering in "Ready-money Cove, " the other, at the opposite end of theisland, was disturbing the echoes of "Pudding-Gno;" and scales, plates, spines, and occipital fragments of palæozoic fishes rewarded the laborsof both. In an article on the scientific meeting at York, which appearedin "Chambers' Journal" in the November of last year, the reading publicwere introduced to a singularly meritorious naturalist, Mr. CharlesPeach, [9] a private in the mounted guard (preventive service), stationed on the southern coast of Cornwall, who has made severalinteresting discoveries on the outer confines of the animal kingdom, that have added considerably to the list of our British zoöphites andechinodermata. The article, a finely-toned one, redolent of thatpleasing sympathy which Mr. Robert Chambers has ever evinced withstruggling merit, referred chiefly to Mr. Peach's labors as anaturalist; but he is also well known in the geological field. 

CHAPTER XII. 

 Ichthyolite Beds of Clune and Lethenbarn--Limestone Quarry--Destruction of Urns and Sarcophagi in the Lime-kiln--Nodules opened--Beautiful coloring of the Remains--Patrick Duff's Description--New Genus of Morayshire Ichthyolite described--Form and size of the Nodules or Stone Coffins--Illustration from Mrs. Marshall's Cements--Forest of Darnaway--The Hill of Berries--Sluie--Elgin--Outliers of the Weald and the Oölite--Description of the Weald at Linksfield--Mr. Duff's _Lepidotus minor_--Eccentric Types of Fish Scales--Visit to the Sandstones of Scat-Craig--Fine suit of Fossils at Scat-Craig--True graveyard Bones, not mere Impressions--Varieties of pattern--The Diker's "Carved Flowers"--_Stagonolepis_, a new genus--Termination of the Ramble. 

My term of furlough was fast drawing to a close. It was now Wednesdaythe 14th August, and on Monday the 19th it behooved me to be seated atmy desk in Edinburgh. I took boat, and crossed the Moray Frith fromCromarty to Nairn, and then walked on, in a very hot sun, overShakspeare's Moor to Boghole, with the intention of examining theichthyolite beds of Clune and Lethenbarn, and afterwards striking acrossthe country to Forres, through the forest of Darnaway, where the forestabuts on the Findhorn, at the picturesque village of Sluie. When I hadlast crossed the moor, exactly ten years before, it was in a tremendousstorm of rain and wind; and the dark platform of heath and bog, with itsold ruinous castle standing sentry over it, seemed greatly more worthyof the genius of the dramatist, as cloud after cloud dashed over it, like ocean waves breaking on some low volcanic island, than it did onthis clear, breathless afternoon, in the unclouded sunshine. But thesublimity of the moor on which Macbeth met the witches depends in nodegree on that of the "heath near Forres, " whether seen in foul weatheror fair; its topography bears relation to but the mind of Shakspeare;and neither tile-draining nor the plough will ever lessen an inch of itsarea. 

The limestone quarry of Clune has been opened on the edge of anextensive moor, about three miles from the public road, where theprovince of Moray sweeps upwards from the broad fertile belt ofcorn-land that borders on the sea, to the brown and shaggy interior. There is an old-fashioned bare-looking farm-house on the one side, surrounded by a few uninclosed patches of corn; and the moorland, heredark with heath, there gray with lichens, stretches away on the other. The quarry itself is merely a piece of moor that has been trenched tothe depth of some five or six feet from the surface, and that presents, at the line where the broken ground leans against the ground stillunbroken, a low uneven frontage, somewhat resembling that of a ruinousstone-fence. It has been opened in the outcrop of an ichthyolite bed ofthe Lower Old Red Sandstone, on which in this locality the thin moorysoil immediately rests, without the intervention of the common boulderclay of the country; and the fish-enveloping nodules, which are composedin this bed of a rich limestone, have been burnt, for a considerablenumber of years, for the purposes of the agriculturist and builder. There was a kiln smoking this evening beside the quarry; and afew laborers were engaged with shovel and pickaxe in cutting intothe stratified clay of the unbroken ground, and throwing up itsspindle-shaped nodules on the bank, as materials for their nextburning. Antiquaries have often regretted that the sculptured marbleof Greece and Egypt, --classic urns, to whose keeping the ashes ofthe dead had been consigned, and antique sarcophagi, roughened withhieroglyphics, --should have been so often condemned to the lime-kiln bythe illiterate Copt or tasteless Mohammedan; and I could not helpexperiencing a somewhat similar feeling here. The urns and sarcophagi, many times more ancient than those of Greece and Egypt, and that toldstill more wondrous stories, lay thickly ranged in this strangecatacomb, --so thickly, that there were quite enough for the lime-kilnand the geologists too; but I found the kiln got all, and this at a timewhen the collector finds scarce any fossils more difficult to procurethan those of the Lower Old Red Sandstone. I asked one of the laborerswhether he did not preserve some of the better specimens, in the hope offinding an occasional purchaser. Not now, he said: he used to preservethem in the days of Lady Cumming of Altyre; but since her ladyship'sdeath, no one in the neighborhood seemed to care for them, and strangersrarely came the way. 

The first nodule I laid open contained a tolerably well-preservedCheiracanthus; the second, an indifferent specimen of Glyptolepis; andthree others, in succession, remains of Coccosteus. Almost every noduleof one especial layer near the top incloses its organism. The coloringis frequently of great beauty. In the Cromarty, as in the Caithness, Orkney, and Gamrie specimens, the animal matter with which the boneswere originally charged has been converted into a dark glossy bitumen, and the plates and scales glitter from a ground of opaque gray, likepieces of japan-work suspended against a rough-cast wall. But here, asin the other Morayshire deposits, the plates and scales exist in nearlytheir original condition, as bone that retains its white color in thecentre of the specimens, where its bulk is greatest, and is oftenbeautifully tinged at its thinner edges by the iron with which the stoneis impregnated. It is not rare to find some of the better preservedfossils colored in a style that reminds one of the more gaudy fishes ofthe tropics. We see the body of the ichthyolite, with its finelyarranged scales, of a pure snow-white. Along the edges, where theoriginal substance of the bone, combining with the oxide of the matrix, has formed a phosphate of iron, there runs a delicately shaded band ofplum-blue; while the out-spread fins, charged still more largely withthe oxide, are of a deep red. The description of Mr. Patrick Duff, inhis "Geology of Moray, " so redolent of the quiet enthusiasm of the truefossil-hunter, especially applies to the ichthyolites of this quarry, and to those of a neighboring opening in the same bed, --the quarry ofLethenbarn. "The nodules, " says Mr. Duff, "which in their external shaperesemble the stones used in the game of curling, but are ellipticalbodies instead of round, lie in the shale on their flat sides, in a linewith the dip. When taken out, they remind one of water-worn pebbles, orrather boulders of a shore. A smart blow on the edge splits them alongon the major axis, and exposes the interesting inclosure. The practisedgeologist knows well the thrilling interest attending the breaking up ofthe nodule: the uninitiated cannot sympathize with it. There is no timewhen a fossil looks so well as when first exposed. There is a clammymoisture on the surface of the scales or plates, which brings out thebeautiful coloring, and adds brilliancy to the enamel. Exposure to theweather soon dims the lustre; and even in a cabinet an old specimen iseasily known by its tarnished aspect. "

I found at Clune no ichthyolite to which the geologists have not beenalready introduced, or with which I had not been acquainted previouslyin the Cromarty beds. The Lower Old Red of Morayshire furnishes, however, at least one genus not yet figured nor described, and of which, so far as I am aware, only a single specimen has yet been found. Itseems to have been a small delicately-formed fish; its head covered withplates; its body with round scales of a size intermediate between thoseof the Osteolepis and Cheiracanthus; its anterior dorsal fin placed, asin the Dipterus, Diplopterus, and Glyptolepis, directly opposite to itsventral fins; the enamelled surfaces of the minute scales were frettedwith microscopic undulating ridges, that radiated from the centre to thecircumference; similar furrows traversed the occipital plates; and thefins, unfurnished with spines, were formed, as in the Dipterus andDiplopterus, of thick-set, enamelled rays. The posterior fins and tailof the creature were not preserved. I may mention, for the satisfactionof the geologist, that I saw this unique fossil in the possession of thelate Lady Cumming of Altyre, a few weeks previous to the lamented deathof her ladyship; and that, on assuring her it was as new in relation tothe Cromarty and Caithness fish-beds as to those of Moray, she intimatedan intention of forthwith sending a drawing of it to Agassiz; but heruntimely decease in all probability interfered with the design, and Ihave not since heard of this new genus of ichthyolite, or of herladyship's interesting specimen, hitherto apparently its onlyrepresentative and memorial. In the Morayshire, as in the Cromarty beds, the limestone nodules take very generally the form of the fish whichthey inclose: they are stone coffins, carefully moulded to express theoutline of the corpses within. Is the fish entire?--the nodule is of aspindle form, broader at the head and narrower at the tail. Is itslightly curved, in the attitude of violent death?--the nodule has alsoits slight curve. Is it bent round, so that the extremities of thecreature meet?--the nodule, in conformity with the outline, is circular. Is it disjointed and broken?--the nodule is correspondingly irregular. In nine cases out of ten, the inclosing coffin, like that of an oldmummy, conforms to the outline of the organism which it incloses. It isfurther worthy of remark, too, that a large fish forms generally alarge nodule, and a small fish a small one. Here, for instance, is anodule fifteen inches in length, here a nodule of only three inches, andhere a nodule of intermediate size, that measures eight inches. We findthat the large nodule contains a Cheirolepis thirteen inches in length, the small one a Diplacanthus of but two and a half inches in length, andthe intermediate one a Cheiracanthus of seven inches. The size of thefish evidently regulated that of the nodule. The coffin is generally asgood a fit in size as in form; and the bulk of the nodule bears almostalways a definite proportion to the amount of animal matter round whichit had formed. I was a good deal struck, a few weeks ago, in glancingover a series of experiments conducted for a different purpose by a ladyof singular ingenuity, --Mrs. Marshall, the inventor and patentee of thebeautiful marble-looking plaster, _Intonacco_, --to find what seemed asimilar principle illustrated in the compositions of her variouscements. These are all formed of a basis of lime, mixed in certainproportions with organic matter. The reader must be familiar withcements of this kind long known among the people, and much used in therepairing of broken pottery, such as a cement compounded of quicklimemade of oyster shells, mixed up with a glue made of skim-milk cheese, and another cement made also of quicklime mixed up with the whites ofeggs. In Mrs. Marshall's cements, the organic matter is variouslycompounded of both animal and vegetable substances, while the earthgenerally employed is sulphate of lime; and the result is aclose-grained marble-like composition, considerably harder than thesulphate in its original crystalline state. She had deposited, in oneset of her experiments, the calcareous earth, mixed up with sand, clay, and other extraneous matters, on some of the commoner molluscs of ourshores; and universally found that the mass, incoherent everywhereelse, had acquired solidity wherever it had been permeated by theanimal matter of the molluscs. Each animal, in proportion to its size, is found to retain, as in the fossiliferous spindles of the Old RedSandstone, its coherent nodule around it. One point in the naturalphenomenon, however, still remains unillustrated by the experiments ofMrs. Marshall. We see in them the animal matter giving solidity to thelime in immediate contact with it; but we do not see it possessing anysuch affinity for it as to form, in an argillaceous compound, like thatof the ichthyolite beds, a centre of attraction powerful enough to drawtogether the lime diffused throughout the mass. It still remains for thegeologic chemist to discover on what principle masses of animal mattershould form the attracting nuclei of limestone nodules. 

The declining sun warned me that I had lingered rather longer than wasprudent among the ichthyolites of Clune; and so, striking in an easterndirection across a flat moor, through which I found the schistose gneissof the district protruding in masses resembling half-buried boulders, Ientered the forest of Darnaway. There was no path, and much underwood, and I enjoyed the luxury of steering my course, out of sight of road andlandmark, by the sun, and of being not sure at times whether I had skillenough to play the part of the bush-ranger under his guidance. A sultryday had clarified and cooled down into a clear, balmy evening; the slantbeam was falling red on a thousand tall trunks, --here gleaming alongsome bosky vista, to which the white silky wood-moths, fluttering byscores, and the midge and the mosquito dancing by myriads, imparted amotty gold-dust atmosphere; there penetrating in straggling rays farinto some gloomy recess, and resting in patches of flame, amid thedarkness, on gnarled stem, or moss-cushioned stump, or gray beard-likelichen. I dislodged, in passing through the underwood, many a tinytenant of the forest, that had a better right to harbor among its wildraspberries and junipers than I had to disturb them, --velvetynight-moths, that had sat with folded wings under the leaves, awaitingthe twilight, and that now took short blind flights of some two or threeyards, to get out of my way, --and robust, well-conditioned spiders, whose elastic, well-tightened lines snapped sharp before me as I pressedthrough, and then curled up on the scarce perceptible breeze, likebroken strands of wool. But every man, however Whiggish in hisinclinations, entertains a secret respect for the powerful; and though Ipassed within a few feet of a large wasps' nest, suspended to a juttingbough of furze, the wasps I took especial care _not_ to disturb. Ipressed on, first through a broad belt of the forest, occupied mainly bymelancholy Scotch firs; next through an opening, in which I found anAmerican-looking village of mingled cottages, gardens, fields and wood;and then through another broad forest-belt, in which the ground is morevaried with height and hollow than in the first, and in which I foundonly forest trees, mostly oaks and beeches. I heard the roar of theFindhorn before me, and premised I was soon to reach the river; butwhether I should pursue it upwards or downwards, in order to find theferry at Sluie, was more than I knew. There lay in my track a beautifulhillock, that reclines on the one side to the setting sun, and sinkssheer on the other, in a mural sandstone precipice, into the Findhorn. The trees open over it, giving full access to the free air and thesunshine; and I found it as thickly studded over with berries as if ithad been the special care of half a dozen gardeners. The red light fellyet redder on the thickly inlaid cranberries and stone-brambles of theslope, and here and there, though so late in the season, on a patch ofwild strawberries; while over all, dark, delicate blueberries, withtheir flour-bedusted coats, were studded as profusely as if they hadbeen peppered over it by a hailstone cloud. I have seldom seen such aschool-boy's paradise, and I was just thinking what a rare discovery Iwould have deemed it had I made it thirty years sooner, when I heard awhooping in the wood, and four little girls, the eldest scarcely eleven, came bounding up to the hillock, their lips and fingers already dyedpurple, and dropped themselves down among the berries with a shout. Theywere sadly startled to find they had got a companion in so solitary arecess; but I succeeded in convincing them that they were in no mannerof danger from him; and on asking whether there was any of them skilfulenough to show me the way to Sluie, they told me they all lived there, and were on their way home from school, which they attended at thevillage in the forest. Hours had elapsed since the master had _let themgo_, but in so fine an evening the berries wouldn't, and so they werestill in the wood. I accompanied them to Sluie, and was ferried over theriver in a salmon coble. There is no point where the Findhorn, celebrated among our Scotch streams for the beauty of its scenery, is sogenerally interesting as in the neighborhood of this village; forest andriver, --each a paragon in its kind, --uniting for several miles togetherwhat is most choice and characteristic in the peculiar features of both. In no locality is the surface of the great forest of Darnaway moreundulated, or its trees nobler; and nowhere does the river present alivelier succession of eddying pools and rippling shallows, or fretitself in sweeping on its zig-zag course, now to the one bank, now tothe other, against a more picturesque and imposing series of cliffs. Butto the geologist the locality possesses an interest peculiar to itself. The precipices on both sides are charged with fossils of the Upper OldRed Sandstone: they form part of a vast indurated graveyard, excavatedto the depth of an hundred feet by the ceaseless wear of the stream; andwhen the waters are low, the teeth-plates and scales of ichthyolites, all of them specifically different from those of Clune and Lethenbarn, and most of them generically so, may be disinterred from the strata inhandfuls. But the closing evening left me neither light nor time for thework of exploration. I heard the curfew in the woods from the yetdistant town, and dark night had set in long ere I reached Forres. Onthe following morning I took a seat in one of the south coaches, and goton to Elgin an hour before noon. 

Elgin, one of the finest of our northern towns, occupies the centre of arichly fossiliferous district, which wants only better sections to rankit among the most interesting in the kingdom. An undulating platform ofOld Red Sandstone, in which we see, largely developed in one locality, the lower formation of the Coccosteus, and in another, still morelargely, the upper formation of the _Holoptychius Nobilissimus_, forms, if I may so speak, the foundation deposit of the district, --the truegeologic plane of the country; and, thickly scattered over this plane, we find numerous detached knolls and patches of the Weald and theOölite, deposited like heaps of travelled soil, or of lime shot down bythe agriculturist on the surface of a field. The Old Red platform ismottled by the outliers of a comparatively modern time: the sepulchralmounds of later races, that lived and died during the reptile age of theworld, repose on the surface of an ancient burying-ground, charged withremains of the long anterior age of the fish; and over all, as a generalcovering, rest the red boulder-clay and the vegetable mould. Mr. Duff, in his valuable "Sketch of the Geology of Moray, " enumerates fiveseveral localities in the neighborhood of Elgin in which there occuroutliers of the Weald; though, of course, in a country so flat, and inwhich the diluvium lies deep, we cannot hold that all have beendiscovered. And though the outliers of the Oölite have not yet beenascertained to be equally numerous, they seem of greater extent; theisolated masses detached from them by the denuding agencies lie thickover extensive areas; and in working out the course of improvement whichhas already rendered Elginshire the garden of the north, the ditcher atone time touches on some bed of shale charged with the characteristicAmmonites and Belemnites of the system, and at another on somecalcareous sandstone bed, abounding with its Pectens, its Plagiostoma, and its Pinnæ. Some of these outliers, whether Wealden or Oölitic, areexternally of great beauty. They occur in the parish of Lhanbryde, aboutthree miles to the east of Elgin, in the form of green pyramidalhillocks, mottled with trees, and at Linksfield, as a confluent group ofswelling grassy mounds. And from their insulated character, and theabundance of organisms which they inclose, they serve to remind one ofthose green pyramids of Central America in which the traveller findsdeposited the skeleton remains of extinct races. It has been suggestedby Mr. Duff, in his "Sketch, "--a suggestion which the lateSutherlandshire discoveries of Mr. Robertson of Inverugie have tended toconfirm, --that the Oölite and Weald of Moray do not, in all probability, represent consecutive formations: they seem to bear the same sort ofrelation to each other as that mutually borne by the Mountain Limestoneand the Coal Measures. The one, of lacustrine or of estuary origin, exhibits chiefly the productions of the land and its fresh waters; theother, as decidedly of marine origin, is charged with the remains ofanimals whose proper home was the sea. But the productions, thoughdissimilar, were in all probability contemporary, just as the crabs andperiwinkles of the Frith of Forth are contemporary with the frogs andlymnea of Flanders moss. 

I had little time for exploration in the neighborhood of Elgin; but thatlittle, through the kindness of my friend Mr. Duff, I was enabled toeconomize. We first visited together the outlier of the Weald atLinksfield. It may be found rising in the landscape, a short mile belowthe town, in the form of a green undulating hillock, half cut through bya limestone quarry; and the section thus furnished is of great beauty. The basis on which the hillock rests is formed of the well-markedcalcareous band in the Upper Old Red, known as the Cornstone, which wefind occurring here, as elsewhere, as a pale concretionary limestone ofconsiderable richness, though in some patches largely mixed with a greenargillaceous earth, and in others passing into a siliceous chert. Overthe pale-colored base, the section of the hillock is ribbed like anonyx: for about forty feet, bands of gray, green, and blue claysalternate with bands of cream-colored, light-green, and dark-bluelimestones; and over all there rests a band of the red boulder-clay, capped by a thin layer of vegetable mould. It is a curious circumstance, well fitted to impress on the geologist the necessity of cautiousinduction, that the boulder-clay not only _overlies_, but also_underlies_, this fresh-water deposit; a bed of unequivocally the sameorigin and character with that at the top lying intercalated, as iffilling up two low flat vaults, between the upper surface of theCornstone and the lower band of the Weald. It would, however, be asunsafe to infer that this intervening bed is older than the overlyingones, as to infer that the rubbish which chokes up the vaulted dungeonof an old castle is more ancient than the arch that stretches over it. However introduced into the cavity which it occupies, --whether byland-springs or otherwise, --we find it containing fragments of the greenand pale limestones that lie above, just as the rubbish of the castledungeon might be found to contain fragments of the castle itself. Whenthe bed of red boulder-clay was intercalated, the rocks of the overlyingWealden were exactly the same sort of indurated substances that they arenow, and were yielding to the operations of some denuding agent. Thealternating clays and limestones of this outlier, each of which musthave been in turn an upper layer at the bottom of some lake or estuary, are abundantly fossiliferous. In some the fresh-water character of thedeposit is well marked: Cyprides are so exceedingly numerous in some ofthe bands, that they impart to the stone an Oölitic appearance; whileothers of a dark-colored limestone we see strewed over, like the oozybottom of a modern lake, with specimens of what seem Paludina, Cyclas, and Planorbus. Some of the other shells are more equivocal: a Mytilus orModiola, which abounds in some of the bands, may have been either a seaor a fresh-water shell; and a small oyster and Astarte seem decidedlymarine. Remains of fish are very abundant, --scales, plates, teeth, ichthyodorulites, and in some instances entire ichthyolites. I saw, inthe collection of Mr. Duff, a small but very entire specimen of_Lepidotus minor_, with the fins spread out on the limestone, as in ananatomical preparation, and almost every plate and scale in its place. Some of his specimens of ichthyodorulites, too, are exceedinglybeautiful, and of great size, resembling jaws thickly set with teeth, the apparent teeth being mere knobs ranged along the concave edge of thebone, the surface of which we see gracefully fluted and enamelled. Whatmost struck me, however, in glancing over the drawers of Mr. Duff, wasthe character of the Ganoid scales of this deposit. The Ganoid order inthe days of the Weald was growing old; and two new orders, --the Ctenoidand Cycloid, --were on the eve of taking its place in creation. Hithertoit had comprised at least two-thirds of all the fish that had existedever since the period in which fish first began; and almost every Ganoidfish had its own peculiar pattern of scale. But it would now seem as ifwell nigh all the simpler patterns were exhausted, and as if, in orderto give the variety which nature loves, forms of the most eccentrictypes had to be resorted to. With scarce any exception save thatfurnished by the scales of the _Lepidotus minor_, which are plainlozenge-shaped plates, thickly japanned, the forms are strangely complexand irregular, easily expressible by the pencil, but beyond the reach ofthe pen. The remains of reptiles have been found occasionally, thoughrarely, in this outlier of the Weald, --the vertebra of a Plesiosaurus, the femur of some Chelonian reptile, and a large fluted tooth, supposedSaurian. 

I would fain have visited some of the neighboring outliers of theOölite, but time did not permit. Mr. Duff's collection, however, enabledme to form a tolerably adequate estimate of their organic contents. Viewed in the group, these present nearly the same aspect as theorganisms of the Upper Lias of Pabba. There is in the same abundancelarge Pinnæ, and well-relieved Pectens, both ribbed and smooth; the sameabundance, too, of Belemnites and Ammonites of resembling type. Both theMoray outliers and the Pabba deposit have their Terebratulæ, Gervilliæ, Plagiostoma, Cardiadæ, their bright Ganoid scales, and theirimperfectly-preserved lignites. They belong apparently to nearly thesame period, and must have been formed in nearly similarcircumstances, --the one on the western, the other on the eastern coastof a country then covered by the vegetation of the Oölite, and nowknown, with reference to an antiquity of but yesterday, as the ancientkingdom of Scotland. I saw among the Ammonites of these outliers atleast one species, which, I believe, has not yet been found elsewhere, and which has been named, after Mr. Robertson of Inverugie, thegentleman who first discovered it, _Ammonites Robertsoni_. Like most ofthe genus to which it belongs, it is an exceedingly beautiful shell, with all its whorls free and gracefully ribbed, and bearing on its back, as its distinguishing specific peculiarity, a triple keel. I spent theevening of this day in visiting, with Mr. Duff, the Upper Old RedSandstones of Scat-Craig. In Elginshire, as in Fife and elsewhere, theUpper Old Red consists of three grand divisions, --a superior bed of paleyellow sandstone, which furnishes the finest building-stone anywherefound in the north of Scotland, --an intermediate calcareous bed, knowntechnically as the Cornstone, --and an inferior bed of sandstone, chiefly, in this locality, of a grayish-red color, and generally veryincoherent in its structure. The three beds, as shown by the fossilcontents of the yellow sandstones above, and of the grayish-redsandstones below, are members of the same formation, --a formation which, in Scotland at least, does not possess an organism in common with theMiddle Old Red formation; that of the Cephalaspis, as developed inForfarshire, Stirling, and Ayr, or the Lower Old Red formation; that ofthe Coccosteus, as developed in Caithness, Cromarty, Inverness, andBanff shires, and in so many different localities in Moray. TheSandstones at Scat-Craig belong to the grayish-red base of the Upper OldRed formation. They lie about five miles south of Elgin, not far distantfrom where the palæozoic deposits of the coast-side lean against thegreat primary nucleus of the interior. We pass from the town, throughdeep rich fields, carefully cultivated and well inclosed: the country, as we advance on the moorlands, becomes more open; the homely cottagetakes the place of the neat villa; the brown heath, of the grassy lea;and unfenced patches of corn here and there alternate with plantings ofdark sombre firs, in their mediocre youth. At length we near thesouthern boundary of the landscape, --an undulating moory ridge, partially planted; and see where a deep gap in the outline opens a wayto the upland districts of the province, a lively hill-stream descendingtowards the east through the bed which it has scooped out for itself ina soft red conglomerate. The section we have come to explore lies alongits course: it has been the grand excavator in the densely occupiedburial-ground over which it flows; but its labors have produced but ashallow scratch after all, --a mere ditch, some ten or twelve feet deep, in a deposit the entire depth of which is supposed greatly to exceed ahundred fathoms. The shallow section, however, has been well wrought;and its suit of fossils is one of the finest, both from the greatspecific variety which they exhibit, and their excellent state ofkeeping, that the Upper Old Red Sandstone has anywhere furnished. 

So great is the incoherency of the matrix, that we can dig into it withour chisels, unassisted by the hammer. It reminds us of the loosegravelly soil of an ancient graveyard, partially consolidated by anight's frost, --a resemblance still further borne out by the conditionand appearance of its organic contents. The numerous bones disseminatedthroughout the mass do not exist, as in so many of the Upper Old RedSandstone rocks, as mere films or impressions, but in their originalforms, retaining bulk as well as surface: they are true graveyard bones, which may be detached entire from the inclosing mass, and of which, werewe sufficiently well acquainted with the anatomy of the long-perishedraces to which they belonged, entire skeletons might be reconstructed. I succeeded in disinterring, during my short stay, an occipital plate ofgreat beauty, fretted on its outer surface by numerous tubercles, confluent on its anterior part, and surrounded on its posterior portion, where they stand detached, by punctulated markings. I found also a finescale of _Holoptychius Nobilissimus_, and a small tooth, bent somewhatlike a nail that had been drawn out of its place by two oppositewrenches, and from the internal structure of which Professor Owen hasbestowed on the animal to which it belonged the generic name Dendrodus. I have ascertained, however, through the indispensable assistance of Mr. George Sanderson, that the genus Holoptychius of Agassiz, named from apeculiarity in the sculpture of the scale, is the identical genusDendrodus of Professor Owen, named from a peculiarity in the structureof the teeth. Those teeth of the genus Holoptychius, whether of theLower or Upper Old Red, that belong to the second or _reptile_ row withwhich the creature's jaws were furnished, present in the cross sectionthe appearance of numerous branches, like those of trees, radiating froma centre like spokes from the nave of a wheel; and their arborescentaspect suggested to the Professor the name Dendrodus. It seems trulywonderful, when one but considers it, to what minute and obscureramifications the variety of pattern, specific and generic, which natureso loves to preserve, is found to descend. We see great diversity ofmode and style in the architecture of a city built of brick; but whilethe houses are different, the bricks are always the same. It is not soin nature. The bricks are as dissimilar as the houses. We find, forinstance, those differences, specific and generic, that obtain amongfishes, both recent and extinct, descending to even the microscopicstructure of their teeth. There is more variety of pattern, --in mostcases of very elegant pattern, --in the sliced fragments of the teeth ofthe ichthyolites of a single formation, than in the carved blocks of anextensive calico-print yard. Each species has its own distinct pattern, as if in all the individuals of which it consisted the same block hadbeen employed to stamp it; each genus has its own general _type_ ofpattern, as if the same inventive idea, variously altered and modified, had been wrought upon in all. In the genus Dendrodus, for instance, itis the generic type, that from a central nave there should radiate, spoke-like, a number of leafy branches; but in the several species, thebranches, if I may so express myself, belong to different shrubs, andpresent dissimilar outlines. There are no repetitions of earlierpatterns to be found among the generically different ichthyolites ofother formations. We see in the world of fashion old modes of ornamentcontinually reviving: the range of invention seems limited; and we findit revolving, in consequence, in an irregular, ever-returning cycle. ButInfinite resource did not need to travel in a circle, and so we find noreturn or doublings in its course. It has appeared to me, that anargument against the transmutation of species, were any such needed, might be founded on those inherent peculiarities of structure that areascertained thus to pervade the entire texture of the framework ofanimals. If we find one building differing from another merely inexternal form, we have no difficulty in conceiving how, by additions andalterations, they might be made to present a uniform appearance;transmutation, development, progression, --if one may use suchterms, --seem possible in such circumstances. But if the buildings differfrom each other, not only in external form, but also in every brick andbeam, bolt and nail, no mere scheme of external alteration can induce areal resemblance. Every brick must be taken down, and every beam andbelt removed. The problem cannot be wrought by the remodelling of an oldhouse: there is no other mode of solving it save by the erection of anew one. 

Among the singularly interesting Old Red fossils of Mr. Duff'scollection I saw the impression of a large ichthyolite from the superioryellow sandstone of the Upper Old Red, which had been brought him by acountry diker only a few days before. In breaking open a building stone, the diker had found the inside of it, he said, covered over withcuriously carved flowers; and, knowing that Mr. Duff had a turn forcuriosities, he had brought the flowers to him. The supposed flowers arethe sculpturings on the scales of the ichthyolite; and, true to theanalogy of the diker, on at least a first glance, they may be held toresemble the rather equivocal florets of a cheap wall-paper, or of anornamental tile. The specimen exhibits the impressions of four rows ofoblong rectangular scales. One row contains seven of these, and anothereight. Each scale averages about an inch and a quarter in length, byabout three quarters of an inch in breadth; and the parallelogramicalfield which it presents is occupied by a curious piece of carving. By asort of pictorial illusion, the device appears as if in motion: it wouldseem as if a sudden explosion had taken place in the middle of thefield, and as if the numerous dislodged fragments, propelled all aroundby the central force, were hurrying to the sides. But these seemingfragments were not elevations in the original scale, but depressions. They almost seem as if they had been indented into it, in the way onesees the first heavy drops of a thunder shower indented into a platformof damp sea sand; and this last peculiarity of appearance seems to havesuggested the name which this sole representative of an extinct genushas received during the course of the last few weeks from Agassiz. AnElgin gentleman forwarded to Neufchatel a singularly fine calotype ofthe fossil, taken by Mr. Adamson of Edinburgh, with a full-size drawingof a few of the scales; and from the calotype and the drawing thenaturalist has decided that the genus is entirely new, and thathenceforth it shall bear the descriptive name of Stagonolepis, ordrop-scale. As I looked for the first time on this broken fragment of anichthyolite, --the sole representative and record of an entire genus ofcreatures that had been once called into existence to fulfil some wisepurpose of the Creator long since accomplished, --I bethought me ofRogers's noble lines on the Torso, --

 "And dost thou still, thou mass of breathing stone, (Thy giant limbs to night and chaos hurled) Still sit as on the fragment of a world, Surviving all?"

Here, however, was a still more wonderful Torso than that of thedismembered Hercules, which so awakened the enthusiasm of the poet. Strange peculiarities of being, --singular habits, curious instincts, thehistory of a race from the period when the all-producing Word had spokenthe first individuals into being, until, in circumstances unfitted fortheir longer existence, or in some great annihilating catastrophe, thelast individuals perished, --were all associated with this piece ofsculptured stone; but, like some ancient inscription of the desert, written in an unknown character and dead tongue, its dark meanings werefast locked up, and no inhabitant of earth possessed the key. Does thatkey anywhere exist, save in the keeping of Him who knows all andproduced all, and to whom there is neither past nor future? Or is therea record of creation kept by those higher intelligences, --the first-bornof spiritual natures, --whose existence stretches far into the eternitythat has gone by, and who possess, as their inheritance, the whole ofthe eternity to come? We may be at least assured, that nothing can betoo low for angels to remember, that was not too low for God to create. 

I took coach for Edinburgh on the following morning; for with my visitto Scat-Craig terminated the explorations of my Summer Ramble. Duringthe summer of the present year I have found time to follow up some ofthe discoveries of the last. In the course of a hasty visit to theisland of Eigg, I succeeded in finding _in situ_ reptile remains of thekind which I had found along the shores in the previous season, indetached water-rolled masses. The deposit in which they occur lies deepin the Oölite. In some parts of the island there rest over italternations of beds of trap and sedimentary strata, to the height ofmore than a thousand feet; but in the line of coast which intervenesbetween the farm-house of Keill and the picturesque shieling describedin my fifth chapter, it has been laid bare by the sea immediately underthe cliffs, and we may see it jutting out at a low angle from among theshingle and rolled stones of the beach for several hundred feettogether, charged everywhere with the teeth, plates, and scales ofGanoid fishes, and somewhat more sparingly, with the ribs, vertebræ, anddigital bones of saurians. But a full description of this interestingdeposit, as its discovery belongs to the Summer Ramble of a year, theramblings of which are not yet completed, must await some future time. 

CHAPTER XIII. 

SUPPLEMENTARY. 

 Supplementary--Isolated reptile Remains in Eigg--Small Isles revisited--The Betsey again--Storm bound--Tacking--Becalmed--Medusæ caught and described--Rain--A Shoal of Porpoises--Change of Weather--The bed-ridden Woman--The Poor Law Act for Scotland--Geological Excursion--Basaltic Columns--Oölitic Beds--Abundance of Organic Remains--Hybodus Teeth--Discovery of reptile Remains _in situ_--Musical Sand of Laig re-examined--Explanation suggested--Sail for Isle Ornsay--Anchored Clouds--A Leak sprung--Peril of the Betsey--At work with Pump and Pails--Safe in Harbor--Return to Edinburgh. 

It is told of the "Spectator, " on his own high authority, that having"read the controversies of some great men concerning the antiquities ofEgypt, he made a voyage to Grand Cairo, on purpose to take the measureof a pyramid, and that, so soon as he had set himself right in thatparticular, he returned to his native country with great satisfaction. "My love of knowledge has not carried me altogether so far, chiefly, Idare say, because my voyaging opportunities have not been quite sogreat. Ever since my ramble of last year, however, I have felt, I amafraid, a not less interest in the geologic antiquities of Small Islesthan that cherished by "Spectator" with respect to the comparativelymodern antiquities of Egypt; and as, in a late journey to these islandsthe object of my visit involved but a single point, nearly as insulatedas the dimensions of a pyramid, I think I cannot do better than sheltermyself under the authority of the short-faced gentleman who wrotearticles in the reign of Queen Anne. I had found in Eigg, inconsiderable abundance and fine keeping, reptile remains of the Oölite;but they had occurred in merely rolled masses, scattered along thebeach. I had not discovered the bed in which they had been originallydeposited, and could neither tell its place in the system, nor itsrelation to the other rocks of the island. The discovery was but ahalf-discovery, --the half of a broken medal, with the date on themissing portion. And so, immediately after the rising of the GeneralAssembly in June last [1845], I set out to revisit Small Isles, accompanied by my friend Mr. Swanson, with the determination ofacquainting myself with the burial-place of the old Oölitic reptiles, ifit lay anywhere open to the light. 

We found the Betsey riding in the anchoring ground at Isle Ornsay, inher foul-weather dishabille, with her topmast struck and in the yard, and her cordage and sides exhibiting in their weathered aspect theinfluence of the bleaching rains and winds of the previous winter. Shewas at once in an undress and getting old, and, as seen from the shorethrough rain and spray, --for the weather was coarse and boisterous, --shehad apparently gained as little in her good looks from eithercircumstance as most other ladies do. We lay storm-bound for three daysat Isle Ornsay, watching from the window of Mr. Swanson's dwelling theincessant showers sweeping down the loch. On the morning of Saturday, the gale, though still blowing right ahead, had moderated; the ministerwas anxious to visit this island charge, after his absence of severalweeks from them at the Assembly; and I, more than half afraid that myterm of furlough might expire ere I had reached my proposed scene ofexploration, was as anxious as he; and so we both resolved, come whatmight, on doggedly beating our way adown the Sound of Sleat to SmallIsles. If the wind does not fail us, said my friend, we have littlemore than a day's work before us, and shall get into Eigg aboutmidnight. We had but one of our seamen aboard, for John Stewart wasengaged with his potato crop at home; but the minister was content, inthe emergency, to rank his passenger as an able-bodied seaman; and so, hoisting sail and anchor, we got under way, and, clearing the loch, struck out into the Sound. 

We tacked in long reaches for several hours, now opening up insuccession the deep withdrawing lochs of the mainland, now clearingpromontory after promontory in the island district of Sleat. In a fewhours we had left a bulky schooner, that had quitted Isle Ornsay at thesame time, full five miles behind us; but as the sun began to decline, the wind began to sink; and about seven o'clock, when we were nearlyabreast of the rocky point of Sleat, and about half-way advanced in ourvoyage, it had died into a calm; and for full twenty hours thereafterthere was no more sailing for the Betsey. We saw the sun set, and theclouds gather, and the pelting rain come down, and nightfall, andmorning break, and the noon-tide hour pass by, and still were wefloating idly in the calm. I employed the few hours of the Saturdayevening that intervened between the time of our arrest and nightfall, infishing from our little boat for medusæ with a bucket. They had risen bymyriads from the bottom as the wind fell, and were mottling the greendepths of the water below and around far as the eye could reach. Amongthe commoner kinds, --the kind with the four purple rings on the area ofits flat bell, which ever vibrates without sound, and the kind with thefringe of dingy brown, and the long stinging tails, of which I havesometimes borne from my swimming excursions the nettle-like smart forhours, --there were at least two species of more unusual occurrence, bothof them very minute. The one, scarcely larger than a shilling, bore thecommon umbiliferous form, but had its area inscribed by a prettyorange-colored wheel; the other, still more minute, and which presentedin the water the appearance of a small hazel-nut of a brownish-yellowhue, I was disposed to set down as a species of beroe. On getting onecaught, however, and transferred to a bowl, I found that thebrownish-colored, melon-shaped mass, though ribbed like the beroe, didnot represent the true outline of the animal; it formed merely thecentre of a transparent gelatinous bell, which, though scarce visible ineven the bowl, proved a most efficient instrument of motion. Such wereits contractile powers, that its sides nearly closed at every stroke, behind the opaque orbicular centre, like the legs of a vigorous swimmer;and the animal, unlike its more bulky congeners, --that, despite theirslow but persevering flappings, seemed greatly at the mercy of the tide, and progressed all one way, --shot, as it willed, backwards, forwards, orathwart. As the evening closed, and the depths beneath presented adingier and yet dingier green, until at length all had become black, thedistinctive colors of the acelpha, --the purple, the orange, and thebrown, --faded and disappeared, and the creatures hung out, instead, their pale phosphoric lights, like the lanterns of a fleet hoisted highto prevent collision in the darkness. Now they gleamed dim andindistinct as they drifted undisturbed through the upper depths, and nowthey flamed out bright and green, like beaten torches, as the tidedashed them against the vessel's sides. I bethought me of the gorgeousdescription of Coleridge, and felt all its beauty:--

 "They moved in tracks of shining white, And when they reared, the elfish light Fell off in hoary flakes. Within the shadow of the ship I watched their rich attire, -- Blue, glassy green, and velvet black: They curled, and swam, and every track Was a flash of golden fire. "

A crew of three, when there are watches to set, divides wofully ill. Asthere was, however, nothing to do in the calm, we decided that our firstwatch should consist of our single seaman, and the second of theminister and his friend. The clouds, which had been thickening forhours, now broke in torrents of rain, and old Alister got into hiswater-proof oil-skin and souwester, and we into our beds. The seams ofthe Betsey's deck had opened so sadly during the past winter, as to beno longer water-tight, and the little cabin resounded drearily in thedarkness, like some dropping cave, to the ceaseless patter of theleakage. We continued to sleep, however, somewhat longer than weought, --for Alister had been unwilling to waken the minister; but we atlength got up, and, relieving watch the first from the tedium of beingrained upon and doing nothing, watch the second was set to do nothingand be rained upon in turn. We had drifted during the night-time on akindly tide, considerably nearer our island, which we could now seelooming blue and indistinct through the haze some seven or eight milesaway. The rain ceased a little before nine, and the clouds rose, revealing the surrounding lands, island and main, --Rum, with its abruptmountain-peaks, --the dark Cuchullins of Skye, --and, far to thesouth-east, where Inverness bounds on Argyllshire, some of the tallesthills in Scotland, --among the rest, the dimly-seen Ben-Wevis. But longwreaths of pale gray cloud lay lazily under their summits, like shroudshalf drawn from off the features of the dead, to be again spread overthem, and we concluded that the dry weather had not yet come. A littlebefore noon we were surrounded for miles by an immense butthinly-spread shoal of porpoises, passing in pairs to the south, toprosecute, on their own behalf, the herring fishing in Lochfine orGareloch; and for a full hour the whole sea, otherwise so silent, becamevocal with long-breathed blowings, as if all the steam-tenders of allthe railways in Britain were careering around us; and we could seeslender jets of spray rising in the air on every side, and glossy blackbacks and pointed fins, that looked as if they had been fashioned out ofKilkenny marble, wheeling heavily along the surface. The clouds againbegan to close as the shoal passed, but we could now hear in thestillness the measured sound of oars, drawn vigorously against thegunwale in the direction of the island of Eigg, still about five milesdistant, though the boat from which they rose had not yet come in sight. "Some of my poor people, " said the minister, "coming to tug us ashore!"We were boarded in rather more than half an hour after, --for the soundsin the dead calm had preceded the boat by miles, --by four active youngmen, who seemed wonderfully glad to see their pastor; and then, amid thethickening showers, which had recommenced heavy as during the night, they set themselves to tow us into the harbor. The poor fellows had along and fatiguing pull, and were thoroughly drenched ere, about sixo'clock in the evening, we had got up to our anchoring ground, andmoored, as usual, in the open tideway between _Eilan Chasteil_ and themain island. There was still time enough for an evening discourse, andthe minister, getting out of his damp clothes, went ashore and preached. 

The evening of Sunday closed in fog and rain, and in fog and rain themorning of Monday arose. The ceaseless patter made dull music on deckand skylight above, and the slower drip, drip, through the leaky beams, drearily beat time within. The roof of my bed was luckily water-tight;and I could look out from my snuggery of blankets on the desolations ofthe leakage, like Bacon's philosopher surveying a tempest from theshore. But the minister was somewhat less fortunate, and had no littletrouble in diverting an ill-conditioned drop that had made a dead set athis pillow. I was now a full week from Edinburgh, and had seen and donenothing; and, were another week to pass after the same manner, --as, foraught that appeared, might well happen, --I might just go home again, asI had come, with my labor for my pains. In the course of the afternoon, however, the weather unexpectedly cleared up, and we set out somewhatimpatiently through the wet grass, to visit a cave a few hundred yardsto the west of _Naomh Fraingh_, in which it had been said theProtestants of the island might meet for the purposes of religiousworship, were they to be ejected from the cottage erected by Mr. Swanson, in which they had worshipped hitherto. We reëxamined, in thepassing, the pitch stone dike mentioned in a former chapter, and thecharnel cave of Frances; but I found nothing to add to my formerdescriptions, and little to modify, save that perhaps the cave appearedless dark, in at least the outer half of its area, than it had seemed tome in the former year, when examined by torch-light, and that thestraggling twilight, as it fell on the ropy sides, green with moss andmould, and on the damp bone-strewn floor, overmantled with a stilldarker crust, like that of a stagnant pool, seemed also to wear its tintof melancholy greenness, as if transmitted through a depth of sea-water. The cavern we had come to examine we found to be a noble arched openingin a dingy-colored precipice of augitic trap, --a cave roomy and lofty asthe nave of a cathedral, and ever resounding to the dash of the sea; butthough it could have amply accommodated a congregation of at least fivehundred, we found the way far too long and difficult for at least theweak and the elderly, and in some places inaccessible at full flood; andso we at once decided against the accommodation which it offered. Butits shelter will, I trust, scarce be needed. 

On our return to the Betsey, we passed through a straggling group ofcottages on the hill-side, one of which, the most dilapidated andsmallest of the number, the minister entered, to visit a poor old woman, who had been bed-ridden for ten years. Scarce ever before had I seen somiserable a hovel. It was hardly larger than the cabin of the Betsey, and a thousand times less comfortable. The walls and roof, formed ofdamp grass-grown turf, with a few layers of unconnected stone in thebasement tiers, seemed to constitute one continuous hillock, slopingupwards from foundation to ridge, like one of the lesser moraines ofAgassiz, save where the fabric here and there bellied outwards orinwards, in perilous dilapidation, that seemed but awaiting the firstbreeze. The low chinky door opened direct into the one wretchedapartment of the hovel, which we found lighted chiefly by holes in theroof. The back of the sick woman's bed was so placed at the edge of theopening, that it had formed at one time a sort of partition to theportion of the apartment, some five or six feet square, which containedthe fire-place; but the boarding that had rendered it such had longsince fallen away, and it now presented merely a naked rickety frame tothe current of cold air from without. Within a foot of the bed-riddenwoman's head there was a hole in the turf-wall, which was, we saw, usually stuffed with a bundle of rags, but which lay open as we entered, and which furnished a downward peep of sea and shore, and the rocky_Eilan Chasteil_, with the minister's yacht riding in the channel hardby. The little hole in the wall had formed the poor creature's onlycommunication with the face of the external world for ten weary years. She lay under a dingy coverlet, which, whatever its original hue, hadcome to differ nothing in color from the graveyard earth, which must sosoon better supply its place. What perhaps first struck the eye was thestrange flatness of the bed-clothes, considering that a human body laybelow: there seemed scarce bulk enough under them for a human skeleton. The light of the opening fell on the corpse-like features of thewoman, --sallow, sharp, bearing at once the stamp of disease and offamine; and yet it was evident, notwithstanding, that they had once beenagreeable, --not unlike those of her daughter, a good-looking girl ofeighteen, who, when we entered, was sitting beside the fire. Neithermother nor daughter had any English; but it was not difficult todetermine, from the welcome with which the minister was greeted from thesick-bed, feeble as the tones were, that he was no unfrequent visitor. He prayed beside the poor creature, and, on coming away, slippedsomething into her hand. I learned that not during the ten years inwhich she had been bed-ridden had she received a single farthing fromthe proprietor, nor, indeed, had any of the poor of the island, and thatthe parish had no session-funds. I saw her husband a few days after, --anold worn-out man, with famine written legibly in his hollow cheek andeye, and on the shrivelled frame, that seemed lost in his tattereddress; and he reiterated the same sad story. They had no means ofliving, he said, save through the charity of their poor neighbors, whohad so little to spare; for the parish or the proprietor had never giventhem anything. He had once, he added, two fine boys, both sailors, whohad helped them; but the one had perished in a storm off the Mull ofCantyre, and the other had died of fever when on a West India voyage;and though their poor girl was very dutiful, and staid in their crazyhut to take care of them in their helpless old age, what other could shedo in a place like Eigg than just share with them their sufferings? Ithas been recently decided by the British Parliament, that in cases ofthis kind the starving poor shall not be permitted to enter the lawcourts of the country, there to sue for a pittance to support life, until an intermediate newly-erected court, alien to the Constitution, before which they must plead at their own expense, shall have firstgiven them permission to prosecute their claims. And I doubt not thatmany of the English gentlemen whose votes swelled the majority, and madeit such, are really humane men, friendly to an equal-handed justice, andwho hold it to be the peculiar glory of the Constitution, as well shownby De Lolme, that it has not one statute-book for the poor, and anotherfor the rich, but the same law and the same administration of law forall. They surely could not have seen that the principle of their PoorLaw Act for Scotland sets the pauper beyond the pale of the Constitutionin the first instance, that he may be starved in the second. Thesuffering paupers of this miserable island cottage would have all theirwants fully satisfied in the grave, long ere they could establish attheir own expense, at Edinburgh, their claim to enter a court of law. Iknow not a fitter case for the interposition of our lately formed"Scottish Association for the Protection of the Poor" than that of thismiserable family; and it is but one of many which the island of Eiggwill be found to furnish. 

After a week's weary waiting, settled weather came at last; and themorning of Tuesday rose bright and fair. My friend, whose absence at theGeneral Assembly had accumulated a considerable amount of ministeriallabor on his hands, had to employ the day professionally; and as JohnStewart was still engaged with his potato crop, I was necessitated tosally out on my first geological excursion alone. In passingvessel-wards, on the previous year, from the _Ru Stoir_ to thefarm-house of Keill, along the escarpment under the cliffs, I hadexamined the shores somewhat too cursorily during the one-half of myjourney, and the closing evening had prevented me from exploring themduring the other half at all; and I now set myself leisurely to retracethe way backwards from the farm-house to the _Stoir_. I descended to thebottom of the cliffs, along the pathway which runs between Keill and thesolitary midway shieling formerly described, and found that the basalticcolumns over head, which had seemed so picturesque in the twilight, lostnone of their beauty when viewed by day. They occur in forms the mostbeautiful and fantastic; here grouped beside some blind opening in theprecipice, like pillars cut round the opening of a tomb, on somerock-front in Petræa; there running in long colonnades, or rising intotall porticoes; yonder radiating in straight lines from some commoncentre, resembling huge pieces of fan-work, or bending out in boldcurves over some shaded chasm, like rows of crooked oaks projecting fromthe steep sides of some dark ravine. The various beds of which thecliffs are composed, as courses of ashlar compose a wall, are of verydifferent degrees of solidity: some are of hard porphyritic or basaltictrap; some of soft Oölitic sandstone or shale. Where the columns rest ona soft stratum, their foundations have in many places given way, andwhole porticoes and colonnades hang perilously forward in totteringruin, separated from the living rock behind by deep chasms. I saw one ofthese chasms, some five or six feet in width, and many yards in length, that descended to a depth which the eye could not penetrate; and anotherpartially filled up with earth and stones, through which, along a darkopening not much larger than a chimney-vent, the boys of the island finda long descending passage to the foot of the precipice, and emerge intolight on the edge of the grassy talus half-way down the hill. Itreminded me of the tunnel in the rock through which Imlac opened up away of escape to Rasselas from the happy valley, --the "subterraneanpassage, " begun "where the summit hung over the middle part, " and that"issued out behind the prominence. "

From the commencement of the range of cliffs, on half-way to theshieling, I found the shore so thickly covered up by masses of trap, thedebris of the precipices above, that I could scarce determine the natureof the bottom on which they rested. I now, however, reached a part ofthe beach where the Oölitic beds are laid bare in thin party-coloredstrata, and at once found something to engage me. Organisms in vastabundance, chiefly shells and fragmentary portions of fishes, lieclosely packed in their folds. One limestone bed, occurring in a darkshale, seems almost entirely composed of a species of small oyster; andsome two or three other thin beds, of what appears to be either aspecies of small Mytilus or Avicula, mixed up with a few shellsresembling large Paludina, and a few more of the gaper family, soclosely resembling existing species, that John Stewart and Alister atonce challenged them as _smurslin_, the Hebridean name for a well-knownshell in these parts, --the _Mya truncata_. The remains offishes, --chiefly Ganoid scales and the teeth of Placoids, --lie scatteredamong the shells in amazing abundance. On the surface of a singlefragment, about nine inches by five, which I detached from one of thebeds, and which now lies before me, I reckon no fewer than twenty-fiveteeth, and twenty-two on the area of another. They are of very variousforms, --some of them squat and round, like ill-formed smallshot, --others spiky and sharp, not unlike flooring nails, --some straightas needles, some bent like the beak of a hawk, --some, like the palatalteeth of the Acrodus of the Lias, resemble small leeches; some, bearinga series of points ranged on a common base, like masts on the hull of avessel, the tallest in the centre, belong to the genus Hybodus. There isa palpable approximation in the teeth of the leech-like form to theteeth with the numerous points. Some of the specimens show the sameplicated structure common to both; and on some of the leech backs, if Imay so speak, there are protuberant knobs, that indicate the places ofthe spiky points on the hybodent teeth. I have got three of each kindslit up by Mr. George Sanderson, and the internal structure appears tobe the same. A dense body of bone is traversed by what seem innumerableroots, resembling those of woody shrubs laid bare along the sides ofsome forest stream. Each internal opening sends off on every side itsmyriads of close-laid filaments; and nowhere do they lie so thickly asin the line of the enamel, forming, from the regularity with which theyare arranged, a sort of framing to the whole section. It is probablethat the Hybodus, --a genus of shark which became extinct some time aboutthe beginning of the chalk, --united, like the shark of Port Jackson, acrushing apparatus of palatal teeth to its lines of cutting ones. Amongthe other remains of these beds I found a dense fragment of bone, apparently reptilian, and a curious dermal plate punctulated withthick-set depressions, bounded on one side by a smooth band, andaltogether closely resembling some saddler's thimble that had been cutopen and straightened. 

Following the beds downwards along the beach, I found that one of thelowest which the tide permitted me to examine, --a bed colored with atinge of red, --was formed of a denser limestone than any of the others, and composed chiefly of vast numbers of small univalves resemblingNeritæ. It was in exactly such a rock I had found, in the previous year, the reptile remains; and I now set myself, with no little eagerness, toexamine it. One of the first pieces I tore up contained a well-preservedPlesiosaurian vertebra; a second contained a vertebra and a rib; and, shortly after, I disinterred a large portion of a pelvis. I had atlength found, beyond doubt, the reptile remains _in situ_. The bed inwhich they occur is laid bare here for several hundred feet along thebeach, jutting out at a low angle among boulders and gravel, and thereptile remains we find embedded chiefly in its under side. It lies lowin the Oölite. All the stratified rocks of the island, with theexception of a small Liasic patch, belong to the Lower Oölite, and thereptile-bed occurs deep in the base of the system, --low in its relationto the nether division, in which it is included. I found it nowhererising to the level of high-water mark. It forms one of the foundationtiers of the island, which, as the latter rises over the sea in someplaces to the height of about fourteen hundred feet, its upper peaks andridges must overlie the bones, making allowance for the dip, to thedepth of at least sixteen hundred. Even at the close of the Oöliticperiod this sepulchral stratum must have been a profoundly ancient one. In working it out, I found two fine specimens of fish jaws, stillretaining their ranges of teeth;--ichthyodorulites, --occipital plates ofvarious forms, either reptile or ichthyic, --Ganoid scales, of nearly thesame varieties of pattern as those in the Weald of Morayshire, --and thevertebræ and ribs, with the digital, pelvic, and limb-bones, ofsaurians. It is not unworthy of remark, that in none of the beds of thisdeposit did I find any of the more characteristic shells of thesystem, --Ammonites, Belemnites, Gryphites, or Nautili. 

I explored the shores of the island on to the _Ru Stoir_, and thence tothe Bay of Laig; but though I found detached masses of the reptile bedoccurring in abundance, indicating that its place lay not far beyond thefall of ebb, in no other locality save the one described did I find itlaid bare. I spent some time beside the Bay of Laig in reëxamining themusical sand, in the hope of determining the peculiarities on which itssonorous qualities depended. But I examined, and cross-examined it invain. I merely succeeded in ascertaining, in addition to my previousobservations, that the loudest sounds are elicited by drawing the handslowly through the incoherent mass, in a segment of a circle, at thefull stretch of the arm, and that the vibrations which produce themcommunicate a peculiar titillating sensation to the hand or foot bywhich they are elicited, extending in the foot to the knee, and in thehand to the elbow. When we pass the wet finger along the edge of anale-glass partially filled with water, we see the vibrations thicklywrinkling the surface: the undulations which, communicated to the air, produce sound, render themselves, when communicated to the water, visible to the eye; and the titillating feeling seems but a modificationof the same phenomenon acting on the nerves and fluids of the leg orarm. It appears to be produced by the wrinklings of the vibrations, if Imay so speak, passing along sentient channels. The sounds willultimately be found dependent, I am of opinion, though I cannot yetexplain the principle, on the purely quartzose character of the sand, and the friction of the incoherent upper strata against under stratacoherent and damp. I remained ten days in the island, and went over allmy former ground, but succeeded in making no further discoveries. 

On the morning of Wednesday, June 25th, we set sail for Isle Ornsay, with a smart breeze from the north-west. The lower and upper sky wastolerably clear, and the sun looked cheerily down on the deep blue ofthe sea; but along the higher ridges of the land there lay long levelstrata of what the meteorologists distinguish as parasitic clouds. Whenevery other patch of vapor in the landscape was in motion, scuddingshorewards from the Atlantic before the still-increasing gale, thererested along both the Scuir of Eigg and the tall opposite ridge of theisland, and along the steep peaks of Rum, clouds that seemed as ifanchored, each on its own mountain-summit, and over which the galefailed to exert any propelling power. They were stationary in the middleof the rushing current, when all else was speeding before it. It hasbeen shown that these parasitic clouds are mere local condensations ofstrata of damp air passing along the mountain-summits, and renderedvisible but to the extent in which the summits affect the temperature. Instead of being stationary, they are ever-forming and ever-dissipatingclouds, --clouds that form a few yards in advance of the condensing hill, and that dissipate a few yards after they have quitted it. I had nothingto do on deck, for we had been joined at Eigg by John Stewart; and so, after watching the appearance of the stationary clouds for some littletime, I went below, and, throwing myself into the minister's largechair, took up a book. The gale meanwhile freshened, and freshened yetmore; and the Betsey leaned over till her lee chain-plate lay along inthe water. There was the usual combination of sounds beneath and aroundme, --the mixture of guggle, clunk, and splash, --of low, continuous rush, and bluff, loud blow, which forms in such circumstances the voyager'sconcert. I soon became aware, however, of yet another species of sound, which I did not like half so well, --a sound as of the washing of ashallow current over a rough surface; and, on the minister coming below, I asked him, tolerably well prepared for his answer, what it mightmean. "It means, " he said, "that we have sprung a leak, and a rather badone; but we are only some six or eight miles from the Point of Sleat, and must soon catch the land. " He returned on deck, and I resumed mybook. Presently, however, the rush became greatly louder; some otherweak patch in the Betsey's upper works had given way, and anon the watercame washing up from the lee side along the edge of the cabin floor. Igot upon deck to see how matters stood with us; and the minister, easingoff the vessel for a few points, gave instant orders to shorten sail, inthe hope of getting her upper works out of the water, and then to unshipthe companion ladder, beneath which a hatch communicated with the lowstrip of hold under the cabin, and to bring aft the pails. We loweredour foresail; furled up the mainsail half-mast high; John Stewart tookhis station at the pump; old Alister and I, furnished with pails, tookours, the one at the foot, the other at the head, of the companion, tohand up and throw over; a young girl, a passenger from Eigg to themainland, lent her assistance, and got wofully drenched in the work;while the minister, retaining his station at the helm, steered right on. But the gale had so increased, that, notwithstanding our diminishedbreadth of sail, the Betsey, straining hard in the rough sea, still layin to the gunwale; and the water, pouring in through a hundred openingchinks in her upper works, rose, despite of our exertions, high overplank, and beam, and cabin-floor, and went dashing against beds andlockers. She was evidently filling, and bade fair to terminate all hervoyagings by a short trip to the bottom. Old Alister, a seaman of thirtyyears' standing, whose station at the bottom of the cabin stairs enabledhim to see how fast the water was gaining on the Betsey, but not how theBetsey was gaining on the land, was by no means the least anxious amongus. Twenty years previous he had seen a vessel go down in exactlysimilar circumstances, and in nearly the same place, and thereminiscence, in the circumstances, seemed rather an uncomfortable one. It had been a bad evening, he said, and the vessel he sailed in, and asloop, her companion, were pressing hard to gain the land. The sloop hadsprung a leak, and was straining, as if for life and death, under apress of canvas. He saw her outsail the vessel to which he belonged, but, when a few shots a-head she gave a sudden lurch, and disappearedfrom the surface instantaneously as a vanishing spectre, and neithersloop nor crew were ever more heard of. 

There are, I am convinced, few deaths less painful than some of thoseuntimely and violent ones at which we are most disposed to shudder. Wewrought so hard at pail and pump, --the occasion, too, was one of so muchexcitement, and tended so thoroughly to awaken our energies, --that I wasconscious, during the whole time, of an exhilaration of spirits ratherpleasurable than otherwise. My fancy was active, and active, strange asthe fact may seem, chiefly with ludicrous objects. Sailors tellregarding the flying Dutchman, that he was a hard-headed captain ofAmsterdam, who, in a bad night and head wind, when all the other vesselsof his fleet were falling back on the port they had recently quitted, obstinately swore that, rather than follow their example, he would keepbeating about till the day of judgment. And the Dutch captain, says thestory, was just taken at his word, and is beating about still. Whenmatters were at the worst with us, we got under the lea of the point ofSleat. The promontory interposed between us and the roll of the sea; thewind gradually took off; and, after having seen the water gaining fastand steadily on us for considerably more than an hour, we, in turn, began to gain on the water. It came ebbing out of drawers and beds, andsunk downwards along pannels and table-legs, --a second retiring deluge;and we entered Isle Ornsay with the cabin-floor all visible, and lessthan two feet water in the hold. On the following morning, taking leaveof my friend the minister, I set off, on my return homewards, by theSkye steamer, and reached Edinburgh on the evening of Saturday. 

 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST;

 OR, TEN THOUSAND MILES OVER THE FOSSILIFEROUS DEPOSITS OF SCOTLAND. 

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST;

OR, TEN THOUSAND MILES OVER THE FOSSILIFEROUS DEPOSITS OF SCOTLAND. [10]

CHAPTER I. 

 Embarkation--A foundered Vessel--Lateness of the Harvest dependent on the Geological character of the Soil--A Granite Harvest and an Old Red Harvest--Cottages of Redstone and of Granite--Arable Soil of Scotland the result of a Geological Grinding Agency--Locality of the Famine of 1846--Mr. Longmuir's Fossils--Geology necessary to a Theologian--Popularizers of Science when dangerous--"Constitution of Man, " and "Vestiges of Creation"--Atop of the Banff Coach--A Geologist's Field Equipment--The trespassing "Stirk"--Silurian Schists inlaid with Old Red--Bay of Gamrie how formed--Gardenstone--Geological Free-masonry illustrated--How to break an Ichthyolite Nodule--An old Rhyme mended--A raised Beach--Fossil Shells--Scotland under water at the time of the Boulder Clays. 

From circumstances that in no way call for explanation, my usualexploratory ramble was thrown this year (1847) from the middle of Julyinto the middle of September; and I embarked at Granton for the northjust as the night began to count hour against hour with the day. Theweather was fine, and the voyage pleasant. I saw by the way, however, atleast one melancholy memorial of a hurricane which had swept the easterncoasts of the island about a fortnight before, and filled the provincialnewspapers with paragraphs of disaster. Nearly opposite where the RedHead lifts its mural front of Old Red Sandstone a hundred yards over thebeach, the steamer passed a foundered vessel, lying about a mile and ahalf off the land, with but her topmast and the point of her peak overthe surface. Her vane, still at the mast-head, was drooping in the calm;and its shadow, with that of the fresh-colored _spar_ to which it wasattached, white atop and yellow beneath, formed a well-definedundulatory strip on the water, that seemed as if ever in the process ofbeing rolled up, and yet still retained its length unshortened. Everyrecession of the swell showed a patch of mainsail attached to the peak:the sail had been hoisted to its full stretch when the vessel went down. And thus, though no one survived to tell the story of her disaster, enough remained to show that she had sprung a leak when straining in thegale, and that, when staggering under a press of canvas towards thestill distant shore, where, by stranding her, the crew had hoped to saveat least their lives, she had disappeared with a sudden lurch, and allaboard had perished. I remembered having read, among other memorabiliaof the hurricane, without greatly thinking of the matter, that "a largesloop had foundered off the Red Head, --name unknown. " But the minuteportion of the wreck which I saw rising over the surface, to certify, like some frail memorial in a churchyard, that the dead lay beneath, hadan eloquence in it which the words wanted, and at once sent theimagination back to deal with the stern realities of the disaster, andthe feelings abroad to expatiate over saddened hearths and melancholyhomesteads, where for many a long day the hapless perished would bemissed and mourned, but where the true story of their fate, though toosurely guessed at, would never be known. 

The harvest had been early; and on to the village of Stonehaven, and amile or two beyond, where the fossiliferous deposits end and the primarybegin, the country presented from the deck only a wide expanse ofstubble. Every farm-steading we passed had its piled stack-yard; and thefields were bare. But the line of demarcation between the Old RedSandstone and the granitic districts formed also a separating linebetween an earlier and later harvest; the fields of the less kindlysubsoil derived from the primary rocks were, I could see, still speckledwith sheaves; and, where the land lay high, or the exposure wasunfavorable, there were reapers at work. All along in the course of myjourney northward from Aberdeen I continued to find the country coveredwith shocks, and laborers employed among them; until, crossing the Spey, I entered on the fossiliferous districts of Moray; and then, as in thesouth, the champaign again showed a bare breadth of stubble, with hereand there a ploughman engaged in turning it down. The traveller bidsfarewell at Stonehaven to not only the Old Red Sandstone and theearly-harvest districts, but also to the rich wheat-lands of thecountry, and does not again fairly enter upon them until, aftertravelling nearly a hundred miles, he passes from Banffshire into theprovince of Moray. He leaves behind him at the same line thewheat-fields and the cottages built of red stone, to find only barleyand oats, and here and there a plot of rye, associated with cottages ofgranite and gneiss, hyperstene and mica schist; but on crossing theSpey, the red cottages reäppear, and fields of rich wheat-land spreadout around them, as in the south. The circumstance is not unworthy thenotice of the geologist. It is but a tedious process through which theminute lichen, settling on a surface of naked stone, forms in the courseof ages a soil for plants of greater bulk and a higher order; and hadScotland been left to the exclusive operation of this slow agent, itwould be still a rocky desert, with perhaps here and there a strip ofalluvial meadow by the side of a stream, and here and there an insulatedpatch of rich soil among the hollows of the crags. It might possess afew gardens for the spade, but no fields for the plough. We owe ourarable land to that comparatively modern geologic agent, whatever itscharacter, that crushed, as in a mill, the upper parts of thesurface-rocks of the kingdom, and then overlaid them with their owndebris and rubbish to the depth of from one to forty yards. This debris, existing in one locality as a boulder-clay more or less finelycomminuted, in another as a grossly pounded gravel, forms, with fewexceptions, that subsoil of the country on which the existing vegetationfirst found root; and, being composed mainly of the formations on whichit more immediately rests, it partakes of their character, --bearing acomparatively lean and hungry aspect over the primary rocks, and agreatly more fertile one over those deposits in which the organicmatters of earlier creations lie diffused. Saxon industry has done muchfor the primary districts of Aberdeen and Banffshires, though it hasfailed to neutralize altogether the effects of causes which date asearly as the times of the Old Red Sandstone; but in the Highlands, whichbelong almost exclusively to the non-fossiliferous formations, and whichwere, on at least the western coasts, but imperfectly subjected to thatgrinding process to which we owe our subsoils, the poor Celt haspermitted the consequences of the original difference to exhibitthemselves in full. If we except the islands of the Inner Hebrides, thefamine of 1846 was restricted in Scotland to the primary districts. 

I made it my first business, on landing in Aberdeen, to wait on myfriend Mr. Longmuir, that I might compare with him a few geologicalnotes, and benefit by his knowledge of the surrounding country. I was, however, unlucky enough to find that he had gone, a few days before, ona journey, from which he had not yet returned; but, through the kindnessof Mrs. Longmuir, to whom I took the liberty of introducing myself, Iwas made free of his stone-room, and held half an hour's conversationwith his Scotch fossils of the Chalk. These had been found, as thereaders of the _Witness_ must remember from his interesting paper on thesubject, on the hill of Dudwick, in the neighborhood of Ellon, and werechiefly impressions--some of them of singular distinctness andbeauty--in yellow flint. I saw among them several specimens of theInoceramus, a thin-shelled, ponderously-hinged conchifer, characteristicof the Cretaceous group, but which has no living representative; withnumerous flints, traversed by rough-edged, bifurcated hollows, in whichbranched sponges had once lain; a well-preserved Pecten; the impressionsof spines of Echini of at least two distinct species; and thenicely-marked impression of part of a Cidaris, with the balls on whichthe sockets of the club-like spines had been fitted existing in theprint as spherical moulds, in which shot might be cast, and with thecentral ligamentary depression, which in the actual fossil exists but asa minute cavity, projecting into the centre of each hollow sphere, likethe wooden fusee into the centre of a bomb-shell. This latter cast, fineand sharp as that of a medal taken in sulphur, seems sufficient ofitself to establish two distinct points: in the first place, that thesiliceous matter of which the flint is composed, though now so hard andrigid, must, in its original condition, have been as impressible as waxsoftened to receive the stamp of the seal; and, in the next, that thoughit was thus yielding in its character, it could not have greatly shrunkin the process of hardening. I looked with no little interest on theseremains of a Scotch formation now so entirely broken up, that, likethose ruined cities of the East which exist but as mere lines ofwrought material barring the face of the desert, there has not "beenleft one stone of it upon another, " but of which the fragments, thoughwidely scattered, bear imprinted upon them, like the stamped bricks ofBabylon, the story of its original condition, and a record of its_founders_. All Mr. Longmuir's Cretaceous fossils from the hill ofDudwick are of flint, --a substance not easily ground down by thedenuding agencies. 

I found several other curious fossils in Mr. Longmuir's collection. Greatly more interesting, however, than any of the specimens which itcontains, is the general fact, that it should be the collection of aFree Church minister, sedulously attentive to the proper duties of hisoffice, but who has yet found time enough to render himself anaccomplished geologist; and whose week-day lectures on the scienceattract crowds, who receive from them, in many instances, their firstknowledge of the strange revolutions of which our globe has been thesubject, blent with the teachings of a wholesome theology. The presentage, above all that has gone before, is peculiarly the age of physicalscience; and of all the physical sciences, not excepting astronomyitself, geology, though it be a fact worthy of notice, that not one ofour truly accomplished geologists is an infidel, is the science of whichinfidelity has most largely availed itself. And as the theologian in ametaphysical age, --when skepticism, conforming to the character of thetime, disseminated its doctrines in the form of nicely abstractspeculations, --had, in order that the enemy might be met in his ownfield, to become a skilful metaphysician, he must now, in like manner, address himself to the tangibilities of natural history and geology, ifhe would avoid the danger and disgrace of having his flank turned byevery sciolist in these walks whom he may chance to encounter. It isthose identical bastions and outworks that are _now_ attacked, whichmust be _now_ defended; not those which were attacked some eighty or ahundred years ago. And as he who succeeds in first mixing up fresh andcurious truths, either with the objections by which religion is assailedor the arguments by which it is defended, imparts to his cause all theinterest which naturally attaches to these truths, and leaves to hisopponent, who passes over them after him as at second hand, a subjectdivested of the fire-edge of novelty, I can deem Mr. Longmuir well andnot unprofessionally employed, in connecting with a sound creed thepicturesque marvels of one of the most popular of the sciences, and bythis means introducing them to his people, linked, from the first, withright associations. According to the old fiction, the look of thebasilisk did not kill unless the creature saw before it was seen;--itsmere _return_ glance was harmless; and there is a class of thoroughlydangerous writers who in this respect resemble the basilisk. It isperilous to give them a first look of the public. They are formidablesimply as the earliest popularizers of some interesting science, or thefirst promulgators of some class of curious little-known facts, withwhich they mix up their special contributions of error, --often the onlyportion of their writings that really belongs to themselves. Nor is itat all so easy to _counteract_ as to _confute_ them. A masterlyconfutation of the part of their works truly their own may, from itssubject, be a very unreadable book: it can have but the insinuatedpoison to deal with, unmixed with the palatable pabulum in which thepoison has been conveyed; and mere treatises on poisons, whether moralor medical, are rarely works of a very delectable order. It seems to beon this principle that there exists no confutation of the "Constitutionof Man" in which the ordinary reader finds amusement to carry himthrough; whereas the work itself, full of curious miscellaneousinformation, is eminently readable; and that the "Vestiges ofCreation, "--a treatise as entertaining as the "Arabian Nights, "--bidsfair, not from the amount of error which it contains, but from theamount of fresh and interestingly told truth with which the error ismingled, to live and do mischief when the various solidly-scientificreplies which it has called forth are laid upon the shelf. Both the"Constitution" and the "Vestiges" had the advantage, so essential to thebasilisk, of taking the first glance of the public on their respectivesubjects; whereas their confutators have been able to render them backbut mere _return_ glances. The only efficiently counteractive mode oflooking down the danger, in cases of this kind, is the mode adopted byMr. Longmuir. 

There was a smart frost next morning; and, for a few hours, my seat onthe top of the Banff coach, by which I travelled across the country towhere the Gamrie and Banff roads part company, was considerably morecool than agreeable. But the keen morning improved into a brilliant day, with an atmosphere transparent as if there had been no atmosphere atall, through which the distant objects looked out as sharp of outline, and in as well-defined light and shadow, as if they had occupied thebackground, not of a Scotch, but of an Italian landscape. A fewspeck-like sails, far away on the intensely blue sea, which opened uponus in a stretch of many leagues, as we surmounted the moory ridge overMacduff, gleamed to the sun with a radiance bright as that of the sparksof a furnace blown to a white heat. The land, uneven of surface, andopen, and abutting in bold promontories on the frith, still bore thesunny hue of harvest, and seemed as if stippled over with shocks fromthe ridgy hill summits, to where ranges of giddy cliffs flung theirshadows across the beach. I struck off for Gamrie by a path that runseastward, nearly parallel to the shore, --which at one or two points itoverlooks from dark-colored cliffs of grauwacke slate, --to the fishingvillage of Gardenstone. My dress was the usual fatigue suit of russet, in which I find I can work amid the soil of ravines and quarries withnot only the best effect, but with even the least possible sacrifice ofappearance: the shabbiest of all suits is a good suit spoiled. Myhammer-shaft projected from my pocket; a knapsack, with a few changes oflinen, slung suspended from my shoulders; a strong cotton umbrellaoccupied my better hand; and a gray maud, buckled shepherd-fashionaslant the chest, completed my equipment. There were few travellers onthe road, which forked off on the hill-side a short mile away, into twobranches, like a huge letter Y, leaving me uncertain which branch tochoose; and I made up my mind to have the point settled by a woman ofmiddle age, marked by a hard, _manly_ countenance, who was coming uptowards me, bound apparently for the Banff or Macduff market, andstooping under a load of dairy produce. She too, apparently, had herpurpose to serve or point to settle; for as we met, she was the first tostand; and, sharply scanning my appearance and aspect at a glance, sheabruptly addressed me. "Honest man, " she said, "do you see yon house wi'the chimla?" "That house with the farm-steadings and stacks beside it?"I replied. "Yes. " "Then I'd be obleeged if ye wald just stap in as ye'rgaing east the gate, and tell _our_ folk that the stirk has gat fra hertether, an' 'ill brak on the wat clover. Tell them to sen' for her_that_ minute. " I undertook the commission; and, passing the endangeredstirk, that seemed luxuriating, undisturbed by any presentiment ofimpending peril, amid the rich swathe of a late clover crop, still dampwith the dews of the morning frost, I tapped at the door of thefarm-house, and delivered my message to a young good-looking girl, innearly the words of the woman:--"The gude-wife bade me tell _them_, " Isaid, "to send that instant for the stirk, for she had gat fra hertether, and would brak on the wat clover. " The girl blushed just a verylittle, and thanked me; and then, after obliging me, in turn, by layingdown for me my proper route, --for I had left the question of the forkedroad to be determined at the farm-house, --she set off at high speed, torescue the unconscious stirk. A walk of rather less than two hoursbrought me abreast of the Bay of Gamrie, --a picturesque indentation ofthe coast, in the formation of which the agency of the old denudingforces, operating on deposits of unequal solidity, may be distinctlytraced. The surrounding country is composed chiefly of Silurian schists, in which there is deeply inlaid a detached strip of mouldering Old RedSandstone, considerably more than twenty miles in length, and thatvaries from two to three miles in breadth. It seems to have been letdown into the more ancient formation, --like the keystone of a bridgeinto the ringstones of the arch when the work is in the act of beingcompleted, --during some of those terrible convulsions which cracked andrent the earth's crust, as if it had been an earthen pipkin brought to ared heat and then plunged into cold water. Its consequent occurrence ina lower tier of the geological edifice than that to which it originallybelonged has saved it from the great denudation which has swept from thesurface of the surrounding country the tier composed of its contemporarybeds and strata, and laid bare the grauwacke on which this upper tierrested. But where it presents its narrow end to the sea, as the olderhouses in our more ancient Scottish villages present their gables to thestreet, the waves of the German Ocean, by incessantly charging againstit, propelled by the tempests of the stormy north, have hollowed itinto the Bay of Gamrie, and left the more solid grauwacke standing outin bold promontories on either side, as the headlands of Gamrie andTroup. 

In passing downwards on the fishing village of Gardenstone, mainly inthe hope of procuring a guide to the ichthyolite beds, I saw a laborerat work with a pickaxe, in a little craggy ravine, about a hundred yardsto the left of the path, and two gentlemen standing beside him. I pausedfor a moment, to ascertain whether the latter were not brother-workersin the geologic field. "Hilloa!--here, "--shouted out the stouter of thetwo gentlemen, as if, by some _clairvoyant_ faculty, he had dived intomy secret thought; "come here. " I went down into the ravine, and foundthe laborer engaged in disinterring ichthyolitic nodules out of a bed ofgray stratified clay, identical in its composition with that of theCromarty fish-beds; and a heap of freshly-broken nodules, speckled withthe organic remains of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, --chiefly occipitalplates and scales, --lay beside him. "Know you aught of these?" said thestouter gentleman, pointing to the heap. "A little, " I replied; "butyour specimens are none of the finest. Here, however, is a dorsal plateof Coccosteus; and here a scattered group of scales of Osteolepis; andhere the occipital plates of _Cheirolepis Cummingiæ_; and here the spineof the anterior dorsal of _Diplacanthus striatus_. " My reading of thefossils was at once recognized, like the mystic sign of the freemason, as establishing for me a place among the geologic brotherhood; and thestout gentleman producing a spirit-flask and a glass, I pledged him andhis companion in a bumper. "Was I not sure?" he said, addressing hisfriend: "I knew by the cut of his jib, notwithstanding his shepherd'splaid, that he was a wanderer of the scientific cast. " We discussed thepeculiarities of the deposit, which, in its mineralogical character, andgenerically in that of its organic contents, resembles, I found, thefish-beds of Cromarty (though, curiously enough, the interveningcontemporary deposits of Moray and the western parts of Banffshirediffer widely, in at least their chemistry, from both); and we wereright good friends ere we parted. To men who travel for amusement, incident is incident, however trivial in itself, and always worthsomething. I showed the younger of the two geologists my mode ofbreaking open an ichthyolitic nodule, so as to secure the best possiblesection of the fish. "Ah, " he said, as he marked a style of handling thehammer which, save for the fifteen years' previous practice of theoperative mason, would be perhaps less complete, --"Ah, you must havebroken open a great many. " His own knowledge of the formation and itsichthyolites had been chiefly derived, he added, from a certain littletreatise on the "Old Red Sandstone, " rather popular than scientific, which he named. I of course claimed no acquaintance with the work; andthe conversation went on. 

The ill luck of my new friends, who had been toiling among the nodulesfor hours without finding an ichthyolite worth transferring to theirbag, showed me that, without excavating more deeply than my timeallowed, I had no chance of finding good specimens. But, well content tohave ascertained that the ichthyolite bed of Gamrie is identical in itscomposition, and, generically at least, in its organisms, with the bedswith which I was best acquainted, I rose to come away. The object whichI next proposed to myself was, to determine whether, as at Eathie andCromarty, the fossils here appear not only on the hill-side, but alsocrop out along the shore. On taking leave, however, of the geologists, Iwas reminded by the younger of what I might have otherwiseforgotten, --a raised beach in the immediate neighborhood (firstdescribed by Mr. Prestwich, in his paper on the Gamrie ichthyolites), which contains shells of the existing species at a higher level thanelsewhere, --so far as is yet known, --on the east coast of Scotland. And, kindly conducting me till he had brought me full within view of it, weparted. The ichthyolites which I had just been laying open occur on theverge of that Strathbogie district in which the Church controversy ragedso hot and high; and by a common enough trick of the associativefaculty, they now recalled to my mind a stanza which memory had somehowcaught when the battle was at the fiercest. It formed part of a satiricaddress, published in an Aberdeen newspaper, to the not very respectablenon-intrusionists who had smoked tobacco and drank whisky in the parishchurch at Culsalmond, on the day of a certain forced settlement there, specially recorded by the clerks of the Justiciary Court. 

 "Tobacco and whisky cost siller, And meal is but scanty at hame; But gang to the stane-mason M----r, Wi' Old Red Sandstone fish he'll fill your wame. "

Rather a dislocated line that last, I thought, and too much in the stylein which Zachary Boyd sings "Pharaoh and the Pascal. " And as it is wrongto leave the beast of even an enemy in the ditch, however long its ears, I must just try and set it on its legs. Would it not run better thus?

 "Tobacco and whisky cost siller, An' meal is but scanty at hame; But gang to the stane-mason M----r, " He'll pang wi' ichth'ólites your wame, -- Wi' _fish_!! as Agassiz has ca'ed 'em, In Greek, like themsel's, _hard_ an' _odd_, That were baked in stane pies afore Adam Gaed names to the haddocks and cod. 

Bad enough as rhyme, I suspect; but conclusive as evidence to provethat the animal spirits, under the influence of the bracing walk, thefine day, and the agreeable recounter at the fish-beds, --not forgettingthe half-gill bumper, --had mounted very considerably above theirordinary level at the editorial desk. 

The raised beach may be found on the slopes of a grass-covered eminence, once the site of an ancient hill-fort, and which still exhibits, alongthe rim-like edge of the flat area atop, scattered fragments of thevitrified walls. A general covering of turf restricted my examination ofthe shells to one point, where a land-slip on a small scale had laid thedeposit bare; but I at least saw enough to convince me that the debrisof the shell-fish used of old as food by the garrison had not beenmistaken for the remains of a raised beach, --a mistake which in otherlocalities has occurred, I have reason to believe, oftener than once. The shells, some of them exceedingly minute, and not of edible species, occur in layers in a siliceous stratified sand, overlaid by a bed ofbluish-colored silt. I picked out of the sand two entire specimens of afull-grown Fusus, little more than half an inch in length, --the _Fususturricola_; and the greater number of the fragments that lay bleachingat the foot of the broken slope, in a state of chalky friability, seemedto be fragments of those smaller bivalves, belonging to the genera_Donax_, _Venus_, and _Mactra_, that are so common on flat sandy shores. But when the sea washed over these shells, they could have been thedenizens of at least no _flat_ shore. The descent on which they occursinks downwards to the existing beach, over which it is elevated at thispoint two hundred and thirty feet, at an angle with the horizon of fromthirty-five to forty degrees. Were the land to be now submerged to wherethey appear on the hill-side, the bay of Gamrie, as abrupt in itsslopes as the upper part of Loch Lomond or the sides of Loch Ness, would possess a depth of forty fathoms water at little more than ahundred yards from the shore. I may add, that I could trace at thisheight no marks of such a continuous terrace around the sides of the bayas the waves would have infallibly excavated in the diluvium, had thesea stood at a level so high, or, according to the more prevalent view, had the land stood at a level so low, for any considerable time; thoughthe green banks which sweep around the upper part of the inflection, unscarred by the defacing plough, would scarce have failed to retainsome mark of where the surges had broken, had the surges been longthere. Whatever may in this special case be the fact, however, I cannotdoubt that in the comparatively modern period of the boulder clays, Scotland lay buried under water to a depth at least five times as greatas the space between this ancient sea-beach and the existing tide-line. 

CHAPTER II. 

 Character of the Rocks near Gardenstone--A Defunct Father-lasher--A Geological Inference--Village of Gardenstone--The drunken Scot--Gardenstone Inn--Lord Gardenstone--A Tempest threatened--The Author's Ghost Story--The Lady in Green--Her Appearance and Tricks--The Rescued Children--The murdered Peddler and his Pack--Where the Green Dress came from--Village of Macduff--Peculiar Appearance of the Beach at the Mouth of the Deveron--Dr. Emslie's Fossils--_Pterichthys quadratus_--Argillaceous Deposit of Blackpots--Pipe-laying in Scotland--Fossils of Blackpots Clay--Mr. Longmuir's Description of them--Blackpots Deposit a Re-formation of a Liasic Patch--Period of its Formation. 

I lingered on the hill-side considerably longer than I ought; and then, hurrying downwards to the beach, passed eastwards under a range ofabrupt, mouldering precipices of red sandstone, to the village. From thelie of the strata, which, instead of inclining coastwise, dip towardsthe interior of the country, and present in the descent seawards theoutcrop of lower and yet lower deposits of the formation, I found itwould be in vain to look for the ichthyolite beds along the shore. Theymay possibly be found, however, though I lacked time to ascertain thefact, along the sides of a deep ravine, which occurs near an oldecclesiastical edifice of gray stone, perched, nest-like, half-way upthe bank, on a green hummock that overlooks the sea. The rocks, laidbare by the tide, belong to the bed of coarse-grained red sandstone, varying from eighty to a hundred and fifty feet in thickness, which liesbetween the lower fish-bed and the great conglomerate, and which, in nota few of its strata, passes itself into a species of conglomerate, different only from that which it overlies, in being more finelycomminuted. The continuity of this bed, like that of the deposit onwhich it rests, is very remarkable. I have found it occurring at manyvarious points, over an area at least ten thousand square miles inextent, and bearing always the same well-marked character of a morethoroughly ground-down conglomerate than the great conglomerate on whichit reposes. The underlying bed is composed of broken fragments of therocks below, crushed, as if by some imperfect rudimentary process, likethat which in a mill merely breaks the grain; whereas, in the bed above, a portion of the previously-crushed materials seems to have beensubjected to some further attritive process, like that through which, inthe mill, the broken grain is ground down into meal or flour. 

As I passed onwards, I saw, amid a heap of drift-weed stranded high onthe beach by the previous tide, a defunct father-lasher, with the twodefensive spines which project from its opercles stuck fast into littlecubes of cork, that had floated its head above water, as thetyro-swimmer floats himself upon bladders; and my previous acquaintancewith the habits of a fishing village enabled me at once to determine whyand how it had perished. Though almost never used as food on the easterncoast of Scotland, it had been inconsiderate enough to take thefisherman's bait, as if it had been worthy of being eaten; and he hadavenged himself for the trouble it had cost him, by mounting it on cork, and sending it off, to wander between wind and water, like the FlyingDutchman, until it died. Was there ever on earth a creature save manthat could have played a fellow-mortal a trick at once so ingeniouslyand gratuitously cruel? Or what would be the proper inference, were I tofind one of the many-thorned ichthyolites of the Lower Old Red Sandstonewith the spines of its pectorals similarly fixed on cubes oflignite?--that there had existed in these early ages not merely_physical death_, but also _moral evil_; and that the being whoperpetrated the evil could not only inflict it simply for the sake ofthe pleasure he found in it, and without prospect of advantage tohimself, but also by so adroitly reversing, fiend-like, the purposes ofthe benevolent Designer, that the weapons given for the defence of apoor harmless creature should be converted into the instruments of itsdestruction. It was not without meaning that it was forbidden by the lawof Moses to seethe a kid in its mother's milk. 

A steep bulwark in front, against which the tide lashes twice everytwenty-four hours, --an abrupt hill behind, --a few rows of squalidcottages built of red sandstone, much wasted by the keen sea-winds, --awilderness of dunghills and ruinous pig-styes, --women seated at thedoors, employed in baiting lines or mending nets, --groups of menlounging lazily at some gable-end fronting the sea, --herds of raggedchildren playing in the lanes, --such are the components of the fishingvillage of Gardenstone. From the identity of name, I had associated theplace with that Lord Gardenstone of the Court of Sessions who published, late in the last century, a volume of "Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, "containing, among other clever things, a series of tart criticisms onEnglish plays, transcribed, it was stated in the preface, from themargins and fly-leaves of the books of a "small library kept open by hisLordship" for the amusement of travellers at the inn of some village inhis immediate neighborhood; and taking it for granted, somehow, thatGardenstone was the village, I was looking around me for the inn, in thehope that where his Lordship had opened a library I might find a dinner. But failing to discern it, I addressed myself on the subject to anelderly man in a pack-sheet apron, who stood all alone, looking out uponthe sea, like Napoleon, in the print, from a projection of the bulwark. He turned round, and showed, by an unmistakable expression of eye andfeature, that he was what the servant girl in "Guy Mannering"characterizes as "very particularly drunk, "--not stupidly, but happily, funnily, conceitedly drunk, and full of all manner of high thoughts ofhimself. "It'll be an awfu' coorse nicht, " he said, "fra the sea. " "Verylikely, " I replied, reiterating my query in a form that indicated somelittle confidence of receiving the needed information; "I daresay youcould point me out the public-house here?" "Aweel, I wat, that I can;but what's that?" pointing to the straps of my knapsack;--"are ye asodger on the Queen's account, or ye'r ain?" "On my own, to be sure; buthave ye a public-house here?" "Ay, twa; ye'll be a traveller?" "O yes, great traveller, and very hungry: have I passed the best public-house?""Ay; and ye'll hae come a gude stap the day?" A woman came up, withspectacles on nose, and a piece of white seam-work in her hand; and, cutting short the dialogue by addressing myself to her, she at oncedirected me to the public-house. "Hoot, gude-wife, " I heard the man say, as I turned down the street, "we suld ha'e gotten mair oot o' him. He'sa great traveller yon, an' has a gude Scots tongue in his head. "

Travellers, save when, during the herring season, an occasionalfish-curer comes the way, rarely bait at the Gardenstone inn; and in thelittle low-browed room, with its windows in the thatch, into which, asher best, the land-lady ushered me, I certainly found nothing toidentify the _locale_ with that chosen by the literary lawyer for hisopen library. But, according to Ferguson, though "learning was scant, provision was good;" and I dined sumptuously on an immense platter offried flounders. There was a little bit of cold pork added to the fare;but, aware from previous experience of the pisciverous habits of theswine of a fishing village, I did what I knew the defunct pig must havevery frequently done before me, --satisfied a keenly-whetted appetite onfish exclusively. I need hardly remind the reader that LordGardenstone's inn was not that of Gardenstone, but that ofLaurence-kirk, --the thriving village which it was the special ambitionof this law-lord of the last century to create; and which, did itproduce only its famed snuff-boxes, with the invisible hinges, would berather a more valuable boon to the country than that secured to it bythose law-lords of our own days, who at one fell blow disestablished thenational religion of Scotland, and broke off the only handle by whichtheir friends the politicians could hope to _manage_ the country's oldvigorous Presbyterianism. Meanwhile it was becoming apparent that theman with the apron had as shrewdly anticipated the character of thecoming night as if he had been soberer. The sun, ere its setting, disappeared in a thick leaden haze, which enveloped the whole heavens;and twilight seemed posting on to night a full hour before its time. Isettled a very moderate bill, and set off under the cliffs at a roundpace, in the hope of scaling the hill, and gaining the high road atopwhich leads to Macduff, ere the darkness closed. I had, however, miscalculated my distance; I, besides, lost some little time in theopening of the deep ravine to which I have already referred as that inwhich possibly the fish-beds may be found cropping out; and I had gotbut a little beyond the gray ecclesiastical ruin, with its lonelyburying-ground, when the tempest broke and the night fell. 

One of the last objects which I saw, as I turned to take a farewell lookof the bay of Gamrie, was the magnificent promontory of Troup Head, outlined in black on a ground of deep gray, with its two terminal stacksstanding apart in the sea. And straightway, through one of those tricksof association so powerful in raising, as if from the dead, buriedmemories of things of which the mind has been oblivious for years, therestarted up in recollection the details of an ancient ghost-story, ofwhich I had not thought before for perhaps a quarter of a century. Ithad been touched, I suppose, in its obscure, unnoted corner, as Ithurieltouched the toad, by the apparition of the insulated stacks of Troup, seen dimly in the thickening twilight over the solitary burying-ground. For it so chances that one of the main incidents of the story bearsreference to an insulated sea-stack; and it is connected altogether, though I cannot fix its special locality, with this part of the coast. The story had been long in my mother's family, into which it had beenoriginally brought by a great-grandfather of the writer, who quittedsome of the seaport villages of Banffshire for the northern side of theMoray Frith, about the year 1718; and, when pushing on in the darkness, straining as I best could, to maintain a sorely-tried umbrella againstthe capricious struggles of the tempest, that now tatooed furiously uponits back as if it were a kettle-drum, and now got underneath its stoutribs, and threatened to send it up aloft like a balloon, and anontwisted it from side to side, and strove to turn it inside out, like aKilmarnock night-cap, --I employed myself in arranging in my mind thedetails of the narrative, as they had been communicated to me half anage before by a female relative. 

The opening of the story, though it existed long ere the times of SirWalter Scott or the Waverly novels, bears some resemblance to theopening in the "Monastery, " of the story of the White Lady of Avenel. The wife of a Banffshire proprietor of the minor class had been aboutsix months dead, when one of her husband's ploughmen, returning onhorseback from the smithy, in the twilight of an autumn evening, wasaccosted, on the banks of a small stream, by a stranger lady, tall andslim, and wholly attired in green, with her face wrapped up in the hoodof her mantle, who requested to be taken up behind him on the horse, andcarried across. There was something in the tones of her voice thatseemed to thrill through his very bones, and to insinuate itself, in theform of a chill fluid, between his skull and the scalp. The request, too, appeared a strange one; for the rivulet was small and low, andcould present no serious bar to the progress of the most timidtraveller. But the man, unwilling ungallantly to offend a lady, turnedhis horse to the bank, and she sprang up lightly behind him. She was, however, a personage that could be better seen than felt; she came incontact with the ploughman's back, he said, as if she had been anill-filled sack of wool; and when, on reaching the opposite side of thestreamlet, she leaped down as slightly as she had mounted, and he turnedfearfully round to catch a second glimpse of her, it was in theconviction that she was a creature considerably less earthly in hertexture than himself. She had opened, with two pale, thin arms, theenveloping hood, exhibiting a face equally pale and thin, which seemedmarked, however, by the roguish, half-humorous expression of one who hadjust succeeded in playing off a good joke. "My dead mistress!!"exclaimed the ploughman. "Yes, John, _your mistress_, " replied theghost. "But ride home, my bonny man, for it's growing late: you and Iwill be better acquainted ere long. " John accordingly rode home and toldhis story. 

Next evening, about the same hour, as two of the laird's servant-maidswere engaged in washing in an out-house, there came a slight tap to thedoor. "Come in, " said one of the maids; and the lady entered, dressed, as on the previous night, in green. She swept past them to the innerpart of the washing-room; and, seating herself on a low bench, fromwhich, ere her death, she used occasionally to superintend theiremployment, she began to question them, as if still in the body, aboutthe progress of their work. The girls, however, were greatly toofrightened to make any reply. She then visited an old woman who hadnursed the laird, and to whom she used to show, ere her departure, greatly more kindness than her husband. And she now seemed as muchinterested in her welfare as ever. She inquired whether the laird waskind to her, and looking round her little smoky cottage, regretted sheshould be so indifferently lodged, and that her cupboard, which wasrather of the emptiest at the time, should not be more amply furnished. For nearly a twelvemonth after, scarce a day passed in which she was notseen by some of the domestics; never, however, except on one occasion, after the sun had risen, or before it had set. The maids could see her, in the gray of the morning flitting like a shadow round their beds, orpeering in upon them at night through the dark window-panes, or athalf-open doors. In the evening she would glide into the kitchen or someof the out-houses, --one of the most familiar and least dignified of herclass that ever held intercourse with mankind, --and inquire of the girlshow they had been employed during the day; often, however, withoutobtaining an answer, though from a cause different from that which hadat first tied their tongues. For they had become so regardless of herpresence, viewing her simply as a troublesome mistress, who had nolonger any claim to be heeded, that when she entered, and they haddropped their conversation, under the impression that their visitor wasa creature of flesh and blood like themselves, they would again resumeit, remarking that the entrant was "only the green lady. " Though alwayscadaverously pale, and miserable looking, she affected a joyousdisposition, and was frequently heard to laugh, even when invisible. Atone time, when provoked by the studied silence of a servant girl, sheflung a pillow at her head, which the girl caught up and returned; atanother, she presented her first acquaintance, the ploughman, with whatseemed to be a handful of silver coin, which he transferred to hispocket, but which, on hearing her laugh, he drew out, and found to bemerely a handful of slate shivers. On yet another occasion, the man, when passing on horseback through a clump of wood, was repeatedly struckfrom behind the trees by little pellets of turf; and, on riding into thethicket, he found that his assailant was the green lady. To her husbandshe never appeared; but he frequently heard the tones of her voiceechoing from the lower apartments, and the faint peal of her cold, unnatural laugh. 

One day at noon, a year after her first appearance, the old nurse wassurprised to see her enter the cottage; as all her previous visits hadbeen made early in the morning or late in the evening; whereasnow, --though the day was dark and lowering, and a storm of wind and rainhad just broken out, --still it _was_ day. "Mammie, " she said, "I cannotopen the heart of the laird, and I have nothing of my own to give you;but I think I can do something for you now. Go straight to the WhiteHouse [that of a neighboring proprietor], and tell the folk there to setout with all the speed of man and horse for the black rock in the sea, at the foot of the crags, or they'll rue it dearly to their dying day. Their bairns, foolish things, have gone out to the rock, and the tidehas flowed around them; and, if no help reach them soon, they'll be allscattered like sea-ware on the shore ere the fall of the sea. But if yougo and tell your story at the White House, mammie, the bairns will besafe for an hour to come, and there will be something done by theirmother to better you, for the news. " The woman went, as directed, andtold her story; and the father of the children set out on horseback inhot haste for the rock, --a low, insulated skerry, which, lying on asolitary part of the beach, far below the line of flood, was shut outfrom the view of the inhabited country by a wall of precipices, andcovered every tide by several feet of water. On reaching the edge of thecliffs, he saw the black rock, as the woman had described, surrounded bythe sea, and the children clinging to its higher crags. But, though thewaves were fast rising, his attempts to ride out through the surf to thepoor little things were frustrated by their cries, which so frightenedhis horse as to render it unmanageable; and so he had to gallop on tothe nearest fishing village for a boat. So much time was unavoidablylost in consequence, that nearly the whole beach was covered by the sea, and the surf had begun to lash the feet of the precipices behind; butuntil the boat arrived, not a single wave dashed over the black rock;though immediately after the last of the children had been rescued, animmense wreath of foam rose twice a man's height over its topmostpinnacle. 

The old nurse, on her return to the cottage, found the green ladysitting beside the fire. "Mammie, " she said, "you have made friends toyourself to-day, who will be kinder to you than your foster-son. I mustnow leave you. My time is out, and you'll be all left to yourselves; butI'll have no rest, mammie, for many a twelvemonth to come. Ten yearsago, a travelling peddler broke into our garden in the fruit season, andI sent out our old ploughman, who is now in Ireland, to drive him away. It was on a Sunday, and everybody else was in church. The men struggledand fought, and the peddler was killed. But though I at first thought ofbringing the case before the laird, when I saw the dead man's pack, withits silks and its velvets, and this unhappy piece of green satin(shaking her dress), my foolish heart beguiled me, and I made theploughman bury the peddler's body under our ash tree, in the corner ofour garden, and we divided his goods and money between us. You must bidthe laird raise his bones, and carry them to the churchyard; and thegold, which you will find in the little bowl under the tapestry in myroom, must be sent to a poor old widow, the peddler's mother, who liveson the shore of Leith. I must now away to Ireland to the ploughman; andI'll be e'en less welcome to him, mammie, than at the laird's; but thehungry blood cries loud against us both, --him and me, --and we mustsuffer together. Take care you look not after me till I have passed theknowe. " She glided away, as she spoke, in a gleam of light; and when theold woman had withdrawn her hand from her eyes, dazzled by the suddenbrightness, she saw only a large black gray-hound crossing the moor. Andthe green lady was never afterwards seen in Scotland. The little hoardof gold pieces, however, stored in a concealed recess of her formerapartment, and the mouldering ruins of the peddler under the ash tree, gave evidence to the truth of her narrative. The story was hardly wildenough for a night so drear and a road so lonely; its ghost-heroine wasbut a homely ghost-heroine, too little aware that the same familiaritywhich, according to the proverb, breeds contempt when exercised by thedenizens of this world, produces similar effects when too much indulgedin by the inhabitants of another. But the arrangement and restoration ofthe details of the tradition, --for they had been scattered in my mindlike the fragments of a broken fossil, --furnished me with so muchamusement, when struggling with the storm, as to shorten by at leastone-half the seven miles which intervene between Gamrie and Macduff. Instead, however, of pressing on to Banff, as I had at first intended, I baited for the night at a snug little inn in the latter village, whichI reached just wet enough to enjoy the luxury of a strong clear fire ofNewcastle coal. 

Mrs. Longmuir had furnished me with a note of introduction to Dr. Emslieof Banff, an intelligent geologist, familiar with the deposits of thedistrict; and, walking on to his place of residence next morning, in arain as heavy as that of the previous night, I made it my first businessto wait on him, and deliver the note. Ere, however, crossing theDeveron, which flows between Banff and Macduff, I paused for a fewminutes in the rain, to mark the peculiar appearance presented by thebeach where the river disembogues into the frith. Occurring as arectangular spit in the line of the shore, with the expanded streamwidening into an estuary on its upper side, and the open sea on thelower, it marks the scene of an obstinate contest between antagonistforces, --the powerful sweep of the torrent, and the not less powerfulwaves of the stormy north-east; and exists, in consequence, as a longgravelly prism, which presents as steep an angle of descent to the waveson the one side as to the current on the other. It is a true river bar, beaten in from its proper place in the sea by the violence of the surf, and fairly stranded. Dr. Emslie obligingly submitted to my inspectionhis set of Gamrie fossils, containing several good specimens ofPterichthys and Coccosteus, undistinguishable, like those I had seen onthe previous day, in their state of keeping, and the character of thenodular matrices in which they lie, from my old acquaintance theCephalaspians of Cromarty. The animal matter which the bony plates andscales originally contained has been converted, in both the Gamrie andCromarty ichthyolites, into a jet-black bitumen; and in both, theinclosing nodules consist of a smoke-colored argillaceous limestone, which formed around the organisms in a bed of stratified clay, and atonce exhibits, in consequence, the rectilinear lines of thestratification, mechanical in their origin, and the radiating ones ofthe sub-crystalline concretion, purely a trick of the chemistry of thedeposit. A Pterichthys in Dr. Emslie's collection struck me as differentin its proportions from any I had previously seen, though, from itsstate of rather imperfect preservation, I hesitated to pronounceabsolutely upon the fact. I cannot now doubt, however, that it belongedto a species not figured nor described at the time; but which, under thename of _Pterichthys quadratus_, forms in part the subject of a stillunpublished memoir, in which Sir Philip Egerton, our first Britishauthority on fossil fish, has done me the honor to associate my humblename with his own; and which will have the effect of reducing to theranks of the Pterichthyan genus the supposed genera _Pamphractus_ and_Homothorax_. A second set of fossils, which Dr. Emslie had derived fromhis tile-works at Blackpots, proved, I found, identical with those ofthe Eathie Lias. As this Banffshire deposit had formed a subject ofconsiderable discussion and difference among geologists, I was curiousto examine it; and the Doctor, though the day was still none of thebest, kindly walked out with me, to bring under my notice appearanceswhich, in the haste of a first examination, I might possibly overlook, and to show me yet another set of fossils which he kept at the works. Heinformed me, as we went, that the Grauwacke (Lower Silurian) deposits ofthe district, hitherto deemed so barren, had recently yielded theirorganisms in a slate quarry at Gamrie-head; and that they belong to thatancient family of the Pennatularia which, in this northern kingdom, seems to have taken precedence of all the others. Judging from what nowappears, the Graptolite must be regarded as the first settler whosquatted for a living in that deep-sea area of undefined boundaryoccupied at the present time by the bold wave-worn headlands and bluehills of Scotland; and this new Banffshire locality not only greatlyextends the range of the fossil in reference to the kingdom, but alsoestablishes, in a general way, the fossiliferous identity of the LowerSilurian deposits to the north of the Grampians with that ofPeebles-shire and Galloway in the south, --so far as I know, the onlyother two Scottish districts in which this organism has been found. 

The argillaceous deposit of Blackpots occupies, in the form of a greenswelling bank, a promontory rather soft than bold in its contour, thatprojects far into the sea, and forms, when tipped with its slim columnof smoke from the tile-kiln, a pleasing feature in the landscape. I hadset it down on the previous day, when it first caught my eye from thelofty cliffs of Gamrie-head, at the distance of some ten or twelvemiles, as different in character from all the other features of theprospect. The country generally is moulded on a framework of primaryrock, and presents headlands of hard, sharp outline, to the attrition ofthe waves; whereas this single headland in the midst, --soft-lined, undulatory, and plump, --seems suited to remind one of Burns's young KirkAlloway beauty disporting amid the thin old ladies that joined with herin the dance. And it _is_ a greatly younger beauty than the Cambrian andmica-schist protuberances that encroach on the sea on either side of it. The sheds and kilns of a tile-work occupy the flat terminal point of thepromontory; and as the clay is valuable, in this tile-draining age, forthe facility with which it can be moulded into pipe-tiles (a purposewhich the ordinary clays of the north of Scotland, composed chiefly ofre-formations of the Old Red Sandstone, are what is technically termedtoo _short_ to serve), it is gradually retreating inland before thepersevering spade and mattock of the laborer. The deposit has alreadybeen drawn out into many hundred miles of cylindrical pipes, and isdestined to be drawn out into many thousands more, --such being one ofthe strange metamorphoses effected in the geologic formations, now thatthat curious animal the Bimana has come upon the stage; and at length itwill have no existence in the country, save as an immense system ofveins and arteries underlying the vegetable mould. Will these veins andarteries, I marvel, form, in their turn, the _fossils_ of anotherperiod, when a higher platform than that into which they have been laidwill be occupied to the full by plants and animals specificallydifferent from those of the present scene of things, --the existences ofa happier and more finished creation? My business to-day, however, waswith the fossils which the deposit now contains, --not with those whichit may ultimately form. 

The Blackpots clay is of a dark-bluish or greenish-gray color, and soadhesive, that I now felt, when walking among it, after the softeningrains of the previous night and morning, as if I had got into a bed ofbird-lime. It is thinly charged with rolled pebbles, septaria, andpieces of a bituminous shale, containing broken Belemnites, andsorely-flattened Ammonites, that exist as thin films of a white chalkylime. The pebbles, like those of the boulder-clay of the northern sideof the Moray Frith, are chiefly of the primary rocks and oldersandstones, and were probably in the neighborhood, in their presentrolled form, long ere the re-formation of the inclosing mass; while theshale and the septaria are, as shown by their fossils, decidedly Liasic. I detected among the conchifers a well-marked species of our northernLias, figured by Sowerby from Eathie specimens, --the _Plagiostomaconcentrica_; and among the Cephalopoda, though considerably broken, the _Belemnite elongatus_ and _Belemnite lanceolata_, with the _AmmoniteKoenigi_ (_mutabilis_), --all Eathie shells. I, besides, found in thebank a piece of a peculiar-looking quartzose sandstone, traversed byhard jaspedeous veins of a brownish-gray color, which I have neverfound, in Scotland at least, save associated with the Lias of ournorth-eastern coasts. Further, my attention was directed by Dr. Emslieto a fine Lignite in his collection, which had once formed some eighteeninches or two feet of the trunk of a straight slender pine, --probablythe _Pinites Eiggensis_, --in which, as in most woods of the Lias andOölite, the annual rings are as strongly marked as in the existing firsor larches of our hill-sides. [11] The Blackpots deposit is evidently are-formation of a Liasic patch, identical, both in mineralogicalcharacter and in its organic remains, with the lower beds of the EathieLias; while the fragments of shale which it contains belong chiefly toan upper Liasic bed. So rich is the dark-colored tenacious argil of theInferior Lias of Eathie, that the geologist who walks over it when it isstill moist with the receding tide would do well to look to hisfooting;--the mixture of soap and grease spread by the ship-carpenteron his launch-slips, to facilitate the progress of his vessel seawards, is not more treacherous to the tread: while the Upper Liasic depositwhich rests over it is composed of a dark slaty shale, largely chargedwith bitumen. And of a Liasic deposit of this compound character, consisting in larger part of an inferior argillaceous bed, and in lesserpart of a superior one of dark shale, the tile-clay of Blackpots hasbeen formed. 

I had next to determine whether aught remained to indicate the period ofits re-formation. The tile-works at the point of the promontory rest ona bed of shell-sand, composed exclusively, like the sand so abundant onthe western coast of Scotland, of fragments of existing shells. These, however, are so fresh and firm, that, though the stratum which they formseems to underlie the clay at its edges, I cannot regard them as olderthan the most modern of our ancient sea-margins. They formed, in allprobability, in the days of the old coast line, a white shelly beach, under such a precipitous front of the dark clay as argillaceous depositsalmost always present to the undermining wear of the waves. On therecession of the sea, however, to its present line, the abrupt, steepfront, loosened by the frosts and washed by the rains, would of coursegradually moulder down over them into a slope; and there would thus becommunicated to the shelly stratum, at least at its edges, an underlyingcharacter. The true period of the re-formation of the deposit was, I canhave no doubt, that of the boulder-clay. I observed that the septariaand larger masses of shale which the bed contains, bear, onroughly-polished surfaces, in the line of their larger axes, themysterious groovings and scratchings of this period, --marks which I havenever yet known to fail in their chronological evidence. It may bementioned, too, simply as a fact, though one of less value than theother, that the deposit occurs in its larger development exactly where, in the average, the boulder-clays also are most largely developed, --alittle over that line where the waves for so many ages charged againstthe coast, ere the last upheaval of the land or the recession of the seasent them back to their present margin. There had probably existed tothe west or north-west of the deposit, perhaps in the middle of the openbay formed by the promontory on which it rests, --for the smallproportion of other than Liasic materials which it contains serves toshow that it could be derived from no great distance, --an outlier of theLower Lias. The icebergs of the cold glacial period, propelled along thesubmerged land by some arctic current, or caught up by the gulf-stream, gradually grated it down, as a mason's laborer grates down the surfaceof the sandstone slab which he is engaged in polishing; and thecomminuted debris, borne eastwards by the current, was cast down here. It has been stated that no Liasic remains have been found in theboulder-clays of Scotland. They are certainly rare in the boulder-claysof the northern shores of the Moray Frith; for there the nearest Lias, bearing in a western direction from the clay, is that of Applecross, onthe other side of the island; and the materials of the boulder-depositsof the north have invariably been derived in the line, westerly in itsgeneral bearing, of the grooves and scratches of the iceberg era. But onthe southern shore of the frith, where that westerly line passed athwartthe Liasic beds of our eastern coast, organisms of the Lias arecomparatively common in the boulder-clays; and here, at Blackpots, wefind an extensive deposit of the same period formed of Liasic materialsalmost exclusively. Fragments of still more modern rocks occur in theboulder-clays of Caithness. My friend Mr. Robert Dick, of Thurso, towhose persevering labors and interesting discoveries in the Old RedSandstone of his locality I have had frequent occasion to refer, hasdetected in a blue boulder-clay, scooped into precipitous banks by theriver Thorsa, fragments both of chalk-flints and a characteristicconglomerate of the Oölite. He has, besides, found it mottled from topto bottom, a full hundred feet over the sea-level, and about two milesinland, with comminuted fragments of existing shells. But of this moreanon. 

CHAPTER III. 

 From Blackpots to Portsoy--Character of the Coast--Burn of Boyne--Fever Phantoms--Graphic Granite--Maupertuis and the Runic Inscription--Explanation of the _quo modo_ of Graphic Granite--Portsoy Inn--Serpentine Beds--Portsoy Serpentine unrivalled for small ornaments--Description of it--Significance of the term _serpentine_--Elizabeth Bond and her "Letters"--From Portsoy to Cullen--Attritive Power of the Ocean illustrated--The Equinoctial--From Cullen to Fochabers--The Old Red again--The old Pensioner--Fochabers--Mr. Joss, the learned Mail-guard--The Editor a sort of Coach-guard--On the Coach to Elgin--Geology of Banffshire--Irregular paging of the Geologic Leaves--Geologic Map of the County like Joseph's Coat--Striking Illustration. 

I parted from Dr. Emslie, and walked on along the shore to Portsoy, --forthree-fourths of the way over the prevailing grauwacke of the county, and for the remaining fourth over mica schist, primary limestone, hornblende slate, granitic and quartz veins, and the various otherkindred rocks of a primary district. The day was still gloomy and gray, and ill suited to improve homely scenery; nor is this portion of theBanff coast nearly so striking as that which I had travelled over theday before. It has, however, its spots of a redeeming character, --rockyrecesses on the shore, half-beach, half-sward, rich in wild-flowers andshells, --where one could saunter in a calm sunny morning, with one's_bairns_ about one, very delightfully; and the interior is here andthere agreeably undulated by diluvial hillocks, that, when the sun fallslow in the evening, must chequer the landscape with many a pleasingalternation of light and shadow. The Burn of Boyne, --which separates, about two miles from Portsoy, a grauwacke from a mica-schistdistrict, --with its bare, open valley, its steep limestone banks, andits gray, melancholy castle, long since roofless and windowless, andsurrounded by a few stunted trees, bears a deserted and solitaryshagginess about it, that struck me as wildly agreeable. It is such avalley as one might expect to meet a ghost in, in some still, dewyevening, as gloamin was darkening into uncertainty the outlines of theancient ruin, and the newly-kindled stars looked down upon the stream. 

It so happened, however, that my only story connected with either ruinor valley was as little a ghost story as might be. I remember that, whenlying ill of fever on one occasion, --indisposed enough to see apparitionafter apparition flitting across the bed-curtains, like the figures of amagic lantern posting along the darkened wall, and yet self-possessedenough to know that they were but mere pictures in the eye, and to watchthem as they rose, --I set myself to determine whether they were in anydegree amenable to the will, or connected by the ordinary associativelinks of the metaphysician. Fixing my mind on a certain object, I stroveto call it up in the character, not of an image of the conceptivefaculty, but of a fever-vision on the retina. The image which I picturedto myself was that of a death's head, yellow and grim, and lighted up, as if from within, amid the darkness of a burial vault. But the death'shead obstinately refused to rise. I had no control, I found, over thefever imagery. And the picture that rose instead, uncalled andunexpected, was that of a coal-fire burning brightly in a grate, with ahuge tea-kettle steaming cheerily over it. 

In traversing the bare height which, rising on the western side of thevalley of the Boyne, owes its comparatively bold relief in the landscapeto the firmness of the primary rock which composes it, I picked up apiece of graphic granite, bearing its inlaid characters of dark quartzon a ground of cream-colored feldspar. This variety, however, thoughoccasionally found in rolled boulders in the neighborhood of Portsoy, isnot the graphic granite for which the locality is famous, and whichoccurs in a vein in the mica schist of the eminence I was nowtraversing, about a mile to the east of the town. The prevailing groundof the granite of the vein is a flesh-colored feldspar; and thethickly-marked quartzose characters with which it is set, greatlysmaller and paler than in the cream-colored stone, bear less the antiqueHebraic look, and would scarce deceive even the most credulousantiquary. Antiquarians, however, _have_ been sometimes deceived byweathered specimens of this graphic rock, in which the characters wereof considerable size, and restricted to thin veins, covering the surfaceof a schistose groundwork. Maupertuis, during his famous journey toLapland, undertaken in 1737, to establish, from actual measurement, thatthe degrees of latitude are longer towards the pole than at the equator, and which demonstrated, of consequence, the true figure of the earth, travelled thirty leagues out of his way, through a wild country coveredwith snow, to examine an ancient monument, of which, he says, "the Finsand Laplanders frequently spoke, as containing in its inscription theknowledge of everything of which they were ignorant. " He found it on theside of a mountain, buried in snow; and ascertained, after kindling agreat fire around it, in order to lay it bare, that it was a stone ofirregular form, composed of various layers of unequal hardness, and thatthe characters, which were rather more than an inch in length, werewritten on "a layer of a species of flint, " chiefly in two lines, with afew scattered signs beneath, while the rest of the mass was composed ofa rock more soft and foliated. Graphic granite, it may be mentioned, generally occurs, not in masses, but in veins and layers. Theinscription had been described in a previously published dissertation ofimmense erudition, as Runic; but a Runic scholar of the party found hecould make nothing of it. The philosopher himself was struck by thefrequent repetition of characters of nearly the same form on the stone;but he was ingenious enough to get over the difficulty, by rememberingthat in our notation, after the Arabic manner, characters shaped exactlyalike may be very frequently repeated, --nay, as in some of the lines ofthe Lapland inscription, may succeed each other, as in the sums I. II. III. IIII. Or X. XX. XXX. , --and yet very distinct and definite ideasattach to them all. Still, however, he could not, he says, venture onauthoritatively deciding whether the inscription was a work of man or asport of nature. He stood between his two conclusions, like ourEdinburgh antiquarians between the two fossil Maries of Gueldres; and, richer in eloquence than most of the philosophers his contemporaries, was quite prepared, in his uncertainty, to give gilded mounting and apurple pall to both. 

"Should it be no other than a sport of nature, " he concludes, "thereputation which the stone bears in this country deserves that we shouldhave given a description of it. If, on the other hand, what is on it bean inscription, though it certainly does not possess the beauty of thesculpture of Greece or Rome, it very possibly has the advantage of beingthe oldest in the universe. The country in which it is found isinhabited only by a race of men who live like beasts in the forests. Wecannot imagine that they can have ever had any memorable event totransmit to posterity, nor, if ever they had had, that they could haveinvented the means. Nor can it be conceived that this country, with itspresent aspect, ever possessed more civilized inhabitants. The rigor ofthe climate and the barrenness of the land have destined it for theretreat of a few miserable wretches, who know no other. It seems, therefore, that the inscription must have been cut at a period when thecountry was situated in a different climate, and before some one ofthose great revolutions which, we cannot doubt, have taken place on ourglobe. The position that the earth's axis holds at present with respectto the ecliptic, occasions Lapland to receive the sun's rays veryobliquely: it is therefore condemned to a long winter, adverse to man, as well as to all the productions of nature. No great movement, possibly, in the heavens was necessary, however, to cause all itsmisfortunes. These regions may formerly have been those on which the sunshone most favorably; the polar circles may have been what now thetropics are, and the torrid zone have filled the place occupied by thetemperate. " Pretty well, Monsieur, for a philosopher! The variousattempts made to unriddle the real history of graphic granite are, however, scarce less curious than the speculations connected with whatmay be termed its romance. It seems to be generally held, since the daysof old Hutton, who, in his "Theory of the Earth, " discussed the subjectwith his usual ingenuity, that the feldspathic basis of the stone firstcrystallized, leaving interstices between the crystals, partaking of acertain regularity of form, --a consequence of the regularity of thecrystals themselves, --and of a certain irregularity from the eccentricdispositions which these manifest in their position and relations toeach other; and that these interstices, being afterwards filled up withquartz, form the characters of the rock, --characters partaking enough ofthe first element of _regularity_ to present their peculiar graphicappearance, and enough of the second element of _irregularity_ toexhibit forms of an alphabet-like variety of outline. The chemist, however, in cross-questioning the explanation, has his puzzle topropound regarding it. Quartz, he says, being considerably less fusiblethan feldspar, would naturally consolidate first, and so would give formto the more fusible substance, instead of deriving form from it. On whatprinciple, then, is it that, reversing its ordinary character, it shouldhave been the last of the two substances to consolidate in the graphicgranite?--a query to which there seems to be no direct reply, but whichas little affects the fact that it _was_ the substance which lastconsolidated, and which took form from the other, as the decision of thelearned Strasburgers, which determined the impossibility of the longnose in Slawkenbergius's Tale, affected the actual existence of thatremarkable feature. "It happens _to be_, notwithstanding yourobjection, " said the controversialists on the pro-nose side of thequestion. "But it _ought not_, " replied their opponents. 

The rain again returned as I was engaged in examining the graphicgranite of the Portsoy vein; the breeze from the sea heightened into agale, that soon fringed the coast with a broad border of foam; and Ientered the town, which looked but indifferently well in its graydishabille of haze and spray, tolerably wet and worn, with but theprospect before me of being weather-bound for the rest of the day. Ifound an old-fashioned inn, kept by somewhat old-fashioned people, whohad lately come from the country to "open a public;" and ensconcedmyself by the fireside, in a huge many-windowed room, that must havewitnessed the county dinners of at least a century ago. Soon wearying, however, of hearing the rain beating mad-like ratans upon the panes, andavailing myself of a comparatively "lucid interval, " I sallied out, wrapped up in my plaid, to examine the serpentine beds in theneighborhood, which produce what is so extensively known as the Portsoymarble. The _beds_ or _veins_ of this substance, --for it is still a mootpoint whether they occur here as mere insulated masses of contemporaryorigin with the primary formations which surround them, or as Plutonicdykes injected into fissures at a later period, --are of veryconsiderable extent, one of them measuring about twenty-five yardsacross, and another considerably more than a quarter of a mile; and, hadthey but the solidity of the true marbles, they would scarce fail to beregarded as valuable quarries of a highly ornamental stone, admirablysuited for the interior decorations of the architect. But they areunluckily what the quarrier would term rubbly, --traversed by an infinityof cracks and fissures; and it is rare indeed to find a continuous massout of which a chimney-jamb or lintel could be fashioned. The serpentinewas wrought here considerably more than a century and a half ago, andexported to France for the magnificent Palace of Versailles; which, though regarded by the French nation, says Voltaire, as "a favoritewithout merit, " Louis the Fourteenth persisted at the time in lavishlybeautifying, and looked as for abroad as Portsoy for materials withwhich to adorn it. I have, however, seen it stated that the greater partof a ship's cargo, brought afterwards to Paris on speculation, wassuffered to lie unwrought for years in the stone-dealer's yard, and wasultimately disposed of as rubbish, --a consequence, probably, of itsunfitness, from its shaky texture, for ornamental purposes on a largescale, though for ornaments of the smaller kind, such as boxes, vases, and plates, it has been pronounced unrivalled. "At Zöblitz, in UpperSaxony, " says Professor Jamieson, "several hundred people are employedin quarrying, cutting, turning, and polishing the serpentine whichoccurs in that neighborhood; and the various articles into which it ismanufactured are carried all over Germany. The serpentine of Portsoy, "he adds, "is, however, far superior to that of Zöblitz, in color, hardness, and transparency, and, when cut, is very beautiful. "

It is really a pretty stone; and, bad as the evening was, it was by nomeans one of the worst of evenings for seeing it to advantage _in situ_, or among the rolled pebbles on the shore. The varnish-like gloss of thewet imparted to the undressed masses all the effect of polish, andbrought out in their proper variegations of color, every cloud, streak, and vein. Viewed in the mass, the general hue is green; so much so, thatan insulated stack, which stands abreast of one of the beds, astone-cast in the sea, has greatly the appearance, at a little distance, of an immense mass of verdigris. But red, gray, and brown are alsoprevailing colors in the rock; occasional veins and blotches of whitegive lightness to the darker portions; and veins of hematitic and deepumbry tints, variety to the portions that are lighter. The greens varyfrom the palest olive to the deepest black-green of the mineralogist;the reds and browns, from blood-red to dark chocolate, and fromwood-brown to brownish-black; and, thus various in shade, they occur inalmost every possible variety of combination and form, --dotted, spotted, clouded, veined, --so that each separate pebble on the shore seems therepresentative of a rock different from the rocks represented by almostall the others. Though not much of a mineralogist, I could have spentconsiderably more time than the weather permitted me to employ thisevening, in admiring the beauties of this beach of _marbles_, orrather, --as the real name, derived from those gorgeous, many-coloredcloudings, that impart a terrible splendor to the skins of the snake andviper family, is not only the more correct, but also the more poeticalof the two, --this beach of _serpentines_. I had, however, to compromisematters between the fierce wind and rain and the pretty rocks andpebbles, by adjourning to the workshop of the Portsoy lapidary, Mr. Clark, and examining under cover his polished specimens, of which Ipurchased for a few shillings a characteristic and elegant little set. Portsoy is peculiarly rich in minerals; and hence it reckons among itsmechanics of the ordinary class, what perhaps no other village inScotland of the same size and population possesses, --a skilful lapidary. Mr. Clark's collection of the graphic granites, serpentines, and talcoseand mica schists, of the district, with their associated minerals, suchas schorl, talc, asbestos, amianthus, mountain cork, steatite, andschiller spar, will be found eminently worthy a visit by the passingtraveller. 

I made several inquiries in the village, though not, as it proved, inthe right direction, regarding a poor old lady, several years dead, ofwhom I had known a very little considerably more than a quarter of acentury before, and whose grave I would have visited, bad as the nightwas, had I met any one who could have pointed it out to me. Butungrateful Portsoy seemed to have forgotten poor Miss Bond, who, in allher printed letters and little stories, so rarely forgot _it_. Have anyof my readers ever seen the work (in two slim volumes), "Letters of aVillage Governess, " published in 1814 by Elizabeth Bond, and dedicatedto Sir Walter Scott? If not, and should they chance to see, as I latelydid, a copy on a stall (with uncut leaves, alas! and selling dog cheap), they might possibly do worse things than buy it. [12]

With better weather I could have spent a day or two very agreeably inPortsoy and its neighborhood; but the rain dashed unceasingly, and madeexploration under the cover of the umbrella somewhat resemble that of asea-bottom under cover of the diving-bell. I could see but little at atime, and the little imperfectly. Miss Bond, in her "Letters, " refers, in her light, pleasing style, to what in more favorable circumstances_might_ be seen. "My troop of _light infantry_, " she says, "keeps me sowell employed here during the day, that the silence and repose of theevening is very delightful. In fine weather I walk by the sea-side, andscramble among the rugged rocks, many of which are inaccessible to humanfeet, forming a fine retreat for foxes. These animals often may be seenfrom the heights, sporting with their cubs in perfect safety. This day Iwent to see the works of an old _virtuoso_, who turns in marble, orrather granite [serpentine] all kinds of chimney-piece ornaments, rings, ear-rings, etc. Several specimens of his work, which must have cost hima vast deal of trouble, I thought very beautiful. It was in thisneighborhood that the celebrated Ferguson spent so much of his time. Theglobular stones on the gate of Durn are still to be seen, on which hemapped out the figuring of the terrestrial and celestial globes. I wastold it was forbidden ground to approach the premises of Durn; but Icould not resist the temptation of visiting the spot where the youngphilosopher had shown such early proofs of his genius; and I accordinglypaid the forfeit of an _impertinent_, for the gentleman who residesthere caught the prowler, and in genteel terms bade her go about herbusiness, and never return. How ungracious! She was doing no harm. "

The morning arose as gloomily as the evening had fallen; and I walked onin the rain to Cullen, fully disposed to sympathize by the way with the"hardy Byron, "--he of the "Narrative, "--who, from his ill-luck inweather, went among his sailors by the name of "Foul-weather Jack. " Inthe sandy bay of Cullen, where the road, after inflecting inland forsome five or six miles, comes again upon the sea, I found the surfcharging home in long white lines six waves deep, --

 "Each stepping where his comrade stood, The instant that he fell. "

The appearance was such as to impart no inadequate idea of the vastattritive power of ocean in wearing down the land. When pausing for alittle abreast of the fishing village, partially sheltered by an oldboat, to mark the fierce turmoil, it suddenly occurred to me, --as thetempest weltered around reef and skerry, and roared wildly, mile aftermile, along the beach, --that the day and night were now just equal, andthat it was the customary equinoctial storm that had broken out toaccompany me on my journey. And so, calculating on a few days more ofit, instead of waiting on in the hope of a fair afternoon to examine theoutlier of Old Red which occurs in the neighborhood of Cullen, I wascontent to see at a distance its mural-sided cliffs rising like brokenwalls through the flat sand; and, taking the road for Fochabers, withthe intention of leaving exploration till fairer weather set in, Iresolved on posting straight on, to join my relatives on the oppositeside of the Frith. The deep-red color of the boulder-clay, as exhibitedby the way-side, in the water-courses and the water, --for every runnelwas tumbling down big and turbid with the rains, --intimated, when, afterleaving Cullen some six or seven miles behind me, I passed from a baremoory region of quartz rock into a region of woods and fields, that Iwas again upon my ancient acquaintance, the Old Red Sandstone. And thesection furnished by the Burn of Tynet showed me shortly after that theintimation was a correct one, and how generally it may be laid down as arule, that at least the more impalpable portions of the boulder-clay arederived from the rocks on which it rests. The ichthyolite beds appear inthe course of the burn. They have furnished several goodspecimens, --among the others, the specimen of Coccosteus figured by Mr. Patrick Duff in his "Sketches of the Geology of Moray;" and they are, besides, curious, as being the first to exhibit to the traveller whoexplores from Gamrie westwards, that peculiar style of coloring whichcharacterizes the Old Red ichthyolites of the shires of Moray and Nairn, and which differs so strikingly from the more sombre style exhibited bythe other ichthyolites of Banffshire, with those of Cromarty, Ross, Caithness, and Orkney. Instead of bearing, like these, one uniform hue, as if deeply shaded with Indian ink, they are gorgeously attired, especially when newly laid open, in white, red, purple, and blue. Theday, however, was ill-suited for fishing Pterichthyes and Osteolepi outof the Tynet: the red water was roaring from bank to brae; here eddyingalong the half-submerged furze, --there tearing down the boulder-days inraw, red land-slips; and so, casting but one eager glance at the bedwhere the fish lay, I travelled on, and entered the tall woods to theeast of Fochabers. The rain ceased for a time; and I met in the woods anold pensioner, who had been evidently weather-bound in somepublic-house, and had now taken the opportunity of the fair interval tostagger to his dwelling. He was eminently, exuberantly happy, --therecould not be two opinions on that head, --full of all manner of brightsunshiny thoughts and imaginations, rendered just a little tremulous anduncertain by the _summer-heat_ exhalations of the imbibed moisture, likedistant objects in a hot noonday landscape in July seen through volumesof rising vapor; and a sheep's head and trotters, which he carried underhis arm, was, I saw, to serve as a peace-offering to his wife at home. True, he had been taking a dram, but he was mindful of the family forall that. He confronted me with the air of an old acquaintance; gave themilitary salute; and then, laying hold of a corner of my plaid with histhumb and forefinger, --"I know you, " he said, "I know _your kind_ well;ye're a Highland-Donald. Od, I've seen ye in the _thick o't_. Ye're_reugh_ fellows when ye're bluid's up!" He had taken me for a grenadierof the 42d; and I lacked the moral courage to undeceive him. I metnothing further on my way worthy of record, save and except a sheep'strotter, dropped by the old pensioner in one of his zig-zaggings to theextreme left; but having no particular use for the trotter at the timeand in the circumstances, I left it to benefit the next passer-by. Ifinished my journey of eighteen miles in capital style, and was withinfive minutes' walk of Fochabers when the horn of the mail-guard wassounding up the street. And, entering the village, I found the vehiclestanding opposite the inn door, minus the horses. 

The _insides_ and _outsides_ were sitting down to dinner together as Ientered the inn; and I felt, after my long walk, that it would be ratheran agreeable matter to join with them. But in the hope of meeting my oldfriend Mr. Joss, I requested to be shown, not into the passengers' room, but into that of the coachman and guard; and with them I dined. It sochanced, however, that Mr. Joss was not _out_ that day; and the man inthe red long coat was a stranger whom I had never seen before. Iinquired of him regarding Mr. Joss, --one of perhaps the most remarkablemail-guards in Europe. I have at least never heard of another who, likehim, amuses his leisure on the coach-top with the "Principia" of Newton, and understands it. And the man, drawing his inference from the interestin Mr. Joss which my queries evinced, asked me whether I myself was nota coach-guard. "No, " I rather thoughtlessly replied, "I am not acoach-guard. " Half a minute's consideration, however, led me to doubtwhether I had given the right answer. "I am not sure, " I said tomyself, on second thoughts, "but the man has cut pretty fairly on thepoint;--I daresay _I am_ a sort of coach-guard. I have to mount mytwice-a-week coach in all weathers, like any mail-guard among them all;I have to start at the appointed hour, whether the vehicle be empty orfull; I have to keep a sharp eye on the opposition coaches; I amresponsible, like any other mail-guard, for all the parcels carried, however little I may have had to do with the making of them up; I havealways to keep my blunderbuss full charged to the muzzle, --not wishingharm to any one, but bound in duty to let drive at all and sundry whowould make war upon the passengers, or attempt running the conveyanceoff the road; and, finally, as my friend Mr. Joss takes the "Principia"to _his_ coach-top, I take pockets full of fossils to the top of mine, and amuse myself in fine days by working out, as I best can, theproblems which they furnish. Yes, I rather think _I am_ a coach-guard. "And so, taking my seat beside my red-coated brother, who had guessed thetrue nature of my occupation so much more shrewdly than myself, I rodeon to Elgin, where I passed the night. 

It is difficult to arrange in the mind the geologic formations ofBanffshire in their character as a series of deposits. The pages of thestony record which the county composes, like those of anunskilfully-folded pamphlet, have been strangely mixed together, so thatpage last succeeds in some places to page first, and, of theintermediate pages, some appear at the beginning of the work, and someat the end. It is not until we reach the western confines of the county, some two or three miles short of the river Spey, its terminal boundaryin this direction, that we find the beds comparatively little disturbed, and arranged chronologically in their original places. In the easternand southern parts of the shire, rocks widely separated by the date oftheir formation have been set down side by side in patches, occasionally of but inconsiderable extent. Now the traveller passes overa district of grauwacke, now over a re-formation of the Lias; anon hefinds himself on a primary limestone, --gneiss, syenite, clay-slate, orquartz-rock; and yet anon amid the fossils of some outlier of the OldRed. The geological map of the county is, like Joseph's coat, of manycolors. I remember seeing, when a boy, more years ago than I am inclinedto specify, some workmen engaged in pulling down what had been ahouse-painter's shop, a full century before. The painter had been in thesomewhat slovenly habit of cleaning his brushes by rubbing them againsta hard-cast wall, which was covered, in consequence, by a many-coloredlayer of paint, a full half-inch in thickness, and as hard as a stone. Taking a little bit home with me, I polished it by rubbing the uppersurface smooth; and, lo! a geological map. The _strata_ of variouslyhued pigment, spread originally over the surface of the hard-cast wall, were cut open, by the _denudation_ of the grindstone, into all manner offantastic forms, and seemed thrown into all sorts of strangeneighborhoods. The _map_ lacked merely the additional perplexity of afew bold _faults_, with here and there a decided _dike_, in order torender it on a small scale a sort of miniature transcript of the geologyof Banff; and I have very frequently found my thoughts reverting to it, in connection with deposits of this broken character. On a rough_hard-cast_ basis of granite I have laid down in imagination, as if byway of priming, coat after coat of the primary rocks, --gneiss, andstratified hornblend, and mica-schist, and quartz-rock, and day-slate;and then, after breaking the coatings well up, and rubbing them welldown, and so spoiling and crumpling up the work as to make theiroriginal order considerably a puzzle, I have begun anew to paint overthe rough surface with thick coatings of grauwacke and grauwacke-slate. When this part of the operation was completed, I have again begunto break up and grind down, --here letting a tract of grauwackesink into the broken primary, --there wearing it off the surfacealtogether, --yonder elevating the original granitic _hard-cast_ till itrose over all the coatings, Primary and Palæozoic. And then I have begunto paint yet a third time with thick Old Red Sandstone pigment; and yetagain to break up and wear down, --here to insert a tenon of the Old Reddeep into a mortise of the grauwacke, as at Gamrie, --there to dovetailit into the clay-slate, as at Tomantoul, --yonder, after laying it acrossthe upturned quartz-rock, as at Cullen, to rub by much the greater partof it away again, leaving but mere remainder-patches and fragments, tomark where it had been. Lastly, if I had none of the superior Palæozoicor Secondary formations to deal with, I have brushed over the whole, byway of finish, with the variously-derived coatings of the superficialdeposits; and thus, as I have said, I have often completed, in idea, after the chance suggestion of the old painter's shop, my portablemodels of the geology of disturbed districts like the Banffshire one. The deposits of Moray are greatly less broken. Denudation has partiallyworn them down; but they seem to have almost wholly escaped the previouscrumpling process. 

CHAPTER IV. 

 Yellow-hued Houses Of Elgin--Geology of the Country indicated by the coloring of the Stone Houses--Fossils of Old Red north of the Grampians different from those of Old Red south--Geologic Formations at Linksfield difficult to be understood--Ganoid Scales of the Wealden--Sudden Reaction, from complex to simple, in the Scales of Fishes--Pore-covered Scales--Extraordinary amount of Design exhibited in Ancient Ganoid Scales--Holoptychius Scale illustrated by Cromwell's "fluted pot"--Patrick Duff's Geological Collection--Elgin Museum--Fishes of the Ganges--Armature of Ancient Fishes--Compensatory Defences--The Hermit-crab--Spines of the Pimelodi--Ride to Campbelton--Theories of the formation of Ardersier and Fortrose Promontories--Tradition of their construction by the Wizard, Michael Scott--A Region of Legendary Lore. 

The prevailing yellow hue of the Elgin houses strikes the eye of thegeologist who has travelled northwards from the Frith of Forth. He takesleave of a similar stone at Cupar-Fife, --a warmly-tinted yellowsandstone, peculiarly well-suited for giving effect to architecturalornament; and after passing along the deep-red sandstone houses of theshires of Angus and Kincardine, and the gneiss, granite, hyperstene, andmica-schist houses of Aberdeen and Banff shires, he again finds housesof a deep red on crossing the Spey, and houses of a warm yellow tint onreaching Elgin, --geologically the Cupar-Fife of the north. And the storythat the colored buildings tell him is, that he has been passing, thoughby a somewhat circuitous route of a hundred and fifty miles, over ananticlinal geological section, --_down_ in the scale till he reachedAberdeen and had gone a little beyond it, and then _up_ again, until atElgin he arrives at the same superior yellow bed of Old Red Sandstonewhich he had quitted at Cupar-Fife. Both beds contain the sameorganisms. The Holoptychius of Dura Den, near Cupar, must have sprungfrom the same original as the Holoptychius of the Hospital andBishop-Mill quarries near Elgin; and it seems not improbable that thetwo beds, thus identical in their character and contents, may haveexisted, ere the upheaval of the Grampians broke their continuity, as anextended deposit, at the bottom of the same sea. But with this last andnewest of the formations of the Old Red Sandstone the identity of thedeposits to the south and north ceases. The strata which in the southoverlie the yellow bed of the Holoptychius represent the Carboniferousperiod, the overlying strata in the north represent the Oölitic one. Onthe one side the miner sinks his shaft, and finds a true coal, composedof the Stigmaria, Calamites, Club-mosses, Ferns, and Araucarians of thePalæozoic era; he sinks his shaft on the other side, and finds but thinseams of an imperfect lignite, composed of the Cycadeæ, Pines, Sphenopteri, and Clathraria of the Secondary period. The flora whichfound its subsoil in the Old Red Sandstone north of the Grampians, belonged to a scene of things so much more modern than the flora whichfound its subsoil in the Old Red Sandstone of the south, that all itsproductions were green and flourishing, waving beside lake, river, andsea, at a time when the productions of the other were locked up, as now, in sand and shale, lime and clay, --the dead mummies of ages longdeparted. 

Another thoroughly wet morning! varied only from the morning of thepreceding day by the absence of wind, and the greater weight of thepersevering vertical rain, that leaped upwards in myriads of littledancing pyramids from the surface of every pool. I walked out undercover of my umbrella, to renew my acquaintance with the outlier of theWeald at Linksfield, and ascertain what sort of section it now presentedunder the quarrying operations of the limeburners. There was, however, little to be seen; the bands of green and blue clays, alternating withstrata of fossiliferous limestone, and layers of a gray shade, thicklycharged with minute shells of Cypris, were sadly blurred this morning bythe trail of numerous slips from above, which had fallen during therains, and softened into mud as they rushed downwards athwart the faceof the quarry: and the arched band of boulder-clay which so mysteriouslyunderlies the deposit was, save in a few parts, wholly covered up by thedebris. The occurrence of the clay here as an inferior bed, with but thecornstone of the Old Red beneath, and all the beds of the Weald restingover it, forms a riddle somewhat difficult of solution; but it ispalpably not reading it aright to regard the deposit, with at least onegeologist who has written on the subject, as older than the rocks above. It is, on the contrary, as a vast amount of various and unequivocalevidence demonstrates, incalculably more modern; nay, we find proof ofthe fact here in that very bed which has been instanced as rendering itdoubtful; the clay of which the interpolation is composed is found tocontain fragments, not only of the cornstone on which it rests, but alsoof the Wealden limestone and shales which it underlies. It forms themere filling up of a flat-roofed cavern, or rather of two flat-roofedcaverns, --for the limestone roof dipped in the centre to the cornstonefloor, --which, previous to the times of the boulder-clay, had lain openin what was then, as now, an old-world deposit, charged with longextinct organisms, but which, during the iceberg period, was penetratedand occupied by the clay, as run lime penetrates and occupies theinterstices of a dry-stone wall. It was no day for gathering fossils. Isaw a few ganoid scales, washed by the rain from the investing rubbish, glittering on fragments of the limestone, with a few of thecharacteristic shells of the deposit, chiefly Unionidæ; but nothingworth bringing away. The adhesive clay of the Weald, widely scatteredby the workmen, and wrought into mortar by the beating rains, made it amatter of some difficulty for the struggling foot to retain the shoe, and, sticking to my soles by pounds at a time, rendered me obnoxious tothe old English nickname of "rough-footed Scot. " And so, aftertraversing the heaps, somewhat like a fly in treacle, I had to yield tothe rain above and the mud beneath, and to return to do in Elgin whatcannot be done equally well in almost any other town of its size inScotland, --pursue my geological inquiries under cover. 

On this, as on other occasions, I was struck by the complex and veryvarious forms assumed by the ganoid scales of the Wealden. Throughoutthe Oölitic system generally, including the Lias, there obtains asingular complexity of type in these little glittering tiles ofenamelled bone, which contrasts strongly with the greatly more simplestyle which obtained among the ganoids of the Palæozoic period. In manyof these last, as in the Coelacanth family, including the generaHoloptychius, Asterolepis, and Glyptolepis, in all their many species, with at least one genus of Dipterians, the genus Dipterus, the externaloutline and arrangement of scale was as simple as in any of the Cycloidfamily of the present time. Like slates on a roof, each single scalecovered two, and was covered by two in turn; and the only point ofdifference which existed in relation to the _laying down_ of these massy_slates_ of _bone_, and the laying down of the very thin ones of _horn_which cover fish such as the carp or salmon, was, that in the massier_slates_, the sides, or _cover_, --nicely bevelled, in order to preservean equability of thickness throughout, --were so adjusted, that twoscales at their edges, where they lay the one over the other, were notthicker than one scale at its centre. Even in the other ganoids, theircontemporaries, such as the Osteolepis and Diplopterus, where thescales were ranged more in the tile fashion, side by side, there was, with much ingenious carpentry in the fitting, a general simplicity ofform. It would almost appear, however, that ere the ganoid order reachedthe times of the Weald, the simple forms had been exhausted, and thatnature, abhorring repetition, and ever stamping upon the scales somespecific characteristic of the creature that bore them, was obliged tohave recourse to forms of a more complex and involved outline. Theselatter-day scales send out nail-like spikes laterally and atop, to layhold upon their neighbors, and exhibit in their undersides grooves thataccommodated the nails sent out, in turn, by their neighbors, to layhold upon _them_. Their forms, too, are indescribably various andfantastic. It seems curious enough, that immediately after thisextremely _artificial_ state of things, if I may so speak, the twoprevailing orders of the fish of the present day, the Cycloids andCtenoids, should have been ushered upon the scene, and more than theoriginal simplicity of scale restored. There took place a suddenreäction, from the fantastic and the complex to the simple and theplain. 

It is further worthy of notice, that though many of the ganoid scales ofthe Secondary systems, including those of the Wealden, glitter asbrightly in burnished enamel as the more splendent scales of the Old RedSandstone and Coal Measures, there is a curious peculiarity exhibited inthe structure of many of the older scales of the highly enamelled class, which, so far as I have yet seen, does not extend beyond the Palæozoicperiod. The outer layer of the scale, which lies over a middle layer ofa cellular cancellated structure, and corresponds, apparently, with thatscarf-skin which in the human subject overlies the _rete mucosum_, isthickly set over with microscopic pores, funnel-shaped in the transversesection, and which, examined by a good glass, in the horizontal oneresemble the puncturings of a sieve. The Megalichthys of the CoalMeasures, with its various carboniferous congeners, with the generaDiplopterus, Dipterus, and Osteolepis of the Old Red Sandstone, --allbrilliantly enamelled fish, --are thickly pore-covered. But whateverpurpose these pores may have served, it seems in the Secondary period tohave been otherwise accomplished, if, indeed, it continued to exist. Itis a curious circumstance, that in no case do the pores seem to pass_through_ the scale. Whatever their use, they existed merely ascommunications between the cells of the middle cancellated layer and thesurface. In a fish of the Chalk, --_Macropoma Mantelli_, --the exposedfields of the scales are covered over with apparently hollow, elongatedcylinders, as the little tubes in a shower-bath cover their round fieldof tin, save that they lie in a greatly flatter angle than the tubes;but I know not that, like the pores of the Dipterians and theMegalichthys, they communicated between the interior of the scale andits external surface. Their structure is at any rate palpably different, and they bear no such resemblance to the pores of the human skin as thatwhich the Palæozoic pores present. 

The amount of design exhibited in the scales of some of the more ancientganoids, --design obvious enough to be clearly read, --is veryextraordinary. A single scale of _Holoptychius Nobilissimus_, --fastlocked up in its red sandstone rock, --laid by, as it were, forever, --will be seen, if we but set ourselves to unravel its texture, toform such an instance of nice adaptation of means to an end as might ofitself be sufficient to confound the atheist. Let me attempt placing oneof these scales before the reader, in its character as a flat counter ofbone, of a nearly circular form, an inch and a half in diameter, and aneighth-part of an inch in thickness; and then ask him to bethinkhimself of the various means by which he would impart to it the greatestpossible degree of strength. The human skull consists of two tables ofsolid bone, an inner and an outer, with a spongy cellular substanceinterposed between them, termed the _diploe_; and such is the effect ofthis arrangement, that the blow which would fracture a continuous wallof bone has its force broken by the spongy intermediate layer, andmerely injures the outer table, leaving not unfrequently the inner one, which more especially protects the brain, wholly unharmed. Now, suchalso was the arrangement in the scale of the _HoloptychiusNobilissimus_. It consisted of its two well-marked tables of solid bone, corresponding in their dermal character, the outer to the cuticle, theinner to the true skin, and the intermediate cellular layer to the _retemucosum_; but bearing an unmistakable analogy also, as a mechanicalcontrivance, to the two plates and the _diploe_ of the human skull. Tothe strengthening principle of the two tables, however, there were twoother principles added. Cromwell, when commissioning for a new helmet, his old one being, as he expresses it, "ill set, " ordered his friend tosend him a "_fluted pot_, " _i. E. _, a helmet ridged and furrowed on thesurface, and suited to break, by its protuberant lines, the force of ablow, so that the vibrations of the stroke would reach the body of themetal deadened and flat. Now, the outer table of the scale of theHoloptychius was a "fluted pot. " The alternate ridges and furrows whichornamented its surface served a purpose exactly similar with that of theflutes and fillets of Cromwell's helmet. The inner table wasstrengthened on a different but not less effective principle. The humanstomach consists of three coats; and two of these, the outermost orperitoneal coat, and the middle or muscular coat, are so arranged, thatthe fibres of the one cross at nearly right angles those of the other. The violence which would tear the compact sides of this important organalong the fibres of the outer coat, would be checked by the transversearrangement of the fibres of the middle coat, and _vice versa_. We findthe cotton manufacturer weaving some of his stronger fabrics on asimilar plan;--they also are made to consist of two _coats_; and what istechnically termed the _tear_ of the upper is so disposed that it liesat an angle of forty-five degrees with the _tear_ of the coat which liesunderneath. Now, the inner table of the scale of the Holoptychius wascomposed, on this principle, of various layers or coats, arranged theone over the other, so that the fibres of each lay at right angleswith the fibres of the others in immediate contact with it. Inthe inner table of one scale I reckon nine of these alternating, variously-disposed layers; so that any application of violence, which, in the language of the lath-splitter, would _run lengthwise along thegrain_ of four of them, would be checked by the _cross grain_ in five. In other words, the line of the _tear_ in five of the layers was rangedat right angles with the line of the _tear_ in four. There were thus ina single scale, in order to secure the greatest possible amount ofstrength, --and who can say what other purposes may have been securedbesides?--three distinct principles embodied, --the principle of the twotables and _diploe_ of the human skull, --the principle of the variouslyarranged coats of the human stomach, --and the principle of OliverCromwell's "fluted pot. " There have been elaborate treatises written onthose ornate flooring-tiles of the classical and middle ages, that areoccasionally dug up by the antiquary amid monastic ruins, or on thesites of old Roman stations. But did any of them ever tell a story halfso instructive or so strange as that told by the incalculably moreancient ganoid _tiles_ of the Palæozoic and Secondary periods?

I called, on my way back from Linksfield, upon my old friend Mr. PatrickDuff, and was introduced once more to his exquisite collection, with itsunique ichthyolites of at least two genera of fishes of the OldRed, --the _Stagonolepis_ and _Placothorax_ of Agassiz, --which up to thepresent time are to be seen nowhere else; and various other finespecimens of rare species, which, having sat for their portraits, havetheir forms preserved in the great work of the naturalist of Neufchatel. He showed me, with some triumph, one of his later acquisitions, --a finespecimen of Holoptychius from the upper yellow sandstone of Bishop-Mill, which exhibits the dorsal ridge covered with a line of large overlappingscales, not at all unlike those overlapping plates which cover the tailof the lobster; for which, by the way, they were mistaken by the workmanwho first laid the fossil open. I examined, too, with some interest, fragments of a gigantic species of Pterichthys, belonging to an inferiordivision of the same Upper Old Red formation as the yellow stone, designated by Agassiz _Pterichthys major_, which must have attained toat least thrice the size, linearly, of even its bulkier congeners of theLower formation of the Coccosteus. After examining many a drawer, stored, from the deposits of the neighborhood, with characteristicfossils of the Lias, the Weald, and the Oölite, and of the Upper andLower Old Red, we set out together to expatiate amid the treasures ofthe Town Museum. 

Among other recent additions to the Museum, there is an interesting setof the fishes of the Ganges, the donation of a gentleman long residentin India, to which Mr. Duff called my attention, as illustrative, insome of the specimens, of the more characteristic ichthyolites of theOld Red Sandstone. One numerous family, the Pimelodi, abundantlyrepresented in the Gangetic region, in not only the rivers, but also theponds, tanks, and estuaries of the district, is certainly worthy thecareful study of the geologist. It approaches nearer, in some of itsmore strongly-marked genera, to the Coccosteus of the Lower Old Red, than any other tribe of existing fishes which I have yet seen. The bodyof the Pimelodus, from the anterior dorsal downwards, is as naked asthat of the eel; whereas the head, and in several of the species theback, is armed with strong plates of naked bone, curiously fretted, asin many of the ichthyolites of the Lower, and more especially of theUpper Old Red Sandstone, into ridges of confluent tubercles, thatradiate from the centre to the edges of the plates. The dorsal plate, too, when detached, as in many of the species, from the plates of thehead, bears upon its inner side a strong central ridge, that deepens asit descends, till it abruptly terminates a little short of thetermination of the plate, exactly as in the dorsal plate of Coccosteus, which sunk its central ridge deep into the back of the animal. The pointof resemblance to be mainly noticed, however, is the contrast furnishedby the powerful armature of the head and back, with the unprotectednakedness of the posterior portions of the creature;--a point speciallynoticeable in the Coccosteus, and apparent also, though in a lesserdegree, in some of the other genera of the Old Red, such as thePterichthyes and Asterolepides. From the snout of the Coccosteus down tothe posterior termination of the dorsal plate, the creature was cased instrong armor, the plates of which remain as freshly preserved in theancient rocks of the country as those of the Pimelodi of the Ganges onthe shelves of the Elgin Museum; but from the pointed termination of theplate immediately over the dorsal fin, to the tail, comprising morethan one half the entire length of the animal, all seems to have beenexposed, without the protection of even a scale, and there survives inthe better specimens only the internal skeleton of the fish and theray-bones of the fins. It was armed, like a French dragoon, with astrong helmet and a short cuirass; and so we find its remains in thestate in which those of some of the soldiers of Napoleon's old guard, that had been committed unstripped to the earth, may be dug up in thefuture on the fatal field of Borodino, or along the banks of the Dwinaor the Wap. The cuirass lies still attached to the helmet, but we findonly the naked skeleton attached to the cuirass. The Pterichthys to itsstrong helmet and cuirass added a posterior armature of comparativelyfeeble scales, as if, while its upper parts were shielded with platearmor, a lighter covering of ring or scale armor sufficed for the lessvital parts beneath. In the Asterolepis the arrangement was somewhatsimilar, save that the plated cuirass was wanting: it was a stronglyhelmed warrior in slight scale armor; for the disproportion between thestrength of the plated head-piece and that of the scaly coat was stillgreater than in the Pterichthys. The occipital star-covered plates are, in some of the larger specimens, fully three-quarters of an inch inthickness, whereas the thickness of the delicately-fretted scales rarelyexceeds a line. 

Why this disproportion between the strength of the armature in differentparts of the same fish should have obtained, as in Pterichthys andAsterolepis, or why, while one portion of the animal was strongly armed, another portion should have been left, as in Coccosteus, wholly exposed, cannot of course be determined by the mere geologist. His rocks presenthim with but the fact of the disproportion, without accounting for it. But the natural history of existing fish, in which, as in the Pimelodi, there may be detected a similar peculiarity of armature, may perhapsthrow some light on the mystery. In Hamilton's "Fishes of the Ganges" Ifind but little reference made to the instincts and habits of theanimals described: their deep-river haunts lie, in many cases, beyondthe reach of observation; and of the observations actually made, thedescriptive naturalist, intent often on mere peculiarities of structure, is not unfrequently too careless. Hamilton describes the habitats of thevarious Indian species of Pimelodi, whether brackish estuaries, ponds, or rivers, but not their characteristic instincts. Of the Silurus, however, a genus of the same great family, I read elsewhere that some ofthe species, such as the _Silurus glanis_, being unwieldy in theirmotions, do not pursue their prey, which consists of small fishes, butlie concealed among the mud, and seize on the chance stragglers thatcome their way. And of the _Pimelodus gulio_, a little, strongly-helmedfish, with a naked body, I was informed by Mr. Duff, on the authority ofthe gentleman who had presented the specimens to the Museum, that itburrowed in the holes of muddy banks, from which it shot out its armedhead, and arrested, as they passed, the minute animals on which itpreyed. The animal world is full of such compensatory defences: there isa half-suit of armor given to shield half the body, and a wise instinctto protect the rest. The _Pholas crispata_ cannot shut its valves so asto protect its anterior parts, without raising them from off those partswhich lie behind: like the Irishman in the haunted house, who attemptedlengthening his blanket by cutting strips from the top and sewing themon to the bottom, it loses at the one end what it gains at the other;but, hemmed round by the solid walls of the recess which it is itsnature to hollow out for itself in shale or stone, the anterior parts, though uncovered by the shell, are not exposed. By closing its valvesanteriorly, it shuts the door of its little house, made like that of theconey-folk of Scripture, in the rock; and then, of the entire cell inwhich it dwells so secure, what is not shut door is impregnable wall. The remark of Paley, that the "human animal is the only one which isnaked, and the only one which can clothe itself, " is by no means quitecorrect. One half the hermit crab is as naked as the "human animal, " andeven less fitted for exposure; for it consists of a thin-skinned, soft, unmuscular bag, filled with delicate viscera; but not even the humananimal is more skilful in clothing himself in the spoils of otheranimals than the hermit crab in wrapping up its naked bag in the strongshell of some dead fusus or buccinum, which it carries about with it inall its peregrinations, as at once clothes, armor, and house. Naturearms its front, and it is itself wise enough to arm its rear. Now, itseems not improbable that the half-armed Coccosteus, a heavy fish, indifferently furnished with fins, may have burrowed, like the recent_Silurus glanis_ or _Pimelodus gulio_, in a thick mud, --of the existenceof which in vast quantity, during the times of the Old Red Sandstone, the dark Caithness flagstones, the fetid breccia of Strathpeffer, andthe gray stratified clays of Cromarty, Moray, and Banff, unequivocallytestify; and that it may have thus not only succeeded in capturing manyof its light-winged contemporaries, which it would have vainly pursuedin open sea, but may have been enabled also to present to its enemies, when assailed in turn, only its armed portions, and to protect itsunarmed parts in its burrow. It is further worthy of notice, that manyof the Pimelodi are furnished with spines, not, like thoseichthyodorulites which occur so frequently in the older Secondary andPalæozoic divisions, unfinished in appearance at their lower extremity, as if, like the spines of the ancient Acanthodi, or those of the recentdog-fish (_Spinax acanthias_), they had been simply embedded in theflesh, but bearing, like the wings of the Pterichthys, an articulatedaspect. Those of the _Pimelodus rita_ and _Pimelodus gagata_ are ofsingular beauty; and when the creatures have no further use for them, and the mud of the Ganges has been consolidated into shale or baked intoflagstone around them, they will make very exquisite fossils. A correctdrawing of the plates and spines of some of the members of the Pimelodifamily, with a portion of the internal skeletons, arranged in theirproper places, but divested of those more destructible parts to whichthey are attached, would serve admirably to show what strange forms fishnot greatly removed from the ordinary type may assume in the fossilstate, and might throw some light on the extraordinary appearanceassumed, as ichthyolites, by the old family of the Cephalaspians. 

The geological department of the Elgin Museum is not yet very complete. The private collections of the locality, by forestalling, greatlyrestrict the supply from the rich deposits in the neighborhood, and havean unquestioned right to do so. The Museum contains, however, severalinteresting organisms. I saw, among the others, a specimen ofDiplopterus, that showed the form and position of the fins of thisrather rare ichthyolite much better than any of the Morayshire specimensportrayed by Agassiz in his great work; and beside it, one of the twospecimens of _Pterichthys oblongus_ which he figures, and on which heestablishes the species. The other individual, --a Cromartyspecimen, --graces my little collection. The gloomy day passed pleasantlyin deciphering, with so accomplished a geologist as Mr. Duff, thesecurious hieroglyphics of the old world, that tell such wonderfulstories, and in comparing _viva voce_, as we were wont to do long yearsbefore in lengthy epistles, our respective notions regarding the truekey for laying open their more occult meanings. And, after sharing withhim in his family dinner, I again took my seat on the mail, as a chill, raw evening was falling, and rode on, some six or eight and twentymiles, to Campbelton. The rain pattered drearily through the night on mybed-room window; and as frequent exposure to the wet had begun to tellon a constitution not altogether so strong as it had once been, Iawakened oftener than was quite comfortable, to hear it. The morning, however, was dry, though gray and sunless; and, taking an earlybreakfast at the inn, I traversed the flat gravelly points of Ardersierand Fortrose, that, projecting like moles far into the Frith, narrow theintervening ferry to considerably less than one-third the width which itwould present were they away. The origin of these long detritalpromontories, which form, when viewed from the heights on either side, so peculiar a feature in the landscape, and which, were they directlyopposite, instead of being set down a mile awry, would shut up theopening altogether, has not yet been satisfactorily accounted for. Onespecial theory assigns their formation to the agency of the descendingtide, striking in zig-gig style, in consequence of some peculiarity ofthe coast-line or of the bottom, from side to side of the Frith, anddepositing a long trail of sand and gravel, at nearly right angles withthe beach, first on the one shore and then on the other. But why thetide, which runs in various zig-zag crossings in the course of theFrith, should have the effect here, and nowhere else, of raising twovast mounds, each a full mile and a quarter in length, with an averagebreadth of from two to five furlongs, is by no means very apparent. Certainly the present tides of the Frith could not have formed them, norcould they have been elevated to their present average height of ten ortwelve feet over the flood-line in a sea standing at the existing level. If they in reality originated in this cause, it must have been ere thelatter upheavals of the land or recessions of the sea, when the greatCaledonian Valley existed as a narrow ocean sound, swept by powerfulcurrents. Upon another and entirely different hypothesis, these flatpromontories have been regarded as the remains, levelled by the waves, and gapped direct in the middle by the tide, of a vast transverse morainof the great valley, belonging to the same glacial age as the lateralmorains some ten or fifteen miles higher up, that extend from theimmediate neighborhood of Inverness to the mansion-house of Dochfour. But this hypothesis, like the other, is not without its difficulties. Why, for instance, should the promontories be a mile awry? There is, however, yet another mode of accounting for their formation, which I amnot in the least disposed to criticise. 

They were constructed, says tradition, through the agency of thearch-wizard Michael Scott. Michael had called up the hosts of Faery toerect the cathedral of Elgin and the chanonry kirk of Fortrose, whichthey completed from foundation to ridge, each in a singlenight, --committing, in their hurry, merely the slight mistake oflocating the building intended for Elgin in Fortrose, and that intendedfor Fortrose in Elgin; but, their work over and done, and when themagician had no further use for them, they absolutely refused to be_laid_; and, like a _posse_ of Irish laborers thrown out of a job, camethronging round him, clamoring for more employment. Fearing lest heshould be torn in pieces, --a catastrophe which has not unfrequentlyhappened in such circumstances in the olden time, and of which thoserecent philanthropists who engage themselves in finding work for theunemployed may have perhaps entertained some little dread in our owndays, --he got rid of them for the time by setting them off in a body torun a mound across the Moray Frith from Fortrose to Ardersier. Toilinghard in the evening of a moonlight night, they had proceeded greatlymore than two-thirds towards the completion of the undertaking, when aluckless Highlander passing by bade God-speed the work, and, by thusbreaking the charm, arrested at once and forever the construction of themound, and saved the navigation of Inverness. 

I stood for a few seconds at the Burn of Rosemarkie undecided whether Ishould take the Scarfs-Craig road, --a break-neck path which runseastwards along the cliffs, and which, though the rougher, is the moredirect Cromarty line of the two, --or the considerably better thoughlonger line of the White Bog, which strikes upwards along the burn in awesterly direction, and joins the Cromarty and Inverness highway on themoor of the Maolbuie. I had got into a part of the country where everylittle locality, and every more striking feature in the landscape, hasits associated tradition; and the pause of a few moments at the tworoads recalled to my memory the details of a ghost-story, long regardedin the district in which it was best known as one of the most authenticof its class, but which seems by no means inexplicable on naturalprinciples. [13]

CHAPTER V. 

 Rosemarkie and its Scaurs--Kaes' Craig--A Jackdaw Settlement--"Rosemarkie Kaes" and "Cromarty Cooties"--"The Danes, " a Group of Excavations--At Home in Cromarty--The Boulder-clay of Cromarty "begins to tell its story"--One of its marked Scenic Peculiarities--Hints to Landscape Painters--"Samuel's Well"--A Chain of Bogs geologically accounted for--Another Scenic Peculiarity--"_Ha-has_ of Nature's digging"--The Author's earliest Field of Hard Labor--Picturesque Cliff of Boulder-clay--Scratchings on the Sandstone--Invariable Characteristic of true Boulder-clay--Scratchings on Pebbles in the line of the longer axis--Illustration from the Boulder-clay of Banff. 

Rosemarkie, with its long narrow valley and its red abrupt _scaurs_, [14]is chiefly interesting to the geologist for its vast beds of theboulder-clay. I am acquainted with no other locality in the kingdomwhere this deposit is hollowed into ravines so profound, or presentsprecipices so imposing and lofty. The clay lies thickly over most partof the Black Isle and the peninsula of Easter Ross, --both soft sandstonedistricts, --bearing everywhere an obvious relation, as a deposit, toboth the form and the conditions of exposure of the existing land, --justas the accumulated snow of a long-lying snow-storm, exposed to thedrifting wind, bears relation to the heights and hollows of the tractswhich it covers. On the higher eminences the clay forms a comparativelythin stratum, and in not a few instances it has been wholly worn away;while on the lower grounds, immediately over the old coast line, and inthe sides of hollow valleys, --exactly such places as we might expect tosee the snow occupying most deeply after a night of drift, --we find itaccumulated in vast beds of from eighty to an hundred feet in thickness. One of these occurs in the opening of the narrow valley along which mycourse this morning lay, and is known far and wide, --for it forms amarked feature in the landscape, and harbors in its recesses a countlessmultitude of jackdaws, --as the "Kaes' Craig of Rosemarkie. " It presentsthe appearance of a hill that had been cut sheer through the middle fromtop to base, and exhibits in its abrupt front a broad red perpendicularsection of at least a hundred feet in height, barred transversely bythin layers of sand, and scored vertically by the slow action of therains. Originally it must have stretched its vanished limb across theopening like some huge snow-wreath accumulated athwart a frozen rivulet;but the incessant sweep of the stream that runs through the valley haslong since amputated and carried it away; and so only half the hill nowremains. The Kaes' Craig resembles in form a lofty chalk cliff, square, massy, abrupt, with no sloping fillet of vegetation bound across itsbrow, but precipitous direct from the hill-top. The little ancientvillage of Rosemarkie stretches away from its base on the opposite sideof the stream; and on its summit and along its sides, groups ofchattering jackdaws, each one of them as reflective and philosophic asthe individual immortalized by Cowper, look down high over the chimneysinto the streets. The clay presents here, more than in almost any otherlocality with which I am acquainted, the character of a stratifieddeposit; and the numerous bands of sand by which the cliff ishorizontally streaked from top to bottom we find hollowed, as weapproach, into a multitude of circular openings, like shot-holes in anold tower, which form breeding-places for the daw and the sand-martin. The biped inhabitants of the cliff are greatly more numerous than thebiped inhabitants of the quiet little hamlet below; and on Fortrosefair-days, when, in virtue of an old feud, the Rosemarkie boys were wontto engage in formidable bickers with the boys of Cromarty, I remember, as one of the invading belligerents, that, in bandying names with themin the fray, we delighted to bestow upon them, as their hereditarysobriquet, given, of course, in allusion to their feathered neighbors, the designation of the "_Rosemarkie kaes_. " Cromarty, however, istwo-thirds surrounded by the waters of a frith abounding in sea-fowl;and the little fellows of Rosemarkie, indignant at being classed withtheir _kaes_, used to designate us with hearty emphasis, in turn, as the"_Cromarty cooties_, " _i. E. _, coots. 

A little higher up the valley, on the western side, there occurs in theclay what may be termed a _group_ of excavations, composing a piece ofscenery ruinously broken and dreary, and that bears a specific characterof its own which scarce any other deposit could have exhibited. Theexcavations are of considerable depth and extent, --hollows out of whichthe materials of pyramids might have been taken. The precipitous sidesare fretted by jutting ridges and receding inflections, that present inabundance their diversified alternations of light and shadow. The steepdescents form cycloid curves, that flatten at their bases, and overwhich the ferruginous stratum of mould atop projects like a cornice. Between neighboring excavations there stand up dividing walls, tall andthin as those of our city buildings, and in some cases broken at theirupper edges into rows of sharp pinnacles or inaccessible turf-copedturrets; while at the bottom of the hollows, washed by the runnelswhich, in the slow lapse of years, have been the architects of thewhole, we find cairn-like accumulations of water-rolled stones, --thedisengaged pebbles and boulders of the deposit. The boulders and pebblesproject also from the steep sides, at all heights and of all sizes, like the primary masses inclosed in our ancient conglomerates, whenexhibited in wave-worn precipices, --forcing upon the mind the conclusionthat the boulder-clay is itself but an unconsolidated conglomerate ofthe later periods, which occupies nearly the same relative position tothe existing vegetable mould, with all its recent productions, that thegreat conglomerate of the Old Red Sandstone occupies in relation to thelower ichthyolite beds of that system, with their numerous extinctorganisms. But its buried stones are fretted with hieroglyphicinscriptions, in the form of strange scratchings and polishings, grooves, ridges, and furrows, --always associated with theboulder-clays, --which those of the more ancient conglomerates want, andwhich, though difficult to read, seem at length to be yielding up thestory which they record. Of this, however, more anon. Viewed bymoonlight, when the pale red of the clay where the beam falls direct isrelieved by the intense shadows, these excavations of the valley ofRosemarkie form scenes of strange and ghostly wildness: the projecting, buttress-like angles, --the broken walls, --the curved inflections, --thepointed pinnacles, --the turrets, with their masses of projectingcoping, --the utter lack of vegetation, save where the heath and thefurze rustle far above, --all combine to form assemblages of drearyruins, amid which, in the solitude of night, one almost expects to seespirits walk. These excavations have been designated, from timeimmemorial, by the neighboring town's-people, as "the Danes;" butwhether the name be, as is most probable, merely a corruption of anappropriate enough Saxon word, "the dens, " or derived, as a vaguetradition is said to testify, from the ages of Danish invasion, it isnot quite the part of the geologist to determine. It may be worthmentioning, however, from its bearing on the point, that there are twoexcavations in the boulder-clay near Cromarty, one of which has beenlong known by the name of "the Morial's Den, " while the other, greatlysmaller in size, rejoices in the double diminutive of "the LittleDennie. " For an hour or so the Danes proved agreeable though somewhatsilent companions; and then, climbing the opposite side of the valley, Igained the high road, and, walking on to Cromarty, found myself oncemore among "the old familiar faces. "

In a few days the storm blew by; and as the prolonged rains had clearedout the deep ravines of the district, and given to the boulder-clay inwhich they are scooped a freshness in its section analogous to freshfracture in rocks of harder consistency, I availed myself of thefacilities afforded me in consequence, for exploring it once more. Ithas long constituted one of the hardest of the many riddles with whichour Scottish deposits exercise the patience and ingenuity of thegeologist. I remember a time when, after passing a day under its barren_scaurs_, or hid in its precipitous ravines, I used to feel in theevening as if I had been travelling under the cloud of night, and hadseen nothing. It was a morose and taciturn companion, and had nospeculation in it. I might stand in front of its curved precipices, red, yellow or gray, according to the prevailing average color of the rockson which it rests, and mark their water-rolled boulders, of allqualities and sizes, sticking out in bold relief from the surface, likethe rock-like protuberances that roughen the rustic basements of thearchitect, from the line of the wall; but I had no _open sesame_ to formvistas through them into the recesses of the past. I saw merely thestiff pastry matrix of which they are composed, and the inclosedpebbles. But the boulder-clay has of late become more sociable; and, though with much hesitancy and irresolution, like old Mr. Spectator onthe first formal opening of his mouth, --a consequence, doubtless, inboth cases of previous habits of silence long indulged, --it begins totell its story. And a most curious story it is. 

The morning was clear, but just a little chill; and a soft covering ofsnow, that had fallen during the storm on the flat summit of Ben-Wevis, and showed its extreme tenuity by the paleness of its tint of wateryblue, was still distinctly visible at the distance of full twenty miles. The sun, low in the sky, --for the hour was early, --cast its slant raysathwart the prospect, giving to each nearer bank and hillock, and to themore distant protuberances on the mountain-sides, those well-definedaccompaniments of shadow that serve by throwing the minor features of alandscape upon the eye in bold relief, to impart to it an air of higherfinish and more careful filling up than it ever bears under a morevertical light. I took the road which, leading westward from the towntowards Invergordon Ferry, skirts the Frith on the one hand, and runsimmediately under the noble escarpment of green bank formed by the oldcoast line on the other. Fully two-thirds of the entire height of therampart here, which rises in all about a hundred feet over thesea-level, is formed of the boulder-clay; and I am acquainted with nolocality in which the deposit presents more strongly, for at least thefirst half mile, one of its marked scenic peculiarities. It is furrowedvertically on the slope, as if by enormous flutings in the more antiqueDoric style; and the ridges by which these are separated, --each from ahundred to a hundred and fifty feet in length, and from five-and-twentyto thirty feet in average height, --resemble those burial mounds withwhich the sexton frets the churchyard turf; with this difference, however, that they seem the burial mounds of giants, tall and bulky asthose that of old warred against the gods. They are striking enough tohave caught the eye of the children of the place, and are known amongthem as the Giants' Graves. I could fain have taken their portrait in acalotype this morning, as they lay against the green bank, --their feetto the shore, and their heads on the top of the escarpment, --likepatients on a reclining bed, and strongly marked, each by its broad barof yellow light and of dark shadow, like the ebon and ivory buttressesof the poet. This little vignette, I would have said to the landscapepainter, represents the boulder-clay, after its precipitous banks--worndown, by the frosts and rains of centuries, into parallel runnels, thatgradually widened into these hollow grooves--had sunk into the angle ofinclination at which the disintegrating agents ceased to operate, andthe green sward covered all up. You must be studying these peculiaritiesof aspect more than ever you studied them before. There is a time comingwhen the connoisseur will as rigidly demand the specific character ofthe various geologic rocks and deposits in your hills, _scaurs_, andprecipices, as he now demands specific character in your shrubs andtrees. 

It is worthy the notice of the young geologist, who has just set himselfto study the various effects produced on the surface of a country by thedeposits which lie under it, that for about a quarter of a mile or so, the base of the escarpment here is bordered by a line of bogs, that bearin the driest weather their mantling of green. They are fed with aperennial supply of water, by a range of deep-seated springs, that comebursting out from under the boulder-clay; and one of their number, whichbears I know not why, the name of Samuel's Well, and yields its equableflow at an equable temperature, summer and winter, into a stone troughby the way-side, is not a little prized by the town's-people, and theseamen that cast anchor in the opposite roadstead, for the lightness andpurity of its water. What is specially worthy of notice in the case is, the very definite beginning and ending of the chain of bogs. All is dryat the base of the escarpment, up to the point at which they commence;and then all is equally dry at the point at which they terminate. And ofexactly the same extent, --beginning where the bogs begin, and endingwhere they end, --we may trace an ancient stratum of pure sand, --ofconsiderable thickness, intercalated between the base of the clay andthe superior surface of the Old Red Sandstone. It is through thispermeable sand that the profoundly seated springs find their way to thesurface, --for the clay is impermeable; and where it comes in contactwith the rock on either side of the arenaceous stratum, the bogs cease. The chain of green bogs is a consequence of the stratum of permeablesand. I have in vain sought this ancient layer of sand, --decidedly ofthe same era with the argillaceous bed which overlies it, --for aughtorganic. A single shell, so unequivocally of the period of theboulder-clay as to occur at the base of the deposit, would be worth, Ihave said, whole drawerfuls of fossils furnished by the better-knowndeposits. But I have since seen in abundance shells of the boulder-clay. 

There is another scenic peculiarity of the clay, which the neighborhoodof Cromarty finely illustrates, and of which my walk this morningfurnished numerous striking instances. The Giants' Graves--to borrowfrom the children of the place--occur on the steep slopes of the oldcoast line, or in the sides of ravines, where the clay, as I have said, had once presented a precipitous front, but had been gradually moulded, under the attritive influences of the elements, into series ofalternating ridges and furrows, which, when they had flattened into theproper angle, the green sward covered up from further waste. But thedeep dells and narrow ravines in which many ranges of these graves occurare themselves peculiarities of the deposit. Wherever the boulder-claylies thick and continuous, as in the parish of Cromarty, on a slopingtable-land, every minute streamlet cuts its way to the solid rock at thebottom, and runs through a deep dell, either softened into beauty by thedisintegrating process, or with all its precipices standing up raw andabrupt over the stream. Four of these ravines, known as the "Old ChapelBurn, " the "Ladies' Walk, " the "Morial's Den, " and the "Red Burn, " eachof them cutting the escarpment of the ancient coast line from top tobase, and winding far into the interior, occur in little more than amile's space; and they lie still more thickly farther to the west. Thesedells of the boulder clay, in their lower windings, --for they becomeshallower and tamer as they ascend, till they terminate in the uplandsin mere _drains_, such as a ditcher might excavate at the rate of ashilling or two per yard, --are eminently picturesque. On those gentlerslopes where the vegetable mould has had time and space to accumulate, we find not a few of the finest and tallest trees of the district. Thereis a bosky luxuriance in their more sheltered hollows, well known to theschoolboy what time the fern begins to pale its fronds, for their storeof hips, sloes, and brambles; and red over the foliage we may see, everand anon as we wend upwards, the abrupt frontage of some precipitous_scaur_, suited to remind the geologist, from its square form and flatbreadth of surface, of the cliffs of the chalk. When viewed from thesea, at the distance of a few miles, these ravines seem to divide thesloping tracts in which they occur into large irregular fields, laid outconsiderably more in accordance with the principles of the landscapegardener than the stiffly squared rectilinear fields of theagriculturist. They are _ha-has_ of Nature's digging; and their bottomand sides in this part of the country we still find occupied in a fewcases--though in many more they have been ravaged by the wastefulaxe--by noble forest-_hedges_, tall enough to overtop, in at least theirmiddle reaches, the tracts of table-land which they divide. 

I passed, a little farther on, the quarry of Old Red Sandstone, with ahuge bank of boulder-clay resting over it, in which I first experiencedthe evils of hard labor, and first set myself to lessen their weight bybecoming an observer of geological phenomena. It had been desertedapparently for many years; and the debris of the clay partially coveredup, in a sloping talus, the frontage of rock beneath. Old Red Sandstoneand boulder-clay, a broad bar of each!--such was the compound problemwhich the excavation propounded to me when I first plied the tool init, --a problem equally dark at the time in both its parts. I have sincegot on a very little way with the Old Red portion of the task; but alasfor the boulder-clay portion of it! A bar of impenetrable shadow hasrested long and obstinately over the newer deposit; and I scarce knowwhether the light which is at length beginning to play on its pebblyfront be that of the sun or of a delusive meteor. But courage, patienthearts! the boulder-clay will one day yield up _its_ secret too. Stillfurther on by a few hundred yards, I could have again found use for thecalotype, in transferring to paper the likeness of a protuberantpicturesque cliff, which, like the Giants' Graves, could have belonged, of all our Scotch deposits, to only the boulder-clay. It stands out, onthe steep acclivity of a furze-covered bank, abrupt as a precipice ofsolid rock, and yet seamed by the rain into numerous divergent channels, with pyramidal peaks between; and, combining the perpendicularity of atrue cliff with the water-scooped furrows of a yielding clay, itpresents a peculiarity of aspect which strikes, by its grotesqueness, eyes little accustomed to detect the picturesque in landscape. Iremember standing to gaze upon it when a mere child; and the fisherchildren of the neighboring town still tell that "_it has beenprophesied_" it will one day fall, "and kill a man and a horse on theroad below, "--a legend which shows it must have attracted _their_ noticetoo. 

I selected as the special scene of exploration this morning, a deepravine of the boulder-clay, which had been recently deepened still moreby the waters of a mill-pond, that had burst during a thunder-shower, and, after scooping out for themselves a bed in the clay some twelve orfifteen feet deep, where there had been formerly merely a shallow drain, had then tumbled into the ravine, and bared it to the rock. Thesandstones of the district, soft and not very durable, show thescratched and polished surfaces but indifferently well, and, whenexposed to the weather, soon lose them; but in the bottom of the runnelby which the ravine is swept I found them exceedingly well marked, --thepolish as decided as the soft red stone could receive, and the lines ofscratching running in their general bearing due east and west, at nearlyright angles with the course of the stream. Wherever the rock had beenlaid bare during the last few months, _there_ were the markings;wherever it had been laid bare for a few twelvemonths, they were gone. Inext marked a circumstance which has now for several years beenattracting my attention, and which I have found an invariablecharacteristic of the true boulder-clay. Not only do the rocks on whichthe deposit rests bear the scratched and polished surfaces, but in everyinstance the fragments of stone which it incloses bear the scratchingsalso, if from their character capable of receiving and retaining suchmarkings, and neither of too coarse a grain nor of too hard a quality. If of limestone, or of a coherent shale, or of a close, finely-grainedsandstone, or of a yielding trap, they are scratched andpolished, --invariably on one, most commonly on both their sides; and itis a noticeable circumstance, that the lines of the scratchings occur, in at least nine cases out of every ten, in the lines of their longeraxes. When decidedly oblong or spindle-shaped, the scratchings runlengthwise, preserving in most cases, on the under and upper sides, whenboth surfaces are scratched, a parallelism singularly exact; whereas, when of a broader form, so that the length and breadth nearlyapproximate, --though the lines generally find out the longer axis, andrun in that direction, --they are less exact in their parallelism, andare occasionally traversed by cross furrows. Of such certain occurrenceis this longitudinal lining on the softer and finer-grained pebbles ofthe boulder-clay, that I have come to regard it as that specialcharacteristic of the deposit on which I can most surely rely forpurposes of identification. I am never quite certain of the boulder-claywhen I do not detect it, nor doubtful of the true character of thedeposit when I do. When examining, for instance, the accumulation ofbroken Liasic materials in the neighborhood of Banff, I made it my firstcare to ascertain whether the bank inclosed fragments of stone or shalebearing the longitudinal markings; and felt satisfied, on finding thatit did, that I had discovered the period of its re-formation. 

CHAPTER VI. 

 Organisms of the Boulder-clay not unequivocal--First Impressions of the Boulder-clay--Difficulty of accounting for its barrenness of Remains--Sir Charles Lyell's reasoning--A Fact to the contrary--Human Skull dug from a Clay-bank--The Author's Change of Belief respecting Organic Remains of the Boulder-clay--Shells from the Clay at Wick--Questions respecting them settled--Conclusions confirmed by Mr. Dick's Discoveries at Thurso--Sir John Sinclair's Discovery of Boulder-clay Shells in 1802--Comminution of the Shells illustrated--_Cyprina islandica_--Its Preservation in larger Proportions than those of other Shells accounted for--Boulder-clays of Scotland reformed during the existing Geological Epoch--Scotland in the Period of the Boulder-clay "merely three detached groups of Islands"--Evidence of the Subsidence of the Land in Scotland--Confirmed by Rev. Mr. Cumming's conclusion--High-lying Granite Boulders--Marks of a succeeding elevatory Period--Scandinavia now rising--Autobiography of a Boulder desirable--A Story of the Supernatural. 

For the greater part of a quarter of a century I had been findingorganisms in abundance in the boulder-clay, but never anything organicthat unequivocally belonged to its own period. I had ascertained that itcontains in Ross and Cromarty nodules of the Old Red Sandstone, whichbear inside, like so many stone coffins, their well laid out skeletonsof the dead; but then the markings on their surface told me that whenthe boulder-clay was in the course of deposition, they had been exactlythe same kind of nodules that they are now. In Moray, it incloses, I hadfound, organisms of the Lias; but _they_ also testify that they presentan appearance in no degree more ancient at the present time than theydid when first enveloped by the clay. In East and West Lothian too, andin the neighborhood of Edinburgh, I had detected in it occasionalorganisms of the Mountain Limestone and the Coal Measures; but these, not less surely than its Liasic fossils in Moray, and its Old Redichthyolites in Cromarty and Ross, belonged to an incalculably moreancient state of things than itself; and--like those shrivelledmanuscripts of Pompeii or Herculaneum, which, whatever else they mayrecord, cannot be expected to tell aught of the catastrophe that buriedthem up--they throw no light whatever on the deposit in which theyoccur. I at length came to regard the boulder-clay--for it is difficultto keep the mind in a purely blank state on any subject on which onethinks a good deal--as representative of a chaotic period of death anddarkness, introductory, mayhap, to the existing scene of things. 

After, however, I had begun to mark the invariable connection of theclay, as a deposit, with the dressed surfaces on which it rests, and thelongitudinal linings of the pebbles and boulders which it incloses, andto associate it, in consequence, with an ice-charged sea and the GreatGulf Stream, it seemed to me extremely difficult to assign a reason whyit should be thus barren of remains. Sir Charles Lyell states, in his"Elements, " that the "stranding of ice-islands in the bays of Icelandsince 1835 has driven away the fish for several successive seasons, andthereby caused a famine among the inhabitants of the country;" and heargues from the fact, "that a sea habitually infested with melting ice, which would chill and freshen the water, might render the sameuninhabitable by marine mollusca. " But then, on the other hand, it isequally a fact that half a million of seals have been killed in a singleseason on the meadow-ice a little to the north of Newfoundland, and thatmany millions of cod, besides other fish, are captured yearly on theshores of that island, though grooved and furrowed by ice-floes almostevery spring. Of the seal family it is specially recorded bynaturalists, that many of the species "are from choice inhabitants ofthe margins of the frozen seas towards both poles; and, of course, inlocalities in which many such animals live, some must occasionally die. "And though the grinding process would certainly have disjointed, andmight probably have worn down and partially mutilated, the bones of theamphibious carnivora of the boulder period, it seems not in the leastprobable, judging from the fragments of loose-grained sandstone and softshale which it has spared, that it would have wholly destroyed them. Soit happened, however, that from North Berwick to the Ord Hill ofCaithness, I had never found in the boulder-clay the slightest trace ofan organism that could be held to belong to itself; and as it seemsnatural to build on negative evidence, if very extensive, considerablymore than mere negative evidence, whatever the circumstances, willcarry, I became somewhat skeptical regarding the very existence ofboulder-fossils, --a skepticism which the worse than doubtful characterof several supposed discoveries in the deposit served considerably tostrengthen. The clay forms, when cut by a water-course, or assailed onthe coast by some unusually high tide, a perpendicular precipice, whichin the course of years slopes into a talus; and as it exhibits in mostinstances no marks of stratification, the clay of the talus--a merere-formation of fragments detached by the frosts and rains from theexposed frontage--can rarely be distinguished from that of the originaldeposit. Now, in these consolidated slopes it is not unusual to findremains, animal and vegetable, of no very remote antiquity. I have seena human skull dug out of the reclining base of a clay-bank once aprecipice, fully six feet from under the surface. It might have beendeemed the skull of some long-lived contemporary of Enoch, --one of theaccursed race, mayhap, "Who sinned and died before the avenging flood. "

But, alas! the laborer dug a little further, and struck his pickaxeagainst an old rybat that lay deeper still. There could be no mistakingthe character of the champfered edge, that still bore the marks of thetool, nor that of the square perforation for the lock-bolt; and a risingtheory, that would have referred the boulder-clay to a period in whichthe polar ice, set loose by the waters of the Noachian deluge, camefloating southwards over the foundered land, straightway stumbledagainst it, and fell. Both rybat and skull had come from an ancientburying-ground, that occupies a projecting angle of the table-landabove. I must now state, however, that my skepticism has thoroughlygiven way; and that, slowly yielding to the force of positive evidence, I have become as assured a believer in the _comminuted recent shells_ ofthe boulder-clay as in the belemnites of the Oölite and Lias, or theganoid ichthyolites of the Old Red Sandstone. 

I had marked, when at Wick, on several occasions, a thick boulder-claydeposit occupying the southern side of the harbor, and forming anelevated platform, on which the higher parts of Pulteneytown are built;but I had noted little else regarding it than that it bears the averagedark-gray color of the flagstones of the district, and that some of thegranitic boulders which protrude from its top and sides are of vastsize. On my last visit, however, rather more than two years ago, whensauntering along its base, after a very wet morning, awaiting the Orkneysteamer, I was surprised to find, where a small slip had taken placeduring the rain, that it was mottled over with minute fragments ofshells. These I examined, and found, so far as, in their extremelybroken condition, I dared determine the point, that they belonged insuch large proportion to one species, --the _Cyprina islandica_ of Dr. Fleming, --that I could detect among them only a single fragment of anyother shell, --the pillar, apparently, of a large specimen of _Purpuralapillus_. Both shells belong to that class of old existences, --longdescended, without the pride of ancient descent, --which link on theextinct to the recent scenes of being. _Cyprina islandica_ and _Purpuralapillus_ not only exist as living molluscs in the British seas, butthey occur also as crag-shells, side by side with the dead races thathave no place in the present fauna. At this time, however, I could butthink of them simply in their character as recent molluscs; and as itseemed quite startling enough to find them in a deposit which I had oncedeemed representative of a period of death, and still continued toregard as obstinately unfossiliferous, I next set myself to determinewhether it really _was_ the boulder-clay in which they occurred. Almostthe first pebble which I disengaged from the mass, however, settled thepoint, by furnishing the evidence on which for several years past I havebeen accustomed to settle it;--it bore in the line of its longer axis, on a polished surface, the freshly-marked grooves and scratchings of theiceberg era. Still, however, I had my doubts, not regarding the deposit, but the shells. Might they not belong merely to the talus of this bankof boulder-clay?--a re-formation, in all probability, not _more_ ancientthan the elevation of the most recent of the old coast lines, --perhapsgreatly less so. Meeting with an intelligent citizen of Wick, Mr. JohnCleghorn, I requested him to keep a vigilant eye on the shells, and toascertain for me, when opportunity offered, whether they occurred deepin the deposit, or were restricted to merely the base of its exposedfront. On my return from Orkney, he kindly brought me a small collectionof fragments, exclusively, so far as I could judge, of _Cyprinaislandica_, picked up in fresh sections of the clay; at the same timeexpressing his belief that they really belonged to the deposit as such, and were not accidental introductions into it from the adjacent shore. And at this point for nearly two years the matter rested, when myattention was again called to it by finding, in the publication of Mr. Keith Johnston's admirable Geological Map of the British Islands, editedby Professor Edward Forbes, that other eyes than mine had detectedshells in the boulder-clay of Caithness. "Cliffs of Pleistocene, " saysthe Professor, in one of his notes attached to the map, "occur at Wick, containing boreal shells, especially _Astarte borealis_. "

I had seen the boulder-clay characteristically developed in theneighborhood of Thurso; but, during a rather hurried visit, had lackedtime to examine it. The omission mattered the less, however, as myfriend Mr. Robert Dick is resident in the locality; and there are fewmen who examine more carefully or more perseveringly than he, or who canenjoy with higher relish the sweets of scientific research. I wrote himregarding Professor Forbes's decision on the boulder-clay of Wick andits shells; urging him to ascertain whether the boulder-clay of Thursohad not its shells also. And almost by return of post I received fromhim, in reply, a little packet of comminuted shells, dug out of adeposit of the boulder-clay, laid open by the river Thorsa, a full milefrom the sea, and from eighty to a hundred feet over its level. He haddetected minute fragments of shell in the clay about a twelvemonthbefore; but a skepticism somewhat similar to my own, added to the dreadof being deceived by mere surface shells, recently derived from theshore in the character _of_ shell-sand, or of the edible species carriedinland for food, and then transferred from the ash-pit to the fields, had not only prevented him from following up the discovery, but evenfrom thinking of it as such. But he eagerly followed it up now, byvisiting every bank of the boulder-clay in his locality within twentymiles of Thurso, and found them all charged, from top to bottom, withcomminuted shells, however great their distance from the sea, or theirelevation over it. The fragments lie thick along the course of theThorsa, where the encroaching stream is scooping out the clay for thefirst time since its deposition, and laying bare the scratched andfurrowed pebbles. They occur, too, in the depths of solitary ravines faramid the moors, and underlie heath, and moss, and vegetable mould, onthe exposed hill-sides. The farm-house of Dalemore, twelve miles fromThurso as the crow flies, and rather more than thirteen miles from Wick, occupies, as nearly as may be, the centre of the county; and yet there, as on the sea-shore, the boulder-clay is charged with its fragments ofmarine shells. Though so barren elsewhere on the east coast of Scotland, the clay is everywhere in Caithness a shell-bearing deposit; and nosooner had Mr. Dick determined the fact for himself, at the expense ofmany a fatiguing journey, and many an hour's hard digging, than he foundthat it had been ascertained long before, though, from the veryinadequate style in which it had been recorded, science had in scarceany degree benefited by the discovery. In 1802 the late Sir JohnSinclair, distinguished for his enlightened zeal in developing theagricultural resources of the country, and for originating itsstatistics, employed a mineralogical surveyor to explore the undergroundtreasures of the district; and the surveyor's journal he had printedunder the title of "Minutes and Observations drawn up in the course of aMineralogical Survey of the County of Caithness, ann. 1802, by JohnBusby, Edinburgh. " Now, in this journal there are frequent referencesmade to the occurrence of marine shells in the blue clay. Mr. Dick hascopied for me the two following entries, --for the work itself I havenever seen:--"1802, Sept. 7th. --Surveyed down the river [Thorsa] toGeize; found blue clay-marl, _intermixed with marine shells_ in greatabundance. " "Sept. 12th. --Set off this morning for Dalemore. Bored forshell-marl in the 'grass-park;' found it in one of the quagmires, but tono great extent. Bored for shell-marl in the 'house-park. ' Surveyed bythe side of the river, and found blue clay-marl in great plenty, _intermixed with marine shells, such as those found at Geize_. Thisplace is supposed to be about twenty miles from the sea; and is oneinstance, among many in Caithness, of _the ocean's covering the inlandcountry at some former period of time_. "

The state of keeping in which the boulder-shells of Caithness occur isexactly what, on the iceberg theory, might be premised. The ponderousice-rafts that went grating over the deep-sea bottom, grinding down itsrocks into clay, and deeply furrowing its pebbles, must have borneheavily on its comparatively fragile shells. If rocks and pebbles didnot escape, the shells must have fared but hardly. And very hardly theyhave fared: the rather unpleasant casualty of being crushed to deathmust have been a greatly more common one in those days than in even thepresent age of railways and machinery. The reader, by passing half abushel of the common shells of our shores through a barley-mill, as apreliminary operation in the process, and by next subjecting the brokenfragments thus obtained to the attritive influence of the waves on somestorm-beaten beach for a twelvemonth or two, as a finishing operation, may produce, when he pleases, exactly such a water-worn shelly debris asmottles the blue boulder-clays of Caithness. The proportion borne by thefragments of one species of shell to that of all the others is veryextraordinary. The _Cyprina islandica_ is still by no means a raremollusc on our Scottish shores, and may, on an exposed coast, after astorm, be picked up by dozens, attached to the roots of the deep-seatangle. It is greatly less abundant, however, than such shells as_Purpura lapillus_, _Mytilus edule_, _Cardium edule_, _Littorinalittorea_, and several others; whereas in the boulder-clay it is, in theproportion of at least ten to one, more abundant than all the others puttogether. The great strength of the shell, however, may have in part ledto this result; as I find that its stronger and massier portions, --thoseof the umbo and hinge-joint, --are exceedingly numerous in proportion toits slimmer and weaker fragments. "The _Cyprina islandica_, " says Dr. Fleming, in his "British Animals, " "is the largest British bivalveshell, measuring sometimes thirteen inches in circumference, and, exclusively of the animal, weighing upwards of nine ounces. " Now, in acollection of fragments of Cyprina sent me by Mr. Dick, disinterred fromthe boulder-clay in various localities in the neighborhood of Thurso, and weighing in all about four ounces, I have detected the brokenremains of no fewer than _sixteen_ hinge joints. And on the sameprinciple through which the stronger fragments of Cyprina were preservedin so much larger proportion than the weaker ones, may Cyprinaitself have been preserved in much larger proportion than itsmore fragile neighbors. Occasionally, however, --escaped, as if byaccident, --characteristic fragments are found of shells by no meansvery strong, --such as _Mytilus_, _Tellina_, and _Astarte_. Among theunivalves I can distinguish _Dentalium entale_, _Purpura lapillus_, _Turritella terebra_, and _Littorina littorea_, all existing shells, butall common also to at least the later deposits of the Crag. And amongthe bivalves Mr. Dick enumerates, --besides the prevailing _Cyprinaislandica_, --_Venus casina_, _Cardium edule_, _Cardium echinatum_, _Mytilus edule_, _Astarte danmoniensis_ (_sulcata_), and _Astartecompressa_, with a _Mactra_, _Artemis_, and _Tellina_. [15] All thedetermined species here, with the exception of _Mytilus edule_, have, with many others, been found by the Rev. Mr. Cumming in theboulder-clays of the Isle of Man; and all of them are living shells atthe present day on our Scottish coasts. It seems scarce possible to fixthe age of a deposit so broken in its organisms, on the principle thatwould first seek to determine its per centage of extinct shells as thedata on which to found. One has to search sedulously and long ere afragment turns up sufficiently entire for the purpose of specificidentification, even when it belongs to a well-known living shell; anddid the clay contain some six or eight per cent. Of the extinct in asimilarly broken condition (and there is no evidence that it contains asingle per cent. Of extinct shells), I know not how, in thecircumstances, the fact could ever be determined. A lifetime might bedevoted to the task of fixing their real proportion, and yet be devotedto it in vain. All that at present can be said is, that, judging fromwhat appears, the boulder-clays of Caithness, and with them theboulder-clays of Scotland generally, and of the Isle of Man, --for theyare all palpably connected with the same iceberg phenomena, and occuralong the same zone in reference to the sea-level, --were formed duringthe _existing_ geological epoch. 

These details may appear tediously minute; but let the reader mark howvery much they involve. The occurrence of recent shells largely diffusedthroughout the boulder-clays of Caithness, at all heights and distancesfrom the sea at which the clay itself occurs, and not only connectedwith the iceberg phenomena by the closest juxtaposition, but alsotestifying distinctly to its agency by the extremely comminuted state inwhich we find them, tell us, not only according to old John Busby, "thatthe ocean covered the inland country at some former period of time, " butthat it covered it to a great height at a time geologically recent, whenour seas were inhabited by exactly the same mollusca as inhabit themnow, and so far as yet appears, by none others. I have not yet detectedthe boulder-clay at more than from six to eight hundred feet over thelevel of the sea; but the travelled boulders I have often found at morethan a thousand feet over it; and Dr. John Fleming, the correctness ofwhose observations few men acquainted with the character of hisresearches or of his mind will be disposed to challenge, has informed methat he has detected the dressed and polished surfaces at least fourhundred feet higher. There occurs a greenstone boulder, of from twelveto fourteen tons weight, says Mr. M'Laren, in his "Geology of Fife andthe Lothians, " on the south side of Black Hill (one of the Pentlandrange), at about fourteen hundred feet over the sea. Now fourteen orfifteen hundred feet, taken as the extreme height of the dressings, though they are said to occur greatly higher, would serve to submerge inthe iceberg ocean almost the whole agricultural region of Scotland. Thecommon hazel (_Corylus avellana_) ceases to grow in the latitude of theGrampians, at from one thousand two hundred to one thousand five hundredfeet over the sea level; the common bracken (_Pteris aquilina_) at aboutthe same height; and corn is never successfully cultivated at a greateraltitude. Where the hazel and bracken cease to grow, it is in vain toattempt growing corn. [16] In the period of the boulder-clay, then, whenthe existing shells of our coasts lived in those inland sounds andfriths of the country that now exist as broad plains or fertile valleys, the sub-aërial superficies of Scotland was restricted to what are nowits barren and mossy regions, and formed, instead of one continuousland, merely three detached groups of islands, --the small Cheviot andHartfell group, --the greatly larger Grampian and Ben Nevis group, --and agroup intermediate in size, extending from Mealfourvonny, on thenorthern shores of Loch Ness, to the Maiden Paps of Caithness. 

The more ancient boulder-clays of Scotland seem to have been formed whenthe land was undergoing a slow process of subsidence, or, as I shouldperhaps rather say, when a very considerable area of the earth'ssurface, including the sea-bottom, as well as the eminences that roseover it, was the subject of a gradual depression; for little or noalteration appears to have taken place at the time in the _relative_levels of the higher and lower portions of the sinking area: thefeatures of the land in the northern part of the kingdom, from thesouthern flanks of the Grampians to the Pentland Frith, seemed to havebeen fixed in nearly the existing forms many ages before, at the close, apparently, of the Oölitic period, and at a still earlier age in theLammermuir district, to the south. And so the sea around our shores musthave deepened in the ratio in which the hills sank. The evidence of thisprocess of subsidence is of a character tolerably satisfactory. Thedressed surfaces occur in Scotland, most certainly, as I have alreadystated on the authority of Dr. Fleming, at the height of fourteenhundred feet over the present sea-level; it has been even said, atfully twice that height, on the lofty flanks of Schehallion, --astatement, however, which I have had hitherto no opportunity ofverifying. They may be found, too, equally well marked, under theexisting high-water line; and it is obviously impossible that thedressing process could have been going on at the higher and lower levelsat the same time. When the icebergs were grating along the more elevatedrocks, the low-lying ones must have been buried under from three toseven hundred fathoms of water, --a depth from three to seven timesgreater, be it remembered, than that at which the most ponderous icebergcould possibly have grounded, or have in any degree affected the bottom. The dressing process, then, must have been a bit-and-bit process, carried on during either a period of elevation, in which the rising landwas subjected, zone after zone, to the sweep of the armed ice from itshigher levels _downwards_, or during a period of subsidence, in which itwas subjected to the ice, zone after zone, from its lower levels_upwards_. And that it was the lower, not the higher levels, that werefirst dressed, appears evident from the circumstance, that though onthese lower levels we find the rocks covered up by continuous beds ofthe boulder-clay, varying generally from twenty to a hundred feet inthickness, they are, notwithstanding, as completely dressed under theclay as on the heights above. Had it been a rising land that wassubjected to the attrition of the icebergs, the debris and dressings ofthe higher rocks would have protected the lower from the attrition; andso the thick accumulation of boulder-clay which overlies the old coastline, for instance, would have rested, not on dressed, but on undressedsurfaces. The barer rocks of the lower levels might of course exhibittheir scratchings and polishings, like those of the higher; but whereverthese scratchings and polishings occurred in the inferior zones, nothick protecting stratum of boulder-clay would be found overlying them;and, _vice versa_, wherever in these zones there occurred thick beds ofboulder-clay, there would be detected on the rock beneath no scratchingsand polishings. In order to _dress_ the entire surface of a country fromthe sea-line and under it to the tops of its hills, and at the same timeto cover up extensive portions of its low-lying rocks with vast depositsof clay, it seems a necessary condition of the process that it should becarried on piece-meal from the lower level upwards, --not from the higherdownwards. 

It interested me much to find, that while from one set of appearances Ihad been inferring the gradual subsidence of the land during the periodof the boulder-clay, the Rev. Mr. Cumming of King William's College hadarrived, from the consideration of quite a different class of phenomena, at a similar conclusion. "It appears to me highly probable, " I find himremarking, in his lately published "Isle of man, " "that at thecommencement of the boulder period there was a gradual sinking of thisarea [that of the island]. Successively, therefore, the points atdifferent degrees of elevation were brought within the influence of thesea, and exposed to the rake of the tides, charged with masses of icewhich had been floated off from the surrounding shores, and bearing ontheir under surfaces, mud, gravel, and fragments of hard rock. " Mr. Cumming goes on to describe, in his volume, some curious appearances, which seem to bear direct on this point, in connection with a boss of apeculiarly-compounded granite, which occurs in the southern part of theisland, about seven hundred feet over the level of the sea. There riseon the western side of the boss two hills, one of which attains to theelevation of nearly seven hundred, and the other of nearly eight hundredfeet over it; and yet both hills to their summits are mottled over withgranite boulders, furnished by the comparatively low-lying boss. One ofthese travelled masses, fully two tons in weight, lies not sixty feetfrom the summit of the loftier hill, at an altitude of nearly fifteenhundred feet over the sea. Now, it seems extremely difficult to conceiveof any other agency than that of a rising sea or of a subsiding land, through which these masses could have been rolled up the steep slopes ofthe hills. Had the boulder period been a period of elevation, or merelya stationary period, during which the land neither rose nor sank, thetravelled boulders would not now be found resting at higher levels thanthat of the parent rock whence they were derived. We occasionally meeton our shores, after violent storms from the sea, stones that have beenrolled from their place at low ebb to nearly the line of flood; but wealways find that it was by the waves of the rising, not of the fallingtide, that their transport was effected. For whatever removals of thekind take place during an ebbing sea are invariably in an oppositedirection;--they are removals, not from lower to higher levels, but fromhigher to lower. 

The upper subsoils of Scotland bear frequent mark of the elevatoryperiod which succeeded this period of depression. The boulder-clay hasits numerous intercalated arenaceous and gravelly beds, which belongevidently to its own era; but the numerous surface-beds of stratifiedsand and gravel by which in so many localities it is overlaid belongevidently to a later time. When, after possibly a long protractedperiod, the land again began to rise, or the sea to fall, the superiorportions of the boulder-clay must have been exposed to the action of thetides and waves; and the same process of separation of parts must havetaken place on a large scale, which one occasionally sees taking placein the present time on a comparatively small one, in ravines of the sameclay swept by a streamlet. After every shower, the stream comes downred and turbid with the finer and more argillaceous portions of thedeposit; minute accumulations of sand are swept to the gorge of theravine, or cast down in ripple-marked patches in its deeper pools; bedsof pebbles and gravel are heaped up in every inflection of its banks;and boulders are laid bare along its sides. Now, a separation, by a sortof washing process of an analogous character, must have taken place inthe materials of the more exposed portions of the boulder-clay, duringthe gradual emergence of the land; and hence, apparently, thoseextensive beds of sand and gravel which in so many parts of the kingdomexist, in relation to the clay, as a superior or upper subsoil; hence, too, occasional beds of a purer clay than that beneath, divested of aconsiderable portion of its arenaceous components, and of almost all itspebbles and boulders. This _washed_ clay, --a re-formation of the boulderdeposit, cast down, mostly in insulated beds in quiet localities, wherethe absence of currents suffered the purer particles held in suspensionby the water to settle, --forms, in Scotland at least, with, of course, the exception of the ancient fire-clays of the Coal Measures, the truebrick and tile clays of the agriculturist and architect. 

It is to these superior beds that all the recent shells yet found abovethe existing sea-level in Scotland, from the Dornoch Frith and beyondit, to beyond the Frith of Forth, seem to belong. Their period is muchless remote than that of the shells of the boulder-clay, and they rarelyoccur in the same comminuted condition. They existed, it would appear, not during the chill twilight period, when the land was in a state ofsubsidence, but during the after period of cheerful dawn, when hill-topafter hill-top was emerging from the deep, and the close of each passingcentury witnessed a broader area of dry land in what is now Scotland, than the close of the century which had gone before. Scandinavia issimilarly rising at the present day, and presents with every succeedingage a more extended breadth of surface. Many of the boulder-stones seemto have been cast down where they now lie, during this latter time. Whenthey occur, as in many instances, high on bare hill-tops, from five tofifteen hundred feet over the sea-level, with neither gravel norboulder-clay beside them, we of course cannot fix their period. They mayhave been dropped by ice-floes or shore-ice, where we now find them, atthe commencement of the period of elevation, after the clay had beenformed; or they may have been deposited by more ponderous icebergsduring its formation, when the land was yet sinking, though during thesubsequent rise the clay may have been washed from around them to lowerlevels. The boulders, however, which we find scattered over the plainsand less elevated hill-sides, with beds of the washed gravel or sandinterposed between them and the clay, must have been cast down wherethey lie, during the elevatory ages. For, had they been washed out ofthe clay, they would have lain, not _over_ the greatly lighter sands andgravels, but _under_ them. Would that they could write their ownhistories! The autobiography of a single boulder, with notes on thevarious floras which had sprung up around it, and the various classes ofbirds, beasts, and insects by which it had been visited, would be worthnine-tenths of all the autobiographies ever published, and a moiety ofthe remainder to boot. 

A few hundred yards from the opening of this dell of the boulder-clay, in which I have so long detained the reader, there is a woodedinflection of the bank, formed by the old coast line, in which therestood, about two centuries ago, a meal-mill, with the cottage of themiller, and which was once known as the scene of one of thosesupernaturalities that belong to the times of the witch and the fairy. The upper anchoring-place of the bay lies nearly opposite theinflection. A shipmaster, who had moored his vessel in this part of theroadstead, some time in the latter days of the first Charles, was onefine evening sitting alone on deck, awaiting the return of his seamen, who had gone ashore, and amusing himself in watching the lights thattwinkled from the scattered farm-houses, and in listening, in theextreme stillness of the calm, to the distant lowing of cattle, or theabrupt bark of the herdsman's dog. As the hour wore later, the soundsceased, and the lights disappeared, --all but one solitary taper, thattwinkled from the window of the miller's cottage. At length, however, italso disappeared, and all was dark around the shores of the bay, as abelt of black velvet. Suddenly a hissing noise was heard overhead; theshipmaster looked up, and saw what seemed to be one of those meteorsknown as falling stars, slanting athwart the heavens in the direction ofthe cottage, and increasing in size and brilliancy as it neared theearth, until the wooded ridge and the shore could be seen as distinctlyfrom the ship-deck as by day. A dog howled piteously from one of theout-houses, --an owl whooped from the wood. The meteor descended until italmost touched the roof, when a cock crew from within; its progressseemed instantly arrested; it stood still, rose about the height of aship's mast, and then began again to descend. The cock crew a secondtime; it rose as before; and, after mounting considerably higher than atfirst, again sank in the line of the cottage, to be again arrested bythe crowing of the cock. It mounted yet a third time, rising higherstill; and, in its last descent, had almost touched the roof, when thefaint clap of wings was heard as if whispered over the water, followedby a still louder note of defiance from the cock. The meteor rose with abound, and, continuing to ascend until it seemed lost among the stars, did not again appear. Next night, however, at the same hour, the samescene was repeated in all its circumstances: the meteor descended, thedog howled, the owl whooped, the cock crew. On the following morning theshipmaster visited the miller's, and, curious to ascertain how thecottage would fare when the cock was away, he purchased the bird; and, sailing from the bay before nightfall, did not return until about amonth after. 

On his voyage inwards, he had no sooner doubled an intervening headland, than he stepped forward to the bows to take a peep at the cottage: ithad vanished. As he approached the anchoring ground, he could discern aheap of blackened stones occupying the place where it had stood; and hewas informed on going ashore, that it had been burnt to the ground, noone knew how, on the very night he had quitted the bay. He had itre-built and furnished, says the story, deeming himself what one of theold schoolmen perhaps term the _occasional_ cause of the disaster. Healso returned the cock, --probably a not less important benefit, --and noafter accident befel the cottage. About fifteen years ago there was ahuman skeleton dug up near the scene of the tradition, with the skull, and the bones of the legs and feet, lying close together, as if the bodyhad been huddled up twofold in a hole; and this discovery led to that ofthe story, which, though at one time often repeated and extensivelybelieved, had been suffered to sleep in the memories of a few elderlypeople for nearly sixty years. 

CHAPTER VII. 

 Relation of the deep red stone of Cromarty to the Ichthyolite Beds of the System--Ruins of a Fossil-charged Bed--Journey to Avoch--Red Dye of the Boulder-clay distinct from the substance itself--Variation of Coloring in the Boulder-clay Red Sandstone accounted for--Hard-pan how formed--A reformed Garden--An ancient Battle-field--Antiquity of Geologic and Human History compared--Burn of Killein--Observation made in boyhood confirmed--Fossil-nodules--Fine Specimen of _Coccosteus decipiens_--Blank strata of Old Red--New View respecting the Rocks of Black Isle--A Trip up Moray and Dingwall Friths--Altered color of the Boulder-clay--Up the Auldgrande River--Scenery of the great Conglomerate--Graphic Description--Laidlaw's Boulder--_Vaccinium myrtillus_--Profusion of Travelled Boulders--The Boulder _Clach Malloch_--Its zones of Animal and Vegetable Life. 

The ravine excavated by the mill-dam showed me what I had never so wellseen before, --the exact relation borne by the deep red stone of theCromarty quarries to the ichthyolite beds of the system. It occupies thesame place, and belongs to the same period, as those superior beds ofthe Lower Old Red Sandstone which are so largely developed in the cliffsof Dunnet Head in Caithness, and of Tarbet Ness in Ross-shire, and whichwere at one time regarded as forming, north of the Grampians, theanalogue of the New Red Sandstone. I paced it across the strata thismorning, in the line of the ravine, and found its thickness over theupper fish-beds, though I was far from reaching its superior layers, which are buried here in the sea, to be rather more than five hundredfeet. The fossiliferous beds occur a few hundred yards below thedwelling-house of Rose Farm. They are not quite uncovered in the ravine;but we find their places indicated by heaps of gray argillaceous shale, mingled with their characteristic ichthyolitic nodules, in one of whichI found a small specimen of Cheiracanthus. The projecting edge of somefossil-charged bed had been struck, mayhap, by an iceberg, and dashedinto ruins, just as the subsiding land had brought the spot within reachof the attritive ice; and the broken heap thus detached had been shortlyafterwards covered up, without mixture of any other deposit, by the redboulder-clay. On the previous day I had detected the fish-beds inanother new locality, --one of the ravines of the lawn of CromartyHouse, --where the gray shale, concealed by a covering of soil and swardfor centuries, had been laid bare during the storm by a swollen runnel, and a small nodule, inclosing a characteristic plate of Pterichthys, washed out. And my next object in to-day's journey, after exploring thisravine of the boulder-clay, was to ascertain whether the beds did notalso occur in a ravine of the parish of Avoch, some eight or nine milesaway, which, when lying a-bed one night in Edinburgh, I rememberedhaving crossed when a boy, at a point which lies considerably out of theordinary route of the traveller. I had remarked on this occasion, as theresuscitated recollection intimated, that the precipices of the Avochravine bore, at the unfrequented point, the peculiar aspect which Ilearned many years after to associate with the ichthyolitic member ofthe system; and I was now quite as curious to test the truth of a sortof vignette landscape, transferred to the mind at an immature period oflife, and preserved in it for full thirty years, as desirous to extendmy knowledge of the fossiliferous beds of a system to the elucidation ofwhich I had peculiarly devoted myself. 

As the traveller reaches the flat moory uplands of the parish, where thewater stagnates amid heath and moss over a thin layer of peaty soil, hefinds the underlying boulder-clay, as shown in the chance sections, spotted and streaked with patches of a grayish-white. There is the samemixture of arenaceous and aluminous particles in the white as in the redportions of the mass; for, as we see so frequently exemplified in thespots and streaks of the Red Sandstone formations, whether Old or New, the coloring matter has been discharged without any accompanying changeof composition in the substance which it pervaded;--evidence enough thatthe red dye must be something distinct from the substance itself, justas the dye of a handkerchief is a thing distinct from the silk or cottonyarn of which the handkerchief has been woven. The stagnant water above, acidulated by its various vegetable solutions, seems to have been insome way connected with these appearances. In every case in which acrack through the clay gives access to the oozing moisture, we see thesides bleached, for several feet downwards, to nearly the color ofpipe-clay; we find the surface, too, when it has been divested of thevegetable soil, presenting for yards together the appearance of sheetsof half-bleached linen: the red ground of the clay has been acted uponby the percolating fluid, as the red ground of a Bandanna handkerchiefis acted upon through the openings in the perforated lead, by thedischarging chloride of lime. The peculiar chemistry through which thesechanges are effected might be found, carefully studied, to throw muchlight on similar phenomena in the older formations. There are quarriesin the New Red Sandstone in which almost every mass of stone presents adifferent shade of color from that of its neighboring mass, and quarriesin the Old Red the strata of which we find streaked and spotted likepieces of calico. And their variegated aspect seems to have beencommunicated, in every instance, not during deposition, nor after theyhad been hardened into stone but when, like the boulder-clay, theyexisted in an intermediate state. Be it remarked, too, that the red clayhere, --evidently derived from the abrasion of the red rocks beneath, --isin dye and composition almost identical with the substance on which, asan unconsolidated sandstone, the bleaching influences, whatever theircharacter, had operated in the Palæozoic period, so many long agesbefore;--it is a repetition of the ancient experiment in the Old Red, that we now see going on in the boulder-clay. It is further worthy ofnotice, that the bleached lines of the clay exhibit, viewedhorizontally, when the overlying vegetable mould has been removed, andthe whitened surface in immediate contact with it paired off, apolygonal arrangement, like that assumed by the cracks in the bottom ofclayey pools dried up in summer by the heat of the sun. Can thesepossibly indicate the ancient rents and fissures of the boulder-clay, formed, immediately after the upheaval of the land, in the first processof drying, and remaining afterwards open enough to receive what theuncracked portions of the surface excluded, --the acidulated bleachingfluid?

The kind of ferruginous pavement of the boulder-clay known to theagriculturist as _pan_, which may be found extending in some cases itsiron cover over whole districts, --sealing them down to barrenness, asthe iron and brass sealed down the stump of Nebuchadnezzar's tree, --is, like the white strips and blotches of the deposit, worthy the carefulnotice of the geologist. It serves to throw some light on the origin ofthose continuous bands of clayey or arenaceous ironstone, which in theolder formations in which vegetable matter abounds, whether Oölitic orCarboniferous, are of such common occurrence. The _pan_ is a stonystratum, scarcely less indurated in some localities than sandstone ofthe average hardness, that rests like a pavement on the surface of theboulder-clay, and that generally bears atop a thin layer of sterilesoil, darkened by a russet covering of stunted heath. The binding cementof the _pan_ is, as I have said, ferruginous, and seems to have beenderived from the vegetable covering above. Of all plants, the heaths arefound to contain most iron. Nor is it difficult to conceive how, incomparatively flat tracts of heathy moor, where the surface water sinksto the stiff subsoil, and on which one generation of plants afteranother has been growing and decaying for many centuries, the minutemetallic particles, disengaged in the process of decomposition, andcarried down by the rains to the impermeable clay, should, byaccumulating there, bind the layer on which they rest, as is the natureof ferruginous oxide, into a continuous stony crust. Wherever this _pan_occurs, we find the superincumbent soil doomed to barrenness, --arid andsun-baked during the summer and autumn months, and, from the same cause, overcharged with moisture in winter and spring. My friend Mr. Swanson, when schoolmaster of Nigg, found a large garden attached to theschool-house so inveterately sterile as to be scarce worth cultivation;a thin stratum of mould rested on a hard impermeable pavement of _pan_, through which not a single root could penetrate to the tenacious but notunkindly subsoil below. He set himself to work in his leisure hours, andbit by bit laid bare and broke up the pavement. The upper mould, longdivorced from the clay on which it had once rested, was again united toit; the piece of ground began gradually to alter its character for thebetter; and when I last passed the way, I found it, though in a state ofsad neglect, covered by a richer vegetation than it had ever borne underthe more careful management of my friend. This ferruginous pavement ofthe boulder-clay may be deemed of interest to the geologist, as acurious instance of deposition in a dense medium, and as illustrativeof the changes which may be effected on previously existing strata, through the agency of an overlying vegetation. 

I passed, on my way, through the ancient battle-field to which I haveincidentally referred in the story of the Miller of Resolis. [17] Modernimprovement has not yet marred it by the plough; and so it still bearson its brown surface many a swelling tumulus and flat oblong mound, and--where the high road of the district passes along its easternedge--the huge gray cairn, raised, says tradition, over the body of anancient Pictish king. But the contest of which it was the scene belongsto a profoundly dark period, ere the gray dawn of Scottish historybegan. As shown by the remains of ancient art occasionally dug up on themoor, it was a conflict of the times of the stone battle-axe, the flintarrow-head, and the unglazed sepulchral urn, unindebted for aught of itssymmetry to the turning-lathe, --times when there were heroes inabundance, but no scribes. And the cairn, about a hundred feet in lengthand breadth, by about twenty in height, with its long hoary hair ofovergrown lichen waving in the breeze, and the trailing club-mossshooting upwards from its base along its sides, bears in its everylineament full mark of its great age. It is a mound striding across thestream of centuries, to connect the past with the present. And yet, after all, what a mere matter of yesterday its extreme antiquity is! Myexplorations this morning bore reference to but the later eras of thegeologist; the portion of the geologic volume which I was attempting todecipher and translate formed the few terminal paragraphs of itsconcluding chapter. And yet the _finis_ had been added to them forthousands of years ere this latter antiquity began. The boulder-clay hadbeen formed and deposited; the land, in rising over the waves, had hadmany a huge pebble washed out of its last formed red stratum, or droppedupon it by ice-floes from above; and these pebbles lay mottling thesurface of this barren moor for mile after mile, bleaching pale to therains and the sun, as the meagre and mossy soil received, in the lapseof centuries, its slow accessions of organic matter, and darkened aroundthem. And then, for a few brief hours, the heath, no longer solitary, became a wild scene of savage warfare, --of waving arms and threateningfaces, --and of human lives violently spilled, gushing forth in blood;and, when all was over, the old weathered boulders were heaped up abovethe slain, and there began a new antiquity in relation to the pile inits gathered state, that bore reference to man's short lifetime, and tothe recent introduction of the species. The child of a few summersspeaks of the events of last year as long gone by; while his fatheradvanced into middle life, regards them as still fresh and recent. 

I reached the Burn of Killein, --the scene of my purposedexplorations, --where it bisects the Inverness road; and struck down therocky ravine, in the line of the descending strata and the fallingstreamlet, towards the point at which I had crossed it so many yearsbefore. First I passed along a thick bed of yellow stone, --next over abed of stratified clay. "The little boy, " I said, "took correct note ofwhat he saw, though without special aim at the time, and as much underthe guidance of a mere observative instinct as Dame Quickly, when shetook note of the sea-coal fire, the round table, the parcel-gilt goblet, and goodwife Keech's dish of prawns dressed in vinegar, as adjuncts ofher interview with old Sir John when he promised to marry her. Theseare unequivocally the ichthyolitic beds, whether they containichthyolites or no. " The first nodule I laid open presented insidemerely a pale oblong patch in the centre, which I examined in vain withthe lens, though convinced of its organic origin, for a single scale. Proceeding farther down the stream, I picked a nodule out of a secondand lower bed, which contained more evidently its organism, --afinely-reticulated fragment, that at first sight reminded me of somedelicate festinella of the Silurian system. It proved, however, to bepart of the tail of a Cheiracanthus, exhibiting--what is rarelyshown--the interior surfaces of those minute rectangular scales which inthis genus lie over the caudal fin, ranged in right lines. A secondnodule presented me with the spines of _Diplacanthus striatus_; andstill farther down the stream, --for the beds are numerous here, andoccupy in vertical extent very considerable space in the system, --Idetected a stratum of bulky nodules charged with fragments ofCoccosteus, belonging chiefly to two species, --_Coccosteus decipiens_and _Coccosteus cuspidatus_. All the specimens bore conclusive evidenceregarding the geologic place and character of the beds in which theyoccur; and in one of the number, a specimen of _Coccosteus decipiens_, sufficiently fine to be transferred to my knapsack, and which nowoccupies its corner in my little collection, the head exhibits all itsplates in their proper order, and the large dorsal plate, thoughdissociated from the nail-like attachment of the nape, presents itscharacteristic breadth entire. It was the plates of this species, firstfound in the flagstones of Caithness, which were taken for those of afresh-water tortoise; and hence apparently its specific name, _decipiens_;--it is the _deceiving_ Coccosteus. I disinterred, in thecourse of my explorations, as many nodules as lay within reach, --now andthen longing for a pickaxe, and a companion robust and perseveringenough to employ it with effect; and after seeing all that was to beseen in the bed of the stream and the precipices, I retraced my steps upthe dell to the highway. And then, striking off across the moor to thenorth, --ascending in the system as I climbed the eminence, which formshere the central ridge of the old Maolbuie Common, --I spent some littletime in a quarry of pale red sandstone, known, from the moory height onwhich it has been opened, as the quarry of the Maolbuie. But here, aselsewhere, the folds of that upper division of the Lower Old Red inwhich it has been excavated contain nothing organic. Why this should beso universally the case, --for in Caithness, Orkney, Cromarty, and Ross, wherever, in short, this member of the system is unequivocallydeveloped, it is invariably barren of remains, --cannot, I suspect, bevery satisfactorily explained. Fossils occur both over and under it, inrocks that seem as little favorable to their preservation; but duringthat intervening period which its blank strata represent, at least the_species_ of all the ichthyolites of the system seem to have changed, and, so far as is yet known, the _genus_ Coccosteus died out entirely. 

The Black Isle has been elaborately described in the last StatisticalAccount of the Parish of Avoch as comprising at least the analogues ofthree vast geologic systems. The Great Conglomerate, and the thick bedof coarse sandstone of corresponding character that lies over it, compose all which is not primary rock of that south-eastern ridge of thedistrict which forms the shores of the Moray Frith; and _they_ arerepresented in the Account as Old Red Sandstone proper. Then, next inorder, --forming the base of a parallel ridge, --come those sandstone andargillaceous bands to which the ichthyolite beds belong; and thesethough at the time the work appeared their existence in the localitycould be but guessed at, are described as representatives of the CoalMeasures. Last of all there occur those superior sandstones of the LowerOld Red formation in which the quarry of the Maolbuie has been opened, and which are largely developed in the central or _backbone_ ridge ofthe district. "And these, " says the writer, "we have little hesitationin assigning to the _New_ Red, or variegated Sandstone formation. " Iremember that some thirteen years ago, --in part misled by authority, andin part really afraid to represent beds of such an enormous aggregatethickness as all belonging to one inconsiderable formation, --for suchwas the character of the Old Red Sandstone at the time, --I ventured, though hesitatingly, and with less of detail, on a somewhat similarstatement regarding the sandstone deposits of the parish of Cromarty. But true it is, notwithstanding, that the stratified rocks of the BlackIsle are composed generally, not of the analogues of three systems, butof merely a fractional portion of a single system, --a fact previouslyestablished in other parts of the district, and which my discovery ofthis day in the Burn of Killein served yet farther to confirm inrelation to that middle portion of the tract in which the parish ofAvoch is situated. The geologic records, unlike the Sybilline books, grow in volume and number as one pauses and hesitates over them;demanding, however, with every addition to their bulk, a larger and yetlarger sum of epochs and of ages. 

The sun had got low in the western sky, and I had at least some eight ornine miles of rough road still before me; but the day had been a happyand not unsuccessful one, and so its hard work had failed to fatigue. The shadows, however, were falling brown and deep on the bleak Maolbuie, as I passed, on my return, the solitary cairn; and it was dark nightlong ere I reached Cromarty. Next morning I quitted the town for theupper reaches of the Frith, to examine yet further the superficialdeposits and travelled boulders of the district. 

I landed at Invergordon a little after noon, from the Leith steamer, that, on its way to the upper ports of the Moray and Dingwall Friths, stops at Cromarty for passengers every Wednesday; and then passingdirect through the village, I took the western road which winds alongthe shore towards Strathpeffer, skirting on the right the ancientprovince of the Munroes. The day was clear and genial; and thewide-spreading woods of this part of the country, a little touched bytheir autumnal tints of brown and yellow, gave a warmth of hue to thelandscape, which at an earlier season it wanted. A few slim streaks ofsemi-transparent mist, that barred the distant hill-peaks, and a fewtowering piles of intensely white cloud, that shot across the deep blueof the heavens, gave warning that the earlier part of the day was to bein all probability the better part of it, and that the harvest ofobservation which it was ultimately to yield might be found to depend onthe prompt use made of the passing hour. What first attracts theattention of the geologist, in journeying westwards, is the alteredcolor of the boulder-clay, as exhibited in ditches by the way-side, oralong the shore. It no longer presents that characteristic redtint, --borrowed from the red sandstone beneath, --so prevalent over theBlack Isle, and in Easter Ross generally; but is of a cold leaden hue, not unlike that which it wears above the Coal Measures of the south, orover the flagstones of Caithness. The altered color here is evidently aconsequence of the large development, in Ferindonald and Strathpeffer, of the ichthyolitic members of the Old Red, existing chiefly as fetidbituminous breccias and dark-colored sandstones: the boulder-clay ofthe locality forms the dressings, not of red, but of blackish-grayrocks; and, as almost everywhere else in Scotland, its trail lies to theeast of the strata, from which it was detached in the character of animpalpable mud by the age-protracted grindings of the denuding agent. Itabounds in masses of bituminous breccia, some of which, of great size, seem to have been drifted direct from the valley of Strathpeffer, andare identical in structure and composition with the rock in which themineral springs of the Strath have their rise, and to which they owetheir peculiar qualities. 

After walking on for about eight miles, through noble woods and a lovelycountry, I struck from off the high road at the pretty little village ofEvanton, and pursued the course of the river Auldgrande, first throughintermingled fields and patches of copsewood, and then through a thickfir wood, to where the bed of the stream contracts from aboulder-strewed bottom of ample breadth, to a gloomy fissure, so deepand dark, that in many places the water cannot be seen, and so narrow, that the trees which shoot out from the opposite sides interlace theirbranches atop. Large banks of the gray boulder-clay, laid open by theriver, and charged with fragments of dingy sandstone and dark-coloredbreccia, testify, along the lower reaches of the stream, to the nearneighborhood of the ichthyolitic member of the Old Red; but where thebanks contract, we find only its lowest member, the Great Conglomerate. This last is by far the most picturesque member of the system, --abruptand bold of outline in its hills, and mural in its precipices. Andnowhere does it exhibit a wilder or more characteristic beauty than atthe tall narrow portal of the Auldgrande, where the river, --afterwailing for miles in a pent-up channel, narrow as one of the lanes ofold Edinburgh, and hemmed in by walls quite as perpendicular, andnearly twice as lofty, --suddenly expands, first into a deep brown pool, and then into a broad tumbling stream, that, as if permanently affectedin temper by the strict severity of the discipline to which its earlylife had been subjected, frets and chafes in all its after course, tillit loses itself in the sea. The banks, ere we reach the opening of thechasm, have become steep, and wild, and densely wooded; and there standout on either hand, giant crags, that plant their iron feet in thestream; here girdled with belts of rank succulent shrubs, that love thedamp shade and the frequent drizzle of the spray; and there hollow andbare, with their round pebbles sticking out from the partiallydecomposed surface, like the piled-up skulls in the great undergroundcemetery of the Parisians. Massy trees, with their green fantastic rootsrising high over the scanty soil, and forming many a labyrinthine recessfor the frog, the toad, and the newt, stretch forth their gnarled armsathwart the stream. In front of the opening, with but a black deep poolbetween, there lies a midway bank of huge stones. Of these, not a few ofthe more angular masses still bear, though sorely worn by the torrent, the mark of the blasting iron, and were evidently tumbled into the chasmfrom the fields above. But in the chasm there was no rest for them, andso the arrowy rush of the water in the confined channel swept them downtill they dropped where they now lie, just where the widening bottomfirst served to dissipate the force of the current. And over the sullenpool in front we may see the stern pillars of the portal rising fromeighty to a hundred feet in height, and scarce twelve feet apart, likethe massive obelisks of some Egyptian temple; while, in gloomy vistawithin, projection starts out beyond projection, like column beyondcolumn in some narrow avenue of approach to Luxor or Carnac. Theprecipices are green, with some moss or byssus, that like the miner, chooses a subterranean habitat, --for here the rays of the sun neverfall; the dead, mossy water beneath, from which the cliffs rise soabruptly, bears the hue of molten pitch; the trees, fast anchored in therock, shoot out their branches across the opening, to form a thicktangled roof, at the height of a hundred and fifty feet overhead; whilefrom the recesses within, where the eye fails to penetrate, there issuesa combination of the strangest and wildest sounds ever yet produced bywater: there is the deafening rush of the torrent, blent as if with theclang of hammers, the roar of vast bellows, and the confused gabble of athousand voices. The sun, hastening to its setting, shone red, yetmellow, through the foliage of the wooded banks on the west, where, highabove, they first curve from the sloping level of the fields, to bendover the stream; or fell more direct on the jutting cliffs and boskydingles opposite, burnishing them as if with gold and fire; but all wascoldly-hued at the bottom, where the torrent foamed gray and chill underthe brown shadow of the banks; and where the narrow portal opened anuntrodden way into the mysterious recesses beyond, the shadow deepenedalmost into blackness. The scene lacked but a ghost to render itperfect. An apparition walking from within like the genius in one ofGoldsmith's essays "along the surface of the water, " would havecompleted it at once. 

Laying hold of an overhanging branch, I warped myself upwards from thebed of the stream along the face of a precipice, and, reaching itssloping top, forced my way to the wood above, over a steep bank coveredwith tangled underwood, and a slim succulent herbage, that sickened forwant of the sun. The yellow light was streaming through many a shaggyvista, as, threading my way along the narrow ravine as near the steepedge as the brokenness of the ground permitted, I reached a huge massof travelled rock, that had been dropped in the old boulder periodwithin a yard's length of the brink. It is composed of a characteristicgranitic gneiss of a pale flesh-color, streaked with black, that, in thehand specimen, can scarce be distinguished from a true granite, butwhich, viewed in the mass, presents, in the arrangement of its intenselydark mica, evident marks of stratification, and which is remarkable, among other things, for furnishing almost all the very large boulders ofthis part of the country. Unlike many of the granitic gneisses, it is afine solid stone, and would cut well. When I had last the pleasure ofspending a few hours with the late Mr. William Laidlaw, the trustedfriend of Sir Walter Scott, he intimated to me his intention, --pointingto a boulder of this species of gneiss, --of having it cut into twooblong pedestals, with which he purposed flanking the entrance to themansion-house of the chief of the Rosses, --the gentleman whose propertyhe at that time superintended. It was, he said, both in appearance andhistory, the most remarkable stone on the lands of Balnagown; and so hewas desirous that it should be exhibited at Balnagown Castle to the bestadvantage. But as he fell shortly after into infirm health, and resignedhis situation, I know not that he ever carried his purpose into effect. The boulder here, beside the chasm, measures about twelve feet in lengthand breadth, by from five to six in height, and contains from eight tonine hundred cubic feet of stone. On its upper table-like surface Ifound a few patches of moss and lichen, and a slim reddening tuft of the_Vaccinium myrtillus_, still bearing, late as was the season, itshalf-dozen blaeberries. This pretty little plant occurs in greatprofusion along the steep edges of the Auldgrande, where its delicatebushes, springing up amid long heath and ling, and crimsoned by theautumnal tinge, gave a peculiar warmth and richness this evening tothose bosky spots under the brown trees, or in immediate contact withthe dark chasm on which the sunlight fell most strongly; and on all themore perilous projections, I found the dark berries still shrivelling ontheir stems. Thirty years earlier I would scarce have left them there;and the more perilous the crag on which they had grown, the moredeliciously would they have eaten. But every period of life has its ownplaythings; and I was now chiefly engaged with the deep chasm and thehuge boulder. Chasm and boulder had come to have greatly more ofinterest to me than the delicate berries, or than even that sovereigndispeller of ennui and low spirits, an adventurous scramble among thecliffs. 

In what state did the chasm exist when the huge boulder, --detached, mayhap, at the close of a severe frost, from some island of thearchipelago that is now the northern Highlands of Scotland, --wassuffered to drop beside it, from some vast ice-floe drifting eastwardson the tide? In all probability merely as a fault in the Conglomerate, similar to many of those faults which in the Coal Measures of thesouthern districts we find occupied by continuous dikes of trap. But inthis northern region, where the trap-rocks are unknown, it must havebeen filled up with the boulder-clay, or with some still more ancientaccumulation of debris. And when the land had risen, and the streams, swollen into rivers, flowed along the hollows which they now occupy, theloose rubbish would in the lapse of ages gradually wash downwards to thesea, as the stones thrown from the fields above were washed downwards ina later time; and thus the deep fissure would ultimately be cleared out. The boulder-stones lie thickly in this neighborhood, and over theeastern half of Ross-shire, and the Black Isle generally; though forthe last century they have been gradually disappearing from the morecultivated tracts on which there were fences or farm-steadings to bebuilt, or where they obstructed the course of the plough. We found themoccurring in every conceivable situation, --high on hill-sides, where theshepherd crouches beside them for shelter in a shower, --deep in the opensea, where they entangle the nets of the fisherman, --on inland moors, where in some remote age they were painfully rolled together, to formthe Druidical circle or Picts'-house, --or on the margin of the coast, where they had been piled over one another at a later time, asprotecting bulwarks against the encroachments of the waves. They liestrewed more sparingly over extended plains, or on exposed heights, thanin hollows sheltered from the west by high land, where the current, whenit dashed high on the hill-sides, must have been diverted from itseasterly course, and revolved in whirling eddies. On the top of the finebluff hill of Fyrish, which I so admired to-day, each time I caught aglimpse of its purple front through the woods, and which shows how noblea mountain the Old Red Sandstone may produce, the boulders lie butsparsely. I especially marked, however, when last on its summit, aponderous traveller of a vividly green hornblende, resting on a bed ofpale yellow sandstone, fully a thousand feet over the present high-waterlevel. But towards the east, in what a seaman would term the _bight_ ofthe hill, the boulders have accumulated in vast numbers. They lie soclosely piled along the course of the river Alness, about half a mileabove the village, that it is with difficulty the waters, when in flood, can force their passage through. For here, apparently, when the tideswept along the hill-side, many an ice-floe, detained in the shelter bythe revolving eddy, dashed together in rude collision, and shook theirstony burdens to the bottom. Immediately to the east of the lowpromontory on which the town of Cromarty is built there is anotherextensive accumulation of boulders, some of them of great size. Theyoccupy exactly the place to which I have oftener than once seen thedrift-ice of the upper part of the Cromarty Frith, set loose by a thaw, and then carried seawards by the retreating tide, forced back by aviolent storm from, the east, and the fragments ground against eachother into powder. And here, I doubt not, of old, when the sea stoodgreatly higher than now, and the ice-floes were immensely larger andmore numerous than those formed, in the existing circumstances, in theupper shallows of the Frith, would the fierce north-east have chargedhome with similar effect, and the broken masses have divested themselvesof their boulders. 

The Highland chieftain of one of our old Gaelic traditions conversedwith a boulder-stone, and told to it the story which he had sworn neverto tell to man. I too, after a sort, have conversed with boulder-stones, not, however, to tell them any story of mine, but to urge them to telltheirs to me. But, lacking the fine ear of Hans Anderson, the Danishpoet, who can hear flowers and butterflies talk, and understand thelanguage of birds, I have as yet succeeded in extracting from them nosuch articulate reply

 "As Memnon's image, long renowned of old By fabling Nilus, to the quivering touch Of Titan's ray, with each repulsive string Consenting, sounded through the warbling air. "

And yet, who can doubt that, were they a little more communicative, their stories of movement in the past, with the additional circumstancesconnected with the places which they have occupied ever since they gaveover travelling, would be exceedingly curious ones? Among the bouldergroup to the east of Cromarty, the most ponderous individual stands soexactly on the low-water line of our great Lammas tides, that though itsshoreward edge may be reached dry-shod from four to six times everytwelvemonth, no one has ever succeeded in walking dry shod round it. Ihave seen a strong breeze from the west, prolonged for a few days, prevent its drying, when the Lammas stream was at its point of lowestebb, by from a foot to eighteen inches, --an indication, apparently, thatto that height the waters of the Atlantic may be heaped up against ourshores by the impulsion of the wind. And the recurrence, during at leastthe last century, of certain ebbs each season, which, when no disturbingatmospheric phenomena interfere with their operation, are sure to lay itdry, demonstrate, that during that period no change, even the mostminute, has taken place on our coasts, in the relative levels of sea andshore. The waves have considerably encroached, during even the lasthalf-century, on the shores immediately opposite; but it must have been, as the stone shows, simply by the attrition of the waves, and theconsequent lowering of the beach, --not through any rise in the ocean, orany depression of the land. 

The huge boulder here has been known for ages as the _Clach Malloch_, oraccursed stone, from the circumstance, says tradition, that a boat wasonce wrecked upon it during a storm, and the boatmen drowned. Thoughlittle more than seven feet in height, by about twelve in length, andsome eight or nine in breadth, its situation on the extreme line of ebbimparts a peculiar character to the various productions, animal andvegetable, which we find adhering to it. They occur in zones, just as onlofty hills the botanist finds his agricultural, moorland, and alpinezones rising in succession as he ascends, the one over the other. At itsbase, where the tide rarely falls, we find two varieties of _Lobulariadigitata_, dead man's hand, the orange colored and the pale, with aspecies of sertularia; and the characteristic vegetable is therough-stemmed tangle, or cuvy. In the zone immediately above the lowest, these productions disappear; the characteristic animal, if animal it be, is a flat yellow sponge, --the _Halichondria papillaris_, --remarkablechiefly for its sharp siliceous spicula and its strong phosphoric smell;and the characteristic vegetable is the smooth-stemmed tangle, orqueener. In yet another zone we find the common limpet and the vesicularkelp-weed; and the small gray balanus and serrated kelp-weed form theproductions of the top. We may see exactly the same zones occurring inbroad belts along the shore, --each zone indicative of a certainoverlying depth of water; but it seems curious enough to find them allexisting in succession on one boulder. Of the boulder and its story, however, more in my next. 

CHAPTER VIII. 

 Imaginary Autobiography of the _Clach Malloch_ Boulder--Its Creation--Its long night of unsummed Centuries--Laid open to light on a desert Island--Surrounded by an Arctic Vegetation--Undermined by the rising Sea--Locked up and floated off on an Ice-field--At rest on the Sea-bottom--Another Night of unsummed Years--The Boulder raised again above the waves by the rising of the Land--Beholds an altered Country--Pine Forests and Mammals--Another Period of Ages passes--The Boulder again floated off by an Iceberg--Finally at rest on the Shore of Cromarty Bay--Time and Occasion of naming it--Strange Phenomena accounted for by Earthquakes--How the Boulder of Petty Bay was moved--The Boulder of Auldgrande--The old Highland Paupers--The little Parsi Girl--Her Letter to her Papa--But one Human Nature on Earth--Journey resumed--Conon Burying Ground--An aged Couple--Gossip. 

The natural, and, if I may so speak, topographical, history of the_Clach Malloch_, --including, of course, its zoölogy and botany, withnotes of those atmospheric effects on the tides, and of that stabilityfor ages of the existing sea-level, which it indicates, --would of itselfform one very interesting chapter: its geological history would furnishanother. It would probably tell, if it once fairly broke silence andbecame autobiographical, first of a feverish dream of intense moltenheat and overpowering pressure; and then of a busy time, in which thefree molecules, as at once the materials and the artisans of the mass, began to build, each according to its nature, under the superintendenceof a curious chemistry, --here forming sheets of black mica, there rhombsof a dark-green hornblende and a flesh-colored feldspar, yonderamorphous masses of a translucent quartz. It would add further, that atlength, when the slow process was over, and the entire space had beenoccupied to the full by plate, molecule, and crystal, the red fierytwilight of the dream deepened into more than midnight gloom, and achill unconscious night descended on the sleeper. The vast Palæozoicperiod passes by, --the scarce less protracted Secondary ages come to aclose, --the Eocene, Miocene, Pliocene epochs are ushered in andterminate, --races begin and end, --families and orders are born and die;but the dead, or those whose deep slumber admits not of dreams, take nonote of time; and so it would tell how its long night of unsummedcenturies seemed, like the long night of the grave, compressed into amoment. 

The marble silence is suddenly broken by the rush of an avalanche, thattears away the superincumbent masses, rolling them into the sea; and theponderous block, laid open to the light, finds itself on the bleak shoreof a desert island of the northern Scottish archipelago, with a wintryscene of snow-covered peaks behind, and an ice-mottled ocean before. Thewinter passes, the cold severe spring comes on, and day after day thefield-ice goes floating by, --now gray in shadow, now bright in the sun. At length vegetation, long repressed, bursts forth, but in no profuseluxuriance. A few dwarf birches unfold their leaves amid the rocks; afew sub-arctic willows hang out their catkins beside the swampy runnels;the golden potentilla opens its bright flowers on slopes where theevergreen _Empetrum nigrum_ slowly ripens its glossy crow-berries; andfrom where the sea-spray dashes at full tide along the beach, to wherethe snow gleams at midsummer on the mountain-summits, the thin shortsward is dotted by the minute cruciform stars of the scurvy-grass, andthe crimson blossoms of the sea-pink. Not a few of the plants of ourexisting sea-shores and of our loftier hill-tops are still identical inspecies; but wide zones of rich herbage, with many a fertile field andmany a stately tree, intervene between the bare marine belts and thebleak insulated eminences; and thus the alpine, notwithstanding itsidentity with the littoral flora, has been long divorced from it; but inthis early time the divorce had not yet taken place, nor for agesthereafter; and the same plants that sprang around the sea-margin rosealso along the middle slopes to the mountain-summits. The landscape istreeless and bare, and a hoary lichen whitens the moors, and waves, asthe years pass by, in pale tufts, from the disinterred stone, nowcovered with weather-stains, green and gray, and standing out in boldand yet bolder relief from the steep hill-side as the pulverizing frostsand washing rains bear away the lesser masses from around it. The sea isslowly rising, and the land, in proportion, narrowing its flattermargins, and yielding up its wider valleys to the tide; the low greenisland of one century forms the half-tide skerry, darkened with algæ, ofanother, and in yet a third exists but as a deep-sea rock. As its summitdisappears, groups of hills, detached from the land, become islands, skerries, deep-sea rocks, in turn. At length the waves at full washwithin a few yards of the granitic block. And now, yielding to theundermining influences, just as a blinding snow-shower is darkening theheavens, it comes thundering down the steep into the sea, where it liesimmediately beneath the high-water line, surrounded by a wide float ofpulverized ice, broken by the waves. A keen frost sets in; thehalf-fluid mass around is bound up for many acres into a solid raft, that clasps fast in its rigid embrace the rocky fragment; a stream-tide, heightened by a strong gale from the west, rises high on the beach; theconsolidated ice-field moves, floats, is detached from the shore, creepsslowly outwards into the offing, bearing atop the boulder; and, finally, caught by the easterly current, it drifts away into the openocean. And then, far from its original bed in the rock, amid thejerkings of a cockling sea, the mass breaks through the supportingfloat, and settles far beneath, amid the green and silent twilight ofthe bottom, where its mosses and lichens yield their place to stonyencrustations of deep purple, and to miniature thickets of arboraceouszoöphites. 

The many-colored Acalephæ float by; the many-armed Sepiadæ shoot over;while shells that love the profounder depths, --the black Modiola anddelicate Anomia, --anchor along the sides of the mass; and where thicketsof the deep-sea tangle spread out their long, streamer-like fronds tothe tide, the strong Cyprina and many-ribbed Astarte shelter by scoresamid the reticulations of the short woody stems and thick-set roots. Asudden darkness comes on, like that which fell upon Sinbad when thegigantic roc descended upon him; the sea-surface is fully sixty fathomsover head; but even at this great depth an enormous iceberg gratesheavily against the bottom, crushing into fragments in its course, Cyprina, Modiola, Astarte, with many a hapless mollusc besides; andfurrows into deep grooves the very rocks on which they lie. It passesaway; and, after many an unsummed year has also passed, there comesanother change. The period of depression and of the boulder-clay isover. The water has shallowed as the sea-line gradually sank, or theland was propelled upwards by some elevatory process from below; andeach time the tide falls, the huge boulder now raises over the watersits broad forehead, already hung round with flowing tresses of brownsea-weed, and looks at the adjacent coast. The country has strangelyaltered its features: it exists no longer as a broken archipelago, scantily covered by a semi-arctic vegetation, but as a continuous land, still whitened, where the great valleys open to the sea, by the palegleam of local glaciers, and snow-streaked on its loftier hill-tops. Butvast forests of dark pine sweep along its hill-sides or selvage itsshores; and the sheltered hollows are enlivened by the lighter green ofthe oak, the ash, and the elm. Human foot has not yet imprinted itssward; but its brute inhabitants have become numerous. The cream-coloredcoat of the wild bull, --a speck of white relieved against a ground ofdingy green, --may be seen far amid the pines, and the long howl of thewolf heard from the nearer thickets. The gigantic elk raises himselffrom his lair, and tosses his ponderous horns at the sound; while thebeaver, in some sequestered dell traversed by a streamlet, plungesalarmed into his deep coffer-dam, and, rising through the submergedopening of his cell, shelters safely within, beyond reach of pursuit. The great transverse valleys of the country, from its eastern to itswestern coasts, are still occupied by the sea, --they exist as broadocean-sounds; and many of the detached hills rise around its shores asislands. The northern Sutor forms a bluff high island, for the plains ofEaster Ross are still submerged; and the Black Isle is in reality whatin later times it is merely in name, --a sea-encircled district, holdinga midway place between where the Sound of the great Caledonian Valleyand the Sounds of the Valleys of the Conon and Carron open into theGerman Ocean. Though the climate has greatly softened, it is still, asthe local glaciers testify, ungenial and severe. Winter protracts hisstay through the later months of spring; and still, as of old, vastfloats of ice, detached from the glaciers, or formed in the lakes andshallower estuaries of the interior, come drifting down the Sounds everyseason, and disappear in the open sea, or lie stranded along the shores. 

Ages have again passed: the huge boulder, from the further sinking ofthe waters, lies dry throughout the neaps, and is covered only at theheight of each stream-tide; there is a float of ice stranded on thebeach, which consolidates around it during the neap, and is floated offby the stream; and the boulder, borne in its midst, as of old, againsets out a voyaging. It has reached the narrow opening of the Sutors, swept downwards by the strong ebb current, when a violent storm from thenorth-east sets in; and, constrained by antagonist forces, --the sweep ofthe tide on the one hand, and the roll of the waves on the other, --theice-raft deflects into the little bay that lies to the east of thepromontory now occupied by the town of Cromarty. And there it tosses, with a hundred more jostling in rude collision; and at length burstingapart, the _Clach Malloch_, its journeyings forever over, settles on itsfinal resting-place. In a period long posterior it saw the ultimateelevation of the land. Who shall dare say how much more it witnessed, ordecide that it did not form the centre of a rich forest vegetation, andthat the ivy did not cling round it, and the wild rose shed its petalsover it, when the Dingwall, Moray, and Dornoch Friths existed assub-aërial valleys, traversed by streams that now enter the sea farapart, but then gathered themselves into one vast river, that, after ithad received the tributary waters of the Shin and the Conon, the Nessand the Beauly, the Helmsdale, the Brora, the Findhorn, and the Spey, rolled on through the flat secondary formations of the outer MorayFrith, --Lias, and Oölite, and Greensand, and Chalk, --to fall into a gulfof the Northern Ocean which intervened between the coasts of Scotlandand Norway, but closed nearly opposite the mouth of the Tyne, leaving abroad level plain to connect the coasts of England with those of theContinent! Be this as it may, the present sea-coast became at length thecommon boundary of land and sea. And the boulder continued to exist forcenturies still later as a nameless stone, on which the tall gray heronrested moveless and ghost-like in the evenings, and the seal at mid-daybasked lazily in the sun. And then there came a night of fierce tempest, in which the agonizing cry of drowning men was heard along the shore. When the morning broke, there lay strewed around a few bloated corpses, and the fragments of a broken wreck; and amid wild execrations and loudsorrow the boulder received its name. Such is the probable history, briefly told, because touched at merely a few detached points, of thehuge _Clach Malloch_. The incident of the second voyage here is ofcourse altogether imaginary, in relation to at least this specialboulder; but it is to second voyages only that all our positive evidencetestifies in the history of its class. The boulders of the St. Lawrence, so well described by Sir Charles Lyell, voyage by thousands everyyear;[18] and there are few of my northern readers who have not heard ofthe short trip taken nearly half a century ago by the boulder of PettyBay, in the neighborhood of Culloden. 

A Highland minister of the last century, in describing, for Sir JohnSinclair's Statistical Account, a large sepulchral cairn in his parish, attributed its formation to an _earthquake_! Earthquakes, in theselatter times, are introduced, like the heathen gods of old, to bringauthors out of difficulties. I do not think, however, --and I have theauthority of the old critic for at least half the opinion, --that eithergods or earthquakes should be resorted to by poets or geologists, without special occasion: they ought never to be called in except as alast resort, when there is no way of getting on without them. And I amafraid there have been few more gratuitous invocations of the earthquakethan on a certain occasion, some five years ago, when it was employed bythe inmate of a north-country manse, at once to account for the removalof the boulder-stone of Petty Bay, and to annihilate at a blow thegeology of the Free Church editor of the _Witness_. I had briefly statedin one of my papers, in referring to this curious incident, that theboulder of the bay had been "borne nearly three hundred yards outwardsinto the sea by an enclasping mass of ice, in the course of a singletide. " "Not at all, " said the northern clergyman; "the cause assigned iswholly insufficient to produce such an effect. All the ice ever formedin the bay would be insufficient to remove such a boulder a distance, not of three hundred, but even of _three_ yards. " The removal of thestone "_is referrible to an_ EARTHQUAKE!" The country, it would seem, took a sudden lurch, and the stone tumbled off. It fell athwart the flatsurface of the bay, as a soup tureen sometimes falls athwart the tableof a storm-beset steamer, vastly to the discomfort of the passengers, and again caught the ground as the land righted. Ingenious, certainly!It does appear a little wonderful, however, that in a shock sotremendous nothing should have fallen off except the stone. In anearthquake on an equally great scale, in the present unsettled state ofsociety, endowed clergymen would, I am afraid, be in some danger offalling out of their charges. 

The boulder beside the Auldgrande has not only, like the _ClachMalloch_, a geologic history of its own, but, what some may deem ofperhaps equal authority, a _mythologic_ history also. The inaccessiblechasm, impervious to the sun, and ever resounding the wild howl of thetortured water, was too remarkable an object to have escaped the noticeof the old imaginative Celts; and they have married it, as was theirwont, to a set of stories quite as wild as itself. And the boulder, occupying a nearly central position in its course, just where the dellis deepest, and narrowest, and blackest, and where the stream bellowsfar underground in its wildest combination of tones, marks out the spotwhere the more extraordinary incidents have happened, and the strangersights have been seen. Immediately beside the stone there is what seemsto be the beginning of a path leading down to the water; but it stopsabruptly at a tree, --the last in the descent, --and the green and dewyrock sinks beyond for more than a hundred feet, perpendicular as a wall. It was at the abrupt termination of this path that a Highlander once sawa beautiful child smiling and stretching out its little hand to him, asit hung half in air by a slender twig. But he well knew that it was nochild, but an evil spirit, and that if he gave it the assistance whichit seemed to crave, he would be pulled headlong into the chasm, andnever heard of more. And the boulder still bears, it is said, on itsside, --though I failed this evening to detect the mark, --the stamp, strangely impressed, of the household keys of Balconie. [19]

The sun had now got as low upon the hill, and the ravine had grown asdark, as when, so long before, the lady of Balconie took her last walkalong the sides of the Auldgrande; and I struck up for the little alpinebridge of a few undressed logs, which has been here thrown across thechasm, at the height of a hundred and thirty feet over the water. As Ipressed through the thick underwood, I startled a strange-lookingapparition in one of the open spaces beside the gulf, where, as shown bythe profusion of plants of _vaccinium_, the blaeberries had greatlyabounded in their season. It was that of an extremely old woman, cadaverously pale and miserable looking, with dotage glistening in herinexpressive, rheum-distilling eyes, and attired in a blue cloak, thathad been homely when at its best, and was now exceedingly tattered. Shehad been poking with her crutch among the bushes, as if looking forberries; but my approach had alarmed her; and she stood muttering inGaelic what seemed, from the tones and repetition, to be a fewdeprecatory sentences. I addressed her in English, and inquired whatcould have brought to a place so wild and lonely, one so feeble andhelpless. "Poor object!" she muttered in reply, --"poor object!--veryhungry;" but her scanty English could carry her no further. I slippedinto her hand a small piece of silver, for which she overwhelmed me withthanks and blessings; and, bringing her to one of the broader avenues, traversed by a road which leads out of the wood, I saw her fairlyentered upon the path in the right direction, and then, retracing mysteps crossed the log-bridge. The old woman, --little, I should supposefrom her appearance, under ninety, --was I doubt not, one of ourill-provided Highland paupers, that starve under a law which, while ithas dried up the genial streams of voluntary charity in the country andpresses hard upon the means of the humbler classes, alleviates little, if at all, the sufferings of the extreme poor. Amid present sufferingand privation there had apparently mingled in her dotage some dream ofearly enjoyment, --a dream of the days when she had plucked berries, alittle herd-girl, on the banks of the Auldgrande; and the vision seemedto have sent her out, far advanced in her second childhood, to pokeamong the bushes with her crutch. 

My old friend the minister of Alness, --uninstalled at the time in hisnew dwelling, --was residing in a house scarce half a mile from thechasm, to which he had removed from the parish manse at the Disruption;and, availing myself of an invitation of long standing, I climbed theacclivity on which it stands, to pass the night with him. I found, however, that with part of his family, he had gone to spend a few weeksbeside the mineral springs of Strathpeffer, in the hope of recruiting aconstitution greatly weakened by excessive labor, and that the entirehousehold at home consisted of but two of the young ladies hisdaughters, and their ward, the little Buchubai Hormazdji. 

And who, asks the reader, is this Buchubai Hormazdji? A little Parsigirl, in her eighth year, the daughter of a Christian convert from theancient faith of Zoroaster, who now labors in the Free Church Mission atBombay. Buchubai, his only child, was on his conversion, forcibly takenfrom him by his relatives, but restored again by a British court of law;and he had secured her safety by sending her to Europe, a voyage of manythousand miles, with a lady, the wife of one of our Indian missionaries, to whom she had become attached, as her second but true mamma, and withwhose sisters I now found her. The little girl, sadly in want of acompanion this evening, was content, for lack of a better, to accept ofme as a playfellow; and she showed me all her rich eastern dresses, andall her toys, and a very fine emerald, set in the oriental fashion, which, when she was in full costume, sparkled from her embroideredtiara. I found her exceedingly like little girls at home, save that sheseemed more than ordinarily observant and intelligent, --a consequencemayhap, of that early development, physical and mental, whichcharacterizes her race. She submitted to me, too, when I had got verymuch into her confidence, a letter she had written to her papa fromStrathpeffer, which was to be sent him by the next Indian mail. And asit may serve to show that the style of little girls whose fathers werefire-worshippers for three thousand years and more differs in noperceptible quality from the style of little girls whose fathers inconsiderably less than three thousand were Pagans, Papists, andProtestants by turns, besides passing through the various intermediateforms of belief, I must, after pledging the reader to strict secrecy, submit it to his perusal:--

"My dearest Papa, --I hope you are quite well. I am visiting mamma atpresent at Strathpeffer. She is much better now than when she wastravelling. Mamma's sisters give their love to you, and mamma, and Mr. And Mrs. F. Also. They all ask you to pray for them, and they will prayalso. There are a great many at water here for sick people to drink outof. The smell of the water is not at all nice. I sometimes drink it. Give my dearest love to Narsion Skishadre, and tell her that I willwrite to her. --Dearest papa, " etc. 

It was a simple thought, which required no reach of mind whatever tograsp, --and yet an hour spent with little Buchubai made it tell upon memore powerfully than ever before, --that there is in reality but onehuman nature on the face of the earth. Had I simply read of BuchubaiHormazdji corresponding with her father Hormazdji Pestonji, and sendingher dear love to her old companion Narsion Skishadre, the names sospecifically different from those which we ourselves employ indesignating our country folk, would probably have led me, through afalse association, to regard the parties to which they attach asscarcely less specifically different from our country folk themselves. Isuspect we are misled by associations of this kind when we descant onthe peculiarities of race as interposing insurmountable barriers to theprogress of improvement, physical or mental. We overlook, amid thediversities of form, color, and language, the specific identity of thehuman family. The Celt, for instance, wants, it is said, those powers ofsustained application which so remarkably distinguish the Saxon; and sowe agree on the expediency of getting rid of our poor Highlanders byexpatriation as soon as possible, and of converting their country intosheep-walks and hunting-parks. It would be surely well to havephilosophy enough to remember what, simply through the exercise of awise faith, the Christian missionary never forgets, that thepeculiarities of race are not specific and ineradicable, but mereinduced habits and idiosyncracies engrafted on the stock of a commonnature by accident of circumstance or development; and that, as theyhave been wrought into the original tissue through the protractedoperation of one set of causes, the operation of another and differentset, wisely and perseveringly directed, could scarce fail to unravel andwork them out again. They form no part of the inherent design of man'snature, but have merely stuck to it in its transmissive passagedownwards and require to be brushed off. There was a time, some fourthousand years ago, when Celt and Saxon were represented by but one manand his wife, with their children and their children's wives; and somesixteen or seventeen centuries earlier all the varieties of thespecies, --Caucasian and Negro, Mongolian and Malay, --lay close packed upin the world's single family. In short, Buchubai's amusing prattleproved to me this evening no bad commentary on St. Paul's sublimeenunciation to the Athenians, that God has "made of one blood allnations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth. " I was amused tofind that the little girl, who listened intently as I described to theyoung ladies all I had seen and knew of the Auldgrande, had never beforeheard of a ghost, and could form no conception of one now. The ladiesexplained, described, defined; carefully guarding all they said, however, by stern disclaimers against the ghost theory altogether, butapparently to little purpose. At length Buchubai exclaimed, that she nowknew what they meant, and that she herself had seen a great many ghostsin India. On explanation, however, her ghosts, though quite frightfulenough, turned out to be not at all spiritual: they were things ofcommon occurrence in the land she had come from, --exposed bodies of thedead. 

Next morning--as the white clouds and thin mist-streaks of the precedingday had fairly foretold--was close and wet; and the long trail of vaporwhich rises from the chasm of the Auldgrande in such weather, and isknown to the people of the neighborhood as the "smoke of the lady'sbaking, " hung, snake-like, over the river. About two o'clock the rainceased, hesitatingly and doubtfully, however, as if it did not quiteknow its own mind; and there arose no breeze to shake the dank grass, orto dissipate the thin mist-wreath that continued to float over the riverunder a sky of deep gray. But the ladies, with Buchubai, impatient tojoin their friends at Strathpeffer, determined on journeyingnotwithstanding; and, availing myself of their company and theirvehicle, I travelled on with them to Dingwall, where we parted. I hadpurposed exploring the gray dingy sandstones and fetid brecciasdeveloped along the shores on the northern side of the bay, about twomiles from the town, and on the sloping acclivities between themansion-houses of Tulloch and Fowlis; but the day was still unfavorable, and the sections seemed untemptingly indifferent; besides, I couldentertain no doubt that the dingy beds here are identical in place withthose of Cadboll on the coast of Easter Ross, which they closelyresemble, and which alternate with the lower ichthyolitic beds of theOld Red Sandstone; and so, for the present at least, I gave up myintention of exploring them. 

In the evening, the sun, far gone down towards its place of setting, burst forth in great beauty; and, under the influence of a kindly breezefrom the west, just strong enough to shake the wet leaves, the sky flungoff its thick mantle of gray. I sauntered out along the high-road, inthe direction of my old haunts at Conon-side, with, however, nointention of walking so far. But the reaches of the river, a little inflood, shone temptingly through the dank foliage, and the cottages underthe Conon woods glittered clear on their sweeping hill-side, "lookingcheerily out" into the landscape; and so I wandered on and on, over thebridge, and along the river, and through the pleasure grounds ofConon-house, till I found myself in the old solitary burying-groundbeside the Conon, which, when last in this part of the country, I wasprevented from visiting by the swollen waters. The rich yellow lightstreamed through the interstices of the tall hedge of forest-trees thatencircles the eminence, once an island, and fell in fantastic patches onthe gray tombstone and the graves. The ruinous little chapel in thecorner, whose walls a quarter of a century before I had distinctlytraced, had sunk into a green mound; and there remained over the swardbut the arch-stone of a Gothic window, with a portion of the mouldedtransom attached, to indicate the character and style of the vanishedbuilding. The old dial-stone, with the wasted gnomon, has alsodisappeared; and the few bright-colored _throch-stanes_, raw from thechisel, that had been added of late years to the group of olderstanding, did not quite make up for what time in the same period hadwithdrawn. One of the newer inscriptions, however, recorded a curiousfact. When I had resided in this part of the country so long before, there was an aged couple in the neighborhood, who had lived together, itwas said, as man and wife, for more than sixty years: and now, here wastheir tombstone and epitaph. They had lived on long after my departure;and when, as the seasons passed, men and women whose births and baptismshad taken place since their wedding-day were falling around them wellstricken in years, death seemed to have forgotten _them_; and when hecame at last, their united ages made up well nigh two centuries. Thewife had seen her ninety-sixth and the husband his hundred and secondbirthday. It does not transcend the skill of the actuary to say how manythousand women must die under ninety-six for every one that reaches it, and how many tens of thousands of men must die under a hundred and twofor every man who attains to an age so extraordinary; but he wouldrequire to get beyond his tables in order to reckon up the chancesagainst the woman destined to attain to ninety-six being courted andmarried in early life by the man born to attain to a hundred and two. 

After enjoying a magnificent sunset on the banks of the Conon, justwhere the scenery, exquisite throughout, is most delightful, I returnedthrough the woods, and spent half an hour by the way in the cottage of akindly-hearted woman, now considerably advanced in years, whom I hadknown, when she was in middle life, as the wife of one of the Conon-sidehinds, and who not unfrequently, when I was toiling at the mallet in theburning sun, hot and thirsty, and rather loosely knit for my work, hadbrought me--all she had to offer at the time--a draught of fresh whey. At first she seemed to have wholly forgotten both her kindness and theobject of it. She well remembered my master, and another Cromarty manwho had been grievously injured, when undermining an old building, bythe sudden fall of the erection; but she could bethink her of no thirdCromarty man whatever. "Eh, sirs!" she at length exclaimed, "I daresayye'll be just the sma' prentice laddie. Weel, what will young folk nocome out o'? They were amaist a' stout big men at the wark exceptyoursel'; an' you're now stouter and bigger than maist o' them. Eh, sirs!--an' are ye still a mason?" "No; I have not wrought as a mason forthe last fourteen years; but I have to work hard enough for all that. ""Weel, weel, it's our appointed lot; an' if we have but health an'strength, an' the wark to do, why should we repine?" Once fairly enteredon our talk together, we gossipped on till the night fell, giving andreceiving information regarding our old acquaintances of a quarter of acentury before; of whom we found that no inconsiderable proportion hadalready sunk in the stream in which eventually we must all disappear. And then, taking leave of the kindly old woman, I walked on in the darkto Dingwall, where I spent the night. I could fain have called by theway on my old friend and brother-workman, Mr. Urquhart, --of a verynumerous party of mechanics employed at Conon-side in the year 1821 theonly individual now resident in this part of the country; but thelateness of the hour forbade. Next morning I returned by the Conon road, as far as the noble old bridge which strides across the stream at thevillage, and which has done so much to banish the water-wraith from thefords; and then striking off to the right, I crossed, by a pathcomparatively little frequented, the insulated group of hills whichseparates the valley of the Conon from that of the Peffer. The day wasmild and pleasant, and the atmosphere clear; but the higher hills againexhibited their ominous belts of vapor, and there had been a slightfrost during the night, --at this autumnal season the almost certainprecursor of rain. 

CHAPTER IX. 

 The Great Conglomerate--Its Undulatory and Rectilinear Members--Knock Farril and its Vitrified Fort--The old Highlanders an observant race--The Vein of Silver--Summit of Knock Farril--Mode of accounting for the Luxuriance of Herbage in the ancient Scottish Fortalices--The green Graves of Culloden--Theories respecting the Vitrification of the Hill-forts--Combined Theories of Williams and Mackenzie probably give the correct account--The Author's Explanation--Transformations of Fused Rocks--Strathpeffer--The Spa--Permanent Odoriferous Qualities of an ancient Sea-bottom converted into Rock--Mineral Springs of the Spa--Infusion of the powdered rock a substitute--Belemnite Water--The lively young Lady's Comments--A befogged Country seen from a hill-top--Ben-Wevis--Journey to Evanton--A Geologist's Night-mare--The Route Home--Ruins of Craighouse--Incompatibility of Tea and Ghosts--End of the Tour. 

I was once more on the Great Conglomerate, --here, as elsewhere, apicturesque, boldly-featured deposit, traversed by narrow, mural-sidedvalleys, and tempested by bluff abrupt eminences. Its hills are greatlyless confluent than those of most of the other sedimentary formations ofScotland; and their insulated summits, recommended by their steep sidesand limited areas to the old savage Vaubans of the Highlands, furnished, ere the historic eras began, sites for not a few of the ancienthill-forts of the country. The vitrified fort of Craig Phadrig, of theOrd Hill of Kessock, and of Knock Farril, --two of the number, the firstand last, being the most celebrated erections of their kind in the northof Scotland, --were all formed on hills of the Great Conglomerate. TheConglomerate exists here as a sort of miniature Highlands, set down atthe northern side of a large angular bay of Palæozoic rock, whichindents the _true_ Highlands of the country, and which exhibits in itscentral area a prolongation of the long moory ridge of the Black Isle, formed, as I have already had occasion to remark, of an _upper_ depositof the same lower division of the Old Red, --a deposit as noticeable foraffecting a confluent, rectilinear character in its elevations, as theConglomerate is remarkable for exhibiting a detached and undulatory one. Exactly the same features are presented by the same deposits in theneighborhood of Inverness; the _undulatory_ Conglomerate composing, tothe north and west of the town, the picturesque wavy ridge comprisingthe twin-eminences of Munlochy Bay, the Ord Hill of Kessock, CraigPhadrig, and the fir-covered hill beyond in the line of the GreatValley; while on the south and east the _rectilinear_ ichthyoliticmember of the system, with the arenaceous beds that lie over it, formthe continuous straight-lined ridge which runs on from beyond the moorof the Leys to beyond the moor of Culloden. There is a pretty littleloch in this dwarf Highlands of the Brahan district, into which the oldCeltic prophet Kenneth Ore, when, like Prospero, he relinquished hisart, buried "deep beyond plummet sound" the magic stone in which he waswont to see the distant and the future. And with the loch it contains anarrow, hermit-like dell, bearing but a single row of fields, and theseof small size, along its flat bottom, and whose steep gray sides ofrustic Conglomerate resemble Cyclopean walls. It, besides, includesamong its hills the steep hill of Knock Farril, which, rising bluff andbold immediately over the southern slopes of Strathpeffer, adds sogreatly to the beauty of the valley, and bears atop perhaps the finestspecimen of the vitrified fort in Scotland; and the bold frontage ofcliff presented by the group to the west, over the pleasure grounds ofBrahan, is, though on no very large scale, one of the mostcharacteristic of the Conglomerate formation which can be seenanywhere. It is formed of exactly such cliffs as the landscape gardenerwould make if he could, --cliffs with their rude prominent pebblesbreaking the light over every square foot of surface, and furnishingfooting, by their innumerable projections, to many a green tuft of moss, and many a sweet little flower. Some of the masses, too, that haverolled down from the precipices among the Brahan woods far below, andstand up, like the ruins of cottages, amid the trees, are of singularbeauty, --worth all the imitation-ruins ever erected, and obnoxious tonone of the disparaging associations which the mere show andmake-believe of the artificial are sure always to awaken. 

Whatever exhibited an aspect in any degree extraordinary was sure toattract the notice of the old Highlanders, --an acutely observant race, however slightly developed their reflective powers; and the greatnatural objects which excited their attention we always find associatedwith some traditionary story. It is said that in the Conglomerate cliffsabove Brahan, a retainer of the Mackenzie, one of the smiths of thetribe, discovered a rich vein of silver, which he wrought by stealth, until he had filled one of the apartments of his cottage with bars andingots. But the treasure, it is added, was betrayed by his ownunfortunate vanity, to his chief, who hanged him in order to servehimself his heir; and no one since his death has proved ingenious enoughto convert the rude rock into silver. Years had, I found, wrought theirchanges amid the miniature Highlands of the Conglomerate. The sapplingsof the straggling wood on the banks of Loch Ousy, --the pleasant littlelake, or lochan rather, of this upland region, --that I remembered havingseen scarce taller than myself, had shot into vigorous treehood; and thesteep slopes of Knock Farril, which I had left covered with their darkscreen of pine, were now thickly mottled over with half-decayed stumps, and bore that peculiarly barren aspect which tracts cleared of theirwood so frequently assume in their transition state, when the plantsthat flourished in the shade have died out in consequence of theexposure, and plants that love the open air and the unbroken sunshinehave not yet sprung up in their place. I found the southern acclivitiesof the hill covered with scattered masses of vitrified stone, that hadfallen from the fortalice atop; and would recommend to the collector inquest of a characteristic specimen, that instead of laboring, to thegeneral detriment of the pile, in detaching one from the walls above, heshould set himself to seek one here. The blocks, uninjured by thehammer, exhibit, in most cases, the angular character of the originalfragments better than those forcibly detached from the mass, andpreserve in fine keeping those hollower interstices which were butpartially filled with the molten matter, and which, when shattered by ablow, break through and lose their character. 

One may spend an hour very agreeably on the green summit of KnockFarril. And at almost all seasons of the year a green summit itis, --greener considerably than any other hill-top in this part of thecountry. The more succulent grasses spring up rich and strong within thewalls, here and there roughened by tufts of nettles, tall and rank, andsomewhat perilous of approach, --witnesses, say the botanists, that manhad once a dwelling in the immediate neighborhood. The green luxuriancewhich characterizes so many of the more ancient fortalices of Scotlandseems satisfactorily accounted for by Dr. Fleming, in his "Zoölogy ofthe Bass. " "The summits and sides of those hills which were occupied byour ancestors as _hill-forts_, " says the naturalist, "usually exhibit afar richer herbage than corresponding heights in the neighborhood withthe mineral soil derived from the same source. It is to be kept in view, that these positions of strength were at the same time occupied as_hill-folds_, into which, during the threatened or actual invasion ofthe district by a hostile tribe, the cattle were driven, especiallyduring the night, as to places of safety, and sent out to pasture in theneighborhood during the day. And the droppings of these collected herdswould, as takes place in analogous cases at present, speedily improvethe soil to such an extent as to induce a permanent fertility. " Thefurther instance adduced by the Doctor, in showing through whatprotracted periods causes transitory in themselves may remain palpablyinfluential in their effects, is curiously suggestive of the oldmetaphysical idea, that as every effect has its cause, "recurring fromcause to cause up to the abyss of eternity, so every cause has also itseffects, linked forward in succession to the end of time. " On the bleakmoor of Culloden the graves of the slain still exist as patches of greensward, surrounded by a brown groundwork of stunted heather. The animalmatter, --once the nerves, muscles, and sinews of brave men, --whichoriginated the change, must have been wholly dissipated ages ago. Butthe effect once produced has so decidedly maintained itself, that itremains not less distinctly stamped upon the heath in the present daythan it could have been in the middle of the last century, only a fewyears after the battle had been stricken. 

The vitrification of the rampart which on every side incloses the grassyarea has been more variously, but less satisfactorily, accounted forthan the green luxuriance within. It was held by Pennant to be an effectof volcanic fire, and that the walls of this and all our other vitrifiedstrongholds are simply the crater-rims of extinct volcanoes, --ahypothesis wholly as untenable in reference to the hill-forts as to thelime-kilns of the country: the vitrified forts are as little volcanic asthe vitrified kilns. Williams, the author of the "Mineral Kingdom, " andone of our earlier British geologists, after deciding, on data which hispeculiar pursuits enabled him to collect and weigh, that they are _not_volcanic, broached the theory, still prevalent, as their name testifies, that they are artificial structures, in which vitrescency was designedlyinduced, in order to cement into solid masses accumulations of loosematerials. Lord Woodhouselee advocated an opposite view. Resting on thefact that the vitrification is but of partial occurrence, be held thatit had been produced, not of design by the builders of the forts, but inthe process of their demolition by a besieging enemy, who, finding, ashe premised, a large portion of the ramparts composed of wood, hadsucceeded in setting them on fire. This hypothesis, however, seems quiteas untenable as that of Pennant. Fires not unfrequently occur in cities, among crowded groups of houses, where walls of stone are surrounded by amuch greater profusion of dry woodwork than could possibly have enteredinto the composition of the ramparts of a hill-fort; but who ever saw, after a city fire, masses of wall from eight to ten feet in thicknessfused throughout? The sandstone columns of the aisles of the OldGreyfriars in Edinburgh, surrounded by the woodwork of the galleries, the flooring, the seating, and the roof, were wasted, during the firewhich destroyed the pile, into mere skeletons of their former selves;but though originally not more than three feet in diameter, theyexhibited no marks of vitrescency. And it does not seem in the leastprobable that the stonework of the Knock Farril rampart could, ifsurrounded by wood at all, have been surrounded by an amount equallygreat, in proportion to its mass, as that which enveloped theaisle-columns of the Old Greyfriars. 

The late Sir George Mackenzie of Coul adopted yet a fourth view. Heheld that the vitrification is simply an effect of the ancientbeacon-fires kindled to warn the country of an invading enemy. But howaccount, on this hypothesis, for ramparts continuous, as in the case ofKnock Farril, all round the hill? A powerful fire long kept up mightwell fuse a heap of loose stones into a solid mass; the bonfire lightedon the summit of Arthur Seat in 1842, to welcome the Queen on her firstvisit to Scotland, particularly fused numerous detached fragments ofbasalt, and imparted, in some spots to the depth of about half an inch, a vesicular structure to the solid rock beneath. But no fire, howeverpowerful, could have constructed a rampart running without break forseveral hundred feet round an insulated hill-top. "To be satisfied, "said Sir George, "of the reason why the signal-fires should be kindledon or beside a heap of stones, we have only to imagine a gale of wind tohave arisen when a fire was kindled on the bare ground. The fuel wouldbe blown about and dispersed, to the great annoyance of those whoattended. The plan for obviating the inconvenience thus occasioned whichwould occur most naturally and readily would be to raise a heap ofstones, on either side of which the fire might be placed to windward;and to account for the vitrification appearing all round the area, it isonly necessary to allow the inhabitants of the country to have had asystem of signals. A fire at one end might denote something differentfrom a fire at the other, or in some intermediate part. On someoccasions two or more fires might be necessary, and sometimes a firealong the whole line. It cannot be doubted, " he adds, "that the rampartwas originally formed with as much regularity as the nature of thematerials would allow, both in order to render it more durable, and tomake it serve the purposes of defence. " This, I am afraid, is stillvery unsatisfactory. A fire lighted along the entire line of a wallinclosing nearly an acre of area could not be other than a veryattenuated, wire-drawn line of fire indeed, and could never possessstrength enough to melt the ponderous mass of rampart beneath, as if ithad been formed of wax or resin. A thousand loads of wood piled in aring round the summit of Knock Farril, and set at once into a blaze, would wholly fail to affect the broad rampart below; and long ere even athousand, or half a thousand, loads could have been cut down, collected, and fired, an invading enemy would have found time enough to moor hisfleet and land his forces, and possess himself of the lower country. Again, the unbroken continuity of the vitrified line militates againstthe signal-system theory. Fire trod so closely upon the heels of fire, that the vitrescency induced by the one fire impinged on and mingledwith the vitrescency induced by the others beside it. There is no othermode of accounting for the continuity of the fusion; and how coulddefinite meanings possibly be attached to the various parts of a line sominutely graduated, that the centre of the fire kindled on any onegraduation could be scarce ten feet apart from the centre of the firekindled on any of its two neighboring graduations? Even by day, theexact compartment which a fire occupied could not be distinguished, atthe distance of half a mile, from its neighboring compartments, and notat all by night, at any distance, from even the compartments farthestremoved from it. Who, for instance, at the distance of a dozen miles orso, could tell whether the flame that shone out in the darkness, whenall other objects around it were invisible, was kindled on the east orwest end of an eminence little more than a hundred yards in length? Nay, who could determine, --for such is the requirement of thehypothesis, --whether it rose from a compartment of the summit a hundredfeet distant from its west or east end, or from a compartment merelyninety or a hundred and ten feet distant from it? The supposed signalsystem, added to the mere beacon hypothesis, is palpably untenable. 

The theory of Williams, however, which is, I am inclined to think, thetrue one in the main, seems capable of being considerably modified andimproved by the hypothesis of Sir George. The hill-fort, --palpably themost primitive form of fortalice or stronghold originated in amountainous country, --seems to constitute man's first essay towardsneutralizing, by the art of fortification, the advantages of superiorforce on the side of an assailing enemy. It was found, on the discoveryof New Zealand, that the savage inhabitants had already learned to erectexactly such hill-forts amid the fastnesses of that country as thosewhich were erected two thousand years earlier by the Scottish aboriginesamid the fastnesses of our own. Nothing seems more probable, therefore, than that the forts of eminences such as Craig Phadrig and Knock Farril, originally mere inclosures of loose, uncemented stones, may belong to aperiod not less ancient than that of the first barbarous wars ofScotland, when, though tribe battled with tribe in fierce warfare, likethe red men of the West with their brethren ere the European had landedon their shores, navigation was yet in so immature a state in NorthernEurope as to secure to them an exemption from foreign invasion. In anafter age, however, when the roving Vikings had become formidable, manyof the eminences originally selected, from _their inaccessibility_, assites for hill-forts, would come to be chosen, from _their prominence inthe landscape_, as stations for beacon-fires. And of course thepreviously erected ramparts, higher always than the inclosed areas, would furnish on such hills the conspicuous points from which the firescould be best seen. Let us suppose, then, that the rampart-crestedeminence of Knock Farril, seen on every side for many miles, has becomein the age of northern invasion one of the beacon-posts of the district, and that large fires, abundantly supplied with fuel by the woods of aforest-covered country, and blown at times into intense heat by thestrong winds so frequent in that upper stratum of air into which thesummit penetrates, have been kindled some six or eight times on someprominent point of the rampart, raised, mayhap, many centuries before. At first the heat has failed to tell on the stubborn quartz and feldsparwhich forms the preponderating material of the gneisses, granites, quartz rocks, and coarse conglomerate sandstones on which it has beenbrought to operate; but each fire throws down into the interstices aconsiderable amount of the fixed salt of the wood, till at length theheap has become charged with a strong flux; and then one powerful firemore, fanned to a white heat by a keen, dry breeze, reduces the wholeinto a semi-fluid mass. The same effects have been produced on thematerials of the rampart by the beacon-fires and the alkali, that wereproduced, according to Pliny, by the fires and the soda of thePhoenician merchants storm-bound on the sands of the river Belus. Butthe state of civilization in Scotland at the time is not such as topermit of the discovery being followed up by similar results. Thesemi-savage guardians of the beacon wonder at the _accident_, as theywell may; but those happy accidents in which the higher order ofdiscoveries originate occur in only the ages of cultivated minds; and sothey do not acquire from it the art of manufacturing glass. It could notfail being perceived, however, by intellects at all human, that theconsolidation which the fires of one week, or month, or year, as thecase happened, had effected on one portion of the wall, might beproduced by the fires of another week, or month, or year, on anotherportion of it; that, in short, a loose incoherent rampart, easy ofdemolition, might be converted, through the newly-discovered process, into a rampart as solid and indestructible as the rock on which itrested. And so, in course of time, simply by shifting the beacon-fires, and bringing them to bear in succession on every part of the wall, KnockFarril, with many a similar eminence in the country, comes to exhibitits completely vitrified fort where there had been but a loosely-piledhill-fort before. It in no degree militates against this compoundtheory, --borrowed in part from Williams and in part from SirGeorge, --that there are detached vitrified masses to be found oneminences evidently never occupied by hill-forts; or that there arehill-forts on other eminences only partially fused, or hill-forts onmany of the less commanding sites that bear about them no marks of fireat all. Nothing can be more probable than that in the first class ofcases we have eminences that had been selected as beacon-stations, whichhad not previously been occupied by hill-forts; and in the last, eminences that had been occupied by hill-forts which, from their want ofprominence in the general landscape, had not been selected asbeacon-stations. And in the intermediate class of cases we have probablyramparts that were only partially vitrified, because some want of fuelin the neighborhood had starved the customary fires, or because fireshad to be less frequently kindled upon them than on the more importantstations; or, finally, because these hill-forts, from some disadvantageof situation, were no longer used as places of strength, and so thebeacon-keepers had no motive to attempt consolidating them throughout bythe piecemeal application of the vitrifying agent. But the old Highlandmode of accounting for the present appearance of Knock Farril and itsvitrified remains is perhaps, after all, quite as good in its way as anyof the modes suggested by the philosophers. [20]

I spent some time, agreeably enough, beside the rude rampart of KnockFarril, in marking the various appearances exhibited by the fused andsemi-fused materials of which it is composed, --the granites, gneisses, mica-schists, hornblendes, clay-slates, and red sandstones of thelocality. One piece of rock, containing much lime, I found resolved intoa yellow opaque substance, not unlike the coarse earthenware used in themaking of ginger-beer bottles; but though it had been so completelymolten that it had dropped into a hollow beneath in long viscid trails, it did not contain a single air-vesicle; while another specimen, apparently a piece of fused mica-schist, was so filled with air-cells, that the dividing partitions were scarcely the tenth of a line inthickness. I found bits of schistose gneiss resolved into green glass;the Old Red Sandstone basis of the Conglomerate, which forms the hill, into a semi-metallic scoria, like that of an iron-smelter's furnace;mica into a gray, waxy-looking stone, that scratched glass; and purewhite quartz into porcellanic trails of white, that ran in one instancealong the face of a darker-colored rock below, like streaks of creamalong the sides of a burnt china jug. In one mass of pale large-grainedgranite I found that the feldspar, though it had acquired a vitreousgloss on the surface, still retained its peculiar rhomboidal cleavage;while the less stubborn quartz around it had become scarce lessvesicular and light than a piece of pumice. On some of the other massesthere was impressed, as if by a seal, the stamp of pieces of charcoal;and so sharply was the impression retained, that I could detect on thevitreous surface the mark of the yearly growths, and even of themedullary rays, of the wood. In breaking open some of the others, Idetected fragments of the charcoal itself, which, hermetically locked upin the rock, had retained all its original carbon. These last remindedme of specimens not unfrequent among the trap-rocks of the Carboniferousand Oölitic systems. From an intrusive overlying wacke in theneighborhood of Linlithgow I have derived for my collection pieces ofcarbonized wood in so complete a state of keeping, that under themicroscope they exhibit unbroken all the characteristic reticulations ofthe coniferæ of the Coal Measures. 

I descended the hill, and, after joining my friends atStrathpeffer, --Buchubai Hormazdji among the rest, --visited the Spa, inthe company of my old friend the minister of Alness. The thoroughidentity of the powerful effluvium that fills the pump-room with that ofa muddy sea-bottom laid bare in warm weather by the tide, is to thedweller on the sea-coast very striking. It _is_ identity, --not mereresemblance. In most cases the organic substances undergo great changesin the bowels of the earth. The animal matter of the Caithnessichthyolites exists, for instance, as a hard, black, insoluble bitumen, which I have used oftener than once as sealing-wax; the vegetable mouldof the Coal Measures has been converted into a fire-clay, so altered inthe organic pabulum, animal and vegetable, whence it derived itsfertility, that, even when laid open for years to the melioratingeffects of the weather and the visits of the winged seeds, it will notbe found bearing a single spike or leaf of green. But here, in smell, atleast, that ancient mud, swum over by the Diplopterus and theDiplacanthus, and in which the Coccosteus and Pterichthys burrowed, hasundergone no change. The soft ooze has become solid rock, but itsodoriferous qualities have remained unaltered. I next visited anexcavation a few hundred yards on the upper side of the pump-room, inwhich the gray fetid breccia of the Strath has been quarried fordyke-building, and examined the rock with some degree of care, without, however, detecting in it a single plate or scale. Lying over thatConglomerate member of the system which, rising high in the Knock Farrilrange, forms the southern boundary of the valley, it occupies the placeof the lower ichthyolitic bed, so rich in organisms in various otherparts of the country; but here the bed, after it had been deposited inthin horizontal laminæ, and had hardened into stone, seems to have beenbroken up, by some violent movement, into minute sharp-edged fragments, that, without wear or attrition, were again consolidated into thebreccia which it now forms. And its ichthyolites, if not previouslyabsorbed, were probably destroyed in the convulsion. Detached scales andspines, however, if carefully sought for in the various openings of thevalley, might still be found in the original laminæ of the fragments. They must have been amazingly abundant in it once; for so largelysaturated is the rock with the organic matter into which they have beenresolved, that, when struck by the hammer, the impalpable dust set loosesensibly affects the organs of taste, and appeals very strongly to thoseof smell. It is through this saturated rock that the mineral springstake their course. Even the surface-waters of the valley, as they passover it contract in a perceptible degree its peculiar taste and odor. With a little more time to spare, I would fain have made this breccia ofthe Old Red the subject of a few simple experiments. I would have groundit into powder, and tried upon it the effect both of cold and hotinfusion. Portions of the water are sometimes carried in casks andbottles, for the use of invalids, to a considerable distance; but it isquite possible that a little of the _rock_, to which the water owes itsqualities, might, when treated in this way, have all the effects of aconsiderable quantity of the _spring_. It might be of some interest, too, to ascertain its qualities when crushed, as a soil, or its effecton other soils; whether, for instance, like the old sterile soils of theCarboniferous period, it has lost, through its rock-change, thefertilizing properties which it once possessed; or whether it stillretains them, like some of the coprolitic beds of the Oölite andGreensand, and might not, in consequence, be employed as a manure. Acourse of such experiments could scarce fail to furnish with agreeableoccupation some of the numerous annual visitants of the Spa, who have tolinger long, with but little to engage them, waiting for what, if itonce fairly leave a man, returns slowly, when it returns at all. 

In mentioning at the dinner-table of my friend my scheme of infusingrock in order to produce Spa water, I referred to the circumstance thatthe Belemnite of our Liasic deposits, when ground into powder, impartsto boiling water a peculiar taste and smell, and that the infusion, taken in very small quantities, sensibly affects both palate andstomach. And I suggested that Belemnite water, deemed sovereign of old, when the Belemnite was regarded as a thunderbolt, in the cure ofbewitched cattle, might be in reality medicinal, and that the ancientsuperstition might thus embody, as ancient superstitions notunfrequently do, a nucleus of fact. The charm, I said, might amount tono more than simply the administration of a medicine to sick cattle, that did harm in no case, and good at times. The lively comment of oneof the young ladies on the remark amused us all. If an infusion of stonehad cured, in the last age, cattle that were bewitched, the Strathpefferwater, she argued, which was, it seems, but an infusion of stone, mightcure cattle that were sick now; and so, though the biped patients ofthe Strath could scarce fail to decrease when they knew that its infusedstone contained but the strainings of old mud, and the juices of deadunsalted fish, it was gratifying to think that the poor Spa might stillcontinue to retain its patients, though of a lower order. The pump-roomwould be converted into a rustic, straw-thatched shed, to which longtrains of sick cattle, affected by weak nerves and dyspepsia, would comestreaming along the roads every morning and evening, to drink and gatherstrength. 

The following morning was wet and lowering, and a flat ceiling of graycloud stretched across the valley, from the summit of the Knock Farrilridge of hills on the one side, to the lower flanks of Ben-Wevis on theother. I had purposed ascending this latter mountain, --the giant of thenorth-eastern coast, and one of the loftiest of our second-classScottish hills anywhere, --to ascertain the extreme upper line at whichtravelled boulders occur in this part of the country. But it was nomorning for wading knee-deep through the trackless heather; and afterwaiting on, in the hope the weather might clear up, watching at a windowthe poorer invalids at the Spa, as they dragged themselves through therain to the water, I lost patience, and sallied out, beplaided andumbrellaed, to see from the top of Knock Farril how the country lookedin a fog. At first, however, I saw much fog, but little country; but asthe day wore on, the flat mist-ceiling rose together, till it rested onbut the distant hills, and the more prominent features of the landscapebegan to stand out amid the more general gray, like the stronger linesand masses in a half-finished drawing, boldly dashed off in the neutraltint of the artist. The portions of the prospect generically distinctare, notwithstanding its great extent and variety, but few; and thepartial veil of haze, by glazing down its distracting multiplicity ofminor points, served to bring them out all the more distinctly. Thereis, first stretching far in a southern and eastern direction along thelandscape, the rectilinear ridge of the Black Isle, --not quite the sortof line a painter would introduce into a composition, but true togeologic character. More in the foreground, in the same direction, therespreads a troubled cockling sea of the Great Conglomerate. Turning tothe north and west, the deep valley of Strathpeffer, with its expanse ofrich level fields, and in the midst its old baronial castle, surroundedby coeval trees of vast bulk, lies so immediately at the foot of theeminence, that I could hear in the calm the rush of the little stream, swollen to thrice its usual bulk by the rains of the night. Beyond rosethe thick-set Ben-Wevis, --a true gneiss mountain, with breadth enough ofshoulders, and amplitude enough of base, to serve a mountain thrice astall, but which, like all its cogeners of this ancient formation, wasarrested in its second stage of growth, so that many of the slimmergranitic and porphyritic hills of the country look down upon it, asAgamemnon, according to Homer, looked down upon Ulysses. 

 "Broad is his breast, his shoulders larger spread, Though great Atrides overtops his head. "

All around, as if topling, wave-like, over the outer edges of thecomparatively flat area of Palæozoic rock which composes the middleground of the landscape, rose a multitude of primary hill-peaks, barelydiscernible in the haze; while the long withdrawing Dingwall Frith, stretching on towards the open sea for full twenty miles, and flanked oneither side by ridges of sandstone, but guarded at the opening by twosquat granitic columns, completed the prospect, by adding to its lastgreat feature. All was gloomy and chill; and as I turned me down thedescent, the thick wetting drizzle again came on; and the mist-wreaths, after creeping upwards along the hill-side, began again to creep down. When I had first visited the valley, more than a quarter of a centurybefore, it was on a hot breathless day of early summer, in which, thoughthe trees in fresh leaf seemed drooping in the sunshine, and thesucculent luxuriance of the fields lay aslant, half-prostrated by thefierce heat, the rich blue of Ben-Wevis, far above, was thickly streakedwith snow, on which it was luxury even to look. It gave one icedfancies, wherewithal to slake, amid the bright glow of summer, thethirst in the mind. The recollection came strongly upon me, as the fogfrom the hill-top closed dark behind, like that sung by the old blindEnglishman, which

 "O'er the marish glides, And gathers ground fast at the lab'rer's heel, Homeward returning. "

But the contrast had nothing sad in it; and it was pleasant to feel thatit had not. I had resigned many a baseless hope and many an idle desiresince I had spent a vacant day amid the sunshine, now gazing on thebroad placid features of the snow-streaked mountain; and now saunteringunder the tall ancient woods, or along the heath-covered slopes of thevalley; but in relation to never-tiring, inexhaustible nature, the heartwas no fresher at that time than it was now. I had grown no older in myfeelings or in my capacity of enjoyment; and what then was there toregret?

I rode down the Strath in an omnibus which plies between the Spa andDingwall, and then walked on to the village of Evanton, which I reachedabout an hour after nightfall, somewhat in the circumstances of the"damp stranger, " who gave Beau Brummel the cold. There were, however, noBeau Brummels in the quiet village inn in which I passed the night, andso the effects of the damp were wholly confined to myself. I was soundlypummelled during the night by a frightful female, who first assumed theappearance of the miserable pauper woman whom I had seen beside theAuldgrande, and then became the Lady of Balconie; and, thoughsufficiently indignant, and much inclined to resist, I could stirneither hand nor foot, but lay passively on my back, jambed fast behindthe huge gneiss boulder and the edge of the gulf. And yet, by a strangeduality of perception, I was conscious all the while that, having gotwet on the previous day, I was now suffering from an attack ofnightmare: and held that it would be no very serious matter even shouldthe lady tumble me into the gulf, seeing that all would be well againwhen I awoke in the morning. Dreams of this character, in whichconsciousness bears reference at once to the fictitious events of thevision and the real circumstances of the sleeper, must occupy, I aminclined to think, very little time, --single moments, mayhap, poisedmidway between the sleeping and waking state. Next day (Sunday) Iattended the Free Church in the parish, where I found a numerous andattentive congregation, --descendants, in large part, of the old devoutMunroes of Ferindonald, --and heard a good solid discourse. And on thefollowing morning I crossed the sea at what is known as the FowlisFerry, to explore, on my homeward route, the rocks laid bare along theshore in the upper reaches of the Frith. 

I found but little by the way: black patches of bitumen in the sandstoneof one of the beds, with a bed of stratified clay, inclosing nodules, inwhich, however, I succeeded in detecting nothing organic; and a fewfragments of clay-slate locked up in the Red Sandstone, sharp andunworn at their edges, as if derived from no great distance, thoughthere be now no clay-slate in the eastern half of Ross; but though therocks here belong evidently to the ichthyolitic member of the Old Red, not a single fish, not a "nibble" even, repaid the patient search ofhalf a day. I, however, passed some time agreeably enough among theruins of Craighouse. When I had last seen, many years before, this oldcastle, [21] the upper stories were accessible; but they were now nolonger so. Time, and the little herdboys who occasionally shelter in itsvaults, had been busy in the interval; and, by breaking off a fewprojecting corners by which the climber had held, and by effacing a fewnotches into which he had thrust his toe-points, they had rendered whathad been merely difficult impracticable. I remarked that the hugekitchen chimney of the building, --a deep hollow recess which stretchesacross the entire gable, and in which, it is said, two thrashers onceplied the flail for a whole winter, --bore less of the stain of recentsmoke than it used to exhibit twenty years before; and inferred thatthere would be fewer wraith-lights seen from the castle at nights thanin those days of _evil spirits_ and illicit stills, when the cottars inthe neighborhood sent more smuggled whiskey to market than any equalnumber of the inhabitants of almost any other district in the north. Ithas been long alleged that there existed a close connection between themore ghostly spirits of the country and its distilled ones. "How do youaccount, " said a north country minister of the last age (the late Rev. Mr. M'Bean of Alves) to a sagacious old elder of his Session, "for thealmost total disappearance of the ghosts and fairies that used to be socommon in your young days?" "Tak my word for 't, minister, " replied theshrewd old man, "it's a' owing to the _tea_; when the _tea_ cam in, theghaists an' fairies gaed out. Weel do I mind when at a' our neeborlymeetings, --bridals, christenings, lyke-wakes, an' the like, --weentertained ane anither wi' rich nappy ale; an' whan the verra dowiesto' us used to get warm i' the face, an' a little confused in the head, an' weel fit to see amaist onything whan on the muirs on our way hame. But the tea has put out the nappy; an' I have remarked, that by losingthe nappy we lost baith ghaists an' fairies. "

Quitting the ruin, I walked on along the shore, tracing the sandstone asI went, as it rises from lower to higher beds; and where it ceases tocrop out at the surface, and gravel and the red boulder-clays take theplace of rock, I struck up the hill, and, traversing the parishes ofResolis and Cromarty, got home early in the evening. I had seen and donescarcely half what I had intended seeing or doing: alas, that inreference to every walk which I have yet attempted to tread, thisspecial statement should be so invariably true to fact!--alas, that allmy full purposes, should be coupled with but half realizations! But Ihad at least the satisfaction, that though I had accomplished little, Ihad enjoyed much; and it is something, though not all, nor nearly all, that, since time is passing, it should pass happily. In my next chapterI shall enter on my tour to Orkney. It dates one year earlier (1846)than the tour with which I have already occupied so many chapters; but Ihave thus inverted the order of _time_, by placing it last, that I maybe able so to preserve the order of _space_ as to render the tracttravelled over in my narrative continuous from Edinburgh to the northernextremity of Pomona. 

CHAPTER X. 

 Recovered Health--Journey to the Orkneys--Aboard the Steamer at Wick--Mr. Bremner--Masonry of the Harbor of Wick--The greatest Blunders result from good Rules misapplied--Mr. Bremner's Theory about sea-washed Masonry--Singular Fracture of the Rock near Wick--The Author's mode of accounting for it--"Simple but not obvious" Thinking--Mr. Bremner's mode of making stone Erections under Water--His exploits in raising foundered Vessels--Aspect of the Orkneys--- The ungracious Schoolmaster--In the Frith of Kirkwall--Cathedral of St. Magnus--Appearance of Kirkwall--Its "perished suppers"--Its ancient Palaces--Blunder of the Scotch Aristocracy--The patronate Wedge--Breaking Ground in Orkney--Minute gregarious Coccosteus--True Position of the Coccosteus' Eyes--Ruins of one of Cromwell's Forts--Antiquities of Orkney--The Cathedral--Its Sculptures--The Mysterious Cell--Prospect from the Tower--Its Chimes--Ruins of Castle Patrick. 

A twelvemonth had gone by since a lingering indisposition, which boreheavily on the springs of life, compelled me to postpone along-projected journey to the Orkneys, and led me to visit, instead, rich level England, with its well-kept roads and smooth railways, alongwhich the enfeebled invalid can travel far without fatigue. I had nowgot greatly stronger; and, if not quite up to my old thirty miles perday, nor altogether so bold a cragsman as I had been only a few yearsbefore, I was at least vigorous enough to enjoy a middling long walk, and to breast a tolerably steep hill. And so I resolved on at leastglancing over, if not exploring, the fossiliferous deposits of theOrkneys, trusting that an eye somewhat practised in the formationsmainly developed in these islands might enable me to make some amendsfor seeing comparatively little, by seeing well. I took coach atInvergordon for Wick early in the morning of Friday; and, after a wearyride, in a bleak gusty day, that sent the dust of the road whirlingabout the ears of the sorely-tossed "outsides, " with whom I had taken mychance, I alighted in Wick, at the inn-door, a little after six o'clockin the evening. The following morning was wet and dreary; and a tumblingsea, raised by the wind of the previous day and night, came rolling intothe bay; but the waves bore with them no steamer; and when, some fivehours after the expected time, she also came rolling in, her darkenedand weather-beaten sides and rigging gave evidence that her passage fromthe south had been no holiday trip. Impatient, however, of looking outupon the sea for hours, from under dripping eaves, and through thedimmed panes of streaming windows, I got aboard with about half-a-dozenother passengers; and while the Wick goods were in the course of beingtransferred to two large boats alongside, we lay tossing in the openbay. The work of raising box and package was superintended by a tallelderly gentleman from the shore, peculiarly Scotch in hisappearance, --the steam company's agent for this part of the country. 

"That, " said an acquaintance, pointing to the agent, "is a veryextraordinary man, --in his own special walk, one of the mostoriginal-minded, and at the same time most thoroughly practical, youperhaps ever saw. That is Mr. Bremner of Wick, known now all overBritain for his success in raising foundered vessels, when every oneelse gives them up. In the lifting of vast weights, or the overcomingthe _vis inertiæ_ of the hugest bodies, nothing ever baffles Mr. Bremner. But come, I must introduce you to him. He takes an interest inyour peculiar science, and is familiar with your geological writings. "

I was accordingly introduced to Mr. Bremner, and passed, in his companythe half-hour which we spent in the bay, in a way that made me wish thetime doubled. I had been struck by the peculiar style of masonryemployed in the harbor of Wick, and by its rock-like strength. The grayponderous stones of the flagstone series of which it is built, insteadof being placed on their flatter beds, like common ashlar in a building, or horizontal strata in a quarry, are raised on end, like staves in apail or barrel, so that at some little distance the work looks as ifformed of upright piles or beams jambed fast together. I had learnedthat Mr. Bremner had been the builder, and adverted to the peculiarityof his style of building. "You have given a vertical tilt to yourstrata, " I said: "most men would have preferred the horizontal position. It used to be regarded as one of the standing rules of my oldprofession, that the 'broad bed of a stone' is the best, and should bealways laid 'below. '" "A good rule for the land, " replied Mr. Bremner, "but no good rule for the sea. The greatest blunders are almost alwaysperpetrated through the misapplication of good rules. On a coast likeours, where boulders of a ton weight are rolled about with every stormlike pebbles, these stones, if placed on what a workman would term theirbest beds, would be scattered along the shore like sea-wrack, by thegales of a single winter. In setting aside the prejudice, " continued Mr. Bremner, "that what is indisputably the best bed for a stone on dry landis also the best bed in the water on an exposed coast, I reasonedthus:--The surf that dashes along the beach in times of tempest, andthat forms the enemy with which I have to contend, is not simply water, with an onward impetus communicated to it by the wind and tide, and areäctive impetus in the opposite direction, --the effect of the backwardrebound, and of its own weight, when raised by these propelling forcesabove its average level of surface. True, it is all this; but it is alsosomething more. As its white breadth of foam indicates, it is a subtilemixture of water and _air_, with a powerful _upward_ action, --aconsequence of the air struggling to effect its escape; and this upwardaction must be taken into account in our calculations, as certainly asthe other and more generally recognized actions. In striking against apiece of building, this subtile mixture dashes through the intersticesinto the interior of the masonry, and, filling up all its cavities, hasby its upward action, a tendency to _set the work afloat_. And thebroader the beds of the stones, of course the more extensive are thesurfaces which it has to act upon. One of these flat flags, ten feet byfour, and a foot in thickness, would present to this upheaving force, ifplaced on end, a superficies of but _four_ square feet; whereas, ifplaced on its broader base, it would present to it a superficies of_forty_ square feet. Obviously, then, with regard to this aërialupheaving force, that acts upon the masonry in a direction in which noprecautions are usually adopted to bind it fast, --for the existence ofthe force itself is not taken into account, --the greater bed of thestone must be just ten times over a worse bed than its lesser one; andon a tempestuous foam-encircled coast such as ours, this aërialupheaving force is in reality, though the builder may not know it, oneof the most formidable forces with which he had to deal. And so, onthese principles, I ventured to set my stones on end, --on what wasdeemed their _worst_, not their _best_ beds, --wedging them all fasttogether, like staves in an anker; and there, to the scandal of all theold rules, are they fast wedged still, firm as a rock. " It was noordinary man that could have originated such reasonings on such asubject, or that could have thrown himself so boldly, and to suchpractical effect, on the conclusions to which they led. 

Mr. Bremner adverted, in the course of our conversation, to a singularappearance among the rocks a little to the east and south of the townof Wick, that had not, he said, attracted the notice it deserved. Thesolid rock had been fractured by some tremendous blow, dealt to itexternally at a considerable height over the sea-level, and its detachedmasses scattered about like the stones of an ill-built harbor broken upby a storm. The force, whatever its nature, had been enormously great. Blocks of some thirty or forty tons weight had been torn from out thesolid strata, and piled up in ruinous heaps, as if the compact precipicehad been a piece of loose brickwork, or had been driven into each other, as if, instead of being composed of perhaps the hardest and toughestsedimentary rock in the country, they had been formed of sun-dried clay. "I brought, " continued Mr. Bremner, "one of your itinerant geologicallecturers to the spot, to get his opinion; but he could say nothingabout the appearance: it was not in his books. " "I suspect, " I replied, "the phenomenon lies quite as much within your own province as withinthat of the geological lecturer. It is in all probability anillustration, on a large scale, of those floating forces with which youoperate on your foundered vessels, joined to the forces, laterallyexerted, by which you drag them towards the shore. When the sea stoodhigher, or the land lower, in the eras of the raised beaches, along whatis now Caithness, the abrupt mural precipices by which your coast hereis skirted must have secured a very considerable depth of water up tothe very edge of the land;--your coast-line must have resembled the sideof a mole or wharf: and in that glacial period to which the thickdeposit of boulder-clay immediately over your harbor yonder belongs, icebergs of very considerable size must not unfrequently have brushedthe brows of your precipices. An iceberg from eighty to a hundred feetin thickness, and perhaps half a square mile in area, could not, inthis old state of things, have come in contact with these cliffs withoutfirst catching the ground outside; and such an iceberg, propelled by afierce storm from the north-east, could not fail to lend the cliff withwhich it came in collision a tremendous blow. You will find that yourshattered precipice marks, in all probability, the scene of a collisionof this character: some hard-headed iceberg must have set itself to rundown the land, and got wrecked upon it for its pains. " My theory, thoughmade somewhat in the dark, --for I had no opportunity of seeing thebroken precipice until after my return from Orkney, --seemed to satisfyMr. Bremner; nor, on a careful survey of the phenomenon, the solution ofwhich it attempted, did I find occasion to modify or give it up. 

With just knowledge enough of Mr. Bremner's peculiar province toappreciate his views, I was much impressed by their broad and practicalsimplicity; and bethought me, as we conversed, that the character of thethinking, which, according to Addison, forms the staple of all writingsof genius, and which he defines as "simple but not obvious, " is acharacter which equally applies to _all_ good thinking, whatever itsspecial department. Power rarely resides in ingenious complexities: itseems to eschew in every walk the elaborately attenuated and razor-edgedmode of thinking, --the thinking akin to that of the old metaphysicalpoets, --and to select the broad and massive style. Hercules, in all therepresentations of him which I have yet seen, is the _broad_ Hercules. Iwas greatly struck by some of Mr. Bremner's views on deep-sea founding. He showed me how, by a series of simple, but certainly not obviouscontrivances, which had a strong air of practicability about them, hecould lay down his erection, course by course, inshore, in a floatingcaisson of peculiar construction, beginning a little beyond the low-ebbline, and warping out his work piecemeal, as it sank, till it hadreached its proper place, in, if necessary, from ten to twelve fathomswater, where, on a bottom previously prepared for it by the diving-bell, he had means to make it take the ground exactly at the required line. The difficulty and vast expense of building altogether by the bell wouldbe obviated, he said, by the contrivance, and a solidity given to thework otherwise impossible in the circumstances: the stones could be laidin his floating caisson with a care as deliberate as on the land. Someof the anecdotes which he communicated to me on this occasion, connectedwith his numerous achievements in weighing up foundered vessels, or infloating off wrecked or stranded ones, were of singular interest; and Iregretted that they should not be recorded in an autobiographicalmemoir. Not a few of them were humorously told, and curiouslyillustrative of that general ignorance regarding the "strength ofmaterials" in which the scientific world has been too strangely sufferedto lie, in this the world's most mechanical age; so that what ought tobe questions of strict calculation are subjected to the guessings of amere common sense, far from adequate, in many cases, to their properresolution. "I once raised a vessel, " said Mr. Bremner, --"a largecollier, chock-full of coal, --which an English projector had actuallyengaged to raise with huge bags of India rubber, inflated with air. Butthe bags, of course taxed far beyond their strength, collapsed or burst;and so, when I succeeded in bringing the vessel up, through theemployment of more adequate means, I got not only ship and cargo, butalso a great deal of good India rubber to boot. " Only a few months afterI enjoyed the pleasure of this interview with the Brindley of Scotland, he was called south, to the achievement of his greatest feat in at leastone special department, --a feat generally recognized and appreciated asthe most herculean of its kind ever performed, --the raising and warpingoff of the Great Britain steamer from her perilous bed in the sand of anexposed bay on the coast of Ireland. I was conscious of a feeling ofsadness as, in parting with Mr. Bremner, I reflected, that a man sosingularly gifted should have been suffered to reach a period of lifevery considerably advanced, in employments little suited to exert hisextraordinary faculties, and which persons of the ordinary type couldhave performed as well. Napoleon, --himself possessed of greatgenius, --could have estimated more adequately than our British rulersthe value of such a man. Had Mr. Bremner been born a Frenchman, he wouldnot now be the mere agent of a steam company, in a third-rate seaporttown. 

The rain had ceased, but the evening was gloomy and chill; and theOrcades, which, on clearing the Caithness coast, came as fully in viewas the haze permitted, were enveloped in an undress of cloud and spray, that showed off their flat low features to no advantage at all. Thebold, picturesque Hebrides look well in any weather; but the levelOrkney Islands, impressed everywhere, on at least their eastern coasts, by the comparatively tame character borne by the Old Red flagstones, when undisturbed by trap or the primary rocks, demand the full-dressauxiliaries of bright sun and clear sky, to render their charms patent. Then, however, in their sleek coats of emerald and purple, andsurrounded by their blue sparkling sounds and seas, with here a longdark wall of rock, that casts its shadow over the breaking waves, andthere a light fringe of sand and broken shells, they are, as Iafterwards ascertained, not without their genuine beauties. But had theyshared in the history of the neighboring Shetland group, that, accordingto some of the older historians, were suffered to lie uninhabited forcenturies after their first discovery, I would rather have beendisposed to marvel this evening, not that they had been unappropriatedso long, but that they had been appropriated at all. The late member forOrkney, not yet unseated by his Shetland opponent, was one of thepassengers in the steamboat; and, with an elderly man, an ambitiousschoolmaster, strongly marked by the peculiarities of the genuinedominie, who had introduced himself to him as a brother voyager, he waspacing the quarter-deck, evidently doing his best to exert, under anunintermittent hot-water _douche_ of queries, the patient courtesy of aMember of Parliament on a visit to his constituency. At length, however, the troubler quitted him, and took his stand immediately beside me; and, too sanguinely concluding that I might take the same kind of libertywith the schoolmaster that the schoolmaster had taken with the Member, Iaddressed to him a simple query in turn. But I had mistaken my man; theschoolmaster permitted to unknown passengers in humble russet no suchsort of familiarities as those permitted by the Member; and so I metwith a prompt rebuff, that at once set me down. I was evidently a big, forward lad, who had taken a liberty with the master. It is, I suspect, scarce possible for a man, unless naturally very superior, to live amongboys for some twenty or thirty years, exerting over them all the while adespotic authority, without contracting those peculiarities of characterwhich the master-spirits, --our Scots, Lambs, and Goldsmiths, --haveembalmed with such exquisite truth in our literature, and which havehitherto militated against the practical realization of thoseunexceptionable abstractions in behalf of the status and standing of theteacher of youth which have been originated by men less in the habit oflooking about them than the poets. It is worth while remarking howinvariably the strong common sense of the Scotch people has run everyscheme under water that, confounding the character of the "villageschoolmaster" with that of the "village clergyman, " would demand fromthe schoolmaster the clergyman's work. 

We crossed the opening of the Pentland Frith, with its white surges anddark boiling eddies, and saw its twin lighthouses rising tall andghostly amid the fog on our lee. We then skirted the shores of SouthRonaldshay, of Burra, of Copinshay, and of Deerness; and, after doublingMoul Head, and threading the sound which separates Shapinshay from theMainland, we entered the Frith of Kirkwall, and caught, amid theuncertain light of the closing evening, our earliest glimpse of theancient Cathedral of St. Magnus. It seems at first sight as if standingsolitary, a huge hermit-like erection, at the bottom of a low bay, --forits humbler companions do not make themselves visible until we haveentered the harbor by a mile or two more, when we begin to find that itoccupies, not an uninhabited tract of shore, but the middle of a graystraggling town, nearly a mile in length. We had just light enough toshow us, on landing, that the main thoroughfare of the place, verynarrow and very crooked, had been laid out, ere the country beyond hadgot highways, or the proprietors carts and carriages, with an exclusiveeye to the necessities of the foot-passenger, --that many of the olderhouses presented, as is common in our northern towns, their gables tothe street, and had narrow slips of closes running down along theirfronts, --and that as we receded from the harbor, a goodly portion oftheir number bore about them an air of respectability, long maintained, but now apparently touched by decay. I saw, in advance of one of thebuildings, several vigorous-looking planes, about forty feet in height, which, fenced by tall houses in front and rear, and flanked by thetortuosities of the street, had apparently forgotten that they were inOrkney, and had grown quite as well as the planes of publicthoroughfares grow elsewhere. After an abortive attempt or two made inother quarters, I was successful in procuring lodgings for a few days inthe house of a respectable widow lady of the place, where I foundcomfort and quiet on very moderate terms. The cast of faded gentilitywhich attached to so many of the older houses of Kirkwall, --remnants ofa time when the wealthier Udallers of the Orkneys used to repair totheir capital at the close of autumn, to while away in each other'ssociety their dreary winters, --reminded me of the poet Malcolm's "Sketchof the Borough, "--a portrait for which Kirkwall is known to havesat, --and of the great revolution effected in its evening parties, when"tea and turn-out" yielded its place to "tea and turn-in. " But thechurchyard of the place, which I had seen, as I passed along, glimmeringwith all its tombstones in the uncertain light, was all that remained torepresent those "great men of the burgh, " who, according to the poet, used to "pop in on its card and dancing assemblies, about the eleventhhour, resplendent in top-boots and scarlet vests, " or of its"suppression-of-vice sisterhood of moral old maids, " who kept all theirneighbors right by the terror of their tongues. I was somewhat in amood, after my chill and hungry voyage, to recall with a hankering ofregret the vision of its departed suppers, so luxuriously described inthe "Sketch, "--suppers at which "large rounds of boiled beef smotheredin cabbage, smoked geese, mutton hams, roasts of pork, and dishes ofdog-fish and of Welsh rabbits melted in their own fat, were diluted bycopious draughts of strong home-brewed ale, and etherealized by giganticbowls of rum punch. " But the past, which is not ours, who, alas, canrecall! And, after discussing a juicy steak and a modest cup of tea, Ifound I could regard with the indifferency of a philosopher, theperished suppers of Kirkwall. 

I quitted my lodgings for church next morning about three-quarters of anhour ere the service commenced; and, finding the doors shut, saunteredup the hill that rises immediately over the town. The thick gloomyweather had passed with the night; and a still, bright, clear-eyedSabbath looked cheerily down on green isle and blue sea. I was quiteunprepared by any previous description, for the imposing assemblage ofancient buildings which Kirkwall presents full in the foreground, whenviewed from the road which ascends along this hilly slope to theuplands. So thickly are they massed together, that, seen from onespecial point of view, they seem a portion of some magnificent city inruins, --some such city though in a widely different style ofarchitecture, as Palmyra or Baalbec. The Cathedral of St. Magnus riseson the right, the castle-palace of Earl Patrick Stuart on the left, thebishop's palace in the space between; and all three occupy sites socontiguous, that a distance of some two or three hundred yards abreastgives the proper angle for taking in the whole group at a glance. I knowno such group elsewhere in Scotland. The church and palace of Linlithgoware in such close proximity, that, seen together, relieved against theblue gleam of their lake, they form one magnificent pile; but we havehere a taller, and, notwithstanding its Saxon plainness, a noblerchurch, than that of the southern burgh, and at least one palace more. And the associations connected with the church, and at least one of thepalaces ascend to a remoter and more picturesque antiquity. Thecastle-palace of Earl Patrick dates from but the time of James theSixth; but in the palace of the bishop, old grim Haco died, after hisdefeat at Largs, "of grief, " says Buchanan, "for the loss of his army, and of a valiant youth his relation;" and in the ancient Cathedral, hisbody, previous to its removal to Norway, was interred for a winter. Thechurch and palace belong to the obscure dawn of the national history, and were Norwegian for centuries before they were Scotch. 

As I was coming down the hill at a snail's pace, I was overtaken by acountryman on his way to church. "Ye'll hae come, " he said, addressingme, "wi' the great man last night?" "I came in the steamer, " I replied, "with your Member, Mr. Dundas. " "O, aye, " rejoined the man; "but I'm nosure he'll be our Member next time. The Voluntaries yonder, ye see, "jerking his head, as he spoke, in the direction of the United Secessionchapel of the place, "are awfu' strong and unco radical; and the FreeKirk folk will soon be as bad as them. But I belong to theEstablishment; and I side wi' Dundas. " The aristocracy of Scotlandcommitted, I am afraid, a sad blunder when they attempted strengtheningtheir influence as a class by seizing hold of the Church patronages. They have fared somewhat like those sailors of Ulysses who, in seekingto appropriate their master's wealth, let out the winds upon themselves;and there is now, in consequence, a perilous voyage and an uncertainlanding before them. It was the patronate wedge that struck from off theScottish Establishment at least nine-tenths of the Dissenters of thekingdom, --its Secession bodies, its Relief body, and, finally, its FreeChurch denomination, --comprising in their aggregate amount a great andinfluential majority of the Scotch people. Our older Dissenters, --acircumstance inevitable to their position as such, --have been throwninto the movement party: the Free Church, in her present transitionstate, sits loose to all the various political sections of the country;but her natural tendency is towards the movement party also; andalready, in consequence, do our Scottish aristocracy possess greatlyless political influence in the kingdom of which they own almost allthe soil, than that wielded by their brethren the Irish and Englisharistocracy in their respective divisions of the empire. Were therepresentation of England and Ireland as liberal as that of Scotland, and as little influenced by the aristocracy, Conservatism, on thepassing of the Reform Bill, might have taken leave of office forevermore. And yet neither the English nor Irish are naturally soConservative as the Scotch. The patronate wedge, like that appropriatedby Achan, has been disastrous to the people, for it has lost to them thegreat benefits of a religious Establishment, and very great these are;but it threatens, as in the case of the sons of Carmi of old, to workmore serious evil to those by whom it was originally coveted, --"evil tothemselves and all their house. " As I approached the Free Church, asquat, sun-burned, carnal-minded "old wee wifie, " who seemed passingtowards the Secession place of worship, after looking wistfully at mygray maud, and concluding for certain that I could not be other than aSouthland drover, came up to me, and asked, in a cautious whisper, "Willye be wantin' a coo?" I replied in the negative; and the wee wifie, after casting a jealous glance at a group of grave-featured Free Churchfolk in our immediate neighborhood, who would scarce have toleratedSabbath trading in a Seceder, tucked up her little blue cloak over herhead, and hied away to the chapel. 

In the Free Church pulpit I recognized an old friend, to whom Iintroduced myself at the close of the service, and by whom I wasintroduced, in turn, to several intelligent members of his session, towhose kindness I owed, on the following day, introductions to some ofthe less accessible curiosities of the place. I rose betimes on themorning of Monday, that I might have leisure enough before me to seethem all, and broke my first ground in Orkney as a geologist in a quarrya few hundred yards to the south and east of the town. It is strangeenough how frequently the explorer in the Old Red finds himselfrestricted in a locality to well nigh a single organism, --an effect, probably, of some gregarious instinct in the ancient fishes of thisformation, similar to that which characterizes so many of the fishes ofthe present time, or of some peculiarity in their constitution, whichmade each choose for itself a peculiar habitat. In this quarry, thoughabounding in broken remains, I found scarce a single fragment which didnot belong to an exceedingly minute species of Coccosteus, of which myfirst specimen had been sent me a few years before by Mr. Robert Dick, from the neighborhood of Thurso, and which I at that time, judging fromits general proportions, had set down as the young of the _Coccosteuscuspidatus_. Its apparent gregariousness, too, quite as marked at Thursoas in this quarry, had assisted, on the strength of an obvious enoughanalogy, in leading to the conclusion. There are several species of theexisting fish, well known on our coasts, that, though solitary whenfully grown, are gregarious when young. The coal-fish, which as thesillock of a few inches in length congregates by thousands, but as thecolum-saw of from two and a half to three feet is a solitary fish, formsa familiar instance; and I had inferred that the Coccosteus, foundsolitary, in most instances, when at its full size, had, like thecoal-fish, congregated in shoals when in a state of immaturity. But amore careful examination of the specimens leads me to conclude that thisminute gregarious Coccosteus, so abundant in this locality that itsfragments thickly speckle the strata for hundreds of yards together--(inone instance I found the dorsal plates of four individuals crowded intoa piece of flag barely six inches square)--was in reality a distinctspecies. Though not more than one-fourth the size, measured linearly, ofthe _Coccosteus decipiens_, its plates exhibit as many of those linesof increment which gave to the occipital buckler of the creature itstortoise-like appearance, and through which plates of the bucklerspecies were at first mistaken for those of a Chelonian, as areexhibited by plates of the larger kinds, with an area ten times asgreat; its tubercles, too, some of them of microscopic size, are asnumerous;--evidences, I think, --when we take into account that in thebulkier species the lines and tubercles increased in number with thegrowth of the plates, and that, once formed, they seem never to havebeen affected by the subsequent enlargement of the creature, --that thisichthyolite was not an _immature_, but really a _miniature_ Coccosteus. We may see on the plates of the full-grown Coccosteus, as on the shellsof bivalves, such as _Cardium echinatum_, or on those of spiralunivalves, such as _Buccinum undatum_, the diminutive markings whichthey bore when the creature was young; and on the plates of this specieswe may detect a regular gradation of tubercles from the microscopic tothe minute, as we may see on the plates of the larger kinds a regulargradation from the minute to the fall-sized. The average length of thedwarf Coccosteus of Thurso and Kirkwall, taken from the snout to thepointed termination of the dorsal plate, ranges from one and a-half totwo inches; its entire length from head to tail probably from three tofour. It was from one of Mr. Dick's specimens of this species that Ifirst determined the true position of the eyes of the Coccosteus, --aposition which some of my lately-found ichthyolites conclusivelydemonstrate, and which Agassiz, in his restoration, deceived byill-preserved specimens, has fixed at a point considerably more lateraland posterior, and where eyes would have been of greatly less use to theanimal. About a field's breadth below this quarry of the _Coccosteusminor_, --if I may take the liberty of extemporizing a name, until suchtime as some person better qualified furnishes the creature with a morecharacteristic one, --there are the remains, consisting of fosse andrampart, with a single cannon lying red and honeycombed amid the ruins, of one of Cromwell's forts, built to protect the town against theassaults of an enemy from the sea. In the few and stormy years duringwhich this ablest of British governors ruled over Scotland, he seems tohave exercised a singularly vigilant eye. The claims on his protectionof even the remote Kirkwall did not escape him. 

The antiquities of the burgh next engaged me; and, as became its dignityand importance, I began with the Cathedral, a building imposing enoughto rank among the most impressive of its class anywhere, but whosepeculiar _setting_ in this remote northern country, joined to theassociations of its early history with the Scandinavian Rollos, Sigurds, Einars, and Hacos of our dingier chronicles, serve greatly to enhanceits interest. It is a noble pile, built of a dark-tinted Old RedSandstone, --a stone which, though by much too sombre for adequatelydeveloping the elegancies of the Grecian or Roman architecture, to whicha light delicate tone of color seems indispensable, harmonizes well withthe massier and less florid styles of the Gothic. The round arch of thatancient Norman school which was at one time so generally recognized asSaxon, prevails in the edifice, and marks out its older portions. A fewof the arches present on their ringstones those characteristic toothedand zig-zag ornaments that are of not unfamiliar occurrence on the roundsquat doorways of the older parish churches of England; but by much thegreater number exhibit merely a few rude mouldings, that bend overponderous columns and massive capitals, unfretted by the tool of thecarver. Though of colossal magnificence, the exterior of the edificeyields in effect, as in all true Gothic buildings, --for the Gothic isgreatest in what the Grecian is least, --to the sombre sublimity of theinterior. The nave, flanked by the dim deep aisles, and by a double rowof smooth-stemmed gigantic columns, supporting each a double tier ofponderous arches, and the transepts, with their three tiers of smallNorman windows, and their bold semi-circular arcs, demurely gay withtoothed or angular carvings, that speak of the days of Rolf andTorfeinar, are singularly fine, --far superior to aught else of the kindin Scotland; and a happy accident has added greatly to their effect. Arare Byssus, --the _Byssus aeruginosa_ of Linnæus, --the _Leprasiaaeruginosa_ of modern botanists, --one of those gloomy vegetables of thedamp cave and dark mine whose true habitat is rather under than upon theearth, has crept over arch, and column, and broad bare wall, and givento well nigh the entire interior of the building a close-fitted liningof dark velvety green, which, like the Attic rust of an ancient medal, forms an appropriate covering to the sculpturings which it enwrapswithout concealing, and harmonizes with at once the dim light and theantique architecture. Where the sun streamed upon it, high over head, through the narrow windows above, it reminded me of a pall of rich greenvelvet. It seems subject, on some of the lower mouldings and damperrecesses, especially amid the tombs and in the aisles, to a decomposingmildew, which eats into it in fantastic map-like lines of mingled blackand gray, so resembling Runic fret-work, that I had some difficulty inconvincing myself that the tracery which it forms, --singularlyappropriate to the architecture, --was not the effect of design. Thechoir and chancel of the edifice, which at the time of my visit werestill employed as the parish church of Kirkwall, and had become a "worldtoo wide" for the shrunken congregation, are more modern and ornate thanthe nave and transepts; and the round arch gives place, in at leasttheir windows, to the pointed one. But the unique consistency of thepile is scarce at all disturbed by this mixture of styles. It is trulywonderful how completely the forgotten architects of the darker agescontrived to avoid those gross offences against good taste and artisticfeeling into which their successors of a greatly more enlightened timeare continually falling. Instead of idly courting ornament for its ownsake, they must have had as their proposed object the production of somedefinite effect, or the development of some special sentiment. It wasperhaps well for them, too, that they were not so overladen as ourmodern architects with the _learning_ of their profession. Extensiveknowledge requires great judgment to guide it. If that high genius whichcan impart its own homogeneous character to very various materials bewanting, the more multifarious a man's ideas become, the more is he indanger of straining after a heterogeneous patch-work excellence, whichis but excellence in its components, and deformity as a whole. Every newvista opened up to him on what has been produced in his art elsewherepresents to him merely a new avenue of error. His mind becomes a meredamaged kaleidoscope, full of little broken pieces of the fair and theexquisite, but devoid of that nicely reflective machinery which canalone cast the fragments into shapes of a chaste and harmonious beauty. 

Judging from the sculptures of St. Magnus, the stone-cutter seems tohave had but an indifferent command of his trade in Orkney, when therewas a good deal known about it elsewhere. And yet the rudeness of hiswork here, much in keeping with the ponderous simplicity of thearchitecture, serves but to link on the pile to a more venerableantiquity, and speaks less of the inartificial than of the remote. I sawa grotesque hatchment high up among the arches, that, with the uncouthcarvings below, served to throw some light on the introduction intoecclesiastical edifices of those ludicrous sculptures that seem soincongruously foreign to the proper use and character of such places. The painter had set himself, with, I doubt not, fair moral intent, toexhibit a skeleton wrapped up in a winding-sheet; but, like the unluckyartist immortalized by Gifford, who proposed painting a lion, butproduced merely a dog, his skill had failed in seconding his intentions, and, instead of achieving a Death in a shroud, he had achieved but amonkey grinning in a towel. His contemporaries, however, unlike those ofGifford's artist, do not seem to have found out the mistake, and so thebetowelled monkey has come to hold a conspicuous place among thesolemnities of the Cathedral. It does not seem difficult to conceive howunintentional ludicrosities of this nature, introduced intoecclesiastical erections in ages too little critical to distinguishbetween what the workman had purposed doing and what he had done, mightcome to be regarded, in a less earnest but more knowing age, asprecedents for the introduction of the intentionally comic andgrotesque. Innocent accidental monkeys in towels may have thus served tousher into serious neighborhoods monkeys in towels that were such withmalice _prepense_. 

I was shown an opening in the masonry, rather more than a man's heightfrom the floor, that marked where a square narrow cell, formed in thethickness of the wall, had been laid open a few years before. And in thecell there was found depending from the middle of the roof a rusty ironchain, with a bit of barley-bread attached. What could the chain and bitof bread have meant? Had they dangled in the remote past over somenorthern Ugolino? or did they form in their dark narrow cell, withoutair-hole or outlet, merely some of the reserve terrors of theCathedral, efficient in bending to the authority of the Church therebellious monk or refractory nun? Ere quitting the building, I scaledthe great tower, --considerably less tall, it is said, than itspredecessor, which was destroyed by lightning about two hundred yearsago, but quite tall enough to command an extensive, and, though bare, not unimpressive prospect. Two arms of the sea, that cut so deeply intothe mainland on its opposite sides as to narrow it into a flat necklittle more than a mile and a half in breadth, stretch away in longvista, the one to the south, and the other to the north; and soimmediately is the Cathedral perched on the isthmus between, as to benearly equally conspicuous from both. It forms in each, to theinward-bound vessel, the terminal object in the landscape. There was notmuch to admire in the town immediately beneath, with its roofs of grayslate, --almost the only parts of it visible from this point ofview, --and its bare treeless suburbs; nor yet in the tract of mingledhill and moor on either hand, into which the island expands from thenarrow neck, like the two ends of a sand-glass; but the long withdrawingocean-avenues between, that seemed approaching from south and north tokiss the feet of the proud Cathedral, --avenues here and there enlivenedon their ground of deep blue by a sail, and fringed on the lee--for thewind blew freshly in the clear sunshine--with their border of dazzlingwhite, were objects worth while climbing the tower to see. Ere mydescent, my guide hammered out of the tower-bells, on my special behalf, somewhat, I daresay, to the astonishment of the burghers below, a set ofchimes handed down entire, in all the notes, from the times of themonks, from which also the four fine bells of the Cathedral havedescended as an heirloom to the burgh. The chimes would have delightedthe heart of old Lisle Bowles, the poet of

 "Well-tun'd bell's enchanting harmony. "

I could, however, have preferred listening to their music, though itseemed really very sweet, a few hundred yards further away; and thequiet clerical poet, --the restorer of the Sonnet in England, would, Idoubt not, have been of the same mind. The oft-recurring tones of thosebells that ring throughout his verse, and to which Byron wickedlyproposed adding a _cap_, form but an ingredient of the poetry in whichhe describes them; and they are represented always as distant tones, that, while they mingle with the softer harmonies of nature, neveroverpower them. 

 "How sweet the tuneful bells responsive peal!

 * * * * *

 And, hark! with lessening cadence now they fall, And now, along the white and level tide They fling their melancholy music wide! Bidding me many a tender thought recall Of happy hours departed, and those years When, from an antique tower, ere life's fair prime, The mournful mazes of their mingling chime First wak'd my wondering childhood into tears!"

From the Cathedral I passed to the mansion of Old Earl Patrick, --astately ruin, in the more ornate castellated style of the sixteenthcentury. It stands in the middle of a dense thicket of what are _trying_to be trees, and have so far succeeded, that they conceal, on one of thesides, the lower story of the building, and rise over the _spring_ ofthe large richly-decorated turrets. These last form so much nearer thebase of the edifice than is common in our old castles, that they exhibitthe appearance rather of hanging towers than of turrets, --of towers withtheir foundations cut away. The projecting windows, with their deepmouldings, square mullions, and cruciform shot-holes, are richspecimens of their peculiar style; and, with the double-windowed turretswith which they range, they communicate a sort of _high-relief_ effectto the entire erection, "the exterior proportions and ornaments ofwhich, " says Sir Walter Scott, in his Journal, "are very handsome. "Though a roofless and broken ruin, with the rank grass waving on itswalls, it is still a piece of very solid masonry, and must have beenrather stiff working as a quarry. Some painstaking burgher had, I found, made a desperate attempt on one of the huge chimney lintels of the greathall of the erection, --an apartment which Sir Walter greatly admired, and in which he lays the scene in the "Pirate" between Cleveland andJack Bunce, but the lintel, a curious example of what, in the exerciseof a little Irish liberty, is sometimes termed a _rectilinear arch_, defied his utmost efforts; and, after half-picking out the keystone, hehad to give it up in despair. The bishop's palace, of which a handsomeold tower still remains tolerably entire, also served for a quarry inits day; and I was scarce sufficiently distressed to learn, that onalmost the last occasion on which it had been wrought for this purpose, one of the two men engaged in the employment suffered a stone, which hehad loosed out of the wall, to drop on the head of his companion, whostood watching for it below, and killed him on the spot. 

CHAPTER XI. 

 The Bishop's Palace at Orkney--Haco the Norwegian--Icelandic Chronicle respecting his Expedition to Scotland--His Death--Removal of his Remains to Norway--Why Norwegian Invasion ceased--Straw-plaiting--The Lassies of Orkney--Orkney Type of Countenance--Celtic and Scandinavian--An accomplished Antiquary--Old Manuscripts--An old Tune-book--Manuscript Letter of Mary Queen of Scots--Letters of General Monck--The fearless Covenanter--Cave of the Rebels--Why the tragedy of "Gustavus Vasa" was prohibited--Quarry of Pickoquoy--Its Fossil Shells--Journey to Stromness--Scenery--Birth-place of Malcolm, the Poet--His History--One of his Poems--His Brother a Free Church Minister--New Scenery. 

The "upper story" of the bishop's palace, in which grim old Hacodied, --thanks to the economic burghers who converted the stately ruininto a quarry, --has wholly disappeared. Though the death of this last ofthe Norwegian invaders does not date more than ten years previous to thebirth of the Bruce, it seems to belong, notwithstanding, to a differentand greatly more ancient period of Scottish history; as if it came underthe influence of a sort of aërial perspective, similar to that whichmakes a neighboring hill in a fog appear as remote as a distant mountainwhen the atmosphere is clearer. Our national wars with the English wererendered familiar to our country folk of the last age, and for centuriesbefore by the old Scotch "_Makkaris, _" Barbour and Blind Harry, and inour own times by the glowing narratives of Sir Walter Scott, --magicianswho, unlike those ancient sorcerers that used to darken the air withtheir incantations, possessed the rare power of dissipating the mistsand vapors of the historic atmosphere, and rendering it transparent. Butwe had no such chroniclers of the time, though only half an age furtherremoved into the past, "When Norse and Danish galleys plied Their oars within the Frith of Clyde, And floated Haco's banner trim Above Norweyan warriors grim, Savage of heart and large of limb. "

And hence the thick haze in which it is enveloped. Curiously enough, however, this period, during which the wild Scot had to contend with thestill wilder wanderers of Scandinavia in fierce combats that he was toolittle skilful to record, and which appears so obscure and remote to hisdescendants, presents a phase comparatively near, and an outlineproportionally sharp and well-defined to the intelligent peasantry ofIceland. _Their_ Barbours and Blind Harries came a few ages sooner thanours, and the fog, in consequence, rose earlier; and so, while Scotchantiquaries of no mean standing can say almost nothing about theexpedition or death-bed of Haco, even the humbler Icelanders, taughtfrom their Sagas in the long winter nights, can tell how, harassed byanxiety and fatigue, the monarch sickened, and recovered, and sickenedagain; and how, dying in the bishop's palace, his body was interred fora winter in the Cathedral, and then borne in spring to the burying-placeof his ancestors in Norway. The only clear vista on the death of Hacowhich now exists is that presented by an Icelandic chronicler: to which, as it seems so little known even in Orkney that the burying-place of themonarch is still occasionally sought for in the Cathedral, I mustintroduce the reader. I quote from an extract containing the account ofHaco's expedition against Scotland, which was translated from theoriginal Icelandic by the Rev. James Johnstone, chaplain to hisBritannic Majesty's Envoy Extraordinary at the court of Denmark, andappeared in the "Edinburgh Magazine" for 1787. 

"King Haco, " says the chronicler, "now in the seven and fortieth year ofhis reign, had spent the summer in watchfulness and anxiety. Being oftencalled to deliberate with his captains, he had enjoyed little rest; andwhen he arrived at Kirkwall, he was confined to his bed by his disorder. Having lain for some nights, the illness abated, and he was on foot forthree days. On the first day he walked about in his apartments; on thesecond he attended at the bishop's chapel to hear mass; and on the thirdhe went to Magnus Church, and walked round the shrine of St. Magnus, Earl of Orkney. He then ordered a bath to be prepared, and got himselfshaved. Some nights after, he relapsed, and took again to his bed. During his sickness he ordered the Bible and Latin authors to be read tohim. But finding his spirits were too much fatigued by reflecting onwhat he had heard, he desired Norwegian books might be read to him nightand day: first the lives of saints; and, when they were ended, he madehis attendants read the Chronicles of our Kings, from Holden the Black, and so of all the Norwegian monarchs in succession, one after the other. The king still found his disorder increasing. He therefore took intoconsideration the pay to be given to his troops, and commanded that amerk of fine silver should be given to each courtier, and half a merk toeach of the masters of the lights, chamberlain, and other attendants onhis person. He ordered all the silver-plate belonging to his table to beweighed, and to be distributed if his standard silver fell short.... King Haco received extreme unction on the night before the festival ofSt. Lucia. Thorgisl, Bishop of Stravanger, Gilbert, Bishop of Hainar, Henry, Bishop of Orkney, Albert Thorleif and many other learned men, were present; and, before the unction, all present bade the kingfarewell with a kiss.... The festival of the Virgin St. Lucia happenedon a Thursday; and on the Saturday after, the king's disorder increasedto such a degree, that he lost the use of his speech; and at midnightAlmighty God called King Haco out of this mortal life. This was matterof great grief to all those who attended, and to most of those who heardof the event. The following barons were present at the death of theking:--Briniolf Johnson, Erling Alfson, John Drottning, Ronald Urka, andsome domestics who had been near the king's person during his illness. Immediately on the decease of the king, bishops and learned men weresent for to sing mass.... On Sunday the royal corpse was carried to theupper hall, and laid on a bier. The body was clothed in a rich garb, with a garland on its head, and dressed out as became a crowned monarch. The masters of the lights stood with tapers in their hands, and thewhole hall was illuminated. All the people came to see the body, whichappeared beautiful and animated; and the king's countenance was as fairand ruddy as while he was alive. It was some alleviation of the deepsorrow of the beholders to see the corpse of their departed sovereign sodecorated. High mass was then sung for the deceased. The nobility keptwatch by the body during the night. On Monday the remains of King Hacowere carried to St. Magnus Church, where they lay in state that night. On Tuesday the royal corpse was put in a coffin, and buried in the choirof St. Magnus Church, near the steps leading to the shrine of St. Magnus, Earl of Orkney. The tomb was then closed, and a canopy wasspread over it. It was also determined that watch should be kept overthe king's grave all winter. At Christmas the bishop and Andrew Plyttfurnished entertainments, as the king had directed; and good presentswere given to all the soldiers. King Haco had given orders that hisremains should be carried east to Norway, and buried near his fathersand relatives. Towards the end of winter, therefore, that great vesselwhich he had in the west was launched, and soon got ready. On AshWednesday the corpse of King Haco was taken out of the ground: thishappened the third of the nones of March. The courtiers followed thecorpse to Skalpeid, where the ship lay, and which was chiefly under thedirection of the Bishop Thorgisl and Andrew Plytt. They put to sea onthe first Saturday in Lent; but, meeting with hard weather, they steeredfor Silavog. From this place they wrote letters to Prince Magnus, acquainting him with the news, and then sailed for Bergen. They arrivedat Laxavog before the festival of St. Benedict. On that day PrinceMagnus rowed out to meet the corpse. The ship was brought near to theking's palace, and the body was carried up to a summer-house. Nextmorning the corpse was removed to Christ's Church, and was attended byPrince Magnus, the two queens, the courtiers, and the town's people. Thebody was then interred in the choir of Christ's Church; and PrinceMagnus addressed a long and gracious speech to those who attended thefuneral procession. All the multitude present were much affected, andexpressed great sorrow of mind. "

So far the Icelandic chronicle. Each age has as certainly its own modeof telling its stories as of adjusting its dress or setting its cap; andthe mode of this northern historian is somewhat prolix. I am not sure, however, whether I would not prefer the simple minuteness with which hedwells on every little circumstance, to that dissertative style ofhistory characteristic of a more reflective age, that for series offacts substitutes bundles of theories. Cowper well describes thehistorians of this latter school, and shows how, on selecting somelittle-known personage of a remote time as their hero, "They disentangle from the puzzled skein In which obscurity has wrapped them up, The threads of politic and shrewd design That ran through all his purposes, and charge His mind with meanings that he never had, Or, having, kept concealed. "

I have seen it elaborately argued by a writer of this class, that thosewasting incursions of the Northmen which must have been such terribleplagues to the southern and western countries of Europe, ceased inconsequence of their conversion to Christianity; for that, under thehumanizing influence of religion, they staid at home, and cultivated thearts of peace. But the hypothesis is, I fear, not very tenable. Christianity, in even a purer form than that in which it first found itsway among the ancient Scandinavians, and when at least as generallyrecognized nationally as it ever was by the subjects of Haco, has failedto put down the trade of aggressive war. It did not prevent honest, obstinate George the Third from warring with the Americans or theFrench: it only led him to enjoin a day of thanksgiving when his troopshad slaughtered a great many of the enemy, and to ordain a fast when theenemy had slaughtered, in turn, a great many of his troops. And Haco, who, though he preferred the lives of the saints, and even of hisancestors, who could not have been very great saints, to the Scriptures, seems, for a king, to have been a not undevout man in his way, and yetappears to have had as few compunctions visitings on the score of hisScottish war as George the Third on that of the French or the Americanone. Christianity, too, ere his invasion of Scotland, had been for aconsiderable time established in his dominions, and ought, were thetheory a true one, to have operated sooner. The Cathedral of St. Magnus, when he walked round the shrine of its patron saint, was at least acentury old. The true secret of the cessation of Norwegian invasionseems to have been the consolidation, under vigorous princes, of thecountries which had lain open to it, --a circumstance which, in the laterattempts of the invaders, led to results similar to those which brokethe heart of tough old Haco, in the bishop's palace at Kirkwall. 

From the ruins I passed to the town, and spent a not uninstructivehalf-hour in sauntering along the streets in the quiet of the evening, acquainting myself with the general aspect of the people. I marked, asone of the peculiar features of the place, groups of tidily-dressedyoung women, engaged at the close-heads with their straw plait, --theprevailing manufacture of the town, --and enjoying at the same time thefresh air and an easy chat. The special contribution made by the lassiesof Orkney to the dress of their female neighbors all over the empire, has led to much tasteful dressing among themselves. Orkney, on its gala, days, is a land of ladies. What seems to be the typical countenance ofthese islands unites an aquiline but not prominent nose to an oval face. In the ordinary Scotch and English countenance, when the nose isaquiline it is also prominent, and the face is thin and angular, as ifthe additional height of the central feature had been given it at theexpense of the cheeks, and of lateral shavings from off the chin. Thehard Duke-of-Wellington face is illustrative of this type. But in theaquiline type of Orkney the countenance is softer and fuller, and, in atleast the female face, the general contour greatly more handsome. Dr. Kombst, in his ethnographic map of Britain and Ireland, gives to thecoast of Caithness and the Shetland Islands a purely Scandinavianpeople, but to the Orkneys a mixed race, which he designates theScandinavian-Gaelic. I would be inclined, however, --preferring rather tofound on those traits of person and character that are still patent, than on the unauthenticated statements of uncertain history, --to regardthe people as essentially one from the northern extremity of Shetland tothe Ord Hill of Caithness. Beyond the Ord Hill, and on to the northernshores of the Frith of Cromarty, we find, though unnoted on the map, adifferent race, --a race strongly marked by the Celtic lineaments, andspeaking the Gaelic tongue. On the southern side of the Frith, andextending on to the Bay of Munlochy, the purely Scandinavian race againoccurs. The sailors of the Danish fleet which four years ago accompaniedthe Crown Prince in his expedition to the Faroe Islands were astonishedwhen, on landing at Cromarty, they recognized in the people the familiarcast of countenance and feature that marked their country folk andrelatives at home; and found that they were simply Scandinavians likethemselves, who, having forgotten their Danish, spoke Scotch instead. Rather more than a mile to the west of the fishing village of Avochthere commences a Celtic district, which stretches on from Munlochy tothe river Nairne; beyond which the Scandinavian and Teutonic-Scandinavianborder that fringes the eastern coast of Scotland extends unbrokensouthwards through Moray, Banff, and Aberdeen, on to Forfar, Fife, theLothians, and the Mearns. These two intercalated patches of Celtic peoplein the northern tract, --that extending from the Ord Hill to the CromartyFrith, and that extending from the Bay of Munlochy to the Nairne, --stillretaining, as they do, after the lapse of ages, a sharp distinctness ofboundary in respect of language, character, and personal appearance, aresurely great curiosities. The writer of these chapters was born on theextreme edge of one of these patches, scarce a mile distant from aGaelic-speaking population; and yet, though his humble ancestors werelocated on the spot for centuries, he can find trace among them of but oneCeltic name; and their language was exclusively the Lowland Scotch. Formany ages the two races, like oil and water, refused to mix. 

I spent the evening very agreeably with one of the Free Church elders ofthe place, Mr. George Petrie, an accomplished antiquary; and found thathis love of the antique, joined to an official connection with thecounty, had cast into his keeping a number of curious old papers of thesixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, --not in the leastconnected, some of them, with the legal and civic records of the place, but which had somehow stuck around these, in their course oftransmission from one age to another, as a float of brushwood in a riveroccasionally brings down along with it, entangled in its folds, uprootedplants and aquatic weeds, that would otherwise have disappeared in thecataracts and eddies of the upper reaches of the stream. Dead as theyseemed, spotted with mildew, and fretted by the moth, I found themcuriously charged with what had once been intellect and emotion, hopesand fears, stern business and light amusement. I saw, among the othermanuscripts, a thin slip of a book, filled with jottings, in the antiquesquare-headed style of notation, of old Scotch tunes, apparently thework of some musical county-clerk of Orkney in the seventeenth century;but the paper, in a miserable state of decay, was blotted crimson andyellow with the rotting damps, and the ink so faded, that the notationof scarce any single piece in the collection seemed legible throughout. Less valuable and more modern, though curious from their eccentricity, there lay, in company with the music, several pieces of verse, addressedby some Orcadian Claud Halcro of the last age, to some local patron, ina vein of compliment rich and stiff as a piece of ancient brocade. Aperemptory letter, bearing the autograph signature of Mary Queen ofScots, to Torquil McLeod of Dunvegan, who had been on the eve, it wouldseem, of marrying a daughter of Donald of the Isles, gave the Skyechieftain, "to wit" that, as he was of the blood royal of Scotland, hecould form no matrimonial alliance without the royal permission, --apermission which, in the case in point, was not to be granted. It servedto show that the woman who so ill liked to be thwarted in her own amourscould, in her character as the Queen, deal despotically enough with thelove affairs of other people. Side by side with the letter of Mary therewere several not less peremptory documents of the times of theCommonwealth, addressed to the Sheriff of Orkney and Shetland, in thename of his Highness the Lord Protector, and that bore the signature ofGeorge Monck. I found them to consist chiefly of dunning letters, --suchletters as those duns write who have victorious armies at theirback, --for large sums of money, the assessments laid on the Orkneys byCromwell. Another series of letters, some ten or twelve years later intheir date, form portions of the history of a worthy covenantingminister, the Rev. Alexander Smith of Colvine, banished to NorthRonaldshay from the extreme south of Scotland, for the offence ofpreaching the gospel, and holding meetings for social worship in his ownhouse; and, as if to demonstrate his incorrigibility, one of theseries, --a letter under his own hand, addressed from his island prisonto the Sheriff-Depute in Kirkwall, --showed him as determined andpersevering in the offence as ever. It was written immediately after hisarrival. "The poor inhabitants, " says the writer, "so many as I haveyet seen, have received me with much joy. _I intend, if the Lord will, to preach Christ to them next Lord's day_, without the least mixture ofanything that may smell of sedition or rebellion. If I be farthertroubled for yt, I resolve to suffer with meekness and patience. " TheGalloway minister must have been an honest man. Deeming preaching histrue vocation, --a vocation from the exercise of which he dared notcease, lest he should render himself obnoxious to the woe referred to bythe apostle, --he yet could not steal a march on even the Sheriff, whoseprofessional duty it was to prevent him from doing _his_; and so hefairly warned him that he proposed breaking the law. The next set ofpapers in the collection dated after the Revolution, and were fullcharged with an enthusiastic Jacobitisin, which seems to have been aprevalent sentiment in Orkney from the death of Queen Anne, until thedisastrous defeat at Culloden quenched in blood the hopes of the party. There is a deep cave still shown on the shores of Westray, within sightof the forlorn Patmos of the poor Covenanter, in which, when the sun goton the Whig side of the hedge, twelve gentlemen, who had been engaged inthe rebellion of 1745, concealed themselves for a whole winter. Soperseveringly were they sought after, that during the whole time theydared not once light a fire, nor attempt fishing from the rocks tosupply themselves with food; and, though they escaped the search, theynever, it is said, completely recovered the horrors of their term ofdreary seclusion, but bore about with them, in broken constitutions, theeffects of the hardships to which they had been subjected. They musthave had full time and opportunity, during that miserable winter, fortesting the justice of the policy that had sent poor Smith into exile, from his snug southern parish in the Presbytery of Dumfries, to theremotest island of the Orkneys. The great lesson taught in Providenceduring the seventeenth and part of the eighteenth century to ourScottish country folk seems to have been the lesson of toleration; andas they were slow, stubborn scholars, the lash was very frequently andvery severely applied. One of the Jacobite papers of Mr. Petrie'scollection, --a triumphal poem on the victory of Gladsmuir, --which, ifless poetical than the Ode of Hamilton of Bangour on the same subject, is in no degree less curious, --serves to throw very decided light on apassage in literary history which puzzled Dr. Johnson, and which scarceany one would think of going to Orkney to settle. 

Johnson states, in his Life of the poet Thomson, that the "firstoperation" of the act passed in 1739 "for licensing plays" was the"prohibition of 'Gustavus Vasa, ' a tragedy of Mr. Brook. " "Why such awork should be obstructed, " he adds, "it is hard to discover. " We learnelsewhere, --from the compiler of the "Modern Universal History, " if Iremember aright, --that "so popular did the prohibitory order of the LordChamberlain render the play, " that, "on its publication the same year, not less than a thousand pounds were the clear produce. " It was not, however, until more than sixty years after, when both Johnson and Brookwere in their graves, that it was deemed safe to license it for thestage. Now, the fact that a drama, in itself as little dangerous as"Cato" or "Douglas, " should have been prohibited by the Government ofthe day, in the first instance, and should have brought the author, onits publication, so large a sum in the second, can be accounted for onlyby a reference to the keen partisanship of the period, and the peculiarcircumstances of parties. The Jacobites, taught by the rebellion of 1715at once the value of the Highlands and the incompetency of theChevalier St. George as a leader, had begun to fix their hopes on theChevalier's son, Charles Edward, at that time a young but promising lad;and, with the tragedy of Brook before them, neither they, nor theEnglish Government of the day could have failed to see the foreignerGeorge the Second typified--unintentionally, surely, on the part ofBrook, who was a "Prince of Wales" Whig--in the foreigner Christiernthe Second, the Scotch Highlanders in the Mountaineers of Dalecarlia, and the young Prince in Gustavus. In the Jacobite manuscript of Mr. Petrie's collection, the parallelism is broadly traced; nor is it in theleast probable, as the poem is a piece of sad mediocrity throughout, that it is a parallelism which was originated by its writer. It musthave been that of his party; and led, I doubt not, five years before, tothe prohibition of Brook's tragedy, and to the singular success whichattended its publication. The passage in the manuscript suggestive ofthis view takes the form of an address to the victorious prince, andruns as follows:--

 "Meanwhile, unguarded youth, thou stoodst alone; The cruel Tyrant urged his Armie on; But Truth and Goodness were the Best of Arms; And, fearless Prince, Thou smil'd at Threatened harms. Thus, Glorious Vasa worked in Swedish mines, -- Thus, Helpless, Saw his Enemy's Designs, -- Till, roused, his Hardy Highlanders arose, And poured Destruction on their foreign foes. "

I rose betimes next morning, and crossed the Peerie [little] Sea, ashallow prolongation of the Bay of Kirkwall, cut off from the main seaby an artificial mound, to the quarry of Pickoquoy, somewhat notable, only a few years ago, as the sole locality in which shells had beendetected in the Old Red Sandstone of Scotland. But these have since beenfound in the neighborhood of Thurso, by Mr. Robert Dick, associatedwith bones and plates of the Asterolepis, and by Mr. William Watt on theopposite side of the Mainland of Orkney, at Marwick Head. So far as hasyet been ascertained, they are all of one species, and more nearlyresemble a small Cyclas than any other shell. They are, however, moredeeply sulcated in concentric lines, drawn, as if by a pair ofcompasses, from the umbone, and somewhat resembling those of the genusAstarte, than any species of Cyclas with which I am acquainted. In allthe specimens I have yet seen, it appears to be rather a thick darkepidermis that survives, than the shell which it covered; nay, it seemsnot impossible that to its thick epidermis, originally an essentiallydifferent substance from that which composed the calcareous case, theshell may have owed its preservation as a fossil; while other shells, its contemporaries, from the circumstance of their having beenunfurnished with any such covering, may have failed to leave any traceof their existence behind them. It seems at least difficult to conceiveof a sea inhabited by many genera of fishes, each divided into severalspecies, and yet furnished with but one species of shell. I found thequarry of Pickoquoy, --a deep excavation only a few yards beyond thehigh-water mark, and some two or three yards under the high-waterlevel, --deserted by the quarrymen, and filled to the brim by theoverflowing of a small stream. I succeeded, however, in detecting itsshells _in situ_. They seem restricted chiefly to a single stratum, scarcely half an inch in thickness, and lie, not thinly scattered overthe platform which they occupy, but impinging on each other, like allthe gregarious shells, in thickly-set groups and clusters. There occuramong them occasional scales of Dipteri; and on some of the fragments ofrock long exposed around the quarry-mouth to the weather I found themassuming a pale nacreous gloss, --an effect, it is not improbable, oftheir still retaining, attached to the epidermis, a thin film of theoriginal shell. The world's history must be vastly more voluminous now, and greatly more varied in its contents, than when the stratum whichthey occupy formed the upper layer of a muddy sea-bottom, and theyopened their valves by myriads, to prey on the organic atoms whichformed their food, or shut them again, startled by the shadow of theDipterus, as he descended from the upper depths of the water to preyupon them in turn. The palate of this ancient ganoid is furnished with acurious dental apparatus, formed apparenly, like that of the recentwolf-fish, for the purpose of crushing shells. 

About mid-day I set out by the mail-gig for Stromness. For the first fewmiles the road winds through a bare solitary valley, overlooked byungainly heath-covered hills of no great altitude, though quite tallenough to prevent the traveller from seeing anything but themselves. Ashe passes on, the valley opens in front on an arm of the sea, over whichthe range of hills on the right abruptly terminates, while that on theleft deflects into a line nearly parallel to the shore, leaving acomparatively level strip of moory land, rather more than a mile inbreadth, between the steeper acclivities and the beach. A tall nakedhouse rises between the road and the sea. Two low islands immediatelybehind it, only a few acres in extent, --one of them bearing a small ruinon its apex, --give a little variety to the central point in the prospectwhich the naked house forms; but the arm of the sea, bordered, at thetime I passed, by a broad brown selvage of sea-weed, is as tame and flatas a Dutch lake; the background beyond, a long monotonous ridge, is bareand treeless; and in front lies the brown moory plain, bordered by thedull line of hills and darkened by scattered stacks of peat. 

The scene is not at all such a one as a poet would, for its own sake, delight to fancy; and yet, in the recollection of at least one verypleasing poet, its hills, and islands, and blue arm of the sea, itsbrown moory plain, and tall naked house rising in the midst, must havebeen surrounded by a sunlit atmosphere of love and desire, bright enoughto impart to even its tamest features a glow of exquisiteness andbeauty. Malcolm the poet was born, and spent his years of boyhood andearly youth, in the tall naked house; and the surrounding landscape isthat to which he refers in his "Tales of Flood and Field, " as rising inimagination before him, bright in the red gleam of the setting sun, when, on the steep slopes of the Pyrenees, the "silent stars of nightwere twinkling high over his head, " and the "tents of the soldieryglimmering pale through the gloom. " The tall house is the manse of theparish of Frith and Stennis; and the poet was the son of the Rev. JohnMalcolm, its minister. Here, when yet a mere lad, dreaming, in the quietobscurity of an Orkney parish, far removed from the seat of war and theliterary circles, of poetic celebrity and military renown, he addresseda letter to the Duke of Kent, the father of our Sovereign Lady thereigning Monarch, expressing an ardent wish to obtain a commission inthe army then engaged in the Peninsula. The letter was such as to excitethe interest of his Royal Highness, who replied to it by return of post, requesting the writer to proceed forthwith to London; for which heimmediately set out, and was received by the Duke with courtesy andkindness. He was instructed by him to take ship for Spain, in which hearrived as volunteer; and, joining the army, engaged at the time in thesiege of St. Sebastian, under General Graham, he was promoted shortlyafter, through the influence of his generous patron, to a lieutenancy inthe 42d Highlanders. He served in that distinguished regiment on to theclosing campaign of the Pyrenees; but received at the battle of Toulousea wound so severe as to render him ever after incapable of active bodilyexertion; and so he had to retire from the army on half-pay, and apension honorably earned. The history of his career as a soldier he hastold with singular interest, in one of the earlier volumes of"Constable's Miscellany;" and his poems abound in snatches ofdescription painfully true, drawn from his experience of the militarylife, --of scenes of stern misery and grim desolation, of injuriesreceived, and of sufferings inflicted, --that must have contrasted sadlyin his mind, in their character as gross realities, with the dreamyvisions of conquest and glory in which he had indulged at an earliertime. The ruin of St. Sebastian, complete enough, and attended withcircumstances of the horrible extreme enough, to appal men longacquainted with the trade of war, must have powerfully impressed animaginative susceptible lad, fresh from the domesticities of a ruralmanse, in whose quiet neighborhood the voice of battle had not beenheard for centuries, and surrounded by a simple people, remarkable forthe respect which they bear to human life. In all probability, the powerevinced in his description of the siege, and of the utter desolation inwhich it terminated, is in part owing to the fresh impressibility of hismind at the time. Such, at least, was my feeling regarding it, as Icaught myself muttering some of its more graphic passages, and saw, fromthe degree of alarm evinced by the boy who drove the mail-gig, that thesounds were not quite lost in the rattle of that somewhat ricketyvehicle, and that he had come to entertain serious doubts respecting thesanity of his passenger:--

 "Sebastian, when I saw thee last, It was in Desolation's day, As through thy voiceless streets I passed, Thy piles in heaps of rubbish lay; The roofless fragments of each wall Bore many a dent of shell and ball; With blood were all thy gateways red, And thou, --a city of the dead!

 With fire and sword thy walks were swept: Exploded mines thy streets had heaped In hills of rubbish; they had been Traversed by gabion and fascine, With cannon lowering in the rear In dark array, --a deadly tier, -- Whose thunder-clouds, with fiery breath, Sent far around their iron death; The bursting shell, in fragments flung Athwart the skies, at midnight sung, Or, on its airy pathway sent, Its meteors sweep the firmament. Thy castle, towering o'er the shore, Keeled on its rock amidst the roar Of thousand thunders, for it stood In circle of a fiery flood; And crumbling masses fiercely sent From its high frowning battlement, Smote by the shot and whistling shell, With groan and crash in ruin fell. Through desert streets the mourner passed, Midst-walls that spectral shadows east, Like some fair spirit wailing o'er The failed scenes it loved of yore; No human voice was heard to bless That place of waste and loneliness. 

 I saw at eve the night-bird fly, And vulture dimly flitting by, To revel o'er each morsel stolen From the cold corse, all black and swoln That on the shattered ramparts lay, Of him who perished yesterday, -- Of him whose pestilential steam Rose reeking on the morning beam, -- Whose fearful fragments, nearly gone, Were blackening from the bleaching bone. 

 The house-dog bounded o'er each scene Where cisterns had so lately been: Away in frantic haste he sprung, And sought to cool his burning tongue. He howled, and to his famished cry The dreary echoes gave reply; And owlet's dirge, through shadows dim, Rolled back in sad response to him. "

The father was succeeded in his parish by the brother of Malcolm, --agentleman to whom, during my stay in Orkney, I took the liberty ofintroducing myself in his snug little Free Church manse at the head ofthe bay, and in whose possession I found the only portrait of the poetwhich exists. It is that of a handsome and interesting looking _young_man, though taken not many years before his death; for, like the greaternumber of his class, he did not live to be an old one, dying underforty. His brother the clergyman kindly accompanied me to two quarriesin the neighborhood of his new domicil, which I found, like almost allthe dry-stone fences of the district, speckled with scales, occipitalplates, and gill-covers, of Osteolepides and Dipteri, but containing noentire ichthyolites. He had taken his side in the Church controversy, hetold me, firmly, but quietly; and when the Disruption came, and he foundit necessary to quit the old manse, which had been a home to his familyfor well nigh two generations, and in which both he and his brother hadbeen born, he scarce knew what his people were to do, nor in whatproportion he was to have followers among them. Somewhat to hissurprise, however, they came out with him almost to a man; so that hissuccessor in the parish church had sometimes, he understood, to preachto congregations scarcely exceeding half a dozen. I had learnedelsewhere how thoroughly Mr. Malcolm was loved and respected by hisparishioners; and that unconsciousness on his own part of the strengthof their affection and esteem, which his statement evinced, formed, Ithought, a very pleasing trait, and one that harmonized well with thefinely-toned unobtrusiveness and unconscious elegance whichcharacterized the genius of his deceased brother. A little beyond theFree Church manse the road ascends between stone walls, abounding infragments of ichthyolites, weathered blue by exposure to the sun andwind; and the top of the eminence forms the water-shed in this part ofthe Mainland, and introduces the traveller to a scene entirely new. Theprospect is of considerable extent; and, what seems strange in Orkney, nowhere presents the traveller, --though it contains its large inlandlake, --with a glimpse of the sea. 

CHAPTER XII. 

 Hills of Orkney--Their Geologic Composition--Scene of Scott's "Pirate"--Stromness--Geology of the District--"Seeking beasts"--Conglomerate in contact with Granite--A palæozoic Hudson's Bay--Thickness of Conglomerate of Orkney--Oldest Vertebrate yet discovered in Orkney--Its Size--Figure of a characteristic plate of the Asterolepis--Peculiarity of Old Red Fishes--Length of the Asterolepis--A rich Ichthyolite Bed--Arrangement of the Layers--Queries as to the Cause of it--Minerals--An abandoned Mine--A lost Vessel--Kelp for Iodine--A dangerous Coast--Incidents of Shipwreck--Hospitality--Stromness Museum--Diplopterus mistaken for Dipterus--Their Resemblances and Differences--Visit to a remarkable Stack--Paring the Soil for Fuel, and consequent Barrenness--Description of the Stack--Wave-formed Caves--Height to which the Surf rises. 

The Orkneys, like the mainland of Scotland, exhibit their higher hillsand precipices on their western coasts: the Ward Hill of Hoy attains toan elevation of sixteen hundred feet; and there are some of theprecipices which skirt the island of which it forms so conspicuous afeature, that rise sheer over the breakers from eight hundred to athousand. Unlike, however, the arrangement on the mainland, it is thenewer rocks that attain to the higher elevations; the heights of Hoy arecomposed of that arenaceous upper member of the Lower Old RedSandstone, --the last formed of the Palæozoic deposits of Orkney, --whichoverlies the ichthyolitic flagstones and shales of Caithness at DunnetHead, and the ichthyolitic nodular beds of Inverness, Ross, andCromarty, at Culloden, Tarbet Ness, within the Northern Sutor, and alongthe bleak ridge of the Maolbuie. It is simply a tall upper story of theformation, erected along the western line of coast in the Orkneys, whichthe eastern line wholly wants. Its screen of hills forms a noblebackground to the prospect which opens on the traveller as he ascendsthe eminence beyond the Free Church manse of Frith and Stennis. A largelake, bare and treeless, like all the other lakes and lochs of Orkney, but picturesque of outline, and divided into an upper and lower sheet ofwater by two low, long promontories, that jut out from opposite sides, and so nearly meet as to be connected by a threadlike line of road, halfmound, half bridge, occupies the middle distance. There are moory hillsand a few cottages in front; and on the promontories, conspicuous in thelandscape, from the relief furnished by the blue ground of thesurrounding waters, stand the tall stones of Stennis, --one group on thenorthern promontory, the other on the south. A gray old-fashioned house, of no very imposing appearance, rises between the road and the lake. Itis the house of Stennis, or Turmister, in which Scott places some of theconcluding scenes of the "Pirate, " and from which he makes Cleveland andhis fantastic admirer Jack Bunce witness the final engagement, in thebay of Stromness, between the Halcyon sloop of war and the savage Goffe. Nor does it matter anything that neither sea nor vessels can be seenfrom the house of Turmister: the fact which would be so fatal to adishonest historian tells with no effect against the honest "_maker_, "responsible for but the management of his tale. 

I got on to Stromness; and finding, after making myself comfortable inmy inn, that I had a fine bright evening still before me, longer by somethree or four degrees of north latitude than the July evenings ofEdinburgh, I set out, hammer in hand, to explore. Stromness is a long, narrow, irregular strip of a town, fairly thrust by a steep hill intothe sea, on which it encroaches in a broken line of wharf-like bulwarks, along which, at high water, vessels of a hundred tons burden float soimmediately beside the houses, that their pennants on gala days waveover the chimney tops. The steep hill forms part of a granitic axis, about six miles in length by a mile in breadth, which forms the backboneof the district, and against which the Great Conglomerate and lowerschists of the Old Red are upturned at a rather high angle. It iswrapped round in some places by a thin caul of the stratified primaryrocks. Immediately over the town, on the brow of the eminence, where thegranitic axis had been laid bare in digging a foundation for the FreeChurch manse, I saw numerous masses of schistose-gneiss, passing in someof the beds into a coarse-grained mica-schist, and a lustroushornblendic slate, that had been quarried from over it, and which may bestill seen built up into the garden-wall of the erection. I walked outtowards the west, to examine the junction of the granite and the GreatConglomerate, where it is laid bare by the sea, little more than aquarter of a mile outside the town. There was a horde of noisy urchins alittle beyond the inn, who, having seen me alight from the mail-gig, haddetermined in their own minds that I was engaged in the politicalcanvass going forward at the time, but had not quite ascertained myside. They now divided into two parties; and when the one, as I passed, set up a "Hurra for Dundas, " the other met them from the opposite sideof the street, with a counter cry of "Anderson forever. " Immediatelyafter clearing the houses, I was accosted by a man from the country. "Ye'll be seeking beasts, " he said: "what price are cattle gi'en thenoo?" "Yes, seeking _beasts_, " I replied, "but very old ones: I havecome to hammer your rocks for petrified fish. " "I see, I see, " said theman; "I took ye by ye'er gray plaid for a drover; but I ken somethingabout the stane fish too; there's lots o' them in the quarries atSkaill. "

I found the great Conglomerate in immediate contact with the granite, which is a ternary of the usual components, somewhat intermediate incolor between that of Peterhead and Aberdeen, and which at this pointbears none of the caul of stratified primary rock by which it isoverlaid on the brow of the hill. When the great Conglomerate, which ismainly composed of it here, was in the act of forming, this granite musthave been one of the surface rocks of the locality, and in no respect adifferent stone from what it is now. The widely-spread Conglomerate baseof the Old Red Sandstone, which presents, over an area of so manythousand square miles, such an identity of character, that specimenstaken from the neighborhood of Lerwick, in Shetland, can scarce bedistinguished from specimens detached from the hills which rise over thegreat Caledonian Valley, contains in various places, as under theNorthern Sutor, for instance, and along the shores of Navity, fragmentsof rock which have not been detected _in situ_ in the districts in whichthey occur as agglomerated pebbles. In general, however, we find itcomposed of the debris of those very granites and gneisses which, as inthe case of the granitic axis here, were forced through it, and throughthe overlying deposits, by deep-seated convulsions, long posterior indate to its formation. It appears to have been formed in a vast oceanicbasin of primary rock, --a Palæozoic Hudson's or Baffin's Bay, --partiallysurrounded, mayhap, by bare primary continents, swept by numerousstreams, rapid and headlong, and charged with the broken debris of theinhospitable regions which they drained. The graptolite-bearinggrauwacke of Banffshire seems to have been the only fossiliferous rockthat occurred throughout the extent of this ancient northern basin. TheConglomerate of Orkney, like that of Moray and Ross, varies from fiftyto a hundred yards in thickness. It is not overlaid in this section bythe thick bed of coarse-grained sandstone, so well-marked a member ofthe formation at Cromarty, Nigg, and Gamrie, and along the northernshores of the Beauly Frith; but at once passes into those graybituminous flagstones so immensely developed in Caithness and theOrkneys. I traced the formation upwards this evening, walking along theedges of the upheaved strata, from where the Conglomerate leans againstthe granite, till where it merges into the gray flagstones, and thenpursued these from older and lower to newer and higher layers, anxiousto ascertain at what distance over the base the more ancient organismsof the system first appear, and what their character and kind. Andlittle more than a hundred _yards_ over the granite, and somewhat lessthan a hundred _feet_ over the upper stratum of the great Conglomerate, I found what I sought, --a well-marked bone, perhaps the oldestvertebrate remain yet discovered in Orkney, embedded in a lightgrayish-colored layer of hard flag. 

What, asks the reader, was the character of the ancient denizen of thePalæozoic basin of which it had formed a part? Was it a large or smallfish, or of a high or low order? Not certainly of a low order, and by nomeans of a small size. The organism in the rock was a specimen of thatcurious nail-shaped bone of the Asterolepis which occurs as a centralridge in the single plate that occupies in this genus the wide curve ofthe under jaw, and as it was fully five inches in length from head topoint, the plate to which it belonged must have measured ten inchesacross, and the frontal occipital buckler with which it was associated, one foot two inches in length (not including the three accessory platesat the nape), by ten inches in breadth. And if built, as it probablywas, in the same massy proportions as its brother Coelacanths theHoloptychius or Glyptolepis, the individual to which the nail-shapedbone belonged must have been, judging from the size of the correspondingparts in these ichthyolites, at least twice as large an animal as thesplendid Clashbennie Holoptychius of the Upper Old Red, now in theBritish Museum. The bulkiest icthyolites yet found in any of thedivisions of the Old Red system are of the genus Asterolepis; and tothis genus, and to evidently an individual of no inconsiderable size, this oldest of the organisms of the Orkney belonged. I was so interestedin the fact, that before leaving this part of the country, I brought Dr. Garson, Stromness, and Mr. William Watt, jun. , Skaill, both veryintelligent palæontologists, to mark the place and character of thefossil, that they might be able to point it out to geological visitorsin the future, or, if they preferred removing it to their town Museum, to indicate to them the stratum in which it had lain. For the present, Imerely request the reader to mark, in the passing, that the most ancientorganic remain yet found in the Old Red of this part of the country, nay, judging from its place, one of the most ancient yet found inScotland, --so far as I know, absolutely the _most_ ancient, --belonged toa ganoid as bulky as a large porpoise, and which, as shown by its teethand jaws, possessed that peculiar organization which characterized thereptile fish of the Upper Devonian and Carboniferous periods. As thereare, however, no calculations more doubtful or more to be suspected thanthose on which the size and bulk of the extinct animals are determinedfrom some surviving fragment of their remains, --plate or bone, --I mustattempt laying before the scientific reader at least a portion of thedata on which I found. 

[Illustration]

This figure represents not inadequately one of the most characteristicplates of the Asterolepis. A very considerable fragment of what seems tobe the same plate has been figured by Agassiz from a cast of one of thehuge specimens of Professor Asmus ("Old Red, " Table 32, Fig. 13); butas no evidence regarding its true place had turned up at the time it wassupposed by the naturalist to form part of the opercular covering of theanimal. It belonged, however, to a different portion of the head. Inalmost all the fish that appear at our tables the space which occurswithin the arched sweep of the lower jaws is mainly occupied by acomplicated osseous mechanism, known to anatomists as the hyoid bone andbranchiostegous rays; and which serves both to support the branchialarches and the branchiostegous membrane. Now, in the fish of the Old RedSandstone, if we except some of the Acanthodians, we find no trace ofthis piece of mechanism: the arched space is covered over with dermalplates of bone, as a window is filled up with panes. Three plates, resembling very considerably the three divisions of a pointed Gothicwindow, furnished with a single central mullion, divided atop into twobranches, occupied the space in the genera Osteolepis and Diplopterus;and two plates resembling the divisions of a pointed Gothic window, whose single central mullion does _not_ branch atop, filled it up in thegenera Holoptychius and Glyptolepis. In the genus Asterolepis thisarch-shaped space was occupied, as I have said, by a single plate, --thatrepresented in the wood-cut; and the nail-shaped bone rose on itsinternal surface along the centre, --the nail-head resting immediatelybeneath the centre of the arch, and the nail-point bordering on theisthmus below, at which the two shoulder-bones terminated. Now, in allthe specimens which I have yet examined, the form and proportions ofthis plate are such that it can be very nearly inscribed in asemi-circle, of which the length of the nail is the radius. A nail fiveinches in length must have belonged to a plate ten inches in its longerdiameter. I have ascertained further, that this longer diameter wasequal to the shorter diameter of the creature's frontal buckler, measured across about two thirds of its entire length from the nape; andthat a transverse diameter of ten inches at this point was associated inthe buckler with a longitudinal diameter of fourteen inches from thenape to the snout. Thus five inches along the nail represent fourteeninches along the occipital shield. The proportion, however, which thelatter bore to the entire body in this genus has still to be determined. The corresponding frontal shield in the Coccosteus was equal to aboutone-fifth the creature's entire length, and in the Osteolepis andDiplopterus, to nearly one-seventh its length; while the length of the_Glyptolepis leptopterus_, a fish of the same family as the Asterolepis, was about five and a half times that of its occipital shield. If theAsterolepis was formed in the proportions of the Diplopterus, theancient individual to which this nail-like bone belonged must have beenabout eight feet two inches in length; but if moulded, as it moreprobably was, in the proportions of the Glyptolepis, only six feet fiveinches. All the Coelacanths, however, were exceedingly massive inproportion to their length; they were fish built in the square, muscular, thick-set, Dirk-Hatterick and Balfour-of-Burley style; and ofthe Russian specimens, some of the larger bones must have belonged toindividuals of from twice to thrice the length of the Stromness one. 

Passing upwards along the strata, step by step, as along a fallen stair, each stratum presenting a nearly perpendicular front, but losing, in thedownward slant of the _tread_, as a carpenter would say, the heightattained in the _rise_, I came, about a quarter of a mile farther to thewest, and several hundred feet higher in the formation, upon a fissiledark-colored bed, largely charged with ichthyolites. The fish I foundranged in three layers, --the lower layer consisting almost exclusivelyof Dipterians, chiefly Osteolepides; the middle layer, of Acanthodians, of the genera Cheiracanthus and Diplacanthus; and the upper layer, ofCephalaspides, mostly of one species, the _Coccosteus decipiens_. Ifound exactly the same arrangement in a bed considerably higher in thesystem, which occurs a full mile farther on, --the Dipterians at thebottom, the Acanthodians in the middle, and the Cephalaspides atop; andwas informed by Mr. William Watt, a competent authority in the case, that the arrangement is comparatively a common one in the quarries ofOrkney. How account for the phenomenon? How account for the threestoreys, and the apportionment of the floors, like those of a greatcity, each to its own specific class of society? Why should the firstfloor be occupied by Osteolepides, the second by Cheiracanthi and theircongeners, and the third by Coccostei? Was the arrangement an effect ofnormal differences in the constitutions of the several families, operated upon by some deleterious gas or mineral poison, which, thoughit eventually destroyed the whole, did not so simultaneously, butconsecutively, --the families of weakest constitution first, and thestrongest last? Or were they exterminated by some disease, that seizedupon the families, not at once, but in succession? Or did they visit thelocality serially, as the haddock now visits our coasts in spring, andthe herring towards the close of summer; and were then killed off, whether by poison or disease, as they came? These are questions whichmay never be conclusively answered. It is well, however, to observe, asa curious geological fact, that peculiar arrangement of the fossils bywhich they are suggested, and to record the various instances in whichit occurs. The minerals which I remarked among the schists here as mostabundant are a kind of black ironstone, exceedingly tough and hard, occurring in detached masses, and a variety of bright pyritesdisseminated among the darker flagstones, either as irregularly-formed, brassy-looking concretions of small size, or spread out on theirsurfaces in thin leaf-like films, that resemble, in some of thespecimens, the icy-foliage with which a severe frost encrusts awindow-pane. Still further on I came upon a vein of galena; but aminer's excavation in the solid rock, a little above high-water mark, quite as dark and nearly as narrow as a fox-earth, showed me that it hadbeen known long before, and, as the workings seemed to have beendeserted for ages, known to but little purpose. The crystals of ore, small and thinly scattered, are embedded in a matrix of barytes, stromnite, and other kindred minerals, and the thickness of the entirevein is not very considerable. I have since learned, from the"Statistical Account of the Parish of Sandwick, " that the workings ofthe mine penetrate into the rock for about a hundred yards, but that ithas been long abandoned, "as a speculation which would not pay. "

I observed scattered over the beach, in the neighborhood of the leadmine, considerable quantities of the hard chalk of England; and, judgingthere could be no deposits of the hard chalk in this neighborhood, Iaddressed myself on my way back, to a kelp-burner engaged in wrapping uphis fire for the night with a thick covering of weed, to ascertain howit had come there. "Ah, master, " he replied, "that chalk is all thatremains of a fine large English vessel, that was knocked to pieces herea few years ago. She was ballasted with the chalk; and as it is a lightsort of stone, the surf has washed it ashore from that low reef in themiddle of the tideway where she struck and broke up. Most of thesailors, poor fellows, lie in the old churchyard, beside the broken ruinyonder. It is a deadly shore this to seafaring-men. " I had understoodthat the kelp-trade was wholly at an end in Orkney; and, remarking thatthe sea-weed which he employed was chiefly of one kind, --the long brownfronds of tang dried in the sun, --I inquired of him to what purpose thesubstance was now employed, seeing that barilla and the carbonate ofsoda had supplanted it in the manufacture of soap and glass, and why hewas so particular in selecting his weed. "It's some valuable medicine, "he said, "that's made of the kelp now: I forget its name; but it's usedfor bad sores and cancer; and we must be particular in our weed, forit's not every kind of weed that has the medicine in't. There's most ofit, we're told, in the leaves of the tang. " "Is the name of the drug, " Iasked, "iodine?" "Ay, that must be just it, " he replied, --"iodine; butit doesn't make such a demand for kelp as the glass and the soap. " Iafterwards learned that the kelp-burner's character of this strip ofcoast, as peculiarly fatal to the mariner, was borne out by many a sadcasualty, too largely charged with the wild and the horrible to belightly forgotten. The respected Free Church clergyman of Stromness, Mr. Learmonth, informed me that, ere the Disruption, while yet minister ofthe parish, there were on one sad occasion eight dead bodies carried ofa Sabbath morning to his manse door. Some of the incidents connectedwith these terrible shipwrecks, as related with much graphic effect by aboatman who carried me across the sound, on an exploratory ramble to theisland of Hoy, struck me as of a character considerably beyond the reachof the mere dealer in fiction. The master of one hapless vessel, a youngman, had brought his wife and only child with him on the voyage destinedto terminate so mournfully; and when the vessel first struck, he hadrushed down to the cabin to bring them both on deck, as their onlychance of safety. He had, however, unthinkingly shut the cabin-doorafter him; a second tremendous blow, as not unfrequently happens insuch cases, so affected the framework of the sides and deck, that thedoor was jammed fast in its frame. And long ere it could be cutopen, --for no human hand could unfasten it, --the vessel had filled tothe beams, and neither the master nor his wife and child were ever seenmore. In another ship, wrecked within a cable-length of the beach, themate, a man of Herculean proportions, and a skilful swimmer, strippedand leaped overboard, not doubting his ability to reach the shore. Buthe had failed to remark what in such circumstances is too oftenforgotten, that the element on which he flung himself, beaten into foamagainst the shallows, was, according to Mr. Bremner's shrewd definition, not water, but a mixture of water and air, specifically lighter than thehuman body; and so at the shore, though so close at hand, he neverarrived, disappearing almost at the vessel's side. "The ground wasrough, " said my informant, "and the sea ran mountains high; and I canscarce tell you how I shuddered on finding, long ere his corpse wasthrown up, his two eyes detached from their sockets, staring from awreath of sea-weed. " There is in this last circumstance, horrible enoughsurely for the wildest German tale ever written, a unique singularity, which removes it beyond the reach of invention. 

At my inn I found a pressing invitation awaiting me from the Free Churchmanse, which I was urged to make my home so long as I remained in thatpart of the country. A geologist, however, fairly possessed by theenthusiasm without which weak man can accomplish nothing, --whether he bea deer-stalker or mammoth-fancier, or angle for live salmon or deadPterichthyes, --has a trick of forgetting the right times of dining andtaking tea, and of throwing the burden of his bodily requirements onearly extempore breakfasts and late suppers; and so reporting myself aman of irregular habits and bad hours, whose movements could not in theleast be depended upon, I had to decline the hospitality which wouldfain have adopted me as its guest, notwithstanding the badness of thecharacter that, in common honesty, I had to certify as my own. Nextmorning I breakfasted at the manse, and was introduced by Mr. Learmonthto two gentlemen of the place, who had been kindly invited to meet withme, and who, from their acquaintance with the geology of the districtenabled me to make the best use of my time, by cutting direct on thosecliffs and quarries in the neighborhood in which organic remains hadbeen detected, instead of wearily re-discovering them for myself. Thereis a small but interesting museum in Stromness, rich in the fossils ofthe locality; and I began the geologic business of the day by devotingan hour to the examination of its organisms, chiefly ichthyolites. I sawamong them several good specimens of the genus Pterichthys, and of whatis elsewhere one of the rarer genera of the Dipterians, --theDiplopterus. A well-marked individual of the latter genus had, I found, been misnamed Dipterus by some geological visitor who had recently comethe way, --a mistake which, as in both ichthyolites the fins aresimilarly placed, occasionally occurs, but which may be easily avoided, when the specimens are in a tolerable state of preservation, by takingnote of a few well-marked characteristics by which the genera aredistinguished. In both Dipterus and Diplopterus the bright enamel of thescales was thickly punctulated by microscopic points, --the exteriorterminations of funnel-shaped openings, that communicated between thesurface and the cells of the middle table of the scale; but the form ofthe scales themselves was different, --that of the Dipterus being nearlycircular, and that of the Diplopterus, save on the dorsal ridge, rhomboidal. Again, the lateral line of the Diplopterus was a raisedline, running as a ridge along the scales; whereas that of the Dipteruswas a depressed one, existing as a furrow. Their heads, too, werecovered by an entirely dissimilar arrangement of plates. The roundedsnout-plate of the Diplopterus was suddenly contracted to nearlyone-half its breadth by two semi-circular inflections, which formed theorbits of the eyes; full in the centre, a little above these, a minute, lozenge-shaped plate seemed as if inlaid in the larger one, theanalogue, apparently, of the anterior frontal; and over all thereexpanded a broad plate, the superior frontal, half divided vertically bya line drawn downwards from the nape, which, however, stopped short inthe middle; and fretted transversely by two small but deeply-indentedrectangular marks, which, crossing from the central to two lateralplates, assumed the semblance of connecting pins. The snout of theDipterus was less round; it bore no mark of the eye-orbits; and thefrontal buckler, broader in proportion to its length than that of theDiplopterus, consisted of many more plates. I may here mention that thefrontal buckler of Diplopterus has not yet been figured nor described;whereas that of Dipterus, though unknown as such, has been given to theworld as the occipital covering of a supposed Cephalaspian, --thePolyphractus. Polyphractus is, however, in reality a synonym forDipterus, --the one name being derived from a peculiarity of the animal'sfins: the other, from the great number of its occipital plates. There isno science founded on mere observation that can be altogether free, inits earlier stages, from mistakes of this character, --mistakes to whichthe palæontologist, however skilful, is peculiarly liable. The teeth ofthe two genera were essentially different. Those of the Dipterus, exclusively palatal, were blunt and squat, and ranged in tworectangular patches;[22] while those of the Diplopterus bristled alongits jaws and were slender and sharp. Their tails, too, though bothheterocercal, were diverse in their type. In each, an angular strip ofgradually-diminishing scales, --a prolongation of the scaly coat whichprotected the body, and which covered here a prolongation of thevertebral column, --ran on to the extreme termination of the upper lobe;but there was in the Diplopterus a greatly larger development of fin onthe superior or dorsal side of the scaly strip than on that of theDipterus. If the caudal fin of the Osteolepis be divided longitudinallyinto six equal parts, it will be found that one of these occurs on theupper side of the vertebral prolongation, and five on the under; in thecaudal fin of the Diplopterus so divided, rather more than _two_ partswill be found to occur on the upper side, and rather less than four onthe under; while in the caudal fin of the Dipterus the development seemsto have been restricted to the under side exclusively; at least, in noneof the many individuals which I have examined have I found any trace ofcaudal rays on the upper side. These are minute and somewhat trivialparticulars; but the geologist may find them of use; and thenon-geologist may be disposed to extend to them some little degree oftolerance, when he considers that they distinguished two largelydeveloped genera of animals, to which the Author of all did not deem itunworthy his wisdom to impart, in the act of creation, certain markedpoints of resemblance, and other certain points of dissimilarity. 

From the Museum, accompanied by one of the gentlemen to whom Mr. Learmonth had introduced me at breakfast, and who obligingly undertookto act as my guide on the occasion, I set out to visit a remarkablestack on the sea-coast, about four miles north and west of Stromness. Wescaled together the steep granitic hill immediately over the town, andthen cut on the stack, straight as the bird flies, across a tracklesscommon, bare and stony, and miserably pared by the _flaughter_ spade. The landed proprietors in this part of the mainland are very numerous, and their properties small; and there are vast breadths of undividedcommon that encircle their little estates, as the Atlantic encircles theOrkneys. But the state in which I found the unappropriated parts of thedistrict had in no degree the effect of making me an opponent ofappropriation or the landholders. Our country, had it been left as awhole to all its people, as the Communist desiderates, would ere now beof exceedingly little value to any portion of them. The soil of theOrkney commons has been so repeatedly pared off and carried away forfuel, that there are now wide tracts on which there is no more soil topare, and which present, for the original covering of peaty mould, acontinuous surface of pale boulder-clay, here and there mottled bydetached tufts of scraggy heath, and here and there roughened byprojections of the underlying rock. All is unredeemable barrenness. Onthe other hand, wherever a bit of private property appears, though inthe immediate neighborhood of these ruined wastes, the surface isswarded over, and the soil is the better, not the worse, for theservices which it has rendered to man in the past. Whatever the Chartistand the Leveller may think of the matter, it is, I find, virtually onbehalf of the many that the soil has been appropriated by the few. Afterpassing from off the tract of moor which overlies the granitic axis ofthe district, to a tract equally moory which spreads over the grayflagstones, I marked, more especially in the hollows and ravines, whereminute springs ooze from the rock, vast quantities of bog-iron embeddedin the soil, and presenting greatly the appearance of the scoria of asmith's forge. The apparent scoria here is simply a reproduction of theiron of the underlying flagstones, transferred, through the agency ofwater, to that stratum of vegetable mould and boulder-clay whichrepresents the recent period. 

I found the stack which I had been brought to see forming thepicturesque centre of a bold tract of rock scenery. It stands out fromthe land as a tall insulated tower, about two hundred feet in height, sorely worn at its base by the breakers that ceaselessly fret againstits sides, but considerably broader atop, where it bears a flat cover ofsward on the same level with the tops of the precipices which in thelapse of ages have receded from around it. Like the sward-crestedhammock left by a party of laborers, to mark the depth to which theyhave cut in removing a bank or digging a pond, it remains to indicatehow the attrition of the surf has told upon the iron-bound coast;demonstrating that lines of precipices hard as iron, and of giddyelevation, are in full retreat before the dogged perseverance of anassailant that, though baffled in each single attack, ever returns tothe charge, and gains by an aggregation of infinitesimals, --the resultof the whole. From the edge of a steep promontory that commands aninflection of the coast, and of the wall of rock which sweeps round it, I watched for a few seconds the sea, --greatly heightened at the time bythe setting in of the flood-tide, --as it broke, surge after surge, against the base of the tall dark precipices; and marked how itaccomplished its work of disintegration. The flagstone deposit hereabounds in vertical cracks and flaws; and in the line of each of themany fissures which these form the waves have opened up a cave; so thatfor hundreds of yards together the precipices seem as if founded onarch-divided piers, and remind one of those ancient prints or drawingsof Old London Bridge in which a range of tall sombre buildings isrepresented as rising high over a line of arches; or of rows of loftyhouses in those cities of southern Europe in which the dwellingsfronting the streets are perforated beneath by lines of squat piazzas, and present above a dingy and windowless breadth of wall. In course oftime the piers attenuate and give way; the undermined precipices toppledown, parting from the solid mass behind in those vertical lines bywhich they are traversed at nearly right angles with their line ofstratification; the perpendicular front which they had covered comes tobe presented, in consequence, to the sea; its faults and cracksgradually widen into caves, as those of the fallen front had graduallywidened at an earlier period; in the lapse of centuries, it too, resigning its place, topples over headlong, an undermined mass; thesurge dashes white and furious where the dense rock had rested before;and thus, in its slow but irresistible march, the sea gains upon theland. In the peculiar disposition and character of the prevailing strataof Orkney, as certainly as in the power of the tides which sweep athwartits coasts, and the wide extent of sea which, stretching around it, gives the waves scope to gather bulk and momentum, may be found thesecret of the extraordinary height to which the surf sometimes risesagainst its walls of rock. During the fiercer tempests, masses of foamshoot upwards against the precipices, like inverted cataracts, fully twohundred feet over the ordinary tide-level, and, washing away the loosersoil from their summits, leaves in its place patches of slaty gravel, resembling that of a common sea-beach. Rocks less perpendicular, however great the violence of the wind and sea, would fail to projectupwards bodies of surf to a height so extraordinary. But the low angleat which the strata lie, and the rectangularity maintained in relationto their line of bed by the fissures which traverse them, give to theOrkney precipices, --remarkable for their perpendicularity and theirmural aspect, --exactly the angle against which the waves, as brokenmasses of foam, beat up to their greatest possible altitude. On a tractof iron-bound coast that skirts the entrance of the Cromarty Frith Ihave seen the surf rise, during violent gales from the north-westespecially, against one rectangular rock, known as the White Rock, fullyan hundred feet; while against scarcely any of the other precipices, more sloping, though equally exposed, did it rise more than half thatheight. 

CHAPTER XIII. 

 Detached Fossils--Remains of the Pterichthys--Terminal Bones of the Coccosteus, etc. , preserved--Internal Skeleton of Coccosteus--The shipwrecked Sailor in the Cave--Bishop Grahame--His Character, as drawn by Baillie--His Successor--Ruins of the Bishop's Country-house--Sub-aërial Formation of Sandstone--Formation near New Kaye--Inference from such Formation--Tour resumed--Loch of Stennis--Waters of the Loch fresh, brackish, and salt--Vegetation varied accordingly--Change produced in the Flounder by fresh water--The Standing Stones, second only to Stonehenge--Their purpose--Their Appearance and Situation--Diameter of the Circle--What the Antiquaries say of it--Reference to it in the "Pirate"--Dr. Hibbert's Account. 

We returned to Stromness along the edge of the cliffs graduallydescending from higher to lower ranges of prepices, and ever and anondetecting ichthyolite beds in the weathered and partially decomposedstrata. As the rock moulders into an incoherent clay, the fossils whichit envelops become not unfrequently wholly detached from it, so that, ona smart blow dealt by the hammer, they leap out entire, resembling, fromthe degree of compression which they exhibit, those mimic fishes carvedout of plates of ivory or of mother-of-pearl, which are used as countersin some of the games of China or the East Indies. The material of whichthey are composed, a brittle jet, though better suited than the stone toresist the disintegrating influences, is in most cases greatly toofragile for preservation. One may, however, acquire from the fragments aknowledge of certain minute points in the structure of the ancientanimals to which they belonged, respecting which specimens of a morerobust texture give no evidence. The plates of Coccosteus sometimesspring out as unbroken as when they covered the living animal, and, ifthe necessary skill be not wanting, may be set up in their originalorder. And I possess specimens of the head of Dipterus in which thenearly circular gill-covers may be examined on both surfaces, interiorand exterior, and in which the cranial portion shows not only theenamelled plates of the frontal buckler, but also the strange mechanismof the palatal teeth, with the intervening cavities that had lodged boththe brain and the occipital part of the spine. The fossils on the top ofthe cliffs here are chiefly Dipterians of the two closely allied genera, Diplopterus and Osteolepis. 

A little farther on, I found, on a hill-side in which extensiveslate-quarries had once been wrought, the remains of Pterichthysexisting as mere patches, from which the color had been discharged, butin which the almost human-like outline of both body and arms were stilldistinctly traceable; and farther on still, where the steep wall ofcliffs sinks into a line of grassy banks, I saw in yet another quarry, ichthyolites of all the three great ganoid families so characteristic ofthe Old Red, --Cephalaspians, Dipterians, and Acanthodians, --ranged inthe three-storied order to which I have already referred as soinexplicable. The specimens, however, though numerous, are not fine. They are resolved into a brittle bituminous coal, resembling hard pitchor black wax, which is always considerably less tenacious than thematrix in which they are inclosed; and so, when laid open by the hammer, they usually split through the middle of the plates and scales, insteadof parting from the stone at their surfaces, and resemble, inconsequence, those dark, shadow-like profiles taken in Indian ink by thelimner, which exhibit a correct outline, but no details. We find, however, in some of the genera, portions of the animal preserved thatare rarely seen in a state of keeping equally perfect in theichthyolites of Cromarty, Moray, or Banff, --those terminal bones of theCoccosteos, for instance, that were prolonged beyond the plates by whichthe head and upper parts of the body were covered. Wherever theichthyolites are inclosed in nodules, as in the more southerly countiesover which the deposit extends, the nodule terminates, in almost everycase, with the massier portions of the organism; for the thinner parts, too inconsiderable to have served as attractive nuclei to the stonymatter when the concretion was forming, were left outside its pale, andso have been lost; whereas, in the northern districts of the deposit, where the fossils, as in Caithness and Orkney, occur in flagstone, theseslimmer parts, when the general state of keeping is tolerably good, liespread out on the planes of the slabs, entire often in their minutestrays and articulations. The numerous Coccostei of this quarry exhibit, attached to their upper plates, their long vertebral columns, of manyjoints, that, depending from the broad dorsal shields of theichthyolite, remind one of those skeleton fishes one sometimes sees onthe shores of a fishing village, in which the bared backbone joints on, cord-like, to the broad plates of the skull. None of the other fishes ofthe Old Red Sandstone possessed an internal skeleton so decidedlyosseous as that of the Coccosteus, and none of them presented externallyso large an extent of naked skin, --provisions which probably wenttogether. For about three-fifths of the entire length of the animal thesurface was unprotected by dermal plates; and the muscles must havefound the fulcrums on which they acted in the internal skeletonexclusively. And hence a necessity for greater strength in theirinterior framework than in that of fishes as strongly fenced roundexternally by scales or plates as the coleoptera by their elytrine, orthe crustacea by their shells. Even in the Coccosteus, however, theossification was by no means complete; and the analogies of the skeletonseem to have allied it rather with the skeletons of the sturgeon familythan with the skeletons of the sharks or rays. The processes of thevertebræ were greatly more solid in their substance than the vertebræthemselves, --a condition which in the sharks and rays is alwaysreversed; and they frequently survive, each with its little sprig ofbone, formed like the letter Y, that attached it to its centrum, projecting from it, in specimens from which the vertebral column itselfhas wholly disappeared. I found frequent traces, during my exploratorylabors in Orkney, of the dorsal and ventral fins of this ichthyolite;but no trace whatever of the pectorals or of the caudal fin. There seemto have been no pectorals; and the tail, as I have always had occasionto remark, was apparently a mere point, unfurnished with rays. 

In descending from the cliffs upon the quarries, my companion pointed toan angular notch in the rock-edge, apparently the upper termination ofone of the numerous vertical cracks by which the precipices aretraversed, and which in so many cases on the Orkney coast have beenhollowed by the waves into long open coves or deep caverns. It was upthere, he said, that about twelve years ago the sole survivor of aship's crew contrived to scramble, four days after his vessel had beendashed to fragments against the rocks below, and when it was judged thatall on board had perished. The vessel was wrecked on a Wednesday. Shehad been marked, when in the offing, standing for the bay of Stromness;but the storm was violent, and the shore a lee one; and as it was seenfrom the beach that she could scarce weather the headland yonder, anumber of people gathered along the cliffs, furnished with ropes, torender to the crew whatever assistance might be possible in thecircumstances. Human help, however, was to avail them nothing. Theirvessel, a fine schooner, when within forty yards of the promontory, wasseized broadside by an enormous wave, and dashed against the cliff, asone might dash a glass-phial against a stone-wall. One blow completedthe work of destruction; she went rolling in entire from keel tomast-head, and returned, on the recoil of the broken surge, a mass ofshapeless fragments, that continued to dance idly amid the foam, or werescattered along the beach. But of the poor men, whom the spectators hadseen but a few seconds before running wildly about the deck, thereremained not a trace; and the saddened spectators returned to theirhomes to say that all had perished. Four days after, --on the morning ofthe following Sabbath, --the sole survivor of the crew, saved, as if bymiracle, climbed up the precipice, and presented himself to a group ofastonished and terrified country people, who could scarce regard him asa creature of this world. The fissure, which at the top of the cliffforms but a mere angular inflection, is hollowed below into a low-roofedcave of profound depth, into the farther extremity of which the tidehardly ever penetrates. It is floored by a narrow strip of shinglybeach; and on this bit of beach, far within the cave, the sailor foundhimself, half a minute after the vessel had struck and gone to pieces, washed in, he knew not how. Two pillows and a few dozen red herrings, which had been swept in along with him, served him for bed and board; atin cover enabled him to catch enough of the fresh-water droppings ofthe roof to quench his thirst; several large fragments of wreck that hadbeen jammed fast athwart the opening of the cave broke the violence ofthe wind and sea; and in that doleful prison, day after day, he saw thetides sink and rise, and lay, when the surf rolled high at the fall ofthe tide, in utter darkness even at mid-day, as the waves outside roseto the roof, and inclosed him in a chamber as entirely cut off from theexternal atmosphere as that of a diving bell. He was oppressed in thedarkness, every time the waves came rolling in and compressed hismodicum of air, by a sensation of extreme heat, --an effect of thecondensation; and then, in the interval of recession, and consequentexpansion, by a sudden chill. At low ebb he had to work hard in clearingaway the accumulations of stone and gravel which had been rolled in bythe previous tide, and threatened to bury him up altogether. At lengthhe succeeded, after many a fruitless attempt, in gaining an upper ledgethat overhung his prison-mouth; and, by a path on which a goat wouldscarce have found footing, he scrambled to the top. His name wasJohnstone; and the cave is still known as "Johnstone's Cave. " Such wasthe narrative of my companion. 

A little farther on, the undulating bank, into which the cliffs sink, projects into the sea as a flat green promontory, edged with hills ofindurated sand, and topped by a picturesque ruin, that forms a pleasingobject in the landscape. The ruin is that of a country residence of thebishops of Orkney during the disturbed and unhappy reign of ScotchEpiscopacy, and bears on a flat tablet of weathered sandstone theinitials of its founder, Bishop George Grahame, and the date of itserection, 1633. With a green cultivated oasis immediately around it, anda fine open sound, overlooked by the bold, picturesque cliffs of Hoy, infront, it must have been, for at least half the year, an agreeable, and, as its remains testify, a not uncomfortable habitation. But I greatlyfear Scottish clergymen of the Establishment, whether Presbyterian orEpiscopalian, when obnoxious, from their position or their tenets, tothe great bulk of the Scottish people, have not been left, since atleast the Reformation, to enjoy either quiet or happy lives, howeverextrinsically favorable the circumstances in which they may have beenplaced. Bishop Grahame, only five years after the date of the erection, was tried before the famous General Assembly of 1638; and, beingconvicted of having "all the ordinar faults of a bishop, " he wasdeposed, and ordered within a limited time "to give tokens ofrepentance, under paine of excommunication. " "He was a curler on the iceon the Sabbath day, " says Baillie, --"a setter of tacks to his sones andgrandsones, to the prejudice of the Church; he oversaw adulterie;slighted charming; neglected preaching and doing of anie good; and heldportions of ministers' stipends for building his cathedral. " Theconcluding portion of his life, after his deposition, was spent inobscurity; nor did his successor in the bishoprick, subsequent to thereëstablishment of Episcopacy at the Restoration, --BishopHoneyman, --close his days more happily. He was struck in the arm by thebullet which the zealot Mitchell had intended for Archbishop Sharp; andthe shattered bone never healed; "for, though he lived some yearsafter, " says Burnet, "_they_ were forced to lay open the wound everyyear, for an exfoliation;" and his life was eventually shortened by hissufferings. All seemed comfortable enough, and quite quiet enough, inthe bishop's country-house to-day. There were two cows quietly chewingthe cud in what apparently had been the dignitary's sitting-room, andpatiently awaiting the services of a young woman who was approaching atsome little distance with a pail. A large gray cat, that had beensunning herself in a sheltered corner of the court-yard, started up atour approach, and disappeared through a slit hole. The sun, now gone fardown the sky, shone brightly on shattered gable-tops, and roofless, rough-edged walls, revealing many a flaw and chasm in the yieldingmasonry; and their shadows fell with picturesque effect on the looselitter, rude implements, and gapped dry-stone fence, of the neglectedfarm-yard which surrounds the building. 

I have said that the flat promontory occupied by the ruin is edged byhills of indurated sand. Existing in some places as a continuous bed ofa soft gritty sandstone, scooped wave-like a-top, and varying from fiveto eight feet in thickness, they form a curious example of a sub-aërialformation, --the sand of which they are composed having been all blownfrom the sea-beach, and consolidated by the action of moisture on acalcareous mixture of comminuted shells, which forms from twenty totwenty-five per cent. Of their entire mass. I found that the sections ofthe bed laid open by the encroachments of the sea, were scarce lessregularly stratified than those of a subaqueous deposit, and that it washollowed, where most exposed to the weather, into a number of sphericalcells, which gave to those parts of the surface where they lay thickest, somewhat the aspect of a rude Runic fret-work, --an appearance notuncommon in weathered sandstones. With more time to spare, I could fainhave studied the deposit more carefully, in the hope of detecting a fewpeculiarities of structure sufficient to distinguish sub-aërially-formedfrom subaqueously-deposited beds of stone. Sandstones of sub-aërialformation are of no very unfrequent occurrence among the recentdeposits. On the coast of Cornwall there are cliffs of considerableheight that extend for several miles, and have attained a degree ofsolidity sufficient to serve the commoner purposes of the architect, which at one time existed as accumulations of blown sand. "It is aroundthe promontory of New Kaye, " says Dr. Paris, in an interesting memoir onthe subject, "that the most extensive formation of sandstone takesplace. Here it may be seen in different stages of induration, from astate in which it is too friable to be detached from the rock upon whichit reposes, to a hardness so considerable, that it requires a violentblow from a sledge-hammer to break it. Buildings are here constructed ofit; the church of Cranstock is entirely built with it; and it is alsoemployed for various articles of domestic and agricultural uses. Thegeologist who has previously examined the celebrated specimen fromGuadaloupe will be struck with the great analogy which it bears to thisformation. " Now, as vast tracts of the earth's surface, --in some partsof the world, as in Northern Africa, millions of square milestogether, --are at present overlaid by accumulations of sand, which havethis tendency to consolidate and become lasting sub-aërial formations, destined to occupy a place among the future strata of the globe, itseems impossible but that also in the old geologic periods there musthave been, as now, sand-wastes and sub-aërial formations. And as therepresentatives of these may still exist in some of our sandstonequarries, it might be well to be possessed of a knowledge of thepeculiarities by which they are to be distinguished from deposits ofsubaqueous origin. In order that I might have an opportunity of studyingthese peculiarities where they are to be seen more extensively developedthan elsewhere on the eastern coast of Scotland, I here formed theintention of spending a day, on my return south, among the sand-wastesof Moray, --a purpose which I afterwards carried into effect. But of thatmore anon. 

On the following morning, availing myself of a kind invitation, throughDr. Garson, from his brother, a Free Church minister resident in aninland district of the Mainland, in convenient neighborhood with thenorthern coasts of the island, and with several quarries, I set outfrom Stromness, taking in my way the Loch and Standing Stones ofStennis, which I had previously seen from but my seat in the mail-gig asI passed. Mr. Learmonth, who had to visit some of his people in thisdirection, accompanied me for several miles along the shores of theloch, and lightened the journey by his interesting snatches of localhistory, suggested by the various objects that lay along ourroad, --buildings, tumuli, ancient battle-fields, and standing stones. The loch itself, an expansive sheet of water fourteen miles incircumference, I contemplated with much interest, and longed for anopportunity of studying its natural history. Two promontories, --thoseoccupied by the Standing Stones, shoot out from the opposite sides, andapproach so near as to be connected by a rustic bridge. They divide theloch into two nearly equal parts, the lower of which gives access to thesea, and is salt in its nether reaches and brackish in its upper ones, while the higher is merely brackish in its nether reaches, and freshenough in its upper ones to be potable. The shores of both were strewed, at the time I passed, by a line of wrack, consisting, for the first fewmiles, from where the lower loch opens to the sea, of only marineplants, then of marine plants mixed with those of fresh-water growth, and then, in the upper sheet of water, of lacustrine plants exclusively. And the fauna of the loch, like its flora, is, I was led to understand, of the same mixed character; the marine and fresh-water animals havingeach their own reaches, with certain debatable tracts between, in whicheach expatiates with more or less freedom, according to its nature andconstitution, --some of the sea-fishes advancing far on the fresh water, and others, among the proper denizens of the lake, encroaching far onthe salt. The common fresh-water eel strikes out, I was told, farthestinto the sea-water; in which, indeed, reversing the habits of thesalmon, it is known in various places to deposit its spawn; it seeks, too, impatient of a low temperature, to escape from the cold of winter, by taking refuge in water brackish enough in a climate such as ours toresist the influence of frost. Of the marine fishes; on the other hand, I found that the flounder got greatly higher than any of the others, inhabiting reaches of the lake almost entirely fresh. A memoir on theLoch of Stennis and its productions, animal and vegetable, such as aGilbert White of Selborne could produce, would be at once a veryvaluable and very curious document. By dividing it into reaches, inwhich the average saltness of the water was carefully ascertained, andits productions noted, with the various modifications which theseunderwent as they receded upwards or downwards from their proper habitattowards the line at which they could no longer exist, much informationmight be acquired, of a kind important to the naturalist, and notwithout its use to the geological student. I have had an opportunityelsewhere of observing a curious change which fresh-water induces on theflounder. In the brackish water of an estuary it becomes, withoutdiminishing in general size, thicker and more fleshy than when in itslegitimate habitat the sea; but the flesh loses in quality what it gainsin quantity;--it is flabby and insipid, and the margin-fin lacks alwaysits delicious strip of transparent fat. I fain wish that someintelligent resident on the shores of Stennis would set himselfcarefully to examine its productions, and that then, after registeringhis observations for a few years, he would favor the world with itsnatural history. 

The Standing Stones, --second in Britain of their kind, to only those ofStonehenge, --occur in two groups; the smaller group (composed, however, of the taller stones) on the southern promontory; the larger on thenorthern one. Rude and shapeless, and bearing no other impress of thedesigning faculty than that they are stuck endwise in the earth, andform, as a whole, regular figures on the sward, there is yet a sublimesolemnity about them, unsurpassed in effect by any ruin I have yet seen, however grand in its design or imposing in its proportions. Their veryrudeness, associated with their ponderous bulk and weight, adds to theirimpressiveness. When there is art and taste enough in a country to hewan ornate column, no one marvels that there should also be mechanicalskill enough in it to set it up on end; but the men who tore from thequarry these vast slabs, some of them eighteen feet in height over thesoil, and raised them where they now stand, must have been ignorantsavages, unacquainted with machinery, and unfurnished, apparently, witha single tool. And what, when contemplating their handiwork, we have tosubtract in idea from their minds, we add, by an involuntary process, totheir bodies: we come to regard the feats which they have accomplishedas performed by a power not mechanical, but gigantic. The consideration, too, that these remains, --eldest of the works of man in thiscountry, --should have so long survived all definite tradition of thepurposes which they were raised to serve, so that we now merely knowregarding them that they were religious in their uses, --products of thatineradicable instinct of man's nature which leads him in so many variousways to attempt conciliating the Powers of another world, --servesgreatly to heighten their effect. History at the time of their erectionhad no existence in these islands: the age, though it sought, throughthe medium of strange, unknown rites, to communicate with Heaven, wasnot knowing enough to communicate, through the medium of alphabet orsymbol, with posterity. The appearance of the obelisks, too, harmonizeswell with their great antiquity and the obscurity of their origin. Forabout a man's height from the ground they are covered thick by theshorter lichens, --chiefly the gray-stone parmelia, --here and thereembroidered by golden-hued patches of the yellow parmelia of the wall;but their heads and shoulders, raised beyond the reach alike of theherd-boy and of his herd, are covered by an extraordinary profusion of aflowing beard-like lichen of unusual length, --the lichen _calicarus_(or, according to modern botanists, _Ramalina scopulorum_), in whichthey look like an assemblage of ancient Druids, mysteriously stern andinvincibly silent and shaggy as the bard of Gray, when

 "Loose his beard and hoary hair Streamed like a meteor on the troubled air. "

The day was perhaps too sunny and clear for seeing the Standing Stonesto the best possible advantage. They could not be better placed than ontheir flat promontories, surrounded by the broad plane of an extensivelake, in a waste, lonely, treeless country, that presents no bold, competing features to divert attention from them as the great centralobjects of the landscape; but the gray of the morning, or an atmosphereof fog and vapor, would have associated better with the mystic obscurityof their history, their shaggy forms, and their livid tints, than theglare of a cloudless sun, that brought out in hard, clear relief theirrude outlines, and gave to each its sharp dark patch of shadow. Gray-colored objects, when tall and imposing, but of irregular form, areseen always to most advantage in an uncertain light, --in fog orfrost-rime, or under a scowling sky, or, as Parnell well expresses it, "amid the living gleams of night. " They appeal, if I may so expressmyself, to the sentiment of the ghostly and the spectral, and demand atleast a partial envelopment of the obscure. Burns, with the true tact ofthe genuine poet, develops the sentiment almost instinctively in anexquisite stanza in one of his less-known songs, "The Posey, "--

 "The hawthorn I will pu', _wi' its locks o' siller gray_, Where, _like an aged man, it stands at break o' day_. "

Scott, too, in describing these very stones, chooses the early morningas the time in which to exhibit them, when they "stood in the gray lightof the dawning, like the phantom forms of antediluvian giants, who, shrouded in the habiliments of the dead, come to revisit, by the palelight, the earth which they had plagued with their oppression, andpolluted by their sins, till they brought down upon it the vengeance oflong-suffering heaven. " On another occasion, he introduces them as"glimmering, a grayish white, in the rising sun, and projecting far tothe westward their long gigantic shadows. " And Malcolm, in the exerciseof a similar faculty with that of Burns and of Scott, surrounds them, inhis description, with a somewhat similar atmosphere of partial dimnessand obscurity:--

 "The hoary rocks, of giant size, That o'er the land in circles rise, Of which tradition may not tell, Fit circles for the wizard's spell, Seen far _amidst the scowling storm_, Seem each a tall and phantom form, _As hurrying vapors o'er them flee, _ Frowning in grim security, While, like a dread voice from the past, Around them moans the autumnal blast. "

There exist curious analogies between the earlier stages of society andthe more immature periods of life, --between the savage and the child;and the huge circle of Stennis seems suggestive of one of these. It isconsiderably more than four hundred feet in diameter, and the stoneswhich compose it, varying from three to fourteen feet in height, musthave been originally from thirty-five to forty in number, though onlysixteen now remain erect. A mound and fosse, still distinctlytraceable, run round the whole; and there are several mysterious-lookingtumuli outside, bulky enough to remind one of the lesser morains of thegeologist. But the circle, notwithstanding its imposing magnitude, isbut a huge child's house, after all, --one of those circles of stoneswhich children lay down on their village green, and then, in theexercise of that imaginative faculty which distinguishes between theyoung of the human animal and those of every other creature, convert, bya sort of conventionalism, into a church or dwelling-house, within whichthey seat themselves, and enact their imitations of their seniors, whether domestic or ecclesiastical. The circle of Stennis was a circle, say the antiquaries, devoted to the sun. The group of stones on thesouthern promontory of the lake formed but a half-circle, and it was ahalf-circle dedicated to the moon. To the circular sun the great rudechildren of an immature age of the world had laid down a circle ofstones on the one promontory; to the moon, in her half-orbed state, theyhad laid down a half-circle on the other; and in propitiating thesematerial deities, to whose standing in the old Scandinavian worship thenames of our _Sun_day and _Mon_day still testify, they employed in theirrespective inclosures, in the exercise of a wild unregulated fancy, uncouth irrational rites, the extremeness of whose folly was in somemeasure concealed by the horrid exquisiteness of their cruelty. We arestill in the nonage of the species, and see human society sowing itswild oats in a thousand various ways, very absurdly often, and oftenvery wickedly; but matters seem to have been greatly worse when, in anage still more immature, the grimly-bearded, six-feet children of Orkneywere laying down their stone-circles on the green. Sir Walter, in theparting scene between Cleveland and Minna Troil, which he describes ashaving taken place amid the lesser group of stones, refers to an immenseslab "lying flat and prostrate in the middle of the others, supportedby short pillars, of which some relics are still visible, " and which isregarded as the sacrificial stone of the erection. "It is a currentbelief, " says Dr. Hibbert, in an elaborate paper in the "Transactions ofthe Scottish Antiquaries, " that upon this stone a victim of royal birthwas immolated. Halfdan the Long-legged, the son of Harold theFair-haired, in punishment for the aggressions of Orkney, had made anunexpected descent upon its coasts, and acquired possession of theJarldom. In the autumn succeeding Halfdan was retorted upon, and, afteran inglorious contest, betook himself to a place of concealment, fromwhich he was the following morning unlodged, and instantly doomed to theAsæ. Einar, the Jarl of Orkney, with his sword carved the captive's backinto the form of an eagle, the spine being longitudinally divided, andthe ribs being separated by a transverse cut as far as the loins. Hethen extracted the lungs, and dedicated them to Odin for a perpetuity ofvictory, singing a wild song, --'I am revenged for the slaughter ofRognvalld: this have the Nornæ decreed. In my fiording the pillar of thepeople has fallen. Build up the cairn, ye active youths, for victory iswith us. From the stones of the sea-shore will I pay the Long-legged ahard seat. ' There is certainly no trace to be detected, in this darkstory, of a golden age of the world: the golden age is, I would fainhope, an age yet to come. There at least exists no evidence that it isan age gone by. It will be the full-grown _manly_ age of the world whenthe race, as such, shall have attained to their years of discretion. They are at present in their froward boyhood, playing at the mischievousgames of war, and diplomacy, and stock-gambling, and site-refusing, andit is not quite agreeable for quiet honest people to be living amongstthem. But there would be nothing gained by going back to that moreinfantine state of society in which the Jarl Einar carved into a redeagle the back of Halfdan the Long-legged. 

CHAPTER XIV. 

 On Horseback--A pared Moor--Small Landholders--Absorption of small holdings in England and Scotland--Division of Land favorable to Civil and Religious Rights--Favorable to social Elevation--An inland Parish--The Landsman and Lobster--Wild Flowers of Orkney--Law of Compensation illustrated by the Tobacco Plant--Poverty tends to Productiveness--Illustrated in Ireland--Profusion of Ichthyolites--Orkney a land of Defunct Fishes--Sandwick--A Collection of Coccostean Flags--A Quarry full of Heads of Dipteri--The Bergil, or Striped Wrasse--Its Resemblance to the Dipterus--Poverty of the Flora of the Lower Old Red--No true Coniferous Wood in the Orkney Flagstones--Departure for Hoy--The intelligent Boatman--Story of the Orkney Fisherman. 

While yet lingering amid the Standing Stones, I was joined by Mr. Garson, who had obligingly ridden a good many miles to meet me, and nowinsisted that I should mount and ride in turn, while he walked by myside, that I might be fresh, he said, for the exploratory ramble of theevening. I could have ventured more readily on taking the command of avessel than of a horse, and with fewer fears of mutiny; but mount I did;and the horse, a discreet animal, finding he was to have matters verymuch his own way, got upon honor with me, and exerted himself to suchpurpose that we did not fall greatly more than a hundred yards behindMr. Garson. We traversed in our journey a long dreary moor, so entirelyruined, like those which I had seen on the previous day, by belonging toeverybody in general, as to be no longer of the slightest use to anybodyin particular. The soil seems to have been naturally poor; but it musthave taken a good deal of spoiling to render it the sterile, verdurelesswaste it is now; for even where it had been poorest, I found that in theisland-like appropriated patches by which it is studded, it at leastbears, what it has long ceased to bear elsewhere, a continuous coveringof green sward. But if disposed to quarrel with the commons of Orkney, Ifound in close neighborhood with them that with which I could have noquarrel, --numerous small properties farmed by the proprietors, andforming, in most instances, farms by no means very large. There areparishes in this part of the mainland divided among from sixty to eightylandowners. 

A nearly similar state of things seems to have obtained in Scotlandabout the beginning of the eighteenth century, and for the greater partof the previous one. I am acquainted with old churchyards in the northof Scotland that contain the burying-grounds of from six to ten landedproprietors, whose lands are now merged into single properties. And, inreading the biographies of our old covenanting ministers, I have oftenremarked as curious, and as bearing in the same line, that noinconsiderable proportion of their number were able to retire, in timesof persecution, to their own little estates. It was during thedisastrous wars of the French Revolution, --wars from the effects ofwhich Great Britain will, I fear, never fully recover, --that the smallerholdings were finally absorbed. About twenty years ere the war began, the lands of England were parcelled out among no fewer than two hundredand fifty thousand families; before the peace of 1815, they had falleninto the hands of thirty-two thousand. In less than half a century, thatbase of actual proprietorship on which the landed interest of anycountry must ever find its surest standing, had contracted in England toless than one-seventh its former extent. In Scotland the absorption ofthe great bulk of the lesser properties seems to have taken placesomewhat earlier; but in it also the revolutionary war appears to havegiven them the final blow; and the more extensive proprietors of thekingdom are assuredly all the less secure in consequence of theirextinction. They were the smaller stones in the wall, that gave firmnessin the setting to the larger, and jammed them fast within those safelimits determined by the line and plummet, which it is ever perilous tooverhang. Very extensive territorial properties, wherever they exist, create almost necessarily--human nature being what it is--a species ofdespotism more oppressive than even that of great unrepresentativegovernments. It used to be remarked on the Continent, that there wasalways less liberty in petty principalities, where the eye of the rulerwas ever on his subjects, than under the absolute monarchies. [23] And ina country such as ours, the accumulation of landed property in the handsof comparatively a few individuals has the effect often of bringing theterritorial privileges of the great landowner into a state ofantagonism with the civil and religious rights of the people, thatcannot be other than perilous to the landowner himself. In a districtdivided, like Orkney, among many owners, a whole country-side could notbe shut up against its people by some ungenerous or intolerantproprietor, --greatly at his own risk and to his own hurt, --as in thecase of Glen Tilt or the Grampians; nor, when met for purposes of publicworship, could the population of a parish be chased from off its baremoors, at his instance, by the constable or the sheriff-officer, toworship God agreeably to their consciences amid the mire of across-road, or on the bare sea-beach uncovered by the ebb of the tide. The smaller properties of the country, too, served admirably asstepping-stones, by which the proprietors or their children, whenpossessed of energy and intellect, could mount to a higher walk ofsociety. Here beside me, for instance, was my friend Mr. Garson, auseful and much-esteemed minister of religion in his native district;while his brother, a medical man of superior parts, was fast rising intoextensive practice in the neighboring town. They had been prepared fortheir respective professions by a classical education; and yet thestepping-stone to positions in society at once so important and sorespectable was simply one of the smaller holdings of Orkney, derived tothem as the descendants of one of the old Scandinavian Udallers, andwhich fell short, I was informed, of a hundred a-year. 

Mr. Garson's dwelling, to which I was welcomed with much hospitality byhis mother and sisters, occupies the middle of an inclined hollow orbasin, so entirely surrounded by low, moory hills, that at nopoint, --though the radius of the prospect averages from four to sixmiles, --does it command a view of the sea. I scarce expected beingintroduced in Orkney to a scene in which the traveller could sothoroughly forget that he was on an island. Of the parish of Harray, which borders on Mr. Garson's property, no part touches the sea-coast;and the people of the parish are represented by their neighbors, whopride themselves upon their skill as sailors and boatmen, as a race oflubberly landsmen, unacquainted with nautical matters, and ignorant ofthe ocean and its productions. A Harray man is represented, in one oftheir stories, as entering into a compact of mutual forbearance with alobster, --to him a monster of unknown powers and formidableproportions, --which he had at first attempted to capture, but which hadshown fight, and had nearly captured him in turn. "Weel, weel, let a-befor let a-be, " he is made to say; "if thou does na clutch me in thygrips, I'se no clutch thee in mine. " It is to this primitive parish thatDavid Vedder, the sailor-poet of Orkney, refers, in his "OrcadianSketches, " as "celebrated over the whole archipelago for thepeculiarities of its inhabitants, their singular manners and habits, their uncouth appearance, and homely address. Being the most landwarddistrict in Pomona, " he adds, "and consequently having littleintercourse with strangers, it has become the stronghold of many ancientcustoms and superstitions, which modern innovation has pushed off fromtheir pedestals in almost all the other parts of the island. Thepermanency of its population, too, is mightily in favor of 'old use andwont, ' as it is almost entirely divided amongst a class of men yelept_pickie_, or petty lairds, each ploughing his own fields and reaping hisown crops, much in the manner their great-great-grandfathers did in thedays of Earl Patrick. And such is the respect which they entertain fortheir hereditary beliefs, that many of them are said still to cast alingering look, not unmixed with reverence, on certain spots held sacredby their Scandinavian ancestors. "

After an early dinner I set out for the barony of Birsay, in thenorthern extremity of the mainland, accompanied by Mr. Garson, andpassed for several miles over a somewhat dreary country, bare, sterile, and brown, studded by cold, broad, treeless lakes, and thinly mottled bygroups of gray, diminutive cottages, that do not look as if there wasmuch of either plenty or comfort inside. But after surmounting the hillsthat form the northern side of the interior basin, I was sensible of asudden improvement on the face of the country. Where the land slopestowards the sea, the shaggy heath gives place to a green luxuriantherbage; and the frequent patches of corn seem to rejoice in a moregenial soil. The lower slopes of Orkney are singularly rich in wildflowers, --richer by many degrees than the fat loamy meadows of England. They resemble gaudy pieces of carpeting, as abundant in petals as inleaves: their luxuriant blow of red and white, blue and yellow, seems asif competing, in the extent of surface which it occupies, with theirgeneral ground of green. I have remarked a somewhat similar luxurianceof wild flowers in the more sheltered hollows of the bleak north-westerncoasts of Scotland. There is little that is rare to be found among theselast, save that a few Alpine plants may be here and there recognized asoccurring at a lower level than elsewhere in Britain; but the vastprofusion of blossoms borne by species common to the greater part of thekingdom imparts to them an apparently novel character. We may detect, Iam inclined to think, in this singular profusion, both in Orkney and thebleaker districts of the mainland of Scotland, the operation of a lawnot less influential in the animal than in the vegetable world, which, when hardship presses upon the life of the individual shrub orquadruped, so as to threaten its vitality, renders it fruitful in behalfof its species. I have seen the principle strikingly exemplified in thecommon tobacco plant, when reared in a northern country in the open air. Year after year it continued to degenerate, and to exhibit a smallerleaf and a shorter stem, until the successors of what in the first yearof trial had been vigorous plants of from three to four feet in height, had in the sixth or eighth become mere weeds of scarce as many inches. But while the more flourishing, and as yet undegenerate plant, hadmerely borne a-top a few florets, which produced a small quantity ofexceedingly minute seeds, the stunted weed, its descendant, was sothickly covered over in its season with its pale yellow bells, as topresent the appearance of a nosegay; and the seeds produced were notonly bulkier in the mass, but also individually of much greater size. The tobacco had grown productive in proportion as it had degenerated andbecome poor. In the common scurvy grass, too, remarkable, with someother plants, as I have already had occasion to mention, for taking itsplace among both the productions of our Alpine heights and of oursea-shores, it will be found that in proportion as its habitat provesungenial, and its stems and leaves become dwarfish and thin, its littlewhite cruciform flowers increase, till, in localities where it barelyexists, as if on the edge of extinction, we find the entire plantforming a dense bundle of seed-vessels, each charged to the full withseed. And in the gay meadows of Orkney, crowded with a vegetation thatapproaches its northern limit of production, we detect what seems to bethe same principle, chronically operative; and hence, it would seem, their extraordinary gaiety. Their richly-blossoming plants are the poorproductive _Irish_ of the vegetable world;[24] for Doubleday seems tobe quite in the right in holding that the law extends to not only theinferior animals, but to our own species also. The lean, ill-fed sow andrabbit rear, it has been long known, a greatly more numerous progenythan the same animals when well cared for and fat; and every horse andcattle breeder knows, that to over-feed his animals proves a sure modeof rendering them sterile. The sheep, if tolerably well pastured, brings forth only a single lamb at a birth; but if half-starved andlean, the chances are that it may bring forth two or three. And so it isalso with the greatly higher human race. Place them in circumstances ofdegradation and hardship so extreme as almost to threaten theirexistence as individuals, and they increase, as if in behalf of thespecies, with a rapidity without precedent in circumstances of greatercomfort. The aristocratic families of a country are continually runningout; and it requires frequent creations to keep up the House of Lords;while our poor people seem increasing in some districts in almost themathematical ratio. The county of Sutherland is already more populousthan it was previous to the great clearings. In Skye, though fullytwo-thirds of the population emigrated early in the latter half of thelast century, a single generation had scarce passed ere the gap wascompletely filled; and miserable Ireland, had the human family no otherbreeding-place or nursery, would of itself be sufficient in a very fewages to people the world. 

We returned, taking in our way the cliffs of Marwick Head, in which Idetected a few scattered plates and scales, and which, like nine-tenthsof the rocks of Orkney, belong to the great flagstone division of theformation. I found the dry-stone fences on Mr. Garson's property stillricher in detached fossil fragments than the cliffs; but there are fewerections in the island that do not inclose in their walls portions ofthe organic. We find ichthyolite remains in the flagstones laid barealong the way-side, --in every heap of road-metal, --in the bottom ofevery stream, --in almost every cottage and fence. Orkney is a land ofdefunct fishes, and contains in its rocky folds more individuals of thewaning ganoid family than are now to be found in all the existing seas, lakes, and rivers of the world. I enjoyed in a snug upper room adelectable night's rest, after a day of prime exercise, prolonged tillit just touched on toil, and again experienced, on looking out in themorning on the wide flat basin around, a feeling somewhat akin towonder, that Orkney should possess a scene at once so extensive and soexclusively inland. 

Towards mid-day I walked on to the parish manse of Sandwick, armed witha letter of introduction to its inmate, the Rev. Charles Clouston, --agentleman whose descriptions of the Orkneys, in the very complete andtastefully written Guide-Book of the Messrs. Anderson of Inverness, andof his own parish in the "Statistical Account of Scotland, " had, bothfrom the high literary ability and the amount of scientific acquirementwhich they exhibit, rendered me desirous to see. I was politelyreceived, though my visit must have been, as I afterwards ascertained, at a rather inconvenient time. It was now late in the week, and thecoming Sabbath was that of the communion in the parish; but Mr. Cloustonobligingly devoted to me at least an hour, and I found it a veryprofitable one. He showed me a collection of flags, with which heintended constructing a grotto, and which contained numerous specimensof Coccosteus, that he had exposed to the weather, to bring out the fineblue efflorescence, --a phosphate of iron which forms on the surface ofthe plates. They reminded me, from their peculiar style of coloring, andthe grotesqueness of their forms, of the blue figuring on pieces ofbuff-colored china, and seemed to be chiefly of one species, veryabundant in Orkney, the _Coccosteus decipiens_. We next walked out tosee a quarry in the neighborhood of the manse, remarkable for containingin immense abundance the heads of Dipteri, --many of them in a good stateof keeping, with all the multitudinous plates to which they owe theirpseudo-name, Polyphractus, in their original places, and bearing unwornand untarnished their minute carvings and delicate enamel, but existingin every case as mere detached heads. I found three of them lying in onelittle slaty fragment of two and a half inches by four, which I broughtalong with me. Mr. Clouston had never seen the curious arrangement ofpalatal plates and teeth which distinguishes the Dipterus; and, drawinghis attention to it in an ill-preserved specimen which I found in thecoping of his glebe-wall, I restored, in a rude pencil sketch, the twoangular patches of teeth that radiate from the elegant dart-head in thecentre of the palate, with the rhomboidal plate behind. "We have a fish, not uncommon on the rocky coasts of this part of the country, " hesaid, --"the Bergil or Striped Wrasse (_Labras Balanus_), --which bearsexactly such patches of angular teeth in its palate. They adherestrongly together; and, when found in our old Picts' houses, whichoccasionally happens, they have been regarded by some of our localantiquaries as artificial, --an opinion which I have had to correct, though it seems not improbable that, from their gem-like appearance, they may have been used in a rude age as ornaments. I think I can showyou one disinterred here some years ago. " It interested me to find, fromMr. Clouston's specimens that the palatal grinders of this recent fishof Orkney very nearly resemble those of its _Dipterus_ of the Old RedSandstone. The group is of nearly the same size in the modern as in theancient fish, and presents the same angular form; but the individualteeth are more strongly set in the Bergil than in the Dipterus, andradiate less regularly from the inner rectangular point of the angle toits base outside. I could fain have procured an Orkney Bergil, in orderto determine the general pattern of its palatal dentition with what isvery peculiar in the more ancient fish, --the form of the lower jaw; andto ascertain farther, from the contents of the stomach, the species ofshell-fish or crustaceans on which it feeds; but, though by no meansrare in Orkney, where it is occasionally used as food, I was unable, during my short stay, to possess myself of a specimen. 

Mr. Clouston had, I found, chiefly directed his palæontologicalinquiries on the vegetable remains of the flagstones, as the departmentof the science in which, in relation to Orkney, most remained to bedone; and his collection of these is the most considerable in the numberof its specimens that I have yet seen. It, however, serves but to showhow very extreme is the poverty of the flora of the Lower Old RedSandstone. The numerous fishes of the period seem to have inhabited asea little more various in its vegetation than in its molluscs. Amongthe specimens of Mr. Clouston's collection I could detect but twospecies of plants, --an imperfectly preserved vegetable, more nearlyresembling a club-moss than aught I have seen, and a smooth-stemmedfucoid, existing as a mere coaly film on the stone, and distinguishedchiefly from the other by its sharp-edged, well-defined outline, andfrom the circumstance that its stems continue to retain the samediameter for a considerable distance, and this, too, after throwing offat acute angles numerous branches, nearly equal in bulk to the parenttrunk. In a specimen about two and a half feet in length, which I owe tothe kindness of Mr. Dick of Thurso, there are stems continuousthroughout, that, though they ramify into from six to eight branches inthat space, are quite as thick atop as at bottom. They are the remains, in all probability, of a long flexible fucoid, like those fucoids of theintertropical seas that, streaming slantwise in the tide, rise notunfrequently to the surface in fifteen and twenty fathoms water. I sawamong Mr. Clouston's specimens no such lignite as the fragment of trueconiferous wood which I had found at Cromarty a few years previous, andwhich, it would seem, is still unique among the fossils of the Old RedSandstone. In the chart of the Pacific attached to the better editionsof "Cook's Voyages, " there are several entries along the track of thegreat navigator that indicate where, in mid-ocean, trees, or fragmentsof trees, had been picked up. The entries, however, are but few, thoughthey belong to all the three voyages together: if I remember aright, there are only five entries in all, --two in the Northern and three inthe Southern Pacific. The floating tree, at a great distance from land, is of rare occurrence in even the present scene of things, though thebreadth of land be great, and trees numerous; and in the times of theOld Red Sandstone, when probably the breadth of land was _not_ great, and trees _not_ numerous, it seems to have been of rarer occurrencestill. But it is at least something to know that in this early age ofthe world trees there were. 

I walked on to Stromness, and on the following morning, that ofSaturday, took boat for Hoy, --skirting, on my passage out, the easternand southern shores of the intervening island of Græmsay, and, on thepassage back again, its western and northern shores. The boatman, anintelligent man, --one of the teachers, as I afterwards ascertained, inthe Free Church Sabbath-school, --lightened the way by his narratives ofstorm and wreck, and not a few interesting snatches of natural history. There is no member of the commoner professions with whom I better liketo meet than with a sensible fisherman, who makes a right use of hiseyes. The history of fishes is still very much what the history ofalmost all animals was little more than half a century ago, --a matter ofmere external description, heavy often and dry, and of classificationfounded exclusively on anatomical details. We have still a very greatdeal to learn regarding the character, habits and instincts of thesedenizens of the deep, --much, in short, respecting that faculty which isin them through which their natures are harmonized to the inexorablelaws, and they continue to live wisely and securely, in consequence, within their own element, when man, with all his reasoning ability, isplaying strange vagaries in his;--a species of knowledge this, by theway, which constitutes by far the most valuable part, --the _mental_department of natural history; and the notes of the intelligentfisherman, gleaned from actual observation, have frequently enabled meto fill portions of the wide hiatus in the history of fishes which itought of right to occupy. In passing, as we toiled along the Græmsaycoast, the ruins of a solitary cottage, the boatman furnished us with afew details of the history and character of its last inmate, an Orkneyfisherman, that would have furnished admirable materials for one of thedarker sketches of Crabbe. He was, he said, a resolute, unsocial man, not devoid of a dash of reckless humor, and remarkable for anextraordinary degree of bodily strength, which he continued to retainunbroken to an age considerably advanced, and which, as he rarelyadmitted of a companion in his voyages, enabled him to work his littleskiff alone, in weather when even better equipped vessels had enough adoto keep the sea. He had been married in early life to areligiously-disposed woman, a member of some dissenting body; but, living with him in the little island of Græmsay, separated by the seafrom any place of worship, he rarely permitted her to see the inside ofa church. At one time, on the occasion of a communion Sabbath in theneighboring parish of Stromness, he seemed to yield to her entreaties, and got ready his yawl, apparently with the design of bringing heracross the Sound to the town. They had, however, no sooner quitted theshore than he sailed off to a green little Ogygia of a holm in theneighborhood, on which, reversing the old mythologic story of Calypsoand Ulysses, he incarcerated the poor woman for the rest of the day tillevening. I could see, from the broad grin with which the boatman greetedthis part of the recital, that there was, unluckily, almost fun enoughin the trick to neutralize the sense of its barbarity. The unsocialfisherman lived on, dreaded and disliked, and yet, when his skiff wasseen boldly keeping the sea in the face of a freshening gale, when everyother was making for port, or stretching out from the land as somestormy evening was falling, not a little admired also. At length, on anight of fearful tempest, the skiff was marked approaching the coast, full on an iron-bound promontory, where there could be no safe landing. The helm, from the steadiness of her course, seemed fast lashed, and, dimly discernible in the uncertain light, the solitary boatman could beseen sitting erect at the bows, as if looking out for the shore. But ashis little bark came shooting inwards on the long roll of a wave, it wasfound that there was no speculation in his stony glance: themisanthropic fisherman was a cold and rigid corpse. He had died at sea, as English juries emphatically express themselves in such cases, under"the visitation of God. "

CHAPTER XV. 

 Hoy--Unique Scenery--The Dwarfie Stone of Hoy--Sir Walter Scott's Account of it--Its Associations--Inscription of Names--George Buchanan's Consolation--The mythic Carbuncle of the Hill of Hoy--No Fossils at Hoy--Striking Profile of Sir Walter Scott on the Hill of Hoy--Sir Walter, and Shetland and Orkney--Originals of two Characters in "The Pirate"--Bessie Millie--Garden of Gow, the "Pirate"--Childhood's Scene of Byron's "Torquil"--The Author's Introduction to his Sister--A German Visitor--German and Scotch Sabbath-keeping habits contrasted--Mr. Watt's Specimens of Fossil Remains--The only new Organism found in Orkney--Back to Kirkwall--to Wick--Vedder's Ode to Orkney. 

We landed at Hoy, on a rocky stretch of shore, composed of the grayflagstones of the district. They spread out here in front of the tallhills composed of the overlying sandstone, in a green undulatingplatform, resembling a somewhat uneven esplanade spread out in front ofa steep rampart. With the upper deposit a new style of scenerycommences, unique in these islands: the hills, bold and abrupt, risefrom fourteen to sixteen hundred feet over the sea-level; and thevalleys by which they are traversed, --no mere shallow inflections of thegeneral surface, like most of the other valleys of Orkney, --are ofprofound depth, precipitous, imposing, and solitary. The sudden changefrom the soft, low, and comparatively tame, to the bold, stern, andhigh, serves admirably to show how much the character of a landscape maydepend on the formation which composes it. A walk of somewhat less thantwo miles brought me into the depths of a brown, shaggy valley, soprofoundly solitary, that it does not contain a single human habitation, nor, with one interesting exception, a single trace of the hand of man. As the traveller approaches by a path somewhat elevated, in order toavoid the peaty bogs of the bottom, along the slopes of the northernside of the dell, he sees, amid the heath below, what at first seems tobe a rhomboidal piece of pavement of pale Old Red Sandstone, bearingatop a few stunted tufts of vegetation. There are no neighboring objectsof a known character by which to estimate its size; the precipitoushill-front behind is more than a thousand feet in height: the greatlytaller Ward Hill of Hoy, which frowns over it on the opposite side, isat least five hundred feet higher; and, dwarfed by these giants, itseems a mere pavior's flag, mayhap some five or six feet square, by fromeighteen inches to two feet in depth. It is only on approaching itwithin a few yards that we find it to be an enormous stone, nearlythirty feet in length by almost fifteen feet in breadth, and in someplaces, though it thins, wedge-like, towards one of the edges, more thansix feet in thickness, --forming altogether such a mass as the quarrierwould detach from the solid rock to form the architrave of some vastgateway, or the pediment of some colossal statue. A cave-likeexcavation, nearly three feet square, and rather more than seven feet indepth, opens on its gray and lichened side. The excavation is widenedwithin, along the opposite walls, into two uncomfortably short beds, very much resembling those of the cabin of a small coasting vessel. Oneof the two is furnished with a protecting ledge and a pillow of stone, hewn out of the solid mass, while the other, which is some five or sixinches shorter than its neighbor, and presents altogether more theappearance of a place of penance than of repose, lacks both cushion andledge. An aperture, which seems to have been originally of a circularform, and about two and a half feet in diameter, but which some unluckyherd-boy, apparently in the want of better employment, has considerablymutilated and widened, opens at the inner excavation of the extremityto the roof, as the hatch of a vessel opens from the hold to the deck;for it is by far too wide in proportion to the size of the apartment tobe regarded as a chimney. A gray, rudely-hewn block of sandstone, which, though greatly too ponderous to be moved by any man of the ordinarystrength, seems to have served the purpose of a door, lies prostratebeside the opening in front. And such is the famous Dwarfie Stone ofHoy, as firmly fixed in our literature by the genius of Sir WalterScott, as in this wild valley by its ponderous weight and breadth ofbase, and regarding which--for it shares in the general obscurity of theother ancient remains of Orkney--the antiquary can do little more thanrepeat, somewhat incredulously, what tradition tells him, viz. , that itwas the work, many ages ago, of an ugly, malignant goblin, half-earthhalf-air, --the Elfin Trolld, --a personage, it is said, that even withinthe last century, used occasionally to be seen flitting about in itsneighborhood. 

I was fortunate in a fine breezy day, clear and sunshiny, save where theshadows of a few dense piled-up clouds swept dark athwart the landscape. In the secluded recesses of the valley all was hot, heavy and still;though now and then a fitful snatch of a breeze, the mere fragment ofsome broken gust that seemed to have lost its way, tossed for a momentthe white cannach of the bogs, or raised spirally into the air, for afew yards, the light beards of some seeding thistle, and straightway letthem down again. Suddenly, however, about noon, a shower broke thick andheavy against the dark sides and gray scalp of the Ward Hill, and camesweeping down the valley. I did what Norna of the Fitful Head had, according to the novelist, done before me in similar circumstances, crept for shelter into the larger bed of the cell, which, though ratherscant, taken fairly lengthwise, for a man of five feet eleven, I found, by stretching myself diagonally from corner to corner, no veryuncomfortable lounging-place in a thunder-shower. Some providentherd-boy had spread it over, apparently months before, with a litteringof heath and fern, which now formed a dry, springy conch; and as I laywrapped up in my plaid, listening to the rain-drops as they patteredthick and heavy atop, or slanted through the broken hatchway to thevacant bed on the opposite side of the excavation, I called up the wildnarrative of Norna, and felt all its poetry. The opening passage of thestory is, however, not poetry, but good prose, in which the curiousvisitor might give expression to his own conjectures, if ingeniousenough either to form or to express them so well. "With my eyes fixed onthe smaller bed, " the sorceress is made to say, "I wearied myself withconjectures regarding the origin and purpose of my singular place ofrefuge. Had it been really the work of that powerful Trolld to whom thepoetry of the Scalds referred it? or was it the tomb of someScandinavian chief, interred with his arms and his wealth, perhaps alsowith his immolated wife, that what he loved best in life might not indeath be divided from him? or was it the abode of penance chosen by somedevoted anchorite of later days? or the idle work of some wanderingmechanic, whom chance, and whim, and leisure, had thrust upon such anundertaking?" What follows this sober passage is the work of the poet. "Sleep, " continues Norna, "had gradually crept upon me among mylucubrations, when I was startled from my slumbers by a second clap ofthunder, and when I awoke, I saw through the dim light which the upperaperture admitted, the unshapely and indistinct form of Trolld thedwarf, seated opposite to me on the lesser couch, which his square andmisshapen bulk seemed absolutely to fill up. I was startled, but notaffrighted; for the blood of the ancient race of Lochlin was warm in myveins. He spoke, and his words were of Norse, --so old, that few save myfather, or I myself could have comprehended their import, --such languageas was spoken in these islands ere Olave planted his cross on the ruinsof heathenism. His meaning was dark also, and obscure, like that whichthe pagan priests were wont to deliver, in the name of their idols, tothe tribes that assembled at the _Helgafels_.... I answered him innearly the same strain, for the spirit of the ancient Scalds of our racewas upon me; and far from fearing the phantom with whom I sat coopedwithin so narrow a space, I felt the impulse of that high courage whichthrust the ancient champions and Druidesses upon contests with theinvisible world, when they thought that the earth no longer containedenemies worthy to be subdued by them.... The Demon scowled at me as ifat once incensed and overawed; and then, coiling himself up in a thickand sulphurous vapor, he disappeared from his place. I did not till thatmoment feel the influence of fright, but then it seized me. I rushedinto the open air, where the tempest had passed away, and all was pureand serene. " Shall I dare confess, that I could fain have passed somestormy night all alone in this solitary cell, were it but to enjoy theluxury of listening, amid the darkness, to the clashing rain and theroar of the wind high among the cliffs, or to detect the brushing soundof hasty footsteps in the wild rustle of the heath, or the moan ofunhappy spirits in the low roar of the distant sea. Or, mayhap, --againto borrow from the poet, --as midnight was passing into morning, "To ponder o'er some mystic lay, Till the wild tale had all its sway; And in the bittern's distant shriek I heard unearthly voices speak, Or thought the wizard priest was come To claim again his ancient home! And bade my busy fancy range To frame him fitting shape and strange; Till from the dream my brow I cleared, And smiled to think that I had feared. "

The Dwarfie Stone has been a good deal undervalued by some writers, suchas the historian of Orkney, Mr. Barry; and, considered simply as a workof art or labor, it certainly does not stand high. When tracing, as Ilay a-bed, the marks of the tool, which, in the harder portions of thestone, are still distinctly visible, I just thought how that, armed withpick and chisel, and working as I was once accustomed to work, I couldcomplete such another excavation to order in some three weeks or amonth. But then, I could not make my excavation a thousand years old, nor envelop its origin in the sun-gilt vapors of a poetic obscurity, norconnect it with the supernatural, through the influences of wild ancienttraditions, nor yet encircle it with a classic halo, borrowed from theundying inventions of an exquisite literary genius. A half-worn pewterspoon, stamped on the back with the word _London_, which was found in amiserable hut on the banks of the Awatska by some British sailors, atonce excited in their minds a thousand tender remembrances of theircountry. And it would, I suspect, be rather a poor criticism, andscarcely suited to grapple with the true phenomena of the case, that, wholly overlooking the magical influences of the associative faculty, would concentrate itself simply on either the-workmanship or thematerials of the spoon. Nor is the Dwarfie Stone to be correctlyestimated, independently of the suggestive principle, on the rules ofthe mere quarrier who sells stones by the cubic foot, or of the merecontractor for hewn work who dresses them by the square one. 

The pillow I found lettered over with the names of visitors; but thestone, --an exceedingly compact red sandstone, --had resisted theimperfect tools at the command of the traveller, --usually a nail orknife; and so there were but two of the names decipherable, --that of an"H. Ross, 1735, " and that of a "P. FOLSTER, 1830. " The rain stillpattered heavily overhead; and with my geological chisel and hammer Idid, to beguile the time, what I very rarely do, --added my name to theothers, in characters which, if both they and the Dwarfie Stone get butfair play, will be distinctly legible two centuries hence. In what statewill the world then exist, or what sort of ideas will fill the head ofthe man who, when the rock has well-nigh yielded up its charge, willdecipher the name for the last time, and inquire, mayhap, regarding theindividual whom it now designates, as I did this morning, when I asked, "Who was this H. Ross, and who this P. Folster?" I remember when itwould have saddened me to think that there would in all probability beas little response in the one case as in the other; but as men rise inyears they become more indifferent than in early youth to "that lifewhich wits inherit after death, " and are content to labor on and beobscure. They learn, too, if I may judge from experience, to pursuescience more exclusively for its own sake, with less, mayhap, ofenthusiasm to carry them on, but with what is at least as strong to takeits place as a moving force, that wind and bottom of formed habitthrough which what were at first acts of the will pass into easyhalf-instinctive promptings of the disposition. In order to acquaintmyself with the fossiliferous deposits of Scotland, I have travelled, hammer in hand, during the last nine years, over fully ten thousandmiles; nor has the work been in the least one of dry labor, --not more sothan that of the angler, or grouse-shooter, or deer-stalker: it hasoccupied the mere leisure interstices of a somewhat busy life, and hasserved to relieve its toils. I have succeeded, however, inaccomplishing but little: besides, what is discovery to-day will be butrudimentary fact to the tyro-geologists of the future. But if much hasnot been done, I have at least the consolation of George Buchanan, when, according to Melvill, "fand sitting in his chair, teiching his young manthat servit him in his chalmer to spell a, b, ab; e, b, eb. 'Betterthis, ' quoth he, 'nor stelling sheipe. '"

The sun broke out in great beauty after the shower, glistening on athousand minute runnels that came streaming down the precipices, andrevealing, through the thin vapory haze, the horizontal lines of stratathat bar the hill-sides, like courses of ashlar in a building. I failed, however, to detect, amid the general many-pointed glitter by which theblue gauze-like mist was bespangled, the light of the great carbunclefor which the Ward Hill has long been famous, --that wondrous gem, according to Sir Walter, "that, though it gleams ruddy as a furnace tothem that view it from beneath, ever becomes invisible to him whosedaring foot scales the precipices whence it darts its splendor. " TheHill of Hoy is, however, not the only one in the kingdom that, accordingto tradition, bears a jewel in its forehead. The "great diamond" of theNorthern Sutor was at one time scarce less famous than the carbuncle ofthe Ward Hill. "I have been oftener than once interrogated on the westerncoast of Scotland regarding the diamond rock of Cromarty; and have beentold, by an old campaigner who fought under Abercrombie, that he haslistened to the familiar story of its diamond amid the sand wastes ofEgypt. " But the diamond has long since disappeared; and we now see onlythe rock. Unlike the carbuncle of Hoy, it was never seen by day; thoughoften, says the legend, the benighted boatmen has gazed, from amid thedarkness, as he came rowing along the shore, on its clear beacon-likeflame, which, streaming from the precipice, threw a fiery strip acrossthe water; and often have the mariners of other countries inquiredwhether the light which they saw so high among the cliffs, right overtheir mast, did not proceed from the shrine of some saint or the cell ofsome hermit. At length an ingenious ship-captain determined on markingits place, brought with him from England a few balls of chalk, and tookaim at it in the night-time with one of his great guns. Ere he hadfired, however, it vanished, as if suddenly withdrawn by some guardianhand; and its place in the rock front has ever since remained asundistinguishable, whether by night or by day, as the scaurs and cleftsaround it. The marvels of the present time abide examination morepatiently. It seems difficult enough to conceive, for instance, that theupper deposit of the Lower Old Red in this locality, out of which themountains of Hoy have been scooped, once overlaid the flag stones of allOrkney, and stretched on and away to Dunnet Head, Tarbet Ness, and theBlack Isle; and yet such is the story, variously authenticated, to whichtheir nearly horizontal strata, and their abrupt precipices lend theirtestimony. In no case has this superior deposit of the formation of theCoccosteus been known to furnish a single fossil; nor did it yield me onthis occasion, among the Hills of Hoy, what it had denied me everywhereelse on every former one. Sly search, however, was by no means eithervery prolonged or very careful. 

I found I had still several hours of day-light before me; and these Ispent, after my return on a rough tumbling sea to Stromness, in a secondsurvey of the coast, westwards from the granitic axis of the island, tothe bishop's palace, and the ichthyolitic quarry beyond. From this pointof view the high terminal Hill of Hoy, towards the west, presents whatis really a striking profile of Sir Walter Scott, sculptured in the rockfront by the storms of ages, on so immense a scale, that the Colossus ofRhodes, Pharos and all, would scarce have furnished materials enough tosupply it with a nose. There are such asperities in the outline as onemight expect in that of a rudely modelled bust, the work of a master, from which, in his fiery haste, he had not detached the superfluousclay; but these interfere in no degree with the fidelity, I had almostsaid spirit, of the likeness. It seems well, as it must have waited forthousands of years ere it became the portrait it now is, that the humanprofile, which it preceded so long, and without which it would havelacked the element of individual truth, should have been that of SirWalter. Amid scenes so heightened in interest by his genius as those ofOrkney, he is entitled to a monument. To the critical student of thephilosophy and history of poetic invention it is not uninstructive toobserve how completely the novelist has appropriated and brought withinthe compass of one fiction, in defiance of all those lower probabilitieswhich the lawyer who pleaded before a jury court would be compelled torespect, almost every interesting scene and object in both the Shetlandand Orkney islands. There was but little intercourse in those daysbetween the two northern archipelagos. It is not yet thirty years sincethey communicated with each other, chiefly through the port of Leith, where their regular traders used to meet monthly; but it was necessary, for purposes of effect, that the dreary sublimities of Shetland shouldbe wrought up into the same piece of rich tissue with the imposingantiquities of Orkney, --Sumburgh Head and Roost with the ancientCathedral of St. Magnus and the earl's palace, and Fitful Head and thesand-enveloped kirk of St. Ringan with the Standing Stones of Stennisand the Dwarfie Stone of Hoy; and so the little jury-court probabilitieshave been sacrificed without scruple, and that higher truth ofcharacter, and that exquisite portraiture of external nature, which givesuch reality to fiction, and make it sink into the mind more deeply thanhistoric fact, have been substituted instead. But such, --considerably tothe annoyance of the lesser critics, --has been ever the practice of thegreater poets. The lesser critics are all critics of the jury-courtcast; while all the great masters of fiction, with Shakspeare at theirhead, have been asserters of that higher truth which is not letter, butspirit, and contemners of the mere judicial probabilities. And so theyhave been continually fretting the little men with their extravagances, and they ever will. What were said to be the originals of two of SirWalter's characters in the "Pirate" were living in the neighborhood ofStromness only a few years ago. An old woman who resided immediatelyover the town, in a little cottage, of which there now remains only theroofless walls, and of whom the sailors, weather-bound in the port, usedoccasionally to purchase a wind, furnished him with the first conceptionof his Norna of the Fitful Head; and an eccentric shopkeeper of theplace, who to his dying day used to designate the "Pirate, " with muchbitterness, as a "lying book, " and its author as a "wicked lying man, "is said to have suggested the character of Bryce Snailsfoot the peddler. To the sorceress Sir Walter himself refers in one of his notes. "At thevillage of Stromness, on the Orkney main island, called Pomona, lived, "he says, "in 1814, an aged dame called Bessie Millie, who helped out hersubsistence by selling favorable winds to mariners. Her dwelling andappearance were not unbecoming her pretensions: her house, which was onthe brow of the steep hill on which Stromness is founded, was onlyaccessible by a series of dirty and precipitous lanes, and, forexposure, might have been the abode of Æolus himself, in whosecommodities the inhabitant dealt. She herself was, as she told us, nearly one hundred years old, withered and dried up like a mummy. Aclay-colored kerchief, folded round her head, corresponded in color toher corpse-like complexion. Two light-blue eyes that gleamed with alustre like that of insanity, an utterance of astonishing rapidity, anose and chin that almost met together, and a ghastly expression ofcunning, gave her the effect of Hecate. She remembered Gow the pirate, who had been a native of these islands, in which he closed his career. Such was Bessie Millie, to whom the mariners paid a sort of tribute, with a feeling betwixt jest and earnest. "

On the opposite side of Stromness, where the arm of the sea, which formsthe harbor, is about a quarter of a mile in width, there is, immediatelyover the shore, a small square patch of ground, apparently a_planticruive_, or garden, surrounded by a tall dry-stone fence. It isall that survives--for the old dwelling-house to which it was attachedwas pulled down several years ago--of the patrimony of Gow the "Pirate;"and is not a little interesting, as having formed the central nucleusround which, --like those bits of thread or wire on which the richlysaturated fluids of the chemist solidify and crystallize, --the entirefiction of the novelist aggregated and condensed under the influence offorces operative only in minds of genius. A white, tall, old-fashionedhouse, conspicuous on the hill-side, looks out across the bay towardsthe square inclosure, which it directly fronts. And it is surely acurious coincidence, that while in one of these two erections, only afew hundred yards apart, one of the heroes of Scott saw the light, theother should have proved the scene of the childhood of one of the heroesof Byron, "Torquil, the nursling of the northern seas. "

The reader will remember, that in Byron's poem of "The Island, " one ofthe younger leaders of the mutineers is described as a native of thesenorthern isles. He is drawn by the poet, amid the wild luxuriance of anisland of the Pacific, as

 "The blue-eyed northern child, Of isles more known to man, but scarce less wild, -- The fair-haired offspring of the Orcades, Where roars the Pentland with his whirling seas, -- Rocked in his cradle by the roaring wind, The tempest-born in body and in mind, -- His young eyes, opening on the ocean foam, -- Had from that moment deemed the deep his home. "

Judging from what I learned of his real history, which is well known inStromness, I found reason to conclude that he had been a hapless youngman, of a kindly, genial nature; and greatly "more sinned against thansinning, " in the unfortunate affair of the mutiny with which his name isnow associated, and for his presumed share in which, untried andunconvicted, he was cruelly left to perish in chains amid the horrors ofa shipwreck. I had the honor of being introduced on the following day tohis sister, a lady far advanced in life, but over whose erect form andhandsome features the years seemed to have passed lightly, and whom Imet at the Free Church of Stromness, to which, at the Disruption, shehad followed her respected minister. It seemed a fact as curiouslycompounded as some of those pictures of the last age in which the thinunsubstantialities of allegory mingled with the tangibilities of thereal and the material, that the sister of one of Byron's heroes shouldbe an attached member of the Free Church. 

On my return to the inn, I found in the public room a young German ofsome one or two and twenty, who, in making the tour of Scotland, hadextended his journey into Orkney. My specimens, which had begun toaccumulate in the room, on chimney-piece and window-sill, had attractedhis notice, and led us into conversation. He spoke English well, but notfluently, --in the style of one who had been more accustomed to read thanto converse in it; and he seemed at least as familiar with two of ourgreat British authors, --Shakspeare and Sir Walter Scott, --as most of thebetter-informed British themselves. It was chiefly the descriptions ofSir Walter in the "Pirate" that had led him into Orkney. He had alreadyvisited the Cathedral of St. Magnus and the Stones of Stennis; and onthe morrow he intended visiting the Dwarfie Stone; though I ventured tosuggest that, as a broad sound lay between Stromness and Hoy, and as themorrow was the Sabbath, he might find some difficulty in doing that. Hiscircle of acquirement was, I found, rather literary than scientific. Itseemed, however, to be that of a really accomplished young man, greatlybetter founded in his scholarship than most of our young Scotchmen onquitting the national universities; and I felt, as we conversedtogether, chiefly on English literature and general politics, how muchpoorer a figure I would have cut in his country than he cut in mine. Ifound, on coming down from my room next morning to a rather latebreakfast, that he had been out among the Stromness fishermen, and hadreturned somewhat chafed. Not a single boatman could he find in apopulous seaport town that would undertake to carry him to the DwarfieStone on the Sabbath, --a fact, to their credit, which it is but simplejustice to state. I saw him afterwards in the Free Church, listeningattentively to a thoroughly earnest and excellent discourse, by theDisruption minister of the parish, Mr. Learmonth; and in the course ofthe evening he dropped in for a short time to the Free ChurchSabbath-school, where he took his seat beside one of the teachers, as ifcurious to ascertain more in detail the character of the instructionwhich had operated so influentially on the boatmen, and which he hadseen telling from the pulpit with such evident effect. What would nothis country now give, --now, while drifting loose from all its oldmoorings, full on the perils of a lee shore, --for the anchor of a faithequally steadfast! He was a Lutheran, he told me; but, as is too commonin Germany, his actual beliefs appeared to be very considerably atvariance with his hereditary creed. The creed was a tolerably sound one, but the living belief regarding it seemed to do little more than takecognizance of what he deemed the fact of its death. 

I had carried with me a letter of introduction to Mr. William Watt, towhom I have already had occasion to refer as an intelligent geologist;but the letter I had no opportunity of delivering. Mr. Watt had learned, however, of my being in the neighborhood, and kindly walked intoStromness, some six or eight miles, on the morning of Monday, to meetwith me, bringing me a few of his rarer specimens. One of the number, --aminute ichthyolite, about three inches in length, --I was at firstdisposed to set down as new, but I have since come to regard it assimply an imperfectly-preserved specimen of a Cromarty and Morayshirespecies, --the _Glyptolepis microlepidotus_; though its state of keepingis such as to render either conclusion an uncertainty. Another of thespecimens was that of a fish, still comparatively rare, first figured inthe first edition of my little volume on the "Old Red Sandstone, " fromthe earliest found specimen, at a time while it was yet unfurnished witha name, but which has since had a place assigned to it in the genusDiplacanthus, as the species longispinus. The scales, when examined bythe glass, remind one, from their pectinated character, of shellscovering the walls of a grotto, --a peculiarity to which, when showing myspecimen to Agassiz, while it had yet no duplicate, I directed hisattention, and which led him to extemporize for it, on the spot, thegeneric name Ostralepis, or shell-scale. On studying it more leisurely, however, in the process of assigning to it a place in his great work, where the reader may now find it figured (Table XIV. , fig. 8), thenaturalist found reason to rank it among the Diplacanthi. Mr. Watt'sspecimen exhibited the outline of the head more completely than mine;but the Orkney ichthyolites rarely present the microscopic minutiæ; andthe shell-like aspect of the scales was shown in but one little patch, where they had left their impressions on the stone. His other specimensconsisted of single plates of a variety of Coccosteus, undistinguishablein their form and proportions from those of the _Coccosteus decipiens_, but which exceeded by about one-third the average size of thecorresponding parts in that species; and of a rib-like bone, thatbelonged apparently to what few of the ichthyolites of the Lower Old Redseem to have possessed, --an osseous internal skeleton. This lastorganism was the only one I saw in Orkney with which I had not beenpreviously acquainted, or which I could regard as new, though possiblyenough it may have formed part, not of an undiscovered genus, but of theknown genus Asterolepis, of whose inner framework, judging from theRussian specimens at least, portions must have been bony. After partingfrom Mr. Watt, I travelled on to Kirkwall, which, after a leisurelyjourney, I reached late in the evening, and on the following morningtook the steamer for Wick. I brought away with me, if not many rarespecimens or many new geological facts, at least a few pleasingrecollections of an interesting country and a hospitable people. In theprevious chapter I indulged in a brief quotation from Mr. David Vedder, the sailor-poet of Orkney, and I shall make no apology for availingmyself in the present, of the vigorous, well-turned stanzas in which heportrays some of those peculiar features by which the land of hisnativity may be best recognized and most characteristically remembered. 

 TO ORKNEY. 

 Land of the whirlpool, --torrent, --foam, Where oceans meet in madd'ning shock; The beetling cliff, --the shelving holm, -- The dark insidious rock. Land of the bleak, the treeless moor, -- The sterile mountain, sered and riven, -- The shapeless cairn, the ruined tower, Scathed by the bolts of heaven, -- The yawning gulf, --the treacherous sand, -- love thee still, MY NATIVE LAND. 

 Land of the dark, the Runic rhyme, -- The mystic ring, --the cavern hoar, -- The Scandinavian seer, sublime In legendary lore. Land of a thousand sea-kings' graves, -- Those tameless spirits of the past, Fierce as their subject arctic waves, Or hyperborean blast, -- Though polar billows round thee foam, I love thee!--thou wert once my home. 

 With glowing heart and island lyre, Ah! would some native bard arise To sing, with all a poet's fire, Thy stern sublimities, -- The roaring flood, --the rushing stream, -- The promontory wild and bare, -- The pyramid, where sea-birds scream, Aloft in middle air, -- The Druid temple on the heath, Old even beyond tradition's birth. 

 Though I have roamed through verdant glades, In cloudless climes, 'neath azure skies, Or plucked from beauteous orient meads, Flowers of celestial dies, -- Though I have laved in limpid streams, That murmur over golden sands, Or basked amid the fulgid beams That flame o'er fairer lands, Or stretched me in the sparry grot, -- My country! THOU wert ne'er forgot. 

THE END. 

FOOTNOTES:

[1] March 31, 1845. 

[2] Professor Nicol of Aberdeen believes the Red Sandstones of the WestHighlands are of Devonian age, and the quartzite and limestone of LowerCarboniferous. --_See Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, February 1857. _--W. S. 

[3] Sir R. Murchison considers these rocks Silurian. See "QuarterlyJournal" of the Geological Society, Anniversary Address. 

[4] Probably one of the Isastrea of Edwards. 

[5] See a paper by the Rev. P. B. Brodie, on Lias Corals, "Edinburgh NewPhilosophic Journal, " April, 1857. 

[6] The verses here referred to are introduced into "My Schools andSchoolmasters, " chapter tenth. 

[7] For a description of this pond see "My Schools and Schoolmasters, "chapter tenth. 

[8] These remarks refer to the poem "On Seeing a Sun-Dial in aChurchyard, " which was introduced here when these chapters were firstpublished in the "Witness, " but, having been afterwards inserted in thetenth chapter of "My Schools and Schoolmasters, " is not here reproduced. 

[9] Mr. Peach has discovered fossils in the Durness limestone, whichrests above the quartzite rock of the west of Scotland, that covers theRed Sandstone long believed to be OLD RED. The fossils are veryobscure. --W. S. S. 

[10] This second title hears reference to the extent of the author'sgeologic excursions in Scotland, during the nine years from 1840 to 1848inclusive. 

[11] Since the above was written, I have seen an interesting paper in"Hogg's Weekly Instructor, " in which the Rev. Mr. Longmuir of Aberdeendescribes a visit to the Lias clay at Blackpots. Mr. Longmuir seems tohave given more time to his researches than I found it agreeable, in avery indifferent day to devote to mine; and his list of fossils isconsiderably longer. Their evidence, however, runs in exactly the sametract with that of the shorter list. He had been told at Banff that theclay contained "petrified tangles;" and the first organism shown him bythe workmen, on his arrival at the deposit, were some of the "tangles"in question. "These" he goes on to say, "we found, as may have alreadybeen anticipated, to be pieces of Belemnites, well known on the otherside of the Frith as 'thunderbolts, ' and esteemed of sovereign efficacyin the cure of bewitched cattle. " Though still wide of the mark, thereis here an evident descent from the supernatural to the physical, fromthe superstitious to the true. "Satisfied that we had a mass of Liasclay before us, we set vigorously to work, in order either to findadditional characteristic fossils, or obtain data on which to form aconjecture as to the history of this out-of-the-way deposit; and ourlabor was not without its reward. We shall now present a brief accountof the specimens we picked up. Observing a number of stones of differentsizes, that had been thrown out, as they were struck, by the workman'sshovel, we immediately commenced, and, like an inquisitor of old, knocked our victims on the head, that they might reveal their secrets;or, like a Roman haruspex, examined their interior, --not, however, toobtain a knowledge of the future, but only to take a peep into the past. 1. Here, then, we take up, not a regular Lias lime nodule, but whatappears to have formed part of one; and the first blow has laid openpart of a whorl of an Ammonite, which, when complete, must have measuredthree or four inches in diameter, and it is perfectly assimilated to thecalcareous matrix. 2. Here is a mass of indurated clay; and a gentleblow has exposed part of two Ammonites, smaller than the former, buttheir shells are white and powdery like chalk. 3. Another fragment islaid open; and there, quite unmistakably, lie the umbo and greaterportion of the _Plagiostoma concentricum_. 4. Another fragment of agranular gritty structure presents a considerable portion of theinterior of one of the shells of a Pecten, but whether the attachedfragment is part of one of its ears, or of the other valve turnedbackward, is not so easily determined. 5. Here is a piece of Belemnitein limestone, and the fracture in the fossil presents the usualglistening planes of cleavage. 6. Next we take up a piece of distinctlylaminated Lias, with Ammonites as thick as they can lie on the pages ofthis black book of natural history. 7. Once more we strike, and we havethe cast and part of the shell of another bivalve; but the valves havebeen jerked off each other, and have suffered a severe compoundfracture; nevertheless we can have little hesitation in pronouncing it aspecies of _unio_. 8. Here is another piece of limestone, with its smallfragment of another shell, of very delicate texture, with finely markedtraverse striæ. We are unwilling to decide on such slight evidence, butfeel inclined to refer it to some species of Plagiostoma. 9. Here is apiece of pyrites, not quite so large as the first, and so vegetable-likein its markings, that it might be mistaken for part of a branch of atree. This is also characteristic of the Lias; for when the shales aredeeply impregnated with bitumen and pyrites, they undergo a slowcombustion when heaped up with faggots and set on fire; and in thecliffs of the Yorkshire coast, after rainy weather, they sometimesspontaneously ignite, and continue to burn for several months. 10. As wepassed through the works, on our way to the clay, we observed a sort ofreservoir, into which the clay, after being freed from its impurities, had been run in a liquid state; the water had evaporated, and the dryingclay had cracked in every direction. Here we find its counterpart inthis large mass of stone; only the clay here, mixed with a portion oflime is petrified, and the fissures filled up with carbonate of lime;thus forming the septaria, or cement stone. We have dressed a specimenof it for our guide, who has a friend that will polish it, when the darkLias will be strikingly contrasted with the white lime, and form rathera pretty piece of natural mosaic. 11. Coming to a simple piece ofmachinery for removing fragments of shale and stone from the clay, weexamined some of the bits so rejected, and found what we had no doubtwere fish-scales. 12. We have yet to notice certain long slender bodies, outwardly brown, but inwardly nearly black, resembling whip-cord insize. Are we to regard these as specimens of a fucus, perhaps the_filum_, or allied to it, which is known in some places by theappropriate name of sea-laces? 13. Passing on to the office, we wereshown a chop of wood that had been found in the clay, and was destinedfor the Banff Museum. It is about eighteen inches in length, and half asmuch in breadth; and although evidently water-worn, yet we could countbetween twenty-five and thirty concentric rings on one of its ends, which not only enabled us to form some conjecture of its age previous toits overthrow, but also justified us in referring it to the coniferæ ofthe _vorwelt_, or ancient world. "

Mr. Longmuir makes the following shrewd remarks, in answering thequestion, "Whether have we here a mass of Lias clay, as originallydeposited, or has it resulted from the breaking up of Lias-shale?" "Theformer alternative, " says Mr. Longmuir, "we have heard, has beenmaintained; but we are inclined to adopt the latter, and that for thefollowing reasons: 1. This clay, judging from other localities, is not_in situ_, but has every appearance of having been precipitated into abasin in the gneiss on which it rests, having apparently under it, although it is impossible to say to what extent, a bed of comminutedshells. 2. The fossils are all fragmentary and water-worn. This isespecially the case with regard to the Belemnites, the pieces averagingfrom one to two inches in length, no workman having ever found acomplete specimen, such as occurs in the Lias-shale at Cromarty, inwhich they may be found nine inches in length. 3. But perhaps the mostsatisfactory proof, and one that in itself may be deemed sufficient, isthe frequent occurrence of pieces of Lias-shale, with their embeddedAmmonites; which clearly show that the Lias had been broken up, tossedabout in some violent agitation of the sea, and churned into clay, justas some denudating process of a similar nature swept away the chalk ofAberdeenshire, leaving on many of its hills and plains the water-wornflints, with the characteristic fossils of the Cretaceous formation. "

[12] A description of Miss Bond and of her "Letters" here referred to, is given in the fifth chapter of "My Schools and Schoolmasters. "

[13] The story here referred to is narrated in "Scenes and Legends ofthe North of Scotland, " chap. XXV. 

[14] _Scaur_, Scotice, a precipice of clay. There is no single Englishword that conveys exactly the same idea. 

[15] Mr. Dick has since disinterred from out the boulder-clays of theBurn of Freswick, _Patella vulgata_, _Buccinum undatum_, _Fesusantiquus_, _Rostellaria_, _Pes pelicana_, a _Natica_, _Lutraria_, and_Balanus_. 

[16] That similarity of condition in which the hazel and the hardercerealia thrive was noted by our north-country farmers of the oldSchool, long ere it had been recorded by the botanist. Hence suchremarks, familiarized into proverbs, as "A good _nut_ year's a good_ait_ year;" or, "As the _nut_ fills the _ait_ fills. "

[17] For this story, see "Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland, "chap. XXV. 

[18] "In the River St. Lawrence, " says Sir Charles Lyell, "the loose iceaccumulates on the shoals during the winter, at which season the wateris low. The separate fragments of ice are readily frozen together in aclimate where the temperature is sometimes thirty degrees below zero, and boulders become entangled with them; so that in the spring, when theriver rises on the melting of the snow, the rocks are floated off, frequently conveying away the boulders to great distances. A singleblock of granite, fifteen feet long by ten feet both in width andheight, and which could not contain less than fifteen hundred cubic feetof stone, was in this way moved down the river several hundred yards, during the late survey in 1837. Heavy anchors of ships, lying on theshore, have in like manner been closed in and removed. In October 1836, wooden stakes were driven several feet into the ground, at one point onthe banks of the St. Lawrence, at high-water mark, and over them werepiled many boulders as large as the united force of six men could roll. The year after, all the boulders had disappeared, and others hadarrived, and the stakes had been drawn out and carried away by theice. "--'Elements, ' first edition, p. 138. 

[19] The story of the Lady of Balconie and her keys is narrated in"Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland. " chap. XI. 

[20] This mode is described in a traditionary story regarding a gigantictribe of _Fions_, narrated in "Scenes and Legends of the North ofScotland, " chap. IV. 

[21] See "My Schools and Schoolmasters, " chap XI. 

[22] I can entertain no doubt that the angular groups of palatal teethfigured by Agassiz and the Russian geologists as those of a supposedPlacoid termed the Ctenodus, are in reality groups of the palatal teethof Dipterus. In some of my specimens the frontal buckler of Polyphractusis connected with the gill-covers and scales of Dipterus, and bears inits palate what cannot he distinguished from the teeth of Ctenodus. Thethree genera resolve themselves into one. 

[23] There is a very admirable remark to this effect in the "TravellingMemorandums" of the late Lord Gardenstone, which, as the work has beenlong out of print, and is now scarce, may be new to many of my readers:"It is certain, and demonstrated by the experience of ages and nations, "says his Lordship, in referring to the old principalities of France, "that the government of petty princes is less favorable to the securityand interests of society than the government of monarchs, who possessgreat and extensive territories. The race of great monarchs cannotpossibly preserve a safe and undisturbed state of government, withoutmany delegations of power and office to men of approved abilities andpractical knowledge, who are subject to complaint during theiradministration, and responsible when it is at an end; or yet without anestablished system of laws and regulations; so that no inconsiderabledegree of security and liberty to the subject is almost inseparablefrom, and essential to, the subsistence and duration of a greatmonarchy. But it is easy for petty princes to practise an arbitrary andirregular exercise of power, by which their people are reduced to acondition of miserable slavery. Indeed, very few of them, in the courseof ages, are capable of conceiving any other means of maintaining theostentatious state, the luxurious and indolent pride, which they mistakefor greatness. I heartily wish that this observation and censure maynot, in some instances, be applicable to great landed proprietors insome parts of Britain. "--Travelling Memorandums, vol. I. P. 123. 1792. 

[24] The exciting effects of a poor soil, or climate, or of severeusage, on the productive powers of various vegetable species, have beenlong and often remarked. Flavel describes, in one of his ingeniousemblems, illustrative of the influence of affliction on the Christian, an orchard tree, which had been beaten with sticks and stones, till itpresented a sorely stunted and mutilated appearance; but which, whilethe fairer and more vigorous trees around it were rich in only leaves, was laden with fruit, --a direct consequence, it is shown, of the hardtreatment to which it had been subjected. I have heard it told in anorthern village, as a curious anecdote, that a large pear tree, whichduring a vigorous existence of nearly fifty years, had borne scarce asingle pear, had, when in a state of decay, and for a few years previousto its death, borne immense crops of from two to three bolls eachseason. And the skilful gardener not unfrequently avails himself of theprinciple on which both phenomena seem to have occurred, --that exhibitedin the beaten and that in the decaying tree, --in rendering his barrenplants fruitful. He has recourse to it even when merely desirous ofascertaining the variety of pear or apple which some thriving sapling, slow in bearing, is yet to produce. Selecting some bough which may beconveniently lopped away without destroying the symmetry of the tree, hedraws his knife across the bark, and inflicts on it a wound, from which, though death may not ensue for some two or three twelvemonths, it cannotultimately recover. Next spring the wounded branch is found to bear itsbunches of blossoms; the blossoms set into fruit; and while in the otherportions of the plant all is vigorous and barren as before, the dyingpart of it, as if sobered by the near prospect of dissolution, is foundfulfilling the proper end of its existence. Soil and climate, too, exert, it has been often remarked, a similar influence. In the unitedparishes of Kirkmichael and Culicuden, in the immediate neighborhood ofCromarty, much of the soil is cold and poor, and the exposure ungenial;and "in most parts, where hardwood has been planted, " says the Rev. Mr. Sage of Resolis, in his "Statistical Account, " "it is stinted in itsgrowth, and bark-bound. Comparatively young trees of ash, " he shrewdlyadds, "_are covered with seed_, --_an almost infallible sign that theirnatural growth is checked_. The leaves, too, fall off about thebeginning of September. "

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