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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Cruise of the Betsey, by Hugh Miller
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: 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 Fossiliferous Deposits of Scotland
+
+
+Author: Hugh Miller
+
+
+
+Release Date: March 8, 2009  [eBook #28273]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Eric Hutton, Greg Bergquist, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+   The punctuation and spelling from the original text have been
+   faithfully preserved. Only obvious typographical errors have
+   been corrected.
+
+   The pointing finger symbol in the advertisement section is
+   represented by -->.
+
+
+
+
+
+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 Fossiliferous
+Deposits 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, by
+Gould and Lincoln,
+In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
+Massachusetts.
+
+Authorized Edition.
+
+By a special arrangement with the late Hugh Miller, Gould And Lincoln
+became the authorized American publishers of his works. By a similar
+arrangement made with the family since his decease, they will also
+publish 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--the
+victim of an overworked brain; and how that bright and vigorous spirit
+was abruptly quenched forever.
+
+During the month of May (1857) Mrs. Miller came to Malvern, after
+recovering from the first shock of bereavement, in search of health and
+repose, and evidently hoping to do justice, on her recovery, to the
+literary remains of her husband. Unhappily the excitement and anxiety
+naturally attaching to a revision of her husband's works proved over
+much for one suffering under such recent trial, and from an affection of
+the brain and spine which ensued; and, in consequence, Mrs. Miller has
+been forbidden, for the present, to engage in any work of mental labor.
+
+Under these circumstances, and at Mrs. Miller's request, I have
+undertaken the editing of "The Cruise of the Betsey, or a Summer Ramble
+among the Fossiliferous Deposits of the Hebrides," as well as "The
+Rambles of a Geologist," hitherto unpublished, save as a series of
+articles in the "Witness" newspaper. The style and arguments of HUGH
+MILLER are so peculiarly his own, that I have not presumed to alter the
+text, and have merely corrected some statements incidental to the
+condition of geological knowledge at the time this work was penned. "The
+Cruise of the Betsey" was written for that well-known paper the
+"Witness" during the period when a disputation productive of much bitter
+feeling waged between the Free and Established Churches of Scotland; but
+as the Disruption and its history possesses little interest to a large
+class of the readers of this work, who will rejoice to follow their
+favorite author among the isles and rocks of the "bonnie land," I have
+expunged _some_ passages, which I am assured the author would have
+omitted had he lived to reprint this interesting narrative of his
+geological rambles. HUGH MILLER battled nobly for his faith while
+living. 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 weeks
+I was free. Chisels and hammers, and the bag for specimens, were taken
+from their corner in the dark closet, and packed up with half a stone
+weight of a fine _soft_ Conservative Edinburgh newspaper, valuable for a
+quality of preserving old things entire. At noon on St. Swithin's day
+(Monday the 15th), I was speeding down the Clyde in the Toward Castle
+steamer, for Tobermory in Mull. In the previous season I had intended
+passing direct from the Oölitic deposits of the eastern coast of
+Scotland, to the Oölitic deposits of the Hebrides. But the weeks glided
+all too quickly away among the ichthyolites of Caithness and Cromarty,
+and the shells and lignites of Sutherland and Ross. My friend, too, the
+Rev. 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 in
+his parish, and not yet provided with one elsewhere; and I concluded he
+would have but little heart, at such a season, for breaking into rocks,
+or for passing from the too pressing monstrosities of an existing state
+of things, to the old lapidified monstrosities of the past. And so my
+design on the Hebrides had to be postponed for a twelvemonth. But my
+friend, now afloat in his Free Church yacht, had got a home on the sea
+beside his island charge, which, if not very secure when nights were
+dark and winds loud, and the little vessel tilted high to the long roll
+of the Atlantic, lay at least beyond the reach of man's intolerance, and
+not beyond the protecting care of the Almighty. He had written me that
+he 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 humbler
+meteorologists, had in this part of the country its alternate fits of
+sunshine and shower. We passed gaily along the green banks of the Clyde,
+with their rich flat fields glittering in moisture, and their lines of
+stately trees, that, as the light flashed out, threw their shadows over
+the grass. The river expanded into the estuary, the estuary into the
+open sea; we left behind us beacon, and obelisk, and rock-perched
+castle;--
+
+       "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 the
+Frith, with the ridgy table-land of Ayrshire stretching away, green, on
+the one side, and the serrated peaks of Arran rising dark and high on
+the other. At sunrise next morning our boat lay, unloading a portion of
+her cargo, in one of the ports of Islay, and we could see the Irish
+coast resting on the horizon to the south and west, like a long
+undulating bank of thin blue cloud; with the island of Rachrin--famous
+for the asylum it had afforded the Bruce when there was no home for him
+in Scotland,--presenting in front its mass of darker azure. On and away!
+We swept past Islay, with its low fertile hills of mica-schist and
+slate; and Jura, with its flat dreary moors, and its far-seen gigantic
+paps, 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 necessary
+for the purpose on the plain below. The Professor describes the view
+from the summit, which includes in its wide circle at once the Isle of
+Skye and the Isle of Man, as singularly noble and imposing; two such
+prospects more, he says, would bring under the eye the whole island of
+Great Britain, from the Pentland Frith to the English Channel. We sped
+past Jura. Then came the Gulf of Coryvrekin, with the bare mountain
+island of Scarba overlooking the fierce, far-famed whirlpool, that we
+could see from the deck, breaking in long lines of foam, and sending out
+its waves in wide rings on every side, when not a speck of white was
+visible elsewhere in the expanse of sea around us. And then came an
+opener space, studded with smaller islands,--mere hill-tops rising out
+of the sea, with here and there insulated groups of pointed rocks, the
+skeletons of perished hills, amid which the tide chafed and fretted, as
+if laboring to complete on the broken remains their work of denudation
+and ruin.
+
+The disposition of land and water on this coast suggests the idea that
+the Western Highlands, from the line in the interior, whence the rivers
+descend to the Atlantic, with the islands beyond to the outer Hebrides,
+are all parts of one great mountainous plane, inclined slantways into
+the sea. First, the long withdrawing valleys of the main land, with
+their brown mossy streams, change their character as they dip beneath
+the sea-level, and become salt-water lochs. The lines of hills that rise
+over them jut out as promontories, till cut off by some transverse
+valley, lowered still more deeply into the brine, and that exists as a
+kyle, minch, or sound, swept twice every tide by powerful currents. The
+sea deepens as the plain slopes downward; mountain-chains stand up out
+of the water as larger islands, single mountains as smaller ones, lower
+eminences as mere groups of pointed rocks; till at length, as we pass
+outwards, all trace of the submerged land disappears, and the wide ocean
+stretches out and away its unfathomable depths. The model of some Alpine
+country raised in plaster on a flat board, and tilted slantways, at a
+low angle, into a basin of water, would exhibit, on a minute scale, an
+appearance exactly similar to that presented by the western coast of
+Scotland 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 of
+the geology of the coast, with its promontories and islands,
+communicates a different idea. These islands and promontories prove to
+be of very various ages and origin. The _outer_ Hebrides may have
+existed as the inner skeleton of some ancient country, contemporary with
+the main land, and that bore on its upper soils the productions of
+perished creations, at a time when by much the larger portion of the
+_inner_ Hebrides,--Skye, and Mull, and the Small Isles,--existed as part
+of the bottom of a wide sound, inhabited by the Cephalopoda and
+Enaliosaurians of the Lias and the Oölite. Judging from its components,
+the Long Island, like the Lammermoors and the Grampians, may have been
+smiling to the sun when the Alps and the Himalaya Mountains lay buried
+in 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, washed
+down by the streams, grew heavy and sank, and on which the belemnite
+dropped 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 mere
+upstart, and Dhawalageri, with its twenty-eight thousand feet of
+elevation, a heady fellow of yesterday,--is not that of a land settling
+down by the head, like a foundering vessel, but of a land whose hills
+and islands, like its great aristocratic families, have arisen from the
+level in very various ages, and under the operation of circumstances
+essentially diverse.
+
+We left behind us the islands of Lunga, Luing, and Seil, and entered the
+narrow Sound of Kerrera, with its border of Old Red conglomerate resting
+on the clay-slate of the district. We had passed Esdaile near enough to
+see the workmen employed in the quarries of the island, so extensively
+known in commerce for their roofing slate, and several small vessels
+beside them, engaged in loading; and now we had got a step higher in the
+geological scale, and could mark from the deck the peculiar character of
+the conglomerate, which, in cliffs washed by the sea, when the binding
+matrix is softer than the pebbles which it encloses, roughens, instead
+of being polished, by the action of the waves, and which, along the
+eastern side of the Sound here, seems as if formed of cannon-shot, of
+all sizes, embedded in cement. The Sound terminates in the beautiful bay
+of Oban, so quiet and sheltered, with its two island breakwaters in
+front,--its semi-circular sweep of hill behind,--its long white-walled
+village, bent like a bow, to conform to the inflection of the
+shore,--its mural precipices behind, tapestried with ivy,--its rich
+patches of green pasture,--its bosky dingles of shrub and tree,--and,
+perched on the seaward promontory, its old, time-eaten keep. "In one
+part of the harbor of Oban," says Dr. James Anderson, in his "Practical
+Treatise on Peat Moss," (1794), "where the depth of the sea is about
+twenty fathoms, the bottom is found to consist of quick peat, which
+affords no safe anchorage." I made inquiry at the captain of the
+steamer, 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 Fort
+William steamer; and, taking out hammer and chisel from my bag, I
+stepped ashore to question my ancient acquaintance, the Old Red
+conglomerate, and was fortunate enough to meet on the pier-head, as I
+landed, one of the best of companions for assisting in such work, Mr.
+Colin Elder, of Isle Ornsay,--the gentleman who had so kindly furnished
+my friend Mr. Swanson with an asylum for his family, when there was no
+longer a home for them in Small Isles. "You are much in luck," he said,
+after our first greeting: "one of the villagers, in improving his
+garden, has just made a cut for some fifteen or twenty yards along the
+face of the precipice behind the village, and laid open the line of
+junction between the conglomerate and the clay-slate. Let us go and see
+it."
+
+I found several things worthy of notice in the chance section to which I
+was thus introduced. The conglomerate lies uncomfortably along the edges
+of the slate strata, which present under it an appearance exactly
+similar to that which they exhibit under the rolled stones and shingle
+of the neighboring shore, where we find them laid bare beside the
+harbor, for several hundred yards. And, mixed with the pebbles of
+various character and origin of which the conglomerate is mainly
+composed, we see detached masses of the slate, that still exhibit on
+their edges the identical lines of fracture characteristic of the rock,
+which they received, when torn from the mass below, myriads of ages
+before. In the incalculably remote period in which the conglomerate base
+of the Old Red Sandstone was formed, the clay-slate of this district had
+been exactly the same sort of rock that it is now. Some long anterior
+convulsion had upturned its strata, and the sweep of water, mingled with
+broken fragments of stone, had worn smooth the exposed edges, just as a
+similar agency wears the edges exposed at the present time. Quarries
+might have been opened in this rock, as now, for a roofing-slate, had
+there been quarriers to open them, or houses to roof over; it was in
+every respect as ancient a looking stone then as in the present late age
+of the world. There are no sermons that seem stranger or more impressive
+to one who has acquired just a little of the language in which they are
+preached, than those which, according to the poet, are to be found in
+stones; a bit of fractured slate, embedded among a mass of rounded
+pebbles, proves voluble with ideas of a kind almost too large for the
+mind of man to grasp. The eternity that hath passed is an ocean without
+a further shore, and a finite conception may in vain attempt to span it
+over. But from the beach, strewed with wrecks, on which we stand to
+contemplate it, we see far out towards the cloudy horizon, many a dim
+islet and many a pinnacled rock, the sepulchres of successive eras,--the
+monuments of consecutive creations: the entire prospect is studded over
+with these landmarks of a hoar antiquity, which, measuring out space
+from space, constitute the vast whole a province of time; nor can the
+eye reach to the open, shoreless infinitude beyond, in which only God
+existed; and, as in a sea-scene in nature, in which headland stretches
+dim and blue beyond headland, and islet beyond islet, the distance seems
+not lessened, but increased, by the crowded objects--we borrow a
+larger, not a smaller idea of the distant eternity, from the vastness of
+the measured periods that occur between.
+
+Over the lower bed of conglomerate, which here, as on the east coast, is
+of great thickness, we find a bed of gray stratified clay, containing a
+few calcareo-argillaceous nodules. The conglomerate cliffs to the north
+of the village present appearances highly interesting to the geologist.
+Rising in a long wall within the pleasure-grounds of Dunolly castle, we
+find them wooded atop and at the base; while immediately at their feet
+there stretches out a grassy lawn, traversed by the road from the
+village to the castle, which sinks with a gradual slope into the
+existing sea-beach, but which ages ago must have been a sea-beach
+itself. We see the bases of the precipices hollowed and worn, with all
+their rents and crevices widened into caves; and mark, at a picturesque
+angle of the rock, what must have been once an insulated sea-stack, some
+thirty or forty feet in height, standing up from amid the rank grass, as
+at one time it stood up from amid the waves. Tufts of fern and sprays of
+ivy bristle from its sides, once roughened by the serrated kelp-weed and
+the tangle. The Highlanders call it M'Dougal's Dog-stone, and say that
+the old chieftains of Lorne made use of it as a post to which to fasten
+their dogs,--animals wild and gigantic as themselves,--when the hunters
+were gathering to rendezvous, and the impatient beagles struggled to
+break away and begin the chase on their own behalf. It owes its
+existence as a stack--for the precipice in which it was once included
+has receded from around it for yards--to an immense boulder in its
+base--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 feet
+in the line of its largest diagonal. A second huge pebble in the same
+detached spire measures four feet by about three. Both have their edges
+much rounded, as if, ere their deposition in the conglomerate, they had
+been long exposed to the wear of the sea; and both are composed of an
+earthy amygdaloidal trap. I have stated elsewhere ["Old Red Sandstone,"
+Chapter XII.], that I had scarce ever seen a stone in the Old Red
+conglomerate which I could not raise from the ground; and ere I said so
+I had examined no inconsiderable extent of this deposit, chiefly,
+however, along the eastern coast of Scotland, where its larger pebbles
+rarely exceed two hundred weight. How account for the occurrence of
+pebbles of so gigantic a size here? We can but guess at a solution, and
+that very vaguely. The islands of Mull and Kerrera form, in the present
+state of things, inner and outer breakwaters between what is now the
+coast of Oban and the waves of the Atlantic; but Mull, in the times of
+even the Oölite, must have existed as a mere sea-bottom; and Kerrera,
+composed mainly of trap, which has brought with it to the surface
+patches of the conglomerate, must, when the conglomerate was in forming,
+have been a mere sea-bottom also. Is it not possible, that when the
+breakwaters _were not_, the Atlantic _was_, and that its tempests, which
+in the present time can transport vast rocks for hundreds of yards along
+the exposed coasts of Shetland and Orkney, may have been the agent here
+in the transport of these huge pebbles of the Old Red conglomerate?
+"Rocks that two or three men could not lift," say the Messrs. Anderson
+of Inverness, in describing the storms of Orkney, "are washed about even
+on the tops of cliffs, which are between sixty and a hundred feet above
+the surface of the sea, when smooth; and detached masses of rock, of an
+enormous size, are well known to have been carried a considerable
+distance between low and high-water mark." "A little way from the
+Brough," says Dr. Patrick Neill, in his 'Tour through Orkney and
+Shetland,' "we saw the prodigious effects of a late winter storm: many
+great stones, one of them of several tons weight, had been tossed up a
+precipice twenty or thirty feet high, and laid fairly on the green
+sward." There is something farther worthy of notice in the stone of
+which the two boulders of the Dog-stack are composed. No species of rock
+occurs more abundantly in the embedded pebbles of this ancient
+conglomerate than rocks of the trap family. We find in it
+trap-porphyries, greenstones, clinkstones, basalts, and amygdalolds,
+largely mingled with fragments of the granitic, clay-slate, and quartz
+rocks. The Plutonic agencies must have been active in the locality for
+periods amazingly protracted; and many of the masses protruded at a very
+early time seem identical in their composition with rocks of the trap
+family, which in other parts of the country we find referred to much
+later eras. There occur in this deposit rolled pebbles of a basalt,
+which in the neighborhood of Edinburgh would be deemed considerably more
+modern than the times of the Mountain Limestone, and in the Isle of
+Skye, considerably more modern than the times of the Oölite.
+
+The sunlight was showering its last slant rays on island and loch, and
+then retreating upwards along the higher hills, chased by the shadows,
+as our boat quitted the bay of Oban, and stretched northwards, along the
+end of green Lismore, for the Sound of Mull. We had just enough of day
+left, as we reached mid sea, to show us the gray fronts of the three
+ancient castles,--- which at this point may be at once seen from the
+deck,--Dunolly, Duart, and Dunstaffnage; and enough left us as we
+entered the Sound, to show, and barely show, the Lady Rock, famous in
+tradition, and made classic by the pen of Campbell, raising its black
+back amid the tides, like a belated porpoise. And then twilight
+deepened into night, and we went snorting through the Strait with a
+stream of green light curling off from either bow in the calm, towards
+the high dim land, that seemed standing up on both sides like tall
+hedges over a green lane. We entered the Bay of Tobermory about
+midnight, and cast anchor amid a group of little vessels. An exceedingly
+small boat shot out from the side of a yacht of rather diminutive
+proportions, but tautly rigged for her size, and bearing an outrigger
+astern. The water this evening was full of phosphoric matter, and it
+gleamed and sparkled around the little boat like a northern aurora
+around a dark cloudlet. There was just light enough to show that the
+oars were plied by a sailor-like man in a Guernsey frock, and that
+another sailor-like man,--the skipper, mayhap,--attired in a cap and
+pea-jacket, stood in the stern. The man in the Guernsey frock was John
+Stewart, 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 of
+the Protestants of Small Isles. In five minutes more I was sitting with
+Mr. Elder beside the little iron stove in the cabin of the Betsey; and
+the minister, divested of his cap and jacket, but still looking the
+veritable skipper to admiration, was busied in making us a rather late
+tea.
+
+The cabin,--my home for the greater part of the three following weeks,
+and that of my friend for the greater part of the previous
+twelvemonth,--I found to be an apartment about twice the size of a
+common bed, and just lofty enough under the beams to permit a man of
+five feet eleven to stand erect in his night-cap. A large table, lashed
+to 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 the
+narrow coffin-like beds in the sides, and space enough at its fore-end
+for two seats in front of the stove. A jealously barred skylight opened
+above; and there depended from it this evening a close lantern-looking
+lamp, sufficiently valuable, no doubt, in foul weather, but dreary and
+dim on the occasions when all one really wished from it was light. The
+peculiar furniture of the place gave evidence to the mixed nature of my
+friend's employment. A well-thumbed chart of the Western Islands lay
+across an equally well-thumbed volume of Henry's "Commentary." There was
+a Polyglot and a spy-glass in one corner, and a copy of Calvin's
+"Institutes," with the latest edition of "The Coaster's Sailing
+Directions," in another; while in an adjoining state-room, nearly large
+enough to accommodate an arm-chair, if the chair could have but
+contrived to get into it, I caught a glimpse of my friend's printing
+press and his case of types, canopied overhead by the blue ancient of
+the vessel, bearing, in stately six-inch letters of white bunting, the
+legend, "FREE CHURCH YACHT." A door opened, which communicated with the
+forecastle, and John Stewart, stooping very much, to accommodate himself
+to the low-roofed passage, thrust in a plate of fresh herrings,
+splendidly toasted, to give substantiality and relish to our tea. The
+little rude forecastle, a considerably smaller apartment than the cabin,
+was all a-glow with the bright fire in the coppers, itself invisible; we
+could see the chain-cable dangling from the hatchway to the floor, and
+John Stewart's companion, a powerful-looking, handsome young man, with
+broad bare breast, and in his shirt-sleeves, squatted full in front of
+the blaze, like the household goblin described by Milton, or the
+"Christmas Present" of Dickens. Mr. Elder left us for the steamer, in
+which 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 my
+bedside, when I awoke, a fragment of rock which he had brought from the
+shore, charged with Liasic fossils; and a note he had written, to say
+that the deposit to which it belonged occurred in the trap immediately
+above the village-mill; and further, to call my attention to a house
+near the middle of the village, built of a mouldering red sandstone,
+which had been found _in situ_ in digging the foundations. I had but
+little time for the work of exploration in Mull, and the information
+thus kindly rendered enabled me to economize it.
+
+The village of Tobermory resembles that of Oban. A quiet bay has its
+secure 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 they
+had been transported from the centre of some stately city entire and at
+once, sweeps round its inner inflection, like a bent bow; and an
+amphitheatre of mingled rock and wood rises behind. With all its beauty,
+however, there hangs about the village an air of melancholy. Like some
+of the other western coast villages, it seems not to have grown,
+piece-meal, as a village ought, but to have been made wholesale, as
+Frankenstein made his man; and to be ever asking, and never more
+incessantly than when it is at its quietest, why it should have been
+made at all? The remains of the Florida, a gallant Spanish ship, lie off
+its shores, a wreck of the Invincible Armada, "deep whelmed," according
+to 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 a
+century ago, to weigh up the Florida, which ended in the weighing up of
+merely a few of her guns, some of them of iron greatly corroded; and
+that, on scraping them, they became so hot under the hand that they
+could not be touched, but that they lost this curious property after a
+few hours' exposure to the air. There have since been repeated instances
+elsewhere, he adds, of the same phenomenon, and chemistry has lent its
+solution of the principles on which it occurs; but, in the year 1740,
+ere the riddle was read, it must have been deemed a thoroughly magical
+one by the simple islanders of Mull. It would seem as if the guns,
+heated in the contest with Drake, Hawkins, and Frobisher, had again
+kindled, under some supernatural influence, with the intense glow of the
+lost battle.
+
+The morning was showery; but it cleared up a little after ten, and we
+landed to explore. We found the mill a little to the south of the
+village, where a small stream descends, all foam and uproar, from the
+higher grounds along a rocky channel half-hidden by brushwood; and the
+Liasic bed occurs in an exposed front directly over it, coped by a thick
+bed of amygdaloidal trap. The organisms are numerous; and, when we dig
+into the bank beyond the reach of the weathering influences, we find
+them delicately preserved, though after a fashion that renders difficult
+their safe removal. Originally the bed must have existed as a brown
+argillaceous mud, somewhat resembling that which forms in the course of
+years, under a scalp of muscles; and it has hardened into a more
+silt-like clay, in which the fossils occur, not as petrifactions, but
+as shells in a state of decay, except in some rare cases, in which a
+calcareous nodule has formed within or around them. Viewed in the group,
+they seem of an intermediate character, between the shells of the Lias
+and the Oölite. One of the first fossils I disinterred was the Gryphæa
+obliquata,--a shell characteristic of the Liasic formation; and the
+fossil immediately after, the Pholadomy æqualis, a shell of the Oölitic
+one. There occurs in great numbers a species of small Pecten,--some of
+the specimens scarce larger than a herring scale; a minute Ostrea, a
+sulcated Terebratula, an Isocardia, a Pullastra, and groups of broken
+serpulæ in vast abundance. The deposit has also its three species of
+Ammonite, existing as mere impressions in the clay; and at least two
+species of Belemnite,--one of the two somewhat resembling the Belemnites
+abbreviatus, but smaller and rather more elongated: while the other, of
+a spindle form, diminishing at both ends, reminds one of the Belemnites
+minimus of the Gault. The Red Sandstone in the centre of the village
+occurs detached, like this Liasic bed, amid the prevailing trap, and may
+be seen _in situ_ beside the southern gable of the tall, deserted
+looking 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 the
+architect; and more nearly resembles the New Red Sandstone of England
+and Dumfriesshire, than any other rock I have yet seen in the north of
+Scotland. 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 the
+sea. I would fain have approached nearer the precipices of Ardnamurchan,
+to trace along their inaccessible fronts the strange reticulations of
+trap figured by Macculloch; but prudence and the skipper forbade our
+trusting even the docile little Betsey, on one of the most formidable
+lee shores in Scotland, in winds so light and variable, and with the
+swell so high. We could hear the deep roar of the surf for miles, and
+see its undulating strip of white flickering under stack and cliff. The
+scenery here seems rich in legendary association. At one tack we bore
+into Bloody Bay, on the Mull coast,--the scene of a naval battle between
+two island chiefs; at another, we approached, on the mainland, a cave
+inaccessible save from the sea, long the haunt of a ruthless Highland
+pirate. Ere we rounded the headland of Ardnamurchan, the slant light of
+evening was gleaming athwart the green acclivities of Mull, barring them
+with long horizontal lines of shadow, where the trap terraces rise step
+beyond step, in the characteristic stair-like arrangement to which the
+rock owes its name; and the sun set as we were bearing down in one long
+tack on the Small Isles. We passed the Isle of Muck, with its one low
+hill; saw the pyramidal mountains of Rum looming tall in the offing; and
+then, running along the Isle of Eigg, with its colossal Scuir rising
+between us and the sky, as if it were a piece of Babylonian wall, or of
+the great wall of China, only vastly larger, set down on the ridge of a
+mountain, we entered the channel which separates the island from one of
+its dependencies, Eilean Chaisteil, and cast anchor in the tideway,
+about fifty yards from the rocks. We were now at home,--the only home
+which 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 wears
+late,--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 our
+first evidence of the fact came in the agreeable form of three bottles
+of fine fresh cream from the shore. Then followed an ample baking of
+nice oaten cakes. The material out of which the cakes were manufactured
+had been sent from the minister's store aboard,--for oatmeal in Eigg is
+rather a scarce commodity in the middle of July; but they had borrowed a
+crispness and flavor from the island, that the meal, left to its own
+resources, could scarcely have communicated; and the golden-colored
+cylinder of fresh butter which accompanied them was all the island's
+own. There was an ample supply of eggs too, as one not quite a conjuror
+might have expected from a country bearing such a name,--eggs with the
+milk in them; and, with cream, butter, oaten cakes, eggs, and tea, all
+of the best, and with sharp-set sea-air appetites to boot, we fared
+sumptuously. There is properly no harbor in the island. We lay in a
+narrow channel, through which, twice every twenty-four hours, the tides
+sweep powerfully in one direction, and then as powerfully in the
+direction opposite; and our anchors had a trick of getting foul, and
+canting stock downwards in the loose sand, which, with pointed rocks all
+around us, over which the current ran races, seemed a very shrewd sort
+of trick indeed. But a kedge and halser, stretched thwartwise to a
+neighboring crag, and jammed fast in a crevice, served in moderate
+weather to keep us tolerably right. In the severer seasons, however, the
+kedge is found inadequate, and the minister has to hoist sail and make
+out for the open sea, as if served with a sudden summons of ejectment.
+
+Among the various things brought aboard this morning, there was a pair
+of island shoes for the minister's cabin use, that struck my fancy not a
+little. They were all around of a deep madder red color, soles, welts
+and uppers; and, though somewhat resembling in form the little yawl of
+the Betsey, were sewed not unskilfully with thongs; and their peculiar
+style of tie seemed of a kind suited to furnish with new idea a
+fashionable shoemaker of the metropolis. They were altogether the
+production of Eigg, from the skin out of which they had been cut, with
+the lime that had prepared it for the tan, and the root by which the tan
+had been furnished, down to the last on which they had been moulded, and
+the artisan that had cast them off, a pair of finished shoes. There are
+few trees, and, of course, no bark to spare, in the island; but the
+islanders find a substitute in the astringent lobiferous root of the
+_Tormentilla erecta_, which they dig out for the purpose among the
+heath, at no inconsiderable expense of time and trouble. I was informed
+by 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 of
+a house or the working of a ship, that the infusion of root had to be
+thrice changed for every skin, and that it took a man nearly a day to
+gather roots enough for a single infusion. I was further informed that
+it was not unusual for the owner of a skin to give it to some neighbor
+to tan, and that, the process finished, it was divided equally between
+them, the time and trouble bestowed on it by the one being deemed
+equivalent to the property held in it by the other. I wished to call a
+pair of these primitive-looking shoes my own, and no sooner was the wish
+expressed, than straightway one islander furnished me with leather, and
+another set to work upon the shoes. When I came to speak of
+remuneration, however, the islanders shook their heads. "No, no, not
+from 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 with
+the 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, about
+half a mile in length by a few hundred yards in breadth; poor in
+pastures, 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 of
+Parliament, than could be made elsewhere in Eigg. This islet bore, in
+the remote past, its rude fort or dun, long since sunk into a few grassy
+mounds; and hence its name. On the landward side rises the island of
+Eigg proper, resembling in outline two wedges, placed point to point on
+a board. The centre is occupied by a deep angular gap, from which the
+ground slopes upward on both sides, till, attaining its extreme height
+at the opposite ends of the island, it drops suddenly on the sea. In the
+northern rising ground the wedge-like outline is complete; in the
+southern one it is somewhat modified by the gigantic Scuir, which rises
+direct 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 vast
+donjon keep, taller, from base to summit, by about a hundred feet, than
+the dome of St. Paul's. The upper slopes of the island are brown and
+moory, and present little on which the eye may rest, save a few trap
+terraces, with rudely columnar fronts; its middle space is mottled with
+patches of green, and studded with dingy cottages, each of which this
+morning, just a little before the breakfast hour, had its own blue
+cloudlet of smoke diffused around it; while along the beach, patches of
+level sand, alternated with tracts of green bank, or both, give place to
+stately 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 of
+semi-circular columns rises some eighty or a hundred feet over the
+shore; and on a green slope, directly above, we see the picturesque
+ruins of the Chapel of St. Donan, one of the disciples of Columba, and
+the 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 bright
+through the transparent green of the sea, three fathoms below our keel,
+and, in a little flat bay directly opposite, it presented almost the
+appearance of pulverized chalk. A stronger contrast to the dingy
+trap-rocks around which it lies could scarce be produced, had contrast
+for effect's sake been the object. On landing on the exposed shelf to
+which we had fastened our halser, I found the origin of the sand
+interestingly exhibited. The hollows of the rock, a rough trachyte, with
+a surface like that of a steel rasp, were filled with handfuls of broken
+shells thrown up by the surf from the sea-banks beyond: fragments of
+echini, bits of the valves of razor-fish, the island cyprina, mactridæ,
+buccinidæ, and fractured periwinkles, lay heaped together in vast
+abundance. In hollow after hollow, as I passed shorewards, I found the
+fragments more and more comminuted, just as, in passing along the
+successive vats of a paper-mill, one finds the linen rags more and more
+disintegrated by the cylinders; and immediately beyond the inner edge of
+the shelf, which is of considerable extent, lies the flat bay, the
+ultimate recipient of the whole, filled to the depth of several feet,
+and to the extent of several hundred yards, with a pure shell-sand, the
+greater part of which had been thus washed ashore in handfuls, and
+ground down by the blended agency of the trachyte and the surf. Once
+formed, however, in this way it began to receive accessions from the
+exuviæ of animals that love such localities,--the deep arenaceous bed
+and soft sand-beach; and these now form no inconsiderable proportion of
+the entire mass. I found the deposit thickly inhabited by spatangi,
+razor-fish, gapers, and large, well-conditioned cockles, which seemed to
+have no idea whatever that they were living amid the debris of a charnel
+house. Such has been the origin here of a bed of shell-sand, consisting
+of many thousand tons, and of which at least eighty per cent. was once
+associated with animal life. And such, I doubt not, is the history of
+many a calcareous rock in the later secondary formations. There are
+strata, not a few, of the Cretaceous and Oölitic groups, that would be
+found--could we but trace their beginnings with a certainty and
+clearness equal to that with which we can unravel the story of this
+deposit--to be, like it, elaborations from dead matter, made through the
+agency 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 on
+island, and strait, and blue open sea. We rowed southwards in our
+little boat, through the channel of Eilean Chaisteil, along the
+trap-rocks of the island, and landed under the two pitchstone veins of
+Eigg, so generally known among mineralogists, and of which specimens may
+be found in so many cabinets. They occur in an earthy, greenish-black
+amygdaloid, which forms a range of sea-cliffs varying in height from
+thirty to fifty feet, and that, from their sad hue and dull fracture,
+seem to absorb the light; while the veins themselves, bright and
+glistening, glitter in the sun, as if they were streams of water
+traversing the face of the rock. The first impression they imparted, in
+viewing them from the boat, was, that the inclosing mass was a pitch
+caldron, rather of the roughest and largest, and much begrimmed by soot,
+that had cracked to the heat, and that the fluid pitch was forcing its
+way outwards through the rents. The veins expand and contract, here
+diminishing to a strip a few inches across, there widening into a
+comparatively broad belt, some two or three feet over; and, as well
+described by M'Culloch, we find the inclosed pitchstone changing in
+color, and assuming a lighter or darker hue, as it nears the edge or
+recedes from it. In the centre it is of a dull olive green, passing
+gradually into blue, which in turn deepens into black; and it is exactly
+at the point of contact with the earthy amygdaloid that the black is
+most intense, and the fracture of the stone glassiest and brightest. I
+was lucky enough to detach a specimen, which, though scarce four inches
+across, exhibits the three colors characteristic of the vein,--its bar
+of olive green on the one side, of intense black on the other, and of
+blue, like that of imperfectly fused bottle-glass, in the centre. This
+curious rock,--so nearly akin in composition and appearance to
+obsidian,--a mineral which, in its dense form, closely resembles the
+coarse dark-colored glass of which common bottles are made, and which,
+in its lighter form, exists as pumice,--constitutes one of the links
+that connect the trap with the unequivocally volcanic rocks. The one
+mineral may be seen beside smoking crater, as in the Lipari Isles,
+passing into pumice; while the other may be converted into a substance
+almost identical with pumice, by the chemist. "It is stated by the
+Honorable George Knox, of Dublin," says Mr. Robert Allan, in his
+valuable mineralogical work, "that the pitchstone of Newry, on being
+exposed to a high temperature, loses its bitumen and water, and is
+converted 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, and
+taking with us his companion, to assist us in carrying such specimens as
+we might procure, we passed westwards for a few hundred yards under the
+crags, and came abreast of a dark angular opening at the base of the
+precipice, scarce two feet in height, and in front of which there lies a
+little sluggish, ankle-deep pool, half mud, half water, and matted over
+with grass and rushes. Along the mural face of the rock of earthy
+amygdaloid there runs a nearly vertical line, which in one of the
+stratified rocks one might perhaps term the line of a fault, but which
+in a trap rock may merely indicate where two semi-molten masses had
+pressed against each other without uniting--just as currents of cooling
+lead, poured by the plumber from the opposite end of a groove, sometimes
+meet and press together, so as to make a close, polished joint, without
+running into one piece. The little angular opening forms the lower
+termination of the line, which, hollowing inwards, recedes near the
+bottom into a shallow cave, roughened with tufts of fern and bunches of
+long silky grass, here and there enlivened by the delicate flowers of
+the lesser rock-geranium. A shower of drops patters from above among the
+weeds and rushes of the little pool. My friend the minister stopped
+short. "There," he said, pointing to the hollow, "you will find such a
+bone cave as you never saw before. Within that opening there lie the
+remains of an entire race, palpably destroyed, as geologists in so many
+other cases are content merely to imagine, by one great catastrophe.
+That is the famous cave of Frances (_Uamh Fraingh_), in which the whole
+people 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 lofty
+than one could have anticipated from the mean vestibule placed in front
+of it. Its extreme length we found to be two hundred and sixty feet; its
+extreme breadth twenty-seven feet; its height, where the roof rises
+highest, from eighteen to twenty feet. The cave seems to have owed its
+origin to two distinct causes. The trap-rocks on each side of the
+vertical fault-like crevice which separates them are greatly decomposed,
+as if by the moisture percolating from above; and directly in the line
+of the crevice must the surf have charged, wave after wave, for ages ere
+the last upheaval of the land. When the Dog-stone at Dunolly existed as
+a sea-stack, skirted with algæ, the breakers on this shore must have
+dashed every tide through the narrow opening of the cavern, and scooped
+out by handfuls the decomposing trap within. The process of
+decomposition, and consequent enlargement, is still going on inside, but
+there is no longer an agent to sweep away the disintegrated fragments.
+Where the roof rises highest, the floor is blocked up with accumulations
+of bulky decaying masses, that have dropped from above; and it is
+covered over its entire area by a stratum of earthy rubbish, which has
+fallen from the sides and ceiling in such abundance, that it covers up
+the straw beds of the perished islanders, which still exist beneath as a
+brown mouldering felt, to the depth of from five to eight inches. Never
+yet was tragedy enacted on a gloomier theatre. An uncertain twilight
+glimmers gray at the entrance, from the narrow vestibule; but all
+within, for full two hundred feet, is black as with Egyptian darkness.
+As we passed onward with our one feeble light, along the dark mouldering
+walls and roof, which absorbed every straggling ray that reached them,
+and over the dingy floor, ropy and damp, the place called to
+recollection that hall in Roman story, hung and carpeted with black,
+into which Domitian once thrust his senate, in a frolic, to read their
+own names on the coffin-lids placed against the wall. The darkness
+seemed to press upon us from every side, as if it were a dense jetty
+fluid, out of which our light had scooped a pailful or two, and that was
+rushing in to supply the vacuum; and the only objects we saw distinctly
+visible were each other's heads and faces, and the lighter parts of our
+dress.
+
+The floor, for about a hundred feet inwards from the narrow vestibule,
+resembles that of a charnel-house. At almost every step we came upon
+heaps of human bones grouped together, as the Psalmist so graphically
+describes, "as when one cutteth and cleaveth wood upon the earth." They
+are of a brownish, earthy hue, here and there tinged with green; the
+skulls, with the exception of a few broken fragments, have disappeared;
+for travellers in the Hebrides have of late years been numerous and
+curious; and many a museum,--that at Abbotsford among the
+rest,--exhibits, in a grinning skull, its memorial of the Massacre at
+Eigg. We find, too, further marks of visitors in the single bones
+separated from the heaps and scattered over the area; but enough still
+remains to show, in the general disposition of the remains, that the
+hapless islanders died under the walls in families, each little group
+separated by a few feet from the others. Here and there the remains of a
+detached skeleton may be seen, as if some robust islander, restless in
+his agony, had stalked out into the middle space ere he fell; but the
+social 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 the
+straw-bed upon which the family had lain, largely mixed with the smaller
+bones of the human frame, ribs and vertebræ, and hand and feet bones;
+occasionally, too, with fragments of unglazed pottery, and various other
+implements of a rude housewifery. The minister found for me, under one
+family heap, the pieces of a half-burned, unglazed earthen jar, with a
+narrow mouth, that, like the sepulchral urns of our ancient tumuli, had
+been 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's
+wooden porringer (_bicker_), perforated by a hole still bearing the mark
+of the cord that had hung it to the wall; and beside the stave lay a few
+of the larger, less destructible bones of the child, with what for a
+time 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 a
+tooth,--a foal of a week old could not have pressed itself through the
+opening; and how the single grinder, evidently no recent introduction
+into the cave, could have got mixed up in the straw with the human
+bones, seemed an enigma somewhat of the class to which the reel in the
+bottle belongs. I found in Edinburgh an unexpected commentator on the
+mystery, in the person of my little boy,--an experimental philosopher in
+his second year. I had spread out on the floor the curiosities of
+Eigg,--among the rest, the relics of the cave, including the pieces of
+earthern jar, and the fragment of the porringer; but the horse's tooth
+seemed to be the only real curiosity among them in the eyes of little
+Bill. He laid instant hold of it; and, appropriating it as a toy,
+continued playing with it till he fell asleep. I have now little doubt
+that it was first brought into the cave by the poor child amid whose
+mouldering remains Mr. Swanson found it. The little pellet of gray hair
+spoke of feeble old age involved in this wholesale massacre with the
+vigorous manhood of the island; and here was a story of unsuspecting
+infancy amusing itself on the eve of destruction with its toys. Alas,
+for man! "Should not I spare Nineveh, that great city," said God to the
+angry prophet, "wherein are more than six score thousand persons that
+cannot discern between their right hand and their left?" God's image
+must have been sadly defaced in the murderers of the poor inoffensive
+children of Eigg, ere they could have heard their feeble wailings,
+raised, no doubt, when the stifling atmosphere within began first to
+thicken, and yet ruthlessly persist in their work of indiscriminate
+destruction.
+
+Various curious things have from time to time been picked up from under
+the bones. An islander found among them, shortly before our visit, a
+sewing needle of copper, little more than an inch in length; fragments
+of Eigg shoes, of the kind still made in the island, are of
+comparatively common occurrence; and Mr. James Wilson relates, in the
+singularly graphic and powerful description of _Uamh Fraingh_, which
+occurs in his "Voyage round the Coasts of Scotland" (1841), that a
+sailor, 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 for
+granted, as I suppose I may, that the dentology of the murderous M'Leods
+outside the cave must have very much resembled that of the murdered
+M'Donalds within, very harmless looking teeth they were for being those
+of an animal so maliciously mischievous as man. I have found in the Old
+Red Sandstone the strong-based tusks of the semi-reptile Holoptychius; I
+have chiselled out of the limestone of the Coal Measures the sharp,
+dagger-like incisors of the Megalichthys; I have picked up in the Lias
+and Oölite the cruel spikes of the Crocodile and the Ichthyosaurus; I
+have seen the trenchant, saw-edged teeth of gigantic Cestracions and
+Squalidæ that had been disinterred from the Chalk and the London Clay;
+and I have felt, as I examined them, that there could be no possibility
+of mistake regarding the nature of the creatures to which they had
+belonged;--they were teeth made for hacking, tearing, mangling,--for
+amputating 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 three
+inoffensive looking grinders, that the animal it had belonged to,--far
+more ruthless and cruel than reptile-fish, crocodiles, or sharks,--was
+of such a nature that it could destroy creatures of even its own kind by
+hundreds at a time, when not in the least incited by hunger, and with no
+ultimate intention of eating them. Man must surely have become an
+immensely worse animal than his teeth show him to have been designed
+for; his teeth give no real evidence regarding his real character. Who,
+for instance, could gather from the dentology of the M'Leods the passage
+in their history to which the cave of Frances bears evidence?
+
+We quitted the cave, with its stagnant damp atmosphere and its mouldy
+unwholesome 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; and
+I learned from my friend, versant in all the various island traditions
+regarding it, that the less I inquired into its history on the spot, the
+more 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, in
+the rude age of the unglazed pipkin and the copper needle; and many
+years seem to have elapsed ere the story of their hapless possessors was
+committed to writing; and so we find it existing in various and somewhat
+conflicting editions. "Some hundred years ago," says Mr. Wilson, "a few
+of the M'Leods landed in Eigg from Skye, where, having greatly
+misconducted themselves, the Eiggites strapped them to their own boats,
+which they sent adrift into the ocean. They were, however, rescued by
+some clansmen; and, soon after, a strong body of the M'Leods set sail
+from Skye, to revenge themselves on Eigg. The natives of the latter
+island 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 exceedingly
+small entrance. It opens from the broken face of a steep bank along the
+shore; and, as the whole coast is cavernous, their particular retreat
+would have been sought for in vain by strangers. So the Skye-men,
+finding the island uninhabited, presumed the natives had fled, and
+satisfied their revengeful feelings by ransacking and pillaging the
+empty houses. Probably the _movables_ were of no great value. They then
+took their departure and left the island, when the sight of a solitary
+human being among the cliffs awakened their suspicion, and induced them
+to return. Unfortunately a slight sprinkling of snow had fallen, and the
+footsteps of an individual were traced to the mouth of the cave. Not
+having been there ourselves at the period alluded to, we cannot speak
+with certainty as to the nature of the parley which ensued, or the
+terms offered by either party; but we know that those were not the days
+of protocols. The ultimatum was unsatisfactory to the Skye-men, who
+immediately 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 very
+entrance of the _Uamh Fraingh_, which they kept up for a length of time;
+and thus, by 'one fell smoke,' they smothered the entire population of
+the island."
+
+Such is Mr. Wilson's version of the story, which, in all its leading
+circumstances, agrees with that of Sir Walter. According, however, to at
+least one of the Eigg versions, it was the M'Leod himself who had landed
+on the island, driven there by a storm. The islanders, at feud with the
+M'Leod's at the time, inhospitably rose upon him, as he bivouacked on
+the shores of the Bay of Laig; and in a fray, in which his party had the
+worse, his back was broken, and he was forced off half dead to sea.
+Several months after, on his partial recovery, he returned, crook-backed
+and infirm, to wreak his vengeance on the inhabitants, all of whom,
+warned of his coming by the array of his galleys in the offing, hid
+themselves in the cave, in which, however, they were ultimately
+betrayed--as narrated by Sir Walter and Mr. Wilson--by the track of some
+footpaths in a sprinkling of snow; and the implacable chieftain, giving
+orders 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 the
+wild, hollow cry from the rock within had sunk into silence, and there
+lived not a single islander of Eigg, man, woman, or child. The fact that
+their remains should have been left to moulder in the cave is proof
+enough, of itself, that none survived to bury the dead. I am inclined
+to believe, from the appearance of the place, that smoke could scarcely
+have been the real agent of destruction; then, as now, it would have
+taken a great deal of pure smoke to smother a Highlander. It may be
+perhaps deemed more probable, that the huge fire of rafter and roof-tree
+piled close against the opening, and rising high over it, would draw out
+the oxygen within as its proper food, till at length all would be
+exhausted; and life would go out for want of it, like the flame of a
+candle under an upturned jar. Sir Walter refers the date of the event to
+some time "about the close of the sixteenth century;" and the coin of
+Queen Mary, mentioned by Mr. Wilson, points at a period at least not
+much earlier; but the exact time of its occurrence is so uncertain, that
+a Roman Catholic priest of the Hebrides, in lately showing his people
+what a very bad thing Protestantism is, instanced, as a specimen of its
+average morality, the affair of the cave. The _Protestant_ M'Leods of
+Skye, he said, full of hatred in their hearts, had murdered, wholesale,
+their wretched brethren, the _Protestant_ M'Donalds of Eigg, and sent
+them off to perdition before their time.
+
+Quitting the beach, we ascended the breezy hill-side on our way to the
+Scuir,--an object so often and so well described, that it might be
+perhaps prudent, instead of attempting one description more, to present
+the reader with some of the already existing ones. "The Scuir of Eigg,"
+says Professor Jamieson, in his 'Mineralogy of the Western Islands,' "is
+perfectly mural, and extends for upwards of a mile and a half, and rises
+to a height of several hundred feet. It is entirely columnar, and the
+columns 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 of
+art; but it has not the extent or sublimity of the Scuir of Eigg. The
+one may be compared with the greatest exertions of human power; the
+other is characteristic of the wildest and most inimitable works of
+nature." "The height of this extraordinary object is considerable," says
+M'Culloch, dashing off his sketch with a still bolder hand; "yet its
+powerful effect arises rather from its peculiar form, and the commanding
+elevation which it occupies, than from its positive altitude. Viewed in
+one direction, it presents a long irregular wall, crowning the summit of
+the highest hill, while in the other it resembles a huge tower. Thus it
+forms no natural combination of outline with the surrounding land, and
+hence acquires that independence in the general landscape which
+increases its apparent magnitude, and produces that imposing effect
+which it displays. From the peculiar position of the Scuir, it must also
+inevitably be viewed from a low station. Hence it everywhere towers high
+above the spectator; while, like other objects on the mountain outline,
+its apparent dimensions are magnified, and its dark mass defined on the
+sky, so as to produce all the additional effects arising from strong
+oppositions of light and shadow. The height of this rock is sufficient
+in this stormy country frequently to arrest the passage of the clouds,
+so as to be further productive of the most brilliant effects in
+landscape. Often they may be seen hovering on its summit, and adding
+ideal dimensions to the lofty face, or, when it is viewed on the
+extremity, conveying the impression of a tower, the height of which is
+such as to lie in the regions of the clouds. Occasionally they sweep
+along the base, leaving its huge and black mass involved in additional
+gloom, and resembling the castle of some Arabian enchanter, built on the
+clouds, and suspended in air." It might be perhaps deemed somewhat
+invidious to deal with pictures such as these in the style the
+connoisseur in the "Vicar of Wakefield" dealt with the old painting,
+when, seizing a brush, he daubed it over with brown varnish, and then
+asked the spectators whether he had not greatly improved the tone of the
+coloring. And yet it is just possible, that in the case of at least
+M'Culloch's picture, the brown varnish might do no manner of harm. But a
+homelier sketch, traced out on almost the same leading lines, with just
+a little less of the aërial in it, may have nearly the same subduing
+effect; I have, besides, a few curious touches to lay in, which seem
+hitherto to have escaped observation and the pencil; and in these
+several circumstances must lie my apology for adding one sketch more to
+the sketches existing already.
+
+The Scuir of Eigg, then, is a veritable Giant's Causeway, like that on
+the coast of Antrim, taken and magnified rather more than twenty times
+in height, and some five or six times in breadth, and then placed on the
+ridge of a hill nearly nine hundred feet high. Viewed sideways, it
+assumes, as described by M'Culloch, the form of a perpendicular but
+ruinous rampart, much gapped above, that runs for about a mile and a
+quarter along the top of a lofty sloping talus. Viewed endways, it
+resembles 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 three
+hundred feet in breadth by four hundred and seventy feet in height,
+perched on the apex of a pyramid, like a statue on a pedestal. This
+strange causeway is columnar from end to end; but the columns, from
+their great altitude and deficient breadth, seem mere rodded shafts in
+the Gothic style; they rather resemble bundles of rods than
+well-proportioned pillars. Few of them exceed eighteen inches in
+diameter, and many of them fall short of half a foot; but, though lost
+in the general mass of the Scuir as independent columns, when we view it
+at an angle sufficiently large to take in its entire bulk, they yet
+impart to it that graceful linear effect which we see brought out in
+tasteful pencil sketches and good line engravings. We approached it this
+day from the shore in the direction in which the eminence it stands upon
+assumes the pyramidal form, and itself the tower-like outline. The
+acclivity is barren and stony,--a true desert foreground, like those of
+Thebes and Palmyra; and the huge square shadow of the tower stretched
+dark and cold athwart it. The sun shone out clearly. One half the
+immense bulk before us, with its delicate vertical lining, lay from top
+to bottom in deep shade, massive and gray; one half presented its
+many-sided columns to the light, here and there gleaming with tints of
+extreme brightness, where the pitchstones presented their glassy planes
+to the sun; its general outline, whether pencilled by the lighter or
+darker tints, stood out sharp and clear; and a stratum of white fleecy
+clouds floated slowly amid the delicious blue behind it. But the minuter
+details I must reserve for my next chapter. One fact, however,
+anticipated just a little out of its order, may heighten the interest of
+the reader. There are massive buildings,--bridges of noble span, and
+harbors that abut far into the waves,--founded on wooden piles; and this
+hugest of hill-forts we find founded on wooden piles also. It is built
+on what a Scotch architect would perhaps term a pile-_brander_ of the
+_Pinites Eiggensis_, an ancient tree of the Oölite. The gigantic Scuir
+of 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 rose
+higher over the horizon at each step we took, till it seemed pointing at
+the middle sky, we could mark peculiarities in its structure which
+escape notice in the distance. We found it composed of various beds,
+each of which would make a Giant's Causeway entire, piled over each
+other like stories in a building, and divided into columns, vertical, or
+nearly so, in every instance except in one bed near the base, in which
+the pillars incline to a side, as if losing footing under the
+superincumbent weight. Innumerable polygonal fragments,--single stones
+of the building,--lie scattered over the slope, composed, like almost
+all 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, a
+mass of black sealing-wax, with numerous pieces of white bugle stuck
+into it. Some of the detached polygons are of considerable size; few of
+them larger and bulkier, however, than a piece of column of this
+characteristic porphyry, about ten feet in length by two feet in
+diameter, which lies a full mile away from any of the others, in the
+line of the old burying-ground, and distant from it only a few hundred
+yards. It seems to have been carried there by man: we find its bearing
+from the Scuir lying nearly at right angles with the direction of the
+drift-boulders of the western coast, which are, besides, of rare
+occurrence in the Hebrides; nor has it a single neighbor; and it seems
+not improbable, as a tradition of the island testifies, that it was
+removed thus far for the purpose of marking some place of sepulture, and
+that the catastrophe of the cave arrested its progress after by far the
+longer and rougher portion of the way had been passed. The dry-arm bones
+of the charnel-house in the rock may have been tugging around it when
+the galleys of the M'Leod hove in sight. The traditional history of
+Eigg, said my friend the minister, compared with that of some of the
+neighboring islands, presents a decapitated aspect: the M'Leods cut it
+off by the neck. Most of the present inhabitants can tell which of their
+ancestors, grandfather, or great-grandfather, or great-great-grandfather,
+first settled in the place, and where they came from; and, with the
+exception of a few vague legends about St. Donan and his grave, which were
+preserved apparently among the people of the other Small Isles, the island
+has no early traditional history.
+
+We had now reached the Scuir. There occur, intercalated with the
+columnar beds, a few bands of a buff-colored non-columnar trap,
+described by M'Culloch as of a texture intermediate between a greenstone
+and a basalt, and which, while the pitchstone around it seems nearly
+indestructible, has weathered so freely as to form horizontal grooves
+along the face of the rock, from two to five yards in depth. One of
+these runs for several hundred feet along the base of the Scuir, just at
+the top of the talus, and greatly resembles a piazza, lacking the outer
+pillars. It is from ten to twelve feet in height, by from fifteen to
+twenty in depth; the columns of the pitch stone-bed immediately above
+it seem perilously hanging in mid air; and along their sides there
+trickles, in even the driest summer weather,--for the Scuir is a
+condenser on an immense scale--minute runnels of water, that patter
+ceaselessly in front of the long deep hollow, like rain from the eaves
+of a cottage during a thunder shower. Inside, however, all is dry, and
+the floor is covered to the depth of several inches with the dung of
+sheep and cattle, that find, in this singular mountain piazza, a place
+of shelter. We had brought a pickaxe with us; and the dry and dusty
+floor, composed mainly of a gritty conglomerate, formed the scene of our
+labors. It is richly fossiliferous, though the organisms have no
+specific variety; and never, certainly, have I found the remains of
+former creations in a scene in which they more powerfully addressed
+themselves to the imagination. A stratum of peat-moss, mixed with
+fresh-water shells, and resting on a layer of vegetable mould, from
+which the stumps and roots of trees still protruded, was once found in
+Italy, buried beneath an ancient tesselated pavement; and the whole gave
+curious evidence of a kind fitted to picture to the imagination a
+background vista of antiquity, all the more remotely ancient in aspect
+from the venerable age of the object in front. Dry ground covered by
+wood, a lake, a morass, and then dry ground again, had all taken
+precedence, on the site of the tesselated pavement, in this instance, of
+an old Roman villa. But what was antiquity in connection with a Roman
+villa, to antiquity in connection with the Scuir of Eigg? Under the old
+foundations 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, had
+sprung up and decayed on hill and beside stream in some nameless
+land,--had then been swept to the sea,--had been entombed deep at the
+bottom in a grit of Oölite,--had been heaved up to the surface, and
+high over it, by volcanic agencies working from beneath,--and had
+finally been built upon, as moles are built upon piles, by the architect
+that had laid down the masonry of the gigantic Scuir, in one fiery layer
+after another. The mountain wall of Eigg, with its dizzy elevation of
+four hundred and seventy feet, is a wall founded on piles of pine laid
+crossways; and, strange as the fact may seem, one has but to dig into
+the 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 to
+be interrupted. Our man who carried the pickaxe had lingered behind us
+for a few hundred yards, in earnest conversation with an islander; and
+he now came up, breathless and in hot haste, to say that the islander, a
+Roman Catholic tacksman in the neighborhood, had peremptorily warned him
+that 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 meddled
+with it. "That message," said my friend, laughing, but looking just a
+little sad through the laugh, "would scarce have been sent us when I was
+minister of the Establishment here; but it seems allowable in the case
+of a poor Dissenter, and is no bad specimen of the thousand little ways
+in 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 a
+fossil preserve, which coupled itself in my mind, through a trick of the
+associative faculty, with the idea of a great fossil act for the
+British empire, framed on the principles of the game-laws; and, just
+wondering what sort of disreputable vagabonds geological poachers
+would become under its deteriorating influence, I laid hold of the
+pickaxe and broke into the stonefast floor; and thence I succeeded in
+abstracting,--feloniously, I dare say, though the crime has not yet got
+into the statute-book--some six or eight pieces of the _Pinites
+Eiggensis_, amounting in all to about half a cubic foot of that very
+ancient wood--value unknown. I trust, should the case come to a serious
+bearing, the members of the London Geological Society will generously
+subscribe half-a-crown a-piece to assist me in feeing counsel. There are
+more interests than mine at stake in the affair. If I be cast and
+committed,--I, who have poached over only a few miserable districts in
+Scotland,--pray, what will become of some of them,--the Lyells,
+Bucklands, Murchisons and Sedgwicks,--who have poached over whole
+continents?
+
+We were successful in procuring several good specimens of the Eigg pine,
+at a depth, in the conglomerate, of from eight to eighteen inches. Some
+of the upper pieces we found in contact with the decomposing trap out of
+which the hollow piazza above had been scooped; but the greater number,
+as my set of specimens abundantly testify, lay embedded in the original
+Oölitic grit in which they had been locked up, in, I doubt not, their
+present fossil state, ere their upheaval, through Plutonic agency, from
+their deep-sea bottom. The annual rings of the wood, which are quite as
+small as in a slow-growing Baltic pine, are distinctly visible in all
+the better pieces I this day transferred to my bag. In one fragment I
+reckon sixteen rings in half an inch, and fifteen in the same space in
+another. The trees to which they belonged seem to have grown on some
+exposed hill-side, where, in the course of half a century, little more
+than from two or three inches were added to their diameter. The _Pinites
+Eiggensis_, or Eigg pine, was first introduced to the notice of the
+scientific world by the late Mr. Witham, in whose interesting work on
+"The Internal Structure of Fossil Vegetables" the reader may find it
+figured and described. The specimen in which he studied its
+peculiarities "was found," he says, "at the base of the magnificent
+mural escarpment named the Scuir of Eigg,--not, however, _in situ_, but
+among fragments of rocks of the Oölitic series." The authors of the
+"Fossil Flora," where it is also figured, describe it as differing very
+considerably in structure from any of the coniferæ of the Coal Measures.
+"Its medullary rays," says Messrs. Lindley and Hutton, "appear to be
+more numerous, and frequently are not continued through one zone of wood
+to another, but more generally terminate at the concentric circles. It
+abounds also in turpentine vessels, or lacunæ, of various sizes, the
+sides of which are distinctly defined." Viewed through the microscope,
+in transparent slips, longitudinal and transverse, it presents, within
+the space of a few lines, objects fitted to fill the mind with wonder.
+We find the minutest cells, glands, fibres, of the original wood
+preserved uninjured. _There_ still are those medullary rays entire that
+communicated between the pith and the outside,--_there_ still the ring
+of thickened cells that indicated the yearly check which the growth
+received when winter came on,--_there_ the polygonal reticulations of
+the cross section, without a single broken mesh,--_there_, too, the
+elongated cells in the longitudinal one, each filled with minute glands
+that take the form of double circles,--_there_ also, of larger size and
+less regular form, the lacunæ in which the turpentine lay: every nicely
+organized speck, invisible to the naked eye, we find in as perfect a
+state of keeping in the incalculably ancient pile-work on which the
+gigantic Scuir is founded, as in the living pines that flourish green on
+our hill-sides. A net-work, compared with which that of the finest lace
+ever worn by the fair reader would seem a net-work of cable, has
+preserved entire, for untold ages, the most delicate peculiarities of
+its pattern. There is not a mesh broken, nor a circular dot away!
+
+The experiments of Mr. Witham on the Eigg fossil, furnish an
+interesting example of the light which a single, apparently simple,
+discovery may throw on whole departments of fact. He sliced his specimen
+longitudinally and across, fastened the slices on glass, ground them
+down till they became semi-transparent, and then, examining them under
+reflected light by the microscope, marked and recorded the specific
+peculiarities of their structure. And we now know, in consequence, that
+the ancient Eigg pine, to which the detached fragment picked up at the
+base of the Scuir belonged,--a pine alike different from those of the
+earlier carboniferous period and those which exist contemporary with
+ourselves,--was, some _three creations_ ago, an exceedingly common tree
+in the country now called Scotland,--as much so, perhaps, as the Scotch
+fir is at the present day. The fossil trees found in such abundance in
+the neighborhood of Helmsdale that they are burnt for lime,--the fossil
+wood of Eathie, in Cromartyshire, and that of Shandwick, in Ross,--all
+belong to the _Pinites Eiggensis_. It seems to have been a straight and
+stately tree, in most instances, as in the Eigg specimens, of slow
+growth. One of the trunks I saw near Navidale measured two feet in
+diameter, but a full century had passed ere it attained to a bulk so
+considerable; and a splendid specimen in my collection, from the same
+locality, which measures twenty-one inches, exhibits even _more_ than a
+hundred annual rings. In one of my specimens, and one only, the rings
+are of great breadth. They differ from those of all the others in the
+proportion in which I have seen the annual rings of a young, vigorous
+fir that had sprung up in some rich, moist hollow, differ from the
+annual rings of trees of the same species that had grown in the shallow,
+hard soil of exposed hill-sides. And this one specimen furnishes curious
+evidence that the often-marked but little understood law, which gives us
+our better and worse seasons in alternate groups, various in number and
+uncertain in their time of recurrence, obtained as early as the age of
+the Oölite. The rings follow each other in groups of lesser and larger
+breadth. 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 alternate
+groups. For some four or five years together, when this pine was a
+living tree, the springs were late and cold, and the summers cloudy and
+chill, as in that group of seasons which intervened between 1835 and
+1841; and then, for four or five years, more springs were early and
+summers genial, as in the after group of 1842, 1843 and 1844. An
+arrangement in nature,--first observed, as we learn from Bacon, by the
+people of the Low Countries, and which has since formed the basis of
+meteoric tables, and of predictions and elaborate cycles of the
+weather,--bound together the twelvemonths of the Oölitic period in
+alternate bundles of better and worse: vegetation throve vigorously
+during the summers of one group, and languished, in those of another, in
+a state of partial development.
+
+Sending away our man shipwards, laden with a bag of fossil wood, we
+ascended 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 of
+the beds considerable variety of direction and form. In one bed they
+belly over with a curve, like the ribs of some wrecked vessel from which
+the planking has been torn away; in another they project in a straight
+line, like muskets planted slantways on the ground to receive a charge
+of cavalry; in others the inclination is inwards, like that of ranges of
+stakes placed in front of a sea-dyke, to break the violence of the
+waves; while yet in others they present, as in the eastern portion of
+the Scuir, the common vertical direction. The ribbed appearance of every
+crag and cliff, imparts to the scene a peculiar character; every larger
+mass of light and shadow is corded with minute stripes; and the feeling
+experienced among the more shattered peaks, and in the more broken
+recesses, seems near akin to that which it is the tendency of some
+magnificent ruin to excite, than that which awakens amid the sublime of
+nature. We feel as if the pillared rocks around us were like the
+Cyclopean walls of Southern Italy,--the erections of some old gigantic
+race passed from the earth forever. The feeling must have been
+experienced on former occasions, amid the innumerable pillars of the
+Scuir; for we find M'Culloch, in his description, ingeniously analyzing
+it. "The resemblance to architecture here is much increased," he says,
+"by the columnar structure, which is sufficiently distinguishable, even
+from a distance, and produces a strong effect of artificial regularity
+when seen near at hand. To this vague association in the mind of the
+efforts of art with the magnitude of nature, is owing much of that
+sublimity of character which the Scuir presents. The sense of power is a
+fertile source of the sublime; and as the appearance of power exerted,
+no less than that of simplicity, is necessary to confer this character
+on architecture, so the mind, insensibly transferring the operations of
+nature to the efforts of art where they approximate in character,
+becomes impressed with a feeling rarely excited by her more ordinary
+forms, 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 the
+masonry, that run transversely, from side to side, still to fill up.
+Along one of these ditch-like gaps, which serves to insulate the eastern
+and highest portion of the Scuir from all its other portions, we find
+fragments of a rude wall of uncemented stones, the remains of an
+ancient hill-fort; which, with its natural rampart of rock on three of
+its four sides, more than a hundred yards in sheer descent, and with its
+deep ditch and rude wall on the fourth, must have formed one of the most
+inaccessible in the kingdom. The masses of pitchstone a-top, though so
+intensely black within, are weathered on the surface into almost a pure
+white; and we found lying detached among them, fragments of common
+amygdaloid and basalt, and minute slaty pieces of chalcedony that had
+formed apparently in fissures of the trap. We would have scrutinized
+more 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 rare
+was to be found. Had we examined somewhat more carefully, we might
+possibly have done what Mr. Woronzow Greig did on the Scuir about
+eighteen years previous,--picked up on it a piece of _bona fide_ Scotch
+pumice. This gentleman, well known through his exertions in statistical
+science, and for his love of science in general, and whose tastes and
+acquirements are not unworthy the son of Mrs. Somerville, has kindly
+informed me by letter regarding his curious discovery. "I visited the
+island 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 of
+game, I amused myself in my wanderings by looking about for natural
+curiosities. I knew little about Geology at the time, but, collecting
+whatever struck my eye as uncommon, I picked up from the sides of the
+Scuir, among various other things, a bit of fossil wood, and, nearly at
+the summit of the eminence, a piece of pumice of a deep brownish-black
+color, and very porous, the pores being large and round, and the
+substance which divided them of a uniform thickness. This last specimen
+I gave to Mr. Lyell, who said that it could not originally have belonged
+to Eigg, though it might possibly have been washed there by the sea,--a
+suggestion, however, with which its place on the top of the Scuir seems
+ill to accord. I may add, that I have since procured a larger specimen
+from the same place." This seems a curious fact, when we take into
+account the identity, in their mineral components, of the pumice and
+obsidian of the recent volcanoes; and that pitchstone, the obsidian of
+the 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 of
+pitchstone in the kingdom. It is just possible, however, that Mr.
+Greig's two specimens may not date farther back, in at least their
+existing state, than the days of the hill-fort. Powerful fires would
+have been required to render the exposed summit of the Scuir at all
+comfortable; there is a deep peat-moss in its immediate neighborhood,
+that would have furnished the necessary fuel; the wind must have been
+sufficiently high on the summit to fan the embers into an intense white
+heat; and if it was heat but half as intense as that which was employed
+in fusing into one mass the thick vitrified ramparts of Craig Phadrig
+and Knock Farril, on the east coast, it could scarce have failed to
+anticipate the experiment of the Hon. Mr. Knox, of Dublin, by converting
+some 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 had
+declined half-way adown the western sky, and for many yards the shadow
+of 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, was
+basking in yellow sunshine; and with its one dark shadow thrown from its
+one mountain-elevated wall of rock, it seemed some immense fantastical
+dial, with its gnomon rising tall in the midst. Far below, perched on
+the apex of the shadow, and half lost in the line of the penumbra, we
+could see two indistinct specks of black, with a dim halo around
+each,--specks that elongated as we arose, and contracted as we sat, and
+went gliding along the line as we walked. The shadows of two gnats
+disporting on the edge of an ordinary gnomon would have seemed vastly
+more important, in proportion, on the figured plane of the dial, than
+these, our ghostly representatives, did here. The sea, spangled in the
+wake of the sun with quick glancing light, stretched out its blue plain
+around us; and we could see included in the wide prospect, on the one
+hand, at once the hill-chains of Morven and Kintail, with the many
+intervening lochs and bold jutting headlands that give variety to the
+mainland; and, on the other, the variously complexioned Hebrides, from
+the Isle of Skye to Uist and Barra, and from Uist and Barra to Tiree and
+Mull. The contiguous Small Isles, Muck and Rum, lay moored immediately
+beside us, like vessels of the same convoy that in some secure roadstead
+drop anchor within hail of each other. I could willingly have lingered
+on the top of the Scuir until after sunset; but the minister, who, ever
+and anon, during the day, had been conning over some notes jotted on a
+paper of wonderfully scant dimensions, reminded me that this was the
+evening of his week-day discourse, and that we were more than a
+particularly rough mile from the place of meeting, and within, half an
+hour of the time. I took one last look of the scene ere we commenced our
+descent. There, in the middle of the ample parish glebe, that looked
+richer and greener in the light of the declining sun than at any former
+period during the day,--rose the snug parish manse; and yonder,--in an
+open island channel, with a strip of dark rocks fringing the land
+within, and another dark strip fringing the barren Eilean Chaisteil
+outside,--lay the Betsey, looking wonderfully diminutive, but evidently
+a little thing of high spirit, taut-masted, with a smart rake aft, and a
+spruce outrigger astern, and flaunting her triangular flag of blue in
+the sun. I pointed first to the manse, and then to the yacht. The
+minister shook his head.
+
+"'Tis a time of strange changes," he said; "I thought to have lived and
+died in that house, and found a quiet grave in the burying-ground yonder
+beside the ruin; but my path was a clear though a rugged one; and from
+almost 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-way
+corner, and suffered the Church question to run its course, without
+quitting my hold of the Establishment. And so I perhaps might. It is
+easy securing one's own safety, in even the worst of times, if one look
+no higher; and I, as I had no opportunity of mixing in the contest, or
+of declaring my views respecting it, might be regarded as an unpledged
+man. But the principles of the Evangelical party were my principles; and
+it would have been consistent with neither honor nor religion to have
+hung back in the day of battle, and suffered the men with whom in heart
+I was at one to pay the whole forfeit of our common quarrel. So I
+attended the Convocation, and pledged myself to stand or fall with my
+brethren. On my return I called my people together, and told them how
+the case stood, and that in May next I bade fair to be a dependent for a
+home on the proprietor of Eigg. And so they petitioned the proprietor
+that he might give me leave to build a house among them,--exactly the
+same sort of favor granted to the Roman Catholics of the island. But
+month after month passed, and they got no reply to their petition; and I
+was left in suspense, not knowing whether I was to have a home among
+them 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; and
+the 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, with
+a wife and family dependent on him, was placed by his silence in cruel
+circumstances of uncertainty. Ere the Disruption took place, however, I
+came to know pretty conclusively what I had to expect. The Doctor's
+factor came to Eigg, and, as I was informed, told the Islanders that it
+was not likely the Doctor would permit a _third_ place of worship on the
+Island: the Roman Catholics had one, and the Establishment had a kind of
+one, and there was to be no more. The factor, an active
+messenger-at-arms, useful in raising rents in these parts, has always
+been understood to speak the mind of his master; but the congregation
+took 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 an
+answer, the Disruption took place; and, laying the whole circumstances
+before my brethren in Edinburgh, who, like myself, interpreted the
+silence of the Doctor into a refusal, I suggested to them the scheme of
+the Betsey, as the only scheme through which I could keep up unbroken my
+connection 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 his
+minister. "We are both very hungry," said my friend: "we have been out
+among the rocks since breakfast-time, and are wonderfully disposed to
+eat. 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 of
+mashed potatoes, and we dined like princes. I observed, for the first
+time, in the interior of this cottage, what I had frequent occasion to
+remark afterwards, that much of the wood used in building in the smaller
+and outer islands of the Hebrides must have drifted across the Atlantic,
+borne eastwards and northwards by the great Gulf-stream. Many of the
+beams and boards, sorely drilled by the _Teredo navalis_, are of
+American timber, that, from time to time, has been cast upon the
+shore,--a portion of it, apparently, from timber-laden vessels
+unfortunate in their voyage, but a portion of it, also, with root and
+branch still attached, bearing mark of having been swept to the sea by
+transatlantic rivers. Nuts and seeds of tropical plants are occasionally
+picked up on the beach. My friend gave me a bean or nut of the _Dolichos
+urens_, or cow-itch shrub, of the West Indies, which an islander had
+found on the shore sometime in the previous year, and given to one of
+the manse children as a toy; and I attach some little interest to it, as
+a curiosity of the same class with the large canes and the fragment of
+carved wood found floating near the shores of Madeira by the
+brother-in-law of Columbus, and which, among other pieces of
+circumstantial evidence, led the great navigator to infer the existence
+of a western continent. Curiosities of this kind seem still more common
+in the northern than in the western islands of Scotland. "Large exotic
+nuts or seeds," says Dr. Patrick Neill, in his interesting "Tour,"
+quoted in a former chapter, "which in Orkney are known by the name of
+Molucca beans, are occasionally found among the _rejectamenta_ of the
+sea, especially after westerly winds. There are two kinds commonly
+found: the larger (of which the fishermen very generally make
+snuff-boxes) seem to be seeds from the great pod of the _Mimosa
+scandens_ of the West Indies; the smaller seeds, from the pod of the
+_Dolichos urens_, also a native of the same region. It is probable that
+the currents of the ocean, and particularly that great current which
+issues from the Gulf of Florida, and is hence denominated the Gulf
+Stream, aid very much in transporting across the mighty Atlantic these
+American products. They are generally quite fresh and entire, and afford
+an 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; and
+we had but just light enough left, on reaching the Betsey, to show us
+that there lay a dead sheep on the deck. It had been sent aboard to be
+killed by the minister's factotum, John Stewart; but John was at the
+evening preaching at the time, and the poor sheep, in its attempts to
+set itself free, had got itself entangled among the cords, and strangled
+itself. "Alas, alas!" exclaimed the minister, "thus ends our hope of
+fresh mutton for the present, and my hapless speculation as a sheep
+farmer for evermore." I learned from him, afterwards, over our tea, that
+shortly previous to the Convocation he had got his glebe,--one of the
+largest in Scotland,--well stocked with sheep and cattle, which he had
+to sell, immediately on the Disruption, in miserably bad condition, at a
+loss of nearly fifty per cent. He had a few sheep, however, that would
+not sell at all, and that remained on the glebe, in consequence, until
+his successor entered into possession. And he, honest man, straightway
+impounded them, and got them incarcerated in a dark, dirty hole,
+somewhat in the way Giant Despair incarcerated the pilgrims,--a thing he
+had quite a legal right to do, seeing that the mile-long glebe, with its
+many acres of luxuriant pasture, was now as much his property as it had
+been Mr. Swanson's a few months before, and seeing Mr. Swanson's few
+sheep had no right to crop his grass. But a worthy neighbor
+interfered,--Mr. M'Donald, of Keil, the principal tenant in the island.
+Mr. M'Donald,--a practical commentator on the law of kindness,--was
+sorely scandalized at what he deemed the new minister's gratuitous
+unkindness to a brother in calamity; and, relieving the sheep, he
+brought them to his own farm, where he found them board and lodging on
+my friend's behalf, till they could be used up at leisure. And it was
+one of the last of this unfortunate lot that now contrived to escape
+from us by anticipating John Stewart. "A black beginning makes a black
+ending," said Gouffing Jock, an ancient border shepherd, when his only
+sheep, a black ewe, the sole survivor of a flock smothered in a
+snow-storm, was worried to death by his dogs. Then, taking down his
+broadsword, he added, "Come awa, my auld friend; thou and I maun e'en
+stock Bowerhope-Law ance mair!" Less warlike than Gouffing Jock, we were
+content to repeat over the dead, on this occasion, simply the first
+portion of his speech; and then, betaking ourselves to our cabin, we
+forgot 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, a
+little after seven, a low stratum of mist, that completely enveloped the
+Scuir, and truncated both the eminence on which it stands and the
+opposite height, stretched like a ruler across the flat valley which
+indents so deeply the middle of the island. But the fogs melted away as
+the morning rose, and ere our breakfast was satisfactorily discussed,
+the last thin wreath had disappeared from around the columned front of
+the rock-tower of Eigg, and a powerful sun looked down on moist slopes
+and dank hollows, from which there arose in the calm a hazy vapor, that,
+while it softened the lower features of the landscape, left the bold
+outline relieved against a clear sky. Accompanied by our attendant of
+the previous day, bearing bag and hammer, we set out a little before
+eleven for the north-western side of the island, by a road which winds
+along the central hollow. My friend showed me as we went, that on the
+edge of an eminence, on which the traveller journeying westwards catches
+the last glimpse of the chapel of St. Donan, there had once been a rude
+cross erected, and another rude cross on an eminence on which he catches
+the last glimpse of the first; and that there had thus been a chain of
+stations 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,--the
+burial-place of the old Culdee,--came full in view. The unsteady
+devotion, that journeyed, fancy-bound, along the heights, to gloat over
+a dead man's bones, had its clue to carry it on in a straight line. Its
+trail was on the ground; it glided snake-like from cross to cross, in
+quest of dust; and, without its finger-posts to guide it, would have
+wandered devious. It is surely a better devotion that, instead of thus
+creeping over the earth to a mouldy sepulchre, can at once launch into
+the sky, secure of finding Him who once arose from one. In less than an
+hour we were descending on the Bay of Laig, a semi-circular indentation
+of the coast, about a mile in length, and, where it opens to the main
+sea, nearly two miles in breadth; with the noble island of Rum rising
+high in front, like some vast breakwater; and a meniscus of
+comparatively level land, walled in behind by a semi-circular rampart of
+continuous precipice, sweeping round its shores. There are few finer
+scenes in the Hebrides than that furnished by this island bay and its
+picturesque accompaniments,--none that break more unexpectedly on the
+traveller who descends upon it from the east; and rarely has it been
+seen, to greater advantage than on the delicate day, so soft, and yet so
+sunshiny and clear, on which I paid it my first visit.
+
+The island of Rum, with its abrupt sea-wall of rock, and its
+steep-pointed hills, that attain, immediately over the sea, an elevation
+of more than two thousand feet, loomed bold and high in the offing, some
+five miles away, but apparently much nearer. The four tall summits of
+the island rose clear against the sky like a group of pyramids; its
+lower slopes and precipices, variegated and relieved by graceful
+alternations of light and shadow, and resting on their blue basement of
+sea, stood out with equal distinctness; but the entire middle space from
+end to end was hidden in a long horizontal stratum of gray cloud, edged
+atop with a lacing of silver. Such was the aspect of the noble
+breakwater in front. Fully two-thirds of the semi-circular rampart of
+rock which shuts in the crescent-shaped plain directly opposite lay in
+deep shadow; but the sun shone softly on the plain itself, brightening
+up many a dingy cottage, and many a green patch of corn; and the bay
+below stretched out, sparkling in the light. There is no part of the
+island so thickly inhabited as this flat meniscus. It is composed almost
+entirely of Oölitic rocks, and bears atop, especially where an ancient
+oyster-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 would
+be no very difficult matter to drain, interpose their rough shag of dark
+green, and break the continuity, the plain around them waves with corn.
+Lying fair, green and populous within the sweep of its inaccessible
+rampart of rock, at least twice as lofty as the ramparts of Babylon of
+old, it reminds one of the suburbs of some ancient city lying embosomed,
+with all its dwellings and fields, within some roomy crescent of the
+city wall. We passed, ere we entered on the level, a steep-sided narrow
+dell, through which a small stream finds its way from the higher
+grounds, and which terminates at the upper end in an abrupt precipice,
+and a lofty but very slim cascade. "One of the few superstitions that
+still linger on the island," said my friend the minister, "is associated
+with that wild hollow. It is believed that shortly before a death takes
+place among the inhabitants, a tall withered female may be seen in the
+twilight, just yonder where the rocks open, washing a shroud in the
+stream. John, there, will perhaps tell you how she was spoken to on one
+occasion, by an over-bold, over-inquisitive islander, curious to know
+whose shroud she was preparing; and how she more than satisfied his
+curiosity, by telling him it was his own. It is a not uninteresting
+fact," added the minister, "that my poor people, since they have become
+more earnest about their religion, think very little about ghosts and
+spectres: their faith in the realities of the unseen world seems to have
+banished from their minds much of their old belief in its phantoms."
+
+In the rude fences that separate from each other the little farms in
+this plain, we find frequent fragments of the oyster bed, hardened into
+a tolerably compact limestone. It is seen to most advantage, however, in
+some of the deeper cuttings in the fields, where the surrounding matrix
+exists merely as an incoherent shale; and the shells may be picked out
+as entire as when they lay, ages before, in the mud, which we still see
+retaining around them its original color. They are small, thin,
+triangular, much resembling in form some specimens of the _Ostrea
+deltoidea_, but greatly less in size. The nearest resembling shell in
+Sowerby is the _Ostrea acuminata_,--an oyster of the clay that underlies
+the great Oölite of Bath. Few of the shells exceed an inch and a half in
+length, 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, to
+the depth of several feet, as shells on the heap at the door of a
+Newhaven fisherman, and extend over many acres. Where they lie open we
+can still detect the triangular disc of the hinge, with the single
+impression of the abductor muscle; and the foliaceous character of the
+shell remains in most instances as distinct as if it had undergone no
+mineral change. I have seen nowhere in Scotland, among the secondary
+formations, so unequivocal an oyster-bed; nor do such beds seem to be at
+all common in formations older than the Tertiary in England, though the
+oyster itself is sufficiently so. We find Mantell stating, in his
+recent work ("Medals of Creation"), after first describing an immense
+oyster bed of the London Basin, that underlies the city (for what is now
+London was once an oyster-bed), that in the chalk below, though it
+contains several species of Ostrea, the shells are diffused
+promiscuously throughout the general mass. Leaving, however, these
+oysters of the Oölite, which never net inclosed nor drag disturbed,
+though they must have formed the food of many an extinct order of
+fish,--mayhap reptile,--we pass on in a south-western direction,
+descending in the geological scale as we go, until we reach the southern
+side of the Bay of Laig. And there, far below tide-mark, we find a
+dark-colored argillaceous shale of the Lias, greatly obscured by
+boulders of trap,--the only deposit of the Liasic formation in the
+island.
+
+A line of trap-hills that rises along the shore seems as if it had
+strewed half its materials over the beach. The rugged blocks lie thick
+as stones in a causeway, down to the line of low ebb,--memorials of a
+time when the surf dashed against the shattered bases of the trap-hills,
+now elevated considerably beyond its reach; and we can catch but partial
+glimpses of the shale below. Wherever access to it can be had, we find
+it richly fossiliferous; but its organisms, with the exception of its
+Belemnites, are very imperfectly preserved. I dug up from under the
+trap-blocks some of the common Liasic Ammonites of the north-eastern
+coast of Scotland, a few of the septa of a large Nautilus, broken pieces
+of wood, and half-effaced casts of what seems a branched coral; but only
+minute portions of the shells have been converted into stone; here and
+there a few chambers in the whorls of an Ammonite or Nautilus, though
+the outline of the entire organism lies impressed in the shale; and the
+ligneous and polyparious fossils we find in a still greater state of
+decay. The Belemnite alone, as is common with this robust fossil,--so
+often the sole survivor of its many contemporaries,--has preserved its
+structure entire. I disinterred from the shale good specimens of the
+Belemnite _sulcatus_ and Belemnite _elongatus_, and found, detached on
+the surface of the bed, a fragment of a singularly large Belemnite, a
+full inch and a quarter in diameter, the species of which I could not
+determine.
+
+Returning by the track we came, we reach the bottom of the bay, which we
+find much obscured with sand and shingle; and pass northwards along its
+side, under a range of low sandstone precipices, with interposing grassy
+slopes, in which the fertile Oölitic meniscus descends to the beach. The
+sandstone, white and soft, and occurring in thick beds, much resembles
+that 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 thin
+vein 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 in
+beds of a blue clay, intercalated with the sandstone, we find fossils in
+abundance, of a character less obscure. We spent a full half-hour in
+picking out shells from the bottom of a long dock-like hollow among the
+rocks, in which a bed of clay has yielded to the waves, while the strata
+on either side stand up over it like low wharfs on the opposite side of
+a river. The shells, though exceedingly fragile,--for they partake of
+the nature of the clayey matrix in which they are imbedded,--rise as
+entire as when they had died among the mud, years, mayhap ages, ere the
+sandstone had been deposited over them; and we were enabled at once to
+detect their extreme dissimilarity, as a group, to the shells of the
+Liasic deposit we had so lately quitted. We did not find in this bed a
+single Ammonite, Belemnite, or Nautilus; but chalky Bivalves, resembling
+our existing Tellina, in vast abundance, mixed with what seem to be a
+small Buccinum and a minute Trochus, with numerous rather equivocal
+fragments of a shell resembling an Oiliva. So thickly do they lie
+clustered together in this deposit, that in some patches where the
+sad-colored argillaceous ground is washed bare by the sea, it seems
+marbled with them into a light gray tint. The group more nearly
+resembles in type a recent one than any I have yet seen in a secondary
+deposit, except perhaps in the Weald of Moray, where we find in one of
+the layers a Planorbis scarce distinguishable from those of our ponds
+and ditches, mingled with a Paludina that seems as nearly modelled after
+the existing form. From the absence of the more characteristic shells of
+the Oölite, I am inclined to deem the deposit one of estuary origin. Its
+clays were probably thrown down, like the silts of so many of our
+rivers, in some shallow bay, where the waters of a descending stream
+mingled with those of the sea, and where, though shells nearly akin to
+our 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 white
+sandstone presents here, for nearly half a mile together, its front to
+the waves, and exhibits, under the incessant wear of the surf, many
+singularly 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 through
+by a tall rugged archway; while the outer pier of the arch,--if pier we
+may term it,--worn to a skeleton, and jutting outwards with a knee-like
+angle, presents the appearance of a thin ungainly leg and splay foot,
+advanced, as if in awkward courtesy, to the breakers. But in a winter
+or two, judging from its present degree of attenuation, and the yielding
+nature of its material, which resembles a damaged mass of arrow-root,
+consolidated by lying in the leaky hold of a vessel, its persevering
+courtesies will be over, and pier and archway must lie in shapeless
+fragments on the beach. Wherever the surf has broken into the upper
+surface of this sandstone bed, and worn it down to nearly the level of
+the 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 in
+width from one to twelve feet; and the ramparts, rising from three to
+six feet over them, are perpendicular as the walls of houses, where they
+front each other, and descend on the opposite sides in irregular slopes.
+The iron block, with square groove and projecting ears, that receives
+the bar of a railway, and connects it with the stone below, represents
+not 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 converted
+the portions of soft sandstone in immediate contact with them into the
+consistence of quartz rock, have long since mouldered away, leaving but
+the hollow rectilinear rents which they had occupied, surmounted by the
+indurated walls which they had baked. Some of the most curious
+appearances, however, connected with the sandstone, though they occur
+chiefly in an upper bed, are exhibited by what seem fields of petrified
+mushrooms, of a gigantic size, that spread out in some places for
+hundreds of yards under the high-water level. These apparent mushrooms
+stand 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 to
+nearly two yards in diameter. In some specimens we find two heads
+joined together in a form resembling a squat figure of _eight_, of what
+printers term the Egyptian type, or, to borrow the illustration of
+M'Culloch, "like the ancient military projectile known by the name of
+double-headed shot;" in other specimens three heads have coalesced in a
+trefoil shape, or rather in a shape like that of an ace of clubs
+divested of the stem. By much the greater number, however, are
+spherical. They are composed of concretionary masses, consolidated, like
+the walls of the dykes, though under some different process, into a hard
+siliceous stone, that has resisted those disintegrating influences of
+the weather and the surf, under which the yielding matrix in which they
+were embedded has worn from around them. Here and there we find them
+lying detached on the beach, like huge shot, compared with which the
+greenstone balls of Mons Meg are but marbles for children to play with;
+in other cases they project from the mural front of rampart-like
+precipices, as if they had been showered into them by the ordnance of
+some besieging battery, and had stuck fast in the mason-work. Abbotsford
+has been described as a romance in stone and lime; we have here, on the
+shores of Laig, what seems a wild but agreeable tale, of the extravagant
+cast of "Christabel," or the "Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner," fretted
+into sandstone. But by far the most curious part of the story remains to
+be told.
+
+The hollows and fissures of the lower sandstone bed we find filled with
+a fine quartzose sand, which, from its pure white color, and the
+clearness with which the minute particles reflect the light, reminds one
+of accumulations of potato-flour drying in the sun. It is formed almost
+entirely of disintegrated particles of the soft sandstone; and as we at
+first find it occurring in mere handfuls, that seem as if they had been
+detached from the mass during the last few tides, we begin to marvel to
+what quarter the missing materials of the many hundred cubic yards of
+rock, ground down along the shore in this bed during the last century or
+two, have been conveyed away. As we pass on northwards, however, we see
+the white sand occurring in much larger quantities,--here heaped up in
+little bent-covered hillocks above the reach of the tide,--there
+stretching out in level, ripple-marked wastes into the waves,--yonder
+rising in flat narrow spits among the shallows. At length we reach a
+small, irregularly-formed bay, a few hundred feet across, floored with
+it from side to side; and see it, on the one hand, descending deep into
+the 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. The
+sandstone bed that has been worn down to form it contains no fossils,
+save here and there a carbonaceous stem; but in an underlying harder
+stratum we occasionally find a few shells; and, with a specimen in my
+hand charged with a group of bivalves resembling the existing conchifera
+of our sandy beaches, I was turning aside this sand of the Oölite, so
+curiously reduced to its original state, and marking how nearly the
+recent shells that lay embedded in it resembled the extinct ones that
+had lain in it so long before, when I became aware of a peculiar sound
+that it yielded to the tread, as my companions paced over it. I struck
+it obliquely with my foot, where the surface lay dry and incoherent in
+the sun, and the sound elicited was a shrill, sonorous note, somewhat
+resembling that produced by a waxed thread, when tightened between the
+teeth and the hand, and tipped by the nail of the forefinger. I walked
+over it, striking it obliquely at each step, and with every blow the
+shrill note was repeated. My companions joined me; and we performed a
+concert, in which, if we could boast of but little variety in the tones
+produced, we might at least challenge all Europe for an instrument of
+the kind which produced them. It seemed less wonderful that there should
+be music in the granite of Memnon, than in the loose Oölitic sand of the
+Bay of Laig. As we marched over the drier tracts, an incessant _woo_,
+_woo_, _woo_, rose from the surface, that might be heard in the calm
+some twenty or thirty yards away; and we found that where a damp
+semi-coherent stratum lay at the depth of three or four inches beneath,
+and all was dry and incoherent above, the tones were loudest and
+sharpest, and most easily evoked by the foot. Our discovery,--for I
+trust I may regard it as such,--adds a third locality to two previously
+known ones, in which what may be termed the musical sand,--no unmeet
+counterpart to the "singing water" of the tale,--has now been found. And
+as the island of Eigg is considerably more accessible than _Jabel
+Nakous_, in Arabia Petræa, or _Reg-Rawan_, in the neighborhood of Cabul,
+there must be facilities presented through the discovery which did not
+exist hitherto, for examining the phenomenon in acoustics which it
+exhibits,--a phenomenon, it may be added, which some of our greatest
+masters of the science have confessed their inability to explain.
+
+_Jabel Nakous_, or the "Mountain of the Bell," is situated about three
+miles from the shores of the Gulf of Suez, in that land of wonders which
+witnessed for forty years the journeyings of the Israelites, and in
+which the granite peaks of Sinai and Horeb overlook an arid wilderness
+of rock and sand. It had been known for many ages by the wild Arab of
+the 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, a
+sound like the first low tones of an Æolian harp stirs the hot
+breezeless air. It swells louder and louder in progressive undulations,
+till at length the dry baked earth seems to vibrate under foot, and the
+startled animal snorts and rears, and struggles to break away. According
+to the Arabian account of the phenomenon, says Sir David Brewster, in
+his "Letters on Natural Magic," there is a convent miraculously
+preserved in the bowels of the hill; and the sounds are said to be those
+of the "_Nakous_, a long metallic ruler, suspended horizontally, which
+the priest strikes with a hammer, for the purpose of assembling the
+monks to prayer." There exists a tradition that on one occasion a
+wandering Greek saw the mountain open, and that, entering by the gap, he
+descended into the subterranean convent, where he found beautiful
+gardens and fountains of delicious water, and brought with him to the
+upper world, on his return, fragments of consecrated bread. The first
+European traveller who visited _Jabel Nakous_, says Sir David, was M.
+Seetzen, a German. He journeyed for several hours over arid sands, and
+under ranges of precipices inscribed by mysterious characters, that
+tell, haply, of the wanderings of Israel under Moses. And reaching,
+about noon, the base of the musical fountain, he found it composed of a
+white friable sandstone, and presenting on two of its sides sandy
+declivities. He watched beside it for an hour and a quarter, and then
+heard, for the first time, a low undulating sound, somewhat resembling
+that of a humming top, which rose and fell, and ceased and began, and
+then ceased again; and in an hour and three quarters after, when in the
+act of climbing along the declivity, he heard the sound yet louder and
+more prolonged. It seemed as if issuing from under his knees, beneath
+which the sand, disturbed by his efforts, was sliding downwards along
+the surface of the rock. Concluding that the sliding sand was the cause
+of the sounds, not an effect of the vibrations which they occasioned, he
+climbed to the top of one of the declivities, and, sliding downwards,
+exerted himself with hands and feet to set the sand in motion. The
+effect produced far exceeded his expectations; the incoherent sand
+rolled under and around in a vast sheet; and so loud was the noise
+produced, that "the earth seemed to tremble beneath him to such a
+degree, that he states he should certainly have been afraid if he had
+been 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 noises
+he heard, but which he was unable to trace to their producing cause, as
+"beginning with a low continuous murmuring sound, which seemed to rise
+beneath his feet," but "which gradually changed into pulsations as it
+became louder, so as to resemble the striking of a clock, and became so
+strong at the end of five minutes _as to detach the sand_." The Mountain
+of the Bell has been since carefully explored by Lieutenant J. Welsted,
+of the Indian navy; and the reader may see it exhibited in a fine
+lithograph, in his travels, as a vast irregularly conical mass of broken
+stone, somewhat resembling one of our Highland cairns, though, of
+course, on a scale immensely more huge, with a steep, angular slope of
+sand resting in a hollow in one of its sides, and rising to nearly its
+apex. "It forms," says Lieutenant Welsted, "one of a ridge of low,
+calcareous hills, at a distance of three and a half miles from the
+beach, to which a sandy plain, extending with a gentle rise to their
+base, connects them. Its height, about four hundred feet, as well as the
+material of which it is composed,--a light-colored friable
+sandstone,--is about the same as the rest of the chain; but an inclined
+plane of almost impalpable sand rises at an angle of forty degrees with
+the horizon, and is bounded by a semi-circle of rocks, presenting
+broken, abrupt, and pinnacled forms, and extending to the base of this
+remarkable hill. Although their shape and arrangement in some respects
+may be said to resemble a whispering gallery, yet I determined by
+experiment that their irregular surface renders them but ill adapted for
+the production of an echo. Seated at a rock at the base of the sloping
+eminence, I directed one of the Bedouins to ascend; and it was not until
+he 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, it
+spread out laterally and upwards, until a considerable portion of the
+surface was in motion. At their commencement the sounds might be
+compared to the faint strains of an Æolian harp when its strings first
+catch the breeze: as the sand became more violently agitated by the
+increased velocity of the descent, the noise more nearly resembled that
+produced by drawing the moistened fingers over glass. As it reached the
+base, the reverberations attained the loudness of distant thunder,
+causing the rock on which we were seated to vibrate; and our
+camels,--animals not easily frightened,--became so alarmed that it was
+with difficulty their drivers could restrain them."
+
+"The hill of _Reg-Rawan_ or the 'Moving Sand,'" says the late Sir
+Alexander 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 rude
+lithographic view, in the "Journal of the Asiatic Society" for 1838, "is
+about forty miles north of Cabul, towards Hindu-kush, and near the base
+of the mountains." It rises to the height of about four hundred feet, in
+an angle formed by the junction of two ridges of hills; and a sheet of
+sand, "pure as that of the sea-shore," and which slopes in an angle of
+forty degrees, reclines against it from base to summit. As represented
+in the lithograph, there projects over the steep sandy slope on each
+side, as in the "Mountain of the Bell," still steeper barriers of rock;
+and we are told by Sir Alexander, that though "the mountains here are
+generally composed of granite or mica, at _Reg-Rawan_ there is sandstone
+and lime." The situation of the sand is curious, he adds: it is seen
+from a great distance; and as there is none other in the neighborhood,
+"it might almost be imagined, from its appearance, that the hill had
+been 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 is
+emitted. 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 the
+place; and the inhabitants have a belief that the sounds are only heard
+on Friday, when the saint of _Reg-Rawan_, who is interred hard by,
+permits." The phenomenon, like the resembling one in Arabia, seems to
+have attracted attention among the inhabitants of the country at an
+early period; and the notice of an eastern annalist, the Emperor Baber,
+who flourished late in the fifteenth century, and, like Cæsar, conquered
+and recorded his conquests, still survives. He describes it as the
+_Khwaja Reg-Rawan_, "a small hill, in which there is a line of sandy
+ground reaching from the top to the bottom," from which there "issues in
+the summer season the sound of drums and nagarets." In connection with
+the fact that the musical sand of Eigg is composed of a disintegrated
+sandstone of the Oölite, it is not quite unworthy of notice that
+sandstone and lime enter into the composition of the hill of
+_Reg-Rawan_,--that the district in which the hill is situated is not a
+sandy one,--and that its slope of sonorous sand seems as if it had
+issued from its side. These various circumstances, taken together, lead
+to the inference that the sand may have originated in the decomposition
+of the rock beneath. It is further noticeable, that the _Jabel Nakous_
+is composed of a white friable sandstone, resembling that of the white
+friable bed of the Bay of Laig, and that it belongs to nearly the same
+geological era. I owe to the kindness of Dr. Wilson of Bombay, two
+specimens which he picked up in Arabia Petræa, of spines of Cidarites of
+the mace-formed type so common in the Chalk and Oölite, but so rare in
+the older formations. Dr. Wilson informs me that they are of frequent
+occurrence in the desert of Arabia Petræa, where they are termed by the
+Arabs petrified olives; that nummulites are also abundant in the
+district; and that the various secondary rocks he examined in his route
+through it seem to belong to the Cretaceous group. It appears not
+improbable, therefore, that all the sonorous sand in the world yet
+discovered is formed, like that of Eigg, of disintegrated sandstone; and
+at least two-thirds of it of the disintegrated sandstone of secondary
+formations, newer than the Lias. But how it should be at all sonorous,
+whatever its age or origin, seems yet to be discovered. There are few
+substances that appear worse suited than sand to communicate to the
+atmosphere those vibratory undulations that are the producing causes of
+sound: the grains, even when sonorous individually, seem, from their
+inevitable contact with each other, to exist under the influence of that
+simple law in acoustics which arrests the tones of the ringing glass or
+struck bell, immediately as they are but touched by some foreign body,
+such as the hand or finger. The one grain, ever in contact with several
+other grains, is a glass or bell on which the hand always rests. And the
+difficulty has been felt and acknowledged. Sir John Herschel, in
+referring to the phenomenon of the _Jabel Nakous_, in his "Treatise on
+Sound," in the "Encyclopædia Metropolitana," describes it as to him
+"utterly inexplicable;" and Sir David Brewster, whom I had the pleasure
+of meeting in December last, assured me it was not less a puzzle to him
+than to Sir John. An eastern traveller, who attributes its production
+to "a reduplication of impulse setting air in vibration in a focus of
+echo," means, I suppose, saying nearly the same thing as the two
+philosophers, and merely conveys his meaning in a less simple style.
+
+I have not yet procured what I expect to procure soon,--sand enough from
+the musical bay at Laig to enable me to make its sonorous qualities the
+subject of experiment at home. It seems doubtful whether a small
+quantity set in motion on an artificial slope will serve to evolve the
+phenomena which have rendered the Mountain of the Bell so famous.
+Lieutenant Welsted informs us, that when his Bedouin first set the sand
+in motion, there was scarce any perceptible sound heard;--it was rolling
+downwards for many yards around him to the depth of a foot, ere the
+music arose; and it is questionable whether the effect could be elicited
+with some fifty or sixty pounds weight of the sand of Eigg, on a slope
+of 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 the
+stillness of a close room, it is just possible that it may. I have,
+however, little doubt, that from small quantities the sound evoked by
+the foot on the shore may be reproduced: enough will lie within the
+reach of experiment to demonstrate the strange difference which exists
+between this sonorous sand of the Oölite, and the common unsonorous sand
+of our sea-beaches; and it is certainly worth while examining into the
+nature and producing causes of a phenomenon so curious in itself, and
+which has been characterized by one of the most distinguished of living
+philosophers as "the most celebrated of all the acoustic wonders which
+the natural world presents to us." In the forthcoming number of the
+"North British Review,"--which appears on Monday first,[1]--the reader
+will find the sonorous sand of Eigg referred to, in an article the
+authorship of which will scarcely be mistaken. "We have here," says the
+writer, after first describing the sounds of _Jabel Nakous_, and then
+referring to those of Eigg, "the phenomenon in its simple state,
+disembarrassed from reflecting rocks, from a hard bed beneath, and from
+cracks and cavities that might be supposed to admit the sand; and
+indicating as its cause, either the accumulated vibration of the air
+when struck by the driven sand, or the accumulated sounds occasioned by
+the mutual impact of the particles of sand against each other. If a
+musket-ball passing through the air emits a whistling note, each
+individual particle of sand must do the same, however faint be the note
+which it yields; and the accumulation of these infinitesimal vibrations
+must constitute an audible sound, varying with the number and velocity
+of moving particles. In like manner, if two plates of silex or quartz,
+which are but large crystals of sand, give out a musical sound when
+mutually struck, the impact or collision of two minute crystals or
+particles of sand must do the same, in however inferior a degree; and
+the union of all these sounds, though singly imperceptible, may
+constitute the musical notes of the Bell Mountain, or the lesser sounds
+of 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 inadvertently
+failed to do,--that the sounds elicited from the sand of Eigg seem as
+directly evoked by the slant blow dealt it by the foot, as the sounds
+similarly evoked from a highly waxed floor, or a board strewed over with
+ground rosin. The sharp shrill note follows the stroke, altogether
+independently of the grains driven into the air. My omission may serve
+to 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 incurring
+the risk of being even tediously minute in their descriptions, to the
+danger of being inadequately brief in them. But, alas! for purposes of
+exact science, rarely are verbal descriptions otherwise than inadequate.
+Let us look, for example, at the various accounts given us of _Jabel
+Nakous_. There are strange sounds heard proceeding from a hill in
+Arabia, and various travellers set themselves to describe them. The
+tones are those of the convent _Nakous_, says the wild Arab;--there must
+be a convent buried under the hill. More like the sounds of a
+humming-top, remarks a phlegmatic German traveller. Not quite like them,
+says an English one in an Oxford gown;--they resemble rather the
+striking of a clock. Nay, listen just a little longer and more
+carefully, says a second Englishman, with epaulettes on his shoulder:
+"the sounds at their commencement may be compared to the faint strains
+of an Æolian harp when its strings first catch the breeze," but anon, as
+the agitation of the sand increases, they "more nearly resemble those
+produced 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 the
+sound of drums and nagarets that issues from the sand." All we really
+know of this often-described music of the desert, after reading all the
+descriptions, is, that its tones bear certain analogies to certain other
+tones,--analogies that seem stronger in one direction to one ear, and
+stronger in another direction to an ear differently constituted, but
+which do not exactly resemble any other sounds in nature. The strange
+music of _Jabel Nakous_, as a combination of tones, is essentially
+unique.
+
+
+
+
+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 the
+promontory which forms the northern extremity of the Bay of Laig.
+Wherever the beach has been swept bare, we see it floored with
+trap-dykes worn down to the level, but in most places accumulations of
+huge blocks of various composition cover it up, concealing the nature of
+the rock beneath. The long semi-circular wall of precipice which,
+sweeping inwards at the bottom of the bay, leaves to the inhabitants
+between its base and the beach their fertile meniscus of land, here
+abuts upon the coast. We see its dark forehead many hundred feet
+overhead, and the grassy platform beneath, now narrowed to a mere talus,
+sweeping upwards to its base from the shore,--steep, broken, lined thick
+with horizontal pathways, mottled over with ponderous masses of rock.
+
+Among the blocks that load the beach, and render our onward progress
+difficult and laborious, we detect occasional fragments of an
+amygdaloidal basalt, charged with a white zeolite, consisting of
+crystals so extremely slender that the balls, with their light fibrous
+contents, remind us of cotton apples divested of the seeds. There
+occur, though more rarely, masses of a hard white sandstone, abounding
+in 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 with
+compressed shells, chiefly bivalves, that it may be regarded as a shell
+breccia. There occur, besides, slabs of fibrous limestone, exactly
+resembling 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 fragmentary
+masses,--all of them, at least, except the fibrous limestone, which
+occurs in mere plank-like bands,--represent distinct beds, of which this
+part of the island is composed, and which present their edges, like
+courses of ashlar in a building, in the splendid section that stretches
+from the tall brow of the precipice to the beach; though in the slopes
+of the talus, where the lower beds appear in but occasional protrusions
+and land-slips, we find some difficulty in tracing their order of
+succession.
+
+Near the base of the slope, where the soil has been undermined and the
+rock laid bare by the waves, there occur beds of a bituminous black
+shale,--resembling the dark shales so common in the Coal Measures,--that
+seem to be of fresh water or estuary origin. Their fossils, though
+numerous, are ill preserved; but we detect in them scales and plates of
+fishes, at least two species of minute bivalves, one of which very much
+resembles a Cyclas; and in some of the fragments, shells of Cypris lie
+embedded in considerable abundance. After all that has been said and
+written by way of accounting for those alternations of lacustrine with
+marine remains, which are of such frequent occurrence in the various
+formations, secondary and tertiary, from the Coal Measures downwards, it
+does seem strange enough that the estuary, or fresh-water lake, should
+so often in the old geologic periods have changed places with the sea.
+It is comparatively easy to conceive that the inner Hebrides should have
+once existed as a broad ocean sound, bounded on one or either side by
+Oölitic islands, from which streams descended, sweeping with them, to
+the marine depths, productions, animal and vegetable, of the land. But
+it is less easy to conceive, that in that sound, the area covered by the
+ocean one year should have been covered by a fresh-water lake in perhaps
+the next, and then by the ocean again a few years after. And yet among
+the Oölitic deposits of the Hebrides evidence seems to exist that
+changes of this nature actually took place. I am not inclined to found
+much on the apparently fresh-water character of the bituminous shales of
+Eigg;--the embedded fossils are all too obscure to be admitted in
+evidence; but there can exist no doubt that fresh water, or at least
+estuary formations, do occur among the marine Oölites of the Hebrides.
+Sir R. Murchison, one of the most cautious, as he is certainly one of
+the most distinguished, of living geologists, found in a northern
+district of Skye, in 1826, a deposit containing Cyclas, Paludina,
+Neritina,--all shells of unequivocally fresh-water origin,--which must
+have been formed, he concludes, in either a lake or estuary. What had
+been sea at one period had been estuary or lake at another. In every
+case, however, in which these intercalated deposits are restricted to
+single strata of no great thickness, it is perhaps safer to refer their
+formation to the agency of temporary land-floods, than to that of
+violent changes of level, now elevating and now depressing the surface.
+There occur, for instance, among the marine Oölites of Brora,--the
+discovery of Mr. Robertson, of Inverugie,--two strata containing
+fresh-water fossils in abundance; but the one stratum is little more
+than an inch in thickness,--the other little more than a foot; and it
+seems considerably more probable, that such deposits should have owed
+their existence to extraordinary land-floods, like those which in 1829
+devastated the province of Moray, and covered over whole miles of marine
+beach with the spoils of land and river, than that a sea-bottom should
+have been elevated for their production, into a fresh-water lake, and
+then let down into a sea-bottom again. We find it recorded in the
+"Shepherd's Calendar," that after the thaw which followed the great
+snow-storm of 1794, there were found on a part of the sands of the
+Solway Frith known as the Beds of Esk, where the tide disgorges much of
+what is thrown into it by the rivers, "one thousand eight hundred and
+forty sheep, nine black cattle, three horses, two men, one woman,
+forty-five dogs, and one hundred and eighty hares, beside a number of
+meaner animals." A similar storm in an earlier time, with a soft
+sea-bottom prepared to receive and retain its spoils, would have formed
+a fresh-water stratum intercalated in a marine deposit.
+
+Rounding the promontory, we lose sight of the Bay of Laig, and find the
+narrow front of the island that now presents itself exhibiting the
+appearance of a huge bastion. The green talus slopes upwards, as its
+basement, for full three hundred feet; and a noble wall of perpendicular
+rock, that towers over and beyond for at least four hundred feet more,
+forms the rampart. Save towards the sea, the view is of but limited
+extent; we see it restricted, on the landward side, to the bold face of
+the bastion; and in a narrow and broken dell that runs nearly parallel
+to the shore for a few hundred yards between the top of the talus and
+the base of the rampart,--a true covered way,--we see but the rampart
+alone. But the dizzy front of black basalt, dark as night, save where a
+broad belt of light-colored sandstone traverses it in an angular
+direction, like a white sash thrown across a funeral robe,--the
+fantastic peaks and turrets in which the rock terminates atop,--the
+masses of broken ruins, roughened with moss and lichen, that have fallen
+from above, and lie scattered at its base,--the extreme loneliness of
+the place, for we have left behind us every trace of the human
+family,--and the expanse of solitary sea which it commands,--all
+conspire to render the scene a profoundly imposing one. It is one of
+those scenes in which a man feels that he is little, and that nature is
+great. There is no precipice in the island in which the puffin so
+delights to build as among the dark pinnacles overhead, or around which
+the 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 at
+the base of the rock. All lay dark below; and the red light atop, half
+absorbed by the dingy hues of the stone, shone with a gleam so faint and
+melancholy, that it served but to deepen the effect of the shadows.
+
+The puffin, a comparatively rare bird in the inner Hebrides, builds, I
+was told, in great numbers in the continuous line of precipice which,
+after sweeping for a full mile round the Bay of Laig, forms the
+pinnacled rampart here, and then, turning another angle of the island,
+runs on parallel to the coast for about six miles more. In former times
+the puffin furnished the islanders, as in St. Kilda, with a staple
+article of food, in those hungry months of summer in which the stores of
+the 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, save
+when they cannot help it; and the introduction of the potato has done
+much to put out the practice of climbing for the bird, except among a
+few young lads, who find excitement enough in the work to pursue it for
+its own sake, as an amusement. I found among the islanders what was
+said to be a piece of the natural history of the puffin, sufficiently
+apocryphal to remind one of the famous passage in the history of the
+barnacle, which traced the lineage of the bird to one of the
+pedunculated cirripedes, and the lineage of the cirripede to a log of
+wood. The puffin feeds its young, say the islanders, on an oily scum of
+the sea, which renders it such an unwieldy mass of fat, that about the
+time when it should be beginning to fly, it becomes unable to get out of
+its hole. The parent bird, not in the least puzzled, however, treats the
+case medicinally, and,--like mothers of another two-legged genus, who,
+when their daughters get over stout, put them through a course of
+reducing acids to bring them down,--feeds it on sorrel leaves for
+several days together, till, like a boxer under training, it gets
+thinned to the proper weight, and becomes able, not only to get out of
+its cell, but also to employ its wings.
+
+We pass through the hollow, and, reaching the farther edge of the
+bastion, towards the east, see a new range of prospect opening before
+us. There is first a long unbroken wall of precipice,--a continuation of
+the tall rampart overhead,--relieved along its irregular upper line by
+the blue sky. We mark the talus widening at its base, and expanding, as
+on the shores of the Bay of Laig, into an irregular grassy platform,
+that, sinking midway into a ditch-like hollow, rises again towards the
+sea, and presents to the waves a perpendicular precipice of redstone.
+The sinking sun shone brightly this evening; and the warm hues of the
+precipice, which bears the name of _Ru-Stoir_,--the Red
+Head,--strikingly contrasted with the pale and dark tints of the
+alternating basalts and sandstones in the taller cliff behind. The
+ditch-like hollow, which seems to indicate the line of a fault, cuts off
+this red headland from all the other rocks of the island, from which it
+appears to differ as considerably in texture as in hue. It consists
+mainly of thick beds of a pale red stone, which M'Culloch regarded as a
+trap, and which, intercalated with here and there a thin band of shale,
+and presenting not a few of the mineralogical appearances of what
+geologists of the school of the late Mr. Cunningham term Primary Old Red
+Sandstone, in some cases has been laid down as a deposit of Old Red
+proper, abutting in the line of a fault on the neighboring Oölites and
+basalts. In the geological map which I carried with me,--not one of high
+authority however,--I found it actually colored as a patch of this
+ancient system. The Old Red Sandstone is largely developed in the
+neighboring island of Rum, in the line of which the _Ru-Stoir_ seems to
+have a more direct bearing than any of the other deposits of Eigg; and
+yet the conclusion regarding this red headland merely adds one proof
+more to the many furnished already, of the inadequacy of mineralogical
+testimony, when taken in evidence regarding the eras of the geologist.
+The hard red beds of _Ru-Stoir_ belong, as I was fortunate enough this
+evening 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 more
+unequivocal than have been yet exhibited by any other deposit in
+Scotland.
+
+What first strikes the eye, in approaching the _Ru-Stoir_ from the west,
+is the columnar character of the stone. The precipices rise immediately
+over the sea, in rude colonnades of from thirty to fifty feet in height;
+single pillars, that have fallen from their places in the line, and
+exhibit a tenacity rare among the trap-rocks,--for they occur in
+unbroken lengths of from ten to twelve feet,--lie scattered below; and
+in several places where the waves have joined issue with the precipices
+in the line on which the base of the columns rest, and swept away the
+supporting foundation, the colonnades open into roomy caverns, that
+resound to the dash of the sea. Wherever the spray lashes, the pale red
+hue of the stone prevails, and the angles of the polygonal shafts are
+rounded; while higher up all is sharp-edged, and the unweathered surface
+is covered by a gray coat of lichens. The tenacity of the prostrate
+columns first drew my attention. The builder scant of materials would
+have experienced no difficulty in finding among them sufficient lintels
+for apertures from eight to twelve feet in width. I was next struck with
+the peculiar composition of the stone; it much rather resembles an
+altered sandstone, in at least the weathered specimens, than a trap, and
+yet there seemed nothing to indicate that it was an _Old Red_ Sandstone.
+Its columnar structure bore evidence to the action of great heat; and
+its pale red color was exactly that which the Oölitic sandstones of the
+island, 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 I
+expected 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 much
+deeper red than the general mass, and much more resembling Old Red
+Sandstone, I succeeded in detecting several shells, identical with those
+of the deposit of blue clay described in a former chapter. There
+occurred in it the small univalve resembling a Trochus, together with
+the oblong bivalve, somewhat like a Tellina; and, spread thickly
+throughout the block, lay fragments of coprolitic matter, and the scales
+and teeth of fishes. Night was coming on, and the tide had risen on the
+beach; but I hammered lustily, and laid open in the dark red shale a
+vertebral joint, a rib, and a parallelogramical fragment of solid bone,
+none of which could have belonged to any fish. It was an interesting
+moment for the curtain to drop over the promontory of _Ru-Stoir_; I had
+thus already found in connection with it well nigh as many reptilian
+remains as had been found in all Scotland before,--for there could exist
+no doubt that the bones I laid open were such; and still more
+interesting discoveries promised to await the coming morning, and a less
+hasty survey. We found a hospitable meal awaiting us at a picturesque
+old two-story house, with, what is rare in the island, a clump of trees
+beside 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 justice
+to the viands. Dark night had long set in ere we reached our vessel.
+
+Next day was Saturday; and it behooved my friend, the minister,--as
+scrupulously careful in his pulpit preparations for the islanders of
+Eigg as if his congregation were an Edinburgh one,--to remain on board,
+and study his discourse for the morrow. I found, however, no unmeet
+companion for my excursion in his trusty mate John Stewart. John had not
+very much English, and I had no Gaelic; but we contrived to understand
+one another wonderfully well; and ere evening I had taught him to be
+quite as expert in hunting dead crocodiles as myself. We reached the
+_Ru-Stoir_, and set hard to work with hammer and chisel. The fragments
+of red shale were strewed thickly along the shore for at least three
+quarters of a mile; wherever the red columnar rock appeared, there lay
+the shale, in water-worn blocks, more or less indurated; but the beach
+was covered over with shingle and detached masses of rock, and we could
+nowhere find it _in situ_. A winter storm powerful enough to wash the
+beach bare might do much to assist the explorer. There is a piece of
+shore on the eastern coast of Scotland, on which for years together I
+used to pick up nodular masses of lime containing fish of the Old Red
+Sandstone; but nowhere in the neighborhood could I find the ichthyolite
+bed in which they had originally formed. The storm of a single night
+swept the beach; and in the morning the ichthyolites lay revealed _in
+situ_ under a stratum of shingle which I had a hundred times examined,
+but which, though scarce a foot in thickness, had concealed from me the
+ichthyolite bed for five twelvemonths together!
+
+Wherever the altered shale of _Ru-Stoir_ has been thrown high on the
+beach, and exposed to the influences of the weather, we find it fretted
+over with minute organisms, mostly the scales, plates, bones, and teeth
+of fishes. The organisms, as is frequently the case, seem
+indestructible, while the hard matrix in which they are embedded has
+weathered from around them. Some of the scales present the rhomboidal
+outline, and closely resemble those of the _Lepidotus Minor_ of the
+Weald; others approximate in shape to an isosceles triangle. The teeth
+are of various forms: some of them, evidently palatal, are mere blunted
+protuberances glittering with enamel,--some of them present the usual
+slim, thorn-like type common in the teeth of the existing fish of our
+coasts,--some again are squat and angular, and rest on rectilinear
+bases, 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 the
+occipital plates, some present a smooth enamelled surface, while some
+are thickly tuberculated,--each tubercle bearing a minute depression in
+its apex, like a crater on the summit of a rounded hill. We find
+reptilian bones in abundance,--a thing new to Scotch geology,--and in a
+state of keeping peculiarly fine. They not a little puzzled John
+Stewart: he could not resist the evidence of his senses: they were
+bones, he said, real bones,--there could be no doubt of that: _there_
+were the joints of a backbone, with the hole the brain-marrow had
+passed through; and _there_ were shank-bones and ribs, and fishes'
+teeth; but how, he wondered, had they all got into the very heart of the
+hard red stones? He had seen what was called wood, he said, dug out of
+the side of the Scuir, without being quite certain whether it was wood
+or no; but there could be no uncertainty here. I laid open numerous
+vertebræ of various forms,--some with long spinous processes rising over
+the body or _centrum_ of the bone,--which I found in every instance,
+unlike that of the Ichthyosaurus, only moderately concave on the
+articulating faces; in others the spinous process seemed altogether
+wanting. Only two of the number bore any mark of the suture which
+unites, in most reptiles, the annular process to the centrum; in the
+others both centrum and process seemed anchylosed, as in quadrupeds,
+into one bone; and there remained no scar to show that the suture had
+ever existed. In some specimens the ribs seem to have been articulated
+to 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 in
+front two little eyelets, to which the great descending artery seems to
+have sent out blood-vessels in pairs. The more entire ribs I was lucky
+enough to disinter have, as in those of crocodileans, double heads; and
+a part of a fibula, about four inches in length, seems also to belong to
+this ancient family. A large proportion of the other bones are evidently
+Plesiosaurian. I found the head of the flat humerus so characteristic of
+the extinct order to which the Plesiosaurus has been assigned, and two
+digital bones of the paddle, that, from their comparatively slender and
+slightly curved form, so unlike the digitals of its cogener the
+Ichthyosaurus, could have belonged evidently to no other reptile. I
+observed, too, in the slightly curved articulations of not a few of the
+vertebræ, the gentle convexity in the concave centre, which, if not
+peculiar to the Plesiosaurus, is at least held to distinguish it from
+most of its contemporaries. Among the various nondescript organisms of
+the shale, I laid open a smooth angular bone, hollowed something like a
+grocer's scoop; a three-pronged caltrop-looking bone, that seems to have
+formed part of a pelvic arch; another angular bone, much massier than
+the first, regarding the probable position of which I could not form a
+conjecture, but which some of my geological friends deem cerebral; an
+extremely dense bone, imperfect at each end, which presents the
+appearance of a cylinder slightly flattened; and various curious
+fragments, which, with what our Scotch museums have not yet
+acquired,--entire reptilian fossils for the purposes of
+comparison,--might, I doubt not, be easily assigned to their proper
+places. It was in vain that, leaving John to collect the scattered
+pieces of shale in which the bones occurred, I set myself again and
+again to discover the bed from which they had been detached. The tide
+had fallen, and a range of skerries lay temptingly off, scarce a hundred
+yards from the water's edge: the shale beds might be among them, with
+Plesiosauri and crocodiles stretching entire; and fain would I have swum
+off to them, as I had done oftener than once elsewhere, with my hammer
+in my teeth, and with shirt and drawers in my hat; but a tall brown
+forest of kelp and tangle in which even a seal might drown, rose thick
+and perilous round both shore and skerries; a slight swell was felting
+the long fronds together; and I deemed it better, on the whole, that the
+discoveries I had already made should be recorded, than that they should
+be lost to geology, mayhap for a whole age, in the attempt to extend
+them.
+
+The water, beautifully transparent, permitted the eye to penetrate into
+its green depths for many fathoms around, though every object
+presented, through the agitated surface, an uncertain and fluctuating
+outline. I could see, however, the pink-colored urchin warping himself
+up, by his many cables, along the steep rock-sides; the green crab
+stalking along the gravelly bottom; a scull of small rock-cod darting
+hither and thither among the tangle-roots; and a few large medusæ slowly
+flapping their continuous fins of gelatine in the opener spaces, a few
+inches under the surface. Many curious families had their
+representatives within the patch of sea which the eye commanded; but the
+strange creatures that had once inhabited it by thousands, and whose
+bones still lay sepulchred on its shores, had none. How strange, that
+the identical sea heaving around stack and skerry in this remote corner
+of the Hebrides should have once been thronged by reptile shapes more
+strange than poet ever imagined,--dragons, gorgons and chimeras! Perhaps
+of all the extinct reptiles, the Plesiosaurus was the most
+extraordinary. An English geologist has described it, grotesquely
+enough, and yet most happily, as a snake _threaded_ through a tortoise.
+And here on this very spot, must these monstrous dragons have disported
+and fed; here must they have raised their little reptile heads and long
+swan-like necks over the surface, to watch an antagonist or select a
+victim; here must they have warred and wedded, and pursued all the
+various instincts of their unknown natures. A strange story, surely,
+considering it is a true one! I may mention in the passing, that some of
+the fragments of the shale in which the remains are embedded have been
+baked by the intense heat into an exceedingly hard, dark-colored stone,
+somewhat resembling basalt. I must add further, that I by no means
+determine the rock with which we find it associated to be in reality an
+altered sandstone. Such is the appearance which it presents where
+weathered; but its general aspect is that of a porphyritic trap. Be it
+what it may, the fact is not at all affected, that the shores, wherever
+it occurs on this tract of insular coast, are strewed with reptilian
+remains of the Oölite.
+
+The day passed pleasantly in the work of exploration and discovery; the
+sun had already declined far in the west; and, bearing with us our
+better fossils, we set out, on our return, by the opposite route to that
+along the Bay of Laig, which we had now thrice walked over. The grassy
+talus so often mentioned continues to run on the eastern side of the
+island for about six miles, between the sea and the inaccessible rampart
+of precipice behind. It varies in breadth from about two to four hundred
+yards; the rampart rises over it from three to five hundred feet; and a
+noble expanse of sea, closed in the distance by a still nobler curtain
+of blue hills, spreads away from its base: and it was along this grassy
+talus that our homeward road lay. Let the Edinburgh reader imagine the
+fine walk under Salisbury Crags lengthened some twenty times,--the line
+of precipices above heightened some five or six times,--the gravelly
+slope at the base not much increased in altitude, but developed
+transversely into a green undulating belt of hilly pasture, with here
+and there a sunny slope level enough for the plough, and here and there
+a rough wilderness of detached crags and broken banks; let him further
+imagine the sea sweeping around the base of this talus, with the nearest
+opposite land--bold, bare and undulating atop--some six or eight miles
+distant; and he will have no very inadequate idea of the peculiar and
+striking scenery through which, this evening, our homeward route lay. I
+have scarce ever walked over a more solitary tract. The sea shuts it in
+on the one hand, and the rampart of rocks on the other; there occurs
+along its entire length no other human dwelling than a lonely summer
+shieling; for full one-half the way we saw no trace of man; and the
+wildness of the few cattle which we occasionally startled in the
+hollows 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 utter
+loneliness, so impressed the imagination. The shieling, a rude
+low-roofed erection of turf and stone, with a door in the centre some
+five feet in height or so, but with no window, rose on the grassy slope
+immediately in front of the vast continuous rampart. A slim pillar of
+smoke ascends from the roof, in the calm, faint and blue within the
+shadow of the precipice, but it caught the sunlight in its ascent, and
+blushed, ere it melted into the ether, a ruddy brown. A streamlet came
+pouring from above in a long white thread, that maintained its
+continuity unbroken for at least two-thirds of the way; and then,
+untwisting into a shower of detached drops, that pattered loud and
+vehemently in a rocky recess, it again gathered itself up into a lively
+little stream, and, sweeping past the shieling, expanded in front into a
+circular pond, at which a few milch cows were leisurely slaking their
+thirst. The whole grassy talus, with a strip mayhap a hundred yards
+wide, of deep green sea, lay within the shadow of the tall rampart; but
+the red light fell, for many a mile beyond, on the glassy surface; and
+the distant Cuchullin Hills, so dark at other times, had all their
+prominent slopes and jutting precipices tipped with bronze; while here
+and there a mist streak, converted into bright flame, stretched along
+their peaks or rested on their sides. Save the lonely shieling, not a
+human dwelling was in sight. An island girl of eighteen, more than
+merely good-looking, though much embrowned by the sun, had come to the
+door to see who the unwonted visitors might be, and recognized in John
+Stewart an old acquaintance. John informed her in her own language that
+I was Mr. Swanson's sworn friend, and not a _Moderate_, but one of their
+own people, and that I had fasted all day, and had come for a drink of
+milk. The name of her minister proved a strongly recommendatory one: I
+have 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 it
+on this occasion, _viva voce_. And as she set herself to prepare for us
+a 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 little
+girls, engaged in keeping up the blaze under a large pot, but sadly
+diverted from their work by our entrance; while the other end was
+occupied 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 was
+occupied by the utensils and produce of the dairy,--flat wooden vessels
+of milk, a butter-churn, and a tub half-filled with curd; while a few
+cheeses, soft from the press, lay on a shelf above. The little girls
+were but occasional visitors, who had come, out of a juvenile frolic, to
+pass the night in the place; but I was informed by John that the
+shieling had two other inmates, young women, like the one so hospitably
+engaged in our behalf, who were out at the milking, and that they lived
+here all alone for several months every year, when the pasturage was at
+its best, employed in making butter and cheese for their master, worthy
+Mr. M'Donald of Keill. They must often feel lonely when night has closed
+darkly over mountain and sea, or in those dreary days of mist and rain
+so common in the Hebrides, when nought may be seen save the few
+shapeless crags that stud the nearer hillocks around them, and nought
+heard save the moaning of the wind in the precipices above, or the
+measured dash of the wave on the wild beach below. And yet they would do
+ill to exchange their solitary life and rude shieling for the village
+dwellings and gregarious habits of the females who ply their rural
+labors in bands among the rich fields of the Lowlands, or for the
+unwholesome backroom and weary task-work of the city seamstress. The
+sunlight was fading from the higher hill-tops of Skye and Glenelg as we
+bade farewell to the lonely shieling and the hospitable island girl.
+
+The evening deepened as we hurried southwards along the scarce visible
+pathway, 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 more
+picturesque peculiarities of the continuous rampart came out more
+strongly as a feature of the scene than when a strip of shade rested
+along the face of the rock, imparting to it a retiring character, and
+all was sunshine beyond. A thick bed of white sandstone, as continuous
+as the rampart itself, runs nearly horizontally about midway in the
+precipice for mile after mile, and, standing out in strong contrast with
+the dark-colored trap above and below, reminds one of a belt of white
+hewn work in a basalt house front, or rather,--for there occurs above a
+second continuous strip, of an olive hue, the color assumed, on
+weathering by a bed of amygdaloid,--of a piece of dingy old-fashioned
+furniture, inlaid with one stringed belt of bleached holly, and another
+of faded green-wood. At some of the more accessible points I climbed to
+the line of white belting, and found it to consist of the same soft
+quartzy sandstone that in the Bay of Laig furnishes the musical sand.
+Lower down there occur, alternating with the trap, beds of shale and of
+blue clay, but they are lost mostly in the talus. Ill adapted to resist
+the frosts and rains of winter, their exposed edges have mouldered into
+a loose soil, now thickly covered over with herbage; and, but for the
+circumstance that we occasionally find them laid bare by a water-course,
+we would scarce be aware of their existence at all. The shale exhibits
+everywhere, as on the opposite side of the _Ru-Stoir_, faint
+impressions of a minute shell resembling a Cyclas, and ill-preserved
+fragments of fish-scales. The blue clay I found at one spot where the
+pathway had cut deep into the hill-side, richly charged with bivalves of
+the species I had seen so abundant in the resembling clay of the Bay of
+Laig; but the closing twilight prevented me from ascertaining whether it
+also contained the characteristic univalves of the deposit, and whether
+its shells,--for they seem identical with those of the altered shales of
+the _Ru-Stoir_,--might not be associated, like these, with reptilian
+remains. Night fell fast, and the streaks of mist that had mottled the
+hills at sunset began to spread gray over the heavens in a continuous
+curtain; but there was light enough left to show me that the trap became
+more columnar as we neared our journey's end. One especial jutting in
+the rock presented in the gloom the appearance of an ancient portico,
+with pediment and cornice, such as the traveller sees on the hill-sides
+of Petræa in front of some old tomb; but it may possibly appear less
+architectural by day. At length, passing from under the long line of
+rampart, just as the stars that had begun to twinkle over it were
+disappearing, one after one, in the thickening vapor, we reached the
+little bay of Kildonan, and found the boat waiting us on the beach. My
+friend the minister, as I entered the cabin, gathered up his notes from
+the table, and gave orders for the tea-kettle; and I spread out before
+him--a happy man--an array of fossils new to Scotch Geology. No one not
+an enthusiastic geologist or a zealous Roman Catholic can really know
+how vast an amount of interest may attach to a few old bones. Has the
+reader 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 of
+no avail whatever?
+
+Thomas Campbell, when asked for a toast in a society of authors, gave
+the memory of Napoleon Bonaparte; significantly adding, "he once hung a
+bookseller." On a nearly similar principle I would be disposed to
+propose among geologists a grateful bumper in honor of the revolutionary
+army that besieged Maestricht. That city, some seventy-five or eighty
+years ago, had its zealous naturalist in the person of M. Hoffmann, a
+diligent excavator in the quarries of St. Peter's mountain, long
+celebrated for its extraordinary fossils. Geology, as a science, had no
+existence at the time; but Hoffmann was doing, in a quiet way, all he
+could to give it a beginning;--he was transferring from the rock to his
+cabinet, shells, and corals, and crustacea, and the teeth and scales of
+fishes, with now and then the vertebræ, and now and then the limb-bone,
+of a reptile. And as he honestly remunerated all the workmen he
+employed, and did no manner of harm to any one, no one heeded him. On
+one eventful morning, however, his friends the quarriers laid bare a
+most 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 it
+lay embedded, cut out entire, and transferred to his house, had spent
+week after week in painfully relieving it from the mass, all Maestricht
+began to speak of it as something really wonderful. There is a cathedral
+on St. Peter's mountain,--the mountain itself is church-land; and the
+lazy canon, awakened by the general talk, laid claim to poor Hoffmann's
+wonderful fossil as _his_ property. He was lord of the manor, he said,
+and the mountain and all that it contained belonged to him. Hoffmann
+defended his fossil as he best could in an expensive lawsuit; but the
+judges found the law clean against him; the huge reptile head was
+declared to be "treasure trove" escheat to the lord of the manor; and
+Hoffmann, half broken-hearted, with but his labor and the lawyer's bills
+for his pains, saw it transferred by rude hands from its place in his
+museum, to the residence of the grasping churchman. The huge fossil head
+experienced the fate of Dr. Chalmer's two hundred churches. Hoffmann was
+a philosopher, however, and he continued to observe and collect as
+before; but he never found such another fossil; and at length, in the
+midst of his ingenious labors, the vital energies failed within him, and
+he broke down and died. The useless canon lived on. The French
+Revolution broke out; the republican army invested Maestricht; the
+batteries were opened; and shot and shell fell thick on the devoted
+city. But in one especial quarter there alighted neither shot nor shell.
+All was safe around the canon's house. Ordinary relics would have
+availed him nothing in the circumstances,--no, not "the three kings of
+Cologne," had he possessed the three kings entire, or the jaw-bones of
+the "eleven thousand virgins;" but there was virtue in the jaw-bones of
+the 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 place
+where it lay. Maestricht surrendered; the fossil was found secreted in a
+vault, and sent away to the _Jardin des Plantes_ at Paris, maugre the
+canon, to delight there the heart of Cuvier; and the French, generously
+addressing themselves to the heirs of Hoffmann as its legitimate owners,
+made over to them a considerable sum of money as its price. They
+reversed the finding of the Maestricht judges; and all save the monks of
+St. 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 my
+geological chapters would be less dull if I left out the geology; and
+another class of semi-geologists, who say there was decidedly too much
+geology in my last. With the present chapter, as there threatens to be
+an utter lack of science in the earlier half of it, and very little, if
+any, in the latter half, I trust both classes may be in some degree
+satisfied. It will bear reference to but the existing system of
+things,--assuredly not the last of the consecutive creations,--and to a
+species of animal that, save in the celebrated Guadaloupe specimens, has
+not yet been found locked up in stone. There have been much of violence
+and suffering in the old immature stages of being,--much, from the era
+of the Holoptychius, with its sharp murderous teeth and strong armor of
+bone, down to that of the cannibal Ichthyosaurus, that bears the broken
+remains of its own kind in its bowels,--much, again, from the times of
+the crocodile of the Oölite, down to the times of the fossil hyena and
+gigantic shark of the Tertiary. Nor, I fear, have matters greatly
+improved in that latest-born creation in the series, that recognizes as
+its delegated lord the first tenant of earth accountable to his Maker.
+But there is a better and a last creation coming, in which man shall
+re-appear, not to oppress and devour his fellow-men, and in which there
+shall be no such wrongs perpetrated as it is my present purpose to
+record,--"new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness."
+Well sung the Ayrshire ploughman, when musing on the great truth that
+the present scene of being "is surely not the last,"--a truth
+corroborated 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 in
+his night-clothes,--gray in fog, and sad with rain. The higher grounds
+of the island lay hid in clouds, far below the level of the central
+hollow; and our whole prospect from the deck was limited to the nearer
+slopes, dank, brown, and uninhabited, and to the rough black crags that
+frown like sentinels over the beach. Now the rime thickened as the rain
+pattered more loudly on the deck; and even the nearer stacks and
+precipices showed as unsolid and spectral in the cloud as moonlight
+shadows thrown on a ground of vapor; anon it cleared up for a few
+hundred yards, as the shower lightened; and then there came in view,
+partially at least, two objects that spoke of man,--a deserted boat
+harbor, formed of loosely piled stone, at the upper extremity of a sandy
+bay; and a roofless dwelling beside it, with two ruinous gables rising
+over the broken walls. The entire scene suggested the idea of a land
+with which man had done for ever;--the vapor-enveloped rocks,--the waste
+of ebb-uncovered sand,--the deserted harbor,--the ruinous house,--the
+melancholy rain-fretted tides eddying along the strip of brown tangle in
+the foreground,--and, dim over all, the thick, slant lines of the
+beating shower!--I know not that of themselves they would have furnished
+materials enough for a finished picture in the style of Hogarth's "End
+of all Things;" but right sure am I that in the hands of Bewick they
+would have been grouped into a tasteful and poetic vignette. We set out
+for church a little after eleven,--the minister encased in his
+ample-skirted storm-jacket of oiled canvas, and protected atop by a
+genuine _sou-wester_, of which the broad posterior rim eloped half a
+yard down his back; and I closely wrapped up in my gray maud, which
+proved, however, a rather indifferent protection against the penetrating
+powers of a true Hebridean drizzle. The building in which the
+congregation meets is a low dingy cottage of turf and stone, situated
+nearly opposite to the manse windows. It had been built by my friend,
+previous to the Disruption, at his own expense, for a Gaelic school, and
+it now serves as a place of worship for the people.
+
+We found the congregation already gathered, and that the very bad
+morning had failed to lessen their numbers. There were a few of the male
+parishioners keeping watch at the door, looking wistfully out through
+the fog and rain for their minister; and at his approach nearly twenty
+more came issuing from the place,--like carder bees from their nest of
+dried grass and moss,--to gather round him, and shake him by the hand.
+The islanders of Eigg are an active, middle-sized race, with
+well-developed heads, acute intellects, and singularly warm feelings.
+And on this occasion at least there could be no possibility of mistake
+respecting the feelings with which they regarded their minister. Rarely
+have I seen human countenances so eloquently vocal with veneration and
+love. The gospel message, which my friend had been the first effectually
+to bring home to their hearts,--the palpable fact of his sacrifice for
+the sake of the high principles which he has taught,--his own kindly
+disposition,--the many services which he has rendered them, for not only
+has he been the minister, but also the sole medical man, of the Small
+Isles, and the benefit of his practice they have enjoyed, in every
+instance, without fee or reward,--his new life of hardship and danger,
+maintained for their sakes amid sinking health and great
+privation,--their frequent fears for his safety when stormy nights close
+over the sea,--and they have seen his little vessel driven from her
+anchorage, just as the evening has fallen,--all these are circumstances
+that 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-steam
+with a particularly wet congregation, some of whom, neither very robust
+nor young, had travelled in the soaking drizzle from the farther
+extremities of the island. And, judging from the serious attention with
+which they listened to the discourse, they must have deemed it full
+value for all it cost them. I have never yet seen a congregation more
+deeply impressed, or that seemed to follow the preacher more
+intelligently; and I was quite sure, though ignorant of the language in
+which my friend addressed them, that he preached to them neither heresy
+nor nonsense. There was as little of the reverence of externals in the
+place as can well be imagined: an uneven earthen floor,--turf-walls on
+every side, and a turf-roof above,--two little windows of four panes
+a-piece, adown which the rain-drops were coursing thick and fast,--a
+pulpit grotesquely rude, that had never employed the bred
+carpenter,--and a few ranges of seats of undressed deal, such were the
+mere materialisms of this lowly church of the people; and yet here,
+notwithstanding, was the living soul of a Christian
+community,--understandings convinced of the truth of the gospel, and
+hearts softened and impressed by its power.
+
+My friend, at the conclusion of his discourse, gave a brief digest of
+its contents in English, for the benefit of his one Saxon auditor; and I
+found, as I had anticipated, that what had so moved the simple islanders
+was just the old wondrous story, which, though repeated and re-repeated
+times beyond number, from the days of the apostles till now, continues
+to 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 Him
+should not perish, but have everlasting life." The great truths which
+had affected many of these poor people to tears, were exactly those
+which, during the last eighteen hundred years, have been active in
+effecting so many moral revolutions in the world, and which must
+ultimately triumph over all error and all oppression. On this occasion,
+as on many others, I had to regret my want of Gaelic. It was my
+misfortune to miss being born to this ancient language, by barely a mile
+of ferry. I first saw light on the southern shore of the Frith of
+Cromarty, where the strait is narrowest, among an old established
+Lowland community, marked by all the characteristics, physical and
+mental, of the Lowlanders of the southern districts; whereas, had I been
+born on the northern shore, I would have been brought up among a Celtic
+tribe, and Gaelic would have been my earliest language. Thus distinct
+was the line between the two races preserved, even after the
+commencement 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. During
+the incumbency of my friend's predecessor, it had been the public-house
+of the island, and the parish minister was by far its best customer. He
+was in the practice of sitting in one of its dingy little rooms, day
+after day, imbibing whisky and peat-reek; and his favorite boon
+companion on these occasions was a Roman Catholic tenant who lived on
+the opposite side of the island, and who, when drinking with the
+minister, used regularly to fasten his horse beside the door, till at
+length all the parish came to know that when the horse was standing
+outside the minister was drinking within. In course of time, through the
+natural gravitation operative in such cases, the poor incumbent became
+utterly scandalous, and was libelled for drunkenness before the General
+Assembly; but, as the island of Eigg lies remote from observation,
+evidence was difficult to procure; and had not the infatuated man got
+senselessly drunk one evening, when in Edinburgh on his trial, and
+staggered, of all places in the world, into the General Assembly, he
+would probably have died minister of Eigg. As the event happened,
+however, the testimony thus unwittingly furnished in the face of the
+Court that tried him was deemed conclusive;--he was summarily deposed
+from his office, and my friend succeeded him. Presbyterianism without
+the animating life is a poor shrunken thing: it never lies in state when
+it is dead; for it has no body of fine forms, or trapping of imposing
+ceremonies, to give it bulk or adornment: without the vitality of
+evangelism it is nothing; and in this low and abject state my friend
+found the Presbyterianism of Eigg. His predecessor had done it only
+mischief; nor had it been by any means vigorous before. Rum is one of
+the four islands of the parish; and all my readers must be familiar with
+Dr. Johnson's celebrated account of the conversion to Protestantism of
+the people of Rum. "The inhabitants," says the Doctor, in his "Journey
+to the Western Islands," "are fifty-eight families, who continued
+Papists for some time after the laird became a Protestant. Their
+adherence to their old religion was strengthened by the countenance of
+the laird's sister, a zealous Romanist; till one Sunday, as they were
+going to mass under the conduct of their patroness, Maclean met them on
+the way, gave one of them a blow on the head with a yellow stick,--I
+suppose a cane, for which the Erse had no name, and drove them to the
+kirk, from which they have never departed. Since the use of this method
+of conversion, the inhabitants of Eigg and Canna who continue Papists
+call 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 had
+lived on the best possible terms with the Popery of the island; the
+parish minister had soaked day after day in the public-house with a
+Roman Catholic boon companion; and when a Papist man married a
+Protestant woman, the woman, as a matter of course, became Papist also;
+whereas, when it was the man who was a Protestant, and the woman a
+Papist, the woman remained what she had been. Roman Catholicism was
+quite content with terms, actual though not implied, of a kind so
+decidedly advantageous; and the Roman Catholics used good-humoredly to
+urge on their neighbors the Protestants, that, as it was palpable they
+had 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. My
+friend labored hard, as a good and honest man ought, to impart to
+Protestantism in his parish the animating life of the Reformation; and,
+through the blessing of God, after years of anxious toil, he at length
+fully succeeded.
+
+I had got wet, and the day continued bad; and so, instead of returning
+to the evening sermon, which began at six, I remained alone aboard of
+the vessel. The rain ceased in little more than an hour after, and in
+somewhat more than two hours I got up on deck to see whether the
+congregation was not dispersing, and if it was not yet time to hang on
+the kettle for our evening tea. The unexpected apparition of some one
+aboard the Free Church yacht startled two ragged boys who were
+manoeuvring a little boat a stone-cast away, under the rocky shores of
+_Eilean Chaisteil_, and who, on catching a glimpse of me, flung
+themselves below the thwarts for concealment. An oar dropped into the
+water; there was a hasty arm and half a head thrust over the gunwale to
+secure it; and then the urchin to whom they belonged again disappeared.
+Meanwhile the boat drifted slowly away: first one little head would
+appear for a moment over the gunwale, then another, as if reconnoitering
+the 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 bay
+at the lower extremity of the glebe, with a cottage, in size and
+appearance much resembling an ant-hill, peeping out at its inner
+extremity among some stunted bushes. I had marked the place before, and
+had been struck with the peculiarity of the choice that could have fixed
+on it as a site for a dwelling: it is at once the most inconvenient and
+picturesque on this side the island. A semi-circular line of columnar
+precipices, that somewhat resembles an amphitheatre turned outside
+in,--for the columns that overlook the area are quite as lofty as those
+which should form the amphitheatre's outer wall,--sweeps round a little
+bay, flat and sandy at half-tide, but bordered higher up by a dingy,
+scarce passable beach of columnar fragments that have toppled from
+above. Between the beach and the line of columns there is a bosky talus,
+more thickly covered with brushwood than is at all common in the
+Hebrides, and scarce more passable than the rough beach at its feet. And
+at the bottom of this talus, with its one gable buried in the steep
+ascent,--for there is scarce a foot-breadth of platform between the
+slope and the beach,--and with the other gable projected to the
+tide-line on rugged columnar masses, stands the cottage. The story of
+the inmate,--the father of the two ragged boys,--is such a one as Crabbe
+would have delighted to tell, and as he could have told better than any
+one else.
+
+He had been, after a sort, a freebooter in his time, but born an age or
+two rather late; and the law had proved over strong for him. On at least
+one occasion, perhaps oftener,--for his adventures are not all known in
+Eigg,--he had been in prison for sheep-stealing. He had the dangerous
+art of subsisting without the ostensible means, and came to be feared
+and avoided by his neighbors as a man who lived on them without asking
+their leave. With neither character nor a settled way of living, his
+wits, I am afraid, must have been often whetted by his necessities: he
+stole lest he should starve. For some time he had resided in the
+adjacent island of Muck; but, proving a bad tenant, he had been ejected
+by the agent of the landlord, I believe a very worthy man, who gave him
+half a boll of meal to get quietly rid of him, and pulled down his
+house, when he had left the island, to prevent his return. Betaking
+himself, with his boys, to a boat, he set out in quest of some new
+lodgment. He made his first attempt or two on the mainland, where he
+strove to drive a trade in begging, but he was always recognized as the
+convicted sheep-stealer, and driven back to the shore. At length, after
+a 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 shed
+with some spars and the old sail of a boat placed slantways against the
+side of a rock, he squatted on the beach, determined, whether he lived
+or died, to find a home on the island. The islanders were no strangers
+to the character of the poor forlorn creature, and kept aloof from
+him,--none of them, however, so much as his own son; and, for a time, my
+friend the minister, aware that he had been the pest of every community
+among which he had lived, stood aloof from him too, in the hope that at
+length, wearied out, he might seek for himself a lodgment elsewhere.
+There came on, however, a dreary night of sleet and rain, accompanied by
+a fierce storm from the sea; and intelligence reached the manse late in
+the evening, that the wretched sheep-stealer had been seized by sudden
+illness, and was dying on the beach. There could be no room for further
+hesitation in this case; and my friend the minister gave instant orders
+that 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, and
+blocked up with rough masses of rock and stone, they found wholly
+impassable with so helpless a burden. And so, administering some
+cordials to the poor, hapless wretch, they had to leave him in the midst
+of the storm, with the old wet sail flapping about his ears, and the
+half-frozen rain pouring in upon him in torrents. He must have passed a
+miserable night, but it could not have been a whit more miserable than
+that passed by the minister in the manse. As the wild blast howled
+around his comfortable dwelling, and shook the casements as if some hand
+outside were assaying to open them, or as the rain pattered sharp and
+thick on the panes, and the measured roar of the surf rose high over
+every other sound, he could think of only the wretched creature exposed
+to the fury of a tempest so terrible, as perchance wrestling in his
+death agony in the darkness beside the breaking wave, or as already
+stiffening on the shore. He was early astir next morning, and almost the
+first person he met was the poor sheep-stealer, looking more like a
+ghost than a living man. The miserable creature had mustered strength
+enough to crawl up from the beach. My friend has often met better men
+with less pleasure. He found a shelter for the poor outcast; he tended
+him, prescribed for him, and, on his recovery, gave him leave to build
+for himself the hovel at the foot of the crags. The islanders were aware
+they had got but an indifferent neighbor through the transaction, though
+none of them, with the exception of the poor creature's son, saw what
+else their minister could have done in the circumstances. But the miller
+could sustain no apology for the arrangement that had given him his
+vagabond father as a neighbor; and oftener than once the site of the
+rising hovel became a scene of noisy contention between parent and son.
+Some of the islanders informed me that they had seen the son engaged in
+pulling down the stones of the walls as fast as the father raised them
+up; 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 with
+a light variable breeze for Isle Ornsay, in Skye, where the wife and
+family of Mr. Swanson resided, and from which he had now been absent for
+a full month. The island diminished, and assumed its tint of diluting
+blue, that waxed paler and paler hour after hour, as we left it slowly
+behind us; and the Scuir, projected boldly from its steep hill-top,
+resembled a sharp hatchet-edge presented to the sky. "Nowhere," said my
+friend, "did I so thoroughly realize the Disruption of last year as at
+this spot. I had just taken my last leave of the manse; Mrs. Swanson had
+staid 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 five
+years of age at the time, in the yacht with me to Skye. The little
+fellow had not much liked to part from his mother, and the previous
+unsettling of all sorts of things in the manse had bred in him thoughts
+he 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 of
+being very manly; and he seemed rather amused that papa should now have
+to make his porridge for him, and to put him to bed, and that it was
+John Stewart, the sailor, who was to be the servant girl. The passage,
+however, was tedious and disagreeable; the wind blew a-head, and heart
+and spirits failing poor Bill, and somewhat sea-sick to boot, he lay
+down 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 poor
+sheep-stealer whom you saw on the shore of Eigg.' This view of matters
+proved in no way consolatory to poor Bill. He continued his sad wail,
+'Home, home, home!' until at length he fairly sobbed himself asleep; and
+I never, on any other occasion, so felt the desolateness of my condition
+as when the cry of my boy,--'Home, home, home!'--was ringing in my
+ears."
+
+We passed, on the one hand, Loch Nevis and Loch Hourn, two fine arms of
+the sea that run far into the mainland, and open up noble vistas among
+the mountains; and, on the other, the long undulating line of Sleat in
+Skye, with its intermingled patches of woodland and arable on the coast,
+and its mottled ranges of heath and rock above. Towards evening we
+entered the harbor of Isle Ornsay, a quiet, well-sheltered bay, with a
+rocky islet for a breakwater on the one side, and the rudiments of a
+Highland village, containing a few good houses, on the other. Half a
+dozen small vessels were riding at anchor, curtained round, half-mast
+high, with herring nets; and a fleet of herring-boats lay moored beside
+them a little nearer the shore. There had been tolerable takes for a few
+nights in the neighboring sea, but the fish had again disappeared, and
+the fishermen, whose worn-out tackle gave such evidence of a
+long-continued run of ill-luck, as I had learned to interpret on the
+east coast, looked gloomy and spiritless, and reported a deficient
+fishery. I found Mrs. Swanson and her family located in one of the two
+best houses in the village, with a neat enclosure in front, and a good
+kitchen-garden behind. The following day I spent in exploring the rocks
+of the district,--a primary region with regard to organic existence,
+"without _form_ and void." From Isle Ornsay to the Point of Sleat, a
+distance of thirteen miles, gneiss is the prevailing deposit; and in no
+place in the district are the strata more varied and interesting than in
+the neighborhood of Knockhouse, the residence of Mr. Elder, which I
+found pleasingly situated at the bottom of a little open bay, skirted
+with picturesque knolls partially wooded, that present to the surf
+precipitous fronts of rock. One insulated eminence, a gun-shot from the
+dwelling-house, that presents to the sea two mural fronts of precipice,
+and sinks in steep grassy slopes on two sides more, bears atop a fine
+old ruin. There is a blind-fronted massy keep, wrapped up in a mantle of
+ivy, perched at the one end, where the precipice sinks steepest; while a
+more ruinous though much more modern pile of building, perforated by a
+double row of windows, occupies the rest of the area. The square keep
+has lost its genealogy in the mists of the past, but a vague tradition
+attributes its erection to the Norwegians. The more modern pile is said
+to have been built about three centuries ago by a younger son of
+M'Donald of the Isles; but it is added that, owing to the jealousy of
+his elder brother, he was not permitted to complete or inhabit it. I
+find it characteristic of most Highland traditions, that they contain
+speeches: they constitute true oral specimens of that earliest and
+rudest style of historic composition in which dialogue alternates with
+narrative. "My wise brother is building a fine house," is the speech
+preserved in this tradition as that of the elder son: "it is rather a
+pity 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 once
+arrested the progress of the work. Mr. Elder's boys showed me several
+minute pieces of brass, somewhat resembling rust-eaten coin, that they
+had dug out of the walls of the old keep; but the pieces bore no impress
+of the dye, and seemed mere fragments of metal beaten thin by the
+hammer.
+
+The gneiss at Knock is exceedingly various in its composition, and many
+of its strata the geologist would fail to recognize as gneiss at all. We
+find along the precipices its two unequivocal varieties, the schistose
+and the granitic, passing not unfrequently, the former into a true mica
+schist, the latter into a pale feldspathose rock, thickly pervaded by
+needle-like crystals of tremolite, that, from the style of the grouping,
+and the contrast existing between the dark green of the enclosed
+mineral, and the pale flesh-color of the ground, frequently furnishes
+specimens of great beauty. In some pieces the tremolite assumes the
+common fan-like form; in some, the crystals, lying at nearly right
+angles with each other, present the appearance of ancient characters
+inlaid in the rock; in some they resemble the footprints of birds in a
+thin layer of snow; and in one curious specimen picked up by Mr.
+Swanson, in which a dark linear strip is covered transversely by
+crystals that project thickly from both its sides, the appearance
+presented is that of a minute stigmaria of the Coal Measures, with the
+leaves, still bearing their original green color, bristling thick around
+it. Mr. Elder showed me, intercalated among the gneiss strata of a
+little ravine in the neighborhood of Isle Ornsay, a thin band of a
+bluish-colored indurated clay, scarcely distinguishable, in the hand
+specimen, from a weathered clay-stone, but unequivocally a stratum of
+the rock. I have found the same stone existing, in a decomposed state,
+as a very tenacious clay, among the gneiss strata of the hill of
+Cromarty; and oftener than once had I amused myself in fashioning it,
+with tolerable success, into such rude pieces of pottery as are
+sometimes found in old sepulchral tumuli. Such are a few of the rocks
+included in the general gneiss deposit of Sleat. If we are to hold, with
+one of the most distinguished of living geologists, that the stratified
+primary rocks are aqueous deposits altered by heat, to how various a
+chemistry must they not have been subjected in this district! In one
+stratum, so softened that all its particles were disengaged to enter
+into new combinations, and yet not so softened but that it still
+maintained its lines of division from the strata above and below, the
+green tremolite was shooting its crystals into the pale homogeneous
+mass; while in another stratum the quartz drew its atoms apart in masses
+that assumed one especial form, the feldspar drew its atoms apart into
+masses that assumed another and different form, and the glittering mica
+built up its multitudinous layers between. Here the unctuous chlorite
+constructed its soft felt; there the micaceous schist arranged its
+undulating 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 section
+of the Lower Oölite furnished by the line of sea-cliffs that, to the
+north of the Portree, rise full seven hundred feet over the beach; and
+on the morning of Wednesday I set out with this intention from Isle
+Ornsay, to join the mail gig at Broadford, and pass on to Portree,--a
+journey of rather more than thirty miles. I soon passed over the gneiss,
+and entered on a wide deposit, extending from side to side of the
+island, of what is generally laid down in our geological maps as Old Red
+Sandstone, but which, in most of its beds, quite as much resembles a
+quartz rock, and which, unlike any Old Red proper I have ever seen,
+passes, by insensible gradations, into the gneiss.[2] Wherever it has
+been laid bare in flat tables among the heath, we find it bearing those
+mysterious scratches on a polished surface which we so commonly find
+associated on the mainland with the boulder clay; but here, as in the
+Hebrides generally, the boulder clay is wanting. To the tract of Red
+Sandstone there succeeds a tract of Lias, which, also extending across
+the island, forms by far the most largely-developed deposit of this
+formation in Scotland. It occupies a flat dingy valley, about six miles
+in length, and that varies from two to four miles in breadth. The dreary
+interior is covered with mosses, and studded with inky pools, in which
+the botanist finds a few rare plants, and which were dimpled, as I
+passed them this morning, with countless eddies, formed by myriads of
+small quick glancing trout, that seemed busily engaged in fly-catching.
+The rock appears but rarely,--all is moss, marsh, and pool; but in a few
+localities on the hill-sides, where some stream has cut into the slope,
+and disintegrated the softer shales, the shepherd finds shells of
+strange form strewed along the water-courses, or bleaching white among
+the heath. The valley,--evidently a dangerous one to the night
+traveller, from its bogs and its tarns,--is said to be haunted by a
+spirit peculiar to itself,--a mischievous, eccentric, grotesque
+creature, not unworthy, from the monstrosity of its form, of being
+associated with the old monsters of the Lias. Luidag--for so the goblin
+is called--has but one leg, terminating, like an ancient satyr's, in a
+cloven foot; but it is furnished with two arms, bearing hard fists at
+the end of them, with which it has been known to strike the benighted
+traveller in the face, or to tumble him over into some dark pool. The
+spectre may be seen at the close of evening hopping vigorously among the
+distant bogs, like a felt ball on its electric platform; and when the
+mist lies thick in the hollows, an occasional glimpse may be caught of
+it 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 this
+goblin 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 the
+valley itself occupied by the sea; and we find the Lias, from its lower
+to its upper beds, exposed in unbroken series along the beach. In the
+middle of the opening lies the green level island of Pabba, altogether
+composed of this formation, and which, differing, in consequence, both
+in outline and color, from every neighboring island and hill, seems a
+little bit of flat fertile England, laid down, as if for contrast's
+sake, amid the wild rough Hebrides. Of Pabba and its wonders, however,
+more anon. I explored a considerable range of shore along the bay; but
+as I made it the subject of two after explorations ere I mastered its
+deposits, I shall defer my description till a subsequent chapter. It was
+late this evening ere the post-gig arrived from the south, and the night
+and several hours of the following morning were spent in travelling to
+Portree. I know not, however, that I could have seen some of the wildest
+and most desolate tracts in Skye to greater advantage. There was light
+enough to show the bold outlines of the hills,--lofty, abrupt,
+pyramidal,--just such hills, both in form and grouping, as a profile in
+black showed best; a low blue vapor slept in the calm over the marshes
+at their feet; the sea, smooth as glass, reflected the dusk twilight
+gleam in the north, revealing the narrow sounds and deep
+mountain-girdled lochs along which we passed; gray crags gleamed dimly
+on the sight; birch-feathered acclivities presented against sea and sky
+their rough bristly edges; all was vast, dreamy, obscure, like one of
+Martin's darker pictures: the land of the seer and the spectre could not
+have been better seen. Morning broke dim and gray, while we were yet
+several miles from Portree; and I reached the inn in time to see from my
+bed-room windows the first rays of the rising sun gleaming on the
+hill-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 from
+Edinburgh; and then, accompanied by a boy, whom I had engaged to carry
+my bag, set out to explore. The morning was ominously hot and
+breathless; and while the sea lay moveless in the calm, as a floor of
+polished marble, mountain and rock, and distant island, seemed tremulous
+all over, through a wavy medium of thick rising vapor. I judged from the
+first that my course of exploration for the day was destined to
+terminate abruptly; and as my arrangements with Mr. Swanson left me, for
+this part of the country, no second day to calculate upon, I hurried
+over deposits which in other circumstances I would have examined more
+carefully,--content with a glance. Accustomed in most instances to take
+long aims, as Cuddy Headrig did, when he steadied his musket on a rest
+behind the hedge, and sent his ball through Laird Oliphant's forehead, I
+had on this occasion to shoot flying; and so, selecting a large object
+for a mark, that I might run the less risk of missing, I strove to
+acquaint myself rather with the general structure of the district than
+with 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 suffer
+another vessel of the same size to take her berth between; and on the
+eastern shores of both Skye and Rasay we find the same Oölitic deposits
+tilted up at nearly the same angle. The section presented on the eastern
+coast of the one is nearly a duplicate of the section presented on the
+eastern coast of the other. During one of the severer frosts of last
+winter I passed along a shallow pond, studded along the sides with
+boulder stones. It had been frozen over; and then, from the evaporation
+so common in protracted frosts, the water had shrunk, and the sheet of
+ice which had sunk down over the central portion of the pond exhibited
+what a geologist would term very considerable marks of disturbance among
+the boulders at the edges. Over one sharp-backed boulder there lay a
+sheet tilted up like the lid of a chest half-raised; and over another
+boulder immediately behind it there lay another uptilted sheet, like the
+lid of a second half-open chest; and in both sheets, the edges, lying in
+nearly parallel lines, presented a range of miniature cliffs to the
+shore. Now, in the two uptilted ice-sheets of this pond I recognized a
+model of the fundamental Oölitic deposits Rasay and Skye. The mainland
+of Scotland had its representative in the crisp snow-covered shore of
+the pond, with its belt of faded sedges; the place of Rasay was
+indicated by the inner, that of Skye by the outer boulder; while the
+ice-sheets, with their shoreward-turned line of cliffs, represented the
+Oölitic beds, that turn to the mainland their dizzy range of precipices,
+varying from six to eight hundred feet in height, and then, sloping
+outwards and downwards, disappear under mountain wildernesses of
+overlying trap. And it was along a portion of the range of cliff that
+forms the outermost of the two uptilted lines, and which presents in
+this district of Skye a frontage of nearly twenty continuous miles to
+the 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 two
+miles into the interior, like the half-raised chest-lid of my
+illustration sloping towards the hinges, or the uptilted ice-table of
+the boulder sloping towards the centre of the pond; and the depression
+behind forms a flat moory valley, full fifteen miles in length, occupied
+by a chain of dark bogs and treeless lochans. A long line of trap-hills
+rises over it, in one of which, considerably in advance of the others, I
+recognized the Storr of Skye, famous among lovers of the picturesque for
+its strange group of mingled pinnacles and towers; while directly
+crossing into the valley from the Sound, and then running southwards for
+about two miles along its bottom, is the noble sea-arm, Loch Portree, in
+which, as indicated by the name (the King's Port) a Scottish king of the
+olden time, in his voyage round his dominions, cast anchor. The opening
+of the loch is singularly majestic;--the cliffs tower high on either
+side in graceful magnificence: but from the peculiar inward slope of the
+land, all within, as the loch reaches the line of the valley, becomes
+tame and low, and a black dreary moor stretches from the flat terminal
+basin into the interior. The opening of Loch Portree is a palace
+gateway, erected in front of some homely suburb, that occupies the place
+which the palace itself should have occupied.
+
+There was, however, no such mixture of the homely and the magnificent in
+the route I had selected to explore. It lay under the escarpment of the
+cliff; and I purposed pursuing it from Portree to Holm, a distance of
+about six miles, and then returning by the flat interior valley. On the
+one hand rose a sloping rampart, full seven hundred feet in height,
+striped longitudinally with alternating bands of white sandstone and
+dark shale, and capped atop by a continuous coping of trap, that lacked
+not massy tower, and overhanging turret, and projecting sentry-box;
+while, on the other hand, spreading outwards in the calm from the line
+of dark trap-rocks below, like a mirror from its carved frame of black
+oak, lay the Sound of Rasay, with its noble background of island and
+main rising bold on the east, and its long mountain vista opening to the
+south. The first fossiliferous deposit which gave me occasion this
+morning to use my hammer occurs near the opening of the loch, beside an
+old 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 a
+widely-spread accumulation of sand,--the bottom, mayhap, of some
+extensive bay of the Oölite, resembling the Loch Portree of the present
+day, in which eddy tides deposited the sand swept along by the tidal
+currents of some neighboring sound, and which swarmed as thickly with
+Cephalopoda as the loch swarmed this day with minute purple-tinged
+Medusæ. I found detached on the shore, immediately below this bed, a
+piece of calcareous fissile sandstone, abounding in small sulcated
+Terebratulæ, identical, apparently, with the Terebratula of a specimen
+in my collection from the inferior Oölite of Yorkshire. A colony of this
+delicate Brachiopod must have once lain moored near this spot, like a
+fleet of long-prowed galleys at anchor, each one with its cable of many
+strands extended earthwards from the single _dead-eye_ in its umbone.
+For a full mile after rounding the northern boundary of the loch, we
+find the immense escarpment composed from top to bottom exclusively of
+trap; but then the Oölite again begins to appear, and about two miles
+further on the section becomes truly magnificent,--one of the finest
+sections of this formation exhibited anywhere in Britain, perhaps in the
+world. In a ravine furrowed in the face of the declivity by the headlong
+descent of a small stream, we may trace all the beds of the system in
+succession, from the Cornbrash, an upper deposit of the Lower Oölite,
+down to the Lias, the formation on which the Oölite rests. The only
+modifying circumstance to the geologist is, that though the sandstone
+beds run continuously along the cliff for miles together, distinct as
+the white bands in a piece of onyx, the intervening beds of shale are
+swarded over, save where we here and there see them laid bare in some
+abrupter acclivity or deeper water-course. In the shale we find numerous
+minute Ammonites, sorely weathered; in the sandstone, Belemnites, some
+of them of great size; and dark carbonaceous markings, passing not
+unfrequently into a glossy cubical coal. At the foot of the cliff I
+picked up an ammonite of considerable size and well-marked
+character,--the _Ammonites Murchisonæ_, first discovered on this coast
+by Sir R. Murchison about fifteen years ago. It measures, when full
+grown, from six to seven inches in diameter; the inner whorls, which are
+broadly visible, are ribbed; whereas the two, and sometimes the three
+outer ones, are smooth,--a marked characteristic of the species. My
+specimen merely enabled me to examine the peculiarities of the shell
+just a little more minutely than I could have done in the pages of
+Sowerby; for such was its state of decay, that it fell to pieces in my
+hands. I had now come full in view of the rocky island of Holm, when the
+altered appearance of the heavens led me to deliberate, just as I was
+warming in the work of exploration, whether, after all, it might not be
+well to scale the cliffs, and strike directly on the inn. It was nearly
+three o'clock; the sky had been gradually darkening since noon, as if
+one thin covering of gauze after another had been drawn over it; hill
+and island had first dimmed and then disappeared in the landscape; and
+now the sun stood up right over the fast-contracting vista of the Sound,
+round and lightless as the moon in a haze; and the downward
+cataract-like streaming of the gray vapor on the horizon showed that
+there the rain had already broken, and was descending in torrents. We
+had been thirsty in the hot sun, and had found the springs few and
+scanty; but the boy now assured me, in very broken English, that we were
+to get a great deal more water than would be good for us, and that it
+might be advisable to get out of its way. And so, climbing to the top of
+the cliffs, along a water-course, we reached the ridge, just as the fog
+came rolling downwards from the peaked brow of the Storr into the flat
+moory valley, and the melancholy lochans roughened and darkened in the
+rain. We were both particularly wet ere we reached Portree.
+
+In exploring our Scotch formations, I have had frequent occasion, in
+Ross, Sutherland, Caithness, and now once more in Skye, to pass over
+ground described by Sir R. Murchison; and in every instance have I found
+myself immensely his debtor. His descriptions possess the merit of being
+true: they are simple outlines often, that leave much to be filled up by
+after discovery; but, like those outlines of the skilful geographer that
+fix the place of some island or strait, though they may not entirely
+define it, they always indicate the exact position in the scale of the
+formations to which they refer. They leave a good deal to be done in the
+way of mapping out the interior of a deposit, if I may so speak; but
+they leave nothing to be done in the way of ascertaining its place. The
+work accomplished is _bona fide_ work,--actual, solid, not to be done
+over again,--work such as could be achieved in only the school of Dr.
+William Smith, the father of English Geology. I have found much to
+admire, too, in the sections of Sir R. Murchison. His section of this
+part of the coast, for example, strikes from the extreme northern part
+of Skye to the island of Holm, thence to Scrapidale in Rasay, thence
+along part of the coast of Scalpa, thence direct through the middle of
+Pabba, and thence to the shore of the Bay of Laig. The line thus taken
+includes, in regular sequence in the descending order, the whole Oölitic
+deposits of the Hebrides, from the Cornbrash, with its overlying
+fresh-water outliers of mayhap the Weald, down to where the Lower Lias
+rests on the primary red sandstones of Sleat. It would have cost
+M'Culloch less exploration to have written a volume than it must have
+cost 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 followed
+repeatedly in the track of another geologist, of, however, a very
+different school, who explored, at a comparatively recent period, the
+deposits of not a few of our Scotch counties. But his labors, in at
+least the fossiliferous formations, seem to have accomplished nothing
+for Geology,--I am afraid, even less than nothing. So far as they had
+influence at all, it must have been to throw back the science. A
+geologist who could have asserted only three years ago ("Geognostical
+Account of Banffshire," 1842), that the Old Red Sandstone of Scotland
+forms merely "a part of the great coal deposit," could have known
+marvellously little of the fossils of the one system, and nothing
+whatever of those of the other. Had he examined ere he decided, instead
+of deciding without any intention of examining, he would have found
+that, while both systems abound in organic remains, they do not possess,
+in Scotland at least, a single species in common, and that even their
+types of being, viewed in the group, are essentially distinct.
+
+The three Edinburgh gentlemen whom I had met at breakfast were still in
+the inn. One of them I had seen before, as one of the guests at a
+Wesleyan soiree, though I saw he failed to remember that I had been
+there as a guest too. The two other gentlemen were altogether strangers
+to me. One of them,--a man on the right side of forty, and a superb
+specimen of the powerful, six-feet two-inch Norman Celt,--I set down as
+a scion of some old Highland family, who, as the broadsword had gone
+out, carried on the internal wars of the country with the formidable
+artillery of Statute and Decision. The other, a gentleman more advanced
+in life, I predicated to be a Highland proprietor, the uncle of the
+younger of the two,--a man whose name, as he had an air of business
+about him, occurred, in all probability, in the Almanac, in the list of
+Scotch advocates. Both were of course high Tories,--I was quite sure of
+that,--zealous in behalf of the Establishment, though previous to the
+Disruption they had not cared for it a pin's point,--and prepared to
+justify the virtual suppression of the toleration laws in the case of
+the Free Church. I was thus decidedly guilty of what old Dr. More calls
+a _prosopolepsia_,--_i.e._ of the crime of judging men by their looks.
+At dinner, however, we gradually ate ourselves into conversation: we
+differed, and disputed, and agreed, and then differed, disputed and
+agreed again. I found first, that my chance companions were really not
+very 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 advanced
+in life,--strange as the fact might seem,--very considerably a
+_Presbyterian_ Whig; and finally, that this latter gentleman, whom I had
+set down as an intolerant Highland proprietor, was a respected writer to
+the signet, a Free Church elder in Edinburgh; and that the other, his
+equally intolerant nephew, was an Edinburgh advocate, of vigorous
+talent, much an enemy of all oppression, and a brother contributor of my
+own to one of the Quarterlies. Of all my surmisings regarding the
+stranger gentlemen, only two points held true,--they were both
+gentlemen of the law, and both had Celtic blood in their veins. The
+evening passed pleasantly; and I can now recommend from experience, to
+the hapless traveller who gets thoroughly wet thirty miles from a change
+of dress, that some of the best things he can resort to in the
+circumstances are, a warm room, a warm glass, and agreeable companions.
+
+On the morrow I behooved to return to Isle Ornsay, to set out on the
+following day, with my friend the minister, for Rum, where he purposed
+preaching on the Sabbath. To have lost a day would have been to lose the
+opportunity of exploring the island, perhaps forever; and, to make all
+sure, I had taken a seat in the mail gig, from the postman who drives
+it, ere going to bed, on the morning of my arrival; and now, when it
+drove 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 my
+seat, 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 who
+deemed himself authorized to receive the fare; was he so?" "Yes." "Could
+you have received it?" "No." "Show me a copy of your regulations." "I
+have no copy of regulations; but I have given the place in the gig to
+another." "Just so; and what say you, postman?" "That you took the place
+from me, and that _he_ has no right to give a place to any one: I carry
+the Portree letters to him, but he has nothing to do with the
+passengers." A person present, the proprietor or stabler of the horse, I
+believe, also interfered on the same side; but what Carlyle terms the
+"gigmanity" of the postmaster was all at stake,--his whole influence in
+the 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 given
+the seat to had taken possession of the gig; and so we had to compound
+the matter by carrying a passenger additional. The incident is scarce
+worth relating; but the postmaster was so vehement and terrible, so
+defiant of us all,--post, stabler, and simple passenger,--and so justly
+impressed with the importance of being postmaster of Portree, that, as I
+am in the way of describing rare specimens at any rate, I must refer to
+him among the rest, as if he had been one of the minor carnivoræ of a
+Skye deposit,--a cuttlefish, that preyed on the weaker molluscs, or a
+hungry polypus, terrible among the animalculæ.
+
+We drove heavily, and had to dismount and walk afoot over every steeper
+acclivity; but I carried my hammer, and only grieved that in some one or
+two localities the road should have been so level. I regretted it in
+especial on the southern and eastern side of Loch Sligachan, where I
+could see from my seat, as we drove past, the dark blue rocks in the
+water-courses on each side the road, studded over with that
+characteristic shell of the Lias, the _Gryphæa incurva_, and that the
+dry-stone fences in the moor above exhibit fossils that might figure in
+a museum. But we rattled by. At Broadford, twenty-five miles from
+Portree, and nine miles from Isle Ornsay, I partook of a hospitable meal
+in the house of an acquaintance; and in little more than two hours after
+was with my friend the minister at Isle Ornsay. The night wore
+pleasantly by. Mrs. Swanson, a niece of the late Dr. Smith of
+Campbelton, so well known for his Celtic researches and his exquisite
+translations of ancient Celtic poetry, I found deeply versed in the
+legendary lore of the Highlands. The minister showed me a fine specimen
+of Pterichthys which I had disinterred for him, out of my first
+discovered fossiliferous deposit of the Old Red Sandstone, exactly
+thirteen years before, and full seven years ere I had introduced the
+creature to the notice of Agassiz. And the minister's daughter, a
+little chubby girl of three summers, taking part in the general
+entertainment, strove to make her Gaelic sound as like English as she
+could, in my especial behalf. I remembered, as I listened to the
+unintelligible prattle of the little thing, unprovided with a word of
+English, that just eighteen years before, her father had had no Gaelic;
+and wondered what he would have thought, could he have been told, when
+he 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 been
+engaged in beating over the Eathie Lias together, collecting Belemnites,
+Ammonites, and fossil wood, and striving in friendly emulation the one
+to surpass the other in the variety and excellence of our specimens. Our
+leisure hours were snatched, at the time, from college studies by the
+one, from the mallet by the other: there were few of them that we did
+not spend together, and that we were not mutually the better for so
+spending. I at least, owe much to these hours,--among other things,
+views of theologic truth, that determined the side I have taken in our
+ecclesiastical controversy. Our courses at an after period lay diverse;
+the young minister had greatly more important business to pursue than
+any which the geologic field furnishes; and so our amicable rivalry
+ceased early. In the words in which an English poet addresses his
+brother,--the clergyman who sat for the picture in the "Deserted
+Village,"--my friend "entered on a sacred office, where the harvest is
+great and the laborers are few, and left to me a field in which the
+laborers are many, and the harvest scarce worth carrying away."
+
+Next day at noon we weighed anchor, and stood out for Rum, a run of
+about twenty-five miles. A kind friend had, we found, sent aboard in our
+behalf two pieces of rare antiquity,--rare anywhere, but especially
+rare in the lockers of the Betsey,--in the agreeable form of two bottles
+of semi-fossil Madeira,--Madeira that had actually existed in the grape
+exactly half a century before, at the time when Robespierre was
+startling Paris from its propriety, by mutilating at the neck the busts
+of other people, and multiplying casts and medals of his own; and we
+found it, explored in moderation, no bad study for geologists,
+especially in coarse weather, when they had got wet and somewhat
+fatigued. It was like Landlord Boniface's ale, mild as milk, had
+exchanged its distinctive flavor as Madeira for a better one, and filled
+the cabin with fragrance every time the cork was drawn. Old observant
+Homer must have smelt some such liquor somewhere, or he could never have
+described so well the still more ancient and venerable wine with which
+wily 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 sound
+opposite Armadale, there fell a dead calm; and the Betsey, more actively
+idle than the ship manned by the Ancient Mariner, dropped sternwards
+along the tide, to the dull music of the flapping sail. The minister
+spent 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 of
+lines, but there were no fish to bite,--got into the boat, but there
+were no neighboring islands to visit,--and sent half a dozen
+pistol-bullets after a shoal of porpoises, which, coming from the Free
+Church yacht, must have astonished the fat sleek fellows pretty
+considerably, but did them, I am afraid, no serious damage. As the
+evening began to close gloomy and gray, a tumbling swell came heaving in
+right ahead from the west; and a bank of cloud, which had been gradually
+rising higher and darker over the horizon in the same direction, first
+changed its abrupt edge atop for a diffused and broken line, and then
+spread itself over the central heavens. The calm was evidently not to be
+a calm long; and the minister issued orders that the gaff-topsail should
+be taken down, and the storm-jib bent; and that we should lower our
+topmast, and have all tight and ready for a smart gale ahead. At half
+past ten, however, the Betsey was still pitching to the swell, with not
+a breath of wind to act on the diminished canvas, and with the solitary
+circumstance in her favor, that the tide ran no longer against her, as
+before. The cabin was full of all manner of creakings; the close lamp
+swung to and fro over the head of my friend; and a refractory
+Concordance, after having twice travelled from him along the entire
+length of the table, flung itself pettishly upon the floor. I got into
+my snug bed about eleven; and at twelve, the minister, after poring
+sufficiently over his notes, and drawing the final score, turned into
+his. In a brief hour after, on came the gale, in a style worthy of its
+previous hours of preparation; and my friend,--his Saturday's work in
+his ministerial capacity well over when he had completed his two
+discourses,--had to begin the Sabbath morning early as the morning
+itself began, by taking his stand at the helm, in his capacity of
+skipper of the Betsey. With the prospect of the services of the Sabbath
+before him, and after working all Saturday to boot, it was rather hard
+to set him down to a midnight spell at the helm, but he could not be
+wanted at such a time, as we had no other such helmsman aboard. The
+gale, thickened with rain, came down, shrieking like a maniac, from off
+the peaked hills of Rum, striking away the tops of the long ridgy
+billows that had risen in the calm to indicate its approach, and then
+carrying them in sheets of spray aslant the furrowed surface, like
+snow-drift hurried across a frozen field. But the Betsey, with her
+storm-jib set, and her mainsail reefed to the cross, kept her weather
+bow bravely to the blast, and gained on it with every tack. She had been
+the pleasure yacht, in her day, of a man of fortune, who had used, in
+running south with her at times as far as Lisbon, to encounter, on not
+worse terms than the stateliest of her neighbors in the voyage, the
+swell of the Bay of Biscay; and she still kept true to her old
+character, with but this drawback, that she had now got somewhat crazy
+in her fastenings, and made rather more water in a heavy sea than her
+one little pump could conveniently keep under. As the fitful gust struck
+her headlong, as if it had been some invisible missile hurled at us from
+off the hill-tops, she stooped her head lower and lower, like old
+stately Hardyknute under the blow of the "King of Norse," till at length
+the lee chain-plate rustled sharp through the foam; but, like a staunch
+Free Churchwoman, the lowlier she bent, the more steadfastly did she
+hold her head to the storm. The strength of the opposition served but to
+speed her on all the more surely to the desired haven. At five o'clock
+in the morning we cast anchor in Loch Scresort,--the only harbor of Rum
+in 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 sudden
+gust had seized it by the flap, and hurried it away far to the lee. He
+had yielded it to the winds, as he had done the temporalities, but much
+more unwillingly, and less as a free agent. Should any conscientious
+mariner 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 that
+he holds Free Church property, and that he is heartily welcome to hold
+it, leaving it to himself to consider whether a benefaction to its full
+value, deducting salvage, is not owing, in honor, to the Sustenation
+Fund.
+
+It was ten o'clock ere the more fatigued aboard could muster resolution
+enough to quit their beds a second time; and then it behooved the
+minister to prepare for his Sabbath labors ashore. The gale still blew
+in fierce gusts from the hills, and the rain pattered like small shot on
+the 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 its
+sides, 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 the
+distance of about a mile from the sea, an elevation of two thousand
+feet. Along the slopes of the sandstone ridge I could discern, through
+the haze, numerous green patches, that had once supported a dense
+population, long since "cleared off" to the backwoods of America, but
+not one inhabited dwelling; while along a black moory acclivity under
+the 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 of
+ripening. The hill-tops were lost in cloud and storm; and ever and anon,
+as a heavier shower came sweeping down on the wind, the intervening
+hollows closed up their gloomy vistas, and all was fog and rime to the
+water's edge. Bad as the morning was, however, we could see the people
+wending their way, in threes and fours, through the dark moor, to the
+place 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 entire
+population--had all come out to meet their minister.
+
+On going ashore, we found the place nearly filled. My friend preached
+two long energetic discourses, and then returned to the yacht, "a worn
+and weary man." The studies of the previous day, and the fatigues of the
+previous night, added to his pulpit duties, had so fairly prostrated his
+strength, that the sternest teetotaller in the kingdom would scarce have
+forbidden him a glass of our fifty-year-old Madeira. But even the
+fifty-year-old Madeira proved no specific in the case. He was suffering
+under excruciating headache, and had to stretch himself in his bed, with
+eyes shut but sleepless, waiting till the fit should pass,--every pulse
+that 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 reader
+take, if he can, from twelve to fifteen trap-hills, varying from one
+thousand to two thousand three hundred feet in height; let him pack them
+closely and squarely together, like rum-bottles in a case-basket; let
+him surround them with a frame of Old Red Sandstone, measuring rather
+more than seven miles on the side, in the way the basket surrounds the
+bottles; then let him set them down in the sea a dozen miles off the
+land,--and he shall have produced a second island of Rum, similar in
+structure to the existing one. In the actual island, however, there is a
+defect in the inclosing basket of sandstone: the basket, complete on
+three of its sides, wants the fourth: and the side opposite to the gap
+which the fourth should have occupied is thicker than the two other
+sides put together. Where I now write there is an old dark-colored
+picture on the wall before me. I take off one of the four bars of which
+the frame is composed,--the end-bar,--and stick it on to the end-bar
+opposite, and then the picture is fully framed on two of its sides, and
+doubly 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 of
+the island,--that in which the Betsey lies at anchor,--and the long
+withdrawing valley, of which the loch is merely a prolongation,
+occurring in the double sandstone bar: it seems to mark--to return to my
+illustration--the line in which the superadded piece of frame has been
+stuck on to the frame proper. The origin of the island is illustrated by
+its structure: it has left its story legibly written, and we have but to
+run our eye over the characters and read. An extended sea-bottom,
+composed of Old Red Sandstone, already tilted up by previous
+convulsions, so that the strata presented their edges, tier beyond tier,
+like roofing slate laid aslant on a floor, became a centre of Plutonic
+activity. The molten trap broke through at various times, and presenting
+various appearances, but in nearly the same centre; here existing as an
+augitic rock, there as a syenite, yonder as a basalt or amygdaloid. At
+one place it uptilted the sandstone; at another it overflowed it; the
+dark central masses raised their heads above the surface, higher and
+higher with every earthquake throe from beneath; till at length the
+gigantic Ben More attained to its present altitude of two thousand three
+hundred feet over the sea-level, and the sandstone, borne up from
+beneath like floating sea-wrack on the back of a porpoise, reached in
+long outside bands its elevation of from six to eight hundred. And such
+is the piece of history, composed in silent but expressive language, and
+inscribed in the old geological character, on the rocks of Rum.
+
+The wind lowered and the rain ceased during the night, and the morning
+of Monday was clear, bracing, and breezy. The island of Rum is chiefly
+famous among mineralogists for its heliotropes or bloodstones; and we
+proposed devoting the greater part of the day to an examination of the
+hill of Scuir More, in which they occur, and which lies on the opposite
+side of the island, about eight miles from the mooring ground of the
+Betsey. Ere setting out, however, I found time enough, by rising some
+two or three hours before breakfast, to explore the Red Sandstones on
+the southern side of the loch. They lie in this bar of the frame,--to
+return once more to my old illustration,--as if it had been cut out of a
+piece of cross-grained deal, in which the annular bands, instead of
+ranging lengthwise, ran diagonally from side to side; stratum leans over
+stratum, dipping towards the west at an angle of about thirty degrees;
+and as in a continuous line of more than seven miles there seem no
+breaks or repetitions in the strata, the thickness of the deposit must
+be enormous,--not less, I should suppose, than from six to eight
+thousand feet. Like the Lower Old Red Sandstones of Cromarty and Moray,
+the red arenaceous strata occur in thick beds, separated from each other
+by bands of a grayish-colored stratified clay, on the planes of which I
+could trace with great distinctness ripple markings; but in vain did I
+explore their numerous folds for the plates, scales, and fucoid
+impressions which abound in the gray argillaceous beds of the shores of
+the Moray and Cromarty Friths. It would, however, be rash to pronounce
+them non-fossiliferous, after the hasty search of a single
+morning,--unpardonably so in one who had spent very many mornings in
+putting to the question the gray stratified beds of Ross and Cromarty,
+ere he succeeded in extorting from them the secret of their organic
+riches.
+
+We set out about half-past ten for Scuir More, through the Red Sandstone
+valley in which Loch Scresort terminates, with one of Mr. Swanson's
+people, a young active lad of twenty, for our guide. In passing upwards
+for nearly a mile along the stream that falls into the upper part of the
+loch, and lays bare the strata, we saw no change in the character of
+the sandstone. Red arenaceous beds of great thickness alternate with
+grayish-colored bands, composed of a ripple-marked micaceous slate and a
+stratified clay. For a depth of full three thousand feet, and I know not
+how much more,--for I lacked time to trace it further,--the deposit
+presents no other variety: the thick red bed of at least a hundred yards
+succeeds the thin gray band of from three to six feet, and is succeeded
+by a similar gray band in turn. The ripple-marks I found as sharply
+relieved in some of the folds as if the wavy undulations to which they
+owed their origin had passed over them within the hour. The
+comparatively small size of their alternating ridges and furrows give
+evidence that the waters beneath which they had formed had been of no
+very profound depth. In the upper part of the valley, which is bare,
+trackless, and solitary, with a high monotonous sandstone ridge bounding
+it on the one side, and a line of gloomy trap-hills rising over it on
+the other, the edges of the strata, where they protrude through the
+mingled heath and moss, exhibit the mysterious scratchings and
+polishings now so generally connected with the glacial theory of
+Agassiz. The scratchings run in nearly the line of the valley, which
+exhibits no trace of moraines; and they seem to have been produced
+rather by the operation of those extensively developed causes, whatever
+their nature, that have at once left their mark on the sides and summits
+of some of our highest hills, and the rocks and boulders of some of our
+most extended plains, than by the agency of forces limited to the
+locality. They testify, Agassiz would perhaps say, not regarding the
+existence of some local glacier that descended from the higher grounds
+into the valley, but respecting the existence of the great polar
+glacier. I felt, however, in this bleak and solitary hollow, with the
+grooved and polished platforms at my feet, stretching away amid the
+heath, like flat tombstones in a graveyard, that I had arrived at one
+geologic inscription to which I still wanted the key. The vesicular
+structure of the traps on the one hand, identical with that of so many
+of our modern lavas,--the ripple-markings of the arenaceous beds on the
+other, indistinguishable from those of the sea-banks on our coasts,--the
+upturned strata and the overlying trap,--told all their several stories
+of fire, or wave, or terrible convulsion, and told them simply and
+clearly; but here was a story not clearly told. It summoned up doubtful,
+ever-shifting visions,--now of a vast ice continent, abutting on this
+far isle of the Hebrides from the Pole, and trampling heavily over
+it,--now of the wild rush of a turbid, mountain-high flood breaking in
+from the west, and hurling athwart the torn surface, rocks, and stones,
+and clay,--now of a dreary ocean rising high along the hills, and
+bearing onward with its winds and currents, huge icebergs, that now
+brushed the mountain-sides, and now grated along the bottom of the
+submerged valleys. The inscription on the polished surfaces, with its
+careless mixture of groove and scratch, is an inscription of very
+various readings.
+
+We passed along a transverse hollow, and then began to ascend a
+hill-side, from the ridge of which the water sheds to the opposite shore
+of 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 brown
+lizard, nearly five inches in length, startled by our approach, ran
+hurriedly across the path; and our guide, possessed by the general
+Highland belief that the creature is poisonous, and injures cattle,
+struck at it with a switch, and cut it in two immediately behind the
+hinder legs. The upper half, containing all that anatomists regard as
+the vitals, heart, brain, and viscera, all the main nerves, and all the
+larger arteries, lay stunned by the blow, as if dead; nor did it
+manifest any signs of vitality so long as we remained beside it; whereas
+the 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 a
+young eel scooped out of some stream, and thrown upon the bank; and then
+lay wriggling and palpitating for about half a minute more. There are
+few things more inexplicable in the province of the naturalist than the
+phenomenon of what may be termed divided life,--vitality broken into
+two, and yet continuing to exist as vitality in both the dissevered
+pieces. We see in the nobler animals mere glimpses of the
+phenomenon,--mere indications of it, doubtfully apparent for at most a
+few minutes. The blood drawn from the human arm by the lancet continues
+to live in the cup until it has cooled and begun to coagulate; and when
+head and body have parted company under the guillotine, both exhibit for
+a brief space such unequivocal signs of life, that the question arose in
+France during the horrors of the Revolution, whether there might not be
+some glimmering of consciousness attendant at the same time on the
+fearfully opening and shutting eyes and mouth of the one, and the
+beating heart and jerking neck of the other. The lower we descend in the
+scale of being, the more striking the instances which we receive of this
+divisibility of the vital principle. I have seen the two halves of the
+heart of a ray pulsating for a full quarter of an hour after they had
+been separated from the body and from each other. The blood circulates
+in the hind leg of a frog for many minutes after the removal of the
+heart, which meanwhile keeps up an independent motion of its own.
+Vitality can be so divided in the earthworm, that, as demonstrated by
+the experiments of Spalanzani, each of the severed parts carries life
+enough away to set it up as an independent animal; while the polypus, a
+creature of still more imperfect organization, and with the vivacious
+principle more equally diffused over it, may be multiplied by its pieces
+nearly as readily as a gooseberry bush by its slips. It was sufficiently
+curious, however, to see, in the case of this brown lizard, the least
+vital half of the creature so much more vivacious, apparently, than the
+half which contained the heart and brain. It is not improbable, however,
+that the presence of these organs had only the effect of rendering the
+upper portion which contained them more capable of being thrown into a
+state of insensibility. A blow dealt one of the vertebrata on the head
+at once renders it insensible. It is after this mode the fisherman kills
+the salmon captured in his wear, and a single blow, when well directed,
+is always sufficient; but no single blow has the same effect on the
+earthworm; and here it was vitality in the inferior portion of the
+reptile,--the earthworm portion of it, if I may so speak,--that refused
+to participate in the state of syncope into which the vitality of the
+superior portion had been thrown. The nice and delicate vitality of the
+brain seems to impart to the whole system in connection with it an
+aptitude for dying suddenly,--a susceptibility of instant death, which
+would be wanting without it. The heart of the rabbit continues to beat
+regularly long after the brain has been removed by careful excision, if
+respiration be artificially kept up; but if, instead of amputating the
+head, 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 principle
+illustrated here. But why the agonized dancing on the sward of the
+inferior part of the reptile?--why its after painful writhing and
+wriggling? The young eel scooped from the stream, whose motions it
+resembled, is impressed by terror, and can feel pain; was _it_ also
+impressed by terror, or susceptible of suffering? We see in the case of
+both exactly the same signs,--the dancing, the writhing, the wriggling;
+but are we to interpret them after the same manner? In the small
+red-headed earthworm divided by Spalanzani, that in three months got
+upper extremities to its lower part, and lower extremities, in as many
+weeks, to its upper part, the dividing blow must have dealt duplicate
+feelings,--pain and terror to the portion below, and pain and terror to
+the portion above,--so far, at least, as a creature so low in the scale
+was susceptible of these feelings; but are we to hold that the leaping,
+wriggling tail of the reptile possessed in any degree a similar
+susceptibility? _I_ can propound the riddle, but who shall resolve it?
+It may be added, that this brown lizard was the only recent saurian I
+chanced to see in the Hebrides, and that, though large for its kind, its
+whole bulk did not nearly equal that of a single vertebral joint of the
+fossil saurians of Eigg. The reptile, since his deposition from the
+first place in the scale of creation, has sunk sadly in those parts: the
+ex-monarch has become a low plebeian.
+
+We came down upon the coast through a swampy valley, terminating in the
+interior in a frowning wall of basalt, and bounded on the south, where
+it opens to the sea, by the Scuir More. The Scuir is a precipitous
+mountain, that rises from twelve to fifteen hundred feet direct over the
+beach. M'Culloch describes it as inaccessible, and states that it is
+only among the debris at its base that its heliotropes can be procured;
+but the distinguished mineralogist must have had considerably less skill
+in climbing rocks than in describing them, as, indeed, some of his
+descriptions, though generally very admirable, abundantly testify. I am
+inclined to infer from his book, after having passed over much of the
+ground which he describes, that he must have been a man of the type so
+well hit off by Burns in his portrait of Captain Grose,--round, rosy,
+short-legged, quick of eye but slow of foot, quite as indifferent a
+climber as Bailie Nicol Jarvie, and disposed at times, like the elderly
+gentleman drawn by Crabbe, to prefer the view at the hill-foot to the
+prospect from its summit. I found little difficulty in scaling the sides
+of Scuir More for a thousand feet upwards,--in one part by a route
+rarely attempted before,--and in ensconcing myself among the
+bloodstones. They occur in the amygdaloidal trap of which the upper part
+of the hill is mainly composed, in great numbers, and occasionally in
+bulky masses; but it is rare to find other than small specimens that
+would be recognized as of value by the lapidary. The inclosing rock must
+have been as thickly vesicular in its original state as the scoria of a
+glass-house; and all the vesicles, large and small, like the retorts and
+receivers of a laboratory, have been vessels in which some curious
+chemical process has been carried on. Many of them we find filled with a
+white semi-translucent or opaque chalcedony; many more with a pure green
+earth, which, where exposed to the bleaching influences of the weather,
+exhibits a fine verdigris hue, but which in the fresh fracture is
+generally of an olive green, or of a brownish or reddish color. I have
+never yet seen a rock in which this earth was so abundant as in the
+amygdaloid of Scuir More. For yards together in some places we see it
+projecting from the surface in round globules, that very much resemble
+green peas, and that occur as thickly in the inclosing mass as pebbles
+in an Old Red Sandstone conglomerate. The heliotrope has formed among it
+in centres, to which the chalcedony seems to have been drawn, as if by
+molecular attraction. We find a mass, varying from the size of a walnut
+to that of a man's head, occupying some larger vesicle or crevice of the
+amygdaloid, and all the smaller vesicles around it, for an inch or two,
+filled with what we may venture to term satellite heliotropes, some of
+them as minute as grains of wild mustard, and all of them more or less
+earthy, generally in proportion to their distance from the first formed
+heliotrope in the middle. No one can see them in their place in the
+rock, with the abundant green earth all around, and the chalcedony, in
+its uncolored state, filling up so many of the larger cavities, without
+acquiescing in the conclusion respecting the origin of the gem first
+suggested by Werner, and afterwards adopted and illustrated by
+M'Culloch. The heliotrope is merely a chalcedony, stained in the forming
+with an infusion of green earth, as the colored waters in the
+apothecary's window are stained by the infusions, vegetable and mineral,
+from which they derive their ornamental character. The red mottlings
+which so heighten the beauty of the stone occur in comparatively few of
+the specimens of Scuir More. They are minute jasperous formations,
+independent of the inclosing mass; and, from their resemblance to
+streaks and spots of blood, suggest the name by which the heliotrope is
+popularly known. I succeeded in making up, among the crags, a set of
+specimens curiously illustrative of the origin of the gem. One specimen
+consists of white, uncolored chalcedony; a second, of a rich
+verdigris-hued green earth; a third, of chalcedony barely tinged with
+green; 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, and
+scarce at all colored on the other; and a seventh, dark and richly
+toned,--a true bloodstone,--thickly streaked and mottled with red
+jasper. In the chemical process that rendered the Scuir More a mountain
+of gems there were two deteriorating circumstances, which operated to
+the disadvantage of its larger heliotropes: the green earth, as if
+insufficiently stirred in the mixing, has gathered, in many of them,
+into minute soft globules, like air-bubbles in glass, that render them
+valueless for the purposes of the lapidary, by filling them all over
+with little cavities; and in not a few of the others, an infiltration of
+lime, that refused to incorporate with the chalcedonic mass, exists in
+thin glassy films and veins, that, from their comparative softness, have
+a nearly similar effect with the impalpable green earth in roughing the
+surface under the burnisher.
+
+We find figured by M'Culloch, in his "Western Islands," the internal
+cavity 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 of
+the amygdaloid. He describes it as curiously illustrative of a various
+chemistry; the outer crust is composed of a pale-zoned agate, inclosing
+a cavity, from the upper side of which there depends a group of
+chalcedonic stalactites, some of them, as in ancient spar caves,
+reaching to the floor; and bearing on its under side a large crystal of
+carbonate of lime, that the longer stalactites pass through. In the
+vesicle in which this hollow pebble was formed three consecutive
+processes must have gone on. First, a process of infiltration coated the
+interior all around with layer after layer, now of one mineral
+substance, now of another, as a plasterer coats over the sides and
+ceiling of a room with successive layers of lime, putty, and stucco; and
+had this process gone on, the whole cell would have been filled with a
+pale-zoned agate. But it ceased, and a new process began. A chalcedonic
+infiltration gradually entered from above; and, instead of coating over
+the walls, roof, and floor, it hardened into a group of spear-like
+stalactites, that lengthened by slow degrees, till some of them had
+traversed the entire cavity from top to bottom. And then this second
+process ceased like the first, and a third commenced. An infiltration
+of lime took place; and the minute calcareous molecules, under the
+influence of the law of crystallization, built themselves up on the
+floor into a large smooth-sided rhomb, resembling a closed sarcophagus
+resting in the middle of some Egyptian cemetery. And then, the limestone
+crystal completed, there ensued no after change. As shown by some other
+specimens, however, there was a yet farther process: a pure quartzose
+deposition took place, that coated not a few of the calcareous rhombs
+with sprigs of rock-crystal. I found in the Scuir More several cellular
+agates in which similar processes had gone on,--none of them quite so
+fine, however, as the one figured by M'Culloch; but there seemed no lack
+of evidence regarding the strange and multifarious chemistry that had
+been carried on in the vesicular cavities of this mountain, as in the
+retorts of some vast laboratory. Here was a vesicle filled with green
+earth,--there a vesicle filled with calcareous spar,--yonder a vesicle
+crusted round on a thin chalcedonic shell with rock-crystal,--in one
+cavity an agate had been elaborated, in another a heliotrope, in a third
+a milk-white chalcedony, in a fourth a jasper. On what principle, and
+under what direction, have results so various taken place in vesicles of
+the 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 in
+thickness, have elaborated only chalcedony? Why should this chamber
+contain only a quartzose compound of oxygen and silica, and that second
+chamber beside it contain only a calcareous compound of lime and
+carbonic acid? What law directed infiltrations so diverse to seek out
+for themselves vesicles in such close neighborhood, and to keep, in so
+many instances, each to his own vesicle? I can but state the
+problem,--not solve it. The groups of heliotropes clustered each around
+its bulky centrical mass seem to show that the principle of molecular
+attraction may be operative in very dense mediæ,--in a hard amygdaloidal
+trap even; and it seems not improbable, that to this law, which draws
+atom to its kindred atom, as clansmen of old used to speed at the
+mustering signal to their gathering place, the various chemistry of the
+vesicles may owe its variety.
+
+I shall attempt stating the chemical problem furnished by the vesicles
+here in a mechanical form. Let us suppose that every vesicle was a
+chamber 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 a
+certain time an infusion of green earth pervaded the surrounding mass,
+and percolated through it, and that every door was opened to receive a
+portion of the infusion. We find that no vesicle wants its coating of
+this earthy mineral. The coating received, however, one-half the doors
+shut, while the other half remained agap, and filled with green earth
+entirely. Next followed a series of alternate infusions of chalcedony,
+jasper, and quartz; many doors opened and received some two or three
+coatings, that form around the vesicles skull-like shells of agate, and
+then shut; a few remained open, and became as entirely occupied with
+agate as many of the previous ones had become filled with green earth.
+Then an ample infusion of chalcedony pervaded the mass. Numerous doors
+again opened; some took in a portion of the chalcedony, and then shut;
+some remained open, and became filled with it; and many more that had
+been previously filled by the green earth opened their doors again, and
+the chalcedony pervading the green porous mass, converted it into
+heliotrope. Then an infusion of lime took place. Doors opened, many of
+which had been hitherto shut, save for a short time, when the green
+earth infusion obtained, and became filled with lime; other doors
+opened for a brief space, and received lime enough to form a few
+crystals. Last of all, there was a pure quartzose infusion, and doors
+opened, some for a longer time, some for a shorter, just as on previous
+occasions. Now, by mechanical means of this character,--by such an
+arrangement of successive infusions, and such a device of shutting and
+opening of doors,--the phenomena exhibited by the vesicles could be
+produced. There is no difficulty in working the problem mechanically, if
+we be allowed to assume in our data successive infusions, well-fitted
+doors, and watchful door-keepers; and if any one can work it
+chemically,--certainly without door-keepers, but with such doors and
+such infusions as he can show to have existed,--he shall have cleared up
+the mystery of the Scuir More. I have given their various cargoes to all
+its many vesicles by mechanical means, at no expense of ingenuity
+whatever. Are there any of my readers prepared to give it to them by
+means purely chemical?
+
+There is a solitary house in the opening of the valley, over which the
+Scuir More stands sentinel,--a house so solitary, that the entire
+breadth of the island intervenes between it and the nearest human
+dwelling. It is inhabited by a shepherd and his wife,--the sole
+representatives in the valley of a numerous population, long since
+expatriated to make way for a few flocks of sheep, but whose ranges of
+little fields may still be seen green amid the heath on both sides, for
+nearly a mile upwards from the opening. After descending along the
+precipices of the Scuir, we struck across the valley, and, on scaling
+the opposite slope sat down on the summit to rest us, about a hundred
+yards over the house of the shepherd. He had seen us from below, when
+engaged among the bloodstones, and had seen, withal, that we were not
+coming his way; and, "on hospitable thoughts intent," he climbed to
+where 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 most
+seasonable, after our long hours of toil, and with a rough journey still
+before us. It is an excellent circumstance, that hospitality grows best
+where 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. It
+flourishes where the inn and the lodging-house cannot exist, and dies
+out where they thrive and multiply.
+
+We reached the cross valley in the interior of the island about half an
+hour before sunset. The evening was clear, calm, golden-tinted; even
+wild heaths and rude rocks had assumed a flush of transient beauty; and
+the emerald-green patches on the hill-sides, barred by the plough
+lengthwise, diagonally, and transverse, had borrowed an aspect of soft
+and velvety richness, from the mellowed light and the broadening
+shadows. All was solitary. We could see among the deserted fields the
+grass-grown foundations of cottages razed to the ground; but the valley,
+more desolate than that which we had left, had not even its single
+inhabited dwelling: it seemed as if man had done with it forever. The
+island, eighteen years before, had been divested of its inhabitants,
+amounting at the time to rather more than four hundred souls, to make
+way for one sheep-farmer and eight thousand sheep. All the aborigines of
+Rum crossed the Atlantic; and at the close of 1828, the entire
+population consisted of but the sheep-farmer, and a few shepherds, his
+servants; the island of Rum reckoned up scarce a single family at this
+period for every five square miles of area which it contained. But
+depopulation on so extreme a scale was found inconvenient; the place had
+been rendered too thoroughly a desert for the comfort of the occupant;
+and on the occasion of a clearing which took place shortly after in
+Skye, he accommodated some ten or twelve of the ejected families with
+sites for cottages, and pasturage for a few cows, on the bit of morass
+beside Loch Scresort, on which I had seen their humble dwellings. But
+the whole of the once-peopled interior remains a wilderness, without
+inhabitant,--all the more lonely in its aspect from the circumstance
+that the solitary valleys, with their plough-furrowed patches, and their
+ruined heaps of stone, open upon shores every whit as solitary as
+themselves, and that the wide untrodden sea stretches drearily around.
+The armies of the insect world were sporting in the light this evening
+by millions; a brown stream that runs through the valley yielded an
+incessant popling sound, from the myriads of fish that were ceaselessly
+leaping in the pools, beguiled by the quick glancing wings of green and
+gold that fluttered over them; along a distant hill-side there ran what
+seemed the ruins of a gray-stone fence, erected, says tradition, in a
+remote age, to facilitate the hunting of the deer; there were fields on
+which the heath and moss of the surrounding moorlands were fast
+encroaching, that had borne many a successive harvest; and prostrate
+cottages, that had been the scenes of christenings, and bridals, and
+blythe new-year's days;--all seemed to bespeak the place a fitting
+habitation for man, in which not only the necessaries, but also a few of
+the luxuries of life, might be procured; but in the entire prospect not
+a man nor a man's dwelling could the eye command. The landscape was one
+without figures. I do not much like extermination carried out so
+thoroughly and on system;--it seems bad policy; and I have not succeeded
+in thinking any the better of it though assured by economists that there
+are more than people enough in Scotland still. There are, I believe,
+more than enough in our workhouses,--more than enough on our
+pauper-rolls,--more than enough huddled up, disreputable, useless, and
+unhappy, in the miasmatic alleys and typhoid courts of our large towns;
+but I have yet to learn how arguments for local depopulation are to be
+drawn from facts such as these. A brave and hardy people, favorably
+placed for the development of all that is excellent in human nature,
+form the glory and strength of a country;--a people sunk into an abyss
+of degradation and misery, and in which it is the whole tendency of
+external circumstances to sink them yet deeper, constitute its weakness
+and its shame; and I cannot quite see on what principle the ominous
+increase which is taking place among us in the worse class, is to form
+our solace or apology for the wholesale expatriation of the better. It
+did not seem as if the depopulation of Rum had tended much to any one's
+advantage. The single sheep-farmer who had occupied the holdings of so
+many had been unfortunate in his speculations, and had left the island:
+the proprietor, his landlord, seemed to have been as little fortunate as
+the tenant, for the island itself was in the market; and a report went
+current at the time, that it was on the eve of being purchased by some
+wealthy Englishman, who purposed converting it into a deer-forest. How
+strange a cycle! Uninhabited originally save by wild animals, it became
+at an early period a home of men, who, as the gray wall on the hill-side
+testified, derived, in part at least, their sustenance from the chase.
+They broke in from the waste the furrowed patches on the slopes of the
+valleys,--they reared herds of cattle and flocks of sheep,--their number
+increased to nearly five hundred souls,--they enjoyed the average
+happiness of human creatures in the present imperfect state of
+being,--they contributed their portion of hardy and vigorous manhood to
+the armies of the country,--and a few of their more adventurous spirits,
+impatient of the narrow bounds which confined them, and a course of
+life little varied by incident, emigrated to America. Then came the
+change of system so general in the Highlands; and the island lost all
+its original inhabitants, on a wool and mutton speculation,--inhabitants,
+the descendants of men who had chased the deer on its hills five hundred
+years before, and who, though they recognized some wild island lord as
+their superior, and did him service, had regarded the place as indisputably
+their own. And now yet another change was on the eve of ensuing, and the
+island 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 or
+two every twelvemonth, but which could form no permanent place of human
+abode. Once more, a strange and surely most melancholy cycle!
+
+There was light enough left, as we reached the upper part of Loch
+Scresort, to show us a shoal of small silver-coated trout, leaping by
+scores at the effluence of the little stream along which we had set out
+in the morning on our expedition. There was a net stretched across where
+the play was thickest; and we learned that the haul of the previous tide
+had amounted to several hundreds. On reaching the Betsey, we found a
+pail and basket laid against the companion-head,--the basket containing
+about two dozen small trout,--the minister's unsolicited teind of the
+morning draught; the pail filled with razor-fish of great size. The
+people of my friend are far from wealthy; there is scarce any
+circulating medium in Rum; and the cottars in Eigg contrive barely
+enough to earn at the harvest in the Lowlands money sufficient to clear
+with their landlord at rent-day. Their contributions for ecclesiastical
+purposes make no great figure, therefore, in the lists of the
+Sustentation Fund. But of what they have they give willingly and in a
+kindly 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 per
+centage of both the fish and the mollusc, derived from the Small Isles,
+in the half-yearly sustentation dividends. We found the supply of
+both,--especially as provisions were beginning to run short in the
+lockers of the Betsey,--quite deserving of our gratitude. The razor-fish
+had been brought us by the worthy catechist of the island. He had gone
+to the ebb in our special behalf, and had spent a tide in laboriously
+filling the pail with these "treasures hid in the sand;" thoroughly
+aware, like the old exiled puritan, who eked out his meals in a time of
+scarcity with the oysters of New England, that even the razor-fish,
+under this head, is included in the promises. There is a peculiarity in
+the razor-fish of Rum that I have not marked in the razor-fish of our
+eastern coasts. The gills of the animal, instead of bearing the general
+color of its other parts, like those of the oyster, are of a deep green
+color, resembling, when examined by the microscope, the fringe of a
+green curtain.
+
+We were told by John Stewart, that the expatriated inhabitants of Rum
+used to catch trout by a simple device of ancient standing, which
+preceded the introduction of nets into the island, and which, it is
+possible, may in other localities have not only preceded the use of the
+net, but may have also suggested it: it had at least the appearance of
+being a first beginning of invention in this direction. The islanders
+gathered large quantities of heath, and then tying it loosely into
+bundles, and stripping it of its softer leafage, they laid the bundles
+across the stream on a little mound held down by stones, with the tops
+of the heath turned upwards to the current. The water rose against the
+mound for a foot or eighteen inches, and then murmured over and through,
+occasioning an expansion among the hard elastic sprays. Next a party of
+the islanders came down the stream, beating the banks and pools, and
+sending a still thickening shoal of trout before them, that, on
+reaching the miniature dam formed by the bundles, darted forward for
+shelter, 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 hastily
+thrown off,--the bundles pitched ashore,--the better fish, to the amount
+not unfrequently of several scores, secured,--and the young fry returned
+to the stream, to take care of themselves, and grow bigger. We fared
+richly this evening, after our hard day's labor, on tea and trout; and
+as the minister had to attend a meeting of the Presbytery of Skye on the
+following Wednesday, we sailed next morning for Glenelg, whence he
+purposed taking the steamer for Portree. Winds were light and baffling,
+and the currents, like capricious friends, neutralized at one time the
+assistance which they lent us at another. It was dark night ere we had
+passed Isle Ornsay, and morning broke as we cast anchor in the Bay of
+Glenelg. At ten o'clock the steamer heaved-to in the bay to land a few
+passengers, and the minister went on board, leaving me in charge of the
+Betsey, 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 in
+the face of an adverse tide. The currents of Kyle Rhea care little for
+the wind-filled sail, and battle at times, on scarce unequal terms, with
+the steam-propelled paddle. The Toward Castle this morning had such a
+struggle to force her way inwards, as may be seen maintained at the door
+of some place of public meeting during the heat of some agitating
+controversy, when seat and passage within can hold no more, and a
+disappointed crowd press eagerly for admission from without. Viewed from
+the anchoring place at Glenelg, the opening of the Kyle presents the
+appearance of the bottom of a landlocked bay;--the hills of Skye seem
+leaning against those of the mainland: and the tide-buffeted steamer
+looked this morning as if boring her way into the earth, like a
+disinterred mole, only at a rate vastly slower. First, however, with a
+progress resembling that of the minute-hand of a clock, the bows
+disappeared amid the heath, then the midships, then the quarter-deck and
+stern, and then, last of all, the red tip of the sun-brightened
+union-jack that streamed gaudily behind. I had at least two hours
+before me ere the Betsey might attempt weighing anchor; and, that they
+might leave some mark, I went and spent them ashore in the opening of
+Glenelg,--a gneiss district, nearly identical in structure with the
+district of Knock and Isle Ornsay. The upper part of the valley is bare
+and treeless, but not such its character where it opens to the sea; the
+hills are richly wooded; and cottages, and cornfields, with here and
+there 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, form
+the central point in the landscape; these are the dismantled Berera
+Barracks, built, like the line of forts in the great Caledonian
+Valley,--Fort George, Fort Augustus, and Fort William,--to overawe the
+Highlands at a time when the loyalty of the Highlander pointed to a king
+beyond the water; but all use for them has long gone by, and they now
+lie in dreary ruin,--mere sheltering places for the toad and the bat. I
+found in a loose silt on the banks of the river, at some little distance
+below tide-mark, a bed of shells and coral, which might belong, I at
+first supposed, to some secondary formation, but which I ascertained, on
+examination, to be a mere recent deposit, not so old by many centuries
+as our last raised sea-beaches. There occurs in various localities on
+these western coasts, especially on the shores of the island of Pabba, a
+sprig coral, considerably larger in size than any I have elsewhere seen
+in Scotland; and it was from its great abundance in this bed of silt
+that 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 been
+arriving in the course of the morning, and dropping anchor, nearer the
+opening or farther away, each according to its sailing ability, to await
+the turn of the tide; and we now found ourselves one of the components
+of a little fleet, with some five or six vessels sweeping up the Kyle
+before us, and some three or four driving on behind. Never, except
+perhaps in a Highland river big in flood, have I seen such a tide. It
+danced and wheeled, and came boiling in huge masses from the bottom; and
+now our bows heaved abruptly round in one direction, and now they jerked
+as suddenly round in another; and, though there blew a moderate breeze
+at the time, the helm failed to keep the sails steadily full. But
+whether our sheets bellied out, or flapped right in the wind's eye, on
+we swept in the tideway, like a cork caught during a thunder shower in
+one of the rapids of the High Street. At one point the Kyle is little
+more than a quarter of a mile in breadth; and here, in the powerful eddy
+which ran along the shore, we saw a group of small fishing-boats
+pursuing a shoal of sillocks in a style that blent all the liveliness of
+the chase with the specific interest of the angle. The shoal, restless
+as the tides among which it disported, now rose in the boilings of one
+eddy, now beat the water into foam amid the stiller dimplings of
+another. The boats hurried from spot to spot wherever the quick
+glittering scales appeared. For a few seconds, rods would be cast thick
+and fast, as if employed in beating the water, and captured fish glanced
+bright to the sun; and then the take would cease, and the play rise
+elsewhere, and oars would flash out amain, as the little fleet again
+dashed into the heart of the shoal. As the Kyle widened, the force of
+the current diminished, and sail and helm again became things of
+positive importance. The wind blew a-head, steady though not strong; and
+the Betsey, with companions in the voyage against which to measure
+herself, began to show her paces. First she passed one bulky vessel,
+then another: she lay closer to the wind than any of her fellows, glided
+more quickly through the water, turned in her stays like Lady Betty in
+a minuet; and, ere we had reached Kyle Akin, the fleet in the middle of
+which we had started were toiling far behind us, all save one vessel, a
+stately brig; and just as we were going to pass her too, she cast
+anchor, to await the change of the tide, which runs from the west during
+flood at Kyle Akin, as it runs from the east through Kyle Rhea. The wind
+had freshened; and as it was now within two hours of full sea, the force
+of the current had somewhat abated; and so we kept on our course,
+tacking in scant room, however, and making but little way. A few vessels
+attempted following us, but, after an inefficient tack or two, they fell
+back on the anchoring ground, leaving the Betsey to buffet the currents
+alone. Tack followed tack sharp and quick in the narrows, with an
+iron-bound coast on either hand. We had frequent and delicate turning:
+now we lost fifty yards, now we gained a hundred. John Stewart held the
+helm; and as none of us had ever sailed the way before, I had the
+vessel's chart spread out on the companion-head before me, and told him
+when to wear and when to hold on his way,--at what places we might run
+up almost to the rock edge, and at what places it was safest to give the
+land a good offing. Hurrah for the Free Church yacht Betsey! and hurrah
+once more! We cleared the Kyle, leaving a whole fleet tide-bound behind
+us; and, stretching out at one long tack into the open sea, bore, at the
+next, right into the bay at Broadford, where we cast anchor for the
+night, within two hundred yards of the shore. Provisions were running
+short; and so I had to make a late dinner this evening on some of the
+razor-fish of Rum, topped by a dish of tea. But there is always rather
+more appetite than food in the country;--such, at least, is the common
+result under the present mode of distribution: the hunger overlaps and
+outstretches the provision; and there was comfort in the reflection,
+that with the razor-fish on which to fall back, it overlapped it but by
+a very little on this occasion in the cabin of the Betsey. The
+steam-boat passed southwards next morning, and I was joined by my friend
+the 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 the
+landscape, volume after volume, like coverings from off a
+mummy,--leaving exposed in the valley of the Lias a brown and cheerless
+prospect of dark bogs and of debris-covered hills, streaked this evening
+with downward lines of foam. The seaward view is more pleasing. The deep
+russet of the interior we find bordered for miles along the edge of the
+bay with a many-shaded fringe of green; and the smooth grassy island of
+Pabba lies in the midst, a polished gem, all the more advantageously
+displayed from the roughness of the surrounding setting. We took boat,
+and explored the Lias in our immediate neighborhood till dusk. I had
+spent several hours among its deposits when on my way to Portree, and
+several hours more when on my journey across the country to the east
+coast; but it may be well, for the sake of maintaining some continuity
+of description, to throw together my various observations on the
+formation, as if made at one time, and to connect them with my
+exploration of Pabba, which took place on the following morning. The
+rocks of Pabba belong to the upper part of the Lias; while the lower
+part may be found leaning to the south, towards the Red Sandstones of
+the Bay of Lucy. Taking what seems to be the natural order, I shall
+begin with the base of the formation first.
+
+In the general indentation of the coast, in the opening of which the
+island of Pabba lies somewhat like a long green steam-boat at anchor,
+there is included a smaller indentation, known as the Bay or Cove of
+Lucy. The central space in the cove is soft and gravelly; but on both
+its sides it is flanked by low rocks, that stretch out into the sea in
+long rectilinear lines, like the foundations of dry-stone fences. On the
+south side the rocks are red; on the north they are of a bluish-gray
+color; their hues are as distinct as those of the colored patches in a
+map; and they represent geological periods that lie widely apart. The
+red rocks we find laid down in most of our maps as Old Red, though I am
+disposed to regard them as of a much higher antiquity than even that
+ancient system; while the bluish-gray rocks are decidedly Liasic.[3] The
+cove between represents a deep ditch-like hollow, which occurs in Skye,
+both in the interior and on the sea-shore, in the line of boundary
+betwixt the Red Sandstone and the Lias; and it "seems to have
+originated," says M'Culloch, "in the decomposition of the exposed parts
+of the formations at their junction." "Hence," he adds, "from the
+wearing of the materials at the surface, a cavity has been produced,
+which becoming subsequently filled with rubbish, and generally covered
+over with a vegetable soil of unusual depth, effectually prevents a view
+of the contiguous parts." The first strata exposed on the northern side
+are the oldest Liasic rocks anywhere seen in Scotland. They are composed
+chiefly of greenish-colored fissile sandstones and calciferous grits, in
+which we meet a few fossils, very imperfectly preserved. But the
+organisms increase as we go on. We see in passing, near a picturesque
+little cottage,--the only one on the shores of the bay,--a crag of a
+singularly rough appearance, that projects mole-like from the sward upon
+the beach, and then descending abruptly to the level of the other
+strata, runs out in a long ragged line into the sea. The stratum, from
+two to three feet in thickness, of which it is formed, seems wholly
+built up of irregularly-formed rubbly concretions, just as some of the
+garden-walls in the neighborhood of Edinburgh are built of the rough
+scoria of our glass-houses; and we find, on examination, that every
+seeming concretion in the bed is a perfectly formed coral of the genus
+Astrea. 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 great
+beauty: nothing can be more irregular than the outline of each mass, and
+yet scarce anything more regular than the sculpturings on every part of
+it. We find them fretted over with polygons, like those of a honeycomb,
+only somewhat less mathematically exact, and the centre of every polygon
+contains its many-rayed star. It is difficult to distinguish between
+species in some of the divisions of corals: one Astrea, recent or
+extinct, is sometimes found so exceedingly like another of some very
+different formation or period, that the more modern might almost be
+deemed a lineal descendant of the more ancient species. With an eye to
+the fact, I brought with me some characteristic specimens of this
+Astrea[4] of the Lower Lias, which I have ranged side by side with the
+Astreæ of the Oölite I had found so abundant a twelvemonth before in the
+neighborhood of Helmsdale. In some of the hand specimens, that present
+merely a piece of polygonal surface, bounded by fractured sides, the
+difference is not easily distinguishable: the polygonal depressions are
+generally smaller in the Oölitic species, and shallower in the Liasic
+one; but not unfrequently these differences disappear, and it is only
+when compared in the entire unbroken coral that their specific
+peculiarities acquire the necessary prominence. The Oölitic Astrea is of
+much greater size than the Liasic one: it occurs not unfrequently in
+masses of from two to three feet in diameter; and as its polygons are
+tubes that converge to the footstalk on which it originally formed, it
+presents in the average outline a fungous-like appearance; whereas in
+the smaller Liasic coral, which rarely exceeds a foot in diameter, there
+is 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 no
+resemblance to the form in another. Some of the recent Astreæ are of
+great beauty when inhabited by the living zoöphites whose skeleton
+framework they compose. Every polygonal star in the mass is the house of
+a separate animal, that, when withdrawn into its cell, presents the
+appearance of a minute flower, somewhat like a daisy stuck flat to the
+surface, and that, when stretched out, resembles a small round tower,
+with a garland of leaves bound round it atop for a cornice. The _Astrea
+viridis_, a coral of the tropics, presents on a ground of velvety brown
+myriads of deep green florets, that ever and anon start up from the
+level in their tower-like shape, contract and expand their petals, and
+then, shrinking back into their cells, straightway became florets again.
+The Lower Lias presented in one of its opening scenes, in this part of
+the world, appearances of similar beauty widely spread. For miles
+together,--we know not how many,--the bottom of a clear shallow sea was
+paved with living Astreæ: every irregular rock-like coral formed a
+separate colony of polypora, that, when in motion, presented the
+appearance of continuous masses of many-colored life, and when at rest,
+the places they occupied were more thickly studded with the living
+florets than the richest and most flowery piece of pasture the reader
+ever saw, with its violets or its daisies. And mile beyond mile this
+scene of beauty stretched on through the shallow depths of the Liasic
+sea. The calcareous framework of most of the recent Astreæ are white;
+but in the species referred to,--the _Astrea viridis_,--it is of a
+dark-brown color. It is not unworthy of remark, in connection with these
+facts, that the Oölitic Astrea of Helmsdale occurs as a white, or, when
+darkest, as a cream-colored petrifaction; whereas the Liasic Astrea of
+Skye 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 thickness
+of from two to three feet. Mass rose over mass,--the living upon the
+dead,--till at length, by a deposit of mingled mud and sand,--the
+effect, mayhap, of some change of currents, induced we know not
+how,--the innumerable polypedes of the living surface were buried up and
+killed, and then, for many yards, layer after layer of a calciferous
+grit was piled over them. The fossils of the grit are few and ill
+preserved; but we occasionally find in it a coral similar to the Astrea
+of the bed below, and, a little higher up, in an impure limestone,
+specimens, in rather indifferent keeping, of a genus of polypifer which
+somewhat resembles the Turbinolia of the Mountain Limestone. It presents
+in the cross section the same radiated structure as the _Turbinolia
+fungites_, and nearly the same furrowed appearance in the longitudinal
+one; but, seen in the larger specimens, we find that it was a branched
+coral, with obtuse forky boughs, in each of which, it is probable, from
+their general structure, there lived a single polype. It may have been
+the resemblance which these bear, when seen in detached branches, to the
+older Caryophyllia, taken in connection with the fact that the deposit
+in which they occur rests on the ancient Red Sandstone of the district,
+that led M'Culloch to question whether this fossiliferous formation had
+not nearly as clear a claim to be regarded as an analogue of the
+Carboniferous Limestone of England as of its Lias; and hence he
+contented himself with terming it simply the Gryphite Limestone. Sir R.
+Murchison, whose much more close and extensive acquaintance with fossils
+enabled him to assign to the deposit its true place, was struck,
+however, with the general resemblance of its polypifers to "those of the
+Madreporite Limestone of the Carboniferous series." These polypifers
+occur in only the lower Lias of Skye.[5] I found no corals in its higher
+beds, though these are charged with other fossils, more characteristic
+of the formation, in vast abundance. In not a few of the middle strata,
+composed of a mud-colored fissile sandstone, the gryphites lie as
+thickly as currants in a Christmas cake; and as they weather white,
+while the stone in which they are embedded retains its dingy hue, they
+somewhat remind one of the white-lead tears of the undertaker mottling a
+hatchment of sable. In a fragment of the dark sandstone, six inches by
+seven, which I brought with me, I reckon no fewer than twenty-two
+gryphites; and it forms but an average specimen of the bed from which I
+detached it. By far the most abundant species is that not inelegant
+shell so characteristic of the formation, the _Gryphæa incurva_. We find
+detached specimens scattered over the beach by hundreds, mixed up with
+the remains of recent shells, as if the _Gryphæa incurva_ were a recent
+shell too. They lie, bleached white by the weather, among the valves of
+defunct oysters and dead buccinidæ; and, from their resemblance to lamps
+cast in the classic model, remind one, in the corners where they have
+accumulated most thickly, of the old magician's stock in trade, who
+wiled away the lamp of Aladdin from Aladdin's simple wife. The _Gryphæa
+obliquita_ and _Gryphæa M'Cullochii_ also occur among these middle
+strata of the Lias, though much less frequently than the other. We,
+besides, found in them at least two species of Pecten, with two species
+of Terebratula,--the one smooth, the other sulcated; a bivalve
+resembling a Donax; another bivalve, evidently a Gervillia, though
+apparently of a species not yet described; and the ill-preserved rings
+of large Ammonites, from ten inches to a foot in diameter. Towards the
+bottom of the bay the fossils again become more rare, though they
+re-appear once more in considerable abundance as we pass along its
+northern side; but in order to acquaint ourselves with the upper
+organisms of the formation, we have to take boat and explore the
+northern shores of Pabba. The Lias of Skye has its three distinct groups
+of fossils: its lower coraline group, in which the Astrea described is
+most abundant; its middle group, in which the _Gryphæa incurva_ occurs
+by millions; and its upper group, abounding in Ammonites, Nautili,
+Pinnæ, and Serpulæ.
+
+Friday made amends for the rains and fogs of its disagreeable
+predecessor: the morning rose bright and beautiful, with just wind
+enough to fill, and barely fill, the sail, hoisted high, with miser
+economy, that not a breath might be lost; and, weighing anchor, and
+shaking out all our canvass, we bore down on Pabba, to explore. This
+island, so soft in outline and color, is formidably fenced round by
+dangerous reefs; and, leaving the Betsey in charge of John Stewart and
+his companion, to dodge on in the offing, I set out with the minister in
+our 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 happy
+geologist 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 little
+more than three miles and a half along the line where the waves break at
+high water brings the traveller back to his starting point; and yet,
+though thus limited in area, the petrifactions of its shores might of
+themselves fill a museum. They rise by thousands and tens of thousands
+on the exposed planes of its sea-washed strata, standing out in bold
+relief, like sculpturings on ancient tombstones, at once mummies and
+monuments,--the dead and the carved memorials of the dead. Every rock is
+a tablet of hieroglyphics, with an ascertained alphabet; every rolled
+pebble a casket with old pictorial records locked up within. Trap-dykes,
+beyond comparison finer than those of the Water of Leith, which first
+suggested to Hutton his theory, stand up like fences over the
+sedimentary strata, or run out like moles far into the sea. The entire
+island, too, so green, rich, and level, is itself a specimen
+illustrative of the effect of geologic formation on scenery. We find its
+nearest neighbor,--the steep, brown, barren island of Longa, which is
+composed of the ancient Red Sandstone of the district,--differing as
+thoroughly from it in aspect as a bit of granite differs from a bit of
+clay-slate; and the whole prospect around, save the green Liasic strip
+that lies along the bottom of the Bay of Broadford, exhibits, true to
+its various components, Plutonic or sedimentary, a character of
+picturesque roughness or bold sublimity. The only piece of smooth, level
+England, contained in the entire landscape, is the fossil-mottled island
+of Pabba. We were first struck, on landing this morning, by the great
+number of Pinnæ embedded in the strata,--shells varying from five to ten
+inches in length,--one species of the common flat type, exemplified in
+the existing _Pinna sulcata_, and another nearly quadrangular, in the
+cross section, like the _Pinna lanceolata_ of the Scarborough limestone.
+The quadrangular species is more deeply crisped outside than the
+flat one. Both species bear the longitudinal groove in the centre,
+and when broken across, are found to contain numerous smaller
+shells,--Terebratulæ of both the smooth and sulcated kinds, and a
+species of minute smooth Pecten resembling the _Pecten demissus_, but
+smaller. 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 all
+sedentary shells, some of them full two feet in length, fastened to
+their places on their deep-sea floors by flowing silky byssi,--cables of
+many strands,--of which beautiful pieces of dress, such as gloves and
+hose, have been manufactured. An old French naturalist, the Abbe Le
+Pluche, tells us that "the Pinna with its fleshy tongue" (foot),--a rude
+inefficient looking implement for work so nice,--"spins such threads as
+are more valuable than silk itself, and with which the most beautiful
+stuffs that ever were seen have been made by Sicilian weavers." Gloves
+made of the byssus of recent Pinnæ may be seen in the British Museum.
+Associated with the numerous Pinnæ of Pabba we found a delicately-formed
+Modiola, a small Ostrya, Plagiostoma, Terebratula, several species of
+Pectens, a triangular univalve resembling a Trochus, innumerable groups
+of Serpulæ, and the star-like joints of Pentacrinites. The Gryphæ are
+also abundant, occurring in extensive beds; and Belemnites of various
+species lie as thickly scattered over the rock as if they had been the
+spindles of a whole kingdom thrown aside in consequence of some such
+edict framed to put them down as that passed by the father of the
+Sleeping Beauty. We find, among the detached masses of the beach,
+specimens of Nautilus, which, though rarely perfect, are sufficiently so
+to show the peculiarities of the shell; and numerous Ammonites project
+in relief from almost every weathered plane of the strata. These last
+shells, in the tract of shore which we examined, are chiefly of one
+species,--the _Ammonites spinatus_,--one of which, considerably broken,
+the reader may find figured in Sowerby's "Mineral Conchology," from a
+specimen brought from Pabba sixteen years ago by Sir R. Murchison. It is
+difficult to procure specimens tolerably complete. We find bits of outer
+rings existing as limestone, with every rib sharply preserved, but the
+rest of the fossil lost in the shale. I succeeded in finding but two
+specimens that show the inner whorls. They are thickly ribbed; and the
+chief peculiarity which they exhibit, not so directly indicated by Mr.
+Sowerby's figure, is, that while the ribs of the outer whorl are broad
+and deep, as in the _Ammonites obtusus_, they suddenly change their
+character, 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 return
+to the Betsey. The little wind had become less, and all the canvas we
+could hang out enabled us to draw but a sluggish furrow. The stern of
+the Betsey "wrought no buttons" on this occasion; but she had a good
+tide under her keel; and ere the dinner-hour we had passed through the
+narrows of Kyle Akin. The village of this name was designed by the late
+Lord M'Donald for a great seaport town; but it refused to grow; and it
+has since become a gentleman in a small way, and does nothing. It forms,
+however, a handsome group of houses, pleasantly situated on a flat green
+tongue 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, as
+if by an earthquake, from top to bottom, which forms one of the most
+picturesque objects I have almost ever seen in a landscape. There are
+bold hills all around, and rocky islands, with the ceaseless rush of
+tides in front; while the cloven tower, rising high over the shore, is
+seen, in threading the Kyles, whether from the south or north, relieved
+dark against the sky, as the central object in the vista. We find it
+thus described by the Messrs. Anderson of Inverness, in their excellent
+"Guide Book,"--by far the best companion of the kind with which the
+traveller who sets himself to explore our Scottish Highlands can be
+provided. "Close to the village of Kyle Akin are the ruins of an old
+square keep, called Castle Muel or Maoil, the walls of which are of a
+remarkable thickness. It is said to have been built by the daughter of a
+Norwegian king, married to a Mackinnon or Macdonald, for the purpose of
+levying an impost on all vessels passing the Kyles, excepting, says the
+tradition, those of her own country. For the more certain exaction of
+this duty, she is reported to have caused a strong chain to be stretched
+across from shore to shore; and the spot in the rocks to which the
+terminal links were attached is still pointed out." It was high time for
+us to be home. The dinner hour came; but, in meet illustration of the
+profound remark of Trotty-Veck, not the dinner. We had been in a cold
+Moderate district, whence there came no half-dozens of eggs, or whole
+dozens of trout, or pailfuls of razor-fish, and in which hard
+cabin-biscuit cost us sixpence per pound. And now our stores were
+exhausted, and we had to dine as best we could, on our last half-ounce
+of 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 there
+nearly three weeks before, when I came first aboard, and no one seemed
+to know for how many weeks previous; for as it had come to be a sort of
+fixture in the vessel, it could be looked at without being seen. But
+necessity sharpens the discerning faculty, and on this pressing
+occasion I was fortunate enough to see it. It was straightway taken
+down, skinned, roasted, and eaten; and, though rather rich in
+ammonia,--a substance better suited to form the food of the organisms
+that do not unite sensation to vitality, than organisms so high in the
+scale as the minister and his friend,--we came deliberately to the
+opinion, that on the whole, we could scarce have dined so well on one of
+Major Bellenden's jack-boots,--"so thick in the soles," according to
+Jenny Dennison, "forby being tough in the upper leather." The tide
+failed us opposite the opening of Loch Alsh; the wind, long dying, at
+length died out into a dead calm; and we cast anchor in ten fathoms
+water, to wait the ebbing current that was to carry us through Kyle
+Rhea.
+
+The ebb-tide set in about half an hour after sunset; and in weighing
+anchor to float down the Kyle,--for we still lacked wind to sail down
+it,--we brought up from below, on one of the anchor-flukes, an immense
+bunch 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 thrown
+out roots along its length of stalk, to attach itself to the rock, in
+the way the ivy attaches itself to the wall. Among the intricacies of
+the true roots of the bunch, if one may speak of the true roots of an
+alga, I reckoned from eighteen to twenty different forms of animal
+life,--Flustræ, Sertulariæ, Serpulæ, Anomiæ, Modiolæ, Astarte, Annelida,
+Crustacea, and Radiata. Among the Crustaceans I found a female crab of a
+reddish-brown color, considerably smaller than the nail of my small
+finger, but fully grown apparently, for the abdominal flap was loaded
+with spawn; and among the Echinoderms, a brownish-yellow sea-urchin
+about the size of a pistol-bullet, furnished with comparatively large
+but thinly-set spines. There is a dangerous rock in the Kyle Rhea, the
+Caileach stone, on which the Commissioners for the Northern Lighthouses
+have stuck a bit of board about the size of a pot-lid, which, as it is
+known to be there, and as no one ever sees it after sunset, is really
+very effective, considering how little it must have cost the country, in
+wrecking vessels. I saw one of its victims, the sloop of an honest
+Methodist, 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 looking
+out in vain for the bit of board, was just stepping into the shrouds, to
+try whether he could not see the rock on which the bit of board is
+placed, when all at once his vessel found out both board and rock for
+herself. We also had anxious looking out this evening for the bit of
+board: one of us thought he saw it right a-head; and when some of the
+others were trying to see it too, John Stewart succeeded in discovering
+it half a pistol-shot astern. The evening was one of the loveliest. The
+moon rose in cloudy majesty over the mountains of Glenelg, brightening
+as it rose, till the boiling eddies around us curled on the darker
+surface in pale circlets of light, and the shadow of the Betsey lay as
+sharply defined on the brown patch of calm to the larboard as if it were
+her portrait taken in black. Immediately at the water-edge, under a tall
+dark hill, there were two smouldering fires, that now shot up a sudden
+tongue of bright flame, and now dimmed into blood-red specks, and sent
+thick strongly-scented trails of smoke athwart the surface of the Kyle.
+We could hear, in the calm, voices from beside them, apparently those of
+children; and learned that they indicated the places of two
+kelp-furnaces,--things which have now become comparatively rare along
+the 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 in
+the moonshine, we could see behind us several spectral-looking sails
+threading their silent way through the narrows, like twilight ghosts
+traversing some haunted corridor.
+
+It was late ere we reached the opening of Isle Ornsay; and as it was
+still a dead calm we had to tug in the Betsey to the anchoring ground
+with a pair of long sweeps. The minister pointed to a low-lying rock on
+the left-hand side of the opening,--a favorite haunt of the seal. "I
+took farewell of the Betsey there last winter," he said. "The night had
+worn late, and was pitch dark; we could see before us scarce the length
+of our bowsprit; not a single light twinkled from the shore; and, in
+taking the bay, we ran bump on the skerry, and stuck fast. The water
+came rushing in, and covered over the cabin-floor. I had Mrs. Swanson
+and my little daughter aboard with me, with one of our servant-maids who
+had become attached to the family, and insisted on following us from
+Eigg; and, of course, our first care was to get them ashore. We had to
+land them on the bare uninhabited island yonder, and a dreary enough
+place 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 at
+least the recommendation of being safe, and the sky, though black and
+wild, was not stormy. I had brought two lanterns ashore: the servant
+girl, with the child in her lap, sat beside one of them, in the shelter
+of a rock; while my wife, with the other, went walking up and down along
+a piece of level sward yonder, waving the light, to attract notice from
+the opposite side of the bay. But though it was seen from the windows of
+my own house by an attached relative, it was deemed merely a
+singularly-distinct apparition of Will o' the Wisp, and so brought us no
+assistance. 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 the
+rocks; and then, taking our few movables ashore, we hung on till the
+tide rose, and, with our boat alongside ready for escape, succeeded in
+warping her into deep water, with the intention of letting her sink
+somewhere beyond the influence of the surf, which, without fail, would
+have broken her up on the skerry in a few hours, had we suffered her to
+remain there. But though, when on the rock, the tide had risen as freely
+over the cabin sole inside as over the crags without, in the deep water
+the Betsey gave no sign of sinking. I went down to the cabin; the water
+was knee-high on the floor, dashing against bed and locker, but it rose
+no higher;--the enormous leak had stopped, we knew not how; and, setting
+ourselves to the pump, we had in an hour or two a clear ship. The Betsey
+is clinker-built below. The elastic oak planks had yielded inwards to
+the pressure of the rock, tearing out the fastenings, and admitted the
+tide at wide yawning seams; but no sooner was the pressure removed, than
+out they sprung again into their places, like bows when the strings are
+slackened; and when the carpenter came to overhaul, he found he had
+little else to do than to remove a split plank, and to supply a few
+dozens 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 vessels
+and fishing boats; and when the Sabbath came round, no inconsiderable
+portion of my friend's congregation was composed of sailors and
+fishermen. His text was appropriate,--"He bringeth them into their
+desired haven;" and as his sea-craft and his theology were alike
+excellent, there were no incongruities in his allegory, and no defects
+in his mode of applying it, and the seamen were hugely delighted. John
+Stewart, though less a master of English than of many other things, told
+me he was able to follow the minister from beginning to end,--a thing he
+had never done before at an English preaching. The sea portion of the
+sermon, 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 of
+it, he was led into the parts that were less simple, and so succeeded in
+comprehending the whole. I would fain see this unique discourse,
+preached by a sailor minister to a sailor congregation, preserved in
+some permanent form, with at least one other discourse,--of which I
+found trace in the island of Eigg, after the lapse of more than a
+twelvemonth,--that had been preached about the time of the Disruption,
+full in sight of the Scuir, with its impregnable hill-fort, and in the
+immediate neighborhood of the cave of Frances, with its heaps of dead
+men's bones. One note stuck fast to the islanders. In times of peril and
+alarm, said the minister, the ancient inhabitants of the island had two
+essentially different kinds of places in which they sought security;
+they had the deep, unwholesome cave, shut up from the light and the
+breath of heaven, and the tall rock summit, with its impregnable fort,
+on which the sun shone and the wind blew. Much hardship might no doubt
+be encountered on the one, when the sky was black with tempest, and
+rains beat, or snows descended; but it was found associated with no
+story of real loss or disaster,--it had kept safe all who had committed
+themselves to it; whereas, in the close atmosphere of the other there
+was warmth, and, after a sort, comfort; and on one memorable day of
+trouble the islanders had deemed it the preferable sheltering place of
+the two. And there survived mouldering skeletons and a frightful
+tradition, to tell the history of their choice. Places of refuge of
+these very opposite kinds, said the minister, continuing his allegory,
+are not peculiar to your island; never was there a day or a place of
+trial in which they did not advance their opposite claims: they are
+advancing them even now all over the world. The one kind you find
+described by one great prophet as low-lying "refuges of lies," over
+which the desolating "scourge must pass," and which the destroying
+"waters must overflow;" while the true character of the other may be
+learned from another great prophet, who was never weary of celebrating
+his "rock and his fortress." "Wit succeeds more from being happily
+addressed," says Goldsmith, "than even from its native poignancy." If
+my friend's allegory does not please quite as well in print and in
+English as it did when delivered _viva voce_ in Gaelic, it should be
+remembered that it was addressed to an out-door congregation, whose
+minds were filled with the consequences of the Disruption,--that the
+bones of _Uamh Fraingh_ lay within a few hundred yards of them,--and
+that the Scuir, with the sun shining bright on its summit, rose tall in
+the background, scarce a mile away.
+
+On Monday I spent several hours in reëxploring the Lias of Lucy Bay and
+its neighborhood, and then walked on to Kyle-Akin, where I parted from
+my friend Mr. Swanson, and took boat for Loch Carron. The greater part
+of the following day was spent in crossing the country to the east coast
+in the mail-gig, through long dreary glens, and a fierce storm of wind
+and rain. In the lower portion of the valley occupied by the river
+Carron, I saw at least two fine groups of moraines. One of these, about
+a mile and a half above the parish manse, marks the place where a
+glacier, that had once descended from a hollow amid the northern range
+of 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 greater
+extent, indicates where one of those river-like glaciers that fill up
+long hollows, and impel their irresistible flood downwards, slow as the
+hour-hand of a time-piece, had terminated towards the sea. I could but
+glance at the appearances as the gig drove past, and point them out to a
+fellow passenger, the Establishment minister of----, remarking, at the
+same time, how much more dreary the prospect must have seemed than even
+it did to-day, though the fog was thick and the drizzle disagreeable,
+when the lateral hollows on each side were blocked up with ice, and
+overhanging glaciers, that ploughed the rock bare in their descent,
+glistened on the bleak hill-sides. I wore a gray maud over a coat of
+rough russet, with waist-coat and trowsers of plaid; and the minister,
+who must have taken me, I suppose, for a southland shepherd looking out
+for a farm, gave me much information of a kind I might have found
+valuable had such been my condition and business, regarding the various
+districts through which we passed. On one high-lying farm, the grass, he
+said, was short and thin, but sweet and wholesome, and the flocks throve
+steadily, and were never thinned by disease; whereas on another farm,
+that lay along the dank bottom of a valley, the herbage was rank and
+rich, and the sheep fed and got heavy, but braxy at the close of autumn
+fell upon them like a pestilence, and more than neutralized to the
+farmer every advantage of the superior fertility of the soil. It was not
+uninteresting, even for one not a sheep-farmer, to learn that the life
+of the sheep is worth fewer years' purchase in one little track of
+country than in another adjacent one; and that those differences in the
+salubrity of particular spots which obtain in other parts of the world
+in regard to our own species, and which make it death to linger on the
+luxuriant river-side, while on the arid plain or elevated hill-top there
+is health and safety, should exist in contiguous walks in the Highlands
+of Scotland in reference to some of the inferior animals. The minister
+and I became wonderfully good friends for the time. All the seats in the
+gig, both back and front, had been occupied ere he had taken his
+passage, and the postman had assigned him a miserable place on the
+narrow elevated platform in the middle, where he had to coil himself up
+like a hedgehog in its hole, sadly to the discomfort of limbs still
+stout and strong, but stiffened by the long service of full seventy
+years. 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, as
+became his years, "'gan murmur." I contrived, by sitting on the edge of
+the gig on the one side, and by getting the postman to take a similar
+seat on the other, to find room for him in front; and there, feeling he
+had not to do with savages, he became kindly and conversible. We beat
+together over a wide range of topics;--the Scotch banks, and Sir Robert
+Peel's intentions regarding them,--the periodical press of
+Scotland,--the Edinburgh literati,--the Free Church even: he had been a
+consistent Moderate all his days, and disliked renegades, he said; and
+I, of course, disliked renegades too. We both remembered that, though
+civilized nations give quarter to an enemy overpowered in open fight,
+they are still in the habit of shooting deserters. In short, we agreed
+on a great many different matters; and, by comparing notes, we made the
+best we could of a tedious journey and a very bad day. At the inn at
+Garve, a long stage from Dingwall, we alighted, and took the road
+together, to straighten our stiffened limbs, while the post man was
+engaged in changing horses. The minister stopped short in the middle of
+a discussion. We are not on equal terms, he said: you know who I am, and
+I don't know you: we did not start fair at the beginning, but let us
+start fair now. Ah, we have agreed hitherto, I replied; but I know not
+how we are to agree when you know who I am: are you sure you will not be
+frightened? 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. Give
+me, man, a shake of your hand." And so the conversation went on as
+before till we parted at Dingwall,--the Establishment clergyman wet to
+the skin, the Free Church editor in no better condition; but both,
+mayhap, rather less out of conceit with the ride than if it had been
+ridden alone.
+
+I had intended passing at least two days in the neighborhood of
+Dingwall, where I proposed renewing an acquaintance, broken off for
+three-and-twenty years, with those bituminous shales of Strathpeffer in
+which the celebrated mineral waters of the valley take their rise,--the
+Old Red Conglomerate of Brahan, the vitrified fort of Knockferrel, the
+ancient tower of Fairburn, above all, the pleasure-grounds of
+Conon-side. I had spent the greater portion of my eighteenth and
+nineteenth years in this part of the country; and I was curious to
+ascertain to what extent the man in middle life would verify the
+observations of the lad,--to recall early incidents, revisit remembered
+scenes, return on old feelings, and see who were dead and who were alive
+among the casual acquaintances of nearly a quarter of a century ago. The
+morning of Wednesday rose dark with fog and rain, but the wind had
+fallen; and as I could not afford to miss seeing Conon-side, I sallied
+out under cover of an umbrella. I crossed the bridge, and reached the
+pleasure-grounds of Conon-house. The river was big in flood: it was
+exactly 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 do
+early in the autumn of that year, and pick up the pearl muscles that lie
+so thickly among the stones at the bottom. I saw, however, amid a
+thicket of bushes by the river-side, a heap of broken shells, where some
+herd-boy had been carrying on such a pearl fishery as I had sometimes
+used to carry on in my own behalf so long before; and I felt it was just
+something to see it. The flood eddied past, dark and heavy, sweeping
+over bulwark and bank. The low-stemmed alders that rose on islet and
+mound seemed shorn of half their trunks in the tide; here and there an
+elastic branch bent to the current, and rose and bent again; and now a
+tuft of withered heath came floating down, and now a soiled wreath of
+foam. How vividly the past rose up before me!--boyish day-dreams
+forgotten 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 the
+ancient Cryptogamiæ, and bore no specific resemblance to the productions
+of a present time. I had passed in the neighborhood the first season I
+anywhere spent among strangers, at an age when home is not a country,
+nor a province even, but simply a little spot of earth inhabited by
+friends and relatives; and the rude verses, long forgotten, in which my
+joy had found vent when on the eve of returning to that home,--a home
+little more than twenty miles away,--came chiming as freshly into my
+memory as if scarce a month had passed since I had composed them beside
+the Conon.[6]
+
+Three-and-twenty years form a large portion of the short life of
+man,--one-third, as nearly as can be expressed in unbroken numbers, of
+the entire term fixed by the psalmist, and full one-half, if we strike
+off the twilight periods of childhood and immature youth, and of
+senectitude weary of its toils. I found curious indications among the
+grounds of Conon-side, of the time that had elapsed since I had last
+seen them. There was a rectangular pond in a corner of a moor, near the
+public road, inhabited by about a dozen voracious, frog-eating pike,
+that I used frequently to visit. The water in the pond was exceedingly
+limpid; 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 narrow
+tangled pathway, to visit it once more. I could have found out the
+place blindfold: there was a piece of flat brown heath that stretched
+round its edges, and a mossy slope that rose at its upper side, at the
+foot of which the taste of the proprietor had placed a rustic chair. The
+spot, though itself bare and moory, was nearly surrounded by wood, and
+looked like a clearing in an American forest. There were lines of
+graceful larches on two of its sides, and a grove of vigorous beeches
+that directly fronted the setting sun on a third; and I had often found
+it a place of delightful resort, in which to saunter alone in the calm
+summer evenings, after the work of the day was over. Such was the scene
+as it existed in my recollection. I came up to it this day through
+dripping trees, along a neglected pathway; and found, for the open space
+and the rectangular pond, a gloomy patch of water in the middle of a
+tangled thicket, that rose some ten or twelve feet over my head. What
+had been bare heath a quarter of a century before had become a thick
+wood; and I remembered, that when I had been last there, the open space
+had just been planted with forest-trees, and that some of the taller
+plants rose half-way to my knee. Human lifetimes, as now measured, are
+not intended to witness both the seed-times and the harvests of
+forests,--both the planting of the sapling, and the felling of the huge
+tree into which it has grown; and so the incident impressed me strongly.
+It reminded me of the sage Shalum in Addison's antediluvian tale, who
+became wealthy by the sale of his great trees, two centuries after he
+had planted them. I pursued my walk, to revisit another little patch of
+water which I had found so very entertaining a volume three-and-twenty
+years previous, that I could still recall many of its lessons; but the
+hand of improvement had been busy among the fields of Conon-side; and
+when I came up to the spot which it had occupied, I found but a piece
+of 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 twenty
+years before. I entered into conversation with one of the ploughmen,
+apparently a man of some intelligence; but he had come to the place only
+a summer or two previous, and the names of most of his predecessors
+sounded unfamiliar in his ears: he knew scarce anything of the old laird
+or his times, and but little of the general history of the district. The
+frequent change of servants incident to the large-farm system has done
+scarce less to wear out the oral antiquities of the country than has
+been done by its busy ploughs in obliterating antiquities of a more
+material cast. The mythologic legend and traditionary story have shared
+the same fate, through the influence of the one cause, which has been
+experienced by the sepulchral tumulus and the ancient encampment under
+the operations of the other. I saw in the pillars and archways of the
+farm-steading some of the hewn stones bearing my own mark,--an anchor,
+to which I used to attach a certain symbolical meaning; and I pointed
+them out to the ploughman. I had hewn these stones, I said, in the days
+of the old laird, the grandfather of the present proprietor. The
+ploughman wondered how a man still in middle life could have such a
+story to tell. I must surely have begun work early in the day, he
+remarked, which was perhaps the best way for getting it soon over. I
+remembered having seen similar markings on the hewn-work of ancient
+castles, and of indulging in, I daresay, idle enough speculations
+regarding what was doing at court and in the field, in Scotland and
+elsewhere, when the old long-departed mechanics had been engaged in
+their work. When this mark was affixed, I have said, all Scotland was
+in mourning for the disaster at Flodden, and the folk in the work-shed
+would have been, mayhap, engaged in discussing the supposed treachery of
+Home, and in arguing whether the hapless James had fallen in battle, or
+gone on a pilgrimage to merit absolution for the death of his father.
+And when this other more modern mark was affixed, the Gowrie conspiracy
+must have been the topic of the day, and the mechanics were probably
+speculating,--at worst not more doubtfully than the historians have done
+after them,--on the guilt or innocence of the Ruthvens. It now rose
+curiously enough in memory, that I was employed in fashioning one of the
+stones marked by the anchor,--a corner stone in a gate-pillar,--when one
+of my brother apprentices entered the work-shed, laden with a bundle of
+newly sharpened irons from the smithy, and said he had just been told by
+the smith that the great Napoleon Bonaparte was dead. I returned to the
+village of Conon Bridge, through the woods of Conon House. The day was
+still very bad: the rain pattered thick on the leaves, and fell
+incessantly in large drops on the pathways. There is a solitary,
+picturesque burying-ground on a wooded hillock beside the river, with
+thick dark woods all around it,--one of the two burying-grounds of the
+parish of Urquhart,--which I would fain have visited, but the swollen
+stream had risen high around, converting the hillock into an island, and
+forbade access. I had spent many an hour among the tombs. They are few
+and scattered, and of the true antique cast,--roughened with death's
+heads, and cross-bones, and rudely sculptured armorial bearings; and on
+a 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, with
+its iron gnomon wasted to a saw-edged film, that contained more oxide
+than metal. The only fossils described in my present chapter are fossils
+of mind; and the reader will, I trust, bear with me should I produce
+one fossil more of this somewhat equivocal class. It has no merit to
+recommend it,--it is simply an organism of an immature intellectual
+formation, in which, however, as in the Carboniferous period, there was
+provision made for the necessities of an after time.[8] If a young man
+born on the wrong side of the Tweed for _speaking_ English, is desirous
+to acquire the ability of _writing_ it, he should by all means begin by
+trying 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 the
+work-shed so many years before lived in the village at the time, I went
+direct to the house he had inhabited, to see whether he might not be
+there still. It was a low-roofed domicile beside the river, but in the
+days of my old acquaintance it had presented an appearance of great
+comfort 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, at
+the 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-hand
+side,--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 was
+one of the elders of the Free Church in Urquhart. Such was the standing
+of my old acquaintance the journeyman mason of twenty-three years ago.
+He had been, when I knew him, a steady, industrious, religious
+man,--with but one exception the only contributor to missionary and
+Bible societies among a numerous party of workmen; and he was now
+occupying a respectable place in his village, and was one of the voters
+of the county. Let Chartism assert what it pleases on the one hand, and
+Toryism what it may on the other, the property-qualification of the
+Reform Bill is essentially a good one for such a country as Scotland. In
+our cities it no doubt extends the political franchise to a fluctuating
+class, ill hafted in society, who possess it one year and want it
+another; but in our villages and smaller towns it hits very nearly the
+right medium for forming a premium on steady industry and character, and
+for securing that at least the mass of those who possess it should be
+sober-minded men, with a stake in the general welfare. In running over
+the histories of the various voters in one of our smaller towns, I found
+that nearly one-half of the whole had, like my old comrade at Conon
+Bridge, acquired for themselves, through steady and industrious habits,
+the qualification from which they derive their vote. My companion failed
+to recognize in the man turned of forty the smooth-cheeked stripling of
+eighteen, with whom he had wrought so long before. I soon succeeded,
+however, in making good my claim to his acquaintance. He had previously
+established the identity of the editor of his newspaper with his quondam
+fellow-workman, and a single link more was all the chain wanted. We
+talked over old matters for half an hour. His wife, a staid respectable
+matron, who, when I had been last in the district, was exactly such a
+person as her eldest daughter, showed me an Encyclopædia, with colored
+prints, which she wished to send, if she knew but how, to the Free
+Church library. I walked with him through his garden, and saw trees
+loaded with yellow-cheeked pippins, where I had once seen only
+unproductive heath, that scantily covered a barren soil of ferruginous
+sand, and unwillingly declining an invitation to wait tea,--for a
+previous engagement interfered,--I took leave of the family, and
+returned to Dingwall. The following morning was gloomy, and threatened
+rain; and giving up my intention of exploring Strathpeffer, I took the
+morning coach for Invergordon, and then walked to Cromarty, where I
+arrived just in time for breakfast.
+
+I marked, from the top of the coach, about two miles to the north-east
+of Dingwall, beds of a deep gray sandstone, identical in color and
+appearance with some of the gray sandstones of the Middle Old Red of
+Forfarshire, and learned that quarries had lately been opened in these
+beds near Montgerald. The Old Red Sandstone lies in immense development
+on the flanks of Ben-Wevis; and it is just possible that the analogue of
+the gray flagstones of Forfar may be found among its upper beds. If so,
+the quarriers should be instructed to look hard for organic
+remains,--the broad-headed Cephalaspis, so characteristic of the
+formation, and the huge Crustacean, its contemporary, that disported in
+plates large as those of the steel mail of the later ages of chivalry.
+The geologists of Dingwall,--if Dingwall has yet got its
+geologists,--might do well to attempt determining the point. I found the
+science much in advance in Cromarty, especially among the ladies,--its
+great patronizers and illustrators everywhere,--and, in not a few
+localities, extensive contributors to its hoards of fact. Just as I
+arrived, there was a pic-nic party of young people setting out for the
+Lias of Shandwick. They spent the day among its richly fossiliferous
+shales and limestones, and brought back with them in the evening,
+Ammonites and Gryphites enough to store a museum. Cromarty had been
+visited during the summer by geologists speaking a foreign tongue, but
+thoroughly conversant with the occult yet common language of the rocks,
+and deeply interested in the stories which the rocks told. The vessels
+in which the Crown Prince of Denmark voyaged to the Faroe Isles had
+been for some time in the bay; and the Danes, his companions, votaries
+of the stony science, zealously plied chisel and hammer among the Old
+Red Sandstones of the coast. A townsman informed me that he had seen a
+Danish Professor hammering like the tutelary Thor of his country among
+the nodules in which I had found the first Pterichthys and first
+Diplacanthus ever disinterred; and that the Professor, ever and anon as
+he laid open a specimen, brought it to a huge smooth boulder, on which
+there lay a copy of the "Old Red Sandstone," to ascertain from the
+descriptions and prints its family and name. Shall I confess that the
+circumstance gratified me exceedingly? There are many elements of
+Discord among mankind in the present time, both at home and abroad,--so
+many, that I am afraid we need entertain no hope of seeing an end, in at
+least our day, to controversy and war. And we should be all the better
+pleased, therefore, to witness the increase of those links of
+union,--such as the harmonizing bonds of a scientific sympathy,--the
+tendency of which is to draw men together in a kindly spirit, and the
+formation of which involves no sacrifice of principle, moral or
+religious. I do not think that the foreigner, after geologizing in my
+company, 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 chapter
+would 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 the
+Cromarty Frith, and another long day in renewing my acquaintance with
+the Liasic deposit at Shandwick. In beating over the Lias, though I
+picked up a few good specimens, I acquired no new facts; but in
+re-examining the Old Red Sandstone and its organisms I was rather more
+successful. I succeeded in eliciting some curious points not yet
+recorded, which, with the details of an interesting discovery made in
+the far north in this formation, I may be perhaps able to weave into a
+chapter somewhat more geological than my last.
+
+Some of the readers of my little work on the Old Red Sandstone will
+perhaps remember that I described the organisms of that ancient system
+as occurring in the neighborhood of Cromarty mainly on one platform,
+raised rather more than a hundred feet over the great Conglomerate; and
+that on this platform, as if suddenly overtaken by some wide-spread
+catastrophe, the ichthyolites lie by thousands and tens of thousands,
+in every attitude of distortion and terror. We see the spiked wings of
+the Pterichthys elevated to the full, as they had been erected in the
+fatal moment of anger and alarm, and the bodies of the Cheirolepis and
+Cheiracanthus bent head to tail, in the stiff posture into which they
+had curled when the last pang was over. In various places in the
+neighborhood the ichthyolites are found _in situ_ in their coffin-like
+nodules, where it is impossible to trace the relation of the beds in
+which they occur to the rocks above and below; and I had suspected for
+years that in at least some of the localities, they could not have
+belonged to the lower platform of death, but to some posterior
+catastrophe that had strewed with carcasses some upper platform. I had
+thought over the matter many a time and oft when I should have been
+asleep,--for it is marvellous how questions of the kind grow upon a man;
+and now, selecting as a hopeful scene of inquiry the splendid section
+under the Northern Sutor, I set myself doggedly to determine whether the
+Old Red Sandstone in this part of the country has not at least its two
+storeys of organic remains, each of which had been equally a scene of
+sudden mortality. I was entirely successful. The lower ichthyolite bed
+occurs exactly one hundred and fourteen feet over the great
+Conglomerate; and three hundred and eighteen feet higher up I found a
+second ichthyolite bed, as rich in fossils as the first, with its thorny
+Acanthodians twisted half round, as if still in the agony of
+dissolution, and its Pterichthyes still extending their spear-like arms
+in the attitude of defence. The discovery enabled me to assign to their
+true places the various ichthyolite beds of the district. Those in the
+immediate neighborhood of the town, and a bed which abuts on the Lias at
+Eathie, belong to the upper platform; while those which appear in Eathie
+Burn, and along the shores at Navity, belong to the lower. The chief
+interest of the discovery, however, arises from the light which it
+throws on the condition of the ancient ocean of the Lower Old Red, and
+on the extreme precariousness of the tenure on which the existence of
+its numerous denizens was held. In a section of little more than a
+hundred yards there occur at least two platforms of violent
+death,--platforms inscribed with unequivocal evidence of two great
+catastrophes which over wide areas depopulated the seas. In the Old Red
+Sandstone of Caithness there are many such platforms: storey rises over
+storey; and the floor of each bears its closely-written record of
+disaster and sudden extinction. Pompeii in this northern locality lies
+over Herculaneum, and Anglano over both. We cease to wonder why the
+higher order of animals should not have been introduced into a scene of
+being that had so recently arisen out of chaos, and over which the reign
+of death so frequently returned. In a somewhat different sense from that
+indicated 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 in
+abundance single plates and scales of ichthyolites, which, as they can
+be removed entire, and viewed on both sides, illustrate points in the
+mechanism of the creatures to which they belonged that cannot be so
+clearly traced in the same remains when locked up in stone. There is a
+vast deal of skilful carpentry exhibited--if carpentry I may term it--in
+the coverings of these ancient ichthyolites. In the commoner fish of our
+existing seas the scales are so thin and flexible,--mere films of
+horn,--that there is no particularly nice fitting required in their
+arrangement. The condition, too, through which portions of unprotected
+skin may be presented to the water, as over and between the rays of the
+fins, and on the snout and lips, obviates many a mechanical difficulty
+of the earlier period, when it was a condition, as the remains
+demonstrate, that no bit of naked skin, should be exposed, and when the
+scales and plates were formed, not of thin horny films, but of solid
+pieces 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 the
+roof of an ancient cathedral;--_they_, on the other hand, were scales of
+the ancient type. Again, it requires no ingenuity whatever, to suffer
+the hands and face to go naked,--and such is the condition of our
+existing fish, with their soft skinny snouts and membranous fins; but to
+cover the hands with flexible steel gauntlets, and the face with such an
+iron mask as that worn by the mysterious prisoner of Louis XIV., would
+require a very large amount of ingenuity indeed; and the ancient
+ichthyolites of the Old Red were all masked and gauntleted. Now the
+detached plates and scales of the stratified clay exhibit not a few of
+the mechanical contrivances through which the bony coverings of these
+fish were made to unite--as in coats of old armor--great strength with
+great flexibility. The scales of the Osteolepis and Diplopterus I found
+nicely bevelled atop and at one of the sides; so that where they
+overlapped each other,--for at the joints not a needle-point could be
+insinuated,--the thickness of the two scales equalled but the thickness
+of one scale in the centre, and thus an equable covering was formed. I
+brought with me some of these detached scales, and they now lie fitted
+together on the table before me, like pieces of complicated hewn work
+carefully arranged on the ground ere the workman transfers them to their
+place on the wall. In the smaller-scaled fish, such as the
+Cheiracanthus and Cheirolepis, a different principle obtained. The
+minute glittering rhombs of bone were set thick on the skin, like those
+small scales of metal sewed on leather, that formed an inferior kind of
+armor still in use in eastern nations, and which was partially used in
+our own country just ere the buff coat altogether superseded the coat of
+mail. I found a beautiful piece of jaw in the clay, with the enamelled
+tusks bristling on its brightly enamelled edge, like iron teeth in an
+iron rake. Mr. Parkinson expresses some wonder, in his work on fossils,
+that in a fine ichthyolite in the British Museum, not only the teeth
+should have been preserved, but also the lips; but we now know enough of
+the construction of the more ancient fish, to cease wondering. The lips
+were formed of as solid bone as the teeth themselves, and had as fair a
+chance of being preserved entire; just as the metallic rim of a toothed
+wheel has as fair a chance of being preserved as the metallic teeth that
+project from it. I was interested in marking the various modes of
+attachment to the body of the animal which the detached scales exhibit.
+The slater fastens on his slates with nails driven into the wood: the
+tiler secures his tiles by means of a raised bar on the under side of
+each, that locks into a corresponding bar of deal in the framework of
+the roof. Now in some of the scales I found the art of the tiler
+anticipated; there were bars raised on their inner sides, to lay hold of
+the skin beneath; while in others it was the art of the slater that had
+been anticipated,--the scales had been slates fastened down by long
+nails driven in slantwise, which were, however, mere prolongations of
+the scale itself. Great truths may be repeated until they become
+truisms, and we fail to note what they in reality convey. The great
+truth that all knowledge dwelt without beginning in the adorable Creator
+must, I am afraid, have been thus common-placed in my mind; for at
+first it struck me as wonderful that the humble arts of the tiler and
+slater should have existed in perfection in the times of the Old Red
+Sandstone.
+
+I had often remarked amid the fossiliferous limestones of the Lower Old
+Red, minute specks and slender veins of a glossy bituminous substance
+somewhat resembling jet, sufficiently hard to admit of a tolerable
+polish, and which emitted in the fire a bright flame, I had remarked,
+further, its apparent identity with a substance used by the ancient
+inhabitants of the northern part of the country in the manufacture of
+their rude ornaments, as occasionally found in sepulchral urns, such as
+beads of an elliptical form, and flat parallelograms, perforated
+edge-wise by some four or five holes a-piece; but I had failed hitherto
+in detecting in the stone, portions of sufficient bulk for the formation
+of either the beads or the parallelograms. On this visit to the
+ichthyolite beds, however, I picked up a nodule that inclosed a mass of
+the jet large enough to admit of being fashioned into trinkets of as
+great bulk as any of the ancient ones I have yet seen, and a portion of
+which I succeeded in actually forming into a parallelogram, that could
+not have been distinguished from those of our old sepulchral urns. It is
+interesting enough to think, that these fossiliferous beds, altogether
+unknown to the people of the country for many centuries, and which, when
+I first discovered them, some twelve or fourteen years ago, were equally
+unknown to geologists, should have been resorted to for this substance,
+perhaps thousands of years ago, by the savage aborigines of the
+district. But our antiquities of the remoter class furnish us with
+several such facts. It is comparatively of late years that we have
+become acquainted with the yellow chalk-flints of Banffshire and
+Aberdeen; though before the introduction of iron into the country they
+seem to have been well known all over the north of Scotland. I have
+never yet seen a stone arrow-head found in any of the northern
+localities, that had not been fashioned out of this hard and splintery
+substance,--a sufficient proof that our ancestors, ere they had formed
+their first acquaintance with the metals, were intimately acquainted
+with at least the mechanical properties of the chalk-flint, and knew
+where in Scotland it was to be found. They were mineralogists enough,
+too, as their stone battle-axes testify, to know that the best
+tool-making rock is the axe-stone of Werner; and in some localities they
+must have brought their supply of this rather rare mineral from great
+distances. A history of those arts of savage life, as shown in the
+relics of our earlier antiquities, which the course of discovery sereved
+thoroughly to supplant, but which could not have been carried on without
+a knowledge of substances and qualities afterwards lost, until
+re-discovered by scientific curiosity, would form of itself an
+exceedingly curious chapter. The art of the gun-flint maker (and it,
+too, promises soon to pass into extinction) is unquestionably a curious
+one, but not a whit more curious or more ingenious than the art
+possessed by the rude inhabitants of our country eighteen hundred years
+ago, of chipping arrow-heads with an astonishing degree of neatness out
+of the same stubborn material. They found, however, that though flint
+made a serviceable arrow-head, it was by much too brittle for an adze or
+battle-axe; and sought elsewhere than among the Banffshire gravels for
+the rock out of which these were to be wrought. Where they found it in
+our northern provinces I have not yet ascertained. It is but a short
+time since I came to know that they were beforehand with me in the
+discovery of the bituminous jet of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, and were
+excavators among its fossiliferous beds. The vitrified forts of the
+north of Scotland give evidence of yet another of the obsolete arts.
+Before the savage inhabitants of the country were ingenious enough to
+know the uses of mortar, or were furnished with tools sufficiently hard
+and solid to dress a bit of sandstone, they must have been acquainted
+with the _chemical_ fact, that with the assistance of fluxes, a pile of
+stones could be fused into a solid wall, and with the _mineralogical_
+fact, that there are certain kinds of stones which yield much more
+readily to the heat than others. The art of making vitrified forts was
+the art of making ramparts of rock through a knowledge of the less
+obstinate earths and the more powerful fluxes. I have been informed by
+Mr. Patrick Duff of Elgin, that he found, in breaking open a vitrified
+fragment detached from an ancient hill-fort, distinct impressions of the
+serrated kelp-weed of our shores,--the identical flux which, in its
+character as the kelp of commerce, was so extensively used in our
+glass-houses only a few years ago.
+
+I was struck, during my explorations at this time, as I had been often
+before, by the style of grouping, if I may so speak, which obtains among
+the Lower Old Red fossils. In no deposit with which I am acquainted,
+however rich in remains, have all its ichthyolites been found lying
+together. The collector finds some one or two species very numerous;
+some two or three considerably less so, but not unfrequent; some one or
+two more, perhaps, exceedingly rare; and a few, though abundant in other
+localities, that never occur at all. In the Cromarty beds, for instance,
+I never found a Holoptychius, and a Dipterus only once; the Diplopterus
+is rare; the Glyptolepis not common; the Cheirolepis and Pterichthys
+more so, but not very abundant; the Cheiracanthus and Diplacanthus, on
+the other hand, are numerous; and the Osteolepis and Coccosteus more
+numerous still. But in other deposits of the same formation, though a
+similar style of grouping obtains, the proportions are reversed with
+regard to species and genera: the fish rare in one locality abound in
+another. In Banniskirk, for instance, the Dipterus is exceedingly
+common, while the Osteolepis and Coccosteus are rare, and the
+Cheiracanthus and Cheirolepis seem altogether awanting. Again, in the
+Morayshire deposits, the Glyptolepis is abundant, and noble specimens of
+the Lower Old Red Holoptychius--of which more anon--are to be found in
+the neighborhood of Thurso, associated with remains of the Diplopterus,
+Coccosteus, Dipterus, and Osteolepis. The fact may be deemed of some
+little interest by the geologist, and may serve to inculcate caution, by
+showing that it is not always safe to determine regarding the place or
+age of subordinate formations from the per centage of certain fossils
+which they may be found to contain, or from the fact that they should
+want some certain organisms of the system to which they belong, and
+possess others. These differences may and do exist in contemporary
+deposits; and I had a striking example, on this occasion, of their
+dependence on a simple law of instinct, which is as active in producing
+the same kind of phenomena now as it seems to have been in the earlier
+days of the Old Red Sandstone. The Cromarty and Moray Friths, mottled
+with fishing boats (for the bustle of the herring fishers had just
+begun), stretched out before me. A few hundred yards from the shore
+there was a yawl lying at anchor, with an old fisherman and a few boys
+angling from the stern for sillocks (the young of the coal-fish) and for
+small rock-cod. A few miles higher up, where the Cromarty Frith expands
+into a wide landlocked basin, with shallow sandy shores, there was a
+second yawl engaged in fishing for flounders and small skate,--for such
+are the kinds of fish that frequent the flat shallows of the basin. A
+turbot-net lay drying in the sun: it served to remind me that some six
+or eight miles away, in an opposite direction, there is a deep-sea bank,
+on which turbot, halibut, and large skate are found. Numerous boats were
+stretching down the Moray Frith, bound for the banks of a more distant
+locality, frequented at this early stage of the herring fishing by
+shoals of herrings, with their attendant dog-fish and cod; and I knew
+that in yet another deep-sea range there lie haddock and whiting banks.
+Almost every variety of existing fish in the two friths has its own
+peculiar habitat; and were they to be destroyed by some sudden
+catastrophe, and preserved by some geologic process, on the banks and
+shoals which they frequent, there would occur exactly the same phenomena
+of grouping in the fossiliferous contemporaneous deposits which they
+would thus constitute, as we find exhibited by the deposits of the Lower
+Old Red Sandstone.
+
+The remains of Holoptychius occur, I have said, in the neighborhood of
+Thurso. I must now add, that very singular remains they are,--full of
+interest to the naturalist, and, in great part at least, new to Geology.
+My readers, votaries of the stony science, must be acquainted with the
+masterly paper of Mr. Sedgwick and Sir R. Murchison "On the Old Red
+Sandstone of Caithness and the North of Scotland generally," which forms
+part of the second volume (second series) of the "Transactions of the
+Geological Society," and with the description which it furnishes, among
+many others, of the rocks in the neighborhood of Thurso.
+Calcareo-bituminous flags, grits, and shales, of which the paving
+flagstones of Caithness may be regarded as the general type, occur on
+the shores, in reefs, crags, and precipices; here stretching along the
+coast in the form of flat, uneven bulwarks: there rising over it in
+steep walls; yonder leaning to the surf, stratum against stratum, like
+flights of stairs thrown down from their slant position to the level; in
+some places severed by faults; in others cast about in every possible
+direction, as if broken and contorted by a thousand antagonist
+movements; but in their general bearing rising towards the east, until
+the whole calcareo-bituminous schists of which this important member of
+the system is composed disappear under the red sandstones of Dunnet
+Head. Such, in effect, is the general description of Mr. Sedgwick and
+Sir R. Murchison, of the rocks in the neighborhood of Thurso. It
+indicates further, that in at least three localities in the range there
+occur in the grits and shales, scales and impressions of fish. And such
+was the ascertained geology of the deposit when taken up last year by an
+ingenious tradesman of Thurso, Mr. Robert Dick, whose patient
+explorations, concentrated mainly on the fossil remains of this deposit,
+bid fair to add to our knowledge of the ichthyology of the Old Red
+Sandstone. Let us accompany Mr. Dick in one of his exploratory rambles.
+The various organisms which he disinterred I shall describe from
+specimens before me, which I owe to his kindness,--the localities in
+which he found them, from a minute and interesting description, for
+which I am indebted to his pen.
+
+Leaving behind us the town at the bottom of its deep bay, we set out to
+explore a bluff-headed parallelogramical promontory, bounded by Thurso
+Bay on the one hand, and Murkle Bay on the other, and which presents to
+the open sea, in the space that stretches between, an undulating line of
+iron-bound coast, exposed to the roll of the northern ocean. We pass two
+stations in which the hard Caithness flagstones so well known in
+commerce are jointed by saws wrought by machinery. As is common in the
+Old Red Sandstone, in which scarce any stratum solid enough to be of
+value to the workmen, whether for building or paving, contains good
+specimens, we find but little to detain us in the dark coherent beds
+from which the flags are quarried. Here and there a few glittering
+scales occur; here and there a few coprolitic patches; here and there
+the faint impression of a fucoid; but no organism sufficiently entire to
+be transferred to the bag. As we proceed outwards, however, and the
+fitful breeze comes laden with the keen freshness of the open sea, we
+find among the hard dark strata in the immediate neighborhood of Thurso
+Castle, a paler-colored bed of fine-grained semi-calcareous stone,
+charged with remains in a state of coherency and keeping better fitted
+to repay the labor of the specimen-collector. The inclosing matrix is
+comparatively soft: when employed in the neighboring fences as a
+building stone, we see it resolved by the skyey influences into
+well-nigh its original mud; whereas the organisms which it contains are
+composed of a hard, scarce destructible substance,--bone steeped in
+bitumen; and the enamel on their outer surfaces is still as glossy and
+bright as the japan on a _papier-maché_ tray fresh from the hands of the
+workman. Their deep black, too, contrasts strongly with the pale hue of
+the stone. They consist chiefly of scales, spines, dermal plates,
+snouts, skull-caps, and vegetable impressions. A little farther on, in a
+thick bed interposed between two faults, the same kind of remains occur
+in the same abundance, largely mingled with scales and teeth of
+Holoptychius, tuberculated plates, and coprolitic blotches; and further
+on still, in a rubbly flagstone, near where a little stream comes
+trotting merrily from the uplands to the sea, there occur
+skull-plates,--at least one of which has been disinterred entire,--large
+and massy as the helmets of ancient warriors. We have now reached the
+outer point of the promontory, where the seaward wave, as it comes
+rolling unbroken from the Pole, crosses, in nearing the shore, the
+eastward sweep of the great Gulf-stream, and then casts itself headlong
+on the rocks. The view has been extending with almost every step we have
+taken, and it has now expanded into a wide and noble prospect of ocean
+and bay, island and main, bold surf-skirted headlands, and green
+retiring hollows. Yonder, on the one hand, are the Orkneys, rising dim
+and blue over the foam-mottled currents of the Pentland Frith; and
+yonder, 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; there
+receding in grassy banks formed of a dark blue diluvium. The fields and
+dwellings of living men mingle in the landscape with old episcopal ruins
+and ancient burying-grounds; and yonder, well-nigh in the opening of the
+Frith, gleams ruddy to the sun,--a true blood-colored blush, when all
+around is azure or pale,--the tall Red Sandstone precipices of Dunnet
+Head. It has been suggested that the planet Mars may owe its red color
+to the extensive development of some such formation as the Old Red
+Sandstone of our own planet: the existing formation in Mars may, at the
+present time, it is said, be a Red Sandstone formation. It seems much
+more probable, however, that the red flush which characterizes the whole
+of that planet,--its oceans as certainly as its continents,--should be
+rather owing to some widely-diffused peculiarity of the surrounding
+atmosphere, than to aught peculiar in the varied surface of land and
+water which that atmosphere surrounds; but certainly the extensive
+existence of such a red system might produce the effect. If the rocks
+and soils of Dunnet Head formed average specimens of those of our globe
+generally, we could look across the heavens at Mars with a disk vastly
+more 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 rising
+frequently appears from the earth.
+
+We have rounded the promontory. The beds exposed along the coast to the
+lashings 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 to
+the hammer like plates of cast iron; yonder soft, unctuous, and
+green,--a kind of chloritic sandstone. And these very various powers of
+resistance and degrees of hardness we find indicated by the rough
+irregularities of the surface. The softer parts retire in long
+trench-like hollows,--the harder stand out in sharp irregular ridges.
+Fossils abound: the bituminous beds glitter bright with glossy
+quadrangular scales, that look like sheets of black mica inclosed in
+granite. We find jaws, teeth, tubercled plates, skull-caps, spines, and
+fucoids,--"tombs among which to contemplate," says Mr. Dick, "of which
+Hervey never dreamed." The condition of complete keeping in which we
+discover some of these remains, even when exposed to the incessant dash
+of the surf, seems truly wonderful. We see scales of Holoptychius
+standing up in bold relief from the hard cherty rock that has worn from
+around them, with all the tubercles and wavy ridges of their sculpture
+entire. This state of keeping seems to be wholly owing to the curious
+chemical change that has taken place in their substance. Ere the
+skeleton of the Bruce, disinterred entire after the lapse of five
+centuries, was recommitted to the tomb, there were such measures taken
+to secure its preservation, that were it to be again disinterred even
+after as many centuries more had passed, it might be found retaining
+unbroken its gigantic proportions. There was molten pitch poured over
+the bones in a state of sufficient fluidity to permeate all their
+pores, and fill up the central hollows, and which, soon hardening around
+them, formed a bituminous matrix, in which they may lie unchanged for
+more than a thousand years. Now, exactly such was the process of keeping
+to which nature resorted with these skeletons of the Old Red Sandstone.
+The animal matter with which they were charged had been converted into a
+hard black bitumen. Like the bones of the Bruce, they are bones steeped
+in pitch; and so thoroughly is every pore and hollow still occupied,
+that, when cast into the fire, they flamed like torches. In one of the
+beds at which we have now arrived Mr. Dick found the occipital plates of
+a Holoptychius of gigantic proportions. The frontal plates measured full
+sixteen inches across, and from the nape of the neck to a little above
+the place of the eyes, full eighteen; while a single plate belonging to
+the lower part of the head measures thirteen and a half inches by seven
+and a half. I have remarked, in my little work on the Old Red
+Sandstone,--founding on a large amount of negative evidence, that a
+mediocrity of size and bulk seems to have obtained among the fish of the
+Lower Old Red, though in at least the Upper formation, a considerable
+increase in both took place. A single piece of positive evidence,
+however, outweighs whole volumes of a merely negative kind. From the
+entire plate now in my possession, which is identical with one figured
+in Mr. Noble of St. Madoes' specimen, and from the huge fragments of the
+upper plates now before me, some of which are full five-eighth parts of
+an inch in thickness, I am prepared to demonstrate that this
+Holoptychius of the Lower Old Red must have been at least thrice the
+size of the _Holoptychius Nobilissimus_ of Clashbennie.
+
+Still we pass on, though with no difficulty, over the rough contorted
+crags, worn by the surf into deep ruts and uneven ridges, gnarled
+protuberances, and crater-like hollows. The fossiliferous beds are
+still very numerous, and largely charged with remains. We see dermal
+bones, spines, scales, and jaws, projecting in high relief from the
+sea-worn surface of the ledges below, and from the weatherworn faces of
+the precipices above; for an uneven wall of crags some thirty or forty
+feet high, now runs along the shore. We have reached what seems a large
+mole, that sloping downwards athwart the beach from the precipices, like
+a huge boat-pier, runs far into the surf. We find it composed of a
+siliceous bed, so intensely compact and hard, that it has preserved its
+proportions entire, while every other rock has worn from around it. For
+century after century have the storms of the fierce north-west sent
+their long ocean-nursed waves to dash against it in foam; for century
+after century have the never-ceasing currents of the Pentland chafed
+against its steep sides, or eddied over its rough crest; and yet still
+does it remain unwasted and unworn,--its abrupt wall retaining all its
+former steepness, and every angular jutting all the original sharpness
+of edge. As we advance the scenery becomes wilder and more broken: here
+an irregular wall of rock projects from the crags towards the sea; there
+a dock-like hollow, in which the water gleams green, intrudes from the
+sea upon the crags; we pass a deep lime-encrusted cave, with which
+tradition associates some wild legends, and which, from the supposed
+resemblance of the hanging stalactites to the entrails of a large animal
+wounded in the chase, bears the name of Pudding-Gno; and then, turning
+an angle of the coast, we enter a solitary bay, that presents at its
+upper extremity a flat expanse of sand. Our walk is still over
+sepulchres charged with the remains of the long-departed. Scales of
+Holoptychius abound, scattered like coin over the surface of the ledges.
+It would seem--to borrow from Mr. Dick--as if some old lord of the
+treasury, who flourished in the days of the coal-money currency, had
+taken a squandering fit at Sanday Bay, and tossed the dingy contents of
+his treasure-chest by shovelfuls upon the rocks. Mr. Dick found in this
+locality some of his finest specimens, one of which--the inner side of
+the skull-cap of a Holoptychius, with every plate occupying its proper
+place, and the large angular holes through which the eyes looked out
+still entire--I trust to be able by and by to present to the public in a
+good engraving. There occur jaws, plates, scales spines,--the remains of
+fucoids, too, of great size and in vast abundance. Mr. Dick has
+disinterred from among the rocks of Sanday Bay flattened carbonaceous
+stems four inches in diameter. We are still within an hour's walk of
+Thurso; but in that brief hour how many marvels have we witnessed!--how
+vast an amount of the vital mechanisms of a perished creation have we
+not passed over! Our walk has been along ranges of sepulchres, greatly
+more wonderful than those of Thebes or Petræa, and mayhap a thousand
+times more ancient. There is no lack of life along the shores of the
+solitary little bay. The shriek of the sparrow-hawk mingles from the
+cliffs with the hoarse deep croak of the raven; the cormorant on some
+wave-encircled ledge, hangs out his dark wing to the breeze; the spotted
+diver, plying his vocation on the shallows beyond, dives and then
+appears, and dives and appears again, and we see the silver glitter of
+scales from his beak; and far away in the offing the sunlight falls on a
+scull of seagulls, that flutter upwards, downwards, and athwart, now in
+the air, thick as midges over some forest-brook in an evening of
+midsummer.
+
+But we again pass onwards, amid a wild ruinous scene of abrupt faults,
+detached fragments of rocks, and reversed strata: again the ledges
+assume their ordinary position and aspect, and we rise from lower to
+higher and still higher beds in the formation,--for such, as I have
+already remarked, is the general arrangement from west to east, along
+the northern coast of Caithness, of the Old Red Sandstone. The great
+Conglomerate base of the formation we find largely developed at Port
+Skerry, just where the western boundary line of the county divides it
+from the county of Sutherland; its thick upper coping of sandstone we
+see forming the tall cliffs of Dunnet Head; and the greater part of the
+space between, nearly twenty miles as the crow flies, is occupied
+chiefly by the shales, grits, and flagstones, which we have found
+charged so abundantly with the strangely-organized ichthyolites of the
+second stage of vertebrate existence. In the twenty intervening miles
+there 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 twenty
+miles are occupied, as truly enormous. And yet it is but one of three
+that occur in a single system. We reach the long flat bay of Dunnet, and
+cross its waste of sands. The incoherent coils of the sand-worm lie
+thick on the surface; and here a swarm of buzzing flies, disturbed by
+the foot, rises in a cloud from some tuft of tangled sea-weed; and here
+myriads of gray crustaceous sand-hoppers dart sidelong in the little
+pools, or vault from the drier ridges a few inches into the air. Were
+the trilobites of the Silurian system,--at one period, as their remains
+testify, more than equally abundant,--creatures of similar habits? We
+have at length arrived at the tall sandstone precipices of Dunnet, with
+their broad decaying fronts of red and yellow; but in vain may we ply
+hammer and chisel among them: not a scale, not a plate, not even the
+stain of an imperfect fucoid appears. We have reached the upper boundary
+of the Lower Old Red formation, and find it bordered by a desert devoid
+of all trace of life. Some of the characteristic types of the formation
+re-appear in the upper deposits; but though there is a reproduction of
+the original works in their more characteristic passages, if I may so
+speak, many of the readings are diverse, and the editions are all new.
+
+It is one of the circumstances of peculiar interest with which Geology
+at its present stage is invested, that there is no man of energy and
+observation who may not rationally indulge in the hope of extending its
+limits by adding to its facts. Mr. Dick, an intelligent tradesman of
+Thurso, agreeably occupies his hours of leisure, for a few months, in
+detaching from the rocks in his neighborhood their organic remains; and
+thus succeeds in adding to the existing knowledge of palæozoic life, by
+disinterring ichthyolites which even Agassiz himself would delight to
+figure and describe. Several of the specimens in my possession, which I
+owe to the kindness of Mr. Dick, are so decidedly unique, that they
+would be regarded as strangers in the completest geological museums
+extant. It is a not uncurious fact, that when the Thurso tradesman was
+pursuing his labors of exploration among rocks beside the Pentland
+Frith, a man of similar character was pursuing exactly similar labors,
+with nearly similar results, among rocks of nearly the same era, that
+bound, on the coast of Cornwall, the British Channel. When the one was
+hammering in "Ready-money Cove," the other, at the opposite end of the
+island, was disturbing the echoes of "Pudding-Gno;" and scales, plates,
+spines, and occipital fragments of palæozoic fishes rewarded the labors
+of both. In an article on the scientific meeting at York, which appeared
+in "Chambers' Journal" in the November of last year, the reading public
+were introduced to a singularly meritorious naturalist, Mr. Charles
+Peach,[9] a private in the mounted guard (preventive service),
+stationed on the southern coast of Cornwall, who has made several
+interesting discoveries on the outer confines of the animal kingdom,
+that have added considerably to the list of our British zoöphites and
+echinodermata. The article, a finely-toned one, redolent of that
+pleasing sympathy which Mr. Robert Chambers has ever evinced with
+struggling merit, referred chiefly to Mr. Peach's labors as a
+naturalist; 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 Wednesday
+the 14th August, and on Monday the 19th it behooved me to be seated at
+my desk in Edinburgh. I took boat, and crossed the Moray Frith from
+Cromarty to Nairn, and then walked on, in a very hot sun, over
+Shakspeare's Moor to Boghole, with the intention of examining the
+ichthyolite beds of Clune and Lethenbarn, and afterwards striking across
+the country to Forres, through the forest of Darnaway, where the forest
+abuts on the Findhorn, at the picturesque village of Sluie. When I had
+last crossed the moor, exactly ten years before, it was in a tremendous
+storm of rain and wind; and the dark platform of heath and bog, with its
+old ruinous castle standing sentry over it, seemed greatly more worthy
+of the genius of the dramatist, as cloud after cloud dashed over it,
+like ocean waves breaking on some low volcanic island, than it did on
+this clear, breathless afternoon, in the unclouded sunshine. But the
+sublimity of the moor on which Macbeth met the witches depends in no
+degree on that of the "heath near Forres," whether seen in foul weather
+or fair; its topography bears relation to but the mind of Shakspeare;
+and neither tile-draining nor the plough will ever lessen an inch of its
+area.
+
+The limestone quarry of Clune has been opened on the edge of an
+extensive moor, about three miles from the public road, where the
+province of Moray sweeps upwards from the broad fertile belt of
+corn-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, here
+dark with heath, there gray with lichens, stretches away on the other.
+The quarry itself is merely a piece of moor that has been trenched to
+the depth of some five or six feet from the surface, and that presents,
+at the line where the broken ground leans against the ground still
+unbroken, a low uneven frontage, somewhat resembling that of a ruinous
+stone-fence. It has been opened in the outcrop of an ichthyolite bed of
+the Lower Old Red Sandstone, on which in this locality the thin moory
+soil immediately rests, without the intervention of the common boulder
+clay of the country; and the fish-enveloping nodules, which are composed
+in this bed of a rich limestone, have been burnt, for a considerable
+number of years, for the purposes of the agriculturist and builder.
+There was a kiln smoking this evening beside the quarry; and a
+few laborers were engaged with shovel and pickaxe in cutting into
+the stratified clay of the unbroken ground, and throwing up its
+spindle-shaped nodules on the bank, as materials for their next
+burning. Antiquaries have often regretted that the sculptured marble
+of Greece and Egypt,--classic urns, to whose keeping the ashes of
+the dead had been consigned, and antique sarcophagi, roughened with
+hieroglyphics,--should have been so often condemned to the lime-kiln by
+the illiterate Copt or tasteless Mohammedan; and I could not help
+experiencing a somewhat similar feeling here. The urns and sarcophagi,
+many times more ancient than those of Greece and Egypt, and that told
+still more wondrous stories, lay thickly ranged in this strange
+catacomb,--so thickly, that there were quite enough for the lime-kiln
+and the geologists too; but I found the kiln got all, and this at a time
+when the collector finds scarce any fossils more difficult to procure
+than those of the Lower Old Red Sandstone. I asked one of the laborers
+whether he did not preserve some of the better specimens, in the hope of
+finding an occasional purchaser. Not now, he said: he used to preserve
+them in the days of Lady Cumming of Altyre; but since her ladyship's
+death, no one in the neighborhood seemed to care for them, and strangers
+rarely came the way.
+
+The first nodule I laid open contained a tolerably well-preserved
+Cheiracanthus; the second, an indifferent specimen of Glyptolepis; and
+three others, in succession, remains of Coccosteus. Almost every nodule
+of one especial layer near the top incloses its organism. The coloring
+is frequently of great beauty. In the Cromarty, as in the Caithness,
+Orkney, and Gamrie specimens, the animal matter with which the bones
+were originally charged has been converted into a dark glossy bitumen,
+and the plates and scales glitter from a ground of opaque gray, like
+pieces of japan-work suspended against a rough-cast wall. But here, as
+in the other Morayshire deposits, the plates and scales exist in nearly
+their original condition, as bone that retains its white color in the
+centre of the specimens, where its bulk is greatest, and is often
+beautifully tinged at its thinner edges by the iron with which the stone
+is impregnated. It is not rare to find some of the better preserved
+fossils colored in a style that reminds one of the more gaudy fishes of
+the tropics. We see the body of the ichthyolite, with its finely
+arranged scales, of a pure snow-white. Along the edges, where the
+original substance of the bone, combining with the oxide of the matrix,
+has formed a phosphate of iron, there runs a delicately shaded band of
+plum-blue; while the out-spread fins, charged still more largely with
+the oxide, are of a deep red. The description of Mr. Patrick Duff, in
+his "Geology of Moray," so redolent of the quiet enthusiasm of the true
+fossil-hunter, especially applies to the ichthyolites of this quarry,
+and to those of a neighboring opening in the same bed,--the quarry of
+Lethenbarn. "The nodules," says Mr. Duff, "which in their external shape
+resemble the stones used in the game of curling, but are elliptical
+bodies instead of round, lie in the shale on their flat sides, in a line
+with the dip. When taken out, they remind one of water-worn pebbles, or
+rather boulders of a shore. A smart blow on the edge splits them along
+on the major axis, and exposes the interesting inclosure. The practised
+geologist knows well the thrilling interest attending the breaking up of
+the nodule: the uninitiated cannot sympathize with it. There is no time
+when a fossil looks so well as when first exposed. There is a clammy
+moisture on the surface of the scales or plates, which brings out the
+beautiful coloring, and adds brilliancy to the enamel. Exposure to the
+weather soon dims the lustre; and even in a cabinet an old specimen is
+easily known by its tarnished aspect."
+
+I found at Clune no ichthyolite to which the geologists have not been
+already introduced, or with which I had not been acquainted previously
+in 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. It
+seems to have been a small delicately-formed fish; its head covered with
+plates; its body with round scales of a size intermediate between those
+of the Osteolepis and Cheiracanthus; its anterior dorsal fin placed, as
+in the Dipterus, Diplopterus, and Glyptolepis, directly opposite to its
+ventral fins; the enamelled surfaces of the minute scales were fretted
+with microscopic undulating ridges, that radiated from the centre to the
+circumference; similar furrows traversed the occipital plates; and the
+fins, unfurnished with spines, were formed, as in the Dipterus and
+Diplopterus, of thick-set, enamelled rays. The posterior fins and tail
+of the creature were not preserved. I may mention, for the satisfaction
+of the geologist, that I saw this unique fossil in the possession of the
+late Lady Cumming of Altyre, a few weeks previous to the lamented death
+of her ladyship; and that, on assuring her it was as new in relation to
+the Cromarty and Caithness fish-beds as to those of Moray, she intimated
+an intention of forthwith sending a drawing of it to Agassiz; but her
+untimely decease in all probability interfered with the design, and I
+have not since heard of this new genus of ichthyolite, or of her
+ladyship's interesting specimen, hitherto apparently its only
+representative and memorial. In the Morayshire, as in the Cromarty beds,
+the limestone nodules take very generally the form of the fish which
+they inclose: they are stone coffins, carefully moulded to express the
+outline of the corpses within. Is the fish entire?--the nodule is of a
+spindle form, broader at the head and narrower at the tail. Is it
+slightly curved, in the attitude of violent death?--the nodule has also
+its slight curve. Is it bent round, so that the extremities of the
+creature 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 old
+mummy, conforms to the outline of the organism which it incloses. It is
+further worthy of remark, too, that a large fish forms generally a
+large nodule, and a small fish a small one. Here, for instance, is a
+nodule fifteen inches in length, here a nodule of only three inches, and
+here a nodule of intermediate size, that measures eight inches. We find
+that the large nodule contains a Cheirolepis thirteen inches in length,
+the small one a Diplacanthus of but two and a half inches in length, and
+the intermediate one a Cheiracanthus of seven inches. The size of the
+fish evidently regulated that of the nodule. The coffin is generally as
+good a fit in size as in form; and the bulk of the nodule bears almost
+always a definite proportion to the amount of animal matter round which
+it had formed. I was a good deal struck, a few weeks ago, in glancing
+over a series of experiments conducted for a different purpose by a lady
+of singular ingenuity,--Mrs. Marshall, the inventor and patentee of the
+beautiful marble-looking plaster, _Intonacco_,--to find what seemed a
+similar principle illustrated in the compositions of her various
+cements. These are all formed of a basis of lime, mixed in certain
+proportions with organic matter. The reader must be familiar with
+cements of this kind long known among the people, and much used in the
+repairing of broken pottery, such as a cement compounded of quicklime
+made 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 of
+eggs. In Mrs. Marshall's cements, the organic matter is variously
+compounded of both animal and vegetable substances, while the earth
+generally employed is sulphate of lime; and the result is a
+close-grained marble-like composition, considerably harder than the
+sulphate in its original crystalline state. She had deposited, in one
+set of her experiments, the calcareous earth, mixed up with sand, clay,
+and other extraneous matters, on some of the commoner molluscs of our
+shores; and universally found that the mass, incoherent everywhere
+else, had acquired solidity wherever it had been permeated by the
+animal matter of the molluscs. Each animal, in proportion to its size,
+is found to retain, as in the fossiliferous spindles of the Old Red
+Sandstone, its coherent nodule around it. One point in the natural
+phenomenon, however, still remains unillustrated by the experiments of
+Mrs. Marshall. We see in them the animal matter giving solidity to the
+lime in immediate contact with it; but we do not see it possessing any
+such affinity for it as to form, in an argillaceous compound, like that
+of the ichthyolite beds, a centre of attraction powerful enough to draw
+together the lime diffused throughout the mass. It still remains for the
+geologic chemist to discover on what principle masses of animal matter
+should form the attracting nuclei of limestone nodules.
+
+The declining sun warned me that I had lingered rather longer than was
+prudent among the ichthyolites of Clune; and so, striking in an eastern
+direction across a flat moor, through which I found the schistose gneiss
+of the district protruding in masses resembling half-buried boulders, I
+entered 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 and
+landmark, by the sun, and of being not sure at times whether I had skill
+enough to play the part of the bush-ranger under his guidance. A sultry
+day had clarified and cooled down into a clear, balmy evening; the slant
+beam was falling red on a thousand tall trunks,--here gleaming along
+some bosky vista, to which the white silky wood-moths, fluttering by
+scores, and the midge and the mosquito dancing by myriads, imparted a
+motty gold-dust atmosphere; there penetrating in straggling rays far
+into some gloomy recess, and resting in patches of flame, amid the
+darkness, on gnarled stem, or moss-cushioned stump, or gray beard-like
+lichen. I dislodged, in passing through the underwood, many a tiny
+tenant of the forest, that had a better right to harbor among its wild
+raspberries and junipers than I had to disturb them,--velvety
+night-moths, that had sat with folded wings under the leaves, awaiting
+the twilight, and that now took short blind flights of some two or three
+yards, to get out of my way,--and robust, well-conditioned spiders,
+whose elastic, well-tightened lines snapped sharp before me as I pressed
+through, and then curled up on the scarce perceptible breeze, like
+broken strands of wool. But every man, however Whiggish in his
+inclinations, entertains a secret respect for the powerful; and though I
+passed within a few feet of a large wasps' nest, suspended to a jutting
+bough of furze, the wasps I took especial care _not_ to disturb. I
+pressed on, first through a broad belt of the forest, occupied mainly by
+melancholy Scotch firs; next through an opening, in which I found an
+American-looking village of mingled cottages, gardens, fields and wood;
+and then through another broad forest-belt, in which the ground is more
+varied with height and hollow than in the first, and in which I found
+only forest trees, mostly oaks and beeches. I heard the roar of the
+Findhorn before me, and premised I was soon to reach the river; but
+whether I should pursue it upwards or downwards, in order to find the
+ferry at Sluie, was more than I knew. There lay in my track a beautiful
+hillock, that reclines on the one side to the setting sun, and sinks
+sheer on the other, in a mural sandstone precipice, into the Findhorn.
+The trees open over it, giving full access to the free air and the
+sunshine; and I found it as thickly studded over with berries as if it
+had been the special care of half a dozen gardeners. The red light fell
+yet redder on the thickly inlaid cranberries and stone-brambles of the
+slope, and here and there, though so late in the season, on a patch of
+wild strawberries; while over all, dark, delicate blueberries, with
+their flour-bedusted coats, were studded as profusely as if they had
+been peppered over it by a hailstone cloud. I have seldom seen such a
+school-boy's paradise, and I was just thinking what a rare discovery I
+would have deemed it had I made it thirty years sooner, when I heard a
+whooping in the wood, and four little girls, the eldest scarcely eleven,
+came bounding up to the hillock, their lips and fingers already dyed
+purple, and dropped themselves down among the berries with a shout. They
+were sadly startled to find they had got a companion in so solitary a
+recess; but I succeeded in convincing them that they were in no manner
+of danger from him; and on asking whether there was any of them skilful
+enough 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 the
+village in the forest. Hours had elapsed since the master had _let them
+go_, but in so fine an evening the berries wouldn't, and so they were
+still in the wood. I accompanied them to Sluie, and was ferried over the
+river in a salmon coble. There is no point where the Findhorn,
+celebrated among our Scotch streams for the beauty of its scenery, is so
+generally interesting as in the neighborhood of this village; forest and
+river,--each a paragon in its kind,--uniting for several miles together
+what is most choice and characteristic in the peculiar features of both.
+In no locality is the surface of the great forest of Darnaway more
+undulated, or its trees nobler; and nowhere does the river present a
+livelier succession of eddying pools and rippling shallows, or fret
+itself in sweeping on its zig-zag course, now to the one bank, now to
+the other, against a more picturesque and imposing series of cliffs. But
+to the geologist the locality possesses an interest peculiar to itself.
+The precipices on both sides are charged with fossils of the Upper Old
+Red Sandstone: they form part of a vast indurated graveyard, excavated
+to the depth of an hundred feet by the ceaseless wear of the stream; and
+when 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 in
+handfuls. But the closing evening left me neither light nor time for the
+work of exploration. I heard the curfew in the woods from the yet
+distant town, and dark night had set in long ere I reached Forres. On
+the following morning I took a seat in one of the south coaches, and got
+on to Elgin an hour before noon.
+
+Elgin, one of the finest of our northern towns, occupies the centre of a
+richly fossiliferous district, which wants only better sections to rank
+it among the most interesting in the kingdom. An undulating platform of
+Old Red Sandstone, in which we see, largely developed in one locality,
+the lower formation of the Coccosteus, and in another, still more
+largely, the upper formation of the _Holoptychius Nobilissimus_, forms,
+if I may so speak, the foundation deposit of the district,--the true
+geologic plane of the country; and, thickly scattered over this plane,
+we find numerous detached knolls and patches of the Weald and the
+Oölite, deposited like heaps of travelled soil, or of lime shot down by
+the agriculturist on the surface of a field. The Old Red platform is
+mottled by the outliers of a comparatively modern time: the sepulchral
+mounds of later races, that lived and died during the reptile age of the
+world, repose on the surface of an ancient burying-ground, charged with
+remains of the long anterior age of the fish; and over all, as a general
+covering, rest the red boulder-clay and the vegetable mould. Mr. Duff,
+in his valuable "Sketch of the Geology of Moray," enumerates five
+several localities in the neighborhood of Elgin in which there occur
+outliers of the Weald; though, of course, in a country so flat, and in
+which the diluvium lies deep, we cannot hold that all have been
+discovered. And though the outliers of the Oölite have not yet been
+ascertained to be equally numerous, they seem of greater extent; the
+isolated masses detached from them by the denuding agencies lie thick
+over extensive areas; and in working out the course of improvement which
+has already rendered Elginshire the garden of the north, the ditcher at
+one time touches on some bed of shale charged with the characteristic
+Ammonites and Belemnites of the system, and at another on some
+calcareous sandstone bed, abounding with its Pectens, its Plagiostoma,
+and its Pinnæ. Some of these outliers, whether Wealden or Oölitic, are
+externally of great beauty. They occur in the parish of Lhanbryde, about
+three miles to the east of Elgin, in the form of green pyramidal
+hillocks, mottled with trees, and at Linksfield, as a confluent group of
+swelling grassy mounds. And from their insulated character, and the
+abundance of organisms which they inclose, they serve to remind one of
+those green pyramids of Central America in which the traveller finds
+deposited the skeleton remains of extinct races. It has been suggested
+by Mr. Duff, in his "Sketch,"--a suggestion which the late
+Sutherlandshire discoveries of Mr. Robertson of Inverugie have tended to
+confirm,--that the Oölite and Weald of Moray do not, in all probability,
+represent consecutive formations: they seem to bear the same sort of
+relation to each other as that mutually borne by the Mountain Limestone
+and the Coal Measures. The one, of lacustrine or of estuary origin,
+exhibits chiefly the productions of the land and its fresh waters; the
+other, as decidedly of marine origin, is charged with the remains of
+animals whose proper home was the sea. But the productions, though
+dissimilar, were in all probability contemporary, just as the crabs and
+periwinkles of the Frith of Forth are contemporary with the frogs and
+lymnea of Flanders moss.
+
+I had little time for exploration in the neighborhood of Elgin; but that
+little, through the kindness of my friend Mr. Duff, I was enabled to
+economize. We first visited together the outlier of the Weald at
+Linksfield. It may be found rising in the landscape, a short mile below
+the town, in the form of a green undulating hillock, half cut through by
+a limestone quarry; and the section thus furnished is of great beauty.
+The basis on which the hillock rests is formed of the well-marked
+calcareous band in the Upper Old Red, known as the Cornstone, which we
+find occurring here, as elsewhere, as a pale concretionary limestone of
+considerable richness, though in some patches largely mixed with a green
+argillaceous earth, and in others passing into a siliceous chert. Over
+the pale-colored base, the section of the hillock is ribbed like an
+onyx: for about forty feet, bands of gray, green, and blue clays
+alternate with bands of cream-colored, light-green, and dark-blue
+limestones; 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 cautious
+induction, that the boulder-clay not only _overlies_, but also
+_underlies_, this fresh-water deposit; a bed of unequivocally the same
+origin and character with that at the top lying intercalated, as if
+filling up two low flat vaults, between the upper surface of the
+Cornstone and the lower band of the Weald. It would, however, be as
+unsafe to infer that this intervening bed is older than the overlying
+ones, as to infer that the rubbish which chokes up the vaulted dungeon
+of an old castle is more ancient than the arch that stretches over it.
+However introduced into the cavity which it occupies,--whether by
+land-springs or otherwise,--we find it containing fragments of the green
+and pale limestones that lie above, just as the rubbish of the castle
+dungeon might be found to contain fragments of the castle itself. When
+the bed of red boulder-clay was intercalated, the rocks of the overlying
+Wealden were exactly the same sort of indurated substances that they are
+now, and were yielding to the operations of some denuding agent. The
+alternating clays and limestones of this outlier, each of which must
+have been in turn an upper layer at the bottom of some lake or estuary,
+are abundantly fossiliferous. In some the fresh-water character of the
+deposit is well marked: Cyprides are so exceedingly numerous in some of
+the bands, that they impart to the stone an Oölitic appearance; while
+others of a dark-colored limestone we see strewed over, like the oozy
+bottom of a modern lake, with specimens of what seem Paludina, Cyclas,
+and Planorbus. Some of the other shells are more equivocal: a Mytilus or
+Modiola, which abounds in some of the bands, may have been either a sea
+or a fresh-water shell; and a small oyster and Astarte seem decidedly
+marine. Remains of fish are very abundant,--scales, plates, teeth,
+ichthyodorulites, and in some instances entire ichthyolites. I saw, in
+the collection of Mr. Duff, a small but very entire specimen of
+_Lepidotus minor_, with the fins spread out on the limestone, as in an
+anatomical preparation, and almost every plate and scale in its place.
+Some of his specimens of ichthyodorulites, too, are exceedingly
+beautiful, and of great size, resembling jaws thickly set with teeth,
+the apparent teeth being mere knobs ranged along the concave edge of the
+bone, the surface of which we see gracefully fluted and enamelled. What
+most struck me, however, in glancing over the drawers of Mr. Duff, was
+the character of the Ganoid scales of this deposit. The Ganoid order in
+the days of the Weald was growing old; and two new orders,--the Ctenoid
+and Cycloid,--were on the eve of taking its place in creation. Hitherto
+it had comprised at least two-thirds of all the fish that had existed
+ever since the period in which fish first began; and almost every Ganoid
+fish had its own peculiar pattern of scale. But it would now seem as if
+well nigh all the simpler patterns were exhausted, and as if, in order
+to give the variety which nature loves, forms of the most eccentric
+types had to be resorted to. With scarce any exception save that
+furnished by the scales of the _Lepidotus minor_, which are plain
+lozenge-shaped plates, thickly japanned, the forms are strangely complex
+and irregular, easily expressible by the pencil, but beyond the reach of
+the pen. The remains of reptiles have been found occasionally, though
+rarely, in this outlier of the Weald,--the vertebra of a Plesiosaurus,
+the femur of some Chelonian reptile, and a large fluted tooth, supposed
+Saurian.
+
+I would fain have visited some of the neighboring outliers of the
+Oölite, but time did not permit. Mr. Duff's collection, however, enabled
+me to form a tolerably adequate estimate of their organic contents.
+Viewed in the group, these present nearly the same aspect as the
+organisms of the Upper Lias of Pabba. There is in the same abundance
+large Pinnæ, and well-relieved Pectens, both ribbed and smooth; the same
+abundance, too, of Belemnites and Ammonites of resembling type. Both the
+Moray outliers and the Pabba deposit have their Terebratulæ, Gervilliæ,
+Plagiostoma, Cardiadæ, their bright Ganoid scales, and their
+imperfectly-preserved lignites. They belong apparently to nearly the
+same period, and must have been formed in nearly similar
+circumstances,--the one on the western, the other on the eastern coast
+of a country then covered by the vegetation of the Oölite, and now
+known, with reference to an antiquity of but yesterday, as the ancient
+kingdom of Scotland. I saw among the Ammonites of these outliers at
+least one species, which, I believe, has not yet been found elsewhere,
+and which has been named, after Mr. Robertson of Inverugie, the
+gentleman who first discovered it, _Ammonites Robertsoni_. Like most of
+the 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 the
+evening of this day in visiting, with Mr. Duff, the Upper Old Red
+Sandstones of Scat-Craig. In Elginshire, as in Fife and elsewhere, the
+Upper Old Red consists of three grand divisions,--a superior bed of pale
+yellow sandstone, which furnishes the finest building-stone anywhere
+found in the north of Scotland,--an intermediate calcareous bed, known
+technically as the Cornstone,--and an inferior bed of sandstone,
+chiefly, in this locality, of a grayish-red color, and generally very
+incoherent in its structure. The three beds, as shown by the fossil
+contents of the yellow sandstones above, and of the grayish-red
+sandstones below, are members of the same formation,--a formation which,
+in Scotland at least, does not possess an organism in common with the
+Middle Old Red formation; that of the Cephalaspis, as developed in
+Forfarshire, Stirling, and Ayr, or the Lower Old Red formation; that of
+the Coccosteus, as developed in Caithness, Cromarty, Inverness, and
+Banff shires, and in so many different localities in Moray. The
+Sandstones at Scat-Craig belong to the grayish-red base of the Upper Old
+Red formation. They lie about five miles south of Elgin, not far distant
+from where the palæozoic deposits of the coast-side lean against the
+great primary nucleus of the interior. We pass from the town, through
+deep rich fields, carefully cultivated and well inclosed: the country,
+as we advance on the moorlands, becomes more open; the homely cottage
+takes the place of the neat villa; the brown heath, of the grassy lea;
+and unfenced patches of corn here and there alternate with plantings of
+dark sombre firs, in their mediocre youth. At length we near the
+southern boundary of the landscape,--an undulating moory ridge,
+partially planted; and see where a deep gap in the outline opens a way
+to the upland districts of the province, a lively hill-stream descending
+towards the east through the bed which it has scooped out for itself in
+a soft red conglomerate. The section we have come to explore lies along
+its course: it has been the grand excavator in the densely occupied
+burial-ground over which it flows; but its labors have produced but a
+shallow 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 a
+hundred fathoms. The shallow section, however, has been well wrought;
+and its suit of fossils is one of the finest, both from the great
+specific variety which they exhibit, and their excellent state of
+keeping, that the Upper Old Red Sandstone has anywhere furnished.
+
+So great is the incoherency of the matrix, that we can dig into it with
+our chisels, unassisted by the hammer. It reminds us of the loose
+gravelly soil of an ancient graveyard, partially consolidated by a
+night's frost,--a resemblance still further borne out by the condition
+and appearance of its organic contents. The numerous bones disseminated
+throughout the mass do not exist, as in so many of the Upper Old Red
+Sandstone rocks, as mere films or impressions, but in their original
+forms, retaining bulk as well as surface: they are true graveyard bones,
+which may be detached entire from the inclosing mass, and of which, were
+we sufficiently well acquainted with the anatomy of the long-perished
+races to which they belonged, entire skeletons might be reconstructed.
+I succeeded in disinterring, during my short stay, an occipital plate of
+great 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 fine
+scale of _Holoptychius Nobilissimus_, and a small tooth, bent somewhat
+like a nail that had been drawn out of its place by two opposite
+wrenches, and from the internal structure of which Professor Owen has
+bestowed 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 a
+peculiarity in the sculpture of the scale, is the identical genus
+Dendrodus of Professor Owen, named from a peculiarity in the structure
+of the teeth. Those teeth of the genus Holoptychius, whether of the
+Lower or Upper Old Red, that belong to the second or _reptile_ row with
+which the creature's jaws were furnished, present in the cross section
+the appearance of numerous branches, like those of trees, radiating from
+a centre like spokes from the nave of a wheel; and their arborescent
+aspect suggested to the Professor the name Dendrodus. It seems truly
+wonderful, when one but considers it, to what minute and obscure
+ramifications the variety of pattern, specific and generic, which nature
+so loves to preserve, is found to descend. We see great diversity of
+mode and style in the architecture of a city built of brick; but while
+the houses are different, the bricks are always the same. It is not so
+in nature. The bricks are as dissimilar as the houses. We find, for
+instance, those differences, specific and generic, that obtain among
+fishes, both recent and extinct, descending to even the microscopic
+structure of their teeth. There is more variety of pattern,--in most
+cases of very elegant pattern,--in the sliced fragments of the teeth of
+the ichthyolites of a single formation, than in the carved blocks of an
+extensive calico-print yard. Each species has its own distinct pattern,
+as if in all the individuals of which it consisted the same block had
+been employed to stamp it; each genus has its own general _type_ of
+pattern, as if the same inventive idea, variously altered and modified,
+had been wrought upon in all. In the genus Dendrodus, for instance, it
+is the generic type, that from a central nave there should radiate,
+spoke-like, a number of leafy branches; but in the several species, the
+branches, if I may so express myself, belong to different shrubs, and
+present dissimilar outlines. There are no repetitions of earlier
+patterns to be found among the generically different ichthyolites of
+other formations. We see in the world of fashion old modes of ornament
+continually reviving: the range of invention seems limited; and we find
+it revolving, in consequence, in an irregular, ever-returning cycle. But
+Infinite resource did not need to travel in a circle, and so we find no
+return or doublings in its course. It has appeared to me, that an
+argument against the transmutation of species, were any such needed,
+might be founded on those inherent peculiarities of structure that are
+ascertained thus to pervade the entire texture of the framework of
+animals. If we find one building differing from another merely in
+external form, we have no difficulty in conceiving how, by additions and
+alterations, they might be made to present a uniform appearance;
+transmutation, development, progression,--if one may use such
+terms,--seem possible in such circumstances. But if the buildings differ
+from each other, not only in external form, but also in every brick and
+beam, bolt and nail, no mere scheme of external alteration can induce a
+real resemblance. Every brick must be taken down, and every beam and
+belt removed. The problem cannot be wrought by the remodelling of an old
+house: there is no other mode of solving it save by the erection of a
+new one.
+
+Among the singularly interesting Old Red fossils of Mr. Duff's
+collection I saw the impression of a large ichthyolite from the superior
+yellow sandstone of the Upper Old Red, which had been brought him by a
+country diker only a few days before. In breaking open a building stone,
+the diker had found the inside of it, he said, covered over with
+curiously carved flowers; and, knowing that Mr. Duff had a turn for
+curiosities, he had brought the flowers to him. The supposed flowers are
+the sculpturings on the scales of the ichthyolite; and, true to the
+analogy of the diker, on at least a first glance, they may be held to
+resemble the rather equivocal florets of a cheap wall-paper, or of an
+ornamental tile. The specimen exhibits the impressions of four rows of
+oblong rectangular scales. One row contains seven of these, and another
+eight. Each scale averages about an inch and a quarter in length, by
+about three quarters of an inch in breadth; and the parallelogramical
+field which it presents is occupied by a curious piece of carving. By a
+sort of pictorial illusion, the device appears as if in motion: it would
+seem as if a sudden explosion had taken place in the middle of the
+field, and as if the numerous dislodged fragments, propelled all around
+by the central force, were hurrying to the sides. But these seeming
+fragments were not elevations in the original scale, but depressions.
+They almost seem as if they had been indented into it, in the way one
+sees the first heavy drops of a thunder shower indented into a platform
+of damp sea sand; and this last peculiarity of appearance seems to have
+suggested the name which this sole representative of an extinct genus
+has received during the course of the last few weeks from Agassiz. An
+Elgin gentleman forwarded to Neufchatel a singularly fine calotype of
+the fossil, taken by Mr. Adamson of Edinburgh, with a full-size drawing
+of a few of the scales; and from the calotype and the drawing the
+naturalist has decided that the genus is entirely new, and that
+henceforth it shall bear the descriptive name of Stagonolepis, or
+drop-scale. As I looked for the first time on this broken fragment of an
+ichthyolite,--the sole representative and record of an entire genus of
+creatures that had been once called into existence to fulfil some wise
+purpose of the Creator long since accomplished,--I bethought me of
+Rogers'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 the
+dismembered Hercules, which so awakened the enthusiasm of the poet.
+Strange peculiarities of being,--singular habits, curious instincts, the
+history of a race from the period when the all-producing Word had spoken
+the first individuals into being, until, in circumstances unfitted for
+their longer existence, or in some great annihilating catastrophe, the
+last individuals perished,--were all associated with this piece of
+sculptured stone; but, like some ancient inscription of the desert,
+written in an unknown character and dead tongue, its dark meanings were
+fast locked up, and no inhabitant of earth possessed the key. Does that
+key anywhere exist, save in the keeping of Him who knows all and
+produced all, and to whom there is neither past nor future? Or is there
+a record of creation kept by those higher intelligences,--the first-born
+of spiritual natures,--whose existence stretches far into the eternity
+that has gone by, and who possess, as their inheritance, the whole of
+the eternity to come? We may be at least assured, that nothing can be
+too 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 visit
+to Scat-Craig terminated the explorations of my Summer Ramble. During
+the summer of the present year I have found time to follow up some of
+the discoveries of the last. In the course of a hasty visit to the
+island of Eigg, I succeeded in finding _in situ_ reptile remains of the
+kind which I had found along the shores in the previous season, in
+detached water-rolled masses. The deposit in which they occur lies deep
+in the Oölite. In some parts of the island there rest over it
+alternations of beds of trap and sedimentary strata, to the height of
+more than a thousand feet; but in the line of coast which intervenes
+between the farm-house of Keill and the picturesque shieling described
+in my fifth chapter, it has been laid bare by the sea immediately under
+the cliffs, and we may see it jutting out at a low angle from among the
+shingle and rolled stones of the beach for several hundred feet
+together, charged everywhere with the teeth, plates, and scales of
+Ganoid fishes, and somewhat more sparingly, with the ribs, vertebræ, and
+digital bones of saurians. But a full description of this interesting
+deposit, as its discovery belongs to the Summer Ramble of a year, the
+ramblings 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 of
+Egypt, he made a voyage to Grand Cairo, on purpose to take the measure
+of a pyramid, and that, so soon as he had set himself right in that
+particular, he returned to his native country with great satisfaction."
+My love of knowledge has not carried me altogether so far, chiefly, I
+dare say, because my voyaging opportunities have not been quite so
+great. Ever since my ramble of last year, however, I have felt, I am
+afraid, a not less interest in the geologic antiquities of Small Isles
+than that cherished by "Spectator" with respect to the comparatively
+modern antiquities of Egypt; and as, in a late journey to these islands
+the object of my visit involved but a single point, nearly as insulated
+as the dimensions of a pyramid, I think I cannot do better than shelter
+myself under the authority of the short-faced gentleman who wrote
+articles in the reign of Queen Anne. I had found in Eigg, in
+considerable abundance and fine keeping, reptile remains of the Oölite;
+but they had occurred in merely rolled masses, scattered along the
+beach. I had not discovered the bed in which they had been originally
+deposited, and could neither tell its place in the system, nor its
+relation to the other rocks of the island. The discovery was but a
+half-discovery,--the half of a broken medal, with the date on the
+missing portion. And so, immediately after the rising of the General
+Assembly in June last [1845], I set out to revisit Small Isles,
+accompanied by my friend Mr. Swanson, with the determination of
+acquainting myself with the burial-place of the old Oölitic reptiles, if
+it lay anywhere open to the light.
+
+We found the Betsey riding in the anchoring ground at Isle Ornsay, in
+her foul-weather dishabille, with her topmast struck and in the yard,
+and her cordage and sides exhibiting in their weathered aspect the
+influence of the bleaching rains and winds of the previous winter. She
+was at once in an undress and getting old, and, as seen from the shore
+through rain and spray,--for the weather was coarse and boisterous,--she
+had apparently gained as little in her good looks from either
+circumstance as most other ladies do. We lay storm-bound for three days
+at Isle Ornsay, watching from the window of Mr. Swanson's dwelling the
+incessant showers sweeping down the loch. On the morning of Saturday,
+the gale, though still blowing right ahead, had moderated; the minister
+was anxious to visit this island charge, after his absence of several
+weeks from them at the Assembly; and I, more than half afraid that my
+term of furlough might expire ere I had reached my proposed scene of
+exploration, was as anxious as he; and so we both resolved, come what
+might, on doggedly beating our way adown the Sound of Sleat to Small
+Isles. If the wind does not fail us, said my friend, we have little
+more than a day's work before us, and shall get into Eigg about
+midnight. We had but one of our seamen aboard, for John Stewart was
+engaged with his potato crop at home; but the minister was content, in
+the 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 in
+succession the deep withdrawing lochs of the mainland, now clearing
+promontory after promontory in the island district of Sleat. In a few
+hours we had left a bulky schooner, that had quitted Isle Ornsay at the
+same 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 nearly
+abreast of the rocky point of Sleat, and about half-way advanced in our
+voyage, it had died into a calm; and for full twenty hours thereafter
+there was no more sailing for the Betsey. We saw the sun set, and the
+clouds gather, and the pelting rain come down, and nightfall, and
+morning break, and the noon-tide hour pass by, and still were we
+floating idly in the calm. I employed the few hours of the Saturday
+evening that intervened between the time of our arrest and nightfall, in
+fishing from our little boat for medusæ with a bucket. They had risen by
+myriads from the bottom as the wind fell, and were mottling the green
+depths of the water below and around far as the eye could reach. Among
+the commoner kinds,--the kind with the four purple rings on the area of
+its flat bell, which ever vibrates without sound, and the kind with the
+fringe of dingy brown, and the long stinging tails, of which I have
+sometimes borne from my swimming excursions the nettle-like smart for
+hours,--there were at least two species of more unusual occurrence, both
+of them very minute. The one, scarcely larger than a shilling, bore the
+common umbiliferous form, but had its area inscribed by a pretty
+orange-colored wheel; the other, still more minute, and which presented
+in the water the appearance of a small hazel-nut of a brownish-yellow
+hue, I was disposed to set down as a species of beroe. On getting one
+caught, however, and transferred to a bowl, I found that the
+brownish-colored, melon-shaped mass, though ribbed like the beroe, did
+not represent the true outline of the animal; it formed merely the
+centre of a transparent gelatinous bell, which, though scarce visible in
+even the bowl, proved a most efficient instrument of motion. Such were
+its 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 their
+slow but persevering flappings, seemed greatly at the mercy of the tide,
+and progressed all one way,--shot, as it willed, backwards, forwards, or
+athwart. As the evening closed, and the depths beneath presented a
+dingier and yet dingier green, until at length all had become black, the
+distinctive colors of the acelpha,--the purple, the orange, and the
+brown,--faded and disappeared, and the creatures hung out, instead,
+their pale phosphoric lights, like the lanterns of a fleet hoisted high
+to prevent collision in the darkness. Now they gleamed dim and
+indistinct as they drifted undisturbed through the upper depths, and now
+they flamed out bright and green, like beaten torches, as the tide
+dashed them against the vessel's sides. I bethought me of the gorgeous
+description 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. As
+there was, however, nothing to do in the calm, we decided that our first
+watch should consist of our single seaman, and the second of the
+minister and his friend. The clouds, which had been thickening for
+hours, now broke in torrents of rain, and old Alister got into his
+water-proof oil-skin and souwester, and we into our beds. The seams of
+the Betsey's deck had opened so sadly during the past winter, as to be
+no longer water-tight, and the little cabin resounded drearily in the
+darkness, like some dropping cave, to the ceaseless patter of the
+leakage. We continued to sleep, however, somewhat longer than we
+ought,--for Alister had been unwilling to waken the minister; but we at
+length got up, and, relieving watch the first from the tedium of being
+rained upon and doing nothing, watch the second was set to do nothing
+and be rained upon in turn. We had drifted during the night-time on a
+kindly tide, considerably nearer our island, which we could now see
+looming blue and indistinct through the haze some seven or eight miles
+away. The rain ceased a little before nine, and the clouds rose,
+revealing the surrounding lands, island and main,--Rum, with its abrupt
+mountain-peaks,--the dark Cuchullins of Skye,--and, far to the
+south-east, where Inverness bounds on Argyllshire, some of the tallest
+hills in Scotland,--among the rest, the dimly-seen Ben-Wevis. But long
+wreaths of pale gray cloud lay lazily under their summits, like shrouds
+half drawn from off the features of the dead, to be again spread over
+them, and we concluded that the dry weather had not yet come. A little
+before noon we were surrounded for miles by an immense but
+thinly-spread shoal of porpoises, passing in pairs to the south, to
+prosecute, on their own behalf, the herring fishing in Lochfine or
+Gareloch; and for a full hour the whole sea, otherwise so silent, became
+vocal with long-breathed blowings, as if all the steam-tenders of all
+the railways in Britain were careering around us; and we could see
+slender jets of spray rising in the air on every side, and glossy black
+backs and pointed fins, that looked as if they had been fashioned out of
+Kilkenny marble, wheeling heavily along the surface. The clouds again
+began to close as the shoal passed, but we could now hear in the
+stillness the measured sound of oars, drawn vigorously against the
+gunwale in the direction of the island of Eigg, still about five miles
+distant, 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 sounds
+in the dead calm had preceded the boat by miles,--by four active young
+men, who seemed wonderfully glad to see their pastor; and then, amid the
+thickening showers, which had recommenced heavy as during the night,
+they set themselves to tow us into the harbor. The poor fellows had a
+long and fatiguing pull, and were thoroughly drenched ere, about six
+o'clock in the evening, we had got up to our anchoring ground, and
+moored, as usual, in the open tideway between _Eilan Chasteil_ and the
+main island. There was still time enough for an evening discourse, and
+the 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 the
+morning of Monday arose. The ceaseless patter made dull music on deck
+and 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 of
+the leakage, like Bacon's philosopher surveying a tempest from the
+shore. But the minister was somewhat less fortunate, and had no little
+trouble in diverting an ill-conditioned drop that had made a dead set at
+his pillow. I was now a full week from Edinburgh, and had seen and done
+nothing; and, were another week to pass after the same manner,--as, for
+aught that appeared, might well happen,--I might just go home again, as
+I had come, with my labor for my pains. In the course of the afternoon,
+however, the weather unexpectedly cleared up, and we set out somewhat
+impatiently through the wet grass, to visit a cave a few hundred yards
+to the west of _Naomh Fraingh_, in which it had been said the
+Protestants of the island might meet for the purposes of religious
+worship, were they to be ejected from the cottage erected by Mr.
+Swanson, in which they had worshipped hitherto. We reëxamined, in the
+passing, the pitch stone dike mentioned in a former chapter, and the
+charnel cave of Frances; but I found nothing to add to my former
+descriptions, and little to modify, save that perhaps the cave appeared
+less dark, in at least the outer half of its area, than it had seemed to
+me in the former year, when examined by torch-light, and that the
+straggling twilight, as it fell on the ropy sides, green with moss and
+mould, and on the damp bone-strewn floor, overmantled with a still
+darker crust, like that of a stagnant pool, seemed also to wear its tint
+of 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 opening
+in a dingy-colored precipice of augitic trap,--a cave roomy and lofty as
+the nave of a cathedral, and ever resounding to the dash of the sea; but
+though it could have amply accommodated a congregation of at least five
+hundred, we found the way far too long and difficult for at least the
+weak and the elderly, and in some places inaccessible at full flood; and
+so we at once decided against the accommodation which it offered. But
+its shelter will, I trust, scarce be needed.
+
+On our return to the Betsey, we passed through a straggling group of
+cottages on the hill-side, one of which, the most dilapidated and
+smallest 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 so
+miserable a hovel. It was hardly larger than the cabin of the Betsey,
+and a thousand times less comfortable. The walls and roof, formed of
+damp grass-grown turf, with a few layers of unconnected stone in the
+basement tiers, seemed to constitute one continuous hillock, sloping
+upwards from foundation to ridge, like one of the lesser moraines of
+Agassiz, save where the fabric here and there bellied outwards or
+inwards, in perilous dilapidation, that seemed but awaiting the first
+breeze. The low chinky door opened direct into the one wretched
+apartment of the hovel, which we found lighted chiefly by holes in the
+roof. The back of the sick woman's bed was so placed at the edge of the
+opening, that it had formed at one time a sort of partition to the
+portion of the apartment, some five or six feet square, which contained
+the fire-place; but the boarding that had rendered it such had long
+since fallen away, and it now presented merely a naked rickety frame to
+the current of cold air from without. Within a foot of the bed-ridden
+woman'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 hard
+by. The little hole in the wall had formed the poor creature's only
+communication with the face of the external world for ten weary years.
+She lay under a dingy coverlet, which, whatever its original hue, had
+come to differ nothing in color from the graveyard earth, which must so
+soon better supply its place. What perhaps first struck the eye was the
+strange flatness of the bed-clothes, considering that a human body lay
+below: there seemed scarce bulk enough under them for a human skeleton.
+The light of the opening fell on the corpse-like features of the
+woman,--sallow, sharp, bearing at once the stamp of disease and of
+famine; and yet it was evident, notwithstanding, that they had once been
+agreeable,--not unlike those of her daughter, a good-looking girl of
+eighteen, who, when we entered, was sitting beside the fire. Neither
+mother nor daughter had any English; but it was not difficult to
+determine, from the welcome with which the minister was greeted from the
+sick-bed, feeble as the tones were, that he was no unfrequent visitor.
+He prayed beside the poor creature, and, on coming away, slipped
+something into her hand. I learned that not during the ten years in
+which she had been bed-ridden had she received a single farthing from
+the proprietor, nor, indeed, had any of the poor of the island, and that
+the parish had no session-funds. I saw her husband a few days after,--an
+old worn-out man, with famine written legibly in his hollow cheek and
+eye, and on the shrivelled frame, that seemed lost in his tattered
+dress; and he reiterated the same sad story. They had no means of
+living, he said, save through the charity of their poor neighbors, who
+had so little to spare; for the parish or the proprietor had never given
+them anything. He had once, he added, two fine boys, both sailors, who
+had helped them; but the one had perished in a storm off the Mull of
+Cantyre, 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 crazy
+hut to take care of them in their helpless old age, what other could she
+do in a place like Eigg than just share with them their sufferings? It
+has been recently decided by the British Parliament, that in cases of
+this kind the starving poor shall not be permitted to enter the law
+courts 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 first
+given them permission to prosecute their claims. And I doubt not that
+many of the English gentlemen whose votes swelled the majority, and made
+it such, are really humane men, friendly to an equal-handed justice, and
+who hold it to be the peculiar glory of the Constitution, as well shown
+by De Lolme, that it has not one statute-book for the poor, and another
+for the rich, but the same law and the same administration of law for
+all. They surely could not have seen that the principle of their Poor
+Law Act for Scotland sets the pauper beyond the pale of the Constitution
+in the first instance, that he may be starved in the second. The
+suffering paupers of this miserable island cottage would have all their
+wants fully satisfied in the grave, long ere they could establish at
+their own expense, at Edinburgh, their claim to enter a court of law. I
+know not a fitter case for the interposition of our lately formed
+"Scottish Association for the Protection of the Poor" than that of this
+miserable family; and it is but one of many which the island of Eigg
+will be found to furnish.
+
+After a week's weary waiting, settled weather came at last; and the
+morning of Tuesday rose bright and fair. My friend, whose absence at the
+General Assembly had accumulated a considerable amount of ministerial
+labor on his hands, had to employ the day professionally; and as John
+Stewart was still engaged with his potato crop, I was necessitated to
+sally out on my first geological excursion alone. In passing
+vessel-wards, on the previous year, from the _Ru Stoir_ to the
+farm-house of Keill, along the escarpment under the cliffs, I had
+examined the shores somewhat too cursorily during the one-half of my
+journey, and the closing evening had prevented me from exploring them
+during the other half at all; and I now set myself leisurely to retrace
+the way backwards from the farm-house to the _Stoir_. I descended to the
+bottom of the cliffs, along the pathway which runs between Keill and the
+solitary midway shieling formerly described, and found that the basaltic
+columns over head, which had seemed so picturesque in the twilight, lost
+none of their beauty when viewed by day. They occur in forms the most
+beautiful and fantastic; here grouped beside some blind opening in the
+precipice, like pillars cut round the opening of a tomb, on some
+rock-front in Petræa; there running in long colonnades, or rising into
+tall porticoes; yonder radiating in straight lines from some common
+centre, resembling huge pieces of fan-work, or bending out in bold
+curves over some shaded chasm, like rows of crooked oaks projecting from
+the steep sides of some dark ravine. The various beds of which the
+cliffs are composed, as courses of ashlar compose a wall, are of very
+different degrees of solidity: some are of hard porphyritic or basaltic
+trap; some of soft Oölitic sandstone or shale. Where the columns rest on
+a soft stratum, their foundations have in many places given way, and
+whole porticoes and colonnades hang perilously forward in tottering
+ruin, separated from the living rock behind by deep chasms. I saw one of
+these 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 another
+partially filled up with earth and stones, through which, along a dark
+opening not much larger than a chimney-vent, the boys of the island find
+a long descending passage to the foot of the precipice, and emerge into
+light on the edge of the grassy talus half-way down the hill. It
+reminded me of the tunnel in the rock through which Imlac opened up a
+way of escape to Rasselas from the happy valley,--the "subterranean
+passage," 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 the
+shieling, I found the shore so thickly covered up by masses of trap, the
+debris of the precipices above, that I could scarce determine the nature
+of the bottom on which they rested. I now, however, reached a part of
+the beach where the Oölitic beds are laid bare in thin party-colored
+strata, and at once found something to engage me. Organisms in vast
+abundance, chiefly shells and fragmentary portions of fishes, lie
+closely packed in their folds. One limestone bed, occurring in a dark
+shale, seems almost entirely composed of a species of small oyster; and
+some two or three other thin beds, of what appears to be either a
+species of small Mytilus or Avicula, mixed up with a few shells
+resembling large Paludina, and a few more of the gaper family, so
+closely resembling existing species, that John Stewart and Alister at
+once challenged them as _smurslin_, the Hebridean name for a well-known
+shell in these parts,--the _Mya truncata_. The remains of
+fishes,--chiefly Ganoid scales and the teeth of Placoids,--lie scattered
+among the shells in amazing abundance. On the surface of a single
+fragment, about nine inches by five, which I detached from one of the
+beds, and which now lies before me, I reckon no fewer than twenty-five
+teeth, and twenty-two on the area of another. They are of very various
+forms,--some of them squat and round, like ill-formed small
+shot,--others spiky and sharp, not unlike flooring nails,--some straight
+as needles, some bent like the beak of a hawk,--some, like the palatal
+teeth of the Acrodus of the Lias, resemble small leeches; some, bearing
+a series of points ranged on a common base, like masts on the hull of a
+vessel, the tallest in the centre, belong to the genus Hybodus. There is
+a palpable approximation in the teeth of the leech-like form to the
+teeth with the numerous points. Some of the specimens show the same
+plicated structure common to both; and on some of the leech backs, if I
+may so speak, there are protuberant knobs, that indicate the places of
+the spiky points on the hybodent teeth. I have got three of each kind
+slit up by Mr. George Sanderson, and the internal structure appears to
+be the same. A dense body of bone is traversed by what seem innumerable
+roots, resembling those of woody shrubs laid bare along the sides of
+some forest stream. Each internal opening sends off on every side its
+myriads of close-laid filaments; and nowhere do they lie so thickly as
+in the line of the enamel, forming, from the regularity with which they
+are arranged, a sort of framing to the whole section. It is probable
+that the Hybodus,--a genus of shark which became extinct some time about
+the beginning of the chalk,--united, like the shark of Port Jackson, a
+crushing apparatus of palatal teeth to its lines of cutting ones. Among
+the other remains of these beds I found a dense fragment of bone,
+apparently reptilian, and a curious dermal plate punctulated with
+thick-set depressions, bounded on one side by a smooth band, and
+altogether closely resembling some saddler's thimble that had been cut
+open and straightened.
+
+Following the beds downwards along the beach, I found that one of the
+lowest which the tide permitted me to examine,--a bed colored with a
+tinge of red,--was formed of a denser limestone than any of the others,
+and composed chiefly of vast numbers of small univalves resembling
+Neritæ. 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, to
+examine it. One of the first pieces I tore up contained a well-preserved
+Plesiosaurian vertebra; a second contained a vertebra and a rib; and,
+shortly after, I disinterred a large portion of a pelvis. I had at
+length found, beyond doubt, the reptile remains _in situ_. The bed in
+which they occur is laid bare here for several hundred feet along the
+beach, jutting out at a low angle among boulders and gravel, and the
+reptile remains we find embedded chiefly in its under side. It lies low
+in the Oölite. All the stratified rocks of the island, with the
+exception of a small Liasic patch, belong to the Lower Oölite, and the
+reptile-bed occurs deep in the base of the system,--low in its relation
+to the nether division, in which it is included. I found it nowhere
+rising to the level of high-water mark. It forms one of the foundation
+tiers of the island, which, as the latter rises over the sea in some
+places to the height of about fourteen hundred feet, its upper peaks and
+ridges must overlie the bones, making allowance for the dip, to the
+depth of at least sixteen hundred. Even at the close of the Oölitic
+period this sepulchral stratum must have been a profoundly ancient one.
+In working it out, I found two fine specimens of fish jaws, still
+retaining their ranges of teeth;--ichthyodorulites,--occipital plates of
+various forms, either reptile or ichthyic,--Ganoid scales, of nearly the
+same varieties of pattern as those in the Weald of Morayshire,--and the
+vertebræ and ribs, with the digital, pelvic, and limb-bones, of
+saurians. It is not unworthy of remark, that in none of the beds of this
+deposit did I find any of the more characteristic shells of the
+system,--Ammonites, Belemnites, Gryphites, or Nautili.
+
+I explored the shores of the island on to the _Ru Stoir_, and thence to
+the Bay of Laig; but though I found detached masses of the reptile bed
+occurring in abundance, indicating that its place lay not far beyond the
+fall of ebb, in no other locality save the one described did I find it
+laid bare. I spent some time beside the Bay of Laig in reëxamining the
+musical sand, in the hope of determining the peculiarities on which its
+sonorous qualities depended. But I examined, and cross-examined it in
+vain. I merely succeeded in ascertaining, in addition to my previous
+observations, that the loudest sounds are elicited by drawing the hand
+slowly through the incoherent mass, in a segment of a circle, at the
+full stretch of the arm, and that the vibrations which produce them
+communicate a peculiar titillating sensation to the hand or foot by
+which they are elicited, extending in the foot to the knee, and in the
+hand to the elbow. When we pass the wet finger along the edge of an
+ale-glass partially filled with water, we see the vibrations thickly
+wrinkling 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 modification
+of the same phenomenon acting on the nerves and fluids of the leg or
+arm. It appears to be produced by the wrinklings of the vibrations, if I
+may so speak, passing along sentient channels. The sounds will
+ultimately be found dependent, I am of opinion, though I cannot yet
+explain the principle, on the purely quartzose character of the sand,
+and the friction of the incoherent upper strata against under strata
+coherent and damp. I remained ten days in the island, and went over all
+my 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 was
+tolerably clear, and the sun looked cheerily down on the deep blue of
+the sea; but along the higher ridges of the land there lay long level
+strata of what the meteorologists distinguish as parasitic clouds. When
+every other patch of vapor in the landscape was in motion, scudding
+shorewards from the Atlantic before the still-increasing gale, there
+rested along both the Scuir of Eigg and the tall opposite ridge of the
+island, and along the steep peaks of Rum, clouds that seemed as if
+anchored, each on its own mountain-summit, and over which the gale
+failed to exert any propelling power. They were stationary in the middle
+of the rushing current, when all else was speeding before it. It has
+been shown that these parasitic clouds are mere local condensations of
+strata of damp air passing along the mountain-summits, and rendered
+visible but to the extent in which the summits affect the temperature.
+Instead of being stationary, they are ever-forming and ever-dissipating
+clouds,--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 nothing
+to 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 little
+time, I went below, and, throwing myself into the minister's large
+chair, took up a book. The gale meanwhile freshened, and freshened yet
+more; and the Betsey leaned over till her lee chain-plate lay along in
+the water. There was the usual combination of sounds beneath and around
+me,--the mixture of guggle, clunk, and splash,--of low, continuous rush,
+and bluff, loud blow, which forms in such circumstances the voyager's
+concert. 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 a
+shallow current over a rough surface; and, on the minister coming below,
+I asked him, tolerably well prepared for his answer, what it might
+mean. "It means," he said, "that we have sprung a leak, and a rather bad
+one; 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 my
+book. Presently, however, the rush became greatly louder; some other
+weak patch in the Betsey's upper works had given way, and anon the water
+came washing up from the lee side along the edge of the cabin floor. I
+got upon deck to see how matters stood with us; and the minister, easing
+off the vessel for a few points, gave instant orders to shorten sail, in
+the hope of getting her upper works out of the water, and then to unship
+the companion ladder, beneath which a hatch communicated with the low
+strip of hold under the cabin, and to bring aft the pails. We lowered
+our foresail; furled up the mainsail half-mast high; John Stewart took
+his station at the pump; old Alister and I, furnished with pails, took
+ours, the one at the foot, the other at the head, of the companion, to
+hand up and throw over; a young girl, a passenger from Eigg to the
+mainland, 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 diminished
+breadth of sail, the Betsey, straining hard in the rough sea, still lay
+in to the gunwale; and the water, pouring in through a hundred opening
+chinks in her upper works, rose, despite of our exertions, high over
+plank, and beam, and cabin-floor, and went dashing against beds and
+lockers. She was evidently filling, and bade fair to terminate all her
+voyagings by a short trip to the bottom. Old Alister, a seaman of thirty
+years' standing, whose station at the bottom of the cabin stairs enabled
+him to see how fast the water was gaining on the Betsey, but not how the
+Betsey was gaining on the land, was by no means the least anxious among
+us. Twenty years previous he had seen a vessel go down in exactly
+similar circumstances, and in nearly the same place, and the
+reminiscence, in the circumstances, seemed rather an uncomfortable one.
+It had been a bad evening, he said, and the vessel he sailed in, and a
+sloop, her companion, were pressing hard to gain the land. The sloop had
+sprung a leak, and was straining, as if for life and death, under a
+press 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 disappeared
+from the surface instantaneously as a vanishing spectre, and neither
+sloop nor crew were ever more heard of.
+
+There are, I am convinced, few deaths less painful than some of those
+untimely and violent ones at which we are most disposed to shudder. We
+wrought so hard at pail and pump,--the occasion, too, was one of so much
+excitement, and tended so thoroughly to awaken our energies,--that I was
+conscious, during the whole time, of an exhilaration of spirits rather
+pleasurable than otherwise. My fancy was active, and active, strange as
+the fact may seem, chiefly with ludicrous objects. Sailors tell
+regarding the flying Dutchman, that he was a hard-headed captain of
+Amsterdam, who, in a bad night and head wind, when all the other vessels
+of his fleet were falling back on the port they had recently quitted,
+obstinately swore that, rather than follow their example, he would keep
+beating about till the day of judgment. And the Dutch captain, says the
+story, was just taken at his word, and is beating about still. When
+matters were at the worst with us, we got under the lea of the point of
+Sleat. The promontory interposed between us and the roll of the sea; the
+wind gradually took off; and, after having seen the water gaining fast
+and 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, and
+sunk downwards along pannels and table-legs,--a second retiring deluge;
+and we entered Isle Ornsay with the cabin-floor all visible, and less
+than two feet water in the hold. On the following morning, taking leave
+of my friend the minister, I set off, on my return homewards, by the
+Skye 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 usual
+exploratory ramble was thrown this year (1847) from the middle of July
+into the middle of September; and I embarked at Granton for the north
+just as the night began to count hour against hour with the day. The
+weather was fine, and the voyage pleasant. I saw by the way, however, at
+least one melancholy memorial of a hurricane which had swept the eastern
+coasts of the island about a fortnight before, and filled the provincial
+newspapers with paragraphs of disaster. Nearly opposite where the Red
+Head lifts its mural front of Old Red Sandstone a hundred yards over the
+beach, the steamer passed a foundered vessel, lying about a mile and a
+half off the land, with but her topmast and the point of her peak over
+the 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 was
+attached, white atop and yellow beneath, formed a well-defined
+undulatory strip on the water, that seemed as if ever in the process of
+being rolled up, and yet still retained its length unshortened. Every
+recession 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 the
+gale, and that, when staggering under a press of canvas towards the
+still distant shore, where, by stranding her, the crew had hoped to save
+at least their lives, she had disappeared with a sudden lurch, and all
+aboard had perished. I remembered having read, among other memorabilia
+of the hurricane, without greatly thinking of the matter, that "a large
+sloop had foundered off the Red Head,--name unknown." But the minute
+portion of the wreck which I saw rising over the surface, to certify,
+like some frail memorial in a churchyard, that the dead lay beneath, had
+an eloquence in it which the words wanted, and at once sent the
+imagination back to deal with the stern realities of the disaster, and
+the feelings abroad to expatiate over saddened hearths and melancholy
+homesteads, where for many a long day the hapless perished would be
+missed and mourned, but where the true story of their fate, though too
+surely guessed at, would never be known.
+
+The harvest had been early; and on to the village of Stonehaven, and a
+mile or two beyond, where the fossiliferous deposits end and the primary
+begin, the country presented from the deck only a wide expanse of
+stubble. Every farm-steading we passed had its piled stack-yard; and the
+fields were bare. But the line of demarcation between the Old Red
+Sandstone and the granitic districts formed also a separating line
+between an earlier and later harvest; the fields of the less kindly
+subsoil derived from the primary rocks were, I could see, still speckled
+with sheaves; and, where the land lay high, or the exposure was
+unfavorable, there were reapers at work. All along in the course of my
+journey northward from Aberdeen I continued to find the country covered
+with shocks, and laborers employed among them; until, crossing the Spey,
+I entered on the fossiliferous districts of Moray; and then, as in the
+south, the champaign again showed a bare breadth of stubble, with here
+and there a ploughman engaged in turning it down. The traveller bids
+farewell at Stonehaven to not only the Old Red Sandstone and the
+early-harvest districts, but also to the rich wheat-lands of the
+country, and does not again fairly enter upon them until, after
+travelling nearly a hundred miles, he passes from Banffshire into the
+province of Moray. He leaves behind him at the same line the
+wheat-fields and the cottages built of red stone, to find only barley
+and oats, and here and there a plot of rye, associated with cottages of
+granite and gneiss, hyperstene and mica schist; but on crossing the
+Spey, the red cottages reäppear, and fields of rich wheat-land spread
+out around them, as in the south. The circumstance is not unworthy the
+notice of the geologist. It is but a tedious process through which the
+minute lichen, settling on a surface of naked stone, forms in the course
+of ages a soil for plants of greater bulk and a higher order; and had
+Scotland been left to the exclusive operation of this slow agent, it
+would be still a rocky desert, with perhaps here and there a strip of
+alluvial meadow by the side of a stream, and here and there an insulated
+patch of rich soil among the hollows of the crags. It might possess a
+few gardens for the spade, but no fields for the plough. We owe our
+arable land to that comparatively modern geologic agent, whatever its
+character, that crushed, as in a mill, the upper parts of the
+surface-rocks of the kingdom, and then overlaid them with their own
+debris and rubbish to the depth of from one to forty yards. This debris,
+existing in one locality as a boulder-clay more or less finely
+comminuted, in another as a grossly pounded gravel, forms, with few
+exceptions, that subsoil of the country on which the existing vegetation
+first found root; and, being composed mainly of the formations on which
+it more immediately rests, it partakes of their character,--bearing a
+comparatively lean and hungry aspect over the primary rocks, and a
+greatly more fertile one over those deposits in which the organic
+matters of earlier creations lie diffused. Saxon industry has done much
+for the primary districts of Aberdeen and Banffshires, though it has
+failed to neutralize altogether the effects of causes which date as
+early as the times of the Old Red Sandstone; but in the Highlands, which
+belong almost exclusively to the non-fossiliferous formations, and which
+were, on at least the western coasts, but imperfectly subjected to that
+grinding process to which we owe our subsoils, the poor Celt has
+permitted the consequences of the original difference to exhibit
+themselves in full. If we except the islands of the Inner Hebrides, the
+famine of 1846 was restricted in Scotland to the primary districts.
+
+I made it my first business, on landing in Aberdeen, to wait on my
+friend Mr. Longmuir, that I might compare with him a few geological
+notes, and benefit by his knowledge of the surrounding country. I was,
+however, unlucky enough to find that he had gone, a few days before, on
+a journey, from which he had not yet returned; but, through the kindness
+of Mrs. Longmuir, to whom I took the liberty of introducing myself, I
+was made free of his stone-room, and held half an hour's conversation
+with his Scotch fossils of the Chalk. These had been found, as the
+readers of the _Witness_ must remember from his interesting paper on the
+subject, on the hill of Dudwick, in the neighborhood of Ellon, and were
+chiefly impressions--some of them of singular distinctness and
+beauty--in yellow flint. I saw among them several specimens of the
+Inoceramus, a thin-shelled, ponderously-hinged conchifer, characteristic
+of the Cretaceous group, but which has no living representative; with
+numerous flints, traversed by rough-edged, bifurcated hollows, in which
+branched sponges had once lain; a well-preserved Pecten; the impressions
+of spines of Echini of at least two distinct species; and the
+nicely-marked impression of part of a Cidaris, with the balls on which
+the sockets of the club-like spines had been fitted existing in the
+print as spherical moulds, in which shot might be cast, and with the
+central ligamentary depression, which in the actual fossil exists but as
+a minute cavity, projecting into the centre of each hollow sphere, like
+the wooden fusee into the centre of a bomb-shell. This latter cast, fine
+and sharp as that of a medal taken in sulphur, seems sufficient of
+itself to establish two distinct points: in the first place, that the
+siliceous matter of which the flint is composed, though now so hard and
+rigid, must, in its original condition, have been as impressible as wax
+softened to receive the stamp of the seal; and, in the next, that though
+it was thus yielding in its character, it could not have greatly shrunk
+in the process of hardening. I looked with no little interest on these
+remains of a Scotch formation now so entirely broken up, that, like
+those ruined cities of the East which exist but as mere lines of
+wrought material barring the face of the desert, there has not "been
+left one stone of it upon another," but of which the fragments, though
+widely scattered, bear imprinted upon them, like the stamped bricks of
+Babylon, the story of its original condition, and a record of its
+_founders_. All Mr. Longmuir's Cretaceous fossils from the hill of
+Dudwick are of flint,--a substance not easily ground down by the
+denuding agencies.
+
+I found several other curious fossils in Mr. Longmuir's collection.
+Greatly more interesting, however, than any of the specimens which it
+contains, is the general fact, that it should be the collection of a
+Free Church minister, sedulously attentive to the proper duties of his
+office, but who has yet found time enough to render himself an
+accomplished geologist; and whose week-day lectures on the science
+attract crowds, who receive from them, in many instances, their first
+knowledge of the strange revolutions of which our globe has been the
+subject, blent with the teachings of a wholesome theology. The present
+age, above all that has gone before, is peculiarly the age of physical
+science; and of all the physical sciences, not excepting astronomy
+itself, geology, though it be a fact worthy of notice, that not one of
+our truly accomplished geologists is an infidel, is the science of which
+infidelity has most largely availed itself. And as the theologian in a
+metaphysical age,--when skepticism, conforming to the character of the
+time, disseminated its doctrines in the form of nicely abstract
+speculations,--had, in order that the enemy might be met in his own
+field, to become a skilful metaphysician, he must now, in like manner,
+address himself to the tangibilities of natural history and geology, if
+he would avoid the danger and disgrace of having his flank turned by
+every sciolist in these walks whom he may chance to encounter. It is
+those identical bastions and outworks that are _now_ attacked, which
+must be _now_ defended; not those which were attacked some eighty or a
+hundred years ago. And as he who succeeds in first mixing up fresh and
+curious truths, either with the objections by which religion is assailed
+or the arguments by which it is defended, imparts to his cause all the
+interest which naturally attaches to these truths, and leaves to his
+opponent, who passes over them after him as at second hand, a subject
+divested of the fire-edge of novelty, I can deem Mr. Longmuir well and
+not unprofessionally employed, in connecting with a sound creed the
+picturesque marvels of one of the most popular of the sciences, and by
+this means introducing them to his people, linked, from the first, with
+right associations. According to the old fiction, the look of the
+basilisk did not kill unless the creature saw before it was seen;--its
+mere _return_ glance was harmless; and there is a class of thoroughly
+dangerous writers who in this respect resemble the basilisk. It is
+perilous to give them a first look of the public. They are formidable
+simply as the earliest popularizers of some interesting science, or the
+first promulgators of some class of curious little-known facts, with
+which they mix up their special contributions of error,--often the only
+portion of their writings that really belongs to themselves. Nor is it
+at all so easy to _counteract_ as to _confute_ them. A masterly
+confutation of the part of their works truly their own may, from its
+subject, be a very unreadable book: it can have but the insinuated
+poison to deal with, unmixed with the palatable pabulum in which the
+poison has been conveyed; and mere treatises on poisons, whether moral
+or medical, are rarely works of a very delectable order. It seems to be
+on this principle that there exists no confutation of the "Constitution
+of Man" in which the ordinary reader finds amusement to carry him
+through; whereas the work itself, full of curious miscellaneous
+information, is eminently readable; and that the "Vestiges of
+Creation,"--a treatise as entertaining as the "Arabian Nights,"--bids
+fair, not from the amount of error which it contains, but from the
+amount of fresh and interestingly told truth with which the error is
+mingled, to live and do mischief when the various solidly-scientific
+replies which it has called forth are laid upon the shelf. Both the
+"Constitution" and the "Vestiges" had the advantage, so essential to the
+basilisk, of taking the first glance of the public on their respective
+subjects; whereas their confutators have been able to render them back
+but mere _return_ glances. The only efficiently counteractive mode of
+looking down the danger, in cases of this kind, is the mode adopted by
+Mr. Longmuir.
+
+There was a smart frost next morning; and, for a few hours, my seat on
+the top of the Banff coach, by which I travelled across the country to
+where the Gamrie and Banff roads part company, was considerably more
+cool than agreeable. But the keen morning improved into a brilliant day,
+with an atmosphere transparent as if there had been no atmosphere at
+all, through which the distant objects looked out as sharp of outline,
+and in as well-defined light and shadow, as if they had occupied the
+background, not of a Scotch, but of an Italian landscape. A few
+speck-like sails, far away on the intensely blue sea, which opened upon
+us in a stretch of many leagues, as we surmounted the moory ridge over
+Macduff, gleamed to the sun with a radiance bright as that of the sparks
+of a furnace blown to a white heat. The land, uneven of surface, and
+open, and abutting in bold promontories on the frith, still bore the
+sunny hue of harvest, and seemed as if stippled over with shocks from
+the ridgy hill summits, to where ranges of giddy cliffs flung their
+shadows across the beach. I struck off for Gamrie by a path that runs
+eastward, nearly parallel to the shore,--which at one or two points it
+overlooks from dark-colored cliffs of grauwacke slate,--to the fishing
+village 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 with
+not only the best effect, but with even the least possible sacrifice of
+appearance: the shabbiest of all suits is a good suit spoiled. My
+hammer-shaft projected from my pocket; a knapsack, with a few changes of
+linen, slung suspended from my shoulders; a strong cotton umbrella
+occupied my better hand; and a gray maud, buckled shepherd-fashion
+aslant the chest, completed my equipment. There were few travellers on
+the road, which forked off on the hill-side a short mile away, into two
+branches, like a huge letter Y, leaving me uncertain which branch to
+choose; and I made up my mind to have the point settled by a woman of
+middle age, marked by a hard, _manly_ countenance, who was coming up
+towards me, bound apparently for the Banff or Macduff market, and
+stooping under a load of dairy produce. She too, apparently, had her
+purpose to serve or point to settle; for as we met, she was the first to
+stand; and, sharply scanning my appearance and aspect at a glance, she
+abruptly 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'r
+gaing east the gate, and tell _our_ folk that the stirk has gat fra her
+tether, an' 'ill brak on the wat clover. Tell them to sen' for her
+_that_ minute." I undertook the commission; and, passing the endangered
+stirk, that seemed luxuriating, undisturbed by any presentiment of
+impending peril, amid the rich swathe of a late clover crop, still damp
+with the dews of the morning frost, I tapped at the door of the
+farm-house, and delivered my message to a young good-looking girl, in
+nearly the words of the woman:--"The gude-wife bade me tell _them_," I
+said, "to send that instant for the stirk, for she had gat fra her
+tether, and would brak on the wat clover." The girl blushed just a very
+little, and thanked me; and then, after obliging me, in turn, by laying
+down for me my proper route,--for I had left the question of the forked
+road to be determined at the farm-house,--she set off at high speed, to
+rescue the unconscious stirk. A walk of rather less than two hours
+brought me abreast of the Bay of Gamrie,--a picturesque indentation of
+the coast, in the formation of which the agency of the old denuding
+forces, operating on deposits of unequal solidity, may be distinctly
+traced. The surrounding country is composed chiefly of Silurian schists,
+in which there is deeply inlaid a detached strip of mouldering Old Red
+Sandstone, considerably more than twenty miles in length, and that
+varies from two to three miles in breadth. It seems to have been let
+down into the more ancient formation,--like the keystone of a bridge
+into the ringstones of the arch when the work is in the act of being
+completed,--during some of those terrible convulsions which cracked and
+rent the earth's crust, as if it had been an earthen pipkin brought to a
+red heat and then plunged into cold water. Its consequent occurrence in
+a lower tier of the geological edifice than that to which it originally
+belonged has saved it from the great denudation which has swept from the
+surface of the surrounding country the tier composed of its contemporary
+beds and strata, and laid bare the grauwacke on which this upper tier
+rested. But where it presents its narrow end to the sea, as the older
+houses in our more ancient Scottish villages present their gables to the
+street, the waves of the German Ocean, by incessantly charging against
+it, propelled by the tempests of the stormy north, have hollowed it
+into the Bay of Gamrie, and left the more solid grauwacke standing out
+in bold promontories on either side, as the headlands of Gamrie and
+Troup.
+
+In passing downwards on the fishing village of Gardenstone, mainly in
+the hope of procuring a guide to the ichthyolite beds, I saw a laborer
+at work with a pickaxe, in a little craggy ravine, about a hundred yards
+to the left of the path, and two gentlemen standing beside him. I paused
+for a moment, to ascertain whether the latter were not brother-workers
+in the geologic field. "Hilloa!--here,"--shouted out the stouter of the
+two gentlemen, as if, by some _clairvoyant_ faculty, he had dived into
+my secret thought; "come here." I went down into the ravine, and found
+the laborer engaged in disinterring ichthyolitic nodules out of a bed of
+gray stratified clay, identical in its composition with that of the
+Cromarty fish-beds; and a heap of freshly-broken nodules, speckled with
+the organic remains of the Lower Old Red Sandstone,--chiefly occipital
+plates and scales,--lay beside him. "Know you aught of these?" said the
+stouter gentleman, pointing to the heap. "A little," I replied; "but
+your specimens are none of the finest. Here, however, is a dorsal plate
+of Coccosteus; and here a scattered group of scales of Osteolepis; and
+here the occipital plates of _Cheirolepis Cummingiæ_; and here the spine
+of the anterior dorsal of _Diplacanthus striatus_." My reading of the
+fossils was at once recognized, like the mystic sign of the freemason,
+as establishing for me a place among the geologic brotherhood; and the
+stout gentleman producing a spirit-flask and a glass, I pledged him and
+his companion in a bumper. "Was I not sure?" he said, addressing his
+friend: "I knew by the cut of his jib, notwithstanding his shepherd's
+plaid, that he was a wanderer of the scientific cast." We discussed the
+peculiarities of the deposit, which, in its mineralogical character, and
+generically in that of its organic contents, resembles, I found, the
+fish-beds of Cromarty (though, curiously enough, the intervening
+contemporary deposits of Moray and the western parts of Banffshire
+differ widely, in at least their chemistry, from both); and we were
+right good friends ere we parted. To men who travel for amusement,
+incident is incident, however trivial in itself, and always worth
+something. I showed the younger of the two geologists my mode of
+breaking open an ichthyolitic nodule, so as to secure the best possible
+section of the fish. "Ah," he said, as he marked a style of handling the
+hammer which, save for the fifteen years' previous practice of the
+operative mason, would be perhaps less complete,--"Ah, you must have
+broken open a great many." His own knowledge of the formation and its
+ichthyolites had been chiefly derived, he added, from a certain little
+treatise on the "Old Red Sandstone," rather popular than scientific,
+which he named. I of course claimed no acquaintance with the work; and
+the conversation went on.
+
+The ill luck of my new friends, who had been toiling among the nodules
+for hours without finding an ichthyolite worth transferring to their
+bag, showed me that, without excavating more deeply than my time
+allowed, I had no chance of finding good specimens. But, well content to
+have ascertained that the ichthyolite bed of Gamrie is identical in its
+composition, and, generically at least, in its organisms, with the beds
+with which I was best acquainted, I rose to come away. The object which
+I next proposed to myself was, to determine whether, as at Eathie and
+Cromarty, the fossils here appear not only on the hill-side, but also
+crop out along the shore. On taking leave, however, of the geologists, I
+was reminded by the younger of what I might have otherwise
+forgotten,--a raised beach in the immediate neighborhood (first
+described by Mr. Prestwich, in his paper on the Gamrie ichthyolites),
+which contains shells of the existing species at a higher level than
+elsewhere,--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, we
+parted. The ichthyolites which I had just been laying open occur on the
+verge of that Strathbogie district in which the Church controversy raged
+so hot and high; and by a common enough trick of the associative
+faculty, they now recalled to my mind a stanza which memory had somehow
+caught when the battle was at the fiercest. It formed part of a satiric
+address, published in an Aberdeen newspaper, to the not very respectable
+non-intrusionists who had smoked tobacco and drank whisky in the parish
+church 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 style
+in which Zachary Boyd sings "Pharaoh and the Pascal." And as it is wrong
+to 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 prove
+that the animal spirits, under the influence of the bracing walk, the
+fine day, and the agreeable recounter at the fish-beds,--not forgetting
+the half-gill bumper,--had mounted very considerably above their
+ordinary 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, along
+the rim-like edge of the flat area atop, scattered fragments of the
+vitrified walls. A general covering of turf restricted my examination of
+the shells to one point, where a land-slip on a small scale had laid the
+deposit bare; but I at least saw enough to convince me that the debris
+of the shell-fish used of old as food by the garrison had not been
+mistaken for the remains of a raised beach,--a mistake which in other
+localities 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 of
+bluish-colored silt. I picked out of the sand two entire specimens of a
+full-grown Fusus, little more than half an inch in length,--the _Fusus
+turricola_; and the greater number of the fragments that lay bleaching
+at the foot of the broken slope, in a state of chalky friability, seemed
+to 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 the
+denizens of at least no _flat_ shore. The descent on which they occur
+sinks downwards to the existing beach, over which it is elevated at this
+point two hundred and thirty feet, at an angle with the horizon of from
+thirty-five to forty degrees. Were the land to be now submerged to where
+they appear on the hill-side, the bay of Gamrie, as abrupt in its
+slopes 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 a
+hundred yards from the shore. I may add, that I could trace at this
+height no marks of such a continuous terrace around the sides of the bay
+as the waves would have infallibly excavated in the diluvium, had the
+sea 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; though
+the green banks which sweep around the upper part of the inflection,
+unscarred by the defacing plough, would scarce have failed to retain
+some mark of where the surges had broken, had the surges been long
+there. Whatever may in this special case be the fact, however, I cannot
+doubt that in the comparatively modern period of the boulder clays,
+Scotland lay buried under water to a depth at least five times as great
+as 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 of
+abrupt, mouldering precipices of red sandstone, to the village. From the
+lie of the strata, which, instead of inclining coastwise, dip towards
+the interior of the country, and present in the descent seawards the
+outcrop of lower and yet lower deposits of the formation, I found it
+would be in vain to look for the ichthyolite beds along the shore. They
+may possibly be found, however, though I lacked time to ascertain the
+fact, along the sides of a deep ravine, which occurs near an old
+ecclesiastical edifice of gray stone, perched, nest-like, half-way up
+the bank, on a green hummock that overlooks the sea. The rocks, laid
+bare by the tide, belong to the bed of coarse-grained red sandstone,
+varying from eighty to a hundred and fifty feet in thickness, which lies
+between the lower fish-bed and the great conglomerate, and which, in not
+a few of its strata, passes itself into a species of conglomerate,
+different only from that which it overlies, in being more finely
+comminuted. The continuity of this bed, like that of the deposit on
+which it rests, is very remarkable. I have found it occurring at many
+various points, over an area at least ten thousand square miles in
+extent, and bearing always the same well-marked character of a more
+thoroughly ground-down conglomerate than the great conglomerate on which
+it reposes. The underlying bed is composed of broken fragments of the
+rocks below, crushed, as if by some imperfect rudimentary process, like
+that which in a mill merely breaks the grain; whereas, in the bed above,
+a portion of the previously-crushed materials seems to have been
+subjected to some further attritive process, like that through which, in
+the 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 on
+the beach by the previous tide, a defunct father-lasher, with the two
+defensive spines which project from its opercles stuck fast into little
+cubes of cork, that had floated its head above water, as the
+tyro-swimmer floats himself upon bladders; and my previous acquaintance
+with the habits of a fishing village enabled me at once to determine why
+and how it had perished. Though almost never used as food on the eastern
+coast of Scotland, it had been inconsiderate enough to take the
+fisherman's bait, as if it had been worthy of being eaten; and he had
+avenged 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 Flying
+Dutchman, until it died. Was there ever on earth a creature save man
+that could have played a fellow-mortal a trick at once so ingeniously
+and gratuitously cruel? Or what would be the proper inference, were I to
+find one of the many-thorned ichthyolites of the Lower Old Red Sandstone
+with the spines of its pectorals similarly fixed on cubes of
+lignite?--that there had existed in these early ages not merely
+_physical death_, but also _moral evil_; and that the being who
+perpetrated the evil could not only inflict it simply for the sake of
+the pleasure he found in it, and without prospect of advantage to
+himself, but also by so adroitly reversing, fiend-like, the purposes of
+the benevolent Designer, that the weapons given for the defence of a
+poor harmless creature should be converted into the instruments of its
+destruction. It was not without meaning that it was forbidden by the law
+of Moses to seethe a kid in its mother's milk.
+
+A steep bulwark in front, against which the tide lashes twice every
+twenty-four hours,--an abrupt hill behind,--a few rows of squalid
+cottages built of red sandstone, much wasted by the keen sea-winds,--a
+wilderness of dunghills and ruinous pig-styes,--women seated at the
+doors, employed in baiting lines or mending nets,--groups of men
+lounging lazily at some gable-end fronting the sea,--herds of ragged
+children playing in the lanes,--such are the components of the fishing
+village of Gardenstone. From the identity of name, I had associated the
+place 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 on
+English plays, transcribed, it was stated in the preface, from the
+margins and fly-leaves of the books of a "small library kept open by his
+Lordship" for the amusement of travellers at the inn of some village in
+his immediate neighborhood; and taking it for granted, somehow, that
+Gardenstone was the village, I was looking around me for the inn, in the
+hope 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 an
+elderly man in a pack-sheet apron, who stood all alone, looking out upon
+the sea, like Napoleon, in the print, from a projection of the bulwark.
+He turned round, and showed, by an unmistakable expression of eye and
+feature, 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 of
+himself. "It'll be an awfu' coorse nicht," he said, "fra the sea." "Very
+likely," I replied, reiterating my query in a form that indicated some
+little confidence of receiving the needed information; "I daresay you
+could 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 a
+sodger on the Queen's account, or ye'r ain?" "On my own, to be sure; but
+have 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, with
+spectacles on nose, and a piece of white seam-work in her hand; and,
+cutting short the dialogue by addressing myself to her, she at once
+directed 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's
+a great traveller yon, an' has a gude Scots tongue in his head."
+
+Travellers, save when, during the herring season, an occasional
+fish-curer comes the way, rarely bait at the Gardenstone inn; and in the
+little low-browed room, with its windows in the thatch, into which, as
+her best, the land-lady ushered me, I certainly found nothing to
+identify the _locale_ with that chosen by the literary lawyer for his
+open library. But, according to Ferguson, though "learning was scant,
+provision was good;" and I dined sumptuously on an immense platter of
+fried flounders. There was a little bit of cold pork added to the fare;
+but, aware from previous experience of the pisciverous habits of the
+swine of a fishing village, I did what I knew the defunct pig must have
+very frequently done before me,--satisfied a keenly-whetted appetite on
+fish exclusively. I need hardly remind the reader that Lord
+Gardenstone's inn was not that of Gardenstone, but that of
+Laurence-kirk,--the thriving village which it was the special ambition
+of this law-lord of the last century to create; and which, did it
+produce only its famed snuff-boxes, with the invisible hinges, would be
+rather a more valuable boon to the country than that secured to it by
+those law-lords of our own days, who at one fell blow disestablished the
+national religion of Scotland, and broke off the only handle by which
+their friends the politicians could hope to _manage_ the country's old
+vigorous Presbyterianism. Meanwhile it was becoming apparent that the
+man with the apron had as shrewdly anticipated the character of the
+coming 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. I
+settled a very moderate bill, and set off under the cliffs at a round
+pace, in the hope of scaling the hill, and gaining the high road atop
+which leads to Macduff, ere the darkness closed. I had, however,
+miscalculated my distance; I, besides, lost some little time in the
+opening of the deep ravine to which I have already referred as that in
+which possibly the fish-beds may be found cropping out; and I had got
+but a little beyond the gray ecclesiastical ruin, with its lonely
+burying-ground, when the tempest broke and the night fell.
+
+One of the last objects which I saw, as I turned to take a farewell look
+of the bay of Gamrie, was the magnificent promontory of Troup Head,
+outlined in black on a ground of deep gray, with its two terminal stacks
+standing apart in the sea. And straightway, through one of those tricks
+of association so powerful in raising, as if from the dead, buried
+memories of things of which the mind has been oblivious for years, there
+started up in recollection the details of an ancient ghost-story, of
+which I had not thought before for perhaps a quarter of a century. It
+had been touched, I suppose, in its obscure, unnoted corner, as Ithuriel
+touched 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 bears
+reference 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 been
+originally brought by a great-grandfather of the writer, who quitted
+some of the seaport villages of Banffshire for the northern side of the
+Moray Frith, about the year 1718; and, when pushing on in the darkness,
+straining as I best could, to maintain a sorely-tried umbrella against
+the capricious struggles of the tempest, that now tatooed furiously upon
+its back as if it were a kettle-drum, and now got underneath its stout
+ribs, and threatened to send it up aloft like a balloon, and anon
+twisted it from side to side, and strove to turn it inside out, like a
+Kilmarnock night-cap,--I employed myself in arranging in my mind the
+details of the narrative, as they had been communicated to me half an
+age before by a female relative.
+
+The opening of the story, though it existed long ere the times of Sir
+Walter Scott or the Waverly novels, bears some resemblance to the
+opening in the "Monastery," of the story of the White Lady of Avenel.
+The wife of a Banffshire proprietor of the minor class had been about
+six months dead, when one of her husband's ploughmen, returning on
+horseback from the smithy, in the twilight of an autumn evening, was
+accosted, on the banks of a small stream, by a stranger lady, tall and
+slim, and wholly attired in green, with her face wrapped up in the hood
+of her mantle, who requested to be taken up behind him on the horse, and
+carried across. There was something in the tones of her voice that
+seemed to thrill through his very bones, and to insinuate itself, in the
+form of a chill fluid, between his skull and the scalp. The request,
+too, appeared a strange one; for the rivulet was small and low, and
+could present no serious bar to the progress of the most timid
+traveller. But the man, unwilling ungallantly to offend a lady, turned
+his 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 in
+contact with the ploughman's back, he said, as if she had been an
+ill-filled sack of wool; and when, on reaching the opposite side of the
+streamlet, she leaped down as slightly as she had mounted, and he turned
+fearfully round to catch a second glimpse of her, it was in the
+conviction that she was a creature considerably less earthly in her
+texture than himself. She had opened, with two pale, thin arms, the
+enveloping hood, exhibiting a face equally pale and thin, which seemed
+marked, however, by the roguish, half-humorous expression of one who had
+just succeeded in playing off a good joke. "My dead mistress!!"
+exclaimed the ploughman. "Yes, John, _your mistress_," replied the
+ghost. "But ride home, my bonny man, for it's growing late: you and I
+will be better acquainted ere long." John accordingly rode home and told
+his story.
+
+Next evening, about the same hour, as two of the laird's servant-maids
+were engaged in washing in an out-house, there came a slight tap to the
+door. "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 inner
+part of the washing-room; and, seating herself on a low bench, from
+which, ere her death, she used occasionally to superintend their
+employment, she began to question them, as if still in the body, about
+the progress of their work. The girls, however, were greatly too
+frightened to make any reply. She then visited an old woman who had
+nursed the laird, and to whom she used to show, ere her departure,
+greatly more kindness than her husband. And she now seemed as much
+interested in her welfare as ever. She inquired whether the laird was
+kind to her, and looking round her little smoky cottage, regretted she
+should be so indifferently lodged, and that her cupboard, which was
+rather 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 not
+seen 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, or
+peering in upon them at night through the dark window-panes, or at
+half-open doors. In the evening she would glide into the kitchen or some
+of the out-houses,--one of the most familiar and least dignified of her
+class that ever held intercourse with mankind,--and inquire of the girls
+how they had been employed during the day; often, however, without
+obtaining an answer, though from a cause different from that which had
+at first tied their tongues. For they had become so regardless of her
+presence, viewing her simply as a troublesome mistress, who had no
+longer any claim to be heeded, that when she entered, and they had
+dropped their conversation, under the impression that their visitor was
+a creature of flesh and blood like themselves, they would again resume
+it, remarking that the entrant was "only the green lady." Though always
+cadaverously pale, and miserable looking, she affected a joyous
+disposition, and was frequently heard to laugh, even when invisible. At
+one time, when provoked by the studied silence of a servant girl, she
+flung a pillow at her head, which the girl caught up and returned; at
+another, she presented her first acquaintance, the ploughman, with what
+seemed to be a handful of silver coin, which he transferred to his
+pocket, but which, on hearing her laugh, he drew out, and found to be
+merely a handful of slate shivers. On yet another occasion, the man,
+when passing on horseback through a clump of wood, was repeatedly struck
+from behind the trees by little pellets of turf; and, on riding into the
+thicket, he found that his assailant was the green lady. To her husband
+she never appeared; but he frequently heard the tones of her voice
+echoing 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 was
+surprised to see her enter the cottage; as all her previous visits had
+been made early in the morning or late in the evening; whereas
+now,--though the day was dark and lowering, and a storm of wind and rain
+had just broken out,--still it _was_ day. "Mammie," she said, "I cannot
+open 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 White
+House [that of a neighboring proprietor], and tell the folk there to set
+out 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 tide
+has flowed around them; and, if no help reach them soon, they'll be all
+scattered like sea-ware on the shore ere the fall of the sea. But if you
+go and tell your story at the White House, mammie, the bairns will be
+safe for an hour to come, and there will be something done by their
+mother to better you, for the news." The woman went, as directed, and
+told her story; and the father of the children set out on horseback in
+hot haste for the rock,--a low, insulated skerry, which, lying on a
+solitary part of the beach, far below the line of flood, was shut out
+from the view of the inhabited country by a wall of precipices, and
+covered every tide by several feet of water. On reaching the edge of the
+cliffs, he saw the black rock, as the woman had described, surrounded by
+the sea, and the children clinging to its higher crags. But, though the
+waves were fast rising, his attempts to ride out through the surf to the
+poor little things were frustrated by their cries, which so frightened
+his horse as to render it unmanageable; and so he had to gallop on to
+the nearest fishing village for a boat. So much time was unavoidably
+lost 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; but
+until the boat arrived, not a single wave dashed over the black rock;
+though immediately after the last of the children had been rescued, an
+immense wreath of foam rose twice a man's height over its topmost
+pinnacle.
+
+The old nurse, on her return to the cottage, found the green lady
+sitting beside the fire. "Mammie," she said, "you have made friends to
+yourself to-day, who will be kinder to you than your foster-son. I must
+now leave you. My time is out, and you'll be all left to yourselves; but
+I'll have no rest, mammie, for many a twelvemonth to come. Ten years
+ago, a travelling peddler broke into our garden in the fruit season, and
+I 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 struggled
+and fought, and the peddler was killed. But though I at first thought of
+bringing the case before the laird, when I saw the dead man's pack, with
+its silks and its velvets, and this unhappy piece of green satin
+(shaking her dress), my foolish heart beguiled me, and I made the
+ploughman bury the peddler's body under our ash tree, in the corner of
+our garden, and we divided his goods and money between us. You must bid
+the laird raise his bones, and carry them to the churchyard; and the
+gold, which you will find in the little bowl under the tapestry in my
+room, must be sent to a poor old widow, the peddler's mother, who lives
+on the shore of Leith. I must now away to Ireland to the ploughman; and
+I'll be e'en less welcome to him, mammie, than at the laird's; but the
+hungry blood cries loud against us both,--him and me,--and we must
+suffer together. Take care you look not after me till I have passed the
+knowe." She glided away, as she spoke, in a gleam of light; and when the
+old woman had withdrawn her hand from her eyes, dazzled by the sudden
+brightness, she saw only a large black gray-hound crossing the moor. And
+the green lady was never afterwards seen in Scotland. The little hoard
+of gold pieces, however, stored in a concealed recess of her former
+apartment, and the mouldering ruins of the peddler under the ash tree,
+gave evidence to the truth of her narrative. The story was hardly wild
+enough for a night so drear and a road so lonely; its ghost-heroine was
+but a homely ghost-heroine, too little aware that the same familiarity
+which, according to the proverb, breeds contempt when exercised by the
+denizens of this world, produces similar effects when too much indulged
+in by the inhabitants of another. But the arrangement and restoration of
+the details of the tradition,--for they had been scattered in my mind
+like the fragments of a broken fossil,--furnished me with so much
+amusement, when struggling with the storm, as to shorten by at least
+one-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, which
+I reached just wet enough to enjoy the luxury of a strong clear fire of
+Newcastle coal.
+
+Mrs. Longmuir had furnished me with a note of introduction to Dr. Emslie
+of Banff, an intelligent geologist, familiar with the deposits of the
+district; and, walking on to his place of residence next morning, in a
+rain as heavy as that of the previous night, I made it my first business
+to wait on him, and deliver the note. Ere, however, crossing the
+Deveron, which flows between Banff and Macduff, I paused for a few
+minutes in the rain, to mark the peculiar appearance presented by the
+beach where the river disembogues into the frith. Occurring as a
+rectangular spit in the line of the shore, with the expanded stream
+widening into an estuary on its upper side, and the open sea on the
+lower, it marks the scene of an obstinate contest between antagonist
+forces,--the powerful sweep of the torrent, and the not less powerful
+waves of the stormy north-east; and exists, in consequence, as a long
+gravelly prism, which presents as steep an angle of descent to the waves
+on 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 inspection
+his set of Gamrie fossils, containing several good specimens of
+Pterichthys and Coccosteus, undistinguishable, like those I had seen on
+the previous day, in their state of keeping, and the character of the
+nodular matrices in which they lie, from my old acquaintance the
+Cephalaspians of Cromarty. The animal matter which the bony plates and
+scales originally contained has been converted, in both the Gamrie and
+Cromarty ichthyolites, into a jet-black bitumen; and in both, the
+inclosing nodules consist of a smoke-colored argillaceous limestone,
+which formed around the organisms in a bed of stratified clay, and at
+once exhibits, in consequence, the rectilinear lines of the
+stratification, mechanical in their origin, and the radiating ones of
+the sub-crystalline concretion, purely a trick of the chemistry of the
+deposit. A Pterichthys in Dr. Emslie's collection struck me as different
+in its proportions from any I had previously seen, though, from its
+state of rather imperfect preservation, I hesitated to pronounce
+absolutely upon the fact. I cannot now doubt, however, that it belonged
+to a species not figured nor described at the time; but which, under the
+name of _Pterichthys quadratus_, forms in part the subject of a still
+unpublished memoir, in which Sir Philip Egerton, our first British
+authority on fossil fish, has done me the honor to associate my humble
+name with his own; and which will have the effect of reducing to the
+ranks of the Pterichthyan genus the supposed genera _Pamphractus_ and
+_Homothorax_. A second set of fossils, which Dr. Emslie had derived from
+his tile-works at Blackpots, proved, I found, identical with those of
+the Eathie Lias. As this Banffshire deposit had formed a subject of
+considerable discussion and difference among geologists, I was curious
+to examine it; and the Doctor, though the day was still none of the
+best, kindly walked out with me, to bring under my notice appearances
+which, 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. He
+informed me, as we went, that the Grauwacke (Lower Silurian) deposits of
+the district, hitherto deemed so barren, had recently yielded their
+organisms in a slate quarry at Gamrie-head; and that they belong to that
+ancient family of the Pennatularia which, in this northern kingdom,
+seems to have taken precedence of all the others. Judging from what now
+appears, the Graptolite must be regarded as the first settler who
+squatted for a living in that deep-sea area of undefined boundary
+occupied at the present time by the bold wave-worn headlands and blue
+hills of Scotland; and this new Banffshire locality not only greatly
+extends the range of the fossil in reference to the kingdom, but also
+establishes, in a general way, the fossiliferous identity of the Lower
+Silurian deposits to the north of the Grampians with that of
+Peebles-shire and Galloway in the south,--so far as I know, the only
+other two Scottish districts in which this organism has been found.
+
+The argillaceous deposit of Blackpots occupies, in the form of a green
+swelling bank, a promontory rather soft than bold in its contour, that
+projects far into the sea, and forms, when tipped with its slim column
+of smoke from the tile-kiln, a pleasing feature in the landscape. I had
+set it down on the previous day, when it first caught my eye from the
+lofty cliffs of Gamrie-head, at the distance of some ten or twelve
+miles, as different in character from all the other features of the
+prospect. The country generally is moulded on a framework of primary
+rock, and presents headlands of hard, sharp outline, to the attrition of
+the waves; whereas this single headland in the midst,--soft-lined,
+undulatory, and plump,--seems suited to remind one of Burns's young Kirk
+Alloway beauty disporting amid the thin old ladies that joined with her
+in the dance. And it _is_ a greatly younger beauty than the Cambrian and
+mica-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 the
+promontory; and as the clay is valuable, in this tile-draining age, for
+the facility with which it can be moulded into pipe-tiles (a purpose
+which the ordinary clays of the north of Scotland, composed chiefly of
+re-formations of the Old Red Sandstone, are what is technically termed
+too _short_ to serve), it is gradually retreating inland before the
+persevering spade and mattock of the laborer. The deposit has already
+been drawn out into many hundred miles of cylindrical pipes, and is
+destined to be drawn out into many thousands more,--such being one of
+the strange metamorphoses effected in the geologic formations, now that
+that curious animal the Bimana has come upon the stage; and at length it
+will have no existence in the country, save as an immense system of
+veins and arteries underlying the vegetable mould. Will these veins and
+arteries, I marvel, form, in their turn, the _fossils_ of another
+period, when a higher platform than that into which they have been laid
+will be occupied to the full by plants and animals specifically
+different from those of the present scene of things,--the existences of
+a happier and more finished creation? My business to-day, however, was
+with the fossils which the deposit now contains,--not with those which
+it may ultimately form.
+
+The Blackpots clay is of a dark-bluish or greenish-gray color, and so
+adhesive, that I now felt, when walking among it, after the softening
+rains of the previous night and morning, as if I had got into a bed of
+bird-lime. It is thinly charged with rolled pebbles, septaria, and
+pieces of a bituminous shale, containing broken Belemnites, and
+sorely-flattened Ammonites, that exist as thin films of a white chalky
+lime. The pebbles, like those of the boulder-clay of the northern side
+of the Moray Frith, are chiefly of the primary rocks and older
+sandstones, and were probably in the neighborhood, in their present
+rolled form, long ere the re-formation of the inclosing mass; while the
+shale and the septaria are, as shown by their fossils, decidedly Liasic.
+I detected among the conchifers a well-marked species of our northern
+Lias, figured by Sowerby from Eathie specimens,--the _Plagiostoma
+concentrica_; and among the Cephalopoda, though considerably broken,
+the _Belemnite elongatus_ and _Belemnite lanceolata_, with the _Ammonite
+Koenigi_ (_mutabilis_),--all Eathie shells. I, besides, found in the
+bank a piece of a peculiar-looking quartzose sandstone, traversed by
+hard jaspedeous veins of a brownish-gray color, which I have never
+found, in Scotland at least, save associated with the Lias of our
+north-eastern coasts. Further, my attention was directed by Dr. Emslie
+to a fine Lignite in his collection, which had once formed some eighteen
+inches or two feet of the trunk of a straight slender pine,--probably
+the _Pinites Eiggensis_,--in which, as in most woods of the Lias and
+Oölite, the annual rings are as strongly marked as in the existing firs
+or larches of our hill-sides.[11] The Blackpots deposit is evidently a
+re-formation of a Liasic patch, identical, both in mineralogical
+character and in its organic remains, with the lower beds of the Eathie
+Lias; while the fragments of shale which it contains belong chiefly to
+an upper Liasic bed. So rich is the dark-colored tenacious argil of the
+Inferior Lias of Eathie, that the geologist who walks over it when it is
+still moist with the receding tide would do well to look to his
+footing;--the mixture of soap and grease spread by the ship-carpenter
+on his launch-slips, to facilitate the progress of his vessel seawards,
+is not more treacherous to the tread: while the Upper Liasic deposit
+which rests over it is composed of a dark slaty shale, largely charged
+with bitumen. And of a Liasic deposit of this compound character,
+consisting in larger part of an inferior argillaceous bed, and in lesser
+part of a superior one of dark shale, the tile-clay of Blackpots has
+been formed.
+
+I had next to determine whether aught remained to indicate the period of
+its re-formation. The tile-works at the point of the promontory rest on
+a bed of shell-sand, composed exclusively, like the sand so abundant on
+the western coast of Scotland, of fragments of existing shells. These,
+however, are so fresh and firm, that, though the stratum which they form
+seems to underlie the clay at its edges, I cannot regard them as older
+than the most modern of our ancient sea-margins. They formed, in all
+probability, in the days of the old coast line, a white shelly beach,
+under such a precipitous front of the dark clay as argillaceous deposits
+almost always present to the undermining wear of the waves. On the
+recession of the sea, however, to its present line, the abrupt, steep
+front, loosened by the frosts and washed by the rains, would of course
+gradually moulder down over them into a slope; and there would thus be
+communicated to the shelly stratum, at least at its edges, an underlying
+character. The true period of the re-formation of the deposit was, I can
+have no doubt, that of the boulder-clay. I observed that the septaria
+and larger masses of shale which the bed contains, bear, on
+roughly-polished surfaces, in the line of their larger axes, the
+mysterious groovings and scratchings of this period,--marks which I have
+never yet known to fail in their chronological evidence. It may be
+mentioned, too, simply as a fact, though one of less value than the
+other, that the deposit occurs in its larger development exactly where,
+in the average, the boulder-clays also are most largely developed,--a
+little over that line where the waves for so many ages charged against
+the coast, ere the last upheaval of the land or the recession of the sea
+sent them back to their present margin. There had probably existed to
+the west or north-west of the deposit, perhaps in the middle of the open
+bay formed by the promontory on which it rests,--for the small
+proportion of other than Liasic materials which it contains serves to
+show that it could be derived from no great distance,--an outlier of the
+Lower Lias. The icebergs of the cold glacial period, propelled along the
+submerged land by some arctic current, or caught up by the gulf-stream,
+gradually grated it down, as a mason's laborer grates down the surface
+of the sandstone slab which he is engaged in polishing; and the
+comminuted debris, borne eastwards by the current, was cast down here.
+It has been stated that no Liasic remains have been found in the
+boulder-clays of Scotland. They are certainly rare in the boulder-clays
+of the northern shores of the Moray Frith; for there the nearest Lias,
+bearing in a western direction from the clay, is that of Applecross, on
+the other side of the island; and the materials of the boulder-deposits
+of the north have invariably been derived in the line, westerly in its
+general bearing, of the grooves and scratches of the iceberg era. But on
+the southern shore of the frith, where that westerly line passed athwart
+the Liasic beds of our eastern coast, organisms of the Lias are
+comparatively common in the boulder-clays; and here, at Blackpots, we
+find an extensive deposit of the same period formed of Liasic materials
+almost exclusively. Fragments of still more modern rocks occur in the
+boulder-clays of Caithness. My friend Mr. Robert Dick, of Thurso, to
+whose persevering labors and interesting discoveries in the Old Red
+Sandstone of his locality I have had frequent occasion to refer, has
+detected in a blue boulder-clay, scooped into precipitous banks by the
+river Thorsa, fragments both of chalk-flints and a characteristic
+conglomerate of the Oölite. He has, besides, found it mottled from top
+to bottom, a full hundred feet over the sea-level, and about two miles
+inland, with comminuted fragments of existing shells. But of this more
+anon.
+
+
+
+
+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,--for
+three-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 other
+kindred rocks of a primary district. The day was still gloomy and gray,
+and ill suited to improve homely scenery; nor is this portion of the
+Banff coast nearly so striking as that which I had travelled over the
+day before. It has, however, its spots of a redeeming character,--rocky
+recesses on the shore, half-beach, half-sward, rich in wild-flowers and
+shells,--where one could saunter in a calm sunny morning, with one's
+_bairns_ about one, very delightfully; and the interior is here and
+there agreeably undulated by diluvial hillocks, that, when the sun falls
+low in the evening, must chequer the landscape with many a pleasing
+alternation of light and shadow. The Burn of Boyne,--which separates,
+about two miles from Portsoy, a grauwacke from a mica-schist
+district,--with its bare, open valley, its steep limestone banks, and
+its gray, melancholy castle, long since roofless and windowless, and
+surrounded by a few stunted trees, bears a deserted and solitary
+shagginess about it, that struck me as wildly agreeable. It is such a
+valley as one might expect to meet a ghost in, in some still, dewy
+evening, as gloamin was darkening into uncertainty the outlines of the
+ancient ruin, and the newly-kindled stars looked down upon the stream.
+
+It so happened, however, that my only story connected with either ruin
+or valley was as little a ghost story as might be. I remember that, when
+lying ill of fever on one occasion,--indisposed enough to see apparition
+after apparition flitting across the bed-curtains, like the figures of a
+magic lantern posting along the darkened wall, and yet self-possessed
+enough to know that they were but mere pictures in the eye, and to watch
+them as they rose,--I set myself to determine whether they were in any
+degree amenable to the will, or connected by the ordinary associative
+links of the metaphysician. Fixing my mind on a certain object, I strove
+to call it up in the character, not of an image of the conceptive
+faculty, but of a fever-vision on the retina. The image which I pictured
+to 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's
+head obstinately refused to rise. I had no control, I found, over the
+fever imagery. And the picture that rose instead, uncalled and
+unexpected, was that of a coal-fire burning brightly in a grate, with a
+huge tea-kettle steaming cheerily over it.
+
+In traversing the bare height which, rising on the western side of the
+valley of the Boyne, owes its comparatively bold relief in the landscape
+to the firmness of the primary rock which composes it, I picked up a
+piece of graphic granite, bearing its inlaid characters of dark quartz
+on a ground of cream-colored feldspar. This variety, however, though
+occasionally found in rolled boulders in the neighborhood of Portsoy, is
+not the graphic granite for which the locality is famous, and which
+occurs in a vein in the mica schist of the eminence I was now
+traversing, about a mile to the east of the town. The prevailing ground
+of the granite of the vein is a flesh-colored feldspar; and the
+thickly-marked quartzose characters with which it is set, greatly
+smaller and paler than in the cream-colored stone, bear less the antique
+Hebraic look, and would scarce deceive even the most credulous
+antiquary. Antiquarians, however, _have_ been sometimes deceived by
+weathered specimens of this graphic rock, in which the characters were
+of considerable size, and restricted to thin veins, covering the surface
+of a schistose groundwork. Maupertuis, during his famous journey to
+Lapland, undertaken in 1737, to establish, from actual measurement, that
+the 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 covered
+with snow, to examine an ancient monument, of which, he says, "the Fins
+and Laplanders frequently spoke, as containing in its inscription the
+knowledge of everything of which they were ignorant." He found it on the
+side of a mountain, buried in snow; and ascertained, after kindling a
+great fire around it, in order to lay it bare, that it was a stone of
+irregular form, composed of various layers of unequal hardness, and that
+the characters, which were rather more than an inch in length, were
+written on "a layer of a species of flint," chiefly in two lines, with a
+few scattered signs beneath, while the rest of the mass was composed of
+a rock more soft and foliated. Graphic granite, it may be mentioned,
+generally occurs, not in masses, but in veins and layers. The
+inscription had been described in a previously published dissertation of
+immense erudition, as Runic; but a Runic scholar of the party found he
+could make nothing of it. The philosopher himself was struck by the
+frequent repetition of characters of nearly the same form on the stone;
+but he was ingenious enough to get over the difficulty, by remembering
+that in our notation, after the Arabic manner, characters shaped exactly
+alike may be very frequently repeated,--nay, as in some of the lines of
+the Lapland inscription, may succeed each other, as in the sums I. II.
+III. IIII. or X. XX. XXX.,--and yet very distinct and definite ideas
+attach to them all. Still, however, he could not, he says, venture on
+authoritatively deciding whether the inscription was a work of man or a
+sport of nature. He stood between his two conclusions, like our
+Edinburgh 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 a
+purple pall to both.
+
+"Should it be no other than a sport of nature," he concludes, "the
+reputation which the stone bears in this country deserves that we should
+have given a description of it. If, on the other hand, what is on it be
+an inscription, though it certainly does not possess the beauty of the
+sculpture of Greece or Rome, it very possibly has the advantage of being
+the oldest in the universe. The country in which it is found is
+inhabited only by a race of men who live like beasts in the forests. We
+cannot imagine that they can have ever had any memorable event to
+transmit to posterity, nor, if ever they had had, that they could have
+invented the means. Nor can it be conceived that this country, with its
+present aspect, ever possessed more civilized inhabitants. The rigor of
+the climate and the barrenness of the land have destined it for the
+retreat of a few miserable wretches, who know no other. It seems,
+therefore, that the inscription must have been cut at a period when the
+country was situated in a different climate, and before some one of
+those great revolutions which, we cannot doubt, have taken place on our
+globe. The position that the earth's axis holds at present with respect
+to the ecliptic, occasions Lapland to receive the sun's rays very
+obliquely: 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 its
+misfortunes. These regions may formerly have been those on which the sun
+shone most favorably; the polar circles may have been what now the
+tropics are, and the torrid zone have filled the place occupied by the
+temperate." Pretty well, Monsieur, for a philosopher! The various
+attempts made to unriddle the real history of graphic granite are,
+however, scarce less curious than the speculations connected with what
+may be termed its romance. It seems to be generally held, since the days
+of old Hutton, who, in his "Theory of the Earth," discussed the subject
+with his usual ingenuity, that the feldspathic basis of the stone first
+crystallized, leaving interstices between the crystals, partaking of a
+certain regularity of form,--a consequence of the regularity of the
+crystals themselves,--and of a certain irregularity from the eccentric
+dispositions which these manifest in their position and relations to
+each other; and that these interstices, being afterwards filled up with
+quartz, form the characters of the rock,--characters partaking enough of
+the first element of _regularity_ to present their peculiar graphic
+appearance, and enough of the second element of _irregularity_ to
+exhibit forms of an alphabet-like variety of outline. The chemist,
+however, in cross-questioning the explanation, has his puzzle to
+propound regarding it. Quartz, he says, being considerably less fusible
+than feldspar, would naturally consolidate first, and so would give form
+to the more fusible substance, instead of deriving form from it. On what
+principle, then, is it that, reversing its ordinary character, it should
+have been the last of the two substances to consolidate in the graphic
+granite?--a query to which there seems to be no direct reply, but which
+as little affects the fact that it _was_ the substance which last
+consolidated, and which took form from the other, as the decision of the
+learned Strasburgers, which determined the impossibility of the long
+nose in Slawkenbergius's Tale, affected the actual existence of that
+remarkable feature. "It happens _to be_, notwithstanding your
+objection," said the controversialists on the pro-nose side of the
+question. "But it _ought not_," replied their opponents.
+
+The rain again returned as I was engaged in examining the graphic
+granite of the Portsoy vein; the breeze from the sea heightened into a
+gale, that soon fringed the coast with a broad border of foam; and I
+entered the town, which looked but indifferently well in its gray
+dishabille of haze and spray, tolerably wet and worn, with but the
+prospect before me of being weather-bound for the rest of the day. I
+found an old-fashioned inn, kept by somewhat old-fashioned people, who
+had lately come from the country to "open a public;" and ensconced
+myself by the fireside, in a huge many-windowed room, that must have
+witnessed the county dinners of at least a century ago. Soon wearying,
+however, of hearing the rain beating mad-like ratans upon the panes, and
+availing myself of a comparatively "lucid interval," I sallied out,
+wrapped up in my plaid, to examine the serpentine beds in the
+neighborhood, which produce what is so extensively known as the Portsoy
+marble. The _beds_ or _veins_ of this substance,--for it is still a moot
+point whether they occur here as mere insulated masses of contemporary
+origin with the primary formations which surround them, or as Plutonic
+dykes injected into fissures at a later period,--are of very
+considerable extent, one of them measuring about twenty-five yards
+across, and another considerably more than a quarter of a mile; and, had
+they but the solidity of the true marbles, they would scarce fail to be
+regarded as valuable quarries of a highly ornamental stone, admirably
+suited for the interior decorations of the architect. But they are
+unluckily what the quarrier would term rubbly,--traversed by an infinity
+of cracks and fissures; and it is rare indeed to find a continuous mass
+out of which a chimney-jamb or lintel could be fashioned. The serpentine
+was wrought here considerably more than a century and a half ago, and
+exported to France for the magnificent Palace of Versailles; which,
+though regarded by the French nation, says Voltaire, as "a favorite
+without merit," Louis the Fourteenth persisted at the time in lavishly
+beautifying, and looked as for abroad as Portsoy for materials with
+which to adorn it. I have, however, seen it stated that the greater part
+of a ship's cargo, brought afterwards to Paris on speculation, was
+suffered to lie unwrought for years in the stone-dealer's yard, and was
+ultimately disposed of as rubbish,--a consequence, probably, of its
+unfitness, from its shaky texture, for ornamental purposes on a large
+scale, though for ornaments of the smaller kind, such as boxes, vases,
+and plates, it has been pronounced unrivalled. "At Zöblitz, in Upper
+Saxony," says Professor Jamieson, "several hundred people are employed
+in quarrying, cutting, turning, and polishing the serpentine which
+occurs in that neighborhood; and the various articles into which it is
+manufactured 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 no
+means 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 the
+wet imparted to the undressed masses all the effect of polish, and
+brought out in their proper variegations of color, every cloud, streak,
+and vein. Viewed in the mass, the general hue is green; so much so, that
+an insulated stack, which stands abreast of one of the beds, a
+stone-cast in the sea, has greatly the appearance, at a little distance,
+of an immense mass of verdigris. But red, gray, and brown are also
+prevailing colors in the rock; occasional veins and blotches of white
+give lightness to the darker portions; and veins of hematitic and deep
+umbry tints, variety to the portions that are lighter. The greens vary
+from the palest olive to the deepest black-green of the mineralogist;
+the reds and browns, from blood-red to dark chocolate, and from
+wood-brown to brownish-black; and, thus various in shade, they occur in
+almost every possible variety of combination and form,--dotted, spotted,
+clouded, veined,--so that each separate pebble on the shore seems the
+representative of a rock different from the rocks represented by almost
+all the others. Though not much of a mineralogist, I could have spent
+considerably more time than the weather permitted me to employ this
+evening, in admiring the beauties of this beach of _marbles_, or
+rather,--as the real name, derived from those gorgeous, many-colored
+cloudings, that impart a terrible splendor to the skins of the snake and
+viper family, is not only the more correct, but also the more poetical
+of the two,--this beach of _serpentines_. I had, however, to compromise
+matters between the fierce wind and rain and the pretty rocks and
+pebbles, by adjourning to the workshop of the Portsoy lapidary, Mr.
+Clark, and examining under cover his polished specimens, of which I
+purchased for a few shillings a characteristic and elegant little set.
+Portsoy is peculiarly rich in minerals; and hence it reckons among its
+mechanics of the ordinary class, what perhaps no other village in
+Scotland of the same size and population possesses,--a skilful lapidary.
+Mr. Clark's collection of the graphic granites, serpentines, and talcose
+and mica schists, of the district, with their associated minerals, such
+as schorl, talc, asbestos, amianthus, mountain cork, steatite, and
+schiller spar, will be found eminently worthy a visit by the passing
+traveller.
+
+I made several inquiries in the village, though not, as it proved, in
+the right direction, regarding a poor old lady, several years dead, of
+whom I had known a very little considerably more than a quarter of a
+century before, and whose grave I would have visited, bad as the night
+was, had I met any one who could have pointed it out to me. But
+ungrateful Portsoy seemed to have forgotten poor Miss Bond, who, in all
+her printed letters and little stories, so rarely forgot _it_. Have any
+of my readers ever seen the work (in two slim volumes), "Letters of a
+Village Governess," published in 1814 by Elizabeth Bond, and dedicated
+to Sir Walter Scott? If not, and should they chance to see, as I lately
+did, 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 in
+Portsoy and its neighborhood; but the rain dashed unceasingly, and made
+exploration under the cover of the umbrella somewhat resemble that of a
+sea-bottom under cover of the diving-bell. I could see but little at a
+time, 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 so
+well employed here during the day, that the silence and repose of the
+evening is very delightful. In fine weather I walk by the sea-side, and
+scramble among the rugged rocks, many of which are inaccessible to human
+feet, forming a fine retreat for foxes. These animals often may be seen
+from the heights, sporting with their cubs in perfect safety. This day I
+went to see the works of an old _virtuoso_, who turns in marble, or
+rather granite [serpentine] all kinds of chimney-piece ornaments, rings,
+ear-rings, etc. Several specimens of his work, which must have cost him
+a vast deal of trouble, I thought very beautiful. It was in this
+neighborhood that the celebrated Ferguson spent so much of his time. The
+globular stones on the gate of Durn are still to be seen, on which he
+mapped out the figuring of the terrestrial and celestial globes. I was
+told it was forbidden ground to approach the premises of Durn; but I
+could not resist the temptation of visiting the spot where the young
+philosopher had shown such early proofs of his genius; and I accordingly
+paid the forfeit of an _impertinent_, for the gentleman who resides
+there caught the prowler, and in genteel terms bade her go about her
+business, and never return. How ungracious! She was doing no harm."
+
+The morning arose as gloomily as the evening had fallen; and I walked on
+in the rain to Cullen, fully disposed to sympathize by the way with the
+"hardy Byron,"--he of the "Narrative,"--who, from his ill-luck in
+weather, went among his sailors by the name of "Foul-weather Jack." In
+the sandy bay of Cullen, where the road, after inflecting inland for
+some five or six miles, comes again upon the sea, I found the surf
+charging 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 vast
+attritive power of ocean in wearing down the land. When pausing for a
+little abreast of the fishing village, partially sheltered by an old
+boat, to mark the fierce turmoil, it suddenly occurred to me,--as the
+tempest weltered around reef and skerry, and roared wildly, mile after
+mile, along the beach,--that the day and night were now just equal, and
+that it was the customary equinoctial storm that had broken out to
+accompany me on my journey. And so, calculating on a few days more of
+it, instead of waiting on in the hope of a fair afternoon to examine the
+outlier of Old Red which occurs in the neighborhood of Cullen, I was
+content to see at a distance its mural-sided cliffs rising like broken
+walls through the flat sand; and, taking the road for Fochabers, with
+the intention of leaving exploration till fairer weather set in, I
+resolved on posting straight on, to join my relatives on the opposite
+side of the Frith. The deep-red color of the boulder-clay, as exhibited
+by the way-side, in the water-courses and the water,--for every runnel
+was tumbling down big and turbid with the rains,--intimated, when, after
+leaving Cullen some six or seven miles behind me, I passed from a bare
+moory region of quartz rock into a region of woods and fields, that I
+was again upon my ancient acquaintance, the Old Red Sandstone. And the
+section furnished by the Burn of Tynet showed me shortly after that the
+intimation was a correct one, and how generally it may be laid down as a
+rule, that at least the more impalpable portions of the boulder-clay are
+derived from the rocks on which it rests. The ichthyolite beds appear in
+the course of the burn. They have furnished several good
+specimens,--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 who
+explores from Gamrie westwards, that peculiar style of coloring which
+characterizes the Old Red ichthyolites of the shires of Moray and Nairn,
+and which differs so strikingly from the more sombre style exhibited by
+the 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. The
+day, however, was ill-suited for fishing Pterichthyes and Osteolepi out
+of the Tynet: the red water was roaring from bank to brae; here eddying
+along the half-submerged furze,--there tearing down the boulder-days in
+raw, red land-slips; and so, casting but one eager glance at the bed
+where the fish lay, I travelled on, and entered the tall woods to the
+east of Fochabers. The rain ceased for a time; and I met in the woods an
+old pensioner, who had been evidently weather-bound in some
+public-house, and had now taken the opportunity of the fair interval to
+stagger to his dwelling. He was eminently, exuberantly happy,--there
+could not be two opinions on that head,--full of all manner of bright
+sunshiny thoughts and imaginations, rendered just a little tremulous and
+uncertain by the _summer-heat_ exhalations of the imbibed moisture, like
+distant objects in a hot noonday landscape in July seen through volumes
+of rising vapor; and a sheep's head and trotters, which he carried under
+his 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 for
+all that. He confronted me with the air of an old acquaintance; gave the
+military salute; and then, laying hold of a corner of my plaid with his
+thumb 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 grenadier
+of the 42d; and I lacked the moral courage to undeceive him. I met
+nothing further on my way worthy of record, save and except a sheep's
+trotter, dropped by the old pensioner in one of his zig-zaggings to the
+extreme left; but having no particular use for the trotter at the time
+and in the circumstances, I left it to benefit the next passer-by. I
+finished my journey of eighteen miles in capital style, and was within
+five minutes' walk of Fochabers when the horn of the mail-guard was
+sounding up the street. And, entering the village, I found the vehicle
+standing opposite the inn door, minus the horses.
+
+The _insides_ and _outsides_ were sitting down to dinner together as I
+entered the inn; and I felt, after my long walk, that it would be rather
+an agreeable matter to join with them. But in the hope of meeting my old
+friend 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 so
+chanced, however, that Mr. Joss was not _out_ that day; and the man in
+the red long coat was a stranger whom I had never seen before. I
+inquired of him regarding Mr. Joss,--one of perhaps the most remarkable
+mail-guards in Europe. I have at least never heard of another who, like
+him, amuses his leisure on the coach-top with the "Principia" of Newton,
+and understands it. And the man, drawing his inference from the interest
+in Mr. Joss which my queries evinced, asked me whether I myself was not
+a coach-guard. "No," I rather thoughtlessly replied, "I am not a
+coach-guard." Half a minute's consideration, however, led me to doubt
+whether I had given the right answer. "I am not sure," I said to
+myself, on second thoughts, "but the man has cut pretty fairly on the
+point;--I daresay _I am_ a sort of coach-guard. I have to mount my
+twice-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 or
+full; I have to keep a sharp eye on the opposition coaches; I am
+responsible, 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 have
+always to keep my blunderbuss full charged to the muzzle,--not wishing
+harm to any one, but bound in duty to let drive at all and sundry who
+would make war upon the passengers, or attempt running the conveyance
+off 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, the
+problems 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 the
+true nature of my occupation so much more shrewdly than myself, I rode
+on to Elgin, where I passed the night.
+
+It is difficult to arrange in the mind the geologic formations of
+Banffshire in their character as a series of deposits. The pages of the
+stony record which the county composes, like those of an
+unskilfully-folded pamphlet, have been strangely mixed together, so that
+page last succeeds in some places to page first, and, of the
+intermediate pages, some appear at the beginning of the work, and some
+at 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 boundary
+in this direction, that we find the beds comparatively little disturbed,
+and arranged chronologically in their original places. In the eastern
+and southern parts of the shire, rocks widely separated by the date of
+their formation have been set down side by side in patches,
+occasionally of but inconsiderable extent. Now the traveller passes over
+a district of grauwacke, now over a re-formation of the Lias; anon he
+finds himself on a primary limestone,--gneiss, syenite, clay-slate, or
+quartz-rock; and yet anon amid the fossils of some outlier of the Old
+Red. The geological map of the county is, like Joseph's coat, of many
+colors. I remember seeing, when a boy, more years ago than I am inclined
+to specify, some workmen engaged in pulling down what had been a
+house-painter's shop, a full century before. The painter had been in the
+somewhat slovenly habit of cleaning his brushes by rubbing them against
+a hard-cast wall, which was covered, in consequence, by a many-colored
+layer 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 upper
+surface smooth; and, lo! a geological map. The _strata_ of variously
+hued pigment, spread originally over the surface of the hard-cast wall,
+were cut open, by the _denudation_ of the grindstone, into all manner of
+fantastic forms, and seemed thrown into all sorts of strange
+neighborhoods. The _map_ lacked merely the additional perplexity of a
+few bold _faults_, with here and there a decided _dike_, in order to
+render it on a small scale a sort of miniature transcript of the geology
+of 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 by
+way of priming, coat after coat of the primary rocks,--gneiss, and
+stratified hornblend, and mica-schist, and quartz-rock, and day-slate;
+and then, after breaking the coatings well up, and rubbing them well
+down, and so spoiling and crumpling up the work as to make their
+original order considerably a puzzle, I have begun anew to paint over
+the rough surface with thick coatings of grauwacke and grauwacke-slate.
+When this part of the operation was completed, I have again begun
+to break up and grind down,--here letting a tract of grauwacke
+sink into the broken primary,--there wearing it off the surface
+altogether,--yonder elevating the original granitic _hard-cast_ till it
+rose over all the coatings, Primary and Palæozoic. And then I have begun
+to paint yet a third time with thick Old Red Sandstone pigment; and yet
+again to break up and wear down,--here to insert a tenon of the Old Red
+deep into a mortise of the grauwacke, as at Gamrie,--there to dovetail
+it into the clay-slate, as at Tomantoul,--yonder, after laying it across
+the upturned quartz-rock, as at Cullen, to rub by much the greater part
+of it away again, leaving but mere remainder-patches and fragments, to
+mark where it had been. Lastly, if I had none of the superior Palæozoic
+or Secondary formations to deal with, I have brushed over the whole, by
+way of finish, with the variously-derived coatings of the superficial
+deposits; and thus, as I have said, I have often completed, in idea,
+after the chance suggestion of the old painter's shop, my portable
+models of the geology of disturbed districts like the Banffshire one.
+The deposits of Moray are greatly less broken. Denudation has partially
+worn them down; but they seem to have almost wholly escaped the previous
+crumpling 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 the
+geologist who has travelled northwards from the Frith of Forth. He takes
+leave of a similar stone at Cupar-Fife,--a warmly-tinted yellow
+sandstone, peculiarly well-suited for giving effect to architectural
+ornament; and after passing along the deep-red sandstone houses of the
+shires of Angus and Kincardine, and the gneiss, granite, hyperstene, and
+mica-schist houses of Aberdeen and Banff shires, he again finds houses
+of a deep red on crossing the Spey, and houses of a warm yellow tint on
+reaching Elgin,--geologically the Cupar-Fife of the north. And the story
+that the colored buildings tell him is, that he has been passing, though
+by a somewhat circuitous route of a hundred and fifty miles, over an
+anticlinal geological section,--_down_ in the scale till he reached
+Aberdeen and had gone a little beyond it, and then _up_ again, until at
+Elgin he arrives at the same superior yellow bed of Old Red Sandstone
+which he had quitted at Cupar-Fife. Both beds contain the same
+organisms. The Holoptychius of Dura Den, near Cupar, must have sprung
+from the same original as the Holoptychius of the Hospital and
+Bishop-Mill quarries near Elgin; and it seems not improbable that the
+two beds, thus identical in their character and contents, may have
+existed, ere the upheaval of the Grampians broke their continuity, as an
+extended deposit, at the bottom of the same sea. But with this last and
+newest of the formations of the Old Red Sandstone the identity of the
+deposits to the south and north ceases. The strata which in the south
+overlie the yellow bed of the Holoptychius represent the Carboniferous
+period, the overlying strata in the north represent the Oölitic one. On
+the one side the miner sinks his shaft, and finds a true coal, composed
+of the Stigmaria, Calamites, Club-mosses, Ferns, and Araucarians of the
+Palæozoic era; he sinks his shaft on the other side, and finds but thin
+seams of an imperfect lignite, composed of the Cycadeæ, Pines,
+Sphenopteri, and Clathraria of the Secondary period. The flora which
+found its subsoil in the Old Red Sandstone north of the Grampians,
+belonged to a scene of things so much more modern than the flora which
+found its subsoil in the Old Red Sandstone of the south, that all its
+productions were green and flourishing, waving beside lake, river, and
+sea, 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 long
+departed.
+
+Another thoroughly wet morning! varied only from the morning of the
+preceding day by the absence of wind, and the greater weight of the
+persevering vertical rain, that leaped upwards in myriads of little
+dancing pyramids from the surface of every pool. I walked out under
+cover of my umbrella, to renew my acquaintance with the outlier of the
+Weald at Linksfield, and ascertain what sort of section it now presented
+under the quarrying operations of the limeburners. There was, however,
+little to be seen; the bands of green and blue clays, alternating with
+strata of fossiliferous limestone, and layers of a gray shade, thickly
+charged with minute shells of Cypris, were sadly blurred this morning by
+the trail of numerous slips from above, which had fallen during the
+rains, and softened into mud as they rushed downwards athwart the face
+of the quarry: and the arched band of boulder-clay which so mysteriously
+underlies the deposit was, save in a few parts, wholly covered up by the
+debris. The occurrence of the clay here as an inferior bed, with but the
+cornstone of the Old Red beneath, and all the beds of the Weald resting
+over it, forms a riddle somewhat difficult of solution; but it is
+palpably not reading it aright to regard the deposit, with at least one
+geologist who has written on the subject, as older than the rocks above.
+It is, on the contrary, as a vast amount of various and unequivocal
+evidence demonstrates, incalculably more modern; nay, we find proof of
+the fact here in that very bed which has been instanced as rendering it
+doubtful; the clay of which the interpolation is composed is found to
+contain fragments, not only of the cornstone on which it rests, but also
+of the Wealden limestone and shales which it underlies. It forms the
+mere filling up of a flat-roofed cavern, or rather of two flat-roofed
+caverns,--for the limestone roof dipped in the centre to the cornstone
+floor,--which, previous to the times of the boulder-clay, had lain open
+in what was then, as now, an old-world deposit, charged with long
+extinct organisms, but which, during the iceberg period, was penetrated
+and occupied by the clay, as run lime penetrates and occupies the
+interstices of a dry-stone wall. It was no day for gathering fossils. I
+saw a few ganoid scales, washed by the rain from the investing rubbish,
+glittering on fragments of the limestone, with a few of the
+characteristic shells of the deposit, chiefly Unionidæ; but nothing
+worth bringing away. The adhesive clay of the Weald, widely scattered
+by the workmen, and wrought into mortar by the beating rains, made it a
+matter of some difficulty for the struggling foot to retain the shoe,
+and, sticking to my soles by pounds at a time, rendered me obnoxious to
+the old English nickname of "rough-footed Scot." And so, after
+traversing the heaps, somewhat like a fly in treacle, I had to yield to
+the rain above and the mud beneath, and to return to do in Elgin what
+cannot be done equally well in almost any other town of its size in
+Scotland,--pursue my geological inquiries under cover.
+
+On this, as on other occasions, I was struck by the complex and very
+various forms assumed by the ganoid scales of the Wealden. Throughout
+the Oölitic system generally, including the Lias, there obtains a
+singular complexity of type in these little glittering tiles of
+enamelled bone, which contrasts strongly with the greatly more simple
+style which obtained among the ganoids of the Palæozoic period. In many
+of these last, as in the Coelacanth family, including the genera
+Holoptychius, Asterolepis, and Glyptolepis, in all their many species,
+with at least one genus of Dipterians, the genus Dipterus, the external
+outline and arrangement of scale was as simple as in any of the Cycloid
+family of the present time. Like slates on a roof, each single scale
+covered two, and was covered by two in turn; and the only point of
+difference 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 preserve
+an equability of thickness throughout,--were so adjusted, that two
+scales at their edges, where they lay the one over the other, were not
+thicker than one scale at its centre. Even in the other ganoids, their
+contemporaries, such as the Osteolepis and Diplopterus, where the
+scales were ranged more in the tile fashion, side by side, there was,
+with much ingenious carpentry in the fitting, a general simplicity of
+form. It would almost appear, however, that ere the ganoid order reached
+the times of the Weald, the simple forms had been exhausted, and that
+nature, abhorring repetition, and ever stamping upon the scales some
+specific characteristic of the creature that bore them, was obliged to
+have recourse to forms of a more complex and involved outline. These
+latter-day scales send out nail-like spikes laterally and atop, to lay
+hold upon their neighbors, and exhibit in their undersides grooves that
+accommodated the nails sent out, in turn, by their neighbors, to lay
+hold upon _them_. Their forms, too, are indescribably various and
+fantastic. It seems curious enough, that immediately after this
+extremely _artificial_ state of things, if I may so speak, the two
+prevailing orders of the fish of the present day, the Cycloids and
+Ctenoids, should have been ushered upon the scene, and more than the
+original simplicity of scale restored. There took place a sudden
+reäction, from the fantastic and the complex to the simple and the
+plain.
+
+It is further worthy of notice, that though many of the ganoid scales of
+the Secondary systems, including those of the Wealden, glitter as
+brightly in burnished enamel as the more splendent scales of the Old Red
+Sandstone and Coal Measures, there is a curious peculiarity exhibited in
+the 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 Palæozoic
+period. The outer layer of the scale, which lies over a middle layer of
+a cellular cancellated structure, and corresponds, apparently, with that
+scarf-skin which in the human subject overlies the _rete mucosum_, is
+thickly set over with microscopic pores, funnel-shaped in the transverse
+section, and which, examined by a good glass, in the horizontal one
+resemble the puncturings of a sieve. The Megalichthys of the Coal
+Measures, with its various carboniferous congeners, with the genera
+Diplopterus, Dipterus, and Osteolepis of the Old Red Sandstone,--all
+brilliantly enamelled fish,--are thickly pore-covered. But whatever
+purpose these pores may have served, it seems in the Secondary period to
+have been otherwise accomplished, if, indeed, it continued to exist. It
+is a curious circumstance, that in no case do the pores seem to pass
+_through_ the scale. Whatever their use, they existed merely as
+communications between the cells of the middle cancellated layer and the
+surface. In a fish of the Chalk,--_Macropoma Mantelli_,--the exposed
+fields of the scales are covered over with apparently hollow, elongated
+cylinders, as the little tubes in a shower-bath cover their round field
+of 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 the
+Megalichthys, they communicated between the interior of the scale and
+its external surface. Their structure is at any rate palpably different,
+and they bear no such resemblance to the pores of the human skin as that
+which the Palæozoic pores present.
+
+The amount of design exhibited in the scales of some of the more ancient
+ganoids,--design obvious enough to be clearly read,--is very
+extraordinary. A single scale of _Holoptychius Nobilissimus_,--fast
+locked up in its red sandstone rock,--laid by, as it were, for
+ever,--will be seen, if we but set ourselves to unravel its texture, to
+form such an instance of nice adaptation of means to an end as might of
+itself be sufficient to confound the atheist. Let me attempt placing one
+of these scales before the reader, in its character as a flat counter of
+bone, of a nearly circular form, an inch and a half in diameter, and an
+eighth-part of an inch in thickness; and then ask him to bethink
+himself of the various means by which he would impart to it the greatest
+possible degree of strength. The human skull consists of two tables of
+solid bone, an inner and an outer, with a spongy cellular substance
+interposed between them, termed the _diploe_; and such is the effect of
+this arrangement, that the blow which would fracture a continuous wall
+of bone has its force broken by the spongy intermediate layer, and
+merely injures the outer table, leaving not unfrequently the inner one,
+which more especially protects the brain, wholly unharmed. Now, such
+also was the arrangement in the scale of the _Holoptychius
+Nobilissimus_. It consisted of its two well-marked tables of solid bone,
+corresponding in their dermal character, the outer to the cuticle, the
+inner to the true skin, and the intermediate cellular layer to the _rete
+mucosum_; but bearing an unmistakable analogy also, as a mechanical
+contrivance, to the two plates and the _diploe_ of the human skull. To
+the strengthening principle of the two tables, however, there were two
+other principles added. Cromwell, when commissioning for a new helmet,
+his old one being, as he expresses it, "ill set," ordered his friend to
+send him a "_fluted pot_," _i.e._, a helmet ridged and furrowed on the
+surface, and suited to break, by its protuberant lines, the force of a
+blow, so that the vibrations of the stroke would reach the body of the
+metal deadened and flat. Now, the outer table of the scale of the
+Holoptychius was a "fluted pot." The alternate ridges and furrows which
+ornamented its surface served a purpose exactly similar with that of the
+flutes and fillets of Cromwell's helmet. The inner table was
+strengthened on a different but not less effective principle. The human
+stomach consists of three coats; and two of these, the outermost or
+peritoneal coat, and the middle or muscular coat, are so arranged, that
+the fibres of the one cross at nearly right angles those of the other.
+The violence which would tear the compact sides of this important organ
+along the fibres of the outer coat, would be checked by the transverse
+arrangement of the fibres of the middle coat, and _vice versa_. We find
+the cotton manufacturer weaving some of his stronger fabrics on a
+similar plan;--they also are made to consist of two _coats_; and what is
+technically termed the _tear_ of the upper is so disposed that it lies
+at an angle of forty-five degrees with the _tear_ of the coat which lies
+underneath. Now, the inner table of the scale of the Holoptychius was
+composed, on this principle, of various layers or coats, arranged the
+one over the other, so that the fibres of each lay at right angles
+with the fibres of the others in immediate contact with it. In
+the 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 the
+grain_ 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 ranged
+at right angles with the line of the _tear_ in four. There were thus in
+a single scale, in order to secure the greatest possible amount of
+strength,--and who can say what other purposes may have been secured
+besides?--three distinct principles embodied,--the principle of the two
+tables and _diploe_ of the human skull,--the principle of the variously
+arranged coats of the human stomach,--and the principle of Oliver
+Cromwell's "fluted pot." There have been elaborate treatises written on
+those ornate flooring-tiles of the classical and middle ages, that are
+occasionally dug up by the antiquary amid monastic ruins, or on the
+sites of old Roman stations. But did any of them ever tell a story half
+so instructive or so strange as that told by the incalculably more
+ancient ganoid _tiles_ of the Palæozoic and Secondary periods?
+
+I called, on my way back from Linksfield, upon my old friend Mr. Patrick
+Duff, and was introduced once more to his exquisite collection, with its
+unique ichthyolites of at least two genera of fishes of the Old
+Red,--the _Stagonolepis_ and _Placothorax_ of Agassiz,--which up to the
+present time are to be seen nowhere else; and various other fine
+specimens of rare species, which, having sat for their portraits, have
+their forms preserved in the great work of the naturalist of Neufchatel.
+He showed me, with some triumph, one of his later acquisitions,--a fine
+specimen of Holoptychius from the upper yellow sandstone of Bishop-Mill,
+which exhibits the dorsal ridge covered with a line of large overlapping
+scales, not at all unlike those overlapping plates which cover the tail
+of the lobster; for which, by the way, they were mistaken by the workman
+who first laid the fossil open. I examined, too, with some interest,
+fragments of a gigantic species of Pterichthys, belonging to an inferior
+division of the same Upper Old Red formation as the yellow stone,
+designated by Agassiz _Pterichthys major_, which must have attained to
+at least thrice the size, linearly, of even its bulkier congeners of the
+Lower formation of the Coccosteus. After examining many a drawer,
+stored, from the deposits of the neighborhood, with characteristic
+fossils of the Lias, the Weald, and the Oölite, and of the Upper and
+Lower Old Red, we set out together to expatiate amid the treasures of
+the Town Museum.
+
+Among other recent additions to the Museum, there is an interesting set
+of the fishes of the Ganges, the donation of a gentleman long resident
+in India, to which Mr. Duff called my attention, as illustrative, in
+some of the specimens, of the more characteristic ichthyolites of the
+Old Red Sandstone. One numerous family, the Pimelodi, abundantly
+represented in the Gangetic region, in not only the rivers, but also the
+ponds, tanks, and estuaries of the district, is certainly worthy the
+careful study of the geologist. It approaches nearer, in some of its
+more strongly-marked genera, to the Coccosteus of the Lower Old Red,
+than any other tribe of existing fishes which I have yet seen. The body
+of the Pimelodus, from the anterior dorsal downwards, is as naked as
+that of the eel; whereas the head, and in several of the species the
+back, is armed with strong plates of naked bone, curiously fretted, as
+in many of the ichthyolites of the Lower, and more especially of the
+Upper Old Red Sandstone, into ridges of confluent tubercles, that
+radiate 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 the
+head, bears upon its inner side a strong central ridge, that deepens as
+it descends, till it abruptly terminates a little short of the
+termination of the plate, exactly as in the dorsal plate of Coccosteus,
+which sunk its central ridge deep into the back of the animal. The point
+of resemblance to be mainly noticed, however, is the contrast furnished
+by the powerful armature of the head and back, with the unprotected
+nakedness of the posterior portions of the creature;--a point specially
+noticeable in the Coccosteus, and apparent also, though in a lesser
+degree, in some of the other genera of the Old Red, such as the
+Pterichthyes and Asterolepides. From the snout of the Coccosteus down to
+the posterior termination of the dorsal plate, the creature was cased in
+strong armor, the plates of which remain as freshly preserved in the
+ancient rocks of the country as those of the Pimelodi of the Ganges on
+the shelves of the Elgin Museum; but from the pointed termination of the
+plate immediately over the dorsal fin, to the tail, comprising more
+than one half the entire length of the animal, all seems to have been
+exposed, without the protection of even a scale, and there survives in
+the better specimens only the internal skeleton of the fish and the
+ray-bones of the fins. It was armed, like a French dragoon, with a
+strong helmet and a short cuirass; and so we find its remains in the
+state 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 the
+future on the fatal field of Borodino, or along the banks of the Dwina
+or the Wap. The cuirass lies still attached to the helmet, but we find
+only the naked skeleton attached to the cuirass. The Pterichthys to its
+strong helmet and cuirass added a posterior armature of comparatively
+feeble scales, as if, while its upper parts were shielded with plate
+armor, a lighter covering of ring or scale armor sufficed for the less
+vital parts beneath. In the Asterolepis the arrangement was somewhat
+similar, save that the plated cuirass was wanting: it was a strongly
+helmed warrior in slight scale armor; for the disproportion between the
+strength of the plated head-piece and that of the scaly coat was still
+greater than in the Pterichthys. The occipital star-covered plates are,
+in some of the larger specimens, fully three-quarters of an inch in
+thickness, whereas the thickness of the delicately-fretted scales rarely
+exceeds a line.
+
+Why this disproportion between the strength of the armature in different
+parts of the same fish should have obtained, as in Pterichthys and
+Asterolepis, 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 present
+him 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 perhaps
+throw some light on the mystery. In Hamilton's "Fishes of the Ganges" I
+find but little reference made to the instincts and habits of the
+animals described: their deep-river haunts lie, in many cases, beyond
+the reach of observation; and of the observations actually made, the
+descriptive naturalist, intent often on mere peculiarities of structure,
+is not unfrequently too careless. Hamilton describes the habitats of the
+various 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 of
+the species, such as the _Silurus glanis_, being unwieldy in their
+motions, do not pursue their prey, which consists of small fishes, but
+lie concealed among the mud, and seize on the chance stragglers that
+come their way. And of the _Pimelodus gulio_, a little, strongly-helmed
+fish, with a naked body, I was informed by Mr. Duff, on the authority of
+the gentleman who had presented the specimens to the Museum, that it
+burrowed in the holes of muddy banks, from which it shot out its armed
+head, and arrested, as they passed, the minute animals on which it
+preyed. The animal world is full of such compensatory defences: there is
+a half-suit of armor given to shield half the body, and a wise instinct
+to protect the rest. The _Pholas crispata_ cannot shut its valves so as
+to protect its anterior parts, without raising them from off those parts
+which lie behind: like the Irishman in the haunted house, who attempted
+lengthening his blanket by cutting strips from the top and sewing them
+on 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 its
+nature to hollow out for itself in shale or stone, the anterior parts,
+though uncovered by the shell, are not exposed. By closing its valves
+anteriorly, it shuts the door of its little house, made like that of the
+coney-folk of Scripture, in the rock; and then, of the entire cell in
+which 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 is
+naked, and the only one which can clothe itself," is by no means quite
+correct. One half the hermit crab is as naked as the "human animal," and
+even less fitted for exposure; for it consists of a thin-skinned, soft,
+unmuscular bag, filled with delicate viscera; but not even the human
+animal is more skilful in clothing himself in the spoils of other
+animals than the hermit crab in wrapping up its naked bag in the strong
+shell of some dead fusus or buccinum, which it carries about with it in
+all its peregrinations, as at once clothes, armor, and house. Nature
+arms its front, and it is itself wise enough to arm its rear. Now, it
+seems 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 existence
+of which in vast quantity, during the times of the Old Red Sandstone,
+the dark Caithness flagstones, the fetid breccia of Strathpeffer, and
+the gray stratified clays of Cromarty, Moray, and Banff, unequivocally
+testify; and that it may have thus not only succeeded in capturing many
+of its light-winged contemporaries, which it would have vainly pursued
+in open sea, but may have been enabled also to present to its enemies,
+when assailed in turn, only its armed portions, and to protect its
+unarmed parts in its burrow. It is further worthy of notice, that many
+of the Pimelodi are furnished with spines, not, like those
+ichthyodorulites which occur so frequently in the older Secondary and
+Palæozoic divisions, unfinished in appearance at their lower extremity,
+as if, like the spines of the ancient Acanthodi, or those of the recent
+dog-fish (_Spinax acanthias_), they had been simply embedded in the
+flesh, but bearing, like the wings of the Pterichthys, an articulated
+aspect. Those of the _Pimelodus rita_ and _Pimelodus gagata_ are of
+singular beauty; and when the creatures have no further use for them,
+and the mud of the Ganges has been consolidated into shale or baked into
+flagstone around them, they will make very exquisite fossils. A correct
+drawing of the plates and spines of some of the members of the Pimelodi
+family, with a portion of the internal skeletons, arranged in their
+proper places, but divested of those more destructible parts to which
+they are attached, would serve admirably to show what strange forms fish
+not greatly removed from the ordinary type may assume in the fossil
+state, and might throw some light on the extraordinary appearance
+assumed, 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, greatly
+restrict the supply from the rich deposits in the neighborhood, and have
+an unquestioned right to do so. The Museum contains, however, several
+interesting organisms. I saw, among the others, a specimen of
+Diplopterus, that showed the form and position of the fins of this
+rather rare ichthyolite much better than any of the Morayshire specimens
+portrayed by Agassiz in his great work; and beside it, one of the two
+specimens of _Pterichthys oblongus_ which he figures, and on which he
+establishes the species. The other individual,--a Cromarty
+specimen,--graces my little collection. The gloomy day passed pleasantly
+in deciphering, with so accomplished a geologist as Mr. Duff, these
+curious hieroglyphics of the old world, that tell such wonderful
+stories, and in comparing _viva voce_, as we were wont to do long years
+before in lengthy epistles, our respective notions regarding the true
+key for laying open their more occult meanings. And, after sharing with
+him 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 twenty
+miles, to Campbelton. The rain pattered drearily through the night on my
+bed-room window; and as frequent exposure to the wet had begun to tell
+on a constitution not altogether so strong as it had once been, I
+awakened oftener than was quite comfortable, to hear it. The morning,
+however, was dry, though gray and sunless; and, taking an early
+breakfast at the inn, I traversed the flat gravelly points of Ardersier
+and Fortrose, that, projecting like moles far into the Frith, narrow the
+intervening ferry to considerably less than one-third the width which it
+would present were they away. The origin of these long detrital
+promontories, which form, when viewed from the heights on either side,
+so peculiar a feature in the landscape, and which, were they directly
+opposite, instead of being set down a mile awry, would shut up the
+opening altogether, has not yet been satisfactorily accounted for. One
+special theory assigns their formation to the agency of the descending
+tide, striking in zig-gig style, in consequence of some peculiarity of
+the coast-line or of the bottom, from side to side of the Frith, and
+depositing a long trail of sand and gravel, at nearly right angles with
+the beach, first on the one shore and then on the other. But why the
+tide, which runs in various zig-zag crossings in the course of the
+Frith, should have the effect here, and nowhere else, of raising two
+vast mounds, each a full mile and a quarter in length, with an average
+breadth of from two to five furlongs, is by no means very apparent.
+Certainly the present tides of the Frith could not have formed them, nor
+could they have been elevated to their present average height of ten or
+twelve 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 the
+latter upheavals of the land or recessions of the sea, when the great
+Caledonian Valley existed as a narrow ocean sound, swept by powerful
+currents. Upon another and entirely different hypothesis, these flat
+promontories have been regarded as the remains, levelled by the waves,
+and gapped direct in the middle by the tide, of a vast transverse morain
+of the great valley, belonging to the same glacial age as the lateral
+morains some ten or fifteen miles higher up, that extend from the
+immediate 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 am
+not in the least disposed to criticise.
+
+They were constructed, says tradition, through the agency of the
+arch-wizard Michael Scott. Michael had called up the hosts of Faery to
+erect the cathedral of Elgin and the chanonry kirk of Fortrose, which
+they completed from foundation to ridge, each in a single
+night,--committing, in their hurry, merely the slight mistake of
+locating the building intended for Elgin in Fortrose, and that intended
+for Fortrose in Elgin; but, their work over and done, and when the
+magician had no further use for them, they absolutely refused to be
+_laid_; and, like a _posse_ of Irish laborers thrown out of a job, came
+thronging round him, clamoring for more employment. Fearing lest he
+should be torn in pieces,--a catastrophe which has not unfrequently
+happened in such circumstances in the olden time, and of which those
+recent philanthropists who engage themselves in finding work for the
+unemployed may have perhaps entertained some little dread in our own
+days,--he got rid of them for the time by setting them off in a body to
+run a mound across the Moray Frith from Fortrose to Ardersier. Toiling
+hard in the evening of a moonlight night, they had proceeded greatly
+more than two-thirds towards the completion of the undertaking, when a
+luckless Highlander passing by bade God-speed the work, and, by thus
+breaking the charm, arrested at once and forever the construction of the
+mound, and saved the navigation of Inverness.
+
+I stood for a few seconds at the Burn of Rosemarkie undecided whether I
+should take the Scarfs-Craig road,--a break-neck path which runs
+eastwards along the cliffs, and which, though the rougher, is the more
+direct Cromarty line of the two,--or the considerably better though
+longer line of the White Bog, which strikes upwards along the burn in a
+westerly direction, and joins the Cromarty and Inverness highway on the
+moor of the Maolbuie. I had got into a part of the country where every
+little locality, and every more striking feature in the landscape, has
+its associated tradition; and the pause of a few moments at the two
+roads recalled to my memory the details of a ghost-story, long regarded
+in the district in which it was best known as one of the most authentic
+of its class, but which seems by no means inexplicable on natural
+principles.[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 the
+boulder-clay. I am acquainted with no other locality in the kingdom
+where this deposit is hollowed into ravines so profound, or presents
+precipices so imposing and lofty. The clay lies thickly over most part
+of the Black Isle and the peninsula of Easter Ross,--both soft sandstone
+districts,--bearing everywhere an obvious relation, as a deposit, to
+both the form and the conditions of exposure of the existing land,--just
+as the accumulated snow of a long-lying snow-storm, exposed to the
+drifting wind, bears relation to the heights and hollows of the tracts
+which it covers. On the higher eminences the clay forms a comparatively
+thin 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 in
+the sides of hollow valleys,--exactly such places as we might expect to
+see the snow occupying most deeply after a night of drift,--we find it
+accumulated 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 my
+course this morning lay, and is known far and wide,--for it forms a
+marked feature in the landscape, and harbors in its recesses a countless
+multitude of jackdaws,--as the "Kaes' Craig of Rosemarkie." It presents
+the appearance of a hill that had been cut sheer through the middle from
+top to base, and exhibits in its abrupt front a broad red perpendicular
+section of at least a hundred feet in height, barred transversely by
+thin layers of sand, and scored vertically by the slow action of the
+rains. Originally it must have stretched its vanished limb across the
+opening like some huge snow-wreath accumulated athwart a frozen rivulet;
+but the incessant sweep of the stream that runs through the valley has
+long since amputated and carried it away; and so only half the hill now
+remains. The Kaes' Craig resembles in form a lofty chalk cliff, square,
+massy, abrupt, with no sloping fillet of vegetation bound across its
+brow, but precipitous direct from the hill-top. The little ancient
+village of Rosemarkie stretches away from its base on the opposite side
+of the stream; and on its summit and along its sides, groups of
+chattering jackdaws, each one of them as reflective and philosophic as
+the individual immortalized by Cowper, look down high over the chimneys
+into the streets. The clay presents here, more than in almost any other
+locality with which I am acquainted, the character of a stratified
+deposit; and the numerous bands of sand by which the cliff is
+horizontally streaked from top to bottom we find hollowed, as we
+approach, into a multitude of circular openings, like shot-holes in an
+old tower, which form breeding-places for the daw and the sand-martin.
+The biped inhabitants of the cliff are greatly more numerous than the
+biped inhabitants of the quiet little hamlet below; and on Fortrose
+fair-days, when, in virtue of an old feud, the Rosemarkie boys were wont
+to engage in formidable bickers with the boys of Cromarty, I remember,
+as one of the invading belligerents, that, in bandying names with them
+in the fray, we delighted to bestow upon them, as their hereditary
+sobriquet, given, of course, in allusion to their feathered neighbors,
+the designation of the "_Rosemarkie kaes_." Cromarty, however, is
+two-thirds surrounded by the waters of a frith abounding in sea-fowl;
+and the little fellows of Rosemarkie, indignant at being classed with
+their _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 the
+clay what may be termed a _group_ of excavations, composing a piece of
+scenery ruinously broken and dreary, and that bears a specific character
+of its own which scarce any other deposit could have exhibited. The
+excavations are of considerable depth and extent,--hollows out of which
+the materials of pyramids might have been taken. The precipitous sides
+are fretted by jutting ridges and receding inflections, that present in
+abundance their diversified alternations of light and shadow. The steep
+descents form cycloid curves, that flatten at their bases, and over
+which the ferruginous stratum of mould atop projects like a cornice.
+Between neighboring excavations there stand up dividing walls, tall and
+thin as those of our city buildings, and in some cases broken at their
+upper edges into rows of sharp pinnacles or inaccessible turf-coped
+turrets; while at the bottom of the hollows, washed by the runnels
+which, in the slow lapse of years, have been the architects of the
+whole, we find cairn-like accumulations of water-rolled stones,--the
+disengaged pebbles and boulders of the deposit. The boulders and pebbles
+project also from the steep sides, at all heights and of all sizes,
+like the primary masses inclosed in our ancient conglomerates, when
+exhibited in wave-worn precipices,--forcing upon the mind the conclusion
+that the boulder-clay is itself but an unconsolidated conglomerate of
+the later periods, which occupies nearly the same relative position to
+the existing vegetable mould, with all its recent productions, that the
+great conglomerate of the Old Red Sandstone occupies in relation to the
+lower ichthyolite beds of that system, with their numerous extinct
+organisms. But its buried stones are fretted with hieroglyphic
+inscriptions, in the form of strange scratchings and polishings,
+grooves, ridges, and furrows,--always associated with the
+boulder-clays,--which those of the more ancient conglomerates want, and
+which, though difficult to read, seem at length to be yielding up the
+story which they record. Of this, however, more anon. Viewed by
+moonlight, when the pale red of the clay where the beam falls direct is
+relieved by the intense shadows, these excavations of the valley of
+Rosemarkie form scenes of strange and ghostly wildness: the projecting,
+buttress-like angles,--the broken walls,--the curved inflections,--the
+pointed pinnacles,--the turrets, with their masses of projecting
+coping,--the utter lack of vegetation, save where the heath and the
+furze rustle far above,--all combine to form assemblages of dreary
+ruins, amid which, in the solitude of night, one almost expects to see
+spirits walk. These excavations have been designated, from time
+immemorial, by the neighboring town's-people, as "the Danes;" but
+whether the name be, as is most probable, merely a corruption of an
+appropriate enough Saxon word, "the dens," or derived, as a vague
+tradition is said to testify, from the ages of Danish invasion, it is
+not quite the part of the geologist to determine. It may be worth
+mentioning, however, from its bearing on the point, that there are two
+excavations in the boulder-clay near Cromarty, one of which has been
+long known by the name of "the Morial's Den," while the other, greatly
+smaller in size, rejoices in the double diminutive of "the Little
+Dennie." For an hour or so the Danes proved agreeable though somewhat
+silent companions; and then, climbing the opposite side of the valley, I
+gained the high road, and, walking on to Cromarty, found myself once
+more among "the old familiar faces."
+
+In a few days the storm blew by; and as the prolonged rains had cleared
+out the deep ravines of the district, and given to the boulder-clay in
+which they are scooped a freshness in its section analogous to fresh
+fracture in rocks of harder consistency, I availed myself of the
+facilities afforded me in consequence, for exploring it once more. It
+has long constituted one of the hardest of the many riddles with which
+our Scottish deposits exercise the patience and ingenuity of the
+geologist. I remember a time when, after passing a day under its barren
+_scaurs_, or hid in its precipitous ravines, I used to feel in the
+evening as if I had been travelling under the cloud of night, and had
+seen nothing. It was a morose and taciturn companion, and had no
+speculation in it. I might stand in front of its curved precipices, red,
+yellow or gray, according to the prevailing average color of the rocks
+on which it rests, and mark their water-rolled boulders, of all
+qualities and sizes, sticking out in bold relief from the surface, like
+the rock-like protuberances that roughen the rustic basements of the
+architect, from the line of the wall; but I had no _open sesame_ to form
+vistas through them into the recesses of the past. I saw merely the
+stiff pastry matrix of which they are composed, and the inclosed
+pebbles. But the boulder-clay has of late become more sociable; and,
+though with much hesitancy and irresolution, like old Mr. Spectator on
+the first formal opening of his mouth,--a consequence, doubtless, in
+both cases of previous habits of silence long indulged,--it begins to
+tell its story. And a most curious story it is.
+
+The morning was clear, but just a little chill; and a soft covering of
+snow, 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 watery
+blue, 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 rays
+athwart the prospect, giving to each nearer bank and hillock, and to the
+more distant protuberances on the mountain-sides, those well-defined
+accompaniments of shadow that serve by throwing the minor features of a
+landscape upon the eye in bold relief, to impart to it an air of higher
+finish and more careful filling up than it ever bears under a more
+vertical light. I took the road which, leading westward from the town
+towards Invergordon Ferry, skirts the Frith on the one hand, and runs
+immediately under the noble escarpment of green bank formed by the old
+coast line on the other. Fully two-thirds of the entire height of the
+rampart here, which rises in all about a hundred feet over the
+sea-level, is formed of the boulder-clay; and I am acquainted with no
+locality in which the deposit presents more strongly, for at least the
+first half mile, one of its marked scenic peculiarities. It is furrowed
+vertically on the slope, as if by enormous flutings in the more antique
+Doric style; and the ridges by which these are separated,--each from a
+hundred to a hundred and fifty feet in length, and from five-and-twenty
+to thirty feet in average height,--resemble those burial mounds with
+which the sexton frets the churchyard turf; with this difference,
+however, that they seem the burial mounds of giants, tall and bulky as
+those that of old warred against the gods. They are striking enough to
+have caught the eye of the children of the place, and are known among
+them as the Giants' Graves. I could fain have taken their portrait in a
+calotype this morning, as they lay against the green bank,--their feet
+to the shore, and their heads on the top of the escarpment,--like
+patients on a reclining bed, and strongly marked, each by its broad bar
+of yellow light and of dark shadow, like the ebon and ivory buttresses
+of the poet. This little vignette, I would have said to the landscape
+painter, represents the boulder-clay, after its precipitous banks--worn
+down, by the frosts and rains of centuries, into parallel runnels, that
+gradually widened into these hollow grooves--had sunk into the angle of
+inclination at which the disintegrating agents ceased to operate, and
+the green sward covered all up. You must be studying these peculiarities
+of aspect more than ever you studied them before. There is a time coming
+when the connoisseur will as rigidly demand the specific character of
+the various geologic rocks and deposits in your hills, _scaurs_, and
+precipices, as he now demands specific character in your shrubs and
+trees.
+
+It is worthy the notice of the young geologist, who has just set himself
+to study the various effects produced on the surface of a country by the
+deposits 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 bear
+in the driest weather their mantling of green. They are fed with a
+perennial supply of water, by a range of deep-seated springs, that come
+bursting out from under the boulder-clay; and one of their number, which
+bears I know not why, the name of Samuel's Well, and yields its equable
+flow at an equable temperature, summer and winter, into a stone trough
+by the way-side, is not a little prized by the town's-people, and the
+seamen that cast anchor in the opposite roadstead, for the lightness and
+purity 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 dry
+at 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 of
+exactly the same extent,--beginning where the bogs begin, and ending
+where they end,--we may trace an ancient stratum of pure sand,--of
+considerable thickness, intercalated between the base of the clay and
+the superior surface of the Old Red Sandstone. It is through this
+permeable sand that the profoundly seated springs find their way to the
+surface,--for the clay is impermeable; and where it comes in contact
+with the rock on either side of the arenaceous stratum, the bogs cease.
+The chain of green bogs is a consequence of the stratum of permeable
+sand. I have in vain sought this ancient layer of sand,--decidedly of
+the same era with the argillaceous bed which overlies it,--for aught
+organic. A single shell, so unequivocally of the period of the
+boulder-clay as to occur at the base of the deposit, would be worth, I
+have said, whole drawerfuls of fossils furnished by the better-known
+deposits. But I have since seen in abundance shells of the boulder-clay.
+
+There is another scenic peculiarity of the clay, which the neighborhood
+of Cromarty finely illustrates, and of which my walk this morning
+furnished numerous striking instances. The Giants' Graves--to borrow
+from the children of the place--occur on the steep slopes of the old
+coast 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 of
+alternating ridges and furrows, which, when they had flattened into the
+proper angle, the green sward covered up from further waste. But the
+deep dells and narrow ravines in which many ranges of these graves occur
+are themselves peculiarities of the deposit. Wherever the boulder-clay
+lies thick and continuous, as in the parish of Cromarty, on a sloping
+table-land, every minute streamlet cuts its way to the solid rock at the
+bottom, and runs through a deep dell, either softened into beauty by the
+disintegrating process, or with all its precipices standing up raw and
+abrupt over the stream. Four of these ravines, known as the "Old Chapel
+Burn," the "Ladies' Walk," the "Morial's Den," and the "Red Burn," each
+of them cutting the escarpment of the ancient coast line from top to
+base, and winding far into the interior, occur in little more than a
+mile's space; and they lie still more thickly farther to the west. These
+dells of the boulder clay, in their lower windings,--for they become
+shallower and tamer as they ascend, till they terminate in the uplands
+in mere _drains_, such as a ditcher might excavate at the rate of a
+shilling or two per yard,--are eminently picturesque. On those gentler
+slopes 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. There
+is a bosky luxuriance in their more sheltered hollows, well known to the
+schoolboy what time the fern begins to pale its fronds, for their store
+of hips, sloes, and brambles; and red over the foliage we may see, ever
+and anon as we wend upwards, the abrupt frontage of some precipitous
+_scaur_, suited to remind the geologist, from its square form and flat
+breadth of surface, of the cliffs of the chalk. When viewed from the
+sea, at the distance of a few miles, these ravines seem to divide the
+sloping tracts in which they occur into large irregular fields, laid out
+considerably more in accordance with the principles of the landscape
+gardener than the stiffly squared rectilinear fields of the
+agriculturist. They are _ha-has_ of Nature's digging; and their bottom
+and sides in this part of the country we still find occupied in a few
+cases--though in many more they have been ravaged by the wasteful
+axe--by noble forest-_hedges_, tall enough to overtop, in at least their
+middle reaches, the tracts of table-land which they divide.
+
+I passed, a little farther on, the quarry of Old Red Sandstone, with a
+huge bank of boulder-clay resting over it, in which I first experienced
+the evils of hard labor, and first set myself to lessen their weight by
+becoming an observer of geological phenomena. It had been deserted
+apparently for many years; and the debris of the clay partially covered
+up, in a sloping talus, the frontage of rock beneath. Old Red Sandstone
+and boulder-clay, a broad bar of each!--such was the compound problem
+which the excavation propounded to me when I first plied the tool in
+it,--a problem equally dark at the time in both its parts. I have since
+got on a very little way with the Old Red portion of the task; but alas
+for the boulder-clay portion of it! A bar of impenetrable shadow has
+rested long and obstinately over the newer deposit; and I scarce know
+whether the light which is at length beginning to play on its pebbly
+front be that of the sun or of a delusive meteor. But courage, patient
+hearts! the boulder-clay will one day yield up _its_ secret too. Still
+further on by a few hundred yards, I could have again found use for the
+calotype, in transferring to paper the likeness of a protuberant
+picturesque cliff, which, like the Giants' Graves, could have belonged,
+of all our Scotch deposits, to only the boulder-clay. It stands out, on
+the steep acclivity of a furze-covered bank, abrupt as a precipice of
+solid rock, and yet seamed by the rain into numerous divergent channels,
+with pyramidal peaks between; and, combining the perpendicularity of a
+true cliff with the water-scooped furrows of a yielding clay, it
+presents a peculiarity of aspect which strikes, by its grotesqueness,
+eyes little accustomed to detect the picturesque in landscape. I
+remember standing to gaze upon it when a mere child; and the fisher
+children of the neighboring town still tell that "_it has been
+prophesied_" it will one day fall, "and kill a man and a horse on the
+road below,"--a legend which shows it must have attracted _their_ notice
+too.
+
+I selected as the special scene of exploration this morning, a deep
+ravine of the boulder-clay, which had been recently deepened still more
+by 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 or
+fifteen feet deep, where there had been formerly merely a shallow drain,
+had then tumbled into the ravine, and bared it to the rock. The
+sandstones of the district, soft and not very durable, show the
+scratched and polished surfaces but indifferently well, and, when
+exposed to the weather, soon lose them; but in the bottom of the runnel
+by which the ravine is swept I found them exceedingly well marked,--the
+polish as decided as the soft red stone could receive, and the lines of
+scratching running in their general bearing due east and west, at nearly
+right angles with the course of the stream. Wherever the rock had been
+laid bare during the last few months, _there_ were the markings;
+wherever it had been laid bare for a few twelvemonths, they were gone. I
+next marked a circumstance which has now for several years been
+attracting my attention, and which I have found an invariable
+characteristic of the true boulder-clay. Not only do the rocks on which
+the deposit rests bear the scratched and polished surfaces, but in every
+instance the fragments of stone which it incloses bear the scratchings
+also, if from their character capable of receiving and retaining such
+markings, 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-grained
+sandstone, or of a yielding trap, they are scratched and
+polished,--invariably on one, most commonly on both their sides; and it
+is a noticeable circumstance, that the lines of the scratchings occur,
+in at least nine cases out of every ten, in the lines of their longer
+axes. When decidedly oblong or spindle-shaped, the scratchings run
+lengthwise, preserving in most cases, on the under and upper sides, when
+both surfaces are scratched, a parallelism singularly exact; whereas,
+when of a broader form, so that the length and breadth nearly
+approximate,--though the lines generally find out the longer axis, and
+run in that direction,--they are less exact in their parallelism, and
+are occasionally traversed by cross furrows. Of such certain occurrence
+is this longitudinal lining on the softer and finer-grained pebbles of
+the boulder-clay, that I have come to regard it as that special
+characteristic of the deposit on which I can most surely rely for
+purposes of identification. I am never quite certain of the boulder-clay
+when I do not detect it, nor doubtful of the true character of the
+deposit when I do. When examining, for instance, the accumulation of
+broken Liasic materials in the neighborhood of Banff, I made it my first
+care to ascertain whether the bank inclosed fragments of stone or shale
+bearing the longitudinal markings; and felt satisfied, on finding that
+it 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 finding
+organisms in abundance in the boulder-clay, but never anything organic
+that unequivocally belonged to its own period. I had ascertained that it
+contains in Ross and Cromarty nodules of the Old Red Sandstone, which
+bear inside, like so many stone coffins, their well laid out skeletons
+of the dead; but then the markings on their surface told me that when
+the boulder-clay was in the course of deposition, they had been exactly
+the same kind of nodules that they are now. In Moray, it incloses, I had
+found, organisms of the Lias; but _they_ also testify that they present
+an appearance in no degree more ancient at the present time than they
+did when first enveloped by the clay. In East and West Lothian too, and
+in the neighborhood of Edinburgh, I had detected in it occasional
+organisms of the Mountain Limestone and the Coal Measures; but these,
+not less surely than its Liasic fossils in Moray, and its Old Red
+ichthyolites in Cromarty and Ross, belonged to an incalculably more
+ancient state of things than itself; and--like those shrivelled
+manuscripts of Pompeii or Herculaneum, which, whatever else they may
+record, cannot be expected to tell aught of the catastrophe that buried
+them up--they throw no light whatever on the deposit in which they
+occur. I at length came to regard the boulder-clay--for it is difficult
+to keep the mind in a purely blank state on any subject on which one
+thinks a good deal--as representative of a chaotic period of death and
+darkness, introductory, mayhap, to the existing scene of things.
+
+After, however, I had begun to mark the invariable connection of the
+clay, as a deposit, with the dressed surfaces on which it rests, and the
+longitudinal linings of the pebbles and boulders which it incloses, and
+to associate it, in consequence, with an ice-charged sea and the Great
+Gulf Stream, it seemed to me extremely difficult to assign a reason why
+it should be thus barren of remains. Sir Charles Lyell states, in his
+"Elements," that the "stranding of ice-islands in the bays of Iceland
+since 1835 has driven away the fish for several successive seasons, and
+thereby caused a famine among the inhabitants of the country;" and he
+argues from the fact, "that a sea habitually infested with melting ice,
+which would chill and freshen the water, might render the same
+uninhabitable by marine mollusca." But then, on the other hand, it is
+equally a fact that half a million of seals have been killed in a single
+season on the meadow-ice a little to the north of Newfoundland, and that
+many millions of cod, besides other fish, are captured yearly on the
+shores of that island, though grooved and furrowed by ice-floes almost
+every spring. Of the seal family it is specially recorded by
+naturalists, that many of the species "are from choice inhabitants of
+the margins of the frozen seas towards both poles; and, of course, in
+localities in which many such animals live, some must occasionally die."
+And though the grinding process would certainly have disjointed, and
+might probably have worn down and partially mutilated, the bones of the
+amphibious carnivora of the boulder period, it seems not in the least
+probable, judging from the fragments of loose-grained sandstone and soft
+shale which it has spared, that it would have wholly destroyed them. So
+it happened, however, that from North Berwick to the Ord Hill of
+Caithness, I had never found in the boulder-clay the slightest trace of
+an organism that could be held to belong to itself; and as it seems
+natural to build on negative evidence, if very extensive, considerably
+more than mere negative evidence, whatever the circumstances, will
+carry, I became somewhat skeptical regarding the very existence of
+boulder-fossils,--a skepticism which the worse than doubtful character
+of several supposed discoveries in the deposit served considerably to
+strengthen. The clay forms, when cut by a water-course, or assailed on
+the coast by some unusually high tide, a perpendicular precipice, which
+in the course of years slopes into a talus; and as it exhibits in most
+instances no marks of stratification, the clay of the talus--a mere
+re-formation of fragments detached by the frosts and rains from the
+exposed frontage--can rarely be distinguished from that of the original
+deposit. Now, in these consolidated slopes it is not unusual to find
+remains, animal and vegetable, of no very remote antiquity. I have seen
+a human skull dug out of the reclining base of a clay-bank once a
+precipice, fully six feet from under the surface. It might have been
+deemed the skull of some long-lived contemporary of Enoch,--one of the
+accursed race, mayhap,
+
+ "Who sinned and died before the avenging flood."
+
+But, alas! the laborer dug a little further, and struck his pickaxe
+against an old rybat that lay deeper still. There could be no mistaking
+the character of the champfered edge, that still bore the marks of the
+tool, nor that of the square perforation for the lock-bolt; and a rising
+theory, that would have referred the boulder-clay to a period in which
+the polar ice, set loose by the waters of the Noachian deluge, came
+floating southwards over the foundered land, straightway stumbled
+against it, and fell. Both rybat and skull had come from an ancient
+burying-ground, that occupies a projecting angle of the table-land
+above. I must now state, however, that my skepticism has thoroughly
+given way; and that, slowly yielding to the force of positive evidence,
+I have become as assured a believer in the _comminuted recent shells_ of
+the boulder-clay as in the belemnites of the Oölite and Lias, or the
+ganoid ichthyolites of the Old Red Sandstone.
+
+I had marked, when at Wick, on several occasions, a thick boulder-clay
+deposit occupying the southern side of the harbor, and forming an
+elevated platform, on which the higher parts of Pulteneytown are built;
+but I had noted little else regarding it than that it bears the average
+dark-gray color of the flagstones of the district, and that some of the
+granitic boulders which protrude from its top and sides are of vast
+size. On my last visit, however, rather more than two years ago, when
+sauntering along its base, after a very wet morning, awaiting the Orkney
+steamer, I was surprised to find, where a small slip had taken place
+during the rain, that it was mottled over with minute fragments of
+shells. These I examined, and found, so far as, in their extremely
+broken condition, I dared determine the point, that they belonged in
+such large proportion to one species,--the _Cyprina islandica_ of Dr.
+Fleming,--that I could detect among them only a single fragment of any
+other shell,--the pillar, apparently, of a large specimen of _Purpura
+lapillus_. Both shells belong to that class of old existences,--long
+descended, without the pride of ancient descent,--which link on the
+extinct to the recent scenes of being. _Cyprina islandica_ and _Purpura
+lapillus_ not only exist as living molluscs in the British seas, but
+they occur also as crag-shells, side by side with the dead races that
+have no place in the present fauna. At this time, however, I could but
+think of them simply in their character as recent molluscs; and as it
+seemed quite startling enough to find them in a deposit which I had once
+deemed representative of a period of death, and still continued to
+regard as obstinately unfossiliferous, I next set myself to determine
+whether it really _was_ the boulder-clay in which they occurred. Almost
+the first pebble which I disengaged from the mass, however, settled the
+point, by furnishing the evidence on which for several years past I have
+been accustomed to settle it;--it bore in the line of its longer axis,
+on a polished surface, the freshly-marked grooves and scratchings of the
+iceberg era. Still, however, I had my doubts, not regarding the deposit,
+but the shells. Might they not belong merely to the talus of this bank
+of boulder-clay?--a re-formation, in all probability, not _more_ ancient
+than the elevation of the most recent of the old coast lines,--perhaps
+greatly less so. Meeting with an intelligent citizen of Wick, Mr. John
+Cleghorn, I requested him to keep a vigilant eye on the shells, and to
+ascertain for me, when opportunity offered, whether they occurred deep
+in the deposit, or were restricted to merely the base of its exposed
+front. On my return from Orkney, he kindly brought me a small collection
+of fragments, exclusively, so far as I could judge, of _Cyprina
+islandica_, picked up in fresh sections of the clay; at the same time
+expressing 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 my
+attention was again called to it by finding, in the publication of Mr.
+Keith Johnston's admirable Geological Map of the British Islands, edited
+by Professor Edward Forbes, that other eyes than mine had detected
+shells in the boulder-clay of Caithness. "Cliffs of Pleistocene," says
+the 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 the
+neighborhood of Thurso; but, during a rather hurried visit, had lacked
+time to examine it. The omission mattered the less, however, as my
+friend Mr. Robert Dick is resident in the locality; and there are few
+men who examine more carefully or more perseveringly than he, or who can
+enjoy with higher relish the sweets of scientific research. I wrote him
+regarding Professor Forbes's decision on the boulder-clay of Wick and
+its shells; urging him to ascertain whether the boulder-clay of Thurso
+had not its shells also. And almost by return of post I received from
+him, in reply, a little packet of comminuted shells, dug out of a
+deposit of the boulder-clay, laid open by the river Thorsa, a full mile
+from the sea, and from eighty to a hundred feet over its level. He had
+detected minute fragments of shell in the clay about a twelvemonth
+before; but a skepticism somewhat similar to my own, added to the dread
+of being deceived by mere surface shells, recently derived from the
+shore in the character _of_ shell-sand, or of the edible species carried
+inland for food, and then transferred from the ash-pit to the fields,
+had not only prevented him from following up the discovery, but even
+from thinking of it as such. But he eagerly followed it up now, by
+visiting every bank of the boulder-clay in his locality within twenty
+miles of Thurso, and found them all charged, from top to bottom, with
+comminuted shells, however great their distance from the sea, or their
+elevation over it. The fragments lie thick along the course of the
+Thorsa, where the encroaching stream is scooping out the clay for the
+first time since its deposition, and laying bare the scratched and
+furrowed pebbles. They occur, too, in the depths of solitary ravines far
+amid the moors, and underlie heath, and moss, and vegetable mould, on
+the exposed hill-sides. The farm-house of Dalemore, twelve miles from
+Thurso 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 of
+marine shells. Though so barren elsewhere on the east coast of Scotland,
+the clay is everywhere in Caithness a shell-bearing deposit; and no
+sooner had Mr. Dick determined the fact for himself, at the expense of
+many a fatiguing journey, and many an hour's hard digging, than he found
+that it had been ascertained long before, though, from the very
+inadequate style in which it had been recorded, science had in scarce
+any degree benefited by the discovery. In 1802 the late Sir John
+Sinclair, distinguished for his enlightened zeal in developing the
+agricultural resources of the country, and for originating its
+statistics, employed a mineralogical surveyor to explore the underground
+treasures of the district; and the surveyor's journal he had printed
+under the title of "Minutes and Observations drawn up in the course of a
+Mineralogical Survey of the County of Caithness, ann. 1802, by John
+Busby, Edinburgh." Now, in this journal there are frequent references
+made to the occurrence of marine shells in the blue clay. Mr. Dick has
+copied for me the two following entries,--for the work itself I have
+never seen:--"1802, Sept. 7th.--Surveyed down the river [Thorsa] to
+Geize; found blue clay-marl, _intermixed with marine shells_ in great
+abundance." "Sept. 12th.--Set off this morning for Dalemore. Bored for
+shell-marl in the 'grass-park;' found it in one of the quagmires, but to
+no great extent. Bored for shell-marl in the 'house-park.' Surveyed by
+the side of the river, and found blue clay-marl in great plenty,
+_intermixed with marine shells, such as those found at Geize_. This
+place is supposed to be about twenty miles from the sea; and is one
+instance, among many in Caithness, of _the ocean's covering the inland
+country at some former period of time_."
+
+The state of keeping in which the boulder-shells of Caithness occur is
+exactly what, on the iceberg theory, might be premised. The ponderous
+ice-rafts that went grating over the deep-sea bottom, grinding down its
+rocks into clay, and deeply furrowing its pebbles, must have borne
+heavily on its comparatively fragile shells. If rocks and pebbles did
+not escape, the shells must have fared but hardly. And very hardly they
+have fared: the rather unpleasant casualty of being crushed to death
+must have been a greatly more common one in those days than in even the
+present age of railways and machinery. The reader, by passing half a
+bushel of the common shells of our shores through a barley-mill, as a
+preliminary operation in the process, and by next subjecting the broken
+fragments thus obtained to the attritive influence of the waves on some
+storm-beaten beach for a twelvemonth or two, as a finishing operation,
+may produce, when he pleases, exactly such a water-worn shelly debris as
+mottles the blue boulder-clays of Caithness. The proportion borne by the
+fragments of one species of shell to that of all the others is very
+extraordinary. The _Cyprina islandica_ is still by no means a rare
+mollusc on our Scottish shores, and may, on an exposed coast, after a
+storm, be picked up by dozens, attached to the roots of the deep-sea
+tangle. It is greatly less abundant, however, than such shells as
+_Purpura lapillus_, _Mytilus edule_, _Cardium edule_, _Littorina
+littorea_, and several others; whereas in the boulder-clay it is, in the
+proportion of at least ten to one, more abundant than all the others put
+together. The great strength of the shell, however, may have in part led
+to this result; as I find that its stronger and massier portions,--those
+of the umbo and hinge-joint,--are exceedingly numerous in proportion to
+its slimmer and weaker fragments. "The _Cyprina islandica_," says Dr.
+Fleming, in his "British Animals," "is the largest British bivalve
+shell, measuring sometimes thirteen inches in circumference, and,
+exclusively of the animal, weighing upwards of nine ounces." Now, in a
+collection of fragments of Cyprina sent me by Mr. Dick, disinterred from
+the boulder-clay in various localities in the neighborhood of Thurso,
+and weighing in all about four ounces, I have detected the broken
+remains of no fewer than _sixteen_ hinge joints. And on the same
+principle through which the stronger fragments of Cyprina were preserved
+in so much larger proportion than the weaker ones, may Cyprina
+itself have been preserved in much larger proportion than its
+more fragile neighbors. Occasionally, however,--escaped, as if by
+accident,--characteristic fragments are found of shells by no means
+very strong,--such as _Mytilus_, _Tellina_, and _Astarte_. Among the
+univalves I can distinguish _Dentalium entale_, _Purpura lapillus_,
+_Turritella terebra_, and _Littorina littorea_, all existing shells, but
+all common also to at least the later deposits of the Crag. And among
+the bivalves Mr. Dick enumerates,--besides the prevailing _Cyprina
+islandica_,--_Venus casina_, _Cardium edule_, _Cardium echinatum_,
+_Mytilus edule_, _Astarte danmoniensis_ (_sulcata_), and _Astarte
+compressa_, with a _Mactra_, _Artemis_, and _Tellina_.[15] All the
+determined species here, with the exception of _Mytilus edule_, have,
+with many others, been found by the Rev. Mr. Cumming in the
+boulder-clays of the Isle of Man; and all of them are living shells at
+the present day on our Scottish coasts. It seems scarce possible to fix
+the age of a deposit so broken in its organisms, on the principle that
+would first seek to determine its per centage of extinct shells as the
+data on which to found. One has to search sedulously and long ere a
+fragment turns up sufficiently entire for the purpose of specific
+identification, even when it belongs to a well-known living shell; and
+did the clay contain some six or eight per cent. of the extinct in a
+similarly broken condition (and there is no evidence that it contains a
+single per cent. of extinct shells), I know not how, in the
+circumstances, the fact could ever be determined. A lifetime might be
+devoted to the task of fixing their real proportion, and yet be devoted
+to it in vain. All that at present can be said is, that, judging from
+what appears, the boulder-clays of Caithness, and with them the
+boulder-clays of Scotland generally, and of the Isle of Man,--for they
+are all palpably connected with the same iceberg phenomena, and occur
+along the same zone in reference to the sea-level,--were formed during
+the _existing_ geological epoch.
+
+These details may appear tediously minute; but let the reader mark how
+very much they involve. The occurrence of recent shells largely diffused
+throughout the boulder-clays of Caithness, at all heights and distances
+from the sea at which the clay itself occurs, and not only connected
+with the iceberg phenomena by the closest juxtaposition, but also
+testifying distinctly to its agency by the extremely comminuted state in
+which we find them, tell us, not only according to old John Busby, "that
+the ocean covered the inland country at some former period of time," but
+that it covered it to a great height at a time geologically recent, when
+our seas were inhabited by exactly the same mollusca as inhabit them
+now, and so far as yet appears, by none others. I have not yet detected
+the boulder-clay at more than from six to eight hundred feet over the
+level of the sea; but the travelled boulders I have often found at more
+than a thousand feet over it; and Dr. John Fleming, the correctness of
+whose observations few men acquainted with the character of his
+researches or of his mind will be disposed to challenge, has informed me
+that he has detected the dressed and polished surfaces at least four
+hundred feet higher. There occurs a greenstone boulder, of from twelve
+to fourteen tons weight, says Mr. M'Laren, in his "Geology of Fife and
+the Lothians," on the south side of Black Hill (one of the Pentland
+range), at about fourteen hundred feet over the sea. Now fourteen or
+fifteen hundred feet, taken as the extreme height of the dressings,
+though they are said to occur greatly higher, would serve to submerge in
+the iceberg ocean almost the whole agricultural region of Scotland. The
+common hazel (_Corylus avellana_) ceases to grow in the latitude of the
+Grampians, at from one thousand two hundred to one thousand five hundred
+feet over the sea level; the common bracken (_Pteris aquilina_) at about
+the same height; and corn is never successfully cultivated at a greater
+altitude. Where the hazel and bracken cease to grow, it is in vain to
+attempt growing corn.[16] In the period of the boulder-clay, then, when
+the existing shells of our coasts lived in those inland sounds and
+friths of the country that now exist as broad plains or fertile valleys,
+the sub-aërial superficies of Scotland was restricted to what are now
+its barren and mossy regions, and formed, instead of one continuous
+land, merely three detached groups of islands,--the small Cheviot and
+Hartfell group,--the greatly larger Grampian and Ben Nevis group,--and a
+group intermediate in size, extending from Mealfourvonny, on the
+northern shores of Loch Ness, to the Maiden Paps of Caithness.
+
+The more ancient boulder-clays of Scotland seem to have been formed when
+the land was undergoing a slow process of subsidence, or, as I should
+perhaps rather say, when a very considerable area of the earth's
+surface, including the sea-bottom, as well as the eminences that rose
+over it, was the subject of a gradual depression; for little or no
+alteration appears to have taken place at the time in the _relative_
+levels of the higher and lower portions of the sinking area: the
+features of the land in the northern part of the kingdom, from the
+southern flanks of the Grampians to the Pentland Frith, seemed to have
+been fixed in nearly the existing forms many ages before, at the close,
+apparently, of the Oölitic period, and at a still earlier age in the
+Lammermuir district, to the south. And so the sea around our shores must
+have deepened in the ratio in which the hills sank. The evidence of this
+process of subsidence is of a character tolerably satisfactory. The
+dressed surfaces occur in Scotland, most certainly, as I have already
+stated on the authority of Dr. Fleming, at the height of fourteen
+hundred feet over the present sea-level; it has been even said, at
+fully twice that height, on the lofty flanks of Schehallion,--a
+statement, however, which I have had hitherto no opportunity of
+verifying. They may be found, too, equally well marked, under the
+existing high-water line; and it is obviously impossible that the
+dressing process could have been going on at the higher and lower levels
+at the same time. When the icebergs were grating along the more elevated
+rocks, the low-lying ones must have been buried under from three to
+seven hundred fathoms of water,--a depth from three to seven times
+greater, be it remembered, than that at which the most ponderous iceberg
+could 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 land
+was subjected, zone after zone, to the sweep of the armed ice from its
+higher levels _downwards_, or during a period of subsidence, in which it
+was subjected to the ice, zone after zone, from its lower levels
+_upwards_. And that it was the lower, not the higher levels, that were
+first dressed, appears evident from the circumstance, that though on
+these lower levels we find the rocks covered up by continuous beds of
+the boulder-clay, varying generally from twenty to a hundred feet in
+thickness, they are, notwithstanding, as completely dressed under the
+clay as on the heights above. Had it been a rising land that was
+subjected to the attrition of the icebergs, the debris and dressings of
+the higher rocks would have protected the lower from the attrition; and
+so the thick accumulation of boulder-clay which overlies the old coast
+line, for instance, would have rested, not on dressed, but on undressed
+surfaces. The barer rocks of the lower levels might of course exhibit
+their scratchings and polishings, like those of the higher; but wherever
+these scratchings and polishings occurred in the inferior zones, no
+thick protecting stratum of boulder-clay would be found overlying them;
+and, _vice versa_, wherever in these zones there occurred thick beds of
+boulder-clay, there would be detected on the rock beneath no scratchings
+and polishings. In order to _dress_ the entire surface of a country from
+the sea-line and under it to the tops of its hills, and at the same time
+to cover up extensive portions of its low-lying rocks with vast deposits
+of clay, it seems a necessary condition of the process that it should be
+carried on piece-meal from the lower level upwards,--not from the higher
+downwards.
+
+It interested me much to find, that while from one set of appearances I
+had been inferring the gradual subsidence of the land during the period
+of the boulder-clay, the Rev. Mr. Cumming of King William's College had
+arrived, from the consideration of quite a different class of phenomena,
+at a similar conclusion. "It appears to me highly probable," I find him
+remarking, in his lately published "Isle of man," "that at the
+commencement of the boulder period there was a gradual sinking of this
+area [that of the island]. Successively, therefore, the points at
+different degrees of elevation were brought within the influence of the
+sea, and exposed to the rake of the tides, charged with masses of ice
+which had been floated off from the surrounding shores, and bearing on
+their 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 a
+peculiarly-compounded granite, which occurs in the southern part of the
+island, about seven hundred feet over the level of the sea. There rise
+on the western side of the boss two hills, one of which attains to the
+elevation of nearly seven hundred, and the other of nearly eight hundred
+feet over it; and yet both hills to their summits are mottled over with
+granite boulders, furnished by the comparatively low-lying boss. One of
+these travelled masses, fully two tons in weight, lies not sixty feet
+from the summit of the loftier hill, at an altitude of nearly fifteen
+hundred feet over the sea. Now, it seems extremely difficult to conceive
+of 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 of
+the hills. Had the boulder period been a period of elevation, or merely
+a stationary period, during which the land neither rose nor sank, the
+travelled boulders would not now be found resting at higher levels than
+that of the parent rock whence they were derived. We occasionally meet
+on our shores, after violent storms from the sea, stones that have been
+rolled from their place at low ebb to nearly the line of flood; but we
+always find that it was by the waves of the rising, not of the falling
+tide, that their transport was effected. For whatever removals of the
+kind take place during an ebbing sea are invariably in an opposite
+direction;--they are removals, not from lower to higher levels, but from
+higher to lower.
+
+The upper subsoils of Scotland bear frequent mark of the elevatory
+period which succeeded this period of depression. The boulder-clay has
+its numerous intercalated arenaceous and gravelly beds, which belong
+evidently to its own era; but the numerous surface-beds of stratified
+sand and gravel by which in so many localities it is overlaid belong
+evidently to a later time. When, after possibly a long protracted
+period, the land again began to rise, or the sea to fall, the superior
+portions of the boulder-clay must have been exposed to the action of the
+tides and waves; and the same process of separation of parts must have
+taken place on a large scale, which one occasionally sees taking place
+in the present time on a comparatively small one, in ravines of the same
+clay swept by a streamlet. After every shower, the stream comes down
+red and turbid with the finer and more argillaceous portions of the
+deposit; minute accumulations of sand are swept to the gorge of the
+ravine, or cast down in ripple-marked patches in its deeper pools; beds
+of 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 sort
+of washing process of an analogous character, must have taken place in
+the materials of the more exposed portions of the boulder-clay, during
+the gradual emergence of the land; and hence, apparently, those
+extensive beds of sand and gravel which in so many parts of the kingdom
+exist, in relation to the clay, as a superior or upper subsoil; hence,
+too, occasional beds of a purer clay than that beneath, divested of a
+considerable portion of its arenaceous components, and of almost all its
+pebbles and boulders. This _washed_ clay,--a re-formation of the boulder
+deposit, cast down, mostly in insulated beds in quiet localities, where
+the absence of currents suffered the purer particles held in suspension
+by the water to settle,--forms, in Scotland at least, with, of course,
+the exception of the ancient fire-clays of the Coal Measures, the true
+brick and tile clays of the agriculturist and architect.
+
+It is to these superior beds that all the recent shells yet found above
+the existing sea-level in Scotland, from the Dornoch Frith and beyond
+it, to beyond the Frith of Forth, seem to belong. Their period is much
+less remote than that of the shells of the boulder-clay, and they rarely
+occur in the same comminuted condition. They existed, it would appear,
+not during the chill twilight period, when the land was in a state of
+subsidence, but during the after period of cheerful dawn, when hill-top
+after hill-top was emerging from the deep, and the close of each passing
+century witnessed a broader area of dry land in what is now Scotland,
+than the close of the century which had gone before. Scandinavia is
+similarly rising at the present day, and presents with every succeeding
+age a more extended breadth of surface. Many of the boulder-stones seem
+to have been cast down where they now lie, during this latter time. When
+they occur, as in many instances, high on bare hill-tops, from five to
+fifteen hundred feet over the sea-level, with neither gravel nor
+boulder-clay beside them, we of course cannot fix their period. They may
+have been dropped by ice-floes or shore-ice, where we now find them, at
+the commencement of the period of elevation, after the clay had been
+formed; or they may have been deposited by more ponderous icebergs
+during its formation, when the land was yet sinking, though during the
+subsequent rise the clay may have been washed from around them to lower
+levels. The boulders, however, which we find scattered over the plains
+and less elevated hill-sides, with beds of the washed gravel or sand
+interposed between them and the clay, must have been cast down where
+they lie, during the elevatory ages. For, had they been washed out of
+the clay, they would have lain, not _over_ the greatly lighter sands and
+gravels, but _under_ them. Would that they could write their own
+histories! The autobiography of a single boulder, with notes on the
+various floras which had sprung up around it, and the various classes of
+birds, beasts, and insects by which it had been visited, would be worth
+nine-tenths of all the autobiographies ever published, and a moiety of
+the 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 wooded
+inflection of the bank, formed by the old coast line, in which there
+stood, about two centuries ago, a meal-mill, with the cottage of the
+miller, and which was once known as the scene of one of those
+supernaturalities that belong to the times of the witch and the fairy.
+The upper anchoring-place of the bay lies nearly opposite the
+inflection. A shipmaster, who had moored his vessel in this part of the
+roadstead, some time in the latter days of the first Charles, was one
+fine evening sitting alone on deck, awaiting the return of his seamen,
+who had gone ashore, and amusing himself in watching the lights that
+twinkled from the scattered farm-houses, and in listening, in the
+extreme stillness of the calm, to the distant lowing of cattle, or the
+abrupt bark of the herdsman's dog. As the hour wore later, the sounds
+ceased, and the lights disappeared,--all but one solitary taper, that
+twinkled from the window of the miller's cottage. At length, however, it
+also disappeared, and all was dark around the shores of the bay, as a
+belt of black velvet. Suddenly a hissing noise was heard overhead; the
+shipmaster looked up, and saw what seemed to be one of those meteors
+known as falling stars, slanting athwart the heavens in the direction of
+the cottage, and increasing in size and brilliancy as it neared the
+earth, until the wooded ridge and the shore could be seen as distinctly
+from the ship-deck as by day. A dog howled piteously from one of the
+out-houses,--an owl whooped from the wood. The meteor descended until it
+almost touched the roof, when a cock crew from within; its progress
+seemed instantly arrested; it stood still, rose about the height of a
+ship's mast, and then began again to descend. The cock crew a second
+time; it rose as before; and, after mounting considerably higher than at
+first, again sank in the line of the cottage, to be again arrested by
+the crowing of the cock. It mounted yet a third time, rising higher
+still; and, in its last descent, had almost touched the roof, when the
+faint clap of wings was heard as if whispered over the water, followed
+by a still louder note of defiance from the cock. The meteor rose with a
+bound, and, continuing to ascend until it seemed lost among the stars,
+did not again appear. Next night, however, at the same hour, the same
+scene was repeated in all its circumstances: the meteor descended, the
+dog howled, the owl whooped, the cock crew. On the following morning the
+shipmaster visited the miller's, and, curious to ascertain how the
+cottage would fare when the cock was away, he purchased the bird; and,
+sailing from the bay before nightfall, did not return until about a
+month 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: it
+had vanished. As he approached the anchoring ground, he could discern a
+heap of blackened stones occupying the place where it had stood; and he
+was informed on going ashore, that it had been burnt to the ground, no
+one knew how, on the very night he had quitted the bay. He had it
+re-built and furnished, says the story, deeming himself what one of the
+old schoolmen perhaps term the _occasional_ cause of the disaster. He
+also returned the cock,--probably a not less important benefit,--and no
+after accident befel the cottage. About fifteen years ago there was a
+human 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 body
+had been huddled up twofold in a hole; and this discovery led to that of
+the story, which, though at one time often repeated and extensively
+believed, had been suffered to sleep in the memories of a few elderly
+people 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 well
+seen before,--the exact relation borne by the deep red stone of the
+Cromarty quarries to the ichthyolite beds of the system. It occupies the
+same place, and belongs to the same period, as those superior beds of
+the Lower Old Red Sandstone which are so largely developed in the cliffs
+of Dunnet Head in Caithness, and of Tarbet Ness in Ross-shire, and which
+were at one time regarded as forming, north of the Grampians, the
+analogue of the New Red Sandstone. I paced it across the strata this
+morning, in the line of the ravine, and found its thickness over the
+upper fish-beds, though I was far from reaching its superior layers,
+which are buried here in the sea, to be rather more than five hundred
+feet. The fossiliferous beds occur a few hundred yards below the
+dwelling-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 which
+I found a small specimen of Cheiracanthus. The projecting edge of some
+fossil-charged bed had been struck, mayhap, by an iceberg, and dashed
+into ruins, just as the subsiding land had brought the spot within reach
+of the attritive ice; and the broken heap thus detached had been shortly
+afterwards covered up, without mixture of any other deposit, by the red
+boulder-clay. On the previous day I had detected the fish-beds in
+another new locality,--one of the ravines of the lawn of Cromarty
+House,--where the gray shale, concealed by a covering of soil and sward
+for 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 this
+ravine of the boulder-clay, was to ascertain whether the beds did not
+also occur in a ravine of the parish of Avoch, some eight or nine miles
+away, which, when lying a-bed one night in Edinburgh, I remembered
+having crossed when a boy, at a point which lies considerably out of the
+ordinary route of the traveller. I had remarked on this occasion, as the
+resuscitated recollection intimated, that the precipices of the Avoch
+ravine bore, at the unfrequented point, the peculiar aspect which I
+learned many years after to associate with the ichthyolitic member of
+the system; and I was now quite as curious to test the truth of a sort
+of vignette landscape, transferred to the mind at an immature period of
+life, and preserved in it for full thirty years, as desirous to extend
+my knowledge of the fossiliferous beds of a system to the elucidation of
+which I had peculiarly devoted myself.
+
+As the traveller reaches the flat moory uplands of the parish, where the
+water stagnates amid heath and moss over a thin layer of peaty soil, he
+finds the underlying boulder-clay, as shown in the chance sections,
+spotted and streaked with patches of a grayish-white. There is the same
+mixture of arenaceous and aluminous particles in the white as in the red
+portions of the mass; for, as we see so frequently exemplified in the
+spots and streaks of the Red Sandstone formations, whether Old or New,
+the coloring matter has been discharged without any accompanying change
+of composition in the substance which it pervaded;--evidence enough that
+the red dye must be something distinct from the substance itself, just
+as the dye of a handkerchief is a thing distinct from the silk or cotton
+yarn of which the handkerchief has been woven. The stagnant water above,
+acidulated by its various vegetable solutions, seems to have been in
+some way connected with these appearances. In every case in which a
+crack through the clay gives access to the oozing moisture, we see the
+sides bleached, for several feet downwards, to nearly the color of
+pipe-clay; we find the surface, too, when it has been divested of the
+vegetable soil, presenting for yards together the appearance of sheets
+of half-bleached linen: the red ground of the clay has been acted upon
+by the percolating fluid, as the red ground of a Bandanna handkerchief
+is acted upon through the openings in the perforated lead, by the
+discharging chloride of lime. The peculiar chemistry through which these
+changes are effected might be found, carefully studied, to throw much
+light on similar phenomena in the older formations. There are quarries
+in the New Red Sandstone in which almost every mass of stone presents a
+different shade of color from that of its neighboring mass, and quarries
+in the Old Red the strata of which we find streaked and spotted like
+pieces of calico. And their variegated aspect seems to have been
+communicated, in every instance, not during deposition, nor after they
+had been hardened into stone but when, like the boulder-clay, they
+existed in an intermediate state. Be it remarked, too, that the red clay
+here,--evidently derived from the abrasion of the red rocks beneath,--is
+in dye and composition almost identical with the substance on which, as
+an unconsolidated sandstone, the bleaching influences, whatever their
+character, had operated in the Palæozoic period, so many long ages
+before;--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 of
+notice, that the bleached lines of the clay exhibit, viewed
+horizontally, when the overlying vegetable mould has been removed, and
+the whitened surface in immediate contact with it paired off, a
+polygonal arrangement, like that assumed by the cracks in the bottom of
+clayey pools dried up in summer by the heat of the sun. Can these
+possibly indicate the ancient rents and fissures of the boulder-clay,
+formed, immediately after the upheaval of the land, in the first process
+of drying, and remaining afterwards open enough to receive what the
+uncracked portions of the surface excluded,--the acidulated bleaching
+fluid?
+
+The kind of ferruginous pavement of the boulder-clay known to the
+agriculturist as _pan_, which may be found extending in some cases its
+iron cover over whole districts,--sealing them down to barrenness, as
+the iron and brass sealed down the stump of Nebuchadnezzar's tree,--is,
+like the white strips and blotches of the deposit, worthy the careful
+notice of the geologist. It serves to throw some light on the origin of
+those continuous bands of clayey or arenaceous ironstone, which in the
+older formations in which vegetable matter abounds, whether Oölitic or
+Carboniferous, are of such common occurrence. The _pan_ is a stony
+stratum, scarcely less indurated in some localities than sandstone of
+the average hardness, that rests like a pavement on the surface of the
+boulder-clay, and that generally bears atop a thin layer of sterile
+soil, darkened by a russet covering of stunted heath. The binding cement
+of the _pan_ is, as I have said, ferruginous, and seems to have been
+derived from the vegetable covering above. Of all plants, the heaths are
+found to contain most iron. Nor is it difficult to conceive how, in
+comparatively flat tracts of heathy moor, where the surface water sinks
+to the stiff subsoil, and on which one generation of plants after
+another has been growing and decaying for many centuries, the minute
+metallic particles, disengaged in the process of decomposition, and
+carried down by the rains to the impermeable clay, should, by
+accumulating there, bind the layer on which they rest, as is the nature
+of ferruginous oxide, into a continuous stony crust. Wherever this _pan_
+occurs, we find the superincumbent soil doomed to barrenness,--arid and
+sun-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 the
+school-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 not
+unkindly subsoil below. He set himself to work in his leisure hours, and
+bit by bit laid bare and broke up the pavement. The upper mould, long
+divorced from the clay on which it had once rested, was again united to
+it; the piece of ground began gradually to alter its character for the
+better; and when I last passed the way, I found it, though in a state of
+sad neglect, covered by a richer vegetation than it had ever borne under
+the more careful management of my friend. This ferruginous pavement of
+the boulder-clay may be deemed of interest to the geologist, as a
+curious instance of deposition in a dense medium, and as illustrative
+of 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 have
+incidentally referred in the story of the Miller of Resolis.[17] Modern
+improvement has not yet marred it by the plough; and so it still bears
+on its brown surface many a swelling tumulus and flat oblong mound,
+and--where the high road of the district passes along its eastern
+edge--the huge gray cairn, raised, says tradition, over the body of an
+ancient Pictish king. But the contest of which it was the scene belongs
+to a profoundly dark period, ere the gray dawn of Scottish history
+began. As shown by the remains of ancient art occasionally dug up on the
+moor, it was a conflict of the times of the stone battle-axe, the flint
+arrow-head, and the unglazed sepulchral urn, unindebted for aught of its
+symmetry to the turning-lathe,--times when there were heroes in
+abundance, but no scribes. And the cairn, about a hundred feet in length
+and breadth, by about twenty in height, with its long hoary hair of
+overgrown lichen waving in the breeze, and the trailing club-moss
+shooting upwards from its base along its sides, bears in its every
+lineament full mark of its great age. It is a mound striding across the
+stream of centuries, to connect the past with the present. And yet,
+after all, what a mere matter of yesterday its extreme antiquity is! My
+explorations this morning bore reference to but the later eras of the
+geologist; the portion of the geologic volume which I was attempting to
+decipher and translate formed the few terminal paragraphs of its
+concluding chapter. And yet the _finis_ had been added to them for
+thousands of years ere this latter antiquity began. The boulder-clay had
+been formed and deposited; the land, in rising over the waves, had had
+many a huge pebble washed out of its last formed red stratum, or dropped
+upon it by ice-floes from above; and these pebbles lay mottling the
+surface of this barren moor for mile after mile, bleaching pale to the
+rains and the sun, as the meagre and mossy soil received, in the lapse
+of centuries, its slow accessions of organic matter, and darkened around
+them. And then, for a few brief hours, the heath, no longer solitary,
+became a wild scene of savage warfare,--of waving arms and threatening
+faces,--and of human lives violently spilled, gushing forth in blood;
+and, when all was over, the old weathered boulders were heaped up above
+the slain, and there began a new antiquity in relation to the pile in
+its gathered state, that bore reference to man's short lifetime, and to
+the recent introduction of the species. The child of a few summers
+speaks of the events of last year as long gone by; while his father
+advanced into middle life, regards them as still fresh and recent.
+
+I reached the Burn of Killein,--the scene of my purposed
+explorations,--where it bisects the Inverness road; and struck down the
+rocky ravine, in the line of the descending strata and the falling
+streamlet, towards the point at which I had crossed it so many years
+before. First I passed along a thick bed of yellow stone,--next over a
+bed of stratified clay. "The little boy," I said, "took correct note of
+what he saw, though without special aim at the time, and as much under
+the guidance of a mere observative instinct as Dame Quickly, when she
+took 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 of
+her interview with old Sir John when he promised to marry her. These
+are unequivocally the ichthyolitic beds, whether they contain
+ichthyolites or no." The first nodule I laid open presented inside
+merely a pale oblong patch in the centre, which I examined in vain with
+the lens, though convinced of its organic origin, for a single scale.
+Proceeding farther down the stream, I picked a nodule out of a second
+and lower bed, which contained more evidently its organism,--a
+finely-reticulated fragment, that at first sight reminded me of some
+delicate festinella of the Silurian system. It proved, however, to be
+part of the tail of a Cheiracanthus, exhibiting--what is rarely
+shown--the interior surfaces of those minute rectangular scales which in
+this genus lie over the caudal fin, ranged in right lines. A second
+nodule presented me with the spines of _Diplacanthus striatus_; and
+still farther down the stream,--for the beds are numerous here, and
+occupy in vertical extent very considerable space in the system,--I
+detected a stratum of bulky nodules charged with fragments of
+Coccosteus, belonging chiefly to two species,--_Coccosteus decipiens_
+and _Coccosteus cuspidatus_. All the specimens bore conclusive evidence
+regarding the geologic place and character of the beds in which they
+occur; and in one of the number, a specimen of _Coccosteus decipiens_,
+sufficiently fine to be transferred to my knapsack, and which now
+occupies its corner in my little collection, the head exhibits all its
+plates in their proper order, and the large dorsal plate, though
+dissociated from the nail-like attachment of the nape, presents its
+characteristic breadth entire. It was the plates of this species, first
+found in the flagstones of Caithness, which were taken for those of a
+fresh-water tortoise; and hence apparently its specific name,
+_decipiens_;--it is the _deceiving_ Coccosteus. I disinterred, in the
+course of my explorations, as many nodules as lay within reach,--now and
+then longing for a pickaxe, and a companion robust and persevering
+enough to employ it with effect; and after seeing all that was to be
+seen in the bed of the stream and the precipices, I retraced my steps up
+the dell to the highway. And then, striking off across the moor to the
+north,--ascending in the system as I climbed the eminence, which forms
+here the central ridge of the old Maolbuie Common,--I spent some little
+time in a quarry of pale red sandstone, known, from the moory height on
+which it has been opened, as the quarry of the Maolbuie. But here, as
+elsewhere, the folds of that upper division of the Lower Old Red in
+which it has been excavated contain nothing organic. Why this should be
+so universally the case,--for in Caithness, Orkney, Cromarty, and Ross,
+wherever, in short, this member of the system is unequivocally
+developed, it is invariably barren of remains,--cannot, I suspect, be
+very satisfactorily explained. Fossils occur both over and under it, in
+rocks that seem as little favorable to their preservation; but during
+that 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 Statistical
+Account of the Parish of Avoch as comprising at least the analogues of
+three vast geologic systems. The Great Conglomerate, and the thick bed
+of coarse sandstone of corresponding character that lies over it,
+compose all which is not primary rock of that south-eastern ridge of the
+district which forms the shores of the Moray Frith; and _they_ are
+represented in the Account as Old Red Sandstone proper. Then, next in
+order,--forming the base of a parallel ridge,--come those sandstone and
+argillaceous bands to which the ichthyolite beds belong; and these
+though at the time the work appeared their existence in the locality
+could be but guessed at, are described as representatives of the Coal
+Measures. Last of all there occur those superior sandstones of the Lower
+Old Red formation in which the quarry of the Maolbuie has been opened,
+and which are largely developed in the central or _backbone_ ridge of
+the district. "And these," says the writer, "we have little hesitation
+in assigning to the _New_ Red, or variegated Sandstone formation." I
+remember that some thirteen years ago,--in part misled by authority, and
+in part really afraid to represent beds of such an enormous aggregate
+thickness as all belonging to one inconsiderable formation,--for such
+was the character of the Old Red Sandstone at the time,--I ventured,
+though hesitatingly, and with less of detail, on a somewhat similar
+statement regarding the sandstone deposits of the parish of Cromarty.
+But true it is, notwithstanding, that the stratified rocks of the Black
+Isle are composed generally, not of the analogues of three systems, but
+of merely a fractional portion of a single system,--a fact previously
+established in other parts of the district, and which my discovery of
+this day in the Burn of Killein served yet farther to confirm in
+relation to that middle portion of the tract in which the parish of
+Avoch 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 yet
+larger sum of epochs and of ages.
+
+The sun had got low in the western sky, and I had at least some eight or
+nine miles of rough road still before me; but the day had been a happy
+and 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 night
+long ere I reached Cromarty. Next morning I quitted the town for the
+upper reaches of the Frith, to examine yet further the superficial
+deposits 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 passing
+direct through the village, I took the western road which winds along
+the shore towards Strathpeffer, skirting on the right the ancient
+province of the Munroes. The day was clear and genial; and the
+wide-spreading woods of this part of the country, a little touched by
+their autumnal tints of brown and yellow, gave a warmth of hue to the
+landscape, which at an earlier season it wanted. A few slim streaks of
+semi-transparent mist, that barred the distant hill-peaks, and a few
+towering piles of intensely white cloud, that shot across the deep blue
+of the heavens, gave warning that the earlier part of the day was to be
+in all probability the better part of it, and that the harvest of
+observation which it was ultimately to yield might be found to depend on
+the prompt use made of the passing hour. What first attracts the
+attention of the geologist, in journeying westwards, is the altered
+color of the boulder-clay, as exhibited in ditches by the way-side, or
+along the shore. It no longer presents that characteristic red
+tint,--borrowed from the red sandstone beneath,--so prevalent over the
+Black 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, or
+over the flagstones of Caithness. The altered color here is evidently a
+consequence of the large development, in Ferindonald and Strathpeffer,
+of the ichthyolitic members of the Old Red, existing chiefly as fetid
+bituminous breccias and dark-colored sandstones: the boulder-clay of
+the locality forms the dressings, not of red, but of blackish-gray
+rocks; and, as almost everywhere else in Scotland, its trail lies to the
+east of the strata, from which it was detached in the character of an
+impalpable mud by the age-protracted grindings of the denuding agent. It
+abounds in masses of bituminous breccia, some of which, of great size,
+seem to have been drifted direct from the valley of Strathpeffer, and
+are identical in structure and composition with the rock in which the
+mineral springs of the Strath have their rise, and to which they owe
+their peculiar qualities.
+
+After walking on for about eight miles, through noble woods and a lovely
+country, I struck from off the high road at the pretty little village of
+Evanton, and pursued the course of the river Auldgrande, first through
+intermingled fields and patches of copsewood, and then through a thick
+fir wood, to where the bed of the stream contracts from a
+boulder-strewed bottom of ample breadth, to a gloomy fissure, so deep
+and dark, that in many places the water cannot be seen, and so narrow,
+that the trees which shoot out from the opposite sides interlace their
+branches atop. Large banks of the gray boulder-clay, laid open by the
+river, and charged with fragments of dingy sandstone and dark-colored
+breccia, testify, along the lower reaches of the stream, to the near
+neighborhood of the ichthyolitic member of the Old Red; but where the
+banks contract, we find only its lowest member, the Great Conglomerate.
+This last is by far the most picturesque member of the system,--abrupt
+and bold of outline in its hills, and mural in its precipices. And
+nowhere does it exhibit a wilder or more characteristic beauty than at
+the tall narrow portal of the Auldgrande, where the river,--after
+wailing for miles in a pent-up channel, narrow as one of the lanes of
+old Edinburgh, and hemmed in by walls quite as perpendicular, and
+nearly twice as lofty,--suddenly expands, first into a deep brown pool,
+and then into a broad tumbling stream, that, as if permanently affected
+in temper by the strict severity of the discipline to which its early
+life had been subjected, frets and chafes in all its after course, till
+it loses itself in the sea. The banks, ere we reach the opening of the
+chasm, have become steep, and wild, and densely wooded; and there stand
+out on either hand, giant crags, that plant their iron feet in the
+stream; here girdled with belts of rank succulent shrubs, that love the
+damp shade and the frequent drizzle of the spray; and there hollow and
+bare, with their round pebbles sticking out from the partially
+decomposed surface, like the piled-up skulls in the great underground
+cemetery of the Parisians. Massy trees, with their green fantastic roots
+rising high over the scanty soil, and forming many a labyrinthine recess
+for the frog, the toad, and the newt, stretch forth their gnarled arms
+athwart the stream. In front of the opening, with but a black deep pool
+between, there lies a midway bank of huge stones. Of these, not a few of
+the more angular masses still bear, though sorely worn by the torrent,
+the mark of the blasting iron, and were evidently tumbled into the chasm
+from the fields above. But in the chasm there was no rest for them, and
+so the arrowy rush of the water in the confined channel swept them down
+till they dropped where they now lie, just where the widening bottom
+first served to dissipate the force of the current. And over the sullen
+pool in front we may see the stern pillars of the portal rising from
+eighty to a hundred feet in height, and scarce twelve feet apart, like
+the massive obelisks of some Egyptian temple; while, in gloomy vista
+within, projection starts out beyond projection, like column beyond
+column in some narrow avenue of approach to Luxor or Carnac. The
+precipices are green, with some moss or byssus, that like the miner,
+chooses a subterranean habitat,--for here the rays of the sun never
+fall; the dead, mossy water beneath, from which the cliffs rise so
+abruptly, bears the hue of molten pitch; the trees, fast anchored in the
+rock, shoot out their branches across the opening, to form a thick
+tangled roof, at the height of a hundred and fifty feet overhead; while
+from the recesses within, where the eye fails to penetrate, there issues
+a combination of the strangest and wildest sounds ever yet produced by
+water: there is the deafening rush of the torrent, blent as if with the
+clang of hammers, the roar of vast bellows, and the confused gabble of a
+thousand voices. The sun, hastening to its setting, shone red, yet
+mellow, through the foliage of the wooded banks on the west, where, high
+above, they first curve from the sloping level of the fields, to bend
+over the stream; or fell more direct on the jutting cliffs and bosky
+dingles opposite, burnishing them as if with gold and fire; but all was
+coldly-hued at the bottom, where the torrent foamed gray and chill under
+the brown shadow of the banks; and where the narrow portal opened an
+untrodden way into the mysterious recesses beyond, the shadow deepened
+almost into blackness. The scene lacked but a ghost to render it
+perfect. An apparition walking from within like the genius in one of
+Goldsmith's essays "along the surface of the water," would have
+completed it at once.
+
+Laying hold of an overhanging branch, I warped myself upwards from the
+bed of the stream along the face of a precipice, and, reaching its
+sloping top, forced my way to the wood above, over a steep bank covered
+with tangled underwood, and a slim succulent herbage, that sickened for
+want of the sun. The yellow light was streaming through many a shaggy
+vista, as, threading my way along the narrow ravine as near the steep
+edge as the brokenness of the ground permitted, I reached a huge mass
+of travelled rock, that had been dropped in the old boulder period
+within a yard's length of the brink. It is composed of a characteristic
+granitic gneiss of a pale flesh-color, streaked with black, that, in the
+hand specimen, can scarce be distinguished from a true granite, but
+which, viewed in the mass, presents, in the arrangement of its intensely
+dark mica, evident marks of stratification, and which is remarkable,
+among other things, for furnishing almost all the very large boulders of
+this part of the country. Unlike many of the granitic gneisses, it is a
+fine solid stone, and would cut well. When I had last the pleasure of
+spending a few hours with the late Mr. William Laidlaw, the trusted
+friend of Sir Walter Scott, he intimated to me his intention,--pointing
+to a boulder of this species of gneiss,--of having it cut into two
+oblong pedestals, with which he purposed flanking the entrance to the
+mansion-house of the chief of the Rosses,--the gentleman whose property
+he at that time superintended. It was, he said, both in appearance and
+history, the most remarkable stone on the lands of Balnagown; and so he
+was desirous that it should be exhibited at Balnagown Castle to the best
+advantage. But as he fell shortly after into infirm health, and resigned
+his situation, I know not that he ever carried his purpose into effect.
+The boulder here, beside the chasm, measures about twelve feet in length
+and breadth, by from five to six in height, and contains from eight to
+nine hundred cubic feet of stone. On its upper table-like surface I
+found a few patches of moss and lichen, and a slim reddening tuft of the
+_Vaccinium myrtillus_, still bearing, late as was the season, its
+half-dozen blaeberries. This pretty little plant occurs in great
+profusion along the steep edges of the Auldgrande, where its delicate
+bushes, springing up amid long heath and ling, and crimsoned by the
+autumnal tinge, gave a peculiar warmth and richness this evening to
+those bosky spots under the brown trees, or in immediate contact with
+the dark chasm on which the sunlight fell most strongly; and on all the
+more perilous projections, I found the dark berries still shrivelling on
+their stems. Thirty years earlier I would scarce have left them there;
+and the more perilous the crag on which they had grown, the more
+deliciously would they have eaten. But every period of life has its own
+playthings; and I was now chiefly engaged with the deep chasm and the
+huge boulder. Chasm and boulder had come to have greatly more of
+interest to me than the delicate berries, or than even that sovereign
+dispeller of ennui and low spirits, an adventurous scramble among the
+cliffs.
+
+In what state did the chasm exist when the huge boulder,--detached,
+mayhap, at the close of a severe frost, from some island of the
+archipelago that is now the northern Highlands of Scotland,--was
+suffered to drop beside it, from some vast ice-floe drifting eastwards
+on the tide? In all probability merely as a fault in the Conglomerate,
+similar to many of those faults which in the Coal Measures of the
+southern districts we find occupied by continuous dikes of trap. But in
+this northern region, where the trap-rocks are unknown, it must have
+been filled up with the boulder-clay, or with some still more ancient
+accumulation of debris. And when the land had risen, and the streams,
+swollen into rivers, flowed along the hollows which they now occupy, the
+loose rubbish would in the lapse of ages gradually wash downwards to the
+sea, as the stones thrown from the fields above were washed downwards in
+a later time; and thus the deep fissure would ultimately be cleared out.
+The boulder-stones lie thickly in this neighborhood, and over the
+eastern half of Ross-shire, and the Black Isle generally; though for
+the last century they have been gradually disappearing from the more
+cultivated tracts on which there were fences or farm-steadings to be
+built, or where they obstructed the course of the plough. We found them
+occurring in every conceivable situation,--high on hill-sides, where the
+shepherd crouches beside them for shelter in a shower,--deep in the open
+sea, where they entangle the nets of the fisherman,--on inland moors,
+where in some remote age they were painfully rolled together, to form
+the Druidical circle or Picts'-house,--or on the margin of the coast,
+where they had been piled over one another at a later time, as
+protecting bulwarks against the encroachments of the waves. They lie
+strewed more sparingly over extended plains, or on exposed heights, than
+in hollows sheltered from the west by high land, where the current, when
+it dashed high on the hill-sides, must have been diverted from its
+easterly course, and revolved in whirling eddies. On the top of the fine
+bluff hill of Fyrish, which I so admired to-day, each time I caught a
+glimpse of its purple front through the woods, and which shows how noble
+a mountain the Old Red Sandstone may produce, the boulders lie but
+sparsely. I especially marked, however, when last on its summit, a
+ponderous traveller of a vividly green hornblende, resting on a bed of
+pale yellow sandstone, fully a thousand feet over the present high-water
+level. But towards the east, in what a seaman would term the _bight_ of
+the hill, the boulders have accumulated in vast numbers. They lie so
+closely piled along the course of the river Alness, about half a mile
+above the village, that it is with difficulty the waters, when in flood,
+can force their passage through. For here, apparently, when the tide
+swept along the hill-side, many an ice-floe, detained in the shelter by
+the revolving eddy, dashed together in rude collision, and shook their
+stony burdens to the bottom. Immediately to the east of the low
+promontory on which the town of Cromarty is built there is another
+extensive accumulation of boulders, some of them of great size. They
+occupy exactly the place to which I have oftener than once seen the
+drift-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 a
+violent storm from, the east, and the fragments ground against each
+other into powder. And here, I doubt not, of old, when the sea stood
+greatly higher than now, and the ice-floes were immensely larger and
+more numerous than those formed, in the existing circumstances, in the
+upper shallows of the Frith, would the fierce north-east have charged
+home with similar effect, and the broken masses have divested themselves
+of their boulders.
+
+The Highland chieftain of one of our old Gaelic traditions conversed
+with a boulder-stone, and told to it the story which he had sworn never
+to 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 tell
+theirs to me. But, lacking the fine ear of Hans Anderson, the Danish
+poet, who can hear flowers and butterflies talk, and understand the
+language of birds, I have as yet succeeded in extracting from them no
+such 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 circumstances
+connected with the places which they have occupied ever since they gave
+over travelling, would be exceedingly curious ones? Among the boulder
+group to the east of Cromarty, the most ponderous individual stands so
+exactly on the low-water line of our great Lammas tides, that though its
+shoreward edge may be reached dry-shod from four to six times every
+twelvemonth, no one has ever succeeded in walking dry shod round it. I
+have seen a strong breeze from the west, prolonged for a few days,
+prevent its drying, when the Lammas stream was at its point of lowest
+ebb, by from a foot to eighteen inches,--an indication, apparently, that
+to that height the waters of the Atlantic may be heaped up against our
+shores by the impulsion of the wind. And the recurrence, during at least
+the last century, of certain ebbs each season, which, when no disturbing
+atmospheric phenomena interfere with their operation, are sure to lay it
+dry, demonstrate, that during that period no change, even the most
+minute, has taken place on our coasts, in the relative levels of sea and
+shore. The waves have considerably encroached, during even the last
+half-century, on the shores immediately opposite; but it must have been,
+as the stone shows, simply by the attrition of the waves, and the
+consequent lowering of the beach,--not through any rise in the ocean, or
+any depression of the land.
+
+The huge boulder here has been known for ages as the _Clach Malloch_, or
+accursed stone, from the circumstance, says tradition, that a boat was
+once wrecked upon it during a storm, and the boatmen drowned. Though
+little more than seven feet in height, by about twelve in length, and
+some eight or nine in breadth, its situation on the extreme line of ebb
+imparts a peculiar character to the various productions, animal and
+vegetable, which we find adhering to it. They occur in zones, just as on
+lofty hills the botanist finds his agricultural, moorland, and alpine
+zones rising in succession as he ascends, the one over the other. At its
+base, where the tide rarely falls, we find two varieties of _Lobularia
+digitata_, dead man's hand, the orange colored and the pale, with a
+species of sertularia; and the characteristic vegetable is the
+rough-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_,--remarkable
+chiefly for its sharp siliceous spicula and its strong phosphoric smell;
+and the characteristic vegetable is the smooth-stemmed tangle, or
+queener. In yet another zone we find the common limpet and the vesicular
+kelp-weed; and the small gray balanus and serrated kelp-weed form the
+productions of the top. We may see exactly the same zones occurring in
+broad belts along the shore,--each zone indicative of a certain
+overlying depth of water; but it seems curious enough to find them all
+existing 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, with
+notes of those atmospheric effects on the tides, and of that stability
+for ages of the existing sea-level, which it indicates,--would of itself
+form one very interesting chapter: its geological history would furnish
+another. It would probably tell, if it once fairly broke silence and
+became autobiographical, first of a feverish dream of intense molten
+heat and overpowering pressure; and then of a busy time, in which the
+free molecules, as at once the materials and the artisans of the mass,
+began to build, each according to its nature, under the superintendence
+of a curious chemistry,--here forming sheets of black mica, there rhombs
+of a dark-green hornblende and a flesh-colored feldspar, yonder
+amorphous masses of a translucent quartz. It would add further, that at
+length, when the slow process was over, and the entire space had been
+occupied to the full by plate, molecule, and crystal, the red fiery
+twilight of the dream deepened into more than midnight gloom, and a
+chill unconscious night descended on the sleeper. The vast Palæozoic
+period passes by,--the scarce less protracted Secondary ages come to a
+close,--the Eocene, Miocene, Pliocene epochs are ushered in and
+terminate,--races begin and end,--families and orders are born and die;
+but the dead, or those whose deep slumber admits not of dreams, take no
+note of time; and so it would tell how its long night of unsummed
+centuries seemed, like the long night of the grave, compressed into a
+moment.
+
+The marble silence is suddenly broken by the rush of an avalanche, that
+tears away the superincumbent masses, rolling them into the sea; and the
+ponderous block, laid open to the light, finds itself on the bleak shore
+of a desert island of the northern Scottish archipelago, with a wintry
+scene of snow-covered peaks behind, and an ice-mottled ocean before. The
+winter passes, the cold severe spring comes on, and day after day the
+field-ice goes floating by,--now gray in shadow, now bright in the sun.
+At length vegetation, long repressed, bursts forth, but in no profuse
+luxuriance. A few dwarf birches unfold their leaves amid the rocks; a
+few sub-arctic willows hang out their catkins beside the swampy runnels;
+the golden potentilla opens its bright flowers on slopes where the
+evergreen _Empetrum nigrum_ slowly ripens its glossy crow-berries; and
+from where the sea-spray dashes at full tide along the beach, to where
+the snow gleams at midsummer on the mountain-summits, the thin short
+sward is dotted by the minute cruciform stars of the scurvy-grass, and
+the crimson blossoms of the sea-pink. Not a few of the plants of our
+existing sea-shores and of our loftier hill-tops are still identical in
+species; but wide zones of rich herbage, with many a fertile field and
+many a stately tree, intervene between the bare marine belts and the
+bleak insulated eminences; and thus the alpine, notwithstanding its
+identity with the littoral flora, has been long divorced from it; but in
+this early time the divorce had not yet taken place, nor for ages
+thereafter; and the same plants that sprang around the sea-margin rose
+also along the middle slopes to the mountain-summits. The landscape is
+treeless and bare, and a hoary lichen whitens the moors, and waves, as
+the years pass by, in pale tufts, from the disinterred stone, now
+covered with weather-stains, green and gray, and standing out in bold
+and yet bolder relief from the steep hill-side as the pulverizing frosts
+and washing rains bear away the lesser masses from around it. The sea is
+slowly rising, and the land, in proportion, narrowing its flatter
+margins, and yielding up its wider valleys to the tide; the low green
+island of one century forms the half-tide skerry, darkened with algæ, of
+another, and in yet a third exists but as a deep-sea rock. As its summit
+disappears, groups of hills, detached from the land, become islands,
+skerries, deep-sea rocks, in turn. At length the waves at full wash
+within a few yards of the granitic block. And now, yielding to the
+undermining influences, just as a blinding snow-shower is darkening the
+heavens, it comes thundering down the steep into the sea, where it lies
+immediately beneath the high-water line, surrounded by a wide float of
+pulverized ice, broken by the waves. A keen frost sets in; the
+half-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; the
+consolidated ice-field moves, floats, is detached from the shore, creeps
+slowly outwards into the offing, bearing atop the boulder; and,
+finally, caught by the easterly current, it drifts away into the open
+ocean. And then, far from its original bed in the rock, amid the
+jerkings of a cockling sea, the mass breaks through the supporting
+float, and settles far beneath, amid the green and silent twilight of
+the bottom, where its mosses and lichens yield their place to stony
+encrustations of deep purple, and to miniature thickets of arboraceous
+zoöphites.
+
+The many-colored Acalephæ float by; the many-armed Sepiadæ shoot over;
+while shells that love the profounder depths,--the black Modiola and
+delicate Anomia,--anchor along the sides of the mass; and where thickets
+of the deep-sea tangle spread out their long, streamer-like fronds to
+the tide, the strong Cyprina and many-ribbed Astarte shelter by scores
+amid the reticulations of the short woody stems and thick-set roots. A
+sudden darkness comes on, like that which fell upon Sinbad when the
+gigantic roc descended upon him; the sea-surface is fully sixty fathoms
+over head; but even at this great depth an enormous iceberg grates
+heavily against the bottom, crushing into fragments in its course,
+Cyprina, Modiola, Astarte, with many a hapless mollusc besides; and
+furrows into deep grooves the very rocks on which they lie. It passes
+away; and, after many an unsummed year has also passed, there comes
+another change. The period of depression and of the boulder-clay is
+over. The water has shallowed as the sea-line gradually sank, or the
+land was propelled upwards by some elevatory process from below; and
+each time the tide falls, the huge boulder now raises over the waters
+its broad forehead, already hung round with flowing tresses of brown
+sea-weed, and looks at the adjacent coast. The country has strangely
+altered 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 pale
+gleam of local glaciers, and snow-streaked on its loftier hill-tops. But
+vast forests of dark pine sweep along its hill-sides or selvage its
+shores; and the sheltered hollows are enlivened by the lighter green of
+the oak, the ash, and the elm. Human foot has not yet imprinted its
+sward; but its brute inhabitants have become numerous. The cream-colored
+coat of the wild bull,--a speck of white relieved against a ground of
+dingy green,--may be seen far amid the pines, and the long howl of the
+wolf heard from the nearer thickets. The gigantic elk raises himself
+from his lair, and tosses his ponderous horns at the sound; while the
+beaver, in some sequestered dell traversed by a streamlet, plunges
+alarmed into his deep coffer-dam, and, rising through the submerged
+opening of his cell, shelters safely within, beyond reach of pursuit.
+The great transverse valleys of the country, from its eastern to its
+western coasts, are still occupied by the sea,--they exist as broad
+ocean-sounds; and many of the detached hills rise around its shores as
+islands. The northern Sutor forms a bluff high island, for the plains of
+Easter Ross are still submerged; and the Black Isle is in reality what
+in later times it is merely in name,--a sea-encircled district, holding
+a midway place between where the Sound of the great Caledonian Valley
+and the Sounds of the Valleys of the Conon and Carron open into the
+German Ocean. Though the climate has greatly softened, it is still, as
+the local glaciers testify, ungenial and severe. Winter protracts his
+stay through the later months of spring; and still, as of old, vast
+floats of ice, detached from the glaciers, or formed in the lakes and
+shallower estuaries of the interior, come drifting down the Sounds every
+season, and disappear in the open sea, or lie stranded along the shores.
+
+Ages have again passed: the huge boulder, from the further sinking of
+the waters, lies dry throughout the neaps, and is covered only at the
+height of each stream-tide; there is a float of ice stranded on the
+beach, which consolidates around it during the neap, and is floated off
+by the stream; and the boulder, borne in its midst, as of old, again
+sets out a voyaging. It has reached the narrow opening of the Sutors,
+swept downwards by the strong ebb current, when a violent storm from the
+north-east sets in; and, constrained by antagonist forces,--the sweep of
+the tide on the one hand, and the roll of the waves on the other,--the
+ice-raft deflects into the little bay that lies to the east of the
+promontory now occupied by the town of Cromarty. And there it tosses,
+with a hundred more jostling in rude collision; and at length bursting
+apart, the _Clach Malloch_, its journeyings forever over, settles on its
+final resting-place. In a period long posterior it saw the ultimate
+elevation of the land. Who shall dare say how much more it witnessed, or
+decide that it did not form the centre of a rich forest vegetation, and
+that the ivy did not cling round it, and the wild rose shed its petals
+over it, when the Dingwall, Moray, and Dornoch Friths existed as
+sub-aërial valleys, traversed by streams that now enter the sea far
+apart, but then gathered themselves into one vast river, that, after it
+had received the tributary waters of the Shin and the Conon, the Ness
+and the Beauly, the Helmsdale, the Brora, the Findhorn, and the Spey,
+rolled on through the flat secondary formations of the outer Moray
+Frith,--Lias, and Oölite, and Greensand, and Chalk,--to fall into a gulf
+of the Northern Ocean which intervened between the coasts of Scotland
+and Norway, but closed nearly opposite the mouth of the Tyne, leaving a
+broad level plain to connect the coasts of England with those of the
+Continent! Be this as it may, the present sea-coast became at length the
+common boundary of land and sea. And the boulder continued to exist for
+centuries still later as a nameless stone, on which the tall gray heron
+rested moveless and ghost-like in the evenings, and the seal at mid-day
+basked 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 loud
+sorrow the boulder received its name. Such is the probable history,
+briefly told, because touched at merely a few detached points, of the
+huge _Clach Malloch_. The incident of the second voyage here is of
+course altogether imaginary, in relation to at least this special
+boulder; but it is to second voyages only that all our positive evidence
+testifies in the history of its class. The boulders of the St. Lawrence,
+so well described by Sir Charles Lyell, voyage by thousands every
+year;[18] and there are few of my northern readers who have not heard of
+the short trip taken nearly half a century ago by the boulder of Petty
+Bay, in the neighborhood of Culloden.
+
+A Highland minister of the last century, in describing, for Sir John
+Sinclair's Statistical Account, a large sepulchral cairn in his parish,
+attributed its formation to an _earthquake_! Earthquakes, in these
+latter times, are introduced, like the heathen gods of old, to bring
+authors out of difficulties. I do not think, however,--and I have the
+authority of the old critic for at least half the opinion,--that either
+gods or earthquakes should be resorted to by poets or geologists,
+without special occasion: they ought never to be called in except as a
+last resort, when there is no way of getting on without them. And I am
+afraid there have been few more gratuitous invocations of the earthquake
+than on a certain occasion, some five years ago, when it was employed by
+the inmate of a north-country manse, at once to account for the removal
+of the boulder-stone of Petty Bay, and to annihilate at a blow the
+geology of the Free Church editor of the _Witness_. I had briefly stated
+in one of my papers, in referring to this curious incident, that the
+boulder of the bay had been "borne nearly three hundred yards outwards
+into the sea by an enclasping mass of ice, in the course of a single
+tide." "Not at all," said the northern clergyman; "the cause assigned is
+wholly insufficient to produce such an effect. All the ice ever formed
+in the bay would be insufficient to remove such a boulder a distance,
+not of three hundred, but even of _three_ yards." The removal of the
+stone "_is referrible to an_ EARTHQUAKE!" The country, it would seem,
+took a sudden lurch, and the stone tumbled off. It fell athwart the flat
+surface of the bay, as a soup tureen sometimes falls athwart the table
+of 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 so
+tremendous nothing should have fallen off except the stone. In an
+earthquake on an equally great scale, in the present unsettled state of
+society, endowed clergymen would, I am afraid, be in some danger of
+falling out of their charges.
+
+The boulder beside the Auldgrande has not only, like the _Clach
+Malloch_, a geologic history of its own, but, what some may deem of
+perhaps equal authority, a _mythologic_ history also. The inaccessible
+chasm, impervious to the sun, and ever resounding the wild howl of the
+tortured water, was too remarkable an object to have escaped the notice
+of the old imaginative Celts; and they have married it, as was their
+wont, to a set of stories quite as wild as itself. And the boulder,
+occupying a nearly central position in its course, just where the dell
+is deepest, and narrowest, and blackest, and where the stream bellows
+far underground in its wildest combination of tones, marks out the spot
+where the more extraordinary incidents have happened, and the stranger
+sights have been seen. Immediately beside the stone there is what seems
+to be the beginning of a path leading down to the water; but it stops
+abruptly at a tree,--the last in the descent,--and the green and dewy
+rock 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 saw
+a beautiful child smiling and stretching out its little hand to him, as
+it hung half in air by a slender twig. But he well knew that it was no
+child, but an evil spirit, and that if he gave it the assistance which
+it seemed to crave, he would be pulled headlong into the chasm, and
+never heard of more. And the boulder still bears, it is said, on its
+side,--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 as
+dark, as when, so long before, the lady of Balconie took her last walk
+along the sides of the Auldgrande; and I struck up for the little alpine
+bridge of a few undressed logs, which has been here thrown across the
+chasm, at the height of a hundred and thirty feet over the water. As I
+pressed through the thick underwood, I startled a strange-looking
+apparition in one of the open spaces beside the gulf, where, as shown by
+the profusion of plants of _vaccinium_, the blaeberries had greatly
+abounded in their season. It was that of an extremely old woman,
+cadaverously pale and miserable looking, with dotage glistening in her
+inexpressive, rheum-distilling eyes, and attired in a blue cloak, that
+had been homely when at its best, and was now exceedingly tattered. She
+had been poking with her crutch among the bushes, as if looking for
+berries; but my approach had alarmed her; and she stood muttering in
+Gaelic what seemed, from the tones and repetition, to be a few
+deprecatory sentences. I addressed her in English, and inquired what
+could have brought to a place so wild and lonely, one so feeble and
+helpless. "Poor object!" she muttered in reply,--"poor object!--very
+hungry;" but her scanty English could carry her no further. I slipped
+into her hand a small piece of silver, for which she overwhelmed me with
+thanks and blessings; and, bringing her to one of the broader avenues,
+traversed by a road which leads out of the wood, I saw her fairly
+entered upon the path in the right direction, and then, retracing my
+steps crossed the log-bridge. The old woman,--little, I should suppose
+from her appearance, under ninety,--was I doubt not, one of our
+ill-provided Highland paupers, that starve under a law which, while it
+has dried up the genial streams of voluntary charity in the country and
+presses hard upon the means of the humbler classes, alleviates little,
+if at all, the sufferings of the extreme poor. Amid present suffering
+and privation there had apparently mingled in her dotage some dream of
+early enjoyment,--a dream of the days when she had plucked berries, a
+little herd-girl, on the banks of the Auldgrande; and the vision seemed
+to have sent her out, far advanced in her second childhood, to poke
+among the bushes with her crutch.
+
+My old friend the minister of Alness,--uninstalled at the time in his
+new dwelling,--was residing in a house scarce half a mile from the
+chasm, to which he had removed from the parish manse at the Disruption;
+and, availing myself of an invitation of long standing, I climbed the
+acclivity 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 weeks
+beside the mineral springs of Strathpeffer, in the hope of recruiting a
+constitution greatly weakened by excessive labor, and that the entire
+household at home consisted of but two of the young ladies his
+daughters, and their ward, the little Buchubai Hormazdji.
+
+And who, asks the reader, is this Buchubai Hormazdji? A little Parsi
+girl, in her eighth year, the daughter of a Christian convert from the
+ancient faith of Zoroaster, who now labors in the Free Church Mission at
+Bombay. Buchubai, his only child, was on his conversion, forcibly taken
+from 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 many
+thousand 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 with
+whose sisters I now found her. The little girl, sadly in want of a
+companion this evening, was content, for lack of a better, to accept of
+me as a playfellow; and she showed me all her rich eastern dresses, and
+all her toys, and a very fine emerald, set in the oriental fashion,
+which, when she was in full costume, sparkled from her embroidered
+tiara. I found her exceedingly like little girls at home, save that she
+seemed more than ordinarily observant and intelligent,--a consequence
+mayhap, of that early development, physical and mental, which
+characterizes her race. She submitted to me, too, when I had got very
+much into her confidence, a letter she had written to her papa from
+Strathpeffer, which was to be sent him by the next Indian mail. And as
+it may serve to show that the style of little girls whose fathers were
+fire-worshippers for three thousand years and more differs in no
+perceptible quality from the style of little girls whose fathers in
+considerably less than three thousand were Pagans, Papists, and
+Protestants by turns, besides passing through the various intermediate
+forms 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 at
+present at Strathpeffer. She is much better now than when she was
+travelling. 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 pray
+also. There are a great many at water here for sick people to drink out
+of. 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 will
+write to her.--Dearest papa," etc.
+
+It was a simple thought, which required no reach of mind whatever to
+grasp,--and yet an hour spent with little Buchubai made it tell upon me
+more powerfully than ever before,--that there is in reality but one
+human nature on the face of the earth. Had I simply read of Buchubai
+Hormazdji corresponding with her father Hormazdji Pestonji, and sending
+her dear love to her old companion Narsion Skishadre, the names so
+specifically different from those which we ourselves employ in
+designating our country folk, would probably have led me, through a
+false association, to regard the parties to which they attach as
+scarcely less specifically different from our country folk themselves. I
+suspect we are misled by associations of this kind when we descant on
+the peculiarities of race as interposing insurmountable barriers to the
+progress of improvement, physical or mental. We overlook, amid the
+diversities of form, color, and language, the specific identity of the
+human family. The Celt, for instance, wants, it is said, those powers of
+sustained application which so remarkably distinguish the Saxon; and so
+we agree on the expediency of getting rid of our poor Highlanders by
+expatriation as soon as possible, and of converting their country into
+sheep-walks and hunting-parks. It would be surely well to have
+philosophy enough to remember what, simply through the exercise of a
+wise faith, the Christian missionary never forgets, that the
+peculiarities of race are not specific and ineradicable, but mere
+induced habits and idiosyncracies engrafted on the stock of a common
+nature by accident of circumstance or development; and that, as they
+have been wrought into the original tissue through the protracted
+operation of one set of causes, the operation of another and different
+set, wisely and perseveringly directed, could scarce fail to unravel and
+work them out again. They form no part of the inherent design of man's
+nature, but have merely stuck to it in its transmissive passage
+downwards and require to be brushed off. There was a time, some four
+thousand years ago, when Celt and Saxon were represented by but one man
+and his wife, with their children and their children's wives; and some
+sixteen or seventeen centuries earlier all the varieties of the
+species,--Caucasian and Negro, Mongolian and Malay,--lay close packed up
+in the world's single family. In short, Buchubai's amusing prattle
+proved to me this evening no bad commentary on St. Paul's sublime
+enunciation to the Athenians, that God has "made of one blood all
+nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth." I was amused to
+find that the little girl, who listened intently as I described to the
+young ladies all I had seen and knew of the Auldgrande, had never before
+heard of a ghost, and could form no conception of one now. The ladies
+explained, described, defined; carefully guarding all they said,
+however, by stern disclaimers against the ghost theory altogether, but
+apparently to little purpose. At length Buchubai exclaimed, that she now
+knew what they meant, and that she herself had seen a great many ghosts
+in India. On explanation, however, her ghosts, though quite frightful
+enough, turned out to be not at all spiritual: they were things of
+common occurrence in the land she had come from,--exposed bodies of the
+dead.
+
+Next morning--as the white clouds and thin mist-streaks of the preceding
+day had fairly foretold--was close and wet; and the long trail of vapor
+which rises from the chasm of the Auldgrande in such weather, and is
+known to the people of the neighborhood as the "smoke of the lady's
+baking," hung, snake-like, over the river. About two o'clock the rain
+ceased, hesitatingly and doubtfully, however, as if it did not quite
+know its own mind; and there arose no breeze to shake the dank grass, or
+to dissipate the thin mist-wreath that continued to float over the river
+under a sky of deep gray. But the ladies, with Buchubai, impatient to
+join their friends at Strathpeffer, determined on journeying
+notwithstanding; and, availing myself of their company and their
+vehicle, I travelled on with them to Dingwall, where we parted. I had
+purposed exploring the gray dingy sandstones and fetid breccias
+developed along the shores on the northern side of the bay, about two
+miles from the town, and on the sloping acclivities between the
+mansion-houses of Tulloch and Fowlis; but the day was still unfavorable,
+and the sections seemed untemptingly indifferent; besides, I could
+entertain no doubt that the dingy beds here are identical in place with
+those of Cadboll on the coast of Easter Ross, which they closely
+resemble, and which alternate with the lower ichthyolitic beds of the
+Old Red Sandstone; and so, for the present at least, I gave up my
+intention 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 breeze
+from the west, just strong enough to shake the wet leaves, the sky flung
+off its thick mantle of gray. I sauntered out along the high-road, in
+the direction of my old haunts at Conon-side, with, however, no
+intention of walking so far. But the reaches of the river, a little in
+flood, shone temptingly through the dank foliage, and the cottages under
+the Conon woods glittered clear on their sweeping hill-side, "looking
+cheerily out" into the landscape; and so I wandered on and on, over the
+bridge, and along the river, and through the pleasure grounds of
+Conon-house, till I found myself in the old solitary burying-ground
+beside the Conon, which, when last in this part of the country, I was
+prevented from visiting by the swollen waters. The rich yellow light
+streamed through the interstices of the tall hedge of forest-trees that
+encircles the eminence, once an island, and fell in fantastic patches on
+the gray tombstone and the graves. The ruinous little chapel in the
+corner, whose walls a quarter of a century before I had distinctly
+traced, had sunk into a green mound; and there remained over the sward
+but the arch-stone of a Gothic window, with a portion of the moulded
+transom attached, to indicate the character and style of the vanished
+building. The old dial-stone, with the wasted gnomon, has also
+disappeared; and the few bright-colored _throch-stanes_, raw from the
+chisel, that had been added of late years to the group of older
+standing, did not quite make up for what time in the same period had
+withdrawn. One of the newer inscriptions, however, recorded a curious
+fact. 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, it
+was said, as man and wife, for more than sixty years: and now, here was
+their tombstone and epitaph. They had lived on long after my departure;
+and when, as the seasons passed, men and women whose births and baptisms
+had taken place since their wedding-day were falling around them well
+stricken in years, death seemed to have forgotten _them_; and when he
+came at last, their united ages made up well nigh two centuries. The
+wife had seen her ninety-sixth and the husband his hundred and second
+birthday. It does not transcend the skill of the actuary to say how many
+thousand 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 two
+for every man who attains to an age so extraordinary; but he would
+require to get beyond his tables in order to reckon up the chances
+against the woman destined to attain to ninety-six being courted and
+married 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, just
+where the scenery, exquisite throughout, is most delightful, I returned
+through the woods, and spent half an hour by the way in the cottage of a
+kindly-hearted woman, now considerably advanced in years, whom I had
+known, when she was in middle life, as the wife of one of the Conon-side
+hinds, and who not unfrequently, when I was toiling at the mallet in the
+burning sun, hot and thirsty, and rather loosely knit for my work, had
+brought 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 the
+object of it. She well remembered my master, and another Cromarty man
+who had been grievously injured, when undermining an old building, by
+the sudden fall of the erection; but she could bethink her of no third
+Cromarty man whatever. "Eh, sirs!" she at length exclaimed, "I daresay
+ye'll be just the sma' prentice laddie. Weel, what will young folk no
+come out o'? They were amaist a' stout big men at the wark except
+yoursel'; 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 for
+the 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 entered
+on our talk together, we gossipped on till the night fell, giving and
+receiving information regarding our old acquaintances of a quarter of a
+century before; of whom we found that no inconsiderable proportion had
+already 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 dark
+to Dingwall, where I spent the night. I could fain have called by the
+way on my old friend and brother-workman, Mr. Urquhart,--of a very
+numerous party of mechanics employed at Conon-side in the year 1821 the
+only individual now resident in this part of the country; but the
+lateness 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 the
+village, and which has done so much to banish the water-wraith from the
+fords; and then striking off to the right, I crossed, by a path
+comparatively little frequented, the insulated group of hills which
+separates the valley of the Conon from that of the Peffer. The day was
+mild and pleasant, and the atmosphere clear; but the higher hills again
+exhibited their ominous belts of vapor, and there had been a slight
+frost during the night,--at this autumnal season the almost certain
+precursor 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, a
+picturesque, boldly-featured deposit, traversed by narrow, mural-sided
+valleys, and tempested by bluff abrupt eminences. Its hills are greatly
+less confluent than those of most of the other sedimentary formations of
+Scotland; and their insulated summits, recommended by their steep sides
+and limited areas to the old savage Vaubans of the Highlands, furnished,
+ere the historic eras began, sites for not a few of the ancient
+hill-forts of the country. The vitrified fort of Craig Phadrig, of the
+Ord Hill of Kessock, and of Knock Farril,--two of the number, the first
+and last, being the most celebrated erections of their kind in the north
+of Scotland,--were all formed on hills of the Great Conglomerate. The
+Conglomerate exists here as a sort of miniature Highlands, set down at
+the northern side of a large angular bay of Palæozoic rock, which
+indents the _true_ Highlands of the country, and which exhibits in its
+central area a prolongation of the long moory ridge of the Black Isle,
+formed, as I have already had occasion to remark, of an _upper_ deposit
+of the same lower division of the Old Red,--a deposit as noticeable for
+affecting a confluent, rectilinear character in its elevations, as the
+Conglomerate is remarkable for exhibiting a detached and undulatory one.
+Exactly the same features are presented by the same deposits in the
+neighborhood of Inverness; the _undulatory_ Conglomerate composing, to
+the north and west of the town, the picturesque wavy ridge comprising
+the twin-eminences of Munlochy Bay, the Ord Hill of Kessock, Craig
+Phadrig, and the fir-covered hill beyond in the line of the Great
+Valley; while on the south and east the _rectilinear_ ichthyolitic
+member of the system, with the arenaceous beds that lie over it, form
+the continuous straight-lined ridge which runs on from beyond the moor
+of the Leys to beyond the moor of Culloden. There is a pretty little
+loch in this dwarf Highlands of the Brahan district, into which the old
+Celtic prophet Kenneth Ore, when, like Prospero, he relinquished his
+art, buried "deep beyond plummet sound" the magic stone in which he was
+wont to see the distant and the future. And with the loch it contains a
+narrow, hermit-like dell, bearing but a single row of fields, and these
+of small size, along its flat bottom, and whose steep gray sides of
+rustic Conglomerate resemble Cyclopean walls. It, besides, includes
+among its hills the steep hill of Knock Farril, which, rising bluff and
+bold immediately over the southern slopes of Strathpeffer, adds so
+greatly to the beauty of the valley, and bears atop perhaps the finest
+specimen of the vitrified fort in Scotland; and the bold frontage of
+cliff presented by the group to the west, over the pleasure grounds of
+Brahan, is, though on no very large scale, one of the most
+characteristic of the Conglomerate formation which can be seen
+anywhere. It is formed of exactly such cliffs as the landscape gardener
+would make if he could,--cliffs with their rude prominent pebbles
+breaking the light over every square foot of surface, and furnishing
+footing, by their innumerable projections, to many a green tuft of moss,
+and many a sweet little flower. Some of the masses, too, that have
+rolled down from the precipices among the Brahan woods far below, and
+stand up, like the ruins of cottages, amid the trees, are of singular
+beauty,--worth all the imitation-ruins ever erected, and obnoxious to
+none of the disparaging associations which the mere show and
+make-believe of the artificial are sure always to awaken.
+
+Whatever exhibited an aspect in any degree extraordinary was sure to
+attract the notice of the old Highlanders,--an acutely observant race,
+however slightly developed their reflective powers; and the great
+natural objects which excited their attention we always find associated
+with some traditionary story. It is said that in the Conglomerate cliffs
+above Brahan, a retainer of the Mackenzie, one of the smiths of the
+tribe, discovered a rich vein of silver, which he wrought by stealth,
+until he had filled one of the apartments of his cottage with bars and
+ingots. But the treasure, it is added, was betrayed by his own
+unfortunate vanity, to his chief, who hanged him in order to serve
+himself his heir; and no one since his death has proved ingenious enough
+to convert the rude rock into silver. Years had, I found, wrought their
+changes amid the miniature Highlands of the Conglomerate. The sapplings
+of the straggling wood on the banks of Loch Ousy,--the pleasant little
+lake, or lochan rather, of this upland region,--that I remembered having
+seen scarce taller than myself, had shot into vigorous treehood; and the
+steep slopes of Knock Farril, which I had left covered with their dark
+screen of pine, were now thickly mottled over with half-decayed stumps,
+and bore that peculiarly barren aspect which tracts cleared of their
+wood so frequently assume in their transition state, when the plants
+that flourished in the shade have died out in consequence of the
+exposure, and plants that love the open air and the unbroken sunshine
+have not yet sprung up in their place. I found the southern acclivities
+of the hill covered with scattered masses of vitrified stone, that had
+fallen from the fortalice atop; and would recommend to the collector in
+quest of a characteristic specimen, that instead of laboring, to the
+general detriment of the pile, in detaching one from the walls above, he
+should set himself to seek one here. The blocks, uninjured by the
+hammer, exhibit, in most cases, the angular character of the original
+fragments better than those forcibly detached from the mass, and
+preserve in fine keeping those hollower interstices which were but
+partially filled with the molten matter, and which, when shattered by a
+blow, break through and lose their character.
+
+One may spend an hour very agreeably on the green summit of Knock
+Farril. And at almost all seasons of the year a green summit it
+is,--greener considerably than any other hill-top in this part of the
+country. The more succulent grasses spring up rich and strong within the
+walls, here and there roughened by tufts of nettles, tall and rank, and
+somewhat perilous of approach,--witnesses, say the botanists, that man
+had once a dwelling in the immediate neighborhood. The green luxuriance
+which characterizes so many of the more ancient fortalices of Scotland
+seems satisfactorily accounted for by Dr. Fleming, in his "Zoölogy of
+the Bass." "The summits and sides of those hills which were occupied by
+our ancestors as _hill-forts_," says the naturalist, "usually exhibit a
+far richer herbage than corresponding heights in the neighborhood with
+the 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 of
+the district by a hostile tribe, the cattle were driven, especially
+during the night, as to places of safety, and sent out to pasture in the
+neighborhood during the day. And the droppings of these collected herds
+would, as takes place in analogous cases at present, speedily improve
+the soil to such an extent as to induce a permanent fertility." The
+further instance adduced by the Doctor, in showing through what
+protracted periods causes transitory in themselves may remain palpably
+influential in their effects, is curiously suggestive of the old
+metaphysical idea, that as every effect has its cause, "recurring from
+cause to cause up to the abyss of eternity, so every cause has also its
+effects, linked forward in succession to the end of time." On the bleak
+moor of Culloden the graves of the slain still exist as patches of green
+sward, surrounded by a brown groundwork of stunted heather. The animal
+matter,--once the nerves, muscles, and sinews of brave men,--which
+originated the change, must have been wholly dissipated ages ago. But
+the effect once produced has so decidedly maintained itself, that it
+remains not less distinctly stamped upon the heath in the present day
+than it could have been in the middle of the last century, only a few
+years after the battle had been stricken.
+
+The vitrification of the rampart which on every side incloses the grassy
+area has been more variously, but less satisfactorily, accounted for
+than the green luxuriance within. It was held by Pennant to be an effect
+of volcanic fire, and that the walls of this and all our other vitrified
+strongholds are simply the crater-rims of extinct volcanoes,--a
+hypothesis wholly as untenable in reference to the hill-forts as to the
+lime-kilns of the country: the vitrified forts are as little volcanic as
+the vitrified kilns. Williams, the author of the "Mineral Kingdom," and
+one of our earlier British geologists, after deciding, on data which his
+peculiar 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 designedly
+induced, in order to cement into solid masses accumulations of loose
+materials. Lord Woodhouselee advocated an opposite view. Resting on the
+fact that the vitrification is but of partial occurrence, be held that
+it had been produced, not of design by the builders of the forts, but in
+the process of their demolition by a besieging enemy, who, finding, as
+he premised, a large portion of the ramparts composed of wood, had
+succeeded in setting them on fire. This hypothesis, however, seems quite
+as untenable as that of Pennant. Fires not unfrequently occur in cities,
+among crowded groups of houses, where walls of stone are surrounded by a
+much greater profusion of dry woodwork than could possibly have entered
+into 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 thickness
+fused throughout? The sandstone columns of the aisles of the Old
+Greyfriars in Edinburgh, surrounded by the woodwork of the galleries,
+the flooring, the seating, and the roof, were wasted, during the fire
+which destroyed the pile, into mere skeletons of their former selves;
+but though originally not more than three feet in diameter, they
+exhibited no marks of vitrescency. And it does not seem in the least
+probable that the stonework of the Knock Farril rampart could, if
+surrounded by wood at all, have been surrounded by an amount equally
+great, in proportion to its mass, as that which enveloped the
+aisle-columns of the Old Greyfriars.
+
+The late Sir George Mackenzie of Coul adopted yet a fourth view. He
+held that the vitrification is simply an effect of the ancient
+beacon-fires kindled to warn the country of an invading enemy. But how
+account, on this hypothesis, for ramparts continuous, as in the case of
+Knock Farril, all round the hill? A powerful fire long kept up might
+well fuse a heap of loose stones into a solid mass; the bonfire lighted
+on the summit of Arthur Seat in 1842, to welcome the Queen on her first
+visit to Scotland, particularly fused numerous detached fragments of
+basalt, and imparted, in some spots to the depth of about half an inch,
+a vesicular structure to the solid rock beneath. But no fire, however
+powerful, could have constructed a rampart running without break for
+several hundred feet round an insulated hill-top. "To be satisfied,"
+said Sir George, "of the reason why the signal-fires should be kindled
+on or beside a heap of stones, we have only to imagine a gale of wind to
+have arisen when a fire was kindled on the bare ground. The fuel would
+be blown about and dispersed, to the great annoyance of those who
+attended. The plan for obviating the inconvenience thus occasioned which
+would occur most naturally and readily would be to raise a heap of
+stones, on either side of which the fire might be placed to windward;
+and to account for the vitrification appearing all round the area, it is
+only necessary to allow the inhabitants of the country to have had a
+system of signals. A fire at one end might denote something different
+from a fire at the other, or in some intermediate part. On some
+occasions two or more fires might be necessary, and sometimes a fire
+along the whole line. It cannot be doubted," he adds, "that the rampart
+was originally formed with as much regularity as the nature of the
+materials would allow, both in order to render it more durable, and to
+make it serve the purposes of defence." This, I am afraid, is still
+very unsatisfactory. A fire lighted along the entire line of a wall
+inclosing nearly an acre of area could not be other than a very
+attenuated, wire-drawn line of fire indeed, and could never possess
+strength enough to melt the ponderous mass of rampart beneath, as if it
+had been formed of wax or resin. A thousand loads of wood piled in a
+ring 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 a
+thousand, or half a thousand, loads could have been cut down, collected,
+and fired, an invading enemy would have found time enough to moor his
+fleet and land his forces, and possess himself of the lower country.
+Again, the unbroken continuity of the vitrified line militates against
+the signal-system theory. Fire trod so closely upon the heels of fire,
+that the vitrescency induced by the one fire impinged on and mingled
+with the vitrescency induced by the others beside it. There is no other
+mode of accounting for the continuity of the fusion; and how could
+definite meanings possibly be attached to the various parts of a line so
+minutely graduated, that the centre of the fire kindled on any one
+graduation could be scarce ten feet apart from the centre of the fire
+kindled on any of its two neighboring graduations? Even by day, the
+exact compartment which a fire occupied could not be distinguished, at
+the distance of half a mile, from its neighboring compartments, and not
+at all by night, at any distance, from even the compartments farthest
+removed from it. Who, for instance, at the distance of a dozen miles or
+so, could tell whether the flame that shone out in the darkness, when
+all other objects around it were invisible, was kindled on the east or
+west end of an eminence little more than a hundred yards in length? Nay,
+who could determine,--for such is the requirement of the
+hypothesis,--whether it rose from a compartment of the summit a hundred
+feet distant from its west or east end, or from a compartment merely
+ninety or a hundred and ten feet distant from it? The supposed signal
+system, added to the mere beacon hypothesis, is palpably untenable.
+
+The theory of Williams, however, which is, I am inclined to think, the
+true one in the main, seems capable of being considerably modified and
+improved by the hypothesis of Sir George. The hill-fort,--palpably the
+most primitive form of fortalice or stronghold originated in a
+mountainous country,--seems to constitute man's first essay towards
+neutralizing, by the art of fortification, the advantages of superior
+force on the side of an assailing enemy. It was found, on the discovery
+of New Zealand, that the savage inhabitants had already learned to erect
+exactly such hill-forts amid the fastnesses of that country as those
+which were erected two thousand years earlier by the Scottish aborigines
+amid 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 a
+period not less ancient than that of the first barbarous wars of
+Scotland, when, though tribe battled with tribe in fierce warfare, like
+the red men of the West with their brethren ere the European had landed
+on their shores, navigation was yet in so immature a state in Northern
+Europe as to secure to them an exemption from foreign invasion. In an
+after age, however, when the roving Vikings had become formidable, many
+of the eminences originally selected, from _their inaccessibility_, as
+sites for hill-forts, would come to be chosen, from _their prominence in
+the landscape_, as stations for beacon-fires. And of course the
+previously erected ramparts, higher always than the inclosed areas,
+would furnish on such hills the conspicuous points from which the fires
+could be best seen. Let us suppose, then, that the rampart-crested
+eminence of Knock Farril, seen on every side for many miles, has become
+in 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 a
+forest-covered country, and blown at times into intense heat by the
+strong winds so frequent in that upper stratum of air into which the
+summit penetrates, have been kindled some six or eight times on some
+prominent point of the rampart, raised, mayhap, many centuries before.
+At first the heat has failed to tell on the stubborn quartz and feldspar
+which forms the preponderating material of the gneisses, granites,
+quartz rocks, and coarse conglomerate sandstones on which it has been
+brought to operate; but each fire throws down into the interstices a
+considerable amount of the fixed salt of the wood, till at length the
+heap has become charged with a strong flux; and then one powerful fire
+more, fanned to a white heat by a keen, dry breeze, reduces the whole
+into a semi-fluid mass. The same effects have been produced on the
+materials of the rampart by the beacon-fires and the alkali, that were
+produced, according to Pliny, by the fires and the soda of the
+Phoenician merchants storm-bound on the sands of the river Belus. But
+the state of civilization in Scotland at the time is not such as to
+permit of the discovery being followed up by similar results. The
+semi-savage guardians of the beacon wonder at the _accident_, as they
+well may; but those happy accidents in which the higher order of
+discoveries originate occur in only the ages of cultivated minds; and so
+they do not acquire from it the art of manufacturing glass. It could not
+fail being perceived, however, by intellects at all human, that the
+consolidation which the fires of one week, or month, or year, as the
+case happened, had effected on one portion of the wall, might be
+produced by the fires of another week, or month, or year, on another
+portion of it; that, in short, a loose incoherent rampart, easy of
+demolition, might be converted, through the newly-discovered process,
+into a rampart as solid and indestructible as the rock on which it
+rested. 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, Knock
+Farril, with many a similar eminence in the country, comes to exhibit
+its completely vitrified fort where there had been but a loosely-piled
+hill-fort before. It in no degree militates against this compound
+theory,--borrowed in part from Williams and in part from Sir
+George,--that there are detached vitrified masses to be found on
+eminences evidently never occupied by hill-forts; or that there are
+hill-forts on other eminences only partially fused, or hill-forts on
+many of the less commanding sites that bear about them no marks of fire
+at all. Nothing can be more probable than that in the first class of
+cases we have eminences that had been selected as beacon-stations, which
+had not previously been occupied by hill-forts; and in the last,
+eminences that had been occupied by hill-forts which, from their want of
+prominence in the general landscape, had not been selected as
+beacon-stations. And in the intermediate class of cases we have probably
+ramparts that were only partially vitrified, because some want of fuel
+in the neighborhood had starved the customary fires, or because fires
+had to be less frequently kindled upon them than on the more important
+stations; or, finally, because these hill-forts, from some disadvantage
+of situation, were no longer used as places of strength, and so the
+beacon-keepers had no motive to attempt consolidating them throughout by
+the piecemeal application of the vitrifying agent. But the old Highland
+mode of accounting for the present appearance of Knock Farril and its
+vitrified remains is perhaps, after all, quite as good in its way as any
+of the modes suggested by the philosophers.[20]
+
+I spent some time, agreeably enough, beside the rude rampart of Knock
+Farril, in marking the various appearances exhibited by the fused and
+semi-fused materials of which it is composed,--the granites, gneisses,
+mica-schists, hornblendes, clay-slates, and red sandstones of the
+locality. One piece of rock, containing much lime, I found resolved into
+a yellow opaque substance, not unlike the coarse earthenware used in the
+making of ginger-beer bottles; but though it had been so completely
+molten 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 in
+thickness. 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 pure
+white quartz into porcellanic trails of white, that ran in one instance
+along the face of a darker-colored rock below, like streaks of cream
+along the sides of a burnt china jug. In one mass of pale large-grained
+granite I found that the feldspar, though it had acquired a vitreous
+gloss on the surface, still retained its peculiar rhomboidal cleavage;
+while the less stubborn quartz around it had become scarce less
+vesicular and light than a piece of pumice. On some of the other masses
+there 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 the
+vitreous surface the mark of the yearly growths, and even of the
+medullary rays, of the wood. In breaking open some of the others, I
+detected fragments of the charcoal itself, which, hermetically locked up
+in the rock, had retained all its original carbon. These last reminded
+me of specimens not unfrequent among the trap-rocks of the Carboniferous
+and Oölitic systems. From an intrusive overlying wacke in the
+neighborhood of Linlithgow I have derived for my collection pieces of
+carbonized wood in so complete a state of keeping, that under the
+microscope they exhibit unbroken all the characteristic reticulations of
+the coniferæ of the Coal Measures.
+
+I descended the hill, and, after joining my friends at
+Strathpeffer,--Buchubai Hormazdji among the rest,--visited the Spa, in
+the company of my old friend the minister of Alness. The thorough
+identity of the powerful effluvium that fills the pump-room with that of
+a muddy sea-bottom laid bare in warm weather by the tide, is to the
+dweller on the sea-coast very striking. It _is_ identity,--not mere
+resemblance. In most cases the organic substances undergo great changes
+in the bowels of the earth. The animal matter of the Caithness
+ichthyolites exists, for instance, as a hard, black, insoluble bitumen,
+which I have used oftener than once as sealing-wax; the vegetable mould
+of the Coal Measures has been converted into a fire-clay, so altered in
+the organic pabulum, animal and vegetable, whence it derived its
+fertility, that, even when laid open for years to the meliorating
+effects of the weather and the visits of the winged seeds, it will not
+be found bearing a single spike or leaf of green. But here, in smell, at
+least, that ancient mud, swum over by the Diplopterus and the
+Diplacanthus, and in which the Coccosteus and Pterichthys burrowed, has
+undergone no change. The soft ooze has become solid rock, but its
+odoriferous qualities have remained unaltered. I next visited an
+excavation a few hundred yards on the upper side of the pump-room, in
+which the gray fetid breccia of the Strath has been quarried for
+dyke-building, and examined the rock with some degree of care, without,
+however, detecting in it a single plate or scale. Lying over that
+Conglomerate member of the system which, rising high in the Knock Farril
+range, forms the southern boundary of the valley, it occupies the place
+of the lower ichthyolitic bed, so rich in organisms in various other
+parts of the country; but here the bed, after it had been deposited in
+thin horizontal laminæ, and had hardened into stone, seems to have been
+broken up, by some violent movement, into minute sharp-edged fragments,
+that, without wear or attrition, were again consolidated into the
+breccia which it now forms. And its ichthyolites, if not previously
+absorbed, were probably destroyed in the convulsion. Detached scales and
+spines, however, if carefully sought for in the various openings of the
+valley, might still be found in the original laminæ of the fragments.
+They must have been amazingly abundant in it once; for so largely
+saturated is the rock with the organic matter into which they have been
+resolved, that, when struck by the hammer, the impalpable dust set loose
+sensibly affects the organs of taste, and appeals very strongly to those
+of smell. It is through this saturated rock that the mineral springs
+take their course. Even the surface-waters of the valley, as they pass
+over 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 of
+the Old Red the subject of a few simple experiments. I would have ground
+it into powder, and tried upon it the effect both of cold and hot
+infusion. Portions of the water are sometimes carried in casks and
+bottles, for the use of invalids, to a considerable distance; but it is
+quite possible that a little of the _rock_, to which the water owes its
+qualities, might, when treated in this way, have all the effects of a
+considerable quantity of the _spring_. It might be of some interest,
+too, to ascertain its qualities when crushed, as a soil, or its effect
+on other soils; whether, for instance, like the old sterile soils of the
+Carboniferous period, it has lost, through its rock-change, the
+fertilizing properties which it once possessed; or whether it still
+retains them, like some of the coprolitic beds of the Oölite and
+Greensand, and might not, in consequence, be employed as a manure. A
+course of such experiments could scarce fail to furnish with agreeable
+occupation some of the numerous annual visitants of the Spa, who have to
+linger long, with but little to engage them, waiting for what, if it
+once fairly leave a man, returns slowly, when it returns at all.
+
+In mentioning at the dinner-table of my friend my scheme of infusing
+rock in order to produce Spa water, I referred to the circumstance that
+the Belemnite of our Liasic deposits, when ground into powder, imparts
+to boiling water a peculiar taste and smell, and that the infusion,
+taken in very small quantities, sensibly affects both palate and
+stomach. And I suggested that Belemnite water, deemed sovereign of old,
+when the Belemnite was regarded as a thunderbolt, in the cure of
+bewitched cattle, might be in reality medicinal, and that the ancient
+superstition might thus embody, as ancient superstitions not
+unfrequently do, a nucleus of fact. The charm, I said, might amount to
+no 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 one
+of the young ladies on the remark amused us all. If an infusion of stone
+had cured, in the last age, cattle that were bewitched, the Strathpeffer
+water, she argued, which was, it seems, but an infusion of stone, might
+cure cattle that were sick now; and so, though the biped patients of
+the Strath could scarce fail to decrease when they knew that its infused
+stone contained but the strainings of old mud, and the juices of dead
+unsalted fish, it was gratifying to think that the poor Spa might still
+continue to retain its patients, though of a lower order. The pump-room
+would be converted into a rustic, straw-thatched shed, to which long
+trains of sick cattle, affected by weak nerves and dyspepsia, would come
+streaming along the roads every morning and evening, to drink and gather
+strength.
+
+The following morning was wet and lowering, and a flat ceiling of gray
+cloud stretched across the valley, from the summit of the Knock Farril
+ridge of hills on the one side, to the lower flanks of Ben-Wevis on the
+other. I had purposed ascending this latter mountain,--the giant of the
+north-eastern coast, and one of the loftiest of our second-class
+Scottish hills anywhere,--to ascertain the extreme upper line at which
+travelled boulders occur in this part of the country. But it was no
+morning for wading knee-deep through the trackless heather; and after
+waiting on, in the hope the weather might clear up, watching at a window
+the poorer invalids at the Spa, as they dragged themselves through the
+rain to the water, I lost patience, and sallied out, beplaided and
+umbrellaed, to see from the top of Knock Farril how the country looked
+in a fog. At first, however, I saw much fog, but little country; but as
+the day wore on, the flat mist-ceiling rose together, till it rested on
+but the distant hills, and the more prominent features of the landscape
+began to stand out amid the more general gray, like the stronger lines
+and masses in a half-finished drawing, boldly dashed off in the neutral
+tint of the artist. The portions of the prospect generically distinct
+are, notwithstanding its great extent and variety, but few; and the
+partial veil of haze, by glazing down its distracting multiplicity of
+minor points, served to bring them out all the more distinctly. There
+is, first stretching far in a southern and eastern direction along the
+landscape, the rectilinear ridge of the Black Isle,--not quite the sort
+of line a painter would introduce into a composition, but true to
+geologic character. More in the foreground, in the same direction, there
+spreads a troubled cockling sea of the Great Conglomerate. Turning to
+the north and west, the deep valley of Strathpeffer, with its expanse of
+rich level fields, and in the midst its old baronial castle, surrounded
+by coeval trees of vast bulk, lies so immediately at the foot of the
+eminence, 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 rose
+the thick-set Ben-Wevis,--a true gneiss mountain, with breadth enough of
+shoulders, and amplitude enough of base, to serve a mountain thrice as
+tall, but which, like all its cogeners of this ancient formation, was
+arrested in its second stage of growth, so that many of the slimmer
+granitic and porphyritic hills of the country look down upon it, as
+Agamemnon, 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 the
+comparatively flat area of Palæozoic rock which composes the middle
+ground of the landscape, rose a multitude of primary hill-peaks, barely
+discernible in the haze; while the long withdrawing Dingwall Frith,
+stretching on towards the open sea for full twenty miles, and flanked on
+either side by ridges of sandstone, but guarded at the opening by two
+squat granitic columns, completed the prospect, by adding to its last
+great feature. All was gloomy and chill; and as I turned me down the
+descent, 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 century
+before, it was on a hot breathless day of early summer, in which, though
+the trees in fresh leaf seemed drooping in the sunshine, and the
+succulent luxuriance of the fields lay aslant, half-prostrated by the
+fierce heat, the rich blue of Ben-Wevis, far above, was thickly streaked
+with snow, on which it was luxury even to look. It gave one iced
+fancies, wherewithal to slake, amid the bright glow of summer, the
+thirst in the mind. The recollection came strongly upon me, as the fog
+from the hill-top closed dark behind, like that sung by the old blind
+Englishman, 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 that
+it had not. I had resigned many a baseless hope and many an idle desire
+since I had spent a vacant day amid the sunshine, now gazing on the
+broad placid features of the snow-streaked mountain; and now sauntering
+under the tall ancient woods, or along the heath-covered slopes of the
+valley; but in relation to never-tiring, inexhaustible nature, the heart
+was no fresher at that time than it was now. I had grown no older in my
+feelings or in my capacity of enjoyment; and what then was there to
+regret?
+
+I rode down the Strath in an omnibus which plies between the Spa and
+Dingwall, and then walked on to the village of Evanton, which I reached
+about an hour after nightfall, somewhat in the circumstances of the
+"damp stranger," who gave Beau Brummel the cold. There were, however, no
+Beau Brummels in the quiet village inn in which I passed the night, and
+so the effects of the damp were wholly confined to myself. I was soundly
+pummelled during the night by a frightful female, who first assumed the
+appearance of the miserable pauper woman whom I had seen beside the
+Auldgrande, and then became the Lady of Balconie; and, though
+sufficiently indignant, and much inclined to resist, I could stir
+neither hand nor foot, but lay passively on my back, jambed fast behind
+the huge gneiss boulder and the edge of the gulf. And yet, by a strange
+duality of perception, I was conscious all the while that, having got
+wet on the previous day, I was now suffering from an attack of
+nightmare: and held that it would be no very serious matter even should
+the lady tumble me into the gulf, seeing that all would be well again
+when I awoke in the morning. Dreams of this character, in which
+consciousness bears reference at once to the fictitious events of the
+vision and the real circumstances of the sleeper, must occupy, I am
+inclined to think, very little time,--single moments, mayhap, poised
+midway between the sleeping and waking state. Next day (Sunday) I
+attended the Free Church in the parish, where I found a numerous and
+attentive congregation,--descendants, in large part, of the old devout
+Munroes of Ferindonald,--and heard a good solid discourse. And on the
+following morning I crossed the sea at what is known as the Fowlis
+Ferry, to explore, on my homeward route, the rocks laid bare along the
+shore in the upper reaches of the Frith.
+
+I found but little by the way: black patches of bitumen in the sandstone
+of one of the beds, with a bed of stratified clay, inclosing nodules, in
+which, however, I succeeded in detecting nothing organic; and a few
+fragments of clay-slate locked up in the Red Sandstone, sharp and
+unworn at their edges, as if derived from no great distance, though
+there be now no clay-slate in the eastern half of Ross; but though the
+rocks here belong evidently to the ichthyolitic member of the Old Red,
+not a single fish, not a "nibble" even, repaid the patient search of
+half a day. I, however, passed some time agreeably enough among the
+ruins of Craighouse. When I had last seen, many years before, this old
+castle,[21] the upper stories were accessible; but they were now no
+longer so. Time, and the little herdboys who occasionally shelter in its
+vaults, had been busy in the interval; and, by breaking off a few
+projecting corners by which the climber had held, and by effacing a few
+notches into which he had thrust his toe-points, they had rendered what
+had been merely difficult impracticable. I remarked that the huge
+kitchen chimney of the building,--a deep hollow recess which stretches
+across the entire gable, and in which, it is said, two thrashers once
+plied the flail for a whole winter,--bore less of the stain of recent
+smoke than it used to exhibit twenty years before; and inferred that
+there would be fewer wraith-lights seen from the castle at nights than
+in those days of _evil spirits_ and illicit stills, when the cottars in
+the neighborhood sent more smuggled whiskey to market than any equal
+number of the inhabitants of almost any other district in the north. It
+has been long alleged that there existed a close connection between the
+more ghostly spirits of the country and its distilled ones. "How do you
+account," 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 the
+almost total disappearance of the ghosts and fairies that used to be so
+common in your young days?" "Tak my word for 't, minister," replied the
+shrewd old man, "it's a' owing to the _tea_; when the _tea_ cam in, the
+ghaists an' fairies gaed out. Weel do I mind when at a' our neeborly
+meetings,--bridals, christenings, lyke-wakes, an' the like,--we
+entertained ane anither wi' rich nappy ale; an' whan the verra dowiest
+o' 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 losing
+the nappy we lost baith ghaists an' fairies."
+
+Quitting the ruin, I walked on along the shore, tracing the sandstone as
+I went, as it rises from lower to higher beds; and where it ceases to
+crop out at the surface, and gravel and the red boulder-clays take the
+place of rock, I struck up the hill, and, traversing the parishes of
+Resolis and Cromarty, got home early in the evening. I had seen and done
+scarcely half what I had intended seeing or doing: alas, that in
+reference to every walk which I have yet attempted to tread, this
+special statement should be so invariably true to fact!--alas, that all
+my full purposes, should be coupled with but half realizations! But I
+had at least the satisfaction, that though I had accomplished little, I
+had enjoyed much; and it is something, though not all, nor nearly all,
+that, since time is passing, it should pass happily. In my next chapter
+I 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 I
+have thus inverted the order of _time_, by placing it last, that I may
+be able so to preserve the order of _space_ as to render the tract
+travelled over in my narrative continuous from Edinburgh to the northern
+extremity 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 bore
+heavily on the springs of life, compelled me to postpone a
+long-projected journey to the Orkneys, and led me to visit, instead,
+rich level England, with its well-kept roads and smooth railways, along
+which the enfeebled invalid can travel far without fatigue. I had now
+got greatly stronger; and, if not quite up to my old thirty miles per
+day, nor altogether so bold a cragsman as I had been only a few years
+before, 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 least
+glancing over, if not exploring, the fossiliferous deposits of the
+Orkneys, trusting that an eye somewhat practised in the formations
+mainly developed in these islands might enable me to make some amends
+for seeing comparatively little, by seeing well. I took coach at
+Invergordon for Wick early in the morning of Friday; and, after a weary
+ride, in a bleak gusty day, that sent the dust of the road whirling
+about the ears of the sorely-tossed "outsides," with whom I had taken my
+chance, I alighted in Wick, at the inn-door, a little after six o'clock
+in the evening. The following morning was wet and dreary; and a tumbling
+sea, raised by the wind of the previous day and night, came rolling into
+the bay; but the waves bore with them no steamer; and when, some five
+hours after the expected time, she also came rolling in, her darkened
+and weather-beaten sides and rigging gave evidence that her passage from
+the south had been no holiday trip. Impatient, however, of looking out
+upon the sea for hours, from under dripping eaves, and through the
+dimmed panes of streaming windows, I got aboard with about half-a-dozen
+other passengers; and while the Wick goods were in the course of being
+transferred to two large boats alongside, we lay tossing in the open
+bay. The work of raising box and package was superintended by a tall
+elderly gentleman from the shore, peculiarly Scotch in his
+appearance,--the steam company's agent for this part of the country.
+
+"That," said an acquaintance, pointing to the agent, "is a very
+extraordinary man,--in his own special walk, one of the most
+original-minded, and at the same time most thoroughly practical, you
+perhaps ever saw. That is Mr. Bremner of Wick, known now all over
+Britain for his success in raising foundered vessels, when every one
+else gives them up. In the lifting of vast weights, or the overcoming
+the _vis inertiæ_ of the hugest bodies, nothing ever baffles Mr.
+Bremner. But come, I must introduce you to him. He takes an interest in
+your peculiar science, and is familiar with your geological writings."
+
+I was accordingly introduced to Mr. Bremner, and passed, in his company
+the half-hour which we spent in the bay, in a way that made me wish the
+time doubled. I had been struck by the peculiar style of masonry
+employed in the harbor of Wick, and by its rock-like strength. The gray
+ponderous stones of the flagstone series of which it is built, instead
+of 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 a
+pail or barrel, so that at some little distance the work looks as if
+formed of upright piles or beams jambed fast together. I had learned
+that Mr. Bremner had been the builder, and adverted to the peculiarity
+of his style of building. "You have given a vertical tilt to your
+strata," I said: "most men would have preferred the horizontal position.
+It used to be regarded as one of the standing rules of my old
+profession, that the 'broad bed of a stone' is the best, and should be
+always laid 'below.'" "A good rule for the land," replied Mr. Bremner,
+"but no good rule for the sea. The greatest blunders are almost always
+perpetrated through the misapplication of good rules. On a coast like
+ours, where boulders of a ton weight are rolled about with every storm
+like pebbles, these stones, if placed on what a workman would term their
+best beds, would be scattered along the shore like sea-wrack, by the
+gales of a single winter. In setting aside the prejudice," continued Mr.
+Bremner, "that what is indisputably the best bed for a stone on dry land
+is also the best bed in the water on an exposed coast, I reasoned
+thus:--The surf that dashes along the beach in times of tempest, and
+that 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 a
+reäctive impetus in the opposite direction,--the effect of the backward
+rebound, and of its own weight, when raised by these propelling forces
+above its average level of surface. True, it is all this; but it is also
+something more. As its white breadth of foam indicates, it is a subtile
+mixture of water and _air_, with a powerful _upward_ action,--a
+consequence of the air struggling to effect its escape; and this upward
+action must be taken into account in our calculations, as certainly as
+the other and more generally recognized actions. In striking against a
+piece of building, this subtile mixture dashes through the interstices
+into the interior of the masonry, and, filling up all its cavities, has
+by its upward action, a tendency to _set the work afloat_. And the
+broader the beds of the stones, of course the more extensive are the
+surfaces which it has to act upon. One of these flat flags, ten feet by
+four, and a foot in thickness, would present to this upheaving force, if
+placed on end, a superficies of but _four_ square feet; whereas, if
+placed on its broader base, it would present to it a superficies of
+_forty_ square feet. Obviously, then, with regard to this aërial
+upheaving force, that acts upon the masonry in a direction in which no
+precautions are usually adopted to bind it fast,--for the existence of
+the force itself is not taken into account,--the greater bed of the
+stone must be just ten times over a worse bed than its lesser one; and
+on a tempestuous foam-encircled coast such as ours, this aërial
+upheaving force is in reality, though the builder may not know it, one
+of the most formidable forces with which he had to deal. And so, on
+these principles, I ventured to set my stones on end,--on what was
+deemed their _worst_, not their _best_ beds,--wedging them all fast
+together, like staves in an anker; and there, to the scandal of all the
+old rules, are they fast wedged still, firm as a rock." It was no
+ordinary man that could have originated such reasonings on such a
+subject, or that could have thrown himself so boldly, and to such
+practical effect, on the conclusions to which they led.
+
+Mr. Bremner adverted, in the course of our conversation, to a singular
+appearance among the rocks a little to the east and south of the town
+of Wick, that had not, he said, attracted the notice it deserved. The
+solid rock had been fractured by some tremendous blow, dealt to it
+externally at a considerable height over the sea-level, and its detached
+masses scattered about like the stones of an ill-built harbor broken up
+by a storm. The force, whatever its nature, had been enormously great.
+Blocks of some thirty or forty tons weight had been torn from out the
+solid strata, and piled up in ruinous heaps, as if the compact precipice
+had been a piece of loose brickwork, or had been driven into each other,
+as if, instead of being composed of perhaps the hardest and toughest
+sedimentary rock in the country, they had been formed of sun-dried clay.
+"I brought," continued Mr. Bremner, "one of your itinerant geological
+lecturers to the spot, to get his opinion; but he could say nothing
+about the appearance: it was not in his books." "I suspect," I replied,
+"the phenomenon lies quite as much within your own province as within
+that of the geological lecturer. It is in all probability an
+illustration, on a large scale, of those floating forces with which you
+operate on your foundered vessels, joined to the forces, laterally
+exerted, by which you drag them towards the shore. When the sea stood
+higher, or the land lower, in the eras of the raised beaches, along what
+is now Caithness, the abrupt mural precipices by which your coast here
+is skirted must have secured a very considerable depth of water up to
+the very edge of the land;--your coast-line must have resembled the side
+of a mole or wharf: and in that glacial period to which the thick
+deposit of boulder-clay immediately over your harbor yonder belongs,
+icebergs of very considerable size must not unfrequently have brushed
+the brows of your precipices. An iceberg from eighty to a hundred feet
+in thickness, and perhaps half a square mile in area, could not, in
+this old state of things, have come in contact with these cliffs without
+first catching the ground outside; and such an iceberg, propelled by a
+fierce storm from the north-east, could not fail to lend the cliff with
+which it came in collision a tremendous blow. You will find that your
+shattered precipice marks, in all probability, the scene of a collision
+of this character: some hard-headed iceberg must have set itself to run
+down the land, and got wrecked upon it for its pains." My theory, though
+made somewhat in the dark,--for I had no opportunity of seeing the
+broken precipice until after my return from Orkney,--seemed to satisfy
+Mr. Bremner; nor, on a careful survey of the phenomenon, the solution of
+which it attempted, did I find occasion to modify or give it up.
+
+With just knowledge enough of Mr. Bremner's peculiar province to
+appreciate his views, I was much impressed by their broad and practical
+simplicity; and bethought me, as we conversed, that the character of the
+thinking, which, according to Addison, forms the staple of all writings
+of genius, and which he defines as "simple but not obvious," is a
+character which equally applies to _all_ good thinking, whatever its
+special department. Power rarely resides in ingenious complexities: it
+seems to eschew in every walk the elaborately attenuated and razor-edged
+mode of thinking,--the thinking akin to that of the old metaphysical
+poets,--and to select the broad and massive style. Hercules, in all the
+representations of him which I have yet seen, is the _broad_ Hercules. I
+was 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 obvious
+contrivances, which had a strong air of practicability about them, he
+could lay down his erection, course by course, inshore, in a floating
+caisson of peculiar construction, beginning a little beyond the low-ebb
+line, and warping out his work piecemeal, as it sank, till it had
+reached its proper place, in, if necessary, from ten to twelve fathoms
+water, 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 would
+be obviated, he said, by the contrivance, and a solidity given to the
+work otherwise impossible in the circumstances: the stones could be laid
+in his floating caisson with a care as deliberate as on the land. Some
+of the anecdotes which he communicated to me on this occasion, connected
+with his numerous achievements in weighing up foundered vessels, or in
+floating off wrecked or stranded ones, were of singular interest; and I
+regretted that they should not be recorded in an autobiographical
+memoir. Not a few of them were humorously told, and curiously
+illustrative of that general ignorance regarding the "strength of
+materials" in which the scientific world has been too strangely suffered
+to lie, in this the world's most mechanical age; so that what ought to
+be questions of strict calculation are subjected to the guessings of a
+mere common sense, far from adequate, in many cases, to their proper
+resolution. "I once raised a vessel," said Mr. Bremner,--"a large
+collier, chock-full of coal,--which an English projector had actually
+engaged to raise with huge bags of India rubber, inflated with air. But
+the bags, of course taxed far beyond their strength, collapsed or burst;
+and so, when I succeeded in bringing the vessel up, through the
+employment of more adequate means, I got not only ship and cargo, but
+also a great deal of good India rubber to boot." Only a few months after
+I enjoyed the pleasure of this interview with the Brindley of Scotland,
+he was called south, to the achievement of his greatest feat in at least
+one special department,--a feat generally recognized and appreciated as
+the most herculean of its kind ever performed,--the raising and warping
+off of the Great Britain steamer from her perilous bed in the sand of an
+exposed bay on the coast of Ireland. I was conscious of a feeling of
+sadness as, in parting with Mr. Bremner, I reflected, that a man so
+singularly gifted should have been suffered to reach a period of life
+very considerably advanced, in employments little suited to exert his
+extraordinary faculties, and which persons of the ordinary type could
+have performed as well. Napoleon,--himself possessed of great
+genius,--could have estimated more adequately than our British rulers
+the value of such a man. Had Mr. Bremner been born a Frenchman, he would
+not now be the mere agent of a steam company, in a third-rate seaport
+town.
+
+The rain had ceased, but the evening was gloomy and chill; and the
+Orcades, which, on clearing the Caithness coast, came as fully in view
+as the haze permitted, were enveloped in an undress of cloud and spray,
+that showed off their flat low features to no advantage at all. The
+bold, picturesque Hebrides look well in any weather; but the level
+Orkney 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-dress
+auxiliaries of bright sun and clear sky, to render their charms patent.
+Then, however, in their sleek coats of emerald and purple, and
+surrounded by their blue sparkling sounds and seas, with here a long
+dark wall of rock, that casts its shadow over the breaking waves, and
+there a light fringe of sand and broken shells, they are, as I
+afterwards ascertained, not without their genuine beauties. But had they
+shared in the history of the neighboring Shetland group, that, according
+to some of the older historians, were suffered to lie uninhabited for
+centuries after their first discovery, I would rather have been
+disposed to marvel this evening, not that they had been unappropriated
+so long, but that they had been appropriated at all. The late member for
+Orkney, not yet unseated by his Shetland opponent, was one of the
+passengers in the steamboat; and, with an elderly man, an ambitious
+schoolmaster, strongly marked by the peculiarities of the genuine
+dominie, who had introduced himself to him as a brother voyager, he was
+pacing the quarter-deck, evidently doing his best to exert, under an
+unintermittent hot-water _douche_ of queries, the patient courtesy of a
+Member 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 liberty
+with the schoolmaster that the schoolmaster had taken with the Member, I
+addressed to him a simple query in turn. But I had mistaken my man; the
+schoolmaster permitted to unknown passengers in humble russet no such
+sort of familiarities as those permitted by the Member; and so I met
+with 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 among
+boys for some twenty or thirty years, exerting over them all the while a
+despotic authority, without contracting those peculiarities of character
+which the master-spirits,--our Scots, Lambs, and Goldsmiths,--have
+embalmed with such exquisite truth in our literature, and which have
+hitherto militated against the practical realization of those
+unexceptionable abstractions in behalf of the status and standing of the
+teacher of youth which have been originated by men less in the habit of
+looking about them than the poets. It is worth while remarking how
+invariably the strong common sense of the Scotch people has run every
+scheme under water that, confounding the character of the "village
+schoolmaster" with that of the "village clergyman," would demand from
+the schoolmaster the clergyman's work.
+
+We crossed the opening of the Pentland Frith, with its white surges and
+dark boiling eddies, and saw its twin lighthouses rising tall and
+ghostly amid the fog on our lee. We then skirted the shores of South
+Ronaldshay, of Burra, of Copinshay, and of Deerness; and, after doubling
+Moul Head, and threading the sound which separates Shapinshay from the
+Mainland, we entered the Frith of Kirkwall, and caught, amid the
+uncertain light of the closing evening, our earliest glimpse of the
+ancient Cathedral of St. Magnus. It seems at first sight as if standing
+solitary, a huge hermit-like erection, at the bottom of a low bay,--for
+its humbler companions do not make themselves visible until we have
+entered the harbor by a mile or two more, when we begin to find that it
+occupies, not an uninhabited tract of shore, but the middle of a gray
+straggling town, nearly a mile in length. We had just light enough to
+show us, on landing, that the main thoroughfare of the place, very
+narrow and very crooked, had been laid out, ere the country beyond had
+got highways, or the proprietors carts and carriages, with an exclusive
+eye to the necessities of the foot-passenger,--that many of the older
+houses presented, as is common in our northern towns, their gables to
+the street, and had narrow slips of closes running down along their
+fronts,--and that as we receded from the harbor, a goodly portion of
+their number bore about them an air of respectability, long maintained,
+but now apparently touched by decay. I saw, in advance of one of the
+buildings, several vigorous-looking planes, about forty feet in height,
+which, fenced by tall houses in front and rear, and flanked by the
+tortuosities of the street, had apparently forgotten that they were in
+Orkney, and had grown quite as well as the planes of public
+thoroughfares grow elsewhere. After an abortive attempt or two made in
+other quarters, I was successful in procuring lodgings for a few days in
+the house of a respectable widow lady of the place, where I found
+comfort and quiet on very moderate terms. The cast of faded gentility
+which attached to so many of the older houses of Kirkwall,--remnants of
+a time when the wealthier Udallers of the Orkneys used to repair to
+their capital at the close of autumn, to while away in each other's
+society their dreary winters,--reminded me of the poet Malcolm's "Sketch
+of the Borough,"--a portrait for which Kirkwall is known to have
+sat,--and of the great revolution effected in its evening parties, when
+"tea and turn-out" yielded its place to "tea and turn-in." But the
+churchyard of the place, which I had seen, as I passed along, glimmering
+with all its tombstones in the uncertain light, was all that remained to
+represent those "great men of the burgh," who, according to the poet,
+used to "pop in on its card and dancing assemblies, about the eleventh
+hour, resplendent in top-boots and scarlet vests," or of its
+"suppression-of-vice sisterhood of moral old maids," who kept all their
+neighbors right by the terror of their tongues. I was somewhat in a
+mood, after my chill and hungry voyage, to recall with a hankering of
+regret the vision of its departed suppers, so luxuriously described in
+the "Sketch,"--suppers at which "large rounds of boiled beef smothered
+in cabbage, smoked geese, mutton hams, roasts of pork, and dishes of
+dog-fish and of Welsh rabbits melted in their own fat, were diluted by
+copious draughts of strong home-brewed ale, and etherealized by gigantic
+bowls of rum punch." But the past, which is not ours, who, alas, can
+recall! And, after discussing a juicy steak and a modest cup of tea, I
+found I could regard with the indifferency of a philosopher, the
+perished suppers of Kirkwall.
+
+I quitted my lodgings for church next morning about three-quarters of an
+hour ere the service commenced; and, finding the doors shut, sauntered
+up the hill that rises immediately over the town. The thick gloomy
+weather had passed with the night; and a still, bright, clear-eyed
+Sabbath looked cheerily down on green isle and blue sea. I was quite
+unprepared by any previous description, for the imposing assemblage of
+ancient buildings which Kirkwall presents full in the foreground, when
+viewed from the road which ascends along this hilly slope to the
+uplands. So thickly are they massed together, that, seen from one
+special point of view, they seem a portion of some magnificent city in
+ruins,--some such city though in a widely different style of
+architecture, as Palmyra or Baalbec. The Cathedral of St. Magnus rises
+on the right, the castle-palace of Earl Patrick Stuart on the left, the
+bishop's palace in the space between; and all three occupy sites so
+contiguous, that a distance of some two or three hundred yards abreast
+gives the proper angle for taking in the whole group at a glance. I know
+no such group elsewhere in Scotland. The church and palace of Linlithgow
+are in such close proximity, that, seen together, relieved against the
+blue gleam of their lake, they form one magnificent pile; but we have
+here a taller, and, notwithstanding its Saxon plainness, a nobler
+church, than that of the southern burgh, and at least one palace more.
+And the associations connected with the church, and at least one of the
+palaces ascend to a remoter and more picturesque antiquity. The
+castle-palace of Earl Patrick dates from but the time of James the
+Sixth; but in the palace of the bishop, old grim Haco died, after his
+defeat at Largs, "of grief," says Buchanan, "for the loss of his army,
+and of a valiant youth his relation;" and in the ancient Cathedral, his
+body, previous to its removal to Norway, was interred for a winter. The
+church 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 a
+countryman on his way to church. "Ye'll hae come," he said, addressing
+me, "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 no
+sure he'll be our Member next time. The Voluntaries yonder, ye see,"
+jerking his head, as he spoke, in the direction of the United Secession
+chapel of the place, "are awfu' strong and unco radical; and the Free
+Kirk folk will soon be as bad as them. But I belong to the
+Establishment; and I side wi' Dundas." The aristocracy of Scotland
+committed, I am afraid, a sad blunder when they attempted strengthening
+their influence as a class by seizing hold of the Church patronages.
+They have fared somewhat like those sailors of Ulysses who, in seeking
+to appropriate their master's wealth, let out the winds upon themselves;
+and there is now, in consequence, a perilous voyage and an uncertain
+landing before them. It was the patronate wedge that struck from off the
+Scottish Establishment at least nine-tenths of the Dissenters of the
+kingdom,--its Secession bodies, its Relief body, and, finally, its Free
+Church denomination,--comprising in their aggregate amount a great and
+influential majority of the Scotch people. Our older Dissenters,--a
+circumstance inevitable to their position as such,--have been thrown
+into the movement party: the Free Church, in her present transition
+state, sits loose to all the various political sections of the country;
+but her natural tendency is towards the movement party also; and
+already, in consequence, do our Scottish aristocracy possess greatly
+less political influence in the kingdom of which they own almost all
+the soil, than that wielded by their brethren the Irish and English
+aristocracy in their respective divisions of the empire. Were the
+representation of England and Ireland as liberal as that of Scotland,
+and as little influenced by the aristocracy, Conservatism, on the
+passing of the Reform Bill, might have taken leave of office for
+evermore. And yet neither the English nor Irish are naturally so
+Conservative as the Scotch. The patronate wedge, like that appropriated
+by Achan, has been disastrous to the people, for it has lost to them the
+great 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 work
+more serious evil to those by whom it was originally coveted,--"evil to
+themselves and all their house." As I approached the Free Church, a
+squat, sun-burned, carnal-minded "old wee wifie," who seemed passing
+towards the Secession place of worship, after looking wistfully at my
+gray maud, and concluding for certain that I could not be other than a
+Southland drover, came up to me, and asked, in a cautious whisper, "Will
+ye 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 Church
+folk in our immediate neighborhood, who would scarce have tolerated
+Sabbath trading in a Seceder, tucked up her little blue cloak over her
+head, and hied away to the chapel.
+
+In the Free Church pulpit I recognized an old friend, to whom I
+introduced myself at the close of the service, and by whom I was
+introduced, in turn, to several intelligent members of his session, to
+whose kindness I owed, on the following day, introductions to some of
+the less accessible curiosities of the place. I rose betimes on the
+morning of Monday, that I might have leisure enough before me to see
+them all, and broke my first ground in Orkney as a geologist in a quarry
+a few hundred yards to the south and east of the town. It is strange
+enough how frequently the explorer in the Old Red finds himself
+restricted in a locality to well nigh a single organism,--an effect,
+probably, of some gregarious instinct in the ancient fishes of this
+formation, similar to that which characterizes so many of the fishes of
+the present time, or of some peculiarity in their constitution, which
+made each choose for itself a peculiar habitat. In this quarry, though
+abounding in broken remains, I found scarce a single fragment which did
+not belong to an exceedingly minute species of Coccosteus, of which my
+first 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 from
+its general proportions, had set down as the young of the _Coccosteus
+cuspidatus_. Its apparent gregariousness, too, quite as marked at Thurso
+as in this quarry, had assisted, on the strength of an obvious enough
+analogy, in leading to the conclusion. There are several species of the
+existing fish, well known on our coasts, that, though solitary when
+fully grown, are gregarious when young. The coal-fish, which as the
+sillock of a few inches in length congregates by thousands, but as the
+colum-saw of from two and a half to three feet is a solitary fish, forms
+a familiar instance; and I had inferred that the Coccosteus, found
+solitary, in most instances, when at its full size, had, like the
+coal-fish, congregated in shoals when in a state of immaturity. But a
+more careful examination of the specimens leads me to conclude that this
+minute gregarious Coccosteus, so abundant in this locality that its
+fragments thickly speckle the strata for hundreds of yards together--(in
+one instance I found the dorsal plates of four individuals crowded into
+a piece of flag barely six inches square)--was in reality a distinct
+species. Though not more than one-fourth the size, measured linearly, of
+the _Coccosteus decipiens_, its plates exhibit as many of those lines
+of increment which gave to the occipital buckler of the creature its
+tortoise-like appearance, and through which plates of the buckler
+species were at first mistaken for those of a Chelonian, as are
+exhibited by plates of the larger kinds, with an area ten times as
+great; its tubercles, too, some of them of microscopic size, are as
+numerous;--evidences, I think,--when we take into account that in the
+bulkier species the lines and tubercles increased in number with the
+growth of the plates, and that, once formed, they seem never to have
+been affected by the subsequent enlargement of the creature,--that this
+ichthyolite was not an _immature_, but really a _miniature_ Coccosteus.
+We may see on the plates of the full-grown Coccosteus, as on the shells
+of bivalves, such as _Cardium echinatum_, or on those of spiral
+univalves, such as _Buccinum undatum_, the diminutive markings which
+they bore when the creature was young; and on the plates of this species
+we may detect a regular gradation of tubercles from the microscopic to
+the minute, as we may see on the plates of the larger kinds a regular
+gradation from the minute to the fall-sized. The average length of the
+dwarf Coccosteus of Thurso and Kirkwall, taken from the snout to the
+pointed termination of the dorsal plate, ranges from one and a-half to
+two inches; its entire length from head to tail probably from three to
+four. It was from one of Mr. Dick's specimens of this species that I
+first determined the true position of the eyes of the Coccosteus,--a
+position which some of my lately-found ichthyolites conclusively
+demonstrate, and which Agassiz, in his restoration, deceived by
+ill-preserved specimens, has fixed at a point considerably more lateral
+and posterior, and where eyes would have been of greatly less use to the
+animal. About a field's breadth below this quarry of the _Coccosteus
+minor_,--if I may take the liberty of extemporizing a name, until such
+time as some person better qualified furnishes the creature with a more
+characteristic one,--there are the remains, consisting of fosse and
+rampart, with a single cannon lying red and honeycombed amid the ruins,
+of one of Cromwell's forts, built to protect the town against the
+assaults of an enemy from the sea. In the few and stormy years during
+which this ablest of British governors ruled over Scotland, he seems to
+have exercised a singularly vigilant eye. The claims on his protection
+of even the remote Kirkwall did not escape him.
+
+The antiquities of the burgh next engaged me; and, as became its dignity
+and importance, I began with the Cathedral, a building imposing enough
+to rank among the most impressive of its class anywhere, but whose
+peculiar _setting_ in this remote northern country, joined to the
+associations of its early history with the Scandinavian Rollos, Sigurds,
+Einars, and Hacos of our dingier chronicles, serve greatly to enhance
+its interest. It is a noble pile, built of a dark-tinted Old Red
+Sandstone,--a stone which, though by much too sombre for adequately
+developing the elegancies of the Grecian or Roman architecture, to which
+a light delicate tone of color seems indispensable, harmonizes well with
+the massier and less florid styles of the Gothic. The round arch of that
+ancient Norman school which was at one time so generally recognized as
+Saxon, prevails in the edifice, and marks out its older portions. A few
+of the arches present on their ringstones those characteristic toothed
+and zig-zag ornaments that are of not unfamiliar occurrence on the round
+squat doorways of the older parish churches of England; but by much the
+greater number exhibit merely a few rude mouldings, that bend over
+ponderous columns and massive capitals, unfretted by the tool of the
+carver. Though of colossal magnificence, the exterior of the edifice
+yields in effect, as in all true Gothic buildings,--for the Gothic is
+greatest in what the Grecian is least,--to the sombre sublimity of the
+interior. The nave, flanked by the dim deep aisles, and by a double row
+of smooth-stemmed gigantic columns, supporting each a double tier of
+ponderous arches, and the transepts, with their three tiers of small
+Norman windows, and their bold semi-circular arcs, demurely gay with
+toothed or angular carvings, that speak of the days of Rolf and
+Torfeinar, are singularly fine,--far superior to aught else of the kind
+in Scotland; and a happy accident has added greatly to their effect. A
+rare Byssus,--the _Byssus aeruginosa_ of Linnæus,--the _Leprasia
+aeruginosa_ of modern botanists,--one of those gloomy vegetables of the
+damp cave and dark mine whose true habitat is rather under than upon the
+earth, has crept over arch, and column, and broad bare wall, and given
+to well nigh the entire interior of the building a close-fitted lining
+of dark velvety green, which, like the Attic rust of an ancient medal,
+forms an appropriate covering to the sculpturings which it enwraps
+without concealing, and harmonizes with at once the dim light and the
+antique architecture. Where the sun streamed upon it, high over head,
+through the narrow windows above, it reminded me of a pall of rich green
+velvet. It seems subject, on some of the lower mouldings and damper
+recesses, especially amid the tombs and in the aisles, to a decomposing
+mildew, which eats into it in fantastic map-like lines of mingled black
+and gray, so resembling Runic fret-work, that I had some difficulty in
+convincing myself that the tracery which it forms,--singularly
+appropriate to the architecture,--was not the effect of design. The
+choir and chancel of the edifice, which at the time of my visit were
+still employed as the parish church of Kirkwall, and had become a "world
+too wide" for the shrunken congregation, are more modern and ornate than
+the nave and transepts; and the round arch gives place, in at least
+their windows, to the pointed one. But the unique consistency of the
+pile is scarce at all disturbed by this mixture of styles. It is truly
+wonderful how completely the forgotten architects of the darker ages
+contrived to avoid those gross offences against good taste and artistic
+feeling into which their successors of a greatly more enlightened time
+are continually falling. Instead of idly courting ornament for its own
+sake, they must have had as their proposed object the production of some
+definite effect, or the development of some special sentiment. It was
+perhaps well for them, too, that they were not so overladen as our
+modern architects with the _learning_ of their profession. Extensive
+knowledge requires great judgment to guide it. If that high genius which
+can impart its own homogeneous character to very various materials be
+wanting, the more multifarious a man's ideas become, the more is he in
+danger of straining after a heterogeneous patch-work excellence, which
+is but excellence in its components, and deformity as a whole. Every new
+vista opened up to him on what has been produced in his art elsewhere
+presents to him merely a new avenue of error. His mind becomes a mere
+damaged kaleidoscope, full of little broken pieces of the fair and the
+exquisite, but devoid of that nicely reflective machinery which can
+alone cast the fragments into shapes of a chaste and harmonious beauty.
+
+Judging from the sculptures of St. Magnus, the stone-cutter seems to
+have had but an indifferent command of his trade in Orkney, when there
+was a good deal known about it elsewhere. And yet the rudeness of his
+work here, much in keeping with the ponderous simplicity of the
+architecture, serves but to link on the pile to a more venerable
+antiquity, and speaks less of the inartificial than of the remote. I saw
+a grotesque hatchment high up among the arches, that, with the uncouth
+carvings below, served to throw some light on the introduction into
+ecclesiastical edifices of those ludicrous sculptures that seem so
+incongruously foreign to the proper use and character of such places.
+The painter had set himself, with, I doubt not, fair moral intent, to
+exhibit a skeleton wrapped up in a winding-sheet; but, like the unlucky
+artist immortalized by Gifford, who proposed painting a lion, but
+produced merely a dog, his skill had failed in seconding his intentions,
+and, instead of achieving a Death in a shroud, he had achieved but a
+monkey grinning in a towel. His contemporaries, however, unlike those of
+Gifford's artist, do not seem to have found out the mistake, and so the
+betowelled monkey has come to hold a conspicuous place among the
+solemnities of the Cathedral. It does not seem difficult to conceive how
+unintentional ludicrosities of this nature, introduced into
+ecclesiastical erections in ages too little critical to distinguish
+between what the workman had purposed doing and what he had done, might
+come to be regarded, in a less earnest but more knowing age, as
+precedents for the introduction of the intentionally comic and
+grotesque. Innocent accidental monkeys in towels may have thus served to
+usher into serious neighborhoods monkeys in towels that were such with
+malice _prepense_.
+
+I was shown an opening in the masonry, rather more than a man's height
+from the floor, that marked where a square narrow cell, formed in the
+thickness of the wall, had been laid open a few years before. And in the
+cell there was found depending from the middle of the roof a rusty iron
+chain, with a bit of barley-bread attached. What could the chain and bit
+of bread have meant? Had they dangled in the remote past over some
+northern Ugolino? or did they form in their dark narrow cell, without
+air-hole or outlet, merely some of the reserve terrors of the
+Cathedral, efficient in bending to the authority of the Church the
+rebellious monk or refractory nun? Ere quitting the building, I scaled
+the great tower,--considerably less tall, it is said, than its
+predecessor, which was destroyed by lightning about two hundred years
+ago, but quite tall enough to command an extensive, and, though bare,
+not unimpressive prospect. Two arms of the sea, that cut so deeply into
+the mainland on its opposite sides as to narrow it into a flat neck
+little more than a mile and a half in breadth, stretch away in long
+vista, the one to the south, and the other to the north; and so
+immediately is the Cathedral perched on the isthmus between, as to be
+nearly equally conspicuous from both. It forms in each, to the
+inward-bound vessel, the terminal object in the landscape. There was not
+much to admire in the town immediately beneath, with its roofs of gray
+slate,--almost the only parts of it visible from this point of
+view,--and its bare treeless suburbs; nor yet in the tract of mingled
+hill and moor on either hand, into which the island expands from the
+narrow neck, like the two ends of a sand-glass; but the long withdrawing
+ocean-avenues between, that seemed approaching from south and north to
+kiss the feet of the proud Cathedral,--avenues here and there enlivened
+on their ground of deep blue by a sail, and fringed on the lee--for the
+wind blew freshly in the clear sunshine--with their border of dazzling
+white, were objects worth while climbing the tower to see. Ere my
+descent, my guide hammered out of the tower-bells, on my special behalf,
+somewhat, I daresay, to the astonishment of the burghers below, a set of
+chimes handed down entire, in all the notes, from the times of the
+monks, from which also the four fine bells of the Cathedral have
+descended as an heirloom to the burgh. The chimes would have delighted
+the 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 it
+seemed really very sweet, a few hundred yards further away; and the
+quiet clerical poet,--the restorer of the Sonnet in England, would, I
+doubt not, have been of the same mind. The oft-recurring tones of those
+bells that ring throughout his verse, and to which Byron wickedly
+proposed adding a _cap_, form but an ingredient of the poetry in which
+he describes them; and they are represented always as distant tones,
+that, while they mingle with the softer harmonies of nature, never
+overpower 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,--a
+stately ruin, in the more ornate castellated style of the sixteenth
+century. 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 the
+sides, the lower story of the building, and rise over the _spring_ of
+the large richly-decorated turrets. These last form so much nearer the
+base of the edifice than is common in our old castles, that they exhibit
+the appearance rather of hanging towers than of turrets,--of towers with
+their foundations cut away. The projecting windows, with their deep
+mouldings, square mullions, and cruciform shot-holes, are rich
+specimens of their peculiar style; and, with the double-windowed turrets
+with which they range, they communicate a sort of _high-relief_ effect
+to the entire erection, "the exterior proportions and ornaments of
+which," says Sir Walter Scott, in his Journal, "are very handsome."
+Though a roofless and broken ruin, with the rank grass waving on its
+walls, it is still a piece of very solid masonry, and must have been
+rather stiff working as a quarry. Some painstaking burgher had, I found,
+made a desperate attempt on one of the huge chimney lintels of the great
+hall of the erection,--an apartment which Sir Walter greatly admired,
+and in which he lays the scene in the "Pirate" between Cleveland and
+Jack Bunce, but the lintel, a curious example of what, in the exercise
+of a little Irish liberty, is sometimes termed a _rectilinear arch_,
+defied his utmost efforts; and, after half-picking out the keystone, he
+had to give it up in despair. The bishop's palace, of which a handsome
+old tower still remains tolerably entire, also served for a quarry in
+its day; and I was scarce sufficiently distressed to learn, that on
+almost 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 he
+had loosed out of the wall, to drop on the head of his companion, who
+stood 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 Haco
+died,--thanks to the economic burghers who converted the stately ruin
+into a quarry,--has wholly disappeared. Though the death of this last of
+the Norwegian invaders does not date more than ten years previous to the
+birth of the Bruce, it seems to belong, notwithstanding, to a different
+and greatly more ancient period of Scottish history; as if it came under
+the influence of a sort of aërial perspective, similar to that which
+makes a neighboring hill in a fog appear as remote as a distant mountain
+when the atmosphere is clearer. Our national wars with the English were
+rendered familiar to our country folk of the last age, and for centuries
+before by the old Scotch "_Makkaris,_" Barbour and Blind Harry, and in
+our own times by the glowing narratives of Sir Walter Scott,--magicians
+who, unlike those ancient sorcerers that used to darken the air with
+their incantations, possessed the rare power of dissipating the mists
+and vapors of the historic atmosphere, and rendering it transparent. But
+we had no such chroniclers of the time, though only half an age further
+removed 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 the
+still wilder wanderers of Scandinavia in fierce combats that he was too
+little skilful to record, and which appears so obscure and remote to his
+descendants, presents a phase comparatively near, and an outline
+proportionally sharp and well-defined to the intelligent peasantry of
+Iceland. _Their_ Barbours and Blind Harries came a few ages sooner than
+ours, and the fog, in consequence, rose earlier; and so, while Scotch
+antiquaries of no mean standing can say almost nothing about the
+expedition or death-bed of Haco, even the humbler Icelanders, taught
+from their Sagas in the long winter nights, can tell how, harassed by
+anxiety and fatigue, the monarch sickened, and recovered, and sickened
+again; and how, dying in the bishop's palace, his body was interred for
+a winter in the Cathedral, and then borne in spring to the burying-place
+of his ancestors in Norway. The only clear vista on the death of Haco
+which 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 the
+monarch is still occasionally sought for in the Cathedral, I must
+introduce the reader. I quote from an extract containing the account of
+Haco's expedition against Scotland, which was translated from the
+original Icelandic by the Rev. James Johnstone, chaplain to his
+Britannic Majesty's Envoy Extraordinary at the court of Denmark, and
+appeared in the "Edinburgh Magazine" for 1787.
+
+"King Haco," says the chronicler, "now in the seven and fortieth year of
+his reign, had spent the summer in watchfulness and anxiety. Being often
+called to deliberate with his captains, he had enjoyed little rest; and
+when 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 for
+three days. On the first day he walked about in his apartments; on the
+second he attended at the bishop's chapel to hear mass; and on the third
+he 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 himself
+shaved. Some nights after, he relapsed, and took again to his bed.
+During his sickness he ordered the Bible and Latin authors to be read to
+him. But finding his spirits were too much fatigued by reflecting on
+what he had heard, he desired Norwegian books might be read to him night
+and day: first the lives of saints; and, when they were ended, he made
+his 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 into
+consideration the pay to be given to his troops, and commanded that a
+merk of fine silver should be given to each courtier, and half a merk to
+each of the masters of the lights, chamberlain, and other attendants on
+his person. He ordered all the silver-plate belonging to his table to be
+weighed, and to be distributed if his standard silver fell short....
+King Haco received extreme unction on the night before the festival of
+St. 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 king
+farewell with a kiss.... The festival of the Virgin St. Lucia happened
+on a Thursday; and on the Saturday after, the king's disorder increased
+to such a degree, that he lost the use of his speech; and at midnight
+Almighty God called King Haco out of this mortal life. This was matter
+of great grief to all those who attended, and to most of those who heard
+of the event. The following barons were present at the death of the
+king:--Briniolf Johnson, Erling Alfson, John Drottning, Ronald Urka, and
+some domestics who had been near the king's person during his illness.
+Immediately on the decease of the king, bishops and learned men were
+sent for to sing mass.... On Sunday the royal corpse was carried to the
+upper 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 the
+whole hall was illuminated. All the people came to see the body, which
+appeared beautiful and animated; and the king's countenance was as fair
+and ruddy as while he was alive. It was some alleviation of the deep
+sorrow of the beholders to see the corpse of their departed sovereign so
+decorated. High mass was then sung for the deceased. The nobility kept
+watch by the body during the night. On Monday the remains of King Haco
+were 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 choir
+of St. Magnus Church, near the steps leading to the shrine of St.
+Magnus, Earl of Orkney. The tomb was then closed, and a canopy was
+spread over it. It was also determined that watch should be kept over
+the king's grave all winter. At Christmas the bishop and Andrew Plytt
+furnished entertainments, as the king had directed; and good presents
+were given to all the soldiers. King Haco had given orders that his
+remains should be carried east to Norway, and buried near his fathers
+and relatives. Towards the end of winter, therefore, that great vessel
+which he had in the west was launched, and soon got ready. On Ash
+Wednesday the corpse of King Haco was taken out of the ground: this
+happened the third of the nones of March. The courtiers followed the
+corpse to Skalpeid, where the ship lay, and which was chiefly under the
+direction of the Bishop Thorgisl and Andrew Plytt. They put to sea on
+the first Saturday in Lent; but, meeting with hard weather, they steered
+for Silavog. From this place they wrote letters to Prince Magnus,
+acquainting him with the news, and then sailed for Bergen. They arrived
+at Laxavog before the festival of St. Benedict. On that day Prince
+Magnus rowed out to meet the corpse. The ship was brought near to the
+king's palace, and the body was carried up to a summer-house. Next
+morning the corpse was removed to Christ's Church, and was attended by
+Prince Magnus, the two queens, the courtiers, and the town's people. The
+body was then interred in the choir of Christ's Church; and Prince
+Magnus addressed a long and gracious speech to those who attended the
+funeral procession. All the multitude present were much affected, and
+expressed great sorrow of mind."
+
+So far the Icelandic chronicle. Each age has as certainly its own mode
+of telling its stories as of adjusting its dress or setting its cap; and
+the mode of this northern historian is somewhat prolix. I am not sure,
+however, whether I would not prefer the simple minuteness with which he
+dwells on every little circumstance, to that dissertative style of
+history characteristic of a more reflective age, that for series of
+facts substitutes bundles of theories. Cowper well describes the
+historians of this latter school, and shows how, on selecting some
+little-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 those
+wasting incursions of the Northmen which must have been such terrible
+plagues to the southern and western countries of Europe, ceased in
+consequence of their conversion to Christianity; for that, under the
+humanizing influence of religion, they staid at home, and cultivated the
+arts of peace. But the hypothesis is, I fear, not very tenable.
+Christianity, in even a purer form than that in which it first found its
+way among the ancient Scandinavians, and when at least as generally
+recognized nationally as it ever was by the subjects of Haco, has failed
+to put down the trade of aggressive war. It did not prevent honest,
+obstinate George the Third from warring with the Americans or the
+French: it only led him to enjoin a day of thanksgiving when his troops
+had slaughtered a great many of the enemy, and to ordain a fast when the
+enemy had slaughtered, in turn, a great many of his troops. And Haco,
+who, though he preferred the lives of the saints, and even of his
+ancestors, 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 yet
+appears to have had as few compunctions visitings on the score of his
+Scottish war as George the Third on that of the French or the American
+one. Christianity, too, ere his invasion of Scotland, had been for a
+considerable time established in his dominions, and ought, were the
+theory 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 a
+century old. The true secret of the cessation of Norwegian invasion
+seems to have been the consolidation, under vigorous princes, of the
+countries which had lain open to it,--a circumstance which, in the later
+attempts of the invaders, led to results similar to those which broke
+the heart of tough old Haco, in the bishop's palace at Kirkwall.
+
+From the ruins I passed to the town, and spent a not uninstructive
+half-hour in sauntering along the streets in the quiet of the evening,
+acquainting myself with the general aspect of the people. I marked, as
+one of the peculiar features of the place, groups of tidily-dressed
+young women, engaged at the close-heads with their straw plait,--the
+prevailing manufacture of the town,--and enjoying at the same time the
+fresh air and an easy chat. The special contribution made by the lassies
+of 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 of
+these islands unites an aquiline but not prominent nose to an oval face.
+In the ordinary Scotch and English countenance, when the nose is
+aquiline it is also prominent, and the face is thin and angular, as if
+the additional height of the central feature had been given it at the
+expense of the cheeks, and of lateral shavings from off the chin. The
+hard Duke-of-Wellington face is illustrative of this type. But in the
+aquiline type of Orkney the countenance is softer and fuller, and, in at
+least the female face, the general contour greatly more handsome. Dr.
+Kombst, in his ethnographic map of Britain and Ireland, gives to the
+coast of Caithness and the Shetland Islands a purely Scandinavian
+people, but to the Orkneys a mixed race, which he designates the
+Scandinavian-Gaelic. I would be inclined, however,--preferring rather to
+found on those traits of person and character that are still patent,
+than on the unauthenticated statements of uncertain history,--to regard
+the people as essentially one from the northern extremity of Shetland to
+the Ord Hill of Caithness. Beyond the Ord Hill, and on to the northern
+shores of the Frith of Cromarty, we find, though unnoted on the map, a
+different race,--a race strongly marked by the Celtic lineaments, and
+speaking the Gaelic tongue. On the southern side of the Frith, and
+extending on to the Bay of Munlochy, the purely Scandinavian race again
+occurs. The sailors of the Danish fleet which four years ago accompanied
+the Crown Prince in his expedition to the Faroe Islands were astonished
+when, on landing at Cromarty, they recognized in the people the familiar
+cast of countenance and feature that marked their country folk and
+relatives at home; and found that they were simply Scandinavians like
+themselves, who, having forgotten their Danish, spoke Scotch instead.
+Rather more than a mile to the west of the fishing village of Avoch
+there commences a Celtic district, which stretches on from Munlochy to
+the river Nairne; beyond which the Scandinavian and Teutonic-Scandinavian
+border that fringes the eastern coast of Scotland extends unbroken
+southwards through Moray, Banff, and Aberdeen, on to Forfar, Fife, the
+Lothians, and the Mearns. These two intercalated patches of Celtic people
+in the northern tract,--that extending from the Ord Hill to the Cromarty
+Frith, and that extending from the Bay of Munlochy to the Nairne,--still
+retaining, as they do, after the lapse of ages, a sharp distinctness of
+boundary in respect of language, character, and personal appearance, are
+surely great curiosities. The writer of these chapters was born on the
+extreme edge of one of these patches, scarce a mile distant from a
+Gaelic-speaking population; and yet, though his humble ancestors were
+located on the spot for centuries, he can find trace among them of but one
+Celtic name; and their language was exclusively the Lowland Scotch. For
+many ages the two races, like oil and water, refused to mix.
+
+I spent the evening very agreeably with one of the Free Church elders of
+the place, Mr. George Petrie, an accomplished antiquary; and found that
+his love of the antique, joined to an official connection with the
+county, had cast into his keeping a number of curious old papers of the
+sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries,--not in the least
+connected, some of them, with the legal and civic records of the place,
+but which had somehow stuck around these, in their course of
+transmission from one age to another, as a float of brushwood in a river
+occasionally brings down along with it, entangled in its folds, uprooted
+plants and aquatic weeds, that would otherwise have disappeared in the
+cataracts and eddies of the upper reaches of the stream. Dead as they
+seemed, spotted with mildew, and fretted by the moth, I found them
+curiously charged with what had once been intellect and emotion, hopes
+and fears, stern business and light amusement. I saw, among the other
+manuscripts, a thin slip of a book, filled with jottings, in the antique
+square-headed style of notation, of old Scotch tunes, apparently the
+work of some musical county-clerk of Orkney in the seventeenth century;
+but the paper, in a miserable state of decay, was blotted crimson and
+yellow with the rotting damps, and the ink so faded, that the notation
+of 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, addressed
+by some Orcadian Claud Halcro of the last age, to some local patron, in
+a vein of compliment rich and stiff as a piece of ancient brocade. A
+peremptory letter, bearing the autograph signature of Mary Queen of
+Scots, to Torquil McLeod of Dunvegan, who had been on the eve, it would
+seem, of marrying a daughter of Donald of the Isles, gave the Skye
+chieftain, "to wit" that, as he was of the blood royal of Scotland, he
+could form no matrimonial alliance without the royal permission,--a
+permission which, in the case in point, was not to be granted. It served
+to show that the woman who so ill liked to be thwarted in her own amours
+could, in her character as the Queen, deal despotically enough with the
+love affairs of other people. Side by side with the letter of Mary there
+were several not less peremptory documents of the times of the
+Commonwealth, addressed to the Sheriff of Orkney and Shetland, in the
+name of his Highness the Lord Protector, and that bore the signature of
+George Monck. I found them to consist chiefly of dunning letters,--such
+letters as those duns write who have victorious armies at their
+back,--for large sums of money, the assessments laid on the Orkneys by
+Cromwell. Another series of letters, some ten or twelve years later in
+their date, form portions of the history of a worthy covenanting
+minister, the Rev. Alexander Smith of Colvine, banished to North
+Ronaldshay from the extreme south of Scotland, for the offence of
+preaching the gospel, and holding meetings for social worship in his own
+house; and, as if to demonstrate his incorrigibility, one of the
+series,--a letter under his own hand, addressed from his island prison
+to the Sheriff-Depute in Kirkwall,--showed him as determined and
+persevering in the offence as ever. It was written immediately after his
+arrival. "The poor inhabitants," says the writer, "so many as I have
+yet 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 of
+anything that may smell of sedition or rebellion. If I be farther
+troubled for yt, I resolve to suffer with meekness and patience." The
+Galloway minister must have been an honest man. Deeming preaching his
+true vocation,--a vocation from the exercise of which he dared not
+cease, lest he should render himself obnoxious to the woe referred to by
+the apostle,--he yet could not steal a march on even the Sheriff, whose
+professional duty it was to prevent him from doing _his_; and so he
+fairly warned him that he proposed breaking the law. The next set of
+papers in the collection dated after the Revolution, and were full
+charged with an enthusiastic Jacobitisin, which seems to have been a
+prevalent sentiment in Orkney from the death of Queen Anne, until the
+disastrous defeat at Culloden quenched in blood the hopes of the party.
+There is a deep cave still shown on the shores of Westray, within sight
+of the forlorn Patmos of the poor Covenanter, in which, when the sun got
+on the Whig side of the hedge, twelve gentlemen, who had been engaged in
+the rebellion of 1745, concealed themselves for a whole winter. So
+perseveringly were they sought after, that during the whole time they
+dared not once light a fire, nor attempt fishing from the rocks to
+supply themselves with food; and, though they escaped the search, they
+never, it is said, completely recovered the horrors of their term of
+dreary seclusion, but bore about with them, in broken constitutions, the
+effects of the hardships to which they had been subjected. They must
+have had full time and opportunity, during that miserable winter, for
+testing the justice of the policy that had sent poor Smith into exile,
+from his snug southern parish in the Presbytery of Dumfries, to the
+remotest island of the Orkneys. The great lesson taught in Providence
+during the seventeenth and part of the eighteenth century to our
+Scottish country folk seems to have been the lesson of toleration; and
+as they were slow, stubborn scholars, the lash was very frequently and
+very severely applied. One of the Jacobite papers of Mr. Petrie's
+collection,--a triumphal poem on the victory of Gladsmuir,--which, if
+less 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 a
+passage in literary history which puzzled Dr. Johnson, and which scarce
+any one would think of going to Orkney to settle.
+
+Johnson states, in his Life of the poet Thomson, that the "first
+operation" of the act passed in 1739 "for licensing plays" was the
+"prohibition of 'Gustavus Vasa,' a tragedy of Mr. Brook." "Why such a
+work should be obstructed," he adds, "it is hard to discover." We learn
+elsewhere,--from the compiler of the "Modern Universal History," if I
+remember aright,--that "so popular did the prohibitory order of the Lord
+Chamberlain 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 Brook
+were in their graves, that it was deemed safe to license it for the
+stage. Now, the fact that a drama, in itself as little dangerous as
+"Cato" or "Douglas," should have been prohibited by the Government of
+the day, in the first instance, and should have brought the author, on
+its publication, so large a sum in the second, can be accounted for only
+by a reference to the keen partisanship of the period, and the peculiar
+circumstances of parties. The Jacobites, taught by the rebellion of 1715
+at once the value of the Highlands and the incompetency of the
+Chevalier St. George as a leader, had begun to fix their hopes on the
+Chevalier's son, Charles Edward, at that time a young but promising lad;
+and, with the tragedy of Brook before them, neither they, nor the
+English Government of the day could have failed to see the foreigner
+George the Second typified--unintentionally, surely, on the part of
+Brook, who was a "Prince of Wales" Whig--in the foreigner Christiern
+the 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 the
+least probable, as the poem is a piece of sad mediocrity throughout,
+that it is a parallelism which was originated by its writer. It must
+have been that of his party; and led, I doubt not, five years before, to
+the prohibition of Brook's tragedy, and to the singular success which
+attended its publication. The passage in the manuscript suggestive of
+this view takes the form of an address to the victorious prince, and
+runs 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, a
+shallow prolongation of the Bay of Kirkwall, cut off from the main sea
+by an artificial mound, to the quarry of Pickoquoy, somewhat notable,
+only a few years ago, as the sole locality in which shells had been
+detected in the Old Red Sandstone of Scotland. But these have since been
+found in the neighborhood of Thurso, by Mr. Robert Dick, associated
+with bones and plates of the Asterolepis, and by Mr. William Watt on the
+opposite side of the Mainland of Orkney, at Marwick Head. So far as has
+yet been ascertained, they are all of one species, and more nearly
+resemble a small Cyclas than any other shell. They are, however, more
+deeply sulcated in concentric lines, drawn, as if by a pair of
+compasses, from the umbone, and somewhat resembling those of the genus
+Astarte, than any species of Cyclas with which I am acquainted. In all
+the specimens I have yet seen, it appears to be rather a thick dark
+epidermis that survives, than the shell which it covered; nay, it seems
+not impossible that to its thick epidermis, originally an essentially
+different substance from that which composed the calcareous case, the
+shell may have owed its preservation as a fossil; while other shells,
+its contemporaries, from the circumstance of their having been
+unfurnished with any such covering, may have failed to leave any trace
+of their existence behind them. It seems at least difficult to conceive
+of a sea inhabited by many genera of fishes, each divided into several
+species, and yet furnished with but one species of shell. I found the
+quarry of Pickoquoy,--a deep excavation only a few yards beyond the
+high-water mark, and some two or three yards under the high-water
+level,--deserted by the quarrymen, and filled to the brim by the
+overflowing of a small stream. I succeeded, however, in detecting its
+shells _in situ_. They seem restricted chiefly to a single stratum,
+scarcely half an inch in thickness, and lie, not thinly scattered over
+the platform which they occupy, but impinging on each other, like all
+the gregarious shells, in thickly-set groups and clusters. There occur
+among them occasional scales of Dipteri; and on some of the fragments of
+rock long exposed around the quarry-mouth to the weather I found them
+assuming a pale nacreous gloss,--an effect, it is not improbable, of
+their still retaining, attached to the epidermis, a thin film of the
+original shell. The world's history must be vastly more voluminous now,
+and greatly more varied in its contents, than when the stratum which
+they occupy formed the upper layer of a muddy sea-bottom, and they
+opened their valves by myriads, to prey on the organic atoms which
+formed their food, or shut them again, startled by the shadow of the
+Dipterus, as he descended from the upper depths of the water to prey
+upon them in turn. The palate of this ancient ganoid is furnished with a
+curious dental apparatus, formed apparenly, like that of the recent
+wolf-fish, for the purpose of crushing shells.
+
+About mid-day I set out by the mail-gig for Stromness. For the first few
+miles the road winds through a bare solitary valley, overlooked by
+ungainly heath-covered hills of no great altitude, though quite tall
+enough to prevent the traveller from seeing anything but themselves. As
+he passes on, the valley opens in front on an arm of the sea, over which
+the range of hills on the right abruptly terminates, while that on the
+left deflects into a line nearly parallel to the shore, leaving a
+comparatively level strip of moory land, rather more than a mile in
+breadth, between the steeper acclivities and the beach. A tall naked
+house rises between the road and the sea. Two low islands immediately
+behind it, only a few acres in extent,--one of them bearing a small ruin
+on its apex,--give a little variety to the central point in the prospect
+which the naked house forms; but the arm of the sea, bordered, at the
+time I passed, by a broad brown selvage of sea-weed, is as tame and flat
+as a Dutch lake; the background beyond, a long monotonous ridge, is bare
+and treeless; and in front lies the brown moory plain, bordered by the
+dull 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 very
+pleasing poet, its hills, and islands, and blue arm of the sea, its
+brown moory plain, and tall naked house rising in the midst, must have
+been surrounded by a sunlit atmosphere of love and desire, bright enough
+to impart to even its tamest features a glow of exquisiteness and
+beauty. Malcolm the poet was born, and spent his years of boyhood and
+early youth, in the tall naked house; and the surrounding landscape is
+that to which he refers in his "Tales of Flood and Field," as rising in
+imagination before him, bright in the red gleam of the setting sun,
+when, on the steep slopes of the Pyrenees, the "silent stars of night
+were twinkling high over his head," and the "tents of the soldiery
+glimmering pale through the gloom." The tall house is the manse of the
+parish of Frith and Stennis; and the poet was the son of the Rev. John
+Malcolm, its minister. Here, when yet a mere lad, dreaming, in the quiet
+obscurity of an Orkney parish, far removed from the seat of war and the
+literary circles, of poetic celebrity and military renown, he addressed
+a letter to the Duke of Kent, the father of our Sovereign Lady the
+reigning Monarch, expressing an ardent wish to obtain a commission in
+the army then engaged in the Peninsula. The letter was such as to excite
+the interest of his Royal Highness, who replied to it by return of post,
+requesting the writer to proceed forthwith to London; for which he
+immediately set out, and was received by the Duke with courtesy and
+kindness. He was instructed by him to take ship for Spain, in which he
+arrived as volunteer; and, joining the army, engaged at the time in the
+siege of St. Sebastian, under General Graham, he was promoted shortly
+after, through the influence of his generous patron, to a lieutenancy in
+the 42d Highlanders. He served in that distinguished regiment on to the
+closing campaign of the Pyrenees; but received at the battle of Toulouse
+a wound so severe as to render him ever after incapable of active bodily
+exertion; and so he had to retire from the army on half-pay, and a
+pension honorably earned. The history of his career as a soldier he has
+told with singular interest, in one of the earlier volumes of
+"Constable's Miscellany;" and his poems abound in snatches of
+description painfully true, drawn from his experience of the military
+life,--of scenes of stern misery and grim desolation, of injuries
+received, and of sufferings inflicted,--that must have contrasted sadly
+in his mind, in their character as gross realities, with the dreamy
+visions of conquest and glory in which he had indulged at an earlier
+time. The ruin of St. Sebastian, complete enough, and attended with
+circumstances of the horrible extreme enough, to appal men long
+acquainted with the trade of war, must have powerfully impressed an
+imaginative susceptible lad, fresh from the domesticities of a rural
+manse, in whose quiet neighborhood the voice of battle had not been
+heard for centuries, and surrounded by a simple people, remarkable for
+the respect which they bear to human life. In all probability, the power
+evinced in his description of the siege, and of the utter desolation in
+which it terminated, is in part owing to the fresh impressibility of his
+mind at the time. Such, at least, was my feeling regarding it, as I
+caught myself muttering some of its more graphic passages, and saw, from
+the degree of alarm evinced by the boy who drove the mail-gig, that the
+sounds were not quite lost in the rattle of that somewhat rickety
+vehicle, and that he had come to entertain serious doubts respecting the
+sanity 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,--a
+gentleman to whom, during my stay in Orkney, I took the liberty of
+introducing myself in his snug little Free Church manse at the head of
+the bay, and in whose possession I found the only portrait of the poet
+which exists. It is that of a handsome and interesting looking _young_
+man, though taken not many years before his death; for, like the greater
+number of his class, he did not live to be an old one, dying under
+forty. His brother the clergyman kindly accompanied me to two quarries
+in the neighborhood of his new domicil, which I found, like almost all
+the dry-stone fences of the district, speckled with scales, occipital
+plates, and gill-covers, of Osteolepides and Dipteri, but containing no
+entire ichthyolites. He had taken his side in the Church controversy, he
+told me, firmly, but quietly; and when the Disruption came, and he found
+it necessary to quit the old manse, which had been a home to his family
+for well nigh two generations, and in which both he and his brother had
+been born, he scarce knew what his people were to do, nor in what
+proportion he was to have followers among them. Somewhat to his
+surprise, however, they came out with him almost to a man; so that his
+successor in the parish church had sometimes, he understood, to preach
+to congregations scarcely exceeding half a dozen. I had learned
+elsewhere how thoroughly Mr. Malcolm was loved and respected by his
+parishioners; and that unconsciousness on his own part of the strength
+of their affection and esteem, which his statement evinced, formed, I
+thought, a very pleasing trait, and one that harmonized well with the
+finely-toned unobtrusiveness and unconscious elegance which
+characterized the genius of his deceased brother. A little beyond the
+Free Church manse the road ascends between stone walls, abounding in
+fragments of ichthyolites, weathered blue by exposure to the sun and
+wind; and the top of the eminence forms the water-shed in this part of
+the Mainland, and introduces the traveller to a scene entirely new. The
+prospect is of considerable extent; and, what seems strange in Orkney,
+nowhere presents the traveller,--though it contains its large inland
+lake,--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 hills
+and precipices on their western coasts: the Ward Hill of Hoy attains to
+an elevation of sixteen hundred feet; and there are some of the
+precipices which skirt the island of which it forms so conspicuous a
+feature, that rise sheer over the breakers from eight hundred to a
+thousand. Unlike, however, the arrangement on the mainland, it is the
+newer rocks that attain to the higher elevations; the heights of Hoy are
+composed of that arenaceous upper member of the Lower Old Red
+Sandstone,--the last formed of the Palæozoic deposits of Orkney,--which
+overlies the ichthyolitic flagstones and shales of Caithness at Dunnet
+Head, and the ichthyolitic nodular beds of Inverness, Ross, and
+Cromarty, at Culloden, Tarbet Ness, within the Northern Sutor, and along
+the bleak ridge of the Maolbuie. It is simply a tall upper story of the
+formation, erected along the western line of coast in the Orkneys, which
+the eastern line wholly wants. Its screen of hills forms a noble
+background to the prospect which opens on the traveller as he ascends
+the eminence beyond the Free Church manse of Frith and Stennis. A large
+lake, bare and treeless, like all the other lakes and lochs of Orkney,
+but picturesque of outline, and divided into an upper and lower sheet of
+water 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, half
+mound, half bridge, occupies the middle distance. There are moory hills
+and a few cottages in front; and on the promontories, conspicuous in the
+landscape, from the relief furnished by the blue ground of the
+surrounding waters, stand the tall stones of Stennis,--one group on the
+northern promontory, the other on the south. A gray old-fashioned house,
+of no very imposing appearance, rises between the road and the lake. It
+is the house of Stennis, or Turmister, in which Scott places some of the
+concluding scenes of the "Pirate," and from which he makes Cleveland and
+his fantastic admirer Jack Bunce witness the final engagement, in the
+bay of Stromness, between the Halcyon sloop of war and the savage Goffe.
+Nor does it matter anything that neither sea nor vessels can be seen
+from the house of Turmister: the fact which would be so fatal to a
+dishonest 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 in
+my inn, that I had a fine bright evening still before me, longer by some
+three or four degrees of north latitude than the July evenings of
+Edinburgh, I set out, hammer in hand, to explore. Stromness is a long,
+narrow, irregular strip of a town, fairly thrust by a steep hill into
+the 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 so
+immediately beside the houses, that their pennants on gala days wave
+over 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 backbone
+of the district, and against which the Great Conglomerate and lower
+schists of the Old Red are upturned at a rather high angle. It is
+wrapped round in some places by a thin caul of the stratified primary
+rocks. Immediately over the town, on the brow of the eminence, where the
+granitic axis had been laid bare in digging a foundation for the Free
+Church manse, I saw numerous masses of schistose-gneiss, passing in some
+of the beds into a coarse-grained mica-schist, and a lustrous
+hornblendic slate, that had been quarried from over it, and which may be
+still seen built up into the garden-wall of the erection. I walked out
+towards the west, to examine the junction of the granite and the Great
+Conglomerate, where it is laid bare by the sea, little more than a
+quarter of a mile outside the town. There was a horde of noisy urchins a
+little beyond the inn, who, having seen me alight from the mail-gig, had
+determined in their own minds that I was engaged in the political
+canvass going forward at the time, but had not quite ascertained my
+side. 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 side
+of the street, with a counter cry of "Anderson forever." Immediately
+after 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 the
+noo?" "Yes, seeking _beasts_," I replied, "but very old ones: I have
+come to hammer your rocks for petrified fish." "I see, I see," said the
+man; "I took ye by ye'er gray plaid for a drover; but I ken something
+about the stane fish too; there's lots o' them in the quarries at
+Skaill."
+
+I found the great Conglomerate in immediate contact with the granite,
+which is a ternary of the usual components, somewhat intermediate in
+color between that of Peterhead and Aberdeen, and which at this point
+bears none of the caul of stratified primary rock by which it is
+overlaid on the brow of the hill. When the great Conglomerate, which is
+mainly composed of it here, was in the act of forming, this granite must
+have been one of the surface rocks of the locality, and in no respect a
+different stone from what it is now. The widely-spread Conglomerate base
+of the Old Red Sandstone, which presents, over an area of so many
+thousand square miles, such an identity of character, that specimens
+taken from the neighborhood of Lerwick, in Shetland, can scarce be
+distinguished from specimens detached from the hills which rise over the
+great Caledonian Valley, contains in various places, as under the
+Northern Sutor, for instance, and along the shores of Navity, fragments
+of rock which have not been detected _in situ_ in the districts in which
+they occur as agglomerated pebbles. In general, however, we find it
+composed of the debris of those very granites and gneisses which, as in
+the case of the granitic axis here, were forced through it, and through
+the overlying deposits, by deep-seated convulsions, long posterior in
+date to its formation. It appears to have been formed in a vast oceanic
+basin of primary rock,--a Palæozoic Hudson's or Baffin's Bay,--partially
+surrounded, mayhap, by bare primary continents, swept by numerous
+streams, rapid and headlong, and charged with the broken debris of the
+inhospitable regions which they drained. The graptolite-bearing
+grauwacke of Banffshire seems to have been the only fossiliferous rock
+that occurred throughout the extent of this ancient northern basin. The
+Conglomerate of Orkney, like that of Moray and Ross, varies from fifty
+to a hundred yards in thickness. It is not overlaid in this section by
+the thick bed of coarse-grained sandstone, so well-marked a member of
+the formation at Cromarty, Nigg, and Gamrie, and along the northern
+shores of the Beauly Frith; but at once passes into those gray
+bituminous flagstones so immensely developed in Caithness and the
+Orkneys. I traced the formation upwards this evening, walking along the
+edges of the upheaved strata, from where the Conglomerate leans against
+the granite, till where it merges into the gray flagstones, and then
+pursued these from older and lower to newer and higher layers, anxious
+to ascertain at what distance over the base the more ancient organisms
+of the system first appear, and what their character and kind. And
+little more than a hundred _yards_ over the granite, and somewhat less
+than a hundred _feet_ over the upper stratum of the great Conglomerate,
+I found what I sought,--a well-marked bone, perhaps the oldest
+vertebrate remain yet discovered in Orkney, embedded in a light
+grayish-colored layer of hard flag.
+
+What, asks the reader, was the character of the ancient denizen of the
+Palæozoic basin of which it had formed a part? Was it a large or small
+fish, or of a high or low order? Not certainly of a low order, and by no
+means of a small size. The organism in the rock was a specimen of that
+curious nail-shaped bone of the Asterolepis which occurs as a central
+ridge in the single plate that occupies in this genus the wide curve of
+the under jaw, and as it was fully five inches in length from head to
+point, the plate to which it belonged must have measured ten inches
+across, and the frontal occipital buckler with which it was associated,
+one foot two inches in length (not including the three accessory plates
+at the nape), by ten inches in breadth. And if built, as it probably
+was, in the same massy proportions as its brother Coelacanths the
+Holoptychius or Glyptolepis, the individual to which the nail-shaped
+bone belonged must have been, judging from the size of the corresponding
+parts in these ichthyolites, at least twice as large an animal as the
+splendid Clashbennie Holoptychius of the Upper Old Red, now in the
+British Museum. The bulkiest icthyolites yet found in any of the
+divisions of the Old Red system are of the genus Asterolepis; and to
+this genus, and to evidently an individual of no inconsiderable size,
+this oldest of the organisms of the Orkney belonged. I was so interested
+in the fact, that before leaving this part of the country, I brought Dr.
+Garson, Stromness, and Mr. William Watt, jun., Skaill, both very
+intelligent palæontologists, to mark the place and character of the
+fossil, that they might be able to point it out to geological visitors
+in 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, I
+merely request the reader to mark, in the passing, that the most ancient
+organic 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 in
+Scotland,--so far as I know, absolutely the _most_ ancient,--belonged to
+a ganoid as bulky as a large porpoise, and which, as shown by its teeth
+and jaws, possessed that peculiar organization which characterized the
+reptile fish of the Upper Devonian and Carboniferous periods. As there
+are, however, no calculations more doubtful or more to be suspected than
+those on which the size and bulk of the extinct animals are determined
+from some surviving fragment of their remains,--plate or bone,--I must
+attempt laying before the scientific reader at least a portion of the
+data on which I found.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+This figure represents not inadequately one of the most characteristic
+plates of the Asterolepis. A very considerable fragment of what seems to
+be the same plate has been figured by Agassiz from a cast of one of the
+huge specimens of Professor Asmus ("Old Red," Table 32, Fig. 13); but
+as no evidence regarding its true place had turned up at the time it was
+supposed by the naturalist to form part of the opercular covering of the
+animal. It belonged, however, to a different portion of the head. In
+almost all the fish that appear at our tables the space which occurs
+within the arched sweep of the lower jaws is mainly occupied by a
+complicated osseous mechanism, known to anatomists as the hyoid bone and
+branchiostegous rays; and which serves both to support the branchial
+arches and the branchiostegous membrane. Now, in the fish of the Old Red
+Sandstone, if we except some of the Acanthodians, we find no trace of
+this piece of mechanism: the arched space is covered over with dermal
+plates of bone, as a window is filled up with panes. Three plates,
+resembling very considerably the three divisions of a pointed Gothic
+window, furnished with a single central mullion, divided atop into two
+branches, 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 the
+genera Holoptychius and Glyptolepis. In the genus Asterolepis this
+arch-shaped space was occupied, as I have said, by a single plate,--that
+represented in the wood-cut; and the nail-shaped bone rose on its
+internal surface along the centre,--the nail-head resting immediately
+beneath the centre of the arch, and the nail-point bordering on the
+isthmus below, at which the two shoulder-bones terminated. Now, in all
+the specimens which I have yet examined, the form and proportions of
+this plate are such that it can be very nearly inscribed in a
+semi-circle, of which the length of the nail is the radius. A nail five
+inches in length must have belonged to a plate ten inches in its longer
+diameter. I have ascertained further, that this longer diameter was
+equal to the shorter diameter of the creature's frontal buckler,
+measured across about two thirds of its entire length from the nape; and
+that a transverse diameter of ten inches at this point was associated in
+the buckler with a longitudinal diameter of fourteen inches from the
+nape to the snout. Thus five inches along the nail represent fourteen
+inches along the occipital shield. The proportion, however, which the
+latter bore to the entire body in this genus has still to be determined.
+The corresponding frontal shield in the Coccosteus was equal to about
+one-fifth the creature's entire length, and in the Osteolepis and
+Diplopterus, 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 the
+Asterolepis was formed in the proportions of the Diplopterus, the
+ancient individual to which this nail-like bone belonged must have been
+about eight feet two inches in length; but if moulded, as it more
+probably was, in the proportions of the Glyptolepis, only six feet five
+inches. All the Coelacanths, however, were exceedingly massive in
+proportion to their length; they were fish built in the square,
+muscular, thick-set, Dirk-Hatterick and Balfour-of-Burley style; and of
+the Russian specimens, some of the larger bones must have belonged to
+individuals 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 the
+downward slant of the _tread_, as a carpenter would say, the height
+attained in the _rise_, I came, about a quarter of a mile farther to the
+west, and several hundred feet higher in the formation, upon a fissile
+dark-colored bed, largely charged with ichthyolites. The fish I found
+ranged in three layers,--the lower layer consisting almost exclusively
+of Dipterians, chiefly Osteolepides; the middle layer, of Acanthodians,
+of the genera Cheiracanthus and Diplacanthus; and the upper layer, of
+Cephalaspides, mostly of one species, the _Coccosteus decipiens_. I
+found exactly the same arrangement in a bed considerably higher in the
+system, which occurs a full mile farther on,--the Dipterians at the
+bottom, the Acanthodians in the middle, and the Cephalaspides atop; and
+was informed by Mr. William Watt, a competent authority in the case,
+that the arrangement is comparatively a common one in the quarries of
+Orkney. How account for the phenomenon? How account for the three
+storeys, and the apportionment of the floors, like those of a great
+city, each to its own specific class of society? Why should the first
+floor be occupied by Osteolepides, the second by Cheiracanthi and their
+congeners, and the third by Coccostei? Was the arrangement an effect of
+normal differences in the constitutions of the several families,
+operated upon by some deleterious gas or mineral poison, which, though
+it eventually destroyed the whole, did not so simultaneously, but
+consecutively,--the families of weakest constitution first, and the
+strongest last? Or were they exterminated by some disease, that seized
+upon the families, not at once, but in succession? Or did they visit the
+locality serially, as the haddock now visits our coasts in spring, and
+the herring towards the close of summer; and were then killed off,
+whether by poison or disease, as they came? These are questions which
+may never be conclusively answered. It is well, however, to observe, as
+a curious geological fact, that peculiar arrangement of the fossils by
+which they are suggested, and to record the various instances in which
+it occurs. The minerals which I remarked among the schists here as most
+abundant are a kind of black ironstone, exceedingly tough and hard,
+occurring in detached masses, and a variety of bright pyrites
+disseminated among the darker flagstones, either as irregularly-formed,
+brassy-looking concretions of small size, or spread out on their
+surfaces in thin leaf-like films, that resemble, in some of the
+specimens, the icy-foliage with which a severe frost encrusts a
+window-pane. Still further on I came upon a vein of galena; but a
+miner'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 had
+been known long before, and, as the workings seemed to have been
+deserted 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 entire
+vein is not very considerable. I have since learned, from the
+"Statistical Account of the Parish of Sandwick," that the workings of
+the mine penetrate into the rock for about a hundred yards, but that it
+has been long abandoned, "as a speculation which would not pay."
+
+I observed scattered over the beach, in the neighborhood of the lead
+mine, considerable quantities of the hard chalk of England; and, judging
+there could be no deposits of the hard chalk in this neighborhood, I
+addressed myself on my way back, to a kelp-burner engaged in wrapping up
+his fire for the night with a thick covering of weed, to ascertain how
+it had come there. "Ah, master," he replied, "that chalk is all that
+remains of a fine large English vessel, that was knocked to pieces here
+a few years ago. She was ballasted with the chalk; and as it is a light
+sort of stone, the surf has washed it ashore from that low reef in the
+middle of the tideway where she struck and broke up. Most of the
+sailors, poor fellows, lie in the old churchyard, beside the broken ruin
+yonder. It is a deadly shore this to seafaring-men." I had understood
+that the kelp-trade was wholly at an end in Orkney; and, remarking that
+the sea-weed which he employed was chiefly of one kind,--the long brown
+fronds of tang dried in the sun,--I inquired of him to what purpose the
+substance was now employed, seeing that barilla and the carbonate of
+soda had supplanted it in the manufacture of soap and glass, and why he
+was 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 used
+for bad sores and cancer; and we must be particular in our weed, for
+it's not every kind of weed that has the medicine in't. There's most of
+it, we're told, in the leaves of the tang." "Is the name of the drug," I
+asked, "iodine?" "Ay, that must be just it," he replied,--"iodine; but
+it doesn't make such a demand for kelp as the glass and the soap." I
+afterwards learned that the kelp-burner's character of this strip of
+coast, as peculiarly fatal to the mariner, was borne out by many a sad
+casualty, too largely charged with the wild and the horrible to be
+lightly forgotten. The respected Free Church clergyman of Stromness, Mr.
+Learmonth, informed me that, ere the Disruption, while yet minister of
+the parish, there were on one sad occasion eight dead bodies carried of
+a Sabbath morning to his manse door. Some of the incidents connected
+with these terrible shipwrecks, as related with much graphic effect by a
+boatman who carried me across the sound, on an exploratory ramble to the
+island of Hoy, struck me as of a character considerably beyond the reach
+of the mere dealer in fiction. The master of one hapless vessel, a young
+man, had brought his wife and only child with him on the voyage destined
+to terminate so mournfully; and when the vessel first struck, he had
+rushed down to the cabin to bring them both on deck, as their only
+chance of safety. He had, however, unthinkingly shut the cabin-door
+after him; a second tremendous blow, as not unfrequently happens in
+such cases, so affected the framework of the sides and deck, that the
+door was jammed fast in its frame. And long ere it could be cut
+open,--for no human hand could unfasten it,--the vessel had filled to
+the beams, and neither the master nor his wife and child were ever seen
+more. In another ship, wrecked within a cable-length of the beach, the
+mate, a man of Herculean proportions, and a skilful swimmer, stripped
+and leaped overboard, not doubting his ability to reach the shore. But
+he had failed to remark what in such circumstances is too often
+forgotten, that the element on which he flung himself, beaten into foam
+against the shallows, was, according to Mr. Bremner's shrewd definition,
+not water, but a mixture of water and air, specifically lighter than the
+human body; and so at the shore, though so close at hand, he never
+arrived, disappearing almost at the vessel's side. "The ground was
+rough," said my informant, "and the sea ran mountains high; and I can
+scarce tell you how I shuddered on finding, long ere his corpse was
+thrown up, his two eyes detached from their sockets, staring from a
+wreath of sea-weed." There is in this last circumstance, horrible enough
+surely 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 Church
+manse, which I was urged to make my home so long as I remained in that
+part of the country. A geologist, however, fairly possessed by the
+enthusiasm without which weak man can accomplish nothing,--whether he be
+a deer-stalker or mammoth-fancier, or angle for live salmon or dead
+Pterichthyes,--has a trick of forgetting the right times of dining and
+taking tea, and of throwing the burden of his bodily requirements on
+early extempore breakfasts and late suppers; and so reporting myself a
+man of irregular habits and bad hours, whose movements could not in the
+least be depended upon, I had to decline the hospitality which would
+fain have adopted me as its guest, notwithstanding the badness of the
+character that, in common honesty, I had to certify as my own. Next
+morning I breakfasted at the manse, and was introduced by Mr. Learmonth
+to two gentlemen of the place, who had been kindly invited to meet with
+me, and who, from their acquaintance with the geology of the district
+enabled me to make the best use of my time, by cutting direct on those
+cliffs and quarries in the neighborhood in which organic remains had
+been detected, instead of wearily re-discovering them for myself. There
+is a small but interesting museum in Stromness, rich in the fossils of
+the locality; and I began the geologic business of the day by devoting
+an hour to the examination of its organisms, chiefly ichthyolites. I saw
+among them several good specimens of the genus Pterichthys, and of what
+is elsewhere one of the rarer genera of the Dipterians,--the
+Diplopterus. A well-marked individual of the latter genus had, I found,
+been misnamed Dipterus by some geological visitor who had recently come
+the way,--a mistake which, as in both ichthyolites the fins are
+similarly placed, occasionally occurs, but which may be easily avoided,
+when the specimens are in a tolerable state of preservation, by taking
+note of a few well-marked characteristics by which the genera are
+distinguished. In both Dipterus and Diplopterus the bright enamel of the
+scales was thickly punctulated by microscopic points,--the exterior
+terminations of funnel-shaped openings, that communicated between the
+surface and the cells of the middle table of the scale; but the form of
+the scales themselves was different,--that of the Dipterus being nearly
+circular, and that of the Diplopterus, save on the dorsal ridge,
+rhomboidal. Again, the lateral line of the Diplopterus was a raised
+line, running as a ridge along the scales; whereas that of the Dipterus
+was a depressed one, existing as a furrow. Their heads, too, were
+covered by an entirely dissimilar arrangement of plates. The rounded
+snout-plate of the Diplopterus was suddenly contracted to nearly
+one-half its breadth by two semi-circular inflections, which formed the
+orbits of the eyes; full in the centre, a little above these, a minute,
+lozenge-shaped plate seemed as if inlaid in the larger one, the
+analogue, apparently, of the anterior frontal; and over all there
+expanded a broad plate, the superior frontal, half divided vertically by
+a line drawn downwards from the nape, which, however, stopped short in
+the middle; and fretted transversely by two small but deeply-indented
+rectangular marks, which, crossing from the central to two lateral
+plates, assumed the semblance of connecting pins. The snout of the
+Dipterus was less round; it bore no mark of the eye-orbits; and the
+frontal buckler, broader in proportion to its length than that of the
+Diplopterus, consisted of many more plates. I may here mention that the
+frontal buckler of Diplopterus has not yet been figured nor described;
+whereas that of Dipterus, though unknown as such, has been given to the
+world as the occipital covering of a supposed Cephalaspian,--the
+Polyphractus. Polyphractus is, however, in reality a synonym for
+Dipterus,--the one name being derived from a peculiarity of the animal's
+fins: the other, from the great number of its occipital plates. There is
+no science founded on mere observation that can be altogether free, in
+its earlier stages, from mistakes of this character,--mistakes to which
+the palæontologist, however skilful, is peculiarly liable. The teeth of
+the two genera were essentially different. Those of the Dipterus,
+exclusively palatal, were blunt and squat, and ranged in two
+rectangular patches;[22] while those of the Diplopterus bristled along
+its jaws and were slender and sharp. Their tails, too, though both
+heterocercal, were diverse in their type. In each, an angular strip of
+gradually-diminishing scales,--a prolongation of the scaly coat which
+protected the body, and which covered here a prolongation of the
+vertebral column,--ran on to the extreme termination of the upper lobe;
+but there was in the Diplopterus a greatly larger development of fin on
+the superior or dorsal side of the scaly strip than on that of the
+Dipterus. If the caudal fin of the Osteolepis be divided longitudinally
+into six equal parts, it will be found that one of these occurs on the
+upper side of the vertebral prolongation, and five on the under; in the
+caudal fin of the Diplopterus so divided, rather more than _two_ parts
+will be found to occur on the upper side, and rather less than four on
+the under; while in the caudal fin of the Dipterus the development seems
+to have been restricted to the under side exclusively; at least, in none
+of the many individuals which I have examined have I found any trace of
+caudal rays on the upper side. These are minute and somewhat trivial
+particulars; but the geologist may find them of use; and the
+non-geologist may be disposed to extend to them some little degree of
+tolerance, when he considers that they distinguished two largely
+developed genera of animals, to which the Author of all did not deem it
+unworthy his wisdom to impart, in the act of creation, certain marked
+points 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 undertook
+to act as my guide on the occasion, I set out to visit a remarkable
+stack on the sea-coast, about four miles north and west of Stromness. We
+scaled together the steep granitic hill immediately over the town, and
+then cut on the stack, straight as the bird flies, across a trackless
+common, 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 undivided
+common that encircle their little estates, as the Atlantic encircles the
+Orkneys. But the state in which I found the unappropriated parts of the
+district had in no degree the effect of making me an opponent of
+appropriation or the landholders. Our country, had it been left as a
+whole to all its people, as the Communist desiderates, would ere now be
+of exceedingly little value to any portion of them. The soil of the
+Orkney commons has been so repeatedly pared off and carried away for
+fuel, that there are now wide tracts on which there is no more soil to
+pare, and which present, for the original covering of peaty mould, a
+continuous surface of pale boulder-clay, here and there mottled by
+detached tufts of scraggy heath, and here and there roughened by
+projections of the underlying rock. All is unredeemable barrenness. On
+the other hand, wherever a bit of private property appears, though in
+the immediate neighborhood of these ruined wastes, the surface is
+swarded over, and the soil is the better, not the worse, for the
+services which it has rendered to man in the past. Whatever the Chartist
+and the Leveller may think of the matter, it is, I find, virtually on
+behalf of the many that the soil has been appropriated by the few. After
+passing from off the tract of moor which overlies the granitic axis of
+the district, to a tract equally moory which spreads over the gray
+flagstones, I marked, more especially in the hollows and ravines, where
+minute springs ooze from the rock, vast quantities of bog-iron embedded
+in the soil, and presenting greatly the appearance of the scoria of a
+smith's forge. The apparent scoria here is simply a reproduction of the
+iron of the underlying flagstones, transferred, through the agency of
+water, to that stratum of vegetable mould and boulder-clay which
+represents the recent period.
+
+I found the stack which I had been brought to see forming the
+picturesque centre of a bold tract of rock scenery. It stands out from
+the land as a tall insulated tower, about two hundred feet in height,
+sorely worn at its base by the breakers that ceaselessly fret against
+its sides, but considerably broader atop, where it bears a flat cover of
+sward on the same level with the tops of the precipices which in the
+lapse of ages have receded from around it. Like the sward-crested
+hammock left by a party of laborers, to mark the depth to which they
+have cut in removing a bank or digging a pond, it remains to indicate
+how the attrition of the surf has told upon the iron-bound coast;
+demonstrating that lines of precipices hard as iron, and of giddy
+elevation, are in full retreat before the dogged perseverance of an
+assailant that, though baffled in each single attack, ever returns to
+the charge, and gains by an aggregation of infinitesimals,--the result
+of the whole. From the edge of a steep promontory that commands an
+inflection 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 by
+the setting in of the flood-tide,--as it broke, surge after surge,
+against the base of the tall dark precipices; and marked how it
+accomplished its work of disintegration. The flagstone deposit here
+abounds in vertical cracks and flaws; and in the line of each of the
+many fissures which these form the waves have opened up a cave; so that
+for hundreds of yards together the precipices seem as if founded on
+arch-divided piers, and remind one of those ancient prints or drawings
+of Old London Bridge in which a range of tall sombre buildings is
+represented as rising high over a line of arches; or of rows of lofty
+houses in those cities of southern Europe in which the dwellings
+fronting the streets are perforated beneath by lines of squat piazzas,
+and present above a dingy and windowless breadth of wall. In course of
+time the piers attenuate and give way; the undermined precipices topple
+down, parting from the solid mass behind in those vertical lines by
+which they are traversed at nearly right angles with their line of
+stratification; the perpendicular front which they had covered comes to
+be presented, in consequence, to the sea; its faults and cracks
+gradually widen into caves, as those of the fallen front had gradually
+widened at an earlier period; in the lapse of centuries, it too,
+resigning its place, topples over headlong, an undermined mass; the
+surge dashes white and furious where the dense rock had rested before;
+and thus, in its slow but irresistible march, the sea gains upon the
+land. In the peculiar disposition and character of the prevailing strata
+of Orkney, as certainly as in the power of the tides which sweep athwart
+its coasts, and the wide extent of sea which, stretching around it,
+gives the waves scope to gather bulk and momentum, may be found the
+secret of the extraordinary height to which the surf sometimes rises
+against its walls of rock. During the fiercer tempests, masses of foam
+shoot upwards against the precipices, like inverted cataracts, fully two
+hundred feet over the ordinary tide-level, and, washing away the looser
+soil 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 project
+upwards bodies of surf to a height so extraordinary. But the low angle
+at which the strata lie, and the rectangularity maintained in relation
+to their line of bed by the fissures which traverse them, give to the
+Orkney precipices,--remarkable for their perpendicularity and their
+mural aspect,--exactly the angle against which the waves, as broken
+masses of foam, beat up to their greatest possible altitude. On a tract
+of iron-bound coast that skirts the entrance of the Cromarty Frith I
+have seen the surf rise, during violent gales from the north-west
+especially, against one rectangular rock, known as the White Rock, fully
+an hundred feet; while against scarcely any of the other precipices,
+more sloping, though equally exposed, did it rise more than half that
+height.
+
+
+
+
+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 gradually
+descending from higher to lower ranges of prepices, and ever and anon
+detecting ichthyolite beds in the weathered and partially decomposed
+strata. As the rock moulders into an incoherent clay, the fossils which
+it envelops become not unfrequently wholly detached from it, so that, on
+a smart blow dealt by the hammer, they leap out entire, resembling, from
+the degree of compression which they exhibit, those mimic fishes carved
+out of plates of ivory or of mother-of-pearl, which are used as counters
+in some of the games of China or the East Indies. The material of which
+they are composed, a brittle jet, though better suited than the stone to
+resist the disintegrating influences, is in most cases greatly too
+fragile for preservation. One may, however, acquire from the fragments a
+knowledge of certain minute points in the structure of the ancient
+animals to which they belonged, respecting which specimens of a more
+robust texture give no evidence. The plates of Coccosteus sometimes
+spring out as unbroken as when they covered the living animal, and, if
+the necessary skill be not wanting, may be set up in their original
+order. And I possess specimens of the head of Dipterus in which the
+nearly circular gill-covers may be examined on both surfaces, interior
+and exterior, and in which the cranial portion shows not only the
+enamelled plates of the frontal buckler, but also the strange mechanism
+of the palatal teeth, with the intervening cavities that had lodged both
+the brain and the occipital part of the spine. The fossils on the top of
+the 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 extensive
+slate-quarries had once been wrought, the remains of Pterichthys
+existing as mere patches, from which the color had been discharged, but
+in which the almost human-like outline of both body and arms were still
+distinctly traceable; and farther on still, where the steep wall of
+cliffs sinks into a line of grassy banks, I saw in yet another quarry,
+ichthyolites of all the three great ganoid families so characteristic of
+the Old Red,--Cephalaspians, Dipterians, and Acanthodians,--ranged in
+the three-storied order to which I have already referred as so
+inexplicable. The specimens, however, though numerous, are not fine.
+They are resolved into a brittle bituminous coal, resembling hard pitch
+or black wax, which is always considerably less tenacious than the
+matrix in which they are inclosed; and so, when laid open by the hammer,
+they usually split through the middle of the plates and scales, instead
+of parting from the stone at their surfaces, and resemble, in
+consequence, those dark, shadow-like profiles taken in Indian ink by the
+limner, which exhibit a correct outline, but no details. We find,
+however, in some of the genera, portions of the animal preserved that
+are rarely seen in a state of keeping equally perfect in the
+ichthyolites of Cromarty, Moray, or Banff,--those terminal bones of the
+Coccosteos, for instance, that were prolonged beyond the plates by which
+the head and upper parts of the body were covered. Wherever the
+ichthyolites are inclosed in nodules, as in the more southerly counties
+over which the deposit extends, the nodule terminates, in almost every
+case, with the massier portions of the organism; for the thinner parts,
+too inconsiderable to have served as attractive nuclei to the stony
+matter when the concretion was forming, were left outside its pale, and
+so have been lost; whereas, in the northern districts of the deposit,
+where the fossils, as in Caithness and Orkney, occur in flagstone, these
+slimmer parts, when the general state of keeping is tolerably good, lie
+spread out on the planes of the slabs, entire often in their minutest
+rays and articulations. The numerous Coccostei of this quarry exhibit,
+attached to their upper plates, their long vertebral columns, of many
+joints, that, depending from the broad dorsal shields of the
+ichthyolite, remind one of those skeleton fishes one sometimes sees on
+the 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 of
+the Old Red Sandstone possessed an internal skeleton so decidedly
+osseous as that of the Coccosteus, and none of them presented externally
+so large an extent of naked skin,--provisions which probably went
+together. For about three-fifths of the entire length of the animal the
+surface was unprotected by dermal plates; and the muscles must have
+found the fulcrums on which they acted in the internal skeleton
+exclusively. And hence a necessity for greater strength in their
+interior framework than in that of fishes as strongly fenced round
+externally by scales or plates as the coleoptera by their elytrine, or
+the crustacea by their shells. Even in the Coccosteus, however, the
+ossification was by no means complete; and the analogies of the skeleton
+seem to have allied it rather with the skeletons of the sturgeon family
+than with the skeletons of the sharks or rays. The processes of the
+vertebræ were greatly more solid in their substance than the vertebræ
+themselves,--a condition which in the sharks and rays is always
+reversed; and they frequently survive, each with its little sprig of
+bone, formed like the letter Y, that attached it to its centrum,
+projecting from it, in specimens from which the vertebral column itself
+has wholly disappeared. I found frequent traces, during my exploratory
+labors in Orkney, of the dorsal and ventral fins of this ichthyolite;
+but no trace whatever of the pectorals or of the caudal fin. There seem
+to have been no pectorals; and the tail, as I have always had occasion
+to remark, was apparently a mere point, unfurnished with rays.
+
+In descending from the cliffs upon the quarries, my companion pointed to
+an angular notch in the rock-edge, apparently the upper termination of
+one of the numerous vertical cracks by which the precipices are
+traversed, and which in so many cases on the Orkney coast have been
+hollowed by the waves into long open coves or deep caverns. It was up
+there, he said, that about twelve years ago the sole survivor of a
+ship's crew contrived to scramble, four days after his vessel had been
+dashed to fragments against the rocks below, and when it was judged that
+all on board had perished. The vessel was wrecked on a Wednesday. She
+had 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 seen
+from the beach that she could scarce weather the headland yonder, a
+number of people gathered along the cliffs, furnished with ropes, to
+render to the crew whatever assistance might be possible in the
+circumstances. Human help, however, was to avail them nothing. Their
+vessel, a fine schooner, when within forty yards of the promontory, was
+seized broadside by an enormous wave, and dashed against the cliff, as
+one might dash a glass-phial against a stone-wall. One blow completed
+the work of destruction; she went rolling in entire from keel to
+mast-head, and returned, on the recoil of the broken surge, a mass of
+shapeless fragments, that continued to dance idly amid the foam, or were
+scattered along the beach. But of the poor men, whom the spectators had
+seen but a few seconds before running wildly about the deck, there
+remained not a trace; and the saddened spectators returned to their
+homes to say that all had perished. Four days after,--on the morning of
+the following Sabbath,--the sole survivor of the crew, saved, as if by
+miracle, climbed up the precipice, and presented himself to a group of
+astonished and terrified country people, who could scarce regard him as
+a creature of this world. The fissure, which at the top of the cliff
+forms but a mere angular inflection, is hollowed below into a low-roofed
+cave of profound depth, into the farther extremity of which the tide
+hardly ever penetrates. It is floored by a narrow strip of shingly
+beach; and on this bit of beach, far within the cave, the sailor found
+himself, 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; a
+tin cover enabled him to catch enough of the fresh-water droppings of
+the roof to quench his thirst; several large fragments of wreck that had
+been jammed fast athwart the opening of the cave broke the violence of
+the wind and sea; and in that doleful prison, day after day, he saw the
+tides sink and rise, and lay, when the surf rolled high at the fall of
+the tide, in utter darkness even at mid-day, as the waves outside rose
+to the roof, and inclosed him in a chamber as entirely cut off from the
+external atmosphere as that of a diving bell. He was oppressed in the
+darkness, every time the waves came rolling in and compressed his
+modicum of air, by a sensation of extreme heat,--an effect of the
+condensation; and then, in the interval of recession, and consequent
+expansion, by a sudden chill. At low ebb he had to work hard in clearing
+away the accumulations of stone and gravel which had been rolled in by
+the previous tide, and threatened to bury him up altogether. At length
+he succeeded, after many a fruitless attempt, in gaining an upper ledge
+that overhung his prison-mouth; and, by a path on which a goat would
+scarce have found footing, he scrambled to the top. His name was
+Johnstone; and the cave is still known as "Johnstone's Cave." Such was
+the 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 of
+indurated sand, and topped by a picturesque ruin, that forms a pleasing
+object in the landscape. The ruin is that of a country residence of the
+bishops of Orkney during the disturbed and unhappy reign of Scotch
+Episcopacy, and bears on a flat tablet of weathered sandstone the
+initials of its founder, Bishop George Grahame, and the date of its
+erection, 1633. With a green cultivated oasis immediately around it, and
+a fine open sound, overlooked by the bold, picturesque cliffs of Hoy, in
+front, it must have been, for at least half the year, an agreeable, and,
+as its remains testify, a not uncomfortable habitation. But I greatly
+fear Scottish clergymen of the Establishment, whether Presbyterian or
+Episcopalian, when obnoxious, from their position or their tenets, to
+the great bulk of the Scottish people, have not been left, since at
+least the Reformation, to enjoy either quiet or happy lives, however
+extrinsically favorable the circumstances in which they may have been
+placed. Bishop Grahame, only five years after the date of the erection,
+was tried before the famous General Assembly of 1638; and, being
+convicted of having "all the ordinar faults of a bishop," he was
+deposed, and ordered within a limited time "to give tokens of
+repentance, under paine of excommunication." "He was a curler on the ice
+on the Sabbath day," says Baillie,--"a setter of tacks to his sones and
+grandsones, to the prejudice of the Church; he oversaw adulterie;
+slighted charming; neglected preaching and doing of anie good; and held
+portions of ministers' stipends for building his cathedral." The
+concluding portion of his life, after his deposition, was spent in
+obscurity; nor did his successor in the bishoprick, subsequent to the
+reëstablishment of Episcopacy at the Restoration,--Bishop
+Honeyman,--close his days more happily. He was struck in the arm by the
+bullet which the zealot Mitchell had intended for Archbishop Sharp; and
+the shattered bone never healed; "for, though he lived some years
+after," says Burnet, "_they_ were forced to lay open the wound every
+year, for an exfoliation;" and his life was eventually shortened by his
+sufferings. All seemed comfortable enough, and quite quiet enough, in
+the bishop's country-house to-day. There were two cows quietly chewing
+the cud in what apparently had been the dignitary's sitting-room, and
+patiently awaiting the services of a young woman who was approaching at
+some little distance with a pail. A large gray cat, that had been
+sunning herself in a sheltered corner of the court-yard, started up at
+our approach, and disappeared through a slit hole. The sun, now gone far
+down the sky, shone brightly on shattered gable-tops, and roofless,
+rough-edged walls, revealing many a flaw and chasm in the yielding
+masonry; and their shadows fell with picturesque effect on the loose
+litter, rude implements, and gapped dry-stone fence, of the neglected
+farm-yard which surrounds the building.
+
+I have said that the flat promontory occupied by the ruin is edged by
+hills of indurated sand. Existing in some places as a continuous bed of
+a soft gritty sandstone, scooped wave-like a-top, and varying from five
+to eight feet in thickness, they form a curious example of a sub-aërial
+formation,--the sand of which they are composed having been all blown
+from the sea-beach, and consolidated by the action of moisture on a
+calcareous mixture of comminuted shells, which forms from twenty to
+twenty-five per cent. of their entire mass. I found that the sections of
+the bed laid open by the encroachments of the sea, were scarce less
+regularly stratified than those of a subaqueous deposit, and that it was
+hollowed, where most exposed to the weather, into a number of spherical
+cells, which gave to those parts of the surface where they lay thickest,
+somewhat the aspect of a rude Runic fret-work,--an appearance not
+uncommon in weathered sandstones. With more time to spare, I could fain
+have studied the deposit more carefully, in the hope of detecting a few
+peculiarities of structure sufficient to distinguish sub-aërially-formed
+from subaqueously-deposited beds of stone. Sandstones of sub-aërial
+formation are of no very unfrequent occurrence among the recent
+deposits. On the coast of Cornwall there are cliffs of considerable
+height that extend for several miles, and have attained a degree of
+solidity sufficient to serve the commoner purposes of the architect,
+which at one time existed as accumulations of blown sand. "It is around
+the promontory of New Kaye," says Dr. Paris, in an interesting memoir on
+the subject, "that the most extensive formation of sandstone takes
+place. Here it may be seen in different stages of induration, from a
+state in which it is too friable to be detached from the rock upon which
+it reposes, to a hardness so considerable, that it requires a violent
+blow from a sledge-hammer to break it. Buildings are here constructed of
+it; the church of Cranstock is entirely built with it; and it is also
+employed for various articles of domestic and agricultural uses. The
+geologist who has previously examined the celebrated specimen from
+Guadaloupe will be struck with the great analogy which it bears to this
+formation." Now, as vast tracts of the earth's surface,--in some parts
+of the world, as in Northern Africa, millions of square miles
+together,--are at present overlaid by accumulations of sand, which have
+this tendency to consolidate and become lasting sub-aërial formations,
+destined to occupy a place among the future strata of the globe, it
+seems impossible but that also in the old geologic periods there must
+have been, as now, sand-wastes and sub-aërial formations. And as the
+representatives of these may still exist in some of our sandstone
+quarries, it might be well to be possessed of a knowledge of the
+peculiarities by which they are to be distinguished from deposits of
+subaqueous origin. In order that I might have an opportunity of studying
+these peculiarities where they are to be seen more extensively developed
+than elsewhere on the eastern coast of Scotland, I here formed the
+intention of spending a day, on my return south, among the sand-wastes
+of Moray,--a purpose which I afterwards carried into effect. But of that
+more anon.
+
+On the following morning, availing myself of a kind invitation, through
+Dr. Garson, from his brother, a Free Church minister resident in an
+inland district of the Mainland, in convenient neighborhood with the
+northern coasts of the island, and with several quarries, I set out
+from Stromness, taking in my way the Loch and Standing Stones of
+Stennis, which I had previously seen from but my seat in the mail-gig as
+I passed. Mr. Learmonth, who had to visit some of his people in this
+direction, accompanied me for several miles along the shores of the
+loch, and lightened the journey by his interesting snatches of local
+history, suggested by the various objects that lay along our
+road,--buildings, tumuli, ancient battle-fields, and standing stones.
+The loch itself, an expansive sheet of water fourteen miles in
+circumference, I contemplated with much interest, and longed for an
+opportunity of studying its natural history. Two promontories,--those
+occupied by the Standing Stones, shoot out from the opposite sides, and
+approach so near as to be connected by a rustic bridge. They divide the
+loch into two nearly equal parts, the lower of which gives access to the
+sea, and is salt in its nether reaches and brackish in its upper ones,
+while the higher is merely brackish in its nether reaches, and fresh
+enough 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 few
+miles, from where the lower loch opens to the sea, of only marine
+plants, 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 having
+each their own reaches, with certain debatable tracts between, in which
+each expatiates with more or less freedom, according to its nature and
+constitution,--some of the sea-fishes advancing far on the fresh water,
+and others, among the proper denizens of the lake, encroaching far on
+the salt. The common fresh-water eel strikes out, I was told, farthest
+into the sea-water; in which, indeed, reversing the habits of the
+salmon, 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 to
+resist 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 the
+Loch of Stennis and its productions, animal and vegetable, such as a
+Gilbert White of Selborne could produce, would be at once a very
+valuable and very curious document. By dividing it into reaches, in
+which the average saltness of the water was carefully ascertained, and
+its productions noted, with the various modifications which these
+underwent as they receded upwards or downwards from their proper habitat
+towards the line at which they could no longer exist, much information
+might be acquired, of a kind important to the naturalist, and not
+without its use to the geological student. I have had an opportunity
+elsewhere of observing a curious change which fresh-water induces on the
+flounder. In the brackish water of an estuary it becomes, without
+diminishing in general size, thicker and more fleshy than when in its
+legitimate habitat the sea; but the flesh loses in quality what it gains
+in quantity;--it is flabby and insipid, and the margin-fin lacks always
+its delicious strip of transparent fat. I fain wish that some
+intelligent resident on the shores of Stennis would set himself
+carefully to examine its productions, and that then, after registering
+his observations for a few years, he would favor the world with its
+natural history.
+
+The Standing Stones,--second in Britain of their kind, to only those of
+Stonehenge,--occur in two groups; the smaller group (composed, however,
+of the taller stones) on the southern promontory; the larger on the
+northern one. Rude and shapeless, and bearing no other impress of the
+designing faculty than that they are stuck endwise in the earth, and
+form, as a whole, regular figures on the sward, there is yet a sublime
+solemnity about them, unsurpassed in effect by any ruin I have yet seen,
+however grand in its design or imposing in its proportions. Their very
+rudeness, associated with their ponderous bulk and weight, adds to their
+impressiveness. When there is art and taste enough in a country to hew
+an ornate column, no one marvels that there should also be mechanical
+skill enough in it to set it up on end; but the men who tore from the
+quarry these vast slabs, some of them eighteen feet in height over the
+soil, and raised them where they now stand, must have been ignorant
+savages, unacquainted with machinery, and unfurnished, apparently, with
+a single tool. And what, when contemplating their handiwork, we have to
+subtract in idea from their minds, we add, by an involuntary process, to
+their bodies: we come to regard the feats which they have accomplished
+as performed by a power not mechanical, but gigantic. The consideration,
+too, that these remains,--eldest of the works of man in this
+country,--should have so long survived all definite tradition of the
+purposes which they were raised to serve, so that we now merely know
+regarding them that they were religious in their uses,--products of that
+ineradicable instinct of man's nature which leads him in so many various
+ways to attempt conciliating the Powers of another world,--serves
+greatly to heighten their effect. History at the time of their erection
+had no existence in these islands: the age, though it sought, through
+the medium of strange, unknown rites, to communicate with Heaven, was
+not knowing enough to communicate, through the medium of alphabet or
+symbol, with posterity. The appearance of the obelisks, too, harmonizes
+well with their great antiquity and the obscurity of their origin. For
+about a man's height from the ground they are covered thick by the
+shorter lichens,--chiefly the gray-stone parmelia,--here and there
+embroidered by golden-hued patches of the yellow parmelia of the wall;
+but their heads and shoulders, raised beyond the reach alike of the
+herd-boy and of his herd, are covered by an extraordinary profusion of a
+flowing beard-like lichen of unusual length,--the lichen _calicarus_
+(or, according to modern botanists, _Ramalina scopulorum_), in which
+they look like an assemblage of ancient Druids, mysteriously stern and
+invincibly 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 Stones
+to the best possible advantage. They could not be better placed than on
+their flat promontories, surrounded by the broad plane of an extensive
+lake, in a waste, lonely, treeless country, that presents no bold,
+competing features to divert attention from them as the great central
+objects of the landscape; but the gray of the morning, or an atmosphere
+of fog and vapor, would have associated better with the mystic obscurity
+of their history, their shaggy forms, and their livid tints, than the
+glare of a cloudless sun, that brought out in hard, clear relief their
+rude outlines, and gave to each its sharp dark patch of shadow.
+Gray-colored objects, when tall and imposing, but of irregular form, are
+seen always to most advantage in an uncertain light,--in fog or
+frost-rime, or under a scowling sky, or, as Parnell well expresses it,
+"amid the living gleams of night." They appeal, if I may so express
+myself, to the sentiment of the ghostly and the spectral, and demand at
+least a partial envelopment of the obscure. Burns, with the true tact of
+the genuine poet, develops the sentiment almost instinctively in an
+exquisite 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 morning
+as the time in which to exhibit them, when they "stood in the gray light
+of the dawning, like the phantom forms of antediluvian giants, who,
+shrouded in the habiliments of the dead, come to revisit, by the pale
+light, the earth which they had plagued with their oppression, and
+polluted by their sins, till they brought down upon it the vengeance of
+long-suffering heaven." On another occasion, he introduces them as
+"glimmering, a grayish white, in the rising sun, and projecting far to
+the westward their long gigantic shadows." And Malcolm, in the exercise
+of a similar faculty with that of Burns and of Scott, surrounds them, in
+his description, with a somewhat similar atmosphere of partial dimness
+and 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 and
+the more immature periods of life,--between the savage and the child;
+and the huge circle of Stennis seems suggestive of one of these. It is
+considerably more than four hundred feet in diameter, and the stones
+which compose it, varying from three to fourteen feet in height, must
+have been originally from thirty-five to forty in number, though only
+sixteen now remain erect. A mound and fosse, still distinctly
+traceable, run round the whole; and there are several mysterious-looking
+tumuli outside, bulky enough to remind one of the lesser morains of the
+geologist. But the circle, notwithstanding its imposing magnitude, is
+but a huge child's house, after all,--one of those circles of stones
+which children lay down on their village green, and then, in the
+exercise of that imaginative faculty which distinguishes between the
+young of the human animal and those of every other creature, convert, by
+a sort of conventionalism, into a church or dwelling-house, within which
+they 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 the
+southern promontory of the lake formed but a half-circle, and it was a
+half-circle dedicated to the moon. To the circular sun the great rude
+children of an immature age of the world had laid down a circle of
+stones on the one promontory; to the moon, in her half-orbed state, they
+had laid down a half-circle on the other; and in propitiating these
+material deities, to whose standing in the old Scandinavian worship the
+names of our _Sun_day and _Mon_day still testify, they employed in their
+respective inclosures, in the exercise of a wild unregulated fancy,
+uncouth irrational rites, the extremeness of whose folly was in some
+measure concealed by the horrid exquisiteness of their cruelty. We are
+still in the nonage of the species, and see human society sowing its
+wild oats in a thousand various ways, very absurdly often, and often
+very wickedly; but matters seem to have been greatly worse when, in an
+age still more immature, the grimly-bearded, six-feet children of Orkney
+were laying down their stone-circles on the green. Sir Walter, in the
+parting scene between Cleveland and Minna Troil, which he describes as
+having taken place amid the lesser group of stones, refers to an immense
+slab "lying flat and prostrate in the middle of the others, supported
+by short pillars, of which some relics are still visible," and which is
+regarded as the sacrificial stone of the erection. "It is a current
+belief," says Dr. Hibbert, in an elaborate paper in the "Transactions of
+the Scottish Antiquaries," that upon this stone a victim of royal birth
+was immolated. Halfdan the Long-legged, the son of Harold the
+Fair-haired, in punishment for the aggressions of Orkney, had made an
+unexpected descent upon its coasts, and acquired possession of the
+Jarldom. In the autumn succeeding Halfdan was retorted upon, and, after
+an inglorious contest, betook himself to a place of concealment, from
+which he was the following morning unlodged, and instantly doomed to the
+Asæ. Einar, the Jarl of Orkney, with his sword carved the captive's back
+into the form of an eagle, the spine being longitudinally divided, and
+the ribs being separated by a transverse cut as far as the loins. He
+then extracted the lungs, and dedicated them to Odin for a perpetuity of
+victory, singing a wild song,--'I am revenged for the slaughter of
+Rognvalld: this have the Nornæ decreed. In my fiording the pillar of the
+people has fallen. Build up the cairn, ye active youths, for victory is
+with us. From the stones of the sea-shore will I pay the Long-legged a
+hard seat.' There is certainly no trace to be detected, in this dark
+story, of a golden age of the world: the golden age is, I would fain
+hope, an age yet to come. There at least exists no evidence that it is
+an age gone by. It will be the full-grown _manly_ age of the world when
+the race, as such, shall have attained to their years of discretion.
+They are at present in their froward boyhood, playing at the mischievous
+games of war, and diplomacy, and stock-gambling, and site-refusing, and
+it is not quite agreeable for quiet honest people to be living amongst
+them. But there would be nothing gained by going back to that more
+infantine state of society in which the Jarl Einar carved into a red
+eagle 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 now
+insisted that I should mount and ride in turn, while he walked by my
+side, that I might be fresh, he said, for the exploratory ramble of the
+evening. I could have ventured more readily on taking the command of a
+vessel 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 very
+much his own way, got upon honor with me, and exerted himself to such
+purpose that we did not fall greatly more than a hundred yards behind
+Mr. Garson. We traversed in our journey a long dreary moor, so entirely
+ruined, like those which I had seen on the previous day, by belonging to
+everybody in general, as to be no longer of the slightest use to anybody
+in particular. The soil seems to have been naturally poor; but it must
+have taken a good deal of spoiling to render it the sterile, verdureless
+waste it is now; for even where it had been poorest, I found that in the
+island-like appropriated patches by which it is studded, it at least
+bears, what it has long ceased to bear elsewhere, a continuous covering
+of green sward. But if disposed to quarrel with the commons of Orkney, I
+found in close neighborhood with them that with which I could have no
+quarrel,--numerous small properties farmed by the proprietors, and
+forming, in most instances, farms by no means very large. There are
+parishes in this part of the mainland divided among from sixty to eighty
+landowners.
+
+A nearly similar state of things seems to have obtained in Scotland
+about the beginning of the eighteenth century, and for the greater part
+of the previous one. I am acquainted with old churchyards in the north
+of Scotland that contain the burying-grounds of from six to ten landed
+proprietors, whose lands are now merged into single properties. And, in
+reading the biographies of our old covenanting ministers, I have often
+remarked as curious, and as bearing in the same line, that no
+inconsiderable proportion of their number were able to retire, in times
+of persecution, to their own little estates. It was during the
+disastrous wars of the French Revolution,--wars from the effects of
+which Great Britain will, I fear, never fully recover,--that the smaller
+holdings were finally absorbed. About twenty years ere the war began,
+the lands of England were parcelled out among no fewer than two hundred
+and fifty thousand families; before the peace of 1815, they had fallen
+into the hands of thirty-two thousand. In less than half a century, that
+base of actual proprietorship on which the landed interest of any
+country must ever find its surest standing, had contracted in England to
+less than one-seventh its former extent. In Scotland the absorption of
+the great bulk of the lesser properties seems to have taken place
+somewhat earlier; but in it also the revolutionary war appears to have
+given them the final blow; and the more extensive proprietors of the
+kingdom are assuredly all the less secure in consequence of their
+extinction. They were the smaller stones in the wall, that gave firmness
+in the setting to the larger, and jammed them fast within those safe
+limits determined by the line and plummet, which it is ever perilous to
+overhang. Very extensive territorial properties, wherever they exist,
+create almost necessarily--human nature being what it is--a species of
+despotism more oppressive than even that of great unrepresentative
+governments. It used to be remarked on the Continent, that there was
+always less liberty in petty principalities, where the eye of the ruler
+was ever on his subjects, than under the absolute monarchies.[23] And in
+a country such as ours, the accumulation of landed property in the hands
+of comparatively a few individuals has the effect often of bringing the
+territorial privileges of the great landowner into a state of
+antagonism with the civil and religious rights of the people, that
+cannot be other than perilous to the landowner himself. In a district
+divided, like Orkney, among many owners, a whole country-side could not
+be shut up against its people by some ungenerous or intolerant
+proprietor,--greatly at his own risk and to his own hurt,--as in the
+case of Glen Tilt or the Grampians; nor, when met for purposes of public
+worship, could the population of a parish be chased from off its bare
+moors, at his instance, by the constable or the sheriff-officer, to
+worship God agreeably to their consciences amid the mire of a
+cross-road, or on the bare sea-beach uncovered by the ebb of the tide.
+The smaller properties of the country, too, served admirably as
+stepping-stones, by which the proprietors or their children, when
+possessed of energy and intellect, could mount to a higher walk of
+society. Here beside me, for instance, was my friend Mr. Garson, a
+useful and much-esteemed minister of religion in his native district;
+while his brother, a medical man of superior parts, was fast rising into
+extensive practice in the neighboring town. They had been prepared for
+their respective professions by a classical education; and yet the
+stepping-stone to positions in society at once so important and so
+respectable was simply one of the smaller holdings of Orkney, derived to
+them as the descendants of one of the old Scandinavian Udallers, and
+which fell short, I was informed, of a hundred a-year.
+
+Mr. Garson's dwelling, to which I was welcomed with much hospitality by
+his mother and sisters, occupies the middle of an inclined hollow or
+basin, so entirely surrounded by low, moory hills, that at no
+point,--though the radius of the prospect averages from four to six
+miles,--does it command a view of the sea. I scarce expected being
+introduced in Orkney to a scene in which the traveller could so
+thoroughly 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, who
+pride themselves upon their skill as sailors and boatmen, as a race of
+lubberly landsmen, unacquainted with nautical matters, and ignorant of
+the ocean and its productions. A Harray man is represented, in one of
+their stories, as entering into a compact of mutual forbearance with a
+lobster,--to him a monster of unknown powers and formidable
+proportions,--which he had at first attempted to capture, but which had
+shown fight, and had nearly captured him in turn. "Weel, weel, let a-be
+for let a-be," he is made to say; "if thou does na clutch me in thy
+grips, I'se no clutch thee in mine." It is to this primitive parish that
+David Vedder, the sailor-poet of Orkney, refers, in his "Orcadian
+Sketches," as "celebrated over the whole archipelago for the
+peculiarities of its inhabitants, their singular manners and habits,
+their uncouth appearance, and homely address. Being the most landward
+district in Pomona," he adds, "and consequently having little
+intercourse with strangers, it has become the stronghold of many ancient
+customs and superstitions, which modern innovation has pushed off from
+their pedestals in almost all the other parts of the island. The
+permanency of its population, too, is mightily in favor of 'old use and
+wont,' as it is almost entirely divided amongst a class of men yelept
+_pickie_, or petty lairds, each ploughing his own fields and reaping his
+own crops, much in the manner their great-great-grandfathers did in the
+days of Earl Patrick. And such is the respect which they entertain for
+their hereditary beliefs, that many of them are said still to cast a
+lingering look, not unmixed with reverence, on certain spots held sacred
+by their Scandinavian ancestors."
+
+After an early dinner I set out for the barony of Birsay, in the
+northern extremity of the mainland, accompanied by Mr. Garson, and
+passed for several miles over a somewhat dreary country, bare, sterile,
+and brown, studded by cold, broad, treeless lakes, and thinly mottled by
+groups of gray, diminutive cottages, that do not look as if there was
+much of either plenty or comfort inside. But after surmounting the hills
+that form the northern side of the interior basin, I was sensible of a
+sudden improvement on the face of the country. Where the land slopes
+towards the sea, the shaggy heath gives place to a green luxuriant
+herbage; and the frequent patches of corn seem to rejoice in a more
+genial soil. The lower slopes of Orkney are singularly rich in wild
+flowers,--richer by many degrees than the fat loamy meadows of England.
+They resemble gaudy pieces of carpeting, as abundant in petals as in
+leaves: their luxuriant blow of red and white, blue and yellow, seems as
+if competing, in the extent of surface which it occupies, with their
+general ground of green. I have remarked a somewhat similar luxuriance
+of wild flowers in the more sheltered hollows of the bleak north-western
+coasts of Scotland. There is little that is rare to be found among these
+last, save that a few Alpine plants may be here and there recognized as
+occurring at a lower level than elsewhere in Britain; but the vast
+profusion of blossoms borne by species common to the greater part of the
+kingdom imparts to them an apparently novel character. We may detect, I
+am inclined to think, in this singular profusion, both in Orkney and the
+bleaker districts of the mainland of Scotland, the operation of a law
+not less influential in the animal than in the vegetable world, which,
+when hardship presses upon the life of the individual shrub or
+quadruped, so as to threaten its vitality, renders it fruitful in behalf
+of its species. I have seen the principle strikingly exemplified in the
+common tobacco plant, when reared in a northern country in the open air.
+Year after year it continued to degenerate, and to exhibit a smaller
+leaf and a shorter stem, until the successors of what in the first year
+of 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, had
+merely borne a-top a few florets, which produced a small quantity of
+exceedingly minute seeds, the stunted weed, its descendant, was so
+thickly covered over in its season with its pale yellow bells, as to
+present the appearance of a nosegay; and the seeds produced were not
+only bulkier in the mass, but also individually of much greater size.
+The tobacco had grown productive in proportion as it had degenerated and
+become poor. In the common scurvy grass, too, remarkable, with some
+other plants, as I have already had occasion to mention, for taking its
+place among both the productions of our Alpine heights and of our
+sea-shores, it will be found that in proportion as its habitat proves
+ungenial, and its stems and leaves become dwarfish and thin, its little
+white cruciform flowers increase, till, in localities where it barely
+exists, as if on the edge of extinction, we find the entire plant
+forming a dense bundle of seed-vessels, each charged to the full with
+seed. And in the gay meadows of Orkney, crowded with a vegetation that
+approaches its northern limit of production, we detect what seems to be
+the same principle, chronically operative; and hence, it would seem,
+their extraordinary gaiety. Their richly-blossoming plants are the poor
+productive _Irish_ of the vegetable world;[24] for Doubleday seems to
+be quite in the right in holding that the law extends to not only the
+inferior animals, but to our own species also. The lean, ill-fed sow and
+rabbit rear, it has been long known, a greatly more numerous progeny
+than the same animals when well cared for and fat; and every horse and
+cattle breeder knows, that to over-feed his animals proves a sure mode
+of rendering them sterile. The sheep, if tolerably well pastured,
+brings forth only a single lamb at a birth; but if half-starved and
+lean, the chances are that it may bring forth two or three. And so it is
+also with the greatly higher human race. Place them in circumstances of
+degradation and hardship so extreme as almost to threaten their
+existence as individuals, and they increase, as if in behalf of the
+species, with a rapidity without precedent in circumstances of greater
+comfort. The aristocratic families of a country are continually running
+out; and it requires frequent creations to keep up the House of Lords;
+while our poor people seem increasing in some districts in almost the
+mathematical ratio. The county of Sutherland is already more populous
+than it was previous to the great clearings. In Skye, though fully
+two-thirds of the population emigrated early in the latter half of the
+last century, a single generation had scarce passed ere the gap was
+completely filled; and miserable Ireland, had the human family no other
+breeding-place or nursery, would of itself be sufficient in a very few
+ages to people the world.
+
+We returned, taking in our way the cliffs of Marwick Head, in which I
+detected a few scattered plates and scales, and which, like nine-tenths
+of the rocks of Orkney, belong to the great flagstone division of the
+formation. I found the dry-stone fences on Mr. Garson's property still
+richer in detached fossil fragments than the cliffs; but there are few
+erections in the island that do not inclose in their walls portions of
+the organic. We find ichthyolite remains in the flagstones laid bare
+along the way-side,--in every heap of road-metal,--in the bottom of
+every stream,--in almost every cottage and fence. Orkney is a land of
+defunct fishes, and contains in its rocky folds more individuals of the
+waning 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 a
+delectable night's rest, after a day of prime exercise, prolonged till
+it just touched on toil, and again experienced, on looking out in the
+morning on the wide flat basin around, a feeling somewhat akin to
+wonder, that Orkney should possess a scene at once so extensive and so
+exclusively inland.
+
+Towards mid-day I walked on to the parish manse of Sandwick, armed with
+a letter of introduction to its inmate, the Rev. Charles Clouston,--a
+gentleman whose descriptions of the Orkneys, in the very complete and
+tastefully written Guide-Book of the Messrs. Anderson of Inverness, and
+of his own parish in the "Statistical Account of Scotland," had, both
+from the high literary ability and the amount of scientific acquirement
+which they exhibit, rendered me desirous to see. I was politely
+received, though my visit must have been, as I afterwards ascertained,
+at a rather inconvenient time. It was now late in the week, and the
+coming Sabbath was that of the communion in the parish; but Mr. Clouston
+obligingly devoted to me at least an hour, and I found it a very
+profitable one. He showed me a collection of flags, with which he
+intended constructing a grotto, and which contained numerous specimens
+of Coccosteus, that he had exposed to the weather, to bring out the fine
+blue efflorescence,--a phosphate of iron which forms on the surface of
+the plates. They reminded me, from their peculiar style of coloring, and
+the grotesqueness of their forms, of the blue figuring on pieces of
+buff-colored china, and seemed to be chiefly of one species, very
+abundant in Orkney, the _Coccosteus decipiens_. We next walked out to
+see a quarry in the neighborhood of the manse, remarkable for containing
+in immense abundance the heads of Dipteri,--many of them in a good state
+of keeping, with all the multitudinous plates to which they owe their
+pseudo-name, Polyphractus, in their original places, and bearing unworn
+and untarnished their minute carvings and delicate enamel, but existing
+in every case as mere detached heads. I found three of them lying in one
+little slaty fragment of two and a half inches by four, which I brought
+along with me. Mr. Clouston had never seen the curious arrangement of
+palatal plates and teeth which distinguishes the Dipterus; and, drawing
+his attention to it in an ill-preserved specimen which I found in the
+coping of his glebe-wall, I restored, in a rude pencil sketch, the two
+angular patches of teeth that radiate from the elegant dart-head in the
+centre of the palate, with the rhomboidal plate behind. "We have a fish,
+not uncommon on the rocky coasts of this part of the country," he
+said,--"the Bergil or Striped Wrasse (_Labras Balanus_),--which bears
+exactly such patches of angular teeth in its palate. They adhere
+strongly together; and, when found in our old Picts' houses, which
+occasionally happens, they have been regarded by some of our local
+antiquaries 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 show
+you one disinterred here some years ago." It interested me to find, from
+Mr. Clouston's specimens that the palatal grinders of this recent fish
+of Orkney very nearly resemble those of its _Dipterus_ of the Old Red
+Sandstone. The group is of nearly the same size in the modern as in the
+ancient fish, and presents the same angular form; but the individual
+teeth are more strongly set in the Bergil than in the Dipterus, and
+radiate less regularly from the inner rectangular point of the angle to
+its base outside. I could fain have procured an Orkney Bergil, in order
+to determine the general pattern of its palatal dentition with what is
+very peculiar in the more ancient fish,--the form of the lower jaw; and
+to ascertain farther, from the contents of the stomach, the species of
+shell-fish or crustaceans on which it feeds; but, though by no means
+rare 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 palæontological
+inquiries on the vegetable remains of the flagstones, as the department
+of the science in which, in relation to Orkney, most remained to be
+done; and his collection of these is the most considerable in the number
+of its specimens that I have yet seen. It, however, serves but to show
+how very extreme is the poverty of the flora of the Lower Old Red
+Sandstone. The numerous fishes of the period seem to have inhabited a
+sea little more various in its vegetation than in its molluscs. Among
+the specimens of Mr. Clouston's collection I could detect but two
+species of plants,--an imperfectly preserved vegetable, more nearly
+resembling a club-moss than aught I have seen, and a smooth-stemmed
+fucoid, existing as a mere coaly film on the stone, and distinguished
+chiefly from the other by its sharp-edged, well-defined outline, and
+from the circumstance that its stems continue to retain the same
+diameter for a considerable distance, and this, too, after throwing off
+at acute angles numerous branches, nearly equal in bulk to the parent
+trunk. In a specimen about two and a half feet in length, which I owe to
+the kindness of Mr. Dick of Thurso, there are stems continuous
+throughout, that, though they ramify into from six to eight branches in
+that 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 the
+intertropical seas that, streaming slantwise in the tide, rise not
+unfrequently to the surface in fifteen and twenty fathoms water. I saw
+among Mr. Clouston's specimens no such lignite as the fragment of true
+coniferous wood which I had found at Cromarty a few years previous, and
+which, it would seem, is still unique among the fossils of the Old Red
+Sandstone. In the chart of the Pacific attached to the better editions
+of "Cook's Voyages," there are several entries along the track of the
+great navigator that indicate where, in mid-ocean, trees, or fragments
+of trees, had been picked up. The entries, however, are but few, though
+they belong to all the three voyages together: if I remember aright,
+there are only five entries in all,--two in the Northern and three in
+the Southern Pacific. The floating tree, at a great distance from land,
+is of rare occurrence in even the present scene of things, though the
+breadth of land be great, and trees numerous; and in the times of the
+Old Red Sandstone, when probably the breadth of land was _not_ great,
+and trees _not_ numerous, it seems to have been of rarer occurrence
+still. But it is at least something to know that in this early age of
+the world trees there were.
+
+I walked on to Stromness, and on the following morning, that of
+Saturday, took boat for Hoy,--skirting, on my passage out, the eastern
+and southern shores of the intervening island of Græmsay, and, on the
+passage back again, its western and northern shores. The boatman, an
+intelligent man,--one of the teachers, as I afterwards ascertained, in
+the Free Church Sabbath-school,--lightened the way by his narratives of
+storm and wreck, and not a few interesting snatches of natural history.
+There is no member of the commoner professions with whom I better like
+to meet than with a sensible fisherman, who makes a right use of his
+eyes. The history of fishes is still very much what the history of
+almost all animals was little more than half a century ago,--a matter of
+mere external description, heavy often and dry, and of classification
+founded exclusively on anatomical details. We have still a very great
+deal to learn regarding the character, habits and instincts of these
+denizens of the deep,--much, in short, respecting that faculty which is
+in them through which their natures are harmonized to the inexorable
+laws, and they continue to live wisely and securely, in consequence,
+within their own element, when man, with all his reasoning ability, is
+playing strange vagaries in his;--a species of knowledge this, by the
+way, which constitutes by far the most valuable part,--the _mental_
+department of natural history; and the notes of the intelligent
+fisherman, gleaned from actual observation, have frequently enabled me
+to fill portions of the wide hiatus in the history of fishes which it
+ought of right to occupy. In passing, as we toiled along the Græmsay
+coast, the ruins of a solitary cottage, the boatman furnished us with a
+few details of the history and character of its last inmate, an Orkney
+fisherman, that would have furnished admirable materials for one of the
+darker sketches of Crabbe. He was, he said, a resolute, unsocial man,
+not devoid of a dash of reckless humor, and remarkable for an
+extraordinary degree of bodily strength, which he continued to retain
+unbroken to an age considerably advanced, and which, as he rarely
+admitted of a companion in his voyages, enabled him to work his little
+skiff alone, in weather when even better equipped vessels had enough ado
+to keep the sea. He had been married in early life to a
+religiously-disposed woman, a member of some dissenting body; but,
+living with him in the little island of Græmsay, separated by the sea
+from any place of worship, he rarely permitted her to see the inside of
+a church. At one time, on the occasion of a communion Sabbath in the
+neighboring parish of Stromness, he seemed to yield to her entreaties,
+and got ready his yawl, apparently with the design of bringing her
+across the Sound to the town. They had, however, no sooner quitted the
+shore than he sailed off to a green little Ogygia of a holm in the
+neighborhood, on which, reversing the old mythologic story of Calypso
+and Ulysses, he incarcerated the poor woman for the rest of the day till
+evening. I could see, from the broad grin with which the boatman greeted
+this part of the recital, that there was, unluckily, almost fun enough
+in the trick to neutralize the sense of its barbarity. The unsocial
+fisherman lived on, dreaded and disliked, and yet, when his skiff was
+seen boldly keeping the sea in the face of a freshening gale, when every
+other was making for port, or stretching out from the land as some
+stormy evening was falling, not a little admired also. At length, on a
+night 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 be
+seen sitting erect at the bows, as if looking out for the shore. But as
+his little bark came shooting inwards on the long roll of a wave, it was
+found that there was no speculation in his stony glance: the
+misanthropic 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 gray
+flagstones of the district. They spread out here in front of the tall
+hills composed of the overlying sandstone, in a green undulating
+platform, resembling a somewhat uneven esplanade spread out in front of
+a steep rampart. With the upper deposit a new style of scenery
+commences, unique in these islands: the hills, bold and abrupt, rise
+from fourteen to sixteen hundred feet over the sea-level; and the
+valleys by which they are traversed,--no mere shallow inflections of the
+general surface, like most of the other valleys of Orkney,--are of
+profound depth, precipitous, imposing, and solitary. The sudden change
+from the soft, low, and comparatively tame, to the bold, stern, and
+high, serves admirably to show how much the character of a landscape may
+depend on the formation which composes it. A walk of somewhat less than
+two miles brought me into the depths of a brown, shaggy valley, so
+profoundly 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 to
+avoid the peaty bogs of the bottom, along the slopes of the northern
+side of the dell, he sees, amid the heath below, what at first seems to
+be a rhomboidal piece of pavement of pale Old Red Sandstone, bearing
+atop a few stunted tufts of vegetation. There are no neighboring objects
+of a known character by which to estimate its size; the precipitous
+hill-front behind is more than a thousand feet in height: the greatly
+taller Ward Hill of Hoy, which frowns over it on the opposite side, is
+at least five hundred feet higher; and, dwarfed by these giants, it
+seems a mere pavior's flag, mayhap some five or six feet square, by from
+eighteen inches to two feet in depth. It is only on approaching it
+within a few yards that we find it to be an enormous stone, nearly
+thirty feet in length by almost fifteen feet in breadth, and in some
+places, though it thins, wedge-like, towards one of the edges, more than
+six feet in thickness,--forming altogether such a mass as the quarrier
+would detach from the solid rock to form the architrave of some vast
+gateway, or the pediment of some colossal statue. A cave-like
+excavation, nearly three feet square, and rather more than seven feet in
+depth, opens on its gray and lichened side. The excavation is widened
+within, along the opposite walls, into two uncomfortably short beds,
+very much resembling those of the cabin of a small coasting vessel. One
+of 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 six
+inches shorter than its neighbor, and presents altogether more the
+appearance of a place of penance than of repose, lacks both cushion and
+ledge. An aperture, which seems to have been originally of a circular
+form, and about two and a half feet in diameter, but which some unlucky
+herd-boy, apparently in the want of better employment, has considerably
+mutilated and widened, opens at the inner excavation of the extremity
+to 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 to
+be regarded as a chimney. A gray, rudely-hewn block of sandstone, which,
+though greatly too ponderous to be moved by any man of the ordinary
+strength, seems to have served the purpose of a door, lies prostrate
+beside the opening in front. And such is the famous Dwarfie Stone of
+Hoy, as firmly fixed in our literature by the genius of Sir Walter
+Scott, as in this wild valley by its ponderous weight and breadth of
+base, and regarding which--for it shares in the general obscurity of the
+other ancient remains of Orkney--the antiquary can do little more than
+repeat, somewhat incredulously, what tradition tells him, viz., that it
+was the work, many ages ago, of an ugly, malignant goblin, half-earth
+half-air,--the Elfin Trolld,--a personage, it is said, that even within
+the last century, used occasionally to be seen flitting about in its
+neighborhood.
+
+I was fortunate in a fine breezy day, clear and sunshiny, save where the
+shadows 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 of
+some broken gust that seemed to have lost its way, tossed for a moment
+the white cannach of the bogs, or raised spirally into the air, for a
+few yards, the light beards of some seeding thistle, and straightway let
+them down again. Suddenly, however, about noon, a shower broke thick and
+heavy against the dark sides and gray scalp of the Ward Hill, and came
+sweeping 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 rather
+scant, taken fairly lengthwise, for a man of five feet eleven, I found,
+by stretching myself diagonally from corner to corner, no very
+uncomfortable lounging-place in a thunder-shower. Some provident
+herd-boy had spread it over, apparently months before, with a littering
+of heath and fern, which now formed a dry, springy conch; and as I lay
+wrapped up in my plaid, listening to the rain-drops as they pattered
+thick and heavy atop, or slanted through the broken hatchway to the
+vacant bed on the opposite side of the excavation, I called up the wild
+narrative of Norna, and felt all its poetry. The opening passage of the
+story is, however, not poetry, but good prose, in which the curious
+visitor might give expression to his own conjectures, if ingenious
+enough either to form or to express them so well. "With my eyes fixed on
+the smaller bed," the sorceress is made to say, "I wearied myself with
+conjectures regarding the origin and purpose of my singular place of
+refuge. Had it been really the work of that powerful Trolld to whom the
+poetry of the Scalds referred it? or was it the tomb of some
+Scandinavian chief, interred with his arms and his wealth, perhaps also
+with his immolated wife, that what he loved best in life might not in
+death be divided from him? or was it the abode of penance chosen by some
+devoted anchorite of later days? or the idle work of some wandering
+mechanic, whom chance, and whim, and leisure, had thrust upon such an
+undertaking?" What follows this sober passage is the work of the poet.
+"Sleep," continues Norna, "had gradually crept upon me among my
+lucubrations, when I was startled from my slumbers by a second clap of
+thunder, and when I awoke, I saw through the dim light which the upper
+aperture admitted, the unshapely and indistinct form of Trolld the
+dwarf, seated opposite to me on the lesser couch, which his square and
+misshapen bulk seemed absolutely to fill up. I was startled, but not
+affrighted; for the blood of the ancient race of Lochlin was warm in my
+veins. He spoke, and his words were of Norse,--so old, that few save my
+father, or I myself could have comprehended their import,--such language
+as was spoken in these islands ere Olave planted his cross on the ruins
+of heathenism. His meaning was dark also, and obscure, like that which
+the pagan priests were wont to deliver, in the name of their idols, to
+the tribes that assembled at the _Helgafels_.... I answered him in
+nearly the same strain, for the spirit of the ancient Scalds of our race
+was upon me; and far from fearing the phantom with whom I sat cooped
+within so narrow a space, I felt the impulse of that high courage which
+thrust the ancient champions and Druidesses upon contests with the
+invisible world, when they thought that the earth no longer contained
+enemies worthy to be subdued by them.... The Demon scowled at me as if
+at once incensed and overawed; and then, coiling himself up in a thick
+and sulphurous vapor, he disappeared from his place. I did not till that
+moment feel the influence of fright, but then it seized me. I rushed
+into the open air, where the tempest had passed away, and all was pure
+and serene." Shall I dare confess, that I could fain have passed some
+stormy night all alone in this solitary cell, were it but to enjoy the
+luxury of listening, amid the darkness, to the clashing rain and the
+roar of the wind high among the cliffs, or to detect the brushing sound
+of hasty footsteps in the wild rustle of the heath, or the moan of
+unhappy spirits in the low roar of the distant sea. Or, mayhap,--again
+to 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, such
+as the historian of Orkney, Mr. Barry; and, considered simply as a work
+of art or labor, it certainly does not stand high. When tracing, as I
+lay a-bed, the marks of the tool, which, in the harder portions of the
+stone, are still distinctly visible, I just thought how that, armed with
+pick and chisel, and working as I was once accustomed to work, I could
+complete such another excavation to order in some three weeks or a
+month. 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, nor
+connect it with the supernatural, through the influences of wild ancient
+traditions, nor yet encircle it with a classic halo, borrowed from the
+undying inventions of an exquisite literary genius. A half-worn pewter
+spoon, stamped on the back with the word _London_, which was found in a
+miserable hut on the banks of the Awatska by some British sailors, at
+once excited in their minds a thousand tender remembrances of their
+country. And it would, I suspect, be rather a poor criticism, and
+scarcely 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 the
+materials of the spoon. Nor is the Dwarfie Stone to be correctly
+estimated, independently of the suggestive principle, on the rules of
+the mere quarrier who sells stones by the cubic foot, or of the mere
+contractor for hewn work who dresses them by the square one.
+
+The pillow I found lettered over with the names of visitors; but the
+stone,--an exceedingly compact red sandstone,--had resisted the
+imperfect tools at the command of the traveller,--usually a nail or
+knife; 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 still
+pattered heavily overhead; and with my geological chisel and hammer I
+did, to beguile the time, what I very rarely do,--added my name to the
+others, in characters which, if both they and the Dwarfie Stone get but
+fair play, will be distinctly legible two centuries hence. In what state
+will the world then exist, or what sort of ideas will fill the head of
+the man who, when the rock has well-nigh yielded up its charge, will
+decipher the name for the last time, and inquire, mayhap, regarding the
+individual 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 it
+would have saddened me to think that there would in all probability be
+as little response in the one case as in the other; but as men rise in
+years they become more indifferent than in early youth to "that life
+which wits inherit after death," and are content to labor on and be
+obscure. They learn, too, if I may judge from experience, to pursue
+science more exclusively for its own sake, with less, mayhap, of
+enthusiasm to carry them on, but with what is at least as strong to take
+its place as a moving force, that wind and bottom of formed habit
+through which what were at first acts of the will pass into easy
+half-instinctive promptings of the disposition. In order to acquaint
+myself with the fossiliferous deposits of Scotland, I have travelled,
+hammer in hand, during the last nine years, over fully ten thousand
+miles; nor has the work been in the least one of dry labor,--not more so
+than that of the angler, or grouse-shooter, or deer-stalker: it has
+occupied the mere leisure interstices of a somewhat busy life, and has
+served to relieve its toils. I have succeeded, however, in
+accomplishing but little: besides, what is discovery to-day will be but
+rudimentary fact to the tyro-geologists of the future. But if much has
+not been done, I have at least the consolation of George Buchanan, when,
+according to Melvill, "fand sitting in his chair, teiching his young man
+that servit him in his chalmer to spell a, b, ab; e, b, eb. 'Better
+this,' quoth he, 'nor stelling sheipe.'"
+
+The sun broke out in great beauty after the shower, glistening on a
+thousand minute runnels that came streaming down the precipices, and
+revealing, through the thin vapory haze, the horizontal lines of strata
+that bar the hill-sides, like courses of ashlar in a building. I failed,
+however, to detect, amid the general many-pointed glitter by which the
+blue gauze-like mist was bespangled, the light of the great carbuncle
+for which the Ward Hill has long been famous,--that wondrous gem,
+according to Sir Walter, "that, though it gleams ruddy as a furnace to
+them that view it from beneath, ever becomes invisible to him whose
+daring foot scales the precipices whence it darts its splendor." The
+Hill of Hoy is, however, not the only one in the kingdom that, according
+to tradition, bears a jewel in its forehead. The "great diamond" of the
+Northern Sutor was at one time scarce less famous than the carbuncle of
+the Ward Hill. "I have been oftener than once interrogated on the western
+coast of Scotland regarding the diamond rock of Cromarty; and have been
+told, by an old campaigner who fought under Abercrombie, that he has
+listened to the familiar story of its diamond amid the sand wastes of
+Egypt." But the diamond has long since disappeared; and we now see only
+the rock. Unlike the carbuncle of Hoy, it was never seen by day; though
+often, says the legend, the benighted boatmen has gazed, from amid the
+darkness, as he came rowing along the shore, on its clear beacon-like
+flame, which, streaming from the precipice, threw a fiery strip across
+the water; and often have the mariners of other countries inquired
+whether the light which they saw so high among the cliffs, right over
+their mast, did not proceed from the shrine of some saint or the cell of
+some hermit. At length an ingenious ship-captain determined on marking
+its place, brought with him from England a few balls of chalk, and took
+aim at it in the night-time with one of his great guns. Ere he had
+fired, however, it vanished, as if suddenly withdrawn by some guardian
+hand; and its place in the rock front has ever since remained as
+undistinguishable, whether by night or by day, as the scaurs and clefts
+around it. The marvels of the present time abide examination more
+patiently. It seems difficult enough to conceive, for instance, that the
+upper deposit of the Lower Old Red in this locality, out of which the
+mountains of Hoy have been scooped, once overlaid the flag stones of all
+Orkney, and stretched on and away to Dunnet Head, Tarbet Ness, and the
+Black Isle; and yet such is the story, variously authenticated, to which
+their nearly horizontal strata, and their abrupt precipices lend their
+testimony. In no case has this superior deposit of the formation of the
+Coccosteus been known to furnish a single fossil; nor did it yield me on
+this occasion, among the Hills of Hoy, what it had denied me everywhere
+else on every former one. Sly search, however, was by no means either
+very prolonged or very careful.
+
+I found I had still several hours of day-light before me; and these I
+spent, after my return on a rough tumbling sea to Stromness, in a second
+survey of the coast, westwards from the granitic axis of the island, to
+the bishop's palace, and the ichthyolitic quarry beyond. From this point
+of view the high terminal Hill of Hoy, towards the west, presents what
+is really a striking profile of Sir Walter Scott, sculptured in the rock
+front by the storms of ages, on so immense a scale, that the Colossus of
+Rhodes, Pharos and all, would scarce have furnished materials enough to
+supply it with a nose. There are such asperities in the outline as one
+might expect in that of a rudely modelled bust, the work of a master,
+from which, in his fiery haste, he had not detached the superfluous
+clay; but these interfere in no degree with the fidelity, I had almost
+said spirit, of the likeness. It seems well, as it must have waited for
+thousands of years ere it became the portrait it now is, that the human
+profile, which it preceded so long, and without which it would have
+lacked the element of individual truth, should have been that of Sir
+Walter. Amid scenes so heightened in interest by his genius as those of
+Orkney, he is entitled to a monument. To the critical student of the
+philosophy and history of poetic invention it is not uninstructive to
+observe how completely the novelist has appropriated and brought within
+the compass of one fiction, in defiance of all those lower probabilities
+which the lawyer who pleaded before a jury court would be compelled to
+respect, almost every interesting scene and object in both the Shetland
+and Orkney islands. There was but little intercourse in those days
+between the two northern archipelagos. It is not yet thirty years since
+they 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 should
+be wrought up into the same piece of rich tissue with the imposing
+antiquities of Orkney,--Sumburgh Head and Roost with the ancient
+Cathedral of St. Magnus and the earl's palace, and Fitful Head and the
+sand-enveloped kirk of St. Ringan with the Standing Stones of Stennis
+and the Dwarfie Stone of Hoy; and so the little jury-court probabilities
+have been sacrificed without scruple, and that higher truth of
+character, and that exquisite portraiture of external nature, which give
+such reality to fiction, and make it sink into the mind more deeply than
+historic fact, have been substituted instead. But such,--considerably to
+the annoyance of the lesser critics,--has been ever the practice of the
+greater poets. The lesser critics are all critics of the jury-court
+cast; while all the great masters of fiction, with Shakspeare at their
+head, have been asserters of that higher truth which is not letter, but
+spirit, and contemners of the mere judicial probabilities. And so they
+have been continually fretting the little men with their extravagances,
+and they ever will. What were said to be the originals of two of Sir
+Walter's characters in the "Pirate" were living in the neighborhood of
+Stromness only a few years ago. An old woman who resided immediately
+over the town, in a little cottage, of which there now remains only the
+roofless walls, and of whom the sailors, weather-bound in the port, used
+occasionally to purchase a wind, furnished him with the first conception
+of his Norna of the Fitful Head; and an eccentric shopkeeper of the
+place, who to his dying day used to designate the "Pirate," with much
+bitterness, 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 the
+village of Stromness, on the Orkney main island, called Pomona, lived,"
+he says, "in 1814, an aged dame called Bessie Millie, who helped out her
+subsistence by selling favorable winds to mariners. Her dwelling and
+appearance were not unbecoming her pretensions: her house, which was on
+the brow of the steep hill on which Stromness is founded, was only
+accessible by a series of dirty and precipitous lanes, and, for
+exposure, might have been the abode of Æolus himself, in whose
+commodities the inhabitant dealt. She herself was, as she told us,
+nearly one hundred years old, withered and dried up like a mummy. A
+clay-colored kerchief, folded round her head, corresponded in color to
+her corpse-like complexion. Two light-blue eyes that gleamed with a
+lustre like that of insanity, an utterance of astonishing rapidity, a
+nose and chin that almost met together, and a ghastly expression of
+cunning, 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 forms
+the harbor, is about a quarter of a mile in width, there is, immediately
+over the shore, a small square patch of ground, apparently a
+_planticruive_, or garden, surrounded by a tall dry-stone fence. It is
+all that survives--for the old dwelling-house to which it was attached
+was pulled down several years ago--of the patrimony of Gow the "Pirate;"
+and is not a little interesting, as having formed the central nucleus
+round which,--like those bits of thread or wire on which the richly
+saturated fluids of the chemist solidify and crystallize,--the entire
+fiction of the novelist aggregated and condensed under the influence of
+forces operative only in minds of genius. A white, tall, old-fashioned
+house, conspicuous on the hill-side, looks out across the bay towards
+the square inclosure, which it directly fronts. And it is surely a
+curious coincidence, that while in one of these two erections, only a
+few hundred yards apart, one of the heroes of Scott saw the light, the
+other should have proved the scene of the childhood of one of the heroes
+of Byron,
+
+ "Torquil, the nursling of the northern seas."
+
+The reader will remember, that in Byron's poem of "The Island," one of
+the younger leaders of the mutineers is described as a native of these
+northern isles. He is drawn by the poet, amid the wild luxuriance of an
+island 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 in
+Stromness, I found reason to conclude that he had been a hapless young
+man, of a kindly, genial nature; and greatly "more sinned against than
+sinning," in the unfortunate affair of the mutiny with which his name is
+now associated, and for his presumed share in which, untried and
+unconvicted, he was cruelly left to perish in chains amid the horrors of
+a shipwreck. I had the honor of being introduced on the following day to
+his sister, a lady far advanced in life, but over whose erect form and
+handsome features the years seemed to have passed lightly, and whom I
+met at the Free Church of Stromness, to which, at the Disruption, she
+had followed her respected minister. It seemed a fact as curiously
+compounded as some of those pictures of the last age in which the thin
+unsubstantialities of allegory mingled with the tangibilities of the
+real and the material, that the sister of one of Byron's heroes should
+be an attached member of the Free Church.
+
+On my return to the inn, I found in the public room a young German of
+some one or two and twenty, who, in making the tour of Scotland, had
+extended his journey into Orkney. My specimens, which had begun to
+accumulate in the room, on chimney-piece and window-sill, had attracted
+his notice, and led us into conversation. He spoke English well, but not
+fluently,--in the style of one who had been more accustomed to read than
+to converse in it; and he seemed at least as familiar with two of our
+great British authors,--Shakspeare and Sir Walter Scott,--as most of the
+better-informed British themselves. It was chiefly the descriptions of
+Sir Walter in the "Pirate" that had led him into Orkney. He had already
+visited the Cathedral of St. Magnus and the Stones of Stennis; and on
+the morrow he intended visiting the Dwarfie Stone; though I ventured to
+suggest that, as a broad sound lay between Stromness and Hoy, and as the
+morrow was the Sabbath, he might find some difficulty in doing that. His
+circle of acquirement was, I found, rather literary than scientific. It
+seemed, however, to be that of a really accomplished young man, greatly
+better founded in his scholarship than most of our young Scotchmen on
+quitting the national universities; and I felt, as we conversed
+together, chiefly on English literature and general politics, how much
+poorer a figure I would have cut in his country than he cut in mine. I
+found, on coming down from my room next morning to a rather late
+breakfast, that he had been out among the Stromness fishermen, and had
+returned somewhat chafed. Not a single boatman could he find in a
+populous seaport town that would undertake to carry him to the Dwarfie
+Stone on the Sabbath,--a fact, to their credit, which it is but simple
+justice to state. I saw him afterwards in the Free Church, listening
+attentively to a thoroughly earnest and excellent discourse, by the
+Disruption minister of the parish, Mr. Learmonth; and in the course of
+the evening he dropped in for a short time to the Free Church
+Sabbath-school, where he took his seat beside one of the teachers, as if
+curious to ascertain more in detail the character of the instruction
+which had operated so influentially on the boatmen, and which he had
+seen telling from the pulpit with such evident effect. What would not
+his country now give,--now, while drifting loose from all its old
+moorings, full on the perils of a lee shore,--for the anchor of a faith
+equally steadfast! He was a Lutheran, he told me; but, as is too common
+in Germany, his actual beliefs appeared to be very considerably at
+variance with his hereditary creed. The creed was a tolerably sound one,
+but the living belief regarding it seemed to do little more than take
+cognizance of what he deemed the fact of its death.
+
+I had carried with me a letter of introduction to Mr. William Watt, to
+whom 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 into
+Stromness, some six or eight miles, on the morning of Monday, to meet
+with me, bringing me a few of his rarer specimens. One of the number,--a
+minute ichthyolite, about three inches in length,--I was at first
+disposed to set down as new, but I have since come to regard it as
+simply an imperfectly-preserved specimen of a Cromarty and Morayshire
+species,--the _Glyptolepis microlepidotus_; though its state of keeping
+is such as to render either conclusion an uncertainty. Another of the
+specimens was that of a fish, still comparatively rare, first figured in
+the first edition of my little volume on the "Old Red Sandstone," from
+the earliest found specimen, at a time while it was yet unfurnished with
+a name, but which has since had a place assigned to it in the genus
+Diplacanthus, as the species longispinus. The scales, when examined by
+the glass, remind one, from their pectinated character, of shells
+covering the walls of a grotto,--a peculiarity to which, when showing my
+specimen to Agassiz, while it had yet no duplicate, I directed his
+attention, and which led him to extemporize for it, on the spot, the
+generic 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), the
+naturalist found reason to rank it among the Diplacanthi. Mr. Watt's
+specimen exhibited the outline of the head more completely than mine;
+but the Orkney ichthyolites rarely present the microscopic minutiæ; and
+the shell-like aspect of the scales was shown in but one little patch,
+where they had left their impressions on the stone. His other specimens
+consisted of single plates of a variety of Coccosteus, undistinguishable
+in their form and proportions from those of the _Coccosteus decipiens_,
+but which exceeded by about one-third the average size of the
+corresponding parts in that species; and of a rib-like bone, that
+belonged apparently to what few of the ichthyolites of the Lower Old Red
+seem to have possessed,--an osseous internal skeleton. This last
+organism was the only one I saw in Orkney with which I had not been
+previously acquainted, or which I could regard as new, though possibly
+enough it may have formed part, not of an undiscovered genus, but of the
+known genus Asterolepis, of whose inner framework, judging from the
+Russian specimens at least, portions must have been bony. After parting
+from Mr. Watt, I travelled on to Kirkwall, which, after a leisurely
+journey, I reached late in the evening, and on the following morning
+took the steamer for Wick. I brought away with me, if not many rare
+specimens or many new geological facts, at least a few pleasing
+recollections of an interesting country and a hospitable people. In the
+previous chapter I indulged in a brief quotation from Mr. David Vedder,
+the sailor-poet of Orkney, and I shall make no apology for availing
+myself in the present, of the vigorous, well-turned stanzas in which he
+portrays some of those peculiar features by which the land of his
+nativity 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 West
+Highlands are of Devonian age, and the quartzite and limestone of Lower
+Carboniferous.--_See Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society,
+February 1857._--W.S.
+
+[3] Sir R. Murchison considers these rocks Silurian. See "Quarterly
+Journal" 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 New
+Philosophic Journal," April, 1857.
+
+[6] The verses here referred to are introduced into "My Schools and
+Schoolmasters," 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 a
+Churchyard," which was introduced here when these chapters were first
+published in the "Witness," but, having been afterwards inserted in the
+tenth chapter of "My Schools and Schoolmasters," is not here reproduced.
+
+[9] Mr. Peach has discovered fossils in the Durness limestone, which
+rests above the quartzite rock of the west of Scotland, that covers the
+Red Sandstone long believed to be OLD RED. The fossils are very
+obscure.--W.S.S.
+
+[10] This second title hears reference to the extent of the author's
+geologic excursions in Scotland, during the nine years from 1840 to 1848
+inclusive.
+
+[11] Since the above was written, I have seen an interesting paper in
+"Hogg's Weekly Instructor," in which the Rev. Mr. Longmuir of Aberdeen
+describes a visit to the Lias clay at Blackpots. Mr. Longmuir seems to
+have given more time to his researches than I found it agreeable, in a
+very indifferent day to devote to mine; and his list of fossils is
+considerably longer. Their evidence, however, runs in exactly the same
+tract with that of the shorter list. He had been told at Banff that the
+clay contained "petrified tangles;" and the first organism shown him by
+the 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 already
+been anticipated, to be pieces of Belemnites, well known on the other
+side of the Frith as 'thunderbolts,' and esteemed of sovereign efficacy
+in the cure of bewitched cattle." Though still wide of the mark, there
+is here an evident descent from the supernatural to the physical, from
+the superstitious to the true. "Satisfied that we had a mass of Lias
+clay before us, we set vigorously to work, in order either to find
+additional characteristic fossils, or obtain data on which to form a
+conjecture as to the history of this out-of-the-way deposit; and our
+labor was not without its reward. We shall now present a brief account
+of the specimens we picked up. Observing a number of stones of different
+sizes, that had been thrown out, as they were struck, by the workman's
+shovel, 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, to
+obtain 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 what
+appears to have formed part of one; and the first blow has laid open
+part of a whorl of an Ammonite, which, when complete, must have measured
+three or four inches in diameter, and it is perfectly assimilated to the
+calcareous matrix. 2. Here is a mass of indurated clay; and a gentle
+blow has exposed part of two Ammonites, smaller than the former, but
+their shells are white and powdery like chalk. 3. Another fragment is
+laid open; and there, quite unmistakably, lie the umbo and greater
+portion of the _Plagiostoma concentricum_. 4. Another fragment of a
+granular gritty structure presents a considerable portion of the
+interior of one of the shells of a Pecten, but whether the attached
+fragment is part of one of its ears, or of the other valve turned
+backward, is not so easily determined. 5. Here is a piece of Belemnite
+in limestone, and the fracture in the fossil presents the usual
+glistening planes of cleavage. 6. Next we take up a piece of distinctly
+laminated Lias, with Ammonites as thick as they can lie on the pages of
+this black book of natural history. 7. Once more we strike, and we have
+the cast and part of the shell of another bivalve; but the valves have
+been jerked off each other, and have suffered a severe compound
+fracture; nevertheless we can have little hesitation in pronouncing it a
+species of _unio_. 8. Here is another piece of limestone, with its small
+fragment of another shell, of very delicate texture, with finely marked
+traverse striæ. We are unwilling to decide on such slight evidence, but
+feel inclined to refer it to some species of Plagiostoma. 9. Here is a
+piece of pyrites, not quite so large as the first, and so vegetable-like
+in its markings, that it might be mistaken for part of a branch of a
+tree. This is also characteristic of the Lias; for when the shales are
+deeply impregnated with bitumen and pyrites, they undergo a slow
+combustion when heaped up with faggots and set on fire; and in the
+cliffs of the Yorkshire coast, after rainy weather, they sometimes
+spontaneously ignite, and continue to burn for several months. 10. As we
+passed through the works, on our way to the clay, we observed a sort of
+reservoir, into which the clay, after being freed from its impurities,
+had been run in a liquid state; the water had evaporated, and the drying
+clay had cracked in every direction. Here we find its counterpart in
+this large mass of stone; only the clay here, mixed with a portion of
+lime is petrified, and the fissures filled up with carbonate of lime;
+thus forming the septaria, or cement stone. We have dressed a specimen
+of it for our guide, who has a friend that will polish it, when the dark
+Lias will be strikingly contrasted with the white lime, and form rather
+a pretty piece of natural mosaic. 11. Coming to a simple piece of
+machinery for removing fragments of shale and stone from the clay, we
+examined some of the bits so rejected, and found what we had no doubt
+were fish-scales. 12. We have yet to notice certain long slender bodies,
+outwardly brown, but inwardly nearly black, resembling whip-cord in
+size. Are we to regard these as specimens of a fucus, perhaps the
+_filum_, or allied to it, which is known in some places by the
+appropriate name of sea-laces? 13. Passing on to the office, we were
+shown a chop of wood that had been found in the clay, and was destined
+for the Banff Museum. It is about eighteen inches in length, and half as
+much in breadth; and although evidently water-worn, yet we could count
+between twenty-five and thirty concentric rings on one of its ends,
+which not only enabled us to form some conjecture of its age previous to
+its overthrow, but also justified us in referring it to the coniferæ of
+the _vorwelt_, or ancient world."
+
+Mr. Longmuir makes the following shrewd remarks, in answering the
+question, "Whether have we here a mass of Lias clay, as originally
+deposited, or has it resulted from the breaking up of Lias-shale?" "The
+former alternative," says Mr. Longmuir, "we have heard, has been
+maintained; but we are inclined to adopt the latter, and that for the
+following reasons: 1. This clay, judging from other localities, is not
+_in situ_, but has every appearance of having been precipitated into a
+basin in the gneiss on which it rests, having apparently under it,
+although it is impossible to say to what extent, a bed of comminuted
+shells. 2. The fossils are all fragmentary and water-worn. This is
+especially the case with regard to the Belemnites, the pieces averaging
+from one to two inches in length, no workman having ever found a
+complete specimen, such as occurs in the Lias-shale at Cromarty, in
+which they may be found nine inches in length. 3. But perhaps the most
+satisfactory proof, and one that in itself may be deemed sufficient, is
+the frequent occurrence of pieces of Lias-shale, with their embedded
+Ammonites; which clearly show that the Lias had been broken up, tossed
+about in some violent agitation of the sea, and churned into clay, just
+as some denudating process of a similar nature swept away the chalk of
+Aberdeenshire, leaving on many of its hills and plains the water-worn
+flints, 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 of
+the North of Scotland," chap. XXV.
+
+[14] _Scaur_, Scotice, a precipice of clay. There is no single English
+word that conveys exactly the same idea.
+
+[15] Mr. Dick has since disinterred from out the boulder-clays of the
+Burn of Freswick, _Patella vulgata_, _Buccinum undatum_, _Fesus
+antiquus_, _Rostellaria_, _Pes pelicana_, a _Natica_, _Lutraria_, and
+_Balanus_.
+
+[16] That similarity of condition in which the hazel and the harder
+cerealia thrive was noted by our north-country farmers of the old
+School, long ere it had been recorded by the botanist. Hence such
+remarks, 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 ice
+accumulates on the shoals during the winter, at which season the water
+is low. The separate fragments of ice are readily frozen together in a
+climate where the temperature is sometimes thirty degrees below zero,
+and boulders become entangled with them; so that in the spring, when the
+river rises on the melting of the snow, the rocks are floated off,
+frequently conveying away the boulders to great distances. A single
+block of granite, fifteen feet long by ten feet both in width and
+height, and which could not contain less than fifteen hundred cubic feet
+of stone, was in this way moved down the river several hundred yards,
+during the late survey in 1837. Heavy anchors of ships, lying on the
+shore, have in like manner been closed in and removed. In October 1836,
+wooden stakes were driven several feet into the ground, at one point on
+the banks of the St. Lawrence, at high-water mark, and over them were
+piled many boulders as large as the united force of six men could roll.
+The year after, all the boulders had disappeared, and others had
+arrived, and the stakes had been drawn out and carried away by the
+ice."--'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 gigantic
+tribe of _Fions_, narrated in "Scenes and Legends of the North of
+Scotland," chap. IV.
+
+[21] See "My Schools and Schoolmasters," chap XI.
+
+[22] I can entertain no doubt that the angular groups of palatal teeth
+figured by Agassiz and the Russian geologists as those of a supposed
+Placoid termed the Ctenodus, are in reality groups of the palatal teeth
+of Dipterus. In some of my specimens the frontal buckler of Polyphractus
+is connected with the gill-covers and scales of Dipterus, and bears in
+its palate what cannot he distinguished from the teeth of Ctenodus. The
+three genera resolve themselves into one.
+
+[23] There is a very admirable remark to this effect in the "Travelling
+Memorandums" of the late Lord Gardenstone, which, as the work has been
+long 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 security
+and interests of society than the government of monarchs, who possess
+great and extensive territories. The race of great monarchs cannot
+possibly preserve a safe and undisturbed state of government, without
+many delegations of power and office to men of approved abilities and
+practical knowledge, who are subject to complaint during their
+administration, and responsible when it is at an end; or yet without an
+established system of laws and regulations; so that no inconsiderable
+degree of security and liberty to the subject is almost inseparable
+from, and essential to, the subsistence and duration of a great
+monarchy. But it is easy for petty princes to practise an arbitrary and
+irregular exercise of power, by which their people are reduced to a
+condition of miserable slavery. Indeed, very few of them, in the course
+of ages, are capable of conceiving any other means of maintaining the
+ostentatious state, the luxurious and indolent pride, which they mistake
+for greatness. I heartily wish that this observation and censure may
+not, in some instances, be applicable to great landed proprietors in
+some parts of Britain."--Travelling Memorandums, vol. i. p. 123. 1792.
+
+[24] The exciting effects of a poor soil, or climate, or of severe
+usage, on the productive powers of various vegetable species, have been
+long and often remarked. Flavel describes, in one of his ingenious
+emblems, illustrative of the influence of affliction on the Christian,
+an orchard tree, which had been beaten with sticks and stones, till it
+presented a sorely stunted and mutilated appearance; but which, while
+the fairer and more vigorous trees around it were rich in only leaves,
+was laden with fruit,--a direct consequence, it is shown, of the hard
+treatment to which it had been subjected. I have heard it told in a
+northern village, as a curious anecdote, that a large pear tree, which
+during a vigorous existence of nearly fifty years, had borne scarce a
+single pear, had, when in a state of decay, and for a few years previous
+to its death, borne immense crops of from two to three bolls each
+season. And the skilful gardener not unfrequently avails himself of the
+principle on which both phenomena seem to have occurred,--that exhibited
+in the beaten and that in the decaying tree,--in rendering his barren
+plants fruitful. He has recourse to it even when merely desirous of
+ascertaining the variety of pear or apple which some thriving sapling,
+slow in bearing, is yet to produce. Selecting some bough which may be
+conveniently lopped away without destroying the symmetry of the tree, he
+draws 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 cannot
+ultimately recover. Next spring the wounded branch is found to bear its
+bunches of blossoms; the blossoms set into fruit; and while in the other
+portions of the plant all is vigorous and barren as before, the dying
+part of it, as if sobered by the near prospect of dissolution, is found
+fulfilling the proper end of its existence. Soil and climate, too,
+exert, it has been often remarked, a similar influence. In the united
+parishes of Kirkmichael and Culicuden, in the immediate neighborhood of
+Cromarty, 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 its
+growth, and bark-bound. Comparatively young trees of ash," he shrewdly
+adds, "_are covered with seed_,--_an almost infallible sign that their
+natural growth is checked_. The leaves, too, fall off about the
+beginning of September."
+
+
+
+
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+THE HALLIG; OR, THE SHEEPFOLD IN THE WATERS. A Tale of Humble Life on
+the Coast of Schleswig. Translated from the German of BIERNATSKI, by
+Mrs. GEORGE P. MARSH. With a Biographical Sketch of the Author. 12mo,
+cloth, $1.00.
+
+     As a revelation of an entire new phase in human society, this work
+     strongly reminds the reader of Miss Bremer's tales. In originality
+     and brilliancy of imagination, it is not inferior to those:--its
+     aim is far higher.
+
+
+THE CRUISE OF THE NORTH STAR; A Narrative of the Excursion made by Mr.
+Vanderbilt's Party in the Steam Yacht, in her Voyage to England, Russia,
+Denmark, France, Spain, Italy, Malta, Turkey, Madeira, &c. By Rev. JOHN
+OVERTON CHOULES, D.D. With elegant Illustrations, &c. 12mo, cloth, gilt
+backs and sides, $1.50; cloth, gilt, $2.00; Turkey, gilt, $3.00.
+
+
+PILGRIMAGE TO EGYPT; embracing a Diary of Explorations on the Nile, with
+Observations Illustrative of the Manners, Customs, and Institutions of
+the People, and of the present condition of the Antiquities and Ruins.
+By Hon. J.V.C. SMITH, late Mayor of the City of Boston. With numerous
+elegant Engravings. 12mo, cloth, $1.25.
+
+
+
+
+POETICAL WORKS.
+
+
+COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS OF WILLIAM COWPER; with a Life and Critical
+Notices of his Writings. Elegant Illustrations. 16mo, cloth, $1.00.
+
+
+POETICAL WORKS OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. Life and Illustrations. 16mo, cloth,
+$1.00.
+
+
+MILTON'S POETICAL WORKS. With a Life and elegant Illustrations. 16mo,
+cloth, $1.00.
+
+     --> The above Poetical Works, by standard authors, are all of uniform
+     size and style, printed on fine paper from clear, distinct type, with
+     new and elegant illustrations, richly bound in full gilt, and plain.
+
+
+
+
+WORKS OF HUGH MILLER.
+
+
+THE OLD RED SANDSTONE; or, New Walks in an Old Field. Illustrated with
+Plates and Geological Sections. NEW EDITION, REVISED AND MUCH ENLARGED,
+by the addition of new matter and new Illustrations, etc. 12mo, cloth,
+$1.25.
+
+     This edition contains over _one hundred pages of entirely new
+     matter_, from the pen of Hugh Miller. It contains, also, several
+     additional new plates and cuts, the old plates re-engraved and
+     improved, and an Appendix of new Notes.
+
+     "It is withal one of the most beautiful specimens of English
+     composition to be found, conveying information on a most difficult
+     and profound science, in a style at once novel, pleasing, and
+     elegant."--DR. SPRAGUE--_Albany Spectator._
+
+
+THE FOOTPRINTS OF THE CREATOR; or, the Asterolepsis of Stromness, with
+numerous Illustrations. With a Memoir of the Author, by LOUIS AGASSIZ.
+12mo, cloth, $1.00.
+
+     DR. BUCKLAND _said he would give his left hand to possess such
+     power of description as this man._
+
+
+TESTIMONY OF THE ROCKS; or, Geology in its Bearings on the two
+Theologies, Natural and Revealed. "Thou shalt be in league with the
+stones of the field."--_Job._ With numerous elegant Illustrations. One
+volume, royal 12mo, cloth, $1.25.
+
+     This is the largest and most comprehensive Geological Work that the
+     distinguished author has yet published. It exhibits the profound
+     learning, the felicitous style, and the scientific perception,
+     which characterize his former works, while it embraces the latest
+     results of geological discovery. But the great charm of the book
+     lies in those passages of glowing eloquence, in which, having
+     spread out his facts, the author proceeds to make deductions from
+     them of the most striking and exciting character. The work is
+     profusely illustrated by engravings executed at Paris, in the
+     highest style of French art.
+
+
+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 Fossiliferous Deposits of Scotland. 12mo, cloth, $1.25.
+
+     Nothing need be said of it save that it possesses the same
+     fascination for the reader that characterizes the author's other
+     works.
+
+
+MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; or, the Story of my Education. AN
+AUTOBIOGRAPHY. With a full-length Portrait of the Author. 12mo, cloth,
+$1.25.
+
+     This is a personal narrative, of a deeply interesting and
+     instructive character, concerning one of the most remarkable men of
+     the age.
+
+
+MY FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. With a fine Engraving of
+the author. 12mo, cloth, $1.00.
+
+     --> A very instructive book of travels, presenting the most perfectly
+     life-like views of England and its people to be found in any language.
+
+     --> _The above six volumes are furnished in sets, printed and bound
+     in uniform style_: viz.,
+
+
+HUGH MILLER'S WORKS, Six Volumes. Elegant embossed cloth, $7.00, library
+sheep, $8.00; half calf, $12.00; antique, $12.00.
+
+
+MACAULAY ON SCOTLAND. A Critique, from the "Witness." 16mo, flexible
+cloth, 25 cts.
+
+
+
+
+GOULD AND LINCOLN,
+
+59 WASHINGTON STREET, BOSTON.
+
+Would call particular attention to the following valuable works
+described in their Catalogue of Publications, viz.:
+
+ Hugh Miller's Works.
+
+ Bayne's Works. Walker's Works. Miall's Works. Bungener's Work.
+
+ Annual of Scientific Discovery. Knight's Knowledge is Power.
+
+ Krummacher's Suffering Saviour.
+
+ Banvard's American Histories. The Aimwell Stories.
+
+ Newcomb's Works. Tweedie's Works. Chambers's Works. Harris' Works.
+
+ Kitto's Cyclopædia of Biblical Literature.
+
+ Mrs. Knight's Life of Montgomery. Kitto's History of Palestin.
+
+ Wheewell's Work.    Wayland's Works.    Agassiz's Works.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+ William's Works. Guyot's Works.
+
+ Thompson's Better Land. Kimball's Heaven. Valuable Works on Missions.
+
+ Haven's Mental Philosophy. Buchanan's Modern Atheism.
+
+ Cruden's Condensed Concordance. Eadie's Analytical Concordance.
+
+ The Psalmist: A Collection of Hymns.
+
+ Valuable School Books. Works for Sabbath Schools.
+
+ Memoir of Amos Lawrence.
+
+ Poetical Works of Milton, Cowpar, Scott. Elegant Miniature Volumes.
+
+ Arvine's Cyolopædia of Anecdotes.
+
+ Ripley's Notes on Gospels, Acts, and Romans.
+
+ Sprague's European Celebrities. Marsh's Camel and the Hallig.
+
+ Roget's Thesaurus of English Words.
+
+ Hackett's Notes on Acts. M'Whorter's Yahveh Christ.
+
+ Siebold and Stannius's Comparative Anatomy. Marco's Geological Map, U.S.
+
+ Religious and Miscellaneous Works.
+
+ Works in the various Departments of Literature, Science and Art.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY***
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+<h1 class="pg">The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Cruise of the Betsey, by Hugh Miller</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: The Cruise of the Betsey</p>
+<p>       or, A Summer Ramble Among the Fossiliferous Deposits of the Hebrides. With Rambles of a Geologist or, Ten Thousand Miles Over the Fossiliferous Deposits of Scotland</p>
+<p>Author: Hugh Miller</p>
+<p>Release Date: March 8, 2009  [eBook #28273]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3 class="pg">E-text prepared by Eric Hutton, Greg Bergquist,<br />
+    and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br />
+    (http://www.pgdp.net)</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="tn">
+
+<p class="center"><big><b>Transcriber&#8217;s Note</b></big></p>
+
+<p class="noin">The punctuation and spelling from the original text have been faithfully preserved. Only obvious
+typographical errors have been corrected.</p>
+
+</div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="t1"><small>THE</small></p>
+
+<h1>CRUISE OF THE BETSEY;</h1>
+
+<p class="t1"><small>OR,</small></p>
+
+<p class="t1"><big>A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE FOSSILIFEROUS<br />
+DEPOSITS OF THE HEBRIDES.</big></p>
+
+<p class="t1"><small>WITH</small></p>
+
+<p class="t2">RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST;</p>
+
+<p class="t1"><small>OR,</small></p>
+
+<p class="t1"><big>TEN THOUSAND MILES OVER THE FOSSILIFEROUS<br />
+DEPOSITS OF SCOTLAND.</big></p>
+
+
+<p class="t1"><br /><br /><small>BY</small><br />
+
+<big>HUGH MILLER, LL. D.,</big><br />
+
+<small>AUTHOR OF "THE OLD RED SANDSTONE," "FOOTPRINTS OF THE CREATOR,"
+"MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS," "THE TESTIMONY
+OF THE ROCKS," ETC.</small><br /><br /><br /></p>
+
+<p class="t3">BOSTON:<br />
+GOULD AND LINCOLN,<br />
+<small>59 WASHINGTON STREET.<br />
+NEW YORK: SHELDON AND COMPANY.<br />
+CINCINNATI: GEO. S. BLANCHARD.</small></p>
+
+<p class="t1">1862.</p>
+<hr />
+
+<p class="center">
+Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1858, by<br />
+<br />
+GOULD AND LINCOLN,<br />
+<br />
+In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.</p>
+
+<p class="t1"><br /><br /><br />AUTHORIZED EDITION.
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">By</span> a special arrangement with the late Hugh Miller, <span class="smcap">Gould and Lincoln</span>
+became the authorized American publishers of his works. By a similar
+arrangement made with the family since his decease, they will also
+publish his <span class="smcap">Posthumous Works</span>, of which the present volume is the first.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">
+<small>ELECTROTYPED BY W. F. DRAPER, ANDOVER, MASS.<br />
+<br />
+PRINTED BY GEO. C. RAND &amp; AVERY, BOSTON.</small><br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="PREFACE" id="PREFACE"></a>PREFACE.</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Naturalists</span> of every class know too well how <span class="smcap">Hugh Miller</span> died&mdash;the
+victim of an overworked brain; and how that bright and vigorous spirit
+was abruptly quenched forever.</p>
+
+<p>During the month of May (1857) Mrs. Miller came to Malvern, after
+recovering from the first shock of bereavement, in search of health and
+repose, and evidently hoping to do justice, on her recovery, to the
+literary remains of her husband. Unhappily the excitement and anxiety
+naturally attaching to a revision of her husband's works proved over
+much for one suffering under such recent trial, and from an affection of
+the brain and spine which ensued; and, in consequence, Mrs. Miller has
+been forbidden, for the present, to engage in any work of mental labor.</p>
+
+<p>Under these circumstances, and at Mrs. Miller's request, I have
+undertaken the editing of "The Cruise of the Betsey, or a Summer Ramble
+among the Fossiliferous Deposits of the Hebrides," as well as "The
+Rambles of a Geologist," hitherto unpublished, save as a series of
+articles in the "Witness" newspaper. The style and arguments of <span class="smcap">Hugh
+Miller</span> are so peculiarly his own, that I have not presumed to alter the
+text, and have merely corrected some statements incidental to the
+condition of geological knowledge at the time this work was penned. "The
+Cruise of the Betsey" was written for that well-known paper the
+"Witness" during the period when a disputation productive of much bitter
+feeling waged between the Free and Established Churches of Scotland; but
+as the Disruption and its history possesses little interest to a large
+class of the readers of this work, who will rejoice to follow their
+favorite author among the isles and rocks of the "bonnie land," I have
+expunged <i>some</i> passages, which I am assured the author would have
+omitted had he lived to reprint this interesting narrative of his
+geological rambles. <span class="smcap">Hugh Miller</span> battled nobly for his faith while
+living. The sword is in the scabbard: let it rest!</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+W.S. SYMONDS.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pendock Rectory, April 1, 1858.</span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS.</h2>
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="Contents">
+<tr>
+<td class='center'><p class="t1"><big>PART I.</big><br /><br />
+THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY.</p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr1'>
+<td class='center'><p class="t1"><big><a href="#Page_15">CHAPTER I.</a></big></p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr2'>
+<td class='td1'>
+Preparation&mdash;Departure&mdash;Recent and Ancient Monstrosities&mdash;A Free
+Church Yacht&mdash;Down the Clyde&mdash;Jura&mdash;Prof. Walker's
+Experiment&mdash;Whirlpool near Scarba&mdash;Geological Character of the
+Western Highlands&mdash;An Illustration&mdash;Different Ages of Outer and
+Inner Hebrides&mdash;Mt. Blanc and the Himalayas "mere
+upstarts"&mdash;Esdaile Quarries&mdash;Oban&mdash;A Section through Conglomerate
+and Slate examined&mdash;McDougal's Dog-stone&mdash;Power of the Ocean to
+move Rocks&mdash;Sound of Mull&mdash;The Betsey&mdash;The Minister's
+Cabin&mdash;Village of Tobermory&mdash;The "Florida," a Wreck of the
+Invincible Armada&mdash;Geologic Exploration and Discovery&mdash;At Anchor.</td>
+<td align='right'>15</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr1'>
+<td class='center'><p class="t1"><big><a href="#Page_31">CHAPTER II.</a></big></p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr2'>
+<td class='td1'>
+The Minister's Larder&mdash;No Harbor&mdash;Eigg Shoes&mdash;<i>Tormentilla
+erecta</i>&mdash;For the <i>Witness'</i> Sake&mdash;Eilean Chaisteil&mdash;Appearance of
+Eigg&mdash;Chapel of St. Donan&mdash;Shell-sand&mdash;Origin of Secondary
+Calcareous Rock suggested&mdash;Exploration of Eigg&mdash;Pitchstone Veins&mdash;A
+Bone Cave&mdash;Massacre at Eigg&mdash;Grouping of Human Bones in the
+Cave&mdash;Relics&mdash;The Horse's Tooth&mdash;A Copper Sewing Needle&mdash;Teeth
+found&mdash;Man a worse Animal than his Teeth show him to have been
+designed for&mdash;Story of the Massacre&mdash;Another Version&mdash;Scuir of
+Eigg&mdash;The Scuir a Giant's Causeway&mdash;Character of the
+Columns&mdash;Remains of a Prostrate Forest.</td>
+<td align='right'>31</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr1'>
+<td class='center'><p class="t1"><big><a href="#Page_49">CHAPTER III.</a></big></p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr2'>
+<td class='td1'>
+Structure of the Scuir&mdash;A stray Column&mdash;The Piazza&mdash;A buried Pine
+Forest the Foundation of the Scuir&mdash;Geological Poachers in a Fossil
+Preserve&mdash;<i>Pinites Eiggensis</i>&mdash;Its Description&mdash;Witham's
+Experiments on Fossil Pine of Eigg&mdash;Rings of the Pine&mdash;Ascent of
+the Scuir&mdash;Appearance of the Top&mdash;White Pitchstone&mdash;Mr. Greig's
+Discovery of Pumice&mdash;A Sunset Scene&mdash;The Manse and the Yacht&mdash;The
+Minister's Story&mdash;A Cottage Repast&mdash;American Timber drifted to the
+Hebrides&mdash;Agency of the Gulf Stream&mdash;The Minister's Sheep.</td>
+<td align='right'>49</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr1'>
+<td class='center'><p class="t1"><big><a href="#Page_66">CHAPTER IV.</a></big></p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr2'>
+<td class='td1'>
+An Excursion&mdash;The Chain of Crosses&mdash;Bay of Laig&mdash;Island of
+Rum&mdash;Description of the Island&mdash;Superstitions banished by pure
+Religion&mdash;Fossil Shells&mdash;Remarkable Oyster Bed&mdash;New species of
+Belemnite&mdash;O&ouml;litic Shells&mdash;White Sandstone Precipices&mdash;Gigantic
+Petrified Mushrooms&mdash;"Christabel" in Stone&mdash;Musical Sand&mdash;<i>Jabel
+Nakous</i>, or Mountain of the Bell&mdash;Experiments of Travellers at
+<i>Jabel Nakous</i>&mdash;Welsted's Account&mdash;<i>Reg-Rawan</i>, or the Moving
+Sand&mdash;The Musical Sounds inexplicable&mdash;Article on the subject in
+the North British Review.</td>
+<td align='right'>66</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr1'>
+<td class='center'><p class="t1"><big><a href="#Page_85">CHAPTER V.</a></big></p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr2'>
+<td class='td1'>
+Trap-dykes&mdash;"Cotton Apples"&mdash;Alternation of Lacustrine with Marine
+Remains&mdash;Analogy from the Beds of Esk&mdash;Aspect of the Island on its
+narrow Front&mdash;The Puffin&mdash;Ru Stoir&mdash;Development of Old Red
+Sandstone&mdash;Striking Columnar character of Ru Stoir&mdash;Discovery of
+Reptilian Remains&mdash;John Stewart's wonder at the Bones in the
+Stones&mdash;Description of the Bones&mdash;"Dragons, Gorgons, and
+Chimeras"&mdash;Exploration and Discovery pursued&mdash;The Midway
+Shieling&mdash;A Celtic Welcome&mdash;Return to the Yacht&mdash;"Array of Fossils
+new to Scotch Geology"&mdash;A Geologist's Toast&mdash;Hoffman and his
+Fossil.</td>
+<td align='right'>85</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr1'>
+<td class='center'><p class="t1"><big><a href="#Page_105">CHAPTER VI.</a></big></p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr2'>
+<td class='td1'>
+Something for Non-geologists&mdash;Man Destructive&mdash;A Better and Last
+Creation coming&mdash;A Rainy Sabbath&mdash;The Meeting House&mdash;The
+Congregation&mdash;The Sermon in Gaelic&mdash;The Old Wondrous Story&mdash;The
+Drunken Minister of Eigg&mdash;Presbyterianism without Life&mdash;Dr.
+Johnson's Account of the Conversion of the People of Rum&mdash;Romanism
+at Eigg&mdash;The Two Boys&mdash;The Freebooter of Eigg&mdash;Voyage resumed&mdash;The
+Homeless Minister&mdash;Harbor of Isle Ornsay&mdash;Interesting Gneiss
+Deposit&mdash;A Norwegian Keep&mdash;Gneiss at Knock&mdash;Curious
+Chemistry&mdash;Sea-cliffs beyond Portsea&mdash;The Goblin Luidag&mdash;Scenery of
+Skye.</td>
+<td align='right'>105</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr1'>
+<td class='center'><p class="t1"><big><a href="#Page_123">CHAPTER VII.</a></big></p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr2'>
+<td class='td1'>
+Exploration resumed&mdash;Geology of Rasay&mdash;An Illustration&mdash;The Storr
+of Skye&mdash;From Portree to Holm&mdash;Discovery of Fossils&mdash;An Island
+Rain&mdash;Sir R. Murchison&mdash;Labor of Drawing a Geological Line&mdash;Three
+Edinburgh Gentlemen&mdash;<i>Prosopolepsia</i>&mdash;Wrong Surmises corrected&mdash;The
+Mail Gig&mdash;The Portree Postmaster&mdash;Isle Ornsay&mdash;An Old
+Acquaintance&mdash;Reminiscences&mdash;A Run for Rum&mdash;"Semi-fossil
+Madeira"&mdash;Idling on Deck&mdash;Prognostics of a Storm&mdash;Description of
+the Gale&mdash;Loch Scresort&mdash;The Minister's lost <i>Sou-wester</i>&mdash;The Free
+Church Gathering&mdash;The weary Minister.</td>
+<td align='right'>123</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr1'>
+<td class='center'><p class="t1"><big><a href="#Page_139">CHAPTER VIII.</a></big></p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr2'>
+<td class='td1'>
+Geology of Rum&mdash;Its curious Character illustrated&mdash;Rum famous for
+Bloodstones&mdash;Red Sandstones&mdash;"Scratchings" in the Rocks&mdash;A
+Geological Inscription without a Key&mdash;The Lizard&mdash;Vitality broken
+into two&mdash;Illustrations&mdash;Speculation&mdash;Scuir More&mdash;Ascent of the
+Scuir&mdash;The Bloodstones&mdash;An Illustrative Set of the Gem&mdash;M'Culloch's
+Pebble&mdash;A Chemical Problem&mdash;The solitary Shepherd's House&mdash;Sheep
+<i>versus</i> Men&mdash;The Depopulation of Rum&mdash;A Haul of Trout&mdash;Rum Mode of
+catching Trout&mdash;At Anchor in the Bay of Glenelg.</td>
+<td align='right'>139</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr1'>
+<td class='center'><p class="t1"><big><a href="#Page_159">CHAPTER IX.</a></big></p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr2'>
+<td class='td1'>
+Kyles of Skye&mdash;A Gneiss District&mdash;Kyle Rhea&mdash;A Boiling Tide&mdash;A
+"Take" of Sillocks&mdash;The Betsey's "Paces"&mdash;In the Bay at
+Broadford&mdash;Rain&mdash;Island of Pabba&mdash;Description of the Island&mdash;Its
+Geological Structure&mdash;Astrea&mdash;Polypifers&mdash;<i>Gryph&#339;a
+incurva</i>&mdash;Three Groups of Fossils in the Lias of Skye&mdash;Abundance of
+the Petrifactions of Pabba&mdash;Scenery&mdash;Pabba a "piece of smooth,
+level England"&mdash;Fossil Shells of Pabba&mdash;- Voyage resumed&mdash;Kyle
+Akin&mdash;Ruins of Castle Maoil&mdash;A "Thornback" Dinner&mdash;The Bunch of
+Deep Sea Tangle&mdash;The Caileach Stone&mdash;Kelp Furnaces&mdash;Escape of the
+Betsey from sinking.</td>
+<td align='right'>159</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr1'>
+<td class='center'><p class="t1"><big><a href="#Page_178">CHAPTER X.</a></big></p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr2'>
+<td class='td1'>
+Isle Orusay&mdash;The Sabbath&mdash;A Sailor-minister's Sermon for
+Sailors&mdash;The Scuir Sermon&mdash;Loch Carron&mdash;Groups of Moraines&mdash;A sheep
+District&mdash;The Editor of the <i>Witness</i> and the Establishment
+Clergyman&mdash;Dingwall&mdash;Conon-side revisited&mdash;The Pond and its
+Changes&mdash;New Faces.&mdash;The Stonemason's Mark&mdash;The Burying-ground of
+Urquhart&mdash;An old Acquaintance&mdash;Property Qualification for Voting in
+Scotland&mdash;Montgerald Sandstone Quarries&mdash;Geological Science in
+Cromarty&mdash;The Danes at Cromarty&mdash;The Danish Professor and the "Old
+Red Sandstone"&mdash;Harmonizing Tendencies of Science.</td>
+<td align='right'>178</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr1'>
+<td class='center'><p class="t1"><big><a href="#Page_192">CHAPTER XI.</a></big></p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr2'>
+<td class='td1'>
+Ichthyolite Beds&mdash;An interesting Discovery&mdash;Two Storeys of Organic
+Remains in the Old Red Sandstone&mdash;Ancient Ocean of Lower Old
+Red&mdash;Two great Catastrophes&mdash;Ancient Fish Scales&mdash;Their skilful
+Mechanism displayed by examples&mdash;Bone Lips&mdash;Arts of the Slater and
+Tiler as old as Old Red Sandstone&mdash;Jet Trinkets&mdash;Flint
+Arrow-heads&mdash;Vitrified Forts of Scotland&mdash;Style of grouping Lower
+Old Red Fossils&mdash;Illustration from Cromarty Fishing
+Phenomena&mdash;Singular Remains of Holoptychius&mdash;Ramble with Mr. Robert
+Dick&mdash;Color of the Planet Mars&mdash;Tombs never dreamed of by
+Hervey&mdash;Skeleton of the Bruce&mdash;Gigantic Holoptychius&mdash;"Coal money
+Currency"&mdash;Upper Boundary of Lower Old Red&mdash;Every one may add to
+the Store of Geological Facts&mdash;Discoveries of Messrs. Dick and
+Peach.</td>
+<td align='right'>192</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr1'>
+<td class='center'><p class="t1"><big><a href="#Page_212">CHAPTER XII.</a></big></p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr2'>
+<td class='td1'>
+Ichthyolite Beds of Clune and Lethenbarn&mdash;Limestone
+Quarry&mdash;Destruction of Urns and Sarcophagi in the
+Lime-kiln&mdash;Nodules opened&mdash;Beautiful coloring of the
+Remains&mdash;Patrick Duff's Description&mdash;New Genus of Morayshire
+Ichthyolite described&mdash;Form and size of the Nodules or Stone
+Coffins&mdash;Illustration from Mrs. Marshall's Cements&mdash;Forest of
+Darnaway&mdash;The Hill of Berries&mdash;Sluie&mdash;Elgin&mdash;Outliers of the Weald
+and the O&ouml;lite&mdash;Description of the Weald at Linksfield&mdash;Mr. Duff's
+<i>Lepidotus minor</i>&mdash;Eccentric Types of Fish Scales&mdash;Visit to the
+Sandstones of Scat-Craig&mdash;Fine suit of Fossils at Scat-Craig&mdash;True
+graveyard Bones, not mere Impressions&mdash;Varieties of pattern&mdash;The
+Diker's "Carved Flowers"&mdash;<i>Stagonolepis</i>, a new Genus&mdash;Termination
+of the Ramble.</td>
+<td align='right'>212</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr1'>
+<td class='center'><p class="t1"><big><a href="#Page_233">CHAPTER XIII.</a></big></p>
+<p class="t1"><small>SUPPLEMENTARY.</small></p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr2'>
+<td class='td1'>
+Supplementary&mdash;Isolated Reptile Remains in Eigg&mdash;Small Isles
+revisited&mdash;The Betsey again&mdash;Storm bound&mdash;Tacking&mdash;Becalmed&mdash;Medus&aelig;
+caught and described&mdash;Rain&mdash;A Shoal of Porpoises&mdash;Change of
+Weather&mdash;The bed-ridden Woman&mdash;The Poor Law Act for
+Scotland&mdash;Geological Excursion&mdash;Basaltic Columns&mdash;O&ouml;litic
+Beds&mdash;Abundance of Organic Remains&mdash;Hybodus Teeth&mdash;Discovery of
+reptile Remains <i>in situ</i>&mdash;Musical Sand of Laig
+re-examined&mdash;Explanation suggested&mdash;Sail for Isle Ornsay&mdash;Anchored
+Clouds&mdash;A Leak sprung&mdash;Peril of the Betsey&mdash;At work with Pump and
+Pails&mdash;Safe in Harbor&mdash;Return to Edinburgh.</td>
+<td align='right'>233</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr1'>
+<td class='center'><p class="t1"><big>PART II.</big></p>
+<p class="t1">RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.</p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr1'>
+<td class='center'><p class="t1"><big><a href="#Page_255">CHAPTER I.</a></big></p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr2'>
+<td class='td1'>
+Embarkation&mdash;A foundered Vessel&mdash;Lateness of the Harvest dependent
+on the Geological character of the Soil&mdash;A Granite Harvest and an
+Old Red Harvest&mdash;Cottages of Redstone and of Granite&mdash;Arable Soil
+of Scotland the result of a Geological Grinding Agency&mdash;Locality of
+the Famine of 1846&mdash;Mr. Longmuir's Fossils&mdash;Geology necessary to a
+Theologian&mdash;Popularizers of Science when dangerous&mdash;"Constitution
+of Man," and "Vestiges of Creation"&mdash;Atop of the Banff Coach&mdash;A
+Geologist's Field Equipment&mdash;The trespassing "Stirk"&mdash;Silurian
+Schists inlaid with Old Red&mdash;Bay of Gamrie, how
+formed&mdash;Gardenstone&mdash;Geological Free-masonry illustrated&mdash;How to
+break an Ichthyolite Nodule&mdash;An old Rhyme mended&mdash;A raised
+Beach&mdash;Fossil Shells&mdash;Scotland under Water at the time of the
+Boulder-clays.</td>
+<td align='right'>255</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr1'>
+<td class='center'><p class="t1"><big><a href="#Page_270">CHAPTER II.</a></big></p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr2'>
+<td class='td1'>
+Character of the Rocks near Gardenstone&mdash;A Defunct Father-lasher&mdash;A
+Geological Inference&mdash;Village of Gardenstone&mdash;The drunken
+Scot&mdash;Gardenstone Inn&mdash;Lord Gardenstone&mdash;A Tempest threatened&mdash;The
+Author's Ghost Story&mdash;The Lady in Green&mdash;Her Appearance and
+Tricks&mdash;The Rescued Children&mdash;The murdered Peddler and his
+Pack&mdash;Where the Green Dress came from&mdash;Village of Macduff&mdash;Peculiar
+Appearance of the Beach at the Mouth of the Deveron&mdash;Dr. Emslie's
+Fossils&mdash;<i>Pterichthys quadratus</i>&mdash;Argillaceous Deposits of
+Blackpots&mdash;Pipe-laying in Scotland&mdash;Fossils of Blackpots Clay&mdash;Mr.
+Longmuir's Description of them&mdash;Blackpots Deposit a Re-formation of
+a Liasic Patch&mdash;Period of its Formation.</td>
+<td align='right'>270</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr1'>
+<td class='center'><p class="t1"><big><a href="#Page_291">CHAPTER III.</a></big></p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr2'>
+<td class='td1'>
+From Blackpots to Portsoy&mdash;Character of the Coast&mdash;Burn of
+Boyne&mdash;Fever Phantoms&mdash;Graphic Granite&mdash;Maupertuis and the Runic
+Inscription&mdash;Explanation of the <i>quo modo</i> of Graphic
+Granite&mdash;Portsoy Inn&mdash;Serpentine Beds&mdash;Portsoy Serpentine
+unrivalled for small ornaments&mdash;Description of it&mdash;Significance of
+the term <i>serpentine</i>&mdash;Elizabeth Bond and her "Letters"&mdash;From
+Portsoy to Cullen&mdash;Attritive Power of the Ocean illustrated&mdash;The
+Equinoctial&mdash;From Cullen to Fochabers&mdash;The Old Red again&mdash;The old
+Pensioner&mdash;Fochabers&mdash;Mr. Joss, the learned Mail-guard&mdash;The Editor
+a sort of Coach-guard&mdash;On the Coach to Elgin&mdash;Geology of
+Banffshire&mdash;Irregular paging of the Geologic Leaves&mdash;Geologic Map
+of the County like Joseph's Coat&mdash;Striking Illustration.</td>
+<td align='right'>291</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr1'>
+<td class='center'><p class="t1"><big><a href="#Page_307">CHAPTER IV.</a></big></p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr2'>
+<td class='td1'>
+Yellow-hued Houses of Elgin&mdash;Geology of the Country indicated by
+the coloring of the Stone Houses&mdash;Fossils of Old Red north of the
+Grampians different from those of Old Red south&mdash;Geologic
+Formations at Linksfield difficult to be understood&mdash;Ganoid Scales
+of the Wealden&mdash;Sudden Reaction, from complex to simple, in the
+Scales of Fishes&mdash;Pore-covered Scales&mdash;Extraordinary amount of
+Design exhibited in Ancient Ganoid Scales&mdash;Holoptychius Scale
+illustrated by Cromwell's "fluted pot"&mdash;Patrick Duff's Geological
+Collection&mdash;Elgin Museum&mdash;Fishes of the Ganges&mdash;Armature of Ancient
+Fishes&mdash;Compensatory Defences&mdash;- The Hermit-crab&mdash;Spines of the
+Pimelodi&mdash;Ride to Campbelton&mdash;Theories of the formation of
+Ardersier and Fortrose Promontories&mdash;Tradition of their
+construction by the Wizard, Michael Scott&mdash;A Region of Legendary
+Lore.</td>
+<td align='right'>307</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr1'>
+<td class='center'><p class="t1"><big><a href="#Page_324">CHAPTER V.</a></big></p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr2'>
+<td class='td1'>
+Rosemarkie and its Scaurs&mdash;Kaes' Craig&mdash;A Jackdaw
+Settlement&mdash;"Rosemarkie Kaes" and "Cromarty Cooties"&mdash;"The Danes,"
+a Group of Excavations&mdash;At Home in Cromarty&mdash;The Boulder-clay of
+Cromarty "begins to tell its story"&mdash;One of its marked Scenic
+Peculiarities&mdash;Hints to Landscape Painters&mdash;"Samuel's Well"&mdash;A
+Chain of Bogs geologically accounted for&mdash;Another Scenic
+Peculiarity&mdash;"<i>Ha-has</i> of Nature's digging"&mdash;The Author's earliest
+Field of Hard Labor&mdash;Picturesque Cliff of Boulder-clay&mdash;Scratchings
+on the Sandstone&mdash;Invariable Characteristic of true
+Boulder-clay&mdash;Scratchings on Pebbles in the line of the longer
+axis&mdash;Illustration from the Boulder-clay of Banff.</td>
+<td align='right'>324</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr1'>
+<td class='center'><p class="t1"><big><a href="#Page_336">CHAPTER VI.</a></big></p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr2'>
+<td class='td1'>
+Organisms of the Boulder-clay not unequivocal&mdash;First Impressions of
+the Boulder-clay&mdash;Difficulty of accounting for its barrenness of
+Remains&mdash;Sir Charles Lyell's reasoning&mdash;A Fact to the
+contrary&mdash;Human Skull dug from a Clay-bank&mdash;The Author's Change of
+Belief respecting Organic Remains of the Boulder-clay&mdash;Shells from
+the Clay at Wick&mdash;Questions respecting them settled&mdash;Conclusions
+confirmed by Mr. Dick's Discoveries at Thurso&mdash;Sir John Sinclair's
+Discovery of Boulder-clay Shells in 1802&mdash;Comminution of the Shells
+illustrated&mdash;<i>Cyprina islandica</i>&mdash;Its Preservation in larger
+Proportions than those of other Shells accounted for&mdash;Boulder-clays
+of Scotland reformed during the existing Geological Epoch&mdash;Scotland
+in the Period of the Boulder-clay "merely three detached groups of
+Islands"&mdash;Evidence of the Subsidence of the Land in
+Scotland&mdash;Confirmed by Rev. Mr. Cumming's conclusion&mdash;High-lying
+Granite Boulders&mdash;Marks of a succeeding elevatory
+Period&mdash;Scandinavia now rising&mdash;Autobiography of a Boulder
+desirable&mdash;A Story of the Supernatural.</td>
+<td align='right'>336</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr1'>
+<td class='center'><p class="t1"><big><a href="#Page_355">CHAPTER VII.</a></big></p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr2'>
+<td class='td1'>
+Relation of the deep red stone of Cromarty to the Ichthyolite Beds
+of the System&mdash;Ruins of a Fossil-charged Bed&mdash;Journey to Avoch&mdash;Red
+Dye of the Boulder-clay distinct from the substance
+itself&mdash;Variation of Coloring in the Boulder-clay Red Sandstone
+accounted for&mdash;Hard-pan how formed&mdash;A reformed Garden&mdash;An ancient
+Battle-field&mdash;Antiquity of Geologic and Human History
+compared&mdash;Burn of Killein&mdash;Observation made in boyhood
+confirmed&mdash;Fossil-nodules&mdash;Fine Specimen of <i>Coccosteus
+decipiens</i>&mdash;Blank strata of Old Red&mdash;New View respecting the Rocks
+of Black Isle&mdash;A Trip up Moray and Dingwall Friths&mdash;Altered color
+of the Boulder-clay&mdash;Up the Auldgrande River&mdash;Scenery of the great
+Conglomerate&mdash;Graphic Description&mdash;Laidlaw's Boulder&mdash;<i>Vaccinium
+myrtillus</i>&mdash;Profusion of Travelled Boulders&mdash;The Boulder <i>Clach
+Malloch</i>&mdash;Its zones of Animal and Vegetable life.</td>
+<td align='right'>355</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr1'>
+<td class='center'><p class="t1"><big><a href="#Page_375">CHAPTER VIII.</a></big></p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr2'>
+<td class='td1'>
+Imaginary Autobiography of the <i>Clach Malloch</i> Boulder&mdash;Its
+Creation&mdash;Its Long Night of unsummed Centuries&mdash;Laid open to light
+on a desert Island&mdash;Surrounded by an Arctic Vegetation&mdash;Undermined
+by the rising Sea&mdash;Locked up and floated off on an Ice-field&mdash;At
+rest on the Sea-bottom&mdash;Another Night of unsummed Years&mdash;The
+Boulder raised again above the waves by the rising of the
+Land&mdash;Beholds an Altered Country&mdash;Pine Forests and Mammals&mdash;Another
+Period of Ages passes&mdash;The Boulder again floated off by an
+Iceberg&mdash;Finally at rest on the Shore of Cromarty Bay&mdash;Time and
+Occasion of naming it&mdash;Strange Phenomena accounted for by
+Earthquakes&mdash;How the Boulder of Petty Bay was moved&mdash;The Boulder of
+Auldgrande&mdash;The old Highland Paupers&mdash;The little Parsi Girl&mdash;Her
+Letter to her Papa&mdash;But one Human Nature on Earth&mdash;Journey
+resumed&mdash;Conon Burying Ground&mdash;An aged Couple&mdash;Gossip.</td>
+<td align='right'>375</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr1'>
+<td class='center'><p class="t1"><big><a href="#Page_393">CHAPTER IX.</a></big></p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr2'>
+<td class='td1'>
+The Great Conglomerate&mdash;Its Undulatory and Rectilinear
+Members&mdash;Knock Farril and its Vitrified Fort&mdash;The old Highlanders
+an observant race&mdash;The Vein of Silver&mdash;Summit of Knock Farril&mdash;Mode
+of accounting for the Luxuriance of Herbage in the ancient Scottish
+Fortalices&mdash;The green Graves of Culloden&mdash;Theories respecting the
+Vitrification of the Hill-forts&mdash;Combined Theories of Williams and
+Mackenzie probably give the correct account&mdash;The Author's
+Explanation&mdash;Transformations of Fused Rocks&mdash;Strathpetlier&mdash;The
+Spa&mdash;Permanent Odoriferous Qualities of an ancient Sea-bottom
+converted into Rock&mdash;Mineral Springs of the Spa&mdash;Infusion of the
+powdered rock a substitute&mdash;Belemnite Water&mdash;The lively young
+Lady's Comments&mdash;A befogged Country seen from a
+hill-top&mdash;Ben-Wevis&mdash;Journey to Evanton&mdash;A Geologist's
+Night-mare&mdash;The Route Home&mdash;Ruins of Craig house&mdash;Incompatibility
+of Tea and Ghosts&mdash;End of the Tour.</td>
+<td align='right'>393</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr1'>
+<td class='center'><p class="t1"><big><a href="#Page_414">CHAPTER X.</a></big></p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr2'>
+<td class='td1'>
+Recovered Health&mdash;Journey to the Orkneys&mdash;Aboard the Steamer at
+Wick&mdash;Mr. Bremner&mdash;Masonry of the Harbor of Wick&mdash;The greatest
+Blunders result from good Rules misapplied&mdash;Mr. Bremner's Theory
+about sea-washed Masonry&mdash;Singular Fracture of the Rock near
+Wick&mdash;The Author's mode of accounting for it&mdash;"Simple but not
+obvious" Thinking&mdash;Mr. Bremner's mode of making stone Erections
+under Water&mdash;His exploits in raising foundered Vessels&mdash;Aspect of
+the Orkneys&mdash;The ungracious Schoolmaster&mdash;In the Frith of
+Kirkwall&mdash;Cathedral of St Magnus&mdash;Appearance of Kirkwall&mdash;Its
+"perished suppers"&mdash;Its ancient Palaces&mdash;Blunder of the Scotch
+Aristocracy&mdash;The patronate Wedge&mdash;Breaking Ground in Orkney&mdash;Minute
+Gregarious Coccosteus&mdash;True Position of the Coccosteus' Eyes&mdash;Ruins
+of one of Cromwell's Forts&mdash;Antiquities of Orkney&mdash;The
+Cathedral&mdash;Its Sculptures&mdash;The Mysterious Cell&mdash;Prospect from the
+Tower&mdash;Its Chimes&mdash;Ruins of Castle Patrick.</td>
+<td align='right'>414</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr1'>
+<td class='center'><p class="t1"><big><a href="#Page_437">CHAPTER XI.</a></big></p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr2'>
+<td class='td1'>
+The Bishop's Palace at Orkney&mdash;Haco the Norwegian&mdash;Icelandic
+Chronicle respecting his Expedition to Scotland&mdash;His Death&mdash;Removal
+of his Remain to Norway&mdash;Why Norwegian Invasion
+ceased&mdash;Straw-plaiting&mdash;The Lassies of Orkney&mdash;Orkney Type of
+Countenance&mdash;Celtic and Scandinavian&mdash;An accomplished
+Antiquary&mdash;Old Manuscripts&mdash;An old Tune book&mdash;Manuscript Letter of
+Mary Queen of Scots&mdash;Letters of General Monck&mdash;The fearless
+Covenanter&mdash;Cave of the Rebels&mdash;Why the tragedy of "Gustavus Vasa"
+was prohibited&mdash;Quarry of Pickoquoy&mdash;Its Fossil Shells&mdash;Journey to
+Stromness&mdash;Scenery&mdash;Birth-place of Malcolm, the Poet&mdash;His
+History&mdash;One of his Poems&mdash;His Brother a Free Church Minister&mdash;New
+Scenery.</td>
+<td align='right'>437</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr1'>
+<td class='center'><p class="t1"><big><a href="#Page_457">CHAPTER XII.</a></big></p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr2'>
+<td class='td1'>
+Hills of Orkney&mdash;Their Geologic Composition&mdash;Scene of Scott's
+"Pirate"&mdash;Stromness&mdash;Geology of the District&mdash;"Seeking
+beasts"&mdash;Conglomerate in contact with Granite&mdash;A pal&aelig;ozoic Hudson's
+Bay&mdash;Thickness of Conglomerate of Orkney&mdash;Oldest Vertebrate yet
+discovered in Orkney&mdash;Its Size&mdash;Figure of a characteristic plate of
+the Asterolepis&mdash;Peculiarity of Old Red Fishes&mdash;Length of the
+Asterolepis&mdash;A rich Ichthyolite Bed&mdash;Arrangement of the
+Layers&mdash;Queries as to the Cause of it&mdash;Minerals&mdash;An abandoned
+Mine&mdash;A lost Vessel&mdash;Kelp for Iodine&mdash;A dangerous Coast&mdash;Incidents
+of Shipwreck&mdash;Hospitality&mdash;Stromness Museum&mdash;Diplopterus mistaken
+for Dipterus&mdash;Their Resemblances and Differences&mdash;Visit to a
+remarkable Stack&mdash;Paring the Soil for Fuel, and consequent
+Barrenness&mdash;Description of the Stack&mdash;Wave-formed Caves&mdash;Height to
+which the Surf rises.</td>
+<td align='right'>457</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr1'>
+<td class='center'><p class="t1"><big><a href="#Page_476">CHAPTER XIII.</a></big></p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr2'>
+<td class='td1'>
+Detached Fossils&mdash;Remains of the Pterichthys&mdash;Terminal Bones of the
+Coccosteus, etc., preserved&mdash;Internal Skeleton of Coccosteus&mdash;The
+shipwrecked Sailor in the Cave&mdash;Bishop Grahame&mdash;His Character, as
+drawn by Baillie&mdash;His Successor&mdash;Ruins of the Bishop's
+Country-house&mdash;Sub-a&euml;rial Formation of Sandstone&mdash;Formation near
+New Kaye&mdash;Inference from such Formation&mdash;Tour resumed&mdash;Loch of
+Stennis&mdash;Waters of the Loch fresh, brackish, and salt&mdash;Vegetation
+varied accordingly&mdash;Change produced in the Flounder by fresh
+water&mdash;The Standing Stones, second only to Stonehenge&mdash;Their
+Purpose&mdash;Their Appearance and Situation&mdash;Diameter of the
+Circle&mdash;What the Antiquaries say of it&mdash;Reference to it in the
+"Pirate"&mdash;Dr. Hibbert's Account.</td>
+<td align='right'>476</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr1'>
+<td class='center'><p class="t1"><big><a href="#Page_492">CHAPTER XIV.</a></big></p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr2'>
+<td class='td1'>
+On Horseback&mdash;A pared Moor&mdash;Small Landholders&mdash;Absorption of small
+holdings in England and Scotland&mdash;Division of Land favorable to
+Civil and Religious Rights&mdash;Favorable to social Elevation&mdash;An
+inland Parish&mdash;The Landsman and Lobster&mdash;Wild Flowers of
+Orkney&mdash;Law of Compensation illustrated by the Tobacco
+Plant&mdash;Poverty tends to Productiveness&mdash;Illustrated in
+Ireland&mdash;Profusion of Ichthyolites&mdash;Orkney a land of Defunct
+Fishes&mdash;Sandwick&mdash;A Collection of Coccostean Flags&mdash;A Quarry full
+of Heads of Dipteri&mdash;The Bergil, or Striped Wrasse&mdash;Its Resemblance
+to the Dipterus&mdash;Poverty of the Flora of the Lower Old Red&mdash;No true
+Coniferous Wood in the Orkney Flagstones&mdash;Departure for Hoy&mdash;The
+intelligent Boatman&mdash;Story of the Orkney Fisherman.</td>
+<td align='right'>492</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr1'>
+<td class='center'><p class="t1"><big><a href="#Page_507">CHAPTER XV.</a></big></p></td>
+</tr>
+<tr class='tr2'>
+<td class='td1'>
+Hoy&mdash;Unique Scenery&mdash;The Dwarfie Stone of Hoy&mdash;Sir Walter Scott's
+Account of it&mdash;Its Associations&mdash;Inscription of Names&mdash;George
+Buchanan's Consolation&mdash;The mythic Carbuncle of the Hill of Hoy&mdash;No
+Fossils at Hoy&mdash;Striking Profile of Sir Walter Scott on the Hill of
+Hoy&mdash;Sir Walter, and Shetland and Orkney&mdash;Originals of two
+Characters in "The Pirate"&mdash;Bessie Millie&mdash;Garden of Gow, the
+"Pirate"&mdash;Childhood's Scene of Byron's "Torquil"&mdash;The Author's
+Introduction to his Sister&mdash;A German Visitor&mdash;German and Scotch
+Sabbath-keeping habits contrasted&mdash;Mr. Watt's Specimens of Fossil
+Remains&mdash;The only new Organism found in Orkney&mdash;Back to
+Kirkwall&mdash;to Wick&mdash;Vedder's Ode to Orkney.</td>
+<td align='right'>507</td>
+</tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="THE_CRUISE_OF_THE_BETSEY" id="THE_CRUISE_OF_THE_BETSEY"></a>THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY.</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h3>CHAPTER I.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="hang"><span class="smcap">Preparation</span>&mdash;Departure&mdash;Recent and Ancient Monstrosities&mdash;A Free
+Church Yacht&mdash;Down the Clyde&mdash;Jura&mdash;Prof. Walker's
+Experiment&mdash;Whirlpool near Scarba&mdash;Geological Character of the
+Western Highlands&mdash;An Illustration&mdash;Different Ages of Outer and
+Inner Hebrides&mdash;Mt. Blanc and the Himalayas "mere
+upstarts"&mdash;Esdaile Quarries&mdash;Oban&mdash;A Section through Conglomerate
+and Slate examined&mdash;M'Dougal's Dog-stone&mdash;Power of the Ocean to
+move Rocks&mdash;Sound of Mull&mdash;The Betsey&mdash;The Minister's
+Cabin&mdash;Village of Tobermory&mdash;The "Florida," a Wreck of the
+Invincible Armada&mdash;Geologic Exploration and Discovery&mdash;At Anchor. </p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> pleasant month of July had again come round, and for full five weeks
+I was free. Chisels and hammers, and the bag for specimens, were taken
+from their corner in the dark closet, and packed up with half a stone
+weight of a fine <i>soft</i> Conservative Edinburgh newspaper, valuable for a
+quality of preserving old things entire. At noon on St. Swithin's day
+(Monday the 15th), I was speeding down the Clyde in the Toward Castle
+steamer, for Tobermory in Mull. In the previous season I had intended
+passing direct from the O&ouml;litic deposits of the eastern coast of
+Scotland, to the O&ouml;litic deposits of the Hebrides. But the weeks glided
+all too quickly away among the ichthyolites of Caithness and Cromarty,
+and the shells and lignites of Sutherland and Ross. My friend, too, the
+Rev. Mr. Swanson, of Small Isles, on whose assistance I had reckoned,
+was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> in the middle of his troubles at the time, with no longer a home in
+his parish, and not yet provided with one elsewhere; and I concluded he
+would have but little heart, at such a season, for breaking into rocks,
+or for passing from the too pressing monstrosities of an existing state
+of things, to the old lapidified monstrosities of the past. And so my
+design on the Hebrides had to be postponed for a twelvemonth. But my
+friend, now afloat in his Free Church yacht, had got a home on the sea
+beside his island charge, which, if not very secure when nights were
+dark and winds loud, and the little vessel tilted high to the long roll
+of the Atlantic, lay at least beyond the reach of man's intolerance, and
+not beyond the protecting care of the Almighty. He had written me that
+he 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.</p>
+
+<p>St. Swithin's day, so important in the calendar of our humbler
+meteorologists, had in this part of the country its alternate fits of
+sunshine and shower. We passed gaily along the green banks of the Clyde,
+with their rich flat fields glittering in moisture, and their lines of
+stately trees, that, as the light flashed out, threw their shadows over
+the grass. The river expanded into the estuary, the estuary into the
+open sea; we left behind us beacon, and obelisk, and rock-perched
+castle;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">"Merrily down we drop</span><br />
+Below the church, below the tower,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Below the light house top,"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>and, as the evening fell, we were ploughing the outer reaches of the
+Frith, with the ridgy table-land of Ayrshire stretching away, green, on
+the one side, and the serrated peaks of Arran rising dark and high on
+the other. At sunrise next morning our boat lay, unloading a portion of
+her cargo, in one of the ports of Islay, and we could see the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> Irish
+coast resting on the horizon to the south and west, like a long
+undulating bank of thin blue cloud; with the island of Rachrin&mdash;famous
+for the asylum it had afforded the Bruce when there was no home for him
+in Scotland,&mdash;presenting in front its mass of darker azure. On and away!
+We swept past Islay, with its low fertile hills of mica-schist and
+slate; and Jura, with its flat dreary moors, and its far-seen gigantic
+paps, 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 necessary
+for the purpose on the plain below. The Professor describes the view
+from the summit, which includes in its wide circle at once the Isle of
+Skye and the Isle of Man, as singularly noble and imposing; two such
+prospects more, he says, would bring under the eye the whole island of
+Great Britain, from the Pentland Frith to the English Channel. We sped
+past Jura. Then came the Gulf of Coryvrekin, with the bare mountain
+island of Scarba overlooking the fierce, far-famed whirlpool, that we
+could see from the deck, breaking in long lines of foam, and sending out
+its waves in wide rings on every side, when not a speck of white was
+visible elsewhere in the expanse of sea around us. And then came an
+opener space, studded with smaller islands,&mdash;mere hill-tops rising out
+of the sea, with here and there insulated groups of pointed rocks, the
+skeletons of perished hills, amid which the tide chafed and fretted, as
+if laboring to complete on the broken remains their work of denudation
+and ruin.</p>
+
+<p>The disposition of land and water on this coast suggests the idea that
+the Western Highlands, from the line in the interior, whence the rivers
+descend to the Atlantic, with the islands beyond to the outer Hebrides,
+are all parts of one great mountainous plane, inclined slantways into
+the sea. First, the long withdrawing valleys of the main land, with
+their brown mossy streams, change their character as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> they dip beneath
+the sea-level, and become salt-water lochs. The lines of hills that rise
+over them jut out as promontories, till cut off by some transverse
+valley, lowered still more deeply into the brine, and that exists as a
+kyle, minch, or sound, swept twice every tide by powerful currents. The
+sea deepens as the plain slopes downward; mountain-chains stand up out
+of the water as larger islands, single mountains as smaller ones, lower
+eminences as mere groups of pointed rocks; till at length, as we pass
+outwards, all trace of the submerged land disappears, and the wide ocean
+stretches out and away its unfathomable depths. The model of some Alpine
+country raised in plaster on a flat board, and tilted slantways, at a
+low angle, into a basin of water, would exhibit, on a minute scale, an
+appearance exactly similar to that presented by the western coast of
+Scotland 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 of
+the geology of the coast, with its promontories and islands,
+communicates a different idea. These islands and promontories prove to
+be of very various ages and origin. The <i>outer</i> Hebrides may have
+existed as the inner skeleton of some ancient country, contemporary with
+the main land, and that bore on its upper soils the productions of
+perished creations, at a time when by much the larger portion of the
+<i>inner</i> Hebrides,&mdash;Skye, and Mull, and the Small Isles,&mdash;existed as part
+of the bottom of a wide sound, inhabited by the Cephalopoda and
+Enaliosaurians of the Lias and the O&ouml;lite. Judging from its components,
+the Long Island, like the Lammermoors and the Grampians, may have been
+smiling to the sun when the Alps and the Himalaya Mountains lay buried
+in the abyss; whereas the greater part of Skye and Mull must have been,
+like these vast mountain-chains of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> the Continent, an oozy sea-floor,
+over which the ligneous productions of the neighboring lands, washed
+down by the streams, grew heavy and sank, and on which the belemnite
+dropped its spindle and the ammonite its shell. The idea imparted of
+<i>old</i> Scotland to the geologist here,&mdash;of Scotland, proudly,
+aristocratically, supereminently old,&mdash;for it can call Mont Blanc a mere
+upstart, and Dhawalageri, with its twenty-eight thousand feet of
+elevation, a heady fellow of yesterday,&mdash;is not that of a land settling
+down by the head, like a foundering vessel, but of a land whose hills
+and islands, like its great aristocratic families, have arisen from the
+level in very various ages, and under the operation of circumstances
+essentially diverse.</p>
+
+<p>We left behind us the islands of Lunga, Luing, and Seil, and entered the
+narrow Sound of Kerrera, with its border of Old Red conglomerate resting
+on the clay-slate of the district. We had passed Esdaile near enough to
+see the workmen employed in the quarries of the island, so extensively
+known in commerce for their roofing slate, and several small vessels
+beside them, engaged in loading; and now we had got a step higher in the
+geological scale, and could mark from the deck the peculiar character of
+the conglomerate, which, in cliffs washed by the sea, when the binding
+matrix is softer than the pebbles which it encloses, roughens, instead
+of being polished, by the action of the waves, and which, along the
+eastern side of the Sound here, seems as if formed of cannon-shot, of
+all sizes, embedded in cement. The Sound terminates in the beautiful bay
+of Oban, so quiet and sheltered, with its two island breakwaters in
+front,&mdash;its semi-circular sweep of hill behind,&mdash;its long white-walled
+village, bent like a bow, to conform to the inflection of the
+shore,&mdash;its mural precipices behind, tapestried with ivy,&mdash;its rich
+patches of green pasture,&mdash;its bosky dingles of shrub and tree,&mdash;and,
+perched on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> seaward promontory, its old, time-eaten keep. "In one
+part of the harbor of Oban," says Dr. James Anderson, in his "Practical
+Treatise on Peat Moss," (1794), "where the depth of the sea is about
+twenty fathoms, the bottom is found to consist of quick peat, which
+affords no safe anchorage." I made inquiry at the captain of the
+steamer, 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 Fort
+William steamer; and, taking out hammer and chisel from my bag, I
+stepped ashore to question my ancient acquaintance, the Old Red
+conglomerate, and was fortunate enough to meet on the pier-head, as I
+landed, one of the best of companions for assisting in such work, Mr.
+Colin Elder, of Isle Ornsay,&mdash;the gentleman who had so kindly furnished
+my friend Mr. Swanson with an asylum for his family, when there was no
+longer a home for them in Small Isles. "You are much in luck," he said,
+after our first greeting: "one of the villagers, in improving his
+garden, has just made a cut for some fifteen or twenty yards along the
+face of the precipice behind the village, and laid open the line of
+junction between the conglomerate and the clay-slate. Let us go and see
+it."</p>
+
+<p>I found several things worthy of notice in the chance section to which I
+was thus introduced. The conglomerate lies uncomfortably along the edges
+of the slate strata, which present under it an appearance exactly
+similar to that which they exhibit under the rolled stones and shingle
+of the neighboring shore, where we find them laid bare beside the
+harbor, for several hundred yards. And, mixed with the pebbles of
+various character and origin of which the conglomerate is mainly
+composed, we see detached masses of the slate, that still exhibit on
+their edges the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> identical lines of fracture characteristic of the rock,
+which they received, when torn from the mass below, myriads of ages
+before. In the incalculably remote period in which the conglomerate base
+of the Old Red Sandstone was formed, the clay-slate of this district had
+been exactly the same sort of rock that it is now. Some long anterior
+convulsion had upturned its strata, and the sweep of water, mingled with
+broken fragments of stone, had worn smooth the exposed edges, just as a
+similar agency wears the edges exposed at the present time. Quarries
+might have been opened in this rock, as now, for a roofing-slate, had
+there been quarriers to open them, or houses to roof over; it was in
+every respect as ancient a looking stone then as in the present late age
+of the world. There are no sermons that seem stranger or more impressive
+to one who has acquired just a little of the language in which they are
+preached, than those which, according to the poet, are to be found in
+stones; a bit of fractured slate, embedded among a mass of rounded
+pebbles, proves voluble with ideas of a kind almost too large for the
+mind of man to grasp. The eternity that hath passed is an ocean without
+a further shore, and a finite conception may in vain attempt to span it
+over. But from the beach, strewed with wrecks, on which we stand to
+contemplate it, we see far out towards the cloudy horizon, many a dim
+islet and many a pinnacled rock, the sepulchres of successive eras,&mdash;the
+monuments of consecutive creations: the entire prospect is studded over
+with these landmarks of a hoar antiquity, which, measuring out space
+from space, constitute the vast whole a province of time; nor can the
+eye reach to the open, shoreless infinitude beyond, in which only God
+existed; and, as in a sea-scene in nature, in which headland stretches
+dim and blue beyond headland, and islet beyond islet, the distance seems
+not lessened, but increased, by the crowded<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> objects&mdash;we borrow a
+larger, not a smaller idea of the distant eternity, from the vastness of
+the measured periods that occur between.</p>
+
+<p>Over the lower bed of conglomerate, which here, as on the east coast, is
+of great thickness, we find a bed of gray stratified clay, containing a
+few calcareo-argillaceous nodules. The conglomerate cliffs to the north
+of the village present appearances highly interesting to the geologist.
+Rising in a long wall within the pleasure-grounds of Dunolly castle, we
+find them wooded atop and at the base; while immediately at their feet
+there stretches out a grassy lawn, traversed by the road from the
+village to the castle, which sinks with a gradual slope into the
+existing sea-beach, but which ages ago must have been a sea-beach
+itself. We see the bases of the precipices hollowed and worn, with all
+their rents and crevices widened into caves; and mark, at a picturesque
+angle of the rock, what must have been once an insulated sea-stack, some
+thirty or forty feet in height, standing up from amid the rank grass, as
+at one time it stood up from amid the waves. Tufts of fern and sprays of
+ivy bristle from its sides, once roughened by the serrated kelp-weed and
+the tangle. The Highlanders call it M'Dougal's Dog-stone, and say that
+the old chieftains of Lorne made use of it as a post to which to fasten
+their dogs,&mdash;animals wild and gigantic as themselves,&mdash;when the hunters
+were gathering to rendezvous, and the impatient beagles struggled to
+break away and begin the chase on their own behalf. It owes its
+existence as a stack&mdash;for the precipice in which it was once included
+has receded from around it for yards&mdash;to an immense boulder in its
+base&mdash;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 feet
+in the line of its largest diagonal. A second huge pebble in the same<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>
+detached spire measures four feet by about three. Both have their edges
+much rounded, as if, ere their deposition in the conglomerate, they had
+been long exposed to the wear of the sea; and both are composed of an
+earthy amygdaloidal trap. I have stated elsewhere ["Old Red Sandstone,"
+Chapter XII.], that I had scarce ever seen a stone in the Old Red
+conglomerate which I could not raise from the ground; and ere I said so
+I had examined no inconsiderable extent of this deposit, chiefly,
+however, along the eastern coast of Scotland, where its larger pebbles
+rarely exceed two hundred weight. How account for the occurrence of
+pebbles of so gigantic a size here? We can but guess at a solution, and
+that very vaguely. The islands of Mull and Kerrera form, in the present
+state of things, inner and outer breakwaters between what is now the
+coast of Oban and the waves of the Atlantic; but Mull, in the times of
+even the O&ouml;lite, must have existed as a mere sea-bottom; and Kerrera,
+composed mainly of trap, which has brought with it to the surface
+patches of the conglomerate, must, when the conglomerate was in forming,
+have been a mere sea-bottom also. Is it not possible, that when the
+breakwaters <i>were not</i>, the Atlantic <i>was</i>, and that its tempests, which
+in the present time can transport vast rocks for hundreds of yards along
+the exposed coasts of Shetland and Orkney, may have been the agent here
+in the transport of these huge pebbles of the Old Red conglomerate?
+"Rocks that two or three men could not lift," say the Messrs. Anderson
+of Inverness, in describing the storms of Orkney, "are washed about even
+on the tops of cliffs, which are between sixty and a hundred feet above
+the surface of the sea, when smooth; and detached masses of rock, of an
+enormous size, are well known to have been carried a considerable
+distance between low and high-water mark." "A little way from the
+Brough," says Dr. Patrick<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> Neill, in his 'Tour through Orkney and
+Shetland,' "we saw the prodigious effects of a late winter storm: many
+great stones, one of them of several tons weight, had been tossed up a
+precipice twenty or thirty feet high, and laid fairly on the green
+sward." There is something farther worthy of notice in the stone of
+which the two boulders of the Dog-stack are composed. No species of rock
+occurs more abundantly in the embedded pebbles of this ancient
+conglomerate than rocks of the trap family. We find in it
+trap-porphyries, greenstones, clinkstones, basalts, and amygdalolds,
+largely mingled with fragments of the granitic, clay-slate, and quartz
+rocks. The Plutonic agencies must have been active in the locality for
+periods amazingly protracted; and many of the masses protruded at a very
+early time seem identical in their composition with rocks of the trap
+family, which in other parts of the country we find referred to much
+later eras. There occur in this deposit rolled pebbles of a basalt,
+which in the neighborhood of Edinburgh would be deemed considerably more
+modern than the times of the Mountain Limestone, and in the Isle of
+Skye, considerably more modern than the times of the O&ouml;lite.</p>
+
+<p>The sunlight was showering its last slant rays on island and loch, and
+then retreating upwards along the higher hills, chased by the shadows,
+as our boat quitted the bay of Oban, and stretched northwards, along the
+end of green Lismore, for the Sound of Mull. We had just enough of day
+left, as we reached mid sea, to show us the gray fronts of the three
+ancient castles,&mdash;- which at this point may be at once seen from the
+deck,&mdash;Dunolly, Duart, and Dunstaffnage; and enough left us as we
+entered the Sound, to show, and barely show, the Lady Rock, famous in
+tradition, and made classic by the pen of Campbell, raising its black
+back amid the tides, like a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> belated porpoise. And then twilight
+deepened into night, and we went snorting through the Strait with a
+stream of green light curling off from either bow in the calm, towards
+the high dim land, that seemed standing up on both sides like tall
+hedges over a green lane. We entered the Bay of Tobermory about
+midnight, and cast anchor amid a group of little vessels. An exceedingly
+small boat shot out from the side of a yacht of rather diminutive
+proportions, but tautly rigged for her size, and bearing an outrigger
+astern. The water this evening was full of phosphoric matter, and it
+gleamed and sparkled around the little boat like a northern aurora
+around a dark cloudlet. There was just light enough to show that the
+oars were plied by a sailor-like man in a Guernsey frock, and that
+another sailor-like man,&mdash;the skipper, mayhap,&mdash;attired in a cap and
+pea-jacket, stood in the stern. The man in the Guernsey frock was John
+Stewart, 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 of
+the Protestants of Small Isles. In five minutes more I was sitting with
+Mr. Elder beside the little iron stove in the cabin of the Betsey; and
+the minister, divested of his cap and jacket, but still looking the
+veritable skipper to admiration, was busied in making us a rather late
+tea.</p>
+
+<p>The cabin,&mdash;my home for the greater part of the three following weeks,
+and that of my friend for the greater part of the previous
+twelvemonth,&mdash;I found to be an apartment about twice the size of a
+common bed, and just lofty enough under the beams to permit a man of
+five feet eleven to stand erect in his night-cap. A large table, lashed
+to 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> for a person to pass between its edges and the
+narrow coffin-like beds in the sides, and space enough at its fore-end
+for two seats in front of the stove. A jealously barred skylight opened
+above; and there depended from it this evening a close lantern-looking
+lamp, sufficiently valuable, no doubt, in foul weather, but dreary and
+dim on the occasions when all one really wished from it was light. The
+peculiar furniture of the place gave evidence to the mixed nature of my
+friend's employment. A well-thumbed chart of the Western Islands lay
+across an equally well-thumbed volume of Henry's "Commentary." There was
+a Polyglot and a spy-glass in one corner, and a copy of Calvin's
+"Institutes," with the latest edition of "The Coaster's Sailing
+Directions," in another; while in an adjoining state-room, nearly large
+enough to accommodate an arm-chair, if the chair could have but
+contrived to get into it, I caught a glimpse of my friend's printing
+press and his case of types, canopied overhead by the blue ancient of
+the vessel, bearing, in stately six-inch letters of white bunting, the
+legend, "<span class="smcap">Free Church Yacht</span>." A door opened, which communicated with the
+forecastle, and John Stewart, stooping very much, to accommodate himself
+to the low-roofed passage, thrust in a plate of fresh herrings,
+splendidly toasted, to give substantiality and relish to our tea. The
+little rude forecastle, a considerably smaller apartment than the cabin,
+was all a-glow with the bright fire in the coppers, itself invisible; we
+could see the chain-cable dangling from the hatchway to the floor, and
+John Stewart's companion, a powerful-looking, handsome young man, with
+broad bare breast, and in his shirt-sleeves, squatted full in front of
+the blaze, like the household goblin described by Milton, or the
+"Christmas Present" of Dickens. Mr. Elder left us for the steamer, in
+which he prosecuted his voyage next morning to Skye; and we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> tumbled in,
+each to his narrow bed,&mdash;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 my
+bedside, when I awoke, a fragment of rock which he had brought from the
+shore, charged with Liasic fossils; and a note he had written, to say
+that the deposit to which it belonged occurred in the trap immediately
+above the village-mill; and further, to call my attention to a house
+near the middle of the village, built of a mouldering red sandstone,
+which had been found <i>in situ</i> in digging the foundations. I had but
+little time for the work of exploration in Mull, and the information
+thus kindly rendered enabled me to economize it.</p>
+
+<p>The village of Tobermory resembles that of Oban. A quiet bay has its
+secure 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 they
+had been transported from the centre of some stately city entire and at
+once, sweeps round its inner inflection, like a bent bow; and an
+amphitheatre of mingled rock and wood rises behind. With all its beauty,
+however, there hangs about the village an air of melancholy. Like some
+of the other western coast villages, it seems not to have grown,
+piece-meal, as a village ought, but to have been made wholesale, as
+Frankenstein made his man; and to be ever asking, and never more
+incessantly than when it is at its quietest, why it should have been
+made at all? The remains of the Florida, a gallant Spanish ship, lie off
+its shores, a wreck of the Invincible Armada, "deep whelmed," according
+to Thompson,</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+<span style="margin-left: 13em;">"What time,</span><br />
+Snatched sudden by the vengeful blast,<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>The scattered vessels drove, and on blind shelve,<br />
+And pointed rock that marks th' indented shore,<br />
+Relentless dashed, where loud the northern main<br />
+Howls through the fractured Caledonian isles."<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Macculloch relates, that there was an attempt made, rather more than a
+century ago, to weigh up the Florida, which ended in the weighing up of
+merely a few of her guns, some of them of iron greatly corroded; and
+that, on scraping them, they became so hot under the hand that they
+could not be touched, but that they lost this curious property after a
+few hours' exposure to the air. There have since been repeated instances
+elsewhere, he adds, of the same phenomenon, and chemistry has lent its
+solution of the principles on which it occurs; but, in the year 1740,
+ere the riddle was read, it must have been deemed a thoroughly magical
+one by the simple islanders of Mull. It would seem as if the guns,
+heated in the contest with Drake, Hawkins, and Frobisher, had again
+kindled, under some supernatural influence, with the intense glow of the
+lost battle.</p>
+
+<p>The morning was showery; but it cleared up a little after ten, and we
+landed to explore. We found the mill a little to the south of the
+village, where a small stream descends, all foam and uproar, from the
+higher grounds along a rocky channel half-hidden by brushwood; and the
+Liasic bed occurs in an exposed front directly over it, coped by a thick
+bed of amygdaloidal trap. The organisms are numerous; and, when we dig
+into the bank beyond the reach of the weathering influences, we find
+them delicately preserved, though after a fashion that renders difficult
+their safe removal. Originally the bed must have existed as a brown
+argillaceous mud, somewhat resembling that which forms in the course of
+years, under a scalp of muscles; and it has hardened into a more
+silt-like clay, in which the fossils occur, not as petrifactions,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> but
+as shells in a state of decay, except in some rare cases, in which a
+calcareous nodule has formed within or around them. Viewed in the group,
+they seem of an intermediate character, between the shells of the Lias
+and the O&ouml;lite. One of the first fossils I disinterred was the Gryph&aelig;a
+obliquata,&mdash;a shell characteristic of the Liasic formation; and the
+fossil immediately after, the Pholadomy &aelig;qualis, a shell of the O&ouml;litic
+one. There occurs in great numbers a species of small Pecten,&mdash;some of
+the specimens scarce larger than a herring scale; a minute Ostrea, a
+sulcated Terebratula, an Isocardia, a Pullastra, and groups of broken
+serpul&aelig; in vast abundance. The deposit has also its three species of
+Ammonite, existing as mere impressions in the clay; and at least two
+species of Belemnite,&mdash;one of the two somewhat resembling the Belemnites
+abbreviatus, but smaller and rather more elongated: while the other, of
+a spindle form, diminishing at both ends, reminds one of the Belemnites
+minimus of the Gault. The Red Sandstone in the centre of the village
+occurs detached, like this Liasic bed, amid the prevailing trap, and may
+be seen <i>in situ</i> beside the southern gable of the tall, deserted
+looking 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 the
+architect; and more nearly resembles the New Red Sandstone of England
+and Dumfriesshire, than any other rock I have yet seen in the north of
+Scotland. I failed to detect in it aught organic.</p>
+
+<p>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 the
+sea. I would fain have approached nearer the precipices of Ardnamurchan,
+to trace along their inaccessible fronts the strange reticulations of
+trap figured by Macculloch; but prudence and the skipper forbade our
+trusting even the docile little<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> Betsey, on one of the most formidable
+lee shores in Scotland, in winds so light and variable, and with the
+swell so high. We could hear the deep roar of the surf for miles, and
+see its undulating strip of white flickering under stack and cliff. The
+scenery here seems rich in legendary association. At one tack we bore
+into Bloody Bay, on the Mull coast,&mdash;the scene of a naval battle between
+two island chiefs; at another, we approached, on the mainland, a cave
+inaccessible save from the sea, long the haunt of a ruthless Highland
+pirate. Ere we rounded the headland of Ardnamurchan, the slant light of
+evening was gleaming athwart the green acclivities of Mull, barring them
+with long horizontal lines of shadow, where the trap terraces rise step
+beyond step, in the characteristic stair-like arrangement to which the
+rock owes its name; and the sun set as we were bearing down in one long
+tack on the Small Isles. We passed the Isle of Muck, with its one low
+hill; saw the pyramidal mountains of Rum looming tall in the offing; and
+then, running along the Isle of Eigg, with its colossal Scuir rising
+between us and the sky, as if it were a piece of Babylonian wall, or of
+the great wall of China, only vastly larger, set down on the ridge of a
+mountain, we entered the channel which separates the island from one of
+its dependencies, Eilean Chaisteil, and cast anchor in the tideway,
+about fifty yards from the rocks. We were now at home,&mdash;the only home
+which 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 wears
+late,&mdash;got into bed.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span></p>
+<h3>CHAPTER II.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="hang">The Minister's Larder&mdash;No Harbor&mdash;Eigg Shoes&mdash;<i>Tormentilla
+erecta</i>&mdash;For the <i>Witness'</i> Sake&mdash;Eilean Chaisteil&mdash;Appearance of
+Eigg&mdash;Chapel of St. Donan&mdash;Shell-sand&mdash;Origin of Secondary
+Calcareous Rock suggested&mdash;Exploration of Eigg&mdash;Pitchstone Veins&mdash;A
+Bone Cave&mdash;Massacre at Eigg&mdash;Grouping of Human Bones in the
+Cave&mdash;Relics&mdash;The Horse's Tooth&mdash;A Copper Sewing Needle&mdash;Teeth
+found&mdash;Man a worse Animal than his Teeth show him to have been
+designed for&mdash;Story of the Massacre&mdash;Another Version&mdash;Scuir of
+Eigg&mdash;The Scuir a Giant's Causeway&mdash;Character of the
+Columns&mdash;Remains of a Prostrate Forest. </p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">We</span> had rich tea this morning. The minister was among his people; and our
+first evidence of the fact came in the agreeable form of three bottles
+of fine fresh cream from the shore. Then followed an ample baking of
+nice oaten cakes. The material out of which the cakes were manufactured
+had been sent from the minister's store aboard,&mdash;for oatmeal in Eigg is
+rather a scarce commodity in the middle of July; but they had borrowed a
+crispness and flavor from the island, that the meal, left to its own
+resources, could scarcely have communicated; and the golden-colored
+cylinder of fresh butter which accompanied them was all the island's
+own. There was an ample supply of eggs too, as one not quite a conjuror
+might have expected from a country bearing such a name,&mdash;eggs with the
+milk in them; and, with cream, butter, oaten cakes, eggs, and tea, all
+of the best, and with sharp-set sea-air appetites to boot, we fared
+sumptuously. There is properly no harbor in the island. We lay in a
+narrow channel, through which, twice every twenty-four hours, the tides
+sweep powerfully in one direction, and then as powerfully<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> in the
+direction opposite; and our anchors had a trick of getting foul, and
+canting stock downwards in the loose sand, which, with pointed rocks all
+around us, over which the current ran races, seemed a very shrewd sort
+of trick indeed. But a kedge and halser, stretched thwartwise to a
+neighboring crag, and jammed fast in a crevice, served in moderate
+weather to keep us tolerably right. In the severer seasons, however, the
+kedge is found inadequate, and the minister has to hoist sail and make
+out for the open sea, as if served with a sudden summons of ejectment.</p>
+
+<p>Among the various things brought aboard this morning, there was a pair
+of island shoes for the minister's cabin use, that struck my fancy not a
+little. They were all around of a deep madder red color, soles, welts
+and uppers; and, though somewhat resembling in form the little yawl of
+the Betsey, were sewed not unskilfully with thongs; and their peculiar
+style of tie seemed of a kind suited to furnish with new idea a
+fashionable shoemaker of the metropolis. They were altogether the
+production of Eigg, from the skin out of which they had been cut, with
+the lime that had prepared it for the tan, and the root by which the tan
+had been furnished, down to the last on which they had been moulded, and
+the artisan that had cast them off, a pair of finished shoes. There are
+few trees, and, of course, no bark to spare, in the island; but the
+islanders find a substitute in the astringent lobiferous root of the
+<i>Tormentilla erecta</i>, which they dig out for the purpose among the
+heath, at no inconsiderable expense of time and trouble. I was informed
+by 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 of
+a house or the working of a ship, that the infusion of root had to be
+thrice changed for every skin, and that it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> took a man nearly a day to
+gather roots enough for a single infusion. I was further informed that
+it was not unusual for the owner of a skin to give it to some neighbor
+to tan, and that, the process finished, it was divided equally between
+them, the time and trouble bestowed on it by the one being deemed
+equivalent to the property held in it by the other. I wished to call a
+pair of these primitive-looking shoes my own, and no sooner was the wish
+expressed, than straightway one islander furnished me with leather, and
+another set to work upon the shoes. When I came to speak of
+remuneration, however, the islanders shook their heads. "No, no, not
+from the <i>Witness</i>: there are not many that take our part, and the
+<i>Witness</i> does." I hold the shoes, therefore, as my first retainer,
+determined, on all occasions of just quarrel, to make common cause with
+the poor islanders.</p>
+
+<p>The view from the anchoring ground presents some very striking features.
+Between us and the sea lies Eilean Chaisteil, a rocky trap islet, about
+half a mile in length by a few hundred yards in breadth; poor in
+pastures, 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 of
+Parliament, than could be made elsewhere in Eigg. This islet bore, in
+the remote past, its rude fort or dun, long since sunk into a few grassy
+mounds; and hence its name. On the landward side rises the island of
+Eigg proper, resembling in outline two wedges, placed point to point on
+a board. The centre is occupied by a deep angular gap, from which the
+ground slopes upward on both sides, till, attaining its extreme height
+at the opposite ends of the island, it drops suddenly on the sea. In the
+northern rising ground the wedge-like outline is complete; in the
+southern one it is somewhat modified by the gigantic Scuir, which rises
+direct on the apex of the height, <i>i.e.</i>, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> thick part of the wedge;
+and which, seen bows-on from this point of view, resembles some vast
+donjon keep, taller, from base to summit, by about a hundred feet, than
+the dome of St. Paul's. The upper slopes of the island are brown and
+moory, and present little on which the eye may rest, save a few trap
+terraces, with rudely columnar fronts; its middle space is mottled with
+patches of green, and studded with dingy cottages, each of which this
+morning, just a little before the breakfast hour, had its own blue
+cloudlet of smoke diffused around it; while along the beach, patches of
+level sand, alternated with tracts of green bank, or both, give place to
+stately 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 of
+semi-circular columns rises some eighty or a hundred feet over the
+shore; and on a green slope, directly above, we see the picturesque
+ruins of the Chapel of St. Donan, one of the disciples of Columba, and
+the Culdee saint and apostle of the island.</p>
+
+<p>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 bright
+through the transparent green of the sea, three fathoms below our keel,
+and, in a little flat bay directly opposite, it presented almost the
+appearance of pulverized chalk. A stronger contrast to the dingy
+trap-rocks around which it lies could scarce be produced, had contrast
+for effect's sake been the object. On landing on the exposed shelf to
+which we had fastened our halser, I found the origin of the sand
+interestingly exhibited. The hollows of the rock, a rough trachyte, with
+a surface like that of a steel rasp, were filled with handfuls of broken
+shells thrown up by the surf from the sea-banks beyond: fragments of
+echini, bits of the valves of razor-fish, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> island cyprina, mactrid&aelig;,
+buccinid&aelig;, and fractured periwinkles, lay heaped together in vast
+abundance. In hollow after hollow, as I passed shorewards, I found the
+fragments more and more comminuted, just as, in passing along the
+successive vats of a paper-mill, one finds the linen rags more and more
+disintegrated by the cylinders; and immediately beyond the inner edge of
+the shelf, which is of considerable extent, lies the flat bay, the
+ultimate recipient of the whole, filled to the depth of several feet,
+and to the extent of several hundred yards, with a pure shell-sand, the
+greater part of which had been thus washed ashore in handfuls, and
+ground down by the blended agency of the trachyte and the surf. Once
+formed, however, in this way it began to receive accessions from the
+exuvi&aelig; of animals that love such localities,&mdash;the deep arenaceous bed
+and soft sand-beach; and these now form no inconsiderable proportion of
+the entire mass. I found the deposit thickly inhabited by spatangi,
+razor-fish, gapers, and large, well-conditioned cockles, which seemed to
+have no idea whatever that they were living amid the debris of a charnel
+house. Such has been the origin here of a bed of shell-sand, consisting
+of many thousand tons, and of which at least eighty per cent. was once
+associated with animal life. And such, I doubt not, is the history of
+many a calcareous rock in the later secondary formations. There are
+strata, not a few, of the Cretaceous and O&ouml;litic groups, that would be
+found&mdash;could we but trace their beginnings with a certainty and
+clearness equal to that with which we can unravel the story of this
+deposit&mdash;to be, like it, elaborations from dead matter, made through the
+agency of animal secretion.</p>
+
+<p>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 on
+island, and strait, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> blue open sea. We rowed southwards in our
+little boat, through the channel of Eilean Chaisteil, along the
+trap-rocks of the island, and landed under the two pitchstone veins of
+Eigg, so generally known among mineralogists, and of which specimens may
+be found in so many cabinets. They occur in an earthy, greenish-black
+amygdaloid, which forms a range of sea-cliffs varying in height from
+thirty to fifty feet, and that, from their sad hue and dull fracture,
+seem to absorb the light; while the veins themselves, bright and
+glistening, glitter in the sun, as if they were streams of water
+traversing the face of the rock. The first impression they imparted, in
+viewing them from the boat, was, that the inclosing mass was a pitch
+caldron, rather of the roughest and largest, and much begrimmed by soot,
+that had cracked to the heat, and that the fluid pitch was forcing its
+way outwards through the rents. The veins expand and contract, here
+diminishing to a strip a few inches across, there widening into a
+comparatively broad belt, some two or three feet over; and, as well
+described by M'Culloch, we find the inclosed pitchstone changing in
+color, and assuming a lighter or darker hue, as it nears the edge or
+recedes from it. In the centre it is of a dull olive green, passing
+gradually into blue, which in turn deepens into black; and it is exactly
+at the point of contact with the earthy amygdaloid that the black is
+most intense, and the fracture of the stone glassiest and brightest. I
+was lucky enough to detach a specimen, which, though scarce four inches
+across, exhibits the three colors characteristic of the vein,&mdash;its bar
+of olive green on the one side, of intense black on the other, and of
+blue, like that of imperfectly fused bottle-glass, in the centre. This
+curious rock,&mdash;so nearly akin in composition and appearance to
+obsidian,&mdash;a mineral which, in its dense form, closely resembles the
+coarse dark-colored glass of which common bottles are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> made, and which,
+in its lighter form, exists as pumice,&mdash;constitutes one of the links
+that connect the trap with the unequivocally volcanic rocks. The one
+mineral may be seen beside smoking crater, as in the Lipari Isles,
+passing into pumice; while the other may be converted into a substance
+almost identical with pumice, by the chemist. "It is stated by the
+Honorable George Knox, of Dublin," says Mr. Robert Allan, in his
+valuable mineralogical work, "that the pitchstone of Newry, on being
+exposed to a high temperature, loses its bitumen and water, and is
+converted into a light substance in every respect resembling pumice."
+But of pumice in connection with the pitchstones of Eigg, more anon.</p>
+
+<p>Leaving our boat to return to the Betsey at John Stewart's leisure, and
+taking with us his companion, to assist us in carrying such specimens as
+we might procure, we passed westwards for a few hundred yards under the
+crags, and came abreast of a dark angular opening at the base of the
+precipice, scarce two feet in height, and in front of which there lies a
+little sluggish, ankle-deep pool, half mud, half water, and matted over
+with grass and rushes. Along the mural face of the rock of earthy
+amygdaloid there runs a nearly vertical line, which in one of the
+stratified rocks one might perhaps term the line of a fault, but which
+in a trap rock may merely indicate where two semi-molten masses had
+pressed against each other without uniting&mdash;just as currents of cooling
+lead, poured by the plumber from the opposite end of a groove, sometimes
+meet and press together, so as to make a close, polished joint, without
+running into one piece. The little angular opening forms the lower
+termination of the line, which, hollowing inwards, recedes near the
+bottom into a shallow cave, roughened with tufts of fern and bunches of
+long silky grass, here and there enlivened by the delicate flowers of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>
+the lesser rock-geranium. A shower of drops patters from above among the
+weeds and rushes of the little pool. My friend the minister stopped
+short. "There," he said, pointing to the hollow, "you will find such a
+bone cave as you never saw before. Within that opening there lie the
+remains of an entire race, palpably destroyed, as geologists in so many
+other cases are content merely to imagine, by one great catastrophe.
+That is the famous cave of Frances (<i>Uamh Fraingh</i>), in which the whole
+people of Eigg were smoked to death by the M'Leods."</p>
+
+<p>We struck a light, and, worming ourselves through the narrow entrance,
+gained the interior,&mdash;a true rock gallery, vastly more roomy and lofty
+than one could have anticipated from the mean vestibule placed in front
+of it. Its extreme length we found to be two hundred and sixty feet; its
+extreme breadth twenty-seven feet; its height, where the roof rises
+highest, from eighteen to twenty feet. The cave seems to have owed its
+origin to two distinct causes. The trap-rocks on each side of the
+vertical fault-like crevice which separates them are greatly decomposed,
+as if by the moisture percolating from above; and directly in the line
+of the crevice must the surf have charged, wave after wave, for ages ere
+the last upheaval of the land. When the Dog-stone at Dunolly existed as
+a sea-stack, skirted with alg&aelig;, the breakers on this shore must have
+dashed every tide through the narrow opening of the cavern, and scooped
+out by handfuls the decomposing trap within. The process of
+decomposition, and consequent enlargement, is still going on inside, but
+there is no longer an agent to sweep away the disintegrated fragments.
+Where the roof rises highest, the floor is blocked up with accumulations
+of bulky decaying masses, that have dropped from above; and it is
+covered over its entire area by a stratum of earthy rubbish, which has
+fallen from the sides and ceiling in such<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> abundance, that it covers up
+the straw beds of the perished islanders, which still exist beneath as a
+brown mouldering felt, to the depth of from five to eight inches. Never
+yet was tragedy enacted on a gloomier theatre. An uncertain twilight
+glimmers gray at the entrance, from the narrow vestibule; but all
+within, for full two hundred feet, is black as with Egyptian darkness.
+As we passed onward with our one feeble light, along the dark mouldering
+walls and roof, which absorbed every straggling ray that reached them,
+and over the dingy floor, ropy and damp, the place called to
+recollection that hall in Roman story, hung and carpeted with black,
+into which Domitian once thrust his senate, in a frolic, to read their
+own names on the coffin-lids placed against the wall. The darkness
+seemed to press upon us from every side, as if it were a dense jetty
+fluid, out of which our light had scooped a pailful or two, and that was
+rushing in to supply the vacuum; and the only objects we saw distinctly
+visible were each other's heads and faces, and the lighter parts of our
+dress.</p>
+
+<p>The floor, for about a hundred feet inwards from the narrow vestibule,
+resembles that of a charnel-house. At almost every step we came upon
+heaps of human bones grouped together, as the Psalmist so graphically
+describes, "as when one cutteth and cleaveth wood upon the earth." They
+are of a brownish, earthy hue, here and there tinged with green; the
+skulls, with the exception of a few broken fragments, have disappeared;
+for travellers in the Hebrides have of late years been numerous and
+curious; and many a museum,&mdash;that at Abbotsford among the
+rest,&mdash;exhibits, in a grinning skull, its memorial of the Massacre at
+Eigg. We find, too, further marks of visitors in the single bones
+separated from the heaps and scattered over the area; but enough still
+remains to show, in the general disposition of the remains, that the
+hapless islanders died under the walls<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> in families, each little group
+separated by a few feet from the others. Here and there the remains of a
+detached skeleton may be seen, as if some robust islander, restless in
+his agony, had stalked out into the middle space ere he fell; but the
+social 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 the
+straw-bed upon which the family had lain, largely mixed with the smaller
+bones of the human frame, ribs and vertebr&aelig;, and hand and feet bones;
+occasionally, too, with fragments of unglazed pottery, and various other
+implements of a rude housewifery. The minister found for me, under one
+family heap, the pieces of a half-burned, unglazed earthen jar, with a
+narrow mouth, that, like the sepulchral urns of our ancient tumuli, had
+been 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's
+wooden porringer (<i>bicker</i>), perforated by a hole still bearing the mark
+of the cord that had hung it to the wall; and beside the stave lay a few
+of the larger, less destructible bones of the child, with what for a
+time puzzled us both not a little,&mdash;one of the grinders of a horse.
+Certain it was, no horse could have got there to have dropped a
+tooth,&mdash;a foal of a week old could not have pressed itself through the
+opening; and how the single grinder, evidently no recent introduction
+into the cave, could have got mixed up in the straw with the human
+bones, seemed an enigma somewhat of the class to which the reel in the
+bottle belongs. I found in Edinburgh an unexpected commentator on the
+mystery, in the person of my little boy,&mdash;an experimental philosopher in
+his second year. I had spread out on the floor the curiosities of
+Eigg,&mdash;among the rest, the relics of the cave, including the pieces of
+earthern jar, and the fragment of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> the porringer; but the horse's tooth
+seemed to be the only real curiosity among them in the eyes of little
+Bill. He laid instant hold of it; and, appropriating it as a toy,
+continued playing with it till he fell asleep. I have now little doubt
+that it was first brought into the cave by the poor child amid whose
+mouldering remains Mr. Swanson found it. The little pellet of gray hair
+spoke of feeble old age involved in this wholesale massacre with the
+vigorous manhood of the island; and here was a story of unsuspecting
+infancy amusing itself on the eve of destruction with its toys. Alas,
+for man! "Should not I spare Nineveh, that great city," said God to the
+angry prophet, "wherein are more than six score thousand persons that
+cannot discern between their right hand and their left?" God's image
+must have been sadly defaced in the murderers of the poor inoffensive
+children of Eigg, ere they could have heard their feeble wailings,
+raised, no doubt, when the stifling atmosphere within began first to
+thicken, and yet ruthlessly persist in their work of indiscriminate
+destruction.</p>
+
+<p>Various curious things have from time to time been picked up from under
+the bones. An islander found among them, shortly before our visit, a
+sewing needle of copper, little more than an inch in length; fragments
+of Eigg shoes, of the kind still made in the island, are of
+comparatively common occurrence; and Mr. James Wilson relates, in the
+singularly graphic and powerful description of <i>Uamh Fraingh</i>, which
+occurs in his "Voyage round the Coasts of Scotland" (1841), that a
+sailor, when he was there, disinterred, by turning up a flat stone, a
+"buck-tooth" and a piece of money,&mdash;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 for
+granted, as I suppose I may, that the dentology of the murderous M'Leods
+outside the cave must have very<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> much resembled that of the murdered
+M'Donalds within, very harmless looking teeth they were for being those
+of an animal so maliciously mischievous as man. I have found in the Old
+Red Sandstone the strong-based tusks of the semi-reptile Holoptychius; I
+have chiselled out of the limestone of the Coal Measures the sharp,
+dagger-like incisors of the Megalichthys; I have picked up in the Lias
+and O&ouml;lite the cruel spikes of the Crocodile and the Ichthyosaurus; I
+have seen the trenchant, saw-edged teeth of gigantic Cestracions and
+Squalid&aelig; that had been disinterred from the Chalk and the London Clay;
+and I have felt, as I examined them, that there could be no possibility
+of mistake regarding the nature of the creatures to which they had
+belonged;&mdash;they were teeth made for hacking, tearing, mangling,&mdash;for
+amputating 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 three
+inoffensive looking grinders, that the animal it had belonged to,&mdash;far
+more ruthless and cruel than reptile-fish, crocodiles, or sharks,&mdash;was
+of such a nature that it could destroy creatures of even its own kind by
+hundreds at a time, when not in the least incited by hunger, and with no
+ultimate intention of eating them. Man must surely have become an
+immensely worse animal than his teeth show him to have been designed
+for; his teeth give no real evidence regarding his real character. Who,
+for instance, could gather from the dentology of the M'Leods the passage
+in their history to which the cave of Frances bears evidence?</p>
+
+<p>We quitted the cave, with its stagnant damp atmosphere and its mouldy
+unwholesome 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; and
+I learned from my friend, versant in all the various<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> island traditions
+regarding it, that the less I inquired into its history on the spot, the
+more 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, in
+the rude age of the unglazed pipkin and the copper needle; and many
+years seem to have elapsed ere the story of their hapless possessors was
+committed to writing; and so we find it existing in various and somewhat
+conflicting editions. "Some hundred years ago," says Mr. Wilson, "a few
+of the M'Leods landed in Eigg from Skye, where, having greatly
+misconducted themselves, the Eiggites strapped them to their own boats,
+which they sent adrift into the ocean. They were, however, rescued by
+some clansmen; and, soon after, a strong body of the M'Leods set sail
+from Skye, to revenge themselves on Eigg. The natives of the latter
+island 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 exceedingly
+small entrance. It opens from the broken face of a steep bank along the
+shore; and, as the whole coast is cavernous, their particular retreat
+would have been sought for in vain by strangers. So the Skye-men,
+finding the island uninhabited, presumed the natives had fled, and
+satisfied their revengeful feelings by ransacking and pillaging the
+empty houses. Probably the <i>movables</i> were of no great value. They then
+took their departure and left the island, when the sight of a solitary
+human being among the cliffs awakened their suspicion, and induced them
+to return. Unfortunately a slight sprinkling of snow had fallen, and the
+footsteps of an individual were traced to the mouth of the cave. Not
+having been there ourselves at the period alluded to, we cannot speak
+with certainty as to the nature of the parley which ensued, or the
+terms<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> offered by either party; but we know that those were not the days
+of protocols. The ultimatum was unsatisfactory to the Skye-men, who
+immediately 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 very
+entrance of the <i>Uamh Fraingh</i>, which they kept up for a length of time;
+and thus, by 'one fell smoke,' they smothered the entire population of
+the island."</p>
+
+<p>Such is Mr. Wilson's version of the story, which, in all its leading
+circumstances, agrees with that of Sir Walter. According, however, to at
+least one of the Eigg versions, it was the M'Leod himself who had landed
+on the island, driven there by a storm. The islanders, at feud with the
+M'Leod's at the time, inhospitably rose upon him, as he bivouacked on
+the shores of the Bay of Laig; and in a fray, in which his party had the
+worse, his back was broken, and he was forced off half dead to sea.
+Several months after, on his partial recovery, he returned, crook-backed
+and infirm, to wreak his vengeance on the inhabitants, all of whom,
+warned of his coming by the array of his galleys in the offing, hid
+themselves in the cave, in which, however, they were ultimately
+betrayed&mdash;as narrated by Sir Walter and Mr. Wilson&mdash;by the track of some
+footpaths in a sprinkling of snow; and the implacable chieftain, giving
+orders 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 the
+wild, hollow cry from the rock within had sunk into silence, and there
+lived not a single islander of Eigg, man, woman, or child. The fact that
+their remains should have been left to moulder in the cave is proof
+enough, of itself, that none survived to bury the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> dead. I am inclined
+to believe, from the appearance of the place, that smoke could scarcely
+have been the real agent of destruction; then, as now, it would have
+taken a great deal of pure smoke to smother a Highlander. It may be
+perhaps deemed more probable, that the huge fire of rafter and roof-tree
+piled close against the opening, and rising high over it, would draw out
+the oxygen within as its proper food, till at length all would be
+exhausted; and life would go out for want of it, like the flame of a
+candle under an upturned jar. Sir Walter refers the date of the event to
+some time "about the close of the sixteenth century;" and the coin of
+Queen Mary, mentioned by Mr. Wilson, points at a period at least not
+much earlier; but the exact time of its occurrence is so uncertain, that
+a Roman Catholic priest of the Hebrides, in lately showing his people
+what a very bad thing Protestantism is, instanced, as a specimen of its
+average morality, the affair of the cave. The <i>Protestant</i> M'Leods of
+Skye, he said, full of hatred in their hearts, had murdered, wholesale,
+their wretched brethren, the <i>Protestant</i> M'Donalds of Eigg, and sent
+them off to perdition before their time.</p>
+
+<p>Quitting the beach, we ascended the breezy hill-side on our way to the
+Scuir,&mdash;an object so often and so well described, that it might be
+perhaps prudent, instead of attempting one description more, to present
+the reader with some of the already existing ones. "The Scuir of Eigg,"
+says Professor Jamieson, in his 'Mineralogy of the Western Islands,' "is
+perfectly mural, and extends for upwards of a mile and a half, and rises
+to a height of several hundred feet. It is entirely columnar, and the
+columns 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> greatest beauty and regularity;
+the pillars are as distinct as if they had been reared by the hand of
+art; but it has not the extent or sublimity of the Scuir of Eigg. The
+one may be compared with the greatest exertions of human power; the
+other is characteristic of the wildest and most inimitable works of
+nature." "The height of this extraordinary object is considerable," says
+M'Culloch, dashing off his sketch with a still bolder hand; "yet its
+powerful effect arises rather from its peculiar form, and the commanding
+elevation which it occupies, than from its positive altitude. Viewed in
+one direction, it presents a long irregular wall, crowning the summit of
+the highest hill, while in the other it resembles a huge tower. Thus it
+forms no natural combination of outline with the surrounding land, and
+hence acquires that independence in the general landscape which
+increases its apparent magnitude, and produces that imposing effect
+which it displays. From the peculiar position of the Scuir, it must also
+inevitably be viewed from a low station. Hence it everywhere towers high
+above the spectator; while, like other objects on the mountain outline,
+its apparent dimensions are magnified, and its dark mass defined on the
+sky, so as to produce all the additional effects arising from strong
+oppositions of light and shadow. The height of this rock is sufficient
+in this stormy country frequently to arrest the passage of the clouds,
+so as to be further productive of the most brilliant effects in
+landscape. Often they may be seen hovering on its summit, and adding
+ideal dimensions to the lofty face, or, when it is viewed on the
+extremity, conveying the impression of a tower, the height of which is
+such as to lie in the regions of the clouds. Occasionally they sweep
+along the base, leaving its huge and black mass involved in additional
+gloom, and resembling the castle of some Arabian enchanter, built on the
+clouds, and suspended<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> in air." It might be perhaps deemed somewhat
+invidious to deal with pictures such as these in the style the
+connoisseur in the "Vicar of Wakefield" dealt with the old painting,
+when, seizing a brush, he daubed it over with brown varnish, and then
+asked the spectators whether he had not greatly improved the tone of the
+coloring. And yet it is just possible, that in the case of at least
+M'Culloch's picture, the brown varnish might do no manner of harm. But a
+homelier sketch, traced out on almost the same leading lines, with just
+a little less of the a&euml;rial in it, may have nearly the same subduing
+effect; I have, besides, a few curious touches to lay in, which seem
+hitherto to have escaped observation and the pencil; and in these
+several circumstances must lie my apology for adding one sketch more to
+the sketches existing already.</p>
+
+<p>The Scuir of Eigg, then, is a veritable Giant's Causeway, like that on
+the coast of Antrim, taken and magnified rather more than twenty times
+in height, and some five or six times in breadth, and then placed on the
+ridge of a hill nearly nine hundred feet high. Viewed sideways, it
+assumes, as described by M'Culloch, the form of a perpendicular but
+ruinous rampart, much gapped above, that runs for about a mile and a
+quarter along the top of a lofty sloping talus. Viewed endways, it
+resembles a tall massy tower,&mdash;such a tower as my friend, Mr. D.O. Hill,
+would delight to draw, and give delight by drawing,&mdash;a tower three
+hundred feet in breadth by four hundred and seventy feet in height,
+perched on the apex of a pyramid, like a statue on a pedestal. This
+strange causeway is columnar from end to end; but the columns, from
+their great altitude and deficient breadth, seem mere rodded shafts in
+the Gothic style; they rather resemble bundles of rods than
+well-proportioned pillars. Few of them exceed eighteen inches in
+diameter, and many of them fall short of half a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> foot; but, though lost
+in the general mass of the Scuir as independent columns, when we view it
+at an angle sufficiently large to take in its entire bulk, they yet
+impart to it that graceful linear effect which we see brought out in
+tasteful pencil sketches and good line engravings. We approached it this
+day from the shore in the direction in which the eminence it stands upon
+assumes the pyramidal form, and itself the tower-like outline. The
+acclivity is barren and stony,&mdash;a true desert foreground, like those of
+Thebes and Palmyra; and the huge square shadow of the tower stretched
+dark and cold athwart it. The sun shone out clearly. One half the
+immense bulk before us, with its delicate vertical lining, lay from top
+to bottom in deep shade, massive and gray; one half presented its
+many-sided columns to the light, here and there gleaming with tints of
+extreme brightness, where the pitchstones presented their glassy planes
+to the sun; its general outline, whether pencilled by the lighter or
+darker tints, stood out sharp and clear; and a stratum of white fleecy
+clouds floated slowly amid the delicious blue behind it. But the minuter
+details I must reserve for my next chapter. One fact, however,
+anticipated just a little out of its order, may heighten the interest of
+the reader. There are massive buildings,&mdash;bridges of noble span, and
+harbors that abut far into the waves,&mdash;founded on wooden piles; and this
+hugest of hill-forts we find founded on wooden piles also. It is built
+on what a Scotch architect would perhaps term a pile-<i>brander</i> of the
+<i>Pinites Eiggensis</i>, an ancient tree of the O&ouml;lite. The gigantic Scuir
+of Eigg rests on the remains of a prostrate forest.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span></p>
+<h3>CHAPTER III.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="hang">Structure of the Scuir&mdash;A stray Column&mdash;The Piazza&mdash;A buried Pine
+Forest the Foundation of the Scuir&mdash;Geological Poachers in a Fossil
+Preserve&mdash;<i>Pinites Eiggensis</i>&mdash;Its Description&mdash;Witham's
+Experiments on Fossil Pine of Eigg&mdash;Rings of the Pine&mdash;Ascent of
+the Scuir&mdash;Appearance of the Top&mdash;White Pitchstone&mdash;Mr. Greig's
+Discovery of Pumice&mdash;A Sunset Scene&mdash;The Manse and the Yacht&mdash;The
+Minister's Story&mdash;A Cottage Repast&mdash;American Timber drifted to the
+Hebrides&mdash;Agency of the Gulf Stream&mdash;The Minister's Sheep. </p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">As</span> we climbed the hill-side, and the Shinar-like tower before us rose
+higher over the horizon at each step we took, till it seemed pointing at
+the middle sky, we could mark peculiarities in its structure which
+escape notice in the distance. We found it composed of various beds,
+each of which would make a Giant's Causeway entire, piled over each
+other like stories in a building, and divided into columns, vertical, or
+nearly so, in every instance except in one bed near the base, in which
+the pillars incline to a side, as if losing footing under the
+superincumbent weight. Innumerable polygonal fragments,&mdash;single stones
+of the building,&mdash;lie scattered over the slope, composed, like almost
+all the rest of the Scuir, of a peculiar and very beautiful stone,
+unlike any other in Scotland&mdash;a dark pitchstone-porphyry, which,
+inclosing crystals of glassy feldspar, resembles in the hand-specimen, a
+mass of black sealing-wax, with numerous pieces of white bugle stuck
+into it. Some of the detached polygons are of considerable size; few of
+them larger and bulkier, however, than a piece of column of this
+characteristic porphyry, about ten feet in length by two feet in
+diameter, which lies a full mile away from any of the others, in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>
+line of the old burying-ground, and distant from it only a few hundred
+yards. It seems to have been carried there by man: we find its bearing
+from the Scuir lying nearly at right angles with the direction of the
+drift-boulders of the western coast, which are, besides, of rare
+occurrence in the Hebrides; nor has it a single neighbor; and it seems
+not improbable, as a tradition of the island testifies, that it was
+removed thus far for the purpose of marking some place of sepulture, and
+that the catastrophe of the cave arrested its progress after by far the
+longer and rougher portion of the way had been passed. The dry-arm bones
+of the charnel-house in the rock may have been tugging around it when
+the galleys of the M'Leod hove in sight. The traditional history of
+Eigg, said my friend the minister, compared with that of some of the
+neighboring islands, presents a decapitated aspect: the M'Leods cut it
+off by the neck. Most of the present inhabitants can tell which of their
+ancestors, grandfather, or great-grandfather, or
+great-great-grandfather, first settled in the place, and where they came
+from; and, with the exception of a few vague legends about St. Donan and
+his grave, which were preserved apparently among the people of the other
+Small Isles, the island has no early traditional history.</p>
+
+<p>We had now reached the Scuir. There occur, intercalated with the
+columnar beds, a few bands of a buff-colored non-columnar trap,
+described by M'Culloch as of a texture intermediate between a greenstone
+and a basalt, and which, while the pitchstone around it seems nearly
+indestructible, has weathered so freely as to form horizontal grooves
+along the face of the rock, from two to five yards in depth. One of
+these runs for several hundred feet along the base of the Scuir, just at
+the top of the talus, and greatly resembles a piazza, lacking the outer
+pillars. It is from ten to twelve feet in height, by from fifteen to
+twenty in depth; the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> columns of the pitch stone-bed immediately above
+it seem perilously hanging in mid air; and along their sides there
+trickles, in even the driest summer weather,&mdash;for the Scuir is a
+condenser on an immense scale&mdash;minute runnels of water, that patter
+ceaselessly in front of the long deep hollow, like rain from the eaves
+of a cottage during a thunder shower. Inside, however, all is dry, and
+the floor is covered to the depth of several inches with the dung of
+sheep and cattle, that find, in this singular mountain piazza, a place
+of shelter. We had brought a pickaxe with us; and the dry and dusty
+floor, composed mainly of a gritty conglomerate, formed the scene of our
+labors. It is richly fossiliferous, though the organisms have no
+specific variety; and never, certainly, have I found the remains of
+former creations in a scene in which they more powerfully addressed
+themselves to the imagination. A stratum of peat-moss, mixed with
+fresh-water shells, and resting on a layer of vegetable mould, from
+which the stumps and roots of trees still protruded, was once found in
+Italy, buried beneath an ancient tesselated pavement; and the whole gave
+curious evidence of a kind fitted to picture to the imagination a
+background vista of antiquity, all the more remotely ancient in aspect
+from the venerable age of the object in front. Dry ground covered by
+wood, a lake, a morass, and then dry ground again, had all taken
+precedence, on the site of the tesselated pavement, in this instance, of
+an old Roman villa. But what was antiquity in connection with a Roman
+villa, to antiquity in connection with the Scuir of Eigg? Under the old
+foundations 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, had
+sprung up and decayed on hill and beside stream in some nameless
+land,&mdash;had then been swept to the sea,&mdash;had been entombed deep at the
+bottom in a grit of O&ouml;lite,&mdash;had been heaved up to the surface, and
+high<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> over it, by volcanic agencies working from beneath,&mdash;and had
+finally been built upon, as moles are built upon piles, by the architect
+that had laid down the masonry of the gigantic Scuir, in one fiery layer
+after another. The mountain wall of Eigg, with its dizzy elevation of
+four hundred and seventy feet, is a wall founded on piles of pine laid
+crossways; and, strange as the fact may seem, one has but to dig into
+the floor of this deep-hewn piazza, to be convinced that at least it
+<i>is</i> a fact.</p>
+
+<p>Just at this interesting stage, however, our explorations bade fair to
+be interrupted. Our man who carried the pickaxe had lingered behind us
+for a few hundred yards, in earnest conversation with an islander; and
+he now came up, breathless and in hot haste, to say that the islander, a
+Roman Catholic tacksman in the neighborhood, had peremptorily warned him
+that 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 meddled
+with it. "That message," said my friend, laughing, but looking just a
+little sad through the laugh, "would scarce have been sent us when I was
+minister of the Establishment here; but it seems allowable in the case
+of a poor Dissenter, and is no bad specimen of the thousand little ways
+in 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 a
+fossil preserve, which coupled itself in my mind, through a trick of the
+associative faculty, with the idea of a great fossil act for the British
+empire, framed on the principles of the game-laws; and, just wondering
+what sort of disreputable vagabonds geological poachers would become
+under its deteriorating influence, I laid hold of the pickaxe and broke
+into the stonefast floor; and thence I succeeded in
+abstracting,&mdash;feloniously, I dare say, though the crime has not yet got<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>
+into the statute-book&mdash;some six or eight pieces of the <i>Pinites
+Eiggensis</i>, amounting in all to about half a cubic foot of that very
+ancient wood&mdash;value unknown. I trust, should the case come to a serious
+bearing, the members of the London Geological Society will generously
+subscribe half-a-crown a-piece to assist me in feeing counsel. There are
+more interests than mine at stake in the affair. If I be cast and
+committed,&mdash;I, who have poached over only a few miserable districts in
+Scotland,&mdash;pray, what will become of some of them,&mdash;the Lyells,
+Bucklands, Murchisons and Sedgwicks,&mdash;who have poached over whole
+continents?</p>
+
+<p>We were successful in procuring several good specimens of the Eigg pine,
+at a depth, in the conglomerate, of from eight to eighteen inches. Some
+of the upper pieces we found in contact with the decomposing trap out of
+which the hollow piazza above had been scooped; but the greater number,
+as my set of specimens abundantly testify, lay embedded in the original
+O&ouml;litic grit in which they had been locked up, in, I doubt not, their
+present fossil state, ere their upheaval, through Plutonic agency, from
+their deep-sea bottom. The annual rings of the wood, which are quite as
+small as in a slow-growing Baltic pine, are distinctly visible in all
+the better pieces I this day transferred to my bag. In one fragment I
+reckon sixteen rings in half an inch, and fifteen in the same space in
+another. The trees to which they belonged seem to have grown on some
+exposed hill-side, where, in the course of half a century, little more
+than from two or three inches were added to their diameter. The <i>Pinites
+Eiggensis</i>, or Eigg pine, was first introduced to the notice of the
+scientific world by the late Mr. Witham, in whose interesting work on
+"The Internal Structure of Fossil Vegetables" the reader may find it
+figured and described. The specimen in which he studied its
+peculiarities "was found," he says, "at the base of the magnificent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>
+mural escarpment named the Scuir of Eigg,&mdash;not, however, <i>in situ</i>, but
+among fragments of rocks of the O&ouml;litic series." The authors of the
+"Fossil Flora," where it is also figured, describe it as differing very
+considerably in structure from any of the conifer&aelig; of the Coal Measures.
+"Its medullary rays," says Messrs. Lindley and Hutton, "appear to be
+more numerous, and frequently are not continued through one zone of wood
+to another, but more generally terminate at the concentric circles. It
+abounds also in turpentine vessels, or lacun&aelig;, of various sizes, the
+sides of which are distinctly defined." Viewed through the microscope,
+in transparent slips, longitudinal and transverse, it presents, within
+the space of a few lines, objects fitted to fill the mind with wonder.
+We find the minutest cells, glands, fibres, of the original wood
+preserved uninjured. <i>There</i> still are those medullary rays entire that
+communicated between the pith and the outside,&mdash;<i>there</i> still the ring
+of thickened cells that indicated the yearly check which the growth
+received when winter came on,&mdash;<i>there</i> the polygonal reticulations of
+the cross section, without a single broken mesh,&mdash;<i>there</i>, too, the
+elongated cells in the longitudinal one, each filled with minute glands
+that take the form of double circles,&mdash;<i>there</i> also, of larger size and
+less regular form, the lacun&aelig; in which the turpentine lay: every nicely
+organized speck, invisible to the naked eye, we find in as perfect a
+state of keeping in the incalculably ancient pile-work on which the
+gigantic Scuir is founded, as in the living pines that flourish green on
+our hill-sides. A net-work, compared with which that of the finest lace
+ever worn by the fair reader would seem a net-work of cable, has
+preserved entire, for untold ages, the most delicate peculiarities of
+its pattern. There is not a mesh broken, nor a circular dot away!</p>
+
+<p>The experiments of Mr. Witham on the Eigg fossil, furnish<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> an
+interesting example of the light which a single, apparently simple,
+discovery may throw on whole departments of fact. He sliced his specimen
+longitudinally and across, fastened the slices on glass, ground them
+down till they became semi-transparent, and then, examining them under
+reflected light by the microscope, marked and recorded the specific
+peculiarities of their structure. And we now know, in consequence, that
+the ancient Eigg pine, to which the detached fragment picked up at the
+base of the Scuir belonged,&mdash;a pine alike different from those of the
+earlier carboniferous period and those which exist contemporary with
+ourselves,&mdash;was, some <i>three creations</i> ago, an exceedingly common tree
+in the country now called Scotland,&mdash;as much so, perhaps, as the Scotch
+fir is at the present day. The fossil trees found in such abundance in
+the neighborhood of Helmsdale that they are burnt for lime,&mdash;the fossil
+wood of Eathie, in Cromartyshire, and that of Shandwick, in Ross,&mdash;all
+belong to the <i>Pinites Eiggensis</i>. It seems to have been a straight and
+stately tree, in most instances, as in the Eigg specimens, of slow
+growth. One of the trunks I saw near Navidale measured two feet in
+diameter, but a full century had passed ere it attained to a bulk so
+considerable; and a splendid specimen in my collection, from the same
+locality, which measures twenty-one inches, exhibits even <i>more</i> than a
+hundred annual rings. In one of my specimens, and one only, the rings
+are of great breadth. They differ from those of all the others in the
+proportion in which I have seen the annual rings of a young, vigorous
+fir that had sprung up in some rich, moist hollow, differ from the
+annual rings of trees of the same species that had grown in the shallow,
+hard soil of exposed hill-sides. And this one specimen furnishes curious
+evidence that the often-marked but little understood law, which gives us
+our better and worse seasons in alternate groups, various in number and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>
+uncertain in their time of recurrence, obtained as early as the age of
+the O&ouml;lite. The rings follow each other in groups of lesser and larger
+breadth. 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 alternate
+groups. For some four or five years together, when this pine was a
+living tree, the springs were late and cold, and the summers cloudy and
+chill, as in that group of seasons which intervened between 1835 and
+1841; and then, for four or five years, more springs were early and
+summers genial, as in the after group of 1842, 1843 and 1844. An
+arrangement in nature,&mdash;first observed, as we learn from Bacon, by the
+people of the Low Countries, and which has since formed the basis of
+meteoric tables, and of predictions and elaborate cycles of the
+weather,&mdash;bound together the twelvemonths of the O&ouml;litic period in
+alternate bundles of better and worse: vegetation throve vigorously
+during the summers of one group, and languished, in those of another, in
+a state of partial development.</p>
+
+<p>Sending away our man shipwards, laden with a bag of fossil wood, we
+ascended 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 of
+the beds considerable variety of direction and form. In one bed they
+belly over with a curve, like the ribs of some wrecked vessel from which
+the planking has been torn away; in another they project in a straight
+line, like muskets planted slantways on the ground to receive a charge
+of cavalry; in others the inclination is inwards, like that of ranges of
+stakes placed in front of a sea-dyke, to break the violence of the
+waves; while yet in others they present, as in the eastern portion of
+the Scuir, the common vertical direction. The ribbed appearance of every
+crag and cliff, imparts to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> scene a peculiar character; every larger
+mass of light and shadow is corded with minute stripes; and the feeling
+experienced among the more shattered peaks, and in the more broken
+recesses, seems near akin to that which it is the tendency of some
+magnificent ruin to excite, than that which awakens amid the sublime of
+nature. We feel as if the pillared rocks around us were like the
+Cyclopean walls of Southern Italy,&mdash;the erections of some old gigantic
+race passed from the earth forever. The feeling must have been
+experienced on former occasions, amid the innumerable pillars of the
+Scuir; for we find M'Culloch, in his description, ingeniously analyzing
+it. "The resemblance to architecture here is much increased," he says,
+"by the columnar structure, which is sufficiently distinguishable, even
+from a distance, and produces a strong effect of artificial regularity
+when seen near at hand. To this vague association in the mind of the
+efforts of art with the magnitude of nature, is owing much of that
+sublimity of character which the Scuir presents. The sense of power is a
+fertile source of the sublime; and as the appearance of power exerted,
+no less than that of simplicity, is necessary to confer this character
+on architecture, so the mind, insensibly transferring the operations of
+nature to the efforts of art where they approximate in character,
+becomes impressed with a feeling rarely excited by her more ordinary
+forms, where these are even more stupendous."</p>
+
+<p>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 the
+masonry, that run transversely, from side to side, still to fill up.
+Along one of these ditch-like gaps, which serves to insulate the eastern
+and highest portion of the Scuir from all its other portions, we find
+fragments of a rude wall of uncemented<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> stones, the remains of an
+ancient hill-fort; which, with its natural rampart of rock on three of
+its four sides, more than a hundred yards in sheer descent, and with its
+deep ditch and rude wall on the fourth, must have formed one of the most
+inaccessible in the kingdom. The masses of pitchstone a-top, though so
+intensely black within, are weathered on the surface into almost a pure
+white; and we found lying detached among them, fragments of common
+amygdaloid and basalt, and minute slaty pieces of chalcedony that had
+formed apparently in fissures of the trap. We would have scrutinized
+more 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 rare
+was to be found. Had we examined somewhat more carefully, we might
+possibly have done what Mr. Woronzow Greig did on the Scuir about
+eighteen years previous,&mdash;picked up on it a piece of <i>bona fide</i> Scotch
+pumice. This gentleman, well known through his exertions in statistical
+science, and for his love of science in general, and whose tastes and
+acquirements are not unworthy the son of Mrs. Somerville, has kindly
+informed me by letter regarding his curious discovery. "I visited the
+island 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 of
+game, I amused myself in my wanderings by looking about for natural
+curiosities. I knew little about Geology at the time, but, collecting
+whatever struck my eye as uncommon, I picked up from the sides of the
+Scuir, among various other things, a bit of fossil wood, and, nearly at
+the summit of the eminence, a piece of pumice of a deep brownish-black
+color, and very porous, the pores being large and round, and the
+substance which divided them of a uniform thickness. This last specimen
+I gave to Mr. Lyell, who said that it could not originally have belonged
+to Eigg, though it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> might possibly have been washed there by the sea,&mdash;a
+suggestion, however, with which its place on the top of the Scuir seems
+ill to accord. I may add, that I have since procured a larger specimen
+from the same place." This seems a curious fact, when we take into
+account the identity, in their mineral components, of the pumice and
+obsidian of the recent volcanoes; and that pitchstone, the obsidian of
+the trap-rocks, is resolvable into a pumice by the art of the chemist.
+If pumice was to be found anywhere in Scotland, we might <i>a priori</i>
+expect to find it in connection with by far the largest mass of
+pitchstone in the kingdom. It is just possible, however, that Mr.
+Greig's two specimens may not date farther back, in at least their
+existing state, than the days of the hill-fort. Powerful fires would
+have been required to render the exposed summit of the Scuir at all
+comfortable; there is a deep peat-moss in its immediate neighborhood,
+that would have furnished the necessary fuel; the wind must have been
+sufficiently high on the summit to fan the embers into an intense white
+heat; and if it was heat but half as intense as that which was employed
+in fusing into one mass the thick vitrified ramparts of Craig Phadrig
+and Knock Farril, on the east coast, it could scarce have failed to
+anticipate the experiment of the Hon. Mr. Knox, of Dublin, by converting
+some of the numerous pitchstone fragments that lie scattered about,
+"into a light substance in every respect resembling pumice."</p>
+
+<p>It was now evening, and rarely have I witnessed a finer. The sun had
+declined half-way adown the western sky, and for many yards the shadow
+of 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, was
+basking in yellow sunshine; and with its one dark shadow thrown from its
+one mountain-elevated wall of rock, it seemed some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> immense fantastical
+dial, with its gnomon rising tall in the midst. Far below, perched on
+the apex of the shadow, and half lost in the line of the penumbra, we
+could see two indistinct specks of black, with a dim halo around
+each,&mdash;specks that elongated as we arose, and contracted as we sat, and
+went gliding along the line as we walked. The shadows of two gnats
+disporting on the edge of an ordinary gnomon would have seemed vastly
+more important, in proportion, on the figured plane of the dial, than
+these, our ghostly representatives, did here. The sea, spangled in the
+wake of the sun with quick glancing light, stretched out its blue plain
+around us; and we could see included in the wide prospect, on the one
+hand, at once the hill-chains of Morven and Kintail, with the many
+intervening lochs and bold jutting headlands that give variety to the
+mainland; and, on the other, the variously complexioned Hebrides, from
+the Isle of Skye to Uist and Barra, and from Uist and Barra to Tiree and
+Mull. The contiguous Small Isles, Muck and Rum, lay moored immediately
+beside us, like vessels of the same convoy that in some secure roadstead
+drop anchor within hail of each other. I could willingly have lingered
+on the top of the Scuir until after sunset; but the minister, who, ever
+and anon, during the day, had been conning over some notes jotted on a
+paper of wonderfully scant dimensions, reminded me that this was the
+evening of his week-day discourse, and that we were more than a
+particularly rough mile from the place of meeting, and within, half an
+hour of the time. I took one last look of the scene ere we commenced our
+descent. There, in the middle of the ample parish glebe, that looked
+richer and greener in the light of the declining sun than at any former
+period during the day,&mdash;rose the snug parish manse; and yonder,&mdash;in an
+open island channel, with a strip of dark rocks fringing the land
+within, and another dark strip<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> fringing the barren Eilean Chaisteil
+outside,&mdash;lay the Betsey, looking wonderfully diminutive, but evidently
+a little thing of high spirit, taut-masted, with a smart rake aft, and a
+spruce outrigger astern, and flaunting her triangular flag of blue in
+the sun. I pointed first to the manse, and then to the yacht. The
+minister shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"'Tis a time of strange changes," he said; "I thought to have lived and
+died in that house, and found a quiet grave in the burying-ground yonder
+beside the ruin; but my path was a clear though a rugged one; and from
+almost 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-way
+corner, and suffered the Church question to run its course, without
+quitting my hold of the Establishment. And so I perhaps might. It is
+easy securing one's own safety, in even the worst of times, if one look
+no higher; and I, as I had no opportunity of mixing in the contest, or
+of declaring my views respecting it, might be regarded as an unpledged
+man. But the principles of the Evangelical party were my principles; and
+it would have been consistent with neither honor nor religion to have
+hung back in the day of battle, and suffered the men with whom in heart
+I was at one to pay the whole forfeit of our common quarrel. So I
+attended the Convocation, and pledged myself to stand or fall with my
+brethren. On my return I called my people together, and told them how
+the case stood, and that in May next I bade fair to be a dependent for a
+home on the proprietor of Eigg. And so they petitioned the proprietor
+that he might give me leave to build a house among them,&mdash;exactly the
+same sort of favor granted to the Roman Catholics of the island. But
+month after month passed, and they got no reply to their petition; and I
+was left in suspense, not knowing whether I was to have a home among
+them or no. I did feel the case<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> a somewhat hard one. The father of Dr.
+M'Pherson of Eigg had been, like myself, a humble Scotch minister; and
+the 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, with
+a wife and family dependent on him, was placed by his silence in cruel
+circumstances of uncertainty. Ere the Disruption took place, however, I
+came to know pretty conclusively what I had to expect. The Doctor's
+factor came to Eigg, and, as I was informed, told the Islanders that it
+was not likely the Doctor would permit a <i>third</i> place of worship on the
+Island: the Roman Catholics had one, and the Establishment had a kind of
+one, and there was to be no more. The factor, an active
+messenger-at-arms, useful in raising rents in these parts, has always
+been understood to speak the mind of his master; but the congregation
+took heart in the emergency, and sent off a second petition to Dr.
+M'Pherson, a week or so previous to the Disruption. Ere <i>it</i> received an
+answer, the Disruption took place; and, laying the whole circumstances
+before my brethren in Edinburgh, who, like myself, interpreted the
+silence of the Doctor into a refusal, I suggested to them the scheme of
+the Betsey, as the only scheme through which I could keep up unbroken my
+connection with my people. So the trial is now over, and here we are,
+and yonder is the Betsey."</p>
+
+<p>We descended the Scuir together for the place of meeting, and entered,
+by the way, the cottage of a worthy islander, much attached to his
+minister. "We are both very hungry," said my friend: "we have been out
+among the rocks since breakfast-time, and are wonderfully disposed to
+eat. 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 of
+mashed potatoes, and we dined like princes. I observed, for the first
+time, in the interior<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> of this cottage, what I had frequent occasion to
+remark afterwards, that much of the wood used in building in the smaller
+and outer islands of the Hebrides must have drifted across the Atlantic,
+borne eastwards and northwards by the great Gulf-stream. Many of the
+beams and boards, sorely drilled by the <i>Teredo navalis</i>, are of
+American timber, that, from time to time, has been cast upon the
+shore,&mdash;a portion of it, apparently, from timber-laden vessels
+unfortunate in their voyage, but a portion of it, also, with root and
+branch still attached, bearing mark of having been swept to the sea by
+transatlantic rivers. Nuts and seeds of tropical plants are occasionally
+picked up on the beach. My friend gave me a bean or nut of the <i>Dolichos
+urens</i>, or cow-itch shrub, of the West Indies, which an islander had
+found on the shore sometime in the previous year, and given to one of
+the manse children as a toy; and I attach some little interest to it, as
+a curiosity of the same class with the large canes and the fragment of
+carved wood found floating near the shores of Madeira by the
+brother-in-law of Columbus, and which, among other pieces of
+circumstantial evidence, led the great navigator to infer the existence
+of a western continent. Curiosities of this kind seem still more common
+in the northern than in the western islands of Scotland. "Large exotic
+nuts or seeds," says Dr. Patrick Neill, in his interesting "Tour,"
+quoted in a former chapter, "which in Orkney are known by the name of
+Molucca beans, are occasionally found among the <i>rejectamenta</i> of the
+sea, especially after westerly winds. There are two kinds commonly
+found: the larger (of which the fishermen very generally make
+snuff-boxes) seem to be seeds from the great pod of the <i>Mimosa
+scandens</i> of the West Indies; the smaller seeds, from the pod of the
+<i>Dolichos urens</i>, also a native of the same region. It is probable that
+the currents of the ocean, and particularly that great current which
+issues from the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> Gulf of Florida, and is hence denominated the Gulf
+Stream, aid very much in transporting across the mighty Atlantic these
+American products. They are generally quite fresh and entire, and afford
+an additional proof how impervious to moisture, and how imperishable,
+nuts and seeds generally are."</p>
+
+<p>The evening was fast falling ere the minister closed his discourse; and
+we had but just light enough left, on reaching the Betsey, to show us
+that there lay a dead sheep on the deck. It had been sent aboard to be
+killed by the minister's factotum, John Stewart; but John was at the
+evening preaching at the time, and the poor sheep, in its attempts to
+set itself free, had got itself entangled among the cords, and strangled
+itself. "Alas, alas!" exclaimed the minister, "thus ends our hope of
+fresh mutton for the present, and my hapless speculation as a sheep
+farmer for evermore." I learned from him, afterwards, over our tea, that
+shortly previous to the Convocation he had got his glebe,&mdash;one of the
+largest in Scotland,&mdash;well stocked with sheep and cattle, which he had
+to sell, immediately on the Disruption, in miserably bad condition, at a
+loss of nearly fifty per cent. He had a few sheep, however, that would
+not sell at all, and that remained on the glebe, in consequence, until
+his successor entered into possession. And he, honest man, straightway
+impounded them, and got them incarcerated in a dark, dirty hole,
+somewhat in the way Giant Despair incarcerated the pilgrims,&mdash;a thing he
+had quite a legal right to do, seeing that the mile-long glebe, with its
+many acres of luxuriant pasture, was now as much his property as it had
+been Mr. Swanson's a few months before, and seeing Mr. Swanson's few
+sheep had no right to crop his grass. But a worthy neighbor
+interfered,&mdash;Mr. M'Donald, of Keil, the principal tenant in the island.
+Mr. M'Donald,&mdash;a practical commentator on the law of kindness,&mdash;was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>
+sorely scandalized at what he deemed the new minister's gratuitous
+unkindness to a brother in calamity; and, relieving the sheep, he
+brought them to his own farm, where he found them board and lodging on
+my friend's behalf, till they could be used up at leisure. And it was
+one of the last of this unfortunate lot that now contrived to escape
+from us by anticipating John Stewart. "A black beginning makes a black
+ending," said Gouffing Jock, an ancient border shepherd, when his only
+sheep, a black ewe, the sole survivor of a flock smothered in a
+snow-storm, was worried to death by his dogs. Then, taking down his
+broadsword, he added, "Come awa, my auld friend; thou and I maun e'en
+stock Bowerhope-Law ance mair!" Less warlike than Gouffing Jock, we were
+content to repeat over the dead, on this occasion, simply the first
+portion of his speech; and then, betaking ourselves to our cabin, we
+forgot all our sorrows over our tea.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span></p>
+<h3>CHAPTER IV.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="hang">An Excursion&mdash;The Chain of Crosses&mdash;Bay of Laig&mdash;Island of
+Rum&mdash;Description of the Island&mdash;Superstitions banished by pure
+Religion&mdash;Fossil Shells&mdash;Remarkable Oyster Bed&mdash;New species of
+Belemnite&mdash;O&ouml;litic Shells&mdash;White Sandstone Precipices&mdash;Gigantic
+Petrified Mushrooms&mdash;"Christabel" in Stone&mdash;Musical Sand&mdash;<i>Jabel
+Nakous</i>, or Mountain of the Bell&mdash;Experiments of Travellers at
+<i>Jabel Nakous</i>&mdash;Welsted's Account&mdash;<i>Reg-Rawan</i>, or the Moving
+Sand&mdash;The Musical Sounds inexplicable&mdash;Article on the subject in
+the North British Review. </p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">There</span> had been rain during the night; and when I first got on deck, a
+little after seven, a low stratum of mist, that completely enveloped the
+Scuir, and truncated both the eminence on which it stands and the
+opposite height, stretched like a ruler across the flat valley which
+indents so deeply the middle of the island. But the fogs melted away as
+the morning rose, and ere our breakfast was satisfactorily discussed,
+the last thin wreath had disappeared from around the columned front of
+the rock-tower of Eigg, and a powerful sun looked down on moist slopes
+and dank hollows, from which there arose in the calm a hazy vapor, that,
+while it softened the lower features of the landscape, left the bold
+outline relieved against a clear sky. Accompanied by our attendant of
+the previous day, bearing bag and hammer, we set out a little before
+eleven for the north-western side of the island, by a road which winds
+along the central hollow. My friend showed me as we went, that on the
+edge of an eminence, on which the traveller journeying westwards catches
+the last glimpse of the chapel of St. Donan, there had once been a rude
+cross erected, and another rude cross on an eminence on which he catches
+the last glimpse of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> first; and that there had thus been a chain of
+stations 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,&mdash;the
+burial-place of the old Culdee,&mdash;came full in view. The unsteady
+devotion, that journeyed, fancy-bound, along the heights, to gloat over
+a dead man's bones, had its clue to carry it on in a straight line. Its
+trail was on the ground; it glided snake-like from cross to cross, in
+quest of dust; and, without its finger-posts to guide it, would have
+wandered devious. It is surely a better devotion that, instead of thus
+creeping over the earth to a mouldy sepulchre, can at once launch into
+the sky, secure of finding Him who once arose from one. In less than an
+hour we were descending on the Bay of Laig, a semi-circular indentation
+of the coast, about a mile in length, and, where it opens to the main
+sea, nearly two miles in breadth; with the noble island of Rum rising
+high in front, like some vast breakwater; and a meniscus of
+comparatively level land, walled in behind by a semi-circular rampart of
+continuous precipice, sweeping round its shores. There are few finer
+scenes in the Hebrides than that furnished by this island bay and its
+picturesque accompaniments,&mdash;none that break more unexpectedly on the
+traveller who descends upon it from the east; and rarely has it been
+seen, to greater advantage than on the delicate day, so soft, and yet so
+sunshiny and clear, on which I paid it my first visit.</p>
+
+<p>The island of Rum, with its abrupt sea-wall of rock, and its
+steep-pointed hills, that attain, immediately over the sea, an elevation
+of more than two thousand feet, loomed bold and high in the offing, some
+five miles away, but apparently much nearer. The four tall summits of
+the island rose clear against the sky like a group of pyramids; its
+lower slopes and precipices, variegated and relieved by graceful<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>
+alternations of light and shadow, and resting on their blue basement of
+sea, stood out with equal distinctness; but the entire middle space from
+end to end was hidden in a long horizontal stratum of gray cloud, edged
+atop with a lacing of silver. Such was the aspect of the noble
+breakwater in front. Fully two-thirds of the semi-circular rampart of
+rock which shuts in the crescent-shaped plain directly opposite lay in
+deep shadow; but the sun shone softly on the plain itself, brightening
+up many a dingy cottage, and many a green patch of corn; and the bay
+below stretched out, sparkling in the light. There is no part of the
+island so thickly inhabited as this flat meniscus. It is composed almost
+entirely of O&ouml;litic rocks, and bears atop, especially where an ancient
+oyster-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 would
+be no very difficult matter to drain, interpose their rough shag of dark
+green, and break the continuity, the plain around them waves with corn.
+Lying fair, green and populous within the sweep of its inaccessible
+rampart of rock, at least twice as lofty as the ramparts of Babylon of
+old, it reminds one of the suburbs of some ancient city lying embosomed,
+with all its dwellings and fields, within some roomy crescent of the
+city wall. We passed, ere we entered on the level, a steep-sided narrow
+dell, through which a small stream finds its way from the higher
+grounds, and which terminates at the upper end in an abrupt precipice,
+and a lofty but very slim cascade. "One of the few superstitions that
+still linger on the island," said my friend the minister, "is associated
+with that wild hollow. It is believed that shortly before a death takes
+place among the inhabitants, a tall withered female may be seen in the
+twilight, just yonder where the rocks open, washing a shroud in the
+stream. John, there, will perhaps tell you how she was spoken to on one
+occasion, by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> an over-bold, over-inquisitive islander, curious to know
+whose shroud she was preparing; and how she more than satisfied his
+curiosity, by telling him it was his own. It is a not uninteresting
+fact," added the minister, "that my poor people, since they have become
+more earnest about their religion, think very little about ghosts and
+spectres: their faith in the realities of the unseen world seems to have
+banished from their minds much of their old belief in its phantoms."</p>
+
+<p>In the rude fences that separate from each other the little farms in
+this plain, we find frequent fragments of the oyster bed, hardened into
+a tolerably compact limestone. It is seen to most advantage, however, in
+some of the deeper cuttings in the fields, where the surrounding matrix
+exists merely as an incoherent shale; and the shells may be picked out
+as entire as when they lay, ages before, in the mud, which we still see
+retaining around them its original color. They are small, thin,
+triangular, much resembling in form some specimens of the <i>Ostrea
+deltoidea</i>, but greatly less in size. The nearest resembling shell in
+Sowerby is the <i>Ostrea acuminata</i>,&mdash;an oyster of the clay that underlies
+the great O&ouml;lite of Bath. Few of the shells exceed an inch and a half in
+length, 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, to
+the depth of several feet, as shells on the heap at the door of a
+Newhaven fisherman, and extend over many acres. Where they lie open we
+can still detect the triangular disc of the hinge, with the single
+impression of the abductor muscle; and the foliaceous character of the
+shell remains in most instances as distinct as if it had undergone no
+mineral change. I have seen nowhere in Scotland, among the secondary
+formations, so unequivocal an oyster-bed; nor do such beds seem to be at
+all common in formations older than the Tertiary in England, though the
+oyster itself is sufficiently so. We find<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> Mantell stating, in his
+recent work ("Medals of Creation"), after first describing an immense
+oyster bed of the London Basin, that underlies the city (for what is now
+London was once an oyster-bed), that in the chalk below, though it
+contains several species of Ostrea, the shells are diffused
+promiscuously throughout the general mass. Leaving, however, these
+oysters of the O&ouml;lite, which never net inclosed nor drag disturbed,
+though they must have formed the food of many an extinct order of
+fish,&mdash;mayhap reptile,&mdash;we pass on in a south-western direction,
+descending in the geological scale as we go, until we reach the southern
+side of the Bay of Laig. And there, far below tide-mark, we find a
+dark-colored argillaceous shale of the Lias, greatly obscured by
+boulders of trap,&mdash;the only deposit of the Liasic formation in the
+island.</p>
+
+<p>A line of trap-hills that rises along the shore seems as if it had
+strewed half its materials over the beach. The rugged blocks lie thick
+as stones in a causeway, down to the line of low ebb,&mdash;memorials of a
+time when the surf dashed against the shattered bases of the trap-hills,
+now elevated considerably beyond its reach; and we can catch but partial
+glimpses of the shale below. Wherever access to it can be had, we find
+it richly fossiliferous; but its organisms, with the exception of its
+Belemnites, are very imperfectly preserved. I dug up from under the
+trap-blocks some of the common Liasic Ammonites of the north-eastern
+coast of Scotland, a few of the septa of a large Nautilus, broken pieces
+of wood, and half-effaced casts of what seems a branched coral; but only
+minute portions of the shells have been converted into stone; here and
+there a few chambers in the whorls of an Ammonite or Nautilus, though
+the outline of the entire organism lies impressed in the shale; and the
+ligneous and polyparious fossils we find in a still greater state of
+decay. The Belemnite alone, as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> is common with this robust fossil,&mdash;so
+often the sole survivor of its many contemporaries,&mdash;has preserved its
+structure entire. I disinterred from the shale good specimens of the
+Belemnite <i>sulcatus</i> and Belemnite <i>elongatus</i>, and found, detached on
+the surface of the bed, a fragment of a singularly large Belemnite, a
+full inch and a quarter in diameter, the species of which I could not
+determine.</p>
+
+<p>Returning by the track we came, we reach the bottom of the bay, which we
+find much obscured with sand and shingle; and pass northwards along its
+side, under a range of low sandstone precipices, with interposing grassy
+slopes, in which the fertile O&ouml;litic meniscus descends to the beach. The
+sandstone, white and soft, and occurring in thick beds, much resembles
+that of the O&ouml;lite of Sutherland. We detect in it few traces of fossils;
+now and then a carbonaceous marking, and now and then what seems a thin
+vein 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 in
+beds of a blue clay, intercalated with the sandstone, we find fossils in
+abundance, of a character less obscure. We spent a full half-hour in
+picking out shells from the bottom of a long dock-like hollow among the
+rocks, in which a bed of clay has yielded to the waves, while the strata
+on either side stand up over it like low wharfs on the opposite side of
+a river. The shells, though exceedingly fragile,&mdash;for they partake of
+the nature of the clayey matrix in which they are imbedded,&mdash;rise as
+entire as when they had died among the mud, years, mayhap ages, ere the
+sandstone had been deposited over them; and we were enabled at once to
+detect their extreme dissimilarity, as a group, to the shells of the
+Liasic deposit we had so lately quitted. We did not find in this bed a
+single Ammonite, Belemnite, or Nautilus; but chalky Bivalves, resembling
+our existing Tellina, in vast abundance,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> mixed with what seem to be a
+small Buccinum and a minute Trochus, with numerous rather equivocal
+fragments of a shell resembling an Oiliva. So thickly do they lie
+clustered together in this deposit, that in some patches where the
+sad-colored argillaceous ground is washed bare by the sea, it seems
+marbled with them into a light gray tint. The group more nearly
+resembles in type a recent one than any I have yet seen in a secondary
+deposit, except perhaps in the Weald of Moray, where we find in one of
+the layers a Planorbis scarce distinguishable from those of our ponds
+and ditches, mingled with a Paludina that seems as nearly modelled after
+the existing form. From the absence of the more characteristic shells of
+the O&ouml;lite, I am inclined to deem the deposit one of estuary origin. Its
+clays were probably thrown down, like the silts of so many of our
+rivers, in some shallow bay, where the waters of a descending stream
+mingled with those of the sea, and where, though shells nearly akin to
+our 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.</p>
+
+<p>We pass on towards the north. A thick bed of an extremely soft white
+sandstone presents here, for nearly half a mile together, its front to
+the waves, and exhibits, under the incessant wear of the surf, many
+singularly 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 through
+by a tall rugged archway; while the outer pier of the arch,&mdash;if pier we
+may term it,&mdash;worn to a skeleton, and jutting outwards with a knee-like
+angle, presents the appearance of a thin ungainly leg and splay foot,
+advanced, as if in awkward courtesy, to the breakers.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> But in a winter
+or two, judging from its present degree of attenuation, and the yielding
+nature of its material, which resembles a damaged mass of arrow-root,
+consolidated by lying in the leaky hold of a vessel, its persevering
+courtesies will be over, and pier and archway must lie in shapeless
+fragments on the beach. Wherever the surf has broken into the upper
+surface of this sandstone bed, and worn it down to nearly the level of
+the 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 in
+width from one to twelve feet; and the ramparts, rising from three to
+six feet over them, are perpendicular as the walls of houses, where they
+front each other, and descend on the opposite sides in irregular slopes.
+The iron block, with square groove and projecting ears, that receives
+the bar of a railway, and connects it with the stone below, represents
+not 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 converted
+the portions of soft sandstone in immediate contact with them into the
+consistence of quartz rock, have long since mouldered away, leaving but
+the hollow rectilinear rents which they had occupied, surmounted by the
+indurated walls which they had baked. Some of the most curious
+appearances, however, connected with the sandstone, though they occur
+chiefly in an upper bed, are exhibited by what seem fields of petrified
+mushrooms, of a gigantic size, that spread out in some places for
+hundreds of yards under the high-water level. These apparent mushrooms
+stand 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 to
+nearly two yards in diameter. In some specimens we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> find two heads
+joined together in a form resembling a squat figure of <i>eight</i>, of what
+printers term the Egyptian type, or, to borrow the illustration of
+M'Culloch, "like the ancient military projectile known by the name of
+double-headed shot;" in other specimens three heads have coalesced in a
+trefoil shape, or rather in a shape like that of an ace of clubs
+divested of the stem. By much the greater number, however, are
+spherical. They are composed of concretionary masses, consolidated, like
+the walls of the dykes, though under some different process, into a hard
+siliceous stone, that has resisted those disintegrating influences of
+the weather and the surf, under which the yielding matrix in which they
+were embedded has worn from around them. Here and there we find them
+lying detached on the beach, like huge shot, compared with which the
+greenstone balls of Mons Meg are but marbles for children to play with;
+in other cases they project from the mural front of rampart-like
+precipices, as if they had been showered into them by the ordnance of
+some besieging battery, and had stuck fast in the mason-work. Abbotsford
+has been described as a romance in stone and lime; we have here, on the
+shores of Laig, what seems a wild but agreeable tale, of the extravagant
+cast of "Christabel," or the "Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner," fretted
+into sandstone. But by far the most curious part of the story remains to
+be told.</p>
+
+<p>The hollows and fissures of the lower sandstone bed we find filled with
+a fine quartzose sand, which, from its pure white color, and the
+clearness with which the minute particles reflect the light, reminds one
+of accumulations of potato-flour drying in the sun. It is formed almost
+entirely of disintegrated particles of the soft sandstone; and as we at
+first find it occurring in mere handfuls, that seem as if they had been
+detached from the mass during the last few<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> tides, we begin to marvel to
+what quarter the missing materials of the many hundred cubic yards of
+rock, ground down along the shore in this bed during the last century or
+two, have been conveyed away. As we pass on northwards, however, we see
+the white sand occurring in much larger quantities,&mdash;here heaped up in
+little bent-covered hillocks above the reach of the tide,&mdash;there
+stretching out in level, ripple-marked wastes into the waves,&mdash;yonder
+rising in flat narrow spits among the shallows. At length we reach a
+small, irregularly-formed bay, a few hundred feet across, floored with
+it from side to side; and see it, on the one hand, descending deep into
+the 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. The
+sandstone bed that has been worn down to form it contains no fossils,
+save here and there a carbonaceous stem; but in an underlying harder
+stratum we occasionally find a few shells; and, with a specimen in my
+hand charged with a group of bivalves resembling the existing conchifera
+of our sandy beaches, I was turning aside this sand of the O&ouml;lite, so
+curiously reduced to its original state, and marking how nearly the
+recent shells that lay embedded in it resembled the extinct ones that
+had lain in it so long before, when I became aware of a peculiar sound
+that it yielded to the tread, as my companions paced over it. I struck
+it obliquely with my foot, where the surface lay dry and incoherent in
+the sun, and the sound elicited was a shrill, sonorous note, somewhat
+resembling that produced by a waxed thread, when tightened between the
+teeth and the hand, and tipped by the nail of the forefinger. I walked
+over it, striking it obliquely at each step, and with every blow the
+shrill note was repeated. My companions joined me; and we performed a
+concert, in which, if we could<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> boast of but little variety in the tones
+produced, we might at least challenge all Europe for an instrument of
+the kind which produced them. It seemed less wonderful that there should
+be music in the granite of Memnon, than in the loose O&ouml;litic sand of the
+Bay of Laig. As we marched over the drier tracts, an incessant <i>woo</i>,
+<i>woo</i>, <i>woo</i>, rose from the surface, that might be heard in the calm
+some twenty or thirty yards away; and we found that where a damp
+semi-coherent stratum lay at the depth of three or four inches beneath,
+and all was dry and incoherent above, the tones were loudest and
+sharpest, and most easily evoked by the foot. Our discovery,&mdash;for I
+trust I may regard it as such,&mdash;adds a third locality to two previously
+known ones, in which what may be termed the musical sand,&mdash;no unmeet
+counterpart to the "singing water" of the tale,&mdash;has now been found. And
+as the island of Eigg is considerably more accessible than <i>Jabel
+Nakous</i>, in Arabia Petr&aelig;a, or <i>Reg-Rawan</i>, in the neighborhood of Cabul,
+there must be facilities presented through the discovery which did not
+exist hitherto, for examining the phenomenon in acoustics which it
+exhibits,&mdash;a phenomenon, it may be added, which some of our greatest
+masters of the science have confessed their inability to explain.</p>
+
+<p><i>Jabel Nakous</i>, or the "Mountain of the Bell," is situated about three
+miles from the shores of the Gulf of Suez, in that land of wonders which
+witnessed for forty years the journeyings of the Israelites, and in
+which the granite peaks of Sinai and Horeb overlook an arid wilderness
+of rock and sand. It had been known for many ages by the wild Arab of
+the 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, a
+sound like the first low tones of an &AElig;olian harp stirs the hot
+breezeless air. It swells louder and louder in progressive undulations,
+till at length<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> the dry baked earth seems to vibrate under foot, and the
+startled animal snorts and rears, and struggles to break away. According
+to the Arabian account of the phenomenon, says Sir David Brewster, in
+his "Letters on Natural Magic," there is a convent miraculously
+preserved in the bowels of the hill; and the sounds are said to be those
+of the "<i>Nakous</i>, a long metallic ruler, suspended horizontally, which
+the priest strikes with a hammer, for the purpose of assembling the
+monks to prayer." There exists a tradition that on one occasion a
+wandering Greek saw the mountain open, and that, entering by the gap, he
+descended into the subterranean convent, where he found beautiful
+gardens and fountains of delicious water, and brought with him to the
+upper world, on his return, fragments of consecrated bread. The first
+European traveller who visited <i>Jabel Nakous</i>, says Sir David, was M.
+Seetzen, a German. He journeyed for several hours over arid sands, and
+under ranges of precipices inscribed by mysterious characters, that
+tell, haply, of the wanderings of Israel under Moses. And reaching,
+about noon, the base of the musical fountain, he found it composed of a
+white friable sandstone, and presenting on two of its sides sandy
+declivities. He watched beside it for an hour and a quarter, and then
+heard, for the first time, a low undulating sound, somewhat resembling
+that of a humming top, which rose and fell, and ceased and began, and
+then ceased again; and in an hour and three quarters after, when in the
+act of climbing along the declivity, he heard the sound yet louder and
+more prolonged. It seemed as if issuing from under his knees, beneath
+which the sand, disturbed by his efforts, was sliding downwards along
+the surface of the rock. Concluding that the sliding sand was the cause
+of the sounds, not an effect of the vibrations which they occasioned, he
+climbed to the top of one of the declivities, and, sliding downwards,
+exerted himself<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> with hands and feet to set the sand in motion. The
+effect produced far exceeded his expectations; the incoherent sand
+rolled under and around in a vast sheet; and so loud was the noise
+produced, that "the earth seemed to tremble beneath him to such a
+degree, that he states he should certainly have been afraid if he had
+been ignorant of the cause." At the time Sir David Brewster wrote
+(1832), the only other European who had visited <i>Jabel Nakous</i> was Mr.
+Gray, of University College, Oxford. This gentleman describes the noises
+he heard, but which he was unable to trace to their producing cause, as
+"beginning with a low continuous murmuring sound, which seemed to rise
+beneath his feet," but "which gradually changed into pulsations as it
+became louder, so as to resemble the striking of a clock, and became so
+strong at the end of five minutes <i>as to detach the sand</i>." The Mountain
+of the Bell has been since carefully explored by Lieutenant J. Welsted,
+of the Indian navy; and the reader may see it exhibited in a fine
+lithograph, in his travels, as a vast irregularly conical mass of broken
+stone, somewhat resembling one of our Highland cairns, though, of
+course, on a scale immensely more huge, with a steep, angular slope of
+sand resting in a hollow in one of its sides, and rising to nearly its
+apex. "It forms," says Lieutenant Welsted, "one of a ridge of low,
+calcareous hills, at a distance of three and a half miles from the
+beach, to which a sandy plain, extending with a gentle rise to their
+base, connects them. Its height, about four hundred feet, as well as the
+material of which it is composed,&mdash;a light-colored friable
+sandstone,&mdash;is about the same as the rest of the chain; but an inclined
+plane of almost impalpable sand rises at an angle of forty degrees with
+the horizon, and is bounded by a semi-circle of rocks, presenting
+broken, abrupt, and pinnacled forms, and extending to the base of this
+remarkable hill. Although their shape and arrangement<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> in some respects
+may be said to resemble a whispering gallery, yet I determined by
+experiment that their irregular surface renders them but ill adapted for
+the production of an echo. Seated at a rock at the base of the sloping
+eminence, I directed one of the Bedouins to ascend; and it was not until
+he 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, it
+spread out laterally and upwards, until a considerable portion of the
+surface was in motion. At their commencement the sounds might be
+compared to the faint strains of an &AElig;olian harp when its strings first
+catch the breeze: as the sand became more violently agitated by the
+increased velocity of the descent, the noise more nearly resembled that
+produced by drawing the moistened fingers over glass. As it reached the
+base, the reverberations attained the loudness of distant thunder,
+causing the rock on which we were seated to vibrate; and our
+camels,&mdash;animals not easily frightened,&mdash;became so alarmed that it was
+with difficulty their drivers could restrain them."</p>
+
+<p>"The hill of <i>Reg-Rawan</i> or the 'Moving Sand,'" says the late Sir
+Alexander 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 rude
+lithographic view, in the "Journal of the Asiatic Society" for 1838, "is
+about forty miles north of Cabul, towards Hindu-kush, and near the base
+of the mountains." It rises to the height of about four hundred feet, in
+an angle formed by the junction of two ridges of hills; and a sheet of
+sand, "pure as that of the sea-shore," and which slopes in an angle of
+forty degrees, reclines against it from base to summit. As represented
+in the lithograph, there projects over the steep sandy slope on each
+side, as in the "Mountain of the Bell," still steeper<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> barriers of rock;
+and we are told by Sir Alexander, that though "the mountains here are
+generally composed of granite or mica, at <i>Reg-Rawan</i> there is sandstone
+and lime." The situation of the sand is curious, he adds: it is seen
+from a great distance; and as there is none other in the neighborhood,
+"it might almost be imagined, from its appearance, that the hill had
+been 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 is
+emitted. On the first trial we distinctly heard two loud hollow sounds,
+such as would be given by a large drum;"&mdash;"there is an echo in the
+place; and the inhabitants have a belief that the sounds are only heard
+on Friday, when the saint of <i>Reg-Rawan</i>, who is interred hard by,
+permits." The phenomenon, like the resembling one in Arabia, seems to
+have attracted attention among the inhabitants of the country at an
+early period; and the notice of an eastern annalist, the Emperor Baber,
+who flourished late in the fifteenth century, and, like C&aelig;sar, conquered
+and recorded his conquests, still survives. He describes it as the
+<i>Khwaja Reg-Rawan</i>, "a small hill, in which there is a line of sandy
+ground reaching from the top to the bottom," from which there "issues in
+the summer season the sound of drums and nagarets." In connection with
+the fact that the musical sand of Eigg is composed of a disintegrated
+sandstone of the O&ouml;lite, it is not quite unworthy of notice that
+sandstone and lime enter into the composition of the hill of
+<i>Reg-Rawan</i>,&mdash;that the district in which the hill is situated is not a
+sandy one,&mdash;and that its slope of sonorous sand seems as if it had
+issued from its side. These various circumstances, taken together, lead
+to the inference that the sand may have originated in the decomposition
+of the rock beneath. It is further noticeable, that the <i>Jabel Nakous</i>
+is composed of a white friable sandstone, resembling that of the white
+friable<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> bed of the Bay of Laig, and that it belongs to nearly the same
+geological era. I owe to the kindness of Dr. Wilson of Bombay, two
+specimens which he picked up in Arabia Petr&aelig;a, of spines of Cidarites of
+the mace-formed type so common in the Chalk and O&ouml;lite, but so rare in
+the older formations. Dr. Wilson informs me that they are of frequent
+occurrence in the desert of Arabia Petr&aelig;a, where they are termed by the
+Arabs petrified olives; that nummulites are also abundant in the
+district; and that the various secondary rocks he examined in his route
+through it seem to belong to the Cretaceous group. It appears not
+improbable, therefore, that all the sonorous sand in the world yet
+discovered is formed, like that of Eigg, of disintegrated sandstone; and
+at least two-thirds of it of the disintegrated sandstone of secondary
+formations, newer than the Lias. But how it should be at all sonorous,
+whatever its age or origin, seems yet to be discovered. There are few
+substances that appear worse suited than sand to communicate to the
+atmosphere those vibratory undulations that are the producing causes of
+sound: the grains, even when sonorous individually, seem, from their
+inevitable contact with each other, to exist under the influence of that
+simple law in acoustics which arrests the tones of the ringing glass or
+struck bell, immediately as they are but touched by some foreign body,
+such as the hand or finger. The one grain, ever in contact with several
+other grains, is a glass or bell on which the hand always rests. And the
+difficulty has been felt and acknowledged. Sir John Herschel, in
+referring to the phenomenon of the <i>Jabel Nakous</i>, in his "Treatise on
+Sound," in the "Encyclop&aelig;dia Metropolitana," describes it as to him
+"utterly inexplicable;" and Sir David Brewster, whom I had the pleasure
+of meeting in December last, assured me it was not less a puzzle to him
+than to Sir John. An eastern traveller, who attributes its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> production
+to "a reduplication of impulse setting air in vibration in a focus of
+echo," means, I suppose, saying nearly the same thing as the two
+philosophers, and merely conveys his meaning in a less simple style.</p>
+
+<p>I have not yet procured what I expect to procure soon,&mdash;sand enough from
+the musical bay at Laig to enable me to make its sonorous qualities the
+subject of experiment at home. It seems doubtful whether a small
+quantity set in motion on an artificial slope will serve to evolve the
+phenomena which have rendered the Mountain of the Bell so famous.
+Lieutenant Welsted informs us, that when his Bedouin first set the sand
+in motion, there was scarce any perceptible sound heard;&mdash;it was rolling
+downwards for many yards around him to the depth of a foot, ere the
+music arose; and it is questionable whether the effect could be elicited
+with some fifty or sixty pounds weight of the sand of Eigg, on a slope
+of but at most a few feet, which it took many hundred weight of sand of
+<i>Jabel Nakous</i>, and a slope of many yards, to produce. But in the
+stillness of a close room, it is just possible that it may. I have,
+however, little doubt, that from small quantities the sound evoked by
+the foot on the shore may be reproduced: enough will lie within the
+reach of experiment to demonstrate the strange difference which exists
+between this sonorous sand of the O&ouml;lite, and the common unsonorous sand
+of our sea-beaches; and it is certainly worth while examining into the
+nature and producing causes of a phenomenon so curious in itself, and
+which has been characterized by one of the most distinguished of living
+philosophers as "the most celebrated of all the acoustic wonders which
+the natural world presents to us." In the forthcoming number of the
+"North British Review,"&mdash;which appears on Monday first,<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>&mdash;the reader
+will find the sonorous sand of Eigg referred to, in an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> article the
+authorship of which will scarcely be mistaken. "We have here," says the
+writer, after first describing the sounds of <i>Jabel Nakous</i>, and then
+referring to those of Eigg, "the phenomenon in its simple state,
+disembarrassed from reflecting rocks, from a hard bed beneath, and from
+cracks and cavities that might be supposed to admit the sand; and
+indicating as its cause, either the accumulated vibration of the air
+when struck by the driven sand, or the accumulated sounds occasioned by
+the mutual impact of the particles of sand against each other. If a
+musket-ball passing through the air emits a whistling note, each
+individual particle of sand must do the same, however faint be the note
+which it yields; and the accumulation of these infinitesimal vibrations
+must constitute an audible sound, varying with the number and velocity
+of moving particles. In like manner, if two plates of silex or quartz,
+which are but large crystals of sand, give out a musical sound when
+mutually struck, the impact or collision of two minute crystals or
+particles of sand must do the same, in however inferior a degree; and
+the union of all these sounds, though singly imperceptible, may
+constitute the musical notes of the Bell Mountain, or the lesser sounds
+of the trodden sea-beach at Eigg."</p>
+
+<p>Here is a vigorous effort made to unlock the difficulty. I should,
+however, have mentioned to the philosophic writer,&mdash;what I inadvertently
+failed to do,&mdash;that the sounds elicited from the sand of Eigg seem as
+directly evoked by the slant blow dealt it by the foot, as the sounds
+similarly evoked from a highly waxed floor, or a board strewed over with
+ground rosin. The sharp shrill note follows the stroke, altogether
+independently of the grains driven into the air. My omission may serve
+to 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 incurring
+the risk of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> being even tediously minute in their descriptions, to the
+danger of being inadequately brief in them. But, alas! for purposes of
+exact science, rarely are verbal descriptions otherwise than inadequate.
+Let us look, for example, at the various accounts given us of <i>Jabel
+Nakous</i>. There are strange sounds heard proceeding from a hill in
+Arabia, and various travellers set themselves to describe them. The
+tones are those of the convent <i>Nakous</i>, says the wild Arab;&mdash;there must
+be a convent buried under the hill. More like the sounds of a
+humming-top, remarks a phlegmatic German traveller. Not quite like them,
+says an English one in an Oxford gown;&mdash;they resemble rather the
+striking of a clock. Nay, listen just a little longer and more
+carefully, says a second Englishman, with epaulettes on his shoulder:
+"the sounds at their commencement may be compared to the faint strains
+of an &AElig;olian harp when its strings first catch the breeze," but anon, as
+the agitation of the sand increases, they "more nearly resemble those
+produced 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 the
+sound of drums and nagarets that issues from the sand." All we really
+know of this often-described music of the desert, after reading all the
+descriptions, is, that its tones bear certain analogies to certain other
+tones,&mdash;analogies that seem stronger in one direction to one ear, and
+stronger in another direction to an ear differently constituted, but
+which do not exactly resemble any other sounds in nature. The strange
+music of <i>Jabel Nakous</i>, as a combination of tones, is essentially
+unique.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span></p>
+<h3>CHAPTER V.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="hang">Trap-Dykes&mdash;"Cotton Apples"&mdash;Alternation of Lacustrine with Marine
+Remains&mdash;Analogy from the Beds of Esk&mdash;Aspect of the Island on its
+narrow Front&mdash;The Puffin&mdash;Ru-Stoir&mdash;Development of Old Red
+Sandstone&mdash;Striking Columnar character of Ru-Stoir&mdash;Discovery of
+Reptilian Remains&mdash;John Stewart's wonder at the Bones in the
+Stones&mdash;Description of the Bones&mdash;"Dragons, Gorgons, and
+Chimeras"&mdash;Exploration and Discovery pursued&mdash;The Midway
+Shieling&mdash;A Celtic Welcome&mdash;Return of the Yacht&mdash;"Array of Fossils
+new to Scotch Geology"&mdash;A Geologist's Toast&mdash;Hoffman and his
+Fossil. </p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">We</span> leave behind us the musical sand, and reach the point of the
+promontory which forms the northern extremity of the Bay of Laig.
+Wherever the beach has been swept bare, we see it floored with
+trap-dykes worn down to the level, but in most places accumulations of
+huge blocks of various composition cover it up, concealing the nature of
+the rock beneath. The long semi-circular wall of precipice which,
+sweeping inwards at the bottom of the bay, leaves to the inhabitants
+between its base and the beach their fertile meniscus of land, here
+abuts upon the coast. We see its dark forehead many hundred feet
+overhead, and the grassy platform beneath, now narrowed to a mere talus,
+sweeping upwards to its base from the shore,&mdash;steep, broken, lined thick
+with horizontal pathways, mottled over with ponderous masses of rock.</p>
+
+<p>Among the blocks that load the beach, and render our onward progress
+difficult and laborious, we detect occasional fragments of an
+amygdaloidal basalt, charged with a white zeolite, consisting of
+crystals so extremely slender that the balls, with their light fibrous
+contents, remind us of cotton<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> apples divested of the seeds. There
+occur, though more rarely, masses of a hard white sandstone, abounding
+in 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 with
+compressed shells, chiefly bivalves, that it may be regarded as a shell
+breccia. There occur, besides, slabs of fibrous limestone, exactly
+resembling 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 fragmentary
+masses,&mdash;all of them, at least, except the fibrous limestone, which
+occurs in mere plank-like bands,&mdash;represent distinct beds, of which this
+part of the island is composed, and which present their edges, like
+courses of ashlar in a building, in the splendid section that stretches
+from the tall brow of the precipice to the beach; though in the slopes
+of the talus, where the lower beds appear in but occasional protrusions
+and land-slips, we find some difficulty in tracing their order of
+succession.</p>
+
+<p>Near the base of the slope, where the soil has been undermined and the
+rock laid bare by the waves, there occur beds of a bituminous black
+shale,&mdash;resembling the dark shales so common in the Coal Measures,&mdash;that
+seem to be of fresh water or estuary origin. Their fossils, though
+numerous, are ill preserved; but we detect in them scales and plates of
+fishes, at least two species of minute bivalves, one of which very much
+resembles a Cyclas; and in some of the fragments, shells of Cypris lie
+embedded in considerable abundance. After all that has been said and
+written by way of accounting for those alternations of lacustrine with
+marine remains, which are of such frequent occurrence in the various
+formations, secondary and tertiary, from the Coal Measures downwards, it
+does seem strange enough<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> that the estuary, or fresh-water lake, should
+so often in the old geologic periods have changed places with the sea.
+It is comparatively easy to conceive that the inner Hebrides should have
+once existed as a broad ocean sound, bounded on one or either side by
+O&ouml;litic islands, from which streams descended, sweeping with them, to
+the marine depths, productions, animal and vegetable, of the land. But
+it is less easy to conceive, that in that sound, the area covered by the
+ocean one year should have been covered by a fresh-water lake in perhaps
+the next, and then by the ocean again a few years after. And yet among
+the O&ouml;litic deposits of the Hebrides evidence seems to exist that
+changes of this nature actually took place. I am not inclined to found
+much on the apparently fresh-water character of the bituminous shales of
+Eigg;&mdash;the embedded fossils are all too obscure to be admitted in
+evidence; but there can exist no doubt that fresh water, or at least
+estuary formations, do occur among the marine O&ouml;lites of the Hebrides.
+Sir R. Murchison, one of the most cautious, as he is certainly one of
+the most distinguished, of living geologists, found in a northern
+district of Skye, in 1826, a deposit containing Cyclas, Paludina,
+Neritina,&mdash;all shells of unequivocally fresh-water origin,&mdash;which must
+have been formed, he concludes, in either a lake or estuary. What had
+been sea at one period had been estuary or lake at another. In every
+case, however, in which these intercalated deposits are restricted to
+single strata of no great thickness, it is perhaps safer to refer their
+formation to the agency of temporary land-floods, than to that of
+violent changes of level, now elevating and now depressing the surface.
+There occur, for instance, among the marine O&ouml;lites of Brora,&mdash;the
+discovery of Mr. Robertson, of Inverugie,&mdash;two strata containing
+fresh-water fossils in abundance; but the one stratum is little more
+than an inch in thickness,&mdash;the other<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> little more than a foot; and it
+seems considerably more probable, that such deposits should have owed
+their existence to extraordinary land-floods, like those which in 1829
+devastated the province of Moray, and covered over whole miles of marine
+beach with the spoils of land and river, than that a sea-bottom should
+have been elevated for their production, into a fresh-water lake, and
+then let down into a sea-bottom again. We find it recorded in the
+"Shepherd's Calendar," that after the thaw which followed the great
+snow-storm of 1794, there were found on a part of the sands of the
+Solway Frith known as the Beds of Esk, where the tide disgorges much of
+what is thrown into it by the rivers, "one thousand eight hundred and
+forty sheep, nine black cattle, three horses, two men, one woman,
+forty-five dogs, and one hundred and eighty hares, beside a number of
+meaner animals." A similar storm in an earlier time, with a soft
+sea-bottom prepared to receive and retain its spoils, would have formed
+a fresh-water stratum intercalated in a marine deposit.</p>
+
+<p>Rounding the promontory, we lose sight of the Bay of Laig, and find the
+narrow front of the island that now presents itself exhibiting the
+appearance of a huge bastion. The green talus slopes upwards, as its
+basement, for full three hundred feet; and a noble wall of perpendicular
+rock, that towers over and beyond for at least four hundred feet more,
+forms the rampart. Save towards the sea, the view is of but limited
+extent; we see it restricted, on the landward side, to the bold face of
+the bastion; and in a narrow and broken dell that runs nearly parallel
+to the shore for a few hundred yards between the top of the talus and
+the base of the rampart,&mdash;a true covered way,&mdash;we see but the rampart
+alone. But the dizzy front of black basalt, dark as night, save where a
+broad belt of light-colored sandstone traverses it in an angular
+direction, like a white<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> sash thrown across a funeral robe,&mdash;the
+fantastic peaks and turrets in which the rock terminates atop,&mdash;the
+masses of broken ruins, roughened with moss and lichen, that have fallen
+from above, and lie scattered at its base,&mdash;the extreme loneliness of
+the place, for we have left behind us every trace of the human
+family,&mdash;and the expanse of solitary sea which it commands,&mdash;all
+conspire to render the scene a profoundly imposing one. It is one of
+those scenes in which a man feels that he is little, and that nature is
+great. There is no precipice in the island in which the puffin so
+delights to build as among the dark pinnacles overhead, or around which
+the 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 at
+the base of the rock. All lay dark below; and the red light atop, half
+absorbed by the dingy hues of the stone, shone with a gleam so faint and
+melancholy, that it served but to deepen the effect of the shadows.</p>
+
+<p>The puffin, a comparatively rare bird in the inner Hebrides, builds, I
+was told, in great numbers in the continuous line of precipice which,
+after sweeping for a full mile round the Bay of Laig, forms the
+pinnacled rampart here, and then, turning another angle of the island,
+runs on parallel to the coast for about six miles more. In former times
+the puffin furnished the islanders, as in St. Kilda, with a staple
+article of food, in those hungry months of summer in which the stores of
+the 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, save
+when they cannot help it; and the introduction of the potato has done
+much to put out the practice of climbing for the bird, except among a
+few young lads, who find excitement enough in the work to pursue it for
+its own sake, as an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> amusement. I found among the islanders what was
+said to be a piece of the natural history of the puffin, sufficiently
+apocryphal to remind one of the famous passage in the history of the
+barnacle, which traced the lineage of the bird to one of the
+pedunculated cirripedes, and the lineage of the cirripede to a log of
+wood. The puffin feeds its young, say the islanders, on an oily scum of
+the sea, which renders it such an unwieldy mass of fat, that about the
+time when it should be beginning to fly, it becomes unable to get out of
+its hole. The parent bird, not in the least puzzled, however, treats the
+case medicinally, and,&mdash;like mothers of another two-legged genus, who,
+when their daughters get over stout, put them through a course of
+reducing acids to bring them down,&mdash;feeds it on sorrel leaves for
+several days together, till, like a boxer under training, it gets
+thinned to the proper weight, and becomes able, not only to get out of
+its cell, but also to employ its wings.</p>
+
+<p>We pass through the hollow, and, reaching the farther edge of the
+bastion, towards the east, see a new range of prospect opening before
+us. There is first a long unbroken wall of precipice,&mdash;a continuation of
+the tall rampart overhead,&mdash;relieved along its irregular upper line by
+the blue sky. We mark the talus widening at its base, and expanding, as
+on the shores of the Bay of Laig, into an irregular grassy platform,
+that, sinking midway into a ditch-like hollow, rises again towards the
+sea, and presents to the waves a perpendicular precipice of redstone.
+The sinking sun shone brightly this evening; and the warm hues of the
+precipice, which bears the name of <i>Ru-Stoir</i>,&mdash;the Red
+Head,&mdash;strikingly contrasted with the pale and dark tints of the
+alternating basalts and sandstones in the taller cliff behind. The
+ditch-like hollow, which seems to indicate the line of a fault, cuts off
+this red headland from all the other rocks of the island, from which it
+appears to differ as considerably<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> in texture as in hue. It consists
+mainly of thick beds of a pale red stone, which M'Culloch regarded as a
+trap, and which, intercalated with here and there a thin band of shale,
+and presenting not a few of the mineralogical appearances of what
+geologists of the school of the late Mr. Cunningham term Primary Old Red
+Sandstone, in some cases has been laid down as a deposit of Old Red
+proper, abutting in the line of a fault on the neighboring O&ouml;lites and
+basalts. In the geological map which I carried with me,&mdash;not one of high
+authority however,&mdash;I found it actually colored as a patch of this
+ancient system. The Old Red Sandstone is largely developed in the
+neighboring island of Rum, in the line of which the <i>Ru-Stoir</i> seems to
+have a more direct bearing than any of the other deposits of Eigg; and
+yet the conclusion regarding this red headland merely adds one proof
+more to the many furnished already, of the inadequacy of mineralogical
+testimony, when taken in evidence regarding the eras of the geologist.
+The hard red beds of <i>Ru-Stoir</i> belong, as I was fortunate enough this
+evening 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 more
+unequivocal than have been yet exhibited by any other deposit in
+Scotland.</p>
+
+<p>What first strikes the eye, in approaching the <i>Ru-Stoir</i> from the west,
+is the columnar character of the stone. The precipices rise immediately
+over the sea, in rude colonnades of from thirty to fifty feet in height;
+single pillars, that have fallen from their places in the line, and
+exhibit a tenacity rare among the trap-rocks,&mdash;for they occur in
+unbroken lengths of from ten to twelve feet,&mdash;lie scattered below; and
+in several places where the waves have joined issue with the precipices
+in the line on which the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> base of the columns rest, and swept away the
+supporting foundation, the colonnades open into roomy caverns, that
+resound to the dash of the sea. Wherever the spray lashes, the pale red
+hue of the stone prevails, and the angles of the polygonal shafts are
+rounded; while higher up all is sharp-edged, and the unweathered surface
+is covered by a gray coat of lichens. The tenacity of the prostrate
+columns first drew my attention. The builder scant of materials would
+have experienced no difficulty in finding among them sufficient lintels
+for apertures from eight to twelve feet in width. I was next struck with
+the peculiar composition of the stone; it much rather resembles an
+altered sandstone, in at least the weathered specimens, than a trap, and
+yet there seemed nothing to indicate that it was an <i>Old Red</i> Sandstone.
+Its columnar structure bore evidence to the action of great heat; and
+its pale red color was exactly that which the O&ouml;litic sandstones of the
+island, 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 I
+expected 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 much
+deeper red than the general mass, and much more resembling Old Red
+Sandstone, I succeeded in detecting several shells, identical with those
+of the deposit of blue clay described in a former chapter. There
+occurred in it the small univalve resembling a Trochus, together with
+the oblong bivalve, somewhat like a Tellina; and, spread thickly
+throughout the block, lay fragments of coprolitic matter, and the scales
+and teeth of fishes. Night was coming on, and the tide had risen on the
+beach; but I hammered lustily, and laid open in the dark red shale a
+vertebral joint, a rib, and a parallelogramical fragment of solid bone,
+none<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> of which could have belonged to any fish. It was an interesting
+moment for the curtain to drop over the promontory of <i>Ru-Stoir</i>; I had
+thus already found in connection with it well nigh as many reptilian
+remains as had been found in all Scotland before,&mdash;for there could exist
+no doubt that the bones I laid open were such; and still more
+interesting discoveries promised to await the coming morning, and a less
+hasty survey. We found a hospitable meal awaiting us at a picturesque
+old two-story house, with, what is rare in the island, a clump of trees
+beside it, which rises on the northern angle of the O&ouml;litic meniscus;
+and after our day's hard work in the fresh sea-air, we did ample justice
+to the viands. Dark night had long set in ere we reached our vessel.</p>
+
+<p>Next day was Saturday; and it behooved my friend, the minister,&mdash;as
+scrupulously careful in his pulpit preparations for the islanders of
+Eigg as if his congregation were an Edinburgh one,&mdash;to remain on board,
+and study his discourse for the morrow. I found, however, no unmeet
+companion for my excursion in his trusty mate John Stewart. John had not
+very much English, and I had no Gaelic; but we contrived to understand
+one another wonderfully well; and ere evening I had taught him to be
+quite as expert in hunting dead crocodiles as myself. We reached the
+<i>Ru-Stoir</i>, and set hard to work with hammer and chisel. The fragments
+of red shale were strewed thickly along the shore for at least three
+quarters of a mile; wherever the red columnar rock appeared, there lay
+the shale, in water-worn blocks, more or less indurated; but the beach
+was covered over with shingle and detached masses of rock, and we could
+nowhere find it <i>in situ</i>. A winter storm powerful enough to wash the
+beach bare might do much to assist the explorer. There is a piece of
+shore on the eastern coast of Scotland, on which for years<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> together I
+used to pick up nodular masses of lime containing fish of the Old Red
+Sandstone; but nowhere in the neighborhood could I find the ichthyolite
+bed in which they had originally formed. The storm of a single night
+swept the beach; and in the morning the ichthyolites lay revealed <i>in
+situ</i> under a stratum of shingle which I had a hundred times examined,
+but which, though scarce a foot in thickness, had concealed from me the
+ichthyolite bed for five twelvemonths together!</p>
+
+<p>Wherever the altered shale of <i>Ru-Stoir</i> has been thrown high on the
+beach, and exposed to the influences of the weather, we find it fretted
+over with minute organisms, mostly the scales, plates, bones, and teeth
+of fishes. The organisms, as is frequently the case, seem
+indestructible, while the hard matrix in which they are embedded has
+weathered from around them. Some of the scales present the rhomboidal
+outline, and closely resemble those of the <i>Lepidotus Minor</i> of the
+Weald; others approximate in shape to an isosceles triangle. The teeth
+are of various forms: some of them, evidently palatal, are mere blunted
+protuberances glittering with enamel,&mdash;some of them present the usual
+slim, thorn-like type common in the teeth of the existing fish of our
+coasts,&mdash;some again are squat and angular, and rest on rectilinear
+bases, 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 the
+occipital plates, some present a smooth enamelled surface, while some
+are thickly tuberculated,&mdash;each tubercle bearing a minute depression in
+its apex, like a crater on the summit of a rounded hill. We find
+reptilian bones in abundance,&mdash;a thing new to Scotch geology,&mdash;and in a
+state of keeping peculiarly fine. They not a little puzzled John
+Stewart: he could not resist the evidence of his senses: they were
+bones, he said, real bones,&mdash;there could be no doubt of that: <i>there</i>
+were the joints of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> a backbone, with the hole the brain-marrow had
+passed through; and <i>there</i> were shank-bones and ribs, and fishes'
+teeth; but how, he wondered, had they all got into the very heart of the
+hard red stones? He had seen what was called wood, he said, dug out of
+the side of the Scuir, without being quite certain whether it was wood
+or no; but there could be no uncertainty here. I laid open numerous
+vertebr&aelig; of various forms,&mdash;some with long spinous processes rising over
+the body or <i>centrum</i> of the bone,&mdash;which I found in every instance,
+unlike that of the Ichthyosaurus, only moderately concave on the
+articulating faces; in others the spinous process seemed altogether
+wanting. Only two of the number bore any mark of the suture which
+unites, in most reptiles, the annular process to the centrum; in the
+others both centrum and process seemed anchylosed, as in quadrupeds,
+into one bone; and there remained no scar to show that the suture had
+ever existed. In some specimens the ribs seem to have been articulated
+to the sides of the centrum; in others there is a transverse process,
+but no marks of articulation. Some of the vertebr&aelig; are evidently dorsal,
+some cervical, one apparently caudal; and almost all agree in showing in
+front two little eyelets, to which the great descending artery seems to
+have sent out blood-vessels in pairs. The more entire ribs I was lucky
+enough to disinter have, as in those of crocodileans, double heads; and
+a part of a fibula, about four inches in length, seems also to belong to
+this ancient family. A large proportion of the other bones are evidently
+Plesiosaurian. I found the head of the flat humerus so characteristic of
+the extinct order to which the Plesiosaurus has been assigned, and two
+digital bones of the paddle, that, from their comparatively slender and
+slightly curved form, so unlike the digitals of its cogener the
+Ichthyosaurus, could have belonged evidently to no other reptile. I
+observed, too, in the slightly curved articulations<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> of not a few of the
+vertebr&aelig;, the gentle convexity in the concave centre, which, if not
+peculiar to the Plesiosaurus, is at least held to distinguish it from
+most of its contemporaries. Among the various nondescript organisms of
+the shale, I laid open a smooth angular bone, hollowed something like a
+grocer's scoop; a three-pronged caltrop-looking bone, that seems to have
+formed part of a pelvic arch; another angular bone, much massier than
+the first, regarding the probable position of which I could not form a
+conjecture, but which some of my geological friends deem cerebral; an
+extremely dense bone, imperfect at each end, which presents the
+appearance of a cylinder slightly flattened; and various curious
+fragments, which, with what our Scotch museums have not yet
+acquired,&mdash;entire reptilian fossils for the purposes of
+comparison,&mdash;might, I doubt not, be easily assigned to their proper
+places. It was in vain that, leaving John to collect the scattered
+pieces of shale in which the bones occurred, I set myself again and
+again to discover the bed from which they had been detached. The tide
+had fallen, and a range of skerries lay temptingly off, scarce a hundred
+yards from the water's edge: the shale beds might be among them, with
+Plesiosauri and crocodiles stretching entire; and fain would I have swum
+off to them, as I had done oftener than once elsewhere, with my hammer
+in my teeth, and with shirt and drawers in my hat; but a tall brown
+forest of kelp and tangle in which even a seal might drown, rose thick
+and perilous round both shore and skerries; a slight swell was felting
+the long fronds together; and I deemed it better, on the whole, that the
+discoveries I had already made should be recorded, than that they should
+be lost to geology, mayhap for a whole age, in the attempt to extend
+them.</p>
+
+<p>The water, beautifully transparent, permitted the eye to penetrate into
+its green depths for many fathoms around,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> though every object
+presented, through the agitated surface, an uncertain and fluctuating
+outline. I could see, however, the pink-colored urchin warping himself
+up, by his many cables, along the steep rock-sides; the green crab
+stalking along the gravelly bottom; a scull of small rock-cod darting
+hither and thither among the tangle-roots; and a few large medus&aelig; slowly
+flapping their continuous fins of gelatine in the opener spaces, a few
+inches under the surface. Many curious families had their
+representatives within the patch of sea which the eye commanded; but the
+strange creatures that had once inhabited it by thousands, and whose
+bones still lay sepulchred on its shores, had none. How strange, that
+the identical sea heaving around stack and skerry in this remote corner
+of the Hebrides should have once been thronged by reptile shapes more
+strange than poet ever imagined,&mdash;dragons, gorgons and chimeras! Perhaps
+of all the extinct reptiles, the Plesiosaurus was the most
+extraordinary. An English geologist has described it, grotesquely
+enough, and yet most happily, as a snake <i>threaded</i> through a tortoise.
+And here on this very spot, must these monstrous dragons have disported
+and fed; here must they have raised their little reptile heads and long
+swan-like necks over the surface, to watch an antagonist or select a
+victim; here must they have warred and wedded, and pursued all the
+various instincts of their unknown natures. A strange story, surely,
+considering it is a true one! I may mention in the passing, that some of
+the fragments of the shale in which the remains are embedded have been
+baked by the intense heat into an exceedingly hard, dark-colored stone,
+somewhat resembling basalt. I must add further, that I by no means
+determine the rock with which we find it associated to be in reality an
+altered sandstone. Such is the appearance which it presents where
+weathered; but its general aspect is that of a porphyritic<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> trap. Be it
+what it may, the fact is not at all affected, that the shores, wherever
+it occurs on this tract of insular coast, are strewed with reptilian
+remains of the O&ouml;lite.</p>
+
+<p>The day passed pleasantly in the work of exploration and discovery; the
+sun had already declined far in the west; and, bearing with us our
+better fossils, we set out, on our return, by the opposite route to that
+along the Bay of Laig, which we had now thrice walked over. The grassy
+talus so often mentioned continues to run on the eastern side of the
+island for about six miles, between the sea and the inaccessible rampart
+of precipice behind. It varies in breadth from about two to four hundred
+yards; the rampart rises over it from three to five hundred feet; and a
+noble expanse of sea, closed in the distance by a still nobler curtain
+of blue hills, spreads away from its base: and it was along this grassy
+talus that our homeward road lay. Let the Edinburgh reader imagine the
+fine walk under Salisbury Crags lengthened some twenty times,&mdash;the line
+of precipices above heightened some five or six times,&mdash;the gravelly
+slope at the base not much increased in altitude, but developed
+transversely into a green undulating belt of hilly pasture, with here
+and there a sunny slope level enough for the plough, and here and there
+a rough wilderness of detached crags and broken banks; let him further
+imagine the sea sweeping around the base of this talus, with the nearest
+opposite land&mdash;bold, bare and undulating atop&mdash;some six or eight miles
+distant; and he will have no very inadequate idea of the peculiar and
+striking scenery through which, this evening, our homeward route lay. I
+have scarce ever walked over a more solitary tract. The sea shuts it in
+on the one hand, and the rampart of rocks on the other; there occurs
+along its entire length no other human dwelling than a lonely summer
+shieling; for full one-half the way we saw no trace of man; and the
+wildness of the few cattle which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> we occasionally startled in the
+hollows showed us that man was no very frequent visitor among them.
+About half an hour before sunset we reached the midway shieling.</p>
+
+<p>Rarely have I seen a more interesting spot, or one that, from its utter
+loneliness, so impressed the imagination. The shieling, a rude
+low-roofed erection of turf and stone, with a door in the centre some
+five feet in height or so, but with no window, rose on the grassy slope
+immediately in front of the vast continuous rampart. A slim pillar of
+smoke ascends from the roof, in the calm, faint and blue within the
+shadow of the precipice, but it caught the sunlight in its ascent, and
+blushed, ere it melted into the ether, a ruddy brown. A streamlet came
+pouring from above in a long white thread, that maintained its
+continuity unbroken for at least two-thirds of the way; and then,
+untwisting into a shower of detached drops, that pattered loud and
+vehemently in a rocky recess, it again gathered itself up into a lively
+little stream, and, sweeping past the shieling, expanded in front into a
+circular pond, at which a few milch cows were leisurely slaking their
+thirst. The whole grassy talus, with a strip mayhap a hundred yards
+wide, of deep green sea, lay within the shadow of the tall rampart; but
+the red light fell, for many a mile beyond, on the glassy surface; and
+the distant Cuchullin Hills, so dark at other times, had all their
+prominent slopes and jutting precipices tipped with bronze; while here
+and there a mist streak, converted into bright flame, stretched along
+their peaks or rested on their sides. Save the lonely shieling, not a
+human dwelling was in sight. An island girl of eighteen, more than
+merely good-looking, though much embrowned by the sun, had come to the
+door to see who the unwonted visitors might be, and recognized in John
+Stewart an old acquaintance. John informed her in her own language that
+I was Mr. Swanson's sworn friend, and not a <i>Moderate</i>, but one of their
+own people, and that I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> had fasted all day, and had come for a drink of
+milk. The name of her minister proved a strongly recommendatory one: I
+have not yet seen the true Celtic interjection of welcome,&mdash;the kindly
+"O o o,"&mdash;attempted on paper; but I had a very agreeable specimen of it
+on this occasion, <i>viva voce</i>. And as she set herself to prepare for us
+a 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 little
+girls, engaged in keeping up the blaze under a large pot, but sadly
+diverted from their work by our entrance; while the other end was
+occupied 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 was
+occupied by the utensils and produce of the dairy,&mdash;flat wooden vessels
+of milk, a butter-churn, and a tub half-filled with curd; while a few
+cheeses, soft from the press, lay on a shelf above. The little girls
+were but occasional visitors, who had come, out of a juvenile frolic, to
+pass the night in the place; but I was informed by John that the
+shieling had two other inmates, young women, like the one so hospitably
+engaged in our behalf, who were out at the milking, and that they lived
+here all alone for several months every year, when the pasturage was at
+its best, employed in making butter and cheese for their master, worthy
+Mr. M'Donald of Keill. They must often feel lonely when night has closed
+darkly over mountain and sea, or in those dreary days of mist and rain
+so common in the Hebrides, when nought may be seen save the few
+shapeless crags that stud the nearer hillocks around them, and nought
+heard save the moaning of the wind in the precipices above, or the
+measured dash of the wave on the wild beach below. And yet they would do
+ill to exchange their solitary life and rude shieling for the village
+dwellings and gregarious habits of the females who ply their rural
+labors in bands among the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> rich fields of the Lowlands, or for the
+unwholesome backroom and weary task-work of the city seamstress. The
+sunlight was fading from the higher hill-tops of Skye and Glenelg as we
+bade farewell to the lonely shieling and the hospitable island girl.</p>
+
+<p>The evening deepened as we hurried southwards along the scarce visible
+pathway, 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 more
+picturesque peculiarities of the continuous rampart came out more
+strongly as a feature of the scene than when a strip of shade rested
+along the face of the rock, imparting to it a retiring character, and
+all was sunshine beyond. A thick bed of white sandstone, as continuous
+as the rampart itself, runs nearly horizontally about midway in the
+precipice for mile after mile, and, standing out in strong contrast with
+the dark-colored trap above and below, reminds one of a belt of white
+hewn work in a basalt house front, or rather,&mdash;for there occurs above a
+second continuous strip, of an olive hue, the color assumed, on
+weathering by a bed of amygdaloid,&mdash;of a piece of dingy old-fashioned
+furniture, inlaid with one stringed belt of bleached holly, and another
+of faded green-wood. At some of the more accessible points I climbed to
+the line of white belting, and found it to consist of the same soft
+quartzy sandstone that in the Bay of Laig furnishes the musical sand.
+Lower down there occur, alternating with the trap, beds of shale and of
+blue clay, but they are lost mostly in the talus. Ill adapted to resist
+the frosts and rains of winter, their exposed edges have mouldered into
+a loose soil, now thickly covered over with herbage; and, but for the
+circumstance that we occasionally find them laid bare by a water-course,
+we would scarce be aware of their existence at all. The shale exhibits
+everywhere,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> as on the opposite side of the <i>Ru-Stoir</i>, faint
+impressions of a minute shell resembling a Cyclas, and ill-preserved
+fragments of fish-scales. The blue clay I found at one spot where the
+pathway had cut deep into the hill-side, richly charged with bivalves of
+the species I had seen so abundant in the resembling clay of the Bay of
+Laig; but the closing twilight prevented me from ascertaining whether it
+also contained the characteristic univalves of the deposit, and whether
+its shells,&mdash;for they seem identical with those of the altered shales of
+the <i>Ru-Stoir</i>,&mdash;might not be associated, like these, with reptilian
+remains. Night fell fast, and the streaks of mist that had mottled the
+hills at sunset began to spread gray over the heavens in a continuous
+curtain; but there was light enough left to show me that the trap became
+more columnar as we neared our journey's end. One especial jutting in
+the rock presented in the gloom the appearance of an ancient portico,
+with pediment and cornice, such as the traveller sees on the hill-sides
+of Petr&aelig;a in front of some old tomb; but it may possibly appear less
+architectural by day. At length, passing from under the long line of
+rampart, just as the stars that had begun to twinkle over it were
+disappearing, one after one, in the thickening vapor, we reached the
+little bay of Kildonan, and found the boat waiting us on the beach. My
+friend the minister, as I entered the cabin, gathered up his notes from
+the table, and gave orders for the tea-kettle; and I spread out before
+him&mdash;a happy man&mdash;an array of fossils new to Scotch Geology. No one not
+an enthusiastic geologist or a zealous Roman Catholic can really know
+how vast an amount of interest may attach to a few old bones. Has the
+reader 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 of
+no avail whatever?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span></p><p>Thomas Campbell, when asked for a toast in a society of authors, gave
+the memory of Napoleon Bonaparte; significantly adding, "he once hung a
+bookseller." On a nearly similar principle I would be disposed to
+propose among geologists a grateful bumper in honor of the revolutionary
+army that besieged Maestricht. That city, some seventy-five or eighty
+years ago, had its zealous naturalist in the person of M. Hoffmann, a
+diligent excavator in the quarries of St. Peter's mountain, long
+celebrated for its extraordinary fossils. Geology, as a science, had no
+existence at the time; but Hoffmann was doing, in a quiet way, all he
+could to give it a beginning;&mdash;he was transferring from the rock to his
+cabinet, shells, and corals, and crustacea, and the teeth and scales of
+fishes, with now and then the vertebr&aelig;, and now and then the limb-bone,
+of a reptile. And as he honestly remunerated all the workmen he
+employed, and did no manner of harm to any one, no one heeded him. On
+one eventful morning, however, his friends the quarriers laid bare a
+most extraordinary fossil,&mdash;the occipital plates of an enormous saurian,
+with jaws four and a half feet long, bristling over with teeth, like
+<i>chevaux de frise</i>; and after Hoffmann, who got the block in which it
+lay embedded, cut out entire, and transferred to his house, had spent
+week after week in painfully relieving it from the mass, all Maestricht
+began to speak of it as something really wonderful. There is a cathedral
+on St. Peter's mountain,&mdash;the mountain itself is church-land; and the
+lazy canon, awakened by the general talk, laid claim to poor Hoffmann's
+wonderful fossil as <i>his</i> property. He was lord of the manor, he said,
+and the mountain and all that it contained belonged to him. Hoffmann
+defended his fossil as he best could in an expensive lawsuit; but the
+judges found the law clean against him; the huge reptile head was
+declared to be "treasure trove"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> escheat to the lord of the manor; and
+Hoffmann, half broken-hearted, with but his labor and the lawyer's bills
+for his pains, saw it transferred by rude hands from its place in his
+museum, to the residence of the grasping churchman. The huge fossil head
+experienced the fate of Dr. Chalmer's two hundred churches. Hoffmann was
+a philosopher, however, and he continued to observe and collect as
+before; but he never found such another fossil; and at length, in the
+midst of his ingenious labors, the vital energies failed within him, and
+he broke down and died. The useless canon lived on. The French
+Revolution broke out; the republican army invested Maestricht; the
+batteries were opened; and shot and shell fell thick on the devoted
+city. But in one especial quarter there alighted neither shot nor shell.
+All was safe around the canon's house. Ordinary relics would have
+availed him nothing in the circumstances,&mdash;no, not "the three kings of
+Cologne," had he possessed the three kings entire, or the jaw-bones of
+the "eleven thousand virgins;" but there was virtue in the jaw-bones of
+the Mosasaurus, and safety in their neighborhood. The French <i>savans</i>,
+like all the other <i>savans</i> of Europe, had heard of Hoffmann's fossil,
+and the French artillery had been directed to play wide of the place
+where it lay. Maestricht surrendered; the fossil was found secreted in a
+vault, and sent away to the <i>Jardin des Plantes</i> at Paris, maugre the
+canon, to delight there the heart of Cuvier; and the French, generously
+addressing themselves to the heirs of Hoffmann as its legitimate owners,
+made over to them a considerable sum of money as its price. They
+reversed the finding of the Maestricht judges; and all save the monks of
+St. Peter's have acquiesced in the justice of the decision.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span></p>
+<h3>CHAPTER VI.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="hang">Something for Non-geologists&mdash;Man Destructive&mdash;A Better and Last
+Creation coming&mdash;A Rainy Sabbath&mdash;The Meeting House&mdash;The
+Congregation&mdash;The Sermon in Gaelic&mdash;The Old Wondrous Story&mdash;The
+Drunken Minister of Eigg&mdash;Presbyterianism without Life&mdash;Dr.
+Johnson's Account of the Conversion of the People of Rum&mdash;Romanism
+at Eigg&mdash;The Two Boys&mdash;The Freebooter of Eigg&mdash;Voyage Resumed&mdash;The
+Homeless Minister&mdash;Harbor of Isle Ornsay&mdash;Interesting Gneiss
+Deposit&mdash;A Norwegian Keep&mdash;Gneiss at Knock&mdash;Curious
+Chemistry&mdash;Sea-cliffs beyond Portsea&mdash;The Goblin Luidag&mdash;Scenery of
+Skye. </p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">I reckon</span> among my readers a class of non-geologists, who think my
+geological chapters would be less dull if I left out the geology; and
+another class of semi-geologists, who say there was decidedly too much
+geology in my last. With the present chapter, as there threatens to be
+an utter lack of science in the earlier half of it, and very little, if
+any, in the latter half, I trust both classes may be in some degree
+satisfied. It will bear reference to but the existing system of
+things,&mdash;assuredly not the last of the consecutive creations,&mdash;and to a
+species of animal that, save in the celebrated Guadaloupe specimens, has
+not yet been found locked up in stone. There have been much of violence
+and suffering in the old immature stages of being,&mdash;much, from the era
+of the Holoptychius, with its sharp murderous teeth and strong armor of
+bone, down to that of the cannibal Ichthyosaurus, that bears the broken
+remains of its own kind in its bowels,&mdash;much, again, from the times of
+the crocodile of the O&ouml;lite, down to the times of the fossil hyena and
+gigantic shark of the Tertiary. Nor, I fear, have matters greatly
+improved in that latest-born<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> creation in the series, that recognizes as
+its delegated lord the first tenant of earth accountable to his Maker.
+But there is a better and a last creation coming, in which man shall
+re-appear, not to oppress and devour his fellow-men, and in which there
+shall be no such wrongs perpetrated as it is my present purpose to
+record,&mdash;"new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness."
+Well sung the Ayrshire ploughman, when musing on the great truth that
+the present scene of being "is surely not the last,"&mdash;a truth
+corroborated since his day by the analogies of a new science,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+"The poor, oppressed, honest man,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Had never sure been born,</span><br />
+Had not there been some recompense<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">To comfort those that mourn."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>It was Sabbath, but the morning rose like a hypochondriac wrapped up in
+his night-clothes,&mdash;gray in fog, and sad with rain. The higher grounds
+of the island lay hid in clouds, far below the level of the central
+hollow; and our whole prospect from the deck was limited to the nearer
+slopes, dank, brown, and uninhabited, and to the rough black crags that
+frown like sentinels over the beach. Now the rime thickened as the rain
+pattered more loudly on the deck; and even the nearer stacks and
+precipices showed as unsolid and spectral in the cloud as moonlight
+shadows thrown on a ground of vapor; anon it cleared up for a few
+hundred yards, as the shower lightened; and then there came in view,
+partially at least, two objects that spoke of man,&mdash;a deserted boat
+harbor, formed of loosely piled stone, at the upper extremity of a sandy
+bay; and a roofless dwelling beside it, with two ruinous gables rising
+over the broken walls. The entire scene suggested the idea<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> of a land
+with which man had done for ever;&mdash;the vapor-enveloped rocks,&mdash;the waste
+of ebb-uncovered sand,&mdash;the deserted harbor,&mdash;the ruinous house,&mdash;the
+melancholy rain-fretted tides eddying along the strip of brown tangle in
+the foreground,&mdash;and, dim over all, the thick, slant lines of the
+beating shower!&mdash;I know not that of themselves they would have furnished
+materials enough for a finished picture in the style of Hogarth's "End
+of all Things;" but right sure am I that in the hands of Bewick they
+would have been grouped into a tasteful and poetic vignette. We set out
+for church a little after eleven,&mdash;the minister encased in his
+ample-skirted storm-jacket of oiled canvas, and protected atop by a
+genuine <i>sou-wester</i>, of which the broad posterior rim eloped half a
+yard down his back; and I closely wrapped up in my gray maud, which
+proved, however, a rather indifferent protection against the penetrating
+powers of a true Hebridean drizzle. The building in which the
+congregation meets is a low dingy cottage of turf and stone, situated
+nearly opposite to the manse windows. It had been built by my friend,
+previous to the Disruption, at his own expense, for a Gaelic school, and
+it now serves as a place of worship for the people.</p>
+
+<p>We found the congregation already gathered, and that the very bad
+morning had failed to lessen their numbers. There were a few of the male
+parishioners keeping watch at the door, looking wistfully out through
+the fog and rain for their minister; and at his approach nearly twenty
+more came issuing from the place,&mdash;like carder bees from their nest of
+dried grass and moss,&mdash;to gather round him, and shake him by the hand.
+The islanders of Eigg are an active, middle-sized race, with
+well-developed heads, acute intellects, and singularly warm feelings.
+And on this occasion at least there could be no possibility of mistake<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span>
+respecting the feelings with which they regarded their minister. Rarely
+have I seen human countenances so eloquently vocal with veneration and
+love. The gospel message, which my friend had been the first effectually
+to bring home to their hearts,&mdash;the palpable fact of his sacrifice for
+the sake of the high principles which he has taught,&mdash;his own kindly
+disposition,&mdash;the many services which he has rendered them, for not only
+has he been the minister, but also the sole medical man, of the Small
+Isles, and the benefit of his practice they have enjoyed, in every
+instance, without fee or reward,&mdash;his new life of hardship and danger,
+maintained for their sakes amid sinking health and great
+privation,&mdash;their frequent fears for his safety when stormy nights close
+over the sea,&mdash;and they have seen his little vessel driven from her
+anchorage, just as the evening has fallen,&mdash;all these are circumstances
+that have concurred in giving him a strong hold on their affections.</p>
+
+<p>The rude turf-building we found full from end to end, and all a-steam
+with a particularly wet congregation, some of whom, neither very robust
+nor young, had travelled in the soaking drizzle from the farther
+extremities of the island. And, judging from the serious attention with
+which they listened to the discourse, they must have deemed it full
+value for all it cost them. I have never yet seen a congregation more
+deeply impressed, or that seemed to follow the preacher more
+intelligently; and I was quite sure, though ignorant of the language in
+which my friend addressed them, that he preached to them neither heresy
+nor nonsense. There was as little of the reverence of externals in the
+place as can well be imagined: an uneven earthen floor,&mdash;turf-walls on
+every side, and a turf-roof above,&mdash;two little windows of four panes
+a-piece, adown which the rain-drops were coursing thick and fast,&mdash;a
+pulpit grotesquely rude, that had never<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> employed the bred
+carpenter,&mdash;and a few ranges of seats of undressed deal, such were the
+mere materialisms of this lowly church of the people; and yet here,
+notwithstanding, was the living soul of a Christian
+community,&mdash;understandings convinced of the truth of the gospel, and
+hearts softened and impressed by its power.</p>
+
+<p>My friend, at the conclusion of his discourse, gave a brief digest of
+its contents in English, for the benefit of his one Saxon auditor; and I
+found, as I had anticipated, that what had so moved the simple islanders
+was just the old wondrous story, which, though repeated and re-repeated
+times beyond number, from the days of the apostles till now, continues
+to be as full of novelty and interest as ever,&mdash;"God so loved the world,
+that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him
+should not perish, but have everlasting life." The great truths which
+had affected many of these poor people to tears, were exactly those
+which, during the last eighteen hundred years, have been active in
+effecting so many moral revolutions in the world, and which must
+ultimately triumph over all error and all oppression. On this occasion,
+as on many others, I had to regret my want of Gaelic. It was my
+misfortune to miss being born to this ancient language, by barely a mile
+of ferry. I first saw light on the southern shore of the Frith of
+Cromarty, where the strait is narrowest, among an old established
+Lowland community, marked by all the characteristics, physical and
+mental, of the Lowlanders of the southern districts; whereas, had I been
+born on the northern shore, I would have been brought up among a Celtic
+tribe, and Gaelic would have been my earliest language. Thus distinct
+was the line between the two races preserved, even after the
+commencement of the present century.</p>
+
+<p>In returning to the Betsey during the mid-day interval<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> in the service,
+we passed the ruinous two-gabled house beside the boat-harbor. During
+the incumbency of my friend's predecessor, it had been the public-house
+of the island, and the parish minister was by far its best customer. He
+was in the practice of sitting in one of its dingy little rooms, day
+after day, imbibing whisky and peat-reek; and his favorite boon
+companion on these occasions was a Roman Catholic tenant who lived on
+the opposite side of the island, and who, when drinking with the
+minister, used regularly to fasten his horse beside the door, till at
+length all the parish came to know that when the horse was standing
+outside the minister was drinking within. In course of time, through the
+natural gravitation operative in such cases, the poor incumbent became
+utterly scandalous, and was libelled for drunkenness before the General
+Assembly; but, as the island of Eigg lies remote from observation,
+evidence was difficult to procure; and had not the infatuated man got
+senselessly drunk one evening, when in Edinburgh on his trial, and
+staggered, of all places in the world, into the General Assembly, he
+would probably have died minister of Eigg. As the event happened,
+however, the testimony thus unwittingly furnished in the face of the
+Court that tried him was deemed conclusive;&mdash;he was summarily deposed
+from his office, and my friend succeeded him. Presbyterianism without
+the animating life is a poor shrunken thing: it never lies in state when
+it is dead; for it has no body of fine forms, or trapping of imposing
+ceremonies, to give it bulk or adornment: without the vitality of
+evangelism it is nothing; and in this low and abject state my friend
+found the Presbyterianism of Eigg. His predecessor had done it only
+mischief; nor had it been by any means vigorous before. Rum is one of
+the four islands of the parish; and all my readers must be familiar with
+Dr. Johnson's celebrated<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> account of the conversion to Protestantism of
+the people of Rum. "The inhabitants," says the Doctor, in his "Journey
+to the Western Islands," "are fifty-eight families, who continued
+Papists for some time after the laird became a Protestant. Their
+adherence to their old religion was strengthened by the countenance of
+the laird's sister, a zealous Romanist; till one Sunday, as they were
+going to mass under the conduct of their patroness, Maclean met them on
+the way, gave one of them a blow on the head with a yellow stick,&mdash;I
+suppose a cane, for which the Erse had no name, and drove them to the
+kirk, from which they have never departed. Since the use of this method
+of conversion, the inhabitants of Eigg and Canna who continue Papists
+call 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 had
+lived on the best possible terms with the Popery of the island; the
+parish minister had soaked day after day in the public-house with a
+Roman Catholic boon companion; and when a Papist man married a
+Protestant woman, the woman, as a matter of course, became Papist also;
+whereas, when it was the man who was a Protestant, and the woman a
+Papist, the woman remained what she had been. Roman Catholicism was
+quite content with terms, actual though not implied, of a kind so
+decidedly advantageous; and the Roman Catholics used good-humoredly to
+urge on their neighbors the Protestants, that, as it was palpable they
+had 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. My
+friend labored hard, as a good and honest man ought, to impart to
+Protestantism in his parish the animating life of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> the Reformation; and,
+through the blessing of God, after years of anxious toil, he at length
+fully succeeded.</p>
+
+<p>I had got wet, and the day continued bad; and so, instead of returning
+to the evening sermon, which began at six, I remained alone aboard of
+the vessel. The rain ceased in little more than an hour after, and in
+somewhat more than two hours I got up on deck to see whether the
+congregation was not dispersing, and if it was not yet time to hang on
+the kettle for our evening tea. The unexpected apparition of some one
+aboard the Free Church yacht startled two ragged boys who were
+man&#339;uvring a little boat a stone-cast away, under the rocky shores of
+<i>Eilean Chaisteil</i>, and who, on catching a glimpse of me, flung
+themselves below the thwarts for concealment. An oar dropped into the
+water; there was a hasty arm and half a head thrust over the gunwale to
+secure it; and then the urchin to whom they belonged again disappeared.
+Meanwhile the boat drifted slowly away: first one little head would
+appear for a moment over the gunwale, then another, as if reconnoitering
+the 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 bay
+at the lower extremity of the glebe, with a cottage, in size and
+appearance much resembling an ant-hill, peeping out at its inner
+extremity among some stunted bushes. I had marked the place before, and
+had been struck with the peculiarity of the choice that could have fixed
+on it as a site for a dwelling: it is at once the most inconvenient and
+picturesque on this side the island. A semi-circular line of columnar
+precipices, that somewhat resembles an amphitheatre turned outside
+in,&mdash;for the columns that overlook the area are quite as lofty as those
+which should form the amphitheatre's outer wall,&mdash;sweeps round a little
+bay, flat and sandy at half-tide, but bordered higher up by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> a dingy,
+scarce passable beach of columnar fragments that have toppled from
+above. Between the beach and the line of columns there is a bosky talus,
+more thickly covered with brushwood than is at all common in the
+Hebrides, and scarce more passable than the rough beach at its feet. And
+at the bottom of this talus, with its one gable buried in the steep
+ascent,&mdash;for there is scarce a foot-breadth of platform between the
+slope and the beach,&mdash;and with the other gable projected to the
+tide-line on rugged columnar masses, stands the cottage. The story of
+the inmate,&mdash;the father of the two ragged boys,&mdash;is such a one as Crabbe
+would have delighted to tell, and as he could have told better than any
+one else.</p>
+
+<p>He had been, after a sort, a freebooter in his time, but born an age or
+two rather late; and the law had proved over strong for him. On at least
+one occasion, perhaps oftener,&mdash;for his adventures are not all known in
+Eigg,&mdash;he had been in prison for sheep-stealing. He had the dangerous
+art of subsisting without the ostensible means, and came to be feared
+and avoided by his neighbors as a man who lived on them without asking
+their leave. With neither character nor a settled way of living, his
+wits, I am afraid, must have been often whetted by his necessities: he
+stole lest he should starve. For some time he had resided in the
+adjacent island of Muck; but, proving a bad tenant, he had been ejected
+by the agent of the landlord, I believe a very worthy man, who gave him
+half a boll of meal to get quietly rid of him, and pulled down his
+house, when he had left the island, to prevent his return. Betaking
+himself, with his boys, to a boat, he set out in quest of some new
+lodgment. He made his first attempt or two on the mainland, where he
+strove to drive a trade in begging, but he was always recognized as the
+convicted sheep-stealer, and driven back to the shore. At<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> length, after
+a 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 shed
+with some spars and the old sail of a boat placed slantways against the
+side of a rock, he squatted on the beach, determined, whether he lived
+or died, to find a home on the island. The islanders were no strangers
+to the character of the poor forlorn creature, and kept aloof from
+him,&mdash;none of them, however, so much as his own son; and, for a time, my
+friend the minister, aware that he had been the pest of every community
+among which he had lived, stood aloof from him too, in the hope that at
+length, wearied out, he might seek for himself a lodgment elsewhere.
+There came on, however, a dreary night of sleet and rain, accompanied by
+a fierce storm from the sea; and intelligence reached the manse late in
+the evening, that the wretched sheep-stealer had been seized by sudden
+illness, and was dying on the beach. There could be no room for further
+hesitation in this case; and my friend the minister gave instant orders
+that 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, and
+blocked up with rough masses of rock and stone, they found wholly
+impassable with so helpless a burden. And so, administering some
+cordials to the poor, hapless wretch, they had to leave him in the midst
+of the storm, with the old wet sail flapping about his ears, and the
+half-frozen rain pouring in upon him in torrents. He must have passed a
+miserable night, but it could not have been a whit more miserable than
+that passed by the minister in the manse. As the wild blast howled
+around his comfortable dwelling, and shook the casements as if some hand
+outside were assaying to open them, or as the rain<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> pattered sharp and
+thick on the panes, and the measured roar of the surf rose high over
+every other sound, he could think of only the wretched creature exposed
+to the fury of a tempest so terrible, as perchance wrestling in his
+death agony in the darkness beside the breaking wave, or as already
+stiffening on the shore. He was early astir next morning, and almost the
+first person he met was the poor sheep-stealer, looking more like a
+ghost than a living man. The miserable creature had mustered strength
+enough to crawl up from the beach. My friend has often met better men
+with less pleasure. He found a shelter for the poor outcast; he tended
+him, prescribed for him, and, on his recovery, gave him leave to build
+for himself the hovel at the foot of the crags. The islanders were aware
+they had got but an indifferent neighbor through the transaction, though
+none of them, with the exception of the poor creature's son, saw what
+else their minister could have done in the circumstances. But the miller
+could sustain no apology for the arrangement that had given him his
+vagabond father as a neighbor; and oftener than once the site of the
+rising hovel became a scene of noisy contention between parent and son.
+Some of the islanders informed me that they had seen the son engaged in
+pulling down the stones of the walls as fast as the father raised them
+up; and, save for the interference of the minister, the hut,
+notwithstanding the permission he gave, would scarce have been built.</p>
+
+<p>On the morning of Monday we unloosed from our moorings, and set out with
+a light variable breeze for Isle Ornsay, in Skye, where the wife and
+family of Mr. Swanson resided, and from which he had now been absent for
+a full month. The island diminished, and assumed its tint of diluting
+blue, that waxed paler and paler hour after hour, as we left it slowly
+behind us; and the Scuir, projected boldly from its steep hill-top,
+resembled a sharp hatchet-edge<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> presented to the sky. "Nowhere," said my
+friend, "did I so thoroughly realize the Disruption of last year as at
+this spot. I had just taken my last leave of the manse; Mrs. Swanson had
+staid 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 five
+years of age at the time, in the yacht with me to Skye. The little
+fellow had not much liked to part from his mother, and the previous
+unsettling of all sorts of things in the manse had bred in him thoughts
+he 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 of
+being very manly; and he seemed rather amused that papa should now have
+to make his porridge for him, and to put him to bed, and that it was
+John Stewart, the sailor, who was to be the servant girl. The passage,
+however, was tedious and disagreeable; the wind blew a-head, and heart
+and spirits failing poor Bill, and somewhat sea-sick to boot, he lay
+down 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 poor
+sheep-stealer whom you saw on the shore of Eigg.' This view of matters
+proved in no way consolatory to poor Bill. He continued his sad wail,
+'Home, home, home!' until at length he fairly sobbed himself asleep; and
+I never, on any other occasion, so felt the desolateness of my condition
+as when the cry of my boy,&mdash;'Home, home, home!'&mdash;was ringing in my
+ears."</p>
+
+<p>We passed, on the one hand, Loch Nevis and Loch Hourn, two fine arms of
+the sea that run far into the mainland, and open up noble vistas among
+the mountains; and, on the other, the long undulating line of Sleat in
+Skye, with its intermingled patches of woodland and arable on the coast,
+and its mottled ranges of heath and rock above.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> Towards evening we
+entered the harbor of Isle Ornsay, a quiet, well-sheltered bay, with a
+rocky islet for a breakwater on the one side, and the rudiments of a
+Highland village, containing a few good houses, on the other. Half a
+dozen small vessels were riding at anchor, curtained round, half-mast
+high, with herring nets; and a fleet of herring-boats lay moored beside
+them a little nearer the shore. There had been tolerable takes for a few
+nights in the neighboring sea, but the fish had again disappeared, and
+the fishermen, whose worn-out tackle gave such evidence of a
+long-continued run of ill-luck, as I had learned to interpret on the
+east coast, looked gloomy and spiritless, and reported a deficient
+fishery. I found Mrs. Swanson and her family located in one of the two
+best houses in the village, with a neat enclosure in front, and a good
+kitchen-garden behind. The following day I spent in exploring the rocks
+of the district,&mdash;a primary region with regard to organic existence,
+"without <i>form</i> and void." From Isle Ornsay to the Point of Sleat, a
+distance of thirteen miles, gneiss is the prevailing deposit; and in no
+place in the district are the strata more varied and interesting than in
+the neighborhood of Knockhouse, the residence of Mr. Elder, which I
+found pleasingly situated at the bottom of a little open bay, skirted
+with picturesque knolls partially wooded, that present to the surf
+precipitous fronts of rock. One insulated eminence, a gun-shot from the
+dwelling-house, that presents to the sea two mural fronts of precipice,
+and sinks in steep grassy slopes on two sides more, bears atop a fine
+old ruin. There is a blind-fronted massy keep, wrapped up in a mantle of
+ivy, perched at the one end, where the precipice sinks steepest; while a
+more ruinous though much more modern pile of building, perforated by a
+double row of windows, occupies the rest of the area. The square keep
+has lost its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> genealogy in the mists of the past, but a vague tradition
+attributes its erection to the Norwegians. The more modern pile is said
+to have been built about three centuries ago by a younger son of
+M'Donald of the Isles; but it is added that, owing to the jealousy of
+his elder brother, he was not permitted to complete or inhabit it. I
+find it characteristic of most Highland traditions, that they contain
+speeches: they constitute true oral specimens of that earliest and
+rudest style of historic composition in which dialogue alternates with
+narrative. "My wise brother is building a fine house," is the speech
+preserved in this tradition as that of the elder son: "it is rather a
+pity 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 once
+arrested the progress of the work. Mr. Elder's boys showed me several
+minute pieces of brass, somewhat resembling rust-eaten coin, that they
+had dug out of the walls of the old keep; but the pieces bore no impress
+of the dye, and seemed mere fragments of metal beaten thin by the
+hammer.</p>
+
+<p>The gneiss at Knock is exceedingly various in its composition, and many
+of its strata the geologist would fail to recognize as gneiss at all. We
+find along the precipices its two unequivocal varieties, the schistose
+and the granitic, passing not unfrequently, the former into a true mica
+schist, the latter into a pale feldspathose rock, thickly pervaded by
+needle-like crystals of tremolite, that, from the style of the grouping,
+and the contrast existing between the dark green of the enclosed
+mineral, and the pale flesh-color of the ground, frequently furnishes
+specimens of great beauty. In some pieces the tremolite assumes the
+common fan-like form; in some, the crystals, lying at nearly right
+angles with each other, present the appearance of ancient characters
+inlaid in the rock; in some they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> resemble the footprints of birds in a
+thin layer of snow; and in one curious specimen picked up by Mr.
+Swanson, in which a dark linear strip is covered transversely by
+crystals that project thickly from both its sides, the appearance
+presented is that of a minute stigmaria of the Coal Measures, with the
+leaves, still bearing their original green color, bristling thick around
+it. Mr. Elder showed me, intercalated among the gneiss strata of a
+little ravine in the neighborhood of Isle Ornsay, a thin band of a
+bluish-colored indurated clay, scarcely distinguishable, in the hand
+specimen, from a weathered clay-stone, but unequivocally a stratum of
+the rock. I have found the same stone existing, in a decomposed state,
+as a very tenacious clay, among the gneiss strata of the hill of
+Cromarty; and oftener than once had I amused myself in fashioning it,
+with tolerable success, into such rude pieces of pottery as are
+sometimes found in old sepulchral tumuli. Such are a few of the rocks
+included in the general gneiss deposit of Sleat. If we are to hold, with
+one of the most distinguished of living geologists, that the stratified
+primary rocks are aqueous deposits altered by heat, to how various a
+chemistry must they not have been subjected in this district! In one
+stratum, so softened that all its particles were disengaged to enter
+into new combinations, and yet not so softened but that it still
+maintained its lines of division from the strata above and below, the
+green tremolite was shooting its crystals into the pale homogeneous
+mass; while in another stratum the quartz drew its atoms apart in masses
+that assumed one especial form, the feldspar drew its atoms apart into
+masses that assumed another and different form, and the glittering mica
+built up its multitudinous layers between. Here the unctuous chlorite
+constructed its soft felt; there the micaceous schist arranged its
+undulating layers; yonder the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> 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!</p>
+
+<p>It had been an essential part of my plan to explore the splendid section
+of the Lower O&ouml;lite furnished by the line of sea-cliffs that, to the
+north of the Portree, rise full seven hundred feet over the beach; and
+on the morning of Wednesday I set out with this intention from Isle
+Ornsay, to join the mail gig at Broadford, and pass on to Portree,&mdash;a
+journey of rather more than thirty miles. I soon passed over the gneiss,
+and entered on a wide deposit, extending from side to side of the
+island, of what is generally laid down in our geological maps as Old Red
+Sandstone, but which, in most of its beds, quite as much resembles a
+quartz rock, and which, unlike any Old Red proper I have ever seen,
+passes, by insensible gradations, into the gneiss.<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> Wherever it has
+been laid bare in flat tables among the heath, we find it bearing those
+mysterious scratches on a polished surface which we so commonly find
+associated on the mainland with the boulder clay; but here, as in the
+Hebrides generally, the boulder clay is wanting. To the tract of Red
+Sandstone there succeeds a tract of Lias, which, also extending across
+the island, forms by far the most largely-developed deposit of this
+formation in Scotland. It occupies a flat dingy valley, about six miles
+in length, and that varies from two to four miles in breadth. The dreary
+interior is covered with mosses, and studded with inky pools, in which
+the botanist finds a few rare plants, and which were dimpled, as I
+passed them this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> morning, with countless eddies, formed by myriads of
+small quick glancing trout, that seemed busily engaged in fly-catching.
+The rock appears but rarely,&mdash;all is moss, marsh, and pool; but in a few
+localities on the hill-sides, where some stream has cut into the slope,
+and disintegrated the softer shales, the shepherd finds shells of
+strange form strewed along the water-courses, or bleaching white among
+the heath. The valley,&mdash;evidently a dangerous one to the night
+traveller, from its bogs and its tarns,&mdash;is said to be haunted by a
+spirit peculiar to itself,&mdash;a mischievous, eccentric, grotesque
+creature, not unworthy, from the monstrosity of its form, of being
+associated with the old monsters of the Lias. Luidag&mdash;for so the goblin
+is called&mdash;has but one leg, terminating, like an ancient satyr's, in a
+cloven foot; but it is furnished with two arms, bearing hard fists at
+the end of them, with which it has been known to strike the benighted
+traveller in the face, or to tumble him over into some dark pool. The
+spectre may be seen at the close of evening hopping vigorously among the
+distant bogs, like a felt ball on its electric platform; and when the
+mist lies thick in the hollows, an occasional glimpse may be caught of
+it 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 this
+goblin of the Liasic valley.</p>
+
+<p>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 the
+valley itself occupied by the sea; and we find the Lias, from its lower
+to its upper beds, exposed in unbroken series along the beach. In the
+middle of the opening lies the green level island of Pabba, altogether
+composed of this formation, and which, differing, in consequence, both
+in outline and color, from every<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> neighboring island and hill, seems a
+little bit of flat fertile England, laid down, as if for contrast's
+sake, amid the wild rough Hebrides. Of Pabba and its wonders, however,
+more anon. I explored a considerable range of shore along the bay; but
+as I made it the subject of two after explorations ere I mastered its
+deposits, I shall defer my description till a subsequent chapter. It was
+late this evening ere the post-gig arrived from the south, and the night
+and several hours of the following morning were spent in travelling to
+Portree. I know not, however, that I could have seen some of the wildest
+and most desolate tracts in Skye to greater advantage. There was light
+enough to show the bold outlines of the hills,&mdash;lofty, abrupt,
+pyramidal,&mdash;just such hills, both in form and grouping, as a profile in
+black showed best; a low blue vapor slept in the calm over the marshes
+at their feet; the sea, smooth as glass, reflected the dusk twilight
+gleam in the north, revealing the narrow sounds and deep
+mountain-girdled lochs along which we passed; gray crags gleamed dimly
+on the sight; birch-feathered acclivities presented against sea and sky
+their rough bristly edges; all was vast, dreamy, obscure, like one of
+Martin's darker pictures: the land of the seer and the spectre could not
+have been better seen. Morning broke dim and gray, while we were yet
+several miles from Portree; and I reached the inn in time to see from my
+bed-room windows the first rays of the rising sun gleaming on the
+hill-tops.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span></p>
+<h3>CHAPTER VII.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="hang">Exploration resumed&mdash;Geology of Rasay&mdash;An Illustration&mdash;Storr of
+Skye&mdash;From Portree to Holm&mdash;Discovery of Fossils&mdash;An Island
+Rain&mdash;Sir R. Murchison&mdash;Labor of drawing a Geological Line&mdash;Three
+Edinburgh Gentlemen&mdash;<i>Prosopolepsia</i>&mdash;Wrong surmises corrected&mdash;The
+Mail Gig&mdash;The Portree Postmaster&mdash;Isle Ornsay&mdash;An Old
+Acquaintance&mdash;Reminiscences&mdash;A Run for Rum&mdash;"Semi-fossil
+Madeira"&mdash;Idling on Deck&mdash;Prognostics of a Storm&mdash;Description of
+the Gale&mdash;Loch Scresort&mdash;The Minister's lost <i>Sou-wester</i>&mdash;The Free
+Church Gathering&mdash;The weary Minister. </p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">I breakfasted</span> in the travellers' room with three gentlemen from
+Edinburgh; and then, accompanied by a boy, whom I had engaged to carry
+my bag, set out to explore. The morning was ominously hot and
+breathless; and while the sea lay moveless in the calm, as a floor of
+polished marble, mountain and rock, and distant island, seemed tremulous
+all over, through a wavy medium of thick rising vapor. I judged from the
+first that my course of exploration for the day was destined to
+terminate abruptly; and as my arrangements with Mr. Swanson left me, for
+this part of the country, no second day to calculate upon, I hurried
+over deposits which in other circumstances I would have examined more
+carefully,&mdash;content with a glance. Accustomed in most instances to take
+long aims, as Cuddy Headrig did, when he steadied his musket on a rest
+behind the hedge, and sent his ball through Laird Oliphant's forehead, I
+had on this occasion to shoot flying; and so, selecting a large object
+for a mark, that I might run the less risk of missing, I strove to
+acquaint myself rather with the general structure of the district than
+with the organisms of its various fossiliferous beds.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span></p><p>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 suffer
+another vessel of the same size to take her berth between; and on the
+eastern shores of both Skye and Rasay we find the same O&ouml;litic deposits
+tilted up at nearly the same angle. The section presented on the eastern
+coast of the one is nearly a duplicate of the section presented on the
+eastern coast of the other. During one of the severer frosts of last
+winter I passed along a shallow pond, studded along the sides with
+boulder stones. It had been frozen over; and then, from the evaporation
+so common in protracted frosts, the water had shrunk, and the sheet of
+ice which had sunk down over the central portion of the pond exhibited
+what a geologist would term very considerable marks of disturbance among
+the boulders at the edges. Over one sharp-backed boulder there lay a
+sheet tilted up like the lid of a chest half-raised; and over another
+boulder immediately behind it there lay another uptilted sheet, like the
+lid of a second half-open chest; and in both sheets, the edges, lying in
+nearly parallel lines, presented a range of miniature cliffs to the
+shore. Now, in the two uptilted ice-sheets of this pond I recognized a
+model of the fundamental O&ouml;litic deposits Rasay and Skye. The mainland
+of Scotland had its representative in the crisp snow-covered shore of
+the pond, with its belt of faded sedges; the place of Rasay was
+indicated by the inner, that of Skye by the outer boulder; while the
+ice-sheets, with their shoreward-turned line of cliffs, represented the
+O&ouml;litic beds, that turn to the mainland their dizzy range of precipices,
+varying from six to eight hundred feet in height, and then, sloping
+outwards and downwards, disappear under mountain wildernesses of
+overlying trap. And it was along a portion of the range of cliff that
+forms the outermost of the two uptilted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> lines, and which presents in
+this district of Skye a frontage of nearly twenty continuous miles to
+the 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 two
+miles into the interior, like the half-raised chest-lid of my
+illustration sloping towards the hinges, or the uptilted ice-table of
+the boulder sloping towards the centre of the pond; and the depression
+behind forms a flat moory valley, full fifteen miles in length, occupied
+by a chain of dark bogs and treeless lochans. A long line of trap-hills
+rises over it, in one of which, considerably in advance of the others, I
+recognized the Storr of Skye, famous among lovers of the picturesque for
+its strange group of mingled pinnacles and towers; while directly
+crossing into the valley from the Sound, and then running southwards for
+about two miles along its bottom, is the noble sea-arm, Loch Portree, in
+which, as indicated by the name (the King's Port) a Scottish king of the
+olden time, in his voyage round his dominions, cast anchor. The opening
+of the loch is singularly majestic;&mdash;the cliffs tower high on either
+side in graceful magnificence: but from the peculiar inward slope of the
+land, all within, as the loch reaches the line of the valley, becomes
+tame and low, and a black dreary moor stretches from the flat terminal
+basin into the interior. The opening of Loch Portree is a palace
+gateway, erected in front of some homely suburb, that occupies the place
+which the palace itself should have occupied.</p>
+
+<p>There was, however, no such mixture of the homely and the magnificent in
+the route I had selected to explore. It lay under the escarpment of the
+cliff; and I purposed pursuing it from Portree to Holm, a distance of
+about six miles, and then returning by the flat interior valley. On the
+one hand rose a sloping rampart, full seven hundred<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> feet in height,
+striped longitudinally with alternating bands of white sandstone and
+dark shale, and capped atop by a continuous coping of trap, that lacked
+not massy tower, and overhanging turret, and projecting sentry-box;
+while, on the other hand, spreading outwards in the calm from the line
+of dark trap-rocks below, like a mirror from its carved frame of black
+oak, lay the Sound of Rasay, with its noble background of island and
+main rising bold on the east, and its long mountain vista opening to the
+south. The first fossiliferous deposit which gave me occasion this
+morning to use my hammer occurs near the opening of the loch, beside an
+old Celtic burying-ground, in the form of a thick bed of hard sandstone,
+charged with Belemnites,&mdash;a bed that must at one time have existed as a
+widely-spread accumulation of sand,&mdash;the bottom, mayhap, of some
+extensive bay of the O&ouml;lite, resembling the Loch Portree of the present
+day, in which eddy tides deposited the sand swept along by the tidal
+currents of some neighboring sound, and which swarmed as thickly with
+Cephalopoda as the loch swarmed this day with minute purple-tinged
+Medus&aelig;. I found detached on the shore, immediately below this bed, a
+piece of calcareous fissile sandstone, abounding in small sulcated
+Terebratul&aelig;, identical, apparently, with the Terebratula of a specimen
+in my collection from the inferior O&ouml;lite of Yorkshire. A colony of this
+delicate Brachiopod must have once lain moored near this spot, like a
+fleet of long-prowed galleys at anchor, each one with its cable of many
+strands extended earthwards from the single <i>dead-eye</i> in its umbone.
+For a full mile after rounding the northern boundary of the loch, we
+find the immense escarpment composed from top to bottom exclusively of
+trap; but then the O&ouml;lite again begins to appear, and about two miles
+further on the section becomes truly magnificent,&mdash;one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> of the finest
+sections of this formation exhibited anywhere in Britain, perhaps in the
+world. In a ravine furrowed in the face of the declivity by the headlong
+descent of a small stream, we may trace all the beds of the system in
+succession, from the Cornbrash, an upper deposit of the Lower O&ouml;lite,
+down to the Lias, the formation on which the O&ouml;lite rests. The only
+modifying circumstance to the geologist is, that though the sandstone
+beds run continuously along the cliff for miles together, distinct as
+the white bands in a piece of onyx, the intervening beds of shale are
+swarded over, save where we here and there see them laid bare in some
+abrupter acclivity or deeper water-course. In the shale we find numerous
+minute Ammonites, sorely weathered; in the sandstone, Belemnites, some
+of them of great size; and dark carbonaceous markings, passing not
+unfrequently into a glossy cubical coal. At the foot of the cliff I
+picked up an ammonite of considerable size and well-marked
+character,&mdash;the <i>Ammonites Murchison&aelig;</i>, first discovered on this coast
+by Sir R. Murchison about fifteen years ago. It measures, when full
+grown, from six to seven inches in diameter; the inner whorls, which are
+broadly visible, are ribbed; whereas the two, and sometimes the three
+outer ones, are smooth,&mdash;a marked characteristic of the species. My
+specimen merely enabled me to examine the peculiarities of the shell
+just a little more minutely than I could have done in the pages of
+Sowerby; for such was its state of decay, that it fell to pieces in my
+hands. I had now come full in view of the rocky island of Holm, when the
+altered appearance of the heavens led me to deliberate, just as I was
+warming in the work of exploration, whether, after all, it might not be
+well to scale the cliffs, and strike directly on the inn. It was nearly
+three o'clock; the sky had been gradually darkening since noon, as if
+one thin covering of gauze<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> after another had been drawn over it; hill
+and island had first dimmed and then disappeared in the landscape; and
+now the sun stood up right over the fast-contracting vista of the Sound,
+round and lightless as the moon in a haze; and the downward
+cataract-like streaming of the gray vapor on the horizon showed that
+there the rain had already broken, and was descending in torrents. We
+had been thirsty in the hot sun, and had found the springs few and
+scanty; but the boy now assured me, in very broken English, that we were
+to get a great deal more water than would be good for us, and that it
+might be advisable to get out of its way. And so, climbing to the top of
+the cliffs, along a water-course, we reached the ridge, just as the fog
+came rolling downwards from the peaked brow of the Storr into the flat
+moory valley, and the melancholy lochans roughened and darkened in the
+rain. We were both particularly wet ere we reached Portree.</p>
+
+<p>In exploring our Scotch formations, I have had frequent occasion, in
+Ross, Sutherland, Caithness, and now once more in Skye, to pass over
+ground described by Sir R. Murchison; and in every instance have I found
+myself immensely his debtor. His descriptions possess the merit of being
+true: they are simple outlines often, that leave much to be filled up by
+after discovery; but, like those outlines of the skilful geographer that
+fix the place of some island or strait, though they may not entirely
+define it, they always indicate the exact position in the scale of the
+formations to which they refer. They leave a good deal to be done in the
+way of mapping out the interior of a deposit, if I may so speak; but
+they leave nothing to be done in the way of ascertaining its place. The
+work accomplished is <i>bona fide</i> work,&mdash;actual, solid, not to be done
+over again,&mdash;work such as could be achieved in only the school of Dr.
+William Smith, the father of English Geology. I have found much to
+admire, too, in the sections<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> of Sir R. Murchison. His section of this
+part of the coast, for example, strikes from the extreme northern part
+of Skye to the island of Holm, thence to Scrapidale in Rasay, thence
+along part of the coast of Scalpa, thence direct through the middle of
+Pabba, and thence to the shore of the Bay of Laig. The line thus taken
+includes, in regular sequence in the descending order, the whole O&ouml;litic
+deposits of the Hebrides, from the Cornbrash, with its overlying
+fresh-water outliers of mayhap the Weald, down to where the Lower Lias
+rests on the primary red sandstones of Sleat. It would have cost
+M'Culloch less exploration to have written a volume than it must have
+cost 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 followed
+repeatedly in the track of another geologist, of, however, a very
+different school, who explored, at a comparatively recent period, the
+deposits of not a few of our Scotch counties. But his labors, in at
+least the fossiliferous formations, seem to have accomplished nothing
+for Geology,&mdash;I am afraid, even less than nothing. So far as they had
+influence at all, it must have been to throw back the science. A
+geologist who could have asserted only three years ago ("Geognostical
+Account of Banffshire," 1842), that the Old Red Sandstone of Scotland
+forms merely "a part of the great coal deposit," could have known
+marvellously little of the fossils of the one system, and nothing
+whatever of those of the other. Had he examined ere he decided, instead
+of deciding without any intention of examining, he would have found
+that, while both systems abound in organic remains, they do not possess,
+in Scotland at least, a single species in common, and that even their
+types of being, viewed in the group, are essentially distinct.</p>
+
+<p>The three Edinburgh gentlemen whom I had met at breakfast were still in
+the inn. One of them I had seen before, as one of the guests at a
+Wesleyan soiree, though I saw he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> failed to remember that I had been
+there as a guest too. The two other gentlemen were altogether strangers
+to me. One of them,&mdash;a man on the right side of forty, and a superb
+specimen of the powerful, six-feet two-inch Norman Celt,&mdash;I set down as
+a scion of some old Highland family, who, as the broadsword had gone
+out, carried on the internal wars of the country with the formidable
+artillery of Statute and Decision. The other, a gentleman more advanced
+in life, I predicated to be a Highland proprietor, the uncle of the
+younger of the two,&mdash;a man whose name, as he had an air of business
+about him, occurred, in all probability, in the Almanac, in the list of
+Scotch advocates. Both were of course high Tories,&mdash;I was quite sure of
+that,&mdash;zealous in behalf of the Establishment, though previous to the
+Disruption they had not cared for it a pin's point,&mdash;and prepared to
+justify the virtual suppression of the toleration laws in the case of
+the Free Church. I was thus decidedly guilty of what old Dr. More calls
+a <i>prosopolepsia</i>,&mdash;<i>i.e.</i> of the crime of judging men by their looks.
+At dinner, however, we gradually ate ourselves into conversation: we
+differed, and disputed, and agreed, and then differed, disputed and
+agreed again. I found first, that my chance companions were really not
+very 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 advanced
+in life,&mdash;strange as the fact might seem,&mdash;very considerably a
+<i>Presbyterian</i> Whig; and finally, that this latter gentleman, whom I had
+set down as an intolerant Highland proprietor, was a respected writer to
+the signet, a Free Church elder in Edinburgh; and that the other, his
+equally intolerant nephew, was an Edinburgh advocate, of vigorous
+talent, much an enemy of all oppression, and a brother contributor of my
+own to one of the Quarterlies. Of all my surmisings regarding the
+stranger gentlemen, only two points held<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> true,&mdash;they were both
+gentlemen of the law, and both had Celtic blood in their veins. The
+evening passed pleasantly; and I can now recommend from experience, to
+the hapless traveller who gets thoroughly wet thirty miles from a change
+of dress, that some of the best things he can resort to in the
+circumstances are, a warm room, a warm glass, and agreeable companions.</p>
+
+<p>On the morrow I behooved to return to Isle Ornsay, to set out on the
+following day, with my friend the minister, for Rum, where he purposed
+preaching on the Sabbath. To have lost a day would have been to lose the
+opportunity of exploring the island, perhaps forever; and, to make all
+sure, I had taken a seat in the mail gig, from the postman who drives
+it, ere going to bed, on the morning of my arrival; and now, when it
+drove 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 my
+seat, 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 who
+deemed himself authorized to receive the fare; was he so?" "Yes." "Could
+you have received it?" "No." "Show me a copy of your regulations." "I
+have no copy of regulations; but I have given the place in the gig to
+another." "Just so; and what say you, postman?" "That you took the place
+from me, and that <i>he</i> has no right to give a place to any one: I carry
+the Portree letters to him, but he has nothing to do with the
+passengers." A person present, the proprietor or stabler of the horse, I
+believe, also interfered on the same side; but what Carlyle terms the
+"gigmanity" of the postmaster was all at stake,&mdash;his whole influence in
+the 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 given
+the seat to had taken possession of the gig; and so we had to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> compound
+the matter by carrying a passenger additional. The incident is scarce
+worth relating; but the postmaster was so vehement and terrible, so
+defiant of us all,&mdash;post, stabler, and simple passenger,&mdash;and so justly
+impressed with the importance of being postmaster of Portree, that, as I
+am in the way of describing rare specimens at any rate, I must refer to
+him among the rest, as if he had been one of the minor carnivor&aelig; of a
+Skye deposit,&mdash;a cuttlefish, that preyed on the weaker molluscs, or a
+hungry polypus, terrible among the animalcul&aelig;.</p>
+
+<p>We drove heavily, and had to dismount and walk afoot over every steeper
+acclivity; but I carried my hammer, and only grieved that in some one or
+two localities the road should have been so level. I regretted it in
+especial on the southern and eastern side of Loch Sligachan, where I
+could see from my seat, as we drove past, the dark blue rocks in the
+water-courses on each side the road, studded over with that
+characteristic shell of the Lias, the <i>Gryph&aelig;a incurva</i>, and that the
+dry-stone fences in the moor above exhibit fossils that might figure in
+a museum. But we rattled by. At Broadford, twenty-five miles from
+Portree, and nine miles from Isle Ornsay, I partook of a hospitable meal
+in the house of an acquaintance; and in little more than two hours after
+was with my friend the minister at Isle Ornsay. The night wore
+pleasantly by. Mrs. Swanson, a niece of the late Dr. Smith of
+Campbelton, so well known for his Celtic researches and his exquisite
+translations of ancient Celtic poetry, I found deeply versed in the
+legendary lore of the Highlands. The minister showed me a fine specimen
+of Pterichthys which I had disinterred for him, out of my first
+discovered fossiliferous deposit of the Old Red Sandstone, exactly
+thirteen years before, and full seven years ere I had introduced the
+creature to the notice of Agassiz. And the minister's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> daughter, a
+little chubby girl of three summers, taking part in the general
+entertainment, strove to make her Gaelic sound as like English as she
+could, in my especial behalf. I remembered, as I listened to the
+unintelligible prattle of the little thing, unprovided with a word of
+English, that just eighteen years before, her father had had no Gaelic;
+and wondered what he would have thought, could he have been told, when
+he 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 been
+engaged in beating over the Eathie Lias together, collecting Belemnites,
+Ammonites, and fossil wood, and striving in friendly emulation the one
+to surpass the other in the variety and excellence of our specimens. Our
+leisure hours were snatched, at the time, from college studies by the
+one, from the mallet by the other: there were few of them that we did
+not spend together, and that we were not mutually the better for so
+spending. I at least, owe much to these hours,&mdash;among other things,
+views of theologic truth, that determined the side I have taken in our
+ecclesiastical controversy. Our courses at an after period lay diverse;
+the young minister had greatly more important business to pursue than
+any which the geologic field furnishes; and so our amicable rivalry
+ceased early. In the words in which an English poet addresses his
+brother,&mdash;the clergyman who sat for the picture in the "Deserted
+Village,"&mdash;my friend "entered on a sacred office, where the harvest is
+great and the laborers are few, and left to me a field in which the
+laborers are many, and the harvest scarce worth carrying away."</p>
+
+<p>Next day at noon we weighed anchor, and stood out for Rum, a run of
+about twenty-five miles. A kind friend had, we found, sent aboard in our
+behalf two pieces of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> rare antiquity,&mdash;rare anywhere, but especially
+rare in the lockers of the Betsey,&mdash;in the agreeable form of two bottles
+of semi-fossil Madeira,&mdash;Madeira that had actually existed in the grape
+exactly half a century before, at the time when Robespierre was
+startling Paris from its propriety, by mutilating at the neck the busts
+of other people, and multiplying casts and medals of his own; and we
+found it, explored in moderation, no bad study for geologists,
+especially in coarse weather, when they had got wet and somewhat
+fatigued. It was like Landlord Boniface's ale, mild as milk, had
+exchanged its distinctive flavor as Madeira for a better one, and filled
+the cabin with fragrance every time the cork was drawn. Old observant
+Homer must have smelt some such liquor somewhere, or he could never have
+described so well the still more ancient and venerable wine with which
+wily Ulysses beguiled one-eyed Polypheme:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">"Unmingled wine,</span><br />
+Mellifluous, undecaying, and divine,<br />
+Which now, some ages from his race concealed,<br />
+The hoary sire in gratitude revealed....<br />
+Scarce twenty measures from the living stream<br />
+To cool one cup sufficed: the goblet crowned,<br />
+Breathed aromatic fragrances around."<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Winds were light and variable. As we reached the middle of the sound
+opposite Armadale, there fell a dead calm; and the Betsey, more actively
+idle than the ship manned by the Ancient Mariner, dropped sternwards
+along the tide, to the dull music of the flapping sail. The minister
+spent the day in the cabin, engaged with his discourse for the morrow;
+and I, that he might suffer as little from interruption as possible,
+<i>mis</i>-spent it upon the deck. I tried fishing with the yacht's set of
+lines, but there were no fish to bite,&mdash;got into the boat, but there
+were no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> neighboring islands to visit,&mdash;and sent half a dozen
+pistol-bullets after a shoal of porpoises, which, coming from the Free
+Church yacht, must have astonished the fat sleek fellows pretty
+considerably, but did them, I am afraid, no serious damage. As the
+evening began to close gloomy and gray, a tumbling swell came heaving in
+right ahead from the west; and a bank of cloud, which had been gradually
+rising higher and darker over the horizon in the same direction, first
+changed its abrupt edge atop for a diffused and broken line, and then
+spread itself over the central heavens. The calm was evidently not to be
+a calm long; and the minister issued orders that the gaff-topsail should
+be taken down, and the storm-jib bent; and that we should lower our
+topmast, and have all tight and ready for a smart gale ahead. At half
+past ten, however, the Betsey was still pitching to the swell, with not
+a breath of wind to act on the diminished canvas, and with the solitary
+circumstance in her favor, that the tide ran no longer against her, as
+before. The cabin was full of all manner of creakings; the close lamp
+swung to and fro over the head of my friend; and a refractory
+Concordance, after having twice travelled from him along the entire
+length of the table, flung itself pettishly upon the floor. I got into
+my snug bed about eleven; and at twelve, the minister, after poring
+sufficiently over his notes, and drawing the final score, turned into
+his. In a brief hour after, on came the gale, in a style worthy of its
+previous hours of preparation; and my friend,&mdash;his Saturday's work in
+his ministerial capacity well over when he had completed his two
+discourses,&mdash;had to begin the Sabbath morning early as the morning
+itself began, by taking his stand at the helm, in his capacity of
+skipper of the Betsey. With the prospect of the services of the Sabbath
+before him, and after working all Saturday to boot, it was rather hard
+to set him down to a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> midnight spell at the helm, but he could not be
+wanted at such a time, as we had no other such helmsman aboard. The
+gale, thickened with rain, came down, shrieking like a maniac, from off
+the peaked hills of Rum, striking away the tops of the long ridgy
+billows that had risen in the calm to indicate its approach, and then
+carrying them in sheets of spray aslant the furrowed surface, like
+snow-drift hurried across a frozen field. But the Betsey, with her
+storm-jib set, and her mainsail reefed to the cross, kept her weather
+bow bravely to the blast, and gained on it with every tack. She had been
+the pleasure yacht, in her day, of a man of fortune, who had used, in
+running south with her at times as far as Lisbon, to encounter, on not
+worse terms than the stateliest of her neighbors in the voyage, the
+swell of the Bay of Biscay; and she still kept true to her old
+character, with but this drawback, that she had now got somewhat crazy
+in her fastenings, and made rather more water in a heavy sea than her
+one little pump could conveniently keep under. As the fitful gust struck
+her headlong, as if it had been some invisible missile hurled at us from
+off the hill-tops, she stooped her head lower and lower, like old
+stately Hardyknute under the blow of the "King of Norse," till at length
+the lee chain-plate rustled sharp through the foam; but, like a staunch
+Free Churchwoman, the lowlier she bent, the more steadfastly did she
+hold her head to the storm. The strength of the opposition served but to
+speed her on all the more surely to the desired haven. At five o'clock
+in the morning we cast anchor in Loch Scresort,&mdash;the only harbor of Rum
+in which a vessel can moor,&mdash;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 <i>sou-wester</i>; a sudden
+gust had seized it by the flap, and hurried it away far to the lee. He
+had yielded it to the winds, as he had done the temporalities,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> but much
+more unwillingly, and less as a free agent. Should any conscientious
+mariner pick up any where in the Atlantic a serviceable ochre-colored
+<i>sou-wester</i>, not at all the worse for the wear, I give him to wit that
+he holds Free Church property, and that he is heartily welcome to hold
+it, leaving it to himself to consider whether a benefaction to its full
+value, deducting salvage, is not owing, in honor, to the Sustenation
+Fund.</p>
+
+<p>It was ten o'clock ere the more fatigued aboard could muster resolution
+enough to quit their beds a second time; and then it behooved the
+minister to prepare for his Sabbath labors ashore. The gale still blew
+in fierce gusts from the hills, and the rain pattered like small shot on
+the 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 its
+sides, 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 the
+distance of about a mile from the sea, an elevation of two thousand
+feet. Along the slopes of the sandstone ridge I could discern, through
+the haze, numerous green patches, that had once supported a dense
+population, long since "cleared off" to the backwoods of America, but
+not one inhabited dwelling; while along a black moory acclivity under
+the 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 of
+ripening. The hill-tops were lost in cloud and storm; and ever and anon,
+as a heavier shower came sweeping down on the wind, the intervening
+hollows closed up their gloomy vistas, and all was fog and rime to the
+water's edge. Bad as the morning was, however, we could see the people
+wending their way, in threes and fours,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> through the dark moor, to the
+place of worship,&mdash;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,&mdash;three-fourths of the entire
+population&mdash;had all come out to meet their minister.</p>
+
+<p>On going ashore, we found the place nearly filled. My friend preached
+two long energetic discourses, and then returned to the yacht, "a worn
+and weary man." The studies of the previous day, and the fatigues of the
+previous night, added to his pulpit duties, had so fairly prostrated his
+strength, that the sternest teetotaller in the kingdom would scarce have
+forbidden him a glass of our fifty-year-old Madeira. But even the
+fifty-year-old Madeira proved no specific in the case. He was suffering
+under excruciating headache, and had to stretch himself in his bed, with
+eyes shut but sleepless, waiting till the fit should pass,&mdash;every pulse
+that beat in his temples a throb of pain.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span></p>
+<h3>CHAPTER VIII.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="hang">Geology of Rum&mdash;Its curious Character illustrated&mdash;Rum famous for
+Bloodstones&mdash;Red Sandstones&mdash;"Scratchings" in the Rocks&mdash;A
+Geological Inscription without a Key&mdash;The Lizard&mdash;Vitality broken
+into two&mdash;Illustrations&mdash;Speculation&mdash;Scuir More&mdash;Ascent of the
+Scuir&mdash;The Bloodstones&mdash;An Illustrative Set of the Gem&mdash;M'Culloch's
+Pebble&mdash;A Chemical Problem&mdash;The solitary Shepherd's House&mdash;Sheep
+<i>versus</i> Men&mdash;The Depopulation of Rum&mdash;A Haul of Trout&mdash;Rum Mode of
+catching Trout&mdash;At Anchor in the Bay of Glenelg. </p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> geology of the island of Rum is simple, but curious. Let the reader
+take, if he can, from twelve to fifteen trap-hills, varying from one
+thousand to two thousand three hundred feet in height; let him pack them
+closely and squarely together, like rum-bottles in a case-basket; let
+him surround them with a frame of Old Red Sandstone, measuring rather
+more than seven miles on the side, in the way the basket surrounds the
+bottles; then let him set them down in the sea a dozen miles off the
+land,&mdash;and he shall have produced a second island of Rum, similar in
+structure to the existing one. In the actual island, however, there is a
+defect in the inclosing basket of sandstone: the basket, complete on
+three of its sides, wants the fourth: and the side opposite to the gap
+which the fourth should have occupied is thicker than the two other
+sides put together. Where I now write there is an old dark-colored
+picture on the wall before me. I take off one of the four bars of which
+the frame is composed,&mdash;the end-bar,&mdash;and stick it on to the end-bar
+opposite, and then the picture is fully framed on two of its sides, and
+doubly framed on a third, but the fourth side lacks framing altogether.
+And such is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> the geology of the island of Rum. We find the one loch of
+the island,&mdash;that in which the Betsey lies at anchor,&mdash;and the long
+withdrawing valley, of which the loch is merely a prolongation,
+occurring in the double sandstone bar: it seems to mark&mdash;to return to my
+illustration&mdash;the line in which the superadded piece of frame has been
+stuck on to the frame proper. The origin of the island is illustrated by
+its structure: it has left its story legibly written, and we have but to
+run our eye over the characters and read. An extended sea-bottom,
+composed of Old Red Sandstone, already tilted up by previous
+convulsions, so that the strata presented their edges, tier beyond tier,
+like roofing slate laid aslant on a floor, became a centre of Plutonic
+activity. The molten trap broke through at various times, and presenting
+various appearances, but in nearly the same centre; here existing as an
+augitic rock, there as a syenite, yonder as a basalt or amygdaloid. At
+one place it uptilted the sandstone; at another it overflowed it; the
+dark central masses raised their heads above the surface, higher and
+higher with every earthquake throe from beneath; till at length the
+gigantic Ben More attained to its present altitude of two thousand three
+hundred feet over the sea-level, and the sandstone, borne up from
+beneath like floating sea-wrack on the back of a porpoise, reached in
+long outside bands its elevation of from six to eight hundred. And such
+is the piece of history, composed in silent but expressive language, and
+inscribed in the old geological character, on the rocks of Rum.</p>
+
+<p>The wind lowered and the rain ceased during the night, and the morning
+of Monday was clear, bracing, and breezy. The island of Rum is chiefly
+famous among mineralogists for its heliotropes or bloodstones; and we
+proposed devoting the greater part of the day to an examination of the
+hill of Scuir More, in which they occur, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> which lies on the opposite
+side of the island, about eight miles from the mooring ground of the
+Betsey. Ere setting out, however, I found time enough, by rising some
+two or three hours before breakfast, to explore the Red Sandstones on
+the southern side of the loch. They lie in this bar of the frame,&mdash;to
+return once more to my old illustration,&mdash;as if it had been cut out of a
+piece of cross-grained deal, in which the annular bands, instead of
+ranging lengthwise, ran diagonally from side to side; stratum leans over
+stratum, dipping towards the west at an angle of about thirty degrees;
+and as in a continuous line of more than seven miles there seem no
+breaks or repetitions in the strata, the thickness of the deposit must
+be enormous,&mdash;not less, I should suppose, than from six to eight
+thousand feet. Like the Lower Old Red Sandstones of Cromarty and Moray,
+the red arenaceous strata occur in thick beds, separated from each other
+by bands of a grayish-colored stratified clay, on the planes of which I
+could trace with great distinctness ripple markings; but in vain did I
+explore their numerous folds for the plates, scales, and fucoid
+impressions which abound in the gray argillaceous beds of the shores of
+the Moray and Cromarty Friths. It would, however, be rash to pronounce
+them non-fossiliferous, after the hasty search of a single
+morning,&mdash;unpardonably so in one who had spent very many mornings in
+putting to the question the gray stratified beds of Ross and Cromarty,
+ere he succeeded in extorting from them the secret of their organic
+riches.</p>
+
+<p>We set out about half-past ten for Scuir More, through the Red Sandstone
+valley in which Loch Scresort terminates, with one of Mr. Swanson's
+people, a young active lad of twenty, for our guide. In passing upwards
+for nearly a mile along the stream that falls into the upper part of the
+loch, and lays bare the strata, we saw no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> change in the character of
+the sandstone. Red arenaceous beds of great thickness alternate with
+grayish-colored bands, composed of a ripple-marked micaceous slate and a
+stratified clay. For a depth of full three thousand feet, and I know not
+how much more,&mdash;for I lacked time to trace it further,&mdash;the deposit
+presents no other variety: the thick red bed of at least a hundred yards
+succeeds the thin gray band of from three to six feet, and is succeeded
+by a similar gray band in turn. The ripple-marks I found as sharply
+relieved in some of the folds as if the wavy undulations to which they
+owed their origin had passed over them within the hour. The
+comparatively small size of their alternating ridges and furrows give
+evidence that the waters beneath which they had formed had been of no
+very profound depth. In the upper part of the valley, which is bare,
+trackless, and solitary, with a high monotonous sandstone ridge bounding
+it on the one side, and a line of gloomy trap-hills rising over it on
+the other, the edges of the strata, where they protrude through the
+mingled heath and moss, exhibit the mysterious scratchings and
+polishings now so generally connected with the glacial theory of
+Agassiz. The scratchings run in nearly the line of the valley, which
+exhibits no trace of moraines; and they seem to have been produced
+rather by the operation of those extensively developed causes, whatever
+their nature, that have at once left their mark on the sides and summits
+of some of our highest hills, and the rocks and boulders of some of our
+most extended plains, than by the agency of forces limited to the
+locality. They testify, Agassiz would perhaps say, not regarding the
+existence of some local glacier that descended from the higher grounds
+into the valley, but respecting the existence of the great polar
+glacier. I felt, however, in this bleak and solitary hollow, with the
+grooved and polished platforms at my<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> feet, stretching away amid the
+heath, like flat tombstones in a graveyard, that I had arrived at one
+geologic inscription to which I still wanted the key. The vesicular
+structure of the traps on the one hand, identical with that of so many
+of our modern lavas,&mdash;the ripple-markings of the arenaceous beds on the
+other, indistinguishable from those of the sea-banks on our coasts,&mdash;the
+upturned strata and the overlying trap,&mdash;told all their several stories
+of fire, or wave, or terrible convulsion, and told them simply and
+clearly; but here was a story not clearly told. It summoned up doubtful,
+ever-shifting visions,&mdash;now of a vast ice continent, abutting on this
+far isle of the Hebrides from the Pole, and trampling heavily over
+it,&mdash;now of the wild rush of a turbid, mountain-high flood breaking in
+from the west, and hurling athwart the torn surface, rocks, and stones,
+and clay,&mdash;now of a dreary ocean rising high along the hills, and
+bearing onward with its winds and currents, huge icebergs, that now
+brushed the mountain-sides, and now grated along the bottom of the
+submerged valleys. The inscription on the polished surfaces, with its
+careless mixture of groove and scratch, is an inscription of very
+various readings.</p>
+
+<p>We passed along a transverse hollow, and then began to ascend a
+hill-side, from the ridge of which the water sheds to the opposite shore
+of 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 brown
+lizard, nearly five inches in length, startled by our approach, ran
+hurriedly across the path; and our guide, possessed by the general
+Highland belief that the creature is poisonous, and injures cattle,
+struck at it with a switch, and cut it in two immediately behind the
+hinder legs. The upper half, containing all that anatomists regard as
+the vitals, heart, brain, and viscera, all the main nerves, and all the
+larger<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> arteries, lay stunned by the blow, as if dead; nor did it
+manifest any signs of vitality so long as we remained beside it; whereas
+the lower half, as if the whole life of the animal had retired into
+<i>it</i>, continued dancing upon the moss for a full minute after, like a
+young eel scooped out of some stream, and thrown upon the bank; and then
+lay wriggling and palpitating for about half a minute more. There are
+few things more inexplicable in the province of the naturalist than the
+phenomenon of what may be termed divided life,&mdash;vitality broken into
+two, and yet continuing to exist as vitality in both the dissevered
+pieces. We see in the nobler animals mere glimpses of the
+phenomenon,&mdash;mere indications of it, doubtfully apparent for at most a
+few minutes. The blood drawn from the human arm by the lancet continues
+to live in the cup until it has cooled and begun to coagulate; and when
+head and body have parted company under the guillotine, both exhibit for
+a brief space such unequivocal signs of life, that the question arose in
+France during the horrors of the Revolution, whether there might not be
+some glimmering of consciousness attendant at the same time on the
+fearfully opening and shutting eyes and mouth of the one, and the
+beating heart and jerking neck of the other. The lower we descend in the
+scale of being, the more striking the instances which we receive of this
+divisibility of the vital principle. I have seen the two halves of the
+heart of a ray pulsating for a full quarter of an hour after they had
+been separated from the body and from each other. The blood circulates
+in the hind leg of a frog for many minutes after the removal of the
+heart, which meanwhile keeps up an independent motion of its own.
+Vitality can be so divided in the earthworm, that, as demonstrated by
+the experiments of Spalanzani, each of the severed parts carries life
+enough away to set it up as an independent animal;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> while the polypus, a
+creature of still more imperfect organization, and with the vivacious
+principle more equally diffused over it, may be multiplied by its pieces
+nearly as readily as a gooseberry bush by its slips. It was sufficiently
+curious, however, to see, in the case of this brown lizard, the least
+vital half of the creature so much more vivacious, apparently, than the
+half which contained the heart and brain. It is not improbable, however,
+that the presence of these organs had only the effect of rendering the
+upper portion which contained them more capable of being thrown into a
+state of insensibility. A blow dealt one of the vertebrata on the head
+at once renders it insensible. It is after this mode the fisherman kills
+the salmon captured in his wear, and a single blow, when well directed,
+is always sufficient; but no single blow has the same effect on the
+earthworm; and here it was vitality in the inferior portion of the
+reptile,&mdash;the earthworm portion of it, if I may so speak,&mdash;that refused
+to participate in the state of syncope into which the vitality of the
+superior portion had been thrown. The nice and delicate vitality of the
+brain seems to impart to the whole system in connection with it an
+aptitude for dying suddenly,&mdash;a susceptibility of instant death, which
+would be wanting without it. The heart of the rabbit continues to beat
+regularly long after the brain has been removed by careful excision, if
+respiration be artificially kept up; but if, instead of amputating the
+head, 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 principle
+illustrated here. But why the agonized dancing on the sward of the
+inferior part of the reptile?&mdash;why its after painful writhing and
+wriggling? The young eel scooped from the stream, whose motions it
+resembled, is impressed by terror, and can feel pain; was <i>it</i> also
+impressed by terror,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> or susceptible of suffering? We see in the case of
+both exactly the same signs,&mdash;the dancing, the writhing, the wriggling;
+but are we to interpret them after the same manner? In the small
+red-headed earthworm divided by Spalanzani, that in three months got
+upper extremities to its lower part, and lower extremities, in as many
+weeks, to its upper part, the dividing blow must have dealt duplicate
+feelings,&mdash;pain and terror to the portion below, and pain and terror to
+the portion above,&mdash;so far, at least, as a creature so low in the scale
+was susceptible of these feelings; but are we to hold that the leaping,
+wriggling tail of the reptile possessed in any degree a similar
+susceptibility? <i>I</i> can propound the riddle, but who shall resolve it?
+It may be added, that this brown lizard was the only recent saurian I
+chanced to see in the Hebrides, and that, though large for its kind, its
+whole bulk did not nearly equal that of a single vertebral joint of the
+fossil saurians of Eigg. The reptile, since his deposition from the
+first place in the scale of creation, has sunk sadly in those parts: the
+ex-monarch has become a low plebeian.</p>
+
+<p>We came down upon the coast through a swampy valley, terminating in the
+interior in a frowning wall of basalt, and bounded on the south, where
+it opens to the sea, by the Scuir More. The Scuir is a precipitous
+mountain, that rises from twelve to fifteen hundred feet direct over the
+beach. M'Culloch describes it as inaccessible, and states that it is
+only among the debris at its base that its heliotropes can be procured;
+but the distinguished mineralogist must have had considerably less skill
+in climbing rocks than in describing them, as, indeed, some of his
+descriptions, though generally very admirable, abundantly testify. I am
+inclined to infer from his book, after having passed over much of the
+ground which he describes, that he must have been a man of the type so<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>
+well hit off by Burns in his portrait of Captain Grose,&mdash;round, rosy,
+short-legged, quick of eye but slow of foot, quite as indifferent a
+climber as Bailie Nicol Jarvie, and disposed at times, like the elderly
+gentleman drawn by Crabbe, to prefer the view at the hill-foot to the
+prospect from its summit. I found little difficulty in scaling the sides
+of Scuir More for a thousand feet upwards,&mdash;in one part by a route
+rarely attempted before,&mdash;and in ensconcing myself among the
+bloodstones. They occur in the amygdaloidal trap of which the upper part
+of the hill is mainly composed, in great numbers, and occasionally in
+bulky masses; but it is rare to find other than small specimens that
+would be recognized as of value by the lapidary. The inclosing rock must
+have been as thickly vesicular in its original state as the scoria of a
+glass-house; and all the vesicles, large and small, like the retorts and
+receivers of a laboratory, have been vessels in which some curious
+chemical process has been carried on. Many of them we find filled with a
+white semi-translucent or opaque chalcedony; many more with a pure green
+earth, which, where exposed to the bleaching influences of the weather,
+exhibits a fine verdigris hue, but which in the fresh fracture is
+generally of an olive green, or of a brownish or reddish color. I have
+never yet seen a rock in which this earth was so abundant as in the
+amygdaloid of Scuir More. For yards together in some places we see it
+projecting from the surface in round globules, that very much resemble
+green peas, and that occur as thickly in the inclosing mass as pebbles
+in an Old Red Sandstone conglomerate. The heliotrope has formed among it
+in centres, to which the chalcedony seems to have been drawn, as if by
+molecular attraction. We find a mass, varying from the size of a walnut
+to that of a man's head, occupying some larger vesicle or crevice of the
+amygdaloid,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> and all the smaller vesicles around it, for an inch or two,
+filled with what we may venture to term satellite heliotropes, some of
+them as minute as grains of wild mustard, and all of them more or less
+earthy, generally in proportion to their distance from the first formed
+heliotrope in the middle. No one can see them in their place in the
+rock, with the abundant green earth all around, and the chalcedony, in
+its uncolored state, filling up so many of the larger cavities, without
+acquiescing in the conclusion respecting the origin of the gem first
+suggested by Werner, and afterwards adopted and illustrated by
+M'Culloch. The heliotrope is merely a chalcedony, stained in the forming
+with an infusion of green earth, as the colored waters in the
+apothecary's window are stained by the infusions, vegetable and mineral,
+from which they derive their ornamental character. The red mottlings
+which so heighten the beauty of the stone occur in comparatively few of
+the specimens of Scuir More. They are minute jasperous formations,
+independent of the inclosing mass; and, from their resemblance to
+streaks and spots of blood, suggest the name by which the heliotrope is
+popularly known. I succeeded in making up, among the crags, a set of
+specimens curiously illustrative of the origin of the gem. One specimen
+consists of white, uncolored chalcedony; a second, of a rich
+verdigris-hued green earth; a third, of chalcedony barely tinged with
+green; 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, and
+scarce at all colored on the other; and a seventh, dark and richly
+toned,&mdash;a true bloodstone,&mdash;thickly streaked and mottled with red
+jasper. In the chemical process that rendered the Scuir More a mountain
+of gems there were two deteriorating circumstances, which operated to
+the disadvantage of its larger heliotropes: the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> green earth, as if
+insufficiently stirred in the mixing, has gathered, in many of them,
+into minute soft globules, like air-bubbles in glass, that render them
+valueless for the purposes of the lapidary, by filling them all over
+with little cavities; and in not a few of the others, an infiltration of
+lime, that refused to incorporate with the chalcedonic mass, exists in
+thin glassy films and veins, that, from their comparative softness, have
+a nearly similar effect with the impalpable green earth in roughing the
+surface under the burnisher.</p>
+
+<p>We find figured by M'Culloch, in his "Western Islands," the internal
+cavity 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 of
+the amygdaloid. He describes it as curiously illustrative of a various
+chemistry; the outer crust is composed of a pale-zoned agate, inclosing
+a cavity, from the upper side of which there depends a group of
+chalcedonic stalactites, some of them, as in ancient spar caves,
+reaching to the floor; and bearing on its under side a large crystal of
+carbonate of lime, that the longer stalactites pass through. In the
+vesicle in which this hollow pebble was formed three consecutive
+processes must have gone on. First, a process of infiltration coated the
+interior all around with layer after layer, now of one mineral
+substance, now of another, as a plasterer coats over the sides and
+ceiling of a room with successive layers of lime, putty, and stucco; and
+had this process gone on, the whole cell would have been filled with a
+pale-zoned agate. But it ceased, and a new process began. A chalcedonic
+infiltration gradually entered from above; and, instead of coating over
+the walls, roof, and floor, it hardened into a group of spear-like
+stalactites, that lengthened by slow degrees, till some of them had
+traversed the entire cavity from top to bottom. And then this second
+process ceased like the first, and a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> third commenced. An infiltration
+of lime took place; and the minute calcareous molecules, under the
+influence of the law of crystallization, built themselves up on the
+floor into a large smooth-sided rhomb, resembling a closed sarcophagus
+resting in the middle of some Egyptian cemetery. And then, the limestone
+crystal completed, there ensued no after change. As shown by some other
+specimens, however, there was a yet farther process: a pure quartzose
+deposition took place, that coated not a few of the calcareous rhombs
+with sprigs of rock-crystal. I found in the Scuir More several cellular
+agates in which similar processes had gone on,&mdash;none of them quite so
+fine, however, as the one figured by M'Culloch; but there seemed no lack
+of evidence regarding the strange and multifarious chemistry that had
+been carried on in the vesicular cavities of this mountain, as in the
+retorts of some vast laboratory. Here was a vesicle filled with green
+earth,&mdash;there a vesicle filled with calcareous spar,&mdash;yonder a vesicle
+crusted round on a thin chalcedonic shell with rock-crystal,&mdash;in one
+cavity an agate had been elaborated, in another a heliotrope, in a third
+a milk-white chalcedony, in a fourth a jasper. On what principle, and
+under what direction, have results so various taken place in vesicles of
+the 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 in
+thickness, have elaborated only chalcedony? Why should this chamber
+contain only a quartzose compound of oxygen and silica, and that second
+chamber beside it contain only a calcareous compound of lime and
+carbonic acid? What law directed infiltrations so diverse to seek out
+for themselves vesicles in such close neighborhood, and to keep, in so
+many instances, each to his own vesicle? I can but state the
+problem,&mdash;not solve it. The groups of heliotropes clustered each around<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span>
+its bulky centrical mass seem to show that the principle of molecular
+attraction may be operative in very dense medi&aelig;,&mdash;in a hard amygdaloidal
+trap even; and it seems not improbable, that to this law, which draws
+atom to its kindred atom, as clansmen of old used to speed at the
+mustering signal to their gathering place, the various chemistry of the
+vesicles may owe its variety.</p>
+
+<p>I shall attempt stating the chemical problem furnished by the vesicles
+here in a mechanical form. Let us suppose that every vesicle was a
+chamber 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 a
+certain time an infusion of green earth pervaded the surrounding mass,
+and percolated through it, and that every door was opened to receive a
+portion of the infusion. We find that no vesicle wants its coating of
+this earthy mineral. The coating received, however, one-half the doors
+shut, while the other half remained agap, and filled with green earth
+entirely. Next followed a series of alternate infusions of chalcedony,
+jasper, and quartz; many doors opened and received some two or three
+coatings, that form around the vesicles skull-like shells of agate, and
+then shut; a few remained open, and became as entirely occupied with
+agate as many of the previous ones had become filled with green earth.
+Then an ample infusion of chalcedony pervaded the mass. Numerous doors
+again opened; some took in a portion of the chalcedony, and then shut;
+some remained open, and became filled with it; and many more that had
+been previously filled by the green earth opened their doors again, and
+the chalcedony pervading the green porous mass, converted it into
+heliotrope. Then an infusion of lime took place. Doors opened, many of
+which had been hitherto shut, save for a short time, when the green
+earth infusion<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> obtained, and became filled with lime; other doors
+opened for a brief space, and received lime enough to form a few
+crystals. Last of all, there was a pure quartzose infusion, and doors
+opened, some for a longer time, some for a shorter, just as on previous
+occasions. Now, by mechanical means of this character,&mdash;by such an
+arrangement of successive infusions, and such a device of shutting and
+opening of doors,&mdash;the phenomena exhibited by the vesicles could be
+produced. There is no difficulty in working the problem mechanically, if
+we be allowed to assume in our data successive infusions, well-fitted
+doors, and watchful door-keepers; and if any one can work it
+chemically,&mdash;certainly without door-keepers, but with such doors and
+such infusions as he can show to have existed,&mdash;he shall have cleared up
+the mystery of the Scuir More. I have given their various cargoes to all
+its many vesicles by mechanical means, at no expense of ingenuity
+whatever. Are there any of my readers prepared to give it to them by
+means purely chemical?</p>
+
+<p>There is a solitary house in the opening of the valley, over which the
+Scuir More stands sentinel,&mdash;a house so solitary, that the entire
+breadth of the island intervenes between it and the nearest human
+dwelling. It is inhabited by a shepherd and his wife,&mdash;the sole
+representatives in the valley of a numerous population, long since
+expatriated to make way for a few flocks of sheep, but whose ranges of
+little fields may still be seen green amid the heath on both sides, for
+nearly a mile upwards from the opening. After descending along the
+precipices of the Scuir, we struck across the valley, and, on scaling
+the opposite slope sat down on the summit to rest us, about a hundred
+yards over the house of the shepherd. He had seen us from below, when
+engaged among the bloodstones, and had seen, withal, that we were not
+coming his way; and, "on hospitable thoughts intent,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> he climbed to
+where 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 most
+seasonable, after our long hours of toil, and with a rough journey still
+before us. It is an excellent circumstance, that hospitality grows best
+where 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. It
+flourishes where the inn and the lodging-house cannot exist, and dies
+out where they thrive and multiply.</p>
+
+<p>We reached the cross valley in the interior of the island about half an
+hour before sunset. The evening was clear, calm, golden-tinted; even
+wild heaths and rude rocks had assumed a flush of transient beauty; and
+the emerald-green patches on the hill-sides, barred by the plough
+lengthwise, diagonally, and transverse, had borrowed an aspect of soft
+and velvety richness, from the mellowed light and the broadening
+shadows. All was solitary. We could see among the deserted fields the
+grass-grown foundations of cottages razed to the ground; but the valley,
+more desolate than that which we had left, had not even its single
+inhabited dwelling: it seemed as if man had done with it forever. The
+island, eighteen years before, had been divested of its inhabitants,
+amounting at the time to rather more than four hundred souls, to make
+way for one sheep-farmer and eight thousand sheep. All the aborigines of
+Rum crossed the Atlantic; and at the close of 1828, the entire
+population consisted of but the sheep-farmer, and a few shepherds, his
+servants; the island of Rum reckoned up scarce a single family at this
+period for every five square miles of area which it contained. But
+depopulation on so extreme a scale was found inconvenient; the place had
+been rendered too thoroughly a desert for the comfort of the occupant;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>
+and on the occasion of a clearing which took place shortly after in
+Skye, he accommodated some ten or twelve of the ejected families with
+sites for cottages, and pasturage for a few cows, on the bit of morass
+beside Loch Scresort, on which I had seen their humble dwellings. But
+the whole of the once-peopled interior remains a wilderness, without
+inhabitant,&mdash;all the more lonely in its aspect from the circumstance
+that the solitary valleys, with their plough-furrowed patches, and their
+ruined heaps of stone, open upon shores every whit as solitary as
+themselves, and that the wide untrodden sea stretches drearily around.
+The armies of the insect world were sporting in the light this evening
+by millions; a brown stream that runs through the valley yielded an
+incessant popling sound, from the myriads of fish that were ceaselessly
+leaping in the pools, beguiled by the quick glancing wings of green and
+gold that fluttered over them; along a distant hill-side there ran what
+seemed the ruins of a gray-stone fence, erected, says tradition, in a
+remote age, to facilitate the hunting of the deer; there were fields on
+which the heath and moss of the surrounding moorlands were fast
+encroaching, that had borne many a successive harvest; and prostrate
+cottages, that had been the scenes of christenings, and bridals, and
+blythe new-year's days;&mdash;all seemed to bespeak the place a fitting
+habitation for man, in which not only the necessaries, but also a few of
+the luxuries of life, might be procured; but in the entire prospect not
+a man nor a man's dwelling could the eye command. The landscape was one
+without figures. I do not much like extermination carried out so
+thoroughly and on system;&mdash;it seems bad policy; and I have not succeeded
+in thinking any the better of it though assured by economists that there
+are more than people enough in Scotland still. There are, I believe,
+more than enough in our workhouses,&mdash;more than enough on our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span>
+pauper-rolls,&mdash;more than enough huddled up, disreputable, useless, and
+unhappy, in the miasmatic alleys and typhoid courts of our large towns;
+but I have yet to learn how arguments for local depopulation are to be
+drawn from facts such as these. A brave and hardy people, favorably
+placed for the development of all that is excellent in human nature,
+form the glory and strength of a country;&mdash;a people sunk into an abyss
+of degradation and misery, and in which it is the whole tendency of
+external circumstances to sink them yet deeper, constitute its weakness
+and its shame; and I cannot quite see on what principle the ominous
+increase which is taking place among us in the worse class, is to form
+our solace or apology for the wholesale expatriation of the better. It
+did not seem as if the depopulation of Rum had tended much to any one's
+advantage. The single sheep-farmer who had occupied the holdings of so
+many had been unfortunate in his speculations, and had left the island:
+the proprietor, his landlord, seemed to have been as little fortunate as
+the tenant, for the island itself was in the market; and a report went
+current at the time, that it was on the eve of being purchased by some
+wealthy Englishman, who purposed converting it into a deer-forest. How
+strange a cycle! Uninhabited originally save by wild animals, it became
+at an early period a home of men, who, as the gray wall on the hill-side
+testified, derived, in part at least, their sustenance from the chase.
+They broke in from the waste the furrowed patches on the slopes of the
+valleys,&mdash;they reared herds of cattle and flocks of sheep,&mdash;their number
+increased to nearly five hundred souls,&mdash;they enjoyed the average
+happiness of human creatures in the present imperfect state of
+being,&mdash;they contributed their portion of hardy and vigorous manhood to
+the armies of the country,&mdash;and a few of their more adventurous spirits,
+impatient of the narrow bounds which confined them, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> a course of
+life little varied by incident, emigrated to America. Then came the
+change of system so general in the Highlands; and the island lost all
+its original inhabitants, on a wool and mutton
+speculation,&mdash;inhabitants, the descendants of men who had chased the
+deer on its hills five hundred years before, and who, though they
+recognized some wild island lord as their superior, and did him service,
+had regarded the place as indisputably their own. And now yet another
+change was on the eve of ensuing, and the island 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 or two every twelvemonth, but
+which could form no permanent place of human abode. Once more, a strange
+and surely most melancholy cycle!</p>
+
+<p>There was light enough left, as we reached the upper part of Loch
+Scresort, to show us a shoal of small silver-coated trout, leaping by
+scores at the effluence of the little stream along which we had set out
+in the morning on our expedition. There was a net stretched across where
+the play was thickest; and we learned that the haul of the previous tide
+had amounted to several hundreds. On reaching the Betsey, we found a
+pail and basket laid against the companion-head,&mdash;the basket containing
+about two dozen small trout,&mdash;the minister's unsolicited teind of the
+morning draught; the pail filled with razor-fish of great size. The
+people of my friend are far from wealthy; there is scarce any
+circulating medium in Rum; and the cottars in Eigg contrive barely
+enough to earn at the harvest in the Lowlands money sufficient to clear
+with their landlord at rent-day. Their contributions for ecclesiastical
+purposes make no great figure, therefore, in the lists of the
+Sustentation Fund. But of what they have they give willingly and in a
+kindly spirit; and if baskets of small trout, or pailfuls of spout-fish,
+went current in the Free Church,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> there would, I am certain, be a per
+centage of both the fish and the mollusc, derived from the Small Isles,
+in the half-yearly sustentation dividends. We found the supply of
+both,&mdash;especially as provisions were beginning to run short in the
+lockers of the Betsey,&mdash;quite deserving of our gratitude. The razor-fish
+had been brought us by the worthy catechist of the island. He had gone
+to the ebb in our special behalf, and had spent a tide in laboriously
+filling the pail with these "treasures hid in the sand;" thoroughly
+aware, like the old exiled puritan, who eked out his meals in a time of
+scarcity with the oysters of New England, that even the razor-fish,
+under this head, is included in the promises. There is a peculiarity in
+the razor-fish of Rum that I have not marked in the razor-fish of our
+eastern coasts. The gills of the animal, instead of bearing the general
+color of its other parts, like those of the oyster, are of a deep green
+color, resembling, when examined by the microscope, the fringe of a
+green curtain.</p>
+
+<p>We were told by John Stewart, that the expatriated inhabitants of Rum
+used to catch trout by a simple device of ancient standing, which
+preceded the introduction of nets into the island, and which, it is
+possible, may in other localities have not only preceded the use of the
+net, but may have also suggested it: it had at least the appearance of
+being a first beginning of invention in this direction. The islanders
+gathered large quantities of heath, and then tying it loosely into
+bundles, and stripping it of its softer leafage, they laid the bundles
+across the stream on a little mound held down by stones, with the tops
+of the heath turned upwards to the current. The water rose against the
+mound for a foot or eighteen inches, and then murmured over and through,
+occasioning an expansion among the hard elastic sprays. Next a party of
+the islanders came down the stream, beating the banks and pools, and
+sending a still thickening<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> shoal of trout before them, that, on
+reaching the miniature dam formed by the bundles, darted forward for
+shelter, 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 hastily
+thrown off,&mdash;the bundles pitched ashore,&mdash;the better fish, to the amount
+not unfrequently of several scores, secured,&mdash;and the young fry returned
+to the stream, to take care of themselves, and grow bigger. We fared
+richly this evening, after our hard day's labor, on tea and trout; and
+as the minister had to attend a meeting of the Presbytery of Skye on the
+following Wednesday, we sailed next morning for Glenelg, whence he
+purposed taking the steamer for Portree. Winds were light and baffling,
+and the currents, like capricious friends, neutralized at one time the
+assistance which they lent us at another. It was dark night ere we had
+passed Isle Ornsay, and morning broke as we cast anchor in the Bay of
+Glenelg. At ten o'clock the steamer heaved-to in the bay to land a few
+passengers, and the minister went on board, leaving me in charge of the
+Betsey, to follow him, when the tide set in, through the Kyles of Skye.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span></p>
+<h3>CHAPTER IX.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="hang">Kyles of Skye&mdash;A Gneiss District&mdash;Kyle Rhea&mdash;A Boiling Tide&mdash;A
+"Take" of Sillocks&mdash;The Betsey's "Paces"&mdash;In the Bay at
+Broadford&mdash;Rain&mdash;Island of Pabba&mdash;Description of the Island&mdash;Its
+Geological Structure&mdash;Astrea&mdash;Polypifers&mdash;<i>Gryph&aelig;a incurva</i>&mdash;Three
+groups of Fossils in the Lias of Skye&mdash;Abundance of the
+Petrifactions of Pabba&mdash;Scenery&mdash;Pabba a "piece of smooth, level
+England"&mdash;Fossil Shells of Pabba&mdash;Voyage resumed&mdash;Kyle Akin&mdash;Ruins
+of Castle Maoil&mdash;A "Thornback" Dinner&mdash;The Bunch of Deep Sea
+Tangle&mdash;The Caileach Stone&mdash;Kelp Furnaces&mdash;Escape of the Betsey
+from sinking. </p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">No</span> sailing vessel attempts threading the Kyles of Skye from the south in
+the face of an adverse tide. The currents of Kyle Rhea care little for
+the wind-filled sail, and battle at times, on scarce unequal terms, with
+the steam-propelled paddle. The Toward Castle this morning had such a
+struggle to force her way inwards, as may be seen maintained at the door
+of some place of public meeting during the heat of some agitating
+controversy, when seat and passage within can hold no more, and a
+disappointed crowd press eagerly for admission from without. Viewed from
+the anchoring place at Glenelg, the opening of the Kyle presents the
+appearance of the bottom of a landlocked bay;&mdash;the hills of Skye seem
+leaning against those of the mainland: and the tide-buffeted steamer
+looked this morning as if boring her way into the earth, like a
+disinterred mole, only at a rate vastly slower. First, however, with a
+progress resembling that of the minute-hand of a clock, the bows
+disappeared amid the heath, then the midships, then the quarter-deck and
+stern, and then, last of all, the red tip of the sun-brightened
+union-jack that streamed gaudily behind.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> I had at least two hours
+before me ere the Betsey might attempt weighing anchor; and, that they
+might leave some mark, I went and spent them ashore in the opening of
+Glenelg,&mdash;a gneiss district, nearly identical in structure with the
+district of Knock and Isle Ornsay. The upper part of the valley is bare
+and treeless, but not such its character where it opens to the sea; the
+hills are richly wooded; and cottages, and cornfields, with here and
+there 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, form
+the central point in the landscape; these are the dismantled Berera
+Barracks, built, like the line of forts in the great Caledonian
+Valley,&mdash;Fort George, Fort Augustus, and Fort William,&mdash;to overawe the
+Highlands at a time when the loyalty of the Highlander pointed to a king
+beyond the water; but all use for them has long gone by, and they now
+lie in dreary ruin,&mdash;mere sheltering places for the toad and the bat. I
+found in a loose silt on the banks of the river, at some little distance
+below tide-mark, a bed of shells and coral, which might belong, I at
+first supposed, to some secondary formation, but which I ascertained, on
+examination, to be a mere recent deposit, not so old by many centuries
+as our last raised sea-beaches. There occurs in various localities on
+these western coasts, especially on the shores of the island of Pabba, a
+sprig coral, considerably larger in size than any I have elsewhere seen
+in Scotland; and it was from its great abundance in this bed of silt
+that I was at first led to deem the deposit an ancient one.</p>
+
+<p>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 been
+arriving in the course of the morning, and dropping anchor, nearer the
+opening or farther away, each according to its sailing ability, to await
+the turn of the tide; and we now found ourselves one of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> the components
+of a little fleet, with some five or six vessels sweeping up the Kyle
+before us, and some three or four driving on behind. Never, except
+perhaps in a Highland river big in flood, have I seen such a tide. It
+danced and wheeled, and came boiling in huge masses from the bottom; and
+now our bows heaved abruptly round in one direction, and now they jerked
+as suddenly round in another; and, though there blew a moderate breeze
+at the time, the helm failed to keep the sails steadily full. But
+whether our sheets bellied out, or flapped right in the wind's eye, on
+we swept in the tideway, like a cork caught during a thunder shower in
+one of the rapids of the High Street. At one point the Kyle is little
+more than a quarter of a mile in breadth; and here, in the powerful eddy
+which ran along the shore, we saw a group of small fishing-boats
+pursuing a shoal of sillocks in a style that blent all the liveliness of
+the chase with the specific interest of the angle. The shoal, restless
+as the tides among which it disported, now rose in the boilings of one
+eddy, now beat the water into foam amid the stiller dimplings of
+another. The boats hurried from spot to spot wherever the quick
+glittering scales appeared. For a few seconds, rods would be cast thick
+and fast, as if employed in beating the water, and captured fish glanced
+bright to the sun; and then the take would cease, and the play rise
+elsewhere, and oars would flash out amain, as the little fleet again
+dashed into the heart of the shoal. As the Kyle widened, the force of
+the current diminished, and sail and helm again became things of
+positive importance. The wind blew a-head, steady though not strong; and
+the Betsey, with companions in the voyage against which to measure
+herself, began to show her paces. First she passed one bulky vessel,
+then another: she lay closer to the wind than any of her fellows, glided
+more quickly through the water, turned in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> her stays like Lady Betty in
+a minuet; and, ere we had reached Kyle Akin, the fleet in the middle of
+which we had started were toiling far behind us, all save one vessel, a
+stately brig; and just as we were going to pass her too, she cast
+anchor, to await the change of the tide, which runs from the west during
+flood at Kyle Akin, as it runs from the east through Kyle Rhea. The wind
+had freshened; and as it was now within two hours of full sea, the force
+of the current had somewhat abated; and so we kept on our course,
+tacking in scant room, however, and making but little way. A few vessels
+attempted following us, but, after an inefficient tack or two, they fell
+back on the anchoring ground, leaving the Betsey to buffet the currents
+alone. Tack followed tack sharp and quick in the narrows, with an
+iron-bound coast on either hand. We had frequent and delicate turning:
+now we lost fifty yards, now we gained a hundred. John Stewart held the
+helm; and as none of us had ever sailed the way before, I had the
+vessel's chart spread out on the companion-head before me, and told him
+when to wear and when to hold on his way,&mdash;at what places we might run
+up almost to the rock edge, and at what places it was safest to give the
+land a good offing. Hurrah for the Free Church yacht Betsey! and hurrah
+once more! We cleared the Kyle, leaving a whole fleet tide-bound behind
+us; and, stretching out at one long tack into the open sea, bore, at the
+next, right into the bay at Broadford, where we cast anchor for the
+night, within two hundred yards of the shore. Provisions were running
+short; and so I had to make a late dinner this evening on some of the
+razor-fish of Rum, topped by a dish of tea. But there is always rather
+more appetite than food in the country;&mdash;such, at least, is the common
+result under the present mode of distribution: the hunger overlaps and
+outstretches the provision;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> and there was comfort in the reflection,
+that with the razor-fish on which to fall back, it overlapped it but by
+a very little on this occasion in the cabin of the Betsey. The
+steam-boat passed southwards next morning, and I was joined by my friend
+the minister a little before breakfast.</p>
+
+<p>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 the
+landscape, volume after volume, like coverings from off a
+mummy,&mdash;leaving exposed in the valley of the Lias a brown and cheerless
+prospect of dark bogs and of debris-covered hills, streaked this evening
+with downward lines of foam. The seaward view is more pleasing. The deep
+russet of the interior we find bordered for miles along the edge of the
+bay with a many-shaded fringe of green; and the smooth grassy island of
+Pabba lies in the midst, a polished gem, all the more advantageously
+displayed from the roughness of the surrounding setting. We took boat,
+and explored the Lias in our immediate neighborhood till dusk. I had
+spent several hours among its deposits when on my way to Portree, and
+several hours more when on my journey across the country to the east
+coast; but it may be well, for the sake of maintaining some continuity
+of description, to throw together my various observations on the
+formation, as if made at one time, and to connect them with my
+exploration of Pabba, which took place on the following morning. The
+rocks of Pabba belong to the upper part of the Lias; while the lower
+part may be found leaning to the south, towards the Red Sandstones of
+the Bay of Lucy. Taking what seems to be the natural order, I shall
+begin with the base of the formation first.</p>
+
+<p>In the general indentation of the coast, in the opening<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> of which the
+island of Pabba lies somewhat like a long green steam-boat at anchor,
+there is included a smaller indentation, known as the Bay or Cove of
+Lucy. The central space in the cove is soft and gravelly; but on both
+its sides it is flanked by low rocks, that stretch out into the sea in
+long rectilinear lines, like the foundations of dry-stone fences. On the
+south side the rocks are red; on the north they are of a bluish-gray
+color; their hues are as distinct as those of the colored patches in a
+map; and they represent geological periods that lie widely apart. The
+red rocks we find laid down in most of our maps as Old Red, though I am
+disposed to regard them as of a much higher antiquity than even that
+ancient system; while the bluish-gray rocks are decidedly Liasic.<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> The
+cove between represents a deep ditch-like hollow, which occurs in Skye,
+both in the interior and on the sea-shore, in the line of boundary
+betwixt the Red Sandstone and the Lias; and it "seems to have
+originated," says M'Culloch, "in the decomposition of the exposed parts
+of the formations at their junction." "Hence," he adds, "from the
+wearing of the materials at the surface, a cavity has been produced,
+which becoming subsequently filled with rubbish, and generally covered
+over with a vegetable soil of unusual depth, effectually prevents a view
+of the contiguous parts." The first strata exposed on the northern side
+are the oldest Liasic rocks anywhere seen in Scotland. They are composed
+chiefly of greenish-colored fissile sandstones and calciferous grits, in
+which we meet a few fossils, very imperfectly preserved. But the
+organisms increase as we go on. We see in passing, near a picturesque
+little cottage,&mdash;the only one on the shores of the bay,&mdash;a crag<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> of a
+singularly rough appearance, that projects mole-like from the sward upon
+the beach, and then descending abruptly to the level of the other
+strata, runs out in a long ragged line into the sea. The stratum, from
+two to three feet in thickness, of which it is formed, seems wholly
+built up of irregularly-formed rubbly concretions, just as some of the
+garden-walls in the neighborhood of Edinburgh are built of the rough
+scoria of our glass-houses; and we find, on examination, that every
+seeming concretion in the bed is a perfectly formed coral of the genus
+Astrea. 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 great
+beauty: nothing can be more irregular than the outline of each mass, and
+yet scarce anything more regular than the sculpturings on every part of
+it. We find them fretted over with polygons, like those of a honeycomb,
+only somewhat less mathematically exact, and the centre of every polygon
+contains its many-rayed star. It is difficult to distinguish between
+species in some of the divisions of corals: one Astrea, recent or
+extinct, is sometimes found so exceedingly like another of some very
+different formation or period, that the more modern might almost be
+deemed a lineal descendant of the more ancient species. With an eye to
+the fact, I brought with me some characteristic specimens of this
+Astrea<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> of the Lower Lias, which I have ranged side by side with the
+Astre&aelig; of the O&ouml;lite I had found so abundant a twelvemonth before in the
+neighborhood of Helmsdale. In some of the hand specimens, that present
+merely a piece of polygonal surface, bounded by fractured sides, the
+difference is not easily distinguishable: the polygonal depressions are
+generally smaller in the O&ouml;litic species, and shallower in the Liasic
+one; but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> not unfrequently these differences disappear, and it is only
+when compared in the entire unbroken coral that their specific
+peculiarities acquire the necessary prominence. The O&ouml;litic Astrea is of
+much greater size than the Liasic one: it occurs not unfrequently in
+masses of from two to three feet in diameter; and as its polygons are
+tubes that converge to the footstalk on which it originally formed, it
+presents in the average outline a fungous-like appearance; whereas in
+the smaller Liasic coral, which rarely exceeds a foot in diameter, there
+is 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 no
+resemblance to the form in another. Some of the recent Astre&aelig; are of
+great beauty when inhabited by the living zo&ouml;phites whose skeleton
+framework they compose. Every polygonal star in the mass is the house of
+a separate animal, that, when withdrawn into its cell, presents the
+appearance of a minute flower, somewhat like a daisy stuck flat to the
+surface, and that, when stretched out, resembles a small round tower,
+with a garland of leaves bound round it atop for a cornice. The <i>Astrea
+viridis</i>, a coral of the tropics, presents on a ground of velvety brown
+myriads of deep green florets, that ever and anon start up from the
+level in their tower-like shape, contract and expand their petals, and
+then, shrinking back into their cells, straightway became florets again.
+The Lower Lias presented in one of its opening scenes, in this part of
+the world, appearances of similar beauty widely spread. For miles
+together,&mdash;we know not how many,&mdash;the bottom of a clear shallow sea was
+paved with living Astre&aelig;: every irregular rock-like coral formed a
+separate colony of polypora, that, when in motion, presented the
+appearance of continuous masses of many-colored life, and when at rest,
+the places they occupied were more thickly studded with the living<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span>
+florets than the richest and most flowery piece of pasture the reader
+ever saw, with its violets or its daisies. And mile beyond mile this
+scene of beauty stretched on through the shallow depths of the Liasic
+sea. The calcareous framework of most of the recent Astre&aelig; are white;
+but in the species referred to,&mdash;the <i>Astrea viridis</i>,&mdash;it is of a
+dark-brown color. It is not unworthy of remark, in connection with these
+facts, that the O&ouml;litic Astrea of Helmsdale occurs as a white, or, when
+darkest, as a cream-colored petrifaction; whereas the Liasic Astrea of
+Skye is invariably of a deep earthy hue. The one was probably a white,
+the other a dingy-colored coral.</p>
+
+<p>The Liasic bed of Astre&aelig; existed long enough here to attain a thickness
+of from two to three feet. Mass rose over mass,&mdash;the living upon the
+dead,&mdash;till at length, by a deposit of mingled mud and sand,&mdash;the
+effect, mayhap, of some change of currents, induced we know not
+how,&mdash;the innumerable polypedes of the living surface were buried up and
+killed, and then, for many yards, layer after layer of a calciferous
+grit was piled over them. The fossils of the grit are few and ill
+preserved; but we occasionally find in it a coral similar to the Astrea
+of the bed below, and, a little higher up, in an impure limestone,
+specimens, in rather indifferent keeping, of a genus of polypifer which
+somewhat resembles the Turbinolia of the Mountain Limestone. It presents
+in the cross section the same radiated structure as the <i>Turbinolia
+fungites</i>, and nearly the same furrowed appearance in the longitudinal
+one; but, seen in the larger specimens, we find that it was a branched
+coral, with obtuse forky boughs, in each of which, it is probable, from
+their general structure, there lived a single polype. It may have been
+the resemblance which these bear, when seen in detached branches, to the
+older Caryophyllia, taken in connection with the fact that the deposit
+in which they occur<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> rests on the ancient Red Sandstone of the district,
+that led M'Culloch to question whether this fossiliferous formation had
+not nearly as clear a claim to be regarded as an analogue of the
+Carboniferous Limestone of England as of its Lias; and hence he
+contented himself with terming it simply the Gryphite Limestone. Sir R.
+Murchison, whose much more close and extensive acquaintance with fossils
+enabled him to assign to the deposit its true place, was struck,
+however, with the general resemblance of its polypifers to "those of the
+Madreporite Limestone of the Carboniferous series." These polypifers
+occur in only the lower Lias of Skye.<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> I found no corals in its higher
+beds, though these are charged with other fossils, more characteristic
+of the formation, in vast abundance. In not a few of the middle strata,
+composed of a mud-colored fissile sandstone, the gryphites lie as
+thickly as currants in a Christmas cake; and as they weather white,
+while the stone in which they are embedded retains its dingy hue, they
+somewhat remind one of the white-lead tears of the undertaker mottling a
+hatchment of sable. In a fragment of the dark sandstone, six inches by
+seven, which I brought with me, I reckon no fewer than twenty-two
+gryphites; and it forms but an average specimen of the bed from which I
+detached it. By far the most abundant species is that not inelegant
+shell so characteristic of the formation, the <i>Gryph&aelig;a incurva</i>. We find
+detached specimens scattered over the beach by hundreds, mixed up with
+the remains of recent shells, as if the <i>Gryph&aelig;a incurva</i> were a recent
+shell too. They lie, bleached white by the weather, among the valves of
+defunct oysters and dead buccinid&aelig;; and, from their resemblance to lamps
+cast in the classic model, remind one, in the corners where they have
+accumulated<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> most thickly, of the old magician's stock in trade, who
+wiled away the lamp of Aladdin from Aladdin's simple wife. The <i>Gryph&aelig;a
+obliquita</i> and <i>Gryph&aelig;a M'Cullochii</i> also occur among these middle
+strata of the Lias, though much less frequently than the other. We,
+besides, found in them at least two species of Pecten, with two species
+of Terebratula,&mdash;the one smooth, the other sulcated; a bivalve
+resembling a Donax; another bivalve, evidently a Gervillia, though
+apparently of a species not yet described; and the ill-preserved rings
+of large Ammonites, from ten inches to a foot in diameter. Towards the
+bottom of the bay the fossils again become more rare, though they
+re-appear once more in considerable abundance as we pass along its
+northern side; but in order to acquaint ourselves with the upper
+organisms of the formation, we have to take boat and explore the
+northern shores of Pabba. The Lias of Skye has its three distinct groups
+of fossils: its lower coraline group, in which the Astrea described is
+most abundant; its middle group, in which the <i>Gryph&aelig;a incurva</i> occurs
+by millions; and its upper group, abounding in Ammonites, Nautili,
+Pinn&aelig;, and Serpul&aelig;.</p>
+
+<p>Friday made amends for the rains and fogs of its disagreeable
+predecessor: the morning rose bright and beautiful, with just wind
+enough to fill, and barely fill, the sail, hoisted high, with miser
+economy, that not a breath might be lost; and, weighing anchor, and
+shaking out all our canvass, we bore down on Pabba, to explore. This
+island, so soft in outline and color, is formidably fenced round by
+dangerous reefs; and, leaving the Betsey in charge of John Stewart and
+his companion, to dodge on in the offing, I set out with the minister in
+our 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 happy
+geologist who, with a few thousands to spare, could call Pabba his own.
+It contains less<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> than a square mile of surface; and a walk of little
+more than three miles and a half along the line where the waves break at
+high water brings the traveller back to his starting point; and yet,
+though thus limited in area, the petrifactions of its shores might of
+themselves fill a museum. They rise by thousands and tens of thousands
+on the exposed planes of its sea-washed strata, standing out in bold
+relief, like sculpturings on ancient tombstones, at once mummies and
+monuments,&mdash;the dead and the carved memorials of the dead. Every rock is
+a tablet of hieroglyphics, with an ascertained alphabet; every rolled
+pebble a casket with old pictorial records locked up within. Trap-dykes,
+beyond comparison finer than those of the Water of Leith, which first
+suggested to Hutton his theory, stand up like fences over the
+sedimentary strata, or run out like moles far into the sea. The entire
+island, too, so green, rich, and level, is itself a specimen
+illustrative of the effect of geologic formation on scenery. We find its
+nearest neighbor,&mdash;the steep, brown, barren island of Longa, which is
+composed of the ancient Red Sandstone of the district,&mdash;differing as
+thoroughly from it in aspect as a bit of granite differs from a bit of
+clay-slate; and the whole prospect around, save the green Liasic strip
+that lies along the bottom of the Bay of Broadford, exhibits, true to
+its various components, Plutonic or sedimentary, a character of
+picturesque roughness or bold sublimity. The only piece of smooth, level
+England, contained in the entire landscape, is the fossil-mottled island
+of Pabba. We were first struck, on landing this morning, by the great
+number of Pinn&aelig; embedded in the strata,&mdash;shells varying from five to ten
+inches in length,&mdash;one species of the common flat type, exemplified in
+the existing <i>Pinna sulcata</i>, and another nearly quadrangular, in the
+cross section, like the <i>Pinna lanceolata</i> of the Scarborough limestone.
+The quadrangular species is more deeply<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> crisped outside than the flat
+one. Both species bear the longitudinal groove in the centre, and when
+broken across, are found to contain numerous smaller
+shells,&mdash;Terebratul&aelig; of both the smooth and sulcated kinds, and a
+species of minute smooth Pecten resembling the <i>Pecten demissus</i>, but
+smaller. The Pinn&aelig;, 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 Pinn&aelig; are all
+sedentary shells, some of them full two feet in length, fastened to
+their places on their deep-sea floors by flowing silky byssi,&mdash;cables of
+many strands,&mdash;of which beautiful pieces of dress, such as gloves and
+hose, have been manufactured. An old French naturalist, the Abbe Le
+Pluche, tells us that "the Pinna with its fleshy tongue" (foot),&mdash;a rude
+inefficient looking implement for work so nice,&mdash;"spins such threads as
+are more valuable than silk itself, and with which the most beautiful
+stuffs that ever were seen have been made by Sicilian weavers." Gloves
+made of the byssus of recent Pinn&aelig; may be seen in the British Museum.
+Associated with the numerous Pinn&aelig; of Pabba we found a delicately-formed
+Modiola, a small Ostrya, Plagiostoma, Terebratula, several species of
+Pectens, a triangular univalve resembling a Trochus, innumerable groups
+of Serpul&aelig;, and the star-like joints of Pentacrinites. The Gryph&aelig; are
+also abundant, occurring in extensive beds; and Belemnites of various
+species lie as thickly scattered over the rock as if they had been the
+spindles of a whole kingdom thrown aside in consequence of some such
+edict framed to put them down as that passed by the father of the
+Sleeping Beauty. We find, among the detached masses of the beach,
+specimens of Nautilus, which, though rarely perfect, are sufficiently so
+to show the peculiarities<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> of the shell; and numerous Ammonites project
+in relief from almost every weathered plane of the strata. These last
+shells, in the tract of shore which we examined, are chiefly of one
+species,&mdash;the <i>Ammonites spinatus</i>,&mdash;one of which, considerably broken,
+the reader may find figured in Sowerby's "Mineral Conchology," from a
+specimen brought from Pabba sixteen years ago by Sir R. Murchison. It is
+difficult to procure specimens tolerably complete. We find bits of outer
+rings existing as limestone, with every rib sharply preserved, but the
+rest of the fossil lost in the shale. I succeeded in finding but two
+specimens that show the inner whorls. They are thickly ribbed; and the
+chief peculiarity which they exhibit, not so directly indicated by Mr.
+Sowerby's figure, is, that while the ribs of the outer whorl are broad
+and deep, as in the <i>Ammonites obtusus</i>, they suddenly change their
+character, and become numerous and narrow in the inner whorls, as in the
+<i>Ammonites communis</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The tide began to flow, and we had to quit our explorations, and return
+to the Betsey. The little wind had become less, and all the canvas we
+could hang out enabled us to draw but a sluggish furrow. The stern of
+the Betsey "wrought no buttons" on this occasion; but she had a good
+tide under her keel; and ere the dinner-hour we had passed through the
+narrows of Kyle Akin. The village of this name was designed by the late
+Lord M'Donald for a great seaport town; but it refused to grow; and it
+has since become a gentleman in a small way, and does nothing. It forms,
+however, a handsome group of houses, pleasantly situated on a flat green
+tongue 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, as
+if by an earthquake, from top to bottom, which forms one of the most
+picturesque objects I have almost ever seen in a landscape.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> There are
+bold hills all around, and rocky islands, with the ceaseless rush of
+tides in front; while the cloven tower, rising high over the shore, is
+seen, in threading the Kyles, whether from the south or north, relieved
+dark against the sky, as the central object in the vista. We find it
+thus described by the Messrs. Anderson of Inverness, in their excellent
+"Guide Book,"&mdash;by far the best companion of the kind with which the
+traveller who sets himself to explore our Scottish Highlands can be
+provided. "Close to the village of Kyle Akin are the ruins of an old
+square keep, called Castle Muel or Maoil, the walls of which are of a
+remarkable thickness. It is said to have been built by the daughter of a
+Norwegian king, married to a Mackinnon or Macdonald, for the purpose of
+levying an impost on all vessels passing the Kyles, excepting, says the
+tradition, those of her own country. For the more certain exaction of
+this duty, she is reported to have caused a strong chain to be stretched
+across from shore to shore; and the spot in the rocks to which the
+terminal links were attached is still pointed out." It was high time for
+us to be home. The dinner hour came; but, in meet illustration of the
+profound remark of Trotty-Veck, not the dinner. We had been in a cold
+Moderate district, whence there came no half-dozens of eggs, or whole
+dozens of trout, or pailfuls of razor-fish, and in which hard
+cabin-biscuit cost us sixpence per pound. And now our stores were
+exhausted, and we had to dine as best we could, on our last half-ounce
+of 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 there
+nearly three weeks before, when I came first aboard, and no one seemed
+to know for how many weeks previous; for as it had come to be a sort of
+fixture in the vessel, it could be looked at without being seen. But
+necessity sharpens the discerning faculty, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> on this pressing
+occasion I was fortunate enough to see it. It was straightway taken
+down, skinned, roasted, and eaten; and, though rather rich in
+ammonia,&mdash;a substance better suited to form the food of the organisms
+that do not unite sensation to vitality, than organisms so high in the
+scale as the minister and his friend,&mdash;we came deliberately to the
+opinion, that on the whole, we could scarce have dined so well on one of
+Major Bellenden's jack-boots,&mdash;"so thick in the soles," according to
+Jenny Dennison, "forby being tough in the upper leather." The tide
+failed us opposite the opening of Loch Alsh; the wind, long dying, at
+length died out into a dead calm; and we cast anchor in ten fathoms
+water, to wait the ebbing current that was to carry us through Kyle
+Rhea.</p>
+
+<p>The ebb-tide set in about half an hour after sunset; and in weighing
+anchor to float down the Kyle,&mdash;for we still lacked wind to sail down
+it,&mdash;we brought up from below, on one of the anchor-flukes, an immense
+bunch 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 thrown
+out roots along its length of stalk, to attach itself to the rock, in
+the way the ivy attaches itself to the wall. Among the intricacies of
+the true roots of the bunch, if one may speak of the true roots of an
+alga, I reckoned from eighteen to twenty different forms of animal
+life,&mdash;Flustr&aelig;, Sertulari&aelig;, Serpul&aelig;, Anomi&aelig;, Modiol&aelig;, Astarte, Annelida,
+Crustacea, and Radiata. Among the Crustaceans I found a female crab of a
+reddish-brown color, considerably smaller than the nail of my small
+finger, but fully grown apparently, for the abdominal flap was loaded
+with spawn; and among the Echinoderms, a brownish-yellow sea-urchin
+about the size of a pistol-bullet, furnished with comparatively large
+but thinly-set spines. There is a dangerous rock in the Kyle Rhea, the
+Caileach stone, on which the Commissioners<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> for the Northern Lighthouses
+have stuck a bit of board about the size of a pot-lid, which, as it is
+known to be there, and as no one ever sees it after sunset, is really
+very effective, considering how little it must have cost the country, in
+wrecking vessels. I saw one of its victims, the sloop of an honest
+Methodist, 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 looking
+out in vain for the bit of board, was just stepping into the shrouds, to
+try whether he could not see the rock on which the bit of board is
+placed, when all at once his vessel found out both board and rock for
+herself. We also had anxious looking out this evening for the bit of
+board: one of us thought he saw it right a-head; and when some of the
+others were trying to see it too, John Stewart succeeded in discovering
+it half a pistol-shot astern. The evening was one of the loveliest. The
+moon rose in cloudy majesty over the mountains of Glenelg, brightening
+as it rose, till the boiling eddies around us curled on the darker
+surface in pale circlets of light, and the shadow of the Betsey lay as
+sharply defined on the brown patch of calm to the larboard as if it were
+her portrait taken in black. Immediately at the water-edge, under a tall
+dark hill, there were two smouldering fires, that now shot up a sudden
+tongue of bright flame, and now dimmed into blood-red specks, and sent
+thick strongly-scented trails of smoke athwart the surface of the Kyle.
+We could hear, in the calm, voices from beside them, apparently those of
+children; and learned that they indicated the places of two
+kelp-furnaces,&mdash;things which have now become comparatively rare along
+the 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 in
+the moonshine, we could see<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> behind us several spectral-looking sails
+threading their silent way through the narrows, like twilight ghosts
+traversing some haunted corridor.</p>
+
+<p>It was late ere we reached the opening of Isle Ornsay; and as it was
+still a dead calm we had to tug in the Betsey to the anchoring ground
+with a pair of long sweeps. The minister pointed to a low-lying rock on
+the left-hand side of the opening,&mdash;a favorite haunt of the seal. "I
+took farewell of the Betsey there last winter," he said. "The night had
+worn late, and was pitch dark; we could see before us scarce the length
+of our bowsprit; not a single light twinkled from the shore; and, in
+taking the bay, we ran bump on the skerry, and stuck fast. The water
+came rushing in, and covered over the cabin-floor. I had Mrs. Swanson
+and my little daughter aboard with me, with one of our servant-maids who
+had become attached to the family, and insisted on following us from
+Eigg; and, of course, our first care was to get them ashore. We had to
+land them on the bare uninhabited island yonder, and a dreary enough
+place 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 at
+least the recommendation of being safe, and the sky, though black and
+wild, was not stormy. I had brought two lanterns ashore: the servant
+girl, with the child in her lap, sat beside one of them, in the shelter
+of a rock; while my wife, with the other, went walking up and down along
+a piece of level sward yonder, waving the light, to attract notice from
+the opposite side of the bay. But though it was seen from the windows of
+my own house by an attached relative, it was deemed merely a
+singularly-distinct apparition of Will o' the Wisp, and so brought us no
+assistance. 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 the
+rocks;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> and then, taking our few movables ashore, we hung on till the
+tide rose, and, with our boat alongside ready for escape, succeeded in
+warping her into deep water, with the intention of letting her sink
+somewhere beyond the influence of the surf, which, without fail, would
+have broken her up on the skerry in a few hours, had we suffered her to
+remain there. But though, when on the rock, the tide had risen as freely
+over the cabin sole inside as over the crags without, in the deep water
+the Betsey gave no sign of sinking. I went down to the cabin; the water
+was knee-high on the floor, dashing against bed and locker, but it rose
+no higher;&mdash;the enormous leak had stopped, we knew not how; and, setting
+ourselves to the pump, we had in an hour or two a clear ship. The Betsey
+is clinker-built below. The elastic oak planks had yielded inwards to
+the pressure of the rock, tearing out the fastenings, and admitted the
+tide at wide yawning seams; but no sooner was the pressure removed, than
+out they sprung again into their places, like bows when the strings are
+slackened; and when the carpenter came to overhaul, he found he had
+little else to do than to remove a split plank, and to supply a few
+dozens of drawn nails."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span></p>
+<h3>CHAPTER X.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="hang">Isle Ornsay&mdash;The Sabbath&mdash;A Sailor-minister's Sermon for
+Sailors&mdash;The Scuir Sermon&mdash;Loch Carron&mdash;Groups of Moraines&mdash;A sheep
+District&mdash;The Editor of the <i>Witness</i> and the Establishment
+Clergyman&mdash;Dingwall&mdash;Conon-side revisited&mdash;The Pond and its
+Changes&mdash;New Faces&mdash;The Stonemason's Mark&mdash;The Burying Ground of
+Urquhart&mdash;An old acquaintance&mdash;Property Qualification for Voting in
+Scotland&mdash;Montgerald Sandstone Quarries&mdash;Geological Science in
+Cromarty&mdash;The Danes at Cromarty&mdash;The Danish Professor and the "Old
+Red Sandstone"&mdash;Harmonizing tendencies of Science. </p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> anchoring ground at Isle Ornsay was crowded with coasting vessels
+and fishing boats; and when the Sabbath came round, no inconsiderable
+portion of my friend's congregation was composed of sailors and
+fishermen. His text was appropriate,&mdash;"He bringeth them into their
+desired haven;" and as his sea-craft and his theology were alike
+excellent, there were no incongruities in his allegory, and no defects
+in his mode of applying it, and the seamen were hugely delighted. John
+Stewart, though less a master of English than of many other things, told
+me he was able to follow the minister from beginning to end,&mdash;a thing he
+had never done before at an English preaching. The sea portion of the
+sermon, he said, was very plain: it was about the helm, and the sails,
+and the anchor, and the chart, and the pilot,&mdash;about rocks, winds,
+currents, and safe harborage; and by attending to this simpler part of
+it, he was led into the parts that were less simple, and so succeeded in
+comprehending the whole. I would fain see this unique discourse,
+preached by a sailor minister to a sailor congregation, preserved in
+some permanent form, with at least one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> other discourse,&mdash;of which I
+found trace in the island of Eigg, after the lapse of more than a
+twelvemonth,&mdash;that had been preached about the time of the Disruption,
+full in sight of the Scuir, with its impregnable hill-fort, and in the
+immediate neighborhood of the cave of Frances, with its heaps of dead
+men's bones. One note stuck fast to the islanders. In times of peril and
+alarm, said the minister, the ancient inhabitants of the island had two
+essentially different kinds of places in which they sought security;
+they had the deep, unwholesome cave, shut up from the light and the
+breath of heaven, and the tall rock summit, with its impregnable fort,
+on which the sun shone and the wind blew. Much hardship might no doubt
+be encountered on the one, when the sky was black with tempest, and
+rains beat, or snows descended; but it was found associated with no
+story of real loss or disaster,&mdash;it had kept safe all who had committed
+themselves to it; whereas, in the close atmosphere of the other there
+was warmth, and, after a sort, comfort; and on one memorable day of
+trouble the islanders had deemed it the preferable sheltering place of
+the two. And there survived mouldering skeletons and a frightful
+tradition, to tell the history of their choice. Places of refuge of
+these very opposite kinds, said the minister, continuing his allegory,
+are not peculiar to your island; never was there a day or a place of
+trial in which they did not advance their opposite claims: they are
+advancing them even now all over the world. The one kind you find
+described by one great prophet as low-lying "refuges of lies," over
+which the desolating "scourge must pass," and which the destroying
+"waters must overflow;" while the true character of the other may be
+learned from another great prophet, who was never weary of celebrating
+his "rock and his fortress." "Wit succeeds more from being happily
+addressed," says Goldsmith, "than even from its native<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> poignancy." If
+my friend's allegory does not please quite as well in print and in
+English as it did when delivered <i>viva voce</i> in Gaelic, it should be
+remembered that it was addressed to an out-door congregation, whose
+minds were filled with the consequences of the Disruption,&mdash;that the
+bones of <i>Uamh Fraingh</i> lay within a few hundred yards of them,&mdash;and
+that the Scuir, with the sun shining bright on its summit, rose tall in
+the background, scarce a mile away.</p>
+
+<p>On Monday I spent several hours in re&euml;xploring the Lias of Lucy Bay and
+its neighborhood, and then walked on to Kyle-Akin, where I parted from
+my friend Mr. Swanson, and took boat for Loch Carron. The greater part
+of the following day was spent in crossing the country to the east coast
+in the mail-gig, through long dreary glens, and a fierce storm of wind
+and rain. In the lower portion of the valley occupied by the river
+Carron, I saw at least two fine groups of moraines. One of these, about
+a mile and a half above the parish manse, marks the place where a
+glacier, that had once descended from a hollow amid the northern range
+of 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 greater
+extent, indicates where one of those river-like glaciers that fill up
+long hollows, and impel their irresistible flood downwards, slow as the
+hour-hand of a time-piece, had terminated towards the sea. I could but
+glance at the appearances as the gig drove past, and point them out to a
+fellow passenger, the Establishment minister of&mdash;&mdash;, remarking, at the
+same time, how much more dreary the prospect must have seemed than even
+it did to-day, though the fog was thick and the drizzle disagreeable,
+when the lateral hollows on each side were blocked up with ice, and
+overhanging glaciers, that ploughed the rock bare in their descent,
+glistened on the bleak hill-sides.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> I wore a gray maud over a coat of
+rough russet, with waist-coat and trowsers of plaid; and the minister,
+who must have taken me, I suppose, for a southland shepherd looking out
+for a farm, gave me much information of a kind I might have found
+valuable had such been my condition and business, regarding the various
+districts through which we passed. On one high-lying farm, the grass, he
+said, was short and thin, but sweet and wholesome, and the flocks throve
+steadily, and were never thinned by disease; whereas on another farm,
+that lay along the dank bottom of a valley, the herbage was rank and
+rich, and the sheep fed and got heavy, but braxy at the close of autumn
+fell upon them like a pestilence, and more than neutralized to the
+farmer every advantage of the superior fertility of the soil. It was not
+uninteresting, even for one not a sheep-farmer, to learn that the life
+of the sheep is worth fewer years' purchase in one little track of
+country than in another adjacent one; and that those differences in the
+salubrity of particular spots which obtain in other parts of the world
+in regard to our own species, and which make it death to linger on the
+luxuriant river-side, while on the arid plain or elevated hill-top there
+is health and safety, should exist in contiguous walks in the Highlands
+of Scotland in reference to some of the inferior animals. The minister
+and I became wonderfully good friends for the time. All the seats in the
+gig, both back and front, had been occupied ere he had taken his
+passage, and the postman had assigned him a miserable place on the
+narrow elevated platform in the middle, where he had to coil himself up
+like a hedgehog in its hole, sadly to the discomfort of limbs still
+stout and strong, but stiffened by the long service of full seventy
+years. 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, as
+became his years, "'gan murmur." I contrived, by sitting<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> on the edge of
+the gig on the one side, and by getting the postman to take a similar
+seat on the other, to find room for him in front; and there, feeling he
+had not to do with savages, he became kindly and conversible. We beat
+together over a wide range of topics;&mdash;the Scotch banks, and Sir Robert
+Peel's intentions regarding them,&mdash;the periodical press of
+Scotland,&mdash;the Edinburgh literati,&mdash;the Free Church even: he had been a
+consistent Moderate all his days, and disliked renegades, he said; and
+I, of course, disliked renegades too. We both remembered that, though
+civilized nations give quarter to an enemy overpowered in open fight,
+they are still in the habit of shooting deserters. In short, we agreed
+on a great many different matters; and, by comparing notes, we made the
+best we could of a tedious journey and a very bad day. At the inn at
+Garve, a long stage from Dingwall, we alighted, and took the road
+together, to straighten our stiffened limbs, while the post man was
+engaged in changing horses. The minister stopped short in the middle of
+a discussion. We are not on equal terms, he said: you know who I am, and
+I don't know you: we did not start fair at the beginning, but let us
+start fair now. Ah, we have agreed hitherto, I replied; but I know not
+how we are to agree when you know who I am: are you sure you will not be
+frightened? Frightened! said the minister sturdily; no, by no man. Then,
+I am the Editor of the <i>Witness</i>. There was a momentary pause. "Well,"
+said the minister, "it's all the same: I'm glad we should have met. Give
+me, man, a shake of your hand." And so the conversation went on as
+before till we parted at Dingwall,&mdash;the Establishment clergyman wet to
+the skin, the Free Church editor in no better condition; but both,
+mayhap, rather less out of conceit with the ride than if it had been
+ridden alone.</p>
+
+<p>I had intended passing at least two days in the neighborhood<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> of
+Dingwall, where I proposed renewing an acquaintance, broken off for
+three-and-twenty years, with those bituminous shales of Strathpeffer in
+which the celebrated mineral waters of the valley take their rise,&mdash;the
+Old Red Conglomerate of Brahan, the vitrified fort of Knockferrel, the
+ancient tower of Fairburn, above all, the pleasure-grounds of
+Conon-side. I had spent the greater portion of my eighteenth and
+nineteenth years in this part of the country; and I was curious to
+ascertain to what extent the man in middle life would verify the
+observations of the lad,&mdash;to recall early incidents, revisit remembered
+scenes, return on old feelings, and see who were dead and who were alive
+among the casual acquaintances of nearly a quarter of a century ago. The
+morning of Wednesday rose dark with fog and rain, but the wind had
+fallen; and as I could not afford to miss seeing Conon-side, I sallied
+out under cover of an umbrella. I crossed the bridge, and reached the
+pleasure-grounds of Conon-house. The river was big in flood: it was
+exactly 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 do
+early in the autumn of that year, and pick up the pearl muscles that lie
+so thickly among the stones at the bottom. I saw, however, amid a
+thicket of bushes by the river-side, a heap of broken shells, where some
+herd-boy had been carrying on such a pearl fishery as I had sometimes
+used to carry on in my own behalf so long before; and I felt it was just
+something to see it. The flood eddied past, dark and heavy, sweeping
+over bulwark and bank. The low-stemmed alders that rose on islet and
+mound seemed shorn of half their trunks in the tide; here and there an
+elastic branch bent to the current, and rose and bent again; and now a
+tuft of withered heath came floating down, and now a soiled wreath of
+foam. How<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> vividly the past rose up before me!&mdash;boyish day-dreams
+forgotten for twenty years,&mdash;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 the
+ancient Cryptogami&aelig;, and bore no specific resemblance to the productions
+of a present time. I had passed in the neighborhood the first season I
+anywhere spent among strangers, at an age when home is not a country,
+nor a province even, but simply a little spot of earth inhabited by
+friends and relatives; and the rude verses, long forgotten, in which my
+joy had found vent when on the eve of returning to that home,&mdash;a home
+little more than twenty miles away,&mdash;came chiming as freshly into my
+memory as if scarce a month had passed since I had composed them beside
+the Conon.<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a></p>
+
+<p>Three-and-twenty years form a large portion of the short life of
+man,&mdash;one-third, as nearly as can be expressed in unbroken numbers, of
+the entire term fixed by the psalmist, and full one-half, if we strike
+off the twilight periods of childhood and immature youth, and of
+senectitude weary of its toils. I found curious indications among the
+grounds of Conon-side, of the time that had elapsed since I had last
+seen them. There was a rectangular pond in a corner of a moor, near the
+public road, inhabited by about a dozen voracious, frog-eating pike,
+that I used frequently to visit. The water in the pond was exceedingly
+limpid; 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 narrow
+tangled pathway, to visit it once more. I could have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> found out the
+place blindfold: there was a piece of flat brown heath that stretched
+round its edges, and a mossy slope that rose at its upper side, at the
+foot of which the taste of the proprietor had placed a rustic chair. The
+spot, though itself bare and moory, was nearly surrounded by wood, and
+looked like a clearing in an American forest. There were lines of
+graceful larches on two of its sides, and a grove of vigorous beeches
+that directly fronted the setting sun on a third; and I had often found
+it a place of delightful resort, in which to saunter alone in the calm
+summer evenings, after the work of the day was over. Such was the scene
+as it existed in my recollection. I came up to it this day through
+dripping trees, along a neglected pathway; and found, for the open space
+and the rectangular pond, a gloomy patch of water in the middle of a
+tangled thicket, that rose some ten or twelve feet over my head. What
+had been bare heath a quarter of a century before had become a thick
+wood; and I remembered, that when I had been last there, the open space
+had just been planted with forest-trees, and that some of the taller
+plants rose half-way to my knee. Human lifetimes, as now measured, are
+not intended to witness both the seed-times and the harvests of
+forests,&mdash;both the planting of the sapling, and the felling of the huge
+tree into which it has grown; and so the incident impressed me strongly.
+It reminded me of the sage Shalum in Addison's antediluvian tale, who
+became wealthy by the sale of his great trees, two centuries after he
+had planted them. I pursued my walk, to revisit another little patch of
+water which I had found so very entertaining a volume three-and-twenty
+years previous, that I could still recall many of its lessons; but the
+hand of improvement had been busy among the fields of Conon-side; and
+when I came up to the spot which it had occupied, I found but a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> piece
+of level arable land, bearing a rank swathe of grass and clover.<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a></p>
+
+<p>Not a single individual did I find on the farm who had been there twenty
+years before. I entered into conversation with one of the ploughmen,
+apparently a man of some intelligence; but he had come to the place only
+a summer or two previous, and the names of most of his predecessors
+sounded unfamiliar in his ears: he knew scarce anything of the old laird
+or his times, and but little of the general history of the district. The
+frequent change of servants incident to the large-farm system has done
+scarce less to wear out the oral antiquities of the country than has
+been done by its busy ploughs in obliterating antiquities of a more
+material cast. The mythologic legend and traditionary story have shared
+the same fate, through the influence of the one cause, which has been
+experienced by the sepulchral tumulus and the ancient encampment under
+the operations of the other. I saw in the pillars and archways of the
+farm-steading some of the hewn stones bearing my own mark,&mdash;an anchor,
+to which I used to attach a certain symbolical meaning; and I pointed
+them out to the ploughman. I had hewn these stones, I said, in the days
+of the old laird, the grandfather of the present proprietor. The
+ploughman wondered how a man still in middle life could have such a
+story to tell. I must surely have begun work early in the day, he
+remarked, which was perhaps the best way for getting it soon over. I
+remembered having seen similar markings on the hewn-work of ancient
+castles, and of indulging in, I daresay, idle enough speculations
+regarding what was doing at court and in the field, in Scotland and
+elsewhere, when the old long-departed mechanics had been engaged in
+their work. When this mark was affixed,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> I have said, all Scotland was
+in mourning for the disaster at Flodden, and the folk in the work-shed
+would have been, mayhap, engaged in discussing the supposed treachery of
+Home, and in arguing whether the hapless James had fallen in battle, or
+gone on a pilgrimage to merit absolution for the death of his father.
+And when this other more modern mark was affixed, the Gowrie conspiracy
+must have been the topic of the day, and the mechanics were probably
+speculating,&mdash;at worst not more doubtfully than the historians have done
+after them,&mdash;on the guilt or innocence of the Ruthvens. It now rose
+curiously enough in memory, that I was employed in fashioning one of the
+stones marked by the anchor,&mdash;a corner stone in a gate-pillar,&mdash;when one
+of my brother apprentices entered the work-shed, laden with a bundle of
+newly sharpened irons from the smithy, and said he had just been told by
+the smith that the great Napoleon Bonaparte was dead. I returned to the
+village of Conon Bridge, through the woods of Conon House. The day was
+still very bad: the rain pattered thick on the leaves, and fell
+incessantly in large drops on the pathways. There is a solitary,
+picturesque burying-ground on a wooded hillock beside the river, with
+thick dark woods all around it,&mdash;one of the two burying-grounds of the
+parish of Urquhart,&mdash;which I would fain have visited, but the swollen
+stream had risen high around, converting the hillock into an island, and
+forbade access. I had spent many an hour among the tombs. They are few
+and scattered, and of the true antique cast,&mdash;roughened with death's
+heads, and cross-bones, and rudely sculptured armorial bearings; and on
+a 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, with
+its iron gnomon wasted to a saw-edged film, that contained more oxide
+than metal. The only fossils described in my present chapter are fossils
+of mind; and the reader<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> will, I trust, bear with me should I produce
+one fossil more of this somewhat equivocal class. It has no merit to
+recommend it,&mdash;it is simply an organism of an immature intellectual
+formation, in which, however, as in the Carboniferous period, there was
+provision made for the necessities of an after time.<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> If a young man
+born on the wrong side of the Tweed for <i>speaking</i> English, is desirous
+to acquire the ability of <i>writing</i> it, he should by all means begin by
+trying to write it in verse.</p>
+
+<p>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 the
+work-shed so many years before lived in the village at the time, I went
+direct to the house he had inhabited, to see whether he might not be
+there still. It was a low-roofed domicile beside the river, but in the
+days of my old acquaintance it had presented an appearance of great
+comfort 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, at
+the door, and was informed that Mr. &mdash;&mdash; now lived higher up the street.
+I would find him, it was added, in the best house on the right-hand
+side,&mdash;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 was
+one of the elders of the Free Church in Urquhart. Such was the standing
+of my old acquaintance the journeyman mason of twenty-three years ago.
+He had been, when I knew him, a steady, industrious, religious
+man,&mdash;with but one exception the only contributor to missionary and
+Bible societies among a numerous party of workmen; and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> he was now
+occupying a respectable place in his village, and was one of the voters
+of the county. Let Chartism assert what it pleases on the one hand, and
+Toryism what it may on the other, the property-qualification of the
+Reform Bill is essentially a good one for such a country as Scotland. In
+our cities it no doubt extends the political franchise to a fluctuating
+class, ill hafted in society, who possess it one year and want it
+another; but in our villages and smaller towns it hits very nearly the
+right medium for forming a premium on steady industry and character, and
+for securing that at least the mass of those who possess it should be
+sober-minded men, with a stake in the general welfare. In running over
+the histories of the various voters in one of our smaller towns, I found
+that nearly one-half of the whole had, like my old comrade at Conon
+Bridge, acquired for themselves, through steady and industrious habits,
+the qualification from which they derive their vote. My companion failed
+to recognize in the man turned of forty the smooth-cheeked stripling of
+eighteen, with whom he had wrought so long before. I soon succeeded,
+however, in making good my claim to his acquaintance. He had previously
+established the identity of the editor of his newspaper with his quondam
+fellow-workman, and a single link more was all the chain wanted. We
+talked over old matters for half an hour. His wife, a staid respectable
+matron, who, when I had been last in the district, was exactly such a
+person as her eldest daughter, showed me an Encyclop&aelig;dia, with colored
+prints, which she wished to send, if she knew but how, to the Free
+Church library. I walked with him through his garden, and saw trees
+loaded with yellow-cheeked pippins, where I had once seen only
+unproductive heath, that scantily covered a barren soil of ferruginous
+sand, and unwillingly declining an invitation to wait tea,&mdash;for a
+previous engagement interfered,&mdash;I took leave of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> the family, and
+returned to Dingwall. The following morning was gloomy, and threatened
+rain; and giving up my intention of exploring Strathpeffer, I took the
+morning coach for Invergordon, and then walked to Cromarty, where I
+arrived just in time for breakfast.</p>
+
+<p>I marked, from the top of the coach, about two miles to the north-east
+of Dingwall, beds of a deep gray sandstone, identical in color and
+appearance with some of the gray sandstones of the Middle Old Red of
+Forfarshire, and learned that quarries had lately been opened in these
+beds near Montgerald. The Old Red Sandstone lies in immense development
+on the flanks of Ben-Wevis; and it is just possible that the analogue of
+the gray flagstones of Forfar may be found among its upper beds. If so,
+the quarriers should be instructed to look hard for organic
+remains,&mdash;the broad-headed Cephalaspis, so characteristic of the
+formation, and the huge Crustacean, its contemporary, that disported in
+plates large as those of the steel mail of the later ages of chivalry.
+The geologists of Dingwall,&mdash;if Dingwall has yet got its
+geologists,&mdash;might do well to attempt determining the point. I found the
+science much in advance in Cromarty, especially among the ladies,&mdash;its
+great patronizers and illustrators everywhere,&mdash;and, in not a few
+localities, extensive contributors to its hoards of fact. Just as I
+arrived, there was a pic-nic party of young people setting out for the
+Lias of Shandwick. They spent the day among its richly fossiliferous
+shales and limestones, and brought back with them in the evening,
+Ammonites and Gryphites enough to store a museum. Cromarty had been
+visited during the summer by geologists speaking a foreign tongue, but
+thoroughly conversant with the occult yet common language of the rocks,
+and deeply interested in the stories which the rocks told. The vessels
+in which the Crown Prince of Denmark voyaged to the Faroe Isles<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> had
+been for some time in the bay; and the Danes, his companions, votaries
+of the stony science, zealously plied chisel and hammer among the Old
+Red Sandstones of the coast. A townsman informed me that he had seen a
+Danish Professor hammering like the tutelary Thor of his country among
+the nodules in which I had found the first Pterichthys and first
+Diplacanthus ever disinterred; and that the Professor, ever and anon as
+he laid open a specimen, brought it to a huge smooth boulder, on which
+there lay a copy of the "Old Red Sandstone," to ascertain from the
+descriptions and prints its family and name. Shall I confess that the
+circumstance gratified me exceedingly? There are many elements of
+Discord among mankind in the present time, both at home and abroad,&mdash;so
+many, that I am afraid we need entertain no hope of seeing an end, in at
+least our day, to controversy and war. And we should be all the better
+pleased, therefore, to witness the increase of those links of
+union,&mdash;such as the harmonizing bonds of a scientific sympathy,&mdash;the
+tendency of which is to draw men together in a kindly spirit, and the
+formation of which involves no sacrifice of principle, moral or
+religious. I do not think that the foreigner, after geologizing in my
+company, 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 chapter
+would require a long apology, and for a long apology space is wanting.
+But there will be no egotism, and much geology, in my next.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span></p>
+<h3>CHAPTER XI</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="hang">Ichthyolite Beds&mdash;An interesting Discovery&mdash;Two Storeys of Organic
+Remains in the Old Red Sandstone&mdash;Ancient Ocean of Lower Old
+Red&mdash;Two great Catastrophes&mdash;Ancient Fish Scales&mdash;Their skilful
+Mechanism displayed by examples&mdash;Bone Lips&mdash;Arts of the Slater and
+Tiler as old as Old Red Sandstone&mdash;Jet Trinkets&mdash;Flint
+Arrow-heads&mdash;Vitrified Forts of Scotland&mdash;Style of grouping Lower
+Old Red Fossils&mdash;Illustration from Cromarty Fishing
+Phenomena&mdash;Singular Remains of Holoptychius&mdash;Ramble with Mr. Robert
+Dick&mdash;Color of the Planet Mars&mdash;Tombs never dreamed of by
+Hervey&mdash;Skeleton of the Bruce&mdash;Gigantic Holoptychius&mdash;"Coal money
+Currency"&mdash;Upper Boundary of Lower Old Red&mdash;Every one may add to
+the Store of Geological Facts&mdash;Discoveries of Messrs. Dick and
+Peach. </p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">I spent</span> one long day in exploring the ichthyolite beds on both sides the
+Cromarty Frith, and another long day in renewing my acquaintance with
+the Liasic deposit at Shandwick. In beating over the Lias, though I
+picked up a few good specimens, I acquired no new facts; but in
+re-examining the Old Red Sandstone and its organisms I was rather more
+successful. I succeeded in eliciting some curious points not yet
+recorded, which, with the details of an interesting discovery made in
+the far north in this formation, I may be perhaps able to weave into a
+chapter somewhat more geological than my last.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the readers of my little work on the Old Red Sandstone will
+perhaps remember that I described the organisms of that ancient system
+as occurring in the neighborhood of Cromarty mainly on one platform,
+raised rather more than a hundred feet over the great Conglomerate; and
+that on this platform, as if suddenly overtaken by some wide-spread
+catastrophe, the ichthyolites lie by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> thousands and tens of thousands,
+in every attitude of distortion and terror. We see the spiked wings of
+the Pterichthys elevated to the full, as they had been erected in the
+fatal moment of anger and alarm, and the bodies of the Cheirolepis and
+Cheiracanthus bent head to tail, in the stiff posture into which they
+had curled when the last pang was over. In various places in the
+neighborhood the ichthyolites are found <i>in situ</i> in their coffin-like
+nodules, where it is impossible to trace the relation of the beds in
+which they occur to the rocks above and below; and I had suspected for
+years that in at least some of the localities, they could not have
+belonged to the lower platform of death, but to some posterior
+catastrophe that had strewed with carcasses some upper platform. I had
+thought over the matter many a time and oft when I should have been
+asleep,&mdash;for it is marvellous how questions of the kind grow upon a man;
+and now, selecting as a hopeful scene of inquiry the splendid section
+under the Northern Sutor, I set myself doggedly to determine whether the
+Old Red Sandstone in this part of the country has not at least its two
+storeys of organic remains, each of which had been equally a scene of
+sudden mortality. I was entirely successful. The lower ichthyolite bed
+occurs exactly one hundred and fourteen feet over the great
+Conglomerate; and three hundred and eighteen feet higher up I found a
+second ichthyolite bed, as rich in fossils as the first, with its thorny
+Acanthodians twisted half round, as if still in the agony of
+dissolution, and its Pterichthyes still extending their spear-like arms
+in the attitude of defence. The discovery enabled me to assign to their
+true places the various ichthyolite beds of the district. Those in the
+immediate neighborhood of the town, and a bed which abuts on the Lias at
+Eathie, belong to the upper platform; while those which appear in Eathie
+Burn, and along the shores<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> at Navity, belong to the lower. The chief
+interest of the discovery, however, arises from the light which it
+throws on the condition of the ancient ocean of the Lower Old Red, and
+on the extreme precariousness of the tenure on which the existence of
+its numerous denizens was held. In a section of little more than a
+hundred yards there occur at least two platforms of violent
+death,&mdash;platforms inscribed with unequivocal evidence of two great
+catastrophes which over wide areas depopulated the seas. In the Old Red
+Sandstone of Caithness there are many such platforms: storey rises over
+storey; and the floor of each bears its closely-written record of
+disaster and sudden extinction. Pompeii in this northern locality lies
+over Herculaneum, and Anglano over both. We cease to wonder why the
+higher order of animals should not have been introduced into a scene of
+being that had so recently arisen out of chaos, and over which the reign
+of death so frequently returned. In a somewhat different sense from that
+indicated by the poet of the "Seasons,"</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+"As yet the trembling <i>year</i> was unconfirmed,<br />
+And <i>winter</i> oft at eve resumed the gale."<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Lying detached in the stratified clay of the fish-beds, there occur in
+abundance single plates and scales of ichthyolites, which, as they can
+be removed entire, and viewed on both sides, illustrate points in the
+mechanism of the creatures to which they belonged that cannot be so
+clearly traced in the same remains when locked up in stone. There is a
+vast deal of skilful carpentry exhibited&mdash;if carpentry I may term it&mdash;in
+the coverings of these ancient ichthyolites. In the commoner fish of our
+existing seas the scales are so thin and flexible,&mdash;mere films of
+horn,&mdash;that there is no particularly nice fitting required in their
+arrangement. The condition,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> too, through which portions of unprotected
+skin may be presented to the water, as over and between the rays of the
+fins, and on the snout and lips, obviates many a mechanical difficulty
+of the earlier period, when it was a condition, as the remains
+demonstrate, that no bit of naked skin, should be exposed, and when the
+scales and plates were formed, not of thin horny films, but of solid
+pieces of bone. Thin slates lie on the roof of a modern dwelling,
+without any nice fitting;&mdash;they are scales of the modern construction:
+but it required much nice fitting to make thick flagstones lie on the
+roof of an ancient cathedral;&mdash;<i>they</i>, on the other hand, were scales of
+the ancient type. Again, it requires no ingenuity whatever, to suffer
+the hands and face to go naked,&mdash;and such is the condition of our
+existing fish, with their soft skinny snouts and membranous fins; but to
+cover the hands with flexible steel gauntlets, and the face with such an
+iron mask as that worn by the mysterious prisoner of Louis XIV., would
+require a very large amount of ingenuity indeed; and the ancient
+ichthyolites of the Old Red were all masked and gauntleted. Now the
+detached plates and scales of the stratified clay exhibit not a few of
+the mechanical contrivances through which the bony coverings of these
+fish were made to unite&mdash;as in coats of old armor&mdash;great strength with
+great flexibility. The scales of the Osteolepis and Diplopterus I found
+nicely bevelled atop and at one of the sides; so that where they
+overlapped each other,&mdash;for at the joints not a needle-point could be
+insinuated,&mdash;the thickness of the two scales equalled but the thickness
+of one scale in the centre, and thus an equable covering was formed. I
+brought with me some of these detached scales, and they now lie fitted
+together on the table before me, like pieces of complicated hewn work
+carefully arranged on the ground ere the workman transfers them to their
+place on the wall. In the smaller-scaled fish,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> such as the
+Cheiracanthus and Cheirolepis, a different principle obtained. The
+minute glittering rhombs of bone were set thick on the skin, like those
+small scales of metal sewed on leather, that formed an inferior kind of
+armor still in use in eastern nations, and which was partially used in
+our own country just ere the buff coat altogether superseded the coat of
+mail. I found a beautiful piece of jaw in the clay, with the enamelled
+tusks bristling on its brightly enamelled edge, like iron teeth in an
+iron rake. Mr. Parkinson expresses some wonder, in his work on fossils,
+that in a fine ichthyolite in the British Museum, not only the teeth
+should have been preserved, but also the lips; but we now know enough of
+the construction of the more ancient fish, to cease wondering. The lips
+were formed of as solid bone as the teeth themselves, and had as fair a
+chance of being preserved entire; just as the metallic rim of a toothed
+wheel has as fair a chance of being preserved as the metallic teeth that
+project from it. I was interested in marking the various modes of
+attachment to the body of the animal which the detached scales exhibit.
+The slater fastens on his slates with nails driven into the wood: the
+tiler secures his tiles by means of a raised bar on the under side of
+each, that locks into a corresponding bar of deal in the framework of
+the roof. Now in some of the scales I found the art of the tiler
+anticipated; there were bars raised on their inner sides, to lay hold of
+the skin beneath; while in others it was the art of the slater that had
+been anticipated,&mdash;the scales had been slates fastened down by long
+nails driven in slantwise, which were, however, mere prolongations of
+the scale itself. Great truths may be repeated until they become
+truisms, and we fail to note what they in reality convey. The great
+truth that all knowledge dwelt without beginning in the adorable Creator
+must, I am afraid, have been thus common-placed in my mind; for at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>
+first it struck me as wonderful that the humble arts of the tiler and
+slater should have existed in perfection in the times of the Old Red
+Sandstone.</p>
+
+<p>I had often remarked amid the fossiliferous limestones of the Lower Old
+Red, minute specks and slender veins of a glossy bituminous substance
+somewhat resembling jet, sufficiently hard to admit of a tolerable
+polish, and which emitted in the fire a bright flame, I had remarked,
+further, its apparent identity with a substance used by the ancient
+inhabitants of the northern part of the country in the manufacture of
+their rude ornaments, as occasionally found in sepulchral urns, such as
+beads of an elliptical form, and flat parallelograms, perforated
+edge-wise by some four or five holes a-piece; but I had failed hitherto
+in detecting in the stone, portions of sufficient bulk for the formation
+of either the beads or the parallelograms. On this visit to the
+ichthyolite beds, however, I picked up a nodule that inclosed a mass of
+the jet large enough to admit of being fashioned into trinkets of as
+great bulk as any of the ancient ones I have yet seen, and a portion of
+which I succeeded in actually forming into a parallelogram, that could
+not have been distinguished from those of our old sepulchral urns. It is
+interesting enough to think, that these fossiliferous beds, altogether
+unknown to the people of the country for many centuries, and which, when
+I first discovered them, some twelve or fourteen years ago, were equally
+unknown to geologists, should have been resorted to for this substance,
+perhaps thousands of years ago, by the savage aborigines of the
+district. But our antiquities of the remoter class furnish us with
+several such facts. It is comparatively of late years that we have
+become acquainted with the yellow chalk-flints of Banffshire and
+Aberdeen; though before the introduction of iron into the country they
+seem to have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> been well known all over the north of Scotland. I have
+never yet seen a stone arrow-head found in any of the northern
+localities, that had not been fashioned out of this hard and splintery
+substance,&mdash;a sufficient proof that our ancestors, ere they had formed
+their first acquaintance with the metals, were intimately acquainted
+with at least the mechanical properties of the chalk-flint, and knew
+where in Scotland it was to be found. They were mineralogists enough,
+too, as their stone battle-axes testify, to know that the best
+tool-making rock is the axe-stone of Werner; and in some localities they
+must have brought their supply of this rather rare mineral from great
+distances. A history of those arts of savage life, as shown in the
+relics of our earlier antiquities, which the course of discovery sereved
+thoroughly to supplant, but which could not have been carried on without
+a knowledge of substances and qualities afterwards lost, until
+re-discovered by scientific curiosity, would form of itself an
+exceedingly curious chapter. The art of the gun-flint maker (and it,
+too, promises soon to pass into extinction) is unquestionably a curious
+one, but not a whit more curious or more ingenious than the art
+possessed by the rude inhabitants of our country eighteen hundred years
+ago, of chipping arrow-heads with an astonishing degree of neatness out
+of the same stubborn material. They found, however, that though flint
+made a serviceable arrow-head, it was by much too brittle for an adze or
+battle-axe; and sought elsewhere than among the Banffshire gravels for
+the rock out of which these were to be wrought. Where they found it in
+our northern provinces I have not yet ascertained. It is but a short
+time since I came to know that they were beforehand with me in the
+discovery of the bituminous jet of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, and were
+excavators among its fossiliferous beds. The vitrified forts of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span>
+north of Scotland give evidence of yet another of the obsolete arts.
+Before the savage inhabitants of the country were ingenious enough to
+know the uses of mortar, or were furnished with tools sufficiently hard
+and solid to dress a bit of sandstone, they must have been acquainted
+with the <i>chemical</i> fact, that with the assistance of fluxes, a pile of
+stones could be fused into a solid wall, and with the <i>mineralogical</i>
+fact, that there are certain kinds of stones which yield much more
+readily to the heat than others. The art of making vitrified forts was
+the art of making ramparts of rock through a knowledge of the less
+obstinate earths and the more powerful fluxes. I have been informed by
+Mr. Patrick Duff of Elgin, that he found, in breaking open a vitrified
+fragment detached from an ancient hill-fort, distinct impressions of the
+serrated kelp-weed of our shores,&mdash;the identical flux which, in its
+character as the kelp of commerce, was so extensively used in our
+glass-houses only a few years ago.</p>
+
+<p>I was struck, during my explorations at this time, as I had been often
+before, by the style of grouping, if I may so speak, which obtains among
+the Lower Old Red fossils. In no deposit with which I am acquainted,
+however rich in remains, have all its ichthyolites been found lying
+together. The collector finds some one or two species very numerous;
+some two or three considerably less so, but not unfrequent; some one or
+two more, perhaps, exceedingly rare; and a few, though abundant in other
+localities, that never occur at all. In the Cromarty beds, for instance,
+I never found a Holoptychius, and a Dipterus only once; the Diplopterus
+is rare; the Glyptolepis not common; the Cheirolepis and Pterichthys
+more so, but not very abundant; the Cheiracanthus and Diplacanthus, on
+the other hand, are numerous; and the Osteolepis and Coccosteus more
+numerous still. But in other deposits of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> the same formation, though a
+similar style of grouping obtains, the proportions are reversed with
+regard to species and genera: the fish rare in one locality abound in
+another. In Banniskirk, for instance, the Dipterus is exceedingly
+common, while the Osteolepis and Coccosteus are rare, and the
+Cheiracanthus and Cheirolepis seem altogether awanting. Again, in the
+Morayshire deposits, the Glyptolepis is abundant, and noble specimens of
+the Lower Old Red Holoptychius&mdash;of which more anon&mdash;are to be found in
+the neighborhood of Thurso, associated with remains of the Diplopterus,
+Coccosteus, Dipterus, and Osteolepis. The fact may be deemed of some
+little interest by the geologist, and may serve to inculcate caution, by
+showing that it is not always safe to determine regarding the place or
+age of subordinate formations from the per centage of certain fossils
+which they may be found to contain, or from the fact that they should
+want some certain organisms of the system to which they belong, and
+possess others. These differences may and do exist in contemporary
+deposits; and I had a striking example, on this occasion, of their
+dependence on a simple law of instinct, which is as active in producing
+the same kind of phenomena now as it seems to have been in the earlier
+days of the Old Red Sandstone. The Cromarty and Moray Friths, mottled
+with fishing boats (for the bustle of the herring fishers had just
+begun), stretched out before me. A few hundred yards from the shore
+there was a yawl lying at anchor, with an old fisherman and a few boys
+angling from the stern for sillocks (the young of the coal-fish) and for
+small rock-cod. A few miles higher up, where the Cromarty Frith expands
+into a wide landlocked basin, with shallow sandy shores, there was a
+second yawl engaged in fishing for flounders and small skate,&mdash;for such
+are the kinds of fish that frequent the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> flat shallows of the basin. A
+turbot-net lay drying in the sun: it served to remind me that some six
+or eight miles away, in an opposite direction, there is a deep-sea bank,
+on which turbot, halibut, and large skate are found. Numerous boats were
+stretching down the Moray Frith, bound for the banks of a more distant
+locality, frequented at this early stage of the herring fishing by
+shoals of herrings, with their attendant dog-fish and cod; and I knew
+that in yet another deep-sea range there lie haddock and whiting banks.
+Almost every variety of existing fish in the two friths has its own
+peculiar habitat; and were they to be destroyed by some sudden
+catastrophe, and preserved by some geologic process, on the banks and
+shoals which they frequent, there would occur exactly the same phenomena
+of grouping in the fossiliferous contemporaneous deposits which they
+would thus constitute, as we find exhibited by the deposits of the Lower
+Old Red Sandstone.</p>
+
+<p>The remains of Holoptychius occur, I have said, in the neighborhood of
+Thurso. I must now add, that very singular remains they are,&mdash;full of
+interest to the naturalist, and, in great part at least, new to Geology.
+My readers, votaries of the stony science, must be acquainted with the
+masterly paper of Mr. Sedgwick and Sir R. Murchison "On the Old Red
+Sandstone of Caithness and the North of Scotland generally," which forms
+part of the second volume (second series) of the "Transactions of the
+Geological Society," and with the description which it furnishes, among
+many others, of the rocks in the neighborhood of Thurso.
+Calcareo-bituminous flags, grits, and shales, of which the paving
+flagstones of Caithness may be regarded as the general type, occur on
+the shores, in reefs, crags, and precipices; here stretching along the
+coast in the form of flat, uneven bulwarks: there rising over it in
+steep<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> walls; yonder leaning to the surf, stratum against stratum, like
+flights of stairs thrown down from their slant position to the level; in
+some places severed by faults; in others cast about in every possible
+direction, as if broken and contorted by a thousand antagonist
+movements; but in their general bearing rising towards the east, until
+the whole calcareo-bituminous schists of which this important member of
+the system is composed disappear under the red sandstones of Dunnet
+Head. Such, in effect, is the general description of Mr. Sedgwick and
+Sir R. Murchison, of the rocks in the neighborhood of Thurso. It
+indicates further, that in at least three localities in the range there
+occur in the grits and shales, scales and impressions of fish. And such
+was the ascertained geology of the deposit when taken up last year by an
+ingenious tradesman of Thurso, Mr. Robert Dick, whose patient
+explorations, concentrated mainly on the fossil remains of this deposit,
+bid fair to add to our knowledge of the ichthyology of the Old Red
+Sandstone. Let us accompany Mr. Dick in one of his exploratory rambles.
+The various organisms which he disinterred I shall describe from
+specimens before me, which I owe to his kindness,&mdash;the localities in
+which he found them, from a minute and interesting description, for
+which I am indebted to his pen.</p>
+
+<p>Leaving behind us the town at the bottom of its deep bay, we set out to
+explore a bluff-headed parallelogramical promontory, bounded by Thurso
+Bay on the one hand, and Murkle Bay on the other, and which presents to
+the open sea, in the space that stretches between, an undulating line of
+iron-bound coast, exposed to the roll of the northern ocean. We pass two
+stations in which the hard Caithness flagstones so well known in
+commerce are jointed by saws wrought by machinery. As is common in the
+Old Red Sandstone, in which scarce any stratum<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> solid enough to be of
+value to the workmen, whether for building or paving, contains good
+specimens, we find but little to detain us in the dark coherent beds
+from which the flags are quarried. Here and there a few glittering
+scales occur; here and there a few coprolitic patches; here and there
+the faint impression of a fucoid; but no organism sufficiently entire to
+be transferred to the bag. As we proceed outwards, however, and the
+fitful breeze comes laden with the keen freshness of the open sea, we
+find among the hard dark strata in the immediate neighborhood of Thurso
+Castle, a paler-colored bed of fine-grained semi-calcareous stone,
+charged with remains in a state of coherency and keeping better fitted
+to repay the labor of the specimen-collector. The inclosing matrix is
+comparatively soft: when employed in the neighboring fences as a
+building stone, we see it resolved by the skyey influences into
+well-nigh its original mud; whereas the organisms which it contains are
+composed of a hard, scarce destructible substance,&mdash;bone steeped in
+bitumen; and the enamel on their outer surfaces is still as glossy and
+bright as the japan on a <i>papier-mach&eacute;</i> tray fresh from the hands of the
+workman. Their deep black, too, contrasts strongly with the pale hue of
+the stone. They consist chiefly of scales, spines, dermal plates,
+snouts, skull-caps, and vegetable impressions. A little farther on, in a
+thick bed interposed between two faults, the same kind of remains occur
+in the same abundance, largely mingled with scales and teeth of
+Holoptychius, tuberculated plates, and coprolitic blotches; and further
+on still, in a rubbly flagstone, near where a little stream comes
+trotting merrily from the uplands to the sea, there occur
+skull-plates,&mdash;at least one of which has been disinterred entire,&mdash;large
+and massy as the helmets of ancient warriors. We have now reached the
+outer point of the promontory,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> where the seaward wave, as it comes
+rolling unbroken from the Pole, crosses, in nearing the shore, the
+eastward sweep of the great Gulf-stream, and then casts itself headlong
+on the rocks. The view has been extending with almost every step we have
+taken, and it has now expanded into a wide and noble prospect of ocean
+and bay, island and main, bold surf-skirted headlands, and green
+retiring hollows. Yonder, on the one hand, are the Orkneys, rising dim
+and blue over the foam-mottled currents of the Pentland Frith; and
+yonder, 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; there
+receding in grassy banks formed of a dark blue diluvium. The fields and
+dwellings of living men mingle in the landscape with old episcopal ruins
+and ancient burying-grounds; and yonder, well-nigh in the opening of the
+Frith, gleams ruddy to the sun,&mdash;a true blood-colored blush, when all
+around is azure or pale,&mdash;the tall Red Sandstone precipices of Dunnet
+Head. It has been suggested that the planet Mars may owe its red color
+to the extensive development of some such formation as the Old Red
+Sandstone of our own planet: the existing formation in Mars may, at the
+present time, it is said, be a Red Sandstone formation. It seems much
+more probable, however, that the red flush which characterizes the whole
+of that planet,&mdash;its oceans as certainly as its continents,&mdash;should be
+rather owing to some widely-diffused peculiarity of the surrounding
+atmosphere, than to aught peculiar in the varied surface of land and
+water which that atmosphere surrounds; but certainly the extensive
+existence of such a red system might produce the effect. If the rocks
+and soils of Dunnet Head formed average specimens of those of our globe
+generally, we could look across<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> the heavens at Mars with a disk vastly
+more 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 rising
+frequently appears from the earth.</p>
+
+<p>We have rounded the promontory. The beds exposed along the coast to the
+lashings of the surf are of various texture and character,&mdash;here tough,
+bituminous, and dark; there of a pale hue, and so hard that they ring to
+the hammer like plates of cast iron; yonder soft, unctuous, and
+green,&mdash;a kind of chloritic sandstone. And these very various powers of
+resistance and degrees of hardness we find indicated by the rough
+irregularities of the surface. The softer parts retire in long
+trench-like hollows,&mdash;the harder stand out in sharp irregular ridges.
+Fossils abound: the bituminous beds glitter bright with glossy
+quadrangular scales, that look like sheets of black mica inclosed in
+granite. We find jaws, teeth, tubercled plates, skull-caps, spines, and
+fucoids,&mdash;"tombs among which to contemplate," says Mr. Dick, "of which
+Hervey never dreamed." The condition of complete keeping in which we
+discover some of these remains, even when exposed to the incessant dash
+of the surf, seems truly wonderful. We see scales of Holoptychius
+standing up in bold relief from the hard cherty rock that has worn from
+around them, with all the tubercles and wavy ridges of their sculpture
+entire. This state of keeping seems to be wholly owing to the curious
+chemical change that has taken place in their substance. Ere the
+skeleton of the Bruce, disinterred entire after the lapse of five
+centuries, was recommitted to the tomb, there were such measures taken
+to secure its preservation, that were it to be again disinterred even
+after as many centuries more had passed, it might be found retaining
+unbroken its gigantic proportions. There was molten pitch poured over
+the bones in a state of sufficient fluidity to permeate all their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span>
+pores, and fill up the central hollows, and which, soon hardening around
+them, formed a bituminous matrix, in which they may lie unchanged for
+more than a thousand years. Now, exactly such was the process of keeping
+to which nature resorted with these skeletons of the Old Red Sandstone.
+The animal matter with which they were charged had been converted into a
+hard black bitumen. Like the bones of the Bruce, they are bones steeped
+in pitch; and so thoroughly is every pore and hollow still occupied,
+that, when cast into the fire, they flamed like torches. In one of the
+beds at which we have now arrived Mr. Dick found the occipital plates of
+a Holoptychius of gigantic proportions. The frontal plates measured full
+sixteen inches across, and from the nape of the neck to a little above
+the place of the eyes, full eighteen; while a single plate belonging to
+the lower part of the head measures thirteen and a half inches by seven
+and a half. I have remarked, in my little work on the Old Red
+Sandstone,&mdash;founding on a large amount of negative evidence, that a
+mediocrity of size and bulk seems to have obtained among the fish of the
+Lower Old Red, though in at least the Upper formation, a considerable
+increase in both took place. A single piece of positive evidence,
+however, outweighs whole volumes of a merely negative kind. From the
+entire plate now in my possession, which is identical with one figured
+in Mr. Noble of St. Madoes' specimen, and from the huge fragments of the
+upper plates now before me, some of which are full five-eighth parts of
+an inch in thickness, I am prepared to demonstrate that this
+Holoptychius of the Lower Old Red must have been at least thrice the
+size of the <i>Holoptychius Nobilissimus</i> of Clashbennie.</p>
+
+<p>Still we pass on, though with no difficulty, over the rough contorted
+crags, worn by the surf into deep ruts and uneven ridges, gnarled
+protuberances, and crater-like hollows.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> The fossiliferous beds are
+still very numerous, and largely charged with remains. We see dermal
+bones, spines, scales, and jaws, projecting in high relief from the
+sea-worn surface of the ledges below, and from the weatherworn faces of
+the precipices above; for an uneven wall of crags some thirty or forty
+feet high, now runs along the shore. We have reached what seems a large
+mole, that sloping downwards athwart the beach from the precipices, like
+a huge boat-pier, runs far into the surf. We find it composed of a
+siliceous bed, so intensely compact and hard, that it has preserved its
+proportions entire, while every other rock has worn from around it. For
+century after century have the storms of the fierce north-west sent
+their long ocean-nursed waves to dash against it in foam; for century
+after century have the never-ceasing currents of the Pentland chafed
+against its steep sides, or eddied over its rough crest; and yet still
+does it remain unwasted and unworn,&mdash;its abrupt wall retaining all its
+former steepness, and every angular jutting all the original sharpness
+of edge. As we advance the scenery becomes wilder and more broken: here
+an irregular wall of rock projects from the crags towards the sea; there
+a dock-like hollow, in which the water gleams green, intrudes from the
+sea upon the crags; we pass a deep lime-encrusted cave, with which
+tradition associates some wild legends, and which, from the supposed
+resemblance of the hanging stalactites to the entrails of a large animal
+wounded in the chase, bears the name of Pudding-Gno; and then, turning
+an angle of the coast, we enter a solitary bay, that presents at its
+upper extremity a flat expanse of sand. Our walk is still over
+sepulchres charged with the remains of the long-departed. Scales of
+Holoptychius abound, scattered like coin over the surface of the ledges.
+It would seem&mdash;to borrow from Mr. Dick&mdash;as if some old lord of the
+treasury, who flourished<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> in the days of the coal-money currency, had
+taken a squandering fit at Sanday Bay, and tossed the dingy contents of
+his treasure-chest by shovelfuls upon the rocks. Mr. Dick found in this
+locality some of his finest specimens, one of which&mdash;the inner side of
+the skull-cap of a Holoptychius, with every plate occupying its proper
+place, and the large angular holes through which the eyes looked out
+still entire&mdash;I trust to be able by and by to present to the public in a
+good engraving. There occur jaws, plates, scales spines,&mdash;the remains of
+fucoids, too, of great size and in vast abundance. Mr. Dick has
+disinterred from among the rocks of Sanday Bay flattened carbonaceous
+stems four inches in diameter. We are still within an hour's walk of
+Thurso; but in that brief hour how many marvels have we witnessed!&mdash;how
+vast an amount of the vital mechanisms of a perished creation have we
+not passed over! Our walk has been along ranges of sepulchres, greatly
+more wonderful than those of Thebes or Petr&aelig;a, and mayhap a thousand
+times more ancient. There is no lack of life along the shores of the
+solitary little bay. The shriek of the sparrow-hawk mingles from the
+cliffs with the hoarse deep croak of the raven; the cormorant on some
+wave-encircled ledge, hangs out his dark wing to the breeze; the spotted
+diver, plying his vocation on the shallows beyond, dives and then
+appears, and dives and appears again, and we see the silver glitter of
+scales from his beak; and far away in the offing the sunlight falls on a
+scull of seagulls, that flutter upwards, downwards, and athwart, now in
+the air, thick as midges over some forest-brook in an evening of
+midsummer.</p>
+
+<p>But we again pass onwards, amid a wild ruinous scene of abrupt faults,
+detached fragments of rocks, and reversed strata: again the ledges
+assume their ordinary position and aspect, and we rise from lower to
+higher and still higher beds in the formation,&mdash;for such, as I have
+already remarked,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> is the general arrangement from west to east, along
+the northern coast of Caithness, of the Old Red Sandstone. The great
+Conglomerate base of the formation we find largely developed at Port
+Skerry, just where the western boundary line of the county divides it
+from the county of Sutherland; its thick upper coping of sandstone we
+see forming the tall cliffs of Dunnet Head; and the greater part of the
+space between, nearly twenty miles as the crow flies, is occupied
+chiefly by the shales, grits, and flagstones, which we have found
+charged so abundantly with the strangely-organized ichthyolites of the
+second stage of vertebrate existence. In the twenty intervening miles
+there 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 twenty
+miles are occupied, as truly enormous. And yet it is but one of three
+that occur in a single system. We reach the long flat bay of Dunnet, and
+cross its waste of sands. The incoherent coils of the sand-worm lie
+thick on the surface; and here a swarm of buzzing flies, disturbed by
+the foot, rises in a cloud from some tuft of tangled sea-weed; and here
+myriads of gray crustaceous sand-hoppers dart sidelong in the little
+pools, or vault from the drier ridges a few inches into the air. Were
+the trilobites of the Silurian system,&mdash;at one period, as their remains
+testify, more than equally abundant,&mdash;creatures of similar habits? We
+have at length arrived at the tall sandstone precipices of Dunnet, with
+their broad decaying fronts of red and yellow; but in vain may we ply
+hammer and chisel among them: not a scale, not a plate, not even the
+stain of an imperfect fucoid appears. We have reached the upper boundary
+of the Lower Old Red formation, and find it bordered by a desert devoid
+of all trace of life. Some of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> the characteristic types of the formation
+re-appear in the upper deposits; but though there is a reproduction of
+the original works in their more characteristic passages, if I may so
+speak, many of the readings are diverse, and the editions are all new.</p>
+
+<p>It is one of the circumstances of peculiar interest with which Geology
+at its present stage is invested, that there is no man of energy and
+observation who may not rationally indulge in the hope of extending its
+limits by adding to its facts. Mr. Dick, an intelligent tradesman of
+Thurso, agreeably occupies his hours of leisure, for a few months, in
+detaching from the rocks in his neighborhood their organic remains; and
+thus succeeds in adding to the existing knowledge of pal&aelig;ozoic life, by
+disinterring ichthyolites which even Agassiz himself would delight to
+figure and describe. Several of the specimens in my possession, which I
+owe to the kindness of Mr. Dick, are so decidedly unique, that they
+would be regarded as strangers in the completest geological museums
+extant. It is a not uncurious fact, that when the Thurso tradesman was
+pursuing his labors of exploration among rocks beside the Pentland
+Frith, a man of similar character was pursuing exactly similar labors,
+with nearly similar results, among rocks of nearly the same era, that
+bound, on the coast of Cornwall, the British Channel. When the one was
+hammering in "Ready-money Cove," the other, at the opposite end of the
+island, was disturbing the echoes of "Pudding-Gno;" and scales, plates,
+spines, and occipital fragments of pal&aelig;ozoic fishes rewarded the labors
+of both. In an article on the scientific meeting at York, which appeared
+in "Chambers' Journal" in the November of last year, the reading public
+were introduced to a singularly meritorious naturalist, Mr. Charles
+Peach,<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> private in the mounted guard (preventive service),
+stationed on the southern coast of Cornwall, who has made several
+interesting discoveries on the outer confines of the animal kingdom,
+that have added considerably to the list of our British zo&ouml;phites and
+echinodermata. The article, a finely-toned one, redolent of that
+pleasing sympathy which Mr. Robert Chambers has ever evinced with
+struggling merit, referred chiefly to Mr. Peach's labors as a
+naturalist; but he is also well known in the geological field.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span></p>
+<h3>CHAPTER XII.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="hang">Ichthyolite Beds of Clune and Lethenbarn&mdash;Limestone
+Quarry&mdash;Destruction of Urns and Sarcophagi in the
+Lime-kiln&mdash;Nodules opened&mdash;Beautiful coloring of the
+Remains&mdash;Patrick Duff's Description&mdash;New Genus of Morayshire
+Ichthyolite described&mdash;Form and size of the Nodules or Stone
+Coffins&mdash;Illustration from Mrs. Marshall's Cements&mdash;Forest of
+Darnaway&mdash;The Hill of Berries&mdash;Sluie&mdash;Elgin&mdash;Outliers of the Weald
+and the O&ouml;lite&mdash;Description of the Weald at Linksfield&mdash;Mr. Duff's
+<i>Lepidotus minor</i>&mdash;Eccentric Types of Fish Scales&mdash;Visit to the
+Sandstones of Scat-Craig&mdash;Fine suit of Fossils at Scat-Craig&mdash;True
+graveyard Bones, not mere Impressions&mdash;Varieties of pattern&mdash;The
+Diker's "Carved Flowers"&mdash;<i>Stagonolepis</i>, a new genus&mdash;Termination
+of the Ramble. </p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">My</span> term of furlough was fast drawing to a close. It was now Wednesday
+the 14th August, and on Monday the 19th it behooved me to be seated at
+my desk in Edinburgh. I took boat, and crossed the Moray Frith from
+Cromarty to Nairn, and then walked on, in a very hot sun, over
+Shakspeare's Moor to Boghole, with the intention of examining the
+ichthyolite beds of Clune and Lethenbarn, and afterwards striking across
+the country to Forres, through the forest of Darnaway, where the forest
+abuts on the Findhorn, at the picturesque village of Sluie. When I had
+last crossed the moor, exactly ten years before, it was in a tremendous
+storm of rain and wind; and the dark platform of heath and bog, with its
+old ruinous castle standing sentry over it, seemed greatly more worthy
+of the genius of the dramatist, as cloud after cloud dashed over it,
+like ocean waves breaking on some low volcanic island, than it did on
+this clear, breathless afternoon, in the unclouded sunshine. But the
+sublimity of the moor on which Macbeth met the witches depends in no
+degree on that of the "heath near Forres,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> whether seen in foul weather
+or fair; its topography bears relation to but the mind of Shakspeare;
+and neither tile-draining nor the plough will ever lessen an inch of its
+area.</p>
+
+<p>The limestone quarry of Clune has been opened on the edge of an
+extensive moor, about three miles from the public road, where the
+province of Moray sweeps upwards from the broad fertile belt of
+corn-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, here
+dark with heath, there gray with lichens, stretches away on the other.
+The quarry itself is merely a piece of moor that has been trenched to
+the depth of some five or six feet from the surface, and that presents,
+at the line where the broken ground leans against the ground still
+unbroken, a low uneven frontage, somewhat resembling that of a ruinous
+stone-fence. It has been opened in the outcrop of an ichthyolite bed of
+the Lower Old Red Sandstone, on which in this locality the thin moory
+soil immediately rests, without the intervention of the common boulder
+clay of the country; and the fish-enveloping nodules, which are composed
+in this bed of a rich limestone, have been burnt, for a considerable
+number of years, for the purposes of the agriculturist and builder.
+There was a kiln smoking this evening beside the quarry; and a few
+laborers were engaged with shovel and pickaxe in cutting into the
+stratified clay of the unbroken ground, and throwing up its
+spindle-shaped nodules on the bank, as materials for their next burning.
+Antiquaries have often regretted that the sculptured marble of Greece
+and Egypt,&mdash;classic urns, to whose keeping the ashes of the dead had
+been consigned, and antique sarcophagi, roughened with
+hieroglyphics,&mdash;should have been so often condemned to the lime-kiln by
+the illiterate Copt or tasteless<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> Mohammedan; and I could not help
+experiencing a somewhat similar feeling here. The urns and sarcophagi,
+many times more ancient than those of Greece and Egypt, and that told
+still more wondrous stories, lay thickly ranged in this strange
+catacomb,&mdash;so thickly, that there were quite enough for the lime-kiln
+and the geologists too; but I found the kiln got all, and this at a time
+when the collector finds scarce any fossils more difficult to procure
+than those of the Lower Old Red Sandstone. I asked one of the laborers
+whether he did not preserve some of the better specimens, in the hope of
+finding an occasional purchaser. Not now, he said: he used to preserve
+them in the days of Lady Cumming of Altyre; but since her ladyship's
+death, no one in the neighborhood seemed to care for them, and strangers
+rarely came the way.</p>
+
+<p>The first nodule I laid open contained a tolerably well-preserved
+Cheiracanthus; the second, an indifferent specimen of Glyptolepis; and
+three others, in succession, remains of Coccosteus. Almost every nodule
+of one especial layer near the top incloses its organism. The coloring
+is frequently of great beauty. In the Cromarty, as in the Caithness,
+Orkney, and Gamrie specimens, the animal matter with which the bones
+were originally charged has been converted into a dark glossy bitumen,
+and the plates and scales glitter from a ground of opaque gray, like
+pieces of japan-work suspended against a rough-cast wall. But here, as
+in the other Morayshire deposits, the plates and scales exist in nearly
+their original condition, as bone that retains its white color in the
+centre of the specimens, where its bulk is greatest, and is often
+beautifully tinged at its thinner edges by the iron with which the stone
+is impregnated. It is not rare to find some of the better preserved
+fossils colored in a style that reminds one of the more gaudy fishes of
+the tropics. We see the body of the ichthyolite,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> with its finely
+arranged scales, of a pure snow-white. Along the edges, where the
+original substance of the bone, combining with the oxide of the matrix,
+has formed a phosphate of iron, there runs a delicately shaded band of
+plum-blue; while the out-spread fins, charged still more largely with
+the oxide, are of a deep red. The description of Mr. Patrick Duff, in
+his "Geology of Moray," so redolent of the quiet enthusiasm of the true
+fossil-hunter, especially applies to the ichthyolites of this quarry,
+and to those of a neighboring opening in the same bed,&mdash;the quarry of
+Lethenbarn. "The nodules," says Mr. Duff, "which in their external shape
+resemble the stones used in the game of curling, but are elliptical
+bodies instead of round, lie in the shale on their flat sides, in a line
+with the dip. When taken out, they remind one of water-worn pebbles, or
+rather boulders of a shore. A smart blow on the edge splits them along
+on the major axis, and exposes the interesting inclosure. The practised
+geologist knows well the thrilling interest attending the breaking up of
+the nodule: the uninitiated cannot sympathize with it. There is no time
+when a fossil looks so well as when first exposed. There is a clammy
+moisture on the surface of the scales or plates, which brings out the
+beautiful coloring, and adds brilliancy to the enamel. Exposure to the
+weather soon dims the lustre; and even in a cabinet an old specimen is
+easily known by its tarnished aspect."</p>
+
+<p>I found at Clune no ichthyolite to which the geologists have not been
+already introduced, or with which I had not been acquainted previously
+in 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. It
+seems to have been a small delicately-formed fish; its head covered with
+plates; its body with round<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> scales of a size intermediate between those
+of the Osteolepis and Cheiracanthus; its anterior dorsal fin placed, as
+in the Dipterus, Diplopterus, and Glyptolepis, directly opposite to its
+ventral fins; the enamelled surfaces of the minute scales were fretted
+with microscopic undulating ridges, that radiated from the centre to the
+circumference; similar furrows traversed the occipital plates; and the
+fins, unfurnished with spines, were formed, as in the Dipterus and
+Diplopterus, of thick-set, enamelled rays. The posterior fins and tail
+of the creature were not preserved. I may mention, for the satisfaction
+of the geologist, that I saw this unique fossil in the possession of the
+late Lady Cumming of Altyre, a few weeks previous to the lamented death
+of her ladyship; and that, on assuring her it was as new in relation to
+the Cromarty and Caithness fish-beds as to those of Moray, she intimated
+an intention of forthwith sending a drawing of it to Agassiz; but her
+untimely decease in all probability interfered with the design, and I
+have not since heard of this new genus of ichthyolite, or of her
+ladyship's interesting specimen, hitherto apparently its only
+representative and memorial. In the Morayshire, as in the Cromarty beds,
+the limestone nodules take very generally the form of the fish which
+they inclose: they are stone coffins, carefully moulded to express the
+outline of the corpses within. Is the fish entire?&mdash;the nodule is of a
+spindle form, broader at the head and narrower at the tail. Is it
+slightly curved, in the attitude of violent death?&mdash;the nodule has also
+its slight curve. Is it bent round, so that the extremities of the
+creature meet?&mdash;the nodule, in conformity with the outline, is circular.
+Is it disjointed and broken?&mdash;the nodule is correspondingly irregular.
+In nine cases out of ten, the inclosing coffin, like that of an old
+mummy, conforms to the outline of the organism which it incloses. It is
+further worthy of remark, too, that a large fish forms<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> generally a
+large nodule, and a small fish a small one. Here, for instance, is a
+nodule fifteen inches in length, here a nodule of only three inches, and
+here a nodule of intermediate size, that measures eight inches. We find
+that the large nodule contains a Cheirolepis thirteen inches in length,
+the small one a Diplacanthus of but two and a half inches in length, and
+the intermediate one a Cheiracanthus of seven inches. The size of the
+fish evidently regulated that of the nodule. The coffin is generally as
+good a fit in size as in form; and the bulk of the nodule bears almost
+always a definite proportion to the amount of animal matter round which
+it had formed. I was a good deal struck, a few weeks ago, in glancing
+over a series of experiments conducted for a different purpose by a lady
+of singular ingenuity,&mdash;Mrs. Marshall, the inventor and patentee of the
+beautiful marble-looking plaster, <i>Intonacco</i>,&mdash;to find what seemed a
+similar principle illustrated in the compositions of her various
+cements. These are all formed of a basis of lime, mixed in certain
+proportions with organic matter. The reader must be familiar with
+cements of this kind long known among the people, and much used in the
+repairing of broken pottery, such as a cement compounded of quicklime
+made 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 of
+eggs. In Mrs. Marshall's cements, the organic matter is variously
+compounded of both animal and vegetable substances, while the earth
+generally employed is sulphate of lime; and the result is a
+close-grained marble-like composition, considerably harder than the
+sulphate in its original crystalline state. She had deposited, in one
+set of her experiments, the calcareous earth, mixed up with sand, clay,
+and other extraneous matters, on some of the commoner molluscs of our
+shores; and universally found that the mass, incoherent everywhere
+else,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> had acquired solidity wherever it had been permeated by the
+animal matter of the molluscs. Each animal, in proportion to its size,
+is found to retain, as in the fossiliferous spindles of the Old Red
+Sandstone, its coherent nodule around it. One point in the natural
+phenomenon, however, still remains unillustrated by the experiments of
+Mrs. Marshall. We see in them the animal matter giving solidity to the
+lime in immediate contact with it; but we do not see it possessing any
+such affinity for it as to form, in an argillaceous compound, like that
+of the ichthyolite beds, a centre of attraction powerful enough to draw
+together the lime diffused throughout the mass. It still remains for the
+geologic chemist to discover on what principle masses of animal matter
+should form the attracting nuclei of limestone nodules.</p>
+
+<p>The declining sun warned me that I had lingered rather longer than was
+prudent among the ichthyolites of Clune; and so, striking in an eastern
+direction across a flat moor, through which I found the schistose gneiss
+of the district protruding in masses resembling half-buried boulders, I
+entered 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 and
+landmark, by the sun, and of being not sure at times whether I had skill
+enough to play the part of the bush-ranger under his guidance. A sultry
+day had clarified and cooled down into a clear, balmy evening; the slant
+beam was falling red on a thousand tall trunks,&mdash;here gleaming along
+some bosky vista, to which the white silky wood-moths, fluttering by
+scores, and the midge and the mosquito dancing by myriads, imparted a
+motty gold-dust atmosphere; there penetrating in straggling rays far
+into some gloomy recess, and resting in patches of flame, amid the
+darkness, on gnarled stem, or moss-cushioned stump, or gray beard-like
+lichen. I dislodged, in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> passing through the underwood, many a tiny
+tenant of the forest, that had a better right to harbor among its wild
+raspberries and junipers than I had to disturb them,&mdash;velvety
+night-moths, that had sat with folded wings under the leaves, awaiting
+the twilight, and that now took short blind flights of some two or three
+yards, to get out of my way,&mdash;and robust, well-conditioned spiders,
+whose elastic, well-tightened lines snapped sharp before me as I pressed
+through, and then curled up on the scarce perceptible breeze, like
+broken strands of wool. But every man, however Whiggish in his
+inclinations, entertains a secret respect for the powerful; and though I
+passed within a few feet of a large wasps' nest, suspended to a jutting
+bough of furze, the wasps I took especial care <i>not</i> to disturb. I
+pressed on, first through a broad belt of the forest, occupied mainly by
+melancholy Scotch firs; next through an opening, in which I found an
+American-looking village of mingled cottages, gardens, fields and wood;
+and then through another broad forest-belt, in which the ground is more
+varied with height and hollow than in the first, and in which I found
+only forest trees, mostly oaks and beeches. I heard the roar of the
+Findhorn before me, and premised I was soon to reach the river; but
+whether I should pursue it upwards or downwards, in order to find the
+ferry at Sluie, was more than I knew. There lay in my track a beautiful
+hillock, that reclines on the one side to the setting sun, and sinks
+sheer on the other, in a mural sandstone precipice, into the Findhorn.
+The trees open over it, giving full access to the free air and the
+sunshine; and I found it as thickly studded over with berries as if it
+had been the special care of half a dozen gardeners. The red light fell
+yet redder on the thickly inlaid cranberries and stone-brambles of the
+slope, and here and there, though so late in the season, on a patch of
+wild strawberries; while over all, dark, delicate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> blueberries, with
+their flour-bedusted coats, were studded as profusely as if they had
+been peppered over it by a hailstone cloud. I have seldom seen such a
+school-boy's paradise, and I was just thinking what a rare discovery I
+would have deemed it had I made it thirty years sooner, when I heard a
+whooping in the wood, and four little girls, the eldest scarcely eleven,
+came bounding up to the hillock, their lips and fingers already dyed
+purple, and dropped themselves down among the berries with a shout. They
+were sadly startled to find they had got a companion in so solitary a
+recess; but I succeeded in convincing them that they were in no manner
+of danger from him; and on asking whether there was any of them skilful
+enough 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 the
+village in the forest. Hours had elapsed since the master had <i>let them
+go</i>, but in so fine an evening the berries wouldn't, and so they were
+still in the wood. I accompanied them to Sluie, and was ferried over the
+river in a salmon coble. There is no point where the Findhorn,
+celebrated among our Scotch streams for the beauty of its scenery, is so
+generally interesting as in the neighborhood of this village; forest and
+river,&mdash;each a paragon in its kind,&mdash;uniting for several miles together
+what is most choice and characteristic in the peculiar features of both.
+In no locality is the surface of the great forest of Darnaway more
+undulated, or its trees nobler; and nowhere does the river present a
+livelier succession of eddying pools and rippling shallows, or fret
+itself in sweeping on its zig-zag course, now to the one bank, now to
+the other, against a more picturesque and imposing series of cliffs. But
+to the geologist the locality possesses an interest peculiar to itself.
+The precipices on both sides are charged with fossils of the Upper Old
+Red Sandstone:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> they form part of a vast indurated graveyard, excavated
+to the depth of an hundred feet by the ceaseless wear of the stream; and
+when 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 in
+handfuls. But the closing evening left me neither light nor time for the
+work of exploration. I heard the curfew in the woods from the yet
+distant town, and dark night had set in long ere I reached Forres. On
+the following morning I took a seat in one of the south coaches, and got
+on to Elgin an hour before noon.</p>
+
+<p>Elgin, one of the finest of our northern towns, occupies the centre of a
+richly fossiliferous district, which wants only better sections to rank
+it among the most interesting in the kingdom. An undulating platform of
+Old Red Sandstone, in which we see, largely developed in one locality,
+the lower formation of the Coccosteus, and in another, still more
+largely, the upper formation of the <i>Holoptychius Nobilissimus</i>, forms,
+if I may so speak, the foundation deposit of the district,&mdash;the true
+geologic plane of the country; and, thickly scattered over this plane,
+we find numerous detached knolls and patches of the Weald and the
+O&ouml;lite, deposited like heaps of travelled soil, or of lime shot down by
+the agriculturist on the surface of a field. The Old Red platform is
+mottled by the outliers of a comparatively modern time: the sepulchral
+mounds of later races, that lived and died during the reptile age of the
+world, repose on the surface of an ancient burying-ground, charged with
+remains of the long anterior age of the fish; and over all, as a general
+covering, rest the red boulder-clay and the vegetable mould. Mr. Duff,
+in his valuable "Sketch of the Geology of Moray," enumerates five
+several localities in the neighborhood<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> of Elgin in which there occur
+outliers of the Weald; though, of course, in a country so flat, and in
+which the diluvium lies deep, we cannot hold that all have been
+discovered. And though the outliers of the O&ouml;lite have not yet been
+ascertained to be equally numerous, they seem of greater extent; the
+isolated masses detached from them by the denuding agencies lie thick
+over extensive areas; and in working out the course of improvement which
+has already rendered Elginshire the garden of the north, the ditcher at
+one time touches on some bed of shale charged with the characteristic
+Ammonites and Belemnites of the system, and at another on some
+calcareous sandstone bed, abounding with its Pectens, its Plagiostoma,
+and its Pinn&aelig;. Some of these outliers, whether Wealden or O&ouml;litic, are
+externally of great beauty. They occur in the parish of Lhanbryde, about
+three miles to the east of Elgin, in the form of green pyramidal
+hillocks, mottled with trees, and at Linksfield, as a confluent group of
+swelling grassy mounds. And from their insulated character, and the
+abundance of organisms which they inclose, they serve to remind one of
+those green pyramids of Central America in which the traveller finds
+deposited the skeleton remains of extinct races. It has been suggested
+by Mr. Duff, in his "Sketch,"&mdash;a suggestion which the late
+Sutherlandshire discoveries of Mr. Robertson of Inverugie have tended to
+confirm,&mdash;that the O&ouml;lite and Weald of Moray do not, in all probability,
+represent consecutive formations: they seem to bear the same sort of
+relation to each other as that mutually borne by the Mountain Limestone
+and the Coal Measures. The one, of lacustrine or of estuary origin,
+exhibits chiefly the productions of the land and its fresh waters; the
+other, as decidedly of marine origin, is charged with the remains of
+animals whose proper home was the sea. But the productions, though
+dissimilar, were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> in all probability contemporary, just as the crabs and
+periwinkles of the Frith of Forth are contemporary with the frogs and
+lymnea of Flanders moss.</p>
+
+<p>I had little time for exploration in the neighborhood of Elgin; but that
+little, through the kindness of my friend Mr. Duff, I was enabled to
+economize. We first visited together the outlier of the Weald at
+Linksfield. It may be found rising in the landscape, a short mile below
+the town, in the form of a green undulating hillock, half cut through by
+a limestone quarry; and the section thus furnished is of great beauty.
+The basis on which the hillock rests is formed of the well-marked
+calcareous band in the Upper Old Red, known as the Cornstone, which we
+find occurring here, as elsewhere, as a pale concretionary limestone of
+considerable richness, though in some patches largely mixed with a green
+argillaceous earth, and in others passing into a siliceous chert. Over
+the pale-colored base, the section of the hillock is ribbed like an
+onyx: for about forty feet, bands of gray, green, and blue clays
+alternate with bands of cream-colored, light-green, and dark-blue
+limestones; 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 cautious
+induction, that the boulder-clay not only <i>overlies</i>, but also
+<i>underlies</i>, this fresh-water deposit; a bed of unequivocally the same
+origin and character with that at the top lying intercalated, as if
+filling up two low flat vaults, between the upper surface of the
+Cornstone and the lower band of the Weald. It would, however, be as
+unsafe to infer that this intervening bed is older than the overlying
+ones, as to infer that the rubbish which chokes up the vaulted dungeon
+of an old castle is more ancient than the arch that stretches over it.
+However introduced into the cavity which it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> occupies,&mdash;whether by
+land-springs or otherwise,&mdash;we find it containing fragments of the green
+and pale limestones that lie above, just as the rubbish of the castle
+dungeon might be found to contain fragments of the castle itself. When
+the bed of red boulder-clay was intercalated, the rocks of the overlying
+Wealden were exactly the same sort of indurated substances that they are
+now, and were yielding to the operations of some denuding agent. The
+alternating clays and limestones of this outlier, each of which must
+have been in turn an upper layer at the bottom of some lake or estuary,
+are abundantly fossiliferous. In some the fresh-water character of the
+deposit is well marked: Cyprides are so exceedingly numerous in some of
+the bands, that they impart to the stone an O&ouml;litic appearance; while
+others of a dark-colored limestone we see strewed over, like the oozy
+bottom of a modern lake, with specimens of what seem Paludina, Cyclas,
+and Planorbus. Some of the other shells are more equivocal: a Mytilus or
+Modiola, which abounds in some of the bands, may have been either a sea
+or a fresh-water shell; and a small oyster and Astarte seem decidedly
+marine. Remains of fish are very abundant,&mdash;scales, plates, teeth,
+ichthyodorulites, and in some instances entire ichthyolites. I saw, in
+the collection of Mr. Duff, a small but very entire specimen of
+<i>Lepidotus minor</i>, with the fins spread out on the limestone, as in an
+anatomical preparation, and almost every plate and scale in its place.
+Some of his specimens of ichthyodorulites, too, are exceedingly
+beautiful, and of great size, resembling jaws thickly set with teeth,
+the apparent teeth being mere knobs ranged along the concave edge of the
+bone, the surface of which we see gracefully fluted and enamelled. What
+most struck me, however, in glancing over the drawers of Mr. Duff, was
+the character of the Ganoid scales of this deposit. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span> Ganoid order in
+the days of the Weald was growing old; and two new orders,&mdash;the Ctenoid
+and Cycloid,&mdash;were on the eve of taking its place in creation. Hitherto
+it had comprised at least two-thirds of all the fish that had existed
+ever since the period in which fish first began; and almost every Ganoid
+fish had its own peculiar pattern of scale. But it would now seem as if
+well nigh all the simpler patterns were exhausted, and as if, in order
+to give the variety which nature loves, forms of the most eccentric
+types had to be resorted to. With scarce any exception save that
+furnished by the scales of the <i>Lepidotus minor</i>, which are plain
+lozenge-shaped plates, thickly japanned, the forms are strangely complex
+and irregular, easily expressible by the pencil, but beyond the reach of
+the pen. The remains of reptiles have been found occasionally, though
+rarely, in this outlier of the Weald,&mdash;the vertebra of a Plesiosaurus,
+the femur of some Chelonian reptile, and a large fluted tooth, supposed
+Saurian.</p>
+
+<p>I would fain have visited some of the neighboring outliers of the
+O&ouml;lite, but time did not permit. Mr. Duff's collection, however, enabled
+me to form a tolerably adequate estimate of their organic contents.
+Viewed in the group, these present nearly the same aspect as the
+organisms of the Upper Lias of Pabba. There is in the same abundance
+large Pinn&aelig;, and well-relieved Pectens, both ribbed and smooth; the same
+abundance, too, of Belemnites and Ammonites of resembling type. Both the
+Moray outliers and the Pabba deposit have their Terebratul&aelig;, Gervilli&aelig;,
+Plagiostoma, Cardiad&aelig;, their bright Ganoid scales, and their
+imperfectly-preserved lignites. They belong apparently to nearly the
+same period, and must have been formed in nearly similar
+circumstances,&mdash;the one on the western, the other on the eastern coast
+of a country then covered by the vegetation of the O&ouml;lite, and now
+known,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> with reference to an antiquity of but yesterday, as the ancient
+kingdom of Scotland. I saw among the Ammonites of these outliers at
+least one species, which, I believe, has not yet been found elsewhere,
+and which has been named, after Mr. Robertson of Inverugie, the
+gentleman who first discovered it, <i>Ammonites Robertsoni</i>. Like most of
+the 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 the
+evening of this day in visiting, with Mr. Duff, the Upper Old Red
+Sandstones of Scat-Craig. In Elginshire, as in Fife and elsewhere, the
+Upper Old Red consists of three grand divisions,&mdash;a superior bed of pale
+yellow sandstone, which furnishes the finest building-stone anywhere
+found in the north of Scotland,&mdash;an intermediate calcareous bed, known
+technically as the Cornstone,&mdash;and an inferior bed of sandstone,
+chiefly, in this locality, of a grayish-red color, and generally very
+incoherent in its structure. The three beds, as shown by the fossil
+contents of the yellow sandstones above, and of the grayish-red
+sandstones below, are members of the same formation,&mdash;a formation which,
+in Scotland at least, does not possess an organism in common with the
+Middle Old Red formation; that of the Cephalaspis, as developed in
+Forfarshire, Stirling, and Ayr, or the Lower Old Red formation; that of
+the Coccosteus, as developed in Caithness, Cromarty, Inverness, and
+Banff shires, and in so many different localities in Moray. The
+Sandstones at Scat-Craig belong to the grayish-red base of the Upper Old
+Red formation. They lie about five miles south of Elgin, not far distant
+from where the pal&aelig;ozoic deposits of the coast-side lean against the
+great primary nucleus of the interior. We pass from the town, through
+deep rich fields, carefully cultivated and well inclosed: the country,
+as we advance<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> on the moorlands, becomes more open; the homely cottage
+takes the place of the neat villa; the brown heath, of the grassy lea;
+and unfenced patches of corn here and there alternate with plantings of
+dark sombre firs, in their mediocre youth. At length we near the
+southern boundary of the landscape,&mdash;an undulating moory ridge,
+partially planted; and see where a deep gap in the outline opens a way
+to the upland districts of the province, a lively hill-stream descending
+towards the east through the bed which it has scooped out for itself in
+a soft red conglomerate. The section we have come to explore lies along
+its course: it has been the grand excavator in the densely occupied
+burial-ground over which it flows; but its labors have produced but a
+shallow scratch after all,&mdash;a mere ditch, some ten or twelve feet deep,
+in a deposit the entire depth of which is supposed greatly to exceed a
+hundred fathoms. The shallow section, however, has been well wrought;
+and its suit of fossils is one of the finest, both from the great
+specific variety which they exhibit, and their excellent state of
+keeping, that the Upper Old Red Sandstone has anywhere furnished.</p>
+
+<p>So great is the incoherency of the matrix, that we can dig into it with
+our chisels, unassisted by the hammer. It reminds us of the loose
+gravelly soil of an ancient graveyard, partially consolidated by a
+night's frost,&mdash;a resemblance still further borne out by the condition
+and appearance of its organic contents. The numerous bones disseminated
+throughout the mass do not exist, as in so many of the Upper Old Red
+Sandstone rocks, as mere films or impressions, but in their original
+forms, retaining bulk as well as surface: they are true graveyard bones,
+which may be detached entire from the inclosing mass, and of which, were
+we sufficiently well acquainted with the anatomy of the long-perished
+races to which they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> belonged, entire skeletons might be reconstructed.
+I succeeded in disinterring, during my short stay, an occipital plate of
+great 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 fine
+scale of <i>Holoptychius Nobilissimus</i>, and a small tooth, bent somewhat
+like a nail that had been drawn out of its place by two opposite
+wrenches, and from the internal structure of which Professor Owen has
+bestowed 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 a
+peculiarity in the sculpture of the scale, is the identical genus
+Dendrodus of Professor Owen, named from a peculiarity in the structure
+of the teeth. Those teeth of the genus Holoptychius, whether of the
+Lower or Upper Old Red, that belong to the second or <i>reptile</i> row with
+which the creature's jaws were furnished, present in the cross section
+the appearance of numerous branches, like those of trees, radiating from
+a centre like spokes from the nave of a wheel; and their arborescent
+aspect suggested to the Professor the name Dendrodus. It seems truly
+wonderful, when one but considers it, to what minute and obscure
+ramifications the variety of pattern, specific and generic, which nature
+so loves to preserve, is found to descend. We see great diversity of
+mode and style in the architecture of a city built of brick; but while
+the houses are different, the bricks are always the same. It is not so
+in nature. The bricks are as dissimilar as the houses. We find, for
+instance, those differences, specific and generic, that obtain among
+fishes, both recent and extinct, descending to even the microscopic
+structure of their teeth. There is more variety of pattern,&mdash;in most<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span>
+cases of very elegant pattern,&mdash;in the sliced fragments of the teeth of
+the ichthyolites of a single formation, than in the carved blocks of an
+extensive calico-print yard. Each species has its own distinct pattern,
+as if in all the individuals of which it consisted the same block had
+been employed to stamp it; each genus has its own general <i>type</i> of
+pattern, as if the same inventive idea, variously altered and modified,
+had been wrought upon in all. In the genus Dendrodus, for instance, it
+is the generic type, that from a central nave there should radiate,
+spoke-like, a number of leafy branches; but in the several species, the
+branches, if I may so express myself, belong to different shrubs, and
+present dissimilar outlines. There are no repetitions of earlier
+patterns to be found among the generically different ichthyolites of
+other formations. We see in the world of fashion old modes of ornament
+continually reviving: the range of invention seems limited; and we find
+it revolving, in consequence, in an irregular, ever-returning cycle. But
+Infinite resource did not need to travel in a circle, and so we find no
+return or doublings in its course. It has appeared to me, that an
+argument against the transmutation of species, were any such needed,
+might be founded on those inherent peculiarities of structure that are
+ascertained thus to pervade the entire texture of the framework of
+animals. If we find one building differing from another merely in
+external form, we have no difficulty in conceiving how, by additions and
+alterations, they might be made to present a uniform appearance;
+transmutation, development, progression,&mdash;if one may use such
+terms,&mdash;seem possible in such circumstances. But if the buildings differ
+from each other, not only in external form, but also in every brick and
+beam, bolt and nail, no mere scheme of external alteration can induce a
+real resemblance. Every brick must be taken down, and every beam<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> and
+belt removed. The problem cannot be wrought by the remodelling of an old
+house: there is no other mode of solving it save by the erection of a
+new one.</p>
+
+<p>Among the singularly interesting Old Red fossils of Mr. Duff's
+collection I saw the impression of a large ichthyolite from the superior
+yellow sandstone of the Upper Old Red, which had been brought him by a
+country diker only a few days before. In breaking open a building stone,
+the diker had found the inside of it, he said, covered over with
+curiously carved flowers; and, knowing that Mr. Duff had a turn for
+curiosities, he had brought the flowers to him. The supposed flowers are
+the sculpturings on the scales of the ichthyolite; and, true to the
+analogy of the diker, on at least a first glance, they may be held to
+resemble the rather equivocal florets of a cheap wall-paper, or of an
+ornamental tile. The specimen exhibits the impressions of four rows of
+oblong rectangular scales. One row contains seven of these, and another
+eight. Each scale averages about an inch and a quarter in length, by
+about three quarters of an inch in breadth; and the parallelogramical
+field which it presents is occupied by a curious piece of carving. By a
+sort of pictorial illusion, the device appears as if in motion: it would
+seem as if a sudden explosion had taken place in the middle of the
+field, and as if the numerous dislodged fragments, propelled all around
+by the central force, were hurrying to the sides. But these seeming
+fragments were not elevations in the original scale, but depressions.
+They almost seem as if they had been indented into it, in the way one
+sees the first heavy drops of a thunder shower indented into a platform
+of damp sea sand; and this last peculiarity of appearance seems to have
+suggested the name which this sole representative of an extinct genus
+has received during the course of the last few weeks from Agassiz. An
+Elgin gentleman forwarded<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> to Neufchatel a singularly fine calotype of
+the fossil, taken by Mr. Adamson of Edinburgh, with a full-size drawing
+of a few of the scales; and from the calotype and the drawing the
+naturalist has decided that the genus is entirely new, and that
+henceforth it shall bear the descriptive name of Stagonolepis, or
+drop-scale. As I looked for the first time on this broken fragment of an
+ichthyolite,&mdash;the sole representative and record of an entire genus of
+creatures that had been once called into existence to fulfil some wise
+purpose of the Creator long since accomplished,&mdash;I bethought me of
+Rogers's noble lines on the Torso,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+"And dost thou still, thou mass of breathing stone,<br />
+(Thy giant limbs to night and chaos hurled)<br />
+Still sit as on the fragment of a world,<br />
+Surviving all?"<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Here, however, was a still more wonderful Torso than that of the
+dismembered Hercules, which so awakened the enthusiasm of the poet.
+Strange peculiarities of being,&mdash;singular habits, curious instincts, the
+history of a race from the period when the all-producing Word had spoken
+the first individuals into being, until, in circumstances unfitted for
+their longer existence, or in some great annihilating catastrophe, the
+last individuals perished,&mdash;were all associated with this piece of
+sculptured stone; but, like some ancient inscription of the desert,
+written in an unknown character and dead tongue, its dark meanings were
+fast locked up, and no inhabitant of earth possessed the key. Does that
+key anywhere exist, save in the keeping of Him who knows all and
+produced all, and to whom there is neither past nor future? Or is there
+a record of creation kept by those higher intelligences,&mdash;the first-born
+of spiritual natures,&mdash;whose existence stretches far into the eternity
+that has gone by, and who possess, as their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> inheritance, the whole of
+the eternity to come? We may be at least assured, that nothing can be
+too low for angels to remember, that was not too low for God to create.</p>
+
+<p>I took coach for Edinburgh on the following morning; for with my visit
+to Scat-Craig terminated the explorations of my Summer Ramble. During
+the summer of the present year I have found time to follow up some of
+the discoveries of the last. In the course of a hasty visit to the
+island of Eigg, I succeeded in finding <i>in situ</i> reptile remains of the
+kind which I had found along the shores in the previous season, in
+detached water-rolled masses. The deposit in which they occur lies deep
+in the O&ouml;lite. In some parts of the island there rest over it
+alternations of beds of trap and sedimentary strata, to the height of
+more than a thousand feet; but in the line of coast which intervenes
+between the farm-house of Keill and the picturesque shieling described
+in my fifth chapter, it has been laid bare by the sea immediately under
+the cliffs, and we may see it jutting out at a low angle from among the
+shingle and rolled stones of the beach for several hundred feet
+together, charged everywhere with the teeth, plates, and scales of
+Ganoid fishes, and somewhat more sparingly, with the ribs, vertebr&aelig;, and
+digital bones of saurians. But a full description of this interesting
+deposit, as its discovery belongs to the Summer Ramble of a year, the
+ramblings of which are not yet completed, must await some future time.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span></p>
+<h3>CHAPTER XIII.</h3>
+
+<p class="center"><small>SUPPLEMENTARY.</small></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="hang">Supplementary&mdash;Isolated reptile Remains in Eigg&mdash;Small Isles
+revisited&mdash;The Betsey again&mdash;Storm bound&mdash;Tacking&mdash;Becalmed&mdash;Medus&aelig;
+caught and described&mdash;Rain&mdash;A Shoal of Porpoises&mdash;Change of
+Weather&mdash;The bed-ridden Woman&mdash;The Poor Law Act for
+Scotland&mdash;Geological Excursion&mdash;Basaltic Columns&mdash;O&ouml;litic
+Beds&mdash;Abundance of Organic Remains&mdash;Hybodus Teeth&mdash;Discovery of
+reptile Remains <i>in situ</i>&mdash;Musical Sand of Laig
+re-examined&mdash;Explanation suggested&mdash;Sail for Isle Ornsay&mdash;Anchored
+Clouds&mdash;A Leak sprung&mdash;Peril of the Betsey&mdash;At work with Pump and
+Pails&mdash;Safe in Harbor&mdash;Return to Edinburgh. </p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> is told of the "Spectator," on his own high authority, that having
+"read the controversies of some great men concerning the antiquities of
+Egypt, he made a voyage to Grand Cairo, on purpose to take the measure
+of a pyramid, and that, so soon as he had set himself right in that
+particular, he returned to his native country with great satisfaction."
+My love of knowledge has not carried me altogether so far, chiefly, I
+dare say, because my voyaging opportunities have not been quite so
+great. Ever since my ramble of last year, however, I have felt, I am
+afraid, a not less interest in the geologic antiquities of Small Isles
+than that cherished by "Spectator" with respect to the comparatively
+modern antiquities of Egypt; and as, in a late journey to these islands
+the object of my visit involved but a single point, nearly as insulated
+as the dimensions of a pyramid, I think I cannot do better than shelter
+myself under the authority of the short-faced gentleman who wrote
+articles in the reign of Queen Anne. I had found in Eigg,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> in
+considerable abundance and fine keeping, reptile remains of the O&ouml;lite;
+but they had occurred in merely rolled masses, scattered along the
+beach. I had not discovered the bed in which they had been originally
+deposited, and could neither tell its place in the system, nor its
+relation to the other rocks of the island. The discovery was but a
+half-discovery,&mdash;the half of a broken medal, with the date on the
+missing portion. And so, immediately after the rising of the General
+Assembly in June last [1845], I set out to revisit Small Isles,
+accompanied by my friend Mr. Swanson, with the determination of
+acquainting myself with the burial-place of the old O&ouml;litic reptiles, if
+it lay anywhere open to the light.</p>
+
+<p>We found the Betsey riding in the anchoring ground at Isle Ornsay, in
+her foul-weather dishabille, with her topmast struck and in the yard,
+and her cordage and sides exhibiting in their weathered aspect the
+influence of the bleaching rains and winds of the previous winter. She
+was at once in an undress and getting old, and, as seen from the shore
+through rain and spray,&mdash;for the weather was coarse and boisterous,&mdash;she
+had apparently gained as little in her good looks from either
+circumstance as most other ladies do. We lay storm-bound for three days
+at Isle Ornsay, watching from the window of Mr. Swanson's dwelling the
+incessant showers sweeping down the loch. On the morning of Saturday,
+the gale, though still blowing right ahead, had moderated; the minister
+was anxious to visit this island charge, after his absence of several
+weeks from them at the Assembly; and I, more than half afraid that my
+term of furlough might expire ere I had reached my proposed scene of
+exploration, was as anxious as he; and so we both resolved, come what
+might, on doggedly beating our way adown the Sound of Sleat to Small
+Isles. If the wind does not fail us, said my friend, we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> have little
+more than a day's work before us, and shall get into Eigg about
+midnight. We had but one of our seamen aboard, for John Stewart was
+engaged with his potato crop at home; but the minister was content, in
+the 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.</p>
+
+<p>We tacked in long reaches for several hours, now opening up in
+succession the deep withdrawing lochs of the mainland, now clearing
+promontory after promontory in the island district of Sleat. In a few
+hours we had left a bulky schooner, that had quitted Isle Ornsay at the
+same 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 nearly
+abreast of the rocky point of Sleat, and about half-way advanced in our
+voyage, it had died into a calm; and for full twenty hours thereafter
+there was no more sailing for the Betsey. We saw the sun set, and the
+clouds gather, and the pelting rain come down, and nightfall, and
+morning break, and the noon-tide hour pass by, and still were we
+floating idly in the calm. I employed the few hours of the Saturday
+evening that intervened between the time of our arrest and nightfall, in
+fishing from our little boat for medus&aelig; with a bucket. They had risen by
+myriads from the bottom as the wind fell, and were mottling the green
+depths of the water below and around far as the eye could reach. Among
+the commoner kinds,&mdash;the kind with the four purple rings on the area of
+its flat bell, which ever vibrates without sound, and the kind with the
+fringe of dingy brown, and the long stinging tails, of which I have
+sometimes borne from my swimming excursions the nettle-like smart for
+hours,&mdash;there were at least two species of more unusual occurrence, both
+of them very minute. The one, scarcely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> larger than a shilling, bore the
+common umbiliferous form, but had its area inscribed by a pretty
+orange-colored wheel; the other, still more minute, and which presented
+in the water the appearance of a small hazel-nut of a brownish-yellow
+hue, I was disposed to set down as a species of beroe. On getting one
+caught, however, and transferred to a bowl, I found that the
+brownish-colored, melon-shaped mass, though ribbed like the beroe, did
+not represent the true outline of the animal; it formed merely the
+centre of a transparent gelatinous bell, which, though scarce visible in
+even the bowl, proved a most efficient instrument of motion. Such were
+its 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,&mdash;that, despite their
+slow but persevering flappings, seemed greatly at the mercy of the tide,
+and progressed all one way,&mdash;shot, as it willed, backwards, forwards, or
+athwart. As the evening closed, and the depths beneath presented a
+dingier and yet dingier green, until at length all had become black, the
+distinctive colors of the acelpha,&mdash;the purple, the orange, and the
+brown,&mdash;faded and disappeared, and the creatures hung out, instead,
+their pale phosphoric lights, like the lanterns of a fleet hoisted high
+to prevent collision in the darkness. Now they gleamed dim and
+indistinct as they drifted undisturbed through the upper depths, and now
+they flamed out bright and green, like beaten torches, as the tide
+dashed them against the vessel's sides. I bethought me of the gorgeous
+description of Coleridge, and felt all its beauty:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+"They moved in tracks of shining white,<br />
+And when they reared, the elfish light<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Fell off in hoary flakes.</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span>Within the shadow of the ship<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">I watched their rich attire,&mdash;</span><br />
+Blue, glassy green, and velvet black:<br />
+They curled, and swam, and every track<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Was a flash of golden fire."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>A crew of three, when there are watches to set, divides wofully ill. As
+there was, however, nothing to do in the calm, we decided that our first
+watch should consist of our single seaman, and the second of the
+minister and his friend. The clouds, which had been thickening for
+hours, now broke in torrents of rain, and old Alister got into his
+water-proof oil-skin and souwester, and we into our beds. The seams of
+the Betsey's deck had opened so sadly during the past winter, as to be
+no longer water-tight, and the little cabin resounded drearily in the
+darkness, like some dropping cave, to the ceaseless patter of the
+leakage. We continued to sleep, however, somewhat longer than we
+ought,&mdash;for Alister had been unwilling to waken the minister; but we at
+length got up, and, relieving watch the first from the tedium of being
+rained upon and doing nothing, watch the second was set to do nothing
+and be rained upon in turn. We had drifted during the night-time on a
+kindly tide, considerably nearer our island, which we could now see
+looming blue and indistinct through the haze some seven or eight miles
+away. The rain ceased a little before nine, and the clouds rose,
+revealing the surrounding lands, island and main,&mdash;Rum, with its abrupt
+mountain-peaks,&mdash;the dark Cuchullins of Skye,&mdash;and, far to the
+south-east, where Inverness bounds on Argyllshire, some of the tallest
+hills in Scotland,&mdash;among the rest, the dimly-seen Ben-Wevis. But long
+wreaths of pale gray cloud lay lazily under their summits, like shrouds
+half drawn from off the features of the dead, to be again spread over
+them, and we concluded that the dry weather had not yet come. A little
+before noon we were surrounded<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> for miles by an immense but
+thinly-spread shoal of porpoises, passing in pairs to the south, to
+prosecute, on their own behalf, the herring fishing in Lochfine or
+Gareloch; and for a full hour the whole sea, otherwise so silent, became
+vocal with long-breathed blowings, as if all the steam-tenders of all
+the railways in Britain were careering around us; and we could see
+slender jets of spray rising in the air on every side, and glossy black
+backs and pointed fins, that looked as if they had been fashioned out of
+Kilkenny marble, wheeling heavily along the surface. The clouds again
+began to close as the shoal passed, but we could now hear in the
+stillness the measured sound of oars, drawn vigorously against the
+gunwale in the direction of the island of Eigg, still about five miles
+distant, 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,&mdash;for the sounds
+in the dead calm had preceded the boat by miles,&mdash;by four active young
+men, who seemed wonderfully glad to see their pastor; and then, amid the
+thickening showers, which had recommenced heavy as during the night,
+they set themselves to tow us into the harbor. The poor fellows had a
+long and fatiguing pull, and were thoroughly drenched ere, about six
+o'clock in the evening, we had got up to our anchoring ground, and
+moored, as usual, in the open tideway between <i>Eilan Chasteil</i> and the
+main island. There was still time enough for an evening discourse, and
+the minister, getting out of his damp clothes, went ashore and preached.</p>
+
+<p>The evening of Sunday closed in fog and rain, and in fog and rain the
+morning of Monday arose. The ceaseless patter made dull music on deck
+and skylight above, and the slower drip, drip, through the leaky beams,
+drearily<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> 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 of
+the leakage, like Bacon's philosopher surveying a tempest from the
+shore. But the minister was somewhat less fortunate, and had no little
+trouble in diverting an ill-conditioned drop that had made a dead set at
+his pillow. I was now a full week from Edinburgh, and had seen and done
+nothing; and, were another week to pass after the same manner,&mdash;as, for
+aught that appeared, might well happen,&mdash;I might just go home again, as
+I had come, with my labor for my pains. In the course of the afternoon,
+however, the weather unexpectedly cleared up, and we set out somewhat
+impatiently through the wet grass, to visit a cave a few hundred yards
+to the west of <i>Naomh Fraingh</i>, in which it had been said the
+Protestants of the island might meet for the purposes of religious
+worship, were they to be ejected from the cottage erected by Mr.
+Swanson, in which they had worshipped hitherto. We re&euml;xamined, in the
+passing, the pitch stone dike mentioned in a former chapter, and the
+charnel cave of Frances; but I found nothing to add to my former
+descriptions, and little to modify, save that perhaps the cave appeared
+less dark, in at least the outer half of its area, than it had seemed to
+me in the former year, when examined by torch-light, and that the
+straggling twilight, as it fell on the ropy sides, green with moss and
+mould, and on the damp bone-strewn floor, overmantled with a still
+darker crust, like that of a stagnant pool, seemed also to wear its tint
+of 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 opening
+in a dingy-colored precipice of augitic trap,&mdash;a cave roomy and lofty as
+the nave of a cathedral, and ever resounding to the dash of the sea; but
+though it could have amply accommodated a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> congregation of at least five
+hundred, we found the way far too long and difficult for at least the
+weak and the elderly, and in some places inaccessible at full flood; and
+so we at once decided against the accommodation which it offered. But
+its shelter will, I trust, scarce be needed.</p>
+
+<p>On our return to the Betsey, we passed through a straggling group of
+cottages on the hill-side, one of which, the most dilapidated and
+smallest 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 so
+miserable a hovel. It was hardly larger than the cabin of the Betsey,
+and a thousand times less comfortable. The walls and roof, formed of
+damp grass-grown turf, with a few layers of unconnected stone in the
+basement tiers, seemed to constitute one continuous hillock, sloping
+upwards from foundation to ridge, like one of the lesser moraines of
+Agassiz, save where the fabric here and there bellied outwards or
+inwards, in perilous dilapidation, that seemed but awaiting the first
+breeze. The low chinky door opened direct into the one wretched
+apartment of the hovel, which we found lighted chiefly by holes in the
+roof. The back of the sick woman's bed was so placed at the edge of the
+opening, that it had formed at one time a sort of partition to the
+portion of the apartment, some five or six feet square, which contained
+the fire-place; but the boarding that had rendered it such had long
+since fallen away, and it now presented merely a naked rickety frame to
+the current of cold air from without. Within a foot of the bed-ridden
+woman'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
+<i>Eilan Chasteil</i>, with the minister's yacht riding in the channel hard
+by. The little hole in the wall had formed the poor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> creature's only
+communication with the face of the external world for ten weary years.
+She lay under a dingy coverlet, which, whatever its original hue, had
+come to differ nothing in color from the graveyard earth, which must so
+soon better supply its place. What perhaps first struck the eye was the
+strange flatness of the bed-clothes, considering that a human body lay
+below: there seemed scarce bulk enough under them for a human skeleton.
+The light of the opening fell on the corpse-like features of the
+woman,&mdash;sallow, sharp, bearing at once the stamp of disease and of
+famine; and yet it was evident, notwithstanding, that they had once been
+agreeable,&mdash;not unlike those of her daughter, a good-looking girl of
+eighteen, who, when we entered, was sitting beside the fire. Neither
+mother nor daughter had any English; but it was not difficult to
+determine, from the welcome with which the minister was greeted from the
+sick-bed, feeble as the tones were, that he was no unfrequent visitor.
+He prayed beside the poor creature, and, on coming away, slipped
+something into her hand. I learned that not during the ten years in
+which she had been bed-ridden had she received a single farthing from
+the proprietor, nor, indeed, had any of the poor of the island, and that
+the parish had no session-funds. I saw her husband a few days after,&mdash;an
+old worn-out man, with famine written legibly in his hollow cheek and
+eye, and on the shrivelled frame, that seemed lost in his tattered
+dress; and he reiterated the same sad story. They had no means of
+living, he said, save through the charity of their poor neighbors, who
+had so little to spare; for the parish or the proprietor had never given
+them anything. He had once, he added, two fine boys, both sailors, who
+had helped them; but the one had perished in a storm off the Mull of
+Cantyre, and the other had died of fever when on a West India voyage;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span>
+and though their poor girl was very dutiful, and staid in their crazy
+hut to take care of them in their helpless old age, what other could she
+do in a place like Eigg than just share with them their sufferings? It
+has been recently decided by the British Parliament, that in cases of
+this kind the starving poor shall not be permitted to enter the law
+courts 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 first
+given them permission to prosecute their claims. And I doubt not that
+many of the English gentlemen whose votes swelled the majority, and made
+it such, are really humane men, friendly to an equal-handed justice, and
+who hold it to be the peculiar glory of the Constitution, as well shown
+by De Lolme, that it has not one statute-book for the poor, and another
+for the rich, but the same law and the same administration of law for
+all. They surely could not have seen that the principle of their Poor
+Law Act for Scotland sets the pauper beyond the pale of the Constitution
+in the first instance, that he may be starved in the second. The
+suffering paupers of this miserable island cottage would have all their
+wants fully satisfied in the grave, long ere they could establish at
+their own expense, at Edinburgh, their claim to enter a court of law. I
+know not a fitter case for the interposition of our lately formed
+"Scottish Association for the Protection of the Poor" than that of this
+miserable family; and it is but one of many which the island of Eigg
+will be found to furnish.</p>
+
+<p>After a week's weary waiting, settled weather came at last; and the
+morning of Tuesday rose bright and fair. My friend, whose absence at the
+General Assembly had accumulated a considerable amount of ministerial
+labor on his hands, had to employ the day professionally; and as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> John
+Stewart was still engaged with his potato crop, I was necessitated to
+sally out on my first geological excursion alone. In passing
+vessel-wards, on the previous year, from the <i>Ru Stoir</i> to the
+farm-house of Keill, along the escarpment under the cliffs, I had
+examined the shores somewhat too cursorily during the one-half of my
+journey, and the closing evening had prevented me from exploring them
+during the other half at all; and I now set myself leisurely to retrace
+the way backwards from the farm-house to the <i>Stoir</i>. I descended to the
+bottom of the cliffs, along the pathway which runs between Keill and the
+solitary midway shieling formerly described, and found that the basaltic
+columns over head, which had seemed so picturesque in the twilight, lost
+none of their beauty when viewed by day. They occur in forms the most
+beautiful and fantastic; here grouped beside some blind opening in the
+precipice, like pillars cut round the opening of a tomb, on some
+rock-front in Petr&aelig;a; there running in long colonnades, or rising into
+tall porticoes; yonder radiating in straight lines from some common
+centre, resembling huge pieces of fan-work, or bending out in bold
+curves over some shaded chasm, like rows of crooked oaks projecting from
+the steep sides of some dark ravine. The various beds of which the
+cliffs are composed, as courses of ashlar compose a wall, are of very
+different degrees of solidity: some are of hard porphyritic or basaltic
+trap; some of soft O&ouml;litic sandstone or shale. Where the columns rest on
+a soft stratum, their foundations have in many places given way, and
+whole porticoes and colonnades hang perilously forward in tottering
+ruin, separated from the living rock behind by deep chasms. I saw one of
+these 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 another
+partially filled up with earth and stones, through which,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> along a dark
+opening not much larger than a chimney-vent, the boys of the island find
+a long descending passage to the foot of the precipice, and emerge into
+light on the edge of the grassy talus half-way down the hill. It
+reminded me of the tunnel in the rock through which Imlac opened up a
+way of escape to Rasselas from the happy valley,&mdash;the "subterranean
+passage," begun "where the summit hung over the middle part," and that
+"issued out behind the prominence."</p>
+
+<p>From the commencement of the range of cliffs, on half-way to the
+shieling, I found the shore so thickly covered up by masses of trap, the
+debris of the precipices above, that I could scarce determine the nature
+of the bottom on which they rested. I now, however, reached a part of
+the beach where the O&ouml;litic beds are laid bare in thin party-colored
+strata, and at once found something to engage me. Organisms in vast
+abundance, chiefly shells and fragmentary portions of fishes, lie
+closely packed in their folds. One limestone bed, occurring in a dark
+shale, seems almost entirely composed of a species of small oyster; and
+some two or three other thin beds, of what appears to be either a
+species of small Mytilus or Avicula, mixed up with a few shells
+resembling large Paludina, and a few more of the gaper family, so
+closely resembling existing species, that John Stewart and Alister at
+once challenged them as <i>smurslin</i>, the Hebridean name for a well-known
+shell in these parts,&mdash;the <i>Mya truncata</i>. The remains of
+fishes,&mdash;chiefly Ganoid scales and the teeth of Placoids,&mdash;lie scattered
+among the shells in amazing abundance. On the surface of a single
+fragment, about nine inches by five, which I detached from one of the
+beds, and which now lies before me, I reckon no fewer than twenty-five
+teeth, and twenty-two on the area of another. They are of very various
+forms,&mdash;some of them squat and round, like ill-formed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> small
+shot,&mdash;others spiky and sharp, not unlike flooring nails,&mdash;some straight
+as needles, some bent like the beak of a hawk,&mdash;some, like the palatal
+teeth of the Acrodus of the Lias, resemble small leeches; some, bearing
+a series of points ranged on a common base, like masts on the hull of a
+vessel, the tallest in the centre, belong to the genus Hybodus. There is
+a palpable approximation in the teeth of the leech-like form to the
+teeth with the numerous points. Some of the specimens show the same
+plicated structure common to both; and on some of the leech backs, if I
+may so speak, there are protuberant knobs, that indicate the places of
+the spiky points on the hybodent teeth. I have got three of each kind
+slit up by Mr. George Sanderson, and the internal structure appears to
+be the same. A dense body of bone is traversed by what seem innumerable
+roots, resembling those of woody shrubs laid bare along the sides of
+some forest stream. Each internal opening sends off on every side its
+myriads of close-laid filaments; and nowhere do they lie so thickly as
+in the line of the enamel, forming, from the regularity with which they
+are arranged, a sort of framing to the whole section. It is probable
+that the Hybodus,&mdash;a genus of shark which became extinct some time about
+the beginning of the chalk,&mdash;united, like the shark of Port Jackson, a
+crushing apparatus of palatal teeth to its lines of cutting ones. Among
+the other remains of these beds I found a dense fragment of bone,
+apparently reptilian, and a curious dermal plate punctulated with
+thick-set depressions, bounded on one side by a smooth band, and
+altogether closely resembling some saddler's thimble that had been cut
+open and straightened.</p>
+
+<p>Following the beds downwards along the beach, I found that one of the
+lowest which the tide permitted me to examine,&mdash;a bed colored with a
+tinge of red,&mdash;was formed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> of a denser limestone than any of the others,
+and composed chiefly of vast numbers of small univalves resembling
+Nerit&aelig;. 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, to
+examine it. One of the first pieces I tore up contained a well-preserved
+Plesiosaurian vertebra; a second contained a vertebra and a rib; and,
+shortly after, I disinterred a large portion of a pelvis. I had at
+length found, beyond doubt, the reptile remains <i>in situ</i>. The bed in
+which they occur is laid bare here for several hundred feet along the
+beach, jutting out at a low angle among boulders and gravel, and the
+reptile remains we find embedded chiefly in its under side. It lies low
+in the O&ouml;lite. All the stratified rocks of the island, with the
+exception of a small Liasic patch, belong to the Lower O&ouml;lite, and the
+reptile-bed occurs deep in the base of the system,&mdash;low in its relation
+to the nether division, in which it is included. I found it nowhere
+rising to the level of high-water mark. It forms one of the foundation
+tiers of the island, which, as the latter rises over the sea in some
+places to the height of about fourteen hundred feet, its upper peaks and
+ridges must overlie the bones, making allowance for the dip, to the
+depth of at least sixteen hundred. Even at the close of the O&ouml;litic
+period this sepulchral stratum must have been a profoundly ancient one.
+In working it out, I found two fine specimens of fish jaws, still
+retaining their ranges of teeth;&mdash;ichthyodorulites,&mdash;occipital plates of
+various forms, either reptile or ichthyic,&mdash;Ganoid scales, of nearly the
+same varieties of pattern as those in the Weald of Morayshire,&mdash;and the
+vertebr&aelig; and ribs, with the digital, pelvic, and limb-bones, of
+saurians. It is not unworthy of remark, that in none of the beds of this
+deposit did I find any of the more characteristic shells of the
+system,&mdash;Ammonites, Belemnites, Gryphites, or Nautili.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span></p><p>I explored the shores of the island on to the <i>Ru Stoir</i>, and thence to
+the Bay of Laig; but though I found detached masses of the reptile bed
+occurring in abundance, indicating that its place lay not far beyond the
+fall of ebb, in no other locality save the one described did I find it
+laid bare. I spent some time beside the Bay of Laig in re&euml;xamining the
+musical sand, in the hope of determining the peculiarities on which its
+sonorous qualities depended. But I examined, and cross-examined it in
+vain. I merely succeeded in ascertaining, in addition to my previous
+observations, that the loudest sounds are elicited by drawing the hand
+slowly through the incoherent mass, in a segment of a circle, at the
+full stretch of the arm, and that the vibrations which produce them
+communicate a peculiar titillating sensation to the hand or foot by
+which they are elicited, extending in the foot to the knee, and in the
+hand to the elbow. When we pass the wet finger along the edge of an
+ale-glass partially filled with water, we see the vibrations thickly
+wrinkling 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 modification
+of the same phenomenon acting on the nerves and fluids of the leg or
+arm. It appears to be produced by the wrinklings of the vibrations, if I
+may so speak, passing along sentient channels. The sounds will
+ultimately be found dependent, I am of opinion, though I cannot yet
+explain the principle, on the purely quartzose character of the sand,
+and the friction of the incoherent upper strata against under strata
+coherent and damp. I remained ten days in the island, and went over all
+my former ground, but succeeded in making no further discoveries.</p>
+
+<p>On the morning of Wednesday, June 25th, we set sail for Isle Ornsay,
+with a smart breeze from the north-west. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> lower and upper sky was
+tolerably clear, and the sun looked cheerily down on the deep blue of
+the sea; but along the higher ridges of the land there lay long level
+strata of what the meteorologists distinguish as parasitic clouds. When
+every other patch of vapor in the landscape was in motion, scudding
+shorewards from the Atlantic before the still-increasing gale, there
+rested along both the Scuir of Eigg and the tall opposite ridge of the
+island, and along the steep peaks of Rum, clouds that seemed as if
+anchored, each on its own mountain-summit, and over which the gale
+failed to exert any propelling power. They were stationary in the middle
+of the rushing current, when all else was speeding before it. It has
+been shown that these parasitic clouds are mere local condensations of
+strata of damp air passing along the mountain-summits, and rendered
+visible but to the extent in which the summits affect the temperature.
+Instead of being stationary, they are ever-forming and ever-dissipating
+clouds,&mdash;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 nothing
+to 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 little
+time, I went below, and, throwing myself into the minister's large
+chair, took up a book. The gale meanwhile freshened, and freshened yet
+more; and the Betsey leaned over till her lee chain-plate lay along in
+the water. There was the usual combination of sounds beneath and around
+me,&mdash;the mixture of guggle, clunk, and splash,&mdash;of low, continuous rush,
+and bluff, loud blow, which forms in such circumstances the voyager's
+concert. I soon became aware, however, of yet another species of sound,
+which I did not like half so well,&mdash;a sound as of the washing of a
+shallow current over a rough surface; and, on the minister coming below,
+I asked him, tolerably well prepared for his answer, what it might<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span>
+mean. "It means," he said, "that we have sprung a leak, and a rather bad
+one; 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 my
+book. Presently, however, the rush became greatly louder; some other
+weak patch in the Betsey's upper works had given way, and anon the water
+came washing up from the lee side along the edge of the cabin floor. I
+got upon deck to see how matters stood with us; and the minister, easing
+off the vessel for a few points, gave instant orders to shorten sail, in
+the hope of getting her upper works out of the water, and then to unship
+the companion ladder, beneath which a hatch communicated with the low
+strip of hold under the cabin, and to bring aft the pails. We lowered
+our foresail; furled up the mainsail half-mast high; John Stewart took
+his station at the pump; old Alister and I, furnished with pails, took
+ours, the one at the foot, the other at the head, of the companion, to
+hand up and throw over; a young girl, a passenger from Eigg to the
+mainland, 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 diminished
+breadth of sail, the Betsey, straining hard in the rough sea, still lay
+in to the gunwale; and the water, pouring in through a hundred opening
+chinks in her upper works, rose, despite of our exertions, high over
+plank, and beam, and cabin-floor, and went dashing against beds and
+lockers. She was evidently filling, and bade fair to terminate all her
+voyagings by a short trip to the bottom. Old Alister, a seaman of thirty
+years' standing, whose station at the bottom of the cabin stairs enabled
+him to see how fast the water was gaining on the Betsey, but not how the
+Betsey was gaining on the land, was by no means the least anxious among
+us. Twenty years previous he had seen a vessel go down in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> exactly
+similar circumstances, and in nearly the same place, and the
+reminiscence, in the circumstances, seemed rather an uncomfortable one.
+It had been a bad evening, he said, and the vessel he sailed in, and a
+sloop, her companion, were pressing hard to gain the land. The sloop had
+sprung a leak, and was straining, as if for life and death, under a
+press 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 disappeared
+from the surface instantaneously as a vanishing spectre, and neither
+sloop nor crew were ever more heard of.</p>
+
+<p>There are, I am convinced, few deaths less painful than some of those
+untimely and violent ones at which we are most disposed to shudder. We
+wrought so hard at pail and pump,&mdash;the occasion, too, was one of so much
+excitement, and tended so thoroughly to awaken our energies,&mdash;that I was
+conscious, during the whole time, of an exhilaration of spirits rather
+pleasurable than otherwise. My fancy was active, and active, strange as
+the fact may seem, chiefly with ludicrous objects. Sailors tell
+regarding the flying Dutchman, that he was a hard-headed captain of
+Amsterdam, who, in a bad night and head wind, when all the other vessels
+of his fleet were falling back on the port they had recently quitted,
+obstinately swore that, rather than follow their example, he would keep
+beating about till the day of judgment. And the Dutch captain, says the
+story, was just taken at his word, and is beating about still. When
+matters were at the worst with us, we got under the lea of the point of
+Sleat. The promontory interposed between us and the roll of the sea; the
+wind gradually took off; and, after having seen the water gaining fast
+and 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, and
+sunk downwards along pannels and table-legs,&mdash;a second<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> retiring deluge;
+and we entered Isle Ornsay with the cabin-floor all visible, and less
+than two feet water in the hold. On the following morning, taking leave
+of my friend the minister, I set off, on my return homewards, by the
+Skye steamer, and reached Edinburgh on the evening of Saturday.</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span></p>
+<p class="t1">
+<big>RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST;</big><br />
+<br />
+<small>OR,</small><br />
+<br />
+TEN THOUSAND MILES OVER THE FOSSILIFEROUS<br />
+DEPOSITS OF SCOTLAND.<br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span></p>
+<p class="t1"><big>RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST;</big></p>
+
+<p class="t1"><small>OR,</small></p>
+
+<p class="t1">TEN THOUSAND MILES OVER THE FOSSILIFEROUS DEPOSITS OF SCOTLAND.<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a></p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h3>CHAPTER I.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="hang">Embarkation&mdash;A foundered Vessel&mdash;Lateness of the Harvest dependent
+on the Geological character of the Soil&mdash;A Granite Harvest and an
+Old Red Harvest&mdash;Cottages of Redstone and of Granite&mdash;Arable Soil
+of Scotland the result of a Geological Grinding Agency&mdash;Locality of
+the Famine of 1846&mdash;Mr. Longmuir's Fossils&mdash;Geology necessary to a
+Theologian&mdash;Popularizers of Science when dangerous&mdash;"Constitution
+of Man," and "Vestiges of Creation"&mdash;Atop of the Banff Coach&mdash;A
+Geologist's Field Equipment&mdash;The trespassing "Stirk"&mdash;Silurian
+Schists inlaid with Old Red&mdash;Bay of Gamrie how
+formed&mdash;Gardenstone&mdash;Geological Free-masonry illustrated&mdash;How to
+break an Ichthyolite Nodule&mdash;An old Rhyme mended&mdash;A raised
+Beach&mdash;Fossil Shells&mdash;Scotland under water at the time of the
+Boulder Clays. </p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">From</span> circumstances that in no way call for explanation, my usual
+exploratory ramble was thrown this year (1847) from the middle of July
+into the middle of September; and I embarked at Granton for the north
+just as the night began to count hour against hour with the day. The
+weather was fine, and the voyage pleasant. I saw by the way, however, at
+least one melancholy memorial of a hurricane which had swept the eastern
+coasts of the island about a fortnight before, and filled the provincial
+newspapers with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> paragraphs of disaster. Nearly opposite where the Red
+Head lifts its mural front of Old Red Sandstone a hundred yards over the
+beach, the steamer passed a foundered vessel, lying about a mile and a
+half off the land, with but her topmast and the point of her peak over
+the surface. Her vane, still at the mast-head, was drooping in the calm;
+and its shadow, with that of the fresh-colored <i>spar</i> to which it was
+attached, white atop and yellow beneath, formed a well-defined
+undulatory strip on the water, that seemed as if ever in the process of
+being rolled up, and yet still retained its length unshortened. Every
+recession 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 the
+gale, and that, when staggering under a press of canvas towards the
+still distant shore, where, by stranding her, the crew had hoped to save
+at least their lives, she had disappeared with a sudden lurch, and all
+aboard had perished. I remembered having read, among other memorabilia
+of the hurricane, without greatly thinking of the matter, that "a large
+sloop had foundered off the Red Head,&mdash;name unknown." But the minute
+portion of the wreck which I saw rising over the surface, to certify,
+like some frail memorial in a churchyard, that the dead lay beneath, had
+an eloquence in it which the words wanted, and at once sent the
+imagination back to deal with the stern realities of the disaster, and
+the feelings abroad to expatiate over saddened hearths and melancholy
+homesteads, where for many a long day the hapless perished would be
+missed and mourned, but where the true story of their fate, though too
+surely guessed at, would never be known.</p>
+
+<p>The harvest had been early; and on to the village of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> Stonehaven, and a
+mile or two beyond, where the fossiliferous deposits end and the primary
+begin, the country presented from the deck only a wide expanse of
+stubble. Every farm-steading we passed had its piled stack-yard; and the
+fields were bare. But the line of demarcation between the Old Red
+Sandstone and the granitic districts formed also a separating line
+between an earlier and later harvest; the fields of the less kindly
+subsoil derived from the primary rocks were, I could see, still speckled
+with sheaves; and, where the land lay high, or the exposure was
+unfavorable, there were reapers at work. All along in the course of my
+journey northward from Aberdeen I continued to find the country covered
+with shocks, and laborers employed among them; until, crossing the Spey,
+I entered on the fossiliferous districts of Moray; and then, as in the
+south, the champaign again showed a bare breadth of stubble, with here
+and there a ploughman engaged in turning it down. The traveller bids
+farewell at Stonehaven to not only the Old Red Sandstone and the
+early-harvest districts, but also to the rich wheat-lands of the
+country, and does not again fairly enter upon them until, after
+travelling nearly a hundred miles, he passes from Banffshire into the
+province of Moray. He leaves behind him at the same line the
+wheat-fields and the cottages built of red stone, to find only barley
+and oats, and here and there a plot of rye, associated with cottages of
+granite and gneiss, hyperstene and mica schist; but on crossing the
+Spey, the red cottages re&auml;ppear, and fields of rich wheat-land spread
+out around them, as in the south. The circumstance is not unworthy the
+notice of the geologist. It is but a tedious process through which the
+minute lichen, settling on a surface of naked stone, forms in the course
+of ages a soil for plants of greater bulk and a higher order; and had
+Scotland been left to the exclusive operation of this slow agent, it
+would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> be still a rocky desert, with perhaps here and there a strip of
+alluvial meadow by the side of a stream, and here and there an insulated
+patch of rich soil among the hollows of the crags. It might possess a
+few gardens for the spade, but no fields for the plough. We owe our
+arable land to that comparatively modern geologic agent, whatever its
+character, that crushed, as in a mill, the upper parts of the
+surface-rocks of the kingdom, and then overlaid them with their own
+debris and rubbish to the depth of from one to forty yards. This debris,
+existing in one locality as a boulder-clay more or less finely
+comminuted, in another as a grossly pounded gravel, forms, with few
+exceptions, that subsoil of the country on which the existing vegetation
+first found root; and, being composed mainly of the formations on which
+it more immediately rests, it partakes of their character,&mdash;bearing a
+comparatively lean and hungry aspect over the primary rocks, and a
+greatly more fertile one over those deposits in which the organic
+matters of earlier creations lie diffused. Saxon industry has done much
+for the primary districts of Aberdeen and Banffshires, though it has
+failed to neutralize altogether the effects of causes which date as
+early as the times of the Old Red Sandstone; but in the Highlands, which
+belong almost exclusively to the non-fossiliferous formations, and which
+were, on at least the western coasts, but imperfectly subjected to that
+grinding process to which we owe our subsoils, the poor Celt has
+permitted the consequences of the original difference to exhibit
+themselves in full. If we except the islands of the Inner Hebrides, the
+famine of 1846 was restricted in Scotland to the primary districts.</p>
+
+<p>I made it my first business, on landing in Aberdeen, to wait on my
+friend Mr. Longmuir, that I might compare with him a few geological
+notes, and benefit by his knowledge of the surrounding country. I was,
+however, unlucky<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> enough to find that he had gone, a few days before, on
+a journey, from which he had not yet returned; but, through the kindness
+of Mrs. Longmuir, to whom I took the liberty of introducing myself, I
+was made free of his stone-room, and held half an hour's conversation
+with his Scotch fossils of the Chalk. These had been found, as the
+readers of the <i>Witness</i> must remember from his interesting paper on the
+subject, on the hill of Dudwick, in the neighborhood of Ellon, and were
+chiefly impressions&mdash;some of them of singular distinctness and
+beauty&mdash;in yellow flint. I saw among them several specimens of the
+Inoceramus, a thin-shelled, ponderously-hinged conchifer, characteristic
+of the Cretaceous group, but which has no living representative; with
+numerous flints, traversed by rough-edged, bifurcated hollows, in which
+branched sponges had once lain; a well-preserved Pecten; the impressions
+of spines of Echini of at least two distinct species; and the
+nicely-marked impression of part of a Cidaris, with the balls on which
+the sockets of the club-like spines had been fitted existing in the
+print as spherical moulds, in which shot might be cast, and with the
+central ligamentary depression, which in the actual fossil exists but as
+a minute cavity, projecting into the centre of each hollow sphere, like
+the wooden fusee into the centre of a bomb-shell. This latter cast, fine
+and sharp as that of a medal taken in sulphur, seems sufficient of
+itself to establish two distinct points: in the first place, that the
+siliceous matter of which the flint is composed, though now so hard and
+rigid, must, in its original condition, have been as impressible as wax
+softened to receive the stamp of the seal; and, in the next, that though
+it was thus yielding in its character, it could not have greatly shrunk
+in the process of hardening. I looked with no little interest on these
+remains of a Scotch formation now so entirely broken up, that, like
+those ruined cities of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> East which exist but as mere lines of
+wrought material barring the face of the desert, there has not "been
+left one stone of it upon another," but of which the fragments, though
+widely scattered, bear imprinted upon them, like the stamped bricks of
+Babylon, the story of its original condition, and a record of its
+<i>founders</i>. All Mr. Longmuir's Cretaceous fossils from the hill of
+Dudwick are of flint,&mdash;a substance not easily ground down by the
+denuding agencies.</p>
+
+<p>I found several other curious fossils in Mr. Longmuir's collection.
+Greatly more interesting, however, than any of the specimens which it
+contains, is the general fact, that it should be the collection of a
+Free Church minister, sedulously attentive to the proper duties of his
+office, but who has yet found time enough to render himself an
+accomplished geologist; and whose week-day lectures on the science
+attract crowds, who receive from them, in many instances, their first
+knowledge of the strange revolutions of which our globe has been the
+subject, blent with the teachings of a wholesome theology. The present
+age, above all that has gone before, is peculiarly the age of physical
+science; and of all the physical sciences, not excepting astronomy
+itself, geology, though it be a fact worthy of notice, that not one of
+our truly accomplished geologists is an infidel, is the science of which
+infidelity has most largely availed itself. And as the theologian in a
+metaphysical age,&mdash;when skepticism, conforming to the character of the
+time, disseminated its doctrines in the form of nicely abstract
+speculations,&mdash;had, in order that the enemy might be met in his own
+field, to become a skilful metaphysician, he must now, in like manner,
+address himself to the tangibilities of natural history and geology, if
+he would avoid the danger and disgrace of having his flank turned by
+every sciolist in these walks whom he may chance to encounter.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span> It is
+those identical bastions and outworks that are <i>now</i> attacked, which
+must be <i>now</i> defended; not those which were attacked some eighty or a
+hundred years ago. And as he who succeeds in first mixing up fresh and
+curious truths, either with the objections by which religion is assailed
+or the arguments by which it is defended, imparts to his cause all the
+interest which naturally attaches to these truths, and leaves to his
+opponent, who passes over them after him as at second hand, a subject
+divested of the fire-edge of novelty, I can deem Mr. Longmuir well and
+not unprofessionally employed, in connecting with a sound creed the
+picturesque marvels of one of the most popular of the sciences, and by
+this means introducing them to his people, linked, from the first, with
+right associations. According to the old fiction, the look of the
+basilisk did not kill unless the creature saw before it was seen;&mdash;its
+mere <i>return</i> glance was harmless; and there is a class of thoroughly
+dangerous writers who in this respect resemble the basilisk. It is
+perilous to give them a first look of the public. They are formidable
+simply as the earliest popularizers of some interesting science, or the
+first promulgators of some class of curious little-known facts, with
+which they mix up their special contributions of error,&mdash;often the only
+portion of their writings that really belongs to themselves. Nor is it
+at all so easy to <i>counteract</i> as to <i>confute</i> them. A masterly
+confutation of the part of their works truly their own may, from its
+subject, be a very unreadable book: it can have but the insinuated
+poison to deal with, unmixed with the palatable pabulum in which the
+poison has been conveyed; and mere treatises on poisons, whether moral
+or medical, are rarely works of a very delectable order. It seems to be
+on this principle that there exists no confutation of the "Constitution
+of Man" in which the ordinary reader finds amusement to carry him
+through; whereas the work itself, full<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> of curious miscellaneous
+information, is eminently readable; and that the "Vestiges of
+Creation,"&mdash;a treatise as entertaining as the "Arabian Nights,"&mdash;bids
+fair, not from the amount of error which it contains, but from the
+amount of fresh and interestingly told truth with which the error is
+mingled, to live and do mischief when the various solidly-scientific
+replies which it has called forth are laid upon the shelf. Both the
+"Constitution" and the "Vestiges" had the advantage, so essential to the
+basilisk, of taking the first glance of the public on their respective
+subjects; whereas their confutators have been able to render them back
+but mere <i>return</i> glances. The only efficiently counteractive mode of
+looking down the danger, in cases of this kind, is the mode adopted by
+Mr. Longmuir.</p>
+
+<p>There was a smart frost next morning; and, for a few hours, my seat on
+the top of the Banff coach, by which I travelled across the country to
+where the Gamrie and Banff roads part company, was considerably more
+cool than agreeable. But the keen morning improved into a brilliant day,
+with an atmosphere transparent as if there had been no atmosphere at
+all, through which the distant objects looked out as sharp of outline,
+and in as well-defined light and shadow, as if they had occupied the
+background, not of a Scotch, but of an Italian landscape. A few
+speck-like sails, far away on the intensely blue sea, which opened upon
+us in a stretch of many leagues, as we surmounted the moory ridge over
+Macduff, gleamed to the sun with a radiance bright as that of the sparks
+of a furnace blown to a white heat. The land, uneven of surface, and
+open, and abutting in bold promontories on the frith, still bore the
+sunny hue of harvest, and seemed as if stippled over with shocks from
+the ridgy hill summits, to where ranges of giddy cliffs flung their
+shadows across the beach. I struck off for Gamrie by a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> path that runs
+eastward, nearly parallel to the shore,&mdash;which at one or two points it
+overlooks from dark-colored cliffs of grauwacke slate,&mdash;to the fishing
+village 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 with
+not only the best effect, but with even the least possible sacrifice of
+appearance: the shabbiest of all suits is a good suit spoiled. My
+hammer-shaft projected from my pocket; a knapsack, with a few changes of
+linen, slung suspended from my shoulders; a strong cotton umbrella
+occupied my better hand; and a gray maud, buckled shepherd-fashion
+aslant the chest, completed my equipment. There were few travellers on
+the road, which forked off on the hill-side a short mile away, into two
+branches, like a huge letter Y, leaving me uncertain which branch to
+choose; and I made up my mind to have the point settled by a woman of
+middle age, marked by a hard, <i>manly</i> countenance, who was coming up
+towards me, bound apparently for the Banff or Macduff market, and
+stooping under a load of dairy produce. She too, apparently, had her
+purpose to serve or point to settle; for as we met, she was the first to
+stand; and, sharply scanning my appearance and aspect at a glance, she
+abruptly 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'r
+gaing east the gate, and tell <i>our</i> folk that the stirk has gat fra her
+tether, an' 'ill brak on the wat clover. Tell them to sen' for her
+<i>that</i> minute." I undertook the commission; and, passing the endangered
+stirk, that seemed luxuriating, undisturbed by any presentiment of
+impending peril, amid the rich swathe of a late clover crop, still damp
+with the dews of the morning frost, I tapped at the door of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span>
+farm-house, and delivered my message to a young good-looking girl, in
+nearly the words of the woman:&mdash;"The gude-wife bade me tell <i>them</i>," I
+said, "to send that instant for the stirk, for she had gat fra her
+tether, and would brak on the wat clover." The girl blushed just a very
+little, and thanked me; and then, after obliging me, in turn, by laying
+down for me my proper route,&mdash;for I had left the question of the forked
+road to be determined at the farm-house,&mdash;she set off at high speed, to
+rescue the unconscious stirk. A walk of rather less than two hours
+brought me abreast of the Bay of Gamrie,&mdash;a picturesque indentation of
+the coast, in the formation of which the agency of the old denuding
+forces, operating on deposits of unequal solidity, may be distinctly
+traced. The surrounding country is composed chiefly of Silurian schists,
+in which there is deeply inlaid a detached strip of mouldering Old Red
+Sandstone, considerably more than twenty miles in length, and that
+varies from two to three miles in breadth. It seems to have been let
+down into the more ancient formation,&mdash;like the keystone of a bridge
+into the ringstones of the arch when the work is in the act of being
+completed,&mdash;during some of those terrible convulsions which cracked and
+rent the earth's crust, as if it had been an earthen pipkin brought to a
+red heat and then plunged into cold water. Its consequent occurrence in
+a lower tier of the geological edifice than that to which it originally
+belonged has saved it from the great denudation which has swept from the
+surface of the surrounding country the tier composed of its contemporary
+beds and strata, and laid bare the grauwacke on which this upper tier
+rested. But where it presents its narrow end to the sea, as the older
+houses in our more ancient Scottish villages present their gables to the
+street, the waves of the German Ocean, by incessantly charging against
+it, propelled<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span> by the tempests of the stormy north, have hollowed it
+into the Bay of Gamrie, and left the more solid grauwacke standing out
+in bold promontories on either side, as the headlands of Gamrie and
+Troup.</p>
+
+<p>In passing downwards on the fishing village of Gardenstone, mainly in
+the hope of procuring a guide to the ichthyolite beds, I saw a laborer
+at work with a pickaxe, in a little craggy ravine, about a hundred yards
+to the left of the path, and two gentlemen standing beside him. I paused
+for a moment, to ascertain whether the latter were not brother-workers
+in the geologic field. "Hilloa!&mdash;here,"&mdash;shouted out the stouter of the
+two gentlemen, as if, by some <i>clairvoyant</i> faculty, he had dived into
+my secret thought; "come here." I went down into the ravine, and found
+the laborer engaged in disinterring ichthyolitic nodules out of a bed of
+gray stratified clay, identical in its composition with that of the
+Cromarty fish-beds; and a heap of freshly-broken nodules, speckled with
+the organic remains of the Lower Old Red Sandstone,&mdash;chiefly occipital
+plates and scales,&mdash;lay beside him. "Know you aught of these?" said the
+stouter gentleman, pointing to the heap. "A little," I replied; "but
+your specimens are none of the finest. Here, however, is a dorsal plate
+of Coccosteus; and here a scattered group of scales of Osteolepis; and
+here the occipital plates of <i>Cheirolepis Cummingi&aelig;</i>; and here the spine
+of the anterior dorsal of <i>Diplacanthus striatus</i>." My reading of the
+fossils was at once recognized, like the mystic sign of the freemason,
+as establishing for me a place among the geologic brotherhood; and the
+stout gentleman producing a spirit-flask and a glass, I pledged him and
+his companion in a bumper. "Was I not sure?" he said, addressing his
+friend: "I knew by the cut of his jib, notwithstanding his shepherd's
+plaid, that he was a wanderer of the scientific<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> cast." We discussed the
+peculiarities of the deposit, which, in its mineralogical character, and
+generically in that of its organic contents, resembles, I found, the
+fish-beds of Cromarty (though, curiously enough, the intervening
+contemporary deposits of Moray and the western parts of Banffshire
+differ widely, in at least their chemistry, from both); and we were
+right good friends ere we parted. To men who travel for amusement,
+incident is incident, however trivial in itself, and always worth
+something. I showed the younger of the two geologists my mode of
+breaking open an ichthyolitic nodule, so as to secure the best possible
+section of the fish. "Ah," he said, as he marked a style of handling the
+hammer which, save for the fifteen years' previous practice of the
+operative mason, would be perhaps less complete,&mdash;"Ah, you must have
+broken open a great many." His own knowledge of the formation and its
+ichthyolites had been chiefly derived, he added, from a certain little
+treatise on the "Old Red Sandstone," rather popular than scientific,
+which he named. I of course claimed no acquaintance with the work; and
+the conversation went on.</p>
+
+<p>The ill luck of my new friends, who had been toiling among the nodules
+for hours without finding an ichthyolite worth transferring to their
+bag, showed me that, without excavating more deeply than my time
+allowed, I had no chance of finding good specimens. But, well content to
+have ascertained that the ichthyolite bed of Gamrie is identical in its
+composition, and, generically at least, in its organisms, with the beds
+with which I was best acquainted, I rose to come away. The object which
+I next proposed to myself was, to determine whether, as at Eathie and
+Cromarty, the fossils here appear not only on the hill-side, but also
+crop out along the shore. On taking leave, however, of the geologists, I
+was reminded by the younger of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> what I might have otherwise
+forgotten,&mdash;a raised beach in the immediate neighborhood (first
+described by Mr. Prestwich, in his paper on the Gamrie ichthyolites),
+which contains shells of the existing species at a higher level than
+elsewhere,&mdash;so far as is yet known,&mdash;on the east coast of Scotland. And,
+kindly conducting me till he had brought me full within view of it, we
+parted. The ichthyolites which I had just been laying open occur on the
+verge of that Strathbogie district in which the Church controversy raged
+so hot and high; and by a common enough trick of the associative
+faculty, they now recalled to my mind a stanza which memory had somehow
+caught when the battle was at the fiercest. It formed part of a satiric
+address, published in an Aberdeen newspaper, to the not very respectable
+non-intrusionists who had smoked tobacco and drank whisky in the parish
+church at Culsalmond, on the day of a certain forced settlement there,
+specially recorded by the clerks of the Justiciary Court.</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+"Tobacco and whisky cost siller,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And meal is but scanty at hame;</span><br />
+But gang to the stane-mason M&mdash;&mdash;r,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Wi' Old Red Sandstone fish he'll fill your wame."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Rather a dislocated line that last, I thought, and too much in the style
+in which Zachary Boyd sings "Pharaoh and the Pascal." And as it is wrong
+to 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?</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+"Tobacco and whisky cost siller,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">An' meal is but scanty at hame;</span><br />
+But gang to the stane-mason M&mdash;&mdash;r,"<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">He'll pang wi' ichth'&oacute;lites your wame,&mdash;</span><br />
+Wi' <i>fish</i>!! as Agassiz has ca'ed 'em,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">In Greek, like themsel's, <i>hard</i> an' <i>odd</i>,</span><br />
+That were baked in stane pies afore Adam<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Gaed names to the haddocks and cod.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span></p><p>Bad enough as rhyme, I suspect; but conclusive as evidence to prove
+that the animal spirits, under the influence of the bracing walk, the
+fine day, and the agreeable recounter at the fish-beds,&mdash;not forgetting
+the half-gill bumper,&mdash;had mounted very considerably above their
+ordinary level at the editorial desk.</p>
+
+<p>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, along
+the rim-like edge of the flat area atop, scattered fragments of the
+vitrified walls. A general covering of turf restricted my examination of
+the shells to one point, where a land-slip on a small scale had laid the
+deposit bare; but I at least saw enough to convince me that the debris
+of the shell-fish used of old as food by the garrison had not been
+mistaken for the remains of a raised beach,&mdash;a mistake which in other
+localities 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 of
+bluish-colored silt. I picked out of the sand two entire specimens of a
+full-grown Fusus, little more than half an inch in length,&mdash;the <i>Fusus
+turricola</i>; and the greater number of the fragments that lay bleaching
+at the foot of the broken slope, in a state of chalky friability, seemed
+to be fragments of those smaller bivalves, belonging to the genera
+<i>Donax</i>, <i>Venus</i>, and <i>Mactra</i>, that are so common on flat sandy shores.
+But when the sea washed over these shells, they could have been the
+denizens of at least no <i>flat</i> shore. The descent on which they occur
+sinks downwards to the existing beach, over which it is elevated at this
+point two hundred and thirty feet, at an angle with the horizon of from
+thirty-five to forty degrees. Were the land to be now submerged to where
+they appear on the hill-side, the bay of Gamrie, as abrupt in its
+slopes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> 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 a
+hundred yards from the shore. I may add, that I could trace at this
+height no marks of such a continuous terrace around the sides of the bay
+as the waves would have infallibly excavated in the diluvium, had the
+sea 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; though
+the green banks which sweep around the upper part of the inflection,
+unscarred by the defacing plough, would scarce have failed to retain
+some mark of where the surges had broken, had the surges been long
+there. Whatever may in this special case be the fact, however, I cannot
+doubt that in the comparatively modern period of the boulder clays,
+Scotland lay buried under water to a depth at least five times as great
+as the space between this ancient sea-beach and the existing tide-line.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span></p>
+<h3>CHAPTER II.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="hang">Character of the Rocks near Gardenstone&mdash;A Defunct Father-lasher&mdash;A
+Geological Inference&mdash;Village of Gardenstone&mdash;The drunken
+Scot&mdash;Gardenstone Inn&mdash;Lord Gardenstone&mdash;A Tempest threatened&mdash;The
+Author's Ghost Story&mdash;The Lady in Green&mdash;Her Appearance and
+Tricks&mdash;The Rescued Children&mdash;The murdered Peddler and his
+Pack&mdash;Where the Green Dress came from&mdash;Village of Macduff&mdash;Peculiar
+Appearance of the Beach at the Mouth of the Deveron&mdash;Dr. Emslie's
+Fossils&mdash;<i>Pterichthys quadratus</i>&mdash;Argillaceous Deposit of
+Blackpots&mdash;Pipe-laying in Scotland&mdash;Fossils of Blackpots Clay&mdash;Mr.
+Longmuir's Description of them&mdash;Blackpots Deposit a Re-formation of
+a Liasic Patch&mdash;Period of its Formation. </p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">I lingered</span> on the hill-side considerably longer than I ought; and then,
+hurrying downwards to the beach, passed eastwards under a range of
+abrupt, mouldering precipices of red sandstone, to the village. From the
+lie of the strata, which, instead of inclining coastwise, dip towards
+the interior of the country, and present in the descent seawards the
+outcrop of lower and yet lower deposits of the formation, I found it
+would be in vain to look for the ichthyolite beds along the shore. They
+may possibly be found, however, though I lacked time to ascertain the
+fact, along the sides of a deep ravine, which occurs near an old
+ecclesiastical edifice of gray stone, perched, nest-like, half-way up
+the bank, on a green hummock that overlooks the sea. The rocks, laid
+bare by the tide, belong to the bed of coarse-grained red sandstone,
+varying from eighty to a hundred and fifty feet in thickness, which lies
+between the lower fish-bed and the great conglomerate, and which, in not
+a few of its strata, passes itself into a species of conglomerate,
+different only from that which it overlies, in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span> being more finely
+comminuted. The continuity of this bed, like that of the deposit on
+which it rests, is very remarkable. I have found it occurring at many
+various points, over an area at least ten thousand square miles in
+extent, and bearing always the same well-marked character of a more
+thoroughly ground-down conglomerate than the great conglomerate on which
+it reposes. The underlying bed is composed of broken fragments of the
+rocks below, crushed, as if by some imperfect rudimentary process, like
+that which in a mill merely breaks the grain; whereas, in the bed above,
+a portion of the previously-crushed materials seems to have been
+subjected to some further attritive process, like that through which, in
+the mill, the broken grain is ground down into meal or flour.</p>
+
+<p>As I passed onwards, I saw, amid a heap of drift-weed stranded high on
+the beach by the previous tide, a defunct father-lasher, with the two
+defensive spines which project from its opercles stuck fast into little
+cubes of cork, that had floated its head above water, as the
+tyro-swimmer floats himself upon bladders; and my previous acquaintance
+with the habits of a fishing village enabled me at once to determine why
+and how it had perished. Though almost never used as food on the eastern
+coast of Scotland, it had been inconsiderate enough to take the
+fisherman's bait, as if it had been worthy of being eaten; and he had
+avenged 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 Flying
+Dutchman, until it died. Was there ever on earth a creature save man
+that could have played a fellow-mortal a trick at once so ingeniously
+and gratuitously cruel? Or what would be the proper inference, were I to
+find one of the many-thorned ichthyolites of the Lower Old Red Sandstone
+with the spines of its pectorals similarly fixed on cubes of
+lignite?&mdash;that there had existed in these<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> early ages not merely
+<i>physical death</i>, but also <i>moral evil</i>; and that the being who
+perpetrated the evil could not only inflict it simply for the sake of
+the pleasure he found in it, and without prospect of advantage to
+himself, but also by so adroitly reversing, fiend-like, the purposes of
+the benevolent Designer, that the weapons given for the defence of a
+poor harmless creature should be converted into the instruments of its
+destruction. It was not without meaning that it was forbidden by the law
+of Moses to seethe a kid in its mother's milk.</p>
+
+<p>A steep bulwark in front, against which the tide lashes twice every
+twenty-four hours,&mdash;an abrupt hill behind,&mdash;a few rows of squalid
+cottages built of red sandstone, much wasted by the keen sea-winds,&mdash;a
+wilderness of dunghills and ruinous pig-styes,&mdash;women seated at the
+doors, employed in baiting lines or mending nets,&mdash;groups of men
+lounging lazily at some gable-end fronting the sea,&mdash;herds of ragged
+children playing in the lanes,&mdash;such are the components of the fishing
+village of Gardenstone. From the identity of name, I had associated the
+place 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 on
+English plays, transcribed, it was stated in the preface, from the
+margins and fly-leaves of the books of a "small library kept open by his
+Lordship" for the amusement of travellers at the inn of some village in
+his immediate neighborhood; and taking it for granted, somehow, that
+Gardenstone was the village, I was looking around me for the inn, in the
+hope 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 an
+elderly man in a pack-sheet apron, who stood all alone, looking out upon
+the sea, like Napoleon, in the print, from a projection<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span> of the bulwark.
+He turned round, and showed, by an unmistakable expression of eye and
+feature, that he was what the servant girl in "Guy Mannering"
+characterizes as "very particularly drunk,"&mdash;not stupidly, but happily,
+funnily, conceitedly drunk, and full of all manner of high thoughts of
+himself. "It'll be an awfu' coorse nicht," he said, "fra the sea." "Very
+likely," I replied, reiterating my query in a form that indicated some
+little confidence of receiving the needed information; "I daresay you
+could point me out the public-house here?" "Aweel, I wat, that I can;
+but what's that?" pointing to the straps of my knapsack;&mdash;"are ye a
+sodger on the Queen's account, or ye'r ain?" "On my own, to be sure; but
+have 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, with
+spectacles on nose, and a piece of white seam-work in her hand; and,
+cutting short the dialogue by addressing myself to her, she at once
+directed 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's
+a great traveller yon, an' has a gude Scots tongue in his head."</p>
+
+<p>Travellers, save when, during the herring season, an occasional
+fish-curer comes the way, rarely bait at the Gardenstone inn; and in the
+little low-browed room, with its windows in the thatch, into which, as
+her best, the land-lady ushered me, I certainly found nothing to
+identify the <i>locale</i> with that chosen by the literary lawyer for his
+open library. But, according to Ferguson, though "learning was scant,
+provision was good;" and I dined sumptuously on an immense platter of
+fried flounders. There was a little bit of cold pork added to the fare;
+but, aware from previous experience of the pisciverous habits of the
+swine<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span> of a fishing village, I did what I knew the defunct pig must have
+very frequently done before me,&mdash;satisfied a keenly-whetted appetite on
+fish exclusively. I need hardly remind the reader that Lord
+Gardenstone's inn was not that of Gardenstone, but that of
+Laurence-kirk,&mdash;the thriving village which it was the special ambition
+of this law-lord of the last century to create; and which, did it
+produce only its famed snuff-boxes, with the invisible hinges, would be
+rather a more valuable boon to the country than that secured to it by
+those law-lords of our own days, who at one fell blow disestablished the
+national religion of Scotland, and broke off the only handle by which
+their friends the politicians could hope to <i>manage</i> the country's old
+vigorous Presbyterianism. Meanwhile it was becoming apparent that the
+man with the apron had as shrewdly anticipated the character of the
+coming 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. I
+settled a very moderate bill, and set off under the cliffs at a round
+pace, in the hope of scaling the hill, and gaining the high road atop
+which leads to Macduff, ere the darkness closed. I had, however,
+miscalculated my distance; I, besides, lost some little time in the
+opening of the deep ravine to which I have already referred as that in
+which possibly the fish-beds may be found cropping out; and I had got
+but a little beyond the gray ecclesiastical ruin, with its lonely
+burying-ground, when the tempest broke and the night fell.</p>
+
+<p>One of the last objects which I saw, as I turned to take a farewell look
+of the bay of Gamrie, was the magnificent promontory of Troup Head,
+outlined in black on a ground of deep gray, with its two terminal stacks
+standing apart in the sea. And straightway, through one of those tricks
+of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span> association so powerful in raising, as if from the dead, buried
+memories of things of which the mind has been oblivious for years, there
+started up in recollection the details of an ancient ghost-story, of
+which I had not thought before for perhaps a quarter of a century. It
+had been touched, I suppose, in its obscure, unnoted corner, as Ithuriel
+touched 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 bears
+reference 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 been
+originally brought by a great-grandfather of the writer, who quitted
+some of the seaport villages of Banffshire for the northern side of the
+Moray Frith, about the year 1718; and, when pushing on in the darkness,
+straining as I best could, to maintain a sorely-tried umbrella against
+the capricious struggles of the tempest, that now tatooed furiously upon
+its back as if it were a kettle-drum, and now got underneath its stout
+ribs, and threatened to send it up aloft like a balloon, and anon
+twisted it from side to side, and strove to turn it inside out, like a
+Kilmarnock night-cap,&mdash;I employed myself in arranging in my mind the
+details of the narrative, as they had been communicated to me half an
+age before by a female relative.</p>
+
+<p>The opening of the story, though it existed long ere the times of Sir
+Walter Scott or the Waverly novels, bears some resemblance to the
+opening in the "Monastery," of the story of the White Lady of Avenel.
+The wife of a Banffshire proprietor of the minor class had been about
+six months dead, when one of her husband's ploughmen, returning on
+horseback from the smithy, in the twilight of an autumn evening, was
+accosted, on the banks of a small<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span> stream, by a stranger lady, tall and
+slim, and wholly attired in green, with her face wrapped up in the hood
+of her mantle, who requested to be taken up behind him on the horse, and
+carried across. There was something in the tones of her voice that
+seemed to thrill through his very bones, and to insinuate itself, in the
+form of a chill fluid, between his skull and the scalp. The request,
+too, appeared a strange one; for the rivulet was small and low, and
+could present no serious bar to the progress of the most timid
+traveller. But the man, unwilling ungallantly to offend a lady, turned
+his 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 in
+contact with the ploughman's back, he said, as if she had been an
+ill-filled sack of wool; and when, on reaching the opposite side of the
+streamlet, she leaped down as slightly as she had mounted, and he turned
+fearfully round to catch a second glimpse of her, it was in the
+conviction that she was a creature considerably less earthly in her
+texture than himself. She had opened, with two pale, thin arms, the
+enveloping hood, exhibiting a face equally pale and thin, which seemed
+marked, however, by the roguish, half-humorous expression of one who had
+just succeeded in playing off a good joke. "My dead mistress!!"
+exclaimed the ploughman. "Yes, John, <i>your mistress</i>," replied the
+ghost. "But ride home, my bonny man, for it's growing late: you and I
+will be better acquainted ere long." John accordingly rode home and told
+his story.</p>
+
+<p>Next evening, about the same hour, as two of the laird's servant-maids
+were engaged in washing in an out-house, there came a slight tap to the
+door. "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 inner
+part of the washing-room; and, seating herself on a low<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span> bench, from
+which, ere her death, she used occasionally to superintend their
+employment, she began to question them, as if still in the body, about
+the progress of their work. The girls, however, were greatly too
+frightened to make any reply. She then visited an old woman who had
+nursed the laird, and to whom she used to show, ere her departure,
+greatly more kindness than her husband. And she now seemed as much
+interested in her welfare as ever. She inquired whether the laird was
+kind to her, and looking round her little smoky cottage, regretted she
+should be so indifferently lodged, and that her cupboard, which was
+rather 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 not
+seen 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, or
+peering in upon them at night through the dark window-panes, or at
+half-open doors. In the evening she would glide into the kitchen or some
+of the out-houses,&mdash;one of the most familiar and least dignified of her
+class that ever held intercourse with mankind,&mdash;and inquire of the girls
+how they had been employed during the day; often, however, without
+obtaining an answer, though from a cause different from that which had
+at first tied their tongues. For they had become so regardless of her
+presence, viewing her simply as a troublesome mistress, who had no
+longer any claim to be heeded, that when she entered, and they had
+dropped their conversation, under the impression that their visitor was
+a creature of flesh and blood like themselves, they would again resume
+it, remarking that the entrant was "only the green lady." Though always
+cadaverously pale, and miserable looking, she affected a joyous
+disposition, and was frequently heard to laugh,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span> even when invisible. At
+one time, when provoked by the studied silence of a servant girl, she
+flung a pillow at her head, which the girl caught up and returned; at
+another, she presented her first acquaintance, the ploughman, with what
+seemed to be a handful of silver coin, which he transferred to his
+pocket, but which, on hearing her laugh, he drew out, and found to be
+merely a handful of slate shivers. On yet another occasion, the man,
+when passing on horseback through a clump of wood, was repeatedly struck
+from behind the trees by little pellets of turf; and, on riding into the
+thicket, he found that his assailant was the green lady. To her husband
+she never appeared; but he frequently heard the tones of her voice
+echoing from the lower apartments, and the faint peal of her cold,
+unnatural laugh.</p>
+
+<p>One day at noon, a year after her first appearance, the old nurse was
+surprised to see her enter the cottage; as all her previous visits had
+been made early in the morning or late in the evening; whereas
+now,&mdash;though the day was dark and lowering, and a storm of wind and rain
+had just broken out,&mdash;still it <i>was</i> day. "Mammie," she said, "I cannot
+open 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 White
+House [that of a neighboring proprietor], and tell the folk there to set
+out 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 tide
+has flowed around them; and, if no help reach them soon, they'll be all
+scattered like sea-ware on the shore ere the fall of the sea. But if you
+go and tell your story at the White House, mammie, the bairns will be
+safe for an hour to come, and there will be something done by their
+mother to better you, for the news." The woman went, as directed, and
+told her story;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span> and the father of the children set out on horseback in
+hot haste for the rock,&mdash;a low, insulated skerry, which, lying on a
+solitary part of the beach, far below the line of flood, was shut out
+from the view of the inhabited country by a wall of precipices, and
+covered every tide by several feet of water. On reaching the edge of the
+cliffs, he saw the black rock, as the woman had described, surrounded by
+the sea, and the children clinging to its higher crags. But, though the
+waves were fast rising, his attempts to ride out through the surf to the
+poor little things were frustrated by their cries, which so frightened
+his horse as to render it unmanageable; and so he had to gallop on to
+the nearest fishing village for a boat. So much time was unavoidably
+lost 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; but
+until the boat arrived, not a single wave dashed over the black rock;
+though immediately after the last of the children had been rescued, an
+immense wreath of foam rose twice a man's height over its topmost
+pinnacle.</p>
+
+<p>The old nurse, on her return to the cottage, found the green lady
+sitting beside the fire. "Mammie," she said, "you have made friends to
+yourself to-day, who will be kinder to you than your foster-son. I must
+now leave you. My time is out, and you'll be all left to yourselves; but
+I'll have no rest, mammie, for many a twelvemonth to come. Ten years
+ago, a travelling peddler broke into our garden in the fruit season, and
+I 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 struggled
+and fought, and the peddler was killed. But though I at first thought of
+bringing the case before the laird, when I saw the dead man's pack, with
+its silks and its velvets, and this unhappy piece of green satin
+(shaking<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> her dress), my foolish heart beguiled me, and I made the
+ploughman bury the peddler's body under our ash tree, in the corner of
+our garden, and we divided his goods and money between us. You must bid
+the laird raise his bones, and carry them to the churchyard; and the
+gold, which you will find in the little bowl under the tapestry in my
+room, must be sent to a poor old widow, the peddler's mother, who lives
+on the shore of Leith. I must now away to Ireland to the ploughman; and
+I'll be e'en less welcome to him, mammie, than at the laird's; but the
+hungry blood cries loud against us both,&mdash;him and me,&mdash;and we must
+suffer together. Take care you look not after me till I have passed the
+knowe." She glided away, as she spoke, in a gleam of light; and when the
+old woman had withdrawn her hand from her eyes, dazzled by the sudden
+brightness, she saw only a large black gray-hound crossing the moor. And
+the green lady was never afterwards seen in Scotland. The little hoard
+of gold pieces, however, stored in a concealed recess of her former
+apartment, and the mouldering ruins of the peddler under the ash tree,
+gave evidence to the truth of her narrative. The story was hardly wild
+enough for a night so drear and a road so lonely; its ghost-heroine was
+but a homely ghost-heroine, too little aware that the same familiarity
+which, according to the proverb, breeds contempt when exercised by the
+denizens of this world, produces similar effects when too much indulged
+in by the inhabitants of another. But the arrangement and restoration of
+the details of the tradition,&mdash;for they had been scattered in my mind
+like the fragments of a broken fossil,&mdash;furnished me with so much
+amusement, when struggling with the storm, as to shorten by at least
+one-half the seven miles which intervene between Gamrie and Macduff.
+Instead, however, of pressing on to Banff, as I had at first intended,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span>
+I baited for the night at a snug little inn in the latter village, which
+I reached just wet enough to enjoy the luxury of a strong clear fire of
+Newcastle coal.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Longmuir had furnished me with a note of introduction to Dr. Emslie
+of Banff, an intelligent geologist, familiar with the deposits of the
+district; and, walking on to his place of residence next morning, in a
+rain as heavy as that of the previous night, I made it my first business
+to wait on him, and deliver the note. Ere, however, crossing the
+Deveron, which flows between Banff and Macduff, I paused for a few
+minutes in the rain, to mark the peculiar appearance presented by the
+beach where the river disembogues into the frith. Occurring as a
+rectangular spit in the line of the shore, with the expanded stream
+widening into an estuary on its upper side, and the open sea on the
+lower, it marks the scene of an obstinate contest between antagonist
+forces,&mdash;the powerful sweep of the torrent, and the not less powerful
+waves of the stormy north-east; and exists, in consequence, as a long
+gravelly prism, which presents as steep an angle of descent to the waves
+on 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 inspection
+his set of Gamrie fossils, containing several good specimens of
+Pterichthys and Coccosteus, undistinguishable, like those I had seen on
+the previous day, in their state of keeping, and the character of the
+nodular matrices in which they lie, from my old acquaintance the
+Cephalaspians of Cromarty. The animal matter which the bony plates and
+scales originally contained has been converted, in both the Gamrie and
+Cromarty ichthyolites, into a jet-black bitumen; and in both, the
+inclosing nodules consist of a smoke-colored argillaceous limestone,
+which formed around the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> organisms in a bed of stratified clay, and at
+once exhibits, in consequence, the rectilinear lines of the
+stratification, mechanical in their origin, and the radiating ones of
+the sub-crystalline concretion, purely a trick of the chemistry of the
+deposit. A Pterichthys in Dr. Emslie's collection struck me as different
+in its proportions from any I had previously seen, though, from its
+state of rather imperfect preservation, I hesitated to pronounce
+absolutely upon the fact. I cannot now doubt, however, that it belonged
+to a species not figured nor described at the time; but which, under the
+name of <i>Pterichthys quadratus</i>, forms in part the subject of a still
+unpublished memoir, in which Sir Philip Egerton, our first British
+authority on fossil fish, has done me the honor to associate my humble
+name with his own; and which will have the effect of reducing to the
+ranks of the Pterichthyan genus the supposed genera <i>Pamphractus</i> and
+<i>Homothorax</i>. A second set of fossils, which Dr. Emslie had derived from
+his tile-works at Blackpots, proved, I found, identical with those of
+the Eathie Lias. As this Banffshire deposit had formed a subject of
+considerable discussion and difference among geologists, I was curious
+to examine it; and the Doctor, though the day was still none of the
+best, kindly walked out with me, to bring under my notice appearances
+which, 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. He
+informed me, as we went, that the Grauwacke (Lower Silurian) deposits of
+the district, hitherto deemed so barren, had recently yielded their
+organisms in a slate quarry at Gamrie-head; and that they belong to that
+ancient family of the Pennatularia which, in this northern kingdom,
+seems to have taken precedence of all the others. Judging from what now
+appears, the Graptolite must be regarded as the first settler who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span>
+squatted for a living in that deep-sea area of undefined boundary
+occupied at the present time by the bold wave-worn headlands and blue
+hills of Scotland; and this new Banffshire locality not only greatly
+extends the range of the fossil in reference to the kingdom, but also
+establishes, in a general way, the fossiliferous identity of the Lower
+Silurian deposits to the north of the Grampians with that of
+Peebles-shire and Galloway in the south,&mdash;so far as I know, the only
+other two Scottish districts in which this organism has been found.</p>
+
+<p>The argillaceous deposit of Blackpots occupies, in the form of a green
+swelling bank, a promontory rather soft than bold in its contour, that
+projects far into the sea, and forms, when tipped with its slim column
+of smoke from the tile-kiln, a pleasing feature in the landscape. I had
+set it down on the previous day, when it first caught my eye from the
+lofty cliffs of Gamrie-head, at the distance of some ten or twelve
+miles, as different in character from all the other features of the
+prospect. The country generally is moulded on a framework of primary
+rock, and presents headlands of hard, sharp outline, to the attrition of
+the waves; whereas this single headland in the midst,&mdash;soft-lined,
+undulatory, and plump,&mdash;seems suited to remind one of Burns's young Kirk
+Alloway beauty disporting amid the thin old ladies that joined with her
+in the dance. And it <i>is</i> a greatly younger beauty than the Cambrian and
+mica-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 the
+promontory; and as the clay is valuable, in this tile-draining age, for
+the facility with which it can be moulded into pipe-tiles (a purpose
+which the ordinary clays of the north of Scotland, composed chiefly of
+re-formations of the Old Red Sandstone, are what is technically termed
+too <i>short</i> to serve), it is gradually<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> retreating inland before the
+persevering spade and mattock of the laborer. The deposit has already
+been drawn out into many hundred miles of cylindrical pipes, and is
+destined to be drawn out into many thousands more,&mdash;such being one of
+the strange metamorphoses effected in the geologic formations, now that
+that curious animal the Bimana has come upon the stage; and at length it
+will have no existence in the country, save as an immense system of
+veins and arteries underlying the vegetable mould. Will these veins and
+arteries, I marvel, form, in their turn, the <i>fossils</i> of another
+period, when a higher platform than that into which they have been laid
+will be occupied to the full by plants and animals specifically
+different from those of the present scene of things,&mdash;the existences of
+a happier and more finished creation? My business to-day, however, was
+with the fossils which the deposit now contains,&mdash;not with those which
+it may ultimately form.</p>
+
+<p>The Blackpots clay is of a dark-bluish or greenish-gray color, and so
+adhesive, that I now felt, when walking among it, after the softening
+rains of the previous night and morning, as if I had got into a bed of
+bird-lime. It is thinly charged with rolled pebbles, septaria, and
+pieces of a bituminous shale, containing broken Belemnites, and
+sorely-flattened Ammonites, that exist as thin films of a white chalky
+lime. The pebbles, like those of the boulder-clay of the northern side
+of the Moray Frith, are chiefly of the primary rocks and older
+sandstones, and were probably in the neighborhood, in their present
+rolled form, long ere the re-formation of the inclosing mass; while the
+shale and the septaria are, as shown by their fossils, decidedly Liasic.
+I detected among the conchifers a well-marked species of our northern
+Lias, figured by Sowerby from Eathie specimens,&mdash;the <i>Plagiostoma
+concentrica</i>; and among the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span> Cephalopoda, though considerably broken,
+the <i>Belemnite elongatus</i> and <i>Belemnite lanceolata</i>, with the <i>Ammonite
+K&#339;nigi</i> (<i>mutabilis</i>),&mdash;all Eathie shells. I, besides, found in the
+bank a piece of a peculiar-looking quartzose sandstone, traversed by
+hard jaspedeous veins of a brownish-gray color, which I have never
+found, in Scotland at least, save associated with the Lias of our
+north-eastern coasts. Further, my attention was directed by Dr. Emslie
+to a fine Lignite in his collection, which had once formed some eighteen
+inches or two feet of the trunk of a straight slender pine,&mdash;probably
+the <i>Pinites Eiggensis</i>,&mdash;in which, as in most woods of the Lias and
+O&ouml;lite, the annual rings are as strongly marked as in the existing firs
+or larches of our hill-sides.<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> The Blackpots deposit is evidently a
+re-formation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span> of a Liasic patch, identical, both in mineralogical
+character and in its organic remains, with the lower beds of the Eathie
+Lias; while the fragments of shale which it contains belong chiefly to
+an upper Liasic bed. So rich is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span> the dark-colored tenacious argil of the
+Inferior Lias of Eathie, that the geologist who walks over it when it is
+still moist with the receding tide would do well to look to his
+footing;&mdash;the mixture of soap and grease spread by the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> ship-carpenter
+on his launch-slips, to facilitate the progress of his vessel seawards,
+is not more treacherous to the tread: while the Upper Liasic deposit
+which rests over it is composed of a dark slaty shale, largely charged
+with bitumen. And of a Liasic deposit of this compound character,
+consisting in larger part of an inferior argillaceous bed, and in lesser
+part of a superior one of dark shale, the tile-clay of Blackpots has
+been formed.</p>
+
+<p>I had next to determine whether aught remained to indicate the period of
+its re-formation. The tile-works at the point of the promontory rest on
+a bed of shell-sand, composed exclusively, like the sand so abundant on
+the western coast of Scotland, of fragments of existing shells. These,
+however, are so fresh and firm, that, though the stratum which they form
+seems to underlie the clay at its edges, I cannot regard them as older
+than the most modern of our ancient sea-margins. They formed, in all
+probability, in the days of the old coast line, a white shelly beach,
+under such a precipitous front of the dark clay as argillaceous deposits
+almost always present to the undermining wear of the waves. On the
+recession of the sea, however, to its present line, the abrupt, steep
+front, loosened by the frosts and washed by the rains, would of course
+gradually moulder down over them into a slope; and there would thus be
+communicated to the shelly stratum, at least at its edges, an underlying
+character. The true period of the re-formation of the deposit was, I can
+have no doubt, that of the boulder-clay. I observed that the septaria
+and larger masses of shale which the bed contains, bear, on
+roughly-polished surfaces, in the line of their larger axes, the
+mysterious groovings and scratchings of this period,&mdash;marks which I have
+never yet known to fail in their chronological evidence. It may be
+mentioned, too, simply as a fact, though one of less value than<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span> the
+other, that the deposit occurs in its larger development exactly where,
+in the average, the boulder-clays also are most largely developed,&mdash;a
+little over that line where the waves for so many ages charged against
+the coast, ere the last upheaval of the land or the recession of the sea
+sent them back to their present margin. There had probably existed to
+the west or north-west of the deposit, perhaps in the middle of the open
+bay formed by the promontory on which it rests,&mdash;for the small
+proportion of other than Liasic materials which it contains serves to
+show that it could be derived from no great distance,&mdash;an outlier of the
+Lower Lias. The icebergs of the cold glacial period, propelled along the
+submerged land by some arctic current, or caught up by the gulf-stream,
+gradually grated it down, as a mason's laborer grates down the surface
+of the sandstone slab which he is engaged in polishing; and the
+comminuted debris, borne eastwards by the current, was cast down here.
+It has been stated that no Liasic remains have been found in the
+boulder-clays of Scotland. They are certainly rare in the boulder-clays
+of the northern shores of the Moray Frith; for there the nearest Lias,
+bearing in a western direction from the clay, is that of Applecross, on
+the other side of the island; and the materials of the boulder-deposits
+of the north have invariably been derived in the line, westerly in its
+general bearing, of the grooves and scratches of the iceberg era. But on
+the southern shore of the frith, where that westerly line passed athwart
+the Liasic beds of our eastern coast, organisms of the Lias are
+comparatively common in the boulder-clays; and here, at Blackpots, we
+find an extensive deposit of the same period formed of Liasic materials
+almost exclusively. Fragments of still more modern rocks occur in the
+boulder-clays of Caithness. My friend Mr. Robert Dick, of Thurso, to
+whose persevering<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> labors and interesting discoveries in the Old Red
+Sandstone of his locality I have had frequent occasion to refer, has
+detected in a blue boulder-clay, scooped into precipitous banks by the
+river Thorsa, fragments both of chalk-flints and a characteristic
+conglomerate of the O&ouml;lite. He has, besides, found it mottled from top
+to bottom, a full hundred feet over the sea-level, and about two miles
+inland, with comminuted fragments of existing shells. But of this more
+anon.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span></p>
+<h3>CHAPTER III.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="hang">From Blackpots to Portsoy&mdash;Character of the Coast&mdash;Burn of
+Boyne&mdash;Fever Phantoms&mdash;Graphic Granite&mdash;Maupertuis and the Runic
+Inscription&mdash;Explanation of the <i>quo modo</i> of Graphic
+Granite&mdash;Portsoy Inn&mdash;Serpentine Beds&mdash;Portsoy Serpentine
+unrivalled for small ornaments&mdash;Description of it&mdash;Significance of
+the term <i>serpentine</i>&mdash;Elizabeth Bond and her "Letters"&mdash;From
+Portsoy to Cullen&mdash;Attritive Power of the Ocean illustrated&mdash;The
+Equinoctial&mdash;From Cullen to Fochabers&mdash;The Old Red again&mdash;The old
+Pensioner&mdash;Fochabers&mdash;Mr. Joss, the learned Mail-guard&mdash;The Editor
+a sort of Coach-guard&mdash;On the Coach to Elgin&mdash;Geology of
+Banffshire&mdash;Irregular paging of the Geologic Leaves&mdash;Geologic Map
+of the County like Joseph's Coat&mdash;Striking Illustration. </p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">I parted</span> from Dr. Emslie, and walked on along the shore to Portsoy,&mdash;for
+three-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 other
+kindred rocks of a primary district. The day was still gloomy and gray,
+and ill suited to improve homely scenery; nor is this portion of the
+Banff coast nearly so striking as that which I had travelled over the
+day before. It has, however, its spots of a redeeming character,&mdash;rocky
+recesses on the shore, half-beach, half-sward, rich in wild-flowers and
+shells,&mdash;where one could saunter in a calm sunny morning, with one's
+<i>bairns</i> about one, very delightfully; and the interior is here and
+there agreeably undulated by diluvial hillocks, that, when the sun falls
+low in the evening, must chequer the landscape with many a pleasing
+alternation of light and shadow. The Burn of Boyne,&mdash;which separates,
+about two miles from Portsoy, a grauwacke from a mica-schist
+district,&mdash;with its bare,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span> open valley, its steep limestone banks, and
+its gray, melancholy castle, long since roofless and windowless, and
+surrounded by a few stunted trees, bears a deserted and solitary
+shagginess about it, that struck me as wildly agreeable. It is such a
+valley as one might expect to meet a ghost in, in some still, dewy
+evening, as gloamin was darkening into uncertainty the outlines of the
+ancient ruin, and the newly-kindled stars looked down upon the stream.</p>
+
+<p>It so happened, however, that my only story connected with either ruin
+or valley was as little a ghost story as might be. I remember that, when
+lying ill of fever on one occasion,&mdash;indisposed enough to see apparition
+after apparition flitting across the bed-curtains, like the figures of a
+magic lantern posting along the darkened wall, and yet self-possessed
+enough to know that they were but mere pictures in the eye, and to watch
+them as they rose,&mdash;I set myself to determine whether they were in any
+degree amenable to the will, or connected by the ordinary associative
+links of the metaphysician. Fixing my mind on a certain object, I strove
+to call it up in the character, not of an image of the conceptive
+faculty, but of a fever-vision on the retina. The image which I pictured
+to 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's
+head obstinately refused to rise. I had no control, I found, over the
+fever imagery. And the picture that rose instead, uncalled and
+unexpected, was that of a coal-fire burning brightly in a grate, with a
+huge tea-kettle steaming cheerily over it.</p>
+
+<p>In traversing the bare height which, rising on the western side of the
+valley of the Boyne, owes its comparatively bold relief in the landscape
+to the firmness of the primary rock which composes it, I picked up a
+piece of graphic<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span> granite, bearing its inlaid characters of dark quartz
+on a ground of cream-colored feldspar. This variety, however, though
+occasionally found in rolled boulders in the neighborhood of Portsoy, is
+not the graphic granite for which the locality is famous, and which
+occurs in a vein in the mica schist of the eminence I was now
+traversing, about a mile to the east of the town. The prevailing ground
+of the granite of the vein is a flesh-colored feldspar; and the
+thickly-marked quartzose characters with which it is set, greatly
+smaller and paler than in the cream-colored stone, bear less the antique
+Hebraic look, and would scarce deceive even the most credulous
+antiquary. Antiquarians, however, <i>have</i> been sometimes deceived by
+weathered specimens of this graphic rock, in which the characters were
+of considerable size, and restricted to thin veins, covering the surface
+of a schistose groundwork. Maupertuis, during his famous journey to
+Lapland, undertaken in 1737, to establish, from actual measurement, that
+the 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 covered
+with snow, to examine an ancient monument, of which, he says, "the Fins
+and Laplanders frequently spoke, as containing in its inscription the
+knowledge of everything of which they were ignorant." He found it on the
+side of a mountain, buried in snow; and ascertained, after kindling a
+great fire around it, in order to lay it bare, that it was a stone of
+irregular form, composed of various layers of unequal hardness, and that
+the characters, which were rather more than an inch in length, were
+written on "a layer of a species of flint," chiefly in two lines, with a
+few scattered signs beneath, while the rest of the mass was composed of
+a rock more soft and foliated. Graphic granite, it may be mentioned,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span>
+generally occurs, not in masses, but in veins and layers. The
+inscription had been described in a previously published dissertation of
+immense erudition, as Runic; but a Runic scholar of the party found he
+could make nothing of it. The philosopher himself was struck by the
+frequent repetition of characters of nearly the same form on the stone;
+but he was ingenious enough to get over the difficulty, by remembering
+that in our notation, after the Arabic manner, characters shaped exactly
+alike may be very frequently repeated,&mdash;nay, as in some of the lines of
+the Lapland inscription, may succeed each other, as in the sums I. II.
+III. IIII. or X. XX. XXX.,&mdash;and yet very distinct and definite ideas
+attach to them all. Still, however, he could not, he says, venture on
+authoritatively deciding whether the inscription was a work of man or a
+sport of nature. He stood between his two conclusions, like our
+Edinburgh 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 a
+purple pall to both.</p>
+
+<p>"Should it be no other than a sport of nature," he concludes, "the
+reputation which the stone bears in this country deserves that we should
+have given a description of it. If, on the other hand, what is on it be
+an inscription, though it certainly does not possess the beauty of the
+sculpture of Greece or Rome, it very possibly has the advantage of being
+the oldest in the universe. The country in which it is found is
+inhabited only by a race of men who live like beasts in the forests. We
+cannot imagine that they can have ever had any memorable event to
+transmit to posterity, nor, if ever they had had, that they could have
+invented the means. Nor can it be conceived that this country, with its
+present aspect, ever possessed more civilized inhabitants.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span> The rigor of
+the climate and the barrenness of the land have destined it for the
+retreat of a few miserable wretches, who know no other. It seems,
+therefore, that the inscription must have been cut at a period when the
+country was situated in a different climate, and before some one of
+those great revolutions which, we cannot doubt, have taken place on our
+globe. The position that the earth's axis holds at present with respect
+to the ecliptic, occasions Lapland to receive the sun's rays very
+obliquely: 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 its
+misfortunes. These regions may formerly have been those on which the sun
+shone most favorably; the polar circles may have been what now the
+tropics are, and the torrid zone have filled the place occupied by the
+temperate." Pretty well, Monsieur, for a philosopher! The various
+attempts made to unriddle the real history of graphic granite are,
+however, scarce less curious than the speculations connected with what
+may be termed its romance. It seems to be generally held, since the days
+of old Hutton, who, in his "Theory of the Earth," discussed the subject
+with his usual ingenuity, that the feldspathic basis of the stone first
+crystallized, leaving interstices between the crystals, partaking of a
+certain regularity of form,&mdash;a consequence of the regularity of the
+crystals themselves,&mdash;and of a certain irregularity from the eccentric
+dispositions which these manifest in their position and relations to
+each other; and that these interstices, being afterwards filled up with
+quartz, form the characters of the rock,&mdash;characters partaking enough of
+the first element of <i>regularity</i> to present their peculiar graphic
+appearance, and enough of the second element of <i>irregularity</i> to
+exhibit forms of an alphabet-like variety of outline. The chemist,
+however, in cross-questioning the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> explanation, has his puzzle to
+propound regarding it. Quartz, he says, being considerably less fusible
+than feldspar, would naturally consolidate first, and so would give form
+to the more fusible substance, instead of deriving form from it. On what
+principle, then, is it that, reversing its ordinary character, it should
+have been the last of the two substances to consolidate in the graphic
+granite?&mdash;a query to which there seems to be no direct reply, but which
+as little affects the fact that it <i>was</i> the substance which last
+consolidated, and which took form from the other, as the decision of the
+learned Strasburgers, which determined the impossibility of the long
+nose in Slawkenbergius's Tale, affected the actual existence of that
+remarkable feature. "It happens <i>to be</i>, notwithstanding your
+objection," said the controversialists on the pro-nose side of the
+question. "But it <i>ought not</i>," replied their opponents.</p>
+
+<p>The rain again returned as I was engaged in examining the graphic
+granite of the Portsoy vein; the breeze from the sea heightened into a
+gale, that soon fringed the coast with a broad border of foam; and I
+entered the town, which looked but indifferently well in its gray
+dishabille of haze and spray, tolerably wet and worn, with but the
+prospect before me of being weather-bound for the rest of the day. I
+found an old-fashioned inn, kept by somewhat old-fashioned people, who
+had lately come from the country to "open a public;" and ensconced
+myself by the fireside, in a huge many-windowed room, that must have
+witnessed the county dinners of at least a century ago. Soon wearying,
+however, of hearing the rain beating mad-like ratans upon the panes, and
+availing myself of a comparatively "lucid interval," I sallied out,
+wrapped up in my plaid, to examine the serpentine beds in the
+neighborhood, which produce what is so extensively known as the Portsoy
+marble. The <i>beds</i> or <i>veins</i> of this substance,&mdash;for it is still a moot
+point whether<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> they occur here as mere insulated masses of contemporary
+origin with the primary formations which surround them, or as Plutonic
+dykes injected into fissures at a later period,&mdash;are of very
+considerable extent, one of them measuring about twenty-five yards
+across, and another considerably more than a quarter of a mile; and, had
+they but the solidity of the true marbles, they would scarce fail to be
+regarded as valuable quarries of a highly ornamental stone, admirably
+suited for the interior decorations of the architect. But they are
+unluckily what the quarrier would term rubbly,&mdash;traversed by an infinity
+of cracks and fissures; and it is rare indeed to find a continuous mass
+out of which a chimney-jamb or lintel could be fashioned. The serpentine
+was wrought here considerably more than a century and a half ago, and
+exported to France for the magnificent Palace of Versailles; which,
+though regarded by the French nation, says Voltaire, as "a favorite
+without merit," Louis the Fourteenth persisted at the time in lavishly
+beautifying, and looked as for abroad as Portsoy for materials with
+which to adorn it. I have, however, seen it stated that the greater part
+of a ship's cargo, brought afterwards to Paris on speculation, was
+suffered to lie unwrought for years in the stone-dealer's yard, and was
+ultimately disposed of as rubbish,&mdash;a consequence, probably, of its
+unfitness, from its shaky texture, for ornamental purposes on a large
+scale, though for ornaments of the smaller kind, such as boxes, vases,
+and plates, it has been pronounced unrivalled. "At Z&ouml;blitz, in Upper
+Saxony," says Professor Jamieson, "several hundred people are employed
+in quarrying, cutting, turning, and polishing the serpentine which
+occurs in that neighborhood; and the various articles into which it is
+manufactured are carried all over Germany. The serpentine of Portsoy,"
+he adds, "is, however, far superior to that of Z&ouml;blitz, in color,
+hardness, and transparency, and, when cut, is very beautiful."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span></p><p>It is really a pretty stone; and, bad as the evening was, it was by no
+means one of the worst of evenings for seeing it to advantage <i>in situ</i>,
+or among the rolled pebbles on the shore. The varnish-like gloss of the
+wet imparted to the undressed masses all the effect of polish, and
+brought out in their proper variegations of color, every cloud, streak,
+and vein. Viewed in the mass, the general hue is green; so much so, that
+an insulated stack, which stands abreast of one of the beds, a
+stone-cast in the sea, has greatly the appearance, at a little distance,
+of an immense mass of verdigris. But red, gray, and brown are also
+prevailing colors in the rock; occasional veins and blotches of white
+give lightness to the darker portions; and veins of hematitic and deep
+umbry tints, variety to the portions that are lighter. The greens vary
+from the palest olive to the deepest black-green of the mineralogist;
+the reds and browns, from blood-red to dark chocolate, and from
+wood-brown to brownish-black; and, thus various in shade, they occur in
+almost every possible variety of combination and form,&mdash;dotted, spotted,
+clouded, veined,&mdash;so that each separate pebble on the shore seems the
+representative of a rock different from the rocks represented by almost
+all the others. Though not much of a mineralogist, I could have spent
+considerably more time than the weather permitted me to employ this
+evening, in admiring the beauties of this beach of <i>marbles</i>, or
+rather,&mdash;as the real name, derived from those gorgeous, many-colored
+cloudings, that impart a terrible splendor to the skins of the snake and
+viper family, is not only the more correct, but also the more poetical
+of the two,&mdash;this beach of <i>serpentines</i>. I had, however, to compromise
+matters between the fierce wind and rain and the pretty rocks and
+pebbles, by adjourning to the workshop of the Portsoy lapidary, Mr.
+Clark, and examining under cover his polished specimens, of which I
+purchased for a few shillings a characteristic<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span> and elegant little set.
+Portsoy is peculiarly rich in minerals; and hence it reckons among its
+mechanics of the ordinary class, what perhaps no other village in
+Scotland of the same size and population possesses,&mdash;a skilful lapidary.
+Mr. Clark's collection of the graphic granites, serpentines, and talcose
+and mica schists, of the district, with their associated minerals, such
+as schorl, talc, asbestos, amianthus, mountain cork, steatite, and
+schiller spar, will be found eminently worthy a visit by the passing
+traveller.</p>
+
+<p>I made several inquiries in the village, though not, as it proved, in
+the right direction, regarding a poor old lady, several years dead, of
+whom I had known a very little considerably more than a quarter of a
+century before, and whose grave I would have visited, bad as the night
+was, had I met any one who could have pointed it out to me. But
+ungrateful Portsoy seemed to have forgotten poor Miss Bond, who, in all
+her printed letters and little stories, so rarely forgot <i>it</i>. Have any
+of my readers ever seen the work (in two slim volumes), "Letters of a
+Village Governess," published in 1814 by Elizabeth Bond, and dedicated
+to Sir Walter Scott? If not, and should they chance to see, as I lately
+did, a copy on a stall (with uncut leaves, alas! and selling dog cheap),
+they might possibly do worse things than buy it.<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a></p>
+
+<p>With better weather I could have spent a day or two very agreeably in
+Portsoy and its neighborhood; but the rain dashed unceasingly, and made
+exploration under the cover of the umbrella somewhat resemble that of a
+sea-bottom under cover of the diving-bell. I could see but little at a
+time, and the little imperfectly. Miss Bond, in her "Letters," refers,
+in her light, pleasing style, to what<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span> in more favorable circumstances
+<i>might</i> be seen. "My troop of <i>light infantry</i>," she says, "keeps me so
+well employed here during the day, that the silence and repose of the
+evening is very delightful. In fine weather I walk by the sea-side, and
+scramble among the rugged rocks, many of which are inaccessible to human
+feet, forming a fine retreat for foxes. These animals often may be seen
+from the heights, sporting with their cubs in perfect safety. This day I
+went to see the works of an old <i>virtuoso</i>, who turns in marble, or
+rather granite [serpentine] all kinds of chimney-piece ornaments, rings,
+ear-rings, etc. Several specimens of his work, which must have cost him
+a vast deal of trouble, I thought very beautiful. It was in this
+neighborhood that the celebrated Ferguson spent so much of his time. The
+globular stones on the gate of Durn are still to be seen, on which he
+mapped out the figuring of the terrestrial and celestial globes. I was
+told it was forbidden ground to approach the premises of Durn; but I
+could not resist the temptation of visiting the spot where the young
+philosopher had shown such early proofs of his genius; and I accordingly
+paid the forfeit of an <i>impertinent</i>, for the gentleman who resides
+there caught the prowler, and in genteel terms bade her go about her
+business, and never return. How ungracious! She was doing no harm."</p>
+
+<p>The morning arose as gloomily as the evening had fallen; and I walked on
+in the rain to Cullen, fully disposed to sympathize by the way with the
+"hardy Byron,"&mdash;he of the "Narrative,"&mdash;who, from his ill-luck in
+weather, went among his sailors by the name of "Foul-weather Jack." In
+the sandy bay of Cullen, where the road, after inflecting inland for
+some five or six miles, comes again upon the sea, I found the surf
+charging home in long white lines six waves deep,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span>"Each stepping where his comrade stood,<br />
+The instant that he fell."<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The appearance was such as to impart no inadequate idea of the vast
+attritive power of ocean in wearing down the land. When pausing for a
+little abreast of the fishing village, partially sheltered by an old
+boat, to mark the fierce turmoil, it suddenly occurred to me,&mdash;as the
+tempest weltered around reef and skerry, and roared wildly, mile after
+mile, along the beach,&mdash;that the day and night were now just equal, and
+that it was the customary equinoctial storm that had broken out to
+accompany me on my journey. And so, calculating on a few days more of
+it, instead of waiting on in the hope of a fair afternoon to examine the
+outlier of Old Red which occurs in the neighborhood of Cullen, I was
+content to see at a distance its mural-sided cliffs rising like broken
+walls through the flat sand; and, taking the road for Fochabers, with
+the intention of leaving exploration till fairer weather set in, I
+resolved on posting straight on, to join my relatives on the opposite
+side of the Frith. The deep-red color of the boulder-clay, as exhibited
+by the way-side, in the water-courses and the water,&mdash;for every runnel
+was tumbling down big and turbid with the rains,&mdash;intimated, when, after
+leaving Cullen some six or seven miles behind me, I passed from a bare
+moory region of quartz rock into a region of woods and fields, that I
+was again upon my ancient acquaintance, the Old Red Sandstone. And the
+section furnished by the Burn of Tynet showed me shortly after that the
+intimation was a correct one, and how generally it may be laid down as a
+rule, that at least the more impalpable portions of the boulder-clay are
+derived from the rocks on which it rests. The ichthyolite beds appear in
+the course of the burn. They have furnished several good
+specimens,&mdash;among the others, the specimen of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span> 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 who
+explores from Gamrie westwards, that peculiar style of coloring which
+characterizes the Old Red ichthyolites of the shires of Moray and Nairn,
+and which differs so strikingly from the more sombre style exhibited by
+the 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. The
+day, however, was ill-suited for fishing Pterichthyes and Osteolepi out
+of the Tynet: the red water was roaring from bank to brae; here eddying
+along the half-submerged furze,&mdash;there tearing down the boulder-days in
+raw, red land-slips; and so, casting but one eager glance at the bed
+where the fish lay, I travelled on, and entered the tall woods to the
+east of Fochabers. The rain ceased for a time; and I met in the woods an
+old pensioner, who had been evidently weather-bound in some
+public-house, and had now taken the opportunity of the fair interval to
+stagger to his dwelling. He was eminently, exuberantly happy,&mdash;there
+could not be two opinions on that head,&mdash;full of all manner of bright
+sunshiny thoughts and imaginations, rendered just a little tremulous and
+uncertain by the <i>summer-heat</i> exhalations of the imbibed moisture, like
+distant objects in a hot noonday landscape in July seen through volumes
+of rising vapor; and a sheep's head and trotters, which he carried under
+his 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 for
+all that. He confronted me with the air of an old acquaintance; gave the
+military salute; and then, laying hold of a corner of my plaid<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span> with his
+thumb and forefinger,&mdash;"I know you," he said, "I know <i>your kind</i> well;
+ye're a Highland-Donald. Od, I've seen ye in the <i>thick o't</i>. Ye're
+<i>reugh</i> fellows when ye're bluid's up!" He had taken me for a grenadier
+of the 42d; and I lacked the moral courage to undeceive him. I met
+nothing further on my way worthy of record, save and except a sheep's
+trotter, dropped by the old pensioner in one of his zig-zaggings to the
+extreme left; but having no particular use for the trotter at the time
+and in the circumstances, I left it to benefit the next passer-by. I
+finished my journey of eighteen miles in capital style, and was within
+five minutes' walk of Fochabers when the horn of the mail-guard was
+sounding up the street. And, entering the village, I found the vehicle
+standing opposite the inn door, minus the horses.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>insides</i> and <i>outsides</i> were sitting down to dinner together as I
+entered the inn; and I felt, after my long walk, that it would be rather
+an agreeable matter to join with them. But in the hope of meeting my old
+friend 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 so
+chanced, however, that Mr. Joss was not <i>out</i> that day; and the man in
+the red long coat was a stranger whom I had never seen before. I
+inquired of him regarding Mr. Joss,&mdash;one of perhaps the most remarkable
+mail-guards in Europe. I have at least never heard of another who, like
+him, amuses his leisure on the coach-top with the "Principia" of Newton,
+and understands it. And the man, drawing his inference from the interest
+in Mr. Joss which my queries evinced, asked me whether I myself was not
+a coach-guard. "No," I rather thoughtlessly replied, "I am not a
+coach-guard." Half a minute's consideration, however, led me to doubt
+whether I had given the right answer. "I am not sure," I said to
+myself,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span> on second thoughts, "but the man has cut pretty fairly on the
+point;&mdash;I daresay <i>I am</i> a sort of coach-guard. I have to mount my
+twice-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 or
+full; I have to keep a sharp eye on the opposition coaches; I am
+responsible, 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 have
+always to keep my blunderbuss full charged to the muzzle,&mdash;not wishing
+harm to any one, but bound in duty to let drive at all and sundry who
+would make war upon the passengers, or attempt running the conveyance
+off the road; and, finally, as my friend Mr. Joss takes the "Principia"
+to <i>his</i> 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, the
+problems which they furnish. Yes, I rather think <i>I am</i> a coach-guard."
+And so, taking my seat beside my red-coated brother, who had guessed the
+true nature of my occupation so much more shrewdly than myself, I rode
+on to Elgin, where I passed the night.</p>
+
+<p>It is difficult to arrange in the mind the geologic formations of
+Banffshire in their character as a series of deposits. The pages of the
+stony record which the county composes, like those of an
+unskilfully-folded pamphlet, have been strangely mixed together, so that
+page last succeeds in some places to page first, and, of the
+intermediate pages, some appear at the beginning of the work, and some
+at 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 boundary
+in this direction, that we find the beds comparatively little disturbed,
+and arranged chronologically in their original places. In the eastern
+and southern parts of the shire, rocks widely separated by the date of
+their formation have been set down side by side in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span> patches,
+occasionally of but inconsiderable extent. Now the traveller passes over
+a district of grauwacke, now over a re-formation of the Lias; anon he
+finds himself on a primary limestone,&mdash;gneiss, syenite, clay-slate, or
+quartz-rock; and yet anon amid the fossils of some outlier of the Old
+Red. The geological map of the county is, like Joseph's coat, of many
+colors. I remember seeing, when a boy, more years ago than I am inclined
+to specify, some workmen engaged in pulling down what had been a
+house-painter's shop, a full century before. The painter had been in the
+somewhat slovenly habit of cleaning his brushes by rubbing them against
+a hard-cast wall, which was covered, in consequence, by a many-colored
+layer 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 upper
+surface smooth; and, lo! a geological map. The <i>strata</i> of variously
+hued pigment, spread originally over the surface of the hard-cast wall,
+were cut open, by the <i>denudation</i> of the grindstone, into all manner of
+fantastic forms, and seemed thrown into all sorts of strange
+neighborhoods. The <i>map</i> lacked merely the additional perplexity of a
+few bold <i>faults</i>, with here and there a decided <i>dike</i>, in order to
+render it on a small scale a sort of miniature transcript of the geology
+of Banff; and I have very frequently found my thoughts reverting to it,
+in connection with deposits of this broken character. On a rough
+<i>hard-cast</i> basis of granite I have laid down in imagination, as if by
+way of priming, coat after coat of the primary rocks,&mdash;gneiss, and
+stratified hornblend, and mica-schist, and quartz-rock, and day-slate;
+and then, after breaking the coatings well up, and rubbing them well
+down, and so spoiling and crumpling up the work as to make their
+original order considerably a puzzle, I have begun anew to paint over
+the rough surface with thick coatings of grauwacke and grauwacke-slate.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span>
+When this part of the operation was completed, I have again begun to
+break up and grind down,&mdash;here letting a tract of grauwacke sink into
+the broken primary,&mdash;there wearing it off the surface
+altogether,&mdash;yonder elevating the original granitic <i>hard-cast</i> till it
+rose over all the coatings, Primary and Pal&aelig;ozoic. And then I have begun
+to paint yet a third time with thick Old Red Sandstone pigment; and yet
+again to break up and wear down,&mdash;here to insert a tenon of the Old Red
+deep into a mortise of the grauwacke, as at Gamrie,&mdash;there to dovetail
+it into the clay-slate, as at Tomantoul,&mdash;yonder, after laying it across
+the upturned quartz-rock, as at Cullen, to rub by much the greater part
+of it away again, leaving but mere remainder-patches and fragments, to
+mark where it had been. Lastly, if I had none of the superior Pal&aelig;ozoic
+or Secondary formations to deal with, I have brushed over the whole, by
+way of finish, with the variously-derived coatings of the superficial
+deposits; and thus, as I have said, I have often completed, in idea,
+after the chance suggestion of the old painter's shop, my portable
+models of the geology of disturbed districts like the Banffshire one.
+The deposits of Moray are greatly less broken. Denudation has partially
+worn them down; but they seem to have almost wholly escaped the previous
+crumpling process.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span></p>
+<h3>CHAPTER IV.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="hang">Yellow-hued Houses Of Elgin&mdash;Geology of the Country indicated by
+the coloring of the Stone Houses&mdash;Fossils of Old Red north of the
+Grampians different from those of Old Red south&mdash;Geologic
+Formations at Linksfield difficult to be understood&mdash;Ganoid Scales
+of the Wealden&mdash;Sudden Reaction, from complex to simple, in the
+Scales of Fishes&mdash;Pore-covered Scales&mdash;Extraordinary amount of
+Design exhibited in Ancient Ganoid Scales&mdash;Holoptychius Scale
+illustrated by Cromwell's "fluted pot"&mdash;Patrick Duff's Geological
+Collection&mdash;Elgin Museum&mdash;Fishes of the Ganges&mdash;Armature of Ancient
+Fishes&mdash;Compensatory Defences&mdash;The Hermit-crab&mdash;Spines of the
+Pimelodi&mdash;Ride to Campbelton&mdash;Theories of the formation of
+Ardersier and Fortrose Promontories&mdash;Tradition of their
+construction by the Wizard, Michael Scott&mdash;A Region of Legendary
+Lore. </p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> prevailing yellow hue of the Elgin houses strikes the eye of the
+geologist who has travelled northwards from the Frith of Forth. He takes
+leave of a similar stone at Cupar-Fife,&mdash;a warmly-tinted yellow
+sandstone, peculiarly well-suited for giving effect to architectural
+ornament; and after passing along the deep-red sandstone houses of the
+shires of Angus and Kincardine, and the gneiss, granite, hyperstene, and
+mica-schist houses of Aberdeen and Banff shires, he again finds houses
+of a deep red on crossing the Spey, and houses of a warm yellow tint on
+reaching Elgin,&mdash;geologically the Cupar-Fife of the north. And the story
+that the colored buildings tell him is, that he has been passing, though
+by a somewhat circuitous route of a hundred and fifty miles, over an
+anticlinal geological section,&mdash;<i>down</i> in the scale till he reached
+Aberdeen and had gone a little beyond it, and then <i>up</i> again, until at
+Elgin he arrives at the same superior yellow bed of Old Red Sandstone
+which he had quitted at Cupar-Fife. Both beds contain the same<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span>
+organisms. The Holoptychius of Dura Den, near Cupar, must have sprung
+from the same original as the Holoptychius of the Hospital and
+Bishop-Mill quarries near Elgin; and it seems not improbable that the
+two beds, thus identical in their character and contents, may have
+existed, ere the upheaval of the Grampians broke their continuity, as an
+extended deposit, at the bottom of the same sea. But with this last and
+newest of the formations of the Old Red Sandstone the identity of the
+deposits to the south and north ceases. The strata which in the south
+overlie the yellow bed of the Holoptychius represent the Carboniferous
+period, the overlying strata in the north represent the O&ouml;litic one. On
+the one side the miner sinks his shaft, and finds a true coal, composed
+of the Stigmaria, Calamites, Club-mosses, Ferns, and Araucarians of the
+Pal&aelig;ozoic era; he sinks his shaft on the other side, and finds but thin
+seams of an imperfect lignite, composed of the Cycade&aelig;, Pines,
+Sphenopteri, and Clathraria of the Secondary period. The flora which
+found its subsoil in the Old Red Sandstone north of the Grampians,
+belonged to a scene of things so much more modern than the flora which
+found its subsoil in the Old Red Sandstone of the south, that all its
+productions were green and flourishing, waving beside lake, river, and
+sea, at a time when the productions of the other were locked up, as now,
+in sand and shale, lime and clay,&mdash;the dead mummies of ages long
+departed.</p>
+
+<p>Another thoroughly wet morning! varied only from the morning of the
+preceding day by the absence of wind, and the greater weight of the
+persevering vertical rain, that leaped upwards in myriads of little
+dancing pyramids from the surface of every pool. I walked out under
+cover of my umbrella, to renew my acquaintance with the outlier of the
+Weald at Linksfield, and ascertain what sort of section it now presented
+under the quarrying operations of the limeburners.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span> There was, however,
+little to be seen; the bands of green and blue clays, alternating with
+strata of fossiliferous limestone, and layers of a gray shade, thickly
+charged with minute shells of Cypris, were sadly blurred this morning by
+the trail of numerous slips from above, which had fallen during the
+rains, and softened into mud as they rushed downwards athwart the face
+of the quarry: and the arched band of boulder-clay which so mysteriously
+underlies the deposit was, save in a few parts, wholly covered up by the
+debris. The occurrence of the clay here as an inferior bed, with but the
+cornstone of the Old Red beneath, and all the beds of the Weald resting
+over it, forms a riddle somewhat difficult of solution; but it is
+palpably not reading it aright to regard the deposit, with at least one
+geologist who has written on the subject, as older than the rocks above.
+It is, on the contrary, as a vast amount of various and unequivocal
+evidence demonstrates, incalculably more modern; nay, we find proof of
+the fact here in that very bed which has been instanced as rendering it
+doubtful; the clay of which the interpolation is composed is found to
+contain fragments, not only of the cornstone on which it rests, but also
+of the Wealden limestone and shales which it underlies. It forms the
+mere filling up of a flat-roofed cavern, or rather of two flat-roofed
+caverns,&mdash;for the limestone roof dipped in the centre to the cornstone
+floor,&mdash;which, previous to the times of the boulder-clay, had lain open
+in what was then, as now, an old-world deposit, charged with long
+extinct organisms, but which, during the iceberg period, was penetrated
+and occupied by the clay, as run lime penetrates and occupies the
+interstices of a dry-stone wall. It was no day for gathering fossils. I
+saw a few ganoid scales, washed by the rain from the investing rubbish,
+glittering on fragments of the limestone, with a few of the
+characteristic shells of the deposit, chiefly Unionid&aelig;; but nothing
+worth bringing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span> away. The adhesive clay of the Weald, widely scattered
+by the workmen, and wrought into mortar by the beating rains, made it a
+matter of some difficulty for the struggling foot to retain the shoe,
+and, sticking to my soles by pounds at a time, rendered me obnoxious to
+the old English nickname of "rough-footed Scot." And so, after
+traversing the heaps, somewhat like a fly in treacle, I had to yield to
+the rain above and the mud beneath, and to return to do in Elgin what
+cannot be done equally well in almost any other town of its size in
+Scotland,&mdash;pursue my geological inquiries under cover.</p>
+
+<p>On this, as on other occasions, I was struck by the complex and very
+various forms assumed by the ganoid scales of the Wealden. Throughout
+the O&ouml;litic system generally, including the Lias, there obtains a
+singular complexity of type in these little glittering tiles of
+enamelled bone, which contrasts strongly with the greatly more simple
+style which obtained among the ganoids of the Pal&aelig;ozoic period. In many
+of these last, as in the C&#339;lacanth family, including the genera
+Holoptychius, Asterolepis, and Glyptolepis, in all their many species,
+with at least one genus of Dipterians, the genus Dipterus, the external
+outline and arrangement of scale was as simple as in any of the Cycloid
+family of the present time. Like slates on a roof, each single scale
+covered two, and was covered by two in turn; and the only point of
+difference which existed in relation to the <i>laying down</i> of these massy
+<i>slates</i> of <i>bone</i>, and the laying down of the very thin ones of <i>horn</i>
+which cover fish such as the carp or salmon, was, that in the massier
+<i>slates</i>, the sides, or <i>cover</i>,&mdash;nicely bevelled, in order to preserve
+an equability of thickness throughout,&mdash;were so adjusted, that two
+scales at their edges, where they lay the one over the other, were not
+thicker than one scale at its centre. Even in the other ganoids, their
+contemporaries, such as the Osteolepis and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span> Diplopterus, where the
+scales were ranged more in the tile fashion, side by side, there was,
+with much ingenious carpentry in the fitting, a general simplicity of
+form. It would almost appear, however, that ere the ganoid order reached
+the times of the Weald, the simple forms had been exhausted, and that
+nature, abhorring repetition, and ever stamping upon the scales some
+specific characteristic of the creature that bore them, was obliged to
+have recourse to forms of a more complex and involved outline. These
+latter-day scales send out nail-like spikes laterally and atop, to lay
+hold upon their neighbors, and exhibit in their undersides grooves that
+accommodated the nails sent out, in turn, by their neighbors, to lay
+hold upon <i>them</i>. Their forms, too, are indescribably various and
+fantastic. It seems curious enough, that immediately after this
+extremely <i>artificial</i> state of things, if I may so speak, the two
+prevailing orders of the fish of the present day, the Cycloids and
+Ctenoids, should have been ushered upon the scene, and more than the
+original simplicity of scale restored. There took place a sudden
+re&auml;ction, from the fantastic and the complex to the simple and the
+plain.</p>
+
+<p>It is further worthy of notice, that though many of the ganoid scales of
+the Secondary systems, including those of the Wealden, glitter as
+brightly in burnished enamel as the more splendent scales of the Old Red
+Sandstone and Coal Measures, there is a curious peculiarity exhibited in
+the 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 Pal&aelig;ozoic
+period. The outer layer of the scale, which lies over a middle layer of
+a cellular cancellated structure, and corresponds, apparently, with that
+scarf-skin which in the human subject overlies the <i>rete mucosum</i>, is
+thickly set over with microscopic pores, funnel-shaped in the transverse
+section, and which, examined<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span> by a good glass, in the horizontal one
+resemble the puncturings of a sieve. The Megalichthys of the Coal
+Measures, with its various carboniferous congeners, with the genera
+Diplopterus, Dipterus, and Osteolepis of the Old Red Sandstone,&mdash;all
+brilliantly enamelled fish,&mdash;are thickly pore-covered. But whatever
+purpose these pores may have served, it seems in the Secondary period to
+have been otherwise accomplished, if, indeed, it continued to exist. It
+is a curious circumstance, that in no case do the pores seem to pass
+<i>through</i> the scale. Whatever their use, they existed merely as
+communications between the cells of the middle cancellated layer and the
+surface. In a fish of the Chalk,&mdash;<i>Macropoma Mantelli</i>,&mdash;the exposed
+fields of the scales are covered over with apparently hollow, elongated
+cylinders, as the little tubes in a shower-bath cover their round field
+of 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 the
+Megalichthys, they communicated between the interior of the scale and
+its external surface. Their structure is at any rate palpably different,
+and they bear no such resemblance to the pores of the human skin as that
+which the Pal&aelig;ozoic pores present.</p>
+
+<p>The amount of design exhibited in the scales of some of the more ancient
+ganoids,&mdash;design obvious enough to be clearly read,&mdash;is very
+extraordinary. A single scale of <i>Holoptychius Nobilissimus</i>,&mdash;fast
+locked up in its red sandstone rock,&mdash;laid by, as it were, for
+ever,&mdash;will be seen, if we but set ourselves to unravel its texture, to
+form such an instance of nice adaptation of means to an end as might of
+itself be sufficient to confound the atheist. Let me attempt placing one
+of these scales before the reader, in its character as a flat counter of
+bone, of a nearly circular form, an inch and a half in diameter, and an
+eighth-part<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> of an inch in thickness; and then ask him to bethink
+himself of the various means by which he would impart to it the greatest
+possible degree of strength. The human skull consists of two tables of
+solid bone, an inner and an outer, with a spongy cellular substance
+interposed between them, termed the <i>diploe</i>; and such is the effect of
+this arrangement, that the blow which would fracture a continuous wall
+of bone has its force broken by the spongy intermediate layer, and
+merely injures the outer table, leaving not unfrequently the inner one,
+which more especially protects the brain, wholly unharmed. Now, such
+also was the arrangement in the scale of the <i>Holoptychius
+Nobilissimus</i>. It consisted of its two well-marked tables of solid bone,
+corresponding in their dermal character, the outer to the cuticle, the
+inner to the true skin, and the intermediate cellular layer to the <i>rete
+mucosum</i>; but bearing an unmistakable analogy also, as a mechanical
+contrivance, to the two plates and the <i>diploe</i> of the human skull. To
+the strengthening principle of the two tables, however, there were two
+other principles added. Cromwell, when commissioning for a new helmet,
+his old one being, as he expresses it, "ill set," ordered his friend to
+send him a "<i>fluted pot</i>," <i>i.e.</i>, a helmet ridged and furrowed on the
+surface, and suited to break, by its protuberant lines, the force of a
+blow, so that the vibrations of the stroke would reach the body of the
+metal deadened and flat. Now, the outer table of the scale of the
+Holoptychius was a "fluted pot." The alternate ridges and furrows which
+ornamented its surface served a purpose exactly similar with that of the
+flutes and fillets of Cromwell's helmet. The inner table was
+strengthened on a different but not less effective principle. The human
+stomach consists of three coats; and two of these, the outermost or
+peritoneal coat, and the middle or muscular coat, are so<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span> arranged, that
+the fibres of the one cross at nearly right angles those of the other.
+The violence which would tear the compact sides of this important organ
+along the fibres of the outer coat, would be checked by the transverse
+arrangement of the fibres of the middle coat, and <i>vice versa</i>. We find
+the cotton manufacturer weaving some of his stronger fabrics on a
+similar plan;&mdash;they also are made to consist of two <i>coats</i>; and what is
+technically termed the <i>tear</i> of the upper is so disposed that it lies
+at an angle of forty-five degrees with the <i>tear</i> of the coat which lies
+underneath. Now, the inner table of the scale of the Holoptychius was
+composed, on this principle, of various layers or coats, arranged the
+one over the other, so that the fibres of each lay at right angles with
+the fibres of the others in immediate contact with it. In the 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 <i>run lengthwise along the
+grain</i> of four of them, would be checked by the <i>cross grain</i> in five.
+In other words, the line of the <i>tear</i> in five of the layers was ranged
+at right angles with the line of the <i>tear</i> in four. There were thus in
+a single scale, in order to secure the greatest possible amount of
+strength,&mdash;and who can say what other purposes may have been secured
+besides?&mdash;three distinct principles embodied,&mdash;the principle of the two
+tables and <i>diploe</i> of the human skull,&mdash;the principle of the variously
+arranged coats of the human stomach,&mdash;and the principle of Oliver
+Cromwell's "fluted pot." There have been elaborate treatises written on
+those ornate flooring-tiles of the classical and middle ages, that are
+occasionally dug up by the antiquary amid monastic ruins, or on the
+sites of old Roman stations. But did any of them ever tell a story half
+so instructive or so strange as that told by the incalculably<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span> more
+ancient ganoid <i>tiles</i> of the Pal&aelig;ozoic and Secondary periods?</p>
+
+<p>I called, on my way back from Linksfield, upon my old friend Mr. Patrick
+Duff, and was introduced once more to his exquisite collection, with its
+unique ichthyolites of at least two genera of fishes of the Old
+Red,&mdash;the <i>Stagonolepis</i> and <i>Placothorax</i> of Agassiz,&mdash;which up to the
+present time are to be seen nowhere else; and various other fine
+specimens of rare species, which, having sat for their portraits, have
+their forms preserved in the great work of the naturalist of Neufchatel.
+He showed me, with some triumph, one of his later acquisitions,&mdash;a fine
+specimen of Holoptychius from the upper yellow sandstone of Bishop-Mill,
+which exhibits the dorsal ridge covered with a line of large overlapping
+scales, not at all unlike those overlapping plates which cover the tail
+of the lobster; for which, by the way, they were mistaken by the workman
+who first laid the fossil open. I examined, too, with some interest,
+fragments of a gigantic species of Pterichthys, belonging to an inferior
+division of the same Upper Old Red formation as the yellow stone,
+designated by Agassiz <i>Pterichthys major</i>, which must have attained to
+at least thrice the size, linearly, of even its bulkier congeners of the
+Lower formation of the Coccosteus. After examining many a drawer,
+stored, from the deposits of the neighborhood, with characteristic
+fossils of the Lias, the Weald, and the O&ouml;lite, and of the Upper and
+Lower Old Red, we set out together to expatiate amid the treasures of
+the Town Museum.</p>
+
+<p>Among other recent additions to the Museum, there is an interesting set
+of the fishes of the Ganges, the donation of a gentleman long resident
+in India, to which Mr. Duff called my attention, as illustrative, in
+some of the specimens, of the more characteristic ichthyolites of the
+Old<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span> Red Sandstone. One numerous family, the Pimelodi, abundantly
+represented in the Gangetic region, in not only the rivers, but also the
+ponds, tanks, and estuaries of the district, is certainly worthy the
+careful study of the geologist. It approaches nearer, in some of its
+more strongly-marked genera, to the Coccosteus of the Lower Old Red,
+than any other tribe of existing fishes which I have yet seen. The body
+of the Pimelodus, from the anterior dorsal downwards, is as naked as
+that of the eel; whereas the head, and in several of the species the
+back, is armed with strong plates of naked bone, curiously fretted, as
+in many of the ichthyolites of the Lower, and more especially of the
+Upper Old Red Sandstone, into ridges of confluent tubercles, that
+radiate 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 the
+head, bears upon its inner side a strong central ridge, that deepens as
+it descends, till it abruptly terminates a little short of the
+termination of the plate, exactly as in the dorsal plate of Coccosteus,
+which sunk its central ridge deep into the back of the animal. The point
+of resemblance to be mainly noticed, however, is the contrast furnished
+by the powerful armature of the head and back, with the unprotected
+nakedness of the posterior portions of the creature;&mdash;a point specially
+noticeable in the Coccosteus, and apparent also, though in a lesser
+degree, in some of the other genera of the Old Red, such as the
+Pterichthyes and Asterolepides. From the snout of the Coccosteus down to
+the posterior termination of the dorsal plate, the creature was cased in
+strong armor, the plates of which remain as freshly preserved in the
+ancient rocks of the country as those of the Pimelodi of the Ganges on
+the shelves of the Elgin Museum; but from the pointed termination of the
+plate immediately over the dorsal fin, to the tail, comprising<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span> more
+than one half the entire length of the animal, all seems to have been
+exposed, without the protection of even a scale, and there survives in
+the better specimens only the internal skeleton of the fish and the
+ray-bones of the fins. It was armed, like a French dragoon, with a
+strong helmet and a short cuirass; and so we find its remains in the
+state 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 the
+future on the fatal field of Borodino, or along the banks of the Dwina
+or the Wap. The cuirass lies still attached to the helmet, but we find
+only the naked skeleton attached to the cuirass. The Pterichthys to its
+strong helmet and cuirass added a posterior armature of comparatively
+feeble scales, as if, while its upper parts were shielded with plate
+armor, a lighter covering of ring or scale armor sufficed for the less
+vital parts beneath. In the Asterolepis the arrangement was somewhat
+similar, save that the plated cuirass was wanting: it was a strongly
+helmed warrior in slight scale armor; for the disproportion between the
+strength of the plated head-piece and that of the scaly coat was still
+greater than in the Pterichthys. The occipital star-covered plates are,
+in some of the larger specimens, fully three-quarters of an inch in
+thickness, whereas the thickness of the delicately-fretted scales rarely
+exceeds a line.</p>
+
+<p>Why this disproportion between the strength of the armature in different
+parts of the same fish should have obtained, as in Pterichthys and
+Asterolepis, 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 present
+him with but the fact of the disproportion, without accounting for it.
+But the natural<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span> history of existing fish, in which, as in the Pimelodi,
+there may be detected a similar peculiarity of armature, may perhaps
+throw some light on the mystery. In Hamilton's "Fishes of the Ganges" I
+find but little reference made to the instincts and habits of the
+animals described: their deep-river haunts lie, in many cases, beyond
+the reach of observation; and of the observations actually made, the
+descriptive naturalist, intent often on mere peculiarities of structure,
+is not unfrequently too careless. Hamilton describes the habitats of the
+various 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 of
+the species, such as the <i>Silurus glanis</i>, being unwieldy in their
+motions, do not pursue their prey, which consists of small fishes, but
+lie concealed among the mud, and seize on the chance stragglers that
+come their way. And of the <i>Pimelodus gulio</i>, a little, strongly-helmed
+fish, with a naked body, I was informed by Mr. Duff, on the authority of
+the gentleman who had presented the specimens to the Museum, that it
+burrowed in the holes of muddy banks, from which it shot out its armed
+head, and arrested, as they passed, the minute animals on which it
+preyed. The animal world is full of such compensatory defences: there is
+a half-suit of armor given to shield half the body, and a wise instinct
+to protect the rest. The <i>Pholas crispata</i> cannot shut its valves so as
+to protect its anterior parts, without raising them from off those parts
+which lie behind: like the Irishman in the haunted house, who attempted
+lengthening his blanket by cutting strips from the top and sewing them
+on 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 its
+nature to hollow out for itself in shale or stone, the anterior parts,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span>
+though uncovered by the shell, are not exposed. By closing its valves
+anteriorly, it shuts the door of its little house, made like that of the
+coney-folk of Scripture, in the rock; and then, of the entire cell in
+which 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 is
+naked, and the only one which can clothe itself," is by no means quite
+correct. One half the hermit crab is as naked as the "human animal," and
+even less fitted for exposure; for it consists of a thin-skinned, soft,
+unmuscular bag, filled with delicate viscera; but not even the human
+animal is more skilful in clothing himself in the spoils of other
+animals than the hermit crab in wrapping up its naked bag in the strong
+shell of some dead fusus or buccinum, which it carries about with it in
+all its peregrinations, as at once clothes, armor, and house. Nature
+arms its front, and it is itself wise enough to arm its rear. Now, it
+seems not improbable that the half-armed Coccosteus, a heavy fish,
+indifferently furnished with fins, may have burrowed, like the recent
+<i>Silurus glanis</i> or <i>Pimelodus gulio</i>, in a thick mud,&mdash;of the existence
+of which in vast quantity, during the times of the Old Red Sandstone,
+the dark Caithness flagstones, the fetid breccia of Strathpeffer, and
+the gray stratified clays of Cromarty, Moray, and Banff, unequivocally
+testify; and that it may have thus not only succeeded in capturing many
+of its light-winged contemporaries, which it would have vainly pursued
+in open sea, but may have been enabled also to present to its enemies,
+when assailed in turn, only its armed portions, and to protect its
+unarmed parts in its burrow. It is further worthy of notice, that many
+of the Pimelodi are furnished with spines, not, like those
+ichthyodorulites which occur so frequently in the older Secondary and
+Pal&aelig;ozoic divisions, unfinished in appearance at their lower extremity,
+as if,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span> like the spines of the ancient Acanthodi, or those of the recent
+dog-fish (<i>Spinax acanthias</i>), they had been simply embedded in the
+flesh, but bearing, like the wings of the Pterichthys, an articulated
+aspect. Those of the <i>Pimelodus rita</i> and <i>Pimelodus gagata</i> are of
+singular beauty; and when the creatures have no further use for them,
+and the mud of the Ganges has been consolidated into shale or baked into
+flagstone around them, they will make very exquisite fossils. A correct
+drawing of the plates and spines of some of the members of the Pimelodi
+family, with a portion of the internal skeletons, arranged in their
+proper places, but divested of those more destructible parts to which
+they are attached, would serve admirably to show what strange forms fish
+not greatly removed from the ordinary type may assume in the fossil
+state, and might throw some light on the extraordinary appearance
+assumed, as ichthyolites, by the old family of the Cephalaspians.</p>
+
+<p>The geological department of the Elgin Museum is not yet very complete.
+The private collections of the locality, by forestalling, greatly
+restrict the supply from the rich deposits in the neighborhood, and have
+an unquestioned right to do so. The Museum contains, however, several
+interesting organisms. I saw, among the others, a specimen of
+Diplopterus, that showed the form and position of the fins of this
+rather rare ichthyolite much better than any of the Morayshire specimens
+portrayed by Agassiz in his great work; and beside it, one of the two
+specimens of <i>Pterichthys oblongus</i> which he figures, and on which he
+establishes the species. The other individual,&mdash;a Cromarty
+specimen,&mdash;graces my little collection. The gloomy day passed pleasantly
+in deciphering, with so accomplished a geologist as Mr. Duff, these
+curious hieroglyphics of the old world, that tell such wonderful
+stories, and in comparing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span> <i>viva voce</i>, as we were wont to do long years
+before in lengthy epistles, our respective notions regarding the true
+key for laying open their more occult meanings. And, after sharing with
+him 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 twenty
+miles, to Campbelton. The rain pattered drearily through the night on my
+bed-room window; and as frequent exposure to the wet had begun to tell
+on a constitution not altogether so strong as it had once been, I
+awakened oftener than was quite comfortable, to hear it. The morning,
+however, was dry, though gray and sunless; and, taking an early
+breakfast at the inn, I traversed the flat gravelly points of Ardersier
+and Fortrose, that, projecting like moles far into the Frith, narrow the
+intervening ferry to considerably less than one-third the width which it
+would present were they away. The origin of these long detrital
+promontories, which form, when viewed from the heights on either side,
+so peculiar a feature in the landscape, and which, were they directly
+opposite, instead of being set down a mile awry, would shut up the
+opening altogether, has not yet been satisfactorily accounted for. One
+special theory assigns their formation to the agency of the descending
+tide, striking in zig-gig style, in consequence of some peculiarity of
+the coast-line or of the bottom, from side to side of the Frith, and
+depositing a long trail of sand and gravel, at nearly right angles with
+the beach, first on the one shore and then on the other. But why the
+tide, which runs in various zig-zag crossings in the course of the
+Frith, should have the effect here, and nowhere else, of raising two
+vast mounds, each a full mile and a quarter in length, with an average
+breadth of from two to five furlongs, is by no means very apparent.
+Certainly the present tides of the Frith could not have formed them, nor
+could they have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span> been elevated to their present average height of ten or
+twelve 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 the
+latter upheavals of the land or recessions of the sea, when the great
+Caledonian Valley existed as a narrow ocean sound, swept by powerful
+currents. Upon another and entirely different hypothesis, these flat
+promontories have been regarded as the remains, levelled by the waves,
+and gapped direct in the middle by the tide, of a vast transverse morain
+of the great valley, belonging to the same glacial age as the lateral
+morains some ten or fifteen miles higher up, that extend from the
+immediate 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 am
+not in the least disposed to criticise.</p>
+
+<p>They were constructed, says tradition, through the agency of the
+arch-wizard Michael Scott. Michael had called up the hosts of Faery to
+erect the cathedral of Elgin and the chanonry kirk of Fortrose, which
+they completed from foundation to ridge, each in a single
+night,&mdash;committing, in their hurry, merely the slight mistake of
+locating the building intended for Elgin in Fortrose, and that intended
+for Fortrose in Elgin; but, their work over and done, and when the
+magician had no further use for them, they absolutely refused to be
+<i>laid</i>; and, like a <i>posse</i> of Irish laborers thrown out of a job, came
+thronging round him, clamoring for more employment. Fearing lest he
+should be torn in pieces,&mdash;a catastrophe which has not unfrequently
+happened in such circumstances in the olden time, and of which those
+recent philanthropists who engage themselves in finding work for the
+unemployed may have perhaps<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span> entertained some little dread in our own
+days,&mdash;he got rid of them for the time by setting them off in a body to
+run a mound across the Moray Frith from Fortrose to Ardersier. Toiling
+hard in the evening of a moonlight night, they had proceeded greatly
+more than two-thirds towards the completion of the undertaking, when a
+luckless Highlander passing by bade God-speed the work, and, by thus
+breaking the charm, arrested at once and forever the construction of the
+mound, and saved the navigation of Inverness.</p>
+
+<p>I stood for a few seconds at the Burn of Rosemarkie undecided whether I
+should take the Scarfs-Craig road,&mdash;a break-neck path which runs
+eastwards along the cliffs, and which, though the rougher, is the more
+direct Cromarty line of the two,&mdash;or the considerably better though
+longer line of the White Bog, which strikes upwards along the burn in a
+westerly direction, and joins the Cromarty and Inverness highway on the
+moor of the Maolbuie. I had got into a part of the country where every
+little locality, and every more striking feature in the landscape, has
+its associated tradition; and the pause of a few moments at the two
+roads recalled to my memory the details of a ghost-story, long regarded
+in the district in which it was best known as one of the most authentic
+of its class, but which seems by no means inexplicable on natural
+principles.<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a></p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span></p>
+<h3>CHAPTER V.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="hang">Rosemarkie and its Scaurs&mdash;Kaes' Craig&mdash;A Jackdaw
+Settlement&mdash;"Rosemarkie Kaes" and "Cromarty Cooties"&mdash;"The Danes,"
+a Group of Excavations&mdash;At Home in Cromarty&mdash;The Boulder-clay of
+Cromarty "begins to tell its story"&mdash;One of its marked Scenic
+Peculiarities&mdash;Hints to Landscape Painters&mdash;"Samuel's Well"&mdash;A
+Chain of Bogs geologically accounted for&mdash;Another Scenic
+Peculiarity&mdash;"<i>Ha-has</i> of Nature's digging"&mdash;The Author's earliest
+Field of Hard Labor&mdash;Picturesque Cliff of Boulder-clay&mdash;Scratchings
+on the Sandstone&mdash;Invariable Characteristic of true
+Boulder-clay&mdash;Scratchings on Pebbles in the line of the longer
+axis&mdash;Illustration from the Boulder-clay of Banff. </p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Rosemarkie</span>, with its long narrow valley and its red abrupt <i>scaurs</i>,<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a>
+is chiefly interesting to the geologist for its vast beds of the
+boulder-clay. I am acquainted with no other locality in the kingdom
+where this deposit is hollowed into ravines so profound, or presents
+precipices so imposing and lofty. The clay lies thickly over most part
+of the Black Isle and the peninsula of Easter Ross,&mdash;both soft sandstone
+districts,&mdash;bearing everywhere an obvious relation, as a deposit, to
+both the form and the conditions of exposure of the existing land,&mdash;just
+as the accumulated snow of a long-lying snow-storm, exposed to the
+drifting wind, bears relation to the heights and hollows of the tracts
+which it covers. On the higher eminences the clay forms a comparatively
+thin 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 in
+the sides of hollow valleys,&mdash;exactly such places as we might expect to
+see the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span> snow occupying most deeply after a night of drift,&mdash;we find it
+accumulated 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 my
+course this morning lay, and is known far and wide,&mdash;for it forms a
+marked feature in the landscape, and harbors in its recesses a countless
+multitude of jackdaws,&mdash;as the "Kaes' Craig of Rosemarkie." It presents
+the appearance of a hill that had been cut sheer through the middle from
+top to base, and exhibits in its abrupt front a broad red perpendicular
+section of at least a hundred feet in height, barred transversely by
+thin layers of sand, and scored vertically by the slow action of the
+rains. Originally it must have stretched its vanished limb across the
+opening like some huge snow-wreath accumulated athwart a frozen rivulet;
+but the incessant sweep of the stream that runs through the valley has
+long since amputated and carried it away; and so only half the hill now
+remains. The Kaes' Craig resembles in form a lofty chalk cliff, square,
+massy, abrupt, with no sloping fillet of vegetation bound across its
+brow, but precipitous direct from the hill-top. The little ancient
+village of Rosemarkie stretches away from its base on the opposite side
+of the stream; and on its summit and along its sides, groups of
+chattering jackdaws, each one of them as reflective and philosophic as
+the individual immortalized by Cowper, look down high over the chimneys
+into the streets. The clay presents here, more than in almost any other
+locality with which I am acquainted, the character of a stratified
+deposit; and the numerous bands of sand by which the cliff is
+horizontally streaked from top to bottom we find hollowed, as we
+approach, into a multitude of circular openings, like shot-holes in an
+old tower, which form breeding-places for the daw and the sand-martin.
+The biped inhabitants of the cliff are greatly more numerous than the
+biped inhabitants<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span> of the quiet little hamlet below; and on Fortrose
+fair-days, when, in virtue of an old feud, the Rosemarkie boys were wont
+to engage in formidable bickers with the boys of Cromarty, I remember,
+as one of the invading belligerents, that, in bandying names with them
+in the fray, we delighted to bestow upon them, as their hereditary
+sobriquet, given, of course, in allusion to their feathered neighbors,
+the designation of the "<i>Rosemarkie kaes</i>." Cromarty, however, is
+two-thirds surrounded by the waters of a frith abounding in sea-fowl;
+and the little fellows of Rosemarkie, indignant at being classed with
+their <i>kaes</i>, used to designate us with hearty emphasis, in turn, as the
+"<i>Cromarty cooties</i>," <i>i.e.</i>, coots.</p>
+
+<p>A little higher up the valley, on the western side, there occurs in the
+clay what may be termed a <i>group</i> of excavations, composing a piece of
+scenery ruinously broken and dreary, and that bears a specific character
+of its own which scarce any other deposit could have exhibited. The
+excavations are of considerable depth and extent,&mdash;hollows out of which
+the materials of pyramids might have been taken. The precipitous sides
+are fretted by jutting ridges and receding inflections, that present in
+abundance their diversified alternations of light and shadow. The steep
+descents form cycloid curves, that flatten at their bases, and over
+which the ferruginous stratum of mould atop projects like a cornice.
+Between neighboring excavations there stand up dividing walls, tall and
+thin as those of our city buildings, and in some cases broken at their
+upper edges into rows of sharp pinnacles or inaccessible turf-coped
+turrets; while at the bottom of the hollows, washed by the runnels
+which, in the slow lapse of years, have been the architects of the
+whole, we find cairn-like accumulations of water-rolled stones,&mdash;the
+disengaged pebbles and boulders of the deposit. The boulders and pebbles
+project also from the steep sides, at all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span> heights and of all sizes,
+like the primary masses inclosed in our ancient conglomerates, when
+exhibited in wave-worn precipices,&mdash;forcing upon the mind the conclusion
+that the boulder-clay is itself but an unconsolidated conglomerate of
+the later periods, which occupies nearly the same relative position to
+the existing vegetable mould, with all its recent productions, that the
+great conglomerate of the Old Red Sandstone occupies in relation to the
+lower ichthyolite beds of that system, with their numerous extinct
+organisms. But its buried stones are fretted with hieroglyphic
+inscriptions, in the form of strange scratchings and polishings,
+grooves, ridges, and furrows,&mdash;always associated with the
+boulder-clays,&mdash;which those of the more ancient conglomerates want, and
+which, though difficult to read, seem at length to be yielding up the
+story which they record. Of this, however, more anon. Viewed by
+moonlight, when the pale red of the clay where the beam falls direct is
+relieved by the intense shadows, these excavations of the valley of
+Rosemarkie form scenes of strange and ghostly wildness: the projecting,
+buttress-like angles,&mdash;the broken walls,&mdash;the curved inflections,&mdash;the
+pointed pinnacles,&mdash;the turrets, with their masses of projecting
+coping,&mdash;the utter lack of vegetation, save where the heath and the
+furze rustle far above,&mdash;all combine to form assemblages of dreary
+ruins, amid which, in the solitude of night, one almost expects to see
+spirits walk. These excavations have been designated, from time
+immemorial, by the neighboring town's-people, as "the Danes;" but
+whether the name be, as is most probable, merely a corruption of an
+appropriate enough Saxon word, "the dens," or derived, as a vague
+tradition is said to testify, from the ages of Danish invasion, it is
+not quite the part of the geologist to determine. It may be worth
+mentioning, however, from its bearing on the point, that there are two
+excavations in the boulder-clay<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span> near Cromarty, one of which has been
+long known by the name of "the Morial's Den," while the other, greatly
+smaller in size, rejoices in the double diminutive of "the Little
+Dennie." For an hour or so the Danes proved agreeable though somewhat
+silent companions; and then, climbing the opposite side of the valley, I
+gained the high road, and, walking on to Cromarty, found myself once
+more among "the old familiar faces."</p>
+
+<p>In a few days the storm blew by; and as the prolonged rains had cleared
+out the deep ravines of the district, and given to the boulder-clay in
+which they are scooped a freshness in its section analogous to fresh
+fracture in rocks of harder consistency, I availed myself of the
+facilities afforded me in consequence, for exploring it once more. It
+has long constituted one of the hardest of the many riddles with which
+our Scottish deposits exercise the patience and ingenuity of the
+geologist. I remember a time when, after passing a day under its barren
+<i>scaurs</i>, or hid in its precipitous ravines, I used to feel in the
+evening as if I had been travelling under the cloud of night, and had
+seen nothing. It was a morose and taciturn companion, and had no
+speculation in it. I might stand in front of its curved precipices, red,
+yellow or gray, according to the prevailing average color of the rocks
+on which it rests, and mark their water-rolled boulders, of all
+qualities and sizes, sticking out in bold relief from the surface, like
+the rock-like protuberances that roughen the rustic basements of the
+architect, from the line of the wall; but I had no <i>open sesame</i> to form
+vistas through them into the recesses of the past. I saw merely the
+stiff pastry matrix of which they are composed, and the inclosed
+pebbles. But the boulder-clay has of late become more sociable; and,
+though with much hesitancy and irresolution, like old Mr. Spectator on
+the first formal opening of his mouth,&mdash;a consequence, doubtless, in
+both cases of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span> previous habits of silence long indulged,&mdash;it begins to
+tell its story. And a most curious story it is.</p>
+
+<p>The morning was clear, but just a little chill; and a soft covering of
+snow, 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 watery
+blue, was still distinctly visible at the distance of full twenty miles.
+The sun, low in the sky,&mdash;for the hour was early,&mdash;cast its slant rays
+athwart the prospect, giving to each nearer bank and hillock, and to the
+more distant protuberances on the mountain-sides, those well-defined
+accompaniments of shadow that serve by throwing the minor features of a
+landscape upon the eye in bold relief, to impart to it an air of higher
+finish and more careful filling up than it ever bears under a more
+vertical light. I took the road which, leading westward from the town
+towards Invergordon Ferry, skirts the Frith on the one hand, and runs
+immediately under the noble escarpment of green bank formed by the old
+coast line on the other. Fully two-thirds of the entire height of the
+rampart here, which rises in all about a hundred feet over the
+sea-level, is formed of the boulder-clay; and I am acquainted with no
+locality in which the deposit presents more strongly, for at least the
+first half mile, one of its marked scenic peculiarities. It is furrowed
+vertically on the slope, as if by enormous flutings in the more antique
+Doric style; and the ridges by which these are separated,&mdash;each from a
+hundred to a hundred and fifty feet in length, and from five-and-twenty
+to thirty feet in average height,&mdash;resemble those burial mounds with
+which the sexton frets the churchyard turf; with this difference,
+however, that they seem the burial mounds of giants, tall and bulky as
+those that of old warred against the gods. They are striking enough to
+have caught the eye of the children of the place, and are known among
+them as the Giants'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span> Graves. I could fain have taken their portrait in a
+calotype this morning, as they lay against the green bank,&mdash;their feet
+to the shore, and their heads on the top of the escarpment,&mdash;like
+patients on a reclining bed, and strongly marked, each by its broad bar
+of yellow light and of dark shadow, like the ebon and ivory buttresses
+of the poet. This little vignette, I would have said to the landscape
+painter, represents the boulder-clay, after its precipitous banks&mdash;worn
+down, by the frosts and rains of centuries, into parallel runnels, that
+gradually widened into these hollow grooves&mdash;had sunk into the angle of
+inclination at which the disintegrating agents ceased to operate, and
+the green sward covered all up. You must be studying these peculiarities
+of aspect more than ever you studied them before. There is a time coming
+when the connoisseur will as rigidly demand the specific character of
+the various geologic rocks and deposits in your hills, <i>scaurs</i>, and
+precipices, as he now demands specific character in your shrubs and
+trees.</p>
+
+<p>It is worthy the notice of the young geologist, who has just set himself
+to study the various effects produced on the surface of a country by the
+deposits 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 bear
+in the driest weather their mantling of green. They are fed with a
+perennial supply of water, by a range of deep-seated springs, that come
+bursting out from under the boulder-clay; and one of their number, which
+bears I know not why, the name of Samuel's Well, and yields its equable
+flow at an equable temperature, summer and winter, into a stone trough
+by the way-side, is not a little prized by the town's-people, and the
+seamen that cast anchor in the opposite roadstead, for the lightness and
+purity of its water. What is specially worthy of notice in the case is,
+the very definite<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span> beginning and ending of the chain of bogs. All is dry
+at 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 of
+exactly the same extent,&mdash;beginning where the bogs begin, and ending
+where they end,&mdash;we may trace an ancient stratum of pure sand,&mdash;of
+considerable thickness, intercalated between the base of the clay and
+the superior surface of the Old Red Sandstone. It is through this
+permeable sand that the profoundly seated springs find their way to the
+surface,&mdash;for the clay is impermeable; and where it comes in contact
+with the rock on either side of the arenaceous stratum, the bogs cease.
+The chain of green bogs is a consequence of the stratum of permeable
+sand. I have in vain sought this ancient layer of sand,&mdash;decidedly of
+the same era with the argillaceous bed which overlies it,&mdash;for aught
+organic. A single shell, so unequivocally of the period of the
+boulder-clay as to occur at the base of the deposit, would be worth, I
+have said, whole drawerfuls of fossils furnished by the better-known
+deposits. But I have since seen in abundance shells of the boulder-clay.</p>
+
+<p>There is another scenic peculiarity of the clay, which the neighborhood
+of Cromarty finely illustrates, and of which my walk this morning
+furnished numerous striking instances. The Giants' Graves&mdash;to borrow
+from the children of the place&mdash;occur on the steep slopes of the old
+coast 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 of
+alternating ridges and furrows, which, when they had flattened into the
+proper angle, the green sward covered up from further waste. But the
+deep dells and narrow ravines in which many ranges of these graves occur
+are themselves peculiarities of the deposit.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span> Wherever the boulder-clay
+lies thick and continuous, as in the parish of Cromarty, on a sloping
+table-land, every minute streamlet cuts its way to the solid rock at the
+bottom, and runs through a deep dell, either softened into beauty by the
+disintegrating process, or with all its precipices standing up raw and
+abrupt over the stream. Four of these ravines, known as the "Old Chapel
+Burn," the "Ladies' Walk," the "Morial's Den," and the "Red Burn," each
+of them cutting the escarpment of the ancient coast line from top to
+base, and winding far into the interior, occur in little more than a
+mile's space; and they lie still more thickly farther to the west. These
+dells of the boulder clay, in their lower windings,&mdash;for they become
+shallower and tamer as they ascend, till they terminate in the uplands
+in mere <i>drains</i>, such as a ditcher might excavate at the rate of a
+shilling or two per yard,&mdash;are eminently picturesque. On those gentler
+slopes 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. There
+is a bosky luxuriance in their more sheltered hollows, well known to the
+schoolboy what time the fern begins to pale its fronds, for their store
+of hips, sloes, and brambles; and red over the foliage we may see, ever
+and anon as we wend upwards, the abrupt frontage of some precipitous
+<i>scaur</i>, suited to remind the geologist, from its square form and flat
+breadth of surface, of the cliffs of the chalk. When viewed from the
+sea, at the distance of a few miles, these ravines seem to divide the
+sloping tracts in which they occur into large irregular fields, laid out
+considerably more in accordance with the principles of the landscape
+gardener than the stiffly squared rectilinear fields of the
+agriculturist. They are <i>ha-has</i> of Nature's digging; and their bottom
+and sides in this part of the country we still find occupied in a few
+cases&mdash;though in many more they have been ravaged<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span> by the wasteful
+axe&mdash;by noble forest-<i>hedges</i>, tall enough to overtop, in at least their
+middle reaches, the tracts of table-land which they divide.</p>
+
+<p>I passed, a little farther on, the quarry of Old Red Sandstone, with a
+huge bank of boulder-clay resting over it, in which I first experienced
+the evils of hard labor, and first set myself to lessen their weight by
+becoming an observer of geological phenomena. It had been deserted
+apparently for many years; and the debris of the clay partially covered
+up, in a sloping talus, the frontage of rock beneath. Old Red Sandstone
+and boulder-clay, a broad bar of each!&mdash;such was the compound problem
+which the excavation propounded to me when I first plied the tool in
+it,&mdash;a problem equally dark at the time in both its parts. I have since
+got on a very little way with the Old Red portion of the task; but alas
+for the boulder-clay portion of it! A bar of impenetrable shadow has
+rested long and obstinately over the newer deposit; and I scarce know
+whether the light which is at length beginning to play on its pebbly
+front be that of the sun or of a delusive meteor. But courage, patient
+hearts! the boulder-clay will one day yield up <i>its</i> secret too. Still
+further on by a few hundred yards, I could have again found use for the
+calotype, in transferring to paper the likeness of a protuberant
+picturesque cliff, which, like the Giants' Graves, could have belonged,
+of all our Scotch deposits, to only the boulder-clay. It stands out, on
+the steep acclivity of a furze-covered bank, abrupt as a precipice of
+solid rock, and yet seamed by the rain into numerous divergent channels,
+with pyramidal peaks between; and, combining the perpendicularity of a
+true cliff with the water-scooped furrows of a yielding clay, it
+presents a peculiarity of aspect which strikes, by its grotesqueness,
+eyes little accustomed to detect the picturesque in landscape. I
+remember<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span> standing to gaze upon it when a mere child; and the fisher
+children of the neighboring town still tell that "<i>it has been
+prophesied</i>" it will one day fall, "and kill a man and a horse on the
+road below,"&mdash;a legend which shows it must have attracted <i>their</i> notice
+too.</p>
+
+<p>I selected as the special scene of exploration this morning, a deep
+ravine of the boulder-clay, which had been recently deepened still more
+by 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 or
+fifteen feet deep, where there had been formerly merely a shallow drain,
+had then tumbled into the ravine, and bared it to the rock. The
+sandstones of the district, soft and not very durable, show the
+scratched and polished surfaces but indifferently well, and, when
+exposed to the weather, soon lose them; but in the bottom of the runnel
+by which the ravine is swept I found them exceedingly well marked,&mdash;the
+polish as decided as the soft red stone could receive, and the lines of
+scratching running in their general bearing due east and west, at nearly
+right angles with the course of the stream. Wherever the rock had been
+laid bare during the last few months, <i>there</i> were the markings;
+wherever it had been laid bare for a few twelvemonths, they were gone. I
+next marked a circumstance which has now for several years been
+attracting my attention, and which I have found an invariable
+characteristic of the true boulder-clay. Not only do the rocks on which
+the deposit rests bear the scratched and polished surfaces, but in every
+instance the fragments of stone which it incloses bear the scratchings
+also, if from their character capable of receiving and retaining such
+markings, 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-grained
+sandstone, or of a yielding trap, they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span> are scratched and
+polished,&mdash;invariably on one, most commonly on both their sides; and it
+is a noticeable circumstance, that the lines of the scratchings occur,
+in at least nine cases out of every ten, in the lines of their longer
+axes. When decidedly oblong or spindle-shaped, the scratchings run
+lengthwise, preserving in most cases, on the under and upper sides, when
+both surfaces are scratched, a parallelism singularly exact; whereas,
+when of a broader form, so that the length and breadth nearly
+approximate,&mdash;though the lines generally find out the longer axis, and
+run in that direction,&mdash;they are less exact in their parallelism, and
+are occasionally traversed by cross furrows. Of such certain occurrence
+is this longitudinal lining on the softer and finer-grained pebbles of
+the boulder-clay, that I have come to regard it as that special
+characteristic of the deposit on which I can most surely rely for
+purposes of identification. I am never quite certain of the boulder-clay
+when I do not detect it, nor doubtful of the true character of the
+deposit when I do. When examining, for instance, the accumulation of
+broken Liasic materials in the neighborhood of Banff, I made it my first
+care to ascertain whether the bank inclosed fragments of stone or shale
+bearing the longitudinal markings; and felt satisfied, on finding that
+it did, that I had discovered the period of its re-formation.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span></p>
+<h3>CHAPTER VI.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="hang">Organisms of the Boulder-clay not unequivocal&mdash;First Impressions of
+the Boulder-clay&mdash;Difficulty of accounting for its barrenness of
+Remains&mdash;Sir Charles Lyell's reasoning&mdash;A Fact to the
+contrary&mdash;Human Skull dug from a Clay-bank&mdash;The Author's Change of
+Belief respecting Organic Remains of the Boulder-clay&mdash;Shells from
+the Clay at Wick&mdash;Questions respecting them settled&mdash;Conclusions
+confirmed by Mr. Dick's Discoveries at Thurso&mdash;Sir John Sinclair's
+Discovery of Boulder-clay Shells in 1802&mdash;Comminution of the Shells
+illustrated&mdash;<i>Cyprina islandica</i>&mdash;Its Preservation in larger
+Proportions than those of other Shells accounted for&mdash;Boulder-clays
+of Scotland reformed during the existing Geological Epoch&mdash;Scotland
+in the Period of the Boulder-clay "merely three detached groups of
+Islands"&mdash;Evidence of the Subsidence of the Land in
+Scotland&mdash;Confirmed by Rev. Mr. Cumming's conclusion&mdash;High-lying
+Granite Boulders&mdash;Marks of a succeeding elevatory
+Period&mdash;Scandinavia now rising&mdash;Autobiography of a Boulder
+desirable&mdash;A Story of the Supernatural. </p></div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">For</span> the greater part of a quarter of a century I had been finding
+organisms in abundance in the boulder-clay, but never anything organic
+that unequivocally belonged to its own period. I had ascertained that it
+contains in Ross and Cromarty nodules of the Old Red Sandstone, which
+bear inside, like so many stone coffins, their well laid out skeletons
+of the dead; but then the markings on their surface told me that when
+the boulder-clay was in the course of deposition, they had been exactly
+the same kind of nodules that they are now. In Moray, it incloses, I had
+found, organisms of the Lias; but <i>they</i> also testify that they present
+an appearance in no degree more ancient at the present time than they
+did when first enveloped by the clay. In East and West Lothian too, and
+in the neighborhood of Edinburgh, I had detected in it occasional
+organisms<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span> of the Mountain Limestone and the Coal Measures; but these,
+not less surely than its Liasic fossils in Moray, and its Old Red
+ichthyolites in Cromarty and Ross, belonged to an incalculably more
+ancient state of things than itself; and&mdash;like those shrivelled
+manuscripts of Pompeii or Herculaneum, which, whatever else they may
+record, cannot be expected to tell aught of the catastrophe that buried
+them up&mdash;they throw no light whatever on the deposit in which they
+occur. I at length came to regard the boulder-clay&mdash;for it is difficult
+to keep the mind in a purely blank state on any subject on which one
+thinks a good deal&mdash;as representative of a chaotic period of death and
+darkness, introductory, mayhap, to the existing scene of things.</p>
+
+<p>After, however, I had begun to mark the invariable connection of the
+clay, as a deposit, with the dressed surfaces on which it rests, and the
+longitudinal linings of the pebbles and boulders which it incloses, and
+to associate it, in consequence, with an ice-charged sea and the Great
+Gulf Stream, it seemed to me extremely difficult to assign a reason why
+it should be thus barren of remains. Sir Charles Lyell states, in his
+"Elements," that the "stranding of ice-islands in the bays of Iceland
+since 1835 has driven away the fish for several successive seasons, and
+thereby caused a famine among the inhabitants of the country;" and he
+argues from the fact, "that a sea habitually infested with melting ice,
+which would chill and freshen the water, might render the same
+uninhabitable by marine mollusca." But then, on the other hand, it is
+equally a fact that half a million of seals have been killed in a single
+season on the meadow-ice a little to the north of Newfoundland, and that
+many millions of cod, besides other fish, are captured yearly on the
+shores of that island, though grooved and furrowed by ice-floes almost
+every spring. Of the seal family it is specially<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span> recorded by
+naturalists, that many of the species "are from choice inhabitants of
+the margins of the frozen seas towards both poles; and, of course, in
+localities in which many such animals live, some must occasionally die."
+And though the grinding process would certainly have disjointed, and
+might probably have worn down and partially mutilated, the bones of the
+amphibious carnivora of the boulder period, it seems not in the least
+probable, judging from the fragments of loose-grained sandstone and soft
+shale which it has spared, that it would have wholly destroyed them. So
+it happened, however, that from North Berwick to the Ord Hill of
+Caithness, I had never found in the boulder-clay the slightest trace of
+an organism that could be held to belong to itself; and as it seems
+natural to build on negative evidence, if very extensive, considerably
+more than mere negative evidence, whatever the circumstances, will
+carry, I became somewhat skeptical regarding the very existence of
+boulder-fossils,&mdash;a skepticism which the worse than doubtful character
+of several supposed discoveries in the deposit served considerably to
+strengthen. The clay forms, when cut by a water-course, or assailed on
+the coast by some unusually high tide, a perpendicular precipice, which
+in the course of years slopes into a talus; and as it exhibits in most
+instances no marks of stratification, the clay of the talus&mdash;a mere
+re-formation of fragments detached by the frosts and rains from the
+exposed frontage&mdash;can rarely be distinguished from that of the original
+deposit. Now, in these consolidated slopes it is not unusual to find
+remains, animal and vegetable, of no very remote antiquity. I have seen
+a human skull dug out of the reclining base of a clay-bank once a
+precipice, fully six feet from under the surface. It might have been
+deemed the skull of some long-lived contemporary of Enoch,&mdash;one of the
+accursed race, mayhap,</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span>"Who sinned and died before the avenging flood."<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>But, alas! the laborer dug a little further, and struck his pickaxe
+against an old rybat that lay deeper still. There could be no mistaking
+the character of the champfered edge, that still bore the marks of the
+tool, nor that of the square perforation for the lock-bolt; and a rising
+theory, that would have referred the boulder-clay to a period in which
+the polar ice, set loose by the waters of the Noachian deluge, came
+floating southwards over the foundered land, straightway stumbled
+against it, and fell. Both rybat and skull had come from an ancient
+burying-ground, that occupies a projecting angle of the table-land
+above. I must now state, however, that my skepticism has thoroughly
+given way; and that, slowly yielding to the force of positive evidence,
+I have become as assured a believer in the <i>comminuted recent shells</i> of
+the boulder-clay as in the belemnites of the O&ouml;lite and Lias, or the
+ganoid ichthyolites of the Old Red Sandstone.</p>
+
+<p>I had marked, when at Wick, on several occasions, a thick boulder-clay
+deposit occupying the southern side of the harbor, and forming an
+elevated platform, on which the higher parts of Pulteneytown are built;
+but I had noted little else regarding it than that it bears the average
+dark-gray color of the flagstones of the district, and that some of the
+granitic boulders which protrude from its top and sides are of vast
+size. On my last visit, however, rather more than two years ago, when
+sauntering along its base, after a very wet morning, awaiting the Orkney
+steamer, I was surprised to find, where a small slip had taken place
+during the rain, that it was mottled over with minute fragments of
+shells. These I examined, and found, so far as, in their extremely
+broken condition, I dared determine the point, that they belonged in
+such large proportion to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span> one species,&mdash;the <i>Cyprina islandica</i> of Dr.
+Fleming,&mdash;that I could detect among them only a single fragment of any
+other shell,&mdash;the pillar, apparently, of a large specimen of <i>Purpura
+lapillus</i>. Both shells belong to that class of old existences,&mdash;long
+descended, without the pride of ancient descent,&mdash;which link on the
+extinct to the recent scenes of being. <i>Cyprina islandica</i> and <i>Purpura
+lapillus</i> not only exist as living molluscs in the British seas, but
+they occur also as crag-shells, side by side with the dead races that
+have no place in the present fauna. At this time, however, I could but
+think of them simply in their character as recent molluscs; and as it
+seemed quite startling enough to find them in a deposit which I had once
+deemed representative of a period of death, and still continued to
+regard as obstinately unfossiliferous, I next set myself to determine
+whether it really <i>was</i> the boulder-clay in which they occurred. Almost
+the first pebble which I disengaged from the mass, however, settled the
+point, by furnishing the evidence on which for several years past I have
+been accustomed to settle it;&mdash;it bore in the line of its longer axis,
+on a polished surface, the freshly-marked grooves and scratchings of the
+iceberg era. Still, however, I had my doubts, not regarding the deposit,
+but the shells. Might they not belong merely to the talus of this bank
+of boulder-clay?&mdash;a re-formation, in all probability, not <i>more</i> ancient
+than the elevation of the most recent of the old coast lines,&mdash;perhaps
+greatly less so. Meeting with an intelligent citizen of Wick, Mr. John
+Cleghorn, I requested him to keep a vigilant eye on the shells, and to
+ascertain for me, when opportunity offered, whether they occurred deep
+in the deposit, or were restricted to merely the base of its exposed
+front. On my return from Orkney, he kindly brought me a small collection
+of fragments, exclusively, so far as I could judge, of <i>Cyprina
+islandica</i>, picked up in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span> fresh sections of the clay; at the same time
+expressing 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 my
+attention was again called to it by finding, in the publication of Mr.
+Keith Johnston's admirable Geological Map of the British Islands, edited
+by Professor Edward Forbes, that other eyes than mine had detected
+shells in the boulder-clay of Caithness. "Cliffs of Pleistocene," says
+the Professor, in one of his notes attached to the map, "occur at Wick,
+containing boreal shells, especially <i>Astarte borealis</i>."</p>
+
+<p>I had seen the boulder-clay characteristically developed in the
+neighborhood of Thurso; but, during a rather hurried visit, had lacked
+time to examine it. The omission mattered the less, however, as my
+friend Mr. Robert Dick is resident in the locality; and there are few
+men who examine more carefully or more perseveringly than he, or who can
+enjoy with higher relish the sweets of scientific research. I wrote him
+regarding Professor Forbes's decision on the boulder-clay of Wick and
+its shells; urging him to ascertain whether the boulder-clay of Thurso
+had not its shells also. And almost by return of post I received from
+him, in reply, a little packet of comminuted shells, dug out of a
+deposit of the boulder-clay, laid open by the river Thorsa, a full mile
+from the sea, and from eighty to a hundred feet over its level. He had
+detected minute fragments of shell in the clay about a twelvemonth
+before; but a skepticism somewhat similar to my own, added to the dread
+of being deceived by mere surface shells, recently derived from the
+shore in the character <i>of</i> shell-sand, or of the edible species carried
+inland for food, and then transferred from the ash-pit to the fields,
+had not only prevented him from following up the discovery,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span> but even
+from thinking of it as such. But he eagerly followed it up now, by
+visiting every bank of the boulder-clay in his locality within twenty
+miles of Thurso, and found them all charged, from top to bottom, with
+comminuted shells, however great their distance from the sea, or their
+elevation over it. The fragments lie thick along the course of the
+Thorsa, where the encroaching stream is scooping out the clay for the
+first time since its deposition, and laying bare the scratched and
+furrowed pebbles. They occur, too, in the depths of solitary ravines far
+amid the moors, and underlie heath, and moss, and vegetable mould, on
+the exposed hill-sides. The farm-house of Dalemore, twelve miles from
+Thurso 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 of
+marine shells. Though so barren elsewhere on the east coast of Scotland,
+the clay is everywhere in Caithness a shell-bearing deposit; and no
+sooner had Mr. Dick determined the fact for himself, at the expense of
+many a fatiguing journey, and many an hour's hard digging, than he found
+that it had been ascertained long before, though, from the very
+inadequate style in which it had been recorded, science had in scarce
+any degree benefited by the discovery. In 1802 the late Sir John
+Sinclair, distinguished for his enlightened zeal in developing the
+agricultural resources of the country, and for originating its
+statistics, employed a mineralogical surveyor to explore the underground
+treasures of the district; and the surveyor's journal he had printed
+under the title of "Minutes and Observations drawn up in the course of a
+Mineralogical Survey of the County of Caithness, ann. 1802, by John
+Busby, Edinburgh." Now, in this journal there are frequent references
+made to the occurrence of marine<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span> shells in the blue clay. Mr. Dick has
+copied for me the two following entries,&mdash;for the work itself I have
+never seen:&mdash;"1802, Sept. 7th.&mdash;Surveyed down the river [Thorsa] to
+Geize; found blue clay-marl, <i>intermixed with marine shells</i> in great
+abundance." "Sept. 12th.&mdash;Set off this morning for Dalemore. Bored for
+shell-marl in the 'grass-park;' found it in one of the quagmires, but to
+no great extent. Bored for shell-marl in the 'house-park.' Surveyed by
+the side of the river, and found blue clay-marl in great plenty,
+<i>intermixed with marine shells, such as those found at Geize</i>. This
+place is supposed to be about twenty miles from the sea; and is one
+instance, among many in Caithness, of <i>the ocean's covering the inland
+country at some former period of time</i>."</p>
+
+<p>The state of keeping in which the boulder-shells of Caithness occur is
+exactly what, on the iceberg theory, might be premised. The ponderous
+ice-rafts that went grating over the deep-sea bottom, grinding down its
+rocks into clay, and deeply furrowing its pebbles, must have borne
+heavily on its comparatively fragile shells. If rocks and pebbles did
+not escape, the shells must have fared but hardly. And very hardly they
+have fared: the rather unpleasant casualty of being crushed to death
+must have been a greatly more common one in those days than in even the
+present age of railways and machinery. The reader, by passing half a
+bushel of the common shells of our shores through a barley-mill, as a
+preliminary operation in the process, and by next subjecting the broken
+fragments thus obtained to the attritive influence of the waves on some
+storm-beaten beach for a twelvemonth or two, as a finishing operation,
+may produce, when he pleases, exactly such a water-worn shelly debris as
+mottles the blue boulder-clays of Caithness. The proportion borne by the
+fragments of one species of shell to that of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span> all the others is very
+extraordinary. The <i>Cyprina islandica</i> is still by no means a rare
+mollusc on our Scottish shores, and may, on an exposed coast, after a
+storm, be picked up by dozens, attached to the roots of the deep-sea
+tangle. It is greatly less abundant, however, than such shells as
+<i>Purpura lapillus</i>, <i>Mytilus edule</i>, <i>Cardium edule</i>, <i>Littorina
+littorea</i>, and several others; whereas in the boulder-clay it is, in the
+proportion of at least ten to one, more abundant than all the others put
+together. The great strength of the shell, however, may have in part led
+to this result; as I find that its stronger and massier portions,&mdash;those
+of the umbo and hinge-joint,&mdash;are exceedingly numerous in proportion to
+its slimmer and weaker fragments. "The <i>Cyprina islandica</i>," says Dr.
+Fleming, in his "British Animals," "is the largest British bivalve
+shell, measuring sometimes thirteen inches in circumference, and,
+exclusively of the animal, weighing upwards of nine ounces." Now, in a
+collection of fragments of Cyprina sent me by Mr. Dick, disinterred from
+the boulder-clay in various localities in the neighborhood of Thurso,
+and weighing in all about four ounces, I have detected the broken
+remains of no fewer than <i>sixteen</i> hinge joints. And on the same
+principle through which the stronger fragments of Cyprina were preserved
+in so much larger proportion than the weaker ones, may Cyprina itself
+have been preserved in much larger proportion than its more fragile
+neighbors. Occasionally, however,&mdash;escaped, as if by
+accident,&mdash;characteristic fragments are found of shells by no means very
+strong,&mdash;such as <i>Mytilus</i>, <i>Tellina</i>, and <i>Astarte</i>. Among the
+univalves I can distinguish <i>Dentalium entale</i>, <i>Purpura lapillus</i>,
+<i>Turritella terebra</i>, and <i>Littorina littorea</i>, all existing shells, but
+all common also to at least the later deposits of the Crag. And among
+the bivalves Mr. Dick enumerates,&mdash;besides<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span> the prevailing <i>Cyprina
+islandica</i>,&mdash;<i>Venus casina</i>, <i>Cardium edule</i>, <i>Cardium echinatum</i>,
+<i>Mytilus edule</i>, <i>Astarte danmoniensis</i> (<i>sulcata</i>), and <i>Astarte
+compressa</i>, with a <i>Mactra</i>, <i>Artemis</i>, and <i>Tellina</i>.<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a> All the
+determined species here, with the exception of <i>Mytilus edule</i>, have,
+with many others, been found by the Rev. Mr. Cumming in the
+boulder-clays of the Isle of Man; and all of them are living shells at
+the present day on our Scottish coasts. It seems scarce possible to fix
+the age of a deposit so broken in its organisms, on the principle that
+would first seek to determine its per centage of extinct shells as the
+data on which to found. One has to search sedulously and long ere a
+fragment turns up sufficiently entire for the purpose of specific
+identification, even when it belongs to a well-known living shell; and
+did the clay contain some six or eight per cent. of the extinct in a
+similarly broken condition (and there is no evidence that it contains a
+single per cent. of extinct shells), I know not how, in the
+circumstances, the fact could ever be determined. A lifetime might be
+devoted to the task of fixing their real proportion, and yet be devoted
+to it in vain. All that at present can be said is, that, judging from
+what appears, the boulder-clays of Caithness, and with them the
+boulder-clays of Scotland generally, and of the Isle of Man,&mdash;for they
+are all palpably connected with the same iceberg phenomena, and occur
+along the same zone in reference to the sea-level,&mdash;were formed during
+the <i>existing</i> geological epoch.</p>
+
+<p>These details may appear tediously minute; but let the reader mark how
+very much they involve. The occurrence of recent shells largely diffused
+throughout the boulder-clays of Caithness, at all heights and distances
+from the sea<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span> at which the clay itself occurs, and not only connected
+with the iceberg phenomena by the closest juxtaposition, but also
+testifying distinctly to its agency by the extremely comminuted state in
+which we find them, tell us, not only according to old John Busby, "that
+the ocean covered the inland country at some former period of time," but
+that it covered it to a great height at a time geologically recent, when
+our seas were inhabited by exactly the same mollusca as inhabit them
+now, and so far as yet appears, by none others. I have not yet detected
+the boulder-clay at more than from six to eight hundred feet over the
+level of the sea; but the travelled boulders I have often found at more
+than a thousand feet over it; and Dr. John Fleming, the correctness of
+whose observations few men acquainted with the character of his
+researches or of his mind will be disposed to challenge, has informed me
+that he has detected the dressed and polished surfaces at least four
+hundred feet higher. There occurs a greenstone boulder, of from twelve
+to fourteen tons weight, says Mr. M'Laren, in his "Geology of Fife and
+the Lothians," on the south side of Black Hill (one of the Pentland
+range), at about fourteen hundred feet over the sea. Now fourteen or
+fifteen hundred feet, taken as the extreme height of the dressings,
+though they are said to occur greatly higher, would serve to submerge in
+the iceberg ocean almost the whole agricultural region of Scotland. The
+common hazel (<i>Corylus avellana</i>) ceases to grow in the latitude of the
+Grampians, at from one thousand two hundred to one thousand five hundred
+feet over the sea level; the common bracken (<i>Pteris aquilina</i>) at about
+the same height; and corn is never successfully cultivated at a greater
+altitude. Where the hazel and bracken cease to grow, it is in vain to
+attempt growing corn.<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a> In the period<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span> of the boulder-clay, then, when
+the existing shells of our coasts lived in those inland sounds and
+friths of the country that now exist as broad plains or fertile valleys,
+the sub-a&euml;rial superficies of Scotland was restricted to what are now
+its barren and mossy regions, and formed, instead of one continuous
+land, merely three detached groups of islands,&mdash;the small Cheviot and
+Hartfell group,&mdash;the greatly larger Grampian and Ben Nevis group,&mdash;and a
+group intermediate in size, extending from Mealfourvonny, on the
+northern shores of Loch Ness, to the Maiden Paps of Caithness.</p>
+
+<p>The more ancient boulder-clays of Scotland seem to have been formed when
+the land was undergoing a slow process of subsidence, or, as I should
+perhaps rather say, when a very considerable area of the earth's
+surface, including the sea-bottom, as well as the eminences that rose
+over it, was the subject of a gradual depression; for little or no
+alteration appears to have taken place at the time in the <i>relative</i>
+levels of the higher and lower portions of the sinking area: the
+features of the land in the northern part of the kingdom, from the
+southern flanks of the Grampians to the Pentland Frith, seemed to have
+been fixed in nearly the existing forms many ages before, at the close,
+apparently, of the O&ouml;litic period, and at a still earlier age in the
+Lammermuir district, to the south. And so the sea around our shores must
+have deepened in the ratio in which the hills sank. The evidence of this
+process of subsidence is of a character tolerably satisfactory. The
+dressed surfaces occur in Scotland, most certainly, as I have already
+stated on the authority of Dr. Fleming, at the height of fourteen
+hundred feet over the present sea-level; it has been even said, at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span>
+fully twice that height, on the lofty flanks of Schehallion,&mdash;a
+statement, however, which I have had hitherto no opportunity of
+verifying. They may be found, too, equally well marked, under the
+existing high-water line; and it is obviously impossible that the
+dressing process could have been going on at the higher and lower levels
+at the same time. When the icebergs were grating along the more elevated
+rocks, the low-lying ones must have been buried under from three to
+seven hundred fathoms of water,&mdash;a depth from three to seven times
+greater, be it remembered, than that at which the most ponderous iceberg
+could 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 land
+was subjected, zone after zone, to the sweep of the armed ice from its
+higher levels <i>downwards</i>, or during a period of subsidence, in which it
+was subjected to the ice, zone after zone, from its lower levels
+<i>upwards</i>. And that it was the lower, not the higher levels, that were
+first dressed, appears evident from the circumstance, that though on
+these lower levels we find the rocks covered up by continuous beds of
+the boulder-clay, varying generally from twenty to a hundred feet in
+thickness, they are, notwithstanding, as completely dressed under the
+clay as on the heights above. Had it been a rising land that was
+subjected to the attrition of the icebergs, the debris and dressings of
+the higher rocks would have protected the lower from the attrition; and
+so the thick accumulation of boulder-clay which overlies the old coast
+line, for instance, would have rested, not on dressed, but on undressed
+surfaces. The barer rocks of the lower levels might of course exhibit
+their scratchings and polishings, like those of the higher; but wherever
+these scratchings and polishings occurred in the inferior zones, no
+thick protecting stratum<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span> of boulder-clay would be found overlying them;
+and, <i>vice versa</i>, wherever in these zones there occurred thick beds of
+boulder-clay, there would be detected on the rock beneath no scratchings
+and polishings. In order to <i>dress</i> the entire surface of a country from
+the sea-line and under it to the tops of its hills, and at the same time
+to cover up extensive portions of its low-lying rocks with vast deposits
+of clay, it seems a necessary condition of the process that it should be
+carried on piece-meal from the lower level upwards,&mdash;not from the higher
+downwards.</p>
+
+<p>It interested me much to find, that while from one set of appearances I
+had been inferring the gradual subsidence of the land during the period
+of the boulder-clay, the Rev. Mr. Cumming of King William's College had
+arrived, from the consideration of quite a different class of phenomena,
+at a similar conclusion. "It appears to me highly probable," I find him
+remarking, in his lately published "Isle of man," "that at the
+commencement of the boulder period there was a gradual sinking of this
+area [that of the island]. Successively, therefore, the points at
+different degrees of elevation were brought within the influence of the
+sea, and exposed to the rake of the tides, charged with masses of ice
+which had been floated off from the surrounding shores, and bearing on
+their 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 a
+peculiarly-compounded granite, which occurs in the southern part of the
+island, about seven hundred feet over the level of the sea. There rise
+on the western side of the boss two hills, one of which attains to the
+elevation of nearly seven hundred, and the other of nearly eight hundred
+feet over it; and yet both hills to their summits are mottled over with
+granite boulders,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span> furnished by the comparatively low-lying boss. One of
+these travelled masses, fully two tons in weight, lies not sixty feet
+from the summit of the loftier hill, at an altitude of nearly fifteen
+hundred feet over the sea. Now, it seems extremely difficult to conceive
+of 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 of
+the hills. Had the boulder period been a period of elevation, or merely
+a stationary period, during which the land neither rose nor sank, the
+travelled boulders would not now be found resting at higher levels than
+that of the parent rock whence they were derived. We occasionally meet
+on our shores, after violent storms from the sea, stones that have been
+rolled from their place at low ebb to nearly the line of flood; but we
+always find that it was by the waves of the rising, not of the falling
+tide, that their transport was effected. For whatever removals of the
+kind take place during an ebbing sea are invariably in an opposite
+direction;&mdash;they are removals, not from lower to higher levels, but from
+higher to lower.</p>
+
+<p>The upper subsoils of Scotland bear frequent mark of the elevatory
+period which succeeded this period of depression. The boulder-clay has
+its numerous intercalated arenaceous and gravelly beds, which belong
+evidently to its own era; but the numerous surface-beds of stratified
+sand and gravel by which in so many localities it is overlaid belong
+evidently to a later time. When, after possibly a long protracted
+period, the land again began to rise, or the sea to fall, the superior
+portions of the boulder-clay must have been exposed to the action of the
+tides and waves; and the same process of separation of parts must have
+taken place on a large scale, which one occasionally sees taking place
+in the present time on a comparatively small one, in ravines of the same
+clay swept by a streamlet.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span> After every shower, the stream comes down
+red and turbid with the finer and more argillaceous portions of the
+deposit; minute accumulations of sand are swept to the gorge of the
+ravine, or cast down in ripple-marked patches in its deeper pools; beds
+of 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 sort
+of washing process of an analogous character, must have taken place in
+the materials of the more exposed portions of the boulder-clay, during
+the gradual emergence of the land; and hence, apparently, those
+extensive beds of sand and gravel which in so many parts of the kingdom
+exist, in relation to the clay, as a superior or upper subsoil; hence,
+too, occasional beds of a purer clay than that beneath, divested of a
+considerable portion of its arenaceous components, and of almost all its
+pebbles and boulders. This <i>washed</i> clay,&mdash;a re-formation of the boulder
+deposit, cast down, mostly in insulated beds in quiet localities, where
+the absence of currents suffered the purer particles held in suspension
+by the water to settle,&mdash;forms, in Scotland at least, with, of course,
+the exception of the ancient fire-clays of the Coal Measures, the true
+brick and tile clays of the agriculturist and architect.</p>
+
+<p>It is to these superior beds that all the recent shells yet found above
+the existing sea-level in Scotland, from the Dornoch Frith and beyond
+it, to beyond the Frith of Forth, seem to belong. Their period is much
+less remote than that of the shells of the boulder-clay, and they rarely
+occur in the same comminuted condition. They existed, it would appear,
+not during the chill twilight period, when the land was in a state of
+subsidence, but during the after period of cheerful dawn, when hill-top
+after hill-top was emerging from the deep, and the close of each passing
+century witnessed a broader area of dry land in what is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span> now Scotland,
+than the close of the century which had gone before. Scandinavia is
+similarly rising at the present day, and presents with every succeeding
+age a more extended breadth of surface. Many of the boulder-stones seem
+to have been cast down where they now lie, during this latter time. When
+they occur, as in many instances, high on bare hill-tops, from five to
+fifteen hundred feet over the sea-level, with neither gravel nor
+boulder-clay beside them, we of course cannot fix their period. They may
+have been dropped by ice-floes or shore-ice, where we now find them, at
+the commencement of the period of elevation, after the clay had been
+formed; or they may have been deposited by more ponderous icebergs
+during its formation, when the land was yet sinking, though during the
+subsequent rise the clay may have been washed from around them to lower
+levels. The boulders, however, which we find scattered over the plains
+and less elevated hill-sides, with beds of the washed gravel or sand
+interposed between them and the clay, must have been cast down where
+they lie, during the elevatory ages. For, had they been washed out of
+the clay, they would have lain, not <i>over</i> the greatly lighter sands and
+gravels, but <i>under</i> them. Would that they could write their own
+histories! The autobiography of a single boulder, with notes on the
+various floras which had sprung up around it, and the various classes of
+birds, beasts, and insects by which it had been visited, would be worth
+nine-tenths of all the autobiographies ever published, and a moiety of
+the remainder to boot.</p>
+
+<p>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 wooded
+inflection of the bank, formed by the old coast line, in which there
+stood, about two centuries ago, a meal-mill, with the cottage of the
+miller, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span> which was once known as the scene of one of those
+supernaturalities that belong to the times of the witch and the fairy.
+The upper anchoring-place of the bay lies nearly opposite the
+inflection. A shipmaster, who had moored his vessel in this part of the
+roadstead, some time in the latter days of the first Charles, was one
+fine evening sitting alone on deck, awaiting the return of his seamen,
+who had gone ashore, and amusing himself in watching the lights that
+twinkled from the scattered farm-houses, and in listening, in the
+extreme stillness of the calm, to the distant lowing of cattle, or the
+abrupt bark of the herdsman's dog. As the hour wore later, the sounds
+ceased, and the lights disappeared,&mdash;all but one solitary taper, that
+twinkled from the window of the miller's cottage. At length, however, it
+also disappeared, and all was dark around the shores of the bay, as a
+belt of black velvet. Suddenly a hissing noise was heard overhead; the
+shipmaster looked up, and saw what seemed to be one of those meteors
+known as falling stars, slanting athwart the heavens in the direction of
+the cottage, and increasing in size and brilliancy as it neared the
+earth, until the wooded ridge and the shore could be seen as distinctly
+from the ship-deck as by day. A dog howled piteously from one of the
+out-houses,&mdash;an owl whooped from the wood. The meteor descended until it
+almost touched the roof, when a cock crew from within; its progress
+seemed instantly arrested; it stood still, rose about the height of a
+ship's mast, and then began again to descend. The cock crew a second
+time; it rose as before; and, after mounting considerably higher than at
+first, again sank in the line of the cottage, to be again arrested by
+the crowing of the cock. It mounted yet a third time, rising higher
+still; and, in its last descent, had almost touched the roof, when the
+faint clap of wings was heard as if whispered over the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span> water, followed
+by a still louder note of defiance from the cock. The meteor rose with a
+bound, and, continuing to ascend until it seemed lost among the stars,
+did not again appear. Next night, however, at the same hour, the same
+scene was repeated in all its circumstances: the meteor descended, the
+dog howled, the owl whooped, the cock crew. On the following morning the
+shipmaster visited the miller's, and, curious to ascertain how the
+cottage would fare when the cock was away, he purchased the bird; and,
+sailing from the bay before nightfall, did not return until about a
+month after.</p>
+
+<p>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: it
+had vanished. As he approached the anchoring ground, he could discern a
+heap of blackened stones occupying the place where it had stood; and he
+was informed on going ashore, that it had been burnt to the ground, no
+one knew how, on the very night he had quitted the bay. He had it
+re-built and furnished, says the story, deeming himself what one of the
+old schoolmen perhaps term the <i>occasional</i> cause of the disaster. He
+also returned the cock,&mdash;probably a not less important benefit,&mdash;and no
+after accident befel the cottage. About fifteen years ago there was a
+human 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 body
+had been huddled up twofold in a hole; and this discovery led to that of
+the story, which, though at one time often repeated and extensively
+believed, had been suffered to sleep in the memories of a few elderly
+people for nearly sixty years.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span></p>
+<h3>CHAPTER VII.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="hang">Relation of the deep red stone of Cromarty to the Ichthyolite Beds
+of the System&mdash;Ruins of a Fossil-charged Bed&mdash;Journey to Avoch&mdash;Red
+Dye of the Boulder-clay distinct from the substance
+itself&mdash;Variation of Coloring in the Boulder-clay Red Sandstone
+accounted for&mdash;Hard-pan how formed&mdash;A reformed Garden&mdash;An ancient
+Battle-field&mdash;Antiquity of Geologic and Human History
+compared&mdash;Burn of Killein&mdash;Observation made in boyhood
+confirmed&mdash;Fossil-nodules&mdash;Fine Specimen of <i>Coccosteus
+decipiens</i>&mdash;Blank strata of Old Red&mdash;New View respecting the Rocks
+of Black Isle&mdash;A Trip up Moray and Dingwall Friths&mdash;Altered color
+of the Boulder-clay&mdash;Up the Auldgrande River&mdash;Scenery of the great
+Conglomerate&mdash;Graphic Description&mdash;Laidlaw's Boulder&mdash;<i>Vaccinium
+myrtillus</i>&mdash;Profusion of Travelled Boulders&mdash;The Boulder <i>Clach
+Malloch</i>&mdash;Its zones of Animal and Vegetable Life. </p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> ravine excavated by the mill-dam showed me what I had never so well
+seen before,&mdash;the exact relation borne by the deep red stone of the
+Cromarty quarries to the ichthyolite beds of the system. It occupies the
+same place, and belongs to the same period, as those superior beds of
+the Lower Old Red Sandstone which are so largely developed in the cliffs
+of Dunnet Head in Caithness, and of Tarbet Ness in Ross-shire, and which
+were at one time regarded as forming, north of the Grampians, the
+analogue of the New Red Sandstone. I paced it across the strata this
+morning, in the line of the ravine, and found its thickness over the
+upper fish-beds, though I was far from reaching its superior layers,
+which are buried here in the sea, to be rather more than five hundred
+feet. The fossiliferous beds occur a few hundred yards below the
+dwelling-house of Rose Farm. They are not quite uncovered in the ravine;
+but we find their places indicated by heaps of gray<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span> argillaceous shale,
+mingled with their characteristic ichthyolitic nodules, in one of which
+I found a small specimen of Cheiracanthus. The projecting edge of some
+fossil-charged bed had been struck, mayhap, by an iceberg, and dashed
+into ruins, just as the subsiding land had brought the spot within reach
+of the attritive ice; and the broken heap thus detached had been shortly
+afterwards covered up, without mixture of any other deposit, by the red
+boulder-clay. On the previous day I had detected the fish-beds in
+another new locality,&mdash;one of the ravines of the lawn of Cromarty
+House,&mdash;where the gray shale, concealed by a covering of soil and sward
+for 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 this
+ravine of the boulder-clay, was to ascertain whether the beds did not
+also occur in a ravine of the parish of Avoch, some eight or nine miles
+away, which, when lying a-bed one night in Edinburgh, I remembered
+having crossed when a boy, at a point which lies considerably out of the
+ordinary route of the traveller. I had remarked on this occasion, as the
+resuscitated recollection intimated, that the precipices of the Avoch
+ravine bore, at the unfrequented point, the peculiar aspect which I
+learned many years after to associate with the ichthyolitic member of
+the system; and I was now quite as curious to test the truth of a sort
+of vignette landscape, transferred to the mind at an immature period of
+life, and preserved in it for full thirty years, as desirous to extend
+my knowledge of the fossiliferous beds of a system to the elucidation of
+which I had peculiarly devoted myself.</p>
+
+<p>As the traveller reaches the flat moory uplands of the parish, where the
+water stagnates amid heath and moss over a thin layer of peaty soil, he
+finds the underlying<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span> boulder-clay, as shown in the chance sections,
+spotted and streaked with patches of a grayish-white. There is the same
+mixture of arenaceous and aluminous particles in the white as in the red
+portions of the mass; for, as we see so frequently exemplified in the
+spots and streaks of the Red Sandstone formations, whether Old or New,
+the coloring matter has been discharged without any accompanying change
+of composition in the substance which it pervaded;&mdash;evidence enough that
+the red dye must be something distinct from the substance itself, just
+as the dye of a handkerchief is a thing distinct from the silk or cotton
+yarn of which the handkerchief has been woven. The stagnant water above,
+acidulated by its various vegetable solutions, seems to have been in
+some way connected with these appearances. In every case in which a
+crack through the clay gives access to the oozing moisture, we see the
+sides bleached, for several feet downwards, to nearly the color of
+pipe-clay; we find the surface, too, when it has been divested of the
+vegetable soil, presenting for yards together the appearance of sheets
+of half-bleached linen: the red ground of the clay has been acted upon
+by the percolating fluid, as the red ground of a Bandanna handkerchief
+is acted upon through the openings in the perforated lead, by the
+discharging chloride of lime. The peculiar chemistry through which these
+changes are effected might be found, carefully studied, to throw much
+light on similar phenomena in the older formations. There are quarries
+in the New Red Sandstone in which almost every mass of stone presents a
+different shade of color from that of its neighboring mass, and quarries
+in the Old Red the strata of which we find streaked and spotted like
+pieces of calico. And their variegated aspect seems to have been
+communicated, in every instance, not during deposition, nor after they
+had been hardened into stone but when, like the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span> boulder-clay, they
+existed in an intermediate state. Be it remarked, too, that the red clay
+here,&mdash;evidently derived from the abrasion of the red rocks beneath,&mdash;is
+in dye and composition almost identical with the substance on which, as
+an unconsolidated sandstone, the bleaching influences, whatever their
+character, had operated in the Pal&aelig;ozoic period, so many long ages
+before;&mdash;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 of
+notice, that the bleached lines of the clay exhibit, viewed
+horizontally, when the overlying vegetable mould has been removed, and
+the whitened surface in immediate contact with it paired off, a
+polygonal arrangement, like that assumed by the cracks in the bottom of
+clayey pools dried up in summer by the heat of the sun. Can these
+possibly indicate the ancient rents and fissures of the boulder-clay,
+formed, immediately after the upheaval of the land, in the first process
+of drying, and remaining afterwards open enough to receive what the
+uncracked portions of the surface excluded,&mdash;the acidulated bleaching
+fluid?</p>
+
+<p>The kind of ferruginous pavement of the boulder-clay known to the
+agriculturist as <i>pan</i>, which may be found extending in some cases its
+iron cover over whole districts,&mdash;sealing them down to barrenness, as
+the iron and brass sealed down the stump of Nebuchadnezzar's tree,&mdash;is,
+like the white strips and blotches of the deposit, worthy the careful
+notice of the geologist. It serves to throw some light on the origin of
+those continuous bands of clayey or arenaceous ironstone, which in the
+older formations in which vegetable matter abounds, whether O&ouml;litic or
+Carboniferous, are of such common occurrence. The <i>pan</i> is a stony
+stratum, scarcely less indurated in some localities than sandstone of
+the average hardness, that rests like a pavement on the surface of the
+boulder-clay, and that generally<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span> bears atop a thin layer of sterile
+soil, darkened by a russet covering of stunted heath. The binding cement
+of the <i>pan</i> is, as I have said, ferruginous, and seems to have been
+derived from the vegetable covering above. Of all plants, the heaths are
+found to contain most iron. Nor is it difficult to conceive how, in
+comparatively flat tracts of heathy moor, where the surface water sinks
+to the stiff subsoil, and on which one generation of plants after
+another has been growing and decaying for many centuries, the minute
+metallic particles, disengaged in the process of decomposition, and
+carried down by the rains to the impermeable clay, should, by
+accumulating there, bind the layer on which they rest, as is the nature
+of ferruginous oxide, into a continuous stony crust. Wherever this <i>pan</i>
+occurs, we find the superincumbent soil doomed to barrenness,&mdash;arid and
+sun-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 the
+school-house so inveterately sterile as to be scarce worth cultivation;
+a thin stratum of mould rested on a hard impermeable pavement of <i>pan</i>,
+through which not a single root could penetrate to the tenacious but not
+unkindly subsoil below. He set himself to work in his leisure hours, and
+bit by bit laid bare and broke up the pavement. The upper mould, long
+divorced from the clay on which it had once rested, was again united to
+it; the piece of ground began gradually to alter its character for the
+better; and when I last passed the way, I found it, though in a state of
+sad neglect, covered by a richer vegetation than it had ever borne under
+the more careful management of my friend. This ferruginous pavement of
+the boulder-clay may be deemed of interest to the geologist, as a
+curious instance of deposition in a dense medium,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span> and as illustrative
+of the changes which may be effected on previously existing strata,
+through the agency of an overlying vegetation.</p>
+
+<p>I passed, on my way, through the ancient battle-field to which I have
+incidentally referred in the story of the Miller of Resolis.<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a> Modern
+improvement has not yet marred it by the plough; and so it still bears
+on its brown surface many a swelling tumulus and flat oblong mound,
+and&mdash;where the high road of the district passes along its eastern
+edge&mdash;the huge gray cairn, raised, says tradition, over the body of an
+ancient Pictish king. But the contest of which it was the scene belongs
+to a profoundly dark period, ere the gray dawn of Scottish history
+began. As shown by the remains of ancient art occasionally dug up on the
+moor, it was a conflict of the times of the stone battle-axe, the flint
+arrow-head, and the unglazed sepulchral urn, unindebted for aught of its
+symmetry to the turning-lathe,&mdash;times when there were heroes in
+abundance, but no scribes. And the cairn, about a hundred feet in length
+and breadth, by about twenty in height, with its long hoary hair of
+overgrown lichen waving in the breeze, and the trailing club-moss
+shooting upwards from its base along its sides, bears in its every
+lineament full mark of its great age. It is a mound striding across the
+stream of centuries, to connect the past with the present. And yet,
+after all, what a mere matter of yesterday its extreme antiquity is! My
+explorations this morning bore reference to but the later eras of the
+geologist; the portion of the geologic volume which I was attempting to
+decipher and translate formed the few terminal paragraphs of its
+concluding chapter. And yet the <i>finis</i> had been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span> added to them for
+thousands of years ere this latter antiquity began. The boulder-clay had
+been formed and deposited; the land, in rising over the waves, had had
+many a huge pebble washed out of its last formed red stratum, or dropped
+upon it by ice-floes from above; and these pebbles lay mottling the
+surface of this barren moor for mile after mile, bleaching pale to the
+rains and the sun, as the meagre and mossy soil received, in the lapse
+of centuries, its slow accessions of organic matter, and darkened around
+them. And then, for a few brief hours, the heath, no longer solitary,
+became a wild scene of savage warfare,&mdash;of waving arms and threatening
+faces,&mdash;and of human lives violently spilled, gushing forth in blood;
+and, when all was over, the old weathered boulders were heaped up above
+the slain, and there began a new antiquity in relation to the pile in
+its gathered state, that bore reference to man's short lifetime, and to
+the recent introduction of the species. The child of a few summers
+speaks of the events of last year as long gone by; while his father
+advanced into middle life, regards them as still fresh and recent.</p>
+
+<p>I reached the Burn of Killein,&mdash;the scene of my purposed
+explorations,&mdash;where it bisects the Inverness road; and struck down the
+rocky ravine, in the line of the descending strata and the falling
+streamlet, towards the point at which I had crossed it so many years
+before. First I passed along a thick bed of yellow stone,&mdash;next over a
+bed of stratified clay. "The little boy," I said, "took correct note of
+what he saw, though without special aim at the time, and as much under
+the guidance of a mere observative instinct as Dame Quickly, when she
+took 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 of
+her interview with old Sir John<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span> when he promised to marry her. These
+are unequivocally the ichthyolitic beds, whether they contain
+ichthyolites or no." The first nodule I laid open presented inside
+merely a pale oblong patch in the centre, which I examined in vain with
+the lens, though convinced of its organic origin, for a single scale.
+Proceeding farther down the stream, I picked a nodule out of a second
+and lower bed, which contained more evidently its organism,&mdash;a
+finely-reticulated fragment, that at first sight reminded me of some
+delicate festinella of the Silurian system. It proved, however, to be
+part of the tail of a Cheiracanthus, exhibiting&mdash;what is rarely
+shown&mdash;the interior surfaces of those minute rectangular scales which in
+this genus lie over the caudal fin, ranged in right lines. A second
+nodule presented me with the spines of <i>Diplacanthus striatus</i>; and
+still farther down the stream,&mdash;for the beds are numerous here, and
+occupy in vertical extent very considerable space in the system,&mdash;I
+detected a stratum of bulky nodules charged with fragments of
+Coccosteus, belonging chiefly to two species,&mdash;<i>Coccosteus decipiens</i>
+and <i>Coccosteus cuspidatus</i>. All the specimens bore conclusive evidence
+regarding the geologic place and character of the beds in which they
+occur; and in one of the number, a specimen of <i>Coccosteus decipiens</i>,
+sufficiently fine to be transferred to my knapsack, and which now
+occupies its corner in my little collection, the head exhibits all its
+plates in their proper order, and the large dorsal plate, though
+dissociated from the nail-like attachment of the nape, presents its
+characteristic breadth entire. It was the plates of this species, first
+found in the flagstones of Caithness, which were taken for those of a
+fresh-water tortoise; and hence apparently its specific name,
+<i>decipiens</i>;&mdash;it is the <i>deceiving</i> Coccosteus. I disinterred, in the
+course of my explorations, as many nodules as lay within reach,&mdash;now and
+then longing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</a></span> for a pickaxe, and a companion robust and persevering
+enough to employ it with effect; and after seeing all that was to be
+seen in the bed of the stream and the precipices, I retraced my steps up
+the dell to the highway. And then, striking off across the moor to the
+north,&mdash;ascending in the system as I climbed the eminence, which forms
+here the central ridge of the old Maolbuie Common,&mdash;I spent some little
+time in a quarry of pale red sandstone, known, from the moory height on
+which it has been opened, as the quarry of the Maolbuie. But here, as
+elsewhere, the folds of that upper division of the Lower Old Red in
+which it has been excavated contain nothing organic. Why this should be
+so universally the case,&mdash;for in Caithness, Orkney, Cromarty, and Ross,
+wherever, in short, this member of the system is unequivocally
+developed, it is invariably barren of remains,&mdash;cannot, I suspect, be
+very satisfactorily explained. Fossils occur both over and under it, in
+rocks that seem as little favorable to their preservation; but during
+that intervening period which its blank strata represent, at least the
+<i>species</i> of all the ichthyolites of the system seem to have changed,
+and, so far as is yet known, the <i>genus</i> Coccosteus died out entirely.</p>
+
+<p>The Black Isle has been elaborately described in the last Statistical
+Account of the Parish of Avoch as comprising at least the analogues of
+three vast geologic systems. The Great Conglomerate, and the thick bed
+of coarse sandstone of corresponding character that lies over it,
+compose all which is not primary rock of that south-eastern ridge of the
+district which forms the shores of the Moray Frith; and <i>they</i> are
+represented in the Account as Old Red Sandstone proper. Then, next in
+order,&mdash;forming the base of a parallel ridge,&mdash;come those sandstone and
+argillaceous bands to which the ichthyolite beds belong; and these<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</a></span>
+though at the time the work appeared their existence in the locality
+could be but guessed at, are described as representatives of the Coal
+Measures. Last of all there occur those superior sandstones of the Lower
+Old Red formation in which the quarry of the Maolbuie has been opened,
+and which are largely developed in the central or <i>backbone</i> ridge of
+the district. "And these," says the writer, "we have little hesitation
+in assigning to the <i>New</i> Red, or variegated Sandstone formation." I
+remember that some thirteen years ago,&mdash;in part misled by authority, and
+in part really afraid to represent beds of such an enormous aggregate
+thickness as all belonging to one inconsiderable formation,&mdash;for such
+was the character of the Old Red Sandstone at the time,&mdash;I ventured,
+though hesitatingly, and with less of detail, on a somewhat similar
+statement regarding the sandstone deposits of the parish of Cromarty.
+But true it is, notwithstanding, that the stratified rocks of the Black
+Isle are composed generally, not of the analogues of three systems, but
+of merely a fractional portion of a single system,&mdash;a fact previously
+established in other parts of the district, and which my discovery of
+this day in the Burn of Killein served yet farther to confirm in
+relation to that middle portion of the tract in which the parish of
+Avoch 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 yet
+larger sum of epochs and of ages.</p>
+
+<p>The sun had got low in the western sky, and I had at least some eight or
+nine miles of rough road still before me; but the day had been a happy
+and 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;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[Pg 365]</a></span> and it was dark night
+long ere I reached Cromarty. Next morning I quitted the town for the
+upper reaches of the Frith, to examine yet further the superficial
+deposits and travelled boulders of the district.</p>
+
+<p>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 passing
+direct through the village, I took the western road which winds along
+the shore towards Strathpeffer, skirting on the right the ancient
+province of the Munroes. The day was clear and genial; and the
+wide-spreading woods of this part of the country, a little touched by
+their autumnal tints of brown and yellow, gave a warmth of hue to the
+landscape, which at an earlier season it wanted. A few slim streaks of
+semi-transparent mist, that barred the distant hill-peaks, and a few
+towering piles of intensely white cloud, that shot across the deep blue
+of the heavens, gave warning that the earlier part of the day was to be
+in all probability the better part of it, and that the harvest of
+observation which it was ultimately to yield might be found to depend on
+the prompt use made of the passing hour. What first attracts the
+attention of the geologist, in journeying westwards, is the altered
+color of the boulder-clay, as exhibited in ditches by the way-side, or
+along the shore. It no longer presents that characteristic red
+tint,&mdash;borrowed from the red sandstone beneath,&mdash;so prevalent over the
+Black 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, or
+over the flagstones of Caithness. The altered color here is evidently a
+consequence of the large development, in Ferindonald and Strathpeffer,
+of the ichthyolitic members of the Old Red, existing chiefly as fetid
+bituminous breccias and dark-colored sandstones:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</a></span> the boulder-clay of
+the locality forms the dressings, not of red, but of blackish-gray
+rocks; and, as almost everywhere else in Scotland, its trail lies to the
+east of the strata, from which it was detached in the character of an
+impalpable mud by the age-protracted grindings of the denuding agent. It
+abounds in masses of bituminous breccia, some of which, of great size,
+seem to have been drifted direct from the valley of Strathpeffer, and
+are identical in structure and composition with the rock in which the
+mineral springs of the Strath have their rise, and to which they owe
+their peculiar qualities.</p>
+
+<p>After walking on for about eight miles, through noble woods and a lovely
+country, I struck from off the high road at the pretty little village of
+Evanton, and pursued the course of the river Auldgrande, first through
+intermingled fields and patches of copsewood, and then through a thick
+fir wood, to where the bed of the stream contracts from a
+boulder-strewed bottom of ample breadth, to a gloomy fissure, so deep
+and dark, that in many places the water cannot be seen, and so narrow,
+that the trees which shoot out from the opposite sides interlace their
+branches atop. Large banks of the gray boulder-clay, laid open by the
+river, and charged with fragments of dingy sandstone and dark-colored
+breccia, testify, along the lower reaches of the stream, to the near
+neighborhood of the ichthyolitic member of the Old Red; but where the
+banks contract, we find only its lowest member, the Great Conglomerate.
+This last is by far the most picturesque member of the system,&mdash;abrupt
+and bold of outline in its hills, and mural in its precipices. And
+nowhere does it exhibit a wilder or more characteristic beauty than at
+the tall narrow portal of the Auldgrande, where the river,&mdash;after
+wailing for miles in a pent-up channel, narrow as one of the lanes of
+old Edinburgh, and hemmed in by walls quite as perpendicular, and
+nearly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</a></span> twice as lofty,&mdash;suddenly expands, first into a deep brown pool,
+and then into a broad tumbling stream, that, as if permanently affected
+in temper by the strict severity of the discipline to which its early
+life had been subjected, frets and chafes in all its after course, till
+it loses itself in the sea. The banks, ere we reach the opening of the
+chasm, have become steep, and wild, and densely wooded; and there stand
+out on either hand, giant crags, that plant their iron feet in the
+stream; here girdled with belts of rank succulent shrubs, that love the
+damp shade and the frequent drizzle of the spray; and there hollow and
+bare, with their round pebbles sticking out from the partially
+decomposed surface, like the piled-up skulls in the great underground
+cemetery of the Parisians. Massy trees, with their green fantastic roots
+rising high over the scanty soil, and forming many a labyrinthine recess
+for the frog, the toad, and the newt, stretch forth their gnarled arms
+athwart the stream. In front of the opening, with but a black deep pool
+between, there lies a midway bank of huge stones. Of these, not a few of
+the more angular masses still bear, though sorely worn by the torrent,
+the mark of the blasting iron, and were evidently tumbled into the chasm
+from the fields above. But in the chasm there was no rest for them, and
+so the arrowy rush of the water in the confined channel swept them down
+till they dropped where they now lie, just where the widening bottom
+first served to dissipate the force of the current. And over the sullen
+pool in front we may see the stern pillars of the portal rising from
+eighty to a hundred feet in height, and scarce twelve feet apart, like
+the massive obelisks of some Egyptian temple; while, in gloomy vista
+within, projection starts out beyond projection, like column beyond
+column in some narrow avenue of approach to Luxor or Carnac. The
+precipices are green, with some moss or byssus, that like the miner,
+chooses a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</a></span> subterranean habitat,&mdash;for here the rays of the sun never
+fall; the dead, mossy water beneath, from which the cliffs rise so
+abruptly, bears the hue of molten pitch; the trees, fast anchored in the
+rock, shoot out their branches across the opening, to form a thick
+tangled roof, at the height of a hundred and fifty feet overhead; while
+from the recesses within, where the eye fails to penetrate, there issues
+a combination of the strangest and wildest sounds ever yet produced by
+water: there is the deafening rush of the torrent, blent as if with the
+clang of hammers, the roar of vast bellows, and the confused gabble of a
+thousand voices. The sun, hastening to its setting, shone red, yet
+mellow, through the foliage of the wooded banks on the west, where, high
+above, they first curve from the sloping level of the fields, to bend
+over the stream; or fell more direct on the jutting cliffs and bosky
+dingles opposite, burnishing them as if with gold and fire; but all was
+coldly-hued at the bottom, where the torrent foamed gray and chill under
+the brown shadow of the banks; and where the narrow portal opened an
+untrodden way into the mysterious recesses beyond, the shadow deepened
+almost into blackness. The scene lacked but a ghost to render it
+perfect. An apparition walking from within like the genius in one of
+Goldsmith's essays "along the surface of the water," would have
+completed it at once.</p>
+
+<p>Laying hold of an overhanging branch, I warped myself upwards from the
+bed of the stream along the face of a precipice, and, reaching its
+sloping top, forced my way to the wood above, over a steep bank covered
+with tangled underwood, and a slim succulent herbage, that sickened for
+want of the sun. The yellow light was streaming through many a shaggy
+vista, as, threading my way along the narrow ravine as near the steep
+edge as the brokenness of the ground permitted, I reached a huge mass
+of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[Pg 369]</a></span> travelled rock, that had been dropped in the old boulder period
+within a yard's length of the brink. It is composed of a characteristic
+granitic gneiss of a pale flesh-color, streaked with black, that, in the
+hand specimen, can scarce be distinguished from a true granite, but
+which, viewed in the mass, presents, in the arrangement of its intensely
+dark mica, evident marks of stratification, and which is remarkable,
+among other things, for furnishing almost all the very large boulders of
+this part of the country. Unlike many of the granitic gneisses, it is a
+fine solid stone, and would cut well. When I had last the pleasure of
+spending a few hours with the late Mr. William Laidlaw, the trusted
+friend of Sir Walter Scott, he intimated to me his intention,&mdash;pointing
+to a boulder of this species of gneiss,&mdash;of having it cut into two
+oblong pedestals, with which he purposed flanking the entrance to the
+mansion-house of the chief of the Rosses,&mdash;the gentleman whose property
+he at that time superintended. It was, he said, both in appearance and
+history, the most remarkable stone on the lands of Balnagown; and so he
+was desirous that it should be exhibited at Balnagown Castle to the best
+advantage. But as he fell shortly after into infirm health, and resigned
+his situation, I know not that he ever carried his purpose into effect.
+The boulder here, beside the chasm, measures about twelve feet in length
+and breadth, by from five to six in height, and contains from eight to
+nine hundred cubic feet of stone. On its upper table-like surface I
+found a few patches of moss and lichen, and a slim reddening tuft of the
+<i>Vaccinium myrtillus</i>, still bearing, late as was the season, its
+half-dozen blaeberries. This pretty little plant occurs in great
+profusion along the steep edges of the Auldgrande, where its delicate
+bushes, springing up amid long heath and ling, and crimsoned by the
+autumnal tinge, gave a peculiar warmth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[Pg 370]</a></span> and richness this evening to
+those bosky spots under the brown trees, or in immediate contact with
+the dark chasm on which the sunlight fell most strongly; and on all the
+more perilous projections, I found the dark berries still shrivelling on
+their stems. Thirty years earlier I would scarce have left them there;
+and the more perilous the crag on which they had grown, the more
+deliciously would they have eaten. But every period of life has its own
+playthings; and I was now chiefly engaged with the deep chasm and the
+huge boulder. Chasm and boulder had come to have greatly more of
+interest to me than the delicate berries, or than even that sovereign
+dispeller of ennui and low spirits, an adventurous scramble among the
+cliffs.</p>
+
+<p>In what state did the chasm exist when the huge boulder,&mdash;detached,
+mayhap, at the close of a severe frost, from some island of the
+archipelago that is now the northern Highlands of Scotland,&mdash;was
+suffered to drop beside it, from some vast ice-floe drifting eastwards
+on the tide? In all probability merely as a fault in the Conglomerate,
+similar to many of those faults which in the Coal Measures of the
+southern districts we find occupied by continuous dikes of trap. But in
+this northern region, where the trap-rocks are unknown, it must have
+been filled up with the boulder-clay, or with some still more ancient
+accumulation of debris. And when the land had risen, and the streams,
+swollen into rivers, flowed along the hollows which they now occupy, the
+loose rubbish would in the lapse of ages gradually wash downwards to the
+sea, as the stones thrown from the fields above were washed downwards in
+a later time; and thus the deep fissure would ultimately be cleared out.
+The boulder-stones lie thickly in this neighborhood, and over the
+eastern half of Ross-shire, and the Black Isle generally; though for
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[Pg 371]</a></span> last century they have been gradually disappearing from the more
+cultivated tracts on which there were fences or farm-steadings to be
+built, or where they obstructed the course of the plough. We found them
+occurring in every conceivable situation,&mdash;high on hill-sides, where the
+shepherd crouches beside them for shelter in a shower,&mdash;deep in the open
+sea, where they entangle the nets of the fisherman,&mdash;on inland moors,
+where in some remote age they were painfully rolled together, to form
+the Druidical circle or Picts'-house,&mdash;or on the margin of the coast,
+where they had been piled over one another at a later time, as
+protecting bulwarks against the encroachments of the waves. They lie
+strewed more sparingly over extended plains, or on exposed heights, than
+in hollows sheltered from the west by high land, where the current, when
+it dashed high on the hill-sides, must have been diverted from its
+easterly course, and revolved in whirling eddies. On the top of the fine
+bluff hill of Fyrish, which I so admired to-day, each time I caught a
+glimpse of its purple front through the woods, and which shows how noble
+a mountain the Old Red Sandstone may produce, the boulders lie but
+sparsely. I especially marked, however, when last on its summit, a
+ponderous traveller of a vividly green hornblende, resting on a bed of
+pale yellow sandstone, fully a thousand feet over the present high-water
+level. But towards the east, in what a seaman would term the <i>bight</i> of
+the hill, the boulders have accumulated in vast numbers. They lie so
+closely piled along the course of the river Alness, about half a mile
+above the village, that it is with difficulty the waters, when in flood,
+can force their passage through. For here, apparently, when the tide
+swept along the hill-side, many an ice-floe, detained in the shelter by
+the revolving eddy, dashed together in rude collision, and shook their
+stony burdens to the bottom.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[Pg 372]</a></span> Immediately to the east of the low
+promontory on which the town of Cromarty is built there is another
+extensive accumulation of boulders, some of them of great size. They
+occupy exactly the place to which I have oftener than once seen the
+drift-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 a
+violent storm from, the east, and the fragments ground against each
+other into powder. And here, I doubt not, of old, when the sea stood
+greatly higher than now, and the ice-floes were immensely larger and
+more numerous than those formed, in the existing circumstances, in the
+upper shallows of the Frith, would the fierce north-east have charged
+home with similar effect, and the broken masses have divested themselves
+of their boulders.</p>
+
+<p>The Highland chieftain of one of our old Gaelic traditions conversed
+with a boulder-stone, and told to it the story which he had sworn never
+to 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 tell
+theirs to me. But, lacking the fine ear of Hans Anderson, the Danish
+poet, who can hear flowers and butterflies talk, and understand the
+language of birds, I have as yet succeeded in extracting from them no
+such articulate reply</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+"As Memnon's image, long renowned of old<br />
+By fabling Nilus, to the quivering touch<br />
+Of Titan's ray, with each repulsive string<br />
+Consenting, sounded through the warbling air."<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>And yet, who can doubt that, were they a little more communicative,
+their stories of movement in the past, with the additional circumstances
+connected with the places which they have occupied ever since they gave<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[Pg 373]</a></span>
+over travelling, would be exceedingly curious ones? Among the boulder
+group to the east of Cromarty, the most ponderous individual stands so
+exactly on the low-water line of our great Lammas tides, that though its
+shoreward edge may be reached dry-shod from four to six times every
+twelvemonth, no one has ever succeeded in walking dry shod round it. I
+have seen a strong breeze from the west, prolonged for a few days,
+prevent its drying, when the Lammas stream was at its point of lowest
+ebb, by from a foot to eighteen inches,&mdash;an indication, apparently, that
+to that height the waters of the Atlantic may be heaped up against our
+shores by the impulsion of the wind. And the recurrence, during at least
+the last century, of certain ebbs each season, which, when no disturbing
+atmospheric phenomena interfere with their operation, are sure to lay it
+dry, demonstrate, that during that period no change, even the most
+minute, has taken place on our coasts, in the relative levels of sea and
+shore. The waves have considerably encroached, during even the last
+half-century, on the shores immediately opposite; but it must have been,
+as the stone shows, simply by the attrition of the waves, and the
+consequent lowering of the beach,&mdash;not through any rise in the ocean, or
+any depression of the land.</p>
+
+<p>The huge boulder here has been known for ages as the <i>Clach Malloch</i>, or
+accursed stone, from the circumstance, says tradition, that a boat was
+once wrecked upon it during a storm, and the boatmen drowned. Though
+little more than seven feet in height, by about twelve in length, and
+some eight or nine in breadth, its situation on the extreme line of ebb
+imparts a peculiar character to the various productions, animal and
+vegetable, which we find adhering to it. They occur in zones, just as on
+lofty hills the botanist finds his agricultural, moorland, and alpine<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[Pg 374]</a></span>
+zones rising in succession as he ascends, the one over the other. At its
+base, where the tide rarely falls, we find two varieties of <i>Lobularia
+digitata</i>, dead man's hand, the orange colored and the pale, with a
+species of sertularia; and the characteristic vegetable is the
+rough-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,&mdash;the <i>Halichondria papillaris</i>,&mdash;remarkable
+chiefly for its sharp siliceous spicula and its strong phosphoric smell;
+and the characteristic vegetable is the smooth-stemmed tangle, or
+queener. In yet another zone we find the common limpet and the vesicular
+kelp-weed; and the small gray balanus and serrated kelp-weed form the
+productions of the top. We may see exactly the same zones occurring in
+broad belts along the shore,&mdash;each zone indicative of a certain
+overlying depth of water; but it seems curious enough to find them all
+existing in succession on one boulder. Of the boulder and its story,
+however, more in my next.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[Pg 375]</a></span></p>
+<h3>CHAPTER VIII.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="hang">Imaginary Autobiography of the <i>Clach Malloch</i> Boulder&mdash;Its
+Creation&mdash;Its long night of unsummed Centuries&mdash;Laid open to light
+on a desert Island&mdash;Surrounded by an Arctic Vegetation&mdash;Undermined
+by the rising Sea&mdash;Locked up and floated off on an Ice-field&mdash;At
+rest on the Sea-bottom&mdash;Another Night of unsummed Years&mdash;The
+Boulder raised again above the waves by the rising of the
+Land&mdash;Beholds an altered Country&mdash;Pine Forests and Mammals&mdash;Another
+Period of Ages passes&mdash;The Boulder again floated off by an
+Iceberg&mdash;Finally at rest on the Shore of Cromarty Bay&mdash;Time and
+Occasion of naming it&mdash;Strange Phenomena accounted for by
+Earthquakes&mdash;How the Boulder of Petty Bay was moved&mdash;The Boulder of
+Auldgrande&mdash;The old Highland Paupers&mdash;The little Parsi Girl&mdash;Her
+Letter to her Papa&mdash;But one Human Nature on Earth&mdash;Journey
+resumed&mdash;Conon Burying Ground&mdash;An aged Couple&mdash;Gossip. </p></div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> natural, and, if I may so speak, topographical, history of the
+<i>Clach Malloch</i>,&mdash;including, of course, its zo&ouml;logy and botany, with
+notes of those atmospheric effects on the tides, and of that stability
+for ages of the existing sea-level, which it indicates,&mdash;would of itself
+form one very interesting chapter: its geological history would furnish
+another. It would probably tell, if it once fairly broke silence and
+became autobiographical, first of a feverish dream of intense molten
+heat and overpowering pressure; and then of a busy time, in which the
+free molecules, as at once the materials and the artisans of the mass,
+began to build, each according to its nature, under the superintendence
+of a curious chemistry,&mdash;here forming sheets of black mica, there rhombs
+of a dark-green hornblende and a flesh-colored feldspar, yonder
+amorphous masses of a translucent quartz. It would add further, that at
+length, when the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[Pg 376]</a></span> slow process was over, and the entire space had been
+occupied to the full by plate, molecule, and crystal, the red fiery
+twilight of the dream deepened into more than midnight gloom, and a
+chill unconscious night descended on the sleeper. The vast Pal&aelig;ozoic
+period passes by,&mdash;the scarce less protracted Secondary ages come to a
+close,&mdash;the Eocene, Miocene, Pliocene epochs are ushered in and
+terminate,&mdash;races begin and end,&mdash;families and orders are born and die;
+but the dead, or those whose deep slumber admits not of dreams, take no
+note of time; and so it would tell how its long night of unsummed
+centuries seemed, like the long night of the grave, compressed into a
+moment.</p>
+
+<p>The marble silence is suddenly broken by the rush of an avalanche, that
+tears away the superincumbent masses, rolling them into the sea; and the
+ponderous block, laid open to the light, finds itself on the bleak shore
+of a desert island of the northern Scottish archipelago, with a wintry
+scene of snow-covered peaks behind, and an ice-mottled ocean before. The
+winter passes, the cold severe spring comes on, and day after day the
+field-ice goes floating by,&mdash;now gray in shadow, now bright in the sun.
+At length vegetation, long repressed, bursts forth, but in no profuse
+luxuriance. A few dwarf birches unfold their leaves amid the rocks; a
+few sub-arctic willows hang out their catkins beside the swampy runnels;
+the golden potentilla opens its bright flowers on slopes where the
+evergreen <i>Empetrum nigrum</i> slowly ripens its glossy crow-berries; and
+from where the sea-spray dashes at full tide along the beach, to where
+the snow gleams at midsummer on the mountain-summits, the thin short
+sward is dotted by the minute cruciform stars of the scurvy-grass, and
+the crimson blossoms of the sea-pink. Not a few of the plants of our
+existing sea-shores and of our loftier hill-tops are still identical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[Pg 377]</a></span> in
+species; but wide zones of rich herbage, with many a fertile field and
+many a stately tree, intervene between the bare marine belts and the
+bleak insulated eminences; and thus the alpine, notwithstanding its
+identity with the littoral flora, has been long divorced from it; but in
+this early time the divorce had not yet taken place, nor for ages
+thereafter; and the same plants that sprang around the sea-margin rose
+also along the middle slopes to the mountain-summits. The landscape is
+treeless and bare, and a hoary lichen whitens the moors, and waves, as
+the years pass by, in pale tufts, from the disinterred stone, now
+covered with weather-stains, green and gray, and standing out in bold
+and yet bolder relief from the steep hill-side as the pulverizing frosts
+and washing rains bear away the lesser masses from around it. The sea is
+slowly rising, and the land, in proportion, narrowing its flatter
+margins, and yielding up its wider valleys to the tide; the low green
+island of one century forms the half-tide skerry, darkened with alg&aelig;, of
+another, and in yet a third exists but as a deep-sea rock. As its summit
+disappears, groups of hills, detached from the land, become islands,
+skerries, deep-sea rocks, in turn. At length the waves at full wash
+within a few yards of the granitic block. And now, yielding to the
+undermining influences, just as a blinding snow-shower is darkening the
+heavens, it comes thundering down the steep into the sea, where it lies
+immediately beneath the high-water line, surrounded by a wide float of
+pulverized ice, broken by the waves. A keen frost sets in; the
+half-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; the
+consolidated ice-field moves, floats, is detached from the shore, creeps
+slowly outwards into the offing, bearing atop the boulder; and,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">[Pg 378]</a></span>
+finally, caught by the easterly current, it drifts away into the open
+ocean. And then, far from its original bed in the rock, amid the
+jerkings of a cockling sea, the mass breaks through the supporting
+float, and settles far beneath, amid the green and silent twilight of
+the bottom, where its mosses and lichens yield their place to stony
+encrustations of deep purple, and to miniature thickets of arboraceous
+zo&ouml;phites.</p>
+
+<p>The many-colored Acaleph&aelig; float by; the many-armed Sepiad&aelig; shoot over;
+while shells that love the profounder depths,&mdash;the black Modiola and
+delicate Anomia,&mdash;anchor along the sides of the mass; and where thickets
+of the deep-sea tangle spread out their long, streamer-like fronds to
+the tide, the strong Cyprina and many-ribbed Astarte shelter by scores
+amid the reticulations of the short woody stems and thick-set roots. A
+sudden darkness comes on, like that which fell upon Sinbad when the
+gigantic roc descended upon him; the sea-surface is fully sixty fathoms
+over head; but even at this great depth an enormous iceberg grates
+heavily against the bottom, crushing into fragments in its course,
+Cyprina, Modiola, Astarte, with many a hapless mollusc besides; and
+furrows into deep grooves the very rocks on which they lie. It passes
+away; and, after many an unsummed year has also passed, there comes
+another change. The period of depression and of the boulder-clay is
+over. The water has shallowed as the sea-line gradually sank, or the
+land was propelled upwards by some elevatory process from below; and
+each time the tide falls, the huge boulder now raises over the waters
+its broad forehead, already hung round with flowing tresses of brown
+sea-weed, and looks at the adjacent coast. The country has strangely
+altered 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">[Pg 379]</a></span> great valleys open to the sea, by the pale
+gleam of local glaciers, and snow-streaked on its loftier hill-tops. But
+vast forests of dark pine sweep along its hill-sides or selvage its
+shores; and the sheltered hollows are enlivened by the lighter green of
+the oak, the ash, and the elm. Human foot has not yet imprinted its
+sward; but its brute inhabitants have become numerous. The cream-colored
+coat of the wild bull,&mdash;a speck of white relieved against a ground of
+dingy green,&mdash;may be seen far amid the pines, and the long howl of the
+wolf heard from the nearer thickets. The gigantic elk raises himself
+from his lair, and tosses his ponderous horns at the sound; while the
+beaver, in some sequestered dell traversed by a streamlet, plunges
+alarmed into his deep coffer-dam, and, rising through the submerged
+opening of his cell, shelters safely within, beyond reach of pursuit.
+The great transverse valleys of the country, from its eastern to its
+western coasts, are still occupied by the sea,&mdash;they exist as broad
+ocean-sounds; and many of the detached hills rise around its shores as
+islands. The northern Sutor forms a bluff high island, for the plains of
+Easter Ross are still submerged; and the Black Isle is in reality what
+in later times it is merely in name,&mdash;a sea-encircled district, holding
+a midway place between where the Sound of the great Caledonian Valley
+and the Sounds of the Valleys of the Conon and Carron open into the
+German Ocean. Though the climate has greatly softened, it is still, as
+the local glaciers testify, ungenial and severe. Winter protracts his
+stay through the later months of spring; and still, as of old, vast
+floats of ice, detached from the glaciers, or formed in the lakes and
+shallower estuaries of the interior, come drifting down the Sounds every
+season, and disappear in the open sea, or lie stranded along the shores.</p>
+
+<p>Ages have again passed: the huge boulder, from the further sinking of
+the waters, lies dry throughout the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[Pg 380]</a></span> neaps, and is covered only at the
+height of each stream-tide; there is a float of ice stranded on the
+beach, which consolidates around it during the neap, and is floated off
+by the stream; and the boulder, borne in its midst, as of old, again
+sets out a voyaging. It has reached the narrow opening of the Sutors,
+swept downwards by the strong ebb current, when a violent storm from the
+north-east sets in; and, constrained by antagonist forces,&mdash;the sweep of
+the tide on the one hand, and the roll of the waves on the other,&mdash;the
+ice-raft deflects into the little bay that lies to the east of the
+promontory now occupied by the town of Cromarty. And there it tosses,
+with a hundred more jostling in rude collision; and at length bursting
+apart, the <i>Clach Malloch</i>, its journeyings forever over, settles on its
+final resting-place. In a period long posterior it saw the ultimate
+elevation of the land. Who shall dare say how much more it witnessed, or
+decide that it did not form the centre of a rich forest vegetation, and
+that the ivy did not cling round it, and the wild rose shed its petals
+over it, when the Dingwall, Moray, and Dornoch Friths existed as
+sub-a&euml;rial valleys, traversed by streams that now enter the sea far
+apart, but then gathered themselves into one vast river, that, after it
+had received the tributary waters of the Shin and the Conon, the Ness
+and the Beauly, the Helmsdale, the Brora, the Findhorn, and the Spey,
+rolled on through the flat secondary formations of the outer Moray
+Frith,&mdash;Lias, and O&ouml;lite, and Greensand, and Chalk,&mdash;to fall into a gulf
+of the Northern Ocean which intervened between the coasts of Scotland
+and Norway, but closed nearly opposite the mouth of the Tyne, leaving a
+broad level plain to connect the coasts of England with those of the
+Continent! Be this as it may, the present sea-coast became at length the
+common boundary of land and sea. And the boulder continued to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[Pg 381]</a></span> exist for
+centuries still later as a nameless stone, on which the tall gray heron
+rested moveless and ghost-like in the evenings, and the seal at mid-day
+basked 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 loud
+sorrow the boulder received its name. Such is the probable history,
+briefly told, because touched at merely a few detached points, of the
+huge <i>Clach Malloch</i>. The incident of the second voyage here is of
+course altogether imaginary, in relation to at least this special
+boulder; but it is to second voyages only that all our positive evidence
+testifies in the history of its class. The boulders of the St. Lawrence,
+so well described by Sir Charles Lyell, voyage by thousands every
+year;<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a> and there are few of my northern readers who have not heard of
+the short trip taken nearly half a century ago by the boulder of Petty
+Bay, in the neighborhood of Culloden.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[Pg 382]</a></span></p><p>A Highland minister of the last century, in describing, for Sir John
+Sinclair's Statistical Account, a large sepulchral cairn in his parish,
+attributed its formation to an <i>earthquake</i>! Earthquakes, in these
+latter times, are introduced, like the heathen gods of old, to bring
+authors out of difficulties. I do not think, however,&mdash;and I have the
+authority of the old critic for at least half the opinion,&mdash;that either
+gods or earthquakes should be resorted to by poets or geologists,
+without special occasion: they ought never to be called in except as a
+last resort, when there is no way of getting on without them. And I am
+afraid there have been few more gratuitous invocations of the earthquake
+than on a certain occasion, some five years ago, when it was employed by
+the inmate of a north-country manse, at once to account for the removal
+of the boulder-stone of Petty Bay, and to annihilate at a blow the
+geology of the Free Church editor of the <i>Witness</i>. I had briefly stated
+in one of my papers, in referring to this curious incident, that the
+boulder of the bay had been "borne nearly three hundred yards outwards
+into the sea by an enclasping mass of ice, in the course of a single
+tide." "Not at all," said the northern clergyman; "the cause assigned is
+wholly insufficient to produce such an effect. All the ice ever formed
+in the bay would be insufficient to remove such a boulder a distance,
+not of three hundred, but even of <i>three</i> yards." The removal of the
+stone "<i>is referrible to an</i> <span class="caps">EARTHQUAKE</span>!" The country, it would seem,
+took a sudden lurch, and the stone tumbled off. It fell athwart the flat
+surface of the bay, as a soup tureen sometimes falls athwart the table
+of 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 so
+tremendous nothing should have fallen<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">[Pg 383]</a></span> off except the stone. In an
+earthquake on an equally great scale, in the present unsettled state of
+society, endowed clergymen would, I am afraid, be in some danger of
+falling out of their charges.</p>
+
+<p>The boulder beside the Auldgrande has not only, like the <i>Clach
+Malloch</i>, a geologic history of its own, but, what some may deem of
+perhaps equal authority, a <i>mythologic</i> history also. The inaccessible
+chasm, impervious to the sun, and ever resounding the wild howl of the
+tortured water, was too remarkable an object to have escaped the notice
+of the old imaginative Celts; and they have married it, as was their
+wont, to a set of stories quite as wild as itself. And the boulder,
+occupying a nearly central position in its course, just where the dell
+is deepest, and narrowest, and blackest, and where the stream bellows
+far underground in its wildest combination of tones, marks out the spot
+where the more extraordinary incidents have happened, and the stranger
+sights have been seen. Immediately beside the stone there is what seems
+to be the beginning of a path leading down to the water; but it stops
+abruptly at a tree,&mdash;the last in the descent,&mdash;and the green and dewy
+rock 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 saw
+a beautiful child smiling and stretching out its little hand to him, as
+it hung half in air by a slender twig. But he well knew that it was no
+child, but an evil spirit, and that if he gave it the assistance which
+it seemed to crave, he would be pulled headlong into the chasm, and
+never heard of more. And the boulder still bears, it is said, on its
+side,&mdash;though I failed this evening to detect the mark,&mdash;the stamp,
+strangely impressed, of the household keys of Balconie.<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">[Pg 384]</a></span></p><p>The sun had now got as low upon the hill, and the ravine had grown as
+dark, as when, so long before, the lady of Balconie took her last walk
+along the sides of the Auldgrande; and I struck up for the little alpine
+bridge of a few undressed logs, which has been here thrown across the
+chasm, at the height of a hundred and thirty feet over the water. As I
+pressed through the thick underwood, I startled a strange-looking
+apparition in one of the open spaces beside the gulf, where, as shown by
+the profusion of plants of <i>vaccinium</i>, the blaeberries had greatly
+abounded in their season. It was that of an extremely old woman,
+cadaverously pale and miserable looking, with dotage glistening in her
+inexpressive, rheum-distilling eyes, and attired in a blue cloak, that
+had been homely when at its best, and was now exceedingly tattered. She
+had been poking with her crutch among the bushes, as if looking for
+berries; but my approach had alarmed her; and she stood muttering in
+Gaelic what seemed, from the tones and repetition, to be a few
+deprecatory sentences. I addressed her in English, and inquired what
+could have brought to a place so wild and lonely, one so feeble and
+helpless. "Poor object!" she muttered in reply,&mdash;"poor object!&mdash;very
+hungry;" but her scanty English could carry her no further. I slipped
+into her hand a small piece of silver, for which she overwhelmed me with
+thanks and blessings; and, bringing her to one of the broader avenues,
+traversed by a road which leads out of the wood, I saw her fairly
+entered upon the path in the right direction, and then, retracing my
+steps crossed the log-bridge. The old woman,&mdash;little, I should suppose
+from her appearance, under ninety,&mdash;was I doubt not, one of our
+ill-provided Highland paupers, that starve under a law which, while it
+has dried up the genial streams of voluntary charity in the country and
+presses hard upon the means of the humbler classes, alleviates little,
+if at all,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">[Pg 385]</a></span> the sufferings of the extreme poor. Amid present suffering
+and privation there had apparently mingled in her dotage some dream of
+early enjoyment,&mdash;a dream of the days when she had plucked berries, a
+little herd-girl, on the banks of the Auldgrande; and the vision seemed
+to have sent her out, far advanced in her second childhood, to poke
+among the bushes with her crutch.</p>
+
+<p>My old friend the minister of Alness,&mdash;uninstalled at the time in his
+new dwelling,&mdash;was residing in a house scarce half a mile from the
+chasm, to which he had removed from the parish manse at the Disruption;
+and, availing myself of an invitation of long standing, I climbed the
+acclivity 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 weeks
+beside the mineral springs of Strathpeffer, in the hope of recruiting a
+constitution greatly weakened by excessive labor, and that the entire
+household at home consisted of but two of the young ladies his
+daughters, and their ward, the little Buchubai Hormazdji.</p>
+
+<p>And who, asks the reader, is this Buchubai Hormazdji? A little Parsi
+girl, in her eighth year, the daughter of a Christian convert from the
+ancient faith of Zoroaster, who now labors in the Free Church Mission at
+Bombay. Buchubai, his only child, was on his conversion, forcibly taken
+from 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 many
+thousand 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 with
+whose sisters I now found her. The little girl, sadly in want of a
+companion this evening, was content, for lack of a better, to accept of
+me as a playfellow; and she showed me all her rich eastern dresses, and
+all her toys, and a very fine emerald, set in the oriental fashion,
+which,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">[Pg 386]</a></span> when she was in full costume, sparkled from her embroidered
+tiara. I found her exceedingly like little girls at home, save that she
+seemed more than ordinarily observant and intelligent,&mdash;a consequence
+mayhap, of that early development, physical and mental, which
+characterizes her race. She submitted to me, too, when I had got very
+much into her confidence, a letter she had written to her papa from
+Strathpeffer, which was to be sent him by the next Indian mail. And as
+it may serve to show that the style of little girls whose fathers were
+fire-worshippers for three thousand years and more differs in no
+perceptible quality from the style of little girls whose fathers in
+considerably less than three thousand were Pagans, Papists, and
+Protestants by turns, besides passing through the various intermediate
+forms of belief, I must, after pledging the reader to strict secrecy,
+submit it to his perusal:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"My dearest Papa,&mdash;I hope you are quite well. I am visiting mamma at
+present at Strathpeffer. She is much better now than when she was
+travelling. 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 pray
+also. There are a great many at water here for sick people to drink out
+of. 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 will
+write to her.&mdash;Dearest papa," etc.</p>
+
+<p>It was a simple thought, which required no reach of mind whatever to
+grasp,&mdash;and yet an hour spent with little Buchubai made it tell upon me
+more powerfully than ever before,&mdash;that there is in reality but one
+human nature on the face of the earth. Had I simply read of Buchubai
+Hormazdji corresponding with her father Hormazdji Pestonji, and sending
+her dear love to her old companion Narsion Skishadre, the names so
+specifically different from those<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">[Pg 387]</a></span> which we ourselves employ in
+designating our country folk, would probably have led me, through a
+false association, to regard the parties to which they attach as
+scarcely less specifically different from our country folk themselves. I
+suspect we are misled by associations of this kind when we descant on
+the peculiarities of race as interposing insurmountable barriers to the
+progress of improvement, physical or mental. We overlook, amid the
+diversities of form, color, and language, the specific identity of the
+human family. The Celt, for instance, wants, it is said, those powers of
+sustained application which so remarkably distinguish the Saxon; and so
+we agree on the expediency of getting rid of our poor Highlanders by
+expatriation as soon as possible, and of converting their country into
+sheep-walks and hunting-parks. It would be surely well to have
+philosophy enough to remember what, simply through the exercise of a
+wise faith, the Christian missionary never forgets, that the
+peculiarities of race are not specific and ineradicable, but mere
+induced habits and idiosyncracies engrafted on the stock of a common
+nature by accident of circumstance or development; and that, as they
+have been wrought into the original tissue through the protracted
+operation of one set of causes, the operation of another and different
+set, wisely and perseveringly directed, could scarce fail to unravel and
+work them out again. They form no part of the inherent design of man's
+nature, but have merely stuck to it in its transmissive passage
+downwards and require to be brushed off. There was a time, some four
+thousand years ago, when Celt and Saxon were represented by but one man
+and his wife, with their children and their children's wives; and some
+sixteen or seventeen centuries earlier all the varieties of the
+species,&mdash;Caucasian and Negro, Mongolian and Malay,&mdash;lay close packed up
+in the world's single family. In short, Buchubai's amusing prattle
+proved<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">[Pg 388]</a></span> to me this evening no bad commentary on St. Paul's sublime
+enunciation to the Athenians, that God has "made of one blood all
+nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth." I was amused to
+find that the little girl, who listened intently as I described to the
+young ladies all I had seen and knew of the Auldgrande, had never before
+heard of a ghost, and could form no conception of one now. The ladies
+explained, described, defined; carefully guarding all they said,
+however, by stern disclaimers against the ghost theory altogether, but
+apparently to little purpose. At length Buchubai exclaimed, that she now
+knew what they meant, and that she herself had seen a great many ghosts
+in India. On explanation, however, her ghosts, though quite frightful
+enough, turned out to be not at all spiritual: they were things of
+common occurrence in the land she had come from,&mdash;exposed bodies of the
+dead.</p>
+
+<p>Next morning&mdash;as the white clouds and thin mist-streaks of the preceding
+day had fairly foretold&mdash;was close and wet; and the long trail of vapor
+which rises from the chasm of the Auldgrande in such weather, and is
+known to the people of the neighborhood as the "smoke of the lady's
+baking," hung, snake-like, over the river. About two o'clock the rain
+ceased, hesitatingly and doubtfully, however, as if it did not quite
+know its own mind; and there arose no breeze to shake the dank grass, or
+to dissipate the thin mist-wreath that continued to float over the river
+under a sky of deep gray. But the ladies, with Buchubai, impatient to
+join their friends at Strathpeffer, determined on journeying
+notwithstanding; and, availing myself of their company and their
+vehicle, I travelled on with them to Dingwall, where we parted. I had
+purposed exploring the gray dingy sandstones and fetid breccias
+developed along the shores on the northern side of the bay, about two<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">[Pg 389]</a></span>
+miles from the town, and on the sloping acclivities between the
+mansion-houses of Tulloch and Fowlis; but the day was still unfavorable,
+and the sections seemed untemptingly indifferent; besides, I could
+entertain no doubt that the dingy beds here are identical in place with
+those of Cadboll on the coast of Easter Ross, which they closely
+resemble, and which alternate with the lower ichthyolitic beds of the
+Old Red Sandstone; and so, for the present at least, I gave up my
+intention of exploring them.</p>
+
+<p>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 breeze
+from the west, just strong enough to shake the wet leaves, the sky flung
+off its thick mantle of gray. I sauntered out along the high-road, in
+the direction of my old haunts at Conon-side, with, however, no
+intention of walking so far. But the reaches of the river, a little in
+flood, shone temptingly through the dank foliage, and the cottages under
+the Conon woods glittered clear on their sweeping hill-side, "looking
+cheerily out" into the landscape; and so I wandered on and on, over the
+bridge, and along the river, and through the pleasure grounds of
+Conon-house, till I found myself in the old solitary burying-ground
+beside the Conon, which, when last in this part of the country, I was
+prevented from visiting by the swollen waters. The rich yellow light
+streamed through the interstices of the tall hedge of forest-trees that
+encircles the eminence, once an island, and fell in fantastic patches on
+the gray tombstone and the graves. The ruinous little chapel in the
+corner, whose walls a quarter of a century before I had distinctly
+traced, had sunk into a green mound; and there remained over the sward
+but the arch-stone of a Gothic window, with a portion of the moulded
+transom attached, to indicate the character and style of the vanished
+building. The old dial-stone, with the wasted gnomon,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">[Pg 390]</a></span> has also
+disappeared; and the few bright-colored <i>throch-stanes</i>, raw from the
+chisel, that had been added of late years to the group of older
+standing, did not quite make up for what time in the same period had
+withdrawn. One of the newer inscriptions, however, recorded a curious
+fact. 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, it
+was said, as man and wife, for more than sixty years: and now, here was
+their tombstone and epitaph. They had lived on long after my departure;
+and when, as the seasons passed, men and women whose births and baptisms
+had taken place since their wedding-day were falling around them well
+stricken in years, death seemed to have forgotten <i>them</i>; and when he
+came at last, their united ages made up well nigh two centuries. The
+wife had seen her ninety-sixth and the husband his hundred and second
+birthday. It does not transcend the skill of the actuary to say how many
+thousand 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 two
+for every man who attains to an age so extraordinary; but he would
+require to get beyond his tables in order to reckon up the chances
+against the woman destined to attain to ninety-six being courted and
+married in early life by the man born to attain to a hundred and two.</p>
+
+<p>After enjoying a magnificent sunset on the banks of the Conon, just
+where the scenery, exquisite throughout, is most delightful, I returned
+through the woods, and spent half an hour by the way in the cottage of a
+kindly-hearted woman, now considerably advanced in years, whom I had
+known, when she was in middle life, as the wife of one of the Conon-side
+hinds, and who not unfrequently, when I was toiling at the mallet in the
+burning sun, hot and thirsty, and rather loosely knit for my work, had
+brought<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">[Pg 391]</a></span> me&mdash;all she had to offer at the time&mdash;a draught of fresh whey.
+At first she seemed to have wholly forgotten both her kindness and the
+object of it. She well remembered my master, and another Cromarty man
+who had been grievously injured, when undermining an old building, by
+the sudden fall of the erection; but she could bethink her of no third
+Cromarty man whatever. "Eh, sirs!" she at length exclaimed, "I daresay
+ye'll be just the sma' prentice laddie. Weel, what will young folk no
+come out o'? They were amaist a' stout big men at the wark except
+yoursel'; an' you're now stouter and bigger than maist o' them. Eh,
+sirs!&mdash;an' are ye still a mason?" "No; I have not wrought as a mason for
+the 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 entered
+on our talk together, we gossipped on till the night fell, giving and
+receiving information regarding our old acquaintances of a quarter of a
+century before; of whom we found that no inconsiderable proportion had
+already 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 dark
+to Dingwall, where I spent the night. I could fain have called by the
+way on my old friend and brother-workman, Mr. Urquhart,&mdash;of a very
+numerous party of mechanics employed at Conon-side in the year 1821 the
+only individual now resident in this part of the country; but the
+lateness 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 the
+village, and which has done so much to banish the water-wraith from the
+fords; and then striking off to the right, I crossed, by a path
+comparatively little frequented, the insulated group of hills which
+separates the valley of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">[Pg 392]</a></span> the Conon from that of the Peffer. The day was
+mild and pleasant, and the atmosphere clear; but the higher hills again
+exhibited their ominous belts of vapor, and there had been a slight
+frost during the night,&mdash;at this autumnal season the almost certain
+precursor of rain.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">[Pg 393]</a></span></p>
+<h3>CHAPTER IX.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="hang">The Great Conglomerate&mdash;Its Undulatory and Rectilinear
+Members&mdash;Knock Farril and its Vitrified Fort&mdash;The old Highlanders
+an observant race&mdash;The Vein of Silver&mdash;Summit of Knock Farril&mdash;Mode
+of accounting for the Luxuriance of Herbage in the ancient Scottish
+Fortalices&mdash;The green Graves of Culloden&mdash;Theories respecting the
+Vitrification of the Hill-forts&mdash;Combined Theories of Williams and
+Mackenzie probably give the correct account&mdash;The Author's
+Explanation&mdash;Transformations of Fused Rocks&mdash;Strathpeffer&mdash;The
+Spa&mdash;Permanent Odoriferous Qualities of an ancient Sea-bottom
+converted into Rock&mdash;Mineral Springs of the Spa&mdash;Infusion of the
+powdered rock a substitute&mdash;Belemnite Water&mdash;The lively young
+Lady's Comments&mdash;A befogged Country seen from a
+hill-top&mdash;Ben-Wevis&mdash;Journey to Evanton&mdash;A Geologist's
+Night-mare&mdash;The Route Home&mdash;Ruins of Craighouse&mdash;Incompatibility of
+Tea and Ghosts&mdash;End of the Tour. </p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">I was</span> once more on the Great Conglomerate,&mdash;here, as elsewhere, a
+picturesque, boldly-featured deposit, traversed by narrow, mural-sided
+valleys, and tempested by bluff abrupt eminences. Its hills are greatly
+less confluent than those of most of the other sedimentary formations of
+Scotland; and their insulated summits, recommended by their steep sides
+and limited areas to the old savage Vaubans of the Highlands, furnished,
+ere the historic eras began, sites for not a few of the ancient
+hill-forts of the country. The vitrified fort of Craig Phadrig, of the
+Ord Hill of Kessock, and of Knock Farril,&mdash;two of the number, the first
+and last, being the most celebrated erections of their kind in the north
+of Scotland,&mdash;were all formed on hills of the Great Conglomerate. The
+Conglomerate exists here as a sort of miniature Highlands, set down at
+the northern side of a large angular bay of Pal&aelig;ozoic rock, which
+indents the <i>true</i> Highlands of the country, and which exhibits in its
+central<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">[Pg 394]</a></span> area a prolongation of the long moory ridge of the Black Isle,
+formed, as I have already had occasion to remark, of an <i>upper</i> deposit
+of the same lower division of the Old Red,&mdash;a deposit as noticeable for
+affecting a confluent, rectilinear character in its elevations, as the
+Conglomerate is remarkable for exhibiting a detached and undulatory one.
+Exactly the same features are presented by the same deposits in the
+neighborhood of Inverness; the <i>undulatory</i> Conglomerate composing, to
+the north and west of the town, the picturesque wavy ridge comprising
+the twin-eminences of Munlochy Bay, the Ord Hill of Kessock, Craig
+Phadrig, and the fir-covered hill beyond in the line of the Great
+Valley; while on the south and east the <i>rectilinear</i> ichthyolitic
+member of the system, with the arenaceous beds that lie over it, form
+the continuous straight-lined ridge which runs on from beyond the moor
+of the Leys to beyond the moor of Culloden. There is a pretty little
+loch in this dwarf Highlands of the Brahan district, into which the old
+Celtic prophet Kenneth Ore, when, like Prospero, he relinquished his
+art, buried "deep beyond plummet sound" the magic stone in which he was
+wont to see the distant and the future. And with the loch it contains a
+narrow, hermit-like dell, bearing but a single row of fields, and these
+of small size, along its flat bottom, and whose steep gray sides of
+rustic Conglomerate resemble Cyclopean walls. It, besides, includes
+among its hills the steep hill of Knock Farril, which, rising bluff and
+bold immediately over the southern slopes of Strathpeffer, adds so
+greatly to the beauty of the valley, and bears atop perhaps the finest
+specimen of the vitrified fort in Scotland; and the bold frontage of
+cliff presented by the group to the west, over the pleasure grounds of
+Brahan, is, though on no very large scale, one of the most
+characteristic of the Conglomerate formation which can be seen
+anywhere.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">[Pg 395]</a></span> It is formed of exactly such cliffs as the landscape gardener
+would make if he could,&mdash;cliffs with their rude prominent pebbles
+breaking the light over every square foot of surface, and furnishing
+footing, by their innumerable projections, to many a green tuft of moss,
+and many a sweet little flower. Some of the masses, too, that have
+rolled down from the precipices among the Brahan woods far below, and
+stand up, like the ruins of cottages, amid the trees, are of singular
+beauty,&mdash;worth all the imitation-ruins ever erected, and obnoxious to
+none of the disparaging associations which the mere show and
+make-believe of the artificial are sure always to awaken.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever exhibited an aspect in any degree extraordinary was sure to
+attract the notice of the old Highlanders,&mdash;an acutely observant race,
+however slightly developed their reflective powers; and the great
+natural objects which excited their attention we always find associated
+with some traditionary story. It is said that in the Conglomerate cliffs
+above Brahan, a retainer of the Mackenzie, one of the smiths of the
+tribe, discovered a rich vein of silver, which he wrought by stealth,
+until he had filled one of the apartments of his cottage with bars and
+ingots. But the treasure, it is added, was betrayed by his own
+unfortunate vanity, to his chief, who hanged him in order to serve
+himself his heir; and no one since his death has proved ingenious enough
+to convert the rude rock into silver. Years had, I found, wrought their
+changes amid the miniature Highlands of the Conglomerate. The sapplings
+of the straggling wood on the banks of Loch Ousy,&mdash;the pleasant little
+lake, or lochan rather, of this upland region,&mdash;that I remembered having
+seen scarce taller than myself, had shot into vigorous treehood; and the
+steep slopes of Knock Farril, which I had left covered with their dark
+screen of pine, were now thickly mottled<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">[Pg 396]</a></span> over with half-decayed stumps,
+and bore that peculiarly barren aspect which tracts cleared of their
+wood so frequently assume in their transition state, when the plants
+that flourished in the shade have died out in consequence of the
+exposure, and plants that love the open air and the unbroken sunshine
+have not yet sprung up in their place. I found the southern acclivities
+of the hill covered with scattered masses of vitrified stone, that had
+fallen from the fortalice atop; and would recommend to the collector in
+quest of a characteristic specimen, that instead of laboring, to the
+general detriment of the pile, in detaching one from the walls above, he
+should set himself to seek one here. The blocks, uninjured by the
+hammer, exhibit, in most cases, the angular character of the original
+fragments better than those forcibly detached from the mass, and
+preserve in fine keeping those hollower interstices which were but
+partially filled with the molten matter, and which, when shattered by a
+blow, break through and lose their character.</p>
+
+<p>One may spend an hour very agreeably on the green summit of Knock
+Farril. And at almost all seasons of the year a green summit it
+is,&mdash;greener considerably than any other hill-top in this part of the
+country. The more succulent grasses spring up rich and strong within the
+walls, here and there roughened by tufts of nettles, tall and rank, and
+somewhat perilous of approach,&mdash;witnesses, say the botanists, that man
+had once a dwelling in the immediate neighborhood. The green luxuriance
+which characterizes so many of the more ancient fortalices of Scotland
+seems satisfactorily accounted for by Dr. Fleming, in his "Zo&ouml;logy of
+the Bass." "The summits and sides of those hills which were occupied by
+our ancestors as <i>hill-forts</i>," says the naturalist, "usually exhibit a
+far richer herbage than corresponding heights in the neighborhood<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">[Pg 397]</a></span> with
+the 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
+<i>hill-folds</i>, into which, during the threatened or actual invasion of
+the district by a hostile tribe, the cattle were driven, especially
+during the night, as to places of safety, and sent out to pasture in the
+neighborhood during the day. And the droppings of these collected herds
+would, as takes place in analogous cases at present, speedily improve
+the soil to such an extent as to induce a permanent fertility." The
+further instance adduced by the Doctor, in showing through what
+protracted periods causes transitory in themselves may remain palpably
+influential in their effects, is curiously suggestive of the old
+metaphysical idea, that as every effect has its cause, "recurring from
+cause to cause up to the abyss of eternity, so every cause has also its
+effects, linked forward in succession to the end of time." On the bleak
+moor of Culloden the graves of the slain still exist as patches of green
+sward, surrounded by a brown groundwork of stunted heather. The animal
+matter,&mdash;once the nerves, muscles, and sinews of brave men,&mdash;which
+originated the change, must have been wholly dissipated ages ago. But
+the effect once produced has so decidedly maintained itself, that it
+remains not less distinctly stamped upon the heath in the present day
+than it could have been in the middle of the last century, only a few
+years after the battle had been stricken.</p>
+
+<p>The vitrification of the rampart which on every side incloses the grassy
+area has been more variously, but less satisfactorily, accounted for
+than the green luxuriance within. It was held by Pennant to be an effect
+of volcanic fire, and that the walls of this and all our other vitrified
+strongholds are simply the crater-rims of extinct volcanoes,&mdash;a
+hypothesis wholly as untenable in reference to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">[Pg 398]</a></span> hill-forts as to the
+lime-kilns of the country: the vitrified forts are as little volcanic as
+the vitrified kilns. Williams, the author of the "Mineral Kingdom," and
+one of our earlier British geologists, after deciding, on data which his
+peculiar pursuits enabled him to collect and weigh, that they are <i>not</i>
+volcanic, broached the theory, still prevalent, as their name testifies,
+that they are artificial structures, in which vitrescency was designedly
+induced, in order to cement into solid masses accumulations of loose
+materials. Lord Woodhouselee advocated an opposite view. Resting on the
+fact that the vitrification is but of partial occurrence, be held that
+it had been produced, not of design by the builders of the forts, but in
+the process of their demolition by a besieging enemy, who, finding, as
+he premised, a large portion of the ramparts composed of wood, had
+succeeded in setting them on fire. This hypothesis, however, seems quite
+as untenable as that of Pennant. Fires not unfrequently occur in cities,
+among crowded groups of houses, where walls of stone are surrounded by a
+much greater profusion of dry woodwork than could possibly have entered
+into 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 thickness
+fused throughout? The sandstone columns of the aisles of the Old
+Greyfriars in Edinburgh, surrounded by the woodwork of the galleries,
+the flooring, the seating, and the roof, were wasted, during the fire
+which destroyed the pile, into mere skeletons of their former selves;
+but though originally not more than three feet in diameter, they
+exhibited no marks of vitrescency. And it does not seem in the least
+probable that the stonework of the Knock Farril rampart could, if
+surrounded by wood at all, have been surrounded by an amount equally
+great, in proportion to its mass, as that which enveloped the
+aisle-columns of the Old Greyfriars.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399">[Pg 399]</a></span></p><p>The late Sir George Mackenzie of Coul adopted yet a fourth view. He
+held that the vitrification is simply an effect of the ancient
+beacon-fires kindled to warn the country of an invading enemy. But how
+account, on this hypothesis, for ramparts continuous, as in the case of
+Knock Farril, all round the hill? A powerful fire long kept up might
+well fuse a heap of loose stones into a solid mass; the bonfire lighted
+on the summit of Arthur Seat in 1842, to welcome the Queen on her first
+visit to Scotland, particularly fused numerous detached fragments of
+basalt, and imparted, in some spots to the depth of about half an inch,
+a vesicular structure to the solid rock beneath. But no fire, however
+powerful, could have constructed a rampart running without break for
+several hundred feet round an insulated hill-top. "To be satisfied,"
+said Sir George, "of the reason why the signal-fires should be kindled
+on or beside a heap of stones, we have only to imagine a gale of wind to
+have arisen when a fire was kindled on the bare ground. The fuel would
+be blown about and dispersed, to the great annoyance of those who
+attended. The plan for obviating the inconvenience thus occasioned which
+would occur most naturally and readily would be to raise a heap of
+stones, on either side of which the fire might be placed to windward;
+and to account for the vitrification appearing all round the area, it is
+only necessary to allow the inhabitants of the country to have had a
+system of signals. A fire at one end might denote something different
+from a fire at the other, or in some intermediate part. On some
+occasions two or more fires might be necessary, and sometimes a fire
+along the whole line. It cannot be doubted," he adds, "that the rampart
+was originally formed with as much regularity as the nature of the
+materials would allow, both in order to render it more durable, and to
+make it serve the purposes of defence." This, I am<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400">[Pg 400]</a></span> afraid, is still
+very unsatisfactory. A fire lighted along the entire line of a wall
+inclosing nearly an acre of area could not be other than a very
+attenuated, wire-drawn line of fire indeed, and could never possess
+strength enough to melt the ponderous mass of rampart beneath, as if it
+had been formed of wax or resin. A thousand loads of wood piled in a
+ring 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 a
+thousand, or half a thousand, loads could have been cut down, collected,
+and fired, an invading enemy would have found time enough to moor his
+fleet and land his forces, and possess himself of the lower country.
+Again, the unbroken continuity of the vitrified line militates against
+the signal-system theory. Fire trod so closely upon the heels of fire,
+that the vitrescency induced by the one fire impinged on and mingled
+with the vitrescency induced by the others beside it. There is no other
+mode of accounting for the continuity of the fusion; and how could
+definite meanings possibly be attached to the various parts of a line so
+minutely graduated, that the centre of the fire kindled on any one
+graduation could be scarce ten feet apart from the centre of the fire
+kindled on any of its two neighboring graduations? Even by day, the
+exact compartment which a fire occupied could not be distinguished, at
+the distance of half a mile, from its neighboring compartments, and not
+at all by night, at any distance, from even the compartments farthest
+removed from it. Who, for instance, at the distance of a dozen miles or
+so, could tell whether the flame that shone out in the darkness, when
+all other objects around it were invisible, was kindled on the east or
+west end of an eminence little more than a hundred yards in length? Nay,
+who could determine,&mdash;for such is the requirement of the
+hypothesis,&mdash;whether it rose from a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401">[Pg 401]</a></span> compartment of the summit a hundred
+feet distant from its west or east end, or from a compartment merely
+ninety or a hundred and ten feet distant from it? The supposed signal
+system, added to the mere beacon hypothesis, is palpably untenable.</p>
+
+<p>The theory of Williams, however, which is, I am inclined to think, the
+true one in the main, seems capable of being considerably modified and
+improved by the hypothesis of Sir George. The hill-fort,&mdash;palpably the
+most primitive form of fortalice or stronghold originated in a
+mountainous country,&mdash;seems to constitute man's first essay towards
+neutralizing, by the art of fortification, the advantages of superior
+force on the side of an assailing enemy. It was found, on the discovery
+of New Zealand, that the savage inhabitants had already learned to erect
+exactly such hill-forts amid the fastnesses of that country as those
+which were erected two thousand years earlier by the Scottish aborigines
+amid 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 a
+period not less ancient than that of the first barbarous wars of
+Scotland, when, though tribe battled with tribe in fierce warfare, like
+the red men of the West with their brethren ere the European had landed
+on their shores, navigation was yet in so immature a state in Northern
+Europe as to secure to them an exemption from foreign invasion. In an
+after age, however, when the roving Vikings had become formidable, many
+of the eminences originally selected, from <i>their inaccessibility</i>, as
+sites for hill-forts, would come to be chosen, from <i>their prominence in
+the landscape</i>, as stations for beacon-fires. And of course the
+previously erected ramparts, higher always than the inclosed areas,
+would furnish on such hills<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402">[Pg 402]</a></span> the conspicuous points from which the fires
+could be best seen. Let us suppose, then, that the rampart-crested
+eminence of Knock Farril, seen on every side for many miles, has become
+in 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 a
+forest-covered country, and blown at times into intense heat by the
+strong winds so frequent in that upper stratum of air into which the
+summit penetrates, have been kindled some six or eight times on some
+prominent point of the rampart, raised, mayhap, many centuries before.
+At first the heat has failed to tell on the stubborn quartz and feldspar
+which forms the preponderating material of the gneisses, granites,
+quartz rocks, and coarse conglomerate sandstones on which it has been
+brought to operate; but each fire throws down into the interstices a
+considerable amount of the fixed salt of the wood, till at length the
+heap has become charged with a strong flux; and then one powerful fire
+more, fanned to a white heat by a keen, dry breeze, reduces the whole
+into a semi-fluid mass. The same effects have been produced on the
+materials of the rampart by the beacon-fires and the alkali, that were
+produced, according to Pliny, by the fires and the soda of the
+Ph&#339;nician merchants storm-bound on the sands of the river Belus. But
+the state of civilization in Scotland at the time is not such as to
+permit of the discovery being followed up by similar results. The
+semi-savage guardians of the beacon wonder at the <i>accident</i>, as they
+well may; but those happy accidents in which the higher order of
+discoveries originate occur in only the ages of cultivated minds; and so
+they do not acquire from it the art of manufacturing glass. It could not
+fail being perceived, however, by intellects at all human, that the
+consolidation which the fires of one week, or month, or year, as the
+case<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_403" id="Page_403">[Pg 403]</a></span> happened, had effected on one portion of the wall, might be
+produced by the fires of another week, or month, or year, on another
+portion of it; that, in short, a loose incoherent rampart, easy of
+demolition, might be converted, through the newly-discovered process,
+into a rampart as solid and indestructible as the rock on which it
+rested. 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, Knock
+Farril, with many a similar eminence in the country, comes to exhibit
+its completely vitrified fort where there had been but a loosely-piled
+hill-fort before. It in no degree militates against this compound
+theory,&mdash;borrowed in part from Williams and in part from Sir
+George,&mdash;that there are detached vitrified masses to be found on
+eminences evidently never occupied by hill-forts; or that there are
+hill-forts on other eminences only partially fused, or hill-forts on
+many of the less commanding sites that bear about them no marks of fire
+at all. Nothing can be more probable than that in the first class of
+cases we have eminences that had been selected as beacon-stations, which
+had not previously been occupied by hill-forts; and in the last,
+eminences that had been occupied by hill-forts which, from their want of
+prominence in the general landscape, had not been selected as
+beacon-stations. And in the intermediate class of cases we have probably
+ramparts that were only partially vitrified, because some want of fuel
+in the neighborhood had starved the customary fires, or because fires
+had to be less frequently kindled upon them than on the more important
+stations; or, finally, because these hill-forts, from some disadvantage
+of situation, were no longer used as places of strength, and so the
+beacon-keepers had no motive to attempt consolidating them throughout by
+the piecemeal application of the vitrifying agent. But the old Highland<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_404" id="Page_404">[Pg 404]</a></span>
+mode of accounting for the present appearance of Knock Farril and its
+vitrified remains is perhaps, after all, quite as good in its way as any
+of the modes suggested by the philosophers.<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a></p>
+
+<p>I spent some time, agreeably enough, beside the rude rampart of Knock
+Farril, in marking the various appearances exhibited by the fused and
+semi-fused materials of which it is composed,&mdash;the granites, gneisses,
+mica-schists, hornblendes, clay-slates, and red sandstones of the
+locality. One piece of rock, containing much lime, I found resolved into
+a yellow opaque substance, not unlike the coarse earthenware used in the
+making of ginger-beer bottles; but though it had been so completely
+molten 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 in
+thickness. 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 pure
+white quartz into porcellanic trails of white, that ran in one instance
+along the face of a darker-colored rock below, like streaks of cream
+along the sides of a burnt china jug. In one mass of pale large-grained
+granite I found that the feldspar, though it had acquired a vitreous
+gloss on the surface, still retained its peculiar rhomboidal cleavage;
+while the less stubborn quartz around it had become scarce less
+vesicular and light than a piece of pumice. On some of the other masses
+there was impressed, as if by a seal, the stamp<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_405" id="Page_405">[Pg 405]</a></span> of pieces of charcoal;
+and so sharply was the impression retained, that I could detect on the
+vitreous surface the mark of the yearly growths, and even of the
+medullary rays, of the wood. In breaking open some of the others, I
+detected fragments of the charcoal itself, which, hermetically locked up
+in the rock, had retained all its original carbon. These last reminded
+me of specimens not unfrequent among the trap-rocks of the Carboniferous
+and O&ouml;litic systems. From an intrusive overlying wacke in the
+neighborhood of Linlithgow I have derived for my collection pieces of
+carbonized wood in so complete a state of keeping, that under the
+microscope they exhibit unbroken all the characteristic reticulations of
+the conifer&aelig; of the Coal Measures.</p>
+
+<p>I descended the hill, and, after joining my friends at
+Strathpeffer,&mdash;Buchubai Hormazdji among the rest,&mdash;visited the Spa, in
+the company of my old friend the minister of Alness. The thorough
+identity of the powerful effluvium that fills the pump-room with that of
+a muddy sea-bottom laid bare in warm weather by the tide, is to the
+dweller on the sea-coast very striking. It <i>is</i> identity,&mdash;not mere
+resemblance. In most cases the organic substances undergo great changes
+in the bowels of the earth. The animal matter of the Caithness
+ichthyolites exists, for instance, as a hard, black, insoluble bitumen,
+which I have used oftener than once as sealing-wax; the vegetable mould
+of the Coal Measures has been converted into a fire-clay, so altered in
+the organic pabulum, animal and vegetable, whence it derived its
+fertility, that, even when laid open for years to the meliorating
+effects of the weather and the visits of the winged seeds, it will not
+be found bearing a single spike or leaf of green. But here, in smell, at
+least, that ancient mud, swum over by the Diplopterus and the
+Diplacanthus, and in which the Coccosteus and Pterichthys burrowed, has
+undergone no change. The soft ooze has become solid rock, but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_406" id="Page_406">[Pg 406]</a></span> its
+odoriferous qualities have remained unaltered. I next visited an
+excavation a few hundred yards on the upper side of the pump-room, in
+which the gray fetid breccia of the Strath has been quarried for
+dyke-building, and examined the rock with some degree of care, without,
+however, detecting in it a single plate or scale. Lying over that
+Conglomerate member of the system which, rising high in the Knock Farril
+range, forms the southern boundary of the valley, it occupies the place
+of the lower ichthyolitic bed, so rich in organisms in various other
+parts of the country; but here the bed, after it had been deposited in
+thin horizontal lamin&aelig;, and had hardened into stone, seems to have been
+broken up, by some violent movement, into minute sharp-edged fragments,
+that, without wear or attrition, were again consolidated into the
+breccia which it now forms. And its ichthyolites, if not previously
+absorbed, were probably destroyed in the convulsion. Detached scales and
+spines, however, if carefully sought for in the various openings of the
+valley, might still be found in the original lamin&aelig; of the fragments.
+They must have been amazingly abundant in it once; for so largely
+saturated is the rock with the organic matter into which they have been
+resolved, that, when struck by the hammer, the impalpable dust set loose
+sensibly affects the organs of taste, and appeals very strongly to those
+of smell. It is through this saturated rock that the mineral springs
+take their course. Even the surface-waters of the valley, as they pass
+over 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 of
+the Old Red the subject of a few simple experiments. I would have ground
+it into powder, and tried upon it the effect both of cold and hot
+infusion. Portions of the water are sometimes carried in casks and
+bottles, for the use of invalids, to a considerable distance; but it is
+quite possible that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407">[Pg 407]</a></span> a little of the <i>rock</i>, to which the water owes its
+qualities, might, when treated in this way, have all the effects of a
+considerable quantity of the <i>spring</i>. It might be of some interest,
+too, to ascertain its qualities when crushed, as a soil, or its effect
+on other soils; whether, for instance, like the old sterile soils of the
+Carboniferous period, it has lost, through its rock-change, the
+fertilizing properties which it once possessed; or whether it still
+retains them, like some of the coprolitic beds of the O&ouml;lite and
+Greensand, and might not, in consequence, be employed as a manure. A
+course of such experiments could scarce fail to furnish with agreeable
+occupation some of the numerous annual visitants of the Spa, who have to
+linger long, with but little to engage them, waiting for what, if it
+once fairly leave a man, returns slowly, when it returns at all.</p>
+
+<p>In mentioning at the dinner-table of my friend my scheme of infusing
+rock in order to produce Spa water, I referred to the circumstance that
+the Belemnite of our Liasic deposits, when ground into powder, imparts
+to boiling water a peculiar taste and smell, and that the infusion,
+taken in very small quantities, sensibly affects both palate and
+stomach. And I suggested that Belemnite water, deemed sovereign of old,
+when the Belemnite was regarded as a thunderbolt, in the cure of
+bewitched cattle, might be in reality medicinal, and that the ancient
+superstition might thus embody, as ancient superstitions not
+unfrequently do, a nucleus of fact. The charm, I said, might amount to
+no 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 one
+of the young ladies on the remark amused us all. If an infusion of stone
+had cured, in the last age, cattle that were bewitched, the Strathpeffer
+water, she argued, which was, it seems, but an infusion of stone, might
+cure cattle that were sick now; and so, though<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_408" id="Page_408">[Pg 408]</a></span> the biped patients of
+the Strath could scarce fail to decrease when they knew that its infused
+stone contained but the strainings of old mud, and the juices of dead
+unsalted fish, it was gratifying to think that the poor Spa might still
+continue to retain its patients, though of a lower order. The pump-room
+would be converted into a rustic, straw-thatched shed, to which long
+trains of sick cattle, affected by weak nerves and dyspepsia, would come
+streaming along the roads every morning and evening, to drink and gather
+strength.</p>
+
+<p>The following morning was wet and lowering, and a flat ceiling of gray
+cloud stretched across the valley, from the summit of the Knock Farril
+ridge of hills on the one side, to the lower flanks of Ben-Wevis on the
+other. I had purposed ascending this latter mountain,&mdash;the giant of the
+north-eastern coast, and one of the loftiest of our second-class
+Scottish hills anywhere,&mdash;to ascertain the extreme upper line at which
+travelled boulders occur in this part of the country. But it was no
+morning for wading knee-deep through the trackless heather; and after
+waiting on, in the hope the weather might clear up, watching at a window
+the poorer invalids at the Spa, as they dragged themselves through the
+rain to the water, I lost patience, and sallied out, beplaided and
+umbrellaed, to see from the top of Knock Farril how the country looked
+in a fog. At first, however, I saw much fog, but little country; but as
+the day wore on, the flat mist-ceiling rose together, till it rested on
+but the distant hills, and the more prominent features of the landscape
+began to stand out amid the more general gray, like the stronger lines
+and masses in a half-finished drawing, boldly dashed off in the neutral
+tint of the artist. The portions of the prospect generically distinct
+are, notwithstanding its great extent and variety, but few; and the
+partial veil of haze,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_409" id="Page_409">[Pg 409]</a></span> by glazing down its distracting multiplicity of
+minor points, served to bring them out all the more distinctly. There
+is, first stretching far in a southern and eastern direction along the
+landscape, the rectilinear ridge of the Black Isle,&mdash;not quite the sort
+of line a painter would introduce into a composition, but true to
+geologic character. More in the foreground, in the same direction, there
+spreads a troubled cockling sea of the Great Conglomerate. Turning to
+the north and west, the deep valley of Strathpeffer, with its expanse of
+rich level fields, and in the midst its old baronial castle, surrounded
+by coeval trees of vast bulk, lies so immediately at the foot of the
+eminence, 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 rose
+the thick-set Ben-Wevis,&mdash;a true gneiss mountain, with breadth enough of
+shoulders, and amplitude enough of base, to serve a mountain thrice as
+tall, but which, like all its cogeners of this ancient formation, was
+arrested in its second stage of growth, so that many of the slimmer
+granitic and porphyritic hills of the country look down upon it, as
+Agamemnon, according to Homer, looked down upon Ulysses.</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+"Broad is his breast, his shoulders larger spread,<br />
+Though great Atrides overtops his head."<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>All around, as if topling, wave-like, over the outer edges of the
+comparatively flat area of Pal&aelig;ozoic rock which composes the middle
+ground of the landscape, rose a multitude of primary hill-peaks, barely
+discernible in the haze; while the long withdrawing Dingwall Frith,
+stretching on towards the open sea for full twenty miles, and flanked on
+either side by ridges of sandstone, but guarded at the opening by two
+squat granitic columns, completed the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_410" id="Page_410">[Pg 410]</a></span> prospect, by adding to its last
+great feature. All was gloomy and chill; and as I turned me down the
+descent, 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 century
+before, it was on a hot breathless day of early summer, in which, though
+the trees in fresh leaf seemed drooping in the sunshine, and the
+succulent luxuriance of the fields lay aslant, half-prostrated by the
+fierce heat, the rich blue of Ben-Wevis, far above, was thickly streaked
+with snow, on which it was luxury even to look. It gave one iced
+fancies, wherewithal to slake, amid the bright glow of summer, the
+thirst in the mind. The recollection came strongly upon me, as the fog
+from the hill-top closed dark behind, like that sung by the old blind
+Englishman, which</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">"O'er the marish glides,</span><br />
+And gathers ground fast at the lab'rer's heel,<br />
+Homeward returning."<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>But the contrast had nothing sad in it; and it was pleasant to feel that
+it had not. I had resigned many a baseless hope and many an idle desire
+since I had spent a vacant day amid the sunshine, now gazing on the
+broad placid features of the snow-streaked mountain; and now sauntering
+under the tall ancient woods, or along the heath-covered slopes of the
+valley; but in relation to never-tiring, inexhaustible nature, the heart
+was no fresher at that time than it was now. I had grown no older in my
+feelings or in my capacity of enjoyment; and what then was there to
+regret?</p>
+
+<p>I rode down the Strath in an omnibus which plies between the Spa and
+Dingwall, and then walked on to the village of Evanton, which I reached
+about an hour after<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_411" id="Page_411">[Pg 411]</a></span> nightfall, somewhat in the circumstances of the
+"damp stranger," who gave Beau Brummel the cold. There were, however, no
+Beau Brummels in the quiet village inn in which I passed the night, and
+so the effects of the damp were wholly confined to myself. I was soundly
+pummelled during the night by a frightful female, who first assumed the
+appearance of the miserable pauper woman whom I had seen beside the
+Auldgrande, and then became the Lady of Balconie; and, though
+sufficiently indignant, and much inclined to resist, I could stir
+neither hand nor foot, but lay passively on my back, jambed fast behind
+the huge gneiss boulder and the edge of the gulf. And yet, by a strange
+duality of perception, I was conscious all the while that, having got
+wet on the previous day, I was now suffering from an attack of
+nightmare: and held that it would be no very serious matter even should
+the lady tumble me into the gulf, seeing that all would be well again
+when I awoke in the morning. Dreams of this character, in which
+consciousness bears reference at once to the fictitious events of the
+vision and the real circumstances of the sleeper, must occupy, I am
+inclined to think, very little time,&mdash;single moments, mayhap, poised
+midway between the sleeping and waking state. Next day (Sunday) I
+attended the Free Church in the parish, where I found a numerous and
+attentive congregation,&mdash;descendants, in large part, of the old devout
+Munroes of Ferindonald,&mdash;and heard a good solid discourse. And on the
+following morning I crossed the sea at what is known as the Fowlis
+Ferry, to explore, on my homeward route, the rocks laid bare along the
+shore in the upper reaches of the Frith.</p>
+
+<p>I found but little by the way: black patches of bitumen in the sandstone
+of one of the beds, with a bed of stratified clay, inclosing nodules, in
+which, however, I succeeded in detecting nothing organic; and a few
+fragments of clay-slate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_412" id="Page_412">[Pg 412]</a></span> locked up in the Red Sandstone, sharp and
+unworn at their edges, as if derived from no great distance, though
+there be now no clay-slate in the eastern half of Ross; but though the
+rocks here belong evidently to the ichthyolitic member of the Old Red,
+not a single fish, not a "nibble" even, repaid the patient search of
+half a day. I, however, passed some time agreeably enough among the
+ruins of Craighouse. When I had last seen, many years before, this old
+castle,<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a> the upper stories were accessible; but they were now no
+longer so. Time, and the little herdboys who occasionally shelter in its
+vaults, had been busy in the interval; and, by breaking off a few
+projecting corners by which the climber had held, and by effacing a few
+notches into which he had thrust his toe-points, they had rendered what
+had been merely difficult impracticable. I remarked that the huge
+kitchen chimney of the building,&mdash;a deep hollow recess which stretches
+across the entire gable, and in which, it is said, two thrashers once
+plied the flail for a whole winter,&mdash;bore less of the stain of recent
+smoke than it used to exhibit twenty years before; and inferred that
+there would be fewer wraith-lights seen from the castle at nights than
+in those days of <i>evil spirits</i> and illicit stills, when the cottars in
+the neighborhood sent more smuggled whiskey to market than any equal
+number of the inhabitants of almost any other district in the north. It
+has been long alleged that there existed a close connection between the
+more ghostly spirits of the country and its distilled ones. "How do you
+account," 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 the
+almost total disappearance of the ghosts and fairies that used to be so
+common in your young days?" "Tak my word for 't, minister," replied the
+shrewd old man, "it's a' owing to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_413" id="Page_413">[Pg 413]</a></span> the <i>tea</i>; when the <i>tea</i> cam in, the
+ghaists an' fairies gaed out. Weel do I mind when at a' our neeborly
+meetings,&mdash;bridals, christenings, lyke-wakes, an' the like,&mdash;we
+entertained ane anither wi' rich nappy ale; an' whan the verra dowiest
+o' 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 losing
+the nappy we lost baith ghaists an' fairies."</p>
+
+<p>Quitting the ruin, I walked on along the shore, tracing the sandstone as
+I went, as it rises from lower to higher beds; and where it ceases to
+crop out at the surface, and gravel and the red boulder-clays take the
+place of rock, I struck up the hill, and, traversing the parishes of
+Resolis and Cromarty, got home early in the evening. I had seen and done
+scarcely half what I had intended seeing or doing: alas, that in
+reference to every walk which I have yet attempted to tread, this
+special statement should be so invariably true to fact!&mdash;alas, that all
+my full purposes, should be coupled with but half realizations! But I
+had at least the satisfaction, that though I had accomplished little, I
+had enjoyed much; and it is something, though not all, nor nearly all,
+that, since time is passing, it should pass happily. In my next chapter
+I 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 I
+have thus inverted the order of <i>time</i>, by placing it last, that I may
+be able so to preserve the order of <i>space</i> as to render the tract
+travelled over in my narrative continuous from Edinburgh to the northern
+extremity of Pomona.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_414" id="Page_414">[Pg 414]</a></span></p>
+<h3>CHAPTER X.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="hang">Recovered Health&mdash;Journey to the Orkneys&mdash;Aboard the Steamer at
+Wick&mdash;Mr. Bremner&mdash;Masonry of the Harbor of Wick&mdash;The greatest
+Blunders result from good Rules misapplied&mdash;Mr. Bremner's Theory
+about sea-washed Masonry&mdash;Singular Fracture of the Rock near
+Wick&mdash;The Author's mode of accounting for it&mdash;"Simple but not
+obvious" Thinking&mdash;Mr. Bremner's mode of making stone Erections
+under Water&mdash;His exploits in raising foundered Vessels&mdash;Aspect of
+the Orkneys&mdash;- The ungracious Schoolmaster&mdash;In the Frith of
+Kirkwall&mdash;Cathedral of St. Magnus&mdash;Appearance of Kirkwall&mdash;Its
+"perished suppers"&mdash;Its ancient Palaces&mdash;Blunder of the Scotch
+Aristocracy&mdash;The patronate Wedge&mdash;Breaking Ground in Orkney&mdash;Minute
+gregarious Coccosteus&mdash;True Position of the Coccosteus' Eyes&mdash;Ruins
+of one of Cromwell's Forts&mdash;Antiquities of Orkney&mdash;The
+Cathedral&mdash;Its Sculptures&mdash;The Mysterious Cell&mdash;Prospect from the
+Tower&mdash;Its Chimes&mdash;Ruins of Castle Patrick. </p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">A twelvemonth</span> had gone by since a lingering indisposition, which bore
+heavily on the springs of life, compelled me to postpone a
+long-projected journey to the Orkneys, and led me to visit, instead,
+rich level England, with its well-kept roads and smooth railways, along
+which the enfeebled invalid can travel far without fatigue. I had now
+got greatly stronger; and, if not quite up to my old thirty miles per
+day, nor altogether so bold a cragsman as I had been only a few years
+before, 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 least
+glancing over, if not exploring, the fossiliferous deposits of the
+Orkneys, trusting that an eye somewhat practised in the formations
+mainly developed in these islands might enable me to make some amends
+for seeing comparatively little, by seeing well. I took coach at
+Invergordon for Wick early in the morning of Friday; and, after a weary
+ride, in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_415" id="Page_415">[Pg 415]</a></span> a bleak gusty day, that sent the dust of the road whirling
+about the ears of the sorely-tossed "outsides," with whom I had taken my
+chance, I alighted in Wick, at the inn-door, a little after six o'clock
+in the evening. The following morning was wet and dreary; and a tumbling
+sea, raised by the wind of the previous day and night, came rolling into
+the bay; but the waves bore with them no steamer; and when, some five
+hours after the expected time, she also came rolling in, her darkened
+and weather-beaten sides and rigging gave evidence that her passage from
+the south had been no holiday trip. Impatient, however, of looking out
+upon the sea for hours, from under dripping eaves, and through the
+dimmed panes of streaming windows, I got aboard with about half-a-dozen
+other passengers; and while the Wick goods were in the course of being
+transferred to two large boats alongside, we lay tossing in the open
+bay. The work of raising box and package was superintended by a tall
+elderly gentleman from the shore, peculiarly Scotch in his
+appearance,&mdash;the steam company's agent for this part of the country.</p>
+
+<p>"That," said an acquaintance, pointing to the agent, "is a very
+extraordinary man,&mdash;in his own special walk, one of the most
+original-minded, and at the same time most thoroughly practical, you
+perhaps ever saw. That is Mr. Bremner of Wick, known now all over
+Britain for his success in raising foundered vessels, when every one
+else gives them up. In the lifting of vast weights, or the overcoming
+the <i>vis inerti&aelig;</i> of the hugest bodies, nothing ever baffles Mr.
+Bremner. But come, I must introduce you to him. He takes an interest in
+your peculiar science, and is familiar with your geological writings."</p>
+
+<p>I was accordingly introduced to Mr. Bremner, and passed, in his company
+the half-hour which we spent in the bay, in a way that made me wish the
+time doubled. I had been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_416" id="Page_416">[Pg 416]</a></span> struck by the peculiar style of masonry
+employed in the harbor of Wick, and by its rock-like strength. The gray
+ponderous stones of the flagstone series of which it is built, instead
+of 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 a
+pail or barrel, so that at some little distance the work looks as if
+formed of upright piles or beams jambed fast together. I had learned
+that Mr. Bremner had been the builder, and adverted to the peculiarity
+of his style of building. "You have given a vertical tilt to your
+strata," I said: "most men would have preferred the horizontal position.
+It used to be regarded as one of the standing rules of my old
+profession, that the 'broad bed of a stone' is the best, and should be
+always laid 'below.'" "A good rule for the land," replied Mr. Bremner,
+"but no good rule for the sea. The greatest blunders are almost always
+perpetrated through the misapplication of good rules. On a coast like
+ours, where boulders of a ton weight are rolled about with every storm
+like pebbles, these stones, if placed on what a workman would term their
+best beds, would be scattered along the shore like sea-wrack, by the
+gales of a single winter. In setting aside the prejudice," continued Mr.
+Bremner, "that what is indisputably the best bed for a stone on dry land
+is also the best bed in the water on an exposed coast, I reasoned
+thus:&mdash;The surf that dashes along the beach in times of tempest, and
+that 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 a
+re&auml;ctive impetus in the opposite direction,&mdash;the effect of the backward
+rebound, and of its own weight, when raised by these propelling forces
+above its average level of surface. True, it is all this; but it is also
+something more. As its white breadth of foam indicates, it is a subtile
+mixture of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_417" id="Page_417">[Pg 417]</a></span> water and <i>air</i>, with a powerful <i>upward</i> action,&mdash;a
+consequence of the air struggling to effect its escape; and this upward
+action must be taken into account in our calculations, as certainly as
+the other and more generally recognized actions. In striking against a
+piece of building, this subtile mixture dashes through the interstices
+into the interior of the masonry, and, filling up all its cavities, has
+by its upward action, a tendency to <i>set the work afloat</i>. And the
+broader the beds of the stones, of course the more extensive are the
+surfaces which it has to act upon. One of these flat flags, ten feet by
+four, and a foot in thickness, would present to this upheaving force, if
+placed on end, a superficies of but <i>four</i> square feet; whereas, if
+placed on its broader base, it would present to it a superficies of
+<i>forty</i> square feet. Obviously, then, with regard to this a&euml;rial
+upheaving force, that acts upon the masonry in a direction in which no
+precautions are usually adopted to bind it fast,&mdash;for the existence of
+the force itself is not taken into account,&mdash;the greater bed of the
+stone must be just ten times over a worse bed than its lesser one; and
+on a tempestuous foam-encircled coast such as ours, this a&euml;rial
+upheaving force is in reality, though the builder may not know it, one
+of the most formidable forces with which he had to deal. And so, on
+these principles, I ventured to set my stones on end,&mdash;on what was
+deemed their <i>worst</i>, not their <i>best</i> beds,&mdash;wedging them all fast
+together, like staves in an anker; and there, to the scandal of all the
+old rules, are they fast wedged still, firm as a rock." It was no
+ordinary man that could have originated such reasonings on such a
+subject, or that could have thrown himself so boldly, and to such
+practical effect, on the conclusions to which they led.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bremner adverted, in the course of our conversation, to a singular
+appearance among the rocks a little to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_418" id="Page_418">[Pg 418]</a></span> the east and south of the town
+of Wick, that had not, he said, attracted the notice it deserved. The
+solid rock had been fractured by some tremendous blow, dealt to it
+externally at a considerable height over the sea-level, and its detached
+masses scattered about like the stones of an ill-built harbor broken up
+by a storm. The force, whatever its nature, had been enormously great.
+Blocks of some thirty or forty tons weight had been torn from out the
+solid strata, and piled up in ruinous heaps, as if the compact precipice
+had been a piece of loose brickwork, or had been driven into each other,
+as if, instead of being composed of perhaps the hardest and toughest
+sedimentary rock in the country, they had been formed of sun-dried clay.
+"I brought," continued Mr. Bremner, "one of your itinerant geological
+lecturers to the spot, to get his opinion; but he could say nothing
+about the appearance: it was not in his books." "I suspect," I replied,
+"the phenomenon lies quite as much within your own province as within
+that of the geological lecturer. It is in all probability an
+illustration, on a large scale, of those floating forces with which you
+operate on your foundered vessels, joined to the forces, laterally
+exerted, by which you drag them towards the shore. When the sea stood
+higher, or the land lower, in the eras of the raised beaches, along what
+is now Caithness, the abrupt mural precipices by which your coast here
+is skirted must have secured a very considerable depth of water up to
+the very edge of the land;&mdash;your coast-line must have resembled the side
+of a mole or wharf: and in that glacial period to which the thick
+deposit of boulder-clay immediately over your harbor yonder belongs,
+icebergs of very considerable size must not unfrequently have brushed
+the brows of your precipices. An iceberg from eighty to a hundred feet
+in thickness, and perhaps half a square mile in area, could<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_419" id="Page_419">[Pg 419]</a></span> not, in
+this old state of things, have come in contact with these cliffs without
+first catching the ground outside; and such an iceberg, propelled by a
+fierce storm from the north-east, could not fail to lend the cliff with
+which it came in collision a tremendous blow. You will find that your
+shattered precipice marks, in all probability, the scene of a collision
+of this character: some hard-headed iceberg must have set itself to run
+down the land, and got wrecked upon it for its pains." My theory, though
+made somewhat in the dark,&mdash;for I had no opportunity of seeing the
+broken precipice until after my return from Orkney,&mdash;seemed to satisfy
+Mr. Bremner; nor, on a careful survey of the phenomenon, the solution of
+which it attempted, did I find occasion to modify or give it up.</p>
+
+<p>With just knowledge enough of Mr. Bremner's peculiar province to
+appreciate his views, I was much impressed by their broad and practical
+simplicity; and bethought me, as we conversed, that the character of the
+thinking, which, according to Addison, forms the staple of all writings
+of genius, and which he defines as "simple but not obvious," is a
+character which equally applies to <i>all</i> good thinking, whatever its
+special department. Power rarely resides in ingenious complexities: it
+seems to eschew in every walk the elaborately attenuated and razor-edged
+mode of thinking,&mdash;the thinking akin to that of the old metaphysical
+poets,&mdash;and to select the broad and massive style. Hercules, in all the
+representations of him which I have yet seen, is the <i>broad</i> Hercules. I
+was 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 obvious
+contrivances, which had a strong air of practicability about them, he
+could lay down his erection, course by course, inshore, in a floating
+caisson of peculiar construction, beginning a little beyond the low-ebb
+line, and warping out his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_420" id="Page_420">[Pg 420]</a></span> work piecemeal, as it sank, till it had
+reached its proper place, in, if necessary, from ten to twelve fathoms
+water, 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 would
+be obviated, he said, by the contrivance, and a solidity given to the
+work otherwise impossible in the circumstances: the stones could be laid
+in his floating caisson with a care as deliberate as on the land. Some
+of the anecdotes which he communicated to me on this occasion, connected
+with his numerous achievements in weighing up foundered vessels, or in
+floating off wrecked or stranded ones, were of singular interest; and I
+regretted that they should not be recorded in an autobiographical
+memoir. Not a few of them were humorously told, and curiously
+illustrative of that general ignorance regarding the "strength of
+materials" in which the scientific world has been too strangely suffered
+to lie, in this the world's most mechanical age; so that what ought to
+be questions of strict calculation are subjected to the guessings of a
+mere common sense, far from adequate, in many cases, to their proper
+resolution. "I once raised a vessel," said Mr. Bremner,&mdash;"a large
+collier, chock-full of coal,&mdash;which an English projector had actually
+engaged to raise with huge bags of India rubber, inflated with air. But
+the bags, of course taxed far beyond their strength, collapsed or burst;
+and so, when I succeeded in bringing the vessel up, through the
+employment of more adequate means, I got not only ship and cargo, but
+also a great deal of good India rubber to boot." Only a few months after
+I enjoyed the pleasure of this interview with the Brindley of Scotland,
+he was called south, to the achievement of his greatest feat in at least
+one special department,&mdash;a feat generally recognized and appreciated as
+the most herculean<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_421" id="Page_421">[Pg 421]</a></span> of its kind ever performed,&mdash;the raising and warping
+off of the Great Britain steamer from her perilous bed in the sand of an
+exposed bay on the coast of Ireland. I was conscious of a feeling of
+sadness as, in parting with Mr. Bremner, I reflected, that a man so
+singularly gifted should have been suffered to reach a period of life
+very considerably advanced, in employments little suited to exert his
+extraordinary faculties, and which persons of the ordinary type could
+have performed as well. Napoleon,&mdash;himself possessed of great
+genius,&mdash;could have estimated more adequately than our British rulers
+the value of such a man. Had Mr. Bremner been born a Frenchman, he would
+not now be the mere agent of a steam company, in a third-rate seaport
+town.</p>
+
+<p>The rain had ceased, but the evening was gloomy and chill; and the
+Orcades, which, on clearing the Caithness coast, came as fully in view
+as the haze permitted, were enveloped in an undress of cloud and spray,
+that showed off their flat low features to no advantage at all. The
+bold, picturesque Hebrides look well in any weather; but the level
+Orkney 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-dress
+auxiliaries of bright sun and clear sky, to render their charms patent.
+Then, however, in their sleek coats of emerald and purple, and
+surrounded by their blue sparkling sounds and seas, with here a long
+dark wall of rock, that casts its shadow over the breaking waves, and
+there a light fringe of sand and broken shells, they are, as I
+afterwards ascertained, not without their genuine beauties. But had they
+shared in the history of the neighboring Shetland group, that, according
+to some of the older historians, were suffered to lie uninhabited for
+centuries after their first discovery, I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_422" id="Page_422">[Pg 422]</a></span> would rather have been
+disposed to marvel this evening, not that they had been unappropriated
+so long, but that they had been appropriated at all. The late member for
+Orkney, not yet unseated by his Shetland opponent, was one of the
+passengers in the steamboat; and, with an elderly man, an ambitious
+schoolmaster, strongly marked by the peculiarities of the genuine
+dominie, who had introduced himself to him as a brother voyager, he was
+pacing the quarter-deck, evidently doing his best to exert, under an
+unintermittent hot-water <i>douche</i> of queries, the patient courtesy of a
+Member 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 liberty
+with the schoolmaster that the schoolmaster had taken with the Member, I
+addressed to him a simple query in turn. But I had mistaken my man; the
+schoolmaster permitted to unknown passengers in humble russet no such
+sort of familiarities as those permitted by the Member; and so I met
+with 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 among
+boys for some twenty or thirty years, exerting over them all the while a
+despotic authority, without contracting those peculiarities of character
+which the master-spirits,&mdash;our Scots, Lambs, and Goldsmiths,&mdash;have
+embalmed with such exquisite truth in our literature, and which have
+hitherto militated against the practical realization of those
+unexceptionable abstractions in behalf of the status and standing of the
+teacher of youth which have been originated by men less in the habit of
+looking about them than the poets. It is worth while remarking how
+invariably the strong common sense of the Scotch people<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_423" id="Page_423">[Pg 423]</a></span> has run every
+scheme under water that, confounding the character of the "village
+schoolmaster" with that of the "village clergyman," would demand from
+the schoolmaster the clergyman's work.</p>
+
+<p>We crossed the opening of the Pentland Frith, with its white surges and
+dark boiling eddies, and saw its twin lighthouses rising tall and
+ghostly amid the fog on our lee. We then skirted the shores of South
+Ronaldshay, of Burra, of Copinshay, and of Deerness; and, after doubling
+Moul Head, and threading the sound which separates Shapinshay from the
+Mainland, we entered the Frith of Kirkwall, and caught, amid the
+uncertain light of the closing evening, our earliest glimpse of the
+ancient Cathedral of St. Magnus. It seems at first sight as if standing
+solitary, a huge hermit-like erection, at the bottom of a low bay,&mdash;for
+its humbler companions do not make themselves visible until we have
+entered the harbor by a mile or two more, when we begin to find that it
+occupies, not an uninhabited tract of shore, but the middle of a gray
+straggling town, nearly a mile in length. We had just light enough to
+show us, on landing, that the main thoroughfare of the place, very
+narrow and very crooked, had been laid out, ere the country beyond had
+got highways, or the proprietors carts and carriages, with an exclusive
+eye to the necessities of the foot-passenger,&mdash;that many of the older
+houses presented, as is common in our northern towns, their gables to
+the street, and had narrow slips of closes running down along their
+fronts,&mdash;and that as we receded from the harbor, a goodly portion of
+their number bore about them an air of respectability, long maintained,
+but now apparently touched by decay. I saw, in advance of one of the
+buildings, several vigorous-looking planes, about forty feet in height,
+which, fenced by tall houses in front and rear, and flanked by the
+tortuosities of the street, had apparently forgotten that they were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_424" id="Page_424">[Pg 424]</a></span> in
+Orkney, and had grown quite as well as the planes of public
+thoroughfares grow elsewhere. After an abortive attempt or two made in
+other quarters, I was successful in procuring lodgings for a few days in
+the house of a respectable widow lady of the place, where I found
+comfort and quiet on very moderate terms. The cast of faded gentility
+which attached to so many of the older houses of Kirkwall,&mdash;remnants of
+a time when the wealthier Udallers of the Orkneys used to repair to
+their capital at the close of autumn, to while away in each other's
+society their dreary winters,&mdash;reminded me of the poet Malcolm's "Sketch
+of the Borough,"&mdash;a portrait for which Kirkwall is known to have
+sat,&mdash;and of the great revolution effected in its evening parties, when
+"tea and turn-out" yielded its place to "tea and turn-in." But the
+churchyard of the place, which I had seen, as I passed along, glimmering
+with all its tombstones in the uncertain light, was all that remained to
+represent those "great men of the burgh," who, according to the poet,
+used to "pop in on its card and dancing assemblies, about the eleventh
+hour, resplendent in top-boots and scarlet vests," or of its
+"suppression-of-vice sisterhood of moral old maids," who kept all their
+neighbors right by the terror of their tongues. I was somewhat in a
+mood, after my chill and hungry voyage, to recall with a hankering of
+regret the vision of its departed suppers, so luxuriously described in
+the "Sketch,"&mdash;suppers at which "large rounds of boiled beef smothered
+in cabbage, smoked geese, mutton hams, roasts of pork, and dishes of
+dog-fish and of Welsh rabbits melted in their own fat, were diluted by
+copious draughts of strong home-brewed ale, and etherealized by gigantic
+bowls of rum punch." But the past, which is not ours, who, alas, can
+recall! And, after discussing a juicy steak and a modest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_425" id="Page_425">[Pg 425]</a></span> cup of tea, I
+found I could regard with the indifferency of a philosopher, the
+perished suppers of Kirkwall.</p>
+
+<p>I quitted my lodgings for church next morning about three-quarters of an
+hour ere the service commenced; and, finding the doors shut, sauntered
+up the hill that rises immediately over the town. The thick gloomy
+weather had passed with the night; and a still, bright, clear-eyed
+Sabbath looked cheerily down on green isle and blue sea. I was quite
+unprepared by any previous description, for the imposing assemblage of
+ancient buildings which Kirkwall presents full in the foreground, when
+viewed from the road which ascends along this hilly slope to the
+uplands. So thickly are they massed together, that, seen from one
+special point of view, they seem a portion of some magnificent city in
+ruins,&mdash;some such city though in a widely different style of
+architecture, as Palmyra or Baalbec. The Cathedral of St. Magnus rises
+on the right, the castle-palace of Earl Patrick Stuart on the left, the
+bishop's palace in the space between; and all three occupy sites so
+contiguous, that a distance of some two or three hundred yards abreast
+gives the proper angle for taking in the whole group at a glance. I know
+no such group elsewhere in Scotland. The church and palace of Linlithgow
+are in such close proximity, that, seen together, relieved against the
+blue gleam of their lake, they form one magnificent pile; but we have
+here a taller, and, notwithstanding its Saxon plainness, a nobler
+church, than that of the southern burgh, and at least one palace more.
+And the associations connected with the church, and at least one of the
+palaces ascend to a remoter and more picturesque antiquity. The
+castle-palace of Earl Patrick dates from but the time of James the
+Sixth; but in the palace of the bishop, old grim Haco died, after his
+defeat at Largs, "of grief," says Buchanan, "for the loss of his army,
+and of a valiant youth his relation;" and in the ancient Cathedral,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_426" id="Page_426">[Pg 426]</a></span> his
+body, previous to its removal to Norway, was interred for a winter. The
+church and palace belong to the obscure dawn of the national history,
+and were Norwegian for centuries before they were Scotch.</p>
+
+<p>As I was coming down the hill at a snail's pace, I was overtaken by a
+countryman on his way to church. "Ye'll hae come," he said, addressing
+me, "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 no
+sure he'll be our Member next time. The Voluntaries yonder, ye see,"
+jerking his head, as he spoke, in the direction of the United Secession
+chapel of the place, "are awfu' strong and unco radical; and the Free
+Kirk folk will soon be as bad as them. But I belong to the
+Establishment; and I side wi' Dundas." The aristocracy of Scotland
+committed, I am afraid, a sad blunder when they attempted strengthening
+their influence as a class by seizing hold of the Church patronages.
+They have fared somewhat like those sailors of Ulysses who, in seeking
+to appropriate their master's wealth, let out the winds upon themselves;
+and there is now, in consequence, a perilous voyage and an uncertain
+landing before them. It was the patronate wedge that struck from off the
+Scottish Establishment at least nine-tenths of the Dissenters of the
+kingdom,&mdash;its Secession bodies, its Relief body, and, finally, its Free
+Church denomination,&mdash;comprising in their aggregate amount a great and
+influential majority of the Scotch people. Our older Dissenters,&mdash;a
+circumstance inevitable to their position as such,&mdash;have been thrown
+into the movement party: the Free Church, in her present transition
+state, sits loose to all the various political sections of the country;
+but her natural tendency is towards the movement party also; and
+already, in consequence, do our Scottish aristocracy possess greatly
+less political influence in the kingdom of which they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_427" id="Page_427">[Pg 427]</a></span> own almost all
+the soil, than that wielded by their brethren the Irish and English
+aristocracy in their respective divisions of the empire. Were the
+representation of England and Ireland as liberal as that of Scotland,
+and as little influenced by the aristocracy, Conservatism, on the
+passing of the Reform Bill, might have taken leave of office for
+evermore. And yet neither the English nor Irish are naturally so
+Conservative as the Scotch. The patronate wedge, like that appropriated
+by Achan, has been disastrous to the people, for it has lost to them the
+great 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 work
+more serious evil to those by whom it was originally coveted,&mdash;"evil to
+themselves and all their house." As I approached the Free Church, a
+squat, sun-burned, carnal-minded "old wee wifie," who seemed passing
+towards the Secession place of worship, after looking wistfully at my
+gray maud, and concluding for certain that I could not be other than a
+Southland drover, came up to me, and asked, in a cautious whisper, "Will
+ye 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 Church
+folk in our immediate neighborhood, who would scarce have tolerated
+Sabbath trading in a Seceder, tucked up her little blue cloak over her
+head, and hied away to the chapel.</p>
+
+<p>In the Free Church pulpit I recognized an old friend, to whom I
+introduced myself at the close of the service, and by whom I was
+introduced, in turn, to several intelligent members of his session, to
+whose kindness I owed, on the following day, introductions to some of
+the less accessible curiosities of the place. I rose betimes on the
+morning of Monday, that I might have leisure enough before me to see
+them all, and broke my first ground in Orkney as a geologist in a quarry
+a few hundred yards to the south and east<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_428" id="Page_428">[Pg 428]</a></span> of the town. It is strange
+enough how frequently the explorer in the Old Red finds himself
+restricted in a locality to well nigh a single organism,&mdash;an effect,
+probably, of some gregarious instinct in the ancient fishes of this
+formation, similar to that which characterizes so many of the fishes of
+the present time, or of some peculiarity in their constitution, which
+made each choose for itself a peculiar habitat. In this quarry, though
+abounding in broken remains, I found scarce a single fragment which did
+not belong to an exceedingly minute species of Coccosteus, of which my
+first 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 from
+its general proportions, had set down as the young of the <i>Coccosteus
+cuspidatus</i>. Its apparent gregariousness, too, quite as marked at Thurso
+as in this quarry, had assisted, on the strength of an obvious enough
+analogy, in leading to the conclusion. There are several species of the
+existing fish, well known on our coasts, that, though solitary when
+fully grown, are gregarious when young. The coal-fish, which as the
+sillock of a few inches in length congregates by thousands, but as the
+colum-saw of from two and a half to three feet is a solitary fish, forms
+a familiar instance; and I had inferred that the Coccosteus, found
+solitary, in most instances, when at its full size, had, like the
+coal-fish, congregated in shoals when in a state of immaturity. But a
+more careful examination of the specimens leads me to conclude that this
+minute gregarious Coccosteus, so abundant in this locality that its
+fragments thickly speckle the strata for hundreds of yards together&mdash;(in
+one instance I found the dorsal plates of four individuals crowded into
+a piece of flag barely six inches square)&mdash;was in reality a distinct
+species. Though not more than one-fourth the size, measured linearly, of
+the <i>Coccosteus decipiens</i>, its plates exhibit<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_429" id="Page_429">[Pg 429]</a></span> as many of those lines
+of increment which gave to the occipital buckler of the creature its
+tortoise-like appearance, and through which plates of the buckler
+species were at first mistaken for those of a Chelonian, as are
+exhibited by plates of the larger kinds, with an area ten times as
+great; its tubercles, too, some of them of microscopic size, are as
+numerous;&mdash;evidences, I think,&mdash;when we take into account that in the
+bulkier species the lines and tubercles increased in number with the
+growth of the plates, and that, once formed, they seem never to have
+been affected by the subsequent enlargement of the creature,&mdash;that this
+ichthyolite was not an <i>immature</i>, but really a <i>miniature</i> Coccosteus.
+We may see on the plates of the full-grown Coccosteus, as on the shells
+of bivalves, such as <i>Cardium echinatum</i>, or on those of spiral
+univalves, such as <i>Buccinum undatum</i>, the diminutive markings which
+they bore when the creature was young; and on the plates of this species
+we may detect a regular gradation of tubercles from the microscopic to
+the minute, as we may see on the plates of the larger kinds a regular
+gradation from the minute to the fall-sized. The average length of the
+dwarf Coccosteus of Thurso and Kirkwall, taken from the snout to the
+pointed termination of the dorsal plate, ranges from one and a-half to
+two inches; its entire length from head to tail probably from three to
+four. It was from one of Mr. Dick's specimens of this species that I
+first determined the true position of the eyes of the Coccosteus,&mdash;a
+position which some of my lately-found ichthyolites conclusively
+demonstrate, and which Agassiz, in his restoration, deceived by
+ill-preserved specimens, has fixed at a point considerably more lateral
+and posterior, and where eyes would have been of greatly less use to the
+animal. About a field's breadth below this quarry of the <i>Coccosteus
+minor</i>,&mdash;if I may take the liberty of extemporizing a name, until such
+time as some person<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_430" id="Page_430">[Pg 430]</a></span> better qualified furnishes the creature with a more
+characteristic one,&mdash;there are the remains, consisting of fosse and
+rampart, with a single cannon lying red and honeycombed amid the ruins,
+of one of Cromwell's forts, built to protect the town against the
+assaults of an enemy from the sea. In the few and stormy years during
+which this ablest of British governors ruled over Scotland, he seems to
+have exercised a singularly vigilant eye. The claims on his protection
+of even the remote Kirkwall did not escape him.</p>
+
+<p>The antiquities of the burgh next engaged me; and, as became its dignity
+and importance, I began with the Cathedral, a building imposing enough
+to rank among the most impressive of its class anywhere, but whose
+peculiar <i>setting</i> in this remote northern country, joined to the
+associations of its early history with the Scandinavian Rollos, Sigurds,
+Einars, and Hacos of our dingier chronicles, serve greatly to enhance
+its interest. It is a noble pile, built of a dark-tinted Old Red
+Sandstone,&mdash;a stone which, though by much too sombre for adequately
+developing the elegancies of the Grecian or Roman architecture, to which
+a light delicate tone of color seems indispensable, harmonizes well with
+the massier and less florid styles of the Gothic. The round arch of that
+ancient Norman school which was at one time so generally recognized as
+Saxon, prevails in the edifice, and marks out its older portions. A few
+of the arches present on their ringstones those characteristic toothed
+and zig-zag ornaments that are of not unfamiliar occurrence on the round
+squat doorways of the older parish churches of England; but by much the
+greater number exhibit merely a few rude mouldings, that bend over
+ponderous columns and massive capitals, unfretted by the tool of the
+carver. Though of colossal magnificence, the exterior of the edifice
+yields in effect, as in all true Gothic buildings,&mdash;for the Gothic is
+greatest in what the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_431" id="Page_431">[Pg 431]</a></span> Grecian is least,&mdash;to the sombre sublimity of the
+interior. The nave, flanked by the dim deep aisles, and by a double row
+of smooth-stemmed gigantic columns, supporting each a double tier of
+ponderous arches, and the transepts, with their three tiers of small
+Norman windows, and their bold semi-circular arcs, demurely gay with
+toothed or angular carvings, that speak of the days of Rolf and
+Torfeinar, are singularly fine,&mdash;far superior to aught else of the kind
+in Scotland; and a happy accident has added greatly to their effect. A
+rare Byssus,&mdash;the <i>Byssus aeruginosa</i> of Linn&aelig;us,&mdash;the <i>Leprasia
+aeruginosa</i> of modern botanists,&mdash;one of those gloomy vegetables of the
+damp cave and dark mine whose true habitat is rather under than upon the
+earth, has crept over arch, and column, and broad bare wall, and given
+to well nigh the entire interior of the building a close-fitted lining
+of dark velvety green, which, like the Attic rust of an ancient medal,
+forms an appropriate covering to the sculpturings which it enwraps
+without concealing, and harmonizes with at once the dim light and the
+antique architecture. Where the sun streamed upon it, high over head,
+through the narrow windows above, it reminded me of a pall of rich green
+velvet. It seems subject, on some of the lower mouldings and damper
+recesses, especially amid the tombs and in the aisles, to a decomposing
+mildew, which eats into it in fantastic map-like lines of mingled black
+and gray, so resembling Runic fret-work, that I had some difficulty in
+convincing myself that the tracery which it forms,&mdash;singularly
+appropriate to the architecture,&mdash;was not the effect of design. The
+choir and chancel of the edifice, which at the time of my visit were
+still employed as the parish church of Kirkwall, and had become a "world
+too wide" for the shrunken congregation, are more modern and ornate than
+the nave and transepts; and the round arch gives place, in at least
+their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_432" id="Page_432">[Pg 432]</a></span> windows, to the pointed one. But the unique consistency of the
+pile is scarce at all disturbed by this mixture of styles. It is truly
+wonderful how completely the forgotten architects of the darker ages
+contrived to avoid those gross offences against good taste and artistic
+feeling into which their successors of a greatly more enlightened time
+are continually falling. Instead of idly courting ornament for its own
+sake, they must have had as their proposed object the production of some
+definite effect, or the development of some special sentiment. It was
+perhaps well for them, too, that they were not so overladen as our
+modern architects with the <i>learning</i> of their profession. Extensive
+knowledge requires great judgment to guide it. If that high genius which
+can impart its own homogeneous character to very various materials be
+wanting, the more multifarious a man's ideas become, the more is he in
+danger of straining after a heterogeneous patch-work excellence, which
+is but excellence in its components, and deformity as a whole. Every new
+vista opened up to him on what has been produced in his art elsewhere
+presents to him merely a new avenue of error. His mind becomes a mere
+damaged kaleidoscope, full of little broken pieces of the fair and the
+exquisite, but devoid of that nicely reflective machinery which can
+alone cast the fragments into shapes of a chaste and harmonious beauty.</p>
+
+<p>Judging from the sculptures of St. Magnus, the stone-cutter seems to
+have had but an indifferent command of his trade in Orkney, when there
+was a good deal known about it elsewhere. And yet the rudeness of his
+work here, much in keeping with the ponderous simplicity of the
+architecture, serves but to link on the pile to a more venerable
+antiquity, and speaks less of the inartificial than of the remote. I saw
+a grotesque hatchment high up among the arches, that, with the uncouth
+carvings below,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_433" id="Page_433">[Pg 433]</a></span> served to throw some light on the introduction into
+ecclesiastical edifices of those ludicrous sculptures that seem so
+incongruously foreign to the proper use and character of such places.
+The painter had set himself, with, I doubt not, fair moral intent, to
+exhibit a skeleton wrapped up in a winding-sheet; but, like the unlucky
+artist immortalized by Gifford, who proposed painting a lion, but
+produced merely a dog, his skill had failed in seconding his intentions,
+and, instead of achieving a Death in a shroud, he had achieved but a
+monkey grinning in a towel. His contemporaries, however, unlike those of
+Gifford's artist, do not seem to have found out the mistake, and so the
+betowelled monkey has come to hold a conspicuous place among the
+solemnities of the Cathedral. It does not seem difficult to conceive how
+unintentional ludicrosities of this nature, introduced into
+ecclesiastical erections in ages too little critical to distinguish
+between what the workman had purposed doing and what he had done, might
+come to be regarded, in a less earnest but more knowing age, as
+precedents for the introduction of the intentionally comic and
+grotesque. Innocent accidental monkeys in towels may have thus served to
+usher into serious neighborhoods monkeys in towels that were such with
+malice <i>prepense</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I was shown an opening in the masonry, rather more than a man's height
+from the floor, that marked where a square narrow cell, formed in the
+thickness of the wall, had been laid open a few years before. And in the
+cell there was found depending from the middle of the roof a rusty iron
+chain, with a bit of barley-bread attached. What could the chain and bit
+of bread have meant? Had they dangled in the remote past over some
+northern Ugolino? or did they form in their dark narrow cell, without
+air-hole or outlet, merely some of the reserve terrors of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_434" id="Page_434">[Pg 434]</a></span>
+Cathedral, efficient in bending to the authority of the Church the
+rebellious monk or refractory nun? Ere quitting the building, I scaled
+the great tower,&mdash;considerably less tall, it is said, than its
+predecessor, which was destroyed by lightning about two hundred years
+ago, but quite tall enough to command an extensive, and, though bare,
+not unimpressive prospect. Two arms of the sea, that cut so deeply into
+the mainland on its opposite sides as to narrow it into a flat neck
+little more than a mile and a half in breadth, stretch away in long
+vista, the one to the south, and the other to the north; and so
+immediately is the Cathedral perched on the isthmus between, as to be
+nearly equally conspicuous from both. It forms in each, to the
+inward-bound vessel, the terminal object in the landscape. There was not
+much to admire in the town immediately beneath, with its roofs of gray
+slate,&mdash;almost the only parts of it visible from this point of
+view,&mdash;and its bare treeless suburbs; nor yet in the tract of mingled
+hill and moor on either hand, into which the island expands from the
+narrow neck, like the two ends of a sand-glass; but the long withdrawing
+ocean-avenues between, that seemed approaching from south and north to
+kiss the feet of the proud Cathedral,&mdash;avenues here and there enlivened
+on their ground of deep blue by a sail, and fringed on the lee&mdash;for the
+wind blew freshly in the clear sunshine&mdash;with their border of dazzling
+white, were objects worth while climbing the tower to see. Ere my
+descent, my guide hammered out of the tower-bells, on my special behalf,
+somewhat, I daresay, to the astonishment of the burghers below, a set of
+chimes handed down entire, in all the notes, from the times of the
+monks, from which also the four fine bells of the Cathedral have
+descended as an heirloom to the burgh. The chimes would have delighted
+the heart of old Lisle Bowles, the poet of</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_435" id="Page_435">[Pg 435]</a></span>"Well-tun'd bell's enchanting harmony."<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>I could, however, have preferred listening to their music, though it
+seemed really very sweet, a few hundred yards further away; and the
+quiet clerical poet,&mdash;the restorer of the Sonnet in England, would, I
+doubt not, have been of the same mind. The oft-recurring tones of those
+bells that ring throughout his verse, and to which Byron wickedly
+proposed adding a <i>cap</i>, form but an ingredient of the poetry in which
+he describes them; and they are represented always as distant tones,
+that, while they mingle with the softer harmonies of nature, never
+overpower them.</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+"How sweet the tuneful bells responsive peal!<br />
+</p>
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<p class="poem">
+And, hark! with lessening cadence now they fall,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And now, along the white and level tide</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">They fling their melancholy music wide!</span><br />
+Bidding me many a tender thought recall<br />
+Of happy hours departed, and those years<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">When, from an antique tower, ere life's fair prime,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The mournful mazes of their mingling chime</span><br />
+First wak'd my wondering childhood into tears!"<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>From the Cathedral I passed to the mansion of Old Earl Patrick,&mdash;a
+stately ruin, in the more ornate castellated style of the sixteenth
+century. It stands in the middle of a dense thicket of what are <i>trying</i>
+to be trees, and have so far succeeded, that they conceal, on one of the
+sides, the lower story of the building, and rise over the <i>spring</i> of
+the large richly-decorated turrets. These last form so much nearer the
+base of the edifice than is common in our old castles, that they exhibit
+the appearance rather of hanging towers than of turrets,&mdash;of towers with
+their foundations cut away. The projecting windows, with their deep
+mouldings, square mullions, and cruciform shot-holes, are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_436" id="Page_436">[Pg 436]</a></span> rich
+specimens of their peculiar style; and, with the double-windowed turrets
+with which they range, they communicate a sort of <i>high-relief</i> effect
+to the entire erection, "the exterior proportions and ornaments of
+which," says Sir Walter Scott, in his Journal, "are very handsome."
+Though a roofless and broken ruin, with the rank grass waving on its
+walls, it is still a piece of very solid masonry, and must have been
+rather stiff working as a quarry. Some painstaking burgher had, I found,
+made a desperate attempt on one of the huge chimney lintels of the great
+hall of the erection,&mdash;an apartment which Sir Walter greatly admired,
+and in which he lays the scene in the "Pirate" between Cleveland and
+Jack Bunce, but the lintel, a curious example of what, in the exercise
+of a little Irish liberty, is sometimes termed a <i>rectilinear arch</i>,
+defied his utmost efforts; and, after half-picking out the keystone, he
+had to give it up in despair. The bishop's palace, of which a handsome
+old tower still remains tolerably entire, also served for a quarry in
+its day; and I was scarce sufficiently distressed to learn, that on
+almost 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 he
+had loosed out of the wall, to drop on the head of his companion, who
+stood watching for it below, and killed him on the spot.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_437" id="Page_437">[Pg 437]</a></span></p>
+<h3>CHAPTER XI.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="hang">The Bishop's Palace at Orkney&mdash;Haco the Norwegian&mdash;Icelandic
+Chronicle respecting his Expedition to Scotland&mdash;His Death&mdash;Removal
+of his Remains to Norway&mdash;Why Norwegian Invasion
+ceased&mdash;Straw-plaiting&mdash;The Lassies of Orkney&mdash;Orkney Type of
+Countenance&mdash;Celtic and Scandinavian&mdash;An accomplished
+Antiquary&mdash;Old Manuscripts&mdash;An old Tune-book&mdash;Manuscript Letter of
+Mary Queen of Scots&mdash;Letters of General Monck&mdash;The fearless
+Covenanter&mdash;Cave of the Rebels&mdash;Why the tragedy of "Gustavus Vasa"
+was prohibited&mdash;Quarry of Pickoquoy&mdash;Its Fossil Shells&mdash;Journey to
+Stromness&mdash;Scenery&mdash;Birth-place of Malcolm, the Poet&mdash;His
+History&mdash;One of his Poems&mdash;His Brother a Free Church Minister&mdash;New
+Scenery. </p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> "upper story" of the bishop's palace, in which grim old Haco
+died,&mdash;thanks to the economic burghers who converted the stately ruin
+into a quarry,&mdash;has wholly disappeared. Though the death of this last of
+the Norwegian invaders does not date more than ten years previous to the
+birth of the Bruce, it seems to belong, notwithstanding, to a different
+and greatly more ancient period of Scottish history; as if it came under
+the influence of a sort of a&euml;rial perspective, similar to that which
+makes a neighboring hill in a fog appear as remote as a distant mountain
+when the atmosphere is clearer. Our national wars with the English were
+rendered familiar to our country folk of the last age, and for centuries
+before by the old Scotch "<i>Makkaris,</i>" Barbour and Blind Harry, and in
+our own times by the glowing narratives of Sir Walter Scott,&mdash;magicians
+who, unlike those ancient sorcerers that used to darken the air with
+their incantations, possessed the rare power of dissipating<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_438" id="Page_438">[Pg 438]</a></span> the mists
+and vapors of the historic atmosphere, and rendering it transparent. But
+we had no such chroniclers of the time, though only half an age further
+removed into the past,</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+"When Norse and Danish galleys plied<br />
+Their oars within the Frith of Clyde,<br />
+And floated Haco's banner trim<br />
+Above Norweyan warriors grim,<br />
+Savage of heart and large of limb."<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>And hence the thick haze in which it is enveloped. Curiously enough,
+however, this period, during which the wild Scot had to contend with the
+still wilder wanderers of Scandinavia in fierce combats that he was too
+little skilful to record, and which appears so obscure and remote to his
+descendants, presents a phase comparatively near, and an outline
+proportionally sharp and well-defined to the intelligent peasantry of
+Iceland. <i>Their</i> Barbours and Blind Harries came a few ages sooner than
+ours, and the fog, in consequence, rose earlier; and so, while Scotch
+antiquaries of no mean standing can say almost nothing about the
+expedition or death-bed of Haco, even the humbler Icelanders, taught
+from their Sagas in the long winter nights, can tell how, harassed by
+anxiety and fatigue, the monarch sickened, and recovered, and sickened
+again; and how, dying in the bishop's palace, his body was interred for
+a winter in the Cathedral, and then borne in spring to the burying-place
+of his ancestors in Norway. The only clear vista on the death of Haco
+which 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 the
+monarch is still occasionally sought for in the Cathedral, I must
+introduce the reader. I quote from an extract containing the account of
+Haco's expedition against Scotland, which was translated from the
+original Icelandic by the Rev.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_439" id="Page_439">[Pg 439]</a></span> James Johnstone, chaplain to his
+Britannic Majesty's Envoy Extraordinary at the court of Denmark, and
+appeared in the "Edinburgh Magazine" for 1787.</p>
+
+<p>"King Haco," says the chronicler, "now in the seven and fortieth year of
+his reign, had spent the summer in watchfulness and anxiety. Being often
+called to deliberate with his captains, he had enjoyed little rest; and
+when 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 for
+three days. On the first day he walked about in his apartments; on the
+second he attended at the bishop's chapel to hear mass; and on the third
+he 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 himself
+shaved. Some nights after, he relapsed, and took again to his bed.
+During his sickness he ordered the Bible and Latin authors to be read to
+him. But finding his spirits were too much fatigued by reflecting on
+what he had heard, he desired Norwegian books might be read to him night
+and day: first the lives of saints; and, when they were ended, he made
+his 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 into
+consideration the pay to be given to his troops, and commanded that a
+merk of fine silver should be given to each courtier, and half a merk to
+each of the masters of the lights, chamberlain, and other attendants on
+his person. He ordered all the silver-plate belonging to his table to be
+weighed, and to be distributed if his standard silver fell short....
+King Haco received extreme unction on the night before the festival of
+St. Lucia. Thorgisl, Bishop of Stravanger, Gilbert, Bishop of Hainar,
+Henry, Bishop of Orkney, Albert Thorleif and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_440" id="Page_440">[Pg 440]</a></span> many other learned men,
+were present; and, before the unction, all present bade the king
+farewell with a kiss.... The festival of the Virgin St. Lucia happened
+on a Thursday; and on the Saturday after, the king's disorder increased
+to such a degree, that he lost the use of his speech; and at midnight
+Almighty God called King Haco out of this mortal life. This was matter
+of great grief to all those who attended, and to most of those who heard
+of the event. The following barons were present at the death of the
+king:&mdash;Briniolf Johnson, Erling Alfson, John Drottning, Ronald Urka, and
+some domestics who had been near the king's person during his illness.
+Immediately on the decease of the king, bishops and learned men were
+sent for to sing mass.... On Sunday the royal corpse was carried to the
+upper 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 the
+whole hall was illuminated. All the people came to see the body, which
+appeared beautiful and animated; and the king's countenance was as fair
+and ruddy as while he was alive. It was some alleviation of the deep
+sorrow of the beholders to see the corpse of their departed sovereign so
+decorated. High mass was then sung for the deceased. The nobility kept
+watch by the body during the night. On Monday the remains of King Haco
+were 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 choir
+of St. Magnus Church, near the steps leading to the shrine of St.
+Magnus, Earl of Orkney. The tomb was then closed, and a canopy was
+spread over it. It was also determined that watch should be kept over
+the king's grave all winter. At Christmas the bishop and Andrew Plytt
+furnished entertainments, as the king<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_441" id="Page_441">[Pg 441]</a></span> had directed; and good presents
+were given to all the soldiers. King Haco had given orders that his
+remains should be carried east to Norway, and buried near his fathers
+and relatives. Towards the end of winter, therefore, that great vessel
+which he had in the west was launched, and soon got ready. On Ash
+Wednesday the corpse of King Haco was taken out of the ground: this
+happened the third of the nones of March. The courtiers followed the
+corpse to Skalpeid, where the ship lay, and which was chiefly under the
+direction of the Bishop Thorgisl and Andrew Plytt. They put to sea on
+the first Saturday in Lent; but, meeting with hard weather, they steered
+for Silavog. From this place they wrote letters to Prince Magnus,
+acquainting him with the news, and then sailed for Bergen. They arrived
+at Laxavog before the festival of St. Benedict. On that day Prince
+Magnus rowed out to meet the corpse. The ship was brought near to the
+king's palace, and the body was carried up to a summer-house. Next
+morning the corpse was removed to Christ's Church, and was attended by
+Prince Magnus, the two queens, the courtiers, and the town's people. The
+body was then interred in the choir of Christ's Church; and Prince
+Magnus addressed a long and gracious speech to those who attended the
+funeral procession. All the multitude present were much affected, and
+expressed great sorrow of mind."</p>
+
+<p>So far the Icelandic chronicle. Each age has as certainly its own mode
+of telling its stories as of adjusting its dress or setting its cap; and
+the mode of this northern historian is somewhat prolix. I am not sure,
+however, whether I would not prefer the simple minuteness with which he
+dwells on every little circumstance, to that dissertative style of
+history characteristic of a more reflective age, that for series of
+facts substitutes bundles of theories.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_442" id="Page_442">[Pg 442]</a></span> Cowper well describes the
+historians of this latter school, and shows how, on selecting some
+little-known personage of a remote time as their hero,</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+"They disentangle from the puzzled skein<br />
+In which obscurity has wrapped them up,<br />
+The threads of politic and shrewd design<br />
+That ran through all his purposes, and charge<br />
+His mind with meanings that he never had,<br />
+Or, having, kept concealed."<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>I have seen it elaborately argued by a writer of this class, that those
+wasting incursions of the Northmen which must have been such terrible
+plagues to the southern and western countries of Europe, ceased in
+consequence of their conversion to Christianity; for that, under the
+humanizing influence of religion, they staid at home, and cultivated the
+arts of peace. But the hypothesis is, I fear, not very tenable.
+Christianity, in even a purer form than that in which it first found its
+way among the ancient Scandinavians, and when at least as generally
+recognized nationally as it ever was by the subjects of Haco, has failed
+to put down the trade of aggressive war. It did not prevent honest,
+obstinate George the Third from warring with the Americans or the
+French: it only led him to enjoin a day of thanksgiving when his troops
+had slaughtered a great many of the enemy, and to ordain a fast when the
+enemy had slaughtered, in turn, a great many of his troops. And Haco,
+who, though he preferred the lives of the saints, and even of his
+ancestors, 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 yet
+appears to have had as few compunctions visitings on the score of his
+Scottish war as George the Third on that of the French or the American
+one. Christianity, too, ere his invasion<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_443" id="Page_443">[Pg 443]</a></span> of Scotland, had been for a
+considerable time established in his dominions, and ought, were the
+theory 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 a
+century old. The true secret of the cessation of Norwegian invasion
+seems to have been the consolidation, under vigorous princes, of the
+countries which had lain open to it,&mdash;a circumstance which, in the later
+attempts of the invaders, led to results similar to those which broke
+the heart of tough old Haco, in the bishop's palace at Kirkwall.</p>
+
+<p>From the ruins I passed to the town, and spent a not uninstructive
+half-hour in sauntering along the streets in the quiet of the evening,
+acquainting myself with the general aspect of the people. I marked, as
+one of the peculiar features of the place, groups of tidily-dressed
+young women, engaged at the close-heads with their straw plait,&mdash;the
+prevailing manufacture of the town,&mdash;and enjoying at the same time the
+fresh air and an easy chat. The special contribution made by the lassies
+of 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 of
+these islands unites an aquiline but not prominent nose to an oval face.
+In the ordinary Scotch and English countenance, when the nose is
+aquiline it is also prominent, and the face is thin and angular, as if
+the additional height of the central feature had been given it at the
+expense of the cheeks, and of lateral shavings from off the chin. The
+hard Duke-of-Wellington face is illustrative of this type. But in the
+aquiline type of Orkney the countenance is softer and fuller, and, in at
+least the female face, the general contour greatly more handsome. Dr.
+Kombst, in his ethnographic map of Britain and Ireland,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_444" id="Page_444">[Pg 444]</a></span> gives to the
+coast of Caithness and the Shetland Islands a purely Scandinavian
+people, but to the Orkneys a mixed race, which he designates the
+Scandinavian-Gaelic. I would be inclined, however,&mdash;preferring rather to
+found on those traits of person and character that are still patent,
+than on the unauthenticated statements of uncertain history,&mdash;to regard
+the people as essentially one from the northern extremity of Shetland to
+the Ord Hill of Caithness. Beyond the Ord Hill, and on to the northern
+shores of the Frith of Cromarty, we find, though unnoted on the map, a
+different race,&mdash;a race strongly marked by the Celtic lineaments, and
+speaking the Gaelic tongue. On the southern side of the Frith, and
+extending on to the Bay of Munlochy, the purely Scandinavian race again
+occurs. The sailors of the Danish fleet which four years ago accompanied
+the Crown Prince in his expedition to the Faroe Islands were astonished
+when, on landing at Cromarty, they recognized in the people the familiar
+cast of countenance and feature that marked their country folk and
+relatives at home; and found that they were simply Scandinavians like
+themselves, who, having forgotten their Danish, spoke Scotch instead.
+Rather more than a mile to the west of the fishing village of Avoch
+there commences a Celtic district, which stretches on from Munlochy to
+the river Nairne; beyond which the Scandinavian and
+Teutonic-Scandinavian border that fringes the eastern coast of Scotland
+extends unbroken southwards through Moray, Banff, and Aberdeen, on to
+Forfar, Fife, the Lothians, and the Mearns. These two intercalated
+patches of Celtic people in the northern tract,&mdash;that extending from the
+Ord Hill to the Cromarty Frith, and that extending from the Bay of
+Munlochy to the Nairne,&mdash;still retaining, as they do, after the lapse of
+ages, a sharp distinctness of boundary in respect of language,
+character,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_445" id="Page_445">[Pg 445]</a></span> and personal appearance, are surely great curiosities. The
+writer of these chapters was born on the extreme edge of one of these
+patches, scarce a mile distant from a Gaelic-speaking population; and
+yet, though his humble ancestors were located on the spot for centuries,
+he can find trace among them of but one Celtic name; and their language
+was exclusively the Lowland Scotch. For many ages the two races, like
+oil and water, refused to mix.</p>
+
+<p>I spent the evening very agreeably with one of the Free Church elders of
+the place, Mr. George Petrie, an accomplished antiquary; and found that
+his love of the antique, joined to an official connection with the
+county, had cast into his keeping a number of curious old papers of the
+sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries,&mdash;not in the least
+connected, some of them, with the legal and civic records of the place,
+but which had somehow stuck around these, in their course of
+transmission from one age to another, as a float of brushwood in a river
+occasionally brings down along with it, entangled in its folds, uprooted
+plants and aquatic weeds, that would otherwise have disappeared in the
+cataracts and eddies of the upper reaches of the stream. Dead as they
+seemed, spotted with mildew, and fretted by the moth, I found them
+curiously charged with what had once been intellect and emotion, hopes
+and fears, stern business and light amusement. I saw, among the other
+manuscripts, a thin slip of a book, filled with jottings, in the antique
+square-headed style of notation, of old Scotch tunes, apparently the
+work of some musical county-clerk of Orkney in the seventeenth century;
+but the paper, in a miserable state of decay, was blotted crimson and
+yellow with the rotting damps, and the ink so faded, that the notation
+of scarce any single piece in the collection seemed legible throughout.
+Less valuable and more modern, though curious from their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_446" id="Page_446">[Pg 446]</a></span> eccentricity,
+there lay, in company with the music, several pieces of verse, addressed
+by some Orcadian Claud Halcro of the last age, to some local patron, in
+a vein of compliment rich and stiff as a piece of ancient brocade. A
+peremptory letter, bearing the autograph signature of Mary Queen of
+Scots, to Torquil McLeod of Dunvegan, who had been on the eve, it would
+seem, of marrying a daughter of Donald of the Isles, gave the Skye
+chieftain, "to wit" that, as he was of the blood royal of Scotland, he
+could form no matrimonial alliance without the royal permission,&mdash;a
+permission which, in the case in point, was not to be granted. It served
+to show that the woman who so ill liked to be thwarted in her own amours
+could, in her character as the Queen, deal despotically enough with the
+love affairs of other people. Side by side with the letter of Mary there
+were several not less peremptory documents of the times of the
+Commonwealth, addressed to the Sheriff of Orkney and Shetland, in the
+name of his Highness the Lord Protector, and that bore the signature of
+George Monck. I found them to consist chiefly of dunning letters,&mdash;such
+letters as those duns write who have victorious armies at their
+back,&mdash;for large sums of money, the assessments laid on the Orkneys by
+Cromwell. Another series of letters, some ten or twelve years later in
+their date, form portions of the history of a worthy covenanting
+minister, the Rev. Alexander Smith of Colvine, banished to North
+Ronaldshay from the extreme south of Scotland, for the offence of
+preaching the gospel, and holding meetings for social worship in his own
+house; and, as if to demonstrate his incorrigibility, one of the
+series,&mdash;a letter under his own hand, addressed from his island prison
+to the Sheriff-Depute in Kirkwall,&mdash;showed him as determined and
+persevering in the offence as ever. It was written immediately after his
+arrival. "The poor inhabitants,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_447" id="Page_447">[Pg 447]</a></span> says the writer, "so many as I have
+yet seen, have received me with much joy. <i>I intend, if the Lord will,
+to preach Christ to them next Lord's day</i>, without the least mixture of
+anything that may smell of sedition or rebellion. If I be farther
+troubled for yt, I resolve to suffer with meekness and patience." The
+Galloway minister must have been an honest man. Deeming preaching his
+true vocation,&mdash;a vocation from the exercise of which he dared not
+cease, lest he should render himself obnoxious to the woe referred to by
+the apostle,&mdash;he yet could not steal a march on even the Sheriff, whose
+professional duty it was to prevent him from doing <i>his</i>; and so he
+fairly warned him that he proposed breaking the law. The next set of
+papers in the collection dated after the Revolution, and were full
+charged with an enthusiastic Jacobitisin, which seems to have been a
+prevalent sentiment in Orkney from the death of Queen Anne, until the
+disastrous defeat at Culloden quenched in blood the hopes of the party.
+There is a deep cave still shown on the shores of Westray, within sight
+of the forlorn Patmos of the poor Covenanter, in which, when the sun got
+on the Whig side of the hedge, twelve gentlemen, who had been engaged in
+the rebellion of 1745, concealed themselves for a whole winter. So
+perseveringly were they sought after, that during the whole time they
+dared not once light a fire, nor attempt fishing from the rocks to
+supply themselves with food; and, though they escaped the search, they
+never, it is said, completely recovered the horrors of their term of
+dreary seclusion, but bore about with them, in broken constitutions, the
+effects of the hardships to which they had been subjected. They must
+have had full time and opportunity, during that miserable winter, for
+testing the justice of the policy that had sent poor Smith into exile,
+from his snug southern parish in the Presbytery of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_448" id="Page_448">[Pg 448]</a></span> Dumfries, to the
+remotest island of the Orkneys. The great lesson taught in Providence
+during the seventeenth and part of the eighteenth century to our
+Scottish country folk seems to have been the lesson of toleration; and
+as they were slow, stubborn scholars, the lash was very frequently and
+very severely applied. One of the Jacobite papers of Mr. Petrie's
+collection,&mdash;a triumphal poem on the victory of Gladsmuir,&mdash;which, if
+less poetical than the Ode of Hamilton of Bangour on the same subject,
+is in no degree less curious,&mdash;serves to throw very decided light on a
+passage in literary history which puzzled Dr. Johnson, and which scarce
+any one would think of going to Orkney to settle.</p>
+
+<p>Johnson states, in his Life of the poet Thomson, that the "first
+operation" of the act passed in 1739 "for licensing plays" was the
+"prohibition of 'Gustavus Vasa,' a tragedy of Mr. Brook." "Why such a
+work should be obstructed," he adds, "it is hard to discover." We learn
+elsewhere,&mdash;from the compiler of the "Modern Universal History," if I
+remember aright,&mdash;that "so popular did the prohibitory order of the Lord
+Chamberlain 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 Brook
+were in their graves, that it was deemed safe to license it for the
+stage. Now, the fact that a drama, in itself as little dangerous as
+"Cato" or "Douglas," should have been prohibited by the Government of
+the day, in the first instance, and should have brought the author, on
+its publication, so large a sum in the second, can be accounted for only
+by a reference to the keen partisanship of the period, and the peculiar
+circumstances of parties. The Jacobites, taught by the rebellion of 1715
+at once the value of the Highlands and the incompetency<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_449" id="Page_449">[Pg 449]</a></span> of the
+Chevalier St. George as a leader, had begun to fix their hopes on the
+Chevalier's son, Charles Edward, at that time a young but promising lad;
+and, with the tragedy of Brook before them, neither they, nor the
+English Government of the day could have failed to see the foreigner
+George the Second typified&mdash;unintentionally, surely, on the part of
+Brook, who was a "Prince of Wales" Whig&mdash;in the foreigner Christiern
+the 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 the
+least probable, as the poem is a piece of sad mediocrity throughout,
+that it is a parallelism which was originated by its writer. It must
+have been that of his party; and led, I doubt not, five years before, to
+the prohibition of Brook's tragedy, and to the singular success which
+attended its publication. The passage in the manuscript suggestive of
+this view takes the form of an address to the victorious prince, and
+runs as follows:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+"Meanwhile, unguarded youth, thou stoodst alone;<br />
+The cruel Tyrant urged his Armie on;<br />
+But Truth and Goodness were the Best of Arms;<br />
+And, fearless Prince, Thou smil'd at Threatened harms.<br />
+Thus, Glorious Vasa worked in Swedish mines,&mdash;<br />
+Thus, Helpless, Saw his Enemy's Designs,&mdash;<br />
+Till, roused, his Hardy Highlanders arose,<br />
+And poured Destruction on their foreign foes."<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>I rose betimes next morning, and crossed the Peerie [little] Sea, a
+shallow prolongation of the Bay of Kirkwall, cut off from the main sea
+by an artificial mound, to the quarry of Pickoquoy, somewhat notable,
+only a few years ago, as the sole locality in which shells had been
+detected in the Old Red Sandstone of Scotland. But these have since been
+found in the neighborhood of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_450" id="Page_450">[Pg 450]</a></span> Thurso, by Mr. Robert Dick, associated
+with bones and plates of the Asterolepis, and by Mr. William Watt on the
+opposite side of the Mainland of Orkney, at Marwick Head. So far as has
+yet been ascertained, they are all of one species, and more nearly
+resemble a small Cyclas than any other shell. They are, however, more
+deeply sulcated in concentric lines, drawn, as if by a pair of
+compasses, from the umbone, and somewhat resembling those of the genus
+Astarte, than any species of Cyclas with which I am acquainted. In all
+the specimens I have yet seen, it appears to be rather a thick dark
+epidermis that survives, than the shell which it covered; nay, it seems
+not impossible that to its thick epidermis, originally an essentially
+different substance from that which composed the calcareous case, the
+shell may have owed its preservation as a fossil; while other shells,
+its contemporaries, from the circumstance of their having been
+unfurnished with any such covering, may have failed to leave any trace
+of their existence behind them. It seems at least difficult to conceive
+of a sea inhabited by many genera of fishes, each divided into several
+species, and yet furnished with but one species of shell. I found the
+quarry of Pickoquoy,&mdash;a deep excavation only a few yards beyond the
+high-water mark, and some two or three yards under the high-water
+level,&mdash;deserted by the quarrymen, and filled to the brim by the
+overflowing of a small stream. I succeeded, however, in detecting its
+shells <i>in situ</i>. They seem restricted chiefly to a single stratum,
+scarcely half an inch in thickness, and lie, not thinly scattered over
+the platform which they occupy, but impinging on each other, like all
+the gregarious shells, in thickly-set groups and clusters. There occur
+among them occasional scales of Dipteri; and on some of the fragments of
+rock long exposed around the quarry-mouth to the weather I found them
+assuming a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_451" id="Page_451">[Pg 451]</a></span> pale nacreous gloss,&mdash;an effect, it is not improbable, of
+their still retaining, attached to the epidermis, a thin film of the
+original shell. The world's history must be vastly more voluminous now,
+and greatly more varied in its contents, than when the stratum which
+they occupy formed the upper layer of a muddy sea-bottom, and they
+opened their valves by myriads, to prey on the organic atoms which
+formed their food, or shut them again, startled by the shadow of the
+Dipterus, as he descended from the upper depths of the water to prey
+upon them in turn. The palate of this ancient ganoid is furnished with a
+curious dental apparatus, formed apparenly, like that of the recent
+wolf-fish, for the purpose of crushing shells.</p>
+
+<p>About mid-day I set out by the mail-gig for Stromness. For the first few
+miles the road winds through a bare solitary valley, overlooked by
+ungainly heath-covered hills of no great altitude, though quite tall
+enough to prevent the traveller from seeing anything but themselves. As
+he passes on, the valley opens in front on an arm of the sea, over which
+the range of hills on the right abruptly terminates, while that on the
+left deflects into a line nearly parallel to the shore, leaving a
+comparatively level strip of moory land, rather more than a mile in
+breadth, between the steeper acclivities and the beach. A tall naked
+house rises between the road and the sea. Two low islands immediately
+behind it, only a few acres in extent,&mdash;one of them bearing a small ruin
+on its apex,&mdash;give a little variety to the central point in the prospect
+which the naked house forms; but the arm of the sea, bordered, at the
+time I passed, by a broad brown selvage of sea-weed, is as tame and flat
+as a Dutch lake; the background beyond, a long monotonous ridge, is bare
+and treeless; and in front lies the brown moory plain, bordered by the
+dull line of hills and darkened by scattered stacks of peat.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_452" id="Page_452">[Pg 452]</a></span></p><p>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 very
+pleasing poet, its hills, and islands, and blue arm of the sea, its
+brown moory plain, and tall naked house rising in the midst, must have
+been surrounded by a sunlit atmosphere of love and desire, bright enough
+to impart to even its tamest features a glow of exquisiteness and
+beauty. Malcolm the poet was born, and spent his years of boyhood and
+early youth, in the tall naked house; and the surrounding landscape is
+that to which he refers in his "Tales of Flood and Field," as rising in
+imagination before him, bright in the red gleam of the setting sun,
+when, on the steep slopes of the Pyrenees, the "silent stars of night
+were twinkling high over his head," and the "tents of the soldiery
+glimmering pale through the gloom." The tall house is the manse of the
+parish of Frith and Stennis; and the poet was the son of the Rev. John
+Malcolm, its minister. Here, when yet a mere lad, dreaming, in the quiet
+obscurity of an Orkney parish, far removed from the seat of war and the
+literary circles, of poetic celebrity and military renown, he addressed
+a letter to the Duke of Kent, the father of our Sovereign Lady the
+reigning Monarch, expressing an ardent wish to obtain a commission in
+the army then engaged in the Peninsula. The letter was such as to excite
+the interest of his Royal Highness, who replied to it by return of post,
+requesting the writer to proceed forthwith to London; for which he
+immediately set out, and was received by the Duke with courtesy and
+kindness. He was instructed by him to take ship for Spain, in which he
+arrived as volunteer; and, joining the army, engaged at the time in the
+siege of St. Sebastian, under General Graham, he was promoted shortly
+after, through the influence of his generous patron, to a lieutenancy in
+the 42d Highlanders. He served in that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_453" id="Page_453">[Pg 453]</a></span> distinguished regiment on to the
+closing campaign of the Pyrenees; but received at the battle of Toulouse
+a wound so severe as to render him ever after incapable of active bodily
+exertion; and so he had to retire from the army on half-pay, and a
+pension honorably earned. The history of his career as a soldier he has
+told with singular interest, in one of the earlier volumes of
+"Constable's Miscellany;" and his poems abound in snatches of
+description painfully true, drawn from his experience of the military
+life,&mdash;of scenes of stern misery and grim desolation, of injuries
+received, and of sufferings inflicted,&mdash;that must have contrasted sadly
+in his mind, in their character as gross realities, with the dreamy
+visions of conquest and glory in which he had indulged at an earlier
+time. The ruin of St. Sebastian, complete enough, and attended with
+circumstances of the horrible extreme enough, to appal men long
+acquainted with the trade of war, must have powerfully impressed an
+imaginative susceptible lad, fresh from the domesticities of a rural
+manse, in whose quiet neighborhood the voice of battle had not been
+heard for centuries, and surrounded by a simple people, remarkable for
+the respect which they bear to human life. In all probability, the power
+evinced in his description of the siege, and of the utter desolation in
+which it terminated, is in part owing to the fresh impressibility of his
+mind at the time. Such, at least, was my feeling regarding it, as I
+caught myself muttering some of its more graphic passages, and saw, from
+the degree of alarm evinced by the boy who drove the mail-gig, that the
+sounds were not quite lost in the rattle of that somewhat rickety
+vehicle, and that he had come to entertain serious doubts respecting the
+sanity of his passenger:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+"Sebastian, when I saw thee last,<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_454" id="Page_454">[Pg 454]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">It was in Desolation's day,</span><br />
+As through thy voiceless streets I passed,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Thy piles in heaps of rubbish lay;</span><br />
+The roofless fragments of each wall<br />
+Bore many a dent of shell and ball;<br />
+With blood were all thy gateways red,<br />
+And thou,&mdash;a city of the dead!<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">With fire and sword thy walks were swept:</span><br />
+Exploded mines thy streets had heaped<br />
+In hills of rubbish; they had been<br />
+Traversed by gabion and fascine,<br />
+With cannon lowering in the rear<br />
+In dark array,&mdash;a deadly tier,&mdash;<br />
+Whose thunder-clouds, with fiery breath,<br />
+Sent far around their iron death;<br />
+The bursting shell, in fragments flung<br />
+Athwart the skies, at midnight sung,<br />
+Or, on its airy pathway sent,<br />
+Its meteors sweep the firmament.<br />
+Thy castle, towering o'er the shore,<br />
+Keeled on its rock amidst the roar<br />
+Of thousand thunders, for it stood<br />
+In circle of a fiery flood;<br />
+And crumbling masses fiercely sent<br />
+From its high frowning battlement,<br />
+Smote by the shot and whistling shell,<br />
+With groan and crash in ruin fell.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Through desert streets the mourner passed,</span><br />
+Midst-walls that spectral shadows east,<br />
+Like some fair spirit wailing o'er<br />
+The failed scenes it loved of yore;<br />
+No human voice was heard to bless<br />
+That place of waste and loneliness.<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">I saw at eve the night-bird fly,</span><br />
+And vulture dimly flitting by,<br />
+To revel o'er each morsel stolen<br />
+From the cold corse, all black and swoln<br />
+That on the shattered ramparts lay,<br />
+Of him who perished yesterday,&mdash;<br />
+Of him whose pestilential steam<br />
+Rose reeking on the morning beam,&mdash;<br />
+Whose fearful fragments, nearly gone,<br />
+Were blackening from the bleaching bone.<br />
+<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_455" id="Page_455">[Pg 455]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">The house-dog bounded o'er each scene</span><br />
+Where cisterns had so lately been:<br />
+Away in frantic haste he sprung,<br />
+And sought to cool his burning tongue.<br />
+He howled, and to his famished cry<br />
+The dreary echoes gave reply;<br />
+And owlet's dirge, through shadows dim,<br />
+Rolled back in sad response to him."<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The father was succeeded in his parish by the brother of Malcolm,&mdash;a
+gentleman to whom, during my stay in Orkney, I took the liberty of
+introducing myself in his snug little Free Church manse at the head of
+the bay, and in whose possession I found the only portrait of the poet
+which exists. It is that of a handsome and interesting looking <i>young</i>
+man, though taken not many years before his death; for, like the greater
+number of his class, he did not live to be an old one, dying under
+forty. His brother the clergyman kindly accompanied me to two quarries
+in the neighborhood of his new domicil, which I found, like almost all
+the dry-stone fences of the district, speckled with scales, occipital
+plates, and gill-covers, of Osteolepides and Dipteri, but containing no
+entire ichthyolites. He had taken his side in the Church controversy, he
+told me, firmly, but quietly; and when the Disruption came, and he found
+it necessary to quit the old manse, which had been a home to his family
+for well nigh two generations, and in which both he and his brother had
+been born, he scarce knew what his people were to do, nor in what
+proportion he was to have followers among them. Somewhat to his
+surprise, however, they came out with him almost to a man; so that his
+successor in the parish church had sometimes, he understood, to preach
+to congregations scarcely exceeding half a dozen. I had learned
+elsewhere how thoroughly Mr. Malcolm was loved and respected by his
+parishioners; and that unconsciousness on his own part of the strength
+of their affection<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_456" id="Page_456">[Pg 456]</a></span> and esteem, which his statement evinced, formed, I
+thought, a very pleasing trait, and one that harmonized well with the
+finely-toned unobtrusiveness and unconscious elegance which
+characterized the genius of his deceased brother. A little beyond the
+Free Church manse the road ascends between stone walls, abounding in
+fragments of ichthyolites, weathered blue by exposure to the sun and
+wind; and the top of the eminence forms the water-shed in this part of
+the Mainland, and introduces the traveller to a scene entirely new. The
+prospect is of considerable extent; and, what seems strange in Orkney,
+nowhere presents the traveller,&mdash;though it contains its large inland
+lake,&mdash;with a glimpse of the sea.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_457" id="Page_457">[Pg 457]</a></span></p>
+<h3>CHAPTER XII.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="hang">Hills of Orkney&mdash;Their Geologic Composition&mdash;Scene of Scott's
+"Pirate"&mdash;Stromness&mdash;Geology of the District&mdash;"Seeking
+beasts"&mdash;Conglomerate in contact with Granite&mdash;A pal&aelig;ozoic Hudson's
+Bay&mdash;Thickness of Conglomerate of Orkney&mdash;Oldest Vertebrate yet
+discovered in Orkney&mdash;Its Size&mdash;Figure of a characteristic plate of
+the Asterolepis&mdash;Peculiarity of Old Red Fishes&mdash;Length of the
+Asterolepis&mdash;A rich Ichthyolite Bed&mdash;Arrangement of the
+Layers&mdash;Queries as to the Cause of it&mdash;Minerals&mdash;An abandoned
+Mine&mdash;A lost Vessel&mdash;Kelp for Iodine&mdash;A dangerous Coast&mdash;Incidents
+of Shipwreck&mdash;Hospitality&mdash;Stromness Museum&mdash;Diplopterus mistaken
+for Dipterus&mdash;Their Resemblances and Differences&mdash;Visit to a
+remarkable Stack&mdash;Paring the Soil for Fuel, and consequent
+Barrenness&mdash;Description of the Stack&mdash;Wave-formed Caves&mdash;Height to
+which the Surf rises. </p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> Orkneys, like the mainland of Scotland, exhibit their higher hills
+and precipices on their western coasts: the Ward Hill of Hoy attains to
+an elevation of sixteen hundred feet; and there are some of the
+precipices which skirt the island of which it forms so conspicuous a
+feature, that rise sheer over the breakers from eight hundred to a
+thousand. Unlike, however, the arrangement on the mainland, it is the
+newer rocks that attain to the higher elevations; the heights of Hoy are
+composed of that arenaceous upper member of the Lower Old Red
+Sandstone,&mdash;the last formed of the Pal&aelig;ozoic deposits of Orkney,&mdash;which
+overlies the ichthyolitic flagstones and shales of Caithness at Dunnet
+Head, and the ichthyolitic nodular beds of Inverness, Ross, and
+Cromarty, at Culloden, Tarbet Ness, within the Northern Sutor, and along
+the bleak ridge of the Maolbuie. It is simply a tall upper story of the
+formation, erected along the western line of coast in the Orkneys, which
+the eastern line wholly wants. Its screen of hills forms a noble
+background<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_458" id="Page_458">[Pg 458]</a></span> to the prospect which opens on the traveller as he ascends
+the eminence beyond the Free Church manse of Frith and Stennis. A large
+lake, bare and treeless, like all the other lakes and lochs of Orkney,
+but picturesque of outline, and divided into an upper and lower sheet of
+water 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, half
+mound, half bridge, occupies the middle distance. There are moory hills
+and a few cottages in front; and on the promontories, conspicuous in the
+landscape, from the relief furnished by the blue ground of the
+surrounding waters, stand the tall stones of Stennis,&mdash;one group on the
+northern promontory, the other on the south. A gray old-fashioned house,
+of no very imposing appearance, rises between the road and the lake. It
+is the house of Stennis, or Turmister, in which Scott places some of the
+concluding scenes of the "Pirate," and from which he makes Cleveland and
+his fantastic admirer Jack Bunce witness the final engagement, in the
+bay of Stromness, between the Halcyon sloop of war and the savage Goffe.
+Nor does it matter anything that neither sea nor vessels can be seen
+from the house of Turmister: the fact which would be so fatal to a
+dishonest historian tells with no effect against the honest "<i>maker</i>,"
+responsible for but the management of his tale.</p>
+
+<p>I got on to Stromness; and finding, after making myself comfortable in
+my inn, that I had a fine bright evening still before me, longer by some
+three or four degrees of north latitude than the July evenings of
+Edinburgh, I set out, hammer in hand, to explore. Stromness is a long,
+narrow, irregular strip of a town, fairly thrust by a steep hill into
+the 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 so
+immediately beside the houses, that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_459" id="Page_459">[Pg 459]</a></span> their pennants on gala days wave
+over 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 backbone
+of the district, and against which the Great Conglomerate and lower
+schists of the Old Red are upturned at a rather high angle. It is
+wrapped round in some places by a thin caul of the stratified primary
+rocks. Immediately over the town, on the brow of the eminence, where the
+granitic axis had been laid bare in digging a foundation for the Free
+Church manse, I saw numerous masses of schistose-gneiss, passing in some
+of the beds into a coarse-grained mica-schist, and a lustrous
+hornblendic slate, that had been quarried from over it, and which may be
+still seen built up into the garden-wall of the erection. I walked out
+towards the west, to examine the junction of the granite and the Great
+Conglomerate, where it is laid bare by the sea, little more than a
+quarter of a mile outside the town. There was a horde of noisy urchins a
+little beyond the inn, who, having seen me alight from the mail-gig, had
+determined in their own minds that I was engaged in the political
+canvass going forward at the time, but had not quite ascertained my
+side. 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 side
+of the street, with a counter cry of "Anderson forever." Immediately
+after 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 the
+noo?" "Yes, seeking <i>beasts</i>," I replied, "but very old ones: I have
+come to hammer your rocks for petrified fish." "I see, I see," said the
+man; "I took ye by ye'er gray plaid for a drover; but I ken something
+about the stane fish too; there's lots o' them in the quarries at
+Skaill."</p>
+
+<p>I found the great Conglomerate in immediate contact with the granite,
+which is a ternary of the usual components,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_460" id="Page_460">[Pg 460]</a></span> somewhat intermediate in
+color between that of Peterhead and Aberdeen, and which at this point
+bears none of the caul of stratified primary rock by which it is
+overlaid on the brow of the hill. When the great Conglomerate, which is
+mainly composed of it here, was in the act of forming, this granite must
+have been one of the surface rocks of the locality, and in no respect a
+different stone from what it is now. The widely-spread Conglomerate base
+of the Old Red Sandstone, which presents, over an area of so many
+thousand square miles, such an identity of character, that specimens
+taken from the neighborhood of Lerwick, in Shetland, can scarce be
+distinguished from specimens detached from the hills which rise over the
+great Caledonian Valley, contains in various places, as under the
+Northern Sutor, for instance, and along the shores of Navity, fragments
+of rock which have not been detected <i>in situ</i> in the districts in which
+they occur as agglomerated pebbles. In general, however, we find it
+composed of the debris of those very granites and gneisses which, as in
+the case of the granitic axis here, were forced through it, and through
+the overlying deposits, by deep-seated convulsions, long posterior in
+date to its formation. It appears to have been formed in a vast oceanic
+basin of primary rock,&mdash;a Pal&aelig;ozoic Hudson's or Baffin's Bay,&mdash;partially
+surrounded, mayhap, by bare primary continents, swept by numerous
+streams, rapid and headlong, and charged with the broken debris of the
+inhospitable regions which they drained. The graptolite-bearing
+grauwacke of Banffshire seems to have been the only fossiliferous rock
+that occurred throughout the extent of this ancient northern basin. The
+Conglomerate of Orkney, like that of Moray and Ross, varies from fifty
+to a hundred yards in thickness. It is not overlaid in this section by
+the thick bed of coarse-grained sandstone, so well-marked a member of
+the formation at Cromarty,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_461" id="Page_461">[Pg 461]</a></span> Nigg, and Gamrie, and along the northern
+shores of the Beauly Frith; but at once passes into those gray
+bituminous flagstones so immensely developed in Caithness and the
+Orkneys. I traced the formation upwards this evening, walking along the
+edges of the upheaved strata, from where the Conglomerate leans against
+the granite, till where it merges into the gray flagstones, and then
+pursued these from older and lower to newer and higher layers, anxious
+to ascertain at what distance over the base the more ancient organisms
+of the system first appear, and what their character and kind. And
+little more than a hundred <i>yards</i> over the granite, and somewhat less
+than a hundred <i>feet</i> over the upper stratum of the great Conglomerate,
+I found what I sought,&mdash;a well-marked bone, perhaps the oldest
+vertebrate remain yet discovered in Orkney, embedded in a light
+grayish-colored layer of hard flag.</p>
+
+<p>What, asks the reader, was the character of the ancient denizen of the
+Pal&aelig;ozoic basin of which it had formed a part? Was it a large or small
+fish, or of a high or low order? Not certainly of a low order, and by no
+means of a small size. The organism in the rock was a specimen of that
+curious nail-shaped bone of the Asterolepis which occurs as a central
+ridge in the single plate that occupies in this genus the wide curve of
+the under jaw, and as it was fully five inches in length from head to
+point, the plate to which it belonged must have measured ten inches
+across, and the frontal occipital buckler with which it was associated,
+one foot two inches in length (not including the three accessory plates
+at the nape), by ten inches in breadth. And if built, as it probably
+was, in the same massy proportions as its brother C&#339;lacanths the
+Holoptychius or Glyptolepis, the individual to which the nail-shaped
+bone belonged must have been, judging from the size of the corresponding
+parts in these ichthyolites, at least twice as large an animal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_462" id="Page_462">[Pg 462]</a></span> as the
+splendid Clashbennie Holoptychius of the Upper Old Red, now in the
+British Museum. The bulkiest icthyolites yet found in any of the
+divisions of the Old Red system are of the genus Asterolepis; and to
+this genus, and to evidently an individual of no inconsiderable size,
+this oldest of the organisms of the Orkney belonged. I was so interested
+in the fact, that before leaving this part of the country, I brought Dr.
+Garson, Stromness, and Mr. William Watt, jun., Skaill, both very
+intelligent pal&aelig;ontologists, to mark the place and character of the
+fossil, that they might be able to point it out to geological visitors
+in 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, I
+merely request the reader to mark, in the passing, that the most ancient
+organic 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 in
+Scotland,&mdash;so far as I know, absolutely the <i>most</i> ancient,&mdash;belonged to
+a ganoid as bulky as a large porpoise, and which, as shown by its teeth
+and jaws, possessed that peculiar organization which characterized the
+reptile fish of the Upper Devonian and Carboniferous periods. As there
+are, however, no calculations more doubtful or more to be suspected than
+those on which the size and bulk of the extinct animals are determined
+from some surviving fragment of their remains,&mdash;plate or bone,&mdash;I must
+attempt laying before the scientific reader at least a portion of the
+data on which I found.</p>
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 213px;">
+<img src="images/image1.jpg" width="213" height="112" alt="illo" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p>This figure represents not inadequately one of the most characteristic
+plates of the Asterolepis. A very considerable fragment of what seems to
+be the same plate has been figured by Agassiz from a cast of one of the
+huge specimens<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_463" id="Page_463">[Pg 463]</a></span> of Professor Asmus ("Old Red," Table 32, Fig. 13); but
+as no evidence regarding its true place had turned up at the time it was
+supposed by the naturalist to form part of the opercular covering of the
+animal. It belonged, however, to a different portion of the head. In
+almost all the fish that appear at our tables the space which occurs
+within the arched sweep of the lower jaws is mainly occupied by a
+complicated osseous mechanism, known to anatomists as the hyoid bone and
+branchiostegous rays; and which serves both to support the branchial
+arches and the branchiostegous membrane. Now, in the fish of the Old Red
+Sandstone, if we except some of the Acanthodians, we find no trace of
+this piece of mechanism: the arched space is covered over with dermal
+plates of bone, as a window is filled up with panes. Three plates,
+resembling very considerably the three divisions of a pointed Gothic
+window, furnished with a single central mullion, divided atop into two
+branches, 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 <i>not</i> branch atop, filled it up in the
+genera Holoptychius and Glyptolepis. In the genus Asterolepis this
+arch-shaped space was occupied, as I have said, by a single plate,&mdash;that
+represented in the wood-cut; and the nail-shaped bone rose on its
+internal surface along the centre,&mdash;the nail-head resting immediately
+beneath the centre of the arch, and the nail-point bordering on the
+isthmus below, at which the two shoulder-bones terminated. Now, in all
+the specimens which I have yet examined, the form and proportions of
+this plate are such that it can be very nearly inscribed in a
+semi-circle, of which the length of the nail is the radius. A nail five
+inches in length must have belonged to a plate ten inches in its longer
+diameter. I have ascertained further, that this longer diameter was
+equal to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_464" id="Page_464">[Pg 464]</a></span> the shorter diameter of the creature's frontal buckler,
+measured across about two thirds of its entire length from the nape; and
+that a transverse diameter of ten inches at this point was associated in
+the buckler with a longitudinal diameter of fourteen inches from the
+nape to the snout. Thus five inches along the nail represent fourteen
+inches along the occipital shield. The proportion, however, which the
+latter bore to the entire body in this genus has still to be determined.
+The corresponding frontal shield in the Coccosteus was equal to about
+one-fifth the creature's entire length, and in the Osteolepis and
+Diplopterus, to nearly one-seventh its length; while the length of the
+<i>Glyptolepis leptopterus</i>, a fish of the same family as the Asterolepis,
+was about five and a half times that of its occipital shield. If the
+Asterolepis was formed in the proportions of the Diplopterus, the
+ancient individual to which this nail-like bone belonged must have been
+about eight feet two inches in length; but if moulded, as it more
+probably was, in the proportions of the Glyptolepis, only six feet five
+inches. All the C&#339;lacanths, however, were exceedingly massive in
+proportion to their length; they were fish built in the square,
+muscular, thick-set, Dirk-Hatterick and Balfour-of-Burley style; and of
+the Russian specimens, some of the larger bones must have belonged to
+individuals of from twice to thrice the length of the Stromness one.</p>
+
+<p>Passing upwards along the strata, step by step, as along a fallen stair,
+each stratum presenting a nearly perpendicular front, but losing, in the
+downward slant of the <i>tread</i>, as a carpenter would say, the height
+attained in the <i>rise</i>, I came, about a quarter of a mile farther to the
+west, and several hundred feet higher in the formation, upon a fissile
+dark-colored bed, largely charged with ichthyolites. The fish I found
+ranged in three layers,&mdash;the lower layer consisting almost exclusively
+of Dipterians, chiefly Osteolepides;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_465" id="Page_465">[Pg 465]</a></span> the middle layer, of Acanthodians,
+of the genera Cheiracanthus and Diplacanthus; and the upper layer, of
+Cephalaspides, mostly of one species, the <i>Coccosteus decipiens</i>. I
+found exactly the same arrangement in a bed considerably higher in the
+system, which occurs a full mile farther on,&mdash;the Dipterians at the
+bottom, the Acanthodians in the middle, and the Cephalaspides atop; and
+was informed by Mr. William Watt, a competent authority in the case,
+that the arrangement is comparatively a common one in the quarries of
+Orkney. How account for the phenomenon? How account for the three
+storeys, and the apportionment of the floors, like those of a great
+city, each to its own specific class of society? Why should the first
+floor be occupied by Osteolepides, the second by Cheiracanthi and their
+congeners, and the third by Coccostei? Was the arrangement an effect of
+normal differences in the constitutions of the several families,
+operated upon by some deleterious gas or mineral poison, which, though
+it eventually destroyed the whole, did not so simultaneously, but
+consecutively,&mdash;the families of weakest constitution first, and the
+strongest last? Or were they exterminated by some disease, that seized
+upon the families, not at once, but in succession? Or did they visit the
+locality serially, as the haddock now visits our coasts in spring, and
+the herring towards the close of summer; and were then killed off,
+whether by poison or disease, as they came? These are questions which
+may never be conclusively answered. It is well, however, to observe, as
+a curious geological fact, that peculiar arrangement of the fossils by
+which they are suggested, and to record the various instances in which
+it occurs. The minerals which I remarked among the schists here as most
+abundant are a kind of black ironstone, exceedingly tough and hard,
+occurring in detached masses, and a variety of bright pyrites
+disseminated among the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_466" id="Page_466">[Pg 466]</a></span> darker flagstones, either as irregularly-formed,
+brassy-looking concretions of small size, or spread out on their
+surfaces in thin leaf-like films, that resemble, in some of the
+specimens, the icy-foliage with which a severe frost encrusts a
+window-pane. Still further on I came upon a vein of galena; but a
+miner'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 had
+been known long before, and, as the workings seemed to have been
+deserted 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 entire
+vein is not very considerable. I have since learned, from the
+"Statistical Account of the Parish of Sandwick," that the workings of
+the mine penetrate into the rock for about a hundred yards, but that it
+has been long abandoned, "as a speculation which would not pay."</p>
+
+<p>I observed scattered over the beach, in the neighborhood of the lead
+mine, considerable quantities of the hard chalk of England; and, judging
+there could be no deposits of the hard chalk in this neighborhood, I
+addressed myself on my way back, to a kelp-burner engaged in wrapping up
+his fire for the night with a thick covering of weed, to ascertain how
+it had come there. "Ah, master," he replied, "that chalk is all that
+remains of a fine large English vessel, that was knocked to pieces here
+a few years ago. She was ballasted with the chalk; and as it is a light
+sort of stone, the surf has washed it ashore from that low reef in the
+middle of the tideway where she struck and broke up. Most of the
+sailors, poor fellows, lie in the old churchyard, beside the broken ruin
+yonder. It is a deadly shore this to seafaring-men." I had understood
+that the kelp-trade was wholly at an end in Orkney; and, remarking that
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_467" id="Page_467">[Pg 467]</a></span> sea-weed which he employed was chiefly of one kind,&mdash;the long brown
+fronds of tang dried in the sun,&mdash;I inquired of him to what purpose the
+substance was now employed, seeing that barilla and the carbonate of
+soda had supplanted it in the manufacture of soap and glass, and why he
+was 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 used
+for bad sores and cancer; and we must be particular in our weed, for
+it's not every kind of weed that has the medicine in't. There's most of
+it, we're told, in the leaves of the tang." "Is the name of the drug," I
+asked, "iodine?" "Ay, that must be just it," he replied,&mdash;"iodine; but
+it doesn't make such a demand for kelp as the glass and the soap." I
+afterwards learned that the kelp-burner's character of this strip of
+coast, as peculiarly fatal to the mariner, was borne out by many a sad
+casualty, too largely charged with the wild and the horrible to be
+lightly forgotten. The respected Free Church clergyman of Stromness, Mr.
+Learmonth, informed me that, ere the Disruption, while yet minister of
+the parish, there were on one sad occasion eight dead bodies carried of
+a Sabbath morning to his manse door. Some of the incidents connected
+with these terrible shipwrecks, as related with much graphic effect by a
+boatman who carried me across the sound, on an exploratory ramble to the
+island of Hoy, struck me as of a character considerably beyond the reach
+of the mere dealer in fiction. The master of one hapless vessel, a young
+man, had brought his wife and only child with him on the voyage destined
+to terminate so mournfully; and when the vessel first struck, he had
+rushed down to the cabin to bring them both on deck, as their only
+chance of safety. He had, however, unthinkingly shut the cabin-door
+after him; a second tremendous blow, as not unfrequently<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_468" id="Page_468">[Pg 468]</a></span> happens in
+such cases, so affected the framework of the sides and deck, that the
+door was jammed fast in its frame. And long ere it could be cut
+open,&mdash;for no human hand could unfasten it,&mdash;the vessel had filled to
+the beams, and neither the master nor his wife and child were ever seen
+more. In another ship, wrecked within a cable-length of the beach, the
+mate, a man of Herculean proportions, and a skilful swimmer, stripped
+and leaped overboard, not doubting his ability to reach the shore. But
+he had failed to remark what in such circumstances is too often
+forgotten, that the element on which he flung himself, beaten into foam
+against the shallows, was, according to Mr. Bremner's shrewd definition,
+not water, but a mixture of water and air, specifically lighter than the
+human body; and so at the shore, though so close at hand, he never
+arrived, disappearing almost at the vessel's side. "The ground was
+rough," said my informant, "and the sea ran mountains high; and I can
+scarce tell you how I shuddered on finding, long ere his corpse was
+thrown up, his two eyes detached from their sockets, staring from a
+wreath of sea-weed." There is in this last circumstance, horrible enough
+surely for the wildest German tale ever written, a unique singularity,
+which removes it beyond the reach of invention.</p>
+
+<p>At my inn I found a pressing invitation awaiting me from the Free Church
+manse, which I was urged to make my home so long as I remained in that
+part of the country. A geologist, however, fairly possessed by the
+enthusiasm without which weak man can accomplish nothing,&mdash;whether he be
+a deer-stalker or mammoth-fancier, or angle for live salmon or dead
+Pterichthyes,&mdash;has a trick of forgetting the right times of dining and
+taking tea, and of throwing the burden of his bodily requirements on
+early extempore breakfasts and late suppers; and so reporting myself a
+man<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_469" id="Page_469">[Pg 469]</a></span> of irregular habits and bad hours, whose movements could not in the
+least be depended upon, I had to decline the hospitality which would
+fain have adopted me as its guest, notwithstanding the badness of the
+character that, in common honesty, I had to certify as my own. Next
+morning I breakfasted at the manse, and was introduced by Mr. Learmonth
+to two gentlemen of the place, who had been kindly invited to meet with
+me, and who, from their acquaintance with the geology of the district
+enabled me to make the best use of my time, by cutting direct on those
+cliffs and quarries in the neighborhood in which organic remains had
+been detected, instead of wearily re-discovering them for myself. There
+is a small but interesting museum in Stromness, rich in the fossils of
+the locality; and I began the geologic business of the day by devoting
+an hour to the examination of its organisms, chiefly ichthyolites. I saw
+among them several good specimens of the genus Pterichthys, and of what
+is elsewhere one of the rarer genera of the Dipterians,&mdash;the
+Diplopterus. A well-marked individual of the latter genus had, I found,
+been misnamed Dipterus by some geological visitor who had recently come
+the way,&mdash;a mistake which, as in both ichthyolites the fins are
+similarly placed, occasionally occurs, but which may be easily avoided,
+when the specimens are in a tolerable state of preservation, by taking
+note of a few well-marked characteristics by which the genera are
+distinguished. In both Dipterus and Diplopterus the bright enamel of the
+scales was thickly punctulated by microscopic points,&mdash;the exterior
+terminations of funnel-shaped openings, that communicated between the
+surface and the cells of the middle table of the scale; but the form of
+the scales themselves was different,&mdash;that of the Dipterus being nearly
+circular, and that of the Diplopterus, save on the dorsal ridge,
+rhomboidal.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_470" id="Page_470">[Pg 470]</a></span> Again, the lateral line of the Diplopterus was a raised
+line, running as a ridge along the scales; whereas that of the Dipterus
+was a depressed one, existing as a furrow. Their heads, too, were
+covered by an entirely dissimilar arrangement of plates. The rounded
+snout-plate of the Diplopterus was suddenly contracted to nearly
+one-half its breadth by two semi-circular inflections, which formed the
+orbits of the eyes; full in the centre, a little above these, a minute,
+lozenge-shaped plate seemed as if inlaid in the larger one, the
+analogue, apparently, of the anterior frontal; and over all there
+expanded a broad plate, the superior frontal, half divided vertically by
+a line drawn downwards from the nape, which, however, stopped short in
+the middle; and fretted transversely by two small but deeply-indented
+rectangular marks, which, crossing from the central to two lateral
+plates, assumed the semblance of connecting pins. The snout of the
+Dipterus was less round; it bore no mark of the eye-orbits; and the
+frontal buckler, broader in proportion to its length than that of the
+Diplopterus, consisted of many more plates. I may here mention that the
+frontal buckler of Diplopterus has not yet been figured nor described;
+whereas that of Dipterus, though unknown as such, has been given to the
+world as the occipital covering of a supposed Cephalaspian,&mdash;the
+Polyphractus. Polyphractus is, however, in reality a synonym for
+Dipterus,&mdash;the one name being derived from a peculiarity of the animal's
+fins: the other, from the great number of its occipital plates. There is
+no science founded on mere observation that can be altogether free, in
+its earlier stages, from mistakes of this character,&mdash;mistakes to which
+the pal&aelig;ontologist, however skilful, is peculiarly liable. The teeth of
+the two genera were essentially different. Those of the Dipterus,
+exclusively palatal, were blunt and squat, and ranged in two<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_471" id="Page_471">[Pg 471]</a></span>
+rectangular patches;<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a> while those of the Diplopterus bristled along
+its jaws and were slender and sharp. Their tails, too, though both
+heterocercal, were diverse in their type. In each, an angular strip of
+gradually-diminishing scales,&mdash;a prolongation of the scaly coat which
+protected the body, and which covered here a prolongation of the
+vertebral column,&mdash;ran on to the extreme termination of the upper lobe;
+but there was in the Diplopterus a greatly larger development of fin on
+the superior or dorsal side of the scaly strip than on that of the
+Dipterus. If the caudal fin of the Osteolepis be divided longitudinally
+into six equal parts, it will be found that one of these occurs on the
+upper side of the vertebral prolongation, and five on the under; in the
+caudal fin of the Diplopterus so divided, rather more than <i>two</i> parts
+will be found to occur on the upper side, and rather less than four on
+the under; while in the caudal fin of the Dipterus the development seems
+to have been restricted to the under side exclusively; at least, in none
+of the many individuals which I have examined have I found any trace of
+caudal rays on the upper side. These are minute and somewhat trivial
+particulars; but the geologist may find them of use; and the
+non-geologist may be disposed to extend to them some little degree of
+tolerance, when he considers that they distinguished two largely
+developed genera of animals, to which the Author of all did not deem it
+unworthy his wisdom to impart, in the act of creation, certain marked
+points of resemblance, and other certain points of dissimilarity.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_472" id="Page_472">[Pg 472]</a></span></p><p>From the Museum, accompanied by one of the gentlemen to whom Mr.
+Learmonth had introduced me at breakfast, and who obligingly undertook
+to act as my guide on the occasion, I set out to visit a remarkable
+stack on the sea-coast, about four miles north and west of Stromness. We
+scaled together the steep granitic hill immediately over the town, and
+then cut on the stack, straight as the bird flies, across a trackless
+common, bare and stony, and miserably pared by the <i>flaughter</i> spade.
+The landed proprietors in this part of the mainland are very numerous,
+and their properties small; and there are vast breadths of undivided
+common that encircle their little estates, as the Atlantic encircles the
+Orkneys. But the state in which I found the unappropriated parts of the
+district had in no degree the effect of making me an opponent of
+appropriation or the landholders. Our country, had it been left as a
+whole to all its people, as the Communist desiderates, would ere now be
+of exceedingly little value to any portion of them. The soil of the
+Orkney commons has been so repeatedly pared off and carried away for
+fuel, that there are now wide tracts on which there is no more soil to
+pare, and which present, for the original covering of peaty mould, a
+continuous surface of pale boulder-clay, here and there mottled by
+detached tufts of scraggy heath, and here and there roughened by
+projections of the underlying rock. All is unredeemable barrenness. On
+the other hand, wherever a bit of private property appears, though in
+the immediate neighborhood of these ruined wastes, the surface is
+swarded over, and the soil is the better, not the worse, for the
+services which it has rendered to man in the past. Whatever the Chartist
+and the Leveller may think of the matter, it is, I find, virtually on
+behalf of the many that the soil has been appropriated by the few. After
+passing from off the tract of moor which overlies the granitic axis of
+the district, to a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_473" id="Page_473">[Pg 473]</a></span> tract equally moory which spreads over the gray
+flagstones, I marked, more especially in the hollows and ravines, where
+minute springs ooze from the rock, vast quantities of bog-iron embedded
+in the soil, and presenting greatly the appearance of the scoria of a
+smith's forge. The apparent scoria here is simply a reproduction of the
+iron of the underlying flagstones, transferred, through the agency of
+water, to that stratum of vegetable mould and boulder-clay which
+represents the recent period.</p>
+
+<p>I found the stack which I had been brought to see forming the
+picturesque centre of a bold tract of rock scenery. It stands out from
+the land as a tall insulated tower, about two hundred feet in height,
+sorely worn at its base by the breakers that ceaselessly fret against
+its sides, but considerably broader atop, where it bears a flat cover of
+sward on the same level with the tops of the precipices which in the
+lapse of ages have receded from around it. Like the sward-crested
+hammock left by a party of laborers, to mark the depth to which they
+have cut in removing a bank or digging a pond, it remains to indicate
+how the attrition of the surf has told upon the iron-bound coast;
+demonstrating that lines of precipices hard as iron, and of giddy
+elevation, are in full retreat before the dogged perseverance of an
+assailant that, though baffled in each single attack, ever returns to
+the charge, and gains by an aggregation of infinitesimals,&mdash;the result
+of the whole. From the edge of a steep promontory that commands an
+inflection of the coast, and of the wall of rock which sweeps round it,
+I watched for a few seconds the sea,&mdash;greatly heightened at the time by
+the setting in of the flood-tide,&mdash;as it broke, surge after surge,
+against the base of the tall dark precipices; and marked how it
+accomplished its work of disintegration. The flagstone deposit here
+abounds in vertical cracks and flaws; and in the line of each of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_474" id="Page_474">[Pg 474]</a></span>
+many fissures which these form the waves have opened up a cave; so that
+for hundreds of yards together the precipices seem as if founded on
+arch-divided piers, and remind one of those ancient prints or drawings
+of Old London Bridge in which a range of tall sombre buildings is
+represented as rising high over a line of arches; or of rows of lofty
+houses in those cities of southern Europe in which the dwellings
+fronting the streets are perforated beneath by lines of squat piazzas,
+and present above a dingy and windowless breadth of wall. In course of
+time the piers attenuate and give way; the undermined precipices topple
+down, parting from the solid mass behind in those vertical lines by
+which they are traversed at nearly right angles with their line of
+stratification; the perpendicular front which they had covered comes to
+be presented, in consequence, to the sea; its faults and cracks
+gradually widen into caves, as those of the fallen front had gradually
+widened at an earlier period; in the lapse of centuries, it too,
+resigning its place, topples over headlong, an undermined mass; the
+surge dashes white and furious where the dense rock had rested before;
+and thus, in its slow but irresistible march, the sea gains upon the
+land. In the peculiar disposition and character of the prevailing strata
+of Orkney, as certainly as in the power of the tides which sweep athwart
+its coasts, and the wide extent of sea which, stretching around it,
+gives the waves scope to gather bulk and momentum, may be found the
+secret of the extraordinary height to which the surf sometimes rises
+against its walls of rock. During the fiercer tempests, masses of foam
+shoot upwards against the precipices, like inverted cataracts, fully two
+hundred feet over the ordinary tide-level, and, washing away the looser
+soil from their summits, leaves in its place patches of slaty gravel,
+resembling that of a common sea-beach. Rocks less perpendicular,
+however<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_475" id="Page_475">[Pg 475]</a></span> great the violence of the wind and sea, would fail to project
+upwards bodies of surf to a height so extraordinary. But the low angle
+at which the strata lie, and the rectangularity maintained in relation
+to their line of bed by the fissures which traverse them, give to the
+Orkney precipices,&mdash;remarkable for their perpendicularity and their
+mural aspect,&mdash;exactly the angle against which the waves, as broken
+masses of foam, beat up to their greatest possible altitude. On a tract
+of iron-bound coast that skirts the entrance of the Cromarty Frith I
+have seen the surf rise, during violent gales from the north-west
+especially, against one rectangular rock, known as the White Rock, fully
+an hundred feet; while against scarcely any of the other precipices,
+more sloping, though equally exposed, did it rise more than half that
+height.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_476" id="Page_476">[Pg 476]</a></span></p>
+<h3>CHAPTER XIII.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="hang">Detached Fossils&mdash;Remains of the Pterichthys&mdash;Terminal Bones of the
+Coccosteus, etc., preserved&mdash;Internal Skeleton of Coccosteus&mdash;The
+shipwrecked Sailor in the Cave&mdash;Bishop Grahame&mdash;His Character, as
+drawn by Baillie&mdash;His Successor&mdash;Ruins of the Bishop's
+Country-house&mdash;Sub-a&euml;rial Formation of Sandstone&mdash;Formation near
+New Kaye&mdash;Inference from such Formation&mdash;Tour resumed&mdash;Loch of
+Stennis&mdash;Waters of the Loch fresh, brackish, and salt&mdash;Vegetation
+varied accordingly&mdash;Change produced in the Flounder by fresh
+water&mdash;The Standing Stones, second only to Stonehenge&mdash;Their
+purpose&mdash;Their Appearance and Situation&mdash;Diameter of the
+Circle&mdash;What the Antiquaries say of it&mdash;Reference to it in the
+"Pirate"&mdash;Dr. Hibbert's Account. </p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">We</span> returned to Stromness along the edge of the cliffs gradually
+descending from higher to lower ranges of prepices, and ever and anon
+detecting ichthyolite beds in the weathered and partially decomposed
+strata. As the rock moulders into an incoherent clay, the fossils which
+it envelops become not unfrequently wholly detached from it, so that, on
+a smart blow dealt by the hammer, they leap out entire, resembling, from
+the degree of compression which they exhibit, those mimic fishes carved
+out of plates of ivory or of mother-of-pearl, which are used as counters
+in some of the games of China or the East Indies. The material of which
+they are composed, a brittle jet, though better suited than the stone to
+resist the disintegrating influences, is in most cases greatly too
+fragile for preservation. One may, however, acquire from the fragments a
+knowledge of certain minute points in the structure of the ancient
+animals to which they belonged, respecting which specimens of a more
+robust texture give no evidence. The plates of Coccosteus sometimes
+spring out as unbroken<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_477" id="Page_477">[Pg 477]</a></span> as when they covered the living animal, and, if
+the necessary skill be not wanting, may be set up in their original
+order. And I possess specimens of the head of Dipterus in which the
+nearly circular gill-covers may be examined on both surfaces, interior
+and exterior, and in which the cranial portion shows not only the
+enamelled plates of the frontal buckler, but also the strange mechanism
+of the palatal teeth, with the intervening cavities that had lodged both
+the brain and the occipital part of the spine. The fossils on the top of
+the cliffs here are chiefly Dipterians of the two closely allied genera,
+Diplopterus and Osteolepis.</p>
+
+<p>A little farther on, I found, on a hill-side in which extensive
+slate-quarries had once been wrought, the remains of Pterichthys
+existing as mere patches, from which the color had been discharged, but
+in which the almost human-like outline of both body and arms were still
+distinctly traceable; and farther on still, where the steep wall of
+cliffs sinks into a line of grassy banks, I saw in yet another quarry,
+ichthyolites of all the three great ganoid families so characteristic of
+the Old Red,&mdash;Cephalaspians, Dipterians, and Acanthodians,&mdash;ranged in
+the three-storied order to which I have already referred as so
+inexplicable. The specimens, however, though numerous, are not fine.
+They are resolved into a brittle bituminous coal, resembling hard pitch
+or black wax, which is always considerably less tenacious than the
+matrix in which they are inclosed; and so, when laid open by the hammer,
+they usually split through the middle of the plates and scales, instead
+of parting from the stone at their surfaces, and resemble, in
+consequence, those dark, shadow-like profiles taken in Indian ink by the
+limner, which exhibit a correct outline, but no details. We find,
+however, in some of the genera, portions of the animal preserved that
+are rarely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_478" id="Page_478">[Pg 478]</a></span> seen in a state of keeping equally perfect in the
+ichthyolites of Cromarty, Moray, or Banff,&mdash;those terminal bones of the
+Coccosteos, for instance, that were prolonged beyond the plates by which
+the head and upper parts of the body were covered. Wherever the
+ichthyolites are inclosed in nodules, as in the more southerly counties
+over which the deposit extends, the nodule terminates, in almost every
+case, with the massier portions of the organism; for the thinner parts,
+too inconsiderable to have served as attractive nuclei to the stony
+matter when the concretion was forming, were left outside its pale, and
+so have been lost; whereas, in the northern districts of the deposit,
+where the fossils, as in Caithness and Orkney, occur in flagstone, these
+slimmer parts, when the general state of keeping is tolerably good, lie
+spread out on the planes of the slabs, entire often in their minutest
+rays and articulations. The numerous Coccostei of this quarry exhibit,
+attached to their upper plates, their long vertebral columns, of many
+joints, that, depending from the broad dorsal shields of the
+ichthyolite, remind one of those skeleton fishes one sometimes sees on
+the 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 of
+the Old Red Sandstone possessed an internal skeleton so decidedly
+osseous as that of the Coccosteus, and none of them presented externally
+so large an extent of naked skin,&mdash;provisions which probably went
+together. For about three-fifths of the entire length of the animal the
+surface was unprotected by dermal plates; and the muscles must have
+found the fulcrums on which they acted in the internal skeleton
+exclusively. And hence a necessity for greater strength in their
+interior framework than in that of fishes as strongly fenced round
+externally by scales or plates as the coleoptera by their elytrine, or
+the crustacea<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_479" id="Page_479">[Pg 479]</a></span> by their shells. Even in the Coccosteus, however, the
+ossification was by no means complete; and the analogies of the skeleton
+seem to have allied it rather with the skeletons of the sturgeon family
+than with the skeletons of the sharks or rays. The processes of the
+vertebr&aelig; were greatly more solid in their substance than the vertebr&aelig;
+themselves,&mdash;a condition which in the sharks and rays is always
+reversed; and they frequently survive, each with its little sprig of
+bone, formed like the letter Y, that attached it to its centrum,
+projecting from it, in specimens from which the vertebral column itself
+has wholly disappeared. I found frequent traces, during my exploratory
+labors in Orkney, of the dorsal and ventral fins of this ichthyolite;
+but no trace whatever of the pectorals or of the caudal fin. There seem
+to have been no pectorals; and the tail, as I have always had occasion
+to remark, was apparently a mere point, unfurnished with rays.</p>
+
+<p>In descending from the cliffs upon the quarries, my companion pointed to
+an angular notch in the rock-edge, apparently the upper termination of
+one of the numerous vertical cracks by which the precipices are
+traversed, and which in so many cases on the Orkney coast have been
+hollowed by the waves into long open coves or deep caverns. It was up
+there, he said, that about twelve years ago the sole survivor of a
+ship's crew contrived to scramble, four days after his vessel had been
+dashed to fragments against the rocks below, and when it was judged that
+all on board had perished. The vessel was wrecked on a Wednesday. She
+had 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 seen
+from the beach that she could scarce weather the headland yonder, a
+number of people gathered along the cliffs, furnished with ropes, to
+render to the crew whatever assistance<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_480" id="Page_480">[Pg 480]</a></span> might be possible in the
+circumstances. Human help, however, was to avail them nothing. Their
+vessel, a fine schooner, when within forty yards of the promontory, was
+seized broadside by an enormous wave, and dashed against the cliff, as
+one might dash a glass-phial against a stone-wall. One blow completed
+the work of destruction; she went rolling in entire from keel to
+mast-head, and returned, on the recoil of the broken surge, a mass of
+shapeless fragments, that continued to dance idly amid the foam, or were
+scattered along the beach. But of the poor men, whom the spectators had
+seen but a few seconds before running wildly about the deck, there
+remained not a trace; and the saddened spectators returned to their
+homes to say that all had perished. Four days after,&mdash;on the morning of
+the following Sabbath,&mdash;the sole survivor of the crew, saved, as if by
+miracle, climbed up the precipice, and presented himself to a group of
+astonished and terrified country people, who could scarce regard him as
+a creature of this world. The fissure, which at the top of the cliff
+forms but a mere angular inflection, is hollowed below into a low-roofed
+cave of profound depth, into the farther extremity of which the tide
+hardly ever penetrates. It is floored by a narrow strip of shingly
+beach; and on this bit of beach, far within the cave, the sailor found
+himself, 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; a
+tin cover enabled him to catch enough of the fresh-water droppings of
+the roof to quench his thirst; several large fragments of wreck that had
+been jammed fast athwart the opening of the cave broke the violence of
+the wind and sea; and in that doleful prison, day after day, he saw the
+tides sink and rise, and lay, when the surf rolled high at the fall of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_481" id="Page_481">[Pg 481]</a></span>
+the tide, in utter darkness even at mid-day, as the waves outside rose
+to the roof, and inclosed him in a chamber as entirely cut off from the
+external atmosphere as that of a diving bell. He was oppressed in the
+darkness, every time the waves came rolling in and compressed his
+modicum of air, by a sensation of extreme heat,&mdash;an effect of the
+condensation; and then, in the interval of recession, and consequent
+expansion, by a sudden chill. At low ebb he had to work hard in clearing
+away the accumulations of stone and gravel which had been rolled in by
+the previous tide, and threatened to bury him up altogether. At length
+he succeeded, after many a fruitless attempt, in gaining an upper ledge
+that overhung his prison-mouth; and, by a path on which a goat would
+scarce have found footing, he scrambled to the top. His name was
+Johnstone; and the cave is still known as "Johnstone's Cave." Such was
+the narrative of my companion.</p>
+
+<p>A little farther on, the undulating bank, into which the cliffs sink,
+projects into the sea as a flat green promontory, edged with hills of
+indurated sand, and topped by a picturesque ruin, that forms a pleasing
+object in the landscape. The ruin is that of a country residence of the
+bishops of Orkney during the disturbed and unhappy reign of Scotch
+Episcopacy, and bears on a flat tablet of weathered sandstone the
+initials of its founder, Bishop George Grahame, and the date of its
+erection, 1633. With a green cultivated oasis immediately around it, and
+a fine open sound, overlooked by the bold, picturesque cliffs of Hoy, in
+front, it must have been, for at least half the year, an agreeable, and,
+as its remains testify, a not uncomfortable habitation. But I greatly
+fear Scottish clergymen of the Establishment, whether Presbyterian or
+Episcopalian, when obnoxious, from their position or their tenets, to
+the great bulk of the Scottish people, have not been left, since<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_482" id="Page_482">[Pg 482]</a></span> at
+least the Reformation, to enjoy either quiet or happy lives, however
+extrinsically favorable the circumstances in which they may have been
+placed. Bishop Grahame, only five years after the date of the erection,
+was tried before the famous General Assembly of 1638; and, being
+convicted of having "all the ordinar faults of a bishop," he was
+deposed, and ordered within a limited time "to give tokens of
+repentance, under paine of excommunication." "He was a curler on the ice
+on the Sabbath day," says Baillie,&mdash;"a setter of tacks to his sones and
+grandsones, to the prejudice of the Church; he oversaw adulterie;
+slighted charming; neglected preaching and doing of anie good; and held
+portions of ministers' stipends for building his cathedral." The
+concluding portion of his life, after his deposition, was spent in
+obscurity; nor did his successor in the bishoprick, subsequent to the
+re&euml;stablishment of Episcopacy at the Restoration,&mdash;Bishop
+Honeyman,&mdash;close his days more happily. He was struck in the arm by the
+bullet which the zealot Mitchell had intended for Archbishop Sharp; and
+the shattered bone never healed; "for, though he lived some years
+after," says Burnet, "<i>they</i> were forced to lay open the wound every
+year, for an exfoliation;" and his life was eventually shortened by his
+sufferings. All seemed comfortable enough, and quite quiet enough, in
+the bishop's country-house to-day. There were two cows quietly chewing
+the cud in what apparently had been the dignitary's sitting-room, and
+patiently awaiting the services of a young woman who was approaching at
+some little distance with a pail. A large gray cat, that had been
+sunning herself in a sheltered corner of the court-yard, started up at
+our approach, and disappeared through a slit hole. The sun, now gone far
+down the sky, shone brightly on shattered gable-tops, and roofless,
+rough-edged walls, revealing many<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_483" id="Page_483">[Pg 483]</a></span> a flaw and chasm in the yielding
+masonry; and their shadows fell with picturesque effect on the loose
+litter, rude implements, and gapped dry-stone fence, of the neglected
+farm-yard which surrounds the building.</p>
+
+<p>I have said that the flat promontory occupied by the ruin is edged by
+hills of indurated sand. Existing in some places as a continuous bed of
+a soft gritty sandstone, scooped wave-like a-top, and varying from five
+to eight feet in thickness, they form a curious example of a sub-a&euml;rial
+formation,&mdash;the sand of which they are composed having been all blown
+from the sea-beach, and consolidated by the action of moisture on a
+calcareous mixture of comminuted shells, which forms from twenty to
+twenty-five per cent. of their entire mass. I found that the sections of
+the bed laid open by the encroachments of the sea, were scarce less
+regularly stratified than those of a subaqueous deposit, and that it was
+hollowed, where most exposed to the weather, into a number of spherical
+cells, which gave to those parts of the surface where they lay thickest,
+somewhat the aspect of a rude Runic fret-work,&mdash;an appearance not
+uncommon in weathered sandstones. With more time to spare, I could fain
+have studied the deposit more carefully, in the hope of detecting a few
+peculiarities of structure sufficient to distinguish sub-a&euml;rially-formed
+from subaqueously-deposited beds of stone. Sandstones of sub-a&euml;rial
+formation are of no very unfrequent occurrence among the recent
+deposits. On the coast of Cornwall there are cliffs of considerable
+height that extend for several miles, and have attained a degree of
+solidity sufficient to serve the commoner purposes of the architect,
+which at one time existed as accumulations of blown sand. "It is around
+the promontory of New Kaye," says Dr. Paris, in an interesting memoir on
+the subject, "that the most extensive formation of sandstone<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_484" id="Page_484">[Pg 484]</a></span> takes
+place. Here it may be seen in different stages of induration, from a
+state in which it is too friable to be detached from the rock upon which
+it reposes, to a hardness so considerable, that it requires a violent
+blow from a sledge-hammer to break it. Buildings are here constructed of
+it; the church of Cranstock is entirely built with it; and it is also
+employed for various articles of domestic and agricultural uses. The
+geologist who has previously examined the celebrated specimen from
+Guadaloupe will be struck with the great analogy which it bears to this
+formation." Now, as vast tracts of the earth's surface,&mdash;in some parts
+of the world, as in Northern Africa, millions of square miles
+together,&mdash;are at present overlaid by accumulations of sand, which have
+this tendency to consolidate and become lasting sub-a&euml;rial formations,
+destined to occupy a place among the future strata of the globe, it
+seems impossible but that also in the old geologic periods there must
+have been, as now, sand-wastes and sub-a&euml;rial formations. And as the
+representatives of these may still exist in some of our sandstone
+quarries, it might be well to be possessed of a knowledge of the
+peculiarities by which they are to be distinguished from deposits of
+subaqueous origin. In order that I might have an opportunity of studying
+these peculiarities where they are to be seen more extensively developed
+than elsewhere on the eastern coast of Scotland, I here formed the
+intention of spending a day, on my return south, among the sand-wastes
+of Moray,&mdash;a purpose which I afterwards carried into effect. But of that
+more anon.</p>
+
+<p>On the following morning, availing myself of a kind invitation, through
+Dr. Garson, from his brother, a Free Church minister resident in an
+inland district of the Mainland, in convenient neighborhood with the
+northern coasts of the island, and with several quarries, I set out
+from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_485" id="Page_485">[Pg 485]</a></span> Stromness, taking in my way the Loch and Standing Stones of
+Stennis, which I had previously seen from but my seat in the mail-gig as
+I passed. Mr. Learmonth, who had to visit some of his people in this
+direction, accompanied me for several miles along the shores of the
+loch, and lightened the journey by his interesting snatches of local
+history, suggested by the various objects that lay along our
+road,&mdash;buildings, tumuli, ancient battle-fields, and standing stones.
+The loch itself, an expansive sheet of water fourteen miles in
+circumference, I contemplated with much interest, and longed for an
+opportunity of studying its natural history. Two promontories,&mdash;those
+occupied by the Standing Stones, shoot out from the opposite sides, and
+approach so near as to be connected by a rustic bridge. They divide the
+loch into two nearly equal parts, the lower of which gives access to the
+sea, and is salt in its nether reaches and brackish in its upper ones,
+while the higher is merely brackish in its nether reaches, and fresh
+enough 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 few
+miles, from where the lower loch opens to the sea, of only marine
+plants, 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 having
+each their own reaches, with certain debatable tracts between, in which
+each expatiates with more or less freedom, according to its nature and
+constitution,&mdash;some of the sea-fishes advancing far on the fresh water,
+and others, among the proper denizens of the lake, encroaching far on
+the salt. The common fresh-water eel strikes out, I was told, farthest
+into the sea-water; in which, indeed, reversing the habits of the
+salmon, it is known in various<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_486" id="Page_486">[Pg 486]</a></span> 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 to
+resist 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 the
+Loch of Stennis and its productions, animal and vegetable, such as a
+Gilbert White of Selborne could produce, would be at once a very
+valuable and very curious document. By dividing it into reaches, in
+which the average saltness of the water was carefully ascertained, and
+its productions noted, with the various modifications which these
+underwent as they receded upwards or downwards from their proper habitat
+towards the line at which they could no longer exist, much information
+might be acquired, of a kind important to the naturalist, and not
+without its use to the geological student. I have had an opportunity
+elsewhere of observing a curious change which fresh-water induces on the
+flounder. In the brackish water of an estuary it becomes, without
+diminishing in general size, thicker and more fleshy than when in its
+legitimate habitat the sea; but the flesh loses in quality what it gains
+in quantity;&mdash;it is flabby and insipid, and the margin-fin lacks always
+its delicious strip of transparent fat. I fain wish that some
+intelligent resident on the shores of Stennis would set himself
+carefully to examine its productions, and that then, after registering
+his observations for a few years, he would favor the world with its
+natural history.</p>
+
+<p>The Standing Stones,&mdash;second in Britain of their kind, to only those of
+Stonehenge,&mdash;occur in two groups; the smaller group (composed, however,
+of the taller stones) on the southern promontory; the larger on the
+northern one. Rude and shapeless, and bearing no other impress of the
+designing faculty than that they are stuck endwise in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_487" id="Page_487">[Pg 487]</a></span> earth, and
+form, as a whole, regular figures on the sward, there is yet a sublime
+solemnity about them, unsurpassed in effect by any ruin I have yet seen,
+however grand in its design or imposing in its proportions. Their very
+rudeness, associated with their ponderous bulk and weight, adds to their
+impressiveness. When there is art and taste enough in a country to hew
+an ornate column, no one marvels that there should also be mechanical
+skill enough in it to set it up on end; but the men who tore from the
+quarry these vast slabs, some of them eighteen feet in height over the
+soil, and raised them where they now stand, must have been ignorant
+savages, unacquainted with machinery, and unfurnished, apparently, with
+a single tool. And what, when contemplating their handiwork, we have to
+subtract in idea from their minds, we add, by an involuntary process, to
+their bodies: we come to regard the feats which they have accomplished
+as performed by a power not mechanical, but gigantic. The consideration,
+too, that these remains,&mdash;eldest of the works of man in this
+country,&mdash;should have so long survived all definite tradition of the
+purposes which they were raised to serve, so that we now merely know
+regarding them that they were religious in their uses,&mdash;products of that
+ineradicable instinct of man's nature which leads him in so many various
+ways to attempt conciliating the Powers of another world,&mdash;serves
+greatly to heighten their effect. History at the time of their erection
+had no existence in these islands: the age, though it sought, through
+the medium of strange, unknown rites, to communicate with Heaven, was
+not knowing enough to communicate, through the medium of alphabet or
+symbol, with posterity. The appearance of the obelisks, too, harmonizes
+well with their great antiquity and the obscurity of their origin. For
+about a man's height from the ground they are covered thick by the
+shorter lichens,&mdash;chiefly the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_488" id="Page_488">[Pg 488]</a></span> gray-stone parmelia,&mdash;here and there
+embroidered by golden-hued patches of the yellow parmelia of the wall;
+but their heads and shoulders, raised beyond the reach alike of the
+herd-boy and of his herd, are covered by an extraordinary profusion of a
+flowing beard-like lichen of unusual length,&mdash;the lichen <i>calicarus</i>
+(or, according to modern botanists, <i>Ramalina scopulorum</i>), in which
+they look like an assemblage of ancient Druids, mysteriously stern and
+invincibly silent and shaggy as the bard of Gray, when</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+"Loose his beard and hoary hair<br />
+Streamed like a meteor on the troubled air."<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The day was perhaps too sunny and clear for seeing the Standing Stones
+to the best possible advantage. They could not be better placed than on
+their flat promontories, surrounded by the broad plane of an extensive
+lake, in a waste, lonely, treeless country, that presents no bold,
+competing features to divert attention from them as the great central
+objects of the landscape; but the gray of the morning, or an atmosphere
+of fog and vapor, would have associated better with the mystic obscurity
+of their history, their shaggy forms, and their livid tints, than the
+glare of a cloudless sun, that brought out in hard, clear relief their
+rude outlines, and gave to each its sharp dark patch of shadow.
+Gray-colored objects, when tall and imposing, but of irregular form, are
+seen always to most advantage in an uncertain light,&mdash;in fog or
+frost-rime, or under a scowling sky, or, as Parnell well expresses it,
+"amid the living gleams of night." They appeal, if I may so express
+myself, to the sentiment of the ghostly and the spectral, and demand at
+least a partial envelopment of the obscure. Burns, with the true tact of
+the genuine poet, develops the sentiment almost instinctively in an
+exquisite stanza in one of his less-known songs, "The Posey,"&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_489" id="Page_489">[Pg 489]</a></span>"The hawthorn I will pu', <i>wi' its locks o' siller gray</i>,<br />
+Where, <i>like an aged man, it stands at break o' day</i>."<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Scott, too, in describing these very stones, chooses the early morning
+as the time in which to exhibit them, when they "stood in the gray light
+of the dawning, like the phantom forms of antediluvian giants, who,
+shrouded in the habiliments of the dead, come to revisit, by the pale
+light, the earth which they had plagued with their oppression, and
+polluted by their sins, till they brought down upon it the vengeance of
+long-suffering heaven." On another occasion, he introduces them as
+"glimmering, a grayish white, in the rising sun, and projecting far to
+the westward their long gigantic shadows." And Malcolm, in the exercise
+of a similar faculty with that of Burns and of Scott, surrounds them, in
+his description, with a somewhat similar atmosphere of partial dimness
+and obscurity:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+"The hoary rocks, of giant size,<br />
+That o'er the land in circles rise,<br />
+Of which tradition may not tell,<br />
+Fit circles for the wizard's spell,<br />
+Seen far <i>amidst the scowling storm</i>,<br />
+Seem each a tall and phantom form,<br />
+<i>As hurrying vapors o'er them flee,</i><br />
+Frowning in grim security,<br />
+While, like a dread voice from the past,<br />
+Around them moans the autumnal blast."<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>There exist curious analogies between the earlier stages of society and
+the more immature periods of life,&mdash;between the savage and the child;
+and the huge circle of Stennis seems suggestive of one of these. It is
+considerably more than four hundred feet in diameter, and the stones
+which compose it, varying from three to fourteen feet in height, must
+have been originally from thirty-five to forty in number, though only
+sixteen now remain erect. A mound and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_490" id="Page_490">[Pg 490]</a></span> fosse, still distinctly
+traceable, run round the whole; and there are several mysterious-looking
+tumuli outside, bulky enough to remind one of the lesser morains of the
+geologist. But the circle, notwithstanding its imposing magnitude, is
+but a huge child's house, after all,&mdash;one of those circles of stones
+which children lay down on their village green, and then, in the
+exercise of that imaginative faculty which distinguishes between the
+young of the human animal and those of every other creature, convert, by
+a sort of conventionalism, into a church or dwelling-house, within which
+they 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 the
+southern promontory of the lake formed but a half-circle, and it was a
+half-circle dedicated to the moon. To the circular sun the great rude
+children of an immature age of the world had laid down a circle of
+stones on the one promontory; to the moon, in her half-orbed state, they
+had laid down a half-circle on the other; and in propitiating these
+material deities, to whose standing in the old Scandinavian worship the
+names of our <i>Sun</i>day and <i>Mon</i>day still testify, they employed in their
+respective inclosures, in the exercise of a wild unregulated fancy,
+uncouth irrational rites, the extremeness of whose folly was in some
+measure concealed by the horrid exquisiteness of their cruelty. We are
+still in the nonage of the species, and see human society sowing its
+wild oats in a thousand various ways, very absurdly often, and often
+very wickedly; but matters seem to have been greatly worse when, in an
+age still more immature, the grimly-bearded, six-feet children of Orkney
+were laying down their stone-circles on the green. Sir Walter, in the
+parting scene between Cleveland and Minna Troil, which he describes as
+having taken place amid the lesser group of stones, refers to an immense
+slab "lying flat and prostrate in the middle of the others, supported
+by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_491" id="Page_491">[Pg 491]</a></span> short pillars, of which some relics are still visible," and which is
+regarded as the sacrificial stone of the erection. "It is a current
+belief," says Dr. Hibbert, in an elaborate paper in the "Transactions of
+the Scottish Antiquaries," that upon this stone a victim of royal birth
+was immolated. Halfdan the Long-legged, the son of Harold the
+Fair-haired, in punishment for the aggressions of Orkney, had made an
+unexpected descent upon its coasts, and acquired possession of the
+Jarldom. In the autumn succeeding Halfdan was retorted upon, and, after
+an inglorious contest, betook himself to a place of concealment, from
+which he was the following morning unlodged, and instantly doomed to the
+As&aelig;. Einar, the Jarl of Orkney, with his sword carved the captive's back
+into the form of an eagle, the spine being longitudinally divided, and
+the ribs being separated by a transverse cut as far as the loins. He
+then extracted the lungs, and dedicated them to Odin for a perpetuity of
+victory, singing a wild song,&mdash;'I am revenged for the slaughter of
+Rognvalld: this have the Norn&aelig; decreed. In my fiording the pillar of the
+people has fallen. Build up the cairn, ye active youths, for victory is
+with us. From the stones of the sea-shore will I pay the Long-legged a
+hard seat.' There is certainly no trace to be detected, in this dark
+story, of a golden age of the world: the golden age is, I would fain
+hope, an age yet to come. There at least exists no evidence that it is
+an age gone by. It will be the full-grown <i>manly</i> age of the world when
+the race, as such, shall have attained to their years of discretion.
+They are at present in their froward boyhood, playing at the mischievous
+games of war, and diplomacy, and stock-gambling, and site-refusing, and
+it is not quite agreeable for quiet honest people to be living amongst
+them. But there would be nothing gained by going back to that more
+infantine state of society in which the Jarl Einar carved into a red
+eagle the back of Halfdan the Long-legged.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_492" id="Page_492">[Pg 492]</a></span></p>
+<h3>CHAPTER XIV.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="hang">On Horseback&mdash;A pared Moor&mdash;Small Landholders&mdash;Absorption of small
+holdings in England and Scotland&mdash;Division of Land favorable to
+Civil and Religious Rights&mdash;Favorable to social Elevation&mdash;An
+inland Parish&mdash;The Landsman and Lobster&mdash;Wild Flowers of
+Orkney&mdash;Law of Compensation illustrated by the Tobacco
+Plant&mdash;Poverty tends to Productiveness&mdash;Illustrated in
+Ireland&mdash;Profusion of Ichthyolites&mdash;Orkney a land of Defunct
+Fishes&mdash;Sandwick&mdash;A Collection of Coccostean Flags&mdash;A Quarry full
+of Heads of Dipteri&mdash;The Bergil, or Striped Wrasse&mdash;Its Resemblance
+to the Dipterus&mdash;Poverty of the Flora of the Lower Old Red&mdash;No true
+Coniferous Wood in the Orkney Flagstones&mdash;Departure for Hoy&mdash;The
+intelligent Boatman&mdash;Story of the Orkney Fisherman. </p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">While</span> yet lingering amid the Standing Stones, I was joined by Mr.
+Garson, who had obligingly ridden a good many miles to meet me, and now
+insisted that I should mount and ride in turn, while he walked by my
+side, that I might be fresh, he said, for the exploratory ramble of the
+evening. I could have ventured more readily on taking the command of a
+vessel 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 very
+much his own way, got upon honor with me, and exerted himself to such
+purpose that we did not fall greatly more than a hundred yards behind
+Mr. Garson. We traversed in our journey a long dreary moor, so entirely
+ruined, like those which I had seen on the previous day, by belonging to
+everybody in general, as to be no longer of the slightest use to anybody
+in particular. The soil seems to have been naturally poor; but it must
+have taken a good deal of spoiling to render it the sterile, verdureless
+waste it is now; for even where it had been poorest, I found that in the
+island-like<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_493" id="Page_493">[Pg 493]</a></span> appropriated patches by which it is studded, it at least
+bears, what it has long ceased to bear elsewhere, a continuous covering
+of green sward. But if disposed to quarrel with the commons of Orkney, I
+found in close neighborhood with them that with which I could have no
+quarrel,&mdash;numerous small properties farmed by the proprietors, and
+forming, in most instances, farms by no means very large. There are
+parishes in this part of the mainland divided among from sixty to eighty
+landowners.</p>
+
+<p>A nearly similar state of things seems to have obtained in Scotland
+about the beginning of the eighteenth century, and for the greater part
+of the previous one. I am acquainted with old churchyards in the north
+of Scotland that contain the burying-grounds of from six to ten landed
+proprietors, whose lands are now merged into single properties. And, in
+reading the biographies of our old covenanting ministers, I have often
+remarked as curious, and as bearing in the same line, that no
+inconsiderable proportion of their number were able to retire, in times
+of persecution, to their own little estates. It was during the
+disastrous wars of the French Revolution,&mdash;wars from the effects of
+which Great Britain will, I fear, never fully recover,&mdash;that the smaller
+holdings were finally absorbed. About twenty years ere the war began,
+the lands of England were parcelled out among no fewer than two hundred
+and fifty thousand families; before the peace of 1815, they had fallen
+into the hands of thirty-two thousand. In less than half a century, that
+base of actual proprietorship on which the landed interest of any
+country must ever find its surest standing, had contracted in England to
+less than one-seventh its former extent. In Scotland the absorption of
+the great bulk of the lesser properties seems to have taken place
+somewhat earlier; but in it also the revolutionary war appears to have
+given them the final blow;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_494" id="Page_494">[Pg 494]</a></span> and the more extensive proprietors of the
+kingdom are assuredly all the less secure in consequence of their
+extinction. They were the smaller stones in the wall, that gave firmness
+in the setting to the larger, and jammed them fast within those safe
+limits determined by the line and plummet, which it is ever perilous to
+overhang. Very extensive territorial properties, wherever they exist,
+create almost necessarily&mdash;human nature being what it is&mdash;a species of
+despotism more oppressive than even that of great unrepresentative
+governments. It used to be remarked on the Continent, that there was
+always less liberty in petty principalities, where the eye of the ruler
+was ever on his subjects, than under the absolute monarchies.<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a> And in
+a country such as ours, the accumulation of landed property in the hands
+of comparatively a few individuals has the effect often of bringing the
+territorial privileges of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_495" id="Page_495">[Pg 495]</a></span> great landowner into a state of
+antagonism with the civil and religious rights of the people, that
+cannot be other than perilous to the landowner himself. In a district
+divided, like Orkney, among many owners, a whole country-side could not
+be shut up against its people by some ungenerous or intolerant
+proprietor,&mdash;greatly at his own risk and to his own hurt,&mdash;as in the
+case of Glen Tilt or the Grampians; nor, when met for purposes of public
+worship, could the population of a parish be chased from off its bare
+moors, at his instance, by the constable or the sheriff-officer, to
+worship God agreeably to their consciences amid the mire of a
+cross-road, or on the bare sea-beach uncovered by the ebb of the tide.
+The smaller properties of the country, too, served admirably as
+stepping-stones, by which the proprietors or their children, when
+possessed of energy and intellect, could mount to a higher walk of
+society. Here beside me, for instance, was my friend Mr. Garson, a
+useful and much-esteemed minister of religion in his native district;
+while his brother, a medical man of superior parts, was fast rising into
+extensive practice in the neighboring town. They had been prepared for
+their respective professions by a classical education; and yet the
+stepping-stone to positions in society at once so important and so
+respectable was simply one of the smaller holdings of Orkney, derived to
+them as the descendants of one of the old Scandinavian Udallers, and
+which fell short, I was informed, of a hundred a-year.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Garson's dwelling, to which I was welcomed with much hospitality by
+his mother and sisters, occupies the middle of an inclined hollow or
+basin, so entirely surrounded by low, moory hills, that at no
+point,&mdash;though the radius of the prospect averages from four to six
+miles,&mdash;does it command a view of the sea. I scarce expected being
+introduced in Orkney to a scene in which the traveller<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_496" id="Page_496">[Pg 496]</a></span> could so
+thoroughly 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, who
+pride themselves upon their skill as sailors and boatmen, as a race of
+lubberly landsmen, unacquainted with nautical matters, and ignorant of
+the ocean and its productions. A Harray man is represented, in one of
+their stories, as entering into a compact of mutual forbearance with a
+lobster,&mdash;to him a monster of unknown powers and formidable
+proportions,&mdash;which he had at first attempted to capture, but which had
+shown fight, and had nearly captured him in turn. "Weel, weel, let a-be
+for let a-be," he is made to say; "if thou does na clutch me in thy
+grips, I'se no clutch thee in mine." It is to this primitive parish that
+David Vedder, the sailor-poet of Orkney, refers, in his "Orcadian
+Sketches," as "celebrated over the whole archipelago for the
+peculiarities of its inhabitants, their singular manners and habits,
+their uncouth appearance, and homely address. Being the most landward
+district in Pomona," he adds, "and consequently having little
+intercourse with strangers, it has become the stronghold of many ancient
+customs and superstitions, which modern innovation has pushed off from
+their pedestals in almost all the other parts of the island. The
+permanency of its population, too, is mightily in favor of 'old use and
+wont,' as it is almost entirely divided amongst a class of men yelept
+<i>pickie</i>, or petty lairds, each ploughing his own fields and reaping his
+own crops, much in the manner their great-great-grandfathers did in the
+days of Earl Patrick. And such is the respect which they entertain for
+their hereditary beliefs, that many of them are said still to cast a
+lingering look, not unmixed with reverence, on certain spots held sacred
+by their Scandinavian ancestors."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_497" id="Page_497">[Pg 497]</a></span></p><p>After an early dinner I set out for the barony of Birsay, in the
+northern extremity of the mainland, accompanied by Mr. Garson, and
+passed for several miles over a somewhat dreary country, bare, sterile,
+and brown, studded by cold, broad, treeless lakes, and thinly mottled by
+groups of gray, diminutive cottages, that do not look as if there was
+much of either plenty or comfort inside. But after surmounting the hills
+that form the northern side of the interior basin, I was sensible of a
+sudden improvement on the face of the country. Where the land slopes
+towards the sea, the shaggy heath gives place to a green luxuriant
+herbage; and the frequent patches of corn seem to rejoice in a more
+genial soil. The lower slopes of Orkney are singularly rich in wild
+flowers,&mdash;richer by many degrees than the fat loamy meadows of England.
+They resemble gaudy pieces of carpeting, as abundant in petals as in
+leaves: their luxuriant blow of red and white, blue and yellow, seems as
+if competing, in the extent of surface which it occupies, with their
+general ground of green. I have remarked a somewhat similar luxuriance
+of wild flowers in the more sheltered hollows of the bleak north-western
+coasts of Scotland. There is little that is rare to be found among these
+last, save that a few Alpine plants may be here and there recognized as
+occurring at a lower level than elsewhere in Britain; but the vast
+profusion of blossoms borne by species common to the greater part of the
+kingdom imparts to them an apparently novel character. We may detect, I
+am inclined to think, in this singular profusion, both in Orkney and the
+bleaker districts of the mainland of Scotland, the operation of a law
+not less influential in the animal than in the vegetable world, which,
+when hardship presses upon the life of the individual shrub or
+quadruped, so as to threaten its vitality, renders it fruitful in behalf
+of its species. I have seen the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_498" id="Page_498">[Pg 498]</a></span> principle strikingly exemplified in the
+common tobacco plant, when reared in a northern country in the open air.
+Year after year it continued to degenerate, and to exhibit a smaller
+leaf and a shorter stem, until the successors of what in the first year
+of 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, had
+merely borne a-top a few florets, which produced a small quantity of
+exceedingly minute seeds, the stunted weed, its descendant, was so
+thickly covered over in its season with its pale yellow bells, as to
+present the appearance of a nosegay; and the seeds produced were not
+only bulkier in the mass, but also individually of much greater size.
+The tobacco had grown productive in proportion as it had degenerated and
+become poor. In the common scurvy grass, too, remarkable, with some
+other plants, as I have already had occasion to mention, for taking its
+place among both the productions of our Alpine heights and of our
+sea-shores, it will be found that in proportion as its habitat proves
+ungenial, and its stems and leaves become dwarfish and thin, its little
+white cruciform flowers increase, till, in localities where it barely
+exists, as if on the edge of extinction, we find the entire plant
+forming a dense bundle of seed-vessels, each charged to the full with
+seed. And in the gay meadows of Orkney, crowded with a vegetation that
+approaches its northern limit of production, we detect what seems to be
+the same principle, chronically operative; and hence, it would seem,
+their extraordinary gaiety. Their richly-blossoming plants are the poor
+productive <i>Irish</i> of the vegetable world;<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a> for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_499" id="Page_499">[Pg 499]</a></span> Doubleday seems to
+be quite in the right in holding that the law extends to not only the
+inferior animals, but to our own species also. The lean, ill-fed sow and
+rabbit rear, it has been long known, a greatly more numerous progeny
+than the same animals when well cared for and fat; and every horse and
+cattle breeder knows, that to over-feed his animals proves a sure mode
+of rendering them sterile. The sheep, if tolerably well pastured,
+brings<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_500" id="Page_500">[Pg 500]</a></span> forth only a single lamb at a birth; but if half-starved and
+lean, the chances are that it may bring forth two or three. And so it is
+also with the greatly higher human race. Place them in circumstances of
+degradation and hardship so extreme as almost to threaten their
+existence as individuals, and they increase, as if in behalf of the
+species, with a rapidity without precedent in circumstances of greater
+comfort. The aristocratic families of a country are continually running
+out; and it requires frequent creations to keep up the House of Lords;
+while our poor people seem increasing in some districts in almost the
+mathematical ratio. The county of Sutherland is already more populous
+than it was previous to the great clearings. In Skye, though fully
+two-thirds of the population emigrated early in the latter half of the
+last century, a single generation had scarce passed ere the gap was
+completely filled; and miserable Ireland, had the human family no other
+breeding-place or nursery, would of itself be sufficient in a very few
+ages to people the world.</p>
+
+<p>We returned, taking in our way the cliffs of Marwick Head, in which I
+detected a few scattered plates and scales, and which, like nine-tenths
+of the rocks of Orkney, belong to the great flagstone division of the
+formation. I found the dry-stone fences on Mr. Garson's property still
+richer in detached fossil fragments than the cliffs; but there are few
+erections in the island that do not inclose in their walls portions of
+the organic. We find ichthyolite remains in the flagstones laid bare
+along the way-side,&mdash;in every heap of road-metal,&mdash;in the bottom of
+every stream,&mdash;in almost every cottage and fence. Orkney is a land of
+defunct fishes, and contains in its rocky folds more individuals of the
+waning 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 a
+delectable<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_501" id="Page_501">[Pg 501]</a></span> night's rest, after a day of prime exercise, prolonged till
+it just touched on toil, and again experienced, on looking out in the
+morning on the wide flat basin around, a feeling somewhat akin to
+wonder, that Orkney should possess a scene at once so extensive and so
+exclusively inland.</p>
+
+<p>Towards mid-day I walked on to the parish manse of Sandwick, armed with
+a letter of introduction to its inmate, the Rev. Charles Clouston,&mdash;a
+gentleman whose descriptions of the Orkneys, in the very complete and
+tastefully written Guide-Book of the Messrs. Anderson of Inverness, and
+of his own parish in the "Statistical Account of Scotland," had, both
+from the high literary ability and the amount of scientific acquirement
+which they exhibit, rendered me desirous to see. I was politely
+received, though my visit must have been, as I afterwards ascertained,
+at a rather inconvenient time. It was now late in the week, and the
+coming Sabbath was that of the communion in the parish; but Mr. Clouston
+obligingly devoted to me at least an hour, and I found it a very
+profitable one. He showed me a collection of flags, with which he
+intended constructing a grotto, and which contained numerous specimens
+of Coccosteus, that he had exposed to the weather, to bring out the fine
+blue efflorescence,&mdash;a phosphate of iron which forms on the surface of
+the plates. They reminded me, from their peculiar style of coloring, and
+the grotesqueness of their forms, of the blue figuring on pieces of
+buff-colored china, and seemed to be chiefly of one species, very
+abundant in Orkney, the <i>Coccosteus decipiens</i>. We next walked out to
+see a quarry in the neighborhood of the manse, remarkable for containing
+in immense abundance the heads of Dipteri,&mdash;many of them in a good state
+of keeping, with all the multitudinous plates to which they owe their
+pseudo-name, Polyphractus, in their original places, and bearing unworn<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_502" id="Page_502">[Pg 502]</a></span>
+and untarnished their minute carvings and delicate enamel, but existing
+in every case as mere detached heads. I found three of them lying in one
+little slaty fragment of two and a half inches by four, which I brought
+along with me. Mr. Clouston had never seen the curious arrangement of
+palatal plates and teeth which distinguishes the Dipterus; and, drawing
+his attention to it in an ill-preserved specimen which I found in the
+coping of his glebe-wall, I restored, in a rude pencil sketch, the two
+angular patches of teeth that radiate from the elegant dart-head in the
+centre of the palate, with the rhomboidal plate behind. "We have a fish,
+not uncommon on the rocky coasts of this part of the country," he
+said,&mdash;"the Bergil or Striped Wrasse (<i>Labras Balanus</i>),&mdash;which bears
+exactly such patches of angular teeth in its palate. They adhere
+strongly together; and, when found in our old Picts' houses, which
+occasionally happens, they have been regarded by some of our local
+antiquaries as artificial,&mdash;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 show
+you one disinterred here some years ago." It interested me to find, from
+Mr. Clouston's specimens that the palatal grinders of this recent fish
+of Orkney very nearly resemble those of its <i>Dipterus</i> of the Old Red
+Sandstone. The group is of nearly the same size in the modern as in the
+ancient fish, and presents the same angular form; but the individual
+teeth are more strongly set in the Bergil than in the Dipterus, and
+radiate less regularly from the inner rectangular point of the angle to
+its base outside. I could fain have procured an Orkney Bergil, in order
+to determine the general pattern of its palatal dentition with what is
+very peculiar in the more ancient fish,&mdash;the form of the lower jaw; and
+to ascertain farther, from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_503" id="Page_503">[Pg 503]</a></span> the contents of the stomach, the species of
+shell-fish or crustaceans on which it feeds; but, though by no means
+rare in Orkney, where it is occasionally used as food, I was unable,
+during my short stay, to possess myself of a specimen.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Clouston had, I found, chiefly directed his pal&aelig;ontological
+inquiries on the vegetable remains of the flagstones, as the department
+of the science in which, in relation to Orkney, most remained to be
+done; and his collection of these is the most considerable in the number
+of its specimens that I have yet seen. It, however, serves but to show
+how very extreme is the poverty of the flora of the Lower Old Red
+Sandstone. The numerous fishes of the period seem to have inhabited a
+sea little more various in its vegetation than in its molluscs. Among
+the specimens of Mr. Clouston's collection I could detect but two
+species of plants,&mdash;an imperfectly preserved vegetable, more nearly
+resembling a club-moss than aught I have seen, and a smooth-stemmed
+fucoid, existing as a mere coaly film on the stone, and distinguished
+chiefly from the other by its sharp-edged, well-defined outline, and
+from the circumstance that its stems continue to retain the same
+diameter for a considerable distance, and this, too, after throwing off
+at acute angles numerous branches, nearly equal in bulk to the parent
+trunk. In a specimen about two and a half feet in length, which I owe to
+the kindness of Mr. Dick of Thurso, there are stems continuous
+throughout, that, though they ramify into from six to eight branches in
+that 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 the
+intertropical seas that, streaming slantwise in the tide, rise not
+unfrequently to the surface in fifteen and twenty fathoms water. I saw
+among Mr. Clouston's specimens no such lignite as the fragment of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_504" id="Page_504">[Pg 504]</a></span> true
+coniferous wood which I had found at Cromarty a few years previous, and
+which, it would seem, is still unique among the fossils of the Old Red
+Sandstone. In the chart of the Pacific attached to the better editions
+of "Cook's Voyages," there are several entries along the track of the
+great navigator that indicate where, in mid-ocean, trees, or fragments
+of trees, had been picked up. The entries, however, are but few, though
+they belong to all the three voyages together: if I remember aright,
+there are only five entries in all,&mdash;two in the Northern and three in
+the Southern Pacific. The floating tree, at a great distance from land,
+is of rare occurrence in even the present scene of things, though the
+breadth of land be great, and trees numerous; and in the times of the
+Old Red Sandstone, when probably the breadth of land was <i>not</i> great,
+and trees <i>not</i> numerous, it seems to have been of rarer occurrence
+still. But it is at least something to know that in this early age of
+the world trees there were.</p>
+
+<p>I walked on to Stromness, and on the following morning, that of
+Saturday, took boat for Hoy,&mdash;skirting, on my passage out, the eastern
+and southern shores of the intervening island of Gr&aelig;msay, and, on the
+passage back again, its western and northern shores. The boatman, an
+intelligent man,&mdash;one of the teachers, as I afterwards ascertained, in
+the Free Church Sabbath-school,&mdash;lightened the way by his narratives of
+storm and wreck, and not a few interesting snatches of natural history.
+There is no member of the commoner professions with whom I better like
+to meet than with a sensible fisherman, who makes a right use of his
+eyes. The history of fishes is still very much what the history of
+almost all animals was little more than half a century ago,&mdash;a matter of
+mere external description, heavy often and dry, and of classification
+founded exclusively on anatomical details. We have still<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_505" id="Page_505">[Pg 505]</a></span> a very great
+deal to learn regarding the character, habits and instincts of these
+denizens of the deep,&mdash;much, in short, respecting that faculty which is
+in them through which their natures are harmonized to the inexorable
+laws, and they continue to live wisely and securely, in consequence,
+within their own element, when man, with all his reasoning ability, is
+playing strange vagaries in his;&mdash;a species of knowledge this, by the
+way, which constitutes by far the most valuable part,&mdash;the <i>mental</i>
+department of natural history; and the notes of the intelligent
+fisherman, gleaned from actual observation, have frequently enabled me
+to fill portions of the wide hiatus in the history of fishes which it
+ought of right to occupy. In passing, as we toiled along the Gr&aelig;msay
+coast, the ruins of a solitary cottage, the boatman furnished us with a
+few details of the history and character of its last inmate, an Orkney
+fisherman, that would have furnished admirable materials for one of the
+darker sketches of Crabbe. He was, he said, a resolute, unsocial man,
+not devoid of a dash of reckless humor, and remarkable for an
+extraordinary degree of bodily strength, which he continued to retain
+unbroken to an age considerably advanced, and which, as he rarely
+admitted of a companion in his voyages, enabled him to work his little
+skiff alone, in weather when even better equipped vessels had enough ado
+to keep the sea. He had been married in early life to a
+religiously-disposed woman, a member of some dissenting body; but,
+living with him in the little island of Gr&aelig;msay, separated by the sea
+from any place of worship, he rarely permitted her to see the inside of
+a church. At one time, on the occasion of a communion Sabbath in the
+neighboring parish of Stromness, he seemed to yield to her entreaties,
+and got ready his yawl, apparently with the design of bringing her
+across the Sound to the town. They had, however, no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_506" id="Page_506">[Pg 506]</a></span> sooner quitted the
+shore than he sailed off to a green little Ogygia of a holm in the
+neighborhood, on which, reversing the old mythologic story of Calypso
+and Ulysses, he incarcerated the poor woman for the rest of the day till
+evening. I could see, from the broad grin with which the boatman greeted
+this part of the recital, that there was, unluckily, almost fun enough
+in the trick to neutralize the sense of its barbarity. The unsocial
+fisherman lived on, dreaded and disliked, and yet, when his skiff was
+seen boldly keeping the sea in the face of a freshening gale, when every
+other was making for port, or stretching out from the land as some
+stormy evening was falling, not a little admired also. At length, on a
+night 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 be
+seen sitting erect at the bows, as if looking out for the shore. But as
+his little bark came shooting inwards on the long roll of a wave, it was
+found that there was no speculation in his stony glance: the
+misanthropic 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."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_507" id="Page_507">[Pg 507]</a></span></p>
+<h3>CHAPTER XV.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="hang">Hoy&mdash;Unique Scenery&mdash;The Dwarfie Stone of Hoy&mdash;Sir Walter Scott's
+Account of it&mdash;Its Associations&mdash;Inscription of Names&mdash;George
+Buchanan's Consolation&mdash;The mythic Carbuncle of the Hill of Hoy&mdash;No
+Fossils at Hoy&mdash;Striking Profile of Sir Walter Scott on the Hill of
+Hoy&mdash;Sir Walter, and Shetland and Orkney&mdash;Originals of two
+Characters in "The Pirate"&mdash;Bessie Millie&mdash;Garden of Gow, the
+"Pirate"&mdash;Childhood's Scene of Byron's "Torquil"&mdash;The Author's
+Introduction to his Sister&mdash;A German Visitor&mdash;German and Scotch
+Sabbath-keeping habits contrasted&mdash;Mr. Watt's Specimens of Fossil
+Remains&mdash;The only new Organism found in Orkney&mdash;Back to
+Kirkwall&mdash;to Wick&mdash;Vedder's Ode to Orkney. </p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">We</span> landed at Hoy, on a rocky stretch of shore, composed of the gray
+flagstones of the district. They spread out here in front of the tall
+hills composed of the overlying sandstone, in a green undulating
+platform, resembling a somewhat uneven esplanade spread out in front of
+a steep rampart. With the upper deposit a new style of scenery
+commences, unique in these islands: the hills, bold and abrupt, rise
+from fourteen to sixteen hundred feet over the sea-level; and the
+valleys by which they are traversed,&mdash;no mere shallow inflections of the
+general surface, like most of the other valleys of Orkney,&mdash;are of
+profound depth, precipitous, imposing, and solitary. The sudden change
+from the soft, low, and comparatively tame, to the bold, stern, and
+high, serves admirably to show how much the character of a landscape may
+depend on the formation which composes it. A walk of somewhat less than
+two miles brought me into the depths of a brown, shaggy valley, so
+profoundly solitary, that it does not contain a single human habitation,
+nor, with one interesting exception, a single trace<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_508" id="Page_508">[Pg 508]</a></span> of the hand of man.
+As the traveller approaches by a path somewhat elevated, in order to
+avoid the peaty bogs of the bottom, along the slopes of the northern
+side of the dell, he sees, amid the heath below, what at first seems to
+be a rhomboidal piece of pavement of pale Old Red Sandstone, bearing
+atop a few stunted tufts of vegetation. There are no neighboring objects
+of a known character by which to estimate its size; the precipitous
+hill-front behind is more than a thousand feet in height: the greatly
+taller Ward Hill of Hoy, which frowns over it on the opposite side, is
+at least five hundred feet higher; and, dwarfed by these giants, it
+seems a mere pavior's flag, mayhap some five or six feet square, by from
+eighteen inches to two feet in depth. It is only on approaching it
+within a few yards that we find it to be an enormous stone, nearly
+thirty feet in length by almost fifteen feet in breadth, and in some
+places, though it thins, wedge-like, towards one of the edges, more than
+six feet in thickness,&mdash;forming altogether such a mass as the quarrier
+would detach from the solid rock to form the architrave of some vast
+gateway, or the pediment of some colossal statue. A cave-like
+excavation, nearly three feet square, and rather more than seven feet in
+depth, opens on its gray and lichened side. The excavation is widened
+within, along the opposite walls, into two uncomfortably short beds,
+very much resembling those of the cabin of a small coasting vessel. One
+of 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 six
+inches shorter than its neighbor, and presents altogether more the
+appearance of a place of penance than of repose, lacks both cushion and
+ledge. An aperture, which seems to have been originally of a circular
+form, and about two and a half feet in diameter, but which some unlucky
+herd-boy, apparently in the want of better employment, has considerably
+mutilated and widened,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_509" id="Page_509">[Pg 509]</a></span> opens at the inner excavation of the extremity
+to 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 to
+be regarded as a chimney. A gray, rudely-hewn block of sandstone, which,
+though greatly too ponderous to be moved by any man of the ordinary
+strength, seems to have served the purpose of a door, lies prostrate
+beside the opening in front. And such is the famous Dwarfie Stone of
+Hoy, as firmly fixed in our literature by the genius of Sir Walter
+Scott, as in this wild valley by its ponderous weight and breadth of
+base, and regarding which&mdash;for it shares in the general obscurity of the
+other ancient remains of Orkney&mdash;the antiquary can do little more than
+repeat, somewhat incredulously, what tradition tells him, viz., that it
+was the work, many ages ago, of an ugly, malignant goblin, half-earth
+half-air,&mdash;the Elfin Trolld,&mdash;a personage, it is said, that even within
+the last century, used occasionally to be seen flitting about in its
+neighborhood.</p>
+
+<p>I was fortunate in a fine breezy day, clear and sunshiny, save where the
+shadows 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 of
+some broken gust that seemed to have lost its way, tossed for a moment
+the white cannach of the bogs, or raised spirally into the air, for a
+few yards, the light beards of some seeding thistle, and straightway let
+them down again. Suddenly, however, about noon, a shower broke thick and
+heavy against the dark sides and gray scalp of the Ward Hill, and came
+sweeping 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 rather
+scant, taken fairly lengthwise,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_510" id="Page_510">[Pg 510]</a></span> for a man of five feet eleven, I found,
+by stretching myself diagonally from corner to corner, no very
+uncomfortable lounging-place in a thunder-shower. Some provident
+herd-boy had spread it over, apparently months before, with a littering
+of heath and fern, which now formed a dry, springy conch; and as I lay
+wrapped up in my plaid, listening to the rain-drops as they pattered
+thick and heavy atop, or slanted through the broken hatchway to the
+vacant bed on the opposite side of the excavation, I called up the wild
+narrative of Norna, and felt all its poetry. The opening passage of the
+story is, however, not poetry, but good prose, in which the curious
+visitor might give expression to his own conjectures, if ingenious
+enough either to form or to express them so well. "With my eyes fixed on
+the smaller bed," the sorceress is made to say, "I wearied myself with
+conjectures regarding the origin and purpose of my singular place of
+refuge. Had it been really the work of that powerful Trolld to whom the
+poetry of the Scalds referred it? or was it the tomb of some
+Scandinavian chief, interred with his arms and his wealth, perhaps also
+with his immolated wife, that what he loved best in life might not in
+death be divided from him? or was it the abode of penance chosen by some
+devoted anchorite of later days? or the idle work of some wandering
+mechanic, whom chance, and whim, and leisure, had thrust upon such an
+undertaking?" What follows this sober passage is the work of the poet.
+"Sleep," continues Norna, "had gradually crept upon me among my
+lucubrations, when I was startled from my slumbers by a second clap of
+thunder, and when I awoke, I saw through the dim light which the upper
+aperture admitted, the unshapely and indistinct form of Trolld the
+dwarf, seated opposite to me on the lesser couch, which his square and
+misshapen bulk seemed absolutely to fill up. I was startled, but not
+affrighted; for the blood of the ancient race of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_511" id="Page_511">[Pg 511]</a></span> Lochlin was warm in my
+veins. He spoke, and his words were of Norse,&mdash;so old, that few save my
+father, or I myself could have comprehended their import,&mdash;such language
+as was spoken in these islands ere Olave planted his cross on the ruins
+of heathenism. His meaning was dark also, and obscure, like that which
+the pagan priests were wont to deliver, in the name of their idols, to
+the tribes that assembled at the <i>Helgafels</i>.... I answered him in
+nearly the same strain, for the spirit of the ancient Scalds of our race
+was upon me; and far from fearing the phantom with whom I sat cooped
+within so narrow a space, I felt the impulse of that high courage which
+thrust the ancient champions and Druidesses upon contests with the
+invisible world, when they thought that the earth no longer contained
+enemies worthy to be subdued by them.... The Demon scowled at me as if
+at once incensed and overawed; and then, coiling himself up in a thick
+and sulphurous vapor, he disappeared from his place. I did not till that
+moment feel the influence of fright, but then it seized me. I rushed
+into the open air, where the tempest had passed away, and all was pure
+and serene." Shall I dare confess, that I could fain have passed some
+stormy night all alone in this solitary cell, were it but to enjoy the
+luxury of listening, amid the darkness, to the clashing rain and the
+roar of the wind high among the cliffs, or to detect the brushing sound
+of hasty footsteps in the wild rustle of the heath, or the moan of
+unhappy spirits in the low roar of the distant sea. Or, mayhap,&mdash;again
+to borrow from the poet,&mdash;as midnight was passing into morning,</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+"To ponder o'er some mystic lay,<br />
+Till the wild tale had all its sway;<br />
+And in the bittern's distant shriek<br />
+I heard unearthly voices speak,<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_512" id="Page_512">[Pg 512]</a></span>Or thought the wizard priest was come<br />
+To claim again his ancient home!<br />
+And bade my busy fancy range<br />
+To frame him fitting shape and strange;<br />
+Till from the dream my brow I cleared,<br />
+And smiled to think that I had feared."<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The Dwarfie Stone has been a good deal undervalued by some writers, such
+as the historian of Orkney, Mr. Barry; and, considered simply as a work
+of art or labor, it certainly does not stand high. When tracing, as I
+lay a-bed, the marks of the tool, which, in the harder portions of the
+stone, are still distinctly visible, I just thought how that, armed with
+pick and chisel, and working as I was once accustomed to work, I could
+complete such another excavation to order in some three weeks or a
+month. 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, nor
+connect it with the supernatural, through the influences of wild ancient
+traditions, nor yet encircle it with a classic halo, borrowed from the
+undying inventions of an exquisite literary genius. A half-worn pewter
+spoon, stamped on the back with the word <i>London</i>, which was found in a
+miserable hut on the banks of the Awatska by some British sailors, at
+once excited in their minds a thousand tender remembrances of their
+country. And it would, I suspect, be rather a poor criticism, and
+scarcely 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 the
+materials of the spoon. Nor is the Dwarfie Stone to be correctly
+estimated, independently of the suggestive principle, on the rules of
+the mere quarrier who sells stones by the cubic foot, or of the mere
+contractor for hewn work who dresses them by the square one.</p>
+
+<p>The pillow I found lettered over with the names of visitors;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_513" id="Page_513">[Pg 513]</a></span> but the
+stone,&mdash;an exceedingly compact red sandstone,&mdash;had resisted the
+imperfect tools at the command of the traveller,&mdash;usually a nail or
+knife; and so there were but two of the names decipherable,&mdash;that of an
+"H. Ross, 1735," and that of a "P. <span class="smcap">Folster</span>, 1830." The rain still
+pattered heavily overhead; and with my geological chisel and hammer I
+did, to beguile the time, what I very rarely do,&mdash;added my name to the
+others, in characters which, if both they and the Dwarfie Stone get but
+fair play, will be distinctly legible two centuries hence. In what state
+will the world then exist, or what sort of ideas will fill the head of
+the man who, when the rock has well-nigh yielded up its charge, will
+decipher the name for the last time, and inquire, mayhap, regarding the
+individual 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 it
+would have saddened me to think that there would in all probability be
+as little response in the one case as in the other; but as men rise in
+years they become more indifferent than in early youth to "that life
+which wits inherit after death," and are content to labor on and be
+obscure. They learn, too, if I may judge from experience, to pursue
+science more exclusively for its own sake, with less, mayhap, of
+enthusiasm to carry them on, but with what is at least as strong to take
+its place as a moving force, that wind and bottom of formed habit
+through which what were at first acts of the will pass into easy
+half-instinctive promptings of the disposition. In order to acquaint
+myself with the fossiliferous deposits of Scotland, I have travelled,
+hammer in hand, during the last nine years, over fully ten thousand
+miles; nor has the work been in the least one of dry labor,&mdash;not more so
+than that of the angler, or grouse-shooter, or deer-stalker: it has
+occupied the mere leisure interstices of a somewhat busy life, and has
+served<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_514" id="Page_514">[Pg 514]</a></span> to relieve its toils. I have succeeded, however, in
+accomplishing but little: besides, what is discovery to-day will be but
+rudimentary fact to the tyro-geologists of the future. But if much has
+not been done, I have at least the consolation of George Buchanan, when,
+according to Melvill, "fand sitting in his chair, teiching his young man
+that servit him in his chalmer to spell a, b, ab; e, b, eb. 'Better
+this,' quoth he, 'nor stelling sheipe.'"</p>
+
+<p>The sun broke out in great beauty after the shower, glistening on a
+thousand minute runnels that came streaming down the precipices, and
+revealing, through the thin vapory haze, the horizontal lines of strata
+that bar the hill-sides, like courses of ashlar in a building. I failed,
+however, to detect, amid the general many-pointed glitter by which the
+blue gauze-like mist was bespangled, the light of the great carbuncle
+for which the Ward Hill has long been famous,&mdash;that wondrous gem,
+according to Sir Walter, "that, though it gleams ruddy as a furnace to
+them that view it from beneath, ever becomes invisible to him whose
+daring foot scales the precipices whence it darts its splendor." The
+Hill of Hoy is, however, not the only one in the kingdom that, according
+to tradition, bears a jewel in its forehead. The "great diamond" of the
+Northern Sutor was at one time scarce less famous than the carbuncle of
+the Ward Hill. "I have been oftener than once interrogated on the western
+coast of Scotland regarding the diamond rock of Cromarty; and have been
+told, by an old campaigner who fought under Abercrombie, that he has
+listened to the familiar story of its diamond amid the sand wastes of
+Egypt." But the diamond has long since disappeared; and we now see only
+the rock. Unlike the carbuncle of Hoy, it was never seen by day; though
+often, says the legend, the benighted boatmen has gazed, from amid the
+darkness, as he came rowing along<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_515" id="Page_515">[Pg 515]</a></span> the shore, on its clear beacon-like
+flame, which, streaming from the precipice, threw a fiery strip across
+the water; and often have the mariners of other countries inquired
+whether the light which they saw so high among the cliffs, right over
+their mast, did not proceed from the shrine of some saint or the cell of
+some hermit. At length an ingenious ship-captain determined on marking
+its place, brought with him from England a few balls of chalk, and took
+aim at it in the night-time with one of his great guns. Ere he had
+fired, however, it vanished, as if suddenly withdrawn by some guardian
+hand; and its place in the rock front has ever since remained as
+undistinguishable, whether by night or by day, as the scaurs and clefts
+around it. The marvels of the present time abide examination more
+patiently. It seems difficult enough to conceive, for instance, that the
+upper deposit of the Lower Old Red in this locality, out of which the
+mountains of Hoy have been scooped, once overlaid the flag stones of all
+Orkney, and stretched on and away to Dunnet Head, Tarbet Ness, and the
+Black Isle; and yet such is the story, variously authenticated, to which
+their nearly horizontal strata, and their abrupt precipices lend their
+testimony. In no case has this superior deposit of the formation of the
+Coccosteus been known to furnish a single fossil; nor did it yield me on
+this occasion, among the Hills of Hoy, what it had denied me everywhere
+else on every former one. Sly search, however, was by no means either
+very prolonged or very careful.</p>
+
+<p>I found I had still several hours of day-light before me; and these I
+spent, after my return on a rough tumbling sea to Stromness, in a second
+survey of the coast, westwards from the granitic axis of the island, to
+the bishop's palace, and the ichthyolitic quarry beyond. From this point
+of view the high terminal Hill of Hoy,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_516" id="Page_516">[Pg 516]</a></span> towards the west, presents what
+is really a striking profile of Sir Walter Scott, sculptured in the rock
+front by the storms of ages, on so immense a scale, that the Colossus of
+Rhodes, Pharos and all, would scarce have furnished materials enough to
+supply it with a nose. There are such asperities in the outline as one
+might expect in that of a rudely modelled bust, the work of a master,
+from which, in his fiery haste, he had not detached the superfluous
+clay; but these interfere in no degree with the fidelity, I had almost
+said spirit, of the likeness. It seems well, as it must have waited for
+thousands of years ere it became the portrait it now is, that the human
+profile, which it preceded so long, and without which it would have
+lacked the element of individual truth, should have been that of Sir
+Walter. Amid scenes so heightened in interest by his genius as those of
+Orkney, he is entitled to a monument. To the critical student of the
+philosophy and history of poetic invention it is not uninstructive to
+observe how completely the novelist has appropriated and brought within
+the compass of one fiction, in defiance of all those lower probabilities
+which the lawyer who pleaded before a jury court would be compelled to
+respect, almost every interesting scene and object in both the Shetland
+and Orkney islands. There was but little intercourse in those days
+between the two northern archipelagos. It is not yet thirty years since
+they 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 should
+be wrought up into the same piece of rich tissue with the imposing
+antiquities of Orkney,&mdash;Sumburgh Head and Roost with the ancient
+Cathedral of St. Magnus and the earl's palace, and Fitful Head and the
+sand-enveloped kirk of St. Ringan with the Standing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_517" id="Page_517">[Pg 517]</a></span> Stones of Stennis
+and the Dwarfie Stone of Hoy; and so the little jury-court probabilities
+have been sacrificed without scruple, and that higher truth of
+character, and that exquisite portraiture of external nature, which give
+such reality to fiction, and make it sink into the mind more deeply than
+historic fact, have been substituted instead. But such,&mdash;considerably to
+the annoyance of the lesser critics,&mdash;has been ever the practice of the
+greater poets. The lesser critics are all critics of the jury-court
+cast; while all the great masters of fiction, with Shakspeare at their
+head, have been asserters of that higher truth which is not letter, but
+spirit, and contemners of the mere judicial probabilities. And so they
+have been continually fretting the little men with their extravagances,
+and they ever will. What were said to be the originals of two of Sir
+Walter's characters in the "Pirate" were living in the neighborhood of
+Stromness only a few years ago. An old woman who resided immediately
+over the town, in a little cottage, of which there now remains only the
+roofless walls, and of whom the sailors, weather-bound in the port, used
+occasionally to purchase a wind, furnished him with the first conception
+of his Norna of the Fitful Head; and an eccentric shopkeeper of the
+place, who to his dying day used to designate the "Pirate," with much
+bitterness, 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 the
+village of Stromness, on the Orkney main island, called Pomona, lived,"
+he says, "in 1814, an aged dame called Bessie Millie, who helped out her
+subsistence by selling favorable winds to mariners. Her dwelling and
+appearance were not unbecoming her pretensions: her house, which was on
+the brow of the steep hill on which Stromness is founded, was only
+accessible by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_518" id="Page_518">[Pg 518]</a></span> a series of dirty and precipitous lanes, and, for
+exposure, might have been the abode of &AElig;olus himself, in whose
+commodities the inhabitant dealt. She herself was, as she told us,
+nearly one hundred years old, withered and dried up like a mummy. A
+clay-colored kerchief, folded round her head, corresponded in color to
+her corpse-like complexion. Two light-blue eyes that gleamed with a
+lustre like that of insanity, an utterance of astonishing rapidity, a
+nose and chin that almost met together, and a ghastly expression of
+cunning, 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."</p>
+
+<p>On the opposite side of Stromness, where the arm of the sea, which forms
+the harbor, is about a quarter of a mile in width, there is, immediately
+over the shore, a small square patch of ground, apparently a
+<i>planticruive</i>, or garden, surrounded by a tall dry-stone fence. It is
+all that survives&mdash;for the old dwelling-house to which it was attached
+was pulled down several years ago&mdash;of the patrimony of Gow the "Pirate;"
+and is not a little interesting, as having formed the central nucleus
+round which,&mdash;like those bits of thread or wire on which the richly
+saturated fluids of the chemist solidify and crystallize,&mdash;the entire
+fiction of the novelist aggregated and condensed under the influence of
+forces operative only in minds of genius. A white, tall, old-fashioned
+house, conspicuous on the hill-side, looks out across the bay towards
+the square inclosure, which it directly fronts. And it is surely a
+curious coincidence, that while in one of these two erections, only a
+few hundred yards apart, one of the heroes of Scott saw the light, the
+other should have proved the scene of the childhood of one of the heroes
+of Byron,</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_519" id="Page_519">[Pg 519]</a></span>"Torquil, the nursling of the northern seas."<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The reader will remember, that in Byron's poem of "The Island," one of
+the younger leaders of the mutineers is described as a native of these
+northern isles. He is drawn by the poet, amid the wild luxuriance of an
+island of the Pacific, as</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">"The blue-eyed northern child,</span><br />
+Of isles more known to man, but scarce less wild,&mdash;<br />
+The fair-haired offspring of the Orcades,<br />
+Where roars the Pentland with his whirling seas,&mdash;<br />
+Rocked in his cradle by the roaring wind,<br />
+The tempest-born in body and in mind,&mdash;<br />
+His young eyes, opening on the ocean foam,&mdash;<br />
+Had from that moment deemed the deep his home."<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Judging from what I learned of his real history, which is well known in
+Stromness, I found reason to conclude that he had been a hapless young
+man, of a kindly, genial nature; and greatly "more sinned against than
+sinning," in the unfortunate affair of the mutiny with which his name is
+now associated, and for his presumed share in which, untried and
+unconvicted, he was cruelly left to perish in chains amid the horrors of
+a shipwreck. I had the honor of being introduced on the following day to
+his sister, a lady far advanced in life, but over whose erect form and
+handsome features the years seemed to have passed lightly, and whom I
+met at the Free Church of Stromness, to which, at the Disruption, she
+had followed her respected minister. It seemed a fact as curiously
+compounded as some of those pictures of the last age in which the thin
+unsubstantialities of allegory mingled with the tangibilities of the
+real and the material, that the sister of one of Byron's heroes should
+be an attached member of the Free Church.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_520" id="Page_520">[Pg 520]</a></span></p><p>On my return to the inn, I found in the public room a young German of
+some one or two and twenty, who, in making the tour of Scotland, had
+extended his journey into Orkney. My specimens, which had begun to
+accumulate in the room, on chimney-piece and window-sill, had attracted
+his notice, and led us into conversation. He spoke English well, but not
+fluently,&mdash;in the style of one who had been more accustomed to read than
+to converse in it; and he seemed at least as familiar with two of our
+great British authors,&mdash;Shakspeare and Sir Walter Scott,&mdash;as most of the
+better-informed British themselves. It was chiefly the descriptions of
+Sir Walter in the "Pirate" that had led him into Orkney. He had already
+visited the Cathedral of St. Magnus and the Stones of Stennis; and on
+the morrow he intended visiting the Dwarfie Stone; though I ventured to
+suggest that, as a broad sound lay between Stromness and Hoy, and as the
+morrow was the Sabbath, he might find some difficulty in doing that. His
+circle of acquirement was, I found, rather literary than scientific. It
+seemed, however, to be that of a really accomplished young man, greatly
+better founded in his scholarship than most of our young Scotchmen on
+quitting the national universities; and I felt, as we conversed
+together, chiefly on English literature and general politics, how much
+poorer a figure I would have cut in his country than he cut in mine. I
+found, on coming down from my room next morning to a rather late
+breakfast, that he had been out among the Stromness fishermen, and had
+returned somewhat chafed. Not a single boatman could he find in a
+populous seaport town that would undertake to carry him to the Dwarfie
+Stone on the Sabbath,&mdash;a fact, to their credit, which it is but simple
+justice to state. I saw him afterwards in the Free Church, listening
+attentively to a thoroughly earnest and excellent discourse,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_521" id="Page_521">[Pg 521]</a></span> by the
+Disruption minister of the parish, Mr. Learmonth; and in the course of
+the evening he dropped in for a short time to the Free Church
+Sabbath-school, where he took his seat beside one of the teachers, as if
+curious to ascertain more in detail the character of the instruction
+which had operated so influentially on the boatmen, and which he had
+seen telling from the pulpit with such evident effect. What would not
+his country now give,&mdash;now, while drifting loose from all its old
+moorings, full on the perils of a lee shore,&mdash;for the anchor of a faith
+equally steadfast! He was a Lutheran, he told me; but, as is too common
+in Germany, his actual beliefs appeared to be very considerably at
+variance with his hereditary creed. The creed was a tolerably sound one,
+but the living belief regarding it seemed to do little more than take
+cognizance of what he deemed the fact of its death.</p>
+
+<p>I had carried with me a letter of introduction to Mr. William Watt, to
+whom 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 into
+Stromness, some six or eight miles, on the morning of Monday, to meet
+with me, bringing me a few of his rarer specimens. One of the number,&mdash;a
+minute ichthyolite, about three inches in length,&mdash;I was at first
+disposed to set down as new, but I have since come to regard it as
+simply an imperfectly-preserved specimen of a Cromarty and Morayshire
+species,&mdash;the <i>Glyptolepis microlepidotus</i>; though its state of keeping
+is such as to render either conclusion an uncertainty. Another of the
+specimens was that of a fish, still comparatively rare, first figured in
+the first edition of my little volume on the "Old Red Sandstone," from
+the earliest found specimen, at a time while it was yet unfurnished with
+a name, but which has since had a place assigned to it in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_522" id="Page_522">[Pg 522]</a></span> genus
+Diplacanthus, as the species longispinus. The scales, when examined by
+the glass, remind one, from their pectinated character, of shells
+covering the walls of a grotto,&mdash;a peculiarity to which, when showing my
+specimen to Agassiz, while it had yet no duplicate, I directed his
+attention, and which led him to extemporize for it, on the spot, the
+generic 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), the
+naturalist found reason to rank it among the Diplacanthi. Mr. Watt's
+specimen exhibited the outline of the head more completely than mine;
+but the Orkney ichthyolites rarely present the microscopic minuti&aelig;; and
+the shell-like aspect of the scales was shown in but one little patch,
+where they had left their impressions on the stone. His other specimens
+consisted of single plates of a variety of Coccosteus, undistinguishable
+in their form and proportions from those of the <i>Coccosteus decipiens</i>,
+but which exceeded by about one-third the average size of the
+corresponding parts in that species; and of a rib-like bone, that
+belonged apparently to what few of the ichthyolites of the Lower Old Red
+seem to have possessed,&mdash;an osseous internal skeleton. This last
+organism was the only one I saw in Orkney with which I had not been
+previously acquainted, or which I could regard as new, though possibly
+enough it may have formed part, not of an undiscovered genus, but of the
+known genus Asterolepis, of whose inner framework, judging from the
+Russian specimens at least, portions must have been bony. After parting
+from Mr. Watt, I travelled on to Kirkwall, which, after a leisurely
+journey, I reached late in the evening, and on the following morning
+took the steamer for Wick. I brought away with me, if not many rare
+specimens or many new geological facts, at least a few pleasing
+recollections of an interesting<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_523" id="Page_523">[Pg 523]</a></span> country and a hospitable people. In the
+previous chapter I indulged in a brief quotation from Mr. David Vedder,
+the sailor-poet of Orkney, and I shall make no apology for availing
+myself in the present, of the vigorous, well-turned stanzas in which he
+portrays some of those peculiar features by which the land of his
+nativity may be best recognized and most characteristically remembered.</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+<small>TO ORKNEY.</small></p>
+<p class="poem">
+Land of the whirlpool,&mdash;torrent,&mdash;foam,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Where oceans meet in madd'ning shock;</span><br />
+The beetling cliff,&mdash;the shelving holm,&mdash;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The dark insidious rock.</span><br />
+Land of the bleak, the treeless moor,&mdash;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The sterile mountain, sered and riven,&mdash;</span><br />
+The shapeless cairn, the ruined tower,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Scathed by the bolts of heaven,&mdash;</span><br />
+The yawning gulf,&mdash;the treacherous sand,&mdash;<br />
+love thee still, <span class="caps">MY NATIVE LAND</span>.<br />
+<br />
+Land of the dark, the Runic rhyme,&mdash;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The mystic ring,&mdash;the cavern hoar,&mdash;</span><br />
+The Scandinavian seer, sublime<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">In legendary lore.</span><br />
+Land of a thousand sea-kings' graves,&mdash;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Those tameless spirits of the past,</span><br />
+Fierce as their subject arctic waves,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Or hyperborean blast,&mdash;</span><br />
+Though polar billows round thee foam,<br />
+I love thee!&mdash;thou wert once my home.<br />
+<br />
+With glowing heart and island lyre,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Ah! would some native bard arise</span><br />
+To sing, with all a poet's fire,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Thy stern sublimities,&mdash;</span><br />
+The roaring flood,&mdash;the rushing stream,&mdash;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The promontory wild and bare,&mdash;</span><br />
+The pyramid, where sea-birds scream,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Aloft in middle air,&mdash;</span><br />
+The Druid temple on the heath,<br />
+Old even beyond tradition's birth.<br />
+<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_524" id="Page_524">[Pg 524]</a></span>Though I have roamed through verdant glades,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">In cloudless climes, 'neath azure skies,</span><br />
+Or plucked from beauteous orient meads,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Flowers of celestial dies,&mdash;</span><br />
+Though I have laved in limpid streams,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">That murmur over golden sands,</span><br />
+Or basked amid the fulgid beams<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">That flame o'er fairer lands,</span><br />
+Or stretched me in the sparry grot,&mdash;<br />
+My country! <span class="caps">THOU</span> wert ne'er forgot.<br />
+<br /><br /></p>
+
+
+<p class="t1">THE END.</p>
+
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> March 31, 1845.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Professor Nicol of Aberdeen believes the Red Sandstones of
+the West Highlands are of Devonian age, and the quartzite and limestone
+of Lower Carboniferous.&mdash;<i>See Quarterly Journal of the Geological
+Society, February 1857.</i>&mdash;W.S.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Sir R. Murchison considers these rocks Silurian. See
+"Quarterly Journal" of the Geological Society, Anniversary Address.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Probably one of the Isastrea of Edwards.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> See a paper by the Rev. P.B. Brodie, on Lias Corals,
+"Edinburgh New Philosophic Journal," April, 1857.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> The verses here referred to are introduced into "My Schools
+and Schoolmasters," chapter tenth.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> For a description of this pond see "My Schools and
+Schoolmasters," chapter tenth.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> These remarks refer to the poem "On Seeing a Sun-Dial in a
+Churchyard," which was introduced here when these chapters were first
+published in the "Witness," but, having been afterwards inserted in the
+tenth chapter of "My Schools and Schoolmasters," is not here
+reproduced.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> Mr. Peach has discovered fossils in the Durness limestone,
+which rests above the quartzite rock of the west of Scotland, that
+covers the Red Sandstone long believed to be <span class="smcap">Old Red</span>. The fossils are
+very obscure.&mdash;W.S.S.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> This second title hears reference to the extent of the
+author's geologic excursions in Scotland, during the nine years from
+1840 to 1848 inclusive.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> Since the above was written, I have seen an interesting
+paper in "Hogg's Weekly Instructor," in which the Rev. Mr. Longmuir of
+Aberdeen describes a visit to the Lias clay at Blackpots. Mr. Longmuir
+seems to have given more time to his researches than I found it
+agreeable, in a very indifferent day to devote to mine; and his list of
+fossils is considerably longer. Their evidence, however, runs in exactly
+the same tract with that of the shorter list. He had been told at Banff
+that the clay contained "petrified tangles;" and the first organism
+shown him by the 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 already been anticipated, to be pieces of Belemnites, well known on
+the other side of the Frith as 'thunderbolts,' and esteemed of sovereign
+efficacy in the cure of bewitched cattle." Though still wide of the
+mark, there is here an evident descent from the supernatural to the
+physical, from the superstitious to the true. "Satisfied that we had a
+mass of Lias clay before us, we set vigorously to work, in order either
+to find additional characteristic fossils, or obtain data on which to
+form a conjecture as to the history of this out-of-the-way deposit; and
+our labor was not without its reward. We shall now present a brief
+account of the specimens we picked up. Observing a number of stones of
+different sizes, that had been thrown out, as they were struck, by the
+workman's shovel, 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,&mdash;not,
+however, to obtain 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 what appears to have formed part of one; and the first blow
+has laid open part of a whorl of an Ammonite, which, when complete, must
+have measured three or four inches in diameter, and it is perfectly
+assimilated to the calcareous matrix. 2. Here is a mass of indurated
+clay; and a gentle blow has exposed part of two Ammonites, smaller than
+the former, but their shells are white and powdery like chalk. 3.
+Another fragment is laid open; and there, quite unmistakably, lie the
+umbo and greater portion of the <i>Plagiostoma concentricum</i>. 4. Another
+fragment of a granular gritty structure presents a considerable portion
+of the interior of one of the shells of a Pecten, but whether the
+attached fragment is part of one of its ears, or of the other valve
+turned backward, is not so easily determined. 5. Here is a piece of
+Belemnite in limestone, and the fracture in the fossil presents the
+usual glistening planes of cleavage. 6. Next we take up a piece of
+distinctly laminated Lias, with Ammonites as thick as they can lie on
+the pages of this black book of natural history. 7. Once more we strike,
+and we have the cast and part of the shell of another bivalve; but the
+valves have been jerked off each other, and have suffered a severe
+compound fracture; nevertheless we can have little hesitation in
+pronouncing it a species of <i>unio</i>. 8. Here is another piece of
+limestone, with its small fragment of another shell, of very delicate
+texture, with finely marked traverse stri&aelig;. We are unwilling to decide
+on such slight evidence, but feel inclined to refer it to some species
+of Plagiostoma. 9. Here is a piece of pyrites, not quite so large as the
+first, and so vegetable-like in its markings, that it might be mistaken
+for part of a branch of a tree. This is also characteristic of the Lias;
+for when the shales are deeply impregnated with bitumen and pyrites,
+they undergo a slow combustion when heaped up with faggots and set on
+fire; and in the cliffs of the Yorkshire coast, after rainy weather,
+they sometimes spontaneously ignite, and continue to burn for several
+months. 10. As we passed through the works, on our way to the clay, we
+observed a sort of reservoir, into which the clay, after being freed
+from its impurities, had been run in a liquid state; the water had
+evaporated, and the drying clay had cracked in every direction. Here we
+find its counterpart in this large mass of stone; only the clay here,
+mixed with a portion of lime is petrified, and the fissures filled up
+with carbonate of lime; thus forming the septaria, or cement stone. We
+have dressed a specimen of it for our guide, who has a friend that will
+polish it, when the dark Lias will be strikingly contrasted with the
+white lime, and form rather a pretty piece of natural mosaic. 11. Coming
+to a simple piece of machinery for removing fragments of shale and stone
+from the clay, we examined some of the bits so rejected, and found what
+we had no doubt were fish-scales. 12. We have yet to notice certain long
+slender bodies, outwardly brown, but inwardly nearly black, resembling
+whip-cord in size. Are we to regard these as specimens of a fucus,
+perhaps the <i>filum</i>, or allied to it, which is known in some places by
+the appropriate name of sea-laces? 13. Passing on to the office, we were
+shown a chop of wood that had been found in the clay, and was destined
+for the Banff Museum. It is about eighteen inches in length, and half as
+much in breadth; and although evidently water-worn, yet we could count
+between twenty-five and thirty concentric rings on one of its ends,
+which not only enabled us to form some conjecture of its age previous to
+its overthrow, but also justified us in referring it to the conifer&aelig; of
+the <i>vorwelt</i>, or ancient world."
+</p><p>
+Mr. Longmuir makes the following shrewd remarks, in answering the
+question, "Whether have we here a mass of Lias clay, as originally
+deposited, or has it resulted from the breaking up of Lias-shale?" "The
+former alternative," says Mr. Longmuir, "we have heard, has been
+maintained; but we are inclined to adopt the latter, and that for the
+following reasons: 1. This clay, judging from other localities, is not
+<i>in situ</i>, but has every appearance of having been precipitated into a
+basin in the gneiss on which it rests, having apparently under it,
+although it is impossible to say to what extent, a bed of comminuted
+shells. 2. The fossils are all fragmentary and water-worn. This is
+especially the case with regard to the Belemnites, the pieces averaging
+from one to two inches in length, no workman having ever found a
+complete specimen, such as occurs in the Lias-shale at Cromarty, in
+which they may be found nine inches in length. 3. But perhaps the most
+satisfactory proof, and one that in itself may be deemed sufficient, is
+the frequent occurrence of pieces of Lias-shale, with their embedded
+Ammonites; which clearly show that the Lias had been broken up, tossed
+about in some violent agitation of the sea, and churned into clay, just
+as some denudating process of a similar nature swept away the chalk of
+Aberdeenshire, leaving on many of its hills and plains the water-worn
+flints, with the characteristic fossils of the Cretaceous formation."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> A description of Miss Bond and of her "Letters" here
+referred to, is given in the fifth chapter of "My Schools and
+Schoolmasters."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> The story here referred to is narrated in "Scenes and
+Legends of the North of Scotland," chap. <span class="smcap">xxv</span>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> <i>Scaur</i>, Scotice, a precipice of clay. There is no single
+English word that conveys exactly the same idea.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> Mr. Dick has since disinterred from out the boulder-clays
+of the Burn of Freswick, <i>Patella vulgata</i>, <i>Buccinum undatum</i>, <i>Fesus
+antiquus</i>, <i>Rostellaria</i>, <i>Pes pelicana</i>, a <i>Natica</i>, <i>Lutraria</i>, and
+<i>Balanus</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> That similarity of condition in which the hazel and the
+harder cerealia thrive was noted by our north-country farmers of the old
+School, long ere it had been recorded by the botanist. Hence such
+remarks, familiarized into proverbs, as "A good <i>nut</i> year's a good
+<i>ait</i> year;" or, "As the <i>nut</i> fills the <i>ait</i> fills."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> For this story, see "Scenes and Legends of the North of
+Scotland," chap. <span class="smcap">xxv.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> "In the River St. Lawrence," says Sir Charles Lyell, "the
+loose ice accumulates on the shoals during the winter, at which season
+the water is low. The separate fragments of ice are readily frozen
+together in a climate where the temperature is sometimes thirty degrees
+below zero, and boulders become entangled with them; so that in the
+spring, when the river rises on the melting of the snow, the rocks are
+floated off, frequently conveying away the boulders to great distances.
+A single block of granite, fifteen feet long by ten feet both in width
+and height, and which could not contain less than fifteen hundred cubic
+feet of stone, was in this way moved down the river several hundred
+yards, during the late survey in 1837. Heavy anchors of ships, lying on
+the shore, have in like manner been closed in and removed. In October
+1836, wooden stakes were driven several feet into the ground, at one
+point on the banks of the St. Lawrence, at high-water mark, and over
+them were piled many boulders as large as the united force of six men
+could roll. The year after, all the boulders had disappeared, and others
+had arrived, and the stakes had been drawn out and carried away by the
+ice."&mdash;'Elements,' first edition, p. 138.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> The story of the Lady of Balconie and her keys is narrated
+in "Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland." chap. <span class="smcap">xi.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> This mode is described in a traditionary story regarding a
+gigantic tribe of <i>Fions</i>, narrated in "Scenes and Legends of the North
+of Scotland," chap. <span class="smcap">iv.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> See "My Schools and Schoolmasters," chap <span class="smcap">xi.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> I can entertain no doubt that the angular groups of
+palatal teeth figured by Agassiz and the Russian geologists as those of
+a supposed Placoid termed the Ctenodus, are in reality groups of the
+palatal teeth of Dipterus. In some of my specimens the frontal buckler
+of Polyphractus is connected with the gill-covers and scales of
+Dipterus, and bears in its palate what cannot he distinguished from the
+teeth of Ctenodus. The three genera resolve themselves into one.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> There is a very admirable remark to this effect in the
+"Travelling Memorandums" of the late Lord Gardenstone, which, as the
+work has been long 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 security and interests of society than the government
+of monarchs, who possess great and extensive territories. The race of
+great monarchs cannot possibly preserve a safe and undisturbed state of
+government, without many delegations of power and office to men of
+approved abilities and practical knowledge, who are subject to complaint
+during their administration, and responsible when it is at an end; or
+yet without an established system of laws and regulations; so that no
+inconsiderable degree of security and liberty to the subject is almost
+inseparable from, and essential to, the subsistence and duration of a
+great monarchy. But it is easy for petty princes to practise an
+arbitrary and irregular exercise of power, by which their people are
+reduced to a condition of miserable slavery. Indeed, very few of them,
+in the course of ages, are capable of conceiving any other means of
+maintaining the ostentatious state, the luxurious and indolent pride,
+which they mistake for greatness. I heartily wish that this observation
+and censure may not, in some instances, be applicable to great landed
+proprietors in some parts of Britain."&mdash;Travelling Memorandums, vol. i.
+p. 123. 1792.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> The exciting effects of a poor soil, or climate, or of
+severe usage, on the productive powers of various vegetable species,
+have been long and often remarked. Flavel describes, in one of his
+ingenious emblems, illustrative of the influence of affliction on the
+Christian, an orchard tree, which had been beaten with sticks and
+stones, till it presented a sorely stunted and mutilated appearance; but
+which, while the fairer and more vigorous trees around it were rich in
+only leaves, was laden with fruit,&mdash;a direct consequence, it is shown,
+of the hard treatment to which it had been subjected. I have heard it
+told in a northern village, as a curious anecdote, that a large pear
+tree, which during a vigorous existence of nearly fifty years, had borne
+scarce a single pear, had, when in a state of decay, and for a few years
+previous to its death, borne immense crops of from two to three bolls
+each season. And the skilful gardener not unfrequently avails himself of
+the principle on which both phenomena seem to have occurred,&mdash;that
+exhibited in the beaten and that in the decaying tree,&mdash;in rendering his
+barren plants fruitful. He has recourse to it even when merely desirous
+of ascertaining the variety of pear or apple which some thriving
+sapling, slow in bearing, is yet to produce. Selecting some bough which
+may be conveniently lopped away without destroying the symmetry of the
+tree, he draws 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 cannot ultimately recover. Next spring the wounded
+branch is found to bear its bunches of blossoms; the blossoms set into
+fruit; and while in the other portions of the plant all is vigorous and
+barren as before, the dying part of it, as if sobered by the near
+prospect of dissolution, is found fulfilling the proper end of its
+existence. Soil and climate, too, exert, it has been often remarked, a
+similar influence. In the united parishes of Kirkmichael and Culicuden,
+in the immediate neighborhood of Cromarty, 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 its growth, and bark-bound. Comparatively
+young trees of ash," he shrewdly adds, "<i>are covered with seed</i>,&mdash;<i>an
+almost infallible sign that their natural growth is checked</i>. The
+leaves, too, fall off about the beginning of September."</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<p class="t1">
+<big>VALUABLE</big><br />
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+<i>entirely new matter</i>. </p></div>
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+strict impartiality, and, without a comment, left to the judgment
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+
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+and the Results of Labor, Capital, and Skill. By <span class="smcap">Charles Knight</span>. With
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+
+
+
+<hr />
+<p class="t1"><big>IMPORTANT WORKS.</big></p>
+
+
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+Notes, Additions, &amp;c. By <span class="smcap">Waldo I. Burnett</span>, M.D., Boston. One elegant
+octavo volume, cloth, $3.00.</p>
+
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+on the subject extant; and its appearance in an English dress, with
+the additions of the American Translator, is everywhere welcomed by
+men of science in this country. </p></div>
+
+
+<p class="hang">UNITED STATES EXPLORING EXPEDITION; during the years 1838, 1839, 1840,
+1841, 1842, under <span class="smcap">Charles Wilkes</span>, U.S.N. Vol. XII.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><span class="smcap">Mollusca and Shells</span>. By <span class="smcap">Augustus A. Gould</span>, M.D. Elegant quarto volume,
+cloth, $6.00.</p>
+
+
+<p class="hang">THE LANDING AT CAPE ANNE; or, <span class="smcap">The Charter of the First Permanent Colony
+on the Territory of the Massachusetts Company</span>. Now discovered, and first
+published from the <span class="caps">ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT</span>, with an inquiry into its
+authority, and a <span class="smcap">History of the Colony</span>, 1624&ndash;1628, Roger Conant,
+Governor. By <span class="smcap">J. Wingate Thornton</span>. 8vo, cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><img src="images/finger.gif" alt="finger" title="" /> "A rare contribution to the early history of New
+England."&mdash;<i>Mercantile Journal.</i> </p></div>
+
+
+<p class="hang">LAKE SUPERIOR; Its Physical Character, Vegetation, and Animals. By <span class="smcap">L.
+Agassiz</span> and others. One volume octavo, elegantly Illustrated, cloth,
+$3.50.</p>
+
+
+<p class="hang">THE HALLIG; <span class="smcap">or, the Sheepfold in the Waters</span>. A Tale of Humble Life on
+the Coast of Schleswig. Translated from the German of <span class="smcap">Biernatski</span>, by
+Mrs. <span class="smcap">George P. Marsh</span>. With a Biographical Sketch of the Author. 12mo,
+cloth, $1.00.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>As a revelation of an entire new phase in human society, this work
+strongly reminds the reader of Miss Bremer's tales. In originality
+and brilliancy of imagination, it is not inferior to those:&mdash;its
+aim is far higher. </p></div>
+
+
+<p class="hang">THE CRUISE OF THE NORTH STAR; A Narrative of the Excursion made by Mr.
+Vanderbilt's Party in the Steam Yacht, in her Voyage to England, Russia,
+Denmark, France, Spain, Italy, Malta, Turkey, Madeira, &amp;c. By Rev. <span class="smcap">John
+Overton Choules</span>, D.D. With elegant Illustrations, &amp;c. 12mo, cloth, gilt
+backs and sides, $1.50; cloth, gilt, $2.00; Turkey, gilt, $3.00.</p>
+
+
+<p class="hang">PILGRIMAGE TO EGYPT; embracing a Diary of Explorations on the Nile, with
+Observations Illustrative of the Manners, Customs, and Institutions of
+the People, and of the present condition of the Antiquities and Ruins.
+By Hon. <span class="smcap">J.V.C. Smith</span>, late Mayor of the City of Boston. With numerous
+elegant Engravings. 12mo, cloth, $1.25.</p>
+
+
+
+<p class="t1">POETICAL WORKS.</p>
+
+
+<p class="hang">COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS OF WILLIAM COWPER; with a Life and Critical
+Notices of his Writings. Elegant Illustrations. 16mo, cloth, $1.00.</p>
+
+
+<p class="hang">POETICAL WORKS OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. Life and Illustrations. 16mo, cloth,
+$1.00.</p>
+
+
+<p class="hang">MILTON'S POETICAL WORKS. With a Life and elegant Illustrations. 16mo,
+cloth, $1.00.</p>
+
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+all of uniform size and style, printed on fine paper from clear,
+distinct type, with new and elegant illustrations, richly bound in
+full gilt, and plain. </p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<p class="t1">WORKS OF HUGH MILLER.</p>
+
+
+<p class="hang">THE OLD RED SANDSTONE; or, New Walks in an Old Field. Illustrated with
+Plates and Geological Sections. <span class="smcap">New Edition, Revised and much Enlarged</span>,
+by the addition of new matter and new Illustrations, etc. 12mo, cloth,
+$1.25.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>This edition contains over <i>one hundred pages of entirely new
+matter</i>, from the pen of Hugh Miller. It contains, also, several
+additional new plates and cuts, the old plates re-engraved and
+improved, and an Appendix of new Notes.</p>
+
+<p>"It is withal one of the most beautiful specimens of English
+composition to be found, conveying information on a most difficult
+and profound science, in a style at once novel, pleasing, and
+elegant."&mdash;<span class="smcap">Dr. Sprague</span>&mdash;<i>Albany Spectator.</i> </p></div>
+
+
+<p class="hang">THE FOOTPRINTS OF THE CREATOR; or, the Asterolepsis of Stromness, with
+numerous Illustrations. With a Memoir of the Author, by <span class="smcap">Louis Agassiz</span>.
+12mo, cloth, $1.00.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Dr. Buckland</span> <i>said he would give his left hand to possess such
+power of description as this man.</i> </p></div>
+
+
+<p class="hang">TESTIMONY OF THE ROCKS; or, Geology in its Bearings on the two
+Theologies, Natural and Revealed. "Thou shalt be in league with the
+stones of the field."&mdash;<i>Job.</i> With numerous elegant Illustrations. One
+volume, royal 12mo, cloth, $1.25.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>This is the largest and most comprehensive Geological Work that the
+distinguished author has yet published. It exhibits the profound
+learning, the felicitous style, and the scientific perception,
+which characterize his former works, while it embraces the latest
+results of geological discovery. But the great charm of the book
+lies in those passages of glowing eloquence, in which, having
+spread out his facts, the author proceeds to make deductions from
+them of the most striking and exciting character. The work is
+profusely illustrated by engravings executed at Paris, in the
+highest style of French art. </p></div>
+
+
+<p class="hang">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 Fossiliferous Deposits of Scotland. 12mo, cloth, $1.25.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Nothing need be said of it save that it possesses the same
+fascination for the reader that characterizes the author's other
+works. </p></div>
+
+
+<p class="hang">MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; or, the Story of my Education. <span class="smcap">An
+Autobiography.</span> With a full-length Portrait of the Author. 12mo, cloth,
+$1.25.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>This is a personal narrative, of a deeply interesting and
+instructive character, concerning one of the most remarkable men of
+the age. </p></div>
+
+
+<p class="hang">MY FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. With a fine Engraving of
+the author. 12mo, cloth, $1.00.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><img src="images/finger.gif" alt="finger" title="" /> A very instructive book of travels, presenting the
+most perfectly life-like views of England and its people to be
+found in any language.</p>
+
+<p><img src="images/finger.gif" alt="finger" title="" /> <i>The above six volumes are furnished in sets,
+printed and bound in uniform style</i>: viz., </p></div>
+
+
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+sheep, $8.00; half calf, $12.00; antique, $12.00.</p>
+
+
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+
+
+<hr />
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+
+<p class="t1">59 WASHINGTON STREET, BOSTON.</p>
+
+<p class="center">Would call particular attention to the following valuable works
+described in their Catalogue of Publications, viz.:</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+Hugh Miller's Works.<br />
+<br />
+Bayne's Works. Walker's Works. Miall's Works. Bungener's Work.<br />
+<br />
+Annual of Scientific Discovery. Knight's Knowledge is Power.<br />
+<br />
+Krummacher's Suffering Saviour.<br />
+<br />
+Banvard's American Histories. The Aimwell Stories.<br />
+<br />
+Newcomb's Works. Tweedie's Works. Chambers's Works. Harris' Works.<br />
+<br />
+Kitto's Cyclop&aelig;dia of Biblical Literature.<br />
+<br />
+Mrs. Knight's Life of Montgomery. Kitto's History of Palestin.<br />
+<br />
+Wheewell's Work.    Wayland's Works.    Agassiz's Works.<br />
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 461px;">
+<img src="images/image2.jpg" width="461" height="323" alt="book" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+William's Works. Guyot's Works.<br />
+<br />
+Thompson's Better Land. Kimball's Heaven. Valuable Works on Missions.<br />
+<br />
+Haven's Mental Philosophy. Buchanan's Modern Atheism.<br />
+<br />
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+<br />
+The Psalmist: A Collection of Hymns.<br />
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+<br />
+Memoir of Amos Lawrence.<br />
+<br />
+Poetical Works of Milton, Cowpar, Scott. Elegant Miniature Volumes.<br />
+<br />
+Arvine's Cyolop&aelig;dia of Anecdotes.<br />
+<br />
+Ripley's Notes on Gospels, Acts, and Romans.<br />
+<br />
+Sprague's European Celebrities. Marsh's Camel and the Hallig.<br />
+<br />
+Roget's Thesaurus of English Words.<br />
+<br />
+Hackett's Notes on Acts. M'Whorter's Yahveh Christ.<br />
+<br />
+Siebold and Stannius's Comparative Anatomy. Marco's Geological Map, U.S.<br />
+<br />
+Religious and Miscellaneous Works.<br />
+<br />
+Works in the various Departments of Literature, Science and Art.<br />
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+
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Cruise of the Betsey, by Hugh Miller
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: 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 Fossiliferous Deposits of Scotland
+
+
+Author: Hugh Miller
+
+
+
+Release Date: March 8, 2009  [eBook #28273]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Eric Hutton, Greg Bergquist, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+   The punctuation and spelling from the original text have been
+   faithfully preserved. Only obvious typographical errors have
+   been corrected.
+
+   The pointing finger symbol in the advertisement section is
+   represented by -->.
+
+
+
+
+
+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 Fossiliferous
+Deposits 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, by
+Gould and Lincoln,
+In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
+Massachusetts.
+
+Authorized Edition.
+
+By a special arrangement with the late Hugh Miller, Gould And Lincoln
+became the authorized American publishers of his works. By a similar
+arrangement made with the family since his decease, they will also
+publish 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--the
+victim of an overworked brain; and how that bright and vigorous spirit
+was abruptly quenched forever.
+
+During the month of May (1857) Mrs. Miller came to Malvern, after
+recovering from the first shock of bereavement, in search of health and
+repose, and evidently hoping to do justice, on her recovery, to the
+literary remains of her husband. Unhappily the excitement and anxiety
+naturally attaching to a revision of her husband's works proved over
+much for one suffering under such recent trial, and from an affection of
+the brain and spine which ensued; and, in consequence, Mrs. Miller has
+been forbidden, for the present, to engage in any work of mental labor.
+
+Under these circumstances, and at Mrs. Miller's request, I have
+undertaken the editing of "The Cruise of the Betsey, or a Summer Ramble
+among the Fossiliferous Deposits of the Hebrides," as well as "The
+Rambles of a Geologist," hitherto unpublished, save as a series of
+articles in the "Witness" newspaper. The style and arguments of HUGH
+MILLER are so peculiarly his own, that I have not presumed to alter the
+text, and have merely corrected some statements incidental to the
+condition of geological knowledge at the time this work was penned. "The
+Cruise of the Betsey" was written for that well-known paper the
+"Witness" during the period when a disputation productive of much bitter
+feeling waged between the Free and Established Churches of Scotland; but
+as the Disruption and its history possesses little interest to a large
+class of the readers of this work, who will rejoice to follow their
+favorite author among the isles and rocks of the "bonnie land," I have
+expunged _some_ passages, which I am assured the author would have
+omitted had he lived to reprint this interesting narrative of his
+geological rambles. HUGH MILLER battled nobly for his faith while
+living. 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--Oolitic 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 Oolite--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--Medusae
+     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--Oolitic
+     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 palaeozoic 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-aerial 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 weeks
+I was free. Chisels and hammers, and the bag for specimens, were taken
+from their corner in the dark closet, and packed up with half a stone
+weight of a fine _soft_ Conservative Edinburgh newspaper, valuable for a
+quality of preserving old things entire. At noon on St. Swithin's day
+(Monday the 15th), I was speeding down the Clyde in the Toward Castle
+steamer, for Tobermory in Mull. In the previous season I had intended
+passing direct from the Oolitic deposits of the eastern coast of
+Scotland, to the Oolitic deposits of the Hebrides. But the weeks glided
+all too quickly away among the ichthyolites of Caithness and Cromarty,
+and the shells and lignites of Sutherland and Ross. My friend, too, the
+Rev. 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 in
+his parish, and not yet provided with one elsewhere; and I concluded he
+would have but little heart, at such a season, for breaking into rocks,
+or for passing from the too pressing monstrosities of an existing state
+of things, to the old lapidified monstrosities of the past. And so my
+design on the Hebrides had to be postponed for a twelvemonth. But my
+friend, now afloat in his Free Church yacht, had got a home on the sea
+beside his island charge, which, if not very secure when nights were
+dark and winds loud, and the little vessel tilted high to the long roll
+of the Atlantic, lay at least beyond the reach of man's intolerance, and
+not beyond the protecting care of the Almighty. He had written me that
+he 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 humbler
+meteorologists, had in this part of the country its alternate fits of
+sunshine and shower. We passed gaily along the green banks of the Clyde,
+with their rich flat fields glittering in moisture, and their lines of
+stately trees, that, as the light flashed out, threw their shadows over
+the grass. The river expanded into the estuary, the estuary into the
+open sea; we left behind us beacon, and obelisk, and rock-perched
+castle;--
+
+       "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 the
+Frith, with the ridgy table-land of Ayrshire stretching away, green, on
+the one side, and the serrated peaks of Arran rising dark and high on
+the other. At sunrise next morning our boat lay, unloading a portion of
+her cargo, in one of the ports of Islay, and we could see the Irish
+coast resting on the horizon to the south and west, like a long
+undulating bank of thin blue cloud; with the island of Rachrin--famous
+for the asylum it had afforded the Bruce when there was no home for him
+in Scotland,--presenting in front its mass of darker azure. On and away!
+We swept past Islay, with its low fertile hills of mica-schist and
+slate; and Jura, with its flat dreary moors, and its far-seen gigantic
+paps, 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 necessary
+for the purpose on the plain below. The Professor describes the view
+from the summit, which includes in its wide circle at once the Isle of
+Skye and the Isle of Man, as singularly noble and imposing; two such
+prospects more, he says, would bring under the eye the whole island of
+Great Britain, from the Pentland Frith to the English Channel. We sped
+past Jura. Then came the Gulf of Coryvrekin, with the bare mountain
+island of Scarba overlooking the fierce, far-famed whirlpool, that we
+could see from the deck, breaking in long lines of foam, and sending out
+its waves in wide rings on every side, when not a speck of white was
+visible elsewhere in the expanse of sea around us. And then came an
+opener space, studded with smaller islands,--mere hill-tops rising out
+of the sea, with here and there insulated groups of pointed rocks, the
+skeletons of perished hills, amid which the tide chafed and fretted, as
+if laboring to complete on the broken remains their work of denudation
+and ruin.
+
+The disposition of land and water on this coast suggests the idea that
+the Western Highlands, from the line in the interior, whence the rivers
+descend to the Atlantic, with the islands beyond to the outer Hebrides,
+are all parts of one great mountainous plane, inclined slantways into
+the sea. First, the long withdrawing valleys of the main land, with
+their brown mossy streams, change their character as they dip beneath
+the sea-level, and become salt-water lochs. The lines of hills that rise
+over them jut out as promontories, till cut off by some transverse
+valley, lowered still more deeply into the brine, and that exists as a
+kyle, minch, or sound, swept twice every tide by powerful currents. The
+sea deepens as the plain slopes downward; mountain-chains stand up out
+of the water as larger islands, single mountains as smaller ones, lower
+eminences as mere groups of pointed rocks; till at length, as we pass
+outwards, all trace of the submerged land disappears, and the wide ocean
+stretches out and away its unfathomable depths. The model of some Alpine
+country raised in plaster on a flat board, and tilted slantways, at a
+low angle, into a basin of water, would exhibit, on a minute scale, an
+appearance exactly similar to that presented by the western coast of
+Scotland 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 of
+the geology of the coast, with its promontories and islands,
+communicates a different idea. These islands and promontories prove to
+be of very various ages and origin. The _outer_ Hebrides may have
+existed as the inner skeleton of some ancient country, contemporary with
+the main land, and that bore on its upper soils the productions of
+perished creations, at a time when by much the larger portion of the
+_inner_ Hebrides,--Skye, and Mull, and the Small Isles,--existed as part
+of the bottom of a wide sound, inhabited by the Cephalopoda and
+Enaliosaurians of the Lias and the Oolite. Judging from its components,
+the Long Island, like the Lammermoors and the Grampians, may have been
+smiling to the sun when the Alps and the Himalaya Mountains lay buried
+in 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, washed
+down by the streams, grew heavy and sank, and on which the belemnite
+dropped 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 mere
+upstart, and Dhawalageri, with its twenty-eight thousand feet of
+elevation, a heady fellow of yesterday,--is not that of a land settling
+down by the head, like a foundering vessel, but of a land whose hills
+and islands, like its great aristocratic families, have arisen from the
+level in very various ages, and under the operation of circumstances
+essentially diverse.
+
+We left behind us the islands of Lunga, Luing, and Seil, and entered the
+narrow Sound of Kerrera, with its border of Old Red conglomerate resting
+on the clay-slate of the district. We had passed Esdaile near enough to
+see the workmen employed in the quarries of the island, so extensively
+known in commerce for their roofing slate, and several small vessels
+beside them, engaged in loading; and now we had got a step higher in the
+geological scale, and could mark from the deck the peculiar character of
+the conglomerate, which, in cliffs washed by the sea, when the binding
+matrix is softer than the pebbles which it encloses, roughens, instead
+of being polished, by the action of the waves, and which, along the
+eastern side of the Sound here, seems as if formed of cannon-shot, of
+all sizes, embedded in cement. The Sound terminates in the beautiful bay
+of Oban, so quiet and sheltered, with its two island breakwaters in
+front,--its semi-circular sweep of hill behind,--its long white-walled
+village, bent like a bow, to conform to the inflection of the
+shore,--its mural precipices behind, tapestried with ivy,--its rich
+patches of green pasture,--its bosky dingles of shrub and tree,--and,
+perched on the seaward promontory, its old, time-eaten keep. "In one
+part of the harbor of Oban," says Dr. James Anderson, in his "Practical
+Treatise on Peat Moss," (1794), "where the depth of the sea is about
+twenty fathoms, the bottom is found to consist of quick peat, which
+affords no safe anchorage." I made inquiry at the captain of the
+steamer, 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 Fort
+William steamer; and, taking out hammer and chisel from my bag, I
+stepped ashore to question my ancient acquaintance, the Old Red
+conglomerate, and was fortunate enough to meet on the pier-head, as I
+landed, one of the best of companions for assisting in such work, Mr.
+Colin Elder, of Isle Ornsay,--the gentleman who had so kindly furnished
+my friend Mr. Swanson with an asylum for his family, when there was no
+longer a home for them in Small Isles. "You are much in luck," he said,
+after our first greeting: "one of the villagers, in improving his
+garden, has just made a cut for some fifteen or twenty yards along the
+face of the precipice behind the village, and laid open the line of
+junction between the conglomerate and the clay-slate. Let us go and see
+it."
+
+I found several things worthy of notice in the chance section to which I
+was thus introduced. The conglomerate lies uncomfortably along the edges
+of the slate strata, which present under it an appearance exactly
+similar to that which they exhibit under the rolled stones and shingle
+of the neighboring shore, where we find them laid bare beside the
+harbor, for several hundred yards. And, mixed with the pebbles of
+various character and origin of which the conglomerate is mainly
+composed, we see detached masses of the slate, that still exhibit on
+their edges the identical lines of fracture characteristic of the rock,
+which they received, when torn from the mass below, myriads of ages
+before. In the incalculably remote period in which the conglomerate base
+of the Old Red Sandstone was formed, the clay-slate of this district had
+been exactly the same sort of rock that it is now. Some long anterior
+convulsion had upturned its strata, and the sweep of water, mingled with
+broken fragments of stone, had worn smooth the exposed edges, just as a
+similar agency wears the edges exposed at the present time. Quarries
+might have been opened in this rock, as now, for a roofing-slate, had
+there been quarriers to open them, or houses to roof over; it was in
+every respect as ancient a looking stone then as in the present late age
+of the world. There are no sermons that seem stranger or more impressive
+to one who has acquired just a little of the language in which they are
+preached, than those which, according to the poet, are to be found in
+stones; a bit of fractured slate, embedded among a mass of rounded
+pebbles, proves voluble with ideas of a kind almost too large for the
+mind of man to grasp. The eternity that hath passed is an ocean without
+a further shore, and a finite conception may in vain attempt to span it
+over. But from the beach, strewed with wrecks, on which we stand to
+contemplate it, we see far out towards the cloudy horizon, many a dim
+islet and many a pinnacled rock, the sepulchres of successive eras,--the
+monuments of consecutive creations: the entire prospect is studded over
+with these landmarks of a hoar antiquity, which, measuring out space
+from space, constitute the vast whole a province of time; nor can the
+eye reach to the open, shoreless infinitude beyond, in which only God
+existed; and, as in a sea-scene in nature, in which headland stretches
+dim and blue beyond headland, and islet beyond islet, the distance seems
+not lessened, but increased, by the crowded objects--we borrow a
+larger, not a smaller idea of the distant eternity, from the vastness of
+the measured periods that occur between.
+
+Over the lower bed of conglomerate, which here, as on the east coast, is
+of great thickness, we find a bed of gray stratified clay, containing a
+few calcareo-argillaceous nodules. The conglomerate cliffs to the north
+of the village present appearances highly interesting to the geologist.
+Rising in a long wall within the pleasure-grounds of Dunolly castle, we
+find them wooded atop and at the base; while immediately at their feet
+there stretches out a grassy lawn, traversed by the road from the
+village to the castle, which sinks with a gradual slope into the
+existing sea-beach, but which ages ago must have been a sea-beach
+itself. We see the bases of the precipices hollowed and worn, with all
+their rents and crevices widened into caves; and mark, at a picturesque
+angle of the rock, what must have been once an insulated sea-stack, some
+thirty or forty feet in height, standing up from amid the rank grass, as
+at one time it stood up from amid the waves. Tufts of fern and sprays of
+ivy bristle from its sides, once roughened by the serrated kelp-weed and
+the tangle. The Highlanders call it M'Dougal's Dog-stone, and say that
+the old chieftains of Lorne made use of it as a post to which to fasten
+their dogs,--animals wild and gigantic as themselves,--when the hunters
+were gathering to rendezvous, and the impatient beagles struggled to
+break away and begin the chase on their own behalf. It owes its
+existence as a stack--for the precipice in which it was once included
+has receded from around it for yards--to an immense boulder in its
+base--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 feet
+in the line of its largest diagonal. A second huge pebble in the same
+detached spire measures four feet by about three. Both have their edges
+much rounded, as if, ere their deposition in the conglomerate, they had
+been long exposed to the wear of the sea; and both are composed of an
+earthy amygdaloidal trap. I have stated elsewhere ["Old Red Sandstone,"
+Chapter XII.], that I had scarce ever seen a stone in the Old Red
+conglomerate which I could not raise from the ground; and ere I said so
+I had examined no inconsiderable extent of this deposit, chiefly,
+however, along the eastern coast of Scotland, where its larger pebbles
+rarely exceed two hundred weight. How account for the occurrence of
+pebbles of so gigantic a size here? We can but guess at a solution, and
+that very vaguely. The islands of Mull and Kerrera form, in the present
+state of things, inner and outer breakwaters between what is now the
+coast of Oban and the waves of the Atlantic; but Mull, in the times of
+even the Oolite, must have existed as a mere sea-bottom; and Kerrera,
+composed mainly of trap, which has brought with it to the surface
+patches of the conglomerate, must, when the conglomerate was in forming,
+have been a mere sea-bottom also. Is it not possible, that when the
+breakwaters _were not_, the Atlantic _was_, and that its tempests, which
+in the present time can transport vast rocks for hundreds of yards along
+the exposed coasts of Shetland and Orkney, may have been the agent here
+in the transport of these huge pebbles of the Old Red conglomerate?
+"Rocks that two or three men could not lift," say the Messrs. Anderson
+of Inverness, in describing the storms of Orkney, "are washed about even
+on the tops of cliffs, which are between sixty and a hundred feet above
+the surface of the sea, when smooth; and detached masses of rock, of an
+enormous size, are well known to have been carried a considerable
+distance between low and high-water mark." "A little way from the
+Brough," says Dr. Patrick Neill, in his 'Tour through Orkney and
+Shetland,' "we saw the prodigious effects of a late winter storm: many
+great stones, one of them of several tons weight, had been tossed up a
+precipice twenty or thirty feet high, and laid fairly on the green
+sward." There is something farther worthy of notice in the stone of
+which the two boulders of the Dog-stack are composed. No species of rock
+occurs more abundantly in the embedded pebbles of this ancient
+conglomerate than rocks of the trap family. We find in it
+trap-porphyries, greenstones, clinkstones, basalts, and amygdalolds,
+largely mingled with fragments of the granitic, clay-slate, and quartz
+rocks. The Plutonic agencies must have been active in the locality for
+periods amazingly protracted; and many of the masses protruded at a very
+early time seem identical in their composition with rocks of the trap
+family, which in other parts of the country we find referred to much
+later eras. There occur in this deposit rolled pebbles of a basalt,
+which in the neighborhood of Edinburgh would be deemed considerably more
+modern than the times of the Mountain Limestone, and in the Isle of
+Skye, considerably more modern than the times of the Oolite.
+
+The sunlight was showering its last slant rays on island and loch, and
+then retreating upwards along the higher hills, chased by the shadows,
+as our boat quitted the bay of Oban, and stretched northwards, along the
+end of green Lismore, for the Sound of Mull. We had just enough of day
+left, as we reached mid sea, to show us the gray fronts of the three
+ancient castles,--- which at this point may be at once seen from the
+deck,--Dunolly, Duart, and Dunstaffnage; and enough left us as we
+entered the Sound, to show, and barely show, the Lady Rock, famous in
+tradition, and made classic by the pen of Campbell, raising its black
+back amid the tides, like a belated porpoise. And then twilight
+deepened into night, and we went snorting through the Strait with a
+stream of green light curling off from either bow in the calm, towards
+the high dim land, that seemed standing up on both sides like tall
+hedges over a green lane. We entered the Bay of Tobermory about
+midnight, and cast anchor amid a group of little vessels. An exceedingly
+small boat shot out from the side of a yacht of rather diminutive
+proportions, but tautly rigged for her size, and bearing an outrigger
+astern. The water this evening was full of phosphoric matter, and it
+gleamed and sparkled around the little boat like a northern aurora
+around a dark cloudlet. There was just light enough to show that the
+oars were plied by a sailor-like man in a Guernsey frock, and that
+another sailor-like man,--the skipper, mayhap,--attired in a cap and
+pea-jacket, stood in the stern. The man in the Guernsey frock was John
+Stewart, 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 of
+the Protestants of Small Isles. In five minutes more I was sitting with
+Mr. Elder beside the little iron stove in the cabin of the Betsey; and
+the minister, divested of his cap and jacket, but still looking the
+veritable skipper to admiration, was busied in making us a rather late
+tea.
+
+The cabin,--my home for the greater part of the three following weeks,
+and that of my friend for the greater part of the previous
+twelvemonth,--I found to be an apartment about twice the size of a
+common bed, and just lofty enough under the beams to permit a man of
+five feet eleven to stand erect in his night-cap. A large table, lashed
+to 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 the
+narrow coffin-like beds in the sides, and space enough at its fore-end
+for two seats in front of the stove. A jealously barred skylight opened
+above; and there depended from it this evening a close lantern-looking
+lamp, sufficiently valuable, no doubt, in foul weather, but dreary and
+dim on the occasions when all one really wished from it was light. The
+peculiar furniture of the place gave evidence to the mixed nature of my
+friend's employment. A well-thumbed chart of the Western Islands lay
+across an equally well-thumbed volume of Henry's "Commentary." There was
+a Polyglot and a spy-glass in one corner, and a copy of Calvin's
+"Institutes," with the latest edition of "The Coaster's Sailing
+Directions," in another; while in an adjoining state-room, nearly large
+enough to accommodate an arm-chair, if the chair could have but
+contrived to get into it, I caught a glimpse of my friend's printing
+press and his case of types, canopied overhead by the blue ancient of
+the vessel, bearing, in stately six-inch letters of white bunting, the
+legend, "FREE CHURCH YACHT." A door opened, which communicated with the
+forecastle, and John Stewart, stooping very much, to accommodate himself
+to the low-roofed passage, thrust in a plate of fresh herrings,
+splendidly toasted, to give substantiality and relish to our tea. The
+little rude forecastle, a considerably smaller apartment than the cabin,
+was all a-glow with the bright fire in the coppers, itself invisible; we
+could see the chain-cable dangling from the hatchway to the floor, and
+John Stewart's companion, a powerful-looking, handsome young man, with
+broad bare breast, and in his shirt-sleeves, squatted full in front of
+the blaze, like the household goblin described by Milton, or the
+"Christmas Present" of Dickens. Mr. Elder left us for the steamer, in
+which 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 my
+bedside, when I awoke, a fragment of rock which he had brought from the
+shore, charged with Liasic fossils; and a note he had written, to say
+that the deposit to which it belonged occurred in the trap immediately
+above the village-mill; and further, to call my attention to a house
+near the middle of the village, built of a mouldering red sandstone,
+which had been found _in situ_ in digging the foundations. I had but
+little time for the work of exploration in Mull, and the information
+thus kindly rendered enabled me to economize it.
+
+The village of Tobermory resembles that of Oban. A quiet bay has its
+secure 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 they
+had been transported from the centre of some stately city entire and at
+once, sweeps round its inner inflection, like a bent bow; and an
+amphitheatre of mingled rock and wood rises behind. With all its beauty,
+however, there hangs about the village an air of melancholy. Like some
+of the other western coast villages, it seems not to have grown,
+piece-meal, as a village ought, but to have been made wholesale, as
+Frankenstein made his man; and to be ever asking, and never more
+incessantly than when it is at its quietest, why it should have been
+made at all? The remains of the Florida, a gallant Spanish ship, lie off
+its shores, a wreck of the Invincible Armada, "deep whelmed," according
+to 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 a
+century ago, to weigh up the Florida, which ended in the weighing up of
+merely a few of her guns, some of them of iron greatly corroded; and
+that, on scraping them, they became so hot under the hand that they
+could not be touched, but that they lost this curious property after a
+few hours' exposure to the air. There have since been repeated instances
+elsewhere, he adds, of the same phenomenon, and chemistry has lent its
+solution of the principles on which it occurs; but, in the year 1740,
+ere the riddle was read, it must have been deemed a thoroughly magical
+one by the simple islanders of Mull. It would seem as if the guns,
+heated in the contest with Drake, Hawkins, and Frobisher, had again
+kindled, under some supernatural influence, with the intense glow of the
+lost battle.
+
+The morning was showery; but it cleared up a little after ten, and we
+landed to explore. We found the mill a little to the south of the
+village, where a small stream descends, all foam and uproar, from the
+higher grounds along a rocky channel half-hidden by brushwood; and the
+Liasic bed occurs in an exposed front directly over it, coped by a thick
+bed of amygdaloidal trap. The organisms are numerous; and, when we dig
+into the bank beyond the reach of the weathering influences, we find
+them delicately preserved, though after a fashion that renders difficult
+their safe removal. Originally the bed must have existed as a brown
+argillaceous mud, somewhat resembling that which forms in the course of
+years, under a scalp of muscles; and it has hardened into a more
+silt-like clay, in which the fossils occur, not as petrifactions, but
+as shells in a state of decay, except in some rare cases, in which a
+calcareous nodule has formed within or around them. Viewed in the group,
+they seem of an intermediate character, between the shells of the Lias
+and the Oolite. One of the first fossils I disinterred was the Gryphaea
+obliquata,--a shell characteristic of the Liasic formation; and the
+fossil immediately after, the Pholadomy aequalis, a shell of the Oolitic
+one. There occurs in great numbers a species of small Pecten,--some of
+the specimens scarce larger than a herring scale; a minute Ostrea, a
+sulcated Terebratula, an Isocardia, a Pullastra, and groups of broken
+serpulae in vast abundance. The deposit has also its three species of
+Ammonite, existing as mere impressions in the clay; and at least two
+species of Belemnite,--one of the two somewhat resembling the Belemnites
+abbreviatus, but smaller and rather more elongated: while the other, of
+a spindle form, diminishing at both ends, reminds one of the Belemnites
+minimus of the Gault. The Red Sandstone in the centre of the village
+occurs detached, like this Liasic bed, amid the prevailing trap, and may
+be seen _in situ_ beside the southern gable of the tall, deserted
+looking 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 the
+architect; and more nearly resembles the New Red Sandstone of England
+and Dumfriesshire, than any other rock I have yet seen in the north of
+Scotland. 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 the
+sea. I would fain have approached nearer the precipices of Ardnamurchan,
+to trace along their inaccessible fronts the strange reticulations of
+trap figured by Macculloch; but prudence and the skipper forbade our
+trusting even the docile little Betsey, on one of the most formidable
+lee shores in Scotland, in winds so light and variable, and with the
+swell so high. We could hear the deep roar of the surf for miles, and
+see its undulating strip of white flickering under stack and cliff. The
+scenery here seems rich in legendary association. At one tack we bore
+into Bloody Bay, on the Mull coast,--the scene of a naval battle between
+two island chiefs; at another, we approached, on the mainland, a cave
+inaccessible save from the sea, long the haunt of a ruthless Highland
+pirate. Ere we rounded the headland of Ardnamurchan, the slant light of
+evening was gleaming athwart the green acclivities of Mull, barring them
+with long horizontal lines of shadow, where the trap terraces rise step
+beyond step, in the characteristic stair-like arrangement to which the
+rock owes its name; and the sun set as we were bearing down in one long
+tack on the Small Isles. We passed the Isle of Muck, with its one low
+hill; saw the pyramidal mountains of Rum looming tall in the offing; and
+then, running along the Isle of Eigg, with its colossal Scuir rising
+between us and the sky, as if it were a piece of Babylonian wall, or of
+the great wall of China, only vastly larger, set down on the ridge of a
+mountain, we entered the channel which separates the island from one of
+its dependencies, Eilean Chaisteil, and cast anchor in the tideway,
+about fifty yards from the rocks. We were now at home,--the only home
+which 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 wears
+late,--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 our
+first evidence of the fact came in the agreeable form of three bottles
+of fine fresh cream from the shore. Then followed an ample baking of
+nice oaten cakes. The material out of which the cakes were manufactured
+had been sent from the minister's store aboard,--for oatmeal in Eigg is
+rather a scarce commodity in the middle of July; but they had borrowed a
+crispness and flavor from the island, that the meal, left to its own
+resources, could scarcely have communicated; and the golden-colored
+cylinder of fresh butter which accompanied them was all the island's
+own. There was an ample supply of eggs too, as one not quite a conjuror
+might have expected from a country bearing such a name,--eggs with the
+milk in them; and, with cream, butter, oaten cakes, eggs, and tea, all
+of the best, and with sharp-set sea-air appetites to boot, we fared
+sumptuously. There is properly no harbor in the island. We lay in a
+narrow channel, through which, twice every twenty-four hours, the tides
+sweep powerfully in one direction, and then as powerfully in the
+direction opposite; and our anchors had a trick of getting foul, and
+canting stock downwards in the loose sand, which, with pointed rocks all
+around us, over which the current ran races, seemed a very shrewd sort
+of trick indeed. But a kedge and halser, stretched thwartwise to a
+neighboring crag, and jammed fast in a crevice, served in moderate
+weather to keep us tolerably right. In the severer seasons, however, the
+kedge is found inadequate, and the minister has to hoist sail and make
+out for the open sea, as if served with a sudden summons of ejectment.
+
+Among the various things brought aboard this morning, there was a pair
+of island shoes for the minister's cabin use, that struck my fancy not a
+little. They were all around of a deep madder red color, soles, welts
+and uppers; and, though somewhat resembling in form the little yawl of
+the Betsey, were sewed not unskilfully with thongs; and their peculiar
+style of tie seemed of a kind suited to furnish with new idea a
+fashionable shoemaker of the metropolis. They were altogether the
+production of Eigg, from the skin out of which they had been cut, with
+the lime that had prepared it for the tan, and the root by which the tan
+had been furnished, down to the last on which they had been moulded, and
+the artisan that had cast them off, a pair of finished shoes. There are
+few trees, and, of course, no bark to spare, in the island; but the
+islanders find a substitute in the astringent lobiferous root of the
+_Tormentilla erecta_, which they dig out for the purpose among the
+heath, at no inconsiderable expense of time and trouble. I was informed
+by 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 of
+a house or the working of a ship, that the infusion of root had to be
+thrice changed for every skin, and that it took a man nearly a day to
+gather roots enough for a single infusion. I was further informed that
+it was not unusual for the owner of a skin to give it to some neighbor
+to tan, and that, the process finished, it was divided equally between
+them, the time and trouble bestowed on it by the one being deemed
+equivalent to the property held in it by the other. I wished to call a
+pair of these primitive-looking shoes my own, and no sooner was the wish
+expressed, than straightway one islander furnished me with leather, and
+another set to work upon the shoes. When I came to speak of
+remuneration, however, the islanders shook their heads. "No, no, not
+from 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 with
+the 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, about
+half a mile in length by a few hundred yards in breadth; poor in
+pastures, 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 of
+Parliament, than could be made elsewhere in Eigg. This islet bore, in
+the remote past, its rude fort or dun, long since sunk into a few grassy
+mounds; and hence its name. On the landward side rises the island of
+Eigg proper, resembling in outline two wedges, placed point to point on
+a board. The centre is occupied by a deep angular gap, from which the
+ground slopes upward on both sides, till, attaining its extreme height
+at the opposite ends of the island, it drops suddenly on the sea. In the
+northern rising ground the wedge-like outline is complete; in the
+southern one it is somewhat modified by the gigantic Scuir, which rises
+direct 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 vast
+donjon keep, taller, from base to summit, by about a hundred feet, than
+the dome of St. Paul's. The upper slopes of the island are brown and
+moory, and present little on which the eye may rest, save a few trap
+terraces, with rudely columnar fronts; its middle space is mottled with
+patches of green, and studded with dingy cottages, each of which this
+morning, just a little before the breakfast hour, had its own blue
+cloudlet of smoke diffused around it; while along the beach, patches of
+level sand, alternated with tracts of green bank, or both, give place to
+stately 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 of
+semi-circular columns rises some eighty or a hundred feet over the
+shore; and on a green slope, directly above, we see the picturesque
+ruins of the Chapel of St. Donan, one of the disciples of Columba, and
+the 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 bright
+through the transparent green of the sea, three fathoms below our keel,
+and, in a little flat bay directly opposite, it presented almost the
+appearance of pulverized chalk. A stronger contrast to the dingy
+trap-rocks around which it lies could scarce be produced, had contrast
+for effect's sake been the object. On landing on the exposed shelf to
+which we had fastened our halser, I found the origin of the sand
+interestingly exhibited. The hollows of the rock, a rough trachyte, with
+a surface like that of a steel rasp, were filled with handfuls of broken
+shells thrown up by the surf from the sea-banks beyond: fragments of
+echini, bits of the valves of razor-fish, the island cyprina, mactridae,
+buccinidae, and fractured periwinkles, lay heaped together in vast
+abundance. In hollow after hollow, as I passed shorewards, I found the
+fragments more and more comminuted, just as, in passing along the
+successive vats of a paper-mill, one finds the linen rags more and more
+disintegrated by the cylinders; and immediately beyond the inner edge of
+the shelf, which is of considerable extent, lies the flat bay, the
+ultimate recipient of the whole, filled to the depth of several feet,
+and to the extent of several hundred yards, with a pure shell-sand, the
+greater part of which had been thus washed ashore in handfuls, and
+ground down by the blended agency of the trachyte and the surf. Once
+formed, however, in this way it began to receive accessions from the
+exuviae of animals that love such localities,--the deep arenaceous bed
+and soft sand-beach; and these now form no inconsiderable proportion of
+the entire mass. I found the deposit thickly inhabited by spatangi,
+razor-fish, gapers, and large, well-conditioned cockles, which seemed to
+have no idea whatever that they were living amid the debris of a charnel
+house. Such has been the origin here of a bed of shell-sand, consisting
+of many thousand tons, and of which at least eighty per cent. was once
+associated with animal life. And such, I doubt not, is the history of
+many a calcareous rock in the later secondary formations. There are
+strata, not a few, of the Cretaceous and Oolitic groups, that would be
+found--could we but trace their beginnings with a certainty and
+clearness equal to that with which we can unravel the story of this
+deposit--to be, like it, elaborations from dead matter, made through the
+agency 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 on
+island, and strait, and blue open sea. We rowed southwards in our
+little boat, through the channel of Eilean Chaisteil, along the
+trap-rocks of the island, and landed under the two pitchstone veins of
+Eigg, so generally known among mineralogists, and of which specimens may
+be found in so many cabinets. They occur in an earthy, greenish-black
+amygdaloid, which forms a range of sea-cliffs varying in height from
+thirty to fifty feet, and that, from their sad hue and dull fracture,
+seem to absorb the light; while the veins themselves, bright and
+glistening, glitter in the sun, as if they were streams of water
+traversing the face of the rock. The first impression they imparted, in
+viewing them from the boat, was, that the inclosing mass was a pitch
+caldron, rather of the roughest and largest, and much begrimmed by soot,
+that had cracked to the heat, and that the fluid pitch was forcing its
+way outwards through the rents. The veins expand and contract, here
+diminishing to a strip a few inches across, there widening into a
+comparatively broad belt, some two or three feet over; and, as well
+described by M'Culloch, we find the inclosed pitchstone changing in
+color, and assuming a lighter or darker hue, as it nears the edge or
+recedes from it. In the centre it is of a dull olive green, passing
+gradually into blue, which in turn deepens into black; and it is exactly
+at the point of contact with the earthy amygdaloid that the black is
+most intense, and the fracture of the stone glassiest and brightest. I
+was lucky enough to detach a specimen, which, though scarce four inches
+across, exhibits the three colors characteristic of the vein,--its bar
+of olive green on the one side, of intense black on the other, and of
+blue, like that of imperfectly fused bottle-glass, in the centre. This
+curious rock,--so nearly akin in composition and appearance to
+obsidian,--a mineral which, in its dense form, closely resembles the
+coarse dark-colored glass of which common bottles are made, and which,
+in its lighter form, exists as pumice,--constitutes one of the links
+that connect the trap with the unequivocally volcanic rocks. The one
+mineral may be seen beside smoking crater, as in the Lipari Isles,
+passing into pumice; while the other may be converted into a substance
+almost identical with pumice, by the chemist. "It is stated by the
+Honorable George Knox, of Dublin," says Mr. Robert Allan, in his
+valuable mineralogical work, "that the pitchstone of Newry, on being
+exposed to a high temperature, loses its bitumen and water, and is
+converted 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, and
+taking with us his companion, to assist us in carrying such specimens as
+we might procure, we passed westwards for a few hundred yards under the
+crags, and came abreast of a dark angular opening at the base of the
+precipice, scarce two feet in height, and in front of which there lies a
+little sluggish, ankle-deep pool, half mud, half water, and matted over
+with grass and rushes. Along the mural face of the rock of earthy
+amygdaloid there runs a nearly vertical line, which in one of the
+stratified rocks one might perhaps term the line of a fault, but which
+in a trap rock may merely indicate where two semi-molten masses had
+pressed against each other without uniting--just as currents of cooling
+lead, poured by the plumber from the opposite end of a groove, sometimes
+meet and press together, so as to make a close, polished joint, without
+running into one piece. The little angular opening forms the lower
+termination of the line, which, hollowing inwards, recedes near the
+bottom into a shallow cave, roughened with tufts of fern and bunches of
+long silky grass, here and there enlivened by the delicate flowers of
+the lesser rock-geranium. A shower of drops patters from above among the
+weeds and rushes of the little pool. My friend the minister stopped
+short. "There," he said, pointing to the hollow, "you will find such a
+bone cave as you never saw before. Within that opening there lie the
+remains of an entire race, palpably destroyed, as geologists in so many
+other cases are content merely to imagine, by one great catastrophe.
+That is the famous cave of Frances (_Uamh Fraingh_), in which the whole
+people 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 lofty
+than one could have anticipated from the mean vestibule placed in front
+of it. Its extreme length we found to be two hundred and sixty feet; its
+extreme breadth twenty-seven feet; its height, where the roof rises
+highest, from eighteen to twenty feet. The cave seems to have owed its
+origin to two distinct causes. The trap-rocks on each side of the
+vertical fault-like crevice which separates them are greatly decomposed,
+as if by the moisture percolating from above; and directly in the line
+of the crevice must the surf have charged, wave after wave, for ages ere
+the last upheaval of the land. When the Dog-stone at Dunolly existed as
+a sea-stack, skirted with algae, the breakers on this shore must have
+dashed every tide through the narrow opening of the cavern, and scooped
+out by handfuls the decomposing trap within. The process of
+decomposition, and consequent enlargement, is still going on inside, but
+there is no longer an agent to sweep away the disintegrated fragments.
+Where the roof rises highest, the floor is blocked up with accumulations
+of bulky decaying masses, that have dropped from above; and it is
+covered over its entire area by a stratum of earthy rubbish, which has
+fallen from the sides and ceiling in such abundance, that it covers up
+the straw beds of the perished islanders, which still exist beneath as a
+brown mouldering felt, to the depth of from five to eight inches. Never
+yet was tragedy enacted on a gloomier theatre. An uncertain twilight
+glimmers gray at the entrance, from the narrow vestibule; but all
+within, for full two hundred feet, is black as with Egyptian darkness.
+As we passed onward with our one feeble light, along the dark mouldering
+walls and roof, which absorbed every straggling ray that reached them,
+and over the dingy floor, ropy and damp, the place called to
+recollection that hall in Roman story, hung and carpeted with black,
+into which Domitian once thrust his senate, in a frolic, to read their
+own names on the coffin-lids placed against the wall. The darkness
+seemed to press upon us from every side, as if it were a dense jetty
+fluid, out of which our light had scooped a pailful or two, and that was
+rushing in to supply the vacuum; and the only objects we saw distinctly
+visible were each other's heads and faces, and the lighter parts of our
+dress.
+
+The floor, for about a hundred feet inwards from the narrow vestibule,
+resembles that of a charnel-house. At almost every step we came upon
+heaps of human bones grouped together, as the Psalmist so graphically
+describes, "as when one cutteth and cleaveth wood upon the earth." They
+are of a brownish, earthy hue, here and there tinged with green; the
+skulls, with the exception of a few broken fragments, have disappeared;
+for travellers in the Hebrides have of late years been numerous and
+curious; and many a museum,--that at Abbotsford among the
+rest,--exhibits, in a grinning skull, its memorial of the Massacre at
+Eigg. We find, too, further marks of visitors in the single bones
+separated from the heaps and scattered over the area; but enough still
+remains to show, in the general disposition of the remains, that the
+hapless islanders died under the walls in families, each little group
+separated by a few feet from the others. Here and there the remains of a
+detached skeleton may be seen, as if some robust islander, restless in
+his agony, had stalked out into the middle space ere he fell; but the
+social 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 the
+straw-bed upon which the family had lain, largely mixed with the smaller
+bones of the human frame, ribs and vertebrae, and hand and feet bones;
+occasionally, too, with fragments of unglazed pottery, and various other
+implements of a rude housewifery. The minister found for me, under one
+family heap, the pieces of a half-burned, unglazed earthen jar, with a
+narrow mouth, that, like the sepulchral urns of our ancient tumuli, had
+been 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's
+wooden porringer (_bicker_), perforated by a hole still bearing the mark
+of the cord that had hung it to the wall; and beside the stave lay a few
+of the larger, less destructible bones of the child, with what for a
+time 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 a
+tooth,--a foal of a week old could not have pressed itself through the
+opening; and how the single grinder, evidently no recent introduction
+into the cave, could have got mixed up in the straw with the human
+bones, seemed an enigma somewhat of the class to which the reel in the
+bottle belongs. I found in Edinburgh an unexpected commentator on the
+mystery, in the person of my little boy,--an experimental philosopher in
+his second year. I had spread out on the floor the curiosities of
+Eigg,--among the rest, the relics of the cave, including the pieces of
+earthern jar, and the fragment of the porringer; but the horse's tooth
+seemed to be the only real curiosity among them in the eyes of little
+Bill. He laid instant hold of it; and, appropriating it as a toy,
+continued playing with it till he fell asleep. I have now little doubt
+that it was first brought into the cave by the poor child amid whose
+mouldering remains Mr. Swanson found it. The little pellet of gray hair
+spoke of feeble old age involved in this wholesale massacre with the
+vigorous manhood of the island; and here was a story of unsuspecting
+infancy amusing itself on the eve of destruction with its toys. Alas,
+for man! "Should not I spare Nineveh, that great city," said God to the
+angry prophet, "wherein are more than six score thousand persons that
+cannot discern between their right hand and their left?" God's image
+must have been sadly defaced in the murderers of the poor inoffensive
+children of Eigg, ere they could have heard their feeble wailings,
+raised, no doubt, when the stifling atmosphere within began first to
+thicken, and yet ruthlessly persist in their work of indiscriminate
+destruction.
+
+Various curious things have from time to time been picked up from under
+the bones. An islander found among them, shortly before our visit, a
+sewing needle of copper, little more than an inch in length; fragments
+of Eigg shoes, of the kind still made in the island, are of
+comparatively common occurrence; and Mr. James Wilson relates, in the
+singularly graphic and powerful description of _Uamh Fraingh_, which
+occurs in his "Voyage round the Coasts of Scotland" (1841), that a
+sailor, 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 for
+granted, as I suppose I may, that the dentology of the murderous M'Leods
+outside the cave must have very much resembled that of the murdered
+M'Donalds within, very harmless looking teeth they were for being those
+of an animal so maliciously mischievous as man. I have found in the Old
+Red Sandstone the strong-based tusks of the semi-reptile Holoptychius; I
+have chiselled out of the limestone of the Coal Measures the sharp,
+dagger-like incisors of the Megalichthys; I have picked up in the Lias
+and Oolite the cruel spikes of the Crocodile and the Ichthyosaurus; I
+have seen the trenchant, saw-edged teeth of gigantic Cestracions and
+Squalidae that had been disinterred from the Chalk and the London Clay;
+and I have felt, as I examined them, that there could be no possibility
+of mistake regarding the nature of the creatures to which they had
+belonged;--they were teeth made for hacking, tearing, mangling,--for
+amputating 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 three
+inoffensive looking grinders, that the animal it had belonged to,--far
+more ruthless and cruel than reptile-fish, crocodiles, or sharks,--was
+of such a nature that it could destroy creatures of even its own kind by
+hundreds at a time, when not in the least incited by hunger, and with no
+ultimate intention of eating them. Man must surely have become an
+immensely worse animal than his teeth show him to have been designed
+for; his teeth give no real evidence regarding his real character. Who,
+for instance, could gather from the dentology of the M'Leods the passage
+in their history to which the cave of Frances bears evidence?
+
+We quitted the cave, with its stagnant damp atmosphere and its mouldy
+unwholesome 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; and
+I learned from my friend, versant in all the various island traditions
+regarding it, that the less I inquired into its history on the spot, the
+more 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, in
+the rude age of the unglazed pipkin and the copper needle; and many
+years seem to have elapsed ere the story of their hapless possessors was
+committed to writing; and so we find it existing in various and somewhat
+conflicting editions. "Some hundred years ago," says Mr. Wilson, "a few
+of the M'Leods landed in Eigg from Skye, where, having greatly
+misconducted themselves, the Eiggites strapped them to their own boats,
+which they sent adrift into the ocean. They were, however, rescued by
+some clansmen; and, soon after, a strong body of the M'Leods set sail
+from Skye, to revenge themselves on Eigg. The natives of the latter
+island 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 exceedingly
+small entrance. It opens from the broken face of a steep bank along the
+shore; and, as the whole coast is cavernous, their particular retreat
+would have been sought for in vain by strangers. So the Skye-men,
+finding the island uninhabited, presumed the natives had fled, and
+satisfied their revengeful feelings by ransacking and pillaging the
+empty houses. Probably the _movables_ were of no great value. They then
+took their departure and left the island, when the sight of a solitary
+human being among the cliffs awakened their suspicion, and induced them
+to return. Unfortunately a slight sprinkling of snow had fallen, and the
+footsteps of an individual were traced to the mouth of the cave. Not
+having been there ourselves at the period alluded to, we cannot speak
+with certainty as to the nature of the parley which ensued, or the
+terms offered by either party; but we know that those were not the days
+of protocols. The ultimatum was unsatisfactory to the Skye-men, who
+immediately 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 very
+entrance of the _Uamh Fraingh_, which they kept up for a length of time;
+and thus, by 'one fell smoke,' they smothered the entire population of
+the island."
+
+Such is Mr. Wilson's version of the story, which, in all its leading
+circumstances, agrees with that of Sir Walter. According, however, to at
+least one of the Eigg versions, it was the M'Leod himself who had landed
+on the island, driven there by a storm. The islanders, at feud with the
+M'Leod's at the time, inhospitably rose upon him, as he bivouacked on
+the shores of the Bay of Laig; and in a fray, in which his party had the
+worse, his back was broken, and he was forced off half dead to sea.
+Several months after, on his partial recovery, he returned, crook-backed
+and infirm, to wreak his vengeance on the inhabitants, all of whom,
+warned of his coming by the array of his galleys in the offing, hid
+themselves in the cave, in which, however, they were ultimately
+betrayed--as narrated by Sir Walter and Mr. Wilson--by the track of some
+footpaths in a sprinkling of snow; and the implacable chieftain, giving
+orders 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 the
+wild, hollow cry from the rock within had sunk into silence, and there
+lived not a single islander of Eigg, man, woman, or child. The fact that
+their remains should have been left to moulder in the cave is proof
+enough, of itself, that none survived to bury the dead. I am inclined
+to believe, from the appearance of the place, that smoke could scarcely
+have been the real agent of destruction; then, as now, it would have
+taken a great deal of pure smoke to smother a Highlander. It may be
+perhaps deemed more probable, that the huge fire of rafter and roof-tree
+piled close against the opening, and rising high over it, would draw out
+the oxygen within as its proper food, till at length all would be
+exhausted; and life would go out for want of it, like the flame of a
+candle under an upturned jar. Sir Walter refers the date of the event to
+some time "about the close of the sixteenth century;" and the coin of
+Queen Mary, mentioned by Mr. Wilson, points at a period at least not
+much earlier; but the exact time of its occurrence is so uncertain, that
+a Roman Catholic priest of the Hebrides, in lately showing his people
+what a very bad thing Protestantism is, instanced, as a specimen of its
+average morality, the affair of the cave. The _Protestant_ M'Leods of
+Skye, he said, full of hatred in their hearts, had murdered, wholesale,
+their wretched brethren, the _Protestant_ M'Donalds of Eigg, and sent
+them off to perdition before their time.
+
+Quitting the beach, we ascended the breezy hill-side on our way to the
+Scuir,--an object so often and so well described, that it might be
+perhaps prudent, instead of attempting one description more, to present
+the reader with some of the already existing ones. "The Scuir of Eigg,"
+says Professor Jamieson, in his 'Mineralogy of the Western Islands,' "is
+perfectly mural, and extends for upwards of a mile and a half, and rises
+to a height of several hundred feet. It is entirely columnar, and the
+columns 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 of
+art; but it has not the extent or sublimity of the Scuir of Eigg. The
+one may be compared with the greatest exertions of human power; the
+other is characteristic of the wildest and most inimitable works of
+nature." "The height of this extraordinary object is considerable," says
+M'Culloch, dashing off his sketch with a still bolder hand; "yet its
+powerful effect arises rather from its peculiar form, and the commanding
+elevation which it occupies, than from its positive altitude. Viewed in
+one direction, it presents a long irregular wall, crowning the summit of
+the highest hill, while in the other it resembles a huge tower. Thus it
+forms no natural combination of outline with the surrounding land, and
+hence acquires that independence in the general landscape which
+increases its apparent magnitude, and produces that imposing effect
+which it displays. From the peculiar position of the Scuir, it must also
+inevitably be viewed from a low station. Hence it everywhere towers high
+above the spectator; while, like other objects on the mountain outline,
+its apparent dimensions are magnified, and its dark mass defined on the
+sky, so as to produce all the additional effects arising from strong
+oppositions of light and shadow. The height of this rock is sufficient
+in this stormy country frequently to arrest the passage of the clouds,
+so as to be further productive of the most brilliant effects in
+landscape. Often they may be seen hovering on its summit, and adding
+ideal dimensions to the lofty face, or, when it is viewed on the
+extremity, conveying the impression of a tower, the height of which is
+such as to lie in the regions of the clouds. Occasionally they sweep
+along the base, leaving its huge and black mass involved in additional
+gloom, and resembling the castle of some Arabian enchanter, built on the
+clouds, and suspended in air." It might be perhaps deemed somewhat
+invidious to deal with pictures such as these in the style the
+connoisseur in the "Vicar of Wakefield" dealt with the old painting,
+when, seizing a brush, he daubed it over with brown varnish, and then
+asked the spectators whether he had not greatly improved the tone of the
+coloring. And yet it is just possible, that in the case of at least
+M'Culloch's picture, the brown varnish might do no manner of harm. But a
+homelier sketch, traced out on almost the same leading lines, with just
+a little less of the aerial in it, may have nearly the same subduing
+effect; I have, besides, a few curious touches to lay in, which seem
+hitherto to have escaped observation and the pencil; and in these
+several circumstances must lie my apology for adding one sketch more to
+the sketches existing already.
+
+The Scuir of Eigg, then, is a veritable Giant's Causeway, like that on
+the coast of Antrim, taken and magnified rather more than twenty times
+in height, and some five or six times in breadth, and then placed on the
+ridge of a hill nearly nine hundred feet high. Viewed sideways, it
+assumes, as described by M'Culloch, the form of a perpendicular but
+ruinous rampart, much gapped above, that runs for about a mile and a
+quarter along the top of a lofty sloping talus. Viewed endways, it
+resembles 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 three
+hundred feet in breadth by four hundred and seventy feet in height,
+perched on the apex of a pyramid, like a statue on a pedestal. This
+strange causeway is columnar from end to end; but the columns, from
+their great altitude and deficient breadth, seem mere rodded shafts in
+the Gothic style; they rather resemble bundles of rods than
+well-proportioned pillars. Few of them exceed eighteen inches in
+diameter, and many of them fall short of half a foot; but, though lost
+in the general mass of the Scuir as independent columns, when we view it
+at an angle sufficiently large to take in its entire bulk, they yet
+impart to it that graceful linear effect which we see brought out in
+tasteful pencil sketches and good line engravings. We approached it this
+day from the shore in the direction in which the eminence it stands upon
+assumes the pyramidal form, and itself the tower-like outline. The
+acclivity is barren and stony,--a true desert foreground, like those of
+Thebes and Palmyra; and the huge square shadow of the tower stretched
+dark and cold athwart it. The sun shone out clearly. One half the
+immense bulk before us, with its delicate vertical lining, lay from top
+to bottom in deep shade, massive and gray; one half presented its
+many-sided columns to the light, here and there gleaming with tints of
+extreme brightness, where the pitchstones presented their glassy planes
+to the sun; its general outline, whether pencilled by the lighter or
+darker tints, stood out sharp and clear; and a stratum of white fleecy
+clouds floated slowly amid the delicious blue behind it. But the minuter
+details I must reserve for my next chapter. One fact, however,
+anticipated just a little out of its order, may heighten the interest of
+the reader. There are massive buildings,--bridges of noble span, and
+harbors that abut far into the waves,--founded on wooden piles; and this
+hugest of hill-forts we find founded on wooden piles also. It is built
+on what a Scotch architect would perhaps term a pile-_brander_ of the
+_Pinites Eiggensis_, an ancient tree of the Oolite. The gigantic Scuir
+of 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 rose
+higher over the horizon at each step we took, till it seemed pointing at
+the middle sky, we could mark peculiarities in its structure which
+escape notice in the distance. We found it composed of various beds,
+each of which would make a Giant's Causeway entire, piled over each
+other like stories in a building, and divided into columns, vertical, or
+nearly so, in every instance except in one bed near the base, in which
+the pillars incline to a side, as if losing footing under the
+superincumbent weight. Innumerable polygonal fragments,--single stones
+of the building,--lie scattered over the slope, composed, like almost
+all 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, a
+mass of black sealing-wax, with numerous pieces of white bugle stuck
+into it. Some of the detached polygons are of considerable size; few of
+them larger and bulkier, however, than a piece of column of this
+characteristic porphyry, about ten feet in length by two feet in
+diameter, which lies a full mile away from any of the others, in the
+line of the old burying-ground, and distant from it only a few hundred
+yards. It seems to have been carried there by man: we find its bearing
+from the Scuir lying nearly at right angles with the direction of the
+drift-boulders of the western coast, which are, besides, of rare
+occurrence in the Hebrides; nor has it a single neighbor; and it seems
+not improbable, as a tradition of the island testifies, that it was
+removed thus far for the purpose of marking some place of sepulture, and
+that the catastrophe of the cave arrested its progress after by far the
+longer and rougher portion of the way had been passed. The dry-arm bones
+of the charnel-house in the rock may have been tugging around it when
+the galleys of the M'Leod hove in sight. The traditional history of
+Eigg, said my friend the minister, compared with that of some of the
+neighboring islands, presents a decapitated aspect: the M'Leods cut it
+off by the neck. Most of the present inhabitants can tell which of their
+ancestors, grandfather, or great-grandfather, or great-great-grandfather,
+first settled in the place, and where they came from; and, with the
+exception of a few vague legends about St. Donan and his grave, which were
+preserved apparently among the people of the other Small Isles, the island
+has no early traditional history.
+
+We had now reached the Scuir. There occur, intercalated with the
+columnar beds, a few bands of a buff-colored non-columnar trap,
+described by M'Culloch as of a texture intermediate between a greenstone
+and a basalt, and which, while the pitchstone around it seems nearly
+indestructible, has weathered so freely as to form horizontal grooves
+along the face of the rock, from two to five yards in depth. One of
+these runs for several hundred feet along the base of the Scuir, just at
+the top of the talus, and greatly resembles a piazza, lacking the outer
+pillars. It is from ten to twelve feet in height, by from fifteen to
+twenty in depth; the columns of the pitch stone-bed immediately above
+it seem perilously hanging in mid air; and along their sides there
+trickles, in even the driest summer weather,--for the Scuir is a
+condenser on an immense scale--minute runnels of water, that patter
+ceaselessly in front of the long deep hollow, like rain from the eaves
+of a cottage during a thunder shower. Inside, however, all is dry, and
+the floor is covered to the depth of several inches with the dung of
+sheep and cattle, that find, in this singular mountain piazza, a place
+of shelter. We had brought a pickaxe with us; and the dry and dusty
+floor, composed mainly of a gritty conglomerate, formed the scene of our
+labors. It is richly fossiliferous, though the organisms have no
+specific variety; and never, certainly, have I found the remains of
+former creations in a scene in which they more powerfully addressed
+themselves to the imagination. A stratum of peat-moss, mixed with
+fresh-water shells, and resting on a layer of vegetable mould, from
+which the stumps and roots of trees still protruded, was once found in
+Italy, buried beneath an ancient tesselated pavement; and the whole gave
+curious evidence of a kind fitted to picture to the imagination a
+background vista of antiquity, all the more remotely ancient in aspect
+from the venerable age of the object in front. Dry ground covered by
+wood, a lake, a morass, and then dry ground again, had all taken
+precedence, on the site of the tesselated pavement, in this instance, of
+an old Roman villa. But what was antiquity in connection with a Roman
+villa, to antiquity in connection with the Scuir of Eigg? Under the old
+foundations 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, had
+sprung up and decayed on hill and beside stream in some nameless
+land,--had then been swept to the sea,--had been entombed deep at the
+bottom in a grit of Oolite,--had been heaved up to the surface, and
+high over it, by volcanic agencies working from beneath,--and had
+finally been built upon, as moles are built upon piles, by the architect
+that had laid down the masonry of the gigantic Scuir, in one fiery layer
+after another. The mountain wall of Eigg, with its dizzy elevation of
+four hundred and seventy feet, is a wall founded on piles of pine laid
+crossways; and, strange as the fact may seem, one has but to dig into
+the 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 to
+be interrupted. Our man who carried the pickaxe had lingered behind us
+for a few hundred yards, in earnest conversation with an islander; and
+he now came up, breathless and in hot haste, to say that the islander, a
+Roman Catholic tacksman in the neighborhood, had peremptorily warned him
+that 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 meddled
+with it. "That message," said my friend, laughing, but looking just a
+little sad through the laugh, "would scarce have been sent us when I was
+minister of the Establishment here; but it seems allowable in the case
+of a poor Dissenter, and is no bad specimen of the thousand little ways
+in 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 a
+fossil preserve, which coupled itself in my mind, through a trick of the
+associative faculty, with the idea of a great fossil act for the
+British empire, framed on the principles of the game-laws; and, just
+wondering what sort of disreputable vagabonds geological poachers
+would become under its deteriorating influence, I laid hold of the
+pickaxe and broke into the stonefast floor; and thence I succeeded in
+abstracting,--feloniously, I dare say, though the crime has not yet got
+into the statute-book--some six or eight pieces of the _Pinites
+Eiggensis_, amounting in all to about half a cubic foot of that very
+ancient wood--value unknown. I trust, should the case come to a serious
+bearing, the members of the London Geological Society will generously
+subscribe half-a-crown a-piece to assist me in feeing counsel. There are
+more interests than mine at stake in the affair. If I be cast and
+committed,--I, who have poached over only a few miserable districts in
+Scotland,--pray, what will become of some of them,--the Lyells,
+Bucklands, Murchisons and Sedgwicks,--who have poached over whole
+continents?
+
+We were successful in procuring several good specimens of the Eigg pine,
+at a depth, in the conglomerate, of from eight to eighteen inches. Some
+of the upper pieces we found in contact with the decomposing trap out of
+which the hollow piazza above had been scooped; but the greater number,
+as my set of specimens abundantly testify, lay embedded in the original
+Oolitic grit in which they had been locked up, in, I doubt not, their
+present fossil state, ere their upheaval, through Plutonic agency, from
+their deep-sea bottom. The annual rings of the wood, which are quite as
+small as in a slow-growing Baltic pine, are distinctly visible in all
+the better pieces I this day transferred to my bag. In one fragment I
+reckon sixteen rings in half an inch, and fifteen in the same space in
+another. The trees to which they belonged seem to have grown on some
+exposed hill-side, where, in the course of half a century, little more
+than from two or three inches were added to their diameter. The _Pinites
+Eiggensis_, or Eigg pine, was first introduced to the notice of the
+scientific world by the late Mr. Witham, in whose interesting work on
+"The Internal Structure of Fossil Vegetables" the reader may find it
+figured and described. The specimen in which he studied its
+peculiarities "was found," he says, "at the base of the magnificent
+mural escarpment named the Scuir of Eigg,--not, however, _in situ_, but
+among fragments of rocks of the Oolitic series." The authors of the
+"Fossil Flora," where it is also figured, describe it as differing very
+considerably in structure from any of the coniferae of the Coal Measures.
+"Its medullary rays," says Messrs. Lindley and Hutton, "appear to be
+more numerous, and frequently are not continued through one zone of wood
+to another, but more generally terminate at the concentric circles. It
+abounds also in turpentine vessels, or lacunae, of various sizes, the
+sides of which are distinctly defined." Viewed through the microscope,
+in transparent slips, longitudinal and transverse, it presents, within
+the space of a few lines, objects fitted to fill the mind with wonder.
+We find the minutest cells, glands, fibres, of the original wood
+preserved uninjured. _There_ still are those medullary rays entire that
+communicated between the pith and the outside,--_there_ still the ring
+of thickened cells that indicated the yearly check which the growth
+received when winter came on,--_there_ the polygonal reticulations of
+the cross section, without a single broken mesh,--_there_, too, the
+elongated cells in the longitudinal one, each filled with minute glands
+that take the form of double circles,--_there_ also, of larger size and
+less regular form, the lacunae in which the turpentine lay: every nicely
+organized speck, invisible to the naked eye, we find in as perfect a
+state of keeping in the incalculably ancient pile-work on which the
+gigantic Scuir is founded, as in the living pines that flourish green on
+our hill-sides. A net-work, compared with which that of the finest lace
+ever worn by the fair reader would seem a net-work of cable, has
+preserved entire, for untold ages, the most delicate peculiarities of
+its pattern. There is not a mesh broken, nor a circular dot away!
+
+The experiments of Mr. Witham on the Eigg fossil, furnish an
+interesting example of the light which a single, apparently simple,
+discovery may throw on whole departments of fact. He sliced his specimen
+longitudinally and across, fastened the slices on glass, ground them
+down till they became semi-transparent, and then, examining them under
+reflected light by the microscope, marked and recorded the specific
+peculiarities of their structure. And we now know, in consequence, that
+the ancient Eigg pine, to which the detached fragment picked up at the
+base of the Scuir belonged,--a pine alike different from those of the
+earlier carboniferous period and those which exist contemporary with
+ourselves,--was, some _three creations_ ago, an exceedingly common tree
+in the country now called Scotland,--as much so, perhaps, as the Scotch
+fir is at the present day. The fossil trees found in such abundance in
+the neighborhood of Helmsdale that they are burnt for lime,--the fossil
+wood of Eathie, in Cromartyshire, and that of Shandwick, in Ross,--all
+belong to the _Pinites Eiggensis_. It seems to have been a straight and
+stately tree, in most instances, as in the Eigg specimens, of slow
+growth. One of the trunks I saw near Navidale measured two feet in
+diameter, but a full century had passed ere it attained to a bulk so
+considerable; and a splendid specimen in my collection, from the same
+locality, which measures twenty-one inches, exhibits even _more_ than a
+hundred annual rings. In one of my specimens, and one only, the rings
+are of great breadth. They differ from those of all the others in the
+proportion in which I have seen the annual rings of a young, vigorous
+fir that had sprung up in some rich, moist hollow, differ from the
+annual rings of trees of the same species that had grown in the shallow,
+hard soil of exposed hill-sides. And this one specimen furnishes curious
+evidence that the often-marked but little understood law, which gives us
+our better and worse seasons in alternate groups, various in number and
+uncertain in their time of recurrence, obtained as early as the age of
+the Oolite. The rings follow each other in groups of lesser and larger
+breadth. 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 alternate
+groups. For some four or five years together, when this pine was a
+living tree, the springs were late and cold, and the summers cloudy and
+chill, as in that group of seasons which intervened between 1835 and
+1841; and then, for four or five years, more springs were early and
+summers genial, as in the after group of 1842, 1843 and 1844. An
+arrangement in nature,--first observed, as we learn from Bacon, by the
+people of the Low Countries, and which has since formed the basis of
+meteoric tables, and of predictions and elaborate cycles of the
+weather,--bound together the twelvemonths of the Oolitic period in
+alternate bundles of better and worse: vegetation throve vigorously
+during the summers of one group, and languished, in those of another, in
+a state of partial development.
+
+Sending away our man shipwards, laden with a bag of fossil wood, we
+ascended 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 of
+the beds considerable variety of direction and form. In one bed they
+belly over with a curve, like the ribs of some wrecked vessel from which
+the planking has been torn away; in another they project in a straight
+line, like muskets planted slantways on the ground to receive a charge
+of cavalry; in others the inclination is inwards, like that of ranges of
+stakes placed in front of a sea-dyke, to break the violence of the
+waves; while yet in others they present, as in the eastern portion of
+the Scuir, the common vertical direction. The ribbed appearance of every
+crag and cliff, imparts to the scene a peculiar character; every larger
+mass of light and shadow is corded with minute stripes; and the feeling
+experienced among the more shattered peaks, and in the more broken
+recesses, seems near akin to that which it is the tendency of some
+magnificent ruin to excite, than that which awakens amid the sublime of
+nature. We feel as if the pillared rocks around us were like the
+Cyclopean walls of Southern Italy,--the erections of some old gigantic
+race passed from the earth forever. The feeling must have been
+experienced on former occasions, amid the innumerable pillars of the
+Scuir; for we find M'Culloch, in his description, ingeniously analyzing
+it. "The resemblance to architecture here is much increased," he says,
+"by the columnar structure, which is sufficiently distinguishable, even
+from a distance, and produces a strong effect of artificial regularity
+when seen near at hand. To this vague association in the mind of the
+efforts of art with the magnitude of nature, is owing much of that
+sublimity of character which the Scuir presents. The sense of power is a
+fertile source of the sublime; and as the appearance of power exerted,
+no less than that of simplicity, is necessary to confer this character
+on architecture, so the mind, insensibly transferring the operations of
+nature to the efforts of art where they approximate in character,
+becomes impressed with a feeling rarely excited by her more ordinary
+forms, 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 the
+masonry, that run transversely, from side to side, still to fill up.
+Along one of these ditch-like gaps, which serves to insulate the eastern
+and highest portion of the Scuir from all its other portions, we find
+fragments of a rude wall of uncemented stones, the remains of an
+ancient hill-fort; which, with its natural rampart of rock on three of
+its four sides, more than a hundred yards in sheer descent, and with its
+deep ditch and rude wall on the fourth, must have formed one of the most
+inaccessible in the kingdom. The masses of pitchstone a-top, though so
+intensely black within, are weathered on the surface into almost a pure
+white; and we found lying detached among them, fragments of common
+amygdaloid and basalt, and minute slaty pieces of chalcedony that had
+formed apparently in fissures of the trap. We would have scrutinized
+more 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 rare
+was to be found. Had we examined somewhat more carefully, we might
+possibly have done what Mr. Woronzow Greig did on the Scuir about
+eighteen years previous,--picked up on it a piece of _bona fide_ Scotch
+pumice. This gentleman, well known through his exertions in statistical
+science, and for his love of science in general, and whose tastes and
+acquirements are not unworthy the son of Mrs. Somerville, has kindly
+informed me by letter regarding his curious discovery. "I visited the
+island 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 of
+game, I amused myself in my wanderings by looking about for natural
+curiosities. I knew little about Geology at the time, but, collecting
+whatever struck my eye as uncommon, I picked up from the sides of the
+Scuir, among various other things, a bit of fossil wood, and, nearly at
+the summit of the eminence, a piece of pumice of a deep brownish-black
+color, and very porous, the pores being large and round, and the
+substance which divided them of a uniform thickness. This last specimen
+I gave to Mr. Lyell, who said that it could not originally have belonged
+to Eigg, though it might possibly have been washed there by the sea,--a
+suggestion, however, with which its place on the top of the Scuir seems
+ill to accord. I may add, that I have since procured a larger specimen
+from the same place." This seems a curious fact, when we take into
+account the identity, in their mineral components, of the pumice and
+obsidian of the recent volcanoes; and that pitchstone, the obsidian of
+the 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 of
+pitchstone in the kingdom. It is just possible, however, that Mr.
+Greig's two specimens may not date farther back, in at least their
+existing state, than the days of the hill-fort. Powerful fires would
+have been required to render the exposed summit of the Scuir at all
+comfortable; there is a deep peat-moss in its immediate neighborhood,
+that would have furnished the necessary fuel; the wind must have been
+sufficiently high on the summit to fan the embers into an intense white
+heat; and if it was heat but half as intense as that which was employed
+in fusing into one mass the thick vitrified ramparts of Craig Phadrig
+and Knock Farril, on the east coast, it could scarce have failed to
+anticipate the experiment of the Hon. Mr. Knox, of Dublin, by converting
+some 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 had
+declined half-way adown the western sky, and for many yards the shadow
+of 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, was
+basking in yellow sunshine; and with its one dark shadow thrown from its
+one mountain-elevated wall of rock, it seemed some immense fantastical
+dial, with its gnomon rising tall in the midst. Far below, perched on
+the apex of the shadow, and half lost in the line of the penumbra, we
+could see two indistinct specks of black, with a dim halo around
+each,--specks that elongated as we arose, and contracted as we sat, and
+went gliding along the line as we walked. The shadows of two gnats
+disporting on the edge of an ordinary gnomon would have seemed vastly
+more important, in proportion, on the figured plane of the dial, than
+these, our ghostly representatives, did here. The sea, spangled in the
+wake of the sun with quick glancing light, stretched out its blue plain
+around us; and we could see included in the wide prospect, on the one
+hand, at once the hill-chains of Morven and Kintail, with the many
+intervening lochs and bold jutting headlands that give variety to the
+mainland; and, on the other, the variously complexioned Hebrides, from
+the Isle of Skye to Uist and Barra, and from Uist and Barra to Tiree and
+Mull. The contiguous Small Isles, Muck and Rum, lay moored immediately
+beside us, like vessels of the same convoy that in some secure roadstead
+drop anchor within hail of each other. I could willingly have lingered
+on the top of the Scuir until after sunset; but the minister, who, ever
+and anon, during the day, had been conning over some notes jotted on a
+paper of wonderfully scant dimensions, reminded me that this was the
+evening of his week-day discourse, and that we were more than a
+particularly rough mile from the place of meeting, and within, half an
+hour of the time. I took one last look of the scene ere we commenced our
+descent. There, in the middle of the ample parish glebe, that looked
+richer and greener in the light of the declining sun than at any former
+period during the day,--rose the snug parish manse; and yonder,--in an
+open island channel, with a strip of dark rocks fringing the land
+within, and another dark strip fringing the barren Eilean Chaisteil
+outside,--lay the Betsey, looking wonderfully diminutive, but evidently
+a little thing of high spirit, taut-masted, with a smart rake aft, and a
+spruce outrigger astern, and flaunting her triangular flag of blue in
+the sun. I pointed first to the manse, and then to the yacht. The
+minister shook his head.
+
+"'Tis a time of strange changes," he said; "I thought to have lived and
+died in that house, and found a quiet grave in the burying-ground yonder
+beside the ruin; but my path was a clear though a rugged one; and from
+almost 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-way
+corner, and suffered the Church question to run its course, without
+quitting my hold of the Establishment. And so I perhaps might. It is
+easy securing one's own safety, in even the worst of times, if one look
+no higher; and I, as I had no opportunity of mixing in the contest, or
+of declaring my views respecting it, might be regarded as an unpledged
+man. But the principles of the Evangelical party were my principles; and
+it would have been consistent with neither honor nor religion to have
+hung back in the day of battle, and suffered the men with whom in heart
+I was at one to pay the whole forfeit of our common quarrel. So I
+attended the Convocation, and pledged myself to stand or fall with my
+brethren. On my return I called my people together, and told them how
+the case stood, and that in May next I bade fair to be a dependent for a
+home on the proprietor of Eigg. And so they petitioned the proprietor
+that he might give me leave to build a house among them,--exactly the
+same sort of favor granted to the Roman Catholics of the island. But
+month after month passed, and they got no reply to their petition; and I
+was left in suspense, not knowing whether I was to have a home among
+them 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; and
+the 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, with
+a wife and family dependent on him, was placed by his silence in cruel
+circumstances of uncertainty. Ere the Disruption took place, however, I
+came to know pretty conclusively what I had to expect. The Doctor's
+factor came to Eigg, and, as I was informed, told the Islanders that it
+was not likely the Doctor would permit a _third_ place of worship on the
+Island: the Roman Catholics had one, and the Establishment had a kind of
+one, and there was to be no more. The factor, an active
+messenger-at-arms, useful in raising rents in these parts, has always
+been understood to speak the mind of his master; but the congregation
+took 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 an
+answer, the Disruption took place; and, laying the whole circumstances
+before my brethren in Edinburgh, who, like myself, interpreted the
+silence of the Doctor into a refusal, I suggested to them the scheme of
+the Betsey, as the only scheme through which I could keep up unbroken my
+connection 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 his
+minister. "We are both very hungry," said my friend: "we have been out
+among the rocks since breakfast-time, and are wonderfully disposed to
+eat. 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 of
+mashed potatoes, and we dined like princes. I observed, for the first
+time, in the interior of this cottage, what I had frequent occasion to
+remark afterwards, that much of the wood used in building in the smaller
+and outer islands of the Hebrides must have drifted across the Atlantic,
+borne eastwards and northwards by the great Gulf-stream. Many of the
+beams and boards, sorely drilled by the _Teredo navalis_, are of
+American timber, that, from time to time, has been cast upon the
+shore,--a portion of it, apparently, from timber-laden vessels
+unfortunate in their voyage, but a portion of it, also, with root and
+branch still attached, bearing mark of having been swept to the sea by
+transatlantic rivers. Nuts and seeds of tropical plants are occasionally
+picked up on the beach. My friend gave me a bean or nut of the _Dolichos
+urens_, or cow-itch shrub, of the West Indies, which an islander had
+found on the shore sometime in the previous year, and given to one of
+the manse children as a toy; and I attach some little interest to it, as
+a curiosity of the same class with the large canes and the fragment of
+carved wood found floating near the shores of Madeira by the
+brother-in-law of Columbus, and which, among other pieces of
+circumstantial evidence, led the great navigator to infer the existence
+of a western continent. Curiosities of this kind seem still more common
+in the northern than in the western islands of Scotland. "Large exotic
+nuts or seeds," says Dr. Patrick Neill, in his interesting "Tour,"
+quoted in a former chapter, "which in Orkney are known by the name of
+Molucca beans, are occasionally found among the _rejectamenta_ of the
+sea, especially after westerly winds. There are two kinds commonly
+found: the larger (of which the fishermen very generally make
+snuff-boxes) seem to be seeds from the great pod of the _Mimosa
+scandens_ of the West Indies; the smaller seeds, from the pod of the
+_Dolichos urens_, also a native of the same region. It is probable that
+the currents of the ocean, and particularly that great current which
+issues from the Gulf of Florida, and is hence denominated the Gulf
+Stream, aid very much in transporting across the mighty Atlantic these
+American products. They are generally quite fresh and entire, and afford
+an 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; and
+we had but just light enough left, on reaching the Betsey, to show us
+that there lay a dead sheep on the deck. It had been sent aboard to be
+killed by the minister's factotum, John Stewart; but John was at the
+evening preaching at the time, and the poor sheep, in its attempts to
+set itself free, had got itself entangled among the cords, and strangled
+itself. "Alas, alas!" exclaimed the minister, "thus ends our hope of
+fresh mutton for the present, and my hapless speculation as a sheep
+farmer for evermore." I learned from him, afterwards, over our tea, that
+shortly previous to the Convocation he had got his glebe,--one of the
+largest in Scotland,--well stocked with sheep and cattle, which he had
+to sell, immediately on the Disruption, in miserably bad condition, at a
+loss of nearly fifty per cent. He had a few sheep, however, that would
+not sell at all, and that remained on the glebe, in consequence, until
+his successor entered into possession. And he, honest man, straightway
+impounded them, and got them incarcerated in a dark, dirty hole,
+somewhat in the way Giant Despair incarcerated the pilgrims,--a thing he
+had quite a legal right to do, seeing that the mile-long glebe, with its
+many acres of luxuriant pasture, was now as much his property as it had
+been Mr. Swanson's a few months before, and seeing Mr. Swanson's few
+sheep had no right to crop his grass. But a worthy neighbor
+interfered,--Mr. M'Donald, of Keil, the principal tenant in the island.
+Mr. M'Donald,--a practical commentator on the law of kindness,--was
+sorely scandalized at what he deemed the new minister's gratuitous
+unkindness to a brother in calamity; and, relieving the sheep, he
+brought them to his own farm, where he found them board and lodging on
+my friend's behalf, till they could be used up at leisure. And it was
+one of the last of this unfortunate lot that now contrived to escape
+from us by anticipating John Stewart. "A black beginning makes a black
+ending," said Gouffing Jock, an ancient border shepherd, when his only
+sheep, a black ewe, the sole survivor of a flock smothered in a
+snow-storm, was worried to death by his dogs. Then, taking down his
+broadsword, he added, "Come awa, my auld friend; thou and I maun e'en
+stock Bowerhope-Law ance mair!" Less warlike than Gouffing Jock, we were
+content to repeat over the dead, on this occasion, simply the first
+portion of his speech; and then, betaking ourselves to our cabin, we
+forgot 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--Oolitic 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, a
+little after seven, a low stratum of mist, that completely enveloped the
+Scuir, and truncated both the eminence on which it stands and the
+opposite height, stretched like a ruler across the flat valley which
+indents so deeply the middle of the island. But the fogs melted away as
+the morning rose, and ere our breakfast was satisfactorily discussed,
+the last thin wreath had disappeared from around the columned front of
+the rock-tower of Eigg, and a powerful sun looked down on moist slopes
+and dank hollows, from which there arose in the calm a hazy vapor, that,
+while it softened the lower features of the landscape, left the bold
+outline relieved against a clear sky. Accompanied by our attendant of
+the previous day, bearing bag and hammer, we set out a little before
+eleven for the north-western side of the island, by a road which winds
+along the central hollow. My friend showed me as we went, that on the
+edge of an eminence, on which the traveller journeying westwards catches
+the last glimpse of the chapel of St. Donan, there had once been a rude
+cross erected, and another rude cross on an eminence on which he catches
+the last glimpse of the first; and that there had thus been a chain of
+stations 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,--the
+burial-place of the old Culdee,--came full in view. The unsteady
+devotion, that journeyed, fancy-bound, along the heights, to gloat over
+a dead man's bones, had its clue to carry it on in a straight line. Its
+trail was on the ground; it glided snake-like from cross to cross, in
+quest of dust; and, without its finger-posts to guide it, would have
+wandered devious. It is surely a better devotion that, instead of thus
+creeping over the earth to a mouldy sepulchre, can at once launch into
+the sky, secure of finding Him who once arose from one. In less than an
+hour we were descending on the Bay of Laig, a semi-circular indentation
+of the coast, about a mile in length, and, where it opens to the main
+sea, nearly two miles in breadth; with the noble island of Rum rising
+high in front, like some vast breakwater; and a meniscus of
+comparatively level land, walled in behind by a semi-circular rampart of
+continuous precipice, sweeping round its shores. There are few finer
+scenes in the Hebrides than that furnished by this island bay and its
+picturesque accompaniments,--none that break more unexpectedly on the
+traveller who descends upon it from the east; and rarely has it been
+seen, to greater advantage than on the delicate day, so soft, and yet so
+sunshiny and clear, on which I paid it my first visit.
+
+The island of Rum, with its abrupt sea-wall of rock, and its
+steep-pointed hills, that attain, immediately over the sea, an elevation
+of more than two thousand feet, loomed bold and high in the offing, some
+five miles away, but apparently much nearer. The four tall summits of
+the island rose clear against the sky like a group of pyramids; its
+lower slopes and precipices, variegated and relieved by graceful
+alternations of light and shadow, and resting on their blue basement of
+sea, stood out with equal distinctness; but the entire middle space from
+end to end was hidden in a long horizontal stratum of gray cloud, edged
+atop with a lacing of silver. Such was the aspect of the noble
+breakwater in front. Fully two-thirds of the semi-circular rampart of
+rock which shuts in the crescent-shaped plain directly opposite lay in
+deep shadow; but the sun shone softly on the plain itself, brightening
+up many a dingy cottage, and many a green patch of corn; and the bay
+below stretched out, sparkling in the light. There is no part of the
+island so thickly inhabited as this flat meniscus. It is composed almost
+entirely of Oolitic rocks, and bears atop, especially where an ancient
+oyster-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 would
+be no very difficult matter to drain, interpose their rough shag of dark
+green, and break the continuity, the plain around them waves with corn.
+Lying fair, green and populous within the sweep of its inaccessible
+rampart of rock, at least twice as lofty as the ramparts of Babylon of
+old, it reminds one of the suburbs of some ancient city lying embosomed,
+with all its dwellings and fields, within some roomy crescent of the
+city wall. We passed, ere we entered on the level, a steep-sided narrow
+dell, through which a small stream finds its way from the higher
+grounds, and which terminates at the upper end in an abrupt precipice,
+and a lofty but very slim cascade. "One of the few superstitions that
+still linger on the island," said my friend the minister, "is associated
+with that wild hollow. It is believed that shortly before a death takes
+place among the inhabitants, a tall withered female may be seen in the
+twilight, just yonder where the rocks open, washing a shroud in the
+stream. John, there, will perhaps tell you how she was spoken to on one
+occasion, by an over-bold, over-inquisitive islander, curious to know
+whose shroud she was preparing; and how she more than satisfied his
+curiosity, by telling him it was his own. It is a not uninteresting
+fact," added the minister, "that my poor people, since they have become
+more earnest about their religion, think very little about ghosts and
+spectres: their faith in the realities of the unseen world seems to have
+banished from their minds much of their old belief in its phantoms."
+
+In the rude fences that separate from each other the little farms in
+this plain, we find frequent fragments of the oyster bed, hardened into
+a tolerably compact limestone. It is seen to most advantage, however, in
+some of the deeper cuttings in the fields, where the surrounding matrix
+exists merely as an incoherent shale; and the shells may be picked out
+as entire as when they lay, ages before, in the mud, which we still see
+retaining around them its original color. They are small, thin,
+triangular, much resembling in form some specimens of the _Ostrea
+deltoidea_, but greatly less in size. The nearest resembling shell in
+Sowerby is the _Ostrea acuminata_,--an oyster of the clay that underlies
+the great Oolite of Bath. Few of the shells exceed an inch and a half in
+length, 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, to
+the depth of several feet, as shells on the heap at the door of a
+Newhaven fisherman, and extend over many acres. Where they lie open we
+can still detect the triangular disc of the hinge, with the single
+impression of the abductor muscle; and the foliaceous character of the
+shell remains in most instances as distinct as if it had undergone no
+mineral change. I have seen nowhere in Scotland, among the secondary
+formations, so unequivocal an oyster-bed; nor do such beds seem to be at
+all common in formations older than the Tertiary in England, though the
+oyster itself is sufficiently so. We find Mantell stating, in his
+recent work ("Medals of Creation"), after first describing an immense
+oyster bed of the London Basin, that underlies the city (for what is now
+London was once an oyster-bed), that in the chalk below, though it
+contains several species of Ostrea, the shells are diffused
+promiscuously throughout the general mass. Leaving, however, these
+oysters of the Oolite, which never net inclosed nor drag disturbed,
+though they must have formed the food of many an extinct order of
+fish,--mayhap reptile,--we pass on in a south-western direction,
+descending in the geological scale as we go, until we reach the southern
+side of the Bay of Laig. And there, far below tide-mark, we find a
+dark-colored argillaceous shale of the Lias, greatly obscured by
+boulders of trap,--the only deposit of the Liasic formation in the
+island.
+
+A line of trap-hills that rises along the shore seems as if it had
+strewed half its materials over the beach. The rugged blocks lie thick
+as stones in a causeway, down to the line of low ebb,--memorials of a
+time when the surf dashed against the shattered bases of the trap-hills,
+now elevated considerably beyond its reach; and we can catch but partial
+glimpses of the shale below. Wherever access to it can be had, we find
+it richly fossiliferous; but its organisms, with the exception of its
+Belemnites, are very imperfectly preserved. I dug up from under the
+trap-blocks some of the common Liasic Ammonites of the north-eastern
+coast of Scotland, a few of the septa of a large Nautilus, broken pieces
+of wood, and half-effaced casts of what seems a branched coral; but only
+minute portions of the shells have been converted into stone; here and
+there a few chambers in the whorls of an Ammonite or Nautilus, though
+the outline of the entire organism lies impressed in the shale; and the
+ligneous and polyparious fossils we find in a still greater state of
+decay. The Belemnite alone, as is common with this robust fossil,--so
+often the sole survivor of its many contemporaries,--has preserved its
+structure entire. I disinterred from the shale good specimens of the
+Belemnite _sulcatus_ and Belemnite _elongatus_, and found, detached on
+the surface of the bed, a fragment of a singularly large Belemnite, a
+full inch and a quarter in diameter, the species of which I could not
+determine.
+
+Returning by the track we came, we reach the bottom of the bay, which we
+find much obscured with sand and shingle; and pass northwards along its
+side, under a range of low sandstone precipices, with interposing grassy
+slopes, in which the fertile Oolitic meniscus descends to the beach. The
+sandstone, white and soft, and occurring in thick beds, much resembles
+that of the Oolite of Sutherland. We detect in it few traces of fossils;
+now and then a carbonaceous marking, and now and then what seems a thin
+vein 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 in
+beds of a blue clay, intercalated with the sandstone, we find fossils in
+abundance, of a character less obscure. We spent a full half-hour in
+picking out shells from the bottom of a long dock-like hollow among the
+rocks, in which a bed of clay has yielded to the waves, while the strata
+on either side stand up over it like low wharfs on the opposite side of
+a river. The shells, though exceedingly fragile,--for they partake of
+the nature of the clayey matrix in which they are imbedded,--rise as
+entire as when they had died among the mud, years, mayhap ages, ere the
+sandstone had been deposited over them; and we were enabled at once to
+detect their extreme dissimilarity, as a group, to the shells of the
+Liasic deposit we had so lately quitted. We did not find in this bed a
+single Ammonite, Belemnite, or Nautilus; but chalky Bivalves, resembling
+our existing Tellina, in vast abundance, mixed with what seem to be a
+small Buccinum and a minute Trochus, with numerous rather equivocal
+fragments of a shell resembling an Oiliva. So thickly do they lie
+clustered together in this deposit, that in some patches where the
+sad-colored argillaceous ground is washed bare by the sea, it seems
+marbled with them into a light gray tint. The group more nearly
+resembles in type a recent one than any I have yet seen in a secondary
+deposit, except perhaps in the Weald of Moray, where we find in one of
+the layers a Planorbis scarce distinguishable from those of our ponds
+and ditches, mingled with a Paludina that seems as nearly modelled after
+the existing form. From the absence of the more characteristic shells of
+the Oolite, I am inclined to deem the deposit one of estuary origin. Its
+clays were probably thrown down, like the silts of so many of our
+rivers, in some shallow bay, where the waters of a descending stream
+mingled with those of the sea, and where, though shells nearly akin to
+our 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 white
+sandstone presents here, for nearly half a mile together, its front to
+the waves, and exhibits, under the incessant wear of the surf, many
+singularly 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 through
+by a tall rugged archway; while the outer pier of the arch,--if pier we
+may term it,--worn to a skeleton, and jutting outwards with a knee-like
+angle, presents the appearance of a thin ungainly leg and splay foot,
+advanced, as if in awkward courtesy, to the breakers. But in a winter
+or two, judging from its present degree of attenuation, and the yielding
+nature of its material, which resembles a damaged mass of arrow-root,
+consolidated by lying in the leaky hold of a vessel, its persevering
+courtesies will be over, and pier and archway must lie in shapeless
+fragments on the beach. Wherever the surf has broken into the upper
+surface of this sandstone bed, and worn it down to nearly the level of
+the 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 in
+width from one to twelve feet; and the ramparts, rising from three to
+six feet over them, are perpendicular as the walls of houses, where they
+front each other, and descend on the opposite sides in irregular slopes.
+The iron block, with square groove and projecting ears, that receives
+the bar of a railway, and connects it with the stone below, represents
+not 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 converted
+the portions of soft sandstone in immediate contact with them into the
+consistence of quartz rock, have long since mouldered away, leaving but
+the hollow rectilinear rents which they had occupied, surmounted by the
+indurated walls which they had baked. Some of the most curious
+appearances, however, connected with the sandstone, though they occur
+chiefly in an upper bed, are exhibited by what seem fields of petrified
+mushrooms, of a gigantic size, that spread out in some places for
+hundreds of yards under the high-water level. These apparent mushrooms
+stand 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 to
+nearly two yards in diameter. In some specimens we find two heads
+joined together in a form resembling a squat figure of _eight_, of what
+printers term the Egyptian type, or, to borrow the illustration of
+M'Culloch, "like the ancient military projectile known by the name of
+double-headed shot;" in other specimens three heads have coalesced in a
+trefoil shape, or rather in a shape like that of an ace of clubs
+divested of the stem. By much the greater number, however, are
+spherical. They are composed of concretionary masses, consolidated, like
+the walls of the dykes, though under some different process, into a hard
+siliceous stone, that has resisted those disintegrating influences of
+the weather and the surf, under which the yielding matrix in which they
+were embedded has worn from around them. Here and there we find them
+lying detached on the beach, like huge shot, compared with which the
+greenstone balls of Mons Meg are but marbles for children to play with;
+in other cases they project from the mural front of rampart-like
+precipices, as if they had been showered into them by the ordnance of
+some besieging battery, and had stuck fast in the mason-work. Abbotsford
+has been described as a romance in stone and lime; we have here, on the
+shores of Laig, what seems a wild but agreeable tale, of the extravagant
+cast of "Christabel," or the "Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner," fretted
+into sandstone. But by far the most curious part of the story remains to
+be told.
+
+The hollows and fissures of the lower sandstone bed we find filled with
+a fine quartzose sand, which, from its pure white color, and the
+clearness with which the minute particles reflect the light, reminds one
+of accumulations of potato-flour drying in the sun. It is formed almost
+entirely of disintegrated particles of the soft sandstone; and as we at
+first find it occurring in mere handfuls, that seem as if they had been
+detached from the mass during the last few tides, we begin to marvel to
+what quarter the missing materials of the many hundred cubic yards of
+rock, ground down along the shore in this bed during the last century or
+two, have been conveyed away. As we pass on northwards, however, we see
+the white sand occurring in much larger quantities,--here heaped up in
+little bent-covered hillocks above the reach of the tide,--there
+stretching out in level, ripple-marked wastes into the waves,--yonder
+rising in flat narrow spits among the shallows. At length we reach a
+small, irregularly-formed bay, a few hundred feet across, floored with
+it from side to side; and see it, on the one hand, descending deep into
+the 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. The
+sandstone bed that has been worn down to form it contains no fossils,
+save here and there a carbonaceous stem; but in an underlying harder
+stratum we occasionally find a few shells; and, with a specimen in my
+hand charged with a group of bivalves resembling the existing conchifera
+of our sandy beaches, I was turning aside this sand of the Oolite, so
+curiously reduced to its original state, and marking how nearly the
+recent shells that lay embedded in it resembled the extinct ones that
+had lain in it so long before, when I became aware of a peculiar sound
+that it yielded to the tread, as my companions paced over it. I struck
+it obliquely with my foot, where the surface lay dry and incoherent in
+the sun, and the sound elicited was a shrill, sonorous note, somewhat
+resembling that produced by a waxed thread, when tightened between the
+teeth and the hand, and tipped by the nail of the forefinger. I walked
+over it, striking it obliquely at each step, and with every blow the
+shrill note was repeated. My companions joined me; and we performed a
+concert, in which, if we could boast of but little variety in the tones
+produced, we might at least challenge all Europe for an instrument of
+the kind which produced them. It seemed less wonderful that there should
+be music in the granite of Memnon, than in the loose Oolitic sand of the
+Bay of Laig. As we marched over the drier tracts, an incessant _woo_,
+_woo_, _woo_, rose from the surface, that might be heard in the calm
+some twenty or thirty yards away; and we found that where a damp
+semi-coherent stratum lay at the depth of three or four inches beneath,
+and all was dry and incoherent above, the tones were loudest and
+sharpest, and most easily evoked by the foot. Our discovery,--for I
+trust I may regard it as such,--adds a third locality to two previously
+known ones, in which what may be termed the musical sand,--no unmeet
+counterpart to the "singing water" of the tale,--has now been found. And
+as the island of Eigg is considerably more accessible than _Jabel
+Nakous_, in Arabia Petraea, or _Reg-Rawan_, in the neighborhood of Cabul,
+there must be facilities presented through the discovery which did not
+exist hitherto, for examining the phenomenon in acoustics which it
+exhibits,--a phenomenon, it may be added, which some of our greatest
+masters of the science have confessed their inability to explain.
+
+_Jabel Nakous_, or the "Mountain of the Bell," is situated about three
+miles from the shores of the Gulf of Suez, in that land of wonders which
+witnessed for forty years the journeyings of the Israelites, and in
+which the granite peaks of Sinai and Horeb overlook an arid wilderness
+of rock and sand. It had been known for many ages by the wild Arab of
+the 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, a
+sound like the first low tones of an Aeolian harp stirs the hot
+breezeless air. It swells louder and louder in progressive undulations,
+till at length the dry baked earth seems to vibrate under foot, and the
+startled animal snorts and rears, and struggles to break away. According
+to the Arabian account of the phenomenon, says Sir David Brewster, in
+his "Letters on Natural Magic," there is a convent miraculously
+preserved in the bowels of the hill; and the sounds are said to be those
+of the "_Nakous_, a long metallic ruler, suspended horizontally, which
+the priest strikes with a hammer, for the purpose of assembling the
+monks to prayer." There exists a tradition that on one occasion a
+wandering Greek saw the mountain open, and that, entering by the gap, he
+descended into the subterranean convent, where he found beautiful
+gardens and fountains of delicious water, and brought with him to the
+upper world, on his return, fragments of consecrated bread. The first
+European traveller who visited _Jabel Nakous_, says Sir David, was M.
+Seetzen, a German. He journeyed for several hours over arid sands, and
+under ranges of precipices inscribed by mysterious characters, that
+tell, haply, of the wanderings of Israel under Moses. And reaching,
+about noon, the base of the musical fountain, he found it composed of a
+white friable sandstone, and presenting on two of its sides sandy
+declivities. He watched beside it for an hour and a quarter, and then
+heard, for the first time, a low undulating sound, somewhat resembling
+that of a humming top, which rose and fell, and ceased and began, and
+then ceased again; and in an hour and three quarters after, when in the
+act of climbing along the declivity, he heard the sound yet louder and
+more prolonged. It seemed as if issuing from under his knees, beneath
+which the sand, disturbed by his efforts, was sliding downwards along
+the surface of the rock. Concluding that the sliding sand was the cause
+of the sounds, not an effect of the vibrations which they occasioned, he
+climbed to the top of one of the declivities, and, sliding downwards,
+exerted himself with hands and feet to set the sand in motion. The
+effect produced far exceeded his expectations; the incoherent sand
+rolled under and around in a vast sheet; and so loud was the noise
+produced, that "the earth seemed to tremble beneath him to such a
+degree, that he states he should certainly have been afraid if he had
+been 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 noises
+he heard, but which he was unable to trace to their producing cause, as
+"beginning with a low continuous murmuring sound, which seemed to rise
+beneath his feet," but "which gradually changed into pulsations as it
+became louder, so as to resemble the striking of a clock, and became so
+strong at the end of five minutes _as to detach the sand_." The Mountain
+of the Bell has been since carefully explored by Lieutenant J. Welsted,
+of the Indian navy; and the reader may see it exhibited in a fine
+lithograph, in his travels, as a vast irregularly conical mass of broken
+stone, somewhat resembling one of our Highland cairns, though, of
+course, on a scale immensely more huge, with a steep, angular slope of
+sand resting in a hollow in one of its sides, and rising to nearly its
+apex. "It forms," says Lieutenant Welsted, "one of a ridge of low,
+calcareous hills, at a distance of three and a half miles from the
+beach, to which a sandy plain, extending with a gentle rise to their
+base, connects them. Its height, about four hundred feet, as well as the
+material of which it is composed,--a light-colored friable
+sandstone,--is about the same as the rest of the chain; but an inclined
+plane of almost impalpable sand rises at an angle of forty degrees with
+the horizon, and is bounded by a semi-circle of rocks, presenting
+broken, abrupt, and pinnacled forms, and extending to the base of this
+remarkable hill. Although their shape and arrangement in some respects
+may be said to resemble a whispering gallery, yet I determined by
+experiment that their irregular surface renders them but ill adapted for
+the production of an echo. Seated at a rock at the base of the sloping
+eminence, I directed one of the Bedouins to ascend; and it was not until
+he 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, it
+spread out laterally and upwards, until a considerable portion of the
+surface was in motion. At their commencement the sounds might be
+compared to the faint strains of an Aeolian harp when its strings first
+catch the breeze: as the sand became more violently agitated by the
+increased velocity of the descent, the noise more nearly resembled that
+produced by drawing the moistened fingers over glass. As it reached the
+base, the reverberations attained the loudness of distant thunder,
+causing the rock on which we were seated to vibrate; and our
+camels,--animals not easily frightened,--became so alarmed that it was
+with difficulty their drivers could restrain them."
+
+"The hill of _Reg-Rawan_ or the 'Moving Sand,'" says the late Sir
+Alexander 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 rude
+lithographic view, in the "Journal of the Asiatic Society" for 1838, "is
+about forty miles north of Cabul, towards Hindu-kush, and near the base
+of the mountains." It rises to the height of about four hundred feet, in
+an angle formed by the junction of two ridges of hills; and a sheet of
+sand, "pure as that of the sea-shore," and which slopes in an angle of
+forty degrees, reclines against it from base to summit. As represented
+in the lithograph, there projects over the steep sandy slope on each
+side, as in the "Mountain of the Bell," still steeper barriers of rock;
+and we are told by Sir Alexander, that though "the mountains here are
+generally composed of granite or mica, at _Reg-Rawan_ there is sandstone
+and lime." The situation of the sand is curious, he adds: it is seen
+from a great distance; and as there is none other in the neighborhood,
+"it might almost be imagined, from its appearance, that the hill had
+been 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 is
+emitted. 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 the
+place; and the inhabitants have a belief that the sounds are only heard
+on Friday, when the saint of _Reg-Rawan_, who is interred hard by,
+permits." The phenomenon, like the resembling one in Arabia, seems to
+have attracted attention among the inhabitants of the country at an
+early period; and the notice of an eastern annalist, the Emperor Baber,
+who flourished late in the fifteenth century, and, like Caesar, conquered
+and recorded his conquests, still survives. He describes it as the
+_Khwaja Reg-Rawan_, "a small hill, in which there is a line of sandy
+ground reaching from the top to the bottom," from which there "issues in
+the summer season the sound of drums and nagarets." In connection with
+the fact that the musical sand of Eigg is composed of a disintegrated
+sandstone of the Oolite, it is not quite unworthy of notice that
+sandstone and lime enter into the composition of the hill of
+_Reg-Rawan_,--that the district in which the hill is situated is not a
+sandy one,--and that its slope of sonorous sand seems as if it had
+issued from its side. These various circumstances, taken together, lead
+to the inference that the sand may have originated in the decomposition
+of the rock beneath. It is further noticeable, that the _Jabel Nakous_
+is composed of a white friable sandstone, resembling that of the white
+friable bed of the Bay of Laig, and that it belongs to nearly the same
+geological era. I owe to the kindness of Dr. Wilson of Bombay, two
+specimens which he picked up in Arabia Petraea, of spines of Cidarites of
+the mace-formed type so common in the Chalk and Oolite, but so rare in
+the older formations. Dr. Wilson informs me that they are of frequent
+occurrence in the desert of Arabia Petraea, where they are termed by the
+Arabs petrified olives; that nummulites are also abundant in the
+district; and that the various secondary rocks he examined in his route
+through it seem to belong to the Cretaceous group. It appears not
+improbable, therefore, that all the sonorous sand in the world yet
+discovered is formed, like that of Eigg, of disintegrated sandstone; and
+at least two-thirds of it of the disintegrated sandstone of secondary
+formations, newer than the Lias. But how it should be at all sonorous,
+whatever its age or origin, seems yet to be discovered. There are few
+substances that appear worse suited than sand to communicate to the
+atmosphere those vibratory undulations that are the producing causes of
+sound: the grains, even when sonorous individually, seem, from their
+inevitable contact with each other, to exist under the influence of that
+simple law in acoustics which arrests the tones of the ringing glass or
+struck bell, immediately as they are but touched by some foreign body,
+such as the hand or finger. The one grain, ever in contact with several
+other grains, is a glass or bell on which the hand always rests. And the
+difficulty has been felt and acknowledged. Sir John Herschel, in
+referring to the phenomenon of the _Jabel Nakous_, in his "Treatise on
+Sound," in the "Encyclopaedia Metropolitana," describes it as to him
+"utterly inexplicable;" and Sir David Brewster, whom I had the pleasure
+of meeting in December last, assured me it was not less a puzzle to him
+than to Sir John. An eastern traveller, who attributes its production
+to "a reduplication of impulse setting air in vibration in a focus of
+echo," means, I suppose, saying nearly the same thing as the two
+philosophers, and merely conveys his meaning in a less simple style.
+
+I have not yet procured what I expect to procure soon,--sand enough from
+the musical bay at Laig to enable me to make its sonorous qualities the
+subject of experiment at home. It seems doubtful whether a small
+quantity set in motion on an artificial slope will serve to evolve the
+phenomena which have rendered the Mountain of the Bell so famous.
+Lieutenant Welsted informs us, that when his Bedouin first set the sand
+in motion, there was scarce any perceptible sound heard;--it was rolling
+downwards for many yards around him to the depth of a foot, ere the
+music arose; and it is questionable whether the effect could be elicited
+with some fifty or sixty pounds weight of the sand of Eigg, on a slope
+of 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 the
+stillness of a close room, it is just possible that it may. I have,
+however, little doubt, that from small quantities the sound evoked by
+the foot on the shore may be reproduced: enough will lie within the
+reach of experiment to demonstrate the strange difference which exists
+between this sonorous sand of the Oolite, and the common unsonorous sand
+of our sea-beaches; and it is certainly worth while examining into the
+nature and producing causes of a phenomenon so curious in itself, and
+which has been characterized by one of the most distinguished of living
+philosophers as "the most celebrated of all the acoustic wonders which
+the natural world presents to us." In the forthcoming number of the
+"North British Review,"--which appears on Monday first,[1]--the reader
+will find the sonorous sand of Eigg referred to, in an article the
+authorship of which will scarcely be mistaken. "We have here," says the
+writer, after first describing the sounds of _Jabel Nakous_, and then
+referring to those of Eigg, "the phenomenon in its simple state,
+disembarrassed from reflecting rocks, from a hard bed beneath, and from
+cracks and cavities that might be supposed to admit the sand; and
+indicating as its cause, either the accumulated vibration of the air
+when struck by the driven sand, or the accumulated sounds occasioned by
+the mutual impact of the particles of sand against each other. If a
+musket-ball passing through the air emits a whistling note, each
+individual particle of sand must do the same, however faint be the note
+which it yields; and the accumulation of these infinitesimal vibrations
+must constitute an audible sound, varying with the number and velocity
+of moving particles. In like manner, if two plates of silex or quartz,
+which are but large crystals of sand, give out a musical sound when
+mutually struck, the impact or collision of two minute crystals or
+particles of sand must do the same, in however inferior a degree; and
+the union of all these sounds, though singly imperceptible, may
+constitute the musical notes of the Bell Mountain, or the lesser sounds
+of 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 inadvertently
+failed to do,--that the sounds elicited from the sand of Eigg seem as
+directly evoked by the slant blow dealt it by the foot, as the sounds
+similarly evoked from a highly waxed floor, or a board strewed over with
+ground rosin. The sharp shrill note follows the stroke, altogether
+independently of the grains driven into the air. My omission may serve
+to 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 incurring
+the risk of being even tediously minute in their descriptions, to the
+danger of being inadequately brief in them. But, alas! for purposes of
+exact science, rarely are verbal descriptions otherwise than inadequate.
+Let us look, for example, at the various accounts given us of _Jabel
+Nakous_. There are strange sounds heard proceeding from a hill in
+Arabia, and various travellers set themselves to describe them. The
+tones are those of the convent _Nakous_, says the wild Arab;--there must
+be a convent buried under the hill. More like the sounds of a
+humming-top, remarks a phlegmatic German traveller. Not quite like them,
+says an English one in an Oxford gown;--they resemble rather the
+striking of a clock. Nay, listen just a little longer and more
+carefully, says a second Englishman, with epaulettes on his shoulder:
+"the sounds at their commencement may be compared to the faint strains
+of an Aeolian harp when its strings first catch the breeze," but anon, as
+the agitation of the sand increases, they "more nearly resemble those
+produced 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 the
+sound of drums and nagarets that issues from the sand." All we really
+know of this often-described music of the desert, after reading all the
+descriptions, is, that its tones bear certain analogies to certain other
+tones,--analogies that seem stronger in one direction to one ear, and
+stronger in another direction to an ear differently constituted, but
+which do not exactly resemble any other sounds in nature. The strange
+music of _Jabel Nakous_, as a combination of tones, is essentially
+unique.
+
+
+
+
+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 the
+promontory which forms the northern extremity of the Bay of Laig.
+Wherever the beach has been swept bare, we see it floored with
+trap-dykes worn down to the level, but in most places accumulations of
+huge blocks of various composition cover it up, concealing the nature of
+the rock beneath. The long semi-circular wall of precipice which,
+sweeping inwards at the bottom of the bay, leaves to the inhabitants
+between its base and the beach their fertile meniscus of land, here
+abuts upon the coast. We see its dark forehead many hundred feet
+overhead, and the grassy platform beneath, now narrowed to a mere talus,
+sweeping upwards to its base from the shore,--steep, broken, lined thick
+with horizontal pathways, mottled over with ponderous masses of rock.
+
+Among the blocks that load the beach, and render our onward progress
+difficult and laborious, we detect occasional fragments of an
+amygdaloidal basalt, charged with a white zeolite, consisting of
+crystals so extremely slender that the balls, with their light fibrous
+contents, remind us of cotton apples divested of the seeds. There
+occur, though more rarely, masses of a hard white sandstone, abounding
+in 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 with
+compressed shells, chiefly bivalves, that it may be regarded as a shell
+breccia. There occur, besides, slabs of fibrous limestone, exactly
+resembling 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 fragmentary
+masses,--all of them, at least, except the fibrous limestone, which
+occurs in mere plank-like bands,--represent distinct beds, of which this
+part of the island is composed, and which present their edges, like
+courses of ashlar in a building, in the splendid section that stretches
+from the tall brow of the precipice to the beach; though in the slopes
+of the talus, where the lower beds appear in but occasional protrusions
+and land-slips, we find some difficulty in tracing their order of
+succession.
+
+Near the base of the slope, where the soil has been undermined and the
+rock laid bare by the waves, there occur beds of a bituminous black
+shale,--resembling the dark shales so common in the Coal Measures,--that
+seem to be of fresh water or estuary origin. Their fossils, though
+numerous, are ill preserved; but we detect in them scales and plates of
+fishes, at least two species of minute bivalves, one of which very much
+resembles a Cyclas; and in some of the fragments, shells of Cypris lie
+embedded in considerable abundance. After all that has been said and
+written by way of accounting for those alternations of lacustrine with
+marine remains, which are of such frequent occurrence in the various
+formations, secondary and tertiary, from the Coal Measures downwards, it
+does seem strange enough that the estuary, or fresh-water lake, should
+so often in the old geologic periods have changed places with the sea.
+It is comparatively easy to conceive that the inner Hebrides should have
+once existed as a broad ocean sound, bounded on one or either side by
+Oolitic islands, from which streams descended, sweeping with them, to
+the marine depths, productions, animal and vegetable, of the land. But
+it is less easy to conceive, that in that sound, the area covered by the
+ocean one year should have been covered by a fresh-water lake in perhaps
+the next, and then by the ocean again a few years after. And yet among
+the Oolitic deposits of the Hebrides evidence seems to exist that
+changes of this nature actually took place. I am not inclined to found
+much on the apparently fresh-water character of the bituminous shales of
+Eigg;--the embedded fossils are all too obscure to be admitted in
+evidence; but there can exist no doubt that fresh water, or at least
+estuary formations, do occur among the marine Oolites of the Hebrides.
+Sir R. Murchison, one of the most cautious, as he is certainly one of
+the most distinguished, of living geologists, found in a northern
+district of Skye, in 1826, a deposit containing Cyclas, Paludina,
+Neritina,--all shells of unequivocally fresh-water origin,--which must
+have been formed, he concludes, in either a lake or estuary. What had
+been sea at one period had been estuary or lake at another. In every
+case, however, in which these intercalated deposits are restricted to
+single strata of no great thickness, it is perhaps safer to refer their
+formation to the agency of temporary land-floods, than to that of
+violent changes of level, now elevating and now depressing the surface.
+There occur, for instance, among the marine Oolites of Brora,--the
+discovery of Mr. Robertson, of Inverugie,--two strata containing
+fresh-water fossils in abundance; but the one stratum is little more
+than an inch in thickness,--the other little more than a foot; and it
+seems considerably more probable, that such deposits should have owed
+their existence to extraordinary land-floods, like those which in 1829
+devastated the province of Moray, and covered over whole miles of marine
+beach with the spoils of land and river, than that a sea-bottom should
+have been elevated for their production, into a fresh-water lake, and
+then let down into a sea-bottom again. We find it recorded in the
+"Shepherd's Calendar," that after the thaw which followed the great
+snow-storm of 1794, there were found on a part of the sands of the
+Solway Frith known as the Beds of Esk, where the tide disgorges much of
+what is thrown into it by the rivers, "one thousand eight hundred and
+forty sheep, nine black cattle, three horses, two men, one woman,
+forty-five dogs, and one hundred and eighty hares, beside a number of
+meaner animals." A similar storm in an earlier time, with a soft
+sea-bottom prepared to receive and retain its spoils, would have formed
+a fresh-water stratum intercalated in a marine deposit.
+
+Rounding the promontory, we lose sight of the Bay of Laig, and find the
+narrow front of the island that now presents itself exhibiting the
+appearance of a huge bastion. The green talus slopes upwards, as its
+basement, for full three hundred feet; and a noble wall of perpendicular
+rock, that towers over and beyond for at least four hundred feet more,
+forms the rampart. Save towards the sea, the view is of but limited
+extent; we see it restricted, on the landward side, to the bold face of
+the bastion; and in a narrow and broken dell that runs nearly parallel
+to the shore for a few hundred yards between the top of the talus and
+the base of the rampart,--a true covered way,--we see but the rampart
+alone. But the dizzy front of black basalt, dark as night, save where a
+broad belt of light-colored sandstone traverses it in an angular
+direction, like a white sash thrown across a funeral robe,--the
+fantastic peaks and turrets in which the rock terminates atop,--the
+masses of broken ruins, roughened with moss and lichen, that have fallen
+from above, and lie scattered at its base,--the extreme loneliness of
+the place, for we have left behind us every trace of the human
+family,--and the expanse of solitary sea which it commands,--all
+conspire to render the scene a profoundly imposing one. It is one of
+those scenes in which a man feels that he is little, and that nature is
+great. There is no precipice in the island in which the puffin so
+delights to build as among the dark pinnacles overhead, or around which
+the 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 at
+the base of the rock. All lay dark below; and the red light atop, half
+absorbed by the dingy hues of the stone, shone with a gleam so faint and
+melancholy, that it served but to deepen the effect of the shadows.
+
+The puffin, a comparatively rare bird in the inner Hebrides, builds, I
+was told, in great numbers in the continuous line of precipice which,
+after sweeping for a full mile round the Bay of Laig, forms the
+pinnacled rampart here, and then, turning another angle of the island,
+runs on parallel to the coast for about six miles more. In former times
+the puffin furnished the islanders, as in St. Kilda, with a staple
+article of food, in those hungry months of summer in which the stores of
+the 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, save
+when they cannot help it; and the introduction of the potato has done
+much to put out the practice of climbing for the bird, except among a
+few young lads, who find excitement enough in the work to pursue it for
+its own sake, as an amusement. I found among the islanders what was
+said to be a piece of the natural history of the puffin, sufficiently
+apocryphal to remind one of the famous passage in the history of the
+barnacle, which traced the lineage of the bird to one of the
+pedunculated cirripedes, and the lineage of the cirripede to a log of
+wood. The puffin feeds its young, say the islanders, on an oily scum of
+the sea, which renders it such an unwieldy mass of fat, that about the
+time when it should be beginning to fly, it becomes unable to get out of
+its hole. The parent bird, not in the least puzzled, however, treats the
+case medicinally, and,--like mothers of another two-legged genus, who,
+when their daughters get over stout, put them through a course of
+reducing acids to bring them down,--feeds it on sorrel leaves for
+several days together, till, like a boxer under training, it gets
+thinned to the proper weight, and becomes able, not only to get out of
+its cell, but also to employ its wings.
+
+We pass through the hollow, and, reaching the farther edge of the
+bastion, towards the east, see a new range of prospect opening before
+us. There is first a long unbroken wall of precipice,--a continuation of
+the tall rampart overhead,--relieved along its irregular upper line by
+the blue sky. We mark the talus widening at its base, and expanding, as
+on the shores of the Bay of Laig, into an irregular grassy platform,
+that, sinking midway into a ditch-like hollow, rises again towards the
+sea, and presents to the waves a perpendicular precipice of redstone.
+The sinking sun shone brightly this evening; and the warm hues of the
+precipice, which bears the name of _Ru-Stoir_,--the Red
+Head,--strikingly contrasted with the pale and dark tints of the
+alternating basalts and sandstones in the taller cliff behind. The
+ditch-like hollow, which seems to indicate the line of a fault, cuts off
+this red headland from all the other rocks of the island, from which it
+appears to differ as considerably in texture as in hue. It consists
+mainly of thick beds of a pale red stone, which M'Culloch regarded as a
+trap, and which, intercalated with here and there a thin band of shale,
+and presenting not a few of the mineralogical appearances of what
+geologists of the school of the late Mr. Cunningham term Primary Old Red
+Sandstone, in some cases has been laid down as a deposit of Old Red
+proper, abutting in the line of a fault on the neighboring Oolites and
+basalts. In the geological map which I carried with me,--not one of high
+authority however,--I found it actually colored as a patch of this
+ancient system. The Old Red Sandstone is largely developed in the
+neighboring island of Rum, in the line of which the _Ru-Stoir_ seems to
+have a more direct bearing than any of the other deposits of Eigg; and
+yet the conclusion regarding this red headland merely adds one proof
+more to the many furnished already, of the inadequacy of mineralogical
+testimony, when taken in evidence regarding the eras of the geologist.
+The hard red beds of _Ru-Stoir_ belong, as I was fortunate enough this
+evening 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 more
+unequivocal than have been yet exhibited by any other deposit in
+Scotland.
+
+What first strikes the eye, in approaching the _Ru-Stoir_ from the west,
+is the columnar character of the stone. The precipices rise immediately
+over the sea, in rude colonnades of from thirty to fifty feet in height;
+single pillars, that have fallen from their places in the line, and
+exhibit a tenacity rare among the trap-rocks,--for they occur in
+unbroken lengths of from ten to twelve feet,--lie scattered below; and
+in several places where the waves have joined issue with the precipices
+in the line on which the base of the columns rest, and swept away the
+supporting foundation, the colonnades open into roomy caverns, that
+resound to the dash of the sea. Wherever the spray lashes, the pale red
+hue of the stone prevails, and the angles of the polygonal shafts are
+rounded; while higher up all is sharp-edged, and the unweathered surface
+is covered by a gray coat of lichens. The tenacity of the prostrate
+columns first drew my attention. The builder scant of materials would
+have experienced no difficulty in finding among them sufficient lintels
+for apertures from eight to twelve feet in width. I was next struck with
+the peculiar composition of the stone; it much rather resembles an
+altered sandstone, in at least the weathered specimens, than a trap, and
+yet there seemed nothing to indicate that it was an _Old Red_ Sandstone.
+Its columnar structure bore evidence to the action of great heat; and
+its pale red color was exactly that which the Oolitic sandstones of the
+island, 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 I
+expected 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 much
+deeper red than the general mass, and much more resembling Old Red
+Sandstone, I succeeded in detecting several shells, identical with those
+of the deposit of blue clay described in a former chapter. There
+occurred in it the small univalve resembling a Trochus, together with
+the oblong bivalve, somewhat like a Tellina; and, spread thickly
+throughout the block, lay fragments of coprolitic matter, and the scales
+and teeth of fishes. Night was coming on, and the tide had risen on the
+beach; but I hammered lustily, and laid open in the dark red shale a
+vertebral joint, a rib, and a parallelogramical fragment of solid bone,
+none of which could have belonged to any fish. It was an interesting
+moment for the curtain to drop over the promontory of _Ru-Stoir_; I had
+thus already found in connection with it well nigh as many reptilian
+remains as had been found in all Scotland before,--for there could exist
+no doubt that the bones I laid open were such; and still more
+interesting discoveries promised to await the coming morning, and a less
+hasty survey. We found a hospitable meal awaiting us at a picturesque
+old two-story house, with, what is rare in the island, a clump of trees
+beside it, which rises on the northern angle of the Oolitic meniscus;
+and after our day's hard work in the fresh sea-air, we did ample justice
+to the viands. Dark night had long set in ere we reached our vessel.
+
+Next day was Saturday; and it behooved my friend, the minister,--as
+scrupulously careful in his pulpit preparations for the islanders of
+Eigg as if his congregation were an Edinburgh one,--to remain on board,
+and study his discourse for the morrow. I found, however, no unmeet
+companion for my excursion in his trusty mate John Stewart. John had not
+very much English, and I had no Gaelic; but we contrived to understand
+one another wonderfully well; and ere evening I had taught him to be
+quite as expert in hunting dead crocodiles as myself. We reached the
+_Ru-Stoir_, and set hard to work with hammer and chisel. The fragments
+of red shale were strewed thickly along the shore for at least three
+quarters of a mile; wherever the red columnar rock appeared, there lay
+the shale, in water-worn blocks, more or less indurated; but the beach
+was covered over with shingle and detached masses of rock, and we could
+nowhere find it _in situ_. A winter storm powerful enough to wash the
+beach bare might do much to assist the explorer. There is a piece of
+shore on the eastern coast of Scotland, on which for years together I
+used to pick up nodular masses of lime containing fish of the Old Red
+Sandstone; but nowhere in the neighborhood could I find the ichthyolite
+bed in which they had originally formed. The storm of a single night
+swept the beach; and in the morning the ichthyolites lay revealed _in
+situ_ under a stratum of shingle which I had a hundred times examined,
+but which, though scarce a foot in thickness, had concealed from me the
+ichthyolite bed for five twelvemonths together!
+
+Wherever the altered shale of _Ru-Stoir_ has been thrown high on the
+beach, and exposed to the influences of the weather, we find it fretted
+over with minute organisms, mostly the scales, plates, bones, and teeth
+of fishes. The organisms, as is frequently the case, seem
+indestructible, while the hard matrix in which they are embedded has
+weathered from around them. Some of the scales present the rhomboidal
+outline, and closely resemble those of the _Lepidotus Minor_ of the
+Weald; others approximate in shape to an isosceles triangle. The teeth
+are of various forms: some of them, evidently palatal, are mere blunted
+protuberances glittering with enamel,--some of them present the usual
+slim, thorn-like type common in the teeth of the existing fish of our
+coasts,--some again are squat and angular, and rest on rectilinear
+bases, 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 the
+occipital plates, some present a smooth enamelled surface, while some
+are thickly tuberculated,--each tubercle bearing a minute depression in
+its apex, like a crater on the summit of a rounded hill. We find
+reptilian bones in abundance,--a thing new to Scotch geology,--and in a
+state of keeping peculiarly fine. They not a little puzzled John
+Stewart: he could not resist the evidence of his senses: they were
+bones, he said, real bones,--there could be no doubt of that: _there_
+were the joints of a backbone, with the hole the brain-marrow had
+passed through; and _there_ were shank-bones and ribs, and fishes'
+teeth; but how, he wondered, had they all got into the very heart of the
+hard red stones? He had seen what was called wood, he said, dug out of
+the side of the Scuir, without being quite certain whether it was wood
+or no; but there could be no uncertainty here. I laid open numerous
+vertebrae of various forms,--some with long spinous processes rising over
+the body or _centrum_ of the bone,--which I found in every instance,
+unlike that of the Ichthyosaurus, only moderately concave on the
+articulating faces; in others the spinous process seemed altogether
+wanting. Only two of the number bore any mark of the suture which
+unites, in most reptiles, the annular process to the centrum; in the
+others both centrum and process seemed anchylosed, as in quadrupeds,
+into one bone; and there remained no scar to show that the suture had
+ever existed. In some specimens the ribs seem to have been articulated
+to the sides of the centrum; in others there is a transverse process,
+but no marks of articulation. Some of the vertebrae are evidently dorsal,
+some cervical, one apparently caudal; and almost all agree in showing in
+front two little eyelets, to which the great descending artery seems to
+have sent out blood-vessels in pairs. The more entire ribs I was lucky
+enough to disinter have, as in those of crocodileans, double heads; and
+a part of a fibula, about four inches in length, seems also to belong to
+this ancient family. A large proportion of the other bones are evidently
+Plesiosaurian. I found the head of the flat humerus so characteristic of
+the extinct order to which the Plesiosaurus has been assigned, and two
+digital bones of the paddle, that, from their comparatively slender and
+slightly curved form, so unlike the digitals of its cogener the
+Ichthyosaurus, could have belonged evidently to no other reptile. I
+observed, too, in the slightly curved articulations of not a few of the
+vertebrae, the gentle convexity in the concave centre, which, if not
+peculiar to the Plesiosaurus, is at least held to distinguish it from
+most of its contemporaries. Among the various nondescript organisms of
+the shale, I laid open a smooth angular bone, hollowed something like a
+grocer's scoop; a three-pronged caltrop-looking bone, that seems to have
+formed part of a pelvic arch; another angular bone, much massier than
+the first, regarding the probable position of which I could not form a
+conjecture, but which some of my geological friends deem cerebral; an
+extremely dense bone, imperfect at each end, which presents the
+appearance of a cylinder slightly flattened; and various curious
+fragments, which, with what our Scotch museums have not yet
+acquired,--entire reptilian fossils for the purposes of
+comparison,--might, I doubt not, be easily assigned to their proper
+places. It was in vain that, leaving John to collect the scattered
+pieces of shale in which the bones occurred, I set myself again and
+again to discover the bed from which they had been detached. The tide
+had fallen, and a range of skerries lay temptingly off, scarce a hundred
+yards from the water's edge: the shale beds might be among them, with
+Plesiosauri and crocodiles stretching entire; and fain would I have swum
+off to them, as I had done oftener than once elsewhere, with my hammer
+in my teeth, and with shirt and drawers in my hat; but a tall brown
+forest of kelp and tangle in which even a seal might drown, rose thick
+and perilous round both shore and skerries; a slight swell was felting
+the long fronds together; and I deemed it better, on the whole, that the
+discoveries I had already made should be recorded, than that they should
+be lost to geology, mayhap for a whole age, in the attempt to extend
+them.
+
+The water, beautifully transparent, permitted the eye to penetrate into
+its green depths for many fathoms around, though every object
+presented, through the agitated surface, an uncertain and fluctuating
+outline. I could see, however, the pink-colored urchin warping himself
+up, by his many cables, along the steep rock-sides; the green crab
+stalking along the gravelly bottom; a scull of small rock-cod darting
+hither and thither among the tangle-roots; and a few large medusae slowly
+flapping their continuous fins of gelatine in the opener spaces, a few
+inches under the surface. Many curious families had their
+representatives within the patch of sea which the eye commanded; but the
+strange creatures that had once inhabited it by thousands, and whose
+bones still lay sepulchred on its shores, had none. How strange, that
+the identical sea heaving around stack and skerry in this remote corner
+of the Hebrides should have once been thronged by reptile shapes more
+strange than poet ever imagined,--dragons, gorgons and chimeras! Perhaps
+of all the extinct reptiles, the Plesiosaurus was the most
+extraordinary. An English geologist has described it, grotesquely
+enough, and yet most happily, as a snake _threaded_ through a tortoise.
+And here on this very spot, must these monstrous dragons have disported
+and fed; here must they have raised their little reptile heads and long
+swan-like necks over the surface, to watch an antagonist or select a
+victim; here must they have warred and wedded, and pursued all the
+various instincts of their unknown natures. A strange story, surely,
+considering it is a true one! I may mention in the passing, that some of
+the fragments of the shale in which the remains are embedded have been
+baked by the intense heat into an exceedingly hard, dark-colored stone,
+somewhat resembling basalt. I must add further, that I by no means
+determine the rock with which we find it associated to be in reality an
+altered sandstone. Such is the appearance which it presents where
+weathered; but its general aspect is that of a porphyritic trap. Be it
+what it may, the fact is not at all affected, that the shores, wherever
+it occurs on this tract of insular coast, are strewed with reptilian
+remains of the Oolite.
+
+The day passed pleasantly in the work of exploration and discovery; the
+sun had already declined far in the west; and, bearing with us our
+better fossils, we set out, on our return, by the opposite route to that
+along the Bay of Laig, which we had now thrice walked over. The grassy
+talus so often mentioned continues to run on the eastern side of the
+island for about six miles, between the sea and the inaccessible rampart
+of precipice behind. It varies in breadth from about two to four hundred
+yards; the rampart rises over it from three to five hundred feet; and a
+noble expanse of sea, closed in the distance by a still nobler curtain
+of blue hills, spreads away from its base: and it was along this grassy
+talus that our homeward road lay. Let the Edinburgh reader imagine the
+fine walk under Salisbury Crags lengthened some twenty times,--the line
+of precipices above heightened some five or six times,--the gravelly
+slope at the base not much increased in altitude, but developed
+transversely into a green undulating belt of hilly pasture, with here
+and there a sunny slope level enough for the plough, and here and there
+a rough wilderness of detached crags and broken banks; let him further
+imagine the sea sweeping around the base of this talus, with the nearest
+opposite land--bold, bare and undulating atop--some six or eight miles
+distant; and he will have no very inadequate idea of the peculiar and
+striking scenery through which, this evening, our homeward route lay. I
+have scarce ever walked over a more solitary tract. The sea shuts it in
+on the one hand, and the rampart of rocks on the other; there occurs
+along its entire length no other human dwelling than a lonely summer
+shieling; for full one-half the way we saw no trace of man; and the
+wildness of the few cattle which we occasionally startled in the
+hollows 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 utter
+loneliness, so impressed the imagination. The shieling, a rude
+low-roofed erection of turf and stone, with a door in the centre some
+five feet in height or so, but with no window, rose on the grassy slope
+immediately in front of the vast continuous rampart. A slim pillar of
+smoke ascends from the roof, in the calm, faint and blue within the
+shadow of the precipice, but it caught the sunlight in its ascent, and
+blushed, ere it melted into the ether, a ruddy brown. A streamlet came
+pouring from above in a long white thread, that maintained its
+continuity unbroken for at least two-thirds of the way; and then,
+untwisting into a shower of detached drops, that pattered loud and
+vehemently in a rocky recess, it again gathered itself up into a lively
+little stream, and, sweeping past the shieling, expanded in front into a
+circular pond, at which a few milch cows were leisurely slaking their
+thirst. The whole grassy talus, with a strip mayhap a hundred yards
+wide, of deep green sea, lay within the shadow of the tall rampart; but
+the red light fell, for many a mile beyond, on the glassy surface; and
+the distant Cuchullin Hills, so dark at other times, had all their
+prominent slopes and jutting precipices tipped with bronze; while here
+and there a mist streak, converted into bright flame, stretched along
+their peaks or rested on their sides. Save the lonely shieling, not a
+human dwelling was in sight. An island girl of eighteen, more than
+merely good-looking, though much embrowned by the sun, had come to the
+door to see who the unwonted visitors might be, and recognized in John
+Stewart an old acquaintance. John informed her in her own language that
+I was Mr. Swanson's sworn friend, and not a _Moderate_, but one of their
+own people, and that I had fasted all day, and had come for a drink of
+milk. The name of her minister proved a strongly recommendatory one: I
+have 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 it
+on this occasion, _viva voce_. And as she set herself to prepare for us
+a 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 little
+girls, engaged in keeping up the blaze under a large pot, but sadly
+diverted from their work by our entrance; while the other end was
+occupied 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 was
+occupied by the utensils and produce of the dairy,--flat wooden vessels
+of milk, a butter-churn, and a tub half-filled with curd; while a few
+cheeses, soft from the press, lay on a shelf above. The little girls
+were but occasional visitors, who had come, out of a juvenile frolic, to
+pass the night in the place; but I was informed by John that the
+shieling had two other inmates, young women, like the one so hospitably
+engaged in our behalf, who were out at the milking, and that they lived
+here all alone for several months every year, when the pasturage was at
+its best, employed in making butter and cheese for their master, worthy
+Mr. M'Donald of Keill. They must often feel lonely when night has closed
+darkly over mountain and sea, or in those dreary days of mist and rain
+so common in the Hebrides, when nought may be seen save the few
+shapeless crags that stud the nearer hillocks around them, and nought
+heard save the moaning of the wind in the precipices above, or the
+measured dash of the wave on the wild beach below. And yet they would do
+ill to exchange their solitary life and rude shieling for the village
+dwellings and gregarious habits of the females who ply their rural
+labors in bands among the rich fields of the Lowlands, or for the
+unwholesome backroom and weary task-work of the city seamstress. The
+sunlight was fading from the higher hill-tops of Skye and Glenelg as we
+bade farewell to the lonely shieling and the hospitable island girl.
+
+The evening deepened as we hurried southwards along the scarce visible
+pathway, 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 more
+picturesque peculiarities of the continuous rampart came out more
+strongly as a feature of the scene than when a strip of shade rested
+along the face of the rock, imparting to it a retiring character, and
+all was sunshine beyond. A thick bed of white sandstone, as continuous
+as the rampart itself, runs nearly horizontally about midway in the
+precipice for mile after mile, and, standing out in strong contrast with
+the dark-colored trap above and below, reminds one of a belt of white
+hewn work in a basalt house front, or rather,--for there occurs above a
+second continuous strip, of an olive hue, the color assumed, on
+weathering by a bed of amygdaloid,--of a piece of dingy old-fashioned
+furniture, inlaid with one stringed belt of bleached holly, and another
+of faded green-wood. At some of the more accessible points I climbed to
+the line of white belting, and found it to consist of the same soft
+quartzy sandstone that in the Bay of Laig furnishes the musical sand.
+Lower down there occur, alternating with the trap, beds of shale and of
+blue clay, but they are lost mostly in the talus. Ill adapted to resist
+the frosts and rains of winter, their exposed edges have mouldered into
+a loose soil, now thickly covered over with herbage; and, but for the
+circumstance that we occasionally find them laid bare by a water-course,
+we would scarce be aware of their existence at all. The shale exhibits
+everywhere, as on the opposite side of the _Ru-Stoir_, faint
+impressions of a minute shell resembling a Cyclas, and ill-preserved
+fragments of fish-scales. The blue clay I found at one spot where the
+pathway had cut deep into the hill-side, richly charged with bivalves of
+the species I had seen so abundant in the resembling clay of the Bay of
+Laig; but the closing twilight prevented me from ascertaining whether it
+also contained the characteristic univalves of the deposit, and whether
+its shells,--for they seem identical with those of the altered shales of
+the _Ru-Stoir_,--might not be associated, like these, with reptilian
+remains. Night fell fast, and the streaks of mist that had mottled the
+hills at sunset began to spread gray over the heavens in a continuous
+curtain; but there was light enough left to show me that the trap became
+more columnar as we neared our journey's end. One especial jutting in
+the rock presented in the gloom the appearance of an ancient portico,
+with pediment and cornice, such as the traveller sees on the hill-sides
+of Petraea in front of some old tomb; but it may possibly appear less
+architectural by day. At length, passing from under the long line of
+rampart, just as the stars that had begun to twinkle over it were
+disappearing, one after one, in the thickening vapor, we reached the
+little bay of Kildonan, and found the boat waiting us on the beach. My
+friend the minister, as I entered the cabin, gathered up his notes from
+the table, and gave orders for the tea-kettle; and I spread out before
+him--a happy man--an array of fossils new to Scotch Geology. No one not
+an enthusiastic geologist or a zealous Roman Catholic can really know
+how vast an amount of interest may attach to a few old bones. Has the
+reader 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 of
+no avail whatever?
+
+Thomas Campbell, when asked for a toast in a society of authors, gave
+the memory of Napoleon Bonaparte; significantly adding, "he once hung a
+bookseller." On a nearly similar principle I would be disposed to
+propose among geologists a grateful bumper in honor of the revolutionary
+army that besieged Maestricht. That city, some seventy-five or eighty
+years ago, had its zealous naturalist in the person of M. Hoffmann, a
+diligent excavator in the quarries of St. Peter's mountain, long
+celebrated for its extraordinary fossils. Geology, as a science, had no
+existence at the time; but Hoffmann was doing, in a quiet way, all he
+could to give it a beginning;--he was transferring from the rock to his
+cabinet, shells, and corals, and crustacea, and the teeth and scales of
+fishes, with now and then the vertebrae, and now and then the limb-bone,
+of a reptile. And as he honestly remunerated all the workmen he
+employed, and did no manner of harm to any one, no one heeded him. On
+one eventful morning, however, his friends the quarriers laid bare a
+most 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 it
+lay embedded, cut out entire, and transferred to his house, had spent
+week after week in painfully relieving it from the mass, all Maestricht
+began to speak of it as something really wonderful. There is a cathedral
+on St. Peter's mountain,--the mountain itself is church-land; and the
+lazy canon, awakened by the general talk, laid claim to poor Hoffmann's
+wonderful fossil as _his_ property. He was lord of the manor, he said,
+and the mountain and all that it contained belonged to him. Hoffmann
+defended his fossil as he best could in an expensive lawsuit; but the
+judges found the law clean against him; the huge reptile head was
+declared to be "treasure trove" escheat to the lord of the manor; and
+Hoffmann, half broken-hearted, with but his labor and the lawyer's bills
+for his pains, saw it transferred by rude hands from its place in his
+museum, to the residence of the grasping churchman. The huge fossil head
+experienced the fate of Dr. Chalmer's two hundred churches. Hoffmann was
+a philosopher, however, and he continued to observe and collect as
+before; but he never found such another fossil; and at length, in the
+midst of his ingenious labors, the vital energies failed within him, and
+he broke down and died. The useless canon lived on. The French
+Revolution broke out; the republican army invested Maestricht; the
+batteries were opened; and shot and shell fell thick on the devoted
+city. But in one especial quarter there alighted neither shot nor shell.
+All was safe around the canon's house. Ordinary relics would have
+availed him nothing in the circumstances,--no, not "the three kings of
+Cologne," had he possessed the three kings entire, or the jaw-bones of
+the "eleven thousand virgins;" but there was virtue in the jaw-bones of
+the 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 place
+where it lay. Maestricht surrendered; the fossil was found secreted in a
+vault, and sent away to the _Jardin des Plantes_ at Paris, maugre the
+canon, to delight there the heart of Cuvier; and the French, generously
+addressing themselves to the heirs of Hoffmann as its legitimate owners,
+made over to them a considerable sum of money as its price. They
+reversed the finding of the Maestricht judges; and all save the monks of
+St. 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 my
+geological chapters would be less dull if I left out the geology; and
+another class of semi-geologists, who say there was decidedly too much
+geology in my last. With the present chapter, as there threatens to be
+an utter lack of science in the earlier half of it, and very little, if
+any, in the latter half, I trust both classes may be in some degree
+satisfied. It will bear reference to but the existing system of
+things,--assuredly not the last of the consecutive creations,--and to a
+species of animal that, save in the celebrated Guadaloupe specimens, has
+not yet been found locked up in stone. There have been much of violence
+and suffering in the old immature stages of being,--much, from the era
+of the Holoptychius, with its sharp murderous teeth and strong armor of
+bone, down to that of the cannibal Ichthyosaurus, that bears the broken
+remains of its own kind in its bowels,--much, again, from the times of
+the crocodile of the Oolite, down to the times of the fossil hyena and
+gigantic shark of the Tertiary. Nor, I fear, have matters greatly
+improved in that latest-born creation in the series, that recognizes as
+its delegated lord the first tenant of earth accountable to his Maker.
+But there is a better and a last creation coming, in which man shall
+re-appear, not to oppress and devour his fellow-men, and in which there
+shall be no such wrongs perpetrated as it is my present purpose to
+record,--"new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness."
+Well sung the Ayrshire ploughman, when musing on the great truth that
+the present scene of being "is surely not the last,"--a truth
+corroborated 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 in
+his night-clothes,--gray in fog, and sad with rain. The higher grounds
+of the island lay hid in clouds, far below the level of the central
+hollow; and our whole prospect from the deck was limited to the nearer
+slopes, dank, brown, and uninhabited, and to the rough black crags that
+frown like sentinels over the beach. Now the rime thickened as the rain
+pattered more loudly on the deck; and even the nearer stacks and
+precipices showed as unsolid and spectral in the cloud as moonlight
+shadows thrown on a ground of vapor; anon it cleared up for a few
+hundred yards, as the shower lightened; and then there came in view,
+partially at least, two objects that spoke of man,--a deserted boat
+harbor, formed of loosely piled stone, at the upper extremity of a sandy
+bay; and a roofless dwelling beside it, with two ruinous gables rising
+over the broken walls. The entire scene suggested the idea of a land
+with which man had done for ever;--the vapor-enveloped rocks,--the waste
+of ebb-uncovered sand,--the deserted harbor,--the ruinous house,--the
+melancholy rain-fretted tides eddying along the strip of brown tangle in
+the foreground,--and, dim over all, the thick, slant lines of the
+beating shower!--I know not that of themselves they would have furnished
+materials enough for a finished picture in the style of Hogarth's "End
+of all Things;" but right sure am I that in the hands of Bewick they
+would have been grouped into a tasteful and poetic vignette. We set out
+for church a little after eleven,--the minister encased in his
+ample-skirted storm-jacket of oiled canvas, and protected atop by a
+genuine _sou-wester_, of which the broad posterior rim eloped half a
+yard down his back; and I closely wrapped up in my gray maud, which
+proved, however, a rather indifferent protection against the penetrating
+powers of a true Hebridean drizzle. The building in which the
+congregation meets is a low dingy cottage of turf and stone, situated
+nearly opposite to the manse windows. It had been built by my friend,
+previous to the Disruption, at his own expense, for a Gaelic school, and
+it now serves as a place of worship for the people.
+
+We found the congregation already gathered, and that the very bad
+morning had failed to lessen their numbers. There were a few of the male
+parishioners keeping watch at the door, looking wistfully out through
+the fog and rain for their minister; and at his approach nearly twenty
+more came issuing from the place,--like carder bees from their nest of
+dried grass and moss,--to gather round him, and shake him by the hand.
+The islanders of Eigg are an active, middle-sized race, with
+well-developed heads, acute intellects, and singularly warm feelings.
+And on this occasion at least there could be no possibility of mistake
+respecting the feelings with which they regarded their minister. Rarely
+have I seen human countenances so eloquently vocal with veneration and
+love. The gospel message, which my friend had been the first effectually
+to bring home to their hearts,--the palpable fact of his sacrifice for
+the sake of the high principles which he has taught,--his own kindly
+disposition,--the many services which he has rendered them, for not only
+has he been the minister, but also the sole medical man, of the Small
+Isles, and the benefit of his practice they have enjoyed, in every
+instance, without fee or reward,--his new life of hardship and danger,
+maintained for their sakes amid sinking health and great
+privation,--their frequent fears for his safety when stormy nights close
+over the sea,--and they have seen his little vessel driven from her
+anchorage, just as the evening has fallen,--all these are circumstances
+that 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-steam
+with a particularly wet congregation, some of whom, neither very robust
+nor young, had travelled in the soaking drizzle from the farther
+extremities of the island. And, judging from the serious attention with
+which they listened to the discourse, they must have deemed it full
+value for all it cost them. I have never yet seen a congregation more
+deeply impressed, or that seemed to follow the preacher more
+intelligently; and I was quite sure, though ignorant of the language in
+which my friend addressed them, that he preached to them neither heresy
+nor nonsense. There was as little of the reverence of externals in the
+place as can well be imagined: an uneven earthen floor,--turf-walls on
+every side, and a turf-roof above,--two little windows of four panes
+a-piece, adown which the rain-drops were coursing thick and fast,--a
+pulpit grotesquely rude, that had never employed the bred
+carpenter,--and a few ranges of seats of undressed deal, such were the
+mere materialisms of this lowly church of the people; and yet here,
+notwithstanding, was the living soul of a Christian
+community,--understandings convinced of the truth of the gospel, and
+hearts softened and impressed by its power.
+
+My friend, at the conclusion of his discourse, gave a brief digest of
+its contents in English, for the benefit of his one Saxon auditor; and I
+found, as I had anticipated, that what had so moved the simple islanders
+was just the old wondrous story, which, though repeated and re-repeated
+times beyond number, from the days of the apostles till now, continues
+to 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 Him
+should not perish, but have everlasting life." The great truths which
+had affected many of these poor people to tears, were exactly those
+which, during the last eighteen hundred years, have been active in
+effecting so many moral revolutions in the world, and which must
+ultimately triumph over all error and all oppression. On this occasion,
+as on many others, I had to regret my want of Gaelic. It was my
+misfortune to miss being born to this ancient language, by barely a mile
+of ferry. I first saw light on the southern shore of the Frith of
+Cromarty, where the strait is narrowest, among an old established
+Lowland community, marked by all the characteristics, physical and
+mental, of the Lowlanders of the southern districts; whereas, had I been
+born on the northern shore, I would have been brought up among a Celtic
+tribe, and Gaelic would have been my earliest language. Thus distinct
+was the line between the two races preserved, even after the
+commencement 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. During
+the incumbency of my friend's predecessor, it had been the public-house
+of the island, and the parish minister was by far its best customer. He
+was in the practice of sitting in one of its dingy little rooms, day
+after day, imbibing whisky and peat-reek; and his favorite boon
+companion on these occasions was a Roman Catholic tenant who lived on
+the opposite side of the island, and who, when drinking with the
+minister, used regularly to fasten his horse beside the door, till at
+length all the parish came to know that when the horse was standing
+outside the minister was drinking within. In course of time, through the
+natural gravitation operative in such cases, the poor incumbent became
+utterly scandalous, and was libelled for drunkenness before the General
+Assembly; but, as the island of Eigg lies remote from observation,
+evidence was difficult to procure; and had not the infatuated man got
+senselessly drunk one evening, when in Edinburgh on his trial, and
+staggered, of all places in the world, into the General Assembly, he
+would probably have died minister of Eigg. As the event happened,
+however, the testimony thus unwittingly furnished in the face of the
+Court that tried him was deemed conclusive;--he was summarily deposed
+from his office, and my friend succeeded him. Presbyterianism without
+the animating life is a poor shrunken thing: it never lies in state when
+it is dead; for it has no body of fine forms, or trapping of imposing
+ceremonies, to give it bulk or adornment: without the vitality of
+evangelism it is nothing; and in this low and abject state my friend
+found the Presbyterianism of Eigg. His predecessor had done it only
+mischief; nor had it been by any means vigorous before. Rum is one of
+the four islands of the parish; and all my readers must be familiar with
+Dr. Johnson's celebrated account of the conversion to Protestantism of
+the people of Rum. "The inhabitants," says the Doctor, in his "Journey
+to the Western Islands," "are fifty-eight families, who continued
+Papists for some time after the laird became a Protestant. Their
+adherence to their old religion was strengthened by the countenance of
+the laird's sister, a zealous Romanist; till one Sunday, as they were
+going to mass under the conduct of their patroness, Maclean met them on
+the way, gave one of them a blow on the head with a yellow stick,--I
+suppose a cane, for which the Erse had no name, and drove them to the
+kirk, from which they have never departed. Since the use of this method
+of conversion, the inhabitants of Eigg and Canna who continue Papists
+call 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 had
+lived on the best possible terms with the Popery of the island; the
+parish minister had soaked day after day in the public-house with a
+Roman Catholic boon companion; and when a Papist man married a
+Protestant woman, the woman, as a matter of course, became Papist also;
+whereas, when it was the man who was a Protestant, and the woman a
+Papist, the woman remained what she had been. Roman Catholicism was
+quite content with terms, actual though not implied, of a kind so
+decidedly advantageous; and the Roman Catholics used good-humoredly to
+urge on their neighbors the Protestants, that, as it was palpable they
+had 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. My
+friend labored hard, as a good and honest man ought, to impart to
+Protestantism in his parish the animating life of the Reformation; and,
+through the blessing of God, after years of anxious toil, he at length
+fully succeeded.
+
+I had got wet, and the day continued bad; and so, instead of returning
+to the evening sermon, which began at six, I remained alone aboard of
+the vessel. The rain ceased in little more than an hour after, and in
+somewhat more than two hours I got up on deck to see whether the
+congregation was not dispersing, and if it was not yet time to hang on
+the kettle for our evening tea. The unexpected apparition of some one
+aboard the Free Church yacht startled two ragged boys who were
+manoeuvring a little boat a stone-cast away, under the rocky shores of
+_Eilean Chaisteil_, and who, on catching a glimpse of me, flung
+themselves below the thwarts for concealment. An oar dropped into the
+water; there was a hasty arm and half a head thrust over the gunwale to
+secure it; and then the urchin to whom they belonged again disappeared.
+Meanwhile the boat drifted slowly away: first one little head would
+appear for a moment over the gunwale, then another, as if reconnoitering
+the 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 bay
+at the lower extremity of the glebe, with a cottage, in size and
+appearance much resembling an ant-hill, peeping out at its inner
+extremity among some stunted bushes. I had marked the place before, and
+had been struck with the peculiarity of the choice that could have fixed
+on it as a site for a dwelling: it is at once the most inconvenient and
+picturesque on this side the island. A semi-circular line of columnar
+precipices, that somewhat resembles an amphitheatre turned outside
+in,--for the columns that overlook the area are quite as lofty as those
+which should form the amphitheatre's outer wall,--sweeps round a little
+bay, flat and sandy at half-tide, but bordered higher up by a dingy,
+scarce passable beach of columnar fragments that have toppled from
+above. Between the beach and the line of columns there is a bosky talus,
+more thickly covered with brushwood than is at all common in the
+Hebrides, and scarce more passable than the rough beach at its feet. And
+at the bottom of this talus, with its one gable buried in the steep
+ascent,--for there is scarce a foot-breadth of platform between the
+slope and the beach,--and with the other gable projected to the
+tide-line on rugged columnar masses, stands the cottage. The story of
+the inmate,--the father of the two ragged boys,--is such a one as Crabbe
+would have delighted to tell, and as he could have told better than any
+one else.
+
+He had been, after a sort, a freebooter in his time, but born an age or
+two rather late; and the law had proved over strong for him. On at least
+one occasion, perhaps oftener,--for his adventures are not all known in
+Eigg,--he had been in prison for sheep-stealing. He had the dangerous
+art of subsisting without the ostensible means, and came to be feared
+and avoided by his neighbors as a man who lived on them without asking
+their leave. With neither character nor a settled way of living, his
+wits, I am afraid, must have been often whetted by his necessities: he
+stole lest he should starve. For some time he had resided in the
+adjacent island of Muck; but, proving a bad tenant, he had been ejected
+by the agent of the landlord, I believe a very worthy man, who gave him
+half a boll of meal to get quietly rid of him, and pulled down his
+house, when he had left the island, to prevent his return. Betaking
+himself, with his boys, to a boat, he set out in quest of some new
+lodgment. He made his first attempt or two on the mainland, where he
+strove to drive a trade in begging, but he was always recognized as the
+convicted sheep-stealer, and driven back to the shore. At length, after
+a 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 shed
+with some spars and the old sail of a boat placed slantways against the
+side of a rock, he squatted on the beach, determined, whether he lived
+or died, to find a home on the island. The islanders were no strangers
+to the character of the poor forlorn creature, and kept aloof from
+him,--none of them, however, so much as his own son; and, for a time, my
+friend the minister, aware that he had been the pest of every community
+among which he had lived, stood aloof from him too, in the hope that at
+length, wearied out, he might seek for himself a lodgment elsewhere.
+There came on, however, a dreary night of sleet and rain, accompanied by
+a fierce storm from the sea; and intelligence reached the manse late in
+the evening, that the wretched sheep-stealer had been seized by sudden
+illness, and was dying on the beach. There could be no room for further
+hesitation in this case; and my friend the minister gave instant orders
+that 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, and
+blocked up with rough masses of rock and stone, they found wholly
+impassable with so helpless a burden. And so, administering some
+cordials to the poor, hapless wretch, they had to leave him in the midst
+of the storm, with the old wet sail flapping about his ears, and the
+half-frozen rain pouring in upon him in torrents. He must have passed a
+miserable night, but it could not have been a whit more miserable than
+that passed by the minister in the manse. As the wild blast howled
+around his comfortable dwelling, and shook the casements as if some hand
+outside were assaying to open them, or as the rain pattered sharp and
+thick on the panes, and the measured roar of the surf rose high over
+every other sound, he could think of only the wretched creature exposed
+to the fury of a tempest so terrible, as perchance wrestling in his
+death agony in the darkness beside the breaking wave, or as already
+stiffening on the shore. He was early astir next morning, and almost the
+first person he met was the poor sheep-stealer, looking more like a
+ghost than a living man. The miserable creature had mustered strength
+enough to crawl up from the beach. My friend has often met better men
+with less pleasure. He found a shelter for the poor outcast; he tended
+him, prescribed for him, and, on his recovery, gave him leave to build
+for himself the hovel at the foot of the crags. The islanders were aware
+they had got but an indifferent neighbor through the transaction, though
+none of them, with the exception of the poor creature's son, saw what
+else their minister could have done in the circumstances. But the miller
+could sustain no apology for the arrangement that had given him his
+vagabond father as a neighbor; and oftener than once the site of the
+rising hovel became a scene of noisy contention between parent and son.
+Some of the islanders informed me that they had seen the son engaged in
+pulling down the stones of the walls as fast as the father raised them
+up; 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 with
+a light variable breeze for Isle Ornsay, in Skye, where the wife and
+family of Mr. Swanson resided, and from which he had now been absent for
+a full month. The island diminished, and assumed its tint of diluting
+blue, that waxed paler and paler hour after hour, as we left it slowly
+behind us; and the Scuir, projected boldly from its steep hill-top,
+resembled a sharp hatchet-edge presented to the sky. "Nowhere," said my
+friend, "did I so thoroughly realize the Disruption of last year as at
+this spot. I had just taken my last leave of the manse; Mrs. Swanson had
+staid 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 five
+years of age at the time, in the yacht with me to Skye. The little
+fellow had not much liked to part from his mother, and the previous
+unsettling of all sorts of things in the manse had bred in him thoughts
+he 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 of
+being very manly; and he seemed rather amused that papa should now have
+to make his porridge for him, and to put him to bed, and that it was
+John Stewart, the sailor, who was to be the servant girl. The passage,
+however, was tedious and disagreeable; the wind blew a-head, and heart
+and spirits failing poor Bill, and somewhat sea-sick to boot, he lay
+down 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 poor
+sheep-stealer whom you saw on the shore of Eigg.' This view of matters
+proved in no way consolatory to poor Bill. He continued his sad wail,
+'Home, home, home!' until at length he fairly sobbed himself asleep; and
+I never, on any other occasion, so felt the desolateness of my condition
+as when the cry of my boy,--'Home, home, home!'--was ringing in my
+ears."
+
+We passed, on the one hand, Loch Nevis and Loch Hourn, two fine arms of
+the sea that run far into the mainland, and open up noble vistas among
+the mountains; and, on the other, the long undulating line of Sleat in
+Skye, with its intermingled patches of woodland and arable on the coast,
+and its mottled ranges of heath and rock above. Towards evening we
+entered the harbor of Isle Ornsay, a quiet, well-sheltered bay, with a
+rocky islet for a breakwater on the one side, and the rudiments of a
+Highland village, containing a few good houses, on the other. Half a
+dozen small vessels were riding at anchor, curtained round, half-mast
+high, with herring nets; and a fleet of herring-boats lay moored beside
+them a little nearer the shore. There had been tolerable takes for a few
+nights in the neighboring sea, but the fish had again disappeared, and
+the fishermen, whose worn-out tackle gave such evidence of a
+long-continued run of ill-luck, as I had learned to interpret on the
+east coast, looked gloomy and spiritless, and reported a deficient
+fishery. I found Mrs. Swanson and her family located in one of the two
+best houses in the village, with a neat enclosure in front, and a good
+kitchen-garden behind. The following day I spent in exploring the rocks
+of the district,--a primary region with regard to organic existence,
+"without _form_ and void." From Isle Ornsay to the Point of Sleat, a
+distance of thirteen miles, gneiss is the prevailing deposit; and in no
+place in the district are the strata more varied and interesting than in
+the neighborhood of Knockhouse, the residence of Mr. Elder, which I
+found pleasingly situated at the bottom of a little open bay, skirted
+with picturesque knolls partially wooded, that present to the surf
+precipitous fronts of rock. One insulated eminence, a gun-shot from the
+dwelling-house, that presents to the sea two mural fronts of precipice,
+and sinks in steep grassy slopes on two sides more, bears atop a fine
+old ruin. There is a blind-fronted massy keep, wrapped up in a mantle of
+ivy, perched at the one end, where the precipice sinks steepest; while a
+more ruinous though much more modern pile of building, perforated by a
+double row of windows, occupies the rest of the area. The square keep
+has lost its genealogy in the mists of the past, but a vague tradition
+attributes its erection to the Norwegians. The more modern pile is said
+to have been built about three centuries ago by a younger son of
+M'Donald of the Isles; but it is added that, owing to the jealousy of
+his elder brother, he was not permitted to complete or inhabit it. I
+find it characteristic of most Highland traditions, that they contain
+speeches: they constitute true oral specimens of that earliest and
+rudest style of historic composition in which dialogue alternates with
+narrative. "My wise brother is building a fine house," is the speech
+preserved in this tradition as that of the elder son: "it is rather a
+pity 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 once
+arrested the progress of the work. Mr. Elder's boys showed me several
+minute pieces of brass, somewhat resembling rust-eaten coin, that they
+had dug out of the walls of the old keep; but the pieces bore no impress
+of the dye, and seemed mere fragments of metal beaten thin by the
+hammer.
+
+The gneiss at Knock is exceedingly various in its composition, and many
+of its strata the geologist would fail to recognize as gneiss at all. We
+find along the precipices its two unequivocal varieties, the schistose
+and the granitic, passing not unfrequently, the former into a true mica
+schist, the latter into a pale feldspathose rock, thickly pervaded by
+needle-like crystals of tremolite, that, from the style of the grouping,
+and the contrast existing between the dark green of the enclosed
+mineral, and the pale flesh-color of the ground, frequently furnishes
+specimens of great beauty. In some pieces the tremolite assumes the
+common fan-like form; in some, the crystals, lying at nearly right
+angles with each other, present the appearance of ancient characters
+inlaid in the rock; in some they resemble the footprints of birds in a
+thin layer of snow; and in one curious specimen picked up by Mr.
+Swanson, in which a dark linear strip is covered transversely by
+crystals that project thickly from both its sides, the appearance
+presented is that of a minute stigmaria of the Coal Measures, with the
+leaves, still bearing their original green color, bristling thick around
+it. Mr. Elder showed me, intercalated among the gneiss strata of a
+little ravine in the neighborhood of Isle Ornsay, a thin band of a
+bluish-colored indurated clay, scarcely distinguishable, in the hand
+specimen, from a weathered clay-stone, but unequivocally a stratum of
+the rock. I have found the same stone existing, in a decomposed state,
+as a very tenacious clay, among the gneiss strata of the hill of
+Cromarty; and oftener than once had I amused myself in fashioning it,
+with tolerable success, into such rude pieces of pottery as are
+sometimes found in old sepulchral tumuli. Such are a few of the rocks
+included in the general gneiss deposit of Sleat. If we are to hold, with
+one of the most distinguished of living geologists, that the stratified
+primary rocks are aqueous deposits altered by heat, to how various a
+chemistry must they not have been subjected in this district! In one
+stratum, so softened that all its particles were disengaged to enter
+into new combinations, and yet not so softened but that it still
+maintained its lines of division from the strata above and below, the
+green tremolite was shooting its crystals into the pale homogeneous
+mass; while in another stratum the quartz drew its atoms apart in masses
+that assumed one especial form, the feldspar drew its atoms apart into
+masses that assumed another and different form, and the glittering mica
+built up its multitudinous layers between. Here the unctuous chlorite
+constructed its soft felt; there the micaceous schist arranged its
+undulating 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 section
+of the Lower Oolite furnished by the line of sea-cliffs that, to the
+north of the Portree, rise full seven hundred feet over the beach; and
+on the morning of Wednesday I set out with this intention from Isle
+Ornsay, to join the mail gig at Broadford, and pass on to Portree,--a
+journey of rather more than thirty miles. I soon passed over the gneiss,
+and entered on a wide deposit, extending from side to side of the
+island, of what is generally laid down in our geological maps as Old Red
+Sandstone, but which, in most of its beds, quite as much resembles a
+quartz rock, and which, unlike any Old Red proper I have ever seen,
+passes, by insensible gradations, into the gneiss.[2] Wherever it has
+been laid bare in flat tables among the heath, we find it bearing those
+mysterious scratches on a polished surface which we so commonly find
+associated on the mainland with the boulder clay; but here, as in the
+Hebrides generally, the boulder clay is wanting. To the tract of Red
+Sandstone there succeeds a tract of Lias, which, also extending across
+the island, forms by far the most largely-developed deposit of this
+formation in Scotland. It occupies a flat dingy valley, about six miles
+in length, and that varies from two to four miles in breadth. The dreary
+interior is covered with mosses, and studded with inky pools, in which
+the botanist finds a few rare plants, and which were dimpled, as I
+passed them this morning, with countless eddies, formed by myriads of
+small quick glancing trout, that seemed busily engaged in fly-catching.
+The rock appears but rarely,--all is moss, marsh, and pool; but in a few
+localities on the hill-sides, where some stream has cut into the slope,
+and disintegrated the softer shales, the shepherd finds shells of
+strange form strewed along the water-courses, or bleaching white among
+the heath. The valley,--evidently a dangerous one to the night
+traveller, from its bogs and its tarns,--is said to be haunted by a
+spirit peculiar to itself,--a mischievous, eccentric, grotesque
+creature, not unworthy, from the monstrosity of its form, of being
+associated with the old monsters of the Lias. Luidag--for so the goblin
+is called--has but one leg, terminating, like an ancient satyr's, in a
+cloven foot; but it is furnished with two arms, bearing hard fists at
+the end of them, with which it has been known to strike the benighted
+traveller in the face, or to tumble him over into some dark pool. The
+spectre may be seen at the close of evening hopping vigorously among the
+distant bogs, like a felt ball on its electric platform; and when the
+mist lies thick in the hollows, an occasional glimpse may be caught of
+it 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 this
+goblin 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 the
+valley itself occupied by the sea; and we find the Lias, from its lower
+to its upper beds, exposed in unbroken series along the beach. In the
+middle of the opening lies the green level island of Pabba, altogether
+composed of this formation, and which, differing, in consequence, both
+in outline and color, from every neighboring island and hill, seems a
+little bit of flat fertile England, laid down, as if for contrast's
+sake, amid the wild rough Hebrides. Of Pabba and its wonders, however,
+more anon. I explored a considerable range of shore along the bay; but
+as I made it the subject of two after explorations ere I mastered its
+deposits, I shall defer my description till a subsequent chapter. It was
+late this evening ere the post-gig arrived from the south, and the night
+and several hours of the following morning were spent in travelling to
+Portree. I know not, however, that I could have seen some of the wildest
+and most desolate tracts in Skye to greater advantage. There was light
+enough to show the bold outlines of the hills,--lofty, abrupt,
+pyramidal,--just such hills, both in form and grouping, as a profile in
+black showed best; a low blue vapor slept in the calm over the marshes
+at their feet; the sea, smooth as glass, reflected the dusk twilight
+gleam in the north, revealing the narrow sounds and deep
+mountain-girdled lochs along which we passed; gray crags gleamed dimly
+on the sight; birch-feathered acclivities presented against sea and sky
+their rough bristly edges; all was vast, dreamy, obscure, like one of
+Martin's darker pictures: the land of the seer and the spectre could not
+have been better seen. Morning broke dim and gray, while we were yet
+several miles from Portree; and I reached the inn in time to see from my
+bed-room windows the first rays of the rising sun gleaming on the
+hill-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 from
+Edinburgh; and then, accompanied by a boy, whom I had engaged to carry
+my bag, set out to explore. The morning was ominously hot and
+breathless; and while the sea lay moveless in the calm, as a floor of
+polished marble, mountain and rock, and distant island, seemed tremulous
+all over, through a wavy medium of thick rising vapor. I judged from the
+first that my course of exploration for the day was destined to
+terminate abruptly; and as my arrangements with Mr. Swanson left me, for
+this part of the country, no second day to calculate upon, I hurried
+over deposits which in other circumstances I would have examined more
+carefully,--content with a glance. Accustomed in most instances to take
+long aims, as Cuddy Headrig did, when he steadied his musket on a rest
+behind the hedge, and sent his ball through Laird Oliphant's forehead, I
+had on this occasion to shoot flying; and so, selecting a large object
+for a mark, that I might run the less risk of missing, I strove to
+acquaint myself rather with the general structure of the district than
+with 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 suffer
+another vessel of the same size to take her berth between; and on the
+eastern shores of both Skye and Rasay we find the same Oolitic deposits
+tilted up at nearly the same angle. The section presented on the eastern
+coast of the one is nearly a duplicate of the section presented on the
+eastern coast of the other. During one of the severer frosts of last
+winter I passed along a shallow pond, studded along the sides with
+boulder stones. It had been frozen over; and then, from the evaporation
+so common in protracted frosts, the water had shrunk, and the sheet of
+ice which had sunk down over the central portion of the pond exhibited
+what a geologist would term very considerable marks of disturbance among
+the boulders at the edges. Over one sharp-backed boulder there lay a
+sheet tilted up like the lid of a chest half-raised; and over another
+boulder immediately behind it there lay another uptilted sheet, like the
+lid of a second half-open chest; and in both sheets, the edges, lying in
+nearly parallel lines, presented a range of miniature cliffs to the
+shore. Now, in the two uptilted ice-sheets of this pond I recognized a
+model of the fundamental Oolitic deposits Rasay and Skye. The mainland
+of Scotland had its representative in the crisp snow-covered shore of
+the pond, with its belt of faded sedges; the place of Rasay was
+indicated by the inner, that of Skye by the outer boulder; while the
+ice-sheets, with their shoreward-turned line of cliffs, represented the
+Oolitic beds, that turn to the mainland their dizzy range of precipices,
+varying from six to eight hundred feet in height, and then, sloping
+outwards and downwards, disappear under mountain wildernesses of
+overlying trap. And it was along a portion of the range of cliff that
+forms the outermost of the two uptilted lines, and which presents in
+this district of Skye a frontage of nearly twenty continuous miles to
+the 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 two
+miles into the interior, like the half-raised chest-lid of my
+illustration sloping towards the hinges, or the uptilted ice-table of
+the boulder sloping towards the centre of the pond; and the depression
+behind forms a flat moory valley, full fifteen miles in length, occupied
+by a chain of dark bogs and treeless lochans. A long line of trap-hills
+rises over it, in one of which, considerably in advance of the others, I
+recognized the Storr of Skye, famous among lovers of the picturesque for
+its strange group of mingled pinnacles and towers; while directly
+crossing into the valley from the Sound, and then running southwards for
+about two miles along its bottom, is the noble sea-arm, Loch Portree, in
+which, as indicated by the name (the King's Port) a Scottish king of the
+olden time, in his voyage round his dominions, cast anchor. The opening
+of the loch is singularly majestic;--the cliffs tower high on either
+side in graceful magnificence: but from the peculiar inward slope of the
+land, all within, as the loch reaches the line of the valley, becomes
+tame and low, and a black dreary moor stretches from the flat terminal
+basin into the interior. The opening of Loch Portree is a palace
+gateway, erected in front of some homely suburb, that occupies the place
+which the palace itself should have occupied.
+
+There was, however, no such mixture of the homely and the magnificent in
+the route I had selected to explore. It lay under the escarpment of the
+cliff; and I purposed pursuing it from Portree to Holm, a distance of
+about six miles, and then returning by the flat interior valley. On the
+one hand rose a sloping rampart, full seven hundred feet in height,
+striped longitudinally with alternating bands of white sandstone and
+dark shale, and capped atop by a continuous coping of trap, that lacked
+not massy tower, and overhanging turret, and projecting sentry-box;
+while, on the other hand, spreading outwards in the calm from the line
+of dark trap-rocks below, like a mirror from its carved frame of black
+oak, lay the Sound of Rasay, with its noble background of island and
+main rising bold on the east, and its long mountain vista opening to the
+south. The first fossiliferous deposit which gave me occasion this
+morning to use my hammer occurs near the opening of the loch, beside an
+old 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 a
+widely-spread accumulation of sand,--the bottom, mayhap, of some
+extensive bay of the Oolite, resembling the Loch Portree of the present
+day, in which eddy tides deposited the sand swept along by the tidal
+currents of some neighboring sound, and which swarmed as thickly with
+Cephalopoda as the loch swarmed this day with minute purple-tinged
+Medusae. I found detached on the shore, immediately below this bed, a
+piece of calcareous fissile sandstone, abounding in small sulcated
+Terebratulae, identical, apparently, with the Terebratula of a specimen
+in my collection from the inferior Oolite of Yorkshire. A colony of this
+delicate Brachiopod must have once lain moored near this spot, like a
+fleet of long-prowed galleys at anchor, each one with its cable of many
+strands extended earthwards from the single _dead-eye_ in its umbone.
+For a full mile after rounding the northern boundary of the loch, we
+find the immense escarpment composed from top to bottom exclusively of
+trap; but then the Oolite again begins to appear, and about two miles
+further on the section becomes truly magnificent,--one of the finest
+sections of this formation exhibited anywhere in Britain, perhaps in the
+world. In a ravine furrowed in the face of the declivity by the headlong
+descent of a small stream, we may trace all the beds of the system in
+succession, from the Cornbrash, an upper deposit of the Lower Oolite,
+down to the Lias, the formation on which the Oolite rests. The only
+modifying circumstance to the geologist is, that though the sandstone
+beds run continuously along the cliff for miles together, distinct as
+the white bands in a piece of onyx, the intervening beds of shale are
+swarded over, save where we here and there see them laid bare in some
+abrupter acclivity or deeper water-course. In the shale we find numerous
+minute Ammonites, sorely weathered; in the sandstone, Belemnites, some
+of them of great size; and dark carbonaceous markings, passing not
+unfrequently into a glossy cubical coal. At the foot of the cliff I
+picked up an ammonite of considerable size and well-marked
+character,--the _Ammonites Murchisonae_, first discovered on this coast
+by Sir R. Murchison about fifteen years ago. It measures, when full
+grown, from six to seven inches in diameter; the inner whorls, which are
+broadly visible, are ribbed; whereas the two, and sometimes the three
+outer ones, are smooth,--a marked characteristic of the species. My
+specimen merely enabled me to examine the peculiarities of the shell
+just a little more minutely than I could have done in the pages of
+Sowerby; for such was its state of decay, that it fell to pieces in my
+hands. I had now come full in view of the rocky island of Holm, when the
+altered appearance of the heavens led me to deliberate, just as I was
+warming in the work of exploration, whether, after all, it might not be
+well to scale the cliffs, and strike directly on the inn. It was nearly
+three o'clock; the sky had been gradually darkening since noon, as if
+one thin covering of gauze after another had been drawn over it; hill
+and island had first dimmed and then disappeared in the landscape; and
+now the sun stood up right over the fast-contracting vista of the Sound,
+round and lightless as the moon in a haze; and the downward
+cataract-like streaming of the gray vapor on the horizon showed that
+there the rain had already broken, and was descending in torrents. We
+had been thirsty in the hot sun, and had found the springs few and
+scanty; but the boy now assured me, in very broken English, that we were
+to get a great deal more water than would be good for us, and that it
+might be advisable to get out of its way. And so, climbing to the top of
+the cliffs, along a water-course, we reached the ridge, just as the fog
+came rolling downwards from the peaked brow of the Storr into the flat
+moory valley, and the melancholy lochans roughened and darkened in the
+rain. We were both particularly wet ere we reached Portree.
+
+In exploring our Scotch formations, I have had frequent occasion, in
+Ross, Sutherland, Caithness, and now once more in Skye, to pass over
+ground described by Sir R. Murchison; and in every instance have I found
+myself immensely his debtor. His descriptions possess the merit of being
+true: they are simple outlines often, that leave much to be filled up by
+after discovery; but, like those outlines of the skilful geographer that
+fix the place of some island or strait, though they may not entirely
+define it, they always indicate the exact position in the scale of the
+formations to which they refer. They leave a good deal to be done in the
+way of mapping out the interior of a deposit, if I may so speak; but
+they leave nothing to be done in the way of ascertaining its place. The
+work accomplished is _bona fide_ work,--actual, solid, not to be done
+over again,--work such as could be achieved in only the school of Dr.
+William Smith, the father of English Geology. I have found much to
+admire, too, in the sections of Sir R. Murchison. His section of this
+part of the coast, for example, strikes from the extreme northern part
+of Skye to the island of Holm, thence to Scrapidale in Rasay, thence
+along part of the coast of Scalpa, thence direct through the middle of
+Pabba, and thence to the shore of the Bay of Laig. The line thus taken
+includes, in regular sequence in the descending order, the whole Oolitic
+deposits of the Hebrides, from the Cornbrash, with its overlying
+fresh-water outliers of mayhap the Weald, down to where the Lower Lias
+rests on the primary red sandstones of Sleat. It would have cost
+M'Culloch less exploration to have written a volume than it must have
+cost 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 followed
+repeatedly in the track of another geologist, of, however, a very
+different school, who explored, at a comparatively recent period, the
+deposits of not a few of our Scotch counties. But his labors, in at
+least the fossiliferous formations, seem to have accomplished nothing
+for Geology,--I am afraid, even less than nothing. So far as they had
+influence at all, it must have been to throw back the science. A
+geologist who could have asserted only three years ago ("Geognostical
+Account of Banffshire," 1842), that the Old Red Sandstone of Scotland
+forms merely "a part of the great coal deposit," could have known
+marvellously little of the fossils of the one system, and nothing
+whatever of those of the other. Had he examined ere he decided, instead
+of deciding without any intention of examining, he would have found
+that, while both systems abound in organic remains, they do not possess,
+in Scotland at least, a single species in common, and that even their
+types of being, viewed in the group, are essentially distinct.
+
+The three Edinburgh gentlemen whom I had met at breakfast were still in
+the inn. One of them I had seen before, as one of the guests at a
+Wesleyan soiree, though I saw he failed to remember that I had been
+there as a guest too. The two other gentlemen were altogether strangers
+to me. One of them,--a man on the right side of forty, and a superb
+specimen of the powerful, six-feet two-inch Norman Celt,--I set down as
+a scion of some old Highland family, who, as the broadsword had gone
+out, carried on the internal wars of the country with the formidable
+artillery of Statute and Decision. The other, a gentleman more advanced
+in life, I predicated to be a Highland proprietor, the uncle of the
+younger of the two,--a man whose name, as he had an air of business
+about him, occurred, in all probability, in the Almanac, in the list of
+Scotch advocates. Both were of course high Tories,--I was quite sure of
+that,--zealous in behalf of the Establishment, though previous to the
+Disruption they had not cared for it a pin's point,--and prepared to
+justify the virtual suppression of the toleration laws in the case of
+the Free Church. I was thus decidedly guilty of what old Dr. More calls
+a _prosopolepsia_,--_i.e._ of the crime of judging men by their looks.
+At dinner, however, we gradually ate ourselves into conversation: we
+differed, and disputed, and agreed, and then differed, disputed and
+agreed again. I found first, that my chance companions were really not
+very 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 advanced
+in life,--strange as the fact might seem,--very considerably a
+_Presbyterian_ Whig; and finally, that this latter gentleman, whom I had
+set down as an intolerant Highland proprietor, was a respected writer to
+the signet, a Free Church elder in Edinburgh; and that the other, his
+equally intolerant nephew, was an Edinburgh advocate, of vigorous
+talent, much an enemy of all oppression, and a brother contributor of my
+own to one of the Quarterlies. Of all my surmisings regarding the
+stranger gentlemen, only two points held true,--they were both
+gentlemen of the law, and both had Celtic blood in their veins. The
+evening passed pleasantly; and I can now recommend from experience, to
+the hapless traveller who gets thoroughly wet thirty miles from a change
+of dress, that some of the best things he can resort to in the
+circumstances are, a warm room, a warm glass, and agreeable companions.
+
+On the morrow I behooved to return to Isle Ornsay, to set out on the
+following day, with my friend the minister, for Rum, where he purposed
+preaching on the Sabbath. To have lost a day would have been to lose the
+opportunity of exploring the island, perhaps forever; and, to make all
+sure, I had taken a seat in the mail gig, from the postman who drives
+it, ere going to bed, on the morning of my arrival; and now, when it
+drove 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 my
+seat, 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 who
+deemed himself authorized to receive the fare; was he so?" "Yes." "Could
+you have received it?" "No." "Show me a copy of your regulations." "I
+have no copy of regulations; but I have given the place in the gig to
+another." "Just so; and what say you, postman?" "That you took the place
+from me, and that _he_ has no right to give a place to any one: I carry
+the Portree letters to him, but he has nothing to do with the
+passengers." A person present, the proprietor or stabler of the horse, I
+believe, also interfered on the same side; but what Carlyle terms the
+"gigmanity" of the postmaster was all at stake,--his whole influence in
+the 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 given
+the seat to had taken possession of the gig; and so we had to compound
+the matter by carrying a passenger additional. The incident is scarce
+worth relating; but the postmaster was so vehement and terrible, so
+defiant of us all,--post, stabler, and simple passenger,--and so justly
+impressed with the importance of being postmaster of Portree, that, as I
+am in the way of describing rare specimens at any rate, I must refer to
+him among the rest, as if he had been one of the minor carnivorae of a
+Skye deposit,--a cuttlefish, that preyed on the weaker molluscs, or a
+hungry polypus, terrible among the animalculae.
+
+We drove heavily, and had to dismount and walk afoot over every steeper
+acclivity; but I carried my hammer, and only grieved that in some one or
+two localities the road should have been so level. I regretted it in
+especial on the southern and eastern side of Loch Sligachan, where I
+could see from my seat, as we drove past, the dark blue rocks in the
+water-courses on each side the road, studded over with that
+characteristic shell of the Lias, the _Gryphaea incurva_, and that the
+dry-stone fences in the moor above exhibit fossils that might figure in
+a museum. But we rattled by. At Broadford, twenty-five miles from
+Portree, and nine miles from Isle Ornsay, I partook of a hospitable meal
+in the house of an acquaintance; and in little more than two hours after
+was with my friend the minister at Isle Ornsay. The night wore
+pleasantly by. Mrs. Swanson, a niece of the late Dr. Smith of
+Campbelton, so well known for his Celtic researches and his exquisite
+translations of ancient Celtic poetry, I found deeply versed in the
+legendary lore of the Highlands. The minister showed me a fine specimen
+of Pterichthys which I had disinterred for him, out of my first
+discovered fossiliferous deposit of the Old Red Sandstone, exactly
+thirteen years before, and full seven years ere I had introduced the
+creature to the notice of Agassiz. And the minister's daughter, a
+little chubby girl of three summers, taking part in the general
+entertainment, strove to make her Gaelic sound as like English as she
+could, in my especial behalf. I remembered, as I listened to the
+unintelligible prattle of the little thing, unprovided with a word of
+English, that just eighteen years before, her father had had no Gaelic;
+and wondered what he would have thought, could he have been told, when
+he 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 been
+engaged in beating over the Eathie Lias together, collecting Belemnites,
+Ammonites, and fossil wood, and striving in friendly emulation the one
+to surpass the other in the variety and excellence of our specimens. Our
+leisure hours were snatched, at the time, from college studies by the
+one, from the mallet by the other: there were few of them that we did
+not spend together, and that we were not mutually the better for so
+spending. I at least, owe much to these hours,--among other things,
+views of theologic truth, that determined the side I have taken in our
+ecclesiastical controversy. Our courses at an after period lay diverse;
+the young minister had greatly more important business to pursue than
+any which the geologic field furnishes; and so our amicable rivalry
+ceased early. In the words in which an English poet addresses his
+brother,--the clergyman who sat for the picture in the "Deserted
+Village,"--my friend "entered on a sacred office, where the harvest is
+great and the laborers are few, and left to me a field in which the
+laborers are many, and the harvest scarce worth carrying away."
+
+Next day at noon we weighed anchor, and stood out for Rum, a run of
+about twenty-five miles. A kind friend had, we found, sent aboard in our
+behalf two pieces of rare antiquity,--rare anywhere, but especially
+rare in the lockers of the Betsey,--in the agreeable form of two bottles
+of semi-fossil Madeira,--Madeira that had actually existed in the grape
+exactly half a century before, at the time when Robespierre was
+startling Paris from its propriety, by mutilating at the neck the busts
+of other people, and multiplying casts and medals of his own; and we
+found it, explored in moderation, no bad study for geologists,
+especially in coarse weather, when they had got wet and somewhat
+fatigued. It was like Landlord Boniface's ale, mild as milk, had
+exchanged its distinctive flavor as Madeira for a better one, and filled
+the cabin with fragrance every time the cork was drawn. Old observant
+Homer must have smelt some such liquor somewhere, or he could never have
+described so well the still more ancient and venerable wine with which
+wily 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 sound
+opposite Armadale, there fell a dead calm; and the Betsey, more actively
+idle than the ship manned by the Ancient Mariner, dropped sternwards
+along the tide, to the dull music of the flapping sail. The minister
+spent 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 of
+lines, but there were no fish to bite,--got into the boat, but there
+were no neighboring islands to visit,--and sent half a dozen
+pistol-bullets after a shoal of porpoises, which, coming from the Free
+Church yacht, must have astonished the fat sleek fellows pretty
+considerably, but did them, I am afraid, no serious damage. As the
+evening began to close gloomy and gray, a tumbling swell came heaving in
+right ahead from the west; and a bank of cloud, which had been gradually
+rising higher and darker over the horizon in the same direction, first
+changed its abrupt edge atop for a diffused and broken line, and then
+spread itself over the central heavens. The calm was evidently not to be
+a calm long; and the minister issued orders that the gaff-topsail should
+be taken down, and the storm-jib bent; and that we should lower our
+topmast, and have all tight and ready for a smart gale ahead. At half
+past ten, however, the Betsey was still pitching to the swell, with not
+a breath of wind to act on the diminished canvas, and with the solitary
+circumstance in her favor, that the tide ran no longer against her, as
+before. The cabin was full of all manner of creakings; the close lamp
+swung to and fro over the head of my friend; and a refractory
+Concordance, after having twice travelled from him along the entire
+length of the table, flung itself pettishly upon the floor. I got into
+my snug bed about eleven; and at twelve, the minister, after poring
+sufficiently over his notes, and drawing the final score, turned into
+his. In a brief hour after, on came the gale, in a style worthy of its
+previous hours of preparation; and my friend,--his Saturday's work in
+his ministerial capacity well over when he had completed his two
+discourses,--had to begin the Sabbath morning early as the morning
+itself began, by taking his stand at the helm, in his capacity of
+skipper of the Betsey. With the prospect of the services of the Sabbath
+before him, and after working all Saturday to boot, it was rather hard
+to set him down to a midnight spell at the helm, but he could not be
+wanted at such a time, as we had no other such helmsman aboard. The
+gale, thickened with rain, came down, shrieking like a maniac, from off
+the peaked hills of Rum, striking away the tops of the long ridgy
+billows that had risen in the calm to indicate its approach, and then
+carrying them in sheets of spray aslant the furrowed surface, like
+snow-drift hurried across a frozen field. But the Betsey, with her
+storm-jib set, and her mainsail reefed to the cross, kept her weather
+bow bravely to the blast, and gained on it with every tack. She had been
+the pleasure yacht, in her day, of a man of fortune, who had used, in
+running south with her at times as far as Lisbon, to encounter, on not
+worse terms than the stateliest of her neighbors in the voyage, the
+swell of the Bay of Biscay; and she still kept true to her old
+character, with but this drawback, that she had now got somewhat crazy
+in her fastenings, and made rather more water in a heavy sea than her
+one little pump could conveniently keep under. As the fitful gust struck
+her headlong, as if it had been some invisible missile hurled at us from
+off the hill-tops, she stooped her head lower and lower, like old
+stately Hardyknute under the blow of the "King of Norse," till at length
+the lee chain-plate rustled sharp through the foam; but, like a staunch
+Free Churchwoman, the lowlier she bent, the more steadfastly did she
+hold her head to the storm. The strength of the opposition served but to
+speed her on all the more surely to the desired haven. At five o'clock
+in the morning we cast anchor in Loch Scresort,--the only harbor of Rum
+in 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 sudden
+gust had seized it by the flap, and hurried it away far to the lee. He
+had yielded it to the winds, as he had done the temporalities, but much
+more unwillingly, and less as a free agent. Should any conscientious
+mariner 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 that
+he holds Free Church property, and that he is heartily welcome to hold
+it, leaving it to himself to consider whether a benefaction to its full
+value, deducting salvage, is not owing, in honor, to the Sustenation
+Fund.
+
+It was ten o'clock ere the more fatigued aboard could muster resolution
+enough to quit their beds a second time; and then it behooved the
+minister to prepare for his Sabbath labors ashore. The gale still blew
+in fierce gusts from the hills, and the rain pattered like small shot on
+the 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 its
+sides, 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 the
+distance of about a mile from the sea, an elevation of two thousand
+feet. Along the slopes of the sandstone ridge I could discern, through
+the haze, numerous green patches, that had once supported a dense
+population, long since "cleared off" to the backwoods of America, but
+not one inhabited dwelling; while along a black moory acclivity under
+the 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 of
+ripening. The hill-tops were lost in cloud and storm; and ever and anon,
+as a heavier shower came sweeping down on the wind, the intervening
+hollows closed up their gloomy vistas, and all was fog and rime to the
+water's edge. Bad as the morning was, however, we could see the people
+wending their way, in threes and fours, through the dark moor, to the
+place 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 entire
+population--had all come out to meet their minister.
+
+On going ashore, we found the place nearly filled. My friend preached
+two long energetic discourses, and then returned to the yacht, "a worn
+and weary man." The studies of the previous day, and the fatigues of the
+previous night, added to his pulpit duties, had so fairly prostrated his
+strength, that the sternest teetotaller in the kingdom would scarce have
+forbidden him a glass of our fifty-year-old Madeira. But even the
+fifty-year-old Madeira proved no specific in the case. He was suffering
+under excruciating headache, and had to stretch himself in his bed, with
+eyes shut but sleepless, waiting till the fit should pass,--every pulse
+that 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 reader
+take, if he can, from twelve to fifteen trap-hills, varying from one
+thousand to two thousand three hundred feet in height; let him pack them
+closely and squarely together, like rum-bottles in a case-basket; let
+him surround them with a frame of Old Red Sandstone, measuring rather
+more than seven miles on the side, in the way the basket surrounds the
+bottles; then let him set them down in the sea a dozen miles off the
+land,--and he shall have produced a second island of Rum, similar in
+structure to the existing one. In the actual island, however, there is a
+defect in the inclosing basket of sandstone: the basket, complete on
+three of its sides, wants the fourth: and the side opposite to the gap
+which the fourth should have occupied is thicker than the two other
+sides put together. Where I now write there is an old dark-colored
+picture on the wall before me. I take off one of the four bars of which
+the frame is composed,--the end-bar,--and stick it on to the end-bar
+opposite, and then the picture is fully framed on two of its sides, and
+doubly 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 of
+the island,--that in which the Betsey lies at anchor,--and the long
+withdrawing valley, of which the loch is merely a prolongation,
+occurring in the double sandstone bar: it seems to mark--to return to my
+illustration--the line in which the superadded piece of frame has been
+stuck on to the frame proper. The origin of the island is illustrated by
+its structure: it has left its story legibly written, and we have but to
+run our eye over the characters and read. An extended sea-bottom,
+composed of Old Red Sandstone, already tilted up by previous
+convulsions, so that the strata presented their edges, tier beyond tier,
+like roofing slate laid aslant on a floor, became a centre of Plutonic
+activity. The molten trap broke through at various times, and presenting
+various appearances, but in nearly the same centre; here existing as an
+augitic rock, there as a syenite, yonder as a basalt or amygdaloid. At
+one place it uptilted the sandstone; at another it overflowed it; the
+dark central masses raised their heads above the surface, higher and
+higher with every earthquake throe from beneath; till at length the
+gigantic Ben More attained to its present altitude of two thousand three
+hundred feet over the sea-level, and the sandstone, borne up from
+beneath like floating sea-wrack on the back of a porpoise, reached in
+long outside bands its elevation of from six to eight hundred. And such
+is the piece of history, composed in silent but expressive language, and
+inscribed in the old geological character, on the rocks of Rum.
+
+The wind lowered and the rain ceased during the night, and the morning
+of Monday was clear, bracing, and breezy. The island of Rum is chiefly
+famous among mineralogists for its heliotropes or bloodstones; and we
+proposed devoting the greater part of the day to an examination of the
+hill of Scuir More, in which they occur, and which lies on the opposite
+side of the island, about eight miles from the mooring ground of the
+Betsey. Ere setting out, however, I found time enough, by rising some
+two or three hours before breakfast, to explore the Red Sandstones on
+the southern side of the loch. They lie in this bar of the frame,--to
+return once more to my old illustration,--as if it had been cut out of a
+piece of cross-grained deal, in which the annular bands, instead of
+ranging lengthwise, ran diagonally from side to side; stratum leans over
+stratum, dipping towards the west at an angle of about thirty degrees;
+and as in a continuous line of more than seven miles there seem no
+breaks or repetitions in the strata, the thickness of the deposit must
+be enormous,--not less, I should suppose, than from six to eight
+thousand feet. Like the Lower Old Red Sandstones of Cromarty and Moray,
+the red arenaceous strata occur in thick beds, separated from each other
+by bands of a grayish-colored stratified clay, on the planes of which I
+could trace with great distinctness ripple markings; but in vain did I
+explore their numerous folds for the plates, scales, and fucoid
+impressions which abound in the gray argillaceous beds of the shores of
+the Moray and Cromarty Friths. It would, however, be rash to pronounce
+them non-fossiliferous, after the hasty search of a single
+morning,--unpardonably so in one who had spent very many mornings in
+putting to the question the gray stratified beds of Ross and Cromarty,
+ere he succeeded in extorting from them the secret of their organic
+riches.
+
+We set out about half-past ten for Scuir More, through the Red Sandstone
+valley in which Loch Scresort terminates, with one of Mr. Swanson's
+people, a young active lad of twenty, for our guide. In passing upwards
+for nearly a mile along the stream that falls into the upper part of the
+loch, and lays bare the strata, we saw no change in the character of
+the sandstone. Red arenaceous beds of great thickness alternate with
+grayish-colored bands, composed of a ripple-marked micaceous slate and a
+stratified clay. For a depth of full three thousand feet, and I know not
+how much more,--for I lacked time to trace it further,--the deposit
+presents no other variety: the thick red bed of at least a hundred yards
+succeeds the thin gray band of from three to six feet, and is succeeded
+by a similar gray band in turn. The ripple-marks I found as sharply
+relieved in some of the folds as if the wavy undulations to which they
+owed their origin had passed over them within the hour. The
+comparatively small size of their alternating ridges and furrows give
+evidence that the waters beneath which they had formed had been of no
+very profound depth. In the upper part of the valley, which is bare,
+trackless, and solitary, with a high monotonous sandstone ridge bounding
+it on the one side, and a line of gloomy trap-hills rising over it on
+the other, the edges of the strata, where they protrude through the
+mingled heath and moss, exhibit the mysterious scratchings and
+polishings now so generally connected with the glacial theory of
+Agassiz. The scratchings run in nearly the line of the valley, which
+exhibits no trace of moraines; and they seem to have been produced
+rather by the operation of those extensively developed causes, whatever
+their nature, that have at once left their mark on the sides and summits
+of some of our highest hills, and the rocks and boulders of some of our
+most extended plains, than by the agency of forces limited to the
+locality. They testify, Agassiz would perhaps say, not regarding the
+existence of some local glacier that descended from the higher grounds
+into the valley, but respecting the existence of the great polar
+glacier. I felt, however, in this bleak and solitary hollow, with the
+grooved and polished platforms at my feet, stretching away amid the
+heath, like flat tombstones in a graveyard, that I had arrived at one
+geologic inscription to which I still wanted the key. The vesicular
+structure of the traps on the one hand, identical with that of so many
+of our modern lavas,--the ripple-markings of the arenaceous beds on the
+other, indistinguishable from those of the sea-banks on our coasts,--the
+upturned strata and the overlying trap,--told all their several stories
+of fire, or wave, or terrible convulsion, and told them simply and
+clearly; but here was a story not clearly told. It summoned up doubtful,
+ever-shifting visions,--now of a vast ice continent, abutting on this
+far isle of the Hebrides from the Pole, and trampling heavily over
+it,--now of the wild rush of a turbid, mountain-high flood breaking in
+from the west, and hurling athwart the torn surface, rocks, and stones,
+and clay,--now of a dreary ocean rising high along the hills, and
+bearing onward with its winds and currents, huge icebergs, that now
+brushed the mountain-sides, and now grated along the bottom of the
+submerged valleys. The inscription on the polished surfaces, with its
+careless mixture of groove and scratch, is an inscription of very
+various readings.
+
+We passed along a transverse hollow, and then began to ascend a
+hill-side, from the ridge of which the water sheds to the opposite shore
+of 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 brown
+lizard, nearly five inches in length, startled by our approach, ran
+hurriedly across the path; and our guide, possessed by the general
+Highland belief that the creature is poisonous, and injures cattle,
+struck at it with a switch, and cut it in two immediately behind the
+hinder legs. The upper half, containing all that anatomists regard as
+the vitals, heart, brain, and viscera, all the main nerves, and all the
+larger arteries, lay stunned by the blow, as if dead; nor did it
+manifest any signs of vitality so long as we remained beside it; whereas
+the 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 a
+young eel scooped out of some stream, and thrown upon the bank; and then
+lay wriggling and palpitating for about half a minute more. There are
+few things more inexplicable in the province of the naturalist than the
+phenomenon of what may be termed divided life,--vitality broken into
+two, and yet continuing to exist as vitality in both the dissevered
+pieces. We see in the nobler animals mere glimpses of the
+phenomenon,--mere indications of it, doubtfully apparent for at most a
+few minutes. The blood drawn from the human arm by the lancet continues
+to live in the cup until it has cooled and begun to coagulate; and when
+head and body have parted company under the guillotine, both exhibit for
+a brief space such unequivocal signs of life, that the question arose in
+France during the horrors of the Revolution, whether there might not be
+some glimmering of consciousness attendant at the same time on the
+fearfully opening and shutting eyes and mouth of the one, and the
+beating heart and jerking neck of the other. The lower we descend in the
+scale of being, the more striking the instances which we receive of this
+divisibility of the vital principle. I have seen the two halves of the
+heart of a ray pulsating for a full quarter of an hour after they had
+been separated from the body and from each other. The blood circulates
+in the hind leg of a frog for many minutes after the removal of the
+heart, which meanwhile keeps up an independent motion of its own.
+Vitality can be so divided in the earthworm, that, as demonstrated by
+the experiments of Spalanzani, each of the severed parts carries life
+enough away to set it up as an independent animal; while the polypus, a
+creature of still more imperfect organization, and with the vivacious
+principle more equally diffused over it, may be multiplied by its pieces
+nearly as readily as a gooseberry bush by its slips. It was sufficiently
+curious, however, to see, in the case of this brown lizard, the least
+vital half of the creature so much more vivacious, apparently, than the
+half which contained the heart and brain. It is not improbable, however,
+that the presence of these organs had only the effect of rendering the
+upper portion which contained them more capable of being thrown into a
+state of insensibility. A blow dealt one of the vertebrata on the head
+at once renders it insensible. It is after this mode the fisherman kills
+the salmon captured in his wear, and a single blow, when well directed,
+is always sufficient; but no single blow has the same effect on the
+earthworm; and here it was vitality in the inferior portion of the
+reptile,--the earthworm portion of it, if I may so speak,--that refused
+to participate in the state of syncope into which the vitality of the
+superior portion had been thrown. The nice and delicate vitality of the
+brain seems to impart to the whole system in connection with it an
+aptitude for dying suddenly,--a susceptibility of instant death, which
+would be wanting without it. The heart of the rabbit continues to beat
+regularly long after the brain has been removed by careful excision, if
+respiration be artificially kept up; but if, instead of amputating the
+head, 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 principle
+illustrated here. But why the agonized dancing on the sward of the
+inferior part of the reptile?--why its after painful writhing and
+wriggling? The young eel scooped from the stream, whose motions it
+resembled, is impressed by terror, and can feel pain; was _it_ also
+impressed by terror, or susceptible of suffering? We see in the case of
+both exactly the same signs,--the dancing, the writhing, the wriggling;
+but are we to interpret them after the same manner? In the small
+red-headed earthworm divided by Spalanzani, that in three months got
+upper extremities to its lower part, and lower extremities, in as many
+weeks, to its upper part, the dividing blow must have dealt duplicate
+feelings,--pain and terror to the portion below, and pain and terror to
+the portion above,--so far, at least, as a creature so low in the scale
+was susceptible of these feelings; but are we to hold that the leaping,
+wriggling tail of the reptile possessed in any degree a similar
+susceptibility? _I_ can propound the riddle, but who shall resolve it?
+It may be added, that this brown lizard was the only recent saurian I
+chanced to see in the Hebrides, and that, though large for its kind, its
+whole bulk did not nearly equal that of a single vertebral joint of the
+fossil saurians of Eigg. The reptile, since his deposition from the
+first place in the scale of creation, has sunk sadly in those parts: the
+ex-monarch has become a low plebeian.
+
+We came down upon the coast through a swampy valley, terminating in the
+interior in a frowning wall of basalt, and bounded on the south, where
+it opens to the sea, by the Scuir More. The Scuir is a precipitous
+mountain, that rises from twelve to fifteen hundred feet direct over the
+beach. M'Culloch describes it as inaccessible, and states that it is
+only among the debris at its base that its heliotropes can be procured;
+but the distinguished mineralogist must have had considerably less skill
+in climbing rocks than in describing them, as, indeed, some of his
+descriptions, though generally very admirable, abundantly testify. I am
+inclined to infer from his book, after having passed over much of the
+ground which he describes, that he must have been a man of the type so
+well hit off by Burns in his portrait of Captain Grose,--round, rosy,
+short-legged, quick of eye but slow of foot, quite as indifferent a
+climber as Bailie Nicol Jarvie, and disposed at times, like the elderly
+gentleman drawn by Crabbe, to prefer the view at the hill-foot to the
+prospect from its summit. I found little difficulty in scaling the sides
+of Scuir More for a thousand feet upwards,--in one part by a route
+rarely attempted before,--and in ensconcing myself among the
+bloodstones. They occur in the amygdaloidal trap of which the upper part
+of the hill is mainly composed, in great numbers, and occasionally in
+bulky masses; but it is rare to find other than small specimens that
+would be recognized as of value by the lapidary. The inclosing rock must
+have been as thickly vesicular in its original state as the scoria of a
+glass-house; and all the vesicles, large and small, like the retorts and
+receivers of a laboratory, have been vessels in which some curious
+chemical process has been carried on. Many of them we find filled with a
+white semi-translucent or opaque chalcedony; many more with a pure green
+earth, which, where exposed to the bleaching influences of the weather,
+exhibits a fine verdigris hue, but which in the fresh fracture is
+generally of an olive green, or of a brownish or reddish color. I have
+never yet seen a rock in which this earth was so abundant as in the
+amygdaloid of Scuir More. For yards together in some places we see it
+projecting from the surface in round globules, that very much resemble
+green peas, and that occur as thickly in the inclosing mass as pebbles
+in an Old Red Sandstone conglomerate. The heliotrope has formed among it
+in centres, to which the chalcedony seems to have been drawn, as if by
+molecular attraction. We find a mass, varying from the size of a walnut
+to that of a man's head, occupying some larger vesicle or crevice of the
+amygdaloid, and all the smaller vesicles around it, for an inch or two,
+filled with what we may venture to term satellite heliotropes, some of
+them as minute as grains of wild mustard, and all of them more or less
+earthy, generally in proportion to their distance from the first formed
+heliotrope in the middle. No one can see them in their place in the
+rock, with the abundant green earth all around, and the chalcedony, in
+its uncolored state, filling up so many of the larger cavities, without
+acquiescing in the conclusion respecting the origin of the gem first
+suggested by Werner, and afterwards adopted and illustrated by
+M'Culloch. The heliotrope is merely a chalcedony, stained in the forming
+with an infusion of green earth, as the colored waters in the
+apothecary's window are stained by the infusions, vegetable and mineral,
+from which they derive their ornamental character. The red mottlings
+which so heighten the beauty of the stone occur in comparatively few of
+the specimens of Scuir More. They are minute jasperous formations,
+independent of the inclosing mass; and, from their resemblance to
+streaks and spots of blood, suggest the name by which the heliotrope is
+popularly known. I succeeded in making up, among the crags, a set of
+specimens curiously illustrative of the origin of the gem. One specimen
+consists of white, uncolored chalcedony; a second, of a rich
+verdigris-hued green earth; a third, of chalcedony barely tinged with
+green; 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, and
+scarce at all colored on the other; and a seventh, dark and richly
+toned,--a true bloodstone,--thickly streaked and mottled with red
+jasper. In the chemical process that rendered the Scuir More a mountain
+of gems there were two deteriorating circumstances, which operated to
+the disadvantage of its larger heliotropes: the green earth, as if
+insufficiently stirred in the mixing, has gathered, in many of them,
+into minute soft globules, like air-bubbles in glass, that render them
+valueless for the purposes of the lapidary, by filling them all over
+with little cavities; and in not a few of the others, an infiltration of
+lime, that refused to incorporate with the chalcedonic mass, exists in
+thin glassy films and veins, that, from their comparative softness, have
+a nearly similar effect with the impalpable green earth in roughing the
+surface under the burnisher.
+
+We find figured by M'Culloch, in his "Western Islands," the internal
+cavity 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 of
+the amygdaloid. He describes it as curiously illustrative of a various
+chemistry; the outer crust is composed of a pale-zoned agate, inclosing
+a cavity, from the upper side of which there depends a group of
+chalcedonic stalactites, some of them, as in ancient spar caves,
+reaching to the floor; and bearing on its under side a large crystal of
+carbonate of lime, that the longer stalactites pass through. In the
+vesicle in which this hollow pebble was formed three consecutive
+processes must have gone on. First, a process of infiltration coated the
+interior all around with layer after layer, now of one mineral
+substance, now of another, as a plasterer coats over the sides and
+ceiling of a room with successive layers of lime, putty, and stucco; and
+had this process gone on, the whole cell would have been filled with a
+pale-zoned agate. But it ceased, and a new process began. A chalcedonic
+infiltration gradually entered from above; and, instead of coating over
+the walls, roof, and floor, it hardened into a group of spear-like
+stalactites, that lengthened by slow degrees, till some of them had
+traversed the entire cavity from top to bottom. And then this second
+process ceased like the first, and a third commenced. An infiltration
+of lime took place; and the minute calcareous molecules, under the
+influence of the law of crystallization, built themselves up on the
+floor into a large smooth-sided rhomb, resembling a closed sarcophagus
+resting in the middle of some Egyptian cemetery. And then, the limestone
+crystal completed, there ensued no after change. As shown by some other
+specimens, however, there was a yet farther process: a pure quartzose
+deposition took place, that coated not a few of the calcareous rhombs
+with sprigs of rock-crystal. I found in the Scuir More several cellular
+agates in which similar processes had gone on,--none of them quite so
+fine, however, as the one figured by M'Culloch; but there seemed no lack
+of evidence regarding the strange and multifarious chemistry that had
+been carried on in the vesicular cavities of this mountain, as in the
+retorts of some vast laboratory. Here was a vesicle filled with green
+earth,--there a vesicle filled with calcareous spar,--yonder a vesicle
+crusted round on a thin chalcedonic shell with rock-crystal,--in one
+cavity an agate had been elaborated, in another a heliotrope, in a third
+a milk-white chalcedony, in a fourth a jasper. On what principle, and
+under what direction, have results so various taken place in vesicles of
+the 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 in
+thickness, have elaborated only chalcedony? Why should this chamber
+contain only a quartzose compound of oxygen and silica, and that second
+chamber beside it contain only a calcareous compound of lime and
+carbonic acid? What law directed infiltrations so diverse to seek out
+for themselves vesicles in such close neighborhood, and to keep, in so
+many instances, each to his own vesicle? I can but state the
+problem,--not solve it. The groups of heliotropes clustered each around
+its bulky centrical mass seem to show that the principle of molecular
+attraction may be operative in very dense mediae,--in a hard amygdaloidal
+trap even; and it seems not improbable, that to this law, which draws
+atom to its kindred atom, as clansmen of old used to speed at the
+mustering signal to their gathering place, the various chemistry of the
+vesicles may owe its variety.
+
+I shall attempt stating the chemical problem furnished by the vesicles
+here in a mechanical form. Let us suppose that every vesicle was a
+chamber 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 a
+certain time an infusion of green earth pervaded the surrounding mass,
+and percolated through it, and that every door was opened to receive a
+portion of the infusion. We find that no vesicle wants its coating of
+this earthy mineral. The coating received, however, one-half the doors
+shut, while the other half remained agap, and filled with green earth
+entirely. Next followed a series of alternate infusions of chalcedony,
+jasper, and quartz; many doors opened and received some two or three
+coatings, that form around the vesicles skull-like shells of agate, and
+then shut; a few remained open, and became as entirely occupied with
+agate as many of the previous ones had become filled with green earth.
+Then an ample infusion of chalcedony pervaded the mass. Numerous doors
+again opened; some took in a portion of the chalcedony, and then shut;
+some remained open, and became filled with it; and many more that had
+been previously filled by the green earth opened their doors again, and
+the chalcedony pervading the green porous mass, converted it into
+heliotrope. Then an infusion of lime took place. Doors opened, many of
+which had been hitherto shut, save for a short time, when the green
+earth infusion obtained, and became filled with lime; other doors
+opened for a brief space, and received lime enough to form a few
+crystals. Last of all, there was a pure quartzose infusion, and doors
+opened, some for a longer time, some for a shorter, just as on previous
+occasions. Now, by mechanical means of this character,--by such an
+arrangement of successive infusions, and such a device of shutting and
+opening of doors,--the phenomena exhibited by the vesicles could be
+produced. There is no difficulty in working the problem mechanically, if
+we be allowed to assume in our data successive infusions, well-fitted
+doors, and watchful door-keepers; and if any one can work it
+chemically,--certainly without door-keepers, but with such doors and
+such infusions as he can show to have existed,--he shall have cleared up
+the mystery of the Scuir More. I have given their various cargoes to all
+its many vesicles by mechanical means, at no expense of ingenuity
+whatever. Are there any of my readers prepared to give it to them by
+means purely chemical?
+
+There is a solitary house in the opening of the valley, over which the
+Scuir More stands sentinel,--a house so solitary, that the entire
+breadth of the island intervenes between it and the nearest human
+dwelling. It is inhabited by a shepherd and his wife,--the sole
+representatives in the valley of a numerous population, long since
+expatriated to make way for a few flocks of sheep, but whose ranges of
+little fields may still be seen green amid the heath on both sides, for
+nearly a mile upwards from the opening. After descending along the
+precipices of the Scuir, we struck across the valley, and, on scaling
+the opposite slope sat down on the summit to rest us, about a hundred
+yards over the house of the shepherd. He had seen us from below, when
+engaged among the bloodstones, and had seen, withal, that we were not
+coming his way; and, "on hospitable thoughts intent," he climbed to
+where 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 most
+seasonable, after our long hours of toil, and with a rough journey still
+before us. It is an excellent circumstance, that hospitality grows best
+where 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. It
+flourishes where the inn and the lodging-house cannot exist, and dies
+out where they thrive and multiply.
+
+We reached the cross valley in the interior of the island about half an
+hour before sunset. The evening was clear, calm, golden-tinted; even
+wild heaths and rude rocks had assumed a flush of transient beauty; and
+the emerald-green patches on the hill-sides, barred by the plough
+lengthwise, diagonally, and transverse, had borrowed an aspect of soft
+and velvety richness, from the mellowed light and the broadening
+shadows. All was solitary. We could see among the deserted fields the
+grass-grown foundations of cottages razed to the ground; but the valley,
+more desolate than that which we had left, had not even its single
+inhabited dwelling: it seemed as if man had done with it forever. The
+island, eighteen years before, had been divested of its inhabitants,
+amounting at the time to rather more than four hundred souls, to make
+way for one sheep-farmer and eight thousand sheep. All the aborigines of
+Rum crossed the Atlantic; and at the close of 1828, the entire
+population consisted of but the sheep-farmer, and a few shepherds, his
+servants; the island of Rum reckoned up scarce a single family at this
+period for every five square miles of area which it contained. But
+depopulation on so extreme a scale was found inconvenient; the place had
+been rendered too thoroughly a desert for the comfort of the occupant;
+and on the occasion of a clearing which took place shortly after in
+Skye, he accommodated some ten or twelve of the ejected families with
+sites for cottages, and pasturage for a few cows, on the bit of morass
+beside Loch Scresort, on which I had seen their humble dwellings. But
+the whole of the once-peopled interior remains a wilderness, without
+inhabitant,--all the more lonely in its aspect from the circumstance
+that the solitary valleys, with their plough-furrowed patches, and their
+ruined heaps of stone, open upon shores every whit as solitary as
+themselves, and that the wide untrodden sea stretches drearily around.
+The armies of the insect world were sporting in the light this evening
+by millions; a brown stream that runs through the valley yielded an
+incessant popling sound, from the myriads of fish that were ceaselessly
+leaping in the pools, beguiled by the quick glancing wings of green and
+gold that fluttered over them; along a distant hill-side there ran what
+seemed the ruins of a gray-stone fence, erected, says tradition, in a
+remote age, to facilitate the hunting of the deer; there were fields on
+which the heath and moss of the surrounding moorlands were fast
+encroaching, that had borne many a successive harvest; and prostrate
+cottages, that had been the scenes of christenings, and bridals, and
+blythe new-year's days;--all seemed to bespeak the place a fitting
+habitation for man, in which not only the necessaries, but also a few of
+the luxuries of life, might be procured; but in the entire prospect not
+a man nor a man's dwelling could the eye command. The landscape was one
+without figures. I do not much like extermination carried out so
+thoroughly and on system;--it seems bad policy; and I have not succeeded
+in thinking any the better of it though assured by economists that there
+are more than people enough in Scotland still. There are, I believe,
+more than enough in our workhouses,--more than enough on our
+pauper-rolls,--more than enough huddled up, disreputable, useless, and
+unhappy, in the miasmatic alleys and typhoid courts of our large towns;
+but I have yet to learn how arguments for local depopulation are to be
+drawn from facts such as these. A brave and hardy people, favorably
+placed for the development of all that is excellent in human nature,
+form the glory and strength of a country;--a people sunk into an abyss
+of degradation and misery, and in which it is the whole tendency of
+external circumstances to sink them yet deeper, constitute its weakness
+and its shame; and I cannot quite see on what principle the ominous
+increase which is taking place among us in the worse class, is to form
+our solace or apology for the wholesale expatriation of the better. It
+did not seem as if the depopulation of Rum had tended much to any one's
+advantage. The single sheep-farmer who had occupied the holdings of so
+many had been unfortunate in his speculations, and had left the island:
+the proprietor, his landlord, seemed to have been as little fortunate as
+the tenant, for the island itself was in the market; and a report went
+current at the time, that it was on the eve of being purchased by some
+wealthy Englishman, who purposed converting it into a deer-forest. How
+strange a cycle! Uninhabited originally save by wild animals, it became
+at an early period a home of men, who, as the gray wall on the hill-side
+testified, derived, in part at least, their sustenance from the chase.
+They broke in from the waste the furrowed patches on the slopes of the
+valleys,--they reared herds of cattle and flocks of sheep,--their number
+increased to nearly five hundred souls,--they enjoyed the average
+happiness of human creatures in the present imperfect state of
+being,--they contributed their portion of hardy and vigorous manhood to
+the armies of the country,--and a few of their more adventurous spirits,
+impatient of the narrow bounds which confined them, and a course of
+life little varied by incident, emigrated to America. Then came the
+change of system so general in the Highlands; and the island lost all
+its original inhabitants, on a wool and mutton speculation,--inhabitants,
+the descendants of men who had chased the deer on its hills five hundred
+years before, and who, though they recognized some wild island lord as
+their superior, and did him service, had regarded the place as indisputably
+their own. And now yet another change was on the eve of ensuing, and the
+island 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 or
+two every twelvemonth, but which could form no permanent place of human
+abode. Once more, a strange and surely most melancholy cycle!
+
+There was light enough left, as we reached the upper part of Loch
+Scresort, to show us a shoal of small silver-coated trout, leaping by
+scores at the effluence of the little stream along which we had set out
+in the morning on our expedition. There was a net stretched across where
+the play was thickest; and we learned that the haul of the previous tide
+had amounted to several hundreds. On reaching the Betsey, we found a
+pail and basket laid against the companion-head,--the basket containing
+about two dozen small trout,--the minister's unsolicited teind of the
+morning draught; the pail filled with razor-fish of great size. The
+people of my friend are far from wealthy; there is scarce any
+circulating medium in Rum; and the cottars in Eigg contrive barely
+enough to earn at the harvest in the Lowlands money sufficient to clear
+with their landlord at rent-day. Their contributions for ecclesiastical
+purposes make no great figure, therefore, in the lists of the
+Sustentation Fund. But of what they have they give willingly and in a
+kindly 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 per
+centage of both the fish and the mollusc, derived from the Small Isles,
+in the half-yearly sustentation dividends. We found the supply of
+both,--especially as provisions were beginning to run short in the
+lockers of the Betsey,--quite deserving of our gratitude. The razor-fish
+had been brought us by the worthy catechist of the island. He had gone
+to the ebb in our special behalf, and had spent a tide in laboriously
+filling the pail with these "treasures hid in the sand;" thoroughly
+aware, like the old exiled puritan, who eked out his meals in a time of
+scarcity with the oysters of New England, that even the razor-fish,
+under this head, is included in the promises. There is a peculiarity in
+the razor-fish of Rum that I have not marked in the razor-fish of our
+eastern coasts. The gills of the animal, instead of bearing the general
+color of its other parts, like those of the oyster, are of a deep green
+color, resembling, when examined by the microscope, the fringe of a
+green curtain.
+
+We were told by John Stewart, that the expatriated inhabitants of Rum
+used to catch trout by a simple device of ancient standing, which
+preceded the introduction of nets into the island, and which, it is
+possible, may in other localities have not only preceded the use of the
+net, but may have also suggested it: it had at least the appearance of
+being a first beginning of invention in this direction. The islanders
+gathered large quantities of heath, and then tying it loosely into
+bundles, and stripping it of its softer leafage, they laid the bundles
+across the stream on a little mound held down by stones, with the tops
+of the heath turned upwards to the current. The water rose against the
+mound for a foot or eighteen inches, and then murmured over and through,
+occasioning an expansion among the hard elastic sprays. Next a party of
+the islanders came down the stream, beating the banks and pools, and
+sending a still thickening shoal of trout before them, that, on
+reaching the miniature dam formed by the bundles, darted forward for
+shelter, 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 hastily
+thrown off,--the bundles pitched ashore,--the better fish, to the amount
+not unfrequently of several scores, secured,--and the young fry returned
+to the stream, to take care of themselves, and grow bigger. We fared
+richly this evening, after our hard day's labor, on tea and trout; and
+as the minister had to attend a meeting of the Presbytery of Skye on the
+following Wednesday, we sailed next morning for Glenelg, whence he
+purposed taking the steamer for Portree. Winds were light and baffling,
+and the currents, like capricious friends, neutralized at one time the
+assistance which they lent us at another. It was dark night ere we had
+passed Isle Ornsay, and morning broke as we cast anchor in the Bay of
+Glenelg. At ten o'clock the steamer heaved-to in the bay to land a few
+passengers, and the minister went on board, leaving me in charge of the
+Betsey, 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--_Gryphaea 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 in
+the face of an adverse tide. The currents of Kyle Rhea care little for
+the wind-filled sail, and battle at times, on scarce unequal terms, with
+the steam-propelled paddle. The Toward Castle this morning had such a
+struggle to force her way inwards, as may be seen maintained at the door
+of some place of public meeting during the heat of some agitating
+controversy, when seat and passage within can hold no more, and a
+disappointed crowd press eagerly for admission from without. Viewed from
+the anchoring place at Glenelg, the opening of the Kyle presents the
+appearance of the bottom of a landlocked bay;--the hills of Skye seem
+leaning against those of the mainland: and the tide-buffeted steamer
+looked this morning as if boring her way into the earth, like a
+disinterred mole, only at a rate vastly slower. First, however, with a
+progress resembling that of the minute-hand of a clock, the bows
+disappeared amid the heath, then the midships, then the quarter-deck and
+stern, and then, last of all, the red tip of the sun-brightened
+union-jack that streamed gaudily behind. I had at least two hours
+before me ere the Betsey might attempt weighing anchor; and, that they
+might leave some mark, I went and spent them ashore in the opening of
+Glenelg,--a gneiss district, nearly identical in structure with the
+district of Knock and Isle Ornsay. The upper part of the valley is bare
+and treeless, but not such its character where it opens to the sea; the
+hills are richly wooded; and cottages, and cornfields, with here and
+there 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, form
+the central point in the landscape; these are the dismantled Berera
+Barracks, built, like the line of forts in the great Caledonian
+Valley,--Fort George, Fort Augustus, and Fort William,--to overawe the
+Highlands at a time when the loyalty of the Highlander pointed to a king
+beyond the water; but all use for them has long gone by, and they now
+lie in dreary ruin,--mere sheltering places for the toad and the bat. I
+found in a loose silt on the banks of the river, at some little distance
+below tide-mark, a bed of shells and coral, which might belong, I at
+first supposed, to some secondary formation, but which I ascertained, on
+examination, to be a mere recent deposit, not so old by many centuries
+as our last raised sea-beaches. There occurs in various localities on
+these western coasts, especially on the shores of the island of Pabba, a
+sprig coral, considerably larger in size than any I have elsewhere seen
+in Scotland; and it was from its great abundance in this bed of silt
+that 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 been
+arriving in the course of the morning, and dropping anchor, nearer the
+opening or farther away, each according to its sailing ability, to await
+the turn of the tide; and we now found ourselves one of the components
+of a little fleet, with some five or six vessels sweeping up the Kyle
+before us, and some three or four driving on behind. Never, except
+perhaps in a Highland river big in flood, have I seen such a tide. It
+danced and wheeled, and came boiling in huge masses from the bottom; and
+now our bows heaved abruptly round in one direction, and now they jerked
+as suddenly round in another; and, though there blew a moderate breeze
+at the time, the helm failed to keep the sails steadily full. But
+whether our sheets bellied out, or flapped right in the wind's eye, on
+we swept in the tideway, like a cork caught during a thunder shower in
+one of the rapids of the High Street. At one point the Kyle is little
+more than a quarter of a mile in breadth; and here, in the powerful eddy
+which ran along the shore, we saw a group of small fishing-boats
+pursuing a shoal of sillocks in a style that blent all the liveliness of
+the chase with the specific interest of the angle. The shoal, restless
+as the tides among which it disported, now rose in the boilings of one
+eddy, now beat the water into foam amid the stiller dimplings of
+another. The boats hurried from spot to spot wherever the quick
+glittering scales appeared. For a few seconds, rods would be cast thick
+and fast, as if employed in beating the water, and captured fish glanced
+bright to the sun; and then the take would cease, and the play rise
+elsewhere, and oars would flash out amain, as the little fleet again
+dashed into the heart of the shoal. As the Kyle widened, the force of
+the current diminished, and sail and helm again became things of
+positive importance. The wind blew a-head, steady though not strong; and
+the Betsey, with companions in the voyage against which to measure
+herself, began to show her paces. First she passed one bulky vessel,
+then another: she lay closer to the wind than any of her fellows, glided
+more quickly through the water, turned in her stays like Lady Betty in
+a minuet; and, ere we had reached Kyle Akin, the fleet in the middle of
+which we had started were toiling far behind us, all save one vessel, a
+stately brig; and just as we were going to pass her too, she cast
+anchor, to await the change of the tide, which runs from the west during
+flood at Kyle Akin, as it runs from the east through Kyle Rhea. The wind
+had freshened; and as it was now within two hours of full sea, the force
+of the current had somewhat abated; and so we kept on our course,
+tacking in scant room, however, and making but little way. A few vessels
+attempted following us, but, after an inefficient tack or two, they fell
+back on the anchoring ground, leaving the Betsey to buffet the currents
+alone. Tack followed tack sharp and quick in the narrows, with an
+iron-bound coast on either hand. We had frequent and delicate turning:
+now we lost fifty yards, now we gained a hundred. John Stewart held the
+helm; and as none of us had ever sailed the way before, I had the
+vessel's chart spread out on the companion-head before me, and told him
+when to wear and when to hold on his way,--at what places we might run
+up almost to the rock edge, and at what places it was safest to give the
+land a good offing. Hurrah for the Free Church yacht Betsey! and hurrah
+once more! We cleared the Kyle, leaving a whole fleet tide-bound behind
+us; and, stretching out at one long tack into the open sea, bore, at the
+next, right into the bay at Broadford, where we cast anchor for the
+night, within two hundred yards of the shore. Provisions were running
+short; and so I had to make a late dinner this evening on some of the
+razor-fish of Rum, topped by a dish of tea. But there is always rather
+more appetite than food in the country;--such, at least, is the common
+result under the present mode of distribution: the hunger overlaps and
+outstretches the provision; and there was comfort in the reflection,
+that with the razor-fish on which to fall back, it overlapped it but by
+a very little on this occasion in the cabin of the Betsey. The
+steam-boat passed southwards next morning, and I was joined by my friend
+the 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 the
+landscape, volume after volume, like coverings from off a
+mummy,--leaving exposed in the valley of the Lias a brown and cheerless
+prospect of dark bogs and of debris-covered hills, streaked this evening
+with downward lines of foam. The seaward view is more pleasing. The deep
+russet of the interior we find bordered for miles along the edge of the
+bay with a many-shaded fringe of green; and the smooth grassy island of
+Pabba lies in the midst, a polished gem, all the more advantageously
+displayed from the roughness of the surrounding setting. We took boat,
+and explored the Lias in our immediate neighborhood till dusk. I had
+spent several hours among its deposits when on my way to Portree, and
+several hours more when on my journey across the country to the east
+coast; but it may be well, for the sake of maintaining some continuity
+of description, to throw together my various observations on the
+formation, as if made at one time, and to connect them with my
+exploration of Pabba, which took place on the following morning. The
+rocks of Pabba belong to the upper part of the Lias; while the lower
+part may be found leaning to the south, towards the Red Sandstones of
+the Bay of Lucy. Taking what seems to be the natural order, I shall
+begin with the base of the formation first.
+
+In the general indentation of the coast, in the opening of which the
+island of Pabba lies somewhat like a long green steam-boat at anchor,
+there is included a smaller indentation, known as the Bay or Cove of
+Lucy. The central space in the cove is soft and gravelly; but on both
+its sides it is flanked by low rocks, that stretch out into the sea in
+long rectilinear lines, like the foundations of dry-stone fences. On the
+south side the rocks are red; on the north they are of a bluish-gray
+color; their hues are as distinct as those of the colored patches in a
+map; and they represent geological periods that lie widely apart. The
+red rocks we find laid down in most of our maps as Old Red, though I am
+disposed to regard them as of a much higher antiquity than even that
+ancient system; while the bluish-gray rocks are decidedly Liasic.[3] The
+cove between represents a deep ditch-like hollow, which occurs in Skye,
+both in the interior and on the sea-shore, in the line of boundary
+betwixt the Red Sandstone and the Lias; and it "seems to have
+originated," says M'Culloch, "in the decomposition of the exposed parts
+of the formations at their junction." "Hence," he adds, "from the
+wearing of the materials at the surface, a cavity has been produced,
+which becoming subsequently filled with rubbish, and generally covered
+over with a vegetable soil of unusual depth, effectually prevents a view
+of the contiguous parts." The first strata exposed on the northern side
+are the oldest Liasic rocks anywhere seen in Scotland. They are composed
+chiefly of greenish-colored fissile sandstones and calciferous grits, in
+which we meet a few fossils, very imperfectly preserved. But the
+organisms increase as we go on. We see in passing, near a picturesque
+little cottage,--the only one on the shores of the bay,--a crag of a
+singularly rough appearance, that projects mole-like from the sward upon
+the beach, and then descending abruptly to the level of the other
+strata, runs out in a long ragged line into the sea. The stratum, from
+two to three feet in thickness, of which it is formed, seems wholly
+built up of irregularly-formed rubbly concretions, just as some of the
+garden-walls in the neighborhood of Edinburgh are built of the rough
+scoria of our glass-houses; and we find, on examination, that every
+seeming concretion in the bed is a perfectly formed coral of the genus
+Astrea. 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 great
+beauty: nothing can be more irregular than the outline of each mass, and
+yet scarce anything more regular than the sculpturings on every part of
+it. We find them fretted over with polygons, like those of a honeycomb,
+only somewhat less mathematically exact, and the centre of every polygon
+contains its many-rayed star. It is difficult to distinguish between
+species in some of the divisions of corals: one Astrea, recent or
+extinct, is sometimes found so exceedingly like another of some very
+different formation or period, that the more modern might almost be
+deemed a lineal descendant of the more ancient species. With an eye to
+the fact, I brought with me some characteristic specimens of this
+Astrea[4] of the Lower Lias, which I have ranged side by side with the
+Astreae of the Oolite I had found so abundant a twelvemonth before in the
+neighborhood of Helmsdale. In some of the hand specimens, that present
+merely a piece of polygonal surface, bounded by fractured sides, the
+difference is not easily distinguishable: the polygonal depressions are
+generally smaller in the Oolitic species, and shallower in the Liasic
+one; but not unfrequently these differences disappear, and it is only
+when compared in the entire unbroken coral that their specific
+peculiarities acquire the necessary prominence. The Oolitic Astrea is of
+much greater size than the Liasic one: it occurs not unfrequently in
+masses of from two to three feet in diameter; and as its polygons are
+tubes that converge to the footstalk on which it originally formed, it
+presents in the average outline a fungous-like appearance; whereas in
+the smaller Liasic coral, which rarely exceeds a foot in diameter, there
+is 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 no
+resemblance to the form in another. Some of the recent Astreae are of
+great beauty when inhabited by the living zoophites whose skeleton
+framework they compose. Every polygonal star in the mass is the house of
+a separate animal, that, when withdrawn into its cell, presents the
+appearance of a minute flower, somewhat like a daisy stuck flat to the
+surface, and that, when stretched out, resembles a small round tower,
+with a garland of leaves bound round it atop for a cornice. The _Astrea
+viridis_, a coral of the tropics, presents on a ground of velvety brown
+myriads of deep green florets, that ever and anon start up from the
+level in their tower-like shape, contract and expand their petals, and
+then, shrinking back into their cells, straightway became florets again.
+The Lower Lias presented in one of its opening scenes, in this part of
+the world, appearances of similar beauty widely spread. For miles
+together,--we know not how many,--the bottom of a clear shallow sea was
+paved with living Astreae: every irregular rock-like coral formed a
+separate colony of polypora, that, when in motion, presented the
+appearance of continuous masses of many-colored life, and when at rest,
+the places they occupied were more thickly studded with the living
+florets than the richest and most flowery piece of pasture the reader
+ever saw, with its violets or its daisies. And mile beyond mile this
+scene of beauty stretched on through the shallow depths of the Liasic
+sea. The calcareous framework of most of the recent Astreae are white;
+but in the species referred to,--the _Astrea viridis_,--it is of a
+dark-brown color. It is not unworthy of remark, in connection with these
+facts, that the Oolitic Astrea of Helmsdale occurs as a white, or, when
+darkest, as a cream-colored petrifaction; whereas the Liasic Astrea of
+Skye is invariably of a deep earthy hue. The one was probably a white,
+the other a dingy-colored coral.
+
+The Liasic bed of Astreae existed long enough here to attain a thickness
+of from two to three feet. Mass rose over mass,--the living upon the
+dead,--till at length, by a deposit of mingled mud and sand,--the
+effect, mayhap, of some change of currents, induced we know not
+how,--the innumerable polypedes of the living surface were buried up and
+killed, and then, for many yards, layer after layer of a calciferous
+grit was piled over them. The fossils of the grit are few and ill
+preserved; but we occasionally find in it a coral similar to the Astrea
+of the bed below, and, a little higher up, in an impure limestone,
+specimens, in rather indifferent keeping, of a genus of polypifer which
+somewhat resembles the Turbinolia of the Mountain Limestone. It presents
+in the cross section the same radiated structure as the _Turbinolia
+fungites_, and nearly the same furrowed appearance in the longitudinal
+one; but, seen in the larger specimens, we find that it was a branched
+coral, with obtuse forky boughs, in each of which, it is probable, from
+their general structure, there lived a single polype. It may have been
+the resemblance which these bear, when seen in detached branches, to the
+older Caryophyllia, taken in connection with the fact that the deposit
+in which they occur rests on the ancient Red Sandstone of the district,
+that led M'Culloch to question whether this fossiliferous formation had
+not nearly as clear a claim to be regarded as an analogue of the
+Carboniferous Limestone of England as of its Lias; and hence he
+contented himself with terming it simply the Gryphite Limestone. Sir R.
+Murchison, whose much more close and extensive acquaintance with fossils
+enabled him to assign to the deposit its true place, was struck,
+however, with the general resemblance of its polypifers to "those of the
+Madreporite Limestone of the Carboniferous series." These polypifers
+occur in only the lower Lias of Skye.[5] I found no corals in its higher
+beds, though these are charged with other fossils, more characteristic
+of the formation, in vast abundance. In not a few of the middle strata,
+composed of a mud-colored fissile sandstone, the gryphites lie as
+thickly as currants in a Christmas cake; and as they weather white,
+while the stone in which they are embedded retains its dingy hue, they
+somewhat remind one of the white-lead tears of the undertaker mottling a
+hatchment of sable. In a fragment of the dark sandstone, six inches by
+seven, which I brought with me, I reckon no fewer than twenty-two
+gryphites; and it forms but an average specimen of the bed from which I
+detached it. By far the most abundant species is that not inelegant
+shell so characteristic of the formation, the _Gryphaea incurva_. We find
+detached specimens scattered over the beach by hundreds, mixed up with
+the remains of recent shells, as if the _Gryphaea incurva_ were a recent
+shell too. They lie, bleached white by the weather, among the valves of
+defunct oysters and dead buccinidae; and, from their resemblance to lamps
+cast in the classic model, remind one, in the corners where they have
+accumulated most thickly, of the old magician's stock in trade, who
+wiled away the lamp of Aladdin from Aladdin's simple wife. The _Gryphaea
+obliquita_ and _Gryphaea M'Cullochii_ also occur among these middle
+strata of the Lias, though much less frequently than the other. We,
+besides, found in them at least two species of Pecten, with two species
+of Terebratula,--the one smooth, the other sulcated; a bivalve
+resembling a Donax; another bivalve, evidently a Gervillia, though
+apparently of a species not yet described; and the ill-preserved rings
+of large Ammonites, from ten inches to a foot in diameter. Towards the
+bottom of the bay the fossils again become more rare, though they
+re-appear once more in considerable abundance as we pass along its
+northern side; but in order to acquaint ourselves with the upper
+organisms of the formation, we have to take boat and explore the
+northern shores of Pabba. The Lias of Skye has its three distinct groups
+of fossils: its lower coraline group, in which the Astrea described is
+most abundant; its middle group, in which the _Gryphaea incurva_ occurs
+by millions; and its upper group, abounding in Ammonites, Nautili,
+Pinnae, and Serpulae.
+
+Friday made amends for the rains and fogs of its disagreeable
+predecessor: the morning rose bright and beautiful, with just wind
+enough to fill, and barely fill, the sail, hoisted high, with miser
+economy, that not a breath might be lost; and, weighing anchor, and
+shaking out all our canvass, we bore down on Pabba, to explore. This
+island, so soft in outline and color, is formidably fenced round by
+dangerous reefs; and, leaving the Betsey in charge of John Stewart and
+his companion, to dodge on in the offing, I set out with the minister in
+our 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 happy
+geologist 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 little
+more than three miles and a half along the line where the waves break at
+high water brings the traveller back to his starting point; and yet,
+though thus limited in area, the petrifactions of its shores might of
+themselves fill a museum. They rise by thousands and tens of thousands
+on the exposed planes of its sea-washed strata, standing out in bold
+relief, like sculpturings on ancient tombstones, at once mummies and
+monuments,--the dead and the carved memorials of the dead. Every rock is
+a tablet of hieroglyphics, with an ascertained alphabet; every rolled
+pebble a casket with old pictorial records locked up within. Trap-dykes,
+beyond comparison finer than those of the Water of Leith, which first
+suggested to Hutton his theory, stand up like fences over the
+sedimentary strata, or run out like moles far into the sea. The entire
+island, too, so green, rich, and level, is itself a specimen
+illustrative of the effect of geologic formation on scenery. We find its
+nearest neighbor,--the steep, brown, barren island of Longa, which is
+composed of the ancient Red Sandstone of the district,--differing as
+thoroughly from it in aspect as a bit of granite differs from a bit of
+clay-slate; and the whole prospect around, save the green Liasic strip
+that lies along the bottom of the Bay of Broadford, exhibits, true to
+its various components, Plutonic or sedimentary, a character of
+picturesque roughness or bold sublimity. The only piece of smooth, level
+England, contained in the entire landscape, is the fossil-mottled island
+of Pabba. We were first struck, on landing this morning, by the great
+number of Pinnae embedded in the strata,--shells varying from five to ten
+inches in length,--one species of the common flat type, exemplified in
+the existing _Pinna sulcata_, and another nearly quadrangular, in the
+cross section, like the _Pinna lanceolata_ of the Scarborough limestone.
+The quadrangular species is more deeply crisped outside than the
+flat one. Both species bear the longitudinal groove in the centre,
+and when broken across, are found to contain numerous smaller
+shells,--Terebratulae of both the smooth and sulcated kinds, and a
+species of minute smooth Pecten resembling the _Pecten demissus_, but
+smaller. The Pinnae, 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 Pinnae are all
+sedentary shells, some of them full two feet in length, fastened to
+their places on their deep-sea floors by flowing silky byssi,--cables of
+many strands,--of which beautiful pieces of dress, such as gloves and
+hose, have been manufactured. An old French naturalist, the Abbe Le
+Pluche, tells us that "the Pinna with its fleshy tongue" (foot),--a rude
+inefficient looking implement for work so nice,--"spins such threads as
+are more valuable than silk itself, and with which the most beautiful
+stuffs that ever were seen have been made by Sicilian weavers." Gloves
+made of the byssus of recent Pinnae may be seen in the British Museum.
+Associated with the numerous Pinnae of Pabba we found a delicately-formed
+Modiola, a small Ostrya, Plagiostoma, Terebratula, several species of
+Pectens, a triangular univalve resembling a Trochus, innumerable groups
+of Serpulae, and the star-like joints of Pentacrinites. The Gryphae are
+also abundant, occurring in extensive beds; and Belemnites of various
+species lie as thickly scattered over the rock as if they had been the
+spindles of a whole kingdom thrown aside in consequence of some such
+edict framed to put them down as that passed by the father of the
+Sleeping Beauty. We find, among the detached masses of the beach,
+specimens of Nautilus, which, though rarely perfect, are sufficiently so
+to show the peculiarities of the shell; and numerous Ammonites project
+in relief from almost every weathered plane of the strata. These last
+shells, in the tract of shore which we examined, are chiefly of one
+species,--the _Ammonites spinatus_,--one of which, considerably broken,
+the reader may find figured in Sowerby's "Mineral Conchology," from a
+specimen brought from Pabba sixteen years ago by Sir R. Murchison. It is
+difficult to procure specimens tolerably complete. We find bits of outer
+rings existing as limestone, with every rib sharply preserved, but the
+rest of the fossil lost in the shale. I succeeded in finding but two
+specimens that show the inner whorls. They are thickly ribbed; and the
+chief peculiarity which they exhibit, not so directly indicated by Mr.
+Sowerby's figure, is, that while the ribs of the outer whorl are broad
+and deep, as in the _Ammonites obtusus_, they suddenly change their
+character, 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 return
+to the Betsey. The little wind had become less, and all the canvas we
+could hang out enabled us to draw but a sluggish furrow. The stern of
+the Betsey "wrought no buttons" on this occasion; but she had a good
+tide under her keel; and ere the dinner-hour we had passed through the
+narrows of Kyle Akin. The village of this name was designed by the late
+Lord M'Donald for a great seaport town; but it refused to grow; and it
+has since become a gentleman in a small way, and does nothing. It forms,
+however, a handsome group of houses, pleasantly situated on a flat green
+tongue 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, as
+if by an earthquake, from top to bottom, which forms one of the most
+picturesque objects I have almost ever seen in a landscape. There are
+bold hills all around, and rocky islands, with the ceaseless rush of
+tides in front; while the cloven tower, rising high over the shore, is
+seen, in threading the Kyles, whether from the south or north, relieved
+dark against the sky, as the central object in the vista. We find it
+thus described by the Messrs. Anderson of Inverness, in their excellent
+"Guide Book,"--by far the best companion of the kind with which the
+traveller who sets himself to explore our Scottish Highlands can be
+provided. "Close to the village of Kyle Akin are the ruins of an old
+square keep, called Castle Muel or Maoil, the walls of which are of a
+remarkable thickness. It is said to have been built by the daughter of a
+Norwegian king, married to a Mackinnon or Macdonald, for the purpose of
+levying an impost on all vessels passing the Kyles, excepting, says the
+tradition, those of her own country. For the more certain exaction of
+this duty, she is reported to have caused a strong chain to be stretched
+across from shore to shore; and the spot in the rocks to which the
+terminal links were attached is still pointed out." It was high time for
+us to be home. The dinner hour came; but, in meet illustration of the
+profound remark of Trotty-Veck, not the dinner. We had been in a cold
+Moderate district, whence there came no half-dozens of eggs, or whole
+dozens of trout, or pailfuls of razor-fish, and in which hard
+cabin-biscuit cost us sixpence per pound. And now our stores were
+exhausted, and we had to dine as best we could, on our last half-ounce
+of 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 there
+nearly three weeks before, when I came first aboard, and no one seemed
+to know for how many weeks previous; for as it had come to be a sort of
+fixture in the vessel, it could be looked at without being seen. But
+necessity sharpens the discerning faculty, and on this pressing
+occasion I was fortunate enough to see it. It was straightway taken
+down, skinned, roasted, and eaten; and, though rather rich in
+ammonia,--a substance better suited to form the food of the organisms
+that do not unite sensation to vitality, than organisms so high in the
+scale as the minister and his friend,--we came deliberately to the
+opinion, that on the whole, we could scarce have dined so well on one of
+Major Bellenden's jack-boots,--"so thick in the soles," according to
+Jenny Dennison, "forby being tough in the upper leather." The tide
+failed us opposite the opening of Loch Alsh; the wind, long dying, at
+length died out into a dead calm; and we cast anchor in ten fathoms
+water, to wait the ebbing current that was to carry us through Kyle
+Rhea.
+
+The ebb-tide set in about half an hour after sunset; and in weighing
+anchor to float down the Kyle,--for we still lacked wind to sail down
+it,--we brought up from below, on one of the anchor-flukes, an immense
+bunch 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 thrown
+out roots along its length of stalk, to attach itself to the rock, in
+the way the ivy attaches itself to the wall. Among the intricacies of
+the true roots of the bunch, if one may speak of the true roots of an
+alga, I reckoned from eighteen to twenty different forms of animal
+life,--Flustrae, Sertulariae, Serpulae, Anomiae, Modiolae, Astarte, Annelida,
+Crustacea, and Radiata. Among the Crustaceans I found a female crab of a
+reddish-brown color, considerably smaller than the nail of my small
+finger, but fully grown apparently, for the abdominal flap was loaded
+with spawn; and among the Echinoderms, a brownish-yellow sea-urchin
+about the size of a pistol-bullet, furnished with comparatively large
+but thinly-set spines. There is a dangerous rock in the Kyle Rhea, the
+Caileach stone, on which the Commissioners for the Northern Lighthouses
+have stuck a bit of board about the size of a pot-lid, which, as it is
+known to be there, and as no one ever sees it after sunset, is really
+very effective, considering how little it must have cost the country, in
+wrecking vessels. I saw one of its victims, the sloop of an honest
+Methodist, 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 looking
+out in vain for the bit of board, was just stepping into the shrouds, to
+try whether he could not see the rock on which the bit of board is
+placed, when all at once his vessel found out both board and rock for
+herself. We also had anxious looking out this evening for the bit of
+board: one of us thought he saw it right a-head; and when some of the
+others were trying to see it too, John Stewart succeeded in discovering
+it half a pistol-shot astern. The evening was one of the loveliest. The
+moon rose in cloudy majesty over the mountains of Glenelg, brightening
+as it rose, till the boiling eddies around us curled on the darker
+surface in pale circlets of light, and the shadow of the Betsey lay as
+sharply defined on the brown patch of calm to the larboard as if it were
+her portrait taken in black. Immediately at the water-edge, under a tall
+dark hill, there were two smouldering fires, that now shot up a sudden
+tongue of bright flame, and now dimmed into blood-red specks, and sent
+thick strongly-scented trails of smoke athwart the surface of the Kyle.
+We could hear, in the calm, voices from beside them, apparently those of
+children; and learned that they indicated the places of two
+kelp-furnaces,--things which have now become comparatively rare along
+the 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 in
+the moonshine, we could see behind us several spectral-looking sails
+threading their silent way through the narrows, like twilight ghosts
+traversing some haunted corridor.
+
+It was late ere we reached the opening of Isle Ornsay; and as it was
+still a dead calm we had to tug in the Betsey to the anchoring ground
+with a pair of long sweeps. The minister pointed to a low-lying rock on
+the left-hand side of the opening,--a favorite haunt of the seal. "I
+took farewell of the Betsey there last winter," he said. "The night had
+worn late, and was pitch dark; we could see before us scarce the length
+of our bowsprit; not a single light twinkled from the shore; and, in
+taking the bay, we ran bump on the skerry, and stuck fast. The water
+came rushing in, and covered over the cabin-floor. I had Mrs. Swanson
+and my little daughter aboard with me, with one of our servant-maids who
+had become attached to the family, and insisted on following us from
+Eigg; and, of course, our first care was to get them ashore. We had to
+land them on the bare uninhabited island yonder, and a dreary enough
+place 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 at
+least the recommendation of being safe, and the sky, though black and
+wild, was not stormy. I had brought two lanterns ashore: the servant
+girl, with the child in her lap, sat beside one of them, in the shelter
+of a rock; while my wife, with the other, went walking up and down along
+a piece of level sward yonder, waving the light, to attract notice from
+the opposite side of the bay. But though it was seen from the windows of
+my own house by an attached relative, it was deemed merely a
+singularly-distinct apparition of Will o' the Wisp, and so brought us no
+assistance. 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 the
+rocks; and then, taking our few movables ashore, we hung on till the
+tide rose, and, with our boat alongside ready for escape, succeeded in
+warping her into deep water, with the intention of letting her sink
+somewhere beyond the influence of the surf, which, without fail, would
+have broken her up on the skerry in a few hours, had we suffered her to
+remain there. But though, when on the rock, the tide had risen as freely
+over the cabin sole inside as over the crags without, in the deep water
+the Betsey gave no sign of sinking. I went down to the cabin; the water
+was knee-high on the floor, dashing against bed and locker, but it rose
+no higher;--the enormous leak had stopped, we knew not how; and, setting
+ourselves to the pump, we had in an hour or two a clear ship. The Betsey
+is clinker-built below. The elastic oak planks had yielded inwards to
+the pressure of the rock, tearing out the fastenings, and admitted the
+tide at wide yawning seams; but no sooner was the pressure removed, than
+out they sprung again into their places, like bows when the strings are
+slackened; and when the carpenter came to overhaul, he found he had
+little else to do than to remove a split plank, and to supply a few
+dozens 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 vessels
+and fishing boats; and when the Sabbath came round, no inconsiderable
+portion of my friend's congregation was composed of sailors and
+fishermen. His text was appropriate,--"He bringeth them into their
+desired haven;" and as his sea-craft and his theology were alike
+excellent, there were no incongruities in his allegory, and no defects
+in his mode of applying it, and the seamen were hugely delighted. John
+Stewart, though less a master of English than of many other things, told
+me he was able to follow the minister from beginning to end,--a thing he
+had never done before at an English preaching. The sea portion of the
+sermon, 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 of
+it, he was led into the parts that were less simple, and so succeeded in
+comprehending the whole. I would fain see this unique discourse,
+preached by a sailor minister to a sailor congregation, preserved in
+some permanent form, with at least one other discourse,--of which I
+found trace in the island of Eigg, after the lapse of more than a
+twelvemonth,--that had been preached about the time of the Disruption,
+full in sight of the Scuir, with its impregnable hill-fort, and in the
+immediate neighborhood of the cave of Frances, with its heaps of dead
+men's bones. One note stuck fast to the islanders. In times of peril and
+alarm, said the minister, the ancient inhabitants of the island had two
+essentially different kinds of places in which they sought security;
+they had the deep, unwholesome cave, shut up from the light and the
+breath of heaven, and the tall rock summit, with its impregnable fort,
+on which the sun shone and the wind blew. Much hardship might no doubt
+be encountered on the one, when the sky was black with tempest, and
+rains beat, or snows descended; but it was found associated with no
+story of real loss or disaster,--it had kept safe all who had committed
+themselves to it; whereas, in the close atmosphere of the other there
+was warmth, and, after a sort, comfort; and on one memorable day of
+trouble the islanders had deemed it the preferable sheltering place of
+the two. And there survived mouldering skeletons and a frightful
+tradition, to tell the history of their choice. Places of refuge of
+these very opposite kinds, said the minister, continuing his allegory,
+are not peculiar to your island; never was there a day or a place of
+trial in which they did not advance their opposite claims: they are
+advancing them even now all over the world. The one kind you find
+described by one great prophet as low-lying "refuges of lies," over
+which the desolating "scourge must pass," and which the destroying
+"waters must overflow;" while the true character of the other may be
+learned from another great prophet, who was never weary of celebrating
+his "rock and his fortress." "Wit succeeds more from being happily
+addressed," says Goldsmith, "than even from its native poignancy." If
+my friend's allegory does not please quite as well in print and in
+English as it did when delivered _viva voce_ in Gaelic, it should be
+remembered that it was addressed to an out-door congregation, whose
+minds were filled with the consequences of the Disruption,--that the
+bones of _Uamh Fraingh_ lay within a few hundred yards of them,--and
+that the Scuir, with the sun shining bright on its summit, rose tall in
+the background, scarce a mile away.
+
+On Monday I spent several hours in reexploring the Lias of Lucy Bay and
+its neighborhood, and then walked on to Kyle-Akin, where I parted from
+my friend Mr. Swanson, and took boat for Loch Carron. The greater part
+of the following day was spent in crossing the country to the east coast
+in the mail-gig, through long dreary glens, and a fierce storm of wind
+and rain. In the lower portion of the valley occupied by the river
+Carron, I saw at least two fine groups of moraines. One of these, about
+a mile and a half above the parish manse, marks the place where a
+glacier, that had once descended from a hollow amid the northern range
+of 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 greater
+extent, indicates where one of those river-like glaciers that fill up
+long hollows, and impel their irresistible flood downwards, slow as the
+hour-hand of a time-piece, had terminated towards the sea. I could but
+glance at the appearances as the gig drove past, and point them out to a
+fellow passenger, the Establishment minister of----, remarking, at the
+same time, how much more dreary the prospect must have seemed than even
+it did to-day, though the fog was thick and the drizzle disagreeable,
+when the lateral hollows on each side were blocked up with ice, and
+overhanging glaciers, that ploughed the rock bare in their descent,
+glistened on the bleak hill-sides. I wore a gray maud over a coat of
+rough russet, with waist-coat and trowsers of plaid; and the minister,
+who must have taken me, I suppose, for a southland shepherd looking out
+for a farm, gave me much information of a kind I might have found
+valuable had such been my condition and business, regarding the various
+districts through which we passed. On one high-lying farm, the grass, he
+said, was short and thin, but sweet and wholesome, and the flocks throve
+steadily, and were never thinned by disease; whereas on another farm,
+that lay along the dank bottom of a valley, the herbage was rank and
+rich, and the sheep fed and got heavy, but braxy at the close of autumn
+fell upon them like a pestilence, and more than neutralized to the
+farmer every advantage of the superior fertility of the soil. It was not
+uninteresting, even for one not a sheep-farmer, to learn that the life
+of the sheep is worth fewer years' purchase in one little track of
+country than in another adjacent one; and that those differences in the
+salubrity of particular spots which obtain in other parts of the world
+in regard to our own species, and which make it death to linger on the
+luxuriant river-side, while on the arid plain or elevated hill-top there
+is health and safety, should exist in contiguous walks in the Highlands
+of Scotland in reference to some of the inferior animals. The minister
+and I became wonderfully good friends for the time. All the seats in the
+gig, both back and front, had been occupied ere he had taken his
+passage, and the postman had assigned him a miserable place on the
+narrow elevated platform in the middle, where he had to coil himself up
+like a hedgehog in its hole, sadly to the discomfort of limbs still
+stout and strong, but stiffened by the long service of full seventy
+years. 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, as
+became his years, "'gan murmur." I contrived, by sitting on the edge of
+the gig on the one side, and by getting the postman to take a similar
+seat on the other, to find room for him in front; and there, feeling he
+had not to do with savages, he became kindly and conversible. We beat
+together over a wide range of topics;--the Scotch banks, and Sir Robert
+Peel's intentions regarding them,--the periodical press of
+Scotland,--the Edinburgh literati,--the Free Church even: he had been a
+consistent Moderate all his days, and disliked renegades, he said; and
+I, of course, disliked renegades too. We both remembered that, though
+civilized nations give quarter to an enemy overpowered in open fight,
+they are still in the habit of shooting deserters. In short, we agreed
+on a great many different matters; and, by comparing notes, we made the
+best we could of a tedious journey and a very bad day. At the inn at
+Garve, a long stage from Dingwall, we alighted, and took the road
+together, to straighten our stiffened limbs, while the post man was
+engaged in changing horses. The minister stopped short in the middle of
+a discussion. We are not on equal terms, he said: you know who I am, and
+I don't know you: we did not start fair at the beginning, but let us
+start fair now. Ah, we have agreed hitherto, I replied; but I know not
+how we are to agree when you know who I am: are you sure you will not be
+frightened? 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. Give
+me, man, a shake of your hand." And so the conversation went on as
+before till we parted at Dingwall,--the Establishment clergyman wet to
+the skin, the Free Church editor in no better condition; but both,
+mayhap, rather less out of conceit with the ride than if it had been
+ridden alone.
+
+I had intended passing at least two days in the neighborhood of
+Dingwall, where I proposed renewing an acquaintance, broken off for
+three-and-twenty years, with those bituminous shales of Strathpeffer in
+which the celebrated mineral waters of the valley take their rise,--the
+Old Red Conglomerate of Brahan, the vitrified fort of Knockferrel, the
+ancient tower of Fairburn, above all, the pleasure-grounds of
+Conon-side. I had spent the greater portion of my eighteenth and
+nineteenth years in this part of the country; and I was curious to
+ascertain to what extent the man in middle life would verify the
+observations of the lad,--to recall early incidents, revisit remembered
+scenes, return on old feelings, and see who were dead and who were alive
+among the casual acquaintances of nearly a quarter of a century ago. The
+morning of Wednesday rose dark with fog and rain, but the wind had
+fallen; and as I could not afford to miss seeing Conon-side, I sallied
+out under cover of an umbrella. I crossed the bridge, and reached the
+pleasure-grounds of Conon-house. The river was big in flood: it was
+exactly 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 do
+early in the autumn of that year, and pick up the pearl muscles that lie
+so thickly among the stones at the bottom. I saw, however, amid a
+thicket of bushes by the river-side, a heap of broken shells, where some
+herd-boy had been carrying on such a pearl fishery as I had sometimes
+used to carry on in my own behalf so long before; and I felt it was just
+something to see it. The flood eddied past, dark and heavy, sweeping
+over bulwark and bank. The low-stemmed alders that rose on islet and
+mound seemed shorn of half their trunks in the tide; here and there an
+elastic branch bent to the current, and rose and bent again; and now a
+tuft of withered heath came floating down, and now a soiled wreath of
+foam. How vividly the past rose up before me!--boyish day-dreams
+forgotten 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 the
+ancient Cryptogamiae, and bore no specific resemblance to the productions
+of a present time. I had passed in the neighborhood the first season I
+anywhere spent among strangers, at an age when home is not a country,
+nor a province even, but simply a little spot of earth inhabited by
+friends and relatives; and the rude verses, long forgotten, in which my
+joy had found vent when on the eve of returning to that home,--a home
+little more than twenty miles away,--came chiming as freshly into my
+memory as if scarce a month had passed since I had composed them beside
+the Conon.[6]
+
+Three-and-twenty years form a large portion of the short life of
+man,--one-third, as nearly as can be expressed in unbroken numbers, of
+the entire term fixed by the psalmist, and full one-half, if we strike
+off the twilight periods of childhood and immature youth, and of
+senectitude weary of its toils. I found curious indications among the
+grounds of Conon-side, of the time that had elapsed since I had last
+seen them. There was a rectangular pond in a corner of a moor, near the
+public road, inhabited by about a dozen voracious, frog-eating pike,
+that I used frequently to visit. The water in the pond was exceedingly
+limpid; 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 narrow
+tangled pathway, to visit it once more. I could have found out the
+place blindfold: there was a piece of flat brown heath that stretched
+round its edges, and a mossy slope that rose at its upper side, at the
+foot of which the taste of the proprietor had placed a rustic chair. The
+spot, though itself bare and moory, was nearly surrounded by wood, and
+looked like a clearing in an American forest. There were lines of
+graceful larches on two of its sides, and a grove of vigorous beeches
+that directly fronted the setting sun on a third; and I had often found
+it a place of delightful resort, in which to saunter alone in the calm
+summer evenings, after the work of the day was over. Such was the scene
+as it existed in my recollection. I came up to it this day through
+dripping trees, along a neglected pathway; and found, for the open space
+and the rectangular pond, a gloomy patch of water in the middle of a
+tangled thicket, that rose some ten or twelve feet over my head. What
+had been bare heath a quarter of a century before had become a thick
+wood; and I remembered, that when I had been last there, the open space
+had just been planted with forest-trees, and that some of the taller
+plants rose half-way to my knee. Human lifetimes, as now measured, are
+not intended to witness both the seed-times and the harvests of
+forests,--both the planting of the sapling, and the felling of the huge
+tree into which it has grown; and so the incident impressed me strongly.
+It reminded me of the sage Shalum in Addison's antediluvian tale, who
+became wealthy by the sale of his great trees, two centuries after he
+had planted them. I pursued my walk, to revisit another little patch of
+water which I had found so very entertaining a volume three-and-twenty
+years previous, that I could still recall many of its lessons; but the
+hand of improvement had been busy among the fields of Conon-side; and
+when I came up to the spot which it had occupied, I found but a piece
+of 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 twenty
+years before. I entered into conversation with one of the ploughmen,
+apparently a man of some intelligence; but he had come to the place only
+a summer or two previous, and the names of most of his predecessors
+sounded unfamiliar in his ears: he knew scarce anything of the old laird
+or his times, and but little of the general history of the district. The
+frequent change of servants incident to the large-farm system has done
+scarce less to wear out the oral antiquities of the country than has
+been done by its busy ploughs in obliterating antiquities of a more
+material cast. The mythologic legend and traditionary story have shared
+the same fate, through the influence of the one cause, which has been
+experienced by the sepulchral tumulus and the ancient encampment under
+the operations of the other. I saw in the pillars and archways of the
+farm-steading some of the hewn stones bearing my own mark,--an anchor,
+to which I used to attach a certain symbolical meaning; and I pointed
+them out to the ploughman. I had hewn these stones, I said, in the days
+of the old laird, the grandfather of the present proprietor. The
+ploughman wondered how a man still in middle life could have such a
+story to tell. I must surely have begun work early in the day, he
+remarked, which was perhaps the best way for getting it soon over. I
+remembered having seen similar markings on the hewn-work of ancient
+castles, and of indulging in, I daresay, idle enough speculations
+regarding what was doing at court and in the field, in Scotland and
+elsewhere, when the old long-departed mechanics had been engaged in
+their work. When this mark was affixed, I have said, all Scotland was
+in mourning for the disaster at Flodden, and the folk in the work-shed
+would have been, mayhap, engaged in discussing the supposed treachery of
+Home, and in arguing whether the hapless James had fallen in battle, or
+gone on a pilgrimage to merit absolution for the death of his father.
+And when this other more modern mark was affixed, the Gowrie conspiracy
+must have been the topic of the day, and the mechanics were probably
+speculating,--at worst not more doubtfully than the historians have done
+after them,--on the guilt or innocence of the Ruthvens. It now rose
+curiously enough in memory, that I was employed in fashioning one of the
+stones marked by the anchor,--a corner stone in a gate-pillar,--when one
+of my brother apprentices entered the work-shed, laden with a bundle of
+newly sharpened irons from the smithy, and said he had just been told by
+the smith that the great Napoleon Bonaparte was dead. I returned to the
+village of Conon Bridge, through the woods of Conon House. The day was
+still very bad: the rain pattered thick on the leaves, and fell
+incessantly in large drops on the pathways. There is a solitary,
+picturesque burying-ground on a wooded hillock beside the river, with
+thick dark woods all around it,--one of the two burying-grounds of the
+parish of Urquhart,--which I would fain have visited, but the swollen
+stream had risen high around, converting the hillock into an island, and
+forbade access. I had spent many an hour among the tombs. They are few
+and scattered, and of the true antique cast,--roughened with death's
+heads, and cross-bones, and rudely sculptured armorial bearings; and on
+a 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, with
+its iron gnomon wasted to a saw-edged film, that contained more oxide
+than metal. The only fossils described in my present chapter are fossils
+of mind; and the reader will, I trust, bear with me should I produce
+one fossil more of this somewhat equivocal class. It has no merit to
+recommend it,--it is simply an organism of an immature intellectual
+formation, in which, however, as in the Carboniferous period, there was
+provision made for the necessities of an after time.[8] If a young man
+born on the wrong side of the Tweed for _speaking_ English, is desirous
+to acquire the ability of _writing_ it, he should by all means begin by
+trying 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 the
+work-shed so many years before lived in the village at the time, I went
+direct to the house he had inhabited, to see whether he might not be
+there still. It was a low-roofed domicile beside the river, but in the
+days of my old acquaintance it had presented an appearance of great
+comfort 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, at
+the 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-hand
+side,--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 was
+one of the elders of the Free Church in Urquhart. Such was the standing
+of my old acquaintance the journeyman mason of twenty-three years ago.
+He had been, when I knew him, a steady, industrious, religious
+man,--with but one exception the only contributor to missionary and
+Bible societies among a numerous party of workmen; and he was now
+occupying a respectable place in his village, and was one of the voters
+of the county. Let Chartism assert what it pleases on the one hand, and
+Toryism what it may on the other, the property-qualification of the
+Reform Bill is essentially a good one for such a country as Scotland. In
+our cities it no doubt extends the political franchise to a fluctuating
+class, ill hafted in society, who possess it one year and want it
+another; but in our villages and smaller towns it hits very nearly the
+right medium for forming a premium on steady industry and character, and
+for securing that at least the mass of those who possess it should be
+sober-minded men, with a stake in the general welfare. In running over
+the histories of the various voters in one of our smaller towns, I found
+that nearly one-half of the whole had, like my old comrade at Conon
+Bridge, acquired for themselves, through steady and industrious habits,
+the qualification from which they derive their vote. My companion failed
+to recognize in the man turned of forty the smooth-cheeked stripling of
+eighteen, with whom he had wrought so long before. I soon succeeded,
+however, in making good my claim to his acquaintance. He had previously
+established the identity of the editor of his newspaper with his quondam
+fellow-workman, and a single link more was all the chain wanted. We
+talked over old matters for half an hour. His wife, a staid respectable
+matron, who, when I had been last in the district, was exactly such a
+person as her eldest daughter, showed me an Encyclopaedia, with colored
+prints, which she wished to send, if she knew but how, to the Free
+Church library. I walked with him through his garden, and saw trees
+loaded with yellow-cheeked pippins, where I had once seen only
+unproductive heath, that scantily covered a barren soil of ferruginous
+sand, and unwillingly declining an invitation to wait tea,--for a
+previous engagement interfered,--I took leave of the family, and
+returned to Dingwall. The following morning was gloomy, and threatened
+rain; and giving up my intention of exploring Strathpeffer, I took the
+morning coach for Invergordon, and then walked to Cromarty, where I
+arrived just in time for breakfast.
+
+I marked, from the top of the coach, about two miles to the north-east
+of Dingwall, beds of a deep gray sandstone, identical in color and
+appearance with some of the gray sandstones of the Middle Old Red of
+Forfarshire, and learned that quarries had lately been opened in these
+beds near Montgerald. The Old Red Sandstone lies in immense development
+on the flanks of Ben-Wevis; and it is just possible that the analogue of
+the gray flagstones of Forfar may be found among its upper beds. If so,
+the quarriers should be instructed to look hard for organic
+remains,--the broad-headed Cephalaspis, so characteristic of the
+formation, and the huge Crustacean, its contemporary, that disported in
+plates large as those of the steel mail of the later ages of chivalry.
+The geologists of Dingwall,--if Dingwall has yet got its
+geologists,--might do well to attempt determining the point. I found the
+science much in advance in Cromarty, especially among the ladies,--its
+great patronizers and illustrators everywhere,--and, in not a few
+localities, extensive contributors to its hoards of fact. Just as I
+arrived, there was a pic-nic party of young people setting out for the
+Lias of Shandwick. They spent the day among its richly fossiliferous
+shales and limestones, and brought back with them in the evening,
+Ammonites and Gryphites enough to store a museum. Cromarty had been
+visited during the summer by geologists speaking a foreign tongue, but
+thoroughly conversant with the occult yet common language of the rocks,
+and deeply interested in the stories which the rocks told. The vessels
+in which the Crown Prince of Denmark voyaged to the Faroe Isles had
+been for some time in the bay; and the Danes, his companions, votaries
+of the stony science, zealously plied chisel and hammer among the Old
+Red Sandstones of the coast. A townsman informed me that he had seen a
+Danish Professor hammering like the tutelary Thor of his country among
+the nodules in which I had found the first Pterichthys and first
+Diplacanthus ever disinterred; and that the Professor, ever and anon as
+he laid open a specimen, brought it to a huge smooth boulder, on which
+there lay a copy of the "Old Red Sandstone," to ascertain from the
+descriptions and prints its family and name. Shall I confess that the
+circumstance gratified me exceedingly? There are many elements of
+Discord among mankind in the present time, both at home and abroad,--so
+many, that I am afraid we need entertain no hope of seeing an end, in at
+least our day, to controversy and war. And we should be all the better
+pleased, therefore, to witness the increase of those links of
+union,--such as the harmonizing bonds of a scientific sympathy,--the
+tendency of which is to draw men together in a kindly spirit, and the
+formation of which involves no sacrifice of principle, moral or
+religious. I do not think that the foreigner, after geologizing in my
+company, 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 chapter
+would 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 the
+Cromarty Frith, and another long day in renewing my acquaintance with
+the Liasic deposit at Shandwick. In beating over the Lias, though I
+picked up a few good specimens, I acquired no new facts; but in
+re-examining the Old Red Sandstone and its organisms I was rather more
+successful. I succeeded in eliciting some curious points not yet
+recorded, which, with the details of an interesting discovery made in
+the far north in this formation, I may be perhaps able to weave into a
+chapter somewhat more geological than my last.
+
+Some of the readers of my little work on the Old Red Sandstone will
+perhaps remember that I described the organisms of that ancient system
+as occurring in the neighborhood of Cromarty mainly on one platform,
+raised rather more than a hundred feet over the great Conglomerate; and
+that on this platform, as if suddenly overtaken by some wide-spread
+catastrophe, the ichthyolites lie by thousands and tens of thousands,
+in every attitude of distortion and terror. We see the spiked wings of
+the Pterichthys elevated to the full, as they had been erected in the
+fatal moment of anger and alarm, and the bodies of the Cheirolepis and
+Cheiracanthus bent head to tail, in the stiff posture into which they
+had curled when the last pang was over. In various places in the
+neighborhood the ichthyolites are found _in situ_ in their coffin-like
+nodules, where it is impossible to trace the relation of the beds in
+which they occur to the rocks above and below; and I had suspected for
+years that in at least some of the localities, they could not have
+belonged to the lower platform of death, but to some posterior
+catastrophe that had strewed with carcasses some upper platform. I had
+thought over the matter many a time and oft when I should have been
+asleep,--for it is marvellous how questions of the kind grow upon a man;
+and now, selecting as a hopeful scene of inquiry the splendid section
+under the Northern Sutor, I set myself doggedly to determine whether the
+Old Red Sandstone in this part of the country has not at least its two
+storeys of organic remains, each of which had been equally a scene of
+sudden mortality. I was entirely successful. The lower ichthyolite bed
+occurs exactly one hundred and fourteen feet over the great
+Conglomerate; and three hundred and eighteen feet higher up I found a
+second ichthyolite bed, as rich in fossils as the first, with its thorny
+Acanthodians twisted half round, as if still in the agony of
+dissolution, and its Pterichthyes still extending their spear-like arms
+in the attitude of defence. The discovery enabled me to assign to their
+true places the various ichthyolite beds of the district. Those in the
+immediate neighborhood of the town, and a bed which abuts on the Lias at
+Eathie, belong to the upper platform; while those which appear in Eathie
+Burn, and along the shores at Navity, belong to the lower. The chief
+interest of the discovery, however, arises from the light which it
+throws on the condition of the ancient ocean of the Lower Old Red, and
+on the extreme precariousness of the tenure on which the existence of
+its numerous denizens was held. In a section of little more than a
+hundred yards there occur at least two platforms of violent
+death,--platforms inscribed with unequivocal evidence of two great
+catastrophes which over wide areas depopulated the seas. In the Old Red
+Sandstone of Caithness there are many such platforms: storey rises over
+storey; and the floor of each bears its closely-written record of
+disaster and sudden extinction. Pompeii in this northern locality lies
+over Herculaneum, and Anglano over both. We cease to wonder why the
+higher order of animals should not have been introduced into a scene of
+being that had so recently arisen out of chaos, and over which the reign
+of death so frequently returned. In a somewhat different sense from that
+indicated 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 in
+abundance single plates and scales of ichthyolites, which, as they can
+be removed entire, and viewed on both sides, illustrate points in the
+mechanism of the creatures to which they belonged that cannot be so
+clearly traced in the same remains when locked up in stone. There is a
+vast deal of skilful carpentry exhibited--if carpentry I may term it--in
+the coverings of these ancient ichthyolites. In the commoner fish of our
+existing seas the scales are so thin and flexible,--mere films of
+horn,--that there is no particularly nice fitting required in their
+arrangement. The condition, too, through which portions of unprotected
+skin may be presented to the water, as over and between the rays of the
+fins, and on the snout and lips, obviates many a mechanical difficulty
+of the earlier period, when it was a condition, as the remains
+demonstrate, that no bit of naked skin, should be exposed, and when the
+scales and plates were formed, not of thin horny films, but of solid
+pieces 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 the
+roof of an ancient cathedral;--_they_, on the other hand, were scales of
+the ancient type. Again, it requires no ingenuity whatever, to suffer
+the hands and face to go naked,--and such is the condition of our
+existing fish, with their soft skinny snouts and membranous fins; but to
+cover the hands with flexible steel gauntlets, and the face with such an
+iron mask as that worn by the mysterious prisoner of Louis XIV., would
+require a very large amount of ingenuity indeed; and the ancient
+ichthyolites of the Old Red were all masked and gauntleted. Now the
+detached plates and scales of the stratified clay exhibit not a few of
+the mechanical contrivances through which the bony coverings of these
+fish were made to unite--as in coats of old armor--great strength with
+great flexibility. The scales of the Osteolepis and Diplopterus I found
+nicely bevelled atop and at one of the sides; so that where they
+overlapped each other,--for at the joints not a needle-point could be
+insinuated,--the thickness of the two scales equalled but the thickness
+of one scale in the centre, and thus an equable covering was formed. I
+brought with me some of these detached scales, and they now lie fitted
+together on the table before me, like pieces of complicated hewn work
+carefully arranged on the ground ere the workman transfers them to their
+place on the wall. In the smaller-scaled fish, such as the
+Cheiracanthus and Cheirolepis, a different principle obtained. The
+minute glittering rhombs of bone were set thick on the skin, like those
+small scales of metal sewed on leather, that formed an inferior kind of
+armor still in use in eastern nations, and which was partially used in
+our own country just ere the buff coat altogether superseded the coat of
+mail. I found a beautiful piece of jaw in the clay, with the enamelled
+tusks bristling on its brightly enamelled edge, like iron teeth in an
+iron rake. Mr. Parkinson expresses some wonder, in his work on fossils,
+that in a fine ichthyolite in the British Museum, not only the teeth
+should have been preserved, but also the lips; but we now know enough of
+the construction of the more ancient fish, to cease wondering. The lips
+were formed of as solid bone as the teeth themselves, and had as fair a
+chance of being preserved entire; just as the metallic rim of a toothed
+wheel has as fair a chance of being preserved as the metallic teeth that
+project from it. I was interested in marking the various modes of
+attachment to the body of the animal which the detached scales exhibit.
+The slater fastens on his slates with nails driven into the wood: the
+tiler secures his tiles by means of a raised bar on the under side of
+each, that locks into a corresponding bar of deal in the framework of
+the roof. Now in some of the scales I found the art of the tiler
+anticipated; there were bars raised on their inner sides, to lay hold of
+the skin beneath; while in others it was the art of the slater that had
+been anticipated,--the scales had been slates fastened down by long
+nails driven in slantwise, which were, however, mere prolongations of
+the scale itself. Great truths may be repeated until they become
+truisms, and we fail to note what they in reality convey. The great
+truth that all knowledge dwelt without beginning in the adorable Creator
+must, I am afraid, have been thus common-placed in my mind; for at
+first it struck me as wonderful that the humble arts of the tiler and
+slater should have existed in perfection in the times of the Old Red
+Sandstone.
+
+I had often remarked amid the fossiliferous limestones of the Lower Old
+Red, minute specks and slender veins of a glossy bituminous substance
+somewhat resembling jet, sufficiently hard to admit of a tolerable
+polish, and which emitted in the fire a bright flame, I had remarked,
+further, its apparent identity with a substance used by the ancient
+inhabitants of the northern part of the country in the manufacture of
+their rude ornaments, as occasionally found in sepulchral urns, such as
+beads of an elliptical form, and flat parallelograms, perforated
+edge-wise by some four or five holes a-piece; but I had failed hitherto
+in detecting in the stone, portions of sufficient bulk for the formation
+of either the beads or the parallelograms. On this visit to the
+ichthyolite beds, however, I picked up a nodule that inclosed a mass of
+the jet large enough to admit of being fashioned into trinkets of as
+great bulk as any of the ancient ones I have yet seen, and a portion of
+which I succeeded in actually forming into a parallelogram, that could
+not have been distinguished from those of our old sepulchral urns. It is
+interesting enough to think, that these fossiliferous beds, altogether
+unknown to the people of the country for many centuries, and which, when
+I first discovered them, some twelve or fourteen years ago, were equally
+unknown to geologists, should have been resorted to for this substance,
+perhaps thousands of years ago, by the savage aborigines of the
+district. But our antiquities of the remoter class furnish us with
+several such facts. It is comparatively of late years that we have
+become acquainted with the yellow chalk-flints of Banffshire and
+Aberdeen; though before the introduction of iron into the country they
+seem to have been well known all over the north of Scotland. I have
+never yet seen a stone arrow-head found in any of the northern
+localities, that had not been fashioned out of this hard and splintery
+substance,--a sufficient proof that our ancestors, ere they had formed
+their first acquaintance with the metals, were intimately acquainted
+with at least the mechanical properties of the chalk-flint, and knew
+where in Scotland it was to be found. They were mineralogists enough,
+too, as their stone battle-axes testify, to know that the best
+tool-making rock is the axe-stone of Werner; and in some localities they
+must have brought their supply of this rather rare mineral from great
+distances. A history of those arts of savage life, as shown in the
+relics of our earlier antiquities, which the course of discovery sereved
+thoroughly to supplant, but which could not have been carried on without
+a knowledge of substances and qualities afterwards lost, until
+re-discovered by scientific curiosity, would form of itself an
+exceedingly curious chapter. The art of the gun-flint maker (and it,
+too, promises soon to pass into extinction) is unquestionably a curious
+one, but not a whit more curious or more ingenious than the art
+possessed by the rude inhabitants of our country eighteen hundred years
+ago, of chipping arrow-heads with an astonishing degree of neatness out
+of the same stubborn material. They found, however, that though flint
+made a serviceable arrow-head, it was by much too brittle for an adze or
+battle-axe; and sought elsewhere than among the Banffshire gravels for
+the rock out of which these were to be wrought. Where they found it in
+our northern provinces I have not yet ascertained. It is but a short
+time since I came to know that they were beforehand with me in the
+discovery of the bituminous jet of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, and were
+excavators among its fossiliferous beds. The vitrified forts of the
+north of Scotland give evidence of yet another of the obsolete arts.
+Before the savage inhabitants of the country were ingenious enough to
+know the uses of mortar, or were furnished with tools sufficiently hard
+and solid to dress a bit of sandstone, they must have been acquainted
+with the _chemical_ fact, that with the assistance of fluxes, a pile of
+stones could be fused into a solid wall, and with the _mineralogical_
+fact, that there are certain kinds of stones which yield much more
+readily to the heat than others. The art of making vitrified forts was
+the art of making ramparts of rock through a knowledge of the less
+obstinate earths and the more powerful fluxes. I have been informed by
+Mr. Patrick Duff of Elgin, that he found, in breaking open a vitrified
+fragment detached from an ancient hill-fort, distinct impressions of the
+serrated kelp-weed of our shores,--the identical flux which, in its
+character as the kelp of commerce, was so extensively used in our
+glass-houses only a few years ago.
+
+I was struck, during my explorations at this time, as I had been often
+before, by the style of grouping, if I may so speak, which obtains among
+the Lower Old Red fossils. In no deposit with which I am acquainted,
+however rich in remains, have all its ichthyolites been found lying
+together. The collector finds some one or two species very numerous;
+some two or three considerably less so, but not unfrequent; some one or
+two more, perhaps, exceedingly rare; and a few, though abundant in other
+localities, that never occur at all. In the Cromarty beds, for instance,
+I never found a Holoptychius, and a Dipterus only once; the Diplopterus
+is rare; the Glyptolepis not common; the Cheirolepis and Pterichthys
+more so, but not very abundant; the Cheiracanthus and Diplacanthus, on
+the other hand, are numerous; and the Osteolepis and Coccosteus more
+numerous still. But in other deposits of the same formation, though a
+similar style of grouping obtains, the proportions are reversed with
+regard to species and genera: the fish rare in one locality abound in
+another. In Banniskirk, for instance, the Dipterus is exceedingly
+common, while the Osteolepis and Coccosteus are rare, and the
+Cheiracanthus and Cheirolepis seem altogether awanting. Again, in the
+Morayshire deposits, the Glyptolepis is abundant, and noble specimens of
+the Lower Old Red Holoptychius--of which more anon--are to be found in
+the neighborhood of Thurso, associated with remains of the Diplopterus,
+Coccosteus, Dipterus, and Osteolepis. The fact may be deemed of some
+little interest by the geologist, and may serve to inculcate caution, by
+showing that it is not always safe to determine regarding the place or
+age of subordinate formations from the per centage of certain fossils
+which they may be found to contain, or from the fact that they should
+want some certain organisms of the system to which they belong, and
+possess others. These differences may and do exist in contemporary
+deposits; and I had a striking example, on this occasion, of their
+dependence on a simple law of instinct, which is as active in producing
+the same kind of phenomena now as it seems to have been in the earlier
+days of the Old Red Sandstone. The Cromarty and Moray Friths, mottled
+with fishing boats (for the bustle of the herring fishers had just
+begun), stretched out before me. A few hundred yards from the shore
+there was a yawl lying at anchor, with an old fisherman and a few boys
+angling from the stern for sillocks (the young of the coal-fish) and for
+small rock-cod. A few miles higher up, where the Cromarty Frith expands
+into a wide landlocked basin, with shallow sandy shores, there was a
+second yawl engaged in fishing for flounders and small skate,--for such
+are the kinds of fish that frequent the flat shallows of the basin. A
+turbot-net lay drying in the sun: it served to remind me that some six
+or eight miles away, in an opposite direction, there is a deep-sea bank,
+on which turbot, halibut, and large skate are found. Numerous boats were
+stretching down the Moray Frith, bound for the banks of a more distant
+locality, frequented at this early stage of the herring fishing by
+shoals of herrings, with their attendant dog-fish and cod; and I knew
+that in yet another deep-sea range there lie haddock and whiting banks.
+Almost every variety of existing fish in the two friths has its own
+peculiar habitat; and were they to be destroyed by some sudden
+catastrophe, and preserved by some geologic process, on the banks and
+shoals which they frequent, there would occur exactly the same phenomena
+of grouping in the fossiliferous contemporaneous deposits which they
+would thus constitute, as we find exhibited by the deposits of the Lower
+Old Red Sandstone.
+
+The remains of Holoptychius occur, I have said, in the neighborhood of
+Thurso. I must now add, that very singular remains they are,--full of
+interest to the naturalist, and, in great part at least, new to Geology.
+My readers, votaries of the stony science, must be acquainted with the
+masterly paper of Mr. Sedgwick and Sir R. Murchison "On the Old Red
+Sandstone of Caithness and the North of Scotland generally," which forms
+part of the second volume (second series) of the "Transactions of the
+Geological Society," and with the description which it furnishes, among
+many others, of the rocks in the neighborhood of Thurso.
+Calcareo-bituminous flags, grits, and shales, of which the paving
+flagstones of Caithness may be regarded as the general type, occur on
+the shores, in reefs, crags, and precipices; here stretching along the
+coast in the form of flat, uneven bulwarks: there rising over it in
+steep walls; yonder leaning to the surf, stratum against stratum, like
+flights of stairs thrown down from their slant position to the level; in
+some places severed by faults; in others cast about in every possible
+direction, as if broken and contorted by a thousand antagonist
+movements; but in their general bearing rising towards the east, until
+the whole calcareo-bituminous schists of which this important member of
+the system is composed disappear under the red sandstones of Dunnet
+Head. Such, in effect, is the general description of Mr. Sedgwick and
+Sir R. Murchison, of the rocks in the neighborhood of Thurso. It
+indicates further, that in at least three localities in the range there
+occur in the grits and shales, scales and impressions of fish. And such
+was the ascertained geology of the deposit when taken up last year by an
+ingenious tradesman of Thurso, Mr. Robert Dick, whose patient
+explorations, concentrated mainly on the fossil remains of this deposit,
+bid fair to add to our knowledge of the ichthyology of the Old Red
+Sandstone. Let us accompany Mr. Dick in one of his exploratory rambles.
+The various organisms which he disinterred I shall describe from
+specimens before me, which I owe to his kindness,--the localities in
+which he found them, from a minute and interesting description, for
+which I am indebted to his pen.
+
+Leaving behind us the town at the bottom of its deep bay, we set out to
+explore a bluff-headed parallelogramical promontory, bounded by Thurso
+Bay on the one hand, and Murkle Bay on the other, and which presents to
+the open sea, in the space that stretches between, an undulating line of
+iron-bound coast, exposed to the roll of the northern ocean. We pass two
+stations in which the hard Caithness flagstones so well known in
+commerce are jointed by saws wrought by machinery. As is common in the
+Old Red Sandstone, in which scarce any stratum solid enough to be of
+value to the workmen, whether for building or paving, contains good
+specimens, we find but little to detain us in the dark coherent beds
+from which the flags are quarried. Here and there a few glittering
+scales occur; here and there a few coprolitic patches; here and there
+the faint impression of a fucoid; but no organism sufficiently entire to
+be transferred to the bag. As we proceed outwards, however, and the
+fitful breeze comes laden with the keen freshness of the open sea, we
+find among the hard dark strata in the immediate neighborhood of Thurso
+Castle, a paler-colored bed of fine-grained semi-calcareous stone,
+charged with remains in a state of coherency and keeping better fitted
+to repay the labor of the specimen-collector. The inclosing matrix is
+comparatively soft: when employed in the neighboring fences as a
+building stone, we see it resolved by the skyey influences into
+well-nigh its original mud; whereas the organisms which it contains are
+composed of a hard, scarce destructible substance,--bone steeped in
+bitumen; and the enamel on their outer surfaces is still as glossy and
+bright as the japan on a _papier-mache_ tray fresh from the hands of the
+workman. Their deep black, too, contrasts strongly with the pale hue of
+the stone. They consist chiefly of scales, spines, dermal plates,
+snouts, skull-caps, and vegetable impressions. A little farther on, in a
+thick bed interposed between two faults, the same kind of remains occur
+in the same abundance, largely mingled with scales and teeth of
+Holoptychius, tuberculated plates, and coprolitic blotches; and further
+on still, in a rubbly flagstone, near where a little stream comes
+trotting merrily from the uplands to the sea, there occur
+skull-plates,--at least one of which has been disinterred entire,--large
+and massy as the helmets of ancient warriors. We have now reached the
+outer point of the promontory, where the seaward wave, as it comes
+rolling unbroken from the Pole, crosses, in nearing the shore, the
+eastward sweep of the great Gulf-stream, and then casts itself headlong
+on the rocks. The view has been extending with almost every step we have
+taken, and it has now expanded into a wide and noble prospect of ocean
+and bay, island and main, bold surf-skirted headlands, and green
+retiring hollows. Yonder, on the one hand, are the Orkneys, rising dim
+and blue over the foam-mottled currents of the Pentland Frith; and
+yonder, 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; there
+receding in grassy banks formed of a dark blue diluvium. The fields and
+dwellings of living men mingle in the landscape with old episcopal ruins
+and ancient burying-grounds; and yonder, well-nigh in the opening of the
+Frith, gleams ruddy to the sun,--a true blood-colored blush, when all
+around is azure or pale,--the tall Red Sandstone precipices of Dunnet
+Head. It has been suggested that the planet Mars may owe its red color
+to the extensive development of some such formation as the Old Red
+Sandstone of our own planet: the existing formation in Mars may, at the
+present time, it is said, be a Red Sandstone formation. It seems much
+more probable, however, that the red flush which characterizes the whole
+of that planet,--its oceans as certainly as its continents,--should be
+rather owing to some widely-diffused peculiarity of the surrounding
+atmosphere, than to aught peculiar in the varied surface of land and
+water which that atmosphere surrounds; but certainly the extensive
+existence of such a red system might produce the effect. If the rocks
+and soils of Dunnet Head formed average specimens of those of our globe
+generally, we could look across the heavens at Mars with a disk vastly
+more 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 rising
+frequently appears from the earth.
+
+We have rounded the promontory. The beds exposed along the coast to the
+lashings 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 to
+the hammer like plates of cast iron; yonder soft, unctuous, and
+green,--a kind of chloritic sandstone. And these very various powers of
+resistance and degrees of hardness we find indicated by the rough
+irregularities of the surface. The softer parts retire in long
+trench-like hollows,--the harder stand out in sharp irregular ridges.
+Fossils abound: the bituminous beds glitter bright with glossy
+quadrangular scales, that look like sheets of black mica inclosed in
+granite. We find jaws, teeth, tubercled plates, skull-caps, spines, and
+fucoids,--"tombs among which to contemplate," says Mr. Dick, "of which
+Hervey never dreamed." The condition of complete keeping in which we
+discover some of these remains, even when exposed to the incessant dash
+of the surf, seems truly wonderful. We see scales of Holoptychius
+standing up in bold relief from the hard cherty rock that has worn from
+around them, with all the tubercles and wavy ridges of their sculpture
+entire. This state of keeping seems to be wholly owing to the curious
+chemical change that has taken place in their substance. Ere the
+skeleton of the Bruce, disinterred entire after the lapse of five
+centuries, was recommitted to the tomb, there were such measures taken
+to secure its preservation, that were it to be again disinterred even
+after as many centuries more had passed, it might be found retaining
+unbroken its gigantic proportions. There was molten pitch poured over
+the bones in a state of sufficient fluidity to permeate all their
+pores, and fill up the central hollows, and which, soon hardening around
+them, formed a bituminous matrix, in which they may lie unchanged for
+more than a thousand years. Now, exactly such was the process of keeping
+to which nature resorted with these skeletons of the Old Red Sandstone.
+The animal matter with which they were charged had been converted into a
+hard black bitumen. Like the bones of the Bruce, they are bones steeped
+in pitch; and so thoroughly is every pore and hollow still occupied,
+that, when cast into the fire, they flamed like torches. In one of the
+beds at which we have now arrived Mr. Dick found the occipital plates of
+a Holoptychius of gigantic proportions. The frontal plates measured full
+sixteen inches across, and from the nape of the neck to a little above
+the place of the eyes, full eighteen; while a single plate belonging to
+the lower part of the head measures thirteen and a half inches by seven
+and a half. I have remarked, in my little work on the Old Red
+Sandstone,--founding on a large amount of negative evidence, that a
+mediocrity of size and bulk seems to have obtained among the fish of the
+Lower Old Red, though in at least the Upper formation, a considerable
+increase in both took place. A single piece of positive evidence,
+however, outweighs whole volumes of a merely negative kind. From the
+entire plate now in my possession, which is identical with one figured
+in Mr. Noble of St. Madoes' specimen, and from the huge fragments of the
+upper plates now before me, some of which are full five-eighth parts of
+an inch in thickness, I am prepared to demonstrate that this
+Holoptychius of the Lower Old Red must have been at least thrice the
+size of the _Holoptychius Nobilissimus_ of Clashbennie.
+
+Still we pass on, though with no difficulty, over the rough contorted
+crags, worn by the surf into deep ruts and uneven ridges, gnarled
+protuberances, and crater-like hollows. The fossiliferous beds are
+still very numerous, and largely charged with remains. We see dermal
+bones, spines, scales, and jaws, projecting in high relief from the
+sea-worn surface of the ledges below, and from the weatherworn faces of
+the precipices above; for an uneven wall of crags some thirty or forty
+feet high, now runs along the shore. We have reached what seems a large
+mole, that sloping downwards athwart the beach from the precipices, like
+a huge boat-pier, runs far into the surf. We find it composed of a
+siliceous bed, so intensely compact and hard, that it has preserved its
+proportions entire, while every other rock has worn from around it. For
+century after century have the storms of the fierce north-west sent
+their long ocean-nursed waves to dash against it in foam; for century
+after century have the never-ceasing currents of the Pentland chafed
+against its steep sides, or eddied over its rough crest; and yet still
+does it remain unwasted and unworn,--its abrupt wall retaining all its
+former steepness, and every angular jutting all the original sharpness
+of edge. As we advance the scenery becomes wilder and more broken: here
+an irregular wall of rock projects from the crags towards the sea; there
+a dock-like hollow, in which the water gleams green, intrudes from the
+sea upon the crags; we pass a deep lime-encrusted cave, with which
+tradition associates some wild legends, and which, from the supposed
+resemblance of the hanging stalactites to the entrails of a large animal
+wounded in the chase, bears the name of Pudding-Gno; and then, turning
+an angle of the coast, we enter a solitary bay, that presents at its
+upper extremity a flat expanse of sand. Our walk is still over
+sepulchres charged with the remains of the long-departed. Scales of
+Holoptychius abound, scattered like coin over the surface of the ledges.
+It would seem--to borrow from Mr. Dick--as if some old lord of the
+treasury, who flourished in the days of the coal-money currency, had
+taken a squandering fit at Sanday Bay, and tossed the dingy contents of
+his treasure-chest by shovelfuls upon the rocks. Mr. Dick found in this
+locality some of his finest specimens, one of which--the inner side of
+the skull-cap of a Holoptychius, with every plate occupying its proper
+place, and the large angular holes through which the eyes looked out
+still entire--I trust to be able by and by to present to the public in a
+good engraving. There occur jaws, plates, scales spines,--the remains of
+fucoids, too, of great size and in vast abundance. Mr. Dick has
+disinterred from among the rocks of Sanday Bay flattened carbonaceous
+stems four inches in diameter. We are still within an hour's walk of
+Thurso; but in that brief hour how many marvels have we witnessed!--how
+vast an amount of the vital mechanisms of a perished creation have we
+not passed over! Our walk has been along ranges of sepulchres, greatly
+more wonderful than those of Thebes or Petraea, and mayhap a thousand
+times more ancient. There is no lack of life along the shores of the
+solitary little bay. The shriek of the sparrow-hawk mingles from the
+cliffs with the hoarse deep croak of the raven; the cormorant on some
+wave-encircled ledge, hangs out his dark wing to the breeze; the spotted
+diver, plying his vocation on the shallows beyond, dives and then
+appears, and dives and appears again, and we see the silver glitter of
+scales from his beak; and far away in the offing the sunlight falls on a
+scull of seagulls, that flutter upwards, downwards, and athwart, now in
+the air, thick as midges over some forest-brook in an evening of
+midsummer.
+
+But we again pass onwards, amid a wild ruinous scene of abrupt faults,
+detached fragments of rocks, and reversed strata: again the ledges
+assume their ordinary position and aspect, and we rise from lower to
+higher and still higher beds in the formation,--for such, as I have
+already remarked, is the general arrangement from west to east, along
+the northern coast of Caithness, of the Old Red Sandstone. The great
+Conglomerate base of the formation we find largely developed at Port
+Skerry, just where the western boundary line of the county divides it
+from the county of Sutherland; its thick upper coping of sandstone we
+see forming the tall cliffs of Dunnet Head; and the greater part of the
+space between, nearly twenty miles as the crow flies, is occupied
+chiefly by the shales, grits, and flagstones, which we have found
+charged so abundantly with the strangely-organized ichthyolites of the
+second stage of vertebrate existence. In the twenty intervening miles
+there 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 twenty
+miles are occupied, as truly enormous. And yet it is but one of three
+that occur in a single system. We reach the long flat bay of Dunnet, and
+cross its waste of sands. The incoherent coils of the sand-worm lie
+thick on the surface; and here a swarm of buzzing flies, disturbed by
+the foot, rises in a cloud from some tuft of tangled sea-weed; and here
+myriads of gray crustaceous sand-hoppers dart sidelong in the little
+pools, or vault from the drier ridges a few inches into the air. Were
+the trilobites of the Silurian system,--at one period, as their remains
+testify, more than equally abundant,--creatures of similar habits? We
+have at length arrived at the tall sandstone precipices of Dunnet, with
+their broad decaying fronts of red and yellow; but in vain may we ply
+hammer and chisel among them: not a scale, not a plate, not even the
+stain of an imperfect fucoid appears. We have reached the upper boundary
+of the Lower Old Red formation, and find it bordered by a desert devoid
+of all trace of life. Some of the characteristic types of the formation
+re-appear in the upper deposits; but though there is a reproduction of
+the original works in their more characteristic passages, if I may so
+speak, many of the readings are diverse, and the editions are all new.
+
+It is one of the circumstances of peculiar interest with which Geology
+at its present stage is invested, that there is no man of energy and
+observation who may not rationally indulge in the hope of extending its
+limits by adding to its facts. Mr. Dick, an intelligent tradesman of
+Thurso, agreeably occupies his hours of leisure, for a few months, in
+detaching from the rocks in his neighborhood their organic remains; and
+thus succeeds in adding to the existing knowledge of palaeozoic life, by
+disinterring ichthyolites which even Agassiz himself would delight to
+figure and describe. Several of the specimens in my possession, which I
+owe to the kindness of Mr. Dick, are so decidedly unique, that they
+would be regarded as strangers in the completest geological museums
+extant. It is a not uncurious fact, that when the Thurso tradesman was
+pursuing his labors of exploration among rocks beside the Pentland
+Frith, a man of similar character was pursuing exactly similar labors,
+with nearly similar results, among rocks of nearly the same era, that
+bound, on the coast of Cornwall, the British Channel. When the one was
+hammering in "Ready-money Cove," the other, at the opposite end of the
+island, was disturbing the echoes of "Pudding-Gno;" and scales, plates,
+spines, and occipital fragments of palaeozoic fishes rewarded the labors
+of both. In an article on the scientific meeting at York, which appeared
+in "Chambers' Journal" in the November of last year, the reading public
+were introduced to a singularly meritorious naturalist, Mr. Charles
+Peach,[9] a private in the mounted guard (preventive service),
+stationed on the southern coast of Cornwall, who has made several
+interesting discoveries on the outer confines of the animal kingdom,
+that have added considerably to the list of our British zoophites and
+echinodermata. The article, a finely-toned one, redolent of that
+pleasing sympathy which Mr. Robert Chambers has ever evinced with
+struggling merit, referred chiefly to Mr. Peach's labors as a
+naturalist; 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 Oolite--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 Wednesday
+the 14th August, and on Monday the 19th it behooved me to be seated at
+my desk in Edinburgh. I took boat, and crossed the Moray Frith from
+Cromarty to Nairn, and then walked on, in a very hot sun, over
+Shakspeare's Moor to Boghole, with the intention of examining the
+ichthyolite beds of Clune and Lethenbarn, and afterwards striking across
+the country to Forres, through the forest of Darnaway, where the forest
+abuts on the Findhorn, at the picturesque village of Sluie. When I had
+last crossed the moor, exactly ten years before, it was in a tremendous
+storm of rain and wind; and the dark platform of heath and bog, with its
+old ruinous castle standing sentry over it, seemed greatly more worthy
+of the genius of the dramatist, as cloud after cloud dashed over it,
+like ocean waves breaking on some low volcanic island, than it did on
+this clear, breathless afternoon, in the unclouded sunshine. But the
+sublimity of the moor on which Macbeth met the witches depends in no
+degree on that of the "heath near Forres," whether seen in foul weather
+or fair; its topography bears relation to but the mind of Shakspeare;
+and neither tile-draining nor the plough will ever lessen an inch of its
+area.
+
+The limestone quarry of Clune has been opened on the edge of an
+extensive moor, about three miles from the public road, where the
+province of Moray sweeps upwards from the broad fertile belt of
+corn-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, here
+dark with heath, there gray with lichens, stretches away on the other.
+The quarry itself is merely a piece of moor that has been trenched to
+the depth of some five or six feet from the surface, and that presents,
+at the line where the broken ground leans against the ground still
+unbroken, a low uneven frontage, somewhat resembling that of a ruinous
+stone-fence. It has been opened in the outcrop of an ichthyolite bed of
+the Lower Old Red Sandstone, on which in this locality the thin moory
+soil immediately rests, without the intervention of the common boulder
+clay of the country; and the fish-enveloping nodules, which are composed
+in this bed of a rich limestone, have been burnt, for a considerable
+number of years, for the purposes of the agriculturist and builder.
+There was a kiln smoking this evening beside the quarry; and a
+few laborers were engaged with shovel and pickaxe in cutting into
+the stratified clay of the unbroken ground, and throwing up its
+spindle-shaped nodules on the bank, as materials for their next
+burning. Antiquaries have often regretted that the sculptured marble
+of Greece and Egypt,--classic urns, to whose keeping the ashes of
+the dead had been consigned, and antique sarcophagi, roughened with
+hieroglyphics,--should have been so often condemned to the lime-kiln by
+the illiterate Copt or tasteless Mohammedan; and I could not help
+experiencing a somewhat similar feeling here. The urns and sarcophagi,
+many times more ancient than those of Greece and Egypt, and that told
+still more wondrous stories, lay thickly ranged in this strange
+catacomb,--so thickly, that there were quite enough for the lime-kiln
+and the geologists too; but I found the kiln got all, and this at a time
+when the collector finds scarce any fossils more difficult to procure
+than those of the Lower Old Red Sandstone. I asked one of the laborers
+whether he did not preserve some of the better specimens, in the hope of
+finding an occasional purchaser. Not now, he said: he used to preserve
+them in the days of Lady Cumming of Altyre; but since her ladyship's
+death, no one in the neighborhood seemed to care for them, and strangers
+rarely came the way.
+
+The first nodule I laid open contained a tolerably well-preserved
+Cheiracanthus; the second, an indifferent specimen of Glyptolepis; and
+three others, in succession, remains of Coccosteus. Almost every nodule
+of one especial layer near the top incloses its organism. The coloring
+is frequently of great beauty. In the Cromarty, as in the Caithness,
+Orkney, and Gamrie specimens, the animal matter with which the bones
+were originally charged has been converted into a dark glossy bitumen,
+and the plates and scales glitter from a ground of opaque gray, like
+pieces of japan-work suspended against a rough-cast wall. But here, as
+in the other Morayshire deposits, the plates and scales exist in nearly
+their original condition, as bone that retains its white color in the
+centre of the specimens, where its bulk is greatest, and is often
+beautifully tinged at its thinner edges by the iron with which the stone
+is impregnated. It is not rare to find some of the better preserved
+fossils colored in a style that reminds one of the more gaudy fishes of
+the tropics. We see the body of the ichthyolite, with its finely
+arranged scales, of a pure snow-white. Along the edges, where the
+original substance of the bone, combining with the oxide of the matrix,
+has formed a phosphate of iron, there runs a delicately shaded band of
+plum-blue; while the out-spread fins, charged still more largely with
+the oxide, are of a deep red. The description of Mr. Patrick Duff, in
+his "Geology of Moray," so redolent of the quiet enthusiasm of the true
+fossil-hunter, especially applies to the ichthyolites of this quarry,
+and to those of a neighboring opening in the same bed,--the quarry of
+Lethenbarn. "The nodules," says Mr. Duff, "which in their external shape
+resemble the stones used in the game of curling, but are elliptical
+bodies instead of round, lie in the shale on their flat sides, in a line
+with the dip. When taken out, they remind one of water-worn pebbles, or
+rather boulders of a shore. A smart blow on the edge splits them along
+on the major axis, and exposes the interesting inclosure. The practised
+geologist knows well the thrilling interest attending the breaking up of
+the nodule: the uninitiated cannot sympathize with it. There is no time
+when a fossil looks so well as when first exposed. There is a clammy
+moisture on the surface of the scales or plates, which brings out the
+beautiful coloring, and adds brilliancy to the enamel. Exposure to the
+weather soon dims the lustre; and even in a cabinet an old specimen is
+easily known by its tarnished aspect."
+
+I found at Clune no ichthyolite to which the geologists have not been
+already introduced, or with which I had not been acquainted previously
+in 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. It
+seems to have been a small delicately-formed fish; its head covered with
+plates; its body with round scales of a size intermediate between those
+of the Osteolepis and Cheiracanthus; its anterior dorsal fin placed, as
+in the Dipterus, Diplopterus, and Glyptolepis, directly opposite to its
+ventral fins; the enamelled surfaces of the minute scales were fretted
+with microscopic undulating ridges, that radiated from the centre to the
+circumference; similar furrows traversed the occipital plates; and the
+fins, unfurnished with spines, were formed, as in the Dipterus and
+Diplopterus, of thick-set, enamelled rays. The posterior fins and tail
+of the creature were not preserved. I may mention, for the satisfaction
+of the geologist, that I saw this unique fossil in the possession of the
+late Lady Cumming of Altyre, a few weeks previous to the lamented death
+of her ladyship; and that, on assuring her it was as new in relation to
+the Cromarty and Caithness fish-beds as to those of Moray, she intimated
+an intention of forthwith sending a drawing of it to Agassiz; but her
+untimely decease in all probability interfered with the design, and I
+have not since heard of this new genus of ichthyolite, or of her
+ladyship's interesting specimen, hitherto apparently its only
+representative and memorial. In the Morayshire, as in the Cromarty beds,
+the limestone nodules take very generally the form of the fish which
+they inclose: they are stone coffins, carefully moulded to express the
+outline of the corpses within. Is the fish entire?--the nodule is of a
+spindle form, broader at the head and narrower at the tail. Is it
+slightly curved, in the attitude of violent death?--the nodule has also
+its slight curve. Is it bent round, so that the extremities of the
+creature 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 old
+mummy, conforms to the outline of the organism which it incloses. It is
+further worthy of remark, too, that a large fish forms generally a
+large nodule, and a small fish a small one. Here, for instance, is a
+nodule fifteen inches in length, here a nodule of only three inches, and
+here a nodule of intermediate size, that measures eight inches. We find
+that the large nodule contains a Cheirolepis thirteen inches in length,
+the small one a Diplacanthus of but two and a half inches in length, and
+the intermediate one a Cheiracanthus of seven inches. The size of the
+fish evidently regulated that of the nodule. The coffin is generally as
+good a fit in size as in form; and the bulk of the nodule bears almost
+always a definite proportion to the amount of animal matter round which
+it had formed. I was a good deal struck, a few weeks ago, in glancing
+over a series of experiments conducted for a different purpose by a lady
+of singular ingenuity,--Mrs. Marshall, the inventor and patentee of the
+beautiful marble-looking plaster, _Intonacco_,--to find what seemed a
+similar principle illustrated in the compositions of her various
+cements. These are all formed of a basis of lime, mixed in certain
+proportions with organic matter. The reader must be familiar with
+cements of this kind long known among the people, and much used in the
+repairing of broken pottery, such as a cement compounded of quicklime
+made 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 of
+eggs. In Mrs. Marshall's cements, the organic matter is variously
+compounded of both animal and vegetable substances, while the earth
+generally employed is sulphate of lime; and the result is a
+close-grained marble-like composition, considerably harder than the
+sulphate in its original crystalline state. She had deposited, in one
+set of her experiments, the calcareous earth, mixed up with sand, clay,
+and other extraneous matters, on some of the commoner molluscs of our
+shores; and universally found that the mass, incoherent everywhere
+else, had acquired solidity wherever it had been permeated by the
+animal matter of the molluscs. Each animal, in proportion to its size,
+is found to retain, as in the fossiliferous spindles of the Old Red
+Sandstone, its coherent nodule around it. One point in the natural
+phenomenon, however, still remains unillustrated by the experiments of
+Mrs. Marshall. We see in them the animal matter giving solidity to the
+lime in immediate contact with it; but we do not see it possessing any
+such affinity for it as to form, in an argillaceous compound, like that
+of the ichthyolite beds, a centre of attraction powerful enough to draw
+together the lime diffused throughout the mass. It still remains for the
+geologic chemist to discover on what principle masses of animal matter
+should form the attracting nuclei of limestone nodules.
+
+The declining sun warned me that I had lingered rather longer than was
+prudent among the ichthyolites of Clune; and so, striking in an eastern
+direction across a flat moor, through which I found the schistose gneiss
+of the district protruding in masses resembling half-buried boulders, I
+entered 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 and
+landmark, by the sun, and of being not sure at times whether I had skill
+enough to play the part of the bush-ranger under his guidance. A sultry
+day had clarified and cooled down into a clear, balmy evening; the slant
+beam was falling red on a thousand tall trunks,--here gleaming along
+some bosky vista, to which the white silky wood-moths, fluttering by
+scores, and the midge and the mosquito dancing by myriads, imparted a
+motty gold-dust atmosphere; there penetrating in straggling rays far
+into some gloomy recess, and resting in patches of flame, amid the
+darkness, on gnarled stem, or moss-cushioned stump, or gray beard-like
+lichen. I dislodged, in passing through the underwood, many a tiny
+tenant of the forest, that had a better right to harbor among its wild
+raspberries and junipers than I had to disturb them,--velvety
+night-moths, that had sat with folded wings under the leaves, awaiting
+the twilight, and that now took short blind flights of some two or three
+yards, to get out of my way,--and robust, well-conditioned spiders,
+whose elastic, well-tightened lines snapped sharp before me as I pressed
+through, and then curled up on the scarce perceptible breeze, like
+broken strands of wool. But every man, however Whiggish in his
+inclinations, entertains a secret respect for the powerful; and though I
+passed within a few feet of a large wasps' nest, suspended to a jutting
+bough of furze, the wasps I took especial care _not_ to disturb. I
+pressed on, first through a broad belt of the forest, occupied mainly by
+melancholy Scotch firs; next through an opening, in which I found an
+American-looking village of mingled cottages, gardens, fields and wood;
+and then through another broad forest-belt, in which the ground is more
+varied with height and hollow than in the first, and in which I found
+only forest trees, mostly oaks and beeches. I heard the roar of the
+Findhorn before me, and premised I was soon to reach the river; but
+whether I should pursue it upwards or downwards, in order to find the
+ferry at Sluie, was more than I knew. There lay in my track a beautiful
+hillock, that reclines on the one side to the setting sun, and sinks
+sheer on the other, in a mural sandstone precipice, into the Findhorn.
+The trees open over it, giving full access to the free air and the
+sunshine; and I found it as thickly studded over with berries as if it
+had been the special care of half a dozen gardeners. The red light fell
+yet redder on the thickly inlaid cranberries and stone-brambles of the
+slope, and here and there, though so late in the season, on a patch of
+wild strawberries; while over all, dark, delicate blueberries, with
+their flour-bedusted coats, were studded as profusely as if they had
+been peppered over it by a hailstone cloud. I have seldom seen such a
+school-boy's paradise, and I was just thinking what a rare discovery I
+would have deemed it had I made it thirty years sooner, when I heard a
+whooping in the wood, and four little girls, the eldest scarcely eleven,
+came bounding up to the hillock, their lips and fingers already dyed
+purple, and dropped themselves down among the berries with a shout. They
+were sadly startled to find they had got a companion in so solitary a
+recess; but I succeeded in convincing them that they were in no manner
+of danger from him; and on asking whether there was any of them skilful
+enough 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 the
+village in the forest. Hours had elapsed since the master had _let them
+go_, but in so fine an evening the berries wouldn't, and so they were
+still in the wood. I accompanied them to Sluie, and was ferried over the
+river in a salmon coble. There is no point where the Findhorn,
+celebrated among our Scotch streams for the beauty of its scenery, is so
+generally interesting as in the neighborhood of this village; forest and
+river,--each a paragon in its kind,--uniting for several miles together
+what is most choice and characteristic in the peculiar features of both.
+In no locality is the surface of the great forest of Darnaway more
+undulated, or its trees nobler; and nowhere does the river present a
+livelier succession of eddying pools and rippling shallows, or fret
+itself in sweeping on its zig-zag course, now to the one bank, now to
+the other, against a more picturesque and imposing series of cliffs. But
+to the geologist the locality possesses an interest peculiar to itself.
+The precipices on both sides are charged with fossils of the Upper Old
+Red Sandstone: they form part of a vast indurated graveyard, excavated
+to the depth of an hundred feet by the ceaseless wear of the stream; and
+when 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 in
+handfuls. But the closing evening left me neither light nor time for the
+work of exploration. I heard the curfew in the woods from the yet
+distant town, and dark night had set in long ere I reached Forres. On
+the following morning I took a seat in one of the south coaches, and got
+on to Elgin an hour before noon.
+
+Elgin, one of the finest of our northern towns, occupies the centre of a
+richly fossiliferous district, which wants only better sections to rank
+it among the most interesting in the kingdom. An undulating platform of
+Old Red Sandstone, in which we see, largely developed in one locality,
+the lower formation of the Coccosteus, and in another, still more
+largely, the upper formation of the _Holoptychius Nobilissimus_, forms,
+if I may so speak, the foundation deposit of the district,--the true
+geologic plane of the country; and, thickly scattered over this plane,
+we find numerous detached knolls and patches of the Weald and the
+Oolite, deposited like heaps of travelled soil, or of lime shot down by
+the agriculturist on the surface of a field. The Old Red platform is
+mottled by the outliers of a comparatively modern time: the sepulchral
+mounds of later races, that lived and died during the reptile age of the
+world, repose on the surface of an ancient burying-ground, charged with
+remains of the long anterior age of the fish; and over all, as a general
+covering, rest the red boulder-clay and the vegetable mould. Mr. Duff,
+in his valuable "Sketch of the Geology of Moray," enumerates five
+several localities in the neighborhood of Elgin in which there occur
+outliers of the Weald; though, of course, in a country so flat, and in
+which the diluvium lies deep, we cannot hold that all have been
+discovered. And though the outliers of the Oolite have not yet been
+ascertained to be equally numerous, they seem of greater extent; the
+isolated masses detached from them by the denuding agencies lie thick
+over extensive areas; and in working out the course of improvement which
+has already rendered Elginshire the garden of the north, the ditcher at
+one time touches on some bed of shale charged with the characteristic
+Ammonites and Belemnites of the system, and at another on some
+calcareous sandstone bed, abounding with its Pectens, its Plagiostoma,
+and its Pinnae. Some of these outliers, whether Wealden or Oolitic, are
+externally of great beauty. They occur in the parish of Lhanbryde, about
+three miles to the east of Elgin, in the form of green pyramidal
+hillocks, mottled with trees, and at Linksfield, as a confluent group of
+swelling grassy mounds. And from their insulated character, and the
+abundance of organisms which they inclose, they serve to remind one of
+those green pyramids of Central America in which the traveller finds
+deposited the skeleton remains of extinct races. It has been suggested
+by Mr. Duff, in his "Sketch,"--a suggestion which the late
+Sutherlandshire discoveries of Mr. Robertson of Inverugie have tended to
+confirm,--that the Oolite and Weald of Moray do not, in all probability,
+represent consecutive formations: they seem to bear the same sort of
+relation to each other as that mutually borne by the Mountain Limestone
+and the Coal Measures. The one, of lacustrine or of estuary origin,
+exhibits chiefly the productions of the land and its fresh waters; the
+other, as decidedly of marine origin, is charged with the remains of
+animals whose proper home was the sea. But the productions, though
+dissimilar, were in all probability contemporary, just as the crabs and
+periwinkles of the Frith of Forth are contemporary with the frogs and
+lymnea of Flanders moss.
+
+I had little time for exploration in the neighborhood of Elgin; but that
+little, through the kindness of my friend Mr. Duff, I was enabled to
+economize. We first visited together the outlier of the Weald at
+Linksfield. It may be found rising in the landscape, a short mile below
+the town, in the form of a green undulating hillock, half cut through by
+a limestone quarry; and the section thus furnished is of great beauty.
+The basis on which the hillock rests is formed of the well-marked
+calcareous band in the Upper Old Red, known as the Cornstone, which we
+find occurring here, as elsewhere, as a pale concretionary limestone of
+considerable richness, though in some patches largely mixed with a green
+argillaceous earth, and in others passing into a siliceous chert. Over
+the pale-colored base, the section of the hillock is ribbed like an
+onyx: for about forty feet, bands of gray, green, and blue clays
+alternate with bands of cream-colored, light-green, and dark-blue
+limestones; 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 cautious
+induction, that the boulder-clay not only _overlies_, but also
+_underlies_, this fresh-water deposit; a bed of unequivocally the same
+origin and character with that at the top lying intercalated, as if
+filling up two low flat vaults, between the upper surface of the
+Cornstone and the lower band of the Weald. It would, however, be as
+unsafe to infer that this intervening bed is older than the overlying
+ones, as to infer that the rubbish which chokes up the vaulted dungeon
+of an old castle is more ancient than the arch that stretches over it.
+However introduced into the cavity which it occupies,--whether by
+land-springs or otherwise,--we find it containing fragments of the green
+and pale limestones that lie above, just as the rubbish of the castle
+dungeon might be found to contain fragments of the castle itself. When
+the bed of red boulder-clay was intercalated, the rocks of the overlying
+Wealden were exactly the same sort of indurated substances that they are
+now, and were yielding to the operations of some denuding agent. The
+alternating clays and limestones of this outlier, each of which must
+have been in turn an upper layer at the bottom of some lake or estuary,
+are abundantly fossiliferous. In some the fresh-water character of the
+deposit is well marked: Cyprides are so exceedingly numerous in some of
+the bands, that they impart to the stone an Oolitic appearance; while
+others of a dark-colored limestone we see strewed over, like the oozy
+bottom of a modern lake, with specimens of what seem Paludina, Cyclas,
+and Planorbus. Some of the other shells are more equivocal: a Mytilus or
+Modiola, which abounds in some of the bands, may have been either a sea
+or a fresh-water shell; and a small oyster and Astarte seem decidedly
+marine. Remains of fish are very abundant,--scales, plates, teeth,
+ichthyodorulites, and in some instances entire ichthyolites. I saw, in
+the collection of Mr. Duff, a small but very entire specimen of
+_Lepidotus minor_, with the fins spread out on the limestone, as in an
+anatomical preparation, and almost every plate and scale in its place.
+Some of his specimens of ichthyodorulites, too, are exceedingly
+beautiful, and of great size, resembling jaws thickly set with teeth,
+the apparent teeth being mere knobs ranged along the concave edge of the
+bone, the surface of which we see gracefully fluted and enamelled. What
+most struck me, however, in glancing over the drawers of Mr. Duff, was
+the character of the Ganoid scales of this deposit. The Ganoid order in
+the days of the Weald was growing old; and two new orders,--the Ctenoid
+and Cycloid,--were on the eve of taking its place in creation. Hitherto
+it had comprised at least two-thirds of all the fish that had existed
+ever since the period in which fish first began; and almost every Ganoid
+fish had its own peculiar pattern of scale. But it would now seem as if
+well nigh all the simpler patterns were exhausted, and as if, in order
+to give the variety which nature loves, forms of the most eccentric
+types had to be resorted to. With scarce any exception save that
+furnished by the scales of the _Lepidotus minor_, which are plain
+lozenge-shaped plates, thickly japanned, the forms are strangely complex
+and irregular, easily expressible by the pencil, but beyond the reach of
+the pen. The remains of reptiles have been found occasionally, though
+rarely, in this outlier of the Weald,--the vertebra of a Plesiosaurus,
+the femur of some Chelonian reptile, and a large fluted tooth, supposed
+Saurian.
+
+I would fain have visited some of the neighboring outliers of the
+Oolite, but time did not permit. Mr. Duff's collection, however, enabled
+me to form a tolerably adequate estimate of their organic contents.
+Viewed in the group, these present nearly the same aspect as the
+organisms of the Upper Lias of Pabba. There is in the same abundance
+large Pinnae, and well-relieved Pectens, both ribbed and smooth; the same
+abundance, too, of Belemnites and Ammonites of resembling type. Both the
+Moray outliers and the Pabba deposit have their Terebratulae, Gervilliae,
+Plagiostoma, Cardiadae, their bright Ganoid scales, and their
+imperfectly-preserved lignites. They belong apparently to nearly the
+same period, and must have been formed in nearly similar
+circumstances,--the one on the western, the other on the eastern coast
+of a country then covered by the vegetation of the Oolite, and now
+known, with reference to an antiquity of but yesterday, as the ancient
+kingdom of Scotland. I saw among the Ammonites of these outliers at
+least one species, which, I believe, has not yet been found elsewhere,
+and which has been named, after Mr. Robertson of Inverugie, the
+gentleman who first discovered it, _Ammonites Robertsoni_. Like most of
+the 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 the
+evening of this day in visiting, with Mr. Duff, the Upper Old Red
+Sandstones of Scat-Craig. In Elginshire, as in Fife and elsewhere, the
+Upper Old Red consists of three grand divisions,--a superior bed of pale
+yellow sandstone, which furnishes the finest building-stone anywhere
+found in the north of Scotland,--an intermediate calcareous bed, known
+technically as the Cornstone,--and an inferior bed of sandstone,
+chiefly, in this locality, of a grayish-red color, and generally very
+incoherent in its structure. The three beds, as shown by the fossil
+contents of the yellow sandstones above, and of the grayish-red
+sandstones below, are members of the same formation,--a formation which,
+in Scotland at least, does not possess an organism in common with the
+Middle Old Red formation; that of the Cephalaspis, as developed in
+Forfarshire, Stirling, and Ayr, or the Lower Old Red formation; that of
+the Coccosteus, as developed in Caithness, Cromarty, Inverness, and
+Banff shires, and in so many different localities in Moray. The
+Sandstones at Scat-Craig belong to the grayish-red base of the Upper Old
+Red formation. They lie about five miles south of Elgin, not far distant
+from where the palaeozoic deposits of the coast-side lean against the
+great primary nucleus of the interior. We pass from the town, through
+deep rich fields, carefully cultivated and well inclosed: the country,
+as we advance on the moorlands, becomes more open; the homely cottage
+takes the place of the neat villa; the brown heath, of the grassy lea;
+and unfenced patches of corn here and there alternate with plantings of
+dark sombre firs, in their mediocre youth. At length we near the
+southern boundary of the landscape,--an undulating moory ridge,
+partially planted; and see where a deep gap in the outline opens a way
+to the upland districts of the province, a lively hill-stream descending
+towards the east through the bed which it has scooped out for itself in
+a soft red conglomerate. The section we have come to explore lies along
+its course: it has been the grand excavator in the densely occupied
+burial-ground over which it flows; but its labors have produced but a
+shallow 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 a
+hundred fathoms. The shallow section, however, has been well wrought;
+and its suit of fossils is one of the finest, both from the great
+specific variety which they exhibit, and their excellent state of
+keeping, that the Upper Old Red Sandstone has anywhere furnished.
+
+So great is the incoherency of the matrix, that we can dig into it with
+our chisels, unassisted by the hammer. It reminds us of the loose
+gravelly soil of an ancient graveyard, partially consolidated by a
+night's frost,--a resemblance still further borne out by the condition
+and appearance of its organic contents. The numerous bones disseminated
+throughout the mass do not exist, as in so many of the Upper Old Red
+Sandstone rocks, as mere films or impressions, but in their original
+forms, retaining bulk as well as surface: they are true graveyard bones,
+which may be detached entire from the inclosing mass, and of which, were
+we sufficiently well acquainted with the anatomy of the long-perished
+races to which they belonged, entire skeletons might be reconstructed.
+I succeeded in disinterring, during my short stay, an occipital plate of
+great 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 fine
+scale of _Holoptychius Nobilissimus_, and a small tooth, bent somewhat
+like a nail that had been drawn out of its place by two opposite
+wrenches, and from the internal structure of which Professor Owen has
+bestowed 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 a
+peculiarity in the sculpture of the scale, is the identical genus
+Dendrodus of Professor Owen, named from a peculiarity in the structure
+of the teeth. Those teeth of the genus Holoptychius, whether of the
+Lower or Upper Old Red, that belong to the second or _reptile_ row with
+which the creature's jaws were furnished, present in the cross section
+the appearance of numerous branches, like those of trees, radiating from
+a centre like spokes from the nave of a wheel; and their arborescent
+aspect suggested to the Professor the name Dendrodus. It seems truly
+wonderful, when one but considers it, to what minute and obscure
+ramifications the variety of pattern, specific and generic, which nature
+so loves to preserve, is found to descend. We see great diversity of
+mode and style in the architecture of a city built of brick; but while
+the houses are different, the bricks are always the same. It is not so
+in nature. The bricks are as dissimilar as the houses. We find, for
+instance, those differences, specific and generic, that obtain among
+fishes, both recent and extinct, descending to even the microscopic
+structure of their teeth. There is more variety of pattern,--in most
+cases of very elegant pattern,--in the sliced fragments of the teeth of
+the ichthyolites of a single formation, than in the carved blocks of an
+extensive calico-print yard. Each species has its own distinct pattern,
+as if in all the individuals of which it consisted the same block had
+been employed to stamp it; each genus has its own general _type_ of
+pattern, as if the same inventive idea, variously altered and modified,
+had been wrought upon in all. In the genus Dendrodus, for instance, it
+is the generic type, that from a central nave there should radiate,
+spoke-like, a number of leafy branches; but in the several species, the
+branches, if I may so express myself, belong to different shrubs, and
+present dissimilar outlines. There are no repetitions of earlier
+patterns to be found among the generically different ichthyolites of
+other formations. We see in the world of fashion old modes of ornament
+continually reviving: the range of invention seems limited; and we find
+it revolving, in consequence, in an irregular, ever-returning cycle. But
+Infinite resource did not need to travel in a circle, and so we find no
+return or doublings in its course. It has appeared to me, that an
+argument against the transmutation of species, were any such needed,
+might be founded on those inherent peculiarities of structure that are
+ascertained thus to pervade the entire texture of the framework of
+animals. If we find one building differing from another merely in
+external form, we have no difficulty in conceiving how, by additions and
+alterations, they might be made to present a uniform appearance;
+transmutation, development, progression,--if one may use such
+terms,--seem possible in such circumstances. But if the buildings differ
+from each other, not only in external form, but also in every brick and
+beam, bolt and nail, no mere scheme of external alteration can induce a
+real resemblance. Every brick must be taken down, and every beam and
+belt removed. The problem cannot be wrought by the remodelling of an old
+house: there is no other mode of solving it save by the erection of a
+new one.
+
+Among the singularly interesting Old Red fossils of Mr. Duff's
+collection I saw the impression of a large ichthyolite from the superior
+yellow sandstone of the Upper Old Red, which had been brought him by a
+country diker only a few days before. In breaking open a building stone,
+the diker had found the inside of it, he said, covered over with
+curiously carved flowers; and, knowing that Mr. Duff had a turn for
+curiosities, he had brought the flowers to him. The supposed flowers are
+the sculpturings on the scales of the ichthyolite; and, true to the
+analogy of the diker, on at least a first glance, they may be held to
+resemble the rather equivocal florets of a cheap wall-paper, or of an
+ornamental tile. The specimen exhibits the impressions of four rows of
+oblong rectangular scales. One row contains seven of these, and another
+eight. Each scale averages about an inch and a quarter in length, by
+about three quarters of an inch in breadth; and the parallelogramical
+field which it presents is occupied by a curious piece of carving. By a
+sort of pictorial illusion, the device appears as if in motion: it would
+seem as if a sudden explosion had taken place in the middle of the
+field, and as if the numerous dislodged fragments, propelled all around
+by the central force, were hurrying to the sides. But these seeming
+fragments were not elevations in the original scale, but depressions.
+They almost seem as if they had been indented into it, in the way one
+sees the first heavy drops of a thunder shower indented into a platform
+of damp sea sand; and this last peculiarity of appearance seems to have
+suggested the name which this sole representative of an extinct genus
+has received during the course of the last few weeks from Agassiz. An
+Elgin gentleman forwarded to Neufchatel a singularly fine calotype of
+the fossil, taken by Mr. Adamson of Edinburgh, with a full-size drawing
+of a few of the scales; and from the calotype and the drawing the
+naturalist has decided that the genus is entirely new, and that
+henceforth it shall bear the descriptive name of Stagonolepis, or
+drop-scale. As I looked for the first time on this broken fragment of an
+ichthyolite,--the sole representative and record of an entire genus of
+creatures that had been once called into existence to fulfil some wise
+purpose of the Creator long since accomplished,--I bethought me of
+Rogers'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 the
+dismembered Hercules, which so awakened the enthusiasm of the poet.
+Strange peculiarities of being,--singular habits, curious instincts, the
+history of a race from the period when the all-producing Word had spoken
+the first individuals into being, until, in circumstances unfitted for
+their longer existence, or in some great annihilating catastrophe, the
+last individuals perished,--were all associated with this piece of
+sculptured stone; but, like some ancient inscription of the desert,
+written in an unknown character and dead tongue, its dark meanings were
+fast locked up, and no inhabitant of earth possessed the key. Does that
+key anywhere exist, save in the keeping of Him who knows all and
+produced all, and to whom there is neither past nor future? Or is there
+a record of creation kept by those higher intelligences,--the first-born
+of spiritual natures,--whose existence stretches far into the eternity
+that has gone by, and who possess, as their inheritance, the whole of
+the eternity to come? We may be at least assured, that nothing can be
+too 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 visit
+to Scat-Craig terminated the explorations of my Summer Ramble. During
+the summer of the present year I have found time to follow up some of
+the discoveries of the last. In the course of a hasty visit to the
+island of Eigg, I succeeded in finding _in situ_ reptile remains of the
+kind which I had found along the shores in the previous season, in
+detached water-rolled masses. The deposit in which they occur lies deep
+in the Oolite. In some parts of the island there rest over it
+alternations of beds of trap and sedimentary strata, to the height of
+more than a thousand feet; but in the line of coast which intervenes
+between the farm-house of Keill and the picturesque shieling described
+in my fifth chapter, it has been laid bare by the sea immediately under
+the cliffs, and we may see it jutting out at a low angle from among the
+shingle and rolled stones of the beach for several hundred feet
+together, charged everywhere with the teeth, plates, and scales of
+Ganoid fishes, and somewhat more sparingly, with the ribs, vertebrae, and
+digital bones of saurians. But a full description of this interesting
+deposit, as its discovery belongs to the Summer Ramble of a year, the
+ramblings 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--Medusae
+     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--Oolitic
+     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 of
+Egypt, he made a voyage to Grand Cairo, on purpose to take the measure
+of a pyramid, and that, so soon as he had set himself right in that
+particular, he returned to his native country with great satisfaction."
+My love of knowledge has not carried me altogether so far, chiefly, I
+dare say, because my voyaging opportunities have not been quite so
+great. Ever since my ramble of last year, however, I have felt, I am
+afraid, a not less interest in the geologic antiquities of Small Isles
+than that cherished by "Spectator" with respect to the comparatively
+modern antiquities of Egypt; and as, in a late journey to these islands
+the object of my visit involved but a single point, nearly as insulated
+as the dimensions of a pyramid, I think I cannot do better than shelter
+myself under the authority of the short-faced gentleman who wrote
+articles in the reign of Queen Anne. I had found in Eigg, in
+considerable abundance and fine keeping, reptile remains of the Oolite;
+but they had occurred in merely rolled masses, scattered along the
+beach. I had not discovered the bed in which they had been originally
+deposited, and could neither tell its place in the system, nor its
+relation to the other rocks of the island. The discovery was but a
+half-discovery,--the half of a broken medal, with the date on the
+missing portion. And so, immediately after the rising of the General
+Assembly in June last [1845], I set out to revisit Small Isles,
+accompanied by my friend Mr. Swanson, with the determination of
+acquainting myself with the burial-place of the old Oolitic reptiles, if
+it lay anywhere open to the light.
+
+We found the Betsey riding in the anchoring ground at Isle Ornsay, in
+her foul-weather dishabille, with her topmast struck and in the yard,
+and her cordage and sides exhibiting in their weathered aspect the
+influence of the bleaching rains and winds of the previous winter. She
+was at once in an undress and getting old, and, as seen from the shore
+through rain and spray,--for the weather was coarse and boisterous,--she
+had apparently gained as little in her good looks from either
+circumstance as most other ladies do. We lay storm-bound for three days
+at Isle Ornsay, watching from the window of Mr. Swanson's dwelling the
+incessant showers sweeping down the loch. On the morning of Saturday,
+the gale, though still blowing right ahead, had moderated; the minister
+was anxious to visit this island charge, after his absence of several
+weeks from them at the Assembly; and I, more than half afraid that my
+term of furlough might expire ere I had reached my proposed scene of
+exploration, was as anxious as he; and so we both resolved, come what
+might, on doggedly beating our way adown the Sound of Sleat to Small
+Isles. If the wind does not fail us, said my friend, we have little
+more than a day's work before us, and shall get into Eigg about
+midnight. We had but one of our seamen aboard, for John Stewart was
+engaged with his potato crop at home; but the minister was content, in
+the 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 in
+succession the deep withdrawing lochs of the mainland, now clearing
+promontory after promontory in the island district of Sleat. In a few
+hours we had left a bulky schooner, that had quitted Isle Ornsay at the
+same 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 nearly
+abreast of the rocky point of Sleat, and about half-way advanced in our
+voyage, it had died into a calm; and for full twenty hours thereafter
+there was no more sailing for the Betsey. We saw the sun set, and the
+clouds gather, and the pelting rain come down, and nightfall, and
+morning break, and the noon-tide hour pass by, and still were we
+floating idly in the calm. I employed the few hours of the Saturday
+evening that intervened between the time of our arrest and nightfall, in
+fishing from our little boat for medusae with a bucket. They had risen by
+myriads from the bottom as the wind fell, and were mottling the green
+depths of the water below and around far as the eye could reach. Among
+the commoner kinds,--the kind with the four purple rings on the area of
+its flat bell, which ever vibrates without sound, and the kind with the
+fringe of dingy brown, and the long stinging tails, of which I have
+sometimes borne from my swimming excursions the nettle-like smart for
+hours,--there were at least two species of more unusual occurrence, both
+of them very minute. The one, scarcely larger than a shilling, bore the
+common umbiliferous form, but had its area inscribed by a pretty
+orange-colored wheel; the other, still more minute, and which presented
+in the water the appearance of a small hazel-nut of a brownish-yellow
+hue, I was disposed to set down as a species of beroe. On getting one
+caught, however, and transferred to a bowl, I found that the
+brownish-colored, melon-shaped mass, though ribbed like the beroe, did
+not represent the true outline of the animal; it formed merely the
+centre of a transparent gelatinous bell, which, though scarce visible in
+even the bowl, proved a most efficient instrument of motion. Such were
+its 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 their
+slow but persevering flappings, seemed greatly at the mercy of the tide,
+and progressed all one way,--shot, as it willed, backwards, forwards, or
+athwart. As the evening closed, and the depths beneath presented a
+dingier and yet dingier green, until at length all had become black, the
+distinctive colors of the acelpha,--the purple, the orange, and the
+brown,--faded and disappeared, and the creatures hung out, instead,
+their pale phosphoric lights, like the lanterns of a fleet hoisted high
+to prevent collision in the darkness. Now they gleamed dim and
+indistinct as they drifted undisturbed through the upper depths, and now
+they flamed out bright and green, like beaten torches, as the tide
+dashed them against the vessel's sides. I bethought me of the gorgeous
+description 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. As
+there was, however, nothing to do in the calm, we decided that our first
+watch should consist of our single seaman, and the second of the
+minister and his friend. The clouds, which had been thickening for
+hours, now broke in torrents of rain, and old Alister got into his
+water-proof oil-skin and souwester, and we into our beds. The seams of
+the Betsey's deck had opened so sadly during the past winter, as to be
+no longer water-tight, and the little cabin resounded drearily in the
+darkness, like some dropping cave, to the ceaseless patter of the
+leakage. We continued to sleep, however, somewhat longer than we
+ought,--for Alister had been unwilling to waken the minister; but we at
+length got up, and, relieving watch the first from the tedium of being
+rained upon and doing nothing, watch the second was set to do nothing
+and be rained upon in turn. We had drifted during the night-time on a
+kindly tide, considerably nearer our island, which we could now see
+looming blue and indistinct through the haze some seven or eight miles
+away. The rain ceased a little before nine, and the clouds rose,
+revealing the surrounding lands, island and main,--Rum, with its abrupt
+mountain-peaks,--the dark Cuchullins of Skye,--and, far to the
+south-east, where Inverness bounds on Argyllshire, some of the tallest
+hills in Scotland,--among the rest, the dimly-seen Ben-Wevis. But long
+wreaths of pale gray cloud lay lazily under their summits, like shrouds
+half drawn from off the features of the dead, to be again spread over
+them, and we concluded that the dry weather had not yet come. A little
+before noon we were surrounded for miles by an immense but
+thinly-spread shoal of porpoises, passing in pairs to the south, to
+prosecute, on their own behalf, the herring fishing in Lochfine or
+Gareloch; and for a full hour the whole sea, otherwise so silent, became
+vocal with long-breathed blowings, as if all the steam-tenders of all
+the railways in Britain were careering around us; and we could see
+slender jets of spray rising in the air on every side, and glossy black
+backs and pointed fins, that looked as if they had been fashioned out of
+Kilkenny marble, wheeling heavily along the surface. The clouds again
+began to close as the shoal passed, but we could now hear in the
+stillness the measured sound of oars, drawn vigorously against the
+gunwale in the direction of the island of Eigg, still about five miles
+distant, 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 sounds
+in the dead calm had preceded the boat by miles,--by four active young
+men, who seemed wonderfully glad to see their pastor; and then, amid the
+thickening showers, which had recommenced heavy as during the night,
+they set themselves to tow us into the harbor. The poor fellows had a
+long and fatiguing pull, and were thoroughly drenched ere, about six
+o'clock in the evening, we had got up to our anchoring ground, and
+moored, as usual, in the open tideway between _Eilan Chasteil_ and the
+main island. There was still time enough for an evening discourse, and
+the 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 the
+morning of Monday arose. The ceaseless patter made dull music on deck
+and 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 of
+the leakage, like Bacon's philosopher surveying a tempest from the
+shore. But the minister was somewhat less fortunate, and had no little
+trouble in diverting an ill-conditioned drop that had made a dead set at
+his pillow. I was now a full week from Edinburgh, and had seen and done
+nothing; and, were another week to pass after the same manner,--as, for
+aught that appeared, might well happen,--I might just go home again, as
+I had come, with my labor for my pains. In the course of the afternoon,
+however, the weather unexpectedly cleared up, and we set out somewhat
+impatiently through the wet grass, to visit a cave a few hundred yards
+to the west of _Naomh Fraingh_, in which it had been said the
+Protestants of the island might meet for the purposes of religious
+worship, were they to be ejected from the cottage erected by Mr.
+Swanson, in which they had worshipped hitherto. We reexamined, in the
+passing, the pitch stone dike mentioned in a former chapter, and the
+charnel cave of Frances; but I found nothing to add to my former
+descriptions, and little to modify, save that perhaps the cave appeared
+less dark, in at least the outer half of its area, than it had seemed to
+me in the former year, when examined by torch-light, and that the
+straggling twilight, as it fell on the ropy sides, green with moss and
+mould, and on the damp bone-strewn floor, overmantled with a still
+darker crust, like that of a stagnant pool, seemed also to wear its tint
+of 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 opening
+in a dingy-colored precipice of augitic trap,--a cave roomy and lofty as
+the nave of a cathedral, and ever resounding to the dash of the sea; but
+though it could have amply accommodated a congregation of at least five
+hundred, we found the way far too long and difficult for at least the
+weak and the elderly, and in some places inaccessible at full flood; and
+so we at once decided against the accommodation which it offered. But
+its shelter will, I trust, scarce be needed.
+
+On our return to the Betsey, we passed through a straggling group of
+cottages on the hill-side, one of which, the most dilapidated and
+smallest 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 so
+miserable a hovel. It was hardly larger than the cabin of the Betsey,
+and a thousand times less comfortable. The walls and roof, formed of
+damp grass-grown turf, with a few layers of unconnected stone in the
+basement tiers, seemed to constitute one continuous hillock, sloping
+upwards from foundation to ridge, like one of the lesser moraines of
+Agassiz, save where the fabric here and there bellied outwards or
+inwards, in perilous dilapidation, that seemed but awaiting the first
+breeze. The low chinky door opened direct into the one wretched
+apartment of the hovel, which we found lighted chiefly by holes in the
+roof. The back of the sick woman's bed was so placed at the edge of the
+opening, that it had formed at one time a sort of partition to the
+portion of the apartment, some five or six feet square, which contained
+the fire-place; but the boarding that had rendered it such had long
+since fallen away, and it now presented merely a naked rickety frame to
+the current of cold air from without. Within a foot of the bed-ridden
+woman'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 hard
+by. The little hole in the wall had formed the poor creature's only
+communication with the face of the external world for ten weary years.
+She lay under a dingy coverlet, which, whatever its original hue, had
+come to differ nothing in color from the graveyard earth, which must so
+soon better supply its place. What perhaps first struck the eye was the
+strange flatness of the bed-clothes, considering that a human body lay
+below: there seemed scarce bulk enough under them for a human skeleton.
+The light of the opening fell on the corpse-like features of the
+woman,--sallow, sharp, bearing at once the stamp of disease and of
+famine; and yet it was evident, notwithstanding, that they had once been
+agreeable,--not unlike those of her daughter, a good-looking girl of
+eighteen, who, when we entered, was sitting beside the fire. Neither
+mother nor daughter had any English; but it was not difficult to
+determine, from the welcome with which the minister was greeted from the
+sick-bed, feeble as the tones were, that he was no unfrequent visitor.
+He prayed beside the poor creature, and, on coming away, slipped
+something into her hand. I learned that not during the ten years in
+which she had been bed-ridden had she received a single farthing from
+the proprietor, nor, indeed, had any of the poor of the island, and that
+the parish had no session-funds. I saw her husband a few days after,--an
+old worn-out man, with famine written legibly in his hollow cheek and
+eye, and on the shrivelled frame, that seemed lost in his tattered
+dress; and he reiterated the same sad story. They had no means of
+living, he said, save through the charity of their poor neighbors, who
+had so little to spare; for the parish or the proprietor had never given
+them anything. He had once, he added, two fine boys, both sailors, who
+had helped them; but the one had perished in a storm off the Mull of
+Cantyre, 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 crazy
+hut to take care of them in their helpless old age, what other could she
+do in a place like Eigg than just share with them their sufferings? It
+has been recently decided by the British Parliament, that in cases of
+this kind the starving poor shall not be permitted to enter the law
+courts 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 first
+given them permission to prosecute their claims. And I doubt not that
+many of the English gentlemen whose votes swelled the majority, and made
+it such, are really humane men, friendly to an equal-handed justice, and
+who hold it to be the peculiar glory of the Constitution, as well shown
+by De Lolme, that it has not one statute-book for the poor, and another
+for the rich, but the same law and the same administration of law for
+all. They surely could not have seen that the principle of their Poor
+Law Act for Scotland sets the pauper beyond the pale of the Constitution
+in the first instance, that he may be starved in the second. The
+suffering paupers of this miserable island cottage would have all their
+wants fully satisfied in the grave, long ere they could establish at
+their own expense, at Edinburgh, their claim to enter a court of law. I
+know not a fitter case for the interposition of our lately formed
+"Scottish Association for the Protection of the Poor" than that of this
+miserable family; and it is but one of many which the island of Eigg
+will be found to furnish.
+
+After a week's weary waiting, settled weather came at last; and the
+morning of Tuesday rose bright and fair. My friend, whose absence at the
+General Assembly had accumulated a considerable amount of ministerial
+labor on his hands, had to employ the day professionally; and as John
+Stewart was still engaged with his potato crop, I was necessitated to
+sally out on my first geological excursion alone. In passing
+vessel-wards, on the previous year, from the _Ru Stoir_ to the
+farm-house of Keill, along the escarpment under the cliffs, I had
+examined the shores somewhat too cursorily during the one-half of my
+journey, and the closing evening had prevented me from exploring them
+during the other half at all; and I now set myself leisurely to retrace
+the way backwards from the farm-house to the _Stoir_. I descended to the
+bottom of the cliffs, along the pathway which runs between Keill and the
+solitary midway shieling formerly described, and found that the basaltic
+columns over head, which had seemed so picturesque in the twilight, lost
+none of their beauty when viewed by day. They occur in forms the most
+beautiful and fantastic; here grouped beside some blind opening in the
+precipice, like pillars cut round the opening of a tomb, on some
+rock-front in Petraea; there running in long colonnades, or rising into
+tall porticoes; yonder radiating in straight lines from some common
+centre, resembling huge pieces of fan-work, or bending out in bold
+curves over some shaded chasm, like rows of crooked oaks projecting from
+the steep sides of some dark ravine. The various beds of which the
+cliffs are composed, as courses of ashlar compose a wall, are of very
+different degrees of solidity: some are of hard porphyritic or basaltic
+trap; some of soft Oolitic sandstone or shale. Where the columns rest on
+a soft stratum, their foundations have in many places given way, and
+whole porticoes and colonnades hang perilously forward in tottering
+ruin, separated from the living rock behind by deep chasms. I saw one of
+these 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 another
+partially filled up with earth and stones, through which, along a dark
+opening not much larger than a chimney-vent, the boys of the island find
+a long descending passage to the foot of the precipice, and emerge into
+light on the edge of the grassy talus half-way down the hill. It
+reminded me of the tunnel in the rock through which Imlac opened up a
+way of escape to Rasselas from the happy valley,--the "subterranean
+passage," 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 the
+shieling, I found the shore so thickly covered up by masses of trap, the
+debris of the precipices above, that I could scarce determine the nature
+of the bottom on which they rested. I now, however, reached a part of
+the beach where the Oolitic beds are laid bare in thin party-colored
+strata, and at once found something to engage me. Organisms in vast
+abundance, chiefly shells and fragmentary portions of fishes, lie
+closely packed in their folds. One limestone bed, occurring in a dark
+shale, seems almost entirely composed of a species of small oyster; and
+some two or three other thin beds, of what appears to be either a
+species of small Mytilus or Avicula, mixed up with a few shells
+resembling large Paludina, and a few more of the gaper family, so
+closely resembling existing species, that John Stewart and Alister at
+once challenged them as _smurslin_, the Hebridean name for a well-known
+shell in these parts,--the _Mya truncata_. The remains of
+fishes,--chiefly Ganoid scales and the teeth of Placoids,--lie scattered
+among the shells in amazing abundance. On the surface of a single
+fragment, about nine inches by five, which I detached from one of the
+beds, and which now lies before me, I reckon no fewer than twenty-five
+teeth, and twenty-two on the area of another. They are of very various
+forms,--some of them squat and round, like ill-formed small
+shot,--others spiky and sharp, not unlike flooring nails,--some straight
+as needles, some bent like the beak of a hawk,--some, like the palatal
+teeth of the Acrodus of the Lias, resemble small leeches; some, bearing
+a series of points ranged on a common base, like masts on the hull of a
+vessel, the tallest in the centre, belong to the genus Hybodus. There is
+a palpable approximation in the teeth of the leech-like form to the
+teeth with the numerous points. Some of the specimens show the same
+plicated structure common to both; and on some of the leech backs, if I
+may so speak, there are protuberant knobs, that indicate the places of
+the spiky points on the hybodent teeth. I have got three of each kind
+slit up by Mr. George Sanderson, and the internal structure appears to
+be the same. A dense body of bone is traversed by what seem innumerable
+roots, resembling those of woody shrubs laid bare along the sides of
+some forest stream. Each internal opening sends off on every side its
+myriads of close-laid filaments; and nowhere do they lie so thickly as
+in the line of the enamel, forming, from the regularity with which they
+are arranged, a sort of framing to the whole section. It is probable
+that the Hybodus,--a genus of shark which became extinct some time about
+the beginning of the chalk,--united, like the shark of Port Jackson, a
+crushing apparatus of palatal teeth to its lines of cutting ones. Among
+the other remains of these beds I found a dense fragment of bone,
+apparently reptilian, and a curious dermal plate punctulated with
+thick-set depressions, bounded on one side by a smooth band, and
+altogether closely resembling some saddler's thimble that had been cut
+open and straightened.
+
+Following the beds downwards along the beach, I found that one of the
+lowest which the tide permitted me to examine,--a bed colored with a
+tinge of red,--was formed of a denser limestone than any of the others,
+and composed chiefly of vast numbers of small univalves resembling
+Neritae. 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, to
+examine it. One of the first pieces I tore up contained a well-preserved
+Plesiosaurian vertebra; a second contained a vertebra and a rib; and,
+shortly after, I disinterred a large portion of a pelvis. I had at
+length found, beyond doubt, the reptile remains _in situ_. The bed in
+which they occur is laid bare here for several hundred feet along the
+beach, jutting out at a low angle among boulders and gravel, and the
+reptile remains we find embedded chiefly in its under side. It lies low
+in the Oolite. All the stratified rocks of the island, with the
+exception of a small Liasic patch, belong to the Lower Oolite, and the
+reptile-bed occurs deep in the base of the system,--low in its relation
+to the nether division, in which it is included. I found it nowhere
+rising to the level of high-water mark. It forms one of the foundation
+tiers of the island, which, as the latter rises over the sea in some
+places to the height of about fourteen hundred feet, its upper peaks and
+ridges must overlie the bones, making allowance for the dip, to the
+depth of at least sixteen hundred. Even at the close of the Oolitic
+period this sepulchral stratum must have been a profoundly ancient one.
+In working it out, I found two fine specimens of fish jaws, still
+retaining their ranges of teeth;--ichthyodorulites,--occipital plates of
+various forms, either reptile or ichthyic,--Ganoid scales, of nearly the
+same varieties of pattern as those in the Weald of Morayshire,--and the
+vertebrae and ribs, with the digital, pelvic, and limb-bones, of
+saurians. It is not unworthy of remark, that in none of the beds of this
+deposit did I find any of the more characteristic shells of the
+system,--Ammonites, Belemnites, Gryphites, or Nautili.
+
+I explored the shores of the island on to the _Ru Stoir_, and thence to
+the Bay of Laig; but though I found detached masses of the reptile bed
+occurring in abundance, indicating that its place lay not far beyond the
+fall of ebb, in no other locality save the one described did I find it
+laid bare. I spent some time beside the Bay of Laig in reexamining the
+musical sand, in the hope of determining the peculiarities on which its
+sonorous qualities depended. But I examined, and cross-examined it in
+vain. I merely succeeded in ascertaining, in addition to my previous
+observations, that the loudest sounds are elicited by drawing the hand
+slowly through the incoherent mass, in a segment of a circle, at the
+full stretch of the arm, and that the vibrations which produce them
+communicate a peculiar titillating sensation to the hand or foot by
+which they are elicited, extending in the foot to the knee, and in the
+hand to the elbow. When we pass the wet finger along the edge of an
+ale-glass partially filled with water, we see the vibrations thickly
+wrinkling 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 modification
+of the same phenomenon acting on the nerves and fluids of the leg or
+arm. It appears to be produced by the wrinklings of the vibrations, if I
+may so speak, passing along sentient channels. The sounds will
+ultimately be found dependent, I am of opinion, though I cannot yet
+explain the principle, on the purely quartzose character of the sand,
+and the friction of the incoherent upper strata against under strata
+coherent and damp. I remained ten days in the island, and went over all
+my 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 was
+tolerably clear, and the sun looked cheerily down on the deep blue of
+the sea; but along the higher ridges of the land there lay long level
+strata of what the meteorologists distinguish as parasitic clouds. When
+every other patch of vapor in the landscape was in motion, scudding
+shorewards from the Atlantic before the still-increasing gale, there
+rested along both the Scuir of Eigg and the tall opposite ridge of the
+island, and along the steep peaks of Rum, clouds that seemed as if
+anchored, each on its own mountain-summit, and over which the gale
+failed to exert any propelling power. They were stationary in the middle
+of the rushing current, when all else was speeding before it. It has
+been shown that these parasitic clouds are mere local condensations of
+strata of damp air passing along the mountain-summits, and rendered
+visible but to the extent in which the summits affect the temperature.
+Instead of being stationary, they are ever-forming and ever-dissipating
+clouds,--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 nothing
+to 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 little
+time, I went below, and, throwing myself into the minister's large
+chair, took up a book. The gale meanwhile freshened, and freshened yet
+more; and the Betsey leaned over till her lee chain-plate lay along in
+the water. There was the usual combination of sounds beneath and around
+me,--the mixture of guggle, clunk, and splash,--of low, continuous rush,
+and bluff, loud blow, which forms in such circumstances the voyager's
+concert. 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 a
+shallow current over a rough surface; and, on the minister coming below,
+I asked him, tolerably well prepared for his answer, what it might
+mean. "It means," he said, "that we have sprung a leak, and a rather bad
+one; 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 my
+book. Presently, however, the rush became greatly louder; some other
+weak patch in the Betsey's upper works had given way, and anon the water
+came washing up from the lee side along the edge of the cabin floor. I
+got upon deck to see how matters stood with us; and the minister, easing
+off the vessel for a few points, gave instant orders to shorten sail, in
+the hope of getting her upper works out of the water, and then to unship
+the companion ladder, beneath which a hatch communicated with the low
+strip of hold under the cabin, and to bring aft the pails. We lowered
+our foresail; furled up the mainsail half-mast high; John Stewart took
+his station at the pump; old Alister and I, furnished with pails, took
+ours, the one at the foot, the other at the head, of the companion, to
+hand up and throw over; a young girl, a passenger from Eigg to the
+mainland, 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 diminished
+breadth of sail, the Betsey, straining hard in the rough sea, still lay
+in to the gunwale; and the water, pouring in through a hundred opening
+chinks in her upper works, rose, despite of our exertions, high over
+plank, and beam, and cabin-floor, and went dashing against beds and
+lockers. She was evidently filling, and bade fair to terminate all her
+voyagings by a short trip to the bottom. Old Alister, a seaman of thirty
+years' standing, whose station at the bottom of the cabin stairs enabled
+him to see how fast the water was gaining on the Betsey, but not how the
+Betsey was gaining on the land, was by no means the least anxious among
+us. Twenty years previous he had seen a vessel go down in exactly
+similar circumstances, and in nearly the same place, and the
+reminiscence, in the circumstances, seemed rather an uncomfortable one.
+It had been a bad evening, he said, and the vessel he sailed in, and a
+sloop, her companion, were pressing hard to gain the land. The sloop had
+sprung a leak, and was straining, as if for life and death, under a
+press 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 disappeared
+from the surface instantaneously as a vanishing spectre, and neither
+sloop nor crew were ever more heard of.
+
+There are, I am convinced, few deaths less painful than some of those
+untimely and violent ones at which we are most disposed to shudder. We
+wrought so hard at pail and pump,--the occasion, too, was one of so much
+excitement, and tended so thoroughly to awaken our energies,--that I was
+conscious, during the whole time, of an exhilaration of spirits rather
+pleasurable than otherwise. My fancy was active, and active, strange as
+the fact may seem, chiefly with ludicrous objects. Sailors tell
+regarding the flying Dutchman, that he was a hard-headed captain of
+Amsterdam, who, in a bad night and head wind, when all the other vessels
+of his fleet were falling back on the port they had recently quitted,
+obstinately swore that, rather than follow their example, he would keep
+beating about till the day of judgment. And the Dutch captain, says the
+story, was just taken at his word, and is beating about still. When
+matters were at the worst with us, we got under the lea of the point of
+Sleat. The promontory interposed between us and the roll of the sea; the
+wind gradually took off; and, after having seen the water gaining fast
+and 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, and
+sunk downwards along pannels and table-legs,--a second retiring deluge;
+and we entered Isle Ornsay with the cabin-floor all visible, and less
+than two feet water in the hold. On the following morning, taking leave
+of my friend the minister, I set off, on my return homewards, by the
+Skye 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 usual
+exploratory ramble was thrown this year (1847) from the middle of July
+into the middle of September; and I embarked at Granton for the north
+just as the night began to count hour against hour with the day. The
+weather was fine, and the voyage pleasant. I saw by the way, however, at
+least one melancholy memorial of a hurricane which had swept the eastern
+coasts of the island about a fortnight before, and filled the provincial
+newspapers with paragraphs of disaster. Nearly opposite where the Red
+Head lifts its mural front of Old Red Sandstone a hundred yards over the
+beach, the steamer passed a foundered vessel, lying about a mile and a
+half off the land, with but her topmast and the point of her peak over
+the 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 was
+attached, white atop and yellow beneath, formed a well-defined
+undulatory strip on the water, that seemed as if ever in the process of
+being rolled up, and yet still retained its length unshortened. Every
+recession 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 the
+gale, and that, when staggering under a press of canvas towards the
+still distant shore, where, by stranding her, the crew had hoped to save
+at least their lives, she had disappeared with a sudden lurch, and all
+aboard had perished. I remembered having read, among other memorabilia
+of the hurricane, without greatly thinking of the matter, that "a large
+sloop had foundered off the Red Head,--name unknown." But the minute
+portion of the wreck which I saw rising over the surface, to certify,
+like some frail memorial in a churchyard, that the dead lay beneath, had
+an eloquence in it which the words wanted, and at once sent the
+imagination back to deal with the stern realities of the disaster, and
+the feelings abroad to expatiate over saddened hearths and melancholy
+homesteads, where for many a long day the hapless perished would be
+missed and mourned, but where the true story of their fate, though too
+surely guessed at, would never be known.
+
+The harvest had been early; and on to the village of Stonehaven, and a
+mile or two beyond, where the fossiliferous deposits end and the primary
+begin, the country presented from the deck only a wide expanse of
+stubble. Every farm-steading we passed had its piled stack-yard; and the
+fields were bare. But the line of demarcation between the Old Red
+Sandstone and the granitic districts formed also a separating line
+between an earlier and later harvest; the fields of the less kindly
+subsoil derived from the primary rocks were, I could see, still speckled
+with sheaves; and, where the land lay high, or the exposure was
+unfavorable, there were reapers at work. All along in the course of my
+journey northward from Aberdeen I continued to find the country covered
+with shocks, and laborers employed among them; until, crossing the Spey,
+I entered on the fossiliferous districts of Moray; and then, as in the
+south, the champaign again showed a bare breadth of stubble, with here
+and there a ploughman engaged in turning it down. The traveller bids
+farewell at Stonehaven to not only the Old Red Sandstone and the
+early-harvest districts, but also to the rich wheat-lands of the
+country, and does not again fairly enter upon them until, after
+travelling nearly a hundred miles, he passes from Banffshire into the
+province of Moray. He leaves behind him at the same line the
+wheat-fields and the cottages built of red stone, to find only barley
+and oats, and here and there a plot of rye, associated with cottages of
+granite and gneiss, hyperstene and mica schist; but on crossing the
+Spey, the red cottages reappear, and fields of rich wheat-land spread
+out around them, as in the south. The circumstance is not unworthy the
+notice of the geologist. It is but a tedious process through which the
+minute lichen, settling on a surface of naked stone, forms in the course
+of ages a soil for plants of greater bulk and a higher order; and had
+Scotland been left to the exclusive operation of this slow agent, it
+would be still a rocky desert, with perhaps here and there a strip of
+alluvial meadow by the side of a stream, and here and there an insulated
+patch of rich soil among the hollows of the crags. It might possess a
+few gardens for the spade, but no fields for the plough. We owe our
+arable land to that comparatively modern geologic agent, whatever its
+character, that crushed, as in a mill, the upper parts of the
+surface-rocks of the kingdom, and then overlaid them with their own
+debris and rubbish to the depth of from one to forty yards. This debris,
+existing in one locality as a boulder-clay more or less finely
+comminuted, in another as a grossly pounded gravel, forms, with few
+exceptions, that subsoil of the country on which the existing vegetation
+first found root; and, being composed mainly of the formations on which
+it more immediately rests, it partakes of their character,--bearing a
+comparatively lean and hungry aspect over the primary rocks, and a
+greatly more fertile one over those deposits in which the organic
+matters of earlier creations lie diffused. Saxon industry has done much
+for the primary districts of Aberdeen and Banffshires, though it has
+failed to neutralize altogether the effects of causes which date as
+early as the times of the Old Red Sandstone; but in the Highlands, which
+belong almost exclusively to the non-fossiliferous formations, and which
+were, on at least the western coasts, but imperfectly subjected to that
+grinding process to which we owe our subsoils, the poor Celt has
+permitted the consequences of the original difference to exhibit
+themselves in full. If we except the islands of the Inner Hebrides, the
+famine of 1846 was restricted in Scotland to the primary districts.
+
+I made it my first business, on landing in Aberdeen, to wait on my
+friend Mr. Longmuir, that I might compare with him a few geological
+notes, and benefit by his knowledge of the surrounding country. I was,
+however, unlucky enough to find that he had gone, a few days before, on
+a journey, from which he had not yet returned; but, through the kindness
+of Mrs. Longmuir, to whom I took the liberty of introducing myself, I
+was made free of his stone-room, and held half an hour's conversation
+with his Scotch fossils of the Chalk. These had been found, as the
+readers of the _Witness_ must remember from his interesting paper on the
+subject, on the hill of Dudwick, in the neighborhood of Ellon, and were
+chiefly impressions--some of them of singular distinctness and
+beauty--in yellow flint. I saw among them several specimens of the
+Inoceramus, a thin-shelled, ponderously-hinged conchifer, characteristic
+of the Cretaceous group, but which has no living representative; with
+numerous flints, traversed by rough-edged, bifurcated hollows, in which
+branched sponges had once lain; a well-preserved Pecten; the impressions
+of spines of Echini of at least two distinct species; and the
+nicely-marked impression of part of a Cidaris, with the balls on which
+the sockets of the club-like spines had been fitted existing in the
+print as spherical moulds, in which shot might be cast, and with the
+central ligamentary depression, which in the actual fossil exists but as
+a minute cavity, projecting into the centre of each hollow sphere, like
+the wooden fusee into the centre of a bomb-shell. This latter cast, fine
+and sharp as that of a medal taken in sulphur, seems sufficient of
+itself to establish two distinct points: in the first place, that the
+siliceous matter of which the flint is composed, though now so hard and
+rigid, must, in its original condition, have been as impressible as wax
+softened to receive the stamp of the seal; and, in the next, that though
+it was thus yielding in its character, it could not have greatly shrunk
+in the process of hardening. I looked with no little interest on these
+remains of a Scotch formation now so entirely broken up, that, like
+those ruined cities of the East which exist but as mere lines of
+wrought material barring the face of the desert, there has not "been
+left one stone of it upon another," but of which the fragments, though
+widely scattered, bear imprinted upon them, like the stamped bricks of
+Babylon, the story of its original condition, and a record of its
+_founders_. All Mr. Longmuir's Cretaceous fossils from the hill of
+Dudwick are of flint,--a substance not easily ground down by the
+denuding agencies.
+
+I found several other curious fossils in Mr. Longmuir's collection.
+Greatly more interesting, however, than any of the specimens which it
+contains, is the general fact, that it should be the collection of a
+Free Church minister, sedulously attentive to the proper duties of his
+office, but who has yet found time enough to render himself an
+accomplished geologist; and whose week-day lectures on the science
+attract crowds, who receive from them, in many instances, their first
+knowledge of the strange revolutions of which our globe has been the
+subject, blent with the teachings of a wholesome theology. The present
+age, above all that has gone before, is peculiarly the age of physical
+science; and of all the physical sciences, not excepting astronomy
+itself, geology, though it be a fact worthy of notice, that not one of
+our truly accomplished geologists is an infidel, is the science of which
+infidelity has most largely availed itself. And as the theologian in a
+metaphysical age,--when skepticism, conforming to the character of the
+time, disseminated its doctrines in the form of nicely abstract
+speculations,--had, in order that the enemy might be met in his own
+field, to become a skilful metaphysician, he must now, in like manner,
+address himself to the tangibilities of natural history and geology, if
+he would avoid the danger and disgrace of having his flank turned by
+every sciolist in these walks whom he may chance to encounter. It is
+those identical bastions and outworks that are _now_ attacked, which
+must be _now_ defended; not those which were attacked some eighty or a
+hundred years ago. And as he who succeeds in first mixing up fresh and
+curious truths, either with the objections by which religion is assailed
+or the arguments by which it is defended, imparts to his cause all the
+interest which naturally attaches to these truths, and leaves to his
+opponent, who passes over them after him as at second hand, a subject
+divested of the fire-edge of novelty, I can deem Mr. Longmuir well and
+not unprofessionally employed, in connecting with a sound creed the
+picturesque marvels of one of the most popular of the sciences, and by
+this means introducing them to his people, linked, from the first, with
+right associations. According to the old fiction, the look of the
+basilisk did not kill unless the creature saw before it was seen;--its
+mere _return_ glance was harmless; and there is a class of thoroughly
+dangerous writers who in this respect resemble the basilisk. It is
+perilous to give them a first look of the public. They are formidable
+simply as the earliest popularizers of some interesting science, or the
+first promulgators of some class of curious little-known facts, with
+which they mix up their special contributions of error,--often the only
+portion of their writings that really belongs to themselves. Nor is it
+at all so easy to _counteract_ as to _confute_ them. A masterly
+confutation of the part of their works truly their own may, from its
+subject, be a very unreadable book: it can have but the insinuated
+poison to deal with, unmixed with the palatable pabulum in which the
+poison has been conveyed; and mere treatises on poisons, whether moral
+or medical, are rarely works of a very delectable order. It seems to be
+on this principle that there exists no confutation of the "Constitution
+of Man" in which the ordinary reader finds amusement to carry him
+through; whereas the work itself, full of curious miscellaneous
+information, is eminently readable; and that the "Vestiges of
+Creation,"--a treatise as entertaining as the "Arabian Nights,"--bids
+fair, not from the amount of error which it contains, but from the
+amount of fresh and interestingly told truth with which the error is
+mingled, to live and do mischief when the various solidly-scientific
+replies which it has called forth are laid upon the shelf. Both the
+"Constitution" and the "Vestiges" had the advantage, so essential to the
+basilisk, of taking the first glance of the public on their respective
+subjects; whereas their confutators have been able to render them back
+but mere _return_ glances. The only efficiently counteractive mode of
+looking down the danger, in cases of this kind, is the mode adopted by
+Mr. Longmuir.
+
+There was a smart frost next morning; and, for a few hours, my seat on
+the top of the Banff coach, by which I travelled across the country to
+where the Gamrie and Banff roads part company, was considerably more
+cool than agreeable. But the keen morning improved into a brilliant day,
+with an atmosphere transparent as if there had been no atmosphere at
+all, through which the distant objects looked out as sharp of outline,
+and in as well-defined light and shadow, as if they had occupied the
+background, not of a Scotch, but of an Italian landscape. A few
+speck-like sails, far away on the intensely blue sea, which opened upon
+us in a stretch of many leagues, as we surmounted the moory ridge over
+Macduff, gleamed to the sun with a radiance bright as that of the sparks
+of a furnace blown to a white heat. The land, uneven of surface, and
+open, and abutting in bold promontories on the frith, still bore the
+sunny hue of harvest, and seemed as if stippled over with shocks from
+the ridgy hill summits, to where ranges of giddy cliffs flung their
+shadows across the beach. I struck off for Gamrie by a path that runs
+eastward, nearly parallel to the shore,--which at one or two points it
+overlooks from dark-colored cliffs of grauwacke slate,--to the fishing
+village 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 with
+not only the best effect, but with even the least possible sacrifice of
+appearance: the shabbiest of all suits is a good suit spoiled. My
+hammer-shaft projected from my pocket; a knapsack, with a few changes of
+linen, slung suspended from my shoulders; a strong cotton umbrella
+occupied my better hand; and a gray maud, buckled shepherd-fashion
+aslant the chest, completed my equipment. There were few travellers on
+the road, which forked off on the hill-side a short mile away, into two
+branches, like a huge letter Y, leaving me uncertain which branch to
+choose; and I made up my mind to have the point settled by a woman of
+middle age, marked by a hard, _manly_ countenance, who was coming up
+towards me, bound apparently for the Banff or Macduff market, and
+stooping under a load of dairy produce. She too, apparently, had her
+purpose to serve or point to settle; for as we met, she was the first to
+stand; and, sharply scanning my appearance and aspect at a glance, she
+abruptly 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'r
+gaing east the gate, and tell _our_ folk that the stirk has gat fra her
+tether, an' 'ill brak on the wat clover. Tell them to sen' for her
+_that_ minute." I undertook the commission; and, passing the endangered
+stirk, that seemed luxuriating, undisturbed by any presentiment of
+impending peril, amid the rich swathe of a late clover crop, still damp
+with the dews of the morning frost, I tapped at the door of the
+farm-house, and delivered my message to a young good-looking girl, in
+nearly the words of the woman:--"The gude-wife bade me tell _them_," I
+said, "to send that instant for the stirk, for she had gat fra her
+tether, and would brak on the wat clover." The girl blushed just a very
+little, and thanked me; and then, after obliging me, in turn, by laying
+down for me my proper route,--for I had left the question of the forked
+road to be determined at the farm-house,--she set off at high speed, to
+rescue the unconscious stirk. A walk of rather less than two hours
+brought me abreast of the Bay of Gamrie,--a picturesque indentation of
+the coast, in the formation of which the agency of the old denuding
+forces, operating on deposits of unequal solidity, may be distinctly
+traced. The surrounding country is composed chiefly of Silurian schists,
+in which there is deeply inlaid a detached strip of mouldering Old Red
+Sandstone, considerably more than twenty miles in length, and that
+varies from two to three miles in breadth. It seems to have been let
+down into the more ancient formation,--like the keystone of a bridge
+into the ringstones of the arch when the work is in the act of being
+completed,--during some of those terrible convulsions which cracked and
+rent the earth's crust, as if it had been an earthen pipkin brought to a
+red heat and then plunged into cold water. Its consequent occurrence in
+a lower tier of the geological edifice than that to which it originally
+belonged has saved it from the great denudation which has swept from the
+surface of the surrounding country the tier composed of its contemporary
+beds and strata, and laid bare the grauwacke on which this upper tier
+rested. But where it presents its narrow end to the sea, as the older
+houses in our more ancient Scottish villages present their gables to the
+street, the waves of the German Ocean, by incessantly charging against
+it, propelled by the tempests of the stormy north, have hollowed it
+into the Bay of Gamrie, and left the more solid grauwacke standing out
+in bold promontories on either side, as the headlands of Gamrie and
+Troup.
+
+In passing downwards on the fishing village of Gardenstone, mainly in
+the hope of procuring a guide to the ichthyolite beds, I saw a laborer
+at work with a pickaxe, in a little craggy ravine, about a hundred yards
+to the left of the path, and two gentlemen standing beside him. I paused
+for a moment, to ascertain whether the latter were not brother-workers
+in the geologic field. "Hilloa!--here,"--shouted out the stouter of the
+two gentlemen, as if, by some _clairvoyant_ faculty, he had dived into
+my secret thought; "come here." I went down into the ravine, and found
+the laborer engaged in disinterring ichthyolitic nodules out of a bed of
+gray stratified clay, identical in its composition with that of the
+Cromarty fish-beds; and a heap of freshly-broken nodules, speckled with
+the organic remains of the Lower Old Red Sandstone,--chiefly occipital
+plates and scales,--lay beside him. "Know you aught of these?" said the
+stouter gentleman, pointing to the heap. "A little," I replied; "but
+your specimens are none of the finest. Here, however, is a dorsal plate
+of Coccosteus; and here a scattered group of scales of Osteolepis; and
+here the occipital plates of _Cheirolepis Cummingiae_; and here the spine
+of the anterior dorsal of _Diplacanthus striatus_." My reading of the
+fossils was at once recognized, like the mystic sign of the freemason,
+as establishing for me a place among the geologic brotherhood; and the
+stout gentleman producing a spirit-flask and a glass, I pledged him and
+his companion in a bumper. "Was I not sure?" he said, addressing his
+friend: "I knew by the cut of his jib, notwithstanding his shepherd's
+plaid, that he was a wanderer of the scientific cast." We discussed the
+peculiarities of the deposit, which, in its mineralogical character, and
+generically in that of its organic contents, resembles, I found, the
+fish-beds of Cromarty (though, curiously enough, the intervening
+contemporary deposits of Moray and the western parts of Banffshire
+differ widely, in at least their chemistry, from both); and we were
+right good friends ere we parted. To men who travel for amusement,
+incident is incident, however trivial in itself, and always worth
+something. I showed the younger of the two geologists my mode of
+breaking open an ichthyolitic nodule, so as to secure the best possible
+section of the fish. "Ah," he said, as he marked a style of handling the
+hammer which, save for the fifteen years' previous practice of the
+operative mason, would be perhaps less complete,--"Ah, you must have
+broken open a great many." His own knowledge of the formation and its
+ichthyolites had been chiefly derived, he added, from a certain little
+treatise on the "Old Red Sandstone," rather popular than scientific,
+which he named. I of course claimed no acquaintance with the work; and
+the conversation went on.
+
+The ill luck of my new friends, who had been toiling among the nodules
+for hours without finding an ichthyolite worth transferring to their
+bag, showed me that, without excavating more deeply than my time
+allowed, I had no chance of finding good specimens. But, well content to
+have ascertained that the ichthyolite bed of Gamrie is identical in its
+composition, and, generically at least, in its organisms, with the beds
+with which I was best acquainted, I rose to come away. The object which
+I next proposed to myself was, to determine whether, as at Eathie and
+Cromarty, the fossils here appear not only on the hill-side, but also
+crop out along the shore. On taking leave, however, of the geologists, I
+was reminded by the younger of what I might have otherwise
+forgotten,--a raised beach in the immediate neighborhood (first
+described by Mr. Prestwich, in his paper on the Gamrie ichthyolites),
+which contains shells of the existing species at a higher level than
+elsewhere,--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, we
+parted. The ichthyolites which I had just been laying open occur on the
+verge of that Strathbogie district in which the Church controversy raged
+so hot and high; and by a common enough trick of the associative
+faculty, they now recalled to my mind a stanza which memory had somehow
+caught when the battle was at the fiercest. It formed part of a satiric
+address, published in an Aberdeen newspaper, to the not very respectable
+non-intrusionists who had smoked tobacco and drank whisky in the parish
+church 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 style
+in which Zachary Boyd sings "Pharaoh and the Pascal." And as it is wrong
+to 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'olites 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 prove
+that the animal spirits, under the influence of the bracing walk, the
+fine day, and the agreeable recounter at the fish-beds,--not forgetting
+the half-gill bumper,--had mounted very considerably above their
+ordinary 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, along
+the rim-like edge of the flat area atop, scattered fragments of the
+vitrified walls. A general covering of turf restricted my examination of
+the shells to one point, where a land-slip on a small scale had laid the
+deposit bare; but I at least saw enough to convince me that the debris
+of the shell-fish used of old as food by the garrison had not been
+mistaken for the remains of a raised beach,--a mistake which in other
+localities 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 of
+bluish-colored silt. I picked out of the sand two entire specimens of a
+full-grown Fusus, little more than half an inch in length,--the _Fusus
+turricola_; and the greater number of the fragments that lay bleaching
+at the foot of the broken slope, in a state of chalky friability, seemed
+to 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 the
+denizens of at least no _flat_ shore. The descent on which they occur
+sinks downwards to the existing beach, over which it is elevated at this
+point two hundred and thirty feet, at an angle with the horizon of from
+thirty-five to forty degrees. Were the land to be now submerged to where
+they appear on the hill-side, the bay of Gamrie, as abrupt in its
+slopes 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 a
+hundred yards from the shore. I may add, that I could trace at this
+height no marks of such a continuous terrace around the sides of the bay
+as the waves would have infallibly excavated in the diluvium, had the
+sea 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; though
+the green banks which sweep around the upper part of the inflection,
+unscarred by the defacing plough, would scarce have failed to retain
+some mark of where the surges had broken, had the surges been long
+there. Whatever may in this special case be the fact, however, I cannot
+doubt that in the comparatively modern period of the boulder clays,
+Scotland lay buried under water to a depth at least five times as great
+as 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 of
+abrupt, mouldering precipices of red sandstone, to the village. From the
+lie of the strata, which, instead of inclining coastwise, dip towards
+the interior of the country, and present in the descent seawards the
+outcrop of lower and yet lower deposits of the formation, I found it
+would be in vain to look for the ichthyolite beds along the shore. They
+may possibly be found, however, though I lacked time to ascertain the
+fact, along the sides of a deep ravine, which occurs near an old
+ecclesiastical edifice of gray stone, perched, nest-like, half-way up
+the bank, on a green hummock that overlooks the sea. The rocks, laid
+bare by the tide, belong to the bed of coarse-grained red sandstone,
+varying from eighty to a hundred and fifty feet in thickness, which lies
+between the lower fish-bed and the great conglomerate, and which, in not
+a few of its strata, passes itself into a species of conglomerate,
+different only from that which it overlies, in being more finely
+comminuted. The continuity of this bed, like that of the deposit on
+which it rests, is very remarkable. I have found it occurring at many
+various points, over an area at least ten thousand square miles in
+extent, and bearing always the same well-marked character of a more
+thoroughly ground-down conglomerate than the great conglomerate on which
+it reposes. The underlying bed is composed of broken fragments of the
+rocks below, crushed, as if by some imperfect rudimentary process, like
+that which in a mill merely breaks the grain; whereas, in the bed above,
+a portion of the previously-crushed materials seems to have been
+subjected to some further attritive process, like that through which, in
+the 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 on
+the beach by the previous tide, a defunct father-lasher, with the two
+defensive spines which project from its opercles stuck fast into little
+cubes of cork, that had floated its head above water, as the
+tyro-swimmer floats himself upon bladders; and my previous acquaintance
+with the habits of a fishing village enabled me at once to determine why
+and how it had perished. Though almost never used as food on the eastern
+coast of Scotland, it had been inconsiderate enough to take the
+fisherman's bait, as if it had been worthy of being eaten; and he had
+avenged 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 Flying
+Dutchman, until it died. Was there ever on earth a creature save man
+that could have played a fellow-mortal a trick at once so ingeniously
+and gratuitously cruel? Or what would be the proper inference, were I to
+find one of the many-thorned ichthyolites of the Lower Old Red Sandstone
+with the spines of its pectorals similarly fixed on cubes of
+lignite?--that there had existed in these early ages not merely
+_physical death_, but also _moral evil_; and that the being who
+perpetrated the evil could not only inflict it simply for the sake of
+the pleasure he found in it, and without prospect of advantage to
+himself, but also by so adroitly reversing, fiend-like, the purposes of
+the benevolent Designer, that the weapons given for the defence of a
+poor harmless creature should be converted into the instruments of its
+destruction. It was not without meaning that it was forbidden by the law
+of Moses to seethe a kid in its mother's milk.
+
+A steep bulwark in front, against which the tide lashes twice every
+twenty-four hours,--an abrupt hill behind,--a few rows of squalid
+cottages built of red sandstone, much wasted by the keen sea-winds,--a
+wilderness of dunghills and ruinous pig-styes,--women seated at the
+doors, employed in baiting lines or mending nets,--groups of men
+lounging lazily at some gable-end fronting the sea,--herds of ragged
+children playing in the lanes,--such are the components of the fishing
+village of Gardenstone. From the identity of name, I had associated the
+place 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 on
+English plays, transcribed, it was stated in the preface, from the
+margins and fly-leaves of the books of a "small library kept open by his
+Lordship" for the amusement of travellers at the inn of some village in
+his immediate neighborhood; and taking it for granted, somehow, that
+Gardenstone was the village, I was looking around me for the inn, in the
+hope 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 an
+elderly man in a pack-sheet apron, who stood all alone, looking out upon
+the sea, like Napoleon, in the print, from a projection of the bulwark.
+He turned round, and showed, by an unmistakable expression of eye and
+feature, 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 of
+himself. "It'll be an awfu' coorse nicht," he said, "fra the sea." "Very
+likely," I replied, reiterating my query in a form that indicated some
+little confidence of receiving the needed information; "I daresay you
+could 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 a
+sodger on the Queen's account, or ye'r ain?" "On my own, to be sure; but
+have 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, with
+spectacles on nose, and a piece of white seam-work in her hand; and,
+cutting short the dialogue by addressing myself to her, she at once
+directed 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's
+a great traveller yon, an' has a gude Scots tongue in his head."
+
+Travellers, save when, during the herring season, an occasional
+fish-curer comes the way, rarely bait at the Gardenstone inn; and in the
+little low-browed room, with its windows in the thatch, into which, as
+her best, the land-lady ushered me, I certainly found nothing to
+identify the _locale_ with that chosen by the literary lawyer for his
+open library. But, according to Ferguson, though "learning was scant,
+provision was good;" and I dined sumptuously on an immense platter of
+fried flounders. There was a little bit of cold pork added to the fare;
+but, aware from previous experience of the pisciverous habits of the
+swine of a fishing village, I did what I knew the defunct pig must have
+very frequently done before me,--satisfied a keenly-whetted appetite on
+fish exclusively. I need hardly remind the reader that Lord
+Gardenstone's inn was not that of Gardenstone, but that of
+Laurence-kirk,--the thriving village which it was the special ambition
+of this law-lord of the last century to create; and which, did it
+produce only its famed snuff-boxes, with the invisible hinges, would be
+rather a more valuable boon to the country than that secured to it by
+those law-lords of our own days, who at one fell blow disestablished the
+national religion of Scotland, and broke off the only handle by which
+their friends the politicians could hope to _manage_ the country's old
+vigorous Presbyterianism. Meanwhile it was becoming apparent that the
+man with the apron had as shrewdly anticipated the character of the
+coming 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. I
+settled a very moderate bill, and set off under the cliffs at a round
+pace, in the hope of scaling the hill, and gaining the high road atop
+which leads to Macduff, ere the darkness closed. I had, however,
+miscalculated my distance; I, besides, lost some little time in the
+opening of the deep ravine to which I have already referred as that in
+which possibly the fish-beds may be found cropping out; and I had got
+but a little beyond the gray ecclesiastical ruin, with its lonely
+burying-ground, when the tempest broke and the night fell.
+
+One of the last objects which I saw, as I turned to take a farewell look
+of the bay of Gamrie, was the magnificent promontory of Troup Head,
+outlined in black on a ground of deep gray, with its two terminal stacks
+standing apart in the sea. And straightway, through one of those tricks
+of association so powerful in raising, as if from the dead, buried
+memories of things of which the mind has been oblivious for years, there
+started up in recollection the details of an ancient ghost-story, of
+which I had not thought before for perhaps a quarter of a century. It
+had been touched, I suppose, in its obscure, unnoted corner, as Ithuriel
+touched 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 bears
+reference 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 been
+originally brought by a great-grandfather of the writer, who quitted
+some of the seaport villages of Banffshire for the northern side of the
+Moray Frith, about the year 1718; and, when pushing on in the darkness,
+straining as I best could, to maintain a sorely-tried umbrella against
+the capricious struggles of the tempest, that now tatooed furiously upon
+its back as if it were a kettle-drum, and now got underneath its stout
+ribs, and threatened to send it up aloft like a balloon, and anon
+twisted it from side to side, and strove to turn it inside out, like a
+Kilmarnock night-cap,--I employed myself in arranging in my mind the
+details of the narrative, as they had been communicated to me half an
+age before by a female relative.
+
+The opening of the story, though it existed long ere the times of Sir
+Walter Scott or the Waverly novels, bears some resemblance to the
+opening in the "Monastery," of the story of the White Lady of Avenel.
+The wife of a Banffshire proprietor of the minor class had been about
+six months dead, when one of her husband's ploughmen, returning on
+horseback from the smithy, in the twilight of an autumn evening, was
+accosted, on the banks of a small stream, by a stranger lady, tall and
+slim, and wholly attired in green, with her face wrapped up in the hood
+of her mantle, who requested to be taken up behind him on the horse, and
+carried across. There was something in the tones of her voice that
+seemed to thrill through his very bones, and to insinuate itself, in the
+form of a chill fluid, between his skull and the scalp. The request,
+too, appeared a strange one; for the rivulet was small and low, and
+could present no serious bar to the progress of the most timid
+traveller. But the man, unwilling ungallantly to offend a lady, turned
+his 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 in
+contact with the ploughman's back, he said, as if she had been an
+ill-filled sack of wool; and when, on reaching the opposite side of the
+streamlet, she leaped down as slightly as she had mounted, and he turned
+fearfully round to catch a second glimpse of her, it was in the
+conviction that she was a creature considerably less earthly in her
+texture than himself. She had opened, with two pale, thin arms, the
+enveloping hood, exhibiting a face equally pale and thin, which seemed
+marked, however, by the roguish, half-humorous expression of one who had
+just succeeded in playing off a good joke. "My dead mistress!!"
+exclaimed the ploughman. "Yes, John, _your mistress_," replied the
+ghost. "But ride home, my bonny man, for it's growing late: you and I
+will be better acquainted ere long." John accordingly rode home and told
+his story.
+
+Next evening, about the same hour, as two of the laird's servant-maids
+were engaged in washing in an out-house, there came a slight tap to the
+door. "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 inner
+part of the washing-room; and, seating herself on a low bench, from
+which, ere her death, she used occasionally to superintend their
+employment, she began to question them, as if still in the body, about
+the progress of their work. The girls, however, were greatly too
+frightened to make any reply. She then visited an old woman who had
+nursed the laird, and to whom she used to show, ere her departure,
+greatly more kindness than her husband. And she now seemed as much
+interested in her welfare as ever. She inquired whether the laird was
+kind to her, and looking round her little smoky cottage, regretted she
+should be so indifferently lodged, and that her cupboard, which was
+rather 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 not
+seen 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, or
+peering in upon them at night through the dark window-panes, or at
+half-open doors. In the evening she would glide into the kitchen or some
+of the out-houses,--one of the most familiar and least dignified of her
+class that ever held intercourse with mankind,--and inquire of the girls
+how they had been employed during the day; often, however, without
+obtaining an answer, though from a cause different from that which had
+at first tied their tongues. For they had become so regardless of her
+presence, viewing her simply as a troublesome mistress, who had no
+longer any claim to be heeded, that when she entered, and they had
+dropped their conversation, under the impression that their visitor was
+a creature of flesh and blood like themselves, they would again resume
+it, remarking that the entrant was "only the green lady." Though always
+cadaverously pale, and miserable looking, she affected a joyous
+disposition, and was frequently heard to laugh, even when invisible. At
+one time, when provoked by the studied silence of a servant girl, she
+flung a pillow at her head, which the girl caught up and returned; at
+another, she presented her first acquaintance, the ploughman, with what
+seemed to be a handful of silver coin, which he transferred to his
+pocket, but which, on hearing her laugh, he drew out, and found to be
+merely a handful of slate shivers. On yet another occasion, the man,
+when passing on horseback through a clump of wood, was repeatedly struck
+from behind the trees by little pellets of turf; and, on riding into the
+thicket, he found that his assailant was the green lady. To her husband
+she never appeared; but he frequently heard the tones of her voice
+echoing 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 was
+surprised to see her enter the cottage; as all her previous visits had
+been made early in the morning or late in the evening; whereas
+now,--though the day was dark and lowering, and a storm of wind and rain
+had just broken out,--still it _was_ day. "Mammie," she said, "I cannot
+open 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 White
+House [that of a neighboring proprietor], and tell the folk there to set
+out 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 tide
+has flowed around them; and, if no help reach them soon, they'll be all
+scattered like sea-ware on the shore ere the fall of the sea. But if you
+go and tell your story at the White House, mammie, the bairns will be
+safe for an hour to come, and there will be something done by their
+mother to better you, for the news." The woman went, as directed, and
+told her story; and the father of the children set out on horseback in
+hot haste for the rock,--a low, insulated skerry, which, lying on a
+solitary part of the beach, far below the line of flood, was shut out
+from the view of the inhabited country by a wall of precipices, and
+covered every tide by several feet of water. On reaching the edge of the
+cliffs, he saw the black rock, as the woman had described, surrounded by
+the sea, and the children clinging to its higher crags. But, though the
+waves were fast rising, his attempts to ride out through the surf to the
+poor little things were frustrated by their cries, which so frightened
+his horse as to render it unmanageable; and so he had to gallop on to
+the nearest fishing village for a boat. So much time was unavoidably
+lost 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; but
+until the boat arrived, not a single wave dashed over the black rock;
+though immediately after the last of the children had been rescued, an
+immense wreath of foam rose twice a man's height over its topmost
+pinnacle.
+
+The old nurse, on her return to the cottage, found the green lady
+sitting beside the fire. "Mammie," she said, "you have made friends to
+yourself to-day, who will be kinder to you than your foster-son. I must
+now leave you. My time is out, and you'll be all left to yourselves; but
+I'll have no rest, mammie, for many a twelvemonth to come. Ten years
+ago, a travelling peddler broke into our garden in the fruit season, and
+I 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 struggled
+and fought, and the peddler was killed. But though I at first thought of
+bringing the case before the laird, when I saw the dead man's pack, with
+its silks and its velvets, and this unhappy piece of green satin
+(shaking her dress), my foolish heart beguiled me, and I made the
+ploughman bury the peddler's body under our ash tree, in the corner of
+our garden, and we divided his goods and money between us. You must bid
+the laird raise his bones, and carry them to the churchyard; and the
+gold, which you will find in the little bowl under the tapestry in my
+room, must be sent to a poor old widow, the peddler's mother, who lives
+on the shore of Leith. I must now away to Ireland to the ploughman; and
+I'll be e'en less welcome to him, mammie, than at the laird's; but the
+hungry blood cries loud against us both,--him and me,--and we must
+suffer together. Take care you look not after me till I have passed the
+knowe." She glided away, as she spoke, in a gleam of light; and when the
+old woman had withdrawn her hand from her eyes, dazzled by the sudden
+brightness, she saw only a large black gray-hound crossing the moor. And
+the green lady was never afterwards seen in Scotland. The little hoard
+of gold pieces, however, stored in a concealed recess of her former
+apartment, and the mouldering ruins of the peddler under the ash tree,
+gave evidence to the truth of her narrative. The story was hardly wild
+enough for a night so drear and a road so lonely; its ghost-heroine was
+but a homely ghost-heroine, too little aware that the same familiarity
+which, according to the proverb, breeds contempt when exercised by the
+denizens of this world, produces similar effects when too much indulged
+in by the inhabitants of another. But the arrangement and restoration of
+the details of the tradition,--for they had been scattered in my mind
+like the fragments of a broken fossil,--furnished me with so much
+amusement, when struggling with the storm, as to shorten by at least
+one-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, which
+I reached just wet enough to enjoy the luxury of a strong clear fire of
+Newcastle coal.
+
+Mrs. Longmuir had furnished me with a note of introduction to Dr. Emslie
+of Banff, an intelligent geologist, familiar with the deposits of the
+district; and, walking on to his place of residence next morning, in a
+rain as heavy as that of the previous night, I made it my first business
+to wait on him, and deliver the note. Ere, however, crossing the
+Deveron, which flows between Banff and Macduff, I paused for a few
+minutes in the rain, to mark the peculiar appearance presented by the
+beach where the river disembogues into the frith. Occurring as a
+rectangular spit in the line of the shore, with the expanded stream
+widening into an estuary on its upper side, and the open sea on the
+lower, it marks the scene of an obstinate contest between antagonist
+forces,--the powerful sweep of the torrent, and the not less powerful
+waves of the stormy north-east; and exists, in consequence, as a long
+gravelly prism, which presents as steep an angle of descent to the waves
+on 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 inspection
+his set of Gamrie fossils, containing several good specimens of
+Pterichthys and Coccosteus, undistinguishable, like those I had seen on
+the previous day, in their state of keeping, and the character of the
+nodular matrices in which they lie, from my old acquaintance the
+Cephalaspians of Cromarty. The animal matter which the bony plates and
+scales originally contained has been converted, in both the Gamrie and
+Cromarty ichthyolites, into a jet-black bitumen; and in both, the
+inclosing nodules consist of a smoke-colored argillaceous limestone,
+which formed around the organisms in a bed of stratified clay, and at
+once exhibits, in consequence, the rectilinear lines of the
+stratification, mechanical in their origin, and the radiating ones of
+the sub-crystalline concretion, purely a trick of the chemistry of the
+deposit. A Pterichthys in Dr. Emslie's collection struck me as different
+in its proportions from any I had previously seen, though, from its
+state of rather imperfect preservation, I hesitated to pronounce
+absolutely upon the fact. I cannot now doubt, however, that it belonged
+to a species not figured nor described at the time; but which, under the
+name of _Pterichthys quadratus_, forms in part the subject of a still
+unpublished memoir, in which Sir Philip Egerton, our first British
+authority on fossil fish, has done me the honor to associate my humble
+name with his own; and which will have the effect of reducing to the
+ranks of the Pterichthyan genus the supposed genera _Pamphractus_ and
+_Homothorax_. A second set of fossils, which Dr. Emslie had derived from
+his tile-works at Blackpots, proved, I found, identical with those of
+the Eathie Lias. As this Banffshire deposit had formed a subject of
+considerable discussion and difference among geologists, I was curious
+to examine it; and the Doctor, though the day was still none of the
+best, kindly walked out with me, to bring under my notice appearances
+which, 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. He
+informed me, as we went, that the Grauwacke (Lower Silurian) deposits of
+the district, hitherto deemed so barren, had recently yielded their
+organisms in a slate quarry at Gamrie-head; and that they belong to that
+ancient family of the Pennatularia which, in this northern kingdom,
+seems to have taken precedence of all the others. Judging from what now
+appears, the Graptolite must be regarded as the first settler who
+squatted for a living in that deep-sea area of undefined boundary
+occupied at the present time by the bold wave-worn headlands and blue
+hills of Scotland; and this new Banffshire locality not only greatly
+extends the range of the fossil in reference to the kingdom, but also
+establishes, in a general way, the fossiliferous identity of the Lower
+Silurian deposits to the north of the Grampians with that of
+Peebles-shire and Galloway in the south,--so far as I know, the only
+other two Scottish districts in which this organism has been found.
+
+The argillaceous deposit of Blackpots occupies, in the form of a green
+swelling bank, a promontory rather soft than bold in its contour, that
+projects far into the sea, and forms, when tipped with its slim column
+of smoke from the tile-kiln, a pleasing feature in the landscape. I had
+set it down on the previous day, when it first caught my eye from the
+lofty cliffs of Gamrie-head, at the distance of some ten or twelve
+miles, as different in character from all the other features of the
+prospect. The country generally is moulded on a framework of primary
+rock, and presents headlands of hard, sharp outline, to the attrition of
+the waves; whereas this single headland in the midst,--soft-lined,
+undulatory, and plump,--seems suited to remind one of Burns's young Kirk
+Alloway beauty disporting amid the thin old ladies that joined with her
+in the dance. And it _is_ a greatly younger beauty than the Cambrian and
+mica-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 the
+promontory; and as the clay is valuable, in this tile-draining age, for
+the facility with which it can be moulded into pipe-tiles (a purpose
+which the ordinary clays of the north of Scotland, composed chiefly of
+re-formations of the Old Red Sandstone, are what is technically termed
+too _short_ to serve), it is gradually retreating inland before the
+persevering spade and mattock of the laborer. The deposit has already
+been drawn out into many hundred miles of cylindrical pipes, and is
+destined to be drawn out into many thousands more,--such being one of
+the strange metamorphoses effected in the geologic formations, now that
+that curious animal the Bimana has come upon the stage; and at length it
+will have no existence in the country, save as an immense system of
+veins and arteries underlying the vegetable mould. Will these veins and
+arteries, I marvel, form, in their turn, the _fossils_ of another
+period, when a higher platform than that into which they have been laid
+will be occupied to the full by plants and animals specifically
+different from those of the present scene of things,--the existences of
+a happier and more finished creation? My business to-day, however, was
+with the fossils which the deposit now contains,--not with those which
+it may ultimately form.
+
+The Blackpots clay is of a dark-bluish or greenish-gray color, and so
+adhesive, that I now felt, when walking among it, after the softening
+rains of the previous night and morning, as if I had got into a bed of
+bird-lime. It is thinly charged with rolled pebbles, septaria, and
+pieces of a bituminous shale, containing broken Belemnites, and
+sorely-flattened Ammonites, that exist as thin films of a white chalky
+lime. The pebbles, like those of the boulder-clay of the northern side
+of the Moray Frith, are chiefly of the primary rocks and older
+sandstones, and were probably in the neighborhood, in their present
+rolled form, long ere the re-formation of the inclosing mass; while the
+shale and the septaria are, as shown by their fossils, decidedly Liasic.
+I detected among the conchifers a well-marked species of our northern
+Lias, figured by Sowerby from Eathie specimens,--the _Plagiostoma
+concentrica_; and among the Cephalopoda, though considerably broken,
+the _Belemnite elongatus_ and _Belemnite lanceolata_, with the _Ammonite
+Koenigi_ (_mutabilis_),--all Eathie shells. I, besides, found in the
+bank a piece of a peculiar-looking quartzose sandstone, traversed by
+hard jaspedeous veins of a brownish-gray color, which I have never
+found, in Scotland at least, save associated with the Lias of our
+north-eastern coasts. Further, my attention was directed by Dr. Emslie
+to a fine Lignite in his collection, which had once formed some eighteen
+inches or two feet of the trunk of a straight slender pine,--probably
+the _Pinites Eiggensis_,--in which, as in most woods of the Lias and
+Oolite, the annual rings are as strongly marked as in the existing firs
+or larches of our hill-sides.[11] The Blackpots deposit is evidently a
+re-formation of a Liasic patch, identical, both in mineralogical
+character and in its organic remains, with the lower beds of the Eathie
+Lias; while the fragments of shale which it contains belong chiefly to
+an upper Liasic bed. So rich is the dark-colored tenacious argil of the
+Inferior Lias of Eathie, that the geologist who walks over it when it is
+still moist with the receding tide would do well to look to his
+footing;--the mixture of soap and grease spread by the ship-carpenter
+on his launch-slips, to facilitate the progress of his vessel seawards,
+is not more treacherous to the tread: while the Upper Liasic deposit
+which rests over it is composed of a dark slaty shale, largely charged
+with bitumen. And of a Liasic deposit of this compound character,
+consisting in larger part of an inferior argillaceous bed, and in lesser
+part of a superior one of dark shale, the tile-clay of Blackpots has
+been formed.
+
+I had next to determine whether aught remained to indicate the period of
+its re-formation. The tile-works at the point of the promontory rest on
+a bed of shell-sand, composed exclusively, like the sand so abundant on
+the western coast of Scotland, of fragments of existing shells. These,
+however, are so fresh and firm, that, though the stratum which they form
+seems to underlie the clay at its edges, I cannot regard them as older
+than the most modern of our ancient sea-margins. They formed, in all
+probability, in the days of the old coast line, a white shelly beach,
+under such a precipitous front of the dark clay as argillaceous deposits
+almost always present to the undermining wear of the waves. On the
+recession of the sea, however, to its present line, the abrupt, steep
+front, loosened by the frosts and washed by the rains, would of course
+gradually moulder down over them into a slope; and there would thus be
+communicated to the shelly stratum, at least at its edges, an underlying
+character. The true period of the re-formation of the deposit was, I can
+have no doubt, that of the boulder-clay. I observed that the septaria
+and larger masses of shale which the bed contains, bear, on
+roughly-polished surfaces, in the line of their larger axes, the
+mysterious groovings and scratchings of this period,--marks which I have
+never yet known to fail in their chronological evidence. It may be
+mentioned, too, simply as a fact, though one of less value than the
+other, that the deposit occurs in its larger development exactly where,
+in the average, the boulder-clays also are most largely developed,--a
+little over that line where the waves for so many ages charged against
+the coast, ere the last upheaval of the land or the recession of the sea
+sent them back to their present margin. There had probably existed to
+the west or north-west of the deposit, perhaps in the middle of the open
+bay formed by the promontory on which it rests,--for the small
+proportion of other than Liasic materials which it contains serves to
+show that it could be derived from no great distance,--an outlier of the
+Lower Lias. The icebergs of the cold glacial period, propelled along the
+submerged land by some arctic current, or caught up by the gulf-stream,
+gradually grated it down, as a mason's laborer grates down the surface
+of the sandstone slab which he is engaged in polishing; and the
+comminuted debris, borne eastwards by the current, was cast down here.
+It has been stated that no Liasic remains have been found in the
+boulder-clays of Scotland. They are certainly rare in the boulder-clays
+of the northern shores of the Moray Frith; for there the nearest Lias,
+bearing in a western direction from the clay, is that of Applecross, on
+the other side of the island; and the materials of the boulder-deposits
+of the north have invariably been derived in the line, westerly in its
+general bearing, of the grooves and scratches of the iceberg era. But on
+the southern shore of the frith, where that westerly line passed athwart
+the Liasic beds of our eastern coast, organisms of the Lias are
+comparatively common in the boulder-clays; and here, at Blackpots, we
+find an extensive deposit of the same period formed of Liasic materials
+almost exclusively. Fragments of still more modern rocks occur in the
+boulder-clays of Caithness. My friend Mr. Robert Dick, of Thurso, to
+whose persevering labors and interesting discoveries in the Old Red
+Sandstone of his locality I have had frequent occasion to refer, has
+detected in a blue boulder-clay, scooped into precipitous banks by the
+river Thorsa, fragments both of chalk-flints and a characteristic
+conglomerate of the Oolite. He has, besides, found it mottled from top
+to bottom, a full hundred feet over the sea-level, and about two miles
+inland, with comminuted fragments of existing shells. But of this more
+anon.
+
+
+
+
+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,--for
+three-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 other
+kindred rocks of a primary district. The day was still gloomy and gray,
+and ill suited to improve homely scenery; nor is this portion of the
+Banff coast nearly so striking as that which I had travelled over the
+day before. It has, however, its spots of a redeeming character,--rocky
+recesses on the shore, half-beach, half-sward, rich in wild-flowers and
+shells,--where one could saunter in a calm sunny morning, with one's
+_bairns_ about one, very delightfully; and the interior is here and
+there agreeably undulated by diluvial hillocks, that, when the sun falls
+low in the evening, must chequer the landscape with many a pleasing
+alternation of light and shadow. The Burn of Boyne,--which separates,
+about two miles from Portsoy, a grauwacke from a mica-schist
+district,--with its bare, open valley, its steep limestone banks, and
+its gray, melancholy castle, long since roofless and windowless, and
+surrounded by a few stunted trees, bears a deserted and solitary
+shagginess about it, that struck me as wildly agreeable. It is such a
+valley as one might expect to meet a ghost in, in some still, dewy
+evening, as gloamin was darkening into uncertainty the outlines of the
+ancient ruin, and the newly-kindled stars looked down upon the stream.
+
+It so happened, however, that my only story connected with either ruin
+or valley was as little a ghost story as might be. I remember that, when
+lying ill of fever on one occasion,--indisposed enough to see apparition
+after apparition flitting across the bed-curtains, like the figures of a
+magic lantern posting along the darkened wall, and yet self-possessed
+enough to know that they were but mere pictures in the eye, and to watch
+them as they rose,--I set myself to determine whether they were in any
+degree amenable to the will, or connected by the ordinary associative
+links of the metaphysician. Fixing my mind on a certain object, I strove
+to call it up in the character, not of an image of the conceptive
+faculty, but of a fever-vision on the retina. The image which I pictured
+to 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's
+head obstinately refused to rise. I had no control, I found, over the
+fever imagery. And the picture that rose instead, uncalled and
+unexpected, was that of a coal-fire burning brightly in a grate, with a
+huge tea-kettle steaming cheerily over it.
+
+In traversing the bare height which, rising on the western side of the
+valley of the Boyne, owes its comparatively bold relief in the landscape
+to the firmness of the primary rock which composes it, I picked up a
+piece of graphic granite, bearing its inlaid characters of dark quartz
+on a ground of cream-colored feldspar. This variety, however, though
+occasionally found in rolled boulders in the neighborhood of Portsoy, is
+not the graphic granite for which the locality is famous, and which
+occurs in a vein in the mica schist of the eminence I was now
+traversing, about a mile to the east of the town. The prevailing ground
+of the granite of the vein is a flesh-colored feldspar; and the
+thickly-marked quartzose characters with which it is set, greatly
+smaller and paler than in the cream-colored stone, bear less the antique
+Hebraic look, and would scarce deceive even the most credulous
+antiquary. Antiquarians, however, _have_ been sometimes deceived by
+weathered specimens of this graphic rock, in which the characters were
+of considerable size, and restricted to thin veins, covering the surface
+of a schistose groundwork. Maupertuis, during his famous journey to
+Lapland, undertaken in 1737, to establish, from actual measurement, that
+the 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 covered
+with snow, to examine an ancient monument, of which, he says, "the Fins
+and Laplanders frequently spoke, as containing in its inscription the
+knowledge of everything of which they were ignorant." He found it on the
+side of a mountain, buried in snow; and ascertained, after kindling a
+great fire around it, in order to lay it bare, that it was a stone of
+irregular form, composed of various layers of unequal hardness, and that
+the characters, which were rather more than an inch in length, were
+written on "a layer of a species of flint," chiefly in two lines, with a
+few scattered signs beneath, while the rest of the mass was composed of
+a rock more soft and foliated. Graphic granite, it may be mentioned,
+generally occurs, not in masses, but in veins and layers. The
+inscription had been described in a previously published dissertation of
+immense erudition, as Runic; but a Runic scholar of the party found he
+could make nothing of it. The philosopher himself was struck by the
+frequent repetition of characters of nearly the same form on the stone;
+but he was ingenious enough to get over the difficulty, by remembering
+that in our notation, after the Arabic manner, characters shaped exactly
+alike may be very frequently repeated,--nay, as in some of the lines of
+the Lapland inscription, may succeed each other, as in the sums I. II.
+III. IIII. or X. XX. XXX.,--and yet very distinct and definite ideas
+attach to them all. Still, however, he could not, he says, venture on
+authoritatively deciding whether the inscription was a work of man or a
+sport of nature. He stood between his two conclusions, like our
+Edinburgh 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 a
+purple pall to both.
+
+"Should it be no other than a sport of nature," he concludes, "the
+reputation which the stone bears in this country deserves that we should
+have given a description of it. If, on the other hand, what is on it be
+an inscription, though it certainly does not possess the beauty of the
+sculpture of Greece or Rome, it very possibly has the advantage of being
+the oldest in the universe. The country in which it is found is
+inhabited only by a race of men who live like beasts in the forests. We
+cannot imagine that they can have ever had any memorable event to
+transmit to posterity, nor, if ever they had had, that they could have
+invented the means. Nor can it be conceived that this country, with its
+present aspect, ever possessed more civilized inhabitants. The rigor of
+the climate and the barrenness of the land have destined it for the
+retreat of a few miserable wretches, who know no other. It seems,
+therefore, that the inscription must have been cut at a period when the
+country was situated in a different climate, and before some one of
+those great revolutions which, we cannot doubt, have taken place on our
+globe. The position that the earth's axis holds at present with respect
+to the ecliptic, occasions Lapland to receive the sun's rays very
+obliquely: 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 its
+misfortunes. These regions may formerly have been those on which the sun
+shone most favorably; the polar circles may have been what now the
+tropics are, and the torrid zone have filled the place occupied by the
+temperate." Pretty well, Monsieur, for a philosopher! The various
+attempts made to unriddle the real history of graphic granite are,
+however, scarce less curious than the speculations connected with what
+may be termed its romance. It seems to be generally held, since the days
+of old Hutton, who, in his "Theory of the Earth," discussed the subject
+with his usual ingenuity, that the feldspathic basis of the stone first
+crystallized, leaving interstices between the crystals, partaking of a
+certain regularity of form,--a consequence of the regularity of the
+crystals themselves,--and of a certain irregularity from the eccentric
+dispositions which these manifest in their position and relations to
+each other; and that these interstices, being afterwards filled up with
+quartz, form the characters of the rock,--characters partaking enough of
+the first element of _regularity_ to present their peculiar graphic
+appearance, and enough of the second element of _irregularity_ to
+exhibit forms of an alphabet-like variety of outline. The chemist,
+however, in cross-questioning the explanation, has his puzzle to
+propound regarding it. Quartz, he says, being considerably less fusible
+than feldspar, would naturally consolidate first, and so would give form
+to the more fusible substance, instead of deriving form from it. On what
+principle, then, is it that, reversing its ordinary character, it should
+have been the last of the two substances to consolidate in the graphic
+granite?--a query to which there seems to be no direct reply, but which
+as little affects the fact that it _was_ the substance which last
+consolidated, and which took form from the other, as the decision of the
+learned Strasburgers, which determined the impossibility of the long
+nose in Slawkenbergius's Tale, affected the actual existence of that
+remarkable feature. "It happens _to be_, notwithstanding your
+objection," said the controversialists on the pro-nose side of the
+question. "But it _ought not_," replied their opponents.
+
+The rain again returned as I was engaged in examining the graphic
+granite of the Portsoy vein; the breeze from the sea heightened into a
+gale, that soon fringed the coast with a broad border of foam; and I
+entered the town, which looked but indifferently well in its gray
+dishabille of haze and spray, tolerably wet and worn, with but the
+prospect before me of being weather-bound for the rest of the day. I
+found an old-fashioned inn, kept by somewhat old-fashioned people, who
+had lately come from the country to "open a public;" and ensconced
+myself by the fireside, in a huge many-windowed room, that must have
+witnessed the county dinners of at least a century ago. Soon wearying,
+however, of hearing the rain beating mad-like ratans upon the panes, and
+availing myself of a comparatively "lucid interval," I sallied out,
+wrapped up in my plaid, to examine the serpentine beds in the
+neighborhood, which produce what is so extensively known as the Portsoy
+marble. The _beds_ or _veins_ of this substance,--for it is still a moot
+point whether they occur here as mere insulated masses of contemporary
+origin with the primary formations which surround them, or as Plutonic
+dykes injected into fissures at a later period,--are of very
+considerable extent, one of them measuring about twenty-five yards
+across, and another considerably more than a quarter of a mile; and, had
+they but the solidity of the true marbles, they would scarce fail to be
+regarded as valuable quarries of a highly ornamental stone, admirably
+suited for the interior decorations of the architect. But they are
+unluckily what the quarrier would term rubbly,--traversed by an infinity
+of cracks and fissures; and it is rare indeed to find a continuous mass
+out of which a chimney-jamb or lintel could be fashioned. The serpentine
+was wrought here considerably more than a century and a half ago, and
+exported to France for the magnificent Palace of Versailles; which,
+though regarded by the French nation, says Voltaire, as "a favorite
+without merit," Louis the Fourteenth persisted at the time in lavishly
+beautifying, and looked as for abroad as Portsoy for materials with
+which to adorn it. I have, however, seen it stated that the greater part
+of a ship's cargo, brought afterwards to Paris on speculation, was
+suffered to lie unwrought for years in the stone-dealer's yard, and was
+ultimately disposed of as rubbish,--a consequence, probably, of its
+unfitness, from its shaky texture, for ornamental purposes on a large
+scale, though for ornaments of the smaller kind, such as boxes, vases,
+and plates, it has been pronounced unrivalled. "At Zoeblitz, in Upper
+Saxony," says Professor Jamieson, "several hundred people are employed
+in quarrying, cutting, turning, and polishing the serpentine which
+occurs in that neighborhood; and the various articles into which it is
+manufactured are carried all over Germany. The serpentine of Portsoy,"
+he adds, "is, however, far superior to that of Zoeblitz, 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 no
+means 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 the
+wet imparted to the undressed masses all the effect of polish, and
+brought out in their proper variegations of color, every cloud, streak,
+and vein. Viewed in the mass, the general hue is green; so much so, that
+an insulated stack, which stands abreast of one of the beds, a
+stone-cast in the sea, has greatly the appearance, at a little distance,
+of an immense mass of verdigris. But red, gray, and brown are also
+prevailing colors in the rock; occasional veins and blotches of white
+give lightness to the darker portions; and veins of hematitic and deep
+umbry tints, variety to the portions that are lighter. The greens vary
+from the palest olive to the deepest black-green of the mineralogist;
+the reds and browns, from blood-red to dark chocolate, and from
+wood-brown to brownish-black; and, thus various in shade, they occur in
+almost every possible variety of combination and form,--dotted, spotted,
+clouded, veined,--so that each separate pebble on the shore seems the
+representative of a rock different from the rocks represented by almost
+all the others. Though not much of a mineralogist, I could have spent
+considerably more time than the weather permitted me to employ this
+evening, in admiring the beauties of this beach of _marbles_, or
+rather,--as the real name, derived from those gorgeous, many-colored
+cloudings, that impart a terrible splendor to the skins of the snake and
+viper family, is not only the more correct, but also the more poetical
+of the two,--this beach of _serpentines_. I had, however, to compromise
+matters between the fierce wind and rain and the pretty rocks and
+pebbles, by adjourning to the workshop of the Portsoy lapidary, Mr.
+Clark, and examining under cover his polished specimens, of which I
+purchased for a few shillings a characteristic and elegant little set.
+Portsoy is peculiarly rich in minerals; and hence it reckons among its
+mechanics of the ordinary class, what perhaps no other village in
+Scotland of the same size and population possesses,--a skilful lapidary.
+Mr. Clark's collection of the graphic granites, serpentines, and talcose
+and mica schists, of the district, with their associated minerals, such
+as schorl, talc, asbestos, amianthus, mountain cork, steatite, and
+schiller spar, will be found eminently worthy a visit by the passing
+traveller.
+
+I made several inquiries in the village, though not, as it proved, in
+the right direction, regarding a poor old lady, several years dead, of
+whom I had known a very little considerably more than a quarter of a
+century before, and whose grave I would have visited, bad as the night
+was, had I met any one who could have pointed it out to me. But
+ungrateful Portsoy seemed to have forgotten poor Miss Bond, who, in all
+her printed letters and little stories, so rarely forgot _it_. Have any
+of my readers ever seen the work (in two slim volumes), "Letters of a
+Village Governess," published in 1814 by Elizabeth Bond, and dedicated
+to Sir Walter Scott? If not, and should they chance to see, as I lately
+did, 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 in
+Portsoy and its neighborhood; but the rain dashed unceasingly, and made
+exploration under the cover of the umbrella somewhat resemble that of a
+sea-bottom under cover of the diving-bell. I could see but little at a
+time, 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 so
+well employed here during the day, that the silence and repose of the
+evening is very delightful. In fine weather I walk by the sea-side, and
+scramble among the rugged rocks, many of which are inaccessible to human
+feet, forming a fine retreat for foxes. These animals often may be seen
+from the heights, sporting with their cubs in perfect safety. This day I
+went to see the works of an old _virtuoso_, who turns in marble, or
+rather granite [serpentine] all kinds of chimney-piece ornaments, rings,
+ear-rings, etc. Several specimens of his work, which must have cost him
+a vast deal of trouble, I thought very beautiful. It was in this
+neighborhood that the celebrated Ferguson spent so much of his time. The
+globular stones on the gate of Durn are still to be seen, on which he
+mapped out the figuring of the terrestrial and celestial globes. I was
+told it was forbidden ground to approach the premises of Durn; but I
+could not resist the temptation of visiting the spot where the young
+philosopher had shown such early proofs of his genius; and I accordingly
+paid the forfeit of an _impertinent_, for the gentleman who resides
+there caught the prowler, and in genteel terms bade her go about her
+business, and never return. How ungracious! She was doing no harm."
+
+The morning arose as gloomily as the evening had fallen; and I walked on
+in the rain to Cullen, fully disposed to sympathize by the way with the
+"hardy Byron,"--he of the "Narrative,"--who, from his ill-luck in
+weather, went among his sailors by the name of "Foul-weather Jack." In
+the sandy bay of Cullen, where the road, after inflecting inland for
+some five or six miles, comes again upon the sea, I found the surf
+charging 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 vast
+attritive power of ocean in wearing down the land. When pausing for a
+little abreast of the fishing village, partially sheltered by an old
+boat, to mark the fierce turmoil, it suddenly occurred to me,--as the
+tempest weltered around reef and skerry, and roared wildly, mile after
+mile, along the beach,--that the day and night were now just equal, and
+that it was the customary equinoctial storm that had broken out to
+accompany me on my journey. And so, calculating on a few days more of
+it, instead of waiting on in the hope of a fair afternoon to examine the
+outlier of Old Red which occurs in the neighborhood of Cullen, I was
+content to see at a distance its mural-sided cliffs rising like broken
+walls through the flat sand; and, taking the road for Fochabers, with
+the intention of leaving exploration till fairer weather set in, I
+resolved on posting straight on, to join my relatives on the opposite
+side of the Frith. The deep-red color of the boulder-clay, as exhibited
+by the way-side, in the water-courses and the water,--for every runnel
+was tumbling down big and turbid with the rains,--intimated, when, after
+leaving Cullen some six or seven miles behind me, I passed from a bare
+moory region of quartz rock into a region of woods and fields, that I
+was again upon my ancient acquaintance, the Old Red Sandstone. And the
+section furnished by the Burn of Tynet showed me shortly after that the
+intimation was a correct one, and how generally it may be laid down as a
+rule, that at least the more impalpable portions of the boulder-clay are
+derived from the rocks on which it rests. The ichthyolite beds appear in
+the course of the burn. They have furnished several good
+specimens,--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 who
+explores from Gamrie westwards, that peculiar style of coloring which
+characterizes the Old Red ichthyolites of the shires of Moray and Nairn,
+and which differs so strikingly from the more sombre style exhibited by
+the 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. The
+day, however, was ill-suited for fishing Pterichthyes and Osteolepi out
+of the Tynet: the red water was roaring from bank to brae; here eddying
+along the half-submerged furze,--there tearing down the boulder-days in
+raw, red land-slips; and so, casting but one eager glance at the bed
+where the fish lay, I travelled on, and entered the tall woods to the
+east of Fochabers. The rain ceased for a time; and I met in the woods an
+old pensioner, who had been evidently weather-bound in some
+public-house, and had now taken the opportunity of the fair interval to
+stagger to his dwelling. He was eminently, exuberantly happy,--there
+could not be two opinions on that head,--full of all manner of bright
+sunshiny thoughts and imaginations, rendered just a little tremulous and
+uncertain by the _summer-heat_ exhalations of the imbibed moisture, like
+distant objects in a hot noonday landscape in July seen through volumes
+of rising vapor; and a sheep's head and trotters, which he carried under
+his 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 for
+all that. He confronted me with the air of an old acquaintance; gave the
+military salute; and then, laying hold of a corner of my plaid with his
+thumb 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 grenadier
+of the 42d; and I lacked the moral courage to undeceive him. I met
+nothing further on my way worthy of record, save and except a sheep's
+trotter, dropped by the old pensioner in one of his zig-zaggings to the
+extreme left; but having no particular use for the trotter at the time
+and in the circumstances, I left it to benefit the next passer-by. I
+finished my journey of eighteen miles in capital style, and was within
+five minutes' walk of Fochabers when the horn of the mail-guard was
+sounding up the street. And, entering the village, I found the vehicle
+standing opposite the inn door, minus the horses.
+
+The _insides_ and _outsides_ were sitting down to dinner together as I
+entered the inn; and I felt, after my long walk, that it would be rather
+an agreeable matter to join with them. But in the hope of meeting my old
+friend 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 so
+chanced, however, that Mr. Joss was not _out_ that day; and the man in
+the red long coat was a stranger whom I had never seen before. I
+inquired of him regarding Mr. Joss,--one of perhaps the most remarkable
+mail-guards in Europe. I have at least never heard of another who, like
+him, amuses his leisure on the coach-top with the "Principia" of Newton,
+and understands it. And the man, drawing his inference from the interest
+in Mr. Joss which my queries evinced, asked me whether I myself was not
+a coach-guard. "No," I rather thoughtlessly replied, "I am not a
+coach-guard." Half a minute's consideration, however, led me to doubt
+whether I had given the right answer. "I am not sure," I said to
+myself, on second thoughts, "but the man has cut pretty fairly on the
+point;--I daresay _I am_ a sort of coach-guard. I have to mount my
+twice-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 or
+full; I have to keep a sharp eye on the opposition coaches; I am
+responsible, 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 have
+always to keep my blunderbuss full charged to the muzzle,--not wishing
+harm to any one, but bound in duty to let drive at all and sundry who
+would make war upon the passengers, or attempt running the conveyance
+off 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, the
+problems 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 the
+true nature of my occupation so much more shrewdly than myself, I rode
+on to Elgin, where I passed the night.
+
+It is difficult to arrange in the mind the geologic formations of
+Banffshire in their character as a series of deposits. The pages of the
+stony record which the county composes, like those of an
+unskilfully-folded pamphlet, have been strangely mixed together, so that
+page last succeeds in some places to page first, and, of the
+intermediate pages, some appear at the beginning of the work, and some
+at 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 boundary
+in this direction, that we find the beds comparatively little disturbed,
+and arranged chronologically in their original places. In the eastern
+and southern parts of the shire, rocks widely separated by the date of
+their formation have been set down side by side in patches,
+occasionally of but inconsiderable extent. Now the traveller passes over
+a district of grauwacke, now over a re-formation of the Lias; anon he
+finds himself on a primary limestone,--gneiss, syenite, clay-slate, or
+quartz-rock; and yet anon amid the fossils of some outlier of the Old
+Red. The geological map of the county is, like Joseph's coat, of many
+colors. I remember seeing, when a boy, more years ago than I am inclined
+to specify, some workmen engaged in pulling down what had been a
+house-painter's shop, a full century before. The painter had been in the
+somewhat slovenly habit of cleaning his brushes by rubbing them against
+a hard-cast wall, which was covered, in consequence, by a many-colored
+layer 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 upper
+surface smooth; and, lo! a geological map. The _strata_ of variously
+hued pigment, spread originally over the surface of the hard-cast wall,
+were cut open, by the _denudation_ of the grindstone, into all manner of
+fantastic forms, and seemed thrown into all sorts of strange
+neighborhoods. The _map_ lacked merely the additional perplexity of a
+few bold _faults_, with here and there a decided _dike_, in order to
+render it on a small scale a sort of miniature transcript of the geology
+of 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 by
+way of priming, coat after coat of the primary rocks,--gneiss, and
+stratified hornblend, and mica-schist, and quartz-rock, and day-slate;
+and then, after breaking the coatings well up, and rubbing them well
+down, and so spoiling and crumpling up the work as to make their
+original order considerably a puzzle, I have begun anew to paint over
+the rough surface with thick coatings of grauwacke and grauwacke-slate.
+When this part of the operation was completed, I have again begun
+to break up and grind down,--here letting a tract of grauwacke
+sink into the broken primary,--there wearing it off the surface
+altogether,--yonder elevating the original granitic _hard-cast_ till it
+rose over all the coatings, Primary and Palaeozoic. And then I have begun
+to paint yet a third time with thick Old Red Sandstone pigment; and yet
+again to break up and wear down,--here to insert a tenon of the Old Red
+deep into a mortise of the grauwacke, as at Gamrie,--there to dovetail
+it into the clay-slate, as at Tomantoul,--yonder, after laying it across
+the upturned quartz-rock, as at Cullen, to rub by much the greater part
+of it away again, leaving but mere remainder-patches and fragments, to
+mark where it had been. Lastly, if I had none of the superior Palaeozoic
+or Secondary formations to deal with, I have brushed over the whole, by
+way of finish, with the variously-derived coatings of the superficial
+deposits; and thus, as I have said, I have often completed, in idea,
+after the chance suggestion of the old painter's shop, my portable
+models of the geology of disturbed districts like the Banffshire one.
+The deposits of Moray are greatly less broken. Denudation has partially
+worn them down; but they seem to have almost wholly escaped the previous
+crumpling 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 the
+geologist who has travelled northwards from the Frith of Forth. He takes
+leave of a similar stone at Cupar-Fife,--a warmly-tinted yellow
+sandstone, peculiarly well-suited for giving effect to architectural
+ornament; and after passing along the deep-red sandstone houses of the
+shires of Angus and Kincardine, and the gneiss, granite, hyperstene, and
+mica-schist houses of Aberdeen and Banff shires, he again finds houses
+of a deep red on crossing the Spey, and houses of a warm yellow tint on
+reaching Elgin,--geologically the Cupar-Fife of the north. And the story
+that the colored buildings tell him is, that he has been passing, though
+by a somewhat circuitous route of a hundred and fifty miles, over an
+anticlinal geological section,--_down_ in the scale till he reached
+Aberdeen and had gone a little beyond it, and then _up_ again, until at
+Elgin he arrives at the same superior yellow bed of Old Red Sandstone
+which he had quitted at Cupar-Fife. Both beds contain the same
+organisms. The Holoptychius of Dura Den, near Cupar, must have sprung
+from the same original as the Holoptychius of the Hospital and
+Bishop-Mill quarries near Elgin; and it seems not improbable that the
+two beds, thus identical in their character and contents, may have
+existed, ere the upheaval of the Grampians broke their continuity, as an
+extended deposit, at the bottom of the same sea. But with this last and
+newest of the formations of the Old Red Sandstone the identity of the
+deposits to the south and north ceases. The strata which in the south
+overlie the yellow bed of the Holoptychius represent the Carboniferous
+period, the overlying strata in the north represent the Oolitic one. On
+the one side the miner sinks his shaft, and finds a true coal, composed
+of the Stigmaria, Calamites, Club-mosses, Ferns, and Araucarians of the
+Palaeozoic era; he sinks his shaft on the other side, and finds but thin
+seams of an imperfect lignite, composed of the Cycadeae, Pines,
+Sphenopteri, and Clathraria of the Secondary period. The flora which
+found its subsoil in the Old Red Sandstone north of the Grampians,
+belonged to a scene of things so much more modern than the flora which
+found its subsoil in the Old Red Sandstone of the south, that all its
+productions were green and flourishing, waving beside lake, river, and
+sea, 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 long
+departed.
+
+Another thoroughly wet morning! varied only from the morning of the
+preceding day by the absence of wind, and the greater weight of the
+persevering vertical rain, that leaped upwards in myriads of little
+dancing pyramids from the surface of every pool. I walked out under
+cover of my umbrella, to renew my acquaintance with the outlier of the
+Weald at Linksfield, and ascertain what sort of section it now presented
+under the quarrying operations of the limeburners. There was, however,
+little to be seen; the bands of green and blue clays, alternating with
+strata of fossiliferous limestone, and layers of a gray shade, thickly
+charged with minute shells of Cypris, were sadly blurred this morning by
+the trail of numerous slips from above, which had fallen during the
+rains, and softened into mud as they rushed downwards athwart the face
+of the quarry: and the arched band of boulder-clay which so mysteriously
+underlies the deposit was, save in a few parts, wholly covered up by the
+debris. The occurrence of the clay here as an inferior bed, with but the
+cornstone of the Old Red beneath, and all the beds of the Weald resting
+over it, forms a riddle somewhat difficult of solution; but it is
+palpably not reading it aright to regard the deposit, with at least one
+geologist who has written on the subject, as older than the rocks above.
+It is, on the contrary, as a vast amount of various and unequivocal
+evidence demonstrates, incalculably more modern; nay, we find proof of
+the fact here in that very bed which has been instanced as rendering it
+doubtful; the clay of which the interpolation is composed is found to
+contain fragments, not only of the cornstone on which it rests, but also
+of the Wealden limestone and shales which it underlies. It forms the
+mere filling up of a flat-roofed cavern, or rather of two flat-roofed
+caverns,--for the limestone roof dipped in the centre to the cornstone
+floor,--which, previous to the times of the boulder-clay, had lain open
+in what was then, as now, an old-world deposit, charged with long
+extinct organisms, but which, during the iceberg period, was penetrated
+and occupied by the clay, as run lime penetrates and occupies the
+interstices of a dry-stone wall. It was no day for gathering fossils. I
+saw a few ganoid scales, washed by the rain from the investing rubbish,
+glittering on fragments of the limestone, with a few of the
+characteristic shells of the deposit, chiefly Unionidae; but nothing
+worth bringing away. The adhesive clay of the Weald, widely scattered
+by the workmen, and wrought into mortar by the beating rains, made it a
+matter of some difficulty for the struggling foot to retain the shoe,
+and, sticking to my soles by pounds at a time, rendered me obnoxious to
+the old English nickname of "rough-footed Scot." And so, after
+traversing the heaps, somewhat like a fly in treacle, I had to yield to
+the rain above and the mud beneath, and to return to do in Elgin what
+cannot be done equally well in almost any other town of its size in
+Scotland,--pursue my geological inquiries under cover.
+
+On this, as on other occasions, I was struck by the complex and very
+various forms assumed by the ganoid scales of the Wealden. Throughout
+the Oolitic system generally, including the Lias, there obtains a
+singular complexity of type in these little glittering tiles of
+enamelled bone, which contrasts strongly with the greatly more simple
+style which obtained among the ganoids of the Palaeozoic period. In many
+of these last, as in the Coelacanth family, including the genera
+Holoptychius, Asterolepis, and Glyptolepis, in all their many species,
+with at least one genus of Dipterians, the genus Dipterus, the external
+outline and arrangement of scale was as simple as in any of the Cycloid
+family of the present time. Like slates on a roof, each single scale
+covered two, and was covered by two in turn; and the only point of
+difference 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 preserve
+an equability of thickness throughout,--were so adjusted, that two
+scales at their edges, where they lay the one over the other, were not
+thicker than one scale at its centre. Even in the other ganoids, their
+contemporaries, such as the Osteolepis and Diplopterus, where the
+scales were ranged more in the tile fashion, side by side, there was,
+with much ingenious carpentry in the fitting, a general simplicity of
+form. It would almost appear, however, that ere the ganoid order reached
+the times of the Weald, the simple forms had been exhausted, and that
+nature, abhorring repetition, and ever stamping upon the scales some
+specific characteristic of the creature that bore them, was obliged to
+have recourse to forms of a more complex and involved outline. These
+latter-day scales send out nail-like spikes laterally and atop, to lay
+hold upon their neighbors, and exhibit in their undersides grooves that
+accommodated the nails sent out, in turn, by their neighbors, to lay
+hold upon _them_. Their forms, too, are indescribably various and
+fantastic. It seems curious enough, that immediately after this
+extremely _artificial_ state of things, if I may so speak, the two
+prevailing orders of the fish of the present day, the Cycloids and
+Ctenoids, should have been ushered upon the scene, and more than the
+original simplicity of scale restored. There took place a sudden
+reaction, from the fantastic and the complex to the simple and the
+plain.
+
+It is further worthy of notice, that though many of the ganoid scales of
+the Secondary systems, including those of the Wealden, glitter as
+brightly in burnished enamel as the more splendent scales of the Old Red
+Sandstone and Coal Measures, there is a curious peculiarity exhibited in
+the 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 Palaeozoic
+period. The outer layer of the scale, which lies over a middle layer of
+a cellular cancellated structure, and corresponds, apparently, with that
+scarf-skin which in the human subject overlies the _rete mucosum_, is
+thickly set over with microscopic pores, funnel-shaped in the transverse
+section, and which, examined by a good glass, in the horizontal one
+resemble the puncturings of a sieve. The Megalichthys of the Coal
+Measures, with its various carboniferous congeners, with the genera
+Diplopterus, Dipterus, and Osteolepis of the Old Red Sandstone,--all
+brilliantly enamelled fish,--are thickly pore-covered. But whatever
+purpose these pores may have served, it seems in the Secondary period to
+have been otherwise accomplished, if, indeed, it continued to exist. It
+is a curious circumstance, that in no case do the pores seem to pass
+_through_ the scale. Whatever their use, they existed merely as
+communications between the cells of the middle cancellated layer and the
+surface. In a fish of the Chalk,--_Macropoma Mantelli_,--the exposed
+fields of the scales are covered over with apparently hollow, elongated
+cylinders, as the little tubes in a shower-bath cover their round field
+of 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 the
+Megalichthys, they communicated between the interior of the scale and
+its external surface. Their structure is at any rate palpably different,
+and they bear no such resemblance to the pores of the human skin as that
+which the Palaeozoic pores present.
+
+The amount of design exhibited in the scales of some of the more ancient
+ganoids,--design obvious enough to be clearly read,--is very
+extraordinary. A single scale of _Holoptychius Nobilissimus_,--fast
+locked up in its red sandstone rock,--laid by, as it were, for
+ever,--will be seen, if we but set ourselves to unravel its texture, to
+form such an instance of nice adaptation of means to an end as might of
+itself be sufficient to confound the atheist. Let me attempt placing one
+of these scales before the reader, in its character as a flat counter of
+bone, of a nearly circular form, an inch and a half in diameter, and an
+eighth-part of an inch in thickness; and then ask him to bethink
+himself of the various means by which he would impart to it the greatest
+possible degree of strength. The human skull consists of two tables of
+solid bone, an inner and an outer, with a spongy cellular substance
+interposed between them, termed the _diploe_; and such is the effect of
+this arrangement, that the blow which would fracture a continuous wall
+of bone has its force broken by the spongy intermediate layer, and
+merely injures the outer table, leaving not unfrequently the inner one,
+which more especially protects the brain, wholly unharmed. Now, such
+also was the arrangement in the scale of the _Holoptychius
+Nobilissimus_. It consisted of its two well-marked tables of solid bone,
+corresponding in their dermal character, the outer to the cuticle, the
+inner to the true skin, and the intermediate cellular layer to the _rete
+mucosum_; but bearing an unmistakable analogy also, as a mechanical
+contrivance, to the two plates and the _diploe_ of the human skull. To
+the strengthening principle of the two tables, however, there were two
+other principles added. Cromwell, when commissioning for a new helmet,
+his old one being, as he expresses it, "ill set," ordered his friend to
+send him a "_fluted pot_," _i.e._, a helmet ridged and furrowed on the
+surface, and suited to break, by its protuberant lines, the force of a
+blow, so that the vibrations of the stroke would reach the body of the
+metal deadened and flat. Now, the outer table of the scale of the
+Holoptychius was a "fluted pot." The alternate ridges and furrows which
+ornamented its surface served a purpose exactly similar with that of the
+flutes and fillets of Cromwell's helmet. The inner table was
+strengthened on a different but not less effective principle. The human
+stomach consists of three coats; and two of these, the outermost or
+peritoneal coat, and the middle or muscular coat, are so arranged, that
+the fibres of the one cross at nearly right angles those of the other.
+The violence which would tear the compact sides of this important organ
+along the fibres of the outer coat, would be checked by the transverse
+arrangement of the fibres of the middle coat, and _vice versa_. We find
+the cotton manufacturer weaving some of his stronger fabrics on a
+similar plan;--they also are made to consist of two _coats_; and what is
+technically termed the _tear_ of the upper is so disposed that it lies
+at an angle of forty-five degrees with the _tear_ of the coat which lies
+underneath. Now, the inner table of the scale of the Holoptychius was
+composed, on this principle, of various layers or coats, arranged the
+one over the other, so that the fibres of each lay at right angles
+with the fibres of the others in immediate contact with it. In
+the 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 the
+grain_ 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 ranged
+at right angles with the line of the _tear_ in four. There were thus in
+a single scale, in order to secure the greatest possible amount of
+strength,--and who can say what other purposes may have been secured
+besides?--three distinct principles embodied,--the principle of the two
+tables and _diploe_ of the human skull,--the principle of the variously
+arranged coats of the human stomach,--and the principle of Oliver
+Cromwell's "fluted pot." There have been elaborate treatises written on
+those ornate flooring-tiles of the classical and middle ages, that are
+occasionally dug up by the antiquary amid monastic ruins, or on the
+sites of old Roman stations. But did any of them ever tell a story half
+so instructive or so strange as that told by the incalculably more
+ancient ganoid _tiles_ of the Palaeozoic and Secondary periods?
+
+I called, on my way back from Linksfield, upon my old friend Mr. Patrick
+Duff, and was introduced once more to his exquisite collection, with its
+unique ichthyolites of at least two genera of fishes of the Old
+Red,--the _Stagonolepis_ and _Placothorax_ of Agassiz,--which up to the
+present time are to be seen nowhere else; and various other fine
+specimens of rare species, which, having sat for their portraits, have
+their forms preserved in the great work of the naturalist of Neufchatel.
+He showed me, with some triumph, one of his later acquisitions,--a fine
+specimen of Holoptychius from the upper yellow sandstone of Bishop-Mill,
+which exhibits the dorsal ridge covered with a line of large overlapping
+scales, not at all unlike those overlapping plates which cover the tail
+of the lobster; for which, by the way, they were mistaken by the workman
+who first laid the fossil open. I examined, too, with some interest,
+fragments of a gigantic species of Pterichthys, belonging to an inferior
+division of the same Upper Old Red formation as the yellow stone,
+designated by Agassiz _Pterichthys major_, which must have attained to
+at least thrice the size, linearly, of even its bulkier congeners of the
+Lower formation of the Coccosteus. After examining many a drawer,
+stored, from the deposits of the neighborhood, with characteristic
+fossils of the Lias, the Weald, and the Oolite, and of the Upper and
+Lower Old Red, we set out together to expatiate amid the treasures of
+the Town Museum.
+
+Among other recent additions to the Museum, there is an interesting set
+of the fishes of the Ganges, the donation of a gentleman long resident
+in India, to which Mr. Duff called my attention, as illustrative, in
+some of the specimens, of the more characteristic ichthyolites of the
+Old Red Sandstone. One numerous family, the Pimelodi, abundantly
+represented in the Gangetic region, in not only the rivers, but also the
+ponds, tanks, and estuaries of the district, is certainly worthy the
+careful study of the geologist. It approaches nearer, in some of its
+more strongly-marked genera, to the Coccosteus of the Lower Old Red,
+than any other tribe of existing fishes which I have yet seen. The body
+of the Pimelodus, from the anterior dorsal downwards, is as naked as
+that of the eel; whereas the head, and in several of the species the
+back, is armed with strong plates of naked bone, curiously fretted, as
+in many of the ichthyolites of the Lower, and more especially of the
+Upper Old Red Sandstone, into ridges of confluent tubercles, that
+radiate 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 the
+head, bears upon its inner side a strong central ridge, that deepens as
+it descends, till it abruptly terminates a little short of the
+termination of the plate, exactly as in the dorsal plate of Coccosteus,
+which sunk its central ridge deep into the back of the animal. The point
+of resemblance to be mainly noticed, however, is the contrast furnished
+by the powerful armature of the head and back, with the unprotected
+nakedness of the posterior portions of the creature;--a point specially
+noticeable in the Coccosteus, and apparent also, though in a lesser
+degree, in some of the other genera of the Old Red, such as the
+Pterichthyes and Asterolepides. From the snout of the Coccosteus down to
+the posterior termination of the dorsal plate, the creature was cased in
+strong armor, the plates of which remain as freshly preserved in the
+ancient rocks of the country as those of the Pimelodi of the Ganges on
+the shelves of the Elgin Museum; but from the pointed termination of the
+plate immediately over the dorsal fin, to the tail, comprising more
+than one half the entire length of the animal, all seems to have been
+exposed, without the protection of even a scale, and there survives in
+the better specimens only the internal skeleton of the fish and the
+ray-bones of the fins. It was armed, like a French dragoon, with a
+strong helmet and a short cuirass; and so we find its remains in the
+state 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 the
+future on the fatal field of Borodino, or along the banks of the Dwina
+or the Wap. The cuirass lies still attached to the helmet, but we find
+only the naked skeleton attached to the cuirass. The Pterichthys to its
+strong helmet and cuirass added a posterior armature of comparatively
+feeble scales, as if, while its upper parts were shielded with plate
+armor, a lighter covering of ring or scale armor sufficed for the less
+vital parts beneath. In the Asterolepis the arrangement was somewhat
+similar, save that the plated cuirass was wanting: it was a strongly
+helmed warrior in slight scale armor; for the disproportion between the
+strength of the plated head-piece and that of the scaly coat was still
+greater than in the Pterichthys. The occipital star-covered plates are,
+in some of the larger specimens, fully three-quarters of an inch in
+thickness, whereas the thickness of the delicately-fretted scales rarely
+exceeds a line.
+
+Why this disproportion between the strength of the armature in different
+parts of the same fish should have obtained, as in Pterichthys and
+Asterolepis, 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 present
+him 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 perhaps
+throw some light on the mystery. In Hamilton's "Fishes of the Ganges" I
+find but little reference made to the instincts and habits of the
+animals described: their deep-river haunts lie, in many cases, beyond
+the reach of observation; and of the observations actually made, the
+descriptive naturalist, intent often on mere peculiarities of structure,
+is not unfrequently too careless. Hamilton describes the habitats of the
+various 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 of
+the species, such as the _Silurus glanis_, being unwieldy in their
+motions, do not pursue their prey, which consists of small fishes, but
+lie concealed among the mud, and seize on the chance stragglers that
+come their way. And of the _Pimelodus gulio_, a little, strongly-helmed
+fish, with a naked body, I was informed by Mr. Duff, on the authority of
+the gentleman who had presented the specimens to the Museum, that it
+burrowed in the holes of muddy banks, from which it shot out its armed
+head, and arrested, as they passed, the minute animals on which it
+preyed. The animal world is full of such compensatory defences: there is
+a half-suit of armor given to shield half the body, and a wise instinct
+to protect the rest. The _Pholas crispata_ cannot shut its valves so as
+to protect its anterior parts, without raising them from off those parts
+which lie behind: like the Irishman in the haunted house, who attempted
+lengthening his blanket by cutting strips from the top and sewing them
+on 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 its
+nature to hollow out for itself in shale or stone, the anterior parts,
+though uncovered by the shell, are not exposed. By closing its valves
+anteriorly, it shuts the door of its little house, made like that of the
+coney-folk of Scripture, in the rock; and then, of the entire cell in
+which 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 is
+naked, and the only one which can clothe itself," is by no means quite
+correct. One half the hermit crab is as naked as the "human animal," and
+even less fitted for exposure; for it consists of a thin-skinned, soft,
+unmuscular bag, filled with delicate viscera; but not even the human
+animal is more skilful in clothing himself in the spoils of other
+animals than the hermit crab in wrapping up its naked bag in the strong
+shell of some dead fusus or buccinum, which it carries about with it in
+all its peregrinations, as at once clothes, armor, and house. Nature
+arms its front, and it is itself wise enough to arm its rear. Now, it
+seems 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 existence
+of which in vast quantity, during the times of the Old Red Sandstone,
+the dark Caithness flagstones, the fetid breccia of Strathpeffer, and
+the gray stratified clays of Cromarty, Moray, and Banff, unequivocally
+testify; and that it may have thus not only succeeded in capturing many
+of its light-winged contemporaries, which it would have vainly pursued
+in open sea, but may have been enabled also to present to its enemies,
+when assailed in turn, only its armed portions, and to protect its
+unarmed parts in its burrow. It is further worthy of notice, that many
+of the Pimelodi are furnished with spines, not, like those
+ichthyodorulites which occur so frequently in the older Secondary and
+Palaeozoic divisions, unfinished in appearance at their lower extremity,
+as if, like the spines of the ancient Acanthodi, or those of the recent
+dog-fish (_Spinax acanthias_), they had been simply embedded in the
+flesh, but bearing, like the wings of the Pterichthys, an articulated
+aspect. Those of the _Pimelodus rita_ and _Pimelodus gagata_ are of
+singular beauty; and when the creatures have no further use for them,
+and the mud of the Ganges has been consolidated into shale or baked into
+flagstone around them, they will make very exquisite fossils. A correct
+drawing of the plates and spines of some of the members of the Pimelodi
+family, with a portion of the internal skeletons, arranged in their
+proper places, but divested of those more destructible parts to which
+they are attached, would serve admirably to show what strange forms fish
+not greatly removed from the ordinary type may assume in the fossil
+state, and might throw some light on the extraordinary appearance
+assumed, 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, greatly
+restrict the supply from the rich deposits in the neighborhood, and have
+an unquestioned right to do so. The Museum contains, however, several
+interesting organisms. I saw, among the others, a specimen of
+Diplopterus, that showed the form and position of the fins of this
+rather rare ichthyolite much better than any of the Morayshire specimens
+portrayed by Agassiz in his great work; and beside it, one of the two
+specimens of _Pterichthys oblongus_ which he figures, and on which he
+establishes the species. The other individual,--a Cromarty
+specimen,--graces my little collection. The gloomy day passed pleasantly
+in deciphering, with so accomplished a geologist as Mr. Duff, these
+curious hieroglyphics of the old world, that tell such wonderful
+stories, and in comparing _viva voce_, as we were wont to do long years
+before in lengthy epistles, our respective notions regarding the true
+key for laying open their more occult meanings. And, after sharing with
+him 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 twenty
+miles, to Campbelton. The rain pattered drearily through the night on my
+bed-room window; and as frequent exposure to the wet had begun to tell
+on a constitution not altogether so strong as it had once been, I
+awakened oftener than was quite comfortable, to hear it. The morning,
+however, was dry, though gray and sunless; and, taking an early
+breakfast at the inn, I traversed the flat gravelly points of Ardersier
+and Fortrose, that, projecting like moles far into the Frith, narrow the
+intervening ferry to considerably less than one-third the width which it
+would present were they away. The origin of these long detrital
+promontories, which form, when viewed from the heights on either side,
+so peculiar a feature in the landscape, and which, were they directly
+opposite, instead of being set down a mile awry, would shut up the
+opening altogether, has not yet been satisfactorily accounted for. One
+special theory assigns their formation to the agency of the descending
+tide, striking in zig-gig style, in consequence of some peculiarity of
+the coast-line or of the bottom, from side to side of the Frith, and
+depositing a long trail of sand and gravel, at nearly right angles with
+the beach, first on the one shore and then on the other. But why the
+tide, which runs in various zig-zag crossings in the course of the
+Frith, should have the effect here, and nowhere else, of raising two
+vast mounds, each a full mile and a quarter in length, with an average
+breadth of from two to five furlongs, is by no means very apparent.
+Certainly the present tides of the Frith could not have formed them, nor
+could they have been elevated to their present average height of ten or
+twelve 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 the
+latter upheavals of the land or recessions of the sea, when the great
+Caledonian Valley existed as a narrow ocean sound, swept by powerful
+currents. Upon another and entirely different hypothesis, these flat
+promontories have been regarded as the remains, levelled by the waves,
+and gapped direct in the middle by the tide, of a vast transverse morain
+of the great valley, belonging to the same glacial age as the lateral
+morains some ten or fifteen miles higher up, that extend from the
+immediate 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 am
+not in the least disposed to criticise.
+
+They were constructed, says tradition, through the agency of the
+arch-wizard Michael Scott. Michael had called up the hosts of Faery to
+erect the cathedral of Elgin and the chanonry kirk of Fortrose, which
+they completed from foundation to ridge, each in a single
+night,--committing, in their hurry, merely the slight mistake of
+locating the building intended for Elgin in Fortrose, and that intended
+for Fortrose in Elgin; but, their work over and done, and when the
+magician had no further use for them, they absolutely refused to be
+_laid_; and, like a _posse_ of Irish laborers thrown out of a job, came
+thronging round him, clamoring for more employment. Fearing lest he
+should be torn in pieces,--a catastrophe which has not unfrequently
+happened in such circumstances in the olden time, and of which those
+recent philanthropists who engage themselves in finding work for the
+unemployed may have perhaps entertained some little dread in our own
+days,--he got rid of them for the time by setting them off in a body to
+run a mound across the Moray Frith from Fortrose to Ardersier. Toiling
+hard in the evening of a moonlight night, they had proceeded greatly
+more than two-thirds towards the completion of the undertaking, when a
+luckless Highlander passing by bade God-speed the work, and, by thus
+breaking the charm, arrested at once and forever the construction of the
+mound, and saved the navigation of Inverness.
+
+I stood for a few seconds at the Burn of Rosemarkie undecided whether I
+should take the Scarfs-Craig road,--a break-neck path which runs
+eastwards along the cliffs, and which, though the rougher, is the more
+direct Cromarty line of the two,--or the considerably better though
+longer line of the White Bog, which strikes upwards along the burn in a
+westerly direction, and joins the Cromarty and Inverness highway on the
+moor of the Maolbuie. I had got into a part of the country where every
+little locality, and every more striking feature in the landscape, has
+its associated tradition; and the pause of a few moments at the two
+roads recalled to my memory the details of a ghost-story, long regarded
+in the district in which it was best known as one of the most authentic
+of its class, but which seems by no means inexplicable on natural
+principles.[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 the
+boulder-clay. I am acquainted with no other locality in the kingdom
+where this deposit is hollowed into ravines so profound, or presents
+precipices so imposing and lofty. The clay lies thickly over most part
+of the Black Isle and the peninsula of Easter Ross,--both soft sandstone
+districts,--bearing everywhere an obvious relation, as a deposit, to
+both the form and the conditions of exposure of the existing land,--just
+as the accumulated snow of a long-lying snow-storm, exposed to the
+drifting wind, bears relation to the heights and hollows of the tracts
+which it covers. On the higher eminences the clay forms a comparatively
+thin 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 in
+the sides of hollow valleys,--exactly such places as we might expect to
+see the snow occupying most deeply after a night of drift,--we find it
+accumulated 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 my
+course this morning lay, and is known far and wide,--for it forms a
+marked feature in the landscape, and harbors in its recesses a countless
+multitude of jackdaws,--as the "Kaes' Craig of Rosemarkie." It presents
+the appearance of a hill that had been cut sheer through the middle from
+top to base, and exhibits in its abrupt front a broad red perpendicular
+section of at least a hundred feet in height, barred transversely by
+thin layers of sand, and scored vertically by the slow action of the
+rains. Originally it must have stretched its vanished limb across the
+opening like some huge snow-wreath accumulated athwart a frozen rivulet;
+but the incessant sweep of the stream that runs through the valley has
+long since amputated and carried it away; and so only half the hill now
+remains. The Kaes' Craig resembles in form a lofty chalk cliff, square,
+massy, abrupt, with no sloping fillet of vegetation bound across its
+brow, but precipitous direct from the hill-top. The little ancient
+village of Rosemarkie stretches away from its base on the opposite side
+of the stream; and on its summit and along its sides, groups of
+chattering jackdaws, each one of them as reflective and philosophic as
+the individual immortalized by Cowper, look down high over the chimneys
+into the streets. The clay presents here, more than in almost any other
+locality with which I am acquainted, the character of a stratified
+deposit; and the numerous bands of sand by which the cliff is
+horizontally streaked from top to bottom we find hollowed, as we
+approach, into a multitude of circular openings, like shot-holes in an
+old tower, which form breeding-places for the daw and the sand-martin.
+The biped inhabitants of the cliff are greatly more numerous than the
+biped inhabitants of the quiet little hamlet below; and on Fortrose
+fair-days, when, in virtue of an old feud, the Rosemarkie boys were wont
+to engage in formidable bickers with the boys of Cromarty, I remember,
+as one of the invading belligerents, that, in bandying names with them
+in the fray, we delighted to bestow upon them, as their hereditary
+sobriquet, given, of course, in allusion to their feathered neighbors,
+the designation of the "_Rosemarkie kaes_." Cromarty, however, is
+two-thirds surrounded by the waters of a frith abounding in sea-fowl;
+and the little fellows of Rosemarkie, indignant at being classed with
+their _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 the
+clay what may be termed a _group_ of excavations, composing a piece of
+scenery ruinously broken and dreary, and that bears a specific character
+of its own which scarce any other deposit could have exhibited. The
+excavations are of considerable depth and extent,--hollows out of which
+the materials of pyramids might have been taken. The precipitous sides
+are fretted by jutting ridges and receding inflections, that present in
+abundance their diversified alternations of light and shadow. The steep
+descents form cycloid curves, that flatten at their bases, and over
+which the ferruginous stratum of mould atop projects like a cornice.
+Between neighboring excavations there stand up dividing walls, tall and
+thin as those of our city buildings, and in some cases broken at their
+upper edges into rows of sharp pinnacles or inaccessible turf-coped
+turrets; while at the bottom of the hollows, washed by the runnels
+which, in the slow lapse of years, have been the architects of the
+whole, we find cairn-like accumulations of water-rolled stones,--the
+disengaged pebbles and boulders of the deposit. The boulders and pebbles
+project also from the steep sides, at all heights and of all sizes,
+like the primary masses inclosed in our ancient conglomerates, when
+exhibited in wave-worn precipices,--forcing upon the mind the conclusion
+that the boulder-clay is itself but an unconsolidated conglomerate of
+the later periods, which occupies nearly the same relative position to
+the existing vegetable mould, with all its recent productions, that the
+great conglomerate of the Old Red Sandstone occupies in relation to the
+lower ichthyolite beds of that system, with their numerous extinct
+organisms. But its buried stones are fretted with hieroglyphic
+inscriptions, in the form of strange scratchings and polishings,
+grooves, ridges, and furrows,--always associated with the
+boulder-clays,--which those of the more ancient conglomerates want, and
+which, though difficult to read, seem at length to be yielding up the
+story which they record. Of this, however, more anon. Viewed by
+moonlight, when the pale red of the clay where the beam falls direct is
+relieved by the intense shadows, these excavations of the valley of
+Rosemarkie form scenes of strange and ghostly wildness: the projecting,
+buttress-like angles,--the broken walls,--the curved inflections,--the
+pointed pinnacles,--the turrets, with their masses of projecting
+coping,--the utter lack of vegetation, save where the heath and the
+furze rustle far above,--all combine to form assemblages of dreary
+ruins, amid which, in the solitude of night, one almost expects to see
+spirits walk. These excavations have been designated, from time
+immemorial, by the neighboring town's-people, as "the Danes;" but
+whether the name be, as is most probable, merely a corruption of an
+appropriate enough Saxon word, "the dens," or derived, as a vague
+tradition is said to testify, from the ages of Danish invasion, it is
+not quite the part of the geologist to determine. It may be worth
+mentioning, however, from its bearing on the point, that there are two
+excavations in the boulder-clay near Cromarty, one of which has been
+long known by the name of "the Morial's Den," while the other, greatly
+smaller in size, rejoices in the double diminutive of "the Little
+Dennie." For an hour or so the Danes proved agreeable though somewhat
+silent companions; and then, climbing the opposite side of the valley, I
+gained the high road, and, walking on to Cromarty, found myself once
+more among "the old familiar faces."
+
+In a few days the storm blew by; and as the prolonged rains had cleared
+out the deep ravines of the district, and given to the boulder-clay in
+which they are scooped a freshness in its section analogous to fresh
+fracture in rocks of harder consistency, I availed myself of the
+facilities afforded me in consequence, for exploring it once more. It
+has long constituted one of the hardest of the many riddles with which
+our Scottish deposits exercise the patience and ingenuity of the
+geologist. I remember a time when, after passing a day under its barren
+_scaurs_, or hid in its precipitous ravines, I used to feel in the
+evening as if I had been travelling under the cloud of night, and had
+seen nothing. It was a morose and taciturn companion, and had no
+speculation in it. I might stand in front of its curved precipices, red,
+yellow or gray, according to the prevailing average color of the rocks
+on which it rests, and mark their water-rolled boulders, of all
+qualities and sizes, sticking out in bold relief from the surface, like
+the rock-like protuberances that roughen the rustic basements of the
+architect, from the line of the wall; but I had no _open sesame_ to form
+vistas through them into the recesses of the past. I saw merely the
+stiff pastry matrix of which they are composed, and the inclosed
+pebbles. But the boulder-clay has of late become more sociable; and,
+though with much hesitancy and irresolution, like old Mr. Spectator on
+the first formal opening of his mouth,--a consequence, doubtless, in
+both cases of previous habits of silence long indulged,--it begins to
+tell its story. And a most curious story it is.
+
+The morning was clear, but just a little chill; and a soft covering of
+snow, 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 watery
+blue, 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 rays
+athwart the prospect, giving to each nearer bank and hillock, and to the
+more distant protuberances on the mountain-sides, those well-defined
+accompaniments of shadow that serve by throwing the minor features of a
+landscape upon the eye in bold relief, to impart to it an air of higher
+finish and more careful filling up than it ever bears under a more
+vertical light. I took the road which, leading westward from the town
+towards Invergordon Ferry, skirts the Frith on the one hand, and runs
+immediately under the noble escarpment of green bank formed by the old
+coast line on the other. Fully two-thirds of the entire height of the
+rampart here, which rises in all about a hundred feet over the
+sea-level, is formed of the boulder-clay; and I am acquainted with no
+locality in which the deposit presents more strongly, for at least the
+first half mile, one of its marked scenic peculiarities. It is furrowed
+vertically on the slope, as if by enormous flutings in the more antique
+Doric style; and the ridges by which these are separated,--each from a
+hundred to a hundred and fifty feet in length, and from five-and-twenty
+to thirty feet in average height,--resemble those burial mounds with
+which the sexton frets the churchyard turf; with this difference,
+however, that they seem the burial mounds of giants, tall and bulky as
+those that of old warred against the gods. They are striking enough to
+have caught the eye of the children of the place, and are known among
+them as the Giants' Graves. I could fain have taken their portrait in a
+calotype this morning, as they lay against the green bank,--their feet
+to the shore, and their heads on the top of the escarpment,--like
+patients on a reclining bed, and strongly marked, each by its broad bar
+of yellow light and of dark shadow, like the ebon and ivory buttresses
+of the poet. This little vignette, I would have said to the landscape
+painter, represents the boulder-clay, after its precipitous banks--worn
+down, by the frosts and rains of centuries, into parallel runnels, that
+gradually widened into these hollow grooves--had sunk into the angle of
+inclination at which the disintegrating agents ceased to operate, and
+the green sward covered all up. You must be studying these peculiarities
+of aspect more than ever you studied them before. There is a time coming
+when the connoisseur will as rigidly demand the specific character of
+the various geologic rocks and deposits in your hills, _scaurs_, and
+precipices, as he now demands specific character in your shrubs and
+trees.
+
+It is worthy the notice of the young geologist, who has just set himself
+to study the various effects produced on the surface of a country by the
+deposits 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 bear
+in the driest weather their mantling of green. They are fed with a
+perennial supply of water, by a range of deep-seated springs, that come
+bursting out from under the boulder-clay; and one of their number, which
+bears I know not why, the name of Samuel's Well, and yields its equable
+flow at an equable temperature, summer and winter, into a stone trough
+by the way-side, is not a little prized by the town's-people, and the
+seamen that cast anchor in the opposite roadstead, for the lightness and
+purity 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 dry
+at 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 of
+exactly the same extent,--beginning where the bogs begin, and ending
+where they end,--we may trace an ancient stratum of pure sand,--of
+considerable thickness, intercalated between the base of the clay and
+the superior surface of the Old Red Sandstone. It is through this
+permeable sand that the profoundly seated springs find their way to the
+surface,--for the clay is impermeable; and where it comes in contact
+with the rock on either side of the arenaceous stratum, the bogs cease.
+The chain of green bogs is a consequence of the stratum of permeable
+sand. I have in vain sought this ancient layer of sand,--decidedly of
+the same era with the argillaceous bed which overlies it,--for aught
+organic. A single shell, so unequivocally of the period of the
+boulder-clay as to occur at the base of the deposit, would be worth, I
+have said, whole drawerfuls of fossils furnished by the better-known
+deposits. But I have since seen in abundance shells of the boulder-clay.
+
+There is another scenic peculiarity of the clay, which the neighborhood
+of Cromarty finely illustrates, and of which my walk this morning
+furnished numerous striking instances. The Giants' Graves--to borrow
+from the children of the place--occur on the steep slopes of the old
+coast 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 of
+alternating ridges and furrows, which, when they had flattened into the
+proper angle, the green sward covered up from further waste. But the
+deep dells and narrow ravines in which many ranges of these graves occur
+are themselves peculiarities of the deposit. Wherever the boulder-clay
+lies thick and continuous, as in the parish of Cromarty, on a sloping
+table-land, every minute streamlet cuts its way to the solid rock at the
+bottom, and runs through a deep dell, either softened into beauty by the
+disintegrating process, or with all its precipices standing up raw and
+abrupt over the stream. Four of these ravines, known as the "Old Chapel
+Burn," the "Ladies' Walk," the "Morial's Den," and the "Red Burn," each
+of them cutting the escarpment of the ancient coast line from top to
+base, and winding far into the interior, occur in little more than a
+mile's space; and they lie still more thickly farther to the west. These
+dells of the boulder clay, in their lower windings,--for they become
+shallower and tamer as they ascend, till they terminate in the uplands
+in mere _drains_, such as a ditcher might excavate at the rate of a
+shilling or two per yard,--are eminently picturesque. On those gentler
+slopes 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. There
+is a bosky luxuriance in their more sheltered hollows, well known to the
+schoolboy what time the fern begins to pale its fronds, for their store
+of hips, sloes, and brambles; and red over the foliage we may see, ever
+and anon as we wend upwards, the abrupt frontage of some precipitous
+_scaur_, suited to remind the geologist, from its square form and flat
+breadth of surface, of the cliffs of the chalk. When viewed from the
+sea, at the distance of a few miles, these ravines seem to divide the
+sloping tracts in which they occur into large irregular fields, laid out
+considerably more in accordance with the principles of the landscape
+gardener than the stiffly squared rectilinear fields of the
+agriculturist. They are _ha-has_ of Nature's digging; and their bottom
+and sides in this part of the country we still find occupied in a few
+cases--though in many more they have been ravaged by the wasteful
+axe--by noble forest-_hedges_, tall enough to overtop, in at least their
+middle reaches, the tracts of table-land which they divide.
+
+I passed, a little farther on, the quarry of Old Red Sandstone, with a
+huge bank of boulder-clay resting over it, in which I first experienced
+the evils of hard labor, and first set myself to lessen their weight by
+becoming an observer of geological phenomena. It had been deserted
+apparently for many years; and the debris of the clay partially covered
+up, in a sloping talus, the frontage of rock beneath. Old Red Sandstone
+and boulder-clay, a broad bar of each!--such was the compound problem
+which the excavation propounded to me when I first plied the tool in
+it,--a problem equally dark at the time in both its parts. I have since
+got on a very little way with the Old Red portion of the task; but alas
+for the boulder-clay portion of it! A bar of impenetrable shadow has
+rested long and obstinately over the newer deposit; and I scarce know
+whether the light which is at length beginning to play on its pebbly
+front be that of the sun or of a delusive meteor. But courage, patient
+hearts! the boulder-clay will one day yield up _its_ secret too. Still
+further on by a few hundred yards, I could have again found use for the
+calotype, in transferring to paper the likeness of a protuberant
+picturesque cliff, which, like the Giants' Graves, could have belonged,
+of all our Scotch deposits, to only the boulder-clay. It stands out, on
+the steep acclivity of a furze-covered bank, abrupt as a precipice of
+solid rock, and yet seamed by the rain into numerous divergent channels,
+with pyramidal peaks between; and, combining the perpendicularity of a
+true cliff with the water-scooped furrows of a yielding clay, it
+presents a peculiarity of aspect which strikes, by its grotesqueness,
+eyes little accustomed to detect the picturesque in landscape. I
+remember standing to gaze upon it when a mere child; and the fisher
+children of the neighboring town still tell that "_it has been
+prophesied_" it will one day fall, "and kill a man and a horse on the
+road below,"--a legend which shows it must have attracted _their_ notice
+too.
+
+I selected as the special scene of exploration this morning, a deep
+ravine of the boulder-clay, which had been recently deepened still more
+by 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 or
+fifteen feet deep, where there had been formerly merely a shallow drain,
+had then tumbled into the ravine, and bared it to the rock. The
+sandstones of the district, soft and not very durable, show the
+scratched and polished surfaces but indifferently well, and, when
+exposed to the weather, soon lose them; but in the bottom of the runnel
+by which the ravine is swept I found them exceedingly well marked,--the
+polish as decided as the soft red stone could receive, and the lines of
+scratching running in their general bearing due east and west, at nearly
+right angles with the course of the stream. Wherever the rock had been
+laid bare during the last few months, _there_ were the markings;
+wherever it had been laid bare for a few twelvemonths, they were gone. I
+next marked a circumstance which has now for several years been
+attracting my attention, and which I have found an invariable
+characteristic of the true boulder-clay. Not only do the rocks on which
+the deposit rests bear the scratched and polished surfaces, but in every
+instance the fragments of stone which it incloses bear the scratchings
+also, if from their character capable of receiving and retaining such
+markings, 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-grained
+sandstone, or of a yielding trap, they are scratched and
+polished,--invariably on one, most commonly on both their sides; and it
+is a noticeable circumstance, that the lines of the scratchings occur,
+in at least nine cases out of every ten, in the lines of their longer
+axes. When decidedly oblong or spindle-shaped, the scratchings run
+lengthwise, preserving in most cases, on the under and upper sides, when
+both surfaces are scratched, a parallelism singularly exact; whereas,
+when of a broader form, so that the length and breadth nearly
+approximate,--though the lines generally find out the longer axis, and
+run in that direction,--they are less exact in their parallelism, and
+are occasionally traversed by cross furrows. Of such certain occurrence
+is this longitudinal lining on the softer and finer-grained pebbles of
+the boulder-clay, that I have come to regard it as that special
+characteristic of the deposit on which I can most surely rely for
+purposes of identification. I am never quite certain of the boulder-clay
+when I do not detect it, nor doubtful of the true character of the
+deposit when I do. When examining, for instance, the accumulation of
+broken Liasic materials in the neighborhood of Banff, I made it my first
+care to ascertain whether the bank inclosed fragments of stone or shale
+bearing the longitudinal markings; and felt satisfied, on finding that
+it 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 finding
+organisms in abundance in the boulder-clay, but never anything organic
+that unequivocally belonged to its own period. I had ascertained that it
+contains in Ross and Cromarty nodules of the Old Red Sandstone, which
+bear inside, like so many stone coffins, their well laid out skeletons
+of the dead; but then the markings on their surface told me that when
+the boulder-clay was in the course of deposition, they had been exactly
+the same kind of nodules that they are now. In Moray, it incloses, I had
+found, organisms of the Lias; but _they_ also testify that they present
+an appearance in no degree more ancient at the present time than they
+did when first enveloped by the clay. In East and West Lothian too, and
+in the neighborhood of Edinburgh, I had detected in it occasional
+organisms of the Mountain Limestone and the Coal Measures; but these,
+not less surely than its Liasic fossils in Moray, and its Old Red
+ichthyolites in Cromarty and Ross, belonged to an incalculably more
+ancient state of things than itself; and--like those shrivelled
+manuscripts of Pompeii or Herculaneum, which, whatever else they may
+record, cannot be expected to tell aught of the catastrophe that buried
+them up--they throw no light whatever on the deposit in which they
+occur. I at length came to regard the boulder-clay--for it is difficult
+to keep the mind in a purely blank state on any subject on which one
+thinks a good deal--as representative of a chaotic period of death and
+darkness, introductory, mayhap, to the existing scene of things.
+
+After, however, I had begun to mark the invariable connection of the
+clay, as a deposit, with the dressed surfaces on which it rests, and the
+longitudinal linings of the pebbles and boulders which it incloses, and
+to associate it, in consequence, with an ice-charged sea and the Great
+Gulf Stream, it seemed to me extremely difficult to assign a reason why
+it should be thus barren of remains. Sir Charles Lyell states, in his
+"Elements," that the "stranding of ice-islands in the bays of Iceland
+since 1835 has driven away the fish for several successive seasons, and
+thereby caused a famine among the inhabitants of the country;" and he
+argues from the fact, "that a sea habitually infested with melting ice,
+which would chill and freshen the water, might render the same
+uninhabitable by marine mollusca." But then, on the other hand, it is
+equally a fact that half a million of seals have been killed in a single
+season on the meadow-ice a little to the north of Newfoundland, and that
+many millions of cod, besides other fish, are captured yearly on the
+shores of that island, though grooved and furrowed by ice-floes almost
+every spring. Of the seal family it is specially recorded by
+naturalists, that many of the species "are from choice inhabitants of
+the margins of the frozen seas towards both poles; and, of course, in
+localities in which many such animals live, some must occasionally die."
+And though the grinding process would certainly have disjointed, and
+might probably have worn down and partially mutilated, the bones of the
+amphibious carnivora of the boulder period, it seems not in the least
+probable, judging from the fragments of loose-grained sandstone and soft
+shale which it has spared, that it would have wholly destroyed them. So
+it happened, however, that from North Berwick to the Ord Hill of
+Caithness, I had never found in the boulder-clay the slightest trace of
+an organism that could be held to belong to itself; and as it seems
+natural to build on negative evidence, if very extensive, considerably
+more than mere negative evidence, whatever the circumstances, will
+carry, I became somewhat skeptical regarding the very existence of
+boulder-fossils,--a skepticism which the worse than doubtful character
+of several supposed discoveries in the deposit served considerably to
+strengthen. The clay forms, when cut by a water-course, or assailed on
+the coast by some unusually high tide, a perpendicular precipice, which
+in the course of years slopes into a talus; and as it exhibits in most
+instances no marks of stratification, the clay of the talus--a mere
+re-formation of fragments detached by the frosts and rains from the
+exposed frontage--can rarely be distinguished from that of the original
+deposit. Now, in these consolidated slopes it is not unusual to find
+remains, animal and vegetable, of no very remote antiquity. I have seen
+a human skull dug out of the reclining base of a clay-bank once a
+precipice, fully six feet from under the surface. It might have been
+deemed the skull of some long-lived contemporary of Enoch,--one of the
+accursed race, mayhap,
+
+ "Who sinned and died before the avenging flood."
+
+But, alas! the laborer dug a little further, and struck his pickaxe
+against an old rybat that lay deeper still. There could be no mistaking
+the character of the champfered edge, that still bore the marks of the
+tool, nor that of the square perforation for the lock-bolt; and a rising
+theory, that would have referred the boulder-clay to a period in which
+the polar ice, set loose by the waters of the Noachian deluge, came
+floating southwards over the foundered land, straightway stumbled
+against it, and fell. Both rybat and skull had come from an ancient
+burying-ground, that occupies a projecting angle of the table-land
+above. I must now state, however, that my skepticism has thoroughly
+given way; and that, slowly yielding to the force of positive evidence,
+I have become as assured a believer in the _comminuted recent shells_ of
+the boulder-clay as in the belemnites of the Oolite and Lias, or the
+ganoid ichthyolites of the Old Red Sandstone.
+
+I had marked, when at Wick, on several occasions, a thick boulder-clay
+deposit occupying the southern side of the harbor, and forming an
+elevated platform, on which the higher parts of Pulteneytown are built;
+but I had noted little else regarding it than that it bears the average
+dark-gray color of the flagstones of the district, and that some of the
+granitic boulders which protrude from its top and sides are of vast
+size. On my last visit, however, rather more than two years ago, when
+sauntering along its base, after a very wet morning, awaiting the Orkney
+steamer, I was surprised to find, where a small slip had taken place
+during the rain, that it was mottled over with minute fragments of
+shells. These I examined, and found, so far as, in their extremely
+broken condition, I dared determine the point, that they belonged in
+such large proportion to one species,--the _Cyprina islandica_ of Dr.
+Fleming,--that I could detect among them only a single fragment of any
+other shell,--the pillar, apparently, of a large specimen of _Purpura
+lapillus_. Both shells belong to that class of old existences,--long
+descended, without the pride of ancient descent,--which link on the
+extinct to the recent scenes of being. _Cyprina islandica_ and _Purpura
+lapillus_ not only exist as living molluscs in the British seas, but
+they occur also as crag-shells, side by side with the dead races that
+have no place in the present fauna. At this time, however, I could but
+think of them simply in their character as recent molluscs; and as it
+seemed quite startling enough to find them in a deposit which I had once
+deemed representative of a period of death, and still continued to
+regard as obstinately unfossiliferous, I next set myself to determine
+whether it really _was_ the boulder-clay in which they occurred. Almost
+the first pebble which I disengaged from the mass, however, settled the
+point, by furnishing the evidence on which for several years past I have
+been accustomed to settle it;--it bore in the line of its longer axis,
+on a polished surface, the freshly-marked grooves and scratchings of the
+iceberg era. Still, however, I had my doubts, not regarding the deposit,
+but the shells. Might they not belong merely to the talus of this bank
+of boulder-clay?--a re-formation, in all probability, not _more_ ancient
+than the elevation of the most recent of the old coast lines,--perhaps
+greatly less so. Meeting with an intelligent citizen of Wick, Mr. John
+Cleghorn, I requested him to keep a vigilant eye on the shells, and to
+ascertain for me, when opportunity offered, whether they occurred deep
+in the deposit, or were restricted to merely the base of its exposed
+front. On my return from Orkney, he kindly brought me a small collection
+of fragments, exclusively, so far as I could judge, of _Cyprina
+islandica_, picked up in fresh sections of the clay; at the same time
+expressing 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 my
+attention was again called to it by finding, in the publication of Mr.
+Keith Johnston's admirable Geological Map of the British Islands, edited
+by Professor Edward Forbes, that other eyes than mine had detected
+shells in the boulder-clay of Caithness. "Cliffs of Pleistocene," says
+the 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 the
+neighborhood of Thurso; but, during a rather hurried visit, had lacked
+time to examine it. The omission mattered the less, however, as my
+friend Mr. Robert Dick is resident in the locality; and there are few
+men who examine more carefully or more perseveringly than he, or who can
+enjoy with higher relish the sweets of scientific research. I wrote him
+regarding Professor Forbes's decision on the boulder-clay of Wick and
+its shells; urging him to ascertain whether the boulder-clay of Thurso
+had not its shells also. And almost by return of post I received from
+him, in reply, a little packet of comminuted shells, dug out of a
+deposit of the boulder-clay, laid open by the river Thorsa, a full mile
+from the sea, and from eighty to a hundred feet over its level. He had
+detected minute fragments of shell in the clay about a twelvemonth
+before; but a skepticism somewhat similar to my own, added to the dread
+of being deceived by mere surface shells, recently derived from the
+shore in the character _of_ shell-sand, or of the edible species carried
+inland for food, and then transferred from the ash-pit to the fields,
+had not only prevented him from following up the discovery, but even
+from thinking of it as such. But he eagerly followed it up now, by
+visiting every bank of the boulder-clay in his locality within twenty
+miles of Thurso, and found them all charged, from top to bottom, with
+comminuted shells, however great their distance from the sea, or their
+elevation over it. The fragments lie thick along the course of the
+Thorsa, where the encroaching stream is scooping out the clay for the
+first time since its deposition, and laying bare the scratched and
+furrowed pebbles. They occur, too, in the depths of solitary ravines far
+amid the moors, and underlie heath, and moss, and vegetable mould, on
+the exposed hill-sides. The farm-house of Dalemore, twelve miles from
+Thurso 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 of
+marine shells. Though so barren elsewhere on the east coast of Scotland,
+the clay is everywhere in Caithness a shell-bearing deposit; and no
+sooner had Mr. Dick determined the fact for himself, at the expense of
+many a fatiguing journey, and many an hour's hard digging, than he found
+that it had been ascertained long before, though, from the very
+inadequate style in which it had been recorded, science had in scarce
+any degree benefited by the discovery. In 1802 the late Sir John
+Sinclair, distinguished for his enlightened zeal in developing the
+agricultural resources of the country, and for originating its
+statistics, employed a mineralogical surveyor to explore the underground
+treasures of the district; and the surveyor's journal he had printed
+under the title of "Minutes and Observations drawn up in the course of a
+Mineralogical Survey of the County of Caithness, ann. 1802, by John
+Busby, Edinburgh." Now, in this journal there are frequent references
+made to the occurrence of marine shells in the blue clay. Mr. Dick has
+copied for me the two following entries,--for the work itself I have
+never seen:--"1802, Sept. 7th.--Surveyed down the river [Thorsa] to
+Geize; found blue clay-marl, _intermixed with marine shells_ in great
+abundance." "Sept. 12th.--Set off this morning for Dalemore. Bored for
+shell-marl in the 'grass-park;' found it in one of the quagmires, but to
+no great extent. Bored for shell-marl in the 'house-park.' Surveyed by
+the side of the river, and found blue clay-marl in great plenty,
+_intermixed with marine shells, such as those found at Geize_. This
+place is supposed to be about twenty miles from the sea; and is one
+instance, among many in Caithness, of _the ocean's covering the inland
+country at some former period of time_."
+
+The state of keeping in which the boulder-shells of Caithness occur is
+exactly what, on the iceberg theory, might be premised. The ponderous
+ice-rafts that went grating over the deep-sea bottom, grinding down its
+rocks into clay, and deeply furrowing its pebbles, must have borne
+heavily on its comparatively fragile shells. If rocks and pebbles did
+not escape, the shells must have fared but hardly. And very hardly they
+have fared: the rather unpleasant casualty of being crushed to death
+must have been a greatly more common one in those days than in even the
+present age of railways and machinery. The reader, by passing half a
+bushel of the common shells of our shores through a barley-mill, as a
+preliminary operation in the process, and by next subjecting the broken
+fragments thus obtained to the attritive influence of the waves on some
+storm-beaten beach for a twelvemonth or two, as a finishing operation,
+may produce, when he pleases, exactly such a water-worn shelly debris as
+mottles the blue boulder-clays of Caithness. The proportion borne by the
+fragments of one species of shell to that of all the others is very
+extraordinary. The _Cyprina islandica_ is still by no means a rare
+mollusc on our Scottish shores, and may, on an exposed coast, after a
+storm, be picked up by dozens, attached to the roots of the deep-sea
+tangle. It is greatly less abundant, however, than such shells as
+_Purpura lapillus_, _Mytilus edule_, _Cardium edule_, _Littorina
+littorea_, and several others; whereas in the boulder-clay it is, in the
+proportion of at least ten to one, more abundant than all the others put
+together. The great strength of the shell, however, may have in part led
+to this result; as I find that its stronger and massier portions,--those
+of the umbo and hinge-joint,--are exceedingly numerous in proportion to
+its slimmer and weaker fragments. "The _Cyprina islandica_," says Dr.
+Fleming, in his "British Animals," "is the largest British bivalve
+shell, measuring sometimes thirteen inches in circumference, and,
+exclusively of the animal, weighing upwards of nine ounces." Now, in a
+collection of fragments of Cyprina sent me by Mr. Dick, disinterred from
+the boulder-clay in various localities in the neighborhood of Thurso,
+and weighing in all about four ounces, I have detected the broken
+remains of no fewer than _sixteen_ hinge joints. And on the same
+principle through which the stronger fragments of Cyprina were preserved
+in so much larger proportion than the weaker ones, may Cyprina
+itself have been preserved in much larger proportion than its
+more fragile neighbors. Occasionally, however,--escaped, as if by
+accident,--characteristic fragments are found of shells by no means
+very strong,--such as _Mytilus_, _Tellina_, and _Astarte_. Among the
+univalves I can distinguish _Dentalium entale_, _Purpura lapillus_,
+_Turritella terebra_, and _Littorina littorea_, all existing shells, but
+all common also to at least the later deposits of the Crag. And among
+the bivalves Mr. Dick enumerates,--besides the prevailing _Cyprina
+islandica_,--_Venus casina_, _Cardium edule_, _Cardium echinatum_,
+_Mytilus edule_, _Astarte danmoniensis_ (_sulcata_), and _Astarte
+compressa_, with a _Mactra_, _Artemis_, and _Tellina_.[15] All the
+determined species here, with the exception of _Mytilus edule_, have,
+with many others, been found by the Rev. Mr. Cumming in the
+boulder-clays of the Isle of Man; and all of them are living shells at
+the present day on our Scottish coasts. It seems scarce possible to fix
+the age of a deposit so broken in its organisms, on the principle that
+would first seek to determine its per centage of extinct shells as the
+data on which to found. One has to search sedulously and long ere a
+fragment turns up sufficiently entire for the purpose of specific
+identification, even when it belongs to a well-known living shell; and
+did the clay contain some six or eight per cent. of the extinct in a
+similarly broken condition (and there is no evidence that it contains a
+single per cent. of extinct shells), I know not how, in the
+circumstances, the fact could ever be determined. A lifetime might be
+devoted to the task of fixing their real proportion, and yet be devoted
+to it in vain. All that at present can be said is, that, judging from
+what appears, the boulder-clays of Caithness, and with them the
+boulder-clays of Scotland generally, and of the Isle of Man,--for they
+are all palpably connected with the same iceberg phenomena, and occur
+along the same zone in reference to the sea-level,--were formed during
+the _existing_ geological epoch.
+
+These details may appear tediously minute; but let the reader mark how
+very much they involve. The occurrence of recent shells largely diffused
+throughout the boulder-clays of Caithness, at all heights and distances
+from the sea at which the clay itself occurs, and not only connected
+with the iceberg phenomena by the closest juxtaposition, but also
+testifying distinctly to its agency by the extremely comminuted state in
+which we find them, tell us, not only according to old John Busby, "that
+the ocean covered the inland country at some former period of time," but
+that it covered it to a great height at a time geologically recent, when
+our seas were inhabited by exactly the same mollusca as inhabit them
+now, and so far as yet appears, by none others. I have not yet detected
+the boulder-clay at more than from six to eight hundred feet over the
+level of the sea; but the travelled boulders I have often found at more
+than a thousand feet over it; and Dr. John Fleming, the correctness of
+whose observations few men acquainted with the character of his
+researches or of his mind will be disposed to challenge, has informed me
+that he has detected the dressed and polished surfaces at least four
+hundred feet higher. There occurs a greenstone boulder, of from twelve
+to fourteen tons weight, says Mr. M'Laren, in his "Geology of Fife and
+the Lothians," on the south side of Black Hill (one of the Pentland
+range), at about fourteen hundred feet over the sea. Now fourteen or
+fifteen hundred feet, taken as the extreme height of the dressings,
+though they are said to occur greatly higher, would serve to submerge in
+the iceberg ocean almost the whole agricultural region of Scotland. The
+common hazel (_Corylus avellana_) ceases to grow in the latitude of the
+Grampians, at from one thousand two hundred to one thousand five hundred
+feet over the sea level; the common bracken (_Pteris aquilina_) at about
+the same height; and corn is never successfully cultivated at a greater
+altitude. Where the hazel and bracken cease to grow, it is in vain to
+attempt growing corn.[16] In the period of the boulder-clay, then, when
+the existing shells of our coasts lived in those inland sounds and
+friths of the country that now exist as broad plains or fertile valleys,
+the sub-aerial superficies of Scotland was restricted to what are now
+its barren and mossy regions, and formed, instead of one continuous
+land, merely three detached groups of islands,--the small Cheviot and
+Hartfell group,--the greatly larger Grampian and Ben Nevis group,--and a
+group intermediate in size, extending from Mealfourvonny, on the
+northern shores of Loch Ness, to the Maiden Paps of Caithness.
+
+The more ancient boulder-clays of Scotland seem to have been formed when
+the land was undergoing a slow process of subsidence, or, as I should
+perhaps rather say, when a very considerable area of the earth's
+surface, including the sea-bottom, as well as the eminences that rose
+over it, was the subject of a gradual depression; for little or no
+alteration appears to have taken place at the time in the _relative_
+levels of the higher and lower portions of the sinking area: the
+features of the land in the northern part of the kingdom, from the
+southern flanks of the Grampians to the Pentland Frith, seemed to have
+been fixed in nearly the existing forms many ages before, at the close,
+apparently, of the Oolitic period, and at a still earlier age in the
+Lammermuir district, to the south. And so the sea around our shores must
+have deepened in the ratio in which the hills sank. The evidence of this
+process of subsidence is of a character tolerably satisfactory. The
+dressed surfaces occur in Scotland, most certainly, as I have already
+stated on the authority of Dr. Fleming, at the height of fourteen
+hundred feet over the present sea-level; it has been even said, at
+fully twice that height, on the lofty flanks of Schehallion,--a
+statement, however, which I have had hitherto no opportunity of
+verifying. They may be found, too, equally well marked, under the
+existing high-water line; and it is obviously impossible that the
+dressing process could have been going on at the higher and lower levels
+at the same time. When the icebergs were grating along the more elevated
+rocks, the low-lying ones must have been buried under from three to
+seven hundred fathoms of water,--a depth from three to seven times
+greater, be it remembered, than that at which the most ponderous iceberg
+could 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 land
+was subjected, zone after zone, to the sweep of the armed ice from its
+higher levels _downwards_, or during a period of subsidence, in which it
+was subjected to the ice, zone after zone, from its lower levels
+_upwards_. And that it was the lower, not the higher levels, that were
+first dressed, appears evident from the circumstance, that though on
+these lower levels we find the rocks covered up by continuous beds of
+the boulder-clay, varying generally from twenty to a hundred feet in
+thickness, they are, notwithstanding, as completely dressed under the
+clay as on the heights above. Had it been a rising land that was
+subjected to the attrition of the icebergs, the debris and dressings of
+the higher rocks would have protected the lower from the attrition; and
+so the thick accumulation of boulder-clay which overlies the old coast
+line, for instance, would have rested, not on dressed, but on undressed
+surfaces. The barer rocks of the lower levels might of course exhibit
+their scratchings and polishings, like those of the higher; but wherever
+these scratchings and polishings occurred in the inferior zones, no
+thick protecting stratum of boulder-clay would be found overlying them;
+and, _vice versa_, wherever in these zones there occurred thick beds of
+boulder-clay, there would be detected on the rock beneath no scratchings
+and polishings. In order to _dress_ the entire surface of a country from
+the sea-line and under it to the tops of its hills, and at the same time
+to cover up extensive portions of its low-lying rocks with vast deposits
+of clay, it seems a necessary condition of the process that it should be
+carried on piece-meal from the lower level upwards,--not from the higher
+downwards.
+
+It interested me much to find, that while from one set of appearances I
+had been inferring the gradual subsidence of the land during the period
+of the boulder-clay, the Rev. Mr. Cumming of King William's College had
+arrived, from the consideration of quite a different class of phenomena,
+at a similar conclusion. "It appears to me highly probable," I find him
+remarking, in his lately published "Isle of man," "that at the
+commencement of the boulder period there was a gradual sinking of this
+area [that of the island]. Successively, therefore, the points at
+different degrees of elevation were brought within the influence of the
+sea, and exposed to the rake of the tides, charged with masses of ice
+which had been floated off from the surrounding shores, and bearing on
+their 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 a
+peculiarly-compounded granite, which occurs in the southern part of the
+island, about seven hundred feet over the level of the sea. There rise
+on the western side of the boss two hills, one of which attains to the
+elevation of nearly seven hundred, and the other of nearly eight hundred
+feet over it; and yet both hills to their summits are mottled over with
+granite boulders, furnished by the comparatively low-lying boss. One of
+these travelled masses, fully two tons in weight, lies not sixty feet
+from the summit of the loftier hill, at an altitude of nearly fifteen
+hundred feet over the sea. Now, it seems extremely difficult to conceive
+of 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 of
+the hills. Had the boulder period been a period of elevation, or merely
+a stationary period, during which the land neither rose nor sank, the
+travelled boulders would not now be found resting at higher levels than
+that of the parent rock whence they were derived. We occasionally meet
+on our shores, after violent storms from the sea, stones that have been
+rolled from their place at low ebb to nearly the line of flood; but we
+always find that it was by the waves of the rising, not of the falling
+tide, that their transport was effected. For whatever removals of the
+kind take place during an ebbing sea are invariably in an opposite
+direction;--they are removals, not from lower to higher levels, but from
+higher to lower.
+
+The upper subsoils of Scotland bear frequent mark of the elevatory
+period which succeeded this period of depression. The boulder-clay has
+its numerous intercalated arenaceous and gravelly beds, which belong
+evidently to its own era; but the numerous surface-beds of stratified
+sand and gravel by which in so many localities it is overlaid belong
+evidently to a later time. When, after possibly a long protracted
+period, the land again began to rise, or the sea to fall, the superior
+portions of the boulder-clay must have been exposed to the action of the
+tides and waves; and the same process of separation of parts must have
+taken place on a large scale, which one occasionally sees taking place
+in the present time on a comparatively small one, in ravines of the same
+clay swept by a streamlet. After every shower, the stream comes down
+red and turbid with the finer and more argillaceous portions of the
+deposit; minute accumulations of sand are swept to the gorge of the
+ravine, or cast down in ripple-marked patches in its deeper pools; beds
+of 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 sort
+of washing process of an analogous character, must have taken place in
+the materials of the more exposed portions of the boulder-clay, during
+the gradual emergence of the land; and hence, apparently, those
+extensive beds of sand and gravel which in so many parts of the kingdom
+exist, in relation to the clay, as a superior or upper subsoil; hence,
+too, occasional beds of a purer clay than that beneath, divested of a
+considerable portion of its arenaceous components, and of almost all its
+pebbles and boulders. This _washed_ clay,--a re-formation of the boulder
+deposit, cast down, mostly in insulated beds in quiet localities, where
+the absence of currents suffered the purer particles held in suspension
+by the water to settle,--forms, in Scotland at least, with, of course,
+the exception of the ancient fire-clays of the Coal Measures, the true
+brick and tile clays of the agriculturist and architect.
+
+It is to these superior beds that all the recent shells yet found above
+the existing sea-level in Scotland, from the Dornoch Frith and beyond
+it, to beyond the Frith of Forth, seem to belong. Their period is much
+less remote than that of the shells of the boulder-clay, and they rarely
+occur in the same comminuted condition. They existed, it would appear,
+not during the chill twilight period, when the land was in a state of
+subsidence, but during the after period of cheerful dawn, when hill-top
+after hill-top was emerging from the deep, and the close of each passing
+century witnessed a broader area of dry land in what is now Scotland,
+than the close of the century which had gone before. Scandinavia is
+similarly rising at the present day, and presents with every succeeding
+age a more extended breadth of surface. Many of the boulder-stones seem
+to have been cast down where they now lie, during this latter time. When
+they occur, as in many instances, high on bare hill-tops, from five to
+fifteen hundred feet over the sea-level, with neither gravel nor
+boulder-clay beside them, we of course cannot fix their period. They may
+have been dropped by ice-floes or shore-ice, where we now find them, at
+the commencement of the period of elevation, after the clay had been
+formed; or they may have been deposited by more ponderous icebergs
+during its formation, when the land was yet sinking, though during the
+subsequent rise the clay may have been washed from around them to lower
+levels. The boulders, however, which we find scattered over the plains
+and less elevated hill-sides, with beds of the washed gravel or sand
+interposed between them and the clay, must have been cast down where
+they lie, during the elevatory ages. For, had they been washed out of
+the clay, they would have lain, not _over_ the greatly lighter sands and
+gravels, but _under_ them. Would that they could write their own
+histories! The autobiography of a single boulder, with notes on the
+various floras which had sprung up around it, and the various classes of
+birds, beasts, and insects by which it had been visited, would be worth
+nine-tenths of all the autobiographies ever published, and a moiety of
+the 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 wooded
+inflection of the bank, formed by the old coast line, in which there
+stood, about two centuries ago, a meal-mill, with the cottage of the
+miller, and which was once known as the scene of one of those
+supernaturalities that belong to the times of the witch and the fairy.
+The upper anchoring-place of the bay lies nearly opposite the
+inflection. A shipmaster, who had moored his vessel in this part of the
+roadstead, some time in the latter days of the first Charles, was one
+fine evening sitting alone on deck, awaiting the return of his seamen,
+who had gone ashore, and amusing himself in watching the lights that
+twinkled from the scattered farm-houses, and in listening, in the
+extreme stillness of the calm, to the distant lowing of cattle, or the
+abrupt bark of the herdsman's dog. As the hour wore later, the sounds
+ceased, and the lights disappeared,--all but one solitary taper, that
+twinkled from the window of the miller's cottage. At length, however, it
+also disappeared, and all was dark around the shores of the bay, as a
+belt of black velvet. Suddenly a hissing noise was heard overhead; the
+shipmaster looked up, and saw what seemed to be one of those meteors
+known as falling stars, slanting athwart the heavens in the direction of
+the cottage, and increasing in size and brilliancy as it neared the
+earth, until the wooded ridge and the shore could be seen as distinctly
+from the ship-deck as by day. A dog howled piteously from one of the
+out-houses,--an owl whooped from the wood. The meteor descended until it
+almost touched the roof, when a cock crew from within; its progress
+seemed instantly arrested; it stood still, rose about the height of a
+ship's mast, and then began again to descend. The cock crew a second
+time; it rose as before; and, after mounting considerably higher than at
+first, again sank in the line of the cottage, to be again arrested by
+the crowing of the cock. It mounted yet a third time, rising higher
+still; and, in its last descent, had almost touched the roof, when the
+faint clap of wings was heard as if whispered over the water, followed
+by a still louder note of defiance from the cock. The meteor rose with a
+bound, and, continuing to ascend until it seemed lost among the stars,
+did not again appear. Next night, however, at the same hour, the same
+scene was repeated in all its circumstances: the meteor descended, the
+dog howled, the owl whooped, the cock crew. On the following morning the
+shipmaster visited the miller's, and, curious to ascertain how the
+cottage would fare when the cock was away, he purchased the bird; and,
+sailing from the bay before nightfall, did not return until about a
+month 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: it
+had vanished. As he approached the anchoring ground, he could discern a
+heap of blackened stones occupying the place where it had stood; and he
+was informed on going ashore, that it had been burnt to the ground, no
+one knew how, on the very night he had quitted the bay. He had it
+re-built and furnished, says the story, deeming himself what one of the
+old schoolmen perhaps term the _occasional_ cause of the disaster. He
+also returned the cock,--probably a not less important benefit,--and no
+after accident befel the cottage. About fifteen years ago there was a
+human 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 body
+had been huddled up twofold in a hole; and this discovery led to that of
+the story, which, though at one time often repeated and extensively
+believed, had been suffered to sleep in the memories of a few elderly
+people 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 well
+seen before,--the exact relation borne by the deep red stone of the
+Cromarty quarries to the ichthyolite beds of the system. It occupies the
+same place, and belongs to the same period, as those superior beds of
+the Lower Old Red Sandstone which are so largely developed in the cliffs
+of Dunnet Head in Caithness, and of Tarbet Ness in Ross-shire, and which
+were at one time regarded as forming, north of the Grampians, the
+analogue of the New Red Sandstone. I paced it across the strata this
+morning, in the line of the ravine, and found its thickness over the
+upper fish-beds, though I was far from reaching its superior layers,
+which are buried here in the sea, to be rather more than five hundred
+feet. The fossiliferous beds occur a few hundred yards below the
+dwelling-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 which
+I found a small specimen of Cheiracanthus. The projecting edge of some
+fossil-charged bed had been struck, mayhap, by an iceberg, and dashed
+into ruins, just as the subsiding land had brought the spot within reach
+of the attritive ice; and the broken heap thus detached had been shortly
+afterwards covered up, without mixture of any other deposit, by the red
+boulder-clay. On the previous day I had detected the fish-beds in
+another new locality,--one of the ravines of the lawn of Cromarty
+House,--where the gray shale, concealed by a covering of soil and sward
+for 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 this
+ravine of the boulder-clay, was to ascertain whether the beds did not
+also occur in a ravine of the parish of Avoch, some eight or nine miles
+away, which, when lying a-bed one night in Edinburgh, I remembered
+having crossed when a boy, at a point which lies considerably out of the
+ordinary route of the traveller. I had remarked on this occasion, as the
+resuscitated recollection intimated, that the precipices of the Avoch
+ravine bore, at the unfrequented point, the peculiar aspect which I
+learned many years after to associate with the ichthyolitic member of
+the system; and I was now quite as curious to test the truth of a sort
+of vignette landscape, transferred to the mind at an immature period of
+life, and preserved in it for full thirty years, as desirous to extend
+my knowledge of the fossiliferous beds of a system to the elucidation of
+which I had peculiarly devoted myself.
+
+As the traveller reaches the flat moory uplands of the parish, where the
+water stagnates amid heath and moss over a thin layer of peaty soil, he
+finds the underlying boulder-clay, as shown in the chance sections,
+spotted and streaked with patches of a grayish-white. There is the same
+mixture of arenaceous and aluminous particles in the white as in the red
+portions of the mass; for, as we see so frequently exemplified in the
+spots and streaks of the Red Sandstone formations, whether Old or New,
+the coloring matter has been discharged without any accompanying change
+of composition in the substance which it pervaded;--evidence enough that
+the red dye must be something distinct from the substance itself, just
+as the dye of a handkerchief is a thing distinct from the silk or cotton
+yarn of which the handkerchief has been woven. The stagnant water above,
+acidulated by its various vegetable solutions, seems to have been in
+some way connected with these appearances. In every case in which a
+crack through the clay gives access to the oozing moisture, we see the
+sides bleached, for several feet downwards, to nearly the color of
+pipe-clay; we find the surface, too, when it has been divested of the
+vegetable soil, presenting for yards together the appearance of sheets
+of half-bleached linen: the red ground of the clay has been acted upon
+by the percolating fluid, as the red ground of a Bandanna handkerchief
+is acted upon through the openings in the perforated lead, by the
+discharging chloride of lime. The peculiar chemistry through which these
+changes are effected might be found, carefully studied, to throw much
+light on similar phenomena in the older formations. There are quarries
+in the New Red Sandstone in which almost every mass of stone presents a
+different shade of color from that of its neighboring mass, and quarries
+in the Old Red the strata of which we find streaked and spotted like
+pieces of calico. And their variegated aspect seems to have been
+communicated, in every instance, not during deposition, nor after they
+had been hardened into stone but when, like the boulder-clay, they
+existed in an intermediate state. Be it remarked, too, that the red clay
+here,--evidently derived from the abrasion of the red rocks beneath,--is
+in dye and composition almost identical with the substance on which, as
+an unconsolidated sandstone, the bleaching influences, whatever their
+character, had operated in the Palaeozoic period, so many long ages
+before;--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 of
+notice, that the bleached lines of the clay exhibit, viewed
+horizontally, when the overlying vegetable mould has been removed, and
+the whitened surface in immediate contact with it paired off, a
+polygonal arrangement, like that assumed by the cracks in the bottom of
+clayey pools dried up in summer by the heat of the sun. Can these
+possibly indicate the ancient rents and fissures of the boulder-clay,
+formed, immediately after the upheaval of the land, in the first process
+of drying, and remaining afterwards open enough to receive what the
+uncracked portions of the surface excluded,--the acidulated bleaching
+fluid?
+
+The kind of ferruginous pavement of the boulder-clay known to the
+agriculturist as _pan_, which may be found extending in some cases its
+iron cover over whole districts,--sealing them down to barrenness, as
+the iron and brass sealed down the stump of Nebuchadnezzar's tree,--is,
+like the white strips and blotches of the deposit, worthy the careful
+notice of the geologist. It serves to throw some light on the origin of
+those continuous bands of clayey or arenaceous ironstone, which in the
+older formations in which vegetable matter abounds, whether Oolitic or
+Carboniferous, are of such common occurrence. The _pan_ is a stony
+stratum, scarcely less indurated in some localities than sandstone of
+the average hardness, that rests like a pavement on the surface of the
+boulder-clay, and that generally bears atop a thin layer of sterile
+soil, darkened by a russet covering of stunted heath. The binding cement
+of the _pan_ is, as I have said, ferruginous, and seems to have been
+derived from the vegetable covering above. Of all plants, the heaths are
+found to contain most iron. Nor is it difficult to conceive how, in
+comparatively flat tracts of heathy moor, where the surface water sinks
+to the stiff subsoil, and on which one generation of plants after
+another has been growing and decaying for many centuries, the minute
+metallic particles, disengaged in the process of decomposition, and
+carried down by the rains to the impermeable clay, should, by
+accumulating there, bind the layer on which they rest, as is the nature
+of ferruginous oxide, into a continuous stony crust. Wherever this _pan_
+occurs, we find the superincumbent soil doomed to barrenness,--arid and
+sun-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 the
+school-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 not
+unkindly subsoil below. He set himself to work in his leisure hours, and
+bit by bit laid bare and broke up the pavement. The upper mould, long
+divorced from the clay on which it had once rested, was again united to
+it; the piece of ground began gradually to alter its character for the
+better; and when I last passed the way, I found it, though in a state of
+sad neglect, covered by a richer vegetation than it had ever borne under
+the more careful management of my friend. This ferruginous pavement of
+the boulder-clay may be deemed of interest to the geologist, as a
+curious instance of deposition in a dense medium, and as illustrative
+of 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 have
+incidentally referred in the story of the Miller of Resolis.[17] Modern
+improvement has not yet marred it by the plough; and so it still bears
+on its brown surface many a swelling tumulus and flat oblong mound,
+and--where the high road of the district passes along its eastern
+edge--the huge gray cairn, raised, says tradition, over the body of an
+ancient Pictish king. But the contest of which it was the scene belongs
+to a profoundly dark period, ere the gray dawn of Scottish history
+began. As shown by the remains of ancient art occasionally dug up on the
+moor, it was a conflict of the times of the stone battle-axe, the flint
+arrow-head, and the unglazed sepulchral urn, unindebted for aught of its
+symmetry to the turning-lathe,--times when there were heroes in
+abundance, but no scribes. And the cairn, about a hundred feet in length
+and breadth, by about twenty in height, with its long hoary hair of
+overgrown lichen waving in the breeze, and the trailing club-moss
+shooting upwards from its base along its sides, bears in its every
+lineament full mark of its great age. It is a mound striding across the
+stream of centuries, to connect the past with the present. And yet,
+after all, what a mere matter of yesterday its extreme antiquity is! My
+explorations this morning bore reference to but the later eras of the
+geologist; the portion of the geologic volume which I was attempting to
+decipher and translate formed the few terminal paragraphs of its
+concluding chapter. And yet the _finis_ had been added to them for
+thousands of years ere this latter antiquity began. The boulder-clay had
+been formed and deposited; the land, in rising over the waves, had had
+many a huge pebble washed out of its last formed red stratum, or dropped
+upon it by ice-floes from above; and these pebbles lay mottling the
+surface of this barren moor for mile after mile, bleaching pale to the
+rains and the sun, as the meagre and mossy soil received, in the lapse
+of centuries, its slow accessions of organic matter, and darkened around
+them. And then, for a few brief hours, the heath, no longer solitary,
+became a wild scene of savage warfare,--of waving arms and threatening
+faces,--and of human lives violently spilled, gushing forth in blood;
+and, when all was over, the old weathered boulders were heaped up above
+the slain, and there began a new antiquity in relation to the pile in
+its gathered state, that bore reference to man's short lifetime, and to
+the recent introduction of the species. The child of a few summers
+speaks of the events of last year as long gone by; while his father
+advanced into middle life, regards them as still fresh and recent.
+
+I reached the Burn of Killein,--the scene of my purposed
+explorations,--where it bisects the Inverness road; and struck down the
+rocky ravine, in the line of the descending strata and the falling
+streamlet, towards the point at which I had crossed it so many years
+before. First I passed along a thick bed of yellow stone,--next over a
+bed of stratified clay. "The little boy," I said, "took correct note of
+what he saw, though without special aim at the time, and as much under
+the guidance of a mere observative instinct as Dame Quickly, when she
+took 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 of
+her interview with old Sir John when he promised to marry her. These
+are unequivocally the ichthyolitic beds, whether they contain
+ichthyolites or no." The first nodule I laid open presented inside
+merely a pale oblong patch in the centre, which I examined in vain with
+the lens, though convinced of its organic origin, for a single scale.
+Proceeding farther down the stream, I picked a nodule out of a second
+and lower bed, which contained more evidently its organism,--a
+finely-reticulated fragment, that at first sight reminded me of some
+delicate festinella of the Silurian system. It proved, however, to be
+part of the tail of a Cheiracanthus, exhibiting--what is rarely
+shown--the interior surfaces of those minute rectangular scales which in
+this genus lie over the caudal fin, ranged in right lines. A second
+nodule presented me with the spines of _Diplacanthus striatus_; and
+still farther down the stream,--for the beds are numerous here, and
+occupy in vertical extent very considerable space in the system,--I
+detected a stratum of bulky nodules charged with fragments of
+Coccosteus, belonging chiefly to two species,--_Coccosteus decipiens_
+and _Coccosteus cuspidatus_. All the specimens bore conclusive evidence
+regarding the geologic place and character of the beds in which they
+occur; and in one of the number, a specimen of _Coccosteus decipiens_,
+sufficiently fine to be transferred to my knapsack, and which now
+occupies its corner in my little collection, the head exhibits all its
+plates in their proper order, and the large dorsal plate, though
+dissociated from the nail-like attachment of the nape, presents its
+characteristic breadth entire. It was the plates of this species, first
+found in the flagstones of Caithness, which were taken for those of a
+fresh-water tortoise; and hence apparently its specific name,
+_decipiens_;--it is the _deceiving_ Coccosteus. I disinterred, in the
+course of my explorations, as many nodules as lay within reach,--now and
+then longing for a pickaxe, and a companion robust and persevering
+enough to employ it with effect; and after seeing all that was to be
+seen in the bed of the stream and the precipices, I retraced my steps up
+the dell to the highway. And then, striking off across the moor to the
+north,--ascending in the system as I climbed the eminence, which forms
+here the central ridge of the old Maolbuie Common,--I spent some little
+time in a quarry of pale red sandstone, known, from the moory height on
+which it has been opened, as the quarry of the Maolbuie. But here, as
+elsewhere, the folds of that upper division of the Lower Old Red in
+which it has been excavated contain nothing organic. Why this should be
+so universally the case,--for in Caithness, Orkney, Cromarty, and Ross,
+wherever, in short, this member of the system is unequivocally
+developed, it is invariably barren of remains,--cannot, I suspect, be
+very satisfactorily explained. Fossils occur both over and under it, in
+rocks that seem as little favorable to their preservation; but during
+that 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 Statistical
+Account of the Parish of Avoch as comprising at least the analogues of
+three vast geologic systems. The Great Conglomerate, and the thick bed
+of coarse sandstone of corresponding character that lies over it,
+compose all which is not primary rock of that south-eastern ridge of the
+district which forms the shores of the Moray Frith; and _they_ are
+represented in the Account as Old Red Sandstone proper. Then, next in
+order,--forming the base of a parallel ridge,--come those sandstone and
+argillaceous bands to which the ichthyolite beds belong; and these
+though at the time the work appeared their existence in the locality
+could be but guessed at, are described as representatives of the Coal
+Measures. Last of all there occur those superior sandstones of the Lower
+Old Red formation in which the quarry of the Maolbuie has been opened,
+and which are largely developed in the central or _backbone_ ridge of
+the district. "And these," says the writer, "we have little hesitation
+in assigning to the _New_ Red, or variegated Sandstone formation." I
+remember that some thirteen years ago,--in part misled by authority, and
+in part really afraid to represent beds of such an enormous aggregate
+thickness as all belonging to one inconsiderable formation,--for such
+was the character of the Old Red Sandstone at the time,--I ventured,
+though hesitatingly, and with less of detail, on a somewhat similar
+statement regarding the sandstone deposits of the parish of Cromarty.
+But true it is, notwithstanding, that the stratified rocks of the Black
+Isle are composed generally, not of the analogues of three systems, but
+of merely a fractional portion of a single system,--a fact previously
+established in other parts of the district, and which my discovery of
+this day in the Burn of Killein served yet farther to confirm in
+relation to that middle portion of the tract in which the parish of
+Avoch 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 yet
+larger sum of epochs and of ages.
+
+The sun had got low in the western sky, and I had at least some eight or
+nine miles of rough road still before me; but the day had been a happy
+and 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 night
+long ere I reached Cromarty. Next morning I quitted the town for the
+upper reaches of the Frith, to examine yet further the superficial
+deposits 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 passing
+direct through the village, I took the western road which winds along
+the shore towards Strathpeffer, skirting on the right the ancient
+province of the Munroes. The day was clear and genial; and the
+wide-spreading woods of this part of the country, a little touched by
+their autumnal tints of brown and yellow, gave a warmth of hue to the
+landscape, which at an earlier season it wanted. A few slim streaks of
+semi-transparent mist, that barred the distant hill-peaks, and a few
+towering piles of intensely white cloud, that shot across the deep blue
+of the heavens, gave warning that the earlier part of the day was to be
+in all probability the better part of it, and that the harvest of
+observation which it was ultimately to yield might be found to depend on
+the prompt use made of the passing hour. What first attracts the
+attention of the geologist, in journeying westwards, is the altered
+color of the boulder-clay, as exhibited in ditches by the way-side, or
+along the shore. It no longer presents that characteristic red
+tint,--borrowed from the red sandstone beneath,--so prevalent over the
+Black 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, or
+over the flagstones of Caithness. The altered color here is evidently a
+consequence of the large development, in Ferindonald and Strathpeffer,
+of the ichthyolitic members of the Old Red, existing chiefly as fetid
+bituminous breccias and dark-colored sandstones: the boulder-clay of
+the locality forms the dressings, not of red, but of blackish-gray
+rocks; and, as almost everywhere else in Scotland, its trail lies to the
+east of the strata, from which it was detached in the character of an
+impalpable mud by the age-protracted grindings of the denuding agent. It
+abounds in masses of bituminous breccia, some of which, of great size,
+seem to have been drifted direct from the valley of Strathpeffer, and
+are identical in structure and composition with the rock in which the
+mineral springs of the Strath have their rise, and to which they owe
+their peculiar qualities.
+
+After walking on for about eight miles, through noble woods and a lovely
+country, I struck from off the high road at the pretty little village of
+Evanton, and pursued the course of the river Auldgrande, first through
+intermingled fields and patches of copsewood, and then through a thick
+fir wood, to where the bed of the stream contracts from a
+boulder-strewed bottom of ample breadth, to a gloomy fissure, so deep
+and dark, that in many places the water cannot be seen, and so narrow,
+that the trees which shoot out from the opposite sides interlace their
+branches atop. Large banks of the gray boulder-clay, laid open by the
+river, and charged with fragments of dingy sandstone and dark-colored
+breccia, testify, along the lower reaches of the stream, to the near
+neighborhood of the ichthyolitic member of the Old Red; but where the
+banks contract, we find only its lowest member, the Great Conglomerate.
+This last is by far the most picturesque member of the system,--abrupt
+and bold of outline in its hills, and mural in its precipices. And
+nowhere does it exhibit a wilder or more characteristic beauty than at
+the tall narrow portal of the Auldgrande, where the river,--after
+wailing for miles in a pent-up channel, narrow as one of the lanes of
+old Edinburgh, and hemmed in by walls quite as perpendicular, and
+nearly twice as lofty,--suddenly expands, first into a deep brown pool,
+and then into a broad tumbling stream, that, as if permanently affected
+in temper by the strict severity of the discipline to which its early
+life had been subjected, frets and chafes in all its after course, till
+it loses itself in the sea. The banks, ere we reach the opening of the
+chasm, have become steep, and wild, and densely wooded; and there stand
+out on either hand, giant crags, that plant their iron feet in the
+stream; here girdled with belts of rank succulent shrubs, that love the
+damp shade and the frequent drizzle of the spray; and there hollow and
+bare, with their round pebbles sticking out from the partially
+decomposed surface, like the piled-up skulls in the great underground
+cemetery of the Parisians. Massy trees, with their green fantastic roots
+rising high over the scanty soil, and forming many a labyrinthine recess
+for the frog, the toad, and the newt, stretch forth their gnarled arms
+athwart the stream. In front of the opening, with but a black deep pool
+between, there lies a midway bank of huge stones. Of these, not a few of
+the more angular masses still bear, though sorely worn by the torrent,
+the mark of the blasting iron, and were evidently tumbled into the chasm
+from the fields above. But in the chasm there was no rest for them, and
+so the arrowy rush of the water in the confined channel swept them down
+till they dropped where they now lie, just where the widening bottom
+first served to dissipate the force of the current. And over the sullen
+pool in front we may see the stern pillars of the portal rising from
+eighty to a hundred feet in height, and scarce twelve feet apart, like
+the massive obelisks of some Egyptian temple; while, in gloomy vista
+within, projection starts out beyond projection, like column beyond
+column in some narrow avenue of approach to Luxor or Carnac. The
+precipices are green, with some moss or byssus, that like the miner,
+chooses a subterranean habitat,--for here the rays of the sun never
+fall; the dead, mossy water beneath, from which the cliffs rise so
+abruptly, bears the hue of molten pitch; the trees, fast anchored in the
+rock, shoot out their branches across the opening, to form a thick
+tangled roof, at the height of a hundred and fifty feet overhead; while
+from the recesses within, where the eye fails to penetrate, there issues
+a combination of the strangest and wildest sounds ever yet produced by
+water: there is the deafening rush of the torrent, blent as if with the
+clang of hammers, the roar of vast bellows, and the confused gabble of a
+thousand voices. The sun, hastening to its setting, shone red, yet
+mellow, through the foliage of the wooded banks on the west, where, high
+above, they first curve from the sloping level of the fields, to bend
+over the stream; or fell more direct on the jutting cliffs and bosky
+dingles opposite, burnishing them as if with gold and fire; but all was
+coldly-hued at the bottom, where the torrent foamed gray and chill under
+the brown shadow of the banks; and where the narrow portal opened an
+untrodden way into the mysterious recesses beyond, the shadow deepened
+almost into blackness. The scene lacked but a ghost to render it
+perfect. An apparition walking from within like the genius in one of
+Goldsmith's essays "along the surface of the water," would have
+completed it at once.
+
+Laying hold of an overhanging branch, I warped myself upwards from the
+bed of the stream along the face of a precipice, and, reaching its
+sloping top, forced my way to the wood above, over a steep bank covered
+with tangled underwood, and a slim succulent herbage, that sickened for
+want of the sun. The yellow light was streaming through many a shaggy
+vista, as, threading my way along the narrow ravine as near the steep
+edge as the brokenness of the ground permitted, I reached a huge mass
+of travelled rock, that had been dropped in the old boulder period
+within a yard's length of the brink. It is composed of a characteristic
+granitic gneiss of a pale flesh-color, streaked with black, that, in the
+hand specimen, can scarce be distinguished from a true granite, but
+which, viewed in the mass, presents, in the arrangement of its intensely
+dark mica, evident marks of stratification, and which is remarkable,
+among other things, for furnishing almost all the very large boulders of
+this part of the country. Unlike many of the granitic gneisses, it is a
+fine solid stone, and would cut well. When I had last the pleasure of
+spending a few hours with the late Mr. William Laidlaw, the trusted
+friend of Sir Walter Scott, he intimated to me his intention,--pointing
+to a boulder of this species of gneiss,--of having it cut into two
+oblong pedestals, with which he purposed flanking the entrance to the
+mansion-house of the chief of the Rosses,--the gentleman whose property
+he at that time superintended. It was, he said, both in appearance and
+history, the most remarkable stone on the lands of Balnagown; and so he
+was desirous that it should be exhibited at Balnagown Castle to the best
+advantage. But as he fell shortly after into infirm health, and resigned
+his situation, I know not that he ever carried his purpose into effect.
+The boulder here, beside the chasm, measures about twelve feet in length
+and breadth, by from five to six in height, and contains from eight to
+nine hundred cubic feet of stone. On its upper table-like surface I
+found a few patches of moss and lichen, and a slim reddening tuft of the
+_Vaccinium myrtillus_, still bearing, late as was the season, its
+half-dozen blaeberries. This pretty little plant occurs in great
+profusion along the steep edges of the Auldgrande, where its delicate
+bushes, springing up amid long heath and ling, and crimsoned by the
+autumnal tinge, gave a peculiar warmth and richness this evening to
+those bosky spots under the brown trees, or in immediate contact with
+the dark chasm on which the sunlight fell most strongly; and on all the
+more perilous projections, I found the dark berries still shrivelling on
+their stems. Thirty years earlier I would scarce have left them there;
+and the more perilous the crag on which they had grown, the more
+deliciously would they have eaten. But every period of life has its own
+playthings; and I was now chiefly engaged with the deep chasm and the
+huge boulder. Chasm and boulder had come to have greatly more of
+interest to me than the delicate berries, or than even that sovereign
+dispeller of ennui and low spirits, an adventurous scramble among the
+cliffs.
+
+In what state did the chasm exist when the huge boulder,--detached,
+mayhap, at the close of a severe frost, from some island of the
+archipelago that is now the northern Highlands of Scotland,--was
+suffered to drop beside it, from some vast ice-floe drifting eastwards
+on the tide? In all probability merely as a fault in the Conglomerate,
+similar to many of those faults which in the Coal Measures of the
+southern districts we find occupied by continuous dikes of trap. But in
+this northern region, where the trap-rocks are unknown, it must have
+been filled up with the boulder-clay, or with some still more ancient
+accumulation of debris. And when the land had risen, and the streams,
+swollen into rivers, flowed along the hollows which they now occupy, the
+loose rubbish would in the lapse of ages gradually wash downwards to the
+sea, as the stones thrown from the fields above were washed downwards in
+a later time; and thus the deep fissure would ultimately be cleared out.
+The boulder-stones lie thickly in this neighborhood, and over the
+eastern half of Ross-shire, and the Black Isle generally; though for
+the last century they have been gradually disappearing from the more
+cultivated tracts on which there were fences or farm-steadings to be
+built, or where they obstructed the course of the plough. We found them
+occurring in every conceivable situation,--high on hill-sides, where the
+shepherd crouches beside them for shelter in a shower,--deep in the open
+sea, where they entangle the nets of the fisherman,--on inland moors,
+where in some remote age they were painfully rolled together, to form
+the Druidical circle or Picts'-house,--or on the margin of the coast,
+where they had been piled over one another at a later time, as
+protecting bulwarks against the encroachments of the waves. They lie
+strewed more sparingly over extended plains, or on exposed heights, than
+in hollows sheltered from the west by high land, where the current, when
+it dashed high on the hill-sides, must have been diverted from its
+easterly course, and revolved in whirling eddies. On the top of the fine
+bluff hill of Fyrish, which I so admired to-day, each time I caught a
+glimpse of its purple front through the woods, and which shows how noble
+a mountain the Old Red Sandstone may produce, the boulders lie but
+sparsely. I especially marked, however, when last on its summit, a
+ponderous traveller of a vividly green hornblende, resting on a bed of
+pale yellow sandstone, fully a thousand feet over the present high-water
+level. But towards the east, in what a seaman would term the _bight_ of
+the hill, the boulders have accumulated in vast numbers. They lie so
+closely piled along the course of the river Alness, about half a mile
+above the village, that it is with difficulty the waters, when in flood,
+can force their passage through. For here, apparently, when the tide
+swept along the hill-side, many an ice-floe, detained in the shelter by
+the revolving eddy, dashed together in rude collision, and shook their
+stony burdens to the bottom. Immediately to the east of the low
+promontory on which the town of Cromarty is built there is another
+extensive accumulation of boulders, some of them of great size. They
+occupy exactly the place to which I have oftener than once seen the
+drift-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 a
+violent storm from, the east, and the fragments ground against each
+other into powder. And here, I doubt not, of old, when the sea stood
+greatly higher than now, and the ice-floes were immensely larger and
+more numerous than those formed, in the existing circumstances, in the
+upper shallows of the Frith, would the fierce north-east have charged
+home with similar effect, and the broken masses have divested themselves
+of their boulders.
+
+The Highland chieftain of one of our old Gaelic traditions conversed
+with a boulder-stone, and told to it the story which he had sworn never
+to 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 tell
+theirs to me. But, lacking the fine ear of Hans Anderson, the Danish
+poet, who can hear flowers and butterflies talk, and understand the
+language of birds, I have as yet succeeded in extracting from them no
+such 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 circumstances
+connected with the places which they have occupied ever since they gave
+over travelling, would be exceedingly curious ones? Among the boulder
+group to the east of Cromarty, the most ponderous individual stands so
+exactly on the low-water line of our great Lammas tides, that though its
+shoreward edge may be reached dry-shod from four to six times every
+twelvemonth, no one has ever succeeded in walking dry shod round it. I
+have seen a strong breeze from the west, prolonged for a few days,
+prevent its drying, when the Lammas stream was at its point of lowest
+ebb, by from a foot to eighteen inches,--an indication, apparently, that
+to that height the waters of the Atlantic may be heaped up against our
+shores by the impulsion of the wind. And the recurrence, during at least
+the last century, of certain ebbs each season, which, when no disturbing
+atmospheric phenomena interfere with their operation, are sure to lay it
+dry, demonstrate, that during that period no change, even the most
+minute, has taken place on our coasts, in the relative levels of sea and
+shore. The waves have considerably encroached, during even the last
+half-century, on the shores immediately opposite; but it must have been,
+as the stone shows, simply by the attrition of the waves, and the
+consequent lowering of the beach,--not through any rise in the ocean, or
+any depression of the land.
+
+The huge boulder here has been known for ages as the _Clach Malloch_, or
+accursed stone, from the circumstance, says tradition, that a boat was
+once wrecked upon it during a storm, and the boatmen drowned. Though
+little more than seven feet in height, by about twelve in length, and
+some eight or nine in breadth, its situation on the extreme line of ebb
+imparts a peculiar character to the various productions, animal and
+vegetable, which we find adhering to it. They occur in zones, just as on
+lofty hills the botanist finds his agricultural, moorland, and alpine
+zones rising in succession as he ascends, the one over the other. At its
+base, where the tide rarely falls, we find two varieties of _Lobularia
+digitata_, dead man's hand, the orange colored and the pale, with a
+species of sertularia; and the characteristic vegetable is the
+rough-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_,--remarkable
+chiefly for its sharp siliceous spicula and its strong phosphoric smell;
+and the characteristic vegetable is the smooth-stemmed tangle, or
+queener. In yet another zone we find the common limpet and the vesicular
+kelp-weed; and the small gray balanus and serrated kelp-weed form the
+productions of the top. We may see exactly the same zones occurring in
+broad belts along the shore,--each zone indicative of a certain
+overlying depth of water; but it seems curious enough to find them all
+existing 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 zoology and botany, with
+notes of those atmospheric effects on the tides, and of that stability
+for ages of the existing sea-level, which it indicates,--would of itself
+form one very interesting chapter: its geological history would furnish
+another. It would probably tell, if it once fairly broke silence and
+became autobiographical, first of a feverish dream of intense molten
+heat and overpowering pressure; and then of a busy time, in which the
+free molecules, as at once the materials and the artisans of the mass,
+began to build, each according to its nature, under the superintendence
+of a curious chemistry,--here forming sheets of black mica, there rhombs
+of a dark-green hornblende and a flesh-colored feldspar, yonder
+amorphous masses of a translucent quartz. It would add further, that at
+length, when the slow process was over, and the entire space had been
+occupied to the full by plate, molecule, and crystal, the red fiery
+twilight of the dream deepened into more than midnight gloom, and a
+chill unconscious night descended on the sleeper. The vast Palaeozoic
+period passes by,--the scarce less protracted Secondary ages come to a
+close,--the Eocene, Miocene, Pliocene epochs are ushered in and
+terminate,--races begin and end,--families and orders are born and die;
+but the dead, or those whose deep slumber admits not of dreams, take no
+note of time; and so it would tell how its long night of unsummed
+centuries seemed, like the long night of the grave, compressed into a
+moment.
+
+The marble silence is suddenly broken by the rush of an avalanche, that
+tears away the superincumbent masses, rolling them into the sea; and the
+ponderous block, laid open to the light, finds itself on the bleak shore
+of a desert island of the northern Scottish archipelago, with a wintry
+scene of snow-covered peaks behind, and an ice-mottled ocean before. The
+winter passes, the cold severe spring comes on, and day after day the
+field-ice goes floating by,--now gray in shadow, now bright in the sun.
+At length vegetation, long repressed, bursts forth, but in no profuse
+luxuriance. A few dwarf birches unfold their leaves amid the rocks; a
+few sub-arctic willows hang out their catkins beside the swampy runnels;
+the golden potentilla opens its bright flowers on slopes where the
+evergreen _Empetrum nigrum_ slowly ripens its glossy crow-berries; and
+from where the sea-spray dashes at full tide along the beach, to where
+the snow gleams at midsummer on the mountain-summits, the thin short
+sward is dotted by the minute cruciform stars of the scurvy-grass, and
+the crimson blossoms of the sea-pink. Not a few of the plants of our
+existing sea-shores and of our loftier hill-tops are still identical in
+species; but wide zones of rich herbage, with many a fertile field and
+many a stately tree, intervene between the bare marine belts and the
+bleak insulated eminences; and thus the alpine, notwithstanding its
+identity with the littoral flora, has been long divorced from it; but in
+this early time the divorce had not yet taken place, nor for ages
+thereafter; and the same plants that sprang around the sea-margin rose
+also along the middle slopes to the mountain-summits. The landscape is
+treeless and bare, and a hoary lichen whitens the moors, and waves, as
+the years pass by, in pale tufts, from the disinterred stone, now
+covered with weather-stains, green and gray, and standing out in bold
+and yet bolder relief from the steep hill-side as the pulverizing frosts
+and washing rains bear away the lesser masses from around it. The sea is
+slowly rising, and the land, in proportion, narrowing its flatter
+margins, and yielding up its wider valleys to the tide; the low green
+island of one century forms the half-tide skerry, darkened with algae, of
+another, and in yet a third exists but as a deep-sea rock. As its summit
+disappears, groups of hills, detached from the land, become islands,
+skerries, deep-sea rocks, in turn. At length the waves at full wash
+within a few yards of the granitic block. And now, yielding to the
+undermining influences, just as a blinding snow-shower is darkening the
+heavens, it comes thundering down the steep into the sea, where it lies
+immediately beneath the high-water line, surrounded by a wide float of
+pulverized ice, broken by the waves. A keen frost sets in; the
+half-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; the
+consolidated ice-field moves, floats, is detached from the shore, creeps
+slowly outwards into the offing, bearing atop the boulder; and,
+finally, caught by the easterly current, it drifts away into the open
+ocean. And then, far from its original bed in the rock, amid the
+jerkings of a cockling sea, the mass breaks through the supporting
+float, and settles far beneath, amid the green and silent twilight of
+the bottom, where its mosses and lichens yield their place to stony
+encrustations of deep purple, and to miniature thickets of arboraceous
+zoophites.
+
+The many-colored Acalephae float by; the many-armed Sepiadae shoot over;
+while shells that love the profounder depths,--the black Modiola and
+delicate Anomia,--anchor along the sides of the mass; and where thickets
+of the deep-sea tangle spread out their long, streamer-like fronds to
+the tide, the strong Cyprina and many-ribbed Astarte shelter by scores
+amid the reticulations of the short woody stems and thick-set roots. A
+sudden darkness comes on, like that which fell upon Sinbad when the
+gigantic roc descended upon him; the sea-surface is fully sixty fathoms
+over head; but even at this great depth an enormous iceberg grates
+heavily against the bottom, crushing into fragments in its course,
+Cyprina, Modiola, Astarte, with many a hapless mollusc besides; and
+furrows into deep grooves the very rocks on which they lie. It passes
+away; and, after many an unsummed year has also passed, there comes
+another change. The period of depression and of the boulder-clay is
+over. The water has shallowed as the sea-line gradually sank, or the
+land was propelled upwards by some elevatory process from below; and
+each time the tide falls, the huge boulder now raises over the waters
+its broad forehead, already hung round with flowing tresses of brown
+sea-weed, and looks at the adjacent coast. The country has strangely
+altered 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 pale
+gleam of local glaciers, and snow-streaked on its loftier hill-tops. But
+vast forests of dark pine sweep along its hill-sides or selvage its
+shores; and the sheltered hollows are enlivened by the lighter green of
+the oak, the ash, and the elm. Human foot has not yet imprinted its
+sward; but its brute inhabitants have become numerous. The cream-colored
+coat of the wild bull,--a speck of white relieved against a ground of
+dingy green,--may be seen far amid the pines, and the long howl of the
+wolf heard from the nearer thickets. The gigantic elk raises himself
+from his lair, and tosses his ponderous horns at the sound; while the
+beaver, in some sequestered dell traversed by a streamlet, plunges
+alarmed into his deep coffer-dam, and, rising through the submerged
+opening of his cell, shelters safely within, beyond reach of pursuit.
+The great transverse valleys of the country, from its eastern to its
+western coasts, are still occupied by the sea,--they exist as broad
+ocean-sounds; and many of the detached hills rise around its shores as
+islands. The northern Sutor forms a bluff high island, for the plains of
+Easter Ross are still submerged; and the Black Isle is in reality what
+in later times it is merely in name,--a sea-encircled district, holding
+a midway place between where the Sound of the great Caledonian Valley
+and the Sounds of the Valleys of the Conon and Carron open into the
+German Ocean. Though the climate has greatly softened, it is still, as
+the local glaciers testify, ungenial and severe. Winter protracts his
+stay through the later months of spring; and still, as of old, vast
+floats of ice, detached from the glaciers, or formed in the lakes and
+shallower estuaries of the interior, come drifting down the Sounds every
+season, and disappear in the open sea, or lie stranded along the shores.
+
+Ages have again passed: the huge boulder, from the further sinking of
+the waters, lies dry throughout the neaps, and is covered only at the
+height of each stream-tide; there is a float of ice stranded on the
+beach, which consolidates around it during the neap, and is floated off
+by the stream; and the boulder, borne in its midst, as of old, again
+sets out a voyaging. It has reached the narrow opening of the Sutors,
+swept downwards by the strong ebb current, when a violent storm from the
+north-east sets in; and, constrained by antagonist forces,--the sweep of
+the tide on the one hand, and the roll of the waves on the other,--the
+ice-raft deflects into the little bay that lies to the east of the
+promontory now occupied by the town of Cromarty. And there it tosses,
+with a hundred more jostling in rude collision; and at length bursting
+apart, the _Clach Malloch_, its journeyings forever over, settles on its
+final resting-place. In a period long posterior it saw the ultimate
+elevation of the land. Who shall dare say how much more it witnessed, or
+decide that it did not form the centre of a rich forest vegetation, and
+that the ivy did not cling round it, and the wild rose shed its petals
+over it, when the Dingwall, Moray, and Dornoch Friths existed as
+sub-aerial valleys, traversed by streams that now enter the sea far
+apart, but then gathered themselves into one vast river, that, after it
+had received the tributary waters of the Shin and the Conon, the Ness
+and the Beauly, the Helmsdale, the Brora, the Findhorn, and the Spey,
+rolled on through the flat secondary formations of the outer Moray
+Frith,--Lias, and Oolite, and Greensand, and Chalk,--to fall into a gulf
+of the Northern Ocean which intervened between the coasts of Scotland
+and Norway, but closed nearly opposite the mouth of the Tyne, leaving a
+broad level plain to connect the coasts of England with those of the
+Continent! Be this as it may, the present sea-coast became at length the
+common boundary of land and sea. And the boulder continued to exist for
+centuries still later as a nameless stone, on which the tall gray heron
+rested moveless and ghost-like in the evenings, and the seal at mid-day
+basked 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 loud
+sorrow the boulder received its name. Such is the probable history,
+briefly told, because touched at merely a few detached points, of the
+huge _Clach Malloch_. The incident of the second voyage here is of
+course altogether imaginary, in relation to at least this special
+boulder; but it is to second voyages only that all our positive evidence
+testifies in the history of its class. The boulders of the St. Lawrence,
+so well described by Sir Charles Lyell, voyage by thousands every
+year;[18] and there are few of my northern readers who have not heard of
+the short trip taken nearly half a century ago by the boulder of Petty
+Bay, in the neighborhood of Culloden.
+
+A Highland minister of the last century, in describing, for Sir John
+Sinclair's Statistical Account, a large sepulchral cairn in his parish,
+attributed its formation to an _earthquake_! Earthquakes, in these
+latter times, are introduced, like the heathen gods of old, to bring
+authors out of difficulties. I do not think, however,--and I have the
+authority of the old critic for at least half the opinion,--that either
+gods or earthquakes should be resorted to by poets or geologists,
+without special occasion: they ought never to be called in except as a
+last resort, when there is no way of getting on without them. And I am
+afraid there have been few more gratuitous invocations of the earthquake
+than on a certain occasion, some five years ago, when it was employed by
+the inmate of a north-country manse, at once to account for the removal
+of the boulder-stone of Petty Bay, and to annihilate at a blow the
+geology of the Free Church editor of the _Witness_. I had briefly stated
+in one of my papers, in referring to this curious incident, that the
+boulder of the bay had been "borne nearly three hundred yards outwards
+into the sea by an enclasping mass of ice, in the course of a single
+tide." "Not at all," said the northern clergyman; "the cause assigned is
+wholly insufficient to produce such an effect. All the ice ever formed
+in the bay would be insufficient to remove such a boulder a distance,
+not of three hundred, but even of _three_ yards." The removal of the
+stone "_is referrible to an_ EARTHQUAKE!" The country, it would seem,
+took a sudden lurch, and the stone tumbled off. It fell athwart the flat
+surface of the bay, as a soup tureen sometimes falls athwart the table
+of 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 so
+tremendous nothing should have fallen off except the stone. In an
+earthquake on an equally great scale, in the present unsettled state of
+society, endowed clergymen would, I am afraid, be in some danger of
+falling out of their charges.
+
+The boulder beside the Auldgrande has not only, like the _Clach
+Malloch_, a geologic history of its own, but, what some may deem of
+perhaps equal authority, a _mythologic_ history also. The inaccessible
+chasm, impervious to the sun, and ever resounding the wild howl of the
+tortured water, was too remarkable an object to have escaped the notice
+of the old imaginative Celts; and they have married it, as was their
+wont, to a set of stories quite as wild as itself. And the boulder,
+occupying a nearly central position in its course, just where the dell
+is deepest, and narrowest, and blackest, and where the stream bellows
+far underground in its wildest combination of tones, marks out the spot
+where the more extraordinary incidents have happened, and the stranger
+sights have been seen. Immediately beside the stone there is what seems
+to be the beginning of a path leading down to the water; but it stops
+abruptly at a tree,--the last in the descent,--and the green and dewy
+rock 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 saw
+a beautiful child smiling and stretching out its little hand to him, as
+it hung half in air by a slender twig. But he well knew that it was no
+child, but an evil spirit, and that if he gave it the assistance which
+it seemed to crave, he would be pulled headlong into the chasm, and
+never heard of more. And the boulder still bears, it is said, on its
+side,--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 as
+dark, as when, so long before, the lady of Balconie took her last walk
+along the sides of the Auldgrande; and I struck up for the little alpine
+bridge of a few undressed logs, which has been here thrown across the
+chasm, at the height of a hundred and thirty feet over the water. As I
+pressed through the thick underwood, I startled a strange-looking
+apparition in one of the open spaces beside the gulf, where, as shown by
+the profusion of plants of _vaccinium_, the blaeberries had greatly
+abounded in their season. It was that of an extremely old woman,
+cadaverously pale and miserable looking, with dotage glistening in her
+inexpressive, rheum-distilling eyes, and attired in a blue cloak, that
+had been homely when at its best, and was now exceedingly tattered. She
+had been poking with her crutch among the bushes, as if looking for
+berries; but my approach had alarmed her; and she stood muttering in
+Gaelic what seemed, from the tones and repetition, to be a few
+deprecatory sentences. I addressed her in English, and inquired what
+could have brought to a place so wild and lonely, one so feeble and
+helpless. "Poor object!" she muttered in reply,--"poor object!--very
+hungry;" but her scanty English could carry her no further. I slipped
+into her hand a small piece of silver, for which she overwhelmed me with
+thanks and blessings; and, bringing her to one of the broader avenues,
+traversed by a road which leads out of the wood, I saw her fairly
+entered upon the path in the right direction, and then, retracing my
+steps crossed the log-bridge. The old woman,--little, I should suppose
+from her appearance, under ninety,--was I doubt not, one of our
+ill-provided Highland paupers, that starve under a law which, while it
+has dried up the genial streams of voluntary charity in the country and
+presses hard upon the means of the humbler classes, alleviates little,
+if at all, the sufferings of the extreme poor. Amid present suffering
+and privation there had apparently mingled in her dotage some dream of
+early enjoyment,--a dream of the days when she had plucked berries, a
+little herd-girl, on the banks of the Auldgrande; and the vision seemed
+to have sent her out, far advanced in her second childhood, to poke
+among the bushes with her crutch.
+
+My old friend the minister of Alness,--uninstalled at the time in his
+new dwelling,--was residing in a house scarce half a mile from the
+chasm, to which he had removed from the parish manse at the Disruption;
+and, availing myself of an invitation of long standing, I climbed the
+acclivity 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 weeks
+beside the mineral springs of Strathpeffer, in the hope of recruiting a
+constitution greatly weakened by excessive labor, and that the entire
+household at home consisted of but two of the young ladies his
+daughters, and their ward, the little Buchubai Hormazdji.
+
+And who, asks the reader, is this Buchubai Hormazdji? A little Parsi
+girl, in her eighth year, the daughter of a Christian convert from the
+ancient faith of Zoroaster, who now labors in the Free Church Mission at
+Bombay. Buchubai, his only child, was on his conversion, forcibly taken
+from 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 many
+thousand 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 with
+whose sisters I now found her. The little girl, sadly in want of a
+companion this evening, was content, for lack of a better, to accept of
+me as a playfellow; and she showed me all her rich eastern dresses, and
+all her toys, and a very fine emerald, set in the oriental fashion,
+which, when she was in full costume, sparkled from her embroidered
+tiara. I found her exceedingly like little girls at home, save that she
+seemed more than ordinarily observant and intelligent,--a consequence
+mayhap, of that early development, physical and mental, which
+characterizes her race. She submitted to me, too, when I had got very
+much into her confidence, a letter she had written to her papa from
+Strathpeffer, which was to be sent him by the next Indian mail. And as
+it may serve to show that the style of little girls whose fathers were
+fire-worshippers for three thousand years and more differs in no
+perceptible quality from the style of little girls whose fathers in
+considerably less than three thousand were Pagans, Papists, and
+Protestants by turns, besides passing through the various intermediate
+forms 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 at
+present at Strathpeffer. She is much better now than when she was
+travelling. 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 pray
+also. There are a great many at water here for sick people to drink out
+of. 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 will
+write to her.--Dearest papa," etc.
+
+It was a simple thought, which required no reach of mind whatever to
+grasp,--and yet an hour spent with little Buchubai made it tell upon me
+more powerfully than ever before,--that there is in reality but one
+human nature on the face of the earth. Had I simply read of Buchubai
+Hormazdji corresponding with her father Hormazdji Pestonji, and sending
+her dear love to her old companion Narsion Skishadre, the names so
+specifically different from those which we ourselves employ in
+designating our country folk, would probably have led me, through a
+false association, to regard the parties to which they attach as
+scarcely less specifically different from our country folk themselves. I
+suspect we are misled by associations of this kind when we descant on
+the peculiarities of race as interposing insurmountable barriers to the
+progress of improvement, physical or mental. We overlook, amid the
+diversities of form, color, and language, the specific identity of the
+human family. The Celt, for instance, wants, it is said, those powers of
+sustained application which so remarkably distinguish the Saxon; and so
+we agree on the expediency of getting rid of our poor Highlanders by
+expatriation as soon as possible, and of converting their country into
+sheep-walks and hunting-parks. It would be surely well to have
+philosophy enough to remember what, simply through the exercise of a
+wise faith, the Christian missionary never forgets, that the
+peculiarities of race are not specific and ineradicable, but mere
+induced habits and idiosyncracies engrafted on the stock of a common
+nature by accident of circumstance or development; and that, as they
+have been wrought into the original tissue through the protracted
+operation of one set of causes, the operation of another and different
+set, wisely and perseveringly directed, could scarce fail to unravel and
+work them out again. They form no part of the inherent design of man's
+nature, but have merely stuck to it in its transmissive passage
+downwards and require to be brushed off. There was a time, some four
+thousand years ago, when Celt and Saxon were represented by but one man
+and his wife, with their children and their children's wives; and some
+sixteen or seventeen centuries earlier all the varieties of the
+species,--Caucasian and Negro, Mongolian and Malay,--lay close packed up
+in the world's single family. In short, Buchubai's amusing prattle
+proved to me this evening no bad commentary on St. Paul's sublime
+enunciation to the Athenians, that God has "made of one blood all
+nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth." I was amused to
+find that the little girl, who listened intently as I described to the
+young ladies all I had seen and knew of the Auldgrande, had never before
+heard of a ghost, and could form no conception of one now. The ladies
+explained, described, defined; carefully guarding all they said,
+however, by stern disclaimers against the ghost theory altogether, but
+apparently to little purpose. At length Buchubai exclaimed, that she now
+knew what they meant, and that she herself had seen a great many ghosts
+in India. On explanation, however, her ghosts, though quite frightful
+enough, turned out to be not at all spiritual: they were things of
+common occurrence in the land she had come from,--exposed bodies of the
+dead.
+
+Next morning--as the white clouds and thin mist-streaks of the preceding
+day had fairly foretold--was close and wet; and the long trail of vapor
+which rises from the chasm of the Auldgrande in such weather, and is
+known to the people of the neighborhood as the "smoke of the lady's
+baking," hung, snake-like, over the river. About two o'clock the rain
+ceased, hesitatingly and doubtfully, however, as if it did not quite
+know its own mind; and there arose no breeze to shake the dank grass, or
+to dissipate the thin mist-wreath that continued to float over the river
+under a sky of deep gray. But the ladies, with Buchubai, impatient to
+join their friends at Strathpeffer, determined on journeying
+notwithstanding; and, availing myself of their company and their
+vehicle, I travelled on with them to Dingwall, where we parted. I had
+purposed exploring the gray dingy sandstones and fetid breccias
+developed along the shores on the northern side of the bay, about two
+miles from the town, and on the sloping acclivities between the
+mansion-houses of Tulloch and Fowlis; but the day was still unfavorable,
+and the sections seemed untemptingly indifferent; besides, I could
+entertain no doubt that the dingy beds here are identical in place with
+those of Cadboll on the coast of Easter Ross, which they closely
+resemble, and which alternate with the lower ichthyolitic beds of the
+Old Red Sandstone; and so, for the present at least, I gave up my
+intention 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 breeze
+from the west, just strong enough to shake the wet leaves, the sky flung
+off its thick mantle of gray. I sauntered out along the high-road, in
+the direction of my old haunts at Conon-side, with, however, no
+intention of walking so far. But the reaches of the river, a little in
+flood, shone temptingly through the dank foliage, and the cottages under
+the Conon woods glittered clear on their sweeping hill-side, "looking
+cheerily out" into the landscape; and so I wandered on and on, over the
+bridge, and along the river, and through the pleasure grounds of
+Conon-house, till I found myself in the old solitary burying-ground
+beside the Conon, which, when last in this part of the country, I was
+prevented from visiting by the swollen waters. The rich yellow light
+streamed through the interstices of the tall hedge of forest-trees that
+encircles the eminence, once an island, and fell in fantastic patches on
+the gray tombstone and the graves. The ruinous little chapel in the
+corner, whose walls a quarter of a century before I had distinctly
+traced, had sunk into a green mound; and there remained over the sward
+but the arch-stone of a Gothic window, with a portion of the moulded
+transom attached, to indicate the character and style of the vanished
+building. The old dial-stone, with the wasted gnomon, has also
+disappeared; and the few bright-colored _throch-stanes_, raw from the
+chisel, that had been added of late years to the group of older
+standing, did not quite make up for what time in the same period had
+withdrawn. One of the newer inscriptions, however, recorded a curious
+fact. 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, it
+was said, as man and wife, for more than sixty years: and now, here was
+their tombstone and epitaph. They had lived on long after my departure;
+and when, as the seasons passed, men and women whose births and baptisms
+had taken place since their wedding-day were falling around them well
+stricken in years, death seemed to have forgotten _them_; and when he
+came at last, their united ages made up well nigh two centuries. The
+wife had seen her ninety-sixth and the husband his hundred and second
+birthday. It does not transcend the skill of the actuary to say how many
+thousand 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 two
+for every man who attains to an age so extraordinary; but he would
+require to get beyond his tables in order to reckon up the chances
+against the woman destined to attain to ninety-six being courted and
+married 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, just
+where the scenery, exquisite throughout, is most delightful, I returned
+through the woods, and spent half an hour by the way in the cottage of a
+kindly-hearted woman, now considerably advanced in years, whom I had
+known, when she was in middle life, as the wife of one of the Conon-side
+hinds, and who not unfrequently, when I was toiling at the mallet in the
+burning sun, hot and thirsty, and rather loosely knit for my work, had
+brought 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 the
+object of it. She well remembered my master, and another Cromarty man
+who had been grievously injured, when undermining an old building, by
+the sudden fall of the erection; but she could bethink her of no third
+Cromarty man whatever. "Eh, sirs!" she at length exclaimed, "I daresay
+ye'll be just the sma' prentice laddie. Weel, what will young folk no
+come out o'? They were amaist a' stout big men at the wark except
+yoursel'; 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 for
+the 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 entered
+on our talk together, we gossipped on till the night fell, giving and
+receiving information regarding our old acquaintances of a quarter of a
+century before; of whom we found that no inconsiderable proportion had
+already 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 dark
+to Dingwall, where I spent the night. I could fain have called by the
+way on my old friend and brother-workman, Mr. Urquhart,--of a very
+numerous party of mechanics employed at Conon-side in the year 1821 the
+only individual now resident in this part of the country; but the
+lateness 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 the
+village, and which has done so much to banish the water-wraith from the
+fords; and then striking off to the right, I crossed, by a path
+comparatively little frequented, the insulated group of hills which
+separates the valley of the Conon from that of the Peffer. The day was
+mild and pleasant, and the atmosphere clear; but the higher hills again
+exhibited their ominous belts of vapor, and there had been a slight
+frost during the night,--at this autumnal season the almost certain
+precursor 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, a
+picturesque, boldly-featured deposit, traversed by narrow, mural-sided
+valleys, and tempested by bluff abrupt eminences. Its hills are greatly
+less confluent than those of most of the other sedimentary formations of
+Scotland; and their insulated summits, recommended by their steep sides
+and limited areas to the old savage Vaubans of the Highlands, furnished,
+ere the historic eras began, sites for not a few of the ancient
+hill-forts of the country. The vitrified fort of Craig Phadrig, of the
+Ord Hill of Kessock, and of Knock Farril,--two of the number, the first
+and last, being the most celebrated erections of their kind in the north
+of Scotland,--were all formed on hills of the Great Conglomerate. The
+Conglomerate exists here as a sort of miniature Highlands, set down at
+the northern side of a large angular bay of Palaeozoic rock, which
+indents the _true_ Highlands of the country, and which exhibits in its
+central area a prolongation of the long moory ridge of the Black Isle,
+formed, as I have already had occasion to remark, of an _upper_ deposit
+of the same lower division of the Old Red,--a deposit as noticeable for
+affecting a confluent, rectilinear character in its elevations, as the
+Conglomerate is remarkable for exhibiting a detached and undulatory one.
+Exactly the same features are presented by the same deposits in the
+neighborhood of Inverness; the _undulatory_ Conglomerate composing, to
+the north and west of the town, the picturesque wavy ridge comprising
+the twin-eminences of Munlochy Bay, the Ord Hill of Kessock, Craig
+Phadrig, and the fir-covered hill beyond in the line of the Great
+Valley; while on the south and east the _rectilinear_ ichthyolitic
+member of the system, with the arenaceous beds that lie over it, form
+the continuous straight-lined ridge which runs on from beyond the moor
+of the Leys to beyond the moor of Culloden. There is a pretty little
+loch in this dwarf Highlands of the Brahan district, into which the old
+Celtic prophet Kenneth Ore, when, like Prospero, he relinquished his
+art, buried "deep beyond plummet sound" the magic stone in which he was
+wont to see the distant and the future. And with the loch it contains a
+narrow, hermit-like dell, bearing but a single row of fields, and these
+of small size, along its flat bottom, and whose steep gray sides of
+rustic Conglomerate resemble Cyclopean walls. It, besides, includes
+among its hills the steep hill of Knock Farril, which, rising bluff and
+bold immediately over the southern slopes of Strathpeffer, adds so
+greatly to the beauty of the valley, and bears atop perhaps the finest
+specimen of the vitrified fort in Scotland; and the bold frontage of
+cliff presented by the group to the west, over the pleasure grounds of
+Brahan, is, though on no very large scale, one of the most
+characteristic of the Conglomerate formation which can be seen
+anywhere. It is formed of exactly such cliffs as the landscape gardener
+would make if he could,--cliffs with their rude prominent pebbles
+breaking the light over every square foot of surface, and furnishing
+footing, by their innumerable projections, to many a green tuft of moss,
+and many a sweet little flower. Some of the masses, too, that have
+rolled down from the precipices among the Brahan woods far below, and
+stand up, like the ruins of cottages, amid the trees, are of singular
+beauty,--worth all the imitation-ruins ever erected, and obnoxious to
+none of the disparaging associations which the mere show and
+make-believe of the artificial are sure always to awaken.
+
+Whatever exhibited an aspect in any degree extraordinary was sure to
+attract the notice of the old Highlanders,--an acutely observant race,
+however slightly developed their reflective powers; and the great
+natural objects which excited their attention we always find associated
+with some traditionary story. It is said that in the Conglomerate cliffs
+above Brahan, a retainer of the Mackenzie, one of the smiths of the
+tribe, discovered a rich vein of silver, which he wrought by stealth,
+until he had filled one of the apartments of his cottage with bars and
+ingots. But the treasure, it is added, was betrayed by his own
+unfortunate vanity, to his chief, who hanged him in order to serve
+himself his heir; and no one since his death has proved ingenious enough
+to convert the rude rock into silver. Years had, I found, wrought their
+changes amid the miniature Highlands of the Conglomerate. The sapplings
+of the straggling wood on the banks of Loch Ousy,--the pleasant little
+lake, or lochan rather, of this upland region,--that I remembered having
+seen scarce taller than myself, had shot into vigorous treehood; and the
+steep slopes of Knock Farril, which I had left covered with their dark
+screen of pine, were now thickly mottled over with half-decayed stumps,
+and bore that peculiarly barren aspect which tracts cleared of their
+wood so frequently assume in their transition state, when the plants
+that flourished in the shade have died out in consequence of the
+exposure, and plants that love the open air and the unbroken sunshine
+have not yet sprung up in their place. I found the southern acclivities
+of the hill covered with scattered masses of vitrified stone, that had
+fallen from the fortalice atop; and would recommend to the collector in
+quest of a characteristic specimen, that instead of laboring, to the
+general detriment of the pile, in detaching one from the walls above, he
+should set himself to seek one here. The blocks, uninjured by the
+hammer, exhibit, in most cases, the angular character of the original
+fragments better than those forcibly detached from the mass, and
+preserve in fine keeping those hollower interstices which were but
+partially filled with the molten matter, and which, when shattered by a
+blow, break through and lose their character.
+
+One may spend an hour very agreeably on the green summit of Knock
+Farril. And at almost all seasons of the year a green summit it
+is,--greener considerably than any other hill-top in this part of the
+country. The more succulent grasses spring up rich and strong within the
+walls, here and there roughened by tufts of nettles, tall and rank, and
+somewhat perilous of approach,--witnesses, say the botanists, that man
+had once a dwelling in the immediate neighborhood. The green luxuriance
+which characterizes so many of the more ancient fortalices of Scotland
+seems satisfactorily accounted for by Dr. Fleming, in his "Zoology of
+the Bass." "The summits and sides of those hills which were occupied by
+our ancestors as _hill-forts_," says the naturalist, "usually exhibit a
+far richer herbage than corresponding heights in the neighborhood with
+the 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 of
+the district by a hostile tribe, the cattle were driven, especially
+during the night, as to places of safety, and sent out to pasture in the
+neighborhood during the day. And the droppings of these collected herds
+would, as takes place in analogous cases at present, speedily improve
+the soil to such an extent as to induce a permanent fertility." The
+further instance adduced by the Doctor, in showing through what
+protracted periods causes transitory in themselves may remain palpably
+influential in their effects, is curiously suggestive of the old
+metaphysical idea, that as every effect has its cause, "recurring from
+cause to cause up to the abyss of eternity, so every cause has also its
+effects, linked forward in succession to the end of time." On the bleak
+moor of Culloden the graves of the slain still exist as patches of green
+sward, surrounded by a brown groundwork of stunted heather. The animal
+matter,--once the nerves, muscles, and sinews of brave men,--which
+originated the change, must have been wholly dissipated ages ago. But
+the effect once produced has so decidedly maintained itself, that it
+remains not less distinctly stamped upon the heath in the present day
+than it could have been in the middle of the last century, only a few
+years after the battle had been stricken.
+
+The vitrification of the rampart which on every side incloses the grassy
+area has been more variously, but less satisfactorily, accounted for
+than the green luxuriance within. It was held by Pennant to be an effect
+of volcanic fire, and that the walls of this and all our other vitrified
+strongholds are simply the crater-rims of extinct volcanoes,--a
+hypothesis wholly as untenable in reference to the hill-forts as to the
+lime-kilns of the country: the vitrified forts are as little volcanic as
+the vitrified kilns. Williams, the author of the "Mineral Kingdom," and
+one of our earlier British geologists, after deciding, on data which his
+peculiar 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 designedly
+induced, in order to cement into solid masses accumulations of loose
+materials. Lord Woodhouselee advocated an opposite view. Resting on the
+fact that the vitrification is but of partial occurrence, be held that
+it had been produced, not of design by the builders of the forts, but in
+the process of their demolition by a besieging enemy, who, finding, as
+he premised, a large portion of the ramparts composed of wood, had
+succeeded in setting them on fire. This hypothesis, however, seems quite
+as untenable as that of Pennant. Fires not unfrequently occur in cities,
+among crowded groups of houses, where walls of stone are surrounded by a
+much greater profusion of dry woodwork than could possibly have entered
+into 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 thickness
+fused throughout? The sandstone columns of the aisles of the Old
+Greyfriars in Edinburgh, surrounded by the woodwork of the galleries,
+the flooring, the seating, and the roof, were wasted, during the fire
+which destroyed the pile, into mere skeletons of their former selves;
+but though originally not more than three feet in diameter, they
+exhibited no marks of vitrescency. And it does not seem in the least
+probable that the stonework of the Knock Farril rampart could, if
+surrounded by wood at all, have been surrounded by an amount equally
+great, in proportion to its mass, as that which enveloped the
+aisle-columns of the Old Greyfriars.
+
+The late Sir George Mackenzie of Coul adopted yet a fourth view. He
+held that the vitrification is simply an effect of the ancient
+beacon-fires kindled to warn the country of an invading enemy. But how
+account, on this hypothesis, for ramparts continuous, as in the case of
+Knock Farril, all round the hill? A powerful fire long kept up might
+well fuse a heap of loose stones into a solid mass; the bonfire lighted
+on the summit of Arthur Seat in 1842, to welcome the Queen on her first
+visit to Scotland, particularly fused numerous detached fragments of
+basalt, and imparted, in some spots to the depth of about half an inch,
+a vesicular structure to the solid rock beneath. But no fire, however
+powerful, could have constructed a rampart running without break for
+several hundred feet round an insulated hill-top. "To be satisfied,"
+said Sir George, "of the reason why the signal-fires should be kindled
+on or beside a heap of stones, we have only to imagine a gale of wind to
+have arisen when a fire was kindled on the bare ground. The fuel would
+be blown about and dispersed, to the great annoyance of those who
+attended. The plan for obviating the inconvenience thus occasioned which
+would occur most naturally and readily would be to raise a heap of
+stones, on either side of which the fire might be placed to windward;
+and to account for the vitrification appearing all round the area, it is
+only necessary to allow the inhabitants of the country to have had a
+system of signals. A fire at one end might denote something different
+from a fire at the other, or in some intermediate part. On some
+occasions two or more fires might be necessary, and sometimes a fire
+along the whole line. It cannot be doubted," he adds, "that the rampart
+was originally formed with as much regularity as the nature of the
+materials would allow, both in order to render it more durable, and to
+make it serve the purposes of defence." This, I am afraid, is still
+very unsatisfactory. A fire lighted along the entire line of a wall
+inclosing nearly an acre of area could not be other than a very
+attenuated, wire-drawn line of fire indeed, and could never possess
+strength enough to melt the ponderous mass of rampart beneath, as if it
+had been formed of wax or resin. A thousand loads of wood piled in a
+ring 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 a
+thousand, or half a thousand, loads could have been cut down, collected,
+and fired, an invading enemy would have found time enough to moor his
+fleet and land his forces, and possess himself of the lower country.
+Again, the unbroken continuity of the vitrified line militates against
+the signal-system theory. Fire trod so closely upon the heels of fire,
+that the vitrescency induced by the one fire impinged on and mingled
+with the vitrescency induced by the others beside it. There is no other
+mode of accounting for the continuity of the fusion; and how could
+definite meanings possibly be attached to the various parts of a line so
+minutely graduated, that the centre of the fire kindled on any one
+graduation could be scarce ten feet apart from the centre of the fire
+kindled on any of its two neighboring graduations? Even by day, the
+exact compartment which a fire occupied could not be distinguished, at
+the distance of half a mile, from its neighboring compartments, and not
+at all by night, at any distance, from even the compartments farthest
+removed from it. Who, for instance, at the distance of a dozen miles or
+so, could tell whether the flame that shone out in the darkness, when
+all other objects around it were invisible, was kindled on the east or
+west end of an eminence little more than a hundred yards in length? Nay,
+who could determine,--for such is the requirement of the
+hypothesis,--whether it rose from a compartment of the summit a hundred
+feet distant from its west or east end, or from a compartment merely
+ninety or a hundred and ten feet distant from it? The supposed signal
+system, added to the mere beacon hypothesis, is palpably untenable.
+
+The theory of Williams, however, which is, I am inclined to think, the
+true one in the main, seems capable of being considerably modified and
+improved by the hypothesis of Sir George. The hill-fort,--palpably the
+most primitive form of fortalice or stronghold originated in a
+mountainous country,--seems to constitute man's first essay towards
+neutralizing, by the art of fortification, the advantages of superior
+force on the side of an assailing enemy. It was found, on the discovery
+of New Zealand, that the savage inhabitants had already learned to erect
+exactly such hill-forts amid the fastnesses of that country as those
+which were erected two thousand years earlier by the Scottish aborigines
+amid 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 a
+period not less ancient than that of the first barbarous wars of
+Scotland, when, though tribe battled with tribe in fierce warfare, like
+the red men of the West with their brethren ere the European had landed
+on their shores, navigation was yet in so immature a state in Northern
+Europe as to secure to them an exemption from foreign invasion. In an
+after age, however, when the roving Vikings had become formidable, many
+of the eminences originally selected, from _their inaccessibility_, as
+sites for hill-forts, would come to be chosen, from _their prominence in
+the landscape_, as stations for beacon-fires. And of course the
+previously erected ramparts, higher always than the inclosed areas,
+would furnish on such hills the conspicuous points from which the fires
+could be best seen. Let us suppose, then, that the rampart-crested
+eminence of Knock Farril, seen on every side for many miles, has become
+in 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 a
+forest-covered country, and blown at times into intense heat by the
+strong winds so frequent in that upper stratum of air into which the
+summit penetrates, have been kindled some six or eight times on some
+prominent point of the rampart, raised, mayhap, many centuries before.
+At first the heat has failed to tell on the stubborn quartz and feldspar
+which forms the preponderating material of the gneisses, granites,
+quartz rocks, and coarse conglomerate sandstones on which it has been
+brought to operate; but each fire throws down into the interstices a
+considerable amount of the fixed salt of the wood, till at length the
+heap has become charged with a strong flux; and then one powerful fire
+more, fanned to a white heat by a keen, dry breeze, reduces the whole
+into a semi-fluid mass. The same effects have been produced on the
+materials of the rampart by the beacon-fires and the alkali, that were
+produced, according to Pliny, by the fires and the soda of the
+Phoenician merchants storm-bound on the sands of the river Belus. But
+the state of civilization in Scotland at the time is not such as to
+permit of the discovery being followed up by similar results. The
+semi-savage guardians of the beacon wonder at the _accident_, as they
+well may; but those happy accidents in which the higher order of
+discoveries originate occur in only the ages of cultivated minds; and so
+they do not acquire from it the art of manufacturing glass. It could not
+fail being perceived, however, by intellects at all human, that the
+consolidation which the fires of one week, or month, or year, as the
+case happened, had effected on one portion of the wall, might be
+produced by the fires of another week, or month, or year, on another
+portion of it; that, in short, a loose incoherent rampart, easy of
+demolition, might be converted, through the newly-discovered process,
+into a rampart as solid and indestructible as the rock on which it
+rested. 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, Knock
+Farril, with many a similar eminence in the country, comes to exhibit
+its completely vitrified fort where there had been but a loosely-piled
+hill-fort before. It in no degree militates against this compound
+theory,--borrowed in part from Williams and in part from Sir
+George,--that there are detached vitrified masses to be found on
+eminences evidently never occupied by hill-forts; or that there are
+hill-forts on other eminences only partially fused, or hill-forts on
+many of the less commanding sites that bear about them no marks of fire
+at all. Nothing can be more probable than that in the first class of
+cases we have eminences that had been selected as beacon-stations, which
+had not previously been occupied by hill-forts; and in the last,
+eminences that had been occupied by hill-forts which, from their want of
+prominence in the general landscape, had not been selected as
+beacon-stations. And in the intermediate class of cases we have probably
+ramparts that were only partially vitrified, because some want of fuel
+in the neighborhood had starved the customary fires, or because fires
+had to be less frequently kindled upon them than on the more important
+stations; or, finally, because these hill-forts, from some disadvantage
+of situation, were no longer used as places of strength, and so the
+beacon-keepers had no motive to attempt consolidating them throughout by
+the piecemeal application of the vitrifying agent. But the old Highland
+mode of accounting for the present appearance of Knock Farril and its
+vitrified remains is perhaps, after all, quite as good in its way as any
+of the modes suggested by the philosophers.[20]
+
+I spent some time, agreeably enough, beside the rude rampart of Knock
+Farril, in marking the various appearances exhibited by the fused and
+semi-fused materials of which it is composed,--the granites, gneisses,
+mica-schists, hornblendes, clay-slates, and red sandstones of the
+locality. One piece of rock, containing much lime, I found resolved into
+a yellow opaque substance, not unlike the coarse earthenware used in the
+making of ginger-beer bottles; but though it had been so completely
+molten 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 in
+thickness. 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 pure
+white quartz into porcellanic trails of white, that ran in one instance
+along the face of a darker-colored rock below, like streaks of cream
+along the sides of a burnt china jug. In one mass of pale large-grained
+granite I found that the feldspar, though it had acquired a vitreous
+gloss on the surface, still retained its peculiar rhomboidal cleavage;
+while the less stubborn quartz around it had become scarce less
+vesicular and light than a piece of pumice. On some of the other masses
+there 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 the
+vitreous surface the mark of the yearly growths, and even of the
+medullary rays, of the wood. In breaking open some of the others, I
+detected fragments of the charcoal itself, which, hermetically locked up
+in the rock, had retained all its original carbon. These last reminded
+me of specimens not unfrequent among the trap-rocks of the Carboniferous
+and Oolitic systems. From an intrusive overlying wacke in the
+neighborhood of Linlithgow I have derived for my collection pieces of
+carbonized wood in so complete a state of keeping, that under the
+microscope they exhibit unbroken all the characteristic reticulations of
+the coniferae of the Coal Measures.
+
+I descended the hill, and, after joining my friends at
+Strathpeffer,--Buchubai Hormazdji among the rest,--visited the Spa, in
+the company of my old friend the minister of Alness. The thorough
+identity of the powerful effluvium that fills the pump-room with that of
+a muddy sea-bottom laid bare in warm weather by the tide, is to the
+dweller on the sea-coast very striking. It _is_ identity,--not mere
+resemblance. In most cases the organic substances undergo great changes
+in the bowels of the earth. The animal matter of the Caithness
+ichthyolites exists, for instance, as a hard, black, insoluble bitumen,
+which I have used oftener than once as sealing-wax; the vegetable mould
+of the Coal Measures has been converted into a fire-clay, so altered in
+the organic pabulum, animal and vegetable, whence it derived its
+fertility, that, even when laid open for years to the meliorating
+effects of the weather and the visits of the winged seeds, it will not
+be found bearing a single spike or leaf of green. But here, in smell, at
+least, that ancient mud, swum over by the Diplopterus and the
+Diplacanthus, and in which the Coccosteus and Pterichthys burrowed, has
+undergone no change. The soft ooze has become solid rock, but its
+odoriferous qualities have remained unaltered. I next visited an
+excavation a few hundred yards on the upper side of the pump-room, in
+which the gray fetid breccia of the Strath has been quarried for
+dyke-building, and examined the rock with some degree of care, without,
+however, detecting in it a single plate or scale. Lying over that
+Conglomerate member of the system which, rising high in the Knock Farril
+range, forms the southern boundary of the valley, it occupies the place
+of the lower ichthyolitic bed, so rich in organisms in various other
+parts of the country; but here the bed, after it had been deposited in
+thin horizontal laminae, and had hardened into stone, seems to have been
+broken up, by some violent movement, into minute sharp-edged fragments,
+that, without wear or attrition, were again consolidated into the
+breccia which it now forms. And its ichthyolites, if not previously
+absorbed, were probably destroyed in the convulsion. Detached scales and
+spines, however, if carefully sought for in the various openings of the
+valley, might still be found in the original laminae of the fragments.
+They must have been amazingly abundant in it once; for so largely
+saturated is the rock with the organic matter into which they have been
+resolved, that, when struck by the hammer, the impalpable dust set loose
+sensibly affects the organs of taste, and appeals very strongly to those
+of smell. It is through this saturated rock that the mineral springs
+take their course. Even the surface-waters of the valley, as they pass
+over 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 of
+the Old Red the subject of a few simple experiments. I would have ground
+it into powder, and tried upon it the effect both of cold and hot
+infusion. Portions of the water are sometimes carried in casks and
+bottles, for the use of invalids, to a considerable distance; but it is
+quite possible that a little of the _rock_, to which the water owes its
+qualities, might, when treated in this way, have all the effects of a
+considerable quantity of the _spring_. It might be of some interest,
+too, to ascertain its qualities when crushed, as a soil, or its effect
+on other soils; whether, for instance, like the old sterile soils of the
+Carboniferous period, it has lost, through its rock-change, the
+fertilizing properties which it once possessed; or whether it still
+retains them, like some of the coprolitic beds of the Oolite and
+Greensand, and might not, in consequence, be employed as a manure. A
+course of such experiments could scarce fail to furnish with agreeable
+occupation some of the numerous annual visitants of the Spa, who have to
+linger long, with but little to engage them, waiting for what, if it
+once fairly leave a man, returns slowly, when it returns at all.
+
+In mentioning at the dinner-table of my friend my scheme of infusing
+rock in order to produce Spa water, I referred to the circumstance that
+the Belemnite of our Liasic deposits, when ground into powder, imparts
+to boiling water a peculiar taste and smell, and that the infusion,
+taken in very small quantities, sensibly affects both palate and
+stomach. And I suggested that Belemnite water, deemed sovereign of old,
+when the Belemnite was regarded as a thunderbolt, in the cure of
+bewitched cattle, might be in reality medicinal, and that the ancient
+superstition might thus embody, as ancient superstitions not
+unfrequently do, a nucleus of fact. The charm, I said, might amount to
+no 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 one
+of the young ladies on the remark amused us all. If an infusion of stone
+had cured, in the last age, cattle that were bewitched, the Strathpeffer
+water, she argued, which was, it seems, but an infusion of stone, might
+cure cattle that were sick now; and so, though the biped patients of
+the Strath could scarce fail to decrease when they knew that its infused
+stone contained but the strainings of old mud, and the juices of dead
+unsalted fish, it was gratifying to think that the poor Spa might still
+continue to retain its patients, though of a lower order. The pump-room
+would be converted into a rustic, straw-thatched shed, to which long
+trains of sick cattle, affected by weak nerves and dyspepsia, would come
+streaming along the roads every morning and evening, to drink and gather
+strength.
+
+The following morning was wet and lowering, and a flat ceiling of gray
+cloud stretched across the valley, from the summit of the Knock Farril
+ridge of hills on the one side, to the lower flanks of Ben-Wevis on the
+other. I had purposed ascending this latter mountain,--the giant of the
+north-eastern coast, and one of the loftiest of our second-class
+Scottish hills anywhere,--to ascertain the extreme upper line at which
+travelled boulders occur in this part of the country. But it was no
+morning for wading knee-deep through the trackless heather; and after
+waiting on, in the hope the weather might clear up, watching at a window
+the poorer invalids at the Spa, as they dragged themselves through the
+rain to the water, I lost patience, and sallied out, beplaided and
+umbrellaed, to see from the top of Knock Farril how the country looked
+in a fog. At first, however, I saw much fog, but little country; but as
+the day wore on, the flat mist-ceiling rose together, till it rested on
+but the distant hills, and the more prominent features of the landscape
+began to stand out amid the more general gray, like the stronger lines
+and masses in a half-finished drawing, boldly dashed off in the neutral
+tint of the artist. The portions of the prospect generically distinct
+are, notwithstanding its great extent and variety, but few; and the
+partial veil of haze, by glazing down its distracting multiplicity of
+minor points, served to bring them out all the more distinctly. There
+is, first stretching far in a southern and eastern direction along the
+landscape, the rectilinear ridge of the Black Isle,--not quite the sort
+of line a painter would introduce into a composition, but true to
+geologic character. More in the foreground, in the same direction, there
+spreads a troubled cockling sea of the Great Conglomerate. Turning to
+the north and west, the deep valley of Strathpeffer, with its expanse of
+rich level fields, and in the midst its old baronial castle, surrounded
+by coeval trees of vast bulk, lies so immediately at the foot of the
+eminence, 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 rose
+the thick-set Ben-Wevis,--a true gneiss mountain, with breadth enough of
+shoulders, and amplitude enough of base, to serve a mountain thrice as
+tall, but which, like all its cogeners of this ancient formation, was
+arrested in its second stage of growth, so that many of the slimmer
+granitic and porphyritic hills of the country look down upon it, as
+Agamemnon, 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 the
+comparatively flat area of Palaeozoic rock which composes the middle
+ground of the landscape, rose a multitude of primary hill-peaks, barely
+discernible in the haze; while the long withdrawing Dingwall Frith,
+stretching on towards the open sea for full twenty miles, and flanked on
+either side by ridges of sandstone, but guarded at the opening by two
+squat granitic columns, completed the prospect, by adding to its last
+great feature. All was gloomy and chill; and as I turned me down the
+descent, 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 century
+before, it was on a hot breathless day of early summer, in which, though
+the trees in fresh leaf seemed drooping in the sunshine, and the
+succulent luxuriance of the fields lay aslant, half-prostrated by the
+fierce heat, the rich blue of Ben-Wevis, far above, was thickly streaked
+with snow, on which it was luxury even to look. It gave one iced
+fancies, wherewithal to slake, amid the bright glow of summer, the
+thirst in the mind. The recollection came strongly upon me, as the fog
+from the hill-top closed dark behind, like that sung by the old blind
+Englishman, 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 that
+it had not. I had resigned many a baseless hope and many an idle desire
+since I had spent a vacant day amid the sunshine, now gazing on the
+broad placid features of the snow-streaked mountain; and now sauntering
+under the tall ancient woods, or along the heath-covered slopes of the
+valley; but in relation to never-tiring, inexhaustible nature, the heart
+was no fresher at that time than it was now. I had grown no older in my
+feelings or in my capacity of enjoyment; and what then was there to
+regret?
+
+I rode down the Strath in an omnibus which plies between the Spa and
+Dingwall, and then walked on to the village of Evanton, which I reached
+about an hour after nightfall, somewhat in the circumstances of the
+"damp stranger," who gave Beau Brummel the cold. There were, however, no
+Beau Brummels in the quiet village inn in which I passed the night, and
+so the effects of the damp were wholly confined to myself. I was soundly
+pummelled during the night by a frightful female, who first assumed the
+appearance of the miserable pauper woman whom I had seen beside the
+Auldgrande, and then became the Lady of Balconie; and, though
+sufficiently indignant, and much inclined to resist, I could stir
+neither hand nor foot, but lay passively on my back, jambed fast behind
+the huge gneiss boulder and the edge of the gulf. And yet, by a strange
+duality of perception, I was conscious all the while that, having got
+wet on the previous day, I was now suffering from an attack of
+nightmare: and held that it would be no very serious matter even should
+the lady tumble me into the gulf, seeing that all would be well again
+when I awoke in the morning. Dreams of this character, in which
+consciousness bears reference at once to the fictitious events of the
+vision and the real circumstances of the sleeper, must occupy, I am
+inclined to think, very little time,--single moments, mayhap, poised
+midway between the sleeping and waking state. Next day (Sunday) I
+attended the Free Church in the parish, where I found a numerous and
+attentive congregation,--descendants, in large part, of the old devout
+Munroes of Ferindonald,--and heard a good solid discourse. And on the
+following morning I crossed the sea at what is known as the Fowlis
+Ferry, to explore, on my homeward route, the rocks laid bare along the
+shore in the upper reaches of the Frith.
+
+I found but little by the way: black patches of bitumen in the sandstone
+of one of the beds, with a bed of stratified clay, inclosing nodules, in
+which, however, I succeeded in detecting nothing organic; and a few
+fragments of clay-slate locked up in the Red Sandstone, sharp and
+unworn at their edges, as if derived from no great distance, though
+there be now no clay-slate in the eastern half of Ross; but though the
+rocks here belong evidently to the ichthyolitic member of the Old Red,
+not a single fish, not a "nibble" even, repaid the patient search of
+half a day. I, however, passed some time agreeably enough among the
+ruins of Craighouse. When I had last seen, many years before, this old
+castle,[21] the upper stories were accessible; but they were now no
+longer so. Time, and the little herdboys who occasionally shelter in its
+vaults, had been busy in the interval; and, by breaking off a few
+projecting corners by which the climber had held, and by effacing a few
+notches into which he had thrust his toe-points, they had rendered what
+had been merely difficult impracticable. I remarked that the huge
+kitchen chimney of the building,--a deep hollow recess which stretches
+across the entire gable, and in which, it is said, two thrashers once
+plied the flail for a whole winter,--bore less of the stain of recent
+smoke than it used to exhibit twenty years before; and inferred that
+there would be fewer wraith-lights seen from the castle at nights than
+in those days of _evil spirits_ and illicit stills, when the cottars in
+the neighborhood sent more smuggled whiskey to market than any equal
+number of the inhabitants of almost any other district in the north. It
+has been long alleged that there existed a close connection between the
+more ghostly spirits of the country and its distilled ones. "How do you
+account," 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 the
+almost total disappearance of the ghosts and fairies that used to be so
+common in your young days?" "Tak my word for 't, minister," replied the
+shrewd old man, "it's a' owing to the _tea_; when the _tea_ cam in, the
+ghaists an' fairies gaed out. Weel do I mind when at a' our neeborly
+meetings,--bridals, christenings, lyke-wakes, an' the like,--we
+entertained ane anither wi' rich nappy ale; an' whan the verra dowiest
+o' 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 losing
+the nappy we lost baith ghaists an' fairies."
+
+Quitting the ruin, I walked on along the shore, tracing the sandstone as
+I went, as it rises from lower to higher beds; and where it ceases to
+crop out at the surface, and gravel and the red boulder-clays take the
+place of rock, I struck up the hill, and, traversing the parishes of
+Resolis and Cromarty, got home early in the evening. I had seen and done
+scarcely half what I had intended seeing or doing: alas, that in
+reference to every walk which I have yet attempted to tread, this
+special statement should be so invariably true to fact!--alas, that all
+my full purposes, should be coupled with but half realizations! But I
+had at least the satisfaction, that though I had accomplished little, I
+had enjoyed much; and it is something, though not all, nor nearly all,
+that, since time is passing, it should pass happily. In my next chapter
+I 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 I
+have thus inverted the order of _time_, by placing it last, that I may
+be able so to preserve the order of _space_ as to render the tract
+travelled over in my narrative continuous from Edinburgh to the northern
+extremity 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 bore
+heavily on the springs of life, compelled me to postpone a
+long-projected journey to the Orkneys, and led me to visit, instead,
+rich level England, with its well-kept roads and smooth railways, along
+which the enfeebled invalid can travel far without fatigue. I had now
+got greatly stronger; and, if not quite up to my old thirty miles per
+day, nor altogether so bold a cragsman as I had been only a few years
+before, 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 least
+glancing over, if not exploring, the fossiliferous deposits of the
+Orkneys, trusting that an eye somewhat practised in the formations
+mainly developed in these islands might enable me to make some amends
+for seeing comparatively little, by seeing well. I took coach at
+Invergordon for Wick early in the morning of Friday; and, after a weary
+ride, in a bleak gusty day, that sent the dust of the road whirling
+about the ears of the sorely-tossed "outsides," with whom I had taken my
+chance, I alighted in Wick, at the inn-door, a little after six o'clock
+in the evening. The following morning was wet and dreary; and a tumbling
+sea, raised by the wind of the previous day and night, came rolling into
+the bay; but the waves bore with them no steamer; and when, some five
+hours after the expected time, she also came rolling in, her darkened
+and weather-beaten sides and rigging gave evidence that her passage from
+the south had been no holiday trip. Impatient, however, of looking out
+upon the sea for hours, from under dripping eaves, and through the
+dimmed panes of streaming windows, I got aboard with about half-a-dozen
+other passengers; and while the Wick goods were in the course of being
+transferred to two large boats alongside, we lay tossing in the open
+bay. The work of raising box and package was superintended by a tall
+elderly gentleman from the shore, peculiarly Scotch in his
+appearance,--the steam company's agent for this part of the country.
+
+"That," said an acquaintance, pointing to the agent, "is a very
+extraordinary man,--in his own special walk, one of the most
+original-minded, and at the same time most thoroughly practical, you
+perhaps ever saw. That is Mr. Bremner of Wick, known now all over
+Britain for his success in raising foundered vessels, when every one
+else gives them up. In the lifting of vast weights, or the overcoming
+the _vis inertiae_ of the hugest bodies, nothing ever baffles Mr.
+Bremner. But come, I must introduce you to him. He takes an interest in
+your peculiar science, and is familiar with your geological writings."
+
+I was accordingly introduced to Mr. Bremner, and passed, in his company
+the half-hour which we spent in the bay, in a way that made me wish the
+time doubled. I had been struck by the peculiar style of masonry
+employed in the harbor of Wick, and by its rock-like strength. The gray
+ponderous stones of the flagstone series of which it is built, instead
+of 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 a
+pail or barrel, so that at some little distance the work looks as if
+formed of upright piles or beams jambed fast together. I had learned
+that Mr. Bremner had been the builder, and adverted to the peculiarity
+of his style of building. "You have given a vertical tilt to your
+strata," I said: "most men would have preferred the horizontal position.
+It used to be regarded as one of the standing rules of my old
+profession, that the 'broad bed of a stone' is the best, and should be
+always laid 'below.'" "A good rule for the land," replied Mr. Bremner,
+"but no good rule for the sea. The greatest blunders are almost always
+perpetrated through the misapplication of good rules. On a coast like
+ours, where boulders of a ton weight are rolled about with every storm
+like pebbles, these stones, if placed on what a workman would term their
+best beds, would be scattered along the shore like sea-wrack, by the
+gales of a single winter. In setting aside the prejudice," continued Mr.
+Bremner, "that what is indisputably the best bed for a stone on dry land
+is also the best bed in the water on an exposed coast, I reasoned
+thus:--The surf that dashes along the beach in times of tempest, and
+that 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 a
+reactive impetus in the opposite direction,--the effect of the backward
+rebound, and of its own weight, when raised by these propelling forces
+above its average level of surface. True, it is all this; but it is also
+something more. As its white breadth of foam indicates, it is a subtile
+mixture of water and _air_, with a powerful _upward_ action,--a
+consequence of the air struggling to effect its escape; and this upward
+action must be taken into account in our calculations, as certainly as
+the other and more generally recognized actions. In striking against a
+piece of building, this subtile mixture dashes through the interstices
+into the interior of the masonry, and, filling up all its cavities, has
+by its upward action, a tendency to _set the work afloat_. And the
+broader the beds of the stones, of course the more extensive are the
+surfaces which it has to act upon. One of these flat flags, ten feet by
+four, and a foot in thickness, would present to this upheaving force, if
+placed on end, a superficies of but _four_ square feet; whereas, if
+placed on its broader base, it would present to it a superficies of
+_forty_ square feet. Obviously, then, with regard to this aerial
+upheaving force, that acts upon the masonry in a direction in which no
+precautions are usually adopted to bind it fast,--for the existence of
+the force itself is not taken into account,--the greater bed of the
+stone must be just ten times over a worse bed than its lesser one; and
+on a tempestuous foam-encircled coast such as ours, this aerial
+upheaving force is in reality, though the builder may not know it, one
+of the most formidable forces with which he had to deal. And so, on
+these principles, I ventured to set my stones on end,--on what was
+deemed their _worst_, not their _best_ beds,--wedging them all fast
+together, like staves in an anker; and there, to the scandal of all the
+old rules, are they fast wedged still, firm as a rock." It was no
+ordinary man that could have originated such reasonings on such a
+subject, or that could have thrown himself so boldly, and to such
+practical effect, on the conclusions to which they led.
+
+Mr. Bremner adverted, in the course of our conversation, to a singular
+appearance among the rocks a little to the east and south of the town
+of Wick, that had not, he said, attracted the notice it deserved. The
+solid rock had been fractured by some tremendous blow, dealt to it
+externally at a considerable height over the sea-level, and its detached
+masses scattered about like the stones of an ill-built harbor broken up
+by a storm. The force, whatever its nature, had been enormously great.
+Blocks of some thirty or forty tons weight had been torn from out the
+solid strata, and piled up in ruinous heaps, as if the compact precipice
+had been a piece of loose brickwork, or had been driven into each other,
+as if, instead of being composed of perhaps the hardest and toughest
+sedimentary rock in the country, they had been formed of sun-dried clay.
+"I brought," continued Mr. Bremner, "one of your itinerant geological
+lecturers to the spot, to get his opinion; but he could say nothing
+about the appearance: it was not in his books." "I suspect," I replied,
+"the phenomenon lies quite as much within your own province as within
+that of the geological lecturer. It is in all probability an
+illustration, on a large scale, of those floating forces with which you
+operate on your foundered vessels, joined to the forces, laterally
+exerted, by which you drag them towards the shore. When the sea stood
+higher, or the land lower, in the eras of the raised beaches, along what
+is now Caithness, the abrupt mural precipices by which your coast here
+is skirted must have secured a very considerable depth of water up to
+the very edge of the land;--your coast-line must have resembled the side
+of a mole or wharf: and in that glacial period to which the thick
+deposit of boulder-clay immediately over your harbor yonder belongs,
+icebergs of very considerable size must not unfrequently have brushed
+the brows of your precipices. An iceberg from eighty to a hundred feet
+in thickness, and perhaps half a square mile in area, could not, in
+this old state of things, have come in contact with these cliffs without
+first catching the ground outside; and such an iceberg, propelled by a
+fierce storm from the north-east, could not fail to lend the cliff with
+which it came in collision a tremendous blow. You will find that your
+shattered precipice marks, in all probability, the scene of a collision
+of this character: some hard-headed iceberg must have set itself to run
+down the land, and got wrecked upon it for its pains." My theory, though
+made somewhat in the dark,--for I had no opportunity of seeing the
+broken precipice until after my return from Orkney,--seemed to satisfy
+Mr. Bremner; nor, on a careful survey of the phenomenon, the solution of
+which it attempted, did I find occasion to modify or give it up.
+
+With just knowledge enough of Mr. Bremner's peculiar province to
+appreciate his views, I was much impressed by their broad and practical
+simplicity; and bethought me, as we conversed, that the character of the
+thinking, which, according to Addison, forms the staple of all writings
+of genius, and which he defines as "simple but not obvious," is a
+character which equally applies to _all_ good thinking, whatever its
+special department. Power rarely resides in ingenious complexities: it
+seems to eschew in every walk the elaborately attenuated and razor-edged
+mode of thinking,--the thinking akin to that of the old metaphysical
+poets,--and to select the broad and massive style. Hercules, in all the
+representations of him which I have yet seen, is the _broad_ Hercules. I
+was 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 obvious
+contrivances, which had a strong air of practicability about them, he
+could lay down his erection, course by course, inshore, in a floating
+caisson of peculiar construction, beginning a little beyond the low-ebb
+line, and warping out his work piecemeal, as it sank, till it had
+reached its proper place, in, if necessary, from ten to twelve fathoms
+water, 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 would
+be obviated, he said, by the contrivance, and a solidity given to the
+work otherwise impossible in the circumstances: the stones could be laid
+in his floating caisson with a care as deliberate as on the land. Some
+of the anecdotes which he communicated to me on this occasion, connected
+with his numerous achievements in weighing up foundered vessels, or in
+floating off wrecked or stranded ones, were of singular interest; and I
+regretted that they should not be recorded in an autobiographical
+memoir. Not a few of them were humorously told, and curiously
+illustrative of that general ignorance regarding the "strength of
+materials" in which the scientific world has been too strangely suffered
+to lie, in this the world's most mechanical age; so that what ought to
+be questions of strict calculation are subjected to the guessings of a
+mere common sense, far from adequate, in many cases, to their proper
+resolution. "I once raised a vessel," said Mr. Bremner,--"a large
+collier, chock-full of coal,--which an English projector had actually
+engaged to raise with huge bags of India rubber, inflated with air. But
+the bags, of course taxed far beyond their strength, collapsed or burst;
+and so, when I succeeded in bringing the vessel up, through the
+employment of more adequate means, I got not only ship and cargo, but
+also a great deal of good India rubber to boot." Only a few months after
+I enjoyed the pleasure of this interview with the Brindley of Scotland,
+he was called south, to the achievement of his greatest feat in at least
+one special department,--a feat generally recognized and appreciated as
+the most herculean of its kind ever performed,--the raising and warping
+off of the Great Britain steamer from her perilous bed in the sand of an
+exposed bay on the coast of Ireland. I was conscious of a feeling of
+sadness as, in parting with Mr. Bremner, I reflected, that a man so
+singularly gifted should have been suffered to reach a period of life
+very considerably advanced, in employments little suited to exert his
+extraordinary faculties, and which persons of the ordinary type could
+have performed as well. Napoleon,--himself possessed of great
+genius,--could have estimated more adequately than our British rulers
+the value of such a man. Had Mr. Bremner been born a Frenchman, he would
+not now be the mere agent of a steam company, in a third-rate seaport
+town.
+
+The rain had ceased, but the evening was gloomy and chill; and the
+Orcades, which, on clearing the Caithness coast, came as fully in view
+as the haze permitted, were enveloped in an undress of cloud and spray,
+that showed off their flat low features to no advantage at all. The
+bold, picturesque Hebrides look well in any weather; but the level
+Orkney 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-dress
+auxiliaries of bright sun and clear sky, to render their charms patent.
+Then, however, in their sleek coats of emerald and purple, and
+surrounded by their blue sparkling sounds and seas, with here a long
+dark wall of rock, that casts its shadow over the breaking waves, and
+there a light fringe of sand and broken shells, they are, as I
+afterwards ascertained, not without their genuine beauties. But had they
+shared in the history of the neighboring Shetland group, that, according
+to some of the older historians, were suffered to lie uninhabited for
+centuries after their first discovery, I would rather have been
+disposed to marvel this evening, not that they had been unappropriated
+so long, but that they had been appropriated at all. The late member for
+Orkney, not yet unseated by his Shetland opponent, was one of the
+passengers in the steamboat; and, with an elderly man, an ambitious
+schoolmaster, strongly marked by the peculiarities of the genuine
+dominie, who had introduced himself to him as a brother voyager, he was
+pacing the quarter-deck, evidently doing his best to exert, under an
+unintermittent hot-water _douche_ of queries, the patient courtesy of a
+Member 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 liberty
+with the schoolmaster that the schoolmaster had taken with the Member, I
+addressed to him a simple query in turn. But I had mistaken my man; the
+schoolmaster permitted to unknown passengers in humble russet no such
+sort of familiarities as those permitted by the Member; and so I met
+with 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 among
+boys for some twenty or thirty years, exerting over them all the while a
+despotic authority, without contracting those peculiarities of character
+which the master-spirits,--our Scots, Lambs, and Goldsmiths,--have
+embalmed with such exquisite truth in our literature, and which have
+hitherto militated against the practical realization of those
+unexceptionable abstractions in behalf of the status and standing of the
+teacher of youth which have been originated by men less in the habit of
+looking about them than the poets. It is worth while remarking how
+invariably the strong common sense of the Scotch people has run every
+scheme under water that, confounding the character of the "village
+schoolmaster" with that of the "village clergyman," would demand from
+the schoolmaster the clergyman's work.
+
+We crossed the opening of the Pentland Frith, with its white surges and
+dark boiling eddies, and saw its twin lighthouses rising tall and
+ghostly amid the fog on our lee. We then skirted the shores of South
+Ronaldshay, of Burra, of Copinshay, and of Deerness; and, after doubling
+Moul Head, and threading the sound which separates Shapinshay from the
+Mainland, we entered the Frith of Kirkwall, and caught, amid the
+uncertain light of the closing evening, our earliest glimpse of the
+ancient Cathedral of St. Magnus. It seems at first sight as if standing
+solitary, a huge hermit-like erection, at the bottom of a low bay,--for
+its humbler companions do not make themselves visible until we have
+entered the harbor by a mile or two more, when we begin to find that it
+occupies, not an uninhabited tract of shore, but the middle of a gray
+straggling town, nearly a mile in length. We had just light enough to
+show us, on landing, that the main thoroughfare of the place, very
+narrow and very crooked, had been laid out, ere the country beyond had
+got highways, or the proprietors carts and carriages, with an exclusive
+eye to the necessities of the foot-passenger,--that many of the older
+houses presented, as is common in our northern towns, their gables to
+the street, and had narrow slips of closes running down along their
+fronts,--and that as we receded from the harbor, a goodly portion of
+their number bore about them an air of respectability, long maintained,
+but now apparently touched by decay. I saw, in advance of one of the
+buildings, several vigorous-looking planes, about forty feet in height,
+which, fenced by tall houses in front and rear, and flanked by the
+tortuosities of the street, had apparently forgotten that they were in
+Orkney, and had grown quite as well as the planes of public
+thoroughfares grow elsewhere. After an abortive attempt or two made in
+other quarters, I was successful in procuring lodgings for a few days in
+the house of a respectable widow lady of the place, where I found
+comfort and quiet on very moderate terms. The cast of faded gentility
+which attached to so many of the older houses of Kirkwall,--remnants of
+a time when the wealthier Udallers of the Orkneys used to repair to
+their capital at the close of autumn, to while away in each other's
+society their dreary winters,--reminded me of the poet Malcolm's "Sketch
+of the Borough,"--a portrait for which Kirkwall is known to have
+sat,--and of the great revolution effected in its evening parties, when
+"tea and turn-out" yielded its place to "tea and turn-in." But the
+churchyard of the place, which I had seen, as I passed along, glimmering
+with all its tombstones in the uncertain light, was all that remained to
+represent those "great men of the burgh," who, according to the poet,
+used to "pop in on its card and dancing assemblies, about the eleventh
+hour, resplendent in top-boots and scarlet vests," or of its
+"suppression-of-vice sisterhood of moral old maids," who kept all their
+neighbors right by the terror of their tongues. I was somewhat in a
+mood, after my chill and hungry voyage, to recall with a hankering of
+regret the vision of its departed suppers, so luxuriously described in
+the "Sketch,"--suppers at which "large rounds of boiled beef smothered
+in cabbage, smoked geese, mutton hams, roasts of pork, and dishes of
+dog-fish and of Welsh rabbits melted in their own fat, were diluted by
+copious draughts of strong home-brewed ale, and etherealized by gigantic
+bowls of rum punch." But the past, which is not ours, who, alas, can
+recall! And, after discussing a juicy steak and a modest cup of tea, I
+found I could regard with the indifferency of a philosopher, the
+perished suppers of Kirkwall.
+
+I quitted my lodgings for church next morning about three-quarters of an
+hour ere the service commenced; and, finding the doors shut, sauntered
+up the hill that rises immediately over the town. The thick gloomy
+weather had passed with the night; and a still, bright, clear-eyed
+Sabbath looked cheerily down on green isle and blue sea. I was quite
+unprepared by any previous description, for the imposing assemblage of
+ancient buildings which Kirkwall presents full in the foreground, when
+viewed from the road which ascends along this hilly slope to the
+uplands. So thickly are they massed together, that, seen from one
+special point of view, they seem a portion of some magnificent city in
+ruins,--some such city though in a widely different style of
+architecture, as Palmyra or Baalbec. The Cathedral of St. Magnus rises
+on the right, the castle-palace of Earl Patrick Stuart on the left, the
+bishop's palace in the space between; and all three occupy sites so
+contiguous, that a distance of some two or three hundred yards abreast
+gives the proper angle for taking in the whole group at a glance. I know
+no such group elsewhere in Scotland. The church and palace of Linlithgow
+are in such close proximity, that, seen together, relieved against the
+blue gleam of their lake, they form one magnificent pile; but we have
+here a taller, and, notwithstanding its Saxon plainness, a nobler
+church, than that of the southern burgh, and at least one palace more.
+And the associations connected with the church, and at least one of the
+palaces ascend to a remoter and more picturesque antiquity. The
+castle-palace of Earl Patrick dates from but the time of James the
+Sixth; but in the palace of the bishop, old grim Haco died, after his
+defeat at Largs, "of grief," says Buchanan, "for the loss of his army,
+and of a valiant youth his relation;" and in the ancient Cathedral, his
+body, previous to its removal to Norway, was interred for a winter. The
+church 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 a
+countryman on his way to church. "Ye'll hae come," he said, addressing
+me, "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 no
+sure he'll be our Member next time. The Voluntaries yonder, ye see,"
+jerking his head, as he spoke, in the direction of the United Secession
+chapel of the place, "are awfu' strong and unco radical; and the Free
+Kirk folk will soon be as bad as them. But I belong to the
+Establishment; and I side wi' Dundas." The aristocracy of Scotland
+committed, I am afraid, a sad blunder when they attempted strengthening
+their influence as a class by seizing hold of the Church patronages.
+They have fared somewhat like those sailors of Ulysses who, in seeking
+to appropriate their master's wealth, let out the winds upon themselves;
+and there is now, in consequence, a perilous voyage and an uncertain
+landing before them. It was the patronate wedge that struck from off the
+Scottish Establishment at least nine-tenths of the Dissenters of the
+kingdom,--its Secession bodies, its Relief body, and, finally, its Free
+Church denomination,--comprising in their aggregate amount a great and
+influential majority of the Scotch people. Our older Dissenters,--a
+circumstance inevitable to their position as such,--have been thrown
+into the movement party: the Free Church, in her present transition
+state, sits loose to all the various political sections of the country;
+but her natural tendency is towards the movement party also; and
+already, in consequence, do our Scottish aristocracy possess greatly
+less political influence in the kingdom of which they own almost all
+the soil, than that wielded by their brethren the Irish and English
+aristocracy in their respective divisions of the empire. Were the
+representation of England and Ireland as liberal as that of Scotland,
+and as little influenced by the aristocracy, Conservatism, on the
+passing of the Reform Bill, might have taken leave of office for
+evermore. And yet neither the English nor Irish are naturally so
+Conservative as the Scotch. The patronate wedge, like that appropriated
+by Achan, has been disastrous to the people, for it has lost to them the
+great 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 work
+more serious evil to those by whom it was originally coveted,--"evil to
+themselves and all their house." As I approached the Free Church, a
+squat, sun-burned, carnal-minded "old wee wifie," who seemed passing
+towards the Secession place of worship, after looking wistfully at my
+gray maud, and concluding for certain that I could not be other than a
+Southland drover, came up to me, and asked, in a cautious whisper, "Will
+ye 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 Church
+folk in our immediate neighborhood, who would scarce have tolerated
+Sabbath trading in a Seceder, tucked up her little blue cloak over her
+head, and hied away to the chapel.
+
+In the Free Church pulpit I recognized an old friend, to whom I
+introduced myself at the close of the service, and by whom I was
+introduced, in turn, to several intelligent members of his session, to
+whose kindness I owed, on the following day, introductions to some of
+the less accessible curiosities of the place. I rose betimes on the
+morning of Monday, that I might have leisure enough before me to see
+them all, and broke my first ground in Orkney as a geologist in a quarry
+a few hundred yards to the south and east of the town. It is strange
+enough how frequently the explorer in the Old Red finds himself
+restricted in a locality to well nigh a single organism,--an effect,
+probably, of some gregarious instinct in the ancient fishes of this
+formation, similar to that which characterizes so many of the fishes of
+the present time, or of some peculiarity in their constitution, which
+made each choose for itself a peculiar habitat. In this quarry, though
+abounding in broken remains, I found scarce a single fragment which did
+not belong to an exceedingly minute species of Coccosteus, of which my
+first 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 from
+its general proportions, had set down as the young of the _Coccosteus
+cuspidatus_. Its apparent gregariousness, too, quite as marked at Thurso
+as in this quarry, had assisted, on the strength of an obvious enough
+analogy, in leading to the conclusion. There are several species of the
+existing fish, well known on our coasts, that, though solitary when
+fully grown, are gregarious when young. The coal-fish, which as the
+sillock of a few inches in length congregates by thousands, but as the
+colum-saw of from two and a half to three feet is a solitary fish, forms
+a familiar instance; and I had inferred that the Coccosteus, found
+solitary, in most instances, when at its full size, had, like the
+coal-fish, congregated in shoals when in a state of immaturity. But a
+more careful examination of the specimens leads me to conclude that this
+minute gregarious Coccosteus, so abundant in this locality that its
+fragments thickly speckle the strata for hundreds of yards together--(in
+one instance I found the dorsal plates of four individuals crowded into
+a piece of flag barely six inches square)--was in reality a distinct
+species. Though not more than one-fourth the size, measured linearly, of
+the _Coccosteus decipiens_, its plates exhibit as many of those lines
+of increment which gave to the occipital buckler of the creature its
+tortoise-like appearance, and through which plates of the buckler
+species were at first mistaken for those of a Chelonian, as are
+exhibited by plates of the larger kinds, with an area ten times as
+great; its tubercles, too, some of them of microscopic size, are as
+numerous;--evidences, I think,--when we take into account that in the
+bulkier species the lines and tubercles increased in number with the
+growth of the plates, and that, once formed, they seem never to have
+been affected by the subsequent enlargement of the creature,--that this
+ichthyolite was not an _immature_, but really a _miniature_ Coccosteus.
+We may see on the plates of the full-grown Coccosteus, as on the shells
+of bivalves, such as _Cardium echinatum_, or on those of spiral
+univalves, such as _Buccinum undatum_, the diminutive markings which
+they bore when the creature was young; and on the plates of this species
+we may detect a regular gradation of tubercles from the microscopic to
+the minute, as we may see on the plates of the larger kinds a regular
+gradation from the minute to the fall-sized. The average length of the
+dwarf Coccosteus of Thurso and Kirkwall, taken from the snout to the
+pointed termination of the dorsal plate, ranges from one and a-half to
+two inches; its entire length from head to tail probably from three to
+four. It was from one of Mr. Dick's specimens of this species that I
+first determined the true position of the eyes of the Coccosteus,--a
+position which some of my lately-found ichthyolites conclusively
+demonstrate, and which Agassiz, in his restoration, deceived by
+ill-preserved specimens, has fixed at a point considerably more lateral
+and posterior, and where eyes would have been of greatly less use to the
+animal. About a field's breadth below this quarry of the _Coccosteus
+minor_,--if I may take the liberty of extemporizing a name, until such
+time as some person better qualified furnishes the creature with a more
+characteristic one,--there are the remains, consisting of fosse and
+rampart, with a single cannon lying red and honeycombed amid the ruins,
+of one of Cromwell's forts, built to protect the town against the
+assaults of an enemy from the sea. In the few and stormy years during
+which this ablest of British governors ruled over Scotland, he seems to
+have exercised a singularly vigilant eye. The claims on his protection
+of even the remote Kirkwall did not escape him.
+
+The antiquities of the burgh next engaged me; and, as became its dignity
+and importance, I began with the Cathedral, a building imposing enough
+to rank among the most impressive of its class anywhere, but whose
+peculiar _setting_ in this remote northern country, joined to the
+associations of its early history with the Scandinavian Rollos, Sigurds,
+Einars, and Hacos of our dingier chronicles, serve greatly to enhance
+its interest. It is a noble pile, built of a dark-tinted Old Red
+Sandstone,--a stone which, though by much too sombre for adequately
+developing the elegancies of the Grecian or Roman architecture, to which
+a light delicate tone of color seems indispensable, harmonizes well with
+the massier and less florid styles of the Gothic. The round arch of that
+ancient Norman school which was at one time so generally recognized as
+Saxon, prevails in the edifice, and marks out its older portions. A few
+of the arches present on their ringstones those characteristic toothed
+and zig-zag ornaments that are of not unfamiliar occurrence on the round
+squat doorways of the older parish churches of England; but by much the
+greater number exhibit merely a few rude mouldings, that bend over
+ponderous columns and massive capitals, unfretted by the tool of the
+carver. Though of colossal magnificence, the exterior of the edifice
+yields in effect, as in all true Gothic buildings,--for the Gothic is
+greatest in what the Grecian is least,--to the sombre sublimity of the
+interior. The nave, flanked by the dim deep aisles, and by a double row
+of smooth-stemmed gigantic columns, supporting each a double tier of
+ponderous arches, and the transepts, with their three tiers of small
+Norman windows, and their bold semi-circular arcs, demurely gay with
+toothed or angular carvings, that speak of the days of Rolf and
+Torfeinar, are singularly fine,--far superior to aught else of the kind
+in Scotland; and a happy accident has added greatly to their effect. A
+rare Byssus,--the _Byssus aeruginosa_ of Linnaeus,--the _Leprasia
+aeruginosa_ of modern botanists,--one of those gloomy vegetables of the
+damp cave and dark mine whose true habitat is rather under than upon the
+earth, has crept over arch, and column, and broad bare wall, and given
+to well nigh the entire interior of the building a close-fitted lining
+of dark velvety green, which, like the Attic rust of an ancient medal,
+forms an appropriate covering to the sculpturings which it enwraps
+without concealing, and harmonizes with at once the dim light and the
+antique architecture. Where the sun streamed upon it, high over head,
+through the narrow windows above, it reminded me of a pall of rich green
+velvet. It seems subject, on some of the lower mouldings and damper
+recesses, especially amid the tombs and in the aisles, to a decomposing
+mildew, which eats into it in fantastic map-like lines of mingled black
+and gray, so resembling Runic fret-work, that I had some difficulty in
+convincing myself that the tracery which it forms,--singularly
+appropriate to the architecture,--was not the effect of design. The
+choir and chancel of the edifice, which at the time of my visit were
+still employed as the parish church of Kirkwall, and had become a "world
+too wide" for the shrunken congregation, are more modern and ornate than
+the nave and transepts; and the round arch gives place, in at least
+their windows, to the pointed one. But the unique consistency of the
+pile is scarce at all disturbed by this mixture of styles. It is truly
+wonderful how completely the forgotten architects of the darker ages
+contrived to avoid those gross offences against good taste and artistic
+feeling into which their successors of a greatly more enlightened time
+are continually falling. Instead of idly courting ornament for its own
+sake, they must have had as their proposed object the production of some
+definite effect, or the development of some special sentiment. It was
+perhaps well for them, too, that they were not so overladen as our
+modern architects with the _learning_ of their profession. Extensive
+knowledge requires great judgment to guide it. If that high genius which
+can impart its own homogeneous character to very various materials be
+wanting, the more multifarious a man's ideas become, the more is he in
+danger of straining after a heterogeneous patch-work excellence, which
+is but excellence in its components, and deformity as a whole. Every new
+vista opened up to him on what has been produced in his art elsewhere
+presents to him merely a new avenue of error. His mind becomes a mere
+damaged kaleidoscope, full of little broken pieces of the fair and the
+exquisite, but devoid of that nicely reflective machinery which can
+alone cast the fragments into shapes of a chaste and harmonious beauty.
+
+Judging from the sculptures of St. Magnus, the stone-cutter seems to
+have had but an indifferent command of his trade in Orkney, when there
+was a good deal known about it elsewhere. And yet the rudeness of his
+work here, much in keeping with the ponderous simplicity of the
+architecture, serves but to link on the pile to a more venerable
+antiquity, and speaks less of the inartificial than of the remote. I saw
+a grotesque hatchment high up among the arches, that, with the uncouth
+carvings below, served to throw some light on the introduction into
+ecclesiastical edifices of those ludicrous sculptures that seem so
+incongruously foreign to the proper use and character of such places.
+The painter had set himself, with, I doubt not, fair moral intent, to
+exhibit a skeleton wrapped up in a winding-sheet; but, like the unlucky
+artist immortalized by Gifford, who proposed painting a lion, but
+produced merely a dog, his skill had failed in seconding his intentions,
+and, instead of achieving a Death in a shroud, he had achieved but a
+monkey grinning in a towel. His contemporaries, however, unlike those of
+Gifford's artist, do not seem to have found out the mistake, and so the
+betowelled monkey has come to hold a conspicuous place among the
+solemnities of the Cathedral. It does not seem difficult to conceive how
+unintentional ludicrosities of this nature, introduced into
+ecclesiastical erections in ages too little critical to distinguish
+between what the workman had purposed doing and what he had done, might
+come to be regarded, in a less earnest but more knowing age, as
+precedents for the introduction of the intentionally comic and
+grotesque. Innocent accidental monkeys in towels may have thus served to
+usher into serious neighborhoods monkeys in towels that were such with
+malice _prepense_.
+
+I was shown an opening in the masonry, rather more than a man's height
+from the floor, that marked where a square narrow cell, formed in the
+thickness of the wall, had been laid open a few years before. And in the
+cell there was found depending from the middle of the roof a rusty iron
+chain, with a bit of barley-bread attached. What could the chain and bit
+of bread have meant? Had they dangled in the remote past over some
+northern Ugolino? or did they form in their dark narrow cell, without
+air-hole or outlet, merely some of the reserve terrors of the
+Cathedral, efficient in bending to the authority of the Church the
+rebellious monk or refractory nun? Ere quitting the building, I scaled
+the great tower,--considerably less tall, it is said, than its
+predecessor, which was destroyed by lightning about two hundred years
+ago, but quite tall enough to command an extensive, and, though bare,
+not unimpressive prospect. Two arms of the sea, that cut so deeply into
+the mainland on its opposite sides as to narrow it into a flat neck
+little more than a mile and a half in breadth, stretch away in long
+vista, the one to the south, and the other to the north; and so
+immediately is the Cathedral perched on the isthmus between, as to be
+nearly equally conspicuous from both. It forms in each, to the
+inward-bound vessel, the terminal object in the landscape. There was not
+much to admire in the town immediately beneath, with its roofs of gray
+slate,--almost the only parts of it visible from this point of
+view,--and its bare treeless suburbs; nor yet in the tract of mingled
+hill and moor on either hand, into which the island expands from the
+narrow neck, like the two ends of a sand-glass; but the long withdrawing
+ocean-avenues between, that seemed approaching from south and north to
+kiss the feet of the proud Cathedral,--avenues here and there enlivened
+on their ground of deep blue by a sail, and fringed on the lee--for the
+wind blew freshly in the clear sunshine--with their border of dazzling
+white, were objects worth while climbing the tower to see. Ere my
+descent, my guide hammered out of the tower-bells, on my special behalf,
+somewhat, I daresay, to the astonishment of the burghers below, a set of
+chimes handed down entire, in all the notes, from the times of the
+monks, from which also the four fine bells of the Cathedral have
+descended as an heirloom to the burgh. The chimes would have delighted
+the 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 it
+seemed really very sweet, a few hundred yards further away; and the
+quiet clerical poet,--the restorer of the Sonnet in England, would, I
+doubt not, have been of the same mind. The oft-recurring tones of those
+bells that ring throughout his verse, and to which Byron wickedly
+proposed adding a _cap_, form but an ingredient of the poetry in which
+he describes them; and they are represented always as distant tones,
+that, while they mingle with the softer harmonies of nature, never
+overpower 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,--a
+stately ruin, in the more ornate castellated style of the sixteenth
+century. 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 the
+sides, the lower story of the building, and rise over the _spring_ of
+the large richly-decorated turrets. These last form so much nearer the
+base of the edifice than is common in our old castles, that they exhibit
+the appearance rather of hanging towers than of turrets,--of towers with
+their foundations cut away. The projecting windows, with their deep
+mouldings, square mullions, and cruciform shot-holes, are rich
+specimens of their peculiar style; and, with the double-windowed turrets
+with which they range, they communicate a sort of _high-relief_ effect
+to the entire erection, "the exterior proportions and ornaments of
+which," says Sir Walter Scott, in his Journal, "are very handsome."
+Though a roofless and broken ruin, with the rank grass waving on its
+walls, it is still a piece of very solid masonry, and must have been
+rather stiff working as a quarry. Some painstaking burgher had, I found,
+made a desperate attempt on one of the huge chimney lintels of the great
+hall of the erection,--an apartment which Sir Walter greatly admired,
+and in which he lays the scene in the "Pirate" between Cleveland and
+Jack Bunce, but the lintel, a curious example of what, in the exercise
+of a little Irish liberty, is sometimes termed a _rectilinear arch_,
+defied his utmost efforts; and, after half-picking out the keystone, he
+had to give it up in despair. The bishop's palace, of which a handsome
+old tower still remains tolerably entire, also served for a quarry in
+its day; and I was scarce sufficiently distressed to learn, that on
+almost 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 he
+had loosed out of the wall, to drop on the head of his companion, who
+stood 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 Haco
+died,--thanks to the economic burghers who converted the stately ruin
+into a quarry,--has wholly disappeared. Though the death of this last of
+the Norwegian invaders does not date more than ten years previous to the
+birth of the Bruce, it seems to belong, notwithstanding, to a different
+and greatly more ancient period of Scottish history; as if it came under
+the influence of a sort of aerial perspective, similar to that which
+makes a neighboring hill in a fog appear as remote as a distant mountain
+when the atmosphere is clearer. Our national wars with the English were
+rendered familiar to our country folk of the last age, and for centuries
+before by the old Scotch "_Makkaris,_" Barbour and Blind Harry, and in
+our own times by the glowing narratives of Sir Walter Scott,--magicians
+who, unlike those ancient sorcerers that used to darken the air with
+their incantations, possessed the rare power of dissipating the mists
+and vapors of the historic atmosphere, and rendering it transparent. But
+we had no such chroniclers of the time, though only half an age further
+removed 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 the
+still wilder wanderers of Scandinavia in fierce combats that he was too
+little skilful to record, and which appears so obscure and remote to his
+descendants, presents a phase comparatively near, and an outline
+proportionally sharp and well-defined to the intelligent peasantry of
+Iceland. _Their_ Barbours and Blind Harries came a few ages sooner than
+ours, and the fog, in consequence, rose earlier; and so, while Scotch
+antiquaries of no mean standing can say almost nothing about the
+expedition or death-bed of Haco, even the humbler Icelanders, taught
+from their Sagas in the long winter nights, can tell how, harassed by
+anxiety and fatigue, the monarch sickened, and recovered, and sickened
+again; and how, dying in the bishop's palace, his body was interred for
+a winter in the Cathedral, and then borne in spring to the burying-place
+of his ancestors in Norway. The only clear vista on the death of Haco
+which 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 the
+monarch is still occasionally sought for in the Cathedral, I must
+introduce the reader. I quote from an extract containing the account of
+Haco's expedition against Scotland, which was translated from the
+original Icelandic by the Rev. James Johnstone, chaplain to his
+Britannic Majesty's Envoy Extraordinary at the court of Denmark, and
+appeared in the "Edinburgh Magazine" for 1787.
+
+"King Haco," says the chronicler, "now in the seven and fortieth year of
+his reign, had spent the summer in watchfulness and anxiety. Being often
+called to deliberate with his captains, he had enjoyed little rest; and
+when 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 for
+three days. On the first day he walked about in his apartments; on the
+second he attended at the bishop's chapel to hear mass; and on the third
+he 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 himself
+shaved. Some nights after, he relapsed, and took again to his bed.
+During his sickness he ordered the Bible and Latin authors to be read to
+him. But finding his spirits were too much fatigued by reflecting on
+what he had heard, he desired Norwegian books might be read to him night
+and day: first the lives of saints; and, when they were ended, he made
+his 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 into
+consideration the pay to be given to his troops, and commanded that a
+merk of fine silver should be given to each courtier, and half a merk to
+each of the masters of the lights, chamberlain, and other attendants on
+his person. He ordered all the silver-plate belonging to his table to be
+weighed, and to be distributed if his standard silver fell short....
+King Haco received extreme unction on the night before the festival of
+St. 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 king
+farewell with a kiss.... The festival of the Virgin St. Lucia happened
+on a Thursday; and on the Saturday after, the king's disorder increased
+to such a degree, that he lost the use of his speech; and at midnight
+Almighty God called King Haco out of this mortal life. This was matter
+of great grief to all those who attended, and to most of those who heard
+of the event. The following barons were present at the death of the
+king:--Briniolf Johnson, Erling Alfson, John Drottning, Ronald Urka, and
+some domestics who had been near the king's person during his illness.
+Immediately on the decease of the king, bishops and learned men were
+sent for to sing mass.... On Sunday the royal corpse was carried to the
+upper 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 the
+whole hall was illuminated. All the people came to see the body, which
+appeared beautiful and animated; and the king's countenance was as fair
+and ruddy as while he was alive. It was some alleviation of the deep
+sorrow of the beholders to see the corpse of their departed sovereign so
+decorated. High mass was then sung for the deceased. The nobility kept
+watch by the body during the night. On Monday the remains of King Haco
+were 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 choir
+of St. Magnus Church, near the steps leading to the shrine of St.
+Magnus, Earl of Orkney. The tomb was then closed, and a canopy was
+spread over it. It was also determined that watch should be kept over
+the king's grave all winter. At Christmas the bishop and Andrew Plytt
+furnished entertainments, as the king had directed; and good presents
+were given to all the soldiers. King Haco had given orders that his
+remains should be carried east to Norway, and buried near his fathers
+and relatives. Towards the end of winter, therefore, that great vessel
+which he had in the west was launched, and soon got ready. On Ash
+Wednesday the corpse of King Haco was taken out of the ground: this
+happened the third of the nones of March. The courtiers followed the
+corpse to Skalpeid, where the ship lay, and which was chiefly under the
+direction of the Bishop Thorgisl and Andrew Plytt. They put to sea on
+the first Saturday in Lent; but, meeting with hard weather, they steered
+for Silavog. From this place they wrote letters to Prince Magnus,
+acquainting him with the news, and then sailed for Bergen. They arrived
+at Laxavog before the festival of St. Benedict. On that day Prince
+Magnus rowed out to meet the corpse. The ship was brought near to the
+king's palace, and the body was carried up to a summer-house. Next
+morning the corpse was removed to Christ's Church, and was attended by
+Prince Magnus, the two queens, the courtiers, and the town's people. The
+body was then interred in the choir of Christ's Church; and Prince
+Magnus addressed a long and gracious speech to those who attended the
+funeral procession. All the multitude present were much affected, and
+expressed great sorrow of mind."
+
+So far the Icelandic chronicle. Each age has as certainly its own mode
+of telling its stories as of adjusting its dress or setting its cap; and
+the mode of this northern historian is somewhat prolix. I am not sure,
+however, whether I would not prefer the simple minuteness with which he
+dwells on every little circumstance, to that dissertative style of
+history characteristic of a more reflective age, that for series of
+facts substitutes bundles of theories. Cowper well describes the
+historians of this latter school, and shows how, on selecting some
+little-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 those
+wasting incursions of the Northmen which must have been such terrible
+plagues to the southern and western countries of Europe, ceased in
+consequence of their conversion to Christianity; for that, under the
+humanizing influence of religion, they staid at home, and cultivated the
+arts of peace. But the hypothesis is, I fear, not very tenable.
+Christianity, in even a purer form than that in which it first found its
+way among the ancient Scandinavians, and when at least as generally
+recognized nationally as it ever was by the subjects of Haco, has failed
+to put down the trade of aggressive war. It did not prevent honest,
+obstinate George the Third from warring with the Americans or the
+French: it only led him to enjoin a day of thanksgiving when his troops
+had slaughtered a great many of the enemy, and to ordain a fast when the
+enemy had slaughtered, in turn, a great many of his troops. And Haco,
+who, though he preferred the lives of the saints, and even of his
+ancestors, 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 yet
+appears to have had as few compunctions visitings on the score of his
+Scottish war as George the Third on that of the French or the American
+one. Christianity, too, ere his invasion of Scotland, had been for a
+considerable time established in his dominions, and ought, were the
+theory 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 a
+century old. The true secret of the cessation of Norwegian invasion
+seems to have been the consolidation, under vigorous princes, of the
+countries which had lain open to it,--a circumstance which, in the later
+attempts of the invaders, led to results similar to those which broke
+the heart of tough old Haco, in the bishop's palace at Kirkwall.
+
+From the ruins I passed to the town, and spent a not uninstructive
+half-hour in sauntering along the streets in the quiet of the evening,
+acquainting myself with the general aspect of the people. I marked, as
+one of the peculiar features of the place, groups of tidily-dressed
+young women, engaged at the close-heads with their straw plait,--the
+prevailing manufacture of the town,--and enjoying at the same time the
+fresh air and an easy chat. The special contribution made by the lassies
+of 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 of
+these islands unites an aquiline but not prominent nose to an oval face.
+In the ordinary Scotch and English countenance, when the nose is
+aquiline it is also prominent, and the face is thin and angular, as if
+the additional height of the central feature had been given it at the
+expense of the cheeks, and of lateral shavings from off the chin. The
+hard Duke-of-Wellington face is illustrative of this type. But in the
+aquiline type of Orkney the countenance is softer and fuller, and, in at
+least the female face, the general contour greatly more handsome. Dr.
+Kombst, in his ethnographic map of Britain and Ireland, gives to the
+coast of Caithness and the Shetland Islands a purely Scandinavian
+people, but to the Orkneys a mixed race, which he designates the
+Scandinavian-Gaelic. I would be inclined, however,--preferring rather to
+found on those traits of person and character that are still patent,
+than on the unauthenticated statements of uncertain history,--to regard
+the people as essentially one from the northern extremity of Shetland to
+the Ord Hill of Caithness. Beyond the Ord Hill, and on to the northern
+shores of the Frith of Cromarty, we find, though unnoted on the map, a
+different race,--a race strongly marked by the Celtic lineaments, and
+speaking the Gaelic tongue. On the southern side of the Frith, and
+extending on to the Bay of Munlochy, the purely Scandinavian race again
+occurs. The sailors of the Danish fleet which four years ago accompanied
+the Crown Prince in his expedition to the Faroe Islands were astonished
+when, on landing at Cromarty, they recognized in the people the familiar
+cast of countenance and feature that marked their country folk and
+relatives at home; and found that they were simply Scandinavians like
+themselves, who, having forgotten their Danish, spoke Scotch instead.
+Rather more than a mile to the west of the fishing village of Avoch
+there commences a Celtic district, which stretches on from Munlochy to
+the river Nairne; beyond which the Scandinavian and Teutonic-Scandinavian
+border that fringes the eastern coast of Scotland extends unbroken
+southwards through Moray, Banff, and Aberdeen, on to Forfar, Fife, the
+Lothians, and the Mearns. These two intercalated patches of Celtic people
+in the northern tract,--that extending from the Ord Hill to the Cromarty
+Frith, and that extending from the Bay of Munlochy to the Nairne,--still
+retaining, as they do, after the lapse of ages, a sharp distinctness of
+boundary in respect of language, character, and personal appearance, are
+surely great curiosities. The writer of these chapters was born on the
+extreme edge of one of these patches, scarce a mile distant from a
+Gaelic-speaking population; and yet, though his humble ancestors were
+located on the spot for centuries, he can find trace among them of but one
+Celtic name; and their language was exclusively the Lowland Scotch. For
+many ages the two races, like oil and water, refused to mix.
+
+I spent the evening very agreeably with one of the Free Church elders of
+the place, Mr. George Petrie, an accomplished antiquary; and found that
+his love of the antique, joined to an official connection with the
+county, had cast into his keeping a number of curious old papers of the
+sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries,--not in the least
+connected, some of them, with the legal and civic records of the place,
+but which had somehow stuck around these, in their course of
+transmission from one age to another, as a float of brushwood in a river
+occasionally brings down along with it, entangled in its folds, uprooted
+plants and aquatic weeds, that would otherwise have disappeared in the
+cataracts and eddies of the upper reaches of the stream. Dead as they
+seemed, spotted with mildew, and fretted by the moth, I found them
+curiously charged with what had once been intellect and emotion, hopes
+and fears, stern business and light amusement. I saw, among the other
+manuscripts, a thin slip of a book, filled with jottings, in the antique
+square-headed style of notation, of old Scotch tunes, apparently the
+work of some musical county-clerk of Orkney in the seventeenth century;
+but the paper, in a miserable state of decay, was blotted crimson and
+yellow with the rotting damps, and the ink so faded, that the notation
+of 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, addressed
+by some Orcadian Claud Halcro of the last age, to some local patron, in
+a vein of compliment rich and stiff as a piece of ancient brocade. A
+peremptory letter, bearing the autograph signature of Mary Queen of
+Scots, to Torquil McLeod of Dunvegan, who had been on the eve, it would
+seem, of marrying a daughter of Donald of the Isles, gave the Skye
+chieftain, "to wit" that, as he was of the blood royal of Scotland, he
+could form no matrimonial alliance without the royal permission,--a
+permission which, in the case in point, was not to be granted. It served
+to show that the woman who so ill liked to be thwarted in her own amours
+could, in her character as the Queen, deal despotically enough with the
+love affairs of other people. Side by side with the letter of Mary there
+were several not less peremptory documents of the times of the
+Commonwealth, addressed to the Sheriff of Orkney and Shetland, in the
+name of his Highness the Lord Protector, and that bore the signature of
+George Monck. I found them to consist chiefly of dunning letters,--such
+letters as those duns write who have victorious armies at their
+back,--for large sums of money, the assessments laid on the Orkneys by
+Cromwell. Another series of letters, some ten or twelve years later in
+their date, form portions of the history of a worthy covenanting
+minister, the Rev. Alexander Smith of Colvine, banished to North
+Ronaldshay from the extreme south of Scotland, for the offence of
+preaching the gospel, and holding meetings for social worship in his own
+house; and, as if to demonstrate his incorrigibility, one of the
+series,--a letter under his own hand, addressed from his island prison
+to the Sheriff-Depute in Kirkwall,--showed him as determined and
+persevering in the offence as ever. It was written immediately after his
+arrival. "The poor inhabitants," says the writer, "so many as I have
+yet 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 of
+anything that may smell of sedition or rebellion. If I be farther
+troubled for yt, I resolve to suffer with meekness and patience." The
+Galloway minister must have been an honest man. Deeming preaching his
+true vocation,--a vocation from the exercise of which he dared not
+cease, lest he should render himself obnoxious to the woe referred to by
+the apostle,--he yet could not steal a march on even the Sheriff, whose
+professional duty it was to prevent him from doing _his_; and so he
+fairly warned him that he proposed breaking the law. The next set of
+papers in the collection dated after the Revolution, and were full
+charged with an enthusiastic Jacobitisin, which seems to have been a
+prevalent sentiment in Orkney from the death of Queen Anne, until the
+disastrous defeat at Culloden quenched in blood the hopes of the party.
+There is a deep cave still shown on the shores of Westray, within sight
+of the forlorn Patmos of the poor Covenanter, in which, when the sun got
+on the Whig side of the hedge, twelve gentlemen, who had been engaged in
+the rebellion of 1745, concealed themselves for a whole winter. So
+perseveringly were they sought after, that during the whole time they
+dared not once light a fire, nor attempt fishing from the rocks to
+supply themselves with food; and, though they escaped the search, they
+never, it is said, completely recovered the horrors of their term of
+dreary seclusion, but bore about with them, in broken constitutions, the
+effects of the hardships to which they had been subjected. They must
+have had full time and opportunity, during that miserable winter, for
+testing the justice of the policy that had sent poor Smith into exile,
+from his snug southern parish in the Presbytery of Dumfries, to the
+remotest island of the Orkneys. The great lesson taught in Providence
+during the seventeenth and part of the eighteenth century to our
+Scottish country folk seems to have been the lesson of toleration; and
+as they were slow, stubborn scholars, the lash was very frequently and
+very severely applied. One of the Jacobite papers of Mr. Petrie's
+collection,--a triumphal poem on the victory of Gladsmuir,--which, if
+less 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 a
+passage in literary history which puzzled Dr. Johnson, and which scarce
+any one would think of going to Orkney to settle.
+
+Johnson states, in his Life of the poet Thomson, that the "first
+operation" of the act passed in 1739 "for licensing plays" was the
+"prohibition of 'Gustavus Vasa,' a tragedy of Mr. Brook." "Why such a
+work should be obstructed," he adds, "it is hard to discover." We learn
+elsewhere,--from the compiler of the "Modern Universal History," if I
+remember aright,--that "so popular did the prohibitory order of the Lord
+Chamberlain 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 Brook
+were in their graves, that it was deemed safe to license it for the
+stage. Now, the fact that a drama, in itself as little dangerous as
+"Cato" or "Douglas," should have been prohibited by the Government of
+the day, in the first instance, and should have brought the author, on
+its publication, so large a sum in the second, can be accounted for only
+by a reference to the keen partisanship of the period, and the peculiar
+circumstances of parties. The Jacobites, taught by the rebellion of 1715
+at once the value of the Highlands and the incompetency of the
+Chevalier St. George as a leader, had begun to fix their hopes on the
+Chevalier's son, Charles Edward, at that time a young but promising lad;
+and, with the tragedy of Brook before them, neither they, nor the
+English Government of the day could have failed to see the foreigner
+George the Second typified--unintentionally, surely, on the part of
+Brook, who was a "Prince of Wales" Whig--in the foreigner Christiern
+the 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 the
+least probable, as the poem is a piece of sad mediocrity throughout,
+that it is a parallelism which was originated by its writer. It must
+have been that of his party; and led, I doubt not, five years before, to
+the prohibition of Brook's tragedy, and to the singular success which
+attended its publication. The passage in the manuscript suggestive of
+this view takes the form of an address to the victorious prince, and
+runs 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, a
+shallow prolongation of the Bay of Kirkwall, cut off from the main sea
+by an artificial mound, to the quarry of Pickoquoy, somewhat notable,
+only a few years ago, as the sole locality in which shells had been
+detected in the Old Red Sandstone of Scotland. But these have since been
+found in the neighborhood of Thurso, by Mr. Robert Dick, associated
+with bones and plates of the Asterolepis, and by Mr. William Watt on the
+opposite side of the Mainland of Orkney, at Marwick Head. So far as has
+yet been ascertained, they are all of one species, and more nearly
+resemble a small Cyclas than any other shell. They are, however, more
+deeply sulcated in concentric lines, drawn, as if by a pair of
+compasses, from the umbone, and somewhat resembling those of the genus
+Astarte, than any species of Cyclas with which I am acquainted. In all
+the specimens I have yet seen, it appears to be rather a thick dark
+epidermis that survives, than the shell which it covered; nay, it seems
+not impossible that to its thick epidermis, originally an essentially
+different substance from that which composed the calcareous case, the
+shell may have owed its preservation as a fossil; while other shells,
+its contemporaries, from the circumstance of their having been
+unfurnished with any such covering, may have failed to leave any trace
+of their existence behind them. It seems at least difficult to conceive
+of a sea inhabited by many genera of fishes, each divided into several
+species, and yet furnished with but one species of shell. I found the
+quarry of Pickoquoy,--a deep excavation only a few yards beyond the
+high-water mark, and some two or three yards under the high-water
+level,--deserted by the quarrymen, and filled to the brim by the
+overflowing of a small stream. I succeeded, however, in detecting its
+shells _in situ_. They seem restricted chiefly to a single stratum,
+scarcely half an inch in thickness, and lie, not thinly scattered over
+the platform which they occupy, but impinging on each other, like all
+the gregarious shells, in thickly-set groups and clusters. There occur
+among them occasional scales of Dipteri; and on some of the fragments of
+rock long exposed around the quarry-mouth to the weather I found them
+assuming a pale nacreous gloss,--an effect, it is not improbable, of
+their still retaining, attached to the epidermis, a thin film of the
+original shell. The world's history must be vastly more voluminous now,
+and greatly more varied in its contents, than when the stratum which
+they occupy formed the upper layer of a muddy sea-bottom, and they
+opened their valves by myriads, to prey on the organic atoms which
+formed their food, or shut them again, startled by the shadow of the
+Dipterus, as he descended from the upper depths of the water to prey
+upon them in turn. The palate of this ancient ganoid is furnished with a
+curious dental apparatus, formed apparenly, like that of the recent
+wolf-fish, for the purpose of crushing shells.
+
+About mid-day I set out by the mail-gig for Stromness. For the first few
+miles the road winds through a bare solitary valley, overlooked by
+ungainly heath-covered hills of no great altitude, though quite tall
+enough to prevent the traveller from seeing anything but themselves. As
+he passes on, the valley opens in front on an arm of the sea, over which
+the range of hills on the right abruptly terminates, while that on the
+left deflects into a line nearly parallel to the shore, leaving a
+comparatively level strip of moory land, rather more than a mile in
+breadth, between the steeper acclivities and the beach. A tall naked
+house rises between the road and the sea. Two low islands immediately
+behind it, only a few acres in extent,--one of them bearing a small ruin
+on its apex,--give a little variety to the central point in the prospect
+which the naked house forms; but the arm of the sea, bordered, at the
+time I passed, by a broad brown selvage of sea-weed, is as tame and flat
+as a Dutch lake; the background beyond, a long monotonous ridge, is bare
+and treeless; and in front lies the brown moory plain, bordered by the
+dull 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 very
+pleasing poet, its hills, and islands, and blue arm of the sea, its
+brown moory plain, and tall naked house rising in the midst, must have
+been surrounded by a sunlit atmosphere of love and desire, bright enough
+to impart to even its tamest features a glow of exquisiteness and
+beauty. Malcolm the poet was born, and spent his years of boyhood and
+early youth, in the tall naked house; and the surrounding landscape is
+that to which he refers in his "Tales of Flood and Field," as rising in
+imagination before him, bright in the red gleam of the setting sun,
+when, on the steep slopes of the Pyrenees, the "silent stars of night
+were twinkling high over his head," and the "tents of the soldiery
+glimmering pale through the gloom." The tall house is the manse of the
+parish of Frith and Stennis; and the poet was the son of the Rev. John
+Malcolm, its minister. Here, when yet a mere lad, dreaming, in the quiet
+obscurity of an Orkney parish, far removed from the seat of war and the
+literary circles, of poetic celebrity and military renown, he addressed
+a letter to the Duke of Kent, the father of our Sovereign Lady the
+reigning Monarch, expressing an ardent wish to obtain a commission in
+the army then engaged in the Peninsula. The letter was such as to excite
+the interest of his Royal Highness, who replied to it by return of post,
+requesting the writer to proceed forthwith to London; for which he
+immediately set out, and was received by the Duke with courtesy and
+kindness. He was instructed by him to take ship for Spain, in which he
+arrived as volunteer; and, joining the army, engaged at the time in the
+siege of St. Sebastian, under General Graham, he was promoted shortly
+after, through the influence of his generous patron, to a lieutenancy in
+the 42d Highlanders. He served in that distinguished regiment on to the
+closing campaign of the Pyrenees; but received at the battle of Toulouse
+a wound so severe as to render him ever after incapable of active bodily
+exertion; and so he had to retire from the army on half-pay, and a
+pension honorably earned. The history of his career as a soldier he has
+told with singular interest, in one of the earlier volumes of
+"Constable's Miscellany;" and his poems abound in snatches of
+description painfully true, drawn from his experience of the military
+life,--of scenes of stern misery and grim desolation, of injuries
+received, and of sufferings inflicted,--that must have contrasted sadly
+in his mind, in their character as gross realities, with the dreamy
+visions of conquest and glory in which he had indulged at an earlier
+time. The ruin of St. Sebastian, complete enough, and attended with
+circumstances of the horrible extreme enough, to appal men long
+acquainted with the trade of war, must have powerfully impressed an
+imaginative susceptible lad, fresh from the domesticities of a rural
+manse, in whose quiet neighborhood the voice of battle had not been
+heard for centuries, and surrounded by a simple people, remarkable for
+the respect which they bear to human life. In all probability, the power
+evinced in his description of the siege, and of the utter desolation in
+which it terminated, is in part owing to the fresh impressibility of his
+mind at the time. Such, at least, was my feeling regarding it, as I
+caught myself muttering some of its more graphic passages, and saw, from
+the degree of alarm evinced by the boy who drove the mail-gig, that the
+sounds were not quite lost in the rattle of that somewhat rickety
+vehicle, and that he had come to entertain serious doubts respecting the
+sanity 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,--a
+gentleman to whom, during my stay in Orkney, I took the liberty of
+introducing myself in his snug little Free Church manse at the head of
+the bay, and in whose possession I found the only portrait of the poet
+which exists. It is that of a handsome and interesting looking _young_
+man, though taken not many years before his death; for, like the greater
+number of his class, he did not live to be an old one, dying under
+forty. His brother the clergyman kindly accompanied me to two quarries
+in the neighborhood of his new domicil, which I found, like almost all
+the dry-stone fences of the district, speckled with scales, occipital
+plates, and gill-covers, of Osteolepides and Dipteri, but containing no
+entire ichthyolites. He had taken his side in the Church controversy, he
+told me, firmly, but quietly; and when the Disruption came, and he found
+it necessary to quit the old manse, which had been a home to his family
+for well nigh two generations, and in which both he and his brother had
+been born, he scarce knew what his people were to do, nor in what
+proportion he was to have followers among them. Somewhat to his
+surprise, however, they came out with him almost to a man; so that his
+successor in the parish church had sometimes, he understood, to preach
+to congregations scarcely exceeding half a dozen. I had learned
+elsewhere how thoroughly Mr. Malcolm was loved and respected by his
+parishioners; and that unconsciousness on his own part of the strength
+of their affection and esteem, which his statement evinced, formed, I
+thought, a very pleasing trait, and one that harmonized well with the
+finely-toned unobtrusiveness and unconscious elegance which
+characterized the genius of his deceased brother. A little beyond the
+Free Church manse the road ascends between stone walls, abounding in
+fragments of ichthyolites, weathered blue by exposure to the sun and
+wind; and the top of the eminence forms the water-shed in this part of
+the Mainland, and introduces the traveller to a scene entirely new. The
+prospect is of considerable extent; and, what seems strange in Orkney,
+nowhere presents the traveller,--though it contains its large inland
+lake,--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 palaeozoic 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 hills
+and precipices on their western coasts: the Ward Hill of Hoy attains to
+an elevation of sixteen hundred feet; and there are some of the
+precipices which skirt the island of which it forms so conspicuous a
+feature, that rise sheer over the breakers from eight hundred to a
+thousand. Unlike, however, the arrangement on the mainland, it is the
+newer rocks that attain to the higher elevations; the heights of Hoy are
+composed of that arenaceous upper member of the Lower Old Red
+Sandstone,--the last formed of the Palaeozoic deposits of Orkney,--which
+overlies the ichthyolitic flagstones and shales of Caithness at Dunnet
+Head, and the ichthyolitic nodular beds of Inverness, Ross, and
+Cromarty, at Culloden, Tarbet Ness, within the Northern Sutor, and along
+the bleak ridge of the Maolbuie. It is simply a tall upper story of the
+formation, erected along the western line of coast in the Orkneys, which
+the eastern line wholly wants. Its screen of hills forms a noble
+background to the prospect which opens on the traveller as he ascends
+the eminence beyond the Free Church manse of Frith and Stennis. A large
+lake, bare and treeless, like all the other lakes and lochs of Orkney,
+but picturesque of outline, and divided into an upper and lower sheet of
+water 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, half
+mound, half bridge, occupies the middle distance. There are moory hills
+and a few cottages in front; and on the promontories, conspicuous in the
+landscape, from the relief furnished by the blue ground of the
+surrounding waters, stand the tall stones of Stennis,--one group on the
+northern promontory, the other on the south. A gray old-fashioned house,
+of no very imposing appearance, rises between the road and the lake. It
+is the house of Stennis, or Turmister, in which Scott places some of the
+concluding scenes of the "Pirate," and from which he makes Cleveland and
+his fantastic admirer Jack Bunce witness the final engagement, in the
+bay of Stromness, between the Halcyon sloop of war and the savage Goffe.
+Nor does it matter anything that neither sea nor vessels can be seen
+from the house of Turmister: the fact which would be so fatal to a
+dishonest 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 in
+my inn, that I had a fine bright evening still before me, longer by some
+three or four degrees of north latitude than the July evenings of
+Edinburgh, I set out, hammer in hand, to explore. Stromness is a long,
+narrow, irregular strip of a town, fairly thrust by a steep hill into
+the 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 so
+immediately beside the houses, that their pennants on gala days wave
+over 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 backbone
+of the district, and against which the Great Conglomerate and lower
+schists of the Old Red are upturned at a rather high angle. It is
+wrapped round in some places by a thin caul of the stratified primary
+rocks. Immediately over the town, on the brow of the eminence, where the
+granitic axis had been laid bare in digging a foundation for the Free
+Church manse, I saw numerous masses of schistose-gneiss, passing in some
+of the beds into a coarse-grained mica-schist, and a lustrous
+hornblendic slate, that had been quarried from over it, and which may be
+still seen built up into the garden-wall of the erection. I walked out
+towards the west, to examine the junction of the granite and the Great
+Conglomerate, where it is laid bare by the sea, little more than a
+quarter of a mile outside the town. There was a horde of noisy urchins a
+little beyond the inn, who, having seen me alight from the mail-gig, had
+determined in their own minds that I was engaged in the political
+canvass going forward at the time, but had not quite ascertained my
+side. 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 side
+of the street, with a counter cry of "Anderson forever." Immediately
+after 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 the
+noo?" "Yes, seeking _beasts_," I replied, "but very old ones: I have
+come to hammer your rocks for petrified fish." "I see, I see," said the
+man; "I took ye by ye'er gray plaid for a drover; but I ken something
+about the stane fish too; there's lots o' them in the quarries at
+Skaill."
+
+I found the great Conglomerate in immediate contact with the granite,
+which is a ternary of the usual components, somewhat intermediate in
+color between that of Peterhead and Aberdeen, and which at this point
+bears none of the caul of stratified primary rock by which it is
+overlaid on the brow of the hill. When the great Conglomerate, which is
+mainly composed of it here, was in the act of forming, this granite must
+have been one of the surface rocks of the locality, and in no respect a
+different stone from what it is now. The widely-spread Conglomerate base
+of the Old Red Sandstone, which presents, over an area of so many
+thousand square miles, such an identity of character, that specimens
+taken from the neighborhood of Lerwick, in Shetland, can scarce be
+distinguished from specimens detached from the hills which rise over the
+great Caledonian Valley, contains in various places, as under the
+Northern Sutor, for instance, and along the shores of Navity, fragments
+of rock which have not been detected _in situ_ in the districts in which
+they occur as agglomerated pebbles. In general, however, we find it
+composed of the debris of those very granites and gneisses which, as in
+the case of the granitic axis here, were forced through it, and through
+the overlying deposits, by deep-seated convulsions, long posterior in
+date to its formation. It appears to have been formed in a vast oceanic
+basin of primary rock,--a Palaeozoic Hudson's or Baffin's Bay,--partially
+surrounded, mayhap, by bare primary continents, swept by numerous
+streams, rapid and headlong, and charged with the broken debris of the
+inhospitable regions which they drained. The graptolite-bearing
+grauwacke of Banffshire seems to have been the only fossiliferous rock
+that occurred throughout the extent of this ancient northern basin. The
+Conglomerate of Orkney, like that of Moray and Ross, varies from fifty
+to a hundred yards in thickness. It is not overlaid in this section by
+the thick bed of coarse-grained sandstone, so well-marked a member of
+the formation at Cromarty, Nigg, and Gamrie, and along the northern
+shores of the Beauly Frith; but at once passes into those gray
+bituminous flagstones so immensely developed in Caithness and the
+Orkneys. I traced the formation upwards this evening, walking along the
+edges of the upheaved strata, from where the Conglomerate leans against
+the granite, till where it merges into the gray flagstones, and then
+pursued these from older and lower to newer and higher layers, anxious
+to ascertain at what distance over the base the more ancient organisms
+of the system first appear, and what their character and kind. And
+little more than a hundred _yards_ over the granite, and somewhat less
+than a hundred _feet_ over the upper stratum of the great Conglomerate,
+I found what I sought,--a well-marked bone, perhaps the oldest
+vertebrate remain yet discovered in Orkney, embedded in a light
+grayish-colored layer of hard flag.
+
+What, asks the reader, was the character of the ancient denizen of the
+Palaeozoic basin of which it had formed a part? Was it a large or small
+fish, or of a high or low order? Not certainly of a low order, and by no
+means of a small size. The organism in the rock was a specimen of that
+curious nail-shaped bone of the Asterolepis which occurs as a central
+ridge in the single plate that occupies in this genus the wide curve of
+the under jaw, and as it was fully five inches in length from head to
+point, the plate to which it belonged must have measured ten inches
+across, and the frontal occipital buckler with which it was associated,
+one foot two inches in length (not including the three accessory plates
+at the nape), by ten inches in breadth. And if built, as it probably
+was, in the same massy proportions as its brother Coelacanths the
+Holoptychius or Glyptolepis, the individual to which the nail-shaped
+bone belonged must have been, judging from the size of the corresponding
+parts in these ichthyolites, at least twice as large an animal as the
+splendid Clashbennie Holoptychius of the Upper Old Red, now in the
+British Museum. The bulkiest icthyolites yet found in any of the
+divisions of the Old Red system are of the genus Asterolepis; and to
+this genus, and to evidently an individual of no inconsiderable size,
+this oldest of the organisms of the Orkney belonged. I was so interested
+in the fact, that before leaving this part of the country, I brought Dr.
+Garson, Stromness, and Mr. William Watt, jun., Skaill, both very
+intelligent palaeontologists, to mark the place and character of the
+fossil, that they might be able to point it out to geological visitors
+in 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, I
+merely request the reader to mark, in the passing, that the most ancient
+organic 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 in
+Scotland,--so far as I know, absolutely the _most_ ancient,--belonged to
+a ganoid as bulky as a large porpoise, and which, as shown by its teeth
+and jaws, possessed that peculiar organization which characterized the
+reptile fish of the Upper Devonian and Carboniferous periods. As there
+are, however, no calculations more doubtful or more to be suspected than
+those on which the size and bulk of the extinct animals are determined
+from some surviving fragment of their remains,--plate or bone,--I must
+attempt laying before the scientific reader at least a portion of the
+data on which I found.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+This figure represents not inadequately one of the most characteristic
+plates of the Asterolepis. A very considerable fragment of what seems to
+be the same plate has been figured by Agassiz from a cast of one of the
+huge specimens of Professor Asmus ("Old Red," Table 32, Fig. 13); but
+as no evidence regarding its true place had turned up at the time it was
+supposed by the naturalist to form part of the opercular covering of the
+animal. It belonged, however, to a different portion of the head. In
+almost all the fish that appear at our tables the space which occurs
+within the arched sweep of the lower jaws is mainly occupied by a
+complicated osseous mechanism, known to anatomists as the hyoid bone and
+branchiostegous rays; and which serves both to support the branchial
+arches and the branchiostegous membrane. Now, in the fish of the Old Red
+Sandstone, if we except some of the Acanthodians, we find no trace of
+this piece of mechanism: the arched space is covered over with dermal
+plates of bone, as a window is filled up with panes. Three plates,
+resembling very considerably the three divisions of a pointed Gothic
+window, furnished with a single central mullion, divided atop into two
+branches, 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 the
+genera Holoptychius and Glyptolepis. In the genus Asterolepis this
+arch-shaped space was occupied, as I have said, by a single plate,--that
+represented in the wood-cut; and the nail-shaped bone rose on its
+internal surface along the centre,--the nail-head resting immediately
+beneath the centre of the arch, and the nail-point bordering on the
+isthmus below, at which the two shoulder-bones terminated. Now, in all
+the specimens which I have yet examined, the form and proportions of
+this plate are such that it can be very nearly inscribed in a
+semi-circle, of which the length of the nail is the radius. A nail five
+inches in length must have belonged to a plate ten inches in its longer
+diameter. I have ascertained further, that this longer diameter was
+equal to the shorter diameter of the creature's frontal buckler,
+measured across about two thirds of its entire length from the nape; and
+that a transverse diameter of ten inches at this point was associated in
+the buckler with a longitudinal diameter of fourteen inches from the
+nape to the snout. Thus five inches along the nail represent fourteen
+inches along the occipital shield. The proportion, however, which the
+latter bore to the entire body in this genus has still to be determined.
+The corresponding frontal shield in the Coccosteus was equal to about
+one-fifth the creature's entire length, and in the Osteolepis and
+Diplopterus, 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 the
+Asterolepis was formed in the proportions of the Diplopterus, the
+ancient individual to which this nail-like bone belonged must have been
+about eight feet two inches in length; but if moulded, as it more
+probably was, in the proportions of the Glyptolepis, only six feet five
+inches. All the Coelacanths, however, were exceedingly massive in
+proportion to their length; they were fish built in the square,
+muscular, thick-set, Dirk-Hatterick and Balfour-of-Burley style; and of
+the Russian specimens, some of the larger bones must have belonged to
+individuals 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 the
+downward slant of the _tread_, as a carpenter would say, the height
+attained in the _rise_, I came, about a quarter of a mile farther to the
+west, and several hundred feet higher in the formation, upon a fissile
+dark-colored bed, largely charged with ichthyolites. The fish I found
+ranged in three layers,--the lower layer consisting almost exclusively
+of Dipterians, chiefly Osteolepides; the middle layer, of Acanthodians,
+of the genera Cheiracanthus and Diplacanthus; and the upper layer, of
+Cephalaspides, mostly of one species, the _Coccosteus decipiens_. I
+found exactly the same arrangement in a bed considerably higher in the
+system, which occurs a full mile farther on,--the Dipterians at the
+bottom, the Acanthodians in the middle, and the Cephalaspides atop; and
+was informed by Mr. William Watt, a competent authority in the case,
+that the arrangement is comparatively a common one in the quarries of
+Orkney. How account for the phenomenon? How account for the three
+storeys, and the apportionment of the floors, like those of a great
+city, each to its own specific class of society? Why should the first
+floor be occupied by Osteolepides, the second by Cheiracanthi and their
+congeners, and the third by Coccostei? Was the arrangement an effect of
+normal differences in the constitutions of the several families,
+operated upon by some deleterious gas or mineral poison, which, though
+it eventually destroyed the whole, did not so simultaneously, but
+consecutively,--the families of weakest constitution first, and the
+strongest last? Or were they exterminated by some disease, that seized
+upon the families, not at once, but in succession? Or did they visit the
+locality serially, as the haddock now visits our coasts in spring, and
+the herring towards the close of summer; and were then killed off,
+whether by poison or disease, as they came? These are questions which
+may never be conclusively answered. It is well, however, to observe, as
+a curious geological fact, that peculiar arrangement of the fossils by
+which they are suggested, and to record the various instances in which
+it occurs. The minerals which I remarked among the schists here as most
+abundant are a kind of black ironstone, exceedingly tough and hard,
+occurring in detached masses, and a variety of bright pyrites
+disseminated among the darker flagstones, either as irregularly-formed,
+brassy-looking concretions of small size, or spread out on their
+surfaces in thin leaf-like films, that resemble, in some of the
+specimens, the icy-foliage with which a severe frost encrusts a
+window-pane. Still further on I came upon a vein of galena; but a
+miner'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 had
+been known long before, and, as the workings seemed to have been
+deserted 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 entire
+vein is not very considerable. I have since learned, from the
+"Statistical Account of the Parish of Sandwick," that the workings of
+the mine penetrate into the rock for about a hundred yards, but that it
+has been long abandoned, "as a speculation which would not pay."
+
+I observed scattered over the beach, in the neighborhood of the lead
+mine, considerable quantities of the hard chalk of England; and, judging
+there could be no deposits of the hard chalk in this neighborhood, I
+addressed myself on my way back, to a kelp-burner engaged in wrapping up
+his fire for the night with a thick covering of weed, to ascertain how
+it had come there. "Ah, master," he replied, "that chalk is all that
+remains of a fine large English vessel, that was knocked to pieces here
+a few years ago. She was ballasted with the chalk; and as it is a light
+sort of stone, the surf has washed it ashore from that low reef in the
+middle of the tideway where she struck and broke up. Most of the
+sailors, poor fellows, lie in the old churchyard, beside the broken ruin
+yonder. It is a deadly shore this to seafaring-men." I had understood
+that the kelp-trade was wholly at an end in Orkney; and, remarking that
+the sea-weed which he employed was chiefly of one kind,--the long brown
+fronds of tang dried in the sun,--I inquired of him to what purpose the
+substance was now employed, seeing that barilla and the carbonate of
+soda had supplanted it in the manufacture of soap and glass, and why he
+was 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 used
+for bad sores and cancer; and we must be particular in our weed, for
+it's not every kind of weed that has the medicine in't. There's most of
+it, we're told, in the leaves of the tang." "Is the name of the drug," I
+asked, "iodine?" "Ay, that must be just it," he replied,--"iodine; but
+it doesn't make such a demand for kelp as the glass and the soap." I
+afterwards learned that the kelp-burner's character of this strip of
+coast, as peculiarly fatal to the mariner, was borne out by many a sad
+casualty, too largely charged with the wild and the horrible to be
+lightly forgotten. The respected Free Church clergyman of Stromness, Mr.
+Learmonth, informed me that, ere the Disruption, while yet minister of
+the parish, there were on one sad occasion eight dead bodies carried of
+a Sabbath morning to his manse door. Some of the incidents connected
+with these terrible shipwrecks, as related with much graphic effect by a
+boatman who carried me across the sound, on an exploratory ramble to the
+island of Hoy, struck me as of a character considerably beyond the reach
+of the mere dealer in fiction. The master of one hapless vessel, a young
+man, had brought his wife and only child with him on the voyage destined
+to terminate so mournfully; and when the vessel first struck, he had
+rushed down to the cabin to bring them both on deck, as their only
+chance of safety. He had, however, unthinkingly shut the cabin-door
+after him; a second tremendous blow, as not unfrequently happens in
+such cases, so affected the framework of the sides and deck, that the
+door was jammed fast in its frame. And long ere it could be cut
+open,--for no human hand could unfasten it,--the vessel had filled to
+the beams, and neither the master nor his wife and child were ever seen
+more. In another ship, wrecked within a cable-length of the beach, the
+mate, a man of Herculean proportions, and a skilful swimmer, stripped
+and leaped overboard, not doubting his ability to reach the shore. But
+he had failed to remark what in such circumstances is too often
+forgotten, that the element on which he flung himself, beaten into foam
+against the shallows, was, according to Mr. Bremner's shrewd definition,
+not water, but a mixture of water and air, specifically lighter than the
+human body; and so at the shore, though so close at hand, he never
+arrived, disappearing almost at the vessel's side. "The ground was
+rough," said my informant, "and the sea ran mountains high; and I can
+scarce tell you how I shuddered on finding, long ere his corpse was
+thrown up, his two eyes detached from their sockets, staring from a
+wreath of sea-weed." There is in this last circumstance, horrible enough
+surely 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 Church
+manse, which I was urged to make my home so long as I remained in that
+part of the country. A geologist, however, fairly possessed by the
+enthusiasm without which weak man can accomplish nothing,--whether he be
+a deer-stalker or mammoth-fancier, or angle for live salmon or dead
+Pterichthyes,--has a trick of forgetting the right times of dining and
+taking tea, and of throwing the burden of his bodily requirements on
+early extempore breakfasts and late suppers; and so reporting myself a
+man of irregular habits and bad hours, whose movements could not in the
+least be depended upon, I had to decline the hospitality which would
+fain have adopted me as its guest, notwithstanding the badness of the
+character that, in common honesty, I had to certify as my own. Next
+morning I breakfasted at the manse, and was introduced by Mr. Learmonth
+to two gentlemen of the place, who had been kindly invited to meet with
+me, and who, from their acquaintance with the geology of the district
+enabled me to make the best use of my time, by cutting direct on those
+cliffs and quarries in the neighborhood in which organic remains had
+been detected, instead of wearily re-discovering them for myself. There
+is a small but interesting museum in Stromness, rich in the fossils of
+the locality; and I began the geologic business of the day by devoting
+an hour to the examination of its organisms, chiefly ichthyolites. I saw
+among them several good specimens of the genus Pterichthys, and of what
+is elsewhere one of the rarer genera of the Dipterians,--the
+Diplopterus. A well-marked individual of the latter genus had, I found,
+been misnamed Dipterus by some geological visitor who had recently come
+the way,--a mistake which, as in both ichthyolites the fins are
+similarly placed, occasionally occurs, but which may be easily avoided,
+when the specimens are in a tolerable state of preservation, by taking
+note of a few well-marked characteristics by which the genera are
+distinguished. In both Dipterus and Diplopterus the bright enamel of the
+scales was thickly punctulated by microscopic points,--the exterior
+terminations of funnel-shaped openings, that communicated between the
+surface and the cells of the middle table of the scale; but the form of
+the scales themselves was different,--that of the Dipterus being nearly
+circular, and that of the Diplopterus, save on the dorsal ridge,
+rhomboidal. Again, the lateral line of the Diplopterus was a raised
+line, running as a ridge along the scales; whereas that of the Dipterus
+was a depressed one, existing as a furrow. Their heads, too, were
+covered by an entirely dissimilar arrangement of plates. The rounded
+snout-plate of the Diplopterus was suddenly contracted to nearly
+one-half its breadth by two semi-circular inflections, which formed the
+orbits of the eyes; full in the centre, a little above these, a minute,
+lozenge-shaped plate seemed as if inlaid in the larger one, the
+analogue, apparently, of the anterior frontal; and over all there
+expanded a broad plate, the superior frontal, half divided vertically by
+a line drawn downwards from the nape, which, however, stopped short in
+the middle; and fretted transversely by two small but deeply-indented
+rectangular marks, which, crossing from the central to two lateral
+plates, assumed the semblance of connecting pins. The snout of the
+Dipterus was less round; it bore no mark of the eye-orbits; and the
+frontal buckler, broader in proportion to its length than that of the
+Diplopterus, consisted of many more plates. I may here mention that the
+frontal buckler of Diplopterus has not yet been figured nor described;
+whereas that of Dipterus, though unknown as such, has been given to the
+world as the occipital covering of a supposed Cephalaspian,--the
+Polyphractus. Polyphractus is, however, in reality a synonym for
+Dipterus,--the one name being derived from a peculiarity of the animal's
+fins: the other, from the great number of its occipital plates. There is
+no science founded on mere observation that can be altogether free, in
+its earlier stages, from mistakes of this character,--mistakes to which
+the palaeontologist, however skilful, is peculiarly liable. The teeth of
+the two genera were essentially different. Those of the Dipterus,
+exclusively palatal, were blunt and squat, and ranged in two
+rectangular patches;[22] while those of the Diplopterus bristled along
+its jaws and were slender and sharp. Their tails, too, though both
+heterocercal, were diverse in their type. In each, an angular strip of
+gradually-diminishing scales,--a prolongation of the scaly coat which
+protected the body, and which covered here a prolongation of the
+vertebral column,--ran on to the extreme termination of the upper lobe;
+but there was in the Diplopterus a greatly larger development of fin on
+the superior or dorsal side of the scaly strip than on that of the
+Dipterus. If the caudal fin of the Osteolepis be divided longitudinally
+into six equal parts, it will be found that one of these occurs on the
+upper side of the vertebral prolongation, and five on the under; in the
+caudal fin of the Diplopterus so divided, rather more than _two_ parts
+will be found to occur on the upper side, and rather less than four on
+the under; while in the caudal fin of the Dipterus the development seems
+to have been restricted to the under side exclusively; at least, in none
+of the many individuals which I have examined have I found any trace of
+caudal rays on the upper side. These are minute and somewhat trivial
+particulars; but the geologist may find them of use; and the
+non-geologist may be disposed to extend to them some little degree of
+tolerance, when he considers that they distinguished two largely
+developed genera of animals, to which the Author of all did not deem it
+unworthy his wisdom to impart, in the act of creation, certain marked
+points 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 undertook
+to act as my guide on the occasion, I set out to visit a remarkable
+stack on the sea-coast, about four miles north and west of Stromness. We
+scaled together the steep granitic hill immediately over the town, and
+then cut on the stack, straight as the bird flies, across a trackless
+common, 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 undivided
+common that encircle their little estates, as the Atlantic encircles the
+Orkneys. But the state in which I found the unappropriated parts of the
+district had in no degree the effect of making me an opponent of
+appropriation or the landholders. Our country, had it been left as a
+whole to all its people, as the Communist desiderates, would ere now be
+of exceedingly little value to any portion of them. The soil of the
+Orkney commons has been so repeatedly pared off and carried away for
+fuel, that there are now wide tracts on which there is no more soil to
+pare, and which present, for the original covering of peaty mould, a
+continuous surface of pale boulder-clay, here and there mottled by
+detached tufts of scraggy heath, and here and there roughened by
+projections of the underlying rock. All is unredeemable barrenness. On
+the other hand, wherever a bit of private property appears, though in
+the immediate neighborhood of these ruined wastes, the surface is
+swarded over, and the soil is the better, not the worse, for the
+services which it has rendered to man in the past. Whatever the Chartist
+and the Leveller may think of the matter, it is, I find, virtually on
+behalf of the many that the soil has been appropriated by the few. After
+passing from off the tract of moor which overlies the granitic axis of
+the district, to a tract equally moory which spreads over the gray
+flagstones, I marked, more especially in the hollows and ravines, where
+minute springs ooze from the rock, vast quantities of bog-iron embedded
+in the soil, and presenting greatly the appearance of the scoria of a
+smith's forge. The apparent scoria here is simply a reproduction of the
+iron of the underlying flagstones, transferred, through the agency of
+water, to that stratum of vegetable mould and boulder-clay which
+represents the recent period.
+
+I found the stack which I had been brought to see forming the
+picturesque centre of a bold tract of rock scenery. It stands out from
+the land as a tall insulated tower, about two hundred feet in height,
+sorely worn at its base by the breakers that ceaselessly fret against
+its sides, but considerably broader atop, where it bears a flat cover of
+sward on the same level with the tops of the precipices which in the
+lapse of ages have receded from around it. Like the sward-crested
+hammock left by a party of laborers, to mark the depth to which they
+have cut in removing a bank or digging a pond, it remains to indicate
+how the attrition of the surf has told upon the iron-bound coast;
+demonstrating that lines of precipices hard as iron, and of giddy
+elevation, are in full retreat before the dogged perseverance of an
+assailant that, though baffled in each single attack, ever returns to
+the charge, and gains by an aggregation of infinitesimals,--the result
+of the whole. From the edge of a steep promontory that commands an
+inflection 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 by
+the setting in of the flood-tide,--as it broke, surge after surge,
+against the base of the tall dark precipices; and marked how it
+accomplished its work of disintegration. The flagstone deposit here
+abounds in vertical cracks and flaws; and in the line of each of the
+many fissures which these form the waves have opened up a cave; so that
+for hundreds of yards together the precipices seem as if founded on
+arch-divided piers, and remind one of those ancient prints or drawings
+of Old London Bridge in which a range of tall sombre buildings is
+represented as rising high over a line of arches; or of rows of lofty
+houses in those cities of southern Europe in which the dwellings
+fronting the streets are perforated beneath by lines of squat piazzas,
+and present above a dingy and windowless breadth of wall. In course of
+time the piers attenuate and give way; the undermined precipices topple
+down, parting from the solid mass behind in those vertical lines by
+which they are traversed at nearly right angles with their line of
+stratification; the perpendicular front which they had covered comes to
+be presented, in consequence, to the sea; its faults and cracks
+gradually widen into caves, as those of the fallen front had gradually
+widened at an earlier period; in the lapse of centuries, it too,
+resigning its place, topples over headlong, an undermined mass; the
+surge dashes white and furious where the dense rock had rested before;
+and thus, in its slow but irresistible march, the sea gains upon the
+land. In the peculiar disposition and character of the prevailing strata
+of Orkney, as certainly as in the power of the tides which sweep athwart
+its coasts, and the wide extent of sea which, stretching around it,
+gives the waves scope to gather bulk and momentum, may be found the
+secret of the extraordinary height to which the surf sometimes rises
+against its walls of rock. During the fiercer tempests, masses of foam
+shoot upwards against the precipices, like inverted cataracts, fully two
+hundred feet over the ordinary tide-level, and, washing away the looser
+soil 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 project
+upwards bodies of surf to a height so extraordinary. But the low angle
+at which the strata lie, and the rectangularity maintained in relation
+to their line of bed by the fissures which traverse them, give to the
+Orkney precipices,--remarkable for their perpendicularity and their
+mural aspect,--exactly the angle against which the waves, as broken
+masses of foam, beat up to their greatest possible altitude. On a tract
+of iron-bound coast that skirts the entrance of the Cromarty Frith I
+have seen the surf rise, during violent gales from the north-west
+especially, against one rectangular rock, known as the White Rock, fully
+an hundred feet; while against scarcely any of the other precipices,
+more sloping, though equally exposed, did it rise more than half that
+height.
+
+
+
+
+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-aerial 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 gradually
+descending from higher to lower ranges of prepices, and ever and anon
+detecting ichthyolite beds in the weathered and partially decomposed
+strata. As the rock moulders into an incoherent clay, the fossils which
+it envelops become not unfrequently wholly detached from it, so that, on
+a smart blow dealt by the hammer, they leap out entire, resembling, from
+the degree of compression which they exhibit, those mimic fishes carved
+out of plates of ivory or of mother-of-pearl, which are used as counters
+in some of the games of China or the East Indies. The material of which
+they are composed, a brittle jet, though better suited than the stone to
+resist the disintegrating influences, is in most cases greatly too
+fragile for preservation. One may, however, acquire from the fragments a
+knowledge of certain minute points in the structure of the ancient
+animals to which they belonged, respecting which specimens of a more
+robust texture give no evidence. The plates of Coccosteus sometimes
+spring out as unbroken as when they covered the living animal, and, if
+the necessary skill be not wanting, may be set up in their original
+order. And I possess specimens of the head of Dipterus in which the
+nearly circular gill-covers may be examined on both surfaces, interior
+and exterior, and in which the cranial portion shows not only the
+enamelled plates of the frontal buckler, but also the strange mechanism
+of the palatal teeth, with the intervening cavities that had lodged both
+the brain and the occipital part of the spine. The fossils on the top of
+the 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 extensive
+slate-quarries had once been wrought, the remains of Pterichthys
+existing as mere patches, from which the color had been discharged, but
+in which the almost human-like outline of both body and arms were still
+distinctly traceable; and farther on still, where the steep wall of
+cliffs sinks into a line of grassy banks, I saw in yet another quarry,
+ichthyolites of all the three great ganoid families so characteristic of
+the Old Red,--Cephalaspians, Dipterians, and Acanthodians,--ranged in
+the three-storied order to which I have already referred as so
+inexplicable. The specimens, however, though numerous, are not fine.
+They are resolved into a brittle bituminous coal, resembling hard pitch
+or black wax, which is always considerably less tenacious than the
+matrix in which they are inclosed; and so, when laid open by the hammer,
+they usually split through the middle of the plates and scales, instead
+of parting from the stone at their surfaces, and resemble, in
+consequence, those dark, shadow-like profiles taken in Indian ink by the
+limner, which exhibit a correct outline, but no details. We find,
+however, in some of the genera, portions of the animal preserved that
+are rarely seen in a state of keeping equally perfect in the
+ichthyolites of Cromarty, Moray, or Banff,--those terminal bones of the
+Coccosteos, for instance, that were prolonged beyond the plates by which
+the head and upper parts of the body were covered. Wherever the
+ichthyolites are inclosed in nodules, as in the more southerly counties
+over which the deposit extends, the nodule terminates, in almost every
+case, with the massier portions of the organism; for the thinner parts,
+too inconsiderable to have served as attractive nuclei to the stony
+matter when the concretion was forming, were left outside its pale, and
+so have been lost; whereas, in the northern districts of the deposit,
+where the fossils, as in Caithness and Orkney, occur in flagstone, these
+slimmer parts, when the general state of keeping is tolerably good, lie
+spread out on the planes of the slabs, entire often in their minutest
+rays and articulations. The numerous Coccostei of this quarry exhibit,
+attached to their upper plates, their long vertebral columns, of many
+joints, that, depending from the broad dorsal shields of the
+ichthyolite, remind one of those skeleton fishes one sometimes sees on
+the 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 of
+the Old Red Sandstone possessed an internal skeleton so decidedly
+osseous as that of the Coccosteus, and none of them presented externally
+so large an extent of naked skin,--provisions which probably went
+together. For about three-fifths of the entire length of the animal the
+surface was unprotected by dermal plates; and the muscles must have
+found the fulcrums on which they acted in the internal skeleton
+exclusively. And hence a necessity for greater strength in their
+interior framework than in that of fishes as strongly fenced round
+externally by scales or plates as the coleoptera by their elytrine, or
+the crustacea by their shells. Even in the Coccosteus, however, the
+ossification was by no means complete; and the analogies of the skeleton
+seem to have allied it rather with the skeletons of the sturgeon family
+than with the skeletons of the sharks or rays. The processes of the
+vertebrae were greatly more solid in their substance than the vertebrae
+themselves,--a condition which in the sharks and rays is always
+reversed; and they frequently survive, each with its little sprig of
+bone, formed like the letter Y, that attached it to its centrum,
+projecting from it, in specimens from which the vertebral column itself
+has wholly disappeared. I found frequent traces, during my exploratory
+labors in Orkney, of the dorsal and ventral fins of this ichthyolite;
+but no trace whatever of the pectorals or of the caudal fin. There seem
+to have been no pectorals; and the tail, as I have always had occasion
+to remark, was apparently a mere point, unfurnished with rays.
+
+In descending from the cliffs upon the quarries, my companion pointed to
+an angular notch in the rock-edge, apparently the upper termination of
+one of the numerous vertical cracks by which the precipices are
+traversed, and which in so many cases on the Orkney coast have been
+hollowed by the waves into long open coves or deep caverns. It was up
+there, he said, that about twelve years ago the sole survivor of a
+ship's crew contrived to scramble, four days after his vessel had been
+dashed to fragments against the rocks below, and when it was judged that
+all on board had perished. The vessel was wrecked on a Wednesday. She
+had 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 seen
+from the beach that she could scarce weather the headland yonder, a
+number of people gathered along the cliffs, furnished with ropes, to
+render to the crew whatever assistance might be possible in the
+circumstances. Human help, however, was to avail them nothing. Their
+vessel, a fine schooner, when within forty yards of the promontory, was
+seized broadside by an enormous wave, and dashed against the cliff, as
+one might dash a glass-phial against a stone-wall. One blow completed
+the work of destruction; she went rolling in entire from keel to
+mast-head, and returned, on the recoil of the broken surge, a mass of
+shapeless fragments, that continued to dance idly amid the foam, or were
+scattered along the beach. But of the poor men, whom the spectators had
+seen but a few seconds before running wildly about the deck, there
+remained not a trace; and the saddened spectators returned to their
+homes to say that all had perished. Four days after,--on the morning of
+the following Sabbath,--the sole survivor of the crew, saved, as if by
+miracle, climbed up the precipice, and presented himself to a group of
+astonished and terrified country people, who could scarce regard him as
+a creature of this world. The fissure, which at the top of the cliff
+forms but a mere angular inflection, is hollowed below into a low-roofed
+cave of profound depth, into the farther extremity of which the tide
+hardly ever penetrates. It is floored by a narrow strip of shingly
+beach; and on this bit of beach, far within the cave, the sailor found
+himself, 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; a
+tin cover enabled him to catch enough of the fresh-water droppings of
+the roof to quench his thirst; several large fragments of wreck that had
+been jammed fast athwart the opening of the cave broke the violence of
+the wind and sea; and in that doleful prison, day after day, he saw the
+tides sink and rise, and lay, when the surf rolled high at the fall of
+the tide, in utter darkness even at mid-day, as the waves outside rose
+to the roof, and inclosed him in a chamber as entirely cut off from the
+external atmosphere as that of a diving bell. He was oppressed in the
+darkness, every time the waves came rolling in and compressed his
+modicum of air, by a sensation of extreme heat,--an effect of the
+condensation; and then, in the interval of recession, and consequent
+expansion, by a sudden chill. At low ebb he had to work hard in clearing
+away the accumulations of stone and gravel which had been rolled in by
+the previous tide, and threatened to bury him up altogether. At length
+he succeeded, after many a fruitless attempt, in gaining an upper ledge
+that overhung his prison-mouth; and, by a path on which a goat would
+scarce have found footing, he scrambled to the top. His name was
+Johnstone; and the cave is still known as "Johnstone's Cave." Such was
+the 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 of
+indurated sand, and topped by a picturesque ruin, that forms a pleasing
+object in the landscape. The ruin is that of a country residence of the
+bishops of Orkney during the disturbed and unhappy reign of Scotch
+Episcopacy, and bears on a flat tablet of weathered sandstone the
+initials of its founder, Bishop George Grahame, and the date of its
+erection, 1633. With a green cultivated oasis immediately around it, and
+a fine open sound, overlooked by the bold, picturesque cliffs of Hoy, in
+front, it must have been, for at least half the year, an agreeable, and,
+as its remains testify, a not uncomfortable habitation. But I greatly
+fear Scottish clergymen of the Establishment, whether Presbyterian or
+Episcopalian, when obnoxious, from their position or their tenets, to
+the great bulk of the Scottish people, have not been left, since at
+least the Reformation, to enjoy either quiet or happy lives, however
+extrinsically favorable the circumstances in which they may have been
+placed. Bishop Grahame, only five years after the date of the erection,
+was tried before the famous General Assembly of 1638; and, being
+convicted of having "all the ordinar faults of a bishop," he was
+deposed, and ordered within a limited time "to give tokens of
+repentance, under paine of excommunication." "He was a curler on the ice
+on the Sabbath day," says Baillie,--"a setter of tacks to his sones and
+grandsones, to the prejudice of the Church; he oversaw adulterie;
+slighted charming; neglected preaching and doing of anie good; and held
+portions of ministers' stipends for building his cathedral." The
+concluding portion of his life, after his deposition, was spent in
+obscurity; nor did his successor in the bishoprick, subsequent to the
+reestablishment of Episcopacy at the Restoration,--Bishop
+Honeyman,--close his days more happily. He was struck in the arm by the
+bullet which the zealot Mitchell had intended for Archbishop Sharp; and
+the shattered bone never healed; "for, though he lived some years
+after," says Burnet, "_they_ were forced to lay open the wound every
+year, for an exfoliation;" and his life was eventually shortened by his
+sufferings. All seemed comfortable enough, and quite quiet enough, in
+the bishop's country-house to-day. There were two cows quietly chewing
+the cud in what apparently had been the dignitary's sitting-room, and
+patiently awaiting the services of a young woman who was approaching at
+some little distance with a pail. A large gray cat, that had been
+sunning herself in a sheltered corner of the court-yard, started up at
+our approach, and disappeared through a slit hole. The sun, now gone far
+down the sky, shone brightly on shattered gable-tops, and roofless,
+rough-edged walls, revealing many a flaw and chasm in the yielding
+masonry; and their shadows fell with picturesque effect on the loose
+litter, rude implements, and gapped dry-stone fence, of the neglected
+farm-yard which surrounds the building.
+
+I have said that the flat promontory occupied by the ruin is edged by
+hills of indurated sand. Existing in some places as a continuous bed of
+a soft gritty sandstone, scooped wave-like a-top, and varying from five
+to eight feet in thickness, they form a curious example of a sub-aerial
+formation,--the sand of which they are composed having been all blown
+from the sea-beach, and consolidated by the action of moisture on a
+calcareous mixture of comminuted shells, which forms from twenty to
+twenty-five per cent. of their entire mass. I found that the sections of
+the bed laid open by the encroachments of the sea, were scarce less
+regularly stratified than those of a subaqueous deposit, and that it was
+hollowed, where most exposed to the weather, into a number of spherical
+cells, which gave to those parts of the surface where they lay thickest,
+somewhat the aspect of a rude Runic fret-work,--an appearance not
+uncommon in weathered sandstones. With more time to spare, I could fain
+have studied the deposit more carefully, in the hope of detecting a few
+peculiarities of structure sufficient to distinguish sub-aerially-formed
+from subaqueously-deposited beds of stone. Sandstones of sub-aerial
+formation are of no very unfrequent occurrence among the recent
+deposits. On the coast of Cornwall there are cliffs of considerable
+height that extend for several miles, and have attained a degree of
+solidity sufficient to serve the commoner purposes of the architect,
+which at one time existed as accumulations of blown sand. "It is around
+the promontory of New Kaye," says Dr. Paris, in an interesting memoir on
+the subject, "that the most extensive formation of sandstone takes
+place. Here it may be seen in different stages of induration, from a
+state in which it is too friable to be detached from the rock upon which
+it reposes, to a hardness so considerable, that it requires a violent
+blow from a sledge-hammer to break it. Buildings are here constructed of
+it; the church of Cranstock is entirely built with it; and it is also
+employed for various articles of domestic and agricultural uses. The
+geologist who has previously examined the celebrated specimen from
+Guadaloupe will be struck with the great analogy which it bears to this
+formation." Now, as vast tracts of the earth's surface,--in some parts
+of the world, as in Northern Africa, millions of square miles
+together,--are at present overlaid by accumulations of sand, which have
+this tendency to consolidate and become lasting sub-aerial formations,
+destined to occupy a place among the future strata of the globe, it
+seems impossible but that also in the old geologic periods there must
+have been, as now, sand-wastes and sub-aerial formations. And as the
+representatives of these may still exist in some of our sandstone
+quarries, it might be well to be possessed of a knowledge of the
+peculiarities by which they are to be distinguished from deposits of
+subaqueous origin. In order that I might have an opportunity of studying
+these peculiarities where they are to be seen more extensively developed
+than elsewhere on the eastern coast of Scotland, I here formed the
+intention of spending a day, on my return south, among the sand-wastes
+of Moray,--a purpose which I afterwards carried into effect. But of that
+more anon.
+
+On the following morning, availing myself of a kind invitation, through
+Dr. Garson, from his brother, a Free Church minister resident in an
+inland district of the Mainland, in convenient neighborhood with the
+northern coasts of the island, and with several quarries, I set out
+from Stromness, taking in my way the Loch and Standing Stones of
+Stennis, which I had previously seen from but my seat in the mail-gig as
+I passed. Mr. Learmonth, who had to visit some of his people in this
+direction, accompanied me for several miles along the shores of the
+loch, and lightened the journey by his interesting snatches of local
+history, suggested by the various objects that lay along our
+road,--buildings, tumuli, ancient battle-fields, and standing stones.
+The loch itself, an expansive sheet of water fourteen miles in
+circumference, I contemplated with much interest, and longed for an
+opportunity of studying its natural history. Two promontories,--those
+occupied by the Standing Stones, shoot out from the opposite sides, and
+approach so near as to be connected by a rustic bridge. They divide the
+loch into two nearly equal parts, the lower of which gives access to the
+sea, and is salt in its nether reaches and brackish in its upper ones,
+while the higher is merely brackish in its nether reaches, and fresh
+enough 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 few
+miles, from where the lower loch opens to the sea, of only marine
+plants, 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 having
+each their own reaches, with certain debatable tracts between, in which
+each expatiates with more or less freedom, according to its nature and
+constitution,--some of the sea-fishes advancing far on the fresh water,
+and others, among the proper denizens of the lake, encroaching far on
+the salt. The common fresh-water eel strikes out, I was told, farthest
+into the sea-water; in which, indeed, reversing the habits of the
+salmon, 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 to
+resist 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 the
+Loch of Stennis and its productions, animal and vegetable, such as a
+Gilbert White of Selborne could produce, would be at once a very
+valuable and very curious document. By dividing it into reaches, in
+which the average saltness of the water was carefully ascertained, and
+its productions noted, with the various modifications which these
+underwent as they receded upwards or downwards from their proper habitat
+towards the line at which they could no longer exist, much information
+might be acquired, of a kind important to the naturalist, and not
+without its use to the geological student. I have had an opportunity
+elsewhere of observing a curious change which fresh-water induces on the
+flounder. In the brackish water of an estuary it becomes, without
+diminishing in general size, thicker and more fleshy than when in its
+legitimate habitat the sea; but the flesh loses in quality what it gains
+in quantity;--it is flabby and insipid, and the margin-fin lacks always
+its delicious strip of transparent fat. I fain wish that some
+intelligent resident on the shores of Stennis would set himself
+carefully to examine its productions, and that then, after registering
+his observations for a few years, he would favor the world with its
+natural history.
+
+The Standing Stones,--second in Britain of their kind, to only those of
+Stonehenge,--occur in two groups; the smaller group (composed, however,
+of the taller stones) on the southern promontory; the larger on the
+northern one. Rude and shapeless, and bearing no other impress of the
+designing faculty than that they are stuck endwise in the earth, and
+form, as a whole, regular figures on the sward, there is yet a sublime
+solemnity about them, unsurpassed in effect by any ruin I have yet seen,
+however grand in its design or imposing in its proportions. Their very
+rudeness, associated with their ponderous bulk and weight, adds to their
+impressiveness. When there is art and taste enough in a country to hew
+an ornate column, no one marvels that there should also be mechanical
+skill enough in it to set it up on end; but the men who tore from the
+quarry these vast slabs, some of them eighteen feet in height over the
+soil, and raised them where they now stand, must have been ignorant
+savages, unacquainted with machinery, and unfurnished, apparently, with
+a single tool. And what, when contemplating their handiwork, we have to
+subtract in idea from their minds, we add, by an involuntary process, to
+their bodies: we come to regard the feats which they have accomplished
+as performed by a power not mechanical, but gigantic. The consideration,
+too, that these remains,--eldest of the works of man in this
+country,--should have so long survived all definite tradition of the
+purposes which they were raised to serve, so that we now merely know
+regarding them that they were religious in their uses,--products of that
+ineradicable instinct of man's nature which leads him in so many various
+ways to attempt conciliating the Powers of another world,--serves
+greatly to heighten their effect. History at the time of their erection
+had no existence in these islands: the age, though it sought, through
+the medium of strange, unknown rites, to communicate with Heaven, was
+not knowing enough to communicate, through the medium of alphabet or
+symbol, with posterity. The appearance of the obelisks, too, harmonizes
+well with their great antiquity and the obscurity of their origin. For
+about a man's height from the ground they are covered thick by the
+shorter lichens,--chiefly the gray-stone parmelia,--here and there
+embroidered by golden-hued patches of the yellow parmelia of the wall;
+but their heads and shoulders, raised beyond the reach alike of the
+herd-boy and of his herd, are covered by an extraordinary profusion of a
+flowing beard-like lichen of unusual length,--the lichen _calicarus_
+(or, according to modern botanists, _Ramalina scopulorum_), in which
+they look like an assemblage of ancient Druids, mysteriously stern and
+invincibly 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 Stones
+to the best possible advantage. They could not be better placed than on
+their flat promontories, surrounded by the broad plane of an extensive
+lake, in a waste, lonely, treeless country, that presents no bold,
+competing features to divert attention from them as the great central
+objects of the landscape; but the gray of the morning, or an atmosphere
+of fog and vapor, would have associated better with the mystic obscurity
+of their history, their shaggy forms, and their livid tints, than the
+glare of a cloudless sun, that brought out in hard, clear relief their
+rude outlines, and gave to each its sharp dark patch of shadow.
+Gray-colored objects, when tall and imposing, but of irregular form, are
+seen always to most advantage in an uncertain light,--in fog or
+frost-rime, or under a scowling sky, or, as Parnell well expresses it,
+"amid the living gleams of night." They appeal, if I may so express
+myself, to the sentiment of the ghostly and the spectral, and demand at
+least a partial envelopment of the obscure. Burns, with the true tact of
+the genuine poet, develops the sentiment almost instinctively in an
+exquisite 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 morning
+as the time in which to exhibit them, when they "stood in the gray light
+of the dawning, like the phantom forms of antediluvian giants, who,
+shrouded in the habiliments of the dead, come to revisit, by the pale
+light, the earth which they had plagued with their oppression, and
+polluted by their sins, till they brought down upon it the vengeance of
+long-suffering heaven." On another occasion, he introduces them as
+"glimmering, a grayish white, in the rising sun, and projecting far to
+the westward their long gigantic shadows." And Malcolm, in the exercise
+of a similar faculty with that of Burns and of Scott, surrounds them, in
+his description, with a somewhat similar atmosphere of partial dimness
+and 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 and
+the more immature periods of life,--between the savage and the child;
+and the huge circle of Stennis seems suggestive of one of these. It is
+considerably more than four hundred feet in diameter, and the stones
+which compose it, varying from three to fourteen feet in height, must
+have been originally from thirty-five to forty in number, though only
+sixteen now remain erect. A mound and fosse, still distinctly
+traceable, run round the whole; and there are several mysterious-looking
+tumuli outside, bulky enough to remind one of the lesser morains of the
+geologist. But the circle, notwithstanding its imposing magnitude, is
+but a huge child's house, after all,--one of those circles of stones
+which children lay down on their village green, and then, in the
+exercise of that imaginative faculty which distinguishes between the
+young of the human animal and those of every other creature, convert, by
+a sort of conventionalism, into a church or dwelling-house, within which
+they 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 the
+southern promontory of the lake formed but a half-circle, and it was a
+half-circle dedicated to the moon. To the circular sun the great rude
+children of an immature age of the world had laid down a circle of
+stones on the one promontory; to the moon, in her half-orbed state, they
+had laid down a half-circle on the other; and in propitiating these
+material deities, to whose standing in the old Scandinavian worship the
+names of our _Sun_day and _Mon_day still testify, they employed in their
+respective inclosures, in the exercise of a wild unregulated fancy,
+uncouth irrational rites, the extremeness of whose folly was in some
+measure concealed by the horrid exquisiteness of their cruelty. We are
+still in the nonage of the species, and see human society sowing its
+wild oats in a thousand various ways, very absurdly often, and often
+very wickedly; but matters seem to have been greatly worse when, in an
+age still more immature, the grimly-bearded, six-feet children of Orkney
+were laying down their stone-circles on the green. Sir Walter, in the
+parting scene between Cleveland and Minna Troil, which he describes as
+having taken place amid the lesser group of stones, refers to an immense
+slab "lying flat and prostrate in the middle of the others, supported
+by short pillars, of which some relics are still visible," and which is
+regarded as the sacrificial stone of the erection. "It is a current
+belief," says Dr. Hibbert, in an elaborate paper in the "Transactions of
+the Scottish Antiquaries," that upon this stone a victim of royal birth
+was immolated. Halfdan the Long-legged, the son of Harold the
+Fair-haired, in punishment for the aggressions of Orkney, had made an
+unexpected descent upon its coasts, and acquired possession of the
+Jarldom. In the autumn succeeding Halfdan was retorted upon, and, after
+an inglorious contest, betook himself to a place of concealment, from
+which he was the following morning unlodged, and instantly doomed to the
+Asae. Einar, the Jarl of Orkney, with his sword carved the captive's back
+into the form of an eagle, the spine being longitudinally divided, and
+the ribs being separated by a transverse cut as far as the loins. He
+then extracted the lungs, and dedicated them to Odin for a perpetuity of
+victory, singing a wild song,--'I am revenged for the slaughter of
+Rognvalld: this have the Nornae decreed. In my fiording the pillar of the
+people has fallen. Build up the cairn, ye active youths, for victory is
+with us. From the stones of the sea-shore will I pay the Long-legged a
+hard seat.' There is certainly no trace to be detected, in this dark
+story, of a golden age of the world: the golden age is, I would fain
+hope, an age yet to come. There at least exists no evidence that it is
+an age gone by. It will be the full-grown _manly_ age of the world when
+the race, as such, shall have attained to their years of discretion.
+They are at present in their froward boyhood, playing at the mischievous
+games of war, and diplomacy, and stock-gambling, and site-refusing, and
+it is not quite agreeable for quiet honest people to be living amongst
+them. But there would be nothing gained by going back to that more
+infantine state of society in which the Jarl Einar carved into a red
+eagle 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 now
+insisted that I should mount and ride in turn, while he walked by my
+side, that I might be fresh, he said, for the exploratory ramble of the
+evening. I could have ventured more readily on taking the command of a
+vessel 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 very
+much his own way, got upon honor with me, and exerted himself to such
+purpose that we did not fall greatly more than a hundred yards behind
+Mr. Garson. We traversed in our journey a long dreary moor, so entirely
+ruined, like those which I had seen on the previous day, by belonging to
+everybody in general, as to be no longer of the slightest use to anybody
+in particular. The soil seems to have been naturally poor; but it must
+have taken a good deal of spoiling to render it the sterile, verdureless
+waste it is now; for even where it had been poorest, I found that in the
+island-like appropriated patches by which it is studded, it at least
+bears, what it has long ceased to bear elsewhere, a continuous covering
+of green sward. But if disposed to quarrel with the commons of Orkney, I
+found in close neighborhood with them that with which I could have no
+quarrel,--numerous small properties farmed by the proprietors, and
+forming, in most instances, farms by no means very large. There are
+parishes in this part of the mainland divided among from sixty to eighty
+landowners.
+
+A nearly similar state of things seems to have obtained in Scotland
+about the beginning of the eighteenth century, and for the greater part
+of the previous one. I am acquainted with old churchyards in the north
+of Scotland that contain the burying-grounds of from six to ten landed
+proprietors, whose lands are now merged into single properties. And, in
+reading the biographies of our old covenanting ministers, I have often
+remarked as curious, and as bearing in the same line, that no
+inconsiderable proportion of their number were able to retire, in times
+of persecution, to their own little estates. It was during the
+disastrous wars of the French Revolution,--wars from the effects of
+which Great Britain will, I fear, never fully recover,--that the smaller
+holdings were finally absorbed. About twenty years ere the war began,
+the lands of England were parcelled out among no fewer than two hundred
+and fifty thousand families; before the peace of 1815, they had fallen
+into the hands of thirty-two thousand. In less than half a century, that
+base of actual proprietorship on which the landed interest of any
+country must ever find its surest standing, had contracted in England to
+less than one-seventh its former extent. In Scotland the absorption of
+the great bulk of the lesser properties seems to have taken place
+somewhat earlier; but in it also the revolutionary war appears to have
+given them the final blow; and the more extensive proprietors of the
+kingdom are assuredly all the less secure in consequence of their
+extinction. They were the smaller stones in the wall, that gave firmness
+in the setting to the larger, and jammed them fast within those safe
+limits determined by the line and plummet, which it is ever perilous to
+overhang. Very extensive territorial properties, wherever they exist,
+create almost necessarily--human nature being what it is--a species of
+despotism more oppressive than even that of great unrepresentative
+governments. It used to be remarked on the Continent, that there was
+always less liberty in petty principalities, where the eye of the ruler
+was ever on his subjects, than under the absolute monarchies.[23] And in
+a country such as ours, the accumulation of landed property in the hands
+of comparatively a few individuals has the effect often of bringing the
+territorial privileges of the great landowner into a state of
+antagonism with the civil and religious rights of the people, that
+cannot be other than perilous to the landowner himself. In a district
+divided, like Orkney, among many owners, a whole country-side could not
+be shut up against its people by some ungenerous or intolerant
+proprietor,--greatly at his own risk and to his own hurt,--as in the
+case of Glen Tilt or the Grampians; nor, when met for purposes of public
+worship, could the population of a parish be chased from off its bare
+moors, at his instance, by the constable or the sheriff-officer, to
+worship God agreeably to their consciences amid the mire of a
+cross-road, or on the bare sea-beach uncovered by the ebb of the tide.
+The smaller properties of the country, too, served admirably as
+stepping-stones, by which the proprietors or their children, when
+possessed of energy and intellect, could mount to a higher walk of
+society. Here beside me, for instance, was my friend Mr. Garson, a
+useful and much-esteemed minister of religion in his native district;
+while his brother, a medical man of superior parts, was fast rising into
+extensive practice in the neighboring town. They had been prepared for
+their respective professions by a classical education; and yet the
+stepping-stone to positions in society at once so important and so
+respectable was simply one of the smaller holdings of Orkney, derived to
+them as the descendants of one of the old Scandinavian Udallers, and
+which fell short, I was informed, of a hundred a-year.
+
+Mr. Garson's dwelling, to which I was welcomed with much hospitality by
+his mother and sisters, occupies the middle of an inclined hollow or
+basin, so entirely surrounded by low, moory hills, that at no
+point,--though the radius of the prospect averages from four to six
+miles,--does it command a view of the sea. I scarce expected being
+introduced in Orkney to a scene in which the traveller could so
+thoroughly 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, who
+pride themselves upon their skill as sailors and boatmen, as a race of
+lubberly landsmen, unacquainted with nautical matters, and ignorant of
+the ocean and its productions. A Harray man is represented, in one of
+their stories, as entering into a compact of mutual forbearance with a
+lobster,--to him a monster of unknown powers and formidable
+proportions,--which he had at first attempted to capture, but which had
+shown fight, and had nearly captured him in turn. "Weel, weel, let a-be
+for let a-be," he is made to say; "if thou does na clutch me in thy
+grips, I'se no clutch thee in mine." It is to this primitive parish that
+David Vedder, the sailor-poet of Orkney, refers, in his "Orcadian
+Sketches," as "celebrated over the whole archipelago for the
+peculiarities of its inhabitants, their singular manners and habits,
+their uncouth appearance, and homely address. Being the most landward
+district in Pomona," he adds, "and consequently having little
+intercourse with strangers, it has become the stronghold of many ancient
+customs and superstitions, which modern innovation has pushed off from
+their pedestals in almost all the other parts of the island. The
+permanency of its population, too, is mightily in favor of 'old use and
+wont,' as it is almost entirely divided amongst a class of men yelept
+_pickie_, or petty lairds, each ploughing his own fields and reaping his
+own crops, much in the manner their great-great-grandfathers did in the
+days of Earl Patrick. And such is the respect which they entertain for
+their hereditary beliefs, that many of them are said still to cast a
+lingering look, not unmixed with reverence, on certain spots held sacred
+by their Scandinavian ancestors."
+
+After an early dinner I set out for the barony of Birsay, in the
+northern extremity of the mainland, accompanied by Mr. Garson, and
+passed for several miles over a somewhat dreary country, bare, sterile,
+and brown, studded by cold, broad, treeless lakes, and thinly mottled by
+groups of gray, diminutive cottages, that do not look as if there was
+much of either plenty or comfort inside. But after surmounting the hills
+that form the northern side of the interior basin, I was sensible of a
+sudden improvement on the face of the country. Where the land slopes
+towards the sea, the shaggy heath gives place to a green luxuriant
+herbage; and the frequent patches of corn seem to rejoice in a more
+genial soil. The lower slopes of Orkney are singularly rich in wild
+flowers,--richer by many degrees than the fat loamy meadows of England.
+They resemble gaudy pieces of carpeting, as abundant in petals as in
+leaves: their luxuriant blow of red and white, blue and yellow, seems as
+if competing, in the extent of surface which it occupies, with their
+general ground of green. I have remarked a somewhat similar luxuriance
+of wild flowers in the more sheltered hollows of the bleak north-western
+coasts of Scotland. There is little that is rare to be found among these
+last, save that a few Alpine plants may be here and there recognized as
+occurring at a lower level than elsewhere in Britain; but the vast
+profusion of blossoms borne by species common to the greater part of the
+kingdom imparts to them an apparently novel character. We may detect, I
+am inclined to think, in this singular profusion, both in Orkney and the
+bleaker districts of the mainland of Scotland, the operation of a law
+not less influential in the animal than in the vegetable world, which,
+when hardship presses upon the life of the individual shrub or
+quadruped, so as to threaten its vitality, renders it fruitful in behalf
+of its species. I have seen the principle strikingly exemplified in the
+common tobacco plant, when reared in a northern country in the open air.
+Year after year it continued to degenerate, and to exhibit a smaller
+leaf and a shorter stem, until the successors of what in the first year
+of 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, had
+merely borne a-top a few florets, which produced a small quantity of
+exceedingly minute seeds, the stunted weed, its descendant, was so
+thickly covered over in its season with its pale yellow bells, as to
+present the appearance of a nosegay; and the seeds produced were not
+only bulkier in the mass, but also individually of much greater size.
+The tobacco had grown productive in proportion as it had degenerated and
+become poor. In the common scurvy grass, too, remarkable, with some
+other plants, as I have already had occasion to mention, for taking its
+place among both the productions of our Alpine heights and of our
+sea-shores, it will be found that in proportion as its habitat proves
+ungenial, and its stems and leaves become dwarfish and thin, its little
+white cruciform flowers increase, till, in localities where it barely
+exists, as if on the edge of extinction, we find the entire plant
+forming a dense bundle of seed-vessels, each charged to the full with
+seed. And in the gay meadows of Orkney, crowded with a vegetation that
+approaches its northern limit of production, we detect what seems to be
+the same principle, chronically operative; and hence, it would seem,
+their extraordinary gaiety. Their richly-blossoming plants are the poor
+productive _Irish_ of the vegetable world;[24] for Doubleday seems to
+be quite in the right in holding that the law extends to not only the
+inferior animals, but to our own species also. The lean, ill-fed sow and
+rabbit rear, it has been long known, a greatly more numerous progeny
+than the same animals when well cared for and fat; and every horse and
+cattle breeder knows, that to over-feed his animals proves a sure mode
+of rendering them sterile. The sheep, if tolerably well pastured,
+brings forth only a single lamb at a birth; but if half-starved and
+lean, the chances are that it may bring forth two or three. And so it is
+also with the greatly higher human race. Place them in circumstances of
+degradation and hardship so extreme as almost to threaten their
+existence as individuals, and they increase, as if in behalf of the
+species, with a rapidity without precedent in circumstances of greater
+comfort. The aristocratic families of a country are continually running
+out; and it requires frequent creations to keep up the House of Lords;
+while our poor people seem increasing in some districts in almost the
+mathematical ratio. The county of Sutherland is already more populous
+than it was previous to the great clearings. In Skye, though fully
+two-thirds of the population emigrated early in the latter half of the
+last century, a single generation had scarce passed ere the gap was
+completely filled; and miserable Ireland, had the human family no other
+breeding-place or nursery, would of itself be sufficient in a very few
+ages to people the world.
+
+We returned, taking in our way the cliffs of Marwick Head, in which I
+detected a few scattered plates and scales, and which, like nine-tenths
+of the rocks of Orkney, belong to the great flagstone division of the
+formation. I found the dry-stone fences on Mr. Garson's property still
+richer in detached fossil fragments than the cliffs; but there are few
+erections in the island that do not inclose in their walls portions of
+the organic. We find ichthyolite remains in the flagstones laid bare
+along the way-side,--in every heap of road-metal,--in the bottom of
+every stream,--in almost every cottage and fence. Orkney is a land of
+defunct fishes, and contains in its rocky folds more individuals of the
+waning 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 a
+delectable night's rest, after a day of prime exercise, prolonged till
+it just touched on toil, and again experienced, on looking out in the
+morning on the wide flat basin around, a feeling somewhat akin to
+wonder, that Orkney should possess a scene at once so extensive and so
+exclusively inland.
+
+Towards mid-day I walked on to the parish manse of Sandwick, armed with
+a letter of introduction to its inmate, the Rev. Charles Clouston,--a
+gentleman whose descriptions of the Orkneys, in the very complete and
+tastefully written Guide-Book of the Messrs. Anderson of Inverness, and
+of his own parish in the "Statistical Account of Scotland," had, both
+from the high literary ability and the amount of scientific acquirement
+which they exhibit, rendered me desirous to see. I was politely
+received, though my visit must have been, as I afterwards ascertained,
+at a rather inconvenient time. It was now late in the week, and the
+coming Sabbath was that of the communion in the parish; but Mr. Clouston
+obligingly devoted to me at least an hour, and I found it a very
+profitable one. He showed me a collection of flags, with which he
+intended constructing a grotto, and which contained numerous specimens
+of Coccosteus, that he had exposed to the weather, to bring out the fine
+blue efflorescence,--a phosphate of iron which forms on the surface of
+the plates. They reminded me, from their peculiar style of coloring, and
+the grotesqueness of their forms, of the blue figuring on pieces of
+buff-colored china, and seemed to be chiefly of one species, very
+abundant in Orkney, the _Coccosteus decipiens_. We next walked out to
+see a quarry in the neighborhood of the manse, remarkable for containing
+in immense abundance the heads of Dipteri,--many of them in a good state
+of keeping, with all the multitudinous plates to which they owe their
+pseudo-name, Polyphractus, in their original places, and bearing unworn
+and untarnished their minute carvings and delicate enamel, but existing
+in every case as mere detached heads. I found three of them lying in one
+little slaty fragment of two and a half inches by four, which I brought
+along with me. Mr. Clouston had never seen the curious arrangement of
+palatal plates and teeth which distinguishes the Dipterus; and, drawing
+his attention to it in an ill-preserved specimen which I found in the
+coping of his glebe-wall, I restored, in a rude pencil sketch, the two
+angular patches of teeth that radiate from the elegant dart-head in the
+centre of the palate, with the rhomboidal plate behind. "We have a fish,
+not uncommon on the rocky coasts of this part of the country," he
+said,--"the Bergil or Striped Wrasse (_Labras Balanus_),--which bears
+exactly such patches of angular teeth in its palate. They adhere
+strongly together; and, when found in our old Picts' houses, which
+occasionally happens, they have been regarded by some of our local
+antiquaries 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 show
+you one disinterred here some years ago." It interested me to find, from
+Mr. Clouston's specimens that the palatal grinders of this recent fish
+of Orkney very nearly resemble those of its _Dipterus_ of the Old Red
+Sandstone. The group is of nearly the same size in the modern as in the
+ancient fish, and presents the same angular form; but the individual
+teeth are more strongly set in the Bergil than in the Dipterus, and
+radiate less regularly from the inner rectangular point of the angle to
+its base outside. I could fain have procured an Orkney Bergil, in order
+to determine the general pattern of its palatal dentition with what is
+very peculiar in the more ancient fish,--the form of the lower jaw; and
+to ascertain farther, from the contents of the stomach, the species of
+shell-fish or crustaceans on which it feeds; but, though by no means
+rare 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 palaeontological
+inquiries on the vegetable remains of the flagstones, as the department
+of the science in which, in relation to Orkney, most remained to be
+done; and his collection of these is the most considerable in the number
+of its specimens that I have yet seen. It, however, serves but to show
+how very extreme is the poverty of the flora of the Lower Old Red
+Sandstone. The numerous fishes of the period seem to have inhabited a
+sea little more various in its vegetation than in its molluscs. Among
+the specimens of Mr. Clouston's collection I could detect but two
+species of plants,--an imperfectly preserved vegetable, more nearly
+resembling a club-moss than aught I have seen, and a smooth-stemmed
+fucoid, existing as a mere coaly film on the stone, and distinguished
+chiefly from the other by its sharp-edged, well-defined outline, and
+from the circumstance that its stems continue to retain the same
+diameter for a considerable distance, and this, too, after throwing off
+at acute angles numerous branches, nearly equal in bulk to the parent
+trunk. In a specimen about two and a half feet in length, which I owe to
+the kindness of Mr. Dick of Thurso, there are stems continuous
+throughout, that, though they ramify into from six to eight branches in
+that 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 the
+intertropical seas that, streaming slantwise in the tide, rise not
+unfrequently to the surface in fifteen and twenty fathoms water. I saw
+among Mr. Clouston's specimens no such lignite as the fragment of true
+coniferous wood which I had found at Cromarty a few years previous, and
+which, it would seem, is still unique among the fossils of the Old Red
+Sandstone. In the chart of the Pacific attached to the better editions
+of "Cook's Voyages," there are several entries along the track of the
+great navigator that indicate where, in mid-ocean, trees, or fragments
+of trees, had been picked up. The entries, however, are but few, though
+they belong to all the three voyages together: if I remember aright,
+there are only five entries in all,--two in the Northern and three in
+the Southern Pacific. The floating tree, at a great distance from land,
+is of rare occurrence in even the present scene of things, though the
+breadth of land be great, and trees numerous; and in the times of the
+Old Red Sandstone, when probably the breadth of land was _not_ great,
+and trees _not_ numerous, it seems to have been of rarer occurrence
+still. But it is at least something to know that in this early age of
+the world trees there were.
+
+I walked on to Stromness, and on the following morning, that of
+Saturday, took boat for Hoy,--skirting, on my passage out, the eastern
+and southern shores of the intervening island of Graemsay, and, on the
+passage back again, its western and northern shores. The boatman, an
+intelligent man,--one of the teachers, as I afterwards ascertained, in
+the Free Church Sabbath-school,--lightened the way by his narratives of
+storm and wreck, and not a few interesting snatches of natural history.
+There is no member of the commoner professions with whom I better like
+to meet than with a sensible fisherman, who makes a right use of his
+eyes. The history of fishes is still very much what the history of
+almost all animals was little more than half a century ago,--a matter of
+mere external description, heavy often and dry, and of classification
+founded exclusively on anatomical details. We have still a very great
+deal to learn regarding the character, habits and instincts of these
+denizens of the deep,--much, in short, respecting that faculty which is
+in them through which their natures are harmonized to the inexorable
+laws, and they continue to live wisely and securely, in consequence,
+within their own element, when man, with all his reasoning ability, is
+playing strange vagaries in his;--a species of knowledge this, by the
+way, which constitutes by far the most valuable part,--the _mental_
+department of natural history; and the notes of the intelligent
+fisherman, gleaned from actual observation, have frequently enabled me
+to fill portions of the wide hiatus in the history of fishes which it
+ought of right to occupy. In passing, as we toiled along the Graemsay
+coast, the ruins of a solitary cottage, the boatman furnished us with a
+few details of the history and character of its last inmate, an Orkney
+fisherman, that would have furnished admirable materials for one of the
+darker sketches of Crabbe. He was, he said, a resolute, unsocial man,
+not devoid of a dash of reckless humor, and remarkable for an
+extraordinary degree of bodily strength, which he continued to retain
+unbroken to an age considerably advanced, and which, as he rarely
+admitted of a companion in his voyages, enabled him to work his little
+skiff alone, in weather when even better equipped vessels had enough ado
+to keep the sea. He had been married in early life to a
+religiously-disposed woman, a member of some dissenting body; but,
+living with him in the little island of Graemsay, separated by the sea
+from any place of worship, he rarely permitted her to see the inside of
+a church. At one time, on the occasion of a communion Sabbath in the
+neighboring parish of Stromness, he seemed to yield to her entreaties,
+and got ready his yawl, apparently with the design of bringing her
+across the Sound to the town. They had, however, no sooner quitted the
+shore than he sailed off to a green little Ogygia of a holm in the
+neighborhood, on which, reversing the old mythologic story of Calypso
+and Ulysses, he incarcerated the poor woman for the rest of the day till
+evening. I could see, from the broad grin with which the boatman greeted
+this part of the recital, that there was, unluckily, almost fun enough
+in the trick to neutralize the sense of its barbarity. The unsocial
+fisherman lived on, dreaded and disliked, and yet, when his skiff was
+seen boldly keeping the sea in the face of a freshening gale, when every
+other was making for port, or stretching out from the land as some
+stormy evening was falling, not a little admired also. At length, on a
+night 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 be
+seen sitting erect at the bows, as if looking out for the shore. But as
+his little bark came shooting inwards on the long roll of a wave, it was
+found that there was no speculation in his stony glance: the
+misanthropic 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 gray
+flagstones of the district. They spread out here in front of the tall
+hills composed of the overlying sandstone, in a green undulating
+platform, resembling a somewhat uneven esplanade spread out in front of
+a steep rampart. With the upper deposit a new style of scenery
+commences, unique in these islands: the hills, bold and abrupt, rise
+from fourteen to sixteen hundred feet over the sea-level; and the
+valleys by which they are traversed,--no mere shallow inflections of the
+general surface, like most of the other valleys of Orkney,--are of
+profound depth, precipitous, imposing, and solitary. The sudden change
+from the soft, low, and comparatively tame, to the bold, stern, and
+high, serves admirably to show how much the character of a landscape may
+depend on the formation which composes it. A walk of somewhat less than
+two miles brought me into the depths of a brown, shaggy valley, so
+profoundly 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 to
+avoid the peaty bogs of the bottom, along the slopes of the northern
+side of the dell, he sees, amid the heath below, what at first seems to
+be a rhomboidal piece of pavement of pale Old Red Sandstone, bearing
+atop a few stunted tufts of vegetation. There are no neighboring objects
+of a known character by which to estimate its size; the precipitous
+hill-front behind is more than a thousand feet in height: the greatly
+taller Ward Hill of Hoy, which frowns over it on the opposite side, is
+at least five hundred feet higher; and, dwarfed by these giants, it
+seems a mere pavior's flag, mayhap some five or six feet square, by from
+eighteen inches to two feet in depth. It is only on approaching it
+within a few yards that we find it to be an enormous stone, nearly
+thirty feet in length by almost fifteen feet in breadth, and in some
+places, though it thins, wedge-like, towards one of the edges, more than
+six feet in thickness,--forming altogether such a mass as the quarrier
+would detach from the solid rock to form the architrave of some vast
+gateway, or the pediment of some colossal statue. A cave-like
+excavation, nearly three feet square, and rather more than seven feet in
+depth, opens on its gray and lichened side. The excavation is widened
+within, along the opposite walls, into two uncomfortably short beds,
+very much resembling those of the cabin of a small coasting vessel. One
+of 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 six
+inches shorter than its neighbor, and presents altogether more the
+appearance of a place of penance than of repose, lacks both cushion and
+ledge. An aperture, which seems to have been originally of a circular
+form, and about two and a half feet in diameter, but which some unlucky
+herd-boy, apparently in the want of better employment, has considerably
+mutilated and widened, opens at the inner excavation of the extremity
+to 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 to
+be regarded as a chimney. A gray, rudely-hewn block of sandstone, which,
+though greatly too ponderous to be moved by any man of the ordinary
+strength, seems to have served the purpose of a door, lies prostrate
+beside the opening in front. And such is the famous Dwarfie Stone of
+Hoy, as firmly fixed in our literature by the genius of Sir Walter
+Scott, as in this wild valley by its ponderous weight and breadth of
+base, and regarding which--for it shares in the general obscurity of the
+other ancient remains of Orkney--the antiquary can do little more than
+repeat, somewhat incredulously, what tradition tells him, viz., that it
+was the work, many ages ago, of an ugly, malignant goblin, half-earth
+half-air,--the Elfin Trolld,--a personage, it is said, that even within
+the last century, used occasionally to be seen flitting about in its
+neighborhood.
+
+I was fortunate in a fine breezy day, clear and sunshiny, save where the
+shadows 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 of
+some broken gust that seemed to have lost its way, tossed for a moment
+the white cannach of the bogs, or raised spirally into the air, for a
+few yards, the light beards of some seeding thistle, and straightway let
+them down again. Suddenly, however, about noon, a shower broke thick and
+heavy against the dark sides and gray scalp of the Ward Hill, and came
+sweeping 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 rather
+scant, taken fairly lengthwise, for a man of five feet eleven, I found,
+by stretching myself diagonally from corner to corner, no very
+uncomfortable lounging-place in a thunder-shower. Some provident
+herd-boy had spread it over, apparently months before, with a littering
+of heath and fern, which now formed a dry, springy conch; and as I lay
+wrapped up in my plaid, listening to the rain-drops as they pattered
+thick and heavy atop, or slanted through the broken hatchway to the
+vacant bed on the opposite side of the excavation, I called up the wild
+narrative of Norna, and felt all its poetry. The opening passage of the
+story is, however, not poetry, but good prose, in which the curious
+visitor might give expression to his own conjectures, if ingenious
+enough either to form or to express them so well. "With my eyes fixed on
+the smaller bed," the sorceress is made to say, "I wearied myself with
+conjectures regarding the origin and purpose of my singular place of
+refuge. Had it been really the work of that powerful Trolld to whom the
+poetry of the Scalds referred it? or was it the tomb of some
+Scandinavian chief, interred with his arms and his wealth, perhaps also
+with his immolated wife, that what he loved best in life might not in
+death be divided from him? or was it the abode of penance chosen by some
+devoted anchorite of later days? or the idle work of some wandering
+mechanic, whom chance, and whim, and leisure, had thrust upon such an
+undertaking?" What follows this sober passage is the work of the poet.
+"Sleep," continues Norna, "had gradually crept upon me among my
+lucubrations, when I was startled from my slumbers by a second clap of
+thunder, and when I awoke, I saw through the dim light which the upper
+aperture admitted, the unshapely and indistinct form of Trolld the
+dwarf, seated opposite to me on the lesser couch, which his square and
+misshapen bulk seemed absolutely to fill up. I was startled, but not
+affrighted; for the blood of the ancient race of Lochlin was warm in my
+veins. He spoke, and his words were of Norse,--so old, that few save my
+father, or I myself could have comprehended their import,--such language
+as was spoken in these islands ere Olave planted his cross on the ruins
+of heathenism. His meaning was dark also, and obscure, like that which
+the pagan priests were wont to deliver, in the name of their idols, to
+the tribes that assembled at the _Helgafels_.... I answered him in
+nearly the same strain, for the spirit of the ancient Scalds of our race
+was upon me; and far from fearing the phantom with whom I sat cooped
+within so narrow a space, I felt the impulse of that high courage which
+thrust the ancient champions and Druidesses upon contests with the
+invisible world, when they thought that the earth no longer contained
+enemies worthy to be subdued by them.... The Demon scowled at me as if
+at once incensed and overawed; and then, coiling himself up in a thick
+and sulphurous vapor, he disappeared from his place. I did not till that
+moment feel the influence of fright, but then it seized me. I rushed
+into the open air, where the tempest had passed away, and all was pure
+and serene." Shall I dare confess, that I could fain have passed some
+stormy night all alone in this solitary cell, were it but to enjoy the
+luxury of listening, amid the darkness, to the clashing rain and the
+roar of the wind high among the cliffs, or to detect the brushing sound
+of hasty footsteps in the wild rustle of the heath, or the moan of
+unhappy spirits in the low roar of the distant sea. Or, mayhap,--again
+to 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, such
+as the historian of Orkney, Mr. Barry; and, considered simply as a work
+of art or labor, it certainly does not stand high. When tracing, as I
+lay a-bed, the marks of the tool, which, in the harder portions of the
+stone, are still distinctly visible, I just thought how that, armed with
+pick and chisel, and working as I was once accustomed to work, I could
+complete such another excavation to order in some three weeks or a
+month. 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, nor
+connect it with the supernatural, through the influences of wild ancient
+traditions, nor yet encircle it with a classic halo, borrowed from the
+undying inventions of an exquisite literary genius. A half-worn pewter
+spoon, stamped on the back with the word _London_, which was found in a
+miserable hut on the banks of the Awatska by some British sailors, at
+once excited in their minds a thousand tender remembrances of their
+country. And it would, I suspect, be rather a poor criticism, and
+scarcely 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 the
+materials of the spoon. Nor is the Dwarfie Stone to be correctly
+estimated, independently of the suggestive principle, on the rules of
+the mere quarrier who sells stones by the cubic foot, or of the mere
+contractor for hewn work who dresses them by the square one.
+
+The pillow I found lettered over with the names of visitors; but the
+stone,--an exceedingly compact red sandstone,--had resisted the
+imperfect tools at the command of the traveller,--usually a nail or
+knife; 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 still
+pattered heavily overhead; and with my geological chisel and hammer I
+did, to beguile the time, what I very rarely do,--added my name to the
+others, in characters which, if both they and the Dwarfie Stone get but
+fair play, will be distinctly legible two centuries hence. In what state
+will the world then exist, or what sort of ideas will fill the head of
+the man who, when the rock has well-nigh yielded up its charge, will
+decipher the name for the last time, and inquire, mayhap, regarding the
+individual 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 it
+would have saddened me to think that there would in all probability be
+as little response in the one case as in the other; but as men rise in
+years they become more indifferent than in early youth to "that life
+which wits inherit after death," and are content to labor on and be
+obscure. They learn, too, if I may judge from experience, to pursue
+science more exclusively for its own sake, with less, mayhap, of
+enthusiasm to carry them on, but with what is at least as strong to take
+its place as a moving force, that wind and bottom of formed habit
+through which what were at first acts of the will pass into easy
+half-instinctive promptings of the disposition. In order to acquaint
+myself with the fossiliferous deposits of Scotland, I have travelled,
+hammer in hand, during the last nine years, over fully ten thousand
+miles; nor has the work been in the least one of dry labor,--not more so
+than that of the angler, or grouse-shooter, or deer-stalker: it has
+occupied the mere leisure interstices of a somewhat busy life, and has
+served to relieve its toils. I have succeeded, however, in
+accomplishing but little: besides, what is discovery to-day will be but
+rudimentary fact to the tyro-geologists of the future. But if much has
+not been done, I have at least the consolation of George Buchanan, when,
+according to Melvill, "fand sitting in his chair, teiching his young man
+that servit him in his chalmer to spell a, b, ab; e, b, eb. 'Better
+this,' quoth he, 'nor stelling sheipe.'"
+
+The sun broke out in great beauty after the shower, glistening on a
+thousand minute runnels that came streaming down the precipices, and
+revealing, through the thin vapory haze, the horizontal lines of strata
+that bar the hill-sides, like courses of ashlar in a building. I failed,
+however, to detect, amid the general many-pointed glitter by which the
+blue gauze-like mist was bespangled, the light of the great carbuncle
+for which the Ward Hill has long been famous,--that wondrous gem,
+according to Sir Walter, "that, though it gleams ruddy as a furnace to
+them that view it from beneath, ever becomes invisible to him whose
+daring foot scales the precipices whence it darts its splendor." The
+Hill of Hoy is, however, not the only one in the kingdom that, according
+to tradition, bears a jewel in its forehead. The "great diamond" of the
+Northern Sutor was at one time scarce less famous than the carbuncle of
+the Ward Hill. "I have been oftener than once interrogated on the western
+coast of Scotland regarding the diamond rock of Cromarty; and have been
+told, by an old campaigner who fought under Abercrombie, that he has
+listened to the familiar story of its diamond amid the sand wastes of
+Egypt." But the diamond has long since disappeared; and we now see only
+the rock. Unlike the carbuncle of Hoy, it was never seen by day; though
+often, says the legend, the benighted boatmen has gazed, from amid the
+darkness, as he came rowing along the shore, on its clear beacon-like
+flame, which, streaming from the precipice, threw a fiery strip across
+the water; and often have the mariners of other countries inquired
+whether the light which they saw so high among the cliffs, right over
+their mast, did not proceed from the shrine of some saint or the cell of
+some hermit. At length an ingenious ship-captain determined on marking
+its place, brought with him from England a few balls of chalk, and took
+aim at it in the night-time with one of his great guns. Ere he had
+fired, however, it vanished, as if suddenly withdrawn by some guardian
+hand; and its place in the rock front has ever since remained as
+undistinguishable, whether by night or by day, as the scaurs and clefts
+around it. The marvels of the present time abide examination more
+patiently. It seems difficult enough to conceive, for instance, that the
+upper deposit of the Lower Old Red in this locality, out of which the
+mountains of Hoy have been scooped, once overlaid the flag stones of all
+Orkney, and stretched on and away to Dunnet Head, Tarbet Ness, and the
+Black Isle; and yet such is the story, variously authenticated, to which
+their nearly horizontal strata, and their abrupt precipices lend their
+testimony. In no case has this superior deposit of the formation of the
+Coccosteus been known to furnish a single fossil; nor did it yield me on
+this occasion, among the Hills of Hoy, what it had denied me everywhere
+else on every former one. Sly search, however, was by no means either
+very prolonged or very careful.
+
+I found I had still several hours of day-light before me; and these I
+spent, after my return on a rough tumbling sea to Stromness, in a second
+survey of the coast, westwards from the granitic axis of the island, to
+the bishop's palace, and the ichthyolitic quarry beyond. From this point
+of view the high terminal Hill of Hoy, towards the west, presents what
+is really a striking profile of Sir Walter Scott, sculptured in the rock
+front by the storms of ages, on so immense a scale, that the Colossus of
+Rhodes, Pharos and all, would scarce have furnished materials enough to
+supply it with a nose. There are such asperities in the outline as one
+might expect in that of a rudely modelled bust, the work of a master,
+from which, in his fiery haste, he had not detached the superfluous
+clay; but these interfere in no degree with the fidelity, I had almost
+said spirit, of the likeness. It seems well, as it must have waited for
+thousands of years ere it became the portrait it now is, that the human
+profile, which it preceded so long, and without which it would have
+lacked the element of individual truth, should have been that of Sir
+Walter. Amid scenes so heightened in interest by his genius as those of
+Orkney, he is entitled to a monument. To the critical student of the
+philosophy and history of poetic invention it is not uninstructive to
+observe how completely the novelist has appropriated and brought within
+the compass of one fiction, in defiance of all those lower probabilities
+which the lawyer who pleaded before a jury court would be compelled to
+respect, almost every interesting scene and object in both the Shetland
+and Orkney islands. There was but little intercourse in those days
+between the two northern archipelagos. It is not yet thirty years since
+they 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 should
+be wrought up into the same piece of rich tissue with the imposing
+antiquities of Orkney,--Sumburgh Head and Roost with the ancient
+Cathedral of St. Magnus and the earl's palace, and Fitful Head and the
+sand-enveloped kirk of St. Ringan with the Standing Stones of Stennis
+and the Dwarfie Stone of Hoy; and so the little jury-court probabilities
+have been sacrificed without scruple, and that higher truth of
+character, and that exquisite portraiture of external nature, which give
+such reality to fiction, and make it sink into the mind more deeply than
+historic fact, have been substituted instead. But such,--considerably to
+the annoyance of the lesser critics,--has been ever the practice of the
+greater poets. The lesser critics are all critics of the jury-court
+cast; while all the great masters of fiction, with Shakspeare at their
+head, have been asserters of that higher truth which is not letter, but
+spirit, and contemners of the mere judicial probabilities. And so they
+have been continually fretting the little men with their extravagances,
+and they ever will. What were said to be the originals of two of Sir
+Walter's characters in the "Pirate" were living in the neighborhood of
+Stromness only a few years ago. An old woman who resided immediately
+over the town, in a little cottage, of which there now remains only the
+roofless walls, and of whom the sailors, weather-bound in the port, used
+occasionally to purchase a wind, furnished him with the first conception
+of his Norna of the Fitful Head; and an eccentric shopkeeper of the
+place, who to his dying day used to designate the "Pirate," with much
+bitterness, 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 the
+village of Stromness, on the Orkney main island, called Pomona, lived,"
+he says, "in 1814, an aged dame called Bessie Millie, who helped out her
+subsistence by selling favorable winds to mariners. Her dwelling and
+appearance were not unbecoming her pretensions: her house, which was on
+the brow of the steep hill on which Stromness is founded, was only
+accessible by a series of dirty and precipitous lanes, and, for
+exposure, might have been the abode of Aeolus himself, in whose
+commodities the inhabitant dealt. She herself was, as she told us,
+nearly one hundred years old, withered and dried up like a mummy. A
+clay-colored kerchief, folded round her head, corresponded in color to
+her corpse-like complexion. Two light-blue eyes that gleamed with a
+lustre like that of insanity, an utterance of astonishing rapidity, a
+nose and chin that almost met together, and a ghastly expression of
+cunning, 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 forms
+the harbor, is about a quarter of a mile in width, there is, immediately
+over the shore, a small square patch of ground, apparently a
+_planticruive_, or garden, surrounded by a tall dry-stone fence. It is
+all that survives--for the old dwelling-house to which it was attached
+was pulled down several years ago--of the patrimony of Gow the "Pirate;"
+and is not a little interesting, as having formed the central nucleus
+round which,--like those bits of thread or wire on which the richly
+saturated fluids of the chemist solidify and crystallize,--the entire
+fiction of the novelist aggregated and condensed under the influence of
+forces operative only in minds of genius. A white, tall, old-fashioned
+house, conspicuous on the hill-side, looks out across the bay towards
+the square inclosure, which it directly fronts. And it is surely a
+curious coincidence, that while in one of these two erections, only a
+few hundred yards apart, one of the heroes of Scott saw the light, the
+other should have proved the scene of the childhood of one of the heroes
+of Byron,
+
+ "Torquil, the nursling of the northern seas."
+
+The reader will remember, that in Byron's poem of "The Island," one of
+the younger leaders of the mutineers is described as a native of these
+northern isles. He is drawn by the poet, amid the wild luxuriance of an
+island 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 in
+Stromness, I found reason to conclude that he had been a hapless young
+man, of a kindly, genial nature; and greatly "more sinned against than
+sinning," in the unfortunate affair of the mutiny with which his name is
+now associated, and for his presumed share in which, untried and
+unconvicted, he was cruelly left to perish in chains amid the horrors of
+a shipwreck. I had the honor of being introduced on the following day to
+his sister, a lady far advanced in life, but over whose erect form and
+handsome features the years seemed to have passed lightly, and whom I
+met at the Free Church of Stromness, to which, at the Disruption, she
+had followed her respected minister. It seemed a fact as curiously
+compounded as some of those pictures of the last age in which the thin
+unsubstantialities of allegory mingled with the tangibilities of the
+real and the material, that the sister of one of Byron's heroes should
+be an attached member of the Free Church.
+
+On my return to the inn, I found in the public room a young German of
+some one or two and twenty, who, in making the tour of Scotland, had
+extended his journey into Orkney. My specimens, which had begun to
+accumulate in the room, on chimney-piece and window-sill, had attracted
+his notice, and led us into conversation. He spoke English well, but not
+fluently,--in the style of one who had been more accustomed to read than
+to converse in it; and he seemed at least as familiar with two of our
+great British authors,--Shakspeare and Sir Walter Scott,--as most of the
+better-informed British themselves. It was chiefly the descriptions of
+Sir Walter in the "Pirate" that had led him into Orkney. He had already
+visited the Cathedral of St. Magnus and the Stones of Stennis; and on
+the morrow he intended visiting the Dwarfie Stone; though I ventured to
+suggest that, as a broad sound lay between Stromness and Hoy, and as the
+morrow was the Sabbath, he might find some difficulty in doing that. His
+circle of acquirement was, I found, rather literary than scientific. It
+seemed, however, to be that of a really accomplished young man, greatly
+better founded in his scholarship than most of our young Scotchmen on
+quitting the national universities; and I felt, as we conversed
+together, chiefly on English literature and general politics, how much
+poorer a figure I would have cut in his country than he cut in mine. I
+found, on coming down from my room next morning to a rather late
+breakfast, that he had been out among the Stromness fishermen, and had
+returned somewhat chafed. Not a single boatman could he find in a
+populous seaport town that would undertake to carry him to the Dwarfie
+Stone on the Sabbath,--a fact, to their credit, which it is but simple
+justice to state. I saw him afterwards in the Free Church, listening
+attentively to a thoroughly earnest and excellent discourse, by the
+Disruption minister of the parish, Mr. Learmonth; and in the course of
+the evening he dropped in for a short time to the Free Church
+Sabbath-school, where he took his seat beside one of the teachers, as if
+curious to ascertain more in detail the character of the instruction
+which had operated so influentially on the boatmen, and which he had
+seen telling from the pulpit with such evident effect. What would not
+his country now give,--now, while drifting loose from all its old
+moorings, full on the perils of a lee shore,--for the anchor of a faith
+equally steadfast! He was a Lutheran, he told me; but, as is too common
+in Germany, his actual beliefs appeared to be very considerably at
+variance with his hereditary creed. The creed was a tolerably sound one,
+but the living belief regarding it seemed to do little more than take
+cognizance of what he deemed the fact of its death.
+
+I had carried with me a letter of introduction to Mr. William Watt, to
+whom 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 into
+Stromness, some six or eight miles, on the morning of Monday, to meet
+with me, bringing me a few of his rarer specimens. One of the number,--a
+minute ichthyolite, about three inches in length,--I was at first
+disposed to set down as new, but I have since come to regard it as
+simply an imperfectly-preserved specimen of a Cromarty and Morayshire
+species,--the _Glyptolepis microlepidotus_; though its state of keeping
+is such as to render either conclusion an uncertainty. Another of the
+specimens was that of a fish, still comparatively rare, first figured in
+the first edition of my little volume on the "Old Red Sandstone," from
+the earliest found specimen, at a time while it was yet unfurnished with
+a name, but which has since had a place assigned to it in the genus
+Diplacanthus, as the species longispinus. The scales, when examined by
+the glass, remind one, from their pectinated character, of shells
+covering the walls of a grotto,--a peculiarity to which, when showing my
+specimen to Agassiz, while it had yet no duplicate, I directed his
+attention, and which led him to extemporize for it, on the spot, the
+generic 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), the
+naturalist found reason to rank it among the Diplacanthi. Mr. Watt's
+specimen exhibited the outline of the head more completely than mine;
+but the Orkney ichthyolites rarely present the microscopic minutiae; and
+the shell-like aspect of the scales was shown in but one little patch,
+where they had left their impressions on the stone. His other specimens
+consisted of single plates of a variety of Coccosteus, undistinguishable
+in their form and proportions from those of the _Coccosteus decipiens_,
+but which exceeded by about one-third the average size of the
+corresponding parts in that species; and of a rib-like bone, that
+belonged apparently to what few of the ichthyolites of the Lower Old Red
+seem to have possessed,--an osseous internal skeleton. This last
+organism was the only one I saw in Orkney with which I had not been
+previously acquainted, or which I could regard as new, though possibly
+enough it may have formed part, not of an undiscovered genus, but of the
+known genus Asterolepis, of whose inner framework, judging from the
+Russian specimens at least, portions must have been bony. After parting
+from Mr. Watt, I travelled on to Kirkwall, which, after a leisurely
+journey, I reached late in the evening, and on the following morning
+took the steamer for Wick. I brought away with me, if not many rare
+specimens or many new geological facts, at least a few pleasing
+recollections of an interesting country and a hospitable people. In the
+previous chapter I indulged in a brief quotation from Mr. David Vedder,
+the sailor-poet of Orkney, and I shall make no apology for availing
+myself in the present, of the vigorous, well-turned stanzas in which he
+portrays some of those peculiar features by which the land of his
+nativity 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 West
+Highlands are of Devonian age, and the quartzite and limestone of Lower
+Carboniferous.--_See Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society,
+February 1857._--W.S.
+
+[3] Sir R. Murchison considers these rocks Silurian. See "Quarterly
+Journal" 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 New
+Philosophic Journal," April, 1857.
+
+[6] The verses here referred to are introduced into "My Schools and
+Schoolmasters," 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 a
+Churchyard," which was introduced here when these chapters were first
+published in the "Witness," but, having been afterwards inserted in the
+tenth chapter of "My Schools and Schoolmasters," is not here reproduced.
+
+[9] Mr. Peach has discovered fossils in the Durness limestone, which
+rests above the quartzite rock of the west of Scotland, that covers the
+Red Sandstone long believed to be OLD RED. The fossils are very
+obscure.--W.S.S.
+
+[10] This second title hears reference to the extent of the author's
+geologic excursions in Scotland, during the nine years from 1840 to 1848
+inclusive.
+
+[11] Since the above was written, I have seen an interesting paper in
+"Hogg's Weekly Instructor," in which the Rev. Mr. Longmuir of Aberdeen
+describes a visit to the Lias clay at Blackpots. Mr. Longmuir seems to
+have given more time to his researches than I found it agreeable, in a
+very indifferent day to devote to mine; and his list of fossils is
+considerably longer. Their evidence, however, runs in exactly the same
+tract with that of the shorter list. He had been told at Banff that the
+clay contained "petrified tangles;" and the first organism shown him by
+the 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 already
+been anticipated, to be pieces of Belemnites, well known on the other
+side of the Frith as 'thunderbolts,' and esteemed of sovereign efficacy
+in the cure of bewitched cattle." Though still wide of the mark, there
+is here an evident descent from the supernatural to the physical, from
+the superstitious to the true. "Satisfied that we had a mass of Lias
+clay before us, we set vigorously to work, in order either to find
+additional characteristic fossils, or obtain data on which to form a
+conjecture as to the history of this out-of-the-way deposit; and our
+labor was not without its reward. We shall now present a brief account
+of the specimens we picked up. Observing a number of stones of different
+sizes, that had been thrown out, as they were struck, by the workman's
+shovel, 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, to
+obtain 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 what
+appears to have formed part of one; and the first blow has laid open
+part of a whorl of an Ammonite, which, when complete, must have measured
+three or four inches in diameter, and it is perfectly assimilated to the
+calcareous matrix. 2. Here is a mass of indurated clay; and a gentle
+blow has exposed part of two Ammonites, smaller than the former, but
+their shells are white and powdery like chalk. 3. Another fragment is
+laid open; and there, quite unmistakably, lie the umbo and greater
+portion of the _Plagiostoma concentricum_. 4. Another fragment of a
+granular gritty structure presents a considerable portion of the
+interior of one of the shells of a Pecten, but whether the attached
+fragment is part of one of its ears, or of the other valve turned
+backward, is not so easily determined. 5. Here is a piece of Belemnite
+in limestone, and the fracture in the fossil presents the usual
+glistening planes of cleavage. 6. Next we take up a piece of distinctly
+laminated Lias, with Ammonites as thick as they can lie on the pages of
+this black book of natural history. 7. Once more we strike, and we have
+the cast and part of the shell of another bivalve; but the valves have
+been jerked off each other, and have suffered a severe compound
+fracture; nevertheless we can have little hesitation in pronouncing it a
+species of _unio_. 8. Here is another piece of limestone, with its small
+fragment of another shell, of very delicate texture, with finely marked
+traverse striae. We are unwilling to decide on such slight evidence, but
+feel inclined to refer it to some species of Plagiostoma. 9. Here is a
+piece of pyrites, not quite so large as the first, and so vegetable-like
+in its markings, that it might be mistaken for part of a branch of a
+tree. This is also characteristic of the Lias; for when the shales are
+deeply impregnated with bitumen and pyrites, they undergo a slow
+combustion when heaped up with faggots and set on fire; and in the
+cliffs of the Yorkshire coast, after rainy weather, they sometimes
+spontaneously ignite, and continue to burn for several months. 10. As we
+passed through the works, on our way to the clay, we observed a sort of
+reservoir, into which the clay, after being freed from its impurities,
+had been run in a liquid state; the water had evaporated, and the drying
+clay had cracked in every direction. Here we find its counterpart in
+this large mass of stone; only the clay here, mixed with a portion of
+lime is petrified, and the fissures filled up with carbonate of lime;
+thus forming the septaria, or cement stone. We have dressed a specimen
+of it for our guide, who has a friend that will polish it, when the dark
+Lias will be strikingly contrasted with the white lime, and form rather
+a pretty piece of natural mosaic. 11. Coming to a simple piece of
+machinery for removing fragments of shale and stone from the clay, we
+examined some of the bits so rejected, and found what we had no doubt
+were fish-scales. 12. We have yet to notice certain long slender bodies,
+outwardly brown, but inwardly nearly black, resembling whip-cord in
+size. Are we to regard these as specimens of a fucus, perhaps the
+_filum_, or allied to it, which is known in some places by the
+appropriate name of sea-laces? 13. Passing on to the office, we were
+shown a chop of wood that had been found in the clay, and was destined
+for the Banff Museum. It is about eighteen inches in length, and half as
+much in breadth; and although evidently water-worn, yet we could count
+between twenty-five and thirty concentric rings on one of its ends,
+which not only enabled us to form some conjecture of its age previous to
+its overthrow, but also justified us in referring it to the coniferae of
+the _vorwelt_, or ancient world."
+
+Mr. Longmuir makes the following shrewd remarks, in answering the
+question, "Whether have we here a mass of Lias clay, as originally
+deposited, or has it resulted from the breaking up of Lias-shale?" "The
+former alternative," says Mr. Longmuir, "we have heard, has been
+maintained; but we are inclined to adopt the latter, and that for the
+following reasons: 1. This clay, judging from other localities, is not
+_in situ_, but has every appearance of having been precipitated into a
+basin in the gneiss on which it rests, having apparently under it,
+although it is impossible to say to what extent, a bed of comminuted
+shells. 2. The fossils are all fragmentary and water-worn. This is
+especially the case with regard to the Belemnites, the pieces averaging
+from one to two inches in length, no workman having ever found a
+complete specimen, such as occurs in the Lias-shale at Cromarty, in
+which they may be found nine inches in length. 3. But perhaps the most
+satisfactory proof, and one that in itself may be deemed sufficient, is
+the frequent occurrence of pieces of Lias-shale, with their embedded
+Ammonites; which clearly show that the Lias had been broken up, tossed
+about in some violent agitation of the sea, and churned into clay, just
+as some denudating process of a similar nature swept away the chalk of
+Aberdeenshire, leaving on many of its hills and plains the water-worn
+flints, 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 of
+the North of Scotland," chap. XXV.
+
+[14] _Scaur_, Scotice, a precipice of clay. There is no single English
+word that conveys exactly the same idea.
+
+[15] Mr. Dick has since disinterred from out the boulder-clays of the
+Burn of Freswick, _Patella vulgata_, _Buccinum undatum_, _Fesus
+antiquus_, _Rostellaria_, _Pes pelicana_, a _Natica_, _Lutraria_, and
+_Balanus_.
+
+[16] That similarity of condition in which the hazel and the harder
+cerealia thrive was noted by our north-country farmers of the old
+School, long ere it had been recorded by the botanist. Hence such
+remarks, 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 ice
+accumulates on the shoals during the winter, at which season the water
+is low. The separate fragments of ice are readily frozen together in a
+climate where the temperature is sometimes thirty degrees below zero,
+and boulders become entangled with them; so that in the spring, when the
+river rises on the melting of the snow, the rocks are floated off,
+frequently conveying away the boulders to great distances. A single
+block of granite, fifteen feet long by ten feet both in width and
+height, and which could not contain less than fifteen hundred cubic feet
+of stone, was in this way moved down the river several hundred yards,
+during the late survey in 1837. Heavy anchors of ships, lying on the
+shore, have in like manner been closed in and removed. In October 1836,
+wooden stakes were driven several feet into the ground, at one point on
+the banks of the St. Lawrence, at high-water mark, and over them were
+piled many boulders as large as the united force of six men could roll.
+The year after, all the boulders had disappeared, and others had
+arrived, and the stakes had been drawn out and carried away by the
+ice."--'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 gigantic
+tribe of _Fions_, narrated in "Scenes and Legends of the North of
+Scotland," chap. IV.
+
+[21] See "My Schools and Schoolmasters," chap XI.
+
+[22] I can entertain no doubt that the angular groups of palatal teeth
+figured by Agassiz and the Russian geologists as those of a supposed
+Placoid termed the Ctenodus, are in reality groups of the palatal teeth
+of Dipterus. In some of my specimens the frontal buckler of Polyphractus
+is connected with the gill-covers and scales of Dipterus, and bears in
+its palate what cannot he distinguished from the teeth of Ctenodus. The
+three genera resolve themselves into one.
+
+[23] There is a very admirable remark to this effect in the "Travelling
+Memorandums" of the late Lord Gardenstone, which, as the work has been
+long 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 security
+and interests of society than the government of monarchs, who possess
+great and extensive territories. The race of great monarchs cannot
+possibly preserve a safe and undisturbed state of government, without
+many delegations of power and office to men of approved abilities and
+practical knowledge, who are subject to complaint during their
+administration, and responsible when it is at an end; or yet without an
+established system of laws and regulations; so that no inconsiderable
+degree of security and liberty to the subject is almost inseparable
+from, and essential to, the subsistence and duration of a great
+monarchy. But it is easy for petty princes to practise an arbitrary and
+irregular exercise of power, by which their people are reduced to a
+condition of miserable slavery. Indeed, very few of them, in the course
+of ages, are capable of conceiving any other means of maintaining the
+ostentatious state, the luxurious and indolent pride, which they mistake
+for greatness. I heartily wish that this observation and censure may
+not, in some instances, be applicable to great landed proprietors in
+some parts of Britain."--Travelling Memorandums, vol. i. p. 123. 1792.
+
+[24] The exciting effects of a poor soil, or climate, or of severe
+usage, on the productive powers of various vegetable species, have been
+long and often remarked. Flavel describes, in one of his ingenious
+emblems, illustrative of the influence of affliction on the Christian,
+an orchard tree, which had been beaten with sticks and stones, till it
+presented a sorely stunted and mutilated appearance; but which, while
+the fairer and more vigorous trees around it were rich in only leaves,
+was laden with fruit,--a direct consequence, it is shown, of the hard
+treatment to which it had been subjected. I have heard it told in a
+northern village, as a curious anecdote, that a large pear tree, which
+during a vigorous existence of nearly fifty years, had borne scarce a
+single pear, had, when in a state of decay, and for a few years previous
+to its death, borne immense crops of from two to three bolls each
+season. And the skilful gardener not unfrequently avails himself of the
+principle on which both phenomena seem to have occurred,--that exhibited
+in the beaten and that in the decaying tree,--in rendering his barren
+plants fruitful. He has recourse to it even when merely desirous of
+ascertaining the variety of pear or apple which some thriving sapling,
+slow in bearing, is yet to produce. Selecting some bough which may be
+conveniently lopped away without destroying the symmetry of the tree, he
+draws 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 cannot
+ultimately recover. Next spring the wounded branch is found to bear its
+bunches of blossoms; the blossoms set into fruit; and while in the other
+portions of the plant all is vigorous and barren as before, the dying
+part of it, as if sobered by the near prospect of dissolution, is found
+fulfilling the proper end of its existence. Soil and climate, too,
+exert, it has been often remarked, a similar influence. In the united
+parishes of Kirkmichael and Culicuden, in the immediate neighborhood of
+Cromarty, 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 its
+growth, and bark-bound. Comparatively young trees of ash," he shrewdly
+adds, "_are covered with seed_,--_an almost infallible sign that their
+natural growth is checked_. The leaves, too, fall off about the
+beginning of September."
+
+
+
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+
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+THE CRUISE OF THE NORTH STAR; A Narrative of the Excursion made by Mr.
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+12mo, cloth, $1.00.
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