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THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA

PRESENTED BY

PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND
MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID

THE

CRUISE OF THE BETSEY;

OR,

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE FOSSILIFEROUS
DEPOSITS OF THE HEBRIDES.

WITH

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST;

OB,

TEN THOUSAND MILES OVER THE FOSSILIFEROUS
DEPOSITS OF SCOTLAND.

BY HUGH KILUEK,

AUTHOR OP " THE OLD RED SANDSTONE," "MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOL-
MASTERS," " THE TESTIMONY OF THE BOCKS," ETC.

EDINBURGH: THOMAS CONSTABLE AND CO.
HAMILTON, ADAMS, AND CO., LONDON.

MDCCCLVIII.

•

EDINBUGH : PRINTED BY MILLER & FAIRLY.

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 for ever.

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 hus-
band. Unhappily the excitement and anxiety naturally at-
taching to a revision of her husband's works proved over much
for one suffering under such recent trial, and from an affec-
tion 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 labour.

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unpublished, save as a series of articles in the "Witness" news-
paper. The style and arguments of HUGH MILLER are so

JVJ363230

PREFACE.

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 favourite 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 MILLEE battled nobly for his faith while living. The
sword is in the scabbard : let it rest !

W. S. SYMONDS.
P.BNDOCK RECTORY, October 1, 1857.

THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY.

CHAPTER I

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. And at noon on St Swithin's
day (Monday the loth), 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 S< ^tland, to the Oolitic de-
posits 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 twelve-

2 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY. ; OR,

month. 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 At-
lantic, 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 glit-
tering 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 lighthouse 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 morn-
ing 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

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 3

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
groupes of pointed rocks, the skeletons of perished hills, amid
which the tides chafed and fretted, as if labouring to com-
plete 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 plain, 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

4 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

ones, lower eminences as mere groupes 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 sub-
merged 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 Enaliosau-
rians of the Lias and the Oolite. Judging from its com-
ponents, 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 ; where-
as 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 neighbour-
ing lands, washed down by the streams, grew heavy and sank,
and on which the belemnite dropped its spindle and the am-
monite its shell. The idea imparted of old Scotland to the
geologist here, — of Scotland, proudly, aristocratically, super-
eminently old, — for it can call Mont Blanc a mere upstart,
and Dhawalageri, with its twenty-eight thousand feet of ele-
vation, a heady fellow of yesterday,— is not that of a land

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 5

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 dis-
trict. We had passed Esdaile near enough to see the work-
men 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 incloses, roughens, instead of being
polished, by the action of the waves, and which, along the east-
ern 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 semicircular 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 pas-
ture,— its bosky dingles of shrub and tree, — and, perched on
the seaward promontory, its old, time-eaten keep. " In one
part of the harbour 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 Ire-
land. We staid at Oban for several hours, waiting the arri-
val of the Fort-William steamer ; and, taking out hammer and

6 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

chisel from my bag, I stepped ashore to question my ancient
acquaintance the Old Bed 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 sec-
tion to which I was thus introduced. The conglomerate lies
unconformably 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
neighbouring shore, where we find. them laid bare beside the
harbour for several hundred yards. And, mixed with the j
pebbles of various character and origin of which the conglo-
merate 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 dis-
trict 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

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 7

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 idea 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 pro-
spect is studded over with these landmarks of a hoar anti-
quity, 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 strati-
fied clay, containing a few calcareo-argillaceous nodules. The
conglomerate cliifs to the north of the village present ap-
pearances 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 gra-
dual slope into the existing sea-beach, but which ages ago
must have been a sea-beach itsel£ We see the bases of the

THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

precipices hollowed and worn, with all their rents and cre-
vices 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 MTDougall's Dog-stone, and say that
the old chieftains of Lome 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
chace 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 con-
glomerate. The mass is of a rudely rhomboidal form, and
measures nearly twelve feet in the line of its largest diago-
nal. A second huge pebble in the same detached spire mea-
sures 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 Ked Sandstone," Chapter XII], that I had
scarce ever seen a stone in the Old Bed 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 hundredweight. 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,

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 9

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 tem-
pests, 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 Ander-
son 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 amygdaloids, largely mingled with fragments of the gra-
nitic, 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

10 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

rolled pebbles of a basalt which in the neighbourhood of Edin-
burgh 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 sun-light 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 Dunstaffhage ; 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, to-
wards the high dim land, that seemed standing up on both
sides like tall hedges over a green lane. We entered the
Bay of Toberinory 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
tartly 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 minis-
ter of the Protestants of Small Isles. In five minutes more

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 1 1

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 admira-
tion, was busied in making us a rather late tea.

The cabin, — my home for the greater part of the three fol-
lowing 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 nightcap. A large table, lashed to the floor, furnished
with tiers of drawers of all sorts and sizes, and bearing a writ-
ing 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 lanthorn-looking lamp, sufficiently valu-
ably, 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,

1 2 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

splendidly toasted, to give substantiality and relish to our
tea. The little rude forecastle, a considerably smaller apart-
ment 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 vil-
lage-mill ; and further, to call my attention to a house near
the middle of the village, built of a mouldering red sand-
stone which had been found in situ in digging the founda-
tions. 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 amphi-
theatre of mingled rock and wood rises behind. With all its
beauty, however, there hangs about the village an air of me-
lancholy. Like some of the other western-coast villages, it
seems not to have grown piecemeal, as a village ought, but

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 13

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 Thomson,

" 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 in-

1 4 ; THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

fluences, 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, some-
what resembling that which forms in the course of years
under a scalp of muscles ; and it has hardened into a mere
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 Oolite. One of the first
fossils I disinterred was the Gryphsea obliquata, — a shell cha-
racteristic of the Liasic formation ; and the fossil immediately
after, the Pholadomya sequalis, — 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 Pul-
lastra, and groupes 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 ab-
breviatus, 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 Sand-
stone 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

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 15

and a heavy swell from the sea. I would fain have approach-
ed 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 vari-
able, and with the swell so high. We could hear the deep
roar of the surf for miles, and see its undulating strip of
white nickering 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 off-
ing ; and then, running along the Isle of Eigg, with its co-
lossal 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 enter-
ed the channel which separates the island from one of its de-
pendencies, 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 comfort-
able 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.

16 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

CHAPTER II.

had rich tea this morning. The minister was among his
people ; and our first evidence of the fact came in the agree-
able 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 flavour from the island, that
the meal, left to its own resources, could scarcely have com-
municated ; and the golden-coloured 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 pro-
perly no harbour in the island. We lay in a narrow chan-
nel, 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 currents ran
races, seemed a very shrewd sort of trick indeed. But a

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 1 7

kedge and halser, stretched thwartwise to a neighbouring crag,
and jambed 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 colour, 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 furnish-
ed, down to the last on which they had been moulded, and
the artizan that had cast them ofij 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 tan-
ning 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 neighbour 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

1 8 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 re-
tainer, 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 Chais-
teil, 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 mo-
dified 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

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 19

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 groupes of de-
tached rocks. Immediately in front of the central hollow,
as if skilfully introduced to relieve the tamest part of the
prospect, a noble wall of semicircular 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 di-
rectly opposite, it presented almost the appearance of pulver-
ized 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, mactrida?, buccinidse,
and fractured periwinkles, lay heaped together in vast abun-
dance. 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 reci-
pient of the whole, filled to the depth of several feet, and to
the extent of several hundred yards, with a pure shell-sand,

20 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OB,

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 ori-
gin here of a bed of shell-sand, consisting of many thousand
tons, and of which at least eighty per cent, was once asso-
ciated with animal life. And such, I doubt not, is the his-
tory of many a calcareous rock in the later secondary forma-
tions. There are strata not a few of the Cretaceous and Ooli-
tic groupes, 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 gene-
rally 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

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 21

them from the boat, was, that the inclosing mass was a pitch
cauldron, rather of the roughest and largest, and much be-
grimed by soot, that had cracked to the heat, and that the
fluid pitch was forcing its way outward 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 pitch-stone changing in co-
lour, 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 amyg-
daloid 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 colours 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 ap-
pearance to obsidian, — a mineral which, in its dense form,
closely resembles the coarse dark-coloured glass of which com-
mon 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 sub-
stance almost identical with pumice by the chemist. " It is
stated by the Honourable George Knox of Dublin," says Mr
Robert Allan, in his valuable mineralogical work, " that the
pitchstone of Newry, on being exposed to a high tempera-
ture, 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

22 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

leisure, and taking with us his companion to assist us in car-
rying such specimens as we might procure, we passed west-
wards for a few hundred yards under the crags, and came
abreast of a dark angular opening at the base of the preci-
pice, 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 ver-
tical line, which in one of the stratified rocks one might per-
haps 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 cool-
ing lead poured by the plumber from the opposite ends 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 shal-
low 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, point-
ing 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 catas-
trophe. That is the famous cave of Frances ( Uamh FhraingJ,
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 ex-

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 23

treme 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 percolat-
ing 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 handiuls the decomposing trap
within. The process of decomposition, and consequent en-
largement, 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 accumula-
tions 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 twi-
light glimmers gray at the entrance, from the narrow vesti-
bule ; 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, roppy and damp, the place called to recollec-
tion that hall in Roman story, hung and carpeted^fertSl 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;

24 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 nar-
row vestibule, resembles that of a charnel-house. At almost
every step we come upon heaps of human bones grouped to-
gether, 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 pot-
tery, 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 pel-
let of gray hair. From under another heap he disinterred
the handle-stave of a child's wooden porringer (bicker), per-

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 25

forated 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, evi-
dently 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 mys-
tery, in the person of my little boy, — an experimental philo-
sopher in his second year. I had spread out on the floor the
curiosities of Eigg, — among the rest, the relics of the cave, in-
cluding the pieces of earthen jar, and the fragment of the por-
ringer ; but the horse's tooth seemed to be the only real cu-
riosity 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 whole-
sale 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 thousand score persons
that cannot discern between their right hand and their left T
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

26 THE CRUISE OP THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 occur-
rence ; and Mr James Wilson relates, in the singularly gra-
phic and powerful description of Uamh Fraingh which oc-
curs 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 lat-
ter 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 sup-
pose 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 Ked Sandstone the strong-
based tusks of the semi-reptile Holoptychius ; I have chi-
selled 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 Squalidse that had been dis-
interred 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, tear-
ing, 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 ruth-
less 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

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 27

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 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 Francis 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 tra-
ditions 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 them-
selves, the Eiggites strapped them to their own boats, which
they sent adrift into the ocean. They were, however, res-
cued 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 nar-
row, 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 uninhabit-

28 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY j OB,

ed, presumed the natives had fled, and satisfied their revenge-
ful feelings by ransacking and pillaging the empty houses.
Probably the moveables 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 suspi-
cion, and induced them to return. Unfortunately a slight
sprinkling of snow had fallen, and the footsteps of an indivi-
dual 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 unsatisfac-
tory to the Skye-men, who immediately proceeded to 'adjust
the preliminaries' in their own way, which adjustment con-
sisted in carrying a vast collection of heather, ferns, and
other combustibles, and making a huge fire just in the very
entrance of the Uamh Fhraing, 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. Ac-
cording, 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'Leods
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 re-
covery, he returned, crook-backed and infirm, to wreak his
vengeance on the inhabitants, all of whom, warned of his com-
ing 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 impla-

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 29

cable chieftain, giving orders, on the discovery, to unroof the
houses in the neighbourhood, 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 sur-
vived 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 McDonalds
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 de-
scribed, that it might be perhaps prudent, instead of attempt-
ing one description more, to present the reader with some of
the already existing ones. " The Scuir pf Eigg," says Pro-
fessor Jamieson, in his " Mineralogy of the Western Islands,"

30 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY j OR,

" 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 ex-
traordinary object is considerable," says M'Culloch, dashing
off his sketch with a still bolder hand ; " yet its powerful ef-
fect 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 com-
bination of outline with the surrounding land, and hence ac-
quires that independence in the general landscape which in-
creases 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 di-
mensions 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, con-
veying the impression of a tower the height of which is such

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 31

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
" Yicar of Wakefield" dealt with the old painting, when, seiz-
ing a brush, he daubed it over with brown varnish, and then
asked the spectators whether he had not greatly improved
the tone of the colouring. 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 ef-
fect ; 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 de-
scribed by M'Culloch, the form of a perpendicular but ruin-
ous 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 Mend Mr D. O. Hill would delight to draw, and give de-
light 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 bun-

32 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY j OR,

dies 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 im-
part 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 bar-
ren 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 deli-
cate 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 pitch-stones 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 deli-
cious blue behind it. But the minuter details I must re-
serve 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 harbours 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 pHe-brander of the Pinites Eiggensis,
an ancient tree of the Oolite. The gigantic Scuir of Eigg
rests on the remains of a prostrate forest

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 33

CHAPTER IIL

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 peculiari-
ties 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 storeys
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 frag-
ments,— 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 Scot-
land,— 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

c

34 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 neigh-
bour ; 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, com-
pared with that of some of the neighbouring islands, pre-
sents 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 appa-
rently 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-coloured non-
columnar trap, described by M'Culloch as of a texture inter-
mediate 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 froih fifteen to twenty in depth ; the columns
of the pitchstone-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 con-

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 35

denser 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. In-
side, 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, com-
posed mainly of a gritty conglomerate, formed the scene of
our labours. 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 rest-
ing 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 back-ground vista of antiquity, all the more
remotely ancient in aspect from the venerable age of the ob-
ject 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 de-
cayed 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 the 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

36 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

mouritain-wall of Eigg, with its dizzy elevation of four hun-
dred and seventy feet, is a wall founded on piles of pine laid
erossways ; 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 pick-
axe had lingered behind us for a few hundred yards, in ear-
nest 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 neighbourhood, had peremptorily
warned him that the Scuir of Eigg was the property of Dr
MTherson 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 al-
lowable in the case of a poor Dissenter, and is no bad speci-
men of the thousand little ways in which the Roman Ca-
tholic 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 disreput-
able 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 abstract-
ing,— 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 Lon-
don Geological Society will generously subscribe half-a-crown

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 37

a-piece to assist me in feeing counsel. There are more inte-
rests than mine at stake in the affair. If I be cast and com-
mitted,— I, who have poached over only a few miserable dis-
tricts 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 imbedded 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-grow-
ing 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 to 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 coniferse of the Coal Measures. " Its me-
dullary rays," say Messrs Lindley and Hutton, " appear to

38 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 ves-
sels, or lacunae, of various sizes, the sides of which are dis-
tinctly defined/' Viewed through the microscope, in trans-
parent 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, — tJtere, too, the elon-
gated 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-trans-
parent, 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

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 39

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
neighbourhood 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 in-
stances, as in the Eigg specimens, of slow growth. One of
the trunks I saw near Navidale measured two feet in diame-
ter, 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 spe-
cimens, 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 shal-
low 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 groupes, 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 groupes 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 groupes. 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

40 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 observ-
ed, as we learn from Bacon, by the people of the low coun-
tries, 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 al-
ternate bundles of better and worse : vegetation throve vigo-
rously 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 fos-
sil-wood, we ascended by a steep broken ravine to the top of
the Scuir. The columns, as we pass on towards the west, di-
minish 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 in yet others
they present, as in the eastern portion of the Scuir, the com-
mon 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 nearer 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 for ever. The feeling must have
been experienced on former occasions amid the innumerable

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 4 1

pillars of the Scuir ; for we find M'Culloch, in his descrip-
tion, ingeniously analyzing it. " The resemblance to archi-
tecture 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 sub-
lime ; and as the appearance of power exerted, no less than
that of simplicity, is necessary to confer this character on ar-
chitecture, so the mind, insensibly transferring the operations
of nature to the efforts of art where they approximate in cha-
racter, 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 level-
led 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 re-
mains 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, anji 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 atop, though so in-
tensely black within, are weathered on the surface into almost
a pure white : and we found lying detached among them, frag-
ments 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

42 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 picee of bonajtde Scotch pumice. This gentle-
man, 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 dis-
covery. "I visited the island of Eigg," he says, "in 1825
or 1826, for the purpose of shooting, and remained in it se-
veral days ; and as there was a great scarcity of game, I
amused myself in my wanderings by looking about for natu-
ral 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 colour, and very
porous, the pores being large and round, and the substance
which divided them of a uniform thickness. This last speci-
men 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 pitch-
stone, 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 exist-

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 43

ing 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
neighbourhood, that would have furnished the necessary fuel ;
the wind must have often been sufficiently high on the sum-
mit 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 Ferril, 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 be-
neath 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 im-
mense 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 in-
distinct 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 representa-
tives, 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

44 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

give variety to the mainland ; and, on the other, the various-
ly-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 Hum, lay moored imme-
diately 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 fring-
ing the barren Eilean Chaisteil outside, — lay the Betsey, look-
ing wonderfully diminutive, but evidently a little thing of
high spirit, tant-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

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 45

aven 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
honour 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 favour granted to the Roman Catholics of the island. But
month after month passed, and they got no reply to their pe-
tition ; 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 MTherson 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 rais-
ing 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 MTher-

46 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

son, 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 connec-
tion 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 ob-
served 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 buildings 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 some time 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 float-

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 47

ing near the shores of Madeira by the brother-in-law of Co-
lumbus, and which, among other similar pieces of circumstan-
tial 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 Scot-
land. " 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, especi-
ally 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 particu-
larly that great current which issues from the Gulf of Flo-
rida, and is hence denominated the Gulf Stream, aid very
much in transporting across the mighty Atlantic these Ame-
rican 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 dis-
course; 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 fac-
totum, 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 involved among the cords, and strangled
itself " Alas, alas ! " exclaimed the minister, " thus ends our
hope of fresh mutton for the present, and my hapless specu-
lation as a sheep-farmer for ever more." I learned from him
afterwards, over our tea, that shortly previous to the Convo-
cation he had got his glebe, — one of the largest in Scotland,
• — well stocked with sheep and cattle, which he had to sell,

48 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

immediately on the Disruption, in miserably bad condition,
at a loss of nearly fifty per cent. He had a few sheep, how-
ever, that would not sell at all, and that remained on the
glebe in consequence, until his successor entered into posses-
sion. 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 neighbour 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 by what he deemed the new minis-
ter's gratuitous unkindness to a brother in calamity ; and, re-
lieving 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 Goufnng Jock, an ancient border shep-
herd, 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 broad sword, 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 occa-
sion, simply the first portion of his speech ; and then, betak-
ing ourselves to our cabin, we forgot all our sorrows over
our tea,

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 49

CHAPTER IY.

THERE had been rain during the night ; and when I first got
on deck, a little after seven, a low stratum of mist, that com-
pletely 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 vapour, 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

D

50 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 arose from one. In less than
an hour we were descending on the Bay of Laig, a semicir-
cular 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 semicircular 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 Bum, 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,

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 51

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 itselij brightening up many a dingy cot-
tage, 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 com-
posed almost entirely of Oolitic rocks, and bears atop, espe-
cially where an ancient oyster-bed of great depth forms the sub-
soil, a kindly and fertile mould. The cottages lie in groupes ;
and, save where a few bogs, which it would be no very dif-
ficult 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 sub-
urbs of some ancient city lying embosomed, with all its dwell-
ings 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-inqui-
sitive islander, curious to know whose shroud she was pre-
paring ; and how she more than satisfied his curiosity, by tell-
ing him it was his own. It is a not uninteresting fact," add-
ed the minister, " that my poor people, since they have become

52 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 en-
tire as when they lay, ages before, in the mud, which we still
see retaining around them its original colour. 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 half in length, and the
majority fall short of an inch. What they lack in bulk, how-
ever, 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 adductor
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 second-
ary 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 Lon-
don was once an oyster-bed), that in the chalk below, though
it contains several species of Ostrea, the shells are diffused

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 53

promiscuously throughout the general mass. Leaving, how-
ever, 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 thepe, far below tidemark, we find a dark-
coloured 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 rug-
ged 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 pre-
served I dug up from under the trap-blocks some of the
common Liasic Ammonites of the north-eastern coast of Scoi-
land, 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
dongatus, and found, detached on the surface of the bed, a
fragment of a singularly large Belemnite, a full inch and a

54 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

quarter in diameter, the species of which I could not deter-
mine.

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 sand-
stone precipices, with interposing grassy slopes, in which the
fertile Oolitic meniscus descends to the beach. The sand-
stone, white and soft, and occurring in thick beds, much re-
sembles 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 sides of a river.
The shells, though exceedingly fragile, — for they partake of
the nature of the clayey matrix in which they are embedded,
— 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 dissi-
milarity, 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, re-
sembling 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 resem-
bling an Oiliva. So thickly do they lie clustered together in
this deposit, that in some patches where the sad-coloured ar-
gillaceous ground is washed bare by the sea, it seems marbled
with them into a light gray tint. The group more nearly

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMOXG THE HEBRIDES. 55

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 distin-
guishable 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 peri-
winkles and whelks congregated thickly, the Belemnite, scared
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 ex-
tremely 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 combi-
nations of form. The low precipices, undermined at the base,
beetle over like the sides of stranded vessels. One of the pro-
jecting 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 awk-
ward courtesy, to the breakers. But in a winter or two,
judging from its present degree of attenuation, and the yield-
ing nature of its material, which resembles a damaged mass
of arrowroot 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

56 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 per-
pendicular 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 con-
sistence of quartz rock, have long since mouldered away,
leaving but the hollow rectilinear rents which they had oc-
cupied, surmounted by the indurated walls which they had
baked. Some of the most curious appearances, however, con-
nected 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 to-
gether in a form resembling a squat figure of eight, of what
printers term the Egyptian type, or, to borrow the illustra-
tion of M'Culloch, " like the ancient military projectile
known by the name of double-headed shot ;" in other speci-
mens 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 SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 57

a hard siliceous stone, that has resisted those disintegrating
influences of the weather and the surf under which the yield-
ing 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 green-
stone 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 extra-
vagant cast of " Christabel," or the " Rhyme of the Ancient
Mariner," fretted into sandstone. But by far the most curi-
ous 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 colour, and the clearness with which the minute par-
ticles reflect the light, reminds one of accumulations of po-
tato-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

58 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 existr-
ing 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 yield-
ed to the tread, as my companions paced over it. I struck
it obliquely with my foot, where the surface lay dry and in-
coherent in the sun, and the sound elicited was a shrill sono-
rous 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 gra-
nite of Memnon, than in the loose Oolitic sand of the Bay
of Laig. As we marched over the drier tracts, an incessant
1000, 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 re-
gard it as such, — adds a third locality to two previously

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 59

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 consi-
derably more accessible than Jabel Nakous in Arabia Petraea,
or Reg-Rawan in the neighbourhood 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 inabi-
lity 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 journey-
ings 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 de-
sert, that there rose at times from this hill a strange, inexpli-
cable music. As he leads his camel past in the heat of the
day, a sound like the first low tones of an ^Eolian harp stirs
the hot breezeless air. It swells louder and louder in pro-
gressive 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 gar-
dens and fountains of delicious water, and brought with him
to the upper world, on his return, fragments of consecrated

60 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

bread. The first European travellerwho visited JabelNakous,
says Sir David, was M. Seetzen, a German. He journeyed
for several hours over arid sands, and under ranges of preci-
pices 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 undu-
lating 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 down-
wards, 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 Jdbel 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 con-
tinuous murmuring sound, which seemed to rise beneath his
feet," but " which gradually changed into pulsations as it be-
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

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 61

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 angu-
lar slope of sand resting in a hollow in one of its sides, and
rising to nearly its apex. " It forms," says Lieutenant Wel-
sted, " 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-coloured 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 semicircle 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 re-
semble 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
C9ntinued 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 ^Eolian harp
when its strings first catch the breeze : as the sand became
more violently agitated by the increased velocity of the de-
scent, the noise more nearly resembled that produced by draw-
ing the moistened fingers over glass. As it reached the base,

62 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 alaign>
ed, 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 hun-
dred 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 moun-
tains 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 neighbourhood, " 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 dis-
tinctly 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 in-
habitants of the country at an early period ; and the notice

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 63

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 to-
gether, lead to the inference that the sand may have originated
in the decomposition of the rock beneath. It is further no-
ticeable, 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 geologi-
cal era. I owe to the kindness of Dr Wilson of Bombay,
two specimens which he picked up in Arabia Petrsea, 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 Petrsea, where they are termed by the Arabs pe-
trified olives ; that nummulites are also abundant in the dis-
trict ; 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, what-
ever its age or origin, seems yet to be discovered. There are
few substances that appear worse suited than sand to com-

64 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

municate 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 rest. 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 tra-
veller, 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. Lieu-
tenant 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 hundredweight
of the sand of Jabel Nakous, and a slope of many yards, to
produce. But in the stillness of a close room, it is just pos-

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 65

sible that it may. I have, however, little doubt, that from
small quantities the sounds evoked by the foot on the shore
may be reproduced : enough will lie within the reach of ex-
periment 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 charac-
terized 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 num-
ber of the " North British Review," — which appears on Mon-
day first,* — the reader will find the sonorous sand of Eigg re-
ferred to, in an article the authorship of which will scarce
be mistaken. " We have here," says the writer, after first
describing the sounds of Jabel Nakvus, and then referring to
those of Eigg, " the phenomenon in its simple state, disem-
barrassed 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
vibrations 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 par-
ticle 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 the 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
* March 31, 1845.
£

66 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 omis-
sion 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 other than inadequate.
Let us just look, for example, at the various accounts given
us of Jabel Nakous. There are strange sounds heard pro-
ceeding from a hill in Arabia, and various travellers set them-
selves 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, re^
marks 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 ^Eolian harp when its
strings first catch the breeze," but anon, as the agitation of
the sand increases, they " more nearly resemble those pro-
duced by drawing the moistened fingers over glass." Not at
all, exclaims the warlike Zahor Ed-Din Muhammad Baber,
twirling his whiskers : "I know a similar hill in the country

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 67

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 descrip-
tions, 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.

68 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OS,

CHAPTER V.

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 com-
position cover it up, concealing the nature of the rock be-
neath. The long semicircular wall of precipice which, sweep-
ing 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 path-
ways, 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 vege-
table impressions, which, from their sculptured markings, re-
call to memory the Sigilaria of the Coal Measures. Here

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 69

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 frag-
mentary 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 build-
ing, 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 protru-
sions and landslips, we find some difficulty in tracing their
order of succession.

Near the base of the slope, where the soil has been under-
mined 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 verv
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,

70 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 dis-
tinguished, of living geologists, found in a northern district
of Sky e, in 1826, a deposit containing Cyclas, Paludina, Ne-
ritina, — all shells of unequivocally fresh-water origin, — which
must have been formed, he concludes, in either a lake or es-
tuary. 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 stra-
tum 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 extra-
ordinary 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-

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 71

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 1 794, 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, besides a num-
ber 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 it-
self 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 co-
vered way, — we see but the rampart alone. But the dizzy
front of black basalt, dark as night, save where a broad belt
of light-coloured sandstone traverses it in an angular direc-
tion, like a white sash thrown across a funeral robe, — the fan-
tastic 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 so-
litary sea which it commands, — all conspire to render the
scene a profoundly imposing one. It is one of those scenes

72 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

in which 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, turn-
ing another angle of the island, runs on parallel to the coast
for about six miles more. In former times the puffin fur-
nished 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 neces-
sities, 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 potatoe 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 pur-
sue it for its own sake, as an amusement. I found among
the islanders what was said to be a piece of the natural his-
tory 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 Hy, it becomes unable to

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 73

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, — re-
lieved 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 plat-
form, that, sinking midway into a ditch-like hollow, rises again
towards the sea, and presents to the waves a perpendicular
precipice of red stone. The sinking sun shone brightly this
evening ; and the warm hues of the precipice, which bears
the name offtu-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 neigh-
bouring Oolites and basalts. In the geological map which
I carried with me, — not one of high authority, however, — I

74 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

found it actually coloured as a patch of this ancient system.
The Old Red Sandstone is largely developed in the neigh-
bouring island of Hum, 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 Plesiosau-
rus 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 Scot-
land.

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 sur-
face 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 pecu-

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 75

liar 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 Sandstona Its columnar structure bore evidence
to the action of great heat ; and its pale red colour was exact-
ly 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 un-
altered 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 Sand-
stone, I succeeded in detecting several shells, identical with
those of the deposit of blue clay described in a former chap-
ter. 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 frag-
ments 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 con-
nection 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 morn-
ing and a less hasty survey. We found a hospitable meal
awaiting us at a picturesque old two-storey 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

76 THE CRUISE OP THE BETSEY ; OR,

the -viands. Dark night had long set in ere we reached our
vessel.

Next day was Saturday ; and it behoved my friend the
minister, — as scrupulously careful in his pulpit preparations
for the islanders of Eigg as if his congregation were an Edin-
burgh 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 con-
trived 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 neigh-
bourhood 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 wea-
ther, we find it fretted over with minute organisms, mostly
the scales, plates, bones, and teeth of fishes. The organisms,

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 77

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, evi-
dently 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 abun-
dance,— 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 back-bone, 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 spi-
nous processes rising over the body or centrum of the bone, —
which I found in every instance, unlike that of the Ichthyo-
saurus, only moderately concave on the articulating iaces;
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 :

78 THE CRUISE OP THE BETSEY ; OB,

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 de-
scending 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 cha-
racteristic 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 un-
like 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 vertebra?,
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 non-
descript organisms of the shale, I laid open a smooth angu-
lar 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

A. SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 79

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 en-
tire ; and fain would I have swam 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-coloured 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 re-
mote 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

80 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 rep-
tile 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-coloured 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 sand-
stone. Such is the appearance which it presents where wea-
thered ; 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 ram-
part 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>

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 81

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 undulat-
ing belt of hilly pasture, with here and there a sunny slope
level enough for the plough, and here and there a rough wil-
derness 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 sun-light 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 cir-

F

82 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

cular 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 sha-
dow of the tall rampart ; but the red light fell, for many a
mile beyond, on the glassy surface ; and the distant Cuchul-
lin 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 recognised in John Stewart
an old acquaintance. John informed her in her own lan-
guage that I was Mr Swanson's sworn friend, and not a Mo-
derate^ 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
" 0 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, en-
gaged 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

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 83

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 se-
veral 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 mea-
sured 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 labours in bands among the rich
fields of the Lowlands, or for the unwholesome back-room and
weary task-work of the city seamstress. The sun-light 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 land-
scape lay equally in shadow, one of the more picturesque pe-
culiarities 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 charac-
ter, 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-coloured
trap above and below, reminds one of a belt of white hewn
work in a basalt house-front, or rather — for there occurs above

84 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

a second continuous strip, of an olive hue, the colour assumed,
on weathering, by a bed of amygdaloid — of a piece of dingy
old-fashioned furniture, inlaid with one stringed belt of bleach ',
ed 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 every-
where, as on the opposite side of the Ru-Stoir, faint impres-
sions 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 con-
tained 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 co-
lumnar as we neared our journey's end. One especial jutting
in the rock presented in the gloom the appearance of an an-
cient portico, with pediment and cornice, such as the travel-
ler sees on the hill-sides of Petrsea 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

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 85

the stars that had begun to twinkle over it were disappear-
ing, one after one, in the thickening vapour, 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, ga-
thered 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 en-
thusiastic 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 ca-
lamity, 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 ; signifi-
cantly adding, " he once hung a bookseller." On a nearly
similar principle I would be disposed to propose among geo-
logists a grateful bumper in honour 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 Hoff-
mann was doing, in a quiet way, all he could to give it a be-
ginning ; — 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 extraordi-
nary fossil, — the occipital plates of an enormous saurian, with
jaws four and a half feet long, bristling over with teeth, like
chevaux defrise ; and after Hoffmann, who got the block in
which it lay embedded, cut out entire, and transferred to his

86 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

house, had spent week after week in painfully relieving it
from the mass, all Maestricht began to speak of it as some-
thing 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 Hoff-
mann'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 Hoff-
mann, half broken-hearted, with but his labour and the law-
yer'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 Chalmers' two hundred churches. Hoffmann was a phi-
losopher, 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 labours, the vital ener-
gies 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 j 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 Mosa-
saurus, and safety in their neighbourhood. The French sa-
vans, like all the other savans of Europe, had heard of Hoff-
mann's fossil, and the French artillery had been directed to
play wide of the place where it lay. Maestricht surrender-
ed ; the fossil was found secreted in a vault, and sent away

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. §7

to the Jardin des Plantes at Paris, maugre the canon, to de-
light there the heart of Cuvier ; and the French, generously
addressing themselves to the heirs of Hoffinann as its legiti-
mate 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.

88 THE CKUISE OF THE BETSEY OK,

CHAPTER VI.

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 satis-
fied. 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
armour 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 recognises 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

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 89

fellow-men, and in which, there shall be no such wrongs per-
petrated as it is my present purpose to record, — " new hea-
vens 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 horn,
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 pro-
spect 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 thicken-
ed 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
vapour ; 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-har-
bour, formed of loosely piled stone, at the upper extremity of
a sandy bay; and a roofless dwelling beside it, with two ruin-
ous gables rising over the broken walls. The entire scene
suggested the idea of a laud with which man had done for
ever ; — the vapour-enveloped rocks, — the waste of ebb-un-
covered sand, — the deserted harbour, — 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 them-
selves they would have furnished materials enough for a finish-

90 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY j OR,

ed 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 canvass, and protect-
ed atop by a genuine sou^wester, of which the broad posterior
rim sloped half a yard down his back ; and I closely wrapped
up in my gray maud, which proved, however, a rather indif-
ferent 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 near-
ly 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 minis-
ter ; 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. Barely have I seen human
countenances so eloquently vocal with veneration and love.
The gospel message, which my friend had been the first effec-
tually 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,

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 9 1

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 lis-
tened 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

92 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; OR,

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 be-
lieveth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."
The great truths which had affected many of these poor peo-
ple 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 the 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 north-
ern 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-harbour. 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 favourite
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

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 93

gravitation operative in such cases, the poor incumbent be-
came utterly scandalous, and was libelled for drunkenness be-
fore 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 happen-
ed, 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 suc-
ceeded 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 cere-
monies, 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 prede-
cessor 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 John-
son'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 yel-
low stick, — I suppose a cane, for which the Earse 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."

94 THE CRUISE OP THE BETSEY j OR,

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 Ca-
tholic 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 Pro-
testant, 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 ad-
vantageous ; and the Roman Catholics used good-humouredly
to urge on their neighbours 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 laboured
hard, as a good and honest man ought, to impart to Protest-
antism 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 stonecast away,
under the rocky shores of Eilean Chaisteil, and who, on catch-
ing 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 disap-

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 95

peared Meanwhile the boat drifted slowly away : first one
little head would appear for a moment over the gunwale, then
another, as if reconnoitring 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 extre-
mity 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 semicircular 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 frag-
ments 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 ofbener, — 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

96 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; OB,

avoided by his neighbours as a man who lived on them with-
out 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 recognised 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 wretch-
ed shed with some spars and the old sail of a boat placed slant-
ways against the side of a rock, he squatted on the beach, de-
termined, 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

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 97

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, admi-
nistering 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 case-
ments 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 re-
covery, 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 neighbour 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 circum-
stances. But the miller could sustain no apology for the ar-
rangement that had given him his vagabond father as a neigh-
bour ; and oftener than once the site of the rising hovel be-
came 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

G

98 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 moor-
ings, and set oui> 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 thajScuir, projected boldly from its
steep hill-top, resembled a sharp hatchet-edge presented to the
sky. " Nowhere," said my friend, " did I so thoroughly rea-
lize 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 furni-
ture, 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, how-
ever, 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 him-

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 99

self 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 Houm,
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 inter-
mingled patches of woodland and arable on the coast, and its
mottled ranges of heath and rock above. Towards evening
we entered the harbour 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 neighbouring sea, but the fish had again disap-
peared, 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 vil-
lage, 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 primaiy region with regard to or-
ganic existence, " without form and void." From Isle Orn-
say 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 neighbour-
hood 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

100 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OK,

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 com-
plete 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 compo-
sition, and many of its strata the geologist would fail to re-
cognise 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 lat-
ter into a pale feldspathose rock, thickly pervaded by needle-
like crystals of tremolite, that, from the style of the group-
ing, and the contrast existing between the dark green of the

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 101

enclosed mineral, and the pale flesh-colour of the ground, fre-
quently 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 trans-
versely 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 colour, bristling thick around it Mr Elder showed
me, intercalate^ among the gneiss strata of a little ravine in
the neighbourhood of Isle Ornsay, a thin band of a bluish-
coloured 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 combina-
tions, 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

102 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

different form, and the glittering mica built up its multitu-
dinous layers between. Here the unctuous chlorite con-
structed 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 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.* 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 main land 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,

* 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.

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 103

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 disin-
tegrated 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, eccen-
tric, 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 hop-
ping vigorously among the distant bogs, like a felt ball on its
electric platform ; and when the mist lies thick in the hol-
lows, 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 j and
we find the Lias, from its lower to its upper beds, exposed in
unbroken series along the beach. In the middle of the open-
ing lies the green level island of Pabba, altogether composed
of this formation, and which, differing, in consequence, both
in outline and colour, from every neighbouring island and

104 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 con-
siderable 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 vapour 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 pass-
ed ; 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.

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 105

CHAPTER YIL

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 explora The morn-
ing was ominously hot and breathless ; and while the sea lay
moveless in the calm, as a floor of polished marble, moun-
tain, and rock, and distant island, seemed tremulous all over,
through a wavy medium of thick rising vapour. 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, — con-
tent with a glance. Accustomed in most instances to take
long aims, as Cuddy Headrig did, when he steadied his mus-
ket 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 or-
ganisms 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

106 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 dis-
turbance 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 be-
hind it there lay another up til ted sheet, like the lid of a second
half-open chest j 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
recognised 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
1 >eds, 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 up-
tilted 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

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 107

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 mooiy valley, full
fifteen miles in length, occupied by a chain of dark bogs and
treeless loehans. A long line of trap-hills rises over it, in
one of which, considerably in advance of the others, I recog-
nised the Storr of Skye, famous among lovers of the pictu-
resque 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 bot-
tom, 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 clifls 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 gate-
way, 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 pur-
suing 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, fall seven hundred feet in height,
striped longitudinally with alternating bands of white sand-
stone and dark shale, and capped atop by a continuous cop-
ing 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

108 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 Port-
ree of the present day, in which eddy tides deposited the
sand swept along by the tidal currents of some neighbouring
sound, and which swarmed as thickly with Cephalopoda as
the loch swarmed this day with minute purple-tinged Me-
dusae. I found detached on the shore, immediately below this
bed, a piece of calcareous fissile sandstone, abounding in small
sulcated Terebratulse, identical, apparently, with the Terebra-
tula 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-prow-
ed 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 be-
comes 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 up-
per deposit of the Lower Oolite, down to the Lias, the for-
mation on which the Oolite rests. The only modifying cir-
cumstance 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

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 109

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 Murchisonce, first disco-
vered 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 dark-
ening since noon, as if one thin covering of gauze after an-
other 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 down-
ward cataract-like streaming of the gray vapour on the hori-
zon 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, climb-

110 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

ing 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 Boss, 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 bonajlde 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 Geo-
logy. 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 de-
scending order, the whole Oolitic deposits of the Hebrides,
from the Cornbrash, with its overlying freshwater 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 ;

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. Ill

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 labours, 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 break-
fast 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 spe-
cimen 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

112 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

was quite sure of that, — zealous in behalf of the Establish-
ment, though previous to the Disruption they had not cared
for it a pin's point, — and prepared to justify the virtual sup-
pression of the toleration laws in the case of the Free Church.
I was thus decidedly guilty of what old Dr More calls a pro-
sopolepsia, — 4. e. of the crime of judging men by their looks.
At dinner, however, we gradually ate ourselves into conver-
sation : we differed, and disputed, and agreed, and then dif-
fered, 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 ad-
vanced in life, — strange as the fact might seem, — very con-
siderably 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, nmch
an enemy of all oppression, and a brother contributor of my
own to one of the Quarterlies. Of all my surmisings regard-
ing 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 behoved 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 explor-
ing the island, perhaps for ever ; 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,

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 113

when it drove up, I went to take my place in it The post-
master of the village, a lean, hungry-looking man, interfered
to prevent me. I had secured my seat, I said, two days pre-
vious. 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 1
" Yes.1' " Could you have received it ?' " No." " Show
me a copy of your regulations." " I have no copy of regu-
lations ; but I have given the place in the gig to another."
" Just so • and what say you, postman T " That you took
the place from me, and that he has no right to give a place
to any one : I cariy 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 relat-
ing ; but the postmaster was so vehement and terrible, so de-
fiant 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 carnivorse of a Skye deposit, — a cuttle-
fish, that preyed on the weaker molluscs, or a hungry poly-
pus, terrible among the animalculse.

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 south-
ern and eastern side of Loch Sligachan, where I could see

H

114 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

from iny 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 Gryphcea incurva, and that
the dry-stone fences in the moor above exhibit fossils that
might figure in a museum. But we rattled by. At Broad-
ford, 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 fossilife-
rous 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 gene-
ral 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

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 115

were not mutually the better for so spending. I at least
owe much to these hours, — among other things, views of theo-
logic 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 busi-
ness 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 labourers are few, and left to me a field in which the
labourers 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 anti-
quity,— 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 Robe-
spierre 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 mode-
ration, no bad study for geologists, especially in coarse wea-
ther, when they had got wet and somewhat fatigued. It
was like Landlord Boniface's ale, mild as milk, had exchanged
its distinctive flavour 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 some-
where, 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,

116 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 mid-
dle 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 stemwards 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 pos-
sible, 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 neighbouring islands to visit, —
and sent half a dozen pistol-bullets after a shoal of porpoises,
which, coming from the Free Church yacht, must have asto-
nished 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 cen-
tral 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 a-head. At half-past ten, however, the Betsey was still
pitching to the swell, with not a breath of wind to act on
the diminished canvass, and with but the solitary circum-
stance in her favour, 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

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 117

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 Mend, — his Sa-
turday'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, shriek-
ing 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 farrowed 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 for-
tune, 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 neighbours 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 in-
visible 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-

118 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; OR,

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 op-
position served but to speed her on all the more surely to the
desired haven. At five o'clock in the morning we cast an-
chor in Loch Scresort, — the only harbour 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 hur-
ried it away far to the lee. He had yielded it to the winds,
as he had done the temporalities, but much more unwilling-
ly, and less as a free agent. Should any conscientious ma-
riner pick up anywhere in the Atlantic a serviceable ochre-
coloured souwester, 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 con-
sider whether a benefaction to its full value, deducting sal-
vage, is not owing, in honour, to the Sustentation Fund.

It was ten o'clock ere the more fatigued aboard could mus-
ter resolution enough to quit their beds a second time ; and
then it behoved the minister to prepare for his Sabbath la-
bours 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 mom-
ing. 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 Hed 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 Ame-

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 119

rica, but not one inhabited dwelling; while along a black
moorj acclivity under the hills on the other side I could
see several groupes of turf cottages, with here and there a
minute speck of raw-looking corn beside them, that, judging
from its colour, seemed to have but a slight chance of ripen-
ing. 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 rhime 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 re-
turned 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.

120 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY j OR,

CHAPTER VIII.

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 to-
gether, 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 sur-
rounds the bottles ; then let him set them down in the sea a
dozen miles off the land, — and he shall have produced a se-
cond island of Rum, similar in structure to the existing one.
In the actual island, however, there is a defect in the inclos-
ing 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 -coloured 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 an-
chor,— and the long withdrawing valley, of which the loch is

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 121

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 over-
flowed 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 hun-
dred. And such is the piece of history, composed in silent
but expressive language, and inscribed in the old geologic cha-
racter, 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

122 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OB,

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-coloured 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 morn-
ing,— unpardonably so in one who had spent very many morn-
ings 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 sand-
stone. Red arenaceous beds of great thickness alternate with
grayish-coloured 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

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 123

gray band of from three to six feet, and is succeeded by a si-
milar 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, identi-
cal with that of so many of our modern lavas, — the ripple-
markings of the arenaceous beds on the other, indistinguish-
able 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

124 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY j OR,

and clearly ; but here was a story not clearly told. It sum-
moned 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 immedi-
ately 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 vi-
tality 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

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 125

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 hu-
man 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, whe-
ther there might not be some glimmering of consciousness at-
tendant at the same time on the fearfully opening and shut-
ting 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 re-
ceive of this divisibility of the vital principle. I have seen
the two halves of the heart of a ray pulsating for a full quar-
ter 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 in-
dependent 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 suffi-
ciently curious, however, to see, in the case of this brown
lizard, the least vital half of the creature so much more vi-
vacious, 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 verte-
brata of the head at once renders it insensible. It is after

126 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 re-
fused 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 regu-
larly long after the brain has been removed by careful exci-
sion, 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 di-
vided by Spalanzani, that in three months got upper extre-
mities 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 rep-
tile possessed in any degree a similar susceptibility 1 I can
propound the riddle, but who shall resolve it ? It may be
added, that this brown lizard was the only recent saurian I

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 127

chanced to see in the Hebrides, and that, though large for its
kind, its whole bulk did not nearly equal that of a single ver-
tebral 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'Cul-
loch describes it as inaccessible, and states that it is only
among the debris at its base that its heliotropes can be pro-
cured ; but the distinguished mineralogist must have had con-
siderably less skill in climbing rocks than in describing them,
as, indeed, some of his descriptions, though generally very
admirable, abundantly testiiy. 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 at-
tempted before, — and in ensconcing myself among the blood-
stones. 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 recognised 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 re-

128 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OB,

ceivers of a laboratory, have been vessels in which some cu-
rious chemical process has been carried on. Many of them
we find filled with a white semi-translucent or opaque chal-
cedony ; 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 gene-
rally of an olive green, or of a brownish or reddish colour.
I have never yet seen a rock in which this earth was so abun-
dant as in the amygdaloid of Scuir More. For yards toge-
ther in some places we see it projecting from the surface in
round globules, that very much resemble green pease, 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, oc-
cupying 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 uncoloured state,
filling up so many of the larger cavities, without acquiescing
in the conclusion respecting the origin of the gem first sug-
gested 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 co-
loured waters in the apothecary's window are stained by the
infusions, vegetable and mineral, from which they derive their
ornamental character. The red inottlings which so heighten
the beauty of the stone occur in comparatively few of the
specimens of Scuir More. They are minute jasperous forma-

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 129

tions, independent of the inclosing mass ; and, from their re-
semblance 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 illus-
trative of the origin of the gem. One specimen consists of
white, uncoloured 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 deep-
ly ; a fifth, tinged more deeply still ; a sixth, of a deep green
on one side, and scarce at all coloured on the other ; and a
seventh, dark and richly toned, — a true bloodstone, — thickly
streaked and mottled with red jasper. In the chemical pro-
cess 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 fill-
ing 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 sur-
face under the burnisher.

We find figured by M'Culloch, in his " Western Islands,"
the internal cavity of a pebble of Scuir More, which he pick-
ed up on the beach below, and which had been formed evi-
dently within one of the larger vesicles of the amygdaloid.
He describes it as curiously illustrative of a various chemis-
try : the outer crust is composed of a pale-zoned agate, inclos-
ing 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 sta~

130 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

lactites 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 sub-
stance, 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 stalac-
tites, 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 com-
menced. An infiltration of lime took place ; and the minute
calcareous molecules, under the influence of the law of crys-
tallization, 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-crys-
tal. 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 multi-
farious chemistry that had been carried on in the vesicular
cavities of this mountain, as in the retorts of some vast labo-
ratory. Here was a vesicle filled with green earth, — there
a vesicle filled with calcareous spar, — yonder a vesicle crust-
ed round on a thin chalcedonic shell with rock-crystal, — in
one cavity an agate had been elaborated, in another a helio-
trope, in a third a milk-white chalcedony, in a fourth a jasper.

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 131

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 1 Why should this
chamber contain only a quartzose compound of oxygen and
silica, and that second chamber beside it contain only a cal-
careous compound of lime and carbonic acid1? What law
directed infiltrations so diverse to seek out for themselves ve-
sicles in such close neighbourhood, and to keep, in so many
instances, each to its own vesicle ? I can but state the prob-
lem,— not solve it. The groupes 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 chemis-
try 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 eveiy 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 open-
ed to receive a portion of the infusion. We find that no ve-
sicle 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

132 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY j OR,

two or three coatings, that form around the vesicles skull-like
shells of agate, and then shut -} a few remained open, and be-
came as entirely occupied with agate as many of the previous
ones had become filled with green earth. Then an ample in-
fusion 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 mechani-
cal means of this character, — by such an arrangement of suc-
cessive 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 succes-
sive 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 mys-
tery of the Scuir More. I have given their various cargoes
to all its many vesicles by mechanical means, at 110 expense
of ingenuity whatever. Are there any of my readers prepared
to give it to them by means purely chemical 1

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

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 133

and his wife, — the sole representatives in the valley of a nu-
merous 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 pre-
cipices 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 re-
freshment most seasonable, after our long hours of toil, and
with a rough journey still before us. It is an excellent cir-
cumstance, that hospitality grows best where it is most need-
ed. 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 nourishes 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 broad-
ening 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 for ever. The island,
eighteen years before, had been divested of its inhabitants,

134 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY j OR,

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 Bheep-farmer, and a few shepherds, his servants : the
island of Rum reckoned up scarce a single family at this pe-
riod for every five square miles of area which it contained.
But depopulation on so extreme a scale was found inconve-
nient ; 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 accommo-
dated some ten or twelve of the ejected families with sites
for cottages, and pasturage for a few cows, 011 the bit of mo-
rass beside Loch Scresort, on which I had seen their humble
dwellings. But the whole of the once peopled interior re-
mains 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 them-
selves, 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 poppling 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 suc-
cessive 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 luxu-

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 135

ries 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 ex-
termination 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 the 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 thesa A brave and hardy people, favour-
ably 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 omi-
nous increase which is taking place among us in the worse
class, is to form our solace or apology for the wholesale ex-
patriation of the better. It did not seem as if the depopula-
tion 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

136 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; OK,

the furrowed patches on the slopes of the valleys, — they rear-
ed herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, — their number increased
to nearly five hundred souls, — they enjoyed the average hap-
piness of human creatures in the present imperfect state of
being, — they contributed their portion of hardy anc[ 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
recognised 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 expedi-
tion. 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 thet 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 barelyTnough to

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 137

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 grati-
tuda The razor-fish had been brought us by the worthy ca-
techist 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 colour of its other
parts, like those of the oyster, are of a deep green colour, re-
sembling, when examined by the microscope, the fringe of a
green curtain.

We were told by John Stewart, that the expatriated in-
habitants 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 gather-
ed 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

138 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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, occa-
sioning 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 them-
selves, and grow bigger. We fared richly this evening, after
our hard day's labour, 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 Skya

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 139

CHAPTEK IX.

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 agi-
tating 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 bot-
tom 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, how-
ever, 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 gaiidily
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

140 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OB,

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 corn-fields, 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 forma-
tion, 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 west-
ern coasts, especially on the shores of the island of Pabba, a
sprig coral, considerably larger in size than any I have else-
where 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 boil-

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 141

ing 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
eddie 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 dis-
ported, now rose in the boilings of one eddie, 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 import-
ance. The wind blew a-head, steady thotigh 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

142 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY j OR,

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 w-ay, — 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, leav-
ing 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 even-
ing on some of the razor -fish of Bum, 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 out-
stretches the provision ; and there was comfort in the reflec-
tion, that with the razor-fish on which to fall back, it over-
lapped it but by a very little on this occasion in the cabin of
the Betsey. The steam-boat passed southwards next morn-
ing, and I was joined by my friend the minister a little be-
fore breakfast

The day was miserably bad : the rain continued pattering
on the skylight, now lighter, now heavier, till within an hour

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 143

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 witli
downward lines of foam. The seaward view is more pleas-
ing. 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 neighbourhood
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 descrip-
tion, to throw together my various observations on the for-
mation, 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 colour ; their hues are as distinct as those of the coloured
patches in a map : and they represent geological periods that

1 44 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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. * 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 decom-
position of the exposed parts of the formations at their junc-
tion." " Hence," he adds, " from the wearing of the mate-
rials at the surface, a cavity has been produced, which becom-
ing subsequently filled with rubbish, and generally cover-
ed 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 any-
where seen in Scotland. They are composed chiefly of green-
ish-coloured fissile sandstones and calciferous grits, in which
we meet a few fossils, veiy 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 descend-
ing 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 neighbourhood of Edinburgh are built of
the rough scoria of our glass-houses ; and we find, on exami-
nation, 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, where-
ever they have been washed by the sea, are of great beauty :

* Sir R. Murchison considers these rocks Sihuian. See "Quarterly
Journal" of the Geological Society, Anniversary Address.

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. ] 45

nothing can be more irregular than the outline of each mass,
and vet scarce anything more regular than the sculpturings
on every part of it. We find them fretted over with poly-
gons, like those of a honeycomb, only somewhat less mathe-
matically 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 ex-
tinct, 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* of the Lower Lias,
which I have ranged side by. side with the Astreoe of the
Oolite I had found so abundant a twelvemonth before in the
neighbourhood of Helmsdale. In some of the hand speci-
mens, that present merely a piece of polygonal surface, bound-
ed by fractured sides, the difference is not easily distinguish-
able : the polygonal depressions are generally smaller in the
Oolitic species, and shallower in the Liasic one ; but not un-
frequently these differences disappear, and it is only when com-
pared in the entire unbroken coral that their specific pecu-
liarities acquire the necessary prominence. The Oolitic As-
trea is of much greater size than the Liasic one : it occurs
not unfrequently in masses of from two to three feet in dia-
meter; 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 flat-
ness common to all, bears no resemblance to the form in ano-
ther. Some of the recent Astreae are of great beauty when
inhabited by the living zoophites whose skeleton framework

* Probably one of the Tsastrea of Edwards.
K

146 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

they compose. Every polygonal star in the mass is the house
of a separate animal, that, when withdrawn into its cell, pre-
sents 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 pe-
tals, and then, shrinking back into their cells, straightway be-
come florets again. The Lower Lias presented in one of its
opening scenes, in this part of the world, appearances of simi-
lar beauty widely spread. For miles together, — we know
not how many, — the bottom of a clear shallow sea was paved
with living Astrese : every irregular rock-like coral formed a
separate colony of polypora, that, when in motion, presented
the appearance of continuous masses of many -coloured 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 Astrese are
white ; but in the species referred to, — the Astrea viridis, —
it is of a dark-brown colour. 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-
coloured petrifaction ; whereas the Liasic Astrea of Skye is
invariably of a deep earthy hue. The one was probably a
white, the other a dingy-coloured coral.

The Liasic bed of Astrese existed long enough here to at-
tain 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 eflect, mayhap, of some change

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 147

of currents, induced we know not how, — the innumerable
polypedes of the living surface were buried up ancl 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 Turbi-
nolia of the Mountain Limestone. It presents in the cross
section the same radiated structure as the TurbinoliafunyiteS)
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 for-
mation 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 en-
abled 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.* I found no corals in its higher beds, though these
are charged with other fossils, more characteristic of the for-
mation, in vast abundance. In not a few of the middle strata,
composed of a mud-coloured fissile sandstone, the gryphites

* See a paper by the Rev. P. B. Brodie, on Lias Corals, " Edinburgh
New Philosophic Journal," April 1857.

148 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 Gryphcea incurva. We find detached specimens scattered
over the beach by hundreds, mixed up with the remains of
recent shells, as if the Gryphcea incurva were a recent shell
too. They lie, bleached white by the weather, among the valves
of defunct oysters and dead bucciriidse j and, from their re-
semblance 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 Gryphcea obliquita
and Gryphcea 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-ap-
pear 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 groupes of fossils : its lower coraline
group, in which the Astrea described is most abundant ; its
middle group, in which the Gryplma incurva occurs by mil-

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMOXG THE HEBRIDES. 149

lions ; and its upper group, abounding in Ammonites, Nau-
tili, Pinnae, and Serpulse.

Friday made amends for the rains and fogs of its disagree-
able 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 j and,
weighing anchor, and shaking out all our canvass, we bore
down on Pabba to explore. This island, so soft in outline
and colour, is formidably fenced round by dangerous reefs ;
and, leaving the Betsey in charge of John Stewart and his
companion, to dodge on in the oifing, I set out with the minis-
ter 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 sculptur-
ings 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 alpha-
bet ; 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 near-
est neighbour, — the steep, brown, barren island of Longa,
which is composed of the ancient Red Sandstone of the dis-

150 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

trict, — differing as thoroughly from it in aspect as a bit of
granite differs from a bit of clay-slate ; and the whole pro-
spect 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 pictu-
resque 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 ex-
isting 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
Pinna?, 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 the Sicilian weavers." Gloves made of the
byssus of recent Pinnae may be seen in the British Museum.

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 151

Associated with the numerous Pinnae of Pabba, we found a
delicately-formed Modiola, a small Ostrya, Plagiostoma, Tere-
bratula, several species of Pectens, a triangular univalve re-
sembling a Trochus, innumerable groupes of Serpulse, and the
star-like joints of Pentacrinites. The Gryphse are also abun-
dant, 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 con-
sequence 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 suc-
ceeded 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 explora-
tions, and return to the Betsey. The little wind had become
less, and all the canvass 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

152 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; OR,

her keel ; and ere the dinner-hour we had passed through the
narrows of Kyle Akin. The village of this name was de-
signed by the late Lord M 'Donald for a great sea-port town ;
but it refused to grow ; and it has since become a gentleman
in a small way, and does nothing. It forms, however, a hand-
some 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 thread-
ing 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 ex-
plore 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 re-
markable thickness. It is said to have been built by the
daughter of a Norwegian king, married to a Mackinnoii or
Macdonald, for the purpose of levying an impost on all ves-
sels 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:Yeck,
not the dinner. We had been in a cold Moderate dStricty.
whence there came no half-dozens of eggs, or whole dozens
of trout, or pailfuls of razor-fish, and in which hard cabin-

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 153

biscuit cost us sixpence per pound. And now our stores
were exhausted, and we had to dine as we best 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 hang-
ing 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 suit-
ed to form the food of the organisms that do not unite sensa-
tion 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 up-
per 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 cany 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 in-
tricacies of the true roots of the bunch, if one may speak of
the true roots of an alga, I reckoned up from eighteen to
twenty different forms of animal life, — Flustrae, Sertulariae,
Serpulse, Anomise, Modiolse, Astarte, Annelida, Crustacea,

154 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

and Radiata. Among the Crustaceans I found a female crab
of a reddish-brown colour, considerably smaller than the nail
of my small finger, but fully grown apparently, for the abdo-
minal flap was loaded with spawn • and among the Echino-
derms, 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 Orn-
say ; 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 name, 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

A RUMMER BAUBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 155

them, apparently those of children ; and learned that they in-
dicated the places of two kelp-furnaces, — things which have
now become comparatively rare along the coasts of the He-
brides. 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-look-
ing 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 favourite 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 servantrmaids who had be-
come 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 lanthorns 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 walk-
ing 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-

156 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OB,

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
moveables 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 suf-
fered 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 re-
moved, 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."

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 157

CHAPTER X.

THE anchoring ground at Isle Ornsay was crowded with coast-
ing vessels and fishing boats ; and when the Sabbath caine
round, no inconsiderable portion of my friend's congregation
was composed of sailors and fishermen. His text was appro-
priate,— " 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 harbourage ; and by attending to this sim-
pler part of it, he was led into the parts that were less sim-
ple, 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 twelve-
month,— that had been preached about the time of the Dis-
ruption, full in sight of the Scuir, with its impregnable hill-

158 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

fort, and in the immediate neighbourhood of the cave of Fran-
cis, with its heaps of dead men's bones. One note stuck fast
to the islanders. In times of peril and alarm, said the mi-
nister, the ancient inhabitants of the island had two essen-
tially 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 his-
tory of their choice. Places of refuge of these very opposite
kinds, said the minister, continuing his allegory, are not pe-
culiar 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 poign-
ancy." 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 con-
sequences of the Disruption, — that the bones of Uamh Fraing

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMOXG THE HEBRIDES. 159

lay within a few hundred yards of them, — and that the Scuir,
with the sun shining bright on its summit, rose tall in the
back-ground, scarce a mile away.

On Monday I spent several hours in re-exploring the Lias
of Lucy Bay and its neighbourhood, 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 follow-
ing 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 groupes of mo-
raines. One of these, about a mile and a half above the parish
manse, marks the place where a glacier, that had once de-
scended 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 consi-
derably 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 ap-
pearances as the gig drove past, and point them out to a fel-
low passenger, the Establishment minister of * *, remark-
ing, 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 hol-
lows on each side were blocked up with ice, and overhanging
glaciers, that ploughed the rock bare in their descent, glis-
tened on the bleak hill-sides. I wore a gray maud over a
coat of rough russet, with waistcoat 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 dis-

160 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY j OR,

tricts 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 adja-
cent one ; and that those differences in the salubrity of par-
ticular spots which obtain in other parts of the world with
regard to our own species, and which make it death to linger
on the luxuriant river-skle, while on the arid plain or ele-
vated hill-top there in health and safety, should exist in con-
tiguous 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 sa-
vages, he became kindly and conversible. We beat together
over a wide range of topics ; — the Scotch banks, and Sir Ro-
bert Peel's intentions regarding them, — the periodical press

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 161

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 quar-
ter to an enemy overpowered in open fight, they are still in
the habit of shooting deserters. In short,i 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 postman was engaged in changing horses. The mi-
nister 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 1 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 con-
versation 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 neighbour-
hood 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 nine-
teenth years in this part of the country ; and I was curious

L

162 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 alive among the casual acquaint-
ances 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 Con on as I had
lost sight of in the winter of 1 821 ; 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 be-
half 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 float-
ing 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 king-
dom 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 neighbourhood 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,

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 163

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 me-
mory as if scarce a month had passed since I had composed
them beside the Conon.*

Three-and-twenty years form a large portion of the short
life of man, — one-third, as nearly as can be expressed in un-
broken 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 pub-
lic 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 blind-
fold : 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 Ame-
rican 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 path-
way ; and found, for the open space and the rectangular pond,

* The verses here referred to are introduced into " My Schools and
Schoolmasters," chapter tenth.

164 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 wit-
ness 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.*

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 intel-
ligence ; 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

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

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 165

the same fate, through the influence of the one cause, which
has been experienced by the sepulchral tumulus and the an-
cient 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 specula-
tions regarding what was doing at court and in the field, in
Scotland and elsewhere, when the old long-departed mecha-
nics 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-ap-
prentices 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

166 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 bury-
ing-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 de-
scribed 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 in-
tellectual formation, in which, however, as in the Carbonife-
rous period, there was provision made for the necessities of
an after time.* 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

* These remarks refer to the poem " On Seeing a Sun-Dial in a Church-
Yard," which was introduced here when these chapters were first published
in the " Witness," but, having been afterwards inserted in the tenth chap-
ter of "My Schools and Schoolmasters," is not here re-produced.

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMOXG THE HEBRIDES. 167

was a low-roofed domicile beside the river, but iii the days of
ray old acquaintance it had presented an appearance of great
comfort and neatness ; and as there now hung an air of ne-
glect 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 be-
sides, and was one of the elders of the Free Church in Ur-
quhart 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 as-
sert 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 derived their vote. My companion failed to recognise
in the man turned of forty the smooth-cheeked stripling of
eighteen, with whom he had wrought so long before. I soon

168 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

succeeded, however, in making good my claim to his acquaint-
ance. He had previously established the identity of the edi-
tor 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 respect-
able matron, who, when I had been last in the district, was
exactly such a person as her eldest daughter, showed me an
Encyclopaedia, with coloured 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 yel-
low-cheeked pippins, where I had once seen only unproduc-
tive 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 inten-
tion 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 colour and appearance with some of the gray sand-
stones of the Middle Old Red of Forfarshire, and learned that
quarries had lately been opened in these beds near Mont-
gerald. The Old Bed Sandstone lies in immense develop-
ment 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 in-
structed 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 geolo-
gists,— might do well to attempt determining the point. I

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 169

found the science much in advance in Cromarty, especially
among the ladies, — its great patronizers and illustrators every-
where,— 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 lime-
stones, and brought back with them in the evening Ammo-
nites 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, vo-
taries 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 Diplacan-
thus ever disinterred ; and that the Professor, ever and anon
as he laid open a specimen, brought it to a huge smooth boul-
der, 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

170 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

do not think that the foreigner, after geologizing in my com-
pany, 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 ego-
tism, and much geology, in my next.

A. SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 171

CHAPTER XL

I SPENT one long day in exploring the ichthyolite beds on
both sides the Cromarty Frith, and another long day in re-
newing my acquaintance with the Liasic deposit at Shand-
wick. In beating over the Lias, though I picked up a few
good specimens, I acquired no new facts ; but in re-examin-
ing 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 geo-
logical than my last

Some of the readers of my little work on the Old Red
Sandstone will perhaps remember that I described the organ-
isms of that ancient system as occurring in the neighbour-
hood 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

172 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

curled when the last pang was over. In various places in
the neighbourhood 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 be-
low ; and I had suspected for years that in at least some of
the localities, they could not have belonged to the lower plat-
form of death, but to some posterior catastrophe that had
strewed with carcases 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 Pterich-
thyes 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 neighbourhood 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 sec-
tion of little more than a hundred yards there occur at least
two platforms of violent death, — platforms inscribed with un-

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 173

equivocal 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 re-
cently 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 de-
monstrate, 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 flag-stones lie on the roof of an ancient

174 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 mys-
terious 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
armour — 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, — forat 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 Gheiracanthus
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 armour 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 beauti-
ful piece of jaw in the clay, with the enamelled tusks brist-
ling 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 ;

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 175

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, suffi-
ciently hard to admit of a tolerable polish, and which emitted
in the fire a bright flame. I had remarked, further, its ap-
parent identity with a substance used by the ancient inhabi-
tants 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 parallelo-
grams, perforated edge-wise by some four or five holes a-piece ;

176 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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, how-
ever, 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 par-
allelogram, 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 com-
paratively 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 north-
ern localities, that had not been fashioned out of this hard
and splintery substance, — a sufficient proof that our ances-
tors, ere they had formed their first acquaintance with the
metals, were intimately acquainted with at least the mechani-
cal 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 loca-
lities 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 served thoroughly to supplant,
but which could not have been earned on without a know-

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 1 7f

ledge of substances and qualities afterwards lost, until re-dis-
covered by scientific curiosity, would form of itself an exceed-
ingly curious chapter. The art of the gun-flint maker (and
it, too, promises soon to pass into extinction) is unquestion-
ably a curious one, but not a whit more curious or more in-
genious 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 stub-
born 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 before-hand with me in the
discovery of the bituminous jet of the Lower Old Bed Sand-
stone, 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 ac-
quainted 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 ram-
parts 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 iden-
tical flux which, in its character as the kelp of commerce, was
so extensively used in our glass-houses only a few years ago.

M

178 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 de-
posit with which I am acquainted, however rich in remains,
have all its ichthyolites been found lying together. The col-
lector 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 Glyp-
tolepis not common ; the Cheirolepis and Pterichthys more
so, but not very abundant; the Cheiracanthus and Dipli-
canthus, on the other hand, are numerous ; and the Osteo-
lepis 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 ex-
ceedingly common, while the Osteolepis and Coccosteus are
rare, and the Cheiracanthus and Cheirolepis seem altogether
awanting. Again, in the Morayshire deposits, the Glypto-
lepis is abundant, and noble specimens of the Lower Old Red
Holoptychius — of which more anon — are to be found in the
neighbourhood of Thurso, associated with remains of the Dip-
lopterus, 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 be-
long, and possess others. These differences may and do exist
in contemporary deposits ; and I had a striking example, on

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 179

thk 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 land-locked 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 shal-
lows of the basin. A turbotrnet 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 contempo-
raneous 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
neighbourhood of Thurso. I must now add, that very singu-
lar 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

1 80 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 de-
scription which it furnishes, among many others, of the rocks
in the neighbourhood 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 stra-
tum, like flights of stairs thrown down from their slant posi-
tion to the level ; in some places severed by faults ; in others
cast about in every possible direction, as if broken and con-
torted by a thousand antagonist movements ; but in their
general bearing rising towards the east, until the whole cal-
careo-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 neigh-
bourhood 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 inge-
nious 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 ich-
thyology of the Old Red Sandstone. Let us accompany Mr
Dick in one of his exploratory rambles. The various organ-
isms which he disinterred I shall describe from specimens be-
fore 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,

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 181

we set out to explore a bluff-headed parallelogramical pro-
montory, 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 Bed 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 suffi-
ciently 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 neighbourhood of Thurso Castle, a
paler-coloured bed of fine-grainedsemicalcareous stone, charged
with remains in a state of coherency and keeping better fit-
ted to repay the labour of the specimen-collector. The in-
closing matrix is comparatively soft : when employed in the
neighbouring 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, tuber-

182 THE CKUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

culated plates, and coprolitic blotches ; and further on still,
in a rubbly flagstone, near where a little stream conies trot-
ting 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 cur-
rents 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 dilu-
vium. 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-coloured blush, when
all around is azure or pale, — the tall Red Sandstone preci-
pices of Dunnet Head. It has been suggested that the planet
Mars may owe its red colour 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 cha-
racterises 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

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 183

that atmosphere surrounds ; but certainly the extensive ex-
istence 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 hea-
vens 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 fre-
quently appears from the earth.

We have rounded the promontory. The beds exposed
along the coast to the lashings of the surf are of various tex-
ture 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 re-
sistance 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 glit-
ter bright with glossy quadrangular scales, that look like sheets
of black mica inclosed in granite. We find jaws, teeth, tu-
bercled 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 re-committed 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

184 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OB,

passed, it might be found retaining unbroken its gigantic pro-
portions. 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 un-
changed 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 has 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 hol-
low still occupied, that, when cast into the fire, they flame
like torches. In one of the beds at which we have now ar-
rived 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 thir-
teen 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 pos-
session, 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 little difficulty, over the

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 185

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 weather-worn 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 in-
tensely 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 un-
worn,— 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, turn-
ing an angle of the coast, we enter a solitary bay, that pre-
sents 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

186 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY j OR,

flourished in the days of the coal-money currency, had taken
a squandering fit at Sanday Bay, and tossed the dingy con-
tents 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 Holopty-
chius, 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 pub-
lic 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 Petrsea, 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 shal-
lows 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 sun-light falls on a scull of sea-
gulls, that flutter upwards, downwards, and athwart, now on
the sea, 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 rock, 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 gene-

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 187

ral arrangement from west to east, along the northern coast
of Caithness, of the Lower 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 Dun-
net 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 abun-
dantly with the strangely-organised 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 par-
tial 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 oc-
cur in a single system. We reach the long flat bay of Dun-
net, 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 tri-
lobites of the Silurian system, — at one period, as their remains
testify, more than equally abundant, — creatures of similar
habits 1 We have at length arrived at the tall sandstone pre-
cipices 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 bor-
dered by a desert devoid of all trace of life. Some of the
characteristic types of the formation re-appear in the upper

1 88 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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, agree-
ably occupies his hours of leisure, for a few months, in de-
taching from the rocks in his neighbourhood their organic
remains ; and thus succeeds in adding to the existing know-
ledge of palaeozoic life, by disinterring ichthyolites which even
Agassiz himself would delight to figure and describe. Seve-
ral 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 labours of exploration among
rocks beside the Pentland Frith, a man of similar character
was pursuing exactly similar labours, with nearly similar re-
sults, 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 oppo-
site end of the island, was disturbing the echoes of " Pudding-
Gno ;" and scales, plates, spines, and occipital fragments of
palaeozoic fishes rewarded the labours of both. In an article
on the scientific meeting at York, which appeared in " Cham-
bers' Journal" in the November of last year, the reading pub-
lic were introduced to a singularly meritorious naturalist, Mr
Charles Peach,* a private in the mounted guard (preventive

* 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.

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 189

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 labours as a naturalist ; but
he is also well known in the geological field.

190 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; OR,

CHAPTER XII.

MY term of furlough was fast drawing to a close. It was
110 w Wednesday the 14th August, and on Monday the 19th
it behoved 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 ich-
thyolite beds of Clune and Lethenbarn, and afterwards strik-
ing across the country to Forres, through the forest of Darn-
away, where the forest abuts on the Findhorn, at the pictu-
resque 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 wea-
ther 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

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 191

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 un-
inclosed 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 sur-
face, and that presents, at the line where the broken ground
leans against the ground still unbroken, a low uneven front-
age, 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-envelop-
ing nodules, which are composed in this bed of a rich lime-
stone, 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
labourers were engaged with shovel and pickaxe in cutting
into the stratified clay of the unbroken ground, and throw-
ing 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 con-
signed, 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

192 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 labourers whether he did not preserve some of the
better specimens, in the hope of finding an occasional pur-
chaser. Not now, he said : he used to preserve them in the
days of Lady Gumming of Altyre ; but since her ladyship's
death, no one in the neighbourhood 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 speci-
men of Glyptolepis ; and three others, in succession, remains
of Coccesteus. Almost every nodule of one especial layer near
the top incloses its organism. The colouring is frequently
of great beauty. In the Cromarty, as in the Caithness, Ork-
ney, and Gamrie specimens, the animal matter with which
the bones were originally charged has been converted into
a dark glossy bitumen, and the plafces 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 Moray-
shire deposits, the plates and scales exist in nearly their ori-
ginal condition, as bone that retains its white colour 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 coloured 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 outspread fins, charged still
more largely with the oxide, are of a deep red. The descrip-
tion of Mr Patrick Duff, in his " Geology of Moray," so re-

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 193

dolent of the qniet enthusiasm of the true fossil-hunter, espe-
cially applies to the ichthyolites of this quany, and to those
of a neighbouring opening in the same bed, — the quany of
Lethenbar. " The nodules," says Mr Duff, " which in their
external shape resemble the stones used in the game of curl-
ing, 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
the 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 sym-
pathize 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
colouring, 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 ske in-
termediate between those of the Osteolepis andCheiracanthus;
its anterior dorsal fin placed, as in the Dipterus, Diplopterus,
and Glyptolepis, directly opposite to its ventral fins ; the ena-
melled surfaces of the minute scales were fretted with micro-
scopic 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

194 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 Gumming
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 Agassis ; 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 interest-
ing 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 en-
tire 1 — the nodule is of a spindle form, broader at the head
and narrower at the tail. Is it slightly curved, in the atti-
tude of violent death 1 — the nodule has also its slight curve.
Is it bent round, so that the extremities of the creature meet 1
— the nodule, in conformity with the outline, is circular. Is
it disjointed and broken ? — the nodule is correspondingly ir-
regular. In nine cases out of ten, the inclosing coffin, like
that of an old mummy, conforms to the outline of the organ-
ism 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 no-
dule 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 Cheir-
acanthus of seven inches. The size of the fish evidently regu-
lated that of the nodule. The coffin is generally as good a
fit in size as in form ; and the bulk of the nodule bears al-

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 195

most 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 in-
genuity,— 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 com-
position, considerably harder than the sulphate in its origi-
nal 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 mol-
luscs of our shores ; and universally found that the mass, in-
coherent 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 fossil iferous spindles of the Old Red Sandstone, its
coherent nodule around it. One point in the natural phe-
nomenon, however, still remains unillustrated by the expe-
riments of Mrs Marshall We see in them the animal mat-
ter giving solidity to the lime in immediate contact with it ;
but we do not see it possessing any such afiinity for it as to
form, in an argillaceous compound, like that of the ichthyo-
lite beds, a centre of attraction powerful enough to draw to-

196 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

gether the lime diffused throughout the mass. It still re-
mains 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 en-
tered 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
woodmoths fluttering by scores, and the midge and the mos-
quito dancing by myriads, imparted a motty gold-dust atmo-
sphere ; there penetrating in straggling rays far into some
gloomy recess, and resting in patches of flame, amid the dark-
ness, 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
harbour 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 percep-
tible 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

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMOXG THE HEBRIDES. 197

feet of a large wasp's nest, suspended to a jutting bough of
furze, the wasps I took especial care not to disturb. I press-
ed 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, gar-
dens, fields, and wood ; and then through another broad fo-
rest-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 Find-
horn 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 sun-
shine ; 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 blaeberries, 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 hil-
lock, 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

198 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 would' nt, 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 interest-
ing as in the neighbourhood of this village ; forest and river,
— each a paragon in its kind, — uniting for several miles to-
gether what is most choice and characteristic in the peculiar
features of both. In no locality is the surface of t'he great
forest of Darnaway more undulated, or its trees nobler ; and
nowhere does the river present a livelier succession of eddy-
ing 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 grave-yard, 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 Lethenbar, 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 cur-
few 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

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 199

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 Nobilissimiis, 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 neighbourhood 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 cha-
racteristic 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

200 THE CKUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OK,

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 Sutherland-
shire 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 mu-
tually borne by the Mountain Limestone and the Coal Mea-
sures. 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 re-
mains of animals whose proper home was the sea. But the
productions, though dissimilar, were in all probability con-
temporary, just as the crabs and periwinkles of the Frith of
Forth are contemporary with the frogs and lymnea of Flan-
ders moss.

I had little time for exploration in the neighbourhood 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-coloured base, the section of the hillock is ribbed
like an onyx : for about forty feet, bands of gray, green, and

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 201

blue clays alternate with bands of cream-coloured, 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 Corn-
stone 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 choaks
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 inter-
calated, 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-coloured 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 de-

202 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

cidedly 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 ichthyodomlites, too, are exceedingly beauti-
ful, and of great size, resembling jaws thickly set with teeth,
the apparent teeth being mere knobs ranged along the con-
cave 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 neighbouring out-
liers of the Oolite, but time did not permit. Mr Duffs col-
lection, however, enabled me to form a tolerably adequate esti-
mate of their organic contents. Viewed in the group, these

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 203

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, Cardiadse, 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 Robert-
son of Inverugie, the gentleman who first discovered it, Am-
monites Robertsoni. Like most of the genus to which it be-
longs, it is an exceedingly beautiful shell, with all its whorls
free and gracefully ribbed, and bearing on its back, as its dis-
tinguishing 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 divi-
sions,— a superior bed of pale yellow sandstone, which fur-
nishes the finest building-stone anywhere found in the north
of Scotland, — an intermediate calcareous bed, known techni-
cally as the Cornstone, — and an inferior bed of sandstone,
chiefly, in this locality, of a grayish-red colour, 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 Forfar-

204 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; OR,

shire, 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 locali-
ties 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 inclos-
ed : 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 out-
line 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 labours 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 fos-
sils 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 re-
minds us of the loose gravelly soil of an ancient grave-yard,
partially consolidated by a night's frost, — a resemblance still
further borne out by the condition and appearance of its or-

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 205

ganic contents. The numerous bones disseminated through-
out 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 grave-yard bones, which may be detached entire from the
inclosing mass, and of which, were we sufficiently well ac-
quainted 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 punctu-
lated 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 in.-
dispensable 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 as-
pect 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,

20 G THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY j OB,

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 frag-
ments 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 in-
dividuals of which it consisted the same block had been em-
ployed 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 Den-
drodus, for instance, it is the generic type, that from a cen-
tral 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 dis-
similar 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 ir-
regular, ever-returning cycle. But Infinite resource did not
need to travel in a circle, and so we find no return or doub-
lings 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, —
possible in such circumstances. But if the buildings

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 207

differ from, each other, not only in external form, but also in
every brick and beam, bolt and nail, no mere scheme of ex-
ternal alteration can induce a real resemblance. Every brick
must be taken down, and every beam and bolt removed. The
problem cannot be wrought by the remodelling of an old
house : there is no other mode of solving it save by the erec-
tion 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 curi-
ously carved flowers ; and, knowing that Mr Duff had a turn
for curiosities, he had brought the flowers to him. The sup-
posed flowers are the sculpturings on the scales of the ichthyo-
lite ; 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 rect-
angular scales. One row contains seven of these, and ano-
ther 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 seem-
ing 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

208 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OK,

name which this sole representative of an extinct genus has
received during the course of the last few weeks from Agas-
siz. An Elgin gentleman forwarded to Neufchatel a singu-
larly 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 de-
cided 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 accom-
plished, — I bethought me of Rogers' noble lines on the Torso, —

"And dost tliou still, thou mass of breathing stone,
(Thy giant limbs to night and chaos hurled)
Still sit as o » 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 exist-
ence, or in some great annihilating catastrophe, the last in-
dividuals 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 inheri-

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 209

tance, the whole of the eternity to come ? "We may be at
least assured, that nothing can be too low for angels to re-
member, 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
Snmmer 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 de-
tached water-rolled masses. The deposit in which they oc-
cur 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 chap-
ter, 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.

210 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY j OR,

CHAPTEE XIII.

SUPPLEMENTARY.

IT is told of the " Spectator," on his own high authority, that
having " read the controversies of some great men concern-
ing 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 an-
tiquities of Small Isles than that cherished by the " Specta-
tor" 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 gentle-
man 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 disco-
vered 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

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 211

half-discovery, — the half of a broken medal, with the date
on the missing portion. And so, immediately after the ris-
ing of the General Assembly in June last [1 845], 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 win-
dow of Mr Swanson's dwelling the incessant showers sweep-
ing down the loch. On the morning of Saturday, the gale,
though still blowing right ahead, had moderated ; the minis-
ter 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 sea-
men aboard, for John Stewart was engaged with his potato
crop at home ; but the minister was content, in the emer-
gency, 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.

212 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OK,

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 dis-
trict of SI eat. 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 night fall, 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 in-
tervened between the time of our arrest and nightfall, in fish-
ing 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 umbi-
liferous form, but had its area inscribed by a pretty orange-
coloured wheel ; the other, still more minute, and which pre-
sented 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-coloured, melon-shaped
mass, though ribbed like the beroe, did not represent the true
outline of the animal : it formed merely the centre of a trans-

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMOSG THE HEBRIDES. 213

parent 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 of their slow but persevering flap-
pings, 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 pre-
sented a dingier and yet dingier green, until at length all had
become black, the distinctive colours 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 lanthorns of a fleet hoisted high to prevent
collision in the darkness. Now they gleamed Him and indis-
tinct 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 hoaiy 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

214 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

the Betsey s deck had opened so sadly during the past win-
ter, as to be no longer water-tight, and the little cabin re-
sounded 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 indis-
tinct 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-Nevis. 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 im-
mense but thinly-spread shoal of porpoises, passing in pairs
to the south, to prosecute, on their own behalf, the herring
fishing in Lochfine or the 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 fa-
shioned 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 direc-

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMOXG THE HEBRIDES. 215

tion 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 dur-
ing the night, they set themselves to tow us unto the har-
bour. 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 tide-way between Ettan Ghastett 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 labour for my pains.
In the course of the afternoon, however, the weather unex-
pectedly cleared up, and we set out somewhat impatiently
through the wet grass, to visit a cave a few hundred yards
to the west of Faomh Fraing, in which it had been said the

216 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; OR,

Protestants of the island might meet for the purposes of re-
ligious worship, were they to be ejected from the cottage
erected by Mr Swanson, in which they had worshipped hither-
to. We re-examined, in the passing, the pitch-stone dike
mentioned in a former chapter, and the charnel cave of Fran-
cis ; 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 melan-
choly 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-coloured precipice of augi-
tic trap, — a cave roomy and lofty as the nave of a cathedral,
and ever resounding to the dash of the sea j 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 accom-
modation 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 di-
lapidated 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 thou-
sand 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

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 217

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 roo£
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 par-
tition 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 Chctsteil, 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 colour 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, con-
sidering 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 wel-
come with which the minister was greeted from the sick-bed,
feeble as the tones were, that he was no unfrequent visitor.

218 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

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 re-
ceived a single farthing from the proprietor, nor, indeed, had
any of the poor of the island, and that the parish had no ses-
sion-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 neighbours, 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 duti-
ful, 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 re-
cently 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 sup-
port 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

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 219

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 labour 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 pictu-
resque 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 Petrsea ; 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 bend-
ing out in bold curves over some shaded chasm, like rows of

220 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR,

crooked oaks projecting from the steep sides of some dark ra-
vine. 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 be-
hind 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 rest-
ed. I now, however, reached a part of the beach where the
Oolitic beds are laid bare in thin party-coloured 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 Avi-
cula, mixed up with a few shells resembling large Paludina,
and a few more of the gaper family, so closely resembling ex-

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 221

isting species, that John Stewart and Alister at once chal-
lenged 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, re-
semble 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 speci-
mens 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 ap-
pears 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

222 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; OR,

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 ex-
amine,— a bed coloured 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 Ne-
ritse. It was in exactly such a rock I had found, in the pre-
vious 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 founda-
tion 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 al-
lowance for the dip, to the depth of at least sixteen hundred
Even at the close of the Oolitic period this sepulchral stra-
tum 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

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 223

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, — Ammo-
nites, 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 re-examining 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 ascertain-
ing, 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 com-
municate 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 undu-
lations which, communicated to the air, produce sound, ren-
der 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

224 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR.

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 dis-
coveries.

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 vapour in the landscape was in motion,
scudding shorewards from the Atlantic before the still-increas-
ing gale, there rested along both the Scuir of Eigg and the
tall opposite ridge of the island, and along the steep peaks of
Bum, 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 con-
densations 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 station-
ary, 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,

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 225

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 minis-
ter 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 re-
sumed 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 fore-
sail ; 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 assist-
ance, and got wofully drenched in the work ; while the minis-
ter, retaining his station at the helm, steered right on. But
the gale had so increased, that, notwithstanding our dimi-
nished 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

p

THE CRUISE OP THE BETSEY ; OR,

thirty years' standing, whose station at the bottom of the
cabin stairs enabled him to see how fast the water was gain-
ing 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 ex-
actly similar circumstances, and in nearly the same place ; and
the reminiscence, in the circumstances, seemed rather an un-
comfortable one. It had been a bad evening, he said, and
the vessel he sailed in, and a sloop, her companion, were press-
ing hard to gain the land. The sloop had sprung a leak, and
was straining, as if for life and death, under a press of can-
vass. He saw her outsail the vessel to which he belonged,
but, when a few bow-shots a-head, she gave a sudden lurch,
and disappeared from the surface instantaneously, as a va-
nishing 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 beat-
ing about till the day of judgment. And the Dutch cap-
tain, says the story, was just taken at his word, and is beat-
ing about still. When matters were at the worst with us,
we got under the lee of the point of Sleat. The promontory
interposed between us and the roll of the sea ; the wind gra-

A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 227

dually 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.

END OF THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY.

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST;

OR

TEN THOUSAND MILES OVER THE FOSS1LIFEBOUS
DEPOSITS OF SCOTLAND.

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST;

OR,

TEN THOUSAND MILES OVER THE FOSSILIFEROUS
DEPOSITS OF SCOTLAND*

CHAPTER L

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 em-
barked 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 sur-
face. Her vane, still at the mast-head, was drooping in the

* This second title bears reference to the extent of the author's geologic
excursions in Scotland during the nine years from 1840 to 1848 inclusive.

232 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

calm ; and its shadow, with that of the fresh -coloured 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 canvass 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 me-
morabilia 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 disas-
ter, 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 Stone-
haven, and a mile or two beyond, where the fossiliferous de-
posits end and the primary begin, the country presented from
the deck only a wide expanse of stubble. Every farm-stead-
ing we passed had its piled stack-yard ; and the fields were
bare. But the line of demarcation between the Old Red Sand-
stone and the granitic districts formed also a separating line
between an earlier and later harvest ; the fields of the less

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 233

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 unfavourable, there were reapers at work.
All along in the course of my journey northward from Aber-
deen I continued to find the country covered with shocks, and
labourers 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 turn-
ing it down. The traveller bids farewell at Stonehaven to
not only the Old Red Sandstone and the early-harvest dis-
tricts, 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, asso-
ciated with cottages of granite and gneiss, hyperstene and mica
schist ; but on crossing the Spey, the red cottages re-appear,
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 per-
haps 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 gar-
dens 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

234 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 sub-
soil 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 pri-
mary 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 Banff-shires, though it has failed to neutralize
altogether the effects of causes which date as early as the
times of the Old Bed 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 sub-
soils, the poor Celt has permitted the consequences of the
original difference to exhibit themselves in full. If we ex-
cept 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 kind-
ness of Mrs Longmuir, to whom I took the liberty of intro-
ducing 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 neighbourhood of Ellon, and were
chiefly impressions — some of them of singular distinctness
and beauty — in yellow flint. I saw among them several speci-

BAUBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 23-5

mens 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 sili-
ceous 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 cha-
racter, it could not have greatly shrunk in the process of hard-
ening. 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 denud-
ing agencies.

I found several other curious fossils in Mr Longmuir's col-
lection. Greatly more interesting, however, than any of the
specimens which it contains, is the general fact, that it should

236 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

be the collection of a Free Church minister, sedulously at-
tentive to the proper duties of his office, but who has yet
found time enough to render himself an accomplished geo-
logist ; 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 phy-
sical sciences, not excepting astronomy itself, geology, though
it be a fact worthy of notice, that not one of our truly ac-
complished geologists is an infidel, is the science of which
infidelity has most largely availed itself. And as the theolo-
gian in a metaphysical age, — when scepticism, 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 me-
taphysician, 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 encoun-
ter. 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 argu-
ments 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 con-
necting with a sound creed the picturesque marvels of one of
the most popular of the sciences, and by this means intro-
ducing them to his people, linked, from the first, with right

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 237

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 popu-
larizers 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 pa-
latable 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 " Constitu-
tion of Man" in which the ordinary reader finds amusement
enough 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 entertain-
ing 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 re-
plies which it has called forth are laid upon the shel£ 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.

238 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

There was a smart frost next morning ; and, for the first
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 agree-
able. But the keen morning improved into a brilliant day,
with an atmosphere transparent as if there had been no at-
mosphere 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 Mac-
duff, 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 promon-
tories 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-coloured cliffs of grau-
wacke 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 shoul-
ders ; 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 239

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 stoop-
ing 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 chirnla?*
" That house with the farm-steadings and stacks beside it T
I replied. " Yes." " Then Id 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 for-
mation of which the agency of the old denuding forces, ope-
rating 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 moul-
dering Old Red Sandstone, considerably more than twenty
miles in length, and that varies from two to three miles in

240 RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST.

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 geo-
logical 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 an-
cient 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 hol-
lowed it into the Bay of Gamrie, and left the more solid grau-
wacke standing out in bold promontories on either side, as
the headlands of Gamrie and Troup.

In passing downwards on the fishing village of Garden-
stone, mainly in the hope of procuring a guide to the ichthyo-
lite beds, I saw a labourer at work with a pick-axe, 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 clair-
voyant faculty, he had dived into my secret thought ; " come
here." I went down into the ravine, and found the labourer
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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 241

him. " Know you aught of these ? said the stouter gentle-
man, 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 Cheiro-
lepis Cummingice ; and here the spine of the anterior dorsal
of Diplacanthus Striatus" My reading of the fossils was at
once recognised, 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 cha-
racter, and generically in that of its organic contents, resem-
bles, 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 some-
thing. 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 cer-
tain little treatise on the " Old Red Sandstone," rather popu-
lar 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
Q

242 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

the nodules for hours without finding an ichthyolite worth
transferring to their bag, showed me that, without excavat-
ing more deeply than my time allowed, I had no chance of
finding good specimens. But, well content to have ascer-
tained 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 other-
wise forgotten, — a raised beach in the immediate neighbour-
hood (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 con-
ducting 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 com-
mon 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 to-
bacco and drank whisky in the parish church at Culsalmond,
on the day of a certain forced settlement there, specially re-
corded 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

RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST. 243

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 bame ;
But gang to the stane-mason M r,"

He'll pang wi' icbth'olites your wame, —
"WT fish! I as Agassiz has ca'd '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 rencounter
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 landslip on a small scale had laid the de-
posit bare ; but I at least saw enough to convince me that
the debris of the shell-fish used of old as food by the garri-
son 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 ef them
exceedingly minute, and not of edible species, occur in layers
in a siliceous stratified sand, overlaid by a bed of bluish-
coloured 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 lurricola ; and the greater number of the frag-
ments that lay bleaching at the foot of the broken slope, in

i

244 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 ter-
race 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.

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 245

CHAPTER IL

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 sand-
stone, to the village. From the lie of the strata, which, in-
stead 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 hum-
mock that overlooks the sea. The rocks, laid bare by the
tide, belong to the bed of coarse-grained red sandstone, vary-
ing from eighty to a hundred end fifty feet in thickness,
which lies between the lower fish-bed and the great conglo-
merate, 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 continu-
ity of this bed, like that of the deposit on which it rests, is
very remarkable. I have found it occurring at many vari-
ous points, over an area at least ten thousand square miles in
extent, and bearing always the same well-marked character

246 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 him-
self 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 inconsi-
derate 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 crea-
ture 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 Bed 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 247

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-sties, — women seated at the doors, employed in
baiting lines or mending nets, — groupes 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 Session who published, late in the last cen-
tury, a volume of " Miscellanies in Prose and Verse," con-
taining, 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 li-
brary kept open by his Lordship" for the amusement of tra-
vellers at the inn of some village in his immediate neigh-
bourhood ; and taking it for granted, somehow, that Garden-
stone 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 unmistakeable expression of eye
and feature, that he was what the servant girl in " Guy Man-
nering" characterizes as " very particularly drunk," — not stu-
pidly, but happily, funnily, conceitedly drunk, and full of all
manner of high thoughts of himsel£ " It'll be an awfu' coorse
nicht," he said, "fra the sea." "Very likely," I replied,

248 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

reiterating my query in a form that indicated some little con-
fidence of receiving the needed information ; " I daresay you
could point me out the public-house here T " Aweel I wat,
that I can ; but what's that T pointing to the straps of my
knapsack ; — " are ye a sodger on the Queen's account, or ye'r
ain T " On my own, to be sure ; but have ye a public-house
here?' "Ay, twa ; yell 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 f '
A woman came up, with spectacles on nose, and a piece of
white seam-work in her hand ; and, cutting short the dia-
logue by addressing myself to her, she at once directed me
to the public-house. "Hoot, gudewife," 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 occa-
sional fish-curer comes the way, rarely bait at the Garden-
stone inn • and in the little low-browed room, with its win-
dows in the thatch, into which, as her best, the landlady
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, pro-
vision 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 exclu-
sively. I need hardly remind the reader that Lord Garden-
stone'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,

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 249

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 po-
liticians 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 cha-
racter 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, how-
ever, miscalculated my distance ; I, besides, lost some little
time in the opening of the deep ravine to which I have al-
ready 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 pro-
montory 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 asso-
ciation 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

250 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

reference to an insulated sea-stack ; and it is connected alto-
gether, 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-grand-
father 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, strain-
ing, as I best could, to maintain a sorely-tried umbrella
against the capricious struggles of the tempest, that now ta-
tooed 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 nightcap,
— 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 Waveiiey novels, bears some
resemblance to the opening, in the " Monastery," of the stoiy
of the White Lady of Avenel. The wife of a Banffshire pro-
prietor of the minor class had been about six months dead,
when one of her husband's ploughmen, returning on horse-
back 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

EAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST, 251

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 lightly 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 consi-
derably less earthly in her texture than himself She had
opened, with two pale, thin arms, the enveloping hood, exhi-
biting 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 acquaint-
ed 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, how-
ever, 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,

252 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 win-
dow-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 trouble-
some mistress, who had no longer any claim to be heeded,
that when she entered, and they had dropped their conver-
sation, 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 Bearing 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.

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 253

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 neighbouring pro-
prietor], 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 round 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 horse-
back 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 un-
manageable ; and so he had to gallop on to the nearest fish-
ing 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 pre-

254 RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST.

cipices 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 pedlar broke into our garden in the fruit
season, and I sent out our old ploughman, who is now in Ire-
land, to drive him away. It was on a Sunday, and every-
body else was in church. The men struggled and fought, and
the pedlar was killed. But though I at first thought of bring-
ing 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 bade the ploughman bury the pedlar'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 pedlar'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,

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 255

however, stored in a concealed recess of her former apartment,
and the mouldering remains of the pedlar 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 pro-
verb, 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 resto-
ration of the details of the tradition, — for they had been scat-
tered 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 MacdufE Instead, how-
ever, 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 introduc-
tion 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 pre-
sented 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 power-
ful 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

256 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 fos-
sils, 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 acquaint-
ance 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 con-
sist of a smoke-coloured argillaceous limestone, which formed
around the organisms in a bed of stratified clay, and at once
exhibits, in consequence, the rectilinear lines of the stratifi-
cation, 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 Pterick-
thys quadrate, forms in part the subject of a still unpub-
lished memoir, in which Sir Philip Egerton, our first British
authority on fossil fish, has done me the honour 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 sub-
ject of considerable discussion and difference among geologists,
I was curious to examine it ; and the Doctor, though the day

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 257

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 in-
formed me, as we went, that the Grauwacke (Lower Silurian)
deposits of the district, hitherto deemed so barren, had re-
cently yielded their organisms in a slate quarry at Gamrie-
head ; and that they belong to that ancient family of the Pen-
natularia which, in this northern kingdom, seems to have taken
precedence of all the others. Judging from what now ap-
pears, the Graptolite must be regarded as the first settler who
squatted for a living in that deep-sea area of undefined boun-
dary occupied at the present time by the bold wave-worn
headlands and blue hills of Scotland ; and this new Banff-
shire 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 out-
line, to the attrition of the waves ; whereas this single head-
land in the midst, — soft-lined; undulatory, and plump, — seems
suited to remind one of Burns' young Kirk Alloway beauty
disporting amid the thin old ladies that joined with her in

258 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

the dance. And it is a greatly younger beauty than the Cam-
brian and mica-schist protuberances that encroach on the sea
on either side of it. The sheds and kilns of a tile-work oc-
cupy 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 techni-
cally termed too short to serve), it is gradually retreating
inland before the persevering spade and mattock of the la-
bourer. 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 oc-
cupied 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 co-
lour, and so adhesive, that I now felt, when walking among
it, after the softening rains of the previous night and morn-
ing, as if I had got into a bed of bird-lime. It is thinly
charged with rolled pebbles, septaria, and pieces of a bitumi-
nous 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 259

older sandstones, and were probably in the neighbourhood, in
their present rolled form, long ere the re-formation of the inclos-
ing 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 Be-
lemnite elongatus and Belemnite lanceolata, with the Ammo-
nite Ko&nigi (mutabilisj, — all Eathie shells. I, besides, found
in the bank a piece of a peculiar-looking quartzose sand-
stone, traversed by hard jaspedeous veins of a brownish-gray
colour, 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, — pro-
bably 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.*

* Since the above was written, I have seen an interesting paper in
" Hogg's "Weekly Instructor," in which the Rev. Mr Longmuir of Aber-
deen 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 consider-
ably 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 organisms 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 antici-
pated, 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 be-
witched 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 vigo-
rously 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 labour 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

260 EAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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

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 unmistakeably, lie the umbo and greater portion
ofihePlagiostomaconcentricum. 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. 6.
Here is a piece of Belemnite in limestone, and the fracture in the fossil pre-
sents 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 frac-
ture ; nevertheless we can have little hesitation in pronouncing it a spe-
cies of unio. 8. Here is another piece of limestone, with its small frag-
ment of another shell, of very delicate texture, with finely marked traverse
striae. We are unwilling to decide on such slight evidence, but feel in-
clined to refer it to some species of Plagiostoma. 9. Here is a piece of
pyrites, not quite so large as the fist, and so vegetable-like in its markings,
that it might be mistaken for part of a branch of a tree. This is also cha-
racteristic 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 evapo-
rated, 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 spe-
cimeH of it for our guide, who has a friend that will pojish it, when the

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 261

to an upper Liasic bed So rich is the dark-coloured tena-
cious 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 de-
posit which rests over it is composed of a dark slaty shale,

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 re-
ferring 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 depo-
sited, or has it resulted from the breaking up of Lias-shale ?' " The for-
mer alternative," says Mr Longmuir, "we have heard, has been main-
tained ; 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 frag-
mentary and water-worn. This is especially the case with regard to the
Belemnites, the pieces averaging from one to two inches in length, no work-
man 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 Aberdeensbire, leaving on many of its hilla and plains the
water- worn flints, with the characteristic fossils of the Cretaceous for-
mation."

262 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

largely charged with bitumen. And of a Liasic deposit of
this compound character, consisting in larger part of an infe-
rior 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 indi-
cate 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-mar-
gins. 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 pre-
sent to the undermining wear of the waves. On the reces-
sion 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 pe-
riod 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,

RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST. 263

perhaps in the middle of the open bay formed by the pro-
montory 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, pro-
pelled along the submerged land by some arctic current, or
caught up by the gulf-stream, gradually grated it down, as a
mason's labourer 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 labours 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.

264 GAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

CHAPTER IIL

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 pri-
mary 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 redeem-
ing character, — rocky recesses on the shore, half-beach, half-
sward, rich in wild-flowers and shells, — where one could saun-
ter in a calm sunny morning, with one's bairns about one,
very delightfully ; and the interior is here and there agree-
ably 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,

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 265

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 occa-
siori) — indisposed enough to see apparition after apparition
flitting across the bed-curtains, like the figures of a magic
lanthorn posting along the darkened wall, and yet self-pos-
sessed 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 steaming1 cheerily over it

In traversing the bare height which, rising on the west-
ern 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 gra-
nite, bearing its inlaid characters of dark quartz on a ground
of cream-coloured feldspar. This variety, however, though
occasionally found in rolled boulders in the neighbourhood
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

266 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

vein is a flesh-coloured feldspar ; and the thickly-marked
quartzose characters with which it is set, greatly smaller and
paler than in the cream-coloured stone, bear less the antique
Hebraic look, and would scarce deceive even the most cre-
dulous antiquary. Antiquarians, however, have been some-
times deceived by weathered specimens of this graphic rock,
in which the characters were of considerable size, and re-
stricted to thin veins, covering the surface of a schistose
groundwork. Maupertuis, during his famous journey to Lap-
land, undertaken in 1737, to establish, from actual measure-
ment, 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 exa-
mine 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 charac-
ters, 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 267

frequently repeated, — nay, as in some of the lines of the Lap-
land inscription, may succeed each other, as in the sums L
II. III. IIIL 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 anti-
quarians between the two fossil Maries of Gueldres; and,
richer in eloquence than most of the philosophers his con-
temporaries, 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 con-
cludes, " the reputation which the stone bears in this country
deserves that we should have given a description of it. Ifj
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 rigour of the cli-
mate 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 can-
not 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 product'.ons of nature. No great move-

268 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

ment, 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 favourably ; the
polar circles may have been what now the tropics are, and
the torrid zone have filled the place occupied by the tempe-
rate." Pretty well, Monsieur, for a philosopher ! The va-
rious 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, partak-
ing of a certain regularity of form, — a consequence of the
regularity of the crystals themselves, — and of a certain irre-
gularity 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 con-
solidate first, and so would give form to the more fusible sub-
stance, 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 1 — 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 Slaw-

RAMBT.Tgg OP A GEOLOGIST. 269

kenbergius's Tale, affected the actual existence of that re-
markable feature. " It happens to be, notwithstanding your
objection," said the controversialists on the pro-nose side of
the question. " But it ougM 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 look-
ed 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-win-
dowed 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 avail-
ing myself of a comparatively " lucid interval," I sallied out,
wrapped up in my plaid, to examine the serpentine beds in
the neighbourhood, which produce what is so extensively
known as the Portsoy marble. The beds or veins of this sub-
stance,— 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 fashion-

270 RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST.

ed The serpentine was wrought here considerably more than
a century and a half ago, and exported to France, for the mag-
nificent Palace of Versailles ; which, though regarded by the
French nation, says Voltaire, as " a favourite without merit,"
Louis the Fourteenth persisted at the time in lavishly beau-
tifying, and looked as far 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
Zoblitz, in Upper Saxony," says Professor Jamieson, " seve-
ral hundred people are employed in quarrying, cutting, turn-
ing, and polishing the serpentine which occurs in that neigh-
bourhood ; and the various articles into which it is manufac-
tured are carried all over Germany. The serpentine of Port-
soy," he adds, " is, however, far superior to that of Zoblitz, in
colour, 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 un-
dressed masses all the effect of polish, and brought out in
their proper variegations of colour, 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 appear-
ance, at a little distance, of an immense mass of verdigris.
But red) gray, and brown are also prevailing colours in the
rock ; occasional veins and blotches of white give lightness

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 271

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 possi-
ble variety of combination and form, — dotted, spotted, cloud-
ed, veined, — so that each separate pebble on the shore seems
the representative of a rock different from the rocks repre-
sented 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 admir-
ing the beauties of this beach of marbles, or rather, — as the
real name, derived from those gorgeous, many-coloured cloud-
ings that impart a terrible splendour 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 Port-
soy 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 gra-
nites, 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, se-
veral years dead, of whom I had known a very little consi-
derably more than a quarter of a century before, and whose

272 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

grave I would have visited, bad as the night was, had I met
any one who could have pointed it out to me. But ungrate-
ful 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 Tillage Governess," published in 1 81 4
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.*

With better weather I could have spent a day or two very
agreeably in Portsoy and its neighbourhood ; 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 favourable cir-
cumstances 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 per-
fect safety. This day I went to see the works of an old vir-
tuoso^ who turns in marble, or rather granite [serpentine] all
kinds of chimney-piece ornaments, rings, ear-rings, &c. Se-
veral specimens of his work, which must have cost him a vast
deal of trouble, I thought very beautiful. It was in this
neighbourhood 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

* A description of Miss Bond and of her " Letters," here referred to, i*
given in the fifth chapter of " My Schools and Schoolmasters."

RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST. 273

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 gen-
tleman 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 sym-
pathize 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 steppiug -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, par-
tially 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 neighbourhood 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

s

274 KAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST.

on the opposite side of the Frith. The deep-red colour of the
boulder-clay, as exhibited by the wayside 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 ichthyo-
lite beds appear in the course of the burn. They have fur-
nished several good specimens, — among the others, the spe-
cimen of Coccosteus figured by Mr Patrick Duff in hi?
" Sketches of the Geology of Moray /' and they are, besides,
curious, as being the first to exhibit to the traveller who ex-
plores from Gamrie westwards, that peculiar style of colour-
ing 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 Pterich-
thyes and Osteolepi out of the Tynet : the red water was roar-
ing from bank to brae; here eddying along the half-sub-
merged furze, — there tearing down the boulder-clays 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 evi-
dently weather-bound in some public-house, and had now taken

RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST. 275

the opportunity of the fair interval to stagger to his dwell-
ing. 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 noon-
day landscape in July seen through volumes of rising va-
pour • 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 j and
then, laying hold of a corner of my plaid with his thumb and
fore-finger, — "I know you," he said, — "I know yourkindwell ;
ye' re a Highland-Donald. Od, I've seen ye in the thick (ft.
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, enter-
ing the village, I found the vehicle standing opposite the inn
door, minus the horses.

The insides and outsides were sitting down to dinner to-
gether 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

276 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 my-
self, on second thoughts, " but the 'man has cut pretty fairly
on the point ; — I daresay / 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 pas-
sengers, 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 /
am a coach-guard." And so, taking my seat beside my red-
coated brother, who had guessed the true nature of my oc-
cupation 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 forma-
tions of Banffshire in their character as a series of deposits.
The pages of the stony record which the county composes, like

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 277

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
colours. I remember seeing, when a boy, more years ago
than I am inclined to specify, some workmen engaged in pull-
ing down what had been a house-painter's shop, a full cen-
tury 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-co-
loured 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 uneven surface of the hard-cast wall, were cut open,
by the denudation of the grindstone, into all manner of fan-
tastic forms, and seemed thrown into all sorts of strange neigh-
bourhoods. 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 tran-
script of the geology of Banff; and I have very frequently
found my thoughts reverting to it, in connection with deposits

I

578 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

of this broken character. On a rough hard-cast basis of gra-
nite 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 clay-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 coat-
ings 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 alto-
gether,— 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 a 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 forma-
tions 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 crump-
ling process.

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 279

CHAPTE R IV.

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 suit-
ed for giving effect to architectural ornament ; and after pass-
ing 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 coloured build-
ings tell him is, that he has been passing, though by a some-
what 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 Eed 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

280 KAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST.

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 Ooli-
tic 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 im-
perfect lignite, composed of the Cycadese, 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 mo-
dern 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 dancing little pyramids from the sur-
face of every pool. I walked out under cover of my um-
brella, 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 lime-
burners. 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 shale thickly charged with
minute shells of Cypris, were sadly blurred this morning by
the trail of numerous slips from above, which had fallen dur-
ing the rains, and softened into mud as they rushed down-

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 281

wards 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 con-
trary, 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 lime-
stone and shales which it underlies. It forms the mere fill-
ing up of a flat-roofed cavern, or rather of two flat-roofed ca-
verns,— 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, dur-
ing 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 diffi-
culty 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 .

282 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 occcasions, I was struck by the com-
plex and very various forms assumed by the ganoid scales of
the Wealden. Throughout the Oolitic system generally, in-
cluding the Lias, there obtains a singular complexity of type
in these little glittering tiles of enamelled bone, which con-
trasts strongly with the greatly more simple style which ob-
tained among the ganoids of the Palaeozoic period. In many
of these last, as in the Coelacanth family, including the ge-
nera 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, how-
ever, that ere the ganoid order reached the times of the Weald,
the simple forms had been exhausted, and that nature, ab-
horring repetition, and ever stamping upon the scales some
specific characteristic of the creature that bore them, was

RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST. 283

obliged to have recourse to forms of a more complex and in-
volved outline. These latter-day scales send out nail-like
spikes laterally and atop, to lay hold of their neighbours, and
exhibit in their under sides grooves that accommodated the
nails sent out, in turn, by their neighbours, to lay hold upon
them. Their forms, too, are indescribably various and fan-
tastic. 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 Cy-
cloids and Ctenoids, should have been ushered upon the scene,
and more than the original simplicity of scale restored. There
took place a sudden re-action, from the fantastic and the com-
plex 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 struc-
ture 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 hu-
man subject overlies the rete mucosum, is thickly set over
with microscopic pores, funnel-shaped in the transverse sec-
tion, 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 conge-
ners, 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

284 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 Palseozoic pores
present.

The amount of design exhibited in the scales of some of
the more ancient ganoids, — design obvious enough to be clear-
ly read, — is very extraordinary. A single scale of Holopty-
chius 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 suf-
ficient 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 frac-
ture 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 285

the arrangement in the scale of the Holoptychius Nobilissi-
mus. It consisted of its two well-marked tables of solid bone,
corresponding in their dermal character, the outer to the cu-
ticle, the inner to the true skin, and the intermediate cellular
layer to the rete mucosum ; but bearing an unmistakeable
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," order-
ed his friend to send him a "fluted pot" i. e., a helmet ridged
and furrowed on the surface, and suited to break, by its pro-
tuberant 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 under-
neath. 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

286 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 1 — 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 Crom-
well's "fluted pot." There have been elaborate treatises
written on those ornate flooring-tiles of the classical and mid-
dle 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 287

tail of the lobster ; for which, by the way, they were mis-
taken by the workman who first laid the fossil open. I ex-
amined, too, with some interest, fragments of a gigantic spe-
cies of Pterichthys, belonging to an inferior division of the
same Upper Old Ked formation as the yellow stone, desig-
nated by Agassiz Pterichthys major, which must have attain-
ed to at least thrice the size, linearly, of even its bulkier con-
geners of the Lower formation of the Coccosteus. After ex-
amining many a drawer, stored, from the deposits of the neigh-
bourhood, 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 call-
ed 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

288 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 armour, 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 com-
mitted 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 armour, a
lighter covering of ring or scale armour 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 armour ;

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 289

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 thick-
ness, whereas the thickness of the delicately-fretted scales rare-
ly exceeds a line.

Why this disproportion between the strength of the arma-
ture 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 pre-
sent him with but the fact of the disproportion, without ac-
counting 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 Granges" I find but
little reference made to the instincts and habits of the ani-
mals described : their deep-river haunts lie, in many cases,
beyond the reach of observation ; and of the observations ac-
tually 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 giants, 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 Pime-
lodiis gidio, a little, strongly-helmed fish, with a naked body,
I was informed by Mr Duff, on the authority of the gentle-
man who had presented the specimens to the Museum, that
it burrowed in the holes of muddy banks, from which it shot

T

290 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 armour
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 hol-
low out for itself in shale or stone, the interior 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, armour, 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, in-
differently 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

RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST. 291

Cromarty, Moray, and Banffj unequivocally testify ; and that
it may have thus not only succeeded in capturing many of its
light-winged contemporaries, which it would have vainly pur-
sued 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, un-
finished in appearance at their lower extremity, as i£, 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 ar-
ticulated aspect. Those of the Pimdodus 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 Pime-
lodi 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 ich-
thyolites, 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 neighbourhood, and have an unquestioned right to do
so. The Museum contains, however, several interesting or-
ganisms. I saw, among the others, a specimen of Diplop-
terus, that showed the form and position of the fins of this
rather rare ichthyolite much better than any of the Moray-

292 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

shire 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 decipher-
ing, 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 win-
dow ; 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 de-
positing 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

RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST. 293

the course of the Frith, should have the effect here, and no-
where 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 re-
cessions 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 promon-
tories 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 neighbourhood of
Inverness to the mansion-house of Dochfour. But this hypo-
thesis, 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 cha-
nonry kirk of Fortrose, which they completed from founda-
tion to ridge, each in a single night, — committing, in their
hurry, merely the slight mistake of locating the building in-
tended for Elgin in Fortrose, and that intended for Fortrose
in Elgin ; but, their work over and done, and when the ma-
gician had no further use for them, they absolutely refused to
be laid ; and, like a posse of Irish labourers thrown out of
a job, came thronging round him, clamouring for more em-
ployment. Fearing lest he should be torn in pieces, — a ca-

294 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

tastrophe which has not unfrequently happened in such cir-
cumstances in the olden time, and of which those recent philan-
thropists who engage themselves in finding work for the un-
employed 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 for
ever the construction of the mound, and saved the naviga-
tion of Inverness.

I stood for a few seconds at the Burn of Rosemarkie, un-
decided 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 wester-
ly 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 me-
mory the details of a ghost-story, long regarded in the dis-
trict in which it was best known as one of the most authen-
tic of its class, but which seems by no means inexplicable on
natural principles.*

* The story here referred to is narrated in " Scenes and Legends of the
North of Scotland," chap. xxv.

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 295

CHAPTER V.

ROSEMAKKIE, with its long narrow valley and its red abrupt
scaurs,* 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 pe-
ninsula of Easter Ross, — both soft sandstone districts, — bear-
ing 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, ex-
posed to the drifting wind, bears relation to the heights and
hollows of the tracts which it covers. On the higher emi-
nences 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

* Scaur, Scotice, a precipice of clay. There is no single English word
that conveys exactly the same idea.

296 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

marked feature in the landscape, and harbours 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 ex-
hibits 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 accumu-
lated 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 Keas' 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 Rbsemarkie stretches away from its
base on the opposite side of the stream ; and on its summit,
and along its sides, groupes of chattering jackdaws, each one
of them as reflective and philosophic as the individual im-
mortalized 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 j 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 open-
ings, like shot-holes in an old tower, which form breeding
places for the daw and the sand-martin. The biped inhabi-
tants 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 297

course, in allusion to their feathered neighbours, the designa-
tion of the " JRosemarkie 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 em-
phasis, 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 excava-
tions, 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 excava-
tions 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 alter-
nations of light and shadow. The steep descents form cycloid
curves, that flatten at their bases, and over which the ferru-
ginous stratum of mould atop projects like a cornice. Be-
tween neighbouring 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 hol-
lows, washed by the runnels which, in the slow lapse of years,
have been the architects of the whole, we find cairn-like ac-
cumulations of water-rolled stones, — the disengaged pebbles
and boulders of the deposit. The boulders and pebbles pro-
ject also from the steep sides, at all heights and of all sizes,
like the primary masses inclosed in our ancient conglome-
rates, 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 oc-
cupies nearly the same relative position to the existing vege-
table mould, with all its recent productions, that the great
conglomerate of the Old Red Sandstone occupies in relation

298 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

to the lower ichthyolite beds of that system, with their nu-
merous extinct organisms. But its buried stones are fretted
with hieroglyphic inscriptions, in the form of strange scratch-
ings 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 moon-
light, when the pale red of the clay where the beam falls di-
rect 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 neighbouring 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

rains had cleared out the deep ravines of the district^ and
given to the boulder-clay in which they are scooped a fresh-
ness 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 colour 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 pasty 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 in-
dulged,— 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 Benwevis, and showed its extreme tenuity by
the paleness of its tint of watery blue, was still distinctly
visible at the distance of fall 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,

300 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 flut-
ings 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 j with this difference,
however, that they seern 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 morn-
ing, 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 gra-
dually widened into these hollow grooves — had sunk into

RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST. 301

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 escarp-
ment 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
wayside, 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 end-
ing of the chain of bogs. All is dry at the base of the es-
carpment, 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

302 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

bogs cease. The chain of green bogs is a consequence of the
stratum of permeable sand. I have in vain sought this an-
cient layer of sand, — decidedly of the same era with the ar-
gillaceous bed which overlies it, — for aught organic. A sin-
gle 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
neighbourhood 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 flat-
tened 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 pe-
culiarities of the deposit. Wherever the boulder-clay lies
thick and continuous, as in the parish of Cromarty, on a slop-
ing 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 "Moral'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 thick-
ly farther to the west. These dells of the boulder-clay, in
their lower windings, — for they become shallower and tamer

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 303

as they ascend, till they terminate in the uplands in mere
drains, such as a ditcher might excavate at the rate of a shil-
ling 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 clifis 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 gar-
dener than the stiffly squared rectilinear fields of the agricul-
turist They are ha-has of Nature's digging ; and their bot-
tom and sides in this part of the country we still find occu-
pied in a few cases — though in many more they have been
ravaged by the wasteful axe — by noble forest-feezes, 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 Sand-
stone, with a huge bank of boulder-clay resting over it, in
which I first experienced the evils of hard labour, 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 Ited
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

304 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

little way with the Old Red portion of the task ; but alas for
the boulder-clay portion of it ! A bar of impenetrable sha-
dow has rested long and obstinately over the newer deposit ;
and I scarce know whether the light which is at length be-
ginning 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 protube-
rant 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 gro-
tesqueness, 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 neighbouring 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 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 305

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 circum-
stance which has now for several years been attracting my
attention, and which I have found an invariable characteris-
tic 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, — inva-
riably 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

306 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

when I do. When examining, for instance, the accumula-
tion of broken Liasic materials in the neighbourhood of Banff,
I made it my first care to ascertain whether the bank inclos-
ed fragments of stone or shale bearing the longitudinal mark-
ings ; and felt satisfied, on finding that it did, that I had dis-
covered the period of its re-formation.

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 307

CHAPTER VI.

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 pe-
riod. I had ascertained that it contains in Ross and Cro-
marty 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 de-
gree more ancient at the present time than they did when
first enveloped by the clay. In East and West Lothian too,
and in the neighbourhood 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 —

308 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

for it is difficult to keep the mind in a purely blank state on
any subject on which one thinks a good deal — as represen-
tative 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 con-
nection 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 " Ele-
ments," that the " stranding of ice-islands in the bays of Ice-
land since 1835 has driven away the fish for several succes-
sive seasons, and thereby caused a famine among the inhabi-
tants 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 New-
foundland, and that many millions of cod, besides other fish,
are captured year] yon 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 locali-
ties 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 partial-
ly 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 309

to the Ord Hill of Caithness, I had never found in the boul-
der-clay the slightest trace of an organism that could be held
to belong to itself ; and as it seems natural to build on nega-
tive evidence, if very extensive, considerably more than mere
negative evidence, whatever the circumstances, will carry, I
became somewhat sceptical regarding the very existence of
boulder-fossils, — a scepticism 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-for-
mation 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
£kull of some long-lived contemporary of Enoch, — one of the
accursed race, mayhap,

" Who sinned and died before the avenging flood."
But, alas ! the labourer dug a little farther, 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,

310 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

that my scepticism has thoroughly given way ; and that, slow-
ly 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 har-
bour, 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 colour
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 mot-
tled 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 Fle-
ming,— that I could detect among them only a single frag-
ment 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 311

was the boulder-clay in which they occurred. Almost the
first pebble which I disengaged from the mass, however, set-
tled the point, by furnishing the evidence on which for seve-
ral years past I have been accustomed to settle it ; — it bore
in the line of its longer axis, on a polished surface, the fresh-
ly-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 For-
bes, that other eyes than mine had detected shells in the boul-
der-clay of Caithness. " Cliffs of Pleistocene," says the Pro-
fessor, 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 neighbourhood 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

312 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 twelve-
month before ; but a scepticism 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 trans-
ferred 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 visit-
ing 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 frag-
ments lie thick along the course of the Thorsa, where the en-
croaching stream is scooping out the clay for the first time
since its deposition, and laying bare the scratched and fur-
rowed 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, occu-
pies, 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 Caith-
ness a shell-bearing deposit ; and no sooner had Mr Dick de-

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 313

termined the fact for himselfj at the expense of many a fa-
tiguing 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 en-
lightened zeal in developing the agricultural resources of the
country, and for originating its statistics, employed a mine-
ralogical surveyor to explore the underground treasures of the
district j 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.
1 802, by John Busby, Edinburgh." Now, in this journal
there are frequent references made to the occurrence of ma-
rine 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. 1 2th. — 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 sup-
posed to be about twenty miles from the sea j and is one in-
stance, 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 Caith-
ness 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

314 EAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

hardly they have fared : the rather unpleasant casualty of
being crushed to death must have been a greatly more com-
mon one in those days than in even the present age of rail-
ways 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 subject-
ing the broken fragments thus obtained to the attritive influ-
ence of the waves on some storm-beaten beach for a twelve-
month 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 to-
gether. The great strength of the shell, however, may have
in part led to this result ; as I find that its stronger and mas-
eier portions, — those of the umbo and hinge-joint, — are ex-
ceedingly 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 neighbourhood 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

KAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 315

much larger proportion than the weaker ones, may Cyprina
itself have been preserved in much larger proportion than its
more fragile neighbours. Occasionally, however, — escaped,
as if by accident, — characteristic fragments are found of shells
by no means very strong, — such as Hytilus, Tdlina, and
Astarte. Among the univalves I can distinguish Dentalium
entale, Purpura lapillus, Turritella terebra, and lAttorina lit-
torea, 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, — Ve-
nus casina, Cardium edule, Cardium echinatum, Mytilus
edule, Astarte danmoniensis (sulcata), and Astarte compressa,
with a Mactra, Artemis, and Tellina* All the determined
species here, with the exception of Mytilus edule, have, with
many others, been found by the Rev. Mr Gumming 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 or-
ganisms, 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 pro-
portion, and yet be devoted to it in vain. All that at pre-
sent can be said is, that, judging from what appears, the boul-
der-clays of Caithness, and with them the boulder-clays of

* Mr Dick has since disinterred from out the houlder-clays of the Burn
of Freswick, Patella vulgata, Buccinum undatum, Fesus antiquus, Hostel-
laria, Pes pelicana, a Natica, Lutraria, and Ealanus.

3 I 6 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 ice-
berg phenomena by the closest juxtaposition, but also testify-
ing 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 hun-
dred feet over the level of the sea ; but the travelled boulders
I have often found at more than a thousand feet over it ; and
Pr 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 sub-
merge in the iceberg ocean almost the whole agricultural re-
gion of Scotland. The common hazel (Gorylus avellana)
ceases to grow in the latitude of the Grampians at from

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 317

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 culti-
vated at a greater altitude. Where the hazel and bracken
cease to grow, it is in vain to attempt growing corn.* 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 con-
tinuous land, merely three detached groupes of islands, — the
small Cheviot and Hartfell group, — the greatly larger Gram-
pian 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-bot-
tom, as well as the eminences that rose over it, was the sub-
ject of a gradual depression ; for little or no alteration ap-
pears 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,
seem 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

* 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."

318 KAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 ele-
vated 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 ground-
ed, 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 dressiags orthe higher rocks would have protect-
ed the lower from the attrition ; and so the thick accumula-
tion of boulder-clay which overlies the old coast line, for in-
stance, would have rested, not on dressed, but on undressed
surfaces. The barer rocks of the lower levels might of course

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 319

exhibit their scratchings and polishings, like those of the
higher ; but wherever these scratchings and polishings oc-
curred 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 scratch-
ings 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 ne-
cessary condition of the process that it should be carried on
piece-meal from the lower levels 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
Gumming of King William's College had arrived, from the
consideration of quite a different class of phenomena, at a si-
milar 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]. Success-
ively, 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 Gumming 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

320 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

eight hundred feet over it ; and yet both hills to their sum-
mits are mottled over with granite boulders, furnished by the
comparatively low-lying boss. One of these travelled masses,
fully two t6ns 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 subsid-
ing 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, dur-
ing which the land neither rose nor sank, the travelled boul-
ders would not now be found resting at higher levels than
that of the parent rock whence they were derived. We oc-
casionally 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 evident-
ly 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 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 321

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 consi-
derable portion of its arenaceous components, and of almost
all its pebbles and boulders. This washed clay, — a re-forma-
tion of the boulder deposit, cast down, mostly in insulated,
beds in quiet localities, where the absence of currents suffer-
ed the purer particles held in suspension by the water to
settle, — forms, in Scotland at least, with, of course, the ex-
ception 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 Dor-
noch 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

x

322 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

rising at the present day, and presents with every succeeding
age a more extended breadth of surface. Many of the boul-
der-stones seem to have been cast down where they now lie,
during this latter time. When they occur, as in many in-
stances, 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 de-
posited 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 va-
rious floras which had sprung up around it, and the various
classes of birds, beasts, and insects by which it had been vi-
sited, 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 be-
long 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

RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST. 323

roadstead, some time in the latter days of the first Charles,
was one fine evening sitting alone on deck, awaiting the re-
turn of his seamen, who had gone ashore, and amusing him-
self 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 outhouses, — an owl whooped from
the wood. The meteor descended until it almost touched the
roof, when a cock crew from within ; its progress seemed in-
stantly 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 consi-
derably higher than at first, again sank in the line of the cot-
tage, 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, how-
ever, 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

324 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 in-
tervening headland, than he stepped forward to the bows to
take a peep at the cottage : it had vanished. As he ap-
proached 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 quit-
ted the bay. He had it re-built and furnished, says the story,
deeming himself what one of the old schoolmen would per-
haps term the occasional cause of the disaster. He also re-
turned 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 be-
lieved, had been suffered to sleep in the memories of a few
elderly people for nearly sixty years.

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 325

CHAPTEK VII.

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 ichthyo-
lite beds of the system. It occupies the same place, and be-
longs 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 ich-
thyolitic 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

326 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 hav-
ing 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 vig-
nette landscape, transferred to the mind at an immature pe-
riod of life, and preserved in it for full thirty years, as de-
sirous 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 pa-
rish, 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 colouring matter has been discharged
without any accompanying change of composition in the sub-
stance which it pervaded ; — evidence enough that the red dye

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 327

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 so-
lutions, 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 colour of
pipe-clay ; we find the surface, too, when it has been divested
of the vegetable soil, presenting for yards together the ap-
pearance 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 Bandona handkerchief is acted upon
through the openings in the perforated lead, by the discharg-
ing 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 for-
mations. There are quarries in the New Red Sandstone in
which almost every mass of stone presents a different shade
of colour from that of its neighbouring 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 dur-
ing deposition, nor after they had been hardened into stone,
but when, like the boulder-clay, they existed in an interme-
diate 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 sub-
stance on which, as an unconsolidated sandstone, the bleach-
ing influences, whatever their character, had operated in the
Palaeozoic period, so many long ages before ; — it is a repeti-
tion of the ancient experiment in the Old Red, that we now
see going on in the boulder-clay. It is further worthy of no-
tice, that the bleached lines of the clay exhibit, viewed hori-

328 BAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

zontally, when the overlying vegetable mould has been re-
moved, and the whitened surface in immediate contact with
it pared 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, imme-
diately 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 acidu-
lated bleaching fluid ?

The kind of ferruginous pavement of the boulder-clay
known to the agriculturist as pan, which may be found ex-
tending 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 com-
mon 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 de-
composition, and carried down by the rains to the imperme-

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 329

able 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 invete-
rately sterile as to be scarce worth cultivation ; a thin stra-
tum of mould rested on a hard impermeable pavement of pan,
through which not a single root could penetrate to the tena-
cious 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 vegeta-
tion than it had ever borne under the more careful manage-
ment of my friend. This ferruginous pavement of the boul-
der-clay may be deemed of interest to the geologist, as a cu-
rious instance of deposition in a dense medium, and as illus-
trative of the changes which may be effected on previously
existing^ strata, through the agency of an overlying vege-
tation.

I passed, on my way, through the ancient battle-field to
which I have incidentally referred in the story of the Miller
of Resolis. * 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

* For this story see " Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland,"
chap. xxv.

330 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 an-
cient 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 sym-
metry to the turning-lathe, — times when there were heroes
in abundance, but no scribes. And the cairn, about a hun-
dred 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 anti-
quity is ! My explorations this morning bore reference to
but the later eras of the geologist : the portion of the geo-
logic volume which I was attempting to decipher and trans-
late formed the few terminal paragraphs of its concluding
chapter. And yet the finis had been added to them for thou-
sands 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 re-

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 331

lation 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 good wife 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 unequivo-
cally 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 Diplacan-
thus 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

332 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

bulky nodules charged with fragments of Coccosteus, belong-
ing chiefly to two species, — Coccosteus decipiens and Coccos-
teus 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 col-
lection, 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, deci-
piens ; — 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 pick-axe, 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 high-
way. 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 Ked 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 favourable to their preservation ; but during that inter-
vening period which its blank strata represent, at least the

RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST. 333

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 cor-
responding 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 re-
presented 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 ichthyo-
lite 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 ag-
gregate thickness as all belonging to one inconsiderable for-
mation,— 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 sand-
stone deposits of the parish of Cromarty. But true it is, not-
withstanding, 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

334 RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST.

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 num-
ber as one pauses and hesitates over them ; demanding, how-
ever, 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-spread-
ing 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 dis-
tant 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 pro-
bability the better part of it, and that the harvest of obser-
vation 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 west-

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 335

wards, is the altered colour of the boulder-clay, as exhibited
iii 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 colour here is
evidently a consequence of the large development, in Ferin-
donald and Strathpeffer, of the ichthyolitic members of the
Old Red, existing chiefly as foetid bituminous breccias and
dark-coloured 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 cha-
racter 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 Strathpefier, 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-coloured breccia, testify, along the lower
reaches of the stream, to the near neighbourhood of the ich-

336 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

thyolitic member of the Old Red ; but where the banks con-
tract, we find only its lowest member, the Great Conglomerate.
This last is by far the most picturesque member of the sys-
tem,— 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 mid-way 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 widen-
ing bottom first served to dissipate the force of the current.

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 337

And over the sullen pool in front we may see the stern pil-
lars 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 roofj at the height
of a hundred and fifty feet overhead ; while from the recesses
within, where the eye fails to penetrate, there issues a com-
bination of the strangest and wildest sounds ever yet pro-
duced by water : there is the deafening rush of the torrent,
blent as if with the clang of hammers, the roar of vast bel-
lows, 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 pre-
cipice, and, reaching its sloping top, forced my way to the

338 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

wood above, over a steep bank covered with tangled under-
wood, 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 per-
mitted, 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-colour, streaked with black, that, in the
hand-specimen, can scarce be distinguished from a true gra-
nite, but which, viewed in the mass, presents, in the arrange-
ment of its intensely dark mica, evident marks of stratifica-
tion, and which is remarkable, among other things, for fur-
nishing 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 plea-
sure of spending a few hours with the late Mr William Laid-
law, 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 appear-
ance and history, the most remarkable stone on the lands of
Balnagown ; and so he was desirous that it should be exhi-
bited 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 con-
tains 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.

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 339

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 im-
mediate 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 boul-
der 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 1 In all probability
merely as a fault in the Conglomerate, similar to many of
those faults which in the Coal Measures of the southern dis-
tricts 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 neighbourhood, and over the eastern half of Ross-shire.

340 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 find
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 pro-
tecting 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 Bed Sandstone
may produce, the boulders lie but sparsely. I especially
marked, however, when last on its summit, a ponderous tra-
veller 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
high along the hill-side, many an ice-floe, detained in the shel-
ter 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 Cro-

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 341

marty is built there is another extensive accumulation of
boulders, some of them of great size. They occupy exactly
the place to which I have ofbener 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 shal-
lows 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 Andersen, the Danish poet, who
can hear flowers and butterflies talk, and understand the lan-
guage 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 com-
municative, 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 1 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

342 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 pheno-
mena interfere with their operation, are sure to lay it dry, de-
monstrate, 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 de-
pression of the land. The huge boulder here has been known
for ages as the Clack 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 ad-
hering 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-coloured
and the pale, with a species of sertularia • and the character-
istic vegetable is the rough-stemmed tangle, or cuvy. In the
zone immediately above the lowest, these productions dis-
appear : the characteristic animal, if animal it be, is a fiat

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 3-43

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 ba-
lanus 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 over-
lying depth of water ; but it seems curious enough to find
them all existing in succession on one boulder. Of the boul-
der and its story, however, more in my next.

344: BAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE natural, and, if I may so speak, topographical, history
of the Clack 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 chap-
ter : its geological history would furnish another. It would
probably tell, if it once fairly broke silence and became auto-
biographical, first of a feverish dream of intense molten heat
and overpowering pressure j and then of a busy time, in which
the free molecules, as at once the materials and the artizans
of the mass, began to build, each according to its nature,
under the superintendence of a curious chemistry, — here form-
ing sheets of black mica, there rhombs of a dark-green horn-
blende and a flesh-coloured 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 mid-
nigh D 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 ;

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 345

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, roll-
ing 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 lit-
toral flora, has been long divorced from it ; but in this early

. time the divorce had not yet taken place, nor for ages there-
after ; and the same plants that sprang around the sea- mar-
gin rose also along the middle slopes to the mountain-sum-

. mits. The landscape is treeless and bare, and a hoary lichen
whitens the moors, and waves, as the years pass by, in pale

346 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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,
naiTowing its flatter margins, and yielding up its wider val-
leys to the tide ; the low green island of one century forms
the half-tide skerry, darkened with algse, of another, and in
yet a third exists but as a deep-sea rock. As its summit dis-
appears, groupes 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 imme-
diately 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-coloured Acalephse float by ; the many-armed
Sepiadse 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-

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 347

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 depres-
sion and of the boulder-clay is over. The water has shal-
lowed as the sea-line gradually sank, or the land was pro-
pelled upwards by some elevatory process from below ; and
each time the tide fells, the huge boulder now raises over
the waters its broad forehead, already hung round with flow-
ing 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 sel-
vage 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 inhabi-
tants have become numerous. The cream-coloured 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 gi-
gantic elk raises himself from his lair, and tosses his ponder-
ous horns at the sound ; while the beaver, in some seques-
tered dell traversed by a streamlet, plunges alarmed into his

348 RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST.

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 sub-
merged ; and the Black Isle is in reality what in later times
it is merely in name, — a sea-encircled district, holding a mid-
way place between where the Sound of the great Caledonian
Valley and the Sounds of the Valleys of the Conan and Car-
ron open into the German Ocean. Though the climate has
greatly softened, it is still, as the local glaciers testify, unge-
nial and severe. Winter protracts his stay through the later
months of spring ; and still, as of old, vast floats of ice, de-
tached 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 fur-
ther sinking of the waters, lies dry throughout the neaps, and
is covered only at the height of each stream-tide j 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 voyag-
ing. 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 Clack Mattock, its journeyings for ever over, settles on its

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 349

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 Scot-
land 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
on a night of fierce tempest, in which the agonizing cry of
drowning men was heard along the shore. When the morn-
ing broke, there lay strewed around a few bloated corpses,
and the fragments of a broken wreck; and amid wild execra-
tions and loud sorrow the boulder received its name. Such
is the probable history, briefly told, because touched at mere-
ly a few detached points, of the huge Clack 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 tes-
tifies in the history of its class. The boulders of the St
Lawrence, so well described by Sir Charles Lyell, voyage by

350 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

thousands every year ;* 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 neigh-
bourhood 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 earth-
quakes 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 gratui-
tous 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

* " 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 30° 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.)

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 351

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 form-
ed in the bay would be insufficient to remove such a boul-
der 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
Clack 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 itsel£ 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

352 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

water ; but it stops abruptly at a tree, — the last in the de-
scent,— 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 smiUhg 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.*

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 Bal-
conie 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 vaccvnium, 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 the 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 help-

* The story of the Lady of Balconie and her keys is narrated in " Scenes
and Legends of the North of Scotland," chap. xi.

RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST. 353

less. " 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 suf-
fering 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 chijdhood, 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
paiish 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 la-
bour, 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 Chris-

354 BAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST.

tian convert from the ancient faith of Zoroaster, who now
labours 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 ob-
servant 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, be-
sides passing through the various intermediate forms of be-
lief, I must, after pledging the reader to strict secrecy, sub-
mit 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

BAUBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 35 O

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," <kc.

It was a simple thought, which it 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 corre-
sponding 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 in-
terposing insurmountable barriers to the progress of improve-
ment, physical or mental. We overlook, amid the diversi-
ties of form, colour, 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 distin-
guish the Saxon ; and so we agree on the expediency of get-
ting 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 idiosyncrasies engrafted on the stock of a
common nature by accidents 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 perseve-

356 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

ringly 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 pas-
sage 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 seven-
teen centuries earlier, all the varieties of the species, — Cau-
casian and Negro, Mongolian and Malay, — lay close packed
up in the world's single family. In short, Buchubai's amus-
ing 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, denned ; 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 vapour which rises from the chasm of
the Auldgrande in such weather, and is known to the people
of the neighbourhood as the " smoke of the lady's baking,"
hung, sliake-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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 357

the dank grass, or to dissipate the thin mist-wreath that con-
tinued 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 journey ing notwithstanding; and,
availing myself of their company and their vehicle, I tra-
velled on with them to Dingwall, where we parted. I had
purposed exploring the gray dingy sandstones and fetid brec-
cias developed along the shores on the northern side of the
bay, about two miles from the town, and on the sloping ac-
clivities between the mansion-houses of Tulloch and Fowlis ;
but the day was still unfavourable, 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 re-
semble, 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 bree2e 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 Cononside, 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 wander-
ed 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 visit-
ing 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

358 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

patches on the gray tomb-stones 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 at-
tached, 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-coloured 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 in-
scriptions, 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 neighbourhood, 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 hus-
band his hundred and second birth-day. It does not trans-
cend 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 359

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 un-
dermining an old building, by the sudden fall of the erection ;
but she could bethink her of no third Cromarty man what-
ever. " 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 V
" 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, its our appointed lot; an' if we have but health an'
strength, an' the wark to do, why should we repine T 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 bro-
ther-workman, Mr TJrquhart, — 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 bridge which strides across

360 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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, 1 crossed, by a path comparatively little fre-
quented, the insulated group of hills which separates the val-
ley 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 vapour, and there had
been a slight frost during the night, — at this autumnal sea-
son the almost certain precursor of rain.

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 361

CHAPTER IX.

I WAS once more on the Great Conglomerate, — here, as else-
where, 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 Yaubans of the High-
lands, 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 Conglome-
rate. 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 prolon-
gation 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 exhi-
biting a detached and undulatory one. Exactly the same

362 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

features are presented by the same deposits in the neigh-
bourhood of Inverness ; the undulatory Conglomerate com-
posing, 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 sys-
tem, with the arenaceous beds that lie over it, form the con-
tinuous 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 Brahaii
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 con-
tains 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 spe-
cimen of the vitrified fort in Scotland ; and the bold front-
age of cliff presented by the group to the west, over the plea-
sure 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 ae 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,

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 363

amid the trees, are of singular beauty, — worth all the imita-
tion-ruins ever erected, and obnoxious to none of the dispa-
raging 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 re-
flective powers ; and the great natural objects which excited
their attention we always find associated with some tradi-
tionary 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 cot-
tage 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 up-
land 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 trans-
ition 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

364 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

labouring, 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 par-
tially filled with the molten matter, and which, when shat-
tered by a blow, break through and lose their character.

One may spend an hour very agreeably on the green sum-
mit 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 some-
what perilous of approach, — witnesses, say the botanists, that
man had once a dwelling in the immediate neighbourhood.
The green luxuriance which characterizes so many of the
more ancient fortalices of Scotland seems satisfactorily ac-
counted 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
neighbourhood 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 neighbourhood during the day. And the droppings qf
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 influen-

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 365

tial in their effects, is curiously suggestive of the old meta-
physical 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 main-
tained 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 in-
closes the grassy area has been more variously, but less satis-
factorily, 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 vol-
canic as the vitrified kilns. Williams, the author of the
" Mineral Kingdom," and one of our earlier British geolo-
gists, after deciding, on data which his peculiar pursuits en-
abled 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 accu-
mulations of loose materials. Lord Woodhouselee advocated
an opposite view. Resting on the fact that the vitrification
is but of partial occurrence, he held that it had been pro-
duced, not of design by the builders of the forts, but in the
process of their demolition by a besieging enemy, who, find-

366 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

ing, as he premised, a large portion of the ramparts composed
of wood, had succeeded in setting them on fire. This hypo-
thesis, however, seems quite as untenable as that of Pennant.
Fires not unfrequently occur in cities, among crowded groupes
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 stone-work of the Knock Far-
ril 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 1 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 de-
tached 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 seve-
ral hundred feet round an insulated hill-top. "To be satis-

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 367

fied," 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 lina It cannot be doubted," he adds,
" that the rampart was originally formed with as much re-
gularity 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 unsa-
tisfactory. A fire lighted along the entire line of a wall in-
closing 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 ram-
part 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 thou-
sand, or half a thousand, loads could have been cut down, col-
lected, and fired, an invading enemy would have found time
enough to moor his fleet and land his forces, and possess him-
self 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

368 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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
neighbouring graduations 1 Even by day, the exact compart-
ment which a fire occupied could not be distinguished, at the
distance of half a mile, from its neighbouring compartments,
and not at all by night, at any distance, from even the com-
partments 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 coun-
try,— seems to constitute man's first essay towards neutral-
izing, 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, there-

OF A GEOLOGIST. 369

fore, than that the forts of eminences such as Craig Phadrig
and Knock Farril, originally mere inclosures of loose, unce-
mented 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 land-
ed 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
Vikingr had become formidable, many of the eminences ori-
ginally selected, from their inaccessibility, as sites for hill-
forts, would come to be chosen, from tlieir prominence in tlie
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

2 A

370 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

rampart by the beacon-fires and the alkali, that were pro-
duced, 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 con-
verted, 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 evi-
dently 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 371

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 neighbourhood 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 vitrify-
ing 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.*

I spent some time, agreeably enough, beside the rude ram-
part of Knock Farril, in markyig 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 be-
neath 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 par-
titions were scarcely the tenth of a line in thickness. I
found bits o£ schistose gneiss resolved into a 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

* 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.

372 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

scratched glass ; and pure white quartz into porcellanic trails
of white, that ran in one instance along the face of a darker-
coloured 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 be-
come 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 sur-
face the mark of the yearly growths, and even of the medul-
lary rays, of the wood. In breaking open some of the others,
I detected fragments of the charcoal itself, which, hermeti-
cally locked up in the rock, had retained all its original car-
bon. These last reminded •me of specimens not unfrequent
among the trap-rocks of the Carboniferous and Oolitic sys-
tems. From an intrusive overlying wacke in the neighbour-
hood 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 charac-
teristic reticulations of the coniferse of the Coal Measures.

I descended the hill, and, after joining my friends at Strath-
pefier, — 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 Caith-
ness 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 373

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 Dipla-
canthus, and in which the Coccosteus and Pterichthys bur-
rowed, has undergone no change. The soft oose has become
solid rock, but its odoriferous qualities have remained unal-
tered. 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 horizon-
tal laminse, 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 de-
stroyed in the convulsion. Detached scales and spines, how-
ever, 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

374 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

pass over it contract in a perceptible degree its peculiar taste
and odour. 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 bot-
tles, 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, wait-
ing 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 pecu-
liar 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 supersti-
tions not unfrequently do, a nucleus of fact. The charm, I
said, might amount to no more than simply the administra-

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 375

tion 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 Wyvis on the other. I had pur-
posed ascending this latter mountain, — the giant of the north-
eastern coast, and one of the loftiest of our second-class Scot-
tish 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-ceil-
ing rose higher, till it rested on but the distant hills, and the
more prominent features of the landscape began to stand out
amid the general gray, like the stronger lines and masses in

376 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

a half-finished drawing, boldly dashed off in the neutral tint
of the artist. The portions of the prospect generically dis-
tinct are, notwithstanding its great extent and variety, but
few ; and the partial veil of haze, by glazing down its dis-
tracting 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 rec-
tilinear ridge of the Black Isle, — not quite the sort of line a
painter would introduce into a composition, but true to geo-
logic character. More in the foreground, in the same direc-
tion, there spreads a troubled cockling sea of the Great Con-
glomerate. Turning to the north and west, the deep valley
of Strathpefier, 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 "Wyvis, — a true gneiss moun-
tain, 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 se-
cond 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 toppling, 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 pri-
mary 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 it its

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 377

last great feature. All was gloomy and chill ; and as I turn-
ed 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 vi-
sited 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 Wyvis, 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 Eng-
lishman, 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 val-
ley ; 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 enjoy-
ment ; and what then was there to regret ?

I rode down the Strath in the omnibus which plies between
the Spa and Dingwall, and then walked on to the village of
Evan ton, which I reached about an hour after nightfall, some-
what 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,

378 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

and so the effects of the damp were wholly confined to my-
self. I was soundly pummelled during the night by a fright-
ful 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 be-
side 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 mo-
ments, mayhap, poised midway between the sleeping and wak-
ing state. Next day (Sunday) I attended the Free Church
in the parish, where I found a numerous and attentive con-
gregation,— descendants, in large part, of the old devout Mun-
roes 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 de-
tecting nothing organic; and a few fragments of clay- slate
locked up in the Eed 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 379

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,* the upper
storeys 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 neighbourhood sent more smuggled whisky 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 fort, minister," replied the shrewd old man,
" it's a' owing to the tea ; whan the tea cam in, the ghaists
an' fairies gaed out. Weel do I mind whan at a' our neebourly
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 f the face, an' a little
confused in the head, an' weel fit to see amaist ony thing whan
* See " My Schools and Schoolmasters." chap. xi.

380 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 accom-
plished 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 Edin-
burgh to the northern extremity of Pomona.

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 381

CHAPTER X.

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 al-
together 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 re-
solved on at least glancing over, if not exploring, the fossili-
ferous deposits of the Orkneys, trusting that an eye some-
what practised in the formations mainly developed in these
islands might enable me to make some amends for seeing com-
paratively 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 whirl-
ing 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 morn-
ing 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

382 KAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

five hours after the expected time, she also came rolling in,
her darkened and weather-beaten sides and rigging gave evi-
dence 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 thorough-
ly 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 inertia;
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 har-
bour of Wick, and by its rock-like strength. The gray pon-
derous stones of the flagstone series of which it is built, in-
stead 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 dis-
tance the work looks as if formed of upright piles or beams
jambed fast together. I had learned that Mr Bremner had

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 383

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 po-
sition. 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 tem-
pest, 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-active impetus in the op-
posite 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 ; biit it is
also something more. As its white breadth of foam indicates,
it is a subtile mixture of water and air, with a powerful up-
ward action, — a consequence of the air struggling to effect its
escape ; and this upward action must be taken into account
in oui' calculations, as certainly as the other and more gene-
rally recognised actions. In striking against a piece of build-
ing, 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

384 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 pre-
cautions are usually adopted to bind it fast, — for the exist-
ence 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 formid-
able forces with which he has 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 scan-
dal 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 conclu-
sions 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 harbour 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 brick-
work, or had been driven into each other, as if, instead of
being composed of perhaps the hardest and toughest sedi-

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 385

mentary 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 opi-
nion ; but he could say nothing about the appearance : it was
not in his books." " I suspect," I replied, " the phenome-
non 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 Caith-
ness, 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 harbour yonder belongs, icebergs of
very considerable size must not unfrequently have brushed the
brows of your precipices. An iceberg from eighty to a hun-
dred 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 colli-
sion 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.

2 B

386 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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, ac-
cording to Addison, forms the staple of all writings of genius,
and which he defines as " simple but not obvious," is a cha-
racter 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 elabo-
rately 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, in-shore, in a floating caisson
of peculiar construction, beginning a little beyond the low-
ebb line, and warping out his work piece-meal, as it sank,
till it had reached its proper place, in, if necessary, from ten
to twelve fathoms water, where, on a bottom previously pre-
pared 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 de-
liberate as on the land. Some of the anecdotes which he
communicated to me on this occasion, connected with his nu-
merous achievements in weighing up foundered vessels, or in
floating off wrecked or stranded ones, were of singular inte-
rest ; and I regretted that they should not be recorded in an
autobiographical memoir. Not a few of them were humor-

OF A GEOLOGIST. 387

ously told, and curiously illustrative of that general ignorance
regarding the " strength of materials" in which the scienti-
fic world has been too strangely suffered to lie, in this the
world's most mechanical age ; so that what ought to be ques-
tions 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, choak-full of coal, — which an Eng-
lish 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 sq,
when I succeeded in bringing the vessel up, through the em-
ployment 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 in-
terview 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 recognised and appreciated as
the most herculean of its kind ever performed, — the raising
and warping off of the Great Britain steamer from her peril-
ous bed in the sand of an exposed bay on the coast of Ire-
land 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 con-
siderably advanced, in employments little suited to exert his
extraordinary faculties, and which persons of the ordinary
type could have performed as well Napoleon, — himself pos-
sessed 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

388 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 ge-
nuine beauties. But had they shared in the history of the
neighbouring Shetland group, that, according to some of the
older historians, were suffered to lie uninhabited for centu-
ries after their first discovery, I would rather have been
disposed to marvel this evening, not that they had been un-
appropriated 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 steam-
boat ; 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 uninterrnittent hot- water douche of queries, the pa-
tient 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 san-
guinely 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 un-
known passengers in humble russet no such sort of familiari-

RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST*. 389

ties 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 Scotts, Lambs, and Goldsmiths, —
have embalmed with such exquisite truth in our literature,
and which have hitherto militated against the practical rea-
lization 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 in-
variably the strong common sense of the Scotch people has
run every scheme under water that, confounding the charac-
ter of the " village schoolmaster" with that of the " village
clergyman," would demand from the schoolmaster the clergy-
man's work,

We crossed the opening of the Pentland Frith, with its
white surges and dark boiling eddies, and saw its twin light-
houses rising tall and ghostly amid the fog on our lee. We
then skirted the shores of South Ronaldshay, of Burra, of Co-
pinshay, 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 erec-
tion, at the bottom of a low bay, — for its humbler compa-
nions do not make themselves visible until we have entered
the harbour 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.

390 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

"We had just light enough to show us, on landing, that the
main thoroughfare of the place, very narrow and very crook-
ed, had been laid out, ere the country beyond had got high-
ways, or the proprietors carts and carriages, with an exclu-
sive 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 harbour, 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 TJdallers
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,"

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 391

or of its " suppression-of-vice sisterhood of moral old maids,"
who kept all their neighbours 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 re-
call ! And, after discussing a juicy steak and a modest cup
of tea, I found I could regard with the indifferency of a phi-
losopher, the perished suppers of KirkwalL

I quitted my lodgings for church next morning about three
quarters of an hour ere the service commenced j 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 un-
prepared by any previous description, for the imposing as-
semblage 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 tak-
ing in the whole group at a glance. I know no such group
elsewhere in Scotland. The church and palace of Linlith-

392 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

gow are in such close proximity, that, seen together, relieved
against the blue gleam of their lake, they form one magnifi-
cent pile ; but we have here a taller, and, notwithstanding
its Saxon plainness, a nobler church, than that of the south-
ern burgh, and at least one palace more. And the associa-
tions connected with the church, and at least one of the pa-
laces, 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 Bucha-
nan, "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
histoiy, 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 Volunta-
ries yonder, ye see," jerking his head, as he spoke, in the di-
rection of the United Secession chapel of the place, " are awfu'
strong, and unco radical ; an' 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 strengthen-
ing their influence as a class by seizing hold of the Church pa-
tronages. 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 con-
sequence, a perilous voyage and an uncertain landing before
them. It was the patronate wedge that struck from off the

RAMBLES OF A. GEOLOGIST. 393

Scottish Establishment at least nine-tenths of the Dissenters of
the kingdom, — its Secession bodies, its Relief body, and, final-
ly, its Free Church denomination, — comprising in their aggre-
gate 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 pos-
sess greatly less political influence in the kingdom of which
they owe almost all the soil, than that wielded by their breth-
ren the Irish and English aristocracy in their respective di-
visions of the empire. Were the representation of England
and Ireland as liberal as that of Scotland, and as little in-
fluenced by the aristocracy, Conservatism, on the passing of
the Reform Bill, might have taken leave of office for ever-
more. And yet neither the English nor Irish are naturallv
so Conservative as the Scotch. The patronate wedge, like
that appropriated by Achan, has been disastrous to the peo-
ple, 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 neighbourhood,
who would scarce have tolerated Sabbath trading in a Sece-

394 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

der, tucked up her little blue cloak over her head, and hied
away to the chapel.

In the Free Church pulpit I recognised 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 fol-
lowing day, introductions to some of the less accessible curio-
sities of the place. I rose betimes on the morning of Mon-
day, 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 grega-
rious instinct in the ancient fishes of this formation, similar
to that which characterizes so many of the fishes of the pre-
sent 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 sin-
gle fragment which did not belong to an exceedingly mi-
nute species of Coccosteus, of which my first specimen had
been sent me a few years before by Mr Robert Dick, from
the neighbourhood 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 gregarious-
ness, 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 congre-
gates 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 395

most instances, when at its fiill 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 con-
clude 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 Goccosteus 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 spe-
cies 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
full-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

396 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 speci-
mens, has fixed at a point considerably more lateral and pos-
terior, 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 extem-
porizing a name, until such time as some person better qua-
lified 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 gover-
nors ruled over Scotland, he seems to have exercised a sin-
gularly vigilant eye. The claims on his protection of even
the remote ELirkwall did not escape him.

The antiquities of the burgh next engaged me ; and, as
became its dignity and importance, I began with the Cathe-
dral, a building impftsing 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 Hollos, 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 colour
seems indispensable, harmonizes well with the massier and
less florid styles of the Gothic. The round arch of that an-
cient Norman school which was at one time so generally re-
cognised as Saxon, prevails in the edifice, and marks out its
older portions. A few of the arches present on their ring-

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 397

stones those characteristic toothed and zig-zag ornaments that
are of not unfamiliar occiirrence on the round squat door-
ways 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, un-
fretted by the tool of the carver. Though of colossal mag-
nificence, 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 Lepra-
sia aeruginosa of modern botanists, — one of those gloomy ve •
getables 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 en-
tire interior of the building a close-fitted lining of dark vel-
vety green, which, like the Attic rust of an ancient medal,
forms an appropriate covering to the sculpturings which it en-
wraps 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 win-
dows 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 de-
composing 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

398 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

tracery which, it forms, — singularly appropriate to the archi-
tecture,— was not the effect of design. The choir and chari-
cel of the edifice, which at the time of my visit were still em-
ployed 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
ei&g&MBed 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 per-
haps 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 cha-
racter to very various materials be wanting, the more multi-
farious 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 else-

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 399

where. 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 sculp-
tures 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 pro-
duced merely a dog, his skill had failed in seconding his in-
tentions, and, instead of achieving a Death in a shroud, he
had achieved but a monkey grinning in a towel. His con-
temporaries, 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 so-
lemnities of the Cathedral. It does not seem difficult to con-
ceive how unintentional ludicrosities of this nature, introduced
into ecclesiastical erections in ages too little critical to distin-
guish 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 acciden-
tal monkeys in towels may have thus served to usher into
serious neighbourhoods 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

400 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

chain and bit of bread have meant 1 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 pre-
decessor, 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 be-
neath, with its roofs of gray slate, — almost the only parts of
it visible from this point of view, — and its bare treeless sub-
urbs ; 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 withdraw-
ing 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 astonish-
ment of the burghers below, a set of chimes handed down en-
tire, in all the notes, from the times of the monks, from which
also the four fine bells of the Cathedral have descended as an

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 401

heir-loom 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 pro-
posed 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 har-
monies 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
storey 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 mul-
lions, and cruciform shot-holes, are rich specimens of their
peculiar style ; and, with the double-windowed turrets with

2 c

402 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

which they range, they communicate a sort of higJwelief ef-
fect to the entire erection, " the exterior proportions and orna-
ments 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 des-
perate 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" be-
tween 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 employ-
ment 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.

OF A GEOLOGIST. 403

CHAPTER XL

THE " upper storey" of the bishop's palace, in which grim old
Haco died, — thanks to the economic burghers who convert-
ed 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 neighbouring hill in a fog appear as re-
mote 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 " Mdkkaris" 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 vapours 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." *

404 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

And hence the thick haze in which it is enveloped. Curi-
ously enough, however, this period, during which the wild
Scot had to contend with the still wilder wanderers of Scan-
dinavia in fierce combats that he was too little skilful to re-
cord, and which appears so obscure and remote to his de-
scendants, presents a phase comparatively near, and an out-
line 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 Nor-
way. 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 ex-
tract containing the account of Haco's expedition against Scot-
land, which was " translated from the original Icelandic by
the Rev. James Johnstone, chaplain to his Britannic Ma-
jesty'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 watch-
fulness 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. Hav-
ing lain for some nights, the illness abated, and he was on foot
for three days. On the first day he walked about in his apart-

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 405

ments; 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 Nor-
wegian books might be read to him night and day : first the
lives of saints ; and, when they were ended, he made his at-
tendants 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 in-
creasing. 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 at-
tendants on his person. He ordered all the silver-plate be-
longing 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 Hamar,
Henry, Bishop of Orkney, Albert Thorleif, and many other
learned men, were present ; and, before the unction, all pre-
sent bade the king farewell with a kiss. * * * The fes-
tival 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 do-
mestics who had been near the king's person during his ill-

406 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

ness. Immediately on the decease of the king, bishops and
learned men were sent for to sing mass. * * * On Sun-
day the royal corpse was carried to the upper hall, and laid
on a bier. The body was clothed in a rich garb, with a gar-
land on its head, and dressed out as became a crowned mo-
narch. 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 Mag-
nus Church, where they lay in state that night. On Tues-
day 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 deter-
mined that watch should be kept over the king's grave all
winter. At Christmas the bishop and Andrew Plytt furnish-
ed entertainments, as the king had directed ; and good pre-
sents 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 hap-
pened the third of the nones of March. The courtiers fol-
lowed 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, ac-

BAUBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 407

quainting 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 multi-
tude 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 conver-
sion to Christianity ; for that, under the humanizing influ-
ence of religion, they staid at home, and cultivated the arts
of peace. But the hypothesis is, I fear, not very tenable.

408 BAUBLES OP A GEOLOGIST.

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 recognised nationally as it ever was by the
subjects of Haco, has failed to put down the trade of aggres-
sive 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 compunctious 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 vigo-
rous princes, of the countries which had lain open to it, — a
circumstance which, in all 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 un-
instructive half-hour in sauntering along the streets in the
quiet of the evening, acquainting myself with the general as-
pect of the people. I marked, as one of the peculiar features
of the place, groupes 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 409

by the lassies of Orkney to the dress of their female neigh-
bours 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 un-
authenticated 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 ex-
tending 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 expe-
dition to the Faroe Islands were astonished when, on land-
ing at Cromarty, they recognised 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

410 RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST.

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-Scan-
dinavian 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, cha-
racter, 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 accomplish-
ed 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 con-
nected, 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 411

curiously charged with what had once been intellect and emo-
tion, 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 no-
tation, 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 crim-
son 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 signa-
ture of Mary Queen of Scots, to Torquil M'Leod of Dun ve-
gan, 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

412 RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST.

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 j 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 deter-
mined 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. / intend, if the Lord will, to preach Christ
to them next Lord's day, wt.out the least mixture of any-
thing that may smell of sedition or rebellion. If I be far-
ther 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 purposed breaking the law.
The next set of papers in the collection dated after the Re-
volution, and were full charged with an enthusiastic Jacobit-
ism, which seems to have been a prevalent sentiment in Ork-
ney 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 gentle-
men, who had been engaged in the rebellion of 1745, con-
cealed 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 413

search, they never, it is said, completely recovered the hor-
rors 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 test-
ing the justice of the policy that had sent poor Smith into
exile, from his snug southern parish in the Presbytery of Dum-
fries, to the remotest island of the Orkneys. The great les-
son taught in Providence during the seventeenth and part of
the eighteenth century to our Scottish countryfolk seems to
have been the lesson of toleration ; and as they were slow,
stubborn scholars, the lash was very frequently and very se-
verely 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 Ban-
gour 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 Yasa,' 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 pub-
lication 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

414 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 typi-
fied— 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 Da-
lecarlia, 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 prohi-
bition of Brook's tragedy, and to the singular success which
attended its publication. The passage in the manuscript sug-
gestive of this view takes the form of an address to the vic-
torious prince, and runs as follows : —

" Meanwhile, unguarded youth, thou stoodst alone ;
The cruel Tyrant urged his Annie 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

RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST. 415

sole locality in which shells had been detected in the Old Red
Sandstone of Scotland. But these have since been found
in the neighbourhood of Thurso, by Mr Robert Dick, asso-
ciated with bones and plates of the Asterolepis, and by Mr
William Watt on the opposite side of the Mainland of Ork-
ney, 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 ge-
nus Astarte, than any species of Cyclas with which I am ac-
quainted. 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 Picko-
quoy, — 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, how-
ever, 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 oc-
cupy, but impinging on each other, like all the gregarious shells,
in thickly-set groupes 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

416 RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST.

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 his-
tory must be vastly more voluminous now, and greatly more
varied in its contents, than when the stratum which they oc-
cupy 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 apparently, 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, soli-
tary valley, overlooked by ungainly heath-covered hills of no
great altitude, though quite tall enough to prevent the tra-
veller 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, bor-
dered, 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, de-

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 417

I

light 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, dream-
ing, in the quiet obscurity of an Orkney parish, far removed
from the seat of war and the literary circles, of poetic cele-
brity and military renown, he addressed a letter to the Duke
of Kent, the father of our Sovereign Lady the reigning Mo-
narch, 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 forth-
with 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 a 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

2 D

418 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

exertion ; and so he had to retire from the army on half-pay,
and a pension honourably 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 at-
tended 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
neighbourhood 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 probabi-
lity, 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 !

RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST. 419

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 swept 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 cast,
Like some fair spirit wailing o'er
The faded 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."

420 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

The father was succeeded in his parish by the brother of
Malcolm, — a gentleman to whom, during my stay in Ork-
ney, 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 ac-
companied me to two quarries in the neighbourhood of his
new domicile, 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 state-
ment evinced, formed, I thought, a very pleasing trait, and
one that harmonized well with the finely-toned unobtrusive-
ness arid 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-

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 421

shed in this part of the Mainland, and introduces the travel-
ler to a scene entirely new. The prospect is of considerable
extent ; and, what seems strange in Orkney, nowhere pre-
sents the traveller — though it contains its large inland lake
— with a glimpse of the sea.

422 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

CHAPTER XII.

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. Un-
like, 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 Pa-
laeozoic 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 storey 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 be-
yond 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 up-
per and lower sheet of water by two low, long promontories,

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 423

that jut out from opposite sides, and so nearly meet as to be
connected by a thread-like line of road, half-mound half-
bridge, occupies the middle distance. There are moory hills
and a few rude 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 Strom-
ness, 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 la-
titude than the July evenings of Edinburgh, I set out, ham-
mer in hand, to explore. Stromness is a long, narrow, irre-
gular strip of a town, fairly thrust by a steep hill into the sea,
on which it encroaches in a broken line of wharf-like bul-
warks, along which, at high water, vessels of a hundred tons
burden float so immediately beside the houses, that their pen-
nants 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 dis-
trict, 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

424 KAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 en-
gaged 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 for ever." Im-
mediately 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 T " 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 some-
thing 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, some-
what intermediate in colour between that of Peterhead and
Aberdeen, and which at this point bears none of the caul of
stratified primary rook 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 425

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 neighbourhood 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 agglo-
merated 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 convul-
sions, 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 en-
tire 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 sec-
tion by the thick bed of coarse-grained sandstone, so well-
marked a member of the formation at Cromarty, Nigg, and
Gramrie, 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 flag-
stones, and then pursued these from older and lower to newer

426 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

and higher layers, anxious to ascertain at what distance over
the base the more ancient organisms of the system first ap-
pear, 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 Ork-
ney, embedded in a light grayish-coloured 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 at least ten inches across, and the fron-
tal 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
Co3lacanths the Holoptychius or Glyptolepis, the individual
to which the nail-shaped bone belonged must have been, judg-
ing from the size of the corresponding parts in these ichthyo-
lites, at least twice as large an animal as the splendid Clash-
bennie Holoptychius of the Upper Old Red, now in the Bri-
tish Museum. The bulkiest ichthyolites yet found in any of
the divisions of the Old Red system are of the genus Astero-
lepis ; and to this genus, and to evidently an individual of
no inconsiderable size, this oldest of the organisms of Orkney
belonged. I was so interested in the fact, that before ulti-
mately leaving this part of the country I brought Dr Gar-
son, Stromness, and Mr William Watt, jun., Skaill, both

RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST. 427

very intelligent palaeontologists, to mark the place and cha-
racter of the fossil, that they might be able to point it out
to geological visitors in the future, or, if they preferred re-
moving it to their town Museum, to indicate to them the
stratum in which it had lain. For the present I merely re-
quest the reader to mark, in the passing, that the most an-
cient 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, possess-
ed 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 frag-
ment of their remains, — plate or bone, — I must attempt lay-
ing before the scientific reader at least a portion of the data
on which I found.

This figure represents not
inadequately one of the most
characteristic plates of the
Asterolepis. A very consider-
able 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

428 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 me-
chanism : 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, di-
vided atop into two branches, occupied the space in the ge-
nera Osteolepis and Diplopterus ; and two plates resembling
the divisions of a pointed Gothic window, whose single cen-
tral 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 sin-
gle 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 propor-
tions of this plate are such that it can be very nearly inscribed
in a semicircle, of which the length of the nail forms 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 429

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 in-
dividual 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 Glyptole-
pis, 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-Hat-
terick and Balfour-of-Burley style ; and of the Russian spe-
cimens, some of the larger bones must have belonged to in-
dividuals 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-
coloured 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 dedpiens. I found ex-
actly the same arrangement in a bed considerably higher in
the system, which occurs a full mile farther on, — the Dipte-
rians 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 arrange-
ment is comparatively a common one in the quarries of Ork-

430 RABBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

ney. 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 cogeners, and the third by
Coccostei ? Was the arrangement an effect of normal differ-
ences 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 1 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 sug-
gested, and to record the various instances in which it oc-
curs. The minerals which I remarked among the schists
here as most abundant are a kind of black ironstone, exceed-
ingly tough and hard, occurring in detached masses, and a
variety of bright pyrites disseminated among the darker flag-
stones, 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 ex-
cavation 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 431

embedded in a matrix of barytes, stromnite, and other kin-
dred minerals, and the thickness of the entire vein is not
veiy considerable. I have since learned, from the " Statisti-
cal 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 neighbourhood
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 neighbourhood, 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 em-
ployed 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

432 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

be just it," he replied, — " iodine ;" but it doesn't make such
a demand for the kelp as the glass and the soap." I after-
wards 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 inci-
dents 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 jambed 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 433

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 shud-
dered 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 with-
out which weak man can accomplish nothing, — whether he
be a deer-stalker or a 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 break-
fasts 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 hospi-
tality which would fain have adopted me as its guest, not-
withstanding the badness of the character that, in common
honesty, I had to certify as my own. Next morning I break-
fasted at the manse, and was introduced by Mr Leannonth
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
neighbourhood 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 organ-

2 E

434 RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST.

isms, 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 ichthyo-
lites 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 com-
municated 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 Dip-
terus 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 sud-
denly 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, ap-
parently, 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,
stopt 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,

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 435

broader in proportion to its length than that of the Diplop-
terus, 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 un-
known as such, has been given to the world as the occipi-
tal 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 ani-
mal'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, how-
ever 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;* 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 cover-
ed 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 longi-
tudinally 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

* I can entertain no doubt that the angular groupes of palatal teeth
figured by Agassiz and the Russian geologists as those of a supposed Placoid
termed the Ctenodus, are in reality groupes of the palatal teeth of Dip-
terus 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 be distinguished from the teeth of Ctenodus. The three
genera resolve themselves into one.

436 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 geolo-
gist may find them of use ; and the non-geologist may be dis-
posed 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, cer-
tain 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 Daughter
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 appro-
priation 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 re-
peatedly pared off and carried away for fuel, that there are
now wide tracts on which there is no more soil to pare, and

KAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST. 437

which present, for the original covering of peaty mould, a con-
tinuous surface of pale boulder-clay, here and there mottled
by detached tufts of scraggy heath, and here and there rough-
ened by projections of the underlying rock. All is unre-
deemable barrenness. On the other hand, wherever a bit of
private property appears, though in the immediate neighbour-
hood 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
oose 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 re-
production of the iron of the underlying flagstones, transfer-
red, 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 form-
ing 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 hummock
left by a party of labourers, 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

438 BAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 flag-
stone 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 build-
ings 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 win-
dowless breadth of wall. In course of time the piers attenu-
ate 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 cover-
ed 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 pecu-
liar disposition and character of the prevailing strata of Ork-
ney, as certainly as in the power of the tides which sweep
athwart its coasts, and the wide extent of sea which, stretch-

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 439

ing around it, gives the waves scope to gather bulk and mo-
mentum, 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 hun-
dred 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 perpendicular-
ity and their mural aspect, — exactly the angle against which
the waves, as broken masses of foam, beat up to their great-
est 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,

44:0 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

CHAPTEE XIII

WE returned to Stromness along the edge of the cliffs, gra-
dually descending from higher to lower ranges of precipices,
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 envelopes 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 mi-
mic 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 frag-
ments 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 sur-
faces, interior and exterior, and in which the cranial portion

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 441

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 ge-
nera, Diplopterus and Osteolepis.

A little farther on, I found, on a hill-side in which ex-
tensive slate-quarries had once been wrought, the remains of
Pterichthys existing as mere patches, from which the colour
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 quariy, ichthyo-
lites 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 bi-
tuminous 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 re-
semble, 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 Cro-
rnarty, Moray, or Banff, — those germinal bones of the Coc-
costeus, 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

442 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

portions of the organism ; for the thinner parts, too incon-
siderable to have served as attractive nuclei to the stony mai>-
ter when the concretion was forming, were left outside its
pale, and so have been lost; whereas, in the northern dis-
tricts 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 dor-
sal 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 ex-
ternally 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 frame-
work than in that of fishes as strongly fenced round exter-
nally by scales or plates as the coleoptera by their ely trine,
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 skele-
tons 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 443

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 labours 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 al-
ready had occasion to remark, was apparently a mere point,
unfurnished with rays.

In descending from the cliffs upon the quarries, my com-
panion pointed to an angular notch in the rock-edge, appa-
rently 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 assist-
ance 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 glassrphial against a stone-wall.
One blow completed the work of destruction ; she went roll-
ing 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

444 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

had seen but a few seconds before running wildly about the
deck, there remained not a trace ; and the saddened specta-
tors 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, climb-
ed up the precipice, and presented himself to a group of as-
tonished and terrified country people, who could scarce re-
gard 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 pe-
netrates. 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 jambed 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 inclos-
ed 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 com-
pressed 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 accumu-
lations 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 gain-

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 445

ing 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 Johnston e ; 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 pictu-
resque ruin, that forms a pleasing object in the landscape.
The ruin is that of a country residence of the bishops of Ork-
ney during the disturbed and unhappy reign of Scotch Epis-
copacy, and bears on a flat tablet of weathered sandstone the
initials of its founder, Bishop George Grahame, and the date
of its erection, 1 633. With a green cultivated oasis imme-
diately around it, and a fine open §ound, 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 Presby-
terian 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 favourable the cir-
cumstances 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 1 638 ; and, be-
ing 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 graridsones, to the preju-
dice of the Church ; he oversaw adulterie ; slighted charm-
ing ; neglected preaching and doing of anie good ; and held
portions of ministers' stipends for building his cathedral."

446 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

The concluding portion of his life, after his deposition, was
spent in obscurity ; nor did his successor in the bishoprick,
subsequent to the re-establishment of Episcopacy at the Re-
storation,— 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 shat-
tered 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 appa-
rently 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, re-
vealing many a flaw and chasm in the yielding masonry ; and
their shadows fell with picturesque effect on the loose litter,
rude implements, and gapped diy-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 subaerial 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 447

subaqueous deposit, and that it was hollowed, where most ex-
posed 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 appear-
ance not uncommon in weathered sandstones. With more
time to spare, I could fain have studied the deposit more care-
fully, in the hope of detecting a few peculiarities of structure
sufficient to distinguish subaerially-formed from subaqueously-
deposited beds of stone. Sandstones of subaerial formation
are of no very unfrequent occurrence among the recent de-
posits. On the coast of Cornwall there are cliffs of consider-
able 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 placa 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 pre-
viously 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 accumula-
tions of sand, which have this tendency to consolidate and be-
come lasting subaerial 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 subaerial formations. And as the re-

448 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

presentatives 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 spend-
ing a day, on my return south, among the sand-wastes of
Moray, — a purpose which I afterwards carried into effect.
But of fcliat more anon.

On the following morning, availing myself of a kind invi-
tation, through Dr Garson, from his brother, a Free Church
minister resident in an inland district of the Mainland, in con-
venient neighbourhood 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 J
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 ap-
proach 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,

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 449

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 debateable 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, impa-
tient 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 pro-
ductions, 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

450 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

loses ill 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 ex-
amine its productions, and that then, after registering his ob-
servations for a few years, he would favour the world with
its natural history.

The Standing Stones, — second in Britain, of their kind, to
only those of Stonehenge, — occur in two groupes; the smaller
group (composed, however, of the taller stones) on the south-
ern promontory ; the larger on the northern one. Rude and
shapeless, and bearing no other impress of the designing fa-
culty than that they are stuck endwise in the earth, and form,
as a whole, regular figures on the sward, there is yet a sub-
lime 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 pon-
derous bulk and weight, adds to their impressiveness. When
there is art and taste enough in a country to hew an ornate
column, 110 one marvels that there should be also 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 machi-
nery, and unfurnished, apparently, with a single tool. And
what, when contemplating their handiwork, we have to sub-
tract in idea from their minds, we add, by an involuntary pro-
cess, 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. <>

ineradicable instinct of man's nature which leads him in so
many various ways to attempt conciliating the Powers of ano-
ther 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 know-
ing enough to communicate, through the medium of alpha-
bet or symbol, with posterity. The appearance of the obe-
lisks, 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, — chief-
ly 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 extraordi-
nary 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 assem-
blage 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 advantaga They could
not be better placed than on their flat promontories, surround-
ed 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 vapour, would have associated better with the misty
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-coloured objects, when

452 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

tall and imposing, but of irregular form, are seen always to
most advantage in an uncertain light, — in fog or frost-rhime,
or under a scowling sky, or, as Parnell well expresses it,
" amid the livid gleams of night." They appeal, if I may so
express myself, to the sentiment of the ghostly and the spec-
tral, and demand at least a partial envelopment of the ob-
scure. Burns, with the true tact of the genuine poet, de-
velops the sentiment almost instinctively in an exquisite
stanza in one of his less-known songs, " The Posey,"-

" The hawthorn I will pu', wt its locks 0' 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 habili-
ments 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, arid
projecting far to the westward their long gigantic shadows."
And Malcolm, in the exercise of a similar faculty with that
of Burns aud 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 ttie scowling storm,
Seem each a tall and phantom form,
As hurrying vapours 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 453

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 distinct-
ly traceable, run round the whole ; and there are several mys-
terious-looking tumuli outside, bulky enough to remind one
of the lesser morains of the geologist. But the circle, notwith-
standing 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, con-
vert, by a sort of conventionalism, into a church or dwelling-
house, within which they seat themselves, and enact their
imitations of the employments of their seniors, whether do-
mestic or ecclesiasticaL The circle of Stennis was a circle,
say the antiquaries, dedicated 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 pro-
montory • 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 Sunday and Monday still testify,
they employed in their respective inclosures. in the exercise
of a wild unregulated fancy, uncouth irrational rites, the ex-
tremeness 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,

454 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST

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 Mina Troil, which he describes as hav-
ing 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,1' says Dr Hibbert, in
an elaborate paper in the " Transactions of the Scottish An-
tiquaries," " 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 pos-
session 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 fol-
lowing morning unlodged, and instantly doomed to the Asse.
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 Kogiivalld : this have
the Nornse decreed. In my fiordirig 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.

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 455

They are at present in their fro ward 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.

456 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

CHAPTER XIV.

WHILE yet lingering ainid 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. T could
have ventured more readily on taking the command of a ves-
sel 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 honour
with me, and exerted himself to such purpose, that we did
not fall greatly more than a hundred yards behind Mr Gar-
son. 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 quar-
rel with the commons of Orkney, I found in close neighbour-
hood with them that with which I could have no quarrel, —

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 457

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 acquaint-
ed with old churchyards in the north of Scotland that con-
tain the burying-grounds of from six to ten landed proprie-
tors, whose lands are now merged into single properties.
And, in reading the biographies of our old covenanting mi-
nisters, I have often remarked as curious, and as bearing in
the same line, that no inconsiderable proportion of their num-
ber were able to retire, in times of persecution, to their own
little estates. It was during the disastrous wars of the
French Revolution, — wars 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 be-
gan, 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 revo-
lutionary war appears to have given them the final blow ;
and the more extensive proprietors of the kingdom are assur-
edly 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 jambed them fast within
those safe limits determined by the line and plummet, which
it is ever perilous to overhang. Yery extensive territorial

458 KAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 govern-
ments. 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 abso-
lute monarchies.* And in a country such as ours, the ac-
cumulation of landed property in the hands of comparatively
a few individuals has the effect often of bringing the territo-
rial privileges of the great landowner into a state of antago-
nism 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,

* 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 hisLordship, in referring to the old principalities of France, "that the
government of petty princes is less favourable to the security and interests
of society than the government of monarchs, who possess great and exten-
sive 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 regula-
tions ; so that no inconsiderable degree of security and liberty to the sub-
ject is almost inseparable from, and essential to, the subsistence and dura-
tion 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 re-
duced to a condition of miserable slavery. Indeed, very few of them, in
the course of ages, are capable of conceiving any other means of maintain-
iug 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.

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 459

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 proprie-
tors 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 neighbouring 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 de-
scendants 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 pro-
spect averages from four to six miles, — does it command a
view of the sea. I scarce expected being introduced in Ork-
ney 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 neighbours, who pride themselves upon their skill as
sailors and boatmen, as a race of lubberly landsmen, unac-
quainted 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 for-
bearance with a lobster, — to him a monster of unknown

460 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 doesna 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 sin-
gular manners and habits, their uncouth appearance, and
homely address. Being the most landward district in Po-
mona," 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 from off their pedestals in almost all the other parts
of the island. The permanency of its population, too, is
mightily in favour of ' old use and wont,' as it is almost en-
tirely divided amongst a class of men yclept 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 re-
verence, 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 groupes 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 coun-
try. Where the land slopes towards the sea, the shaggy heath

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 461

gives place to a green luxuriant herbage ; and the frequent
patches of com 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 Eng-
land. 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 sur-
face 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
recognised as occurring at a lower level than elsewhere in Bri-
tain ; but the vast profusion of blossoms borne by species com-
mon 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 vege-
table world, which, when hardship presses upon the life of
the individual shrub or quadruped, so as to threaten its vi-
tality, 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 county 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 flou-
t-ishing, and as yet undegenerate plant, had merely borne
a-top a few florets, which produced a small quantity of ex-
ceedingly 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

462 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 Al-
pine 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 produc-
tive Irish of the vegetable world ;* for Doubleday seems to

* 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 conse-
quence, 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 ex-
hibited in the beaten and that in the decaying tree,— in rendering his bar-
ren 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 conve-
niently 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 ulti-

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 463

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 pas-
tured, 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 hard-
ship so extreme as almost to threaten their existence as in-
dividuals, 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 conti-
nually running out ; and it requires frequent creations to
keep up the House of Lords ; while our poor people seem in-
creasing 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,

mately 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 neighbourhood 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 Kesolis, 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."

464 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 wayside, — 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 some-
what 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 Sand-
wick, 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 ac-
quirement 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 profit-

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 465

able one. He showed me a collection of flags, with which
he intended constructing a grotto, and which contained nu-
merous 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 re-
minded me, from their peculiar style of colouring, and the
grotesqueness of their forms, of the blue figuring on pieces
of buff-coloured china, and seemed to be chiefly of one spe-
cies, very abundant in Orkney, the Coccosteus decipiens. We
next walked out to see a quarry in the neighbourhood 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 bear-
ing unworn and untarnished their minute carvings and deli-
cate enamel, but existing in every case as mere detached
heads. I found three of them lying in one little slaty frag-
ment of two and a half inches by four, which I brought along
with me. Mr Clouston had never seen the curious arrange-
ment of palatal plates and teeth which distinguishes the Dip-
terus ; and, drawing his attention to it in an ill-preserved
specimen which I found in the coping of his glebe-wall, I re-
stored, 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 (Labrus
Bcdanus), — which bears exactly such patches of angular teeth
in its palate. They adhere strongly together ; and, when
found in our old Pict's 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

2 G

466 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

think I can show you one disinterred here some years ago."
It interested me to find, from Mr Clouston's specimen, that
the palatal grinders of this recent fish of Orkney very near-
ly resemble those of its Dipterus of the Old Eed 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 rect-
angular 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 pe-
culiar 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 palseontolo-
gical inquiries on the vegetable remains of the flagstones, as
the department of the science in which, in relation to Ork-
ney, 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 many specimens of Mr Clouston's
collection I could detect but two species of plants, — an im-
perfectly 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 out-
line, and from the circumstance that its stems continue to re-
tain the same diameter for a considerable distance, and this,

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 467

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 kind-
ness 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, stream-
ing slantwise in the tide, rise not unfrequently to the sur-
face 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 Paci-
fic 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 float-
ing 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 pas-
sage out, the eastern and southern shores of the intervening
island of Grsemsay, and, on the passage back again, its west-
ern and northern shores. The boatman, an intelligent man,
— one of the teachers, as I afterwards ascertained, in the Free

468 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 pro-
fessions with whom I better like to meet than with a sensi-
ble fisherman, who makes a right use of his eyes. The his-
tory of fishes is still, very much what the history of almost
all animals was little more than half a century ago, — a mat-
ter 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 ob-
servation, 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 Grsemsay
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 ad-
mirable materials for one of the darker sketches of Crabbe.
He was, he said, a resolute, unsocial man, not devoid of a
dash of reckless humour, and remarkable for an extraordi-
nary 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 469

member of some dissenting body ; but, living with him in
the little island of Grsemsay, separated by the sea from any
place of worship, he rarely permitted her to see the ihside
of a church. At one time, on the occasion of a communion
Sabbath in the neighbouring 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 neighbourhood,
on which, reversing the old mythologic stoiy 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 boatmen 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 dis-
cernible 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 specula-
tion 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."

470 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

CHAPTER XV.

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 un-
even 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 four-
teen to sixteen hundred feet over the sea-level ; and the val-
leys by which they are traversed, — no mere shallow inflec-
tions 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 com-
paratively tame, to the bold, stern, and high, serves admir-
ably 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 inte-
resting exception, a single trace of the hand of man. As
the traveller approaches by a path somewhat elevated, in or-
der to avoid the peaty bogs of the bottom, along the slopes
of the northern side of the dell, he sees, amid the heath be-
low, what at first seems to be a rhomboidal piece of pave-

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 47 1

ment of pale Old Red Sandstone, bearing atop a few stunted
tufts of vegetation. There are no neighbouring objects of a
known character by which to estimate its size ; the precipi-
tous 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 pavier'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 neighbour, and presents altogether more the appear-
ance of a place of penance than of repose, lacks both cushion
and ledge. An aperture, which seems to have been origi-
nally of a circular form, and about two and a half feet in dia-
meter, but which some unlucky herd-boy, apparently in the
want of better employment, has considerably mutilated and
widened, opens at the inner extremity of the excavation 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

472 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

ponderous to be moved by any man of the ordinary strength,
seems to have served the purpose of a door, lies prostrate be-
side 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 gob-
lin, 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 neighbourhood.

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, ac-
cording to the novelist, done before me in similar circum-
stances,— 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 couch ; and as I
lay wrapped up in my plaid, listening to the rain-drops as

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 473

they pattered thick and heavy a-top, 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, how-
ever, 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 Scan-
dinavian 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 undertak-
ing T 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 admit-
ted, 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 lan-
guage 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 as-

474 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

sembled 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 im-
pulse 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 vapour, he dis-
appeared 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 dark-
ness, to the dashing 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 bor-
row 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 uneai'thly 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 smil'd 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 labour, 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 475

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 vapours of a poetic obscurity, nor connect it with
the supernatural, through the influences of wild ancient tra-
ditions, 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 work-
manship or the materials of the spoon. Nor is the Dwarfie
Stone to be correctly estimated, independently of the suggest-
ive 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 visit-
ors ; but the stone, — an exceedingly compact red sandstone,
— had resisted the imperfect tools at the command of the tra-
veller,— usually a nail or knife ; and so there were but two
of the names decipherable, — that of an "H. Koss, 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

476 RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST.

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. Fol-
ster ?" 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 be-
come more indifferent than in early youth to " that life which
wits inherit after death," and are content to labour 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 prompt-
ings 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 labour,
— not more so than that of the angler, or grouse-shooter, or
deer-stalker : it has occupied the mere leisure insterstices 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, glist-
ening on a thousand minute runnels that came streaming down
the precipices, and revealing, through the thin vapoury haze,
the horizontal lines of strata that bar the hill-sides, like courses
of ashlar in a building. I failed, however, to detect, amid

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 477

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 in-
visible to him whose daring foot scales the precipices whence
it darts its splendour." 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 interro-
gated on the western coast of Scotland regarding the " dia-
mond rock of Gromarty ;" and have been told by an old cam-
paigner 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 boatman 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 with-
drawn 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

478 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

deposit of the Lower Old Red in this locality, out of which
the mountains of Hoy have been scooped, once overlaid the
flagstones of all Orkney, and stretched on and away to Dun-
net Head, Tarbet Ness, and the Black Isle ; and yet such is
the story, variously authenticated, to which their nearly hori-
zontal 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. My
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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 479

is not uninstructive to observe how completely the novelist
has appropriated and brought within the compass of one fic-
tion, 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 in-
tercourse in those days between the two northern archipela-
gos. 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 ne-
cessary, for the 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-enve-
loped kirk of St Ringan with the Standing Stones of Sten-
nis 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 portrait-
ure 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 cri-
tics 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 contemn-
ers of the mere judicial probabilities. And so they have
been continually fretting the little men with their extrava-
gances, and they ever will. What were said to be the ori-
ginals of two of Sir Walter's characters in the " Pirate" were
living in the neighbourhood 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 roof-

480 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

less walls, and of whom 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
pedlar. 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 subsist-
ence by selling favourable winds to mariners. Her dwell-
ing 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 .^Eolus himself, in whose commodities the inha-
bitant dealt. She herself was, as she told us, nearly one
hundred years old, withered and dried up like a mummy. A
clay-coloured kerchief, folded round her head, corresponded
in colour to her corpse-like complexion. Two light-blue
eyes that gleamed with a lustre like that of insanity, an ut-
terance 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 harbour, 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, sur-
rounded by a tall dry-stone fence. It is all that survives
— for the old dwelling-house to which it was attached was

RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST. 481

pulled down several years ago — of the patrimony of Grow the
" Pirate ;" and is not a little interesting, as having formed
the central nucleus rouDd which, — like those bits of tnread
or wire on which the richly saturated fluids of the chemist
solidify and crystallize, — the entire fiction of the novelist ag-
gregated and condensed under the influence of forces opera-
tive 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 de-
scribed as a native of these northern isles. He is drawn by
the poet, amid the wild luxuriance of an island of the Paci-
fic, 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 unfor-
tunate affair of the mutiny with which his name is now as-
sociated, 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 honour of being intro-
duced on the following day to his sister, a lady far advanced

2 H

482 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 cu-
riously 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 mak-
ing the tour of Scotland, had extended his journey into Ork-
ney. 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 ac-
customed 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 Ork-
ney. 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 quit-
ting the national universities ; and I felt, as we conversed to-
gether, 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

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 483

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 in-
struction which had operated so influentially on the boatmen,
and which he had seen telling from the pulpit with such evi-
dent 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 stead-
fast ! He was a Lutheran, he told me ; but, as is too com-
mon in Germany, his actual beliefs appeared to be very con-
siderably 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 te
deemed the fact of its death.

I had carried with me a letter of introduction to Mr Wil-
liam 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 neighbourhood, 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-pre-
served specimen of a Cromarty and Morayshire species, — the

484 BAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 Diplacan-
thus, 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 Ostra-
lepis, 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 XI V., 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, undis-
tinguishable 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 pos-
sessed,— 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 frame-work, judging from the Russian specimens

KAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 485

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 Yedder, the sailor-poet
of Orkney ; and I shall make no apology for availing my-
selfj 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 recognised and most
characteristically remembered.

TO OBKNBT.

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 hleak,— 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, —
I 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 stem sublimities, —
The roaring flood,— the rushing stream, —
The promontory wild and bare, —

486 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

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 pluck' d from beauteous orient meads,

Flowers of celestial dies, —
Though I have laved iu 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.

END OF RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.

h) ty* lob Ungti 3Hiiltr.

THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR, A SUMMER RAMBLE

AMONG THE FOSSELIFEROUS DEPOSITS OF THE HEBRIDES : with

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST ; or, TEN THOUSAND MILES

OVER THE FOSSILIFEROUS DEPOSITS OF SCOTLAND. Post 8vO,

price 7s. 6cL

II.

THE TESTIMONY OF THE ROCKS ; or, GEOLOGY IN ITS
BEARING ON THE TWO THEOLOGIES — NATURAL AND REVEALED.
Post 8vo. Profusely Illustrated, price 7s. 6d.

[Twenty-third Thousand.

" The volume is well worthy of being his last contribution to science,
literature, and religion. . . . It is unquestionably his noblest produc-
tion. Its comprehensiveness of view, its force of argument, its profusion,
beauty, and grandeur of illustration, have often been exemplified in his
former writings, but never before so uniformly. With specimens of gra-
phic descriptions which he never surpassed, we find sustained generaliza-
tions and speculations of a bolder kind than he was wont to attempt. . . .
Its intrinsic value is superlative. "We cannot lay down the book without
formally assuring readers of the rare entertainment its grandly descriptive,
argumentative, reflective, and speculative pages afford, or without repeat-
ing our intense regret that we have no more of such works to expect." —
Edinburgh Weekly Review.

" Fossil species, however long extinct, live again in Mr Miller's pages.
His fossil fishes swim and gambol as though they were creatures of to-day,
and were called sharks and rays instead of Pterichthyses and Holopty-
chiuses ; whilst his vegetable Cyclopteruses and Didymoclcenas shoot, and
blossom, and wave in the wind, as though they were plants of to-day. We

WORKS BY THE LATE HUGH MILLER.

cannot close these pages without a deep feeling of regret that the vigorous
hand and brave intellect that are so conspicuous in every page should have
so suddenly and painfully ceased to work. "We commend the book as a
fitting memorial of the mind of a man remarkable for his self-culture, li-
teraiy ability, accurate science, and manly assertions of his convictions of
the truth." — Athenceum.

" The style is easy, the knowledge brought to bear upon the subject is
varied and extensive, and the purpose of the whole is thoroughly honour-
able and good." — Saturday Review.

" The work is eloquently written, and will afford its readers a great body
of fact and philosophy." — Atlas.

"Valuable and interesting to the geologist, as well as to the general
reader.'' — English Churchman.

" The fully -matured thought, the well-poised magnificent conception,
and the carefully elaborated diction, meet us in every page."— Aberdeen
Herald.

" The most remarkable work of perhaps the most remarkable man of tho
age. ... A magnificent epic, and the Principia of Geology." — British
and Foreign Evangelical Review.

III.

MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS ; or, THE STOUT
OP MY EDUCATION. Post 8vo, cloth, price 7s. 6d.

[Tenth Edition.

" A story which we have read with pleasure, and shall treasure up in
memory for the sake of the manly career narrated, and the glances at old-
world manners and distant scenes afforded us by the way." — Athenaeum.

" This is in our opinion the best of Mr Miller's books." — Chambers'*
Journal.

" Such a story of such a life as this has never been told before. There
is no risk in prophesying that it will take its stand at once as the most
perfect piece of autobiography of the present day— perhaps of any day." —
Taiffs Magazine.

" Such a book, written by such a man, could not be otherwise than very
instructive, and it will be found no less interesting."— Eclectic Review.

IV.

SCENES AND LEGENDS OF THE NORTH OF SCOT-
LAND. Post 8vo, price 7s. 6d. [Fifth Edition.

" A highly amusing and interesting book, written by a remarkable man,
who will infallibly be well known." — Leigh Hunt's Journal.

"A very pleasing and interesting book. The style has a purity and
elegance which remind one of Irving, or of Irving's master, Goldsmith."

Mr Miller is evidently a man of singular reflective powers, deep and
enthusiastic feelings, and no small share of both humour and pathos." —
Chambers' s Journal.

" Written in a style which I had begun to regard as one of the lost arts."
— The late Baron Hume.

WORKS BY THE LATE HUGH MILLER.
V.

THE OLD RED SANDSTONE ; or, NEW WALKS IN AN OLD
FIELD. With Plates, price 7s. 6d. [Ninth Edition.

" The excellent and lively work of our meritorious and self-taught coun-
tryman, Hugh Miller. This work is as admirable for the clearness of
its'description and the sweetness of its composition, as for the purity and
gracefulness that pervade it." — Edinburgh Review.

" The geological formation known as the Old Red Sandstone was long
supposed to be peculiarly barren of fossils. The researches of geologists,
especially those of Mr Miller, have, however, shown that formation to be
as rich in organic remains as any that has been explored. Mr Miller's
exceedingly interesting book on this formation is just the sort of work to
render any subject popular. It is written in a remarkably pleasing style,
and contains a wonderful amount of information."— Westminster Review.

" This admirable work, the production of a man who obtained his geo-
logical knowledge while working day by day as a labourer in a quarry of
the Old Red Sandstone in the north-east part of Scotland, evinces talent
of the highest order, a deep and healthful moral feeling, a perfect com-
mand of the finest language, and a beautiful union of philosophy and poetry.
No geologist can peruse this volume without instruction and delight. It
affords an admirable synopsis of the formation between the Granitic Schists
and the Coal Measures ; and, indeed, embraces an enlarged and highly phi-
losophical view of the science, and of its relation to the Creator." — Profes*
tor SUliman's American Journal of Science.

" A geological work has appeared, small in size, unpretending in spirit
and manner— its contents the conscientious and accurate narrative of fact
— its style the beautiful simplicity of truth— and altogether possessing, for
a rational reader, an interest superior to that of a novel — the ' Old Red
Sandstone,' by Hugh Miller." — Dr Pye Smith's Relation between Scripture
and Geology.

" In Mr Miller's charming little work will be found a very graphic de-
scription of the Old Red Fishes. I know not a more fascinating volume on
any branch of British Geology." — Mantelfs Medals of Creation.

" In Mr Miller we have to hail the accession to geological writers of a
man highly qualified to advance the science. His work, to a beginner, is
worth a thousand didactic treatises."— Sir R. Murchison's Address to the
Geological Society, 1842.

VI.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE.

Crown 8vo, cloth, price 7s. 6d. [Sixth Edition.

" Thought is the prevailing element : good, sturdy, hard-worked
thought, such as we too seldom encounter in modern productions." —
Athenceum.

" This is precisely the kind of book we should have looked for from the
author of the ' Old Red Sandstone.' Straightforward and earnest in
style, rich and varied in matter, these ' First Impressions' will add an-
other laurel to the wreath which Mr Miller has already won for himself."
— Westminster Review.

" Mr Miller is a man of genius ; and, whatever country he may visit,
you may be sure his ' Impressions' will have equal reference to the land
and the people, to the geology of the region, and the humanity of it," —
British Quarterly Review.

WORKS BY THE LATE HUGH MILLER.
VII.

LETTER from one of the SCOTCH PEOPLE to the RIGHT
HON. LORD BROUGHAM AND VAUX, on the Opinions
expressed by his Lordship in the AUCHTERARDER CASE. Fourth
Edition, price 3d.

" Over and above the judicial arguments in the reports of the Auchter-
arder and Lethendy cases, the Church question has been discussed in a
great variety of pamphlets, some of them very long and very able, others
of them very long without being particularly able, and one of them parti-
cularly able without being long ; I mean the elegant and masculine pro-
duction of Hugh Miller, entitled ' A Letter to Lord Brougham.' " —
Church Principles Considered in theivt Results, by W. E. Gladstone, Esq.
M.P. :,V:-C

VIII.

THE WHIGGISM OF THE OLD SCHOOL, as exemplified
by the Past History and Present Condition of the Church of
Scotland. Second Edition. 8vo, price 4d.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY
BERKELEY

Return to desk from which borrowed.
This book is DUE on the last date stamped below.

1 AprS 3LL

REC'D LD

MAY 18 1960

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YB 16674

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