1! ; f pi am THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES GIFT OF Mrs. Marion Kelper TH E CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE FOSSILIFEROUS DEPOSITS OF THE HEBRIDES. WITH EAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST; OR, TEN THOUSAND MILES OVER THE FOSSILIFEROUS DEPOSITS OF SCOTLAND. B Y HUGH MILLER, LL. D., AUTHOR OF " THE OLD RED SANDSTONE, 1 ' " FOOTPRINTS OF THE CREATOR," " MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS," " THE TESTIMONY OF THE ROCKS," ETC. BOSTON: Q O U L D AND LINCOLN, 69 WASHINGTON STREET, NEW YORK: SHELDON AND COMPANY. CINCINNATI : GEO. 8. BLANCHARD. 1859. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1S58, by GOULD A X D LINCOLN, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. AUTHORIZED EDITION. BY a special arrangement with the late Hugh Miller, GOULD AND LINCOLN became the authorized American publishers of his works. By a similar ar- rangement made with the family since his decease, they will also publish his POSTHUMOUS WORKS, of which the present volume is the first. ELECTROTTPED BT W. F. DRAPER, ANDOVER. MASS. PRINTED BY GEO. C. RAND & AVERT. BOSTON. Qe 2.44- PREFACE. NATURALISTS of every class know too well how HUGH MIL- LER died tlie victim of an overworked brain ; and how that bright and vigorous spirit was abruptly quenched forever. During the month of May (1857) Mrs. Miller came to Mal- vern, after recovering from the first shock of bereavement, in search of health and repose, and evidently hoping to do justice, on her recovery, to the literary remains of her husband. Un- happily the excitement and anxiety naturally attaching to a re- vision of her husband's works proved over much for one suffer- ing under such recent trial, and from an affection of the brain and spine which ensued ; and, in consequence, Mrs. Miller has been forbidden, for the present, to engage in any work of men- tal labor. Under these circumstances, and at Mrs. Miller's request, I have undertaken the editing of " The Cruise of the Betsey, or a Summer Ramble among the Fossiliferous Deposits of the He- 980781 IV PREFACE. brides," as well as " The Rambles of a Geologist," hitherto un- published, save as a series of articles in the " Witness " news- paper. The style and arguments of HUGH MILLER are so peculiarly his own, that I have not presumed to alter the text, and have merely corrected some statements incidental to the condition of geological knowledge at the time this work was penned. " The Cruise of the Betsey " was written for that well-known paper the " Witness " during the period when a disputation productive of much bitter feeling waged between the Free and Established Churches of Scotland ; but as the Disruption and its history possesses little interest to a large class of the readers of this work, who will rejoice to follow their favorite author among the isles and rocks of the " bon- nie 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 MIL- LER battled nobly for his faith while living. The sword is in the scabbard : let it rest ! W. S. SYMONDS. PENDOCK RECTORY, APRIL 1, 1858. CONTENTS. PART I. THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY. CHAPTER I. Preparation Departure Recent and Ancient Monstrosities A Free Church Yacht Down the Clyde Jura Prof. Walker's Experiment Whirlpool near Scarba Geological Character of the Western Highlands An Illus- tration Different Ages of Outer and Inner Hebrides Mt. Blanc and the Himalayas " mere upstarts " Esdaile Quarries Oban A Section through Conglomerate and Slate examined M'Dougal's Dog-stone Power of the Ocean to move Eocks Sound of Mull The Betsey The Minister's Cabiu Village of Tobermory The "Florida," a Wreck of the Invincible Armada Geologic Exploration and Discovery At Anchor. . . 15 CHAPTER II. The Minister's Larder No Harbor Eigg Shoes Tormentilla erecta For the Witness'' Sake Eilean Chaisteil Appearance of Eigg Chapel of St. Donan Shell-sand Origin of Secondary Calcareous Rock suggested Exploration of Eigg Pitchstone Veins A Bone Cave Massacre at Eigg Grouping of Human Bones in the Cave Relics The Horse's Tooth A Copper Sewing Needle Teeth found Man a worse Animal than his Teeth show him to have been designed for Story of the Massacre Another Ver- sion Scuir of Eigg The Scuir a Giant's Causeway Character of the Columns Remains of a Prostrate Forest. 31 CHAPTER III. Structure of the Scuir A stray Column The Piazza A buried Pine Forest the Foundation of the Scuir Geological Poachers in a Fossil Preserve Pinites Eiggensis Its Description Witham's Experiments on Fossil Pine 1* VI CONTENTS. of Eigg Rings of the Pine Ascent of the Scuir Appearance of the Top White Pitchstone Mr. Greig's Discovery of Pumice A Sunset Scene The Manse and the Yacht The Minister's Story A Cottage Repast American Timber drifted to the Hebrides Agency of the Gulf Stream The Minister's Sheep 49 CHAPTER IV. An Excursion The Chain of Crosses Bay of Laig Island of Rum Descrip- tion of the Island Superstitions banished by pure Religion Fossil Shells- Remarkable Oyster Bed New species of Belemnite Oolitic Shells White Sandstone Precipices Gigantic Petrified Mushrooms" Christabel" in Stone Musical Sand Jabel Nakous, or Mountain of the Bell Experiments of Travellers at Jabel NaJcous Welsted's Account Reg-Rawan, or the Mov- ing Sand The Musical Sounds inexplicable Article on the subject in the North British Review 66 CHAPTER V. Trap-dykes " Cotton Apples " Alternation of Lacustrine -with Marine Re- mains Analogy from the Beds of Esk Aspect of the Island on its narrow Front The Puffin Ru Stoir Development of Old Red Sandstone Strik- ing Columnar character of Ru Stoir Discovery of Reptilian Remains John Stewart's wonder at the Bones in the Stones Description of the Bones "Dragons, Gorgons, and Chimeras" Exploration and Discovery pur- sued The Midway Shieling A Celtic Welcome Return to the Yacht " Array of Fossils new to Scotch Geology " A Geologist's Toast Hoffman and his Fossil. 85 CHAPTER VI. Something for Non-geologists Man Destructive A Better and Last Creation coming A Rainy Sabbath The Meeting House The Congregation The Sermon in Gaelic The Old Wondrous Story The Drunken Minister of Eigg Presbytcrianism without Life Dr. Johnson's Account of the Con- version of the People of Rum Romanism at Eigg The Two Boys The Freebooter of Eigg Voyage resumed The Homeless Minister Harbor of Isle Ornsay Interesting Gneiss Deposit A Norwegian Keep Gneiss at Knock Curious Chemistry Sea-cliffs beyond Portsea The Goblin Luidag Scenery of Skye. 105 CONTENTS. VII CHAPTER VII. Exploration resumed Geology of Rasay An Illustration The Storr of Skye From Portree to Holm Discovery of Fossils An Island Rain Sir R. Murchisou Labor of Drawing a Geological Line Three Edinburgh Gentlemen Prosopolepsia Wrong Surmises corrected The Mail Gig The Portree Postmaster Isle Orusay An Old Acquaintance Reminis- cences A Run for Rum " Semi-fossil Madeira " Idling on Deck Prognostics of a Storm Description of the Gale Loch Scresort The Minister's lost Sou-wester The Free Church Gathering The weary Min- ister. 123 CHAPTER VIII. Geology of Rum Its curious Character illustrated Rum famous for Blood- stones Red Sandstones " Scratchings :I in the Rocks A Geological In- scription without a Key The Lizard Vitality broken into two Illustra- tions Speculation Scuir More Ascent of the Scuir The Bloodstones An Illustrative Set of the Gem M'Culloch's Pebble A Chemical Prob- lem The solitary Shepherd's House Sheep versus Men The Depopula- tion of Rum A Haul of Trout Rum Mode of catching Trout At Anchor in the Bay of Glenelg. 140 CHA PTER IX. Kyles of Skye A Gneiss District Kyle Rhea A Boiling Tide A " Take " of Sillocks The Betsey's "Paces" In the Bay at Broadford Rain Island of Pabba Description of the Island Its Geological Structure Astrea Polypifers Gryphcea incurva Three Groups of Fossils in the Lias of Skye Abundance of the Petrifactions of Pabba Scenery Pabba a "piece of smooth, level England" Fossil Shells of Pabba Voyage re- sumed Kyle Akin Ruins of Castle Maoil A " Thornback " Dinner The Bunch of Deep Sea Tangle The Caileach Stone Kelp Furnaces Escape of the Betsey from sinking 159 CHAPTER X. Isle Ornsay The Sabbath A Sailor-minister's Sermon for Sailors The Scuir Sermon Loch Carron Groups of Moraines A sheep District The Editor of the Witness and the Establishment Clergyman Dingwall Conon-side revisited The Pond and its Changes New Faces The Stone- mason's Mark The Burying-ground of Urquhart An old Acquaintance Property Qualification for Voting in Scotland Montgerald Sandstone VIII CONTENTS. Quarries Geological Science in Cromarty The Danes at Cromarty The Danish Professor and the " Old Red Sandstone " Harmonizing Tendencies of Science 178 CHAPTER XI. Jchthyolite Beds An interesting Discovery Two Storeys of Organic Remains in the Old Red Sandstone Ancient Ocean of Lower Old Red Two great Catastrophes Ancient Fish Scales Their skilful Mechanism displayed by examples Bone Lips Arts of the Slater and Tiler as old as Old Red Sandstone Jet Trinkets Flint Arrow-heads Vitrified Forts of Scotland Style of grouping Lower Old Red Fossils Illustration from Cromarty Fishing Phenomena Singular Remains of Iloloptychius Ramble with Mr. Robert Dick Color of the Planet Mars Tombs never dreamed of by Hervey Skeleton of the Bruce Gigantic Holoptychius "Coal money Currency " Upper Boundary of Lower Old Red Every one may add to the Store of Geological Facts Discoveries of Messrs. Dick and Peach. . 192 CHAPTER XII. Ichthyolite Beds of Clune and Lelhenbarn Limestone Quarry Destruction of Urns and Sarcophagi in the Lime-kiln Nodules opened Beautiful coloring of the Remains Patrick Duff's Description New Genus of Moray- shire Ichthyolite described Form and size of the Nodules or Stone Coffins Illustration from Mrs. Marshall's Cements Forest of Darnaway The Hill of Berries Sluie Elgin Outliers of the Weald and the Oolite Descrip- tion of the Weald at Linksfleld Mr. Duff's Lepidotus minor Eccentric Types of Fish Scales Visit to the Sandstones of Scat-Craig Fine suit of Fossils at Scat-Craig True graveyard Bones, not mere Impressions Va- rieties of pattern The Diker's " Carved Flowers " Stagonolepis, a new Genus Termination of the Ramble. 212 CHAPTER XIII. SUPPLEMENTARY. Supplementary Isolated Reptile Remains in Eigg Small Isles revisited The Betsey again Storm bound Tacking Becalmed Medusa; caught and described Rain A Shoal of Porpoises Change of Weather The bed- ridden Woman The Poor Law Act for Scotland Geological Excursion Basaltic Columns Oolitic Beds Abundance of Organic Remains Hybo- dus Teeth Discovery of reptile Remains in situ Musical Sand of Laig re-examined Explanation suggested Sail for Isle Ornsay Anchored Clouds A Leak sprung Peril of the Betsey At work with Pump and Pails Safe in Harbor Return to Edinburgh 233 CONTENTS. PART II. RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. CHAPTER I. Embarkation A foundered Vessel Lateness of the Harvest dependent on the Geological character of the Soil A Granite Harvest and an Old Red Harvest Cottages of Redstone and of Granite Arable Soil of Scotland the result of a Geological Grinding Agency Locality of the Famine of 1846 Mr. Longmuir's Fossils Geology necessary to a Theologian Popnlarizers of Science when dangerous " Constitution of Man," and " Vestiges of Crea- tion " Atop of the Banff Coach A Geologist's Field Equipment The trespassing " Stirk " Silurian Schists inlaid with Old Red Bav of Gamrie how formed Gardenstoue Geological Free-masonry illustrated How to break an Ichthyolite Nodule An old Rhyme mended A raised Beach Fossil Shells Scotland under Water at the time of the Boulder-clays. 255 CHAPTER II. Character of the Rocks near Gardenstone A Defunct Father-lasher A Geo- logical Inference Village of Gardenstone The drunken Scot Garden- stone Inn Lord Gardenstone A Tempest threatened The Author's Ghost Story The Lady in Green Her Appearance and Tricks The Res- cued Children The murdered Peddler and his Pack Where the Green Dress came from Village of Macduff Peculiar Appearance of the Beach at the Mouth of the Deveron Dr. Emslie's Fossils Pterichthys quadratus Argillaceous Deposits of Blackpots Pipe-laying in Scotland Fossils of Blackpots Clay Mr. Longmuir's Description of them Blackpots Deposit a Re-formation of a Liasic Patch Period of its Formation. . . . 270 CONTEXTS. CHAPTER III. From Blackpots to Portsoy Character of the Coast Burn of Boyr.e Fever Phantoms Graphic Granite Maupertuis and the Eunic Inscription Explanation of the quo modo of Graphic Granite Portsoy Inn Serpentine Beds Portsoy Serpentine unrivalled for small ornaments Description of it Significance of the term serpentine Elizabeth Bond and her " Lctl'-r.-; ' From Portsoy to Cullen Attritive Power of the Ocean illustrated The Equinoctial From Cullen to Fochabers The Old Red again The old Pensioner Fochabers Mr. Joss, the learnod Mail-guard The F.diti r s. sort of Coach-guard On the Coach to Elgin Geology of Banflthl-.e Irregular paging of the Geologic Leaves Geologic Map of the County like Joseph's Coat Striking Illustration 291 CHAPTER IV. Yellow-hned Houses of Elgin Geology of the Country indicated by the coloring of the Stone Houses Fossils of Old Red north of the Grampians different from those of Old Red south Geologic Formations at Liukstield difficult to be understood Ganoid Scales of the Wealdcn Sudden Reaction, from complex to simple, in the Scales of Fishes Pore-covered Scales Extraor- dinary amount of Design exhibited in Ancient Ganoid Scales Holoptychius Scale illustrated by Cromwell's "fluted pot" Patrick Duff's Geological Collection Elgin Museum Fishes of the Ganges Armature of Ancient Fishes Compensatory Defences The Hermit-crab . Spines of the Pime- lodi Ride to Campbclton Theories of the formation of Ardersier and Fortrose Promontories Tradition of their construction by the Wizard, Michael Scott A Region of Legendary Lore 307 CHAPTER V. Rosemarkie and its Scaurs Kaes' Craig A Jackdaw Settlement " Rose- markie Kaes" and " Cromarty Cooties" '-The Danes," a Group of Ex- cavations At Home in Cromarty The Boulder-clay of Cromarty " begins to tell its story " One of its marked Scenic Peculiarities Hints to Land- scape Painters " Samuel's Well ' : A Chain of Bogs geologically accounted for Another Scenic Peculiarity " Ha-has of Nature's digging " The Author's earliest Field of Hard Labor Picturesque Cliff of Boulder-c!ay Scratchings on the Sandstone Invariable Characteristic of true Boulder- clay Scratchings on Pebbles in the line of the longer axis Illustration from the Boulder-clay of Banff. ... 324 C X T E N T S . XI CHAPTER VI. Organisms of the Boulder-clay not unequivocal First Impressions of the Boulder-clay Difficulty of accounting for its barrenness of Remains Sir Charles Lyell's reasoning A Fact to the contrary Human Skull dug from a Clay-bank The Author's Change of Belief respecting Organic Remains of the Boulder-clay Shells from the Clay at Wick Questions respecting them settled Conclusions confirmed by Mr. Dick's Discoveries at Thurso Sir John Sinclair's Discovery of Boulder-clay Shells in 1802 Comminution of the Shells illustrated Cyprina islandica Its Preservation in larger Pro- portions than those of other Shells accounted for Boulder-clays of Scot- land reformed during the existing Geological Epoch Scotland in the Period of the Boulder-clay " merely three detached groups of Islands " Evidence of the Subsidence of the Land in Scotland Confirmed by Rev. Mr. Cum- ming's conclusion High-lying Granite Boulders Marks of a succeeding elevatory Period Scandinavia now rising Autobiography of a Boulder desirable A Story of the Supernatural 336 CHAPTER VII. Relation of the deep red stone of Cromarty to the Ichthyolite Beds of the System Ruins of a Fossil-charged Bed Journey to Avoch Red Dye of the Boulder-clay distinct from the substance itself Variation of Colonn;; in the Boulder-clay Red Sandstone accounted for Hard-pan how formed A reformed Garden An ancient Battle-field Antiquity of Geologic and Human History compared Burn of Killein Observation made in boy- hood confirmed Fossil-nodules Fine Specimen of Coccosteus decipiens Blank strata of Old Red New View respecting the Rocks of Black Isle A Trip up Moray and Dingwall Friths Altered color of the Boulder-clay Up the Auldgrande River Scenery of the great Conglomerate Graphic Description Laidlaw's Boulder Vacciniitm myrtillus Profusion of Trav- elled Boulders The Boulder Clack Malloch Its zones of Annual and Vege- table Life. 355 CHAPTER VIII. Imaginary Autobiography of the Clach Malloch Boulder Its Creation Its Long Night of unsummed Centuries Laid open to light on a desert Island Surrounded by an Arctic Vegetation Undermined by the rising Sea Locked up and floated off on an Ice-field At rest on the Sea-bottom Another Night of uusummed Years The Boulder raif cd again above the XII CONTENTS. waves by the rising of the Land Beholds an Altered Country Tine For- ests and Mammals Another Period of Ages passes The Boulder apaiu floated off by an Iceberg Finally at rest on the Shore of Cromarty Bay Time and Occasion of naming it Strange Phenomena accounted for by Earth- quakes How the Boulder of Petty Bay was moved The Boulder of Auld- grande The old Highland Paupers The little Parsi Girl Her Letter to her Papa But one Human Nature on Earth Journey resumed Conon Burying Ground An aged Couple Gossip. 375 CHAPTER IX. The Great Conglomerate Its Undulatory and Rectilinear Members Knock Farril and its Vitrified Fort The old Highlanders an observant race The Vein of Silver Summit of Knock Farril Mode of accounting for the Luxuriance of Herbage in the ancient Scottish Fortalices The green Graves of Culloden Theories respecting the Vitrification of the Hill-forts Com- bined Theories of Williams and Mackenzie probably give the correct account The Author's Explanation Transformations of Fused Rocks Stratbpeffer The Spa Permanent Odoriferous Qualities of an ancient Sea-bottom con- verted into Rock Mineral Springs of the Spa Infusion of the powdered rock a substitute Belemnite Water The lively young Lady's Comments A befogged Country seen from a hill-top Beu-Wyvis Journey to Evantou A Geologist's Night-mare The Route Home Ruins of Craig house Incompatibility of Tea' and Ghosts End of the Tour. . . 393 CHAPTER X. Recovered Health Journey to the Orkneys Aboard the Steamer at Wick Mr. Bremner Masonry of the Harbor of Wick The greatest Blunders result from good Rules misapplied Mr. Bremner's Theory about sea-washed Masonry Singular Fracture of the Rock near Wick The Author's mode of accounting for it '> Simple but not obvious :) Thinking Mr. Bremuer's mode of making stone Erections under Water His exploits in raising foundered Vessels Aspect of the Orkneys The ungracious Schoolmaster In the Frith of Kirkwall Cathedral of St Magnus Appearance of Kirkwall Its " perished suppers" Its ancient Palaces Blunder of the Scotch Aristocracy The patronate Wedge Breaking Ground in Orkney Minute Gregarious Coccosteus True Position of the Coccostcus' Eyes Ruins of one of Cromwell's Forts Antiquities of Orkney The Cathedral Its Sculptures The Mysterious Cell Prospect from the Tower Its Chimes Ruins of Castle Patrick 414 CONTENTS. XIII CHAPTER XI. The Bishop's Palace at Orkney Haco the Norwegian Icelandic Chronicle respecting his Expedition to Scotland His Death Removal of his Re- mains to Norway Why Norwegian Invasion ceased Straw-plaiting The Lassies of Orkney Orkney Type of Countenance Celtic and Scandi- navian An accomplished Antiquary Old Manuscripts An old Tune book Manuscript Letter of Mary Queen of Scots Letters of General Monck The fearless Covenanter Cave of the Rebels "Why the tragedy of " Gustavus Vasa" was prohibited Quarry of Pickoquoy Its Fossil Shells Journey to Stromness Scenery Birth-place of Malcolm, the Poet His History One of his Poems His Brother a Free Church Minister New Scenery. 437 CHAPTER XII. Hills of Orkney Their Geologic Composition Scene of Scott's "Pirate" Stromness Geology of the District " Seeking beasts" Conglomerate in contact with Granite A palaeozoic Hudson's Bay Thickness of Conglom- erate of Orkney Oldest Vertebrate yet discovered in Orkney Its Size Figure of a characteristic plate of the Asterolepis Peculiarity of Old Red Fishes Length of the Asterolepis A rich Ichthyolite Bed Arrangement of the Layers Queries as to the Cause of it Minerals An abandoned Mine A lost Vessel Kelp for Iodine A dangerous Coast Incidents of Shipwreck Hospitality Stromness Museum Diplopterus mistaken for Dipterus Their Resemblances and Differences Visit to a remarkable Stack Paring the Soil for Fuel, and consequent Barrenness Description of the Stack Wave-formed Caves Height to which the Surf rises. . . 457 CHAPTER XIII. Detached Fossils Remains of the Pterichthys Terminal Bones of the Coccos- tens, etc., preserved Internal Skeleton of Coccosteus The shipwrecked Sailor in the Cave Bishop Grahame His Character, as drawn by Baillie His Successor Ruins of the Bishop's Country -house Sub-aerial Formation of Sandstone Formation near New Kaye Inference from such Formation Tour resumed Loch of Stennis Waters of the Loch fresh, brackish, and salt Vegetation varied accordingly Change produced in the Flounder by fresh water The Standing Stones, second only to Stonehenge Their Purpose Their Appearance and Situation Diameter of the Circle What the Antiquaries say of it Reference to it in the " Pirate " Dr. Hibbert's Account. 476 2 XIV CONTENTS. CHAPTER XIV. On Horseback A pared Moor Small Landholders Absorption of small holdings in England and Scotland Division of Land favorable to Civil and Religious Eights Favorable to social Elevation An inland Parish The Landsman and Lobster Wild Flowers of Orkney Law of Compensation illustrated by the Tobacco Plant Poverty tends to Productiveness Illus- trated in Ireland Profusion of Ichthyolites Orkney a land of Defunct Fishes Sandwick A Collection of Coccostean Flags A Quarry full of Heads of Dipteri The Bergil, or Striped Wrasse Its Resemblance to the Dipterus Poverty of the Flora of the Lower Old Red No true Coniferous Wood in the Orkney Flagstones Departure for Hoy The intelligent Boat- man Story of the Orkney Fisherman 492 CHAPTER XV. Hoy Unique Scenery The Dwarfie Stone of Hoy Sir Walter Scott's Ac- count of it Its Associations Inscription of Names George Buchanan's Consolation The mythic Carbuncle of the Hill of Hoy No Fossils at Hoy Striking Profile of Sir Walter Scott on the Hill of Hoy Sir Walter, and Shetland and Orkney Originals of two Characters in ' The Pirate " Bessie Millie Garden of Gow, the " Pirate " Childhood's Scene of Byron's " Torquil " The Author's Introduction to his Sister A German Visitor German and Scotch Sabbath-keeping habits contrasted Mr. Watt's Speci- mens of Fossil Remains The only new Organism found in Orkney Back to Kirkwall to Wick Tedder's Ode to Orkney. .... 507 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY. CHAPTER I. PREPARATION Departure Recent and Ancient Monstrosities A Free Church Yacht Down the Clyde Jura Prof. Walker's Experiment Whirlpool near Scarba Geological Character of the Western Highlands An Illus- tration Different Ages of Outer and Inner Hebrides Mt. Blanc and the Himalayas " mere upstarts" Esdaile Quarries Oban A Section through Conglomerate and Slate examined M'Dougal's Dog-stone Power of the Ocean to move Rocks Sound of Mull The Betsey The Minister's Cabin Village of Tobermory The " Florida," a Wreck of the Invincible Armada Geologic Exploration and Discovery At Anchor. THE pleasant month of July had again come round, and for full five weeks I was free. Chisels and hammers, and the bag for specimens, were taken from their corner in the dark closet, and packed up with half a stone weight of a fine soft Conservative Edinburgh newspaper, valuable for a quality of preserving old things entire. At noon on St. Swithin's day (Monday the 15th), I was speeding down the Clyde in the Toward Castle steamer, for Tobermory in Mull. In the previous season I had intended passing direct from the Oolitic deposits of the eastern coast of Scotland, to the Oolitic deposits of the Hebrides. But the weeks glided all too quickly away among the ichthyolites of Caithness and Cromai-ty, and the shells and lignites of Sutherland and Ross. My friend, too, the Rev. Mr. Swan- son, of Small Isles, on whose assistance I had reckoned, was 16 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; OR, in the middle of his troubles at the time, -with no longer a home in his parish, and not yet provided with one else- where ; 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- 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 Atlantic, lay at least beyond the reach of man's intolerance, and not beyond the protecting care of the Almighty. He had written me that he would run down his vessel from Small Isles to meet me at Tobermory, and in consequence of the arrangement I was now on my way to Mull. St. Swithin's day, so important in the calendar of our humbler meteorologists, had in this part of the country its alt ornate fits of sunshine and shower. We passed gaily along the green banks of the Clyde, with their rich flat fields glittering in moisture, and their lines of stately trees, that, as the light flashed out, threw their shadows over the grass. The river expanded into the estuary, the estuary into the open sea ; we left behind us beacon, and obelisk, and rock-perched castle ; " Merrily down we drop Below the church, below the tower, Below the light house top , " and, as the evening fell, we were ploughing the outer reaches of the Frith, with the ridgy table-land of Ayrshire stretching away, green, on the one side, and the serrated peaks of Arran rising dark and high on the other. At sun- rise next morning our boat lay, unloading a portion of her cargo, in one of the ports of Islay, and we could see the A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. IT Irish coast resting on the horizon to the south and west, like a long undulating bank of thin blue cloud ; with the island of Rachrin famous for the asylum it had afforded the Bruce when there was no home for him in Scotland, presenting in front its mass of darker azure. On and away ! We swept past Islay, with its low fertile hills of mica-schist and slate ; and Jura, with its flat dreary moors, and its far- seen gigantic paps, on one of which, in the last age, Professor Walker, of Edinburgh, set water a-boil with six degrees of heat less than he found necessary for the purpose on the plain below. The Professor describes the view from the summit, which includes in its wide circle at once the Isle of Skye and the Isle of Man, as singularly noble and imposing ; two such prospects more, he says, would bring under the eye the whole island of Great Britain, from the Pentland Frith to the English Channel. We sped past Jura. Then came the Gulf of Coryvrekin, with the bare mountain island of Scarba overlooking the fiei'ce, 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 else- where in the expanse of sea around us. And then came an opener space, studded with smaller islands, mere hill-tops rising out of the sea, with here and there insulated groups of pointed rocks, the skeletons of perished hills, amid which the tide chafed and fretted, as if laboring to complete on the broken remains their work of denudation and ruin. The disposition of land and water on this coast suggests the idea that the Western Highlands, from the line in the interior, whence the rivers descend to the Atlantic, with the islands beyond to the outer Hebrides, are all parts of one great mountainous plane, inclined slantways into the sea. First, the long withdrawing valleys of the main land, with their brown mossy streams, change their character as 1* 18 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR, they dip beneath the sea-level, and become salt-water lochs. The lines of hills that rise over them jut out as promonto- ries, till cut off by some transverse valley, lowered still more deeply into the brine, and that exists as a kyle, minch, or sound, swept twice every tide by powerful currents. The sea deepens as the plain slopes downward ; mountain- chains stand up out of the water as larger islands, single mountains as smaller ones, lower eminences as mere groups of pointed rocks ; till at length, as we pass outwards, all trace of the submerged land disappears, and the wide ocean stretches out and away its unfathomable depths. The model of some Alpine country raised in plaster on a flat board, and tilted slaiitways, 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 Enaliosauriaus of the Lias and the Oolite. Judging from its components, the Long Island, like the Lammermoors and the Grampians, may have been smiling to the sun when the Alps and the Himalaya Mountains lay buried in the abyss ; whereas tho greater part of Skye and Mull must have been, like these vast mountain-chains of A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 19 the Continent, an oozy sea-floor, over which the ligneous productions of the neighboring lands, washed down by the streams, grew heavy and sank, and on which the belemnite dropped its spindle and the ammonite its shell. The idea imparted of old Scotland to the geologist here, of Scot- land, proudly, aristocratically, supereminently old, for it can call Mont Blanc a mere upstart, and Dhawalageri, with its twenty-eight thousand feet of elevation, a heady fellow of yesterday, is not that of a land settling down by the head, like a foundering vessel, but of a land whose hills and islands, like its great aristocratic families, have arisen from, the level in very various ages, and under the operation of circumstances essentially diverse. We left behind us the islands of Lttnga, Luing, and Seil, and entered the narrow Sound of Kerrera, with its border of Old Red conglomerate resting on the clay-slate of the district. We had passed Esdaile near enough to see the workmen employed in the quarries of the island, so exten- sively known in commerce for their roofing slate, and sev- eral small vessels beside them, engaged in loading ; and now we had got a step higher in the geological scale, and could mark from the deck the peculiar character of the conglomerate, which, in cliffs washed by the sea, when the binding matrix is softer than the pebbles which it encloses, roughens, instead of being polished, by the action of the waves, and which, along the eastern side of the Sound here, seems as if formed of cannon-shot, of all sizes, embedded in cement. The Sound terminates in the beautiful bay of Oban, so quiet and sheltered, with its two island break- waters 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 pasture, its bosky dingles of shrub and tree, and, perched on the 20 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY J OR, seaward promontory, its old, time-eaten keep. "In one part of the harbor of Oban," says Dr. James Anderson, in his "Practical Treatise on Peat Moss," (1794), "where the depth of the sea is about twenty fathoms, the bottom is found to consist of quick peat, which affords no safe anchorage." I made inquiry at the captain of the steamer, regarding this submerged deposit, but he had never heard of it. There are, however, many such on the coasts of both Britain and Ireland. We staid at Oban for several hours, waiting the arrival of the Fort "William steamer ; and, taking out hammer and chisel from my bag, I stepped ashore to question my ancient acquaintance, the Old Red conglomerate, and was fortunate enough to meet on the pier-head, as I landed, one of the best of companions for assisting in such work, Mr. Colin Elder, of Isle Ornsay, the gentleman who had so kindly furnished my friend Mr. Swanson with an asylum for his family, when there was no longer a home for them in Small Isles. " You are much in luck," he said, after our first greeting : " one of the villagers, in improving his garden, has just made a cut for some fifteen or twenty yards along the face of the precipice behind the village, and laid open the line of junction between the conglomerate and the clay-slate. Let us go and see it." I found several things worthy of notice in the chance section to which I was thus introduced. The conglomerate lies uncomformably along the edges of the slate strata, which present under it an appearance exactly similar to that which they exhibit under the rolled stones and shingle of the neighboring shore, where we find them laid bare beside the harbor, for several hundred yards. And, mixed with the pebbles of various character and origin of which the conglomerate is mainly composed, we see detached masses of the slate, that still exhibit on their edges the A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 21 identical lines of fracture characteristic of the rock, which they received, when torn from the mass below, myriads of ages before. In the incalculably remote period in which the conglomerate base of the Old Red Sandstone was formed, the clay-slate of this district had been exactly the same sort of rock that it is now. Some long anterior con- vulsion 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 quarricrs to open them, or houses to roof over ; it was in every respect as ancient a looking stone then as in the present late age of the world. There are no sermons that seem stranger or more impressive to one who has acquired just a little of the language in which they are preached, than those which, according to the poet, are to be found in stones ; a bit of fractured slate, embedded among a mass of rounded pebbles, proves voluble with ideas of a kind almost too large for the mind of man to grasp. The eternity that hath passed is an ocean without a further shore, and a finite conception may in vain attempt to span it over. But from the beach, strewed with wrecks, on which we stand to contemplate it, we see far out towards the cloudy horizon, many a dim islet and many a pinnacled rock, the sepulchres of successive eras, the monuments of consecutive creations: the entire prospect is studded over with these landmarks of a hoar antiquity, which, measuring out space from space, constitute the vast whole a province of time ; nor can the eye reach to the open, shoreless infinitude beyond, in which only God existed; and, as in a sea-scene in nature, in which headland stretches dim and blue beyond headland, and islet beyond islet, the distance seems not lessened, but increased, by the crowded 22 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR, objects -we borrow a larger, not a smaller idea of the distant eternity, from the vastness of the measured periods that occur between. Over the lower bed of conglomerate, which here, as on the east coast, is of great thickness, we find a bed of gray stratified clay, containing a few calcareo-argillaceous nod- ules. The conglomerate cliffs to the north of the village present appearances highly interesting to the geologist. Rising in a long wall within the pleasure-grounds of Dunolly castle, we find them wooded atop and at the base; while immediately at their feet there stretches out a grassy lawn, traversed by the road from the village to the castle, which sinks with a gradual slope into the existing sea-beach, but which ages ago must have been a sea-beach itself. "We see the bases of the precipices hollowed and worn, with all their rents and crevices widened into caves ; and mark, at a picturesque angle of the rock, what must have been once an insulated sea-stack, some thirty or forty feet in height, standing up from amid the rank grass, as at one time it stood up from amid the waves. Tufts of fern and sprays of ivy bristle from its sides, once roughened by the serrated kelp-weed and the tangle. The Highlanders call it M'Dougal's Dog-stone, and say that the old chief- tains 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 chase on their own behalf. It owes its existence as a stack for the precipice in which it was once included has receded from around it for yards to an immense boulder in its base by far the largest stone I ever saw in an Old Red conglomerate. The mass is of a rudely rhomboidal form, and measures nearly twelve feet in the line of its largest diagonal. A second huge pebble in the same A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 23 detached spire measures four feet by about three. Both have their edges much rounded, as if, ere their deposition in the conglomerate, they had been long exposed to the wear of the sea ; and both are composed of an earthy amygdaloidal trap. I have stated elsewhere [" Old Red Sandstone," Chaper XII.], that I had scarce ever seen a stone in the Old Red conglomerate which I could not raise from the ground ; and ere I said so I had examined no in- considerable extent of this deposit, chiefly, however, along the eastern coast of Scotland, where its larger pebbles rarely exceed two hundred weight. How account for the occurrence of pebbles of so gigantic a size here ? We can but guess at a solution, and that very vaguely. The islands of Mull and Kerrera form, in the present state of things, inner and outer breakwaters between what is now the coast of Oban and the waves of the Atlantic ; but Mull, in the times of even the Oolite, must have existed as a mere sea- bottom ; and Kerrera, composed mainly of trap, which has brought with it to the surface patches of the conglomerate, must, when the conglomerate was in forming, have been a mere sea-bottom also. Is it not possible, that when the breakwaters tcere not, the Atlantic teas, 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. Anderson of Inverness, in describing the storms of Orkney, " are washed about even on the tops of cliffs, which are between sixty and a hundred feet above the surface of the sea, when smooth ; and detached masses of rock, of an enormous size, are well known to have been carried a considerable distance between low and high-water mark." "A little way from the Brough," says Dr. Patrick 24 THE CRUISE OP THE BETSEY J OB, ISTeill, 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 granitic, clay-slate, and quartz rocks. The Plutonic agencies must have been active in the locality for periods amazingly protracted ; and many of the masses protruded at a very early time seem identical in their composition with rocks of the trap family, which in other parts of the country we find referred to much later eras. There occur in this deposit rolled pebbles of a basalt, which in the neighborhood of Edinburgh would be deemed considerably more modern than the times of the Mountain Limestone, and in the Isle of Skye, considerably more modern than the times of the Oolite. The 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 Dunstaffnage ; and enough left us as we entered the Sound, to show, and barely show, the Lady Rock, famous in tradition, and made classic by the pen of Campbell, raising its black back amid the tides, like a A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 25 belated porpoise. And then twilight deepened into night, and we went snorting through the Strait with a stream of green light curling off from either bow in the calm, towards the high dim land, that seemed standing up on both sides like tall hedges over a green lane. "We entered the Bay of Tobermory about midnight, and cast anchor amid a group of little vessels. An exceedingly small boat shot out from the side of a yacht of rather dim- inutive proportions, but tautly rigged for her size, and bearing an outrigger astern. The water this evening was full of phosphoric matter, and it gleamed and sparkled around the little boat like a northern aurora around a dark cloudlet. There was^j ust light enough to show that the oars were plied by a sailor-like man in a Guernsey frock, and that another sailor-like man, the skipper, mayhap, attired in a cap and pea-jacket, stood in the stern. The man in the Guernsey frock was John Stewart, sole mate and half the crew of the Free Church yacht Betsey ; and the skipper-like man in the pea-jacket was my friend the minister of the Protestants of Small Isles. In five min- utes more I was sitting with Mr. Elder beside the little iron stove in the cabin of the Betsey ; and the minister, divested of his cap and jacket, but still looking the verita- ble skipper to admiration, was busied in making us a rather late tea. The cabin, my home for the greater part of the three following weeks, and that of my friend for the greater part of the previous twelvemonth, I found to be an apartment about twice the size of a common bed, and just lofty enough under the 'beams to permit a man of five feet eleven to stand erect in his night-cap. A large table, lashed to the floor, furnished with tiers of drawers of all sorts and sizes, and bearing a writing desk bound to it a-top, occupied the middle space, leaving just room enough 3 26 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; OR, for a person to pass between its edges and the narrow coffin-like beds in the sides, and space enough at its fore- end for two seats in front of the stove. A jealously barred skylight opened above; and there depended from it this evening a close lantern-looking lamp, sufficiently valua- ble, 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 la?est edition of "The Coaster's Sailing Directions," in another ; while in an adjoin- ing 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 him- self to the low-roofed passage, thrust in a plate of fresh herrings, splendidly toasted, to give substantiality and relish to our tea. The little rude forecastle, a considerably smaller apartment than the cabin, was all a-glow with the bright fire in the coppers, itself invisible ; we could see the chain-cable dangling from the hatchway to the floor, and John Stewart's companion, a powerful-looking, handsome young man, with broad bare breast, and in his shirt-sleeves, squatted full in front of the blaze, like the household goblin described by Milton, or the " Christmas Present " of Dickens. Mr. Elder left us for the steamer, in which he prosecuted his voyage next morning to Skye ; and we A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 27 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 bed- side, when I awoke, a fragment of rock which he had brought from the shore, charged with Liasic fossils ; and a note he had written, to say that the deposit to which it belonged occurred in the trap immediately above the village-mill ; and further, to call my attention to a house near the middle of the village, built of a mouldering red sandstone, which had been found in situ in digging the foundations. I had but little time for the work of explor- ation 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 trans- ported from the centre of some stately city entire and at once, sweeps round its inner inflection, like a bent bow j and an amphitheatre of mingled rock and wood rises behind. With all its beauty, however, there hangs about the village an air of melancholy. Like some of the other western coast villages, it seems not to have grown, piece- meal, as a village ought, but to have been made wholesale, as Frankenstein made his man ; and to be ever asking, and never more incessantly than when it is at its quietest, why it should have been made at all ? The remains of the Florida, a gallant Spanish ship, lie off it shores, a wreck of the Invincible Armada, " deep whelmed," according to Thompson, " What time, Snatched sudden by the vengeful blast, The scattered vessels drove, and on blind shelve, 28 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; OR, And pointed rock that marks th' indented shore, Eelentless 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 organ- isms are numerous ; and, when we dig into the bank beyond the reach of the weathering influences, we find them delicately preserved, though after a fashion that renders difficult their safe removal. Originally the bed must have existed as a brown argillaceous mud, somewhat resembling that which forms in the course of years, under a scalp of muscles ; and it has hardened into a more eilt-like clay, in which the fossils occur, not as petrifactions, A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 29 but as shells in a state of decay, except in some rare cases, in which a calcareous nodule has formed within or around them. Viewed in the group, they seem of an intermediate character, between the shells of the Lias and the Oolite. One of the first fossils I disinterred was the Gryphaea obliquata, a shell characteristic of the Liasic formation ; and the fossil immediately after, the Pholadomy aequalis, a shell of the Oolitic one. There occurs in great numbers a species of small Pecten, some of the specimens scarce larger than a herring scale ; a minute Ostrea, a sulcated Terebratula, an Isocardia, a Pullastra, and groups of broken serpulae in vast abundance. The deposit has also its three species of Ammonite, existing as mere impressions in the clay; and at least two species of Belemnite, one of the two somewhat resembling the Belemnites abbrevia- tus, 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 Snndstone 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 resem- bles the New Red Sandstone of England and Dumfries- shire, 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 gal- lantly out the Sound, in the face of an intermittent baffling wind and a heavy swell from the sea. I would fain have approached nearer the precipices of Ardnamur- chan, 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 3* 30 THE CKUISE OF THE BETSEY. Betsey, on one of the most formidable lee snores in Scot- land, in winds so light and variable, and with the swell so high. We could hear the deep roar of the surf for miles, and see its undulating strip of white flickering under stack and cliff. The scenery here seems rich in legendary asso- ciation. 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 Ardnamui-chan, 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 ofling; and then, running along the Isle of Eigg, with its colossal Scuir rising between us and the sky, as if it were a piece of Babylonian wall, or of the great wall of China, only vastly larger, set down on the ridge of a mountain, we entered the channel which separates the island from one of its dependencies, Eilean Chaisteil, and cast anchor in the tideway, about fifty yards from the rocks. We were now at home, the only home which the proprietor of the island permits to the islanders' min- ister; and, after getting warm and comfortable over the stove and a cup of tea, we did what all sensible men do in their own homes when the night wears late, got into bed. CHAPTER II. The Minister's Larder No Harbor Eigg Shoes Tormentilla erecta For the Witness' Sake Eilean Chaisteil Appearance of Eigg Chapel of St. Donan Shell-sand Origin of Secondary Calcareous Hock suggested Exploration of Eigg Pitchstone Veins A Bone Cave Massacre at Eigg Grouping of Human Bones in the Cave Eelics The Horse's Tooth A Copper Sewing Needle Teeth found Man a worse Animal than his Teeth show him to have been designed for Story of the Massacre Another Ver- sion Scuir of Eigg The Scuir a Giant's Causeway Character of the Columns Remains of a Prostrate Forest. WE had rich tea this morning. The minister was among his people ; and our first evidence of the fact came in the agreeable form of three bottles of fine fresh cream from the shore. Then followed an ample baking of nice oaten cakes. The material out of which the cakes were manufactured had been sent from the minister's store aboard, for oatmeal in Eigg is rather a scarce commodity in the middle of July ; but they had borrowed a crispness and flavor from the island, that the meal, left to its own resources, could scarcely have communicated,; and the golden-colored cylinder of fresh butter which accompanied them was all the island's own. There was an ample sup- ply of eggs too, as one not quite a conjuror might have expected from a country bearing such a name, eggs with the milk in them ; and, with cream, butter, oaten cakes, eggs, and tea, all of the best, and with sharp-set sea-air appetites to boot, we fared sumptuously. There is properly no harbor in the island. We lay in a narrow channel, through which, twice every twenty-four hours, the tides sweep powerfully in one direction, and then as powerfully 32 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; OR, in the direction opposite ; and our anchors had a trick of getting foul, and canting stock downwards in the loose sand, which, with pointed rocks all around us, over which the current ran races, seemed a very shrewd sort of trick indeed. But a kedge and halser, stretched thwartwise to a neighboring crag, and jammed fast in a crevice, served in moderate weather to keep us tolerably right. In the severer seasons, however, the kedge is found inadequate, and the minister has to hoist sail and make out for the open sea, as if served with a sudden summons of eject- ment. Among the various things brought aboard this morning, there was a pair of island shoes for the minister's cabin use, that struck my fancy not a little. They were all around of a deep madder red color, soles, welts and upprs ; and, though somewhat resembling in form the little yawl of the Betsey, were sewed not unskilfully with thongs ; and their peculiar style of tie seemed of a kind suited to furnish with new idea a fashionable shoemaker of the metropolis. They were altogether the production of Eigg, from the skin out of which they had been cut, with the lime that had prepared it for the tan, and the root by which the tan had been furnished, down to the last on which they had been moulded, and the artisan that had cast them off, a pair of finished shoes. There are few trees, and, of course, no bark to spare, in the island ; but the islanders find a substitute in the astringent lobiferous root of the Tormentilla erecta, which they dig out for the purpose among the heath, at no inconsiderable expense of time and trouble. I was informed by John Stewart, an adept in all the multifarious arts of the island, from the tanning of leather and the tilling of land, to the building of a house or the working of a ship, that the infusion of root had to be thrice changed for every skin, and that it A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 33 took a man nearly a day to gather roots enough for a single infusion. I was further informed that it was not unusual for the owner of a skin to give it to some neighbor to tan, and that, the process finished, it was divided equally between them, the time and trouble bestowed on it by the one being deemed equivalent to the property held in it by the other. I wished to call a pair of these primitive-looking shoes my own, and no sooner was the wish expressed, than straightway one islander furnished me with leather, and another set to work upon the shoes. When I came to speak of remuneration, however, the islanders shook their heads. " No, no, not from the Witness : there are not many that take our part, and the Witness does." I hold the shoes, therefore, as my first retainer, determined, on all occasions of just quarrel, to make common cause with the poor islanders. The view from the anchoring ground presents some very striking features. Between us and the sea lies Eilean Chaisteil, a rocky trap islet, about half a mile hi length by a few hundred yards in breadth; poor in pastures, but peculiarly rich in sea-weed, of which John Stewart used, he informed me, to make finer kelp, ere the trade was put down by act of Parliament, than could be made elsewhere in Eigg. This islet bore, in the remote past, its rude fort or dun, long since sunk into a few grassy mounds ; and hence its name. On the landward side rises the island of Eigg proper, resembling in outline two wedges, placed point to point on a board. The centre is occupied by a deep angular gap, from which the ground slopes upward on both sides, till, attaining its extreme height at the opposite ends of the island, it drops suddenly on the sea. In the northern rising ground the wedge-like outline is complete ; in the southern one it is somewhat modified by the gigantic Scuir, which rises direct on the apex of the height, i. e., the 84 THE CEUISE OF THE BETSEY J OR, thick part of the wedge ; and which, seen bows-on from this point of view, resembles some vast donjon keep, taller, from base to summit, by about a hundred feet, than the dome of St. Paul's. The upper slopes of the island are brown and moory, and present little on which the eye may rest, save a few trap terraces, with rudely columnar fronts ; its middle space is mottled with patches of green, and studded with dingy cottages, each of which this morning, just a little before the breakfast hour, had its own blue cloudlet of smoke diffused ai-ound it; while along the beach, patches of level sand, alternated with tracts of green bank, or both, give place to stately ranges of basaltic columns, or dingy groups of detached rocks. Immediately in front of the central hollow, as if skilfully introduced, to relieve the tamest part of the prospect, a noble Avail 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 directly opposite, it presented almost the appearance of pulverized chalk. A stronger contrast to the dingy trap-rocks around which it lies could scarce be produced, had contrast for effect's sake been the object. On landing on the exposed shelf to which we had fastened our halser, I found the origin of the sand interestingly exhibited. The hollows of the rock, a rough trachyte, with a surface like that of a steel rasp, were filled with handfuls of broken shells thrown up by the surf from the sea-banks beyond : fragments of echini, bits of the valves of razor-fish, the A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 35 island cyprina, mactridge, buccinidse, and fractured peri- winkles, lay heaped together in vast abundance. In hollow after hollow, as I passed shorewards, I found the fragments more and more comminuted, just as, in passing along the successive vats of a paper-mill, one finds the linen rags more and more disintegrated by the cylinders ; and imme- diately beyond the inner edge of the shelf, which is of con- siderable extent, lies the flat bay, the ultimate recipient of the whole, filled to the depth of several feet, and to the extent of several hundred yards, with a pure shell-sand, the greater part of which had been thus washed ashore in handfuls, and ground down by the blended agency of the trachyte and the surf. Once formed, however, in this way it began to receive accessions from the exuviaa of animals that love such localities, the deep arenaceous bed and soft sand-beach ; and these now form no inconsiderable pro- portion 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 what- ever that they were living amid the debris of a charnel house. Such has been the origin here of a bed of shell-sand, consisting of many thousand tons, and of which at least eighty per cent, was once associated with animal life. And such, I doubt not, is the history of many a calcareous rock in the later secondary formations. There are strata, not a few, of the Cretaceous and Oolitic groups, that would be found could we but trace their beginnings with a cer- tainty and clearness equal to that with which we can unravel the story of this deposit to be, like it, elabora- tions 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 36 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR, blue open sea. "We rowed southwards in our little boat, through the channel of Eilean Chaisteil, along the trap- rocks of the island, and landed under the two pitchstone veins of Eigg, so generally known among mineralogists, and of which specimens may be found in so many cabinets. They occur in an earthy, greenish-black amygdaloid, which forms a range of sea-cliffs varying in height from thirty to fifty feet, and that, from their sad hue and dull fracture, seem to absorb the light ; while the veins themselves, bright and glistening, glitter in the sun, as if they were streams of water traversing the face of the rock. The first impression they imparted, in viewing them from the boat, was, that the inclosing mass was a pitch caldron, rather of the roughest and largest, and much begrimmed by soot, that had cracked to the heat, and that the fluid pitch was forcing its way outwards through the rents. The veins expand and contract, here diminishing to a strip a few inches across, there widening into a comparatively broad belt, some two or three feet over ; and, as well described by M'Culloch, we find the inclosed pitchstone changing in color, and assuming a lighter or darker hue, as it nears the edge or recedes from it. In the centre it is of a dull olive green, passing gradually into blue, which in turn deepens into black ; and it is exactly at the point of contact with the earthy amygdaloid that the black is most intense, and the fracture of the stone glassiest and brightest. I was lucky enough to detach a specimen, which, though scarce four inches across, exhibits the three colors characteristic of the vein, its bar of olive green on the one side, of intense black on the other, and of blue, like that of imper- fectly fused bottle-glass, in the centre. This curious rock, so neai-ly akin in composition and appearance to obsidian, a mineral which, in its dense form, closely resembles the coarse dark-colored glass of which common bottles are A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. u7 made, and which, in its lighter form, exists as pumice, con- stitutes 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 Honorable George Knox, of Dublin," says Mr. Robert Allan, in his valuable mineralogical work, " that the pitchstone of Newry, on being exposed to a high tem- perature, loses its bitumen and water, and is converted into a light substance in every respect resembling pumice." But of pumice in connection with the pitchstones of Eigg, more anon. Leaving our boat to return to the Betsey at John Stewart's leisure, and taking with us his companion, to assist us in carrying such specimens as we might procure, we passed westwards for a few hundred yards under the crags, and came abreast of a dark angular opening at the base of the precipice, scarce two feet in height, and in front of which there lies a little sluggish, ankle-deep pool, half mud, half water, and matted over with grass and rushes. Along the mural face of the rock of earthy amygdaloid there runs a nearly vertical line, which in one of the strati- fied rocks one might perhaps term the line of a fault, but which in a trap rock may merely indicate where two semi- molten masses had pressed against each other without uniting just as currents of cooling lead, poured by the plumber from the opposite end of a groove, sometimes meet and press together, so as to make a close, polished joint, without running into one piece. The little angular opening forms the lower termination of the line, which, hollowing inwards, recedes near the bottom into a shallow cave, roughened with tufts of fern and bunches of long silky grass, here and there enlivened by the delicate flowers of 4 88 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; OR, the lesser rock-geranium. A shower of drops patters from above among the weeds and rushes of the little pool. My friend the minister stopped short. " There," he said, pointing to the hollow, " you will find such a bone cave as you never saw before. Within that opening there lie the remains of an entire race, palpably destroyed, as geologists in so many other cases are content merely to imagine, by one great catastrophe. That is the famous cave of Frances ( Uamh Fraingh), in which the whole people of Eigg were smoked to death by the M'Leods." We struck a light, and, worming ourselves through the narrow entrance, gained the interior, a true rock gallery, vastly more roomy and lofty than one could have antici- pated from the mean vestibule placed in front of it. Its extreme length we found to be two hundred and sixty feet ; its extreme breadth twenty-seven feet ; its height, where the roof rises highest, from eighteen to twenty feet. The cave seems to have owed its origin to two distinct causes. The trap-rocks on each side of the vertical fault-like crev- ice which separates them are greatly decomposed, as if by the moisture percolating from above ; and directly in the line of the crevice must the surf have charged, wave after wave, for ages ere the last upheaval of the land. When the Dog-stone at Dunolly existed as a sea-stack, skirted with alga?, the breakers on this shore mnst have dashed every tide through the narrow opening of the cavern, and scooped out by handfuls the decomposing trap within. The process of decomposition, and consequent enlargement, is still going on inside, but there is no longer an agent to sweep away the disintegrated fragments. Where the roof rises highest, the floor is blocked up with accumulations of bulky decaying masses, that have dropped from above ; and it is covered over its entire area by a stratum of earthy rubbish, which has fallen from the sides and ceiling in such A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 39 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 uncer- tain twilight glimmers gray at the entrance, from the narrow vestibule ; but all within, for full two hundred feet, is black as with Egyptian darkness. As Ave passed onward with our one feeble light, along the dark mouldering walls and roof, which absorbed every straggling ray that reached them, and over the dingy floor, ropy and damp, the place called to recollection that hall in Roman story, hung and carpeted with black, into which Domitian once thrust his senate, in a frolic, to read their own names on the coffin-lids placed against the wall. The darkness seemed to press upon us from every side, as if it were a dense jetty fluid, out of which our light had scooped a pailful or two, and that was rushing in to supply the vacuum ; and the only objects we saw distinctly visible were each other's heads and faces, and the lighter parts of our dress. The floor, for about a hundred feet inwards from the nar- row vestibule, resembles that of a charnel-house. At almost every step we came upon heaps of human bones grouped together, as the Psalmist so graphically describes, " as when one cutteth and cleaveth wood upon the earth." They are of a brownish, earthy hue, here and there tinged with green ; the skulls, with the exception of a few broken fragments, have disappeared ; for travellers in the Hebrides have of late years been numerous and curious ; and many a museum, that at Abbotsford among the rest, exhibits, in a grinning skull, its memorial of the Massacre at Eigg. We find, too, further marks of visitors in the single bones separated from the heaps and scattered over the area ; but enough still remains to show, in the general disposition of the remains, that the hapless islanders died under the walls 40 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; OR, 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 pellet of gray hair. From under another heap he disinterred the handle-stave of a child's wooden pon-inger (bicker), perforated by a hole still bearing the mark of the cord that had hung it to the wall ; and beside the stave lay a few of the larger, less destructible bones of the child, with what for a time puzzled us both not a little. one of the grinders of a horse. Certain it was, no horse could have got there to have dropped a tooth, a foal of a week old could not have pressed itself through the open- ing ; and how the single grinder, evidently no recent intro- duction into the cave, could have got mixed up in the straw with the human bones, seemed an enigma somewhat of the * O class to which the reel in the bottle belongs. I found in Edinburgh an unexpected commentator on the mystery, in the person of my little boy, an experimental philosopher in his second year. I had spread out on the floor the curi- osities of Eigg, among the rest, the relics of the cave, including the pieces of earthern jar, and the fragment of A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 41 the porringer ; but the horse's tooth seemed to be the only real curiosity among them in the eyes of little Bill. Pie laid instant hold of it ; and, appropriating it as a toy, con- tinued 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 mouldei'ing remains Mr. Swanson found it. The little pellet of gray hair spoke of feeble old age involved in this wholesale massacre with the vigorous man- hood of the island ; and here was a story of unsuspecting infancy amusing itself on the eve of destruction with its toys. Alas, for man ! " Should not I spare Nineveh, that great city," said God to the angry prophet, " wherein are more than six score thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left ? " God's image must have been sadly defaced in the murderers of the poor inoffensive children of Eigg, ere they could have heard their feeble wailings, raised, no doubt, when the stifling atmosphere within began first to thicken, and yet ruthlessly persist in their work of indiscriminate destruction. Various curious things have from time to time been picked up from under the bones. An islander found among them, shortly before our visit, a sewing needle of copper, little more than an inch in length ; fragments of Eigg shoes, of the kind still made in the island, are of comparatively common occurrence; and Mr. James Wilson relates, in the singularly graphic and powerful description of Uamh Fraingh, which occurs in his " Voyage round the Coasts of Scotland" (1841), that a sailor, when he was there, disin- terred, by turning up a flat stone, a " buck-tooth " and a piece of money, the latter a rusty copper coin, apparently of the times of Mary of Scotland. I also found a few teeth ; they were sticking fast in a fragment of jaw ; and, taking it for granted, as I suppose I may, that the dentology of the murderous M'Leods outside the cave must have very 4* 42 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; OR, much resembled that of the murdered M'Donalds within, very harmless looking teeth they were for being those of an animal so maliciously mischievous as man. I have found in the Old Red Sandstone the strong-based tusks of the semi- reptile Holoptychius ; I have chiselled out of the limestone of the Coai Measures the sharp, dagger-like incisors of the Megalichthys ; I have picked up in the Lias and Oolite the cruel spikes of the Crocodile and the Ichthyosaurus; I have seen the trenchant, saw-edged teeth of gigantic Cestracions and Squalidae that had been disinterred from the Chalk and the London Clay ; and I have felt, as I examined them, that there could be no possibility of mistake regarding the nature of the creatures to which they had belonged ; they were teeth made for hacking, tearing, mangling, for amputating limbs at a bite, and laying open bulky bodies with a crunch ; but I could find no such evidence in the human jaw, with its three inoffensive looking grinders, that the animal it had belonged to, far more ruthless and cruel than reptile-fish, crocodiles, or sharks, was of such a nature that it could destroy creatures of even its own kind by hundreds at a time, when not in the least incited by hunger, and with no ultimate intention of eating them. Man must surely have become an immensely worse animal than his teeth show him to have been designed for ; his teeth give no real evidence regarding his real character. "Who, for instance, could gather from the dentology of the M'Leods the passage in their history to which the cave of Frances bears evidence ? "We quitted the cave, with its stagnant damp atmosphere and its mouldy unwholesome smells, to breathe the fresh sea-air on the beach without. Its story, as recorded by Sir Walter in his " Tales of a Grandfather," and by Mr. "Wilson, in his "Voyage," must be familiar to the reader; and I learned from my friend, versant in all the various A SUMMER EAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. -13 island traditions regarding it, that the less I inquired into its history on the spot, the more was I likely to feel satisfied that I knew something about it. There seem to have been no chroniclers, in this part of the Hebrides, in the rude age of the unglazed pipkin and the copper needle ; and many years seem to have elapsed ere the story of their hapless possessors was committed to writing; and so we find it existing in various and somewhat conflicting edi- tions. " Some hundred years ago," says Mr. Wilson, " a few of the M'Leods landed in Eigg from Skye, where, having greatly misconducted themselves, the Eiggites strapped them to their own boats, which they sent adrift into the ocean. They were, however, rescued by some clansmen ; and, soon after, a strong body of the M'Leods set sail from Skye, to revenge themselves on Eigg. The natives of the latter island feeling they were not of suffi- cient force to offer resistance, went and hid themselves (men, women, and children) in this secret care, which is narrow, but of great subterranean length, with an exceed- ingly small entrance. It opens from the broken face of a steep bank along the shore ; and, as the whole coast is cavernous, their particular retreat would have been sought for in vain by strangers. So the Skye-men, finding the island uninhabited, presumed the natives had fled, and satisfied their revengeful feelings by ransacking and pillaging the empty houses. Probably the movables were of no great value. They then took their departure and left the island, when the sight of a solitary human being among the cliffs awakened their suspicion, and induced them to return. Unfortunately a slight sprinkling of snow had fallen, and the footsteps of an individual were traced to the mouth of the cave. Not having been there ourselves at the period alluded to, we cannot speak with certainty as to the nature of the parley which ensued, or the terms 44 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY | OR, offered by either party ; but we know that those were not the days of protocols. The ultimatum was unsatisfactory to the Skye-men, who immediately proceeded to ' adjust the preliminaries' in their own way, which adjustment consisted in carrying a vast collection of heather, ferns, and other combustibles, and making a huge fire just in the very entrance of the Uamh Fraingh, which they kept up for a length of time ; and thus, by ' one fell smoke,' they smothered the entire population of the island." Such is Mr. Wilson's version of the story, which, in all its leading circumstances, agrees with that of Sir Walter. o * o According, however, to at least one of the Eigg versions, it was the M'Leod himself who had landed on the island, driven there by a storm. The islanders, at feud with the M'Leod's at the time, inhospitably rose upon him, as he bivouacked on the shores of the Bay of Laig; and in a fray, in which his party had the worse, his back was broken, and he was forced off half dead to sea. Several months after, on his partial recovery, he returned, crook- backed and infirm, to wreak his vengeance on the inhab- itants, all of whom, warned of his coming by the array of his galleys in the offing, hid themselves in the cave, in which, however, they were ultimately betrayed as narrated by Sir Walter and Mr. Wilson by the track of some footpaths in a sprinkling of snow; and the implacable chieftain, giving orders on the discovery, to unroof the houses in the neighborhood, raised high a pile of rafters against the opening, and set it on fire. And there he stood in front of the blaze, hump-backed and glim, till the wild hollow ciy from the rock within had sunk into silence, and there lived not a single islander of Eigg. man, woman, or child. The fact that their remains should have been left to moulder in the cave is proof enough, of itself, that none survived to bury the A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 45 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, men- tioned by Mr. Wilson, points at a period at least not much earlier ; but the exact time of its occurrence is so uncer- tain, that a Roman Catholic priest of the Hebrides, in lately showing his people what a very bad thing Protest- antism is, instanced, as a specimen of its average morality, the affair of the cave. The Protestant M'Leods of Skye, he said, full of hatred in their hearts, had murdered, wholesale, their wretched brethren, the Protestant M'Don- alds of Eigg, and sent them oif to perdition before their time. Quitting the beach, we ascended the breezy hill-side on our way to the Scuir, an object so often and so well described, that it might be perhaps prudent, instead of attempting one description more, to present the reader with some of the already existing ones. " The Scuir of Eigg," says Professor Jamieson, in his 'Mineralogy of the Western Islands,' " is perfectly mural, and extends for upwards of a mile and a half, and rises to a height of several hundred feet. It is entirely columnar, and the columns rise in successive ranges, until they reach the summit, where, from their great height, they appear, when viewed from below, diminutive. Staffa is an object of the 46 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; OR, 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 extraor- dinary object is considerable," says M'Culloch, dashing off his sketch with a still bolder hand ; " yet its powerful effect arises rather from its peculiar form, and the com- manding elevation which it occupies, than from its positive altitude. Viewed in one direction, it presents a long irregular wall, crowning the summit of the highest hill, while in the other it resembles a huge tower. Thus it forms no natural combination of outline with the surround- ing land, and hence acquires that independence in the general landscape which increases its apparent magnitude, and produces that imposing effect which it displays. From the peculiar position of the Scuir, it must also inevitably be viewed from a low station. Hence it everywhere towers high above the spectator ; while, like other objects on the mountain outline, its apparent dimensions are mag- nified, and its dark mass defined on the sky, so as to produce all the additional effects arising from strong oppositions of light and shadow. The height of this rock is sufficient in this stormy country frequently to arrest the passage of the clouds, so as to be further productive of the most brilliant effects in landscape. Often they may be seen hovering on its summit, and adding ideal dimensions to the lofty face, or, when it is viewed on the extremity, conveying the impression of a tower, the height of which is such as to lie in the regions of the clouds. Occasionally they sweep along the base, leaving its huge and black mass involved in additional gloom, and resembling the castle of some Arabian enchanter, built on the clouds, and suspended A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 47 in air." It might be perhaps deemed somewhat invidious to deal with pictures such as these in the style tho connois- seur in the "Vicar of Wakefield" dealt with the old paint- ing, when, seizing a brush, he daubed it over with brown varnish, and then asked the spectators whether he had not greatly improved the tone of the coloring. And yet it is just possible, that in the case of at least M'Culloch's pic- ture, the brown varnish might do no manner of harm. But a homelier sketch, traced out on almost the same leading lines, with just a little less of the aerial in it, may have nearly the same subduing effect; I have, besides, a few curious touches to lay in, which seem hitherto to have escaped observation and the pencil ; and in these several circumstances must lie my apology for adding one sketch more to the sketches existing already. The Scuir of Eigg, then, is a veritable Giant's Causeway, like that on the coast of Antrim, taken and magnified rather more than twenty times in height, and some five or six times in breadth, and then placed on the ridge of a hill nearly nine hundred feet high. Viewed sideways, it as- sumes, as described by M'Culloch, the form of a perpendic- ular but ruinous rampart, much gapped above, that runs for about a mile and a quarter along the top of a lofty sloping talus. Viewed endways, it resembles a tall massy tower, such a tower as my friend, Mr. D. O. Hill, would delight to draw, and give delight by drawing, a, tower three hundred feet in breadth by four hundred and seventy feet in height, perched on the apex of a pyramid, like a statue on a pedestal. This strange causeway is columnar from end to end ; but the columns, from their great alti- tude and deficient breadth, seem mere rodded shafts in the Gothic style; they rather resemble bundles of rods than well-proportioned pillars. Few of them exceed eighteen inches in diameter, and many of them fall short of half a 48 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY. foot ; but, though lost in the general mass of the Scuir as independent columns, when we view it at an angle suffi- ciently large to take in its entire bulk, they yet impart to it that graceful linear effect which we see brought out in tasteful pencil sketches and good line engravings. We approached it this day from the shore in the direction in which the eminence it stands upon assumes the pyramidal form, and itself the tower-like outline. The acclivity is barren and stony, a true desert foreground, like those of Thebes and Palmyra ; and the huge square shadow of the tower stretched dark and cold athwart it. The sun shone out clearly. One half the immense bulk before us, with its delicate veitical lining, lay from top to bottom in deep shade, massive and gray ; one half presented its many-sided columns to the light, here and there gleaming with tints of extreme brightness, where the pitchstones presented their glassy planes to the sun ; its general outline, whether pen- cilled by the lighter or darker tints, stood out sharp and clear ; and a stratum of white fleecy clouds floated slowly amid the delicious blue behind it. But the minuter details I must reserve for my next chapter. One fact, however, anticipated just a little out of its order, may heighten the interest of the reader. There are massive buildings, bridges of noble span, and harbors that abut far into the waves, founded on wooden piles; and this hugest of hill- forts we find founded on wooden piles also. It is built on what a Scotch architect would perhaps term a pile-brander of the Pinites Eiggensis, an ancient tree of the Oolite. The gigantic Scuir of Eigg rests on the remains of a prostrate forest. CHAPTER III. Structure of the Scuir A stray Column The Piazza A buried Pine Forest the Foundation of the Scuir Geological Poachers in a Fossil Preserve Pinites Eiggensis Its Description Witham's Experiments on Fossil Pine of Eigg Rings of the Pine Ascent of the Scuir Appearance of the Top White Pitchstone Mr. Greig's Discovery of Pumice A Sunset Scene The Manse and the Yacht The Minister's Story A Cottage Repast American Timber drifted to the Hebrides Agency of the Gulf Stream The Minister's Steep. As we climbed the hill-side, and the Shinar-like tower before us rose higher over the horizon at each step we took, till it seemed pointing at the middle sky, we could mark peculiarities in its structure which escape notice in the dis- tance. We found it composed of various beds, each of which would make a Giant's Causeway entire, piled over each other like stories in a building, and divided into columns, vertical, or nearly so, in every instance except in one bed near the base, in which the pillars incline to a side, as if losing footing under the superincumbent weight. In- numerable polygonal fragments, single stones of the build- ing, lie scattered over the slope, composed, like almost all the rest of the Scuir, of a peculiar and very beautiful stone, unlike any other in Scotland a dark pitchstone-porphyry, which, inclosing crystals of glassy feldspar, resembles in the hand-specimen, a mass of black sealing-wax, with numerous pieces of white bugle stuck into it. Some of the detached polygons are of considerable size ; few of them larger and bulkier, however, than a piece of column of this characteristic porphyry, about ten feet in length by two feet in diameter, which lies a full mile away from any of the others, in the 50 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; OR, line of the old burying-ground, and distant fi-orn it only a few hundred yards. It seems to have been carried there by man : we find its bearing from the Scuir lying nearly at right angles with the direction of the drift-boulders of the western coast, which are, besides, of rare occurrence in the Hebrides ; nor has it a single neighbor ; and it seems not improbable, as a tradition of the island testifies, that it was removed thus far for the purpose of marking some place of sepulture, and that the catastrophe of the cave arrested its progress after by far the longer and rougher portion of the way had been passed. The dry arm-bones of the charnel- house in the rock may have been tugging around it .when the galleys of the M'Leod hove in sight. The traditional history of Eigg, said my friend the minister, compared with that of some of the neighboring islands, presents a decapi- tated 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-grand- father, first settled in the place, and where they came from ; and, with the exception of a few vague legends about St. Donan and his grave, which were preserved apparently among the people of the other Small Isles, the island has no early traditional history. We had now reached the Scuir. There occur, interca- lated with the columnar beds, a few bands of a buff-colored non-columnar trap, described by M'Culloch as of a texture intermediate between a greenstone and a basalt, and which, while the pitchstone around it seems nearly indestructible, has weathered so freely as to form horizontal grooves along the face of the rock, from two to five yards in depth. One of these runs for several hundred feet along the base of the Scuir, just at the top of the talus, and greatly resembles a piazza, lacking the outer pillars. It is from ten to twelve feet in height, by from fifteen to twenty in depth ; the A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 51 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 condenser on an immense scale minute runnels of water, that patter ceaselessly in front of the long deep hol- low, like rain from the eaves of a cottage during a thunder shower. Inside, however, all is dry, and the floor is covered to the depth of several inches with the dung of sheep and cattle, that find, in this singular mountain piazza, a place of shelter. We had brought a pickaxe with us ; and the dry and dusty floor, composed mainly of a gritty conglomerate, formed the scene of our labors. It is richly fossiliferous, though the organisms have no specific variety ; and never, certainly, have I found the remains of former creations in a scene in which they more powerfully addressed themselves to the imagination. A stratum of peat-moss, mixed with fresh-water shells, and resting on a layer of vegetable mould, from which the stumps and roots of trees still protruded, was once found in Italy, buried beneath an ancient tesse- lated 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 object in front. Dry ground cov- ered by wood, a lake, a morass, and then dry ground again, had all taken precedence, on the site of the tesselated pave- ment, 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 Eigsr ? Under the old oo foundations of this huge wall we find the remains of a pine forest, that, long ere a single bed of the porphyry had burst from beneath, had sprung up and decayed on lull and be- side stream in some nameless land, had then been swept to the sea, had been entombed deep at the bottom in a grit of Oolite, had been heaved up to the surface, and high 52 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; OR, 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 Scuiv, in one fiery layer after another. The moun- tain wall of Eigg, with its dizzy elevation of four hundred and seventy feet, is a wall founded on piles of pine laid crossways ; and, strange as the fact may seem, one has but to dig into the floor of this deep-hewn piazza, to be con- vinced that at least it is a fact. Just at this interesting stage, however, our explorations bade fair to be interrupted. Our man who carried the pickaxe had lingered behind us for a few hundred yards, in earnest conversation with an islander ; and he now came up, breathless and in hot haste, to say that the islander, a Roman Catholic tacksman in the neighborhood, had pe- remptorily warned him that the Scuir of Eigg was the prop- erty of Dr. M'Pherson of Aberdeen, not ours, and that the Doctor would be very angry at any man who meddled with it. " That message," said my friend, laughing, but looking just a little sad through the laugh, "would scarce have been sent us when I was minister of the Establishment here ; but it seems allowable in the case of a poor Dissenter, and is no bad specimen of the thousand little ways in which the Roman Catholic population of the island try to annoy me, now that they see my back to the wall." I was tickled with the idea of a fossil preserve, which coupled itself in my mind, through a trick of the associative faculty, with the idea of a great fossil act for the British empire, framed on the principles of the game-laws ; and, just wondering what sort of disreputable vagabonds geological poachers would become under its deteriorating influence, I laid hold of the pickaxe and broke into the stonefast floor ; and thence I succeeded in abstracting, feloniously, I dare say, though the crime has not yet got A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 53 into the statute-book some six or "eight pieces of the P mites Eiggensis, amounting in all to about half a cubic foot of that very ancient wood value unknown. I trust, should the case come to a serious bearing, the members of the London Geological Society will generously subscribe half-a-crown a-piece to assist me in feeing counsel. There arc more interests than mine at stake in the affair. If I be cast and committed, I, who have poached over only a few miserable districts in Scotland, pray, what will become of some of them, the Lyells, Bucklands, Murchisons and Sedgwicks, who have poached over whole continents? "We were successful in procuring several good specimens of the Eigg pine, at a depth, in the conglomerate, of from eight to eighteen inches. Some of the upper pieces we found in contact with the decomposing trap out of which the hollow piazza above had been scooped ; but the greater number, as my set of specimens abundantly testify, lay em- bedded in the original Oolitic grit in which they had been locked up, in, I doubt not, their present fossil state, ere their upheaval, through Plutonic agency, from their deep- sea bottom. The annual rings of the wood, which are quite as small as in a slow-growing Baltic pine, are distinctly visible in all the better pieces I this day transferred to my bag. In one fragment I reckon sixteen rings in half an inch, and fifteen in the same space in another. The trees to which they belonged seem to have grown on some exposed hill-side, where, in the course of half a century, little more than from two or three inches were added to their diameter. The Pinites Eiggensis, or Eigg pine, was first introduced to the notice of the scientific world by the late Mr.Witham, in whose interesting work on " The Internal Structure of Fossil Vegetables " the reader may find it figured and de- scribed. The specimen in which he studied its peculiarities "was found," he says, "at the base of the magnificent 5* 54 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR, mural escarpment named the Scuir of Eigg, not, however, in situ, but among fragments of rocks of the Oolitic series." The authors of the " Fossil Flora," where it is also figured, describe it as differing very considerably in structure from any of the coniferae of the Coal Measures. " Its me- dullary rays," says Messrs. Lindley and Hutton, " appear to be more numerous, and frequently are not continued through one zone of wood to another, but more generally terminate at the concentric circles. It abounds also in turpentine vessels, or lacunae, of various sizes, the sides of which are distinctly defined." Viewed through the micro- scope, in transparent slips, longitudinal and transverse, it presents, within the space of a few lines, objects fitted to fill the mind with wonder. We find the minutest cells, glands, fibres, of the original wood preserved uninjured. Tfiere still are those medullary rays entire that communi- cated between the pith and the outside, there still the ring of thickened cells that indicated the yearly check which the growth received when winter came on, there the polygonal reticulations of the cross section, without a single broken mesh, there, too, the elongated cells in the longitudinal one, each filled with minute glands that take the form of double circles, there also, of larger size and less regular form, the lacuna? 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 peculi- arities of its pattern. There is not a mesh broken, nor a circular dot away ! The experiments of Mr. Witham on the Eigg fossil, fur- A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 55 nish an interesting example of the light which a single, ap- parently 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 be- came semi-transparent, and then, examining them under reflected light by the microscope, marked and recorded the specific peculiarities of their structure. And we now know, in consequence, that the ancient Ejgg 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 exceed- ingly 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 neighbor- hood of Helmsdale that they are burnt for lime, the fossil wood of Eathie, in Cromartyshire, and that of Shandwick, in Ross, all belong to the Pinites Eiggensis. It seems to have been a straight and stately tree, in most instances, as in the Eigg specimens, of slow growth. One of the trunks I saw near Navidale measured two feet in diameter, but a full century had passed ere it attained to a bulk so considerable ; and a splendid specimen in my collection, from the same locality, which measures twenty-one inches, exhibits even more than a hundred annual rings. In one of my specimens, and one only, the rings are of great breadth. They differ from those of all the others in the proportion in which I have seen the annual rings of a young, vigorous fir that had sprung up in some rich, moist hollow, differ from the annual rings of trees of the same species that had grown in the shallow, hard soil of exposed hill-sides. And this one specimen furnishes curious evidence that the often-marked but little understood law, which gives us our better and worse seasons in alternate groups, various in number and 56 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; OR, uncertain in their time of recurrence, obtained as early as the age of the Oolite. The rings follow each other in groups of lesser and larger breadth. One group of four rings measures an inch and a quarter across, while an adjoin- ing group of five rings measures only five-eighth parts ; and in a breadth of six inches there occur five of these alternate groups. For some four or five years together, when this pine was a living tree, the springs were late and cold, and the summers cloudy and chill, as in that group of seasons which intervened between 1835 and 1841; and then, for four or five years, more springs were early and summers genial, as in the after group of 1842, 1843 and 1844. An arrangement in nature, first observed, as we learn from Bacon, by the people of the Low Countries, and which has since formed the basis of meteoric tables, and of predictions and elaborate cycles of the weather, bound together the twelvemonths of the Oolitic period in alternate bundles of better and worse : vegetation throve vigorously during the summers of one group, and languished, in those of another, in a state of partial development. Sending away our man shipwards, laden with a bag of fossil wood, we ascended by a steep broken ravine to the top of the Scuir. The columns, as we pass on towards the west, diminish in size, and assume in many of the beds considerable variety of direction and form. In one bed they belly over with a curve, like the ribs of some wrecked vessel from which the planking has been torn away ; in an- other they project in a straight line, like muskets planted slantways on the ground to receive a charge of cavalry ; in others the inclination is inwards, like that of ranges of stakes placed in front of a sea-dyke, to break the violence of the waves ; while yet in others they present, as in the eastern portion of the Scuir, the common vertical direction. The ribbed appearance of every crag and cliff, imparts to the A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 57 scene a peculiar character; every larger mass of light and shadow is corded with minute stripes; and the feeling experienced among the more shattered peaks, and in the more broken recesses, seems near akin to that which it is the tendency of some magnificent ruin to excite, than that which awakens amid the sublime of nature. We feel as if the pillared rocks around us were like the Cyclopean Avails of Southern Italy,' the erections of some old gigantic race passed from the earth forever. The feeling must have been experienced on former occasions, amid the innumerable pillars of the Scuir ; for we find M'Culloch, in his 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 architecture, so the mind, insensibly transferring the opera- tions of nature to the efforts of art where they approxi- mate in character, becomes impressed with a feeling rarely excited by her more ordinary forms, where these are* even more stupendous." The top of the Scuir, more especially towards its eastern termination, resembles that of some vast mole not yet levelled over by the workmen ; the pavement has not yet been laid clown, 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 58 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; OR, stones, the remains of an ancient hill-fort ; which, with its natural rampart of rock on three of its four sides, more than a hundred yards in sheer descent, and with its deep ditch and rude wall on the fourth, must have fonned one of the most inaccessible in the kingdom. The masses of pitchstone a-top, though so intensely black within, are weathered on the surface into almost a pure white ; and we found lying detached among them, fragments of common amygdaloid and basalt, and minute slaty pieces of chalced- ony that had formed apparently in fissures of the trap. We would have scrutinized more narrowly at the time had we expected to find anything more rare; but I did not know until fuh 1 four months after, that aught more rare was to be found. Had we examined somewhat more carefully, we might possibly have done what Mr. Woronzow Greig did on the Scuir about eighteen years previous, picked up on it a piece of bona fide Scotch pumice. This 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 several days ; and as there was a great scarcity of game, I amused myself in my wanderings by looking about for nat- ural curiosities. I knew little about Geology at the time, but, collecting whatever struck my eye as uncommon, I picked up from the sides of the Scuir, among various other things, a bit of fossil wood, and, nearly at the summit of the eminence, a piece of pumice of a deep brownish-black color, and very porous, the pores being large and round, and the substance which divided them of a uniform thick- ness. This last specimen I gave to Mr. Lyell, who said that it could not originally have belonged to Eigg, though it A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 59 might possibly have been washed there by the sea, a sug- gestion, however, with which its place on the top of the Scuir seems ill to accord. I may add, that I have since procured a larger specimen from the same place." This seems a curious fact, when we take into account the identity, in their mineral components, of the pumice and obsidian of the recent volcanoes ; and that pitchstone, the obsidian of the trap-rocks, is resolvable into a pumice by the art of the chemist. If pumice was to be found anywhere in Scotland, we might a priori expect to find it in connection with by far the largest mass of pitchstone in the kingdom. It is just possible, however, that Mr. Greig's two specimens may not date farther back, in at least their existing state, than the days of the hill-fort. Powerful fires would have been required to render the exposed summit of the Scuir at all comfortable ; there is a deep peat-moss in its immediate neighborhood, that would have furnished the necessary fuel ; the wind must have been sufficiently high on the summit to fan the embers into an intense white heat ; and if it was heat but half as intense as that which was employed in fusing into one mass the thick vitrified ram- parts of Craig Phadrig and Knock Farril, on the east coast, it could scarce have failed to anticipate the experiment of the Hon. Mr. Knox, of Dublin, by converting some of the numerous pitchstone fragments that lie scattered about, " into a light substance in every respect resembling pumice." It was now evening, and rarely have I witnessed a finer. The sun had declined half-way adown the western sky, and for many yards the shadow of the gigantic Scuir lay dark beneath us along the descending slope. All the rest of the island, spread out at our feet as in a map, was basking in yellow sunshine ; and with its one dark shadow thrown from its one mountain-elevated wall of rock, it seemed some 60 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR, immense fantastical dial, with its gnomon rising tall in the midst. Far below, perched on the apex of the shadow, and half lost in the line of the penumbra, we could see two indistinct specks of black, with a dim halo around each, specks that elongated as we arose, and contracted as we sat, and went gliding along the line as we walked. The shadows of two gnats disporting on the edge of an ordi- nary gnomon would have seemed vastly more important, in proportion, on the figured plane of the dial, than these, our ghostly representatives, did here. The sea, spangled in the wake of the sun with quick glancing light, stretched out its blue plain around us; and we could see included in the wide prospect, on the one hand, at once the hill-chains of Morven and Kintail, with the many intervening lochs and bold jutting headlands that give variety to the mainland ; and, on the other, the variously complexioned Hebrides, from the Isle of Skye to Uist and Barra, and from Uist and Barra to Tiree and Mull. The contiguous Small Isles, Muck and Rum, lay moored immediately beside us, like vessels of the same convoy that in some secure roadstead drop anchor within hail of each other. I could willingly have lingered on the top of the Scuir until after sunset ; but the minister, who, ever and anon, during the day, had been conning over some notes jotted on a paper of wonder- fully scant dimensions, reminded me that this was the even- ing 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 A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 61 fringing the barren Eilean Chaisteil outside, lay the Betsey, looking wonderfully diminutive, but evidently a little thing of high spirit, taut-masted, with a smart rake aft, and a spruce outrigger astern, and flaunting her trian- gular 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 Avas 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 ques- tion to run its course, without quitting my hold of the Establishment. And so I perhaps might. It is easy secur- ing one's own safety, in even the worst of times, if one look no higher ; and I, as I had no opportunity of mixing in the contest, or of declaring my views respecting it, might be regarded as an unpledged man. But the principles of the Evangelical party were my principles ; and it would have been consistent with neither honor nor religion to have hung back in the day of battle, and suffered the men with whom in heart I was at one to pay the whole forfeit of our common quarrel. So I attended the Convocation, and pledged myself to stand or fall with my brethren. On my return I called my people together, and told them how the case stood, and that in May next I bade fair to be a dependent for a home on the proprietor of Eigg. And so they petitioned the proprietor that he might give me leave to build a house among them, exactly the same sort of favor granted to the Roman Catholics of the island. But month after month passed, and they got no reply to their petition ; and I was left in suspense, not knowing whether I was to have a home among them or no. I did feel the case 6 (32 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR, a somewhat hard one. The father of Dr. M'Pherson of Eigg had been, like myself, a humble Scotch minister ; and the Doctor, however indifferent to his people's wishes in such a matter, might have just thought that a man in his father's station in life, with a wife and family dependent on him, was placed by his silence in cruel circumstances of un- certainty. 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 per- mit 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 mes- senger-at-arms, useful in raising rents in these parts, has always been understood to speak the mind of his master ; but the congregation took heart in the emergency, and sent off a second petition to Dr. M'Pherson, a week or so pre- vious 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, inter- preted 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 tip unbroken my connection with my people. So the trial is now over, and here we are, and yonder is the Betsey." We descended the Scuir together for the place of meet- ing, 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 \is, and a splendid platter of mashed potatoes, and we dined like princes. I observed, for the first time, in the interior A SUMMER KAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 63 of this cottage,- what I had frequent occasion to remark afterwards, that much of the wood used in building in the smaller and outer islands of the Hebrides must have drifted across the Atlantic, borne eastwards and northwards by the great Gulf-stream. Many of the beams and boards, sorely drilled by the Teredo navalis, are of American tim- ber, that, from time to time, has been cast upon the shore, a portion of it, apparently, from timber-laden vessels unfor- tunate 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 ti'opical plants are occasionally picked up on the beach. My friend gave me a bean or nut of the Dolichos urens, or cow- itch shrub, of the West Indies, which an islander had found on the shore sometime in the previous year, and given to one of the manse children as a toy ; and I attach some little interest to it, as a curiosity of the same class with the large ^canes and the fragment of carved wood found floating near the shores of Madeira by the brother-in-law of Columbus, and which, among other pieces of circumstantial evidence, led the great navigator to infer the existence of a western continent. Curiosities of this kind seem still more common in the northern than in the western islands of Scotland. "Large exotic nuts or seeds," says Dr. Patrick Neill, in his interesting " Tour," quoted in a former chapter, " which in Orkney are known by the name of Molucca beans, are oc- casionally found among the rejectamenta of the sea, especially after westerly winds. There are two kinds commonly found : the larger (of which the fishermen very generally make snuff-boxes) seem to be seeds from the great pod of the Mimosa scandens of the West Indies ; the smaller seeds, from the pod of the Dolichos urens, also a native of the same region. It is probable that the currents of the ocean, and particularly that great current which issues from the 64 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; OR, Gulf of Florida, and is hence denominated the Gulf Stream, aid very much in ti'ansporting across the mighty Atlantic these American products. They are generally quite fresh and entire, and afford an additional proof how impervioiis to moisture, and how imperishable, nuts and seeds generally are." The evening was fast falling ere the minister closed his discourse ; and we had but just light enough left, on reach- ing the Betsey, to show us that there lay a dead sheep on the deck. It had been sent aboard to be killed by the minister's factotum, John Stewart'; but John was at the evening preaching at the time, and the poor sheep, in its attempts to set itself free, had got itself entangled among the cords, and strangled itself. "Alas, alas!" exclaimed the minister, " thus ends our hope of fresh mutton for the present, and my hapless speculation as a sheep farmer for evermore." I learned from him, afterwards, over our tea, that shortly previous to the Convocation he had got his glebe, one of the largest in Scotland, well stocked with sheep and cattle, which he had to sell, immediately on the Disruption, in miserably bad condition, at a loss of nearly fifty per cent. He had a few sheep, however, that would not sell at all, and that remained on the glebe, in conse- quence, until his successor entered into possession. And he, honest man, straightway impounded them, and got them incarcerated in a dark, dirty hole, somewhat in the way Giant Despair incarcerated the pilgrims, a thing he had quite a legal right to do, seeing that the mile-long glebe, with its many acres of luxuriant pasture, was now as much his property as it had been Mr. Swanson's a few months before, and seeing Mr. Swanson's few sheep had no right to crop his grass. But a worthy neighbor interfered, Mr. M'Donald, of Keil, the principal tenant in the island. Mi. M'Donald, a practical commentator on the law of kind- A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 65 ness, Avas sorely scandalized at what he deemed the new minister's gratuitous unkindncss to a brother in calamity ; and, relieving the sheep, he brought them to his own farm, where he found them board and lodging on my friend's be- half, till they could be used up at leisure. And it was one of the last of this unfortunate lot that now contrived to escape from us by anticipating John Stewart. " A black beginning makes a black ending," said Gouffing Jock, an ancient border shepherd, when his only sheep, a black ewe, the sole survivor of a flock smothered in a snow-storm, was worried to death by 'his dogs. Then, taking down his broadsword, he added, " Come awa, my auld friend ; thou and I maun e'en stock Bowerhope-Law ance mair ! " Less warlike than Goufiing Jock, we were content to repeat over the dead, on this occasion, simply the first portion of his speech ; and then, betaking ourselves to our cabin, we for- got all our sorrows over our tea. 6* CHAPTER IV. An Excursion The Chain of Crosses Bay of Laig Island of Rum Descrip- tion of the Island Superstitions banished by pure Religion Fossil Shells Remarkable Oyster Bed New species of Belemnite Oolitic Shells White Sandstone Precipices Gigantic Petrified Mushrooms "Christabel" in Stone Musical Sand Jabel Nakous, or Mountain of the Bell Experiments of Travellers at Jabel Nakous Welsted's Account Reg-Rawan, or the Mov- ing Sand The Musical Sounds inexplicable Article on the subject in the North British Review. THERE had been rain during the night ; and when I first got on deck, a little after seven, a low stratum of mist, that completely enveloped the Scuir, and truncated both the eminence on which it stands and the opposite height, stretched like a ruler across the flat valley which indents so deeply the middle of the island. But the fogs melted away as the morning rose, and ere our breakfast was satisfactorily discussed, the last thin wreath had disappeared from around the columned front of the rock-tower of Eigg, and a power- ful sun looked down on moist slopes and dank hollows, from which there arose in the calm a hazy vapor, that, while it softened the lower features of the landscape, left the bold outline relieved against a clear sky. Accompanied by our attendant of the previous day, bearing bag and hammer, we set out a little before eleven for the north-\vestern 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 A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 67 first; and that there had thus been a chain of stations formed from sea to sea, like the sights of a land-surveyor, from one of which a second could be seen, and a third from the second, till, last of all, the emphatically holy point of the island, the burial-place of the old Culdee, came full in view. The unsteady devotion, that journeyed, fancy-bound, along the heights, to gloat over a dead man's bones, had its clue to carry it on in a straight line. Its trail was on the ground ; it glided snake-like from cross to cross, in quest of dust ; and, without its finger-posts to guide it, would have wandered devious. It is surely a better devotion that, in- stead of thus creeping over the earth to a mouldy sepulchre, can at once launch into the sky, secure of finding Him who once arose from one. In less than an hour we were" de- scending on the Bay of Laig, a semicircular 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 Rum, with its abrupt sea-wall of rock, and its steep-pointed hills, that attain, immediately over the sea, an elevation of more than two thousand feet, loomed bold and high in the offing, some five miles away, but apparently much nearer. The four tall summits of the island rose clear against the sky like a group of pyramids ; its lower slopes and precipices, variegated and relieved by graceful 68 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; OR, alternations of light and shadow, and resting on their blue basement of sea, stood out with equal distinctness; but the entire middle space from end to end was hidden in a long horizontal stratum of gray cloud, edged atop with a lacing of silver. Such was the aspect of the noble break- water in front. Fully two-thirds of the semicircular ram- part of rock which shuts in the crescent-shaped plain directly opposite lay in deep shadow ; but the sun shone softly on the plain itself, brightening up many a dingy cottage, and many a green patch of corn ; and the bay below stretched out, sparkling in the light. There is no part of the island so thickly inhabited as this flat meniscus. It is composed almost entirely of Oolitic rocks, and bears atop, especially where an ancient oyster-bed of great depth forms the subsoil, a kindly and fertile mould. The cottages lie in groups ; and, save where a few bogs, which it would be no very difficult matter to drain, interpose their rough shag of dark green, and break the continuity, the plain around them waves with corn. Lying fair, green and populous within the sweep of its inaccessible rampart of rock, at least tAvice as lofty as the ramparts of Babylon of old, it reminds one of the suburbs 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 nar- row 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 cas- cade. " 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 tak-s 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 A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 69 an over-bold, over-inquisitive islander, curious to know whose shroud she was preparing ; and how she more than satisfied his curiosity, by telling him it was his own. It is a not un- interesting fact," added the minister, " that my poor people, since they have become more earnest about their religion, think very little about ghosts and spectres : their faith in the realities of the unseen world seems to have banished from their minds much of their old belief in its phantoms." In the rude fences that separate from each other the little farms in this plain, we find frequent fragments of the oyster bed, hardened into a tolerably compact limestone. It is seen to most advantage, however, in some of the deeper cuttings in the fields, where the surrounding matrix exists merely as an incoherent shale ; and the shells may be picked out as entire as when they lay, ages before, in the mud, which we still see retaining around them its original color. They are small, thin, triangular, much resembling in form some specimens of the Ostrea deltoidea, but greatly less in size. The nearest resembling shell in Sowerby is the Ostrea acuminata, an oyster of the clay that underlies the great Oolite of Bath. Few of the shells exceed an inch and a half in length, and the majority fall short of an inch. What they lack in bulk, however, they make up in number. They are massed as thickly together, to the depth of several feet, as shells on the heap at the door of a Newhaven fisherman, and extend over many acres. Where they lie open we can still detect the triangular disc of the hinge, with the single impression of the abductor muscle ; and the foliaceous character of the shell remains in most instances as distinct as if it had undergone no mineral change. I have seen nowhere in Scotland, among the secondary formations, so unequivocal an oyster-bed ; nor do such beds seem to be at all common in formations older than the Tertiary in Eng- land, though the oyster itself is sufficiently so. We find 70 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OB, Mantell stating, in his recent work (" Medals of Creation"), after first describing an immense oyster bed of the London Basin, that underlies the city (for what is now London was once an oyster-bed), that in the chalk below, though it con- tains several species of Ostrea, the shells are diffused pro- miscuously 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 there, far below tide-mark, we find a dark-colored argillaceous shale of the Lias, greatly obscured by boulders of trap, the only deposit of the Liasic formation in the island. A line of trap-hills that rises along the shore seems as if it had strewed half its materials over the beach. The 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 preserved. I dug up from under the trap- blocks some of the common Liasic Ammonites of the north- eastern coast of Scotland, a few of the septa of a large Nautilus, broken pieces of wood, and half-effaced casts of what seems a branched coral ; but only minute portions of the shells have been converted into stone ; here and there a few chambers in the whorls of an Ammonite or Nautilus, though the outline of the entire organism lies impressed in the shale ; and the ligneous and polyparious fossils we find in a still greater state of decay. The Belemnite alone, as A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 71 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 speci- mens of the Belemnite sulcatus and Belemnite elongatus, and found, detached on the surface of the bed, a fragment of a singularly large Belemnite, a full inch and a quarter in diameter, the species of which I could not determine. Returning by the track we came, we reach the bottom of the bay, which we find much obscured with sand and shingle ; and pass noi'th wards along its side, under a range of low sandstone precipices, with interposing grassy slopes, in which the fertile Oolitic meniscus descends to the beach. The sandstone, white and soft, and occurring in thick beds, much resembles that of the Oolite of Sutherland. We detect in it few traces of fossils ; now and then a carbona- ceous 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 char- acter less obscure. We spent a full half-hour in picking out shells from the bottom of a long dock-like hollow among the rocks, in which a bed of clay has yielded to the waves, while the strata on either side stand up over it like low wharfs on the opposite side of a river. The shells, though exceedingly fragile, for they partake of the na- ture of the clayey matrix in which they are imbedded, rise as entire as when they had died among the mud, years, mayhap ages, ere the sandstone had been deposited over them; and we were enabled at once to detect their ex- treme dissimilarity, as a group, to the shells of the Liasic deposit we had so lately quitted. We did not find in this bed a single Ammonite, Belemnite, or Nautilus ; but chalky Bivalves, resembling our existing Tellina, in vast abund- 72 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; OR, ance, mixed with what seem to be a small Buccinum and a minute Trochus, with numerous rather equivocal fragments of a shell resembling an Oiliva. So thickly do they lie clustered together in this deposit, that in some patches where the sad-colored argillaceous ground is washed bare by the sea, it seems marbled with them into a light gray tint. The group more nearly resembles in type a recent one than any I have yet seen in a secondary deposit, except perhaps in the Weald of Moray, where we find in one of the layers a Planorbis scarce distinguishable from those of our ponds and ditches, mingled with a Paludina that seems as nearly modelled after the existing form. From the absence of the more characteristic shells of the Oolite, I am inclined to deem the deposit one of estuary origin. Its clays were probably thrown down, like the silts of so many of our rivers, in some shallow bay, where the waters of a descending stream mingled with those of the sea, and where, though shells nearly akin to our existing periwinkles and whelks congregate thickly, the Belemnite, 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 combinations of form. The low precipices, undermined at the base, beetle over like the sides of stranded vessels. One of the projecting promontories we find hollowed through and through by a tall rugged archway ; while the outer pier of the arch, if pier we may term it, worn to a skeleton, and jutting outwards with a knee-like angle, presents the appearance of a thin ungainly leg and splay foot, advanced, as if in awkward courtesy, to the breakers. A SUMMEll K AMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 73 But in a winter or two, judging from its present degree of attenuation, and the yielding nature of its material, which resembles a damaged mass of arrow-root, consolidated by lying in the leaky hold of a vessel, its persevering courte- sies 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 sand-stone bed, and worn it down to nearly the level of the shore, what seem a number of double ramparts, fronting each other, and separated by deep square ditches exactly parallel in the sides, traverse the irregular level in every direction. The ditches vary in width from one to twelve feet ; and the ramparts, rising from three to six feet over them, are perpendicular as the walls of houses, where they front each other, and descend on the opposite sides in irregular slopes. The iron block, with square groove and projecting ears, that receives the bar of a railway, and connects it with the stone below, rep- resents not inadequately a section of one of these ditches, with its ramparts. They form here the sole remains ot dykes of an earthy trap, which, though at one time in a state of such high fusion that they converted the portions of soft sandstone in immediate contact with them into the consistence of quartz rock, have long since mouldered away, leaving but the hollow rectilinear rents which they had occupied, surmounted by the indurated walls which they had baked. Some of the most curious appearances, however, connected with the sandstone, though they occur chiefly in an upper bed, are exhibited by what seem fields of petrified mushrooms, of a gigantic size, that spread out in some places for hundreds of yards under the high-water level. These apparent mushrooms stand on thick squat stems, from a foot to eighteen inches in height ; the heads are round like those of toad-stools, and vary from one foot to nearly two yards in diameter. In some specimens we 74 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; OK, find two heads joined together in a form resembling a squat figure of eight, of what printers terra the Egyptian type, or, to borrow the illustration of M'Culloch, " like the ancient military projectile known by the name of double- headed shot ; " in other specimens three heads have coa- lesced in a trefoil shape, or rather in a shape like that of an ace of clubs divested of the stem. By much the greater number, however, are spherical. They are composed of concretionary masses, consolidated, like the walls of the dykes, though under some different process, into a hard siliceous stone, that has resisted those disintegrating influ- ences of the weather and the surf, under which the yielding matrix in which they -were embedded has worn from around them. Here and there we find them lying detached on the beach, like huge shot, compared with Avhich the greenstone balls of Mons Meg are but marbles for children to play with ; in other cases they project from the mural front of rampart-like precipices, as if they had been show- ered 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 agreea- ble tale, of the exti'avagant cast of " Christabel," or the " Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner," fretted into sandstone. But by far the most curious part of the story remains tfl be told. The hollows and fissures of the lower sandstone bed we find filled with a fine quartzose sand, which, from its pun white color, and the clearness with which the minute par. tides reflect the light, reminds one of accumulations of potato-flour drying in the sun. It is formed almost entirely of disintegrated particles of the soft sandstone ; and as we at first find it occurring in mere handfuls, that seem as if they had been detached from the mass during the last few A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 75 tides, we begin to marvel to what quarter the missing materials of the many hundred cubic yards of rock, ground down along the shore in this bed during the last century or two, have been conveyed away. As we pass on northwards, however, we see the white sand occurring in much larger quantities, here heaped up in little bent-covered hillocks above the reach of the tide, there stretching out in level, ripple-marked wastes into the waves, yonder rising in flat narrow spits among the shallows. At length we reach a small, irregularly-formed bay, a few hundred feet across, floored with it from side to side ; and see it, on the one hand, descending deep into the sea, that exhibits over its whiteness a lighter tint of green, and, on the other, en- croaching on the land, in the form of drifted banks, cov- ered with the plants common to our tracts of sandy downs. The sandstone bed that has been worn down to form it contains no fossils, save here and there a carbonaceous stem ; but in an underlying harder stratum we occasionally find a few shells ; and, with a specimen in my hand charged with a group of bivalves resembling the existing conchifera of our sandy beaches, I was turning aside this sand of the Oolite, so curiously reduced to its original state, and mark- ing how nearly the recent shells that lay embedded in it resembled the extinct ones that had lain in it so long before, when I became aware of a peculiar sound that it yielded to the tread, as my companions paced over it. I struck it obliquely with my foot, where the surface lay dry and inco- herent in the sun, and the sound elicited was a shrill, sonorous note, somewhat resembling that produced by a waxed thread, when tightened between the teeth and the hand, and tipped by the nail of the forefinger. I walked over it, striking it obliquely at each step, and with every blow the shrill note was repeated. My companions joined me ; and we performed a concert, in which, if we could 7G THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; Oil, boast of but little variety in the tones produced, we might at least challenge all Europe for an instrument of the kind which produced them. It seemed less wonderful that there should be music in the granite of Memnon, than in the loose Oolitic sand of the Bay of Laig. As we marched over the drier tracts, an incessant woo, icoo, ?coo, rose from the surface, that might be heard in the calm some twenty or thirty yards away ; and we found that where a damp semi-coherent stratum lay at the depth of three or four inches beneath, and all was dry and incoherent above, the tones were loudest and sharpest, and most easily evoked by the foot. Our discovery, for I trust I may regard it as such, adds a third locality to two previously known ones, in which what may be termed the musical sand, no unmeet counterpart to the " singing water " of the tale, has now been found. And as the island of Eigg is consid- erably more accessible than Jabel Nakous, in Arabia Pet rrea, or Reg-Raman, in the neighborhood of Cabul, there must be facilities presented through the discovery which did not exist hitherto, for examining the phenomenon in acoustics which it exhibits, a phenomenon, it may be added, which some of our greatest masters of the science have confessed their inability to explain. Jabel Nakous, or the " Mountain of the Bell," is situ- ated about three miles from the shores of the Gulf of Suez, in that land of wonders which witnessed for forty years the journeyings of the Israelites, and in which the granite peaks of Sinai and Horeb overlook an arid wilderness of rock and sand. It had been known for many ages by the wild Arab of the desert, that thei-e rose at times from this hill a strange, inexplicable music. As he leads his camel past in the heat of the day, a sound like the first low tones of an ./Eolian harp stirs the hot breezeless air. It swells louder and louder in progressive undulations, till at length A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THt HEBRIDES. 77 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 phenom- enon, says Sir David Brewster, in his " Letters on Natural Magic," there is a convent miraculously preserved in the bowels of the hill ; and the sounds are said to be those of the " Nakous, a long metallic ruler, suspended horizontally, which the priest strikes with a hammer, for the purpose of assembling the monks to prayer." There exists a tradition that on one occasion a wandering Greek saw the mountain open, and that, entering by the gap, he descended into the subterranean convent, where he found beautiful gardens and fountains of delicious water, and brought with him to the upper world, on his return, fragments of consecrated bread. The first European traveller who visited Jcibel Nakous, says Sir David, was M. Seetzen, a German. He journeyed for several hours over arid sands, and under ranges of precipices inscribed by mysterious characters, that tell, haply, of the wanderings of Israel under Moses. And reaching, about noon, the base of the musical fountain, he found it composed of a white friable sandstone, and present- ing on two of its sides sandy declivities. He watched beside it for an hour and a quarter, and then heard, for the first time, a low undulating sound, somewhat resembling that of a humming top, which rose and fell, and ceased and began, and then ceased again ; and in an hour and three quarters after, when in the act of climbing along the de- clivity, 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 vibra- tions which they occasioned, he climbed to the top of one of the declivities, and, sliding downwards, exerted himself 78 THE CRUISE OP THE BETSEY ; OR, 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 cer- tainly have been afraid if he had been ignorant of the cause." At the time Sir David Brewster wrote (1832), the only other European who had visited Jabel Nakous was Mr. Gray, of University College, Oxford. This gentleman describes the noises he heard, but which he was unable to trace to their producing cause, as " beginning with a low continuous murmuring sound, which seemed to rise beneath his feet," but " which gradually changed into pulsations as it became louder, so as to resemble the striking of a clock, and became so strong at the end of five minutes as to de- tach the sand." The Mountain of the Bell has been since carefully explored by Lieutenant J. Welsted, of the Indian navy ; and the reader may see it exhibited in a fine litho- graph, in his travels, as a vast irregularly conical mass of broken stone, somewhat resembling one of our Highland cairns, though, of course, on a scale immensely more huge, with a steep, angular slope of sand resting in a hollow in one of its sides, and rising to nearly its apex. "It forms," says Lieutenant Welsted, " one of a ridge of low, calcare- ous hills, at a distance of three and a half miles from the beach, to which a sandy plain, extending with a gentle rise to their base, connects them. Its height, about four hundred feet, as well as the material of which it is composed, a light-colored friable sandstone, is about the same as the rest of the chain; but an inclined plane of almost impalpa^ ble sand rises at an angle of forty degrees with the horizon, and is bounded by a semi-circle of rocks, presenting broken, abrupt, and pinnacled forms, and extending to the base of this remarkable hill. Although their shape and arrange- A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 79 ment in some respects may be said to resemble a whisper- ing gallery, yet I determined by experiment that their irregular surface renders them but ill adapted for the pro- duction 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 con- tinued stream ; but, as the Ai'ab 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 ^olian harp when its strings first catch the breeze : as the sand became more violently agitated by the increased velocity of the descent, the noise more nearly resembled that produced by drawing the moistened fingers over glass. As it reached the base, the reverberations attained the loudness of distant thunder, causing the rock on which we were seated to vibrate ; and our camels, animals not easily frightened, became so alarmed that it was with difficulty their drivers could restrain them. "The hill of Mey-Rawan, or the 'Moving Sand,'" says the late Sir Alexander Burnes, by whom the place was visited in the autumn of 1837, and who has recorded his visit in a brief paper, illustrated by a rude lithographic view, in the "Journal of the Asiatic Society" for 1838, "is about forty miles north of Cabul, towards Hindu-kush, and near the base of the mountains." It rises to the height of about four hundred feet, in an angle formed by the junction of two ridges of hills ; and a sheet of sand, " pure as that of the sea-shore," and which slopes in an angle of forty degrees, reclines against it from base to summit. As represented in the lithograph, there projects over the steep sandy slope on each side, as in the " Mountain of the Bell," still steeper 80 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; OR, barriers of rock ; and we are told by Sir Alexander, that though " the mountains here are generally composed of granite or mica, at Rey-Rawan there is sandstone and lime." The situation of the sand is curious, he adds: it is seen from a ccreat distance ; and as there is none other in O * the neighborhood, " it might almost be imagined, from its appearance, that the hill had been cut in two, and that the sand had gushed forth as from a sand-bag." "When set in motion by a body of people who slide down it, a sound is emitted. On the first trial we distinctly heard two loud hollow sounds, such as would be given by a large drum ;" "there is an' echo in the place; and the inhabitants have a beh'ef that the sounds are only heard on Friday, when the saint of Rey-Rawan, who is interred hard by, permits." The phenomenon, like the resembling one in Arabia, seems to have attracted attention among the inhabitants of the countiy at an early period ; and the notice of an eastern annalist, the Emperor Baber, who flourished late in the fifteenth century, and, like Caesar, conquered and recorded his conquests, still survives. He describes it as the Khwaja Rey-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 Rey-Rawan, that the district in which the hill is situated is not a sandy one, and that its slope of sonorous sand seems as if it had issued from its side. These various circumstances, taken together, lead to the inference that the sand may have orig- inated in the decomposition of the rock beneath. It is fur- ther noticeable, that the Jabel Nakous is composed of a white friable sandstone, resembling that of the white friable A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 81 bed of the Bay of Lnig, and that it belongs to nearly the same geological era. I owe to the kindness of Dr. Wilson of Bombay, two specimens which he picked up in Arabia Petrcea, 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 fre- quent occurrence in the desert of Arabia Petrsea, where they are termed by the Arabs petrified olives ; that num- mulites are also abundant in the district ; and that the vari- ous 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 disin- tegrated 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 communicate to the atmosphere those vibratory undulations tli at are the producing causes of sound: the grains, even when sonorous individually, seem, from their inevitable con- tact Avith each other, to exist under the influence of that simple law in acoustics which arrests the tones of the ring- ing glass or struck bell, immediately as they are but touched by some foreign body, such as the hand or finger. The one grain, ever in contact with several other grains, is a glass or bell on which the hand always rests. And the difficulty has been felt and acknowledged. Sir John Herschel, in referring to the phenomenon of the Jabel Nakous, in his "Treatise on Sound," in the " Encyclopedia Metropoli- tana," describes it as to him " utterly inexplicable ; " and Sir David Brewster, whom I had the pleasure of meeting in December last, assured me it was not less a puzzle to him than to Sir John. An eastern traveller, who attributes its 82 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; OH, 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 pheno- mena which have rendered the Mountain of the Bell so famous. Lieutenant Welsted informs us, that when his Bedouin first set the sand in motion, there was scarce any perceptible sound heard ; it was rolling downwards for many yards around him to the depth of a foot, ere the music arose ; and it is questionable whether the effect could be elicited with some fifty or sixty pounds weight of the sand of Eigg, on a slope of but at most a few feet, which it took many hundred weight of sand of Jabel Nakous, and a slope of many yards, to produce. But in the stillness of a close room, it is just possible that it may. I have, however, little doubt, that from small quantities the sound evoked by the foot on the shore may be reproduced : enough will lie within the reach of experiment to demonstrate the strange difference which exists between this sonorous sand of the Oolite, and the common unsonorous sand of our sea-beaches ; and it is certainly worth while examining into the nature and producing causes of a phenomenon so curious in itself, and which lias been characterized by one of the most dis- tinguished of living philosophers as " the most celebrated of all the acoustic wonders which the natural world pre- sents to us." In the forthcoming number of the " Xorth British Review," which appears on Monday first,* the reader will find the sonorous sand of Eigg referred to, in an * March 31, 1815. A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 83 article the authorship of which will scarcely be mistaken. " We have here," says the writer, after first describing the sounds of Jcibel Nak-ous^ and then referring to those of Eigg, " the phenomenon in its simple state, disembarrassed from reflecting rocks, from a hard bed beneath, and from cracks and cavities that might be supposed to admit the sand ; and indicating as its cause, either the accumulated vibration of the air when struck by the driven sand, or the accumulated sounds occasioned by the mutual impact of the particles of sand against each other. If a musket-ball pass- ing through the air emits a whistling note, each individual particle of sand must do the same, however faint be the note which it yields ; and the accumulation of these infinitesimal vibrations must constitute an audible sound, varying with the number and velocity of moving particles. In like man- ner, if two plates of silex or quartz, which are but large crystals of sand, give out a musical sound when mutually struck, the impact or collision of two minute crystals or particles of sand must do the same, in however inferior a degree ; and the union of all these sounds, though singly imperceptible, may constitute the musical notes of the Bell Mountain, or the lesser sounds of the trodden sea-beach at Eigg." Here is a vigorous effort made to unlock the difficulty. I should, however, have mentioned to the philosophic writer, what I inadvertently failed to do, that the sounds elicited from the sand of Eigg seem as directly evoked by the slant blow dealt it by the foot, as the sounds similarly evoked from a highly waxed floor, or a board strewed over with ground rosin. The sharp shrill note follows the stroke, altogether independently of the grains driven into the air. My omission may serve to show how much safer it is for those minds of the observant order, that serve as hands and eyes to the reflective ones, to prefer incurring the risk of 84 THE CRUISE OP THE BETSEY. being even tediously minute in their descriptions, to the danger of being inadequately brief in them. But, alas ! for purposes of exact science, rarely are verbal descriptions otherwise than inadequate. Let us look, for example, at the various accounts given us of Jabel Nakous. There are strange sounds heard proceeding from a hill in Arabia, and vaiious travellers set themselves to describe them. The tones are those of the convent Nakous, says the wild Arab ; there must be a convent buried tinder the hill. More like the sounds of a humming-top, remarks a phlegmatic German traveller. Not quite like them, says an English one in an Oxford gown ; they resemble rather the striking of a clock. Nay, listen just a little longer and more care- fully, 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 Muhammed Baber, twirling his whiskers : " I know a similar hill in the country towards Hindu-kush : it is the sound of drums and nagarets that issues from the sand." All we really know of this often-described music of the desert, after reading all the descriptions, is, that its tones bear certain analogies to cer- tain other tones, analogies that seem stronger in one direction to one ear, and stronger in another direction to an ear differently constituted, but Avhich do not exactly resemble any other sounds in nature. The strange music of Jabel Nakous, as a combination of tones, is essentially unique. CHAPTER V. Trap-Dykes "Cotton Apples" Alternation of Lacustrine with Marine Re- mains Analogy from the Beds of Esk Aspect of the Island on its narrow Front The Puffin Ru-Stoir Development of Old Red Sandstone Strik- ing Columnar character of Ru-Stoir Discovery of Reptilian Remains John Stewart's wonder at the Bones in the Stones Description of the Bones "Dragons, Gorgons, and Chimeras" Exploration and Discovery pursued The Midway Shieling A Celtic Welcome Return to the Yacht "Array of Fossils new to Scotch Geology " A Geologist's Toast Hoffman and his Fossil. WE leave behind us the musical sand, and reach the point of the promontory which forms the northern extremity of the Bay of Laig. Wherever the beach has been swept bare, we see it floored with trap-dykes worn down to the level, but in most places accumulations of huge blocks of various composition cover it up, concealing the nature of the rock beneath. The long semicircular wall of precipice which, sweeping inwards at the bottom of the bay, leaves to the inhabitants between its base and the beach their fer- tile meniscus of land, here abuts upon the coast. We see its dark forehead many hundred feet overhead, and the grassy platform beneath, now narrowed to a mere talus, sweeping upwards to its base from the shore, steep, broken, lined thick with horizontal pathways, mottled over with ponderous masses of rock. Among the blocks that load the beach, and render our onward progress difficult and laborious, we detect occasional fragments of an amygdaloidal basalt, charged with a white zeolite, consisting of crystals so extremely slender that the balls, with their light fibrous contents, remind us of cotton 86 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; OR, apples divested of the seeds. There occur, though more rarely, masses of a hard white sandstone, abounding in vegetable impressions, which, from their sculptured mark- ings, recalled to memory the Sigillaria of the Coal Measures. Here and there, too, we find fragments of a calcareous stone, so largely charged with compressed shells, chiefly bivalves, that it may be regarded as a shell breccia. There occur, besides, slabs of fibrous limestone, exactly resembling the limestone of the ichthyolite beds of the Lower Old Red ; and blocks of a hard gray stone, of silky lustre in the fresh fracture, thickly speckled with carbonaceous mark- ings. These fragmentary masses, all of them, at least, except the fibrous limestone, which occurs in mere plank- like bands, represent distinct beds, of which this part of the island is composed, and which present their edges, like courses of ashlar in a building, in the splendid section that stretches from the tall brow of the precipice to the beach ; though in the slopes of the talus, where the lower beds appear in but occasional protrusions and landslips, we find some difficulty in tracing their order of succession. Near the base of the slope, where the soil has been undermined and the rock laid bare by the waves, there occur beds of a bituminous black shale, resembling the dark shales so common in the Coal Measures, that seem to be of fresh water or estuary origin. Their fossils, though numerous, are ill preserved ; but we detect in them scales and plates of fishes, at least two species of minute bivalves, one of which very much resembles a Cyclas ; and in some of the fragments, shells of Cypris lie embedded in consider- able 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 A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 87 that the estuary, or fresh-water lake, should so often in the old geologic periods have changed places with the sea. It is comparatively easy to conceive that the inner Hebrides should have once existed as a broad ocean sound, bounded on one or either side by Oolitic islands, from which streams descended, sweeping with them, to the marine depths, pro- ductions, animal and vegetable, of the land. But it is less easy to C9nceive, 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 bitu- minous shales of Eigg; the embedded fossils are all too obscure to be admitted in evidence ; but there can exist no doubt that fresh water, or at least estuary formations, do occur among the marine Oolites of the Hebrides. Sir R. Murchison, one of the most cautious, as he is certainly one of the most distinguished, of living geologists, found in a northern district of Skye, in 1826, a deposit containing Cyclas, Paludina, Neritina, all shells of unequivocally fresh-water origin, which must have been formed, he con- cludes, in either a lake or estuary. What had been sea at one period had been estuary or lake at another. In evciy case, however, in which these intercalated deposits are restricted to single strata of no great thickness, it is per- haps safer to refer their formation to the agency of tem- porary land-floods, than to that of violent changes of level, now elevating and now depressing the surface. There occur, for instance, among the rnai'ine Oolites of Bror.i, the discovery of Mr. Robertson, of Inverugie, two strata containing fresh-water fossils in abundance; but the one stratum is little more than an inch in thickness, the other 88 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR, little more than a foot; and it seems considerably more probable, that such deposits should have owed their exist- ence to extraordinary land-floods, like those which in 1829 devastated the province of Moray, and covered over whole miles of marine beach with the spoils of land and river, than that a sea-bottom should have been elevated for their production, into a fresh-water lake, and then let down into a sea-bottom again. We find it recorded in the "Shep- herd's Calendar," that after the thaw which followed the great snow-storm of 1794, there were found on a part of the sands of the Solway Frith known as the Beds of Esk, where the tide disgorges much of what is thrown into it by the rivers, " one thousand eight hundred and forty sheep, nine black cattle, three horses, two men, one woman, forty- five dogs, and one hundred and eighty hares, beside a 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 interca- lated 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 pre- sents itself exhibiting the appearance of a huge bastion. The green talus slopes upwards, as its basement, for full three hundred feet; and a noble wall of perpendicular rock, that towers over and beyond for at least four hundred feet more, forms the rampart. Save towards the sea, the view is of but limited extent ; we see it restricted, on the land- ward side, to the bold face of the bastion ; and in a narrow and broken dell that runs nearly parallel to the shore for a few hundred yards between the top of the talus and the base of the rampart, a true covered way, we see but the rampart alone. But the dizzy front of black basalt, dark as night, save where a broad belt of light-colored sandstone traverses it in an angular direction, like a white A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 80 sash thrown across a funeral robe, the fantastic peaks and turrets in which the rock terminates atop, the masses of broken ruins, roughened with moss and lichen, that have fallen from above, and lie scattered at its base, the ex- treme loneliness of the place, for we have left behind us every trace of the human family, and the expanse of sol- itary sea which it commands, all conspire to render the scene a profoundly imposing one. It is one of those scenes in which a man feels that he is little, and that nature is great. There is no precipice in the island in which the puffin so delights to build as among the dark pinnacles overhead, or around which the silence is so frequently broken by the harsh scream of the eagle. The sun had got far adown the sky ere we had reached the covered way at the base of the rock. All lay dark below ; and the red light atop, half absorbed by the dingy hues of the stone, shone with a gleam so faint and melancholy, that it served but to deepen the effect of the shadows. The puffin, a comparatively rare bird in the inner Heb- rides, builds, I was told, in great numbers in the continuous line of precipice which, after sweeping for a full mile round the Bay of Laig, forms the pinnacled rampart here, and then, turning another angle of the island, runs on parallel to the coast for about six miles more. In former times the puffin furnished the islanders, as in St. Kilda, with a staple article of food, in those hungry months of summer in which the stores of the old crop had begun to fail, and the new crop had not yet ripened ; and the people of Eigg, taught by their necessities, were bold cragsmen. But men do not peril life and limb for the mere sake of a meal, save when they cannot help it ; and the introduction of the potato has done much to put out the practice of climbing for the bird, except among a few young lads, who find excitement enough in the work to pursue it for its own sake, as an 8* 90 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR, amusement. I found among the islanders what was said to be a piece of the natural history of the puffin, sufficiently apocryphal to remind one of the famous passage in the his- tory of the barnacle, which traced the lineage of the bird to one of the pedunculated cirripedes, and the lineage of the cirripede to a log of wood. The puffin feeds its young, say the islanders, on an oily scum of the sea, which renders it such an unwieldy mass of fat, that about the time when it should be beginning to fly, it becomes unable to get out of its hole. The parent bird, not in the least puzzled, how- ever, 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 over- head, relieved along its irregular upper line by the blue sky. We mark the talus widening at its base, and expand- ing, as on the shores of the Bay of Laig, into an irregular grassy platform, .that, sinking midway into a ditch-like hol- low, rises again towards the sea, and presents to the waves a perpendicular precipice of redstone. The sinking sun shone brightly this evening; and the warm hues of the precipice, which bears the name of Ri^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 of this red headland from all the other rocks of the island, from which it appears to differ as con- A SUMMER KAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 91 siderably 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 mineralogi. cal appearances of what geologists of the school of the lato Mr. Cunningham term Primary Old Red Sandstone, in some cases has been laid down as a deposit of Old Red proper, abutting in the line of a fault on the neighboring Oolites and basalts. In the geological map which I carried with me, not one of high authority however, I found it actually colored as a patch of this ancient system. The Old Red Sandstone is largely developed in the neighboring island of Rum, in the line of which the JRu-Stoir seems t picked up in RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 341 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 Geo- logical Map of the British Islands, edited by Professor Edward Forbes, that other eyes than mine had detected shells in the boulder-clay of Caithness. " Cliffs of Pleisto- cene," says the Professor, in one of his notes attached to the map, " occur at Wick, containing boreal shells, espe- cially Astarte borealis" I had seen the boulder-clay characteristically developed in the neighborhood of Thurso ; but, during a rather hur- ried visit, had lacked time to examine it. The omission mattered the less, however, as my friend Mr. Robert Dick is resident in the locality; and there are few men who examine more carefully or more perseveringly than he, or who can enjoy with higher relish the sweets of scientific research. I Avrote him regarding Professor Forbes's decis- ion 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 skepticism somewhat similar to my own, added to the dread of being deceived by mere sur- face shells, recently derived from the shore in the charac- ter of shell-sand, or of the edible species earned inland for food, and then transferred from the ash-pit to the fields, had not only prevented him from following up the dis- 29* 342 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. covery, but even from thinking of it as such. But ho eagerly followed it up now, by*visiting every bank of the boulder-clay in his locality within twenty miles of Thurso, and found them all charged, from top to bottom, with comminuted shells, however great their distance from the sea, or their elevation over it. The fragments lie thick along the course of the Thorsa, where the encroaching stream is scooping out the clay for the first time since its deposition, and laying bare the scratched and furrowed pebbles. They occur, too, in the depths of solitary ravines far amid the moors, and underlie heath, and moss, and vegetable mould, on the exposed hill-sides. The farm- house of Dalemore, twelve miles from Thurso as the crow flies, and rather more than thirteen miles from Wick, 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 every- where in Caithness a shell-bearing deposit ; and no sooner had Mr. Dick determined the fact for himself, at the expense of many a fatiguing journey, and many an hour's hard digging than he found that it had been ascertained OO O' long before, though, from the very inadequate style in which it had been recorded, science had in scarce any degree benefited by the discovery. In 1802 the late Sir John Sinclair, distinguished for his enlightened zeal in developing the agricultural resources of the country, and for originating its statistics, employed a mineralogical sur- veyor to explore the underground treasures of the district; and the surveyor's journal he had printed under the title of "Minutes and Observations drawn up in the course of a Mineralogical Survey of the County of Caithness, aim. 1802^ by John Busby, Edinburgh." Now, in this journal there are frequent references made to the occurrence of marine RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 843 shells in the blue clay. Mr. Dick has copied for me the two following entries, for the work itself I have never seen : "1 802, Sept. 7th. Surveyed down the river [Thorsa] to Geize ; found blue clay-marl, intermixed with marine shells in great abundance." "Sept. 12th. Set off this morning for Dalemore. Bored for shell-marl in the 'grass-park;' found it in one of the quagmires, but to no great extent. Bored for shell-marl in the 'house-park.' Surveyed by the side of the river, and found blue clay- marl in great plenty, intermixed with marine shells, such as those found at Geize. This place is supposed to be about twenty miles from the sea; and is one instance, among many in Caithness, of the ocean's covering the inland country at some former period of time" The state of keeping in which the boulder-shells of Caithness occur is exactly what, on the iceberg theory, might be premised. The ponderous ice-rafts that went grating over the deep-sea bottom, grinding down its rocks into clay, and deeply furroAving its pebbles, must have borne heprily on its comparatively fragile shells. If rocks and pebbles did not escape, the shells must have fared but hardly. And very hardly they have fared: the rather unpleasant casualty of being crushed to death must have been a greatly more common one in those days than in even the present age of railways and machinery. The reader, by passing half a bushel of the common shells of our shores through a barley-mill, as a preliminary opera- tion in the process, and by next subjecting the broken fragments thus obtained to the attritive influence of the waves on some storm-beaten beach for a 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 344 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. all the others is very extraordinary. The Cyprina island- tea is still by no means a rare mollusc on our Scottish shores, and may, on an exposed coast, after a storm, be picked up by dozens, attached to the roots of the deep-sea tangle. It is greatly less abundant, however, than such shells as Purpura lapillus, Mytilus edule, Cardium edule, Littorina littorea, and several others; whereas in the boulder-clay it is, in the proportion of at least ten to one,! more abundant than all the others put together. The great strength of the shell, however, may have in part led to this result ; as I find that its stronger and massier por- tions, those of the umbo and hinge-joint, are exceed- ingly 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 circumfer- ence, and, exclusively of the animal, weighing upwards of nine ounces." KOAV, in a collection of fragments of Cyprina sent me by Mr. Dick, disinterred from the boulder-clay in various localities in the neighborhood of Thurso, and weighing in all about four ounces, I have detected the broken remains of no fewer than sixteen hinge joints. And on the same principle through which the stronger fragments of Cyprina were preserved in so much larger proportion than the weaker ones, may Cyprina itself have been preserved in much larger proportion than its more fragile neighbors. Occasionally, however, escaped, as if by accident, characteristic fragments are found of shells by no means very strong, such as Myti- lus, Tettina, and Astarte. Among the univalves I can dis- tinguish Dentaliiun entale, Purpura lapillus, Turritella terebra, and Littorina littorea, all existing shells, but all common also to at least the later deposits of the Crag. And among the bivalves Mr. Dick enumerates, besides RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 345 the prevailing Cyprina islandica, Venus casina, Car- dium edule, Cardiiim echinatum^ Mytihts editle, Astarte dcmmoniensis (sulcata), and Astarte compressa, with a Mactra^ Artemis, and Tettina.* All the determined spe- cies 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 liv- ing shells at the present day on our Scottish coasts. It seems scarce possible to fix the age of a deposit so broken in its organisms, on the principle that would first seek to determine its per centage of extinct shells as the data on which to found. One has to search sedulously and long ere a fragment turns up sufficiently entire for the purpose of specific identification, even when it belongs to a well- known living shell ; and did the clay contain some six or eight per cent, of the extinct in a similarly broken condi- tion (and there is no evidence that it contains a single per cent, of extinct shells), I know not how, in the circum- stances, the fact could ever be determined. A lifetime might be devoted to the task of fixing their real propor- tion, and yet be devoted to it in vain. All that at present can be said is, that, judging from what appears, the boulder-clays of Caithness, and with them the boulder-clays of Scotland generally, and of the Isle of Man, for they are all palpably connected with the same iceberg phenom- ena, 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 * Mr. Dick has since disinterred from out the boulder-clays of the Burn of Freswick, Patella vulgata, Buccinum undatum, Fesus antiquus, Rostel- laria, Pes pelicana, a Natica, Lutrariu, and Balanus. 846 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. at which the clay itself occurs, and not only connected with the iceberg phenomena by the closest juxtaposition, but also testifying distinctly to its agency by the extremely com- minuted state in which we find them, tell us, not only according to old John Busby, " that the ocean covered the inland country at some former period of time," but that it covered it to a great height at a time geologically recent, when our seas were inhabited by exactly the same mollusca as inhabit them now, and so far as yet appears, by none others. I have not yet detected the boulder-clay at more than from six to eight hundred feet over the level of the sea ; but the travelled boulders I have often found at more than a thousand feet over it ; and Dr. John Fleming, the correctness of whose observations few men acquainted with the character of his researches or of his mind will be dis- posed to challenge, has informed me that he has detected the dressed and polished surfaces at least four hundred feet higher. There occurs a greenstone boulder, of from twelve to fourteen tons weight, says Mr. M'Laren, in his " Geology of Fife and the Lothians," on the south side of Black Hill (one of the Pentland range), at about fourteen hundred feet over the sea. Now fourteen or fifteen hundred feet, taken as the extreme height of the dressings, though they are said to occur greatly higher, would serve to submerge in the ice- berg ocean almost the whole agricultural region of Scotland. The common hazel ( Corylus avdlana) ceases to grow in the latitude of the Grampians, at from one thousand two hundred to one thousand five hundred feet over the sea level ; the common bracken (Pteris aquilina) at about the same height ; and com is never successfully cultivated at a greater altitude. Where the hazel and bracken cease to grow, it is in vain to attempt growing corn.* In the period * That similarity of condition in which the hazel and the harrier cerealia thrive was noted by our north-country farmers of the old School, long ere RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 347 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- terial superficies of Scotland w r as restricted to what are now its barren and mossy regions, and formed, instead of one continuous land, merely three detached groups of islands, the small Cheviot and Hartfell group, the greatly larger Grampian and Ben Nevis group, and a group inter- mediate in size, extending from Mealfourvonny, on the northern shores of Loch Ness, to the Maiden Paps of Caithness. The more ancient boulder-clays of Scotland seem to have been formed when the land was undergoing a slow process of subsidence, or, as I should perhaps rather say, when a very considerable area of the earth's surface, including the sea-bottom, as well as the eminences that rose over it, was the subject of a gradual depression ; for little or no altera- tion appears to have taken place at the time in the relative levels of the higher and lower portions of the sinking area : the features of the land in the northern part of the kingdom, from the southern flanks of the Grampians to the Pentland Frith, seemed to have been fixed in nearly the existing forms many ages before, at the close, apparently, of the Oolitic period, and at a still earlier age in the Lammermuir district, to the south. And so the sea around our shores must have deepened in the ratio in which the hills sank. The evidence of this process of subsidence is of a character tolerably satisfactory. The dressed surfaces occur in Scot- land, 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 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 iill.-i the nit nils." 34:8 BAilBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. fully twice that height, on the lofty flanks of Schehallion, a statement, however, which I have had hitherto no oppor- tunity of verifying. They may be found, too, equally well marked, under the existing high-water line ; and it is obvi- ously impossible that the dressing process could have been going on at the higher and lower levels at the same time. When the icebergs were grating along the more elevated rocks, the low-lying ones must have been buried under from three to seven hundred fathoms of water, a depth from three to seven times greater, be it remembered, than that at which the most ponderous iceberg could possibly have grounded, or have in any degree affected the bottom. The dressing process, then, must have been a bit-and-bit process, carried on during either a period of elevation, in which the rising land was subjected, zone after zone, to the sweep of the armed ice from its higher levels downwards, or during a period of subsidence, in which it was subjected to the ice, zone after zone, from its lower levels upwards. And that it was the lower, not the higher levels, that were first dressed, appears evident from the circumstance, that thaugh 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, not- withstanding, as completely dressed under the clay as on the heights above. Had it been a rising land that was sub- o o jected to the attrition of the icebergs, the debris and dress- ings of the higher rocks would have protected the lower from the attrition; and so the thick accumulation of boulder-clay which overlies the old coast line, for instance, would have rested, not on dressed, but on undressed sur- faces. The barer rocks of the lower levels might of course exhibit their scratchings and polishings, like those of the higher; but wherever these scratchings and polishings occurred in the inferior zones, no thick protecting stratum RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 349 of boulder-clay would be found ovei'lying them; and, vice versa, wherever in these zones there occurred thick beds of boulder-clay, there would be detected on the rock beneath no scratchings and polishings. In order to dress the entire surface of a country from the sea-line and under it to the tops of its hills, and at the same time to cover up extensive portions of its low-lying rocks with vast deposits of clay, it seems a necessary condition of the process that it should be carried on piece-meal from the lower level upwards, not from the higher downwards. It interested me much to find, that while from one set of appearances I had been inferring the gradual subsidence of the land during the period of the boulder-clay, the Rev. Mr. Cummincc of King William's College had arrived, o o o * from the consideration of quite a different class of phe- nomena, at a similar conclusion. " It appears to me highly probable," I find him remarking, in his lately published " Isle of man," " that at the commencement of the boulder period there was a gradual sinking of this area [that of the island]. Successively, therefore, the points at different degrees of elevation were brought within the influence of the sea, and exposed to the rake of the tides, charged with masses of ice which had been floated off from the surrounding shores, and bearing on their under surfaces, mud, gravel, and fragments of hard rock." Mr. Gumming goes on to describe, in his volume, some curious appear- ances, which seem to bear direct on this point, in con- nection with a boss of a peculiarly-compounded granite, which occurs in the southern part of the island, about seven hundred feet over the level of the sea. There rise on the western side of the boss two hills, one of which attains to the elevation of nearly seven hundred, and the other of nearly eight hundred feet over it ; and yet both hills to their summits are mottled over with granite boul- 30 350 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. ders, furnished by the comparatively low-lying boss. One of these travelled masses, fully two tons in weight, lies not sixty feet from the summit of the loftier hill, at an altitude of nearly fifteen hundred feet over the sea. Now, it seems extremely difficult to conceive of any other agency than that of a rising sea or of a subsiding land, through which these masses could have been rolled up the steep slopes of the hills. Had the boulder period been a period of elevation, or merely a stationary period, during which the land neither rose nor sank, the travelled boul- ders would not now be found resting at higher levels than that of the parent rock whence they were derived. We occasionally meet on our shores, after violent storms from the sea, stones that have been rolled from their place at low ebb to nearly the line of flood ; but we always find that it was by the waves of the rising, not of the falling tide, that their transport was effected. For whatever removals of the kind take place during an ebbing sea are invariably in an opposite direction; they are removals, not from lower to higher levels, but from higher to lower. The upper subsoils of Scotland bear frequent mark of the clevatory period which succeeded this period of de- pression. 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 over- laid belong evidently to a later time. When, after possi- bly a long protracted period, the land again began to rise, or the sea to fall, the superior portions of the boulder-clay must have been exposed to the action of the tides and waves ; and the same process of separation of parts must have taken place on a large scale, which one occasionally sees taking place in the present time on a comparatively small one, in ravines of the same clay swept by a stream- RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 351 let. 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 wash- ing process of an analogous character, must have taken place in the materials of the more exposed portions of the boulder-clay, during the gradual emergence of the land ; and hence, apparently, those extensive beds of sand and gravel which in so many parts of the kingdom exist, in relation to the clay, as a superior or upper subsoil ; hence, too, occasional beds of a purer clay than that beneath, divested of a considerable portion of its arenaceous com- ponents, and of almost all its pebbles and boulders. This teas /ted clay, a re-formation of the boulder deposit, cast down, mostly in insulated beds in qxiiet localities, where the absence of currents suffered the purer particles held in suspension by the water to settle, forms, in Scotland at least, with, of course, the exception of the ancient fire- clays of the Coal Measures, the true brick and tile clays of the agriculturist and architect. It is to these superior beds that all the recent shells yet found above the existing sea-level in Scotland, from the Dornoch Frith and beyond it, to beyond the Frith of Forth, seem to belong. Their period is much less remote than that of the shells of the boulder-clay, and they rarely occur in the same comminuted condition. They existed, it would appear, not during the chill twilight period, when the land was in a state of subsidence, biit 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 dryland in what is 352 KAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. now Scotland, than the close of the century which had gone before. Scandinavia is similarly rising at the present day, and presents with every succeeding age a more ex- tended breadth of surface. Many of the boulder-stones seem to have been cast down where they now lie, during this latter time. When they occur, as in many instances, high on bare hill-tops, from five to fifteen hundred feet over the sea-level, with neither gravel nor boulder-clay beside them, we of course cannot fix their period. They may have been dropped by ice-floes or shore-ice, where we now find them, at the commencement of the period of elevation, after the clay had been formed ; or they may have been deposited by more ponderous icebergs during its formation, when the land was yet sinking, though dur- ing the subsequent rise the clay may have been washed from around them to lower levels. The boulders, how- ever, which we find scattered over the plains and less elevated hill-sides, with beds of the washed gravel or sand interposed between them and the clay, must have been cast down where they lie, during the elevatory ages. For, had they been washed out of the clay, they would have lain, not over the greatly lighter sands and gravels, but under them. Would that they could write their own histories! The autobiography of a single boulder, with notes on the various floi'as which had sprung up around it, and the various classes of birds, beasts, and insects by which it had been visited, would be worth nine-tenths of all the autobiographies ever published, and a moiety of the remainder to boot. A few hundred yards from the opening of this dell of the boulder-clay, in which I have so long detained the reader, there is a wooded inflection of the bank, formed by the old coast line, in which there stood, about two cen- turies ago, a meal-mill, with the cottage of the miller, and RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 853 which was once known as the scene of one of those super- naturalities that belong to the times of the witch and the fairy. The upper anchoring-place of the bay lies nearly opposite the inflection. A shipmaster, who had moored his vessel in this part of the roadstead, some time in the latter days of the first Charles, Avas one fine evening sit- ting alone on deck, awaiting the return of his seamen, who had gone ashore, and. amusing himself in watching the lights that twinkled from the scattei-ed 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 cot- tage. At length, however, it also disappeared, and all was dark around the shores of the bay, as a belt of black vel- vet. Suddenly a hissing noise was heard overhead ; the shipmaster looked up, and saw what seemed to be one of those meteors known as falling stars, slanting athwart the heavens in the direction of the cottage, and increasing in size and brilliancy as it neared the earth, until the wooded ridge and the shore could be seen as distinctly from the ship-deck as by day. A dog howled piteously from one of the out-houses, an owl whooped from the wood. The meteor descended until it almost touched the roof, when a cock crew from within; its progress seemed 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 considerably higher than at first, again sank in the line of the cottage, to be again arrested by the crowing of the cock. It mounted yet a third time, rising higher still; and, in its last descent, had almost touched the roof, when the faint clap of wings was heard as if whispered over the 30* 354 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. water, followed by a still louder note of defiance from tho cock. The meteor rose with a bound, and, continuing to ascend until it seemed lost among the stars, did not again appear. Next night, however, at the same hour, the same scene was repeated in all its circumstances : the meteor descended, the dog howled, the OAV! whooped, the cock crew. On the following morning the shipmaster visited the miller's, and, curious to ascertain how the cottage would fare when the cock was away, he purchased the bird ; and, sailing from the bay before nightfall, did not return until about a month after. On his voyage inwards, he had no sooner doubled an intervening headland, than he stepped forward to the bows to take a peep at the cottage : it had vanished. As he approached the anchoring ground, he could discern a heap of blackened stones occupying the place where it had stood ; and he was informed on going ashore, that it had been burnt to the ground, no one knew how, on the very night he had quitted the bay. He had it re-built and furnished, says the story, deeming himself what one of the old school- men perhaps term the occasional cause of the disaster. He also returned the cock, probably a not less important benefit, and no after accident befel the cottage. About fifteen years ago there was a human skeleton dug up near the scene of the tradition, with the skull, and the bones of the legs and feet, lying close together, as if the body had been huddled up twofold in a hole ; and this discovery led to that of the story, which, though at one time often repeated and extensively believed, had been suffered to sleep in the memories of a few elderly people for nearly sixty years. CHAPTER VII. Relation of the deep red stone of Cromarty to the Ichthyolite Beds of the System Ruins of a Fossil-charged Bed Journey to Avoch Red Dye of the Boulder-clay distinct from the substance itself Variation of Coloring in the Boulder-clay Red Sandstone accounted for Hard-pan how formed A reforn^d Garden An ancient Battle-field Antiquity of Geologic and Human History compared Burn of Killein Observation made in boy- hood confirmed Fossil-nodules Fine Specimen of Coccosteus decipiens Blank strata of Old Red New View respecting the Rocks of Black Isle A Trip up Moray and Dingwall Friths Altered color of the Boulder-clay Up the Auldgrande River Scenery of the great Conglomerate Graphic Description Laidlaw's Boulder Vaccinium myrtillus Profusion of Trav- elled Boulders The Boulder Clach. Mattock, Its zones of Animal and Vege- table Life. THE ravine excavated by the mill-dam showed me what I had never so well seen before, the exact relation borne by the deep red stone of the Cromarty quarries to the ich- thyolite beds of the system. It occupies the same place, and belongs to the same period, as those superior beds of the Lower Old Red Sandstone which are so largely devel- oped 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 thick- ness over the upper fish-beds, though I was far from reach- ing 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 856 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. argillaceous shale, mingled with their characteristic ichthy- olitic nodules, in one of which I found a small specimen of Cheiracanthus. The projecting edge of some fossil-charged bed had been struck, mayhap, by an iceberg, and dashed into ruins, just as the subsiding land had brought the spot within reach of the attritive ice ; and the broken heap thus detached had been shortly afterwards covered up, without mixture of any other deposit, by the red boulder-clay. On : the previous day I had detected the fish-beds in another new locality, one of the ravines of the lawn of Cromarty House, where the gray shale, concealed by a covering of soil and sward for centuries, had been laid br.re during the storm by a swollen runnel, and a small nodule, inclosing a characteristic plate of Pterichthys, washed out. And my next object in to-day's journey, after exploring this ravine of the boulder-clay, was to ascertain whether the beds did not also occur in a ravine of the parish of Avoch, some eight or nine miles away, which, when lying a-bed one night in Edinburgh, I remembered having crossed when a boy, at a point which lies considerably out of the ordinary route of the traveller. I had remarked on this occasion, as the resuscitated recollection intimated, that the precipices of the Avoch ravine bore, at the unfrequented point, the peculiar aspect which I learned many years after to associ- ate 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 period of life, and preserved in it for full thirty years, as desirous to extend my knowledge of the fossiliferous beds of a system to the elucidation of which I had peculiarly de- voted myself. As the traveller reaches the flat moory uplands of the parish, where the water stagnates amid heath and moss over a thin layer of peaty soil, he finds the underlying RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 357 boulder-clay, as shown in the chance sections, spotted and streaked with patches of a grayish- white. There is the same mixture of arenaceous and aluminous particles in the white as in the red portions of the mass ; for, as we see so frequently exemplified in the spots and streaks of the Red Sandstone formations, whether Old or New, the coloring matter has been discharged without any accompanying change of composition in the substance which it per- vaded ; evidence enough that the red dye must be some- thing distinct from the substance itself, just as the dye of a handkerchief is a thing distinct from the silk or cotton yarn of which the handkerchief has been woven. The stagnant water above, acidulated by its various vegetable solutions, seems to have been in some Avay connected with these appearances. In every case in which a crack through the clay gives access to the oozing moisture, we see the sides bleached, for several feet downwards, to nearly the color of pipe-clay ; we find the surface, too, when it has been divested of the vegetable soil, presenting for yards together the appearance of sheets of half-bleached linen : the red ground of the clay has been acted upon by the percolating fluid, as the red ground of a Bandanna handker- chief is acted upon through the openings in the perforated lead, by the discharging chloride of lime. The peculiar chemistry through which these changes are effected might be found, carefully studied, to throw much light on similar phenomena in the older formations. There are quarries in the New Red Sandstone in which almost every mass of stone presents a different shade of color from that of its neighboring mass, and qiiarries 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 communi- cated, in every instance, not during deposition, nor after they had been hardened into stone but when, like the 358 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. boulder-clay, they existed in an intermediate state. Be it remarked, too, that the red clay here, evidently derived from the abrasion of the red rocks beneath, is in dye and composition almost identical with the substance on which, as an unconsolidated sandstone, the bleaching influences, whatever their charactei*, had operated in the Palaeozoic period, so many long ages before ; it is a repetition of the ancient experiment in the Old Red, that we now see going on in the boulder-clay. It is further worthy of no- tice, that the bleached lines of the clay exhibit, viewed horizontally, when the overlying vegetable mould has been removed, and the whitened surface in immediate con- tact with it paired off, a polygonal arrangement, like that assumed by the cracks in the bottom of clayey pools dried up in summer by the heat of the sun. Can these possibly indicate the ancient rents and fissures of the boulder-clay, formed, immediately after the upheaval of the land, in the first process of drying, and remaining afterwards open enough to receive what the uncracked portions of the sur- face excluded, the acidulated bleaching fluid ? The kind of ferruginous pavement of the boulder-clay known to the agriculturist as^>a??, 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 care- ful notice of the geologist. It serves to throw some light on the origin of those continuous bands of clayey or aren- aceous ironstone, which in the older formations in which vegetable matter abounds, whether Oolitic or Cai'boni- ferous, are of such common occurrence. The pan is a stony stratum, scarcely less indurated in some localities than sandstone of the average hardness, that rests like a pavement on the surface of the boulder-clay, and that gen- RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 359 erally bears atop a thin layer of sterile soil, darkened by a russet covering of stunted heath. The binding cement of the pan is, as I have said, ferruginous, and seems to have been derived from the vegetable covering above. Of all plants, the heaths are found to contain most iron. Nor is it difficult to conceive how, in comparatively flat tracts of heathy moor, where the surface water sinks to the stiff subsoil, and on which one generation of plants after another has been growing and decaying for many centuries, the minute metallic particles, disengaged in the process of decomposition, and carried down by the rains to the im- permeable 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 occui-s, we find the superincumbent soil doomed to br.r- renness, arid and sun-baked during the summer and autumn months, and, from the same cause, overcharged with moisture in winter and spring. My fi'iend Mr. Swan- son, when schoolmaster of Nigg, found a large garden attached to the school-house so inveterately sterile as to be scarce worth cultivation ; a thin stratum of mould rested on a hard impermeable pavement of pan, through which not a single root could penetrate to the tenacious but not unkindly subsoil below. He set himself to work in his leisure hours, and bit by bit laid bare and broke up the pavement. The upper mould, long divoi'ced 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 veg- etation than it had ever borne under the more careful management of my friend. This ferruginous pavement of the boulder-clay may be deemed of intei-est to the geol- ogist, as a curious instance of deposition in a dense me- 360 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. dium, and as illustrative of the changes which may be effected on previously existing strata, through the agency of an overlying vegetation. I passed, on my way, through the ancient battle-field to which I have incidentally referred in the story of the Miller of Resolis.* Modern improvement has not yet marred it by the plough ; and so it still bears on its brown surface many a swelling tumulus and flat oblong mound, and where the high road of the district passes along its eastern edge the huge gray cairn, raised, says tradition, over the body of an ancient Pictish king. But the contest of which it was the scene belongs to a profoundly dark period, ere the gray dawn of Scottish history began. As shown by the remains of ancient art occasionally dug up on the moor, it was a conflict of the times of the stone battle-axe, the flint arrow-head, and the unglazed sepul- chral urn, imindebted for aught of its symmetry to the turning-lathe, times when there were heroes in abun- dance, but no scribes. And the cairn, about a hundred feet in length and breadth, by about twenty in height, with its long hoary hair of overgrown lichen waving in the breeze, and the trailing club-moss shooting upwards from its base along its sides, bears in its every lineament full mark of its great age. It is a mound striding across the stream of centuries, to connect the past with the pre- sent. And yet, after all, what a mere matter of yesterday its extreme antiquity is! My explorations this morning bore reference to but the later eras of the geologist ; the portion of the geologic volume which I was attempting to decipher and translate formed the few terminal paragraphs of its concluding chapter. And yet the finis had been * For this story, see " Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland," chap. xxv. RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST- SGI added to them for thousands of years ere this latter anti- quity 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 tho lapse of cen- turies, 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 rela- tion 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 ad- vanced into middle life, regards them as still fresh and recent. I reached the Burn of Killein, the scene of my pur- posed 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 i mere observative instinct as Dame Quickly, when she took note of the sea-coal fire, the round table, the parcel-gilt goblet, and goodwife Keech's dish of prawns dressed in vinegar, as adjuncts of her interview with old Sir John 31 362 KAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. when he promised to marry her. These .are unequivocally the ichthyolitic beds, whether they contain ichthyolites or no." The first nodule I laid open presented inside merely a pale oblong patch in the centre, which I examined in vain with the lens, though convinced of its organic origin, for a single scale. Proceeding farther down the stream, I picked a nodule out of a second and lower bed, which con- tained more evidently its organism, a finely-reticulated fragment, that at first sight reminded me of some delicate festinella of the Silurian system. It proved, however, to be part of the tail of a Cheiracanthus, exhibiting what is rarely shown the interior surfaces of those minute rectangular scales which in this genus lie over the caudal fin, ranged in right lines. A second nodule presented me with the spines of Diplacanthus striatus ; and still farther down the stream, for the beds are numerous here, and occupy in vertical extent veiy considerable space in the system, I detected a stratum of bulky nodules charged with fragments of Coccosteus, belonging chiefly to two species, Coccosteus decipiens and Coccosteus cuspidatus. All the specimens bore conclusive evidence regarding the geologic place and character of the beds in which they occur ; and in one of the number, a specimen of Coccosteus decipienS) sufficiently fine to be transferred to my knap- sack, 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 charac- teristic breadth entire. It was the plates of this species, first found in the flagstones of Caithness, which were taken for those of a fresh-water tortoise ; and hence apparently its specific name, decipiens ; it is the deceiving Coccos- teus. I disinterred, in the course of my explorations, as many nodules as lay within reach, now and then long- RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 363 ing for a pick-axe, and a companion robust and persever- ing enough to employ it with effect ; and after seeing all that was to be seen in the bed of the stream and the pre- cipices, I retraced my steps up the dell to the highway. And then, striking off across the moor to the north, ascending in the system as I climbed the eminence, which forms here the central ridge of the old Maolbuie Common, I spent some little time in a quarry of pale red sand- stone, known, from the moory height on which it has been opened, as the quarry of the Maolbuie. But here, as else- where, the folds of that upper division of the Lower Old Red in which it has been excavated contain nothing or- ganic. 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 devel- oped, it is invariably barren of remains, cannot, I sus- pect, be very satisfactorily explained. Fossils occur both over and under it, in rocks that seem as little favorable to their preservation; but during that intervening period which its blank strata represent, at least the species of all the ichthyolites of the system seem to have changed, and, so far as is yet known, the genus Coccosteus died out entirely. The Black Isle has been elaborately described in the last Statistical Account of the Parish of Avoch as comprising at least the analogues of three vast geologic systems. The Great Conglomerate, and the thick bed of coarse sand- stone of corresponding character that lies over it, compose all which is not primary rock of that south-eastern ridge of the district which forms the shores of the Moray Frith ; and they are represented in the Account as Old Red Sand- stone proper. Then, next in order, forming the base of a parallel ridge, come those sandstone and argillaceous bands to which the ichthyolite beds belong; and these, 364 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. though at the time the work appeared their existence in the locality could be but guessed at, are described as rep- resentatives 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 back-bone ridge of the district. "And these," says the writer, "we have little hesitation in assigning to the New Red, or variegated Sandstone formation." I remember that some thirteen years ago, in part misled by authority, and in part really afraid to represent beds of such an enormous aggregate thickness as all belonging to one inconsiderable oo o o o formation, for such was the character of the Old Red Sandstone at the time, I ventured, though hesitatingly, and with less of detail, on a somewhat similar statement regarding the sandstone deposits of the parish of Crom- arty. But true it is, notwithstanding, that the stratified rocks of the Black Isle are composed generally, not of the analogues of three systems, but of merely a fractional por- tion of a single system, a fact previously established in other parts of the district, and which my discovery of this day in the Burn of Killein served yet farther to confirm in relation to that middle portion of the tract in which the parish of Avoch is situated. The geologic records, unlike the Sybilline books, grow in volume and number as one pauses and hesitates over them ; demanding, however, witli 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 shad- ows, however, were falling brown and deep on the bleak Maolbuie, as I passed, on my return, the solitary cairn ; RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 3G5 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 passen- gers every Wednesday; and then passing direct through the village, I took the western road which winds along the shore towards Strathpeffer, skirting on the right the ancient province of the Munroes. The day was clear and genial ; and the wide-spreading woods of this part of the country, a little touched by their autumnal tints of brown and yellow, gave a warmth of hue to the landscape, which at an earlier season it wanted. A few slim streaks of semi-transparent mist, that barred the distant hill-peaks, and a few towering piles of intensely white cloud, that shot across the deep blue of the heavens, gave warning that the earlier part of the day was to be in all probability the better part of it, and that the harvest of observation which it was ultimately to yield might be found to depend on the prompt use made of the passing hour. What first attracts the attention of the geologist, in journeying west- wards, is the altered color of the boulder-clay, as exhibited in ditches by the way-side, or along the shore. It no longer presents that characteristic red tint, borrowed from the red sandstone beneath, so prevalent over the Black Isle, and in Easter Ross generally ; but is of a cold leaden hue, not unlike that which it wears above the Coal Measures of the south, or over the flagstones of Caithness. The altered color here is evidently a consequence of the large development, in Ferindonald and Strathpeffer, of the ichthyolitic members of the Old Red, existing chiefly as fetid bituminous breccias and dark-colored sandstones: 31* 366 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. the boulder-clay of the locality forms the dressings, not of red, but of blackish-gray rocks ; and, as almost everywhere else in Scotland, its trail lies to the east of the strata, from which it was detached in the character of an impalpable mud by the age-protracted grindings of the denuding agent. It abounds in masses of bituminous breccia, some of which, of great size, seem to have been drifted direct from the valley of Strathpeffer, and are identical in struc- ture 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 fis- sure, so deep and dark, that in many places the water can- not be seen, and so narrow, that the trees which shoot out from the opposite sides interlace their branches atop. Large banks of the gray boulder-clay, laid open by the river, and charged with fragments of dingy sandstone and dark-colored breccia, testify, along the lower reaches of the stream, to the near neighborhood of the ichthyolitic member of the Old Red ; but where the banks contract, we find only its lowest member, the Great Conglomerate. This last is by far the most picturesque member of the system, abrupt and bold of outline in its hills, and mural in its precipices. And nowhere does it exhibit a wilder or more characteristic beauty than at the tall narrow portal of the Auldgrande, where the river, after wailing for miles in a pent-up channel, narrow as one of the lanes of old Edinburgh, and hemmed in by walls quite as perpendicular, and nearly EAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 867 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 be- come 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 succu- lent shrubs, that love the damp shade and the frequent driz- zle 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 labyiinthine 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 be- tween, 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 chan- nel swept them down till they dropped where they now lie, just where the widening bottom first served to dissipate the force of the current. And over the sullen pool in front we may see the stern pillars of the portal rising from eighty to a hundred feet in height, and scarce twelve feet apart, like the massive obelisks of some Egyptian temple; while, in gloomy vista within, projection starts out beyond projec- tion, 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 368 GAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. subterranean habitat, tor here the rays of the sun never fall ; the dead, mossy water beneath, from which the cliffs rise so abruptly, bears the hue of molten pitch ; the trees, fast anchored in the rock, shoot out their branches across the opening, to form a thick tangled roof, at the height of a hundred and fifty feet overhead; while from the recesses within, where the eye fails to penetrate, there issues a combination of the strangest and wildest sounds ever yet produced by water : there is the deafening rush of the tor- rent, blent as if with the clang of hammers, the roar of vast bellows, and the confused gabble of a thousand voices. The sun, hastening to its setting, shone red, yet mellow, through the foliage of the wooded banks on the west, where, high above, they first curve from the sloping level of the fields, to bend over the stream ; or fell more direct on the jutting cliffs and bosky dingles opposite, burnishing them as if with gold and fire ; but all was coldly-hued at the bottom, where the torrent foamed gray and chill under the brown shadow of the banks; and where the narrow portal opened an untrodden way into the myste- rious recesses beyond, the shadoAV deepened almost into blackness. The scene lacked but a ghost to render it per- fect. 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 my- self upwards from the bed of the stream along 'the face of a precipice, and, reaching its sloping top, forced my w:iy to the wood above, over a steep bank covered with tan- gled underwood, and a slim succulent herbage, that sick- ened 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 broken- ness of the ground permitted, I reached a huge mass of RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 369 travelled rock, that had been dropped in the old boulder period within a yard's length of the brink. It is composed of a characteristic granitic gneiss of a pale flesh-color, streaked with black, that, in the hand specimen, can scarce be distinguished from a true granite, but which, viewed in the mass, presents, in the arrangement of its intensely dark mica, evident marks of stratification, and which is remarkable, among other things, for furnishing almost all the very large boulders of this part of the country. Un- like many of the granitic gneisses, it is a fine solid stone, and would cut well. When I had last the pleasure of spending a few hours with the late Mr. William Laidlaw, the trusted friend of Sir Walter Scott, he intimated to me his intention, pointing to a boulder of this species of gneiss, of having it cut into two oblong pedestals, with which he pui-posed flanking the entrance to the man- sion-house of the chief of the Rosses, the gentleman whose property he at that time superintended. It was, he said, both in appearance and history, the most remark- able stone on the lands of Balnagown; and so he was desirous that it should be exhibited at Balnagown Castle to the best advantage. But as he fell shortly after into infirm health, and resigned his situation, I know not that he ever carried his purpose into effect. The boulder here, beside the chasm, measures about twelve feet in length and breadth, by from five to six in height, and contains from eight to nine hundred cubic feet of stone. On its upper table-like surface I found a few patches of moss and lichen, and a slim reddening tuft of the Vacciniutn myrtillus^ still bearing, late as was the season, its half-dozen blae- berries. This pretty little plant occurs in great profusion along the steep edges of the Auklgrande, where its deli- cate bushes, springing up amid long heath and ling, and crimsoned by the autumnal tinge, gave a peculiar warmth 370 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. and richness this evening to those bosky spots under the brown trees, or in immediate contact Avith 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 play- things ; and I was now chiefly engaged with the deep chasm and the huge boulder. Chasm and boulder had come to have greatly more of interest to me than the del- icate berries, or than even that sovereign dispeller of ennui and low spirits, an adventurous scramble among the cliffs. In what state did the chasm exist when the huge boulder, detached, mayhap, at the close of a severe frost, from some island of the archipelago that is now the northern Highlands of Scotland, was suffered to drop beside it, from some vast ice-floe drifting eastwards on the tide ? In all probability merely as a fault in the Conglo- merate, similar to many of those faults which in the Coal Measures of the southern districts we find occupied by continuous dikes of trap. But in this northern region, where the trap-rocks are unknown, it must have been filled up with the boulder-clay, or with some still more ancient accumulation of debris. And when the land had risen, and the streams, swollen into rivers, flowed along the hol- lows which they now occupy, the loose rubbish would in the lapse of ages gradually wash downwards to the sea, as the stones thrown from the fields above were washed downwards in a later time ; and thus the deep fissure would ultimately be cleared out. The boulder-stones lie thickly in this neighborhood, and over the eastern half of Ross-shire, and the Black Isle generally ; though for the RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST. 871 last century they have been gradually disappearing from the more cultivated tracts on which there were fences or farm-steadings to be built, or where they obstructed the course of the plough. We found them occurring in every conceivable situation, high on hillsides, where the shep- herd crouches beside them for shelter in a shower, deep in the open sea, where they entangle the nets of the fish- erman, on inland moors, where in some remote age they were painfully rolled together, to form the Druidical circle or Picts'-house, or on the margin of the coast, where they had been piled over one another at a later time, as protecting bulwarks against the encroachments of the waves. They lie strewed more sparingly over extended plains, or on exposed heights, than in hollows sheltered from the west by high land, where the current, when it dashed high on the hill-sides, must have been diverted from its easterly course, and revolved in whirling eddies. On the top of the fine bluff hill of Fyrish, which I so ad- mired to-day, each time I caught a glimpse of its purple front through the woods, and which shows how noble a mountain the Old Red Sandstone may produce, the boul- ders lie but sparsely. I especially marked, however, when last on its summit, a ponderous traveller of a vividly green hornblende, resting on a bed of pale yellow sandstone, fully a thousand feet over the present high-water level. But towards the east, in what a seaman would term the bight of the hill, the boulders have accumulated in vast numbers. They lie so closely piled along the course of the river Alness, about half a mile above the village, that it is with difficulty the waters, when in flood, can force their passage through. For here, apparently, when the tide swept along the hill-side, many an ice-floe, detained in the shelter by the revolving eddy, dashed together in rude collision, and shook their stony burdens to the but- 372 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. torn. Immediately to the east of the IOAV promontory on which the town of Cromarty is built there is another ex- tensive accumulation of boulders, some of them of great size. They occupy exactly the place to which I have oftener than once seen the drift-ice of the upper part of the Cromarty Frith, set loose by a thaw, and then carried seawards by the retreating tide, forced back by a violent storm from the east, and the fragments ground against each other into powder. And here, I doubt not, of old, when the sea stood greatly higher than now, and the ice- floes were immensely larger and more numerous than those formed, in the existing circumstances, in the upper shallows of the Frith, would the fierce north-east have charged home with similar effect, and the broken masses have divested themselves of their boulders. The Highland chieftain of one of our old Gaelic tradi- tions 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, how- ever, to tell them any stoiy of mine, but to urge them to tell theirs to me. But, lacking the fine ear of Hans An- derson, the Danish poet, who can hear flowers and butter- flies talk, and understand the language of birds, I have as yet succeeded in extracting from them no such articulate reply "As Meranon's image, long renowned of old By fabling Nilus, to the quivering touch Of Titan's ray, with each repulsive string Consenting, sounded through the warbling air." And yet, who can doubt that, were they a little more communicative, their stories of movement in the past, with the additional circumstances connected with the places which they have occupied ever since they gave RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 373 over travelling, would be exceedingly curious ones? Among the boulder group to the east of Cromarty, the most ponderous individual stands so exactly on the low- water line of our great Lammas tides, that though its shoreward edge may be reached dry-shod from four to six times every twelvemonth, no one has ever succeeded in walking dry shod round it. I have seen a strong breeze from the west, prolonged for a few days, prevent its dry- ing, 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 centiiry, of certain ebbs each season, which, when no dis- turbing atmospheric phenomena interfere with their opera- tion, are sure to lay it dry, demonstrate, that during that period no change, even the most minute, has taken place on our coasts, in the relative levels of sea and shore. The waves have considerably encroached, during even the last half-century, on the shores immediately opposite ; but it must have been, as the stone shows, simply by the attri- tion of the waves, and the consequent lowering of the beach, not through any rise in the ocean, or any depres- sion of the land. The huge boulder here has been known for ages as the Clach Mullock, or accursed stone, from the circumstance, says tradition, that a boat was once wrecked upon it dur- ing 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 ex- ' treme line of ebb imparts a peculiar character to the vari- ous productions, animal and vegetable, which we find adhering to it. They occur in zones, just as on lofty hills the botanist finds his agricultural, moorland, and alpine 32 374 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 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 Lobiilaria digitata, dead man's hand, the orange colored and the pale, with a species of sertularia ; and the characteristic vegetable is the rough-stemmed tangle, or cuvy. In the zone immediately above the low- est, these productions disappear ; the characteristic animal, if animal it be, is a flat yellow sponge, the Halichond.ria papillaris, remarkable chiefly for its sharp siliceous spi- cula and its strong phosphoric smell ; and the characteris- tic vegetable is the smooth-stemmed tangle, or queener. In yet another zone we find the common limpet and the vesi- cular kelp-weed ; and the small gray balanus and serrated kelp-weed form the productions of the top. We may see exactly the same zones occurring in broad belts along the shore, each zone indicative of a certain overlying depth of water ; but it seems curious enough to find them all existing in succession on one boulder. Of the boulder and its story, however, more in my next. CHAPTER VIII. Imaginary Autobiography of the Clack Mnlloch Boulder Its Creation Its long night of unsummed Centuries Laid open to light on a desert Island Surrounded by an Arctic Vegetation Undermined by the rising Sea Locked up and floated off on an Ice-field At rest on the Sea-bottom Another Night of unsnmmed Years The Boulder raised again above the waves by the rising of the Land Beholds an altered Country Pine For- ests and Mammals Another Period of Ages passes The Boulder again floated off by an Iceberg Finally at rest on the Shore of Cromarty Bay- Time and Occasion of naming it Strange Phenomena accounted for by Earth- quakes How the Boulder of Petty Bay was moved The Boulder of Auld- grande The old Highland Paupers The little Parsi Girl Her Letter to her Papa But one Human Nature on Earth Journey resumed Conon Burying Ground An aged Couple Gossip. THE natural, and, if I may so speak, topographical, his- tory of the Glacfi Malloch, including, of course, its zoology and botany, with notes of those atmospheric effects on the tides, and of that stability for ages of the existing sea-level, which it indicates, would of itself form one very interesting chapter : its geological history would furnish another. It would probably tell, if it once fairly broke silence and became autobiographical, first of a feverish dream, of intense molten heat and overpowering pressure; and then of a busy time, in which the free molecules, as at once the materials and the artisans of the mass, began to build, each according to its nature, under the superintend- ence of a curious chemistry, here forming sheets of black mica, there rhombs of a dark-green hornblende and a flesh- colored feldspar, yonder amorphous masses of a translucent quartz. It would add further, that at length, when the 376 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. slow process was over, and the entire space had been occu, pied to the full by plate, molecule, and crystal, the red fiery twilight of the dream deepened into more than mid- night gloom, and a chill unconscious night descended on the sleeper. The vast Paleozoic period passes by, the scarce less protracted Secondary ages come to a close, the Eocene, Miocene, Pliocene epochs are ushered in and terminate, races begin and end, families and orders are born and die ; but the dead, or those whose deep slumber admits not of dreams, take no note of time ; and so it would tell how its long night of unsummed centuries seemed, like the long night of the grave, compressed into a moment. The marble silence is suddenly broken by the rush of an avalanche, that tears away the superincumbent masses, rolling them into the sea; and the ponderous block, laid open to the light, finds itself on the bleak shore of a desert island of the northern Scottish archipelago, with- a wintry scene of snow-covered peaks behind, and an ice-mottled ocean before. The winter passes, the cold severe spring comes on, and day after day the field-ice goes floating 1 >y, 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 nifjrmn 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 blos- soms of the sea-pink. Xot a few of the plants of our exist- ing sea-shores and of our loftier hill-tops are still identical RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 377 in species ; but wide zones of rich herbage, with many a fertile field and many a stately tree, intervene betAveen the bare marine belts and the bleak insulated eminences ; and thus, the alpine, notwithstanding its identity with the littoral flora, has been long divorced from it ; but in this early time the divorce had not yet taken place, nor for ages thereafter; and the same plants that sprang around the sea-margin rose also along the middle slopes to the mountain-summits. The landscape is treeless and bare, and a hoary lichen whitens the moors, and waves, as the years pass by, in pale tufts, from the disinterred stone, now covered with weather-stains, green and gray, and standing out in bold and yet bolder relief from the steep hill-side as the pulverizing frosts and washing rains bear away the lesser masses from around it. The sea is slowly rising, and the land, in proportion, narrowing its flatter margins, and yielding up its wider valleys to the tide ; the low green island of one century forms the half-tide skerry, darkened with algae, of another, and in yet a third exists but as a deep-sea rock. As its summit disappears, groups of hills, detached from the land, become islands, skerries, deep-sea rocks, in turn. At length the waves at full wash within a few yards of the granitic block. And now, yielding to the undermining influences, just as a blinding snow-shower is darkening the heavens, it comes thundering down the steep into the sea, where it lies immediately beneath the high-water line, surrounded by a wide float of pulverized ice, broken by the waves. A keen frost sets in ; the half- fluid mass around is bound up for many acres into a solid raft, that clasps fast in its rigid embrace the rocky frag- ment ; 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, 32* 378 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. finally, caught by the easterly current, it drifts away into the open ocean. And then, far from its original bed in the rock, amid the jerkings of a cockling sea, the mass breaks through the supporting float, and settles far beneath, amid the green and silent twilight of the bottom, where its mosses and lichens yield their place to stony encrustations of deep purple, and to miniature thickets of arboraceous zoophites. The many-colored Acalcphaa float by; the many-armed Sepiadsc shoot over; while shells that love the profounder depths, the black Modiola and delicate Anomia, anchor along the sides of the mass ; and where thickets of the deep-sea tangle spread out their long, streamer-like fronds to the tide, the strong Cyprina and many-ribbed Astarte shelter by scores amid the reticulations of the short woody stems and thick-set roots. A sudden darkness comes on, like that which fell upon Sinbad when the gigantic roc descended upon him; the sea-surface is fully sixty fathoms over head ; but even at this great depth an enormous ice- berg grates heavily against the bottom, crushing into frag- ments 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 tinsummed year has also passed, there comes another change. The period of depression and of the boulder-clay is over. The water has shallowed as the sea- line gradually sank, or the land was propelled upwards by some elevatory process from below ; and each time the tide falls, the huge boulder now raises over the waters its broad forehead, already hung round with flowing tresses of brown sea-weed, and looks at the adjacent coast. The country has strangely altered its features : it exists no longer as a broken archipelago, scantily covered by a semi-arctic vege- tation, but as a continuous land, still whitened, where the RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 370 great valleys open to the sea, by the pale gleam of local glaciers, and snow-streaked on its loftier hill-tops. But vast forests of dark pine sweep along its hill-sides or selvage its shores ; and the sheltered hollows are enlivened by the lighter green of the oak, the ash, and the elm. Human foot has not yet imprinted its sward ; but its brute inhabitants have become numerous. The cream-colored coat of the wild bull, a speck of white relieved against a ground of dingy green, may be seen far amid the pines, and the long howl of the wolf heard from the nearer thickets. The gigantic elk raises himself from his lair, and tosses his pon- derous horns at the sound; while the beaver, in some sequestered dell traversed by a streamlet, plunges alarmed into his deep coffer-dam, and, rising through the submerged opening of his cell, shelters safely within, beyond reach of pursuit. The great transverse valleys of the country, from its eastern to its western coasts, are still occupied by the sea, they exist as broad ocean-sounds ; and many of the detached hills rise around its shores as islands. The north- ern Sutor forms a bluff high island, for the plains of Easter Ross are still submerged ; and the Black Isle is in reality what in later times it is merely in name, a sea-encircled district, holding a mid-way place between where the Sound of the great Caledonian Valley and the Sounds of the Val- leys of the Conon and Can-on open into the German Ocean. Though the climate has greatly softened, it is still, as the local glaciers testify, ungenial and severe. Winter pro- tracts his stay through the later months of spring; and still, as of old, vast floats of ice, detached from the glaciers, or formed in the lakes and shallower estuaries of the inte- rior, come drifting down the Sounds every season, and disappear in the open sea, or lie stranded along the shores. Ages have again passed : the huge boulder, from the further sinking of the waters, lies dry throughout the 380 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. neaps, and is covered only at the height of each stream- tide ; there is a float of ice stranded on the beach, which consolidates around it during the neap, and is floated off by the stream ; and the boulder, borne in its midst, as of old, again sets out a voyaging. It has reached the narrow opening of the Sutors, swept downwards by the strong ebb current, when a violent storm from the north-east sets in ; and, constrained by antagonist forces, the sweep of the tide on the one hand, and the roll of the waves on the other, the ice-raft deflects into the little bay that lies to the east of the promontory now occupied by the town of Cromarty. And there it tosses, with a hundred more jostling in rude collision ; and at length bursting apart, the Clach Mattock, its journeyings forever over, settles on its final resting-place. In a period long posterior it saw the ultimate elevation of the land. Who shall dare say how much more it witnessed, or decide that it did not form the centre of a rich forest vegetation, and that the ivy did not cling round it, and the wild rose shed its petals over it, when the Dingwall, Moray, and Dornoch Friths existed as sub-aerial valleys, traversed by streams that now enter the sea far apart, but then gathered them- selves 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 Green- sand, and Chalk, to fall into a gulf of the Northern Ocean which intei'vened between the coasts of Scotland and Norway, but closed nearly opposite the mouth of the Tyne, leaving a broad level plain to connect the coasts of England with those of the Continent ! Be this as it may, the present sea-cor.st became at length the common boun- dary of land and sea. And the boulder continued to RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 381 exist for centuries still later as a nameless stone, on which the tall gray heron rested moveless and ghost-like in the evenings, and the seal at mid-day basked lazily in the sun. And then there came a night of fierce tempest, in which the agonizing ciy of drowning men was heard along the shore. When the morning broke, there lay strewed around a few bloated corpses, and the fragments of a broken wreck ; and amid wild execrations and loud sorrow the boulder received its name. Such is the probable history, briefly told, because touched at merely a few detached points, of the huge Clach Mattoch. The incident of the second voyage here is of course altogether imaginary, in relation to at least this special boulder ; but it is to second voyages only that all our positive evidence testifies in the history of its class. The boulders of the St. Lawrence, so well described by Sir Charles Lyell, voyage by thousands eveiy 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- borhood of Culloden. * " In the River St. Lawrence," says Sir Charles Lycll, " the loose ice accumulates on the shoals during the winter, at which season the water is low. The separate fragments of ice arc readily frozen together in a cli- mate where the temperature is sometimes thirty degress 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 gran- ite, 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. Law- rence, 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. 108. 382 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. A Highland minister of the last century, in describing, for Sir John Sinclair's Statistical Account, a large sepul- chral cairn in his parish, attributed its formation to an earthquake ! Earthquakes, in these latter times, are intro- duced, like the heathen gods of old, to bring authors out of difficulties. I do not think, however, and I have the authority of the old critic for at least half the opinion, that either gods or earthquakes should be resorted to by poets or geologists, without special occasion : they ought never to be called in except as a last resort, when there is no way of getting on without them. And I am afraid there have been few more gratuitous invocations of the earthquake than on a certain occasion, some five years ago, when it was employed by the inmate of a north-coun- try manse, at once to account for the removal of the boulder-stone of Petty Bay, and to annihilate at a blow the geology of the Free Church editor of the "Witness. I had briefly stated in one of my papers, in referring to this curious incident, that the boulder of the bay had been " borne nearly three hundred yards outwards into the sea by an enclasping mass of ice, in the course of a single tide." "Xot at all," said the northern clergyman; "the cause assigned is wholly insufficient to produce such an effect. All the ice ever formed in the bay would be insuf- ficient to remove such a boulder a distance, not of three hundred, but even of three yards." The removal of the stone " is referrible to an EAETHQUAKE ! " 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 RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST. 383 off except the stone. In an earthquake on an equally great scale, in the present unsettled state of society, en- dowed clergymen would, I am afraid, be in some danger of falling out of their charges. The boulder beside the Auldgrande has not only, like the Clach Malloeh, a geologic history of its own, but, what some may deem of perhaps equal authority, a my- thologic history also. The inaccessible chasm, impervious to the sun, and ever resounding the wild howl of the tor- tured water, was too remarkable an object to have escaped the notice of the old imaginative Celts ; and they have married it, as was their wont, to a set of stories quite as wild as itself. And the boulder, occupying a nearly cen- tral 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. Im- mediately beside the stone there is what seems to be the beginning of a path leading down to the water; but it stops abruptly at a tree, the last in the descent, and the green and dewy rock sinks beyond for more than a hundred feet, perpendicular as a wall. It Avas at the abrupt termination of this path that a Highlander once saw a beautiful child smiling and stretching out its little hand to him, as it hung half in air by a slender tAvig. 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 story of the Lady of Balconie and her keys is narrated in " Scenes and Lo^onds of the North of Scotland." chap. xi. 384 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. The sun had now got as low upon the hill, and the ra- vine had grown as dark, as when, so long before, the lady of Balconie took her last walk along the sides of the Auld- grande ; and I struck up for the little alpine bridge of a few undressed logs, which has been here thrown across the chasm, at the height of a hundred and thirty feet over the water. As I pressed through the thick underwood, I startled a strange-looking apparition in one of the open spaces beside the gulf, where, as shown by the profusion of plants of vaccinium, the blaeberries had greatly abounded in their season. It was that of an extremely old woman, cadaverously pale and miserable looking, with dotage glistening in her inexpressive, rheum-distilling eyes, and attired in a blue cloak, that had been homely when at its best, and was now exceedingly tattered. She had been poking with her crutch among the bushes, as if looking for berries ; but my approach had alarmed her ; and she stood muttering in Gaelic what seemed, from the tones and repe- tition, to be a few deprecatory sentences. I addressed her in English, and inquired what could have brought to a place so wild and lonely, one so feeble and helpless. " Poor ob- ject!" she muttered in reply, "poor object! very hun- gry;" 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, KAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 385 the sufferings of the extreme poor. Amid present suffering and privation there had apparently mingled in her dotage some dream of early enjoyment, a dream of the days when she had plucked berries, a little herd-girl, on the banks of the Anldgrandc ; and the vision seemed to have sent her out, far advanced in her second childhood, to poke among the bushes with her crutch. My old friend the minister of Alness, uninstalled at the time in his new dwelling, was residing in a house scarce half a mile from the chasm, to which he had removed from the parish manse at the Disruption ; and, availing myself of an invitation of long standing, I climbed the acclivity on which it stands, to pass the night with him. I found, how- ever, that with part of his family, he had gone to spend a few weeks beside the mineral springs of Strath peifer, in the hope of recruiting a constitution greatly weakened by excessive labor, and that the entire household at home con- sisted of but two of the young ladies his daughters, and their ward, the little Buchubai Hormazdji. And who, asks the reader, is this Buchubai Hormazdji? A little Parsi girl, in her eighth year, the daughter of a Christian convert from the ancient faith of Zoroaster, who now labors in the Free Church Mission at Bombay. Bu- chubai, 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, 33 386 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. when she was in full costume, sparkled from her embroidered tiara. I found her exceedingly like little girls at home, save that she seemed more than ordinarily observant and intelli- gent, a consequence mayhap, of that early development, physical and mental, which characterizes her race. She sub- mitted to me, too, when I had got very much into her confi- dence, a letter she had written to her papa from Strathpeffer, which was to be sent him by the next Indian mail. And as it may serve to show that the style of little girls whose fathers were fire-worshippers for three thousand years and more differs in no perceptible quality from the style of little girls whose fathers in considerably less than three thousand were Pagans, Papists, and Protestants by turns, besides passing through the various intermediate forms of belief, I must, after pledging the reader to strict secrecy, submit it to his perusal : "My dearest Papa, I hope you are quite well. lam visiting mamma at present at Strathpeffer. She is much better now than when she was travelling. Mamma's sisters give their love to you, and mamma, and Mr. and Mrs. F. also. They all ask you to pray for them, and they will pray also. There are a great many at water here for sick people to drink out of. The smell of the water is not at all nice. I sometimes drink it. Give my dearest love to Narsion Skishadre, and tell her that I will write to her. Dearest papa." etc. It was a simple thought, which required no reach of mind whatever to grasp, and yet an hour spent with' little Bu- chubai made it tell upon me more powerfully than ever before, that there is in reality but one human nature on the face of the earth. Had I simply read of Buchubai Hormazdji corresponding with her father Hormazdji Pes- tonji, and sending her dear love to her old companion Xarsion Skishadre, the names so specifically different from those HAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 387 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 diiferent from our country folk themselves. I suspect we are misled by associations of this kind when we descant on the peculiarities of race as interposing insur- mountable barriers to the progress of improvement, physi- cal or mental. We overlook, amid the diversities of form, color, and language, the specific identity of the human family. The Celt, for instance, wants, it is said, those powers of sustained application which so remarkably dis- tinguish the Saxon ; and so we agree on the expediency of getting rid of our poor Highlanders by expatriation as soon as possible, and of converting their country into sheep- walks and hunting-parks. It would be surely well to have philosophy enough to remember what, simply through the exercise of a wise faith, the Christian missionary never for- gets, that the peculiarities of race are not specific and ine- radicable, but mere induced habits and idiosyncracies engrafted on the stock of a common nature by accident of circumstance or development ; and that, as they have been wrought into the original tissue through the protracted operation of one set of causes, the operation of another and different set, wisely and perseveringly directed, could scarce fail to unravel and work them out again. They form no part of the inherent design of man's nature, but have merely stuck to it in its transmissive passage downwards and require to be brushed off. There was a time, some four thousand years ago, when Celt and Saxon were represented by but one man and his wife, with their children and their children's wives ; and some sixteen or seventeen centuries earlier all the varieties of the species, Caucasian and Negro, Mongolian and Malay, lay close packed up in the world's single family. In short, Buchubai's amusing prattle proved 388 KAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. S. to me this evening no bad commentary on St. Paul's sublime enunciation to the Athenians, that God has " made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth." I was amused to find that the little girl, who listened intently as I described to the young ladies all I had seen and knew of the Auldgrande, had never before heard of a ghost, and could form no conception of one now. The ladies explained, described, defined ; care- fully guarding all they said, however, by stern disclaimers against the ghost theory altogether, but apparently to little purpose. At length Buchubai exclaimed, that she now knew what they meant, and that she herself had seen a great many ghosts in India. On explanation, however, her ghosts, though quite frightful enough, turned out to be not at all spiritual : they were things of common occurrence in the land she had come from, exposed bodies of the dead. Next morning as the white clouds and thin mist-streaks of the preceding day had fairly foretold was close and wet ; and the long trail of vapor which rises from the chasm of the Auldgrande in such weather, and is known to the people of the neighborhood as the " smoke of the lady's baking," hung, snake-like, over the river. About two o'clock the rain ceased, hesitatingly and doubtfully, however, as if it did not quite know its own mind ; and there arose no -breeze to shake the dank grass, or to dissipate the thin mist-wreath that continued to float over the river under a sky of deep gray. But the ladies, with Buchubai, impa- tient to join their friends at Strathpeffer, determined on journeying notwithstanding ; and, availing myself of their company and their vehicle, I travelled on with them to Dingwall, whei % e we parted. I had purposed exploring the gray dingy sandstones and fetid breccias developed along the shores on the northern side of the bay, about two RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 389 miles from the town, and on the sloping acclivities between the mansion-houses of Tulloch and Fowlis ; but the day was still unfavorable, and the sections seemed untemptingly indifferent ; besides, I could entertain no doubt that the dingy beds here are identical in place with those of Cad- boll on the coast of Easter Ross, which they closely resem- ble, and which alternate with the lower ichthyolitic beds of the Old Red Sandstone ; and so, for the present at least, I gave up my intention of exploring them. In the evening, the sun, far gone down towards its place of setting, burst forth in great beauty ; and, under the influence of a kindly breeze from the west, just strong enough to shake the wet leaves, the sky flung off its thick mantle of gray. I sauntered out along the high-road, in the direction of my old haunts at 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 wandered on and on, over the bridge, and along the river, and through the pleasure grounds of Conon -house, till I found myself in the old solitary burying- ground beside the Conon, which, when last in this part of the country, I was prevented from visiting by the swollen waters. The rich yellow light streamed through the inter- stices of the tall hedge of forest-trees that encircles the eminence, once an island, and fell in fantastic patches on the gray tombstone and the graves. The ruinous little chapel in the corner, whose walls a quarter of a century before I had distinctly traced, had sunk into a green mound ; and there remained over the sward but the arch-stone of a Gothic window, with a portion of the moulded transom attached, to indicate the character and style of the vanished building. The old dial-stone, with the wasted gnomon, 33* 390 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. has also disappeared ; and the few bright-colored throch- stanes, raw froln the chisel, that had been added of late years to the group of older standing, did not quite make up for what time in the same period had withdrawn. One of the newer inscriptions, however, recorded a curious fact. When I had resided in this part of the country so long be- fore, there was an aged couple in the neighborhood, who had lived together, it was said, as man and wife, for more than sixty years: and now, here was their tombstone and epi- taph. They had lived on long after my departure ; and when, as the seasons passed, men and women whose births and bap- tisms had taken place since their wedding-day were flailing around them well stricken in years, death seemed to have for- gotten them / ebold and Stannius'a Comparative Anatomy. Marco's Geological Map, V. 8. Religious and Miscellaneous Works. Works ia the various Department* "f Literature, Science and Art. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. Form L9-32m-8,'58(5876s4)444 Miller - 264 Cruise of the M61o Betsey _ QE 264 M61c A 001 185524 4