The Cruise of the Betsey Part 4

The Liasic bed of Astreae existed long enough here to attain a thickness of from two to three feet. Ma.s.s rose over ma.s.s,--the living upon the dead,--till at length, by a deposit of mingled mud and sand,--the effect, mayhap, of some change of currents, induced we know not how,--the innumerable polypedes of the living surface were buried up and killed, and then, for many yards, layer after layer of a calciferous grit was piled over them. The fossils of the grit are few and ill preserved; but we occasionally find in it a coral similar to the Astrea of the bed below, and, a little higher up, in an impure limestone, specimens, in rather indifferent keeping, of a genus of polypifer which somewhat resembles the Turbinolia of the Mountain Limestone. It presents in the cross section the same radiated structure as the _Turbinolia fungites_, and nearly the same furrowed appearance in the longitudinal one; but, seen in the larger specimens, we find that it was a branched coral, with obtuse forky boughs, in each of which, it is probable, from their general structure, there lived a single polype. It may have been the resemblance which these bear, when seen in detached branches, to the older Caryophyllia, taken in connection with the fact that the deposit in which they occur rests on the ancient Red Sandstone of the district, that led M'Culloch to question whether this fossiliferous formation had not nearly as clear a claim to be regarded as an a.n.a.logue of the Carboniferous Limestone of England as of its Lias; and hence he contented himself with terming it simply the Gryphite Limestone. Sir R.

Murchison, whose much more close and extensive acquaintance with fossils enabled him to a.s.sign to the deposit its true place, was struck, however, with the general resemblance of its polypifers to "those of the Madreporite Limestone of the Carboniferous series." These polypifers occur in only the lower Lias of Skye.[5] I found no corals in its higher beds, though these are charged with other fossils, more characteristic of the formation, in vast abundance. In not a few of the middle strata, composed of a mud-colored fissile sandstone, the gryphites lie as thickly as currants in a Christmas cake; and as they weather white, while the stone in which they are embedded retains its dingy hue, they somewhat remind one of the white-lead tears of the undertaker mottling a hatchment of sable. In a fragment of the dark sandstone, six inches by seven, which I brought with me, I reckon no fewer than twenty-two gryphites; and it forms but an average specimen of the bed from which I detached it. By far the most abundant species is that not inelegant sh.e.l.l so characteristic of the formation, the _Gryphaea incurva_. We find detached specimens scattered over the beach by hundreds, mixed up with the remains of recent sh.e.l.ls, as if the _Gryphaea incurva_ were a recent sh.e.l.l too. They lie, bleached white by the weather, among the valves of defunct oysters and dead buccinidae; and, from their resemblance to lamps cast in the cla.s.sic model, remind one, in the corners where they have acc.u.mulated most thickly, of the old magician's stock in trade, who wiled away the lamp of Aladdin from Aladdin's simple wife. The _Gryphaea obliquita_ and _Gryphaea M'Cullochii_ also occur among these middle strata of the Lias, though much less frequently than the other. We, besides, found in them at least two species of Pecten, with two species of Terebratula,--the one smooth, the other sulcated; a bivalve resembling a Donax; another bivalve, evidently a Gervillia, though apparently of a species not yet described; and the ill-preserved rings of large Ammonites, from ten inches to a foot in diameter. Towards the bottom of the bay the fossils again become more rare, though they re-appear once more in considerable abundance as we pa.s.s along its northern side; but in order to acquaint ourselves with the upper organisms of the formation, we have to take boat and explore the northern sh.o.r.es of Pabba. The Lias of Skye has its three distinct groups of fossils: its lower coraline group, in which the Astrea described is most abundant; its middle group, in which the _Gryphaea incurva_ occurs by millions; and its upper group, abounding in Ammonites, Nautili, Pinnae, and Serpulae.

Friday made amends for the rains and fogs of its disagreeable predecessor: the morning rose bright and beautiful, with just wind enough to fill, and barely fill, the sail, hoisted high, with miser economy, that not a breath might be lost; and, weighing anchor, and shaking out all our canva.s.s, we bore down on Pabba, to explore. This island, so soft in outline and color, is formidably fenced round by dangerous reefs; and, leaving the Betsey in charge of John Stewart and his companion, to dodge on in the offing, I set out with the minister in our little boat, and landed on the north-eastern side of the island, beside a trap-d.y.k.e that served us as a pier. He would be a happy geologist who, with a few thousands to spare, could call Pabba his own.

It contains less than a square mile of surface; and a walk of little more than three miles and a half along the line where the waves break at high water brings the traveller back to his starting point; and yet, though thus limited in area, the petrifactions of its sh.o.r.es might of themselves fill a museum. They rise by thousands and tens of thousands on the exposed planes of its sea-washed strata, standing out in bold relief, like sculpturings on ancient tombstones, at once mummies and monuments,--the dead and the carved memorials of the dead. Every rock is a tablet of hieroglyphics, with an ascertained alphabet; every rolled pebble a casket with old pictorial records locked up within. Trap-d.y.k.es, beyond comparison finer than those of the Water of Leith, which first suggested to Hutton his theory, stand up like fences over the sedimentary strata, or run out like moles far into the sea. The entire island, too, so green, rich, and level, is itself a specimen ill.u.s.trative of the effect of geologic formation on scenery. We find its nearest neighbor,--the steep, brown, barren island of Longa, which is composed of the ancient Red Sandstone of the district,--differing as thoroughly from it in aspect as a bit of granite differs from a bit of clay-slate; and the whole prospect around, save the green Liasic strip that lies along the bottom of the Bay of Broadford, exhibits, true to its various components, Plutonic or sedimentary, a character of picturesque roughness or bold sublimity. The only piece of smooth, level England, contained in the entire landscape, is the fossil-mottled island of Pabba. We were first struck, on landing this morning, by the great number of Pinnae embedded in the strata,--sh.e.l.ls varying from five to ten inches in length,--one species of the common flat type, exemplified in the existing _Pinna sulcata_, and another nearly quadrangular, in the cross section, like the _Pinna lanceolata_ of the Scarborough limestone.

The quadrangular species is more deeply crisped outside than the flat one. Both species bear the longitudinal groove in the centre, and when broken across, are found to contain numerous smaller sh.e.l.ls,--Terebratulae of both the smooth and sulcated kinds, and a species of minute smooth Pecten resembling the _Pecten demissus_, but smaller. The Pinnae, ere they became embedded in the original sea-bottom, long since hardened into rock around them, were, we find, dead sh.e.l.ls, into which, as into the dead open sh.e.l.ls of our existing beaches, smaller sh.e.l.ls were washed by the waves. Our recent Pinnae are all sedentary sh.e.l.ls, some of them full two feet in length, fastened to their places on their deep-sea floors by flowing silky byssi,--cables of many strands,--of which beautiful pieces of dress, such as gloves and hose, have been manufactured. An old French naturalist, the Abbe Le Pluche, tells us that "the Pinna with its fleshy tongue" (foot),--a rude inefficient looking implement for work so nice,--"spins such threads as are more valuable than silk itself, and with which the most beautiful stuffs that ever were seen have been made by Sicilian weavers." Gloves made of the byssus of recent Pinnae may be seen in the British Museum.

a.s.sociated with the numerous Pinnae of Pabba we found a delicately-formed Modiola, a small Ostrya, Plagiostoma, Terebratula, several species of Pectens, a triangular univalve resembling a Trochus, innumerable groups of Serpulae, and the star-like joints of Pentacrinites. The Gryphae are also abundant, occurring in extensive beds; and Belemnites of various species lie as thickly scattered over the rock as if they had been the spindles of a whole kingdom thrown aside in consequence of some such edict framed to put them down as that pa.s.sed by the father of the Sleeping Beauty. We find, among the detached ma.s.ses of the beach, specimens of Nautilus, which, though rarely perfect, are sufficiently so to show the peculiarities of the sh.e.l.l; and numerous Ammonites project in relief from almost every weathered plane of the strata. These last sh.e.l.ls, in the tract of sh.o.r.e which we examined, are chiefly of one species,--the _Ammonites spinatus_,--one of which, considerably broken, the reader may find figured in Sowerby's "Mineral Conchology," from a specimen brought from Pabba sixteen years ago by Sir R. Murchison. It is difficult to procure specimens tolerably complete. We find bits of outer rings existing as limestone, with every rib sharply preserved, but the rest of the fossil lost in the shale. I succeeded in finding but two specimens that show the inner whorls. They are thickly ribbed; and the chief peculiarity which they exhibit, not so directly indicated by Mr.

Sowerby's figure, is, that while the ribs of the outer whorl are broad and deep, as in the _Ammonites obtusus_, they suddenly change their character, and become numerous and narrow in the inner whorls, as in the _Ammonites communis_.

The tide began to flow, and we had to quit our explorations, and return to the Betsey. The little wind had become less, and all the canvas we could hang out enabled us to draw but a sluggish furrow. The stern of the Betsey "wrought no b.u.t.tons" on this occasion; but she had a good tide under her keel; and ere the dinner-hour we had pa.s.sed through the narrows of Kyle Akin. The village of this name was designed by the late Lord M'Donald for a great seaport town; but it refused to grow; and it has since become a gentleman in a small way, and does nothing. It forms, however, a handsome group of houses, pleasantly situated on a flat green tongue of land, on the Skye side, just within the opening of the Kyle; and there rises on an eminence beyond it a fine old tower, rent open, as if by an earthquake, from top to bottom, which forms one of the most picturesque objects I have almost ever seen in a landscape. There are bold hills all around, and rocky islands, with the ceaseless rush of tides in front; while the cloven tower, rising high over the sh.o.r.e, is seen, in threading the Kyles, whether from the south or north, relieved dark against the sky, as the central object in the vista. We find it thus described by the Messrs. Anderson of Inverness, in their excellent "Guide Book,"--by far the best companion of the kind with which the traveller who sets himself to explore our Scottish Highlands can be provided. "Close to the village of Kyle Akin are the ruins of an old square keep, called Castle Muel or Maoil, the walls of which are of a remarkable thickness. It is said to have been built by the daughter of a Norwegian king, married to a Mackinnon or Macdonald, for the purpose of levying an impost on all vessels pa.s.sing the Kyles, excepting, says the tradition, those of her own country. For the more certain exaction of this duty, she is reported to have caused a strong chain to be stretched across from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e; and the spot in the rocks to which the terminal links were attached is still pointed out." It was high time for us to be home. The dinner hour came; but, in meet ill.u.s.tration of the profound remark of Trotty-Veck, not the dinner. We had been in a cold Moderate district, whence there came no half-dozens of eggs, or whole dozens of trout, or pailfuls of razor-fish, and in which hard cabin-biscuit cost us sixpence per pound. And now our stores were exhausted, and we had to dine as best we could, on our last half-ounce of tea, sweetened by our last quarter of a pound of sugar. I had marked, however, a dried thornback hanging among the rigging. It had been there nearly three weeks before, when I came first aboard, and no one seemed to know for how many weeks previous; for as it had come to be a sort of fixture in the vessel, it could be looked at without being seen. But necessity sharpens the discerning faculty, and on this pressing occasion I was fortunate enough to see it. It was straightway taken down, skinned, roasted, and eaten; and, though rather rich in ammonia,--a substance better suited to form the food of the organisms that do not unite sensation to vitality, than organisms so high in the scale as the minister and his friend,--we came deliberately to the opinion, that on the whole, we could scarce have dined so well on one of Major b.e.l.l.e.n.den's jack-boots,--"so thick in the soles," according to Jenny Dennison, "forby being tough in the upper leather." The tide failed us opposite the opening of Loch Alsh; the wind, long dying, at length died out into a dead calm; and we cast anchor in ten fathoms water, to wait the ebbing current that was to carry us through Kyle Rhea.

The ebb-tide set in about half an hour after sunset; and in weighing anchor to float down the Kyle,--for we still lacked wind to sail down it,--we brought up from below, on one of the anchor-flukes, an immense bunch of deep-sea tangle, with huge soft fronds and long slender stems, that had lain flat on the rocky bottom, and had here and there thrown out roots along its length of stalk, to attach itself to the rock, in the way the ivy attaches itself to the wall. Among the intricacies of the true roots of the bunch, if one may speak of the true roots of an alga, I reckoned from eighteen to twenty different forms of animal life,--Fl.u.s.trae, Sertulariae, Serpulae, Anomiae, Modiolae, Astarte, Annelida, Crustacea, and Radiata. Among the Crustaceans I found a female crab of a reddish-brown color, considerably smaller than the nail of my small finger, but fully grown apparently, for the abdominal flap was loaded with sp.a.w.n; and among the Echinoderms, a brownish-yellow sea-urchin about the size of a pistol-bullet, furnished with comparatively large but thinly-set spines. There is a dangerous rock in the Kyle Rhea, the Caileach stone, on which the Commissioners for the Northern Lighthouses have stuck a bit of board about the size of a pot-lid, which, as it is known to be there, and as no one ever sees it after sunset, is really very effective, considering how little it must have cost the country, in wrecking vessels. I saw one of its victims, the sloop of an honest Methodist, in whose bottom the Caileach had knocked out a hole, repairing at Isle Ornsay; and I was told, that if I wished to see more, I had only just to wait a little. The honest Methodist, after looking out in vain for the bit of board, was just stepping into the shrouds, to try whether he could not see the rock on which the bit of board is placed, when all at once his vessel found out both board and rock for herself. We also had anxious looking out this evening for the bit of board: one of us thought he saw it right a-head; and when some of the others were trying to see it too, John Stewart succeeded in discovering it half a pistol-shot astern. The evening was one of the loveliest. The moon rose in cloudy majesty over the mountains of Glenelg, brightening as it rose, till the boiling eddies around us curled on the darker surface in pale circlets of light, and the shadow of the Betsey lay as sharply defined on the brown patch of calm to the larboard as if it were her portrait taken in black. Immediately at the water-edge, under a tall dark hill, there were two smouldering fires, that now shot up a sudden tongue of bright flame, and now dimmed into blood-red specks, and sent thick strongly-scented trails of smoke athwart the surface of the Kyle.

We could hear, in the calm, voices from beside them, apparently those of children; and learned that they indicated the places of two kelp-furnaces,--things which have now become comparatively rare along the coasts of the Hebrides. There was the low rush of tides all around, and the distant voices from the sh.o.r.e, but no other sounds; and, dim in the moons.h.i.+ne, we could see behind us several spectral-looking sails threading their silent way through the narrows, like twilight ghosts traversing some haunted corridor.

It was late ere we reached the opening of Isle Ornsay; and as it was still a dead calm we had to tug in the Betsey to the anchoring ground with a pair of long sweeps. The minister pointed to a low-lying rock on the left-hand side of the opening,--a favorite haunt of the seal. "I took farewell of the Betsey there last winter," he said. "The night had worn late, and was pitch dark; we could see before us scarce the length of our bowsprit; not a single light twinkled from the sh.o.r.e; and, in taking the bay, we ran b.u.mp on the skerry, and stuck fast. The water came rus.h.i.+ng in, and covered over the cabin-floor. I had Mrs. Swanson and my little daughter aboard with me, with one of our servant-maids who had become attached to the family, and insisted on following us from Eigg; and, of course, our first care was to get them ash.o.r.e. We had to land them on the bare uninhabited island yonder, and a dreary enough place it was at midnight, in winter, with its rocks, bogs, and heath, and with a rude sea tumbling over the skerries in front; but it had at least the recommendation of being safe, and the sky, though black and wild, was not stormy. I had brought two lanterns ash.o.r.e: the servant girl, with the child in her lap, sat beside one of them, in the shelter of a rock; while my wife, with the other, went walking up and down along a piece of level sward yonder, waving the light, to attract notice from the opposite side of the bay. But though it was seen from the windows of my own house by an attached relative, it was deemed merely a singularly-distinct apparition of Will o' the Wisp, and so brought us no a.s.sistance. Meanwhile we had carried out a kedge astern of the Betsey, as the sea was flowing at the time, to keep her from beating in over the rocks; and then, taking our few movables ash.o.r.e, we hung on till the tide rose, and, with our boat alongside ready for escape, succeeded in warping her into deep water, with the intention of letting her sink somewhere beyond the influence of the surf, which, without fail, would have broken her up on the skerry in a few hours, had we suffered her to remain there. But though, when on the rock, the tide had risen as freely over the cabin sole inside as over the crags without, in the deep water the Betsey gave no sign of sinking. I went down to the cabin; the water was knee-high on the floor, das.h.i.+ng against bed and locker, but it rose no higher;--the enormous leak had stopped, we knew not how; and, setting ourselves to the pump, we had in an hour or two a clear s.h.i.+p. The Betsey is clinker-built below. The elastic oak planks had yielded inwards to the pressure of the rock, tearing out the fastenings, and admitted the tide at wide yawning seams; but no sooner was the pressure removed, than out they sprung again into their places, like bows when the strings are slackened; and when the carpenter came to overhaul, he found he had little else to do than to remove a split plank, and to supply a few dozens of drawn nails."

CHAPTER X.

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

The anchoring ground at Isle Ornsay was crowded with coasting vessels and fis.h.i.+ng boats; and when the Sabbath came round, no inconsiderable portion of my friend's congregation was composed of sailors and fishermen. His text was appropriate,--"He bringeth them into their desired haven;" and as his sea-craft and his theology were alike excellent, there were no incongruities in his allegory, and no defects in his mode of applying it, and the seamen were hugely delighted. John Stewart, though less a master of English than of many other things, told me he was able to follow the minister from beginning to end,--a thing he had never done before at an English preaching. The sea portion of the sermon, he said, was very plain: it was about the helm, and the sails, and the anchor, and the chart, and the pilot,--about rocks, winds, currents, and safe harborage; and by attending to this simpler part of it, he was led into the parts that were less simple, and so succeeded in comprehending the whole. I would fain see this unique discourse, preached by a sailor minister to a sailor congregation, preserved in some permanent form, with at least one other discourse,--of which I found trace in the island of Eigg, after the lapse of more than a twelvemonth,--that had been preached about the time of the Disruption, full in sight of the Scuir, with its impregnable hill-fort, and in the immediate neighborhood of the cave of Frances, with its heaps of dead men's bones. One note stuck fast to the islanders. In times of peril and alarm, said the minister, the ancient inhabitants of the island had two essentially different kinds of places in which they sought security; they had the deep, unwholesome cave, shut up from the light and the breath of heaven, and the tall rock summit, with its impregnable fort, on which the sun shone and the wind blew. Much hards.h.i.+p might no doubt be encountered on the one, when the sky was black with tempest, and rains beat, or snows descended; but it was found a.s.sociated with no story of real loss or disaster,--it had kept safe all who had committed themselves to it; whereas, in the close atmosphere of the other there was warmth, and, after a sort, comfort; and on one memorable day of trouble the islanders had deemed it the preferable sheltering place of the two. And there survived mouldering skeletons and a frightful tradition, to tell the history of their choice. Places of refuge of these very opposite kinds, said the minister, continuing his allegory, are not peculiar to your island; never was there a day or a place of trial in which they did not advance their opposite claims: they are advancing them even now all over the world. The one kind you find described by one great prophet as low-lying "refuges of lies," over which the desolating "scourge must pa.s.s," and which the destroying "waters must overflow;" while the true character of the other may be learned from another great prophet, who was never weary of celebrating his "rock and his fortress." "Wit succeeds more from being happily addressed," says Goldsmith, "than even from its native poignancy." If my friend's allegory does not please quite as well in print and in English as it did when delivered _viva voce_ in Gaelic, it should be remembered that it was addressed to an out-door congregation, whose minds were filled with the consequences of the Disruption,--that the bones of _Uamh Fraingh_ lay within a few hundred yards of them,--and that the Scuir, with the sun s.h.i.+ning bright on its summit, rose tall in the background, scarce a mile away.

On Monday I spent several hours in reexploring the Lias of Lucy Bay and its neighborhood, and then walked on to Kyle-Akin, where I parted from my friend Mr. Swanson, and took boat for Loch Carron. The greater part of the following day was spent in crossing the country to the east coast in the mail-gig, through long dreary glens, and a fierce storm of wind and rain. In the lower portion of the valley occupied by the river Carron, I saw at least two fine groups of moraines. One of these, about a mile and a half above the parish manse, marks the place where a glacier, that had once descended from a hollow amid the northern range of hills, had furrowed up the gravel and earth before it in long ridges, which we find running nearly parallel to the road; the other group, which lies higher up the valley, and seems of considerably greater extent, indicates where one of those river-like glaciers that fill up long hollows, and impel their irresistible flood downwards, slow as the hour-hand of a time-piece, had terminated towards the sea. I could but glance at the appearances as the gig drove past, and point them out to a fellow pa.s.senger, the Establishment minister of----, remarking, at the same time, how much more dreary the prospect must have seemed than even it did to-day, though the fog was thick and the drizzle disagreeable, when the lateral hollows on each side were blocked up with ice, and overhanging glaciers, that ploughed the rock bare in their descent, glistened on the bleak hill-sides. I wore a gray maud over a coat of rough russet, with waist-coat and trowsers of plaid; and the minister, who must have taken me, I suppose, for a southland shepherd looking out for a farm, gave me much information of a kind I might have found valuable had such been my condition and business, regarding the various districts through which we pa.s.sed. On one high-lying farm, the gra.s.s, he said, was short and thin, but sweet and wholesome, and the flocks throve steadily, and were never thinned by disease; whereas on another farm, that lay along the dank bottom of a valley, the herbage was rank and rich, and the sheep fed and got heavy, but braxy at the close of autumn fell upon them like a pestilence, and more than neutralized to the farmer every advantage of the superior fertility of the soil. It was not uninteresting, even for one not a sheep-farmer, to learn that the life of the sheep is worth fewer years' purchase in one little track of country than in another adjacent one; and that those differences in the salubrity of particular spots which obtain in other parts of the world in regard to our own species, and which make it death to linger on the luxuriant river-side, while on the arid plain or elevated hill-top there is health and safety, should exist in contiguous walks in the Highlands of Scotland in reference to some of the inferior animals. The minister and I became wonderfully good friends for the time. All the seats in the gig, both back and front, had been occupied ere he had taken his pa.s.sage, and the postman had a.s.signed him a miserable place on the narrow elevated platform in the middle, where he had to coil himself up like a hedgehog in its hole, sadly to the discomfort of limbs still stout and strong, but stiffened by the long service of full seventy years. And, as in the case made famous by Cowper, of the "softer s.e.x"

and the old-fas.h.i.+oned iron-cus.h.i.+oned arm-chairs, the old man had, as became his years, "'gan murmur." I contrived, by sitting on the edge of the gig on the one side, and by getting the postman to take a similar seat on the other, to find room for him in front; and there, feeling he had not to do with savages, he became kindly and conversible. We beat together over a wide range of topics;--the Scotch banks, and Sir Robert Peel's intentions regarding them,--the periodical press of Scotland,--the Edinburgh literati,--the Free Church even: he had been a consistent Moderate all his days, and disliked renegades, he said; and I, of course, disliked renegades too. We both remembered that, though civilized nations give quarter to an enemy overpowered in open fight, they are still in the habit of shooting deserters. In short, we agreed on a great many different matters; and, by comparing notes, we made the best we could of a tedious journey and a very bad day. At the inn at Garve, a long stage from Dingwall, we alighted, and took the road together, to straighten our stiffened limbs, while the post man was engaged in changing horses. The minister stopped short in the middle of a discussion. We are not on equal terms, he said: you know who I am, and I don't know you: we did not start fair at the beginning, but let us start fair now. Ah, we have agreed hitherto, I replied; but I know not how we are to agree when you know who I am: are you sure you will not be frightened? Frightened! said the minister st.u.r.dily; no, by no man. Then, I am the Editor of the _Witness_. There was a momentary pause. "Well,"

said the minister, "it's all the same: I'm glad we should have met. Give me, man, a shake of your hand." And so the conversation went on as before till we parted at Dingwall,--the Establishment clergyman wet to the skin, the Free Church editor in no better condition; but both, mayhap, rather less out of conceit with the ride than if it had been ridden alone.

I had intended pa.s.sing at least two days in the neighborhood of Dingwall, where I proposed renewing an acquaintance, broken off for three-and-twenty years, with those bituminous shales of Strathpeffer in which the celebrated mineral waters of the valley take their rise,--the Old Red Conglomerate of Brahan, the vitrified fort of Knockferrel, the ancient tower of Fairburn, above all, the pleasure-grounds of Conon-side. I had spent the greater portion of my eighteenth and nineteenth years in this part of the country; and I was curious to ascertain to what extent the man in middle life would verify the observations of the lad,--to recall early incidents, revisit remembered scenes, return on old feelings, and see who were dead and who were alive among the casual acquaintances of nearly a quarter of a century ago. The morning of Wednesday rose dark with fog and rain, but the wind had fallen; and as I could not afford to miss seeing Conon-side, I sallied out under cover of an umbrella. I crossed the bridge, and reached the pleasure-grounds of Conon-house. The river was big in flood: it was exactly such a river Conon as I had lost sight of in the winter of 1821; and I had to give up all hope of wading into its fords, as I used to do early in the autumn of that year, and pick up the pearl muscles that lie so thickly among the stones at the bottom. I saw, however, amid a thicket of bushes by the river-side, a heap of broken sh.e.l.ls, where some herd-boy had been carrying on such a pearl fishery as I had sometimes used to carry on in my own behalf so long before; and I felt it was just something to see it. The flood eddied past, dark and heavy, sweeping over bulwark and bank. The low-stemmed alders that rose on islet and mound seemed shorn of half their trunks in the tide; here and there an elastic branch bent to the current, and rose and bent again; and now a tuft of withered heath came floating down, and now a soiled wreath of foam. How vividly the past rose up before me!--boyish day-dreams forgotten for twenty years,--the fossils of an early formation of mind, produced at a period when the atmosphere of feeling was warmer than now, and the immaturities of the mental kingdom grew rank and large, like the ancient Cryptogamiae, and bore no specific resemblance to the productions of a present time. I had pa.s.sed in the neighborhood the first season I anywhere spent among strangers, at an age when home is not a country, nor a province even, but simply a little spot of earth inhabited by friends and relatives; and the rude verses, long forgotten, in which my joy had found vent when on the eve of returning to that home,--a home little more than twenty miles away,--came chiming as freshly into my memory as if scarce a month had pa.s.sed since I had composed them beside the Conon.[6]

Three-and-twenty years form a large portion of the short life of man,--one-third, as nearly as can be expressed in unbroken numbers, of the entire term fixed by the psalmist, and full one-half, if we strike off the twilight periods of childhood and immature youth, and of senect.i.tude weary of its toils. I found curious indications among the grounds of Conon-side, of the time that had elapsed since I had last seen them. There was a rectangular pond in a corner of a moor, near the public road, inhabited by about a dozen voracious, frog-eating pike, that I used frequently to visit. The water in the pond was exceedingly limpid; and I could watch from the banks every motion of the hungry, energetic inmates. And now I struck off from the river-side by a narrow tangled pathway, to visit it once more. I could have found out the place blindfold: there was a piece of flat brown heath that stretched round its edges, and a mossy slope that rose at its upper side, at the foot of which the taste of the proprietor had placed a rustic chair. The spot, though itself bare and moory, was nearly surrounded by wood, and looked like a clearing in an American forest. There were lines of graceful larches on two of its sides, and a grove of vigorous beeches that directly fronted the setting sun on a third; and I had often found it a place of delightful resort, in which to saunter alone in the calm summer evenings, after the work of the day was over. Such was the scene as it existed in my recollection. I came up to it this day through dripping trees, along a neglected pathway; and found, for the open s.p.a.ce and the rectangular pond, a gloomy patch of water in the middle of a tangled thicket, that rose some ten or twelve feet over my head. What had been bare heath a quarter of a century before had become a thick wood; and I remembered, that when I had been last there, the open s.p.a.ce had just been planted with forest-trees, and that some of the taller plants rose half-way to my knee. Human lifetimes, as now measured, are not intended to witness both the seed-times and the harvests of forests,--both the planting of the sapling, and the felling of the huge tree into which it has grown; and so the incident impressed me strongly.

It reminded me of the sage Shalum in Addison's antediluvian tale, who became wealthy by the sale of his great trees, two centuries after he had planted them. I pursued my walk, to revisit another little patch of water which I had found so very entertaining a volume three-and-twenty years previous, that I could still recall many of its lessons; but the hand of improvement had been busy among the fields of Conon-side; and when I came up to the spot which it had occupied, I found but a piece of level arable land, bearing a rank swathe of gra.s.s and clover.[7]

Not a single individual did I find on the farm who had been there twenty years before. I entered into conversation with one of the ploughmen, apparently a man of some intelligence; but he had come to the place only a summer or two previous, and the names of most of his predecessors sounded unfamiliar in his ears: he knew scarce anything of the old laird or his times, and but little of the general history of the district. The frequent change of servants incident to the large-farm system has done scarce less to wear out the oral antiquities of the country than has been done by its busy ploughs in obliterating antiquities of a more material cast. The mythologic legend and traditionary story have shared the same fate, through the influence of the one cause, which has been experienced by the sepulchral tumulus and the ancient encampment under the operations of the other. I saw in the pillars and archways of the farm-steading some of the hewn stones bearing my own mark,--an anchor, to which I used to attach a certain symbolical meaning; and I pointed them out to the ploughman. I had hewn these stones, I said, in the days of the old laird, the grandfather of the present proprietor. The ploughman wondered how a man still in middle life could have such a story to tell. I must surely have begun work early in the day, he remarked, which was perhaps the best way for getting it soon over. I remembered having seen similar markings on the hewn-work of ancient castles, and of indulging in, I daresay, idle enough speculations regarding what was doing at court and in the field, in Scotland and elsewhere, when the old long-departed mechanics had been engaged in their work. When this mark was affixed, I have said, all Scotland was in mourning for the disaster at Flodden, and the folk in the work-shed would have been, mayhap, engaged in discussing the supposed treachery of Home, and in arguing whether the hapless James had fallen in battle, or gone on a pilgrimage to merit absolution for the death of his father.

And when this other more modern mark was affixed, the Gowrie conspiracy must have been the topic of the day, and the mechanics were probably speculating,--at worst not more doubtfully than the historians have done after them,--on the guilt or innocence of the Ruthvens. It now rose curiously enough in memory, that I was employed in fas.h.i.+oning one of the stones marked by the anchor,--a corner stone in a gate-pillar,--when one of my brother apprentices entered the work-shed, laden with a bundle of newly sharpened irons from the smithy, and said he had just been told by the smith that the great Napoleon Bonaparte was dead. I returned to the village of Conon Bridge, through the woods of Conon House. The day was still very bad: the rain pattered thick on the leaves, and fell incessantly in large drops on the pathways. There is a solitary, picturesque burying-ground on a wooded hillock beside the river, with thick dark woods all around it,--one of the two burying-grounds of the parish of Urquhart,--which I would fain have visited, but the swollen stream had risen high around, converting the hillock into an island, and forbade access. I had spent many an hour among the tombs. They are few and scattered, and of the true antique cast,--roughened with death's heads, and cross-bones, and rudely sculptured armorial bearings; and on a broken wall, that marked where the ancient chapel once had stood, there might be seen, in the year 1821, a small, badly-cut sun-dial, with its iron gnomon wasted to a saw-edged film, that contained more oxide than metal. The only fossils described in my present chapter are fossils of mind; and the reader will, I trust, bear with me should I produce one fossil more of this somewhat equivocal cla.s.s. It has no merit to recommend it,--it is simply an organism of an immature intellectual formation, in which, however, as in the Carboniferous period, there was provision made for the necessities of an after time.[8] If a young man born on the wrong side of the Tweed for _speaking_ English, is desirous to acquire the ability of _writing_ it, he should by all means begin by trying to write it in verse.

I pa.s.sed, on my return to Dingwall, through the village of Conon Bridge; and remembering that one of the masons who had hewn beside me in the work-shed so many years before lived in the village at the time, I went direct to the house he had inhabited, to see whether he might not be there still. It was a low-roofed domicile beside the river, but in the days of my old acquaintance it had presented an appearance of great comfort and neatness; and as there now hung an air of neglect about it, I inferred that it had found some other tenant. I inquired, however, at the door, and was informed that Mr. ---- now lived higher up the street.

I would find him, it was added, in the best house on the right-hand side,--the house with a hewn front, and a shop in it. He kept the shop, and was the owner of the house, and had another house besides, and was one of the elders of the Free Church in Urquhart. Such was the standing of my old acquaintance the journeyman mason of twenty-three years ago.

He had been, when I knew him, a steady, industrious, religious man,--with but one exception the only contributor to missionary and Bible societies among a numerous party of workmen; and he was now occupying a respectable place in his village, and was one of the voters of the county. Let Chartism a.s.sert what it pleases on the one hand, and Toryism what it may on the other, the property-qualification of the Reform Bill is essentially a good one for such a country as Scotland. In our cities it no doubt extends the political franchise to a fluctuating cla.s.s, ill hafted in society, who possess it one year and want it another; but in our villages and smaller towns it hits very nearly the right medium for forming a premium on steady industry and character, and for securing that at least the ma.s.s of those who possess it should be sober-minded men, with a stake in the general welfare. In running over the histories of the various voters in one of our smaller towns, I found that nearly one-half of the whole had, like my old comrade at Conon Bridge, acquired for themselves, through steady and industrious habits, the qualification from which they derive their vote. My companion failed to recognize in the man turned of forty the smooth-cheeked stripling of eighteen, with whom he had wrought so long before. I soon succeeded, however, in making good my claim to his acquaintance. He had previously established the ident.i.ty of the editor of his newspaper with his quondam fellow-workman, and a single link more was all the chain wanted. We talked over old matters for half an hour. His wife, a staid respectable matron, who, when I had been last in the district, was exactly such a person as her eldest daughter, showed me an Encyclopaedia, with colored prints, which she wished to send, if she knew but how, to the Free Church library. I walked with him through his garden, and saw trees loaded with yellow-cheeked pippins, where I had once seen only unproductive heath, that scantily covered a barren soil of ferruginous sand, and unwillingly declining an invitation to wait tea,--for a previous engagement interfered,--I took leave of the family, and returned to Dingwall. The following morning was gloomy, and threatened rain; and giving up my intention of exploring Strathpeffer, I took the morning coach for Invergordon, and then walked to Cromarty, where I arrived just in time for breakfast.

I marked, from the top of the coach, about two miles to the north-east of Dingwall, beds of a deep gray sandstone, identical in color and appearance with some of the gray sandstones of the Middle Old Red of Forfars.h.i.+re, and learned that quarries had lately been opened in these beds near Montgerald. The Old Red Sandstone lies in immense development on the flanks of Ben-Wevis; and it is just possible that the a.n.a.logue of the gray flagstones of Forfar may be found among its upper beds. If so, the quarriers should be instructed to look hard for organic remains,--the broad-headed Cephalaspis, so characteristic of the formation, and the huge Crustacean, its contemporary, that disported in plates large as those of the steel mail of the later ages of chivalry.

The geologists of Dingwall,--if Dingwall has yet got its geologists,--might do well to attempt determining the point. I found the science much in advance in Cromarty, especially among the ladies,--its great patronizers and ill.u.s.trators everywhere,--and, in not a few localities, extensive contributors to its h.o.a.rds of fact. Just as I arrived, there was a pic-nic party of young people setting out for the Lias of Shandwick. They spent the day among its richly fossiliferous shales and limestones, and brought back with them in the evening, Ammonites and Gryphites enough to store a museum. Cromarty had been visited during the summer by geologists speaking a foreign tongue, but thoroughly conversant with the occult yet common language of the rocks, and deeply interested in the stories which the rocks told. The vessels in which the Crown Prince of Denmark voyaged to the Faroe Isles had been for some time in the bay; and the Danes, his companions, votaries of the stony science, zealously plied chisel and hammer among the Old Red Sandstones of the coast. A townsman informed me that he had seen a Danish Professor hammering like the tutelary Thor of his country among the nodules in which I had found the first Pterichthys and first Diplacanthus ever disinterred; and that the Professor, ever and anon as he laid open a specimen, brought it to a huge smooth boulder, on which there lay a copy of the "Old Red Sandstone," to ascertain from the descriptions and prints its family and name. Shall I confess that the circ.u.mstance gratified me exceedingly? There are many elements of Discord among mankind in the present time, both at home and abroad,--so many, that I am afraid we need entertain no hope of seeing an end, in at least our day, to controversy and war. And we should be all the better pleased, therefore, to witness the increase of those links of union,--such as the harmonizing bonds of a scientific sympathy,--the tendency of which is to draw men together in a kindly spirit, and the formation of which involves no sacrifice of principle, moral or religious. I do not think that the foreigner, after geologizing in my company, would have had any very vehement desire, in the event of a war, to cut me down, or to knock me on the head. I am afraid this chapter would require a long apology, and for a long apology s.p.a.ce is wanting.

But there will be no egotism, and much geology, in my next.

CHAPTER XI.

Ichthyolite Beds--An interesting Discovery--Two Storeys of Organic Remains in the Old Red Sandstone--Ancient Ocean of Lower Old Red--Two great Catastrophes--Ancient Fish Scales--Their skilful Mechanism displayed by examples--Bone Lips--Arts of the Slater and Tiler as old as Old Red Sandstone--Jet Trinkets--Flint Arrow-heads--Vitrified Forts of Scotland--Style of grouping Lower Old Red Fossils--Ill.u.s.tration from Cromarty Fis.h.i.+ng Phenomena--Singular Remains of Holoptychius--Ramble with Mr. Robert d.i.c.k--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. d.i.c.k and Peach.

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

Some of the readers of my little work on the Old Red Sandstone will perhaps remember that I described the organisms of that ancient system as occurring in the neighborhood of Cromarty mainly on one platform, raised rather more than a hundred feet over the great Conglomerate; and that on this platform, as if suddenly overtaken by some wide-spread catastrophe, the ichthyolites lie by thousands and tens of thousands, in every att.i.tude of distortion and terror. We see the spiked wings of the Pterichthys elevated to the full, as they had been erected in the fatal moment of anger and alarm, and the bodies of the Cheirolepis and Cheiracanthus bent head to tail, in the stiff posture into which they had curled when the last pang was over. In various places in the neighborhood the ichthyolites are found _in situ_ in their coffin-like nodules, where it is impossible to trace the relation of the beds in which they occur to the rocks above and below; and I had suspected for years that in at least some of the localities, they could not have belonged to the lower platform of death, but to some posterior catastrophe that had strewed with carca.s.ses some upper platform. I had thought over the matter many a time and oft when I should have been asleep,--for it is marvellous how questions of the kind grow upon a man; and now, selecting as a hopeful scene of inquiry the splendid section under the Northern Sutor, I set myself doggedly to determine whether the Old Red Sandstone in this part of the country has not at least its two storeys of organic remains, each of which had been equally a scene of sudden mortality. I was entirely successful. The lower ichthyolite bed occurs exactly one hundred and fourteen feet over the great Conglomerate; and three hundred and eighteen feet higher up I found a second ichthyolite bed, as rich in fossils as the first, with its th.o.r.n.y Acanthodians twisted half round, as if still in the agony of dissolution, and its Pterichthyes still extending their spear-like arms in the att.i.tude of defence. The discovery enabled me to a.s.sign to their true places the various ichthyolite beds of the district. Those in the immediate neighborhood of the town, and a bed which abuts on the Lias at Eathie, belong to the upper platform; while those which appear in Eathie Burn, and along the sh.o.r.es at Navity, belong to the lower. The chief interest of the discovery, however, arises from the light which it throws on the condition of the ancient ocean of the Lower Old Red, and on the extreme precariousness of the tenure on which the existence of its numerous denizens was held. In a section of little more than a hundred yards there occur at least two platforms of violent death,--platforms inscribed with unequivocal evidence of two great catastrophes which over wide areas depopulated the seas. In the Old Red Sandstone of Caithness there are many such platforms: storey rises over storey; and the floor of each bears its closely-written record of disaster and sudden extinction. Pompeii in this northern locality lies over Herculaneum, and Anglano over both. We cease to wonder why the higher order of animals should not have been introduced into a scene of being that had so recently arisen out of chaos, and over which the reign of death so frequently returned. In a somewhat different sense from that indicated by the poet of the "Seasons,"

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

Lying detached in the stratified clay of the fish-beds, there occur in abundance single plates and scales of ichthyolites, which, as they can be removed entire, and viewed on both sides, ill.u.s.trate points in the mechanism of the creatures to which they belonged that cannot be so clearly traced in the same remains when locked up in stone. There is a vast deal of skilful carpentry exhibited--if carpentry I may term it--in the coverings of these ancient ichthyolites. In the commoner fish of our existing seas the scales are so thin and flexible,--mere films of horn,--that there is no particularly nice fitting required in their arrangement. The condition, too, through which portions of unprotected skin may be presented to the water, as over and between the rays of the fins, and on the snout and lips, obviates many a mechanical difficulty of the earlier period, when it was a condition, as the remains demonstrate, that no bit of naked skin, should be exposed, and when the scales and plates were formed, not of thin h.o.r.n.y films, but of solid pieces of bone. Thin slates lie on the roof of a modern dwelling, without any nice fitting;--they are scales of the modern construction: but it required much nice fitting to make thick flagstones lie on the roof of an ancient cathedral;--_they_, on the other hand, were scales of the ancient type. Again, it requires no ingenuity whatever, to suffer the hands and face to go naked,--and such is the condition of our existing fish, with their soft skinny snouts and membranous fins; but to cover the hands with flexible steel gauntlets, and the face with such an iron mask as that worn by the mysterious prisoner of Louis XIV., would require a very large amount of ingenuity indeed; and the ancient ichthyolites of the Old Red were all masked and gauntleted. Now the detached plates and scales of the stratified clay exhibit not a few of the mechanical contrivances through which the bony coverings of these fish were made to unite--as in coats of old armor--great strength with great flexibility. The scales of the Osteolepis and Diplopterus I found nicely bevelled atop and at one of the sides; so that where they overlapped each other,--for at the joints not a needle-point could be insinuated,--the thickness of the two scales equalled but the thickness of one scale in the centre, and thus an equable covering was formed. I brought with me some of these detached scales, and they now lie fitted together on the table before me, like pieces of complicated hewn work carefully arranged on the ground ere the workman transfers them to their place on the wall. In the smaller-scaled fish, such as the Cheiracanthus and Cheirolepis, a different principle obtained. The minute glittering rhombs of bone were set thick on the skin, like those small scales of metal sewed on leather, that formed an inferior kind of armor still in use in eastern nations, and which was partially used in our own country just ere the buff coat altogether superseded the coat of mail. I found a beautiful piece of jaw in the clay, with the enamelled tusks bristling on its brightly enamelled edge, like iron teeth in an iron rake. Mr. Parkinson expresses some wonder, in his work on fossils, that in a fine ichthyolite in the British Museum, not only the teeth should have been preserved, but also the lips; but we now know enough of the construction of the more ancient fish, to cease wondering. The lips were formed of as solid bone as the teeth themselves, and had as fair a chance of being preserved entire; just as the metallic rim of a toothed wheel has as fair a chance of being preserved as the metallic teeth that project from it. I was interested in marking the various modes of attachment to the body of the animal which the detached scales exhibit.

The slater fastens on his slates with nails driven into the wood: the tiler secures his tiles by means of a raised bar on the under side of each, that locks into a corresponding bar of deal in the framework of the roof. Now in some of the scales I found the art of the tiler antic.i.p.ated; there were bars raised on their inner sides, to lay hold of the skin beneath; while in others it was the art of the slater that had been antic.i.p.ated,--the scales had been slates fastened down by long nails driven in slantwise, which were, however, mere prolongations of the scale itself. Great truths may be repeated until they become truisms, and we fail to note what they in reality convey. The great truth that all knowledge dwelt without beginning in the adorable Creator must, I am afraid, have been thus common-placed in my mind; for at first it struck me as wonderful that the humble arts of the tiler and slater should have existed in perfection in the times of the Old Red Sandstone.

I had often remarked amid the fossiliferous limestones of the Lower Old Red, minute specks and slender veins of a glossy bituminous substance somewhat resembling jet, sufficiently hard to admit of a tolerable polish, and which emitted in the fire a bright flame, I had remarked, further, its apparent ident.i.ty with a substance used by the ancient inhabitants of the northern part of the country in the manufacture of their rude ornaments, as occasionally found in sepulchral urns, such as beads of an elliptical form, and flat parallelograms, perforated edge-wise by some four or five holes a-piece; but I had failed hitherto in detecting in the stone, portions of sufficient bulk for the formation of either the beads or the parallelograms. On this visit to the ichthyolite beds, however, I picked up a nodule that inclosed a ma.s.s of the jet large enough to admit of being fas.h.i.+oned into trinkets of as great bulk as any of the ancient ones I have yet seen, and a portion of which I succeeded in actually forming into a parallelogram, that could not have been distinguished from those of our old sepulchral urns. It is interesting enough to think, that these fossiliferous beds, altogether unknown to the people of the country for many centuries, and which, when I first discovered them, some twelve or fourteen years ago, were equally unknown to geologists, should have been resorted to for this substance, perhaps thousands of years ago, by the savage aborigines of the district. But our antiquities of the remoter cla.s.s furnish us with several such facts. It is comparatively of late years that we have become acquainted with the yellow chalk-flints of Banffs.h.i.+re and Aberdeen; though before the introduction of iron into the country they seem to have been well known all over the north of Scotland. I have never yet seen a stone arrow-head found in any of the northern localities, that had not been fas.h.i.+oned out of this hard and splintery substance,--a sufficient proof that our ancestors, ere they had formed their first acquaintance with the metals, were intimately acquainted with at least the mechanical properties of the chalk-flint, and knew where in Scotland it was to be found. They were mineralogists enough, too, as their stone battle-axes testify, to know that the best tool-making rock is the axe-stone of Werner; and in some localities they must have brought their supply of this rather rare mineral from great distances. A history of those arts of savage life, as shown in the relics of our earlier antiquities, which the course of discovery sereved thoroughly to supplant, but which could not have been carried on without a knowledge of substances and qualities afterwards lost, until re-discovered by scientific curiosity, would form of itself an exceedingly curious chapter. The art of the gun-flint maker (and it, too, promises soon to pa.s.s into extinction) is unquestionably a curious one, but not a whit more curious or more ingenious than the art possessed by the rude inhabitants of our country eighteen hundred years ago, of chipping arrow-heads with an astonis.h.i.+ng degree of neatness out of the same stubborn material. They found, however, that though flint made a serviceable arrow-head, it was by much too brittle for an adze or battle-axe; and sought elsewhere than among the Banffs.h.i.+re gravels for the rock out of which these were to be wrought. Where they found it in our northern provinces I have not yet ascertained. It is but a short time since I came to know that they were beforehand with me in the discovery of the bituminous jet of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, and were excavators among its fossiliferous beds. The vitrified forts of the north of Scotland give evidence of yet another of the obsolete arts.

Before the savage inhabitants of the country were ingenious enough to know the uses of mortar, or were furnished with tools sufficiently hard and solid to dress a bit of sandstone, they must have been acquainted with the _chemical_ fact, that with the a.s.sistance of fluxes, a pile of stones could be fused into a solid wall, and with the _mineralogical_ fact, that there are certain kinds of stones which yield much more readily to the heat than others. The art of making vitrified forts was the art of making ramparts of rock through a knowledge of the less obstinate earths and the more powerful fluxes. I have been informed by Mr. Patrick Duff of Elgin, that he found, in breaking open a vitrified fragment detached from an ancient hill-fort, distinct impressions of the serrated kelp-weed of our sh.o.r.es,--the identical flux which, in its character as the kelp of commerce, was so extensively used in our gla.s.s-houses only a few years ago.

I was struck, during my explorations at this time, as I had been often before, by the style of grouping, if I may so speak, which obtains among the Lower Old Red fossils. In no deposit with which I am acquainted, however rich in remains, have all its ichthyolites been found lying together. The collector finds some one or two species very numerous; some two or three considerably less so, but not unfrequent; some one or two more, perhaps, exceedingly rare; and a few, though abundant in other localities, that never occur at all. In the Cromarty beds, for instance, I never found a Holoptychius, and a Dipterus only once; the Diplopterus is rare; the Glyptolepis not common; the Cheirolepis and Pterichthys more so, but not very abundant; the Cheiracanthus and Diplacanthus, on the other hand, are numerous; and the Osteolepis and Coccosteus more numerous still. But in other deposits of the same formation, though a similar style of grouping obtains, the proportions are reversed with regard to species and genera: the fish rare in one locality abound in another. In Banniskirk, for instance, the Dipterus is exceedingly common, while the Osteolepis and Coccosteus are rare, and the Cheiracanthus and Cheirolepis seem altogether awanting. Again, in the Morays.h.i.+re deposits, the Glyptolepis is abundant, and n.o.ble specimens of the Lower Old Red Holoptychius--of which more anon--are to be found in the neighborhood of Thurso, a.s.sociated with remains of the Diplopterus, Coccosteus, Dipterus, and Osteolepis. The fact may be deemed of some little interest by the geologist, and may serve to inculcate caution, by showing that it is not always safe to determine regarding the place or age of subordinate formations from the per centage of certain fossils which they may be found to contain, or from the fact that they should want some certain organisms of the system to which they belong, and possess others. These differences may and do exist in contemporary deposits; and I had a striking example, on this occasion, of their dependence on a simple law of instinct, which is as active in producing the same kind of phenomena now as it seems to have been in the earlier days of the Old Red Sandstone. The Cromarty and Moray Friths, mottled with fis.h.i.+ng boats (for the bustle of the herring fishers had just begun), stretched out before me. A few hundred yards from the sh.o.r.e there was a yawl lying at anchor, with an old fisherman and a few boys angling from the stern for sillocks (the young of the coal-fish) and for small rock-cod. A few miles higher up, where the Cromarty Frith expands into a wide landlocked basin, with shallow sandy sh.o.r.es, there was a second yawl engaged in fis.h.i.+ng for flounders and small skate,--for such are the kinds of fish that frequent the flat shallows of the basin. A turbot-net lay drying in the sun: it served to remind me that some six or eight miles away, in an opposite direction, there is a deep-sea bank, on which turbot, halibut, and large skate are found. Numerous boats were stretching down the Moray Frith, bound for the banks of a more distant locality, frequented at this early stage of the herring fis.h.i.+ng by shoals of herrings, with their attendant dog-fish and cod; and I knew that in yet another deep-sea range there lie haddock and whiting banks.

Almost every variety of existing fish in the two friths has its own peculiar habitat; and were they to be destroyed by some sudden catastrophe, and preserved by some geologic process, on the banks and shoals which they frequent, there would occur exactly the same phenomena of grouping in the fossiliferous contemporaneous deposits which they would thus const.i.tute, as we find exhibited by the deposits of the Lower Old Red Sandstone.

The remains of Holoptychius occur, I have said, in the neighborhood of Thurso. I must now add, that very singular remains they are,--full of interest to the naturalist, and, in great part at least, new to Geology.

My readers, votaries of the stony science, must be acquainted with the masterly paper of Mr. Sedgwick and Sir R. Murchison "On the Old Red Sandstone of Caithness and the North of Scotland generally," which forms part of the second volume (second series) of the "Transactions of the Geological Society," and with the description which it furnishes, among many others, of the rocks in the neighborhood of Thurso.

Calcareo-bituminous flags, grits, and shales, of which the paving flagstones of Caithness may be regarded as the general type, occur on the sh.o.r.es, in reefs, crags, and precipices; here stretching along the coast in the form of flat, uneven bulwarks: there rising over it in steep walls; yonder leaning to the surf, stratum against stratum, like flights of stairs thrown down from their slant position to the level; in some places severed by faults; in others cast about in every possible direction, as if broken and contorted by a thousand antagonist movements; but in their general bearing rising towards the east, until the whole calcareo-bituminous schists of which this important member of the system is composed disappear under the red sandstones of Dunnet He