The Cruise of the Betsey

Chapter 5

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The quarry itself is merely a piece of moor that has been trenched to the depth of some five or six feet from the surface, and that presents, at the line where the broken ground leans against the ground still unbroken, a low uneven frontage, somewhat resembling that of a ruinous stone-fence. It has been opened in the outcrop of an ichthyolite bed of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, on which in this locality the thin moory soil immediately rests, without the intervention of the common boulder clay of the country; and the fish-enveloping nodules, which are composed in this bed of a rich limestone, have been burnt, for a considerable number of years, for the purposes of the agriculturist and builder.

There was a kiln smoking this evening beside the quarry; and a few laborers were engaged with shovel and pickaxe in cutting into the stratified clay of the unbroken ground, and throwing up its spindle-shaped nodules on the bank, as materials for their next burning. Antiquaries have often regretted that the sculptured marble of Greece and Egypt,--cla.s.sic urns, to whose keeping the ashes of the dead had been consigned, and antique sarcophagi, roughened with hieroglyphics,--should have been so often condemned to the lime-kiln by the illiterate Copt or tasteless Mohammedan; and I could not help experiencing a somewhat similar feeling here. The urns and sarcophagi, many times more ancient than those of Greece and Egypt, and that told still more wondrous stories, lay thickly ranged in this strange catacomb,--so thickly, that there were quite enough for the lime-kiln and the geologists too; but I found the kiln got all, and this at a time when the collector finds scarce any fossils more difficult to procure than those of the Lower Old Red Sandstone. I asked one of the laborers whether he did not preserve some of the better specimens, in the hope of finding an occasional purchaser. Not now, he said: he used to preserve them in the days of Lady c.u.mming of Altyre; but since her ladyship"s death, no one in the neighborhood seemed to care for them, and strangers rarely came the way.

The first nodule I laid open contained a tolerably well-preserved Cheiracanthus; the second, an indifferent specimen of Glyptolepis; and three others, in succession, remains of Coccosteus. Almost every nodule of one especial layer near the top incloses its organism. The coloring is frequently of great beauty. In the Cromarty, as in the Caithness, Orkney, and Gamrie specimens, the animal matter with which the bones were originally charged has been converted into a dark glossy bitumen, and the plates and scales glitter from a ground of opaque gray, like pieces of j.a.pan-work suspended against a rough-cast wall. But here, as in the other Morayshire deposits, the plates and scales exist in nearly their original condition, as bone that retains its white color in the centre of the specimens, where its bulk is greatest, and is often beautifully tinged at its thinner edges by the iron with which the stone is impregnated. It is not rare to find some of the better preserved fossils colored in a style that reminds one of the more gaudy fishes of the tropics. We see the body of the ichthyolite, with its finely arranged scales, of a pure snow-white. Along the edges, where the original substance of the bone, combining with the oxide of the matrix, has formed a phosphate of iron, there runs a delicately shaded band of plum-blue; while the out-spread fins, charged still more largely with the oxide, are of a deep red. The description of Mr. Patrick Duff, in his "Geology of Moray," so redolent of the quiet enthusiasm of the true fossil-hunter, especially applies to the ichthyolites of this quarry, and to those of a neighboring opening in the same bed,--the quarry of Lethenbarn. "The nodules," says Mr. Duff, "which in their external shape resemble the stones used in the game of curling, but are elliptical bodies instead of round, lie in the shale on their flat sides, in a line with the dip. When taken out, they remind one of water-worn pebbles, or rather boulders of a sh.o.r.e. A smart blow on the edge splits them along on the major axis, and exposes the interesting inclosure. The practised geologist knows well the thrilling interest attending the breaking up of the nodule: the uninitiated cannot sympathize with it. There is no time when a fossil looks so well as when first exposed. There is a clammy moisture on the surface of the scales or plates, which brings out the beautiful coloring, and adds brilliancy to the enamel. Exposure to the weather soon dims the l.u.s.tre; and even in a cabinet an old specimen is easily known by its tarnished aspect."

I found at Clune no ichthyolite to which the geologists have not been already introduced, or with which I had not been acquainted previously in the Cromarty beds. The Lower Old Red of Morayshire furnishes, however, at least one genus not yet figured nor described, and of which, so far as I am aware, only a single specimen has yet been found. It seems to have been a small delicately-formed fish; its head covered with plates; its body with round scales of a size intermediate between those of the Osteolepis and Cheiracanthus; its anterior dorsal fin placed, as in the Dipterus, Diplopterus, and Glyptolepis, directly opposite to its ventral fins; the enamelled surfaces of the minute scales were fretted with microscopic undulating ridges, that radiated from the centre to the circ.u.mference; similar furrows traversed the occipital plates; and the fins, unfurnished with spines, were formed, as in the Dipterus and Diplopterus, of thick-set, enamelled rays. The posterior fins and tail of the creature were not preserved. I may mention, for the satisfaction of the geologist, that I saw this unique fossil in the possession of the late Lady c.u.mming of Altyre, a few weeks previous to the lamented death of her ladyship; and that, on a.s.suring her it was as new in relation to the Cromarty and Caithness fish-beds as to those of Moray, she intimated an intention of forthwith sending a drawing of it to Aga.s.siz; but her untimely decease in all probability interfered with the design, and I have not since heard of this new genus of ichthyolite, or of her ladyship"s interesting specimen, hitherto apparently its only representative and memorial. In the Morayshire, as in the Cromarty beds, the limestone nodules take very generally the form of the fish which they inclose: they are stone coffins, carefully moulded to express the outline of the corpses within. Is the fish entire?--the nodule is of a spindle form, broader at the head and narrower at the tail. Is it slightly curved, in the att.i.tude of violent death?--the nodule has also its slight curve. Is it bent round, so that the extremities of the creature meet?--the nodule, in conformity with the outline, is circular.

Is it disjointed and broken?--the nodule is correspondingly irregular.

In nine cases out of ten, the inclosing coffin, like that of an old mummy, conforms to the outline of the organism which it incloses. It is further worthy of remark, too, that a large fish forms generally a large nodule, and a small fish a small one. Here, for instance, is a nodule fifteen inches in length, here a nodule of only three inches, and here a nodule of intermediate size, that measures eight inches. We find that the large nodule contains a Cheirolepis thirteen inches in length, the small one a Diplacanthus of but two and a half inches in length, and the intermediate one a Cheiracanthus of seven inches. The size of the fish evidently regulated that of the nodule. The coffin is generally as good a fit in size as in form; and the bulk of the nodule bears almost always a definite proportion to the amount of animal matter round which it had formed. I was a good deal struck, a few weeks ago, in glancing over a series of experiments conducted for a different purpose by a lady of singular ingenuity,--Mrs. Marshall, the inventor and patentee of the beautiful marble-looking plaster, _Intonacco_,--to find what seemed a similar principle ill.u.s.trated in the compositions of her various cements. These are all formed of a basis of lime, mixed in certain proportions with organic matter. The reader must be familiar with cements of this kind long known among the people, and much used in the repairing of broken pottery, such as a cement compounded of quicklime made of oyster sh.e.l.ls, mixed up with a glue made of skim-milk cheese, and another cement made also of quicklime mixed up with the whites of eggs. In Mrs. Marshall"s cements, the organic matter is variously compounded of both animal and vegetable substances, while the earth generally employed is sulphate of lime; and the result is a close-grained marble-like composition, considerably harder than the sulphate in its original crystalline state. She had deposited, in one set of her experiments, the calcareous earth, mixed up with sand, clay, and other extraneous matters, on some of the commoner molluscs of our sh.o.r.es; and universally found that the ma.s.s, incoherent everywhere else, had acquired solidity wherever it had been permeated by the animal matter of the molluscs. Each animal, in proportion to its size, is found to retain, as in the fossiliferous spindles of the Old Red Sandstone, its coherent nodule around it. One point in the natural phenomenon, however, still remains unill.u.s.trated by the experiments of Mrs. Marshall. We see in them the animal matter giving solidity to the lime in immediate contact with it; but we do not see it possessing any such affinity for it as to form, in an argillaceous compound, like that of the ichthyolite beds, a centre of attraction powerful enough to draw together the lime diffused throughout the ma.s.s. It still remains for the geologic chemist to discover on what principle ma.s.ses of animal matter should form the attracting nuclei of limestone nodules.

The declining sun warned me that I had lingered rather longer than was prudent among the ichthyolites of Clune; and so, striking in an eastern direction across a flat moor, through which I found the schistose gneiss of the district protruding in ma.s.ses resembling half-buried boulders, I entered the forest of Darnaway. There was no path, and much underwood, and I enjoyed the luxury of steering my course, out of sight of road and landmark, by the sun, and of being not sure at times whether I had skill enough to play the part of the bush-ranger under his guidance. A sultry day had clarified and cooled down into a clear, balmy evening; the slant beam was falling red on a thousand tall trunks,--here gleaming along some bosky vista, to which the white silky wood-moths, fluttering by scores, and the midge and the mosquito dancing by myriads, imparted a motty gold-dust atmosphere; there penetrating in straggling rays far into some gloomy recess, and resting in patches of flame, amid the darkness, on gnarled stem, or moss-cushioned stump, or gray beard-like lichen. I dislodged, in pa.s.sing through the underwood, many a tiny tenant of the forest, that had a better right to harbor among its wild raspberries and junipers than I had to disturb them,--velvety night-moths, that had sat with folded wings under the leaves, awaiting the twilight, and that now took short blind flights of some two or three yards, to get out of my way,--and robust, well-conditioned spiders, whose elastic, well-tightened lines snapped sharp before me as I pressed through, and then curled up on the scarce perceptible breeze, like broken strands of wool. But every man, however Whiggish in his inclinations, entertains a secret respect for the powerful; and though I pa.s.sed within a few feet of a large wasps" nest, suspended to a jutting bough of furze, the wasps I took especial care _not_ to disturb. I pressed on, first through a broad belt of the forest, occupied mainly by melancholy Scotch firs; next through an opening, in which I found an American-looking village of mingled cottages, gardens, fields and wood; and then through another broad forest-belt, in which the ground is more varied with height and hollow than in the first, and in which I found only forest trees, mostly oaks and beeches. I heard the roar of the Findhorn before me, and premised I was soon to reach the river; but whether I should pursue it upwards or downwards, in order to find the ferry at Sluie, was more than I knew. There lay in my track a beautiful hillock, that reclines on the one side to the setting sun, and sinks sheer on the other, in a mural sandstone precipice, into the Findhorn.

The trees open over it, giving full access to the free air and the sunshine; and I found it as thickly studded over with berries as if it had been the special care of half a dozen gardeners. The red light fell yet redder on the thickly inlaid cranberries and stone-brambles of the slope, and here and there, though so late in the season, on a patch of wild strawberries; while over all, dark, delicate blueberries, with their flour-bedusted coats, were studded as profusely as if they had been peppered over it by a hailstone cloud. I have seldom seen such a school-boy"s paradise, and I was just thinking what a rare discovery I would have deemed it had I made it thirty years sooner, when I heard a whooping in the wood, and four little girls, the eldest scarcely eleven, came bounding up to the hillock, their lips and fingers already dyed purple, and dropped themselves down among the berries with a shout. They were sadly startled to find they had got a companion in so solitary a recess; but I succeeded in convincing them that they were in no manner of danger from him; and on asking whether there was any of them skilful enough to show me the way to Sluie, they told me they all lived there, and were on their way home from school, which they attended at the village in the forest. Hours had elapsed since the master had _let them go_, but in so fine an evening the berries wouldn"t, and so they were still in the wood. I accompanied them to Sluie, and was ferried over the river in a salmon coble. There is no point where the Findhorn, celebrated among our Scotch streams for the beauty of its scenery, is so generally interesting as in the neighborhood of this village; forest and river,--each a paragon in its kind,--uniting for several miles together what is most choice and characteristic in the peculiar features of both.

In no locality is the surface of the great forest of Darnaway more undulated, or its trees n.o.bler; and nowhere does the river present a livelier succession of eddying pools and rippling shallows, or fret itself in sweeping on its zig-zag course, now to the one bank, now to the other, against a more picturesque and imposing series of cliffs. But to the geologist the locality possesses an interest peculiar to itself.

The precipices on both sides are charged with fossils of the Upper Old Red Sandstone: they form part of a vast indurated graveyard, excavated to the depth of an hundred feet by the ceaseless wear of the stream; and when the waters are low, the teeth-plates and scales of ichthyolites, all of them specifically different from those of Clune and Lethenbarn, and most of them generically so, may be disinterred from the strata in handfuls. But the closing evening left me neither light nor time for the work of exploration. I heard the curfew in the woods from the yet distant town, and dark night had set in long ere I reached Forres. On the following morning I took a seat in one of the south coaches, and got on to Elgin an hour before noon.

Elgin, one of the finest of our northern towns, occupies the centre of a richly fossiliferous district, which wants only better sections to rank it among the most interesting in the kingdom. An undulating platform of Old Red Sandstone, in which we see, largely developed in one locality, the lower formation of the Coccosteus, and in another, still more largely, the upper formation of the _Holoptychius n.o.bilissimus_, forms, if I may so speak, the foundation deposit of the district,--the true geologic plane of the country; and, thickly scattered over this plane, we find numerous detached knolls and patches of the Weald and the Oolite, deposited like heaps of travelled soil, or of lime shot down by the agriculturist on the surface of a field. The Old Red platform is mottled by the outliers of a comparatively modern time: the sepulchral mounds of later races, that lived and died during the reptile age of the world, repose on the surface of an ancient burying-ground, charged with remains of the long anterior age of the fish; and over all, as a general covering, rest the red boulder-clay and the vegetable mould. Mr. Duff, in his valuable "Sketch of the Geology of Moray," enumerates five several localities in the neighborhood of Elgin in which there occur outliers of the Weald; though, of course, in a country so flat, and in which the diluvium lies deep, we cannot hold that all have been discovered. And though the outliers of the Oolite have not yet been ascertained to be equally numerous, they seem of greater extent; the isolated ma.s.ses detached from them by the denuding agencies lie thick over extensive areas; and in working out the course of improvement which has already rendered Elginshire the garden of the north, the ditcher at one time touches on some bed of shale charged with the characteristic Ammonites and Belemnites of the system, and at another on some calcareous sandstone bed, abounding with its Pectens, its Plagiostoma, and its Pinnae. Some of these outliers, whether Wealden or Oolitic, are externally of great beauty. They occur in the parish of Lhanbryde, about three miles to the east of Elgin, in the form of green pyramidal hillocks, mottled with trees, and at Linksfield, as a confluent group of swelling gra.s.sy mounds. And from their insulated character, and the abundance of organisms which they inclose, they serve to remind one of those green pyramids of Central America in which the traveller finds deposited the skeleton remains of extinct races. It has been suggested by Mr. Duff, in his "Sketch,"--a suggestion which the late Sutherlandshire discoveries of Mr. Robertson of Inverugie have tended to confirm,--that the Oolite and Weald of Moray do not, in all probability, represent consecutive formations: they seem to bear the same sort of relation to each other as that mutually borne by the Mountain Limestone and the Coal Measures. The one, of lacustrine or of estuary origin, exhibits chiefly the productions of the land and its fresh waters; the other, as decidedly of marine origin, is charged with the remains of animals whose proper home was the sea. But the productions, though dissimilar, were in all probability contemporary, just as the crabs and periwinkles of the Frith of Forth are contemporary with the frogs and lymnea of Flanders moss.

I had little time for exploration in the neighborhood of Elgin; but that little, through the kindness of my friend Mr. Duff, I was enabled to economize. We first visited together the outlier of the Weald at Linksfield. It may be found rising in the landscape, a short mile below the town, in the form of a green undulating hillock, half cut through by a limestone quarry; and the section thus furnished is of great beauty.

The basis on which the hillock rests is formed of the well-marked calcareous band in the Upper Old Red, known as the Cornstone, which we find occurring here, as elsewhere, as a pale concretionary limestone of considerable richness, though in some patches largely mixed with a green argillaceous earth, and in others pa.s.sing into a siliceous chert. Over the pale-colored base, the section of the hillock is ribbed like an onyx: for about forty feet, bands of gray, green, and blue clays alternate with bands of cream-colored, light-green, and dark-blue limestones; and over all there rests a band of the red boulder-clay, capped by a thin layer of vegetable mould. It is a curious circ.u.mstance, well fitted to impress on the geologist the necessity of cautious induction, that the boulder-clay not only _overlies_, but also _underlies_, this fresh-water deposit; a bed of unequivocally the same origin and character with that at the top lying intercalated, as if filling up two low flat vaults, between the upper surface of the Cornstone and the lower band of the Weald. It would, however, be as unsafe to infer that this intervening bed is older than the overlying ones, as to infer that the rubbish which chokes up the vaulted dungeon of an old castle is more ancient than the arch that stretches over it.

However introduced into the cavity which it occupies,--whether by land-springs or otherwise,--we find it containing fragments of the green and pale limestones that lie above, just as the rubbish of the castle dungeon might be found to contain fragments of the castle itself. When the bed of red boulder-clay was intercalated, the rocks of the overlying Wealden were exactly the same sort of indurated substances that they are now, and were yielding to the operations of some denuding agent. The alternating clays and limestones of this outlier, each of which must have been in turn an upper layer at the bottom of some lake or estuary, are abundantly fossiliferous. In some the fresh-water character of the deposit is well marked: Cyprides are so exceedingly numerous in some of the bands, that they impart to the stone an Oolitic appearance; while others of a dark-colored limestone we see strewed over, like the oozy bottom of a modern lake, with specimens of what seem Paludina, Cyclas, and Planorbus. Some of the other sh.e.l.ls are more equivocal: a Mytilus or Modiola, which abounds in some of the bands, may have been either a sea or a fresh-water sh.e.l.l; and a small oyster and Astarte seem decidedly marine. Remains of fish are very abundant,--scales, plates, teeth, ichthyodorulites, and in some instances entire ichthyolites. I saw, in the collection of Mr. Duff, a small but very entire specimen of _Lepidotus minor_, with the fins spread out on the limestone, as in an anatomical preparation, and almost every plate and scale in its place.

Some of his specimens of ichthyodorulites, too, are exceedingly beautiful, and of great size, resembling jaws thickly set with teeth, the apparent teeth being mere k.n.o.bs ranged along the concave edge of the bone, the surface of which we see gracefully fluted and enamelled. What most struck me, however, in glancing over the drawers of Mr. Duff, was the character of the Ganoid scales of this deposit. The Ganoid order in the days of the Weald was growing old; and two new orders,--the Ctenoid and Cycloid,--were on the eve of taking its place in creation. Hitherto it had comprised at least two-thirds of all the fish that had existed ever since the period in which fish first began; and almost every Ganoid fish had its own peculiar pattern of scale. But it would now seem as if well nigh all the simpler patterns were exhausted, and as if, in order to give the variety which nature loves, forms of the most eccentric types had to be resorted to. With scarce any exception save that furnished by the scales of the _Lepidotus minor_, which are plain lozenge-shaped plates, thickly j.a.panned, the forms are strangely complex and irregular, easily expressible by the pencil, but beyond the reach of the pen. The remains of reptiles have been found occasionally, though rarely, in this outlier of the Weald,--the vertebra of a Plesiosaurus, the femur of some Chelonian reptile, and a large fluted tooth, supposed Saurian.

I would fain have visited some of the neighboring outliers of the Oolite, but time did not permit. Mr. Duff"s collection, however, enabled me to form a tolerably adequate estimate of their organic contents.

Viewed in the group, these present nearly the same aspect as the organisms of the Upper Lias of Pabba. There is in the same abundance large Pinnae, and well-relieved Pectens, both ribbed and smooth; the same abundance, too, of Belemnites and Ammonites of resembling type. Both the Moray outliers and the Pabba deposit have their Terebratulae, Gervilliae, Plagiostoma, Cardiadae, their bright Ganoid scales, and their imperfectly-preserved lignites. They belong apparently to nearly the same period, and must have been formed in nearly similar circ.u.mstances,--the one on the western, the other on the eastern coast of a country then covered by the vegetation of the Oolite, and now known, with reference to an antiquity of but yesterday, as the ancient kingdom of Scotland. I saw among the Ammonites of these outliers at least one species, which, I believe, has not yet been found elsewhere, and which has been named, after Mr. Robertson of Inverugie, the gentleman who first discovered it, _Ammonites Robertsoni_. Like most of the genus to which it belongs, it is an exceedingly beautiful sh.e.l.l, with all its whorls free and gracefully ribbed, and bearing on its back, as its distinguishing specific peculiarity, a triple keel. I spent the evening of this day in visiting, with Mr. Duff, the Upper Old Red Sandstones of Scat-Craig. In Elginshire, as in Fife and elsewhere, the Upper Old Red consists of three grand divisions,--a superior bed of pale yellow sandstone, which furnishes the finest building-stone anywhere found in the north of Scotland,--an intermediate calcareous bed, known technically as the Cornstone,--and an inferior bed of sandstone, chiefly, in this locality, of a grayish-red color, and generally very incoherent in its structure. The three beds, as shown by the fossil contents of the yellow sandstones above, and of the grayish-red sandstones below, are members of the same formation,--a formation which, in Scotland at least, does not possess an organism in common with the Middle Old Red formation; that of the Cephalaspis, as developed in Forfarshire, Stirling, and Ayr, or the Lower Old Red formation; that of the Coccosteus, as developed in Caithness, Cromarty, Inverness, and Banff shires, and in so many different localities in Moray. The Sandstones at Scat-Craig belong to the grayish-red base of the Upper Old Red formation. They lie about five miles south of Elgin, not far distant from where the palaeozoic deposits of the coast-side lean against the great primary nucleus of the interior. We pa.s.s from the town, through deep rich fields, carefully cultivated and well inclosed: the country, as we advance on the moorlands, becomes more open; the homely cottage takes the place of the neat villa; the brown heath, of the gra.s.sy lea; and unfenced patches of corn here and there alternate with plantings of dark sombre firs, in their mediocre youth. At length we near the southern boundary of the landscape,--an undulating moory ridge, partially planted; and see where a deep gap in the outline opens a way to the upland districts of the province, a lively hill-stream descending towards the east through the bed which it has scooped out for itself in a soft red conglomerate. The section we have come to explore lies along its course: it has been the grand excavator in the densely occupied burial-ground over which it flows; but its labors have produced but a shallow scratch after all,--a mere ditch, some ten or twelve feet deep, in a deposit the entire depth of which is supposed greatly to exceed a hundred fathoms. The shallow section, however, has been well wrought; and its suit of fossils is one of the finest, both from the great specific variety which they exhibit, and their excellent state of keeping, that the Upper Old Red Sandstone has anywhere furnished.

So great is the incoherency of the matrix, that we can dig into it with our chisels, una.s.sisted by the hammer. It reminds us of the loose gravelly soil of an ancient graveyard, partially consolidated by a night"s frost,--a resemblance still further borne out by the condition and appearance of its organic contents. The numerous bones disseminated throughout the ma.s.s do not exist, as in so many of the Upper Old Red Sandstone rocks, as mere films or impressions, but in their original forms, retaining bulk as well as surface: they are true graveyard bones, which may be detached entire from the inclosing ma.s.s, and of which, were we sufficiently well acquainted with the anatomy of the long-perished races to which they belonged, entire skeletons might be reconstructed.

I succeeded in disinterring, during my short stay, an occipital plate of great beauty, fretted on its outer surface by numerous tubercles, confluent on its anterior part, and surrounded on its posterior portion, where they stand detached, by punctulated markings. I found also a fine scale of _Holoptychius n.o.bilissimus_, and a small tooth, bent somewhat like a nail that had been drawn out of its place by two opposite wrenches, and from the internal structure of which Professor Owen has bestowed on the animal to which it belonged the generic name Dendrodus.

I have ascertained, however, through the indispensable a.s.sistance of Mr.

George Sanderson, that the genus Holoptychius of Aga.s.siz, named from a peculiarity in the sculpture of the scale, is the identical genus Dendrodus of Professor Owen, named from a peculiarity in the structure of the teeth. Those teeth of the genus Holoptychius, whether of the Lower or Upper Old Red, that belong to the second or _reptile_ row with which the creature"s jaws were furnished, present in the cross section the appearance of numerous branches, like those of trees, radiating from a centre like spokes from the nave of a wheel; and their arborescent aspect suggested to the Professor the name Dendrodus. It seems truly wonderful, when one but considers it, to what minute and obscure ramifications the variety of pattern, specific and generic, which nature so loves to preserve, is found to descend. We see great diversity of mode and style in the architecture of a city built of brick; but while the houses are different, the bricks are always the same. It is not so in nature. The bricks are as dissimilar as the houses. We find, for instance, those differences, specific and generic, that obtain among fishes, both recent and extinct, descending to even the microscopic structure of their teeth. There is more variety of pattern,--in most cases of very elegant pattern,--in the sliced fragments of the teeth of the ichthyolites of a single formation, than in the carved blocks of an extensive calico-print yard. Each species has its own distinct pattern, as if in all the individuals of which it consisted the same block had been employed to stamp it; each genus has its own general _type_ of pattern, as if the same inventive idea, variously altered and modified, had been wrought upon in all. In the genus Dendrodus, for instance, it is the generic type, that from a central nave there should radiate, spoke-like, a number of leafy branches; but in the several species, the branches, if I may so express myself, belong to different shrubs, and present dissimilar outlines. There are no repet.i.tions of earlier patterns to be found among the generically different ichthyolites of other formations. We see in the world of fashion old modes of ornament continually reviving: the range of invention seems limited; and we find it revolving, in consequence, in an irregular, ever-returning cycle. But Infinite resource did not need to travel in a circle, and so we find no return or doublings in its course. It has appeared to me, that an argument against the trans.m.u.tation of species, were any such needed, might be founded on those inherent peculiarities of structure that are ascertained thus to pervade the entire texture of the framework of animals. If we find one building differing from another merely in external form, we have no difficulty in conceiving how, by additions and alterations, they might be made to present a uniform appearance; trans.m.u.tation, development, progression,--if one may use such terms,--seem possible in such circ.u.mstances. But if the buildings differ from each other, not only in external form, but also in every brick and beam, bolt and nail, no mere scheme of external alteration can induce a real resemblance. Every brick must be taken down, and every beam and belt removed. The problem cannot be wrought by the remodelling of an old house: there is no other mode of solving it save by the erection of a new one.

Among the singularly interesting Old Red fossils of Mr. Duff"s collection I saw the impression of a large ichthyolite from the superior yellow sandstone of the Upper Old Red, which had been brought him by a country diker only a few days before. In breaking open a building stone, the diker had found the inside of it, he said, covered over with curiously carved flowers; and, knowing that Mr. Duff had a turn for curiosities, he had brought the flowers to him. The supposed flowers are the sculpturings on the scales of the ichthyolite; and, true to the a.n.a.logy of the diker, on at least a first glance, they may be held to resemble the rather equivocal florets of a cheap wall-paper, or of an ornamental tile. The specimen exhibits the impressions of four rows of oblong rectangular scales. One row contains seven of these, and another eight. Each scale averages about an inch and a quarter in length, by about three quarters of an inch in breadth; and the parallelogramical field which it presents is occupied by a curious piece of carving. By a sort of pictorial illusion, the device appears as if in motion: it would seem as if a sudden explosion had taken place in the middle of the field, and as if the numerous dislodged fragments, propelled all around by the central force, were hurrying to the sides. But these seeming fragments were not elevations in the original scale, but depressions.

They almost seem as if they had been indented into it, in the way one sees the first heavy drops of a thunder shower indented into a platform of damp sea sand; and this last peculiarity of appearance seems to have suggested the name which this sole representative of an extinct genus has received during the course of the last few weeks from Aga.s.siz. An Elgin gentleman forwarded to Neufchatel a singularly fine calotype of the fossil, taken by Mr. Adamson of Edinburgh, with a full-size drawing of a few of the scales; and from the calotype and the drawing the naturalist has decided that the genus is entirely new, and that henceforth it shall bear the descriptive name of Stagonolepis, or drop-scale. As I looked for the first time on this broken fragment of an ichthyolite,--the sole representative and record of an entire genus of creatures that had been once called into existence to fulfil some wise purpose of the Creator long since accomplished,--I bethought me of Rogers"s n.o.ble lines on the Torso,--

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

Here, however, was a still more wonderful Torso than that of the dismembered Hercules, which so awakened the enthusiasm of the poet.

Strange peculiarities of being,--singular habits, curious instincts, the history of a race from the period when the all-producing Word had spoken the first individuals into being, until, in circ.u.mstances unfitted for their longer existence, or in some great annihilating catastrophe, the last individuals perished,--were all a.s.sociated with this piece of sculptured stone; but, like some ancient inscription of the desert, written in an unknown character and dead tongue, its dark meanings were fast locked up, and no inhabitant of earth possessed the key. Does that key anywhere exist, save in the keeping of Him who knows all and produced all, and to whom there is neither past nor future? Or is there a record of creation kept by those higher intelligences,--the first-born of spiritual natures,--whose existence stretches far into the eternity that has gone by, and who possess, as their inheritance, the whole of the eternity to come? We may be at least a.s.sured, that nothing can be too low for angels to remember, that was not too low for G.o.d to create.

I took coach for Edinburgh on the following morning; for with my visit to Scat-Craig terminated the explorations of my Summer Ramble. During the summer of the present year I have found time to follow up some of the discoveries of the last. In the course of a hasty visit to the island of Eigg, I succeeded in finding _in situ_ reptile remains of the kind which I had found along the sh.o.r.es in the previous season, in detached water-rolled ma.s.ses. The deposit in which they occur lies deep in the Oolite. In some parts of the island there rest over it alternations of beds of trap and sedimentary strata, to the height of more than a thousand feet; but in the line of coast which intervenes between the farm-house of Keill and the picturesque shieling described in my fifth chapter, it has been laid bare by the sea immediately under the cliffs, and we may see it jutting out at a low angle from among the shingle and rolled stones of the beach for several hundred feet together, charged everywhere with the teeth, plates, and scales of Ganoid fishes, and somewhat more sparingly, with the ribs, vertebrae, and digital bones of saurians. But a full description of this interesting deposit, as its discovery belongs to the Summer Ramble of a year, the ramblings of which are not yet completed, must await some future time.

CHAPTER XIII.

SUPPLEMENTARY.

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

It is told of the "Spectator," on his own high authority, that having "read the controversies of some great men concerning the antiquities of Egypt, he made a voyage to Grand Cairo, on purpose to take the measure of a pyramid, and that, so soon as he had set himself right in that particular, he returned to his native country with great satisfaction."

My love of knowledge has not carried me altogether so far, chiefly, I dare say, because my voyaging opportunities have not been quite so great. Ever since my ramble of last year, however, I have felt, I am afraid, a not less interest in the geologic antiquities of Small Isles than that cherished by "Spectator" with respect to the comparatively modern antiquities of Egypt; and as, in a late journey to these islands the object of my visit involved but a single point, nearly as insulated as the dimensions of a pyramid, I think I cannot do better than shelter myself under the authority of the short-faced gentleman who wrote articles in the reign of Queen Anne. I had found in Eigg, in considerable abundance and fine keeping, reptile remains of the Oolite; but they had occurred in merely rolled ma.s.ses, scattered along the beach. I had not discovered the bed in which they had been originally deposited, and could neither tell its place in the system, nor its relation to the other rocks of the island. The discovery was but a half-discovery,--the half of a broken medal, with the date on the missing portion. And so, immediately after the rising of the General a.s.sembly in June last [1845], I set out to revisit Small Isles, accompanied by my friend Mr. Swanson, with the determination of acquainting myself with the burial-place of the old Oolitic reptiles, if it lay anywhere open to the light.

We found the Betsey riding in the anchoring ground at Isle Ornsay, in her foul-weather dishabille, with her topmast struck and in the yard, and her cordage and sides exhibiting in their weathered aspect the influence of the bleaching rains and winds of the previous winter. She was at once in an undress and getting old, and, as seen from the sh.o.r.e through rain and spray,--for the weather was coa.r.s.e and boisterous,--she had apparently gained as little in her good looks from either circ.u.mstance as most other ladies do. We lay storm-bound for three days at Isle Ornsay, watching from the window of Mr. Swanson"s dwelling the incessant showers sweeping down the loch. On the morning of Sat.u.r.day, the gale, though still blowing right ahead, had moderated; the minister was anxious to visit this island charge, after his absence of several weeks from them at the a.s.sembly; and I, more than half afraid that my term of furlough might expire ere I had reached my proposed scene of exploration, was as anxious as he; and so we both resolved, come what might, on doggedly beating our way adown the Sound of Sleat to Small Isles. If the wind does not fail us, said my friend, we have little more than a day"s work before us, and shall get into Eigg about midnight. We had but one of our seamen aboard, for John Stewart was engaged with his potato crop at home; but the minister was content, in the emergency, to rank his pa.s.senger as an able-bodied seaman; and so, hoisting sail and anchor, we got under way, and, clearing the loch, struck out into the Sound.

We tacked in long reaches for several hours, now opening up in succession the deep withdrawing lochs of the mainland, now clearing promontory after promontory in the island district of Sleat. In a few hours we had left a bulky schooner, that had quitted Isle Ornsay at the same time, full five miles behind us; but as the sun began to decline, the wind began to sink; and about seven o"clock, when we were nearly abreast of the rocky point of Sleat, and about half-way advanced in our voyage, it had died into a calm; and for full twenty hours thereafter there was no more sailing for the Betsey. We saw the sun set, and the clouds gather, and the pelting rain come down, and nightfall, and morning break, and the noon-tide hour pa.s.s by, and still were we floating idly in the calm. I employed the few hours of the Sat.u.r.day evening that intervened between the time of our arrest and nightfall, in fishing from our little boat for medusae with a bucket. They had risen by myriads from the bottom as the wind fell, and were mottling the green depths of the water below and around far as the eye could reach. Among the commoner kinds,--the kind with the four purple rings on the area of its flat bell, which ever vibrates without sound, and the kind with the fringe of dingy brown, and the long stinging tails, of which I have sometimes borne from my swimming excursions the nettle-like smart for hours,--there were at least two species of more unusual occurrence, both of them very minute. The one, scarcely larger than a shilling, bore the common umbiliferous form, but had its area inscribed by a pretty orange-colored wheel; the other, still more minute, and which presented in the water the appearance of a small hazel-nut of a brownish-yellow hue, I was disposed to set down as a species of beroe. On getting one caught, however, and transferred to a bowl, I found that the brownish-colored, melon-shaped ma.s.s, though ribbed like the beroe, did not represent the true outline of the animal; it formed merely the centre of a transparent gelatinous bell, which, though scarce visible in even the bowl, proved a most efficient instrument of motion. Such were its contractile powers, that its sides nearly closed at every stroke, behind the opaque orbicular centre, like the legs of a vigorous swimmer; and the animal, unlike its more bulky congeners,--that, despite their slow but persevering flappings, seemed greatly at the mercy of the tide, and progressed all one way,--shot, as it willed, backwards, forwards, or athwart. As the evening closed, and the depths beneath presented a dingier and yet dingier green, until at length all had become black, the distinctive colors of the acelpha,--the purple, the orange, and the brown,--faded and disappeared, and the creatures hung out, instead, their pale phosphoric lights, like the lanterns of a fleet hoisted high to prevent collision in the darkness. Now they gleamed dim and indistinct as they drifted undisturbed through the upper depths, and now they flamed out bright and green, like beaten torches, as the tide dashed them against the vessel"s sides. I bethought me of the gorgeous description of Coleridge, and felt all its beauty:--

"They moved in tracks of shining white, And when they reared, the elfish light Fell off in h.o.a.ry flakes.

Within the shadow of the ship I watched their rich attire,-- Blue, gla.s.sy green, and velvet black: They curled, and swam, and every track Was a flash of golden fire."

A crew of three, when there are watches to set, divides wofully ill. As there was, however, nothing to do in the calm, we decided that our first watch should consist of our single seaman, and the second of the minister and his friend. The clouds, which had been thickening for hours, now broke in torrents of rain, and old Alister got into his water-proof oil-skin and souwester, and we into our beds. The seams of the Betsey"s deck had opened so sadly during the past winter, as to be no longer water-tight, and the little cabin resounded drearily in the darkness, like some dropping cave, to the ceaseless patter of the leakage. We continued to sleep, however, somewhat longer than we ought,--for Alister had been unwilling to waken the minister; but we at length got up, and, relieving watch the first from the tedium of being rained upon and doing nothing, watch the second was set to do nothing and be rained upon in turn. We had drifted during the night-time on a kindly tide, considerably nearer our island, which we could now see looming blue and indistinct through the haze some seven or eight miles away. The rain ceased a little before nine, and the clouds rose, revealing the surrounding lands, island and main,--Rum, with its abrupt mountain-peaks,--the dark Cuchullins of Skye,--and, far to the south-east, where Inverness bounds on Argyllshire, some of the tallest hills in Scotland,--among the rest, the dimly-seen Ben-Wevis. But long wreaths of pale gray cloud lay lazily under their summits, like shrouds half drawn from off the features of the dead, to be again spread over them, and we concluded that the dry weather had not yet come. A little before noon we were surrounded for miles by an immense but thinly-spread shoal of porpoises, pa.s.sing in pairs to the south, to prosecute, on their own behalf, the herring fishing in Lochfine or Gareloch; and for a full hour the whole sea, otherwise so silent, became vocal with long-breathed blowings, as if all the steam-tenders of all the railways in Britain were careering around us; and we could see slender jets of spray rising in the air on every side, and glossy black backs and pointed fins, that looked as if they had been fashioned out of Kilkenny marble, wheeling heavily along the surface. The clouds again began to close as the shoal pa.s.sed, but we could now hear in the stillness the measured sound of oars, drawn vigorously against the gunwale in the direction of the island of Eigg, still about five miles distant, though the boat from which they rose had not yet come in sight.

"Some of my poor people," said the minister, "coming to tug us ash.o.r.e!"

We were boarded in rather more than half an hour after,--for the sounds in the dead calm had preceded the boat by miles,--by four active young men, who seemed wonderfully glad to see their pastor; and then, amid the thickening showers, which had recommenced heavy as during the night, they set themselves to tow us into the harbor. The poor fellows had a long and fatiguing pull, and were thoroughly drenched ere, about six o"clock in the evening, we had got up to our anchoring ground, and moored, as usual, in the open tideway between _Eilan Chasteil_ and the main island. There was still time enough for an evening discourse, and the minister, getting out of his damp clothes, went ash.o.r.e and preached.

The evening of Sunday closed in fog and rain, and in fog and rain the morning of Monday arose. The ceaseless patter made dull music on deck and skylight above, and the slower drip, drip, through the leaky beams, drearily beat time within. The roof of my bed was luckily water-tight; and I could look out from my snuggery of blankets on the desolations of the leakage, like Bacon"s philosopher surveying a tempest from the sh.o.r.e. But the minister was somewhat less fortunate, and had no little trouble in diverting an ill-conditioned drop that had made a dead set at his pillow. I was now a full week from Edinburgh, and had seen and done nothing; and, were another week to pa.s.s after the same manner,--as, for aught that appeared, might well happen,--I might just go home again, as I had come, with my labor for my pains. In the course of the afternoon, however, the weather unexpectedly cleared up, and we set out somewhat impatiently through the wet gra.s.s, to visit a cave a few hundred yards to the west of _Naomh Fraingh_, in which it had been said the Protestants of the island might meet for the purposes of religious worship, were they to be ejected from the cottage erected by Mr.

Swanson, in which they had worshipped hitherto. We reexamined, in the pa.s.sing, the pitch stone dike mentioned in a former chapter, and the charnel cave of Frances; but I found nothing to add to my former descriptions, and little to modify, save that perhaps the cave appeared less dark, in at least the outer half of its area, than it had seemed to me in the former year, when examined by torch-light, and that the straggling twilight, as it fell on the ropy sides, green with moss and mould, and on the damp bone-strewn floor, overmantled with a still darker crust, like that of a stagnant pool, seemed also to wear its tint of melancholy greenness, as if transmitted through a depth of sea-water.

The cavern we had come to examine we found to be a n.o.ble arched opening in a dingy-colored precipice of augitic trap,--a cave roomy and lofty as the nave of a cathedral, and ever resounding to the dash of the sea; but though it could have amply accommodated a congregation of at least five hundred, we found the way far too long and difficult for at least the weak and the elderly, and in some places inaccessible at full flood; and so we at once decided against the accommodation which it offered. But its shelter will, I trust, scarce be needed.

On our return to the Betsey, we pa.s.sed through a straggling group of cottages on the hill-side, one of which, the most dilapidated and smallest of the number, the minister entered, to visit a poor old woman, who had been bed-ridden for ten years. Scarce ever before had I seen so miserable a hovel. It was hardly larger than the cabin of the Betsey, and a thousand times less comfortable. The walls and roof, formed of damp gra.s.s-grown turf, with a few layers of unconnected stone in the bas.e.m.e.nt tiers, seemed to const.i.tute one continuous hillock, sloping upwards from foundation to ridge, like one of the lesser moraines of Aga.s.siz, save where the fabric here and there bellied outwards or inwards, in perilous dilapidation, that seemed but awaiting the first breeze. The low c.h.i.n.ky door opened direct into the one wretched apartment of the hovel, which we found lighted chiefly by holes in the roof. The back of the sick woman"s bed was so placed at the edge of the opening, that it had formed at one time a sort of part.i.tion to the portion of the apartment, some five or six feet square, which contained the fire-place; but the boarding that had rendered it such had long since fallen away, and it now presented merely a naked rickety frame to the current of cold air from without. Within a foot of the bed-ridden woman"s head there was a hole in the turf-wall, which was, we saw, usually stuffed with a bundle of rags, but which lay open as we entered, and which furnished a downward peep of sea and sh.o.r.e, and the rocky _Eilan Chasteil_, with the minister"s yacht riding in the channel hard by. The little hole in the wall had formed the poor creature"s only communication with the face of the external world for ten weary years.

She lay under a dingy coverlet, which, whatever its original hue, had come to differ nothing in color from the graveyard earth, which must so soon better supply its place. What perhaps first struck the eye was the strange flatness of the bed-clothes, considering that a human body lay below: there seemed scarce bulk enough under them for a human skeleton.

The light of the opening fell on the corpse-like features of the woman,--sallow, sharp, bearing at once the stamp of disease and of famine; and yet it was evident, notwithstanding, that they had once been agreeable,--not unlike those of her daughter, a good-looking girl of eighteen, who, when we entered, was sitting beside the fire. Neither mother nor daughter had any English; but it was not difficult to determine, from the welcome with which the minister was greeted from the sick-bed, feeble as the tones were, that he was no unfrequent visitor.

He prayed beside the poor creature, and, on coming away, slipped something into her hand. I learned that not during the ten years in which she had been bed-ridden had she received a single farthing from the proprietor, nor, indeed, had any of the poor of the island, and that the parish had no session-funds. I saw her husband a few days after,--an old worn-out man, with famine written legibly in his hollow cheek and eye, and on the shrivelled frame, that seemed lost in his tattered dress; and he reiterated the same sad story. They had no means of living, he said, save through the charity of their poor neighbors, who had so little to spare; for the parish or the proprietor had never given them anything. He had once, he added, two fine boys, both sailors, who had helped them; but the one had perished in a storm off the Mull of Cantyre, and the other had died of fever when on a West India voyage; and though their poor girl was very dutiful, and staid in their crazy hut to take care of them in their helpless old age, what other could she do in a place like Eigg than just share with them their sufferings? It has been recently decided by the British Parliament, that in cases of this kind the starving poor shall not be permitted to enter the law courts of the country, there to sue for a pittance to support life, until an intermediate newly-erected court, alien to the Const.i.tution, before which they must plead at their own expense, shall have first given them permission to prosecute their claims. And I doubt not that many of the English gentlemen whose votes swelled the majority, and made it such, are really humane men, friendly to an equal-handed justice, and who hold it to be the peculiar glory of the Const.i.tution, as well shown by De Lolme, that it has not one statute-book for the poor, and another for the rich, but the same law and the same administration of law for all. They surely could not have seen that the principle of their Poor Law Act for Scotland sets the pauper beyond the pale of the Const.i.tution in the first instance, that he may be starved in the second. The suffering paupers of this miserable island cottage would have all their wants fully satisfied in the grave, long ere they could establish at their own expense, at Edinburgh, their claim to enter a court of law. I know not a fitter case for the interposition of our lately formed "Scottish a.s.sociation for the Protection of the Poor" than that of this miserable family; and it is but one of many which the island of Eigg will be found to furnish.

After a week"s weary waiting, settled weather came at last; and the morning of Tuesday rose bright and fair. My friend, whose absence at the General a.s.sembly had acc.u.mulated a considerable amount of ministerial labor on his hands, had to employ the day professionally; and as John Stewart was still engaged with his potato crop, I was necessitated to sally out on my first geological excursion alone. In pa.s.sing vessel-wards, on the previous year, from the _Ru Stoir_ to the farm-house of Keill, along the escarpment under the cliffs, I had examined the sh.o.r.es somewhat too cursorily during the one-half of my journey, and the closing evening had prevented me from exploring them during the other half at all; and I now set myself leisurely to retrace the way backwards from the farm-house to the _Stoir_. I descended to the bottom of the cliffs, along the pathway which runs between Keill and the solitary midway shieling formerly described, and found that the basaltic columns over head, which had seemed so picturesque in the twilight, lost none of their beauty when viewed by day. They occur in forms the most beautiful and fantastic; here grouped beside some blind opening in the precipice, like pillars cut round the opening of a tomb, on some rock-front in Petraea; there running in long colonnades, or rising into tall porticoes; yonder radiating in straight lines from some common centre, resembling huge pieces of fan-work, or bending out in bold curves over some shaded chasm, like rows of crooked oaks projecting from the steep sides of some dark ravine. The various beds of which the cliffs are composed, as courses of ashlar compose a wall, are of very different degrees of solidity: some are of hard porphyritic or basaltic trap; some of soft Oolitic sandstone or shale. Where the columns rest on a soft stratum, their foundations have in many places given way, and whole porticoes and colonnades hang perilously forward in tottering ruin, separated from the living rock behind by deep chasms. I saw one of these chasms, some five or six feet in width, and many yards in length, that descended to a depth which the eye could not penetrate; and another partially filled up with earth and stones, through which, along a dark opening not much larger than a chimney-vent, the boys of the island find a long descending pa.s.sage to the foot of the precipice, and emerge into light on the edge of the gra.s.sy talus half-way down the hill. It reminded me of the tunnel in the rock through which Imlac opened up a way of escape to Ra.s.selas from the happy valley,--the "subterranean pa.s.sage," begun "where the summit hung over the middle part," and that "issued out behind the prominence."

From the commencement of the range of cliffs, on half-way to the shieling, I found the sh.o.r.e so thickly covered up by ma.s.ses of trap, the debris of the precipices above, that I could scarce determine the nature of the bottom on which they rested. I now, however, reached a part of the beach where the Oolitic beds are laid bare in thin party-colored strata, and at once found something to engage me. Organisms in vast abundance, chiefly sh.e.l.ls and fragmentary portions of fishes, lie closely packed in their folds. One limestone bed, occurring in a dark shale, seems almost entirely composed of a species of small oyster; and some two or three other thin beds, of what appears to be either a species of small Mytilus or Avicula, mixed up with a few sh.e.l.ls resembling large Paludina, and a few more of the gaper family, so closely resembling existing species, that John Stewart and Alister at once challenged them as _smurslin_, the Hebridean name for a well-known sh.e.l.l in these parts,--the _Mya truncata_. The remains of fishes,--chiefly Ganoid scales and the teeth of Placoids,--lie scattered among the sh.e.l.ls in amazing abundance. On the surface of a single fragment, about nine inches by five, which I detached from one of the beds, and which now lies before me, I reckon no fewer than twenty-five teeth, and twenty-two on the area of another. They are of very various forms,--some of them squat and round, like ill-formed small shot,--others spiky and sharp, not unlike flooring nails,--some straight as needles, some bent like the beak of a hawk,--some, like the palatal teeth of the Acrodus of the Lias, resemble small leeches; some, bearing a series of points ranged on a common base, like masts on the hull of a vessel, the tallest in the centre, belong to the genus Hybodus. There is a palpable approximation in the teeth of the leech-like form to the teeth with the numerous points. Some of the specimens show the same plicated structure common to both; and on some of the leech backs, if I may so speak, there are protuberant k.n.o.bs, that indicate the places of the spiky points on the hybodent teeth. I have got three of each kind slit up by Mr. George Sanderson, and the internal structure appears to be the same. A dense body of bone is traversed by what seem innumerable roots, resembling those of woody shrubs laid bare along the sides of some forest stream. Each internal opening sends off on every side its myriads of close-laid filaments; and nowhere do they lie so thickly as in the line of the enamel, forming, from the regularity with which they are arranged, a sort of framing to the whole section. It is probable that the Hybodus,--a genus of shark which became extinct some time about the beginning of the chalk,--united, like the shark of Port Jackson, a crushing apparatus of palatal teeth to its lines of cutting ones. Among the other remains of these beds I found a dense fragment of bone, apparently reptilian, and a curious dermal plate punctulated with thick-set depressions, bounded on one side by a smooth band, and altogether closely resembling some saddler"s thimble that had been cut open and straightened.

Following the beds downwards along the beach, I found that one of the lowest which the tide permitted me to examine,--a bed colored with a tinge of red,--was formed of a denser limestone than any of the others, and composed chiefly of vast numbers of small univalves resembling Neritae. It was in exactly such a rock I had found, in the previous year, the reptile remains; and I now set myself, with no little eagerness, to examine it. One of the first pieces I tore up contained a well-preserved Plesiosaurian vertebra; a second contained a vertebra and a rib; and, shortly after, I disinterred a large portion of a pelvis. I had at length found, beyond doubt, the reptile remains _in situ_. The bed in which they occur is laid bare here for several hundred feet along the beach, jutting out at a low angle among boulders and gravel, and the reptile remains we find embedded chiefly in its under side. It lies low in the Oolite. All the stratified rocks of the island, with the exception of a small Liasic patch, belong to the Lower Oolite, and the reptile-bed occurs deep in the base of the system,--low in its relation to the nether division, in which it is included. I found it nowhere rising to the level of high-water mark. It forms one of the foundation tiers of the island, which, as the latter rises over the sea in some places to the height of about fourteen hundred feet, its upper peaks and ridges must overlie the bones, making allowance for the dip, to the depth of at least sixteen hundred. Even at the close of the Oolitic period this sepulchral stratum must have been a profoundly ancient one.

In working it out, I found two fine specimens of fish jaws, still retaining their ranges of teeth;--ichthyodorulites,--occipital plates of various forms, either reptile or ichthyic,--Ganoid scales, of nearly the same varieties of pattern as those in the Weald of Morayshire,--and the vertebrae and ribs, with the digital, pelvic, and limb-bones, of saurians. It is not unworthy of remark, that in none of the beds of this deposit did I find any of the more characteristic sh.e.l.ls of the system,--Ammonites, Belemnites, Gryphites, or Nautili.

I explored the sh.o.r.es of the island on to the _Ru Stoir_, and thence to the Bay of Laig; but though I found detached ma.s.ses of the reptile bed occurring in abundance, indicating that its place lay not far beyond the fall of ebb, in no other locality save the one described did I find it laid bare. I spent some time beside the Bay of Laig in reexamining the musical sand, in the hope of determining the peculiarities on which its sonorous qualities depended. But I examined, and cross-examined it in vain. I merely succeeded in ascertaining, in addition to my previous observations, that the loudest sounds are elicited by drawing the hand slowly through the incoherent ma.s.s, in a segment of a circle, at the full stretch of the arm, and that the vibrations which produce them communicate a peculiar t.i.tillating sensation to the hand or foot by which they are elicited, extending in the foot to the knee, and in the hand to the elbow. When we pa.s.s the wet finger along the edge of an ale-gla.s.s partially filled with water, we see the vibrations thickly wrinkling the surface: the undulations which, communicated to the air, produce sound, render themselves, when communicated to the water, visible to the eye; and the t.i.tillating feeling seems but

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