The Cruise of the Betsey Part 6

RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST;

OR,

TEN THOUSAND MILES OVER THE FOSSILIFEROUS DEPOSITS OF SCOTLAND.[10]

CHAPTER I.

Embarkation--A foundered Vessel--Lateness of the Harvest dependent on the Geological character of the Soil--A Granite Harvest and an Old Red Harvest--Cottages of Redstone and of Granite--Arable Soil of Scotland the result of a Geological Grinding Agency--Locality of the Famine of 1846--Mr. Longmuir's Fossils--Geology necessary to a Theologian--Popularizers of Science when dangerous--"Const.i.tution of Man," and "Vestiges of Creation"--Atop of the Banff Coach--A Geologist's Field Equipment--The trespa.s.sing "Stirk"--Silurian Schists inlaid with Old Red--Bay of Gamrie how formed--Gardenstone--Geological Free-masonry ill.u.s.trated--How to break an Ichthyolite Nodule--An old Rhyme mended--A raised Beach--Fossil Sh.e.l.ls--Scotland under water at the time of the Boulder Clays.

From circ.u.mstances that in no way call for explanation, my usual exploratory ramble was thrown this year (1847) from the middle of July into the middle of September; and I embarked at Granton for the north just as the night began to count hour against hour with the day. The weather was fine, and the voyage pleasant. I saw by the way, however, at least one melancholy memorial of a hurricane which had swept the eastern coasts of the island about a fortnight before, and filled the provincial newspapers with paragraphs of disaster. Nearly opposite where the Red Head lifts its mural front of Old Red Sandstone a hundred yards over the beach, the steamer pa.s.sed a foundered vessel, lying about a mile and a half off the land, with but her topmast and the point of her peak over the surface. Her vane, still at the mast-head, was drooping in the calm; and its shadow, with that of the fresh-colored _spar_ to which it was attached, white atop and yellow beneath, formed a well-defined undulatory strip on the water, that seemed as if ever in the process of being rolled up, and yet still retained its length unshortened. Every recession of the swell showed a patch of mainsail attached to the peak: the sail had been hoisted to its full stretch when the vessel went down.

And thus, though no one survived to tell the story of her disaster, enough remained to show that she had sprung a leak when straining in the gale, and that, when staggering under a press of canvas towards the still distant sh.o.r.e, where, by stranding her, the crew had hoped to save at least their lives, she had disappeared with a sudden lurch, and all aboard had perished. I remembered having read, among other memorabilia of the hurricane, without greatly thinking of the matter, that "a large sloop had foundered off the Red Head,--name unknown." But the minute portion of the wreck which I saw rising over the surface, to certify, like some frail memorial in a churchyard, that the dead lay beneath, had an eloquence in it which the words wanted, and at once sent the imagination back to deal with the stern realities of the disaster, and the feelings abroad to expatiate over saddened hearths and melancholy homesteads, where for many a long day the hapless perished would be missed and mourned, but where the true story of their fate, though too surely guessed at, would never be known.

The harvest had been early; and on to the village of Stonehaven, and a mile or two beyond, where the fossiliferous deposits end and the primary begin, the country presented from the deck only a wide expanse of stubble. Every farm-steading we pa.s.sed had its piled stack-yard; and the fields were bare. But the line of demarcation between the Old Red Sandstone and the granitic districts formed also a separating line between an earlier and later harvest; the fields of the less kindly subsoil derived from the primary rocks were, I could see, still speckled with sheaves; and, where the land lay high, or the exposure was unfavorable, there were reapers at work. All along in the course of my journey northward from Aberdeen I continued to find the country covered with shocks, and laborers employed among them; until, crossing the Spey, I entered on the fossiliferous districts of Moray; and then, as in the south, the champaign again showed a bare breadth of stubble, with here and there a ploughman engaged in turning it down. The traveller bids farewell at Stonehaven to not only the Old Red Sandstone and the early-harvest districts, but also to the rich wheat-lands of the country, and does not again fairly enter upon them until, after travelling nearly a hundred miles, he pa.s.ses from Banffs.h.i.+re into the province of Moray. He leaves behind him at the same line the wheat-fields and the cottages built of red stone, to find only barley and oats, and here and there a plot of rye, a.s.sociated with cottages of granite and gneiss, hyperstene and mica schist; but on crossing the Spey, the red cottages reappear, and fields of rich wheat-land spread out around them, as in the south. The circ.u.mstance is not unworthy the notice of the geologist. It is but a tedious process through which the minute lichen, settling on a surface of naked stone, forms in the course of ages a soil for plants of greater bulk and a higher order; and had Scotland been left to the exclusive operation of this slow agent, it would be still a rocky desert, with perhaps here and there a strip of alluvial meadow by the side of a stream, and here and there an insulated patch of rich soil among the hollows of the crags. It might possess a few gardens for the spade, but no fields for the plough. We owe our arable land to that comparatively modern geologic agent, whatever its character, that crushed, as in a mill, the upper parts of the surface-rocks of the kingdom, and then overlaid them with their own debris and rubbish to the depth of from one to forty yards. This debris, existing in one locality as a boulder-clay more or less finely comminuted, in another as a grossly pounded gravel, forms, with few exceptions, that subsoil of the country on which the existing vegetation first found root; and, being composed mainly of the formations on which it more immediately rests, it partakes of their character,--bearing a comparatively lean and hungry aspect over the primary rocks, and a greatly more fertile one over those deposits in which the organic matters of earlier creations lie diffused. Saxon industry has done much for the primary districts of Aberdeen and Banffs.h.i.+res, though it has failed to neutralize altogether the effects of causes which date as early as the times of the Old Red Sandstone; but in the Highlands, which belong almost exclusively to the non-fossiliferous formations, and which were, on at least the western coasts, but imperfectly subjected to that grinding process to which we owe our subsoils, the poor Celt has permitted the consequences of the original difference to exhibit themselves in full. If we except the islands of the Inner Hebrides, the famine of 1846 was restricted in Scotland to the primary districts.

I made it my first business, on landing in Aberdeen, to wait on my friend Mr. Longmuir, that I might compare with him a few geological notes, and benefit by his knowledge of the surrounding country. I was, however, unlucky enough to find that he had gone, a few days before, on a journey, from which he had not yet returned; but, through the kindness of Mrs. Longmuir, to whom I took the liberty of introducing myself, I was made free of his stone-room, and held half an hour's conversation with his Scotch fossils of the Chalk. These had been found, as the readers of the _Witness_ must remember from his interesting paper on the subject, on the hill of Dudwick, in the neighborhood of Ellon, and were chiefly impressions--some of them of singular distinctness and beauty--in yellow flint. I saw among them several specimens of the Inoceramus, a thin-sh.e.l.led, ponderously-hinged conchifer, characteristic of the Cretaceous group, but which has no living representative; with numerous flints, traversed by rough-edged, bifurcated hollows, in which branched sponges had once lain; a well-preserved Pecten; the impressions of spines of Echini of at least two distinct species; and the nicely-marked impression of part of a Cidaris, with the b.a.l.l.s on which the sockets of the club-like spines had been fitted existing in the print as spherical moulds, in which shot might be cast, and with the central ligamentary depression, which in the actual fossil exists but as a minute cavity, projecting into the centre of each hollow sphere, like the wooden fusee into the centre of a bomb-sh.e.l.l. This latter cast, fine and sharp as that of a medal taken in sulphur, seems sufficient of itself to establish two distinct points: in the first place, that the siliceous matter of which the flint is composed, though now so hard and rigid, must, in its original condition, have been as impressible as wax softened to receive the stamp of the seal; and, in the next, that though it was thus yielding in its character, it could not have greatly shrunk in the process of hardening. I looked with no little interest on these remains of a Scotch formation now so entirely broken up, that, like those ruined cities of the East which exist but as mere lines of wrought material barring the face of the desert, there has not "been left one stone of it upon another," but of which the fragments, though widely scattered, bear imprinted upon them, like the stamped bricks of Babylon, the story of its original condition, and a record of its _founders_. All Mr. Longmuir's Cretaceous fossils from the hill of Dudwick are of flint,--a substance not easily ground down by the denuding agencies.

I found several other curious fossils in Mr. Longmuir's collection.

Greatly more interesting, however, than any of the specimens which it contains, is the general fact, that it should be the collection of a Free Church minister, sedulously attentive to the proper duties of his office, but who has yet found time enough to render himself an accomplished geologist; and whose week-day lectures on the science attract crowds, who receive from them, in many instances, their first knowledge of the strange revolutions of which our globe has been the subject, blent with the teachings of a wholesome theology. The present age, above all that has gone before, is peculiarly the age of physical science; and of all the physical sciences, not excepting astronomy itself, geology, though it be a fact worthy of notice, that not one of our truly accomplished geologists is an infidel, is the science of which infidelity has most largely availed itself. And as the theologian in a metaphysical age,--when skepticism, conforming to the character of the time, disseminated its doctrines in the form of nicely abstract speculations,--had, in order that the enemy might be met in his own field, to become a skilful metaphysician, he must now, in like manner, address himself to the tangibilities of natural history and geology, if he would avoid the danger and disgrace of having his flank turned by every sciolist in these walks whom he may chance to encounter. It is those identical bastions and outworks that are _now_ attacked, which must be _now_ defended; not those which were attacked some eighty or a hundred years ago. And as he who succeeds in first mixing up fresh and curious truths, either with the objections by which religion is a.s.sailed or the arguments by which it is defended, imparts to his cause all the interest which naturally attaches to these truths, and leaves to his opponent, who pa.s.ses over them after him as at second hand, a subject divested of the fire-edge of novelty, I can deem Mr. Longmuir well and not unprofessionally employed, in connecting with a sound creed the picturesque marvels of one of the most popular of the sciences, and by this means introducing them to his people, linked, from the first, with right a.s.sociations. According to the old fiction, the look of the basilisk did not kill unless the creature saw before it was seen;--its mere _return_ glance was harmless; and there is a cla.s.s of thoroughly dangerous writers who in this respect resemble the basilisk. It is perilous to give them a first look of the public. They are formidable simply as the earliest popularizers of some interesting science, or the first promulgators of some cla.s.s of curious little-known facts, with which they mix up their special contributions of error,--often the only portion of their writings that really belongs to themselves. Nor is it at all so easy to _counteract_ as to _confute_ them. A masterly confutation of the part of their works truly their own may, from its subject, be a very unreadable book: it can have but the insinuated poison to deal with, unmixed with the palatable pabulum in which the poison has been conveyed; and mere treatises on poisons, whether moral or medical, are rarely works of a very delectable order. It seems to be on this principle that there exists no confutation of the "Const.i.tution of Man" in which the ordinary reader finds amus.e.m.e.nt to carry him through; whereas the work itself, full of curious miscellaneous information, is eminently readable; and that the "Vestiges of Creation,"--a treatise as entertaining as the "Arabian Nights,"--bids fair, not from the amount of error which it contains, but from the amount of fresh and interestingly told truth with which the error is mingled, to live and do mischief when the various solidly-scientific replies which it has called forth are laid upon the shelf. Both the "Const.i.tution" and the "Vestiges" had the advantage, so essential to the basilisk, of taking the first glance of the public on their respective subjects; whereas their confutators have been able to render them back but mere _return_ glances. The only efficiently counteractive mode of looking down the danger, in cases of this kind, is the mode adopted by Mr. Longmuir.

There was a smart frost next morning; and, for a few hours, my seat on the top of the Banff coach, by which I travelled across the country to where the Gamrie and Banff roads part company, was considerably more cool than agreeable. But the keen morning improved into a brilliant day, with an atmosphere transparent as if there had been no atmosphere at all, through which the distant objects looked out as sharp of outline, and in as well-defined light and shadow, as if they had occupied the background, not of a Scotch, but of an Italian landscape. A few speck-like sails, far away on the intensely blue sea, which opened upon us in a stretch of many leagues, as we surmounted the moory ridge over Macduff, gleamed to the sun with a radiance bright as that of the sparks of a furnace blown to a white heat. The land, uneven of surface, and open, and ab.u.t.ting in bold promontories on the frith, still bore the sunny hue of harvest, and seemed as if stippled over with shocks from the ridgy hill summits, to where ranges of giddy cliffs flung their shadows across the beach. I struck off for Gamrie by a path that runs eastward, nearly parallel to the sh.o.r.e,--which at one or two points it overlooks from dark-colored cliffs of grauwacke slate,--to the fis.h.i.+ng village of Gardenstone. My dress was the usual fatigue suit of russet, in which I find I can work amid the soil of ravines and quarries with not only the best effect, but with even the least possible sacrifice of appearance: the shabbiest of all suits is a good suit spoiled. My hammer-shaft projected from my pocket; a knapsack, with a few changes of linen, slung suspended from my shoulders; a strong cotton umbrella occupied my better hand; and a gray maud, buckled shepherd-fas.h.i.+on aslant the chest, completed my equipment. There were few travellers on the road, which forked off on the hill-side a short mile away, into two branches, like a huge letter Y, leaving me uncertain which branch to choose; and I made up my mind to have the point settled by a woman of middle age, marked by a hard, _manly_ countenance, who was coming up towards me, bound apparently for the Banff or Macduff market, and stooping under a load of dairy produce. She too, apparently, had her purpose to serve or point to settle; for as we met, she was the first to stand; and, sharply scanning my appearance and aspect at a glance, she abruptly addressed me. "Honest man," she said, "do you see yon house wi'

the chimla?" "That house with the farm-steadings and stacks beside it?"

I replied. "Yes." "Then I'd be obleeged if ye wald just stap in as ye'r gaing east the gate, and tell _our_ folk that the stirk has gat fra her tether, an' 'ill brak on the wat clover. Tell them to sen' for her _that_ minute." I undertook the commission; and, pa.s.sing the endangered stirk, that seemed luxuriating, undisturbed by any presentiment of impending peril, amid the rich swathe of a late clover crop, still damp with the dews of the morning frost, I tapped at the door of the farm-house, and delivered my message to a young good-looking girl, in nearly the words of the woman:--"The gude-wife bade me tell _them_," I said, "to send that instant for the stirk, for she had gat fra her tether, and would brak on the wat clover." The girl blushed just a very little, and thanked me; and then, after obliging me, in turn, by laying down for me my proper route,--for I had left the question of the forked road to be determined at the farm-house,--she set off at high speed, to rescue the unconscious stirk. A walk of rather less than two hours brought me abreast of the Bay of Gamrie,--a picturesque indentation of the coast, in the formation of which the agency of the old denuding forces, operating on deposits of unequal solidity, may be distinctly traced. The surrounding country is composed chiefly of Silurian schists, in which there is deeply inlaid a detached strip of mouldering Old Red Sandstone, considerably more than twenty miles in length, and that varies from two to three miles in breadth. It seems to have been let down into the more ancient formation,--like the keystone of a bridge into the ringstones of the arch when the work is in the act of being completed,--during some of those terrible convulsions which cracked and rent the earth's crust, as if it had been an earthen pipkin brought to a red heat and then plunged into cold water. Its consequent occurrence in a lower tier of the geological edifice than that to which it originally belonged has saved it from the great denudation which has swept from the surface of the surrounding country the tier composed of its contemporary beds and strata, and laid bare the grauwacke on which this upper tier rested. But where it presents its narrow end to the sea, as the older houses in our more ancient Scottish villages present their gables to the street, the waves of the German Ocean, by incessantly charging against it, propelled by the tempests of the stormy north, have hollowed it into the Bay of Gamrie, and left the more solid grauwacke standing out in bold promontories on either side, as the headlands of Gamrie and Troup.

In pa.s.sing downwards on the fis.h.i.+ng village of Gardenstone, mainly in the hope of procuring a guide to the ichthyolite beds, I saw a laborer at work with a pickaxe, in a little craggy ravine, about a hundred yards to the left of the path, and two gentlemen standing beside him. I paused for a moment, to ascertain whether the latter were not brother-workers in the geologic field. "Hilloa!--here,"--shouted out the stouter of the two gentlemen, as if, by some _clairvoyant_ faculty, he had dived into my secret thought; "come here." I went down into the ravine, and found the laborer engaged in disinterring ichthyolitic nodules out of a bed of gray stratified clay, identical in its composition with that of the Cromarty fish-beds; and a heap of freshly-broken nodules, speckled with the organic remains of the Lower Old Red Sandstone,--chiefly occipital plates and scales,--lay beside him. "Know you aught of these?" said the stouter gentleman, pointing to the heap. "A little," I replied; "but your specimens are none of the finest. Here, however, is a dorsal plate of Coccosteus; and here a scattered group of scales of Osteolepis; and here the occipital plates of _Cheirolepis c.u.mmingiae_; and here the spine of the anterior dorsal of _Diplacanthus striatus_." My reading of the fossils was at once recognized, like the mystic sign of the freemason, as establis.h.i.+ng for me a place among the geologic brotherhood; and the stout gentleman producing a spirit-flask and a gla.s.s, I pledged him and his companion in a b.u.mper. "Was I not sure?" he said, addressing his friend: "I knew by the cut of his jib, notwithstanding his shepherd's plaid, that he was a wanderer of the scientific cast." We discussed the peculiarities of the deposit, which, in its mineralogical character, and generically in that of its organic contents, resembles, I found, the fish-beds of Cromarty (though, curiously enough, the intervening contemporary deposits of Moray and the western parts of Banffs.h.i.+re differ widely, in at least their chemistry, from both); and we were right good friends ere we parted. To men who travel for amus.e.m.e.nt, incident is incident, however trivial in itself, and always worth something. I showed the younger of the two geologists my mode of breaking open an ichthyolitic nodule, so as to secure the best possible section of the fish. "Ah," he said, as he marked a style of handling the hammer which, save for the fifteen years' previous practice of the operative mason, would be perhaps less complete,--"Ah, you must have broken open a great many." His own knowledge of the formation and its ichthyolites had been chiefly derived, he added, from a certain little treatise on the "Old Red Sandstone," rather popular than scientific, which he named. I of course claimed no acquaintance with the work; and the conversation went on.

The ill luck of my new friends, who had been toiling among the nodules for hours without finding an ichthyolite worth transferring to their bag, showed me that, without excavating more deeply than my time allowed, I had no chance of finding good specimens. But, well content to have ascertained that the ichthyolite bed of Gamrie is identical in its composition, and, generically at least, in its organisms, with the beds with which I was best acquainted, I rose to come away. The object which I next proposed to myself was, to determine whether, as at Eathie and Cromarty, the fossils here appear not only on the hill-side, but also crop out along the sh.o.r.e. On taking leave, however, of the geologists, I was reminded by the younger of what I might have otherwise forgotten,--a raised beach in the immediate neighborhood (first described by Mr. Prestwich, in his paper on the Gamrie ichthyolites), which contains sh.e.l.ls of the existing species at a higher level than elsewhere,--so far as is yet known,--on the east coast of Scotland. And, kindly conducting me till he had brought me full within view of it, we parted. The ichthyolites which I had just been laying open occur on the verge of that Strathbogie district in which the Church controversy raged so hot and high; and by a common enough trick of the a.s.sociative faculty, they now recalled to my mind a stanza which memory had somehow caught when the battle was at the fiercest. It formed part of a satiric address, published in an Aberdeen newspaper, to the not very respectable non-intrusionists who had smoked tobacco and drank whisky in the parish church at Culsalmond, on the day of a certain forced settlement there, specially recorded by the clerks of the Justiciary Court.

"Tobacco and whisky cost siller, And meal is but scanty at hame; But gang to the stane-mason M----r, Wi' Old Red Sandstone fish he'll fill your wame."

Rather a dislocated line that last, I thought, and too much in the style in which Zachary Boyd sings "Pharaoh and the Pascal." And as it is wrong to leave the beast of even an enemy in the ditch, however long its ears, I must just try and set it on its legs. Would it not run better thus?

"Tobacco and whisky cost siller, An' meal is but scanty at hame; But gang to the stane-mason M----r,"

He'll pang wi' ichth'olites your wame,-- Wi' _fish_!! as Aga.s.siz has ca'ed 'em, In Greek, like themsel's, _hard_ an' _odd_, That were baked in stane pies afore Adam Gaed names to the haddocks and cod.

Bad enough as rhyme, I suspect; but conclusive as evidence to prove that the animal spirits, under the influence of the bracing walk, the fine day, and the agreeable recounter at the fish-beds,--not forgetting the half-gill b.u.mper,--had mounted very considerably above their ordinary level at the editorial desk.

The raised beach may be found on the slopes of a gra.s.s-covered eminence, once the site of an ancient hill-fort, and which still exhibits, along the rim-like edge of the flat area atop, scattered fragments of the vitrified walls. A general covering of turf restricted my examination of the sh.e.l.ls to one point, where a land-slip on a small scale had laid the deposit bare; but I at least saw enough to convince me that the debris of the sh.e.l.l-fish used of old as food by the garrison had not been mistaken for the remains of a raised beach,--a mistake which in other localities has occurred, I have reason to believe, oftener than once.

The sh.e.l.ls, some of them exceedingly minute, and not of edible species, occur in layers in a siliceous stratified sand, overlaid by a bed of bluish-colored silt. I picked out of the sand two entire specimens of a full-grown Fusus, little more than half an inch in length,--the _Fusus turricola_; and the greater number of the fragments that lay bleaching at the foot of the broken slope, in a state of chalky friability, seemed to be fragments of those smaller bivalves, belonging to the genera _Donax_, _Venus_, and _Mactra_, that are so common on flat sandy sh.o.r.es.

But when the sea washed over these sh.e.l.ls, they could have been the denizens of at least no _flat_ sh.o.r.e. The descent on which they occur sinks downwards to the existing beach, over which it is elevated at this point two hundred and thirty feet, at an angle with the horizon of from thirty-five to forty degrees. Were the land to be now submerged to where they appear on the hill-side, the bay of Gamrie, as abrupt in its slopes as the upper part of Loch Lomond or the sides of Loch Ness, would possess a depth of forty fathoms water at little more than a hundred yards from the sh.o.r.e. I may add, that I could trace at this height no marks of such a continuous terrace around the sides of the bay as the waves would have infallibly excavated in the diluvium, had the sea stood at a level so high, or, according to the more prevalent view, had the land stood at a level so low, for any considerable time; though the green banks which sweep around the upper part of the inflection, unscarred by the defacing plough, would scarce have failed to retain some mark of where the surges had broken, had the surges been long there. Whatever may in this special case be the fact, however, I cannot doubt that in the comparatively modern period of the boulder clays, Scotland lay buried under water to a depth at least five times as great as the s.p.a.ce between this ancient sea-beach and the existing tide-line.

CHAPTER II.

Character of the Rocks near Gardenstone--A Defunct Father-lasher--A Geological Inference--Village of Gardenstone--The drunken Scot--Gardenstone Inn--Lord Gardenstone--A Tempest threatened--The Author's Ghost Story--The Lady in Green--Her Appearance and Tricks--The Rescued Children--The murdered Peddler and his Pack--Where the Green Dress came from--Village of Macduff--Peculiar Appearance of the Beach at the Mouth of the Deveron--Dr. Emslie's Fossils--_Pterichthys quadratus_--Argillaceous Deposit of Blackpots--Pipe-laying in Scotland--Fossils of Blackpots Clay--Mr.

Longmuir's Description of them--Blackpots Deposit a Re-formation of a Liasic Patch--Period of its Formation.

I lingered on the hill-side considerably longer than I ought; and then, hurrying downwards to the beach, pa.s.sed eastwards under a range of abrupt, mouldering precipices of red sandstone, to the village. From the lie of the strata, which, instead of inclining coastwise, dip towards the interior of the country, and present in the descent seawards the outcrop of lower and yet lower deposits of the formation, I found it would be in vain to look for the ichthyolite beds along the sh.o.r.e. They may possibly be found, however, though I lacked time to ascertain the fact, along the sides of a deep ravine, which occurs near an old ecclesiastical edifice of gray stone, perched, nest-like, half-way up the bank, on a green hummock that overlooks the sea. The rocks, laid bare by the tide, belong to the bed of coa.r.s.e-grained red sandstone, varying from eighty to a hundred and fifty feet in thickness, which lies between the lower fish-bed and the great conglomerate, and which, in not a few of its strata, pa.s.ses itself into a species of conglomerate, different only from that which it overlies, in being more finely comminuted. The continuity of this bed, like that of the deposit on which it rests, is very remarkable. I have found it occurring at many various points, over an area at least ten thousand square miles in extent, and bearing always the same well-marked character of a more thoroughly ground-down conglomerate than the great conglomerate on which it reposes. The underlying bed is composed of broken fragments of the rocks below, crushed, as if by some imperfect rudimentary process, like that which in a mill merely breaks the grain; whereas, in the bed above, a portion of the previously-crushed materials seems to have been subjected to some further attritive process, like that through which, in the mill, the broken grain is ground down into meal or flour.

As I pa.s.sed onwards, I saw, amid a heap of drift-weed stranded high on the beach by the previous tide, a defunct father-lasher, with the two defensive spines which project from its opercles stuck fast into little cubes of cork, that had floated its head above water, as the tyro-swimmer floats himself upon bladders; and my previous acquaintance with the habits of a fis.h.i.+ng village enabled me at once to determine why and how it had perished. Though almost never used as food on the eastern coast of Scotland, it had been inconsiderate enough to take the fisherman's bait, as if it had been worthy of being eaten; and he had avenged himself for the trouble it had cost him, by mounting it on cork, and sending it off, to wander between wind and water, like the Flying Dutchman, until it died. Was there ever on earth a creature save man that could have played a fellow-mortal a trick at once so ingeniously and gratuitously cruel? Or what would be the proper inference, were I to find one of the many-thorned ichthyolites of the Lower Old Red Sandstone with the spines of its pectorals similarly fixed on cubes of lignite?--that there had existed in these early ages not merely _physical death_, but also _moral evil_; and that the being who perpetrated the evil could not only inflict it simply for the sake of the pleasure he found in it, and without prospect of advantage to himself, but also by so adroitly reversing, fiend-like, the purposes of the benevolent Designer, that the weapons given for the defence of a poor harmless creature should be converted into the instruments of its destruction. It was not without meaning that it was forbidden by the law of Moses to seethe a kid in its mother's milk.

A steep bulwark in front, against which the tide lashes twice every twenty-four hours,--an abrupt hill behind,--a few rows of squalid cottages built of red sandstone, much wasted by the keen sea-winds,--a wilderness of dunghills and ruinous pig-styes,--women seated at the doors, employed in baiting lines or mending nets,--groups of men lounging lazily at some gable-end fronting the sea,--herds of ragged children playing in the lanes,--such are the components of the fis.h.i.+ng village of Gardenstone. From the ident.i.ty of name, I had a.s.sociated the place with that Lord Gardenstone of the Court of Sessions who published, late in the last century, a volume of "Miscellanies in Prose and Verse,"

containing, among other clever things, a series of tart criticisms on English plays, transcribed, it was stated in the preface, from the margins and fly-leaves of the books of a "small library kept open by his Lords.h.i.+p" for the amus.e.m.e.nt of travellers at the inn of some village in his immediate neighborhood; and taking it for granted, somehow, that Gardenstone was the village, I was looking around me for the inn, in the hope that where his Lords.h.i.+p had opened a library I might find a dinner.

But failing to discern it, I addressed myself on the subject to an elderly man in a pack-sheet ap.r.o.n, who stood all alone, looking out upon the sea, like Napoleon, in the print, from a projection of the bulwark.

He turned round, and showed, by an unmistakable expression of eye and feature, that he was what the servant girl in "Guy Mannering"

characterizes as "very particularly drunk,"--not stupidly, but happily, funnily, conceitedly drunk, and full of all manner of high thoughts of himself. "It'll be an awfu' coorse nicht," he said, "fra the sea." "Very likely," I replied, reiterating my query in a form that indicated some little confidence of receiving the needed information; "I daresay you could point me out the public-house here?" "Aweel, I wat, that I can; but what's that?" pointing to the straps of my knapsack;--"are ye a sodger on the Queen's account, or ye'r ain?" "On my own, to be sure; but have ye a public-house here?" "Ay, twa; ye'll be a traveller?" "O yes, great traveller, and very hungry: have I pa.s.sed the best public-house?"

"Ay; and ye'll hae come a gude stap the day?" A woman came up, with spectacles on nose, and a piece of white seam-work in her hand; and, cutting short the dialogue by addressing myself to her, she at once directed me to the public-house. "Hoot, gude-wife," I heard the man say, as I turned down the street, "we suld ha'e gotten mair oot o' him. He's a great traveller yon, an' has a gude Scots tongue in his head."

Travellers, save when, during the herring season, an occasional fish-curer comes the way, rarely bait at the Gardenstone inn; and in the little low-browed room, with its windows in the thatch, into which, as her best, the land-lady ushered me, I certainly found nothing to identify the _locale_ with that chosen by the literary lawyer for his open library. But, according to Ferguson, though "learning was scant, provision was good;" and I dined sumptuously on an immense platter of fried flounders. There was a little bit of cold pork added to the fare; but, aware from previous experience of the pisciverous habits of the swine of a fis.h.i.+ng village, I did what I knew the defunct pig must have very frequently done before me,--satisfied a keenly-whetted appet.i.te on fish exclusively. I need hardly remind the reader that Lord Gardenstone's inn was not that of Gardenstone, but that of Laurence-kirk,--the thriving village which it was the special ambition of this law-lord of the last century to create; and which, did it produce only its famed snuff-boxes, with the invisible hinges, would be rather a more valuable boon to the country than that secured to it by those law-lords of our own days, who at one fell blow disestablished the national religion of Scotland, and broke off the only handle by which their friends the politicians could hope to _manage_ the country's old vigorous Presbyterianism. Meanwhile it was becoming apparent that the man with the ap.r.o.n had as shrewdly antic.i.p.ated the character of the coming night as if he had been soberer. The sun, ere its setting, disappeared in a thick leaden haze, which enveloped the whole heavens; and twilight seemed posting on to night a full hour before its time. I settled a very moderate bill, and set off under the cliffs at a round pace, in the hope of scaling the hill, and gaining the high road atop which leads to Macduff, ere the darkness closed. I had, however, miscalculated my distance; I, besides, lost some little time in the opening of the deep ravine to which I have already referred as that in which possibly the fish-beds may be found cropping out; and I had got but a little beyond the gray ecclesiastical ruin, with its lonely burying-ground, when the tempest broke and the night fell.

One of the last objects which I saw, as I turned to take a farewell look of the bay of Gamrie, was the magnificent promontory of Troup Head, outlined in black on a ground of deep gray, with its two terminal stacks standing apart in the sea. And straightway, through one of those tricks of a.s.sociation so powerful in raising, as if from the dead, buried memories of things of which the mind has been oblivious for years, there started up in recollection the details of an ancient ghost-story, of which I had not thought before for perhaps a quarter of a century. It had been touched, I suppose, in its obscure, unnoted corner, as Ithuriel touched the toad, by the apparition of the insulated stacks of Troup, seen dimly in the thickening twilight over the solitary burying-ground.

For it so chances that one of the main incidents of the story bears reference to an insulated sea-stack; and it is connected altogether, though I cannot fix its special locality, with this part of the coast.

The story had been long in my mother's family, into which it had been originally brought by a great-grandfather of the writer, who quitted some of the seaport villages of Banffs.h.i.+re for the northern side of the Moray Frith, about the year 1718; and, when pus.h.i.+ng on in the darkness, straining as I best could, to maintain a sorely-tried umbrella against the capricious struggles of the tempest, that now tatooed furiously upon its back as if it were a kettle-drum, and now got underneath its stout ribs, and threatened to send it up aloft like a balloon, and anon twisted it from side to side, and strove to turn it inside out, like a Kilmarnock night-cap,--I employed myself in arranging in my mind the details of the narrative, as they had been communicated to me half an age before by a female relative.

The opening of the story, though it existed long ere the times of Sir Walter Scott or the Waverly novels, bears some resemblance to the opening in the "Monastery," of the story of the White Lady of Avenel.

The wife of a Banffs.h.i.+re proprietor of the minor cla.s.s had been about six months dead, when one of her husband's ploughmen, returning on horseback from the smithy, in the twilight of an autumn evening, was accosted, on the banks of a small stream, by a stranger lady, tall and slim, and wholly attired in green, with her face wrapped up in the hood of her mantle, who requested to be taken up behind him on the horse, and carried across. There was something in the tones of her voice that seemed to thrill through his very bones, and to insinuate itself, in the form of a chill fluid, between his skull and the scalp. The request, too, appeared a strange one; for the rivulet was small and low, and could present no serious bar to the progress of the most timid traveller. But the man, unwilling ungallantly to offend a lady, turned his horse to the bank, and she sprang up lightly behind him. She was, however, a personage that could be better seen than felt; she came in contact with the ploughman's back, he said, as if she had been an ill-filled sack of wool; and when, on reaching the opposite side of the streamlet, she leaped down as slightly as she had mounted, and he turned fearfully round to catch a second glimpse of her, it was in the conviction that she was a creature considerably less earthly in her texture than himself. She had opened, with two pale, thin arms, the enveloping hood, exhibiting a face equally pale and thin, which seemed marked, however, by the roguish, half-humorous expression of one who had just succeeded in playing off a good joke. "My dead mistress!!"

exclaimed the ploughman. "Yes, John, _your mistress_," replied the ghost. "But ride home, my bonny man, for it's growing late: you and I will be better acquainted ere long." John accordingly rode home and told his story.

Next evening, about the same hour, as two of the laird's servant-maids were engaged in was.h.i.+ng in an out-house, there came a slight tap to the door. "Come in," said one of the maids; and the lady entered, dressed, as on the previous night, in green. She swept past them to the inner part of the was.h.i.+ng-room; and, seating herself on a low bench, from which, ere her death, she used occasionally to superintend their employment, she began to question them, as if still in the body, about the progress of their work. The girls, however, were greatly too frightened to make any reply. She then visited an old woman who had nursed the laird, and to whom she used to show, ere her departure, greatly more kindness than her husband. And she now seemed as much interested in her welfare as ever. She inquired whether the laird was kind to her, and looking round her little smoky cottage, regretted she should be so indifferently lodged, and that her cupboard, which was rather of the emptiest at the time, should not be more amply furnished.

For nearly a twelvemonth after, scarce a day pa.s.sed in which she was not seen by some of the domestics; never, however, except on one occasion, after the sun had risen, or before it had set. The maids could see her, in the gray of the morning flitting like a shadow round their beds, or peering in upon them at night through the dark window-panes, or at half-open doors. In the evening she would glide into the kitchen or some of the out-houses,--one of the most familiar and least dignified of her cla.s.s that ever held intercourse with mankind,--and inquire of the girls how they had been employed during the day; often, however, without obtaining an answer, though from a cause different from that which had at first tied their tongues. For they had become so regardless of her presence, viewing her simply as a troublesome mistress, who had no longer any claim to be heeded, that when she entered, and they had dropped their conversation, under the impression that their visitor was a creature of flesh and blood like themselves, they would again resume it, remarking that the entrant was "only the green lady." Though always cadaverously pale, and miserable looking, she affected a joyous disposition, and was frequently heard to laugh, even when invisible. At one time, when provoked by the studied silence of a servant girl, she flung a pillow at her head, which the girl caught up and returned; at another, she presented her first acquaintance, the ploughman, with what seemed to be a handful of silver coin, which he transferred to his pocket, but which, on hearing her laugh, he drew out, and found to be merely a handful of slate s.h.i.+vers. On yet another occasion, the man, when pa.s.sing on horseback through a clump of wood, was repeatedly struck from behind the trees by little pellets of turf; and, on riding into the thicket, he found that his a.s.sailant was the green lady. To her husband she never appeared; but he frequently heard the tones of her voice echoing from the lower apartments, and the faint peal of her cold, unnatural laugh.

One day at noon, a year after her first appearance, the old nurse was surprised to see her enter the cottage; as all her previous visits had been made early in the morning or late in the evening; whereas now,--though the day was dark and lowering, and a storm of wind and rain had just broken out,--still it _was_ day. "Mammie," she said, "I cannot open the heart of the laird, and I have nothing of my own to give you; but I think I can do something for you now. Go straight to the White House [that of a neighboring proprietor], and tell the folk there to set out with all the speed of man and horse for the black rock in the sea, at the foot of the crags, or they'll rue it dearly to their dying day.

Their bairns, foolish things, have gone out to the rock, and the tide has flowed around them; and, if no help reach them soon, they'll be all scattered like sea-ware on the sh.o.r.e ere the fall of the sea. But if you go and tell your story at the White House, mammie, the bairns will be safe for an hour to come, and there will be something done by their mother to better you, for the news." The woman went, as directed, and told her story; and the father of the children set out on horseback in hot haste for the rock,--a low, insulated skerry, which, lying on a solitary part of the beach, far below the line of flood, was shut out from the view of the inhabited country by a wall of precipices, and covered every tide by several feet of water. On reaching the edge of the cliffs, he saw the black rock, as the woman had described, surrounded by the sea, and the children clinging to its higher crags. But, though the waves were fast rising, his attempts to ride out through the surf to the poor little things were frustrated by their cries, which so frightened his horse as to render it unmanageable; and so he had to gallop on to the nearest fis.h.i.+ng village for a boat. So much time was unavoidably lost in consequence, that nearly the whole beach was covered by the sea, and the surf had begun to lash the feet of the precipices behind; but until the boat arrived, not a single wave dashed over the black rock; though immediately after the last of the children had been rescued, an immense wreath of foam rose twice a man's height over its topmost pinnacle.

The old nurse, on her return to the cottage, found the green lady sitting beside the fire. "Mammie," she said, "you have made friends to yourself to-day, who will be kinder to you than your foster-son. I must now leave you. My time is out, and you'll be all left to yourselves; but I'll have no rest, mammie, for many a twelvemonth to come. Ten years ago, a travelling peddler broke into our garden in the fruit season, and I sent out our old ploughman, who is now in Ireland, to drive him away.

It was on a Sunday, and everybody else was in church. The men struggled and fought, and the peddler was killed. But though I at first thought of bringing the case before the laird, when I saw the dead man's pack, with its silks and its velvets, and this unhappy piece of green satin (shaking her dress), my foolish heart beguiled me, and I made the ploughman bury the peddler's body under our ash tree, in the corner of our garden, and we divided his goods and money between us. You must bid the laird raise his bones, and carry them to the churchyard; and the gold, which you will find in the little bowl under the tapestry in my room, must be sent to a poor old widow, the peddler's mother, who lives on the sh.o.r.e of Leith. I must now away to Ireland to the ploughman; and I'll be e'en less welcome to him, mammie, than at the laird's; but the hungry blood cries loud against us both,--him and me,--and we must suffer together. Take care you look not after me till I have pa.s.sed the knowe." She glided away, as she spoke, in a gleam of light; and when the old woman had withdrawn her hand from her eyes, dazzled by the sudden brightness, she saw only a large black gray-hound crossing the moor. And the green lady was never afterwards seen in Scotland. The little h.o.a.rd of gold pieces, however, stored in a concealed recess of her former apartment, and the mouldering ruins of the peddler under the ash tree, gave evidence to the truth of her narrative. The story was hardly wild enough for a night so drear and a road so lonely; its ghost-heroine was but a homely ghost-heroine, too little aware that the same familiarity which, according to the proverb, breeds contempt when exercised by the denizens of this world, produces similar effects when too much indulged in by the inhabitants of another. But the arrangement and restoration of the details of the tradition,--for they had been scattered in my mind like the fragments of a broken fossil,--furnished me with so much amus.e.m.e.nt, when struggling with the storm, as to shorten by at least one-half the seven miles which intervene between Gamrie and Macduff.

Instead, however, of pressing on to Banff, as I had at first intended, I baited for the night at a snug little inn in the latter village, which I reached just wet enough to enjoy the luxury of a strong clear fire of Newcastle coal.

Mrs. Longmuir had furnished me with a note of introduction to Dr. Emslie of Banff, an intelligent geologist, familiar with the deposits of the district; and, walking on to his place of residence next morning, in a rain as heavy as that of the previous night, I made it my first business to wait on him, and deliver the note. Ere, however, crossing the Deveron, which flows between Banff and Macduff, I paused for a few minutes in the rain, to mark the peculiar appearance presented by the beach where the river disembogues into the frith. Occurring as a rectangular spit in the line of the sh.o.r.e, with the expanded stream widening into an estuary on its upper side, and the open sea on the lower, it marks the scene of an obstinate contest between antagonist forces,--the powerful sweep of the torrent, and the not less powerful waves of the stormy north-east; and exists, in consequence, as a long gravelly prism, which presents as steep an angle of descent to the waves on the one side as to the current on the other. It is a true river bar, beaten in from its proper place in the sea by the violence of the surf, and fairly stranded. Dr. Emslie obligingly submitted to my inspection his set of Gamrie fossils, containing several good specimens of Pterichthys and Coccosteus, undistinguishable, like those I had seen on the previous day, in their state of keeping, and the character of the nodular matrices in which they lie, from my old acquaintance the Cephalaspians of Cromarty. The animal matter which the bony plates and scales originally contained has been converted, in both the Gamrie and Cromarty ichthyolites, into a jet-black bitumen; and in both, the inclosing nodules consist of a smoke-colored argillaceous limestone, which formed around the organisms in a bed of stratified clay, and at once exhibits, in consequence, the rectilinear lines of the stratification, mechanical in their origin, and the radiating ones of the sub-crystalline concretion, purely a trick of the chemistry of the deposit. A Pterichthys in Dr. Emslie's collection struck me as different in its proportions from any I had previously seen, though, from its state of rather imperfect preservation, I hesitated to p.r.o.nounce absolutely upon the fact. I cannot now doubt, however, that it belonged to a species not figured nor described at the time; but which, under the name of _Pterichthys quadratus_, forms in part the subject of a still unpublished memoir, in which Sir Philip Egerton, our first British authority on fossil fish, has done me the honor to a.s.sociate my humble name with his own; and which will have the effect of reducing to the ranks of the Pterichthyan genus the supposed genera _Pamphractus_ and _h.o.m.othorax_. A second set of fossils, which Dr. Emslie had derived from his tile-works at Blackpots, proved, I found, identical with those of the Eathie Lias. As this Banffs.h.i.+re deposit had formed a subject of considerable discussion and difference among geologists, I was curious to examine it; and the Doctor, though the day was still none of the best, kindly walked out with me, to bring under my notice appearances which, in the haste of a first examination, I might possibly overlook, and to show me yet another set of fossils which he kept at the works. He informed me, as we went, that the Grauwacke (Lower Silurian) deposits of the district, hitherto deemed so barren, had recently yielded their organisms in a slate quarry at Gamrie-head; and that they belong to that ancient family of the Pennatularia which, in this northern kingdom, seems to have taken precedence of all the others. Judging from what now appears, the Graptolite must be regarded as the first settler who squatted for a living in that deep-sea area of undefined boundary occupied at the present time by the bold wave-worn headlands and blue hills of Scotland; and this new Banffs.h.i.+re locality not only greatly extends the range of the fossil in reference to the kingdom, but also establishes, in a general way, the fossiliferous ident.i.ty of the Lower Silurian deposits to the north of the Grampians with that of Peebles-s.h.i.+re and Galloway in the south,--so far as I know, the only other two Scottish districts in which this organism has been found.

The argillaceous deposit of Blackpots occupies, in the form of a green swelling bank, a promontory rather soft than bold in its contour, that projects far into the sea, and forms, when tipped with its slim column of smoke from the tile-kiln, a pleasing feature in the landscape. I had set it down on the previous day, when it first caught my eye from the lofty cliffs of Gamrie-head, at the distance of some ten or twelve miles, as different in character from all the other features of the prospect. The country generally is moulded on a framework of primary rock, and presents headlands of hard, sharp outline, to the attrition of the waves; whereas this single headland in the midst,--soft-lined, undulatory, and plump,--seems suited to remind one of Burns's young Kirk Alloway beauty disporting amid the thin old ladies that joined with her in the dance. And it _is_ a greatly younger beauty than the Cambrian and mica-schist protuberances that encroach on the sea on either side of it.

The sheds and kilns of a tile-work occupy the flat terminal point of the promontory; and as the clay is valuable, in this tile-draining age, for the facility with which it can be moulded into pipe-tiles (a purpose which the ordinary clays of the north of Scotland, composed chiefly of re-formations of the Old Red Sandstone, are what is technically termed too _short_ to serve), it is gradually retreating inland before the persevering spade and mattock of the laborer. The deposit has already been drawn out into many hundred miles of cylindrical pipes, and is destined to be drawn out into many thousands more,--such being one of the strange metamorphoses effected in the geologic formations, now that that curious animal the Bimana has come upon the stage; and at length it will have no existence in the country, save as an immense system of veins and arteries underlying the vegetable mould. Will these veins and arteries, I marvel, form, in their turn, the _fossils_ of another period, when a higher platform than that into which they have been laid will be occupied to the full by plants and animals specifically different from those of the present scene of things,--the existences of a happier and more finished creation? My business to-day, however, was with the fossils which the deposit now contains,--not with those which it may ultimately form.

The Blackpots clay is of a dark-bluish or greenish-gray color, and so adhesive, that I now felt, when walking among it, after the softening rains of the previous night and morning, as if I had got into a bed of bird-lime. It is thinly charged with rolled pebbles, septaria, and pieces of a bituminous shale, containing broken Belemnites, and sorely-flattened Ammonites, that exist as thin films of a white chalky lime. The pebbles, like those of the boulder-clay of the northern side of the Moray Frith, are chiefly of the primary rocks and older sandstones, and were probably in the neighborhood, in their present rolled form, long ere the re-formation of the inclosing ma.s.s; while the shale and the septaria are, as shown by their fossils, decidedly Liasic.

I detected among the conchifers a well-marked species of our northern Lias, figured by Sowerby from Eathie specimens,--the _Plagiostoma concentrica_; and among the Cephalopoda, though considerably broken, the _Belemnite elongatus_ and _Belemnite lanceolata_, with the _Ammonite Koenigi_ (_mutabilis_),--all Eathie sh.e.l.ls. I, besides, found in the bank a piece of a peculiar-looking quartzose sandstone, traversed by hard jaspedeous veins of a brownish-gray color, which I have never found, in Scotland at least, save a.s.sociated with the Lias of our north-eastern coasts. Further, my attention was directed by Dr. Emslie to a fine Lignite in his collection, which had once formed some eighteen inches or two feet of the trunk of a straight slender pine,--probably the _Pinites Eiggensis_,--in which, as in most woods of the Lias and Oolite, the annual rings are as strongly marked as in the existing firs or larches of our hill-sides.[11] The Blackpots deposit is evidently a re-formation of a Liasic patch, identical, both in mineralogical character and in its organic remains, with the lower beds of the Eathie Lias; while the fragments of shale which it contains belong chiefly to an upper Liasic bed. So rich is the dark-colored tenacious argil of the Inferior Lias of Eathie, that the geologist who walks over it when it is still moist with the receding tide would do well to look to his footing;--the mixture of soap and grease spread by the s.h.i.+p-carpenter on his launch-slips, to facilitate the progress of his vessel seawards, is not more treacherous to the tread: while the Upper Liasic deposit which rests over it is composed of a dark slaty shale, largely charged with bitumen. And of a Liasic deposit of this compound character, consisting in larger part of an inferior argillaceous bed, and in lesser part of a superior one of dark shale, the tile-clay of Blackpots has been formed.

I had next to determine whether aught remained to indicate the period of its re-formation. The tile-works at the point of the promontory rest on a bed of sh.e.l.l-sand, composed exclusively, like the sand so abundant on the western coast of Scotland, of fragments of existing sh.e.l.ls. These, however, are so fresh and firm, that, though the stratum which they form seems to underlie the clay at its edges, I cannot regard them as older than the most modern of our ancient sea-margins. They formed, in all probability, in the days of the old coast line, a white sh.e.l.ly beach, under such a precipitous front of the dark clay as argillaceous deposits almost always present to the undermining wear of the waves. On the recession of the sea, however, to its present line, the abrupt, steep front, loosened by the frosts and washed by the rains, would of course gradually moulder down over them into a slope; and there would thus be communicated to the sh.e.l.ly stratum, at least at its edges, an underlying character. The true period of the re-formation of the deposit was, I can have no doubt, that of the boulder-clay. I observed that the septaria and larger ma.s.ses of shale which the bed contains, bear, on roughly-polished surfaces, in the line of their larger axes, the mysterious groovings and scratchings of this period,--marks which I have never yet known to fail in their chronological evidence. It may be mentioned, too, simply as a fact, though one of less value than the other, that the deposit occurs in its larger development exactly where, in the average, the boulder-clays also are most largely developed,--a little over that line where the waves for so many ages charged against the coast, ere the last upheaval of the land or the recession of the sea sent them back to their present margin. There had probably existed to the west or north-west of the deposit, perhaps in the middle of the open bay formed by the promontory on which it rests,--for the small proportion of other than Liasic materials which it contains serves to show that it could be derived from no great distance,--an outlier of the Lower Lias. The icebergs of the cold glacial period, propelled along the submerged land by some arctic current, or caught up by the gulf-stream, gradually grated it down, as a mason's laborer grates down the surface of the sandstone slab which he is engaged in polis.h.i.+ng; and the comminuted debris, borne eastwards by the current, was cast down here.

It has been stated that no Liasic remains have been found in the boulder-clays of Scotland. They are certainly rare in the boulder-clays of the northern sh.o.r.es of the Moray Frith; for there the nearest Lias, bearing in a western direction from the clay, is that of Applecross, on the other side of the island; and the materials of the boulder-deposits of the north have invariably been derived in the line, westerly in its general bearing, of the grooves and scratches of the iceberg era. But on the southern sh.o.r.e of the frith, where that westerly line pa.s.sed athwart the Liasic beds of our eastern coast, organisms of the Lias are comparatively common in the boulder-clays; and here, at Blackpots, we find an extensive deposit of the same period formed of Liasic materials almost exclusively. Fragments of still more modern rocks occur in the boulder-clays of Caithness. My friend Mr. Robert d.i.c.k, of Thurso, to whose persevering labors and interesting discoveries in the Old Red Sandstone of his locality I have had frequent occasion to refer, has detected in a blue boulder-clay, scooped into precipitous banks by the river Thorsa, fragments both of chalk-flints and a characteristic conglomerate of the Oolite. He has, besides, found it mottled from top to bottom, a full hundred feet over the sea-level, and about two miles inland, with comminuted fragments of existing sh.e.l.ls. But of this more anon.

CHAPTER III.