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THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY;
Or,
A Summer Ramble Among the Fossiliferous Deposits of the Hebrides.
With
RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST;
Or,
Ten Thousand Miles Over the Fossiliferous
Deposits of Scotland.
by
HUGH MILLER, LL. D.,
Author of "The Old Red Sandstone," "Footprints of the Creator,"
"My Schools and Schoolmasters," "The Testimony of the Rocks," Etc.
Boston:
Gould and Lincoln,
59 Washington Street.
New York: Sheldon and Company.
Cincinnati: Geo. S. Blanchard.
1862.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1858, by
Gould and Lincoln,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.
Authorized Edition.
By a special arrangement with the late Hugh Miller, Gould And Lincoln
became the authorized American publishers of his works. By a similar
arrangement made with the family since his decease, they will also
publish his POSTHUMOUS WORKS, of which the present volume is the first.
Electrotyped by W. F. Draper, Andover, Mass.
Printed by Geo. C. Rand & Avery, Boston.
PREFACE.
Naturalists of every class know too well how HUGH MILLER died--the
victim of an overworked brain; and how that bright and vigorous spirit
was abruptly quenched forever.
During the month of May (1857) Mrs. Miller came to Malvern, after
recovering from the first shock of bereavement, in search of health and
repose, and evidently hoping to do justice, on her recovery, to the
literary remains of her husband. Unhappily the excitement and anxiety
naturally attaching to a revision of her husband's works proved over
much for one suffering under such recent trial, and from an affection of
the brain and spine which ensued; and, in consequence, Mrs. Miller has
been forbidden, for the present, to engage in any work of mental labor.
Under these circumstances, and at Mrs. Miller's request, I have
undertaken the editing of "The Cruise of the Betsey, or a Summer Ramble
among the Fossiliferous Deposits of the Hebrides," as well as "The
Rambles of a Geologist," hitherto unpublished, save as a series of
articles in the "Witness" newspaper. The style and arguments of HUGH
MILLER are so peculiarly his own, that I have not presumed to alter the
text, and have merely corrected some statements incidental to the
condition of geological knowledge at the time this work was penned. "The
Cruise of the Betsey" was written for that well-known paper the
"Witness" during the period when a disputation productive of much bitter
feeling waged between the Free and Established Churches of Scotland; but
as the Disruption and its history possesses little interest to a large
class of the readers of this work, who will rejoice to follow their
favorite author among the isles and rocks of the "bonnie land," I have
expunged _some_ passages, which I am assured the author would have
omitted had he lived to reprint this interesting narrative of his
geological rambles. HUGH MILLER battled nobly for his faith while
living. The sword is in the scabbard: let it rest!
W.S. SYMONDS.
PENDOCK RECTORY, APRIL 1, 1858.
CONTENTS.
PART I.
THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY.
CHAPTER I.
Preparation--Departure--Recent and Ancient Monstrosities--A Free
Church Yacht--Down the Clyde--Jura--Prof. Walker's
Experiment--Whirlpool near Scarba--Geological Character of the
Western Highlands--An Illustration--Different Ages of Outer and
Inner Hebrides--Mt. Blanc and the Himalayas "mere
upstarts"--Esdaile Quarries--Oban--A Section through Conglomerate
and Slate examined--McDougal's Dog-stone--Power of the Ocean to
move Rocks--Sound of Mull--The Betsey--The Minister's
Cabin--Village of Tobermory--The "Florida," a Wreck of the
Invincible Armada--Geologic Exploration and Discovery--At Anchor. 15
CHAPTER II.
The Minister's Larder--No Harbor--Eigg Shoes--_Tormentilla
erecta_--For the _Witness'_ Sake--Eilean Chaisteil--Appearance of
Eigg--Chapel of St. Donan--Shell-sand--Origin of Secondary
Calcareous Rock suggested--Exploration of Eigg--Pitchstone Veins--A
Bone Cave--Massacre at Eigg--Grouping of Human Bones in the
Cave--Relics--The Horse's Tooth--A Copper Sewing Needle--Teeth
found--Man a worse Animal than his Teeth show him to have been
designed for--Story of the Massacre--Another Version--Scuir of
Eigg--The Scuir a Giant's Causeway--Character of the
Columns--Remains of a Prostrate Forest. 31
CHAPTER III.
Structure of the Scuir--A stray Column--The Piazza--A buried Pine
Forest the Foundation of the Scuir--Geological Poachers in a Fossil
Preserve--_Pinites Eiggensis_--Its Description--Witham's
Experiments on Fossil Pine of Eigg--Rings of the Pine--Ascent of
the Scuir--Appearance of the Top--White Pitchstone--Mr. Greig's
Discovery of Pumice--A Sunset Scene--The Manse and the Yacht--The
Minister's Story--A Cottage Repast--American Timber drifted to the
Hebrides--Agency of the Gulf Stream--The Minister's Sheep. 49
CHAPTER IV.
An Excursion--The Chain of Crosses--Bay of Laig--Island of
Rum--Description of the Island--Superstitions banished by pure
Religion--Fossil Shells--Remarkable Oyster Bed--New species of
Belemnite--Oolitic Shells--White Sandstone Precipices--Gigantic
Petrified Mushrooms--"Christabel" in Stone--Musical Sand--_Jabel
Nakous_, or Mountain of the Bell--Experiments of Travellers at
_Jabel Nakous_--Welsted's Account--_Reg-Rawan_, or the Moving
Sand--The Musical Sounds inexplicable--Article on the subject in
the North British Review. 66
CHAPTER V.
Trap-dykes--"Cotton Apples"--Alternation of Lacustrine with Marine
Remains--Analogy from the Beds of Esk--Aspect of the Island on its
narrow Front--The Puffin--Ru Stoir--Development of Old Red
Sandstone--Striking Columnar character of Ru Stoir--Discovery of
Reptilian Remains--John Stewart's wonder at the Bones in the
Stones--Description of the Bones--"Dragons, Gorgons, and
Chimeras"--Exploration and Discovery pursued--The Midway
Shieling--A Celtic Welcome--Return to the Yacht--"Array of Fossils
new to Scotch Geology"--A Geologist's Toast--Hoffman and his
Fossil. 85
CHAPTER VI.
Something for Non-geologists--Man Destructive--A Better and Last
Creation coming--A Rainy Sabbath--The Meeting House--The
Congregation--The Sermon in Gaelic--The Old Wondrous Story--The
Drunken Minister of Eigg--Presbyterianism without Life--Dr.
Johnson's Account of the Conversion of the People of Rum--Romanism
at Eigg--The Two Boys--The Freebooter of Eigg--Voyage resumed--The
Homeless Minister--Harbor of Isle Ornsay--Interesting Gneiss
Deposit--A Norwegian Keep--Gneiss at Knock--Curious
Chemistry--Sea-cliffs beyond Portsea--The Goblin Luidag--Scenery of
Skye. 105
CHAPTER VII.
Exploration resumed--Geology of Rasay--An Illustration--The Storr
of Skye--From Portree to Holm--Discovery of Fossils--An Island
Rain--Sir R. Murchison--Labor of Drawing a Geological Line--Three
Edinburgh Gentlemen--_Prosopolepsia_--Wrong Surmises corrected--The
Mail Gig--The Portree Postmaster--Isle Ornsay--An Old
Acquaintance--Reminiscences--A Run for Rum--"Semi-fossil
Madeira"--Idling on Deck--Prognostics of a Storm--Description of
the Gale--Loch Scresort--The Minister's lost _Sou-wester_--The Free
Church Gathering--The weary Minister. 123
CHAPTER VIII.
Geology of Rum--Its curious Character illustrated--Rum famous for
Bloodstones--Red Sandstones--"Scratchings" in the Rocks--A
Geological Inscription without a Key--The Lizard--Vitality broken
into two--Illustrations--Speculation--Scuir More--Ascent of the
Scuir--The Bloodstones--An Illustrative Set of the Gem--M'Culloch's
Pebble--A Chemical Problem--The solitary Shepherd's House--Sheep
_versus_ Men--The Depopulation of Rum--A Haul of Trout--Rum Mode of
catching Trout--At Anchor in the Bay of Glenelg. 139
CHAPTER IX.
Kyles of Skye--A Gneiss District--Kyle Rhea--A Boiling Tide--A
"Take" of Sillocks--The Betsey's "Paces"--In the Bay at
Broadford--Rain--Island of Pabba--Description of the Island--Its
Geological Structure--Astrea--Polypifers--_Gryphoea
incurva_--Three Groups of Fossils in the Lias of Skye--Abundance of
the Petrifactions of Pabba--Scenery--Pabba a "piece of smooth,
level England"--Fossil Shells of Pabba--- Voyage resumed--Kyle
Akin--Ruins of Castle Maoil--A "Thornback" Dinner--The Bunch of
Deep Sea Tangle--The Caileach Stone--Kelp Furnaces--Escape of the
Betsey from sinking. 159
CHAPTER X.
Isle Orusay--The Sabbath--A Sailor-minister's Sermon for
Sailors--The Scuir Sermon--Loch Carron--Groups of Moraines--A sheep
District--The Editor of the _Witness_ and the Establishment
Clergyman--Dingwall--Conon-side revisited--The Pond and its
Changes--New Faces.--The Stonemason's Mark--The Burying-ground of
Urquhart--An old Acquaintance--Property Qualification for Voting in
Scotland--Montgerald Sandstone Quarries--Geological Science in
Cromarty--The Danes at Cromarty--The Danish Professor and the "Old
Red Sandstone"--Harmonizing Tendencies of Science. 178
CHAPTER XI.
Ichthyolite Beds--An interesting Discovery--Two Storeys of Organic
Remains in the Old Red Sandstone--Ancient Ocean of Lower Old
Red--Two great Catastrophes--Ancient Fish Scales--Their skilful
Mechanism displayed by examples--Bone Lips--Arts of the Slater and
Tiler as old as Old Red Sandstone--Jet Trinkets--Flint
Arrow-heads--Vitrified Forts of Scotland--Style of grouping Lower
Old Red Fossils--Illustration from Cromarty Fishing
Phenomena--Singular Remains of Holoptychius--Ramble with Mr. Robert
Dick--Color of the Planet Mars--Tombs never dreamed of by
Hervey--Skeleton of the Bruce--Gigantic Holoptychius--"Coal money
Currency"--Upper Boundary of Lower Old Red--Every one may add to
the Store of Geological Facts--Discoveries of Messrs. Dick and
Peach. 192
CHAPTER XII.
Ichthyolite Beds of Clune and Lethenbarn--Limestone
Quarry--Destruction of Urns and Sarcophagi in the
Lime-kiln--Nodules opened--Beautiful coloring of the
Remains--Patrick Duff's Description--New Genus of Morayshire
Ichthyolite described--Form and size of the Nodules or Stone
Coffins--Illustration from Mrs. Marshall's Cements--Forest of
Darnaway--The Hill of Berries--Sluie--Elgin--Outliers of the Weald
and the Oolite--Description of the Weald at Linksfield--Mr. Duff's
_Lepidotus minor_--Eccentric Types of Fish Scales--Visit to the
Sandstones of Scat-Craig--Fine suit of Fossils at Scat-Craig--True
graveyard Bones, not mere Impressions--Varieties of pattern--The
Diker's "Carved Flowers"--_Stagonolepis_, a new Genus--Termination
of the Ramble. 212
CHAPTER XIII.
SUPPLEMENTARY.
Supplementary--Isolated Reptile Remains in Eigg--Small Isles
revisited--The Betsey again--Storm bound--Tacking--Becalmed--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--Anchored
Clouds--A Leak sprung--Peril of the Betsey--At work with Pump and
Pails--Safe in Harbor--Return to Edinburgh. 233
PART II.
RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST.
CHAPTER I.
Embarkation--A foundered Vessel--Lateness of the Harvest dependent
on the Geological character of the Soil--A Granite Harvest and an
Old Red Harvest--Cottages of Redstone and of Granite--Arable Soil
of Scotland the result of a Geological Grinding Agency--Locality of
the Famine of 1846--Mr. Longmuir's Fossils--Geology necessary to a
Theologian--Popularizers of Science when dangerous--"Constitution
of Man," and "Vestiges of Creation"--Atop of the Banff Coach--A
Geologist's Field Equipment--The trespassing "Stirk"--Silurian
Schists inlaid with Old Red--Bay of Gamrie, how
formed--Gardenstone--Geological Free-masonry illustrated--How to
break an Ichthyolite Nodule--An old Rhyme mended--A raised
Beach--Fossil Shells--Scotland under Water at the time of the
Boulder-clays. 255
CHAPTER II.
Character of the Rocks near Gardenstone--A Defunct Father-lasher--A
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 Deposits of
Blackpots--Pipe-laying in Scotland--Fossils of Blackpots Clay--Mr.
Longmuir's Description of them--Blackpots Deposit a Re-formation of
a Liasic Patch--Period of its Formation. 270
CHAPTER III.
From Blackpots to Portsoy--Character of the Coast--Burn of
Boyne--Fever Phantoms--Graphic Granite--Maupertuis and the Runic
Inscription--Explanation of the _quo modo_ of Graphic
Granite--Portsoy Inn--Serpentine Beds--Portsoy Serpentine
unrivalled for small ornaments--Description of it--Significance of
the term _serpentine_--Elizabeth Bond and her "Letters"--From
Portsoy to Cullen--Attritive Power of the Ocean illustrated--The
Equinoctial--From Cullen to Fochabers--The Old Red again--The old
Pensioner--Fochabers--Mr. Joss, the learned Mail-guard--The Editor
a sort of Coach-guard--On the Coach to Elgin--Geology of
Banffshire--Irregular paging of the Geologic Leaves--Geologic Map
of the County like Joseph's Coat--Striking Illustration. 291
CHAPTER IV.
Yellow-hued Houses of Elgin--Geology of the Country indicated by
the coloring of the Stone Houses--Fossils of Old Red north of the
Grampians different from those of Old Red south--Geologic
Formations at Linksfield difficult to be understood--Ganoid Scales
of the Wealden--Sudden Reaction, from complex to simple, in the
Scales of Fishes--Pore-covered Scales--Extraordinary amount of
Design exhibited in Ancient Ganoid Scales--Holoptychius Scale
illustrated by Cromwell's "fluted pot"--Patrick Duff's Geological
Collection--Elgin Museum--Fishes of the Ganges--Armature of Ancient
Fishes--Compensatory Defences--- The Hermit-crab--Spines of the
Pimelodi--Ride to Campbelton--Theories of the formation of
Ardersier and Fortrose Promontories--Tradition of their
construction by the Wizard, Michael Scott--A Region of Legendary
Lore. 307
CHAPTER V.
Rosemarkie and its Scaurs--Kaes' Craig--A Jackdaw
Settlement--"Rosemarkie Kaes" and "Cromarty Cooties"--"The Danes,"
a Group of Excavations--At Home in Cromarty--The Boulder-clay of
Cromarty "begins to tell its story"--One of its marked Scenic
Peculiarities--Hints to Landscape Painters--"Samuel's Well"--A
Chain of Bogs geologically accounted for--Another Scenic
Peculiarity--"_Ha-has_ of Nature's digging"--The Author's earliest
Field of Hard Labor--Picturesque Cliff of Boulder-clay--Scratchings
on the Sandstone--Invariable Characteristic of true
Boulder-clay--Scratchings on Pebbles in the line of the longer
axis--Illustration from the Boulder-clay of Banff. 324
CHAPTER VI.
Organisms of the Boulder-clay not unequivocal--First Impressions of
the Boulder-clay--Difficulty of accounting for its barrenness of
Remains--Sir Charles Lyell's reasoning--A Fact to the
contrary--Human Skull dug from a Clay-bank--The Author's Change of
Belief respecting Organic Remains of the Boulder-clay--Shells from
the Clay at Wick--Questions respecting them settled--Conclusions
confirmed by Mr. Dick's Discoveries at Thurso--Sir John Sinclair's
Discovery of Boulder-clay Shells in 1802--Comminution of the Shells
illustrated--_Cyprina islandica_--Its Preservation in larger
Proportions than those of other Shells accounted for--Boulder-clays
of Scotland reformed during the existing Geological Epoch--Scotland
in the Period of the Boulder-clay "merely three detached groups of
Islands"--Evidence of the Subsidence of the Land in
Scotland--Confirmed by Rev. Mr. Cumming's conclusion--High-lying
Granite Boulders--Marks of a succeeding elevatory
Period--Scandinavia now rising--Autobiography of a Boulder
desirable--A Story of the Supernatural. 336
CHAPTER VII.
Relation of the deep red stone of Cromarty to the Ichthyolite Beds
of the System--Ruins of a Fossil-charged Bed--Journey to Avoch--Red
Dye of the Boulder-clay distinct from the substance
itself--Variation of Coloring in the Boulder-clay Red Sandstone
accounted for--Hard-pan how formed--A reformed Garden--An ancient
Battle-field--Antiquity of Geologic and Human History
compared--Burn of Killein--Observation made in boyhood
confirmed--Fossil-nodules--Fine Specimen of _Coccosteus
decipiens_--Blank strata of Old Red--New View respecting the Rocks
of Black Isle--A Trip up Moray and Dingwall Friths--Altered color
of the Boulder-clay--Up the Auldgrande River--Scenery of the great
Conglomerate--Graphic Description--Laidlaw's Boulder--_Vaccinium
myrtillus_--Profusion of Travelled Boulders--The Boulder _Clach
Malloch_--Its zones of Animal and Vegetable life. 355
CHAPTER VIII.
Imaginary Autobiography of the _Clach Malloch_ Boulder--Its
Creation--Its Long Night of unsummed Centuries--Laid open to light
on a desert Island--Surrounded by an Arctic Vegetation--Undermined
by the rising Sea--Locked up and floated off on an Ice-field--At
rest on the Sea-bottom--Another Night of unsummed Years--The
Boulder raised again above the waves by the rising of the
Land--Beholds an Altered Country--Pine Forests and Mammals--Another
Period of Ages passes--The Boulder again floated off by an
Iceberg--Finally at rest on the Shore of Cromarty Bay--Time and
Occasion of naming it--Strange Phenomena accounted for by
Earthquakes--How the Boulder of Petty Bay was moved--The Boulder of
Auldgrande--The old Highland Paupers--The little Parsi Girl--Her
Letter to her Papa--But one Human Nature on Earth--Journey
resumed--Conon Burying Ground--An aged Couple--Gossip. 375
CHAPTER IX.
The Great Conglomerate--Its Undulatory and Rectilinear
Members--Knock Farril and its Vitrified Fort--The old Highlanders
an observant race--The Vein of Silver--Summit of Knock Farril--Mode
of accounting for the Luxuriance of Herbage in the ancient Scottish
Fortalices--The green Graves of Culloden--Theories respecting the
Vitrification of the Hill-forts--Combined Theories of Williams and
Mackenzie probably give the correct account--The Author's
Explanation--Transformations of Fused Rocks--Strathpetlier--The
Spa--Permanent Odoriferous Qualities of an ancient Sea-bottom
converted into Rock--Mineral Springs of the Spa--Infusion of the
powdered rock a substitute--Belemnite Water--The lively young
Lady's Comments--A befogged Country seen from a
hill-top--Ben-Wevis--Journey to Evanton--A Geologist's
Night-mare--The Route Home--Ruins of Craig house--Incompatibility
of Tea and Ghosts--End of the Tour. 393
CHAPTER X.
Recovered Health--Journey to the Orkneys--Aboard the Steamer at
Wick--Mr. Bremner--Masonry of the Harbor of Wick--The greatest
Blunders result from good Rules misapplied--Mr. Bremner's Theory
about sea-washed Masonry--Singular Fracture of the Rock near
Wick--The Author's mode of accounting for it--"Simple but not
obvious" Thinking--Mr. Bremner's mode of making stone Erections
under Water--His exploits in raising foundered Vessels--Aspect of
the Orkneys--The ungracious Schoolmaster--In the Frith of
Kirkwall--Cathedral of St Magnus--Appearance of Kirkwall--Its
"perished suppers"--Its ancient Palaces--Blunder of the Scotch
Aristocracy--The patronate Wedge--Breaking Ground in Orkney--Minute
Gregarious Coccosteus--True Position of the Coccosteus' Eyes--Ruins
of one of Cromwell's Forts--Antiquities of Orkney--The
Cathedral--Its Sculptures--The Mysterious Cell--Prospect from the
Tower--Its Chimes--Ruins of Castle Patrick. 414
CHAPTER XI.
The Bishop's Palace at Orkney--Haco the Norwegian--Icelandic
Chronicle respecting his Expedition to Scotland--His Death--Removal
of his Remain to Norway--Why Norwegian Invasion
ceased--Straw-plaiting--The Lassies of Orkney--Orkney Type of
Countenance--Celtic and Scandinavian--An accomplished
Antiquary--Old Manuscripts--An old Tune book--Manuscript Letter of
Mary Queen of Scots--Letters of General Monck--The fearless
Covenanter--Cave of the Rebels--Why the tragedy of "Gustavus Vasa"
was prohibited--Quarry of Pickoquoy--Its Fossil Shells--Journey to
Stromness--Scenery--Birth-place of Malcolm, the Poet--His
History--One of his Poems--His Brother a Free Church Minister--New
Scenery. 437
CHAPTER XII.
Hills of Orkney--Their Geologic Composition--Scene of Scott's
"Pirate"--Stromness--Geology of the District--"Seeking
beasts"--Conglomerate in contact with Granite--A palaeozoic Hudson's
Bay--Thickness of Conglomerate of Orkney--Oldest Vertebrate yet
discovered in Orkney--Its Size--Figure of a characteristic plate of
the Asterolepis--Peculiarity of Old Red Fishes--Length of the
Asterolepis--A rich Ichthyolite Bed--Arrangement of the
Layers--Queries as to the Cause of it--Minerals--An abandoned
Mine--A lost Vessel--Kelp for Iodine--A dangerous Coast--Incidents
of Shipwreck--Hospitality--Stromness Museum--Diplopterus mistaken
for Dipterus--Their Resemblances and Differences--Visit to a
remarkable Stack--Paring the Soil for Fuel, and consequent
Barrenness--Description of the Stack--Wave-formed Caves--Height to
which the Surf rises. 457
CHAPTER XIII.
Detached Fossils--Remains of the Pterichthys--Terminal Bones of the
Coccosteus, etc., preserved--Internal Skeleton of Coccosteus--The
shipwrecked Sailor in the Cave--Bishop Grahame--His Character, as
drawn by Baillie--His Successor--Ruins of the Bishop's
Country-house--Sub-aerial Formation of Sandstone--Formation near
New Kaye--Inference from such Formation--Tour resumed--Loch of
Stennis--Waters of the Loch fresh, brackish, and salt--Vegetation
varied accordingly--Change produced in the Flounder by fresh
water--The Standing Stones, second only to Stonehenge--Their
Purpose--Their Appearance and Situation--Diameter of the
Circle--What the Antiquaries say of it--Reference to it in the
"Pirate"--Dr. Hibbert's Account. 476
CHAPTER XIV.
On Horseback--A pared Moor--Small Landholders--Absorption of small
holdings in England and Scotland--Division of Land favorable to
Civil and Religious Rights--Favorable to social Elevation--An
inland Parish--The Landsman and Lobster--Wild Flowers of
Orkney--Law of Compensation illustrated by the Tobacco
Plant--Poverty tends to Productiveness--Illustrated in
Ireland--Profusion of Ichthyolites--Orkney a land of Defunct
Fishes--Sandwick--A Collection of Coccostean Flags--A Quarry full
of Heads of Dipteri--The Bergil, or Striped Wrasse--Its Resemblance
to the Dipterus--Poverty of the Flora of the Lower Old Red--No true
Coniferous Wood in the Orkney Flagstones--Departure for Hoy--The
intelligent Boatman--Story of the Orkney Fisherman. 492
CHAPTER XV.
Hoy--Unique Scenery--The Dwarfie Stone of Hoy--Sir Walter Scott's
Account of it--Its Associations--Inscription of Names--George
Buchanan's Consolation--The mythic Carbuncle of the Hill of Hoy--No
Fossils at Hoy--Striking Profile of Sir Walter Scott on the Hill of
Hoy--Sir Walter, and Shetland and Orkney--Originals of two
Characters in "The Pirate"--Bessie Millie--Garden of Gow, the
"Pirate"--Childhood's Scene of Byron's "Torquil"--The Author's
Introduction to his Sister--A German Visitor--German and Scotch
Sabbath-keeping habits contrasted--Mr. Watt's Specimens of Fossil
Remains--The only new Organism found in Orkney--Back to
Kirkwall--to Wick--Vedder's Ode to Orkney. 507
THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY.
CHAPTER I.
Preparation--Departure--Recent and Ancient Monstrosities--A Free
Church Yacht--Down the Clyde--Jura--Prof. Walker's
Experiment--Whirlpool near Scarba--Geological Character of the
Western Highlands--An Illustration--Different Ages of Outer and
Inner Hebrides--Mt. Blanc and the Himalayas "mere
upstarts"--Esdaile Quarries--Oban--A Section through Conglomerate
and Slate examined--M'Dougal's Dog-stone--Power of the Ocean to
move Rocks--Sound of Mull--The Betsey--The Minister's
Cabin--Village of Tobermory--The "Florida," a Wreck of the
Invincible Armada--Geologic Exploration and Discovery--At Anchor.
The pleasant month of July had again come round, and for full five weeks
I was free. Chisels and hammers, and the bag for specimens, were taken
from their corner in the dark closet, and packed up with half a stone
weight of a fine _soft_ Conservative Edinburgh newspaper, valuable for a
quality of preserving old things entire. At noon on St. Swithin's day
(Monday the 15th), I was speeding down the Clyde in the Toward Castle
steamer, for Tobermory in Mull. In the previous season I had intended
passing direct from the Oolitic deposits of the eastern coast of
Scotland, to the Oolitic deposits of the Hebrides. But the weeks glided
all too quickly away among the ichthyolites of Caithness and Cromarty,
and the shells and lignites of Sutherland and Ross. My friend, too, the
Rev. Mr. Swanson, of Small Isles, on whose assistance I had reckoned,
was in the middle of his troubles at the time, with no longer a home in
his parish, and not yet provided with one elsewhere; and I concluded he
would have but little heart, at such a season, for breaking into rocks,
or for passing from the too pressing monstrosities of an existing state
of things, to the old lapidified monstrosities of the past. And so my
design on the Hebrides had to be postponed for a twelvemonth. But my
friend, now afloat in his Free Church yacht, had got a home on the sea
beside his island charge, which, if not very secure when nights were
dark and winds loud, and the little vessel tilted high to the long roll
of the Atlantic, lay at least beyond the reach of man's intolerance, and
not beyond the protecting care of the Almighty. He had written me that
he would run down his vessel from Small Isles to meet me at Tobermory,
and in consequence of the arrangement I was now on my way to Mull.
St. Swithin's day, so important in the calendar of our humbler
meteorologists, had in this part of the country its alternate fits of
sunshine and shower. We passed gaily along the green banks of the Clyde,
with their rich flat fields glittering in moisture, and their lines of
stately trees, that, as the light flashed out, threw their shadows over
the grass. The river expanded into the estuary, the estuary into the
open sea; we left behind us beacon, and obelisk, and rock-perched
castle;--
"Merrily down we drop
Below the church, below the tower,
Below the light house top,"
and, as the evening fell, we were ploughing the outer reaches of the
Frith, with the ridgy table-land of Ayrshire stretching away, green, on
the one side, and the serrated peaks of Arran rising dark and high on
the other. At sunrise next morning our boat lay, unloading a portion of
her cargo, in one of the ports of Islay, and we could see the Irish
coast resting on the horizon to the south and west, like a long
undulating bank of thin blue cloud; with the island of Rachrin--famous
for the asylum it had afforded the Bruce when there was no home for him
in Scotland,--presenting in front its mass of darker azure. On and away!
We swept past Islay, with its low fertile hills of mica-schist and
slate; and Jura, with its flat dreary moors, and its far-seen gigantic
paps, on one of which, in the last age, Professor Walker, of Edinburgh,
set water a-boil with six degrees of heat less than he found necessary
for the purpose on the plain below. The Professor describes the view
from the summit, which includes in its wide circle at once the Isle of
Skye and the Isle of Man, as singularly noble and imposing; two such
prospects more, he says, would bring under the eye the whole island of
Great Britain, from the Pentland Frith to the English Channel. We sped
past Jura. Then came the Gulf of Coryvrekin, with the bare mountain
island of Scarba overlooking the fierce, far-famed whirlpool, that we
could see from the deck, breaking in long lines of foam, and sending out
its waves in wide rings on every side, when not a speck of white was
visible elsewhere in the expanse of sea around us. And then came an
opener space, studded with smaller islands,--mere hill-tops rising out
of the sea, with here and there insulated groups of pointed rocks, the
skeletons of perished hills, amid which the tide chafed and fretted, as
if laboring to complete on the broken remains their work of denudation
and ruin.
The disposition of land and water on this coast suggests the idea that
the Western Highlands, from the line in the interior, whence the rivers
descend to the Atlantic, with the islands beyond to the outer Hebrides,
are all parts of one great mountainous plane, inclined slantways into
the sea. First, the long withdrawing valleys of the main land, with
their brown mossy streams, change their character as they dip beneath
the sea-level, and become salt-water lochs. The lines of hills that rise
over them jut out as promontories, till cut off by some transverse
valley, lowered still more deeply into the brine, and that exists as a
kyle, minch, or sound, swept twice every tide by powerful currents. The
sea deepens as the plain slopes downward; mountain-chains stand up out
of the water as larger islands, single mountains as smaller ones, lower
eminences as mere groups of pointed rocks; till at length, as we pass
outwards, all trace of the submerged land disappears, and the wide ocean
stretches out and away its unfathomable depths. The model of some Alpine
country raised in plaster on a flat board, and tilted slantways, at a
low angle, into a basin of water, would exhibit, on a minute scale, an
appearance exactly similar to that presented by the western coast of
Scotland and the Hebrides. The water would rise along the hollows,
longitudinal and transverse, forming sounds and lochs, and surround,
island-like, the more deeply submerged eminences. But an examination of
the geology of the coast, with its promontories and islands,
communicates a different idea. These islands and promontories prove to
be of very various ages and origin. The _outer_ Hebrides may have
existed as the inner skeleton of some ancient country, contemporary with
the main land, and that bore on its upper soils the productions of
perished creations, at a time when by much the larger portion of the
_inner_ Hebrides,--Skye, and Mull, and the Small Isles,--existed as part
of the bottom of a wide sound, inhabited by the Cephalopoda and
Enaliosaurians of the Lias and the Oolite. Judging from its components,
the Long Island, like the Lammermoors and the Grampians, may have been
smiling to the sun when the Alps and the Himalaya Mountains lay buried
in the abyss; whereas the greater part of Skye and Mull must have been,
like these vast mountain-chains of the Continent, an oozy sea-floor,
over which the ligneous productions of the neighboring lands, washed
down by the streams, grew heavy and sank, and on which the belemnite
dropped its spindle and the ammonite its shell. The idea imparted of
_old_ Scotland to the geologist here,--of Scotland, proudly,
aristocratically, supereminently old,--for it can call Mont Blanc a mere
upstart, and Dhawalageri, with its twenty-eight thousand feet of
elevation, a heady fellow of yesterday,--is not that of a land settling
down by the head, like a foundering vessel, but of a land whose hills
and islands, like its great aristocratic families, have arisen from the
level in very various ages, and under the operation of circumstances
essentially diverse.
We left behind us the islands of Lunga, Luing, and Seil, and entered the
narrow Sound of Kerrera, with its border of Old Red conglomerate resting
on the clay-slate of the district. We had passed Esdaile near enough to
see the workmen employed in the quarries of the island, so extensively
known in commerce for their roofing slate, and several small vessels
beside them, engaged in loading; and now we had got a step higher in the
geological scale, and could mark from the deck the peculiar character of
the conglomerate, which, in cliffs washed by the sea, when the binding
matrix is softer than the pebbles which it encloses, roughens, instead
of being polished, by the action of the waves, and which, along the
eastern side of the Sound here, seems as if formed of cannon-shot, of
all sizes, embedded in cement. The Sound terminates in the beautiful bay
of Oban, so quiet and sheltered, with its two island breakwaters in
front,--its semi-circular sweep of hill behind,--its long white-walled
village, bent like a bow, to conform to the inflection of the
shore,--its mural precipices behind, tapestried with ivy,--its rich
patches of green pasture,--its bosky dingles of shrub and tree,--and,
perched on the seaward promontory, its old, time-eaten keep. "In one
part of the harbor of Oban," says Dr. James Anderson, in his "Practical
Treatise on Peat Moss," (1794), "where the depth of the sea is about
twenty fathoms, the bottom is found to consist of quick peat, which
affords no safe anchorage." I made inquiry at the captain of the
steamer, regarding this submerged deposit, but he had never heard of it.
There are, however, many such on the coasts of both Britain and Ireland.
We staid at Oban for several hours, waiting the arrival of the Fort
William steamer; and, taking out hammer and chisel from my bag, I
stepped ashore to question my ancient acquaintance, the Old Red
conglomerate, and was fortunate enough to meet on the pier-head, as I
landed, one of the best of companions for assisting in such work, Mr.
Colin Elder, of Isle Ornsay,--the gentleman who had so kindly furnished
my friend Mr. Swanson with an asylum for his family, when there was no
longer a home for them in Small Isles. "You are much in luck," he said,
after our first greeting: "one of the villagers, in improving his
garden, has just made a cut for some fifteen or twenty yards along the
face of the precipice behind the village, and laid open the line of
junction between the conglomerate and the clay-slate. Let us go and see
it."
I found several things worthy of notice in the chance section to which I
was thus introduced. The conglomerate lies uncomfortably along the edges
of the slate strata, which present under it an appearance exactly
similar to that which they exhibit under the rolled stones and shingle
of the neighboring shore, where we find them laid bare beside the
harbor, for several hundred yards. And, mixed with the pebbles of
various character and origin of which the conglomerate is mainly
composed, we see detached masses of the slate, that still exhibit on
their edges the identical lines of fracture characteristic of the rock,
which they received, when torn from the mass below, myriads of ages
before. In the incalculably remote period in which the conglomerate base
of the Old Red Sandstone was formed, the clay-slate of this district had
been exactly the same sort of rock that it is now. Some long anterior
convulsion had upturned its strata, and the sweep of water, mingled with
broken fragments of stone, had worn smooth the exposed edges, just as a
similar agency wears the edges exposed at the present time. Quarries
might have been opened in this rock, as now, for a roofing-slate, had
there been quarriers to open them, or houses to roof over; it was in
every respect as ancient a looking stone then as in the present late age
of the world. There are no sermons that seem stranger or more impressive
to one who has acquired just a little of the language in which they are
preached, than those which, according to the poet, are to be found in
stones; a bit of fractured slate, embedded among a mass of rounded
pebbles, proves voluble with ideas of a kind almost too large for the
mind of man to grasp. The eternity that hath passed is an ocean without
a further shore, and a finite conception may in vain attempt to span it
over. But from the beach, strewed with wrecks, on which we stand to
contemplate it, we see far out towards the cloudy horizon, many a dim
islet and many a pinnacled rock, the sepulchres of successive eras,--the
monuments of consecutive creations: the entire prospect is studded over
with these landmarks of a hoar antiquity, which, measuring out space
from space, constitute the vast whole a province of time; nor can the
eye reach to the open, shoreless infinitude beyond, in which only God
existed; and, as in a sea-scene in nature, in which headland stretches
dim and blue beyond headland, and islet beyond islet, the distance seems
not lessened, but increased, by the crowded objects--we borrow a
larger, not a smaller idea of the distant eternity, from the vastness of
the measured periods that occur between.
Over the lower bed of conglomerate, which here, as on the east coast, is
of great thickness, we find a bed of gray stratified clay, containing a
few calcareo-argillaceous nodules. The conglomerate cliffs to the north
of the village present appearances highly interesting to the geologist.
Rising in a long wall within the pleasure-grounds of Dunolly castle, we
find them wooded atop and at the base; while immediately at their feet
there stretches out a grassy lawn, traversed by the road from the
village to the castle, which sinks with a gradual slope into the
existing sea-beach, but which ages ago must have been a sea-beach
itself. We see the bases of the precipices hollowed and worn, with all
their rents and crevices widened into caves; and mark, at a picturesque
angle of the rock, what must have been once an insulated sea-stack, some
thirty or forty feet in height, standing up from amid the rank grass, as
at one time it stood up from amid the waves. Tufts of fern and sprays of
ivy bristle from its sides, once roughened by the serrated kelp-weed and
the tangle. The Highlanders call it M'Dougal's Dog-stone, and say that
the old chieftains of Lorne made use of it as a post to which to fasten
their dogs,--animals wild and gigantic as themselves,--when the hunters
were gathering to rendezvous, and the impatient beagles struggled to
break away and begin the chase on their own behalf. It owes its
existence as a stack--for the precipice in which it was once included
has receded from around it for yards--to an immense boulder in its
base--by far the largest stone I ever saw in an Old Red conglomerate.
The mass is of a rudely rhomboidal form, and measures nearly twelve feet
in the line of its largest diagonal. A second huge pebble in the same
detached spire measures four feet by about three. Both have their edges
much rounded, as if, ere their deposition in the conglomerate, they had
been long exposed to the wear of the sea; and both are composed of an
earthy amygdaloidal trap. I have stated elsewhere ["Old Red Sandstone,"
Chapter XII.], that I had scarce ever seen a stone in the Old Red
conglomerate which I could not raise from the ground; and ere I said so
I had examined no inconsiderable extent of this deposit, chiefly,
however, along the eastern coast of Scotland, where its larger pebbles
rarely exceed two hundred weight. How account for the occurrence of
pebbles of so gigantic a size here? We can but guess at a solution, and
that very vaguely. The islands of Mull and Kerrera form, in the present
state of things, inner and outer breakwaters between what is now the
coast of Oban and the waves of the Atlantic; but Mull, in the times of
even the Oolite, must have existed as a mere sea-bottom; and Kerrera,
composed mainly of trap, which has brought with it to the surface
patches of the conglomerate, must, when the conglomerate was in forming,
have been a mere sea-bottom also. Is it not possible, that when the
breakwaters _were not_, the Atlantic _was_, and that its tempests, which
in the present time can transport vast rocks for hundreds of yards along
the exposed coasts of Shetland and Orkney, may have been the agent here
in the transport of these huge pebbles of the Old Red conglomerate?
"Rocks that two or three men could not lift," say the Messrs. Anderson
of Inverness, in describing the storms of Orkney, "are washed about even
on the tops of cliffs, which are between sixty and a hundred feet above
the surface of the sea, when smooth; and detached masses of rock, of an
enormous size, are well known to have been carried a considerable
distance between low and high-water mark." "A little way from the
Brough," says Dr. Patrick Neill, in his 'Tour through Orkney and
Shetland,' "we saw the prodigious effects of a late winter storm: many
great stones, one of them of several tons weight, had been tossed up a
precipice twenty or thirty feet high, and laid fairly on the green
sward." There is something farther worthy of notice in the stone of
which the two boulders of the Dog-stack are composed. No species of rock
occurs more abundantly in the embedded pebbles of this ancient
conglomerate than rocks of the trap family. We find in it
trap-porphyries, greenstones, clinkstones, basalts, and amygdalolds,
largely mingled with fragments of the granitic, clay-slate, and quartz
rocks. The Plutonic agencies must have been active in the locality for
periods amazingly protracted; and many of the masses protruded at a very
early time seem identical in their composition with rocks of the trap
family, which in other parts of the country we find referred to much
later eras. There occur in this deposit rolled pebbles of a basalt,
which in the neighborhood of Edinburgh would be deemed considerably more
modern than the times of the Mountain Limestone, and in the Isle of
Skye, considerably more modern than the times of the Oolite.
The sunlight was showering its last slant rays on island and loch, and
then retreating upwards along the higher hills, chased by the shadows,
as our boat quitted the bay of Oban, and stretched northwards, along the
end of green Lismore, for the Sound of Mull. We had just enough of day
left, as we reached mid sea, to show us the gray fronts of the three
ancient castles,--- which at this point may be at once seen from the
deck,--Dunolly, Duart, and Dunstaffnage; and enough left us as we
entered the Sound, to show, and barely show, the Lady Rock, famous in
tradition, and made classic by the pen of Campbell, raising its black
back amid the tides, like a belated porpoise. And then twilight
deepened into night, and we went snorting through the Strait with a
stream of green light curling off from either bow in the calm, towards
the high dim land, that seemed standing up on both sides like tall
hedges over a green lane. We entered the Bay of Tobermory about
midnight, and cast anchor amid a group of little vessels. An exceedingly
small boat shot out from the side of a yacht of rather diminutive
proportions, but tautly rigged for her size, and bearing an outrigger
astern. The water this evening was full of phosphoric matter, and it
gleamed and sparkled around the little boat like a northern aurora
around a dark cloudlet. There was just light enough to show that the
oars were plied by a sailor-like man in a Guernsey frock, and that
another sailor-like man,--the skipper, mayhap,--attired in a cap and
pea-jacket, stood in the stern. The man in the Guernsey frock was John
Stewart, sole mate and half the crew of the Free Church yacht Betsey;
and the skipper-like man in the pea-jacket was my friend the minister of
the Protestants of Small Isles. In five minutes more I was sitting with
Mr. Elder beside the little iron stove in the cabin of the Betsey; and
the minister, divested of his cap and jacket, but still looking the
veritable skipper to admiration, was busied in making us a rather late
tea.
The cabin,--my home for the greater part of the three following weeks,
and that of my friend for the greater part of the previous
twelvemonth,--I found to be an apartment about twice the size of a
common bed, and just lofty enough under the beams to permit a man of
five feet eleven to stand erect in his night-cap. A large table, lashed
to the floor, furnished with tiers of drawers of all sorts and sizes,
and bearing a writing desk bound to it a-top, occupied the middle space,
leaving just room enough for a person to pass between its edges and the
narrow coffin-like beds in the sides, and space enough at its fore-end
for two seats in front of the stove. A jealously barred skylight opened
above; and there depended from it this evening a close lantern-looking
lamp, sufficiently valuable, no doubt, in foul weather, but dreary and
dim on the occasions when all one really wished from it was light. The
peculiar furniture of the place gave evidence to the mixed nature of my
friend's employment. A well-thumbed chart of the Western Islands lay
across an equally well-thumbed volume of Henry's "Commentary." There was
a Polyglot and a spy-glass in one corner, and a copy of Calvin's
"Institutes," with the latest edition of "The Coaster's Sailing
Directions," in another; while in an adjoining state-room, nearly large
enough to accommodate an arm-chair, if the chair could have but
contrived to get into it, I caught a glimpse of my friend's printing
press and his case of types, canopied overhead by the blue ancient of
the vessel, bearing, in stately six-inch letters of white bunting, the
legend, "FREE CHURCH YACHT." A door opened, which communicated with the
forecastle, and John Stewart, stooping very much, to accommodate himself
to the low-roofed passage, thrust in a plate of fresh herrings,
splendidly toasted, to give substantiality and relish to our tea. The
little rude forecastle, a considerably smaller apartment than the cabin,
was all a-glow with the bright fire in the coppers, itself invisible; we
could see the chain-cable dangling from the hatchway to the floor, and
John Stewart's companion, a powerful-looking, handsome young man, with
broad bare breast, and in his shirt-sleeves, squatted full in front of
the blaze, like the household goblin described by Milton, or the
"Christmas Present" of Dickens. Mr. Elder left us for the steamer, in
which he prosecuted his voyage next morning to Skye; and we tumbled in,
each to his narrow bed,--comfortable enough sort of resting places,
though not over soft; and slept so soundly, that we failed to mark Mr.
Elder's return for a few seconds, a little after daybreak. I found at my
bedside, when I awoke, a fragment of rock which he had brought from the
shore, charged with Liasic fossils; and a note he had written, to say
that the deposit to which it belonged occurred in the trap immediately
above the village-mill; and further, to call my attention to a house
near the middle of the village, built of a mouldering red sandstone,
which had been found _in situ_ in digging the foundations. I had but
little time for the work of exploration in Mull, and the information
thus kindly rendered enabled me to economize it.
The village of Tobermory resembles that of Oban. A quiet bay has its
secure island-breakwater in front; a line of tall, well-built houses,
not in the least rural in their aspect, but that seem rather as if they
had been transported from the centre of some stately city entire and at
once, sweeps round its inner inflection, like a bent bow; and an
amphitheatre of mingled rock and wood rises behind. With all its beauty,
however, there hangs about the village an air of melancholy. Like some
of the other western coast villages, it seems not to have grown,
piece-meal, as a village ought, but to have been made wholesale, as
Frankenstein made his man; and to be ever asking, and never more
incessantly than when it is at its quietest, why it should have been
made at all? The remains of the Florida, a gallant Spanish ship, lie off
its shores, a wreck of the Invincible Armada, "deep whelmed," according
to Thompson,
"What time,
Snatched sudden by the vengeful blast,
The scattered vessels drove, and on blind shelve,
And pointed rock that marks th' indented shore,
Relentless dashed, where loud the northern main
Howls through the fractured Caledonian isles."
Macculloch relates, that there was an attempt made, rather more than a
century ago, to weigh up the Florida, which ended in the weighing up of
merely a few of her guns, some of them of iron greatly corroded; and
that, on scraping them, they became so hot under the hand that they
could not be touched, but that they lost this curious property after a
few hours' exposure to the air. There have since been repeated instances
elsewhere, he adds, of the same phenomenon, and chemistry has lent its
solution of the principles on which it occurs; but, in the year 1740,
ere the riddle was read, it must have been deemed a thoroughly magical
one by the simple islanders of Mull. It would seem as if the guns,
heated in the contest with Drake, Hawkins, and Frobisher, had again
kindled, under some supernatural influence, with the intense glow of the
lost battle.
The morning was showery; but it cleared up a little after ten, and we
landed to explore. We found the mill a little to the south of the
village, where a small stream descends, all foam and uproar, from the
higher grounds along a rocky channel half-hidden by brushwood; and the
Liasic bed occurs in an exposed front directly over it, coped by a thick
bed of amygdaloidal trap. The organisms are numerous; and, when we dig
into the bank beyond the reach of the weathering influences, we find
them delicately preserved, though after a fashion that renders difficult
their safe removal. Originally the bed must have existed as a brown
argillaceous mud, somewhat resembling that which forms in the course of
years, under a scalp of muscles; and it has hardened into a more
silt-like clay, in which the fossils occur, not as petrifactions, but
as shells in a state of decay, except in some rare cases, in which a
calcareous nodule has formed within or around them. Viewed in the group,
they seem of an intermediate character, between the shells of the Lias
and the Oolite. One of the first fossils I disinterred was the Gryphaea
obliquata,--a shell characteristic of the Liasic formation; and the
fossil immediately after, the Pholadomy aequalis, a shell of the Oolitic
one. There occurs in great numbers a species of small Pecten,--some of
the specimens scarce larger than a herring scale; a minute Ostrea, a
sulcated Terebratula, an Isocardia, a Pullastra, and groups of broken
serpulae in vast abundance. The deposit has also its three species of
Ammonite, existing as mere impressions in the clay; and at least two
species of Belemnite,--one of the two somewhat resembling the Belemnites
abbreviatus, but smaller and rather more elongated: while the other, of
a spindle form, diminishing at both ends, reminds one of the Belemnites
minimus of the Gault. The Red Sandstone in the centre of the village
occurs detached, like this Liasic bed, amid the prevailing trap, and may
be seen _in situ_ beside the southern gable of the tall, deserted
looking house at the hill-foot, that has been built of it. It is a soft,
coarse-grained, mouldering stone, ill fitted for the purposes of the
architect; and more nearly resembles the New Red Sandstone of England
and Dumfriesshire, than any other rock I have yet seen in the north of
Scotland. I failed to detect in it aught organic.
We weighed anchor about two o'clock, and beat gallantly out the Sound,
in the face of an intermittent baffling wind and a heavy swell from the
sea. I would fain have approached nearer the precipices of Ardnamurchan,
to trace along their inaccessible fronts the strange reticulations of
trap figured by Macculloch; but prudence and the skipper forbade our
trusting even the docile little Betsey, on one of the most formidable
lee shores in Scotland, in winds so light and variable, and with the
swell so high. We could hear the deep roar of the surf for miles, and
see its undulating strip of white flickering under stack and cliff. The
scenery here seems rich in legendary association. At one tack we bore
into Bloody Bay, on the Mull coast,--the scene of a naval battle between
two island chiefs; at another, we approached, on the mainland, a cave
inaccessible save from the sea, long the haunt of a ruthless Highland
pirate. Ere we rounded the headland of Ardnamurchan, the slant light of
evening was gleaming athwart the green acclivities of Mull, barring them
with long horizontal lines of shadow, where the trap terraces rise step
beyond step, in the characteristic stair-like arrangement to which the
rock owes its name; and the sun set as we were bearing down in one long
tack on the Small Isles. We passed the Isle of Muck, with its one low
hill; saw the pyramidal mountains of Rum looming tall in the offing; and
then, running along the Isle of Eigg, with its colossal Scuir rising
between us and the sky, as if it were a piece of Babylonian wall, or of
the great wall of China, only vastly larger, set down on the ridge of a
mountain, we entered the channel which separates the island from one of
its dependencies, Eilean Chaisteil, and cast anchor in the tideway,
about fifty yards from the rocks. We were now at home,--the only home
which the proprietor of the island permits to the islanders' minister;
and, after getting warm and comfortable over the stove and a cup of tea,
we did what all sensible men do in their own homes when the night wears
late,--got into bed.
CHAPTER II.
The Minister's Larder--No Harbor--Eigg Shoes--_Tormentilla
erecta_--For the _Witness'_ Sake--Eilean Chaisteil--Appearance of
Eigg--Chapel of St. Donan--Shell-sand--Origin of Secondary
Calcareous Rock suggested--Exploration of Eigg--Pitchstone Veins--A
Bone Cave--Massacre at Eigg--Grouping of Human Bones in the
Cave--Relics--The Horse's Tooth--A Copper Sewing Needle--Teeth
found--Man a worse Animal than his Teeth show him to have been
designed for--Story of the Massacre--Another Version--Scuir of
Eigg--The Scuir a Giant's Causeway--Character of the
Columns--Remains of a Prostrate Forest.
We had rich tea this morning. The minister was among his people; and our
first evidence of the fact came in the agreeable form of three bottles
of fine fresh cream from the shore. Then followed an ample baking of
nice oaten cakes. The material out of which the cakes were manufactured
had been sent from the minister's store aboard,--for oatmeal in Eigg is
rather a scarce commodity in the middle of July; but they had borrowed a
crispness and flavor from the island, that the meal, left to its own
resources, could scarcely have communicated; and the golden-colored
cylinder of fresh butter which accompanied them was all the island's
own. There was an ample supply of eggs too, as one not quite a conjuror
might have expected from a country bearing such a name,--eggs with the
milk in them; and, with cream, butter, oaten cakes, eggs, and tea, all
of the best, and with sharp-set sea-air appetites to boot, we fared
sumptuously. There is properly no harbor in the island. We lay in a
narrow channel, through which, twice every twenty-four hours, the tides
sweep powerfully in one direction, and then as powerfully in the
direction opposite; and our anchors had a trick of getting foul, and
canting stock downwards in the loose sand, which, with pointed rocks all
around us, over which the current ran races, seemed a very shrewd sort
of trick indeed. But a kedge and halser, stretched thwartwise to a
neighboring crag, and jammed fast in a crevice, served in moderate
weather to keep us tolerably right. In the severer seasons, however, the
kedge is found inadequate, and the minister has to hoist sail and make
out for the open sea, as if served with a sudden summons of ejectment.
Among the various things brought aboard this morning, there was a pair
of island shoes for the minister's cabin use, that struck my fancy not a
little. They were all around of a deep madder red color, soles, welts
and uppers; and, though somewhat resembling in form the little yawl of
the Betsey, were sewed not unskilfully with thongs; and their peculiar
style of tie seemed of a kind suited to furnish with new idea a
fashionable shoemaker of the metropolis. They were altogether the
production of Eigg, from the skin out of which they had been cut, with
the lime that had prepared it for the tan, and the root by which the tan
had been furnished, down to the last on which they had been moulded, and
the artisan that had cast them off, a pair of finished shoes. There are
few trees, and, of course, no bark to spare, in the island; but the
islanders find a substitute in the astringent lobiferous root of the
_Tormentilla erecta_, which they dig out for the purpose among the
heath, at no inconsiderable expense of time and trouble. I was informed
by John Stewart, an adept in all the multifarious arts of the island,
from the tanning of leather and the tilling of land, to the building of
a house or the working of a ship, that the infusion of root had to be
thrice changed for every skin, and that it took a man nearly a day to
gather roots enough for a single infusion. I was further informed that
it was not unusual for the owner of a skin to give it to some neighbor
to tan, and that, the process finished, it was divided equally between
them, the time and trouble bestowed on it by the one being deemed
equivalent to the property held in it by the other. I wished to call a
pair of these primitive-looking shoes my own, and no sooner was the wish
expressed, than straightway one islander furnished me with leather, and
another set to work upon the shoes. When I came to speak of
remuneration, however, the islanders shook their heads. "No, no, not
from the _Witness_: there are not many that take our part, and the
_Witness_ does." I hold the shoes, therefore, as my first retainer,
determined, on all occasions of just quarrel, to make common cause with
the poor islanders.
The view from the anchoring ground presents some very striking features.
Between us and the sea lies Eilean Chaisteil, a rocky trap islet, about
half a mile in length by a few hundred yards in breadth; poor in
pastures, but peculiarly rich in sea-weed, of which John Stewart used,
he informed me, to make finer kelp, ere the trade was put down by act of
Parliament, than could be made elsewhere in Eigg. This islet bore, in
the remote past, its rude fort or dun, long since sunk into a few grassy
mounds; and hence its name. On the landward side rises the island of
Eigg proper, resembling in outline two wedges, placed point to point on
a board. The centre is occupied by a deep angular gap, from which the
ground slopes upward on both sides, till, attaining its extreme height
at the opposite ends of the island, it drops suddenly on the sea. In the
northern rising ground the wedge-like outline is complete; in the
southern one it is somewhat modified by the gigantic Scuir, which rises
direct on the apex of the height, _i.e._, the thick part of the wedge;
and which, seen bows-on from this point of view, resembles some vast
donjon keep, taller, from base to summit, by about a hundred feet, than
the dome of St. Paul's. The upper slopes of the island are brown and
moory, and present little on which the eye may rest, save a few trap
terraces, with rudely columnar fronts; its middle space is mottled with
patches of green, and studded with dingy cottages, each of which this
morning, just a little before the breakfast hour, had its own blue
cloudlet of smoke diffused around it; while along the beach, patches of
level sand, alternated with tracts of green bank, or both, give place to
stately ranges of basaltic columns, or dingy groups of detached rocks.
Immediately in front of the central hollow, as if skilfully introduced,
to relieve the tamest part of the prospect, a noble wall of
semi-circular columns rises some eighty or a hundred feet over the
shore; and on a green slope, directly above, we see the picturesque
ruins of the Chapel of St. Donan, one of the disciples of Columba, and
the Culdee saint and apostle of the island.
One of the things that first struck me, as I got on deck this morning,
was the extreme whiteness of the sand. I could see it gleaming bright
through the transparent green of the sea, three fathoms below our keel,
and, in a little flat bay directly opposite, it presented almost the
appearance of pulverized chalk. A stronger contrast to the dingy
trap-rocks around which it lies could scarce be produced, had contrast
for effect's sake been the object. On landing on the exposed shelf to
which we had fastened our halser, I found the origin of the sand
interestingly exhibited. The hollows of the rock, a rough trachyte, with
a surface like that of a steel rasp, were filled with handfuls of broken
shells thrown up by the surf from the sea-banks beyond: fragments of
echini, bits of the valves of razor-fish, the island cyprina, mactridae,
buccinidae, and fractured periwinkles, lay heaped together in vast
abundance. In hollow after hollow, as I passed shorewards, I found the
fragments more and more comminuted, just as, in passing along the
successive vats of a paper-mill, one finds the linen rags more and more
disintegrated by the cylinders; and immediately beyond the inner edge of
the shelf, which is of considerable extent, lies the flat bay, the
ultimate recipient of the whole, filled to the depth of several feet,
and to the extent of several hundred yards, with a pure shell-sand, the
greater part of which had been thus washed ashore in handfuls, and
ground down by the blended agency of the trachyte and the surf. Once
formed, however, in this way it began to receive accessions from the
exuviae of animals that love such localities,--the deep arenaceous bed
and soft sand-beach; and these now form no inconsiderable proportion of
the entire mass. I found the deposit thickly inhabited by spatangi,
razor-fish, gapers, and large, well-conditioned cockles, which seemed to
have no idea whatever that they were living amid the debris of a charnel
house. Such has been the origin here of a bed of shell-sand, consisting
of many thousand tons, and of which at least eighty per cent. was once
associated with animal life. And such, I doubt not, is the history of
many a calcareous rock in the later secondary formations. There are
strata, not a few, of the Cretaceous and Oolitic groups, that would be
found--could we but trace their beginnings with a certainty and
clearness equal to that with which we can unravel the story of this
deposit--to be, like it, elaborations from dead matter, made through the
agency of animal secretion.
We set out on our first exploratory ramble in Eigg an hour before noon.
The day was bracing and breezy, and a clear sun looked cheerily down on
island, and strait, and blue open sea. We rowed southwards in our
little boat, through the channel of Eilean Chaisteil, along the
trap-rocks of the island, and landed under the two pitchstone veins of
Eigg, so generally known among mineralogists, and of which specimens may
be found in so many cabinets. They occur in an earthy, greenish-black
amygdaloid, which forms a range of sea-cliffs varying in height from
thirty to fifty feet, and that, from their sad hue and dull fracture,
seem to absorb the light; while the veins themselves, bright and
glistening, glitter in the sun, as if they were streams of water
traversing the face of the rock. The first impression they imparted, in
viewing them from the boat, was, that the inclosing mass was a pitch
caldron, rather of the roughest and largest, and much begrimmed by soot,
that had cracked to the heat, and that the fluid pitch was forcing its
way outwards through the rents. The veins expand and contract, here
diminishing to a strip a few inches across, there widening into a
comparatively broad belt, some two or three feet over; and, as well
described by M'Culloch, we find the inclosed pitchstone changing in
color, and assuming a lighter or darker hue, as it nears the edge or
recedes from it. In the centre it is of a dull olive green, passing
gradually into blue, which in turn deepens into black; and it is exactly
at the point of contact with the earthy amygdaloid that the black is
most intense, and the fracture of the stone glassiest and brightest. I
was lucky enough to detach a specimen, which, though scarce four inches
across, exhibits the three colors characteristic of the vein,--its bar
of olive green on the one side, of intense black on the other, and of
blue, like that of imperfectly fused bottle-glass, in the centre. This
curious rock,--so nearly akin in composition and appearance to
obsidian,--a mineral which, in its dense form, closely resembles the
coarse dark-colored glass of which common bottles are made, and which,
in its lighter form, exists as pumice,--constitutes one of the links
that connect the trap with the unequivocally volcanic rocks. The one
mineral may be seen beside smoking crater, as in the Lipari Isles,
passing into pumice; while the other may be converted into a substance
almost identical with pumice, by the chemist. "It is stated by the
Honorable George Knox, of Dublin," says Mr. Robert Allan, in his
valuable mineralogical work, "that the pitchstone of Newry, on being
exposed to a high temperature, loses its bitumen and water, and is
converted into a light substance in every respect resembling pumice."
But of pumice in connection with the pitchstones of Eigg, more anon.
Leaving our boat to return to the Betsey at John Stewart's leisure, and
taking with us his companion, to assist us in carrying such specimens as
we might procure, we passed westwards for a few hundred yards under the
crags, and came abreast of a dark angular opening at the base of the
precipice, scarce two feet in height, and in front of which there lies a
little sluggish, ankle-deep pool, half mud, half water, and matted over
with grass and rushes. Along the mural face of the rock of earthy
amygdaloid there runs a nearly vertical line, which in one of the
stratified rocks one might perhaps term the line of a fault, but which
in a trap rock may merely indicate where two semi-molten masses had
pressed against each other without uniting--just as currents of cooling
lead, poured by the plumber from the opposite end of a groove, sometimes
meet and press together, so as to make a close, polished joint, without
running into one piece. The little angular opening forms the lower
termination of the line, which, hollowing inwards, recedes near the
bottom into a shallow cave, roughened with tufts of fern and bunches of
long silky grass, here and there enlivened by the delicate flowers of
the lesser rock-geranium. A shower of drops patters from above among the
weeds and rushes of the little pool. My friend the minister stopped
short. "There," he said, pointing to the hollow, "you will find such a
bone cave as you never saw before. Within that opening there lie the
remains of an entire race, palpably destroyed, as geologists in so many
other cases are content merely to imagine, by one great catastrophe.
That is the famous cave of Frances (_Uamh Fraingh_), in which the whole
people of Eigg were smoked to death by the M'Leods."
We struck a light, and, worming ourselves through the narrow entrance,
gained the interior,--a true rock gallery, vastly more roomy and lofty
than one could have anticipated from the mean vestibule placed in front
of it. Its extreme length we found to be two hundred and sixty feet; its
extreme breadth twenty-seven feet; its height, where the roof rises
highest, from eighteen to twenty feet. The cave seems to have owed its
origin to two distinct causes. The trap-rocks on each side of the
vertical fault-like crevice which separates them are greatly decomposed,
as if by the moisture percolating from above; and directly in the line
of the crevice must the surf have charged, wave after wave, for ages ere
the last upheaval of the land. When the Dog-stone at Dunolly existed as
a sea-stack, skirted with algae, the breakers on this shore must have
dashed every tide through the narrow opening of the cavern, and scooped
out by handfuls the decomposing trap within. The process of
decomposition, and consequent enlargement, is still going on inside, but
there is no longer an agent to sweep away the disintegrated fragments.
Where the roof rises highest, the floor is blocked up with accumulations
of bulky decaying masses, that have dropped from above; and it is
covered over its entire area by a stratum of earthy rubbish, which has
fallen from the sides and ceiling in such abundance, that it covers up
the straw beds of the perished islanders, which still exist beneath as a
brown mouldering felt, to the depth of from five to eight inches. Never
yet was tragedy enacted on a gloomier theatre. An uncertain twilight
glimmers gray at the entrance, from the narrow vestibule; but all
within, for full two hundred feet, is black as with Egyptian darkness.
As we passed onward with our one feeble light, along the dark mouldering
walls and roof, which absorbed every straggling ray that reached them,
and over the dingy floor, ropy and damp, the place called to
recollection that hall in Roman story, hung and carpeted with black,
into which Domitian once thrust his senate, in a frolic, to read their
own names on the coffin-lids placed against the wall. The darkness
seemed to press upon us from every side, as if it were a dense jetty
fluid, out of which our light had scooped a pailful or two, and that was
rushing in to supply the vacuum; and the only objects we saw distinctly
visible were each other's heads and faces, and the lighter parts of our
dress.
The floor, for about a hundred feet inwards from the narrow vestibule,
resembles that of a charnel-house. At almost every step we came upon
heaps of human bones grouped together, as the Psalmist so graphically
describes, "as when one cutteth and cleaveth wood upon the earth." They
are of a brownish, earthy hue, here and there tinged with green; the
skulls, with the exception of a few broken fragments, have disappeared;
for travellers in the Hebrides have of late years been numerous and
curious; and many a museum,--that at Abbotsford among the
rest,--exhibits, in a grinning skull, its memorial of the Massacre at
Eigg. We find, too, further marks of visitors in the single bones
separated from the heaps and scattered over the area; but enough still
remains to show, in the general disposition of the remains, that the
hapless islanders died under the walls in families, each little group
separated by a few feet from the others. Here and there the remains of a
detached skeleton may be seen, as if some robust islander, restless in
his agony, had stalked out into the middle space ere he fell; but the
social arrangement is the general one. And beneath every heap we find,
at the depth, as has been said, of a few inches, the remains of the
straw-bed upon which the family had lain, largely mixed with the smaller
bones of the human frame, ribs and vertebrae, and hand and feet bones;
occasionally, too, with fragments of unglazed pottery, and various other
implements of a rude housewifery. The minister found for me, under one
family heap, the pieces of a half-burned, unglazed earthen jar, with a
narrow mouth, that, like the sepulchral urns of our ancient tumuli, had
been moulded by the hand, without the assistance of the potter's wheel;
and to one of the fragments there stuck a minute pellet of gray hair.
From under another heap he disinterred the handle-stave of a child's
wooden porringer (_bicker_), perforated by a hole still bearing the mark
of the cord that had hung it to the wall; and beside the stave lay a few
of the larger, less destructible bones of the child, with what for a
time puzzled us both not a little,--one of the grinders of a horse.
Certain it was, no horse could have got there to have dropped a
tooth,--a foal of a week old could not have pressed itself through the
opening; and how the single grinder, evidently no recent introduction
into the cave, could have got mixed up in the straw with the human
bones, seemed an enigma somewhat of the class to which the reel in the
bottle belongs. I found in Edinburgh an unexpected commentator on the
mystery, in the person of my little boy,--an experimental philosopher in
his second year. I had spread out on the floor the curiosities of
Eigg,--among the rest, the relics of the cave, including the pieces of
earthern jar, and the fragment of the porringer; but the horse's tooth
seemed to be the only real curiosity among them in the eyes of little
Bill. He laid instant hold of it; and, appropriating it as a toy,
continued playing with it till he fell asleep. I have now little doubt
that it was first brought into the cave by the poor child amid whose
mouldering remains Mr. Swanson found it. The little pellet of gray hair
spoke of feeble old age involved in this wholesale massacre with the
vigorous manhood of the island; and here was a story of unsuspecting
infancy amusing itself on the eve of destruction with its toys. Alas,
for man! "Should not I spare Nineveh, that great city," said God to the
angry prophet, "wherein are more than six score thousand persons that
cannot discern between their right hand and their left?" God's image
must have been sadly defaced in the murderers of the poor inoffensive
children of Eigg, ere they could have heard their feeble wailings,
raised, no doubt, when the stifling atmosphere within began first to
thicken, and yet ruthlessly persist in their work of indiscriminate
destruction.
Various curious things have from time to time been picked up from under
the bones. An islander found among them, shortly before our visit, a
sewing needle of copper, little more than an inch in length; fragments
of Eigg shoes, of the kind still made in the island, are of
comparatively common occurrence; and Mr. James Wilson relates, in the
singularly graphic and powerful description of _Uamh Fraingh_, which
occurs in his "Voyage round the Coasts of Scotland" (1841), that a
sailor, when he was there, disinterred, by turning up a flat stone, a
"buck-tooth" and a piece of money,--the latter a rusty copper coin,
apparently of the times of Mary of Scotland. I also found a few teeth;
they were sticking fast in a fragment of jaw; and, taking it for
granted, as I suppose I may, that the dentology of the murderous M'Leods
outside the cave must have very much resembled that of the murdered
M'Donalds within, very harmless looking teeth they were for being those
of an animal so maliciously mischievous as man. I have found in the Old
Red Sandstone the strong-based tusks of the semi-reptile Holoptychius; I
have chiselled out of the limestone of the Coal Measures the sharp,
dagger-like incisors of the Megalichthys; I have picked up in the Lias
and Oolite the cruel spikes of the Crocodile and the Ichthyosaurus; I
have seen the trenchant, saw-edged teeth of gigantic Cestracions and
Squalidae that had been disinterred from the Chalk and the London Clay;
and I have felt, as I examined them, that there could be no possibility
of mistake regarding the nature of the creatures to which they had
belonged;--they were teeth made for hacking, tearing, mangling,--for
amputating limbs at a bite, and laying open bulky bodies with a crunch;
but I could find no such evidence in the human jaw, with its three
inoffensive looking grinders, that the animal it had belonged to,--far
more ruthless and cruel than reptile-fish, crocodiles, or sharks,--was
of such a nature that it could destroy creatures of even its own kind by
hundreds at a time, when not in the least incited by hunger, and with no
ultimate intention of eating them. Man must surely have become an
immensely worse animal than his teeth show him to have been designed
for; his teeth give no real evidence regarding his real character. Who,
for instance, could gather from the dentology of the M'Leods the passage
in their history to which the cave of Frances bears evidence?
We quitted the cave, with its stagnant damp atmosphere and its mouldy
unwholesome smells, to breathe the fresh sea-air on the beach without.
Its story, as recorded by Sir Walter in his "Tales of a Grandfather,"
and by Mr. Wilson, in his "Voyage," must be familiar to the reader; and
I learned from my friend, versant in all the various island traditions
regarding it, that the less I inquired into its history on the spot, the
more was I likely to feel satisfied that I knew something about it.
There seem to have been no chroniclers, in this part of the Hebrides, in
the rude age of the unglazed pipkin and the copper needle; and many
years seem to have elapsed ere the story of their hapless possessors was
committed to writing; and so we find it existing in various and somewhat
conflicting editions. "Some hundred years ago," says Mr. Wilson, "a few
of the M'Leods landed in Eigg from Skye, where, having greatly
misconducted themselves, the Eiggites strapped them to their own boats,
which they sent adrift into the ocean. They were, however, rescued by
some clansmen; and, soon after, a strong body of the M'Leods set sail
from Skye, to revenge themselves on Eigg. The natives of the latter
island feeling they were not of sufficient force to offer resistance,
went and hid themselves (men, women, and children) in this secret cave,
which is narrow, but of great subterranean length, with an exceedingly
small entrance. It opens from the broken face of a steep bank along the
shore; and, as the whole coast is cavernous, their particular retreat
would have been sought for in vain by strangers. So the Skye-men,
finding the island uninhabited, presumed the natives had fled, and
satisfied their revengeful feelings by ransacking and pillaging the
empty houses. Probably the _movables_ were of no great value. They then
took their departure and left the island, when the sight of a solitary
human being among the cliffs awakened their suspicion, and induced them
to return. Unfortunately a slight sprinkling of snow had fallen, and the
footsteps of an individual were traced to the mouth of the cave. Not
having been there ourselves at the period alluded to, we cannot speak
with certainty as to the nature of the parley which ensued, or the
terms offered by either party; but we know that those were not the days
of protocols. The ultimatum was unsatisfactory to the Skye-men, who
immediately proceeded to 'adjust the preliminaries' in their own way,
which adjustment consisted in carrying a vast collection of heather,
ferns, and other combustibles, and making a huge fire just in the very
entrance of the _Uamh Fraingh_, which they kept up for a length of time;
and thus, by 'one fell smoke,' they smothered the entire population of
the island."
Such is Mr. Wilson's version of the story, which, in all its leading
circumstances, agrees with that of Sir Walter. According, however, to at
least one of the Eigg versions, it was the M'Leod himself who had landed
on the island, driven there by a storm. The islanders, at feud with the
M'Leod's at the time, inhospitably rose upon him, as he bivouacked on
the shores of the Bay of Laig; and in a fray, in which his party had the
worse, his back was broken, and he was forced off half dead to sea.
Several months after, on his partial recovery, he returned, crook-backed
and infirm, to wreak his vengeance on the inhabitants, all of whom,
warned of his coming by the array of his galleys in the offing, hid
themselves in the cave, in which, however, they were ultimately
betrayed--as narrated by Sir Walter and Mr. Wilson--by the track of some
footpaths in a sprinkling of snow; and the implacable chieftain, giving
orders on the discovery, to unroof the houses in the neighborhood,
raised high a pile of rafters against the opening, and set it on fire.
And there he stood in front of the blaze, hump-backed and grim, till the
wild, hollow cry from the rock within had sunk into silence, and there
lived not a single islander of Eigg, man, woman, or child. The fact that
their remains should have been left to moulder in the cave is proof
enough, of itself, that none survived to bury the dead. I am inclined
to believe, from the appearance of the place, that smoke could scarcely
have been the real agent of destruction; then, as now, it would have
taken a great deal of pure smoke to smother a Highlander. It may be
perhaps deemed more probable, that the huge fire of rafter and roof-tree
piled close against the opening, and rising high over it, would draw out
the oxygen within as its proper food, till at length all would be
exhausted; and life would go out for want of it, like the flame of a
candle under an upturned jar. Sir Walter refers the date of the event to
some time "about the close of the sixteenth century;" and the coin of
Queen Mary, mentioned by Mr. Wilson, points at a period at least not
much earlier; but the exact time of its occurrence is so uncertain, that
a Roman Catholic priest of the Hebrides, in lately showing his people
what a very bad thing Protestantism is, instanced, as a specimen of its
average morality, the affair of the cave. The _Protestant_ M'Leods of
Skye, he said, full of hatred in their hearts, had murdered, wholesale,
their wretched brethren, the _Protestant_ M'Donalds of Eigg, and sent
them off to perdition before their time.
Quitting the beach, we ascended the breezy hill-side on our way to the
Scuir,--an object so often and so well described, that it might be
perhaps prudent, instead of attempting one description more, to present
the reader with some of the already existing ones. "The Scuir of Eigg,"
says Professor Jamieson, in his 'Mineralogy of the Western Islands,' "is
perfectly mural, and extends for upwards of a mile and a half, and rises
to a height of several hundred feet. It is entirely columnar, and the
columns rise in successive ranges, until they reach the summit, where,
from their great height, they appear, when viewed from below,
diminutive. Staffa is an object of the greatest beauty and regularity;
the pillars are as distinct as if they had been reared by the hand of
art; but it has not the extent or sublimity of the Scuir of Eigg. The
one may be compared with the greatest exertions of human power; the
other is characteristic of the wildest and most inimitable works of
nature." "The height of this extraordinary object is considerable," says
M'Culloch, dashing off his sketch with a still bolder hand; "yet its
powerful effect arises rather from its peculiar form, and the commanding
elevation which it occupies, than from its positive altitude. Viewed in
one direction, it presents a long irregular wall, crowning the summit of
the highest hill, while in the other it resembles a huge tower. Thus it
forms no natural combination of outline with the surrounding land, and
hence acquires that independence in the general landscape which
increases its apparent magnitude, and produces that imposing effect
which it displays. From the peculiar position of the Scuir, it must also
inevitably be viewed from a low station. Hence it everywhere towers high
above the spectator; while, like other objects on the mountain outline,
its apparent dimensions are magnified, and its dark mass defined on the
sky, so as to produce all the additional effects arising from strong
oppositions of light and shadow. The height of this rock is sufficient
in this stormy country frequently to arrest the passage of the clouds,
so as to be further productive of the most brilliant effects in
landscape. Often they may be seen hovering on its summit, and adding
ideal dimensions to the lofty face, or, when it is viewed on the
extremity, conveying the impression of a tower, the height of which is
such as to lie in the regions of the clouds. Occasionally they sweep
along the base, leaving its huge and black mass involved in additional
gloom, and resembling the castle of some Arabian enchanter, built on the
clouds, and suspended in air." It might be perhaps deemed somewhat
invidious to deal with pictures such as these in the style the
connoisseur in the "Vicar of Wakefield" dealt with the old painting,
when, seizing a brush, he daubed it over with brown varnish, and then
asked the spectators whether he had not greatly improved the tone of the
coloring. And yet it is just possible, that in the case of at least
M'Culloch's picture, the brown varnish might do no manner of harm. But a
homelier sketch, traced out on almost the same leading lines, with just
a little less of the aerial in it, may have nearly the same subduing
effect; I have, besides, a few curious touches to lay in, which seem
hitherto to have escaped observation and the pencil; and in these
several circumstances must lie my apology for adding one sketch more to
the sketches existing already.
The Scuir of Eigg, then, is a veritable Giant's Causeway, like that on
the coast of Antrim, taken and magnified rather more than twenty times
in height, and some five or six times in breadth, and then placed on the
ridge of a hill nearly nine hundred feet high. Viewed sideways, it
assumes, as described by M'Culloch, the form of a perpendicular but
ruinous rampart, much gapped above, that runs for about a mile and a
quarter along the top of a lofty sloping talus. Viewed endways, it
resembles a tall massy tower,--such a tower as my friend, Mr. D.O. Hill,
would delight to draw, and give delight by drawing,--a tower three
hundred feet in breadth by four hundred and seventy feet in height,
perched on the apex of a pyramid, like a statue on a pedestal. This
strange causeway is columnar from end to end; but the columns, from
their great altitude and deficient breadth, seem mere rodded shafts in
the Gothic style; they rather resemble bundles of rods than
well-proportioned pillars. Few of them exceed eighteen inches in
diameter, and many of them fall short of half a foot; but, though lost
in the general mass of the Scuir as independent columns, when we view it
at an angle sufficiently large to take in its entire bulk, they yet
impart to it that graceful linear effect which we see brought out in
tasteful pencil sketches and good line engravings. We approached it this
day from the shore in the direction in which the eminence it stands upon
assumes the pyramidal form, and itself the tower-like outline. The
acclivity is barren and stony,--a true desert foreground, like those of
Thebes and Palmyra; and the huge square shadow of the tower stretched
dark and cold athwart it. The sun shone out clearly. One half the
immense bulk before us, with its delicate vertical lining, lay from top
to bottom in deep shade, massive and gray; one half presented its
many-sided columns to the light, here and there gleaming with tints of
extreme brightness, where the pitchstones presented their glassy planes
to the sun; its general outline, whether pencilled by the lighter or
darker tints, stood out sharp and clear; and a stratum of white fleecy
clouds floated slowly amid the delicious blue behind it. But the minuter
details I must reserve for my next chapter. One fact, however,
anticipated just a little out of its order, may heighten the interest of
the reader. There are massive buildings,--bridges of noble span, and
harbors that abut far into the waves,--founded on wooden piles; and this
hugest of hill-forts we find founded on wooden piles also. It is built
on what a Scotch architect would perhaps term a pile-_brander_ of the
_Pinites Eiggensis_, an ancient tree of the Oolite. The gigantic Scuir
of Eigg rests on the remains of a prostrate forest.
CHAPTER III.
Structure of the Scuir--A stray Column--The Piazza--A buried Pine
Forest the Foundation of the Scuir--Geological Poachers in a Fossil
Preserve--_Pinites Eiggensis_--Its Description--Witham's
Experiments on Fossil Pine of Eigg--Rings of the Pine--Ascent of
the Scuir--Appearance of the Top--White Pitchstone--Mr. Greig's
Discovery of Pumice--A Sunset Scene--The Manse and the Yacht--The
Minister's Story--A Cottage Repast--American Timber drifted to the
Hebrides--Agency of the Gulf Stream--The Minister's Sheep.
As we climbed the hill-side, and the Shinar-like tower before us rose
higher over the horizon at each step we took, till it seemed pointing at
the middle sky, we could mark peculiarities in its structure which
escape notice in the distance. We found it composed of various beds,
each of which would make a Giant's Causeway entire, piled over each
other like stories in a building, and divided into columns, vertical, or
nearly so, in every instance except in one bed near the base, in which
the pillars incline to a side, as if losing footing under the
superincumbent weight. Innumerable polygonal fragments,--single stones
of the building,--lie scattered over the slope, composed, like almost
all the rest of the Scuir, of a peculiar and very beautiful stone,
unlike any other in Scotland--a dark pitchstone-porphyry, which,
inclosing crystals of glassy feldspar, resembles in the hand-specimen, a
mass of black sealing-wax, with numerous pieces of white bugle stuck
into it. Some of the detached polygons are of considerable size; few of
them larger and bulkier, however, than a piece of column of this
characteristic porphyry, about ten feet in length by two feet in
diameter, which lies a full mile away from any of the others, in the
line of the old burying-ground, and distant from it only a few hundred
yards. It seems to have been carried there by man: we find its bearing
from the Scuir lying nearly at right angles with the direction of the
drift-boulders of the western coast, which are, besides, of rare
occurrence in the Hebrides; nor has it a single neighbor; and it seems
not improbable, as a tradition of the island testifies, that it was
removed thus far for the purpose of marking some place of sepulture, and
that the catastrophe of the cave arrested its progress after by far the
longer and rougher portion of the way had been passed. The dry-arm bones
of the charnel-house in the rock may have been tugging around it when
the galleys of the M'Leod hove in sight. The traditional history of
Eigg, said my friend the minister, compared with that of some of the
neighboring islands, presents a decapitated aspect: the M'Leods cut it
off by the neck. Most of the present inhabitants can tell which of their
ancestors, grandfather, or great-grandfather, or great-great-grandfather,
first settled in the place, and where they came from; and, with the
exception of a few vague legends about St. Donan and his grave, which were
preserved apparently among the people of the other Small Isles, the island
has no early traditional history.
We had now reached the Scuir. There occur, intercalated with the
columnar beds, a few bands of a buff-colored non-columnar trap,
described by M'Culloch as of a texture intermediate between a greenstone
and a basalt, and which, while the pitchstone around it seems nearly
indestructible, has weathered so freely as to form horizontal grooves
along the face of the rock, from two to five yards in depth. One of
these runs for several hundred feet along the base of the Scuir, just at
the top of the talus, and greatly resembles a piazza, lacking the outer
pillars. It is from ten to twelve feet in height, by from fifteen to
twenty in depth; the columns of the pitch stone-bed immediately above
it seem perilously hanging in mid air; and along their sides there
trickles, in even the driest summer weather,--for the Scuir is a
condenser on an immense scale--minute runnels of water, that patter
ceaselessly in front of the long deep hollow, like rain from the eaves
of a cottage during a thunder shower. Inside, however, all is dry, and
the floor is covered to the depth of several inches with the dung of
sheep and cattle, that find, in this singular mountain piazza, a place
of shelter. We had brought a pickaxe with us; and the dry and dusty
floor, composed mainly of a gritty conglomerate, formed the scene of our
labors. It is richly fossiliferous, though the organisms have no
specific variety; and never, certainly, have I found the remains of
former creations in a scene in which they more powerfully addressed
themselves to the imagination. A stratum of peat-moss, mixed with
fresh-water shells, and resting on a layer of vegetable mould, from
which the stumps and roots of trees still protruded, was once found in
Italy, buried beneath an ancient tesselated pavement; and the whole gave
curious evidence of a kind fitted to picture to the imagination a
background vista of antiquity, all the more remotely ancient in aspect
from the venerable age of the object in front. Dry ground covered by
wood, a lake, a morass, and then dry ground again, had all taken
precedence, on the site of the tesselated pavement, in this instance, of
an old Roman villa. But what was antiquity in connection with a Roman
villa, to antiquity in connection with the Scuir of Eigg? Under the old
foundations of this huge wall we find the remains of a pine forest,
that, long ere a single bed of the porphyry had burst from beneath, had
sprung up and decayed on hill and beside stream in some nameless
land,--had then been swept to the sea,--had been entombed deep at the
bottom in a grit of Oolite,--had been heaved up to the surface, and
high over it, by volcanic agencies working from beneath,--and had
finally been built upon, as moles are built upon piles, by the architect
that had laid down the masonry of the gigantic Scuir, in one fiery layer
after another. The mountain wall of Eigg, with its dizzy elevation of
four hundred and seventy feet, is a wall founded on piles of pine laid
crossways; and, strange as the fact may seem, one has but to dig into
the floor of this deep-hewn piazza, to be convinced that at least it
_is_ a fact.
Just at this interesting stage, however, our explorations bade fair to
be interrupted. Our man who carried the pickaxe had lingered behind us
for a few hundred yards, in earnest conversation with an islander; and
he now came up, breathless and in hot haste, to say that the islander, a
Roman Catholic tacksman in the neighborhood, had peremptorily warned him
that the Scuir of Eigg was the property of Dr. M'Pherson of Aberdeen,
not ours, and that the Doctor would be very angry at any man who meddled
with it. "That message," said my friend, laughing, but looking just a
little sad through the laugh, "would scarce have been sent us when I was
minister of the Establishment here; but it seems allowable in the case
of a poor Dissenter, and is no bad specimen of the thousand little ways
in which the Roman Catholic population of the island try to annoy me,
now that they see my back to the wall." I was tickled with the idea of a
fossil preserve, which coupled itself in my mind, through a trick of the
associative faculty, with the idea of a great fossil act for the
British empire, framed on the principles of the game-laws; and, just
wondering what sort of disreputable vagabonds geological poachers
would become under its deteriorating influence, I laid hold of the
pickaxe and broke into the stonefast floor; and thence I succeeded in
abstracting,--feloniously, I dare say, though the crime has not yet got
into the statute-book--some six or eight pieces of the _Pinites
Eiggensis_, amounting in all to about half a cubic foot of that very
ancient wood--value unknown. I trust, should the case come to a serious
bearing, the members of the London Geological Society will generously
subscribe half-a-crown a-piece to assist me in feeing counsel. There are
more interests than mine at stake in the affair. If I be cast and
committed,--I, who have poached over only a few miserable districts in
Scotland,--pray, what will become of some of them,--the Lyells,
Bucklands, Murchisons and Sedgwicks,--who have poached over whole
continents?
We were successful in procuring several good specimens of the Eigg pine,
at a depth, in the conglomerate, of from eight to eighteen inches. Some
of the upper pieces we found in contact with the decomposing trap out of
which the hollow piazza above had been scooped; but the greater number,
as my set of specimens abundantly testify, lay embedded in the original
Oolitic grit in which they had been locked up, in, I doubt not, their
present fossil state, ere their upheaval, through Plutonic agency, from
their deep-sea bottom. The annual rings of the wood, which are quite as
small as in a slow-growing Baltic pine, are distinctly visible in all
the better pieces I this day transferred to my bag. In one fragment I
reckon sixteen rings in half an inch, and fifteen in the same space in
another. The trees to which they belonged seem to have grown on some
exposed hill-side, where, in the course of half a century, little more
than from two or three inches were added to their diameter. The _Pinites
Eiggensis_, or Eigg pine, was first introduced to the notice of the
scientific world by the late Mr. Witham, in whose interesting work on
"The Internal Structure of Fossil Vegetables" the reader may find it
figured and described. The specimen in which he studied its
peculiarities "was found," he says, "at the base of the magnificent
mural escarpment named the Scuir of Eigg,--not, however, _in situ_, but
among fragments of rocks of the Oolitic series." The authors of the
"Fossil Flora," where it is also figured, describe it as differing very
considerably in structure from any of the coniferae of the Coal Measures.
"Its medullary rays," says Messrs. Lindley and Hutton, "appear to be
more numerous, and frequently are not continued through one zone of wood
to another, but more generally terminate at the concentric circles. It
abounds also in turpentine vessels, or lacunae, of various sizes, the
sides of which are distinctly defined." Viewed through the microscope,
in transparent slips, longitudinal and transverse, it presents, within
the space of a few lines, objects fitted to fill the mind with wonder.
We find the minutest cells, glands, fibres, of the original wood
preserved uninjured. _There_ still are those medullary rays entire that
communicated between the pith and the outside,--_there_ still the ring
of thickened cells that indicated the yearly check which the growth
received when winter came on,--_there_ the polygonal reticulations of
the cross section, without a single broken mesh,--_there_, too, the
elongated cells in the longitudinal one, each filled with minute glands
that take the form of double circles,--_there_ also, of larger size and
less regular form, the lacunae in which the turpentine lay: every nicely
organized speck, invisible to the naked eye, we find in as perfect a
state of keeping in the incalculably ancient pile-work on which the
gigantic Scuir is founded, as in the living pines that flourish green on
our hill-sides. A net-work, compared with which that of the finest lace
ever worn by the fair reader would seem a net-work of cable, has
preserved entire, for untold ages, the most delicate peculiarities of
its pattern. There is not a mesh broken, nor a circular dot away!
The experiments of Mr. Witham on the Eigg fossil, furnish an
interesting example of the light which a single, apparently simple,
discovery may throw on whole departments of fact. He sliced his specimen
longitudinally and across, fastened the slices on glass, ground them
down till they became semi-transparent, and then, examining them under
reflected light by the microscope, marked and recorded the specific
peculiarities of their structure. And we now know, in consequence, that
the ancient Eigg pine, to which the detached fragment picked up at the
base of the Scuir belonged,--a pine alike different from those of the
earlier carboniferous period and those which exist contemporary with
ourselves,--was, some _three creations_ ago, an exceedingly common tree
in the country now called Scotland,--as much so, perhaps, as the Scotch
fir is at the present day. The fossil trees found in such abundance in
the neighborhood of Helmsdale that they are burnt for lime,--the fossil
wood of Eathie, in Cromartyshire, and that of Shandwick, in Ross,--all
belong to the _Pinites Eiggensis_. It seems to have been a straight and
stately tree, in most instances, as in the Eigg specimens, of slow
growth. One of the trunks I saw near Navidale measured two feet in
diameter, but a full century had passed ere it attained to a bulk so
considerable; and a splendid specimen in my collection, from the same
locality, which measures twenty-one inches, exhibits even _more_ than a
hundred annual rings. In one of my specimens, and one only, the rings
are of great breadth. They differ from those of all the others in the
proportion in which I have seen the annual rings of a young, vigorous
fir that had sprung up in some rich, moist hollow, differ from the
annual rings of trees of the same species that had grown in the shallow,
hard soil of exposed hill-sides. And this one specimen furnishes curious
evidence that the often-marked but little understood law, which gives us
our better and worse seasons in alternate groups, various in number and
uncertain in their time of recurrence, obtained as early as the age of
the Oolite. The rings follow each other in groups of lesser and larger
breadth. One group of four rings measures an inch and a quarter across,
while an adjoining group of five rings measures only five-eighth parts;
and in a breadth of six inches there occur five of these alternate
groups. For some four or five years together, when this pine was a
living tree, the springs were late and cold, and the summers cloudy and
chill, as in that group of seasons which intervened between 1835 and
1841; and then, for four or five years, more springs were early and
summers genial, as in the after group of 1842, 1843 and 1844. An
arrangement in nature,--first observed, as we learn from Bacon, by the
people of the Low Countries, and which has since formed the basis of
meteoric tables, and of predictions and elaborate cycles of the
weather,--bound together the twelvemonths of the Oolitic period in
alternate bundles of better and worse: vegetation throve vigorously
during the summers of one group, and languished, in those of another, in
a state of partial development.
Sending away our man shipwards, laden with a bag of fossil wood, we
ascended by a steep broken ravine to the top of the Scuir. The columns,
as we pass on towards the west, diminish in size, and assume in many of
the beds considerable variety of direction and form. In one bed they
belly over with a curve, like the ribs of some wrecked vessel from which
the planking has been torn away; in another they project in a straight
line, like muskets planted slantways on the ground to receive a charge
of cavalry; in others the inclination is inwards, like that of ranges of
stakes placed in front of a sea-dyke, to break the violence of the
waves; while yet in others they present, as in the eastern portion of
the Scuir, the common vertical direction. The ribbed appearance of every
crag and cliff, imparts to the scene a peculiar character; every larger
mass of light and shadow is corded with minute stripes; and the feeling
experienced among the more shattered peaks, and in the more broken
recesses, seems near akin to that which it is the tendency of some
magnificent ruin to excite, than that which awakens amid the sublime of
nature. We feel as if the pillared rocks around us were like the
Cyclopean walls of Southern Italy,--the erections of some old gigantic
race passed from the earth forever. The feeling must have been
experienced on former occasions, amid the innumerable pillars of the
Scuir; for we find M'Culloch, in his description, ingeniously analyzing
it. "The resemblance to architecture here is much increased," he says,
"by the columnar structure, which is sufficiently distinguishable, even
from a distance, and produces a strong effect of artificial regularity
when seen near at hand. To this vague association in the mind of the
efforts of art with the magnitude of nature, is owing much of that
sublimity of character which the Scuir presents. The sense of power is a
fertile source of the sublime; and as the appearance of power exerted,
no less than that of simplicity, is necessary to confer this character
on architecture, so the mind, insensibly transferring the operations of
nature to the efforts of art where they approximate in character,
becomes impressed with a feeling rarely excited by her more ordinary
forms, where these are even more stupendous."
The top of the Scuir, more especially towards its eastern termination,
resembles that of some vast mole not yet levelled over by the workmen;
the pavement has not yet been laid down, and there are deep gaps in the
masonry, that run transversely, from side to side, still to fill up.
Along one of these ditch-like gaps, which serves to insulate the eastern
and highest portion of the Scuir from all its other portions, we find
fragments of a rude wall of uncemented stones, the remains of an
ancient hill-fort; which, with its natural rampart of rock on three of
its four sides, more than a hundred yards in sheer descent, and with its
deep ditch and rude wall on the fourth, must have formed one of the most
inaccessible in the kingdom. The masses of pitchstone a-top, though so
intensely black within, are weathered on the surface into almost a pure
white; and we found lying detached among them, fragments of common
amygdaloid and basalt, and minute slaty pieces of chalcedony that had
formed apparently in fissures of the trap. We would have scrutinized
more narrowly at the time had we expected to find anything more rare;
but I did not know until full four months after, that aught more rare
was to be found. Had we examined somewhat more carefully, we might
possibly have done what Mr. Woronzow Greig did on the Scuir about
eighteen years previous,--picked up on it a piece of _bona fide_ Scotch
pumice. This gentleman, well known through his exertions in statistical
science, and for his love of science in general, and whose tastes and
acquirements are not unworthy the son of Mrs. Somerville, has kindly
informed me by letter regarding his curious discovery. "I visited the
island of Eigg," he says, "in 1825 or 1826, for the purpose of shooting,
and remained in it several days; and as there was a great scarcity of
game, I amused myself in my wanderings by looking about for natural
curiosities. I knew little about Geology at the time, but, collecting
whatever struck my eye as uncommon, I picked up from the sides of the
Scuir, among various other things, a bit of fossil wood, and, nearly at
the summit of the eminence, a piece of pumice of a deep brownish-black
color, and very porous, the pores being large and round, and the
substance which divided them of a uniform thickness. This last specimen
I gave to Mr. Lyell, who said that it could not originally have belonged
to Eigg, though it might possibly have been washed there by the sea,--a
suggestion, however, with which its place on the top of the Scuir seems
ill to accord. I may add, that I have since procured a larger specimen
from the same place." This seems a curious fact, when we take into
account the identity, in their mineral components, of the pumice and
obsidian of the recent volcanoes; and that pitchstone, the obsidian of
the trap-rocks, is resolvable into a pumice by the art of the chemist.
If pumice was to be found anywhere in Scotland, we might _a priori_
expect to find it in connection with by far the largest mass of
pitchstone in the kingdom. It is just possible, however, that Mr.
Greig's two specimens may not date farther back, in at least their
existing state, than the days of the hill-fort. Powerful fires would
have been required to render the exposed summit of the Scuir at all
comfortable; there is a deep peat-moss in its immediate neighborhood,
that would have furnished the necessary fuel; the wind must have been
sufficiently high on the summit to fan the embers into an intense white
heat; and if it was heat but half as intense as that which was employed
in fusing into one mass the thick vitrified ramparts of Craig Phadrig
and Knock Farril, on the east coast, it could scarce have failed to
anticipate the experiment of the Hon. Mr. Knox, of Dublin, by converting
some of the numerous pitchstone fragments that lie scattered about,
"into a light substance in every respect resembling pumice."
It was now evening, and rarely have I witnessed a finer. The sun had
declined half-way adown the western sky, and for many yards the shadow
of the gigantic Scuir lay dark beneath us along the descending slope.
All the rest of the island, spread out at our feet as in a map, was
basking in yellow sunshine; and with its one dark shadow thrown from its
one mountain-elevated wall of rock, it seemed some immense fantastical
dial, with its gnomon rising tall in the midst. Far below, perched on
the apex of the shadow, and half lost in the line of the penumbra, we
could see two indistinct specks of black, with a dim halo around
each,--specks that elongated as we arose, and contracted as we sat, and
went gliding along the line as we walked. The shadows of two gnats
disporting on the edge of an ordinary gnomon would have seemed vastly
more important, in proportion, on the figured plane of the dial, than
these, our ghostly representatives, did here. The sea, spangled in the
wake of the sun with quick glancing light, stretched out its blue plain
around us; and we could see included in the wide prospect, on the one
hand, at once the hill-chains of Morven and Kintail, with the many
intervening lochs and bold jutting headlands that give variety to the
mainland; and, on the other, the variously complexioned Hebrides, from
the Isle of Skye to Uist and Barra, and from Uist and Barra to Tiree and
Mull. The contiguous Small Isles, Muck and Rum, lay moored immediately
beside us, like vessels of the same convoy that in some secure roadstead
drop anchor within hail of each other. I could willingly have lingered
on the top of the Scuir until after sunset; but the minister, who, ever
and anon, during the day, had been conning over some notes jotted on a
paper of wonderfully scant dimensions, reminded me that this was the
evening of his week-day discourse, and that we were more than a
particularly rough mile from the place of meeting, and within, half an
hour of the time. I took one last look of the scene ere we commenced our
descent. There, in the middle of the ample parish glebe, that looked
richer and greener in the light of the declining sun than at any former
period during the day,--rose the snug parish manse; and yonder,--in an
open island channel, with a strip of dark rocks fringing the land
within, and another dark strip fringing the barren Eilean Chaisteil
outside,--lay the Betsey, looking wonderfully diminutive, but evidently
a little thing of high spirit, taut-masted, with a smart rake aft, and a
spruce outrigger astern, and flaunting her triangular flag of blue in
the sun. I pointed first to the manse, and then to the yacht. The
minister shook his head.
"'Tis a time of strange changes," he said; "I thought to have lived and
died in that house, and found a quiet grave in the burying-ground yonder
beside the ruin; but my path was a clear though a rugged one; and from
almost the moment that it opened up to me, I saw what I had to expect.
It has been said that I might have lain by here in this out-of-the-way
corner, and suffered the Church question to run its course, without
quitting my hold of the Establishment. And so I perhaps might. It is
easy securing one's own safety, in even the worst of times, if one look
no higher; and I, as I had no opportunity of mixing in the contest, or
of declaring my views respecting it, might be regarded as an unpledged
man. But the principles of the Evangelical party were my principles; and
it would have been consistent with neither honor nor religion to have
hung back in the day of battle, and suffered the men with whom in heart
I was at one to pay the whole forfeit of our common quarrel. So I
attended the Convocation, and pledged myself to stand or fall with my
brethren. On my return I called my people together, and told them how
the case stood, and that in May next I bade fair to be a dependent for a
home on the proprietor of Eigg. And so they petitioned the proprietor
that he might give me leave to build a house among them,--exactly the
same sort of favor granted to the Roman Catholics of the island. But
month after month passed, and they got no reply to their petition; and I
was left in suspense, not knowing whether I was to have a home among
them or no. I did feel the case a somewhat hard one. The father of Dr.
M'Pherson of Eigg had been, like myself, a humble Scotch minister; and
the Doctor, however indifferent to his people's wishes in such a matter,
might have just thought that a man in his father's station in life, with
a wife and family dependent on him, was placed by his silence in cruel
circumstances of uncertainty. Ere the Disruption took place, however, I
came to know pretty conclusively what I had to expect. The Doctor's
factor came to Eigg, and, as I was informed, told the Islanders that it
was not likely the Doctor would permit a _third_ place of worship on the
Island: the Roman Catholics had one, and the Establishment had a kind of
one, and there was to be no more. The factor, an active
messenger-at-arms, useful in raising rents in these parts, has always
been understood to speak the mind of his master; but the congregation
took heart in the emergency, and sent off a second petition to Dr.
M'Pherson, a week or so previous to the Disruption. Ere _it_ received an
answer, the Disruption took place; and, laying the whole circumstances
before my brethren in Edinburgh, who, like myself, interpreted the
silence of the Doctor into a refusal, I suggested to them the scheme of
the Betsey, as the only scheme through which I could keep up unbroken my
connection with my people. So the trial is now over, and here we are,
and yonder is the Betsey."
We descended the Scuir together for the place of meeting, and entered,
by the way, the cottage of a worthy islander, much attached to his
minister. "We are both very hungry," said my friend: "we have been out
among the rocks since breakfast-time, and are wonderfully disposed to
eat. Do not put yourself about, but give us anything you have at hand."
There was a bowl of rich milk brought us, and a splendid platter of
mashed potatoes, and we dined like princes. I observed, for the first
time, in the interior of this cottage, what I had frequent occasion to
remark afterwards, that much of the wood used in building in the smaller
and outer islands of the Hebrides must have drifted across the Atlantic,
borne eastwards and northwards by the great Gulf-stream. Many of the
beams and boards, sorely drilled by the _Teredo navalis_, are of
American timber, that, from time to time, has been cast upon the
shore,--a portion of it, apparently, from timber-laden vessels
unfortunate in their voyage, but a portion of it, also, with root and
branch still attached, bearing mark of having been swept to the sea by
transatlantic rivers. Nuts and seeds of tropical plants are occasionally
picked up on the beach. My friend gave me a bean or nut of the _Dolichos
urens_, or cow-itch shrub, of the West Indies, which an islander had
found on the shore sometime in the previous year, and given to one of
the manse children as a toy; and I attach some little interest to it, as
a curiosity of the same class with the large canes and the fragment of
carved wood found floating near the shores of Madeira by the
brother-in-law of Columbus, and which, among other pieces of
circumstantial evidence, led the great navigator to infer the existence
of a western continent. Curiosities of this kind seem still more common
in the northern than in the western islands of Scotland. "Large exotic
nuts or seeds," says Dr. Patrick Neill, in his interesting "Tour,"
quoted in a former chapter, "which in Orkney are known by the name of
Molucca beans, are occasionally found among the _rejectamenta_ of the
sea, especially after westerly winds. There are two kinds commonly
found: the larger (of which the fishermen very generally make
snuff-boxes) seem to be seeds from the great pod of the _Mimosa
scandens_ of the West Indies; the smaller seeds, from the pod of the
_Dolichos urens_, also a native of the same region. It is probable that
the currents of the ocean, and particularly that great current which
issues from the Gulf of Florida, and is hence denominated the Gulf
Stream, aid very much in transporting across the mighty Atlantic these
American products. They are generally quite fresh and entire, and afford
an additional proof how impervious to moisture, and how imperishable,
nuts and seeds generally are."
The evening was fast falling ere the minister closed his discourse; and
we had but just light enough left, on reaching the Betsey, to show us
that there lay a dead sheep on the deck. It had been sent aboard to be
killed by the minister's factotum, John Stewart; but John was at the
evening preaching at the time, and the poor sheep, in its attempts to
set itself free, had got itself entangled among the cords, and strangled
itself. "Alas, alas!" exclaimed the minister, "thus ends our hope of
fresh mutton for the present, and my hapless speculation as a sheep
farmer for evermore." I learned from him, afterwards, over our tea, that
shortly previous to the Convocation he had got his glebe,--one of the
largest in Scotland,--well stocked with sheep and cattle, which he had
to sell, immediately on the Disruption, in miserably bad condition, at a
loss of nearly fifty per cent. He had a few sheep, however, that would
not sell at all, and that remained on the glebe, in consequence, until
his successor entered into possession. And he, honest man, straightway
impounded them, and got them incarcerated in a dark, dirty hole,
somewhat in the way Giant Despair incarcerated the pilgrims,--a thing he
had quite a legal right to do, seeing that the mile-long glebe, with its
many acres of luxuriant pasture, was now as much his property as it had
been Mr. Swanson's a few months before, and seeing Mr. Swanson's few
sheep had no right to crop his grass. But a worthy neighbor
interfered,--Mr. M'Donald, of Keil, the principal tenant in the island.
Mr. M'Donald,--a practical commentator on the law of kindness,--was
sorely scandalized at what he deemed the new minister's gratuitous
unkindness to a brother in calamity; and, relieving the sheep, he
brought them to his own farm, where he found them board and lodging on
my friend's behalf, till they could be used up at leisure. And it was
one of the last of this unfortunate lot that now contrived to escape
from us by anticipating John Stewart. "A black beginning makes a black
ending," said Gouffing Jock, an ancient border shepherd, when his only
sheep, a black ewe, the sole survivor of a flock smothered in a
snow-storm, was worried to death by his dogs. Then, taking down his
broadsword, he added, "Come awa, my auld friend; thou and I maun e'en
stock Bowerhope-Law ance mair!" Less warlike than Gouffing Jock, we were
content to repeat over the dead, on this occasion, simply the first
portion of his speech; and then, betaking ourselves to our cabin, we
forgot all our sorrows over our tea.
CHAPTER IV.
An Excursion--The Chain of Crosses--Bay of Laig--Island of
Rum--Description of the Island--Superstitions banished by pure
Religion--Fossil Shells--Remarkable Oyster Bed--New species of
Belemnite--Oolitic Shells--White Sandstone Precipices--Gigantic
Petrified Mushrooms--"Christabel" in Stone--Musical Sand--_Jabel
Nakous_, or Mountain of the Bell--Experiments of Travellers at
_Jabel Nakous_--Welsted's Account--_Reg-Rawan_, or the Moving
Sand--The Musical Sounds inexplicable--Article on the subject in
the North British Review.
There had been rain during the night; and when I first got on deck, a
little after seven, a low stratum of mist, that completely enveloped the
Scuir, and truncated both the eminence on which it stands and the
opposite height, stretched like a ruler across the flat valley which
indents so deeply the middle of the island. But the fogs melted away as
the morning rose, and ere our breakfast was satisfactorily discussed,
the last thin wreath had disappeared from around the columned front of
the rock-tower of Eigg, and a powerful sun looked down on moist slopes
and dank hollows, from which there arose in the calm a hazy vapor, that,
while it softened the lower features of the landscape, left the bold
outline relieved against a clear sky. Accompanied by our attendant of
the previous day, bearing bag and hammer, we set out a little before
eleven for the north-western side of the island, by a road which winds
along the central hollow. My friend showed me as we went, that on the
edge of an eminence, on which the traveller journeying westwards catches
the last glimpse of the chapel of St. Donan, there had once been a rude
cross erected, and another rude cross on an eminence on which he catches
the last glimpse of the first; and that there had thus been a chain of
stations formed from sea to sea, like the sights of a land-surveyor,
from one of which a second could be seen, and a third from the second,
till, last of all, the emphatically holy point of the island,--the
burial-place of the old Culdee,--came full in view. The unsteady
devotion, that journeyed, fancy-bound, along the heights, to gloat over
a dead man's bones, had its clue to carry it on in a straight line. Its
trail was on the ground; it glided snake-like from cross to cross, in
quest of dust; and, without its finger-posts to guide it, would have
wandered devious. It is surely a better devotion that, instead of thus
creeping over the earth to a mouldy sepulchre, can at once launch into
the sky, secure of finding Him who once arose from one. In less than an
hour we were descending on the Bay of Laig, a semi-circular indentation
of the coast, about a mile in length, and, where it opens to the main
sea, nearly two miles in breadth; with the noble island of Rum rising
high in front, like some vast breakwater; and a meniscus of
comparatively level land, walled in behind by a semi-circular rampart of
continuous precipice, sweeping round its shores. There are few finer
scenes in the Hebrides than that furnished by this island bay and its
picturesque accompaniments,--none that break more unexpectedly on the
traveller who descends upon it from the east; and rarely has it been
seen, to greater advantage than on the delicate day, so soft, and yet so
sunshiny and clear, on which I paid it my first visit.
The island of Rum, with its abrupt sea-wall of rock, and its
steep-pointed hills, that attain, immediately over the sea, an elevation
of more than two thousand feet, loomed bold and high in the offing, some
five miles away, but apparently much nearer. The four tall summits of
the island rose clear against the sky like a group of pyramids; its
lower slopes and precipices, variegated and relieved by graceful
alternations of light and shadow, and resting on their blue basement of
sea, stood out with equal distinctness; but the entire middle space from
end to end was hidden in a long horizontal stratum of gray cloud, edged
atop with a lacing of silver. Such was the aspect of the noble
breakwater in front. Fully two-thirds of the semi-circular rampart of
rock which shuts in the crescent-shaped plain directly opposite lay in
deep shadow; but the sun shone softly on the plain itself, brightening
up many a dingy cottage, and many a green patch of corn; and the bay
below stretched out, sparkling in the light. There is no part of the
island so thickly inhabited as this flat meniscus. It is composed almost
entirely of Oolitic rocks, and bears atop, especially where an ancient
oyster-bed of great depth forms the subsoil, a kindly and fertile mould.
The cottages lie in groups; and, save where a few bogs, which it would
be no very difficult matter to drain, interpose their rough shag of dark
green, and break the continuity, the plain around them waves with corn.
Lying fair, green and populous within the sweep of its inaccessible
rampart of rock, at least twice as lofty as the ramparts of Babylon of
old, it reminds one of the suburbs of some ancient city lying embosomed,
with all its dwellings and fields, within some roomy crescent of the
city wall. We passed, ere we entered on the level, a steep-sided narrow
dell, through which a small stream finds its way from the higher
grounds, and which terminates at the upper end in an abrupt precipice,
and a lofty but very slim cascade. "One of the few superstitions that
still linger on the island," said my friend the minister, "is associated
with that wild hollow. It is believed that shortly before a death takes
place among the inhabitants, a tall withered female may be seen in the
twilight, just yonder where the rocks open, washing a shroud in the
stream. John, there, will perhaps tell you how she was spoken to on one
occasion, by an over-bold, over-inquisitive islander, curious to know
whose shroud she was preparing; and how she more than satisfied his
curiosity, by telling him it was his own. It is a not uninteresting
fact," added the minister, "that my poor people, since they have become
more earnest about their religion, think very little about ghosts and
spectres: their faith in the realities of the unseen world seems to have
banished from their minds much of their old belief in its phantoms."
In the rude fences that separate from each other the little farms in
this plain, we find frequent fragments of the oyster bed, hardened into
a tolerably compact limestone. It is seen to most advantage, however, in
some of the deeper cuttings in the fields, where the surrounding matrix
exists merely as an incoherent shale; and the shells may be picked out
as entire as when they lay, ages before, in the mud, which we still see
retaining around them its original color. They are small, thin,
triangular, much resembling in form some specimens of the _Ostrea
deltoidea_, but greatly less in size. The nearest resembling shell in
Sowerby is the _Ostrea acuminata_,--an oyster of the clay that underlies
the great Oolite of Bath. Few of the shells exceed an inch and a half in
length, and the majority fall short of an inch. What they lack in bulk,
however, they make up in number. They are massed as thickly together, to
the depth of several feet, as shells on the heap at the door of a
Newhaven fisherman, and extend over many acres. Where they lie open we
can still detect the triangular disc of the hinge, with the single
impression of the abductor muscle; and the foliaceous character of the
shell remains in most instances as distinct as if it had undergone no
mineral change. I have seen nowhere in Scotland, among the secondary
formations, so unequivocal an oyster-bed; nor do such beds seem to be at
all common in formations older than the Tertiary in England, though the
oyster itself is sufficiently so. We find Mantell stating, in his
recent work ("Medals of Creation"), after first describing an immense
oyster bed of the London Basin, that underlies the city (for what is now
London was once an oyster-bed), that in the chalk below, though it
contains several species of Ostrea, the shells are diffused
promiscuously throughout the general mass. Leaving, however, these
oysters of the Oolite, which never net inclosed nor drag disturbed,
though they must have formed the food of many an extinct order of
fish,--mayhap reptile,--we pass on in a south-western direction,
descending in the geological scale as we go, until we reach the southern
side of the Bay of Laig. And there, far below tide-mark, we find a
dark-colored argillaceous shale of the Lias, greatly obscured by
boulders of trap,--the only deposit of the Liasic formation in the
island.
A line of trap-hills that rises along the shore seems as if it had
strewed half its materials over the beach. The rugged blocks lie thick
as stones in a causeway, down to the line of low ebb,--memorials of a
time when the surf dashed against the shattered bases of the trap-hills,
now elevated considerably beyond its reach; and we can catch but partial
glimpses of the shale below. Wherever access to it can be had, we find
it richly fossiliferous; but its organisms, with the exception of its
Belemnites, are very imperfectly preserved. I dug up from under the
trap-blocks some of the common Liasic Ammonites of the north-eastern
coast of Scotland, a few of the septa of a large Nautilus, broken pieces
of wood, and half-effaced casts of what seems a branched coral; but only
minute portions of the shells have been converted into stone; here and
there a few chambers in the whorls of an Ammonite or Nautilus, though
the outline of the entire organism lies impressed in the shale; and the
ligneous and polyparious fossils we find in a still greater state of
decay. The Belemnite alone, as is common with this robust fossil,--so
often the sole survivor of its many contemporaries,--has preserved its
structure entire. I disinterred from the shale good specimens of the
Belemnite _sulcatus_ and Belemnite _elongatus_, and found, detached on
the surface of the bed, a fragment of a singularly large Belemnite, a
full inch and a quarter in diameter, the species of which I could not
determine.
Returning by the track we came, we reach the bottom of the bay, which we
find much obscured with sand and shingle; and pass northwards along its
side, under a range of low sandstone precipices, with interposing grassy
slopes, in which the fertile Oolitic meniscus descends to the beach. The
sandstone, white and soft, and occurring in thick beds, much resembles
that of the Oolite of Sutherland. We detect in it few traces of fossils;
now and then a carbonaceous marking, and now and then what seems a thin
vein of coal, but which proves to be merely the bark of some woody stem,
converted into a glossy bituminous lignite, like that of Brora. But in
beds of a blue clay, intercalated with the sandstone, we find fossils in
abundance, of a character less obscure. We spent a full half-hour in
picking out shells from the bottom of a long dock-like hollow among the
rocks, in which a bed of clay has yielded to the waves, while the strata
on either side stand up over it like low wharfs on the opposite side of
a river. The shells, though exceedingly fragile,--for they partake of
the nature of the clayey matrix in which they are imbedded,--rise as
entire as when they had died among the mud, years, mayhap ages, ere the
sandstone had been deposited over them; and we were enabled at once to
detect their extreme dissimilarity, as a group, to the shells of the
Liasic deposit we had so lately quitted. We did not find in this bed a
single Ammonite, Belemnite, or Nautilus; but chalky Bivalves, resembling
our existing Tellina, in vast abundance, mixed with what seem to be a
small Buccinum and a minute Trochus, with numerous rather equivocal
fragments of a shell resembling an Oiliva. So thickly do they lie
clustered together in this deposit, that in some patches where the
sad-colored argillaceous ground is washed bare by the sea, it seems
marbled with them into a light gray tint. The group more nearly
resembles in type a recent one than any I have yet seen in a secondary
deposit, except perhaps in the Weald of Moray, where we find in one of
the layers a Planorbis scarce distinguishable from those of our ponds
and ditches, mingled with a Paludina that seems as nearly modelled after
the existing form. From the absence of the more characteristic shells of
the Oolite, I am inclined to deem the deposit one of estuary origin. Its
clays were probably thrown down, like the silts of so many of our
rivers, in some shallow bay, where the waters of a descending stream
mingled with those of the sea, and where, though shells nearly akin to
our existing periwinkles and whelks congregate thickly, the Belemnite,
seared by the brackish water, never plied its semi-cartilaginous fins,
or the Nautilus or Ammonite hoisted its membranaceous sail.
We pass on towards the north. A thick bed of an extremely soft white
sandstone presents here, for nearly half a mile together, its front to
the waves, and exhibits, under the incessant wear of the surf, many
singularly grotesque combinations of form. The low precipices,
undermined at the base, beetle over like the sides of stranded vessels.
One of the projecting promontories we find hollowed through and through
by a tall rugged archway; while the outer pier of the arch,--if pier we
may term it,--worn to a skeleton, and jutting outwards with a knee-like
angle, presents the appearance of a thin ungainly leg and splay foot,
advanced, as if in awkward courtesy, to the breakers. But in a winter
or two, judging from its present degree of attenuation, and the yielding
nature of its material, which resembles a damaged mass of arrow-root,
consolidated by lying in the leaky hold of a vessel, its persevering
courtesies will be over, and pier and archway must lie in shapeless
fragments on the beach. Wherever the surf has broken into the upper
surface of this sandstone bed, and worn it down to nearly the level of
the shore, what seem a number of double ramparts, fronting each other,
and separated by deep square ditches exactly parallel in the sides,
traverse the irregular level in every direction. The ditches vary in
width from one to twelve feet; and the ramparts, rising from three to
six feet over them, are perpendicular as the walls of houses, where they
front each other, and descend on the opposite sides in irregular slopes.
The iron block, with square groove and projecting ears, that receives
the bar of a railway, and connects it with the stone below, represents
not inadequately a section of one of these ditches, with its ramparts.
They form here the sole remains of dykes of an earthy trap, which,
though at one time in a state of such high fusion that they converted
the portions of soft sandstone in immediate contact with them into the
consistence of quartz rock, have long since mouldered away, leaving but
the hollow rectilinear rents which they had occupied, surmounted by the
indurated walls which they had baked. Some of the most curious
appearances, however, connected with the sandstone, though they occur
chiefly in an upper bed, are exhibited by what seem fields of petrified
mushrooms, of a gigantic size, that spread out in some places for
hundreds of yards under the high-water level. These apparent mushrooms
stand on thick squat stems, from a foot to eighteen inches in height;
the heads are round like those of toad-stools, and vary from one foot to
nearly two yards in diameter. In some specimens we find two heads
joined together in a form resembling a squat figure of _eight_, of what
printers term the Egyptian type, or, to borrow the illustration of
M'Culloch, "like the ancient military projectile known by the name of
double-headed shot;" in other specimens three heads have coalesced in a
trefoil shape, or rather in a shape like that of an ace of clubs
divested of the stem. By much the greater number, however, are
spherical. They are composed of concretionary masses, consolidated, like
the walls of the dykes, though under some different process, into a hard
siliceous stone, that has resisted those disintegrating influences of
the weather and the surf, under which the yielding matrix in which they
were embedded has worn from around them. Here and there we find them
lying detached on the beach, like huge shot, compared with which the
greenstone balls of Mons Meg are but marbles for children to play with;
in other cases they project from the mural front of rampart-like
precipices, as if they had been showered into them by the ordnance of
some besieging battery, and had stuck fast in the mason-work. Abbotsford
has been described as a romance in stone and lime; we have here, on the
shores of Laig, what seems a wild but agreeable tale, of the extravagant
cast of "Christabel," or the "Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner," fretted
into sandstone. But by far the most curious part of the story remains to
be told.
The hollows and fissures of the lower sandstone bed we find filled with
a fine quartzose sand, which, from its pure white color, and the
clearness with which the minute particles reflect the light, reminds one
of accumulations of potato-flour drying in the sun. It is formed almost
entirely of disintegrated particles of the soft sandstone; and as we at
first find it occurring in mere handfuls, that seem as if they had been
detached from the mass during the last few tides, we begin to marvel to
what quarter the missing materials of the many hundred cubic yards of
rock, ground down along the shore in this bed during the last century or
two, have been conveyed away. As we pass on northwards, however, we see
the white sand occurring in much larger quantities,--here heaped up in
little bent-covered hillocks above the reach of the tide,--there
stretching out in level, ripple-marked wastes into the waves,--yonder
rising in flat narrow spits among the shallows. At length we reach a
small, irregularly-formed bay, a few hundred feet across, floored with
it from side to side; and see it, on the one hand, descending deep into
the sea, that exhibits over its whiteness a lighter tint of green, and,
on the other, encroaching on the land, in the form of drifted banks,
covered with the plants common to our tracts of sandy downs. The
sandstone bed that has been worn down to form it contains no fossils,
save here and there a carbonaceous stem; but in an underlying harder
stratum we occasionally find a few shells; and, with a specimen in my
hand charged with a group of bivalves resembling the existing conchifera
of our sandy beaches, I was turning aside this sand of the Oolite, so
curiously reduced to its original state, and marking how nearly the
recent shells that lay embedded in it resembled the extinct ones that
had lain in it so long before, when I became aware of a peculiar sound
that it yielded to the tread, as my companions paced over it. I struck
it obliquely with my foot, where the surface lay dry and incoherent in
the sun, and the sound elicited was a shrill, sonorous note, somewhat
resembling that produced by a waxed thread, when tightened between the
teeth and the hand, and tipped by the nail of the forefinger. I walked
over it, striking it obliquely at each step, and with every blow the
shrill note was repeated. My companions joined me; and we performed a
concert, in which, if we could boast of but little variety in the tones
produced, we might at least challenge all Europe for an instrument of
the kind which produced them. It seemed less wonderful that there should
be music in the granite of Memnon, than in the loose Oolitic sand of the
Bay of Laig. As we marched over the drier tracts, an incessant _woo_,
_woo_, _woo_, rose from the surface, that might be heard in the calm
some twenty or thirty yards away; and we found that where a damp
semi-coherent stratum lay at the depth of three or four inches beneath,
and all was dry and incoherent above, the tones were loudest and
sharpest, and most easily evoked by the foot. Our discovery,--for I
trust I may regard it as such,--adds a third locality to two previously
known ones, in which what may be termed the musical sand,--no unmeet
counterpart to the "singing water" of the tale,--has now been found. And
as the island of Eigg is considerably more accessible than _Jabel
Nakous_, in Arabia Petraea, or _Reg-Rawan_, in the neighborhood of Cabul,
there must be facilities presented through the discovery which did not
exist hitherto, for examining the phenomenon in acoustics which it
exhibits,--a phenomenon, it may be added, which some of our greatest
masters of the science have confessed their inability to explain.
_Jabel Nakous_, or the "Mountain of the Bell," is situated about three
miles from the shores of the Gulf of Suez, in that land of wonders which
witnessed for forty years the journeyings of the Israelites, and in
which the granite peaks of Sinai and Horeb overlook an arid wilderness
of rock and sand. It had been known for many ages by the wild Arab of
the desert, that there rose at times from this hill a strange,
inexplicable music. As he leads his camel past in the heat of the day, a
sound like the first low tones of an Aeolian harp stirs the hot
breezeless air. It swells louder and louder in progressive undulations,
till at length the dry baked earth seems to vibrate under foot, and the
startled animal snorts and rears, and struggles to break away. According
to the Arabian account of the phenomenon, says Sir David Brewster, in
his "Letters on Natural Magic," there is a convent miraculously
preserved in the bowels of the hill; and the sounds are said to be those
of the "_Nakous_, a long metallic ruler, suspended horizontally, which
the priest strikes with a hammer, for the purpose of assembling the
monks to prayer." There exists a tradition that on one occasion a
wandering Greek saw the mountain open, and that, entering by the gap, he
descended into the subterranean convent, where he found beautiful
gardens and fountains of delicious water, and brought with him to the
upper world, on his return, fragments of consecrated bread. The first
European traveller who visited _Jabel Nakous_, says Sir David, was M.
Seetzen, a German. He journeyed for several hours over arid sands, and
under ranges of precipices inscribed by mysterious characters, that
tell, haply, of the wanderings of Israel under Moses. And reaching,
about noon, the base of the musical fountain, he found it composed of a
white friable sandstone, and presenting on two of its sides sandy
declivities. He watched beside it for an hour and a quarter, and then
heard, for the first time, a low undulating sound, somewhat resembling
that of a humming top, which rose and fell, and ceased and began, and
then ceased again; and in an hour and three quarters after, when in the
act of climbing along the declivity, he heard the sound yet louder and
more prolonged. It seemed as if issuing from under his knees, beneath
which the sand, disturbed by his efforts, was sliding downwards along
the surface of the rock. Concluding that the sliding sand was the cause
of the sounds, not an effect of the vibrations which they occasioned, he
climbed to the top of one of the declivities, and, sliding downwards,
exerted himself with hands and feet to set the sand in motion. The
effect produced far exceeded his expectations; the incoherent sand
rolled under and around in a vast sheet; and so loud was the noise
produced, that "the earth seemed to tremble beneath him to such a
degree, that he states he should certainly have been afraid if he had
been ignorant of the cause." At the time Sir David Brewster wrote
(1832), the only other European who had visited _Jabel Nakous_ was Mr.
Gray, of University College, Oxford. This gentleman describes the noises
he heard, but which he was unable to trace to their producing cause, as
"beginning with a low continuous murmuring sound, which seemed to rise
beneath his feet," but "which gradually changed into pulsations as it
became louder, so as to resemble the striking of a clock, and became so
strong at the end of five minutes _as to detach the sand_." The Mountain
of the Bell has been since carefully explored by Lieutenant J. Welsted,
of the Indian navy; and the reader may see it exhibited in a fine
lithograph, in his travels, as a vast irregularly conical mass of broken
stone, somewhat resembling one of our Highland cairns, though, of
course, on a scale immensely more huge, with a steep, angular slope of
sand resting in a hollow in one of its sides, and rising to nearly its
apex. "It forms," says Lieutenant Welsted, "one of a ridge of low,
calcareous hills, at a distance of three and a half miles from the
beach, to which a sandy plain, extending with a gentle rise to their
base, connects them. Its height, about four hundred feet, as well as the
material of which it is composed,--a light-colored friable
sandstone,--is about the same as the rest of the chain; but an inclined
plane of almost impalpable sand rises at an angle of forty degrees with
the horizon, and is bounded by a semi-circle of rocks, presenting
broken, abrupt, and pinnacled forms, and extending to the base of this
remarkable hill. Although their shape and arrangement in some respects
may be said to resemble a whispering gallery, yet I determined by
experiment that their irregular surface renders them but ill adapted for
the production of an echo. Seated at a rock at the base of the sloping
eminence, I directed one of the Bedouins to ascend; and it was not until
he had reached some distance that I perceived the sand in motion,
rolling down the hill to the depth of a foot. It did not, however,
descend in one continued stream; but, as the Arab scrambled up, it
spread out laterally and upwards, until a considerable portion of the
surface was in motion. At their commencement the sounds might be
compared to the faint strains of an Aeolian harp when its strings first
catch the breeze: as the sand became more violently agitated by the
increased velocity of the descent, the noise more nearly resembled that
produced by drawing the moistened fingers over glass. As it reached the
base, the reverberations attained the loudness of distant thunder,
causing the rock on which we were seated to vibrate; and our
camels,--animals not easily frightened,--became so alarmed that it was
with difficulty their drivers could restrain them."
"The hill of _Reg-Rawan_ or the 'Moving Sand,'" says the late Sir
Alexander Burnes, by whom the place was visited in the autumn of 1837,
and who has recorded his visit in a brief paper, illustrated by a rude
lithographic view, in the "Journal of the Asiatic Society" for 1838, "is
about forty miles north of Cabul, towards Hindu-kush, and near the base
of the mountains." It rises to the height of about four hundred feet, in
an angle formed by the junction of two ridges of hills; and a sheet of
sand, "pure as that of the sea-shore," and which slopes in an angle of
forty degrees, reclines against it from base to summit. As represented
in the lithograph, there projects over the steep sandy slope on each
side, as in the "Mountain of the Bell," still steeper barriers of rock;
and we are told by Sir Alexander, that though "the mountains here are
generally composed of granite or mica, at _Reg-Rawan_ there is sandstone
and lime." The situation of the sand is curious, he adds: it is seen
from a great distance; and as there is none other in the neighborhood,
"it might almost be imagined, from its appearance, that the hill had
been cut in two, and that the sand had gushed forth as from a sand-bag."
"When set in motion by a body of people who slide down it, a sound is
emitted. On the first trial we distinctly heard two loud hollow sounds,
such as would be given by a large drum;"--"there is an echo in the
place; and the inhabitants have a belief that the sounds are only heard
on Friday, when the saint of _Reg-Rawan_, who is interred hard by,
permits." The phenomenon, like the resembling one in Arabia, seems to
have attracted attention among the inhabitants of the country at an
early period; and the notice of an eastern annalist, the Emperor Baber,
who flourished late in the fifteenth century, and, like Caesar, conquered
and recorded his conquests, still survives. He describes it as the
_Khwaja Reg-Rawan_, "a small hill, in which there is a line of sandy
ground reaching from the top to the bottom," from which there "issues in
the summer season the sound of drums and nagarets." In connection with
the fact that the musical sand of Eigg is composed of a disintegrated
sandstone of the Oolite, it is not quite unworthy of notice that
sandstone and lime enter into the composition of the hill of
_Reg-Rawan_,--that the district in which the hill is situated is not a
sandy one,--and that its slope of sonorous sand seems as if it had
issued from its side. These various circumstances, taken together, lead
to the inference that the sand may have originated in the decomposition
of the rock beneath. It is further noticeable, that the _Jabel Nakous_
is composed of a white friable sandstone, resembling that of the white
friable bed of the Bay of Laig, and that it belongs to nearly the same
geological era. I owe to the kindness of Dr. Wilson of Bombay, two
specimens which he picked up in Arabia Petraea, of spines of Cidarites of
the mace-formed type so common in the Chalk and Oolite, but so rare in
the older formations. Dr. Wilson informs me that they are of frequent
occurrence in the desert of Arabia Petraea, where they are termed by the
Arabs petrified olives; that nummulites are also abundant in the
district; and that the various secondary rocks he examined in his route
through it seem to belong to the Cretaceous group. It appears not
improbable, therefore, that all the sonorous sand in the world yet
discovered is formed, like that of Eigg, of disintegrated sandstone; and
at least two-thirds of it of the disintegrated sandstone of secondary
formations, newer than the Lias. But how it should be at all sonorous,
whatever its age or origin, seems yet to be discovered. There are few
substances that appear worse suited than sand to communicate to the
atmosphere those vibratory undulations that are the producing causes of
sound: the grains, even when sonorous individually, seem, from their
inevitable contact with each other, to exist under the influence of that
simple law in acoustics which arrests the tones of the ringing glass or
struck bell, immediately as they are but touched by some foreign body,
such as the hand or finger. The one grain, ever in contact with several
other grains, is a glass or bell on which the hand always rests. And the
difficulty has been felt and acknowledged. Sir John Herschel, in
referring to the phenomenon of the _Jabel Nakous_, in his "Treatise on
Sound," in the "Encyclopaedia Metropolitana," describes it as to him
"utterly inexplicable;" and Sir David Brewster, whom I had the pleasure
of meeting in December last, assured me it was not less a puzzle to him
than to Sir John. An eastern traveller, who attributes its production
to "a reduplication of impulse setting air in vibration in a focus of
echo," means, I suppose, saying nearly the same thing as the two
philosophers, and merely conveys his meaning in a less simple style.
I have not yet procured what I expect to procure soon,--sand enough from
the musical bay at Laig to enable me to make its sonorous qualities the
subject of experiment at home. It seems doubtful whether a small
quantity set in motion on an artificial slope will serve to evolve the
phenomena which have rendered the Mountain of the Bell so famous.
Lieutenant Welsted informs us, that when his Bedouin first set the sand
in motion, there was scarce any perceptible sound heard;--it was rolling
downwards for many yards around him to the depth of a foot, ere the
music arose; and it is questionable whether the effect could be elicited
with some fifty or sixty pounds weight of the sand of Eigg, on a slope
of but at most a few feet, which it took many hundred weight of sand of
_Jabel Nakous_, and a slope of many yards, to produce. But in the
stillness of a close room, it is just possible that it may. I have,
however, little doubt, that from small quantities the sound evoked by
the foot on the shore may be reproduced: enough will lie within the
reach of experiment to demonstrate the strange difference which exists
between this sonorous sand of the Oolite, and the common unsonorous sand
of our sea-beaches; and it is certainly worth while examining into the
nature and producing causes of a phenomenon so curious in itself, and
which has been characterized by one of the most distinguished of living
philosophers as "the most celebrated of all the acoustic wonders which
the natural world presents to us." In the forthcoming number of the
"North British Review,"--which appears on Monday first,[1]--the reader
will find the sonorous sand of Eigg referred to, in an article the
authorship of which will scarcely be mistaken. "We have here," says the
writer, after first describing the sounds of _Jabel Nakous_, and then
referring to those of Eigg, "the phenomenon in its simple state,
disembarrassed from reflecting rocks, from a hard bed beneath, and from
cracks and cavities that might be supposed to admit the sand; and
indicating as its cause, either the accumulated vibration of the air
when struck by the driven sand, or the accumulated sounds occasioned by
the mutual impact of the particles of sand against each other. If a
musket-ball passing through the air emits a whistling note, each
individual particle of sand must do the same, however faint be the note
which it yields; and the accumulation of these infinitesimal vibrations
must constitute an audible sound, varying with the number and velocity
of moving particles. In like manner, if two plates of silex or quartz,
which are but large crystals of sand, give out a musical sound when
mutually struck, the impact or collision of two minute crystals or
particles of sand must do the same, in however inferior a degree; and
the union of all these sounds, though singly imperceptible, may
constitute the musical notes of the Bell Mountain, or the lesser sounds
of the trodden sea-beach at Eigg."
Here is a vigorous effort made to unlock the difficulty. I should,
however, have mentioned to the philosophic writer,--what I inadvertently
failed to do,--that the sounds elicited from the sand of Eigg seem as
directly evoked by the slant blow dealt it by the foot, as the sounds
similarly evoked from a highly waxed floor, or a board strewed over with
ground rosin. The sharp shrill note follows the stroke, altogether
independently of the grains driven into the air. My omission may serve
to show how much safer it is for those minds of the observant order,
that serve as hands and eyes to the reflective ones, to prefer incurring
the risk of being even tediously minute in their descriptions, to the
danger of being inadequately brief in them. But, alas! for purposes of
exact science, rarely are verbal descriptions otherwise than inadequate.
Let us look, for example, at the various accounts given us of _Jabel
Nakous_. There are strange sounds heard proceeding from a hill in
Arabia, and various travellers set themselves to describe them. The
tones are those of the convent _Nakous_, says the wild Arab;--there must
be a convent buried under the hill. More like the sounds of a
humming-top, remarks a phlegmatic German traveller. Not quite like them,
says an English one in an Oxford gown;--they resemble rather the
striking of a clock. Nay, listen just a little longer and more
carefully, says a second Englishman, with epaulettes on his shoulder:
"the sounds at their commencement may be compared to the faint strains
of an Aeolian harp when its strings first catch the breeze," but anon, as
the agitation of the sand increases, they "more nearly resemble those
produced by drawing the moistened fingers over glass." Not at all,
exclaims the warlike Zahor Ed-din Muhammed Baber, twirling his whiskers:
"I know a similar hill in the country towards Hindu-kush: it is the
sound of drums and nagarets that issues from the sand." All we really
know of this often-described music of the desert, after reading all the
descriptions, is, that its tones bear certain analogies to certain other
tones,--analogies that seem stronger in one direction to one ear, and
stronger in another direction to an ear differently constituted, but
which do not exactly resemble any other sounds in nature. The strange
music of _Jabel Nakous_, as a combination of tones, is essentially
unique.
CHAPTER V.
Trap-Dykes--"Cotton Apples"--Alternation of Lacustrine with Marine
Remains--Analogy from the Beds of Esk--Aspect of the Island on its
narrow Front--The Puffin--Ru-Stoir--Development of Old Red
Sandstone--Striking Columnar character of Ru-Stoir--Discovery of
Reptilian Remains--John Stewart's wonder at the Bones in the
Stones--Description of the Bones--"Dragons, Gorgons, and
Chimeras"--Exploration and Discovery pursued--The Midway
Shieling--A Celtic Welcome--Return of the Yacht--"Array of Fossils
new to Scotch Geology"--A Geologist's Toast--Hoffman and his
Fossil.
We leave behind us the musical sand, and reach the point of the
promontory which forms the northern extremity of the Bay of Laig.
Wherever the beach has been swept bare, we see it floored with
trap-dykes worn down to the level, but in most places accumulations of
huge blocks of various composition cover it up, concealing the nature of
the rock beneath. The long semi-circular wall of precipice which,
sweeping inwards at the bottom of the bay, leaves to the inhabitants
between its base and the beach their fertile meniscus of land, here
abuts upon the coast. We see its dark forehead many hundred feet
overhead, and the grassy platform beneath, now narrowed to a mere talus,
sweeping upwards to its base from the shore,--steep, broken, lined thick
with horizontal pathways, mottled over with ponderous masses of rock.
Among the blocks that load the beach, and render our onward progress
difficult and laborious, we detect occasional fragments of an
amygdaloidal basalt, charged with a white zeolite, consisting of
crystals so extremely slender that the balls, with their light fibrous
contents, remind us of cotton apples divested of the seeds. There
occur, though more rarely, masses of a hard white sandstone, abounding
in vegetable impressions, which, from their sculptured markings,
recalled to memory the Sigillaria of the Coal Measures. Here and there,
too, we find fragments of a calcareous stone, so largely charged with
compressed shells, chiefly bivalves, that it may be regarded as a shell
breccia. There occur, besides, slabs of fibrous limestone, exactly
resembling the limestone of the ichthyolite beds of the Lower Old Red;
and blocks of a hard gray stone, of silky lustre in the fresh fracture,
thickly speckled with carbonaceous markings. These fragmentary
masses,--all of them, at least, except the fibrous limestone, which
occurs in mere plank-like bands,--represent distinct beds, of which this
part of the island is composed, and which present their edges, like
courses of ashlar in a building, in the splendid section that stretches
from the tall brow of the precipice to the beach; though in the slopes
of the talus, where the lower beds appear in but occasional protrusions
and land-slips, we find some difficulty in tracing their order of
succession.
Near the base of the slope, where the soil has been undermined and the
rock laid bare by the waves, there occur beds of a bituminous black
shale,--resembling the dark shales so common in the Coal Measures,--that
seem to be of fresh water or estuary origin. Their fossils, though
numerous, are ill preserved; but we detect in them scales and plates of
fishes, at least two species of minute bivalves, one of which very much
resembles a Cyclas; and in some of the fragments, shells of Cypris lie
embedded in considerable abundance. After all that has been said and
written by way of accounting for those alternations of lacustrine with
marine remains, which are of such frequent occurrence in the various
formations, secondary and tertiary, from the Coal Measures downwards, it
does seem strange enough that the estuary, or fresh-water lake, should
so often in the old geologic periods have changed places with the sea.
It is comparatively easy to conceive that the inner Hebrides should have
once existed as a broad ocean sound, bounded on one or either side by
Oolitic islands, from which streams descended, sweeping with them, to
the marine depths, productions, animal and vegetable, of the land. But
it is less easy to conceive, that in that sound, the area covered by the
ocean one year should have been covered by a fresh-water lake in perhaps
the next, and then by the ocean again a few years after. And yet among
the Oolitic deposits of the Hebrides evidence seems to exist that
changes of this nature actually took place. I am not inclined to found
much on the apparently fresh-water character of the bituminous shales of
Eigg;--the embedded fossils are all too obscure to be admitted in
evidence; but there can exist no doubt that fresh water, or at least
estuary formations, do occur among the marine Oolites of the Hebrides.
Sir R. Murchison, one of the most cautious, as he is certainly one of
the most distinguished, of living geologists, found in a northern
district of Skye, in 1826, a deposit containing Cyclas, Paludina,
Neritina,--all shells of unequivocally fresh-water origin,--which must
have been formed, he concludes, in either a lake or estuary. What had
been sea at one period had been estuary or lake at another. In every
case, however, in which these intercalated deposits are restricted to
single strata of no great thickness, it is perhaps safer to refer their
formation to the agency of temporary land-floods, than to that of
violent changes of level, now elevating and now depressing the surface.
There occur, for instance, among the marine Oolites of Brora,--the
discovery of Mr. Robertson, of Inverugie,--two strata containing
fresh-water fossils in abundance; but the one stratum is little more
than an inch in thickness,--the other little more than a foot; and it
seems considerably more probable, that such deposits should have owed
their existence to extraordinary land-floods, like those which in 1829
devastated the province of Moray, and covered over whole miles of marine
beach with the spoils of land and river, than that a sea-bottom should
have been elevated for their production, into a fresh-water lake, and
then let down into a sea-bottom again. We find it recorded in the
"Shepherd's Calendar," that after the thaw which followed the great
snow-storm of 1794, there were found on a part of the sands of the
Solway Frith known as the Beds of Esk, where the tide disgorges much of
what is thrown into it by the rivers, "one thousand eight hundred and
forty sheep, nine black cattle, three horses, two men, one woman,
forty-five dogs, and one hundred and eighty hares, beside a number of
meaner animals." A similar storm in an earlier time, with a soft
sea-bottom prepared to receive and retain its spoils, would have formed
a fresh-water stratum intercalated in a marine deposit.
Rounding the promontory, we lose sight of the Bay of Laig, and find the
narrow front of the island that now presents itself exhibiting the
appearance of a huge bastion. The green talus slopes upwards, as its
basement, for full three hundred feet; and a noble wall of perpendicular
rock, that towers over and beyond for at least four hundred feet more,
forms the rampart. Save towards the sea, the view is of but limited
extent; we see it restricted, on the landward side, to the bold face of
the bastion; and in a narrow and broken dell that runs nearly parallel
to the shore for a few hundred yards between the top of the talus and
the base of the rampart,--a true covered way,--we see but the rampart
alone. But the dizzy front of black basalt, dark as night, save where a
broad belt of light-colored sandstone traverses it in an angular
direction, like a white sash thrown across a funeral robe,--the
fantastic peaks and turrets in which the rock terminates atop,--the
masses of broken ruins, roughened with moss and lichen, that have fallen
from above, and lie scattered at its base,--the extreme loneliness of
the place, for we have left behind us every trace of the human
family,--and the expanse of solitary sea which it commands,--all
conspire to render the scene a profoundly imposing one. It is one of
those scenes in which a man feels that he is little, and that nature is
great. There is no precipice in the island in which the puffin so
delights to build as among the dark pinnacles overhead, or around which
the silence is so frequently broken by the harsh scream of the eagle.
The sun had got far adown the sky ere we had reached the covered way at
the base of the rock. All lay dark below; and the red light atop, half
absorbed by the dingy hues of the stone, shone with a gleam so faint and
melancholy, that it served but to deepen the effect of the shadows.
The puffin, a comparatively rare bird in the inner Hebrides, builds, I
was told, in great numbers in the continuous line of precipice which,
after sweeping for a full mile round the Bay of Laig, forms the
pinnacled rampart here, and then, turning another angle of the island,
runs on parallel to the coast for about six miles more. In former times
the puffin furnished the islanders, as in St. Kilda, with a staple
article of food, in those hungry months of summer in which the stores of
the old crop had begun to fail, and the new crop had not yet ripened;
and the people of Eigg, taught by their necessities, were bold cragsmen.
But men do not peril life and limb for the mere sake of a meal, save
when they cannot help it; and the introduction of the potato has done
much to put out the practice of climbing for the bird, except among a
few young lads, who find excitement enough in the work to pursue it for
its own sake, as an amusement. I found among the islanders what was
said to be a piece of the natural history of the puffin, sufficiently
apocryphal to remind one of the famous passage in the history of the
barnacle, which traced the lineage of the bird to one of the
pedunculated cirripedes, and the lineage of the cirripede to a log of
wood. The puffin feeds its young, say the islanders, on an oily scum of
the sea, which renders it such an unwieldy mass of fat, that about the
time when it should be beginning to fly, it becomes unable to get out of
its hole. The parent bird, not in the least puzzled, however, treats the
case medicinally, and,--like mothers of another two-legged genus, who,
when their daughters get over stout, put them through a course of
reducing acids to bring them down,--feeds it on sorrel leaves for
several days together, till, like a boxer under training, it gets
thinned to the proper weight, and becomes able, not only to get out of
its cell, but also to employ its wings.
We pass through the hollow, and, reaching the farther edge of the
bastion, towards the east, see a new range of prospect opening before
us. There is first a long unbroken wall of precipice,--a continuation of
the tall rampart overhead,--relieved along its irregular upper line by
the blue sky. We mark the talus widening at its base, and expanding, as
on the shores of the Bay of Laig, into an irregular grassy platform,
that, sinking midway into a ditch-like hollow, rises again towards the
sea, and presents to the waves a perpendicular precipice of redstone.
The sinking sun shone brightly this evening; and the warm hues of the
precipice, which bears the name of _Ru-Stoir_,--the Red
Head,--strikingly contrasted with the pale and dark tints of the
alternating basalts and sandstones in the taller cliff behind. The
ditch-like hollow, which seems to indicate the line of a fault, cuts off
this red headland from all the other rocks of the island, from which it
appears to differ as considerably in texture as in hue. It consists
mainly of thick beds of a pale red stone, which M'Culloch regarded as a
trap, and which, intercalated with here and there a thin band of shale,
and presenting not a few of the mineralogical appearances of what
geologists of the school of the late Mr. Cunningham term Primary Old Red
Sandstone, in some cases has been laid down as a deposit of Old Red
proper, abutting in the line of a fault on the neighboring Oolites and
basalts. In the geological map which I carried with me,--not one of high
authority however,--I found it actually colored as a patch of this
ancient system. The Old Red Sandstone is largely developed in the
neighboring island of Rum, in the line of which the _Ru-Stoir_ seems to
have a more direct bearing than any of the other deposits of Eigg; and
yet the conclusion regarding this red headland merely adds one proof
more to the many furnished already, of the inadequacy of mineralogical
testimony, when taken in evidence regarding the eras of the geologist.
The hard red beds of _Ru-Stoir_ belong, as I was fortunate enough this
evening to ascertain, not to the ages of the Coccosteus and Pterichthys,
but to the far later ages of the Plesiosaurus and the fossil crocodile.
I found them associated with more reptilian remains, of a character more
unequivocal than have been yet exhibited by any other deposit in
Scotland.
What first strikes the eye, in approaching the _Ru-Stoir_ from the west,
is the columnar character of the stone. The precipices rise immediately
over the sea, in rude colonnades of from thirty to fifty feet in height;
single pillars, that have fallen from their places in the line, and
exhibit a tenacity rare among the trap-rocks,--for they occur in
unbroken lengths of from ten to twelve feet,--lie scattered below; and
in several places where the waves have joined issue with the precipices
in the line on which the base of the columns rest, and swept away the
supporting foundation, the colonnades open into roomy caverns, that
resound to the dash of the sea. Wherever the spray lashes, the pale red
hue of the stone prevails, and the angles of the polygonal shafts are
rounded; while higher up all is sharp-edged, and the unweathered surface
is covered by a gray coat of lichens. The tenacity of the prostrate
columns first drew my attention. The builder scant of materials would
have experienced no difficulty in finding among them sufficient lintels
for apertures from eight to twelve feet in width. I was next struck with
the peculiar composition of the stone; it much rather resembles an
altered sandstone, in at least the weathered specimens, than a trap, and
yet there seemed nothing to indicate that it was an _Old Red_ Sandstone.
Its columnar structure bore evidence to the action of great heat; and
its pale red color was exactly that which the Oolitic sandstones of the
island, with their slight ochreous tinge, would assume in a common fire.
And so I set myself to look for fossils. In the columnar stone itself I
expected none, as none occur in vast beds of the unaltered sandstones,
out of some one of which I supposed it might possibly have been formed;
and none I found: but in a rolled block of altered shale of a much
deeper red than the general mass, and much more resembling Old Red
Sandstone, I succeeded in detecting several shells, identical with those
of the deposit of blue clay described in a former chapter. There
occurred in it the small univalve resembling a Trochus, together with
the oblong bivalve, somewhat like a Tellina; and, spread thickly
throughout the block, lay fragments of coprolitic matter, and the scales
and teeth of fishes. Night was coming on, and the tide had risen on the
beach; but I hammered lustily, and laid open in the dark red shale a
vertebral joint, a rib, and a parallelogramical fragment of solid bone,
none of which could have belonged to any fish. It was an interesting
moment for the curtain to drop over the promontory of _Ru-Stoir_; I had
thus already found in connection with it well nigh as many reptilian
remains as had been found in all Scotland before,--for there could exist
no doubt that the bones I laid open were such; and still more
interesting discoveries promised to await the coming morning, and a less
hasty survey. We found a hospitable meal awaiting us at a picturesque
old two-story house, with, what is rare in the island, a clump of trees
beside it, which rises on the northern angle of the Oolitic meniscus;
and after our day's hard work in the fresh sea-air, we did ample justice
to the viands. Dark night had long set in ere we reached our vessel.
Next day was Saturday; and it behooved my friend, the minister,--as
scrupulously careful in his pulpit preparations for the islanders of
Eigg as if his congregation were an Edinburgh one,--to remain on board,
and study his discourse for the morrow. I found, however, no unmeet
companion for my excursion in his trusty mate John Stewart. John had not
very much English, and I had no Gaelic; but we contrived to understand
one another wonderfully well; and ere evening I had taught him to be
quite as expert in hunting dead crocodiles as myself. We reached the
_Ru-Stoir_, and set hard to work with hammer and chisel. The fragments
of red shale were strewed thickly along the shore for at least three
quarters of a mile; wherever the red columnar rock appeared, there lay
the shale, in water-worn blocks, more or less indurated; but the beach
was covered over with shingle and detached masses of rock, and we could
nowhere find it _in situ_. A winter storm powerful enough to wash the
beach bare might do much to assist the explorer. There is a piece of
shore on the eastern coast of Scotland, on which for years together I
used to pick up nodular masses of lime containing fish of the Old Red
Sandstone; but nowhere in the neighborhood could I find the ichthyolite
bed in which they had originally formed. The storm of a single night
swept the beach; and in the morning the ichthyolites lay revealed _in
situ_ under a stratum of shingle which I had a hundred times examined,
but which, though scarce a foot in thickness, had concealed from me the
ichthyolite bed for five twelvemonths together!
Wherever the altered shale of _Ru-Stoir_ has been thrown high on the
beach, and exposed to the influences of the weather, we find it fretted
over with minute organisms, mostly the scales, plates, bones, and teeth
of fishes. The organisms, as is frequently the case, seem
indestructible, while the hard matrix in which they are embedded has
weathered from around them. Some of the scales present the rhomboidal
outline, and closely resemble those of the _Lepidotus Minor_ of the
Weald; others approximate in shape to an isosceles triangle. The teeth
are of various forms: some of them, evidently palatal, are mere blunted
protuberances glittering with enamel,--some of them present the usual
slim, thorn-like type common in the teeth of the existing fish of our
coasts,--some again are squat and angular, and rest on rectilinear
bases, prolonged considerably on each side of the body of the tooth,
like the rim of a hat or the flat head of a scupper nail. Of the
occipital plates, some present a smooth enamelled surface, while some
are thickly tuberculated,--each tubercle bearing a minute depression in
its apex, like a crater on the summit of a rounded hill. We find
reptilian bones in abundance,--a thing new to Scotch geology,--and in a
state of keeping peculiarly fine. They not a little puzzled John
Stewart: he could not resist the evidence of his senses: they were
bones, he said, real bones,--there could be no doubt of that: _there_
were the joints of a backbone, with the hole the brain-marrow had
passed through; and _there_ were shank-bones and ribs, and fishes'
teeth; but how, he wondered, had they all got into the very heart of the
hard red stones? He had seen what was called wood, he said, dug out of
the side of the Scuir, without being quite certain whether it was wood
or no; but there could be no uncertainty here. I laid open numerous
vertebrae of various forms,--some with long spinous processes rising over
the body or _centrum_ of the bone,--which I found in every instance,
unlike that of the Ichthyosaurus, only moderately concave on the
articulating faces; in others the spinous process seemed altogether
wanting. Only two of the number bore any mark of the suture which
unites, in most reptiles, the annular process to the centrum; in the
others both centrum and process seemed anchylosed, as in quadrupeds,
into one bone; and there remained no scar to show that the suture had
ever existed. In some specimens the ribs seem to have been articulated
to the sides of the centrum; in others there is a transverse process,
but no marks of articulation. Some of the vertebrae are evidently dorsal,
some cervical, one apparently caudal; and almost all agree in showing in
front two little eyelets, to which the great descending artery seems to
have sent out blood-vessels in pairs. The more entire ribs I was lucky
enough to disinter have, as in those of crocodileans, double heads; and
a part of a fibula, about four inches in length, seems also to belong to
this ancient family. A large proportion of the other bones are evidently
Plesiosaurian. I found the head of the flat humerus so characteristic of
the extinct order to which the Plesiosaurus has been assigned, and two
digital bones of the paddle, that, from their comparatively slender and
slightly curved form, so unlike the digitals of its cogener the
Ichthyosaurus, could have belonged evidently to no other reptile. I
observed, too, in the slightly curved articulations of not a few of the
vertebrae, the gentle convexity in the concave centre, which, if not
peculiar to the Plesiosaurus, is at least held to distinguish it from
most of its contemporaries. Among the various nondescript organisms of
the shale, I laid open a smooth angular bone, hollowed something like a
grocer's scoop; a three-pronged caltrop-looking bone, that seems to have
formed part of a pelvic arch; another angular bone, much massier than
the first, regarding the probable position of which I could not form a
conjecture, but which some of my geological friends deem cerebral; an
extremely dense bone, imperfect at each end, which presents the
appearance of a cylinder slightly flattened; and various curious
fragments, which, with what our Scotch museums have not yet
acquired,--entire reptilian fossils for the purposes of
comparison,--might, I doubt not, be easily assigned to their proper
places. It was in vain that, leaving John to collect the scattered
pieces of shale in which the bones occurred, I set myself again and
again to discover the bed from which they had been detached. The tide
had fallen, and a range of skerries lay temptingly off, scarce a hundred
yards from the water's edge: the shale beds might be among them, with
Plesiosauri and crocodiles stretching entire; and fain would I have swum
off to them, as I had done oftener than once elsewhere, with my hammer
in my teeth, and with shirt and drawers in my hat; but a tall brown
forest of kelp and tangle in which even a seal might drown, rose thick
and perilous round both shore and skerries; a slight swell was felting
the long fronds together; and I deemed it better, on the whole, that the
discoveries I had already made should be recorded, than that they should
be lost to geology, mayhap for a whole age, in the attempt to extend
them.
The water, beautifully transparent, permitted the eye to penetrate into
its green depths for many fathoms around, though every object
presented, through the agitated surface, an uncertain and fluctuating
outline. I could see, however, the pink-colored urchin warping himself
up, by his many cables, along the steep rock-sides; the green crab
stalking along the gravelly bottom; a scull of small rock-cod darting
hither and thither among the tangle-roots; and a few large medusae slowly
flapping their continuous fins of gelatine in the opener spaces, a few
inches under the surface. Many curious families had their
representatives within the patch of sea which the eye commanded; but the
strange creatures that had once inhabited it by thousands, and whose
bones still lay sepulchred on its shores, had none. How strange, that
the identical sea heaving around stack and skerry in this remote corner
of the Hebrides should have once been thronged by reptile shapes more
strange than poet ever imagined,--dragons, gorgons and chimeras! Perhaps
of all the extinct reptiles, the Plesiosaurus was the most
extraordinary. An English geologist has described it, grotesquely
enough, and yet most happily, as a snake _threaded_ through a tortoise.
And here on this very spot, must these monstrous dragons have disported
and fed; here must they have raised their little reptile heads and long
swan-like necks over the surface, to watch an antagonist or select a
victim; here must they have warred and wedded, and pursued all the
various instincts of their unknown natures. A strange story, surely,
considering it is a true one! I may mention in the passing, that some of
the fragments of the shale in which the remains are embedded have been
baked by the intense heat into an exceedingly hard, dark-colored stone,
somewhat resembling basalt. I must add further, that I by no means
determine the rock with which we find it associated to be in reality an
altered sandstone. Such is the appearance which it presents where
weathered; but its general aspect is that of a porphyritic trap. Be it
what it may, the fact is not at all affected, that the shores, wherever
it occurs on this tract of insular coast, are strewed with reptilian
remains of the Oolite.
The day passed pleasantly in the work of exploration and discovery; the
sun had already declined far in the west; and, bearing with us our
better fossils, we set out, on our return, by the opposite route to that
along the Bay of Laig, which we had now thrice walked over. The grassy
talus so often mentioned continues to run on the eastern side of the
island for about six miles, between the sea and the inaccessible rampart
of precipice behind. It varies in breadth from about two to four hundred
yards; the rampart rises over it from three to five hundred feet; and a
noble expanse of sea, closed in the distance by a still nobler curtain
of blue hills, spreads away from its base: and it was along this grassy
talus that our homeward road lay. Let the Edinburgh reader imagine the
fine walk under Salisbury Crags lengthened some twenty times,--the line
of precipices above heightened some five or six times,--the gravelly
slope at the base not much increased in altitude, but developed
transversely into a green undulating belt of hilly pasture, with here
and there a sunny slope level enough for the plough, and here and there
a rough wilderness of detached crags and broken banks; let him further
imagine the sea sweeping around the base of this talus, with the nearest
opposite land--bold, bare and undulating atop--some six or eight miles
distant; and he will have no very inadequate idea of the peculiar and
striking scenery through which, this evening, our homeward route lay. I
have scarce ever walked over a more solitary tract. The sea shuts it in
on the one hand, and the rampart of rocks on the other; there occurs
along its entire length no other human dwelling than a lonely summer
shieling; for full one-half the way we saw no trace of man; and the
wildness of the few cattle which we occasionally startled in the
hollows showed us that man was no very frequent visitor among them.
About half an hour before sunset we reached the midway shieling.
Rarely have I seen a more interesting spot, or one that, from its utter
loneliness, so impressed the imagination. The shieling, a rude
low-roofed erection of turf and stone, with a door in the centre some
five feet in height or so, but with no window, rose on the grassy slope
immediately in front of the vast continuous rampart. A slim pillar of
smoke ascends from the roof, in the calm, faint and blue within the
shadow of the precipice, but it caught the sunlight in its ascent, and
blushed, ere it melted into the ether, a ruddy brown. A streamlet came
pouring from above in a long white thread, that maintained its
continuity unbroken for at least two-thirds of the way; and then,
untwisting into a shower of detached drops, that pattered loud and
vehemently in a rocky recess, it again gathered itself up into a lively
little stream, and, sweeping past the shieling, expanded in front into a
circular pond, at which a few milch cows were leisurely slaking their
thirst. The whole grassy talus, with a strip mayhap a hundred yards
wide, of deep green sea, lay within the shadow of the tall rampart; but
the red light fell, for many a mile beyond, on the glassy surface; and
the distant Cuchullin Hills, so dark at other times, had all their
prominent slopes and jutting precipices tipped with bronze; while here
and there a mist streak, converted into bright flame, stretched along
their peaks or rested on their sides. Save the lonely shieling, not a
human dwelling was in sight. An island girl of eighteen, more than
merely good-looking, though much embrowned by the sun, had come to the
door to see who the unwonted visitors might be, and recognized in John
Stewart an old acquaintance. John informed her in her own language that
I was Mr. Swanson's sworn friend, and not a _Moderate_, but one of their
own people, and that I had fasted all day, and had come for a drink of
milk. The name of her minister proved a strongly recommendatory one: I
have not yet seen the true Celtic interjection of welcome,--the kindly
"O o o,"--attempted on paper; but I had a very agreeable specimen of it
on this occasion, _viva voce_. And as she set herself to prepare for us
a rich bowl of mingled milk and cream, John and I entered the shieling.
There was a turf fire at the one end, at which there sat two little
girls, engaged in keeping up the blaze under a large pot, but sadly
diverted from their work by our entrance; while the other end was
occupied by a bed of dry straw, spread on the floor from wall to wall,
and fenced off at the foot by a line of stones. The middle space was
occupied by the utensils and produce of the dairy,--flat wooden vessels
of milk, a butter-churn, and a tub half-filled with curd; while a few
cheeses, soft from the press, lay on a shelf above. The little girls
were but occasional visitors, who had come, out of a juvenile frolic, to
pass the night in the place; but I was informed by John that the
shieling had two other inmates, young women, like the one so hospitably
engaged in our behalf, who were out at the milking, and that they lived
here all alone for several months every year, when the pasturage was at
its best, employed in making butter and cheese for their master, worthy
Mr. M'Donald of Keill. They must often feel lonely when night has closed
darkly over mountain and sea, or in those dreary days of mist and rain
so common in the Hebrides, when nought may be seen save the few
shapeless crags that stud the nearer hillocks around them, and nought
heard save the moaning of the wind in the precipices above, or the
measured dash of the wave on the wild beach below. And yet they would do
ill to exchange their solitary life and rude shieling for the village
dwellings and gregarious habits of the females who ply their rural
labors in bands among the rich fields of the Lowlands, or for the
unwholesome backroom and weary task-work of the city seamstress. The
sunlight was fading from the higher hill-tops of Skye and Glenelg as we
bade farewell to the lonely shieling and the hospitable island girl.
The evening deepened as we hurried southwards along the scarce visible
pathway, or paused for a few seconds to examine some shattered block,
bulky as a Highland cottage, that had fallen from the precipice above.
Now that the whole landscape lay equally in shadow, one of the more
picturesque peculiarities of the continuous rampart came out more
strongly as a feature of the scene than when a strip of shade rested
along the face of the rock, imparting to it a retiring character, and
all was sunshine beyond. A thick bed of white sandstone, as continuous
as the rampart itself, runs nearly horizontally about midway in the
precipice for mile after mile, and, standing out in strong contrast with
the dark-colored trap above and below, reminds one of a belt of white
hewn work in a basalt house front, or rather,--for there occurs above a
second continuous strip, of an olive hue, the color assumed, on
weathering by a bed of amygdaloid,--of a piece of dingy old-fashioned
furniture, inlaid with one stringed belt of bleached holly, and another
of faded green-wood. At some of the more accessible points I climbed to
the line of white belting, and found it to consist of the same soft
quartzy sandstone that in the Bay of Laig furnishes the musical sand.
Lower down there occur, alternating with the trap, beds of shale and of
blue clay, but they are lost mostly in the talus. Ill adapted to resist
the frosts and rains of winter, their exposed edges have mouldered into
a loose soil, now thickly covered over with herbage; and, but for the
circumstance that we occasionally find them laid bare by a water-course,
we would scarce be aware of their existence at all. The shale exhibits
everywhere, as on the opposite side of the _Ru-Stoir_, faint
impressions of a minute shell resembling a Cyclas, and ill-preserved
fragments of fish-scales. The blue clay I found at one spot where the
pathway had cut deep into the hill-side, richly charged with bivalves of
the species I had seen so abundant in the resembling clay of the Bay of
Laig; but the closing twilight prevented me from ascertaining whether it
also contained the characteristic univalves of the deposit, and whether
its shells,--for they seem identical with those of the altered shales of
the _Ru-Stoir_,--might not be associated, like these, with reptilian
remains. Night fell fast, and the streaks of mist that had mottled the
hills at sunset began to spread gray over the heavens in a continuous
curtain; but there was light enough left to show me that the trap became
more columnar as we neared our journey's end. One especial jutting in
the rock presented in the gloom the appearance of an ancient portico,
with pediment and cornice, such as the traveller sees on the hill-sides
of Petraea in front of some old tomb; but it may possibly appear less
architectural by day. At length, passing from under the long line of
rampart, just as the stars that had begun to twinkle over it were
disappearing, one after one, in the thickening vapor, we reached the
little bay of Kildonan, and found the boat waiting us on the beach. My
friend the minister, as I entered the cabin, gathered up his notes from
the table, and gave orders for the tea-kettle; and I spread out before
him--a happy man--an array of fossils new to Scotch Geology. No one not
an enthusiastic geologist or a zealous Roman Catholic can really know
how vast an amount of interest may attach to a few old bones. Has the
reader ever heard how fossil relics once saved the dwelling of a monk,
in a time of great general calamity, when all his other relics proved of
no avail whatever?
Thomas Campbell, when asked for a toast in a society of authors, gave
the memory of Napoleon Bonaparte; significantly adding, "he once hung a
bookseller." On a nearly similar principle I would be disposed to
propose among geologists a grateful bumper in honor of the revolutionary
army that besieged Maestricht. That city, some seventy-five or eighty
years ago, had its zealous naturalist in the person of M. Hoffmann, a
diligent excavator in the quarries of St. Peter's mountain, long
celebrated for its extraordinary fossils. Geology, as a science, had no
existence at the time; but Hoffmann was doing, in a quiet way, all he
could to give it a beginning;--he was transferring from the rock to his
cabinet, shells, and corals, and crustacea, and the teeth and scales of
fishes, with now and then the vertebrae, and now and then the limb-bone,
of a reptile. And as he honestly remunerated all the workmen he
employed, and did no manner of harm to any one, no one heeded him. On
one eventful morning, however, his friends the quarriers laid bare a
most extraordinary fossil,--the occipital plates of an enormous saurian,
with jaws four and a half feet long, bristling over with teeth, like
_chevaux de frise_; and after Hoffmann, who got the block in which it
lay embedded, cut out entire, and transferred to his house, had spent
week after week in painfully relieving it from the mass, all Maestricht
began to speak of it as something really wonderful. There is a cathedral
on St. Peter's mountain,--the mountain itself is church-land; and the
lazy canon, awakened by the general talk, laid claim to poor Hoffmann's
wonderful fossil as _his_ property. He was lord of the manor, he said,
and the mountain and all that it contained belonged to him. Hoffmann
defended his fossil as he best could in an expensive lawsuit; but the
judges found the law clean against him; the huge reptile head was
declared to be "treasure trove" escheat to the lord of the manor; and
Hoffmann, half broken-hearted, with but his labor and the lawyer's bills
for his pains, saw it transferred by rude hands from its place in his
museum, to the residence of the grasping churchman. The huge fossil head
experienced the fate of Dr. Chalmer's two hundred churches. Hoffmann was
a philosopher, however, and he continued to observe and collect as
before; but he never found such another fossil; and at length, in the
midst of his ingenious labors, the vital energies failed within him, and
he broke down and died. The useless canon lived on. The French
Revolution broke out; the republican army invested Maestricht; the
batteries were opened; and shot and shell fell thick on the devoted
city. But in one especial quarter there alighted neither shot nor shell.
All was safe around the canon's house. Ordinary relics would have
availed him nothing in the circumstances,--no, not "the three kings of
Cologne," had he possessed the three kings entire, or the jaw-bones of
the "eleven thousand virgins;" but there was virtue in the jaw-bones of
the Mosasaurus, and safety in their neighborhood. The French _savans_,
like all the other _savans_ of Europe, had heard of Hoffmann's fossil,
and the French artillery had been directed to play wide of the place
where it lay. Maestricht surrendered; the fossil was found secreted in a
vault, and sent away to the _Jardin des Plantes_ at Paris, maugre the
canon, to delight there the heart of Cuvier; and the French, generously
addressing themselves to the heirs of Hoffmann as its legitimate owners,
made over to them a considerable sum of money as its price. They
reversed the finding of the Maestricht judges; and all save the monks of
St. Peter's have acquiesced in the justice of the decision.
CHAPTER VI.
Something for Non-geologists--Man Destructive--A Better and Last
Creation coming--A Rainy Sabbath--The Meeting House--The
Congregation--The Sermon in Gaelic--The Old Wondrous Story--The
Drunken Minister of Eigg--Presbyterianism without Life--Dr.
Johnson's Account of the Conversion of the People of Rum--Romanism
at Eigg--The Two Boys--The Freebooter of Eigg--Voyage Resumed--The
Homeless Minister--Harbor of Isle Ornsay--Interesting Gneiss
Deposit--A Norwegian Keep--Gneiss at Knock--Curious
Chemistry--Sea-cliffs beyond Portsea--The Goblin Luidag--Scenery of
Skye.
I reckon among my readers a class of non-geologists, who think my
geological chapters would be less dull if I left out the geology; and
another class of semi-geologists, who say there was decidedly too much
geology in my last. With the present chapter, as there threatens to be
an utter lack of science in the earlier half of it, and very little, if
any, in the latter half, I trust both classes may be in some degree
satisfied. It will bear reference to but the existing system of
things,--assuredly not the last of the consecutive creations,--and to a
species of animal that, save in the celebrated Guadaloupe specimens, has
not yet been found locked up in stone. There have been much of violence
and suffering in the old immature stages of being,--much, from the era
of the Holoptychius, with its sharp murderous teeth and strong armor of
bone, down to that of the cannibal Ichthyosaurus, that bears the broken
remains of its own kind in its bowels,--much, again, from the times of
the crocodile of the Oolite, down to the times of the fossil hyena and
gigantic shark of the Tertiary. Nor, I fear, have matters greatly
improved in that latest-born creation in the series, that recognizes as
its delegated lord the first tenant of earth accountable to his Maker.
But there is a better and a last creation coming, in which man shall
re-appear, not to oppress and devour his fellow-men, and in which there
shall be no such wrongs perpetrated as it is my present purpose to
record,--"new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness."
Well sung the Ayrshire ploughman, when musing on the great truth that
the present scene of being "is surely not the last,"--a truth
corroborated since his day by the analogies of a new science,--
"The poor, oppressed, honest man,
Had never sure been born,
Had not there been some recompense
To comfort those that mourn."
It was Sabbath, but the morning rose like a hypochondriac wrapped up in
his night-clothes,--gray in fog, and sad with rain. The higher grounds
of the island lay hid in clouds, far below the level of the central
hollow; and our whole prospect from the deck was limited to the nearer
slopes, dank, brown, and uninhabited, and to the rough black crags that
frown like sentinels over the beach. Now the rime thickened as the rain
pattered more loudly on the deck; and even the nearer stacks and
precipices showed as unsolid and spectral in the cloud as moonlight
shadows thrown on a ground of vapor; anon it cleared up for a few
hundred yards, as the shower lightened; and then there came in view,
partially at least, two objects that spoke of man,--a deserted boat
harbor, formed of loosely piled stone, at the upper extremity of a sandy
bay; and a roofless dwelling beside it, with two ruinous gables rising
over the broken walls. The entire scene suggested the idea of a land
with which man had done for ever;--the vapor-enveloped rocks,--the waste
of ebb-uncovered sand,--the deserted harbor,--the ruinous house,--the
melancholy rain-fretted tides eddying along the strip of brown tangle in
the foreground,--and, dim over all, the thick, slant lines of the
beating shower!--I know not that of themselves they would have furnished
materials enough for a finished picture in the style of Hogarth's "End
of all Things;" but right sure am I that in the hands of Bewick they
would have been grouped into a tasteful and poetic vignette. We set out
for church a little after eleven,--the minister encased in his
ample-skirted storm-jacket of oiled canvas, and protected atop by a
genuine _sou-wester_, of which the broad posterior rim eloped half a
yard down his back; and I closely wrapped up in my gray maud, which
proved, however, a rather indifferent protection against the penetrating
powers of a true Hebridean drizzle. The building in which the
congregation meets is a low dingy cottage of turf and stone, situated
nearly opposite to the manse windows. It had been built by my friend,
previous to the Disruption, at his own expense, for a Gaelic school, and
it now serves as a place of worship for the people.
We found the congregation already gathered, and that the very bad
morning had failed to lessen their numbers. There were a few of the male
parishioners keeping watch at the door, looking wistfully out through
the fog and rain for their minister; and at his approach nearly twenty
more came issuing from the place,--like carder bees from their nest of
dried grass and moss,--to gather round him, and shake him by the hand.
The islanders of Eigg are an active, middle-sized race, with
well-developed heads, acute intellects, and singularly warm feelings.
And on this occasion at least there could be no possibility of mistake
respecting the feelings with which they regarded their minister. Rarely
have I seen human countenances so eloquently vocal with veneration and
love. The gospel message, which my friend had been the first effectually
to bring home to their hearts,--the palpable fact of his sacrifice for
the sake of the high principles which he has taught,--his own kindly
disposition,--the many services which he has rendered them, for not only
has he been the minister, but also the sole medical man, of the Small
Isles, and the benefit of his practice they have enjoyed, in every
instance, without fee or reward,--his new life of hardship and danger,
maintained for their sakes amid sinking health and great
privation,--their frequent fears for his safety when stormy nights close
over the sea,--and they have seen his little vessel driven from her
anchorage, just as the evening has fallen,--all these are circumstances
that have concurred in giving him a strong hold on their affections.
The rude turf-building we found full from end to end, and all a-steam
with a particularly wet congregation, some of whom, neither very robust
nor young, had travelled in the soaking drizzle from the farther
extremities of the island. And, judging from the serious attention with
which they listened to the discourse, they must have deemed it full
value for all it cost them. I have never yet seen a congregation more
deeply impressed, or that seemed to follow the preacher more
intelligently; and I was quite sure, though ignorant of the language in
which my friend addressed them, that he preached to them neither heresy
nor nonsense. There was as little of the reverence of externals in the
place as can well be imagined: an uneven earthen floor,--turf-walls on
every side, and a turf-roof above,--two little windows of four panes
a-piece, adown which the rain-drops were coursing thick and fast,--a
pulpit grotesquely rude, that had never employed the bred
carpenter,--and a few ranges of seats of undressed deal, such were the
mere materialisms of this lowly church of the people; and yet here,
notwithstanding, was the living soul of a Christian
community,--understandings convinced of the truth of the gospel, and
hearts softened and impressed by its power.
My friend, at the conclusion of his discourse, gave a brief digest of
its contents in English, for the benefit of his one Saxon auditor; and I
found, as I had anticipated, that what had so moved the simple islanders
was just the old wondrous story, which, though repeated and re-repeated
times beyond number, from the days of the apostles till now, continues
to be as full of novelty and interest as ever,--"God so loved the world,
that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him
should not perish, but have everlasting life." The great truths which
had affected many of these poor people to tears, were exactly those
which, during the last eighteen hundred years, have been active in
effecting so many moral revolutions in the world, and which must
ultimately triumph over all error and all oppression. On this occasion,
as on many others, I had to regret my want of Gaelic. It was my
misfortune to miss being born to this ancient language, by barely a mile
of ferry. I first saw light on the southern shore of the Frith of
Cromarty, where the strait is narrowest, among an old established
Lowland community, marked by all the characteristics, physical and
mental, of the Lowlanders of the southern districts; whereas, had I been
born on the northern shore, I would have been brought up among a Celtic
tribe, and Gaelic would have been my earliest language. Thus distinct
was the line between the two races preserved, even after the
commencement of the present century.
In returning to the Betsey during the mid-day interval in the service,
we passed the ruinous two-gabled house beside the boat-harbor. During
the incumbency of my friend's predecessor, it had been the public-house
of the island, and the parish minister was by far its best customer. He
was in the practice of sitting in one of its dingy little rooms, day
after day, imbibing whisky and peat-reek; and his favorite boon
companion on these occasions was a Roman Catholic tenant who lived on
the opposite side of the island, and who, when drinking with the
minister, used regularly to fasten his horse beside the door, till at
length all the parish came to know that when the horse was standing
outside the minister was drinking within. In course of time, through the
natural gravitation operative in such cases, the poor incumbent became
utterly scandalous, and was libelled for drunkenness before the General
Assembly; but, as the island of Eigg lies remote from observation,
evidence was difficult to procure; and had not the infatuated man got
senselessly drunk one evening, when in Edinburgh on his trial, and
staggered, of all places in the world, into the General Assembly, he
would probably have died minister of Eigg. As the event happened,
however, the testimony thus unwittingly furnished in the face of the
Court that tried him was deemed conclusive;--he was summarily deposed
from his office, and my friend succeeded him. Presbyterianism without
the animating life is a poor shrunken thing: it never lies in state when
it is dead; for it has no body of fine forms, or trapping of imposing
ceremonies, to give it bulk or adornment: without the vitality of
evangelism it is nothing; and in this low and abject state my friend
found the Presbyterianism of Eigg. His predecessor had done it only
mischief; nor had it been by any means vigorous before. Rum is one of
the four islands of the parish; and all my readers must be familiar with
Dr. Johnson's celebrated account of the conversion to Protestantism of
the people of Rum. "The inhabitants," says the Doctor, in his "Journey
to the Western Islands," "are fifty-eight families, who continued
Papists for some time after the laird became a Protestant. Their
adherence to their old religion was strengthened by the countenance of
the laird's sister, a zealous Romanist; till one Sunday, as they were
going to mass under the conduct of their patroness, Maclean met them on
the way, gave one of them a blow on the head with a yellow stick,--I
suppose a cane, for which the Erse had no name, and drove them to the
kirk, from which they have never departed. Since the use of this method
of conversion, the inhabitants of Eigg and Canna who continue Papists
call the Protestantism of Rum the religion of the yellow stick." Now,
such was the kind of Protestantism that, since the days of Dr. Johnson,
had also been introduced, I know not by what means, into Eigg. It had
lived on the best possible terms with the Popery of the island; the
parish minister had soaked day after day in the public-house with a
Roman Catholic boon companion; and when a Papist man married a
Protestant woman, the woman, as a matter of course, became Papist also;
whereas, when it was the man who was a Protestant, and the woman a
Papist, the woman remained what she had been. Roman Catholicism was
quite content with terms, actual though not implied, of a kind so
decidedly advantageous; and the Roman Catholics used good-humoredly to
urge on their neighbors the Protestants, that, as it was palpable they
had no religion of any kind, they had better surely come over to them,
and have some. In short, all was harmony between the two Churches. My
friend labored hard, as a good and honest man ought, to impart to
Protestantism in his parish the animating life of the Reformation; and,
through the blessing of God, after years of anxious toil, he at length
fully succeeded.
I had got wet, and the day continued bad; and so, instead of returning
to the evening sermon, which began at six, I remained alone aboard of
the vessel. The rain ceased in little more than an hour after, and in
somewhat more than two hours I got up on deck to see whether the
congregation was not dispersing, and if it was not yet time to hang on
the kettle for our evening tea. The unexpected apparition of some one
aboard the Free Church yacht startled two ragged boys who were
manoeuvring a little boat a stone-cast away, under the rocky shores of
_Eilean Chaisteil_, and who, on catching a glimpse of me, flung
themselves below the thwarts for concealment. An oar dropped into the
water; there was a hasty arm and half a head thrust over the gunwale to
secure it; and then the urchin to whom they belonged again disappeared.
Meanwhile the boat drifted slowly away: first one little head would
appear for a moment over the gunwale, then another, as if reconnoitering
the enemy; but I still kept my place on deck; and at length, tired out,
the ragged little crew took to their oars, and rowed into a shallow bay
at the lower extremity of the glebe, with a cottage, in size and
appearance much resembling an ant-hill, peeping out at its inner
extremity among some stunted bushes. I had marked the place before, and
had been struck with the peculiarity of the choice that could have fixed
on it as a site for a dwelling: it is at once the most inconvenient and
picturesque on this side the island. A semi-circular line of columnar
precipices, that somewhat resembles an amphitheatre turned outside
in,--for the columns that overlook the area are quite as lofty as those
which should form the amphitheatre's outer wall,--sweeps round a little
bay, flat and sandy at half-tide, but bordered higher up by a dingy,
scarce passable beach of columnar fragments that have toppled from
above. Between the beach and the line of columns there is a bosky talus,
more thickly covered with brushwood than is at all common in the
Hebrides, and scarce more passable than the rough beach at its feet. And
at the bottom of this talus, with its one gable buried in the steep
ascent,--for there is scarce a foot-breadth of platform between the
slope and the beach,--and with the other gable projected to the
tide-line on rugged columnar masses, stands the cottage. The story of
the inmate,--the father of the two ragged boys,--is such a one as Crabbe
would have delighted to tell, and as he could have told better than any
one else.
He had been, after a sort, a freebooter in his time, but born an age or
two rather late; and the law had proved over strong for him. On at least
one occasion, perhaps oftener,--for his adventures are not all known in
Eigg,--he had been in prison for sheep-stealing. He had the dangerous
art of subsisting without the ostensible means, and came to be feared
and avoided by his neighbors as a man who lived on them without asking
their leave. With neither character nor a settled way of living, his
wits, I am afraid, must have been often whetted by his necessities: he
stole lest he should starve. For some time he had resided in the
adjacent island of Muck; but, proving a bad tenant, he had been ejected
by the agent of the landlord, I believe a very worthy man, who gave him
half a boll of meal to get quietly rid of him, and pulled down his
house, when he had left the island, to prevent his return. Betaking
himself, with his boys, to a boat, he set out in quest of some new
lodgment. He made his first attempt or two on the mainland, where he
strove to drive a trade in begging, but he was always recognized as the
convicted sheep-stealer, and driven back to the shore. At length, after
a miserable term of wandering, he landed in the winter season on Eigg,
where he had a grown-up son, a miller; and, erecting a wretched shed
with some spars and the old sail of a boat placed slantways against the
side of a rock, he squatted on the beach, determined, whether he lived
or died, to find a home on the island. The islanders were no strangers
to the character of the poor forlorn creature, and kept aloof from
him,--none of them, however, so much as his own son; and, for a time, my
friend the minister, aware that he had been the pest of every community
among which he had lived, stood aloof from him too, in the hope that at
length, wearied out, he might seek for himself a lodgment elsewhere.
There came on, however, a dreary night of sleet and rain, accompanied by
a fierce storm from the sea; and intelligence reached the manse late in
the evening, that the wretched sheep-stealer had been seized by sudden
illness, and was dying on the beach. There could be no room for further
hesitation in this case; and my friend the minister gave instant orders
that the poor creature should be carried to the manse. The party,
however, which he had sent to remove him found the task impracticable.
The night was pitch dark; and the road, dangerous with precipices, and
blocked up with rough masses of rock and stone, they found wholly
impassable with so helpless a burden. And so, administering some
cordials to the poor, hapless wretch, they had to leave him in the midst
of the storm, with the old wet sail flapping about his ears, and the
half-frozen rain pouring in upon him in torrents. He must have passed a
miserable night, but it could not have been a whit more miserable than
that passed by the minister in the manse. As the wild blast howled
around his comfortable dwelling, and shook the casements as if some hand
outside were assaying to open them, or as the rain pattered sharp and
thick on the panes, and the measured roar of the surf rose high over
every other sound, he could think of only the wretched creature exposed
to the fury of a tempest so terrible, as perchance wrestling in his
death agony in the darkness beside the breaking wave, or as already
stiffening on the shore. He was early astir next morning, and almost the
first person he met was the poor sheep-stealer, looking more like a
ghost than a living man. The miserable creature had mustered strength
enough to crawl up from the beach. My friend has often met better men
with less pleasure. He found a shelter for the poor outcast; he tended
him, prescribed for him, and, on his recovery, gave him leave to build
for himself the hovel at the foot of the crags. The islanders were aware
they had got but an indifferent neighbor through the transaction, though
none of them, with the exception of the poor creature's son, saw what
else their minister could have done in the circumstances. But the miller
could sustain no apology for the arrangement that had given him his
vagabond father as a neighbor; and oftener than once the site of the
rising hovel became a scene of noisy contention between parent and son.
Some of the islanders informed me that they had seen the son engaged in
pulling down the stones of the walls as fast as the father raised them
up; and, save for the interference of the minister, the hut,
notwithstanding the permission he gave, would scarce have been built.
On the morning of Monday we unloosed from our moorings, and set out with
a light variable breeze for Isle Ornsay, in Skye, where the wife and
family of Mr. Swanson resided, and from which he had now been absent for
a full month. The island diminished, and assumed its tint of diluting
blue, that waxed paler and paler hour after hour, as we left it slowly
behind us; and the Scuir, projected boldly from its steep hill-top,
resembled a sharp hatchet-edge presented to the sky. "Nowhere," said my
friend, "did I so thoroughly realize the Disruption of last year as at
this spot. I had just taken my last leave of the manse; Mrs. Swanson had
staid a day behind me in charge of a few remaining pieces of furniture,
and I was bearing some of the rest, and my little boy Bill, scarce five
years of age at the time, in the yacht with me to Skye. The little
fellow had not much liked to part from his mother, and the previous
unsettling of all sorts of things in the manse had bred in him thoughts
he had not quite words to express. The further change to the yacht, too,
he had deemed far from an agreeable one. But he had borne up, by way of
being very manly; and he seemed rather amused that papa should now have
to make his porridge for him, and to put him to bed, and that it was
John Stewart, the sailor, who was to be the servant girl. The passage,
however, was tedious and disagreeable; the wind blew a-head, and heart
and spirits failing poor Bill, and somewhat sea-sick to boot, he lay
down on the floor, and cried bitterly to be taken home. 'Alas, my boy!'
I said, 'you have no home now: your father is like the poor
sheep-stealer whom you saw on the shore of Eigg.' This view of matters
proved in no way consolatory to poor Bill. He continued his sad wail,
'Home, home, home!' until at length he fairly sobbed himself asleep; and
I never, on any other occasion, so felt the desolateness of my condition
as when the cry of my boy,--'Home, home, home!'--was ringing in my
ears."
We passed, on the one hand, Loch Nevis and Loch Hourn, two fine arms of
the sea that run far into the mainland, and open up noble vistas among
the mountains; and, on the other, the long undulating line of Sleat in
Skye, with its intermingled patches of woodland and arable on the coast,
and its mottled ranges of heath and rock above. Towards evening we
entered the harbor of Isle Ornsay, a quiet, well-sheltered bay, with a
rocky islet for a breakwater on the one side, and the rudiments of a
Highland village, containing a few good houses, on the other. Half a
dozen small vessels were riding at anchor, curtained round, half-mast
high, with herring nets; and a fleet of herring-boats lay moored beside
them a little nearer the shore. There had been tolerable takes for a few
nights in the neighboring sea, but the fish had again disappeared, and
the fishermen, whose worn-out tackle gave such evidence of a
long-continued run of ill-luck, as I had learned to interpret on the
east coast, looked gloomy and spiritless, and reported a deficient
fishery. I found Mrs. Swanson and her family located in one of the two
best houses in the village, with a neat enclosure in front, and a good
kitchen-garden behind. The following day I spent in exploring the rocks
of the district,--a primary region with regard to organic existence,
"without _form_ and void." From Isle Ornsay to the Point of Sleat, a
distance of thirteen miles, gneiss is the prevailing deposit; and in no
place in the district are the strata more varied and interesting than in
the neighborhood of Knockhouse, the residence of Mr. Elder, which I
found pleasingly situated at the bottom of a little open bay, skirted
with picturesque knolls partially wooded, that present to the surf
precipitous fronts of rock. One insulated eminence, a gun-shot from the
dwelling-house, that presents to the sea two mural fronts of precipice,
and sinks in steep grassy slopes on two sides more, bears atop a fine
old ruin. There is a blind-fronted massy keep, wrapped up in a mantle of
ivy, perched at the one end, where the precipice sinks steepest; while a
more ruinous though much more modern pile of building, perforated by a
double row of windows, occupies the rest of the area. The square keep
has lost its genealogy in the mists of the past, but a vague tradition
attributes its erection to the Norwegians. The more modern pile is said
to have been built about three centuries ago by a younger son of
M'Donald of the Isles; but it is added that, owing to the jealousy of
his elder brother, he was not permitted to complete or inhabit it. I
find it characteristic of most Highland traditions, that they contain
speeches: they constitute true oral specimens of that earliest and
rudest style of historic composition in which dialogue alternates with
narrative. "My wise brother is building a fine house," is the speech
preserved in this tradition as that of the elder son: "it is rather a
pity for himself that he should be building it on another man's lands."
The remark was repeated to the builder, says the story, and at once
arrested the progress of the work. Mr. Elder's boys showed me several
minute pieces of brass, somewhat resembling rust-eaten coin, that they
had dug out of the walls of the old keep; but the pieces bore no impress
of the dye, and seemed mere fragments of metal beaten thin by the
hammer.
The gneiss at Knock is exceedingly various in its composition, and many
of its strata the geologist would fail to recognize as gneiss at all. We
find along the precipices its two unequivocal varieties, the schistose
and the granitic, passing not unfrequently, the former into a true mica
schist, the latter into a pale feldspathose rock, thickly pervaded by
needle-like crystals of tremolite, that, from the style of the grouping,
and the contrast existing between the dark green of the enclosed
mineral, and the pale flesh-color of the ground, frequently furnishes
specimens of great beauty. In some pieces the tremolite assumes the
common fan-like form; in some, the crystals, lying at nearly right
angles with each other, present the appearance of ancient characters
inlaid in the rock; in some they resemble the footprints of birds in a
thin layer of snow; and in one curious specimen picked up by Mr.
Swanson, in which a dark linear strip is covered transversely by
crystals that project thickly from both its sides, the appearance
presented is that of a minute stigmaria of the Coal Measures, with the
leaves, still bearing their original green color, bristling thick around
it. Mr. Elder showed me, intercalated among the gneiss strata of a
little ravine in the neighborhood of Isle Ornsay, a thin band of a
bluish-colored indurated clay, scarcely distinguishable, in the hand
specimen, from a weathered clay-stone, but unequivocally a stratum of
the rock. I have found the same stone existing, in a decomposed state,
as a very tenacious clay, among the gneiss strata of the hill of
Cromarty; and oftener than once had I amused myself in fashioning it,
with tolerable success, into such rude pieces of pottery as are
sometimes found in old sepulchral tumuli. Such are a few of the rocks
included in the general gneiss deposit of Sleat. If we are to hold, with
one of the most distinguished of living geologists, that the stratified
primary rocks are aqueous deposits altered by heat, to how various a
chemistry must they not have been subjected in this district! In one
stratum, so softened that all its particles were disengaged to enter
into new combinations, and yet not so softened but that it still
maintained its lines of division from the strata above and below, the
green tremolite was shooting its crystals into the pale homogeneous
mass; while in another stratum the quartz drew its atoms apart in masses
that assumed one especial form, the feldspar drew its atoms apart into
masses that assumed another and different form, and the glittering mica
built up its multitudinous layers between. Here the unctuous chlorite
constructed its soft felt; there the micaceous schist arranged its
undulating layers; yonder the dull clay hardened amid the intense heat,
but, when all else was changing, retained its structure unchanged.
Surely a curious chemistry, and conducted on an enormous scale!
It had been an essential part of my plan to explore the splendid section
of the Lower Oolite furnished by the line of sea-cliffs that, to the
north of the Portree, rise full seven hundred feet over the beach; and
on the morning of Wednesday I set out with this intention from Isle
Ornsay, to join the mail gig at Broadford, and pass on to Portree,--a
journey of rather more than thirty miles. I soon passed over the gneiss,
and entered on a wide deposit, extending from side to side of the
island, of what is generally laid down in our geological maps as Old Red
Sandstone, but which, in most of its beds, quite as much resembles a
quartz rock, and which, unlike any Old Red proper I have ever seen,
passes, by insensible gradations, into the gneiss.[2] Wherever it has
been laid bare in flat tables among the heath, we find it bearing those
mysterious scratches on a polished surface which we so commonly find
associated on the mainland with the boulder clay; but here, as in the
Hebrides generally, the boulder clay is wanting. To the tract of Red
Sandstone there succeeds a tract of Lias, which, also extending across
the island, forms by far the most largely-developed deposit of this
formation in Scotland. It occupies a flat dingy valley, about six miles
in length, and that varies from two to four miles in breadth. The dreary
interior is covered with mosses, and studded with inky pools, in which
the botanist finds a few rare plants, and which were dimpled, as I
passed them this morning, with countless eddies, formed by myriads of
small quick glancing trout, that seemed busily engaged in fly-catching.
The rock appears but rarely,--all is moss, marsh, and pool; but in a few
localities on the hill-sides, where some stream has cut into the slope,
and disintegrated the softer shales, the shepherd finds shells of
strange form strewed along the water-courses, or bleaching white among
the heath. The valley,--evidently a dangerous one to the night
traveller, from its bogs and its tarns,--is said to be haunted by a
spirit peculiar to itself,--a mischievous, eccentric, grotesque
creature, not unworthy, from the monstrosity of its form, of being
associated with the old monsters of the Lias. Luidag--for so the goblin
is called--has but one leg, terminating, like an ancient satyr's, in a
cloven foot; but it is furnished with two arms, bearing hard fists at
the end of them, with which it has been known to strike the benighted
traveller in the face, or to tumble him over into some dark pool. The
spectre may be seen at the close of evening hopping vigorously among the
distant bogs, like a felt ball on its electric platform; and when the
mist lies thick in the hollows, an occasional glimpse may be caught of
it even by day. But when I passed the way there was no fog: the light,
though softened by a thin film of cloud, fell equally over the heath,
revealing hill and hollow; and I was unlucky enough not to see this
goblin of the Liasic valley.
A deep indentation of the coast, which forms the bay of Broadford,
corresponds with the hollow of the valley. It is simply a portion of the
valley itself occupied by the sea; and we find the Lias, from its lower
to its upper beds, exposed in unbroken series along the beach. In the
middle of the opening lies the green level island of Pabba, altogether
composed of this formation, and which, differing, in consequence, both
in outline and color, from every neighboring island and hill, seems a
little bit of flat fertile England, laid down, as if for contrast's
sake, amid the wild rough Hebrides. Of Pabba and its wonders, however,
more anon. I explored a considerable range of shore along the bay; but
as I made it the subject of two after explorations ere I mastered its
deposits, I shall defer my description till a subsequent chapter. It was
late this evening ere the post-gig arrived from the south, and the night
and several hours of the following morning were spent in travelling to
Portree. I know not, however, that I could have seen some of the wildest
and most desolate tracts in Skye to greater advantage. There was light
enough to show the bold outlines of the hills,--lofty, abrupt,
pyramidal,--just such hills, both in form and grouping, as a profile in
black showed best; a low blue vapor slept in the calm over the marshes
at their feet; the sea, smooth as glass, reflected the dusk twilight
gleam in the north, revealing the narrow sounds and deep
mountain-girdled lochs along which we passed; gray crags gleamed dimly
on the sight; birch-feathered acclivities presented against sea and sky
their rough bristly edges; all was vast, dreamy, obscure, like one of
Martin's darker pictures: the land of the seer and the spectre could not
have been better seen. Morning broke dim and gray, while we were yet
several miles from Portree; and I reached the inn in time to see from my
bed-room windows the first rays of the rising sun gleaming on the
hill-tops.
CHAPTER VII.
Exploration resumed--Geology of Rasay--An Illustration--Storr of
Skye--From Portree to Holm--Discovery of Fossils--An Island
Rain--Sir R. Murchison--Labor of drawing a Geological Line--Three
Edinburgh Gentlemen--_Prosopolepsia_--Wrong surmises corrected--The
Mail Gig--The Portree Postmaster--Isle Ornsay--An Old
Acquaintance--Reminiscences--A Run for Rum--"Semi-fossil
Madeira"--Idling on Deck--Prognostics of a Storm--Description of
the Gale--Loch Scresort--The Minister's lost _Sou-wester_--The Free
Church Gathering--The weary Minister.
I breakfasted in the travellers' room with three gentlemen from
Edinburgh; and then, accompanied by a boy, whom I had engaged to carry
my bag, set out to explore. The morning was ominously hot and
breathless; and while the sea lay moveless in the calm, as a floor of
polished marble, mountain and rock, and distant island, seemed tremulous
all over, through a wavy medium of thick rising vapor. I judged from the
first that my course of exploration for the day was destined to
terminate abruptly; and as my arrangements with Mr. Swanson left me, for
this part of the country, no second day to calculate upon, I hurried
over deposits which in other circumstances I would have examined more
carefully,--content with a glance. Accustomed in most instances to take
long aims, as Cuddy Headrig did, when he steadied his musket on a rest
behind the hedge, and sent his ball through Laird Oliphant's forehead, I
had on this occasion to shoot flying; and so, selecting a large object
for a mark, that I might run the less risk of missing, I strove to
acquaint myself rather with the general structure of the district than
with the organisms of its various fossiliferous beds.
The long narrow island of Rasay lies parallel to the coast of Skye,
like a vessel laid along a wharf, but drawn out from it as if to suffer
another vessel of the same size to take her berth between; and on the
eastern shores of both Skye and Rasay we find the same Oolitic deposits
tilted up at nearly the same angle. The section presented on the eastern
coast of the one is nearly a duplicate of the section presented on the
eastern coast of the other. During one of the severer frosts of last
winter I passed along a shallow pond, studded along the sides with
boulder stones. It had been frozen over; and then, from the evaporation
so common in protracted frosts, the water had shrunk, and the sheet of
ice which had sunk down over the central portion of the pond exhibited
what a geologist would term very considerable marks of disturbance among
the boulders at the edges. Over one sharp-backed boulder there lay a
sheet tilted up like the lid of a chest half-raised; and over another
boulder immediately behind it there lay another uptilted sheet, like the
lid of a second half-open chest; and in both sheets, the edges, lying in
nearly parallel lines, presented a range of miniature cliffs to the
shore. Now, in the two uptilted ice-sheets of this pond I recognized a
model of the fundamental Oolitic deposits Rasay and Skye. The mainland
of Scotland had its representative in the crisp snow-covered shore of
the pond, with its belt of faded sedges; the place of Rasay was
indicated by the inner, that of Skye by the outer boulder; while the
ice-sheets, with their shoreward-turned line of cliffs, represented the
Oolitic beds, that turn to the mainland their dizzy range of precipices,
varying from six to eight hundred feet in height, and then, sloping
outwards and downwards, disappear under mountain wildernesses of
overlying trap. And it was along a portion of the range of cliff that
forms the outermost of the two uptilted lines, and which presents in
this district of Skye a frontage of nearly twenty continuous miles to
the long Sound of Rasay, that my to-day's course of exploration lay.
From the top of the cliff the surface slopes downwards for about two
miles into the interior, like the half-raised chest-lid of my
illustration sloping towards the hinges, or the uptilted ice-table of
the boulder sloping towards the centre of the pond; and the depression
behind forms a flat moory valley, full fifteen miles in length, occupied
by a chain of dark bogs and treeless lochans. A long line of trap-hills
rises over it, in one of which, considerably in advance of the others, I
recognized the Storr of Skye, famous among lovers of the picturesque for
its strange group of mingled pinnacles and towers; while directly
crossing into the valley from the Sound, and then running southwards for
about two miles along its bottom, is the noble sea-arm, Loch Portree, in
which, as indicated by the name (the King's Port) a Scottish king of the
olden time, in his voyage round his dominions, cast anchor. The opening
of the loch is singularly majestic;--the cliffs tower high on either
side in graceful magnificence: but from the peculiar inward slope of the
land, all within, as the loch reaches the line of the valley, becomes
tame and low, and a black dreary moor stretches from the flat terminal
basin into the interior. The opening of Loch Portree is a palace
gateway, erected in front of some homely suburb, that occupies the place
which the palace itself should have occupied.
There was, however, no such mixture of the homely and the magnificent in
the route I had selected to explore. It lay under the escarpment of the
cliff; and I purposed pursuing it from Portree to Holm, a distance of
about six miles, and then returning by the flat interior valley. On the
one hand rose a sloping rampart, full seven hundred feet in height,
striped longitudinally with alternating bands of white sandstone and
dark shale, and capped atop by a continuous coping of trap, that lacked
not massy tower, and overhanging turret, and projecting sentry-box;
while, on the other hand, spreading outwards in the calm from the line
of dark trap-rocks below, like a mirror from its carved frame of black
oak, lay the Sound of Rasay, with its noble background of island and
main rising bold on the east, and its long mountain vista opening to the
south. The first fossiliferous deposit which gave me occasion this
morning to use my hammer occurs near the opening of the loch, beside an
old Celtic burying-ground, in the form of a thick bed of hard sandstone,
charged with Belemnites,--a bed that must at one time have existed as a
widely-spread accumulation of sand,--the bottom, mayhap, of some
extensive bay of the Oolite, resembling the Loch Portree of the present
day, in which eddy tides deposited the sand swept along by the tidal
currents of some neighboring sound, and which swarmed as thickly with
Cephalopoda as the loch swarmed this day with minute purple-tinged
Medusae. I found detached on the shore, immediately below this bed, a
piece of calcareous fissile sandstone, abounding in small sulcated
Terebratulae, identical, apparently, with the Terebratula of a specimen
in my collection from the inferior Oolite of Yorkshire. A colony of this
delicate Brachiopod must have once lain moored near this spot, like a
fleet of long-prowed galleys at anchor, each one with its cable of many
strands extended earthwards from the single _dead-eye_ in its umbone.
For a full mile after rounding the northern boundary of the loch, we
find the immense escarpment composed from top to bottom exclusively of
trap; but then the Oolite again begins to appear, and about two miles
further on the section becomes truly magnificent,--one of the finest
sections of this formation exhibited anywhere in Britain, perhaps in the
world. In a ravine furrowed in the face of the declivity by the headlong
descent of a small stream, we may trace all the beds of the system in
succession, from the Cornbrash, an upper deposit of the Lower Oolite,
down to the Lias, the formation on which the Oolite rests. The only
modifying circumstance to the geologist is, that though the sandstone
beds run continuously along the cliff for miles together, distinct as
the white bands in a piece of onyx, the intervening beds of shale are
swarded over, save where we here and there see them laid bare in some
abrupter acclivity or deeper water-course. In the shale we find numerous
minute Ammonites, sorely weathered; in the sandstone, Belemnites, some
of them of great size; and dark carbonaceous markings, passing not
unfrequently into a glossy cubical coal. At the foot of the cliff I
picked up an ammonite of considerable size and well-marked
character,--the _Ammonites Murchisonae_, first discovered on this coast
by Sir R. Murchison about fifteen years ago. It measures, when full
grown, from six to seven inches in diameter; the inner whorls, which are
broadly visible, are ribbed; whereas the two, and sometimes the three
outer ones, are smooth,--a marked characteristic of the species. My
specimen merely enabled me to examine the peculiarities of the shell
just a little more minutely than I could have done in the pages of
Sowerby; for such was its state of decay, that it fell to pieces in my
hands. I had now come full in view of the rocky island of Holm, when the
altered appearance of the heavens led me to deliberate, just as I was
warming in the work of exploration, whether, after all, it might not be
well to scale the cliffs, and strike directly on the inn. It was nearly
three o'clock; the sky had been gradually darkening since noon, as if
one thin covering of gauze after another had been drawn over it; hill
and island had first dimmed and then disappeared in the landscape; and
now the sun stood up right over the fast-contracting vista of the Sound,
round and lightless as the moon in a haze; and the downward
cataract-like streaming of the gray vapor on the horizon showed that
there the rain had already broken, and was descending in torrents. We
had been thirsty in the hot sun, and had found the springs few and
scanty; but the boy now assured me, in very broken English, that we were
to get a great deal more water than would be good for us, and that it
might be advisable to get out of its way. And so, climbing to the top of
the cliffs, along a water-course, we reached the ridge, just as the fog
came rolling downwards from the peaked brow of the Storr into the flat
moory valley, and the melancholy lochans roughened and darkened in the
rain. We were both particularly wet ere we reached Portree.
In exploring our Scotch formations, I have had frequent occasion, in
Ross, Sutherland, Caithness, and now once more in Skye, to pass over
ground described by Sir R. Murchison; and in every instance have I found
myself immensely his debtor. His descriptions possess the merit of being
true: they are simple outlines often, that leave much to be filled up by
after discovery; but, like those outlines of the skilful geographer that
fix the place of some island or strait, though they may not entirely
define it, they always indicate the exact position in the scale of the
formations to which they refer. They leave a good deal to be done in the
way of mapping out the interior of a deposit, if I may so speak; but
they leave nothing to be done in the way of ascertaining its place. The
work accomplished is _bona fide_ work,--actual, solid, not to be done
over again,--work such as could be achieved in only the school of Dr.
William Smith, the father of English Geology. I have found much to
admire, too, in the sections of Sir R. Murchison. His section of this
part of the coast, for example, strikes from the extreme northern part
of Skye to the island of Holm, thence to Scrapidale in Rasay, thence
along part of the coast of Scalpa, thence direct through the middle of
Pabba, and thence to the shore of the Bay of Laig. The line thus taken
includes, in regular sequence in the descending order, the whole Oolitic
deposits of the Hebrides, from the Cornbrash, with its overlying
fresh-water outliers of mayhap the Weald, down to where the Lower Lias
rests on the primary red sandstones of Sleat. It would have cost
M'Culloch less exploration to have written a volume than it must have
cost Sir R. Murchison to draw this single line; but the line once drawn,
is work done to the hands of all after explorers. I have followed
repeatedly in the track of another geologist, of, however, a very
different school, who explored, at a comparatively recent period, the
deposits of not a few of our Scotch counties. But his labors, in at
least the fossiliferous formations, seem to have accomplished nothing
for Geology,--I am afraid, even less than nothing. So far as they had
influence at all, it must have been to throw back the science. A
geologist who could have asserted only three years ago ("Geognostical
Account of Banffshire," 1842), that the Old Red Sandstone of Scotland
forms merely "a part of the great coal deposit," could have known
marvellously little of the fossils of the one system, and nothing
whatever of those of the other. Had he examined ere he decided, instead
of deciding without any intention of examining, he would have found
that, while both systems abound in organic remains, they do not possess,
in Scotland at least, a single species in common, and that even their
types of being, viewed in the group, are essentially distinct.
The three Edinburgh gentlemen whom I had met at breakfast were still in
the inn. One of them I had seen before, as one of the guests at a
Wesleyan soiree, though I saw he failed to remember that I had been
there as a guest too. The two other gentlemen were altogether strangers
to me. One of them,--a man on the right side of forty, and a superb
specimen of the powerful, six-feet two-inch Norman Celt,--I set down as
a scion of some old Highland family, who, as the broadsword had gone
out, carried on the internal wars of the country with the formidable
artillery of Statute and Decision. The other, a gentleman more advanced
in life, I predicated to be a Highland proprietor, the uncle of the
younger of the two,--a man whose name, as he had an air of business
about him, occurred, in all probability, in the Almanac, in the list of
Scotch advocates. Both were of course high Tories,--I was quite sure of
that,--zealous in behalf of the Establishment, though previous to the
Disruption they had not cared for it a pin's point,--and prepared to
justify the virtual suppression of the toleration laws in the case of
the Free Church. I was thus decidedly guilty of what old Dr. More calls
a _prosopolepsia_,--_i.e._ of the crime of judging men by their looks.
At dinner, however, we gradually ate ourselves into conversation: we
differed, and disputed, and agreed, and then differed, disputed and
agreed again. I found first, that my chance companions were really not
very high Tories; and then, that they were not Tories at all; and then,
that the younger of the two was very much a Whig, and the more advanced
in life,--strange as the fact might seem,--very considerably a
_Presbyterian_ Whig; and finally, that this latter gentleman, whom I had
set down as an intolerant Highland proprietor, was a respected writer to
the signet, a Free Church elder in Edinburgh; and that the other, his
equally intolerant nephew, was an Edinburgh advocate, of vigorous
talent, much an enemy of all oppression, and a brother contributor of my
own to one of the Quarterlies. Of all my surmisings regarding the
stranger gentlemen, only two points held true,--they were both
gentlemen of the law, and both had Celtic blood in their veins. The
evening passed pleasantly; and I can now recommend from experience, to
the hapless traveller who gets thoroughly wet thirty miles from a change
of dress, that some of the best things he can resort to in the
circumstances are, a warm room, a warm glass, and agreeable companions.
On the morrow I behooved to return to Isle Ornsay, to set out on the
following day, with my friend the minister, for Rum, where he purposed
preaching on the Sabbath. To have lost a day would have been to lose the
opportunity of exploring the island, perhaps forever; and, to make all
sure, I had taken a seat in the mail gig, from the postman who drives
it, ere going to bed, on the morning of my arrival; and now, when it
drove up, I went to take my place in it. The postmaster of the village,
a lean, hungry-looking man, interfered to prevent me. I had secured my
seat, I said, two days previous. Ah, but I had not secured it from him.
"I know nothing of you," I replied; "but I secured it from one who
deemed himself authorized to receive the fare; was he so?" "Yes." "Could
you have received it?" "No." "Show me a copy of your regulations." "I
have no copy of regulations; but I have given the place in the gig to
another." "Just so; and what say you, postman?" "That you took the place
from me, and that _he_ has no right to give a place to any one: I carry
the Portree letters to him, but he has nothing to do with the
passengers." A person present, the proprietor or stabler of the horse, I
believe, also interfered on the same side; but what Carlyle terms the
"gigmanity" of the postmaster was all at stake,--his whole influence in
the mail-gig of Portree; and so he argued, and threatened withal, and,
what was the more serious part of the business, the person he had given
the seat to had taken possession of the gig; and so we had to compound
the matter by carrying a passenger additional. The incident is scarce
worth relating; but the postmaster was so vehement and terrible, so
defiant of us all,--post, stabler, and simple passenger,--and so justly
impressed with the importance of being postmaster of Portree, that, as I
am in the way of describing rare specimens at any rate, I must refer to
him among the rest, as if he had been one of the minor carnivorae of a
Skye deposit,--a cuttlefish, that preyed on the weaker molluscs, or a
hungry polypus, terrible among the animalculae.
We drove heavily, and had to dismount and walk afoot over every steeper
acclivity; but I carried my hammer, and only grieved that in some one or
two localities the road should have been so level. I regretted it in
especial on the southern and eastern side of Loch Sligachan, where I
could see from my seat, as we drove past, the dark blue rocks in the
water-courses on each side the road, studded over with that
characteristic shell of the Lias, the _Gryphaea incurva_, and that the
dry-stone fences in the moor above exhibit fossils that might figure in
a museum. But we rattled by. At Broadford, twenty-five miles from
Portree, and nine miles from Isle Ornsay, I partook of a hospitable meal
in the house of an acquaintance; and in little more than two hours after
was with my friend the minister at Isle Ornsay. The night wore
pleasantly by. Mrs. Swanson, a niece of the late Dr. Smith of
Campbelton, so well known for his Celtic researches and his exquisite
translations of ancient Celtic poetry, I found deeply versed in the
legendary lore of the Highlands. The minister showed me a fine specimen
of Pterichthys which I had disinterred for him, out of my first
discovered fossiliferous deposit of the Old Red Sandstone, exactly
thirteen years before, and full seven years ere I had introduced the
creature to the notice of Agassiz. And the minister's daughter, a
little chubby girl of three summers, taking part in the general
entertainment, strove to make her Gaelic sound as like English as she
could, in my especial behalf. I remembered, as I listened to the
unintelligible prattle of the little thing, unprovided with a word of
English, that just eighteen years before, her father had had no Gaelic;
and wondered what he would have thought, could he have been told, when
he first sat down to study it, the story of his island charge in Eigg,
and his Free Church yacht the Betsey. Nineteen years before, we had been
engaged in beating over the Eathie Lias together, collecting Belemnites,
Ammonites, and fossil wood, and striving in friendly emulation the one
to surpass the other in the variety and excellence of our specimens. Our
leisure hours were snatched, at the time, from college studies by the
one, from the mallet by the other: there were few of them that we did
not spend together, and that we were not mutually the better for so
spending. I at least, owe much to these hours,--among other things,
views of theologic truth, that determined the side I have taken in our
ecclesiastical controversy. Our courses at an after period lay diverse;
the young minister had greatly more important business to pursue than
any which the geologic field furnishes; and so our amicable rivalry
ceased early. In the words in which an English poet addresses his
brother,--the clergyman who sat for the picture in the "Deserted
Village,"--my friend "entered on a sacred office, where the harvest is
great and the laborers are few, and left to me a field in which the
laborers are many, and the harvest scarce worth carrying away."
Next day at noon we weighed anchor, and stood out for Rum, a run of
about twenty-five miles. A kind friend had, we found, sent aboard in our
behalf two pieces of rare antiquity,--rare anywhere, but especially
rare in the lockers of the Betsey,--in the agreeable form of two bottles
of semi-fossil Madeira,--Madeira that had actually existed in the grape
exactly half a century before, at the time when Robespierre was
startling Paris from its propriety, by mutilating at the neck the busts
of other people, and multiplying casts and medals of his own; and we
found it, explored in moderation, no bad study for geologists,
especially in coarse weather, when they had got wet and somewhat
fatigued. It was like Landlord Boniface's ale, mild as milk, had
exchanged its distinctive flavor as Madeira for a better one, and filled
the cabin with fragrance every time the cork was drawn. Old observant
Homer must have smelt some such liquor somewhere, or he could never have
described so well the still more ancient and venerable wine with which
wily Ulysses beguiled one-eyed Polypheme:--
"Unmingled wine,
Mellifluous, undecaying, and divine,
Which now, some ages from his race concealed,
The hoary sire in gratitude revealed....
Scarce twenty measures from the living stream
To cool one cup sufficed: the goblet crowned,
Breathed aromatic fragrances around."
Winds were light and variable. As we reached the middle of the sound
opposite Armadale, there fell a dead calm; and the Betsey, more actively
idle than the ship manned by the Ancient Mariner, dropped sternwards
along the tide, to the dull music of the flapping sail. The minister
spent the day in the cabin, engaged with his discourse for the morrow;
and I, that he might suffer as little from interruption as possible,
_mis_-spent it upon the deck. I tried fishing with the yacht's set of
lines, but there were no fish to bite,--got into the boat, but there
were no neighboring islands to visit,--and sent half a dozen
pistol-bullets after a shoal of porpoises, which, coming from the Free
Church yacht, must have astonished the fat sleek fellows pretty
considerably, but did them, I am afraid, no serious damage. As the
evening began to close gloomy and gray, a tumbling swell came heaving in
right ahead from the west; and a bank of cloud, which had been gradually
rising higher and darker over the horizon in the same direction, first
changed its abrupt edge atop for a diffused and broken line, and then
spread itself over the central heavens. The calm was evidently not to be
a calm long; and the minister issued orders that the gaff-topsail should
be taken down, and the storm-jib bent; and that we should lower our
topmast, and have all tight and ready for a smart gale ahead. At half
past ten, however, the Betsey was still pitching to the swell, with not
a breath of wind to act on the diminished canvas, and with the solitary
circumstance in her favor, that the tide ran no longer against her, as
before. The cabin was full of all manner of creakings; the close lamp
swung to and fro over the head of my friend; and a refractory
Concordance, after having twice travelled from him along the entire
length of the table, flung itself pettishly upon the floor. I got into
my snug bed about eleven; and at twelve, the minister, after poring
sufficiently over his notes, and drawing the final score, turned into
his. In a brief hour after, on came the gale, in a style worthy of its
previous hours of preparation; and my friend,--his Saturday's work in
his ministerial capacity well over when he had completed his two
discourses,--had to begin the Sabbath morning early as the morning
itself began, by taking his stand at the helm, in his capacity of
skipper of the Betsey. With the prospect of the services of the Sabbath
before him, and after working all Saturday to boot, it was rather hard
to set him down to a midnight spell at the helm, but he could not be
wanted at such a time, as we had no other such helmsman aboard. The
gale, thickened with rain, came down, shrieking like a maniac, from off
the peaked hills of Rum, striking away the tops of the long ridgy
billows that had risen in the calm to indicate its approach, and then
carrying them in sheets of spray aslant the furrowed surface, like
snow-drift hurried across a frozen field. But the Betsey, with her
storm-jib set, and her mainsail reefed to the cross, kept her weather
bow bravely to the blast, and gained on it with every tack. She had been
the pleasure yacht, in her day, of a man of fortune, who had used, in
running south with her at times as far as Lisbon, to encounter, on not
worse terms than the stateliest of her neighbors in the voyage, the
swell of the Bay of Biscay; and she still kept true to her old
character, with but this drawback, that she had now got somewhat crazy
in her fastenings, and made rather more water in a heavy sea than her
one little pump could conveniently keep under. As the fitful gust struck
her headlong, as if it had been some invisible missile hurled at us from
off the hill-tops, she stooped her head lower and lower, like old
stately Hardyknute under the blow of the "King of Norse," till at length
the lee chain-plate rustled sharp through the foam; but, like a staunch
Free Churchwoman, the lowlier she bent, the more steadfastly did she
hold her head to the storm. The strength of the opposition served but to
speed her on all the more surely to the desired haven. At five o'clock
in the morning we cast anchor in Loch Scresort,--the only harbor of Rum
in which a vessel can moor,--within two hundred yards of the shore,
having, with the exception of the minister, gained no loss in the gale.
He, luckless man, had parted from his excellent _sou-wester_; a sudden
gust had seized it by the flap, and hurried it away far to the lee. He
had yielded it to the winds, as he had done the temporalities, but much
more unwillingly, and less as a free agent. Should any conscientious
mariner pick up any where in the Atlantic a serviceable ochre-colored
_sou-wester_, not at all the worse for the wear, I give him to wit that
he holds Free Church property, and that he is heartily welcome to hold
it, leaving it to himself to consider whether a benefaction to its full
value, deducting salvage, is not owing, in honor, to the Sustenation
Fund.
It was ten o'clock ere the more fatigued aboard could muster resolution
enough to quit their beds a second time; and then it behooved the
minister to prepare for his Sabbath labors ashore. The gale still blew
in fierce gusts from the hills, and the rain pattered like small shot on
the deck. Loch Scresort, by no means one of our finer island lochs,
viewed under any circumstances, looked particularly dismal this morning.
It forms the opening of a dreary moorland valley, bounded on one of its
sides, to the mouth of the loch, by a homely ridge of Old Red Sandstone,
and on the other by a line of dark augitic hills, that attain, at the
distance of about a mile from the sea, an elevation of two thousand
feet. Along the slopes of the sandstone ridge I could discern, through
the haze, numerous green patches, that had once supported a dense
population, long since "cleared off" to the backwoods of America, but
not one inhabited dwelling; while along a black moory acclivity under
the hills on the other side I could see several groups of turf cottages,
with here and there a minute speck of raw-looking corn beside them,
that, judging from its color, seemed to have but a slight chance of
ripening. The hill-tops were lost in cloud and storm; and ever and anon,
as a heavier shower came sweeping down on the wind, the intervening
hollows closed up their gloomy vistas, and all was fog and rime to the
water's edge. Bad as the morning was, however, we could see the people
wending their way, in threes and fours, through the dark moor, to the
place of worship,--a black turf hovel, like the meeting-house in Eigg.
The appearance of the Betsey in the loch had been the gathering signal;
and the Free Church islanders,--three-fourths of the entire
population--had all come out to meet their minister.
On going ashore, we found the place nearly filled. My friend preached
two long energetic discourses, and then returned to the yacht, "a worn
and weary man." The studies of the previous day, and the fatigues of the
previous night, added to his pulpit duties, had so fairly prostrated his
strength, that the sternest teetotaller in the kingdom would scarce have
forbidden him a glass of our fifty-year-old Madeira. But even the
fifty-year-old Madeira proved no specific in the case. He was suffering
under excruciating headache, and had to stretch himself in his bed, with
eyes shut but sleepless, waiting till the fit should pass,--every pulse
that beat in his temples a throb of pain.
CHAPTER VIII.
Geology of Rum--Its curious Character illustrated--Rum famous for
Bloodstones--Red Sandstones--"Scratchings" in the Rocks--A
Geological Inscription without a Key--The Lizard--Vitality broken
into two--Illustrations--Speculation--Scuir More--Ascent of the
Scuir--The Bloodstones--An Illustrative Set of the Gem--M'Culloch's
Pebble--A Chemical Problem--The solitary Shepherd's House--Sheep
_versus_ Men--The Depopulation of Rum--A Haul of Trout--Rum Mode of
catching Trout--At Anchor in the Bay of Glenelg.
The geology of the island of Rum is simple, but curious. Let the reader
take, if he can, from twelve to fifteen trap-hills, varying from one
thousand to two thousand three hundred feet in height; let him pack them
closely and squarely together, like rum-bottles in a case-basket; let
him surround them with a frame of Old Red Sandstone, measuring rather
more than seven miles on the side, in the way the basket surrounds the
bottles; then let him set them down in the sea a dozen miles off the
land,--and he shall have produced a second island of Rum, similar in
structure to the existing one. In the actual island, however, there is a
defect in the inclosing basket of sandstone: the basket, complete on
three of its sides, wants the fourth: and the side opposite to the gap
which the fourth should have occupied is thicker than the two other
sides put together. Where I now write there is an old dark-colored
picture on the wall before me. I take off one of the four bars of which
the frame is composed,--the end-bar,--and stick it on to the end-bar
opposite, and then the picture is fully framed on two of its sides, and
doubly framed on a third, but the fourth side lacks framing altogether.
And such is the geology of the island of Rum. We find the one loch of
the island,--that in which the Betsey lies at anchor,--and the long
withdrawing valley, of which the loch is merely a prolongation,
occurring in the double sandstone bar: it seems to mark--to return to my
illustration--the line in which the superadded piece of frame has been
stuck on to the frame proper. The origin of the island is illustrated by
its structure: it has left its story legibly written, and we have but to
run our eye over the characters and read. An extended sea-bottom,
composed of Old Red Sandstone, already tilted up by previous
convulsions, so that the strata presented their edges, tier beyond tier,
like roofing slate laid aslant on a floor, became a centre of Plutonic
activity. The molten trap broke through at various times, and presenting
various appearances, but in nearly the same centre; here existing as an
augitic rock, there as a syenite, yonder as a basalt or amygdaloid. At
one place it uptilted the sandstone; at another it overflowed it; the
dark central masses raised their heads above the surface, higher and
higher with every earthquake throe from beneath; till at length the
gigantic Ben More attained to its present altitude of two thousand three
hundred feet over the sea-level, and the sandstone, borne up from
beneath like floating sea-wrack on the back of a porpoise, reached in
long outside bands its elevation of from six to eight hundred. And such
is the piece of history, composed in silent but expressive language, and
inscribed in the old geological character, on the rocks of Rum.
The wind lowered and the rain ceased during the night, and the morning
of Monday was clear, bracing, and breezy. The island of Rum is chiefly
famous among mineralogists for its heliotropes or bloodstones; and we
proposed devoting the greater part of the day to an examination of the
hill of Scuir More, in which they occur, and which lies on the opposite
side of the island, about eight miles from the mooring ground of the
Betsey. Ere setting out, however, I found time enough, by rising some
two or three hours before breakfast, to explore the Red Sandstones on
the southern side of the loch. They lie in this bar of the frame,--to
return once more to my old illustration,--as if it had been cut out of a
piece of cross-grained deal, in which the annular bands, instead of
ranging lengthwise, ran diagonally from side to side; stratum leans over
stratum, dipping towards the west at an angle of about thirty degrees;
and as in a continuous line of more than seven miles there seem no
breaks or repetitions in the strata, the thickness of the deposit must
be enormous,--not less, I should suppose, than from six to eight
thousand feet. Like the Lower Old Red Sandstones of Cromarty and Moray,
the red arenaceous strata occur in thick beds, separated from each other
by bands of a grayish-colored stratified clay, on the planes of which I
could trace with great distinctness ripple markings; but in vain did I
explore their numerous folds for the plates, scales, and fucoid
impressions which abound in the gray argillaceous beds of the shores of
the Moray and Cromarty Friths. It would, however, be rash to pronounce
them non-fossiliferous, after the hasty search of a single
morning,--unpardonably so in one who had spent very many mornings in
putting to the question the gray stratified beds of Ross and Cromarty,
ere he succeeded in extorting from them the secret of their organic
riches.
We set out about half-past ten for Scuir More, through the Red Sandstone
valley in which Loch Scresort terminates, with one of Mr. Swanson's
people, a young active lad of twenty, for our guide. In passing upwards
for nearly a mile along the stream that falls into the upper part of the
loch, and lays bare the strata, we saw no change in the character of
the sandstone. Red arenaceous beds of great thickness alternate with
grayish-colored bands, composed of a ripple-marked micaceous slate and a
stratified clay. For a depth of full three thousand feet, and I know not
how much more,--for I lacked time to trace it further,--the deposit
presents no other variety: the thick red bed of at least a hundred yards
succeeds the thin gray band of from three to six feet, and is succeeded
by a similar gray band in turn. The ripple-marks I found as sharply
relieved in some of the folds as if the wavy undulations to which they
owed their origin had passed over them within the hour. The
comparatively small size of their alternating ridges and furrows give
evidence that the waters beneath which they had formed had been of no
very profound depth. In the upper part of the valley, which is bare,
trackless, and solitary, with a high monotonous sandstone ridge bounding
it on the one side, and a line of gloomy trap-hills rising over it on
the other, the edges of the strata, where they protrude through the
mingled heath and moss, exhibit the mysterious scratchings and
polishings now so generally connected with the glacial theory of
Agassiz. The scratchings run in nearly the line of the valley, which
exhibits no trace of moraines; and they seem to have been produced
rather by the operation of those extensively developed causes, whatever
their nature, that have at once left their mark on the sides and summits
of some of our highest hills, and the rocks and boulders of some of our
most extended plains, than by the agency of forces limited to the
locality. They testify, Agassiz would perhaps say, not regarding the
existence of some local glacier that descended from the higher grounds
into the valley, but respecting the existence of the great polar
glacier. I felt, however, in this bleak and solitary hollow, with the
grooved and polished platforms at my feet, stretching away amid the
heath, like flat tombstones in a graveyard, that I had arrived at one
geologic inscription to which I still wanted the key. The vesicular
structure of the traps on the one hand, identical with that of so many
of our modern lavas,--the ripple-markings of the arenaceous beds on the
other, indistinguishable from those of the sea-banks on our coasts,--the
upturned strata and the overlying trap,--told all their several stories
of fire, or wave, or terrible convulsion, and told them simply and
clearly; but here was a story not clearly told. It summoned up doubtful,
ever-shifting visions,--now of a vast ice continent, abutting on this
far isle of the Hebrides from the Pole, and trampling heavily over
it,--now of the wild rush of a turbid, mountain-high flood breaking in
from the west, and hurling athwart the torn surface, rocks, and stones,
and clay,--now of a dreary ocean rising high along the hills, and
bearing onward with its winds and currents, huge icebergs, that now
brushed the mountain-sides, and now grated along the bottom of the
submerged valleys. The inscription on the polished surfaces, with its
careless mixture of groove and scratch, is an inscription of very
various readings.
We passed along a transverse hollow, and then began to ascend a
hill-side, from the ridge of which the water sheds to the opposite shore
of the island, and on which we catch our first glimpse of Scuir More,
standing up over the sea, like a pyramid shorn of its top. A brown
lizard, nearly five inches in length, startled by our approach, ran
hurriedly across the path; and our guide, possessed by the general
Highland belief that the creature is poisonous, and injures cattle,
struck at it with a switch, and cut it in two immediately behind the
hinder legs. The upper half, containing all that anatomists regard as
the vitals, heart, brain, and viscera, all the main nerves, and all the
larger arteries, lay stunned by the blow, as if dead; nor did it
manifest any signs of vitality so long as we remained beside it; whereas
the lower half, as if the whole life of the animal had retired into
_it_, continued dancing upon the moss for a full minute after, like a
young eel scooped out of some stream, and thrown upon the bank; and then
lay wriggling and palpitating for about half a minute more. There are
few things more inexplicable in the province of the naturalist than the
phenomenon of what may be termed divided life,--vitality broken into
two, and yet continuing to exist as vitality in both the dissevered
pieces. We see in the nobler animals mere glimpses of the
phenomenon,--mere indications of it, doubtfully apparent for at most a
few minutes. The blood drawn from the human arm by the lancet continues
to live in the cup until it has cooled and begun to coagulate; and when
head and body have parted company under the guillotine, both exhibit for
a brief space such unequivocal signs of life, that the question arose in
France during the horrors of the Revolution, whether there might not be
some glimmering of consciousness attendant at the same time on the
fearfully opening and shutting eyes and mouth of the one, and the
beating heart and jerking neck of the other. The lower we descend in the
scale of being, the more striking the instances which we receive of this
divisibility of the vital principle. I have seen the two halves of the
heart of a ray pulsating for a full quarter of an hour after they had
been separated from the body and from each other. The blood circulates
in the hind leg of a frog for many minutes after the removal of the
heart, which meanwhile keeps up an independent motion of its own.
Vitality can be so divided in the earthworm, that, as demonstrated by
the experiments of Spalanzani, each of the severed parts carries life
enough away to set it up as an independent animal; while the polypus, a
creature of still more imperfect organization, and with the vivacious
principle more equally diffused over it, may be multiplied by its pieces
nearly as readily as a gooseberry bush by its slips. It was sufficiently
curious, however, to see, in the case of this brown lizard, the least
vital half of the creature so much more vivacious, apparently, than the
half which contained the heart and brain. It is not improbable, however,
that the presence of these organs had only the effect of rendering the
upper portion which contained them more capable of being thrown into a
state of insensibility. A blow dealt one of the vertebrata on the head
at once renders it insensible. It is after this mode the fisherman kills
the salmon captured in his wear, and a single blow, when well directed,
is always sufficient; but no single blow has the same effect on the
earthworm; and here it was vitality in the inferior portion of the
reptile,--the earthworm portion of it, if I may so speak,--that refused
to participate in the state of syncope into which the vitality of the
superior portion had been thrown. The nice and delicate vitality of the
brain seems to impart to the whole system in connection with it an
aptitude for dying suddenly,--a susceptibility of instant death, which
would be wanting without it. The heart of the rabbit continues to beat
regularly long after the brain has been removed by careful excision, if
respiration be artificially kept up; but if, instead of amputating the
head, the brain be crushed in its place by a sudden blow of a hammer,
the heart ceases its motion at once. And such seemed to be the principle
illustrated here. But why the agonized dancing on the sward of the
inferior part of the reptile?--why its after painful writhing and
wriggling? The young eel scooped from the stream, whose motions it
resembled, is impressed by terror, and can feel pain; was _it_ also
impressed by terror, or susceptible of suffering? We see in the case of
both exactly the same signs,--the dancing, the writhing, the wriggling;
but are we to interpret them after the same manner? In the small
red-headed earthworm divided by Spalanzani, that in three months got
upper extremities to its lower part, and lower extremities, in as many
weeks, to its upper part, the dividing blow must have dealt duplicate
feelings,--pain and terror to the portion below, and pain and terror to
the portion above,--so far, at least, as a creature so low in the scale
was susceptible of these feelings; but are we to hold that the leaping,
wriggling tail of the reptile possessed in any degree a similar
susceptibility? _I_ can propound the riddle, but who shall resolve it?
It may be added, that this brown lizard was the only recent saurian I
chanced to see in the Hebrides, and that, though large for its kind, its
whole bulk did not nearly equal that of a single vertebral joint of the
fossil saurians of Eigg. The reptile, since his deposition from the
first place in the scale of creation, has sunk sadly in those parts: the
ex-monarch has become a low plebeian.
We came down upon the coast through a swampy valley, terminating in the
interior in a frowning wall of basalt, and bounded on the south, where
it opens to the sea, by the Scuir More. The Scuir is a precipitous
mountain, that rises from twelve to fifteen hundred feet direct over the
beach. M'Culloch describes it as inaccessible, and states that it is
only among the debris at its base that its heliotropes can be procured;
but the distinguished mineralogist must have had considerably less skill
in climbing rocks than in describing them, as, indeed, some of his
descriptions, though generally very admirable, abundantly testify. I am
inclined to infer from his book, after having passed over much of the
ground which he describes, that he must have been a man of the type so
well hit off by Burns in his portrait of Captain Grose,--round, rosy,
short-legged, quick of eye but slow of foot, quite as indifferent a
climber as Bailie Nicol Jarvie, and disposed at times, like the elderly
gentleman drawn by Crabbe, to prefer the view at the hill-foot to the
prospect from its summit. I found little difficulty in scaling the sides
of Scuir More for a thousand feet upwards,--in one part by a route
rarely attempted before,--and in ensconcing myself among the
bloodstones. They occur in the amygdaloidal trap of which the upper part
of the hill is mainly composed, in great numbers, and occasionally in
bulky masses; but it is rare to find other than small specimens that
would be recognized as of value by the lapidary. The inclosing rock must
have been as thickly vesicular in its original state as the scoria of a
glass-house; and all the vesicles, large and small, like the retorts and
receivers of a laboratory, have been vessels in which some curious
chemical process has been carried on. Many of them we find filled with a
white semi-translucent or opaque chalcedony; many more with a pure green
earth, which, where exposed to the bleaching influences of the weather,
exhibits a fine verdigris hue, but which in the fresh fracture is
generally of an olive green, or of a brownish or reddish color. I have
never yet seen a rock in which this earth was so abundant as in the
amygdaloid of Scuir More. For yards together in some places we see it
projecting from the surface in round globules, that very much resemble
green peas, and that occur as thickly in the inclosing mass as pebbles
in an Old Red Sandstone conglomerate. The heliotrope has formed among it
in centres, to which the chalcedony seems to have been drawn, as if by
molecular attraction. We find a mass, varying from the size of a walnut
to that of a man's head, occupying some larger vesicle or crevice of the
amygdaloid, and all the smaller vesicles around it, for an inch or two,
filled with what we may venture to term satellite heliotropes, some of
them as minute as grains of wild mustard, and all of them more or less
earthy, generally in proportion to their distance from the first formed
heliotrope in the middle. No one can see them in their place in the
rock, with the abundant green earth all around, and the chalcedony, in
its uncolored state, filling up so many of the larger cavities, without
acquiescing in the conclusion respecting the origin of the gem first
suggested by Werner, and afterwards adopted and illustrated by
M'Culloch. The heliotrope is merely a chalcedony, stained in the forming
with an infusion of green earth, as the colored waters in the
apothecary's window are stained by the infusions, vegetable and mineral,
from which they derive their ornamental character. The red mottlings
which so heighten the beauty of the stone occur in comparatively few of
the specimens of Scuir More. They are minute jasperous formations,
independent of the inclosing mass; and, from their resemblance to
streaks and spots of blood, suggest the name by which the heliotrope is
popularly known. I succeeded in making up, among the crags, a set of
specimens curiously illustrative of the origin of the gem. One specimen
consists of white, uncolored chalcedony; a second, of a rich
verdigris-hued green earth; a third, of chalcedony barely tinged with
green; a fourth, of chalcedony tinged just a shade more deeply; a fifth,
tinged more deeply still; a sixth, of a deep green on one side, and
scarce at all colored on the other; and a seventh, dark and richly
toned,--a true bloodstone,--thickly streaked and mottled with red
jasper. In the chemical process that rendered the Scuir More a mountain
of gems there were two deteriorating circumstances, which operated to
the disadvantage of its larger heliotropes: the green earth, as if
insufficiently stirred in the mixing, has gathered, in many of them,
into minute soft globules, like air-bubbles in glass, that render them
valueless for the purposes of the lapidary, by filling them all over
with little cavities; and in not a few of the others, an infiltration of
lime, that refused to incorporate with the chalcedonic mass, exists in
thin glassy films and veins, that, from their comparative softness, have
a nearly similar effect with the impalpable green earth in roughing the
surface under the burnisher.
We find figured by M'Culloch, in his "Western Islands," the internal
cavity of a pebble of Scuir More, which he picked up on the beach below,
and which had been formed evidently within one of the larger vesicles of
the amygdaloid. He describes it as curiously illustrative of a various
chemistry; the outer crust is composed of a pale-zoned agate, inclosing
a cavity, from the upper side of which there depends a group of
chalcedonic stalactites, some of them, as in ancient spar caves,
reaching to the floor; and bearing on its under side a large crystal of
carbonate of lime, that the longer stalactites pass through. In the
vesicle in which this hollow pebble was formed three consecutive
processes must have gone on. First, a process of infiltration coated the
interior all around with layer after layer, now of one mineral
substance, now of another, as a plasterer coats over the sides and
ceiling of a room with successive layers of lime, putty, and stucco; and
had this process gone on, the whole cell would have been filled with a
pale-zoned agate. But it ceased, and a new process began. A chalcedonic
infiltration gradually entered from above; and, instead of coating over
the walls, roof, and floor, it hardened into a group of spear-like
stalactites, that lengthened by slow degrees, till some of them had
traversed the entire cavity from top to bottom. And then this second
process ceased like the first, and a third commenced. An infiltration
of lime took place; and the minute calcareous molecules, under the
influence of the law of crystallization, built themselves up on the
floor into a large smooth-sided rhomb, resembling a closed sarcophagus
resting in the middle of some Egyptian cemetery. And then, the limestone
crystal completed, there ensued no after change. As shown by some other
specimens, however, there was a yet farther process: a pure quartzose
deposition took place, that coated not a few of the calcareous rhombs
with sprigs of rock-crystal. I found in the Scuir More several cellular
agates in which similar processes had gone on,--none of them quite so
fine, however, as the one figured by M'Culloch; but there seemed no lack
of evidence regarding the strange and multifarious chemistry that had
been carried on in the vesicular cavities of this mountain, as in the
retorts of some vast laboratory. Here was a vesicle filled with green
earth,--there a vesicle filled with calcareous spar,--yonder a vesicle
crusted round on a thin chalcedonic shell with rock-crystal,--in one
cavity an agate had been elaborated, in another a heliotrope, in a third
a milk-white chalcedony, in a fourth a jasper. On what principle, and
under what direction, have results so various taken place in vesicles of
the same rock, that in many instances occur scarce half an inch apart?
Why, for instance, should that vesicle have elaborated only green earth,
and the vesicle separated from it by a partition barely a line in
thickness, have elaborated only chalcedony? Why should this chamber
contain only a quartzose compound of oxygen and silica, and that second
chamber beside it contain only a calcareous compound of lime and
carbonic acid? What law directed infiltrations so diverse to seek out
for themselves vesicles in such close neighborhood, and to keep, in so
many instances, each to his own vesicle? I can but state the
problem,--not solve it. The groups of heliotropes clustered each around
its bulky centrical mass seem to show that the principle of molecular
attraction may be operative in very dense mediae,--in a hard amygdaloidal
trap even; and it seems not improbable, that to this law, which draws
atom to its kindred atom, as clansmen of old used to speed at the
mustering signal to their gathering place, the various chemistry of the
vesicles may owe its variety.
I shall attempt stating the chemical problem furnished by the vesicles
here in a mechanical form. Let us suppose that every vesicle was a
chamber furnished with a door, and that beside every door there watched,
as in the draught doors of our coal-pits, some one to open and shut it,
as circumstances might require. Let us suppose further, that for a
certain time an infusion of green earth pervaded the surrounding mass,
and percolated through it, and that every door was opened to receive a
portion of the infusion. We find that no vesicle wants its coating of
this earthy mineral. The coating received, however, one-half the doors
shut, while the other half remained agap, and filled with green earth
entirely. Next followed a series of alternate infusions of chalcedony,
jasper, and quartz; many doors opened and received some two or three
coatings, that form around the vesicles skull-like shells of agate, and
then shut; a few remained open, and became as entirely occupied with
agate as many of the previous ones had become filled with green earth.
Then an ample infusion of chalcedony pervaded the mass. Numerous doors
again opened; some took in a portion of the chalcedony, and then shut;
some remained open, and became filled with it; and many more that had
been previously filled by the green earth opened their doors again, and
the chalcedony pervading the green porous mass, converted it into
heliotrope. Then an infusion of lime took place. Doors opened, many of
which had been hitherto shut, save for a short time, when the green
earth infusion obtained, and became filled with lime; other doors
opened for a brief space, and received lime enough to form a few
crystals. Last of all, there was a pure quartzose infusion, and doors
opened, some for a longer time, some for a shorter, just as on previous
occasions. Now, by mechanical means of this character,--by such an
arrangement of successive infusions, and such a device of shutting and
opening of doors,--the phenomena exhibited by the vesicles could be
produced. There is no difficulty in working the problem mechanically, if
we be allowed to assume in our data successive infusions, well-fitted
doors, and watchful door-keepers; and if any one can work it
chemically,--certainly without door-keepers, but with such doors and
such infusions as he can show to have existed,--he shall have cleared up
the mystery of the Scuir More. I have given their various cargoes to all
its many vesicles by mechanical means, at no expense of ingenuity
whatever. Are there any of my readers prepared to give it to them by
means purely chemical?
There is a solitary house in the opening of the valley, over which the
Scuir More stands sentinel,--a house so solitary, that the entire
breadth of the island intervenes between it and the nearest human
dwelling. It is inhabited by a shepherd and his wife,--the sole
representatives in the valley of a numerous population, long since
expatriated to make way for a few flocks of sheep, but whose ranges of
little fields may still be seen green amid the heath on both sides, for
nearly a mile upwards from the opening. After descending along the
precipices of the Scuir, we struck across the valley, and, on scaling
the opposite slope sat down on the summit to rest us, about a hundred
yards over the house of the shepherd. He had seen us from below, when
engaged among the bloodstones, and had seen, withal, that we were not
coming his way; and, "on hospitable thoughts intent," he climbed to
where we sat, accompanied by his wife, she bearing a vast bowl of milk,
and he a basket of bread and cheese. And we found the refreshment most
seasonable, after our long hours of toil, and with a rough journey still
before us. It is an excellent circumstance, that hospitality grows best
where it is most needed. In the thick of men it dwindles and disappears,
like fruits in the thick of a wood; but where man is planted sparsely,
it blossoms and matures, like apples on a standard or espalier. It
flourishes where the inn and the lodging-house cannot exist, and dies
out where they thrive and multiply.
We reached the cross valley in the interior of the island about half an
hour before sunset. The evening was clear, calm, golden-tinted; even
wild heaths and rude rocks had assumed a flush of transient beauty; and
the emerald-green patches on the hill-sides, barred by the plough
lengthwise, diagonally, and transverse, had borrowed an aspect of soft
and velvety richness, from the mellowed light and the broadening
shadows. All was solitary. We could see among the deserted fields the
grass-grown foundations of cottages razed to the ground; but the valley,
more desolate than that which we had left, had not even its single
inhabited dwelling: it seemed as if man had done with it forever. The
island, eighteen years before, had been divested of its inhabitants,
amounting at the time to rather more than four hundred souls, to make
way for one sheep-farmer and eight thousand sheep. All the aborigines of
Rum crossed the Atlantic; and at the close of 1828, the entire
population consisted of but the sheep-farmer, and a few shepherds, his
servants; the island of Rum reckoned up scarce a single family at this
period for every five square miles of area which it contained. But
depopulation on so extreme a scale was found inconvenient; the place had
been rendered too thoroughly a desert for the comfort of the occupant;
and on the occasion of a clearing which took place shortly after in
Skye, he accommodated some ten or twelve of the ejected families with
sites for cottages, and pasturage for a few cows, on the bit of morass
beside Loch Scresort, on which I had seen their humble dwellings. But
the whole of the once-peopled interior remains a wilderness, without
inhabitant,--all the more lonely in its aspect from the circumstance
that the solitary valleys, with their plough-furrowed patches, and their
ruined heaps of stone, open upon shores every whit as solitary as
themselves, and that the wide untrodden sea stretches drearily around.
The armies of the insect world were sporting in the light this evening
by millions; a brown stream that runs through the valley yielded an
incessant popling sound, from the myriads of fish that were ceaselessly
leaping in the pools, beguiled by the quick glancing wings of green and
gold that fluttered over them; along a distant hill-side there ran what
seemed the ruins of a gray-stone fence, erected, says tradition, in a
remote age, to facilitate the hunting of the deer; there were fields on
which the heath and moss of the surrounding moorlands were fast
encroaching, that had borne many a successive harvest; and prostrate
cottages, that had been the scenes of christenings, and bridals, and
blythe new-year's days;--all seemed to bespeak the place a fitting
habitation for man, in which not only the necessaries, but also a few of
the luxuries of life, might be procured; but in the entire prospect not
a man nor a man's dwelling could the eye command. The landscape was one
without figures. I do not much like extermination carried out so
thoroughly and on system;--it seems bad policy; and I have not succeeded
in thinking any the better of it though assured by economists that there
are more than people enough in Scotland still. There are, I believe,
more than enough in our workhouses,--more than enough on our
pauper-rolls,--more than enough huddled up, disreputable, useless, and
unhappy, in the miasmatic alleys and typhoid courts of our large towns;
but I have yet to learn how arguments for local depopulation are to be
drawn from facts such as these. A brave and hardy people, favorably
placed for the development of all that is excellent in human nature,
form the glory and strength of a country;--a people sunk into an abyss
of degradation and misery, and in which it is the whole tendency of
external circumstances to sink them yet deeper, constitute its weakness
and its shame; and I cannot quite see on what principle the ominous
increase which is taking place among us in the worse class, is to form
our solace or apology for the wholesale expatriation of the better. It
did not seem as if the depopulation of Rum had tended much to any one's
advantage. The single sheep-farmer who had occupied the holdings of so
many had been unfortunate in his speculations, and had left the island:
the proprietor, his landlord, seemed to have been as little fortunate as
the tenant, for the island itself was in the market; and a report went
current at the time, that it was on the eve of being purchased by some
wealthy Englishman, who purposed converting it into a deer-forest. How
strange a cycle! Uninhabited originally save by wild animals, it became
at an early period a home of men, who, as the gray wall on the hill-side
testified, derived, in part at least, their sustenance from the chase.
They broke in from the waste the furrowed patches on the slopes of the
valleys,--they reared herds of cattle and flocks of sheep,--their number
increased to nearly five hundred souls,--they enjoyed the average
happiness of human creatures in the present imperfect state of
being,--they contributed their portion of hardy and vigorous manhood to
the armies of the country,--and a few of their more adventurous spirits,
impatient of the narrow bounds which confined them, and a course of
life little varied by incident, emigrated to America. Then came the
change of system so general in the Highlands; and the island lost all
its original inhabitants, on a wool and mutton speculation,--inhabitants,
the descendants of men who had chased the deer on its hills five hundred
years before, and who, though they recognized some wild island lord as
their superior, and did him service, had regarded the place as indisputably
their own. And now yet another change was on the eve of ensuing, and the
island was to return to its original state, as a home of wild animals,
where a few hunters from the mainland might enjoy the chase for a month or
two every twelvemonth, but which could form no permanent place of human
abode. Once more, a strange and surely most melancholy cycle!
There was light enough left, as we reached the upper part of Loch
Scresort, to show us a shoal of small silver-coated trout, leaping by
scores at the effluence of the little stream along which we had set out
in the morning on our expedition. There was a net stretched across where
the play was thickest; and we learned that the haul of the previous tide
had amounted to several hundreds. On reaching the Betsey, we found a
pail and basket laid against the companion-head,--the basket containing
about two dozen small trout,--the minister's unsolicited teind of the
morning draught; the pail filled with razor-fish of great size. The
people of my friend are far from wealthy; there is scarce any
circulating medium in Rum; and the cottars in Eigg contrive barely
enough to earn at the harvest in the Lowlands money sufficient to clear
with their landlord at rent-day. Their contributions for ecclesiastical
purposes make no great figure, therefore, in the lists of the
Sustentation Fund. But of what they have they give willingly and in a
kindly spirit; and if baskets of small trout, or pailfuls of spout-fish,
went current in the Free Church, there would, I am certain, be a per
centage of both the fish and the mollusc, derived from the Small Isles,
in the half-yearly sustentation dividends. We found the supply of
both,--especially as provisions were beginning to run short in the
lockers of the Betsey,--quite deserving of our gratitude. The razor-fish
had been brought us by the worthy catechist of the island. He had gone
to the ebb in our special behalf, and had spent a tide in laboriously
filling the pail with these "treasures hid in the sand;" thoroughly
aware, like the old exiled puritan, who eked out his meals in a time of
scarcity with the oysters of New England, that even the razor-fish,
under this head, is included in the promises. There is a peculiarity in
the razor-fish of Rum that I have not marked in the razor-fish of our
eastern coasts. The gills of the animal, instead of bearing the general
color of its other parts, like those of the oyster, are of a deep green
color, resembling, when examined by the microscope, the fringe of a
green curtain.
We were told by John Stewart, that the expatriated inhabitants of Rum
used to catch trout by a simple device of ancient standing, which
preceded the introduction of nets into the island, and which, it is
possible, may in other localities have not only preceded the use of the
net, but may have also suggested it: it had at least the appearance of
being a first beginning of invention in this direction. The islanders
gathered large quantities of heath, and then tying it loosely into
bundles, and stripping it of its softer leafage, they laid the bundles
across the stream on a little mound held down by stones, with the tops
of the heath turned upwards to the current. The water rose against the
mound for a foot or eighteen inches, and then murmured over and through,
occasioning an expansion among the hard elastic sprays. Next a party of
the islanders came down the stream, beating the banks and pools, and
sending a still thickening shoal of trout before them, that, on
reaching the miniature dam formed by the bundles, darted forward for
shelter, as if to a hollow bank, and stuck among the slim hard branches,
as they would in the meshes of a net. The stones were then hastily
thrown off,--the bundles pitched ashore,--the better fish, to the amount
not unfrequently of several scores, secured,--and the young fry returned
to the stream, to take care of themselves, and grow bigger. We fared
richly this evening, after our hard day's labor, on tea and trout; and
as the minister had to attend a meeting of the Presbytery of Skye on the
following Wednesday, we sailed next morning for Glenelg, whence he
purposed taking the steamer for Portree. Winds were light and baffling,
and the currents, like capricious friends, neutralized at one time the
assistance which they lent us at another. It was dark night ere we had
passed Isle Ornsay, and morning broke as we cast anchor in the Bay of
Glenelg. At ten o'clock the steamer heaved-to in the bay to land a few
passengers, and the minister went on board, leaving me in charge of the
Betsey, to follow him, when the tide set in, through the Kyles of Skye.
CHAPTER IX.
Kyles of Skye--A Gneiss District--Kyle Rhea--A Boiling Tide--A
"Take" of Sillocks--The Betsey's "Paces"--In the Bay at
Broadford--Rain--Island of Pabba--Description of the Island--Its
Geological Structure--Astrea--Polypifers--_Gryphaea incurva_--Three
groups of Fossils in the Lias of Skye--Abundance of the
Petrifactions of Pabba--Scenery--Pabba a "piece of smooth, level
England"--Fossil Shells of Pabba--Voyage resumed--Kyle Akin--Ruins
of Castle Maoil--A "Thornback" Dinner--The Bunch of Deep Sea
Tangle--The Caileach Stone--Kelp Furnaces--Escape of the Betsey
from sinking.
No sailing vessel attempts threading the Kyles of Skye from the south in
the face of an adverse tide. The currents of Kyle Rhea care little for
the wind-filled sail, and battle at times, on scarce unequal terms, with
the steam-propelled paddle. The Toward Castle this morning had such a
struggle to force her way inwards, as may be seen maintained at the door
of some place of public meeting during the heat of some agitating
controversy, when seat and passage within can hold no more, and a
disappointed crowd press eagerly for admission from without. Viewed from
the anchoring place at Glenelg, the opening of the Kyle presents the
appearance of the bottom of a landlocked bay;--the hills of Skye seem
leaning against those of the mainland: and the tide-buffeted steamer
looked this morning as if boring her way into the earth, like a
disinterred mole, only at a rate vastly slower. First, however, with a
progress resembling that of the minute-hand of a clock, the bows
disappeared amid the heath, then the midships, then the quarter-deck and
stern, and then, last of all, the red tip of the sun-brightened
union-jack that streamed gaudily behind. I had at least two hours
before me ere the Betsey might attempt weighing anchor; and, that they
might leave some mark, I went and spent them ashore in the opening of
Glenelg,--a gneiss district, nearly identical in structure with the
district of Knock and Isle Ornsay. The upper part of the valley is bare
and treeless, but not such its character where it opens to the sea; the
hills are richly wooded; and cottages, and cornfields, with here and
there a reach of the lively little river, peep out from among the trees.
A group of tall roofless buildings, with a strong wall in front, form
the central point in the landscape; these are the dismantled Berera
Barracks, built, like the line of forts in the great Caledonian
Valley,--Fort George, Fort Augustus, and Fort William,--to overawe the
Highlands at a time when the loyalty of the Highlander pointed to a king
beyond the water; but all use for them has long gone by, and they now
lie in dreary ruin,--mere sheltering places for the toad and the bat. I
found in a loose silt on the banks of the river, at some little distance
below tide-mark, a bed of shells and coral, which might belong, I at
first supposed, to some secondary formation, but which I ascertained, on
examination, to be a mere recent deposit, not so old by many centuries
as our last raised sea-beaches. There occurs in various localities on
these western coasts, especially on the shores of the island of Pabba, a
sprig coral, considerably larger in size than any I have elsewhere seen
in Scotland; and it was from its great abundance in this bed of silt
that I was at first led to deem the deposit an ancient one.
We weighed anchor about noon, and entered the opening of Kyle Rhea.
Vessel after vessel, to the number of eight or ten in all, had been
arriving in the course of the morning, and dropping anchor, nearer the
opening or farther away, each according to its sailing ability, to await
the turn of the tide; and we now found ourselves one of the components
of a little fleet, with some five or six vessels sweeping up the Kyle
before us, and some three or four driving on behind. Never, except
perhaps in a Highland river big in flood, have I seen such a tide. It
danced and wheeled, and came boiling in huge masses from the bottom; and
now our bows heaved abruptly round in one direction, and now they jerked
as suddenly round in another; and, though there blew a moderate breeze
at the time, the helm failed to keep the sails steadily full. But
whether our sheets bellied out, or flapped right in the wind's eye, on
we swept in the tideway, like a cork caught during a thunder shower in
one of the rapids of the High Street. At one point the Kyle is little
more than a quarter of a mile in breadth; and here, in the powerful eddy
which ran along the shore, we saw a group of small fishing-boats
pursuing a shoal of sillocks in a style that blent all the liveliness of
the chase with the specific interest of the angle. The shoal, restless
as the tides among which it disported, now rose in the boilings of one
eddy, now beat the water into foam amid the stiller dimplings of
another. The boats hurried from spot to spot wherever the quick
glittering scales appeared. For a few seconds, rods would be cast thick
and fast, as if employed in beating the water, and captured fish glanced
bright to the sun; and then the take would cease, and the play rise
elsewhere, and oars would flash out amain, as the little fleet again
dashed into the heart of the shoal. As the Kyle widened, the force of
the current diminished, and sail and helm again became things of
positive importance. The wind blew a-head, steady though not strong; and
the Betsey, with companions in the voyage against which to measure
herself, began to show her paces. First she passed one bulky vessel,
then another: she lay closer to the wind than any of her fellows, glided
more quickly through the water, turned in her stays like Lady Betty in
a minuet; and, ere we had reached Kyle Akin, the fleet in the middle of
which we had started were toiling far behind us, all save one vessel, a
stately brig; and just as we were going to pass her too, she cast
anchor, to await the change of the tide, which runs from the west during
flood at Kyle Akin, as it runs from the east through Kyle Rhea. The wind
had freshened; and as it was now within two hours of full sea, the force
of the current had somewhat abated; and so we kept on our course,
tacking in scant room, however, and making but little way. A few vessels
attempted following us, but, after an inefficient tack or two, they fell
back on the anchoring ground, leaving the Betsey to buffet the currents
alone. Tack followed tack sharp and quick in the narrows, with an
iron-bound coast on either hand. We had frequent and delicate turning:
now we lost fifty yards, now we gained a hundred. John Stewart held the
helm; and as none of us had ever sailed the way before, I had the
vessel's chart spread out on the companion-head before me, and told him
when to wear and when to hold on his way,--at what places we might run
up almost to the rock edge, and at what places it was safest to give the
land a good offing. Hurrah for the Free Church yacht Betsey! and hurrah
once more! We cleared the Kyle, leaving a whole fleet tide-bound behind
us; and, stretching out at one long tack into the open sea, bore, at the
next, right into the bay at Broadford, where we cast anchor for the
night, within two hundred yards of the shore. Provisions were running
short; and so I had to make a late dinner this evening on some of the
razor-fish of Rum, topped by a dish of tea. But there is always rather
more appetite than food in the country;--such, at least, is the common
result under the present mode of distribution: the hunger overlaps and
outstretches the provision; and there was comfort in the reflection,
that with the razor-fish on which to fall back, it overlapped it but by
a very little on this occasion in the cabin of the Betsey. The
steam-boat passed southwards next morning, and I was joined by my friend
the minister a little before breakfast.
The day was miserably bad: the rain continued pattering on the skylight,
now lighter, now heavier, till within an hour of sunset, when it ceased,
and a light breeze began to unroll the thick fogs from off the
landscape, volume after volume, like coverings from off a
mummy,--leaving exposed in the valley of the Lias a brown and cheerless
prospect of dark bogs and of debris-covered hills, streaked this evening
with downward lines of foam. The seaward view is more pleasing. The deep
russet of the interior we find bordered for miles along the edge of the
bay with a many-shaded fringe of green; and the smooth grassy island of
Pabba lies in the midst, a polished gem, all the more advantageously
displayed from the roughness of the surrounding setting. We took boat,
and explored the Lias in our immediate neighborhood till dusk. I had
spent several hours among its deposits when on my way to Portree, and
several hours more when on my journey across the country to the east
coast; but it may be well, for the sake of maintaining some continuity
of description, to throw together my various observations on the
formation, as if made at one time, and to connect them with my
exploration of Pabba, which took place on the following morning. The
rocks of Pabba belong to the upper part of the Lias; while the lower
part may be found leaning to the south, towards the Red Sandstones of
the Bay of Lucy. Taking what seems to be the natural order, I shall
begin with the base of the formation first.
In the general indentation of the coast, in the opening of which the
island of Pabba lies somewhat like a long green steam-boat at anchor,
there is included a smaller indentation, known as the Bay or Cove of
Lucy. The central space in the cove is soft and gravelly; but on both
its sides it is flanked by low rocks, that stretch out into the sea in
long rectilinear lines, like the foundations of dry-stone fences. On the
south side the rocks are red; on the north they are of a bluish-gray
color; their hues are as distinct as those of the colored patches in a
map; and they represent geological periods that lie widely apart. The
red rocks we find laid down in most of our maps as Old Red, though I am
disposed to regard them as of a much higher antiquity than even that
ancient system; while the bluish-gray rocks are decidedly Liasic.[3] The
cove between represents a deep ditch-like hollow, which occurs in Skye,
both in the interior and on the sea-shore, in the line of boundary
betwixt the Red Sandstone and the Lias; and it "seems to have
originated," says M'Culloch, "in the decomposition of the exposed parts
of the formations at their junction." "Hence," he adds, "from the
wearing of the materials at the surface, a cavity has been produced,
which becoming subsequently filled with rubbish, and generally covered
over with a vegetable soil of unusual depth, effectually prevents a view
of the contiguous parts." The first strata exposed on the northern side
are the oldest Liasic rocks anywhere seen in Scotland. They are composed
chiefly of greenish-colored fissile sandstones and calciferous grits, in
which we meet a few fossils, very imperfectly preserved. But the
organisms increase as we go on. We see in passing, near a picturesque
little cottage,--the only one on the shores of the bay,--a crag of a
singularly rough appearance, that projects mole-like from the sward upon
the beach, and then descending abruptly to the level of the other
strata, runs out in a long ragged line into the sea. The stratum, from
two to three feet in thickness, of which it is formed, seems wholly
built up of irregularly-formed rubbly concretions, just as some of the
garden-walls in the neighborhood of Edinburgh are built of the rough
scoria of our glass-houses; and we find, on examination, that every
seeming concretion in the bed is a perfectly formed coral of the genus
Astrea. We have arrived at an entire bed of corals, all of one species.
Their surfaces, wherever they have been washed by the sea, are of great
beauty: nothing can be more irregular than the outline of each mass, and
yet scarce anything more regular than the sculpturings on every part of
it. We find them fretted over with polygons, like those of a honeycomb,
only somewhat less mathematically exact, and the centre of every polygon
contains its many-rayed star. It is difficult to distinguish between
species in some of the divisions of corals: one Astrea, recent or
extinct, is sometimes found so exceedingly like another of some very
different formation or period, that the more modern might almost be
deemed a lineal descendant of the more ancient species. With an eye to
the fact, I brought with me some characteristic specimens of this
Astrea[4] of the Lower Lias, which I have ranged side by side with the
Astreae of the Oolite I had found so abundant a twelvemonth before in the
neighborhood of Helmsdale. In some of the hand specimens, that present
merely a piece of polygonal surface, bounded by fractured sides, the
difference is not easily distinguishable: the polygonal depressions are
generally smaller in the Oolitic species, and shallower in the Liasic
one; but not unfrequently these differences disappear, and it is only
when compared in the entire unbroken coral that their specific
peculiarities acquire the necessary prominence. The Oolitic Astrea is of
much greater size than the Liasic one: it occurs not unfrequently in
masses of from two to three feet in diameter; and as its polygons are
tubes that converge to the footstalk on which it originally formed, it
presents in the average outline a fungous-like appearance; whereas in
the smaller Liasic coral, which rarely exceeds a foot in diameter, there
is no such general convergency of the tubes; and the form in one piece,
save that there is a certain degree of flatness common to all, bears no
resemblance to the form in another. Some of the recent Astreae are of
great beauty when inhabited by the living zoophites whose skeleton
framework they compose. Every polygonal star in the mass is the house of
a separate animal, that, when withdrawn into its cell, presents the
appearance of a minute flower, somewhat like a daisy stuck flat to the
surface, and that, when stretched out, resembles a small round tower,
with a garland of leaves bound round it atop for a cornice. The _Astrea
viridis_, a coral of the tropics, presents on a ground of velvety brown
myriads of deep green florets, that ever and anon start up from the
level in their tower-like shape, contract and expand their petals, and
then, shrinking back into their cells, straightway became florets again.
The Lower Lias presented in one of its opening scenes, in this part of
the world, appearances of similar beauty widely spread. For miles
together,--we know not how many,--the bottom of a clear shallow sea was
paved with living Astreae: every irregular rock-like coral formed a
separate colony of polypora, that, when in motion, presented the
appearance of continuous masses of many-colored life, and when at rest,
the places they occupied were more thickly studded with the living
florets than the richest and most flowery piece of pasture the reader
ever saw, with its violets or its daisies. And mile beyond mile this
scene of beauty stretched on through the shallow depths of the Liasic
sea. The calcareous framework of most of the recent Astreae are white;
but in the species referred to,--the _Astrea viridis_,--it is of a
dark-brown color. It is not unworthy of remark, in connection with these
facts, that the Oolitic Astrea of Helmsdale occurs as a white, or, when
darkest, as a cream-colored petrifaction; whereas the Liasic Astrea of
Skye is invariably of a deep earthy hue. The one was probably a white,
the other a dingy-colored coral.
The Liasic bed of Astreae existed long enough here to attain a thickness
of from two to three feet. Mass rose over mass,--the living upon the
dead,--till at length, by a deposit of mingled mud and sand,--the
effect, mayhap, of some change of currents, induced we know not
how,--the innumerable polypedes of the living surface were buried up and
killed, and then, for many yards, layer after layer of a calciferous
grit was piled over them. The fossils of the grit are few and ill
preserved; but we occasionally find in it a coral similar to the Astrea
of the bed below, and, a little higher up, in an impure limestone,
specimens, in rather indifferent keeping, of a genus of polypifer which
somewhat resembles the Turbinolia of the Mountain Limestone. It presents
in the cross section the same radiated structure as the _Turbinolia
fungites_, and nearly the same furrowed appearance in the longitudinal
one; but, seen in the larger specimens, we find that it was a branched
coral, with obtuse forky boughs, in each of which, it is probable, from
their general structure, there lived a single polype. It may have been
the resemblance which these bear, when seen in detached branches, to the
older Caryophyllia, taken in connection with the fact that the deposit
in which they occur rests on the ancient Red Sandstone of the district,
that led M'Culloch to question whether this fossiliferous formation had
not nearly as clear a claim to be regarded as an analogue of the
Carboniferous Limestone of England as of its Lias; and hence he
contented himself with terming it simply the Gryphite Limestone. Sir R.
Murchison, whose much more close and extensive acquaintance with fossils
enabled him to assign to the deposit its true place, was struck,
however, with the general resemblance of its polypifers to "those of the
Madreporite Limestone of the Carboniferous series." These polypifers
occur in only the lower Lias of Skye.[5] I found no corals in its higher
beds, though these are charged with other fossils, more characteristic
of the formation, in vast abundance. In not a few of the middle strata,
composed of a mud-colored fissile sandstone, the gryphites lie as
thickly as currants in a Christmas cake; and as they weather white,
while the stone in which they are embedded retains its dingy hue, they
somewhat remind one of the white-lead tears of the undertaker mottling a
hatchment of sable. In a fragment of the dark sandstone, six inches by
seven, which I brought with me, I reckon no fewer than twenty-two
gryphites; and it forms but an average specimen of the bed from which I
detached it. By far the most abundant species is that not inelegant
shell so characteristic of the formation, the _Gryphaea incurva_. We find
detached specimens scattered over the beach by hundreds, mixed up with
the remains of recent shells, as if the _Gryphaea incurva_ were a recent
shell too. They lie, bleached white by the weather, among the valves of
defunct oysters and dead buccinidae; and, from their resemblance to lamps
cast in the classic model, remind one, in the corners where they have
accumulated most thickly, of the old magician's stock in trade, who
wiled away the lamp of Aladdin from Aladdin's simple wife. The _Gryphaea
obliquita_ and _Gryphaea M'Cullochii_ also occur among these middle
strata of the Lias, though much less frequently than the other. We,
besides, found in them at least two species of Pecten, with two species
of Terebratula,--the one smooth, the other sulcated; a bivalve
resembling a Donax; another bivalve, evidently a Gervillia, though
apparently of a species not yet described; and the ill-preserved rings
of large Ammonites, from ten inches to a foot in diameter. Towards the
bottom of the bay the fossils again become more rare, though they
re-appear once more in considerable abundance as we pass along its
northern side; but in order to acquaint ourselves with the upper
organisms of the formation, we have to take boat and explore the
northern shores of Pabba. The Lias of Skye has its three distinct groups
of fossils: its lower coraline group, in which the Astrea described is
most abundant; its middle group, in which the _Gryphaea incurva_ occurs
by millions; and its upper group, abounding in Ammonites, Nautili,
Pinnae, and Serpulae.
Friday made amends for the rains and fogs of its disagreeable
predecessor: the morning rose bright and beautiful, with just wind
enough to fill, and barely fill, the sail, hoisted high, with miser
economy, that not a breath might be lost; and, weighing anchor, and
shaking out all our canvass, we bore down on Pabba, to explore. This
island, so soft in outline and color, is formidably fenced round by
dangerous reefs; and, leaving the Betsey in charge of John Stewart and
his companion, to dodge on in the offing, I set out with the minister in
our little boat, and landed on the north-eastern side of the island,
beside a trap-dyke that served us as a pier. He would be a happy
geologist who, with a few thousands to spare, could call Pabba his own.
It contains less than a square mile of surface; and a walk of little
more than three miles and a half along the line where the waves break at
high water brings the traveller back to his starting point; and yet,
though thus limited in area, the petrifactions of its shores might of
themselves fill a museum. They rise by thousands and tens of thousands
on the exposed planes of its sea-washed strata, standing out in bold
relief, like sculpturings on ancient tombstones, at once mummies and
monuments,--the dead and the carved memorials of the dead. Every rock is
a tablet of hieroglyphics, with an ascertained alphabet; every rolled
pebble a casket with old pictorial records locked up within. Trap-dykes,
beyond comparison finer than those of the Water of Leith, which first
suggested to Hutton his theory, stand up like fences over the
sedimentary strata, or run out like moles far into the sea. The entire
island, too, so green, rich, and level, is itself a specimen
illustrative of the effect of geologic formation on scenery. We find its
nearest neighbor,--the steep, brown, barren island of Longa, which is
composed of the ancient Red Sandstone of the district,--differing as
thoroughly from it in aspect as a bit of granite differs from a bit of
clay-slate; and the whole prospect around, save the green Liasic strip
that lies along the bottom of the Bay of Broadford, exhibits, true to
its various components, Plutonic or sedimentary, a character of
picturesque roughness or bold sublimity. The only piece of smooth, level
England, contained in the entire landscape, is the fossil-mottled island
of Pabba. We were first struck, on landing this morning, by the great
number of Pinnae embedded in the strata,--shells varying from five to ten
inches in length,--one species of the common flat type, exemplified in
the existing _Pinna sulcata_, and another nearly quadrangular, in the
cross section, like the _Pinna lanceolata_ of the Scarborough limestone.
The quadrangular species is more deeply crisped outside than the
flat one. Both species bear the longitudinal groove in the centre,
and when broken across, are found to contain numerous smaller
shells,--Terebratulae of both the smooth and sulcated kinds, and a
species of minute smooth Pecten resembling the _Pecten demissus_, but
smaller. The Pinnae, ere they became embedded in the original sea-bottom,
long since hardened into rock around them, were, we find, dead shells,
into which, as into the dead open shells of our existing beaches,
smaller shells were washed by the waves. Our recent Pinnae are all
sedentary shells, some of them full two feet in length, fastened to
their places on their deep-sea floors by flowing silky byssi,--cables of
many strands,--of which beautiful pieces of dress, such as gloves and
hose, have been manufactured. An old French naturalist, the Abbe Le
Pluche, tells us that "the Pinna with its fleshy tongue" (foot),--a rude
inefficient looking implement for work so nice,--"spins such threads as
are more valuable than silk itself, and with which the most beautiful
stuffs that ever were seen have been made by Sicilian weavers." Gloves
made of the byssus of recent Pinnae may be seen in the British Museum.
Associated with the numerous Pinnae of Pabba we found a delicately-formed
Modiola, a small Ostrya, Plagiostoma, Terebratula, several species of
Pectens, a triangular univalve resembling a Trochus, innumerable groups
of Serpulae, and the star-like joints of Pentacrinites. The Gryphae are
also abundant, occurring in extensive beds; and Belemnites of various
species lie as thickly scattered over the rock as if they had been the
spindles of a whole kingdom thrown aside in consequence of some such
edict framed to put them down as that passed by the father of the
Sleeping Beauty. We find, among the detached masses of the beach,
specimens of Nautilus, which, though rarely perfect, are sufficiently so
to show the peculiarities of the shell; and numerous Ammonites project
in relief from almost every weathered plane of the strata. These last
shells, in the tract of shore which we examined, are chiefly of one
species,--the _Ammonites spinatus_,--one of which, considerably broken,
the reader may find figured in Sowerby's "Mineral Conchology," from a
specimen brought from Pabba sixteen years ago by Sir R. Murchison. It is
difficult to procure specimens tolerably complete. We find bits of outer
rings existing as limestone, with every rib sharply preserved, but the
rest of the fossil lost in the shale. I succeeded in finding but two
specimens that show the inner whorls. They are thickly ribbed; and the
chief peculiarity which they exhibit, not so directly indicated by Mr.
Sowerby's figure, is, that while the ribs of the outer whorl are broad
and deep, as in the _Ammonites obtusus_, they suddenly change their
character, and become numerous and narrow in the inner whorls, as in the
_Ammonites communis_.
The tide began to flow, and we had to quit our explorations, and return
to the Betsey. The little wind had become less, and all the canvas we
could hang out enabled us to draw but a sluggish furrow. The stern of
the Betsey "wrought no buttons" on this occasion; but she had a good
tide under her keel; and ere the dinner-hour we had passed through the
narrows of Kyle Akin. The village of this name was designed by the late
Lord M'Donald for a great seaport town; but it refused to grow; and it
has since become a gentleman in a small way, and does nothing. It forms,
however, a handsome group of houses, pleasantly situated on a flat green
tongue of land, on the Skye side, just within the opening of the Kyle;
and there rises on an eminence beyond it a fine old tower, rent open, as
if by an earthquake, from top to bottom, which forms one of the most
picturesque objects I have almost ever seen in a landscape. There are
bold hills all around, and rocky islands, with the ceaseless rush of
tides in front; while the cloven tower, rising high over the shore, is
seen, in threading the Kyles, whether from the south or north, relieved
dark against the sky, as the central object in the vista. We find it
thus described by the Messrs. Anderson of Inverness, in their excellent
"Guide Book,"--by far the best companion of the kind with which the
traveller who sets himself to explore our Scottish Highlands can be
provided. "Close to the village of Kyle Akin are the ruins of an old
square keep, called Castle Muel or Maoil, the walls of which are of a
remarkable thickness. It is said to have been built by the daughter of a
Norwegian king, married to a Mackinnon or Macdonald, for the purpose of
levying an impost on all vessels passing the Kyles, excepting, says the
tradition, those of her own country. For the more certain exaction of
this duty, she is reported to have caused a strong chain to be stretched
across from shore to shore; and the spot in the rocks to which the
terminal links were attached is still pointed out." It was high time for
us to be home. The dinner hour came; but, in meet illustration of the
profound remark of Trotty-Veck, not the dinner. We had been in a cold
Moderate district, whence there came no half-dozens of eggs, or whole
dozens of trout, or pailfuls of razor-fish, and in which hard
cabin-biscuit cost us sixpence per pound. And now our stores were
exhausted, and we had to dine as best we could, on our last half-ounce
of tea, sweetened by our last quarter of a pound of sugar. I had marked,
however, a dried thornback hanging among the rigging. It had been there
nearly three weeks before, when I came first aboard, and no one seemed
to know for how many weeks previous; for as it had come to be a sort of
fixture in the vessel, it could be looked at without being seen. But
necessity sharpens the discerning faculty, and on this pressing
occasion I was fortunate enough to see it. It was straightway taken
down, skinned, roasted, and eaten; and, though rather rich in
ammonia,--a substance better suited to form the food of the organisms
that do not unite sensation to vitality, than organisms so high in the
scale as the minister and his friend,--we came deliberately to the
opinion, that on the whole, we could scarce have dined so well on one of
Major Bellenden's jack-boots,--"so thick in the soles," according to
Jenny Dennison, "forby being tough in the upper leather." The tide
failed us opposite the opening of Loch Alsh; the wind, long dying, at
length died out into a dead calm; and we cast anchor in ten fathoms
water, to wait the ebbing current that was to carry us through Kyle
Rhea.
The ebb-tide set in about half an hour after sunset; and in weighing
anchor to float down the Kyle,--for we still lacked wind to sail down
it,--we brought up from below, on one of the anchor-flukes, an immense
bunch of deep-sea tangle, with huge soft fronds and long slender stems,
that had lain flat on the rocky bottom, and had here and there thrown
out roots along its length of stalk, to attach itself to the rock, in
the way the ivy attaches itself to the wall. Among the intricacies of
the true roots of the bunch, if one may speak of the true roots of an
alga, I reckoned from eighteen to twenty different forms of animal
life,--Flustrae, Sertulariae, Serpulae, Anomiae, Modiolae, Astarte, Annelida,
Crustacea, and Radiata. Among the Crustaceans I found a female crab of a
reddish-brown color, considerably smaller than the nail of my small
finger, but fully grown apparently, for the abdominal flap was loaded
with spawn; and among the Echinoderms, a brownish-yellow sea-urchin
about the size of a pistol-bullet, furnished with comparatively large
but thinly-set spines. There is a dangerous rock in the Kyle Rhea, the
Caileach stone, on which the Commissioners for the Northern Lighthouses
have stuck a bit of board about the size of a pot-lid, which, as it is
known to be there, and as no one ever sees it after sunset, is really
very effective, considering how little it must have cost the country, in
wrecking vessels. I saw one of its victims, the sloop of an honest
Methodist, in whose bottom the Caileach had knocked out a hole,
repairing at Isle Ornsay; and I was told, that if I wished to see more,
I had only just to wait a little. The honest Methodist, after looking
out in vain for the bit of board, was just stepping into the shrouds, to
try whether he could not see the rock on which the bit of board is
placed, when all at once his vessel found out both board and rock for
herself. We also had anxious looking out this evening for the bit of
board: one of us thought he saw it right a-head; and when some of the
others were trying to see it too, John Stewart succeeded in discovering
it half a pistol-shot astern. The evening was one of the loveliest. The
moon rose in cloudy majesty over the mountains of Glenelg, brightening
as it rose, till the boiling eddies around us curled on the darker
surface in pale circlets of light, and the shadow of the Betsey lay as
sharply defined on the brown patch of calm to the larboard as if it were
her portrait taken in black. Immediately at the water-edge, under a tall
dark hill, there were two smouldering fires, that now shot up a sudden
tongue of bright flame, and now dimmed into blood-red specks, and sent
thick strongly-scented trails of smoke athwart the surface of the Kyle.
We could hear, in the calm, voices from beside them, apparently those of
children; and learned that they indicated the places of two
kelp-furnaces,--things which have now become comparatively rare along
the coasts of the Hebrides. There was the low rush of tides all around,
and the distant voices from the shore, but no other sounds; and, dim in
the moonshine, we could see behind us several spectral-looking sails
threading their silent way through the narrows, like twilight ghosts
traversing some haunted corridor.
It was late ere we reached the opening of Isle Ornsay; and as it was
still a dead calm we had to tug in the Betsey to the anchoring ground
with a pair of long sweeps. The minister pointed to a low-lying rock on
the left-hand side of the opening,--a favorite haunt of the seal. "I
took farewell of the Betsey there last winter," he said. "The night had
worn late, and was pitch dark; we could see before us scarce the length
of our bowsprit; not a single light twinkled from the shore; and, in
taking the bay, we ran bump on the skerry, and stuck fast. The water
came rushing in, and covered over the cabin-floor. I had Mrs. Swanson
and my little daughter aboard with me, with one of our servant-maids who
had become attached to the family, and insisted on following us from
Eigg; and, of course, our first care was to get them ashore. We had to
land them on the bare uninhabited island yonder, and a dreary enough
place it was at midnight, in winter, with its rocks, bogs, and heath,
and with a rude sea tumbling over the skerries in front; but it had at
least the recommendation of being safe, and the sky, though black and
wild, was not stormy. I had brought two lanterns ashore: the servant
girl, with the child in her lap, sat beside one of them, in the shelter
of a rock; while my wife, with the other, went walking up and down along
a piece of level sward yonder, waving the light, to attract notice from
the opposite side of the bay. But though it was seen from the windows of
my own house by an attached relative, it was deemed merely a
singularly-distinct apparition of Will o' the Wisp, and so brought us no
assistance. Meanwhile we had carried out a kedge astern of the Betsey,
as the sea was flowing at the time, to keep her from beating in over the
rocks; and then, taking our few movables ashore, we hung on till the
tide rose, and, with our boat alongside ready for escape, succeeded in
warping her into deep water, with the intention of letting her sink
somewhere beyond the influence of the surf, which, without fail, would
have broken her up on the skerry in a few hours, had we suffered her to
remain there. But though, when on the rock, the tide had risen as freely
over the cabin sole inside as over the crags without, in the deep water
the Betsey gave no sign of sinking. I went down to the cabin; the water
was knee-high on the floor, dashing against bed and locker, but it rose
no higher;--the enormous leak had stopped, we knew not how; and, setting
ourselves to the pump, we had in an hour or two a clear ship. The Betsey
is clinker-built below. The elastic oak planks had yielded inwards to
the pressure of the rock, tearing out the fastenings, and admitted the
tide at wide yawning seams; but no sooner was the pressure removed, than
out they sprung again into their places, like bows when the strings are
slackened; and when the carpenter came to overhaul, he found he had
little else to do than to remove a split plank, and to supply a few
dozens of drawn nails."
CHAPTER X.
Isle Ornsay--The Sabbath--A Sailor-minister's Sermon for
Sailors--The Scuir Sermon--Loch Carron--Groups of Moraines--A sheep
District--The Editor of the _Witness_ and the Establishment
Clergyman--Dingwall--Conon-side revisited--The Pond and its
Changes--New Faces--The Stonemason's Mark--The Burying Ground of
Urquhart--An old acquaintance--Property Qualification for Voting in
Scotland--Montgerald Sandstone Quarries--Geological Science in
Cromarty--The Danes at Cromarty--The Danish Professor and the "Old
Red Sandstone"--Harmonizing tendencies of Science.
The anchoring ground at Isle Ornsay was crowded with coasting vessels
and fishing boats; and when the Sabbath came round, no inconsiderable
portion of my friend's congregation was composed of sailors and
fishermen. His text was appropriate,--"He bringeth them into their
desired haven;" and as his sea-craft and his theology were alike
excellent, there were no incongruities in his allegory, and no defects
in his mode of applying it, and the seamen were hugely delighted. John
Stewart, though less a master of English than of many other things, told
me he was able to follow the minister from beginning to end,--a thing he
had never done before at an English preaching. The sea portion of the
sermon, he said, was very plain: it was about the helm, and the sails,
and the anchor, and the chart, and the pilot,--about rocks, winds,
currents, and safe harborage; and by attending to this simpler part of
it, he was led into the parts that were less simple, and so succeeded in
comprehending the whole. I would fain see this unique discourse,
preached by a sailor minister to a sailor congregation, preserved in
some permanent form, with at least one other discourse,--of which I
found trace in the island of Eigg, after the lapse of more than a
twelvemonth,--that had been preached about the time of the Disruption,
full in sight of the Scuir, with its impregnable hill-fort, and in the
immediate neighborhood of the cave of Frances, with its heaps of dead
men's bones. One note stuck fast to the islanders. In times of peril and
alarm, said the minister, the ancient inhabitants of the island had two
essentially different kinds of places in which they sought security;
they had the deep, unwholesome cave, shut up from the light and the
breath of heaven, and the tall rock summit, with its impregnable fort,
on which the sun shone and the wind blew. Much hardship might no doubt
be encountered on the one, when the sky was black with tempest, and
rains beat, or snows descended; but it was found associated with no
story of real loss or disaster,--it had kept safe all who had committed
themselves to it; whereas, in the close atmosphere of the other there
was warmth, and, after a sort, comfort; and on one memorable day of
trouble the islanders had deemed it the preferable sheltering place of
the two. And there survived mouldering skeletons and a frightful
tradition, to tell the history of their choice. Places of refuge of
these very opposite kinds, said the minister, continuing his allegory,
are not peculiar to your island; never was there a day or a place of
trial in which they did not advance their opposite claims: they are
advancing them even now all over the world. The one kind you find
described by one great prophet as low-lying "refuges of lies," over
which the desolating "scourge must pass," and which the destroying
"waters must overflow;" while the true character of the other may be
learned from another great prophet, who was never weary of celebrating
his "rock and his fortress." "Wit succeeds more from being happily
addressed," says Goldsmith, "than even from its native poignancy." If
my friend's allegory does not please quite as well in print and in
English as it did when delivered _viva voce_ in Gaelic, it should be
remembered that it was addressed to an out-door congregation, whose
minds were filled with the consequences of the Disruption,--that the
bones of _Uamh Fraingh_ lay within a few hundred yards of them,--and
that the Scuir, with the sun shining bright on its summit, rose tall in
the background, scarce a mile away.
On Monday I spent several hours in reexploring the Lias of Lucy Bay and
its neighborhood, and then walked on to Kyle-Akin, where I parted from
my friend Mr. Swanson, and took boat for Loch Carron. The greater part
of the following day was spent in crossing the country to the east coast
in the mail-gig, through long dreary glens, and a fierce storm of wind
and rain. In the lower portion of the valley occupied by the river
Carron, I saw at least two fine groups of moraines. One of these, about
a mile and a half above the parish manse, marks the place where a
glacier, that had once descended from a hollow amid the northern range
of hills, had furrowed up the gravel and earth before it in long ridges,
which we find running nearly parallel to the road; the other group,
which lies higher up the valley, and seems of considerably greater
extent, indicates where one of those river-like glaciers that fill up
long hollows, and impel their irresistible flood downwards, slow as the
hour-hand of a time-piece, had terminated towards the sea. I could but
glance at the appearances as the gig drove past, and point them out to a
fellow passenger, the Establishment minister of----, remarking, at the
same time, how much more dreary the prospect must have seemed than even
it did to-day, though the fog was thick and the drizzle disagreeable,
when the lateral hollows on each side were blocked up with ice, and
overhanging glaciers, that ploughed the rock bare in their descent,
glistened on the bleak hill-sides. I wore a gray maud over a coat of
rough russet, with waist-coat and trowsers of plaid; and the minister,
who must have taken me, I suppose, for a southland shepherd looking out
for a farm, gave me much information of a kind I might have found
valuable had such been my condition and business, regarding the various
districts through which we passed. On one high-lying farm, the grass, he
said, was short and thin, but sweet and wholesome, and the flocks throve
steadily, and were never thinned by disease; whereas on another farm,
that lay along the dank bottom of a valley, the herbage was rank and
rich, and the sheep fed and got heavy, but braxy at the close of autumn
fell upon them like a pestilence, and more than neutralized to the
farmer every advantage of the superior fertility of the soil. It was not
uninteresting, even for one not a sheep-farmer, to learn that the life
of the sheep is worth fewer years' purchase in one little track of
country than in another adjacent one; and that those differences in the
salubrity of particular spots which obtain in other parts of the world
in regard to our own species, and which make it death to linger on the
luxuriant river-side, while on the arid plain or elevated hill-top there
is health and safety, should exist in contiguous walks in the Highlands
of Scotland in reference to some of the inferior animals. The minister
and I became wonderfully good friends for the time. All the seats in the
gig, both back and front, had been occupied ere he had taken his
passage, and the postman had assigned him a miserable place on the
narrow elevated platform in the middle, where he had to coil himself up
like a hedgehog in its hole, sadly to the discomfort of limbs still
stout and strong, but stiffened by the long service of full seventy
years. And, as in the case made famous by Cowper, of the "softer sex"
and the old-fashioned iron-cushioned arm-chairs, the old man had, as
became his years, "'gan murmur." I contrived, by sitting on the edge of
the gig on the one side, and by getting the postman to take a similar
seat on the other, to find room for him in front; and there, feeling he
had not to do with savages, he became kindly and conversible. We beat
together over a wide range of topics;--the Scotch banks, and Sir Robert
Peel's intentions regarding them,--the periodical press of
Scotland,--the Edinburgh literati,--the Free Church even: he had been a
consistent Moderate all his days, and disliked renegades, he said; and
I, of course, disliked renegades too. We both remembered that, though
civilized nations give quarter to an enemy overpowered in open fight,
they are still in the habit of shooting deserters. In short, we agreed
on a great many different matters; and, by comparing notes, we made the
best we could of a tedious journey and a very bad day. At the inn at
Garve, a long stage from Dingwall, we alighted, and took the road
together, to straighten our stiffened limbs, while the post man was
engaged in changing horses. The minister stopped short in the middle of
a discussion. We are not on equal terms, he said: you know who I am, and
I don't know you: we did not start fair at the beginning, but let us
start fair now. Ah, we have agreed hitherto, I replied; but I know not
how we are to agree when you know who I am: are you sure you will not be
frightened? Frightened! said the minister sturdily; no, by no man. Then,
I am the Editor of the _Witness_. There was a momentary pause. "Well,"
said the minister, "it's all the same: I'm glad we should have met. Give
me, man, a shake of your hand." And so the conversation went on as
before till we parted at Dingwall,--the Establishment clergyman wet to
the skin, the Free Church editor in no better condition; but both,
mayhap, rather less out of conceit with the ride than if it had been
ridden alone.
I had intended passing at least two days in the neighborhood of
Dingwall, where I proposed renewing an acquaintance, broken off for
three-and-twenty years, with those bituminous shales of Strathpeffer in
which the celebrated mineral waters of the valley take their rise,--the
Old Red Conglomerate of Brahan, the vitrified fort of Knockferrel, the
ancient tower of Fairburn, above all, the pleasure-grounds of
Conon-side. I had spent the greater portion of my eighteenth and
nineteenth years in this part of the country; and I was curious to
ascertain to what extent the man in middle life would verify the
observations of the lad,--to recall early incidents, revisit remembered
scenes, return on old feelings, and see who were dead and who were alive
among the casual acquaintances of nearly a quarter of a century ago. The
morning of Wednesday rose dark with fog and rain, but the wind had
fallen; and as I could not afford to miss seeing Conon-side, I sallied
out under cover of an umbrella. I crossed the bridge, and reached the
pleasure-grounds of Conon-house. The river was big in flood: it was
exactly such a river Conon as I had lost sight of in the winter of 1821;
and I had to give up all hope of wading into its fords, as I used to do
early in the autumn of that year, and pick up the pearl muscles that lie
so thickly among the stones at the bottom. I saw, however, amid a
thicket of bushes by the river-side, a heap of broken shells, where some
herd-boy had been carrying on such a pearl fishery as I had sometimes
used to carry on in my own behalf so long before; and I felt it was just
something to see it. The flood eddied past, dark and heavy, sweeping
over bulwark and bank. The low-stemmed alders that rose on islet and
mound seemed shorn of half their trunks in the tide; here and there an
elastic branch bent to the current, and rose and bent again; and now a
tuft of withered heath came floating down, and now a soiled wreath of
foam. How vividly the past rose up before me!--boyish day-dreams
forgotten for twenty years,--the fossils of an early formation of mind,
produced at a period when the atmosphere of feeling was warmer than now,
and the immaturities of the mental kingdom grew rank and large, like the
ancient Cryptogamiae, and bore no specific resemblance to the productions
of a present time. I had passed in the neighborhood the first season I
anywhere spent among strangers, at an age when home is not a country,
nor a province even, but simply a little spot of earth inhabited by
friends and relatives; and the rude verses, long forgotten, in which my
joy had found vent when on the eve of returning to that home,--a home
little more than twenty miles away,--came chiming as freshly into my
memory as if scarce a month had passed since I had composed them beside
the Conon.[6]
Three-and-twenty years form a large portion of the short life of
man,--one-third, as nearly as can be expressed in unbroken numbers, of
the entire term fixed by the psalmist, and full one-half, if we strike
off the twilight periods of childhood and immature youth, and of
senectitude weary of its toils. I found curious indications among the
grounds of Conon-side, of the time that had elapsed since I had last
seen them. There was a rectangular pond in a corner of a moor, near the
public road, inhabited by about a dozen voracious, frog-eating pike,
that I used frequently to visit. The water in the pond was exceedingly
limpid; and I could watch from the banks every motion of the hungry,
energetic inmates. And now I struck off from the river-side by a narrow
tangled pathway, to visit it once more. I could have found out the
place blindfold: there was a piece of flat brown heath that stretched
round its edges, and a mossy slope that rose at its upper side, at the
foot of which the taste of the proprietor had placed a rustic chair. The
spot, though itself bare and moory, was nearly surrounded by wood, and
looked like a clearing in an American forest. There were lines of
graceful larches on two of its sides, and a grove of vigorous beeches
that directly fronted the setting sun on a third; and I had often found
it a place of delightful resort, in which to saunter alone in the calm
summer evenings, after the work of the day was over. Such was the scene
as it existed in my recollection. I came up to it this day through
dripping trees, along a neglected pathway; and found, for the open space
and the rectangular pond, a gloomy patch of water in the middle of a
tangled thicket, that rose some ten or twelve feet over my head. What
had been bare heath a quarter of a century before had become a thick
wood; and I remembered, that when I had been last there, the open space
had just been planted with forest-trees, and that some of the taller
plants rose half-way to my knee. Human lifetimes, as now measured, are
not intended to witness both the seed-times and the harvests of
forests,--both the planting of the sapling, and the felling of the huge
tree into which it has grown; and so the incident impressed me strongly.
It reminded me of the sage Shalum in Addison's antediluvian tale, who
became wealthy by the sale of his great trees, two centuries after he
had planted them. I pursued my walk, to revisit another little patch of
water which I had found so very entertaining a volume three-and-twenty
years previous, that I could still recall many of its lessons; but the
hand of improvement had been busy among the fields of Conon-side; and
when I came up to the spot which it had occupied, I found but a piece
of level arable land, bearing a rank swathe of grass and clover.[7]
Not a single individual did I find on the farm who had been there twenty
years before. I entered into conversation with one of the ploughmen,
apparently a man of some intelligence; but he had come to the place only
a summer or two previous, and the names of most of his predecessors
sounded unfamiliar in his ears: he knew scarce anything of the old laird
or his times, and but little of the general history of the district. The
frequent change of servants incident to the large-farm system has done
scarce less to wear out the oral antiquities of the country than has
been done by its busy ploughs in obliterating antiquities of a more
material cast. The mythologic legend and traditionary story have shared
the same fate, through the influence of the one cause, which has been
experienced by the sepulchral tumulus and the ancient encampment under
the operations of the other. I saw in the pillars and archways of the
farm-steading some of the hewn stones bearing my own mark,--an anchor,
to which I used to attach a certain symbolical meaning; and I pointed
them out to the ploughman. I had hewn these stones, I said, in the days
of the old laird, the grandfather of the present proprietor. The
ploughman wondered how a man still in middle life could have such a
story to tell. I must surely have begun work early in the day, he
remarked, which was perhaps the best way for getting it soon over. I
remembered having seen similar markings on the hewn-work of ancient
castles, and of indulging in, I daresay, idle enough speculations
regarding what was doing at court and in the field, in Scotland and
elsewhere, when the old long-departed mechanics had been engaged in
their work. When this mark was affixed, I have said, all Scotland was
in mourning for the disaster at Flodden, and the folk in the work-shed
would have been, mayhap, engaged in discussing the supposed treachery of
Home, and in arguing whether the hapless James had fallen in battle, or
gone on a pilgrimage to merit absolution for the death of his father.
And when this other more modern mark was affixed, the Gowrie conspiracy
must have been the topic of the day, and the mechanics were probably
speculating,--at worst not more doubtfully than the historians have done
after them,--on the guilt or innocence of the Ruthvens. It now rose
curiously enough in memory, that I was employed in fashioning one of the
stones marked by the anchor,--a corner stone in a gate-pillar,--when one
of my brother apprentices entered the work-shed, laden with a bundle of
newly sharpened irons from the smithy, and said he had just been told by
the smith that the great Napoleon Bonaparte was dead. I returned to the
village of Conon Bridge, through the woods of Conon House. The day was
still very bad: the rain pattered thick on the leaves, and fell
incessantly in large drops on the pathways. There is a solitary,
picturesque burying-ground on a wooded hillock beside the river, with
thick dark woods all around it,--one of the two burying-grounds of the
parish of Urquhart,--which I would fain have visited, but the swollen
stream had risen high around, converting the hillock into an island, and
forbade access. I had spent many an hour among the tombs. They are few
and scattered, and of the true antique cast,--roughened with death's
heads, and cross-bones, and rudely sculptured armorial bearings; and on
a broken wall, that marked where the ancient chapel once had stood,
there might be seen, in the year 1821, a small, badly-cut sun-dial, with
its iron gnomon wasted to a saw-edged film, that contained more oxide
than metal. The only fossils described in my present chapter are fossils
of mind; and the reader will, I trust, bear with me should I produce
one fossil more of this somewhat equivocal class. It has no merit to
recommend it,--it is simply an organism of an immature intellectual
formation, in which, however, as in the Carboniferous period, there was
provision made for the necessities of an after time.[8] If a young man
born on the wrong side of the Tweed for _speaking_ English, is desirous
to acquire the ability of _writing_ it, he should by all means begin by
trying to write it in verse.
I passed, on my return to Dingwall, through the village of Conon Bridge;
and remembering that one of the masons who had hewn beside me in the
work-shed so many years before lived in the village at the time, I went
direct to the house he had inhabited, to see whether he might not be
there still. It was a low-roofed domicile beside the river, but in the
days of my old acquaintance it had presented an appearance of great
comfort and neatness; and as there now hung an air of neglect about it,
I inferred that it had found some other tenant. I inquired, however, at
the door, and was informed that Mr. ---- now lived higher up the street.
I would find him, it was added, in the best house on the right-hand
side,--the house with a hewn front, and a shop in it. He kept the shop,
and was the owner of the house, and had another house besides, and was
one of the elders of the Free Church in Urquhart. Such was the standing
of my old acquaintance the journeyman mason of twenty-three years ago.
He had been, when I knew him, a steady, industrious, religious
man,--with but one exception the only contributor to missionary and
Bible societies among a numerous party of workmen; and he was now
occupying a respectable place in his village, and was one of the voters
of the county. Let Chartism assert what it pleases on the one hand, and
Toryism what it may on the other, the property-qualification of the
Reform Bill is essentially a good one for such a country as Scotland. In
our cities it no doubt extends the political franchise to a fluctuating
class, ill hafted in society, who possess it one year and want it
another; but in our villages and smaller towns it hits very nearly the
right medium for forming a premium on steady industry and character, and
for securing that at least the mass of those who possess it should be
sober-minded men, with a stake in the general welfare. In running over
the histories of the various voters in one of our smaller towns, I found
that nearly one-half of the whole had, like my old comrade at Conon
Bridge, acquired for themselves, through steady and industrious habits,
the qualification from which they derive their vote. My companion failed
to recognize in the man turned of forty the smooth-cheeked stripling of
eighteen, with whom he had wrought so long before. I soon succeeded,
however, in making good my claim to his acquaintance. He had previously
established the identity of the editor of his newspaper with his quondam
fellow-workman, and a single link more was all the chain wanted. We
talked over old matters for half an hour. His wife, a staid respectable
matron, who, when I had been last in the district, was exactly such a
person as her eldest daughter, showed me an Encyclopaedia, with colored
prints, which she wished to send, if she knew but how, to the Free
Church library. I walked with him through his garden, and saw trees
loaded with yellow-cheeked pippins, where I had once seen only
unproductive heath, that scantily covered a barren soil of ferruginous
sand, and unwillingly declining an invitation to wait tea,--for a
previous engagement interfered,--I took leave of the family, and
returned to Dingwall. The following morning was gloomy, and threatened
rain; and giving up my intention of exploring Strathpeffer, I took the
morning coach for Invergordon, and then walked to Cromarty, where I
arrived just in time for breakfast.
I marked, from the top of the coach, about two miles to the north-east
of Dingwall, beds of a deep gray sandstone, identical in color and
appearance with some of the gray sandstones of the Middle Old Red of
Forfarshire, and learned that quarries had lately been opened in these
beds near Montgerald. The Old Red Sandstone lies in immense development
on the flanks of Ben-Wevis; and it is just possible that the analogue of
the gray flagstones of Forfar may be found among its upper beds. If so,
the quarriers should be instructed to look hard for organic
remains,--the broad-headed Cephalaspis, so characteristic of the
formation, and the huge Crustacean, its contemporary, that disported in
plates large as those of the steel mail of the later ages of chivalry.
The geologists of Dingwall,--if Dingwall has yet got its
geologists,--might do well to attempt determining the point. I found the
science much in advance in Cromarty, especially among the ladies,--its
great patronizers and illustrators everywhere,--and, in not a few
localities, extensive contributors to its hoards of fact. Just as I
arrived, there was a pic-nic party of young people setting out for the
Lias of Shandwick. They spent the day among its richly fossiliferous
shales and limestones, and brought back with them in the evening,
Ammonites and Gryphites enough to store a museum. Cromarty had been
visited during the summer by geologists speaking a foreign tongue, but
thoroughly conversant with the occult yet common language of the rocks,
and deeply interested in the stories which the rocks told. The vessels
in which the Crown Prince of Denmark voyaged to the Faroe Isles had
been for some time in the bay; and the Danes, his companions, votaries
of the stony science, zealously plied chisel and hammer among the Old
Red Sandstones of the coast. A townsman informed me that he had seen a
Danish Professor hammering like the tutelary Thor of his country among
the nodules in which I had found the first Pterichthys and first
Diplacanthus ever disinterred; and that the Professor, ever and anon as
he laid open a specimen, brought it to a huge smooth boulder, on which
there lay a copy of the "Old Red Sandstone," to ascertain from the
descriptions and prints its family and name. Shall I confess that the
circumstance gratified me exceedingly? There are many elements of
Discord among mankind in the present time, both at home and abroad,--so
many, that I am afraid we need entertain no hope of seeing an end, in at
least our day, to controversy and war. And we should be all the better
pleased, therefore, to witness the increase of those links of
union,--such as the harmonizing bonds of a scientific sympathy,--the
tendency of which is to draw men together in a kindly spirit, and the
formation of which involves no sacrifice of principle, moral or
religious. I do not think that the foreigner, after geologizing in my
company, would have had any very vehement desire, in the event of a war,
to cut me down, or to knock me on the head. I am afraid this chapter
would require a long apology, and for a long apology space is wanting.
But there will be no egotism, and much geology, in my next.
CHAPTER XI.
Ichthyolite Beds--An interesting Discovery--Two Storeys of Organic
Remains in the Old Red Sandstone--Ancient Ocean of Lower Old
Red--Two great Catastrophes--Ancient Fish Scales--Their skilful
Mechanism displayed by examples--Bone Lips--Arts of the Slater and
Tiler as old as Old Red Sandstone--Jet Trinkets--Flint
Arrow-heads--Vitrified Forts of Scotland--Style of grouping Lower
Old Red Fossils--Illustration from Cromarty Fishing
Phenomena--Singular Remains of Holoptychius--Ramble with Mr. Robert
Dick--Color of the Planet Mars--Tombs never dreamed of by
Hervey--Skeleton of the Bruce--Gigantic Holoptychius--"Coal money
Currency"--Upper Boundary of Lower Old Red--Every one may add to
the Store of Geological Facts--Discoveries of Messrs. Dick and
Peach.
I spent one long day in exploring the ichthyolite beds on both sides the
Cromarty Frith, and another long day in renewing my acquaintance with
the Liasic deposit at Shandwick. In beating over the Lias, though I
picked up a few good specimens, I acquired no new facts; but in
re-examining the Old Red Sandstone and its organisms I was rather more
successful. I succeeded in eliciting some curious points not yet
recorded, which, with the details of an interesting discovery made in
the far north in this formation, I may be perhaps able to weave into a
chapter somewhat more geological than my last.
Some of the readers of my little work on the Old Red Sandstone will
perhaps remember that I described the organisms of that ancient system
as occurring in the neighborhood of Cromarty mainly on one platform,
raised rather more than a hundred feet over the great Conglomerate; and
that on this platform, as if suddenly overtaken by some wide-spread
catastrophe, the ichthyolites lie by thousands and tens of thousands,
in every attitude of distortion and terror. We see the spiked wings of
the Pterichthys elevated to the full, as they had been erected in the
fatal moment of anger and alarm, and the bodies of the Cheirolepis and
Cheiracanthus bent head to tail, in the stiff posture into which they
had curled when the last pang was over. In various places in the
neighborhood the ichthyolites are found _in situ_ in their coffin-like
nodules, where it is impossible to trace the relation of the beds in
which they occur to the rocks above and below; and I had suspected for
years that in at least some of the localities, they could not have
belonged to the lower platform of death, but to some posterior
catastrophe that had strewed with carcasses some upper platform. I had
thought over the matter many a time and oft when I should have been
asleep,--for it is marvellous how questions of the kind grow upon a man;
and now, selecting as a hopeful scene of inquiry the splendid section
under the Northern Sutor, I set myself doggedly to determine whether the
Old Red Sandstone in this part of the country has not at least its two
storeys of organic remains, each of which had been equally a scene of
sudden mortality. I was entirely successful. The lower ichthyolite bed
occurs exactly one hundred and fourteen feet over the great
Conglomerate; and three hundred and eighteen feet higher up I found a
second ichthyolite bed, as rich in fossils as the first, with its thorny
Acanthodians twisted half round, as if still in the agony of
dissolution, and its Pterichthyes still extending their spear-like arms
in the attitude of defence. The discovery enabled me to assign to their
true places the various ichthyolite beds of the district. Those in the
immediate neighborhood of the town, and a bed which abuts on the Lias at
Eathie, belong to the upper platform; while those which appear in Eathie
Burn, and along the shores at Navity, belong to the lower. The chief
interest of the discovery, however, arises from the light which it
throws on the condition of the ancient ocean of the Lower Old Red, and
on the extreme precariousness of the tenure on which the existence of
its numerous denizens was held. In a section of little more than a
hundred yards there occur at least two platforms of violent
death,--platforms inscribed with unequivocal evidence of two great
catastrophes which over wide areas depopulated the seas. In the Old Red
Sandstone of Caithness there are many such platforms: storey rises over
storey; and the floor of each bears its closely-written record of
disaster and sudden extinction. Pompeii in this northern locality lies
over Herculaneum, and Anglano over both. We cease to wonder why the
higher order of animals should not have been introduced into a scene of
being that had so recently arisen out of chaos, and over which the reign
of death so frequently returned. In a somewhat different sense from that
indicated by the poet of the "Seasons,"
"As yet the trembling _year_ was unconfirmed,
And _winter_ oft at eve resumed the gale."
Lying detached in the stratified clay of the fish-beds, there occur in
abundance single plates and scales of ichthyolites, which, as they can
be removed entire, and viewed on both sides, illustrate points in the
mechanism of the creatures to which they belonged that cannot be so
clearly traced in the same remains when locked up in stone. There is a
vast deal of skilful carpentry exhibited--if carpentry I may term it--in
the coverings of these ancient ichthyolites. In the commoner fish of our
existing seas the scales are so thin and flexible,--mere films of
horn,--that there is no particularly nice fitting required in their
arrangement. The condition, too, through which portions of unprotected
skin may be presented to the water, as over and between the rays of the
fins, and on the snout and lips, obviates many a mechanical difficulty
of the earlier period, when it was a condition, as the remains
demonstrate, that no bit of naked skin, should be exposed, and when the
scales and plates were formed, not of thin horny films, but of solid
pieces of bone. Thin slates lie on the roof of a modern dwelling,
without any nice fitting;--they are scales of the modern construction:
but it required much nice fitting to make thick flagstones lie on the
roof of an ancient cathedral;--_they_, on the other hand, were scales of
the ancient type. Again, it requires no ingenuity whatever, to suffer
the hands and face to go naked,--and such is the condition of our
existing fish, with their soft skinny snouts and membranous fins; but to
cover the hands with flexible steel gauntlets, and the face with such an
iron mask as that worn by the mysterious prisoner of Louis XIV., would
require a very large amount of ingenuity indeed; and the ancient
ichthyolites of the Old Red were all masked and gauntleted. Now the
detached plates and scales of the stratified clay exhibit not a few of
the mechanical contrivances through which the bony coverings of these
fish were made to unite--as in coats of old armor--great strength with
great flexibility. The scales of the Osteolepis and Diplopterus I found
nicely bevelled atop and at one of the sides; so that where they
overlapped each other,--for at the joints not a needle-point could be
insinuated,--the thickness of the two scales equalled but the thickness
of one scale in the centre, and thus an equable covering was formed. I
brought with me some of these detached scales, and they now lie fitted
together on the table before me, like pieces of complicated hewn work
carefully arranged on the ground ere the workman transfers them to their
place on the wall. In the smaller-scaled fish, such as the
Cheiracanthus and Cheirolepis, a different principle obtained. The
minute glittering rhombs of bone were set thick on the skin, like those
small scales of metal sewed on leather, that formed an inferior kind of
armor still in use in eastern nations, and which was partially used in
our own country just ere the buff coat altogether superseded the coat of
mail. I found a beautiful piece of jaw in the clay, with the enamelled
tusks bristling on its brightly enamelled edge, like iron teeth in an
iron rake. Mr. Parkinson expresses some wonder, in his work on fossils,
that in a fine ichthyolite in the British Museum, not only the teeth
should have been preserved, but also the lips; but we now know enough of
the construction of the more ancient fish, to cease wondering. The lips
were formed of as solid bone as the teeth themselves, and had as fair a
chance of being preserved entire; just as the metallic rim of a toothed
wheel has as fair a chance of being preserved as the metallic teeth that
project from it. I was interested in marking the various modes of
attachment to the body of the animal which the detached scales exhibit.
The slater fastens on his slates with nails driven into the wood: the
tiler secures his tiles by means of a raised bar on the under side of
each, that locks into a corresponding bar of deal in the framework of
the roof. Now in some of the scales I found the art of the tiler
anticipated; there were bars raised on their inner sides, to lay hold of
the skin beneath; while in others it was the art of the slater that had
been anticipated,--the scales had been slates fastened down by long
nails driven in slantwise, which were, however, mere prolongations of
the scale itself. Great truths may be repeated until they become
truisms, and we fail to note what they in reality convey. The great
truth that all knowledge dwelt without beginning in the adorable Creator
must, I am afraid, have been thus common-placed in my mind; for at
first it struck me as wonderful that the humble arts of the tiler and
slater should have existed in perfection in the times of the Old Red
Sandstone.
I had often remarked amid the fossiliferous limestones of the Lower Old
Red, minute specks and slender veins of a glossy bituminous substance
somewhat resembling jet, sufficiently hard to admit of a tolerable
polish, and which emitted in the fire a bright flame, I had remarked,
further, its apparent identity with a substance used by the ancient
inhabitants of the northern part of the country in the manufacture of
their rude ornaments, as occasionally found in sepulchral urns, such as
beads of an elliptical form, and flat parallelograms, perforated
edge-wise by some four or five holes a-piece; but I had failed hitherto
in detecting in the stone, portions of sufficient bulk for the formation
of either the beads or the parallelograms. On this visit to the
ichthyolite beds, however, I picked up a nodule that inclosed a mass of
the jet large enough to admit of being fashioned into trinkets of as
great bulk as any of the ancient ones I have yet seen, and a portion of
which I succeeded in actually forming into a parallelogram, that could
not have been distinguished from those of our old sepulchral urns. It is
interesting enough to think, that these fossiliferous beds, altogether
unknown to the people of the country for many centuries, and which, when
I first discovered them, some twelve or fourteen years ago, were equally
unknown to geologists, should have been resorted to for this substance,
perhaps thousands of years ago, by the savage aborigines of the
district. But our antiquities of the remoter class furnish us with
several such facts. It is comparatively of late years that we have
become acquainted with the yellow chalk-flints of Banffshire and
Aberdeen; though before the introduction of iron into the country they
seem to have been well known all over the north of Scotland. I have
never yet seen a stone arrow-head found in any of the northern
localities, that had not been fashioned out of this hard and splintery
substance,--a sufficient proof that our ancestors, ere they had formed
their first acquaintance with the metals, were intimately acquainted
with at least the mechanical properties of the chalk-flint, and knew
where in Scotland it was to be found. They were mineralogists enough,
too, as their stone battle-axes testify, to know that the best
tool-making rock is the axe-stone of Werner; and in some localities they
must have brought their supply of this rather rare mineral from great
distances. A history of those arts of savage life, as shown in the
relics of our earlier antiquities, which the course of discovery sereved
thoroughly to supplant, but which could not have been carried on without
a knowledge of substances and qualities afterwards lost, until
re-discovered by scientific curiosity, would form of itself an
exceedingly curious chapter. The art of the gun-flint maker (and it,
too, promises soon to pass into extinction) is unquestionably a curious
one, but not a whit more curious or more ingenious than the art
possessed by the rude inhabitants of our country eighteen hundred years
ago, of chipping arrow-heads with an astonishing degree of neatness out
of the same stubborn material. They found, however, that though flint
made a serviceable arrow-head, it was by much too brittle for an adze or
battle-axe; and sought elsewhere than among the Banffshire gravels for
the rock out of which these were to be wrought. Where they found it in
our northern provinces I have not yet ascertained. It is but a short
time since I came to know that they were beforehand with me in the
discovery of the bituminous jet of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, and were
excavators among its fossiliferous beds. The vitrified forts of the
north of Scotland give evidence of yet another of the obsolete arts.
Before the savage inhabitants of the country were ingenious enough to
know the uses of mortar, or were furnished with tools sufficiently hard
and solid to dress a bit of sandstone, they must have been acquainted
with the _chemical_ fact, that with the assistance of fluxes, a pile of
stones could be fused into a solid wall, and with the _mineralogical_
fact, that there are certain kinds of stones which yield much more
readily to the heat than others. The art of making vitrified forts was
the art of making ramparts of rock through a knowledge of the less
obstinate earths and the more powerful fluxes. I have been informed by
Mr. Patrick Duff of Elgin, that he found, in breaking open a vitrified
fragment detached from an ancient hill-fort, distinct impressions of the
serrated kelp-weed of our shores,--the identical flux which, in its
character as the kelp of commerce, was so extensively used in our
glass-houses only a few years ago.
I was struck, during my explorations at this time, as I had been often
before, by the style of grouping, if I may so speak, which obtains among
the Lower Old Red fossils. In no deposit with which I am acquainted,
however rich in remains, have all its ichthyolites been found lying
together. The collector finds some one or two species very numerous;
some two or three considerably less so, but not unfrequent; some one or
two more, perhaps, exceedingly rare; and a few, though abundant in other
localities, that never occur at all. In the Cromarty beds, for instance,
I never found a Holoptychius, and a Dipterus only once; the Diplopterus
is rare; the Glyptolepis not common; the Cheirolepis and Pterichthys
more so, but not very abundant; the Cheiracanthus and Diplacanthus, on
the other hand, are numerous; and the Osteolepis and Coccosteus more
numerous still. But in other deposits of the same formation, though a
similar style of grouping obtains, the proportions are reversed with
regard to species and genera: the fish rare in one locality abound in
another. In Banniskirk, for instance, the Dipterus is exceedingly
common, while the Osteolepis and Coccosteus are rare, and the
Cheiracanthus and Cheirolepis seem altogether awanting. Again, in the
Morayshire deposits, the Glyptolepis is abundant, and noble specimens of
the Lower Old Red Holoptychius--of which more anon--are to be found in
the neighborhood of Thurso, associated with remains of the Diplopterus,
Coccosteus, Dipterus, and Osteolepis. The fact may be deemed of some
little interest by the geologist, and may serve to inculcate caution, by
showing that it is not always safe to determine regarding the place or
age of subordinate formations from the per centage of certain fossils
which they may be found to contain, or from the fact that they should
want some certain organisms of the system to which they belong, and
possess others. These differences may and do exist in contemporary
deposits; and I had a striking example, on this occasion, of their
dependence on a simple law of instinct, which is as active in producing
the same kind of phenomena now as it seems to have been in the earlier
days of the Old Red Sandstone. The Cromarty and Moray Friths, mottled
with fishing boats (for the bustle of the herring fishers had just
begun), stretched out before me. A few hundred yards from the shore
there was a yawl lying at anchor, with an old fisherman and a few boys
angling from the stern for sillocks (the young of the coal-fish) and for
small rock-cod. A few miles higher up, where the Cromarty Frith expands
into a wide landlocked basin, with shallow sandy shores, there was a
second yawl engaged in fishing for flounders and small skate,--for such
are the kinds of fish that frequent the flat shallows of the basin. A
turbot-net lay drying in the sun: it served to remind me that some six
or eight miles away, in an opposite direction, there is a deep-sea bank,
on which turbot, halibut, and large skate are found. Numerous boats were
stretching down the Moray Frith, bound for the banks of a more distant
locality, frequented at this early stage of the herring fishing by
shoals of herrings, with their attendant dog-fish and cod; and I knew
that in yet another deep-sea range there lie haddock and whiting banks.
Almost every variety of existing fish in the two friths has its own
peculiar habitat; and were they to be destroyed by some sudden
catastrophe, and preserved by some geologic process, on the banks and
shoals which they frequent, there would occur exactly the same phenomena
of grouping in the fossiliferous contemporaneous deposits which they
would thus constitute, as we find exhibited by the deposits of the Lower
Old Red Sandstone.
The remains of Holoptychius occur, I have said, in the neighborhood of
Thurso. I must now add, that very singular remains they are,--full of
interest to the naturalist, and, in great part at least, new to Geology.
My readers, votaries of the stony science, must be acquainted with the
masterly paper of Mr. Sedgwick and Sir R. Murchison "On the Old Red
Sandstone of Caithness and the North of Scotland generally," which forms
part of the second volume (second series) of the "Transactions of the
Geological Society," and with the description which it furnishes, among
many others, of the rocks in the neighborhood of Thurso.
Calcareo-bituminous flags, grits, and shales, of which the paving
flagstones of Caithness may be regarded as the general type, occur on
the shores, in reefs, crags, and precipices; here stretching along the
coast in the form of flat, uneven bulwarks: there rising over it in
steep walls; yonder leaning to the surf, stratum against stratum, like
flights of stairs thrown down from their slant position to the level; in
some places severed by faults; in others cast about in every possible
direction, as if broken and contorted by a thousand antagonist
movements; but in their general bearing rising towards the east, until
the whole calcareo-bituminous schists of which this important member of
the system is composed disappear under the red sandstones of Dunnet
Head. Such, in effect, is the general description of Mr. Sedgwick and
Sir R. Murchison, of the rocks in the neighborhood of Thurso. It
indicates further, that in at least three localities in the range there
occur in the grits and shales, scales and impressions of fish. And such
was the ascertained geology of the deposit when taken up last year by an
ingenious tradesman of Thurso, Mr. Robert Dick, whose patient
explorations, concentrated mainly on the fossil remains of this deposit,
bid fair to add to our knowledge of the ichthyology of the Old Red
Sandstone. Let us accompany Mr. Dick in one of his exploratory rambles.
The various organisms which he disinterred I shall describe from
specimens before me, which I owe to his kindness,--the localities in
which he found them, from a minute and interesting description, for
which I am indebted to his pen.
Leaving behind us the town at the bottom of its deep bay, we set out to
explore a bluff-headed parallelogramical promontory, bounded by Thurso
Bay on the one hand, and Murkle Bay on the other, and which presents to
the open sea, in the space that stretches between, an undulating line of
iron-bound coast, exposed to the roll of the northern ocean. We pass two
stations in which the hard Caithness flagstones so well known in
commerce are jointed by saws wrought by machinery. As is common in the
Old Red Sandstone, in which scarce any stratum solid enough to be of
value to the workmen, whether for building or paving, contains good
specimens, we find but little to detain us in the dark coherent beds
from which the flags are quarried. Here and there a few glittering
scales occur; here and there a few coprolitic patches; here and there
the faint impression of a fucoid; but no organism sufficiently entire to
be transferred to the bag. As we proceed outwards, however, and the
fitful breeze comes laden with the keen freshness of the open sea, we
find among the hard dark strata in the immediate neighborhood of Thurso
Castle, a paler-colored bed of fine-grained semi-calcareous stone,
charged with remains in a state of coherency and keeping better fitted
to repay the labor of the specimen-collector. The inclosing matrix is
comparatively soft: when employed in the neighboring fences as a
building stone, we see it resolved by the skyey influences into
well-nigh its original mud; whereas the organisms which it contains are
composed of a hard, scarce destructible substance,--bone steeped in
bitumen; and the enamel on their outer surfaces is still as glossy and
bright as the japan on a _papier-mache_ tray fresh from the hands of the
workman. Their deep black, too, contrasts strongly with the pale hue of
the stone. They consist chiefly of scales, spines, dermal plates,
snouts, skull-caps, and vegetable impressions. A little farther on, in a
thick bed interposed between two faults, the same kind of remains occur
in the same abundance, largely mingled with scales and teeth of
Holoptychius, tuberculated plates, and coprolitic blotches; and further
on still, in a rubbly flagstone, near where a little stream comes
trotting merrily from the uplands to the sea, there occur
skull-plates,--at least one of which has been disinterred entire,--large
and massy as the helmets of ancient warriors. We have now reached the
outer point of the promontory, where the seaward wave, as it comes
rolling unbroken from the Pole, crosses, in nearing the shore, the
eastward sweep of the great Gulf-stream, and then casts itself headlong
on the rocks. The view has been extending with almost every step we have
taken, and it has now expanded into a wide and noble prospect of ocean
and bay, island and main, bold surf-skirted headlands, and green
retiring hollows. Yonder, on the one hand, are the Orkneys, rising dim
and blue over the foam-mottled currents of the Pentland Frith; and
yonder, on the other, the far-stretching promontory of Holborn Head,
with the line of coast that sweeps along the opposite side of the bay;
here sinking in abrupt flagstone precipices direct into the tide; there
receding in grassy banks formed of a dark blue diluvium. The fields and
dwellings of living men mingle in the landscape with old episcopal ruins
and ancient burying-grounds; and yonder, well-nigh in the opening of the
Frith, gleams ruddy to the sun,--a true blood-colored blush, when all
around is azure or pale,--the tall Red Sandstone precipices of Dunnet
Head. It has been suggested that the planet Mars may owe its red color
to the extensive development of some such formation as the Old Red
Sandstone of our own planet: the existing formation in Mars may, at the
present time, it is said, be a Red Sandstone formation. It seems much
more probable, however, that the red flush which characterizes the whole
of that planet,--its oceans as certainly as its continents,--should be
rather owing to some widely-diffused peculiarity of the surrounding
atmosphere, than to aught peculiar in the varied surface of land and
water which that atmosphere surrounds; but certainly the extensive
existence of such a red system might produce the effect. If the rocks
and soils of Dunnet Head formed average specimens of those of our globe
generally, we could look across the heavens at Mars with a disk vastly
more rubicund and fiery than his own. The earth, as seen from the moon,
would seem such a planet bathed in blood as the moon at its rising
frequently appears from the earth.
We have rounded the promontory. The beds exposed along the coast to the
lashings of the surf are of various texture and character,--here tough,
bituminous, and dark; there of a pale hue, and so hard that they ring to
the hammer like plates of cast iron; yonder soft, unctuous, and
green,--a kind of chloritic sandstone. And these very various powers of
resistance and degrees of hardness we find indicated by the rough
irregularities of the surface. The softer parts retire in long
trench-like hollows,--the harder stand out in sharp irregular ridges.
Fossils abound: the bituminous beds glitter bright with glossy
quadrangular scales, that look like sheets of black mica inclosed in
granite. We find jaws, teeth, tubercled plates, skull-caps, spines, and
fucoids,--"tombs among which to contemplate," says Mr. Dick, "of which
Hervey never dreamed." The condition of complete keeping in which we
discover some of these remains, even when exposed to the incessant dash
of the surf, seems truly wonderful. We see scales of Holoptychius
standing up in bold relief from the hard cherty rock that has worn from
around them, with all the tubercles and wavy ridges of their sculpture
entire. This state of keeping seems to be wholly owing to the curious
chemical change that has taken place in their substance. Ere the
skeleton of the Bruce, disinterred entire after the lapse of five
centuries, was recommitted to the tomb, there were such measures taken
to secure its preservation, that were it to be again disinterred even
after as many centuries more had passed, it might be found retaining
unbroken its gigantic proportions. There was molten pitch poured over
the bones in a state of sufficient fluidity to permeate all their
pores, and fill up the central hollows, and which, soon hardening around
them, formed a bituminous matrix, in which they may lie unchanged for
more than a thousand years. Now, exactly such was the process of keeping
to which nature resorted with these skeletons of the Old Red Sandstone.
The animal matter with which they were charged had been converted into a
hard black bitumen. Like the bones of the Bruce, they are bones steeped
in pitch; and so thoroughly is every pore and hollow still occupied,
that, when cast into the fire, they flamed like torches. In one of the
beds at which we have now arrived Mr. Dick found the occipital plates of
a Holoptychius of gigantic proportions. The frontal plates measured full
sixteen inches across, and from the nape of the neck to a little above
the place of the eyes, full eighteen; while a single plate belonging to
the lower part of the head measures thirteen and a half inches by seven
and a half. I have remarked, in my little work on the Old Red
Sandstone,--founding on a large amount of negative evidence, that a
mediocrity of size and bulk seems to have obtained among the fish of the
Lower Old Red, though in at least the Upper formation, a considerable
increase in both took place. A single piece of positive evidence,
however, outweighs whole volumes of a merely negative kind. From the
entire plate now in my possession, which is identical with one figured
in Mr. Noble of St. Madoes' specimen, and from the huge fragments of the
upper plates now before me, some of which are full five-eighth parts of
an inch in thickness, I am prepared to demonstrate that this
Holoptychius of the Lower Old Red must have been at least thrice the
size of the _Holoptychius Nobilissimus_ of Clashbennie.
Still we pass on, though with no difficulty, over the rough contorted
crags, worn by the surf into deep ruts and uneven ridges, gnarled
protuberances, and crater-like hollows. The fossiliferous beds are
still very numerous, and largely charged with remains. We see dermal
bones, spines, scales, and jaws, projecting in high relief from the
sea-worn surface of the ledges below, and from the weatherworn faces of
the precipices above; for an uneven wall of crags some thirty or forty
feet high, now runs along the shore. We have reached what seems a large
mole, that sloping downwards athwart the beach from the precipices, like
a huge boat-pier, runs far into the surf. We find it composed of a
siliceous bed, so intensely compact and hard, that it has preserved its
proportions entire, while every other rock has worn from around it. For
century after century have the storms of the fierce north-west sent
their long ocean-nursed waves to dash against it in foam; for century
after century have the never-ceasing currents of the Pentland chafed
against its steep sides, or eddied over its rough crest; and yet still
does it remain unwasted and unworn,--its abrupt wall retaining all its
former steepness, and every angular jutting all the original sharpness
of edge. As we advance the scenery becomes wilder and more broken: here
an irregular wall of rock projects from the crags towards the sea; there
a dock-like hollow, in which the water gleams green, intrudes from the
sea upon the crags; we pass a deep lime-encrusted cave, with which
tradition associates some wild legends, and which, from the supposed
resemblance of the hanging stalactites to the entrails of a large animal
wounded in the chase, bears the name of Pudding-Gno; and then, turning
an angle of the coast, we enter a solitary bay, that presents at its
upper extremity a flat expanse of sand. Our walk is still over
sepulchres charged with the remains of the long-departed. Scales of
Holoptychius abound, scattered like coin over the surface of the ledges.
It would seem--to borrow from Mr. Dick--as if some old lord of the
treasury, who flourished in the days of the coal-money currency, had
taken a squandering fit at Sanday Bay, and tossed the dingy contents of
his treasure-chest by shovelfuls upon the rocks. Mr. Dick found in this
locality some of his finest specimens, one of which--the inner side of
the skull-cap of a Holoptychius, with every plate occupying its proper
place, and the large angular holes through which the eyes looked out
still entire--I trust to be able by and by to present to the public in a
good engraving. There occur jaws, plates, scales spines,--the remains of
fucoids, too, of great size and in vast abundance. Mr. Dick has
disinterred from among the rocks of Sanday Bay flattened carbonaceous
stems four inches in diameter. We are still within an hour's walk of
Thurso; but in that brief hour how many marvels have we witnessed!--how
vast an amount of the vital mechanisms of a perished creation have we
not passed over! Our walk has been along ranges of sepulchres, greatly
more wonderful than those of Thebes or Petraea, and mayhap a thousand
times more ancient. There is no lack of life along the shores of the
solitary little bay. The shriek of the sparrow-hawk mingles from the
cliffs with the hoarse deep croak of the raven; the cormorant on some
wave-encircled ledge, hangs out his dark wing to the breeze; the spotted
diver, plying his vocation on the shallows beyond, dives and then
appears, and dives and appears again, and we see the silver glitter of
scales from his beak; and far away in the offing the sunlight falls on a
scull of seagulls, that flutter upwards, downwards, and athwart, now in
the air, thick as midges over some forest-brook in an evening of
midsummer.
But we again pass onwards, amid a wild ruinous scene of abrupt faults,
detached fragments of rocks, and reversed strata: again the ledges
assume their ordinary position and aspect, and we rise from lower to
higher and still higher beds in the formation,--for such, as I have
already remarked, is the general arrangement from west to east, along
the northern coast of Caithness, of the Old Red Sandstone. The great
Conglomerate base of the formation we find largely developed at Port
Skerry, just where the western boundary line of the county divides it
from the county of Sutherland; its thick upper coping of sandstone we
see forming the tall cliffs of Dunnet Head; and the greater part of the
space between, nearly twenty miles as the crow flies, is occupied
chiefly by the shales, grits, and flagstones, which we have found
charged so abundantly with the strangely-organized ichthyolites of the
second stage of vertebrate existence. In the twenty intervening miles
there are many breaks and faults, and so there may be, of course,
recurrences of the same strata, and re-appearances of the same beds;
but, after making large allowance for partial foldings and repetitions,
we must regard the development of this formation, with which the twenty
miles are occupied, as truly enormous. And yet it is but one of three
that occur in a single system. We reach the long flat bay of Dunnet, and
cross its waste of sands. The incoherent coils of the sand-worm lie
thick on the surface; and here a swarm of buzzing flies, disturbed by
the foot, rises in a cloud from some tuft of tangled sea-weed; and here
myriads of gray crustaceous sand-hoppers dart sidelong in the little
pools, or vault from the drier ridges a few inches into the air. Were
the trilobites of the Silurian system,--at one period, as their remains
testify, more than equally abundant,--creatures of similar habits? We
have at length arrived at the tall sandstone precipices of Dunnet, with
their broad decaying fronts of red and yellow; but in vain may we ply
hammer and chisel among them: not a scale, not a plate, not even the
stain of an imperfect fucoid appears. We have reached the upper boundary
of the Lower Old Red formation, and find it bordered by a desert devoid
of all trace of life. Some of the characteristic types of the formation
re-appear in the upper deposits; but though there is a reproduction of
the original works in their more characteristic passages, if I may so
speak, many of the readings are diverse, and the editions are all new.
It is one of the circumstances of peculiar interest with which Geology
at its present stage is invested, that there is no man of energy and
observation who may not rationally indulge in the hope of extending its
limits by adding to its facts. Mr. Dick, an intelligent tradesman of
Thurso, agreeably occupies his hours of leisure, for a few months, in
detaching from the rocks in his neighborhood their organic remains; and
thus succeeds in adding to the existing knowledge of palaeozoic life, by
disinterring ichthyolites which even Agassiz himself would delight to
figure and describe. Several of the specimens in my possession, which I
owe to the kindness of Mr. Dick, are so decidedly unique, that they
would be regarded as strangers in the completest geological museums
extant. It is a not uncurious fact, that when the Thurso tradesman was
pursuing his labors of exploration among rocks beside the Pentland
Frith, a man of similar character was pursuing exactly similar labors,
with nearly similar results, among rocks of nearly the same era, that
bound, on the coast of Cornwall, the British Channel. When the one was
hammering in "Ready-money Cove," the other, at the opposite end of the
island, was disturbing the echoes of "Pudding-Gno;" and scales, plates,
spines, and occipital fragments of palaeozoic fishes rewarded the labors
of both. In an article on the scientific meeting at York, which appeared
in "Chambers' Journal" in the November of last year, the reading public
were introduced to a singularly meritorious naturalist, Mr. Charles
Peach,[9] a private in the mounted guard (preventive service),
stationed on the southern coast of Cornwall, who has made several
interesting discoveries on the outer confines of the animal kingdom,
that have added considerably to the list of our British zoophites and
echinodermata. The article, a finely-toned one, redolent of that
pleasing sympathy which Mr. Robert Chambers has ever evinced with
struggling merit, referred chiefly to Mr. Peach's labors as a
naturalist; but he is also well known in the geological field.
CHAPTER XII.
Ichthyolite Beds of Clune and Lethenbarn--Limestone
Quarry--Destruction of Urns and Sarcophagi in the
Lime-kiln--Nodules opened--Beautiful coloring of the
Remains--Patrick Duff's Description--New Genus of Morayshire
Ichthyolite described--Form and size of the Nodules or Stone
Coffins--Illustration from Mrs. Marshall's Cements--Forest of
Darnaway--The Hill of Berries--Sluie--Elgin--Outliers of the Weald
and the Oolite--Description of the Weald at Linksfield--Mr. Duff's
_Lepidotus minor_--Eccentric Types of Fish Scales--Visit to the
Sandstones of Scat-Craig--Fine suit of Fossils at Scat-Craig--True
graveyard Bones, not mere Impressions--Varieties of pattern--The
Diker's "Carved Flowers"--_Stagonolepis_, a new genus--Termination
of the Ramble.
My term of furlough was fast drawing to a close. It was now Wednesday
the 14th August, and on Monday the 19th it behooved me to be seated at
my desk in Edinburgh. I took boat, and crossed the Moray Frith from
Cromarty to Nairn, and then walked on, in a very hot sun, over
Shakspeare's Moor to Boghole, with the intention of examining the
ichthyolite beds of Clune and Lethenbarn, and afterwards striking across
the country to Forres, through the forest of Darnaway, where the forest
abuts on the Findhorn, at the picturesque village of Sluie. When I had
last crossed the moor, exactly ten years before, it was in a tremendous
storm of rain and wind; and the dark platform of heath and bog, with its
old ruinous castle standing sentry over it, seemed greatly more worthy
of the genius of the dramatist, as cloud after cloud dashed over it,
like ocean waves breaking on some low volcanic island, than it did on
this clear, breathless afternoon, in the unclouded sunshine. But the
sublimity of the moor on which Macbeth met the witches depends in no
degree on that of the "heath near Forres," whether seen in foul weather
or fair; its topography bears relation to but the mind of Shakspeare;
and neither tile-draining nor the plough will ever lessen an inch of its
area.
The limestone quarry of Clune has been opened on the edge of an
extensive moor, about three miles from the public road, where the
province of Moray sweeps upwards from the broad fertile belt of
corn-land that borders on the sea, to the brown and shaggy interior.
There is an old-fashioned bare-looking farm-house on the one side,
surrounded by a few uninclosed patches of corn; and the moorland, here
dark with heath, there gray with lichens, stretches away on the other.
The quarry itself is merely a piece of moor that has been trenched to
the depth of some five or six feet from the 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,--classic 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 Cumming 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 japan-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 shore. A smart blow on the edge splits them along
on the major axis, and exposes the interesting inclosure. The practised
geologist knows well the thrilling interest attending the breaking up of
the nodule: the uninitiated cannot 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 lustre; and even in a cabinet an old specimen is
easily known by its tarnished aspect."
I found at Clune no ichthyolite to which the geologists have not been
already introduced, or with which I had not been acquainted previously
in the Cromarty beds. The Lower Old Red of Morayshire furnishes,
however, at least one genus not yet figured nor described, and of which,
so far as I am aware, only a single specimen has yet been found. It
seems to have been a small delicately-formed fish; its head covered with
plates; its body with round scales of a 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
circumference; similar furrows traversed the occipital plates; and the
fins, unfurnished with spines, were formed, as in the Dipterus and
Diplopterus, of thick-set, enamelled rays. The 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 Cumming of Altyre, a few weeks previous to the lamented death
of her ladyship; and that, on assuring her it was as new in relation to
the Cromarty and Caithness fish-beds as to those of Moray, she intimated
an intention of forthwith sending a drawing of it to Agassiz; 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 attitude 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 illustrated in the compositions of her various
cements. These are all formed of a basis of lime, mixed in certain
proportions with organic matter. The reader must be familiar with
cements of this kind long known among the people, and much used in the
repairing of broken pottery, such as a cement compounded of quicklime
made of oyster shells, mixed up with a glue made of skim-milk cheese,
and another cement made also of quicklime mixed up with the whites of
eggs. In Mrs. Marshall's cements, the organic matter is variously
compounded of both animal and vegetable substances, while the earth
generally employed is sulphate of lime; and the result is a
close-grained marble-like 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
shores; and universally found that the mass, 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 unillustrated 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 mass. It still remains for the
geologic chemist to discover on what principle masses of animal matter
should form the attracting nuclei of limestone nodules.
The declining sun warned me that I had lingered rather longer than was
prudent among the ichthyolites of Clune; and so, striking in an eastern
direction across a flat moor, through which I found the schistose gneiss
of the district protruding in masses resembling half-buried boulders, I
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 passing 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
passed 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 nobler; 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 Nobilissimus_, 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 masses detached from them by the denuding agencies lie thick
over extensive areas; and in working out the course of improvement which
has already rendered Elginshire the garden of the north, the ditcher at
one time touches on some bed of shale charged with the 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 grassy mounds. And from their insulated character, and the
abundance of organisms which they inclose, they serve to remind one of
those green pyramids of Central America in which the traveller finds
deposited the skeleton remains of extinct races. It has been suggested
by Mr. Duff, in his "Sketch,"--a suggestion which the late
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 passing 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 circumstance,
well fitted to impress on the geologist the necessity of cautious
induction, that the boulder-clay not only _overlies_, but also
_underlies_, this fresh-water deposit; a bed of unequivocally the same
origin and character with that at the top lying intercalated, as if
filling up two low flat vaults, between the upper surface of the
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 shells are more equivocal: a Mytilus or
Modiola, which abounds in some of the bands, may have been either a sea
or a fresh-water shell; and a small oyster and Astarte seem 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 knobs 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 japanned, the forms are strangely complex
and irregular, easily expressible by the pencil, but beyond the reach of
the pen. The remains of reptiles have been found occasionally, though
rarely, in this outlier of the Weald,--the vertebra of a Plesiosaurus,
the femur of some Chelonian reptile, and a large fluted tooth, supposed
Saurian.
I would fain have visited some of the 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
circumstances,--the one on the western, the other on the eastern coast
of a country then covered by the vegetation of the Oolite, and now
known, with reference to an antiquity of but yesterday, as the ancient
kingdom of Scotland. I saw among the Ammonites of these outliers at
least one species, which, I believe, has not yet been found elsewhere,
and which has been named, after Mr. 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 shell,
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 pass 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 grassy lea;
and unfenced patches of corn here and there alternate with plantings of
dark sombre firs, in their mediocre youth. At length we near the
southern boundary of the landscape,--an undulating moory ridge,
partially planted; and see where a deep gap in the 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, unassisted 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 mass do not exist, as in so many of the Upper Old Red
Sandstone rocks, as mere films or impressions, but in their original
forms, retaining bulk as well as surface: they are true graveyard bones,
which may be detached entire from the inclosing mass, 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 Nobilissimus_, and a small tooth, bent somewhat
like a nail that had been drawn out of its place by two opposite
wrenches, and from the internal structure of which Professor Owen has
bestowed on the animal to which it belonged the generic name Dendrodus.
I have ascertained, however, through the indispensable assistance of Mr.
George Sanderson, that the genus Holoptychius of Agassiz, named from a
peculiarity in the sculpture of the scale, is the identical genus
Dendrodus of Professor Owen, named from a peculiarity in the structure
of the teeth. Those teeth of the genus Holoptychius, whether of the
Lower or Upper Old Red, that belong to the second or _reptile_ row with
which the creature's jaws were furnished, present in the cross section
the appearance of numerous branches, like those of trees, radiating from
a centre like spokes from the nave of a wheel; and their arborescent
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 repetitions of earlier
patterns to be found among the generically different ichthyolites of
other formations. We see in the world of fashion old modes of ornament
continually reviving: the range of invention seems limited; and we find
it revolving, in consequence, in an 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 transmutation of species, were any such needed,
might be founded on those inherent peculiarities of structure that are
ascertained thus to pervade the entire texture of the framework of
animals. If we find one building differing from another merely in
external form, we have no difficulty in conceiving how, by additions and
alterations, they might be made to present a uniform appearance;
transmutation, development, progression,--if one may use such
terms,--seem possible in such circumstances. 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
analogy of the diker, on at least a first glance, they may be held to
resemble the rather equivocal florets of a cheap wall-paper, or of an
ornamental tile. The specimen exhibits the impressions of four rows of
oblong 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 Agassiz. 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 noble lines on the Torso,--
"And dost thou still, thou mass 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 circumstances unfitted for
their longer existence, or in some great annihilating catastrophe, the
last individuals perished,--were all associated with this piece of
sculptured stone; but, like some ancient inscription of the desert,
written in an unknown character and dead tongue, its dark meanings were
fast locked up, and no inhabitant of earth possessed the key. Does that
key anywhere exist, save in the keeping of Him who knows all and
produced all, and to whom there is neither past nor future? Or is there
a record of creation kept by those higher intelligences,--the first-born
of spiritual natures,--whose existence stretches far into the eternity
that has gone by, and who possess, as their inheritance, the whole of
the eternity to come? We may be at least assured, that nothing can be
too low for angels to remember, that was not too low for God to create.
I took coach for Edinburgh on the following morning; for with my visit
to Scat-Craig terminated the explorations of my 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 shores in the previous season, in
detached water-rolled masses. 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--Anchored
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 masses, 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
Assembly 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 shore
through rain and spray,--for the weather was coarse and boisterous,--she
had apparently gained as little in her good looks from either
circumstance as most other ladies do. We lay storm-bound for three days
at Isle Ornsay, watching from the window of Mr. Swanson's dwelling the
incessant showers sweeping down the loch. On the morning of Saturday,
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 Assembly; and I, more than half afraid that my
term of furlough might expire ere I had reached my proposed scene of
exploration, was as anxious as he; and so we both resolved, come what
might, on doggedly beating our way adown the Sound of Sleat to Small
Isles. If the wind does not fail us, said my friend, we have little
more than a day's work before us, and shall get into Eigg about
midnight. We had but one of our seamen aboard, for John Stewart was
engaged with his potato crop at home; but the minister was content, in
the emergency, to rank his passenger as an able-bodied seaman; and so,
hoisting sail and anchor, we got under way, and, clearing the loch,
struck out into the Sound.
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 pass by, and still were we
floating idly in the calm. I employed the few hours of the Saturday
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 mass, 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 hoary flakes.
Within the shadow of the ship
I watched their rich attire,--
Blue, glassy green, and velvet black:
They curled, and swam, and every track
Was a flash of golden fire."
A crew of three, when there are watches to set, divides wofully ill. As
there was, however, nothing to do in the calm, we decided that our first
watch should consist of our single seaman, and the second of the
minister and his friend. The clouds, which had been thickening for
hours, now broke in torrents of rain, and old Alister got into his
water-proof oil-skin and souwester, and we into our beds. The seams of
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, passing 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 passed, 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 ashore!"
We were boarded in rather more than half an hour after,--for the sounds
in the dead calm had preceded the boat by miles,--by four active young
men, who seemed wonderfully glad to see their pastor; and then, amid the
thickening showers, which had recommenced heavy as 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 ashore and preached.
The evening of Sunday closed in fog and rain, and in fog and rain the
morning of Monday arose. The ceaseless patter made dull music on deck
and skylight above, and the slower drip, drip, through the leaky beams,
drearily beat time within. The roof of my bed was luckily water-tight;
and I could look out from my snuggery of blankets on the desolations of
the leakage, like Bacon's philosopher surveying a tempest from the
shore. But the minister was somewhat less fortunate, and had no little
trouble in diverting an ill-conditioned drop that had made a dead set at
his pillow. I was now a full week from Edinburgh, and had seen and done
nothing; and, were another week to pass after the same manner,--as, for
aught that appeared, might well happen,--I might just go home again, as
I had come, with my 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 grass, 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
passing, 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 noble 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 passed 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 grass-grown turf, with a few layers of unconnected stone in the
basement tiers, seemed to constitute one continuous hillock, sloping
upwards from foundation to ridge, like one of the lesser moraines of
Agassiz, save where the fabric here and there bellied outwards or
inwards, in perilous dilapidation, that seemed but awaiting the first
breeze. The low chinky door opened direct into the one wretched
apartment of the hovel, which we found lighted chiefly by holes in the
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 partition to the
portion of the apartment, some five or six feet square, which contained
the fire-place; but the boarding that had rendered it such had long
since fallen away, and it now presented merely a naked rickety frame to
the current of cold air from without. Within a foot of the bed-ridden
woman's head there was a hole in the turf-wall, which was, we saw,
usually stuffed with a bundle of rags, but which lay open as we entered,
and which furnished a downward peep of sea and shore, and the rocky
_Eilan 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 Constitution,
before which they must plead at their own expense, shall have first
given them permission to prosecute their claims. And I doubt not that
many of the English gentlemen whose votes swelled the majority, and made
it such, are really humane men, friendly to an equal-handed justice, and
who hold it to be the peculiar glory of the Constitution, as well shown
by De Lolme, that it has not one statute-book for the poor, and another
for the rich, but the same law and the same administration of law for
all. They surely could not have seen that the principle of their Poor
Law Act for Scotland sets the pauper beyond the pale of the Constitution
in the first instance, that he may be starved in the second. The
suffering paupers of this miserable island cottage would have all their
wants fully satisfied in the grave, long ere they could establish at
their own expense, at Edinburgh, their claim to enter a court of law. I
know not a fitter case for the interposition of our lately formed
"Scottish Association for the Protection of the Poor" than that of this
miserable family; and it is but one of many which the island of Eigg
will be found to furnish.
After a week's weary waiting, settled weather came at last; and the
morning of Tuesday rose bright and fair. My friend, whose absence at the
General Assembly had accumulated a considerable amount of ministerial
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 passing
vessel-wards, on the previous year, from the _Ru Stoir_ to the
farm-house of Keill, along the escarpment under the cliffs, I had
examined the shores somewhat too cursorily during the one-half of my
journey, and the closing evening had prevented me from exploring them
during the other half at all; and I now set myself leisurely to retrace
the way backwards from the farm-house to the _Stoir_. I descended to the
bottom of the cliffs, along the pathway which runs between Keill and the
solitary midway shieling formerly described, and found that the basaltic
columns over head, which had seemed so 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 passage to the foot of the precipice, and emerge into
light on the edge of the grassy talus half-way down the hill. It
reminded me of the tunnel in the rock through which Imlac opened up a
way of escape to Rasselas from the happy valley,--the "subterranean
passage," begun "where the summit hung over the middle part," and that
"issued out behind the prominence."
From the commencement of the range of cliffs, on half-way to the
shieling, I found the shore so thickly covered up by masses of trap, the
debris of the precipices above, that I could scarce determine the nature
of the bottom on which they 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 shells and fragmentary portions of fishes, lie
closely packed in their folds. One limestone bed, occurring in a dark
shale, seems almost entirely composed of a species of small oyster; and
some two or three other thin beds, of what appears to be either a
species of small Mytilus or Avicula, mixed up with a few shells
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
shell in these parts,--the _Mya truncata_. The remains of
fishes,--chiefly Ganoid scales and the teeth of Placoids,--lie scattered
among the shells in amazing abundance. On the surface of a single
fragment, about nine inches by five, which I detached from one of the
beds, and which now lies before me, I reckon no fewer than twenty-five
teeth, and twenty-two on the area of another. They are of very various
forms,--some of them squat and round, like ill-formed small
shot,--others spiky and sharp, not unlike flooring nails,--some straight
as needles, some bent like the beak of a hawk,--some, like the palatal
teeth of the Acrodus of the Lias, 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 knobs, that indicate the places of
the spiky points on the hybodent teeth. I have got three of each kind
slit up by Mr. George Sanderson, and the internal structure 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 shells of the
system,--Ammonites, Belemnites, Gryphites, or Nautili.
I explored the shores of the island on to the _Ru Stoir_, and thence to
the Bay of Laig; but though I found detached masses of the reptile bed
occurring in abundance, indicating that its place lay not far beyond the
fall of ebb, in no other locality save the one described did I find it
laid bare. I spent some time beside the Bay of Laig in 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 mass, in a segment of a circle, at the
full stretch of the arm, and that the vibrations which produce them
communicate a peculiar titillating sensation to the hand or foot by
which they are elicited, extending in the foot to the knee, and in the
hand to the elbow. When we pass the wet finger along the edge of an
ale-glass partially filled with water, we see the vibrations thickly
wrinkling the surface: the undulations which, communicated to the air,
produce sound, render themselves, when communicated to the water,
visible to the eye; and the titillating feeling seems but a modification
of the same phenomenon acting on the nerves and fluids of the leg or
arm. It appears to be produced by the wrinklings of the vibrations, if I
may so speak, passing along sentient channels. The sounds will
ultimately be found dependent, I am of opinion, though I cannot yet
explain the principle, on the purely quartzose character of the sand,
and the friction of the incoherent upper strata against under strata
coherent and damp. I remained ten days in the island, and went over all
my former ground, but succeeded in making no further discoveries.
On the morning of Wednesday, June 25th, we set sail for Isle Ornsay,
with a smart breeze from the north-west. The lower and upper sky was
tolerably clear, and the sun looked cheerily down on the deep blue of
the sea; but along the higher ridges of the land there lay long level
strata of what the meteorologists distinguish as parasitic clouds. When
every other patch of vapor in the landscape was in motion, scudding
shorewards from the Atlantic before the still-increasing gale, there
rested along both the Scuir of Eigg and the tall opposite ridge of the
island, and along the steep peaks of Rum, clouds that seemed as if
anchored, each on its own mountain-summit, and over which the gale
failed to exert any propelling power. They were stationary in the middle
of the rushing current, when all else was speeding before it. It has
been shown that these parasitic clouds are mere local condensations of
strata of damp air passing along the mountain-summits, and rendered
visible but to the extent in which the summits affect the temperature.
Instead of being stationary, they are ever-forming and ever-dissipating
clouds,--clouds that form a few yards in advance of the condensing hill,
and that dissipate a few yards after they have quitted it. I had nothing
to do on deck, for we had been joined at Eigg by John Stewart; and so,
after watching the appearance of the stationary clouds for some little
time, I went below, and, throwing myself into the minister's large
chair, took up a book. The gale meanwhile freshened, and freshened yet
more; and the Betsey leaned over till her lee chain-plate lay along in
the water. There was the usual combination of sounds beneath and around
me,--the mixture of guggle, clunk, and splash,--of low, continuous rush,
and bluff, loud blow, which forms in such circumstances the voyager's
concert. I soon became aware, however, of yet another species of sound,
which I did not like half so well,--a sound as of the washing of a
shallow current over a rough surface; and, on the minister coming below,
I asked him, tolerably well prepared for his answer, what it might
mean. "It means," he said, "that we have sprung a leak, and a rather bad
one; but we are only some six or eight miles from the Point of Sleat,
and must soon catch the land." He returned on deck, and I resumed my
book. Presently, however, the rush became greatly louder; some other
weak patch in the Betsey's upper works had given way, and anon the water
came washing up from the lee side along the edge of the cabin floor. I
got upon deck to see how matters stood with us; and the minister, easing
off the vessel for a few points, gave instant orders to shorten sail, in
the hope of getting her upper works out of the water, and then to unship
the companion ladder, beneath which a hatch communicated with the low
strip of hold under the cabin, and to bring aft the pails. We lowered
our foresail; furled up the mainsail half-mast high; John Stewart took
his station at the pump; old Alister and I, furnished with pails, took
ours, the one at the foot, the other at the head, of the companion, to
hand up and throw over; a young girl, a passenger from Eigg to the
mainland, lent her assistance, and got wofully drenched in the work;
while the minister, retaining his station at the helm, steered right on.
But the gale had so increased, that, notwithstanding our diminished
breadth of sail, the Betsey, straining hard in the rough sea, still lay
in to the gunwale; and the water, pouring in through a hundred opening
chinks in her upper works, rose, despite of our exertions, high over
plank, and beam, and cabin-floor, and went dashing against beds and
lockers. She was evidently filling, and bade fair to terminate all her
voyagings by a short trip to the bottom. Old Alister, a seaman of thirty
years' standing, whose station at the bottom of the cabin stairs enabled
him to see how fast the water was gaining on the Betsey, but not how the
Betsey was gaining on the land, was by no means the least anxious among
us. Twenty years previous he had seen a vessel go down in exactly
similar circumstances, and in nearly the same place, and the
reminiscence, in the circumstances, seemed rather an uncomfortable one.
It had been a bad evening, he said, and the vessel he sailed in, and a
sloop, her companion, were pressing hard to gain the land. The sloop had
sprung a leak, and was straining, as if for life and death, under a
press of canvas. He saw her outsail the vessel to which he belonged,
but, when a few shots a-head she gave a sudden lurch, and disappeared
from the surface instantaneously as a vanishing spectre, and neither
sloop nor crew were ever more heard of.
There are, I am convinced, few deaths less painful than some of those
untimely and violent ones at which we are most disposed to shudder. We
wrought so hard at pail and pump,--the occasion, too, was one of so much
excitement, and tended so thoroughly to awaken our energies,--that I was
conscious, during the whole time, of an exhilaration of spirits rather
pleasurable than otherwise. My fancy was active, and active, strange as
the fact may seem, chiefly with ludicrous objects. Sailors tell
regarding the flying Dutchman, that he was a hard-headed captain of
Amsterdam, who, in a bad night and head wind, when all the other vessels
of his fleet were falling back on the port they had recently quitted,
obstinately swore that, rather than follow their example, he would keep
beating about till the day of judgment. And the Dutch captain, says the
story, was just taken at his word, and is beating about still. When
matters were at the worst with us, we got under the lea of the point of
Sleat. The promontory interposed between us and the roll of the sea; the
wind gradually took off; and, after having seen the water gaining fast
and steadily on us for considerably more than an hour, we, in turn,
began to gain on the water. It came ebbing out of drawers and beds, and
sunk downwards along pannels and table-legs,--a second retiring deluge;
and we entered Isle Ornsay with the cabin-floor all visible, and less
than two feet water in the hold. On the following morning, taking leave
of my friend the minister, I set off, on my return homewards, by the
Skye steamer, and reached Edinburgh on the evening of Saturday.
RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST;
OR,
TEN THOUSAND MILES OVER THE FOSSILIFEROUS
DEPOSITS OF SCOTLAND.
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--"Constitution
of Man," and "Vestiges of Creation"--Atop of the Banff Coach--A
Geologist's Field Equipment--The trespassing "Stirk"--Silurian
Schists inlaid with Old Red--Bay of Gamrie how
formed--Gardenstone--Geological Free-masonry illustrated--How to
break an Ichthyolite Nodule--An old Rhyme mended--A raised
Beach--Fossil Shells--Scotland under water at the time of the
Boulder Clays.
From circumstances that in no way call for explanation, my usual
exploratory ramble was thrown this year (1847) from the middle of July
into the middle of September; and I 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 passed a foundered vessel, lying about a mile and a
half off the land, with but her topmast and the point of her peak over
the 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 shore, where, by stranding her, the crew had hoped to save
at least their lives, she had disappeared with a sudden lurch, and all
aboard had perished. I remembered having read, among other 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 passed 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 passes from Banffshire into the
province of Moray. He leaves behind him at the same line the
wheat-fields and the cottages built of red stone, to find only barley
and oats, and here and there a plot of rye, associated 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 circumstance is not unworthy the
notice of the geologist. It is but a tedious process through which the
minute lichen, settling on a surface of naked stone, forms in the course
of ages a soil for plants of greater bulk and a higher order; and had
Scotland been left to the exclusive operation of this slow agent, it
would be still a rocky desert, with 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 Banffshires, 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-shelled, ponderously-hinged conchifer, characteristic
of the Cretaceous group, but which has no living representative; with
numerous flints, traversed by rough-edged, bifurcated hollows, in which
branched sponges had once lain; a well-preserved Pecten; the impressions
of spines of Echini of at least two distinct species; and the
nicely-marked impression of part of a Cidaris, with the balls on which
the sockets of the club-like spines had been fitted existing in the
print as spherical moulds, in which shot might be cast, and with the
central ligamentary depression, which in the actual fossil exists but as
a minute cavity, projecting into the centre of each hollow sphere, like
the wooden fusee into the centre of a bomb-shell. This latter cast, fine
and sharp as that of a medal taken in sulphur, seems sufficient of
itself to establish two distinct points: in the first place, that the
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 assailed
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 passes over them after him as at second hand, a subject
divested of the fire-edge of novelty, I can deem Mr. Longmuir well and
not unprofessionally employed, in 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 associations. According to the old fiction, the look of the
basilisk did not kill unless the creature saw before it was seen;--its
mere _return_ glance was harmless; and there is a class of thoroughly
dangerous writers who in this respect resemble the basilisk. It is
perilous to give them a first look of the public. They are formidable
simply as the earliest popularizers of some interesting science, or the
first promulgators of some class of curious little-known facts, with
which they mix up their special contributions of error,--often the only
portion of their writings that really belongs to themselves. Nor is it
at all so easy to _counteract_ as to _confute_ them. A masterly
confutation of the part of their works truly their own may, from its
subject, be a very unreadable book: it can have but the insinuated
poison to deal with, unmixed with the 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 "Constitution
of Man" in which the ordinary reader finds amusement 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
"Constitution" and the "Vestiges" had the advantage, so essential to the
basilisk, of taking the first glance of the public on their respective
subjects; whereas their confutators have been able to render them back
but mere _return_ glances. The only efficiently counteractive mode of
looking down the danger, in cases of this kind, is the mode adopted by
Mr. Longmuir.
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 abutting 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 shore,--which at one or two points it
overlooks from dark-colored cliffs of grauwacke slate,--to the fishing
village of Gardenstone. My dress was the usual fatigue suit of russet,
in which I find I can work amid the soil of ravines and quarries with
not only the best effect, but with even the least possible sacrifice of
appearance: the shabbiest of all suits is a good suit spoiled. My
hammer-shaft projected from my pocket; a knapsack, with a few changes of
linen, slung suspended from my shoulders; a strong cotton umbrella
occupied my better hand; and a gray maud, buckled shepherd-fashion
aslant the chest, completed my equipment. There were few travellers on
the road, which forked off on the hill-side a short mile away, into two
branches, like a huge letter Y, leaving me uncertain which branch to
choose; and I made up my mind to have 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, passing the endangered
stirk, that seemed luxuriating, undisturbed by any presentiment of
impending peril, amid the rich swathe of a late clover crop, still damp
with the dews of the morning frost, I tapped at the door of the
farm-house, and delivered my message to a young good-looking girl, in
nearly the words of the woman:--"The gude-wife bade me tell _them_," I
said, "to send that instant for the stirk, for she had gat fra her
tether, and would brak on the wat clover." The girl blushed just a very
little, and thanked me; and then, after obliging me, in turn, by laying
down for me my proper route,--for I had left the question of the forked
road to be determined at the farm-house,--she set off at high speed, to
rescue the unconscious stirk. A walk of rather less than two hours
brought me abreast of the Bay of Gamrie,--a picturesque indentation of
the coast, in the 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 passing downwards on the fishing 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 Cummingiae_; 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 establishing for me a place among the geologic brotherhood; and the
stout gentleman producing a spirit-flask and a glass, I pledged him and
his companion in a bumper. "Was I not sure?" he said, addressing his
friend: "I knew by the cut of his jib, notwithstanding his shepherd's
plaid, that he was a wanderer of the scientific cast." We discussed the
peculiarities of the deposit, which, in its mineralogical 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 Banffshire
differ widely, in at least their chemistry, from both); and we were
right good friends ere we parted. To men who travel for amusement,
incident is incident, however trivial in itself, and always worth
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 shore. 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 shells of the existing species at a higher level than
elsewhere,--so far as is yet known,--on the east coast of Scotland. And,
kindly 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 associative
faculty, they now recalled to my mind a stanza which memory had somehow
caught when the battle was at the fiercest. It formed part of a satiric
address, published in an Aberdeen newspaper, to the not very respectable
non-intrusionists who had smoked 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 Agassiz 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 bumper,--had mounted very considerably above their
ordinary level at the editorial desk.
The raised beach may be found on the slopes of a grass-covered eminence,
once the site of an ancient hill-fort, and which still exhibits, along
the rim-like edge of the flat area atop, scattered fragments of the
vitrified walls. A general covering of turf restricted my examination of
the shells to one point, where a 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 shell-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 shells, 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 shores.
But when the sea washed over these shells, they could have been the
denizens of at least no _flat_ shore. The descent on which they occur
sinks downwards to the existing beach, over which it is elevated at this
point two hundred and thirty feet, at an angle with the horizon of from
thirty-five to forty degrees. Were the land to be now submerged to where
they appear on the hill-side, the bay of Gamrie, as abrupt in its
slopes as the upper part of Loch Lomond or the sides of Loch Ness,
would possess a depth of forty fathoms water at little more than a
hundred yards from the shore. I may add, that I could trace at this
height no marks of such a continuous 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 space between this ancient sea-beach and the existing tide-line.