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.
I parted from Dr. Emslie, and walked on along the shore to Portsoy,--for
three-fourths of the way over the prevailing grauwacke of the county,
and for the remaining fourth over mica schist, primary limestone,
hornblende slate, granitic and quartz veins, and the various other
kindred rocks of a primary district. The day was still gloomy and gray,
and ill suited to improve homely scenery; nor is this portion of the
Banff coast nearly so striking as that which I had travelled over the
day before. It has, however, its spots of a redeeming character,--rocky
recesses on the shore, half-beach, half-sward, rich in wild-flowers and
shells,--where one could saunter in a calm sunny morning, with one's
_bairns_ about one, very delightfully; and the interior is here and
there agreeably undulated by diluvial hillocks, that, when the sun falls
low in the evening, must chequer the landscape with many a pleasing
alternation of light and shadow. The Burn of Boyne,--which separates,
about two miles from Portsoy, a grauwacke from a mica-schist
district,--with its bare, open valley, its steep limestone banks, and
its gray, melancholy castle, long since roofless and windowless, and
surrounded by a few stunted trees, bears a deserted and solitary
shagginess about it, that struck me as wildly agreeable. It is such a
valley as one might expect to meet a ghost in, in some still, dewy
evening, as gloamin was darkening into uncertainty the outlines of the
ancient ruin, and the newly-kindled stars looked down upon the stream.
It so happened, however, that my only story connected with either ruin
or valley was as little a ghost story as might be. I remember that, when
lying ill of fever on one occasion,--indisposed enough to see apparition
after apparition flitting across the bed-curtains, like the figures of a
magic lantern posting along the darkened wall, and yet self-possessed
enough to know that they were but mere pictures in the eye, and to watch
them as they rose,--I set myself to determine whether they were in any
degree amenable to the will, or connected by the ordinary associative
links of the metaphysician. Fixing my mind on a certain object, I strove
to call it up in the character, not of an image of the conceptive
faculty, but of a fever-vision on the retina. The image which I pictured
to myself was that of a death's head, yellow and grim, and lighted up,
as if from within, amid the darkness of a burial vault. But the death's
head obstinately refused to rise. I had no control, I found, over the
fever imagery. And the picture that rose instead, uncalled and
unexpected, was that of a coal-fire burning brightly in a grate, with a
huge tea-kettle steaming cheerily over it.
In traversing the bare height which, rising on the western side of the
valley of the Boyne, owes its comparatively bold relief in the landscape
to the firmness of the primary rock which composes it, I picked up a
piece of graphic granite, bearing its inlaid characters of dark quartz
on a ground of cream-colored feldspar. This variety, however, though
occasionally found in rolled boulders in the neighborhood of Portsoy, is
not the graphic granite for which the locality is famous, and which
occurs in a vein in the mica schist of the eminence I was now
traversing, about a mile to the east of the town. The prevailing ground
of the granite of the vein is a flesh-colored feldspar; and the
thickly-marked quartzose characters with which it is set, greatly
smaller and paler than in the cream-colored stone, bear less the antique
Hebraic look, and would scarce deceive even the most credulous
antiquary. Antiquarians, however, _have_ been sometimes deceived by
weathered specimens of this graphic rock, in which the characters were
of considerable size, and restricted to thin veins, covering the surface
of a schistose groundwork. Maupertuis, during his famous journey to
Lapland, undertaken in 1737, to establish, from actual measurement, that
the degrees of latitude are longer towards the pole than at the equator,
and which demonstrated, of consequence, the true figure of the earth,
travelled thirty leagues out of his way, through a wild country covered
with snow, to examine an ancient monument, of which, he says, "the Fins
and Laplanders frequently spoke, as containing in its inscription the
knowledge of everything of which they were ignorant." He found it on the
side of a mountain, buried in snow; and ascertained, after kindling a
great fire around it, in order to lay it bare, that it was a stone of
irregular form, composed of various layers of unequal hardness, and that
the characters, which were rather more than an inch in length, were
written on "a layer of a species of flint," chiefly in two lines, with a
few scattered signs beneath, while the rest of the mass was composed of
a rock more soft and foliated. Graphic granite, it may be mentioned,
generally occurs, not in masses, but in veins and layers. The
inscription had been described in a previously published dissertation of
immense erudition, as Runic; but a Runic scholar of the party found he
could make nothing of it. The philosopher himself was struck by the
frequent repetition of characters of nearly the same form on the stone;
but he was ingenious enough to get over the difficulty, by remembering
that in our notation, after the Arabic manner, characters shaped exactly
alike may be very frequently repeated,--nay, as in some of the lines of
the Lapland inscription, may succeed each other, as in the sums I. II.
III. IIII. or X. XX. XXX.,--and yet very distinct and definite ideas
attach to them all. Still, however, he could not, he says, venture on
authoritatively deciding whether the inscription was a work of man or a
sport of nature. He stood between his two conclusions, like our
Edinburgh antiquarians between the two fossil Maries of Gueldres; and,
richer in eloquence than most of the philosophers his contemporaries,
was quite prepared, in his uncertainty, to give gilded mounting and a
purple pall to both.
"Should it be no other than a sport of nature," he concludes, "the
reputation which the stone bears in this country deserves that we should
have given a description of it. If, on the other hand, what is on it be
an inscription, though it certainly does not possess the beauty of the
sculpture of Greece or Rome, it very possibly has the advantage of being
the oldest in the universe. The country in which it is found is
inhabited only by a race of men who live like beasts in the forests. We
cannot imagine that they can have ever had any memorable event to
transmit to posterity, nor, if ever they had had, that they could have
invented the means. Nor can it be conceived that this country, with its
present aspect, ever possessed more civilized inhabitants. The rigor of
the climate and the barrenness of the land have destined it for the
retreat of a few miserable wretches, who know no other. It seems,
therefore, that the inscription must have been cut at a period when the
country was situated in a different climate, and before some one of
those great revolutions which, we cannot doubt, have taken place on our
globe. The position that the earth's axis holds at present with respect
to the ecliptic, occasions Lapland to receive the sun's rays very
obliquely: it is therefore condemned to a long winter, adverse to man,
as well as to all the productions of nature. No great movement,
possibly, in the heavens was necessary, however, to cause all its
misfortunes. These regions may formerly have been those on which the sun
shone most favorably; the polar circles may have been what now the
tropics are, and the torrid zone have filled the place occupied by the
temperate." Pretty well, Monsieur, for a philosopher! The various
attempts made to unriddle the real history of graphic granite are,
however, scarce less curious than the speculations connected with what
may be termed its romance. It seems to be generally held, since the days
of old Hutton, who, in his "Theory of the Earth," discussed the subject
with his usual ingenuity, that the feldspathic basis of the stone first
crystallized, leaving interstices between the crystals, partaking of a
certain regularity of form,--a consequence of the regularity of the
crystals themselves,--and of a certain irregularity from the eccentric
dispositions which these manifest in their position and relations to
each other; and that these interstices, being afterwards filled up with
quartz, form the characters of the rock,--characters partaking enough of
the first element of _regularity_ to present their peculiar graphic
appearance, and enough of the second element of _irregularity_ to
exhibit forms of an alphabet-like variety of outline. The chemist,
however, in cross-questioning the explanation, has his puzzle to
propound regarding it. Quartz, he says, being considerably less fusible
than feldspar, would naturally consolidate first, and so would give form
to the more fusible substance, instead of deriving form from it. On what
principle, then, is it that, reversing its ordinary character, it should
have been the last of the two substances to consolidate in the graphic
granite?--a query to which there seems to be no direct reply, but which
as little affects the fact that it _was_ the substance which last
consolidated, and which took form from the other, as the decision of the
learned Strasburgers, which determined the impossibility of the long
nose in Slawkenbergius's Tale, affected the actual existence of that
remarkable feature. "It happens _to be_, notwithstanding your
objection," said the controversialists on the pro-nose side of the
question. "But it _ought not_," replied their opponents.
The rain again returned as I was engaged in examining the graphic
granite of the Portsoy vein; the breeze from the sea heightened into a
gale, that soon fringed the coast with a broad border of foam; and I
entered the town, which looked but indifferently well in its gray
dishabille of haze and spray, tolerably wet and worn, with but the
prospect before me of being weather-bound for the rest of the day. I
found an old-fashioned inn, kept by somewhat old-fashioned people, who
had lately come from the country to "open a public;" and ensconced
myself by the fireside, in a huge many-windowed room, that must have
witnessed the county dinners of at least a century ago. Soon wearying,
however, of hearing the rain beating mad-like ratans upon the panes, and
availing myself of a comparatively "lucid interval," I sallied out,
wrapped up in my plaid, to examine the serpentine beds in the
neighborhood, which produce what is so extensively known as the Portsoy
marble. The _beds_ or _veins_ of this substance,--for it is still a moot
point whether they occur here as mere insulated masses of contemporary
origin with the primary formations which surround them, or as Plutonic
dykes injected into fissures at a later period,--are of very
considerable extent, one of them measuring about twenty-five yards
across, and another considerably more than a quarter of a mile; and, had
they but the solidity of the true marbles, they would scarce fail to be
regarded as valuable quarries of a highly ornamental stone, admirably
suited for the interior decorations of the architect. But they are
unluckily what the quarrier would term rubbly,--traversed by an infinity
of cracks and fissures; and it is rare indeed to find a continuous mass
out of which a chimney-jamb or lintel could be fashioned. The serpentine
was wrought here considerably more than a century and a half ago, and
exported to France for the magnificent Palace of Versailles; which,
though regarded by the French nation, says Voltaire, as "a favorite
without merit," Louis the Fourteenth persisted at the time in lavishly
beautifying, and looked as for abroad as Portsoy for materials with
which to adorn it. I have, however, seen it stated that the greater part
of a ship's cargo, brought afterwards to Paris on speculation, was
suffered to lie unwrought for years in the stone-dealer's yard, and was
ultimately disposed of as rubbish,--a consequence, probably, of its
unfitness, from its shaky texture, for ornamental purposes on a large
scale, though for ornaments of the smaller kind, such as boxes, vases,
and plates, it has been pronounced unrivalled. "At Zoeblitz, in Upper
Saxony," says Professor Jamieson, "several hundred people are employed
in quarrying, cutting, turning, and polishing the serpentine which
occurs in that neighborhood; and the various articles into which it is
manufactured are carried all over Germany. The serpentine of Portsoy,"
he adds, "is, however, far superior to that of Zoeblitz, in color,
hardness, and transparency, and, when cut, is very beautiful."
It is really a pretty stone; and, bad as the evening was, it was by no
means one of the worst of evenings for seeing it to advantage _in situ_,
or among the rolled pebbles on the shore. The varnish-like gloss of the
wet imparted to the undressed masses all the effect of polish, and
brought out in their proper variegations of color, every cloud, streak,
and vein. Viewed in the mass, the general hue is green; so much so, that
an insulated stack, which stands abreast of one of the beds, a
stone-cast in the sea, has greatly the appearance, at a little distance,
of an immense mass of verdigris. But red, gray, and brown are also
prevailing colors in the rock; occasional veins and blotches of white
give lightness to the darker portions; and veins of hematitic and deep
umbry tints, variety to the portions that are lighter. The greens vary
from the palest olive to the deepest black-green of the mineralogist;
the reds and browns, from blood-red to dark chocolate, and from
wood-brown to brownish-black; and, thus various in shade, they occur in
almost every possible variety of combination and form,--dotted, spotted,
clouded, veined,--so that each separate pebble on the shore seems the
representative of a rock different from the rocks represented by almost
all the others. Though not much of a mineralogist, I could have spent
considerably more time than the weather permitted me to employ this
evening, in admiring the beauties of this beach of _marbles_, or
rather,--as the real name, derived from those gorgeous, many-colored
cloudings, that impart a terrible splendor to the skins of the snake and
viper family, is not only the more correct, but also the more poetical
of the two,--this beach of _serpentines_. I had, however, to compromise
matters between the fierce wind and rain and the pretty rocks and
pebbles, by adjourning to the workshop of the Portsoy lapidary, Mr.
Clark, and examining under cover his polished specimens, of which I
purchased for a few shillings a characteristic and elegant little set.
Portsoy is peculiarly rich in minerals; and hence it reckons among its
mechanics of the ordinary class, what perhaps no other village in
Scotland of the same size and population possesses,--a skilful lapidary.
Mr. Clark's collection of the graphic granites, serpentines, and talcose
and mica schists, of the district, with their associated minerals, such
as schorl, talc, asbestos, amianthus, mountain cork, steatite, and
schiller spar, will be found eminently worthy a visit by the passing
traveller.
I made several inquiries in the village, though not, as it proved, in
the right direction, regarding a poor old lady, several years dead, of
whom I had known a very little considerably more than a quarter of a
century before, and whose grave I would have visited, bad as the night
was, had I met any one who could have pointed it out to me. But
ungrateful Portsoy seemed to have forgotten poor Miss Bond, who, in all
her printed letters and little stories, so rarely forgot _it_. Have any
of my readers ever seen the work (in two slim volumes), "Letters of a
Village Governess," published in 1814 by Elizabeth Bond, and dedicated
to Sir Walter Scott? If not, and should they chance to see, as I lately
did, a copy on a stall (with uncut leaves, alas! and selling dog cheap),
they might possibly do worse things than buy it.[12]
With better weather I could have spent a day or two very agreeably in
Portsoy and its neighborhood; but the rain dashed unceasingly, and made
exploration under the cover of the umbrella somewhat resemble that of a
sea-bottom under cover of the diving-bell. I could see but little at a
time, and the little imperfectly. Miss Bond, in her "Letters," refers,
in her light, pleasing style, to what in more favorable circumstances
_might_ be seen. "My troop of _light infantry_," she says, "keeps me so
well employed here during the day, that the silence and repose of the
evening is very delightful. In fine weather I walk by the sea-side, and
scramble among the rugged rocks, many of which are inaccessible to human
feet, forming a fine retreat for foxes. These animals often may be seen
from the heights, sporting with their cubs in perfect safety. This day I
went to see the works of an old _virtuoso_, who turns in marble, or
rather granite [serpentine] all kinds of chimney-piece ornaments, rings,
ear-rings, etc. Several specimens of his work, which must have cost him
a vast deal of trouble, I thought very beautiful. It was in this
neighborhood that the celebrated Ferguson spent so much of his time. The
globular stones on the gate of Durn are still to be seen, on which he
mapped out the figuring of the terrestrial and celestial globes. I was
told it was forbidden ground to approach the premises of Durn; but I
could not resist the temptation of visiting the spot where the young
philosopher had shown such early proofs of his genius; and I accordingly
paid the forfeit of an _impertinent_, for the gentleman who resides
there caught the prowler, and in genteel terms bade her go about her
business, and never return. How ungracious! She was doing no harm."
The morning arose as gloomily as the evening had fallen; and I walked on
in the rain to Cullen, fully disposed to sympathize by the way with the
"hardy Byron,"--he of the "Narrative,"--who, from his ill-luck in
weather, went among his sailors by the name of "Foul-weather Jack." In
the sandy bay of Cullen, where the road, after inflecting inland for
some five or six miles, comes again upon the sea, I found the surf
charging home in long white lines six waves deep,--
"Each stepping where his comrade stood,
The instant that he fell."
The appearance was such as to impart no inadequate idea of the vast
attritive power of ocean in wearing down the land. When pausing for a
little abreast of the fishing village, partially sheltered by an old
boat, to mark the fierce turmoil, it suddenly occurred to me,--as the
tempest weltered around reef and skerry, and roared wildly, mile after
mile, along the beach,--that the day and night were now just equal, and
that it was the customary equinoctial storm that had broken out to
accompany me on my journey. And so, calculating on a few days more of
it, instead of waiting on in the hope of a fair afternoon to examine the
outlier of Old Red which occurs in the neighborhood of Cullen, I was
content to see at a distance its mural-sided cliffs rising like broken
walls through the flat sand; and, taking the road for Fochabers, with
the intention of leaving exploration till fairer weather set in, I
resolved on posting straight on, to join my relatives on the opposite
side of the Frith. The deep-red color of the boulder-clay, as exhibited
by the way-side, in the water-courses and the water,--for every runnel
was tumbling down big and turbid with the rains,--intimated, when, after
leaving Cullen some six or seven miles behind me, I passed from a bare
moory region of quartz rock into a region of woods and fields, that I
was again upon my ancient acquaintance, the Old Red Sandstone. And the
section furnished by the Burn of Tynet showed me shortly after that the
intimation was a correct one, and how generally it may be laid down as a
rule, that at least the more impalpable portions of the boulder-clay are
derived from the rocks on which it rests. The ichthyolite beds appear in
the course of the burn. They have furnished several good
specimens,--among the others, the specimen of Coccosteus figured by Mr.
Patrick Duff in his "Sketches of the Geology of Moray;" and they are,
besides, curious, as being the first to exhibit to the traveller who
explores from Gamrie westwards, that peculiar style of coloring which
characterizes the Old Red ichthyolites of the shires of Moray and Nairn,
and which differs so strikingly from the more sombre style exhibited by
the other ichthyolites of Banffshire, with those of Cromarty, Ross,
Caithness, and Orkney. Instead of bearing, like these, one uniform hue,
as if deeply shaded with Indian ink, they are gorgeously attired,
especially when newly laid open, in white, red, purple, and blue. The
day, however, was ill-suited for fishing Pterichthyes and Osteolepi out
of the Tynet: the red water was roaring from bank to brae; here eddying
along the half-submerged furze,--there tearing down the boulder-days in
raw, red land-slips; and so, casting but one eager glance at the bed
where the fish lay, I travelled on, and entered the tall woods to the
east of Fochabers. The rain ceased for a time; and I met in the woods an
old pensioner, who had been evidently weather-bound in some
public-house, and had now taken the opportunity of the fair interval to
stagger to his dwelling. He was eminently, exuberantly happy,--there
could not be two opinions on that head,--full of all manner of bright
sunshiny thoughts and imaginations, rendered just a little tremulous and
uncertain by the _summer-heat_ exhalations of the imbibed moisture, like
distant objects in a hot noonday landscape in July seen through volumes
of rising vapor; and a sheep's head and trotters, which he carried under
his arm, was, I saw, to serve as a peace-offering to his wife at home.
True, he had been taking a dram, but he was mindful of the family for
all that. He confronted me with the air of an old acquaintance; gave the
military salute; and then, laying hold of a corner of my plaid with his
thumb and forefinger,--"I know you," he said, "I know _your kind_ well;
ye're a Highland-Donald. Od, I've seen ye in the _thick o't_. Ye're
_reugh_ fellows when ye're bluid's up!" He had taken me for a grenadier
of the 42d; and I lacked the moral courage to undeceive him. I met
nothing further on my way worthy of record, save and except a sheep's
trotter, dropped by the old pensioner in one of his zig-zaggings to the
extreme left; but having no particular use for the trotter at the time
and in the circumstances, I left it to benefit the next passer-by. I
finished my journey of eighteen miles in capital style, and was within
five minutes' walk of Fochabers when the horn of the mail-guard was
sounding up the street. And, entering the village, I found the vehicle
standing opposite the inn door, minus the horses.
The _insides_ and _outsides_ were sitting down to dinner together as I
entered the inn; and I felt, after my long walk, that it would be rather
an agreeable matter to join with them. But in the hope of meeting my old
friend Mr. Joss, I requested to be shown, not into the passengers' room,
but into that of the coachman and guard; and with them I dined. It so
chanced, however, that Mr. Joss was not _out_ that day; and the man in
the red long coat was a stranger whom I had never seen before. I
inquired of him regarding Mr. Joss,--one of perhaps the most remarkable
mail-guards in Europe. I have at least never heard of another who, like
him, amuses his leisure on the coach-top with the "Principia" of Newton,
and understands it. And the man, drawing his inference from the interest
in Mr. Joss which my queries evinced, asked me whether I myself was not
a coach-guard. "No," I rather thoughtlessly replied, "I am not a
coach-guard." Half a minute's consideration, however, led me to doubt
whether I had given the right answer. "I am not sure," I said to
myself, on second thoughts, "but the man has cut pretty fairly on the
point;--I daresay _I am_ a sort of coach-guard. I have to mount my
twice-a-week coach in all weathers, like any mail-guard among them all;
I have to start at the appointed hour, whether the vehicle be empty or
full; I have to keep a sharp eye on the opposition coaches; I am
responsible, like any other mail-guard, for all the parcels carried,
however little I may have had to do with the making of them up; I have
always to keep my blunderbuss full charged to the muzzle,--not wishing
harm to any one, but bound in duty to let drive at all and sundry who
would make war upon the passengers, or attempt running the conveyance
off the road; and, finally, as my friend Mr. Joss takes the "Principia"
to _his_ coach-top, I take pockets full of fossils to the top of mine,
and amuse myself in fine days by working out, as I best can, the
problems which they furnish. Yes, I rather think _I am_ a coach-guard."
And so, taking my seat beside my red-coated brother, who had guessed the
true nature of my occupation so much more shrewdly than myself, I rode
on to Elgin, where I passed the night.
It is difficult to arrange in the mind the geologic formations of
Banffshire in their character as a series of deposits. The pages of the
stony record which the county composes, like those of an
unskilfully-folded pamphlet, have been strangely mixed together, so that
page last succeeds in some places to page first, and, of the
intermediate pages, some appear at the beginning of the work, and some
at the end. It is not until we reach the western confines of the county,
some two or three miles short of the river Spey, its terminal boundary
in this direction, that we find the beds comparatively little disturbed,
and arranged chronologically in their original places. In the eastern
and southern parts of the shire, rocks widely separated by the date of
their formation have been set down side by side in patches,
occasionally of but inconsiderable extent. Now the traveller passes over
a district of grauwacke, now over a re-formation of the Lias; anon he
finds himself on a primary limestone,--gneiss, syenite, clay-slate, or
quartz-rock; and yet anon amid the fossils of some outlier of the Old
Red. The geological map of the county is, like Joseph's coat, of many
colors. I remember seeing, when a boy, more years ago than I am inclined
to specify, some workmen engaged in pulling down what had been a
house-painter's shop, a full century before. The painter had been in the
somewhat slovenly habit of cleaning his brushes by rubbing them against
a hard-cast wall, which was covered, in consequence, by a many-colored
layer of paint, a full half-inch in thickness, and as hard as a stone.
Taking a little bit home with me, I polished it by rubbing the upper
surface smooth; and, lo! a geological map. The _strata_ of variously
hued pigment, spread originally over the surface of the hard-cast wall,
were cut open, by the _denudation_ of the grindstone, into all manner of
fantastic forms, and seemed thrown into all sorts of strange
neighborhoods. The _map_ lacked merely the additional perplexity of a
few bold _faults_, with here and there a decided _dike_, in order to
render it on a small scale a sort of miniature transcript of the geology
of Banff; and I have very frequently found my thoughts reverting to it,
in connection with deposits of this broken character. On a rough
_hard-cast_ basis of granite I have laid down in imagination, as if by
way of priming, coat after coat of the primary rocks,--gneiss, and
stratified hornblend, and mica-schist, and quartz-rock, and day-slate;
and then, after breaking the coatings well up, and rubbing them well
down, and so spoiling and crumpling up the work as to make their
original order considerably a puzzle, I have begun anew to paint over
the rough surface with thick coatings of grauwacke and grauwacke-slate.
When this part of the operation was completed, I have again begun
to break up and grind down,--here letting a tract of grauwacke
sink into the broken primary,--there wearing it off the surface
altogether,--yonder elevating the original granitic _hard-cast_ till it
rose over all the coatings, Primary and Palaeozoic. And then I have begun
to paint yet a third time with thick Old Red Sandstone pigment; and yet
again to break up and wear down,--here to insert a tenon of the Old Red
deep into a mortise of the grauwacke, as at Gamrie,--there to dovetail
it into the clay-slate, as at Tomantoul,--yonder, after laying it across
the upturned quartz-rock, as at Cullen, to rub by much the greater part
of it away again, leaving but mere remainder-patches and fragments, to
mark where it had been. Lastly, if I had none of the superior Palaeozoic
or Secondary formations to deal with, I have brushed over the whole, by
way of finish, with the variously-derived coatings of the superficial
deposits; and thus, as I have said, I have often completed, in idea,
after the chance suggestion of the old painter's shop, my portable
models of the geology of disturbed districts like the Banffshire one.
The deposits of Moray are greatly less broken. Denudation has partially
worn them down; but they seem to have almost wholly escaped the previous
crumpling process.