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.
The prevailing yellow hue of the Elgin houses strikes the eye of the
geologist who has travelled northwards from the Frith of Forth. He takes
leave of a similar stone at Cupar-Fife,--a warmly-tinted yellow
sandstone, peculiarly well-suited for giving effect to architectural
ornament; and after passing along the deep-red sandstone houses of the
shires of Angus and Kincardine, and the gneiss, granite, hyperstene, and
mica-schist houses of Aberdeen and Banff shires, he again finds houses
of a deep red on crossing the Spey, and houses of a warm yellow tint on
reaching Elgin,--geologically the Cupar-Fife of the north. And the story
that the colored buildings tell him is, that he has been passing, though
by a somewhat circuitous route of a hundred and fifty miles, over an
anticlinal geological section,--_down_ in the scale till he reached
Aberdeen and had gone a little beyond it, and then _up_ again, until at
Elgin he arrives at the same superior yellow bed of Old Red Sandstone
which he had quitted at Cupar-Fife. Both beds contain the same
organisms. The Holoptychius of Dura Den, near Cupar, must have sprung
from the same original as the Holoptychius of the Hospital and
Bishop-Mill quarries near Elgin; and it seems not improbable that the
two beds, thus identical in their character and contents, may have
existed, ere the upheaval of the Grampians broke their continuity, as an
extended deposit, at the bottom of the same sea. But with this last and
newest of the formations of the Old Red Sandstone the identity of the
deposits to the south and north ceases. The strata which in the south
overlie the yellow bed of the Holoptychius represent the Carboniferous
period, the overlying strata in the north represent the Oolitic one. On
the one side the miner sinks his shaft, and finds a true coal, composed
of the Stigmaria, Calamites, Club-mosses, Ferns, and Araucarians of the
Palaeozoic era; he sinks his shaft on the other side, and finds but thin
seams of an imperfect lignite, composed of the Cycadeae, Pines,
Sphenopteri, and Clathraria of the Secondary period. The flora which
found its subsoil in the Old Red Sandstone north of the Grampians,
belonged to a scene of things so much more modern than the flora which
found its subsoil in the Old Red Sandstone of the south, that all its
productions were green and flourishing, waving beside lake, river, and
sea, at a time when the productions of the other were locked up, as now,
in sand and shale, lime and clay,--the dead mummies of ages long
departed.
Another thoroughly wet morning! varied only from the morning of the
preceding day by the absence of wind, and the greater weight of the
persevering vertical rain, that leaped upwards in myriads of little
dancing pyramids from the surface of every pool. I walked out under
cover of my umbrella, to renew my acquaintance with the outlier of the
Weald at Linksfield, and ascertain what sort of section it now presented
under the quarrying operations of the limeburners. There was, however,
little to be seen; the bands of green and blue clays, alternating with
strata of fossiliferous limestone, and layers of a gray shade, thickly
charged with minute shells of Cypris, were sadly blurred this morning by
the trail of numerous slips from above, which had fallen during the
rains, and softened into mud as they rushed downwards athwart the face
of the quarry: and the arched band of boulder-clay which so mysteriously
underlies the deposit was, save in a few parts, wholly covered up by the
debris. The occurrence of the clay here as an inferior bed, with but the
cornstone of the Old Red beneath, and all the beds of the Weald resting
over it, forms a riddle somewhat difficult of solution; but it is
palpably not reading it aright to regard the deposit, with at least one
geologist who has written on the subject, as older than the rocks above.
It is, on the contrary, as a vast amount of various and unequivocal
evidence demonstrates, incalculably more modern; nay, we find proof of
the fact here in that very bed which has been instanced as rendering it
doubtful; the clay of which the interpolation is composed is found to
contain fragments, not only of the cornstone on which it rests, but also
of the Wealden limestone and shales which it underlies. It forms the
mere filling up of a flat-roofed cavern, or rather of two flat-roofed
caverns,--for the limestone roof dipped in the centre to the cornstone
floor,--which, previous to the times of the boulder-clay, had lain open
in what was then, as now, an old-world deposit, charged with long
extinct organisms, but which, during the iceberg period, was penetrated
and occupied by the clay, as run lime penetrates and occupies the
interstices of a dry-stone wall. It was no day for gathering fossils. I
saw a few ganoid scales, washed by the rain from the investing rubbish,
glittering on fragments of the limestone, with a few of the
characteristic shells of the deposit, chiefly Unionidae; but nothing
worth bringing away. The adhesive clay of the Weald, widely scattered
by the workmen, and wrought into mortar by the beating rains, made it a
matter of some difficulty for the struggling foot to retain the shoe,
and, sticking to my soles by pounds at a time, rendered me obnoxious to
the old English nickname of "rough-footed Scot." And so, after
traversing the heaps, somewhat like a fly in treacle, I had to yield to
the rain above and the mud beneath, and to return to do in Elgin what
cannot be done equally well in almost any other town of its size in
Scotland,--pursue my geological inquiries under cover.
On this, as on other occasions, I was struck by the complex and very
various forms assumed by the ganoid scales of the Wealden. Throughout
the Oolitic system generally, including the Lias, there obtains a
singular complexity of type in these little glittering tiles of
enamelled bone, which contrasts strongly with the greatly more simple
style which obtained among the ganoids of the Palaeozoic period. In many
of these last, as in the Coelacanth family, including the genera
Holoptychius, Asterolepis, and Glyptolepis, in all their many species,
with at least one genus of Dipterians, the genus Dipterus, the external
outline and arrangement of scale was as simple as in any of the Cycloid
family of the present time. Like slates on a roof, each single scale
covered two, and was covered by two in turn; and the only point of
difference which existed in relation to the _laying down_ of these massy
_slates_ of _bone_, and the laying down of the very thin ones of _horn_
which cover fish such as the carp or salmon, was, that in the massier
_slates_, the sides, or _cover_,--nicely bevelled, in order to preserve
an equability of thickness throughout,--were so adjusted, that two
scales at their edges, where they lay the one over the other, were not
thicker than one scale at its centre. Even in the other ganoids, their
contemporaries, such as the Osteolepis and Diplopterus, where the
scales were ranged more in the tile fashion, side by side, there was,
with much ingenious carpentry in the fitting, a general simplicity of
form. It would almost appear, however, that ere the ganoid order reached
the times of the Weald, the simple forms had been exhausted, and that
nature, abhorring repetition, and ever stamping upon the scales some
specific characteristic of the creature that bore them, was obliged to
have recourse to forms of a more complex and involved outline. These
latter-day scales send out nail-like spikes laterally and atop, to lay
hold upon their neighbors, and exhibit in their undersides grooves that
accommodated the nails sent out, in turn, by their neighbors, to lay
hold upon _them_. Their forms, too, are indescribably various and
fantastic. It seems curious enough, that immediately after this
extremely _artificial_ state of things, if I may so speak, the two
prevailing orders of the fish of the present day, the Cycloids and
Ctenoids, should have been ushered upon the scene, and more than the
original simplicity of scale restored. There took place a sudden
reaction, from the fantastic and the complex to the simple and the
plain.
It is further worthy of notice, that though many of the ganoid scales of
the Secondary systems, including those of the Wealden, glitter as
brightly in burnished enamel as the more splendent scales of the Old Red
Sandstone and Coal Measures, there is a curious peculiarity exhibited in
the structure of many of the older scales of the highly enamelled class,
which, so far as I have yet seen, does not extend beyond the Palaeozoic
period. The outer layer of the scale, which lies over a middle layer of
a cellular cancellated structure, and corresponds, apparently, with that
scarf-skin which in the human subject overlies the _rete mucosum_, is
thickly set over with microscopic pores, funnel-shaped in the transverse
section, and which, examined by a good glass, in the horizontal one
resemble the puncturings of a sieve. The Megalichthys of the Coal
Measures, with its various carboniferous congeners, with the genera
Diplopterus, Dipterus, and Osteolepis of the Old Red Sandstone,--all
brilliantly enamelled fish,--are thickly pore-covered. But whatever
purpose these pores may have served, it seems in the Secondary period to
have been otherwise accomplished, if, indeed, it continued to exist. It
is a curious circumstance, that in no case do the pores seem to pass
_through_ the scale. Whatever their use, they existed merely as
communications between the cells of the middle cancellated layer and the
surface. In a fish of the Chalk,--_Macropoma Mantelli_,--the exposed
fields of the scales are covered over with apparently hollow, elongated
cylinders, as the little tubes in a shower-bath cover their round field
of tin, save that they lie in a greatly flatter angle than the tubes;
but I know not that, like the pores of the Dipterians and the
Megalichthys, they communicated between the interior of the scale and
its external surface. Their structure is at any rate palpably different,
and they bear no such resemblance to the pores of the human skin as that
which the Palaeozoic pores present.
The amount of design exhibited in the scales of some of the more ancient
ganoids,--design obvious enough to be clearly read,--is very
extraordinary. A single scale of _Holoptychius Nobilissimus_,--fast
locked up in its red sandstone rock,--laid by, as it were, for
ever,--will be seen, if we but set ourselves to unravel its texture, to
form such an instance of nice adaptation of means to an end as might of
itself be sufficient to confound the atheist. Let me attempt placing one
of these scales before the reader, in its character as a flat counter of
bone, of a nearly circular form, an inch and a half in diameter, and an
eighth-part of an inch in thickness; and then ask him to bethink
himself of the various means by which he would impart to it the greatest
possible degree of strength. The human skull consists of two tables of
solid bone, an inner and an outer, with a spongy cellular substance
interposed between them, termed the _diploe_; and such is the effect of
this arrangement, that the blow which would fracture a continuous wall
of bone has its force broken by the spongy intermediate layer, and
merely injures the outer table, leaving not unfrequently the inner one,
which more especially protects the brain, wholly unharmed. Now, such
also was the arrangement in the scale of the _Holoptychius
Nobilissimus_. It consisted of its two well-marked tables of solid bone,
corresponding in their dermal character, the outer to the cuticle, the
inner to the true skin, and the intermediate cellular layer to the _rete
mucosum_; but bearing an unmistakable analogy also, as a mechanical
contrivance, to the two plates and the _diploe_ of the human skull. To
the strengthening principle of the two tables, however, there were two
other principles added. Cromwell, when commissioning for a new helmet,
his old one being, as he expresses it, "ill set," ordered his friend to
send him a "_fluted pot_," _i.e._, a helmet ridged and furrowed on the
surface, and suited to break, by its protuberant lines, the force of a
blow, so that the vibrations of the stroke would reach the body of the
metal deadened and flat. Now, the outer table of the scale of the
Holoptychius was a "fluted pot." The alternate ridges and furrows which
ornamented its surface served a purpose exactly similar with that of the
flutes and fillets of Cromwell's helmet. The inner table was
strengthened on a different but not less effective principle. The human
stomach consists of three coats; and two of these, the outermost or
peritoneal coat, and the middle or muscular coat, are so arranged, that
the fibres of the one cross at nearly right angles those of the other.
The violence which would tear the compact sides of this important organ
along the fibres of the outer coat, would be checked by the transverse
arrangement of the fibres of the middle coat, and _vice versa_. We find
the cotton manufacturer weaving some of his stronger fabrics on a
similar plan;--they also are made to consist of two _coats_; and what is
technically termed the _tear_ of the upper is so disposed that it lies
at an angle of forty-five degrees with the _tear_ of the coat which lies
underneath. Now, the inner table of the scale of the Holoptychius was
composed, on this principle, of various layers or coats, arranged the
one over the other, so that the fibres of each lay at right angles
with the fibres of the others in immediate contact with it. In
the inner table of one scale I reckon nine of these alternating,
variously-disposed layers; so that any application of violence, which,
in the language of the lath-splitter, would _run lengthwise along the
grain_ of four of them, would be checked by the _cross grain_ in five.
In other words, the line of the _tear_ in five of the layers was ranged
at right angles with the line of the _tear_ in four. There were thus in
a single scale, in order to secure the greatest possible amount of
strength,--and who can say what other purposes may have been secured
besides?--three distinct principles embodied,--the principle of the two
tables and _diploe_ of the human skull,--the principle of the variously
arranged coats of the human stomach,--and the principle of Oliver
Cromwell's "fluted pot." There have been elaborate treatises written on
those ornate flooring-tiles of the classical and middle ages, that are
occasionally dug up by the antiquary amid monastic ruins, or on the
sites of old Roman stations. But did any of them ever tell a story half
so instructive or so strange as that told by the incalculably more
ancient ganoid _tiles_ of the Palaeozoic and Secondary periods?
I called, on my way back from Linksfield, upon my old friend Mr. Patrick
Duff, and was introduced once more to his exquisite collection, with its
unique ichthyolites of at least two genera of fishes of the Old
Red,--the _Stagonolepis_ and _Placothorax_ of Agassiz,--which up to the
present time are to be seen nowhere else; and various other fine
specimens of rare species, which, having sat for their portraits, have
their forms preserved in the great work of the naturalist of Neufchatel.
He showed me, with some triumph, one of his later acquisitions,--a fine
specimen of Holoptychius from the upper yellow sandstone of Bishop-Mill,
which exhibits the dorsal ridge covered with a line of large overlapping
scales, not at all unlike those overlapping plates which cover the tail
of the lobster; for which, by the way, they were mistaken by the workman
who first laid the fossil open. I examined, too, with some interest,
fragments of a gigantic species of Pterichthys, belonging to an inferior
division of the same Upper Old Red formation as the yellow stone,
designated by Agassiz _Pterichthys major_, which must have attained to
at least thrice the size, linearly, of even its bulkier congeners of the
Lower formation of the Coccosteus. After examining many a drawer,
stored, from the deposits of the neighborhood, with characteristic
fossils of the Lias, the Weald, and the Oolite, and of the Upper and
Lower Old Red, we set out together to expatiate amid the treasures of
the Town Museum.
Among other recent additions to the Museum, there is an interesting set
of the fishes of the Ganges, the donation of a gentleman long resident
in India, to which Mr. Duff called my attention, as illustrative, in
some of the specimens, of the more characteristic ichthyolites of the
Old Red Sandstone. One numerous family, the Pimelodi, abundantly
represented in the Gangetic region, in not only the rivers, but also the
ponds, tanks, and estuaries of the district, is certainly worthy the
careful study of the geologist. It approaches nearer, in some of its
more strongly-marked genera, to the Coccosteus of the Lower Old Red,
than any other tribe of existing fishes which I have yet seen. The body
of the Pimelodus, from the anterior dorsal downwards, is as naked as
that of the eel; whereas the head, and in several of the species the
back, is armed with strong plates of naked bone, curiously fretted, as
in many of the ichthyolites of the Lower, and more especially of the
Upper Old Red Sandstone, into ridges of confluent tubercles, that
radiate from the centre to the edges of the plates. The dorsal plate,
too, when detached, as in many of the species, from the plates of the
head, bears upon its inner side a strong central ridge, that deepens as
it descends, till it abruptly terminates a little short of the
termination of the plate, exactly as in the dorsal plate of Coccosteus,
which sunk its central ridge deep into the back of the animal. The point
of resemblance to be mainly noticed, however, is the contrast furnished
by the powerful armature of the head and back, with the unprotected
nakedness of the posterior portions of the creature;--a point specially
noticeable in the Coccosteus, and apparent also, though in a lesser
degree, in some of the other genera of the Old Red, such as the
Pterichthyes and Asterolepides. From the snout of the Coccosteus down to
the posterior termination of the dorsal plate, the creature was cased in
strong armor, the plates of which remain as freshly preserved in the
ancient rocks of the country as those of the Pimelodi of the Ganges on
the shelves of the Elgin Museum; but from the pointed termination of the
plate immediately over the dorsal fin, to the tail, comprising more
than one half the entire length of the animal, all seems to have been
exposed, without the protection of even a scale, and there survives in
the better specimens only the internal skeleton of the fish and the
ray-bones of the fins. It was armed, like a French dragoon, with a
strong helmet and a short cuirass; and so we find its remains in the
state in which those of some of the soldiers of Napoleon's old guard,
that had been committed unstripped to the earth, may be dug up in the
future on the fatal field of Borodino, or along the banks of the Dwina
or the Wap. The cuirass lies still attached to the helmet, but we find
only the naked skeleton attached to the cuirass. The Pterichthys to its
strong helmet and cuirass added a posterior armature of comparatively
feeble scales, as if, while its upper parts were shielded with plate
armor, a lighter covering of ring or scale armor sufficed for the less
vital parts beneath. In the Asterolepis the arrangement was somewhat
similar, save that the plated cuirass was wanting: it was a strongly
helmed warrior in slight scale armor; for the disproportion between the
strength of the plated head-piece and that of the scaly coat was still
greater than in the Pterichthys. The occipital star-covered plates are,
in some of the larger specimens, fully three-quarters of an inch in
thickness, whereas the thickness of the delicately-fretted scales rarely
exceeds a line.
Why this disproportion between the strength of the armature in different
parts of the same fish should have obtained, as in Pterichthys and
Asterolepis, or why, while one portion of the animal was strongly armed,
another portion should have been left, as in Coccosteus, wholly exposed,
cannot of course be determined by the mere geologist. His rocks present
him with but the fact of the disproportion, without accounting for it.
But the natural history of existing fish, in which, as in the Pimelodi,
there may be detected a similar peculiarity of armature, may perhaps
throw some light on the mystery. In Hamilton's "Fishes of the Ganges" I
find but little reference made to the instincts and habits of the
animals described: their deep-river haunts lie, in many cases, beyond
the reach of observation; and of the observations actually made, the
descriptive naturalist, intent often on mere peculiarities of structure,
is not unfrequently too careless. Hamilton describes the habitats of the
various Indian species of Pimelodi, whether brackish estuaries, ponds,
or rivers, but not their characteristic instincts. Of the Silurus,
however, a genus of the same great family, I read elsewhere that some of
the species, such as the _Silurus glanis_, being unwieldy in their
motions, do not pursue their prey, which consists of small fishes, but
lie concealed among the mud, and seize on the chance stragglers that
come their way. And of the _Pimelodus gulio_, a little, strongly-helmed
fish, with a naked body, I was informed by Mr. Duff, on the authority of
the gentleman who had presented the specimens to the Museum, that it
burrowed in the holes of muddy banks, from which it shot out its armed
head, and arrested, as they passed, the minute animals on which it
preyed. The animal world is full of such compensatory defences: there is
a half-suit of armor given to shield half the body, and a wise instinct
to protect the rest. The _Pholas crispata_ cannot shut its valves so as
to protect its anterior parts, without raising them from off those parts
which lie behind: like the Irishman in the haunted house, who attempted
lengthening his blanket by cutting strips from the top and sewing them
on to the bottom, it loses at the one end what it gains at the other;
but, hemmed round by the solid walls of the recess which it is its
nature to hollow out for itself in shale or stone, the anterior parts,
though uncovered by the shell, are not exposed. By closing its valves
anteriorly, it shuts the door of its little house, made like that of the
coney-folk of Scripture, in the rock; and then, of the entire cell in
which it dwells so secure, what is not shut door is impregnable wall.
The remark of Paley, that the "human animal is the only one which is
naked, and the only one which can clothe itself," is by no means quite
correct. One half the hermit crab is as naked as the "human animal," and
even less fitted for exposure; for it consists of a thin-skinned, soft,
unmuscular bag, filled with delicate viscera; but not even the human
animal is more skilful in clothing himself in the spoils of other
animals than the hermit crab in wrapping up its naked bag in the strong
shell of some dead fusus or buccinum, which it carries about with it in
all its peregrinations, as at once clothes, armor, and house. Nature
arms its front, and it is itself wise enough to arm its rear. Now, it
seems not improbable that the half-armed Coccosteus, a heavy fish,
indifferently furnished with fins, may have burrowed, like the recent
_Silurus glanis_ or _Pimelodus gulio_, in a thick mud,--of the existence
of which in vast quantity, during the times of the Old Red Sandstone,
the dark Caithness flagstones, the fetid breccia of Strathpeffer, and
the gray stratified clays of Cromarty, Moray, and Banff, unequivocally
testify; and that it may have thus not only succeeded in capturing many
of its light-winged contemporaries, which it would have vainly pursued
in open sea, but may have been enabled also to present to its enemies,
when assailed in turn, only its armed portions, and to protect its
unarmed parts in its burrow. It is further worthy of notice, that many
of the Pimelodi are furnished with spines, not, like those
ichthyodorulites which occur so frequently in the older Secondary and
Palaeozoic divisions, unfinished in appearance at their lower extremity,
as if, like the spines of the ancient Acanthodi, or those of the recent
dog-fish (_Spinax acanthias_), they had been simply embedded in the
flesh, but bearing, like the wings of the Pterichthys, an articulated
aspect. Those of the _Pimelodus rita_ and _Pimelodus gagata_ are of
singular beauty; and when the creatures have no further use for them,
and the mud of the Ganges has been consolidated into shale or baked into
flagstone around them, they will make very exquisite fossils. A correct
drawing of the plates and spines of some of the members of the Pimelodi
family, with a portion of the internal skeletons, arranged in their
proper places, but divested of those more destructible parts to which
they are attached, would serve admirably to show what strange forms fish
not greatly removed from the ordinary type may assume in the fossil
state, and might throw some light on the extraordinary appearance
assumed, as ichthyolites, by the old family of the Cephalaspians.
The geological department of the Elgin Museum is not yet very complete.
The private collections of the locality, by forestalling, greatly
restrict the supply from the rich deposits in the neighborhood, and have
an unquestioned right to do so. The Museum contains, however, several
interesting organisms. I saw, among the others, a specimen of
Diplopterus, that showed the form and position of the fins of this
rather rare ichthyolite much better than any of the Morayshire specimens
portrayed by Agassiz in his great work; and beside it, one of the two
specimens of _Pterichthys oblongus_ which he figures, and on which he
establishes the species. The other individual,--a Cromarty
specimen,--graces my little collection. The gloomy day passed pleasantly
in deciphering, with so accomplished a geologist as Mr. Duff, these
curious hieroglyphics of the old world, that tell such wonderful
stories, and in comparing _viva voce_, as we were wont to do long years
before in lengthy epistles, our respective notions regarding the true
key for laying open their more occult meanings. And, after sharing with
him in his family dinner, I again took my seat on the mail, as a chill,
raw evening was falling, and rode on, some six or eight and twenty
miles, to Campbelton. The rain pattered drearily through the night on my
bed-room window; and as frequent exposure to the wet had begun to tell
on a constitution not altogether so strong as it had once been, I
awakened oftener than was quite comfortable, to hear it. The morning,
however, was dry, though gray and sunless; and, taking an early
breakfast at the inn, I traversed the flat gravelly points of Ardersier
and Fortrose, that, projecting like moles far into the Frith, narrow the
intervening ferry to considerably less than one-third the width which it
would present were they away. The origin of these long detrital
promontories, which form, when viewed from the heights on either side,
so peculiar a feature in the landscape, and which, were they directly
opposite, instead of being set down a mile awry, would shut up the
opening altogether, has not yet been satisfactorily accounted for. One
special theory assigns their formation to the agency of the descending
tide, striking in zig-gig style, in consequence of some peculiarity of
the coast-line or of the bottom, from side to side of the Frith, and
depositing a long trail of sand and gravel, at nearly right angles with
the beach, first on the one shore and then on the other. But why the
tide, which runs in various zig-zag crossings in the course of the
Frith, should have the effect here, and nowhere else, of raising two
vast mounds, each a full mile and a quarter in length, with an average
breadth of from two to five furlongs, is by no means very apparent.
Certainly the present tides of the Frith could not have formed them, nor
could they have been elevated to their present average height of ten or
twelve feet over the flood-line in a sea standing at the existing level.
If they in reality originated in this cause, it must have been ere the
latter upheavals of the land or recessions of the sea, when the great
Caledonian Valley existed as a narrow ocean sound, swept by powerful
currents. Upon another and entirely different hypothesis, these flat
promontories have been regarded as the remains, levelled by the waves,
and gapped direct in the middle by the tide, of a vast transverse morain
of the great valley, belonging to the same glacial age as the lateral
morains some ten or fifteen miles higher up, that extend from the
immediate neighborhood of Inverness to the mansion-house of Dochfour.
But this hypothesis, like the other, is not without its difficulties.
Why, for instance, should the promontories be a mile awry? There is,
however, yet another mode of accounting for their formation, which I am
not in the least disposed to criticise.
They were constructed, says tradition, through the agency of the
arch-wizard Michael Scott. Michael had called up the hosts of Faery to
erect the cathedral of Elgin and the chanonry kirk of Fortrose, which
they completed from foundation to ridge, each in a single
night,--committing, in their hurry, merely the slight mistake of
locating the building intended for Elgin in Fortrose, and that intended
for Fortrose in Elgin; but, their work over and done, and when the
magician had no further use for them, they absolutely refused to be
_laid_; and, like a _posse_ of Irish laborers thrown out of a job, came
thronging round him, clamoring for more employment. Fearing lest he
should be torn in pieces,--a catastrophe which has not unfrequently
happened in such circumstances in the olden time, and of which those
recent philanthropists who engage themselves in finding work for the
unemployed may have perhaps entertained some little dread in our own
days,--he got rid of them for the time by setting them off in a body to
run a mound across the Moray Frith from Fortrose to Ardersier. Toiling
hard in the evening of a moonlight night, they had proceeded greatly
more than two-thirds towards the completion of the undertaking, when a
luckless Highlander passing by bade God-speed the work, and, by thus
breaking the charm, arrested at once and forever the construction of the
mound, and saved the navigation of Inverness.
I stood for a few seconds at the Burn of Rosemarkie undecided whether I
should take the Scarfs-Craig road,--a break-neck path which runs
eastwards along the cliffs, and which, though the rougher, is the more
direct Cromarty line of the two,--or the considerably better though
longer line of the White Bog, which strikes upwards along the burn in a
westerly direction, and joins the Cromarty and Inverness highway on the
moor of the Maolbuie. I had got into a part of the country where every
little locality, and every more striking feature in the landscape, has
its associated tradition; and the pause of a few moments at the two
roads recalled to my memory the details of a ghost-story, long regarded
in the district in which it was best known as one of the most authentic
of its class, but which seems by no means inexplicable on natural
principles.[13]