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.
For the greater part of a quarter of a century I had been finding
organisms in abundance in the boulder-clay, but never anything organic
that unequivocally belonged to its own period. I had ascertained that it
contains in Ross and Cromarty nodules of the Old Red Sandstone, which
bear inside, like so many stone coffins, their well laid out skeletons
of the dead; but then the markings on their surface told me that when
the boulder-clay was in the course of deposition, they had been exactly
the same kind of nodules that they are now. In Moray, it incloses, I had
found, organisms of the Lias; but _they_ also testify that they present
an appearance in no degree more ancient at the present time than they
did when first enveloped by the clay. In East and West Lothian too, and
in the neighborhood of Edinburgh, I had detected in it occasional
organisms of the Mountain Limestone and the Coal Measures; but these,
not less surely than its Liasic fossils in Moray, and its Old Red
ichthyolites in Cromarty and Ross, belonged to an incalculably more
ancient state of things than itself; and--like those shrivelled
manuscripts of Pompeii or Herculaneum, which, whatever else they may
record, cannot be expected to tell aught of the catastrophe that buried
them up--they throw no light whatever on the deposit in which they
occur. I at length came to regard the boulder-clay--for it is difficult
to keep the mind in a purely blank state on any subject on which one
thinks a good deal--as representative of a chaotic period of death and
darkness, introductory, mayhap, to the existing scene of things.
After, however, I had begun to mark the invariable connection of the
clay, as a deposit, with the dressed surfaces on which it rests, and the
longitudinal linings of the pebbles and boulders which it incloses, and
to associate it, in consequence, with an ice-charged sea and the Great
Gulf Stream, it seemed to me extremely difficult to assign a reason why
it should be thus barren of remains. Sir Charles Lyell states, in his
"Elements," that the "stranding of ice-islands in the bays of Iceland
since 1835 has driven away the fish for several successive seasons, and
thereby caused a famine among the inhabitants of the country;" and he
argues from the fact, "that a sea habitually infested with melting ice,
which would chill and freshen the water, might render the same
uninhabitable by marine mollusca." But then, on the other hand, it is
equally a fact that half a million of seals have been killed in a single
season on the meadow-ice a little to the north of Newfoundland, and that
many millions of cod, besides other fish, are captured yearly on the
shores of that island, though grooved and furrowed by ice-floes almost
every spring. Of the seal family it is specially recorded by
naturalists, that many of the species "are from choice inhabitants of
the margins of the frozen seas towards both poles; and, of course, in
localities in which many such animals live, some must occasionally die."
And though the grinding process would certainly have disjointed, and
might probably have worn down and partially mutilated, the bones of the
amphibious carnivora of the boulder period, it seems not in the least
probable, judging from the fragments of loose-grained sandstone and soft
shale which it has spared, that it would have wholly destroyed them. So
it happened, however, that from North Berwick to the Ord Hill of
Caithness, I had never found in the boulder-clay the slightest trace of
an organism that could be held to belong to itself; and as it seems
natural to build on negative evidence, if very extensive, considerably
more than mere negative evidence, whatever the circumstances, will
carry, I became somewhat skeptical regarding the very existence of
boulder-fossils,--a skepticism which the worse than doubtful character
of several supposed discoveries in the deposit served considerably to
strengthen. The clay forms, when cut by a water-course, or assailed on
the coast by some unusually high tide, a perpendicular precipice, which
in the course of years slopes into a talus; and as it exhibits in most
instances no marks of stratification, the clay of the talus--a mere
re-formation of fragments detached by the frosts and rains from the
exposed frontage--can rarely be distinguished from that of the original
deposit. Now, in these consolidated slopes it is not unusual to find
remains, animal and vegetable, of no very remote antiquity. I have seen
a human skull dug out of the reclining base of a clay-bank once a
precipice, fully six feet from under the surface. It might have been
deemed the skull of some long-lived contemporary of Enoch,--one of the
accursed race, mayhap,
"Who sinned and died before the avenging flood."
But, alas! the laborer dug a little further, and struck his pickaxe
against an old rybat that lay deeper still. There could be no mistaking
the character of the champfered edge, that still bore the marks of the
tool, nor that of the square perforation for the lock-bolt; and a rising
theory, that would have referred the boulder-clay to a period in which
the polar ice, set loose by the waters of the Noachian deluge, came
floating southwards over the foundered land, straightway stumbled
against it, and fell. Both rybat and skull had come from an ancient
burying-ground, that occupies a projecting angle of the table-land
above. I must now state, however, that my skepticism has thoroughly
given way; and that, slowly yielding to the force of positive evidence,
I have become as assured a believer in the _comminuted recent shells_ of
the boulder-clay as in the belemnites of the Oolite and Lias, or the
ganoid ichthyolites of the Old Red Sandstone.
I had marked, when at Wick, on several occasions, a thick boulder-clay
deposit occupying the southern side of the harbor, and forming an
elevated platform, on which the higher parts of Pulteneytown are built;
but I had noted little else regarding it than that it bears the average
dark-gray color of the flagstones of the district, and that some of the
granitic boulders which protrude from its top and sides are of vast
size. On my last visit, however, rather more than two years ago, when
sauntering along its base, after a very wet morning, awaiting the Orkney
steamer, I was surprised to find, where a small slip had taken place
during the rain, that it was mottled over with minute fragments of
shells. These I examined, and found, so far as, in their extremely
broken condition, I dared determine the point, that they belonged in
such large proportion to one species,--the _Cyprina islandica_ of Dr.
Fleming,--that I could detect among them only a single fragment of any
other shell,--the pillar, apparently, of a large specimen of _Purpura
lapillus_. Both shells belong to that class of old existences,--long
descended, without the pride of ancient descent,--which link on the
extinct to the recent scenes of being. _Cyprina islandica_ and _Purpura
lapillus_ not only exist as living molluscs in the British seas, but
they occur also as crag-shells, side by side with the dead races that
have no place in the present fauna. At this time, however, I could but
think of them simply in their character as recent molluscs; and as it
seemed quite startling enough to find them in a deposit which I had once
deemed representative of a period of death, and still continued to
regard as obstinately unfossiliferous, I next set myself to determine
whether it really _was_ the boulder-clay in which they occurred. Almost
the first pebble which I disengaged from the mass, however, settled the
point, by furnishing the evidence on which for several years past I have
been accustomed to settle it;--it bore in the line of its longer axis,
on a polished surface, the freshly-marked grooves and scratchings of the
iceberg era. Still, however, I had my doubts, not regarding the deposit,
but the shells. Might they not belong merely to the talus of this bank
of boulder-clay?--a re-formation, in all probability, not _more_ ancient
than the elevation of the most recent of the old coast lines,--perhaps
greatly less so. Meeting with an intelligent citizen of Wick, Mr. John
Cleghorn, I requested him to keep a vigilant eye on the shells, and to
ascertain for me, when opportunity offered, whether they occurred deep
in the deposit, or were restricted to merely the base of its exposed
front. On my return from Orkney, he kindly brought me a small collection
of fragments, exclusively, so far as I could judge, of _Cyprina
islandica_, picked up in fresh sections of the clay; at the same time
expressing his belief that they really belonged to the deposit as such,
and were not accidental introductions into it from the adjacent shore.
And at this point for nearly two years the matter rested, when my
attention was again called to it by finding, in the publication of Mr.
Keith Johnston's admirable Geological Map of the British Islands, edited
by Professor Edward Forbes, that other eyes than mine had detected
shells in the boulder-clay of Caithness. "Cliffs of Pleistocene," says
the Professor, in one of his notes attached to the map, "occur at Wick,
containing boreal shells, especially _Astarte borealis_."
I had seen the boulder-clay characteristically developed in the
neighborhood of Thurso; but, during a rather hurried visit, had lacked
time to examine it. The omission mattered the less, however, as my
friend Mr. Robert Dick is resident in the locality; and there are few
men who examine more carefully or more perseveringly than he, or who can
enjoy with higher relish the sweets of scientific research. I wrote him
regarding Professor Forbes's decision on the boulder-clay of Wick and
its shells; urging him to ascertain whether the boulder-clay of Thurso
had not its shells also. And almost by return of post I received from
him, in reply, a little packet of comminuted shells, dug out of a
deposit of the boulder-clay, laid open by the river Thorsa, a full mile
from the sea, and from eighty to a hundred feet over its level. He had
detected minute fragments of shell in the clay about a twelvemonth
before; but a skepticism somewhat similar to my own, added to the dread
of being deceived by mere surface shells, recently derived from the
shore in the character _of_ shell-sand, or of the edible species carried
inland for food, and then transferred from the ash-pit to the fields,
had not only prevented him from following up the discovery, but even
from thinking of it as such. But he eagerly followed it up now, by
visiting every bank of the boulder-clay in his locality within twenty
miles of Thurso, and found them all charged, from top to bottom, with
comminuted shells, however great their distance from the sea, or their
elevation over it. The fragments lie thick along the course of the
Thorsa, where the encroaching stream is scooping out the clay for the
first time since its deposition, and laying bare the scratched and
furrowed pebbles. They occur, too, in the depths of solitary ravines far
amid the moors, and underlie heath, and moss, and vegetable mould, on
the exposed hill-sides. The farm-house of Dalemore, twelve miles from
Thurso as the crow flies, and rather more than thirteen miles from Wick,
occupies, as nearly as may be, the centre of the county; and yet there,
as on the sea-shore, the boulder-clay is charged with its fragments of
marine shells. Though so barren elsewhere on the east coast of Scotland,
the clay is everywhere in Caithness a shell-bearing deposit; and no
sooner had Mr. Dick determined the fact for himself, at the expense of
many a fatiguing journey, and many an hour's hard digging, than he found
that it had been ascertained long before, though, from the very
inadequate style in which it had been recorded, science had in scarce
any degree benefited by the discovery. In 1802 the late Sir John
Sinclair, distinguished for his enlightened zeal in developing the
agricultural resources of the country, and for originating its
statistics, employed a mineralogical surveyor to explore the underground
treasures of the district; and the surveyor's journal he had printed
under the title of "Minutes and Observations drawn up in the course of a
Mineralogical Survey of the County of Caithness, ann. 1802, by John
Busby, Edinburgh." Now, in this journal there are frequent references
made to the occurrence of marine shells in the blue clay. Mr. Dick has
copied for me the two following entries,--for the work itself I have
never seen:--"1802, Sept. 7th.--Surveyed down the river [Thorsa] to
Geize; found blue clay-marl, _intermixed with marine shells_ in great
abundance." "Sept. 12th.--Set off this morning for Dalemore. Bored for
shell-marl in the 'grass-park;' found it in one of the quagmires, but to
no great extent. Bored for shell-marl in the 'house-park.' Surveyed by
the side of the river, and found blue clay-marl in great plenty,
_intermixed with marine shells, such as those found at Geize_. This
place is supposed to be about twenty miles from the sea; and is one
instance, among many in Caithness, of _the ocean's covering the inland
country at some former period of time_."
The state of keeping in which the boulder-shells of Caithness occur is
exactly what, on the iceberg theory, might be premised. The ponderous
ice-rafts that went grating over the deep-sea bottom, grinding down its
rocks into clay, and deeply furrowing its pebbles, must have borne
heavily on its comparatively fragile shells. If rocks and pebbles did
not escape, the shells must have fared but hardly. And very hardly they
have fared: the rather unpleasant casualty of being crushed to death
must have been a greatly more common one in those days than in even the
present age of railways and machinery. The reader, by passing half a
bushel of the common shells of our shores through a barley-mill, as a
preliminary operation in the process, and by next subjecting the broken
fragments thus obtained to the attritive influence of the waves on some
storm-beaten beach for a twelvemonth or two, as a finishing operation,
may produce, when he pleases, exactly such a water-worn shelly debris as
mottles the blue boulder-clays of Caithness. The proportion borne by the
fragments of one species of shell to that of all the others is very
extraordinary. The _Cyprina islandica_ is still by no means a rare
mollusc on our Scottish shores, and may, on an exposed coast, after a
storm, be picked up by dozens, attached to the roots of the deep-sea
tangle. It is greatly less abundant, however, than such shells as
_Purpura lapillus_, _Mytilus edule_, _Cardium edule_, _Littorina
littorea_, and several others; whereas in the boulder-clay it is, in the
proportion of at least ten to one, more abundant than all the others put
together. The great strength of the shell, however, may have in part led
to this result; as I find that its stronger and massier portions,--those
of the umbo and hinge-joint,--are exceedingly numerous in proportion to
its slimmer and weaker fragments. "The _Cyprina islandica_," says Dr.
Fleming, in his "British Animals," "is the largest British bivalve
shell, measuring sometimes thirteen inches in circumference, and,
exclusively of the animal, weighing upwards of nine ounces." Now, in a
collection of fragments of Cyprina sent me by Mr. Dick, disinterred from
the boulder-clay in various localities in the neighborhood of Thurso,
and weighing in all about four ounces, I have detected the broken
remains of no fewer than _sixteen_ hinge joints. And on the same
principle through which the stronger fragments of Cyprina were preserved
in so much larger proportion than the weaker ones, may Cyprina
itself have been preserved in much larger proportion than its
more fragile neighbors. Occasionally, however,--escaped, as if by
accident,--characteristic fragments are found of shells by no means
very strong,--such as _Mytilus_, _Tellina_, and _Astarte_. Among the
univalves I can distinguish _Dentalium entale_, _Purpura lapillus_,
_Turritella terebra_, and _Littorina littorea_, all existing shells, but
all common also to at least the later deposits of the Crag. And among
the bivalves Mr. Dick enumerates,--besides the prevailing _Cyprina
islandica_,--_Venus casina_, _Cardium edule_, _Cardium echinatum_,
_Mytilus edule_, _Astarte danmoniensis_ (_sulcata_), and _Astarte
compressa_, with a _Mactra_, _Artemis_, and _Tellina_.[15] All the
determined species here, with the exception of _Mytilus edule_, have,
with many others, been found by the Rev. Mr. Cumming in the
boulder-clays of the Isle of Man; and all of them are living shells at
the present day on our Scottish coasts. It seems scarce possible to fix
the age of a deposit so broken in its organisms, on the principle that
would first seek to determine its per centage of extinct shells as the
data on which to found. One has to search sedulously and long ere a
fragment turns up sufficiently entire for the purpose of specific
identification, even when it belongs to a well-known living shell; and
did the clay contain some six or eight per cent. of the extinct in a
similarly broken condition (and there is no evidence that it contains a
single per cent. of extinct shells), I know not how, in the
circumstances, the fact could ever be determined. A lifetime might be
devoted to the task of fixing their real proportion, and yet be devoted
to it in vain. All that at present can be said is, that, judging from
what appears, the boulder-clays of Caithness, and with them the
boulder-clays of Scotland generally, and of the Isle of Man,--for they
are all palpably connected with the same iceberg phenomena, and occur
along the same zone in reference to the sea-level,--were formed during
the _existing_ geological epoch.
These details may appear tediously minute; but let the reader mark how
very much they involve. The occurrence of recent shells largely diffused
throughout the boulder-clays of Caithness, at all heights and distances
from the sea at which the clay itself occurs, and not only connected
with the iceberg phenomena by the closest juxtaposition, but also
testifying distinctly to its agency by the extremely comminuted state in
which we find them, tell us, not only according to old John Busby, "that
the ocean covered the inland country at some former period of time," but
that it covered it to a great height at a time geologically recent, when
our seas were inhabited by exactly the same mollusca as inhabit them
now, and so far as yet appears, by none others. I have not yet detected
the boulder-clay at more than from six to eight hundred feet over the
level of the sea; but the travelled boulders I have often found at more
than a thousand feet over it; and Dr. John Fleming, the correctness of
whose observations few men acquainted with the character of his
researches or of his mind will be disposed to challenge, has informed me
that he has detected the dressed and polished surfaces at least four
hundred feet higher. There occurs a greenstone boulder, of from twelve
to fourteen tons weight, says Mr. M'Laren, in his "Geology of Fife and
the Lothians," on the south side of Black Hill (one of the Pentland
range), at about fourteen hundred feet over the sea. Now fourteen or
fifteen hundred feet, taken as the extreme height of the dressings,
though they are said to occur greatly higher, would serve to submerge in
the iceberg ocean almost the whole agricultural region of Scotland. The
common hazel (_Corylus avellana_) ceases to grow in the latitude of the
Grampians, at from one thousand two hundred to one thousand five hundred
feet over the sea level; the common bracken (_Pteris aquilina_) at about
the same height; and corn is never successfully cultivated at a greater
altitude. Where the hazel and bracken cease to grow, it is in vain to
attempt growing corn.[16] In the period of the boulder-clay, then, when
the existing shells of our coasts lived in those inland sounds and
friths of the country that now exist as broad plains or fertile valleys,
the sub-aerial superficies of Scotland was restricted to what are now
its barren and mossy regions, and formed, instead of one continuous
land, merely three detached groups of islands,--the small Cheviot and
Hartfell group,--the greatly larger Grampian and Ben Nevis group,--and a
group intermediate in size, extending from Mealfourvonny, on the
northern shores of Loch Ness, to the Maiden Paps of Caithness.
The more ancient boulder-clays of Scotland seem to have been formed when
the land was undergoing a slow process of subsidence, or, as I should
perhaps rather say, when a very considerable area of the earth's
surface, including the sea-bottom, as well as the eminences that rose
over it, was the subject of a gradual depression; for little or no
alteration appears to have taken place at the time in the _relative_
levels of the higher and lower portions of the sinking area: the
features of the land in the northern part of the kingdom, from the
southern flanks of the Grampians to the Pentland Frith, seemed to have
been fixed in nearly the existing forms many ages before, at the close,
apparently, of the Oolitic period, and at a still earlier age in the
Lammermuir district, to the south. And so the sea around our shores must
have deepened in the ratio in which the hills sank. The evidence of this
process of subsidence is of a character tolerably satisfactory. The
dressed surfaces occur in Scotland, most certainly, as I have already
stated on the authority of Dr. Fleming, at the height of fourteen
hundred feet over the present sea-level; it has been even said, at
fully twice that height, on the lofty flanks of Schehallion,--a
statement, however, which I have had hitherto no opportunity of
verifying. They may be found, too, equally well marked, under the
existing high-water line; and it is obviously impossible that the
dressing process could have been going on at the higher and lower levels
at the same time. When the icebergs were grating along the more elevated
rocks, the low-lying ones must have been buried under from three to
seven hundred fathoms of water,--a depth from three to seven times
greater, be it remembered, than that at which the most ponderous iceberg
could possibly have grounded, or have in any degree affected the bottom.
The dressing process, then, must have been a bit-and-bit process,
carried on during either a period of elevation, in which the rising land
was subjected, zone after zone, to the sweep of the armed ice from its
higher levels _downwards_, or during a period of subsidence, in which it
was subjected to the ice, zone after zone, from its lower levels
_upwards_. And that it was the lower, not the higher levels, that were
first dressed, appears evident from the circumstance, that though on
these lower levels we find the rocks covered up by continuous beds of
the boulder-clay, varying generally from twenty to a hundred feet in
thickness, they are, notwithstanding, as completely dressed under the
clay as on the heights above. Had it been a rising land that was
subjected to the attrition of the icebergs, the debris and dressings of
the higher rocks would have protected the lower from the attrition; and
so the thick accumulation of boulder-clay which overlies the old coast
line, for instance, would have rested, not on dressed, but on undressed
surfaces. The barer rocks of the lower levels might of course exhibit
their scratchings and polishings, like those of the higher; but wherever
these scratchings and polishings occurred in the inferior zones, no
thick protecting stratum of boulder-clay would be found overlying them;
and, _vice versa_, wherever in these zones there occurred thick beds of
boulder-clay, there would be detected on the rock beneath no scratchings
and polishings. In order to _dress_ the entire surface of a country from
the sea-line and under it to the tops of its hills, and at the same time
to cover up extensive portions of its low-lying rocks with vast deposits
of clay, it seems a necessary condition of the process that it should be
carried on piece-meal from the lower level upwards,--not from the higher
downwards.
It interested me much to find, that while from one set of appearances I
had been inferring the gradual subsidence of the land during the period
of the boulder-clay, the Rev. Mr. Cumming of King William's College had
arrived, from the consideration of quite a different class of phenomena,
at a similar conclusion. "It appears to me highly probable," I find him
remarking, in his lately published "Isle of man," "that at the
commencement of the boulder period there was a gradual sinking of this
area [that of the island]. Successively, therefore, the points at
different degrees of elevation were brought within the influence of the
sea, and exposed to the rake of the tides, charged with masses of ice
which had been floated off from the surrounding shores, and bearing on
their under surfaces, mud, gravel, and fragments of hard rock." Mr.
Cumming goes on to describe, in his volume, some curious appearances,
which seem to bear direct on this point, in connection with a boss of a
peculiarly-compounded granite, which occurs in the southern part of the
island, about seven hundred feet over the level of the sea. There rise
on the western side of the boss two hills, one of which attains to the
elevation of nearly seven hundred, and the other of nearly eight hundred
feet over it; and yet both hills to their summits are mottled over with
granite boulders, furnished by the comparatively low-lying boss. One of
these travelled masses, fully two tons in weight, lies not sixty feet
from the summit of the loftier hill, at an altitude of nearly fifteen
hundred feet over the sea. Now, it seems extremely difficult to conceive
of any other agency than that of a rising sea or of a subsiding land,
through which these masses could have been rolled up the steep slopes of
the hills. Had the boulder period been a period of elevation, or merely
a stationary period, during which the land neither rose nor sank, the
travelled boulders would not now be found resting at higher levels than
that of the parent rock whence they were derived. We occasionally meet
on our shores, after violent storms from the sea, stones that have been
rolled from their place at low ebb to nearly the line of flood; but we
always find that it was by the waves of the rising, not of the falling
tide, that their transport was effected. For whatever removals of the
kind take place during an ebbing sea are invariably in an opposite
direction;--they are removals, not from lower to higher levels, but from
higher to lower.
The upper subsoils of Scotland bear frequent mark of the elevatory
period which succeeded this period of depression. The boulder-clay has
its numerous intercalated arenaceous and gravelly beds, which belong
evidently to its own era; but the numerous surface-beds of stratified
sand and gravel by which in so many localities it is overlaid belong
evidently to a later time. When, after possibly a long protracted
period, the land again began to rise, or the sea to fall, the superior
portions of the boulder-clay must have been exposed to the action of the
tides and waves; and the same process of separation of parts must have
taken place on a large scale, which one occasionally sees taking place
in the present time on a comparatively small one, in ravines of the same
clay swept by a streamlet. After every shower, the stream comes down
red and turbid with the finer and more argillaceous portions of the
deposit; minute accumulations of sand are swept to the gorge of the
ravine, or cast down in ripple-marked patches in its deeper pools; beds
of pebbles and gravel are heaped up in every inflection of its banks;
and boulders are laid bare along its sides. Now, a separation, by a sort
of washing process of an analogous character, must have taken place in
the materials of the more exposed portions of the boulder-clay, during
the gradual emergence of the land; and hence, apparently, those
extensive beds of sand and gravel which in so many parts of the kingdom
exist, in relation to the clay, as a superior or upper subsoil; hence,
too, occasional beds of a purer clay than that beneath, divested of a
considerable portion of its arenaceous components, and of almost all its
pebbles and boulders. This _washed_ clay,--a re-formation of the boulder
deposit, cast down, mostly in insulated beds in quiet localities, where
the absence of currents suffered the purer particles held in suspension
by the water to settle,--forms, in Scotland at least, with, of course,
the exception of the ancient fire-clays of the Coal Measures, the true
brick and tile clays of the agriculturist and architect.
It is to these superior beds that all the recent shells yet found above
the existing sea-level in Scotland, from the Dornoch Frith and beyond
it, to beyond the Frith of Forth, seem to belong. Their period is much
less remote than that of the shells of the boulder-clay, and they rarely
occur in the same comminuted condition. They existed, it would appear,
not during the chill twilight period, when the land was in a state of
subsidence, but during the after period of cheerful dawn, when hill-top
after hill-top was emerging from the deep, and the close of each passing
century witnessed a broader area of dry land in what is now Scotland,
than the close of the century which had gone before. Scandinavia is
similarly rising at the present day, and presents with every succeeding
age a more extended breadth of surface. Many of the boulder-stones seem
to have been cast down where they now lie, during this latter time. When
they occur, as in many instances, high on bare hill-tops, from five to
fifteen hundred feet over the sea-level, with neither gravel nor
boulder-clay beside them, we of course cannot fix their period. They may
have been dropped by ice-floes or shore-ice, where we now find them, at
the commencement of the period of elevation, after the clay had been
formed; or they may have been deposited by more ponderous icebergs
during its formation, when the land was yet sinking, though during the
subsequent rise the clay may have been washed from around them to lower
levels. The boulders, however, which we find scattered over the plains
and less elevated hill-sides, with beds of the washed gravel or sand
interposed between them and the clay, must have been cast down where
they lie, during the elevatory ages. For, had they been washed out of
the clay, they would have lain, not _over_ the greatly lighter sands and
gravels, but _under_ them. Would that they could write their own
histories! The autobiography of a single boulder, with notes on the
various floras which had sprung up around it, and the various classes of
birds, beasts, and insects by which it had been visited, would be worth
nine-tenths of all the autobiographies ever published, and a moiety of
the remainder to boot.
A few hundred yards from the opening of this dell of the boulder-clay,
in which I have so long detained the reader, there is a wooded
inflection of the bank, formed by the old coast line, in which there
stood, about two centuries ago, a meal-mill, with the cottage of the
miller, and which was once known as the scene of one of those
supernaturalities that belong to the times of the witch and the fairy.
The upper anchoring-place of the bay lies nearly opposite the
inflection. A shipmaster, who had moored his vessel in this part of the
roadstead, some time in the latter days of the first Charles, was one
fine evening sitting alone on deck, awaiting the return of his seamen,
who had gone ashore, and amusing himself in watching the lights that
twinkled from the scattered farm-houses, and in listening, in the
extreme stillness of the calm, to the distant lowing of cattle, or the
abrupt bark of the herdsman's dog. As the hour wore later, the sounds
ceased, and the lights disappeared,--all but one solitary taper, that
twinkled from the window of the miller's cottage. At length, however, it
also disappeared, and all was dark around the shores of the bay, as a
belt of black velvet. Suddenly a hissing noise was heard overhead; the
shipmaster looked up, and saw what seemed to be one of those meteors
known as falling stars, slanting athwart the heavens in the direction of
the cottage, and increasing in size and brilliancy as it neared the
earth, until the wooded ridge and the shore could be seen as distinctly
from the ship-deck as by day. A dog howled piteously from one of the
out-houses,--an owl whooped from the wood. The meteor descended until it
almost touched the roof, when a cock crew from within; its progress
seemed instantly arrested; it stood still, rose about the height of a
ship's mast, and then began again to descend. The cock crew a second
time; it rose as before; and, after mounting considerably higher than at
first, again sank in the line of the cottage, to be again arrested by
the crowing of the cock. It mounted yet a third time, rising higher
still; and, in its last descent, had almost touched the roof, when the
faint clap of wings was heard as if whispered over the water, followed
by a still louder note of defiance from the cock. The meteor rose with a
bound, and, continuing to ascend until it seemed lost among the stars,
did not again appear. Next night, however, at the same hour, the same
scene was repeated in all its circumstances: the meteor descended, the
dog howled, the owl whooped, the cock crew. On the following morning the
shipmaster visited the miller's, and, curious to ascertain how the
cottage would fare when the cock was away, he purchased the bird; and,
sailing from the bay before nightfall, did not return until about a
month after.
On his voyage inwards, he had no sooner doubled an intervening headland,
than he stepped forward to the bows to take a peep at the cottage: it
had vanished. As he approached the anchoring ground, he could discern a
heap of blackened stones occupying the place where it had stood; and he
was informed on going ashore, that it had been burnt to the ground, no
one knew how, on the very night he had quitted the bay. He had it
re-built and furnished, says the story, deeming himself what one of the
old schoolmen perhaps term the _occasional_ cause of the disaster. He
also returned the cock,--probably a not less important benefit,--and no
after accident befel the cottage. About fifteen years ago there was a
human skeleton dug up near the scene of the tradition, with the skull,
and the bones of the legs and feet, lying close together, as if the body
had been huddled up twofold in a hole; and this discovery led to that of
the story, which, though at one time often repeated and extensively
believed, had been suffered to sleep in the memories of a few elderly
people for nearly sixty years.