CHAPTER XI.

Geological Physiognomy.--Scenery of the Primary Formations; Gneiss, Mica Schist, Quartz Rock.--Of the Secondary; the Chalk Formations, the Oolite, the New Red Sandstone, the Coal Measures.--Scenery in the Neighborhood of Edinburgh.--Aspect of the Trap Rocks.--The Disturbing and Denuding Agencies.--Distinctive Features of the Old Red Sandstone.--Of the Great Conglomerate.--Of the Ichthyolite Beds.--The Burn of Eathie.--The Upper Old Red Sandstones.--Scene in Moray.

Physiognomy is no idle or doubtful science in connection with Geology. The physiognomy of a country indicates, almost invariably, its geological character. There is scarce a rock among the more ancient groups that does not affect its peculiar form of hill and valley. Each has its style of landscape; and as the vegetation of a district depends often on the nature of the underlying deposits, not only are the main outlines regulated by the mineralogy of the formations which they define, but also in many cases the manner in which these outlines are filled up. The coloring of the landscape is well nigh as intimately connected with its Geology as the drawing. The traveller passes through a mountainous region of gneiss. The hills, which, though bulky, are shapeless, raise their huge backs so high over the brown, dreary moors, which, unvaried by precipice or ravine, stretch away for miles from their feet, that even amid the heats of midsummer the snow gleams in streaks and patches from their summits. And yet so vast is their extent of base, and their tops so truncated, that they seem but half-finished hills notwithstanding--hills interdicted somehow in the forming, and the work stopped ere the upper stories had been added. He pursues his journey, and enters a district of micaceous schist. The hills are no longer truncated, or the t moors unbroken; the heavy ground-swell of the former landscape has become a tempestuous sea, agitated by powerful winds and conflicting tides. The picturesque and somewhat fantastic outline is composed of high, sharp peaks, bold, craggy domes, steep, broken acclivities, and deeply serrated ridges; and the higher hills seem as if set round with a framework of props and buttresses, that stretch out on every side like the roots of an ancient oak. He passes on, and the landscape varies; the surrounding hills, though lofty, pyramidal, and abrupt, are less rugged than before; and the ravines, though still deep and narrow, are walled by ridges no longer serrated and angular, but comparatively rectilinear and smooth. But the vegetation is even more scanty than formerly; the steeper slopes are covered with streams of debris, on which scarce a moss or lichen finds root; and the conoidal hills, bare of soil from their summits half way down, seem so many naked skeletons, that speak of the decay and death of nature. All is solitude and sterility. The territory is one of Quartz rock. Still the traveller passes on: the mountains sink into low swellings; long rectilinear ridges run out towards the distant sea, and terminate in bluff, precipitous headlands. The valleys, soft and pastoral, widen into plains, or incline in long-drawn slopes of gentlest declivity. The streams, hitherto so headlong and broken, linger beside their banks, and then widen into friths and estuaries. The deep soil is covered by a thick mantle of vegetation--by forest trees of largest growth, and rich fields of corn; and the solitude of the mountains has given place to a busy population. He has left behind him the primary regions, and entered on one of the secondary districts.

And these less rugged formations have also their respective styles--marred and obliterated often by the Plutonic agency, which imparts to them in some instances its own character, and in some an intermediate one, but in general distinctly marked, and easily recognized. The Chalk presents its long inland lines of apparent coast, that send out their rounded headlands, cape beyond cape, into the wooded or corn-covered plains below. Here and there, there juts up at the base of the escarpement a white, obelisk-like stack; here and there, there opens into the interior a narrow, grassy bay, in which noble beeches have cast anchor. There are valleys without streams; and the landscape a-top is a scene of arid and uneven downs, that seem to rise and fall like the sea after a storm. We pass on to the Oolite: the slopes are more gentle, the lines of rising ground less continuous, and less coast-like; the valleys have their rivulets, and the undulating surface is covered by a richer vegetation. We enter on a district of New Red Sandstone. Deep, narrow ravines intersect elevated platforms. There are lines of low precipices, so perpendicular and so red, that they seem as if walled over with new brick; and here and there, amid the speckled and mouldering sandstones, that gather no covering of lichen, there stands up a huge, altar-like mass of lime, mossy and gray, as if it represented a remoter antiquity than the rocks around it. The Coal Measures present often the appearance of vast lakes frozen over during a high wind, partially broken afterwards by a sudden thaw, and then frozen again. Their shores stand up around them in the form of ridges and mountain chains of the older rocks; and their surfaces are grooved into flat valleys and long lines of elevation. Take, as an instance, the scenery about Edinburgh. The Ochil Hills and the Grampians form the distant shores of the seeming lake or basin on the one side, the range of the Lammermuirs and the Pentland group on the other; the space between is ridged and furrowed in long lines, that run in nearly the same direction from north-east to south-west, as if, when the binding frost w r as first setting in, the wind had blown from off the northern or southern shore.

But whence these abrupt, precipitous hills that stud the landscape, and form, in the immediate neighborhood of the city, its more striking features? They belong--to return to the illustration of the twice-frozen lake--to the middle period of thaw, when the ice broke up; and, as they are composed chiefly of matter ejected from the abyss, might have characterized equally any of the other formations. Their very striking forms, however, illustrate happily the operations of the great agencies on which, in the secondary and transition deposits, all the peculiarities of scenery depend. The molten matter from beneath seems to have been injected, in the first instance, through rents and fissures among the carboniferous shales and sandstones of the district, where it lay cooling in its subterranean matrices, in beds and dikes, like metal in the moulds of the founder; and the places which if occupied must have been indicated on the surface but by curves and swellings of the strata. The denuding power then came into operation in the form of tides and currents, and ground down the superincumbent rocks. The injected masses, now cooled and hardened, were laid bare; and the softer framework of the moulds in which they had been cast was washed from their summits and sides, except where long ridges remained attached to them in the lines of the current, as if to indicate the direction in which they had broken its force. Every larger stone in a water-course, after the torrent fed by a thunder shower has just subsided, shows, on the same principle, its trail of sand and shingle piled up behind it. The outlines of the landscape were modified yet further by the yielding character of the basement of sandstone or shale on which the Plutonic beds so often rest. The basement crumbled away as the tides and waves broke against it. The injected beds above, undermined in the process, and with a vertical cleavage, induced by their columnar tendency, fell down in masses that left a front perpendicular as a wall. Each bed came thus to present its own upright line of precipice; and hence--when they rise bed above bed, as often occurs--the stair-like outline of hill to which the trap rocks owe their name; hence the outline of the Dalmahoy Crags, for instance, and of the southern and western front of Salisbury Crags.

In all the sedimentary formations the peculiarities of scenery depend on three circumstances--on the Plutonic agencies, the denuding agencies, and the manner and proportions in which the harder and softer beds of the deposits on which these operated alternate with one another. There is an union of the active and the passive in the formation of landscape; that which disturbs and grinds down, and that which, according to its texture and composition, affects, if I may so speak, a peculiar style of being ground down and disturbed; and it is in the passive circumstances that the peculiarities chiefly originate, Hence it is that the scenery of the Chalk differs from the scenery of the Oolite, and both from that of the Coal Measures. The Old Red Sandstone has also its peculiarities of prospect, which vary according to its formations, and the amount and character of the disturbing and denuding agencies to which these have been exposed. Instead, however, of crowding its various, and, in some instances, dissimilar features into one landscape, I shall introduce to the reader a few of its more striking and characteristic scenes, as exhibited in various localities, and by different deposits, beginning first with its conglomerate base.

The great antiquity of this deposit is unequivocally indicated by the manner in which we find it capping, far in the interior, in insulated beds and patches, some of our loftier hills, or, in some instances, wrapping them round, as with a caul, from base to summit. It mixes largely, in our northern districts, with the mountain scenery of the country, and imparts strength and boldness of outline to every landscape in which it occurs. Its island-like patches affect generally a bluff parabolic or conical outline; its loftier hills present rounded, dome-like summits, which sink to the plain on the one hand in steep, slightly concave lines, and on the other in lines decidedly convex, and a little less steep. The mountain of boldest outline in 'the line of the Caledonian Valley (Mealforvony) is composed externally of this rock. Except where covered by the diluvium, it seems little friendly to vegetation. Its higher summits are well nigh as bare as those of the primary rocks; and when a public road crosses its lower ridges, the traveller generally finds that there is no paving process necessary to procure a hardened surface, for his wheels rattle over the pebbles embedded in the rock. On the sea-coast, in several localities, the deposit presents striking peculiarities of outline. The bluff and rounded precipices stand out in vast masses, that affect the mural form, and present few of the minuter angularities of the primary rocks. Here and there a square buttress of huge proportions leans against the front of some low-browed crag, that seems little to need any such support, and casts a length of shadow athwart its face. There opens along the base of the rock a line of rounded, shallow caves, or what seem rather the openings of caves not yet dug, and which testify of a period when the sea stood about thirty feet higher on our coasts than at present. A multitude of stacks and tabular masses lie grouped in front, perforated often by squat, heavy arches; and stacks, caverns, buttresses, crags, and arches, are all alike mottled over by the thickly-set and variously colored pebbles. There is a tract of scenery of this strangely marked character in the neighborhood of Dunottar, and two other similar tracts in the far north, where the hill of Nigg, in Ross-shire, declines towards the Lias deposit in the Bay of Shandwick, and where, in the vicinity of Inverness, a line of bold, precipitous coast runs between the pyramidal wooded eminence which occupies the south-eastern corner of Ross, and the tower-like headlands that guard the entrance of the Bay of Munlochy. In the latter tract, however, the conglomerate is much less cavernous than in the other two.

The sea-coast of St. Vigeans, in Forfarshire, has been long celebrated for its romantic scenery and its caves; and though it belongs rather to the conglomerate base of the upper formation than to the great conglomerate base of the lower, it is marked, from the nature of the materials--materials common to both--by features indistinguishable from those which characterize the sea-coasts of the older deposit. Its wall of precipices averages from a hundred to a hundred and eighty feet in height--no very great matter compared with some of our northern lines, but the cliffs make up for their want of altitude by their bold and picturesque combinations of form; and I scarce know where a long summer's day could well be passed more agreeably than among their wild and solitary recesses. The incessant lashings of the sea have ground them down into shapes the most fantastic. Huge stacks, that stand up from amid the breakers, are here and there perforated by round, heavy-browed arches, and cast the morning shadows inland athwart the cavern-hollowed precipices behind. The never-ceasing echoes reply, in long and gloomy caves, to the wild tones of the sea. Here a bluff promontory projects into the deep, green water, and the white foam, in times of tempest, dashes up a hundred feet against its face. There a narrow strip of vegetation, spangled with wild flowers, intervenes between the beach and the foot of the cliffs that sweep along the bottom of some semicircular bay; but we see, from the rounded caves by which they are studded, and the polish which has blunted their lower angularities, that at some early period the breakers must have dashed for ages against their bases. The _Gaylet Pot_, a place of interest, from its very striking appearance, to more than geologists, is connected with one of the deep-sea promontories. We see an oblong hollow in the centre of a corn-field, that borders on the cliffs. It deepens as we approach it, and on reaching the edge we find ourselves standing on the verge of a precipice about a hundred and fifty feet in depth, and see the waves dashing along the bottom. On descending by a somewhat precarious path, we find that a long, tunnel-like cavern communicates with the sea, and mark, through the deep gloom of the passage, the sunlight playing beyond; and now and then a white sail passing the opening, as if flitting across the field of a telescope. The _Gaylet Pot_ seems originally to have been merely a deep, straight cave, hollowed in the line of a fault by the waves; and it owes evidently its present appearance to the falling in of the roof for about a hundred yards, at its inner extremity.

We pass from the conglomerate to the middle and upper beds of the lower formation, and find scenery of a different character in the districts in which they prevail. The aspect is less bold and rugged, and affects often long horizontal lines, that stretch away without rise or depression, amid the surrounding inequalities of the landscape for miles and leagues, and that decline to either side, like roofs of what the architect would term a low pitch. The ridge of the Leys in the eastern opening of the Caledonian Valley, so rectilinear in its outline, and so sloping in its sides, presents a good illustration of this peculiarity. The rectilinear ridge which runs from the Southern Sutor of Cromarty far into the interior of the country, and which has been compared in a former chapter to the shaft of a spear, furnishes another illustration equally apt.[AX] Where the sloping sides of these roof-like ridges decline, as in the latter instance, towards an exposed sea-coast, we find the slope terminating often in an abrupt line of rock dug out by the waves. It is thus a roof set on walls, and furnished with eaves. A ditch just finished by the laborer presents regularly sloping sides; but the little stream that comes running through gradually widens its bed by digging furrows into the slopes, the undermined masses fall in and are swept away, and, in the course of a few months, the sides are no longer sloping, but abrupt. And such, on a great scale, has been the process through which coast-lines that were originally paved slopes have become walls of precipices. The waves cut first through the outer strata; and every stratum thus divided comes to present two faces--a perpendicular face in the newly-formed line of precipice, and another horizontal face lying parallel to it, along the shore. One half the severed stratum seems as if rising out of the sea, the other half as if descending from the hill: the geologist who walks along the beach finds the various beds presented in duplicate--a hill-bed on the one side, and a sea-bed on the other. There occurs a very interesting instance of this arrangement in the bold line of coast on the northern shore of the Moray Frith, so often alluded to in a previous chapter, as extending between the Southern Sutor and the Hill of Eathie; and which forms the wall of a portion of the roof-like ridge last described. The sea first broke in a long line through strata of red and gray shale, next through a thick bed of pale-yellow stone, then through a continuous bed of stratified clays and nodular limestone, and, last of all, through a bed, thicker than any of the others, of indurated red sandstone. The line of cliffs formed in this way rises abruptly for about a hundred yards on the one hand; the shore stretches out for more than double the same space on the other; on both sides the beds exactly correspond; and to ascend in the line of the strata from the foot of the cliffs, we have either to climb the hill, or to pass downwards at low ebb to the edge of the sea. The section is of interest, not only from the numerous organisms, animal and vegetable, which its ichthyolite beds contain, but from the illustration which it also furnishes of denudation to a vast extent from causes still in active operation. A line of precipices a hundred yards in height, and more than two miles in length, has been dug out of the slope by the slow wear of the waves, in the unreckoned course of that period during which the present sea was bounded in this locality by the existing line of coast. (See Frontispiece, sect. 3.)

[Footnote AX: The valleys which separate these ridges form often spacious friths and bays, the frequent occurrence of which in the Old lied Sandstone constitutes, in some localities, one of the characteristics of the system. Mark in a map of the north of Scotland, how closely friths and estuaries lie crowded together between the counties of Sutherland and Inverness. In a line of coast little more than forty miles in extent, there occur four arms of the sea--the Friths of Cromarty, Beauly, and Dornoch, and the Bay of Munlochy. The Frith of Tay and the Basin of Montrose are also semi-marine valleys of the Old Red Sandstone. Two of the finest harbors in Britain, or the world, belong to it--Milford Haven, in South Wales, and the Bay of Cromarty.]

I know not a more instructive walk for the young geologist than that furnished by the two miles of shore along which this section extends. Years of examination and inquiry would fail to exhaust it. It presents us, I have said, with the numerous organisms of the Lower Old Red Sandstone; it presents us also, towards its western extremity, with the still more numerous organisms of the Lower and Upper Lias; nor are the inflections and faults which its strata exhibit less instructive than its fossils or its vast denuded hollow. I have climbed along its wall of cliffs during the height of a tempestuous winter tide, when waves of huge volume, that had begun to gather strength under the night of the Northern Ocean, were bursting and foaming below; and as the harder pebbles, uplifted by the surge, rolled by thousands and tens of thousands along the rocky bottom, and the work of denudation went on, I have thought of the remote past, when the same agents had first begun to grind down the upper strata, whose broken edges now projected high over my head on the one hand, and lay buried far under the waves at my feet on the other. Almost all mountain chains present their abrupter escarpements to the sea, though separated from it in many instances by hundreds of miles--a consequence, it is probable, of a similar course of denudation, ere they had attained their present altitude, or the plains at their feet had been elevated over the level of the ocean. Had a rise of a hundred feet taken place in this northern district in the days of Cæsar, the whole upper part of the Moray Frith would have been laid dry, and it would now have seemed as inexplicable that this roof-like ridge should present so rugged a line of wall to the distant sea, as that the Western Ghauts of India should invariably turn their steepest declivities to the basin of the Indian Ocean, or that, from the Arctic Circle to the southern extremity of Patagonia, the huge mountain-chain of America should elevate its dizzy precipices in the line of the Pacific.

Let us take another view of this section. It stretches between two of the granitic knobs or wedges to which I have had such frequent occasion to refer--the Southern Sutor of Cromarty, and the Hill of Eathie; and the edges of the strata somewhat remind one of the edges of a bundle of deals laid flatways on two stones, and bent towards the middle by their own weight. But their more brittle character is shown by the manner in which their ends are broken and uptilted against the granitic knobs on which they seem to rest; and towards the western knob the whole bundle has been broken across from below, and the opening occasioned by the fracture forms a deep, savage ravine, skirted by precipices, that runs far into the interior, and exhibits the lower portion of the system to well nigh its base. Will the reader spend a very few minutes in exploring the solitary recesses of this rocky trench--it matters not whether as a scene-hunter or a geologist? We pass onwards along the beach through the middle line of the denuded hollow. The natural rampart that rises on the right ascends towards the uplands in steep slopes, lined horizontally by sheep-walks, and fretted by mossy knolls, and churchyard-like ridges--or juts out into abrupt and weathered crags, crusted with lichens and festooned with ivy--or recedes into bosky hollows, roughened by the sloe-thorn, the wild-rose, and the juniper; on the left the wide extent of the Moray Frith stretches out to the dim horizon, with its vein-like currents, and its undulating lines of coast; while before us we see, far in the distance, the blue vista of the Great Valley, with its double wall of jagged and serrated hills, and directly in the opening, the gray, diminished spires of Inverness. We reach a brown, mossy stream, of just volume enough to sweep away the pebbles and shells that have been strewed in its course by the last tide; and see, on turning a sudden angle, the precipices cleft to their base by the ravine that has yielded its waters a passage from the interior.

We enter along the bed of the stream. A line of mural precipices rises on either hand--here advancing in ponderous overhanging buttresses, there receding into deep, damp recesses, tapestried with ivy, and darkened with birch and hazel. A powerful spring, charged with lime, comes pouring by a hundred different threads over the rounded brow of a beetling crag, and the decaying vegetation around it is hardening into stone. The cliffs vary their outline at every step, as if assuming in succession, all the various combinations of form that constitute the wild and the picturesque; and the pale hues of the stone seem, when brightened by the sun, the very tints a painter would choose to heighten the effect of his shades, or to contrast most delicately with the luxuriant profusion of bushes and flowers that wave over the higher shelves and crannies. A colony of swallows have built from time immemorial under the overhanging strata of one of the loftier precipices; the fox and badger harbor in the clefts of the steeper and more inaccessible banks. As we proceed, the deli becomes wilder and more deeply wooded; the stream frets and toils at our feet--here leaping over an opposing ridge;--there struggling in a pool--yonder escaping to the light from under some broken fragment of cliff. There is a richer profusion of flowers, a thicker mantling of ivy and honeysuckle; and after passing a semicircular inflection of the bank, that waves from base to summit with birch, hazel, and hawthorn, we find the passage shut up by a perpendicular wall of rock about thirty feet in height, over which the stream precipitates itself, in a slender column of foam, into a dark, mossy basin. The long arms of an intermingled clump of birches and hazels stretch half way across, tripling with their shade the apparent depth of the pool, and heightening in an equal ratio the white flicker of the cascade, and the effect of the bright patches of foam which, flung from the rock, incessantly revolve on the eddy.

Mark now the geology of the ravine. For about half way from where it opens to the shore, to where the path is obstructed by the deep mossy pool and the cascade, its precipitous sides consist of three bars or stories. There is first, reckoning from the stream upwards, a broad bar of pale red; then a broad bar of pale lead color; last and highest, a broad bar of pale yellow; and above all, there rises a steep green slope, that continues its ascent till it gains the top of the ridge. The middle, lead-colored bar is an ichthyolite bed, a place of sepulture among the rocks, where the dead lie by myriads. The yellow bar above is a thick bed of saliferous sandstone. We may see the projections on which the sun has beat most powerfully covered with a white crust of salt; and it may be deemed worthy of remark, in connection with the circumstance, that its shelves and crannies are richer in vegetation than those of the other bars. The pale red bar below is composed of a coarser and harder sandstone, which forms an upper moiety of the arenaceous portion of the great conglomerate. Now mark, further, that on reaching a midway point between the beach and the cascade, this triple-barred line of precipices abruptly terminates, and a line of precipices of coarse conglomerate as abruptly begins. I occasionally pass a continuous wall, built at two different periods, and composed of two different kinds of materials: the one half of it is formed of white sandstone, the other half of a dark-colored basalt; and the place where the sandstone ends and the basalt begins is marked by a vertical line, on the one side of which all is dark colored, while all is of a light color on the other. Equally marked and abrupt is the vertical line which separates the triple-barred from the conglomerate cliffs of the ravine of Eathie. The ravine itself may be described as a fault in the strata; but here is a fault, lying at right angles with it, on a much larger scale: the great conglomerate on which the triple bars rest has been cast up at least two hundred feet, and placed side by side with them. And yet the surface above bears no trace of the catastrophe. Denuding agencies of even greater power than those which have hollowed out the cliffs of the neighboring coast, or whose operations have been prolonged through periods of even more extended duration, have ground down the projected line of the upheaved mass to the level of the undisturbed masses beside it. Now, mark further, as we ascend the ravine, that the grand cause of the disturbance appears to illustrate, as it were, and that very happily, the manner in which the fault was originally produced. The precipice, over which the stream leaps at one bound into the mossy hollow, is composed of granitic gneiss, and seems evidently to have intruded itself, with much disturbance, among the surrounding conglomerate and sandstones. A few hundred yards higher up the dell, there is another much loftier precipice of gneiss, round which we find the traces of still greater disturbance; and, higher still, yet a third abrupt precipice of the same rock. The gneiss rose, trap-like, in steps, and carried up the sandstone before it in detached squares. Each step has its answering fault immediately over it; and the fault where the triple bars and the conglomerate meet is merely a fault whose step of granitic gneiss stopped short ere it reached the surface. But the accompanying section (see Frontispiece, sect. 4) will better illustrate the geology of this interesting ravine, than it can be illustrated by any written description. I may remark, ere taking leave of it, however, that its conglomerates exhibit a singularly large amount of false stratification at an acute angle with the planes of the real strata, and that a bed of mouldering sandstone near the base of the system may be described, from its fissile character, as a tilestone.[AY]

[Footnote AY: There is a natural connection, it is said, between wild scenes and wild legends; and some of the traditions connected with this romantic and solitary dell illustrate the remark. Till a comparatively late period, it was known at many a winter fireside as a favorite haunt of the fairies--the most poetical of all our old tribes of spectres, and at one time one of the most popular. I have conversed with an old woman, who, when a very little girl, had seen myriads of them dancing, as the sun was setting, on the further edge of the dell; and with a still older man, who had the temerity to offer one of them a pinch of snuff at the foot of the cascade. Nearly a mile from where the ravine opens to the sea, it assumes a gentler and more pastoral character; the sides, no longer precipitous, descend towards the stream in green, sloping banks; and a beaten path, which runs between Cromarty and Rosemarkie, winds down the one side and ascends the other. More than sixty years ago, one Donald Calder, a Cromarty shop-keeper, was journeying by this path shortly after nightfall. The moon, at full, had just risen; but there was a silvery mist sleeping on the lower grounds, that obscured her light; and the dell, in all its extent, was so overcharged by the vapor, that it seemed an immense, overflooded river winding through the landscape. Donald had reached its farther edge, and could hear the rush of the stream from the deep obscurity of the abyss below, when there rose from the opposite side a strain of the most delightful music he had ever heard. He staid and listened. The words of a song, of such simple beauty that they seemed without effort to stamp themselves on his memory, came wafted in the music; and the chorus, in which a thousand tiny voices seemed to join, was a familiar address to himself--"Hey, Donald Calder; ho, Donald Calder." "There are nane of my Navity acquaintance," thought Donald, "who sing like that. Wha can it be?" He descended into the cloud; but in passing the little stream the music ceased; and on reaching the spot on which the singer had seemed stationed, he saw only a bare bank sinking into a solitary moor, unvaried by either bush or hollow in which the musician might have lain concealed. He had hardly time, however, to estimate the marvels of the case, when the music again struck up, but on the opposite side of the dell, and apparently from the very knoll on which he had so recently listened to it. The conviction that it could not be other than supernatural overpowered him; and he hurried homewards under the influence of a terror so extreme, that, unfortunately for our knowledge of fairy literature, it had the effect of obliterating from his memory every part of the song except the chorus. The sun rose as he reached Cromarty; and he found that, instead of having lingered at the edge of the dell for only a few minutes--and the time had seemed no longer--he had spent beside it the greater part of the night.

The fairies have deserted the Burn of Eathie; but we have proof, quite as conclusive as the nature of the case admits, that when they ceased to be seen there it would have been vain to have looked for them any where else. There is a cluster of turf-built cottages grouped on the southern side of the ravine; a few scattered knolls, and a long, partially wooded hollow, that seems a sort of covered way leading to the recesses of the dell, interpose between them and the nearer edge, and the hill rises behind. On a Sabbath morning, nearly sixty years ago, the inmates of this little hamlet had all gone to church, all except a herd-boy and a little girl, his sister, who were lounging beside one of the cottages; when, just as the shadow of the garden dial had fallen on the line of noon, they saw a long cavalcade ascending out of the ravine through the wooded hollow. It winded among the knolls and bushes; and, turning round the northern gable of the cottage beside which the sole spectators of the scene were stationed, began to ascend the eminence towards the south. The horses were shaggy, diminutive things, speckled dun and gray; the riders, stunted, misgrown, ugly creatures, attired in antique jerkins of plaid, long gray cloaks, and little red caps, from under which their wild, uncombed locks shot out over their cheeks and foreheads. The boy and his sister stood gazing in utter dismay and astonishment, as rider after rider, each one more uncouth and dwarfish than the one that had preceded it, passed the cottage and disappeared among the brushwood, which at that period covered the hill, until at length the entire rout, except the last rider, who lingered a few yards behind the others, had gone by. "What are ye, little mannie? and where are ye going?" inquired the boy, his curiosity getting the better of his fears and his prudence. "Not of the race of Adam," said the creature, turning for a moment in his saddle; "the People of Peace shall never more be seen in Scotland."]

I know comparatively little of the scenery of the middle, or Cornstone formation. Its features in England are bold and striking; in Scotland, of a tamer and more various character. The Den of Balruddery is a sweet, wooded dell, marked by no characteristic peculiarities. Many of the seeming peculiarities of the formation in Forfarshire, as in Fife, may be traced to the disturbing trap. The appearance exhibited is that of uneven plains, that rise and fall in long, undulating ridges--an appearance which any other member of the system might have presented. We find the upper formation associated with scenery of great, though often wild beauty; and nowhere is this more strikingly the case than in the province of Moray, where it leans against the granitic gneiss of the uplands, and slopes towards the sea in long plains of various fertility, deep and rich, as in the neighborhood of Elgin, or singularly bleak and unproductive, as in the far-famed "heath near Forres." Let us select the scene where the Findhorn, after hurrying over ridge and shallow, amid combinations of rock and wood, wildly picturesque as any the kingdom affords, enters on the lower country, with a course less headlong, through a vast trench scooped in the pale red sandstone of the upper formation. For miles above the junction of the newer and older rocks the river has been toiling in a narrow and uneven channel, between two upright walls of hard gray gneiss, thickly traversed, in every complexity of pattern, by veins of a light red, large grained granite. The gneiss abruptly terminates, but not so the wall of precipices. A lofty front of gneiss is joined to a lofty front of sandstone, like the front walls of two adjoining houses; and the broken and uptilted strata of the softer stone show that the older and harder rocks must have invaded it from below. A little farther down the stream, the strata assume what seems, in a short extent of frontage, a horizontal position, like courses of ashlar in a building, but which, when viewed in the range, is found to incline at a low angle towards the distant sea. Here, as in many other localities, the young geologist must guard against the conclusion, that the rock is necessarily low in the geological scale which he finds resting against the gneiss. The gneiss, occupying a very different place from that on which it was originally formed, has been thrust into close neighborhood with widely separated formations. The great conglomerate base of the system rests over it in Orkney, Caithness, Ross, Cromarty, and Inverness; and there is no trace of what should be the intervening grauwacke. The upper formation of the system leans upon it here. We find the Lower Lias uptilted against it at the Hill of Eathie--the great Oolite on the eastern coast of Sutherland; and as the flints and chalk fossils of Banff and Aberdeen are found lying immediately over it in these counties, it is probable that the denuded members of the Cretaceous group once rested upon it there. The fact that a deposit should be found lying in contact with the gneiss, furnishes no argument for the great antiquity or the fundamental character of that deposit; and it were well that the geologist who sets himself to estimate the depth of the Old Red Sandstone, or the succession of its various formations, should keep the circumstance in view. That may be in reality but a small and upper portion of the system which he finds bounded by the gneiss on its under side, and by the diluvium on its upper.

We stand on a wooded eminence, that sinks perpendicularly into the river on the left, in a mural precipice, and descends with a billowy swell into the broad, fertile plain in front, as if the uplands were breaking in one vast wave upon the low country. There is a patch of meadow on the opposite side of the stream, shaded by a group of ancient trees, gnarled and mossy, and with half their topmost branches dead and white as the bones of a skeleton. We look down upon them from an elevation so commanding, that their uppermost twigs seem on well nigh the same level with their interlaced and twisted roots, washed bare on the bank edge by the winter floods. A colony of herons has built from time immemorial among the branches. There are trees so laden with nests that the boughs bend earthwards on every side, like the boughs of orchard trees in autumn; and the bleached and feathered masses which they bear--the cradles of succeeding generations--glitter gray through the foliage in continuous groups, as if each tree bore on its single head all the wigs of the Court of Session. The solitude is busy with the occupations and enjoyments of instinct. The birds, tall and stately, stand by troops in the shallows, or wade warily, as the fish glance by, to the edge of the current, or rising, with the slow flap of wing and sharp creak peculiar to the tribe, drop suddenly into their nests. The great forest of Darnaway stretches beyond, feathering a thousand knolls, that reflect a colder and grayer tint as they recede, and lessen, and present on the horizon a billowy line of blue. The river brawls along under pale red cliffs, wooded a-top. It is through a vast burial-yard that it has cut its way--a field of the dead so ancient, that the sepulchres of Thebes and Luxor are but of the present day in comparison--resting-places for the recently departed, whose funerals are but just over. These mouldering strata are charged with remains, scattered and detached as those of a churchyard, but not less entire in their parts--occipital bones, jaws, teeth, spines, scales--the dust and rubbish of a departed creation. The cliffs sink as the plain flattens, and green, sloping banks of diluvium take their place; but they again rise in the middle distance into an abrupt and lofty promontory, that, stretching like an immense rib athwart the level country, projects far into the stream, and gives an angular inflection to its course. There ascends from the apex a thin, blue column of smoke--that of a lime-kiln. That ridge and promontory are composed of the thick limestone band, which, in Moray as in Fife, separates the pale red from the pale yellow beds of the Upper Old Red Sandstone; and the flattened tracts on both sides show how much better it has resisted the denuding agencies than either the yellow strata that rests over it, or the pale red strata which it overlies.