The Cruise of the Betsey Part 7

From Blackpots to Portsoy--Character of the Coast--Burn of Boyne--Fever Phantoms--Graphic Granite--Maupertuis and the Runic Inscription--Explanation of the _quo modo_ of Graphic Granite--Portsoy Inn--Serpentine Beds--Portsoy Serpentine unrivalled for small ornaments--Description of it--Significance of the term _serpentine_--Elizabeth Bond and her "Letters"--From Portsoy to Cullen--Attritive Power of the Ocean ill.u.s.trated--The Equinoctial--From Cullen to Fochabers--The Old Red again--The old Pensioner--Fochabers--Mr. Joss, the learned Mail-guard--The Editor a sort of Coach-guard--On the Coach to Elgin--Geology of Banffshire--Irregular paging of the Geologic Leaves--Geologic Map of the County like Joseph's Coat--Striking Ill.u.s.tration.

I parted from Dr. Emslie, and walked on along the sh.o.r.e to Portsoy,--for three-fourths of the way over the prevailing grauwacke of the county, and for the remaining fourth over mica schist, primary limestone, hornblende slate, granitic and quartz veins, and the various other kindred rocks of a primary district. The day was still gloomy and gray, and ill suited to improve homely scenery; nor is this portion of the Banff coast nearly so striking as that which I had travelled over the day before. It has, however, its spots of a redeeming character,--rocky recesses on the sh.o.r.e, half-beach, half-sward, rich in wild-flowers and sh.e.l.ls,--where one could saunter in a calm sunny morning, with one's _bairns_ about one, very delightfully; and the interior is here and there agreeably undulated by diluvial hillocks, that, when the sun falls low in the evening, must chequer the landscape with many a pleasing alternation of light and shadow. The Burn of Boyne,--which separates, about two miles from Portsoy, a grauwacke from a mica-schist district,--with its bare, open valley, its steep limestone banks, and its gray, melancholy castle, long since roofless and windowless, and surrounded by a few stunted trees, bears a deserted and solitary s.h.a.gginess about it, that struck me as wildly agreeable. It is such a valley as one might expect to meet a ghost in, in some still, dewy evening, as gloamin was darkening into uncertainty the outlines of the ancient ruin, and the newly-kindled stars looked down upon the stream.

It so happened, however, that my only story connected with either ruin or valley was as little a ghost story as might be. I remember that, when lying ill of fever on one occasion,--indisposed enough to see apparition after apparition flitting across the bed-curtains, like the figures of a magic lantern posting along the darkened wall, and yet self-possessed enough to know that they were but mere pictures in the eye, and to watch them as they rose,--I set myself to determine whether they were in any degree amenable to the will, or connected by the ordinary a.s.sociative links of the metaphysician. Fixing my mind on a certain object, I strove to call it up in the character, not of an image of the conceptive faculty, but of a fever-vision on the retina. The image which I pictured to myself was that of a death's head, yellow and grim, and lighted up, as if from within, amid the darkness of a burial vault. But the death's head obstinately refused to rise. I had no control, I found, over the fever imagery. And the picture that rose instead, uncalled and unexpected, was that of a coal-fire burning brightly in a grate, with a huge tea-kettle steaming cheerily over it.

In traversing the bare height which, rising on the western side of the valley of the Boyne, owes its comparatively bold relief in the landscape to the firmness of the primary rock which composes it, I picked up a piece of graphic granite, bearing its inlaid characters of dark quartz on a ground of cream-colored feldspar. This variety, however, though occasionally found in rolled boulders in the neighborhood of Portsoy, is not the graphic granite for which the locality is famous, and which occurs in a vein in the mica schist of the eminence I was now traversing, about a mile to the east of the town. The prevailing ground of the granite of the vein is a flesh-colored feldspar; and the thickly-marked quartzose characters with which it is set, greatly smaller and paler than in the cream-colored stone, bear less the antique Hebraic look, and would scarce deceive even the most credulous antiquary. Antiquarians, however, _have_ been sometimes deceived by weathered specimens of this graphic rock, in which the characters were of considerable size, and restricted to thin veins, covering the surface of a schistose groundwork. Maupertuis, during his famous journey to Lapland, undertaken in 1737, to establish, from actual measurement, that the degrees of lat.i.tude are longer towards the pole than at the equator, and which demonstrated, of consequence, the true figure of the earth, travelled thirty leagues out of his way, through a wild country covered with snow, to examine an ancient monument, of which, he says, "the Fins and Laplanders frequently spoke, as containing in its inscription the knowledge of everything of which they were ignorant." He found it on the side of a mountain, buried in snow; and ascertained, after kindling a great fire around it, in order to lay it bare, that it was a stone of irregular form, composed of various layers of unequal hardness, and that the characters, which were rather more than an inch in length, were written on "a layer of a species of flint," chiefly in two lines, with a few scattered signs beneath, while the rest of the ma.s.s was composed of a rock more soft and foliated. Graphic granite, it may be mentioned, generally occurs, not in ma.s.ses, but in veins and layers. The inscription had been described in a previously published dissertation of immense erudition, as Runic; but a Runic scholar of the party found he could make nothing of it. The philosopher himself was struck by the frequent repet.i.tion of characters of nearly the same form on the stone; but he was ingenious enough to get over the difficulty, by remembering that in our notation, after the Arabic manner, characters shaped exactly alike may be very frequently repeated,--nay, as in some of the lines of the Lapland inscription, may succeed each other, as in the sums I. II.

III. IIII. or X. XX. x.x.x.,--and yet very distinct and definite ideas attach to them all. Still, however, he could not, he says, venture on authoritatively deciding whether the inscription was a work of man or a sport of nature. He stood between his two conclusions, like our Edinburgh antiquarians between the two fossil Maries of Gueldres; and, richer in eloquence than most of the philosophers his contemporaries, was quite prepared, in his uncertainty, to give gilded mounting and a purple pall to both.

"Should it be no other than a sport of nature," he concludes, "the reputation which the stone bears in this country deserves that we should have given a description of it. If, on the other hand, what is on it be an inscription, though it certainly does not possess the beauty of the sculpture of Greece or Rome, it very possibly has the advantage of being the oldest in the universe. The country in which it is found is inhabited only by a race of men who live like beasts in the forests. We cannot imagine that they can have ever had any memorable event to transmit to posterity, nor, if ever they had had, that they could have invented the means. Nor can it be conceived that this country, with its present aspect, ever possessed more civilized inhabitants. The rigor of the climate and the barrenness of the land have destined it for the retreat of a few miserable wretches, who know no other. It seems, therefore, that the inscription must have been cut at a period when the country was situated in a different climate, and before some one of those great revolutions which, we cannot doubt, have taken place on our globe. The position that the earth's axis holds at present with respect to the ecliptic, occasions Lapland to receive the sun's rays very obliquely: it is therefore condemned to a long winter, adverse to man, as well as to all the productions of nature. No great movement, possibly, in the heavens was necessary, however, to cause all its misfortunes. These regions may formerly have been those on which the sun shone most favorably; the polar circles may have been what now the tropics are, and the torrid zone have filled the place occupied by the temperate." Pretty well, Monsieur, for a philosopher! The various attempts made to unriddle the real history of graphic granite are, however, scarce less curious than the speculations connected with what may be termed its romance. It seems to be generally held, since the days of old Hutton, who, in his "Theory of the Earth," discussed the subject with his usual ingenuity, that the feldspathic basis of the stone first crystallized, leaving interstices between the crystals, partaking of a certain regularity of form,--a consequence of the regularity of the crystals themselves,--and of a certain irregularity from the eccentric dispositions which these manifest in their position and relations to each other; and that these interstices, being afterwards filled up with quartz, form the characters of the rock,--characters partaking enough of the first element of _regularity_ to present their peculiar graphic appearance, and enough of the second element of _irregularity_ to exhibit forms of an alphabet-like variety of outline. The chemist, however, in cross-questioning the explanation, has his puzzle to propound regarding it. Quartz, he says, being considerably less fusible than feldspar, would naturally consolidate first, and so would give form to the more fusible substance, instead of deriving form from it. On what principle, then, is it that, reversing its ordinary character, it should have been the last of the two substances to consolidate in the graphic granite?--a query to which there seems to be no direct reply, but which as little affects the fact that it _was_ the substance which last consolidated, and which took form from the other, as the decision of the learned Strasburgers, which determined the impossibility of the long nose in Slawkenbergius's Tale, affected the actual existence of that remarkable feature. "It happens _to be_, notwithstanding your objection," said the controversialists on the pro-nose side of the question. "But it _ought not_," replied their opponents.

The rain again returned as I was engaged in examining the graphic granite of the Portsoy vein; the breeze from the sea heightened into a gale, that soon fringed the coast with a broad border of foam; and I entered the town, which looked but indifferently well in its gray dishabille of haze and spray, tolerably wet and worn, with but the prospect before me of being weather-bound for the rest of the day. I found an old-fashioned inn, kept by somewhat old-fashioned people, who had lately come from the country to "open a public;" and ensconced myself by the fireside, in a huge many-windowed room, that must have witnessed the county dinners of at least a century ago. Soon wearying, however, of hearing the rain beating mad-like ratans upon the panes, and availing myself of a comparatively "lucid interval," I sallied out, wrapped up in my plaid, to examine the serpentine beds in the neighborhood, which produce what is so extensively known as the Portsoy marble. The _beds_ or _veins_ of this substance,--for it is still a moot point whether they occur here as mere insulated ma.s.ses of contemporary origin with the primary formations which surround them, or as Plutonic d.y.k.es injected into fissures at a later period,--are of very considerable extent, one of them measuring about twenty-five yards across, and another considerably more than a quarter of a mile; and, had they but the solidity of the true marbles, they would scarce fail to be regarded as valuable quarries of a highly ornamental stone, admirably suited for the interior decorations of the architect. But they are unluckily what the quarrier would term rubbly,--traversed by an infinity of cracks and fissures; and it is rare indeed to find a continuous ma.s.s out of which a chimney-jamb or lintel could be fashioned. The serpentine was wrought here considerably more than a century and a half ago, and exported to France for the magnificent Palace of Versailles; which, though regarded by the French nation, says Voltaire, as "a favorite without merit," Louis the Fourteenth persisted at the time in lavishly beautifying, and looked as for abroad as Portsoy for materials with which to adorn it. I have, however, seen it stated that the greater part of a ship's cargo, brought afterwards to Paris on speculation, was suffered to lie unwrought for years in the stone-dealer's yard, and was ultimately disposed of as rubbish,--a consequence, probably, of its unfitness, from its shaky texture, for ornamental purposes on a large scale, though for ornaments of the smaller kind, such as boxes, vases, and plates, it has been p.r.o.nounced unrivalled. "At Zoblitz, in Upper Saxony," says Professor Jamieson, "several hundred people are employed in quarrying, cutting, turning, and polishing the serpentine which occurs in that neighborhood; and the various articles into which it is manufactured are carried all over Germany. The serpentine of Portsoy,"

he adds, "is, however, far superior to that of Zoblitz, in color, hardness, and transparency, and, when cut, is very beautiful."

It is really a pretty stone; and, bad as the evening was, it was by no means one of the worst of evenings for seeing it to advantage _in situ_, or among the rolled pebbles on the sh.o.r.e. The varnish-like gloss of the wet imparted to the undressed ma.s.ses all the effect of polish, and brought out in their proper variegations of color, every cloud, streak, and vein. Viewed in the ma.s.s, the general hue is green; so much so, that an insulated stack, which stands abreast of one of the beds, a stone-cast in the sea, has greatly the appearance, at a little distance, of an immense ma.s.s of verdigris. But red, gray, and brown are also prevailing colors in the rock; occasional veins and blotches of white give lightness to the darker portions; and veins of hemat.i.tic and deep umbry tints, variety to the portions that are lighter. The greens vary from the palest olive to the deepest black-green of the mineralogist; the reds and browns, from blood-red to dark chocolate, and from wood-brown to brownish-black; and, thus various in shade, they occur in almost every possible variety of combination and form,--dotted, spotted, clouded, veined,--so that each separate pebble on the sh.o.r.e seems the representative of a rock different from the rocks represented by almost all the others. Though not much of a mineralogist, I could have spent considerably more time than the weather permitted me to employ this evening, in admiring the beauties of this beach of _marbles_, or rather,--as the real name, derived from those gorgeous, many-colored cloudings, that impart a terrible splendor to the skins of the snake and viper family, is not only the more correct, but also the more poetical of the two,--this beach of _serpentines_. I had, however, to compromise matters between the fierce wind and rain and the pretty rocks and pebbles, by adjourning to the workshop of the Portsoy lapidary, Mr.

Clark, and examining under cover his polished specimens, of which I purchased for a few shillings a characteristic and elegant little set.

Portsoy is peculiarly rich in minerals; and hence it reckons among its mechanics of the ordinary cla.s.s, what perhaps no other village in Scotland of the same size and population possesses,--a skilful lapidary.

Mr. Clark's collection of the graphic granites, serpentines, and talcose and mica schists, of the district, with their a.s.sociated minerals, such as schorl, talc, asbestos, amianthus, mountain cork, steat.i.te, and schiller spar, will be found eminently worthy a visit by the pa.s.sing traveller.

I made several inquiries in the village, though not, as it proved, in the right direction, regarding a poor old lady, several years dead, of whom I had known a very little considerably more than a quarter of a century before, and whose grave I would have visited, bad as the night was, had I met any one who could have pointed it out to me. But ungrateful Portsoy seemed to have forgotten poor Miss Bond, who, in all her printed letters and little stories, so rarely forgot _it_. Have any of my readers ever seen the work (in two slim volumes), "Letters of a Village Governess," published in 1814 by Elizabeth Bond, and dedicated to Sir Walter Scott? If not, and should they chance to see, as I lately did, a copy on a stall (with uncut leaves, alas! and selling dog cheap), they might possibly do worse things than buy it.[12]

With better weather I could have spent a day or two very agreeably in Portsoy and its neighborhood; but the rain dashed unceasingly, and made exploration under the cover of the umbrella somewhat resemble that of a sea-bottom under cover of the diving-bell. I could see but little at a time, and the little imperfectly. Miss Bond, in her "Letters," refers, in her light, pleasing style, to what in more favorable circ.u.mstances _might_ be seen. "My troop of _light infantry_," she says, "keeps me so well employed here during the day, that the silence and repose of the evening is very delightful. In fine weather I walk by the sea-side, and scramble among the rugged rocks, many of which are inaccessible to human feet, forming a fine retreat for foxes. These animals often may be seen from the heights, sporting with their cubs in perfect safety. This day I went to see the works of an old _virtuoso_, who turns in marble, or rather granite [serpentine] all kinds of chimney-piece ornaments, rings, ear-rings, etc. Several specimens of his work, which must have cost him a vast deal of trouble, I thought very beautiful. It was in this neighborhood that the celebrated Ferguson spent so much of his time. The globular stones on the gate of Durn are still to be seen, on which he mapped out the figuring of the terrestrial and celestial globes. I was told it was forbidden ground to approach the premises of Durn; but I could not resist the temptation of visiting the spot where the young philosopher had shown such early proofs of his genius; and I accordingly paid the forfeit of an _impertinent_, for the gentleman who resides there caught the prowler, and in genteel terms bade her go about her business, and never return. How ungracious! She was doing no harm."

The morning arose as gloomily as the evening had fallen; and I walked on in the rain to Cullen, fully disposed to sympathize by the way with the "hardy Byron,"--he of the "Narrative,"--who, from his ill-luck in weather, went among his sailors by the name of "Foul-weather Jack." In the sandy bay of Cullen, where the road, after inflecting inland for some five or six miles, comes again upon the sea, I found the surf charging home in long white lines six waves deep,--

"Each stepping where his comrade stood, The instant that he fell."

The appearance was such as to impart no inadequate idea of the vast attritive power of ocean in wearing down the land. When pausing for a little abreast of the fishing village, partially sheltered by an old boat, to mark the fierce turmoil, it suddenly occurred to me,--as the tempest weltered around reef and skerry, and roared wildly, mile after mile, along the beach,--that the day and night were now just equal, and that it was the customary equinoctial storm that had broken out to accompany me on my journey. And so, calculating on a few days more of it, instead of waiting on in the hope of a fair afternoon to examine the outlier of Old Red which occurs in the neighborhood of Cullen, I was content to see at a distance its mural-sided cliffs rising like broken walls through the flat sand; and, taking the road for Fochabers, with the intention of leaving exploration till fairer weather set in, I resolved on posting straight on, to join my relatives on the opposite side of the Frith. The deep-red color of the boulder-clay, as exhibited by the way-side, in the water-courses and the water,--for every runnel was tumbling down big and turbid with the rains,--intimated, when, after leaving Cullen some six or seven miles behind me, I pa.s.sed from a bare moory region of quartz rock into a region of woods and fields, that I was again upon my ancient acquaintance, the Old Red Sandstone. And the section furnished by the Burn of Tynet showed me shortly after that the intimation was a correct one, and how generally it may be laid down as a rule, that at least the more impalpable portions of the boulder-clay are derived from the rocks on which it rests. The ichthyolite beds appear in the course of the burn. They have furnished several good specimens,--among the others, the specimen of Coccosteus figured by Mr.

Patrick Duff in his "Sketches of the Geology of Moray;" and they are, besides, curious, as being the first to exhibit to the traveller who explores from Gamrie westwards, that peculiar style of coloring which characterizes the Old Red ichthyolites of the shires of Moray and Nairn, and which differs so strikingly from the more sombre style exhibited by the other ichthyolites of Banffshire, with those of Cromarty, Ross, Caithness, and Orkney. Instead of bearing, like these, one uniform hue, as if deeply shaded with Indian ink, they are gorgeously attired, especially when newly laid open, in white, red, purple, and blue. The day, however, was ill-suited for fishing Pterichthyes and Osteolepi out of the Tynet: the red water was roaring from bank to brae; here eddying along the half-submerged furze,--there tearing down the boulder-days in raw, red land-slips; and so, casting but one eager glance at the bed where the fish lay, I travelled on, and entered the tall woods to the east of Fochabers. The rain ceased for a time; and I met in the woods an old pensioner, who had been evidently weather-bound in some public-house, and had now taken the opportunity of the fair interval to stagger to his dwelling. He was eminently, exuberantly happy,--there could not be two opinions on that head,--full of all manner of bright sunshiny thoughts and imaginations, rendered just a little tremulous and uncertain by the _summer-heat_ exhalations of the imbibed moisture, like distant objects in a hot noonday landscape in July seen through volumes of rising vapor; and a sheep's head and trotters, which he carried under his arm, was, I saw, to serve as a peace-offering to his wife at home.

True, he had been taking a dram, but he was mindful of the family for all that. He confronted me with the air of an old acquaintance; gave the military salute; and then, laying hold of a corner of my plaid with his thumb and forefinger,--"I know you," he said, "I know _your kind_ well; ye're a Highland-Donald. Od, I've seen ye in the _thick o't_. Ye're _reugh_ fellows when ye're bluid's up!" He had taken me for a grenadier of the 42d; and I lacked the moral courage to undeceive him. I met nothing further on my way worthy of record, save and except a sheep's trotter, dropped by the old pensioner in one of his zig-zaggings to the extreme left; but having no particular use for the trotter at the time and in the circ.u.mstances, I left it to benefit the next pa.s.ser-by. I finished my journey of eighteen miles in capital style, and was within five minutes' walk of Fochabers when the horn of the mail-guard was sounding up the street. And, entering the village, I found the vehicle standing opposite the inn door, minus the horses.

The _insides_ and _outsides_ were sitting down to dinner together as I entered the inn; and I felt, after my long walk, that it would be rather an agreeable matter to join with them. But in the hope of meeting my old friend Mr. Joss, I requested to be shown, not into the pa.s.sengers' room, but into that of the coachman and guard; and with them I dined. It so chanced, however, that Mr. Joss was not _out_ that day; and the man in the red long coat was a stranger whom I had never seen before. I inquired of him regarding Mr. Joss,--one of perhaps the most remarkable mail-guards in Europe. I have at least never heard of another who, like him, amuses his leisure on the coach-top with the "Principia" of Newton, and understands it. And the man, drawing his inference from the interest in Mr. Joss which my queries evinced, asked me whether I myself was not a coach-guard. "No," I rather thoughtlessly replied, "I am not a coach-guard." Half a minute's consideration, however, led me to doubt whether I had given the right answer. "I am not sure," I said to myself, on second thoughts, "but the man has cut pretty fairly on the point;--I daresay _I am_ a sort of coach-guard. I have to mount my twice-a-week coach in all weathers, like any mail-guard among them all; I have to start at the appointed hour, whether the vehicle be empty or full; I have to keep a sharp eye on the opposition coaches; I am responsible, like any other mail-guard, for all the parcels carried, however little I may have had to do with the making of them up; I have always to keep my blunderbuss full charged to the muzzle,--not wishing harm to any one, but bound in duty to let drive at all and sundry who would make war upon the pa.s.sengers, or attempt running the conveyance off the road; and, finally, as my friend Mr. Joss takes the "Principia"

to _his_ coach-top, I take pockets full of fossils to the top of mine, and amuse myself in fine days by working out, as I best can, the problems which they furnish. Yes, I rather think _I am_ a coach-guard."

And so, taking my seat beside my red-coated brother, who had guessed the true nature of my occupation so much more shrewdly than myself, I rode on to Elgin, where I pa.s.sed the night.

It is difficult to arrange in the mind the geologic formations of Banffshire in their character as a series of deposits. The pages of the stony record which the county composes, like those of an unskilfully-folded pamphlet, have been strangely mixed together, so that page last succeeds in some places to page first, and, of the intermediate pages, some appear at the beginning of the work, and some at the end. It is not until we reach the western confines of the county, some two or three miles short of the river Spey, its terminal boundary in this direction, that we find the beds comparatively little disturbed, and arranged chronologically in their original places. In the eastern and southern parts of the shire, rocks widely separated by the date of their formation have been set down side by side in patches, occasionally of but inconsiderable extent. Now the traveller pa.s.ses over a district of grauwacke, now over a re-formation of the Lias; anon he finds himself on a primary limestone,--gneiss, syenite, clay-slate, or quartz-rock; and yet anon amid the fossils of some outlier of the Old Red. The geological map of the county is, like Joseph's coat, of many colors. I remember seeing, when a boy, more years ago than I am inclined to specify, some workmen engaged in pulling down what had been a house-painter's shop, a full century before. The painter had been in the somewhat slovenly habit of cleaning his brushes by rubbing them against a hard-cast wall, which was covered, in consequence, by a many-colored layer of paint, a full half-inch in thickness, and as hard as a stone.

Taking a little bit home with me, I polished it by rubbing the upper surface smooth; and, lo! a geological map. The _strata_ of variously hued pigment, spread originally over the surface of the hard-cast wall, were cut open, by the _denudation_ of the grindstone, into all manner of fantastic forms, and seemed thrown into all sorts of strange neighborhoods. The _map_ lacked merely the additional perplexity of a few bold _faults_, with here and there a decided _dike_, in order to render it on a small scale a sort of miniature transcript of the geology of Banff; and I have very frequently found my thoughts reverting to it, in connection with deposits of this broken character. On a rough _hard-cast_ basis of granite I have laid down in imagination, as if by way of priming, coat after coat of the primary rocks,--gneiss, and stratified hornblend, and mica-schist, and quartz-rock, and day-slate; and then, after breaking the coatings well up, and rubbing them well down, and so spoiling and crumpling up the work as to make their original order considerably a puzzle, I have begun anew to paint over the rough surface with thick coatings of grauwacke and grauwacke-slate.

When this part of the operation was completed, I have again begun to break up and grind down,--here letting a tract of grauwacke sink into the broken primary,--there wearing it off the surface altogether,--yonder elevating the original granitic _hard-cast_ till it rose over all the coatings, Primary and Palaeozoic. And then I have begun to paint yet a third time with thick Old Red Sandstone pigment; and yet again to break up and wear down,--here to insert a tenon of the Old Red deep into a mortise of the grauwacke, as at Gamrie,--there to dovetail it into the clay-slate, as at Tomantoul,--yonder, after laying it across the upturned quartz-rock, as at Cullen, to rub by much the greater part of it away again, leaving but mere remainder-patches and fragments, to mark where it had been. Lastly, if I had none of the superior Palaeozoic or Secondary formations to deal with, I have brushed over the whole, by way of finish, with the variously-derived coatings of the superficial deposits; and thus, as I have said, I have often completed, in idea, after the chance suggestion of the old painter's shop, my portable models of the geology of disturbed districts like the Banffshire one.

The deposits of Moray are greatly less broken. Denudation has partially worn them down; but they seem to have almost wholly escaped the previous crumpling process.

CHAPTER IV.

Yellow-hued Houses Of Elgin--Geology of the Country indicated by the coloring of the Stone Houses--Fossils of Old Red north of the Grampians different from those of Old Red south--Geologic Formations at Linksfield difficult to be understood--Ganoid Scales of the Wealden--Sudden Reaction, from complex to simple, in the Scales of Fishes--Pore-covered Scales--Extraordinary amount of Design exhibited in Ancient Ganoid Scales--Holoptychius Scale ill.u.s.trated 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sing, 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 ident.i.ty 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 a.s.sumed 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 ma.s.sy _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 ma.s.sier _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 repet.i.tion, 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 cla.s.s, 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 gla.s.s, 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 circ.u.mstance, that in no case do the pores seem to pa.s.s _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 n.o.bilissimus_,--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 n.o.bilissimus_. 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 a.n.a.logy 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 cla.s.sical 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 Aga.s.siz,--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 Aga.s.siz _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 ill.u.s.trative, 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 cuira.s.s; 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 cuira.s.s lies still attached to the helmet, but we find only the naked skeleton attached to the cuira.s.s. The Pterichthys to its strong helmet and cuira.s.s 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 cuira.s.s 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 pa.s.sed, 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 sh.e.l.l, 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 sh.e.l.l 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 quant.i.ty, 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 a.s.sailed 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 a.s.sume in the fossil state, and might throw some light on the extraordinary appearance a.s.sumed, 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 Aga.s.siz 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 pa.s.sed 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 const.i.tution 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 a.s.signs 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 sh.o.r.e 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 circ.u.mstances 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 pa.s.sing by bade G.o.d-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 a.s.sociated 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 cla.s.s, but which seems by no means inexplicable on natural principles.[13]

CHAPTER V.

Rosemarkie and its Scaurs--Kaes' Craig--A Jackdaw Settlement--"Rosemarkie Kaes" and "Cromarty Cooties"--"The Danes,"

a Group of Excavations--At Home in Cromarty--The Boulder-clay of Cromarty "begins to tell its story"--One of its marked Scenic Peculiarities--Hints to Landscape Painters--"Samuel's Well"--A Chain of Bogs geologically accounted for--Another Scenic Peculiarity--"_Ha-has_ of Nature's digging"--The Author's earliest Field of Hard Labor--Picturesque Cliff of Boulder-clay--Scratchings on the Sandstone--Invariable Characteristic of true Boulder-clay--Scratchings on Pebbles in the line of the longer axis--Ill.u.s.tration from the Boulder-clay of Banff.

Rosemarkie, with its long narrow valley and its red abrupt _scaurs_,[14]

is chiefly interesting to the geologist for its vast beds of the boulder-clay. I am acquainted with no other locality in the kingdom where this deposit is hollowed into ravines so profound, or presents precipices so imposing and lofty. The clay lies thickly over most part of the Black Isle and the peninsula of Easter Ross,--both soft sandstone districts,--bearing everywhere an obvious relation, as a deposit, to both the form and the conditions of exposure of the existing land,--just as the acc.u.mulated snow of a long-lying snow-storm, exposed to the drifting wind, bears relation to the heights and hollows of the tracts which it covers. On the higher eminences the clay forms a comparatively thin stratum, and in not a few instances it has been wholly worn away; while on the lower grounds, immediately over the old coast line, and in the sides of hollow valleys,--exactly such places as we might expect to see the snow occupying most deeply after a night of drift,--we find it acc.u.mulated in vast beds of from eighty to an hundred feet in thickness.

One of these occurs in the opening of the narrow valley along which my course this morning lay, and is known far and wide,--for it forms a marked feature in the landscape, and harbors in its recesses a countless mult.i.tude of jackdaws,--as the "Kaes' Craig of Rosemarkie." It presents the appearance of a hill that had been cut sheer through the middle from top to base, and exhibits in its abrupt front a broad red perpendicular section of at least a hundred feet in height, barred transversely by thin layers of sand, and scored vertically by the slow action of the rains. Originally it must have stretched its vanished limb across the opening like some huge snow-wreath acc.u.mulated athwart a frozen rivulet; but the incessant sweep of the stream that runs through the valley has long since amputated and carried it away; and so only half the hill now remains. The Kaes' Craig resembles in f