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We leave behind us the musical sand, and reach the point of the promontory
which forms the northern extremity of the Bay of Laig. Wherever the beach
has been swept bare, we see it floored with trap-dykes worn down to the
level, but in most places accumulations of huge blocks of various
composition cover it up, concealing the nature of the rock beneath. The
long semicircular wall of precipice which, sweeping inwards at the bottom
of the bay, leaves to the inhabitants between its base and the beach their
fertile meniscus of land, here abuts upon the coast. We see its dark
forehead many hundred feet overhead, and the grassy platform beneath, now
narrowed to a mere talus, sweeping upwards to its base from the shore, -
steep,. broken, lined thick with horizontal pathways, mottled over with
ponderous masses of rock.
Among the blocks that load the beach, and render
our onward progress difficult and laborious, we detect occasional
fragments of an amygdaloidal basalt, charged with a white zeolite,
consisting of crystals so extremely slender, that the balls, with their
light fibrous contents, remind us of cotton apples divested of the seeds.
There occur, though more rarely, masses of a hard white sandstone,
abounding in vegetable impressions, which, from their sculptured markings,
recall to memory the Sigilaria of the Coal Measures. Here and there, too,
we find fragments of a calcareous stone, so largely charged with
compressed shells, chiefly bivalves, that it may be regarded as a shell
breccia. There occur, besides, slabs of fibrous limestone, exactly
resembling the limestone of the ichthyolite beds of the Lower Old Red; and
blocks of a hard gray stone, of silky lustre in the fresh fracture,
thickly speckled with carbonaceous markings. These fragmentary masses, -
all of them, at least, except the fibrous limsetone, which occurs in mere
plank-like bands, represent distinct beds, of which this part of the
island is composed, and which present their edges, like courses of ashlar
in a building, in the splendid section that stretches from the tall brow
of the precipice to the beach; though in the slopes of the talus, where
the lower beds appear in but occasional protrusions and landslips, we find
some difficulty in tracing their order of succession.
Near the base of the slope, where the soil has
been undermined and the rock laid bare by the waves, there occur beds of a
bituminous black shale, - resembling the dark shales so common in the
Coal Measures, - that seem to be fresh-water or estuary origin. Their
fossils, though numerous, are ill preserved; but we detect in them scales
and plates of fishes, at least two species of minute bivalves, one of
which very much resembles a Cyclas; and in some of the fragments, shells
of Cypris lie embedded in considerable abundance. After all that has been
said and written by way of accounting for those alternations of lacustrine
with marine remains which are of such frequent occurrence in the various
formations, secondary and tertiary, from the Coal Measures downwards, it
does seem strange enough that the estuary, or fresh-water lake, should so
often in the old geologic periods have changed places with the sea. It is
comparatively easy to conceive that the inner Hebrides should have once
existed as a broad ocean-sound, bounded on one or either side by Oolitic
islands,from which streams descended, sweeping with them, to the marine
depths, productions, animal and vegetable, of the land. But it is less
easy to conceive, that in that sound, the area covered by the ocean one
year should have been covered by a fresh-water lake in perhaps the next,
and then by the ocean again a few years after. And yet among the Oolitic
deposits of the Hebrides evidence seems to exist that changes of this
nature actually took place. I am not inclined to found much on the
apparently fresh-water character of the bituminous shales of Eigg; - the
embedded fossils are all too obscure to be admitted in evidence: but there
can exist no doubt, that fresh-water, or at least estuary formations, do
occur among the marine Oolites of the Hebrides. Sir R. Murchison, one of
the most cautious, as he is certainly one of the most distinguished, of
living geologists, found in a northern district of Skye, in 1826, a
deposit containing Cyclas, Paludina, Neritina, - all shells of
unequivocally fresh-water origin,- which must have been formed, he
concludes, in either a lake or estuary. What had been sea at one period
had been estuary or lake at another. In every case, however, in which
these intercalated deposits are restricted to single strata of no great
thickness, it is perhaps safer to refer their formation to the agency of
temporary land-floods, than to that of violent changes of level, - now
elevating and now depressing the surface. There occur, for instance,
among the marine Oolites of Brora, - the discovery of Mr. Robertson of
Inverugie, - two strata containing fresh-water fossils in abundance; but
the one stratum is little more than an inch in thickness, - the other
little more than a foot; and it seems considerably more probable, that
such deposits should have owed their existence to extraordinary
land-floods, like those which in 1829 devastated the province of Moray,
and covered over whole miles of marine beach with the spoils of land and
river, than that a sea-bottom should have been elevated, for their
production,into a fresh-water lake, and then let down into a sea-bottom
again. We find it recorded in the “Shepherd’s Calendar,” that after the
thaw which followed the great snow-storm of 1794, there were found on a
part of the sands of the Solway Frith known as the Beds of Esk, where the
tide disgorges much of what is thrown into it by the rivers, “one thousand
eight hundred and forty sheep, nine black cattle, three horses, two men,
one woman, forty-five dogs, and one hundred and eighty hares, besides a
number of meaner animals.” A similar storm in an earlier time, with a soft
sea-bottom prepared to receive and retain its spoils, would have formed a
fresh-water stratum intercalated in a marine deposit.
Rounding the promontory, we lose sight of the Bay
of Laig, and find the narrow front of the island that now presents itself
exhibiting the appearance of a huge bastion. The green talus slopes
upwards, as its basement, for full three hundred feet; and a noble wall
of perpendicular rock, that towers over and beyond for at least four
hundred feet more, forms the rampart. Save towards the sea, the view is
of but limited extent: we see it restricted, on the landward side, to the
bold face of the bastion; and a narrow and broken dell that runs nearly
parallel to the shore for a few hundred yards between the top of the talus
and the base of the rampart, - a true covered way, - we see but the
rampart alone.But the dizzy front of black basalt, dark as night, save
where a broad belt of light-coloured sandstone traverses it in an angular
direction, like a white sash thrown across a funeral robe, - the fantastic
peaks and turrets in which the rock terminates atop, - the masses of
broken ruins, roughened with moss and lichen, that have fallen from above,
and lie scattered at its base, - the extreme loneliness of the place, for
we have left behind us every trace of the human family, - and the expanse
of solitary sea which it commands, - all conspire to render the scene a
profoundly imposing one. It is one of those scenes in which man feels
that he is little, and that nature is great. There is no precipice in the
island in which the puffin so delights to build as among the dark
pinnacles overhead, or around which the silence is so frequently broken by
the harsh scream of the eagle. The sun had got far adown the sky ere we
had reached the covered way at the base of the rock. All lay dark below;
and the red light atop, half-absorbed by the dingy hues of the stone,
shone with a gleam so faint and melancholy, that it served but to deepen
the effect of the shadows.
The puffin, a comparatively rare bird in the inner
Hebrides, builds, I was told, in great numbers in the continuous line of
precipice which, after sweeping for a full mile round the Bay of Laig,
forms the pinnacled rampart here,and then, turning another angle of the
island, runs on parallel to the coast for about six miles more. In former
times the puffin furnished the islanders, as in St Kilda, with a staple
article of food, in those hungry months of summer in which the stores of
the old crop had begun to fail, and the new crop had not yet ripened; and
the peole of Eigg, taught by their necessities, were bold cragsmen. But
men d not peril life and limb for the mere sake of a meal, save when they
cannot help it; and the introduction of the potatoe has done much to put
out the practice of climbing for the bird, except among a few young lads,
who find excitement enough n the work to pursue it for its own sake, as an
amusement. I found among the islanders what was said to be a piece of the
natural history of the puffin, sufficiently apocryphal to remind one of
the famous passage in the history of the barnacle, which traced the
lineage of the bird to one of the pedunculated cirripedes, and the lineage
of the cirripede to a log of wood. The puffin feeds its young, say the
islanders, on an oily scum of the sea, which renders it such an unwieldy
mass of fat, that about the time when it should be beginning to fly, it
becomes unable to get out of its hole. The parent bird, not in the least
puzzled, however, treats the case medicinally, and, - like mothers of
another two-legged genus, who, when their daughters get over-stout, put
them through a course of reducing acids to bring them down, - feeds it on
sorrel-leaves for several days together, till, like a boxer under
training, it gets thinned to the proper weight, and becomes able not only
to get out of its cell, but also to employ its wings.
We pass through the hollow, and, reaching the
farther edge of the bastion, towards the east, see a new range of prospect
opening before us. There is first a long unbroken wall of precipice, - a
continuation of the tall rampart overhead, - relieved along its irregular
upper line by the blue sky. We mark the talus widening at its base, and
expanding, as on the shores of the Bay of Laig, into an irregular grassy
platform, that, sinking midway into a ditch-like hollow, rises again
towards the sea, and presents to the waves a perpendicular precipice of
red stone. The sinking sun shone brightly this evening; and the warm
hues of the precipice, which bears the name of Ru-Stoir,- the Red Head, -
strikingly contrasted with the pale and dark tints of the alternating
basalts and sandstones in the taller cliff behind. The ditch-like hollow,
which seems to indicate the line of a fault, cuts off this red headland
from all the other rocks of the island, from which it appears to differ as
considerably in texture as in hue. It consists mainly of thick beds of a
pale red stone, which M’Culloch regarded as a trap, and which,
intercalated with here and there a thin band of shale, and presenting not
a few of the mineralogical appearances fo what geologists of the school of
the late Mr. Cunningham term Primary Old Red Sandstone, in some cases has
been laid down as a deposit of Old Red proper, abutting in the line of a
fault on the neighbouring Oolites and basalts. In the geological map
which I carried with me, - not one of high authority, however, - I found
it actually coloured as a patch of this ancient system. The Old Red
Sandstone is largely developed in the neighbouring island of Rum, in the
line of which the Ru-Stoir seems to have a more direct bearing than any of
the other deposits of Eigg; and yet the conclusion regarding this red
headland merely adds one proof more to the many furnished already, of the
inadequacy of mineralogical testimony, when taken in evidence regarding
the eras of the geologist. The hard red beds of Ru-Stoir belong, as I was
fortunate enough this evening to ascertain, not to the ages of the
Coccosteus and Pterichthys, but to the far later ages of the Pleiosaurus
and the fossil crocodile. I found them associated with more reptilian
remains, of a character more unequivocal, than have been yet exhibited by
any other deposit in Scotland.
What first strikes the eye, in approaching the
Ru-Stoir from the west, is the columnar character of the stone. The
precipices rise immediately over the sea, in rude colonnades of from
thirty to fifty feet in height; single pillars, that have fallen from
their places in the line, and exhibit a tenacity rare among the
trap-rocks, - for they occur in unbroken lengths of from ten to twelve
feet, - lie scattered below; and in several places where the waves have
joined issue with the precipices in the line on which the base of the
columns rest, and swept away the supporting foundations, the colonnades
open into roomy caverns, that resound to the dash of the sea. Wherever
the spray lashes, the pale red hue of the stone prevails, and theangles of
the polygonal shafts are rounded; while higher up all is sharp-edged, and
the unweathered surface is covered by a gray coat of lichens. The tenacity
of the prostrate columns first drew my attention. The builder scant of
materials would have experienced no difficulty in finding among them
sufficient lintels for apertures from eight to twelve feet in width. I
was next struck with the peculiar composition of the stone: it much rather
resembles an altered sandstone, in at least the weathered specimens, than
a trap, and yet there seemed nothing to indicate that it was an Old Red
Sandstone. Its columnar structure bore evidence to the action of great
heat; and its pale red colour was exactly that which the Oolitic
sandstones of the island, with their slight ocherous tinge, would assume
in a commone fire. And so I set myself to look for fossils. In the
columnar stone itself I expected none, as none occur in vast beds of the
unaltered sandstones, out of some one of which I supposed it might
possibly have been formed; and none I found: but in a rolled block of
altered shale of a much deeper red than the general mass, and much more
resembling OldRed Sandstone, I succeeded in detecting several
shells,identical with those of the deposit of blue clay described in a
former chapter. There occurred in it the small univalve resembling a
Trochus, together with the oblong bivalve, somewhat like a Tellina; and,
spread thickly throughout the block, lay fragments of coprolitic matter,
and the scales and teeth of fishes. Night was coming on, and the tide had
risen on the beach; but I hammered lustily, and laid open in the dark red
shale a vertebral joint, a rib, and a parallelogramical fragment of solid
bone, none of which could have belonged to any fish. It was an interesting
moment for the curtain to drop over the promontory of Ru-Stoir: I had thus
already found in connection with it well nigh as many reptilian remains as
had been found in all Scotland before, - for there could exist no doubt
that the bones I laid open were such; and still more interesting
discoveries promised to await the coming morning and a less hasty survey.
We found a hospitable meal awaiting us at a picturesque old two-storey
house, with, what is rare in the island, a clump of trees beside it, which
rises on the northern angle of the Oolitic meniscus; and after our day’s
hard work in the fresh sea-air, we did ample justice to the viands. Dark
night had long set in ere we reached our vessel.
Next day was Saturday; and it behoved my friend
the minister, - as scrupulously careful in his pulpit preparations for
the islanders of Eigg as if his congregation were an Edinburgh one, - to
remain on board, and study his discourse for the morrow.I found, however,
no unmeet companion for my excursion in his trusty mate John Stewart.
John had not very much English, and I had no Gaelic; but we contrived to
understand one another wonderfully well; and ere evening I had taught him
to be quite as expert in hunting dead crocodiles as myself. We reached
the Ru-Stoir, set hard to work with hammer and chisel. The fragments of
red shale were strewed thickly along the shore for at least three quarters
of a mile; - wherever the red columnar rock appeared, there lay the shale,
in water-worn blocks, more or less indurated; but the beach was covered
over with shingle and detached masses of rock, and we could nowhere find
it in situ.A winter storm powerful enough to wash the beach bare might do
much to assist the explorer. There is a piece of shore on the eastern
coast of Scotland, on which for years together I used to pick up nodular
masses of lime containing fish of the Old Red Sandstone; but nowhere in
the neighbourhood could I find the ichthyolite bed in which they had
originally formed. The storm of a single night swept the beach; and in
the morning the ichthyolites lay revealed in situ under a stratum of
shingle which I had a hundred times examined, but which, though scarce a
foot in thickness, had concealed from me he ichthyolite bed for five
twelvemonths together!
Wherever the altered shale of Ru-Stoir has been
thrown high on the beach, and exposed to the influences of the weather, we
find it fretted over with minute organisms, mostly the scales, plates,
bones, and teeth of fishes. The organisms, as is frequently the case,
seem indestructible, while the hard matrix in which they are embedded has
weathered from around them. Some of the scales present the rhomboidal
outline, and closely resemble those of the Lepidotus Minor of the Weald;
others approximate in shape to an isosceles triangle The teeth are of
various forms: some of them, evidently palatal, are mere blunted
protuberances glittering with enamel - some of them present the usual
slim, thorn-like type common in the teeth of the existing fish of our
coasts, - some again are squat and angular, and rest on rectilinear bases,
prolonged considerably on each side of the body of the tooth, like the rim
of a hat or the flat head of a scupper nail. Of the occipital plates,
some present a smooth enamelled surface, while some are thickl;y
tuberculated, - each tubercle bearing a minute depression in its apex,
like a crater on the summit of a rounded hill. We find reptilian bones in
abundance, - a thing new to Scotch geology, - and in a state of keeping
peculiarly fine. They not a little puzzled John Stewart: he could not
resist the evidence of his senses: they were bones, he said real bones, -
there could be no doubt of that: there were the joints of a back-bone,
with the hole the brain-marrow had passed through; and there were
shank-bones and ribs, and fishes’ teeth; but how, he wondered, had they
all got into the very hearat of the hard red stones?.He had seen what was
called wood, he said, dug out of the side of the Scuir, without being
quite certain whether it was wood or no; but there could be no uncertainty
here. I laid open numerous vertebrae of various forms, - some with long
spinous processes rising over the body or centrum of the bone, - which I
found in every instance, unlike that of the Ichthyuosaurus, only
moderately concave on the articulating faces; in others the spinous
process seemed altogether wanting. Only two of the number bore any mark
of the suture which unites, in most reptiles, the annular process to the
centrum:in the others both centrum and process seemed anchylosed, as in
quadrupeds, into one bone; and there remained no scar to show that the
suture had ever existed. In some specimens the ribs seem to have been
articulated to the sides of the centrum; in others there is a transverse
process, but no marks of articulation. Some of the vertebrae are
evidently dorsal, some cervical, one apparently caudal; and almost all
agree in showing in front two little eyelets, to which the great
descending artery seems to have sent out blood-vessels in pairs. The more
entire ribs I was lucky enough to disinter have, as in those of
crocodileans, double heads; and a part of a fibula, about four inches in
length, seems also to belong to this ancient family. A large proportion
of the other bones are evidently Plesiosaurian. I found the head of the
flat humerus so characteristic of the extinct order to which the
Plesiosaurus has been assigned, and two digital bones of the paddle, that,
from their comparat ively slender and slightly curved form, so unlike
the digitals of its cogener the Ichthyosaurus, could have belonged
evidently to no other reptile. I observed, too, in the slightly-curved
articulations of not a few of the vertebrae, the gently convexity in the
concave centre, which, if not peculiar to the Plesiosaurus, is at least
held to distinguish it from most of its contemporaries. Among the various
nondescript organisms of the shale, I laid open a smooth angular
bone,hollowed something like a grocer’s scoop; a three-pronged
caltrop-looking bone, that seems to have formed part of a pelvic arch;
another angular bone, much massier than the first, regarding the probable
position of which I could not form a conjecture, but which some of my
geological friends deem cerebral; an extremely dense bone, imperfect at
each end, which presents the appearance of a cylinder slightly flattened;
and various curious fragments, which, with what our Scotch museums have
not yet acquired, - entire reptilian fossils for the purposes of
comparison,- might, I doubt not, be easily assigned to their proper
places. It was in vain that, leaving John to collect the scattered pieces
of shale in which the bones occurred, I set myself again and again to
discover the bed from which they had been detached. The tide had fallen;
and a range of skerries lay temptingly off, scarce a hundred yards from
the water’s edge: the shale-beds might be among them, with Plesiosauri and
crocodiles stretching entire; and fain would I have swam off to them, as I
had done oftener than once elsewhere, with my hammer in my teeth, and with
shirt and drawers in my hat; but a tall brown forest of kelp and tangle,
in which even a seal might drown, rose thick and perilous round both shore
and skerries; a slight swell was felting the long fronds together; and I
deemed it better, on the whole, that the discoveries I had already made
should be recorded, than that they should be lost to geology, mayhap for
a whole age, in the attempt to extend them.
The water, beautifully transparent, permitted the
eye to penetrate into its green depths for many fathoms around, though
every object presented, through the agitated surface, an uncertain and
fluctuating outline. I could see, however, the pink-coloured urchin
warping himself up, by his many cables, along the steep rock-sides; the
green crab stalking along the gravelly bottom; a scull of small rock-cod
darting hither and thither among the tangle- roots ; and a few large
medusae slowly flapping their continuous fins of gelatine in the opener
spaces, a few inches under the surface. Many curious families had their
representatives within the patch of sea which the eye commanded; but the
strange creatures that had once inhabited it by thousands, and whose bones
still lay sepulchred on its shores, had none. How strange, that the
identical sea heaving around stack and skerry in this remote corner of
the Hebrides should have once been thronged by reptile shapes more strange
that poet ever imagined, - dragons, gorgons and chimeras! Perhaps of all
the extinct reptiles, the Plesiosaurus was the most extraordinary. An
English geologist has described it, grotesquely enough, and yet most
happily, as a snake threaded through a tortoise. And here, on this very
spot, must these monstrous dragons have disported and fed; here must they
have raised their little reptile heads and long swan-like necks over the
surface, to watch an antagonist or select a victim; here must they have
warred and wedded, and pursued all the various instincts of their unknown
natures. A strange story, surely, considering it is a true one! I may
mention in the passing, that some of the fragments of the shale in which
the remains are embedded have been baked by the intense heat into an
exceedingly hard, dark-coloured stone, somewhat resembling basalt. I
must add further, that I by no means determine the rock with which we find
it associated to be in reality an altered sandstone.Such is the appearance
which it presents where weathered ; but its general aspect is that of a
porphyritic trap. Be it what it may, the fact is not at all affected,
that the shores, wherever it occurs on this tract of insular coast, are
strewed with reptilian remains of the Oolite.
The day passed pleasantly in the work of
exploration and discovery; the sun had already declined far in the west;
and, bearing with us our better fossils, we set out, on our return, by the
opposite route to that along the Bay of Laig, which we had now thrice
walked over. The grassy talus so often mentioned continues to run o the
eastern side of the island for about six miles, between the sea and the
inaccessible rampart of precipice behind. It varies in breadth from about
two to four hundred yards; the rampart rises over it from three to five
hundred feet; and a noble expanse of sea, closed in the distance by a
still nobler curtain of blue hills, spreads away from its base; and it was
along this grassy talus that our homeward road lay. Let the Edinburgh
reader imagine the fine walk under Salisbury Crags lengthened some twenty
times, - the line of precipices above heightened some five or six times, -
the gravelly slope at the base not much increased in altitude, but
developed transversely into a green undulating belt of hilly pasture, with
here and there a sunny slope level enough for the plough, and here and
there a rough wilderness of detached crags and broken banks; let him
further imagine the sea sweeping around the base of this talus, with the
nearest opposite land - bold, bare, and undulating atop - some six or
eight miles distant; and he will have no very inadequate idea of the
peculiar and striking scenery through which, this evening, our homeward
route lay. I have scarce ever walked over a more solitary tract. The sea
shuts it in on the one hand, and the rampart of rocks on the other; there
occurs along its entire length no other human dwelling than a lonely
summer shieling; for full one-half the way we saw no trace of man; and the
wildness of the few cattle which we occasionally startled in the hollows
showed us that man was no very frequent visitor among them. About half an
hour before sunset we reached the midway shieling.
Rarely have I seen a more interesting spot, or one
that, from its utter loneliness, so impressed the imagination. The
shieling, a rude low-roofed erection of turf and stone, with a door in the
centre some five feet in height or so, but with no window, rose on the
grassy slope immediately in front of the vast continuous rampart. A slim
pillar of smoke ascends from the roof, in the calm, faint and blue within
the shadow of the precipice, but it caught the sun-light in its ascent,
and blushed, ere it melted into the ether, a ruddy brown. A streamlet
came pouring from above in a long white thread, that maintained its
continuity unbroken for at least two-thirds of the way; and then,
untwisting into a shower of detached drops, that pattered loud and
vehemently in a rocky recess, it again gathered itself up into a lively
little stream, and, sweeping past the shieling, expanded in front into a
circular pond, at which a few milch cows were leisurely slaking their
thirst. The whole grassy talus, with a strip, mayhap a hundred yards
wide, of deep green sea, lay within the shadow of the tall rampart; but
the red light fell, for many a mile beyond, on the glassy surface; and the
distant Cuchullin Hills, so dark at other times, had all their prominent
slopes and jutting precipices tipped with bronze; while here and there a
mist streak, converted into bright flame, stretched along their peaks, or
rested on their sides. Save the lonely shieling, not a human dwelling was
in sight. An island girl of eighteen, more than merely good-looking,
though much embrowned by the sun, had come to the door to see who the
unwonted visitors might be, and recognized in John Stewart an old
acquaintance. John informed her in her own language that I was Mr.
Swanson’s sworn friend, and not a Moderate, but one of their own people,
and that I had fasted all day, and had come for a drink of milk. The name
of her minister proved a strongly recommendatory one: I have not yet seen
the true Celtic interjection of welcome, - the kindly “O o o,” - attempted
on paper; but I had a very agreeable specimen of it on this occasion,
viva voce. And as she set herself to prepare for us a rich bowl of
mingled milk and cream, John and I entered the shieling. There was turf
fire at the one end, at which there sat two little girls, engaged in
keeping up the blaze under a large pot, but sadly diverted from their work
by our entrance; while the other end was occupied by a bed of dry straw,
spread on the floor from wall to wall, and fenced off at the foot by a
line of stones. The middle space was occupied by the utensils and produce
of the dairy, - flat wooden vessels of milk, a butter-churn, and a tub
half-filled with curd; while a few cheeses, soft from the press, lay on a
shelf above. The little girls were but occasional visitors, who had come
out of a juvenile frolic, to pass the night in the place; but I was
informed by John that the shieling had two other inmates, young women,
like the one so hospitably engaged in our behalf, who were out at the
milking, and that they lived here all alone for several months every year,
when the pasturage was at its best, employed in making butter and cheese
for their master, worthy Mr. M’Donald of Keill. They must often feel
lonely when night has closed darkly over mountain and sea, or in those
dreary days of mist and rain so common in the Hebrides, when nought may be
seen save the few shapeless crags that stud the nearer hillocks arounds
them, and nought heard save the moaning of the wind in the precipices
above, or the measured dash of the wave on the wild beach below. And yet
they would do ill to exchange their solitary life and rude shieling for
the village dwellings and gregarious habits of the females who ply their
rural labours in bands among the rich fields of the Lowlands, or for the
unwholesome back-room and weary task-work of the city seamstress. The
sun-light was fading from the higher hill-tops of Skye and Glenelg, as we
bade farewell to the lonely shieling and the hospitable island girl. The
evening deepened as we hurried southawards along the scarce visible
pathway, or paused for a few seconds to examine some shattered block,
bulky as a Highland cottage, that had fallen from the precipice above.
Now that the whole landscape lay equally in shadow, one of the more
picturesque peculiarities of the continuous rampart came out more strongly
as a feature of the scene than when a strip of shade rested along the face
of the rock, imparting to it a retiring character, and all was sunshine
beyond. A thick bed of white sandstone, as continuous as the rampart
itself, runs nearly horizontally about midway in the precipice for mile
after mile, and, standing out in strong contrast with the dark-coloured
trap above and below, reminds one of a belt of white hewn work in a basalt
house-front, or rather - for there occurs above a second continuous strip,
of an olive hue,the colour assumed, on weathering, by a bed of amygdaloid
- of a piece of dingy old-fashioned furniture, inlaid with one stringed
belt of bleached holly, and another of faded green-wood. At some of the
more accessible points I climbed to the line of white belting, and found
it to consist of the same soft quartzy sandstone that in the Bay of Laig
furnishes the musical sand. Lower down there occur, alternating with the
trap, beds of shale andof blue clay, but they are lost mostly in the
talus. Ill adapted to resist the frosts and rains of winter, their exposed
edges have mouldered into a loose soil, now thickly covered over with
herbage; and, but for the circumstance that we occasionally find them laid
bare by a water-course, we would scarce be aware of their existence at
all. The shale exhibits everywhere, as on the opposite side of the
Ru-Stoir, faint impressions of a minute shell resembling a Cyclas, and
ill-preserved fragments of fish-scales. The blue clay I found at one spot
where the pathway had cut deep into the hill-side, richly charged with
bivalves of the species I had seen so abundant in the resembling clay of
the Bay of Laig; but the closing twilight prevented me from ascertaining
whether it also contained the characteristic univalves of the deposit, and
whether its shells, - for they seem identical with those of the altered
shales of the Ru-Stoir, - might not be associated, like these, with
reptilian remains. Night fell fast, and the streaks of mist that had
mottled the hills at sunset began to spread gray over the heavens in a
continuous curtain; but there was light enough left to show me that the
trap became more columnar as we neared our journey’s end. One especial
jutting in the rock presented in the gloom the appearance of an ancient
portico, with pediment and cornice, such as the traveller sees on the
hill-sides of Petraea in front of some old tomb; but it may possibly
appear less architectural by day. At length, passing from under the long
line of rampart, just as the stars that had begun to twinkle over it were
disappearing, one after one, in the thickeninig vapour, we reached little
bay of Kildonan, and found the boat waiting us on the beach. My friend
the minister, as I entered the cabin, gathered up his notes from the
table, and gave orders for the tea-kettle; and I spread out before him - a
happy man- an array of fossils new to Scotch Geology. No one not an
enthusiastic geologist or a zealous Roman Catholic can really know how
vast an amount of interest may attach to a few old bones. Has the reader
ever heard how fossil relics one saved the dwelling of a monk, in a time
of great general calamity, when all his other relics proved of no avail
whatever?
Thomas Campbell, when asked for a toast in a
society of authors, gave the memory of Napoleon Bonaparte; significantly
adding,”he once hung a bookseller.” On a nearly similar principle I would
be disposed to propose among geologists a grateful bumper in honour of the
revolutionary army that besieged Maestricht. That city, some seventy-five
or eighty years ago, had its zealous naturalist in the person of
M.Hoffmann, a diligent excavator in the quarries of St. Peter’s mountain,
long celebrated for its extraordinary fossils. Geology, as a science, had
no existence at the time; but Hoffmann was doing, in a quiet way, all he
could to give it a beginning; - he was transferring from the rock to his
cabinet, shells, and corals, and crustacea, and the teeth and scales of
fishes, with now and then the vertebrae, and now and then the limb-bone,
of a reptile. And as he honestly remunerated all the workmen he employed,
and did no manner of harm to any one, no one heeded him. On one eventful
morning, however, his friends the quarriers laid bare a most extraordinary
fossil, - the occipital plates of an enormous saurian, with jaws four and
a half feet long, bristling over with teeth, like chevaux de frise; and
after Hoffmann, who got the block in which it lay embedded, cut out
entire, and transferred to his house, had spent week after week in
painfully relieving it from the mass, all Maestricht began to speak of it
as something really wonderful. There is a cathedral on St.Peter’s
mountain, - the mountain itself is church-land; and the lazy canon,
awakened by the general talk, laid claim to poor Hoffmann’s wonderful
fossil as his property. He was lord of the manor, he said, and the
mountain and all that it contained belonged to him. Hoffmann defended his
fossil as he best could in an expensive lawsuit; but the judges found the
law clean against him; the huge reptile head was declared to be “treasure
trove” escheat to the lord of the manor; and Hoffmann half broken-hearted,
with but his labour and the lawyer’s bills for his pains, saw it
transferred by rude hands from its place in his museum, to the residence
of the grasping churchman. The huge fossil head experienced the fate of
Dr. Chalmers’ two hundred churches. Hoffmann was a philosopher, however,
and he continued to observe and collect as before; but he never found such
another fossil; and at length, in the midst of his ingenious labours, the
vital energies failed within him, and he broke down and died. The useless
canon lived on. The French Revolution broke out; the republican army
invested Maestricht; the batteries were opened; and shot and shell fell
thick on the devoted city. But in one especial quarter there alighted
neither shot nor shell. All was safe around the canon’s house. Ordinary
relics would have availed him nothing in the circumstances, - no, not “the
three kings of Cologne,” had he possessed the three kings entire, or the
jaw-bones of the “eleven thousand virgins;” but there was virtue in the
jaw-bones of the Mosasaurus, and safety in their neighbourhood. The French
savans, like all the other savans of Europe, had heard of Hoffmann’s
fossil, and the French artillery had been directed to play wide of the
place where it lay. Maestricht surrendered; the fossil was found secreted
in a vault, and sent away to the Jardin des Plantes at Paris, maugre the
canon, to delight there the heart of Cuvier; and the French, generously
addressing themselves to the heirs of Hoffmann as its legitimate owners,
made over to them a considerable sum fo money as its price. They reversed
the finding of the Maestricht judges; and all save the monks of St Peter’s
have acquiesced in the justice of the decision. |
