nd framework of His creatures, during
the second age of vertebrate existence; and one portion of my inquiries
determined the date of these ideas, and another their character.

Many of the best sections of the Sutors and the adjacent hills, with
their associated deposits, cannot be examined without boat; and so I
purchased for a few pounds a light little yawl, furnished with mast and
sail, and that rowed four oars, to enable me to carry out my
explorations. It made me free of the Cromarty and Moray Firths for some
six or eight miles from the town, and afforded me many a pleasant
evening's excursion to the deep-sea caves and skerries, and the
picturesque surf-wasted stacks of the granitic wall of rock which runs
in the Ben Nevis line of elevation, from Shadwick on the east to the
Scarfs Crag on the west. I know not a richer tract for the geologist.
Independently of the interest that attaches to its sorely-contorted
granitic gneiss--which seems, as Murchison shrewdly remarks, to have
been protruded through the sedimentary deposits in a solid state, as a
fractured bone is sometimes protruded through the integuments--there
occurs along the range three several deposits of the Old Red
ichthyolites, and three several deposits of the Lias, besides the
sub-aqueous ones, with two insulated skerries, which I am inclined to
regard as outliers of the Oolite. These last occur in the form of
half-tide rocks, very dangerous to the mariner, which lie a full
half-mile from the shore, and can be visited with safety only at low
water during dead calms, when no ground swell comes rolling in from the
sea. I have set out as early as two o'clock in a fine summer morning
for these skerries, and, after spending several hours upon them, have
been seated at the bank desk before ten; but these were mornings of very
hard work. It was the long Saturday afternoons that were my favourite
seasons of explorations; and when the weather was fine, my wife would
often accompany me in these excursions; and we not unfrequently anchored
our skiff in some rocky bay, or over some fishing bank, and, provided
with rods and lines, caught, ere our return, a basket of rock-cod or
coal-fish for supper, that always seemed of finer flavour than the fish
supplied us in the market. These were happy holidays. Shelley predicates
of a day of exquisite beauty, that it would continue to "live like joy
in memory." I do retain recollections of these evenings spent in my
little ski