ot very long
ere the introduction upon our planet of the inquisitive little creature
that has been puzzling himself--hitherto at least with no satisfactory
result--in attempting to account for their origin. I examined, too, with
some care, the old coast-line, so well developed in this neighbourhood
as to form one of the features of its striking scenery, and which must
be regarded as the geological memorial and representative of those
latter ages of the world in which the human epoch impinged on the old
Pre-Adamite periods. The magistrates of the place were engaged at the
time in doing their duty, like sensible men, as they were, in what I
could not help thinking a somewhat barbarous instance. The neat, well
proportioned, very uninteresting jail-spire of the burgh, about which,
in its integrity, no one cares anything, had been shaken by an
earthquake, which took place in the year 1816, into one of the greatest
curiosities in the kingdom. The earthquake, which, for a Scotch one, had
been unprecedentedly severe, especially in the line of the great
Caledonian Valley, had, by a strange vorticose motion, twisted round the
spire, so that, at the transverse line of displacement, the _panes_ and
corners of the octagonal broach which its top formed overshot their
proper positions fully seven inches. The corners were carried into
nearly the middle of the _panes_, as if some gigantic hand, in
attempting to twirl round the building by the spire, as one twirls round
a spinning top by the stalk or bole, had, from some failure in the
coherency of the masonry, succeeded in turning round only the part of
which it had laid hold. Sir Charles Lyell figures, in his "Principles,"
similar shifts in stones of two obelisks in a Calabrian convent, and
subjoins the ingenious suggestion on the subject of Messrs. Darwin and
Mallet. And here was there a Scotch example of the same sort of
mysterious phenomena, not less curious than the Calabrian one, and
certainly unique in its character _as Scotch_, which, though the injured
building had already stood twelve years in its displaced condition, and
might stand for as many more as the hanging tower of Pisa, the
magistrates were laboriously effacing at the expense of the burgh. They
were completely successful too; and the jail spire was duly restored to
its state of original insignificance, as a fifth-rate piece of
ornamental masonry. But how very absurd, save, mayhap, here and there to
a geologist, must n