erhaps 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, beside 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 in 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-colored 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, ro