r 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 redstone.
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 of 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 neighboring Oolites and
basalts. In the geological map which I carried with me,--not one of high
authority however,--I found it actually colored as a patch of this
ancient system. The Old Red Sandstone is largely developed in the
neighboring 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 t