ave swum
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-colored 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 than 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-colored 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