more accessible points I climbed to
the line of white belting, and found it to consist of the same soft
quartzy sandstone that in the Bay of Laig furnishes the musical sand.
Lower down there occur, alternating with the trap, beds of shale and of
blue clay, but they are lost mostly in the talus. Ill adapted to resist
the frosts and rains of winter, their exposed edges have mouldered into
a loose soil, now thickly covered over with herbage; and, but for the
circumstance that we occasionally find them laid bare by a water-course,
we would scarce be aware of their existence at all. The shale exhibits
everywhere, as on the opposite side of the _Ru-Stoir_, faint
impressions of a minute shell resembling a Cyclas, and ill-preserved
fragments of fish-scales. The blue clay I found at one spot where the
pathway had cut deep into the hill-side, richly charged with bivalves of
the species I had seen so abundant in the resembling clay of the Bay of
Laig; but the closing twilight prevented me from ascertaining whether it
also contained the characteristic univalves of the deposit, and whether
its shells,--for they seem identical with those of the altered shales of
the _Ru-Stoir_,--might not be associated, like these, with reptilian
remains. Night fell fast, and the streaks of mist that had mottled the
hills at sunset began to spread gray over the heavens in a continuous
curtain; but there was light enough left to show me that the trap became
more columnar as we neared our journey's end. One especial jutting in
the rock presented in the gloom the appearance of an ancient portico,
with pediment and cornice, such as the traveller sees on the hill-sides
of Petraea in front of some old tomb; but it may possibly appear less
architectural by day. At length, passing from under the long line of
rampart, just as the stars that had begun to twinkle over it were
disappearing, one after one, in the thickening vapor, we reached the
little bay of Kildonan, and found the boat waiting us on the beach. My
friend the minister, as I entered the cabin, gathered up his notes from
the table, and gave orders for the tea-kettle; and I spread out before
him--a happy man--an array of fossils new to Scotch Geology. No one not
an enthusiastic geologist or a zealous Roman Catholic can really know
how vast an amount of interest may attach to a few old bones. Has the
reader ever heard how fossil relics once saved the dwelling of a monk,
in a time of great general cala