e and there
the faint impression of a fucoid; but no organism sufficiently entire to
be transferred to the bag. As we proceed outwards, however, and the
fitful breeze comes laden with the keen freshness of the open sea, we
find among the hard dark strata in the immediate neighborhood of Thurso
Castle, a paler-colored bed of fine-grained semi-calcareous stone,
charged with remains in a state of coherency and keeping better fitted
to repay the labor of the specimen-collector. The inclosing matrix is
comparatively soft: when employed in the neighboring fences as a
building stone, we see it resolved by the skyey influences into
well-nigh its original mud; whereas the organisms which it contains are
composed of a hard, scarce destructible substance,--bone steeped in
bitumen; and the enamel on their outer surfaces is still as glossy and
bright as the japan on a _papier-mache_ tray fresh from the hands of the
workman. Their deep black, too, contrasts strongly with the pale hue of
the stone. They consist chiefly of scales, spines, dermal plates,
snouts, skull-caps, and vegetable impressions. A little farther on, in a
thick bed interposed between two faults, the same kind of remains occur
in the same abundance, largely mingled with scales and teeth of
Holoptychius, tuberculated plates, and coprolitic blotches; and further
on still, in a rubbly flagstone, near where a little stream comes
trotting merrily from the uplands to the sea, there occur
skull-plates,--at least one of which has been disinterred entire,--large
and massy as the helmets of ancient warriors. We have now reached the
outer point of the promontory, where the seaward wave, as it comes
rolling unbroken from the Pole, crosses, in nearing the shore, the
eastward sweep of the great Gulf-stream, and then casts itself headlong
on the rocks. The view has been extending with almost every step we have
taken, and it has now expanded into a wide and noble prospect of ocean
and bay, island and main, bold surf-skirted headlands, and green
retiring hollows. Yonder, on the one hand, are the Orkneys, rising dim
and blue over the foam-mottled currents of the Pentland Frith; and
yonder, on the other, the far-stretching promontory of Holborn Head,
with the line of coast that sweeps along the opposite side of the bay;
here sinking in abrupt flagstone precipices direct into the tide; there
receding in grassy banks formed of a dark blue diluvium. The fields and
dwellings of living men m