ingle in the landscape with old episcopal ruins
and ancient burying-grounds; and yonder, well-nigh in the opening of the
Frith, gleams ruddy to the sun,--a true blood-colored blush, when all
around is azure or pale,--the tall Red Sandstone precipices of Dunnet
Head. It has been suggested that the planet Mars may owe its red color
to the extensive development of some such formation as the Old Red
Sandstone of our own planet: the existing formation in Mars may, at the
present time, it is said, be a Red Sandstone formation. It seems much
more probable, however, that the red flush which characterizes the whole
of that planet,--its oceans as certainly as its continents,--should be
rather owing to some widely-diffused peculiarity of the surrounding
atmosphere, than to aught peculiar in the varied surface of land and
water which that atmosphere surrounds; but certainly the extensive
existence of such a red system might produce the effect. If the rocks
and soils of Dunnet Head formed average specimens of those of our globe
generally, we could look across the heavens at Mars with a disk vastly
more rubicund and fiery than his own. The earth, as seen from the moon,
would seem such a planet bathed in blood as the moon at its rising
frequently appears from the earth.

We have rounded the promontory. The beds exposed along the coast to the
lashings of the surf are of various texture and character,--here tough,
bituminous, and dark; there of a pale hue, and so hard that they ring to
the hammer like plates of cast iron; yonder soft, unctuous, and
green,--a kind of chloritic sandstone. And these very various powers of
resistance and degrees of hardness we find indicated by the rough
irregularities of the surface. The softer parts retire in long
trench-like hollows,--the harder stand out in sharp irregular ridges.
Fossils abound: the bituminous beds glitter bright with glossy
quadrangular scales, that look like sheets of black mica inclosed in
granite. We find jaws, teeth, tubercled plates, skull-caps, spines, and
fucoids,--"tombs among which to contemplate," says Mr. Dick, "of which
Hervey never dreamed." The condition of complete keeping in which we
discover some of these remains, even when exposed to the incessant dash
of the surf, seems truly wonderful. We see scales of Holoptychius
standing up in bold relief from the hard cherty rock that has worn from
around them, with all the tubercles and wavy ridges of their sculpture
entire. T