soil, or its effect
on other soils; whether, for instance, like the old sterile soils of the
Carboniferous period, it has lost, through its rock-change, the
fertilizing properties which it once possessed; or whether it still
retains them, like some of the coprolitic beds of the Oolite and
Greensand, and might not, in consequence, be employed as a manure. A
course of such experiments could scarce fail to furnish with agreeable
occupation some of the numerous annual visitants of the Spa, who have to
linger long, with but little to engage them, waiting for what, if it
once fairly leave a man, returns slowly, when it returns at all.

In mentioning at the dinner-table of my friend my scheme of infusing
rock in order to produce Spa water, I referred to the circumstance that
the Belemnite of our Liasic deposits, when ground into powder, imparts
to boiling water a peculiar taste and smell, and that the infusion,
taken in very small quantities, sensibly affects both palate and
stomach. And I suggested that Belemnite water, deemed sovereign of old,
when the Belemnite was regarded as a thunderbolt, in the cure of
bewitched cattle, might be in reality medicinal, and that the ancient
superstition might thus embody, as ancient superstitions not
unfrequently do, a nucleus of fact. The charm, I said, might amount to
no more than simply the administration of a medicine to sick cattle,
that did harm in no case, and good at times. The lively comment of one
of the young ladies on the remark amused us all. If an infusion of stone
had cured, in the last age, cattle that were bewitched, the Strathpeffer
water, she argued, which was, it seems, but an infusion of stone, might
cure cattle that were sick now; and so, though the biped patients of
the Strath could scarce fail to decrease when they knew that its infused
stone contained but the strainings of old mud, and the juices of dead
unsalted fish, it was gratifying to think that the poor Spa might still
continue to retain its patients, though of a lower order. The pump-room
would be converted into a rustic, straw-thatched shed, to which long
trains of sick cattle, affected by weak nerves and dyspepsia, would come
streaming along the roads every morning and evening, to drink and gather
strength.

The following morning was wet and lowering, and a flat ceiling of gray
cloud stretched across the valley, from the summit of the Knock Farril
ridge of hills on the one side, to the lower flanks of Be