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water, followed by a still louder note of defiance from the cock. The meteor rose with a bound, and, continuing to ascend until it seemed lost among the stars, did not again appear. Next night, however, at the same hour, the same scene was repeated in all its circumstances: the meteor descended, the dog howled, the owl whooped, the cock crew. On the following morning the shipmaster visited the miller's, and, curious to ascertain how the cottage would fare when the cock was away, he purchased the bird; and, sailing from the bay before nightfall, did not return until about a month after.

On his voyage inwards, he had no sooner doubled an intervening headland, than he stepped forward to the bows. to take a peep at the cottage: it had vanished. As he approached the anchoring ground, he could discern a heap of blackened stones occupying the place where it had stood; and he was informed on going ashore, that it had been burnt to the ground, no one knew how, on the very night he had quitted the bay. He had it re-built and furnished, says the story, deeming himself what one of the old schoolmen perhaps term the occasional cause of the disaster. He also returned the cock, probably a not less important benefit, and no after accident befel the cottage. About fifteen years ago there was a human skeleton dug up near the scene of the tradition, with the skull, and the bones of the legs and feet, lying close together, as if the body had been huddled up twofold in a hole; and this discovery led to that of the story, which, though at one time often repeated and extensively believed, had been suffered to sleep in the memories of a few elderly people for nearly sixty years.

CHAPTER VII.

Relation of the deep red stone of Cromarty to the Ichthyolite Beds of the System Ruins of a Fossil-charged Bed - Journey to Avoch Red Dye of the Boulder-clay distinct from the substance itself - Variation of Coloring in the Boulder-clay Red Sandstone accounted for Hard-pan how formed — A reformed Garden An ancient Battle-field- Antiquity of Geologic and Human History compared Burn of Killein Observation made in boyhood confirmed Fossil-nodules - Fine Specimen of Coccosteus decipiens — Blank strata of Old Red - New View respecting the Rocks of Black IsleA Trip up Moray and Dingwall Friths - Altered color of the Boulder-clay Up the Auldgrande River - Scenery of the great Conglomerate - Graphic Description - Laidlaw's Boulder Vaccinium myrtillus - Profusion of Trayelled Boulders - - The Boulder Clach Malloch Its zones of Animal and Vegetable Life.

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THE ravine excavated by the mill-dam showed me what I had never so well seen before, the exact relation borne by the deep red stone of the Cromarty quarries to the ichthyolite beds of the system. It occupies the same place, and belongs to the same period, as those superior beds of the Lower Old Red Sandstone which are so largely developed in the cliffs of Dunnet Head in Caithness, and of Tarbet Ness in Ross-shire, and which were at one time regarded as forming, north of the Grampians, the analogue of the New Red Sandstone. I paced it across the strata this morning, in the line of the ravine, and found its thickness over the upper fish-beds, though I was far from reaching its superior layers, which are buried here in the sea, to be rather more than five hundred feet. The fossiliferous beds occur a few hundred yards below the dwelling-house of Rose Farm. They are not quite uncovered in the ravine; but we find their places indicated by heaps of gray

argillaceous shale, mingled with their characteristic ichthyolitic nodules, in one of which I found a small specimen of Cheiracanthus. The projecting edge of some fossil-charged bed had been struck, mayhap, by an iceberg, and dashed into ruins, just as the subsiding land had brought the spot within reach of the attritive ice; and the broken heap thus detached had been shortly afterwards covered up, without mixture of any other deposit, by the red boulder-clay. On the previous day I had detected the fish-beds in another new locality, one of the ravines of the lawn of Cromarty House, where the gray shale, concealed by a covering of soil and sward for centuries, had been laid bare during the storm by a swollen runnel, and a small nodule, inclosing a characteristic plate of Pteriththys, washed out. And my next object in to-day's journey, after exploring this ravine of the boulder-clay, was to ascertain whether the beds did. not also occur in a ravine of the parish of Avoch, some eight or nine miles away, which, when lying a-bed one night in Edinburgh, I remembered having crossed when a boy, at a point which lies considerably out of the ordinary route of the traveller. I had remarked on this occasion, as the resuscitated recollection intimated, that the precipices of the Avoch ravine bore, at the unfrequented point, the peculiar aspect which I learned many years after to associ ate with the ichthyolitic member of the system; and I was now quite as curious to test the truth of a sort of vignette landscape, transferred to the mind at an immature period of life, and preserved in it for full thirty years, as desirous to extend my knowledge of the fossiliferous beds of a system to the elucidation of which I had peculiarly devoted myself.

As the traveller reaches the flat moory uplands of the parish, where the water stagnates amid heath and moss over a thin layer of peaty soil, he finds the underlying

boulder-clay, as shown in the chance sections, spotted and streaked with patches of a grayish-white. There is the same mixture of arenaceous and aluminous particles in the white as in the red portions of the mass; for, as we see so frequently exemplified in the spots and streaks of the Red Sandstone formations, whether Old or New, the coloring matter has been discharged without any accompanying change of composition in the substance which it pervaded ; — evidence enough that the red dye must be something distinct from the substance itself, just as the dye of a handkerchief is a thing distinct from the silk or cotton yarn of which the handkerchief has been woven. The stagnant water above, acidulated by its various vegetable solutions, seems to have been in some way connected with these appearances. In every case in which a crack through the clay gives access to the oozing moisture, we see the sides bleached, for several feet downwards, to nearly the color of pipe-clay; we find the surface, too, when it has been divested of the vegetable soil, presenting for yards together the appearance of sheets of half-bleached linen: the red ground of the clay has been acted upon by the percolating fluid, as the red ground of a Bandanna handkerchief is acted upon through the openings in the perforated lead, by the discharging chloride of lime. The peculiar chemistry through which these changes are effected might be found, carefully studied, to throw much light on similar phenomena in the older formations. There are quarries in the New Red Sandstone in which almost every mass of stone presents a different shade of color from that of its neighboring mass, and quarries in the Old Red the strata of which we find streaked and spotted like pieces of calico. And their variegated aspect seems to have been communicated, in every instance, not during deposition, nor after they had been hardened into stone but when, like the

boulder-clay, they existed in an intermediate state. Be it remarked, too, that the red clay here,― evidently derived from the abrasion of the red rocks beneath,—is in dye and composition almost identical with the substance on which, as an unconsolidated sandstone, the bleaching influences, whatever their character, had operated in the Paleozoic period, so many long ages before; it is a repetition of the ancient experiment in the Old Red, that we now see going on in the boulder-clay. It is further worthy of notice, that the bleached lines of the clay exhibit, viewed horizontally, when the overlying vegetable mould has been removed, and the whitened surface in immediate contact with it paired off, a polygonal arrangement, like that assumed by the cracks in the bottom of clayey pools dried up in summer by the heat of the sun. Can these possibly indicate the ancient rents and fissures of the boulder-clay, formed, immediately after the upheaval of the land, in the first process of drying, and remaining afterwards open enough to receive what the uncracked portions of the surface excluded, the acidulated bleaching fluid?

The kind of ferruginous pavement of the boulder-clay known to the agriculturist as pan, which may be found extending in some cases its iron cover over whole districts,— sealing them down to barrenness, as the iron and brass sealed down the stump of Nebuchadnezzar's tree, — is, like the white strips and blotches of the deposit, worthy the careful notice of the geologist. It serves to throw some light on the origin of those continuous bands of clayey or arenaceous ironstone, which in the older formations in which vegetable matter abounds, whether Oölitic or Carboniferous, are of such common occurrence. The pan is a stony stratum, scarcely less indurated in some localities than sandstone of the average hardness, that rests like a pavement on the surface of the boulder-clay, and that gen

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