still finer subject for the chisel; its Gryphites stand out in the boldest style of art. One very striking Ammonite (Ammonite perarmatus) exhibits a double row of prominent cones, that run along the spiral windings, and give to it the appearance of an Ionic volute ingeniously rusticated; and another Ammonite, that takes its name from the quarry (Ammonite Braamburiensis), presents on its smooth, broad surface, for in form it resembles some of our recent nautili, -the gracefully-involved lines of the internal partitioning, as sharp and distinct as if traced on copper by the burin. The traveller explores and examines, and finds the rude excavation on the hill-side converted into the studio of some wonderful sculptor. In the quarry opened on the other eminence there are similar appearances presented; but the stone is softer, and the impressions less sharp.

GLACIERS AND MORAINES OF SUTHERLAND.

LET us mark the abrupt and imposing character of the hills. They rise dark, lofty, and bare, and show-to employ a graphic Highland phrase-their bones sticking through the skin. They must have been well swept, surely; and as they are composed mainly of Old Red Sandstone conglomerate in this locality,-for we have left behind us the granitic hills of Navidale and Loth,—their sweepings, could we but find them, would have doubtless a well-marked character. And now let us turn to appearances of another kind. We stand on the polished surface of the rock, with its rectilinear grooves and scratches, and, when we look upwards along the lines, see the mountains and the valley; but what see we when we look downwards along the lines? Something exceedingly curious indeed;-double and triple ranges of miniature hills, composed of boulders and gravel,-the veritable conglomerate sweepings of the mountain-slopes and the valley, mixed with sweepings of the more distant

primary hills that rise behind. There they lie, in lines that preserve such a rude parallelism to the steep range from which they were originally scraped, as the waves that rebound from a seaward barrier of cliff maintain to the line of the barrier. Varying from thirty to forty feet in height, and steep and pyramidal, in the cross section, as roofs of houses, they run in continuous undulating lines of from a hundred yards to half a mile in length. Three such lines, with their intervening valleys, occur between the base of Braambury Hill and the village of Brora, like inner, outer, and middle mounds of circumvallation in an ancient hillfort. If one steadily rakes, with the edge of one's moist palm, the scattered crumbs on a polished tea-table, they form, of course, into irregular lines, presenting in the transverse section a rudely angular form; and in the direction in which they have been swept, the moisture from the palm furrows the mahogany with minute streaks of dimness. The illustration is one on the smallest scale possible. But if the palm be tolerably moist, the crumbs tolerably abundant, and the polish of the mahogany brought brightly out, and if we rake into rude parallelism in this way, line after line from the front of some platter or bread-dish, upturned to represent the line of hills, we shall have provided ourselves with no very inadequate model of the phenomena of Braambury. But what palm of inconceivable weight, breadth, and strength, could have been employed here in thus raking the débris into lines of hills half a mile in length by at least thirty feet in height, and in pressing into smoothness, as it passed, the asperities of the solid rocks below? The reader has already anticipated the reply. We have before us indications of an ancient glacier the most unequivocal that are to be found perhaps anywhere in the kingdom: there is not a condition or accompaniment wanting. I have had my doubts regarding glacial agency in Scotland: but after visiting this locality a twelvemonth ago, I found doubt impossible; and I

would now fain recommend the sceptical to suspend their ultimate decision on the point, until such time as they shall have acquainted themselves with the grooved and polished rocks of Braambury, and the parallel moraines that stretch out around its base.

I had lacked time, during my visit of the previous season, to examine the moraines that lie in the opening of the valley higher up, and now set out to explore them. The day had become exceedingly pleasant: a few cottony-looking wreaths of mist still mottled the hills, and the sky overhead was still laden with clouds; but ever and anon the sun broke out in hasty glimpses, that went flashing across the dark moors, now lighting up some bosky recess or abrupt cliff, now casting into strong prominence some insulated moraine. The hollow between Braambury and the hills is occupied, as I have said, by an extensive morass, in which the inhabitants of the neighbourhood dig their winter fuel, and which we find fretted, in consequence, by numerous rectilinear cavities, filled with an inky water, and roughened and darkened on its drier swellings with innumerable parallelograms of peat. I passed an opening in which there were no fewer than five gnarled, short-stemmed fir-trees, laid bare. They lay clustered together, as if uprooted and thrown down by some tremendous hurricane,-presenting exactly such appearances as I have seen in the woods of Cromarty after the hurricane of November 1830, when, in less than an hour, three thousand full-grown trees were blown down in one not very extensive wood, and lay heaped on some of the more exposed eminences in groups of six and eight. A few hundred yards from the prostrate trees there rises, amid the morass, a solitary moraine. I could see its gravelly root extending downwards under the peat which, in the slow course of ages, had accumulated around it, and found the conviction pressing upon me, that many centuries ago, when the five prostrate pines were living denizens of the forest,

and the moss which now enveloped them had not yet formed, this insulated hill must have raised its heathy ridge over the trees, and borne the marks of an antiquity apparently not less remote than those which it bears now. And then, long ere the hill itself had formed, the same remark must have applied with at least equal force to the Oolitic rock below. We see that, when overlaid by the ponderous ice, it must have been exactly the same sort of hard, brittle sandstone it is at the present moment. As shown by the slim partitionings that divide internally its casts of Belemnites, it must have hardened ere its fossils were absorbed ; and, as shown by its polished and striated surfaces, its fossils must have been absorbed ere the glacier slid over it. We see laid bare in the lines of the striæ, the casts of Gryphites, Pectens, and Terebratula; we see further, that the hollows which they formed were weak places in the stone, and that the ice, breaking through, had crushed into them the minute fragments of which their roofs had been composed; and so infer from the appearances, that the newer Oolite of Sutherland must have been as firm a building-stone in the ages of the glaciers as it is now.

As we approach the valley of the Brora, we see a long, well-marked moraine sweeping in a curved line along the base of the hill that forms its northern boundary of entrance, and are again reminded, by the general parallelism of moraine and hill, of the reversed wave thrown back from a barrier of rock. In the gorge of the valley, immediately below where the river expands into a fine wild lake, we find the moraines very abundant, but preserving no regularity of line. They exist as a broken, cockling sea of miniature hills; and, to follow up the twice-used illustration, remind one of rebounding waves at the opening of a rocky bay, where the lines meet and cross, and break one another into fragments. Like many of the other moraines of the Highlands, they were of mark enough to attract the

notice of the old imaginative Celta, who called them Tomhans, and believed them to be haunts of the fairies,—domiciles whose enchanted places of entrance might be discovered on just one night of the year, but which no man, not desirous of becoming a denizen of fairyland, would do well to enter. The lake above is a fine lonely sheet of water, fringed with birch, and overlooked by many a green uninhabited spot, dimly barred by the plough. A range of stern, solemn-looking hills rises steep and precipitous on either hand; while a single picturesque hill, with abrupt sides and a tabular summit, terminates the upward vista some six or eight miles away. I saw in one reedy bay a whole community of water-lilies opening their broad white petals and golden stamens to the light; and, wishing to possess myself of one that grew nearer the shore than any of the others, and having no such companion as Cowper's dog Beau to bring it me, I cut a long switch of birch, and struck sharply at the stem, that I might decapitate it, and then steer it to land. But the blow, though repeated and re-repeated, fell short; and I had drawn my last, when up there started from the bottom a splendid lily, two-thirds developed, a true Venus, that, rising from the water, looked up to the light, neck-deep, with the rest. The agitation occasioned by the strokes had burst the calyx, and, true to its nature, up the prematurely-liberated flower had sprung. The image which the incident furnished mingled curiously with my attempted restorations of the ancient state of the valley. The delicate lily, rising to the surface in its quiet, sheltered bay, during a bright glimpse of sunshine, formed an interesting point of contrast to what seemed a fast foaming river of ice, that rose on the hillsides more than half their height, and swept downwards, till where it terminated in the plain, in an abrupt moving precipice, that ploughed before it, in its irresistible march, huge hills of gravel and stone.