Thomas Campbell, when asked for a toast in a society of authors, gave the memory of Napoleon Bonaparte; significantly adding, "he once hung a bookseller.” On a nearly similar principle I would be disposed to propose among geologists a grateful bumper in honor of the revolutionary army that besieged Maestricht. That city, some seventy-five or eighty years ago, had its zealous naturalist in the person of M. Hoffmann, a diligent excavator in the quarries of St. Peter's mountain, long celebrated for its extraordinary fossils. Geology, as a science, had no existence at the time; but Hoffmann was doing, in a quiet way, all he could to give it a beginning; he was transferring from the rock to his cabinet, shells, and corals, and crustacea, and the teeth and scales of fishes, with now and then the vertebræ, and now and then the limb-bone, of a reptile. And as he honestly remunerated all the workmen he employed, and did no manner of harm to any one, no one heeded him. On one eventful morning, however, his friends the quarriers laid bare a most extraordinary fossil, -the occipital plates of an enormous saurian, with jaws four and a half feet long, bristling over with teeth, like chevaux de frise; and after Hoffmann, who got the block in which it lay embedded, cut out entire, and transferred to his house, had spent week after week in painfully relieving it from the mass, all Maestricht began to speak of it as something really wonderful. There is a cathedral on St. Peter's mountain, the mountain itself is churchland; and the lazy canon, awakened by the general talk, laid claim to poor Hoffmann's wonderful fossil as his property. He was lord of the manor, he said, and the mountain and all that it contained belonged to him. Hoffmann defended his fossil as he best could in an expensive lawsuit; but the judges found the law clean against him; the huge reptile head was declared to be "treasure trove"

escheat to the lord of the manor; and Hoffmann, half broken-hearted, with but his labor and the lawyer's bills for his pains, saw it transferred by rude hands from its place in his museum, to the residence of the grasping church、 man. The huge fossil head experienced the fate of Dr. Chalmer's two hundred churches. Hoffmann was a philosopher, however, and he continued to observe and col lect as before; but he never found such another fossil; and at length, in the midst of his ingenious labors, the vital energies failed within him, and he broke down and died. The useless canon lived on. The French Revolution broke out; the republican army invested Maestricht; the batteries were opened; and shot and shell fell thick on the devoted city. But in one especial quarter there alighted neither shot nor shell. All was safe around the canon's house. Ordinary relics would have availed him nothing in the circumstances,

no, not "the three kings

of Cologne,” had he possessed the three kings entire, or the jaw-bones of the "eleven thousand virgins;" but there was virtue in the jaw-bones of the Mosasaurus, and safety in their neighborhood. The French savans, like all the other savans of Europe, had heard of Hoffmann's fossil, and the French artillery had been directed to play wide of the place where it lay. Maestricht surrendered; the fossil was found secreted in a vault, and sent away to the Jardin des Plantes at Paris, maugre the canon, to delight there the heart of Cuvier; and the French, generously addressing themselves to the heirs of Hoffmann as its legitimate owners, made over to them à considerable sum of money as its price. They reversed the finding of the Maestricht judges; and all save the monks of St. Peter's have acquiesced in the justice of the decision.

CHAPTER VI.

Something for Non-geologists-Man Destructive-A Better and Last Creation coming A Rainy Sabbath-The Meeting House-The Congregation — The Sermon in Gaelic-The Old Wondrous Story - The Drunken Minister of Eigg-Presbyterianism without Life-Dr. Johnson's Account of the Conversion of the People of Rum - Romanism at Eigg - The Two Boys-The Freebooter of Eigg - Voyage Resumed - The Homeless Minister- Harbor of Isle Ornsay - Interesting Gneiss Deposit A Norwegian Keep - Gneiss at Knock- Curious Chemistry - Sea-cliffs beyond Portsea Luidag― Scenery of Skye.

The Goblin

I RECKON among my readers a class of non-geologists, who think my geological chapters would be less dull if I left out the geology; and another class of semi-geologists, who say there was decidedly too much geology in my last. With the present chapter, as there threatens to be an utter lack of science in the earlier half of it, and very little, if any, in the latter half, I trust both classes may be in some degree satisfied. It will bear reference to but the existing system of things,-assuredly not the last of the consecutive creations, and to a species of animal that, save in the celebrated Guadaloupe specimens, has not yet been found locked up in stone. in stone. There have been much of violence and suffering in the old immature stages of being, much, from the era of the Holoptychius, with its sharp murderous teeth and strong armor of bone, down to that of the cannibal Ichthyosaurus, that bears the broken remains of its own kind in its bowels,-much, again, from the times of the crocodile of the Oölite, down to the times of the fossil hyena and gigantic shark of the Tertiary. Nor, I fear, have matters greatly improved in that latest

born creation in the series, that recognizes as its delegated lord the first tenant of earth accountable to his Maker. But there is a better and a last creation coming, in which man shall re-appear, not to oppress and devour his fellowmen, and in which there shall be no such wrongs perpetrated as it is my present purpose to record,-"new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness." Well sung the Ayrshire ploughman, when musing on the great truth that the present scene of being "is surely not the last," a truth corroborated since his day by the analogies of a new science,

"The poor, oppressed, honest man,

Had never sure been born,

Had not there been some recompense

To comfort those that mourn.”"

It was Sabbath, but the morning rose like a hypochon driac wrapped up in his night-clothes-gray in fog, and sad with rain. The higher grounds of the island lay hid in clouds, far below the level of the central hollow; and our whole prospect from the deck was limited to the nearer slopes, dank, brown, and uninhabited, and to the rough black crags that frown like sentinels over the beach. Now the rime thickened as the rain pattered more loudly on the deck; and even the nearer stacks and precipices showed as unsolid and spectral in the cloud as moonlight shadows thrown on a ground of vapor; anon it cleared up for a few hundred yards, as the shower lightened; and then there came in view, partially at least, two objects that spoke of man, -a deserted boat harbor, formed of loosely piled stone, at the upper extremity of a sandy bay; and a roofless dwelling beside it, with two ruinous gables rising over the broken walls. The entire scene suggested the idea

of a land with which man had done for ever; - the vapor-enveloped rocks, the waste of ebb-uncovered sand, the deserted harbor, the ruinous house, the — melancholy rain-fretted tides eddying along the strip of brown tangle in the foreground, and, dim over all, the thick, slant lines of the beating shower!-I know not that of themselves they would have furnished materials enough for a finished picture in the style of Hogarth's “End of all Things;" but right sure am I that in the hands of Bewick they would have been grouped into a tasteful and poetic vignette. We set out for church a little after eleven, the minister encased in his ampleskirted storm-jacket of oiled canvas, and protected atop by a genuine sou-wester, of which the broad posterior rim sloped half a yard down his back; and I closely wrapped up in my gray maud, which proved, however, a rather indifferent protection against the penetrating powers of a true Hebridean drizzle. The building in which the congregation meets is a low dingy cottage of turf and stone, situated nearly opposite to the manse windows. It had been built by my friend, previous to the Disruption, at his own expense, for a Gaelic school, and it now serves as a place of worship for the people.

We found the congregation already gathered, and that the very bad morning had failed to lessen their numbers. There were a few of the male parishioners keeping watch at the door, looking wistfully out through the fog and rain for their minister; and at his approach nearly twenty more came issuing from the place,-like carder bees from their nest of dried grass and moss, -to gather round him, and shake him by the hand. The islanders of Eigg are an active, middle-sized race, with well-developed heads, acute intellects, and singularly warm feelings. And on this occasion at least there could be no possibility of mistake