Findhorn, and of the Spey, are all well-defined furrows; nor are the mountain ridges which separate them less definitely ranged in continuous lines. The ridges and furrows of the earlier ploughing are, on the contrary, as might be anticipated, broken and interrupted: the effacing plough has passed over them; and yet there are certain localities in which we find the fragments of this earlier system sufficiently entire to form one of the main features of the landscape. In passing through the upper reaches of the Moray Frith, and along the Caledonian Valley, the cross furrows may be seen branching off to the west, and existing as the valleys of Loch Fleet, of the Dornoch Frith, of the Frith of Cromarty, of the Bay of Munlochy, of the Frith of Beauly, and, as we enter the Highlands proper, as Glen Urquhart, Glen Morrison, Glen Garry, Loch Arkaig, and Loch Eil. The diagonal system,-represented by the great valley itself, and known as the system of Ben Nevis and the Ord of Caithness in our own country, and, according to De Beaumont, as that of Mount Pilate and Coté d'Or on the Continent, was upheaved after the close of the Oolitic ages. It was not until at least the period of the Weald that its "hills had been formed and its mountains brought forth;" and in the line of the Moray Frith the Lias and Oolite lie uptilted, at steep angles, against the sides of its long ranges of precipice. It is not so easy determining the age of the older system. No formation occurs in the North of Scotland between the Lias and the Old Red Sandstone; the vast Carboniferous, Permian, and Triasic deposits are represented by a wide gap; and all that can be said regarding the older hills is, that they disturbed and bore up with them the Old Red Sandstone; but that as there lay at their basis, at the time of their upheaval, no more modern rock to be disturbed, it seems impossible definitely to fix their era. Neither does there appear among their estuaries or valleys any trace of the Oolitic deposits. Existing, in all probability, during even the times of the Lias, as the subaerial framework of Oolitic Scotland, as the framework on which the Oolitic vegetables grew, no deposit of the system could of course have taken place over them. I had not yet, however, formed any very definite ideas regarding the two systems, or ascertained that they belonged apparently to a different time; and, finding the Lias upheaved against the steeper sides of the Moray Frith,--one of the huge furrows of the more modern system,—I repeatedly sought to find it uptilted also against the shores of the Cromarty Frith,-one of the furrows of the greatly more ancient one. I had, however, prosecuted the search in a somewhat desultory manner; and as a pause of a few days took place in my professional labors in the autumn of 1830, between the completing of one piece of work and the commencement of another, I resolved on devoting the time to a thorough survey of the Cromarty Frith, in the hope of detecting the Lias. I began my search at the granitic gneiss of the Hill, and, proceeding westwards, passed in succession, in the ascending order, over the uptilted beds of the lower Old Red Sandstone, from the Great Conglomerate base of the system, till I reached the middle member of the deposit, which consists, in this locality, of alternate beds of limestone, sandstone, and stratified clay, and which we find represented in Caithness by the extensively developed flag-stones. And then, the rock disappearing, I passed over a pebbly beach mottled with boulders; and in a little bay, not half a mile distant from the town, I again found the rock laid bare. I had long before observed that the rock rose to the surface in this little bay; I had even employed, when a boy, pieces. of its stratified clay as slate-pencil; but I had yet failed minutely to examine it. I was now, however, struck by its resemblance, in all save color, to the Lias. The strata lay at a low angle: they were composed of an argillaceous shale, and abounded in limestone nodules; and, save that both shale and nodules bore, instead of the deep liasic gray, an olivaceous tint; I might have almost supposed I had fallen on a continuation of some of the Eathie beds. I laid open a nodule with a blow of the hammer, and my heart leaped up when I saw that it enclosed an organism. A dark, ill defined, bituminous mass occupied the centre; but I could distinguish what seemed to be spines and small ichthyic bones projecting from its edges; and when I subjected them to the scrutiny of the glass, unlike those mere chance resemblances which sometimes deceive for a moment the eye, the more distinct and unequivocal did their forms become. I laid open a second nodule. It contained a group of glittering rhomboidal scales, with a few cerebral plates, and a jaw bristling with teeth. A third nodule also supplied its organism, in a welldefined ichthyolite, covered with minute, finely-striated scales, and furnished with a sharp spine in the anterior edge of every fin. I eagerly wrought on, and disinterred, in the course of a single tide, specimens enough to cover a museum table; and it was with intense delight that, as the ripple of the advancing tide was rising against the pebbles, and covering up the ichthyolitic beds, I carried them to the higher slopes of the beach, and, seated on a boulder, began carefully to examine them in detail, with a common botanist's microscope. But not a plate, spine, or scale could I detect among their organisms, identical with the ichthyic remains of the Lias. I had got amid the remains of an entirely different and incalculably more ancient creation. My new-found organisms represented, not the first, but merely the second age of vertebrate existence on our planet; but as the remains of the earlier age exist as the mere detached teeth and spines of placoids, which, though they give full evidence of the existence of the fishes to which they belong, throw scarce any light on their structure, it is from the ganoids of the second age that the palæontologist can with certainty know under what peculiarities of form, and associated with varieties of mechanism, vertebral life existed in the earlier ages of the world. In my new-found deposit,-to which I soon added, however, within the limits of the parish, some six or eight deposits more, all charged with the same ichthyic remains,-I found I had work enough before me for the patient study of years. CHAPTER XXII. "They lay aside their private cares, BURNS. WE had, as I have already stated, no Dissenters in the parish of Cromarty. What were known as the Haldane's People had tried to effect a lodgment among us in the town, but without success: in the course of several years they failed to acquire more than six or eight members; and these were not of the more solid people, but marked as an eccentric class, fond of argument, and possessed by a rage for the novel and the extreme. The leading teachers of the party were a retired English merchant and an ex-blacksmith, who, quitting the forge in middle life, had pursued the ordinary studies to no very great effect, and become a preacher. And both were, I believe, good men, but by no means prudent missionaries. They said very strong things against the Church of Scotland, in a place where the Church of Scotland was much respected; and it was observed, that while they did not do a great deal to convert the irreligious to Christianity, they were exceedingly zealous in their endeavors to make the religious Baptists. Much to my annoyance in my younger days, they used to waylay Uncle Sandy on his return from the Hill, on evenings when I had gone to get some lesson from him regarding sandworms, or razor-fish, or the sea-hare, and engage him in long controversies about infant baptism and Church Establishments. The matters which they discussed were greatly too high for me, nor was I by any means an attentive listener; but I picked up enough to know that Unclė Sandy, though a man of slow speech, held stiffly to the Establishment scheme of Knox, and the defence of Presbyterianism; and it did not require any particularly nice perceptive powers to observe that both his antagonists and himself used at times to get pretty warm, and to talk tolerably loud,--louder, at least, than was at all necessary in the quiet evening woods. I remember, too, that in urging him to quit the National Church for theirs, they usually employed language borrowed from the Revelations; and that, calling his Church Babylon, they bade him come out of her, that he might not be a partaker of her plagues. Uncle Sandy had seen too much of the world, and read and heard too much of controversy, to be out of measure shocked by the phrase; but with a decent farmer of the parish the hard words of the proselytizers did them a mischief. The retired merchant had urged him to quit the Establishment; and the farmer had replied by asking, in his simplicity, whether he thought he ought to leave his Church to sink in that way? "Yes," exclaimed the merchant with great emphasis; "leave her to sink to her place, -the lowest hell!" This was terrible: the decent farmer opened huge eyes at hearing what he deemed a bold blasphemy. The Church of which the Baptist spoke was, in Cromarty at least, the Church of the outed Mr. Hugh Anderson, who gave up his all in the time of the persecution, for conscience' sake; it was the Church of Mr. Gordon, whose ministry had been so signally countenanced during the period of the great revival; it was the Church of devout Mr. Munro, and of worthy Mr. Smith, and of many a godly elder and God-fearing member who had held by Christ the Head; and yet here was it denounced as a Church whose true place was hell. The farmer turned away, sick of the controversy; and the imprudent speech of the re |