hieroglyphics, to which living nature furnishes the key, we may perhaps be permitted to indulge in some of those reflections which so naturally suggest themselves in solitary churchyards, or among the tombs of the ancient dead.

The hill of Eathie is a picturesque eminence of granitic gneiss, largely mixed with beds of hornblende schist, which extends, in a long precipitous ridge, some five or six hundred feet in height, along the northern side of the Moray Firth, and forms one of a primary chain of hills, which, in their upheaval, uptilted deposits of the Lias and Oolite. The deposit which the hill of Eathie disturbed is exclusively a Liassic one: the upturned edge of the base of the formation rests against the bottom of the hill; and we may trace the edges of its various upper deposits for several hundred feet outwards, bed above bed, until, apparently near the top of the formation, we lose them in the sea. There is a wild beauty on the shores of Eathie. A selvage of comparatively level ground, that occupies the space between the rocky beach and an inflection of the hill, seems embosomed in solitude; the naked scaurs and furze-covered slopes, where the fox and the badger breed, interpose their dizzy fence between it and the inhabited portions of the country above; while the rough unfrequented shore and wide-spreading sea form the secluding barriers below. The only human dwellings visible are the minute specks of white that look out in the sunshine from the dim and diluted blue of the opposite coast; and we may see the lonely firth broadening and widening as it recedes from the eye, and opens to the ocean in a direction so uninterrupted by land, that the waves, which, when the wind blows from the keen north, first begin to break on the distant headlands, and then come running up the coast, like white coursers, may have heaved their first undulating movements under the polar ice. The scene seems such a one as the anchorite might choose to wear out life in, far from the society of fellow-man; and we actually find, in exploring its

bosky thickets of wild rose and sloe-thorn, that some anchorite of the olden time did make choice of it. A grey shapeless hillock of lichened stone, shaded by luxuriant tufts of fern, still bears the name of the old chapel; and an adjacent spring, on whose overhanging sprays of ivy we may occasionally detect minute tags of linen and woollen cloth,-the offerings of a long-derived superstition, not quite extinct in the district,-is still known as the Saint's Well. But who the anchorite was, tradition has long since forgot; and it was only last year that I succeeded in recovering the name of the saint from an old man, whose father had been a farmer on the land considerably more than a hundred years before. The chapel and spring had been dedicated, he said, to St. Kennat, a name which we need scarce look for in the Romish Calendar, but which designated, it is probable, one of our old Culdee saints.

The various beds of the Eathie deposit,—all save the lowest, which consists of a blue adhesive clay,-are composed of a dark, finely laminated shale; and, varying in thickness from thirty feet to thirty yards, they are curiously separated from each other by bands of fossiliferous limestone. And so impalpable a substance are these shales, that, when subjected to calcination, which is necessary to extract the bitumen with which they are charged, and which gives them toughness and coherency, they resolve into a powder, used occasionally, from its extreme fineness, in the cleaning of polished brass and copper. They were laid down, it is probable, in circumstances similar to those in which, as described by the late Captain Basil Hall, extensive deposits are now taking place in the Yellow Sea of China. At sunset,' says Captain Hall, in the narrative of his voyage to Loo-Choo, 'no land could be perceived from the mast-head, although we were in less than five fathoms water. And before the day broke next morning, the tide had fallen a whole fathom, which brought the ship's bottom within three feet of the

ground. It was soon afterwards discovered that she was actually sailing along with her keel in the mud, which was sufficiently indicated by a long yellow train in our wake. Some inconvenience was caused by this extreme shallowness, as it retarded our headway, and affected the steering; but there was in reality not much danger, as it was ascertained, by forcing long poles into the ground, that for many fathoms below the surface on which the sounding lead rested, and from which level the depth of water is estimated, the bottom consisted of nothing but mud formed of an impalpable powder, without the least particle of sand or gravel.' The Liassic deposit of Eathie must have been of slow deposition. It consists of laminæ as thin as sheets of pasteboard, which, of course, shows that there was but little deposited at a time, and pauses between each deposit. And, though a soft muddy surface could have been of itself no proper habitat for the sedentary animals,-serpulæ, oysters, gryphites, and terebratulæ, we find further, that they did, notwithstanding, find footing upon it, by attaching themselves to the dead shells of such of the sailing or swimming molluscs, Ammonites and Belemnites, as died over it, and left upon it their remains; from which we infer that the pauses must have been very protracted, seeing that they gave time sufficient for the Terebratulæ,-shells that never moved from the place in which they were originally fixed,-to grow up to maturity. The thin leaves of these Liassic volumes must have been slowly formed and deliberately written; for as a series of volumes, reclining against a granite pedestal in the geologic library of nature, I used to find pleasure in regarding them. The limestone bands, curiously marbled with lignite, ichthyolite, and shell, formed the stiff boarding; and the thin pasteboard-like lamine between,-tens and hundreds of thousands in number in even the slimmer volumes,-composed the closely written leaves. For never did characters or figures lie closer in a page than the organisms on the sur

faces of these leaf-like laminæ. Permit me to present you from my note-book with a few readings taken during a single visit from these strange pages.

We insinuate our lever into a fissure of the shale, and turn up a portion of one of the lamina, whose surface had last seen the light when existing as part of the bottom of the old Liassic sea, when more than half the formation had still to be deposited. Is it not one of the prints of Sowerby's Mineral Conchology that has opened up to us? Nay, the shells lie too thickly for that, and there are too many repetitions of organisms of the same species. The drawing, too, is finer, and the shading seems produced rather by such a degree of relief in the figures as may be seen in those of an embossed card, than by any arrangement of lighter and darker colour. And yet the general tone of the colouring, though dimmed by the action of untold centuries, is still very striking. The ground of the tablet is of a deep black, while the colours stand out in various shades, from opaque to silvery white, and from silvery white to deep grey. There, for instance, is a group of large Ammonites, as if drawn in white chalk; there, a cluster of minute bivalves resembling Pectens, each of which bears its thin film of silvery nacre; there, a gracefully formed Lima in deep neutral tint; while, lying athwart the page, like the dark hawthorn leaf in Bewick's well-known vignette, there are two slim swordshaped leaves coloured in deep umber. We lay open a portion of another page. The centre is occupied by a large Myacites, still bearing a warm tint of yellowish brown, and which must have been an exceedingly brilliant shell in its day; there is a Modiola, a smaller shell, but similar in tint, though not quite so bright, lying a few inches away, with an assemblage of dark grey Gryphites of considerable size on the one side, and on the other a fleet of minute Terebratulæ, that had been borne down and covered up by some fresh deposit from above, when riding at their anchors. We turn

over yet another page. It is occupied exclusively by Ammonites of various sizes, but all of one species, as if a whole argosy, old and young, convoyés and convoyed, had been wrecked at once, and sent disabled and dead to the bottom. And here we open yet another page more. It bears a set of extremely slender Belemnites. They lie along and athwart, and in every possible angle, like a heap of boarding-pikes thrown carelessly down on a vessel's deck on the surrender of the crew. Here, too, is an assemblage of bright black plates, that shine like pieces of japan work, the cerebral plates of some fish of the ganoid order; and here an immense accumulation of minute glittering scales of a circular form. We apply the microscope, and find every little interstice in the page covered with organisms. And leaf after leaf, for tens and hundreds of feet together, repeats the same strange story. The great Alexandrian library, with its unsummed tomes of ancient literature, the accumulation of long ages, was but a poor and meagre collection, scarce less puny in bulk than recent in date, when compared with this vast and wondrous library of the Scotch Lias.

Now, this Eathie deposit is a crowded burying-ground, greatly more charged with remains of the dead, and more thoroughly saturated with what was once animal matter, than ever yet was city burying-ground in its most unsanitary state. Every limestone band or nodule yields, when struck by the hammer, the heavy fetid odour of corruption and decay; and so charged is the laminated shale with an animal-derived bitumen, that it flames in the fire as if it had been steeped in oil, and yields a carburetted hydrogen gas scarce less abundantly than some of our coals of vegetable origin. The fact of the existence, throughout all the geological ages, of the great law of death, is a fact which must often press upon the geologist. Almost all the materials of his history he derives from cenotaphs and catacombs. He finds no inconsiderable portion of the earth's crust com