belongs, as I have already
had occasion to mention, to what De Beaumont would term the Ben Nevis
system of hills--that latest of our Scottish mountain systems which,
running from south-west to north-east, in the line of the great
Caledonian valley, and in that of the valleys of the Nairn, Findhorn,
and Spey, uptilted in its course, when it arose, the Oolites of
Sutherland, and the Lias of Cromarty and Ross. The deposit which the
Hill of Eathie disturbed is exclusively a Liassic one. The upturned base
of the formation rests immediately against the Hill; and we may trace
the edges of the various overlying beds for several hundred feet
outwards, until, apparently near the top of the deposit, we lose them in
the sea. The various beds--all save the lowest, which consists of a blue
adhesive clay--are composed of a dark shale, consisting of
easily-separable laminae, thin as sheets of pasteboard; and they are
curiously divided from each other by bands of fossiliferous limestone of
but from one to two feet thick. These Liassic beds, with their
separating bands, are a sort of boarded books; 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,
elaborately marbled with lignite, ichthyolite, and shell, form the stiff
boarding; the pasteboard-like laminae between--tens and hundreds of
thousands in number in even the slimmer volumes--compose the
closely-written leaves. I say closely written; for never yet did signs
or characters lie closer on page or scroll than do the organisms of the
Lias on the surface of these leaf-like laminae. I can scarce hope to
communicate to the reader, after the lapse of so many years, an adequate
idea of the feeling of wonder which the marvels of this deposit excited
in my mind, wholly new as they were to me at the time. Even the fairy
lore of my first-formed library--that of the birchen box--had impressed
me less. The general tone of the colouring of these written leaves,
though dimmed by the action of untold centuries, is still very striking.
The ground is invariably of a deep neutral grey, verging on black; while
the flattened organisms, which present about the same degree of relief
as one sees in the figures of an embossed card, contrast with it in
tints that vary from opaque to silvery white, and from pale yellow to an
umbry or chestnut brown. Groups of ammonites appear as if drawn in white
cha