heir vocation to divest her people of
their patriotism, and who virtually teach them that a country no longer
theirs is not worth the fighting for, it might be very safely concluded
that she was but manifesting, in one other direction, the strong good
sense which has ever distinguished her. Though shut out, however, from
the neighbouring fields and policies, the Niddry woods were open to me;
and I have enjoyed many an agreeable saunter along a broad planted belt,
with a grassy path in the midst, that forms their southern boundary, and
through whose long vista I could see the sun sink over the picturesque
ruins of Craigmillar Castle. A few peculiarities in the natural history
of the district showed me, that the two degrees of latitude which lay
between me and the former scenes of my studies were not without their
influence on both the animal and vegetable kingdoms. The group of
land-shells was different, in at least its proportions; and one
well-marked mollusc--the large tortoise-shell helix (_helix aspersa_),
very abundant in this neighbourhood--I had never seen in the north at
all. I formed, too, my first acquaintance in this woody, bush-skirted
walk, with the hedgehog in its wild state--an animal which does not
occur to the north of the Moray Firth. I saw, besides, though the summer
was of but the average warmth, the oak ripening its acorns--a rare
occurrence among the Cromarty woods, where, in at least nine out of
every ten seasons, the fruit merely forms and then drops off. But my
researches this season lay rather among fossils than among recent plants
and animals. I was now for the first time located on the Carboniferous
System: the stone at which I wrought was intercalated among the working
coal-seams, and abounded in well-marked impressions of the more robust
vegetables of the period--stigmaria, sigillaria, calamites, and
lepidodendra; and as they greatly excited my curiosity I spent many an
evening hour in the quarry in which they occurred, in tracing their
forms in the rock; or, extending my walks to the neighbouring coal pits,
I laid open with my hammer, in quest of organisms, the blocks of shale
or stratified clay raised from beneath by the miner. There existed at
the time none of those popular digests of geological science which are
now so common; and so I had to grope my way without guide or assistant,
and wholly unfurnished with a vocabulary. At length, however, by dint of
patient labour, I came to form not