t once struck me, that in this
recent scene of devastation I had the origin of full one-half of our
Scottish mosses exemplified. Some of the mosses of the south date from
the times of Roman invasion. Their lower tiers of trunks bear the mark
of the Roman axe; and in some instances, the sorely wasted axe itself--a
narrow, oblong tool, somewhat resembling that of the American
backwoodsman--has been found sticking in the buried stump Some of our
other mosses are of still more modern origin: there exist Scottish
mosses that seem to have been formed when Robert the Bruce felled the
woods and wasted the country of John of Lorn. But of the others, not a
few have palpably owed their origin to violent hurricanes, such as the
one which on this occasion ravaged the Hill of Cromarty. The trees which
form their lower stratum are broken across, or torn up by the roots,
_and their trunks all lie one way_. Much of the interest of a science
such as geology must consist in the ability of making dead deposits
represent living scenes; and from this hurricane I was enabled to
conceive, pictorially, if I may so express myself, of the origin of
those comparatively recent deposits of Scotland which, formed almost
exclusively of vegetable matter, contain, with rude works of art, and
occasionally remains of the early human inhabitants of the country,
skeletons of the wolf, the bear, and the beaver, with horns of the _bos
primigenius_ and _bos longifrons_, and of a gigantic variety of red
deer, unequalled in size by animals of the same species in these latter
ages. Occasionally I was enabled to vivify in this way even the ancient
deposits of the Lias, with their vast abundance of cephalopodous
mollusca--belemnites, ammonites, and nautili. My friend of the Cave had
become parish schoolmaster of Nigg; and his hospitable dwelling
furnished me with an excellent centre for exploring the geology of the
parish, especially its Liassic deposits at Shandwick, with their huge
gryphites and their numerous belemnites, of at least two species,
comparatively rare at Eathie--the _belemnite abreviatus_ and _belemnite
elongatus_. I had learned that these curious shells once formed part of
the internal framework of a mollusc more nearly akin to the
cuttle-fishes of the present day than aught else that now exists; and
the cuttle-fishes--not rare in at least one of their species (_loligo
vulgare_) in the Firth of Cromarty--I embraced every opportunity of
examining. I