sea-coast, near Fiquainville, that this
greatest of modern naturalists was led, by finding a cuttle-fish
stranded on the beach, which he afterwards dissected, to study the
anatomy and character of the mollusca. To me, however, the lesson
served merely to vivify the dead deposits of the Oolitic system, as
represented by the Lias of Cromarty and Ross. The middle and later ages
of the great secondary division were peculiarly ages of the
cephalopodous molluscs: their belemnites, ammonites, nautili, baculites,
hamites, turrilites, and scaphites, belonged to the great natural
class--singularly rich in its extinct orders and genera, though
comparatively poor in its existing ones--which we find represented by
the cuttle-fish; and when engaged in disinterring the remains of the
earlier-born members of the family--ammonites, belemnites, and
nautili--from amid the shales of Eathie or the mud-stones of Shandwick,
the incident of the loligo has enabled me to conceive of them, not as
mere dead remains, but as the living inhabitants of primaeval seas,
stirred by the diurnal tides, and lighted up by the sun.

When pursuing my researches amid the deposits of the Lias, I was
conducted to an interesting discovery. There are two great systems of
hills in the north of Scotland--an older and a newer--that bisect each
other like the furrows of a field that had first been ploughed across
and then diagonally. The diagonal furrows, as the last drawn, are still
very entire. The great Caledonian Valley, open from sea to sea, is the
most remarkable of these; but the parallel valleys of the Nairn, of the
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 Firth, 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 Firth, of the Firth of
Cromarty, of the Bay of Munlochy, of the Firth of Beauty, and, as we
enter the Highlands proper, as Glen Urquhart, Glen Morrison, Glen Garry,
Loch Arkaig, and Lo