principles of the game-laws; and, just
wondering what sort of disreputable vagabonds geological poachers
would become under its deteriorating influence, I laid hold of the
pickaxe and broke into the stonefast floor; and thence I succeeded in
abstracting,--feloniously, I dare say, though the crime has not yet got
into the statute-book--some six or eight pieces of the _Pinites
Eiggensis_, amounting in all to about half a cubic foot of that very
ancient wood--value unknown. I trust, should the case come to a serious
bearing, the members of the London Geological Society will generously
subscribe half-a-crown a-piece to assist me in feeing counsel. There are
more interests than mine at stake in the affair. If I be cast and
committed,--I, who have poached over only a few miserable districts in
Scotland,--pray, what will become of some of them,--the Lyells,
Bucklands, Murchisons and Sedgwicks,--who have poached over whole
continents?

We were successful in procuring several good specimens of the Eigg pine,
at a depth, in the conglomerate, of from eight to eighteen inches. Some
of the upper pieces we found in contact with the decomposing trap out of
which the hollow piazza above had been scooped; but the greater number,
as my set of specimens abundantly testify, lay embedded in the original
Oolitic grit in which they had been locked up, in, I doubt not, their
present fossil state, ere their upheaval, through Plutonic agency, from
their deep-sea bottom. The annual rings of the wood, which are quite as
small as in a slow-growing Baltic pine, are distinctly visible in all
the better pieces I this day transferred to my bag. In one fragment I
reckon sixteen rings in half an inch, and fifteen in the same space in
another. The trees to which they belonged seem to have grown on some
exposed hill-side, where, in the course of half a century, little more
than from two or three inches were added to their diameter. The _Pinites
Eiggensis_, or Eigg pine, was first introduced to the notice of the
scientific world by the late Mr. Witham, in whose interesting work on
"The Internal Structure of Fossil Vegetables" the reader may find it
figured and described. The specimen in which he studied its
peculiarities "was found," he says, "at the base of the magnificent
mural escarpment named the Scuir of Eigg,--not, however, _in situ_, but
among fragments of rocks of the Oolitic series." The authors of the
"Fossil Flora," where it is also figured, desc