ommon tree
in the country now called Scotland,--as much so, perhaps, as the Scotch
fir is at the present day. The fossil trees found in such abundance in
the neighborhood of Helmsdale that they are burnt for lime,--the fossil
wood of Eathie, in Cromartyshire, and that of Shandwick, in Ross,--all
belong to the _Pinites Eiggensis_. It seems to have been a straight and
stately tree, in most instances, as in the Eigg specimens, of slow
growth. One of the trunks I saw near Navidale measured two feet in
diameter, but a full century had passed ere it attained to a bulk so
considerable; and a splendid specimen in my collection, from the same
locality, which measures twenty-one inches, exhibits even _more_ than a
hundred annual rings. In one of my specimens, and one only, the rings
are of great breadth. They differ from those of all the others in the
proportion in which I have seen the annual rings of a young, vigorous
fir that had sprung up in some rich, moist hollow, differ from the
annual rings of trees of the same species that had grown in the shallow,
hard soil of exposed hill-sides. And this one specimen furnishes curious
evidence that the often-marked but little understood law, which gives us
our better and worse seasons in alternate groups, various in number and
uncertain in their time of recurrence, obtained as early as the age of
the Oolite. The rings follow each other in groups of lesser and larger
breadth. One group of four rings measures an inch and a quarter across,
while an adjoining group of five rings measures only five-eighth parts;
and in a breadth of six inches there occur five of these alternate
groups. For some four or five years together, when this pine was a
living tree, the springs were late and cold, and the summers cloudy and
chill, as in that group of seasons which intervened between 1835 and
1841; and then, for four or five years, more springs were early and
summers genial, as in the after group of 1842, 1843 and 1844. An
arrangement in nature,--first observed, as we learn from Bacon, by the
people of the Low Countries, and which has since formed the basis of
meteoric tables, and of predictions and elaborate cycles of the
weather,--bound together the twelvemonths of the Oolitic period in
alternate bundles of better and worse: vegetation throve vigorously
during the summers of one group, and languished, in those of another, in
a state of partial development.

Sending away our man shipwards, laden with