of quartz rock, have long since mouldered away, leaving but
the hollow rectilinear rents which they had occupied, surmounted by the
indurated walls which they had baked. Some of the most curious
appearances, however, connected with the sandstone, though they occur
chiefly in an upper bed, are exhibited by what seem fields of petrified
mushrooms, of a gigantic size, that spread out in some places for
hundreds of yards under the high-water level. These apparent mushrooms
stand on thick squat stems, from a foot to eighteen inches in height;
the heads are round like those of toad-stools, and vary from one foot to
nearly two yards in diameter. In some specimens we find two heads
joined together in a form resembling a squat figure of _eight_, of what
printers term the Egyptian type, or, to borrow the illustration of
M'Culloch, "like the ancient military projectile known by the name of
double-headed shot;" in other specimens three heads have coalesced in a
trefoil shape, or rather in a shape like that of an ace of clubs
divested of the stem. By much the greater number, however, are
spherical. They are composed of concretionary masses, consolidated, like
the walls of the dykes, though under some different process, into a hard
siliceous stone, that has resisted those disintegrating influences of
the weather and the surf, under which the yielding matrix in which they
were embedded has worn from around them. Here and there we find them
lying detached on the beach, like huge shot, compared with which the
greenstone balls of Mons Meg are but marbles for children to play with;
in other cases they project from the mural front of rampart-like
precipices, as if they had been showered into them by the ordnance of
some besieging battery, and had stuck fast in the mason-work. Abbotsford
has been described as a romance in stone and lime; we have here, on the
shores of Laig, what seems a wild but agreeable tale, of the extravagant
cast of "Christabel," or the "Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner," fretted
into sandstone. But by far the most curious part of the story remains to
be told.

The hollows and fissures of the lower sandstone bed we find filled with
a fine quartzose sand, which, from its pure white color, and the
clearness with which the minute particles reflect the light, reminds one
of accumulations of potato-flour drying in the sun. It is formed almost
entirely of disintegrated particles of the soft sandstone; and as we at
first find it