the
Stones--Description of the Bones--"Dragons, Gorgons, and
Chimeras"--Exploration and Discovery pursued--The Midway
Shieling--A Celtic Welcome--Return of the Yacht--"Array of Fossils
new to Scotch Geology"--A Geologist's Toast--Hoffman and his
Fossil.

We leave behind us the musical sand, and reach the point of the
promontory which forms the northern extremity of the Bay of Laig.
Wherever the beach has been swept bare, we see it floored with
trap-dykes worn down to the level, but in most places accumulations of
huge blocks of various composition cover it up, concealing the nature of
the rock beneath. The long semi-circular wall of precipice which,
sweeping inwards at the bottom of the bay, leaves to the inhabitants
between its base and the beach their fertile meniscus of land, here
abuts upon the coast. We see its dark forehead many hundred feet
overhead, and the grassy platform beneath, now narrowed to a mere talus,
sweeping upwards to its base from the shore,--steep, broken, lined thick
with horizontal pathways, mottled over with ponderous masses of rock.

Among the blocks that load the beach, and render our onward progress
difficult and laborious, we detect occasional fragments of an
amygdaloidal basalt, charged with a white zeolite, consisting of
crystals so extremely slender that the balls, with their light fibrous
contents, remind us of cotton apples divested of the seeds. There
occur, though more rarely, masses of a hard white sandstone, abounding
in vegetable impressions, which, from their sculptured markings,
recalled to memory the Sigillaria of the Coal Measures. Here and there,
too, we find fragments of a calcareous stone, so largely charged with
compressed shells, chiefly bivalves, that it may be regarded as a shell
breccia. There occur, besides, slabs of fibrous limestone, exactly
resembling the limestone of the ichthyolite beds of the Lower Old Red;
and blocks of a hard gray stone, of silky lustre in the fresh fracture,
thickly speckled with carbonaceous markings. These fragmentary
masses,--all of them, at least, except the fibrous limestone, which
occurs in mere plank-like bands,--represent distinct beds, of which this
part of the island is composed, and which present their edges, like
courses of ashlar in a building, in the splendid section that stretches
from the tall brow of the precipice to the beach; though in the slopes
of the talus, where the lower beds appear in but