track of another geologist, of, however, a very
different school, who explored, at a comparatively recent period, the
deposits of not a few of our Scotch counties. But his labors, in at
least the fossiliferous formations, seem to have accomplished nothing
for Geology,--I am afraid, even less than nothing. So far as they had
influence at all, it must have been to throw back the science. A
geologist who could have asserted only three years ago ("Geognostical
Account of Banffshire," 1842), that the Old Red Sandstone of Scotland
forms merely "a part of the great coal deposit," could have known
marvellously little of the fossils of the one system, and nothing
whatever of those of the other. Had he examined ere he decided, instead
of deciding without any intention of examining, he would have found
that, while both systems abound in organic remains, they do not possess,
in Scotland at least, a single species in common, and that even their
types of being, viewed in the group, are essentially distinct.

The three Edinburgh gentlemen whom I had met at breakfast were still in
the inn. One of them I had seen before, as one of the guests at a
Wesleyan soiree, though I saw he failed to remember that I had been
there as a guest too. The two other gentlemen were altogether strangers
to me. One of them,--a man on the right side of forty, and a superb
specimen of the powerful, six-feet two-inch Norman Celt,--I set down as
a scion of some old Highland family, who, as the broadsword had gone
out, carried on the internal wars of the country with the formidable
artillery of Statute and Decision. The other, a gentleman more advanced
in life, I predicated to be a Highland proprietor, the uncle of the
younger of the two,--a man whose name, as he had an air of business
about him, occurred, in all probability, in the Almanac, in the list of
Scotch advocates. Both were of course high Tories,--I was quite sure of
that,--zealous in behalf of the Establishment, though previous to the
Disruption they had not cared for it a pin's point,--and prepared to
justify the virtual suppression of the toleration laws in the case of
the Free Church. I was thus decidedly guilty of what old Dr. More calls
a _prosopolepsia_,--_i.e._ of the crime of judging men by their looks.
At dinner, however, we gradually ate ourselves into conversation: we
differed, and disputed, and agreed, and then differed, disputed and
agreed again. I found first, that my chance companions we