most extended plains, than by the agency of forces limited to the
locality. They testify, Agassiz would perhaps say, not regarding the
existence of some local glacier that descended from the higher grounds
into the valley, but respecting the existence of the great polar
glacier. I felt, however, in this bleak and solitary hollow, with the
grooved and polished platforms at my feet, stretching away amid the
heath, like flat tombstones in a graveyard, that I had arrived at one
geologic inscription to which I still wanted the key. The vesicular
structure of the traps on the one hand, identical with that of so many
of our modern lavas,--the ripple-markings of the arenaceous beds on the
other, indistinguishable from those of the sea-banks on our coasts,--the
upturned strata and the overlying trap,--told all their several stories
of fire, or wave, or terrible convulsion, and told them simply and
clearly; but here was a story not clearly told. It summoned up doubtful,
ever-shifting visions,--now of a vast ice continent, abutting on this
far isle of the Hebrides from the Pole, and trampling heavily over
it,--now of the wild rush of a turbid, mountain-high flood breaking in
from the west, and hurling athwart the torn surface, rocks, and stones,
and clay,--now of a dreary ocean rising high along the hills, and
bearing onward with its winds and currents, huge icebergs, that now
brushed the mountain-sides, and now grated along the bottom of the
submerged valleys. The inscription on the polished surfaces, with its
careless mixture of groove and scratch, is an inscription of very
various readings.

We passed along a transverse hollow, and then began to ascend a
hill-side, from the ridge of which the water sheds to the opposite shore
of the island, and on which we catch our first glimpse of Scuir More,
standing up over the sea, like a pyramid shorn of its top. A brown
lizard, nearly five inches in length, startled by our approach, ran
hurriedly across the path; and our guide, possessed by the general
Highland belief that the creature is poisonous, and injures cattle,
struck at it with a switch, and cut it in two immediately behind the
hinder legs. The upper half, containing all that anatomists regard as
the vitals, heart, brain, and viscera, all the main nerves, and all the
larger arteries, lay stunned by the blow, as if dead; nor did it
manifest any signs of vitality so long as we remained beside it; whereas
the lower half, as if the