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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
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