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interior in a frowning wall of basalt, and bounded on the south, where
it opens to the sea, by the Scuir More. The Scuir is a precipitous
mountain, that rises from twelve to fifteen hundred feet direct over the
beach. M'Culloch describes it as inaccessible, and states that it is
only among the debris at its base that its heliotropes can be procured;
but the distinguished mineralogist must have had considerably less skill
in climbing rocks than in describing them, as, indeed, some of his
descriptions, though generally very admirable, abundantly testify. I am
inclined to infer from his book, after having passed over much of the
ground which he describes, that he must have been a man of the type so
well hit off by Burns in his portrait of Captain Grose,--round, rosy,
short-legged, quick of eye but slow of foot, quite as indifferent a
climber as Bailie Nicol Jarvie, and disposed at times, like the elderly
gentleman drawn by Crabbe, to prefer the view at the hill-foot to the
prospect from its summit. I found little difficulty in scaling the sides
of Scuir More for a thousand feet upwards,--in one part by a route
rarely attempted before,--and in ensconcing myself among the
bloodstones. They occur in the amygdaloidal trap of which the upper part
of the hill is mainly composed, in great numbers, and occasionally in
bulky masses; but it is rare to find other than small specimens that
would be recognized as of value by the lapidary. The inclosing rock must
have been as thickly vesicular in its original state as the scoria of a
glass-house; and all the vesicles, large and small, like the retorts and
receivers of a laboratory, have been vessels in which some curious
chemical process has been carried on. Many of them we find filled with a
white semi-translucent or opaque chalcedony; many more with a pure green
earth, which, where exposed to the bleaching influences of the weather,
exhibits a fine verdigris hue, but which in the fresh fracture is
generally of an olive green, or of a brownish or reddish color. I have
never yet seen a rock in which this earth was so abundant as in the
amygdaloid of Scuir More. For yards together in some places we see it
projecting from the surface in round globules, that very much resemble
green peas, and that occur as thickly in the inclosing mass as pebbles
in an Old Red Sandstone conglomerate. The heliotrope has formed among it
in centres, to which the chalcedony seems to have been drawn, as if by