d, as
if laboring to complete on the broken remains their work of denudation
and ruin.

The disposition of land and water on this coast suggests the idea that
the Western Highlands, from the line in the interior, whence the rivers
descend to the Atlantic, with the islands beyond to the outer Hebrides,
are all parts of one great mountainous plane, inclined slantways into
the sea. First, the long withdrawing valleys of the main land, with
their brown mossy streams, change their character as they clip beneath
the sea-level, and become salt-water lochs. The lines of hills that rise
over them jut out as promontories, till cut off by some transverse
valley, lowered still more deeply into the brine, and that exists as a
kyle, minch, or sound, swept twice every tide by powerful currents. The
sea deepens as the plain slopes downward; mountain-chains stand up out
of the water as larger islands, single mountains as smaller ones, lower
eminences as mere groups of pointed rocks; till at length, as we pass
outwards, all trace of the submerged land disappears, and the wide ocean
stretches out and away its unfathomable depths. The model of some Alpine
country raised in plaster on a flat board, and tilted slantways, at a
low angle, into a basin of water, would exhibit, on a minute scale, an
appearance exactly similar to that presented by the western coast of
Scotland and the Hebrides. The water would rise along the hollows,
longitudinal and transverse, forming sounds and lochs, and surround,
island-like, the more deeply submerged eminences. But an examination of
the geology of the coast, with its promontories and islands,
communicates a different idea. These islands and promontories prove to
be of very various ages and origin. The _outer_ Hebrides may have
existed as the inner skeleton of some ancient country, contemporary with
the main land, and that bore on its upper soils the productions of
perished creations, at a time when by much the larger portion of the
_inner_ Hebrides,--Skye, and Mull, and the Small Isles,--existed as part
of the bottom of a wide sound, inhabited by the Cephalopoda and
Enaliosaurians of the Lias and the Oolite. Judging from its components,
the Long Island, like the Lammermoors and the Grampians, may have been
smiling to the sun when the Alps and the Himalaya Mountains lay buried
in the abyss; whereas the greater part of Skye and Mull must have been,
like these vast mountain-chains of the Continent, an oozy sea