seen. But
necessity sharpens the discerning faculty, and on this pressing
occasion I was fortunate enough to see it. It was straightway taken
down, skinned, roasted, and eaten; and, though rather rich in
ammonia,--a substance better suited to form the food of the organisms
that do not unite sensation to vitality, than organisms so high in the
scale as the minister and his friend,--we came deliberately to the
opinion, that on the whole, we could scarce have dined so well on one of
Major Bellenden's jack-boots,--"so thick in the soles," according to
Jenny Dennison, "forby being tough in the upper leather." The tide
failed us opposite the opening of Loch Alsh; the wind, long dying, at
length died out into a dead calm; and we cast anchor in ten fathoms
water, to wait the ebbing current that was to carry us through Kyle
Rhea.

The ebb-tide set in about half an hour after sunset; and in weighing
anchor to float down the Kyle,--for we still lacked wind to sail down
it,--we brought up from below, on one of the anchor-flukes, an immense
bunch of deep-sea tangle, with huge soft fronds and long slender stems,
that had lain flat on the rocky bottom, and had here and there thrown
out roots along its length of stalk, to attach itself to the rock, in
the way the ivy attaches itself to the wall. Among the intricacies of
the true roots of the bunch, if one may speak of the true roots of an
alga, I reckoned from eighteen to twenty different forms of animal
life,--Flustrae, Sertulariae, Serpulae, Anomiae, Modiolae, Astarte, Annelida,
Crustacea, and Radiata. Among the Crustaceans I found a female crab of a
reddish-brown color, considerably smaller than the nail of my small
finger, but fully grown apparently, for the abdominal flap was loaded
with spawn; and among the Echinoderms, a brownish-yellow sea-urchin
about the size of a pistol-bullet, furnished with comparatively large
but thinly-set spines. There is a dangerous rock in the Kyle Rhea, the
Caileach stone, on which the Commissioners for the Northern Lighthouses
have stuck a bit of board about the size of a pot-lid, which, as it is
known to be there, and as no one ever sees it after sunset, is really
very effective, considering how little it must have cost the country, in
wrecking vessels. I saw one of its victims, the sloop of an honest
Methodist, in whose bottom the Caileach had knocked out a hole,
repairing at Isle Ornsay; and I was told, that if I wished to see more,
I had only