of the family, and
returned to Dingwall. The following morning was gloomy, and threatened
rain; and giving up my intention of exploring Strathpeffer, I took the
morning coach for Invergordon, and then walked to Cromarty, where I
arrived just in time for breakfast.

I marked, from the top of the coach, about two miles to the north-east
of Dingwall, beds of a deep gray sandstone, identical in color and
appearance with some of the gray sandstones of the Middle Old Red of
Forfarshire, and learned that quarries had lately been opened in these
beds near Montgerald. The Old Red Sandstone lies in immense development
on the flanks of Ben-Wevis; and it is just possible that the analogue of
the gray flagstones of Forfar may be found among its upper beds. If so,
the quarriers should be instructed to look hard for organic
remains,--the broad-headed Cephalaspis, so characteristic of the
formation, and the huge Crustacean, its contemporary, that disported in
plates large as those of the steel mail of the later ages of chivalry.
The geologists of Dingwall,--if Dingwall has yet got its
geologists,--might do well to attempt determining the point. I found the
science much in advance in Cromarty, especially among the ladies,--its
great patronizers and illustrators everywhere,--and, in not a few
localities, extensive contributors to its hoards of fact. Just as I
arrived, there was a pic-nic party of young people setting out for the
Lias of Shandwick. They spent the day among its richly fossiliferous
shales and limestones, and brought back with them in the evening,
Ammonites and Gryphites enough to store a museum. Cromarty had been
visited during the summer by geologists speaking a foreign tongue, but
thoroughly conversant with the occult yet common language of the rocks,
and deeply interested in the stories which the rocks told. The vessels
in which the Crown Prince of Denmark voyaged to the Faroe Isles had
been for some time in the bay; and the Danes, his companions, votaries
of the stony science, zealously plied chisel and hammer among the Old
Red Sandstones of the coast. A townsman informed me that he had seen a
Danish Professor hammering like the tutelary Thor of his country among
the nodules in which I had found the first Pterichthys and first
Diplacanthus ever disinterred; and that the Professor, ever and anon as
he laid open a specimen, brought it to a huge smooth boulder, on which
there lay a copy of the "Old Red Sandstone," to asc