nd of man to grasp. The eternity that hath passed is an ocean without
a further shore, and a finite conception may in vain attempt to span it
over. But from the beach, strewed with wrecks, on which we stand to
contemplate it, we see far out towards the cloudy horizon, many a dim
islet and many a pinnacled rock, the sepulchres of successive eras,--the
monuments of consecutive creations: the entire prospect is studded over
with these landmarks of a hoar antiquity, which, measuring out space
from space, constitute the vast whole a province of time; nor can the
eye reach to the open, shoreless infinitude beyond, in which only God
existed; and, as in a sea-scene in nature, in which headland stretches
dim and blue beyond headland, and islet beyond islet, the distance seems
not lessened, but increased, by the crowded objects--we borrow a
larger, not a smaller idea of the distant eternity, from the vastness of
the measured periods that occur between.

Over the lower bed of conglomerate, which here, as on the east coast, is
of great thickness, we find a bed of gray stratified clay, containing a
few calcareo-argillaceous nodules. The conglomerate cliffs to the north
of the village present appearances highly interesting to the geologist.
Rising in a long wall within the pleasure-grounds of Dunolly castle, we
find them wooded atop and at the base; while immediately at their feet
there stretches out a grassy lawn, traversed by the road from the
village to the castle, which sinks with a gradual slope into the
existing sea-beach, but which ages ago must have been a sea-beach
itself. We see the bases of the precipices hollowed and worn, with all
their rents and crevices widened into caves; and mark, at a picturesque
angle of the rock, what must have been once an insulated sea-stack, some
thirty or forty feet in height, standing up from amid the rank grass, as
at one time it stood up from amid the waves. Tufts of fern and sprays of
ivy bristle from its sides, once roughened by the serrated kelp-weed and
the tangle. The Highlanders call it M'Dougal's Dog-stone, and say that
the old chieftains of Lorne made use of it as a post to which to fasten
their dogs,--animals wild and gigantic as themselves,--when the hunters
were gathering to rendezvous, and the impatient beagles struggled to
break away and begin the chase on their own behalf. It owes its
existence as a stack--for the precipice in which it was once included
has receded from around