t, would never be known.

The harvest had been early; and on to the village of Stonehaven, and a
mile or two beyond, where the fossiliferous deposits end and the primary
begin, the country presented from the deck only a wide expanse of
stubble. Every farm-steading we passed had its piled stack-yard; and the
fields were bare. But the line of demarcation between the Old Red
Sandstone and the granitic districts formed also a separating line
between an earlier and later harvest; the fields of the less kindly
subsoil derived from the primary rocks were, I could see, still speckled
with sheaves; and, where the land lay high, or the exposure was
unfavorable, there were reapers at work. All along in the course of my
journey northward from Aberdeen I continued to find the country covered
with shocks, and laborers employed among them; until, crossing the Spey,
I entered on the fossiliferous districts of Moray; and then, as in the
south, the champaign again showed a bare breadth of stubble, with here
and there a ploughman engaged in turning it down. The traveller bids
farewell at Stonehaven to not only the Old Red Sandstone and the
early-harvest districts, but also to the rich wheat-lands of the
country, and does not again fairly enter upon them until, after
travelling nearly a hundred miles, he passes from Banffshire into the
province of Moray. He leaves behind him at the same line the
wheat-fields and the cottages built of red stone, to find only barley
and oats, and here and there a plot of rye, associated with cottages of
granite and gneiss, hyperstene and mica schist; but on crossing the
Spey, the red cottages reappear, and fields of rich wheat-land spread
out around them, as in the south. The circumstance is not unworthy the
notice of the geologist. It is but a tedious process through which the
minute lichen, settling on a surface of naked stone, forms in the course
of ages a soil for plants of greater bulk and a higher order; and had
Scotland been left to the exclusive operation of this slow agent, it
would be still a rocky desert, with perhaps here and there a strip of
alluvial meadow by the side of a stream, and here and there an insulated
patch of rich soil among the hollows of the crags. It might possess a
few gardens for the spade, but no fields for the plough. We owe our
arable land to that comparatively modern geologic agent, whatever its
character, that crushed, as in a mill, the upper parts of the
surface-rocks of