the kingdom, and then overlaid them with their own
debris and rubbish to the depth of from one to forty yards. This debris,
existing in one locality as a boulder-clay more or less finely
comminuted, in another as a grossly pounded gravel, forms, with few
exceptions, that subsoil of the country on which the existing vegetation
first found root; and, being composed mainly of the formations on which
it more immediately rests, it partakes of their character,--bearing a
comparatively lean and hungry aspect over the primary rocks, and a
greatly more fertile one over those deposits in which the organic
matters of earlier creations lie diffused. Saxon industry has done much
for the primary districts of Aberdeen and Banffshires, though it has
failed to neutralize altogether the effects of causes which date as
early as the times of the Old Red Sandstone; but in the Highlands, which
belong almost exclusively to the non-fossiliferous formations, and which
were, on at least the western coasts, but imperfectly subjected to that
grinding process to which we owe our subsoils, the poor Celt has
permitted the consequences of the original difference to exhibit
themselves in full. If we except the islands of the Inner Hebrides, the
famine of 1846 was restricted in Scotland to the primary districts.

I made it my first business, on landing in Aberdeen, to wait on my
friend Mr. Longmuir, that I might compare with him a few geological
notes, and benefit by his knowledge of the surrounding country. I was,
however, unlucky enough to find that he had gone, a few days before, on
a journey, from which he had not yet returned; but, through the kindness
of Mrs. Longmuir, to whom I took the liberty of introducing myself, I
was made free of his stone-room, and held half an hour's conversation
with his Scotch fossils of the Chalk. These had been found, as the
readers of the _Witness_ must remember from his interesting paper on the
subject, on the hill of Dudwick, in the neighborhood of Ellon, and were
chiefly impressions--some of them of singular distinctness and
beauty--in yellow flint. I saw among them several specimens of the
Inoceramus, a thin-shelled, ponderously-hinged conchifer, characteristic
of the Cretaceous group, but which has no living representative; with
numerous flints, traversed by rough-edged, bifurcated hollows, in which
branched sponges had once lain; a well-preserved Pecten; the impressions
of spines of Echini of at least two distin