ng the Belemnites
abbreviatus, but smaller and rather more elongated: while the other, of
a spindle form, diminishing at both ends, reminds one of the Belemnites
minimus of the Gault. The Red Sandstone in the centre of the village
occurs detached, like this Liasic bed, amid the prevailing trap, and may
be seen _in situ_ beside the southern gable of the tall, deserted
looking house at the hill-foot, that has been built of it. It is a soft,
coarse-grained, mouldering stone, ill fitted for the purposes of the
architect; and more nearly resembles the New Red Sandstone of England
and Dumfriesshire, than any other rock I have yet seen in the north of
Scotland. I failed to detect in it aught organic.

We weighed anchor about two o'clock, and beat gallantly out the Sound,
in the face of an intermittent baffling wind and a heavy swell from the
sea. I would fain have approached nearer the precipices of Ardnamurchan,
to trace along their inaccessible fronts the strange reticulations of
trap figured by Macculloch; but prudence and the skipper forbade our
trusting even the docile little Betsey, on one of the most formidable
lee shores in Scotland, in winds so light and variable, and with the
swell so high. We could hear the deep roar of the surf for miles, and
see its undulating strip of white flickering under stack and cliff. The
scenery here seems rich in legendary association. At one tack we bore
into Bloody Bay, on the Mull coast,--the scene of a naval battle between
two island chiefs; at another, we approached, on the mainland, a cave
inaccessible save from the sea, long the haunt of a ruthless Highland
pirate. Ere we rounded the headland of Ardnamurchan, the slant light of
evening was gleaming athwart the green acclivities of Mull, barring them
with long horizontal lines of shadow, where the trap terraces rise step
beyond step, in the characteristic stair-like arrangement to which the
rock owes its name; and the sun set as we were bearing down in one long
tack on the Small Isles. We passed the Isle of Muck, with its one low
hill; saw the pyramidal mountains of Rum looming tall in the offing; and
then, running along the Isle of Eigg, with its colossal Scuir rising
between us and the sky, as if it were a piece of Babylonian wall, or of
the great wall of China, only vastly larger, set down on the ridge of a
mountain, we entered the channel which separates the island from one of
its dependencies, Eilean Chaisteil, and cast anchor i