ic may be heaped up against our
shores by the impulsion of the wind. And the recurrence, during at least
the last century, of certain ebbs each season, which, when no disturbing
atmospheric phenomena interfere with their operation, are sure to lay it
dry, demonstrate, that during that period no change, even the most
minute, has taken place on our coasts, in the relative levels of sea and
shore. The waves have considerably encroached, during even the last
half-century, on the shores immediately opposite; but it must have been,
as the stone shows, simply by the attrition of the waves, and the
consequent lowering of the beach,--not through any rise in the ocean, or
any depression of the land.

The huge boulder here has been known for ages as the _Clach Malloch_, or
accursed stone, from the circumstance, says tradition, that a boat was
once wrecked upon it during a storm, and the boatmen drowned. Though
little more than seven feet in height, by about twelve in length, and
some eight or nine in breadth, its situation on the extreme line of ebb
imparts a peculiar character to the various productions, animal and
vegetable, which we find adhering to it. They occur in zones, just as on
lofty hills the botanist finds his agricultural, moorland, and alpine
zones rising in succession as he ascends, the one over the other. At its
base, where the tide rarely falls, we find two varieties of _Lobularia
digitata_, dead man's hand, the orange colored and the pale, with a
species of sertularia; and the characteristic vegetable is the
rough-stemmed tangle, or cuvy. In the zone immediately above the lowest,
these productions disappear; the characteristic animal, if animal it be,
is a flat yellow sponge,--the _Halichondria papillaris_,--remarkable
chiefly for its sharp siliceous spicula and its strong phosphoric smell;
and the characteristic vegetable is the smooth-stemmed tangle, or
queener. In yet another zone we find the common limpet and the vesicular
kelp-weed; and the small gray balanus and serrated kelp-weed form the
productions of the top. We may see exactly the same zones occurring in
broad belts along the shore,--each zone indicative of a certain
overlying depth of water; but it seems curious enough to find them all
existing in succession on one boulder. Of the boulder and its story,
however, more in my next.

CHAPTER VIII.

Imaginary Autobiography of the _Clach Malloch_ Boulder--Its
Creation--Its long night of u