nsummed Centuries--Laid open to light
on a desert Island--Surrounded by an Arctic Vegetation--Undermined
by the rising Sea--Locked up and floated off on an Ice-field--At
rest on the Sea-bottom--Another Night of unsummed Years--The
Boulder raised again above the waves by the rising of the
Land--Beholds an altered Country--Pine Forests and Mammals--Another
Period of Ages passes--The Boulder again floated off by an
Iceberg--Finally at rest on the Shore of Cromarty Bay--Time and
Occasion of naming it--Strange Phenomena accounted for by
Earthquakes--How the Boulder of Petty Bay was moved--The Boulder of
Auldgrande--The old Highland Paupers--The little Parsi Girl--Her
Letter to her Papa--But one Human Nature on Earth--Journey
resumed--Conon Burying Ground--An aged Couple--Gossip.

The natural, and, if I may so speak, topographical, history of the
_Clach Malloch_,--including, of course, its zoology and botany, with
notes of those atmospheric effects on the tides, and of that stability
for ages of the existing sea-level, which it indicates,--would of itself
form one very interesting chapter: its geological history would furnish
another. It would probably tell, if it once fairly broke silence and
became autobiographical, first of a feverish dream of intense molten
heat and overpowering pressure; and then of a busy time, in which the
free molecules, as at once the materials and the artisans of the mass,
began to build, each according to its nature, under the superintendence
of a curious chemistry,--here forming sheets of black mica, there rhombs
of a dark-green hornblende and a flesh-colored feldspar, yonder
amorphous masses of a translucent quartz. It would add further, that at
length, when the slow process was over, and the entire space had been
occupied to the full by plate, molecule, and crystal, the red fiery
twilight of the dream deepened into more than midnight gloom, and a
chill unconscious night descended on the sleeper. The vast Palaeozoic
period passes by,--the scarce less protracted Secondary ages come to a
close,--the Eocene, Miocene, Pliocene epochs are ushered in and
terminate,--races begin and end,--families and orders are born and die;
but the dead, or those whose deep slumber admits not of dreams, take no
note of time; and so it would tell how its long night of unsummed
centuries seemed, like the long night of the grave, compressed into a
moment.

The