harles Lyell, voyage by thousands every
year;[18] and there are few of my northern readers who have not heard of
the short trip taken nearly half a century ago by the boulder of Petty
Bay, in the neighborhood of Culloden.

A Highland minister of the last century, in describing, for Sir John
Sinclair's Statistical Account, a large sepulchral cairn in his parish,
attributed its formation to an _earthquake_! Earthquakes, in these
latter times, are introduced, like the heathen gods of old, to bring
authors out of difficulties. I do not think, however,--and I have the
authority of the old critic for at least half the opinion,--that either
gods or earthquakes should be resorted to by poets or geologists,
without special occasion: they ought never to be called in except as a
last resort, when there is no way of getting on without them. And I am
afraid there have been few more gratuitous invocations of the earthquake
than on a certain occasion, some five years ago, when it was employed by
the inmate of a north-country manse, at once to account for the removal
of the boulder-stone of Petty Bay, and to annihilate at a blow the
geology of the Free Church editor of the _Witness_. I had briefly stated
in one of my papers, in referring to this curious incident, that the
boulder of the bay had been "borne nearly three hundred yards outwards
into the sea by an enclasping mass of ice, in the course of a single
tide." "Not at all," said the northern clergyman; "the cause assigned is
wholly insufficient to produce such an effect. All the ice ever formed
in the bay would be insufficient to remove such a boulder a distance,
not of three hundred, but even of _three_ yards." The removal of the
stone "_is referrible to an_ EARTHQUAKE!" The country, it would seem,
took a sudden lurch, and the stone tumbled off. It fell athwart the flat
surface of the bay, as a soup tureen sometimes falls athwart the table
of a storm-beset steamer, vastly to the discomfort of the passengers,
and again caught the ground as the land righted. Ingenious, certainly!
It does appear a little wonderful, however, that in a shock so
tremendous nothing should have fallen off except the stone. In an
earthquake on an equally great scale, in the present unsettled state of
society, endowed clergymen would, I am afraid, be in some danger of
falling out of their charges.

The boulder beside the Auldgrande has not only, like the _Clach
Malloch_, a geologic history of its own, bu