a tempestuous foam-encircled coast such as ours, this aerial
upheaving force is in reality, though the builder may not know it, one
of the most formidable forces with which he had to deal. And so, on
these principles, I ventured to set my stones on end,--on what was
deemed their _worst_, not their _best_ beds,--wedging them all fast
together, like staves in an anker; and there, to the scandal of all the
old rules, are they fast wedged still, firm as a rock." It was no
ordinary man that could have originated such reasonings on such a
subject, or that could have thrown himself so boldly, and to such
practical effect, on the conclusions to which they led.

Mr. Bremner adverted, in the course of our conversation, to a singular
appearance among the rocks a little to the east and south of the town
of Wick, that had not, he said, attracted the notice it deserved. The
solid rock had been fractured by some tremendous blow, dealt to it
externally at a considerable height over the sea-level, and its detached
masses scattered about like the stones of an ill-built harbor broken up
by a storm. The force, whatever its nature, had been enormously great.
Blocks of some thirty or forty tons weight had been torn from out the
solid strata, and piled up in ruinous heaps, as if the compact precipice
had been a piece of loose brickwork, or had been driven into each other,
as if, instead of being composed of perhaps the hardest and toughest
sedimentary rock in the country, they had been formed of sun-dried clay.
"I brought," continued Mr. Bremner, "one of your itinerant geological
lecturers to the spot, to get his opinion; but he could say nothing
about the appearance: it was not in his books." "I suspect," I replied,
"the phenomenon lies quite as much within your own province as within
that of the geological lecturer. It is in all probability an
illustration, on a large scale, of those floating forces with which you
operate on your foundered vessels, joined to the forces, laterally
exerted, by which you drag them towards the shore. When the sea stood
higher, or the land lower, in the eras of the raised beaches, along what
is now Caithness, the abrupt mural precipices by which your coast here
is skirted must have secured a very considerable depth of water up to
the very edge of the land;--your coast-line must have resembled the side
of a mole or wharf: and in that glacial period to which the thick
deposit of boulder-clay immediately over your