harbor yonder belongs,
icebergs of very considerable size must not unfrequently have brushed
the brows of your precipices. An iceberg from eighty to a hundred feet
in thickness, and perhaps half a square mile in area, could not, in
this old state of things, have come in contact with these cliffs without
first catching the ground outside; and such an iceberg, propelled by a
fierce storm from the north-east, could not fail to lend the cliff with
which it came in collision a tremendous blow. You will find that your
shattered precipice marks, in all probability, the scene of a collision
of this character: some hard-headed iceberg must have set itself to run
down the land, and got wrecked upon it for its pains." My theory, though
made somewhat in the dark,--for I had no opportunity of seeing the
broken precipice until after my return from Orkney,--seemed to satisfy
Mr. Bremner; nor, on a careful survey of the phenomenon, the solution of
which it attempted, did I find occasion to modify or give it up.

With just knowledge enough of Mr. Bremner's peculiar province to
appreciate his views, I was much impressed by their broad and practical
simplicity; and bethought me, as we conversed, that the character of the
thinking, which, according to Addison, forms the staple of all writings
of genius, and which he defines as "simple but not obvious," is a
character which equally applies to _all_ good thinking, whatever its
special department. Power rarely resides in ingenious complexities: it
seems to eschew in every walk the elaborately attenuated and razor-edged
mode of thinking,--the thinking akin to that of the old metaphysical
poets,--and to select the broad and massive style. Hercules, in all the
representations of him which I have yet seen, is the _broad_ Hercules. I
was greatly struck by some of Mr. Bremner's views on deep-sea founding.
He showed me how, by a series of simple, but certainly not obvious
contrivances, which had a strong air of practicability about them, he
could lay down his erection, course by course, inshore, in a floating
caisson of peculiar construction, beginning a little beyond the low-ebb
line, and warping out his work piecemeal, as it sank, till it had
reached its proper place, in, if necessary, from ten to twelve fathoms
water, where, on a bottom previously prepared for it by the diving-bell,
he had means to make it take the ground exactly at the required line.
The difficulty and vast expense of building al