eologist may be disposed to extend to them some little degree of
tolerance, when he considers that they distinguished two largely
developed genera of animals, to which the Author of all did not deem it
unworthy his wisdom to impart, in the act of creation, certain marked
points of resemblance, and other certain points of dissimilarity.

From the Museum, accompanied by one of the gentlemen to whom Mr.
Learmonth had introduced me at breakfast, and who obligingly undertook
to act as my guide on the occasion, I set out to visit a remarkable
stack on the sea-coast, about four miles north and west of Stromness. We
scaled together the steep granitic hill immediately over the town, and
then cut on the stack, straight as the bird flies, across a trackless
common, bare and stony, and miserably pared by the _flaughter_ spade.
The landed proprietors in this part of the mainland are very numerous,
and their properties small; and there are vast breadths of undivided
common that encircle their little estates, as the Atlantic encircles the
Orkneys. But the state in which I found the unappropriated parts of the
district had in no degree the effect of making me an opponent of
appropriation or the landholders. Our country, had it been left as a
whole to all its people, as the Communist desiderates, would ere now be
of exceedingly little value to any portion of them. The soil of the
Orkney commons has been so repeatedly pared off and carried away for
fuel, that there are now wide tracts on which there is no more soil to
pare, and which present, for the original covering of peaty mould, a
continuous surface of pale boulder-clay, here and there mottled by
detached tufts of scraggy heath, and here and there roughened by
projections of the underlying rock. All is unredeemable barrenness. On
the other hand, wherever a bit of private property appears, though in
the immediate neighborhood of these ruined wastes, the surface is
swarded over, and the soil is the better, not the worse, for the
services which it has rendered to man in the past. Whatever the Chartist
and the Leveller may think of the matter, it is, I find, virtually on
behalf of the many that the soil has been appropriated by the few. After
passing from off the tract of moor which overlies the granitic axis of
the district, to a tract equally moory which spreads over the gray
flagstones, I marked, more especially in the hollows and ravines, where
minute springs ooze from the rock, vast