ralist, and not
without its use to the geological student. I have had an opportunity
elsewhere of observing a curious change which fresh-water induces on the
flounder. In the brackish water of an estuary it becomes, without
diminishing in general size, thicker and more fleshy than when in its
legitimate habitat the sea; but the flesh loses in quality what it gains
in quantity;--it is flabby and insipid, and the margin-fin lacks always
its delicious strip of transparent fat. I fain wish that some
intelligent resident on the shores of Stennis would set himself
carefully to examine its productions, and that then, after registering
his observations for a few years, he would favor the world with its
natural history.

The Standing Stones,--second in Britain of their kind, to only those of
Stonehenge,--occur in two groups; the smaller group (composed, however,
of the taller stones) on the southern promontory; the larger on the
northern one. Rude and shapeless, and bearing no other impress of the
designing faculty than that they are stuck endwise in the earth, and
form, as a whole, regular figures on the sward, there is yet a sublime
solemnity about them, unsurpassed in effect by any ruin I have yet seen,
however grand in its design or imposing in its proportions. Their very
rudeness, associated with their ponderous bulk and weight, adds to their
impressiveness. When there is art and taste enough in a country to hew
an ornate column, no one marvels that there should also be mechanical
skill enough in it to set it up on end; but the men who tore from the
quarry these vast slabs, some of them eighteen feet in height over the
soil, and raised them where they now stand, must have been ignorant
savages, unacquainted with machinery, and unfurnished, apparently, with
a single tool. And what, when contemplating their handiwork, we have to
subtract in idea from their minds, we add, by an involuntary process, to
their bodies: we come to regard the feats which they have accomplished
as performed by a power not mechanical, but gigantic. The consideration,
too, that these remains,--eldest of the works of man in this
country,--should have so long survived all definite tradition of the
purposes which they were raised to serve, so that we now merely know
regarding them that they were religious in their uses,--products of that
ineradicable instinct of man's nature which leads him in so many various
ways to attempt conciliating the Powers of ano