remains of a prostrate forest.

CHAPTER III.

Structure of the Scuir--A stray Column--The Piazza--A buried Pine
Forest the Foundation of the Scuir--Geological Poachers in a Fossil
Preserve--_Pinites Eiggensis_--Its Description--Witham's
Experiments on Fossil Pine of Eigg--Rings of the Pine--Ascent of
the Scuir--Appearance of the Top--White Pitchstone--Mr. Greig's
Discovery of Pumice--A Sunset Scene--The Manse and the Yacht--The
Minister's Story--A Cottage Repast--American Timber drifted to the
Hebrides--Agency of the Gulf Stream--The Minister's Sheep.

As we climbed the hill-side, and the Shinar-like tower before us rose
higher over the horizon at each step we took, till it seemed pointing at
the middle sky, we could mark peculiarities in its structure which
escape notice in the distance. We found it composed of various beds,
each of which would make a Giant's Causeway entire, piled over each
other like stories in a building, and divided into columns, vertical, or
nearly so, in every instance except in one bed near the base, in which
the pillars incline to a side, as if losing footing under the
superincumbent weight. Innumerable polygonal fragments,--single stones
of the building,--lie scattered over the slope, composed, like almost
all the rest of the Scuir, of a peculiar and very beautiful stone,
unlike any other in Scotland--a dark pitchstone-porphyry, which,
inclosing crystals of glassy feldspar, resembles in the hand-specimen, a
mass of black sealing-wax, with numerous pieces of white bugle stuck
into it. Some of the detached polygons are of considerable size; few of
them larger and bulkier, however, than a piece of column of this
characteristic porphyry, about ten feet in length by two feet in
diameter, which lies a full mile away from any of the others, in the
line of the old burying-ground, and distant from it only a few hundred
yards. It seems to have been carried there by man: we find its bearing
from the Scuir lying nearly at right angles with the direction of the
drift-boulders of the western coast, which are, besides, of rare
occurrence in the Hebrides; nor has it a single neighbor; and it seems
not improbable, as a tradition of the island testifies, that it was
removed thus far for the purpose of marking some place of sepulture, and
that the catastrophe of the cave arrested its progress after by far the
longer and rougher portion of the way had been passed.