y age of
the world trees there were.

I walked on to Stromness, and on the following morning, that of
Saturday, took boat for Hoy,--skirting, on my passage out, the eastern
and southern shores of the intervening island of Graemsay, and, on the
passage back again, its western and northern shores. The boatman, an
intelligent man,--one of the teachers, as I afterwards ascertained, in
the Free Church Sabbath-school,--lightened the way by his narratives of
storm and wreck, and not a few interesting snatches of natural history.
There is no member of the commoner professions with whom I better like
to meet than with a sensible fisherman, who makes a right use of his
eyes. The history of fishes is still very much what the history of
almost all animals was little more than half a century ago,--a matter of
mere external description, heavy often and dry, and of classification
founded exclusively on anatomical details. We have still a very great
deal to learn regarding the character, habits and instincts of these
denizens of the deep,--much, in short, respecting that faculty which is
in them through which their natures are harmonized to the inexorable
laws, and they continue to live wisely and securely, in consequence,
within their own element, when man, with all his reasoning ability, is
playing strange vagaries in his;--a species of knowledge this, by the
way, which constitutes by far the most valuable part,--the _mental_
department of natural history; and the notes of the intelligent
fisherman, gleaned from actual observation, have frequently enabled me
to fill portions of the wide hiatus in the history of fishes which it
ought of right to occupy. In passing, as we toiled along the Graemsay
coast, the ruins of a solitary cottage, the boatman furnished us with a
few details of the history and character of its last inmate, an Orkney
fisherman, that would have furnished admirable materials for one of the
darker sketches of Crabbe. He was, he said, a resolute, unsocial man,
not devoid of a dash of reckless humor, and remarkable for an
extraordinary degree of bodily strength, which he continued to retain
unbroken to an age considerably advanced, and which, as he rarely
admitted of a companion in his voyages, enabled him to work his little
skiff alone, in weather when even better equipped vessels had enough ado
to keep the sea. He had been married in early life to a
religiously-disposed woman, a member of some dissenting body; but,
l