The dry-arm bones
of the charnel-house in the rock may have been tugging around it when
the galleys of the M'Leod hove in sight. The traditional history of
Eigg, said my friend the minister, compared with that of some of the
neighboring islands, presents a decapitated aspect: the M'Leods cut it
off by the neck. Most of the present inhabitants can tell which of their
ancestors, grandfather, or great-grandfather, or great-great-grandfather,
first settled in the place, and where they came from; and, with the
exception of a few vague legends about St. Donan and his grave, which were
preserved apparently among the people of the other Small Isles, the island
has no early traditional history.

We had now reached the Scuir. There occur, intercalated with the
columnar beds, a few bands of a buff-colored non-columnar trap,
described by M'Culloch as of a texture intermediate between a greenstone
and a basalt, and which, while the pitchstone around it seems nearly
indestructible, has weathered so freely as to form horizontal grooves
along the face of the rock, from two to five yards in depth. One of
these runs for several hundred feet along the base of the Scuir, just at
the top of the talus, and greatly resembles a piazza, lacking the outer
pillars. It is from ten to twelve feet in height, by from fifteen to
twenty in depth; the columns of the pitch stone-bed immediately above
it seem perilously hanging in mid air; and along their sides there
trickles, in even the driest summer weather,--for the Scuir is a
condenser on an immense scale--minute runnels of water, that patter
ceaselessly in front of the long deep hollow, like rain from the eaves
of a cottage during a thunder shower. Inside, however, all is dry, and
the floor is covered to the depth of several inches with the dung of
sheep and cattle, that find, in this singular mountain piazza, a place
of shelter. We had brought a pickaxe with us; and the dry and dusty
floor, composed mainly of a gritty conglomerate, formed the scene of our
labors. It is richly fossiliferous, though the organisms have no
specific variety; and never, certainly, have I found the remains of
former creations in a scene in which they more powerfully addressed
themselves to the imagination. A stratum of peat-moss, mixed with
fresh-water shells, and resting on a layer of vegetable mould, from
which the stumps and roots of trees still protruded, was once found in
Italy, buried beneath an ancient tesselated