, and the depth two feet eight inches. The removed mass had been
borne to a distance of thirty feet, when it was shivered into thirteen
or more lesser fragments, some of which, were carried still farther,
from 30 to 120 feet. A block, nine feet two inches by six feet and a
half, and four feet thick, was hurried up the acclivity to a distance of
150 feet."[391]

At Northmavine, also, angular blocks of stone have been removed in a
similar manner to considerable distances by the waves of the sea, some
of which are represented in the annexed figure.

_Effects of lightning._--In addition to numerous examples of masses
detached and driven by the waves, tides, and currents from their place,
some remarkable effects of lightning are recorded in these isles. At
Funzie, in Fetlar, about the middle of the last century, a rock of
mica-schist, 105 feet long, ten feet broad, and in some places four feet
thick, was in an instant torn by a flash of lightning from its bed, and
broken into three large and several smaller fragments. One of these,
twenty-six feet long, ten feet broad, and four feet thick, was simply
turned over. The second, which was twenty-eight feet long, seventeen
broad, and five feet in thickness, was hurled across a high point to the
distance of fifty yards. Another broken mass, about forty feet long, was
thrown still farther, but in the same direction, quite into the sea.
There were also many smaller fragments scattered up and down.[392]

[Illustration: Fig. 27.

Stony fragments drifted by the sea. Northmavine, Shetland.]

When we thus see electricity co-operating with the violent movements of
the ocean in heaping up piles of shattered rocks on dry land and beneath
the waters, we cannot but admit that a region which shall be the
theatre, for myriads of ages, of the action of such disturbing causes,
might present, at some future period, if upraised far above the bosom of
the deep, a scene of havoc and ruin that may compare with any now found
by the geologist on the surface of our continents.

In some of the Shetland Isles, as on the west of Meikle Roe, dikes, or
veins of soft granite, have mouldered away; while the matrix in which
they were inclosed, being of the same substance, but of a firmer
texture, has remained unaltered. Thus, long narrow ravines, sometimes
twenty feet wide, are laid open, and often give access to the waves.
After describing some huge cavernous apertures into which the sea flows
for 250 fee