ts devious course, forming, on the Glenarm shores, a line of
coast the most fantastically beautiful that can be imagined.

"If this, tedious expedition have not entirely worn out your patience,
let us now take a view of the coast of Ragery itself, from the lofty
summit of Fairhead, which overlook it. Westward we see its white cliff
rising abruptly from the ocean, corresponding accurately in materials
and elevation with those of the opposite shore, and like them, crowned
with a venerable load of the same vitrifiable rock. Eastward, we behold
it dip to the level of the sea, and soon give place to many beautiful
arrangements of basalt pillars which form the eastern end of the island,
and lie opposite to the basaltes of Fairhead, affording in every part a
reasonable presumption that the two coasts were formerly connected,
and that each was created and deranged by the same causes extensively
operating over both.

"But it is not in these larger features alone that the similitude may be
traced; the more minute and accidental circumstances serve equally well
to ascertain it.

"Thus, an heterogeneous mass of freestone, coals, iron-ore, etc. which
forms the east side of Ballycastle Bay, and appears quite different from
the common fossils of the country, may be traced also directly opposite,
running under Rathlin, with circumstances which almost demonstrably
ascertain it to be the same vein.

"What I would infer from hence is, that this whole coast has undergone
considerable changes; that those abrupt promontories, which now run
wildly into the ocean, in proud defiance of its boisterous waves, have
been rendered broken and irregular by some violent convulsion of nature;
and that the island of Ragery, standing as it were in the midst between
this and the Scottish coast, may be the surviving fragment of a large
tract of country which, at some period of time, has been buried in the
deep."

Besides this argument of the gradation from a continent of land to
a bare rock, we have another from the consideration of those rocks
themselves, so far as these could not be formed by nature in their
present state, but must have been portions of a greater mass. How, for
example, could a perpendicular mountain, such as St. Kilda, have been
produced in the ocean? Of whatever materials we shall suppose it formed,
we never shall find means for the production of such a mass in its
present insulated state. Let us take examples of this kind near our