Academy of Science. 



champion of Ireland, and was angry at the boasting of a certain Scotch giant, 

 who oflered to give the Irish champion a beating, provided he could cross over to 

 Ireland without getting wet. Thereupon Fin McCoul obtained permission of the 

 king, and built a causeway straight over to the dwelling-place of the Scot. Upon 

 this causeway the Scot crossed over to Ireland, and was badly beaten by Fin 

 McCoul, who then generously invited the Scot to continue in Ireland. The invita- 

 tion was accepted, for everybody knows that Scotland has ever been a liard place 

 to get a living in, while Ireland was always the richest country in the world. 

 May not this legend point to the former existence of the whole as parts of a 

 causeway betvvein Staffa and Ireland? It certainly indicates an old belief of the 

 people in the existence of such a causeway. 



I conclude thtse notes with one more thought on the formation of Fingal's Cave 

 — a thought that occurred to me when surveying the ecclesiastical ruins of lona, a 

 thought of which I can not say whether it is original because peculiar, or peculiar 

 because original. The island of lona, nine miles southwest of Staffa, was one of 

 the first seats of Christianity in Britain. St. Coloniba, an Irish missionary, began 

 religious foundations there in the fourth century. He was one of the Culdees, who 

 preferred lonely and retired places. In this island are many fine old ruins of a 

 cathedral, a chapel and nunnery, and some peculiar carved pillars called the lona 

 crosses. Of these crosses there were in the island, previous to the Reformation, 

 about 360, marking the graves of kings, abbots and monks. These cros^ses seemed 

 to be of basalt, like the pillars of Fingal's Cave. Now while in Fingal's Cave, I 

 was wondering how it was possible that the sides of the cave, as they are at present, 

 could have been formed by the forces of nature alone. For the pillars along the 

 sides are broken out to the width of five or six feet, leaving their broken ends 

 adhering to the crushed basalt of the roof, whih; the lower ends form a pathway 

 by which one may traverse the length of the cave as in a side gallery of a church. 

 It seems impossible that these columns should be thus broken by nature, and so 

 when I saw the crosses on the adjacent island, the thought came at once, that they 

 were the missing pillars of Fingal's Cave. Is it not possible that the.se hardy 

 Christians pried out, as would be comparatively easy, the pillars along the sides 

 of the cave, and made them into the crosses that once marked the graves of their 

 dead? The number of broken columns in the cave I judged to be about equal 

 to the number of the crosses — three hundred and sixty. Perhaps, then, the cave as 

 it now stands is pan tally the work of man. 



Possibly, too, It was used as a place of retreat or worship by the Culdees before 

 they built their cathedral in lona. It would certainly be a beautiful thought to 

 the Christian mmd, that the earliest songs and prayers of his faith went up to 

 the Creator from this temple of His creation, which seems to me nobler than any 

 yet rnised by human hands. 



I r> member that just as we were entering the cave, fifty tourists m the farther 

 end look up together the strains of the '"Old Hundredth " hymn; and as the full notes 

 went up along the great shadowy vault, and rolling back and forth multiplied into 

 a sounding flood of music, it seemed to me that I had never heard a hymn ot praise 

 in so appropriate a place. 



Then followed the strains of "God Save the Queen," so grateful to American 

 ears as our national hymn. And there, as it were, in the very bosom ot the earth, 

 witli the prismatic tints of blue and green and gold in the vault above answering 

 back the beams of rising light reflected from the -waves below, with the boom 

 of the sea, as it rolled Us long surues up the watery aisle ana hurhd them 

 thundering against the opposing wall, closed in about on every nand by tne 



