192 MASS OF BLUE LIMESTONE. 



wall of cliffs that overliangs the northern shore of the 

 Moraj^ Frith. The interest he displayed in the objects 

 around him, is strikingly contrasted with the ignorance 

 and superstition to which he refers. 



" In the course of the first day's employment," he 

 says, " I picked up a nodular mass of blue limestone, 

 and laid it open by a stroke of the hammer. Wonderful 

 to relate, it contained inside a beautifully finished piece 

 of sculpture — one of the volutes, apparently, of an Ionic 

 capital. Was there another such curiosity in the whole 

 world ? I broke open a few other nodules of similar 

 appearance — for they lay pretty thickly on the shore — 

 and found that there might be. In one of these were 

 what seemed to be scales of fishes, and the impressions 

 of a few minute bivalves, prettily striated : in the centre 

 of another, there was actually a piece of decayed wood. 

 Of all nature's riddles, these seemed to me at once 

 the most interesting and the most difficult to expound. 

 I treasured them carefully up, and was told by one of 

 the workmen to whom I showed them, that there was 

 a part of the shore about two miles farther to the west, 

 where curiously shaped stones, somewhat like the heads 

 of boarding-pikes, were occasionally picked up ; and 

 that in his father's days the country people called them 

 thunderbolts, and deemed them of sovereign efficacy 



