131 
the period of the general decadence of the Irish abbeys and monas- 
teries. A further detail would be inconsistent with my present 
limits. 
SECTION SIXTH. 
GENERAL APPEARANCE.—MOPERN STATE. 
The approach to the Isles of Aran presents a view awfully sub- 
lime. Elevated high above a wide tract of deep and boisterous 
ocean, and opposing to the beating billows an impregnable and per- 
pendicular barrier of massy and lava-coloured rock, several hundred 
feet high, one may easily associate with the sublimity of the scene, 
and its Alpine grandeur, something of the terrors of a Vesuvian 
eruption, or of that violent shock, which is supposed to have torn 
these isles from the neighbouring continent. Our annalists insist on 
the latter event; and the late Mr. Kirwan is entirely, though un- 
knowingly, with them. Ina note on his “ Primitive State of the 
Globe,” page 58, he thus observes : 
«The bay of Galway appears to have been originally a Granite 
mountain, shattered and swallowed during this catastrophe ; for, 
fragments of granite are found on its northern shore, though none 
in the neighbouring mountains, which are chiefly argillitic. And 
so a vast mass of granite, called the Gregory, lately on one of the 
isles of Aran, one hundred feet, at least, above the level of the sea, 
ten or twelve feet high, as many broad, and about twenty in length; 
though the whole mass of this island consists of compact lime-stone, 
and no granitic hill within eight or ten miles of it. This was 
shattered by lightening in 1774.” 
As you advance close to the islands, you observe craggy and 
