8 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 
and found I had food enough for thought that evening, with- 
out once thinking of the unhappiness of a life of labor. 
The immense masses of diluvium which we had to clear 
away rendered the working of the quarry laborious and ex- 
pensive, and all the party quitted it in a few days, to make 
trial of another that seemed to promise better. The one we 
lef. is situated, as I have said, on the southern shore of an in- 
land bay —the Bay of Cromarty; the one to which we re- 
moved has been opened in a lofty wall of cliffs that overhangs 
the northern shore of the Moray Frith. I soon found | was 
to be no loser by the change. Not the united labors of a 
thousand men for more than a thousand years could have fur- 
nished a better section of the geology of the district than this 
range of cliffs. It may be regarded as a sort of chance dis- 
section on the earth’s crust. We see in one place the pri- 
mary rock, with its veins of granite and quartz, its dizzy preci- 
pices of gneiss, and its huge masses of hornblende; we find 
the secondary rock in another, with its beds of sandstone and 
shale, its spars, its clays, and its nodular limestones. We dis- 
cover the still little known but highly interesting fossils of the 
Old Red Sandstone in one deposition ; we find the beautifully 
preserved shells and lignites of the Lias in another. There 
are the remains of two several creations at once before us. 
The shore, too, is heaped with rolled fragments of almost 
every variety of rock, — basalts, ironstones, hypersthenes, por- 
phyries, bituminous shales, and micaceous schists. In short, 
the young geologist, had he all Europe before him, could 
hardly choose for himself a better field. I had, however, no 
one to tell me so at the time, for geology had not yet travelled 
so far north; and so, without guide or vocabulary, I had to 
grope my way as I best might, and find out all its wonders 
for myself. But so slow was the process, and so much was I 
