THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 99 
trouble. Now, in the neighborhood of this granitic wedge, 
or wall, the strata are arranged, not like books in a box, — 
such was their original position, — but like books on the 
shelves of alibrary. They have been unpacked and arranged 
by the uptilting agent; and the knowledge of them, which 
could only have been attained in their first circumstances by 
perforating them with a shaft of immense depth, may now 
be acquired simply by passing over their edges. A morn- 
ing’s saunter gives us what would have cost, but for the 
upheaving granite, the labor of a hundred miners for five 
years. 
By far the greater portion of the life of the writer was 
spent within less than half an hour’s walk of one of these 
upturned edges. I have described the granitic rock, With 
reference to the disturbance it has occasioned as a wedge 
forced from below, and with reference to its rectilinear posi- 
tion in the sandstone district which it traverses, as a stone 
wall running half-way into a field. It may communicate a 
still correcter and livelier idea to think of it as a row of 
wedges, such as one sometimes sees in a quarry when the work- 
men are engaged in cutting out from the mass some immense 
block, intended to form a stately column or huge architrave. 
The eminences, like the wedges, are separated; in some 
places the sandstone lies between— in others there occur 
huge chasms filled by the sea. The Friths of Cromarty and 
Beauly, for instance, and the Bay of Munlochy, open into 
the interior between these wedge-like eminences ; — the well- 
known Sutors of Cromarty represent two of the wedges ; 
and it was the section furnished by the Southern Sutor that 
lay so immediately in the writer’s neighborhood. The line 
of the Cromarty Frith forms an angle of about thirty-five 
degrees with that of the granitic line of wedge-like hills which 
