104 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 
which has, in consequence, its sprinkling of fragments of 
gneiss, transported by an agency so obvious. But for every 
one such fragment which it bears, we find at least ten boul- 
ders that have been borne for forty and fifty miles in the op- 
posite direction from the interior of the country —a direction 
in which no transporting agency now exists. The tempests 
of thousands of years have conveyed for but a few hundred 
yards not more than a tithe of the materials of this tract; 
nine tenths of the whole have been conveyed by an older 
agency over spaces of forty and fifty miles. How immense- 
ly more powerful, then, or how immensely protracted in its 
operation, must that older agency have been! 
I passed onwards, and reached a little bay, or, rather, an- 
gular indentation of the coast, in the neighborhood of the 
town. It was laid bare by the tide, this morning, far beyond 
its outer opening; and the huge, table-like boulder, which 
occupies nearly its centre, and to which, in a former chapter, 
I have had occasion to refer, held but a middle place between 
the still darkened flood-line that ran high along the beach, 
and the brown line of ebb that bristled far below with forests 
of the rough-stemmed tangle. This little bay, or inflection 
of the coast, serves as a sort of natural wear in detaining 
floating drift-weed, and is often found piled, after violent 
storms from the east, with accumulations, many yards in ex- 
tent, and several feet in depth, of kelp and tangle, mixed 
with zoophytes and mollusca, and the remains of fish killed 
among the shallows by the tempest. Early in the last cen- 
tury, a large body of herrings, pursued by whales and por- 
poises, were stranded in it, to the amount of several hundred 
barrels; and it is said that salt and cask failed the packers 
when but comparatively a small portion of the shoal were 
cured, and that by much the greatest part of them were car- 
