174 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 
tains a large amount of amusing and extraordinary fact; and 
his description of the formation of a peat-moss in the central 
Highlands of Ross-shire has been quoted by almost every 
naturalist who, since the days of the sagacious nobleman, 
has written on the formation of peat. His life was extended 
to extreme old age; and as his literary ardor remained un- 
diminished till the last, some of his writings were produced 
at a period when most other men are sunk in the incurious 
indifferency and languor of old age. And among these later 
productions are his remarks on peat. He relates that, when 
a very young man, he had marked, in passing on a journey 
through the central Highlands of Ross-shire, a wood of very 
ancient trees, doddered and moss-grown, and evidently pass- 
ing into a state of death through the last stages of decay. 
He had been led by business into the same district many 
years after, when in middle life, and found that the wood had 
entirely disappeared, and that the heathy hollow which it had 
covered was now occupied by a green, stagnant morass, un- 
varied in its tame and level extent by either bush or tree. 
In his old age he again visited the locality, and saw the green 
surface roughened with dingy-colored hollows, and several 
Highlanders engaged in it in cutting peat in a stratum several 
feet in depth. What he had once seen an aged forest had 
now become an extensive peat-moss. 
Some time towards the close of the seventeenth century 
he purchased the lands of Cromarty, where his turn for mi- 
nute observation seems to have anticipated — little, however, 
to his own profit—some of the later geological discoveries. 
There is a deep, wooded ravine in the neighborhood of the 
town, traversed by a small stream, which has laid bare, for 
the space of about forty yards in the opening of the hollow, 
the gray sandstone and stratified clays of the inferior fish 
