ROCKS OF SCOTLAND. 341 
Sutors, into an inflection of the shore which intervenes between 
the town and the hill of Cromarty. When the tide fell, and 
the bottom of the bay was laid bare, we found it occupied for 
many acres by the stranded ice, mass crowded upon mass, so 
that scarce an interstice could be seen between them, and all 
occupying the horizontal position of their original formation. 
As the tide rose, however, and the night fell, the gale freshened 
into a hurricane; the ice, jambed against the steep shore on 
the one hand, and exposed to the heavy roll of the waves on 
the other, began to pack, not so much by rising, as in a choked 
up river, mass over mass, as by rising on edge; and in the 
morning, when the tide had again fallen, we found it occupying, 
not the whole, as before, but only the inner portion of the bay, 
and uptilted on edge, for roods together, like, in short, the up- 
tilted Grauwacke slates of the Pentlands. And may not, I 
asked, as the scene rose fresh in memory amid the recesses of 
the hills, — may not I be now witnessing the somewhat similar 
results of some tremendous earth-storm, in which the molten 
waves of the abyss first broke up the consolidated but still com- 
paratively thin crust of our planet, as ice is broken up under 
the joint operations of storm and thaw; and then packed into 
this corner, as the ice-floats were packed into the little bay, 
those ruins of the surface which, while yet unbroken, and in 
the horizontal position, must have extended over a much greater 
space? It does seem, from the appearance of many of our 
more dislocated and older formations, that there came a time 
in the history of the globe in which there was, if I may so 
speak, no longer room to spread them out, and they had to be 
compressed, in consequence, into many a fold and wrinkle. 
Are we to infer that these ancient robings of the earth, with 
their many convolutions, which, as it were, hang loose about it, 
indicate a shrinking in its general bulk? or are they merely 
but locally too large for the portions of surface which they oc- 
j 29* 
