FIRST GEOLOGICAL WORKS 271 



meeting of the British Association in Glasgow. It was 

 there that Agassiz, who had come fresh from the 

 study of Swiss glaciers to the Scottish Highlands, 

 announced that he had found clear evidence that the 

 mountains of this country had once also nourished 

 their glaciers and snow-fields. It was then, too, that 

 the same illustrious naturalist gave the first account 

 of the fossils found by Hugh Miller at Cromarty, 

 one of which he named after its discoverer. In that 

 gathering of eminent men, Murchison declared that 

 the articles which had been appearing in the Witness 

 were ' written in a style so beautiful and poetical as 

 to throw plain geologists like himself into the shade.' 

 Buckland, famous for his own eloquent pages in the 

 Bridgewater Treatise, expressed his unbounded aston- 

 ishment and admiration, affirming that ' he would 

 give his left hand to possess such powers of descrip- 

 tion.' The articles were next year collected and 

 expanded into his Old Red Sandstone, or New Walks 

 in an Old Field — the first and, in some respects, the 

 freshest and most delightful of all his scientific 

 volumes. 



In subsequent years there appeared in the same 

 columns his Cruise of the Betsy — a series of papers 

 written among the Western Isles, and full of the 

 poetry and geological charm of that marvellous region ; 

 his Rambles of a Geologist, in which he included the 

 results of his wanderings over Scotland between 

 1840 and 1848, and other essays, the more impor- 

 tant of which were collected with pious care by his 

 widow, and published in a succession of volumes 

 after his death. His First Impressions of England 



