CHAPTER XX 



PEAT* 



Having been honoured by a request from the Secretary 

 of the Inverness Scientific Societv and Field Club to 

 write a paper, I rather reluctantly agreed, doubting my 

 capability of producing with my pen anything sufficiently 

 interesting to make it worth listening to; and now that 

 I have written on " Peat," I feel as one who is not an 

 authority on the subject, but rather as one in search 

 of knowledge. Still, I hope that I may be the feeble 

 means of rousing someone else more capable than myself 

 to take up and go fully into the subject on which I write. 

 I have often wondered why so very much energy has 

 been expended in writing and theorising on the funda- 

 mental gneiss and the Torrid on red, whereas no one 

 seems to take any notice of the thick black layer which 

 usually covers both these ancient rocks in this part of the 

 country. 



The American tourists profess to be always interested 

 in what they amusingly term " the elegant ruins of the 

 old country.'' Now, though my peat is undoubtedly 

 a ruin, and a very old one, I fear I cannot exactly lay 

 claim to its being very elegant (being certainly more 

 useful than ornamenoal), but I do think it deserves to be 

 classed among the most interesting natural phenomena 

 of our land. Not only is the actual peat itself in- 



* A paper read at a meeting of the Inverness Scientific Society 

 and Field Club in 1908. 



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