IN THE HIGHLANDS 265 



that I have only twice in my lifetime seen one here, 

 though I have found them in abundance in the woods of 

 the Pyrenees. Why has it died out ? Surely it is that 

 the climate has changed, and that it liked the hot 

 summers of the last century, when my grandfather 

 regularly feasted at Gairloch on ripe strawberries and 

 cherries on the King's birthday, the 4th of June ; whereas 

 now, if he were alive, and still thought strawberries and 

 cherries necessary for the proper keeping of the festival, 

 he would require to shift the day to the 4th of July 

 at least. 



The green beetle wings in the peat appear to be those 

 of the rose-beetle, which is now rather a rare insect with 

 us, but which, judging by their debris in the peat, must 

 have swarmed at one time, like the locusts in Egypt in 

 the days of the plagues . Nowadays one comes across a few 

 of them only in sunny places facing the south, but these 

 remains have been found in dark, dank hollows, looking 

 due north. Perhaps in the good old beetle days the 

 climate was so hot that they chose the shade in preference . 



Now as to when the peat began to form . It is evidently 

 a post-glacial deposit, because, when out deer-stalking, I 

 notice beds of it lying on the top of ice-polished slabs of 

 gneiss. Geologists can give us no idea of the age of the 

 rocks, though they can tell us that some rocks are young 

 in comparison to others. I wonder whether they can 

 make any guess at the date when the snow and glaciers 

 began to recede uphill from high-water mark ? To look 

 at some of the ground in the Torridon and Gairloch deer- 

 forests, one would say that the final disappearance of 

 the glaciers from some of their high corries could not 

 be such a very old story, as in some places neither peat 



