360 MAN OF SCIENCE. 



flower ; but as it is in green and red it has got its 

 superior beauty protected by a cover of glass. Is there 

 nothing akin in Highland gentility to the stately gen- 

 tility of the savage ? The dignified Indian chief, when 

 determined on being very fine, smears his forehead with 

 vermilion, and sticks himself round with glass beads/ 



' Monday evening. 



* I have been spending the day, from nine o'clock 

 till five, among the cliffs to the north of Helmsdale. 

 Rare sport. Fossil wood and corals may be gathered 

 on the shore by tons, and there are abundance of 

 bivalves, serpulse, impressions of ammonites, spines of 

 echini, and some fine belemnites. I found a piece of 

 fossil wood, a cross-section of a tree showing the pith 

 and the annual rings, which measures rather more than 

 twenty inches across. It was so weighty that I had to 

 employ three boys to carry it to Helmsdale, where it 

 lies to be shipped for Leith by the first vessel. By 

 being at an expense of a few shillings with it, it may be 

 rendered one of the most splendid specimens of the kind 

 anywhere in existence. If sawn through the centre, and 

 then polished, it will show the growths of at least fifty 

 summers, and the alternating checks of as many winters. 

 The polishing cannot cost me more than six or eight 

 shillings, and it will form an ornament for your mantel- 

 piece splendid to your heart's content. Some of the 

 corals are of great size. I saw one nearly three feet in 

 diameter, and which, to all appearance, would not have 

 attained to so great a bulk in less than a century. At 

 least, the brain-stone coral of the tropics, which it very 

 nearly resembles, takes a full hundred years to attain a 

 size equally great. I could, of course, bring only frag- 

 ments away with me, but even the smallest are pretty, 



