312 THE JOURNEYMAN. 



feet in thickness ; and though thousands of cart-loads 

 have of late years been carried away for lime, the supply 

 seems as great as at first. As we passed through, 

 immense shoals of shrimps and young flounders were 

 striking against our naked feet, reminding me, from 

 their numbers and their extreme minuteness, of the 

 cloud of flies that buzzed round my head at noon. I 

 saw the sand-worms lie so thickly that their little pyra- 

 mids fretted the entire surface nearly as far as the eye 

 could reach, reminding one of the ripple raised by a 

 light breeze on a sheet of water, while the remote 

 horizon was darkened by endless beds of mussels and 

 periwinkles. I am certain there is more of animal life 

 in a few acres of this waste than is comprised in the 

 human population of the entire world. In some com- 

 paratively recent era recent, at least, in the chronology 

 of the geologist the sea seems to have stood several 

 fathoms higher on our coasts than it does at present. 

 Large beds of shells have been found in the interior of 

 the valley, the opening of which is occupied by the 

 sands of Nigg, more than two miles beyond the extreme 

 rise of the tide; and John tells me that, not many 

 years since, the bones of a fish of the whale species 

 were found in the parish of Fearn, at a still higher level. 

 ' I was shown, on quitting the sands, two fine 

 chalybeate springs, which gush out of a rock of veined 

 sandstone among the woods of Tarbat-house. They are 

 thickly surrounded by pine and willow, in a solitary but 

 not unpleasing recess, and their waters, after leaping to 

 the base of the rock, with a half-gurgling, half-tinkling 

 sound, unite in a small runnel, and form a little melan- 

 choly lochan, matted over with weeds, and edged with 

 flags and rushes. The waters of both are strongly 

 though not equally acidulous, and the course both along 



