190 THE LIFE OF JAMES D. FORBES. [CHAP. 



nomer Royal lectured for Forbes in his College class room, 

 and received from the University the degree of LL.D. 



The summer home of Professor and Mrs. Forbes and 

 their young family was for the year 1849 Chiefs wood, 

 in the Rhymer's Glen, well known to readers of the 

 Life of Scott as the home of the son-in-law and biographer 

 of the poet. Forbes' time there was spent in writing for 

 the Edinburgh Review a paper on Greenwich Observatory, 

 in working at a map of the Mer dc Glace, reducing his 

 Alpine surveys of 1846, or in a tour among the Border 

 hills. This was varied by a longer excursion in autumn, 

 of which the following letter is a record : 



'To M. STUDER, BERNE. 



1 CHIEFSWOOD, August 29^, 1849; 



' You must have had more " second sight " than 

 myself when, in your kind and most welcome letter 

 of the 1 4th July, you prophesy a tour in the footsteps 

 of Walter Scott as my summer's .occupation. You will 

 not easily believe, perhaps, that, not content with the 

 s'-riiery of Melrose, the glen of Thomas the Rhymer, 

 the Abbey, arid the glen of the White Lady of Avenel, 

 I have been on the track of the Pirate, the Fitful 

 Head, the Cathedral of Kirkwall, the stones of Stennis, 

 and the Isle of Hoy. In short, I have returned from 

 a tour of Orkney and Shetland. I was induced thereto 

 by my friend Mr. Airy having projected this excursion. 

 1 visited Orkney with him and Mrs. Airy, but I went on 

 to Shetland alone. Caithness, the northernmost part 

 of the mainland of Scotland, and Orkney are chiefly 

 remarkable, geologically, for the great extension of cer- 

 tain members of the old red sandstone formations, which 

 have been ably described by Mr. Hugh Miller, and which 

 contain, you are aware, a host of fishes -which charac- 

 terize "that formation, and which are perhaps nowhere 

 found in such perfection, although in Russia the same 

 species have been found. These are the fish named 

 and classified so successfully by Agassiz, such as the 

 Asterolepis, Glyptolepia, &c. I visited some of these 



