146 REFLECTIONS ON HOLBORN HEAD. CHAP. xi. 



reptile fish traced on the rock. It was the cranial 

 buckler of one of the hugest ganoids of the Old Ked 

 Sandstone, the Asterolepis. And there it lay, as it had 

 been deposited, far back in the bypast eternity, at the 

 bottom of a muddy sea. But the mud existed now as a 

 dense grey rock, hard as iron, and what had been the 

 bottom of a palaeozoic sea had become the edge of a 

 dizzy precipice, elevated more than a hundred yards 

 over the surf. The world must have been a very differ- 

 ent world, I said, when that creature lived, from what 

 it is now. There could have been no such precipices 

 then; a few flat islands comprised, in all probability, 

 the whole dry land of the globe ; and that emotion 

 of which I had just been compassed, is it not something 

 new in creation also ? The deep gloom of these perilous 

 gulphs these incessant roarings these dizzy precipices 

 the sublime roll of these huge waves are they not 

 associated in my mind with a certain idea of danger a 

 feeling of incipient terror, which, in all God's creation, 

 man, and man only, is organised to experience ? Is it 

 not an emotion which neither the inferior animals on 

 the one hand, nor the higher spiritual existences on the 

 other, can in the least feel an emotion dependent on 

 the union of a living soul with a fragile body of clay, 

 easily broken ?"* 



While at Thurso, Miller fired his friend's mind with 

 the injustice done to the poor remnant of the Highlanders 

 who still remain in the far north. Many years before, 

 the Celts had been driven out of their homes, such as 



* Hugh Miller s Lectures on Geology, pp. 199, 200. Ed. 1869. 



