418 GEOLOGY A MYSTERY. CHAP. xxiv. 



The sea was his delight. He wandered along the 

 shores, and found things rich and beautiful and full of 

 wonder. Though he wandered about solitary, he had no 

 time for melancholy dreams. Every flower melted him, 

 every star touched him, even every beetle engraved 

 itself upon his mind. He was a reverent man. Un- 

 belief is blindness, but his mind was all eyes, and his 

 imagination was full of light, and life, and being. 



The earth became to him, in a measure, transparent. 

 It drew him out of the narrow sphere of self-interest. 

 Everywhere he saw significancies, laws, chains of cause 

 and effect, endlessly interlinked. He could not theorise 

 about what he saw. He wanted the true foundation 

 facts. "Let us have facts," he said, "real, certain, 

 unmistakable facts ; there can be no science without 

 them." 



Geology was at first a great mystery to him. It 

 seemed to him, as it really was, a revelation of the 

 physical conditions of the by-past world. The rocks 

 near Thurso spoke to him of a time when the Coccos- 

 teus, large and small, covered with berry bones the 

 Osteolepis, with enamelled bony scales the wrinkled 

 ganoid Holoptychius, the gigantic Asterolepis, covered 

 with star scales had ranged at will over the length and 

 breadth of Caithness. 



All these had, at some remote period, been destroyed 

 by violent death, either by a sudden retirement of the 

 sea, or by a sudden uplifting of the land. Platforms of 

 death rose one above another, story above story, the 

 floor of each bearing its record of disaster and sudden 



