A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 35 



denser on an immense scale, minute runnels of water, that 

 patter ceaselessly in front of the long deep hollow, like rain 

 from the eaves of a cottage during a thunder-shower. In- 

 side, however, all is dry, and the floor is covered to the depth 

 of several inches with the dung of sheep and cattle, that find, 

 in this singular mountain-piazza, a place of shelter. We had 

 brought a pickaxe with us ; and the dry and dusty floor, com- 

 posed mainly of a gritty conglomerate, formed the scene of 

 our labours. It is richly fossiliferous, though the organisms 

 have no specific variety ; and never certainly have I found 

 the remains of former creations in a scene in which they 

 more powerfully addressed themselves to the imagination. A 

 stratum of peat-moss, mixed with fresh-water shells, and rest- 

 ing on a layer of vegetable mould, from which the stumps 

 and roots of trees still protruded, was once found in Italy 

 buried beneath an ancient tesselated pavement; and the 

 whole gave curious evidence of a kind fitted to picture to the 

 imagination a back-ground vista of antiquity, all the more 

 remotely ancient in aspect from the venerable age of the ob- 

 ject in front Dry ground covered by wood, a lake, a morass, 

 and then dry ground again, had all taken precedence, on the 

 site of the tesselated pavement, in this instance, of an old 

 Roman villa. But what was antiquity in connection with a 

 Roman villa, to antiquity in connection with the Scuir of 

 Eigg ? Under the old foundations of this huge wall we find 

 the remains of a pine-forest, that, long ere a single bed of 

 the porphyry had burst from beneath, had sprung up and de- 

 cayed on hill and beside stream in some nameless land, had 

 then been swept to the sea, had been entombed deep at the 

 bottom in a grit of the Oolite, had been heaved up to the 

 surface, and high over it, by volcanic agencies working from 

 beneath, and had finally been built upon, as moles are built 

 upon piles, by the architect that had laid down the masonry 

 of the gigantic Scuir in one fiery layer after another. The 



