A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 37 



a-piece to assist me in feeing counsel. There are more inte- 

 rests than mine at stake in the affair. If I be cast and com- 

 mitted, I, who have poached over only a few miserable dis- 

 tricts in Scotland, pray, what will become of some of them, 

 the Lyells, Bucklands, Murchisons, and Sedgwicks, who 

 have poached over whole continents ? 



We were successful in procuring several good specimens of 

 the Eigg pine, at a depth, in the conglomerate, of from eight 

 to eighteen inches. Some of the upper pieces we found in 

 contact with the decomposing trap out of which the hollow 

 piazza above had been scooped ; but the greater number, as 

 my set of specimens abundantly testify, lay imbedded in the 

 original Oolitic grit in which they had been locked up, in, I 

 doubt not, their present fossil state, ere their upheaval, through 

 Plutonic agency, from their deep-sea bottom. The annual 

 rings of the wood, which are quite as small as in a slow-grow- 

 ing Baltic pine, are distinctly visible in all the better pieces 

 I this day transferred to my bag. In one fragment I reckon 

 sixteen rings in half an inch, and fifteen in the same space in 

 another. The trees to which they belonged seem to have 

 grown on some exposed hill-side, where, in the course of half 

 a century, little more than from two to three inches were 

 added to their diameter. The Pinites Eiggensis, or Eigg pine, 

 was first introduced to the notice of the scientific world by 

 the late Mr Witham, in whose interesting work on " The 

 Internal Structure of Fossil Vegetables" the reader may find 

 it figured and described. The specimen in which he studied 

 its peculiarities " was found," he says, " at the base of the 

 magnificent mural escarpment named the Scuir of Eigg, not, 

 however, in situ, but among fragments of rocks of the Oolitic 

 series." The authors of the " Fossil Flora," where it is also 

 figured, describe it as differing very considerably in structure 

 from any of the coniferse of the Coal Measures. " Its me- 

 dullary rays," say Messrs Lindley and Hutton, " appear to 



