A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 39 



ancient Eigg pine, to which the detached fragment picked 

 up at the base of the Scuir belonged, a pine alike different 

 from those of the earlier carboniferous period and those which 

 exist contemporary with ourselves, was, some three creations 

 ago, an exceedingly common tree in the country now called 

 Scotland, as much so, perhaps, as the Scotch fir is at the 

 present day. The fossil-trees found in such abundance in the 

 neighbourhood of Helmsdale that they are burnt for lime, 

 the fossil-wood of Eathie in Cromartyshire, and that of 

 Shandwick in Ross, all belong to the Pinites Eiggensis. It 

 seems to have been a straight and stately tree, in most in- 

 stances, as in the Eigg specimens, of slow growth. One of 

 the trunks I saw near Navidale measured two feet in diame- 

 ter, but a full century had passed ere it attained to a bulk so 

 considerable ; and a splendid specimen in my collection from 

 the same locality, which measures twenty-one inches, exhibits 

 even more than a hundred annual rings. In one of my spe- 

 cimens, and one only, the rings are of great breadth. They 

 differ from those of all the others in the proportion in which 

 I have seen the annual rings of a young vigorous fir that had 

 sprung up in some rich moist hollow, differ from the annual 

 rings of trees of the same species that had grown in the shal- 

 low hard soil of exposed hill-sides. And this one specimen 

 furnishes curious evidence that the often-marked but little 

 understood law, which gives us our better and worse seasons 

 in alternate groupes, various in number and uncertain in their 

 time of recurrence, obtained as early as the age of the Oolite. 

 The rings follow each other in groupes of lesser and larger 

 breadth. One group of four rings measures an inch and a 

 quarter across, while an adjoining group of five rings measures 

 only five-eighth parts ; and in a breadth of six inches there 

 occur five of these alternate groupes. For some four or five 

 years together, when this pine was a living tree, the springs 

 were late and cold, and the summers cloudy and chill, as in 



