THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR, 



precipices hollowed and worn, with all their rents and cre- 

 vices widened into caves ; and mark, at a picturesque angle 

 of the rock, what must have been once an insulated sea-stack, 

 some thirty or forty feet in height, standing up from amid 

 the rank grass, as at one time it stood up from amid the 

 waves. Tufts of fern and sprays of ivy bristle from its sides, 

 once roughened by the serrated kelp-weed and the tangle. 

 The Highlanders call it MTDougall's Dog-stone, and say that 

 the old chieftains of Lome made use of it as a post to which to 

 fasten their dogs, animals wild and gigantic as themselves, 

 when the hunters were gathering to rendezvous, and the 

 impatient beagles struggled to break away and begin the 

 chace on their own behalf. It owes its existence as a stack 

 for the precipice in which it was once included has receded 

 from around it for yards to an immense boulder in its base, 

 by far the largest stone I ever saw in an Old Red con- 

 glomerate. The mass is of a rudely rhomboidal form, and 

 measures nearly twelve feet in the line of its largest diago- 

 nal. A second huge pebble in the same detached spire mea- 

 sures four feet by about three. Both have their edges much 

 rounded, as if, ere their deposition in the conglomerate, they 

 had been long exposed to the wear of the sea ; and both are 

 composed of an earthy amygdaloidal trap. I have stated 

 elsewhere [" Old Ked Sandstone," Chapter XII], that I had 

 scarce ever seen a stone in the Old Bed conglomerate which 

 I could not raise from the ground ; and ere I said so I had 

 examined no inconsiderable extent of this deposit, chiefly, 

 however, along the eastern coast of Scotland, where its larger 

 pebbles rarely exceed two hundredweight. How account for 

 the occurrence of pebbles of so gigantic a size here ? We 

 can but guess at a solution, and that very vaguely. The 

 islands of Mull and Kerrera form, in the present state of 

 things, inner and outer breakwaters between what is now 

 the coast of Oban and the waves of the Atlantic ; but Mull, 



