4 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR, 



ones, lower eminences as mere groupes of pointed rocks ; till 

 at length, as we pass outwards, all trace of the submerged 

 land disappears, and the wide ocean stretches out and away 

 its unfathomable depths. The model of some alpine country 

 raised in plaster on a flat board, and tilted slantways at a low 

 angle into a basin of water, would exhibit on a minute scale 

 an appearance exactly similar to that presented by the western 

 coast of Scotland and the Hebrides. The water would rise 

 along the hollows, longitudinal and transverse, forming sounds 

 and lochs, and surround, island-like, the more deeply sub- 

 merged eminences. But an examination of the geology of 

 the coast, with its promontories and islands, communicates a 

 different idea. These islands and promontories prove to be 

 of very various ages and origin. The outer Hebrides may 

 have existed as the inner skeleton of some ancient country 

 contemporary with the main land, and that bore on its upper 

 soils the productions of perished creations, at a time when 

 by much the larger portion of the inner Hebrides, Skye, and 

 Mull, and the Small Isles, existed as part of the bottom of 

 a wide sound, inhabited by the Cephalopoda and Enaliosau- 

 rians of the Lias and the Oolite. Judging from its com- 

 ponents, the Long Island, like the Lammermoors and the 

 Grampians, may have been smiling to the sun when the Alps 

 and the Himalaya Mountains lay buried in the abyss ; where- 

 as the greater part of Skye and Mull must have been, like 

 these vast mountain-chains of the Continent, an oozy sea- 

 floor, over which the ligneous productions of the neighbour- 

 ing lands, washed down by the streams, grew heavy and sank, 

 and on which the belemnite dropped its spindle and the am- 

 monite its shell. The idea imparted of old Scotland to the 

 geologist here, of Scotland, proudly, aristocratically, super- 

 eminently old, for it can call Mont Blanc a mere upstart, 

 and Dhawalageri, with its twenty-eight thousand feet of ele- 

 vation, a heady fellow of yesterday, is not that of a land 



