A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 3 



of which, in the last age, Professor Walker of Edinburgh 

 set water a-boil with six degrees of heat less than he found 

 necessary for the purpose on the plain below. The Professor 

 describes the view from the summit, which includes in its 

 wide circle at once the Isle of Skye and the Isle of Man, as 

 singularly noble and imposing : two such prospects more, he 

 says, would bring under the eye the whole island of Great 

 Britain, from the Pentland Frith to the English Channel. 

 We sped past Jura. Then came the Gulf of Coryvrekin, 

 with the bare mountain island of Scarba overlooking the 

 fierce, far-famed whirlpool that we could see from the deck 

 breaking in long lines of foam, and sending out its waves in 

 wide rings on every side, when not a speck of white was 

 visible elsewhere in the expanse of sea around us. And then 

 came an opener space, studded with smaller islands, mere 

 hill-tops rising out of the sea, with here and there insulated 

 groupes of pointed rocks, the skeletons of perished hills, amid 

 which the tides chafed and fretted, as if labouring to com- 

 plete on the broken remains their work of denudation and 

 ruin. 



The disposition of land and water on this coast suggests 

 the idea that the Western Highlands, from the line in the 

 interior whence the rivers descend to the Atlantic, with the 

 islands beyond to the outer Hebrides, are all parts of one 

 great mountainous plain, inclined slantways into the sea. 

 First, the long withdrawing valleys of the main land, with 

 their brown mossy streams, change their character as they 

 dip beneath the sea-level, and become salt-water lochs. The 

 lines of hills that rise over them jut out as promontories, till 

 cut off by some transverse valley, lowered still more deeply 

 into the brine, and that exists as a kyle, minch, or sound, 

 swept twice every tide by powerful currents. The sea deepens 

 as the plain slopes downward ; mountain-chains stand up 

 out of the water as larger islands, single mountains as smaller 



