A. SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 79 



easily assigned to their proper places. It was in vain that, 

 leaving John to collect the scattered pieces of shale in which 

 the bones occurred, I set myself again and again to discover 

 the bed from which they had been detached. The tide had 

 fallen ; and a range of skerries lay temptingly off, scarce a 

 hundred yards from the water's edge : the shale-beds might be 

 among them, with Plesiosauri and crocodiles stretching en- 

 tire ; and fain would I have swam off to them, as I had done 

 oftener than once elsewhere, with my hammer in my teeth, 

 and with shirt and drawers in my hat ; but a tall brown forest 

 of kelp and tangle, in which even a seal might drown, rose 

 thick and perilous round both shore and skerries ; a slight 

 swell was felting the long fronds together ; and I deemed it 

 better, on the whole, that the discoveries I had already made 

 should be recorded, than that they should be lost to geology, 

 mayhap for a whole age, in the attempt to extend them, 



The water, beautifully transparent, permitted the eye to 

 penetrate into its green depths for many fathoms around, 

 though every object presented, through the agitated surface, 

 an uncertain and fluctuating outline. I could see, however, 

 the pink-coloured urchin warping himself up, by his many 

 cables, along the steep rock-sides ; the green crab stalking 

 along the gravelly bottom ; a scull of small rock-cod darting 

 hither and thither among the tangle-roots ; and a few large 

 medusae slowly flapping their continuous fins of gelatine in 

 the opener spaces, a few inches under the surface. Many 

 curious families had their representatives within the patch of 

 sea which the eye commanded ; but the strange creatures that 

 had once inhabited it by thousands, and whose bones still 

 lay sepulchred on its shores, had none. How strange, that 

 the identical sea heaving around stack and skerry in this re- 

 mote corner of the Hebrides should have once been thronged 

 by reptile shapes more strange than poet ever imagined, 

 dragons, gorgons, and chimeras ! Perhaps of all the extinct 



