A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 85 



the stars that had begun to twinkle over it were disappear- 

 ing, one after one, in the thickening vapour, we reached the 

 little bay of Kildonan, and found the boat waiting us on the 

 beach. My friend the minister, as I entered the cabin, ga- 

 thered up his notes from the table, and gave orders for the 

 tea-kettle ; and I spread out before him a happy man an 

 array of fossils new to Scotch Geology. No one not an en- 

 thusiastic geologist or a zealous Roman Catholic can really 

 know how vast an amount of interest may attach to a few 

 old bones. Has the reader ever heard how fossil relics once 

 saved the dwelling of a monk, in a time of great general ca- 

 lamity, when all his other relics proved of no avail whatever ? 

 Thomas Campbell, when asked for a toast in a society of 

 authors, gave the memory of Napoleon Bonaparte ; signifi- 

 cantly adding, " he once hung a bookseller." On a nearly 

 similar principle I would be disposed to propose among geo- 

 logists a grateful bumper in honour of the revolutionary army 

 that besieged Maestricht. That city, some seventy-five or 

 eighty years ago, had its zealous naturalist in the person of 

 M. Hoffmann, a diligent excavator in the quarries of St 

 Peter's mountain, long celebrated for its extraordinary fossils. 

 Geology, as a science, had no existence at the time ; but Hoff- 

 mann was doing, in a quiet way, all he could to give it a be- 

 ginning ; he was transferring from the rock to his cabinet, 

 shells, and corals, and Crustacea, and the teeth and scales of 

 fishes, with now and then the vertebrae, and now and then 

 the limb-bone, of a reptile. And as he honestly remunerated 

 all the workmen he employed, and did no manner of harm 

 to any one, no one heeded him. On one eventful morning, 

 however, his friends the quarriers laid bare a most extraordi- 

 nary fossil, the occipital plates of an enormous saurian, with 

 jaws four and a half feet long, bristling over with teeth, like 

 chevaux defrise ; and after Hoffmann, who got the block in 

 which it lay embedded, cut out entire, and transferred to his 



