106 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR, 



berth between ; and on the eastern shores of both Skye and 

 Rasay we find the same Oolitic deposits tilted up at nearly 

 the same angle. The section presented on the eastern coast 

 of the one is nearly a duplicate of the section presented on 

 the eastern coast of the other. During one of the severer 

 frosts of last winter I passed along a shallow pond, studded 

 along the sides with boulder stones. It had been frozen over; 

 and then, from the evaporation so common in protracted 

 frosts, the water had shrunk, and the sheet of ice which had 

 sunk down over the central portion of the pond exhibited 

 what a geologist would term very considerable marks of dis- 

 turbance among the boulders at the edges. Over one sharp- 

 backed boulder there lay a sheet tilted up like the lid of a 

 chest half-raised ; and over another boulder immediately be- 

 hind it there lay another up til ted sheet, like the lid of a second 

 half-open chest j and in both sheets, the edges, lying in nearly 

 parallel lines, presented a range of miniature cliffs to the 

 shore. Now, in the two uptilted ice-sheets of this pond I 

 recognised a model of the fundamental Oolitic deposits Rasay 

 and Skye. The mainland of Scotland had its representative 

 in the crisp snow-covered shore of the pond, with its belt of 

 faded sedges ; the place of Rasay was indicated by the inner, 

 that of Skye by the outer boulder ; while the ice-sheets, with 

 their shoreward-turned line of cliffs, represented the Oolitic 

 1 >eds, that turn to the mainland their dizzy range of precipices, 

 varying from six to eight hundred feet in height, and then, 

 sloping outwards and downwards, disappear under mountain 

 wildernesses of overlying trap. And it was along a portion 

 of the range of cliff that forms the outermost of the two up- 

 tilted lines, and which presents in this district of Skye a 

 frontage of nearly twenty continuous miles to the long Sound 

 of Rasay, that my to-day's course of exploration lay. From 

 the top of the cliff the surface slopes downwards for about two 

 miles into the interior, like the half-raised chest-lid of my 



