A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. Ill 



but the line once drawn, is work done to the hands of all 

 after explorers. I have followed repeatedly in the track of 

 another geologist, of, however, a very different school, who 

 explored, at a comparatively recent period, the deposits of not 

 a few of our Scotch counties. But his labours, in at least 

 the fossiliferous formations, seem to have accomplished nothing 

 for Geology, I am afraid, even less than nothing. So far 

 as they had influence at all, it must have been to throw back 

 the science. A geologist who could have asserted only three 

 years ago (" Geognostical Account of Banffshire," 1842), that 

 the Old Red Sandstone of Scotland forms merely " a part of 

 the great coal deposit," could have known marvellously little 

 of the fossils of the one system, and nothing whatever of those 

 of the other. Had he examined ere he decided, instead of 

 deciding without any intention of examining, he would have 

 found that, while both systems abound in organic remains, 

 they do not possess, in Scotland at least, a single species in 

 common, and that even their types of being, viewed in the 

 group, are essentially distinct. 



The three Edinburgh gentlemen whom I had met at break- 

 fast were still in the inn. One of them I had seen before, 

 as one of the guests at a Wesleyan soiree, though I saw he 

 failed to remember that I had been there as a guest too. The 

 two other gentlemen were altogether strangers to me. One 

 of them, a man on the right side of forty, and a superb spe- 

 cimen of the powerful, six-feet-two-inch Norman Celt, I set 

 down as a scion of some old Highland family, who, as the 

 broadsword had gone out, carried on the internal wars of the 

 country with the formidable artillery of Statute and Decision. 

 The other, a gentleman more advanced in life, I predicated 

 to be a Highland proprietor, the uncle of the younger of the 

 two, a man whose name, as he had an air of business about 

 him, occurred, in all probability, in the Almanac, in the list 

 of Scotch advocates. Both were of course high Tories, I 



