A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 127 



chanced to see in the Hebrides, and that, though large for its 

 kind, its whole bulk did not nearly equal that of a single ver- 

 tebral joint of the fossil saurians of Eigg. The reptile, since 

 his deposition from the first place in the scale of creation, has 

 sunk sadly in those parts : the ex-monarch has become a low 

 plebeian. 



We came down upon the coast through a swampy valley, 

 terminating in the interior in a frowning wall of basalt, and 

 bounded on the south, where it opens to the sea, by the Scuir 

 More. The Scuir is a precipitous mountain, that rises from 

 twelve to fifteen hundred feet direct over the beach. M'Cul- 

 loch describes it as inaccessible, and states that it is only 

 among the debris at its base that its heliotropes can be pro- 

 cured ; but the distinguished mineralogist must have had con- 

 siderably less skill in climbing rocks than in describing them, 

 as, indeed, some of his descriptions, though generally very 

 admirable, abundantly testiiy. I am inclined to infer from 

 his book, after having passed over much of the ground which 

 he describes, that he must have been a man of the type so 

 well hit off by Burns in his portrait of Captain Grose, round, 

 rosy, short-legged, quick of eye but slow of foot, quite as 

 indifferent a climber as Bailie Nicol Jarvie, and disposed at 

 times, like the elderly gentleman drawn by Crabbe, to prefer 

 the view at the hill-foot to the prospect from its summit I 

 found little difficulty in scaling the sides of Scuir More for a 

 thousand feet upwards, in one part by a route rarely at- 

 tempted before, and in ensconcing myself among the blood- 

 stones. They occur in the amygdaloidal trap of which the 

 upper part of the hill is mainly composed, in great numbers, 

 and occasionally in bulky masses ; but it is rare to find other 

 than small specimens that would be recognised as of value by 

 the lapidary. The inclosing rock must have been as thickly 

 vesicular in its original state as the scoria of a glass-house ; 

 and all the vesicles, large and small, like the retorts and re- 



