A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 129 



tions, independent of the inclosing mass ; and, from their re- 

 semblance to streaks and spots of blood, suggest the name by 

 which the heliotrope is popularly known. I succeeded in 

 making up, among the crags, a set of specimens curiously illus- 

 trative of the origin of the gem. One specimen consists of 

 white, uncoloured chalcedony ; a second, of a rich verdigris- 

 hued green earth ; a third, of chalcedony barely tinged with 

 green ; a fourth, of chalcedony tinged just a shade more deep- 

 ly ; a fifth, tinged more deeply still ; a sixth, of a deep green 

 on one side, and scarce at all coloured on the other ; and a 

 seventh, dark and richly toned, a true bloodstone, thickly 

 streaked and mottled with red jasper. In the chemical pro- 

 cess that rendered the Scuir More a mountain of gems there 

 were two deteriorating circumstances, which operated to the 

 disadvantage of its larger heliotropes : the green earth, as if 

 insufficiently stirred in the mixing, has gathered, in many of 

 them, into minute soft globules, like air-bubbles in glass, that 

 render them valueless for the purposes of the lapidary, by fill- 

 ing them all over with little cavities ; and in not a few of the 

 others, an infiltration of lime, that refused to incorporate with 

 the chalcedonic mass, exists in thin glassy films and veins, 

 that, from their comparative softness, have a nearly similar 

 effect with the impalpable green earth in roughing the sur- 

 face under the burnisher. 



We find figured by M'Culloch, in his " Western Islands," 

 the internal cavity of a pebble of Scuir More, which he pick- 

 ed up on the beach below, and which had been formed evi- 

 dently within one of the larger vesicles of the amygdaloid. 

 He describes it as curiously illustrative of a various chemis- 

 try : the outer crust is composed of a pale-zoned agate, inclos- 

 ing a cavity, from the upper side of which there depends a 

 group of chalcedonic stalactites, some of them, as in ancient 

 spar caves, reaching to the floor ; and bearing on its under 

 side a large crystal of carbonate of lime, that the longer sta~ 



