A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 169 



found the science much in advance in Cromarty, especially 

 among the ladies, its great patronizers and illustrators every- 

 where, and, in not a few localities, extensive contributors to 

 its hoards of fact Just as I arrived, there was a pic-nic party 

 of young people setting out for the Lias of Shandwick. They 

 spent the day among its richly fossiliferous shales and lime- 

 stones, and brought back with them in the evening Ammo- 

 nites and Gryphites enough to store a museum. Cromarty 

 had been visited during the summer by geologists speaking a 

 foreign tongue, but thoroughly conversant with the occult yet 

 common language of the rocks, and deeply interested in the 

 stories which the rocks told. The vessels in which the Crown 

 Prince of Denmark voyaged to the Faroe Isles had been for 

 some time in the bay ; and the Danes, his companions, vo- 

 taries of the stony science, zealously plied chisel and hammer 

 among the Old Red Sandstones of the coast. A townsman 

 informed me that he had seen a Danish Professor hammering 

 like the tutelary Thor of his country among the nodules in 

 which I had found the first Pterichthys and first Diplacan- 

 thus ever disinterred ; and that the Professor, ever and anon 

 as he laid open a specimen, brought it to a huge smooth boul- 

 der, on which there lay a copy of the " Old Red Sandstone," 

 to ascertain from the descriptions and prints its family and 

 name. Shall I confess that the circumstance gratified me 

 exceedingly ? There are many elements of discord among 

 mankind in the present time, both at home and abroad, so 

 many, that I am afraid we need entertain no hope of seeing 

 an end, in at least our day, to controversy and war. And 

 we should be all the better pleased, therefore, to witness the 

 increase of those links of union, such as the harmonizing 

 bonds of a scientific sympathy, the tendency of which is to 

 draw men together in a kindly spirit, and the formation of 

 which involves no sacrifice of principle, moral or religious. I 



