182 THE CKUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR, 



culated plates, and coprolitic blotches ; and further on still, 

 in a rubbly flagstone, near where a little stream conies trot- 

 ting merrily from the uplands to the sea, there occur skull- 

 plates, at least one of which has been disinterred entire, 

 large and massy as the helmets of ancient warriors. We have 

 now reached the outer point of the promontory, where the 

 seaward wave, as it comes rolling unbroken from the Pole, 

 crosses, in nearing the shore, the eastward sweep of the great 

 Gulf-stream, and then casts itself headlong on the rocks. The 

 view has been extending with almost every step we have taken, 

 and it has now expanded into a wide and noble prospect of 

 ocean and bay, island and main, bold surf-skirted headlands, 

 and green retiring hollows. Yonder, on the one hand, are 

 the Orkneys, rising dim and blue over the foam-mottled cur- 

 rents of the Pentland Frith ; and yonder, on the other, the 

 far-stretching promontory of Holborn Head, with the line 

 of coast that sweeps along the opposite side of the bay ; here 

 sinking in abrupt flagstone precipices direct into the tide ; 

 there receding in grassy banks formed of a dark blue dilu- 

 vium. The fields and dwellings of living men mingle in 

 the landscape with old episcopal ruins and' ancient burying- 

 grounds ; and yonder, well-nigh in the opening of the Frith, 

 gleams ruddy to the sun, a true blood-coloured blush, when 

 all around is azure or pale, the tall Red Sandstone preci- 

 pices of Dunnet Head. It has been suggested that the planet 

 Mars may owe its red colour to the extensive development of 

 some such formation as the Old Red Sandstone of our own 

 planet : the existing formation in Mars may, at the present 

 time, it is said, be a Red Sandstone formation. It seems 

 much more probable, however, that the red flush which cha- 

 racterises the whole of that planet, its oceans as certainly 

 as its continents, should be rather owing to some widely- 

 diffused peculiarity of the surrounding atmosphere, than to 

 aught peculiar in the varied surface of land and water which 



