RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 233 



kindly subsoil derived from the primary rocks were, I could 

 see, still speckled with sheaves ; and, where the land lay high, 

 or the exposure was unfavourable, there were reapers at work. 

 All along in the course of my journey northward from Aber- 

 deen I continued to find the country covered with shocks, and 

 labourers employed among them ; until, crossing the Spey 

 I entered on the fossiliferous districts of Moray ; and then, 

 as in the south, the champaign again showed a bare breadth 

 of stubble, with here and there a ploughman engaged in turn- 

 ing it down. The traveller bids farewell at Stonehaven to 

 not only the Old Red Sandstone and the early-harvest dis- 

 tricts, but also to the rich wheat-lands of the country, and 

 does not again fairly enter upon them until, after travelling 

 nearly a hundred miles, he passes from Banffshire into the 

 province of Moray. He leaves behind him at the same line 

 the wheat-fields and the cottages built of red stone, to find 

 only barley and oats, and here and there a plot of rye, asso- 

 ciated with cottages of granite and gneiss, hyperstene and mica 

 schist ; but on crossing the Spey, the red cottages re-appear, 

 and fields of rich wheat-land spread out around them, as in 

 the south. The circumstance is not unworthy the notice of 

 the geologist. It is but a tedious process through which the 

 minute lichen, settling on a surface of naked stone, forms in 

 the course of ages a soil for plants of greater bulk and a higher 

 order ; and had Scotland been left to the exclusive operation 

 of this slow agent, it would be still a rocky desert, with per- 

 haps here and there a strip of alluvial meadow by the side of 

 a stream, and here and there an insulated patch of rich soil 

 among the hollows of the crags. It might possess a few gar- 

 dens for the spade, but no fields for the plough. "We owe 

 our arable land to that comparatively modern geologic agent, 

 whatever its character, that crushed, as in a mill, the upper 

 parts of the surface-rocks of the kingdom, and then overlaid 

 them with their own debris and rubbish to the depth of from 



