234 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 



one to forty yards. This debris, existing in one locality as a 

 boulder-clay more or less finely comminuted, in another as a 

 grossly pounded gravel, forms, with few exceptions, that sub- 

 soil of the country on which the existing vegetation first found 

 root; and, being composed mainly of the formations on which 

 it more immediately rests, it partakes of their character, 

 bearing a comparatively lean and hungry aspect over the pri- 

 mary rocks, and a greatly more fertile one over those deposits 

 in which the organic matters of earlier creations lie diffused. 

 Saxon industry has done much for the primary districts of 

 Aberdeen and Banff-shires, though it has failed to neutralize 

 altogether the effects of causes which date as early as the 

 times of the Old Bed Sandstone; but in the Highlands, which 

 belong almost exclusively to the non-fossiliferous formations, 

 and which were, on at least the western coasts, but imperfectly 

 subjected to that grinding process to which we owe our sub- 

 soils, the poor Celt has permitted the consequences of the 

 original difference to exhibit themselves in full. If we ex- 

 cept the islands of the Inner Hebrides, the famine of 1846 

 was restricted in Scotland to the primary districts. 



I made it my first business, on landing in Aberdeen, to 

 wait on my friend Mr Longmuir, that I might compare with 

 him a few geological notes, and benefit by his knowledge of 

 the surrounding country. I was, however, unlucky enough 

 to find that he had gone, a few days before, on a journey, 

 from which he had not yet returned ; but, through the kind- 

 ness of Mrs Longmuir, to whom I took the liberty of intro- 

 ducing myself, I was made free of his stone-room, and held 

 half an hour's conversation with his Scotch fossils of the 

 Chalk, These had been found, as the readers of the Witness 

 must remember from his interesting paper on the subject, on 

 the hill of Dudwick, in the neighbourhood of Ellon, and were 

 chiefly impressions some of them of singular distinctness 

 and beauty in yellow flint. I saw among them several speci- 



