322 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 



rising at the present day, and presents with every succeeding 

 age a more extended breadth of surface. Many of the boul- 

 der-stones seem to have been cast down where they now lie, 

 during this latter time. When they occur, as in many in- 

 stances, high on bare hill-tops, from five to fifteen hundred 

 feet over the sea-level, with neither gravel nor boulder-clay 

 beside them, we of course cannot fix their period. They may 

 have been dropped by ice-floes or shore-ice, where we now 

 find them, at the commencement of the period of elevation, 

 after the clay had been formed ; or they may have been de- 

 posited by more ponderous icebergs during its formation, when 

 the land was yet sinking, though during the subsequent rise 

 the clay may have been washed from around them to lower 

 levels. The boulders, however, which we find scattered over 

 the plains and less elevated hill-sides, with beds of the washed 

 gravel or sand interposed between them and the clay, must 

 have been cast down where they lie, during the elevatory ages. 

 For, had they been washed out of the clay, they would have 

 lain, not over the greatly lighter sands and gravels, but under 

 them. Would that they could write their own histories ! 

 The autobiography of a single boulder, with notes on the va- 

 rious floras which had sprung up around it, and the various 

 classes of birds, beasts, and insects by which it had been vi- 

 sited, would be worth nine-tenths of all the autobiographies 

 ever published, and a moiety of the remainder to boot 



A few hundred yards from the opening of this dell of the 

 boulder-clay, in which I have so long detained the reader, 

 there is a wooded inflection of the bank, formed by the old 

 coast line, in which there stood, about two centuries ago, a 

 meal-mill, with the cottage of the miller, and which was once 

 known as the scene of one of those supernaturalities that be- 

 long to the times of the witch and the fairy. The upper 

 anchoring-place of the bay lies nearly opposite the inflection. 

 A shipmaster, who had moored his vessel in this part of the 



