330 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 



ancient Pictish king. But the contest of which it was the 

 scene belongs to a profoundly dark period, ere the gray dawn 

 of Scottish history began. As shown by the remains of an- 

 cient art occasionally dug up on the moor, it was a conflict 

 of the times of the stone battle-axe, the flint arrow-head, and 

 the unglazed sepulchral urn, unindebted for aught of its sym- 

 metry to the turning-lathe, times when there were heroes 

 in abundance, but no scribes. And the cairn, about a hun- 

 dred feet in length and breadth, by about twenty in height, 

 with its long hoary hair of overgrown lichen waving in the 

 breeze, and the trailing club-moss shooting upwards from its 

 base along its sides, bears in its every lineament full mark of 

 its great age. It is a mound striding across the stream of 

 centuries, to connect the past with the present. And yet, 

 after all, what a mere matter of yesterday its extreme anti- 

 quity is ! My explorations this morning bore reference to 

 but the later eras of the geologist : the portion of the geo- 

 logic volume which I was attempting to decipher and trans- 

 late formed the few terminal paragraphs of its concluding 

 chapter. And yet the finis had been added to them for thou- 

 sands of years ere this latter antiquity began. The boulder- 

 clay had been formed and deposited ; the land, in rising over 

 the waves, had had many a huge pebble washed out of its 

 last formed red stratum, or dropped upon it by ice-floes from 

 above ; and these pebbles lay mottling the surface of this 

 barren moor for mile after mile, bleaching pale to the rains 

 and the sun, as the meagre and mossy soil received, in the 

 lapse of centuries, its slow accessions of organic matter, and 

 darkened around them. And then, for a few brief hours, 

 the heath, no longer solitary, became a wild scene of savage 

 warfare, of waving arms and threatening faces, and of 

 human lives violently spilled, gushing forth in blood ; and, 

 when all was over, the old weathered boulders were heaped 

 up above the slain, and there began a new antiquity in re- 



