RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 339 



This pretty little plant occurs in great profusion along the 

 steep edges of the Auldgrande, where its delicate bushes, 

 springing up amid long heath and ling, and crimsoned by the 

 autumnal tinge, gave a peculiar -warmth and richness this 

 evening to those bosky spots under the brown trees, or in im- 

 mediate contact with the dark chasm on which the sunlight 

 fell most strongly ; and on all the more perilous projections 

 I found the dark berries still shrivelling on their stems. 

 Thirty years earlier I would scarce have left them there; and 

 the more perilous the crag on which* they had grown, the 

 more deliciously would they have eaten. But every period 

 of life has its own playthings ; and I was now chiefly engaged 

 with the deep chasm and the huge boulder. Chasm and boul- 

 der had come to have greatly more of interest to me than the 

 delicate berries, or than even that sovereign dispeller of ennui 

 and low spirits, an adventurous scramble among the cliffs. 



In what state did the chasm exist when the huge boulder, 

 detached, mayhap, at the close of a severe frost, from some 

 island of the archipelago that is now the northern Highlands 

 of Scotland, was suffered to drop beside it, from some vast 

 ice-floe drifting eastwards on the tide 1 In all probability 

 merely as a fault in the Conglomerate, similar to many of 

 those faults which in the Coal Measures of the southern dis- 

 tricts we find occupied by continuous dikes of trap. But in 

 this northern region, where the trap-rocks are unknown, it 

 must have been filled up with the boulder-clay, or with some 

 still more ancient accumulation of debris. And when the 

 land had risen, and the streams, swollen into rivers, flowed 

 along the hollows which they now occupy, the loose rubbish 

 would in the lapse of ages gradually wash downwards to the 

 sea, as the stones thrown from the fields above were washed 

 downwards in a later time: and thus the deep fissure would 

 ultimately be cleared out The boulder-stones lie thickly 

 in this neighbourhood, and over the eastern half of Ross-shire. 



