RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 341 



marty is built there is another extensive accumulation of 

 boulders, some of them of great size. They occupy exactly 

 the place to which I have ofbener than once seen the drift- 

 ice of the upper part of the Cromarty Frith, set loose by a 

 thaw, and then carried seawards by the retreating tide, forced 

 back by a violent storm from the east, and the fragments 

 ground against each other into powder. And here, I doubt 

 not, of old, when the sea stood greatly higher than now, and 

 the ice-floes were immensely larger and more numerous than 

 those formed, in the existing circumstances, in the upper shal- 

 lows of the Frith, would the fierce north-east have charged 

 home with similar effect, and the broken masses have divested 

 themselves of their boulders. 



The Highland chieftain of one of our old Gaelic traditions 

 conversed with a boulder-stone, and told to it the story which 

 he had sworn never to tell to man. I too, after a sort, have 

 conversed with boulder-stones, not, however, to tell them any 

 story of mine, but to urge them to tell theirs to me. But, 

 lacking the fine ear of Hans Andersen, the Danish poet, who 

 can hear flowers and butterflies talk, and understand the lan- 

 guage of birds, I have as yet succeeded in extracting from 

 them no such articulate reply 



" As Memnon's image, long renowned of old 

 By fabling Nilus, to the quivering touch 

 Of Titan's ray, with each repulsive string 

 Consenting, sounded through the warbling air." 



And yet who can doubt that, were they a little more com- 

 municative, their stories of movement in the past, with the 

 additional circumstances connected with the places which they 

 have occupied ever since they gave over travelling, would be 

 exceedingly curious ones 1 Among the boulder group to the 

 east of Cromarty, the most ponderous individual stands so 

 exactly on the low-water line of our great Lammas tides, that, 

 though its shoreward edge may be reached dry-shod from four 



