RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 345 



but the dead, or those whose deep slumber admits not of 

 dreams, take no note of time ; and so it would tell how its 

 long night of unsummed centuries seemed, like the long night 

 of the grave, compressed into a moment. 



The marble silence is suddenly broken by the rush of an 

 avalanche, that tears away the superincumbent masses, roll- 

 ing them into the sea ; and the ponderous block, laid open 

 to the light, finds itself on the bleak shore of a desert island 

 of the northern Scottish archipelago, with a wintry scene of 

 snow-covered peaks behind, and an ice-mottled ocean before. 

 The winter passes, the cold severe spring comes on, and day 

 after day the field-ice goes floating by, now gray in shadow, 

 now bright in the sun. At length vegetation, long repressed, 

 bursts forth, but in no profuse luxuriance. A few dwarf 

 birches unfold their leaves amid the rocks ; a few sub-arctic 

 willows hang out their catkins beside the swampy runnels ; 

 the golden potentilla opens its bright flowers on slopes where 

 the evergreen Empetrum nigrum slowly ripens its glossy crow- 

 berries; and from where the sea-spray dashes at full tide 

 along the beach, to where the snow gleams at midsummer 

 on the mountain-summits, the thin short sward is dotted 

 by the minute cruciform stars of the scurvy-grass, and the 

 crimson blossoms of the sea-pink. Not a few of the plants 

 of our existing sea-shores and of our loftier hill-tops are still 

 identical in species ; but wide zones of rich herbage, with 

 many a fertile field and many a stately tree, intervene between 

 the bare marine belts and the bleak insulated eminences; 

 and thus the alpine, notwithstanding its identity with the lit- 

 toral flora, has been long divorced from it ; but in this early 



. time the divorce had not yet taken place, nor for ages there- 

 after ; and the same plants that sprang around the sea- mar- 

 gin rose also along the middle slopes to the mountain-sum- 



. mits. The landscape is treeless and bare, and a hoary lichen 

 whitens the moors, and waves, as the years pass by, in pale 



