346 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 



tufts, from the disinterred stone, now covered with weather- 

 stains, green and gray, and standing out in bold and yet 

 bolder relief from the steep hill-side, as the pulverizing frosts 

 and washing rains bear away the lesser masses from around 

 it The sea is slowly rising, and the land, in proportion, 

 naiTowing its flatter margins, and yielding up its wider val- 

 leys to the tide ; the low green island of one century forms 

 the half-tide skerry, darkened with algse, of another, and in 

 yet a third exists but as a deep-sea rock. As its summit dis- 

 appears, groupes of hills, detached from the land, become 

 islands, skerries, deep-sea rocks, in turn. At length the 

 waves at full wash within a few yards of the granitic block. 

 And now, yielding to the undermining influences, just as a 

 blinding snow-shower is darkening the heavens, it comes 

 thundering down the steep into the sea, where it lies imme- 

 diately beneath the high-water line, surrounded by a wide 

 float of pulverized ice, broken by the waves. A keen frost 

 sets in; the half-fluid mass around is bound up for many 

 acres into a solid raft, that clasps fast in its rigid embrace 

 the rocky fragment ; a stream-tide, heightened by a strong 

 gale from the west, rises high on the beach ; the consolidated 

 ice-field moves, floats, is detached from the shore, creeps slowly 

 outwards into the offing, bearing atop the boulder; and, 

 finally caught by the easterly current, it drifts away into the 

 open ocean. And then, far from its original bed in the rock, 

 amid the jerkings of a cockling sea, the mass breaks through 

 the supporting float, and settles far beneath, amid the green 

 and silent twilight of the bottom, where its mosses and lichens 

 yield their place to stony encrustations of deep purple, and 

 to miniature thickets of arboraceous zoophites. 



The many-coloured Acalephse float by ; the many-armed 

 Sepiadse shoot over ; while shells that love the profounder 

 depths, the black Modiola and delicate Anomia, anchor 

 along the sides of the mass ; and where thickets of the deep- 



