RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 349 



final resting-place. In a period long posterior it saw the 

 ultimate elevation of the land. "Who shall dare say how 

 much more it witnessed, or decide that it did not form the 

 centre of a rich forest vegetation, and that the ivy did not 

 cling round it, and the wild rose shed its petals over it, when 

 the Dingwall, Moray, and Dornoch Friths existed as sub- 

 aerial valleys, traversed by streams that now enter the sea 

 far apart, but then gathered themselves into one vast river, 

 that, after it had received the tributary waters of the Shin 

 and the Conon, the Ness and the Beauly, the Helmsdale, the 

 Brora, the Findhorn, and the Spey, rolled on through the flat 

 secondary formations of the outer Moray Frith, Lias, and 

 Oolite, and Greensand, and Chalk, to fall into a gulf of the 

 Northern Ocean which intervened between the coasts of Scot- 

 land and Norway, but closed nearly opposite the mouth of 

 the Tyne, leaving a broad level plain to connect the coasts 

 of England with those of the Continent ! Be this as it may, 

 the present sea-coast became at length the common boundary 

 of land and sea. And the boulder continued to exist for 

 centuries still later as a nameless stone, on which the tall gray 

 heron rested moveless and ghost-like in the evenings, and the 

 seal at mid-day basked lazily in the sun. And then there came 

 on a night of fierce tempest, in which the agonizing cry of 

 drowning men was heard along the shore. When the morn- 

 ing broke, there lay strewed around a few bloated corpses, 

 and the fragments of a broken wreck; and amid wild execra- 

 tions and loud sorrow the boulder received its name. Such 

 is the probable history, briefly told, because touched at mere- 

 ly a few detached points, of the huge Clack Malloch. The 

 incident of the second voyage here is of course altogether 

 imaginary, in relation to at least this special boulder ; but it 

 is to second voyages only that all our positive evidence tes- 

 tifies in the history of its class. The boulders of the St 

 Lawrence, so well described by Sir Charles Lyell, voyage by 



