RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 351 



incident, that the boulder of the bay had been " borne nearly 

 three hundred yards outwards into the sea by an enclasping 

 mass of ice, in the course of a single tide." " Not at all," 

 said the northern clergyman ; " the cause assigned is wholly 

 insufficient to produce such an effect. All the ice ever form- 

 ed in the bay would be insufficient to remove such a boul- 

 der a distance, not of three hundred, but even of three yards." 

 The removal of the stone " is referrible to an EARTHQUAKE !" 

 The country, it would seem, took a sudden lurch, and the 

 stone tumbled off It fell athwart the flat surface of the bay, 

 as a soup tureen sometimes falls athwart the table of a storm- 

 beset steamer, vastly to the discomfort of the passengers, and 

 again caught the ground as the land righted. Ingenious, 

 certainly ! It does appear a little wonderful, however, that in 

 a shock so tremendous nothing should have fallen off except 

 the stone. In an earthquake on an equally great scale, in 

 the present unsettled state of society, endowed clergymen 

 would, I am afraid, be in some danger of falling out of their 

 charges. 



The boulder beside the Auldgrande has not only, like the 

 Clack Malloch, a geologic history of its own, but, what some 

 may deem of perhaps equal authority, a mythologic history 

 also. The inaccessible chasm, impervious to the sun, and 

 ever resounding the wild howl of the tortured water, was too 

 remarkable an object to have escaped the notice of the old 

 imaginative Celts ; and they have married it, as was their 

 wont, to a set of stories quite as wild as itsel And the 

 boulder, occupying a nearly central position in its course, 

 just where the dell is deepest, and narrowest, and blackest, 

 and where the stream bellows far underground in its wildest 

 combination of tones, marks out the spot where the more 

 extraordinary incidents have happened, and the stranger sights 

 have been seen. Immediately beside the stone there is what 

 seems to be the beginning of a path leading down to the 



