376 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 



a half-finished drawing, boldly dashed off in the neutral tint 

 of the artist. The portions of the prospect generically dis- 

 tinct are, notwithstanding its great extent and variety, but 

 few ; and the partial veil of haze, by glazing down its dis- 

 tracting multiplicity of minor points, served to bring them 

 out all the more distinctly. There is, first, stretching far in 

 a southern and eastern direction along the landscape, the rec- 

 tilinear ridge of the Black Isle, not quite the sort of line a 

 painter would introduce into a composition, but true to geo- 

 logic character. More in the foreground, in the same direc- 

 tion, there spreads a troubled cockling sea of the Great Con- 

 glomerate. Turning to the north and west, the deep valley 

 of Strathpefier, with its expanse of rich level fields, and in 

 the midst its old baronial castle, surrounded by coeval trees 

 of vast bulk, lies so immediately at the foot of the eminence, 

 that I could hear in the calm the rush of the little stream, 

 swollen to thrice its usual bulk by the rains of the night. 

 Beyond rose the thick-set Ben "Wyvis, a true gneiss moun- 

 tain, with breadth enough of shoulders, and amplitude enough 

 of base, to serve a mountain thrice as tall, but which, like all 

 its cogeners of this ancient formation, was arrested in its se- 

 cond stage of growth, so that many of the slimmer granitic 

 and porphyritic hills of the country look down upon it, as 

 Agamemnon, according to Homer, looked down upon Ulysses. 



" Broad is his breast, his shoulders larger spread, 

 Though great Atrides overtops his head." 



All around, as if toppling, wave-like, over the outer edges of 

 the comparatively flat area of Palaeozoic rock which composes 

 the middle ground of the landscape, rose a multitude of pri- 

 mary hill-peaks, barely discernible in the haze ; while the 

 long withdrawing Dingwall Frith, stretching on towards the 

 open sea for full twenty miles, and flanked on either side by 

 ridges of sandstone, but guarded at the opening by two squat 

 granitic columns, completed the prospect, by adding to it its 



