450 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 



loses ill quality what it gains in quantity ; it is flabby and 

 insipid, and the margin-fin lacks always its delicious strip of 

 transparent fat. I fain wish that some intelligent resident 

 on the shores of Stennis would set himself carefully to ex- 

 amine its productions, and that then, after registering his ob- 

 servations for a few years, he would favour the world with 

 its natural history. 



The Standing Stones, second in Britain, of their kind, to 

 only those of Stonehenge, occur in two groupes; the smaller 

 group (composed, however, of the taller stones) on the south- 

 ern promontory ; the larger on the northern one. Rude and 

 shapeless, and bearing no other impress of the designing fa- 

 culty than that they are stuck endwise in the earth, and form, 

 as a whole, regular figures on the sward, there is yet a sub- 

 lime solemnity about them, unsurpassed in effect by any ruin 

 I have yet seen, however grand in its design or imposing in its 

 proportions. Their very rudeness, associated with their pon- 

 derous bulk and weight, adds to their impressiveness. When 

 there is art and taste enough in a country to hew an ornate 

 column, 110 one marvels that there should be also mechanical 

 skill enough in it to set it up on end ; but the men who tore 

 from the quarry these vast slabs, some of them eighteen feet 

 in height over the soil, and raised them, where they now stand, 

 must have been ignorant savages, unacquainted with machi- 

 nery, and unfurnished, apparently, with a single tool. And 

 what, when contemplating their handiwork, we have to sub- 

 tract in idea from their minds, we add, by an involuntary pro- 

 cess, to their bodies : we come to regard the feats which they 

 have accomplished as performed by a power not mechanical, 

 but gigantic. The consideration, too, that these remains, 

 eldest of the works of man in this country, should have so 

 long survived all definite tradition of the purposes which they 

 were raised to serve, so that we now merely know regarding 

 them that they were religious in their uses, products of that 



