260 SCOTTISH BOTANY. [November, 



Carse of Stirling^ bounded by the lofty Ochil Hills^ and the richly 

 cultivated and wooded county of Kinross, enlivened by the calm, 

 transparent expanse of the historic Loch Leven, and protected 

 by the blue Lomonds, upon whose singularly beautiful outlines 

 the eye of the celebrated painter, Sir David Wilkie, had often 

 rested with unwearied admiration and delight ; while on the 

 other, the German Ocean blended with the sky in the far-off 

 distance ; and the extensive plains of the Lothians, divided from 

 Fifeshire by the broad, silvery belt of the Frith of Forth, gradu- 

 ally ascended into the bleak ranges of the Pentlands and Lam- 

 mermoors, enclosing in their magnificent setting, like a gem of 

 purest ray, the classic monuments, spires, and buildings of the 

 Modern Athens, guarded by its lion-like hill and its romantic 

 castle, and enveloped in an ethereal mist, which, like a white 

 veil on the face of a bride, enhanced its beauties and stimulated 

 the imagination by the charms which it concealed. In a hollow 

 between the summit on which we stood and a neighbouring hill, 

 the chimney-stalk of a coal-pit attracted our attention, and led 

 away our thoughts from the present to those remote ages in the 

 history of the earth, when these plains, now covered with waving 

 corn and studded with human dwellings, were immense marshes, 

 covered with the fluted stems of gigantic Calamites and Equiseta, 

 amid whose recesses the ichthyosaurus, and other huge monsters, 

 roared and wallowed, and made war upon each other ; and those 

 sloping hillsides, so beautiful with their ever-varying effects of 

 light and shade, and their pine-woods, like the shadows of thun- 

 der-clouds reposing amid the brighter green, were covered with 

 huge Ferns and Lycopods, compared to which, their modern re- 

 presentatives, the Club-mosses and Rock-brake at our feet, 

 dwindled into absolute insignificance ; and when those hills, 

 amid which we then stood, were active volcanoes, discharging 

 their streams of boiling lava from their craters, or hurling up 

 showers of ashes and cinders into the flaming and lurid clouds, 

 which enveloped the sky from end to end. 



Forming imaginative pictures like these, of the appearance 

 which the surrounding country presented during the Carbonife- 

 rous epoch, and indulging in these vague musings, influenced by 

 every object which attracted our notice, and leading the thoughts 

 afar off, peculiar to the evening hour, we slowly descended the 

 hill, carrying with us the specimens we had collected. The dull. 



