408 REVIEWS POPULAR GEOLOGY. 



he throws around his theme, can be made fully apparent. It occurs 

 in the fourth lecture, and is entitled " A Walk into the "Wilds of the 

 Oolite Hills of Sutherland:" 



" Let us, however, ere we part for the evening, adventure a short walk into the 

 wilds of the Oolite, in that portion of space, now occupied on the surface of the 

 globe by the north-eastern hills of Sutherland, where they abut on the precipitous 

 Ord. 



" We stand on an elevated wood-covered ridge, that on the one hand overlooks 

 the blue sea, and descends on the other towards a broad river, beyond which there 

 spreads a wide expanse of a mountainous forest-covered country. The higher and 

 more distant hills are dark with pines ; and save that the sun, already low in the 

 sky, is flinging athwart them his yellow light and gilding, high over shaded dells 

 and the deeper valley's cllfF, and copse, and bare mossy summit, the general col- 

 ouring of the back-ground «vould be blue and cold. But the ray falls bright and 

 warm on the rich vegetation around us, — tree ferns, and tall club mosses, and 

 graceful palms, and the strangely proportioned cycadacese, whose leaves seem 

 fronds of the bracken fixed upon decapitated stumps, and along the banks of the 

 river we see intensely green hedges of the feathered equisetacese. Brown cones 

 and weathered spiky leaves strew the ground ; and scarce a hundred yards away 

 there is a noble Araucarian, that raises, sphere-like, its proud head more than a 

 hundred feet over its fellows, and whose trunk, bedewed with odoriferous balsam, 

 glistens to the sun. 



" The calm stillness of the air makes itself faintly audible in the drowsy hum of 

 insects ; there is a gorgeous light-poised dragon-fly darting hither and thither 

 through the minuter great-like groups ; it settles for a moment on one of the 

 lesser ferns, and a small insectivorous creature, scarce larger than a rat, issues 

 noiselessly from its hole, and creeps stealthily towards it. But there is the whirr 

 of wings heard overhead, and, lo! a monster descends, and the little mammal starts 

 back into its hole. 'Tis a winged dragon of the Oolite, a carniverous reptile, keen 

 of eye and sharp of tooth, and that to the head and jaws of the crocodile adds the 

 neck of a bird, the tail of an ordhiary mammal, and that floats through the air on 

 leathern wings resembling those of the great vampire bat. We have seen in the 

 minute, rat-like creature, one of the two known mammals of this vast land of the 

 Oolite,-r-the insect-eating Amphithiriutn; and in the flying reptile, one of its 

 strangely organized Plecodactyh. 



" But hark 1 what sounds are these ? Tramp, tramp, tramp, — crash, crash. Tree 

 fern and club moss, cycas and zamia, yield to the force and momentum of some 

 immense reptile, and the colossal Iquanodon breaks through. He is tall as the 

 tallest elephant, but from tail to snout greatly more than twice as long; bears, like 

 the rhinoceros, a short horn on his snout ; and has his jaws thickly implanted with 

 saw-like teeth. But, though formidable from his great height and strength, he 

 possesses the comparative inoffensiveuess of the herbinorious animals; and, with 

 no desire to attack, and no necessity to defend, he moves slowly onward, deliber- 

 ately munching, as he passes, the succulent stems of the cycadacea. The sun is 



