288 Older Mountains. 



must have been very great. I consider it certain, that 

 from these mountains glaciers descended through 

 ancient valleys, now lost, and indeed that other sub- 

 angular conglomerates of the Old Eed Sandstone in 

 various parts of Britain consist of stratified moraine 

 matter. All the ordinary influences of terrestrial 

 waste rain, rivers, frosts, snow, ice, wind, and waves 

 were at work sculpturing the surface of that old land, 

 and on the very same land they have been at work 

 from that day to this. What was the precise form 

 of the highlands that bordered this Old Eed Sand- 

 stone lake, it is now impossible to know, except that it 

 was mountainous; but this is certain, that after the 

 early disturbances of the strata, the general result of 

 all the wasting influences, acting down to the present 

 day, has been to produce the present scenery. Thus it 

 is certain that all the Cambrian and Laurentian rocks 

 of the north-west of Scotland, were once buried deep 

 beneath Lower Silurian gneiss thousands of feet thick ; 

 that on the west these Silurian strata have been, in 

 places, almost utterly worn away, and the Cambrian 

 rocks, as in Suilven, have thus been exposed and moulded 

 into an outlier by subsequent waste. Some of these 

 mountains in Sutherland now form the grandest and 

 most abrupt peaks of the north-west Highlands, stand- 

 ing, steep-sided and high like Suilven, isolated, on 

 a broad raised platform of Laurentian gneiss. And just 

 as a railway navigator leaves pillars of earth in a railway 

 cutting, to mark how much he has removed, so the 

 great excavator, Time, has left these mountain land- 

 marks to record the greatness of his operations. 



It is at first hard to realise these facts, but observa- 

 tion and reflection combined lead to this inevitable 

 result. 



