376 Anniversary Address. 



are wont to do ; or on a sudden alarm, wheeling round and 

 darting off from apprehended danger. The route down the 

 Eye was over Lower Silurian shales, which contain a more 

 notable quantity of Carbonate of Lime than is generally found 

 in the same formation elsewhere in Berwickshire. A dike of 

 Basalt was seen in the Ale water cutting through the same 

 strata. The red soil that we had passed over affords indica- 

 tions of Red Sandstone, which makes its appearance in the 

 Ale above Millbank, whence it is supposed to extend to the 

 Fort at Eyemouth. The Greywacke of the Ale is indeed 

 very rufescent, but insufficiently coloured to warrant the deep 

 hue of the red soils all along its banks, so far as we went, 

 and which are also continuous to the coast. These seem to 

 mark either the proximity of Red Sandstones and their accom- 

 panying marls ; or their presence in former periods of the earth's 

 history, although now swept off. Transported materials also 

 mix with them ; as for instance fragments of drift-coal, and 

 heel, an earthy red haematite, near the brick work at Ale mill, 

 where the clay is said to be accumulated in a natural hollow; 

 but in general a soil owes more to the abrasion of the sub- 

 jacent rock than to substances brought from a distance. 



The party having separated in the Ayton woods, one division 

 went up the Ale, while the others made for Eyemouth and 

 the coasts adjacent. Reseda luteola grew about Millbank 

 and on the Kip rock, a bold perpendicular section of Grey- 

 wacke and its slate, with the strata nearly horizontal. The 

 Reseda appears alien here, handed down from people who 

 may have used it for dyeing in the olden time. About the 

 summit of the pine-crowned cliff, a pair of the pretty Motacilla 

 Boarula (Grey Wagtail) amused us by their restless solicitude 

 about the safety of their nest, hid somewhere up in that fast- 

 ness, far beyond our reach. Kip rocks are numerous in Scot- 

 land, the name being applied to jutting eminences or upright 

 points of rocks. The Islandic Keppr is a tumour; Kipper is 

 a beaked fish; Kippii horns are horns curved upwards. 



The Ale water, whose tortuous glen we had now entered, 

 is in summer an unobtrusive burn, continually being crossed 



