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NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



writer has studied on American shores, in northern Scotland at 

 Scrabster and Caithness, in Hoy and the other islands of the Orkneys, 

 are surpassed in magnitude and effect by this leviathan rock. It lies 

 like an immense Atlantic liner, almost at right angles to the course 

 of the South cove, headed inward to the North cove wharf. Its 

 limestone strata, which stand vertical, rise to a hight of 290 feet 

 at its highest landward apex, where today a weathered joint face 

 hangs out a triangular rock mass like a pennant flying at foremast 

 peak. 



From the sharp landward bow the massive widens outward to a 

 diameter of about 300 feet and extends in length seaward 1500 feet, 



Seaward face of the pillar at outer end of Perce rock ; showing the arch 



its top sloping with undulating surface rapidly at first and then more 

 gently backward. Sternward stands an isolated rock pillar, remnant 

 of a fallen arch which the seas brought down, as my good friend 

 Philip Le Boutillier tells me, on a rough 17th of June 1845. But the 

 rock is still tunneled aft by a fine arch through which a boat at sail 

 might pass were it not for the breakers. On its rearward sea face is 

 another and smaller arch. The summit of the rock is the breeding- 

 ground of thousands of gulls and cormorants, which make an ever 

 moving halo of white and black about the grassy slopes and jagged 

 asperities of the surface and whose screams and calls are as 

 sempiternal as the breaking of the surf on the fallen rocks. The 

 cliff is virtually inaccessible. Local traditions and Sir Gilbert 

 Parker tell of its having been scaled, but be this as it may, the walls 



