546 PROFESSOR HEDDLE ON THE MINERALOGY OF SCOTLAND. 
be the other way, but it is somewhat obscure. This obscurity is in part due to 
the occurrence of an almost non-laminated massive rock, which my con/rére, Mr 
DupceEon, and I claim to have discovered here, as no one of the writers who 
have described the country has noticed it. 
This rock consists in greatest part of garnet, in less of smaragdite, and in 
still less of kyanite—it is in fact eklogite. 
The rock forms a ridge extending from Ben Capval on the west, to Roneval 
on the east ; itis somewhere about eight miles in length, by two in breadth, with 
an altitude of 1000 feet on the west and 1500 on the east. 
On rounding to the northward the eastern extremity of this ridge, the horn- 
blendic rock is again met with, its layers laced and bound together by huge 
granitic dykes. 
This extends to the northward as a gently undulating country,—if such a 
word is here applicable,—for a distance of some seven miles, with a breadth of 
about four. 
Tn no other part of Scotland is such an expanse of utterly barren waste to be 
met with. There is copse on Cruchan Ben, heath bells in deep Glen Coe ; there 
are at least waterfalls which represent that motion which is akin to life at 
Coruisk, and there is plenty of heather, along with the grey boulder stones on 
the dreary moor of Rannock. But here there is nothing. And had those 
writers, who in their eloquence have expended all the synonyms of desolation in 
their descriptions of the above localities, but visited this, they would have 
found themselves with an exhausted vocabulary in presence of a scene which, 
for dreary barrenness, transcends them all. 
A great flat—and yet not a flat; roll after roll of bared and bleacial 
rock,—like the swellings of the ocean petrified after storm; no covering 
whatever, 
thd 
“Worn and wasted to the bones ; 
nothing which speaks of life; nothing which, at first sight, even speaks of 
motion past. The only objects which speak at all, speak of death, —every loose 
stone has been sedulously collected to form those cairns which mark the resting- 
places of the funeral corteges which for generations have carried their burdens 
from sea to sea. . 
In single line these cairns stretch from east to west, and, some little way 
north of them, there also stretches a line of towering eminences, connected 
ridge-wise into an elevated Scuir. 
Crossing transversely the scalped and wasted outcrops of one of the hardest 
of known rocks, curiosity is strained to the utmost as one speculates upon the 
nature of this enduring ridge. 
If this primal rib of old mother earth upon which we walk has been so cut 

