1 
126 ANIMAL LIFE ON THE 
components, the Long Island, like the Lammermoors and \ 
the Grampians, may have been smiling in the sun when 
the Alps and Himalaya mountains lay buried in the abyss ; i 
whereas, the greater part of Skye and Mull must have I 
been, like these vast mountain chains of the Continent, an i 
oozy sea-floor, over which the ligneous productions of the \ 
neighbouring lands, washed down by the streams, grew ; 
heavy and sank, and on which the belemnite dropped its ] 
spindle and the ammonite its shell." Speaking in the same i 
strain, the geological account of Taylor's Pictorial Scotland \ 
says : — Twelve hundred feet on the slope of the Lomonds, \ 
or high up among the sources of the Nith, near Cumnock, i 
and we tread the shores of a former sea — the shells, corals, \ 
and drift-leaves, all embedded in its sands, and all still as \ 
perfect and beautiful as when washed and stranded up by j 
the last ripple of its waves. Thus i 
* Earthquakes have raised to heaven the humble vale, 
And gulfs the mountain's mighty mass entombed ; j 
And where the Atlantic rolls, fair continents have bloomed,' \ 
is not to be regarded as the mere exaggerations of the poet, j 
but the warrantable deductions of the man of science." 
On the shores of the Clyde's once inland sea, these j 
shells lived and moved and had their being ] and that very : 
possibly may have been long before the Fossil Grove of | 
Whiteinch" spread a green leaf to the summer's sun. j 
Throughout these countless ages they have lain entombed \ 
with the rich deposits of the carboniferous system, while ! 
these deposits were preparing and consolidating for the use 
of God's creature — man. Yet how strange the story — by ! 
the power of self-made laws, one man here and another i 
there, even in this enlightened age, dare to claim them as ; 
their own. ; 
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