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THI, GIFT OF
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EDINBURGH AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD,
GEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL;
- tº
$
e º e
tº
WITH THE
GEOLOGY OF THE BASS R00K.
BY HUGH MILLER, 22 - e s
AUTHOR OF • THE OLD RED SANDSTONE,” “My schools AND SCHOOLMASTERS,’
‘THE TESTIMONY of THE Rocks,” ETC.
FO URTH Zzyz770M.
EDINBURGH :
W I L L I A M P. N. I. M. M. O.
I 87 O.
MURRAY AND GIBB, EDINBURGH,
PRINTERS TO HER MAJESTY'S STATIONERY OFFICE,
P R E F A C E.
I HAVE at length the melancholy Satisfaction of present-
ing to the reader the last of that series of works fit for
publication left upon my hands by my beloved husband.
Four of these, it will be remembered,—viz. The Cruise of
the Betsey; 7%e Headship of Christ; Essays, Historical and
Critical, with the last issued volume of Zales and Sketches,
—were prepared for the press by his own hand, although
not in a convenient or portable form, the first three having
appeared in the columns of the Witness newspaper ; the
last, in Wilson's Zales of the Borders.
The remaining two, which were left in manuscript,
JCectures on Popular Geology, and a portion of the present
work on the Geology of Edinburgh and its Meighbourhood,
—I have made it a Sacred duty to give to the world,
according to the repeatedly expressed intention of their
author; and I have had the less hesitation in fulfilling
this task, because all his manuscripts, especially those pre-
pared for delivery before a popular audience, were written
with the utmost care, and required no revision or addition,
unless in the shape of an occasional note, where any late
discovery rendered a modification or explanation of the
sense necessary or desirable. The proofs of the present
manuscripts I have submitted to the Rev. W. S. Symonds,
- -----. º: f's
cºs ºf ºzº, A. ’s
** ...' ... " – . … ." . A s
*3 &..}}. º, '-º'- 2-º-
* : T. if *k-
†: i_3 + 3 ºtº
iv. AA’AºA'A CA.
to whom, as on many former occasions, my warmest
thanks are due.
The two lectures with which the volume commences
were read by my husband before the Philosophical Institu-
tion ; the papers on the Brick-Clays of Portobello and the
Raised Beach at Fillyside, before the Royal Physical Society.
The miscellaneous essays which follow the portion of
the work treating of the Geology of Edinburgh and its
Neighbourhood were written for the Witness. They are
chiefly descriptions of memorable incidents in the modern
history of the city which came under the author's own
observation; and to many readers they will form not the
least interesting portion of the volume.
7%e Geology of the Bass explains itself to be a contribu-
tion to a work published in 1847, devoted to the elucida-
tion of the History, the Natural History, and all the other
peculiarities of the Bass Rock. The work was got up
under the auspices of James Crawford, Esq., W.S., a native
of North Berwick, in conjunction with Mr. W. P. Kennedy,
publisher, and Mr. John Greig, printer. Hugh Miller
reserved the copyright of his own contribution on its Geo-
logy for the purpose of making it a constituent part of his
Geology of Scotland,-a work long contemplated, and into
which all these papers and lectures, as well as those on
Popular Geology, would have been incorporated.
The writing of the manuscript papers now for the first
time published formed in reality the latest labours of my
husband's life, the preparation for the press of 7%é Zésà-
mony of the Åocks being a work merely editorial, al-
AA’EA ACA2. - V
though requiring more thought, and an intenser applica-
tion, than the state of his health at that time could
safely permit. Whilst residing at Portobello for the last
four years of his life, he frequently left home about mid-
day, and spent his time until late in the evening in ex-
ploring the shores of Leith, and the nearer towns along
the margin of the sea, giving his exclusive attention to
the formation of the coast-lines, and endeavouring to ex-
tract the secrets of the boulder and brick clays. His
success, at a much earlier period, in the region of the
Old Red Sandstone, at a time when it was a terra in-
cognita to geologists, is sufficiently well known. His re-
searches in the boulder-clay department, that dark and
mysterious period which was long believed to be the
epoch of the Flood, shutting out the present act in life's
wonderful drama from all the other long-drawn scenes of
the past,-are scarcely, however, known at all, because I
believe their only very distinct record is to be found in
the pages now given to the public. It is thus hoped
that this little volume, not quite so bulky as some of
its predecessors, may prove not unwelcome to geologists;
while I most fondly trust— having kept it to the last
with that especial view—that it will be accepted by the
citizens of Edinburgh as an additional memorial of one
who lived among them for the best years of his life, who
had their interests warmly at heart, and to whom all that
pertained to his Country was intensely dear. He has
been called the last of the Scotchmen,_in an exclusive
Sense, I presume, – as a well-known writer called Dr.
vi PREFACE.
Chalmers the last of the Christians. We may hope,
however, that God in his providence will yet raise up
for our country other Christians like Dr. Chalmers, and
Scotchmen like Hugh Miller.
I consider my task as editor of these posthumous
volumes to have ended. By some, perhaps, the series
may have been regarded as too lengthened. Yet it ap-
peared to me that one more abridged would not have
done justice to my husband's life-work, or placed his
varied toils in a position in which they could properly
be appreciated.
If I am spared, and permitted health and strength
sufficient for affording some little assistance in the pre-
paration of a Memoir subsequent to his autobiography,
I shall think that I have not lived these latter painful
years quite in vain. At any rate, such materials as I
have shall be placed in the hands of a literary gentleman
whom I consider competent to the task.
I am the more particular in mentioning this, as I
have had frequent applications from gentlemen, who felt
there was a want which ought to be supplied, requesting
what materials I could afford, and offering to undertake
the work. I therefore take this opportunity of stating that
the precious record of my husband's latest and busiest
years will be my next care, believing, as I do, that it is
a record not wholly without warning, yet full of interest
and instruction, for more than one class of his fellow-men.
LYDIA MILLER,
Mozember 1863.
CO N T E N T S.
—º-
PAGE
GEOLOGICAT, FEATURES-LECTURE I. º e . . . º I
LECTURE II. . g º º º 47
on THE BRICK-clays of PORTOBELLO, WITH THEIR ORGAN-
ISMS, VEGETABLE AND ANIMAL, º a. * º . 91
ON A RAISED SEA-BOTTOM NEAR FILLYSIDE BANK, BETWEEN .
LEITH AND PORTOBELLO, tº º ë • • ... I IO
ANCIENT SEA-MARGINS, . º º e e & 's . I25
THE MEADows, cº e º © º e . I 34
THE DROUGHTS OF 1842, o º e • * • . 148
EDINBURGH, . o e º º e e º o . I58
THE QUEEN’s VISIT TO SCOTLAND IN 1842, . e tº . I68
LADY GLENORCHY'S CHAPEL, . o e º e º . 177
A VoICE FROM THE GREY FRIARS, . & © G o . I9 I
TRINITY COLLEGE CHURCH zersus BURNS’ MONUMENT, . • 2O6
THE FUNERAL OF CHALMERS, . ... tº tº g & º . 2 I9
ST. MARGARET's WELL, . o º º º e o . 228
GEOLOGY OF THE BASS, . & º • * º º e • 245
E D IN B U R G H
AND ITS NEIGHEO U R HOOD.
G F O / O G M C A L AP E A T U R F S.
T, ECT U R E I.
Natural Features of the City–Once a Scene of Lakes—Its Trap-Rock
Hills and Precipices—The Deposits found in the Meadows or old
Borough Loch—How produced—Ancient Picture of Watson's
Hospital and the surrounding Locality—What is now the City
once covered with Trees and Thickets, the abode of Wild Beasts—
The Ancient and Existing Coast-Lines—Traces of the Sea having
once flowed as far as Stockbridge on the West and Fillyside on
the East—The Duke's Quarry at Granton situated between the two
Coast-Lines—Its Littoral Remains—Four Belts or Areas of Sea-
bottom, termed Zones—Their Deposits—Tract of Laminarian
Sea-bottom near North Queensferry—The Appearances which it
exhibits—The Sands, Gravels, and Brick-Clays around the City—
Ancient Sea-bottom in Banffshire—The Geography of Scotland,
when covered by the Tide, widely different from what it is now—
The Site of Edinburgh then existing as a Scene of Islands of the
Sea—The Shell Alphabet—The Boulder-Clay Deposit—Its Or-
ganisms—Most of the New Town built upon it—Conclusion.
THE Scottish capital is one of the few great cities of the
empire that possesses natural features, and which, were the
buildings away, would, while it ceased to be town, become
very picturesque country. And hence one of the peculiar
- A
2 AE/D/AV/3 UAEGAſ A WZO 77'S AWAZY GHBO UA’AſOOD.
characteristics of Edinburgh. The natural features so over-
top the artificial ones, its hollow valleys are so much more
strongly marked than its streets, and its hills and precipices
than its buildings, – Arthur Seat and the Crags look so
proudly down on its towers and spires,-and so huge is the
mass, and so bold the outline of its Castle rock and its
Calton, compared with those of the buildings which over-
top them,--that intelligent visitors, with an eye for the
prominent and distinctive in scenery, are led to conceive
of it rather as a great country place than as a great town.
It is a scene of harmonious contrasts. Not only does it
present us with a picturesque city of the grey, time-faded
past, drawn out side by side, as if for purposes of Com-
parison, with a gay, freshly-tinted city of the present, rich
in all the elegancies and amenities, but it exhibits also,
in the same well-occupied area, town and Country; as if
they, too, had been brought together for purposes of Com-
parison, and as if, instead of remaining in uncompromising
opposition, as elsewhere, they had resolved on showing
how congruously, and how much to their mutual advantage,
they could unite and agree. This remarkable prominency
of natural feature renders it comparatively easy for us to
conceive of the aspect exhibited by what is now Edinburgh,
ere yet it had become a home of man. Hogg, in his
“Queen's Wake,” describes with a few graphic strokes the
Edinburgh of the times of Edward I. :—
‘See yon little hamlet, o'ershadow’d with Smoke;
See yon hoary battlement throned on the rock ;
Even there shall a city in splendour break forth, L
The haughty Dun-Edin, the Queen of the North ;
GEOZOG/CA/L APFA 7TURAE.S. 3
There learning shall flourish, and liberty Smile, -
The awe of the world, and the pride of the isle.”
Let us, however, attempt conceiving of it at a greatly earlier
time; at a time when those leaf-shaped swords of bronze
found a few years since in its neighbourhood, on the
southern flanks of Arthur Seat, glittered at the sides of the
old aboriginal warriors, to whom the antiquary has now
restored them, and when the ancient fortress of the Maidens
existed in its first form, like the rude hill-forts of New
Zealand, as a few earthen heaps ranged mound beyond
mound, with deep ditches between, and topped by lines of
tall, undressed palisades.
The scene consists, more immediately in the foreground,
of a series of what seem nearly parallel valleys, with ridges
between, steeper or more gentle of ascent, according to the
disposition and form of the trap-rocks which protected them
from the denuding agencies on the west, and which at this
early period are bosky with bush and tree. Each of these
valleys has its blue gleaming lake. There is the Mor
Loch, a sheet of water still remembered by some of our
older citizens, but whose very name points to another sheet
of water, the South Loch, of which tradition retains no
recollection, but of which unequivocal remains have been
found, in the form of beds of silt, impressions of aquatic
plants, and layers of lacustrine shells, in the valley now
occupied by the Cowgate and the Grassmarket. Beyond,
in a flatter and tamer valley, there is a reed-encircled lake
on the area now occupied by the Meadows, which, as
indicated by the extent of its remains, must have existed
4 EDINBURGH AND ITS AWE/GA/BOURATOOD.
as a piece of open water for many centuries. A smaller
lake, also indicated by its shells, Limnaea and Cyclas,
lies along the hollow valley which intervenes between the
classic ridge of St. Leonards and the sloping talus of
Salisbury Crags. Yet another lochen occupies the valley
between the grassy back of the Crags and the dizzy front
of Arthur Seat, known as the Hunter's Bog. Dunsappie
Loch has been of late restored ; and that of Duddingston,
though with lessened area and ever-shallowing depths, still
exists. And thus, in a tract of country little more than one
and a half square miles in extent, at least seven lakes must
have opened their blue eyes to the sky, and given in these
early times lightness and beauty to the otherwise shaggy
landscape.
Let us now mark a peculiarity in its bolder features. All
its steeper precipices present their iron fronts to the west,
while towards the east its slopes are prolonged and gentle.
The Castle and Calton rocks, the erect front of Salisbury
Crags, the western flanks and dark brow of Arthur Seat,
the trap precipices that rise over Lochend, the low trap
precipices of Hawk Hill, all look to the west, as if watching
the advance from that quarter of the enemy that had wasted
them of old. There is another peculiarity of the scene. I
have said that its valleys appear at first nearly parallel ; but
they in reality converge towards the east, and most of them
unite in that quarter. The valleys of the Nor' Loch and
the Cowgate meet at Holyrood; the valley between St.
Leonards and the Crags has nearly the same point of
junction; and yet a little farther to the east still, we find
GAE O/LOG/CA/. FEA 7TURES. 5
the valley of the Hunter's Bog uniting with the others. In
short, these contiguous valleys find their point of union
towards the east, just where a great current, flowing from
the west, and broken up into separate streams by the trap
eminences, would find its point of union. Let us mark yet
one peculiarity more. Immediately in advance of the taller
precipices we find deep pot-like hollows. There is such a
hollow in advance of the Castle rock, towards the west.
CRAG AND TAIL PHENOMENA.
There is a corresponding hollow towards the west in ad-
vance of the precipices of the Calton. There is such a
hollow in the valley in advance of Salisbury Crags. The
hollow in advance of the precipices of Lochend is occupied
by the waters of the loch. The restored loch of Dunsappie
occupies the corresponding hollow to the west of that emi-
nence. In fine, wherever the great current whose waters
would have united where the valleys now unite would be
beaten back by the bold cliffs, and form a scarping eddy,
we find these excavated hollows. -
Such seem to be the main features of the tract of
country now occupied either by the Scottish capital, or
in its immediate neighbourhood, a tract which, if not
appropriated by one of the most picturesque of cities,

6 AEAD/WBUA’GH A WZO / TS AWAE/G//BOU/RAVOOD.
might be laid out into the most magnificent of land-
scape gardens,—a garden with which Hagley, or Stowe,
or the Leasowes, might compete in vain.
The most modern deposits in the neighbourhood of
the city are those of its ancient lakes. And yet, as
these hollows, surrounded by their natural barriers of
rock or clay, must have been receptacles of water ever
since the last upheaval of the land, their lower beds
must represent what, in relation to human history, may
be regarded as a very remote period. The Meadows
—the site of what was of old known as the Borough
Loch — were laid open in 1842 by a series of deep
drains, which have converted into green sward what,
previous to that time, used, in at least the winter
months, to be unsightly morass; and the sections then
exhibited bore inscribed along their sides, in easily de-
cipherable characters, a history of the vanished lake.
The lower and earlier deposits were formed of a fine
grey silt, separated into lamina as thin as pasteboard,
and that bore in its folds the partially carbonized im-
pressions of what seemed to be the common water-flag
and common reed. Immediately above the silt there
occurred a bed of grey shell-marl, composed mainly of
lacustrine shells, which thinned out towards the edges
of the lake, but which near its centre had attained to
the great depth of six feet. So light and small were
these shelly coverings, that twenty, on the average,
weighed only a grain; and yet every acre of the cen-
tral portions of the Borough Loch had in the course
GAE O/LOGYCA/. FEA 7TURAE.S. * 7
of ages accumulated its many hundreds of cart-loads.
They were, as I have said, chiefly lacustrine ; but a
few stragglers from the land — helicidae and bulimi —
might be found among them, washed, no doubt, into
the lake by heavy rains; and in the middle of a thick
bed the workmen came upon the wasted fragment of
a deer's horn. Over this shell-marl there lay in some
parts from two to three feet of peat-moss; and in one
tangled mass I found embedded, in a state of wonderful
preservation, the remains of the large evening beetle,
the insect so poetically described by Collins as winding
* His small but sullen horn,
As oft he rises, 'midst the twilight path,
Against the Pilgrim borne with heedless hum.’
The glossy elytra still preserved their prismatic tints of
azure and green. But fragile as we may deem creatures
of this division, the chitine or elytrine with which they
are covered, and which form their strong wing-cases, is
one of perhaps the most indestructible substances in
nature. The Chitine of dragon-flies of the Oolite, nay,
of scorpions of the Coal Measures, has been detected,
after the lapse of Countless ages, lying unchanged in the
rock. The characters in which, about twelve years ago,
I found the history of the Borough Loch inscribed along
the sides of the Meadow excavation, were, as I have
said, easily decipherable. For many years there was a
slow silty deposition taking place along its bottom. The
soaking rains of winter and early spring, and the heavy
thunder showers of Summer and autumn, rendered it
8 AEIO/WBURGH AND ITS AWEIGHBOURHOOD.
turbid, time after time, with the clay and soil of the
surrounding grounds : each flood deposited its layer,
which, though thin as the leaves of a book, gradually
swelled by repetition into bulk and volume ; and now
the leaf-like folds enclosed a reed, and now a flag,
and now a rush, as if to tell that around the edges
of this quiet lake there stood up a green rank hedge
of aquatic plants, amid whose recesses the dragon-fly
deposited its young, and the wild duck reared her
brood. Anon the lake became a busy scene of life.
Minute Cycladidae crept by thousands over its bottom,
each on its pale fleshy foot ; while the air-breathing
Lemnaeidae walked along the under plane of its surface
by hundreds, reversed, like flies along a ceiling, with
their terminal whorls turned downwards. At length,
after generation had succeeded generation for many
ages, the exuviae of the dead so filled the depths of
the lake, that there was no longer space for the living :
the water mosses began to spring up in its marly shal-
lows, and gradually contracted its area, until what had
been so long open water became unsightly morass, and
the old Borough Loch was transformed into the Mea-
dows. At least partially, however, it seems to have re-
tained its character as a lake down to the middle of
the last century." In one of the larger rooms of Wat-
son's Hospital, the plaster is occupied by a painting
*This part of the subject is more fully treated of in a separate paper
on the Meadows, which the reader will find in a subsequent part of the
volume.
GAE O/LOG/CA / FAZA 7TUA’A.S. 9
more than a hundred years old,—the work, says tradi.
tion, of a grateful pupil of the institution,--which re-
presents the Hospital itself as it appeared at the time
from the part of the Meadows which lies immediately
below. That portion of the central Meadow Walk
which lies to the east of the building, and which is
now overshadowed by a double row of trees, that ex-
hibit in their gnarled trunks and stiff angular boughs an
appearance of very considerable antiquity, is represented
as a bare narrow pathway, unadorned by a single shrub.
Instead of the closely-piled rows of houses at Lauriston,
there is a tall narrow house, with sharp serrated gables,
that peeps out from amid a clump of forest trees; and
immediately in the foreground, in a locality now occu-
pied by a piece of green sward, we see a quiet shaded
corner of the Borough Loch, with a few drooping wil-
lows hanging their branches over it. I have said that
in draining the Meadows the workmen found, at a con-
siderable depth in the marl, the fragment of a deer's
horn." Numerous deer horns of great size were found
embedded, about seventy years ago, in the marl of
Duddingston Loch ; and you will remember that the
old chapel of Holyrood was founded, in fulfilment of
a vow, by David I., on the spot where he narrowly
escaped being destroyed by a furious hart at bay. The
arms of the ancient burgh of Canongate continue to ex-
*In the Museum of the Edinburgh Antiquarian Society there are the
skull and horns of a large stag (Cervus AEleft/las), which were dug up at
an earlier time in one of the parks of the Meadows.
Io EDINBURGH AND /ZS WEIGHBOURHOOD.
hibit the hart: the head, with its branchy horns, still
flares in gold from the walls of the grey, time-worn Tol-
booth ; and I find it stated by Mr. Daniel Wilson, so
well known for his antiquarian researches, that the ancient
service - book which records the incident relates that it
took place in the fourth year of the reign of David,
when he was residing in the neighbouring fortress, then
surrounded, it is added by the chronicler, “with ane
gret forrest, full of hartis, hynds, toddis, and sic like
manner of bestis.’ It costs an effort, amid the busy
hum of a crowded and venerable city, to fall back in
imagination upon a time ere the foundations of its grey
antique buildings had yet been laid, and when the areas
occupied by its tall tenements and narrow lanes were
cumbered with great trees and dark thickets, and the
fox crept stealthily through the bushes, and the red
deer and the roe sheltered in its glades. And yet,
both the history and the geology of the district testify
of such a time, and tell that, amid the rocks, and trees,
and blue gleaming lakes of what is now the busy Scot-
tish capital, the huntsman might have pursued his sport
amid the silence of shaggy Solitudes, a silence un-
broken save by the belling of the hart in its season,
or the long howl of the wolf in winter.
‘’Wolfs long howl when winter winds blow keen.’
The geological deposit in our neighbourhood to which I
shall next refer, as next in age reckoning backwards, is
that which intervenes between the ancient and the existing
coast-lines. It must have been formed, or rather must
GEOZOGICAL FEATURES. I I
have received its latter modifications, when the sea at flood
stood against the grassy terrace which runs in a line nearly
parallel to that of the existing shore, round the larger part
of Great Britain and Ireland; and which, in the near vicinity
of Edinburgh, has so often attracted the notice of geologists.
SECTION OF OI,D AND MODERN COAST-LINES NEAR PORTO BELLO.
In this neighbourhood the old line seems to have less of
that parallelism with the present one to which I have
referred, than on most other parts of the Coast, and its
outline must have been, in consequence, greatly more
picturesque and varied than that of Our existing sea-beach.
Besides the nearly parallel valleys of the city and its
suburbs, there is a valley, well-nigh transverse in its direc-
tion, which opens upon the sea towards the north. The
Water of Leith flows along its bottom ; and its nether
reaches, which are still occupied at flood by the tide,
formed the old harbour of Edinburgh. Now, when the
sea broke against the ancient Coast-line, it must have filled
the bottom of this valley from its present opening to near
Stockbridge, forming a quiet sheltered creek, fully two
miles in length, by from nearly a half to a quarter of a mile
in breadth. It must have also entered, though for a much
shorter distance, along the flat valley near the old-fashioned
farmhouse of Fillyside Bank, once known as the Figget

I2 AE/D/AVPUA’G// AAWD /7'S AVE/G///3OURA/OOD,
Whins; and thus a line of coast little more than a mile
and a half in extent, which now presents a nearly recti-
linear and somewhat tame outline, must have been then
LE | TH
Pll.LYSIDE BANK I-,
STOCKBRIDGE
ANCIENT AND EXISTING COAST-LINES.
indented by two arms of the sea, on whose quiet waters the
aboriginal huntsman of the stone period may have moored
his primitive canoe, formed of a single log ; or built, beside
their forest-covered shores, his rude wigwam of turf and
brushwood.
It is stated by Mr. Maclaren, in his Geology of Fife
and the /..of/lians, that in 1834, in cutting the railway that
runs between Portobello and Leith, the workmen ſound in
the opening of what had been the smaller Creek—that of
the Figget Whins—an oyster-bed of considerable extent ;
and we know that the regular stratification of the sea-sand,
which forms the subsoil in what had been the upper reaches





GAE O/LOGYCA/. FFA 7TURES. 13
of the larger Creek or estuary—that of Stockbridge—at-
tracted many years ago the attention of Playfair. We
find it specially referred to in a work of classical beauty,+
his well-known ///ustration of the Huttonian Z.%eory. ‘The
soil,” he says, “after a thin covering is removed, consists
entirely of sea-sand, regularly stratified, with layers of a
black carbonaceous matter in their lamellae interposed be-
tween them. Shells are, I believe, but rarely found in it;
but it has every other appearance of a sea-beach.” Mr.
Maclaren states, on the authority of Mr. Jardine, civil
engineer, that in the oyster-bed of the Fillyside or Figget
estuary, most of the valves of the shells were separate,
though in some few cases they occurred together, a con-
dition, of course, to be expected, if, as seems more than
probable from the appearances, the land rose by fits and
starts, during paroxysms of upheaval, with intervals of
repose between. I cannot doubt that the oyster once lived
on the spot. A few years ago, after a gale from the north-
east, coincident with a very high tide, had swept the shores,
and made several encroachments on the coast-line, I found,
several hundred yards to the east of this old oyster-bed,
numerous valves of oysters attached to a stratum of boulder
Stones, from which the overlying sward, with about three
feet of laminated sand, had just been washed away. The
nature of the evidence here could not be mistaken. The
Sedentary oyster, when living on a hard bottom, often
solders itself by its lower valves to rocks or stones; and
many ages after death the valves remain, as in this instance,
still attached to their ancient moorings: but where the
14 EDINBURGH AND /TS WEIGHBOURHOOD.
valves remain, the individuals to which they belong must
have lived and died. It is, however, probable, that wher-
ever we find great deposits of oysters, as at Fillyside Bank,
between the ancient and modern coast-lines, they must
have ceased to live in consequence of some previous up-
heaval of the sea-bottom ere the final recession of the Sea.
to its present limits. The oyster-beds of the Frith of Forth
are never ſaid dry by the fall of the ebb : they occur in
what has been termed the Laminarian zone, in from four to
Seven fathoms water; whereas, when the high-water line
rested along the base of the green escarpment at Granton
and Portobello, the beds in question must have lain within,
not the Laminarian, but the Littoral zone. And hence the
displaced and scattered valves, an effect, evidently, of
the exposure of the shells after death to the waves of an
open beach, subjected piecemeal to the action of the surf
by the rise and fall of the tide. All the remains which I
have found underlying, in this neighbourhood, the flat ter-
race that intervenes between the present and the ancient
Coast-lines, exhibit the Littoral character, though the original
Laminarian character may, as in the adduced instance, be
seen through it. There is no locality within a few miles
of Edinburgh where these Littoral remains can be better
studied than immediately over what is known as the Duke's
Quarry at Granton. The whole of that huge excavation
lies between the two coast-lines; and we see everywhere in
Section, along the edge, in the overlying sand and gravel,
the ancient shells which had strewed the old beach ere the
last upheaval of the land. When I last passed that way, a
GAE O/LOG/CA/, /7/EA 7'UA’/2.S. 15
series of excavations, apparently for drainage purposes, lay
open in the lea field which lies between the quarry and the
old ruinous mansion-house to the east. They were from
about a hundred feet to a hundred yards distant from the
present high-water line of stream tides; and each excava-
tion exhibited its layer of old shells, identical in character
and disposition with those of the existing beach below,
such as single valves of the oyster and pecten, numerous
specimens of the whelk, dog-whelk, and periwinkle; speci.
mens in less abundance of turritellae and aporrhais ; and in
the higher pits, immediately under the grassy escarpment
which had formed the margin of the old beach, I found
numerous detached valves of a minute bivalve of the Lami-
narian zone,—Corbula nucleus. This last was the only shell
of the ancient shore which I did not also detect on the
modern one. I may mention, that among the old shells I
found the wave-worn fragment of a horse's tooth. It was
of small size, and must have belonged to some old abori-
ginal horse of the country, never broken into the bridle,
that had lived and died ere the last upheaval of the land.
As this mixture of Littoral and Laminarian characters
has been misinterpreted by some of our geologists, and
made the occasion of a good deal of controversy, you will,
I trust, permit me to make it the subject of a few remarks.
I need scarce remind you that there are certain belts or
areas of sea-bottom which usually maintain a degree of
parallelism, more or less perfect, with the land, that, ac-
Cording to the depth of water by which they are overlaid,
are occupied by certain species of plants and animals
16 AE/D/AVPURGH AAVZ) / 7.S AWAE/GA/APO UAEA/OOZ).
peculiar to themselves. These belts or areas are termed
zones, and may be regarded as four in number. There is,
first—reckoning downwards from the land—the Littoral
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THE FOUR ZONES.
or shore zone, which comprises that strip or belt of mingled
beach and sea-bottom that intervenes between high and
low water marks. This zone has its own peculiar plants
and animals, such as the fucoids and the periwinkles.
Next comes the Laminarian zone, extending from the line
where the sea rests at the ebb of stream tides, to the depth


GAE O/LOG/CA/, /7/2.4 7'UA' FS'. 17
of fifteen fathoms. As the name indicates, it is the zone
of the Laminaria or tangles. In the Frith of Forth it is
that of the oysters and the common pecten, Pecten oper-
cularis; and it is also that of most species of the genera
Mactra and Venus. Beyond, extending from fifteen to fifty
fathoms, lies the Median or middle zone, known also, from
the abundance of its corals, as the Coralline zone. The
Infra-Median zone, or zone of the deep-sea corals, extend-
ing from fifty to one hundred fathoms, lies still farther
beyond ; and we then reach what is known as the Abyssal
region-a region in whose upper reaches even shell or
coral becomes rare, and over whose desert bottom, in the
profounder depths, there ever reposes a sluggish weight of
ponderous water, unstirred by tides or tempests, in which
most traces of life, animal or vegetable, disappear.
It is chiefly with the two inner of the four zones of sea-
bottom that the student of the Post-Tertiary period is called
on to deal in this neighbourhood. The Coralline zone
exists in our Frith as but a few detached patches (as in the
neighbourhood of Queensferry), or as a depressed area in
its entrance, some eight or ten miles beyond Inchkeith;
though, of course, ere the latter upheavals of the land, it
must have been much more considerable. And what I
would now call your attention to is the fact, that with each
of these upheavals a change must have taken place in the
zones of all the neighbouring seas. An upheaval which
converted the Littoral zone into dry land would have also
the effect of elevating the Laminarian zone into the levels
which the Littoral one had just occupied, and a portion of
|E}
18 AED/WRURGH AND /ZS WEIGHBOURHOOD.
the Coralline zone into the levels of the Laminarian One.
And in course of time these would assume respectively the
Littoral and Laminarian characters, and at the same time
still retain, in at least their dead shells, some of the charac-
ters which they had borne originally. What is now the
Littoral zone of the neighbouring shore, must have been
its Laminarian zone when the waves broke against the
grassy escarpment of Leith and Granton ; and from the
shells of the flat terrace on which, in this district, Porto-
bello, Musselburgh, and the greater part of Leith and
Newhaven are built, we find that, though it existed as a
Littoral zone at the period of its upheaval, it had formed a
portion of the Laminarian zone at a previous period, ere
some earlier upheaval had taken place. We can still see
in its organisms the Laminarian, if I may so express myself,
through the Littoral zone. On the more exposed coasts in
our immediate neighbourhood, the storms of many cen-
turies have obliterated all mark of that previous Lami-
narian condition of what is now the Littoral zone, which
must have obtained ere the last upheaval. In a sheltered
bay, however, scarce half a mile distant from the village of
North Queensferry, I was fortunate enough to discover, this
season, a tract of the Laminarian sea-bottom belonging tC)
the times of the old coast-line, raised far within the present
Littoral level; so that I could look down, in the open air,
on the remains of beds of shells which in ordinary circum-
stances can be swept by only the dredge and the trawl.
It has assumed, however, since the period of upheaval, not
a few of the Littoral characteristics ; and, as being de-
GEO/LOG/CA/L FEA 7'OA’E.S. 19
cidedly of the age of which I am now treating, and as
its peculiar conditions throw light on those of the terrace
of the old coast-line, I shall venture on a brief description
of the appearances which it exhibits. -
Opening among the trap-rocks of a precipitous shore
in somewhat the form of a horse-shoe, it presents at its
inner extremity the flat terrace of the old coast-line,
which, when I was first introduced to the place this
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PORT LAING (North QUEENSFERRY).
season, I found fragrant with a strip of rich bean-field,
and the ancient escarpment, gorgeous with wild roses and
the rock geranium, rising steep and shaggy over the fur-
rows. Beneath the field there is a broad sandy beach
strewed with shells, along which the tide rises and falls;
and observing, first, that most of its shells presented a
worn and aged appearance, I next ascertained that there
occurred among them, in great abundance, single valves
of Corbula nucleus, -the single species which I found










2O AE/D/AVB UAEGA/ AAV/D /TS AWAE/GA/BOU/CA/OO/D.
among the shells of the raised beach at Granton, but
failed to detect on the neighbouring shore. As a beach
shell, this Corbula is rare, but very common as a deep-
sea one. “Whilst the naturalist, say the accomplished
authors of the History of ſ/he British Moſ/usca, “whose
efforts at Collecting are confined to the rocks, sands, and
briny pools of Our Coast, is apt to regard this species
as of unfrequent occurrence, its extreme prevalence is
a subject of almost petulant complaint from the habitual
dredger.' I struck outwards along the sands, to ascer-
tain whence the Corbula and the aged shells had been
derived, and found, at the half-ebb line, a deposit of what
is now a blue clay, but which had once evidently been
a deep-sea mud, stretching from side to side of the little
bay, and abounding in ancient deep-sea shells, evidently
lying in situ. The remains of a great oyster-bed, some
of the valves still united and mottled with stones, to
which groups of single under-valves were still attached,
might be traced to within twenty yards of high-water
mark. As is common in such beds, numerous valves
of Pecten opercularis mingled with those of the oyster.
A bed of Corbula nucleus lay a little beyond, but still
far above the line of low ebb ; and with these Corbulae
there occurred, in considerable abundance, specimens of
Nucula nucleus, Saxicava rugosa, Anomia ephippium,
Emarginula reticulata, Dentalium entale, and Murex
erenaceus. Specimens of Cyprina islandica and Car-
dium echinatum still lay fixed in the bed, with the two
valves united, as when they had died. I found Turri-
GE O/LOG/CA/. A. EA 7TURAE.S. 21
tella communis very abundant; Modiola modiolus and
Pecten maximus considerably less so ; and a few speci-
mens of Pecten fusio, Lucinopsis undata, and Lucina
borealis. Now, all these shells, though some of them
are occasionally found alive at the ebb line of very low
tides, are not Littoral, but Laminarian shells. They are
exactly such shells as the dredge still brings up from
such portions of the bottom of the Frith of Forth as are
covered by from six to ten fathoms water. The oysters
of the Frith are now dredged up from four to six or
seven fathoms. But what had been in succession here
a middle and upper belt of the Taminarian zone during
the rise of the land, has now lain for many ages within
the Littoral one, and it has assumed in the time not a
few Littoral characters. We find the ancient clay per-
forated by borers that belong to the lower portion of
the Littoral zone, such as Pholas candida and Pholas
crispata, and by gapers, such as Mya truncata and Lu-
traria elliptica; resting over it, we find the shells of peri-
winkles, the dog-whelk, and the edible cockle ; and by
much the greater number of the deep-sea shells which
cover it, washed in their present exposed position by
the waves of ages, exist, on at least the surface, as de-
tached valves. -
There are just two circumstances that I would mention
as curious in connection with this little bay. We find
in the ancient clay decayed fragments of wood, nume-
rous cones of the Scotch fir, and occasionally, though
more rarely, the shells of acorns and hazel-nuts, – all,
22 E ZO/WAE O//&GAZ AAV/O / 7'S AVAE/GA/BOUR //OO/O.
apparently, from their state of keeping, and the manner
in which we find them embedded, of the same age as
the deep-sea shells. Such were some of the indigenous
trees of the country ere the latter upheaval of the land.
Swept down by the streams and rivers of the upper part
of the Frith, these fruits and boughs, becoming at length
weightier than the water which had sustained them, sank
to the bottom, and became embedded in the mud ; and
their existence in considerable quantity in this deposit
throws light on the occurrence of vegetable remains of
very different species, but corresponding character, among
the Liassic shells of Eathie and Shandwick in the north
of Scotland, and among those of the Mountain Lime-
stone of Tweed Mill and Budle in the south. My other
fact is a more curious one. The shells which belong
to the time of the old coast-line have been found iden-
tical with those still living in our seas. I have been in-
formed by Mr. Smith of Jordan Hill, one of our highest
authorities on the subject, that when he first set himself,
many years ago, to compare the shells of the old coast.
terrace with those of the present coast, he found among
the former three species which he had not at the time
found living ; but that subsequently he succeeded in
dredging up all three in the neighbouring seas, and thus
established the zoological identity of the Post-Tertiary
periods with the existing one. I detected, however, in
this little bay, existing as a fossil of the times of the
raised beaches, a shell which has not yet been found
living on Our Scottish coasts, and which, though now
G/E O/LOG/CAM, ACEA 7'O/č/.S. 23
&=4
an exceeding rare British shell, seems in those ancient
times, when the Littoral clays of the bay existed as deep-
sea mud, to have been a tolerably common one in the
Frith of Forth. I refer to the Thracia convexa, “not
yet found,’ say the authors of the History of British Mo/.
/usca, ‘ elsewhere than in the British islands, where it is
reckoned one of Our rarest species;” but of which I ob-
tained here, in an area of less than an acre (though
mostly in a very fragmentary state), portions of more than
three dozen individuals. ‘The South Devonshire coast
has produced,’ says Mr. Hanley, “the greater part of the
specimens of this shell existing in cabinets. In Torbay
it is occasionally, though very rarely, brought in by the
trawlers, who know it by the name of the golden /em,-
possibly in allusion to the comparatively high price they
obtain for it, or perhaps in consequence of its rich yellow
colouring.’ It is surely curious enough to find, that what
is now so rare in the southern locality, in which it is
least so, should have been so abundant once in our own
neighbourhood; and further, that the one shell which
distinguished zoologically between the times of the old
and those of the existing coast-line, should be a shell
so interesting from its exclusively British character, and
so highly valued by the collector. -
Next in age in this vicinity, reckoning backwards to
the terraces of the old coast-line, with their beds of
existing shells, are those stratified Sands, gravels, and
brick-clays, which form the subsoil of so many of the
richer fields that lie around the city. In the sand, which
24 AEZ)/AWBURGH AAVD /TS AWA. ZGAAOURHOOD.
usually contains a good deal of carbonaceous matter dis-
posed in the laminae, and curiously intercalates with the
gravels, I have succeeded in finding in this neighbour-
hood no organism that properly belongs to itself. Car-
bonaceous matter, though originally organic, exists but
as re-formations of culm and comminuted shales, derived
from the Coal Measures. But in the brick-clays a few
organisms have been detected. I have disinterred from
out the brick-clays of Fife—evidently of the same age as
our own—some of the lateral plates of Balanus com-
munis, with fragments of Cyprina islandica; and I have
seen, with Mr. William Rhind of this city, a specimen of
what seemed to be a fresh-water shell, Cyclas cornea,
derived from the brick-clays of Portobello. But in order
to find the stratified sands of apparently the same age as
those of the neighbouring fields abundantly fossiliferous,
the geologist would require to remove northwards to
Banffshire, where a sea-bottom richly charged with shells
may be found at a level considerably higher over the
present sea-line than the higher parts of the New Town
of Edinburgh, and which at one point lies from five to
six miles inland. When the tide covered that ancient
sea-bottom, the geography of Scotland must have been
widely different from what it is now. The great Cale-
donian Valley must have been an ocean sound, open
from sea to Sea, bearing along its bottom, at its highest
levels, near Loch Oich, twenty-five fathoms of water, and
about thirty-seven fathoms where the town of Inverness
now stands. A similar sound, broader but not so deep,
GAEO/OG/CA/L FEA 7TU/ø/2.S. 25
would have connected what are now the Friths of Forth
and Clyde. Scotland to the north would have consisted,
ſlot of one continuous land, but of two ; a third and
larger division would have run far into England, and in
our own immediate neighbourhood would present a strik-
ing scene of ocean channels and rocky islets. Over the
spot where St. Cuthbert's Church now stands there would
rest twelve fathoms of water, and twenty-two fathoms
over the spot now occupied by the Palace of Holyrood.
. The Calton Hill must have formed at that time an islet
elevated, at its highest point, about a hundred and ten
feet over the sea-level; the ridge of the more ancient
portion of the Old Town, with the Castle rock rising
boldly at its western termination, an islet of an elevation
of nearly two hundred feet. The elevated ground on
which part of the southern portion of the Old Town is
built, would exist as a flatter and broader island, separated
from the Castle Hill islet by a narrow channel occupying
the valley of the Cowgate and the Grassmarket, and from
the ridge of Bruntsfield and the Grange by a sea-channel
occupying the flat hollow of the Meadows. A deep arm
of the sea would run, amid the Arthur Seat group of
hills, along the valley of the Hunter's Bog: the group
would itself form a picturesque island ; and a wide and
ample bay, traversed by the bold promontory of Craig-
millar Castle, would cover the larger part of the Dalkeith
Coal-field, and submerge, to the depth of about seventeen
fathoms, the site of the town of Dalkeith itself. When the
Curtain first rose upon us this evening, we saw what is
26 ED/VBURGH AND /ZS WEIGHBOORHOOD.
now Edinburgh existing as a scene of lakes; we now see
it existing as a Scene of islands; and from the organisms
of the raised sea-bottom of Banffshire, with those occa-
sionally found in the brick-clays of the neighbourhood, and
the more elevated Post-Pliocene deposits of the western
coasts of Scotland, we can predicate the exact type of at
least molluscan life which existed in its surrounding seas,
and infer from that the character of the flora by which its
islets were covered. Many of the Post-Pliocene shells are
identical with those now found in our seas. I detected in
abundance, in the two hundred and thirty feet sea-bottom
of Gamrie, the pretty little crimson-coloured bivalve of our
sandy shores, Tellina solidula. I found also the common
whelk, Buccinum undatum ; the common edible cockle
and mussel, Cardium and Mytilus edulis; the deep-sea
cockle, Cardium echinatum; the horse mussel, Modiola
modiolus; with Cyprina islandica, Turritella communis,
Mangelia, and Fusus. But with these there mingled in
great abundance shells whose proper haunts lie far to the
north, such as Astarte arctica, a northern form abundant
on the shores of Greenland, but become so exceedingly
rare in our seas, that the authors of the British Mo//usca,
though indefatigable dredgers, had actually to borrow the
British specimen which they figured for their work; and
Tellina proxima. It is one of the peculiarities of this
latter shell—an exceedingly common one in the Banff-
shire beds—that it receives its fullest development in
point of size amid the intense cold of the higher lati-
tudes. It thrives best in a wintry climate ; and it is a
GAE O/LOGICA / / /. A 7'U/č/.S. 27
curious fact, that while a specimen figured among the
British Mollusca, which, though not found alive, was
dredged off the Isle of Skye in a state of great freshness,
measured only about ſtaff an inch in length, and the
larger specimens of the latter Post-Pliocene beds of the
Clyde measure little more than an inch in length, the
larger individuals of the two hundred and thirty feet sea-
bottom of Banffshire measure nearly two inches in length.
The diminishing sizes indicate a gradually meliorating
climate ; a climate, however, which, when the site of the
Scottish capital formed a group of islands, and these large
tellinidae were living by millions in our seas, had not yet
begun to improve. The islands of the Castle rock and
the Calton Hill must have been covered in these times
by a Subarctic vegetation, similar to that which we now
find restricted to our higher hill-tops; and the blue Pent-
lands must have borne, even at midsummer, their frequent
streaks of snow.
Permit me here to call your attention to the pregnant
meanings with which—regarded as the characters of a
decipherable alphabet—the shells of a deposit such as
that of the raised beaches of the neighbourhood, or of .
the elevated sea-bottom at Gamrie, may be found charged.
In several distinct aspects do shells—the testaceous cover-
ings of the acephalous and gasteropodous molluscs—press
themselves upon the notice of the human family. In
what may be termed the aesthetic point of view, we find
them meetly associated with flowers. When spending
some quiet summer month with our children in some
28 AEDINBURGH AN/) /7 S WEIGHBOURA'OOD.
rural district washed by the sea, what do the little ones
bring home to us in triumph, as the objects that most
approve themselves to their native taste for the beautiful?
—what but flowers from the meadow, and shells from the
sea P. We enter in our rambles some humble cottage, and,
ranged over the chimney, we mark, as the results of a
taste as unsophisticated, exactly the same combination,--
a few freshly-pulled flowers, stuck into some glass or jug ;
and, placed at equal distances, to Satisfy the arranging
faculty, a row of pretty shells. Where the taste has been
more highly educated, we find often the same combina-
tion : here, in a corner of Some princely drawing-room, a
splendid cabinet of exotic shells; and yonder, encased in
glass, at the ample window, a luxuriant blow of exotic
flowers. And finally, in examining Some ancient piece
of sculpture, the product of an exquisitely refined age, or
some specimen of the noble architecture of old Greece,
we find, impressed by the classical stamp, the same com-
bination still,—the wreathed shell blended with the open-
ing blossom, the curled ammonite existing as the volute
of one classic order,-the still undeveloped circinate stems
of the acanthus as the double volutes of another: here a
wreath of Oak leaves; there the elegant lamp-like nautilus,
the acorn and the pecten, the murex and the laurel. With
flowers and foliage as the most obviously lovely of in-
animate objects, the sense of the beautiful, alike in its
most unsophisticated and its most highly cultivated State,
has ever associated shells. The honour of this compan-
ionship has been recently claimed for sea-weeds, - no
GAE O/LOG/CA/L /º/, A TURAE.S. 29
doubt very beautiful objects when prepared by a careful
hand.
“Oh call us not weeds—we are flowers of the sea,
For lovely, and bright, and gay-tinted are we :
Our blush is as deep as the rose of the bowers;
Then call us not weeds—we are ocean's gay flowers.”
The claim is, however, a very recent one; nor has it its
foundations in the aesthetic. Nearly two thousand years
ago, when Virgil could refer to the ‘sea-weed cast out
upon the shore’ as ‘vile,’ and Horace as “useless,’ their
contemporary, Vitruvius, was engaged, like the architects
of a still older time, in uniting on frieze and pediment
the shell and the flower; and the sculptor had given to
Venus, as her pearly car, a vast conchifer, and to Triton,
as “his many-wreathed horn,' a turreted univalve.
Still more interesting are shells when regarded, in the
zoological view, as representatives of one of the four pri-
mary divisions into which, in all the successive creations,
animal life has been separated. They exemplify one of
the four great ideas of the Creator, as exhibited in suc-
cession in all the geological periods. Whatever has yet
lived upon earth, if we except a few microscopic anoma-
lies known as the Amorphoza, has lived in the vertebrate,
molluscan, articulated, or radiated form. In these four
assemblages, the second place is usually assigned to the
molluscs; and, from the great durability and simple forms
of their shelly coverings, we find them much more entire
in ancient rocks and deposits than the remains of animals
of any of the other three divisions. Shells are peculiarly
30 FDIVBURGH AND /TS AWAEIGHBOURAIOOD.
the medals of the geologist ; and, thanks to our natu-
ralists, we are now better able than in any former period
to trace ‘the image’ and read the ‘superscription’ which
they bear. The list of British shells, for instance, may
now be regarded as complete. Though during the last
few years the dredger has been busy around our coasts,
and our beaches and shores have been well tried by the
collector, scarce a single new shell has been added to
the number previously known. The list of the British
shells that live in our seas may be regarded as fairly and
adequately taken : ‘the number of our marine Acephala,
or bivalve shellfish, may be stated,’ say the authors of
the History of f/ie British //o//usca, “at a hundred and
sixty species; the number of our testaceous marine Gas-
teropoda, or univalve shell-fish, at two hundred and thirty-
two.' We have thus three hundred and ninety-two British
shells. Some of these the naturalist finds restricted to
the Littoral zone, some to the Laminarian, some to the
outer and inner Coralline zones ; Some; again, belong
to only the southern parts of the island, some to only
the north. Some few are found to be either peculiarly
British, such as Pecten niveus and Thracia Convexa, or,
like the common edible oyster, receive in the British seas
their fullest development. Others, like the Haliotis tuber-
culata' of the Channel Islands, belong to a southern
group that barely touches the southern extremity, not of
Britain itself, but of its immediate dependencies; while
* The Haliotis abounds on the shores of the Channel Islands, and is
called the Ormer. It adheres to the rock with its foot, like the limpet.
GAE O/LOG/CA/, /7 FA TOWA’A.S. 3 I
others belong to essentially northern groups, and, like
Astarte elliptica, are found in only the northern shores of
Scotland. The proportion, too, in which certain shells
appear on certain parts of the British coasts has been
carefully noted. Some are exceedingly rare in the north,
though abundant in the south ; and others unfrequent in
the South, though common in the north. The various
depths of water in which the various shells live, the cli-
matal belts in which they live, the extreme limits which
they barely reach, and then cease to appear, with refer-
ence both to zones of climate and zones of depth, their
range, too, of fullest development in relation to both,
have all been noted, with their peculiarities of habit and
structure, the various ties of relationship that run through
their several families and genera, and the degree in which
certain disturbing conditions serve to modify their form
and size ; and these zoological facts, interesting to every
student of natural history for their own sakes, borrow a
new interest when we come to regard them as meanings
attached to shells viewed as the characters of an alpha-
bet by which the history of ancient deposits and bypast
periods can be read. In this special point of view, shells
become well-defined hieroglyphics, to which the naturalist
furnishes the key.
This shell-alphabet consists in Britain, as has been
shown, of three hundred and ninety-two several charac-
ters or words,-a large but still manageable number, com-
pared at least with the alphabet of the Chinese, or the
hieroglyphic symbols of the old Egyptian. Nor is it
32 EDINBURGH AND /TS AWEIGHBOURAIOOD.
necessary to know all these (for some of them are of
exceeding rarity, and may not be seen once in a life-
time), in order to be qualified adequately to read the
inscriptions which they compose. I have already at-
tempted reading the meanings of the mingled group of
Laminarian and Littoral shells which we find buried be-
neath the grassy terrace of the old coast-line at Fillyside
Bank and Granton. They tell that the level strip along
our coasts, which has been dry land ever since the his-
toric ages began (mayhap long before), had at a previous
period been covered during flood by the Littoral or shore
strip of sea; and at a period still earlier by the Lami-
narian sea-strip, or strip of the tangles. In other words,
they tell us that the land rose by paroxysms of upheaval,
with periods of repose between. Even the single excep-
tional shell of the Granton old coast-terrace to which I
have referred (Corbula nucleus) as occurring in the exca-
vations more than a hundred yards inland, and which
we do not now find, in at least aught approaching to
similar abundance, on the neighbouring shores, gives evi-
dence of the same fact. It tells that, when the spot
where we now find it, immediately under the grassy
escarpment, lay along the high-water line, a Laminarian
strip, containing beds of the deep-sea shell Corbula
nucleus, lay exposed beyond, in Consequence of a previ-
ous upheaval, to the action of the Surf. Mark, however,
the further fact recorded by the various shells of the
Granton terrace,—a fact equally borne out by the shells
found at the same level all around our shores. Here, in
G/EO ZOG/CA / FAEA 7'URES. 33
the box before me, is a collection of these Granton shells.
The group is as unsightly a one as may be,—Sorely de-
cayed, for the sand and gravel amid which they lay freely
admitted the percolating moisture, and did not wholly
exclude the air. The mere lover of the aesthetic would
find no charm in them ; the mere zoologist would seek
to study the species which they exemplify in greatly
fresher specimens ; the mere collector of the exotic and
the rare would fail to find among them a single shell to
which he would attach the slightest value. In what,
then, does their interest consist, seeing that they are
identical, not only in species, but also in the proportions
in which they occur, and the degree of size to which
they have attained, with the commonest living shells of
the neighbouring frith ? Their interest mainly consists
in the fact which they record in their character as an
alphabet. They clearly and unequivocally tell, that when
the sea beat against the old coast-line, and covered the
site of fully two-thirds of the seaport towns of Scotland,
the country had exactly the same climate as it has now.
It may have been somewhat modified by the wide-spread-
ing forests of the time ; but the average temperature of
the Scottish seas must have been then just what it is
now : the gulf-stream must have set in towards our shores
just as now, giving to us a climate which scarce belongs
to our latitudinal zone ; the cereals then, as now, could
have been successfully reared upon our plains; nor can
we doubt that then, as now, the Germanic flora flourished
in our sheltered valleys and on our lower hill-sides, And
C
34 EDINBURGH AND ITS AWEIGHBOURHOOD.
such is the curious story with which, in their character
as the letters of an alphabet, these decayed Granton shells
of the common type are charged.
Very different is the piece of narrative which we find
shell-inscribed upon the brick-clays and the stratified sands
of the higher levels. As shown by the shells of the raised
sea-bottom of Banffshire, elevated about twenty-five feet
above the level of the building in which we are now
assembled [the Music Hall, George Street, Edinburgh], a
subarctic climate must have obtained, in the age in which
they lived, in what is now Scotland. Such, in the case, is
the testimony of the shell-alphabet. Its group of shells is
no longer British. Its prevailing tellina — the Tellina
proxima—occurs along the more northerly shores of Nor-
way and Labrador, but is no longer found living in our
seas. Its prevailing astarte—Astarte arctica—belongs, as
its name indicates, to a high arctic parallel, and, though
very rarely seen on even the northern coasts of Scotland,
is very abundant on those of Spitzbergen. Its prevailing
fusus—Fusus propinquus—is essentially a boreal species.
Its prevailing natica is Natica clausa,—also a shell of
Spitzbergen and the North Cape. Even such of its shells
as are still not rare in our seas, such as Cyprina islandica,
are northern shells, and occur in its beds and layers, not
in the British, but in the Icelandic or Norwegian propor-
tions. In short, the inscription written on these high-lying
sea-bottoms and beaches in the old shell character, tell us
that the climate of the period was subarctic; and as we
find a certain well-marked subarctic flora on the northern
GAEO/LOG/CA/, /7/2. A 7"U/CAE.S. 35
coasts and islands around which these shells still continue
to live, we infer—having the fixity of the conditions and
constitution of animal species for our basis—that when
they lived amid the deep retiring valleys of the Arthur
Seat group of hills, or harboured around the submerged
feet of the Calton and Castle rocks, the group of islands
which now exist in their altered character as the site of
Edinburgh must have been covered by a boreal vegetation,
constituting what is now known as the Scandinavian flora.
Further, associated with these shells, where they now live,
we find in the iceberg and the glacier, powerful mechanical
agents at work, grooving and furrowing the solid rocks,
and transporting to great distances huge stones. And,
detecting in our own neighbourhood the unequivocal
marks of these agencies-vast boulders of travelled rock,
and dressed rock-surfaces, we infer, that when Tellina
proxima and Astarte arctica lived at the bottom of its
seas, extensive floats of field-ice must have careered over
its surface; and that, while the frequent iceberg grounded
on its coasts, numerous glaciers must have descended
along its hill-sides. When lately touching, in conversa-
tion, on some of these circumstances to Mr. Ruskin, he
exclaimed, ‘What a subject for a painter would not that
wintry archipelago form ' The scene, if restored by the
pencil of a Harvey or a Hill, would indeed be a striking
one. In front, a solitary group of islets, familiar in their
forms, but strange in all their adjuncts, would rise, shaggy
with the Scandinavian flora, over an ice-speckled sea; in
the background, the blue Pentlands, snow-streaked at
36 ED/VBURGH AND /TS AWEIGHBOURHOOD.
midsummer, and with the glacier gleaming blue in their
sloping hollows, would stretch along the horizon their
undulating line; while in the submerged valleys of what
is now the Scottish capital, the whale would blow, and the
seal raise its round black head; and on some drifting sheet
of ice the lazy morse would lie stretched in the sun, amid
the screaming of a scul/ of Subarctic birds,-the arctic skua,
the snow-fowl, and the Icelandic gull.
Beneath the stratified sands and the brick-clays we find
the boulder-clay,+in this part of the country the oldest of
the superficial deposits. It occurs very extensively in this
very neighbourhood, and by much the larger part of the
New Town of Edinburgh is built on it. Like our stratified
sands and gravels, it is unfossiliferous in this part of the
country, but abounds in shells farther to the north, as in
Caithness; and it has of late yielded shells to the south,
in Wigtonshire; and in both ends of the kingdom we find
these exhibiting exactly the same boreal character as those
of the stratified sand in Banffshire. The deposit, how-
ever, is further remarkable for the strange mechanical
phenomena which it exhibits. Most of the larger shells
which it contains exist as but broken fragments; the
stones which it encloses, from the largest boulders to the
minutest pebbles, are mysteriously lined and grooved,—
most frequently in the direction of their longer axes; and
the rocks upon which it rests are almost invariably
scratched and polished, as if worn down by the prolonged
action of some such agency, on a great Scale, as we see
employed in the yard of the stone-cutter, in Smoothing
GEO ZOG/CA/C FEA 7TUA’/.S. 37
the surfaces of his pavement slabs and sepulchral tablets.
It was evidently the same agent that grooved and dressed
the rocks and scratched the pebbles, that broke the shells;
and, referring once more to our shell-alphabet, we know
that, just as we find the Scandinavian flora associated with
such a group of molluscs, we find also associated with them
a sufficient agent for the production of the mechanical
phenomena of the deposit, in icebergs and glaciers. In
formerly addressing you on this subject, I called your
attention to some of the more striking characteristics of
the boulder-clay deposits in the immediate vicinity of
Edinburgh, to its travelled rocks of huge size—its great
depths in hollows sheltered from the old denuding agencies
—its general correspondence in tint to the average colour
of the rocks which it overlies, to the heights, too, to which
it ascends along our hill-sides, and which evidently testify
of a time when the sea stood at least a thousand feet
higher than it does now, and most of our mountain groups
existed as but clusters of islands. Further, I pointed out
the several places in the neighbourhood where, as on the
southern flank of Arthur Seat, and at St. Margaret's Station
on the North British Railway, the grooved and dressed
rock-surfaces so generally associated with the formation
may be most advantageously seen.” I can at present add
to the characteristics at that time adverted to, only one
other striking feature of the boulder-clay,+a feature, how-
ever, still unrecorded, save very briefly by Mr. Robert
* Dressed surfaces are to be seen on the Calton Hill, on Salisbury
Crags, near the quarry opened at Blackford Hill, and at Corstorphine.
38 EDINBURGH AND ITS AWEIGHBOURAIOOD.
Chambers, to whom I pointed it out, in his able and
interesting paper on the glacial phenomena of Scotland.
There occurs deep in the clay, at two several points on
our coast, what I have ventured to term pavements, for
:=–SX Sº, *.
< . &Sºs Ç G <--> O
***T*~~~ -----...
PAVE MENTS IN THE COULDER-CLAY.
such is their appearance, — composed of boulder-stones
laid, as in a common pavement, with their smoother sur-
ſaces upwards. The ancient pavements of Pompeii and
Herculaneum exhibit, when bared of the overlying ashes
or lava, the marks of the old wheel-ruts into which they
were grooved so many ages before. These pavements of
the boulder clay, when uncovered, as in this neighbour-

GEOzog/CAL FEATURES. J
39
hood, by the action of the waves, are found to be similarly
grooved and rutted. As decidedly as the greenstone
causeways of our streets bear evidence, in their scratched
and furrowed surfaces, of the heavily-laden carts and wag-
gons that have passed over them, are these pavements of
the boulder-clay charged with evidence that great moving
masses had also dragged their ponderous weight over them.
But the agent was evidently the same as that which grooved
and polished the rocks beneath: it was the ocean-borne
icebergal cars of winter that rutted these strange sub-
terranean pavements, compared with which, those of the
buried cities of Vesuvius are of yesterday. All of them
I have yet observed have their direction and striation east-
north-east,--the general direction, in the district, of the
lines and grooves of the rock below ; almost all of them
decline slightly to the east, and, when relieved by the
waves, resemble low flat moles stretching from the land
into the sea. They indicate, I am inclined to hold, pauses
in the formation of the boulder-clay deposit, during which,
washed by waves and currents, its general surface was
lowered, and came to be thickly covered by the disengaged
pebbles and boulders of the general mass, ranged in One
place. And then the old agency re-commenced its opera-
tions ; and, pressing the stones down into the mass, so as
to imprint the pavement-like regularity on their upper
surface, it grooved and striated them, as when acting at an
earlier period on the solid rock below. These curious
pavements may be regarded as conclusive, in the proof
they furnish, that the boulder-clay was not, as some think,
40 EDINBURGH AND /TS AWEIGHBOURHOOD.
a simultaneously formed deposit, the product of Some
great mud wave from the sea, but of slow formation ; and,
further, that it presented surface after surface in succession
to the great grooving and polishing agent to which it seems
to have owed its origin. Two of these pavements may be
found about a quarter of a mile apart, and at a half-way
distance, on the line of coast between Leith and Porto-
bello, and two others on the line of coast between Porto-
bello and Musselburgh.
I have already referred to the subarctic character of the
shells of the boulder-clay. Its other organisms are rare in
Scotland. They are, however, quite sufficient to identify
it as geologically of the same age as what is known as the
Mammaliferous Crag of Norfolk, and to show how very
strange the fauna which our island, or rather group of
islands, at that time possessed. The nearest locality to
Edinburgh in which mammaliferous remains of the boulder.
clay have yet been found seems to be that clay deposit in
the neighbourhood of Falkirk, in which, in the year 1821,
twenty feet from the surface, a tusk of the Elephas primi-
genius was found. Similar tusks, with fragments of the
horns of reindeer, were detected in the same deposit about
eight years later in the immediate vicinity of Kilmarnock.
And from the remains of the Mammaliferous Crag we know
how very strange that fauna of our country was which was
associated with the northern elephant and the reindeer.
Many of my auditory must have seen the very extraordi-
nary collection exhibited in Edinburgh rather more than a
year ago by Mr. Gordon Cumming, a collection extraordi-
GAEOZOGICAL FEATURES. 4. I
nary in itself, but altogether unique regarded as the trophies
of one bold hunter, a genuine representative in these latter
times of those mighty hunters of the mythologic ages who,
warring on the wild beasts, the previous occupants of the
soil, made way for its true possessors, the agriculturist and
the shepherd. It will be remembered that what first struck
the eye as peculiarly characteristic of that collection, was
the huge proportion borne to the whole by its pachyder-
mous specimens. Vast tusks of the African elephant,
huge skulls of the hippopotamus, and still huger skulls of
the rhinoceros, -some of them bearing, according to their
species, their single, and some their double horns,—formed
the prominent features through which the unique pecu-
liarity of the collection was most readily appreciated, and
by which it has been best remembered. And, strange to
relate, the fauna of the British islands during the ages of
the boulder-clay and the Mammaliferous Crag was marked
by exactly the same prominent traits. At once the most
striking and most abundant of its mammaliferous remains
are the remains of its huge pachyderms. Its elephants
seem to have been greatly more abundant than their con-
geners in the African or Asiatic centre. It had, like Africa,
its two species of rhinoceros, both, however, double-horned,
and a large species of hippopotamus. And with these huge
animals there were associated the great cave tiger, the great
Cave hyaena, the great cave bear, the Irish elk, the reindeer,
and the gigantic Ox. The description given by an English
naturalist of the group of animals which in this early age
inhabited the south of England, would apply equally to the
42 A.D/NBURGH AAWD /TS AWAE/G///3OURAIOOD.
vicinity of the Scottish capital. “Those who ramble, he
says, “amid the beautiful Scenery of Torquay, or gaze with
admiration on the bold outlines of the Cheddar Cliffs, will
find it difficult to believe that in former ages these spots
were roamed over by bears, surpassing in size the grizzly
bear of the Rocky Mountains, or the polar bear of the
arctic regions; yet the abundant remains found in the
neighbourhood incontestably prove that such was the case.
Grand indeed was the fauna of the British islands in those
early days. Tigers as large again as the biggest Asiatic
species lurked in the ancient thickets; elephants of nearly
twice the bulk of the largest individuals that now exist in
Africa or Ceylon roamed here in herds ; at least two
species of rhinoceros found their way through the primeval
forest; and the lakes and rivers were tenanted by hippo-
potami as bulky, and with as great tusks, as those of
Africa.’ The immense size of some of our mammals of
the Post-Pliocene period, regarded as the inhabitants of a
northern latitude, and a climate greatly more severe than
now, is one of not the least Curious circumstances con-
nected with the group. I found that the largest elephant
tusk in Mr. Gordon Cumming's collection measured nine
feet in length, and had a diameter at the base of six and
a half inches. When passing my foot-rule over it, the
person who showed the collection came up and said,
‘That tusk is the largest ever seen in Britain.’ ‘The
largest,' I remarked, correcting his statement, though the
correction escaped notice,— the largest ever brought to
Britain.” There was a very considerable difference in the
GAEO/LOGYCA/L /7FA 7TURES. 43
case between the terms brought and seen. No tusks of
our recent elephants, Asiatic or African, larger than Mr.
Gordon Cumming's splendid specimens, had ever been
brought to England ; but greatly larger tusks of the old
native species have been found and seen in England. A
specimen found at Ilford, and which Professor Owen
describes as the finest tusk of a British mammoth that
has come under his observation, measured twelve feet six
inches in length. Another tusk, dredged up from a tract
of sea-bottom near Ramsgate, had its lower part awant-
ing; but the fragment which remained was nine feet in
length, and eight inches in diameter. The great size of
the bones of this extinct species corresponds with that of
the tusks. In the skeleton of the large Indian elephant
which is preserved in the Museum of the London College
of Surgeons, the humerus measures two feet eleven inches
in length, and has a circumference in the middle of one
foot one inch and six lines ; whereas a humerus of the
Elephas primigenius, found on the Norfolk coast, measures
four feet five inches in length, and has a circumference in
the middle of two feet two inches and six lines. The
bone of the ancient British elephant is eighteen inches
longer, and thirteen inches more in circumference, than
the corresponding bone in what is deemed a large speci-
men of the Asiatic one. Of a surety “there were giants
in those days.” It is one of the strange circumstances
Connected with the extraordinary group of animals that
lived in Britain during the ages of the boulder-clay, that
some of the creatures, their contemporaries, still continue
44 ED/VBURGA AAVD /TS AWAE/GAZROURA'OOD.
to survive. The skeleton of the badger of Kent's Hole
cannot be distinguished from that of the species which
still burrows in our hill-sides ; nor the bones of its wild
cat from those of the existing wild cat of the less fre-
quented jungles and ravines of the lower Highlands. The
existing otter and fox, too, seem to be of equal antiquity.
Again, many of the existing shells date their beginnings
from a time greatly more ancient. Many of them, such as
the common edible periwinkle and mussel, ascend to the
ages of the Red Crag; and not a few more, such as the
whelk and the edible oyster, to the more remote ages of
the Coralline Crag.
But who shall attempt measuring off by Seasons or cen-
turies the duration of the more ancient families of our
native mammals, or reckon up the years that have passed
since the extinct elephant, the contemporary of their pro-
genitors, found his way through the dense, low-stemmed
forests of our country, or the reindeer browsed on the moss
of its hill-sides? We know that for at least two thousand
years, land and Sea in Our island have maintained, in rela-
tion to each other, the present levels, that the Roman
wall of Antoninus was made to terminate at the Friths of
Forth and Clyde, with reference to the existing coast-line
on both sides of the island,-and that, when Caesar landed
in Britain, St. Michael's Mount was connected, as now,
with the land, at low water, by a flat isthmus.' We ascer-
' Diodorus Siculus refers to Julius Caesar as having ‘in our time’
conquered Britain ; and then describes the ten miners of Cornwall as
conveying the Smelted metal ‘to a British isle near at hand, called
GAZOZOG/CA/. FEA TURES. 45
- O
tain further, from the average depth of the caves of both
the present and the old coast-line, that if the surf broke
against the present shore for a period of but two thousand
years, it must have broken for at least three thousand years
more against the grassy escarpment of the old line. On
the lowest calculation, then, we exhaust the five thousand
years during which man has been a denizen of earth, ere
we rise beyond the comparatively recent period in which
the climatal conditions of our country were exactly what
they are now, in which the same shells lived around our
coasts, and the same plants flourished on our plains and
hill-sides, in which our mountains rose over the sea-level
only some thirty feet less than they do now, and our land
possessed, with the exception of the old coast-terrace, its
present extent of area. Calculation loses footing in the
vast void beyond. But the periods must have been very
lengthened during which the subarctic molluscs flourished
in our seas, and then gradually died out, and during which,
stage after stage, the land rose, till what had been a scat-
tered archipelago became the mountain groups of our
Country, and the islets and ocean-sounds of what is now
Edinburgh passed into a picturesque wilderness of hill,
valley, and lake. Greatly more than ten thousand years
may have elapsed since the last Scottish elephant ceased to
live, or the last iceberg drifted along the submerged valleys
of our country. But the eternity of the past furnishes
Actis. For at low tide, all being dry,” he adds, ‘between them and
the island, they convey over in carts abundance of tin in the meantime.”
—Book v. chap. ii.
46 EDINBURGH AND ITS AWEIGHBOURAE/OOD.
ample room for vastly greater periods: nor must we forget,
that with the Adorable Being who superintended and fore-
ordained all the revolutions of our earth and its inhabitants,
‘one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as
one day.”
G/EC)/LOGICA/, /7 FA TOW/C.E.S. 47
I, ECT U R E II.
The Scenery of Edinburgh praised by Men of Genius: Durns, IHogg,
Scott, Campbell—The various Subsoils of the District—Its Strati-
fied Deposits : the Silurian, the Old Red, and the Carboniferous
— The Arthur Seat Group of Trap-Rocks — The Huttonian
Theory first suggested by their appearances—The Maclaren Theory
—Description of the other Trap-Rocks of Edinburgh and its
Neighbourhood—Their Upheaval by Convulsions—Theory regard-
ing their Formation—The Coal Measures—Their Extent—The
Colliers once bound as Slaves to the Soil—Their final Emancipa-
tion in 1799–The Class still strongly marked by the Slave-Nature
—The Coal-Seams of Mid-Lothian—Theory as to the Time re-
quired for their Formation—Visit to a Coal-Pit at Dryden—The
Ancient Flora of the District—Animal Footprints on a Block of
Sandstone—Other Footprints of Animals to be found—Distilla-
tion of Oils and Naphtha from the Coals and Shales of the Oolitic
and Carboniferous Systems—Their Application to Economic Pur-
poses—The Question, What is Coal? litigated—Marine Lime-
stone, and the Shale Deposit beneath it—Most of the Old Town
of Edinburgh built on the latter—Picturesque View of the succes-
sive Geological Periods.
IT is always in some degree perilous to attempt connecting
new associations with old scenes. The process is ever
exposed to the sort of criticism that consists in the drawing
of disadvantageous contrasts, and of comparisons of the
kind instituted in Holy Writ between the new wine and
the old. And where the scenery is of so exquisite a cast
as that which surrounds the Scottish capital, and the asso-
ciations wedded to it for centuries of so high a character,
the risk must of course be all the greater. It is not ordi-
nary men that have been highest in their praise of the
48 A.D/VBURGA/ AAWD /7'S AWAE/GA/BOURAIOOD.
scenery of Edinburgh; nor yet enthusiasts of the shallower
kind that have been most powerfully moved by its varied
beauties. Lockhart tells us, in his Zife of Burns, that
the ‘magnificent scenery of the Scottish capital filled
the poet with extraordinary delight. In the spring morn-
ings,’ it is added, “he walked very often to the top of
Arthur Seat, and, lying prostrate on the turf, surveyed the
rising of the sun out of the sea in silent admiration ; his
chosen companion on such occasions being that learned
artist and ardent lover of nature, Mr. Alexander Naismith.”
As shown by the magical snatches of description in the
* Queen's Wake, the Ettrick Shepherd must have been
scarce less deeply moved. Amid the mountain tracts of
that wonderful Park, so unlike any other piece of pleasure-
ground attached to any other great European city, he found
enough of the wild, and the stern, and the lonely, to
awaken that peculiar genius for the Supernatural in which
he excelled all his poetical contemporaries; and straight-
way its upland solitudes became, as the night fell, a haunt
of spirits.
‘By mountain sheer and column tall,
How solemn was that evening fall !
The air was calm, the stars were bright,
The hoar-frost flighter'd down the night.
But oft the listening groupes stood still,
For spirits talk’d along the hill;
Yes, all along, from cliff and tree,
On Arthur Seat and Salisbury,
Came voices floating down the air,
From viewless shades that linger'd there.
The words were fraught with mystery :
Voices of men they could not be.’
GAEO ZOG/CA/L FEA TURE.S. 49
I need scarce refer to those descriptions given by Scott
of his ‘own romantic town,” which have stamped its bold
features on the world’s literature; nor, in especial, to that
scene in which the picturesque walk under Salisbury Crags
is described,—a walk to which I shall shortly have to
advert, as scarce less classical to the geologist than to the
poet. It may, however, not be so generally known, that
Thomas Campbell, in his projected poem, ‘The Queen of
the North,’ which unfortunately exists as but a mere frag-
ment, describes himself as taking his stand for a general
survey, amid the same mountain tract by which Burns was
so powerfully impressed, and which Hogg and Sir Walter
have so exquisitely described. We first find the poet apos-
trophizing the scene as a favourite haunt of his boyhood.
* Ye mountain walks, Edina's green domain
Haunts of my youth, where oft, by fancy drawn
At vermeil eve, still noon, or shady down,
My soul, secluded from the deafening throng,
Has woo'd the bosom-prompted power of song.’
And then, standing on its rocky summit, we find him
expatiating over the goodly prospect that opened around,
and appealing to its associations of the grey, hoary past.
* Ever musing here beside the Druid's stone,
Where British Arthur built his airy throne,
Far as my sight can travel o'er the scene,
From Lomond's height to Rosslyn's lovely green,
On every moor, wild wood, and mountain side,
From Forth’s fair wanderings to the ocean tide,-
On each the legendary loves to tell
Where chiefs encounter'd, and the mighty fell ;
Each war-worn turret on the distant shore
Speaks, like a herald, of the feats of yore ;
D
50 A.D./M.BURGH AND /TS AWAE/G//BOUR//OOD.
And though the shades at dark oblivion frown
On sacred scenes and deeds of high renown,
Yet shall some oral tale, some chanted rhyme,
Still mark the spot, and teach succeeding time
How oſt our ſathers, to our country true,
The glorious sword of independence drew,
How well the plaided clans, in battle-tread,
Impenetrably stood or greatly died,—
How long the genius of their rights delay’d,—
How sternly guarded, and how late betrayed.’
However perilous the attempt, I must cast myself full
on associations of a widely different character; and in
asking you to take your stand in fancy on the noble
hill-top, with its cincture of dark precipice, where Camp-
bell invoked the muse, and from which Burns, with the
rapt feeling of the poet, watched the sun of early summer
rise out of the Frith, it is less to survey the existing land-
scape with its land and sea, or to trace the many links
which unite its fair scenes with human history and the
noblest trophies of the national literature, than to call
up widely different lands and seas which once occupied
the same area, “even waters,'—to borrow the sublime lan-
guage of Job, ‘waters forgotten of the foot, and dried
up and gone away from men ; and paths which no fowl
knoweth, and which the vulture's eye hath not seen.’
Glancing for a moment at the smiling fertility of a
prospect which the historian Macaulay selects as ade-
quately representative of what can be effected in even
unfavourable circumstances by the noble self-relying
genius of Protestantism, let us bare the soil of its vege-
table mould, as the anatomist divests his subjects of the
GEO/LOG/CA/. FEA 7TURES. 5 I
integuments, and then mark the formations which lie
immediately beneath. The skin - deep beauty of the
landscape has disappeared ; and we find almost all the
lower grounds appropriated by the agriculturist covered
over by the stratified sands and gravels, and the brick-
clays. We have already dealt with these and with their
teachings; but let us just remark, in the passing, how
wide the area which the looser subsoils occupy in the pro-
spect, subsoils that scarce at all differ in their materials
from the sands and gravels of our sea-shores. Such also
are the materials which the hot winds of the great rain-
less deserts heap up over the arid rocks that compose
their nether framework. These deserts are simply, like
the flatter tracts around us, old sea-bottoms, over which
‘hot and copper skies,’ like those sung by the poet, never
suffered the vegetable crust to form. And hence mainly
the difference that obtains between the dreary wastes
of Sahara and the tracts of variegated verdure which
surround the Scottish capital. It is to our ever-dropping
climate, with its hundred and fifty-two days of annual
rain, that we owe our vegetable mould with its rich and
beauteous mantle of Sward and foliage. And next, strip-
ping from off the landscape its sands and gravels, we see
its underlying boulder-clays, dingy and grey, and here
presenting their vast ice-borne stones, and there their
iceberg pavements. And these clays in turn stripped
away, the bare rocks appear, various in colour and un-
even in surface, but everywhere grooved and polished,
from the sea-level, and beneath it, to the height of more
52 EDINBURGH AND ITS AWEIGHBOURAIOOD.
than a thousand feet, by evidently the same agent that
careered along the pavements and transported the great
stones. Let us attend first to the natural divisions through
which this vast chaos of rocks may be converted into a
scene of order, amid which we may be enabled to pro-
secute our researches without risk of losing our way.
Of the various stratified deposits laid open before us,
the most modern is the Carboniferous system, which we
find here consisting of two well-marked divisions,—the
Coal Measures proper, in which all the workable coal-
seams occur; and an underlying division of marine lime-
stone and calciferous sandstone,—the analogues, apparently,
of the Mountain Limestone and millstone grits of the
English coal-fields. These two divisions occupy by much
the larger portion of the fore and middle grounds of the
prospect; but along the western flanks of the Pentlands
and the northern slopes of the Lammermoor range we
may catch a glimpse, on the skirts of the landscape, of
an older system,-the Old Red Sandstone; and the Lam-
mermoors themselves, with a minute though fundamental
portion of the Pentland group, belong to the yet older
Silurian system,--that emphatically ancient group of rocks
during the deposition of which, life, animal and vegetable,
seems to have had its commencement on our planet.
Our view from Arthur Seat thus includes at least repre-
sentative members of the three prevailing systems of the
great Palaeozoic division,-the Silurian or Lower Palae-
ozoic system, the Old Red or Middle Palaeozoic system,
and the Carboniferous or Upper Palaeozoic system. It
GAEO ZOG/CA/. FEA TU/e/E.S. - 53
includes, however, yet another group of rocks,—rocks
that occur in proportions so large, and present outlines
so striking, that the scene possesses scarce a prominent
feature which it does not owe to them. And these, not
deposited, but erupted, belong, considered as a class, not
to one, but to every geologic period in the world's history,
and are, even in this neighbourhood, though they may
not sweep across the entire chronological scale, of very
various ages. I of course refer to the trap-rocks,—that pic-
turesque family to which we owe, with the various islands
of the Frith, the Castle, the Calton, and the Craiglockhart
Hills, the noble Arthur Seat group, the wooded heights of
Corstorphine, and the blue range of the Pentlands.
Let us, in the first instance, deal very briefly with these
trap-rocks. We stand on what may be well termed the
classical ground of geology. It was the appearances pre-
sented by this very group of hills which first suggested
that theory of world-wide celebrity which Hutton origi-
nated and Playfair illustrated, and which derived such solid
support from the experiments of Sir James Hall. There
is Scarce a trap eminence around us for the possession of
which the asserters of the antagonist schools of Scotland
and of Germany have not contended. They have been all
Subjected to the rival claims of Neptune and of Pluto,
—of water and of fire. Along that walk introduced by
Scott into one of his happiest fictions, as the scene of the
morning adventure of Reuben Butler, and which he SO
graphically describes, the hottest of the battle has lain. It
formed one of the favourite walks of Hutton. An altered
54 AEDIA/BURGH A WD I TS AWAE/GA/BOURA'OOZ).
fragment of rock traversed by a vein of argillaceous
haematite, which stands up in one of the cleared Spaces,
still bears his name, and was spared, it is said, when the
quarrier was busy around it, at his request, as strikingly
illustrative of his theory of mineral veins. A little lower
down, towards the south, there occurs in the greenstone
a few minute flags of indurated shale, to which the Wer-
nerians have triumphantly referred in the controversy, as
bearing out their hypothesis of stratification from above.
A little farther up, in the opposite direction, an extraor-
dinary mass of the same shale, torn from the sedimentary
rocks below, has been hurled upwards into the greenstone
by the eruptive forces acting from beneath, and forms one
of the most remarkable illustrations anywhere to be seen
of the Huttonian theory. The neighbouring eminence has
formed the subject of the careful descriptions and singu-
larly ingenious hypothesis of Mr. Maclaren,--a hypothesis
which, though embodied in language severely simple,
throws back the imagination upon a time when volcanic
fires vexed the bowels of the mountain, and a widespread
sea dashed against its summit, and when what eruptions
extruded, and the heat and pressure consolidated, the slow
wear of the surf wasted away. In the overhanging preci-
pice to the south we are presented, in what is known as
Samson's Ribs, with one of the finest specimens of basaltic
columns on the east coast of Scotland, and of which the
general aspect has been made widely known by the print
given in the section devoted to volcanoes, in the great
Physical Atlas, edited by Mr. Alexander Keith Johnston
GEOZOGICAL FEATURES. 55
of this city,+a work of more than European reputation,
which reflects honour on the science of Scotland. I need
refer to but a few of the other names associated with the
singularly instructive phenomena of this trappean group of
hills, to that of an accomplished mineralogist, the late
Mr. Thomas Allan of Edinburgh, to that of the late Mr.
Hay Cunningham,_and to those of Mr. Townson, Mr.
Milne Home, Dr. Fleming, and Professor Jamieson. In
closing my reference to that contest so long maintained be-
tween the schools of Hutton and of Werner, and of which
the Arthur Seat group formed for a series of years one of
the pitched battle-fields, it will, I trust, not be deemed
disrespectful to any veteran of Science, honourably worn
in the service, if I express my satisfaction, that the victory
should now be all but universally recognised as resting
with our countrymen. Not indifferent, I trust, as a geolo-
gist, to the claims of Scientific truth, nor wholly insensible,
as a Scotchman, to the honour of my country, I must be
permitted to congratulate a Scotch audience on the fact
that the Scottish school of Geology, originated by a native
of Edinburgh, in this neighbourhood, bids fair, in its own
province, like the Scottish school of Metaphysics, to give
law to the world.
The trap-rocks of Edinburgh and its neighbourhood
Consist of vast beds, such as that of Salisbury Crags, in-
jected apparently among the sedimentary strata, of huge
masses, like that which forms the Castle rock, and which
are in all probability the upper portions of tower-like
columns protruded from below, and descending to very
56 EDINBURGH AND ITS AWEIGHBOURAOOD.
profound depths, and further, of long-extending dikes,
like those which traverse the Water of Leith in the imme-
diate vicinity of St Bernard's Well, and which may be
regarded as the mere fillings-up of Cracks in the earth's
crust by the protrusion of molten matter from the reser-
voir beneath. The trap-tuffs constitute yet a fourth form,
and combine, as in the tuff-beds of the Calton Hill, sedi-
mentary arrangement with trappean materials. It seems
not improbable that, in the production of many of .
these beds or strata, a union of the two great forces took
place, and that components furnished originally by the Plu-
tonic agencies were ultimately consigned to the stratifying
operations of the aqueous ones. Let us in especial mark
the trap-dikes that seam the stratified rocks all around.
They are very numerous in this neighbourhood ; and it
has been remarked, that when they cut the sedimentary
strata at nearly right angles with the plane of deposition,
they have usually their direction and bearing on some great
trap eminence in the neighbourhood. Thus, the two trap-
dikes of the Water of Leith, near Stockbridge, bear direct
on Arthur Seat; and a broad trap-dike at Niddry, about
equally distant from that hill on the opposite side, also
bears direct on the Seat; and, could we but actually see the
landscape as I have asked you to conceive of it, stripped
of the superficial deposits, I entertain little doubt that we
would see these dikes radiating from the mountain as their
Centre, like the spokes of a wheel from its nave ; or rather,
like those glistening lines of light that radiate in every
direction from the crater-formed mountains of the moon,
G/E O/LOG/CA/C FEA 7TU/č/.S. 57
and which have been so admirably illustrated both by the
pencil and the experiments of a distinguished native of
Edinburgh, Mr. James Naismith, the inventor of the
steam-hammer. Very terrible convulsions must have ac-
companied the protrusion of those immense prominences.
They seem to have everywhere broken and shattered the
shell of sedimentary rock, as an unannealed pipkin is
broken by a sudden change of temperature ; or rather
starred and cracked it where they came through, as a pane
of glass is starred and Cracked by the passage of a stone or
| RING-STONES.
bullet. Unlike, however, the fracturing force in the pipkin,
or the blow dealt to the pane, the disturbing agent here,
with its fine flood of molten matter, again cemented, in
most instances, what it broke; and our trap-dikes may be
regarded as the edges of the cement lines. In other in-
stances, however, the cement is wanting, and the unfilled
Cracks are accompanied usually by great misplacements of
the strata, known technically as faults or shifts. You may
receive as a familiar but not inadequate illustration of

58 EDINBURGH AND /TS AWE/GHBOURAOOD.
these, what sometimes takes place in an arch with an ill-
fitted-together keystone. The keystone shifts by slipping
downwards (till arrested at the point where its breadth fits
the opening into which it had been thrust), and by its
partial fall gets out of the line of the other ring-stones;
and very enormous, in the Mid-Lothian coal-fields, some of
these shifts are. At Sheriff-hall, near Dalkeith, there is
a slip of eighty fathoms. The strata on the one side of the
crack, which is about nine feet in width, have fallen down
ºf ceorocycAZ ZEVAZ of CAS7A FSA/AW405
four hundred and eighty feet below the strata on the other
side, a height about equal to that of the lower summit of
Arthur Seat over the Hunter's Bog ; and at Loanhead
there is a fault of sixty fathoms: the downcast is more
than equal to the height of Salisbury Crags over the valley
of St. Leonards. Even between the tract of carboniferous
rocks over which the New Town of Edinburgh is built,
and the tract of greatly older carboniferous rocks on which
the Old Town is situated, there is a fault at which a down-
cast of several hundred feet must have taken place. The


GAEOZOG/CA/C FEA TURES. 59
New Town rises, if I may so speak, on the slipped key-
stone. The underlying strata, though geologically, and in
their original position, several hundred feet higher than
those which underlie the Castle esplanade, are now, with
respect to the actual level, nearly two hundred feet lower.
In a lecture on what may be termed the geology of the
moon, delivered in the October of last year before her
Majesty the Queen and Prince Albert by Mr. Naismith,
he referred to certain appearances on the surface of that
satellite, that seemed to be the results, in Some very
ancient time, of the sudden falling in of portions of an
unsupported crust, or a retreating nucleus of molten
matter ; and took occasion to suggest that some of the
great slips and shifts on the surface of our own planet,
with their huge downcasts, may have had a similar origin.
The suggestion is at once bold and ingenious. The dis-
placed keystone of our illustration would certainly not
have slipped had there not been an empty space below ;
nor does it seem improbable that the lowered platform
on which the New Town of Edinburgh now stands may,
at some incalculably remote period, have settled down-
wards, amid earthquake convulsion, through some inter-
sticial space (an effect of the refrigerating influences), on
the molten nucleus beneath. These faults and slips would
have left to our earth, save for another great force, less
potent but greatly more persistent in its operations than
the Plutonic one, a surface as uneven and abrupt as that
of the moon itself. But the denuding agencies, prolonged
through unreckoned ages, planed down the surface, as a
60 ED/AWBURGH AAVO ITS AWEIGHBOU/RHOOD.
house-carpenter planes off what he terms the over-wood
of his flooring ; and across the lines of faults, the oppo-
site sides of which must have originally shown a differ-
ence of level to the extent of hundreds of feet, the plough
can now be driven. Throughout the Mid-Lothian coal-field
the over-wood has all been ploughed down.
The Coal Measures themselves fill a great basin, which
occupies the comparatively level space between the western
slopes of the Garelton Hills near Haddington, and the
eastern slopes of Arthur Seat and the Pentlands. The
CLAY-BEDS.
surface is comparatively level, because the basin is ſuſ/;
but were these Coal Measures to be removed from it,
that plain now laid out into the rich corn-fields of Mid-
Lothian would exist as by far the profoundest valley in
Scotland,-a valley greatly more profound than Corrisk,
or Glen-Nevis, or Glencoe. Were Ben-Lomond, with its
three thousand two hundred feet of altitude, to be set
down in the middle of this valley or basin, it would be
So nearly submerged that its summit would scarce rise to
the level of the Queen's Drive. We find this enormous
basin filled with about a hundred and seventy beds of

GEO LOGICA/. FEATURES.. 61
shale, clay, coal, sandstone, and ironstone, ranged layer
above layer in long irregular curves, much broken by the
faults and shifts to which I have already made reference,
but, save for these breaks, of greatly later date than their
deposition, continuous over wide areas ; and of these
hundred and seventy beds, rather more than thirty con-
sist of workable seams of coal. One of the most dis-
tinctive characters of the flat tract which overlies the
basin, the feature that strikes the eye of the traveller
who hurries along its lines of railway as peculiarly its
own, consists in its numerous coal-works and collier cot-
tages,—in its narrow-gabled engine - houses, with their
ever-smoking chimneys and their huge outstretched arms,
that are seen on the verge of the horizon, ever rising and
falling as the mighty moving power expands and con-
denses,<-and in its lines of low-roofed huts, uniform in
their humble mediocrity as those of slave-villages. The
dwellers in these low huts have a very singular history,
regarded as that of Scotchmen. It is not yet fully eighty
years since they were slaves, as firmly bound to the soil
as the serfs of Russia, and transferable, like the huts in
which they dwelt, or the minerals amid which they bur-
rowed, from the hands of one proprietor to another.
In conversing not long since with a distinguished
foreigner, better acquainted than almost any one else
with the history of the Sclavonic races, he informed me
that serfship in some of the Russian provinces is by no
means of high antiquity. It is not derived, as might be
Supposed, from the barbarism of an ancient time, but
62 ED/AWBURGAſ AAWD /TS AWAE/G//BOUA’AFOO D.
introduced as one of the encroachments of modern
despotism on the wild freedom of tribes, weak because
they were ignorant and their numbers few. And such
seems to be the history of our Scottish colliers. Pro-
foundly ignorant, kept apart, by their underground pro-
fession and their peculiar habits, from the other people of
the country, and, withal, not very formidable from their
numbers, their liberty seems to have been taken piece-
meal from them mainly during the seventeenth century,
by the acts of a Parliament in which they were of course
wholly unrepresented, and by the decisions of a court in
which no one ever appeared for their interests. It was
the old Scottish Parliament and our present Court of
Session that made the colliers slaves; and the salters or
Salt-makers of the north-eastern shores of Mid-Lothian
were associated with them in bondage. The coal and
salt masters (as they were termed) of this part of the
Country were powerful proprietors, possessed of great
political influence; and they seem to have been virtually
the authors of the acts and the prompters of the decisions.
The greatest of their number in this locality were the
ancient Seatons of Winton, a very influential family during
the reigns of the latter Stuarts. Old Professor George
Sinclair, the author of a curious volume on ghosts and
witches, entitled Satan's Invisible World ZXsplayed, of
which some of our grandmothers knew a good deal, dedi-
cates one of his works to the Earl of Winton, who
flourished immediately previous to the Revolution ; and,
after expatiating on what he quaintly enough terms his
GAE O/LOG/CA/. Aſ EA 7'07/8A.S. 63
‘Lordship's virtues anent the coal and the salt,' he goes
on to urge upon all, with a curious eloquence, that his
titled patron was ‘the greatest nobleman who was a coal
and Salt master, and the greatest coal and salt master that
was a nobleman.' I fear the ‘virtues anent the coal and
the salt” of this distinguished family, with those of the
other great mineral proprietors, their contemporaries, were
mainly of the kind rendered too palpable in the Scottish
acts anent colliers and salters, the earliest of which of
any mark or importance dates no farther back than the
year 1606. It was then statute and ordained, under a
penalty of a hundred pounds, that no person within the
realm should hire or employ colliers, coal-bearers, or
salters, unless furnished with a sufficient testimonial from
the master whom they had last served ; and further, ‘ that
Sae mony colliers, coal-bearers, and salters,’ as without
such testimonial received such ‘forewages and fees, should
be esteemed, repute, and holden as thieves, and punished
in their bodies.’ Pretty well, methinks, as a specimen of
the class-legislation of the good old times . This act,
however, stringent as it may seem, was found insuffi-
cient : there was a class of persons employed in the pits
whom it did not include ; and in 1661 it was further en-
acted, ‘ that because watermen, who lave and draw water
in the coal-heugh heads, and gatesmen, who work the
wayes and passages in the said heughs, are as necessary
ſo f/he ozºners and masters of the said coal/eighs as the
Coal-hewers and coal-bearers, it is therefore statute and
ordained, that they should come under exactly the same
64 EDINBURGH AND ITS AWEIGHBOURATOOD.
penalties as the others, in the event of quitting their
masters without certificate ; and that it should be equally
illegal, in the lack of such a document, for any persons to
employ them.” There was still, however, a certain degree
of incompleteness in these slave-making acts. The coal-
workers unreasonably demanded wages; and, to put down
claims which were found troublesome, it was further
enacted, in a specific clause, that it should ‘not be lawful
for any coal-master in the kingdom to give any greater
fee than the sum of twenty merks in fee or bountith,'—
a clause which, according to the interpretation of Lord
Kames, fixed the large sum of one pound two shillings
Sterling as the yearly wages of colliers and salters. It
was, however, found that at times the poor subterranean
men became restive, or, breaking out into wild licence,
refused to work ; and so there was a further clause devised
to deal with the difficulty, and in which the ‘virtues anent
the coal and salt” became more than usually palpable.
‘Because’—so runs the reason given—‘coal-hewers within
the kingdom, and other workers within coal-heughs, with
salters, do ly from their work at Pasche, Yule, Whitsun-
day, and certain other times of the year, which times they
employ in drinking and debauching, to the great offence of
God and prejudice of their masters, it is therefore statute
and ordained, that the said coal-hewers and salters, and
other workmen in coal-heughs in the kingdom, work all
the six days of the week, except the time of Christmas.’
The slavery of the colliers and salters was now fully com-
pleted by act of Parliament ; the Supreme Court gave
GAEO/LOGYCA/. ATA: A 7TURES’. 65
effect, by its decisions, to the imposed law; the Habeas
Corpus Act, introduced into Scotland in 17 or, expressly
declared in one of its clauses, that its provisions were not
to be extended to workers in coal or makers of salt; and
for a hundred and fourteen years, men and women born
within four miles of the Scottish capital were held as
strictly in thrall by their masters as the negroes of Cuba
or Carolina are held at the present day. The Letters of
Junius had appeared, rousing the English people to resist
even the slightest encroachment on their liberties ; the
War of Independence in the American colonies had
begun ; Robert Burns was cherishing, as a peasant lad
in Ayrshire, those sentiments of a generous freedom which
breathe from every stanza of his noble and manly verse;
nay, Granville Sharp had obtained his Act, through which
slavery, if that of the negro or the foreigner, could not
come into contact with the soil of Britain without ceasing
to be slavery ; and yet the poor Scotch collier, buried in
that very soil, and bearing about with him its stains, still
remained a slave. Not until the year 1775 did the law
which had so insidiously bound him set him even nomi-
nally free ; and certainly very strange, regarded as a
British law of the latter half of the eighteenth century,
is the preamble of that Act which extended to him, in
the first instance, a verbal freedom. “Whereas,' it runs,
‘by the statute law of Scotland, as explained by the
judges of the courts of law there, many colliers, coal-
bearers, and salters, are in a state of slavery or bondage,
bound to the collieries and salt-works, z0/iere they work
E
66 ED/AWAE URGH AAWD /TS AWAE/GHPOURAE/OO.D.
for Zife, transferable with the collieries and sal-works; and
' etc. etc. This Emancipatory
whereas, the emancipating,
Act failed, however, virtually to emancipate, in conse-
quence of certain conditions attached to it, which the
poor workers underground were too improvident and too
little ingenious to implement ; and their actual emanci-
pation did not take place until the year 1799, when it
was effected by a second Act, which stated in its preamble
that, notwithstanding the former enactment, ‘many col-
liers and coal-bearers still continued in a state of bondage'
in Scotland. When residing in a village on the neigh-
bouring coal-field, nearly thirty years ago, I had many
opportunities of conversing with Scotchmen, the colliers
of a neighbouring hamlet, who had been born slaves; and
at that time found the class still strongly marked by the
slave-nature. Though legally only transferable, in the
earlier time, with the works and the minerals to which
they were attached, cases occasionally occurred in which
they were actually transferred by sale from one part of
the country to another. During the lapse of the present
century, the son of an extensive coal-proprietor was
engaged in examining, with a friend, the pits of a pro-
prietor in another part of the field; and finding a collier
the tones of whose speech resembled those of the colliers
of his own district, he inquired of him whether originally
he had not belonged to it? “Oh I' exclaimed the man,
with apparent surprise, ‘ d'ye no ken me? Do ye no ken
that your faither sold me for a pony?' I owe the anec-
dote to Mr. Robert Chambers.
GAEO ZOGYCA/C FAA 7'URES. 67
I trust this digression will not be regarded as standing
greatly in need of an apology. There are few things
more interesting in geological science than those Snatches
of human history, or those peculiarities of human con-
dition, which we find associated, necessarily often, but
usually very unexpectedly, with certain formations and
groupes of rocks. Dr. Buckland has shown, in his Bridge-
water Zreatise, that the various branches of industry pro-
secuted in the various districts of England—pastoral,
agricultural, manufacturing—are regulated almost exclu-
sively by the development of the several geologic sys-
tems which form the framework of the special tracts in
which they are pursued. I have been told by the late
Dr. Malcolmson of Madras, a man who stood high both
in medical and geological science, — that he found the
diseases of India vary according to the formation of
the country. I attempted showing, on a former occasion,
that a large proportion of the world’s wars of independ-
ence have been prosecuted in its primary and its trap
districts. And we now see how in Scotland even, a Sub-
terranean life, spent amid the Coal Measures, separated
in destiny and standing one portion of the people as
widely from all the others as the Russian serf is sepa-
rated at the present time from the free-born Englishman.
Nor is this curious passage in our domestic history with-
out its lesson. The poor colliers had become very igno-
rant and very improvident ere the law-enacting and law-
administrating powers of the kingdom metamorphosed
them into slaves. May we not safely infer from such
68 A.D/AWAEURGA AAWD / 7.S. AVE/GAPO URAE/OO.D.
instances—and they are very many—that intelligence and
morals form the true defences of a people's liberties in
even comparatively civilised times, that he who would
connive at the popular ignorance is indifferent to the
popular freedom, and that the truest patriot is the man
who, by extending to his humbler countrymen the bless-
ings of a solid education—an education both of the head
and heart — would impart to them at once the discern-
ment to detect and the moral courage to repel every
aggression, whether open or insidious, of unprincipled
power P
But let us pass from the colliers of our Mid-Lothian
coal-field, to the coal-seams amid which they labour. I
have said that rather more than thirty of these seams
are workable ; and the number of the unworkable seams,
varying from a few inches to about a foot and a half in
thickness, amounts to at least as many more. In the
comparatively small section of the Carboniferous strata
presented in the Joppa Quarry, near Portobello, we find
no fewer than seven coal-seams, four of them unworkable,
and three of them wrought out. By much the larger
portion of the coal in this Mid-Lothian field seems to
have been elaborated in situ, where we now find it.
Under at least three-fourths of the seams, the original
soil that produced the vegetable matter which composed
them may be detected existing as a stratum of greyish-
coloured clay, much traversed by roots that pass upward.
into the overlying coal. And, when Sauntering along
some vertical section of the Coal Measures, we see, for
GEO LOGYCA/. FEA TURES. 69
hundreds of yards together, bed succeeding bed, and,
with deposits of clay, or shale, or sandstone between,
seam succeeding seam ; when we remark that many of
these beds, as shown by the extreme thinness and great
number of their laminae, must have been of very slow
deposition, — that the formation of each layer of soil
below the coal-seams must have been the work of years,
— for in no circumstances do soils form rapidly; and
further, when we reflect that most of the seams them-
selves—some of them from four to six feet in thickness
— were elaborated from air and water by these under-
lying soils in the vegetable form, can we avoid coming
to the conclusion that enormous periods of time must
have elapsed ere the three thousand feet of the Mid-
Lothian Coal Measures could have been formed or de-
posited P. It has been estimated by Mr. Maclaren, on
the data of Macculloch, that this coal-field alone could not
have been produced in less than six hundred thousand
years. The estimate may seem extravagantly high, re-
garded even as an estimate of the duration of the Car-
boniferous period anywhere ; and yet we find that, how-
ever correct an approximation it may be with reference
to our own coal-field, it fails adequately to represent the
amazingly prolonged eons of the Carboniferous stage, in
the general history of the globe. Sir Charles Lyell, in
his recent visit to America, examined the Nova Scotia
coal-fields, and found, from one uninterrupted section on
the shores of the Bay of Fundy, that the thickness of
its strata amounts to fourteen thousand five hundred and
7o EDINBURGH A WD ITS AWEIGHBOURHOOD.
seventy feet. And amid these strata, as amid those of
Mid-Lothian, there are beds of ancient soil, each of
which must have taken many years to form, and nume-
rous seams of coal, that must have been elaborated on
the spot which they continue to occupy; but even cast-
ing out of the calculation the long periods of elaboration
by vegetable growth, and regarding the whole field as a
result of simple deposition, Sir Charles succeeds in show-
ing that, at the rate of deposition now going on in the
Delta of the Mississippi, it would take two millions of
years to form the Nova Scotia coal-field. Well may
geology and astronomy be regarded as peculiarly the
sister sciences. If the one enables us more worthily to
conceive of the sublime vastness of that space in which
God dwells, not less does the other heighten our concep-
tions of the awful eternity during which He has existed.
There is not much of the geological to be seen in
the coal-pits of Mid-Lothian; and a visit to their gloomy
recesses is always disagreeable, and sometimes attended
with danger. As not, however, without a special interest
in their way, I shall give you the details, as I recorded
them at the time, of a visit which I paid nearly twelve
years ago to a pit at Dryden,_more, however, in connec-
tion with the movement of that period for meliorating the
condition of the collier women, which terminated in the
Act abolishing female labour in the pits, than with any
geologic object. Previous experience had taught me that
a single section opened up along some coast-line by the
sea, or along the sides of some ravine by a streamlet,
GEOLOGICAL FEATURES. 7 I
was worth, for purely geologic purposes, all the coal-pits
in the country.
There is not a prettier dell in the south of Scotland
than that of Dryden, rendered classic by the allusion of
Sir Walter Scott, in his ballad of “Rosabella.' We are
told there that the wondrous blaze which gleamed from
above the sepulchral vault of Rosslyn—some sign that
disaster impended over the line of high St. Clare—
“Was seen from Dryden's groves of oak, -
And seen from classic Hawthornden.’
Dryden is a winding valley, overhung by precipitous banks
and stately wood, that opens into the wider valley of the
Esk, and exposes, in its course, a series of strata singu-
larly interesting to the geologist. Passing fresh over the
shales, sandstones, and unprofitable coal-seams that in this
part of the country underlie the Mountain Iimestone, we
rise, in our downhill progress, to the limestone itself—
here very amply developed, and rich in its peculiar fossils.
Then passing over a series of overlying sandstone and
grey shale, with here and there a layer of coal, and here
and there a belt of ironstone, we at length arrive at a
workable coal-seam. We See a few cottages overhung by
trees, and with these, an engine-house rising beside a low
precipice on the one side of the dell ; and the huge
square wall of coal which blocks up the level spot on
the other side shows the nature of the working. The
strata along which we have been passing lie at an angle
of about forty; and the seam, in consequence, is one of
the kind most difficult to the collier, and known as an
72 EDINBURGH AND /TS AWEIGHBOURAIOOD.
edge-coal. At a little distance farther down the dell there
is a perpendicular shaft, adown which we descend by a
wooden staircase of six flights. The steps are slippery
and covered with mud, and the land-springs descend along
the sides in a perpetual shower. At the bottom of the
shaft we see an opening about four feet in height, into
which we grope our way; and as the daylight has wholly
failed, we strike a light, and then descend for some fifteen
or twenty feet along a sloping plane cut into steps. We
next enter a narrow gallery, ankle-deep in mud, and pass
on till we reach another opening, lower even than the
first, adown which we descend by a second flight of steps,
and arrive at a second gallery. The floor is drier, and
we find we are treading on a pavement of coal, and that
the roof overhead is also coal. We reach yet another
opening, but the gallery stretches past it; and, ere turn-
ing aside to descend to a lower level, we force our way
forward into what, from the untrodden appearance of the
floor, and the mould on the roof and walls, seems to be
an old deserted working. Here and there, too, a mouldy
wooden prop supports the insecurer portions of the roof.
But our light warns us to return. It sinks into sudden
dimness, and, assuming the form and size of a pistol-
bullet, seems stuck on the top of the wick, like the ball
of a discharging rod on the wire. It brightens up again
as we approach the opening. We have got into the fresh
current ; and the glow of unwholesome perspiration which
came so suddenly upon us scarce a minute since is as
suddenly checked. We descend yet a third flight, and
G/EO/OG/CA/C FEA 7TURES. 73
f
reach the lowest gallery to which the workmen have yet
descended. The atmosphere is close and heavy, charged,
apparently, with the Smoke of the miners' lamps, and
rendered still more oppressive by a strong smell of train
oil. There is a heap of tools lying on the floor; and im-
mediately before us we see the coal projecting, in partially
loosened blocks, undermined by the pick, and which a
few blows of the wedge will entirely separate from their
place in the seam. But the uncouth chamber into which
we have penetrated is a place rather for the coal-hewer
than the geologist. The black cubical coal stretches over
and under us, and the dark walls on either side are com-
posed, the one of a grey arenaceous clay, the other of
barren shale,
The time chosen for our exploratory descent is that
when the workmen are absent at their mid-day meal; nor
would it be very convenient to thread a passage so narrow
and long, so broken by descents, and perplexed by turn-
ings, when the bearers are passing out and in, either
laden with coal, or carrying on their shoulders the bulky
basket. Here the miners come, however, each furnished
with his lamp. They squat themselves down in a reclining
posture, which only habit could have rendered bearable 5
and, striking out the projecting masses of coal, roll them
over into the gallery. And now come the bearers with
their baskets, to carry up to the surface the coal thus
disengaged. But what work for women P. Each bears a
lamp fastened to her head, to light the long upward
ascent ; and, laden with more than a hundredweight of
74 EDINBURGH AND /TS AWEIGHBOURAOO/D.
coal, and bent forward at nearly a right angle, to avoid
coming in contact with the low roof, they ascend slowly
along the flights of steps, and through the narrow galleries,
and, lastly, up the long stair of the shaft; and when they
have reached the Surface, they unload at the coal-heap,
and return. And such is the employment of females for
twelve, and sometimes fifteen hours together. It has been
estimated by Mr. Robert Bald, the distinguished mining
engineer, that one of their ordinary day's work is equal
to the carrying of a hundredweight from the level of
the sea to the top of Ben-Lomond. These poor collier
women—the coal-bearers of the old Scotch Acts—were
even more strongly marked by the slave nature, at the
time they first came under my observation in this part of
the country, nearly thirty years ago, than the men. I
have seen them crying like children, when toiling, nearly
exhausted under the load, along the steep upper stages
of their journeys to the surface, and then returning with
the empty Creel, scarce a minute after, singing with glee.
They were marked, too, by a peculiar type of mouth :
both the upper and under lip drooped forward, Swollen,
meaningless, void of all mark indicative of the Compressive
control of mind. It was the mouth of the Savage in that
humblest and least developed condition of which the great
weakness is an even more deplorable trait than the pre-
vailing rudeness and barbarism. I describe, however, a
state of things which has already become obsolete in the
district. Women are no longer employed as animals of
burden in our Scottish coal-pits. The drooping, degraded
GEOLOGICAL FEATURES. 75
type of mouth seems already to have disappeared from
among our collier population; and when I visited Dryden
a few years ago, I found the galleries of this last of the
pits that had been wrought in the ancient style of the
times of the slave-colliers, lying vacant and deserted. . My
description, were it to survive, might be well regarded as
one of the fossils of the Coal Measures—a memorial of
a condition of things become extinct. And such is the
character borne by even the comparatively recent history
of our Scottish colliers in general. It bears upon its
front the stamp of obsolete ages, and of States of Society
long gone by.
From the gloom of this coal-pit, with its carbonaceous
ceiling and floor, and its dingy walls of shale and fire-
clay, would that I could transport you to the deep forests
which furnished of old the materials of the seam | I re-
member that in emerging to the light of the wooded dell
above, I was at first dazzled by the bright Sunshine ; but
the Soft green foliage of the noble trees that rose along
the steep sides of the valley, and of the brake and lady-
fern that shot up tall and luxuriant in the shaded recesses
below, fell soothingly on the eye, and the entire scene
contrasted very agreeably with the more than dungeon
darkness of the excavations beneath. And not less, but
more marked, would have been the contrast, had it been
from the coal-pit into the forest which had resolved into
the Coal that I had emerged. Noble trees of the arau.
carian type, a hundred and fifty feet in height, would have
taken the place of the oaks and elms of the dell ; the
76 ZZO/AWAURGA AAWD /7'S AWAE/GA/BOURAIOOD.
lepidodendron, an enormous club-moss, tall as a ship's
mast, and covered with spiky leaves, and with seed-bearing
receptacles light as the cuttings of the willow, would have
been substituted for its ashes ; for its birch and hazel we
would have seen the ornately fluted sigillaria, and the
ulodendron with its scaly trunk and its rectilinear rows
of sessile cones ; while for its plants of a humbler order,
—the bracken, and the Sweetly-scented woodroof, and the
mare's-tail,--we would have found numerous somewhat re-
sembling families, tall Calamites, the asterophyllites, with
their many-rayed, verticillate leaves, and more than two
hundred species of ferns, Some of them slim and graceful,
like the delicate sphenopteris, and some of them rising
into the arboraceous form, and assuming the dignity of
trees.
Some of the remains of this gorgeous flora which have
been detected in the immediate neighbourhood of Edin-
burgh are remarkable for their great size and fine state of
preservation. I have seen in Joppa Quarry, as Completely
relieved from the general strata as a column from the mass
of stone out of which it had been cut by the workmen,
a considerable portion of a lepidodendron, thicker than
the body of a man, and which must have belonged to a
plant fully seventy feet in height. Some of the finest speci-
mens of ulodendron ever found have been furnished by
Craigleith Quarry, and the bed of the Water of Leith,
near Colinton, One very fine specimen from the quarry,
figured and described by Dr. Buckland in his Bridgewater
Zreatise, may be seen in the Museum of the Royal Society
G/EO/LOG/CA/L FAEA 7TURES. 77
of Edinburgh ; another specimen of great beauty, which I
disinterred from the bed of the stream, may be seen on
the table before us. The ulodendron must have been a
very remarkable plant. The late Captain Basil Hall de-
scribes, in his notice of the island of Java, a singular tree
called familiarly the ‘traveller's friend,” urania being its
botanic name. ‘We found it to differ,’ he says, “from
most other trees, in having all its branches in one place,
like the sticks of a fan, or the feathers of a peacock's tail.’
The ulodendron seems also to have had its branches all
in one place ; but besides this peculiarity, there ran along
its trunk and its greater boughs straight continuous lines
of stemless cones, like rows of buttons on the dress of a
boy, that left impressed on the bark, when they dropped
off, lines of beautifully sculptured scars. The general
surface, too, was delicately fretted by obovate scales ; and,
bearing each an apparent mid-rib, they may serve to re-
mind the architect of that style of sculpture adopted by
Palladio from his master Vetruvius, when, in ornament-
ing the Corinthian or composite torus, he fretted it into
closely imbricated leaves. The sigillaria, of which fre-
quent specimens occur in the Mid-Lothian coal-field, with
its carved and fluted column-like stem, must also have
been an extraordinary, and, in its more ornate species, a
very fine plant, or rather tree ; and nothing can well be
more graceful than the sphenopteri of Burdiehouse, and
the neuropteri and pecopteri of Preston and Dalkeith. I
Set myself nearly a twelvemonth ago to restore, from a
series of specimens, the frond of Sphenopteris affinis, one
78 ED/VBURGH AAWD /TS WEIGHBOURATOOD.
of the most abundant of the Burdiehouse ferns. I drew
it slowly and laboriously, piecemeal, from my authorities
the fossils, without drawing on imagination for a single
pinna or leaflet; but greatly more graceful and elegant
than if I had set myself to design something I deemed
pretty, it grew up under my hands. The rachis or stem
somewhat resembled that of the common hill-side bracken,
Pteris aquilina, but—a peculiarity without example in the
ferns of the present day—it divided, not into three, but
into two parts; and then a series of alternate pinnae and
Ø %D 4)
© 4.) ©
ARAUCARIANS OF THE GRANTON QUARRY.
alternate leaflets completed the frond. This ancient
fern must have imparted lightness and beauty to many
a dank meadow and sloping hill-side during the times of
the Lower Coal Measures, and waved its slim pinnae and
minute leaflets with a billowy motion over wide areas, to
the hot breezes that shook the old Carboniferous forests.
The fossils, however, for which this neighbourhood is most
remarkable, are its gigantic trees. The fossilized arau-
carians of Craigleith, when first found in 1826, were
wholly unique in the geologic world; nor has anything
equal to the araucarians of the Granton Quarry yet been
found. In examining these last, two in number, which
the Granton Railway brings within less than a mile of
GAEOZOG/CAA. APEA 7'URAE.S.
Edinburgh, and which, while those of the other quarry",
have been removed through the operations of the quarrier,
have been spared through the good taste of the noble pro-
prietor, his Grace the Duke of Buccleuch, I would urge the
visitor to observe the angle at which they both lie;—the
one raised on its rocky pedestal, the other laterally exposed
in the precipitous side of the quarry. The angle of in-
clination is the same in both, both lie the same way,+
in both the nether and weightier portion of the ponderous
bole is turned downwards; they are both evidently what
an American would term the snags of some river of the
Carboniferous period, that flowed in what is now, in re-
ference to the existing arrangement of the land, an uphill
direction. Neither of them is complete, they are but
mere fragments of trees; and yet the smaller of the two is
about four feet in diameter by seventy feet in length ;
while the larger, still more a fragment, has a length of
sixty-one feet, but then it has a diameter at the lower end
of about six feet, and a diameter at the upper end of two.
The height of the latter, when it existed entire as a living
tree, could not have fallen short of a hundred feet. And
of this vast tree, which must have rivalled in bulk and size
that sung by Milton, as
‘Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast
Of some great ammiral,’
the larger and massive part survives within a short distance
of Edinburgh, in the character of one of the hugest fossils
in the world.
I have little to add to my former description of the shells

AºA)/AVPURGA AAWD J 7'S AVAE/GHAEO URATOO/O.
\ºnd fishes of the neighbouring coal-field. The little is,
however, of interest. I was shown last winter by Mr.
Cadell, the scientific and accomplished mineral surveyor
of the Duke of Buccleuch, the footprints of some large
animal impressed on a block of sandstone which had
formed part of the roof of one of the coal-seams wrought
in the immediate vicinity of Dalkeith. The block, little
more than three feet either way, bore only six of the prints,
or rather of the casts of the prints ; but I was informed by
Mr. Cadell that they could be traced continuously for
Several yards, as they crossed diagonally one of the ex-
cavated passages. They stood up in bold relief on the
stone. Apparently some animal of the great reptilian class
had trodden heavily across the upper surface of what is
now the coal-seam, when it existed as a black carbona-
ceous mud or moss, sinking deep at every step ; but the
semi-elastic matter received the impressions only indif.
ferently well: it received them much as a footprint would
be received by our existing mosses; and so the sand after.
wards cast down upon it, and now existing as stone, though
it presents casts of the prints in regular sequence, does not
exhibit that sharpness of outline in each print necessary
to the determination of the order of reptiles to which the
creature belonged. We only know from these strongly but
not sharply marked impressions on the rock, that over that
portion of the earth's surface now occupied by the rich
fields of Mid-Lothian, and the noble parks of Dalhousie
and Dalkeith, huge reptiles strode heavily in the ages of
the Carboniferous era,_monsters, mayhap, as strangely

GAE O/LOGYCA/. FAA 7TURES. 8.
aberrant of type, compared with the existing denizens of
the animal world, as the great plants ulodendron, Calamites,
and sigillaria, under which they passed, seem anomalous
and aberrant, compared with the existing denizens of the
vegetable one. To the gigantic ganoidal fishes of Gilmer-
ton and Burdiehouse,_fishes that bore in their jaws rep-
tilian teeth thrice bulkier than those of the largest croco-
dile, and formidable in proportion to their bulk, the course
of discovery has recently added a huge placoid from the
Dalkeith coal-field, of the Cestraciont family; but we know
little else of this ancient shark than that, where the Port-
Jackson Cestracion bears a defensive spine of one and a
half inch long, it bore one about fifteen inches in length,
and more than equally stout in proportion. And that is
just all. In these recent additions to our Carboniferous
fauna we have but the track of the reptile and the spine of
the shark. In, however, what must be regarded as origi-
nally a part of the same coal-field as that of Mid-Lothian,
—the coal-field in the neighbourhood of Carluke, there
have been recently discovered fragments of the osseous
skeleton of a reptile closely allied to the archigosaurus
of the Carboniferous deposits of Germany. Besides the
bearing of such discoveries on the world’s history, they
show, among other things, with what equal progress, in at
least those highly civilised parts of the world in which
science is cultivated, the course of geologic discovery is
going on. In writing no further back than in the year
1846 on the first appearance of the reptile in Creation, I
stated that, so far as was known, it had taken place during
- F
82 /2/D/AVPURGA A/VD /TS AWAE/GP/APOURAE/OO}}.
the times of the Magnesian Limestone,—a member of that
Permian system which immediately overlies the coal, and
forms the most modern of the great Palaeozoic deposits.
Since that time, however, either the remains or footprints
of reptiles have been discovered in the coal-fields of
Rhenish Bavaria, in the coal-field of Pennsylvania in the
TJnited States, in the coal-field of Nova Scotia, and now
in the Carluke and Mid-Lothian coal-fields. But then, on
the other hand, the fact that in a system so extensively
wrought as the Coal Measures, reptilian remains should
not have been sooner detected, and that they should
still be so very rare, must serve to show how very incon-
spicuous the place which was occupied by the reptile
during the old Carboniferous ages. The great prevail-
ing vertebrates of the period were not its reptiles, but its
Sauroid fishes. .
I had purposed adducing in my address a few curious
facts regarding the coal-fields in our neighbourhood, mainly
economic in their bearing ; but my narrow limits forbid.
Permit me, however, just to advert to a natural process of
distillation, of which we are presented with an instance to
the west of Edinburgh. It is comparatively of late that
the chemist has set himself to distil, for economic purposes,
the coals and shales of the Oolitic and Carboniferous
systems. A recently established work among the Kim-
meridge shales yields in abundance valuable oils and
naphthas, from what, in the times of the Upper Oolite,
had formed the fleshy framework of influmerable ammo-
nites and belemnites ; and to what is known as the Tor.
GE O/LOGYCA/. FEA 7TO/AEA.S. 83
banehill mineral, the Carboniferous vegetation has imparted
so inflammable a character, that there can be extracted
from every ton of the substance not less than twelve
gallons of naphtha and twenty-six gallons of parafine oil.
Nature, however, had her distillations in this neighbour-
hood long ere patents or chemists, or even the human
family, existed. In what is known as the Binny Quarry,
a quarry of a white building sandstone which occurs in
the tract of lower Carboniferous rocks that intervenes
between the Mid-Lothian and Falkirk coal-fields,--a highly
inflammable substance has been found, which the quar-
riers have been in the practice of converting into candles
of a consistency resembling that of bee's wax, but not alto-
gether so white. This substance occurs in the fissures of
the rock; and I lately paid the quarry a visit, in order to
ascertain whence it had been derived. I found the district
much overflown by trap. The Binny Crags—a greenstone
eminence lofty enough to form a feature, though a remote
one, in the prospect from Our Castle Hill—is in the im-
mediate neighbourhood of the quarry; and , its erupted
traps seem to have Come in Contact with a thick bed of
shale, which Overlies the sandstone bed in which the quarry
has been opened. A sort of natural distillation took place.
The bitumen or parafine, freed from the shale by the heat,
forced its way downwards into the vertical cracks and
fissures of the stone; and in these, and these only, not in
the interstices of the stratification, is the substance found.
It has been used for many years in lighting, in the long
winter nights, the neighbouring cottages; but it is only
84 EDINBURGH AND 17's WEIGHBOURHoop.
now that the chemist is learning to employ one of the
substances extracted in his distillations from coal and shale,
to a similar purpose, by making it assume the form of
parafine candles. There might be also some interest in
referring to the fact, had we but the necessary time, that
during the present year three great legal cases have arisen,
—one on the Continent, another in America, the third in
our own country, all hinging on the one question, What
is coal? Without in the least challenging the opposite
judgments which the various courts have pronounced, but
rather, on the contrary, holding that, whether they deter-
mine black to be black, or black to be white, or black to
be black in one place and white in another, they are
all equally legal and in the right, I must be permitted to
say, the simultaneous existence of such cases in localities
so widely separated as Prussia, Scotland, and the United
States, must be regarded as an evidence of the existence
of thought and inquiry in unwonted directions over no
small portion of the civilised world. The American case,
tried before a special jury, was made to hinge on the
question whether a certain inflammable substance, dug out
of the earth, and occasionally employed in tarring the
bottoms of boats, was an asphalt or a coal ; and the jury
decided it to be a coal. In our own country, where the
issues were also subjected to a jury, the decision on a
very different substance—the Torbanehill mineral—was
the same. Whatever makes money and gas is coal to a
coalmaster; and whatever comes out of the ground, and
burns, is coal to most jurymen. In Germany the question
GEO/LOG/CA/C FEA 7TURE.S. 85
was subjected, not to a jury, but to an association of scien-
tific men ; and they, sitting in judgment on this same Tor-
banehill mineral, and in direct opposition to the interests
of their employer, the State, decided that to be merely a
singularly inflammable shale which our Scotch jury had
pronounced to be a true coal. I of course refer to the
subject as merely a curious one. It certainly is a curious
fact, and strikingly illustrative of what has been termed
the glorious uncertainty of the law, that a certain mining
firm or company should be permitted to work in this
country a certain mineral substance because it is here
legally determined to be a coal, which they are permitted
to export duty free into Prussia because it is there legally
held not to be a coal, and to supply with it, in the city of
Frankfort, in its character as a resinoed shale, an oil and
resin gas company; while a coal-gas company in the same
city is inhibited, on the plea that it is not a coal, from
dealing with them.
But I must hasten to a conclusion. At the base of the
Coal Measures proper, we find the Marine Limestones,
with their remains, representative of a period when seas
of moderate depth, and abounding in molluscs, placoid
fishes, corals, and whole forests of encrinites, stretched
out for ages over the area subsequently occupied by the
coal. I have already referred to the Marine Limestones
of Dryden, one of the best sections of the formation as
developed in Scotland which I have yet anywhere seen ;
and we find it exhibited in this neighbourhood in several
other localities, as at Liberton, at Gilmerton, and very
36 ED/AWBURGH AAWD /TS WAEIGHBO URAE/OO.D.
interestingly near that ancient castle of Crichton, rendered
classic by the well-known description in ‘Marmion.’ The
time seems to have been one of vicissitude and revolu-
tion,-land and sea not unfrequently changed places: and
SO, intercalated with the limestones that in almost every
fragment bear some organism of the sea, we find beds
of shale containing only terrestrial and fresh-water plants,
and thin unworkable seams of coal. Beneath the Marine
Limestones, and representative of a still older period,
there occurs a largely developed formation of red or pale-
coloured shales, that alternates with sandstone beds of the
same hue, and exhibits in its upper portions occasional
seams of limestone, that seem to have been formed in lakes
or estuaries. On this nether formation, which in this part
of the kingdom forms the base of the Carboniferous system,
the larger part of the Old Town of Edinburgh is built ;
and the far-famed limestone of Burdiehouse, specimens of
whose fishes and plants may be found in almost every
geologic museum in the world, composes one of its higher
beds. Still descending in the scale, we pass into another
and more ancient system,-the Old Red Sandstone,—a
system whose upper members are largely developed, in
this vicinity, in the western portion of the Pentland range,
and in a considerable tract of country, flanking the Lam-
mermoors, that extends from beyond Fala to Dunbar. I
am not aware, however, that it has produced any fossils
in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh, at least nearer than
the interesting section extending on the sea-shore from
Sellar Point to Dunglass Burn, where it is found to contain
GEOZOG/CAZ FEATURES. 87
scales of Holoptychius, and plates of its characteristic
genus Pterichthys. In the same tract, in the neighbour-
hood of Dunse, it has yielded, though decidedly a marine
formation, terrestrial plants, Calamites apparently, and a
fern that very much resembles the Neuropteris gigantea
of the Coal Measures. It is generally held, from the
manner in which the Old Red strata are deposited, that
the grauwackes of the Lammermoors existed at the time
as a subaerial tract or island; and it seems not impro-
bable that these plants of the sandstone may have been
drifted from its shores, and that they formed on its
slopes and planes part of a flora greatly less rich than
that of the Coal Measures, but, generally at least, of the
same character.
The grauwackes themselves, or, as they are now termed,
the Lower Silurians, belong, to a greatly more ancient
period still,—to a period so vastly more ancient, that
when the seas of the Upper Old Red Sandstone spread
out around them, they existed as a series of old-looking
rocks, - rocks every whit as old-looking as they are
now, and uptilted in a position so directly vertical in
many instances, that their upper could not be distin-
guished from their under beds, or the ascending line
determined from the descending one; and yet they too
had their period of slow deposition in an ocean in which
we find no trace of land. It was tenanted by the trilo-
bite, the Orthoceratite, numerous brachipods, and, as in
the long posterior seas of the Mountain Limestone, with
numbers innumerable of crinodea. In its lower depths
88 EZ)/AVAE UA’GH AAWD /7'S' WAE/GAAPO ÚRA/OO/O.
we find little else than graptolites, with occasional beds
of an impure anthracite, composed, it is not improbable,
of the sea-weeds of the period : and then the record
closes; and, as is fabled of ancient voyagers, such as the
wanderer of Ithaca, we cross the line where the precincts
of the cheerful day terminate, and a curtain of thick dark-
ness drops down upon the deep.
Let us cast a glance, ere this curtain ultimately falls,
along the various succeeding scenes of our long upward
passage. The Silurians, at which we have just arrived,
present us with but a shoreless ocean, which, though the
light falls through the transparent water in the middle
spaces on pearly shell, and stony flower, and Snow-white
coral, we see encircled all around the horizon with a
thick fog, like that which rested on either hand of the
great bridge seen in vision by Mirza. The curtain falls
and rises, and a wide sea still spreads out around ; but,
unlike the other, it is a sea much vexed by waves and
currents, whose vast shallows of water-rolled pebbles rise
to the action of the surf, and abounding in uncouth
ganoidal fishes, – Holoptychii, and Pterichthyes, and the
sculptured Asterolepis. And in the midst, encircled with
its snow-white line of breakers, there lies, inlaid in the
blue, a flat green island. We have looked abroad on
the times of the Old Red Sandstone. And then the cur-
tain again falls, to rise over an ever-changing landscape
of fern-covered plain, and reed-bearing ‘marish,” and
bright coralline sea, and boundless forests, spread on
and away to the far horizon, tangled, and dark, and

GEO/OG/CA/. Aſ EA 7TURAES’. ~
`--
dank, and inhabited by doleful creatures; their deep
still lakes travelled by the reptile fish, and their gloomier
shades the haunt of the Scorpion and the Salamander.
And then the curtain again descends, and ere it yet
again rises, ages and Systems pass away ; but we see
dimly through its folds the gleam of erupted fire, and a
submarine volcano flares fiercely on the dark horizon ;
and, blent with the deep groan of earthquakes, we hear
the loud rush of denuding currents, and the ceaseless
dash of waves. And slowly as the curtain once more
ascends, we see a boreal scene of islands ; the bolder
features of the landscape have become familiar; but a
subarctic sea breaks high against the hill-sides, and the
whale blows in our submerged valleys; and where street
or ample square now extends, the morse floats past on
his raft of field-ice, and the seal raises its round black
head ; and, though summer has risen on the scene, the
brow of the distant Pentlands gleams white with snow,
and along the hollow dells of the hills the glacier de-
scends. And yet once more the scene changes. The
climate has softened, and the sea receded, and the rich
Germanic flora gives its flowers to the meadows, and
its tall forest trees to the woods; and amid a tract of
shaggy hills and blue gleaming lakes, David of Scotland
has gone forth from the Maiden fortress, perched high
on its rock, to hunt the deer and the roe amid the
bosky thickets that rise thick and tangled around the
precipices of the Calton. I have performed my task
hastily and inadequately,–I have drawn but a few thin
a
--"

_* * URGA AAVD / 7.S. AVE/GH/AEOUR}} OOD.
and meagre lines; but they at least touch some of the
bolder features of what, in a more skilful hand, would
worthily fill a noble breadth of canvas; and I leave it
to some happier pencil to lay in the colours, and to
supply the lights and the shading.
ON THE
BRICK-CLAYS OF PORTO BELLO,
witH THEIR
ORGANISMS, VEGE TABLE AND AN/MAZ.
—?—
WHAT are known as the Portobello brick-clays occupy a
considerable tract of Comparatively level country, which
intervenes between the eastern slopes of the Arthur Seat
group of hills and the Sea. The covering of rich vege-
table mould which forms the upper stratum of the tract
— so valuable to the agriculturist, that it still lets for
about six pounds per acre — precludes any very exact
survey of their limits; but we know from occasional ex-
cavations in the tract, and at least one natural section,
that they extend over an area of at least a square mile.
A well, sunk a few years ago at Abercorn Place, one
hundred and ten yards on the upper or Edinburgh side
of the first milestone from Portobello, passed through
a stratum of the brick-clays six feet in thickness; and
several excavations made in the immediate neighbour-
hood, on the farm of Mr. Scott of Northfield, laid open
the continuous bed which they form at various points,
91
92 EZ)/NBURGH AND /TS AWAE/GHBOURHOOD.
fully a mile distant from the sea, where they averaged
in thickness from five to seven feet. In all probability,
judging from the general level, and their gradual thinning
out, they terminate in this direction about the middle of
the field which extends to the house of Willow Bank;
while more to the South they appear about sixty yards
below the mill of Easter Duddingston, in the section
formed by the Figget Burn, whence they stretch east-
wards to near Joppa Quarry. They acquire their
greatest elevation at Stuart Street and its neighbour-
hood, where they rise about eighty feet over the high-
water line; and attain to their greatest known depth in
the town of Portobello, at the paper-works of the Messrs.
Craig, where at one point, immediately beside the burn,
they were perforated Several years ago, in sinking a well,
to the depth of not less than a hundred feet. Their
extent along the shore to the west has not been very
definitely traced, but from their eastern extremity near
Joppa, to where they terminate beyond the brick-works
of Mr. Ingram, cannot greatly exceed a mile. The
boulder-clay appears all around the edges of the area
which they occupy, and forms, I cannot doubt, the basin
in which they rest. It appears in a characteristic sec-
tion a little above Duddingston Mill, charged with its
grooved and polished boulders: it was cut through to
a considerable depth by the excavations for the North
British Railway, in the vicinity of Stuart Street and
Abercorn Place, and there found underlying the brick-
clays ; and it appears along the shore, accompanied by
7THE BAC/CA-CZA VS OF AZOA’7'O BAE/L/CO. 93
some of its most striking phenomena, both to the east
and west of Portobello, a little beyond the limits of the
basin. In sholt, the Portobello brick-clays may be re-
garded as occupying a boulder-clay basin or valley about
a mile in length and breadth, not reckoning on their
unknown portion, which seems to extend outwards under
the sea ; and, thinning out all around the edges of the
hollow, they attain, where deepest in the lower reaches
of the Figget Burn, a thickness, as I have already said,
of at least a hundred feet. -
Their colour is very much that, on the average, of the
boulder-clay of the district: they bear a deep leaden hue ;
nor can I doubt that their materials were originally derived
from it. But they must have been deposited at a some-
what later time, and under different conditions. They are
finely laminated throughout : even their most compact
beds, when exposed edgewise for a few weeks to the
weather, are found to consist of hundreds of layers, thin
as sheets of pasteboard; and there run throughout the
deposit thin strata of silt or sand, that, unlike the arena-
ceous intercalations of the boulder clay, preserve for many
yards the same thickness, and maintain in many cases
nearly the same level. The brick-clays in this locality
must have been slowly deposited in comparatively tranquil
waters, undisturbed, apparently, by the restless agencies
which, during the boulder-clay period, grooved and fur-
rowed the solid rocks of the country, and transported and
left their strange marks on the great stones to which the
boulder formation owes its name. Up till a comparatively
94 EDINBURGH AND /TS AWEIGHBOURHOOD.
late period it was not known that the Portobello brick-
clays enclosed their organisms—the remains of plants and
animals that had existed during their deposition. I was
informed, however, several years ago, by Mr. Allan Living-
ston, senior, the intelligent proprietor of one of the Porto-
bello brick-works, that his workmen, many years before,
had cut, at a considerable depth, through a scattered layer
of shells, and found a stump of a doddered tree ; and a
respected member of our society, Mr. William Rhind, pro-
duced, at one of Our meetings of the session of 1852–53, a
sorely-decayed shell which he had found in the deposit, and
which, so far as could be judged in its state of extreme
decomposition, was a fresh-water bivalve—Cyclas Cornea.
All my own attempts to find organisms in the deposit were
unsuccessful. I was informed, however, in January last,
by the younger Mr. Livingston, whose kindness, both in
tendering me the information, and in affording me every
facility at his works in following it up, I must here be per-
mitted to acknowledge, that his brick-clays were again
furnishing their shells in considerable abundance; and ac-
cordingly, shortly after our January meeting, I visited the
deposit, and I have, as leisure served, been working it out
ever since. I found the bed of shells to which he referred
in the upper part of his brick-field, a few yards from the
road which passes between the Portobello railway station
and the old Roman way familiarly known as the Fishwives'
Causeway. It occurs at the depth of from three to five
feet from the surface of the brick-clay, and from about six
to eight feet from the surface of the soil; and when I last
THE BRICK-CZA VS OF PORTOBEZZO. 95
examined it, it measured, from where it first appears in the
section, to the point where the excavation terminates and
it disappears in the bank, exactly fifty yards. The level
of the bed is from fourteen to fifteen feet above the high-
water line, from which it (the bed) is rather more than a
quarter of a mile distant. Where thickest, the bed is about
eighteen inches in depth. All the shells which I at first
detected were of one species. And as most of the speci-
mens were in a bad state of keeping, and associated ex-
clusively with what seemed to be fresh-water remains, some
time elapsed ere I could determine what that species really
was. It was, I saw, a bivalve varying from an inch to an
inch and half in length and breadth ; and as it was not
until my third visit that I succeeded in detecting the hinge,
and as I found it occupying evidently the place in which
it had lived and died, among roots of the common reed
(Arundo phragmites), and apparently those of the water-
flag, I too hastily leaped to the conclusion that it could not
be other than a fresh-water shell, though of a kind which I
could not identify as still native to the country. On find-
ing the hinge, however, though in but an indifferent state
of preservation, I was struck by the resemblance of the
obliquely triangular fulcrum in either valve to that of Scro-
bicularia; but finding it associated with not only the reeds
and flags, but with also the trunks of sorely-decayed oak
trees, and frequent branches of alder and birch, I still
hesitated; and it was not until I had submitted my speci-
mens to Mr. Gray of the British Museum, and to perhaps
the highest conchological authority in the world, M. G. P.
96 EDINBURGH A WD /TS AWEIGHBOURHOOD.
Deshayes, whom I was fortunate enough to meet in the
Museum, that I was content to yield to the evidence, and
to recognise a shell associated, so far as I had at the time
ascertained, with no marine production, as a marine shell.
Since my return from London, however, the same deposit
has yielded me, from a lower and more arenaceous stratum,
scattered specimens of the common periwinkle (Littorina
littorea), and a few much-wasted valves of the crimson
tellina (Tellina solidula). It has also yielded me, washed
apparently from the bed, a specimen of Helix nemoralis.
The large shell-bed, notwithstanding the associated reeds
and branches of trees, must be recognised as a bed of Scro-
bicularia piperata, still occupying the place, as the position
of the shells indicate, where the individuals which compose
it had lived and died. ‘Scrobicularia piperata,’ as Mon-
tagu remarks, ‘is chiefly found at the mouths of rivers or
inlets, not remote from fresh water ; and though never
beyond the flux of the tide, yet it delights in situations
where fresh water is occasionally flowing over. It princi-
pally inhabits sludge or muddy places, buried to the depth
of five or six inches. It is from the comparative in-
accessibility of such spots,’ add the Messrs. Forbes and
Hanley, in their British Mol/usca, “that the species, though
abundant, is not frequently taken alive, and that Cabinets
are usually only furnished with dead valves, washed on
shore after rough weather.' I may mention that I was
informed, when last in London, that in the lower reaches
of the Thames, near Gravesend, miniature forests of reeds
and rushes stand out at the river edge in the brackish
7 HE BRICK-CZAWS OF PORTOBEZZO. 97
water, and that whole beds of Scrobicularia piperata burrow
at their roots. - -
The oak trunks which I found associated with the shells
were, with one exception, rather of small size, varying
from about six inches to a foot in diameter. The larger
trunk was, however, that of a pretty considerable tree,
measuring twenty-seven feet from the root, at which it
was nearly two feet in diameter, to the fork of its first
large bough, where it measured about sixteen inches across.
Both the larger and smaller trees had all the appearance
of being drifted to the spot where they lay, and had ap-
parently been in a state of decay, and half sunk in the
mud, when the shells were living around them. They
were deeply cracked in the line of the medullary rays; and
the flags and reeds had, in not a few instances, insinuated
themselves into the cracks. One curious specimen—a
branch of Scotch fir—had been in such a state of decay
when the aquatic vegetation flourished over and around it,
that the underground stems seemed to have found a scarce
less ready passage through its substance than through that
of the clay itself; and it appeared, in consequence, as if
literally sewed by them to the stratum in which it lay.
From the peculiar appearance of this specimen, it struck
me that the question might be fairly raised, whether the
vegetation, chiefly subterranean in its character, that thus
perforated the wood, might not have existed at a Con-
siderably later period than the shells with which we find
it associated. Certainly, the mere contiguity of shells in
situ, and of decayed underground stems also in situ, gives
G
98 EDINBURGH AND ITS AWEIGHBOURHOOD.
no evidence whatever of the contemporaneity of the shells
and stems. Purely marine shells might be found occupy-
ing the spot in which they had lived and died, associated
with purely lacustrine stems similarly circumstanced; but
as the special stems and shells of the brick-clays, here at
least, could have lived together, there of course attaches
less interest to the solution of the question in this par-
ticular instance. Over the brick-clays at the eastern ex-
tremity of the shell-bed, and, in the average, about four
feet higher in the section, there rest detached beds of
fine yellow sand, a foot in thickness or so, which, how-
ever, in two several places thin out and disappear; over
the sand there lies a thinner but more continuous stratum
of moss; over the moss, about a foot more of grey silt;
and the vegetable mould overtops the whole. The greater
part of a fir tree, about ten inches in diameter, still lies
in the sand; but, as shown by its under side, which is in
contact with the underlying clay, the sand must have
been merely deposited around it ; and in the stratum of
moss above, there occurred several trunks, of small size,
of birch, alder, hawthorn, and what seems to be ash. All
the deeper-lying oaks and firs were in such a state of
decay, that they offered scarce more resistance to the
labourer's spade than the surrounding clay; the upper-
lying birch, hawthorn, and alder, were also much decayed;
but a portion of the fir tree in the sand still retains its
turpentine; and the heart of the large oak to which I
have referred preserves a considerable degree of tough-
ness of fibre. The shells, even the best preserved indi-
THE BRICK-CZAPS OF PORTOBEZZO. 99
viduals among them, are in such a state of extreme fragility,
that it was my first work, on getting home, after every
visit to the deposit, to steep my specimens in a solution
of gelatine, which seems to have restored to them a por-
tion of their original solidity. It may be mentioned as a
curious circumstance, suggestive, mayhap, of the unsalutary
character of the salt-water marsh, that the brick-clay, in its
upper beds, in this place, where most thickly traversed by
the roots of the reed and water-flag, diffused, when first
laid open by the workmen, a peculiarly heavy odour.
In referring somewhat more in detail to the remains,
plant and animal, of this interesting deposit, permit me
first to make a few remarks regarding its vegetable
organisms. In the overlying silt I found no other remains
than those of recent roots, shot downwards from the soil
above ; on the other hand, at about from eight to ten
feet beneath the surface of the clay, the vegetable remains
disappear. The lowest lying organism which I detected
—a sorely decayed twig of oak-did not exceed the ten
feet; and downwards for about thirty feet more—for such
is the depth of the formation at this place—the stiff and
finely laminated clay has hitherto not been found to yield
a single plant or shell. A little above the place of the
oak twig, nine feet or so from the surface, there Occurs a
thin dark-coloured stratum of vegetable matter, traversed
nearly horizontally by pointed stems, much flattened, and
in a bad state of keeping, but apparently those of Arundo.
Above this stratum the stems become very abundant, main-
taining mostly the erect position, and presenting, when
Too ED/VE URGAſ AAV/D ITS AWAEIGH POURHOO/).
first laid open—though they shrivel up, when dried, into
mere films—the original character very distinctly. When
preserved in water, they might pass for the remains of
plants that had lived only a few seasons ago. Still higher
up in the bed, however, where the specimens must be
by many years more modern than those beneath, they
are greatly more indistinct and antique-looking; while
higher up still in the sand, where they must be still more
modern, they exist as mere encrustations of ferruginous
stone, that, if one judged merely from their mineral ap-
pearance, might be deemed as old as the times of the
Coal Measures. The instance is a curious one of the
inadequacy of the test furnished by the mere state of
keeping of a fossil to determine its age. Nor is it unin-
teresting to observe how, in comparatively recent times,
a nucleus of vegetable matter attracted around it, as
similar nuclei used to do in the times of the Carboni-
ferous system and the Lias, the iron previously existing
as a disseminated oxide in the stratum in which it lay.
The trees of the deposit, from its demonstrably great
antiquity, in relation at least to human history, must be
regarded as in every instance indigenous to the country.
The oak, birch, alder, hawthorn, and Scotch fir, have
long been recognised as indisputably native to Scotland.
I am not sure, however, that the ash has been generally
regarded as one of our indigenous trees. I find Gardiner,
in his Flora of Forfarshire, referring to it as probably
introduced into at least that part of the kingdom ; and
doubts also rest on the indigenousness of the yew. I am
THE BAC/C/ -CZA VS OF PORTO BAE ZZO. . IoI
mistaken, however, if this Portobello deposit does not
furnish specimens of both species. A slender trunk in
the thin stratum of moss lying immediately beneath the
upper stratum of silt exhibits exactly the appearance and
grain of a young ash, though, from its extreme state of
decay, I have been unable to subject it in transparent
slips to the microscope; and a trunk, also of small size,
lodged in the stratum occupied by the shells, presents,
so far as I have been able to test it, all the peculiarities
of the yew. It is exceedingly close of grain ; its zones
of yearly growth lie in as little space as sheets of paste-
board; the longitudinal Sections of sufficient thinness,
which I have succeeded in detaching from it, show the
coniferous disks existing, as in Taxus baccata; and the
external surface of the stem has the twisted appearance
so common in our yews, and So uncommon in any of
our other conifers. From the brittleness of the specimen,
however, I have been unable to procure a transverse sec-
tion. One of the trunks of birch which lay in the same
stratum as the shells, though Sorely decayed in its ligneous
interior, still retained the bark in a state of great entire-
ness. The tough Outer integument continued to bear its
silvery hue, just a little tarnished; and in a specimen
now on the table, I found it perforated by a series of
circular borings, the work, evidently, of some worm or
grub that had lived in the Scottish forests of perhaps
some three or four thousand years ago.
The animal organisms of the deposit we find charged
with an evidence still more curious than its vegetable re-
Io2 AE/)/AVAE UAEGA/ AAV/D / 7.S. WAE/GAAOURAFOOD.
mains. Its few fresh-water shells, Helix and Cyclas, must
have been washed into it by the stream. Its scattered
periwinkles and Tellinidae were probably carried dead
into it by the waves ;—at least, all the Tellinidae which
I detected existed as single valves; nor, though the
stratum to which I found the periwinkles restricted was .
greatly more arenaceous than the strata above and below,
could I find any evidence that they had lived on it.
Though the periwinkles occasionally occur in small num-
bers on muddy shores, they usually prefer a harder
bottom than they could have found in the estuary of
the Figget Burn. The evidence furnished by the Scrobi-
cularia bed is, however, of a very different kind. It
cannot rational/y be doubted, -that on the spot where we
now find them, the individual shells which compose it
once lived and died. Let me run briefly over the
various points which bear upon the fact. In the first
place, the clay in which they occur must have formed
exactly such a mud as that in which the living shell still
loves to burrow. Further, we find them associated in
the stratum which they occupy with no other shell: the
only exceptional instances occurred at just a single
point, where I found two detached valves of Tellina
solidula, and the specimen of Helix nemoralis. Further,
in the great majority of cases the Scrobicularia of this
bed exist as double valves, retaining, in some instances,
even the ligament. And it is surely not in the least
probable that a shell so inaccessible in its oozy haunts
as to be usually found, according to the Messrs. Forbes
7A/E AEA'ſ CK-C/A VS OF PO/07"O BAE ZZO. IO3
J
and Hanley, represented in collections by but single
valves washed ashore by storms, should be found in the
bed, existing as complete shells, by hundreds and thou-
sands, and this, too, without the companionship of other
shells, as if it had been merely washed to the spot by
some great wave, like that which accompanied the earth-
quakes of Lisbon or Calabria. But yet further, the posi-
tion in which almost all the fresher specimens occur is
wholly irreconcilable with the supposition that they could
have been transported to the spot on which we now find
them. Scrobicularia, when living, stands erect in the mud
on One of its ends,--an end which furnishes, in propor-
tion to the general mass of the shell, a base scarce so
large as that furnished by the edge of a shilling or sove-
reign ; and it would be no more irrational to Suppose
that, of a heap of gold or silver coin Swept hurriedly
along a floor, greatly more than the half would erect
themselves on their edges, than that, of many thousand
flat bivalves similarly swept, and left to rest in the posi-
tion natural to them on the Ordinary mechanical principles,
greatly more than the one half should erect themselves
on their edges. But I still very considerably understate
the argument furnished by the position of the shells.
When in their proper habitat, burrowing in the mud,
they cannot present either end indiscriminately as the
upper one. It is indispensable to their wellbeing that
the rounded end should be the lower end, and the sub-
triangular end, from which the long siphonal tubes pro-
ject, should be the upper one ;-a reverse position would
IoA. AEDINBURGH A WD /TS AWEIGHBOURAE/OO.D.
be quite as unnatural to the animal as it would be for a
man to stand upon his head ; and the question, of course,
comes to be an important one, – viz., What end of the
shells do we find sticking downwards in the clay, and
what upwards P What first struck me in my earlier visits
to the deposit, was the upright position of the shells. I
found, on my first visit, seven standing upright in the clay
in the space of eighteen inches; and on the second, five
in the space of six inches. But their state of preserva-
tion was scarce perfect enough to enable me conclusively
to determine their subtriangular from their rounded end.
Since that time, however, I have, in all my visits to the
deposit, kept the point in view ; and I have now disin-
terred from the bed, at various times, no fewer than sixty-
three specimens standing erect, or but slightly inclined
from the perpendicular, all in such a state of keeping
that their anterior could be distinguished from their pos-
terior ends. And mark the result. In every one of the
sixty-three examples, the subtriangular end, from which
the siphuncular tubes had once protruded, was placed
uppermost ; the rounded end below. All these shells oc-
Cupied the position proper to the living animal. Nothing,
save the vital principle once operative within them in
exactly the place where we now find their remains, could
have produced such a result. That it could have been
the result of any mere chance arrangement, is greatly
more improbable than that sixty-three halfpennies thrown
up into the air should all turn up heads on their descent ;
seeing that in the case of the shells there would be not
THE BRICK-CZA YS OF PORTOBAEZZO. Io;
only the chances against their all presenting the same
end upwards, but also the chances against their stand-
ing up on a sharp edge, instead of resting, as would be
natural for them on mere mechanical principles, on one
of their flat sides.
All the shells of the deposit, however, do not stand
erect. Occasionally a fallen shell may be found tolerably
entire, though in most instances they are very much broken, .
and exist not unfrequently as single valves, divested of the
thin yellowish-coloured epidermis. And fallen shells in a
detached fragmentary state are by no means rare. But let
it be remarked, that the negative evidence which these fur-
nish in no degree militates against the positive evidence
furnished by the erect ones. Exposed to accident, and
under the influence of the ordinary mechanical laws, it is
natural for the erect to fall; but all the more, not the less,
distinctly and conclusively on that account do the ones
that still remain erect and unfallen testify to the influence
of laws not mechanical. The law of gravitation SO certainly
stretches a dead man along the ground, that we at Once
infer that the man who stands erect owes his erectness to a
vital principle operative in defiance of the law. But it is
unnecessary to contend for what cannot be disputed. Let
me next remark, that where we now find the shells of Scro-
bicularia, as in this bed, in their natural position, the sea
must once have been ; nay, that they must have been
washed twice in the twenty-four hours by even the lower
neap-tides, a condition necessary to their existence as
shells not lacus/rine, but marine. And that such must have
106 EDINBURGH AND ITS AWEIGHBOURHOOD.
been their level in relation to that of the sea at the time,
we find borne out by the circumstance that the thick
stratum of clay which rests over them—a stratum varying,
as I have said, from three to five feet—seems to have been
deposited in conditions similar to those of the stratum
beneath, The estuary in which they lay seems to have
been gradually silted up after their death ; but we can
scarce suppose that it could have been so silted to a
higher level than that of stream-tides, without some change
taking place in the character of the deposit. The shells,
then, when living, must have been covered at Spring-tides,
in the place where they now lie, by from four to six feet of
salt or brackish water; and so the sea at flood must have
stood, in that remote age, at a level about twenty feet
higher than it does now, or the land at a level about twenty
feet lower. The thin beds of sand which in several places
overtop the brick-clays in the Figget valley may have been
either deposited by the waters of the stream during land-
floods, and, of consequence, ere the upheaval of the old
coastline ; or they may have been drifted by storms from
the sea during unusually high tides, or wafted by the winds
from the beach ; and the overlying strata of moss and silt
are the deposits of a still later time, when what had been
previously in Succession a quiet muddy arm of the sea, and
next a brackish reed-bearing estuary, had probably existed
alternately as Swamp and lake, -a lake dammed up, it is
probable, by a sand-bar or storm-beach, raised by the
waves along the line of the shore. But even the last of
these strata must have been deposited ere the upheaval of
7 HE BRICK-CZA YS OF PORTOBEZZO. Io'7
the old coast-terrace—estimated here, I find, by our re-
spected president, Mr. Robert Chambers, in his Ancient Sea
Margins, at twenty feet—gave to the spot its present free
drainage and its thoroughly subaerial character. And the old
Scrobicularia bed must have been covered up ere that remote
event, an event removed far beyond the historic period,
by from six to eight feet of clay, sand, silt, and moss. Thus,
then, the bed, besides its other points of geologic interest
just enumerated, is of yet further interest as an example of
what is rare in Scotland,-a deposit intermediate in age be-
tween the old glacial deposits, which we find charged, like
those of Gamrie and the boulder-clays of Caithness, with
shells similar to those which now occur on the coasts of sub-
arctic Norway and Greenland, and the deposits which occupy
the flat terrace immediately beneath the old coast-line.
The place held by the brick-clays of the entire Portobello
deposit, in their relation to the Arthur Seat group of hills,
and their probable derivation from the boulder-clays of the
district, is not unworthy of being noted. Sheltered by the
hills—when these must have existed, during the glacial
ages, as a group of islands—from that easterly flowing
current of whose existence we have so many evidences in
the form and direction of our valleys, of denudation and
the aspect of our trap-rocks, they occupy exactly the posi-
tion in which, under the condition of a partially submerged
land swept by such a current, such a deposition might be
expected. The water, charged with the washings of the
boulder-clays, would throw down its sediment in the calm
and shelter of the spot where we now find the brick-clay
IO8 E/D/AVPURGH AAVD Z 7'S AVE/GAZAROURATOOD.
deposit. It may be stated, in connection with this sugges-
tion, that boulders do occur at times, though very rarely,
in what seem the older brick-clays, and that such of their
number as were not too hard to receive the glacial mark-
ings, or too coarse-grained or friable to retain them, exhibit
the workings still. There lies at the brickwork of Mr.
Ingram, who has kindly afforded me every facility in
examining the deposit on his grounds, and given me much
valuable information regarding it, a sandstone boulder of
nearly a ton weight, which was dug out of the brick-clay
a considerable time since ; and of several smaller boulders
recently found about seven feet from its surface, there is a
specimen now on the Society's table, on which the charac-
teristic grooves and scratches are as distinctly marked as
on any similar block the product of the boulder-clay. The
uppermost or last deposited stratum of the older brick-
clays—a stratum about six feet in thickness—is much.
mixed with streaks and lines of a fine yellow sand, in
some places curiously disturbed and contorted; and as it
is easily distinguishable in Consequence, its relation to the
newer brick-clays—those in which the shells occur—we
find traceable without difficulty. The newer, apparently a
re-formation of the older, as the older themselves are a
re-formation of the boulder-clay, occupy an oblong basin in
the general deposit, which runs to a hitherto unascertained
extent inwards along the valley of the Figget Burn. They
are evidently, as satisfactorily shown by one of the sec-
tions now open, the fillings-up of an estuary by which the
old brick-clay was traversed, many ages, mayhap, after the
7 AE AER/CA-CZA VS OA' A'OR7'O BAE ZZO. Io9
deposit itself had been formed, but which, silted up by the
disintegrated clays, had ceased to exist, Save as a mere
swamp, ere the last upheaval of the land. In the section
referred to–that furnished by an excavation at present in
the course of being hollowed by Mr. Livingston's labourers
—the line between the newer and older clays is distinctly
. traceable, shelving outwards from the centre of the valley,
to what must have been the western shore of this ancient
estuary. The entire deposit, older and newer, furnishes us
with two little bits of picture. We are first presented with
a scene of islands—the hills which overlook the Scottish
capital, or on which it is built—half sunk in a glacial sea.
A powerful current from the west, occasionally charged
with icebergs, sweeps past them, turbid with the washings
of the raw, recently-formed boulder clays of the great flat
valley which stretches between the Friths of Forth and
Clyde; and in the sheltered tract of sea to the east of the
islets, amid slowly revolving eddies, the sediment is cast
slowly down, and, layer after layer, the brick-clays are
formed along the bottom. And then, in long posterior
ages, after the land has risen, -all save its last formed
terrace,—and the subarctic rigour of its climate has softened,
we mark a long withdrawing estuary running along what is
now the valley of the Figget Burn. It is skirted by the
aboriginal trees of the country, oak, and birch, and alder,
and the Scotch fir; and, save where a sluggish stream creeps
through the midst, we see it thickly occupied by miniature
forests of reeds and rushes, amid the intricacies of whose
roots the mud-loving Scrobicularia breed by thousands.
ON A
R A IS E D S E A-BOT TO M N E A R
FILLY SIDE BAN K,
A E 7" VVA. AE W W. A. Z ZTAZ A AVAD º O ſº Z"O BAE Z Z O.
*~3-
IT is stated by Mr. Charles Maclaren, in his Geology of
Fife and the Zothians, that his attention was called in
1834, by Mr. Jardine, civil engineer, to a bed of oyster-
shells which had been laid open by the labourers engaged
in cutting the line of railway which extends between Leith
and Portobello. “The shells,’ says Mr. Maclaren, “lay
about a foot, or a little more, under the vegetable soil, in
a fine gravel, and extended over a considerable space
along the railway, but were in greatest abundance near
the mouth of the Foul Burn, about half a mile east of Sea-
field Baths. They lay,’ he adds, ‘pretty close together ;
were so numerous, that probably a thousand might be
found within a space three or four yards square ; were
in general much decomposed ; and existed as but detached
valves, though in a few instances the valves still occurred
unseparated. The oyster greatly predominated in the bed;
but it contained a mixture of other shells, such as Bucci-
110
RAISED SEA-BOTTOM AVEAR FIZZ PSIDE. 111
num, Pecten, Patella, and Cardium edule. And further,
the level of the stratum in which they lay embedded was,
he found, from six to eight feet above that of the highest
stream-tides, and about twenty-six or twenty-eight feet
above the lowest level of low water.’ So far Mr. Mac-
laren. He adds, however, in a note, that he recorded
his observations on this deposit in the Scotsman news-
paper of November 1, 1834, unaware at the time that
the shells had been exposed many years before, and de-
scribed by Professor Jamieson to his class.
In the immediate locality where Mr. Maclaren found
the shells lying most thickly, the land is protected against
the encroachments of the sea by a bulwark of rude
masonry, and so cannot be seen in section. To the
east, however, about one hundred and sixty yards from
the Foul Burn, the bulwark terminates; and the higher
stream-tides of winter and spring, when urged upwards
by gales from the sea, wash the bank, which presents, in
consequence, a low abrupt front, consisting of two several
deposits. The lowermost of these is composed of the
Ordinary boulder-clay of the district; the uppermost, of a
stratified sand and gravel, which forms here the immediate
Subsoil of the thin layer of vegetable mould that rests over
all. I observed many years ago, in this sand and gravel,
an interrupted layer of partially decomposed shells, chiefly
Oysters, but mingled with occasional specimens of Bucci-
num, Littorina, Cardium, and Patella, which occurs from
fourteen to eighteen inches from the surface, in the line
of the stratification; and identified it, from its character
f 12 AE/)/WBURGH A WZ) /7'S' WEIGHAEOURAE/OOD.
and position, as the stratum of shells described by Mr.
Maclaren. A few years later, however, after a great tide,
which had encroached very considerably on the bank, I
marked, in the neighbourhood of the shells, another ap-
pearance, to which I attached even more importance in
its bearing on the question of upheaval. Immediately on
the top of the underlying clay, and in some instances par-
tially embedded in it, there is an irregular layer, at this
spot, of boulder-stones, from some of which the stratified
sand and gravel had now been washed for the first time.
And to not a few of these newly-uncovered stones I found
the under valves of oysters still firmly attached. Unless
the stones had been carried there previous to the forma-
tion of the bed of stratified sand and gravel, by some
enormous wave of translation, an oyster-scalp must have
existed on that very spot; and the appearance certainly
did not favour the notion of a wave of translation. The
oyster-valves occupied the sides and upper portions of all
the boulders to which I saw them fixed : a wave of transla-
tion would surely have reversed some of them . The stones
bearing the shells lay contiguous, not scattered : a wave
of translation would surely have scattered some of them
And though none of them were of great size, at least one
of their number—a block of greenstone—contained from
four to five cubic feet of ponderous stone ; and even the
least massive of the others would have demanded for their
transport from the existing oyster-grounds of the Frith, to
their present place above the level of stream-tides, the
agency of a very formidable wave. Further, they occupied
RA/SAED SEA-BOTTOM AVEAR FIZZ PSIDE. 113
exactly the position, with relation to the boulder-clay, in
which we usually find such groups of boulders in the
instances — as along shores and river-banks—in which
there has been a partial denudation of the deposit. Some
of the limestone boulders, their neighbours, I found per
forated by the cells of Pholas and Saxicava ; and in some
cases the decayed shells of Saxicava rugosa, and of that
dwarf variety of Tapes pullastra which, though unable to
scoop out a house for itself, finds at once a refuge and a
prison in hollows excavated by the boring molluscs. Such
were the appearances which I remarked at this time. I
had, unluckily, not visited the spot immediately after the
storm which had laid it bare ; and a talus of loose sand
and gravel, which had fallen from the upper deposit, had
in the interval formed over the clay, and lay scattered
amid the stones, and thus prevented me from detecting
those further particulars of the deposit to which I would
now call the attention of the Society.
In the latter part of last month, a heavy gale from the
Sea, coincident with a high stream-tide, again swept the
lower margin of the land at this point, and, encroaching
On the double deposit of boulder-clay and stratified sand,
opened up a fresh section. I visited the spot immediately
after the storm had blown over, and found the talus which
had covered the surface of the clay washed away, and a
second bed of shells, which underlies the bed described by
Mr. Maclaren by about two feet and a half, laid bare. It
lies at the base of the stratified deposit, and consists, in
large part, of oyster-shells, existing, however, almost ex-
H
I 14 EDINBURGH AAWD /TS AWEIGHBO ÚRHOOD.
clusively as single valves, and largely mingled, especially
in the upper part of the bed, with the more common lit-
toral shells, such as the periwinkles, Littorina littorea, and
Littorina littoralis, with Patella vulgata, Purpura lapillus,
Cardium edule, and Tellina solidula. It contains also
shells of a lower level, which are, however, frequent on
our beaches, such as Cardium echinatum, Pecten opercu-
laris, Turritella communis, and Anomia ephippium ; with
shells which might have belonged to either the Littoral or
the Laminarian zone, such as Buccinum undatum, Solen
siliqua, Trochus cinerarius, and Tapes pullastra. In some
of the specimens of Tapes I found the valves still united
by the Sorely-decayed ligament, as also in a solitary speci-
men of Oyster, and in a single entire specimen of a shell
comparatively unfrequent on our shores, though once very
abundant in what are now the brick-clays of Portobello,"
—Scrobicularia piperata. ‘Of this shell, though not ab-
solutely rare,’ say the authors of the British Mo/usca,
‘ cabinets, from the inaccessibility of its habitat, are usually
only furnished with dead valves washed on shore after
rough weather.’ My collection contains not a few speci-
mens of Scrobicularia from the Portobello clays, with their
valves still united ; but my best and least decayed speci-
men is that which I derived a few weeks ago from this
comparatively modern, but absolutely ancient, bed.
Immediately below this stratum of shells, which extends,
so far as I could trace it in the section, about a hundred
and thirty feet, the layer of boulders occurs which rests
upon the boulder-clay. I found fewer of their number ex-
RAISED SEA-BOTTOM NEAR FIZZYSIDE. 115
hibiting the attached oyster-valves than on the former
occasion. At one spot, however, within the Compass of
about three yards, and only a few inches beneath the
level of the shell-bed, I reckoned five to which these
sedentary molluscs had been fast anchored by their nether
valves, one of them a block of about half a ton weight;
and from the deeply hollowed cells of several of the lime-
stone boulders immediately beside them I extracted shells
of Saxicava rugosa, and of the distorted variety of Tapes
pullastra already referred to, and which was known to the
conchologists as Venus perforans." Under the sloping
edges of three of these stones, and protected by a re-for-
mation of the clay which had wrapped them round till
washed off by the previous tide, I found three oysters—
one in each instance—still existing as double valves; one
of them still sticking fast to its stone,—the other two still in
junction with theirs, but with their hold loosened, appa-
rently, by the rotting percolation of fresh water from above.
In the flattened portions of the valves that had furnished
the area of connection there were Balani embedded, which
had been sticking to the stones previous to the attach-
ment and growth of the shells, and which had been grown
around and enveloped in their substance. In the indivi-
dual which had still retained its hold of the rock I found
a delicate Lepralia thus enclosed. Another patch of Le-
* “The length of our largest specimen is about two inches, and its
breadth about an inch and a quarter. These dimensions, however, are
but rarely attained to, the majority of examples being about an inch
and a half only in length, and of proportionate width.”—British Mo/-
ſusca. -
II 6 A. ZO/AWAPOWA’GAA AAV/O / 7.S AWAE/GA/APO OVA2A/OO/O.
pralia, so perfect in its state of keeping that, for aught
which appeared, it might have been living only a few
weeks ago, occurred in the interior of one of the three
oysters, immediately over the muscular impression, — of
course showing, that while still in its deep-water habitat,
the original possessor of the shell had died, and had left
an empty apartment to the occupancy of the little Le-
pralia. The surface of the boulder-clay was in many places
thickly covered with shells, some of them minute and
much broken, others of larger size, and, when of the
bivalve division, with the valves still attached. Of
these last, large well-preserved specimens of Tapes pul-
lastra were most numerous. Pecten pusio also occurred,
though, in all the instances save one, as single valves
only ; with large specimens of Anomia ephippium. The
prevailing univalve of this layer was the common Trochus
cinerarius, still bearing very freshly, in most of the speci-
mens, its native colours. Nassa incrassata and Turritella
communis were not unfrequent ; Murex erinaceus and
Nuclea nucleus were present, but comparatively rare ; and
I found only a few specimens of Patella pellucida. Speci-
mens also occurred of Purpura lapillus, which seemed,
however, to belong to a thin, higher-lying layer than that
to which Pecten pusio, Murex erinaceus, and Anomia
ephippium belonged, and which was evidently littoral in
its character. Many of the minuter stones on this lower
bottom I found encrusted with serpulae and lepraliae, and
exactly resembling in their appearance the Smaller stones
brought to the surface by the dredge from the inner bands
RAISED SEA-BO7 TOM NEAR FIZZYS/DE. 117
of the Laminarian zone. Several of its larger boulders had
also their serpulae, though in a state of greater decay. It
had also its darkly-tinged oyster-shells — the dead shells,
evidently, of a Laminarian Sea-bottom—similarly encrusted.
More importance, however, must be attached to my remain-
ing fact. On the surface of the boulder-clay, and perforat-
ing it to the depth of from three to four inches, I found
well-grown specimens of Mya truncata, evidently occupy-
ing the places in which they had lived and died. The
firm boulder-clay lay in most of the cases undisturbed
around them. Their open siphuncular ends were turned
upwards; their rounded ends downwards. In one in-
stance, the ruins of the tubular membrane which had
protected the siphons lay inside the opening, just where
they had fallen during the process of decay. The shells
were still covered — such was their state of keeping —
by the yellowish-brown epidermis, and were as solid and
entire as if they had lived only a few years ago. The
area of clay-surface laid bare was comparatively small, and
much cumbered by boulders. It furnished me, however,
with twelve (now nineteen) specimens of Mya in the state
and position described, and with several others in a similar
state of keeping, but detached from their original places
by the surf. But to these last, of course, I attach no im-
portance in the argument which I would derive from the
position of the other. In laminarian deposits of this cha-
racter, whether merely raised within the Littoral zone, or
to a higher level, altogether beyond the reach of the tide,
Sorely decayed twigs of weeds, fir cones, and hazel-nuts,
II 8 AE/O//VPURGAſ AAVD / 7'S AVE/GAPO URHOOD.
are of not unfrequent occurrence. I found in this deposit
a few dark-coloured twigs, existing—such was the state of
decay—as mere vegetable pulp; and a single hazel-nut,
I have referred to a thin, higher-lying layer of littoral
shells which rested immediately over this laminarian layer,
and was in some places much mixed with it. I found it
composed chiefly of the shells of Patella vulgata, Purpura
lapillus, Trochus cinerarius, and the periwinkles. The
specimens were usually much broken, tinged in many
places with a ferruginous stain, which the laminarian shells
wanted, and collected in considerable quantities round the
looser stones and boulders. Similar accumulations of the
same shells, in the same broken state, may be seen among
the stones and boulders of the middle and lower zones
of shore laid bare ‘by the larger ebb-tides; and are charac-
teristic of a littoral, but not of a beach, deposit. The
various appearances of the entire section here, with its
several beds, I read as follows.
In some dateless and undateable period, very remote in
its relation to human history, but geologically recent, for
exactly the same shells as now existed on our shores,-the
surface of the boulder-clay at this spot formed, with its
groups of boulders, a sea-bottom of the Laminarian zone,
occupied by an Oyster-bed. Mya truncata burrowed in
the stiff fundamental clay, and Saxicava rugosa and Venus
perforans, in the calcareous blocks which lay scattered over
it ; its pebbles were encrusted by Serpulac and Lepraliae ;
it was traversed by Nassa, Turritella, and Trochus ; Pecten
pusio found its home in its crevices, and in the hollows of
RAISED SEA-BOTTOM NEAR F/ZZ PSIDE. 119
its decayed shells ; and Patella pellucida and Anomia
ephippium attached themselves to its tangles and pebbles.
The depth of water which rested over it I cannot deter-
mine other than approximately. “The oysters of the Frith
of Forth,’ say the authors of the British Mollusca, “are
dredged in from four to six or seven fathoms water.” In
some instances, however, in very sheltered localities, they
approach almost to the line of low ebb : I have seen the
inner edge of an oyster-bed laid dry at Flowerdale, in
Gairloch, during stream-tides; but the individual oysters,
in all such cases, are of small size ; and as the shells of
this elevated oyster-bed of the ancient coast attained to
the average proportions common in the Frith beyond, we
may, I think, safely assume for it at least the minimum, if
not indeed the average, depth of our oyster-beds of the
present day, viz. from four to five fathoms. Either from
an upheaval of the land or recession of the sea, a change
in the level of the bed took place : it was elevated within
reach of the surf; its oysters, unfitted for such a habitat,
died ; and, save where sheltered amid the crevices of the
boulders, or attached to them by their under valves, were
washed upwards to form a littoral deposit. This I take to
be the origin of the thick bed of shells at the base of the
stratified sand and gravel; and its numerous mingled mol-
luscs that select the space between low and high water as
their proper haunts, such as the periwinkles, with Patella
vulgata, Purpura lappillus, and Tellina Solidula, testify to
the nature of the change. The thin irregular stratum of
shell, much broken, and bearing a ferruginous tinge, that
I2O E/D/AVBURGH AAVD /TS AWAE/GA/BOURAE/OO.D.
lies between this mixed shelly stratum and the fundamental
Mya bed, indicates, I must hold, a transition period which
intervened between the upheaval of the deposit to the
level of the lower Littoral zone, and its yet further up-
heaval to the level of the beach proper, or 1%fter Littoral
zone. Over the mixed shell-bed there took place an ac-
cumulation of common beach deposits, chiefly sand and
gravel, to the depth of nearly three feet, and then the
uppermost shell-layer was formed. Though composed
mainly of Oyster-shells, I cannot regard it as marking the
site of a second oyster-bed. Though not without its mixture
of other laminarian shells besides the oyster, such as
Cardium echinatum and Pecten opercularis, it has its shells
of the Littoral zone, such as Patella vulgata and Cardium
edule ; and the mingled sand and gravel in which it occurs
bears entirely the beach character and aspect. I regard it
simply as indicating that a further upheaval of the land
had brought some oyster-bed in the sea beyond from the
laminarian to the littoral level, and that the shells, driven
upwards by the surf, and mingled with other shells, littoral
and laminarian, thickly strewed the beach at this line.
From about fourteen to eighteen inches of yet further
beach deposits took place, covering up all ; and then a
final elevation of the land raised not only the upper sand
and gravel strata, but even the underlying argillaceous sea-
bottom, with its Mya, Anomia, and attached oysters, above
the level of ordinary stream-tides. Such I take to be the
history of the deposit.
The escarpment so generally recognised as the old coast-
A’.4/SA; D SAEAl-AO 7'7"O/l/ AWEA/& F///. Y.S/Z) E. I.21
line, though of no great height in this neighbourhood, is
well marked, and, from its rampart-like continuity, and
the line of willows which runs along its summit, forms a
conspicuous feature in the prospect. Its sloping base,
against which the waves must have broken at the full of
the tide for ages, lies two hundred and fifty-four yards in-
land from this ancient sea-bottom, and at an elevation
over it of about sixteen feet. Our stream-tides of March
and September fall rather more than eighteen feet; and
so, when the high-water line reached to but the base of
the escarpment, the deposit must have been already a
littoral one. The some fourteen or eighteen feet Im Ore
necessary to furnish depth enough of water for its oysters,
would have very considerably affected the outline of the
coast here. As Mr. Maclaren well remarks, a change in
the level of the land of little more than thirty feet beneath
the existing one would cover the greater part of the site
of the town of Leith, and fill the lower reaches of the
valley into which the harbour of that place opens with an
arm of the sea about two miles long and a quarter of a
mile broad ; and the flat winding valley of the Figget
Burn, immediately behind Portobello, so remarkable for its
Scrobicularia bed, would be similarly occupied for about
three quarters of a mile. The old coast-line between Leith
and Portobello is of a more picturesque character than the
present. It advances on the green gently sloping terrace
at its base, in the form of low promontories, or reced
into shallow bays; and one of the largest and deepest i.e.
these occurs so nearly opposite the oyster deposits here,
122 EDINBURGH AND 17S WEIGHBOURHOOD.
that the deposit described by Mr. Maclaren as occurring
at the Foul Burn occupies about the same place at its
mouth, on the western side, as the one just described does
on its eastern one. The old solitary farmhouse of Filly-
side Bank, with its drooping willows and dank meadows,
occupies the inner part of this ancient bay, long deserted
by the sea ; and beside and behind the building there are
hollow swamps, which existed, in all probability, when
the land stood some eighteen or twenty feet lower than
at present, as muddy lagoons. Scrobicularia find meet
habitats in such localities ; and it seems not unlikely, that
from some of these hollows, when occupied, during flood,
by every tide, the specimens of this shell furnished by the
lower-beach bed of the deposit may have been derived.
Though it supplied me with but one entire specimen of
the shell, I detected in it, when first laid bare, several
broken valves. -
It is not always safe to estimate the age of a shell-
bed by the state of keeping in which its shells occur.
The freshness of the various strata of shells in the very
deposit I describe seems in an inverse proportion to their
age,_the uppermost, and of course newest stratum, being
in a state of Sore decay; the second, and considerably
older stratum, if not absolutely fresh, at least tolerably so;
the third, or last littoral stratum, though broken by the
mechanical action of the waves, in the main fresher still ;
... and the fourth, and oldest of all, that of the underlying
ºomediº in a state of preservation wonderfully
good. Its Mya, and not a few of its oysters, might, for
RAISED SEA-BO7TOM NEAR FIZZYSIDE. I23
aught that appears in their state of keeping, have been
living, as I have already said, only a few years ago. The
nature of the matrix in which shells lie determines their
condition much more influentially than the number of years
during which they may have lain in it. But in matrices of
an equally conservative quality, the comparative states of
keeping ought Surely to furnish approximate tests of age ;
and the sorely-decayed condition of the Scrobicularia of
Portobello, though enclosed in a stiff clay, compared with
the freshness of the Scrobicularia of this deposit, seems to
indicate that they belong to ages pretty widely separated.
The Scrobicularia of the muddy wood-skirted estuary which
is now the Figget Burn must have been dead and silted
over for many years ere those of the Fillyside deposit had
come into existence. Geologically the recent period is
one ; but from the first appearance of its group of shells,
as preserved in old upheaved estuaries, such as that of
the Figget valley at Portobello, and that of the Lones of
Fearn in Ross-shire, and the period of that last elevation
of the land which gave to our country its present coast-line,
thousands of years may have elapsed; and of even the
later period, we know that it lies beyond the first begin-
nings of the national history. It is a curious fact, but not
the less a real one, that some of these fresh-looking shells
on the Society's table had ceased to live, and were locked
up in their matrices of sand or clay, long ere the battles
of Largs or Luncarty had been stricken, or the names of
Wallace and the Bruce had become watchwords in Scot-
land. If man lived at all in our island previous to the
124 AEDINBURGH A WD /TS AWEIGHBOURHOOD.
last general upheaval of the land, it must have been as
an uncultured savage, unacquainted with the metals, and
ignorant of all save the most rudimentary arts. But there
is no fact oftener denoted by our science than the very
curious one, that the recent of the geologist and the remote
of the antiquary are convertible terms; and that what we
describe without hesitation as a modern shell may be older
than the times of Homer or of Hesiod, or than even the
first beginnings of human history.
A N CIE N T S E A - M A R G IN S.
SHOULD the Edinburgh reader, in availing himself of the
present long evenings for the purposes of exercise or recrea-
tion, extend his walk along the coast-road which connects
Portobello with Leith, he will perceive, when the tide is
out, that the portions of dry land and sea-beach immedi-
ately under his eye consist of two belts of sloping plain,_
an upper belt covered with long luxuriant herbage, and a
lower belt composed of bare sea-sand and gravel. With
this difference—purely a result of their present difference
of level, which imparts to the one a subaerial, and to
the other a subaqueous character—the two belts present
a wonderful identity of character. They slope transversely
at nearly the same low angle, and spread out laterally in
nearly the same flat line. Were we to dig into the soil a
little below the rank grass of the upper plain, we would
find that it is formed of materials exactly resembling those
of the lower, i.e. stratified sea-sand and gravel, mixed with
marine shells of the existing species; and that in both, the
Sand, shells, and gravel rest on a subsoil of the boulder-
clay. From this clay those numerous boulders that stud
the lower platform have been derived. They seem to
have existed on the upper platform also, and may still be
detected along one of the water-courses; but a careful hus-
125
126 FDTWBURGH AND /TS AWEIGHBOURAOOD.
bandry has long since cleared them from off the surface.
What, however, most strongly marks the resemblance of
the two plains, are the continuous escarpments which bound
their upper sides. The one, lashed by the surf during
the frequent storms of winter, runs, irregular and broken,
along the coast at the stream-tide line of high water ; the
other, so smooth and comparatively regular as to resemble
a very flat rampart, bounds the view on the upper side of
the road, and bears atop a long line of willows. More varied
in outline than the lower escarpment, this upper line pre-
sents, in succession, its two grassy bays that retire towards
the interior, and an angular willow-crowned promontory that
projects between. In the eastern extremity of the western
bay, just where the old-fashioned farmhouse of Fillyside
Bank is situated, there must have existed in ancient times
a sort of muddy lagoon, that ran upwards for several hun-
dred yards along the flat valley through which the small
stream that drained the hollow now occupied by the Cow-
gate and the eastern and northern ravines of Arthur Seat,
found its way to the sea. On the western side of this rural
grass-bearing bay, the escarpment is considerably higher
than on its eastern side ; and on the corresponding escarp-
ment of the lower platform, directly opposite, there is a
similar rise. Save that the upper escarpment is the more
undulating and graceful of the two, there is as thorough
all identity between them as between the contiguous steps
of a stair; but while the lower escarpment forms the present
coast-line, and is an effect of the encroachments, during
stream-tides, of the sea at the existing level, the upper
AAVC/A2/V7' SA’A-/ſ/AA’G//V.S. 127
escarpment formed the coast-line thousands of years ago,
when the sea stood higher than now, or the land lower,
and when, though the country seems to have had its
human inhabitants, the art of communicating with pos-
terity by alphabet or symbol was an art either very par-
tially developed, or, what seems more probable, altogether
unknown. When this green winding bank, topped with
willows (the most modern of the ‘ancient sea-margins'),
was washed by the waves at full and new moon, like
the bare broken escarpment below, the inhabitants of
the country were rude savages, who dwelt in wigwams
formed of green branches, or in cave-like subterranean
dens of undressed stone,—who employed in war and the
chase weapons of flint and jasper, — and who navigated
their rivers and estuaries in canoes hollowed by fire out
of single logs of wood.
Now, this lower and most modern of the old coast-lines
may be traced along the greater part of both the eastern
and western shores of Scotland. The level platform which
it overtops forms a broken selvage of irregular breadth all
around the island, extending outwards on shallow coasts,
as on the coast of Forfarshire, between Arbroath and
Dundee, for several miles, but restricted where the water
is deep, as along the southern coasts of Aberdeen, to a
narrow belt a few yards in breadth; or, where lines of
precipices rise abruptly out of the sea, wanting altogether.
Not a few of our seaports and watering towns, such as
the greater part of Leith, Portobello, Fisherrow, Kirkcaldy,
Dundee, Dingwall, Invergordon, and Cromarty, are built
I 28 A. ZD/AVP CWAGAZ AAV/D / 7'S AWAE/GA/ARO UVA’ATOO/D.
upon it; and it furnishes in various localities extensive
ranges of Sandy links, and large tracts of valuable gardens
and fields. It is strongly marked on the southern side of
the Dornoch Frith, immediately below and a little to the
east of the town of Tain, where it attains a breadth of from
One to two miles, and where the coast sea-margin, rising
over the cottage-mottled plain below in a series of alternate
bays and headlands, strikes even the least practised eye as
possessed of all the characteristic peculiarities of a true
coast-line. It is scarce less marked in the neighbourhood
of Cromarty, and on the opposite shores of the Frith, in
the parish of Nigg. It runs along by much the greater
portion of the eastern coast of Sutherland; and forms, at
the head of Loch Fleet, in the neighbourhood of Dornoch,
a long withdrawing frith, bounded by picturesque shores,
and covered by a short green sward, level as the sea in a
calm, on which groups of willow and alder trees take the
place of busy fleets, and the hare and partridge that of the
coot and the porpoise. It is not improbable that canoes
may have floated on this frith, now an extended plain,
grazed by herds of cattle ; and that the dwellings of the
rude fishers by whom they were navigated may have arisen
among the woods on its shores. At a not later period the
estuary of the Clyde must have extended at least six or
eight miles higher than Glasgow; and on three several
Occasions ancient vessels have been dug out of the silt
which underlies some of the busiest streets of the city, that
must have tilted high over the area now occupied by
Squares and public buildings, ere this last of the ancient
A/VC/EAV7 SEA-MARG/AVS. 129
beaches was deserted by the sea. But though man had
entered upon the scene, it was in an age anterior to human
history, in at least this island. ‘Mr. Smith of Jordan Hill,’
says Mr. Robert Chambers, in his Ancient Sea - Margins
as Memorials of Changes in the relative Zevels of Sea and
Zand', ‘ has pointed out that the Roman wall, at its termi-
nations on the Friths of Forth and Clyde, appears to have
been formed with respect to the present relative level of
sea and land. He also quotes the description of St.
Michael's Mount in Cornwall, which Diodorus Siculus
gives in the time of Augustus, showing it to have been
then, as now, connected with the mainland at ebb-tide.”
Could we fix with any certainty the time when the last
change of level took place, and the platform of the lower
coast-line was gained from the sea, there might be an ap-
proximation made to the anterior space of time during
which the sea continued standing against it, and the line
of high water had been the willow-crowned escarpment at
Portobello. There are portions of the coast that at this
early period presented lines of precipices to the waves,
which are now fringed at their bases by strips of verdure,
and removed beyond their reach. There are other por-
tions of coast in the immediate neighbourhood of these,
where similar lines of precipices, identical in their powers
of resistance, were brought by the same movement, whether
of elevation of the land or of recession of the sea, within
that very influence of the waves beyond which the others
were raised. And each line bears, in the caves with which
it is fretted,—caves hollowed by the attrition of the surf in
I
130 FDIVBURGH AND /TS WEIGHBOURHOOD.
the direction of faults, or where masses of yielding texture
had been included in the more solid rock,-indices to
mark, proportionally at least, the respective periods during
which they were exposed to the excavating agent. Thus
the average depth of the ancient caves in an exposed line
of coast, as ascertained by dividing the aggregate sum of .
their depths by their number, and the average depth, ascer-
tained by the same process, of the recent caves equally
exposed on the same coast, and hollowed in the same
variety of rock, could scarce fail to represent their respec-
tive periods of exposure, had we but a given number of
years, historically determined, to set off against the average
measurement of the recent excavations. Even wanting
this, however, it is something to know the fact generally,
but absolutely, that though the sea has stood at the exist-
ing sea-margin in this country since at least the closing
days of the Roman Commonwealth, it stood for a consider-
ably longer period at the last of the old sea-margins. The
rock of which those remarkable promontories, the Sutors
of Cromarty, are composed, is a granite gneiss, much tra-
versed by faults, and enclosing occasional masses of a soft
chloritic schist, that yields to the waves; while the sur-
rounding gneiss, hard enough to strike fire with steel,
remains little affected by the attrition of centuries. It has,
in consequence, along these promontories its numerous
caves, ranged in a double row,-the lower row that of the
existing coast, the upper that of the old coast-line ; and we
have examined them with some little degree of care. The
deepest of the recent caves measures, from the opening
AAVC/AAV7' SAFA-MA RG//V.S. I31
to its inner extremity, where the rock closes, exactly a
hundred feet; the deepest of the ancient ones, now so
completely raised above the surf, that in the severest
storms and highest tides the wave never reaches its mouth,
is exactly a hundred and fifty feet; and these respective
depths, though much beyond the average of their several
rows, bear, so far as we could ascertain the point, the pro-
portion to each other borne by these averages. If the ex-
cavation of the recent caves be the work of two thousand
years, the excavation of the ancient ones must have oc-
cupied three thousand.
Above this lowest and most modern of the ancient sea-
margins there is no other coast-line at all to be compared
with it in continuity of extent, or the distinctness with
which it is marked. There are detached sets of terraces
in various localities, in some instances widely separated,
that wonderfully correspond in height ; and to demonstrate
that correspondence over extensive areas, and to show that
each set, according to its height, must have owed its origin
to the sea when the sea stood at the analogous line of
level, forms a portion of the plan of the singularly inter-
esting and meritorious work of Mr. Robert Chambers to
which we have already referred. It is of course to be ex-
pected that, the higher and more ancient the beach, the
more must it be worn down by the action of the elements,
especially by the descent of water-courses; and as the
beaches intermediate between that of the strongly marked
line to which we have adverted, and the upper lines trace-
able in detached fragments in the moorland districts of
132 EDINBURGH AND /TS AWEIGHBOURAIOOD.
the Country, occur in an agricultural region, the obliterating
wear of the plough has been added to that of the elements.
Still, after all fair allowances have been made, there re-
main great difficulties in the way. We have been puzzled,
for instance, by the fact that Scotland presents us with but
two lines of water-worn caves, that of the recent coast-line,
and that of the old line immediately above it. Mr. Cham-
bers enumerates no fewer than fifteen lines intermediate
between the twenty-feet line and a line at three hundred
and six feet ; and in the range of granite rocks already re-
ferred to, that skirts the Sutors, there are precipices fully
a hundred yards in height, and broadly exposed to the
stormy north-east, whose bases bear their double line of
deeply hollowed caverns. But they exhibit no third, or
fourth, or fifth line. Equally impressible throughout their
entire extent of front, and with their enclosed masses of
chloritic schist, and their lines of fault as thickly set in their
brows as in their bases, they yet present no upper storeys
of caves. Had the sea stood at the fifteen intermediate
lines for periods at all equal in duration to those in which
it has stood at the lower ancient or at the existing coast-
line, the taller precipices of the Sutors would present
their seventeen storeys of excavations; and excavations
in a hard granite gneiss, that varied from twenty to a
hundred feet in depth, would form marks at least as in-
delible as parallel roads on the mountain-sides, or mounds
of gravel and debris rising over the course of rivers. The
want of lines of caves higher than those of the second
coast-line would seem to indicate, that though the sea
A WC/AEAVT SEA-MAA’G//VS. *.. I 33
may have remained long enough at the various upper
levels to leave its mark on soft impressible materials, it
did not remain long enough to excavate into caverns the
solid rocks.
What forms the prominent feature of Mr. Chambers'
work, already referred to, is the decided leaning which it
exhibits on the part of the writer to the old geological
theory of the recession of the sea, rather than to the more
modern one of a comparatively partial elevation of the
land. According to the modern view, the line of the sea-
level is regarded as one of the most fixed in nature, while
that of the land, subject to elevations and depressions, is
laid down as an arbitrary and fluctuating line; whereas,
according to the ancient view, it was the sea-line that was
regarded as fluctuating, and that of the land as stable and
immoveable. It has been demonstrated by very ample
experience, that the land-line is not stable: in the Old
World there are at least five localities—Scandinavia, the
west coast of Italy, the coasts of Cutch and of Aracan, and
part of the kingdom of Luzon—where the land is rising at
the present time; and in the New World there are vast
districts in which it suddenly changed its level for a higher
during the present century. But it by no means follows
that, because the line of the land fluctuates, that of the sea
is stable : exactly the reverse inference would, we should
think, be the sounder one. --
T H E M E A D O W S.
THE Town Council improvements in the large tract of flat
marshy ground on the south side of Edinburgh so well
known as ‘The Meadows,' are progressing daily, and bid
fair to be very decided improvements indeed. The large
boulder-stones which lined the edges of the tract in a broad
belt of some sixty or eighty yards across, are in the course
of being broken up by gunpowder and the hammer; several
thousand yards of drains have been formed ; and at present
(1842) the surface of the entire area presents a broken
scene of recently felled trees, loose heaps of newly fractured
stone, pyramids of draining tiles, and large accumulations
of soil, that vary in Colour, according to the character of
the bottom, from white to rusty brown, and from deep
black to grey. In a few weeks, however, the whole will
be smoothed over; and if there be virtue in labour well
directed, and tile-draining according to the most approved
mode, we shall soon have a continuous sheet of green dry
sward for an unwholesome marshy hollow ; and the last
vestiges of the ancient Borough Loch shall have disap-
peared. All our readers have heard of the Borough Moor:
it has been graphically described by Scott in ‘Marmion,'
as the site of the encampment of the unhappy James pre-
134
THA. A/A2A/DO W.S. - I 35
vious to his fatal march to Flodden. Fields, and gardens,
and tasteful villas, now cover it over: there remains not a
vestige that maintains the ancient character: its very name
has become a thing of tradition : but it still exists in the
pages of Scott as a wild broken moor, partially covered by
the remains of an ancient forest ; and we have but to give
our imaginations up to the poet, in order to see it still,
with the white tents shining from amid the mingling
foliage, the standard of Scotland rising tall in the midst,
— groupes of a picturesque soldiery Scattered over the
sylvan area,-and the dusky town, strongly walled and
jealously guarded, looming in the background. But while
the recollection of the Borough Moor has been thus pre-
served, the Borough Loch, its neighbour, has been less
fortunate; though, at the time when the poet represents
Marmion as riding over Blackford, it must have formed
as marked a feature in the landscape as the moor itself;-
it must have stretched a broad blue sheet of water between
the half-felled forest and the city,+the home of the pike
and the perch, and the occasional haunt of the coot and
the sea-gull; and its huge boulder-stones, one of which is
even now yielding its ponderous bulk to the expansive
force of gunpowder, and flinging up its fragments into the
air, must have stood up along its sedgy shore, amid thickets
of reeds and flags, and widespread shallows covered by
the white-flowering trefoil. - - -
The Borough Loch seems to have been one of a chain
of small shallow lakes, which, until a Comparatively late
period, studded the bottom of the long hollow valley which
136 EDINBURGH AND ITS AWEIGHBOURAOOD.
extends onwards from Duddingston towards Falkirk, and
which is bounded on the north by the ridge of low trap
eminences to which Corstorphine Hill belongs, and on the
south by the resembling ridge to which Blackford and
Craiglockhart Hills belong. A loch in the neighbourhood
of Corstorphine—now, like the Borough Loch, a green hol-
low—had its boat and its duck-shooting as late, it is said,
as the middle of the last century. Edinburgh had a lake,
it is evident, at one period, in each of its three nearly
parallel hollows, that to the north of the Castle, now
occupied by the Princes Street Gardens,—that through
which the Cowgate runs,—and that more especially the
subject of our present description, and of the Town
Council improvements. Duddingston and Lochend still
exist unchanged. The great extent of water exposed in
the line of the valley had its marked effect on the atmo-
sphere and the general health of the inhabitants: the crops
of the farmer suffered severely from Cold fogs ; and diseases
now scarce known in Scotland were comparatively Com-
mon in the district. The records of the Medical Faculty
in Edinburgh do not extend to a period by any means
remote. We have been informed, however, by a medical
friend, that among their earlier entries, agues and marsh
fevers occur as usual diseases of the town and neighbour-
hood. The diseases of the Scottish capital in those days
seem to have resembled the diseases of Canada and the
Low Countries now. Combe adverts to the fact in one of
his writings, but perhaps without taking sufficiently into
account the numerous lakes of the district. In the Causes
THE MEADOWS. I 37
J
to which he chiefly refers, causes connected with an un-
skilful and slovenly style of husbandry, and the filth and
moisture suffered to accumulate around the dwellings of
the country people,_it resembled all the rest of Scotland
at the period. “A gentleman who died about ten years
ago, at an advanced period of life,' says the writer, in a
work now fourteen years before the public, “told me that
six miles from Edinburgh the country was so unhealthy in
his youth, that every spring the farmers and their servants
were seized with fever and ague, and needed regularly to
undergo bleeding and a course of medicine, to prevent
attacks, or to restore them from their effects. After, how-
ever, an improved system of agriculture and draining was
established, and vast pools of stagnant water, formerly
left between the ridges of fields, were removed, dunghills
carried to a distance from the door, and the houses them-
selves made more spacious and commodious, every symp-
tom of ague and marsh fever disappeared from the district.”
The fact is at once curious and instructive. Rousseau
could describe the savage state as the state of nature; but
facts such as these—facts furnishing the true solution of
the problem why, as established by our life-insurance tables,
human life should be more extended now than in the days
of our grandfathers—unanswerably demonstrate the con-
trary. They show that, so natural is civilisation to man,
that he cannot live out his proper term without it.
It would be difficult for the young geologist to find a
more instructive walk, or a walk in which he will find more
that serves to connect the agency of existing causes with
138 EDINBURGH AAWD ITS AWEIGHBOURHOOD.
Some of the earlier geological phenomena, than that along
the open drains of the Meadows. He will detect in it a
lacustrine deposit in the very act of passing into dry land,
and find not a few of those appearances that seem So
puzzling in the ancient formations, not yet dissociated
from those every-day operations of nature through which
they were produced. May we ask the reader to accom-
pany us for just a few hundred yards along one of the
deeper drains P And first let us remark the varieties of
bottom. That leaden-coloured earth, which rose to the
Spade in large adhesive masses like clay, but which is now
falling asunder under the influence of the weather, and
resolving itself into a mixture of fine Sand and dried mud,
is the kind of subsoil known as silt, so common in the
deltas of rivers and the bottoms of lakes and estuaries.
The rains of a thunder-storm in the gentler seasons of the
year, or of a tempestuous night in winter, wash away par-
ticles of the looser and lighter soil from a thousand decli-
vities, and every little stream rushes down foul and turbid
to the lake, river, or estuary into which it disgorges its
waters. The lighter particles are carried farthest, and sub-
side last. We have seen a northern frith many fathoms
in depth, and with a surface of many Square miles, ren-
dered turbid throughout its entire extent by a thunder-
shower of scarce an hour's continuance. The process is
repeated some sixty or eighty times every season. Layer
subsides over layer; the delta enlarges and gains upon the
sea ; the lake or estuary gradually shallows and contracts
its area ; and in many cases the soil formed is just such a -
THE MEADOWS, I39
silt as that which we see thrown out of the ditch before
us. It must have formed very slowly in a piece of water
that, like the Borough Loch, had no considerable stream
falling into it; but the stratification observable in the
weathered masses thrown out, show that in this manner it
must have been formed. We see them splitting into
crumbling layers as thin as paper. Mark further that in
one or two places the silt is of a lighter tint than in the
general mass, enclosing fragments of lacustrine shells, and
that it presents an iron-shot appearance, not at all unlike
what we often find in the older sandstones. It is thickly
mottled by minute ferruginous spots, which seem, from the
vestiges of decayed plants which we can trace among them,
to have had a vegetable origin. Had the ferruginous
markings of the older Sandstones a vegetable origin too?
It is not uncommon to find what seem consolidated silts
among almost all the formations. An ancient Danish ship
has been found embedded in silt near the mouth of one of
our English rivers. In the Coal Measures we find beds,
composed, apparently, of the same substance, but hardened
into stone, rich in remains of the ancient fish and strange
flora of that remote period. In the Old Red Sandstone a
resembling mixture of stratified sand and mud is found to
contain the uncouth Cephalaspides and gigantic crustacea
of the cornstones. The creations were dissimilar in all
their many productions; but in all alike rains descended,
and streams swollen and turbid discharged their waters into
lakes and Seas.
We pass onwards, and reach a different subsoil. The
140 A. D/AVPOWA’GAZ AAV/D A 7TS AWE/GA/BOUR}}OO/O.
leaden-coloured tint has given place to one of deep black,
with here and there a mingling band of brown. We have
arrived at one of the beds of lacustrine peat, in which the
Meadows abound. The Irish labourers employed in the
work of draining, reminded apparently of their green bogs,
and their weeks of periodical summer labour spent in re-
stocking their turf-stacks, exhausted during the chills of
winter, have been cutting the masses in the peat form, and
placing them end-long, in pairs, all along the margin of the
ditch. The bed out of which they have been cut seems
here to cover about half an acre ; and we see it composing
the bottom of the ditch, which has failed to perforate it,
and rising nearly two feet along its sides. When the
Borough Loch began to shallow, it must have formed a
swampy patch, whose surface, level with that of the water,
would seem in the drier seasons a low island, and, after
prolonged rains, would return to its original condition of
a dark tangled shoal. The floating islands of our old
chroniclers were formed of patches of lacustrine moss, such
as the one at which we have arrived, removed from their
foundations by either their own buoyancy, or the force of
currents. Sir Thomas Dick Lauder graphically describes
one of these patches, which had been torn up by the very
roots in a small Highland lake during the great Moray-
shire floods of 1829, and then stranded high on a neigh-
bouring shore as a wrecked island. Let us examine some
of the masses thrown out by the Irishmen. This light
Spongy fragment seems composed almost exclusively of
some species of aquatic moss : the slim branching stems,
7TAZAZ /l/A2A/DO W.S. 141
covered by their minute silky leaves, are well-nigh as dis-
tinct as when the plants to which they belonged were vege-
tating amid the water. In this other fragment we find what
seems to be a moss of a different species: the stems are
harder and more slender, and the much minuter leaflets,
less numerous and less silky, stand out as stiffly as thorns,
or the shoots of the wild rose. Occasionally we find a
minute twig, occasionally the remains of a beach leaf; and
these, it is probable, have been drifted from the shore.
There occur in the more solid peat, circular spots of deep
black, surrounded by a lighter-coloured ring, waved with
such regularity as to remind one of the section of a fluted
column. These are the remains of the roots of aquatic
plants : the comparatively light-coloured ring is composed
evidently of woody tissue. Not a few of the masses abound
in minute shining seeds, or rather the shells of seeds. They
cannot be those of the chara, figured by Lyell as abundant
in a fossil state in the recent lacustrine deposits of Forfar-
shire, as, instead of the spirally-carved integument of the
seed-vessel of the chara, we are presented with an integu-
ment altogether smooth and brightly japanned. In this pale
marly mass we find the remains of a flattened reed. Two
of the joints are still discernible, with the minute striae that
run between them ; and the entire organism, both from its
well-marked form and its deep black colour, contrasted
with the pale tint of the Surrounding mass, serves strongly
to remind us of a calamite of the Coal Measures, enclosed
in a smoke-coloured limestone. We have disinterred fossils
in Burdiehouse—slender calamites—carbonized in the pale,
142 EDINBURGH AND ITS AWEIGHBOURHOOD.
splintery stone, that could scarce be distinguished from
that recent reed in its matrix of marl. -
But what have we here in the centre of this fragment of
peat P The well-preserved remains of a beetle, apparently
of the heavy rounded species, known as the twilight or
dung beetle. The head, breast, and three of the legs, are
distinctly traceable; and the elytra are as entire as when
they covered the living insect. And yet, in all probability,
several centuries have elapsed since the creature, struck
down in its twilight course, perchance by some sudden
breeze, found death and a tomb in that tuft of aquatic
moss. But what are centuries, when associated with the
highly-preserved remains of even much more fragile insects
than the beetle P Dr. Buckland, in his recently published
address to the Geological Society of London, states that in
the course of last year there had been found in the Lias of
Warwickshire, near Evesham, the fossil wing of a dragon.
fly, in such a state of perfect keeping, that the opaque spot
usually found at the anterior margin of the wing in Libel-
lulidae is distinctly marked, and the branching nervures
entire enough to show that they closely resemble those of
recent species, ‘approaching most nearly to the genus
AEshna.” Even well-preserved insects and Arachnidans of
the Coal Measures are not very uncommon. The remains
of spiders, scorpions, flies even, that may possibly have
enjoyed life for but a few days, have been found entire in
the ironstone nodules and limestones of the Carboniferous
period, or embedded in pieces of coal, or even enveloped
in sandstone. The enduring nature of the peculiar sub-
ZTAZAZ MAZAZOO IV.S. I 43
£f
stance chitine or elytrine, of which the elytra of beetles and
the skin of scorpions are composed, says Dr. Buckland in
his address, explains the cause of their perfect preservation
in rocks so ancient.
We have passed from the moss to a greyish-white sub-
soil, speckled by millions and tens of millions of minute
shells. Every fragment thrown up is seeded over with
them, some so very thickly, that the entire bulk is owing
chiefly to their presence. That greyish-white subsoil is
shell-marl, so valuable in some soils as a manure. The
Meadows, if we may judge from the long lines of pale-
coloured soil thrown up along the drains, and the apparent
depth of the beds in some places, must contain many
thousand loads of this substance. And yet, how very
minute the shells of which it has been formed Twenty
of them, of the average size, Scarce weigh a grain. We see
but the shells, entire, or existing as a chalky earth, and
every trace of the animals which inhabited them has dis-
appeared. Much of the animal matter, however, remains
in that grey earth, in the form of ammonia. We brought
home with us one of the richer masses, with the intention
of preserving it in a tin box, and placed it beside a strong
fire, to evaporate the moisture with which it was charged.
As it heated, and the vapour arose in a stream, it began to
yield a peculiar odour, at first of an undecided character,
but which gradually waxed more powerful to the heat, and
became ultimately very strong. It was that of animal
matter in a state of decay. Some of the shales of our
north-Country Lias, quite as rich in organisms as the marl
144 EDINBURGH A WD ZZ S WEIGHBOURHOOD.
of the Meadows, yield a strong foetid odour when struck
by the hammer ; and the ammonia of the marl seems to
illustrate the cause. At the first glance we detect three
genera of lacustrine shells among the myriads strewed at
our feet; the most abundant a lymnea, and the next most
abundant a cyclas; the first a turbinated univalve, some-
what like the whelk ; the other a cockle-like bivalve. As
we examine, we find the genera increase, and with the
genera the species also. We find at least two species of
cyclas, and, if we mistake not, three species of lymnea ;
and with these shells of rarer form, two very delicate
species of planorbis, and more than one species of valvata.
We saw a very pretty collection of these shells picked up
among the drains of the Meadows within the last few
weeks. Some of them were of great beauty: among these,
two species of planorbis, which, if found in a fossil state,
might readily be mistaken for ammonites of the secondary
formation: there is the same discoid form. The planorbis,
like the ammonite, is a regular volute. One species, too,
like a numerous family of ammonites, has a delicate dorsal
keel; in another, the keel, as in a still more numerous
family of ammonite, is wanting. All that seem lacking to
restore the extinct Cornu ammonis in this existing shell
are the numerous chambers and the siphuncle. The gene-
rations of the molluscous animals whose remains now
whiten the Meadows, must have succeeded one another
for many centuries, generation after generation, ere these
rich accumulations of lime and ammonia could have been
formed. It is not improbable that in this green hollow a
TA/A) // EA 7)O W.S. I45
portion of the waters of the Noachian deluge remained,
what time the ebbing currents had just ceased to roll over
the higher grounds; and that, from that remote period
until less than two centuries ago, the boundaries then
marked out in obedience to the natural law, which fills the
moist hollow, and leaves the height dry, continued to be
occupied by that ancient lake. The bittern has boomed
amid its reeds, and the stately swan skimmed over its
surface, when yonder Castle rock was a naked cliff, rising
amid an uninhabited country, and the gigantic elk and the
bear found shelter in the shaggy forest which waved on
these ridges, now crowded by their ten thousand human
habitations, and musical with the murmurous hum of a
busy population. What is recent to the geologist is re-
moteness to the antiquary. It is not improbable that some
of the shells in the lower portion of that marl bed were
browsing, according to their nature, on aquatic plants, or
alternately rising to the surface to respire, and descending
to feed, full four thousand years ago.
We find no remains of birds along the open drains, nor
yet of fishes. The Borough Loch, however, must have had
both its fish and its birds. For the preservation of the
fish, the circumstances must have been unfavourable. The
great paucity of the remains of birds in all the formations
since the creation of this class has often been remarked.
Lyell attributes the paucity to their extreme lightness in
proportion to their volume. ‘For, in consequence,' he
says, “ of the hollow tubular structure of their bones, and
Iš.
146 EDINBURGH AND 17's WEIGHBovKHoop
the quantity of their feathers, they do not sink when they
die on the water, but float on the surface until stranded on
the shore or devoured by predaceous animals.” “And to
these causes,’ he adds, “we may ascribe the absence of
any vestige of the bones of birds in the recent marl forma-
tions of Scotland ; although these lakes, until the moment
when they were artificially drained, were frequented by a
great abundance of water-fowl.’ But we have exhausted
our space, and, we are afraid, the patience of some of our
readers, without at all exhausting our subject. A good
deal might be said in showing how recent lacustrine de-
posits, like the one described, illustrate some of the fresh-
water deposits of the older formations, – the Wealden
patches of Skye and Morayshire, for instance, or those
lacustrine deposits of the Eocene, in the Paris basin,
which furnished Cuvier with the strange quadrupedal re-
mains of which he made so wonderful a use,_perhaps
even of some of the beds of the Coal Measures in our
own neighbourhood. We have been told by Dr. Malcolm-
son of Madras, that for many thousand Square miles, in
Hindustan, the whole geology of the country consists of
detached lacustrine patches, apparently of Some Tertiary
period, and of immense tracts of an overlying basalt,
which seems to have burst from the abyss, in the remote
past, on a low district of lakes and marshes. On the
whole, our visit to the Meadows has been a much quieter
one than that described by poor Ferguson, on which it is
comment enough to say, that the visitor died at the age of
twenty-four, in the asylum that stands scarce four hundred
THE MAEA VOO VVS'. 147
f
yards from the northern edge of the hollow. Do our
readers remember his description ?
* Hear then, my bucks, how drunken fate decreed us
For a nocturnal visit to the Meadows,
And how we valorous champions durst engage—
Oh, deed unequalled—both the Bridge and Cage,
The rage of perilous winters which had stood,
This 'gainst the wind, and that against the flood;
But what nor wind, nor flood, nor heaven could bend e'er,
We tumbled down, my bucks, and made surrender.’
T H E D R O U G HTS OF 1842.
THE newspapers still bear occasional testimony to the ex-
traordinary droughts of the autumn just gone by. One
paragraph informs us that all the springs of a country-side
have been dried up, and the farmers of the district com-
pelled to send for the necessary supply of water, with cart
and cask, to the deeper pools of some distant river. We
are told by another of some extensive lake sunk so far
beneath the ordinary level, that it no longer sends off its
waters to the sea through the accustomed channel, but,
like some of the lakes of the tropics, finds its diminished
sources less than sufficient to supply the waste of evapora-
tion. A third describes the condition of some Highland
river sunk from a broad impetuous stream into a meagre
runnel, that seems half lost in a wilderness of whitened
pebbles and gravel, with here and there a patch of aquatic
weeds bleached in the sun to the semblance of tufts of
flax, and here and there a bed of pearl-mussels, all gaping
and dead, and prepared to yield the rich glossy Seeds
which they enclose, to the hand of the first shepherd or
sportsman that visits the solitude where they lie. There
was poetry, and something more, in the fact narrated in
yet a fourth paragraph, the one descriptive of the drying
up of the Elbe, near Pirna, and of the square sculptured
148
THE DROUGHTS OF 1842. I49.
stone discovered at the bottom. “When last men saw
me, in August 1629,’ said the inscription, “they wept, and
they who see me next shall weep too;'—a curious memorial
of sufferings forgotten for more than two centuries, – of
melancholy forebodings and fears indulged amid fields and
vineyards, leafless and brown, on which the produce of the
year had been parched into ashes by the prolonged drought
of an ungenial Summer and spring. And something more,
too, than merely a curious memorial ;-an eloquent voice
from depths silent for ages, or whose sounds had joined
in but the general chorus of nature, amid the roar of the
floods and storms of winter, or the softer murmurs of the
sinking winds and lessening currents of spring ;-the voice
of a preacher urging on all men, through the medium of
an argument of no common-place character, the duty of
thankfulness. The Elbe was dried up in 1629, and men
wept ;-it has been dried up in 1842, and the phenomenon
is regarded without either fear or sorrow. How has the
difference occurred P Simply from a transposition in the
periods during which the producing cause operated, of
somewhat less than two months. The droughts of the
one year were droughts in spring and early Summer, and
famine was the consequence: the grapes hung blighted
on the vines in sapless diminutive clusters, and the fields
rustled light and dry with unshot corn withered in the ear-
blade. The river was dried up in August. The droughts
of the passing year, on the contrary, were droughts in
autumn, and the river was not dried up before October.
And so men deciphered this interesting memorial of the
15o EDINBURGH AND ITS AWEIGHBOURA'OOD.
remote predecessor of the present season amid the gaiety
of a corn-harvest of much more than the usual plenty, and
of a gay and glorious vintage. We are not sure that we
have ever heard a better thanksgiving sermon than the
sermon read by the inscription of the Elbe.
Our old black-letter historians would have delighted to
record such an event. The effects of the late drought,
even as shown in our own country, would have found a
place in their dingy pages, amid narratives of state transac-
tions, details of the huntings and journeyings of monarchs,
and descriptions of treasons, executions, and wars. History
has become a different sort of thing now from what it was
in the hands of the chroniclers; and it is perhaps well that
such should be the case. There has been a proper division
of labour in the literary field ; and the history of natural
phenomena has come to be dissociated from that of human
affairs, except in the instances in which they chance to be
united in the relation of cause and effect. We, for instance,
hear of a protracted drought from a modern historiographer,
in the event of its producing a famine, and the famine an
insurrection or poor-law ; but not otherwise. Most lovers of
black-letter will, however, agree with us in thinking, that no
slight share of the pleasure to be derived from the works
of the old chroniclers arises from the curious glimpses of
natural phenomena which they contain, glimpses rendered
in most cases all the more striking from the atmosphere of
Superstitious belief through which we are made to catch
them. They form, as it were, a set of vignettes to the
works in which they occur, vignettes of no ordinary splen-
*
THE DROUGHTS OF 1842. I 5 I
dour. All of them have at least interest as pictures. The
bloody battle fought at midnight in the northern sky, when
the wild flash of artillery gleamed red and blue from the
pole to the central heavens, and from the central heavens
to the pole ; and then, when all was over, the flush of deep
crimson that remained behind, to tell how deadly the
conflict had been The wonder seen in the sun, the
flaming sword, the double or treble moon,_the bearded
star, the shower of blood, the terrible hurricane,—the
inundation,-the year of continued floods,--the drought
prolonged till rivers and lakes disappeared, and the very
earth seemed chopt and cracked for lack of moisture, like
a kiln-burned pipkin too rudely exposed to the heat ; nay,
even the strange fish thrown ashore on Some sea-coast, or
dragged out of the mouth of some river, or the worm
found with a human face and a crown on its head, or the
preternatural birth, brute or human, -or the monster-
savage caught in the woods ;-all have their interest, as
the figures of a sort of wild unintentional poetry, which only
a dark age could have originated, and whose beau ideaſ,
as a thing of art, we find embodied in Coleridge's ‘Rhyme
of the Ancient Mariner.” These chroniclers have a kind of
successors in our own times, not, as we have shown, in
our historians properly so called, but in writers of a humbler
class, men who record the history of a day or week, or
(as chances in our own case) of half a week, at a time.
Theirs are the only histories that have at least all the
breadth of the black-letter ones about them, however little
they may possess of their interest ; and we but availed
152 EZ)/AVAURGA AND / 7 S WAE/GHBOURHOOD.
ourselves of our privilege of late, when, in referring to
the recent drought, we detailed a few of its most curious
results, the disappearance of the large artificial lake in
the neighbourhood known by the rather prosaic name of
the Compensation Pond, among the rest.
The name of this piece of water must have militated
against it with our readers at a distance. They have con-
ceived of it, in all probability, as a mere patch, with recti-
linear sides and right angles, a genuine pond; in short,
just a very little superior to a tolerable horse one, with a
submerged churchyard at its bottom, infused for the special
benefit of our Edinburgh water-drinkers. The drying up of
such an affair would be no event worthy the notice of an
old chronicler. But not such the character of the Compen-
sation Pond. Let the reader imagine of it as marked by
all the better characteristics of a genuine Highland loch in
a genuine Highland glen, Surrounded by bold steep banks,
embosomed by hills varying from a thousand to nineteen
hundred feet in height, with water much more than enough,
in its ordinary condition, to float the largest vessel in the
navy, and almost roomy enough for her to tack in with a
head wind. Were an ordinary-sized sloop to founder in
some of the deeper parts of the Compensation Pond, the
whole of the mainmast would disappear, and two-thirds of
the topmast to boot. It is obvious that the drying up of
So huge a reservoir, full for at least the last twenty years,
must have presented appearances not unworthy the atten-
tion of the naturalist, and of interest, regarded as keys, if
We may so speak, to geological phenomena. It is not
7A/E DROUGHTS OF 1842. I 53
every day that one can walk dry-shod over the bottom of
a lake a full mile in length, and not less than ten fathoms
in depth. The novelty of the occurrence renders us
desirous of recording a few of such of the more striking
appearances as seem to have escaped the notice of our
contemporaries; and, should the reader indulge us with
his company, we shall take just a few minutes' walk
together over the brown surface of the uncovered area,
and point out the various phenomena as we go along.
The artificial mound which confined the water in the
valley is hid by yonder projecting point; and the aspect
presented, in consequence, very much resembles that of a
muddy estuary left by the tide. But the vastness of the
vacant depth interferes with the idea. Not in even the
Straits of Magellan does the tide fall so far; and on the
eastern coast of Scotland it would require the ebbs of four
stream-tides united to uncover so profound a hollow. The
opposite bank rises at a steep angle to the top of the
hill. All above is brown with heath and withered fern;
all beneath is browner still with sludge, gravel, and mud;
but a rectilinear bar of lighter Colour runs along the high-
water line, where the light of day and the waters of the
lake have been operating, during the last twenty years,
in bleaching the various earths and stones on which for
that period they have been beating together. What was
a small island of about half an acre when we last visited
the lake, and saw its waters gleaming blue along that
light-coloured line, now presents the appearance of a bluff
knoll, standing out at the foot of one of the hills, with a
154 EDINBURGH AND ITS AWEIGHBOURHOOD.
slight depression on the one side along the connecting
neck, where the water could have stood only a foot or
two at most, and with a sheer descent of at least fifty feet
on the other. The foundations of the ruined chapel of St.
Catherine of the Hopes occupy a lower eminence farther
up the valley. All around is brown with sludge: there
are sludgy hollows and sludgy acclivities, that must have
looked considerably better when covered by a carpeting
of yellow springy moss, studded with flowers. In the
midst there rises a pyramid of hardened mud, piled over
the tombstone of James Glendinning (1666), to protect it
from the ravages of the class who entertain so thorough
a regard for interesting monuments of antiquity, that they
always carry them away piecemeal in their pockets, unless
prevented per force. On the ridge of the eminence we
may see a low brown parallelogram, as if cast in clay,
some forty feet by twenty or so. And these form the
entire remains of the chapel of St. Catherine of the Hopes
and its burying-ground. One can say all of the building
now, however, that George Chalmers ventured to say of
it when he wrote his Caledonia:—‘Its ruins may still be
seen by those eyes that delight to dwell on what is old.’
Our readers are probably acquainted with the traditions
associated with its origin; but they may feel some further
interest in it from its chance connection with one of the
more important cases which have arisen out of our present
ecclesiastical struggle. Originally the chapel belonged to
the monks of Holyrood; but it has been in the possession
also of the Presbyterian Church, and has had its Reformed
7A/E DROUGHTS OF 1842. I 55
minister; and he, though unprovided with a parish, had a
seat, in virtue of his status quoad sacra, in the Presbytery
of Edinburgh.
As we descend to the lower levels, every patch of vege-
tation disappears. Higher up, and where the water must
have stood from perhaps twelve to twenty feet, we find
bunches of weed, slimy and minute of leaf, that here and
there lie studded over the brown sludge, like tufts of faded
worsted, or the russet seats of skin described by Cowper.
All marks of life, however, have not ceased. In even
the lowest depths we find the surface studded over with
minute, dark-coloured specks, like pin-heads, and perceive,
on examination, that these minute specks are shell-fish.
The surface is covered by millions, and thousands of
millions, of that delicate bivalve the cyclas. All are
dead. The mollusc within exists but as a minute-coloured
blackish speck of decaying animal matter. Mark, further,
that though we occasionally meet with the shell of a
univalve, a lymnea, or valvata, these are comparatively
rare, not in the proportion of one for every one thousand
of the other class. I.et us not too hastily infer, however,
that the bivalves were by much the more abundant in-
habitants of the lake. They were only worse fitted for
retreat than their neighbours. They were fixed by nature
to the place which they now occupy, and, when left by the
receding waters, they died; whereas the univalves marched
downwards as the waters fell, and may now be found by
myriads, we doubt not, in the patch of a few acres into
which the lake has contracted its limits. What a puzzle
156 EDINBURGH AND ITS AWEIGHBOURHOOD.
for future geologists In this layer of shells they will
find scarce anything but bivalves; in the layer, that will
be deposited above it, it is probable that univalves will.
be the more numerous. Or, suppose that the whole lake
were to dry up, and that, with all the bivalves, all the
univalves were to perish also. How account for the vast
accumulation of the latter in one spot, as opposed to the
equal diffusion of the other class? How very difficult a
riddle, and yet how easily read with the assistance of the
key ! We understand that great numbers of the fish of the
lake have already died. The survivors shelter with the
lymmeidae and their congeners; and, as in many deposits
of ichthyolites, their remains, were the lake to dry up
altogether, would lie in a dense shoal. They would occur
in a single stratum too; and hence at least one mode of
accounting for the frequent restrictions of ichthyolite bone-
beds in quarries to a single layer in the strata.”
The terraced beaches of the lake, –parallel roads, as
they have been termed in other localities,—are in some
places remarkably well defined. We walked for several
hundred yards along one of its beaches, dug by the waves
out of a steep slope of about thirty-five degrees, where the
terrace was fully six feet in breadth, and declined at so low
an angle that it made no unpleasant road. At another.
place we counted no fewer than eighteen of these terraces,
varying from a few feet to a few inches in breadth, in a.
1 The general appearance of the bottom of the Pond, with its foot-
prints of men and animals still uneffaced, is described in the Séeſch-
Aook of Æopular Geology, Lecture Fifth, p. 163 et seg.
THE DROUGHTS OF 1842. 157
declivity of not more than fifty feet. Like those pencil-
lings of the ventometer, through which the winds are made
to register their own power and direction, they served to
indicate what gales had prevailed during the various stages
when the waters were sinking, and with what force they
had blown.
E D IN B U R G. H.
EDINBURGH, one of the most picturesque of European
capitals, has also one of the most picturesque of histories,
and is scarce less fitted to form the subject of an amus-
ing book than of a fine painting. Most other cities have
had but one historic nucleus or centre: Edinburgh had
two, or, if we include Leith, more properly three. Most
other cities, though they have their older and newer por-
tions,—their fashionable ‘west ends,’ and their ancient
densely-peopled east ones,<-exist not in duplicate, but
as one. Edinburgh, though change has been unhappily
busy during the last half-century amid its older streets
and lanes, still exists as two cities, each representative
of a different and strongly contrasted time. Towns such
as Glasgow, Aberdeen, Elgin, Dunblane, St. Andrews,
Arbroath,--some of them now very great, others mere
skeletons,—had an ecclesiastical nucleus: they formed at
first round their respective cathedrals, and began life as
handmaidens to the clergy. Towns, again, such as Stir-
ling and Dumbarton, with perhaps a majority of the more
ancient villages of the kingdom, had a military origin ;
they congregated for protection around some strong castle
or fortress: while yet a third class, comparatively rare in
Scotland, though not without representatives on the north
158
A.D/AWARUA’GAZ. I 59
side of the Frith of Forth, and comparatively abundant in
the sister kingdom, commenced their existence as traffickers
and merchants. But Edinburgh, if we include the port
and town of Leith, first made parts of herself by Robert
the Bruce ; and So, old enough to rank, in point of anti-
quity, with at least our second-class towns, had all the
three nuclei around which to form. She had her military
centre in the grand old Castle, whose first ages are lost
in the obscurity of the prehistoric periods; her ecclesi-
astical centre in Holyrood, with its attendant village of
Abbey Hill and burgh of Canongate; and her commercial
centre, of at least five centuries standing, in the port of
Leith. And each centre has a peculiar interest of its
own, more especially the military and ecclesiastical ones.
Nothing, however, so adds to the effect of the earlier
points of her history as the very striking scenery—un-
changed and unchangeable in its main features—in which
they were set. The early history of most other large
towns is associated with but mere perished collections of
old buildings, which can be but imperfectly restored in
imagination from here and there a surviving fragment.
American writers, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and
Washington Irving, in introducing into their works notices
of the early history of their cities, derive no small advan-
tage from the newness of their country in its relation
to civilised man. They find it easy to represent their
greatest towns as consisting of a few log shanties in the
brown recesses of a forest, or of a few storehouses rising
immediately over a rude quay, formed of turf and stakes,
160 A.D/AWE URGAſ AAV/D /TS AWAE/GAAPO OVRAZOO D.
on the swampy edge of an estuary or river. Nor does it
ask any great stretch of fancy on the part of the reader to
conceive of even their largest and most densely-peopled
cities as existing as the tracts of wild wood or dank
meadow, which they actually constituted some two or
three hundred years ago. It is greatly more difficult so to
conceive of the ancient cities of Europe, that were places
of human dwelling ere the first beginnings of history.
But great boldness of natural feature has in one respect
nearly the same effect as recentness of date; and in no
European city ought this to be more strongly felt, or more
strikingly exemplified, than in Edinburgh.
It is stated by John Wesley, in referring to his early
life, that his history ought properly to be regarded as
commencing a very considerable time before he was born.
He then goes on to relate a quarrel which took place
between his father and mother on purely political grounds,
and which led for a time to their separation. In like
manner, the history of most cities, especially such as have
had a military or commercial nucleus, ought to date a
long time before they were born. For in most cases their
future history was determined by Some great operation
of nature, ere even the human species had any existence.
And Edinburgh forms a striking illustration of this class.
It is situated in a great belt of Country that stretches
across the island from sea to Sea, in which the strata,
consisting of shales, stratified clays, and Sandstones, are
comparatively soft and incoherent, but which were injected
and overflowed in many places, in a very early age, by
EDINBURGH. I61
hard, stiff trap. Long after, when, during a period of
submergence, the land sat low in the water, this tract was
washed for ages by a great easterly-flowing current, per-
sistent in its direction as the great Gulf stream, and
probably a prolongation of it; and under the incessant
friction which it induced, the shales, clays, and sandstones
were denuded and worn down, and the harder traps left
standing up in high relief over them. The appearance
produced was very much on a large scale what we see
on a small one along a steep road roughened by stones
and pebbles, and thick with dust, after it has been washed
by a heavy thunder-shower. The stones stand up more
prominently than before, and most of them bear a trail
of sand and gravel behind them. And it is thus with
the trap-rocks. They present bluff, bold faces to the west,
where the wasting current had flowed; and bear to the
east trails of the softer strata, which they shielded from
denudation, as the pebbles of our illustration shield each
its trail of sand and gravel. Such is the character of al-
most all the trap eminences around Edinburgh. Further,
such, with a few exceptions, is the character of all the
insulated trap-hills which occur in the yielding Coal
Measure belt, to which we have referred, in its course from
Sea to Sea. And long ages after the excavation of these
hills, after the westerly current had ceased, and the land
arisen, and trees had taken root in the grey and lichened
fissures, once clothed with sea-weed,—man, fallen and a
Wanderer, and at war with his neighbour, found in them
places of strength on which he could build his hut in com-
L
I62 Æ/O/WPORGAſ A WD /TS AWAE/GAZAPOURATOOD.
parative safety, and defend himself against odds. One
trap eminence he found peculiarly suited for this purpose.
It was the head of a great Column-like mass, from whose
steep front and sides the current had washed away the
softer rocks, leaving, though at a greatly lower level than
that of its summit, a narrow trail of the incoherent strata
behind. And thus, form elaborated by the joint agency
of fire and water, long ages ere man had being, coupled
with the evil nature which he manifested shortly after he
began to be, and the necessities which arose out of that
evil nature, determined that the insulated rock should in
the first instance be the site of a fortress, and in the next
the centre of a town. Such was the origin of Edinburgh,
the deciding incident in its history that took place ere it
was born. It is more than probable that the Castle Hill
has formed the site of a stronghold ever since man took
possession of the island. Its fortifications would have at
first consisted of a few grassy mounds, topped, like the
hill-forts of New Zealand only an age ago, by lines of
palisades; it would then possibly take the second form
of fortress, known in Scotland as that of the vitrified fort;
and then walls and towers would encircle it, and a town
would grow up on the sloping talus, almost under its
shadow, to share in the protection which it afforded.
Every succeeding age would witness new changes; there
would be changes in the towers and ramparts, and changes
in the gradually growing city below. In the year 16oo,
Edinburgh was little more than half a mile in length, by
little more than a quarter of a mile in breadth. It has
A. ZD/AW/3 UA’GAZ. I63
since become what we now see it, a great metropolis, for
which man has done much, but nature more.
The ecclesiastical portion of the place grew up long after
its military portion. At the distance of about three-quarters
of a mile from the hamlet under the battlements, there rose
far adown the sloping talus, as early as the year 12 oo, a
Second hamlet, separated from the first by open fields and
thickets of brushwood, and which had grown around the
ecclesiastical centre of the place. The old chapel of Holy-
rood was founded, in fulfilment of a vow by David I., on
the spot where he narrowly escaped being destroyed by a
furious hart at bay.” On the third day after the celebration
of the mass, the king, yielding to the solicitations of his
young nobles, set forth from the Castle, it is said, to hunt,
notwithstanding the earnest dissuasions of a holy canon.
“At last, quhen he wos comyn threw the vail that lies to
the eist fra the said Castell, quhere now lyes the Cannon-
gait, the staill past threw the wood with sic noyis and dyn
of buyillis, that all the bestes wer raisit fra their dennis.’
The king, separated from his train, was thrown from his
horse, and about to be gored by a hart “with awful and
braid tyndis,' when a cross slipt into his hands, at the sight
of which the hart fled away; and the king was thereafter
admonished in a vision to build the Abbey on the spot.
“The account is curious,” remarks Mr. Daniel Wilson, “as
affording a glimpse of the city at that early period, con-
tracted within its narrow limits, and encircled by a wild
forest.’ Undoubtedly, from the character of the country
* This incident is also alluded to in the first lecture, page 9.
164 ED/VBURGH A WD /TS AWAE/GHBOURAIOOZ).
around Edinburgh, and the remains found in its superficial
deposits, it must have furnished a promising centre for the
sportsmen in the days of David, and long after. It was a
scene of hills, valleys, precipices, and Scraggy wood, and
almost every valley had its lake ; and in the deposits of
these lakes no unequivocal traces of the early game of the
district have been found. Occasional traces of the old
woods have also been detected in similar formations.
There are few of the aboriginal trees of the country of
which specimens have not been found in an argillaceous
deposit near Portobello ; and from a print of the city, not
older than the time of Charles II., we find that at least the
lower slopes of the Arthur Seat group of hills were, in that
comparatively recent age, covered with bushes and stunted
wood.
Amid this picturesque landscape, with the ancient rock-
perched fortalice as its centre, were those scenes enacted
which occupy so prominent a place in the history of our
country. We have been pleasingly reminded both of their
number and variety by a goodly volume, entitled A History
of Edinburgh from the Earliest Period to the Completion of
the Half-Century 1850, by John Anderson. Mr. Anderson
states in his preface that he has been engaged, more or less,
for the last ten years in procuring materials for this work ;
and certainly the result of his labours is a very curious and
interesting book. There is something fascinating to minds
that to an active imagination unite a taste for antiquari-
anism, in the more ancient streets and lanes of an old
town. “Walter Scott,’ says Lockhart, in a passage quoted
A. D/AWE UAEGAZ. I65
by Mr. Anderson, “delighted in passing through some of
the quaint windings of the ancient city, now deserted,
except at mid-day, by the upper world. How often have I
seen him go a long way round, rather than miss the oppor-
tunity of halting for a few minutes on the vacant esplanade
of Holyrood, or under the darkest shadows of the Castle
rock where it overhangs the Grassmarket, and the huge
slab that still marks where the gibbet of Porteous and the
Covenanters had its station . His coachman knew him too
well to move at a Jehu's pace amid such scenes as these.
No funeral hearse crept more leisurely than did his landau
up the Canongate or the Cowgate ; and not a queer totter-
ing gable but recalled to him some long buried memory of
splendour or bloodshed, which, by a few words, he set
before the hearer in the reality of life.” For the poet
Crabbe the Old Town had a similar fascination. “As to
the city itself,’ he said (see Lockhart's letter to the son of
the poet), “he soon got wearied of the New Town, but could
amuse himself for ever in the old one. He was more than
once detected rambling after nightfall by himself among
some of the obscurest wynds and closes; and Sir Walter,
fearing that at a time of such confusion [the time of the
visit of George IV.] he might get into some scene of trouble,
took the precaution of desiring a friendly caddie from the
corner of Castle Street to follow him the next time he went
out alone in the evening.” A similar taste has been the
origin of such works as Wilson's Memorials, and the Złºad:-
tions of Chambers. Mr. Anderson’s work is of a somewhat
different cast from either of these last : it is a volume of
I66 AF/D/AWAE URGAſ AAWD /TS AWAE/GAAPOURAE/OO.D.
annals, with numerous biographic sketches intermixed ; but
it ministers to the same feeling, and is suggestive of many a
curious picture and practice. How suggestive, for instance,
are notices like the following:—‘The streets of Edinburgh
were first lighted in 1555, when, on account of the fre-
quent robberies, the Council ordered lanterns or boweſs to
be hung out in the streets and closes, to continue burning
from five till nine o'clock in the evening.” Hours wore
later as the years passed ; and in 1584 the Council gave
one hour more to the decent citizen. For it was this year
decreed that, in order to prevent broils and disorders in the
streets, “there should be sounded every night at ten o'clock
forty strokes on the great city bell, after which no person
to be on the streets under the penalty of twenty shillings -
Scottish and imprisonment.’ The High Street, in the age
when such laws were found necessary, must have been a
rather indifferent promenade in the night-time. The various
markets, as established by James III., indicate, by the sites
to which they were restricted, the old localities of the city,+
some of them, after the lapse of nearly four centuries, well-
known localities still. The ‘horse-meat market' was held
in the Cowgate ; the fish market in that portion of the
High Street which extended from Friar Wynd to the
Netherbow; the salt market in Niddry's Wynd ; the ‘camp
of chapmen’ lay between the bell-house and the Tron ; the
nolt market about the Tron ; the shoe market at Forrester's
Wynd ; the meal and corn market at the Tolbooth and up
Liberton's Wynd ; butter, cheese, and meal were exhibited
for sale at the Upper Bow ; cutlers' and Smith work be-
AE/D/AVAE URGH/. 167
neath the Netherbow; and all saddlery work in the Grass-
market. There must have been curious grouping on fair-
days in Edinburgh. Down till the Reformation, the inci-
dents connected with the city history are mainly of local
and antiquarian interest. With the rise of Protestantism
they broaden in their consequences and bearings, and cul-
minate in that famous riot in the High Church in which
Jenny Geddes struck the first blow. On the long war
which began there and then, and which did not terminate
until the Revolution of 1688, the liberties of Britain and
America depended ; nay, the future prospects of a world."
* “Edinburgh an Age ago’ may be regarded as an appropriate sequel
to the above. It will be found in the volume of Hugh Miller's works
entitled Æssays, Historical and Critical.
THE QUEEN'S VISIT TO SCOTLAND
IN 1842.
EDINBURGH during the passing week has resembled one
of those inland seas into which a hundred different
streams disgorge their waters, but from which no great
stream takes its rise in turn. It has formed a kind of
reservoir, into which the living tide of our rural popula-
tion has been flowing through all the many channels of
conveyance which connect the capital with the provinces.
Roads, railways, canals, the Sea, all in lesser or larger
proportion,-have contributed to swell the general amount;
and the place, now overflowing in its many streets and
lanes, resembles an overcharged lake in an open winter,
when broken by eddies and disturbed by antagonist cur-
rents. The occasion can be no uninteresting one, that
has drawn to our city, at a season when the tide flows
naturally in the opposite direction, at least a hundred
thousand visitors, many of them from very considerable
distances, and at no inconsiderable expense ; and we think
we can scarce do better than attempt setting before the
portion of our readers that have been unable to join in
the crowd, a few of the more striking scenes that so
many have come so far to see. We shall rather deli-
enate than narrate.
168
THE QUEEN'S FIRST VISIT TO SCOTZAND. 169
Wednesday last, in the southern and midland districts
of Scotland, was one of those mild agreeable days of
tempered sunshine and shadow of which our better tracts
of autumn weather are mainly composed. It was what
Gilbert White of Selborne would have termed a delicate
day. There were a few white clouds high overhead;
there rested on the outer skirts of the landscape a soft
grey haze ; a slight breeze just served, by rippling the
waters of the Frith, to give intensity to their tints of blue;
the distant heights, with their multitudinous squares of
yellow, so significant of the decline of the season, looked
soft and dim, as if sketched in an unfinished drawing ;
the city itself, seated proudly amid its hills, raised its
picturesque and close-piled masses through the thin haze,
as if it were a thing half of earth, half of cloud, its
shadows softened into a bluish-grey, its mingling lights
sobered down into a pale and Smoky amber. One of
our poets speaks of the roar sent by a great city ‘through
all its many gates.” One had but to stand and listen on
this morning, to decide regarding the appropriateness of
the phrase. An infinity of blended tones, the hum of
eager and moving crowds,-the rattle of coaches, the
incessant strokes of workmen employed by hundreds in
the erection of balconies and scaffolds,--a thousand name-
less sounds, besides, – were all mingled into one mighty
roar — the voice of the city — resembling at a distance
the noise of a high wind in a leafless wood, or the mur-
mur of the far-off ocean in a tempest. The streets were
early astir. There were, if we may so speak, main cur-
17o EDIAWBURGH A WD /TS AWAEIGHAOURAIOOD.
rents in the living tide, which continued to flow from
long before noon till nightfall. One main current had
set in towards the shore ; others of lesser volume and
momentum, and more broken by meeting tides, flowed
full in the direction of the nearer heights which command
a full view of the Frith. The Calton, blackened by its
moving thousands, resembled a huge ant-hill just stirred.
We could descry, too, in the distance, and but barely
descry, that the upper outline of Arthur Seat was roughened
by its anxious crowds. But in no locality was the ap-
pearance exhibited of a more animating or impressive
character than in the immediate neighbourhood of Gran-
ton, the projected scene of her Majesty's landing. It was
in this direction that the main current had set in. The
green sloping bank which runs parallel to the shore, at
the distance of less than half a field's breadth from the
beach, and which at one period must have formed the
coast-line, was literally blackened by spectators. The
road below was more than equally crowded,—the broad
strip of beach uncovered by the tide was mottled by its
restless groups. Nor was the Frith beyond less a scene
of life and animation. Boats, and vessels of larger size,
crowded by their pleasure parties, fitted around the huge
mole which here projects its vast length into the sea,
now casting anchor, now again making sail, and turning
their heads down the Frith, as if in eager anxiety to
descry the expected flotilla. Steamboats, with their long
evanescent trails of cloud, went gliding in every direction
athwart the blue ; ever and anon a larger vessel hove
THE QUEEN'S FIRST VISIT TO SCOTLAND. 171
round, and, turning her side to the shore, Saluted the
harbour with a gun. The echoes rang merrily ; the group
of vessels laid along the mole, when some half-dozen
steamers or so moored at once among them, seemed as
if enveloped in cloud and darkness; and flag and pennon
waved sullenly from amid the smoke, like the gauds and
braveries of life when dimmed by its troubles. The day
wore fast on : still no signal intimated from cliff or castle
that the royal flotilla had entered the Frith. The tides
and winds had been adverse: it was feared, too, that
what had been but a thin fleecy haze ashore might have
been a fog at sea. All expectation of the Queen's arrival
before nightfall at length vanished, and about four o'clock
the vast crowds began to break up and disperse. We
could mark not a few blank countenances among the
humbler pedestrians,—many of them country people from
the neighbouring Counties, who had got just their single
day to see the Queen, and who, disappointed once, could
entertain no hope of enjoying a second opportunity. We
could sympathize in the vexation manifested by a stalwart
shepherd in a grey maud, who had left his flock on the
previous evening on a hill-side some thirty miles away, as,
in turning from his conspicuous and well-chosen stand,
he gave vent to his feelings of disappointment in a half-
sad, half-humorous, ‘Dash it, and will I no see her after a’ſ”
The fall of evening was marked by a scene scarce less
striking than that of the day, though of a character alto-
gether different. A brown haze hung over the skirts of
the horizon, dense enough to blot out the whole opposite
172 EZ)/NBURGH AND ITS AWEIGHBOURAIOOD,
line of coast and the wide extent of Frith below, and yet
not so dense but that the fires kindled up on all the more
conspicuous heights shone through, each surrounded by
its own dusky halo. A dotted outline of red light served
to restore well-nigh all the bolder features of the vanished
landscape. The flames rose broad and high on the nearer
heights. A huge uneven pennon of fire flared on the sum-
mit of Arthur Seat, lighting up its own Swart trail of smoke
with an umbry red, and converting into a vast halo, of
more than a thousand yards diameter, the mist-wreaths
that brooded above. The rugged outline of Salisbury
Crags stood out distinctly visible in the foreground, like
a sketch in black richly bronzed. The ridge of the Pent-
lands had its three fires; the Binny and Dalmahoy Crags,
in the long retiring valley to the west, had each their
beacon; and with these, many a solitary peak besides,
where the unwonted light must have scared the fox in
his lair and the hawk on her perch. The Calton Hill,
even after the night had closed, was still crowded by its
thousands of spectators, – its brown and sombre groupes,
half visible, and only half, by the red flickering light that
streamed from the neighbouring hill. There was a charm
to detain them in the scene itself, well-nigh one of the
most sublime of the kind we ever witnessed ; and there
was something for the imagination to lay hold of, in the
circumstance that already must the expected flotilla have
entered the Frith, a long dim vista tracked in fire; and
that all the flaming peaks which composed the line on
either side must have addressed their welcome ere now
THE QUEEN'S FIRST VISIT TO SCOTZAND. 173
to the gaze of the royal voyager. At length the flames
began to sink, and the crowds to disperse.
The morning rose dull and drizzly, but it cleared up
as the hours passed ; and ere nine o'clock, though still
somewhat gloomy, it had become at least dry overhead.
The morning papers had intimated to the city the arrival
of the royal Squadron in the roads over night. And at
seven o'clock a signal-gun had been fired from the Castle.
We were fortunate enough not to know exactly what the
latter had been intended to mean ; and, inferring that it
just intimated that the Queen was to be soon visible, we
set out early, determined, at all events, to see the Queen.
We found no such heady current in the greater thorough-
fares as on the previous morning; and the few we spoke
to on the subject seemed secure that, on some definite
understanding at which her Majesty's Ministers and the
city Magistracy had arrived, the royal progress through
the city would not take place before noon. Perhaps,
however, save for the disappointment of the previous day,
there would have been somewhat less patience manifested
by the inhabitants, less of a disposition to wait for nearly
the stipulated hour. We made our way to the Calton,
where we found a few hundreds already assembled, and
ensconced ourselves among the shrubbery on the edge of
the low precipice that overhangs the road. The Castle
guns began to fire, and we concluded that the Queen had
just touched Scottish ground. There were a few open
carriages drawn up on the road below ; and the one im-
mediately under the place where we were stationed we
174 ED/VBURGH AND /TS WEIGHBOURAIOOD.
found particularly worth looking into : it carried the noble
Hindu, Baboo Dwarkanath. We were admiring his singu-
larly expressive countenance,—one of the most intellectual
in its cast we have almost ever seen, -his well-formed
forehead, and dark bright eye, -and remarking how very
handsome a man may be, maugre a brown skin, and fea-
tures both a little touched by age, and of the decided
Asiatic type, when the cry arose, ‘Here comes the mili-
tary 1' We looked westward, and saw that Princes Street,
from the Mound to the North Bridge, had suddenly be-
come one dense sea of moving heads, and that every cross
street and opening was pouring in its thousands to swell
the amount. There was a minute patch of scarlet inlaid
in the mass; all was dingy around it; and it came moving
steadily along in the midst, like a float of drift-wood falling
down a river. This, thought we, must be the van of the
procession,-the advanced guard, to reconnoitre and clear
the way: the main body, with the Queen, must still be a
considerable distance behind. The patch of scarlet came
floating on. We could discern bright helmets and the
glitter of steel; we could mark a sudden crowding to the
windows-a hasty rush to the Overhanging galleries, more
than two-thirds empty but a minute before, a waving of
handkerchiefs and of hats; and a cry, not loud, but deep,
which we could scarce term a cheer, but which seemed
to express a deeper feeling, ran along the line of specta-
tors as the military passed. Could this be the Queen?
It was. She sat in a low open carriage, with Prince
Albert on her left, clear-complexioned, but pale, taste-
THE QUEEN'S FIRST VISIT TO ScozzAND. 175
fully but plainly dressed, -one whom in private life we
would perhaps describe as a pretty woman, very thoroughly
the lady, but who, as the daughter of a hundred kings,
and a monarch on whose vast dominions the sun never
sets, seemed, of course, a great deal more. The presence
of the learned Baboo Dwarkanath served to heighten our
estimate of her greatness. The illustrious Hindu from the
far east—the representative of a hundred millions of the
human species—had been led to this spot to look upon
one who was as certainly his Sovereign as our own.
Alas ! how the ridiculous contrives to mingle itself with
all human attempts at the sublime ! The procession
passed on ; and, quitting our stand in the shrubbery on
the Calton, we joined the thickening masses in Princes
Street, where all seemed disaffection and anger. Not
one out of every four we met had seen the Queen ; and
the chagrin manifested at the disappointment seemed in
due proportion to the previous enthusiasm. It was hard
for men, some of whom had travelled from one to two
hundred miles just to catch a glimpse of her, to be
baulked so miserably ; and they seemed in lack of an
object on which to vent their spleen. ‘The Queen's
Ministers have insulted the city Magistracy,” said one.
‘We must have the illumination countermanded, exclaimed
another. There was a gausey, buxom fishwife passing at
the time on a cart. “Why, there is a Queen for us!’
shouted out a third ; and a thousand heads, at the hint,
were bent in mock obeisance to the fishwife. There was
more of bitterness than of sport in the incident, —not,
176 ED7WBURGH AND ITS WEIGHBOURHOOD.
however, on the part of the fishwife, apparently a person
of humour enough to appreciate the kind of honour paid
her, and who went on bowing right and left to her loving
subjects, –not, indeed, with all the grace of monarchy,
but with a degree of mock dignity that travestied it ex-
ceedingly well. We understand that in the untoward mis-
arrangement which led to the disappointment of so many
thousands the Queen herself had no share whatever, and
that the city Magistrates shared in it quite as little. The
odium—and it is by no means slight—is attached by the
citizens to her Majesty's Ministers.-September 3.
LADY GLE NORCHY'S CHAPEL.
‘Carry up my bones from hence.”—GEN. i. 25.
IN the lower and deeper part of the picturesque valley
ſhich separates the Old from the New Town of Edin-
urgh, there is a plain but massy and not unimposing
structure, lately a place of worship, which a party of work-
men are at present engaged in razing to the ground. It
presented on the first day of the new year a singularly
forlorn and desolate appearance. The rafters of the roof
rose dark and bare over the dingy walls, like the ribs
of a decaying carcase, from which the blackened integu-
ments have dropped piecemeal away. The large windows,
divested of the glass and the framing, revealed to the
spectator outside, tottering columns, broken galleries, and
ranges of dilapidated pews, with here and there a ragged
gap in the plaster, from which some sepulchral marble had
been recently torn. All around there lay huge heaps of
stone, the debris of walls overturned to their foundations,
blent with irregular piles of splintered trunks and torn
branches of trees, the sole remains of that old botanic
garden of Edinburgh which was established about the
middle of the seventeenth century, by one of the earliest
cultivators of natural history in Scotland, Sir Andrew Bal-
M

178 ED/VBURGH A WD /TS AWEIGHBOURHOOD.
four. Amid the desolation there rose, still entire, the
single column of a gateway, which had given access to the
building; and the iron gate itself swung unbroken on its
hinges; but where the corresponding column had stood
there yawned a deep and wide excavation, through which
one might look down, as in some pictured section of the
geologist, from the travelled soil of the surface, to a lightish
strip of native mould beneath, thence to a belt of red
subsoil, and thence to a deep stratified bed of yellow fire-
clay, alternating with bands of stone, which belong evi
dently to the base of the Coal Measures. The chasm ha
cut off the pathway on which, for full seventy years, a
devout and numerous congregation had found access to
the place of worship beyond; and all that remained to
indicate its place was a line of hawthorn bushes, that pro-
jected, root and branch, Over the steep broken edge, and
the remaining column of the gateway, with its hanging
gate. There lay around, amid the heaps of earth and
stone, the remains of iron pipes, encrusted with rust; tubes
of lead, the conductors of another element, projected into
the excavation ; and the foggy atmosphere was largely
charged with escaping gas, an unmistakeable evidence
that some of these useful underground veins and arteries
of the city, when severed, in the course of the opera-
tion which had cut among them so deeply, had, as sur-
geons express themselves, been too carelessly ‘taken up.’
Rarely have we looked upon a scene of greater desola-
tion than that furnished on the opening day of the year
by this ruined place of worship, whether we regarded the




/ A DV GZAZAVORCA/Y'S CHAPAEZ. 179
dilapidated building itself, with its yawning openings and
naked rafters, through which the rising breeze whistled so
drearily, or the rough scene of ruin that bristled all around
it, or the dismal enveloping atmosphere of mingled fog and
smoke, charged with the oppressive scent that, “smelling
horrible in the nostril, suggested to the imagination one
circumstance more of decomposition and decay.
The broken chapel of our sketch had presented, seven
days before, a different but not less striking scene. Nine
in the morning had struck on the clock of St. Giles; but
a dense fog, accompanied by a thick drizzling rain, hung
over the city, and the light of day seemed as if still en-
gaged in an uncertain struggle with the darkness. The tall
tenements of the Old Town rose over the valley, tier
above tier; but the upper tiers on the hill-top, barely dis-
cernible amid the haze, seemed but the beginning of other
and higher tiers; and the city—a thing rather of shadow
than of Substance—appeared, like the city of a fairy tale,
as if rising to the clouds. The huge North Bridge loomed
through the fog as but the mere spectre of a bridge, as
if a mere apparitional erection of grey cloud, with Crowds
of unsubstantial ghosts hurrying along its upper line ; and
inside the chapel below all was gloomy and brown, Save
where a few lights gleamed from the centre of the area,
where a party of workmen were engaged in laying open an
excavation in the floor. A hearse with its nodding plumes
stood in waiting at the gate without. A few ponderous
flags, one of which bore, inserted on its upper plane, a
Square plate of brass, were heaved warily aside with lever
I8o EDINBURGH AAVZ) /7'S AVAE/GA/BOUR}/OOD.
and bar, disclosing below a deep recess and a descending
flight of steps; and in a narrow catacomb to which the
steps led, the light flashed on the gilded studs of a solitary
coffin, that for nearly sixty years had rested in the dark-
ness. A line of coronets on the sides had borrowed from
the close damps of the place a tinge of deep green; but
the coal-black cloth seemed untarnished, and the gilding of
the plates and nails atop were in some places scarce less
fresh than when it had first passed from the burnisher of
the workman. The years of more than half a century
had, however, accomplished their work of decay. The
coffin, in the first attempt of the labourers to remove it
from its place, parted longitudinally atop ; and as it was
carried past us, to be deposited within a new shell pre-
pared for the purpose, we could see through the opening
a human skeleton—tall for that of a female—enveloped
in brown dust, in which there mingled the remains of the
cerements that had attired the lady for the tomb. The
plate above bore, in characters still distinctly legible, that
the remains were those of Lady Glenorchy, the foundress
of the chapel, and that she had departed in July 1786, in
her forty-fourth year. The cover of the new shell was then
screwed down over both the mouldering skeleton and the
coffin to which it had been consigned so long before; and
after it had been removed to its place in the hearse, the
vehicle moved slowly away, followed by a few gentlemen,
members of the Free Church, who, in accordance with the
terms of her Ladyship's will, were the trustees of the build-
ing. The whole scene, singularly picturesque and deeply
JAZ) V. GZAZAVOA’C// V’.S. CA/A1/2 E/C. I8I
impressive, was of a kind which, once seen, can never be
forgotten.
* Her Ladyship,’ says her excellent biographer, the late
Dr. Jones, ‘had expressed a wish to be buried in her chapel
at Edinburgh. The persons who took the charge of her
funeral accordingly ordered a vault or catacomb to be pre-
pared to receive the body. On taking up the flooring, the
ground was found to be solid rock ; but with considerable
difficulty an excavation was made sufficient to contain the
coffin. The head of the excavation lies directly under the
middle of the communion-table ; and a stone, with a brass
plate inserted in the centre, on which is deeply engraved
her Ladyship's name, age, and time of death, closes the
opening. On Monday the 24th—fourteen days after her
death—the body was deposited in this place. The present
[late] Earl of Breadalbane, who came from London for the
purpose, attended as chief mourner; and her silent obse-
quies took place in the midst of a great multitude of weep-
ing spectators, who on this occasion crowded the chapel.”
Such is the description given by Dr. Jones, an eye-witness
of the scene, and who, on the following Sabbath, preached
her Ladyship's funeral sermon to a congregation again
moved to tears. The history of her deep interest in the
chapel—and it was but one of many which she had reared,
Some in England, some in the Highlands—arose out of the
protracted Struggle and the many prayers which it cost her,
ere she had succeeded in placing it on a foundation at
Once independent of the National Church, and yet in connec-
tion with the Church's better ministers, Lady Glenorchy
I82 E/O/WBUA’GA/ AAWD /TS AWAE/GHAOURHOOD,
was peculiarly one of the class who, conscious of their
high destiny as heirs of immortality, live in the broad eye
of eternity, and walk with God. “As an entire character,’
says her biographer, “she did not leave one behind her
who might be compared with her.” She had watched the
struggle then going on between the two great parties in the
Establishment ; and seeing that Evangelism had the worse
in the contest, and that it was still sinking, she had built
her Edinburgh chapel in the hope of furnishing it with a
lodging-place, in which, in its time of depression and de-
feat, it might find shelter. She reckoned among her friends
and counsellors some of the best and ablest men of the
party, old Dr. John Erskine of the Greyfriars, Drs. Web-
ster, Walker, and Hunter, and Dr. David Johnstone of
Leith. She found, too, a singularly acute and disinterested
adviser in the advocate Crosbie—better known to the
readers of Guy Mannering as the accomplished lawyer
Pleydell; and, with the assistance of these men, she at
length succeeded in getting the chapel placed on such a
footing, that it was at once in connection with the Estab-
lishment, and independent of it. But a hard and pro-
tracted battle had first to be fought around its walls; and
we recognise among the combatants on both sides the
leading men of their respective parties at the time. Mode-
ratism, regarding it as a suspicious outpost, from which the
party might catch a mischief, fought hard to get its com-
munication with the Establishment cut off : Evangelism
struggled as hard to get it maintained. Dr. Carlyle of
Inveresk, Dr. George Hill of St. Andrews, Dr. Campbell
ZADY GEENORCHY'S CHAPEZ. I83
J
of Aberdeen, and all the lower but not less zealous men of
the party who made common cause with them, strove to fix
upon it the brand of separatism and dissent ; while Drs.
Erskine, Johnstone, Hunter, and Webster strove as hard
to extend to it the countenance and communion of the
National Church. At times the one party had the advan-
tage, at times the other. Dr. Erskine gained his point in
the Presbytery of Edinburgh ; but in the Synod of Lothian
and Tweeddale he sustained a defeat, on the motion of
Dr. Carlyle, who succeeded in getting a sentence recorded
which discharged all ministers and probationers of the
Church within the bounds from officiating in her Lady-
ship's chapel. And there was little expectation entertained
that the General Assembly, constituted as it was in those
days, would reverse the finding of the Synod. Moderatism.
mustered strong : and Lady Glenorchy gave up all hope in
the matter, but, as her Diary shows us, not all prayer ; for
we find whole days set apart by her to earnest solicitation,
in the solitude of her closet, that “God would overrule
the counsel of the Assembly respecting her chapel.” The
day of conflict came : the lawyer-elders, including the
officers of the Crown for Scotland, stood inexplicably aloof
on the occasion from their Moderate friends; nay, more,
One of their number—Chief Baron Montgomery—spoke
and voted against them ; and, after a keen and protracted
debate, Dr. John Erskine and the Evangelists, to the
astonishment of all men, carried the day. There was not
a devout minister in the Establishment but was now at full
liberty to preach in the chapel of Lady Glenorchy.
184 EDINBURGH AND ITS AWEIGHBOURHOOD.
The principles and conditions of its constitution were
laid down in the document which embodied them, with the
most scrupulous care. “I am Sure a' will gae right,’ says
Dandie Dinmont, in the novel, in reference to the Ellan-
gowan case, “if Mr. Pleydell will take this bit job in hand.”
The original of Pleydell did not belie this character in
drawing up the Constitution of Lady Glenorchy's chapel.
So stringently was it framed, that it required an express
Act of Parliament to set it aside ; and of its various clauses,
there was at least one which looked so profoundly into
Scottish law, that perhaps few living lawyers could have
told three twelvemonths ago at what it really pointed.
It strictly prohibited all and Sundry from attaching to the
chapel a territorial district ; and it was not until our quoad
sacra churches were cast as illegal by the civil courts, rather
on the fact that they had assumed territorial districts, than
on the fact that their ministers had sat in the ecclesias-
tical courts, that the Occult meaning which Crosbie had no
doubt intended the clause to embody was fully understood.
Moderatism, however, found various means of annoying
Iady Glenorchy and her people independently of law.
She had secured for her chapel the services of Mr., after-
wards Dr. Balfour, so well known for many years in an
after period as the venerable minister of the High Church
of Glasgow, but who at this time was minister in the
country parish of Lecropt. On tendering his resignation
to his Presbytery, however, they refused, contrary to all
practice, to receive it; and so Mr. Balfour, greatly to Lady
Glenorchy's disappointment and his own, was prevented
J.A. D Y GALAX/WO/CC//Y'S C//A/2 E/C. I85
from entering on his engagement. She met with various
other studied annoyances of a similar kind ; but her design
notwithstanding proved eminently successful. The Congre-
gation attached to her chapel ranked among the most
numerous and select in the city; and for more than half a
century they enjoyed the ministerial services of Dr. Snell
Jones, at once one of the most excellent men and useful
ministers within the Church. The reader may find a high,
but not too high, appreciation of his character, religious and
intellectual, in the form of a critique on his published ser-
mons, among the writings of Dr. Chalmers. Her Ladyship's
many prayers for her chapel had not been unheard nor
unanswered ; and we have but to glance over the extracts
from her Diary, as we have said, to see how many and how
deeply earnest these prayers were. The first minister ap-
pointed to the charge—a thoroughly good man—had died
of consumption in the course of the first twelvemonth, and
she had assiduously tended him in his last illness. ‘For
two months past,” she says—we extract from her Diary—
“I have been employed in attending the dying-bed of Mr.
Sheriff, who this day lies at the point of death. He has
borne a noble testimony to the power of faith in supporting
and quieting the mind under bodily distress and the certain
approach of death. For six weeks past the Lord has given
me much heartfelt submission to His will in this trial. He
has shown me wherefore it was sent ; convinced me of the
expediency and necessity of it to subdue my will in those
things I judged not only lawful, but in which I thought I
might be zealous. He has brought me to give up the
I86 ED/AVPURGAſ AAV/O / 7.S AWE/GA/BOU/RAZOOD.
chapel wholly to Himself, being the Head, Governor,
and Lawgiver of His Church ; and last night and this day
[June 7, 1778] He enabled me to surrender up myself and
all my plans wholly to Him, without any known reserve.
I got power to ask much for the chapel for ages to come,
that it might be a lamp and a witness for the doctrines of
the true Church in future generations,—a place where true
vital religion might be taught, and where souls might daily
be born again, and savingly united to Christ. I had some
degree of faith for this, and that a proper pastor would be
provided for it by the Lord in His own time ; and I sought
patience to wait upon Him for the answer of this prayer.
And now, O my gracious Saviour, as I have devoted myself,
and all that I am and have, unto Thee this day upon my
knees, and with my heart and tongue, I would now, in Thy
presence, confirm it with my hand, and, with all sincerity of
heart, solemnly give up and commit to Thee my soul, body,
and spirit, my life, reputation, goods, friends, relations,
health, and outward comforts, my understanding, will, and
affections,—in short, all that I am and have, to be disposed
of as shall be most for the glory of Thy name, and for the
eternal good of my soul. Guide and conduct me through
life ; be with me, to support and comfort me, in death ;
and receive me at last into Thy kingdom and glory, to be
ever with Thee throughout etermity. And the whole glory
and praise shall be ascribed unto the Father, Son, and
Holy Ghost, one God, for ever and ever.’
Such were the aspirations and prayers, and such the
Covenants with her God, of Lady Glenorchy. For full
LA/O Y GALEVORCH Y’.S. CHAPE/. 187
s fifty-seven years after her death, her chapel continued to
form one of the strongholds of Evangelism in Edinburgh.
It had furnished during the reign of Moderatism, when
the city churches were under Moderate control, a ready
place of meeting for all evangelistic purposes of a public
nature ; and as our ecclesiastical struggle drew towards a
close, and interdicts and inhibitions were shutting churches
against the principles, as they had been shut at the earlier
period, though in a different way, it again became a place
of resort for it, which no interdict or inhibition could shut.
The public meetings for prayer which immediately suc-
ceeded the Convocation were held in Lady Glenorchy's.
The Disruption ensued: the Residuary Presbytery of Edin-
burgh, after hesitating nearly three-quarters of a year, as
well they might, at length determined to act in the matter
agreeably to their character; and, turning out into the
streets, at the commencement, if we remember aright, of a
snow-storm, her Ladyship's congregation, they seized upon
the building. Moderate clergymen preached in it by
turns, and saw skeleton congregations of Some six or eight
persons scattered over pews in which some sixteen to
eighteen hundred had wont to assemble; and, in holding
their miserable mockery of a communion, they witnessed
some three or four poor creatures sitting at the table at
which from eight hundred to a thousand of the excellent
of the city had used to communicate. This sad residuum
sat down over the dust of Lady Glenorchy, amid the
dreary vacuity of her chapel; and good people, Cognizant
of the fact that the dust did rest below, and familiar with
188 ED//VB UAEGA/ AAV/O / TS AWAE/GAZEO UAEA/OOZ).
her Ladyship's character and prayers, had strange thoughts
and misgivings on the subject, which they knew not how
to express, and termed the providence a mysterious one.
And so it perhaps was. But it seems a not less wonderful
providence that the mockery of the sacrament was not
permitted to be repeated. At the very time when the
excluded people were engaged in contributing funds and
taking measures for erecting for themselves a place of
worship, which they purposed should bear the name of
the respected lady to whom they had owed their existence
as a congregation, but which would have been merely one
of two Lady Glenorchy's chapels in the city, an event, all
unforeseen and unthought of, was preparing to dash into
the dust the desecrated structure, and to raze not only the
building itself to its foundations, but even to annihilate,
for fathoms down, the very soil upon which it had stood.
The North British Railway passes over the site of Lady
Glenorchy's chapel, at a considerably lower level than that
which had been occupied by the chapel’s lowest founda-
tion-stone; and the revered dust of her Ladyship will now
rest, in consequence, in the building occupied by the
descendants of her people, – men who continue to hold,
as she held, by Christ the Head. Once more, say we,
a curious, and surely not uninstructive story. Many a
strange event had to take place ere the bones of Joseph
could be carried by the Israelites from their Egyptian
place of sepulture to the Land of Promise. It would
have been no easy task ten short months ago to have
predicted the kind of event through which the bones of
LA DV G/LEAVORCH Y'S CAHAPE/. 189
Lady" Glenorchy were to be removed up from the place
which had been so miserably diverted from the purpose
for which she had reared it, and which she had given up
in covenant to her God, as the “Head, Governor, and -
Lawgiver of His Church.”
More than fifty-eight years have elapsed since a weeping
assembly witnessed the burial of Lady Glenorchy. Many
a change since that period has come over the affairs of
men. America had just closed its struggle of independence
at the time. The dissolute French Court was engaged in
sowing the seeds of the Revolution. Napoleon was a
nameless boy. And while belief in the truth of revelation
appeared as if dying out among men, what seemed the
dawn of a political millennium was rising on the horizon.
The buds of promise have been blasted, and buds that
seemed withering have freshened and blown. Dynasties,
since the death of her Ladyship, have sunk and disap-
peared,—kingdoms have changed their governments, their
boundaries, and their names, Haristocracies have gone
down, royal blood has flowed on scaffolds,--heroes have
arisen to accomplish missions of vengeance, the purport
of which they knew not, and then, their work done, have
been laid ignobly by. The political dawn proved a mere
electric flush in the heavens, that broke in lightning and
tempest ; and after the lapse of more than half a century,
the kingdoms of the earth, with not more to enjoy than
they then possessed, seem less inclined to hope. They
have seen reform, heroship, revolution, all on the largest
and sublimest scale, and are yet none the better for having
190 EDINBURGH AND /TS AWAEIGHBOURAZOOD.
seen them. But what seemed the dying belief—the belief
of struggling minorities every day becoming weaker, and
of the lamented good passing prematurely away—still
lives on, vigorous and effective, as in its early youth, while
all of earth that promised to live and occupy its room is
dying or dead. All has changed except that faith held
so firmly by Lady Glenorchy, and the God on whom that
faith reposed ; and if there be a voice to the Free Church,
of Scotland from her Ladyship's tomb, is it not a voice
that tells of an overruling Providence, who, amid scenes
of evil, works out His own good purposes, and makes every
event, however seemingly untoward, fulfil the counsel of
His will P-/anuary 4, 1845.
A VOICE FROM THE GREY FRIARS.
‘Our holy and beautiful house is burnt with fire.”—ISA. xliii. 2.
THERE were two churches in Edinburgh a very few
weeks ago, which were more specially connected than
any other churches in the kingdom, the One with a per-
sonal, the other with a great National Covenant. These
covenants bore, in both cases alike, that Christ Jesus, the
adorable Son of God, and not any secular court or earthly
potentate, is the sole King and Head of the Church. Both
buildings had alike passed into the hands of the Estab-
lishment, — an institution that, rather less than two years
before, had practically repudiated the grand doctrine
which the documents had been framed with the express
purpose of maintaining, the One, as we have Said, in a
personal, the other in a national relation. Both alike,
from the durability of their materials, and the rock-like
solidity of their masonry, bade fair to endure for Cen-
turies. And both alike, at the present moment, lie in
dreary desolation and ruin, open to the wild winds of
heaven and the bleak wintry showers. We state but the
facts, and leave others to draw from them what infer-
ences they may. The one building — the chapel which
Lady Glenorchy gave up in covenant to her God, “as
191
192 EDINBURGH AND ITS AWEIGHBOURAOOD.
the Head, Governor, and Lawgiver of His Church’—
exists as but a group of broken walls, that totter to
the stroke of the workman. The other—that venerable
church of the Greyfriars, in which, two hundred and
seven years ago, the best and noblest of Scotland as-
sembled to swear fealty to the Divine King and Law-
giver, and not a few of them to subscribe the binding
instrument with their blood, that church which, in the
seventeenth century, was the church of Alexander Hen-
derson, which in the eighteenth was the church of Dr.
John Erskine, which in the nineteenth was all but the
church of Dr. Andrew Thomson, for he held his first
Edinburgh charge under a prolongation of its roof,
that venerable building exists now as a mass of scathed
and blackened ruins, its huge beams and timbers dis-
sipated into thin air, and many of its very stones cal-
cined into a ferruginous sand.
We passed the Greyfriars on our road churchwards on
Sabbath last, a little before ten o'clock, and saw, through
the trees of Heriot's, its huge length of roof stretching -
entire from gable to gable, but covered with what seemed
a dense white vapour, that appeared as if issuing from
every joint in the slating, and that rose slantways in a
broad many-volumed Column into the clear morning air.
A circular opening in the apex of the gable was mean-
while belohing out Smoke of a darker hue, like some
vast cannon to which the lint-stock had just been applied.
A minute jet of intensely red light, the first fire visible
from the outside, rose for a moment from beside the
A VOACE AERO// TAIA. GA’Aº VFR/AA’.S. I93
ridge, immediately beneath the pinnacle on the eastern
end ; the white thick vapour caught the flame sudden as
a train of gunpowder or a jet of coal-gas ; and what had
been vapour but a moment before became at once a
continuous stratum of fire, that, without touching, played
Over the slates, and, after disappearing for a moment,
as a light breeze from the west passed over the roof,
kindled again, and was again extinguished. The great
eastern window, which was still unbroken, glared with a
deep fiery red, shaded with umber, that gave an idea of
the thickest darkness of cloud struggling, imprisoned,
with the intensest light of fire : a tongue of flame came
dashing outwards, crashing through the glass ; and in
a moment's space the mass of red bronze within had
kindled into intense brightness. A broad pennon of
fire came rushing through the whole breadth of the arched
window, waving and cracking like a whip-thong over the
graves below, many of which now lie scorched and
blackened; and a still huger volume of flame rose
through the roof, and curled and roared for full thirty
feet over the ridge, hurling high into the smoke, ashes
and flaming embers, that, again descending, twinkled
among the tombs in a shower of fire. The pinnacle on
the eastern gable—a pyramidal mass of stone—whitened
and Cracked amid the flames, and, throwing off splinter
after splinter into the fiery area below, assumed a strik-
ing resemblance to a human figure, that, standing un-
moved where the conflagration raged most fiercely,
- N
194 EDINBURGH AND ITS WEIGHBOURHOOD.
seemed the very genius of the Scene. In rather less
than twenty minutes from the first appearance of the
flames, every window of the church was vomiting fire;
and all that remained of the roof on the main body of
the building—for on the aisles it had disappeared even
sooner — was merely the large skeleton beams, which,
though all gilded with flame, continued for a few minutes
longer to stride from wall to wall. The roaring of the
flames, the crackling of the calcining stones, that threw
out all around them from the columns their red-hot
fragments, – the crashing of the beams, as they parted
and came rushing down, the duller patter of the broken
slates, as they fell from above in showers, all made up
a fearful concert, which mingled in the silence of the
Sabbath morning with the low murmurs of the awe-
struck crowd and the shouts of the firemen. A sea of
fire continued to rage within the area of the building,
after the beams had all parted from their places above ;
but the gleam gradually sank lower. It had raged
awhile along the roof, - awhile half-wall high along the
galleries; and now it rose but a few yards over the
floor, wreathing its tongue-like flames around the
columns, and playing amid the pointed arches. Such,
however, was the intensity of the heat, that not a frag-
ment of the charcoal has remained ; not even the butt-
end of a beam in the wall. The last smouldering em-
bers threw off their successive coats of white ashes; and,
floating away in light impalpable films, left not a ves-
A VOACAE AEROM 7THE GRE VATRZAA’.S. I95
tige behind. The area of the Old Greyfriars—an un-
even waste of broken slate and stone—lies as bare as
the floor of a quarry.
It seemed at one time as if the adjoining church of the
New Greyfriars—a building which dates rather more than
a century later than the perished erection—might pos-
sibly be saved. The flames lingered for a few minutes at
the dividing wall, as the light breeze from the west blew
them backwards over the scorched ruins on which they
had already wrought their worst. The illusion, however,
was speedily dispelled : they rose fierce and high over the
ridge ; and the Central opening in the western gable, like
that in the east so shortly before, began to belch forth
into the air its thick column of fire. But the work of ruin
went more slowly on : the flames had to travel against the
wind, that ever and anon blew them away from the mate-
rials on which they fed. The firemen of Edinburgh, too,
assisted by a party of soldiers from the Castle, were all on
the ground ere now. They had opened up their communi-
cations with the various reservoirs in the neighbourhood;
and four engines were kept in full play, emptying their
Contents on the ignited rafters and the galleries. The
hissing of the water on the glowing embers mingled with
the roar of the flames ; and the clank of the engines, with
the crash of falling beams and the rattle of descending
slates. There mixed, too, in the vast volume of thick
dingy smoke that, blown aslant over the burying-ground,
threw a more than twilight shade on the graves, clouds of
white steam ; and the fire glowed less brightly within the
196 EDINBURGH AND I TS VEIGHBOURAIOOD.
area of the building. But all that great daring and much
exertion have accomplished in the case merely amounts
to this, that while the main body of the more modern erec-
tion is roofless from end to end, the entire roof of one of
the side aisles, and a broken fragment of the roof of the
other, have been preserved ; and the floor of the building
is strewn, not with fragments of calcined stone, but with
heaps of charred rafters, and the ruins of broken galleries
and pews. It presents a more, not a less, melancholy ap-
pearance than the church of the Old Greyfriars, apparently
on the principle that invests a mouldering carcase with
more, not less, circumstances of the horrible than a flesh-
less skeleton. The fire originated, as almost all such fires
do originate, through the overheating of a stove, the flue
of which passed under a piece of panelling attached to
the wall, and which communicated with one of the gal-
leries. The person in attendance, after lighting the fire
about four o'clock in the morning, and then leaving it,
returned just in time to see the piece of panelling falling
in red embers on the floor, and the flames nimbly spread-
ing from the portion of the gallery immediately over it to
the parts adjacent.
The ruins, during the whole of Monday and the greater
part of Tuesday, - until, in consequence of some new
manifestation of insecurity in the walls of the old church,
it was deemed necessary to shut them up, were largely
visited. And of the thousands who gazed upon them, and
saw a work of decay such as it usually takes many cen-
turies to accomplish, wrought by the havoc of one short
A VO/CAE AEROM 7THE GAA V/7 RAR.S. I97
hour, few have been unimpressed. What first strikes the
eye on entering, is the completeness of the ruin, and the
raw colour imparted to the stone. The huge gaping
window of the eastern gable, with its thick-set mullion,
is bordered by a calcined frame ; and the hewn work is
chipped and flawed, as if Knox's “rascal multitude” had
been hammering upon it for a week. The graves below,
for several yards away, testify to the formidable body of
flame to which the opening must have given vent. The
long rank herbage that had sprung over them in the sum-
mer, and had faded and dried up in the autumn and winter,
had caught fire, and they lay scorched and blackened, as
if covered by a pall. On an ancient and very fantastic
monument beside the window, there stands, in prominent
relief, a tall figure of death, in the common skeleton form,
and armed with the all-destroying Scythe. The grim sen-
tinel kept his place bravely. He has borrowed from the
conflagration a darker grin, and the Smoke seems to have
circled thickly in the hollow of his open ribs, but he has
caught no scathe from the fire ; and when the vast bolt
of flame roared from the opening beside him, and the
graves were blazing at his feet, he must have furnished
no inadequate resemblance to his prototype, the ‘goblin
full of wrath, described by Milton, that took his stand
by the infernal gates, - - - ". . . .
“When wide they stood, and, like a furnace-mouth,
Cast forth redounding smoke and ruddy flame.’
On entering the interior of the ruins, the utter desolation
of the scene comes more fully in view. The double row
198 EDINBURGH AND ITS WEIGHBOURHOOD.
of squat columns which divide the aisles from the body of
the church, and support the side walls, seem wasted to
half their former size : base and capital, the mouldings,
and the octagonal angles, have all disappeared ; and there
remains but a rude and irregular surface of calcined rock-
work. They look less like columns than like bars of
wasted iron worn almost to a point. The very ring-stones
of the arches have lost their hewn faces in the fire, and
present as broken and rubbly an appearance as the pillars
on which they rest. Where two stone-stairs had led to the
galleries, we see but a few minute fragments projecting
from the wall : nor do even the detached steps appear in
the rubbish below ;-they seem to have crackled away, in
the intense heat, into minute fragments. The upper por-
tions of the walls are less scathed ; but the pinnacle, so
strangely chipped into a statue, looks fantastically down
on the ruins ; and every breath of wind blows away the
burnt and loosened mortar in clouds of dust. We saw,
projecting from the walls, a wasted iron bolt, that had
been fixed there ages before to Support the magisterial
mace; and marked directly above, where the outer plaster
had peeled away, a portion of the royal arms of Scotland,
chiefly the mantlings around the Crown, with the crown
itself, and part of the rampant lion of the crest, bearing
the sceptre in its one paw and the sword in the other. It
seemed curious enough that these silent remembrancers of
the splendour of the past should have thus contrived to
peep out amid the utter desolation of the present. They
served to remind us that, let Moderatism build to itself
A VO/CE FRO// 7TP/E GAZAZ VFR/AAP.S. I99
whatever kind of church it may, it will not be the church
of Alexander Henderson, nor of John Erskine, nor yet
that in which the National Covenant was signed.
The building which, like an old martyr, closed its history
on the morning of Sabbath last in smoke and fire, has
witnessed some of the most striking scenes recorded in our
ecclesiastical annals. It was erected after the accession
of James to the throne of England, at a time when many
of our better ministers were languishing in prison or in
exile, and when the hirelings who had supplied their places
made oath at their ordination, as a part of the ceremony,
that they recognised the ‘King's Highness as the onlie
supreme Governour of this realme, as weel in all spirituall
or ecclesiasticall things or causes, as temporall.’ But the
spirit of the nation was not dead, nor could it be excluded
from the Greyfriars. Baillie tells us that even prior to the
famous scene in the High Church, which proved pregnant
with two great revolutions, “on the Sunday morning, when
the Bishop of Argyll, in the Greyfriars, began to officiate,
incontinent the serving-maids began such a tumult as was
never heard of in our nation since the Reformation.’ And
the tumult which these Edinburgh Serving-maids thus com-
menced, for there chanced to be deep meaning in their
quarrel with Prelacy and the Bishop, employed Leslie,
Cromwell, and William III. completely to finish.
In the following year the church of the Greyfriars wit-
nessed the subscription of the National Covenant. “As
the hour drew near,’ says Hetherington, in his singularly
eloquent and graphic narrative, ‘the people from all quar-
2OO AE/D//V/3 ÖVA’GAZ A1A/A) /TS AWAE/GAZARO UVA’AZOO/O.
ters flocked to the spot, and before the Commissioner ap-
peared, the church and churchyard were densely filled with
the gravest, the wisest, and the best of Scotland's pious
sons and daughters. The meeting was constituted by
Henderson, in a prayer of very remarkable power, ear-
nestness, and spirituality of tone and feeling. The dense
multitude listened with breathless reverence and awe, as if
each man felt himself alone in the presence of the Hearer
of prayer. When he concluded, the Earl of Lauder stood
forth, addressed the meeting, and stated, explained, and
vindicated the object for which they were assembled. He
directed their attention to the covenants of other days,
when their venerated fathers had publicly joined them-
selves to the Lord, and had obtained support under trials
and deliverance from every danger; pointed out the simi-
larity of their position, and the Consequent propriety and
duty of fleeing to the same high tower of Almighty strength;
and concluded by an appeal to the Searcher of hearts,
that nothing disloyal or treasonable was meant. Johnston
of Warriston then unrolled the vast sheet of parchment,
and, in a clear and steady voice, read the Covenant aloud.
He finished and stood silent. A solemn stillness followed,
—deep, unbroken, Sacred. Men felt the near presence of
that dread Majesty to whom they were about to vow
allegiance, and bowed their souls before Him, in the
breathless awe of silent adoration. . . . Again a deep
and solemn pause ensued,—not the pause of irresolution,
but of modest diffidence, each thinking every other more
worthy than himself to place the first name upon this
A VOICE FROM THE GRE VFRYA R.S. 201
sacred bond. An aged nobleman, the venerable Earl of
Sutherland, at last stepped slowly and reverentially for-
ward, and, with throbbing heart and trembling hand, sub-
scribed Scotland's Covenant with God. All hesitation in
a moment disappeared. Name followed name in swift
succession, till all within the church had given their signa-
tures. It was then removed into the churchyard, and
spread out on a level grave-stone, to obtain the subscrip-
tions of the assembled multitude. Here the Scene became,
if possible, still more impressive. The intense emotions
of many became irrepressible. Some wept aloud; some
burst into a shout of exultation ; some after their names
added the words fi/Z death; and some, opening a vein,
subscribed with their own blood. As the space became
filled, they wrote their names in a contracted form, limit-
ing them at last to the initials, till not a spot remained
on which another letter could be subscribed.’
In the year succeeding the one in which this impressive
scene took place, Alexander Henderson was appointed
minister of the Greyfriars. To-day (the 22d January),
making the necessary allowance for the change in the
style, is the two hundred and sixth anniversary of his in-
duction; and his tombstone may still be seen in the ad-
joining churchyard. He passed away, and a long and
dreary period of persecution ensued ; the echoes of the
church of the Greyfriars were awakened day after day by
the clank of hammers from the neighbouring street, busied
in erecting gibbets for the martyrs of the Covenant so
ominously subscribed in blood; and the venerated remains
202 ÆJD//VB VA2G/7 A/V/O / 7.S. /VAE/GAZARO Ú/ú HOO/O.
lie interred in the malefactor's corner, some half a stone-
cast away, at the foot of the grave-covered slope over
which the building rises. On the opposite side of the
burying-ground there is a retired alley of tombs, – an
Egyptian-looking street of the dead, in which the prisoners
of Bothwell Bridge were cooped up by hundreds, and kept
in the open air, exposed to every vicissitude of the seasons
for nine months together. The Revolution came round ;
the principle of the Covenant triumphed ; and the Grey-
friars became once more a Presbyterian church. The
second century after its erection wore on ; Moderatism
became potent in the Establishment ; and, by one of those
curious chances which occur so rarely in the history of
institutions or states, if chance we may term it, the two
great leaders of the antagonistic parties—Principal William
Robertson and Dr. John Erskine—were associates in the
collegiate charge of the Greyfriars. . We need scarce re-
mind the reader of the well-known anecdote associated
with the place, and so characteristic of not only the men
themselves, but of the opposite sets of principles which
they represented. ‘If virtue,” said the Principal,—full of
confidence in man's natural love of the just and good,
“if virtue were to take to itself a human form, and visit
our earth, all men would love, admire, and worship it.”
‘Let it not be forgotten,' remarked his venerable colleague,
on referring to the sentiment in the after-service of the
same day, ‘ that virtue did once take to itself a human
form, and did visit this earth, and that men, instead of
loving it, admiring it, worshipping it, reviled, persecuted,
A VOXCE FROM 7THE GRE VFRYARS. 2O3
and finally crucified it.’ The building, too, in reference
to this middle period, has an interest reflected upon it
by the charms of inventive genius expatiating on a solid
substratum of truth. The church to which the lawyer
Pleydell is represented as bringing Guy Mannering, when
on his visit in Edinburgh, is the church of the Greyfriars;
and the preacher whose appearance and manner are so
graphically described in the novel was Sir Walter's own
minister, —during at least his boyhood, -the venerable
Dr. Erskine. It is further worthy of notice, that the last
truly wise man of his party, Dr. Inglis, a man, however,
who, as he advanced on eternity, receded from that party
more and more, who originated the Indian Mission,-and
who, had his life been spared, might have prevented that
suicidal course pursued in the late struggle by Moderatism
which precipitated the Disruption,--was one of the mini-
sters of the Greyfriars. His immediate successor, with the
successor of his colleague the late Dr. Anderson, were the
last collegiate ministers of this church; and they are now
ministers of the Free Church. The last of the twain in
charge, for Mr. Guthrie had been draughted to St. John's
a year or two previous, the good and able man who laid
down his living at the call of sacred principle when the
hour of trial came, and quitted a pulpit rendered vene-
rable by many a high and interesting association when he
found it could no longer be usefully or honourably occu-
pied, - was standing in the middle of the ruins as we
entered, looking around him, as if striving to recall, in
the utter desolation of the place, the features by , which
204 EDINBURGH AND ITS AWEIGHBOURHOOD.
he had so long known it. The remark with which he
greeted us was a very simple one, and yet it was fraught
with meaning —‘I have not been here before,' he said,
“since the Disruption.’
We suppose Moderatism will be by and by setting itself
to repair the more modern church of the Greyfriars, and
to erect a new building on the site of the more ancient
one. It will matter little. There is abundance of room
for half a dozen such congregations as the Congregation
of the one, in the neighbouring church of St. John's, which,
without loss to any party, might be erected into a col-
legiate charge ; and more than room for at least as many
such congregations as that of the other, in the Assembly
Hall, which might very safely be converted into a col-
legiate charge too. If the building scheme goes On, we
shall have an uninteresting, useless new house substi-
tuted for some very interesting ruins, that, with the assist-
ance of a few wallflower seeds, and a few ivy bushes,
might be made to harmonize as finely in aspect as in
reality with the antique monuments, classic names, and
stirring associations, of the surrounding burying-ground.
These classic names and stirring associations are many.
In but one narrow corner of the erection which the fire
has spared we see the tablets of Allan Ramsay, Colin
Maclaren, and Hugh Blair, looking down from the wall.
It may be remarked, in conclusion, that the history of
the perished building strikingly illustrates the vicissitudes
to which the principle of spiritual independence has been
Subjected in this country during the lapse of little more
A VO/CAE FROM THE GRE VAWA/A R.S. 2O5
than two centuries. In the course of that period the
church of the Greyfriars had been twice in the possession
—at one time for a hundred and fifty years together—of
an Establishment whose thorough independence in mat-
ters ecclesiastical the State recognised; and thrice in the
hands of Erastianized corporations, that bartered away their
spiritual liberties for bread.—January 22, 1845.
TRINITY COLLEGE CHURCH
V E R S US
B U R N S’ MO N U M E N T.
THE wanderings of the Virgin's house at Loretto from
its old Judaean site, until at length, after crossing many
a land and sea, it settled down where it now stands, form
the subject of a curious Romish legend, which devout
Catholics in Italy are still trying to believe; and the rest-
less voyagings of St. Cuthbert in his stone coffin in quest
of a suitable sepulchre, which for long years the over-
particular saint failed to find, were once devoutly credited
in the neighbourhood of Coldingham and Lindisferne.
But there was palpable myth in both cases; and the
history of the Trinity College Church of Edinburgh, since
it was pulled down a few years ago by the North British
Railway Company, throws, we think, a flood of light on
the origin of both stories. It was not, as the legend
bears, the Virgin's house — a clumsy erection of stone
and lime—that went a-travelling of itself over the isles
of Greece and the upper reaches of the Mediterranean ;
nor yet did the stone coffin of St. Cuthbert launch spon-
taneously upon the Tweed, as was reported, and float
from Melrose to Tilmouth. Both legends only body forth
206
7 RAN. COZ, CHURCH v. BURNS’ MOWUMENT: 2O7
the many vexed discussions that took place regarding
house and coffin in the Established Presbyteries and
Town Councils of those early days, after a Jerusalem
Aqueduct Company had purchased the site of the build-
ing and pulled it down, and a sanitary commission, in-
stituted by the old Saxon Wigamote, to inquire into the
state of the intramural cemeteries of the kingdom, had
broken up the saint's tomb, and carried his coffin out-
side the church door. The various stages at which both
house and coffin are said to have rested for a while, in
reality only intimate the various stages of the long dis-
cussion which took place regarding them, and the many
new sites suggested for their accommodation. Nay, we
are not sure whether the history of the Trinity College
Church since its demolition, if erected into a myth on
this obvious principle, would not make a better legend
than either of them. Future ages may perhaps tell, should
Puseyism be destined to realize all its hopes in Britain,
that when religion was at its lowest ebb in Scotland, a
wicked railway company having resolved on demolishing,
for their own secular ends, the church of the Holy Trinity,
founded by the devout Mary of Guelders, the outraged
building transported itself in a single night to a rocky
platform beside the Calton stairs; that, however, after
baiting for a while on its proud perch, it then removed,
first to the head of the Waverley Bridge, then to a humble
site at the side of the old Nor' Loch, then to a corner of
Ireland's woodyard; and, finally, that, returning to a shelf
of the Calton, a little lower in place than the one it had
208 EDINBURGH AND 17:S WEIGHBOURHOOD.
first selected, it demolished at one fell blow the monu-
ment of a profligate poet, and, squatting itself down on
its site, remained there till this day. There would, of
course, be no want of evidence, framed on the principle
of Mr. Newman and his coadjutors, to make good the
miracle. The mere probabilities would, of course, be
found registering a large balance in its favour; while, as
real evidence, it could be shown from the portfolios of
the antiquaries, that while there existed many prints and
drawings that represented the building on its original and
final sites, there existed at least one rare print, a tinted
lithograph, which exhibited it resting on that earliest of
the intermediate stages which was situated beside the
Calton stairs.
In all seriousness, however, we cannot help thinking
that the majority of our Town Council, consisting though
it does of sensible and excellent men, has, in its previous
decisions regarding this building, committed a mistake.
It seems to have forgotten things that ought to have been
remembered, and to have remembered things that ought
to have been forgotten, and to have arrived at a conclu-
Sion, in consequence, that, if persisted in, must have the
effect of placing it in a state of collision with all our
better judges of the aesthetic on the one hand, and all the
admirers of our great national poet on the other. But as
no overt act has yet been committed, we fain hope that
the respectable men who constitute the slender majority
in the case may yet see the propriety of resiling from a
position which cannot fail to expose them to much dis-
7RIN. COZ, CHURCH v. BURNS’ MOWUMENT. 209
agreeable animadversion and comment. Even regarded
as a simple economic question, it does look somewhat
strange that, with many suitable sites at their command
which would cost them nothing, the Town Council should
have at length selected a site already occupied by an
ornamental building, that cannot be removed under an
expense of nearly eighteen hundred pounds. Franklin's
whistle was no doubt a very excellent whistle;—we are
assured, on his own unexceptionable authority, that it
made noise enough to disturb the whole house; but then
Franklin tells us also that he paid a great deal too much
money for it;-and even admitting—what such judges of
the aesthetic as Harvey and Macculloch will to a certainty
not admit—that the site of the Burns Monument is a site
better by a barely perceptible shade for the Trinity Church
than any other that could be selected, really eighteen
hundred pounds is a large price for a barely perceptible
shade. It is a large price for a mere whistle, especially,
too, as undoubted judges of such articles say it is a whistle
that won't blow. Further, the claim of the Trinity College
Church,-not as a church, be it remarked, but regarded
simply as a piece of architecture, to dispossess of its site
the monument of Scotland's greatest poet, is not a claim—
Scotchmen being the judges—that will be very readily
recognised. If in reality a serious and weighty claim, it
ought, of course, to be urged as a matter of principle at
all hazards, and against all the men of taste and genius in
the kingdom; but not being a matter of principle, but of
taste merely, we question whether it would be prudent or
O
2 Lo AE/D/AVPURGAſ AAV/D /TS AWAE/GHBO OVA’AſOO/O.
advisable to urge it in the form it must to a certainty
assume, viz. the claim of a building that has not a single
association connected with it worth a farthing, to dispos-
sess of its well-selected site the monument of a poet more
dear, with all his faults, to the Scottish people, than any
other his country ever produced. The case is one of
collision ; and as no person alleges that the site of the
monument is not a very suitable one for it, it resolves
itself into the simple question : What are the claims of the
Trinity College building, whether aesthetic or otherwise, to
dispossess of its modest and proper site the monument of
the national poet?
It must tell in behalf of the old building, in such an
inquiry, that there exists at the present time such a rage
for the mediaeval as existed up to the middle of the last
century in favour of hooped petticoats and high head-
dresses. And unquestionably a Gothic inferior, independ-
ently of any existing prejudice in behalf of the site as a
whole, is one of the noblest architectural ideas which man,
in his pursuit of the aesthetic, has yet devised. But a
Gothic exterior is a much humbler effort of mind, even
when at its best,-even in a York or Strasburg Cathedral ;
and in the less happy instances it is a meagre, poverty-
stricken thing. The interior embodies a natural idea, the
idea of a noble grove, with its colossal trunks twisted like
the great chestnuts, or grooved, rodded, and clustered, like
massive beeches and huge elms, and that emulates, in its
fretted groins and interlacing ribs, the thickly woven
branches that spread overhead. But the Gothic exterior
7 'A'ZAV. CO/. CHURCH, V, AE URAWS” MOAVU//E/W7. 2 II
embodies no such natural idea, it is often a mere barn-
like case for the stony grove within ; and the old architects,
as if sensible of this inferiority, often showed their art by
concealing it in Woods and hollows, over which a well-
proportioned spire, pointing like a finger heavenwards, and
worthy of being looked at, might be seen representing the
entire building. And when the hollow was very deep, or
the wood well grown, the exterior betrayed less than the
ordinary care, and the architect concentrated himself on
the interior almost exclusively. Such was peculiarly the
case with the old Trinity Church, ‘besyde Edinburgh.”
Placed in a deep valley, almost within the shadow of a
great precipice that overlooked its highest pinnacle, and
surrounded, at the time of its erection, by a thick wood,
it could be but imperfectly seen from any quarter ; and so
the architect devoted himself chiefly to the inside of the
building, and produced one of the most delicate morsels
of interior architecture to be found in this part of Scotland.
Its exterior, however, was greatly less to be admired, even
where finished. Its flying buttresses were squat and un-
graceful, its walls low, and none of its windows or outer
doorways very fine. Unluckily, too, from the death of its
foundress, some of the parts most essential to its general
proportions were left unbuilt. A squat, awkward-looking
gable, Serrated by its lines of crow-steps, took the place
of a central tower or spire; and where the nave should
have joined on to the choir, there rose a flat wall of coarse
rubble-work, perforated by a wretched window, that resem-
bled a great eyelet-hole, and that was flanked by a lesser
2 I2 E/D/AWBURGAſ A WD J 7.S AWAE/GATPO URATOOD.
eyelet-hole on each side. Where the nave itself should
have been, there remained a blank; and, seen on this
side from a point of view which the architect could never
have contemplated,—that furnished by the North Bridge,
—the Church of the Holy Trinity was, without exception,
the ugliest building in Edinburgh. It had less the look
of an ecclesiastical edifice than of a cartwright's shop,
of a shop with three wheels hung upon the walls—a big
one and two little ones—as a sign of what might be
procured from the mechanic inside ; and was, in short,
homeliness and misproportion themselves thrown into the
architectural form. The only sort of place in which the
Trinity Church could be re-erected, either in accordance
with the original design of the architect, or with due con-
sideration of its actually unfinished condition, would be a
place where it could be as well hidden as it was of old,
ere the North Bridge laid open its posterior deformities
to the gaze of the public, and where the visitor, after a
sudden introduction to its completed eastern end, with its
not unhandsome porch, curiously roofed with stone, would
be at once ushered into its exquisite interior, so calm and
solemn, with its lofty aisle, its rich groining, and its finely
proportioned doorways. Even in Gothic buildings of
greater exterior pretensions than the Trinity Church, the
effect of a sudden introduction of this kind to what is best
in them is very striking. The old parish church of Strat-
ford-on-Avon is, even externally, an eminently handsome
building, and, when seen outside the town, to which it is
attached, looks well on every side. The passage to it
TRIN. COZ, CHURCH v. BURNS’ MONUMENT 213
from the street, however, that street in which the “New
Place,’ Shakspeare's residence, was situated,—is through
so thick a grove of limes, that one can Scarce catch in
the passage a glimpse of the building; and so it is to the
noble interior, with its fine proportions and dim religious
light, that the visitor is first introduced. We were scarce
ever more strongly impressed than when, passing through
the chequered passage of delicate green, with the sunlight
playing in through the leaves, we were at once ushered
into that awful interior, and saw the simple monument of
the poet of greatest soul which the world had ever pro-
duced, glistening in the pale light upon the wall. And
we doubt not that, amid the bosky hollows at the foot of
the Calton, on its northern side, such a place of conceal-
ment might be found for the Trinity Church. The young
wood in that quarter is thriving, and promises to be thick
and tall.
In these remarks we have dealt with the question at
issue simply as one of taste. The question, however, has
as certainly an ecclesiastical as an aesthetic aspect. The
parish attached to the Trinity Church is one of the most
destitute in Edinburgh, and one of the most devoid of
religious ordinances. In passing through the Canongate,
countrywards, on a Sabbath afternoon, we have seen more
of the people who never attend any church lounging at the
close-heads than would have filled the Church of the Holy
Trinity thrice over. But not such the character of the
locality in which it is proposed to re-erect it. The inhabit-
ants of Regent and Carlton Terraces belong mainly to the
214 EDINBURGH A WD /TS AWE/GHBO URAIOOD.
upper ranks ; the people of Norton Place and Comely
Green, to the middle classes. They are church-goers
already ; and a new church in the district would be of no
use to them, and of no moral effect on the community at
large. We have, we confess, our quarrel with the Estab-
lishment; but we would ill like to thwart it did we see it
setting itself in all earnestness to the recovery of the lapsed
classes. It is only contemptible when, as in this instance,
we find it running away from its proper scene of duty,
though at the same time arrogating to itself the name of
the “Church of the poor and the forgotten,' and planting
itself down—on so-called aesthetic principles as false in
taste as in morals—where there is no use for it whatever.
The claims of the Trinity Church to dispossess the Burns
Monument of the site secured to it by many years of pos-
session, is of course a different question from any of those
to which we have already referred. We think the church
can have no such claim. The ground fairly granted to a
public monument ought to remain for ever after the pro-
perty of the public, and this altogether irrespective of any
change which may take place in opinion regarding the cha-
racter of the man to whom it was erected. No one can
have formed a lower estimate of Robert Burns than we
ourselves have done of Charles II., of “glorious memory;’
and yet, when, Some years ago, the horse and man of Par-
liament Square were taken down, and the report went
abroad that they were not to be re-erected, we felt as if an
important historic document had been destroyed, and that
Edinburgh had one point less of interest than before. And
7 RAN. COZ, CHURCH v. BURNS’ MOWUMENT 215
the Burns Monument, regarded simply as a fact, should be
at least equally sacred. It is a greatly more wonderful
fact than the statue of Charles ; it is a fact which the
American poet Hallec, on his visit to this country, viewed
in the proper light:
“I’ve stood beside the cottage bed,
Where the bard-peasant first drew breath;
A straw-thatch'd roof above his head,
A straw-wrought couch beneath.
And I have stood beside the pile—
His monument—that tells to heaven
The homage of earth's proudest isle
To that bard-peasant given.’
Yes; a very strange fact, worthy of all due consideration,
—worthy, too, of being carefully preserved, were it but for
its curious documentary character. Further, it is also a
noticeable fact, that all the men of genius who have lived
since the days of the indomitable peasant have regarded
his memory with the deepest and tenderest sympathy,
that they have found profounder meanings in his writings,
and nobler traits in his character, than ordinary men ; for
while ordinary men seemed to see but his specks and
spans, as if they looked at the luminary through eyes
naturally smoked and darkened, the higher intellects see
but the all-enveloping blaze of his glorious genius. But
perhaps their morale may have been at fault P. That craves
reflection. We know that the pious Montgomery ranked
among the fervent admirers of Burns; and we have seen
the face of the saintly Chalmers glow with delight as he
pronounced one of his soul-stirring lines, No one can
2 I6 ED//VBURGH AAV/D 77'S AWAE/GA/BOURATOOAD.
defend all that the poet did or said. True, his frailties
have been somewhat severely dealt with. He was, with
all his faults, a greatly better man than either of his two
greatest contemporaries. He did not drink half so hard as
William Pitt ; and yet respectable people toast the memory
of the “Heaven-born Minister,’ without making any allu-
sion whatever to the four bottles of port that he used to
put under his belt of an evening ; and while he was cer-
tainly not more licentious or less sober than Charles James
Fox, he was beyond Comparison a more honest man; for
he was no gambler, and paid all his just debts, and would
have died rather than fabricate the mean lie which de-
prived an honourable lady of her moral status as the wife
of a British prince. But it would be idle to represent
Burns as other than an imperfect character. His own
honest pen gives the lie to the unwise friends of his
memory who take up a position SO untenable :
“The poor inhabitant below
Was quick to learn and wise to know,
And keenly felt the social glow
And softer flame,
But thoughtless follies laid him low,
And stained his name.’
Nor can it be denied that some of his writings have done
harm. It seems, however, to be a law of Providence that
the earth-stains which pollute the fountains of genius should
be deposited by the stream in its course, and that the
living waters should at length run clear. And it has been
so with the poetry of Burns. It is not by his worse, but
by his better writings, that he is now remembered : by his
7 R/V. COZ, CHURCH v. BURNS’ MONUMENT. 217
songs, unrivalled in the literature of the world ; and by
those undying pieces, such as the “Cottar's Saturday Night,’
so rich in character and manner, and in high moral senti-
ment withal, that are destined to • * : * ~ * * * *
“Be known, perchance, when Scotland is no more,
And tell the tale of what she was before.”
And if his writings have done harm, let us not forget that
they have also done no little good. Robert Burns was
the man who first taught the Scottish people to stand
erect. Let us not be blind to the great national faults,
and only lynx-eyed to the faults of the great national poet.
A mean and Creeping subserviency to the great, a get-
ting up ‘to be hanged in order to please the laird,'—was
the master fault of the Scotch people ; and a century of
persecution had failed to wean them of it. That part of
the General Epistle of James which treats of “respect of
persons,’ and the undue partiality shown to men with
‘gold rings and goodly apparel,’ might have been more
appropriately addressed to the Scotch even after the rich
had ‘oppressed’ and drawn them ‘before the judgment-
seat,’ and ‘blasphemed the Holy Name,' than to almost
any other people of Europe. But the independent peasant
who, in the most trying circumstances, never bent himself
before the worthless wealthy or the titled great, and who,
in his ever living strains, asserted the dignity of manhood,
taught them another lesson ; and they have learned it.
Yes; the Scottish people have lost the habitual stoop, and
now stand erect ; and all honour, say we, to the reformer
who, more than any other, effected the change. His life,
218 A.D/AWAEURGH AND / 7.S AWAE/GHAEOUR}}OOD.
as certainly as his works, were effectual in producing it;
and, had it accomplished nothing else, it would not, with
all its errors and shortcomings, have been spent in vain.
“Through care and pain, and want and woe,
With wounds which only death could heal,
Tortures the poor alone can know,
The proud alone can feel,
He kept his honesty and truth,
His independent tongue and pen,
And moved, in manhood and in youth,
Pride of his brother men.
* Strong sense, deep feeling, passions strong,
A hate of tyrant and of knave,
A love of right, a scorn of wrong,
Of coward and of slave,
A leal warm heart, a spirit high,
That could not fear and would not bow,
Were written in his manly eye,
And on his manly brow.
“Praise to the bard, his songs are driven
Like flower-seeds on the wild winds strewn,
Where'er beneath the sky of heaven
The birds of fame are flown.
Praise to the man: a nation stood
Beside his coffin with wet eyes,—
Her brave, her beautiful, her good,
As when a loved one dies.
‘And still, as on his funeral day,
Men stand his cold earth-couch around,
With the mute feelings that we pay
To consecrated ground.
And consecrated ground it is, -
The last, the hallow'd home of one
Who lives upon all memories,
Though with the buried gone,’
T H E FUNERAL OF CH A LM ERS.
DUST to dust;-the grave now holds all that was mortal
of Thomas Chalmers. Never before did we witness such
a funeral ; nay, never before, in at least the memory of
man, did Scotland witness such a funeral. Greatness of
the mere extrinsic type can always Command a showy
pageant, but mere extrinsic greatness never yet succeeded
in purchasing the tears of a people ; and the spectacle of
yesterday — in which the trappings of grief, worn not as
idle signs, but as the representatives of a real sorrow,
were borne by well-nigh half the population of the metro-
polis, and blackened the public ways for furlong after
furlong, and mile after mile—was such as Scotland has
rarely witnessed, and which mere rank or wealth, when
at the highest or the fullest, were never yet able to buy.
It was a solemn tribute spontaneously paid to departed
goodness and greatness by the public mind.
Dr. Chalmers had, we understand, expressed a wish
to be buried in the lately opened cemetery at Grange,
situated on the pleasant rising ground—once, we believe,
a portion of the old Boroughmoor—about a quarter of 3.
mile south of the Meadows, and little more than half a
mile from the Doctor's favourite residence at Morning-
side. It is a singularly beautiful spot, surrounded on all
219
22c, E/D/AW/3 UAEGA/ A/V/D /TS AWE/GA/BOURAE/OO.D.
sides by green fields, and on the south and west by lines
of well-grown forest trees, that must have seen at least
their century. And, sweeping downwards on every side,
—towards the Grange House and Morningside on the
south and west, and towards Newington and the Meadows
on the east and north, it commands within its range
of prospect every more striking feature of the scenery
for which Edinburgh and its neighbourhood are so re-
markable. The purple Pentlands, piled up, as seen from
this point of view, over the nearer Braid Hills and the
Hill of Blackford, look down upon it on the one hand;
the colossal Arthur Seat, just in the point of view where
the lion-like contour of the eminence is most complete,
seems sentinelling it on the other ; the flatter lines of the
landscape, roughened with wood, and dotted over with
buildings reduced in the distance to mere speck-like points,
present here and there, in comparatively prominent relief,
their bolder objects, here Liberton, with its church and
tower, there the rising ground of Craigmillar, with its
ancient ruin, -yonder, amid the tall trees, the Gothic
chapel of St. Catherine ; while along the long-descending
ridge, bearing its picturesque bravery of spires and monu-
ments, and guarded by its veteran Castle at the one ter.
mination, and the tall escarpment of Salisbury Crags on
the other, stands the proud city, with its smoke-wreath
resting over it. We had at one time half-wished that
Chalmers should have been buried in the Greyfriars,
with the Hendersons and M'Cries of our ecclesiastical,
and the Robertsons and Mackenzies of our literary, his-
TAZAZ AſOAVAEA’A Z OA’ CAZAZA/AFA'.S. 22 I
tory, where the Church made its greatest and most im-
posing stand against the Erastian encroachments of the
secular arm, and where the dust of so many of the martyrs
lies. But we recognise as more appropriate the choice
which selected the virgin soil of this new locality, whose
main associations are with the sublime of nature, with
the unnarrowed expanse of the heavens above, and the
plains and hills, the woods and fields, that give variety
to the wide tract of earth below. Chalmers, like all the
truly great, may be said rather to have created than to
have belonged to an era. Influenced by the past, like
all men, he was yet less influenced by it in its immediate
connection with his own Church and country, than any
of our other great ecclesiastical leaders since the days of
Enox. He could feel the poetry of the times of the
Covenant, and sympathize with the Christian men who
died in behalf of the rights and liberties of their Church,
—rights and liberties identical, in those ages, with the
cause of religion itself; but in looking for his patterns
and examples, he did what was done by all our first Re-
formers, passed over those uninspired times, on which
we are perhaps too apt to linger, impressed rather by the
scarce wholesome admiration of what our fathers did for
God, than for what God did for them ; and rested his
whole mind on that more wonderful time when the ador-
able Redeemer walked our earth in the flesh, and fallible
men, inspired by the Spirit, gave infallible testimony re-
garding Him.
The day was one of those gloomy days not unfrequent
222 AE/D/AVE UAEGA A/V/D /TS AWAE/GA/BOURAE/OO/O.
in early summer, which steep the landscape in a Sombre,
neutral tint of grey, a sort of diluted gloom ; and volumes
of mist, unvariegated, blank, and diffuse of outline, flew
low athwart the hills, or lay folded on the distant horizon.
A chill breeze from the east murmured drearily through
the trees that line the cemetery on the south and west,
and rustled amid the low ornamental shrubs that vary and
adorn its surface. We felt as if the garish sunshine would
have associated ill with the Occasion. A continuous range
of burial vaults, elevated some twenty feet over the level,
with a screen of Gothic architecture in front, fenced by a
parapet, and laid out into a broad roadway atop, runs all
along the cemetery from side to side, and was covered at
an early hour by many thousand spectators, mostly well-
dressed females. All the neighbouring roads, with the
various streets through which the procession passed, from
Morningside on to Lauriston, and from Lauriston to the
burying-ground,--a distance, by this circuitous route, of
considerably more than two miles, were lined thick with
people. We are confident we rather under-estimate than
exaggerate their numbers when we state that the specta-
tors of the funeral must have rather exceeded than fallen
short of a hundred thousand persons. As the procession
approached, the shops on both sides, with scarce any ex-
ceptions, were shut up, and business suspended. There
was no part of the street or road through which it passed
sufficiently open, or nearly so, to give a view of the whole.
The spectator merely saw file after file pass by in what
seemed endless succession. In the cemetery, which is of
7A7A. Aſ UAVERA / OF CA/AIA/AA’.S. 223
great extent, the whole was at once seen for the first time,
and the appearance was that of an army. The figures
dwindled in the distance, in receding towards the open
grave along the long winding walk, as in those magnifi-
cent pictures of Martin in which even the littleness of
men is made to enhance the greatness of their works and
the array of their aggregated numbers. And still the open
gateway continued to give ingress to the dingy, living tide,
that seemed to flow unceasingly inwards, like some perennial
stream that disembogues its waters into a lake. The party-
coloured thousands on the eminence above, all in silence,
and many of them in tears, the far-stretching lines of the
mourners below,-the effect, amid the general black, of
the scarlet cloaks of the magistracy (for the magistrates of
Edinburgh, with much good taste and feeling, had come
in their robes of office, and attended by their officials
and insignia, to manifest their spontaneous respect for the
memory of the greatest of their countrymen), the slow,
measured tramp, that, with the rustle of the breeze, formed
the only sounds audible in so vast an assemblage, — all
conspired to compose a scene solemn and impressive in
the highest degree, and of which the recollection will long
survive in the memory of the spectators. There was a
moral sublimity in the spectacle. It spoke, more em-
phatically than by words, of the dignity of intrinsic excel-
lence, and of the height to which a true man may attain.
It was the dust of a Presbyterian minister which the coffin
contained ; and yet they were burying him amid the tears
of a nation, and with more than kingly honours.
224 AEDINBURGH AAWD /TS WEIGHEO URA'OOD.
Churches long bear the impress lent them by the cha-
racter of their founders. The Puritanism of New England
has not yet wholly resigned the stamp imprinted on it by
the Pilgrim Fathers; and Wesleyism in the Old Connec-
tion still exhibits not a few of the distinctive personal
peculiarities of John Wesley. That theory of Hume re-
garding the formation of national character, which traces
the leading moral and mental features of a people to the
individual traits, caught up through the imitative faculty
by admiring followers, which marked their first heroes,
Statesmen, and legislators, is doubtless over-stretched.
And yet it does seem to explain, in part, how at least
churches, very various often in their character, independ-
ently of doctrine, should be marked, even when drawing
their membership from among the same people, by distinc-
tive peculiarities. There are Scotch Quakers as certainly
as Scotch Presbyterians; and the one body has as invari-
ably borne, since its first beginnings, the impress of the
passive, pacific Penn, as the other, in all its history, that
of the warlike Knox, —he who bore the sword before
George Wishart, prepared to defend against all assailants,
however armed with mere legal authority, or formidable
from their numbers, the preacher of the true evangel.
Could we wish aught better to the Free church of Scot-
land than that it should bear the impress of Chalmers,
the simplicity, backed by the wisdom, the quiet gentle-
ness, united to the extraordinary power, — the Catholic
tolerance, that looked to the ‘root of the matter’ in its
dealing with other churches, and was satisfied if it but
7A/A2 APUAVERA/L OF CAZAZMAEA’.S. 225
found it joined to the honest zeal that would sacrifice all
rather than yield up even one solitary truth in connection
with its own, above all, the unceasing interest in the
economic, the physical, the mental improvement of the
species, that diverted or misdirected, no, not for one
moment, as is so frequently the case with the mere tem-
poral philanthropist,-an intense love of souls, and the
consequent labours for their salvation ? We have seen
many dissertative remarks on the character of Chalmers,
but never yet a single remark on what has ever appeared
to us as its most wonderful feature. Men are so consti-
tuted, not only in the average, but in even very high speci-
mens, that the existence among them of two great parties
—the movement party and the stationary one—seems in-
evitable. There would be no progress without the impetus
of the one, and no stability without the weight of the other.
In the working of the vessel, whether that of Church or
State, the instinct of the one party leads it to busy itself
with the hoisting of the sails, and that of the other with
the laying in of the ballast. Now, it was peculiarly ex-
traordinary in Chalmers, that he was not of either, but of
both parties, at once far in advance of the movement
men, and firmest among the most firm of the stationary,
—at once a promulgator of new truths, which in a better
age than the present the world will gladly reduce to prac-
tice, and a determined conservator of old truths, and of
what is truly good in the old state of things. Men being
what they are, party seems inevitable: and yet how vast
the waste of exertion which it occasions ! In a world
P
226 Z/)//VPURGAſ AAV/D /TS AWAE/GA/BOURATOO D.
of Chalmerses there would be no party, and no need for
it. The progress of the species, owing to the more com-
plete construction of the intellectual machine, would go
on steadily and safely without the drag.
Were we asked to give in one word the main character-
istic of the present age, that one word would be ‘MOTION.”
We are living fast as a nation : the railways of the coun-
try are typical of its general career. There is as large an
amount of change condensed in a few years of the present
as in centuries of the past. Where are the old parties of
the country P Vanished during the last two twelvemonths.
There is scarce an institution of the empire, secular or
ecclesiastical, that has not wholly altered its character since
the death of George IV. We have seen the cycle of the
two previous centuries repeated during the last twenty
years; and the Free Church need scarce expect wholly to
escape the influence of the time. It was with direct re-
ference to this state of things that we have often felt the
presence of Chalmers among us to be so peculiarly valu-
able. With greatly more energy than any other man of
the body, he had also greatly more of the vis inertia that
withstands the influence of a current from without. He
formed, in one important phase of his character, a great
immovable anchor, that moored the vessel of the Free
Church right over the Disruption ; and, now that he is
gone, there must be sedulous watch kept, lest, yielding to
the insidious tendencies of the time, we drift away. Wash-
ington Irving has compared some of our great writers whose
works have fixed the language, to huge trees flourishing
7TAZAZ. A UAVAEAEA / OF CAE/A1/A1/A2/2.S. 227
beside the banks of a river, that cast out an immense
extent of closely reticulated rootage, and thus preserve
around them the loose soil, which, save for the protection
they afford, would be washed out by the hollowing eddies,
and swept to the sea. The illustration, in another and
different application, brings out our idea of one of the
great characteristics of Chalmers. He formed such a tree,
and secured the institution in which he had taken deep
root, and which sheltered under his shadow, against the
disintegrating wear of the current. But the stately oak
has fallen in its place ; and it were well Surely that, fully
aware of what his presence did for us, and of the peculiar
dangers to which we are exposed now that he is away,
we should be taking note of our true position, and of the
means by which it may best be retained. There is still
strong help in the God which he served, and potency and
wisdom in the doctrines which he asserted, and the princi-
ples which he illustrated and maintained,—June 5, 1847.
ST. M. A R G A RET’S W E L L.
THE differences which exist among men in matters of pure
taste have long since become proverbial. The most dis-
putatious among us soon arrive at an agreement respect-
ing all that can be measured, weighed, or counted. No
one contends that the pound Scots is equal to the pound
sterling, or that the English mile is of such ample measure
as the Scotch one, even when the latter is divested of the
“bittock.’ And though there was some dispute a few years
ago regarding the comparative heights of Ben Macdhui
and Ben Nevis, and though the old traveller William Lith-
gow was severe, about two centuries earlier, on ‘the igno-
rant presumption of blind cosmographers, who in their
maps made England longer than Scotland,’ both points
have since been very satisfactorily settled,—the one by
the Government surveyors, the other by those very cosmo-
graphers who, with all their blindness, have made it, we
think, sufficiently apparent that the said William was lite-
rally magnifying his country when he described it as ‘out-
stripping the southern one in length by a hundred and
twenty miles.” In matters of taste, however, we have no
such standard for settling a difference as that furnished by
the balance or the measuring chain. It used to be dis-
puted, in the early days of the writer, whether Byron or
228
ST MAA'GAA’A, 7”.S. WAE ZZ. 229
Sir Walter Scott was the greater genius; but we must
confess that we failed to see the dispute very satisfactorily
settled, even on the occasions on which we ourselves took
2. part in it. And as for those controversies respecting the
merits of rival preachers, into which attached members of
their congregations sometimes enter, we know not that we
ever yet saw one of them settled, with the full agreement
of the contending parties, after the same manner. The
respective altitudes of Ben Nevis and Ben Macdhui were
soon determined ; but when did the people of the church
in Crown Court, London, ever agree with the people of
any other church in the world in their estimate of the
altitudes of the Rev. Dr. Cumming? We know not, how-
ever, a finer illustration of the great uncertainty of the
standard of taste than the one unintentionally furnished
us by Hume in his well-known essay on the subject.
After professing to show that philosophy and common
sense are alike hostile to the idea of an absolute standard
for the determination of either real beauty or real de-
formity, he goes on to say that, ‘ though this axiom, by
passing into a proverb, seems to have attained the sanction
of common sense, there is certainly a species of common
Sense which opposes it, — at least serves to modify and
restrain it.” “Whoever,’ he adds, “would assert an equality
of genius and eloquence between Bunyan and Addison,
would be thought to defend no less an extravagance than
if he had maintained a molehill to be as high as Teneriffe,
or a pond as extensive as the ocean.” Alas ! did ever
hapless critic fall upon so unlucky an illustration before?
230 A.D/NBURGH AND /TS AWEIGHBOURAOOD.
Poor Bunyan — though Cowper, Johnson, and Franklin
were all secretly admiring him at the time—was greatly at
a discount when Hume wrote ; nor was the philosophic
Sceptic, with his cold, meagre fancy, and his exquisitely
clear though decidedly Frenchified English, fitted, either by
nature or education, rightly to appreciate for himself one
of the purest Saxon styles Englishman had ever written,
and one of the most vigorous imaginations man had ever
possessed ; and so, in setting off the merits of Addison,
a writer that lay more within the range of his appreciation,
—he could bethink him, in an unlucky hour, of no fitter
foil than Bunyan. It would be, of course, wholly idle to
remark at this time of day, that though Addison was a
tasteful allegorist, neither the Vision of Marrañon nor the
Wision of Mirza at all equal in impressiveness or sustained
effect the allegories of the two Pilgrims, Christian and his
wife, or even that of the Holy War; or that the style of
either the ZXia/ogues on Medals, or of the 7% ave/s in Italy,
with all its fresh and easy flow, is Superior to that of the
Aiſgrim's Progress. And yet, though at this time of day
it must be wholly unnecessary to argue the point, we can-
not deny ourselves the pleasure of quoting, as a set-off
against the estimate of Hume, the essentially just criticism
of Macaulay on both the style and the inventive powers
of Bunyan. “We are not afraid to say,” remarks the juster
critic, “that though there were many clever men in Eng-
land during the latter half of the seventeenth century,
there were only two minds which possessed the imagi-
native faculty in a very eminent degree. One of these
S7. /l/AA’GA RAE 7’’.S. VVE/C/. 23 J
I
minds produced the Paradise Zost, the other the Pigrim's
Arogress.’ And not less decided is the critic's estimate
of the style which Hume so depreciated. ‘The style of
Bunyan,’ he says, “is delightful to every reader, and in-
valuable as a study to every person who wishes to obtain
a wide command over the English language. The vocabu-
lary is the vocabulary of the common people. There is
not an expression, if we except a few technical terms of
theology, which would puzzle the rudest peasant. We
have observed several pages which do not contain a single
word of more than two syllables; yet no writer has said
more exactly what he meant to say. For magnificence,
for pathos, for vehement exhortation, for subtle disqui-
sition,-for every purpose of the poet, the Orator, and the
divine,—this homely dialect—the dialect of plain work-
ing men—was perfectly sufficient. There is no book in
our literature on which we would so readily stake the
fame of the old unpolluted English language, no book
which shows so well how rich that language is in its own
proper wealth, and how little it has been improved by all
that it has borrowed.” Such is the estimate of Macaulay,
as opposed to that of Hume. Nor can we doubt that it
is now generally received as the correct one. And yet,
who can doubt that it serves to enhance the value of the
illustration of the elder historian and critic, as an excellent
though unintentional piece of evidence respecting his first
proposition,-the non-existence of an absolute standard of
taste P For assuredly, did there exist such an absolute
standard, Hume would never have made choice of Bunyan
232 EDINBURGH AND ITS AWEIGHBOURHOOD.
as a foil to set off the peculiar excellences of Addison
either as a writer of English or as an allegorist.
Our introduction is rather a lengthened one, regarded
as simply an apology for what is to follow, -a question
of pure taste, on which we ask our Edinburgh readers
to decide. There has been, however, not a little discus-
sion of late years in the Scottish capital on matters of
this nature. It has been discussed, for instance, whether
the Queen's Park should be laid out with trees, or left
in its present comparative nakedness ; after what style
the Meadows ought to be improved ; where the most
suitable site is to be found for the old church of Mary
of Guelders; and whether the new Exhibition Buildings
should have been erected on the Mound, where they at
present stand, or elsewhere. And we believe that, on at
least all the points already settled, - for the old Trinity
Church still wanders, like that of Loretto of old, in quest
of a resting-place, — the decisions, notwithstanding the
want of an absolute standard to decide by, have been
sound and good. And now for the special point of verſu
on which we are desirous the Edinburgh public should
arrive at a decision. They are acquainted with the for-
lorn little village of Restalrig, in the midst of its mud flats.
and fetid meadows, and which has so greatly changed its
character for the worse since the drainage of Edinburgh
has been changed, in the course of modern improvement,
so very much for the better. The time is comparatively
not remote since the flat valley in which it lies was tra-
versed by a small clear brook, that, rising in the Hunter's
S7. Al/AA’GAA’Aº 7’’.S. WAE Z.Z. 233
Bog, and receiving minute accessions in its course from
two very celebrated Saints' wells, St. Anthony's and St.
Margaret's, found its way to the Sea, after Sweeping past
the old ruinous church, through the arid but fragrant
wastes of the Figget Whins. Even so late as 1790,
when the now gloomy mansion-house of Marionville, in
its immediate neighbourhood, was the scene of the gayest
private theatricals perhaps in Britain, and ere its posses.
sor had gained for himself the name of the ‘Fortunate
- Duellist, and become one of the most unhappy of men,
Restalrig was an eminently pleasant suburban village,
surrounded by rich gardens and cheerful fields. At an
earlier time—not greatly earlier, however, than the first
beginnings of the Reformation —it more than equalled
the town of Leith in importance; and at an after time,
its magnificent church, on which successive kings had
lavished their gifts, had become such a receptacle of
imagery, that the Reformers, finding themselves unable
to purge it, had to order its demolition. In a greatly
earlier age, when all that existed of Edinburgh was but
a rude hill-fort, perched on a rock that rose from amid a
wooded waste, glittering with blue lochans, Restalrig had
its chapel erected over the tomb of a female saint, who
died there in the fourth century, and by whose relics
miracles used to be wrought. It was famous, too, for
its holy well, dedicated centuries ago to St. Margaret,
and the haunt for ages of many a pilgrim. But evil
times began to rise on the village. First, the General
Assembly of 1560 ordered that its magnificent church
*
234 EDINBURGH AND ITS AWEIGHBOURAOOD.
should, as a ‘monument of idolatry, be utterly casten
down and destroyed.’ And about eleven years after,
when Kirkaldy of Grange held the Castle of Edinburgh
for the Queen, the Port of the Nether Bow was built
with a portion of the materials derived from it. The
village which, during the siege of Leith under the regency
of Mary of Guise, had accommodated no small portion
of the English army, gradually dwindled away ; but it
was not until about the beginning of the present century
that the amenities of the place began to be destroyed.
Lying in a prolongation of the valley which not only
carries off, as has been said, the wholesome drainage of
the Arthur Seat group of hills, with their pleasant springs
and runnels, but also drainage of a very different kind,
—that of by very much the larger part of the Old Town
of Edinburgh, – it has been inundated, from the copious
introduction of water into the city, and the Substitution
of effective drains for the old practice which Samuel
Johnson, during his visit, “nosed in the dark,' by a river
of liquid manure, which, by being spread out, on the
irrigating principle, on both sides of it, has encircled it
with fetid and pestilential meadows. It has, in fine,
become a place of mud and manure.
But other evils have overtaken the village, which,
though they have militated Sadly against its ancient as-
sociations, are not altogether of So unmixed a nature.
We formed our first acquaintance with it rather more
than thirty years ago. It was at that time a place of
great resort for its tea-gardens, and, though the foul-
ST MARGARAET’S WEZZ. 235
water meadows had begun to encroach on its amenities,
had many pleasant and interesting points. We still re-
member the interest it excited when, on strolling one
day into its churchyard, we unexpectedly saw, in front
of the ruins, the humble tombstone of ‘Henry Brougham,
Esq. of Brougham Hall,'—the father of the distinguished
statesman ; and on an older tomb immediately beside it,
the name of a family dear to every admirer of the Cove-
nanters, – that of the Johnstons of Warriston. There,
too, in an ancient vault, — an exquisite piece of Gothic
architecture of the middle English style, and curiously
covered atop by a thicket of slanted yews, - we recog-
nised the old burial-place of the Logans of Restalrig.
It still contained at the time the tombstone of a Lady
Logan of Restalrig, who died in 1596,- only four years
previous to the Gowrie conspiracy; and it seems to have
been, from its damp, dark mould, that the skeleton of
Logan himself was exhumed, some six or eight twelve-
months after, to take its place at the bar of the Privy
Council, and to have sentence of forfeiture and infamy
passed against it, for the share taken by the living man
in that mysterious transaction. But what we deemed the
most interesting relict in the village or its neighbourhood
was to be found a few hundred yards to the west, beside
the broken pathway which at that time winded between
the hamlet and the Abbey Hill. It was one of the
two Saints' wells to which we have already referred, that
of St. Margaret. An exquisite piece of old architecture
rose over a hexagonal cell, groined in the corners, and
236 EDINBURGH AND ITS AWEIGHBOURHOOD.
with a central pillar rising from amid the pellucid water,
and which furnished a resting-place to the massive ribs
that bent over it. No record fixed the age of the
erection: it was palpably not older than at least the
earlier eras of the pointed style, for such was the form
of its curiously involved arches; and yet such was its
antiquity, that the ornate tomb of the Logans—an erec-
tion of mayhap the times of James III. — has been pro-
nounced by the authorities a palpable imitation of it.
Directly over the mossy dome in which the erection
terminated atop, there rose an alder tree, gnarled and
old; but when we first saw it, in the clear sunshine of
a delicious morning in early summer, thickly speckled
with its broad umbelliferous blossoms, it formed a not
unpleasant object; while a little beyond there stood a
Small picturesque cottage, humble and not very tidy, but
altogether such a one as the youthful limner would have
chosen for a first sketch. Occupying a slope, too, the
corner in which cottage and well were situated had
escaped at least the immediate contamination, if not the
unsightly neighbourhood, of the fetid meadows and foul
water. But another, and at this time wholly unexpected,
enemy was at hand. The North British Railway now
runs at some little distance above the saint's well,—and
well and railway might have continued to exist harmoni-
ously together ; but unluckily the sloping bank was marked
out for a station, and the foundations of a great building,
designed for a sort of general workshop, were laid down
on the site of the spring. The picturesque cottage was .
ST, MA RGA RAE 7”.S. WAE/L/. 237
pulled down, the old gnarled tree grubbed up, and the
workmen were proceeding to raze the little Gothic erec-
tion that had protected the water for more than six
centuries, when they were arrested by an interdict. A
sort of compromise was effected : the great building was
erected on the purposed site; but there was a sort of
open drain left under its foundations, to communicate
between the well and the public road ; and such of the
curious as have zeal enough to enter a repulsive-looking
hole, little more than four feet in height, — to descend
by a few rude steps, to wade through a gloomy passage
floored with Ordure, and charged with an atmosphere
somewhat resembling that which reeks over a dunghill
in a warm day-may still find, just where daylight fails,
the Saint's spring welling up in darkness and disgrace
under its canopy of ribbed stone. Had it been utterly
destroyed, it would have existed as at least an agree-
able recollection ; whereas not a single association can
be connected with it in its present condition that is not
unpleasing,
Let us now state our question. We have said that two
Saints' wells sent their waters to swell the little brook
which, in the better days of the village, found its way to
the sea through the flat valley of Restalrig. The fate of
one of these we have just related. The other, situated
about three-quarters of a mile higher up the valley, still
comes gushing to the light from its hill-side, as free and
pure as when the saint first took it under his patronage, or
as when, at a later period, a power vastly greater than his
238 EDINBURGH AND ITS AWEIGHBOURHOOD.
rendered it classic, by giving it an abiding name in Scot-
tish song. We of course refer to St. Anthony's well,—so
well known in all its striking features to at least our
Edinburgh readers, many of whom may have never heard
of the other, and whose name must be familiar over the
world to all acquainted with our ballad literature. The
picturesque ruins of St. Anthony's chapel,-classical also
from their introduction into song and legend,- in espe-
cial from the prominence assigned to them as one of
the features in the trysting scene in the Heart of Mid-
Zołhian,—rises immediately above, and would surely har-
monize well with the introduction into the scene of one
ruin more. And why not set free the prisoned building
that now lies in darkness behind its vestibule of dung at
St. Margaret's, and place it over the spring of St. Anthony?
Not only would it furnish a new point of interest to the
Park, already so rich in these, but it would serve also to
keep even St. Margaret's itself more in remembrance than
it can at present be, in its sunk and degraded condition.
Of its interest as a piece of architecture, independent of
its great antiquity, the reader may be enabled to judge
from the following description by a very competent autho-
rity,+Dr. Daniel Wilson, author of ZŽe Arehistoric Ammals
of Scotland:—
* Not far from the ancient collegiate church of Restalrig,” he says in
his Memorials of Ædinburgh, “on the old road to Holyrood Abbey, is
the beautiful Gothic well dedicated to St. Margaret, the patron Saint
of Scotland. An octagonal [hexagonal] building rises internally to the
height of about four and a half feet of plain ashlar work, with a stone
ledge and seat running round seven [five] of the sides, while the eighth
ST. A/AA’GAA’AC 7'?.S" WAE/L/L. 239
[sixthl is occupied by a pointed arch, which forms the entrance to the
well. From the centre of the water, which fills the whole area of the
building, pure as in the days of the pious Queen, a decorated pillar
rises to the same height as the walls, with grotesque gurgoils, from
which the water has originally been made to flow. Above the spring
is a beautiful groined roof, presenting, with the ribs that rise from cor-
responding corbels at each of eight [six] angles of the building, a singu-
larly rich effect when illuminated by the reflected light from the water
below. A few years since, this curious fountain stood by the side of
the ancient and little-frequented cross road leading from the Abbey
Hill to the village of Restalrig. A fine old alder tree, with its knotted
and furrowed branches, spread a luxuriant covering over its grass-grown
top, and a rustic little thatched cottage stood in front of it; forming
altogether a most attractive object of antiquarian pilgrimage. But
alas !’
It would be surely worth while bringing such a curiosity
to the open day and the fresh air, were it but again to see
the dancing sunlight reflected from the water on the richly
fretted roof, grey with the lichens of many centuries.—
AVovember Io, 1855.
GEOILOGY OF THE BASS.
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'069 I NI GILVIS CIGÐI HIIRTOJI SLI NI SSVT QIEJ,







GEOLOGY OF THE BASS.
‘THERE are a small knot of us,’ said a literary friend, ad-
dressing the writer one evening about four months ago,
‘getting up what will, I daresay, be a rather curious
volume on the Bass ; and to-morrow we visit the rock in
a body to procure materials. Professor John Fleming
undertakes the zoology of the work ; Professor Balfour its
botany; Professor Thomas M'Crie the historical portion,
civil and ecclesiastical ; Professor M'Crie's friend, Mr.
James Anderson, a learned Covenanter, grapples with the
biographies of what are termed the Bass Martyrs; while
your humble servant conducts the business part of the
concern, and in his Capacity of purveyor-general waits on
you. Our to-morrow's expedition still lacks a geologist,
and our literary speculation Some one learned enough in
pre-Adamite history to contribute the portion of the work
analogous to that earlier part of the Welsh genealogy which
preceded the famous note: “N.B.-About this, time the
world was created.” Professor M'Crie goes no higher
than the days of St. Baldred the Culdee, who died on the
Bass some time early in the seventh century, and was in-
terred entire in three several burying-grounds at once.
Will you not go with us to-morrow, and contribute to our
245
246 GAE O/LOGY OF 7A. A. B.A.S.S.
book the geologic history of the island, from its first ap-
pearance, or before, down to the times of St. Baldred P’
“I spent a day on the Bass some four or five summers
ago,' I replied, ‘and saw, I believe, almost the little all to
be seen on it by the geologist. It consists of one huge
mass of homogeneous trap, Scarce more varied in its tex-
ture than a piece of cast-metal ; and what would you have
me to say about a mass of homogeneous trap P’
“Anything or everything,’ was the rejoinder. “Dr. Man-
tell writes an ingenious little book on a flint pebble scarcely
larger than a hen's egg. You may easily write at least
Žart of a little book on a magnificent mass of rock, loftier
by a deal than the dome of St Paul's, and a full mile in
circumference. At all events, come with us; and if you
do not find much to say about the rock itself, you can
eke out your description by notices of the geology of the
adjacent coast, and here and there stick in an occasional
episode, commemorative of whatever adventures may be.
fall us by the way. We regard it as one of the essential
requisites of our little volume that all its science be con-
siderably diluted with gossip.’ .
I was unlucky enough to miss making one in next day's
party, all through lack of a railway bill. And yet, con-
vinced that the poet Gray was in the right in deeming “a
remark made on the spot worth a cartload of recollection,'
I could not set myself to write the geology of the Bass
with aught approaching to comfort, without having first
renewed with the rock the acquaintance broken off for
years. But engagements interfered, and weeks and months
GAEO/COGY OF 7"HE BASS. 247
slipped away, and summer passed into autumn, and autumn
into winter; and yet the Bass, inaccessible at times during
the boisterous and gloomy season of the year which had
now set in for weeks together, was still unvisited. I had
fixed on one leisure day as convenient for the journey,
and it rose foul with rain. I had selected another, and
there came on during the night a storm from the sea, that
sent up the white waves a full hundred feet against the
eastern precipices of the island, and bathed the old ram-
part walls in spray. I staked my last chance on yet a
third leisure day; and, though far advanced in November,
the morning broke clear and bright as a morning in May.
Half an hour after sunrise I was awaiting the downward
train at the Portobello station. There blew a breeze from
the west, just strong enough, though it scarce waved the
withered grass on the slopes below, to set the wires of the
electric telegraph a-vibrating overhead, and they rung sono-
rous and clear in the quiet of the morning, like the strings
of Some gigantic musical instrument. How many thousand
passengers must have hurried along the rails during the last
twelvemonth, their ears so filled by the grinding noises of
the wheels and the Snorting of the engine, as never to have
discovered that each stretch from post to post of the wires
that accompany them throughout their journey forms a
great Æolian harp, full, when the wind blows, of all rich
tones, from those of the murmurs of myriads of bees collect-
ing honey-dew among the leaves of a forest, to those of the
howlings of the night hurricane amid the open turrets and
deserted corridors of some haunted castle. I bethought
248 GEOLOGY OF THE BASS.
- me—as the train, half enveloped in Smoke and steam,
came rushing up with shriek and groan, and the melody
above, wild yet singularly pleasing, was lost in the din—
of Wordsworth's fine lines on ‘the voice of Tendency,” and
found that they had become suddenly linked in my mind
with a new association : -
‘The mighty stream of TENDENCY
Utters, for elevation of our thought,
A clear sonorous voice, inaudible
To the vast multitude, whose doom it is
To throng the clamorous highways of the world.”
The Edinburgh reader must have often marked the tract
of comparatively level ground which intervenes between
Arthur Seat and the Pentlands on the one hand, and those
heights beyond Tranent on the other that merge into the
Lammermoor Hills on the South, and piece on to the trap
eminences of Haddington and North Berwick on the east.
It furnishes no prominent feature on which the eye can
repose. Nay, from this circumstance, though occupying a
large portion of the area of the landscape, we find that an
elegant poet, the ‘Delta’ of Blackwood's Magazine, wholly
omits it in his description of the scene in which it
OCCUITS :
‘Traced like a map, the landscape lies
In cultured beauty, stretching wide :
There Pentland’s green acclivities,
There ocean, with its azure tide,-
There Arthur Seat, and, gleaming through
Thy southern wing, Dun-Edin blue !
While in the orient, Lammer's daughters,
A distant giant range,_are seen ;
North Berwick Law, with cone of green,
And Bass amid the waters.”
GAE O/LOGY O/7 THE B.A.S.S. 249
The natural objects enumerated here, of course omitting
the ocean, are the imposing eminences that form the op-
posite shores of the middle expanse,_Arthur Seat and the
Pentlands on the one hand, and the Lammermoors, North
Berwick Law, and the Bass, on the other. And the parts
of the Frith opposite these boldly-featured regions partake
strikingly of their character. The middle space that fronts
the flat district ashore does not present a single island;
whereas directly opposite the upper tract of hill and valley,
we find numerous hill-tops rising above the water, and
forming the islands of Inchkeith, Inchcolm, Inchgarvie,
Inchmykrie, Carcraig, and Cramond; while opposite the
lower tract we find another scene of half submerged hills
existing as the islets of Eyebroughy, Fidra, the Iamb,
Craigleith, the Bass, and the May. Now, this inconspicu-
ous flat space between, which leaves the sea so open to
the mariner, and the land so free to the plough, and over
which the first twelve miles of my journey along the rails
lay this morning, forms the eastern Coal-deposit, or basin,
of the Lothians. The traveller may distinguish, on either
hand, from the windows of his carriage, the numerous
workings that stud the surface, by their tall brick chimneys
and the smoke of their engines ; and mark the frequent
train sweeping by, laden with coals for the distant city.
To conceive of the deposit in its character as a basin, one
has to become acquainted with not merely those external
features of the country to which I have adverted, but also
with the internal arrangement of its strata. Standing on
the banks of a Highland lake of profound depth, such as
250 GEO/LOG V OF THE BA.S.S.
Loch Ness, or the upper portion of Loch Lomond, one
can easily conceive of the rocky hollow in which the
waters are contained, as a vast bowl or basin, and this
altogether irrespective of the form of the subaerial portion
of the valley that rises over the surface. We can conceive
of the rocky hollow occupied by the lake, as a true basin,
even should it occur in the middle of so flat a moor, that
in winter, when the water is frozen, and a snow-storm lies
thick on the earth, the surface of moor and lake presented
one continuous plain. We can conceive of a steep sloping
side trending into a rocky bottom many fathoms below ;
then the opposite side rising in an angle equally steep ;
and, last of all, the horizontal line of ice or water stretch-
ing across the abyss, like the string across the curve formed
by a bow bent tight by the archer. The Coal Measures of
the Lothians represent pretty nearly such a lake ; and their
shores—though, unlike those of the lake of my illustration,
sufficiently bold to strike the eye as the leading features of
the landscape in which they are included—bear no com-
parison in height to the profound depth of the submerged
portion at their feet. The ancient strata trend downwards
in a steep angle from their sides, to the depth of at least
three thousand feet, and then, flattening in the centre of the
lake into a curved bottom, rise against the opposite emi-
nences in an angle equally steep. Were the Coal Measures
to be removed from that deep basin of the more ancient
rocks in which they lie, there would intervene between
Arthur Seat and the Pentlands on the west, and the Garl-
ton Hills and Gullan Point on the east, the profoundest
GEOzogy of THE BASS. 25 I
valley in Scotland,-a valley considerably more profound
than Corriskin, Glen Nevis, or Glencoe. The twelve miles
of railway which intervene between Piershill Barracks and
the Garlton Hills may be regarded as a sort of suspension
bridge stretched over the vast gulf; and the profound
depth below is occupied by one hundred and seventy beds
of shale, Sandstone, coal, and clay, ranged in long irregular
curves, that lie parallel to the bottom, and of which no
fewer than thirty-three are seams of coal. And over all,
as their proper covering, like the stratum of ice and snow
spread over the surface of the Highland lake of my illus-
tration, lie the boulder and brick clays, beds of sand and
gravel, and the vegetable mould.
On reaching the station-house at Drem, I transferred
myself from the railway vehicle to an omnibus that plies
between the station and North Berwick; and we drove
across the country. A coach-top is not quite the place
from which the geology of a district may be most carefully
studied; and yet it has its advantages too. There cannot
be a better point of observation from which to acquaint
one's self with what may be termed the geological physi-
ognomy of a country. One sees, besides, of what materials
the walls that line the sides of the way are composed ; and
they almost always furnish their modicum of evidence re.
garding the prevailing rocks. When speeding along the
railway over the Coal Measures, the traveller finds that
the fences are constructed of sandstone ; whereas in the
district across which the omnibus here Conveys him, he
sees that they are almost all built of trap. And with this
252 GAEO ZOG Y OF 7TAZAZ A.A.S.S.
piece of evidence the features of the surrounding landscape
entirely harmonize. The general surface of the country
is soft and rich ; but abrupt rocks—the broken bones of
the land—here and there stick out high over the surface,
as if to mark the wounds and fractures of ancient conflict.
There are the Garlton Hills behind ; a long ridge of feld-
spar porphyry rises immediately on the left; on the right
the greenstone eminence on which the old Castle of
Dirleton is built ascends abruptly from beside the smooth
area of one of the loveliest, most English-looking villages
in Scotland ; northwards, encircled by the sea, we may
descry the precipitous trap islets of Fidra, the Lamb, and
Craigleith ; Several inland Crags, more in the foreground,
and half hidden in wood, stud the sandy champaign which
here lines the coast; while on the east, immensely more
huge than the hugest of the Egyptian pyramids, and, as
seen from this point, scarce less regularly pyramidal in
its outline, towards the noble monarch of the scene,—
“North Berwick Law, with come of green.’
In passing the ancient Castle of Dirleton, which, like
the Castles of Dunbar, Edinburgh, Stirling, and Dumbar-
ton, owed its degree of impregnability as a stronghold
mainly to its abrupt trap-rock, and which stood siege
against the English in the days of Edward I, it occurred
to me as not a little curious, that the early geological
history of a district should so often seem typical of its
subsequent civil history. If a country's geological history
was very disturbed,—if the trap-rocks broke out from be-
low, and tilted up its strata in a thousand abrupt angles,
GEOzogy OF THE BASS. 253
steep precipices, and yawning chasms, the chance is as
ten to one that there succeeded, when man Came upon
the scene, a history, scarce less disturbed, of fierce wars,
protracted sieges, and desperate battles. The stormy
morning, during which merely the angry elements contend,
is succeeded in almost every instance by a stormy day,
maddened by the turmoil of human passion. A moment's
further cogitation, while it greatly dissipated the mystery,
served to show through what immense periods mere physi-
cal causes may continue to operate with moral effect; and
how, in the purposes of Him who saw the end from the
beginning, a scene of fiery confusion,-of roaring waves
and heaving earthquakes,—of ascending hills and deepen-
ing valleys, may have been closely associated with the
right development, and ultimate dignity and happiness, of
the yet unborn moral agent of creation, –responsible
man. It is amid these centres of geologic disturbance,
the natural strongholds of the earth, that the true battles
of the race—the battles of civilisation and civil liberty—
have been successfully maintained by handfuls of hardy
men, against the despot-led myriads of the plains. The
reader, in glancing over a map of Europe and the countries
adjacent, on which the mountain groupes are marked, will
at once perceive that Greece and the Holy Land, Scotland
and the Swiss Cantons, formed centres of great Plutonic dis-
turbance of this character. They had each their geologic
tremors and perturbations,—their protracted periods of
eruption and earthquake, -long ere their analogous civil
history, with its ages of convulsion and revolution, in
254 GAEO ZOG Y OF 7A/A2 B.A.S.S.
which man was the agent, had yet commenced its course.
And, indirectly at least, the disturbed civil history was, in
each instance, a consequence of the disturbed geologic one.
While pursuing the idea, a sudden turning of the road
brought me full in view of the Bass, looming tall and
stately through a faint grey haze, that had dropped its
veil of thin gauze over the stern features of the rock.
But the Bass, though one of the Plutonic strongholds of
the earth, and certainly not the least impregnable among
the number, has, so far as the policy and character of its
old masters are exhibited in the record, no very ennobling
history. It has been strong chiefly on the side of the
despot and the tyrant. Its name appears in our earlier
literature only to be associated with lying legends and
false miracles. Then, after forming for centuries the site
of a stronghold little remarkable in the annals of the
country, save that the unfortunate James I. took sail from
it for France previous to his long captivity in England,
the rock was converted into a State prison, at a time when
to worship God agreeably to the dictates of conscience
was a grave State offence. And so its dungeons came
to be filled with not a few of the country's best men. At
a still later period it held out for James VII., and was the
last spot in Great Britain that recognised as legitimate the
event which placed the Constitution of the empire on its
present happy basis. And then, for a time, it became a
haunt of lawless pirates, the dread of defenceless fisher-
men and the honest trader. How reconcile with so dis-
reputable a history the feelings of respect and veneration
GAEO/LOGY OF 7 A/A2 A3A.S.S. 255
--"
with which the old rock is so frequently surveyed and
so extensively associated P Johnson, in his singularly
vigorous and manly poem, which poets such as Sir Walter
Scott have so greatly admired, but which mere critics
have censured as non-poetical, speaks of a virtue “sovereign
o'er transmuted ill.’ Virtue does possess a transmutative
power. The death of patriots and heroes under the hands
of public executioners confers honour on scaffolds and
gibbets; the prison-cells of martyrs and confessors breathe
forth recollections of the endurance of the persecuted, that
absorb all those harsher associations which link on to the
memory of the persecutor. Nay, even instruments of
fierce torture come to be regarded less as the repulsive
mementoes of a ruthless cruelty, than as the valued relics
of a high heroism. And hence the interest that attaches
to the Bass.
It is now many years since I gazed on this rock for the
first time from the Frith beyond ; but the recollection of
the emotions which it excited is still fresh. Some of its
more celebrated sufferers came from the immediate neigh-
bourhood of the locality in which I passed my childhood
and boyhood, with my first years of labour, a little nor-
thern Oasis, in which, during the times of the persecution of
Charles II. and his brother, Presbyterianism was as strong
and vital as in any district of the south or west ; and the
‘ echoes of their fame'—to employ the language of Words-
worth—‘ring through’ that part of ‘Scotland to this hour.’
In the quarry in which I first became acquainted with
Severe toil, and an observer of geological phenomena, I
256 GEOzoGP OF 7:HE BASS.
used to know when it was time to cease from my labours
for the day by marking the evening Sun resting over the
high-lying farmhouse of Brea, the little patrimony from
which one of the captives of the Bass—Fraser—derived his
title. And from the grassy knoll above the hollow I could
see the parish churches of two of its other more noted
captives, -M-Gilligen of Alness, and Hog of Kiltearn.
Hence many an imagination about the rocky Bass, with
its high-lying walks and dizzy precipices, had filled my
mind long ere I had seen it. I have now before me,
among the jottings of an old journal, a brief record of the
feelings with which I first surveyed it from the deck of a
sailing vessel ; nor, though the passage does Smack, I find,
of the enthusiasm of early youth, am I greatly ashamed of
it —‘We are bearing up the Frith in gallant style, within
two miles of the shore, and shall in a few hours, if the
breeze fail not, be within sight of Edinburgh. Yonder is
the Bass, rising like an immense tower out of the sea.
Times have changed since the excellent of the earth were
condemned by the unjust and the dissolute to wear out
life on that solitary rock. My eyes fill as I gaze on it !
The persecutors have gone to their place : the last vial has
long since been poured out on the heads of the infatuated
race who, in their short-sighted policy, would fain have
rendered men faithful to their princes by making them
untrue to their God. But the noble constancy of the per-
secuted, the high fortitude of the martyr, still live. There
is a halo encircling the brow of that rugged rock; and
from many a solitary grave, and many a lonely battle-field,
GAE O/LOGY OF 7TA/AE /3A.S.S. 257
there come voices and thunderings like those which issued
of old from within the cloud, that tell us how this world,
with all its little interests, must pass away, but that for
those who fight the good fight, and keep the faith, there is
a rest that is eternal.” - - . - * > .
It is not uninstructive to remark, from facts and feelings
such as these,_and the instances on record are very great,
—how much more permanently good connects itself with
matter, in the associations of the human mind, than evil.
The wickedness of the wicked cannot so infeoff itself, if
one may so speak, in even their contrivances of most dia-
bolical design—screws, and boots, and thumbkins, dolorous
dungeons, and scaffolds hung round with the insignia of
disgrace,—but that the virtues of their victims seize hold
upon them, and so entirely appropriate them in the recol-
lection of future generations, that the claim of the original
possessor is lost. What a striking comment on the sacred
text, ‘The memory of the just is blessed ; but the name of
the wicked shall rot l’ It seems to throw a gleam of light,
too, athwart a deeply mysterious subject. It was a greatly
worse time than the present in this country, when the dun-
geons of yonder rock were crowded with the country's most
conscientious men. And yet how intense the interest with
which we look back upon these times, and on the rock
itself, as a sort of stepping-stone by which to ascend to
their Scenes of ready sacrifice, firm endurance, and high
resolve ; and how very poor would not the national history
become, were all its records of resembling purport and cha-
racter to be blotted out ! The evil of the past has served
. R
258 GE O/LOGY OF 7"HAE AEA.S.S.
but to enhance its good. May there not be a time coming
when the just made perfect shall look back upon all ill,
moral and physical, with a similar feeling ; when the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil shall grow once more
beside the tree of life in the Paradise of God, but when
its fruit, rendered wholesome by the transmutative power,
shall be the subject of no punitive prohibition ; and when
the world which we inhabit, wrapped round with holiest
associations, as once the dungeon-house and Scaffold of a
Divine Sufferer, shall be regarded—disreputable as we may
now deem its annals—with reverence and respect, as the
Bass of the universe, and its history be deemed perhaps
the most precious record in the archives of heaven P
I found a friend waiting me at North Berwick,” who
kindly accompanied me in my exploratory ramble along
the shore, and who, as his acquaintance with the district
was greatly more minute than mine, enabled me to econo-
mize much time. We passed eastwards under the cliffs,
and soon found ourselves on the prevailing trap-tuff of the
district, a curiously compounded rock, evidently of Plutonic
origin, and yet as regularly stratified as almost any rock
belonging to the Neptunean series. The body of the tuff
consists of loosely aggregated grains, in some of the beds
larger, in some more minute, of the various trap-rocks and
minerals, such as green-earth, wacke, a finely levigated
basalt, and decomposed greenstone ; and, enclosed in this
yielding matrix, there lie fragments of the harder traps,
Some sharp and angular, others water-worn and round, that
*James Cook, Esq., one of her Majesty's heralds.
GAE O/LOGY OF 7 A/AE B.A.S.S. 259
vary in size from a hazel-nut to a hogshead. It encloses
also occasional fragments of the aqueous rocks,—here a
mass of red sandstone, there a block of lime. There occa-
sionally occur in it, too, viewed over large areas, trap and
sedimentary rocks of vast size, beds of the aqueous series
many hundred feet in extent, and masses of the Plutonic,
that exist as tall precipices or extensive skerries; but they,
of course, can be regarded as no part of the tuff. As might
be premised from its incoherent texture, we find it to be
an exceedingly yielding rock. Wherever the lofty line of
rampart which it here presents to the coast encroaches on
the sea, we perceive that, hollowed beneath by the dash of
the waves, it exhibits ranges of bold over-beetling preci-
pices; while, wherever it retires, we discover that it has
weathered down into steep green slopes, with here and
there some of the harder masses which it encloses sticking
picturesquely through. The enigma that most imperatively
demands being read in the case of this rock is the union of
sedimentary arrangement with Plutonic materials; nor does
it seem a riddle particularly difficult of solution.
In the works of the Abbé Spallanzani, a distinguished
continental naturalist who flourished during the latter half
of the last century, the reader may find an elaborate de-
scription of the volcano of Stromboli, one of the Lipari
Islands. There are, it would seem, several respects in
which this volcano furnishes peculiar facilities to the ob-
Server. It occurs, not on the apex, but on the side, of a
mountain ; and is so entirely commanded, in consequence,
by the heights which rise over it, that the visitor, if the
26o GAE O/LOGY OF 7A/E B.A.S.S.
necessary courage be not wanting, may approach so as to
look down into the boiling depths of the crater. Unlike
most other volcanoes, it is in a state of perpetual activity;
and, what is of still more importance for our present pur-
pose, it rises so immediately over the sea, that no incon-
siderable portion of the calcined or molten matter which
it has been ejecting day by day, and hour by hour, for at
least the last two thousand years, falls hissing into the
water. The Plutonic agent gives up its charge direct into
the hands of the sedimentary one. Spallanzani relates,
in his lively description, how, venturing as near the peril-
ous chasm as he at first deemed safe, he found the view
not sufficiently commanding; and how, looking round,
“he perceived a small cavern hollowed in the rock, near
the gulf of the volcano,' which, “taking advantage of one
of the short intervals between the eruptions,’ he was for-
tunate enough to gain. “And here,’ he says, “protected
by the roof of the cavern, I could look down into the
very bowels of the volcano, and Truth and Nature stood,
as it were, unveiled before me.’ ‘I found the crater,’ he
continues, “filled to a certain height with a liquid red-hot
matter resembling melted brass, which is the fluid lava.
This lava appears to be agitated by two distinct motions,
—the one intestine, whirling, and tumultuous; the other,
that which impels it upwards. The liquid matter is raised
sometimes with more, sometimes with less rapidity within
the crater ; its superficies becomes inflated, and covered
with large bubbles, some of which are several feet in
diameter ; and when it has reached the distance of twenty-
GAEO ZOG Y OF THE BA.S.S. 261
five or thirty feet from the upper edge, a sound is heard
not unlike a short clap of thunder, the bubbles presently
burst, and at the same moment a portion of the lava,
separated into a thousand pieces, is thrown up with in-
describable swiftness, accompanied with a copious erup-
tion of smoke, ashes, and sand. After the explosion, the
lava within the crater sinks, but soon again rises as before,
and new tumours appear, which again burst, and produce
new explosions.” “In the smaller and moderate ejections,’
he adds, “ the stones, still so hot, that their redness, not-
withstanding the light of the sun, is distinctly visible in
the air, fall back into the crater, and at their collision
with the fluid lava, produce a sound similar to that of
water struck by a number of staves; but in the greater
ejections, a considerable quantity always fall outside the
crater's mouth ; and, bounding down the steep declivity,
dash into the sea, giving, on entering the waves, that
sharp hissing sound which in a lesser degree is produced
by a bar of red-hot iron plunged by a Smith into a trough
of water.” The Abbé, on another occasion, approached,
he tells us, the foot of the slope on its seaward side, and
saw the “ignited stones’ rolling down. ‘The five sailors,'
he says, “who had charge of the boat in which I was,
and some other natives of Stromboli who were with me,
and whose occupation often brought them to that part
of the sea, told me that the volcano might now be con-
sidered as very quiet ; assuring me that, in its greater fits
of fury, red-hot stones were frequently thrown to the dis-
tance of a mile from the shore, and that, consequently,
262 GEO/LOG V OF 7A/F B.A.S.S.
at such times it was impossible to remain with a boat So
near the mountain as we then were. And their assertion
appeared to me sufficiently proved by a comparison of
the size of the fragments thrown out in the explosions I
now witnessed, with that of those which had been ejected
in several former eruptions. The first (many of which
had stopped at the bottom of the precipice) were not
more than three feet in diameter; while many of the
fragments thrown out at other times, of similar quality to
them, and which lay in large heaps on the shore, were,
some four, some five feet in diameter, and others even
still larger.’ The tract of sea immediately beneath is
much perplexed with currents, and exposed to storms—
(the Lipari Isles, in mythologic history, formed the king-
dom of old AEolus); and though, since the volcano ex-
isted in its active state, lava and ashes to the amount of
many millions of cubical yards must have been cast out,
and though at one time, about forty-four years previous
to the date of Spallanzani's visit, it ejected ‘such an im-
mense quantity of scoriae, that it caused,’ to use the ex-
pression of his informants, “a dry place in the sea,' the
débris has been so diffused by the waves and tides, that
there is a depth of about twenty fathoms found but a
few hundred yards in front of the crater. The ejected
materials are spread by the sedimentary agents over a
large Superficies. Now, in the semi-Neptunean, semi-
Plutonic deposit of Stromboli, which is even now in the
forming, we are presented with every condition necessary
to the formation of such a deposit of stratified tuff as
GAE O/LOGY OF THE BASS. 263
that which composes so considerable a portion of the
coast of North Berwick. There is first the general matrix
of ashes, sand, and triturated lava, laid down in continuous
layers by the aqueous agent; then the embedded frag-
ments of the harder Plutonic rocks, varying in bulk from
the size of a pea up to blocks of more than five feet in
diameter; and, lastly, with the transporting agency of
tides and waves at command, the occasional introduction
of fragments of sedimentary rock, either derived from
strata broken up when the volcano Originally burst forth,
or carried from a distance, can be no very inexplicable
enigma.
As we proceeded towards the cottages of the fishermen
of Canty Bay, where boat for the Bass is usually taken,
I was informed by my companion, that Dr. Fleming, who
had been residing for several weeks during the previous
summer at North Berwick, had detected on the surfaces
of the trap-rocks near the harbour, unequivocal marks of
the action of icebergs. He found exactly such grooves
and ſurrows on these rocks as had been found by Lyell
on those of the coast of Nova Scotia, where the produc-
ing cause is still at work; and every scratch and line may
be traced to the half stranded masses that, dimly seen
during the tempests of the winter gone by, had grated
harshly along the skerries of the shore. Certainly the
associations of the geologist take a wide range,_* from
beds of raging fire, to starve in ice.’ The rocks here, in
their structure and composition, speak of Plutonic con-
vulsion and the fiery abyss ; while the inscriptions on
264 GAE O/LOG V OA. TA/A. A.A.S.S.
their surfaces testify of a time when colossal ice-floes,
stranded upon our shores,
“Lay dark and wild, beat with perpetual storms
Of whirlwind and dire hail, which on firm land
Thaw’d not, but gathered heap, and ruin seemed
Of ancient pile ; all else deep snow and ice.”
The Bass is perforated by a profound cavern, occasion-
ally accessible at extreme ebb. We had purposed attempt-
ing its exploration ; and as the tide, though fast falling,
still stood high on the beach, we whiled away an hour or
two—after first securing the services of the boatmen,
awaiting the recession of the water—in examining the
coast still farther to the east, and in Surveying the magni-
ficent ruins of Tantallan. For at least several centuries
the ancient edifice has been associated in a familiar pro-
verb with the imposing islet opposite, as the subject of two
impossibilities,
‘Ding down Tantallan,—
Mak’ a brig to the Bass,'—
a half-stanza which served for ages to characterize the sort
of achievements which cannot be achieved ; and which,
according to an old military tradition, formed the burden
of the ‘Scots March.’ Hamilton of Gilbertfield—a name
once familiar in Scotch poetry—assures Allan Ramsay, in
one of his metrical epistles, that
‘Nowther Hielanman nor Lawlan',
In poetrie,
But mocht as weel ding down Tantallan
As match wi' thee.’
GAE O/LOGY OF 7A/A2 A3A.S.S. 265
5
But we live in times in which the family of the impossibles
is fast becoming extinct. The Bass still remains unbridged
only because no one during the late railway mania chanced
to propose running a line in that direction : we have seen
the verse of Ramsay considerably more than matched by
poets, both of Highland and Lowland extraction ; and
Time is fast ‘dinging down” the stately towers of Tantal-
lan. Addison, in his vision of the picture gallery, could
See among the masterpieces of the dead painters only
one artist at work,-an old man with a solitary tuft of
long hair upon his forehead, who wrought with a pencil
so exceedingly minute, that a thousand strokes produced
Scarce any visible impression, and who, as a colourist, dealt
chiefly in brown. I recognised the same ancient gentle-
man seated high on the central tower of Tantallan, engaged,
apparently, in whetting a scythe on the stonework of the
edifice, and ever and anon blowing away the detached
particles of dust with his breath. He seemed to be quite
as leisurely now in his habits as when seen in the days of
Queen Anne among the pictures. But there was an ex-
pression of wonderful power stamped on his calm, pale,
passionless visage ; and when I Saw the marvels which he
had accomplished in his quiet way,+how, after laying the
doughty Douglases on their back, he had broken down the
drawbridge of their impregnable stronghold, and half filled
up the moat, and torn the iron gate of their dungeon off
its hinges, and laid corridor and gallery open to the winds
of heaven,-and how, still as unfatigued as if his tasks had
but just begun, he was going on in his work without rest
266 GAZO/LOGY OF 7A/AE /3A.S.S.
or intermission,--I could not avoid recognising him as
one of the most formidable opponents, or most potent
allies, that cause or party could possibly possess; and felt
that it betrayed nought approximating to conceit in Sir
Walter Scott, that he should have employed so confidently,
and on so many occasions, his favourite-Spanish proverb,
* Zimze and Z, gentlemen, against any two.’
The Castle of Tantallan consists of three massive towers,
united by two curtains of lofty rampart, that stretch across
the neck of a small promontory of trap-tuff, hollowed into
inaccessible precipices by the waves below. The entire
fortalice consists of three sides of wall-like rock, and one
side of rock-like wall. The edifice, if laid down elsewhere,
would be simply a piece of detached masonry, that en-
closed no area, and could be rendered subservient to no
purpose of defence ; and so it seems difficult to imagine a
less fortunate conception regarding it than that of a local
topographer, viz. that though at present ‘ nearly insulated,
it once stood at a considerable distance from the sea,' and
what is now the perpendicular cliff immediately behind
‘ended in a gentle slope, which extended greatly beyond
the Bass.’ The stronghold, so situated, would be in ex-
actly the circumstances of the old warrior in the ballad,
who, setting his back to a dry-stone fence to defend himself
against odds, found his rear laid hopelessly open by the
demolition of the crazy erection behind. Change has not
been quite so rapid in its march as the myth here would
argue; and the geologist may find on these ruins, marks
GAEO LOG Y OF THE BASS. 267
not only of its progress, but of the rate at which it goes on.
The two curtains, with the eastern and western towers, are
composed of a pale-coloured Old Red Sandstone,—in the
main a durable stone, though some of the hewn surfaces
have become hollowed, under the weathering influences,
like pieces of honeycomb, and the ‘bloody heart’ is falling
away piecemeal from the armorial shield over the gateway.
But the greater part of the central tower, evidently a later
erection, is formed of a fine-grained trap-tuff; and with it
the agencies of decomposition and decay have been work-
ing strange vagaries. The surfaces of the solid ashlar
have retreated at least half a foot from the original line ;
while the more durable cement in which they were em-
bedded stands out around and over them in thin crusts,
resembling hollow cowls projecting over wasted heads,-
like, for instance, the becowled head of the spectre monk
in the Castle of Ożranto. Now, this trap-tuff portion of
the tower—evidently no part of the original design, but a
mere after-thought—is in all probability not older than the
days of Archibald, sixth Earl of Angus, the nephew of the
poet Gawin Douglas, and the stepfather of James v., of
whom it is known, that on his return from exile on the
death of James, he greatly strengthened the edifice ; and
its state of keeping serves to show how much, when ope-
rating on such materials, the tear and wear of a few centu-
ries may do. I bethought me, in front of the old wasted
tower, as I marked at my feet a fragment of dressed stone,
which, covered up till very recently by the soil, still re-
tained the marks of the tool, with all the original sharpness,
268 GAE O/LOGY OF THAE AERA.S.S.
—of the time-worn aspect exhibited by the more exposed
slopes and precipices of the hills and mountains of our
country, compared with the dressed and polished appear-
ance which they so often present in those portions which
a protecting cover of mould or clay has shielded from the
disintegrating influences. Arthur Seat, with its worn and
lichened precipices, shattered by the frosts and rains of
many centuries, resembles the time-wasted tower ; while
the stretch of grooved and furrowed rock on its southern
flank, which the workmen engaged in forming the Queen's
Drive laid bare about two years ago, and which seemed at
the time as if it had been operated upon by some powerful
polishing machine only a day or two previous, represents
the piece of disinterred stone, sharp from the chisel. And
in the case of both the tower and the hill, as in many
other matters, things are not what they appear to be.
The hewn surface of the tower was a greatly more ancient
surface than the present one; and it is but the more
modern frontage of Arthur Seat that presents the marks of
a hoar antiquity; while its dressed and polished portions,
which appear so modern, are portions of what is truly its
old skin not yet cast off. It was once all scratched and
polished from base to summit, just as the wasted tower
once exhibited, from basement to battlement, the marks
of the mallet ; nay, all Scotland, from the level of the sea
to the height of fifteen hundred or two thousand feet,
seems to have been dressed after this mysterious style, as
if Scoured over its entire area on some general cleaning
night. But the central tower of Tantallan tells us how
GAEO LOGY OF 7A/AE /3A.S.S. 269
and why it is that only on the less exposed portions of the
surface of the country need we look for evidence of this
strange scrubbing-bout. It is only on the buried pieces of
the hewn work, if we may so speak, that we find the
sharp markings of the tool. -
The enclosed area of the fortress, cut off from the land
by the towers and their curtains, and surrounded seawards
by a line of inaccessible precipices, we find occupied by
a range of Sorely dilapidated buildings, that rise in rough-
edged picturesqueness on the west, immediately over the
rock-edge, and by a piece of rich garden-ground, fringed
on the north and east by thickets of stunted alder. The
ruins and the neglected garden are all that remain of the
scene which Scott has so well described in Marmion as a
favourite haunt of the Lady Clare :
“I said, Tantallan's dizzy steep
IHung o'er the margin of the deep,
And many a tower and rampart there
Repelled the insult of the air ;
Which, when the tempest vexed the sky,
Half breeze, half spray, came whistling by;
Above the booming ocean leant
The far-projecting battlement;
The billows burst in ceaseless flow,
Deep on the precipice below ;
And steepy rock and frantic tide
Approach of human step defied.’
A fine morning had matured into a lovely day. The sun
glanced bright on the deep green of the sea immediately
beneath; and the reflection went dancing in the calm, in
wavelets of light, athwart the shaded faces of the preci-
pices ; while a short mile beyond, the noble Bass loomed
27O - GEO ZOG Y OF THE BA.S.S.
tall in the offing, half in light, half in shadow; and, dimly
discerned through the slowly dissipating haze, in the back-
ground rose the rampart-like crags of the Isle of May.
Nor was the framing of the picture, as Surveyed through
one of the shattered openings of the edifice, without its
share of picturesque beauty. It consisted of fantastically
piled stone, moulded of old by the chisel, and now par-
tially o’ershadowed by tufts of withered grass and half faded
wallflower. Could the old stately lords of the Castle have
tasted, I asked myself, the poetry of a scene which they
must have so often surveyed P And, as if to rebuke the
shallow petulance that would restrict whatever is exquisite
in sentiment to one's own superficial times, that “noble
lord, of Douglas blood,' who ‘gave rude Scotland Virgil's
page,’ and who must a thousand times have looked out
upon the sublime features of the prospect from the very
spot on which I now stood, seemed to raise his mitred
front in the opening, and then, stalking by, tall and
stately, to vanish amid the ruins. The ‘schot-wyndo’ that
he ‘unschet ane litel on char,’ to look out upon the bleak
winter morning which he so graphically describes in one
of his prologues, may have been the identical shot-window
through which, a moment before, I had cast a careless
glance upon the sea ; and these were the vaulted passages
through which he must have so often paced, ere the field
of Flodden was stricken, calling up, as he himself ex-
presses it, in a line which would have stamped him poet
had he never written another,
* Gousty Schaddois of eild and grisly deed,”
GEO LOGY OF 7'HAE B.A.S.S. 271
I succeeded in scrambling up to a middle range of
apartments that are hollowed in the thickness of the front
rampart; but there is an upper range, inaccessible with-
out a ladder, which I failed in reaching, and which, if
once attained, might be made good by five against five
hundred any day. I was informed by my companion, that
Some four or five and thirty years ago, when he was a boy
at School, this upper range was seized and garrisoned by
a gang of mischievous thieves, headed by an old sailor,
who had been wrecked shortly before on the rocky islet
of Fidra, and had taken a fancy to the ancient ruin.
They had constructed a ladder of ropes, which could be
let down or drawn up at pleasure ; and, Sallying out,
always in the night-time, they annoyed the country, week
after week, by depredations on portable property of all
kinds, especially provisions,—depredations which, though
they always left mark enough behind them, never left
quite enough to trace them to the depredators. Sheep
were carried off and slaughtered in the fields; the larders
of gentlemen who, like all men of sense, valued good
dinners, were broken into, and turkey and tongue ex-
tracted ; bakers were robbed of their flour, – provision
merchants of their hams; a vessel in the harbour, on the
eve of Sailing, was lightened of her sea-stock; one worthy
burgher, much in the habit of examining objects in the
distance, had his spy-glass stolen, another was denuded
of his clothes; the mansion-house of Seacliff was harried,
—the farm-house of Scoughall plundered ; and quiet men
and respectable women grew nervous over three whole
272 GAEO/COG Jº OA. THE BA.S.S.
parishes, when they thought of the light-fingered invisi-
bilities that wrought the mischief, and asked what was to
come next. Some of the North Berwick fishermen had
seen lights at night twinkling high amid the ruins from
slit openings and shot-holes; but supernaturalities are all
according to nature in connection with such ruins as Tan-
tallan, and so the lights excited no suspicion. A High-
landman who had been sent by his master to plant ivy
against the walls had been pelted by an unseen hand
with bits of lime; but he was by much too learned in
such things not to know that it is fatal to blab regard-
ing the liberties which the denizens of the spiritual world
take with mortals, and so he wisely held his tongue. At
length, however, just as the general dismay had reached
its acme, the haunt of the thieves was discovered by some
young girls, who, when employed in thinning turnips in
the Castle, were startled by the apparition of a weather-
beaten face, surmounted by a red Kilmarnock night-cap,
gazing at them as intently from a window in the fourth
storey of the edifice, as if the owner of the cap and face
had been some second Christy of the Cleek, and longed
to eat them. They fled, shrieking, along the identical
passage through which the ‘good Lord Marmion’ escaped
the grim Douglas, when
‘The ponderous grate behind him rung ;’
the neighbourhood was raised, the hold stormed, and,
after a desperate resistance, the old sailor captured ; and
with his ultimate banishment by the magistracy, the last
GAE O/LOGY OF 7"HAE /3A.S.S. 273
incident in the history of Tantallan terminated. The
earlier passages were of a more chivalric character; and
yet, when, on groping my way into the dungeon of the
fortress, a gloomy cell, nearly level with the moat out-
side,-I saw one narrow opening, through which I could
discern only a minute patch of sky, rising slantwise in the
ponderous wall to the surface, and another still narrower
opening, through which I could discern only a minute
patch of sea, slanting downwards into the solid rock,-
when I had breathed for a few moments the dead stagnant
air of the place, and marked the massive iron hinges of
the door corroded into mere skeletons by the unwhole-
some damps, when I had looked upon the naked walls,
and the rubbish-covered floor, and the low-browed roof
of dripping stone,—I deemed it a greatly better matter to
be contemporary with low rogues, such as the sailor in the
red Kilmarnock night-cap, than with high-spirited, mail-
covered, steel-helmed robbers, such as those ancient lords
of Tantallan who had kept the key of this dolorous dun-
geon, and could serve at will the unhappy captives which
it had once contained, as one of them had served Maclellan,
tutor of Bomby, in their dungeon at Thrieve.
We quitted the ruins, and returned to Canty Bay along
the cliffs. There occur between the bay and the Castle,
as if inlaid in the trap-tuff, two immense beds of the Old
Red Sandstone of the district; while a third bed, of at
least equal extent, occurs a few hundred yards to the east
of the ruins, in the neighbourhood of the mansion-house
of Seacliff. In a locality in which the surface has been
S
274. GAEO/LOGY OF THE BA.S.S.
so broken up that at least three-fourths of its present area
is composed of the disturbing trap, and in which the old
sedimentary rocks exist as mere insulated patches, there
can of course be no satisfactory determination regarding
the relations of strata. There are, however, various appear-
ances which led me to believe that these beds occur, when
in their proper place, deep in the Old Red, and that in
their present position they lie not far from the ancient
focus of disturbance. They exhibit—what is greatly more
common towards the base than in the upper deposits of
the system—a large amount of false stratification : they
hold a middle place, in point of distance, between the
last patches of the lower Coal Measures which appear on
the coast of Dirleton to the west, and the first patches
that appear on the coast of Dunbar on the east; while the
lie of their true strata, not very greatly removed in some
of the beds from the horizontal, indicates a nearly central
application of the disturbing force. This last circumstance
is not unworthy of notice. Insulated patches of stratified
rock, so covered up by soil and diluvium that their rela-
tions cannot be traced, are often held to have escaped
the disturbing influences if their strata but rest in the
original horizontal line ; whereas the horizontality of their
position may be a consequence, not of the absence of
disturbance, but merely of its focal proximity. Behemoth,
rising amid a field of float-ice, may occasion considerable
disturbance and derangement among the pieces that tilt
up against his sides; but the pieces which he carries up
on his back retain nearly their original position of undis-
GAEOZOGY OF THE AEA.S.S. 275
turbed horizontality. I spent a day early in the autumn
of the present year in examining that junction, at Siccar
Point, of the Old Red Conglomerate, with the still older
slate-rocks and micaceous Schists of the district, which
Playfair, in his Memoir of Hutton, has rendered classical ;
and found the principle to which I refer, of apparent non-
disturbance immediately over the focus where the dis-
turbance had been greatest, as finely illustrated by the
section as at least any of the other phenomena which its
appearances have been cited to substantiate.
I enjoyed on this occasion the companionship of the
Tev. Mr. Dodds of Belhaven, and found his intimate
acquaintance with the district, and with geological fact in
general, of great value. On passing along the railway to
the east of the town, where the strata, exposed on each
side by the excavation, exhibit those alternations of sand-
stone and shale so common in the Coal Measures, he
informed me that at this point the workmen had found
numerous fossils; and he afterwards kindly procured for
me One of the specimens,—a block of indurated shale,
largely charged with two well-known corals of the Carboni-
ferous Limestone,—Cyathophyllum fungites and Tubipora
radiata. A full mile and a quarter from where the primary
rock first appears, we saw decided marks of the disturbance
which it occasioned. The Old Red Sandstone, exhibited
here in Sections of enormous thickness, lies tilted up
against it in an angle which heightens as we proceed, till
it assumes, at the point of junction, a nearly vertical posi-
tion. But the focus of disturbance once reached, the marks
276 G/E O/LOGY O/7 7. HE B.A.S.S.
of disturbance cease ; and the occasional patches of the
Old Red which here and there appear, rest horizontally
on the primary rock. They are—to return to my illustra-
tion—the ice-fragments which, carried up on the broad
back of Behemoth, rest on their original planes, while
those that lean against his sides have been set steeply on
edge. The Siccar Point is hollowed into a wildly romantic
cavern, open to the roll of the Sea, and Scooped almost
exclusively out of an ancient bed of purplish-coloured clay-
slate, raised, like the schist in which it is intercalated,
in a nearly vertical angle, and which presents, in the
weathering, a sort of fantastic fret-work, as if a fraternity
of Chinese carvers had been at work on its sides for ages.
And, forming the roof of the Cavern, and laid down as
nicely horizontal on the sharp edges of the more ancient
strata as if the levelling rule of the mason or carpenter had
been employed in the work, we see stretching overhead
the lowest bed of the Old Red Sandstone. On this very
point, with the noble cavern full in front, old Hutton stood
and lectured ; and he had for his auditory Playfair and Sir
James Hall. But a description of the scene in Playfair's
own words may at least serve to show how admirably these
Huttonians of the last age could write as well as reason —
‘The ridge of the Lammermoor Hills, in the south of
Scotland, consists,’ says the accomplished Professor, ‘of
primary micaceous schistus, and extends from St. Abb's
Head westward, till it joins the metalliferous mountains
about the sources of the Clyde. The sea-coast affords a
transverse section of this Alpine tract at its eastern ex-
G/EO/COG V OF 77/7/2 /3A.S.S. 277
tremity, and exhibits the changes from the primary to the
secondary strata, both on the south and on the north. Dr.
Hutton wished particularly to examine the latter of these ;
and on this occasion Sir James Hall and I had the pleasure
to accompany him. We sailed in a boat from Dunglass
on a day when the fineness of the weather permitted us to
keep close to the foot of the rocks which line the shore
in that quarter, directing our course southwards in search
of the termination of the secondary strata. We made for
a high rocky point or headland, the Siccar, near which,
from our observations on shore, we knew that the object
we were in search of was likely to be discovered. On
landing at this point, we found that we actually trod On
the primeval rock which forms alternately the base and
the summit of the present land. It is here a micaceous
schistus, in beds nearly vertical, highly indurated, and
stretching from south-east to north-west. The surface of
this rock runs, with a moderate ascent, from the level of
low water at which we landed, nearly to that of high water,
where the schistus has a thin covering of red horizontal
Sandstone laid over it ; and this sandstone, at the distance
of a few yards farther back, rises into a very high perpen-
dicular cliff. Here, therefore, the immediate contact of
the two rocks is not only visible, but is curiously dissected
and laid open by the action of the waves. The rugged
tops of the schistus are seen penetrating into the horizontal
beds of sandstone; and the lowest of these last form a
breccia Containing fragments of schistus, some round and
others angular, united by an arenaceous cement.
278 GAE O/LOGY OF 7/7A: PA.S.S.
‘Dr. Hutton,’ continues the Professor, “was highly
pleased with appearances that set in so clear a light the
different formations of the parts which compose the ex-
terior crust of the earth, and where all the circumstances
were combined that could render the observation satis-
factory and precise. On us, who saw these phenomena
for the first time, the impression made will not easily be
forgotten. The palpable evidence presented to us of one
of the most extraordinary and important facts in the
natural history of the earth, gave a reality and substance
to those theoretical speculations which, however probable,
had never till now been directly authenticated by the testi-
mony of the senses. We often said to ourselves, What
clearer evidence could we have had of the different for-
mations of these rocks, and of the long interval which
separated these formations, had we actually seen them
emerging from the bosom of the deep? We felt ourselves
necessarily carried back to the time when the schistus on
which we stood was yet at the bottom of the sea, and
when the sandstone before us was only beginning to be
deposited, in the shape of sand or mud, from the waters
of a superincumbent ocean. An epocha still more remote
presented itself, when even the most ancient of these
rocks, instead of standing upright in vertical beds, lay in
horizontal planes at the bottom of the sea, and were not
yet disturbed by that immeasurable force which has burst
asunder the solid pavement of the globe. Revolutions
still more remote appeared in the distance of this extra-
Ordinary perspective. The mind seemed to grow giddy
GAZOZOG Y OF 7A/A2 A3A.S.S. 279
by looking so far into the abyss of time; and while we
listened with earnestness and admiration to the philo-
sopher who was unfolding to us the order and series of
these wonderful events, we became sensible how much
farther reason may sometimes go than imagination can
venture to follow. As for the rest, we were truly fortunate
in the course we had pursued in this excursion: a great
number of other curious and important facts presented
themselves; and we returned, having collected in one day
more ample materials for future speculation than have
sometimes resulted from years of diligent and laborious
research.” -
On reaching Canty Bay, we found the boatmen in readi-
ness; and, embarking for the Bass, rowed leisurely round
the island. What perhaps first strikes the eye in the
structure of the precipices, as the boat sweeps outwards
along the western side, is the number of vertical lines by
which they are traversed. No one would venture to de-
scribe the rock as columnar ; and yet, like most of the -
trap-rocks, - like Salisbury Crags, for instance, or the
Castle rock of Edinburgh, towards the south and west, or
the basaltic summit of Arthur Seat, the artist who set
himself to transfer its likeness to paper or canvas would
require to deal much more largely in upright strokes of
the pencil than in strokes of any other kind. A similar
peculiarity may be observed in some of the primary dis-
tricts. The porphyritic precipices of Glencoe are barred
along the course of the valley, on both sides, by strongly-
marked vertical lines, that harmonize well with the sharp
28O GE O/LOG V O/7 TA/A2 B.A.S.S.
perpendicular peaks atop ; and where the vertical lines
and perpendicular peaks cease, whether at the upper or
lower opening of the glen, the traveller may safely con-
clude that he has entered on a different formation. As
we pass seawards under the higher precipices of the
Bass, the vertical lining takes a slightly outward Čast; the
rude columns seem bent forward like the bayonet-armed
muskets of a foot-regiment placed in the proper angle for
repelling the charge of a troop of horse ; and on the
shelves formed by the rude cross-jointing of these columns
do the innumerable birds that frequent the rock find the
perilous mid-air platforms on which they rear their young.
At the time of my former visit, to borrow from old
Dunbar,
* The air was dirkit with the fowlis,
That cam with yammeris and with youlis,
With shrykking, skreeking, skrymming scowlis,
And meikle noyis and showtes.’
But all was silent to-day, November, according to the
quondam missionary of St. Kilda, is the ‘deadest month
of the year ;’ ‘the bulk of the fowls having deserted the
coast, leave the rocks black [i.e. white] and dead.’ I was
not sufficiently aware, during my previous visit, how very
much the birds add to the effect of the rock-scenery of
the island. The gannet measures from wing-tip to wing-
tip full six feet; the great black gull, five ; the blue or
herring gull, about four feet nine inches; and, flying at all
heights along the precipices, thick as motes in the sun-
beam,_this one so immediately overhead that the well-
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GAE O/LOGY OF 7//E AEA.S.S. 283
defined shadow which it casts darkens half the yawl below,
—that other well-nigh four hundred feet in the air, though
still under the level of the summit, they serve, by their
gradations of size, from where they seem mere specks in
the firmament, to where they exhibit, almost within staff.
reach, their amplest development of bulk, as objects to
measure the altitudes by. And these altitudes appear
considerably less when they are away. But an abrupt
rock-tower, rising out of the sea to the height of four
hundred and twenty feet, must be always an imposing
object, whatever its accompaniments, or let us measure it
as we may.
* Dread rock thy life is two eternities, -
The last in air, the former in the deep ;
First with the whales, last with the eagle skies.
Drowned wast thou till an earthquake made the steep :
Another cannot bow thy giant size l’
I was not fortunate enough to effect a landing in the
great cavern by which the island is perforated: the tide
had not fallen sufficiently low to permit the approach of
the boat through the narrow opening to the beach within ;
and, pleasant as the day was, an incipient frost rendered
it rather ‘a naughty one for swimming in.' But we ap-
proached as near as the strait vestibule—half blocked up
by a rock that at every recession of the wave showed its
pointed tusk above water — gave permission ; and I saw
enough of the cave to enable me to conceive of its true
character and formation. One of those slicken-sided lines
of division so common in the trap-rocks runs across the
284 GEO/LOGY OF 7A/AE BASS.
island from east to west, cutting it into two unseparated
parts, immediately under the foundations of the old chapel.
As is not uncommon along these lines, whether occasioned
by the escape of vapours from below, or the introduc-
tion of moisture from above, the rock on both sides, so
firm and unwasted elsewhere, is considerably decomposed;
and the sea, by incessantly charging direct in this sof-
tened line from the stormy east, has in the lapse of ages
hollowed a passage for itself through. A fine natural
niche, a full hundred feet in height, — such a one,
perhaps, as that which Wordsworth apostrophizes in his
“Sonnets on the River Duddon,'—forms the opening of
the cavern, the roof bristling high overhead with minute
tufts of a beautiful rock - fern, the basement course, if I
may so speak, roughened with brown algae, and having
the dark green sea for its floor. But the cavern beyond
seems scarce worthy of such a gateway: the roof appears
from this point to close in upon it; and a projection from
one of the sides completely shuts up its long vista to
the sea and the daylight on the opposite side of the
island. The height of this tunnel of nature's forming is
about thirty feet throughout; its length about a hundred
and seventy yards. Not far from its western opening
there occurs a beach of gravel, which, save when the
waves run high during the flood of stream-tides, is rarely
covered. Its middle space contains a dark pool, filled
even at low ebb with from three to four feet water; and
an accumulation of rude boulders occupies the remaining
portion of its length, a little within the eastern entrance.
GAE O/LOGY OF 7A/A2 A3 A.S.S. 285
It is a dark and dreary recess, full of chill airs and
dropping damps, –Such a Cavern as that into which the
famous Sinbad the Sailor was lowered, at the command
of his dear friend the king, when his wife had died, and,
agreeably to the courtesy of the country, he had to be
buried with her alive, in order to keep her company.
So quiet was this delicate winter day, as Gilbert
White would term it, and so smooth the water, that we
effected our landing on the Bass without a tithe of the
risk or difficulty which the midsummer visitors of the
rock have not unfrequently to encounter. The only
landing-places, two in number, occur on a flat shelving
point which forms the south-eastern termination of the
island. Our boatmen selected on this occasion the land-
ing-place in more immediate proximity with the fortress,
as the better of the two ; and we found its superiority
owing to the circumstance that it had been originally cut,
at no inconsiderable expense of labour, into the living
rock, here of so solid a consistence, that — to employ
the words used by Sir Walter in describing a similar
undertaking—‘a labourer who wrought at the work might
in the evening have carried home in his bonnet all the
shivers which he had struck from the mass in the course
of the day.”
The flat point in which the landing-place is hollowed
forms a lateral prolongation of the lowest of three shelves
or platforms, into which, with precipitous cliffs between,
the sloping surface of the island is divided ; and the
upper part of this lowest shelf or platform, which rises
286 GEO ZOG V OA' THE BA.S.S.
in level as it sweeps from the eastern to the western
precipices, is occupied by the ancient fortress. The
stronghold was so designed, that a single stretch of wall
built across the point, and at its one extremity joining
on to the here inaccessible cliff which rises towards the
second platform of the island, and terminating at its
other extremity with the sheer rock-edge that descends
perpendicularly into the sea, served to shut up the whole
Bass. The entire platform somewhat resembles in shape
a gigantic letter A, -the flat shelving point, with its land-
ing-places, representing the lower part of the letter up to
the transverse stroke ; the higher portion of the platform,
occupied by the various buildings of the fortress, the part
of the letter above the stroke ; and the single cross wall,
made effective in shutting up so much, the transverse
stroke itself. To this transverse rampart there joins on
at right angles a longitudinal rampart, — a line, to fol-
low up my peculiarly literary illustration, drawn from the
middle of the cross stroke of the A to the apex of the
letter; or if the reader has been accustomed to disen-
tangle and peruse those fantastic ciphers, Curiously com-
pounded of capital letters, which One so frequently finds
inscribed on the mouldering tablets and storied lintels
of ancient Castles, he may conceive of it as a T reversed,
inscribed within a greatly larger A, the central cross line
of the cipher serving to form the transverse stroke of
each of the component letters. And this longitudinal
rampart, by running along the middle of the enclosed
portion of the shelf, both served to front the sea with
GEOLOGY OF THE BASS. 287
its tier of cannon for purposes of offence, and to protect
defensively from distant cannonading the buildings which
lie clustered behind. The whole fortalice, in short, may
be conceived of, in the ground-plan, as a gigantic letter
T, for the A represents chiefly the ground on which it
stands. And while any part of it might be battered from
a distance, only the transverse portion of it could be ap-
proached by an enemy from the landing-places; the
longitudinal portion, protected in front by inaccessible
rocks, and in flank by the transverse wall, being as
entirely included in the enclosed area outside its para-
pet as within.
All the doors of the deserted fortalice now lie open
except one, – a door by which the tenant of the Bass
fences against unauthorized visitors the upper part of
the island, with its flocks of unfledged gannets and its
sheep ; and this door, as it occurs, not in the transverse
wall, but at the top of a long ascending passage beyond,
leaves the space in front of the longitudinal rampart as
open to the vagrant foot as the shelving point in front
of the transverse one. The door divides the island into
two unequal parts, a lower and upper ; and I am thus
particular in detailing the circumstance, as it serves to
show on what slight and trivial causes the preservation
or extinction of a vegetable species may sometimes de-
pend. The sheep are restricted by the door to the
upper division of the island; while two comparatively
rare plants, indigenous to the place — the sea-beet and
the Bass mallow — are found in only its lower division.
288 GEO/OG Y OF 7THE BAS'.S.
The same door which protects the sheep from the law-
less depredator has protected the two rare plants from
the sheep, and so they continue to exist; while in several
other islands of the Frith, in which they once found a
habitat, but enjoyed the protection of no jealous door,
they exist no longer. Even in the Bass they seem to
be in considerable danger from the recent introduction
of a colony of rabbits, that have already made them-
selves free of both the lower and upper divisions of the
island, and that, by scooping the soil from under the
mallows, and by nibbling off the reproductive germins of
the beet, have of late very sensibly diminished the num-
bers of both. The beet plants, in especial, seemed to
be thrice more numerous when I formerly visited the
place than I found them now.
The rabbits, however, though no friends to the rare
plants, nor yet to the ruins,—for, with their unsightly ex-
cavations, they have been working sad havoc among the
parapets and slimmer walls, did me some service as a sort
of geological pioneers. They had been busily at work
immediately under what I have described as the longi-
tudinal wall of the fortress, where the tree-mallow grows
thick and tall in a loose greyish-coloured soil, which may
be now safely described as vegetable mould, but which
existed a century and a half ago simply as the débris and
exuviae of the garrison. And their excavations here, from
two to four feet in depth, serve to lay open to the visitor a
formation of comparatively recent origin, the various re-
mains of which, animal and vegetable, organic and artistic,
GAE O/LOGY OF 7A/A2 /3A.S.S. 289.
all speak of man. The accumulation constitutes such a
deposit as would surely be now and then unveiled by the
explorer of the more ancient fossiliferous beds, had there
existed a rational tool-making creature in the earlier ages
of creation, or had man, as some writers fancy, been con-
temporary with all the geologic systems in succession.
It is not unusual to bestow a name on the subordinate
beds of larger formations, from the more characteristic
organisms which they contain. We have thus ‘Coral Rags,'
and ‘Achthyolitic Beds,' and ‘Gryphite, Encrimal, and Penta-
3
merous Limestones;’ and were we, on a similar principle
of nomenclature, to bestow on this limited formation a
name frc . . ...,v prevalent remains which it exhibits, we
would have to term it the Zbóacco-fifte deposit. It abounds
in the decapitated Stalks and broken bowls of tobacco-
pipes of antique form and massy proportions, any one of
which would have furnished materials enough for the con-
struction of two such pipes
‘As Smokers smoke in these degenerate days.”
Assisted by my companion, I picked up in a few minutes
the bowls of five of these memorials of bygone luxury, and
the stalks of about twice as many more. Some of the
stalks at their terminal points are well rounded, as if long
in friendly contact with the teeth ; while their lack of wax
or varnish shows that the art of glazing for an inch or
two, to protect the lips from the fretting absorbescence of
the pipe-clay, had yet to be invented. The bowls are all
broken short at the neck,-evidence that the wasteful prac-
T
290 GEO ZOG V OF 7"HE BASS.
tice of knocking out the ashes, not, as was Uncle Toby's
wont, against the thumb-nail, but against a hard stone, has
been by no means confined to our own anti-economic age ;
and most of them still bear the darkened stain of the
tobacco. There are few of the heads of that head-taking-
off century, not excepting the head of the Royal Martyr
himself, in so excellent a state of keeping, or that still bear
about them such unequivocal mark of what had most
engaged them in their undetached condition, whether the
Virginian weed, unlimited prerogative de ſure divino, or
the Canterburian ceremonies. The deposit in which they
occur lies parallel to, and immediately in front, as has been
said, of the longitudinal line of rampart, along which the
sentinels must have paced frequent and oft, humming,
during the midnight watch, some reckless old-world song—
* If e'er I do well, 'tis a wonder,’ or ‘Three bottles and a
quart,'—and consoling themselves, as the keen sea-breeze
whistled sharp and shrill through embrasure and shot-hole,
with a whiff of tobacco. The night is drizzly and chill ;
and yonder, tall in the fog, may be seen the grimly-mous-
tached, triangular-capped, buff-belted, duffle-becoated
scoundrel of a sentry pacing along the wall, and crooning an
old drinking song as he goes. One pipe is already smoked
out. He stops; and, firmly holding the stalk of the imple-
ment at the neck, he taps the bowl against the edge of the
parapet, in preparation for another. It breaks short in his
hand; and, with a sudden oath, that forms a rather abrupt
episode in the tune, and disturbs poor Mr. Blackadder in
his cell, he sends the bowl a-whizzing over the rampart,
GEOZOGY OF 7://E BASS. 29I
and the stalk straightway follows it. And now, after a
hundred and eighty years have come and gone, here is
both bowl and stalk | One English poet has written
verses on the detached heel of an old shoe ; another on a
rejected quid of tobacco divested of the juice. I do not
see why a mutilated tobacco-pipe of the Bass should not
make quite as good a subject as either. Their abundance
here serves to demonstrate that the unscrupulous soldiery
of the times of Charles II. must have been not a little
remarkable as a smoke-inhaling fraternity; while the fact
that a vicar of the neighbouring parish of Golyn was de-
posed by James VI. for the high crime of Smoking tobacco,
about half a century before, shows that smoke-inhaling
could scarce have taken rank, in the times of James's
grandson, among the very respectable accomplishments.
The weed, if not obnoxious to all the anathemas of the
pedant monarch's ‘Counterblast,' must have still been the
subject of an appreciation at least as disparaging as that
of Lamb’s “Farewell : '-
‘Sooty retainer to the vine;
Bacchus’ black servant, negro fine;
Sorcerer that mak’st us dote upon
Thy begrimed complexion;
And, for thy pernicious sake,
More and greater oaths to break
Than reclaimed lovers take . . .
Stinkingest of the stinking kind;
Filth of the mouth, and fog of the mind;
Henbane, nightshade, both together,
Hemlock, aconite.”
With the broken tobacco-pipes I found numerous frag.
292 G. EO/O G. V. O.A.' THE /3A.S.S.
ments of beef and mutton bones, that still bore mark of
the butcher's saw, blent with the frequent bones of birds,
and fractured shells of the edible crab,-memorials, the
two last, of contributions furnished by the islet itself to
the wants of its garrison or the prisoners. I picked up,
besides, a little bit of brass, the ornamental facing, appa-
rently, of some piece of uniform ; with several bits of iron,
long since oxidized out of all shape, and stuck round with
agglomerations of gravel and coal, and bits of decayed
wood, representative, to the young geologist, of the com-
ponents of some ancient conglomerate of the Devonian or
Carboniferous period, bound together by a calcareous or
metallic cement. My companion found, glittering among
the débris, what at the first glance seemed to be a cluster
of minute, well-formed pearls of great beauty and brilliancy,
set in a little tablet ; but the jewel turned out, on examina-
tion, to be merely the fragment of some highly ornamented
apothecary’s phial, embossed into semi-globular studs, that
owed all their iridescence to the Sorely decomposed state
of the glass. Glass decomposes under the action of the
elements, like many of the trap-rocks, such as greenstone,
basalt, and the claystones, by splitting into layers parallel
to the planes, or, as in this instance, to the curves, of the
original mass; and the plane of each layer, under the same
optical law that imparts iridescence to minute sheets of
mica partially raised from the mass, reflects the prismatic
colours. Hence the frequent gorgeousness of old stable and
outhouse windows, little indebted to the art of the stainer,
but left to the amateur pencillings of two greatly more deli-
GAEO ZOGY OF THE BASS, 293
cate artists in this special department, cobwebbed neglect
and decomposing damp. When examined by the micro-
scope, I found the studs of the Bass specimen presenting
exactly the appearance of— what decomposing balls of
greenstone have been so often compared to—many-coated
bulbous roots, such as that of the onion or lily. In green-
stone the disintegrating substance is commonly iron ; in
glass it is the fixed salt, such as kelp or barilla, used as a
flux in fusing the stubborn silex ; and the concentric dis-
position affected by both substances seems to be in part
a consequence of the homogeneity induced in the mass by
the previous fusion, through which the main agent in the
decomposition, whether moisture or air, is permitted to act
equally all round at equal depths from the surface,—a pro-
cess with which the disturbing lines of stratification in a
sedimentary mass would scarce fail to interfere. I saw a
large cannon-shot, of rude form, and much encased in rust,
which had been laid bare by the rabbits in this curious de-
posit a few weeks before. It had lain sunk in the dºris
to the depth of about four feet, immediately under a partial
breach in the masonry where the fortress had been battered
from the sea; and it had not improbably dealt it a severe
blow in the quarrel of William of Nassau. But what I
deemed perhaps the most curious remains in the heap were
numerous splinters of black English flint, that exactly re-
sembled the rejectamenta of a gun-flint maker's shop. In
digging on, to ascertain, if possible, for what purpose chips
of black flint could have been brought to the Bass, my
companion disinterred a rude gun-flint, — exactly such a
294 &EOZOGY OF THE BASS.
thing as I have seen a poverty-stricken north-country
poacher chip, at his leisure, for his fowling-piece, out of
a mass of agate or jasper. The matchlock had yielded
its place only a short time before, to the spring-lock with
its hammer and flint ; but a minute subdivision of labour
had not as yet, it would seem, separated the art of the
gun-flint maker into a distinct profession; and so, during
their leisure hours on the ramparts, the soldiers of the
garrison had been in the practice of fashioning their flints
for themselves, and of pitching the chips, with now and
then an occasional abortion, such as the One we had just
picked up, over the walls. There was laid open a good
many years since, among the Sand-hills of Findhorn, on
the coast of Moray, the débris of a somewhat similar
species of flint-work, blent, as in this instance, with a few
of the half finished implements that had been marred in
the making ; but the northern flint-manufactory had be-
longed to a greatly more ancient period than that of the
musket or its spring-lock. The half finished implements
found among the sand-hills were the flint-heads of arrows.
IMy description of the time-wasted remains of this little
patch may be perhaps deemed too minute. I am desirous,
however, for the special benefit of the uninitiated, to ex-
hibit—deduced from a few familiar objects—the sort of cir-
cumstantial evidence on which, drawn from objects greatly
less familiar, the geologist founds no inconsiderable pro-
portion of his conclusions. He is much a reasoner in the
inferential style, and expatiates largely on the deductive
and the circumstantial. It is, besides, not unimportant to
GEOzogy of THE BASS. 295
note, that wherever man has been long a dweller, he has
left enduring traces behind him—indubitable marks—of his
designing capacity, stamped upon metal or stone, stained
into glass or earthenware, or baked into brick. In Saun-
tering along the shore on either side of the Frith of Forth,
one may know when one is passing the older towns, such
as Leith, Musselburgh, or Prestonpans, without once rais-
ing an eye to mark the dwellings, simply by observing
the altered appearance of the beach. Among the ordi-
nary water-rolled pebbles, composed mostly of the trap
and sandstone rocks of the district, there occur in great
abundance, in the immediate neighbourhood of the houses,
fragments of brick and tile, broken bits of pottery, pieces
of fractured bottles and window-panes, and the scoriae of
glass-houses, iron-furnaces, and gas-works. And Certainly
few of these remains can be deemed less fitted to contend,
through greatly extended periods, with time and the de-
composing elements, than the fish and ferns, the delicate
shells and minute corallines, of the earlier geologic systems.
Dr. Keith found the fluted columns and sculptured capitals
of the ancient cities of the Holy Land as fresh and un-
worn as if they had passed from under the tool but yester-
day ; and he recognised, in the enormous accumulations
of hewn stone which in some localities load the surface far
as the eye can reach, the ready-made materials with which,
almost without sound of hammer or of saw, as during the
erection of the temple of old, the dwellings of restored
Judah may yet be built. The burnt bricks that coated the
Birs Nimroud, probably the oldest ruin in the world, still
296 GAEO/LOG V OA' THE AEA.S.S.
retain, as sharply as when they were removed from the
kiln in the days of the earlier Babylonian monarchs, their
mysterious inscriptions; and the polished granite of the
sarcophagus of Cheops has not resigned, in the lapse of
three thousand years, a single hieroglyphic. I have been
told by a relative who fought in Egypt under Abercromby,
that the soldiery, in digging one of their wells, passed for
eight or ten feet through the débris of an ancient pottery,
and that even the fragments at the bottom of the heap—
mayhap the accumulated breakage of centuries, in a manu-
factory of the times of Cleopatra or the Ptolemies—re-
tained their bits of pattern as freshly as if they had been
moulded and broken scarce a month before. If in all the
earlier geologic formations, from the Silurian to the Ter-
tiary inclusive, we find no trace of a rational being pos-
sessed of such a control over inert matter as the idea of
rationality necessarily involves, the antiquities of the older
historic nations, and even the débris and rubbish of the
more ancient towns of our own country, serve to show that
it is not because the memorials of such a being would be
either so few as to escape notice, or so fragile as to defy
preservation. No sooner does man appear upon the Scene
as the last-born of creation, than, in that upper stratum of
the earth's crust which represents what geologists term the
recent period, we find abundant trace of him ; and deeply
interesting, when presented in the geologic form, some of
the more ancient of these traces are.
The recent deposit of the Bass is charged, as has been
said, with numerous detached bones, mutilated by the
GAE O/LOGY OF 7A/A) /3A.S.S. 297
butcher's saw. One of the most ancient fossils that testi-
fies to the existence of man does so in a Somewhat similar
manner. It exhibits him as vested in an ability, possessed
by none of the other carnivora, of facilitating the gratifi-
cation of his appetites, or the supply of his wants, by the
employment of cunningly-fashioned weapons of his own
fabrication and design. In the upper drift of the province
of Scania, in Sweden, there occur numerous bones of a
gigantic animal of the ox family; and on the skeleton of
one of these, singular for its degree of entireness, an
ancient hunter of the country seems to have left his mark.
‘A skeleton of the Bos Urus or Bos primigenius,’ says
Sir Roderick Murchison in his admirable paper on the
Scandinavian Drift, was extracted by Professor Nilsson
from beneath ten feet of peat, near Ystadt, the horns of
the animal having been found deeply buried in the sub-
jacent blue clay on which the bog has accumulated. This
specimen is not only most remarkable as being the only
entire skeleton yet found of an animal whose bones occur
in the ancient drift of the diluvium of many countries of
Europe, as well as in Siberia (where it is the associate of
the Mammoth and the Rhinoceros tichorhinus), but also
as exhibiting upon the vertebral column a perforation which
Nilsson has no doubt was inflicted by the stone-head of
a javelin thrown by one of the aboriginal human inhabit-
ants of Scania. By whatever instrument inflicted, this
wound has its longest orifice on the anterior face of the
first lumbar vertebra, and, diminishing gradually in size,
has penetrated the second lumbar vertebra, and has even
298 GEOLOGY OF THE BASS.
slightly injured the third. Occupying himself for many
years in collecting all the utensils of the aborigines of
his country, and in studying their uses, Professor. Nilsson
shows that the orifice in the vertebra of the specimen of
Bos primigenius in question is so exactly fitted by one of
the stone-headed javelins found in the neighbourhood, that
no reasonable doubt can be entertained that the wound
was inflicted by a human being. He does not think that
the wound was mortal; but, on the contrary, he indicates,
from the manner in which the bone seems afterwards to
have cemented, that the creature lived two or three years
after the infliction of a wound produced by the hurling
of a javelin horizontally in the direction of the head, but
which, missing the head, passed between the horns, and
impinged on this projecting portion of the back.’
I insist rather on the permanency of the works of men
than on that of the framework of their bodies, rather on
the broadly-marked traces which former generations have
left behind them, in the ruins and débris of the extinct
nations, than on the scarce less perfectly preserved human
remains of ancient catacombs and sepulchres; and I do
SO chiefly in reference to a strange suggestion, not greatly
insisted upon in these days, but not without its portion
of plausibility, and peculiarly adapted to appeal to the
imagination. It at least addressed itself very powerfully
to mine when first brought acquainted with it, many years
ago, by a friend then studying at the University. I had
already begun to form my collection of Liassic fossils, and,
much struck by the strangeness of their forms, was patiently
GEOLOGY OF THE BASS. 299
waiting for some light respecting them, when my friend,
who had seen a good many such in the College Museum,
and had just returned home from his first year's course,
informed me that they were regarded as belonging to a
bygone creation, of which not so much as a single plant
or animal continued to exist. Nay, he had even heard it
urged as not improbable, that the ancient world in which
they had flourished and decayed—a world greatly older
than that beyond the Flood — had been tenanted by
rational, responsible beings, for whom, as for the race to
which we ourselves belong, a resurrection and a day of
final judgment had awaited. But many thousands of years
had elapsed since that day—emphatically the last to the
pre-Adamite race, for whom it was appointed—had come
and gone. Of all the accountable Creatures that had
been summoned to its bar, bone had been gathered to
its bone, so that not a vestige of the framework of their
bodies occurred in the rocks or soils in which they had
been originally inhumed; and, in consequence, only the
remains of their irresponsible contemporaries, the inferior
animals, and those of the vegetable productions of their
fields and forests, were now to be found. How strange
the conception It filled my imagination for a time with
visions of the remote past, instinct with a wild poetry, bor-
rowed in part from such conceptions of the pre-Adamite
kings, and the semi-material intelligences, their contem-
poraries, as one finds in Beckford's Wałżeck, or Moore's
Zoves of the Angels; and invested my fossil lignites and
shells, through the influence of the associative faculty, with
3OO GAEO/LOG V OA' THE BASS.
an obscure and terrible sublimity, that filled the whole
mind. But there is not even a shadow of foundation for
a conception so wild : on the contrary, the geologic evi-
dence, whether primary and direct, or derivative and ana-
logical, militates full against it.
I say derivative and analogical, as certainly as primary
and direct. The rational, accountable creature of the
present scene of things stands in his proper place on the
apex of material animated being : he forms the terminal
point of that pyramid, the condition of all whose com-
ponents is vitality breathed into dust. At the ample base
we recognise the lower forms of life, shells, crustaceans,
and zoophytes; a little higher up we find the vast family
of the vertebrate inhabitants of the waters, – fish ; still
higher up we see a distinct stage in the ascent occupied
by birds and reptiles; still higher up are ranged those im-
portant families of the mammaliferous quadrupeds described
in Scripture as the ‘beasts of the field;’ and then, supreme
over all, and pointing to heaven, we mark, on the cloud-
enveloped summit of the pyramid, reasoning, responsible
man. How incomplete would not the edifice seem,--a
mere unfinished frustrum,_were the intermediate tiers to
be struck away, and man to be placed in immediate juxta-
position with the fish | Such, however, would be the place
and relations of a rational, accountable being, during the
vast divisions of the Palaeozoic period. Or how incom-
plete even would not the edifice seem, were but the second
tier—that comprising the beasts of the field—to be struck
away, and man to be placed in immediate juxtaposition
GAEO ZOG V of THE BASS. 3OI
with the bird and the reptile ! And yet such would be
the place and relations of a rational, accountable being,
during the vast divisions of the Secondary period. It is
not merely on the palpable incompleteness of the chain
in either case, or on the enormous width of its gaps, that
we would have to insist, but also on the positive helpless.
ness of a rational Creature so circumstanced. The moral
agent of such a world would be the unheeded monarch of
an ungovernable canai//e; and, lacking the higher order
of subjects, from which alone his servants and ministers
could be selected, he would lack also, in consequence, any
profitable command over the lower. The mighty armies
which he would be called on to command would, from the
lack of subordinate officers, be mere mutinous mobs, with
which no combined movement could be accomplished, or
general achievement performed. The earth, as it existed
in these earlier periods, could have been no home for
man; and with this conclusion the direct findings of the
geologic record thoroughly agree. In the Palaeozoic, the
Secondary, and the earlier Tertiary formations, we discover
no trace whatever of a reasoning creature, who could stamp
the impress of his mind on inert matter. Ancient as is
the earth which we inhabit, we seem to be in but the first
beginnings of the moral government of God. -
I can, of course, refer to the divine government here
in but its relation to agents possessed, like man, of body
as certainly as of spirit, for of none other can matter
furnish any recognisable trace. In vain, from any exist-
ing data, may we attempt to assign era or epocha, amid
302 GEOZOGY OF 7"HE BASS.
the revolutions of the bygone eternity, to that revolt of
the unembodied powers of evil which
“Raised impious war in Heaven, and battle proud.’
It may have been contemporary with some of the later
geologic formations in our own earth ; or it may have
taken place, according to Milton, when
“As yet this world was not, and Chaos wild
Reigned where these heavens now roll,—where earth now rests,
Upon her centre poised ;’
or it may have arisen as a cloud in the Palaeozoic dawn
of creation, to darken with its shadow every after scene
of existence in all the succeeding creations—those SCelleS
in which the fierce Sauroid fish battled with his congeners,
or the gigantic Saurian with his kindred reptiles, or the
enormous mammal with his weaker brethren of the plain
or forest. It may have exerted a malign influence on
the pre-Adamite ages of Suffering, violence, and death,
just as the sin of the human species now exerts a malign
influence on the condition of those unoffending animals,
contemporary with man, that groan and Suffer because of
human offence. We know regarding neither the era nor
the influence of the earlier event, for on these points the
voice of inspiration is mute; but God's moral government,
in its relation to at least embodied and materia/ agents, is
but of late origin,_a thing of but the passing ages of our
planet ; and for the staying of the great plague, so recently
broken out, the decease at Jerusalem has already been
accomplished. And who shall dare limit the circle of
GAEOZOGY OF 7"HE BASS, 3O3
worlds to which the influence of that decease is destined
to extend? Many a great kingdom has been gladdened
by the beam which broke from the little hill of Calvary:
why may not many a great planet be cheered by the same
beam transmitted from the little world in which the little
hill is included ?
The walls of the stronghold of the Bass, with the excep-
tion of a few rybats or lintels, formed of a light red or
pale Sandstone brought from the shore, are built of stone
quarried from the rock on which it stands. The stone,
originally of a dingy Olive-green colour, like so many other
rocks of the trap family, exhibits, wherever exposed tC)
the weather, a deep tinge of chocolate-brown, the effect,
apparently, of a slight admixture of iron. In the line of
rock which flanks on the right the narrow passage that
runs between the Outer and inner gateway, I detected
several minute veins of this widely-diffused metal exist-
ing as compact red ironstone, brown in the mass, but of
a deep red colour in the streak. A similar species of iron
ore, found in considerable abundance in various parts of
the Highlands, is employed by shepherds, under the name
of Keel, as a pigment for marking their sheep, and yields
a stain which, from its metallic character, is not easily
effaceable. The trap of the Bass has been described by
a celebrated continental geologist, M. A. Boue, as a com-
pact clinkstone ; by Mr. James Nicol, in his. Guide to
the Geology of Scotland, as a “fine granular greenstone
or clinkstone.' I may be permitted to remark, for the
benefit of the uninitiated, that the hard splintery trap-
3O4. GAE O/LOG Y OA' 7TAZAZ /3A.S.S.
rock on which the Castle of Edinburgh stands is a clink-
stone ; while the trap-rock of lighter colour and larger
grain, which forms the noble range of trap precipices that
sweep along the brow of Salisbury Crags, is a greenstone.
The trap of the Bass seems to be of an intermediate
hybrid species: several of the fragments which I detached
from the rocks in the immediate neighbourhood of the
landing-place,—conchoidal in their fracture, and sprinkled
over with minute needle-like crystals of feldspar, that
sparkle in a homogeneous base,_partake more of the
nature of clinkstone ; while in the upper and middle
walks of the island, where the stone is less conchoidal,
and both more persistently granular and the grains con-
siderably larger, it partakes more of the greenstone charac-
ter. But the entire mass, whatever its minuter differences,
is evidently one in its components, and was all consoli-
dated under the refrigerating influences, at Some points
perhaps more, at others less slowly, but in exactly the
same set of circumstances. It may be mentioned, how-
ever, in the passing, that none of the detached fragments
exhibit the peculiar globular structure so frequently shown
in weathering by the greenstone family; nor, indeed, do
we find among the precipices of the island, save in the
line of the cave, marks of weathering of any kind. The
angles stand out as sharp and unworn as if they had been
first exposed to the atmosphere but yesterday; and to
this principle of indestructibility, possessed in a high de-
gree by all the harder clinkstones, does the entire island
owe its preservation in its imposing proportions and singu-
GAEO/COGY OF 7A/AE AEA.S.S. 3O5
lar boldness of outline. Had it been originally composed
of such a yielding tuff as that on which the ſortress of
Tantallan is erected, we would now in vain seek its place
amid the waters, or would find it indicated merely by
some low skerry, dangerous to the mariner at the fall of
the tide.
The sloping acclivity of the Bass consists, as has been
said, of three great steps or terraces, with steep belts of
precipice rising between ; and of these terraces, the lowest
is occupied, as has been already shown, by the fortress,
and furnishes, where it sinks slopingly towards the sea on
the south-east, the two landing-places of the island. The
middle terrace, situated exactly over the cave, and owing
its origin apparently to the operations of the denuding
agencies directed on the same great fissure out of which
the perforation has been scooped, has furnished the site of
the ancient chapel of the island; while the upper and
largest terrace, lying but a single stage beneath the summit
of the rock, we find laid out into a levelled rectangular
enclosure, once a garden. -
The Chapel, though history has failed to note the date of
its erection, bears unequivocal marks of being the oldest
building on the island. A few sandstone rybats line one of
the sides of the door; and there is a sandstone trough
which may have once contained the holy water; but these
merely indicate a Comparatively recent reparation of the
edifice—probably not long anterior in date to the times of
the Reformation. The older hewn work of the erection is
Wrought, not in Sandstone, but in a characteristic well-
.. U
306 GAE O/LOGY OF 7'HAE AEA.S.S.
marked claystone porphyry, occasionally seamed by minute
veins of dull red jasper, which is still quarried for the pur-
poses of the builder in the neighbourhood of Dirleton. Like
most of the porphyries, it is a durable stone ; but in this
exposed locality the wear of many ages has told even on
it ; and it presents on the planes, once smoothed by the
tool, a deeply fretted surface. The compact earthy base
has slowly yielded to the weathering influences, and the
embedded crystals stand out over it in bold relief. The
masonry, too, of the walls and gables speaks, like the
wasted porphyry, of a remote age. In the rubble-work of
the fortress below, though sufficiently rude, we invariably
find two simple rules respected, an attention to which dis-
tinguishes, in the eye of the initiated, the work of the bred
mason of at least the last four centuries, from that of the
untaught diker, or cowan, of the same period. The stones
are placed invariably on their larger, not their lesser beds;
and each, though laid irregularly with respect to its neigh-
bours, ranges level on at least its own bed. A ruler laid
parallel to the line in which it rests would be found to lie
parallel to the line of the horizon also. But in the rubble-
work of the chapel above we find no such laws respected.
The workmen by whom it was built, like the old Cyclopean
builders of Sicily and Etruria, or the untaught burghers of
Edinburgh, who turned out en masse to raise their city wall
in troublous times, had them not in their mind. And the
characteristic is a very general one of the mason-work of
our older and ruder chapels—our Culdee chapels, as I may
perhaps venture to term them. The stones rest on what-
GEO ZOGY OF 7//E AEA.S.S. 3O7
ever beds chanced to fit, or in whatever angle best suited
the Jie of the course immediately below.
The garden, surrounded by a ruinous wall and a broad
fringe of nettles, occupies, as has been said, the upper
terrace of the island. When I had last seen it in the
genial month of June 1842, it bore, among the long rank
grass that marks the richness of its soil, its delicate sprink-
ling of ‘garden - flowers grown wild ;' but the pleasant
: cherry trees,’ of the fruit of which Mr. Fraser of Brea
* several times tasted,’ were no longer to be seen ; and
now, overborne by the wintry influences, the flowers them-
selves had disappeared, and the area lay covered with a
sallow carpeting of withered herbage. What is termed the
well — a deep square excavation near the middle of the
enclosure—I found full to overflowing with a brown turbid
fluid, which gave honest information to the organs of smell
that it was neither necessary nor advisable to consult re-
garding it those of taste. It had proved, I was informed
by the boatmen, the grave of a hapless sheep during one
of the snow-storms of last winter; and a cold infusion of
undressed mutton—for the animal had been left to decay
when it had fallen—would form, I am afraid, but tolerable
drinking, even with the benefit of the finest of water as a
menstruum. The water of the Bass, however, and I saw
considerable accumulations of it in two other receptacles,
—must be bad when at the best. Mr. Fraser complains,
in his Memoir, that in the winter time, when communica-
tion between the island and the mainland was cut off by
the surf, the prisoners had not unfrequently, for lack of
308 G. EO/OGY OF 7A/A2 B.A.S.S.
better, to drink ‘corrupted water, sprinkled over with a
little oatmeal.” The frequent rains,—for there is no true
spring in the island,-in soaking downwards through the
rich soil, fattened during a long Series of years by the dung
dropped on it by the birds, becomes a sort of dilute tinc-
ture of guano, which, however fitted for the support of
vegetable existence, must be but little conducive to the
welfare of animal life. And hence one of the charac-
teristics indicated by the laird of Brae, the Bass water is
‘corrupted water.’
A pyramid of loose stones—the work of some of the
troops engaged in the great Ordnance survey—occupies
the apex of the island. One is sometimes inclined to
regret that these conspicuous mementoes of an important
national undertaking, which in the remoter and wilder
regions of our country furnish so many central resting
points, from which the eye—to employ a phrase of Shen-
stone's—“lets itself out on the surrounding landscape,’
should be of so temporary a character. Placed, as most
of them are, far out of reach of the levelling plough and
harrow, and of the covetous dike-builder, they would form,
were they but constructed of stone and run lime, connect-
ing links between the present and remotely future genera-
tions, that would be at least more honourable to the age
of their erection than monuments raised to commemorate
the ferocities of barbarous clan-battles, or the doubtful
virtues of convenient statesmen, who got places for their
dependents. They might have their little tablets, too,
commemorative, like those of the old Roman wall, of the
GZO/LOGY OF 7TA/AE PA.S.S. 309
laborious ‘ vexi/Zarić’ who had erected them, and usefully
illustrative, besides, of the Comparative powers, in resisting
disintegration, of the various serpentines, marbles, granites,
and sandstones of the country. The stony sentinel of the
Bass—for sentinel, at a little distance, it seems—occupies,
like many of its fellows over Scotland, what in the winter
nights must be a Supremely drear and lonely watching
station,-quite the sort of place for the ghost of some old
persecuting prison-captain to take its stand, what time the
midnight moon looks out through rack and spray, and the
shadow of the old chapel falls deep and black athwart the
sward. The island must have been less solitary a-nights
than now, during at least the summer season, some sixty
years ago, when, according to an account by Alexander
Wilson, the well-known literary pedlar, the climbers resided
permanently on the rock at breeding time, ‘in a little hut,
in which liquor and bread and cheese were sold’ for the
‘accommodation of chance visitors, and of the sportsmen
who frequented the place for the diversion of shooting.’
Wilson, laden with pieces of muslin and of verse, and with
the prospectus of his first publication in his pocket, jour-
neyed along the coast in the autumn of 1789, to make a
“bold push,’ as he somewhat quaintly informs the reader in
his journal, ‘for the united interest of pack and poems,'—
recording each night the observations and occurrences of
the day. He had visited Canty—or, as he writes the word,
Com/y—Bay, where then, as now, ‘a few solitary fishers
lived, and was much struck with the appearance of the
Bass, ‘a large rock,’ he says, “rising out of the sea to the
3 IO GAEOLOGY OF THE BASS.
dreadful height of six hundred feet, giving the spectator
an awful idea of its Almighty founder, who weigheth the
mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance ; who, by
one word, raised into existence this vast universe, with all
these unwieldy rocks; and who will, when His Almighty
goodness shall think fit, with one word command them to
their primitive nothing.” But though he eagerly transferred
to his journal all the information regarding the rock which
he succeeded in collecting, he was unable, it would seem,
to visit it: times were hard, and his list, both of sales and
subscribers, low.
‘The poor pedlar failed to be favoured with sale,
And they did not encourage the poet.’
Wilson pointedly refers in his journal to the ‘prodigious
number of solan geese that build among the cliffs of the
rock.” With what feelings, as he lay on the green bank
ashore, did he survey the flocks wheeling and screaming
around it, thick as midges over a woodland pool in mid-
Summer, now gleaming bright in the distance as they
presented their white backs to the Sun, -anon disappearing
for a moment, as they wheeled in airy evolution, and the
shaded edges of their wings turned to the spectator | Did
the pulses of the incipient Ornithologist beat any the
quicker as he gazed on the living cloud P or did there arise
within him a presentiment—a sort of first glimmer—of the
happy enthusiasm which at an after period pervaded his
whole mind, when, week after week, he lived in the wild
forests of the West, or swept in his canoe over the breasts
of mighty rivers for hundreds of miles, marking every
GAEO/LOGY OF THE AEA.S.S. 3II
beauty of form, every variety of note, every peculiarity of
instinct, vested in the feathered creation, and laying in,
fresh from nature, the materials of his magnificent descrip-
tions P Had we met such a poor curious pedlar to-day, we
would willingly have indulged him in a gratis voyage to
the Bass, and charged the expense of his entertainment to
the account of the forthcoming volume ; but pedlars of the
type of the Ornithologist are, I suspect, rare. The last of
the fraternity with whom I came in contact was a tall,
Corduroy-encased man, laden with japanned trays. There
was an idle report current at the time—for our meeting
occurred shortly after the Queen's first visit to Scotland—
that her Majesty purposed purchasing Craigmillar Castle,
and getting it fitted up into a royal residence; and as the
castle, on its noble slope, with the blue Pentlands in the
background, and Arthur Seat, half in shadow, half bronzed
by the sun, full in front, formed our prospect at the time,
the tall pedlar was amusing himself in loyally criticising
the landscape on behalf of his Sovereign. ‘Yes,’ he said,
‘there's a wheen bonny parks there, and there's bonny
bits of wud atween them ; but yonder's a curn of zelg/.
hills; an' it's an ugly rocky lump that Arthur Seat. Nae
doubt the place is no a bad place; but it wad be a hantle
prettier place for a queen if we could but tak’ awa the
coorse Pentlands and the reigh Seat.' -
How vastly more strange and extravagant-looking truth
is than fiction 1 Our Edinburgh Reviewers deemed it one
of the gravest among the many grave offences of Words.
worth, that he should have made the hero of the ‘Excur.
312 GAZO/.OGY OF THE BASS.
sion' a pedlar. “What,’ they ask, “but the most wretched
and provoking perversity of taste and judgment could in-
duce any one to place his chosen advocate of wisdom and
virtue in so absurd and fantastic a condition ? Did Mr.
Wordsworth really imagine that his favourite doctrines
were likely to gain anything in point of effect or authority
by being put into the mouth of a person accustomed to
higgle about tape or brass sleeve-buttons? Or is it not
plain that, independent of the ridicule and disgust which
such a personification must give to many of his readers,
its adoption exposes his work throughout to the charge of
revolting incongruity and utter disregard of probability or
nature? If the critics be thus severe on the mere choice
of so humble a hero, what would they not have said had
the poet ventured to represent his pedlar, not only as a
wise and meditative man, but also as an accomplished
writer, and a successful cultivator of natural science,—the
author of a great national work, eloquent as that of Buffon,
and incomparably more true in its facts and observations!
Nay, what would they have said if, rising to the extreme
of extravagance, he had ventured to relate that the pedlar,
having left the magnificent work unfinished at his death,
an accomplished prince—the nephew of by far the most
puissant monarch of modern times—took it up and Com-
pleted it in a volume, bearing honourable reference and
testimony, in almost every page, to the ability and singular
faithfulness of his humble predecessor the ‘Wanderer?”
And yet this strange story, so full of ‘revolting incongruity
and utter disregard of probability and nature,” would be
GAZO/LOGY OF THE BASS. 3I 3
exactly that of the Paisley pedlar, Alexander Wilson, the
author of the American Ornithology, a work completed by
a fervent admirer of the pedlar's genius, Prince Charles
Lucien Bonaparte. There are several passages in the
journal kept by Wilson when he visited Canty Bay and its
neighbourhood—though he was a young man at the time,
unpossessed of that mastery over the powers of thought
and composition to which he afterwards attained—that
serve strikingly to remind one of the peculiar vein of
observation and reflection developed in the Wanderer Of
the ‘Excursion.” The following incident, for instance,
recorded during the evening on which he jotted down his
remarks on the Bass, seems such a one as the humble
hero of Wordsworth would have delighted to narrate.
He had passed on from Canty Bay to Tantallan, where
he lingered long amid the broken walls and nodding
arches. And then, “ having sufficiently examined the
ancient structure,” he says, “I proceeded forwards, and
arrived at a small village, where, the night coming on, I
obtained lodgings in a little ale-house. While I sat con-
versing with the landlord, he communicated to me the
following incident, which had recently taken place in a
family in the neighbourhood. About six months ago, the
master of the house, who was by trade a fisher, fell sick,
and continued in a lingering way until about three weeks
ago, when distemper increased to that degree that all hopes
of recovery were gone. In these circumstances he pre-
pared himself for dissolution in a manner that became a
Christian, and agreeably to the character he had all along
3I4. GEOZOGY OF THE BASS.
been distinguished by when in health and vigour. Mean-
while, his wife, being pregnant, drew near the time of her
delivery ; and as the thought that he should not see his
last child cost the poor man no small uneasiness, it became
one of his fervent petitions to Heaven that he might be
spared until after its birth. But his malady increased, and
all his relations were called on to take their last farewell.
While they stood around his bed, expecting his immediate
departure, his wife was taken suddenly ill, and in less than
an hour was delivered of twins, which the dying man no
sooner understood, than he made signs that the minister
should be sent for, who accordingly in a short time came.
He then attempted to rise in bed, but his strength was ex-
hausted. Hereupon one of his daughters went into the
bed behind him, and supported his hands until he held up
both the children; first one and then the other. Then,
kissing them both, he delivered them over to their mother,
and, reclining his head softly on the pillow, expired.” Such
is one of the more characteristic passages in the prose
“Axcursion' of the pedlar Wilson. It forms, however, no
part of the Geology of the Bass. *
Let us now see whether we cannot form some con-
sistent theory regarding the origin and early history of
the rock. It occurs, as has been said, in a highly dis-
turbed district, which extends on the west to Aberlady
Bay, and on the east to near the ancient Castle of Dun-
bar, and includes in its stormy area by far the greater
part of the parishes of Whitekirk, Prestonkirk, North
Berwick, Dirleton, and Athelstaneford. The trap islands
GEOZOGY OF THE BASS. 315
and skerries that lie on both sides parallel to the shore
show that this Plutonic region does not, at least immedi-
ately, terminate with the coast-line ; while the Isle of
May—a vast mass of greenstone, lofty enough to raise
its head above the profounder depths of the Frith beyond
—may be regarded as fairly indicating that, on the con-
trary, it stretches quite as far under the sea as into the
interior of the country. And occupying nearly the centre
of this disturbed district, like some undressed obelisk
standing lichened and grey in the middle of some ancient
battle-field, rises the tall column of the Bass. How ac-
count for its presence there?
The thick of the battle between the Vulcanists and
Neptuneans has always lain around elevations of this
character : they have formed posts of vantage, for the
possession of which the contending parties have struggled
like the British and French forces at Waterloo round
Hougomont and La Haye Sainte ; but the wind of the
commotion has been long since laid, and they may now
be approached fearlessly and in safety. The Wernerians,
some of whom could believe, about the beginning of
the present century, that even obsidian and pumice were
of ‘aquatic formation,’ regarded them as mere aqueous
concretions, terminating abruptly below, without com-
munication with rocks of resembling character, and as
similar in their origin to the hard insulated yolks which
Sometimes occur in beds of sandstone and of lime; while
the Huttonians held them, on the other hand, to be,
like the lava of volcanoes, productions of the internal
316 GAEO/OG Y OF 7A/AE AEA.S.S.
fire, and believed that they communicated in every in-
stance with the abyss from which their substance was
at first derived. Both parties, of course, agreed in re-
cognising immense denudation as the agent which had
scooped from around them the softer rocks, in which,
according to the Wernerian, they had consolidated under
the operations of some unknown chemistry; or whose
rents and chasms, opened by the volcanic forces, had
furnished, according to the Huttonian, the moulds in
which they had been cast,--as an ironfounder casts his
ponderous wheels, levers, and axles, in matrices of clay
or sand, that communicate by sluice with the molten re-
servoir of the furnace. Let us take immense denudation,
then, the work of tides and waves operating for myriads
of ages, as an agent common to both parties. From
where Edinburgh now stands, a huge dome of the Coal
Measures, greatly loftier than the Pentlands, and that
once connected the coal-field of Falkirk with that of
Dalkeith, has been swept away by this tremendous power;
while from the western districts of Ross, a deposition of
the Old Red Sandstone, full three thousand feet in thick-
ness, has in like manner been ground down, and the
gneiss rocks on which it rested laid bare. And in the
one district we find eminences of harder texture than
the mass that had once enveloped them,--such as Arthur
Seat, the Castle rock, Corstorphine Hill, and the Dal-
mahoy Crags, – standing up in high relief; and moun-
tains such as Suil Veinn, Coul Beg, and Coul More, in
the other.
GAEO/COGY OF 7//E BASS. 3I 7
‘Who was it scoop'd these stony waves?
Who scalp'd the brows of old Cairngorm,
And dug these ever-yawning caves 2–
'Twas I, the Spirit of the storm.’
And, scattered over the disturbed district of which the
Bass occupies nearly the centre, we find resembling marks
of vast denudation ; the Bass itself, the four adjoining
islands, the Isle of May, the Garlton Hills near Had-
dington, and the Law of North Berwick, serving but in
little part to indicate the height at which the enveloping
material once stood. These eminences compose, accord-
ing to the poet, the stony waves of the locality, scooped
out of the yielding mass by the ‘Spirit of the storm.’
With the denuding agencies granted, then, by both
parties, as a force operative in converting the inequalities
in solidity of the rocks of the district into inequalities
of level on its surface, let us next remark, that all the
eminences thus scooped out are composed of hard trap;
while the reduced mass out of which they have been dug
consists either of soft trap-tuff, or of stratified shales,
sandstones, and limestones, rocks these last which Wer-
nerians and Huttonians alike recognise as of sedimentary
origin. From the section of the harder traps, exhibited
On the general surface by the denuding forces, can we
alone judge of their original forms as solid figures, or of
that of the buried portions of them ; and the difficulty of
determining from mere sections the form of even regu-
/ar figures, may serve to show how much uncertainty and
doubt must always attend the attempt to determine from
mere sections the form of irregular ones. Let us suppose
318 GAZO/COG Jº OA. THE BA.S.S.
that a mass of black opaque glass, thickly charged with
regularly-formed cones of white china, –cones described
by angles of many various degrees of acuteness, and care-
lessly huddled together in every possible angle of incli-
nation,--has been ground down to a considerable depth,
as if by the denuding agencies, and then polished. In
how many diverse figures of white would not the china.
cones be presented . There would be paraboles and
hyperboles, circles, ellipses, and isosceles triangles; the
circles would be of every variety of size; the angles of
every degree of acuteness; the paraboles, hyperboles,
and ellipses, of every proportion and form compatible
with the integrity of these figures; and who, save the
mathematician who had studied conics, could demon-
strate that the one normal figure, of which all these
numerous forms were sections, could be the cone, and
the cone only P But if the embedded pieces of china
were not of regular, but of irregular figures, their forms
as solids could, from the sections laid open, be but con-
jectured, not demonstrated. Such, however, is the diffi-
culty with which the geologist, whatever his school, has
to contend, who studies by section the forms of the trap-
rocks, enclosed in sedimentary or tuffaceous matrices ;
and, of course, great uncertainty must always attach to
arguments, whether for the support or demolition of any
theory, founded upon these doubtful forms. It may be
received as a general principle, for instance, that dikes
and veins of aqueous origin, filled by the ocean from
above, will terminate beneath somewhat in a wedge-like
GEO/OGY OF 7"HE AASS. 3I9
fashion, or, at least, that they will terminate beneath, and
will be open above ; whereas, of veins or dikes of Plutonic
origin, filled by injected matter from the abyss, it may
be received as a general principle, that while they may
in some cases terminate in a wedge-like form above, they
will be always open below. And, accordingly, much has
been built by the Huttonian on dikes open beneath, and
much by the Wernerian on similar dikes shut beneath,
and merely open atop. But the section in such cases
can convey but an inadequate and doubtful idea of the
enclosed mass, whether deposited from above, or injected
from below ; and even were the idea adequate, and the
form of the mass demonstrably ascertained, existing in
many cases as a mere fragment which the denuding agent
has spared, exceedingly little explanatory of its origin
could with propriety be founded upon its form. There
exists, I doubt not, many a wedge-shaped bed of trap
that has now no connection whatever with the abysmal
depths. It is demonstrable, however, that such trap-
wedges, though as entirely insulated as yolks or concre-
tions, may have been filled from beneath notwithstand-
ing. Let me attempt an illustration, which may serve
also to exemplify my theory of the Bass.
Let us suppose, then, that where Edinburgh Castle now
stands there yawned of old the crater of a volcano. The
molten lava boiled fiercely within the chasm ; the im-
prisoned gases struggled hard for egress; ever and anon
showers of ashes and fragments of stone were emitted, and
in their descent fell all around, until at length a consider-
320 GAE O/LOG V OF 7TA/AE /3A.S.S.
able hill of a true volcanic tuff came to be formed, adown
which there rushed from time to time vast beds of molten
matter, which, gradually cooling on the slopes, alternated,
in the form of trap-beds, with the tuff. At length the
base of the hill, ever widening by this process, came, in
the lapse of seasons, to extend eastwards to what are now
Salisbury Crags, the Crags being, let us suppose, but a
portion of the tuffaceous bottom, topped by one of the
lava-beds that had issued from the central crater. It will,
of course, be at once seen that I am not dealing here with
the actual theory of the Crags or Castle Hill: the actual
theory the reader may find, if he wills, ingeniously and
satisfactorily stated in Mr. Maclaren's interesting Sketches
of the Geology of Fife and the Zoſhians. I am dealing, not
with the actualities of the case, but for the sake of illus-
tration, with what demonstrably might have been. Let us
suppose, further, that in the lapse of ages this volcano had
become extinct, that the lava within had hardened in the
crater, like a pillar of molten bronze in its mould,—and
that then, through the gradual submergence of the land,
the eminence had come to be exposed to the denuding
powers of the great Gulf Stream setting in against it from
the west, and the prolonged roll of the waves of the At-
lantic, occasionally aggravated by tempest. At first the
western base of the hill would begin to wear away, as the
tides and billows chaſed against the unsolid tuff, and the
lava-beds, deeply undermined, broke off in vast masses and
tumbled down. Anon the solid central column, moulded
in the crater, would be laid bare ; yet anon, thoroughly
GAEO/LOGY O/F THE B.A.S.S. 321
divested of its case, it would stand out as an insulated
stack, with but the tail of softer matter behind it, which it
had shielded from the denuding forces. At length, of the
entire hill there would remain but the central column,
greatly shortened in its altitude, like the trunk of a tree
two-thirds cut down, the ridge on which the more ancient
part of the city now stands ; and a portion of the eastern
base of the hill, represented by Salisbury Crags, bearing
atop a wedge of trap, terminating, at what is called the
Hunter's Bog, in a thin edge, and, though at one time con-
nected with the insulated column, and by the column with
the Plutonic depths below, now cut off by a wide chasm
from both. And then, at this stage, through an upheaval
of the land, let us suppose that the denuding agents had
ceased to operate, and that the extinct volcano came to
exist permanently as a truncated column of rock, and a
detached dike of consolidated lava, open above and shut
below, the one admirably suited to form the site of an
impregnable stronghold, the other to furnish the foundation
of a Wernerian argument conclusive regarding the aqueous
Origin of trap. The mode of insulation specified here is
but one of many in which wedges and overlying masses of
igneous rock, originally derived from the gulf beneath, may
have come to exist in altogether as insulated a state as
sedimentary beds or travelled boulders.
But the grand question at issue between the two schools
of geology may now be regarded as finally settled; and the
trap-rocks, with the exception of the tuffs, in the composi-
tion and arrangement of which, as has been shown, both
X
322 GAE O/LOGY OF THE B.A.S.S.
the aqueous and the Plutonic elements may have been
operative, have been made over entire to the Huttonian.
No man would venture at this time of day to stand up for
the ‘aquatic formation’ of obsidian or pumice ; and few
indeed for the sedimentary origin of either the greenstone
of Salisbury Crags, or the hybrid clinkstone of the Bass.
The volcanic districts have been explored, and the passage
of the lavas into the traps carefully noted, with their re-
sembling powers of disturbance when ejected into fissures
or existing as dikes. The assistance of the chemist, too,
has been called in : trap has been fused into a porous
glass, and the glass again re-fused, by a slow process, into
a basaltic crystallite, undistinguishable in some specimens
from the original rock, or converted, by a process less
leisurely, into a liver-like wacke; and lava similarly treated
has been made to yield a resembling glass in the first in-
stance, and, as the experiment was conducted more or less
slowly, an almost identical Crystallite, or a liver-like wacke,
in the second. The more ancient rocks have also been
put to the question, and a primary hornblende converted
in the crucible into an augitic basalt. The quality pos-
sessed by the traps of altering other rocks in immediate
contact with them has also been examined, and similar
alterations produced simply by the agency of heat and
pressure. Coal in juxtaposition with a trap-dike has been
found converted into coke, clay baked into lydian-stone or
jasper, chalk fused into marble; and what the igneous rock
did of old in the bowels of the earth, the experimenter has
succeeded in doing in his laboratory, with but heat, pres-
GEO ZOG Y OF TAZAZ A.A.S.S. 323
sure, and time for his assistants. There are few points
better established in the whole circle of geological science
than the igneous origin of the trap-rocks.
The ponderous column of the Bass—to sum up my
theory in a few words—is composed, as has been shown,
of one of the harder and more solid of these igneous
rocks. Rising near the centre of the disturbed district
in which it occurs, it indicates, I am inclined to hold, the
place of a great Crater, at one time filled to the top with
molten matter, which, when the fires beneath burnt low,
gradually and slowly consolidated into crystallite as it
cooled, until it became the unyielding rock which we
now find it. The tuffaceous matrix in which it had been
moulded, exposed to the denuding agencies, wore piece-
meal away; much even of the upper portion of the column
itself may have disappeared; and what remains, rising from
the level of the sea-bottom below to the height of six hun-
dred feet, may be regarded as the capital-divested top of
some pillar of the desert, that, buried by the drifting sand,
exhibits but a comparatively small portion of its entire
length over the surface, but descends deep into the in-
terior, communicating with the very basement of the edi-
fice to which it belongs. -
We had now spent a considerable time on the island,
and a lovely day was passing into a still lovelier evening.
The sun hung low over the western shoulder of North Ber-
wick Law, in a sky embrowned along the horizon by a dif-
fused vapour, the effect of an incipient frost; and the light,
tinged as if with blood, fell in one ruddy sheet athwart
324. - G/EO/LOGY OF 7A/E B.A.S.S.
the glassy surface of the sea, now undisturbed by a single
ripple, and imparted a deep tinge of purple to the brown
ruins at our feet, and the lichened rocks around us. The
shadow of the Bass, elongated for miles, stretched in dark-
iness towards the east, like the shadow of the mysterious
pillar of cloud of old along the sands of the Desert; while,
dim in the haze towards the north, we could discern, and
barely discern, the uncertain outline of the grey cliffs of
May, with its white Pharos atop, that seemed a sheeted
spectre, the solitary inhabitant of some island of Cloud.
land. The steep precipices of the neighbouring coast
frowned dark and cold in the shade, but the red beam
slanted warmly along the level expanse of fields atop ; and
though the stern Tantallan presented to us his shady side,
there was a strange brightness in the gleam of his eyes : the
slant light, passing sheer through window and shot-hole,
traversed, in long rules of ruddy bronze, the stratum of
frosty vapour behind.
There was a magnificent combination of fairy wildness
and beauty in the scene. And yet it was all a reality,
though a transitory one. It tarnished and faded as the
sun sank lower in the cloud ; and in a brief half-hour all
was enveloped in grey. And then, late in the night, the
moon, far in its wane, would arise, and reveal, amid the
deep solitude of the islet, a scene of drear and ghostly
uncertainties, jutting cliffs, and broken and roofless walls,
and a dark sea around, traversed by one broad pathway
of undulating light. And then morning would dawn, and
the beam redden and strengthen, and the canvas would
GAE O/LOG}^ OA” T///, /3A1.S.S. 325
exhibit within the old outlines another and fresher succes-
sion of colours. Thus, with every passing hour and season,
and every meteoric change, does the landscape alter,
now tranquil in the Calm, anon troubled with tempest ;
and thus has it ever altered : but not merely has the filling
up—the shades and colours—done so, but the solid out-
lines also ; and when standing, during this exquisite even-
ing hour, beside the little pyramid on the summit of the
rock, I could not help wishing that, under the influence
of some such vision as fell upon Mirza in the ‘long hollow
valley of Bagdad,' I could see Scene succeed scene in the
surrounding area, from the early dawn of being in the
days of the Grauwacke, down to those historic periods
during which, doing or suffering, man enacted his part
upon the stage. How many of those dark enigmas would
not the mere survey serve to solve, which a true though
little-known poet, Colton, invoked the genius of the in-
spired Hebrew lawgiver to unriddle !
“O thou that o'er the Egyptian hurled
Thy crystal wall, and didst a world
Both made and marred record : O deign to tell,
Seer of the pillared flame and granite well,
Who taught old Mother Earth to hide
The lava's age-repeated tide;
And bid—though centuries toiled in vain—
Her thousandth Eden bloom again;
Or solve what eras, since the shock
Of flood and flame rived hill and rock,
Have rolled,—to turn to flint and stone
The bison's horn, the mammoth's boné!
Embedded deep and dark they lie,
'Neath mountains heaped on mountains high,
326 GEOLOGY OF THE BASS.
So long, their very race is spent, L
They exist but in their monument.
But who their mausoleum made 2
Did earthquakes wield that mighty spade
That renders all old Babel piled
But the card-castle of a child 2
Strange, that Creation can’t afford
Such pomp to shroud her sixth-day's lord,
But gives each mean or monstrous thing
That burial she denies her king.
These are earth's secrets; but to gain
Those of the Deep thout rent in twain,
'Twere worth a dull eternity
Of common life to question thee.”
The curtain rises, and there spreads out a wide sea,
limited, however, in its area by a dark fog that broods
along the horizon, and enveloped, even where best seen,
in a grey obscurity, like that of a misty morning in May
an hour before the Sun has risen. It is the ocean of our
Scotch Grauwacke that rolls beneath and around us; but
regarding its inhabitants,<-SO exceedingly numerous and
well-defined in the contemporary seas of what is now
IEngland,--we can do little more than guess. We know
merely that it rolls its waves over a grey impalpable mud,
to whose numerous folds it communicates in the shallows
the characteristic ripple-markings; that it possesses a
chambered shell of the genus Orthocera, with two or three
obscure Brachiopods; and that the grey mud beneath
abounds in some localities with a curious zoophyte, akin
to the existing sea-pens of our deep submarine hollows.
The most abundant denizens of that twilight sea are
creatures shaped like a quill, or rather communities of
GEO ZOG Y OF 7THE PA.S.S. 327
creatures,-for each quill is a little republic,+that enjoy
their central shaft, with its stony axis, as common pro-
perty, and have their rows of microscopic domiciles ranged
in the filaments of the web. The light brightens over the
wide expanse, and the fog rises; myriads of ages have
passed by ; the countless strata of the Grauwacke are
already deposited ; and we have entered on the eras of
the Old Red Sandstone. That change has taken place,
to the reality of which, as conclusively indicated in space,
the judgment of Playfair could not refuse its assent, but
with whose slow operations, as spread over time almost
lengthened into eternity, his imagination failed to grapple.
The perspective darkened as he looked along the long
vista of the ages gone by, and left on his mind but a per-
plexing and shadowy idea of a dim platform of undefined
boundary, on which chaotic revolutions of incalculable
vastness were performed during periods of immeasurable
extent. It does seem a strange fact, and yet the evidence
of its reality as such is incontrovertible, that when the
lower beds of the Old Red Sandstone were—to borrow
from the philosopher—“only beginning to be deposited
in the shape of mud or sand, from the waters of a super-
incumbent ocean,’ the Grauwacke on which they were
thrown down was quite as old a looking rock as it is now,
and that the numerous graptolites preserved in its strata
existed at the time as but the dimly preserved fossils which
We 110 W. See them,-miniature quills, with thickly serrated
edges, drawn in glossy bitumen on a ground of grey.
With the beginnings of the Old Red Sandstone a slight
328 GAE O/LOG}^ OA. ZTA/A. B.A.S.S.
change takes place in the colouring of the prospect. There
is a flush of ochrey red over yonder shallow, where the
wave beats on the ferruginous sand ; the skerry beyond
seems darkened with sea-weed ; and though we are still,
as before, out of sight of land, and so can know little
regarding its productions, we may see a minute branch
of club-moss floating past, and the trunk of some conifer-
ous tree, and can, in Consequence, at least determine that
land there is. But mark how brightly the depths gleam
with the mirror-like reflection of scales, -scales resplen-
dent with enamel, that owe their name—ganoid, or glitter-
ing—to their brilliancy. How strangely uncouth the
forms of these ancient denizens of the deep, and, in some
instances, how monstrous their size Yonder, swimming
leisurely a few feet under the surface, as if watching the
play of a distant shoal of diplopteri, is the ponderous
asterolepis, -its glassy eyes set in their triangular Sockets,
as in some families of Snakes, immediately over its mouth,
—its head armed with a dermal covering of bone, from
which a musket-bullet would rebound as from a stone-
wall,—its body tiled over with oblong Scales, delicately
carved, like the inlaid mail of a warrior, its jaws furnished
with their outer tier of minute thickly-set fish-teeth, and
their inner tier of reptile-teeth, greatly bulkier than those
of the crocodile, and set at wide intervals, after the Sauroid
pattern. And yonder—a member of the same family, of
larger scale, and more squat, though somewhat less Colossal
in its proportions—swims the strong holoptychius. The
numerous flights of pterichthyes, with their compact bodies,
GEO ZOG Y OF 7///E AEA.S.S. 329
spread wings, and rudder-like tails, resemble flocks of sub-
marine birds ; the plated coccosteus and the broad glyp-
tolepis flap heavily along the bottom ; crowds of minute
cheiracanthi, with all their various congeners, bristling
with spines, and poised on membranaceous, Scale-covered
fins, dart hither, thither, and athwart, in the green stratum
above; while, dimly seen, a huge crustacean Creeps slowly
over the ribbed sand beneath. But ages and centuries
pass in quick succession, as the waves roll along the sur-
face,—species and genera pass away, families become ex-
tinct, races perish ; the rocks of the Old Red Sandstone,
holding in their stony folds their numerous strange organ-
isms, are all laid down, as those of the Grauwacke had
been previously deposited ; and the Scene changes as the
unsummed periods of the system reach their close.
There is a further increase in the light as the day ad-
vances, and the sun climbs the steep of heaven ; but the
ſogs of morning still hang their dense folds on the horizon.
We shall look out for the land when the mist rises: it
cannot now be far distant. The brown eddies of a freshet
circle past, restricted, as where vast rivers mingle with the
ocean, to an upper layer of sea; and broken reeds, withered -
ferns, the cones of the Lycopodiaceae, and of trees of the
Araucarian family, float outwards in the current, thick
and frequent as the spoils of the great Mississippi in the
course of the voyager, when he has come within half a
day’s sail of the shores of the delta. But our view is still
restricted, as heretofore, to a wide tract of sea, – now
whitened, where the frequent flats and banks rise within
33O GAZO/LOGY OF 7"HE BA.S.S.
a few fathoms of the surface, by innumerable beds of
shells, reefs of corals, and forests of Crinoidea. Here,
the water seems all a-glow with the brilliant colours of
the living polypi that tenant the calcareous cells, green,
scarlet and blue, yellow and purple : we seem as if look-
ing down on gorgeous parterres, submerged when in full
blow, or, through the dew-bedimmed panes of a green-
house, on the magnificent heaths, geraniums, and cacti
of the warmer latitudes, when richest in flower. Yonder
there lie vast argosies of snowy Terebratula, each fast
anchored to the rocky bottom by the fleshy cable that
stretches from the circular dead eye in its umbone, like the
mooring chain from the prow of a galley; while directly
over them, vibrating in the tide, stretch the marble-like
petals of the stone lily. The surface is ploughed by the
numerous Sailing-shells of the period, the huge Orthocera,
and the whorled nautilacea and goniatite. And fish abound
as before, though the races are all different. We may
mark the smaller varieties in play over the coral beds,-
the lively palaeoniscus, that so resembles a gold-fish cased
in bone,—and the squat deeply-bodied amblypterus, with
its nicely fretted scales and plates, and its strongly rayed
fins. The gyracanthis, with its massy spine carved as
elaborately as the 'prentice pillar in Roslin, swims through
the profounder depths, uncertain in outline, like a moving
cloud by night; while the better defined megalichthys,
with its coat of bright quadrangular scales, and its closely-
jointed and finely-punctulated helmet of enamelled bone,
glides vigorously along yonder submarine field of Crinoi-
GEO/LOGY OF THAE BASS. 33 I
dea, and the slim stony arms and tall Columnar stems,
brushed by its fins, bend, as it passes, like a swathe of
tall grass swept by a sudden breeze. We are full in the
middle of the era of the Carboniferous Limestone. And
some of us may be rendered both wiser and humbler,
mayhap, by noting a simple fact or two directly connected
with this formation, ere the curtain drop over it.
We have already marked in our survey numerous beds
of shells, glimmering pale through the shallows;–here
argosies of Terebratula anchored to the rocks beneath,
there fleets of chambered nautilaceae, careering along the
surface of the waters above. But it is chiefly on the fixed
shells — the numerous bivalves of the profounder depths
—that I would now ask the reader to concentrate his
attention. They belong, in large proportion, to a class
imperfectly represented in the existing seas, and which
had comparatively few representatives during even the
Secondary periods, rich as these were in molluscs of high
development; though, during the great Palaeozoic divi-
sion, their vast abundance formed one of the most re-
markable characteristics of the period. Of this class (the
Brachiopoda of the modern naturalist), many hundred
species have already been determined in the older rocks
of our island ; while, as living inhabitants of the seas
which encircle it, Dr. Fleming, in his British Animals,
enumerates but four species; and none of these—such is
their rarity—the greater part of my readers ever saw."
* TEREBRATULA eranium, T. Zsitacea, T. aurita, and CRISPUS ano-
malus.
332 GE O/LOGY OF 7///E /3A.S.S.
These Brachiopoda, of which in the Carboniferous Lime-
Stone there existed the numerous families of the Tere-
bratula, the Spirifer, and the Productus, were in all their
species bivalves of an exceedingly helpless class. The
valves, instead of being united, as in the cockle, mussel,
pecten, and oyster, by strong elastic hinges, were merely
Sewed together, if I may so speak, by bundles of unelastic
fleshy fibres; and the opening of the lips a very little
apart-so simple and facile a movement to the ordinary
bivalve,
was to the Brachiopod an achievement feebly
accomplished through the agency of an operose and com-
plex machinery. To compensate, however, for the defect,
the Creatures were furnished on both sides the mouth
with numerous cilia, or hair-like appendages, through the
rapid vibratory movements of which they could produce
minute currents in the water, and thus bring into the in-
terior of their shells, between lips raised but a line apart,
the numerous particles of organic matter floating around
them which constituted their proper food. They resem-
bled in their mode of living rather the orders below them,-
radiata. Such as the Actinea, or Zoophytes such as the Tubu-
lariadae, than true molluscs. But there are no mistakes in
the work of the Divine Mechanician : in the absence of an
elastic hinge, the minute cilia performed their part; and
So, throughout the vast periods of the Palaeozoic division,
the helpless Brachiopoda continued to exist in vastly
greater numbers than any of their contemporaries.
Now, it is a curious circumstance, that Paley, when
adducing, in his AWałural Zheology, some of the marks of
G/E O/LOG Y O / ZY/ZAZ A.A.S.S. 333
design so apparent in the hinge of bivalves, such as
the cockle and oyster, misses by far the most important
point exhibited in its construction, and so converts his
bivalves into poor helpless Brachiopoda, unfurnished with
the compensatory cilia. It is further curious that, in the
elaborate edition of the 77teology, jointly published by
Lord Brougham and Sir Charles Bell, though there be a
neat woodcut of the Venus - heart cockle given to illus-
trate their author's idea, the omitted point is not noticed.
‘In the bivalve order of shell-fish,’ says the Archdeacon,
—‘ cockles, mussels, oysters, etc., what contrivance can
be so simple or so clear as the insertion at the back of
a tough tendinous substance, that becomes at once the
Ågament which binds the two shells together, and the
Ainge upon which they open and shut?” Most true ! the
inserted cartilage is both ligament and hinge ; but even
some of the helpless Brachiopoda have, in the one in-
sertion at their back, both ligament and hinge, and are
helpless Brachiopoda notwithstanding; whereas the cockle,
oyster, mussel, and all bivalves of their order, can do
what the Brachiopoda cannot, — open their shells with
great prompitude ; and at least a few of them can, like
the pecten, dart edgeways through the water, like missiles
thrown by the hand, simply by the rapid shutting of
their valves again. These have been described as the
butterflies of the sea. Whence comes this opening power,
which Paley's description so evidently does not involve?
The power of opening the human palm resides in the
muscles on the back of the fore -arm ; the power of
334. GAEO/OG V OF 7'HAE AEA.S.S.
shutting it, in the muscles in the front of the fore arm,
directly opposite. These last — the muscles operative in
shutting the palm — are in the cockle, and all other
bivalves of its class, represented by the adductor muscles;
but what represents in the shell those antagonist muscles
by which the palm is opened? The bivalve, from its
peculiar construction, can have no antagonist muscles ;
its little circle of life is bounded by the lips of the two
valves; and as the proper place of the antagonist muscles
would be of necessity on the outside of the shell, far
beyond that circle of vitality, antagonist muscles it can- -
not possibly possess; and yet, whenever the creature wills
it, the work of the missing muscles is promptly, performed.
Now, mark how this happens. The cartilage inserted at
the back is, according to Paley, at once the Zăgament
which binds the two shells together, and the hinge upon
which they open and shut; but it is yet something more,
—it is a powerful spring, compressed, and, if I may use
the phrase, “set on full cock,” by the strain of the ad-
ductor muscles; and no sooner is that strain relaxed than
up flies the valve, like some ingeniously contrived trap-
door, when one releases the steel Spring, in obedience
to the mechanical force locked up for use in the power-
fully elastic bit of cartilage, that without derangement or
confusion serves so many various purposes. Sir Godfrey
Kneller is said to have remarked, in the plenitude of
his conceit, that if God Almighty had taken / is advice
on some important points of contrivance, matters would
probably have been better on the whole ; and the Say-
GAE O/LOGY O/7 7"AA" B.A.S.S. 335
ing is recorded as characteristic of the irreverent vanity
of the artist. Alas, poor addle-headed coxcomb Paley
and his two editors, – men of high standing compared
with Sir Godfrey, - could not have been entrusted, it
would seem, by the great First Designer with the con-
struction of even the hinge of a bivalve. The cockles,
oysters, pectens, and mussels, hinged by them, would be
all helpless Brachiopoda, with not only no spring in their
hinges, but also unfurnished with the compensatory appa-
ratus within, and would, in consequence, become extinct
in a week. Is there no lesson here?
But, lo l the mist rises, and slowly dissipates in the
Sun ; and yonder, Scarce half a mile away, is the land,-
a low Swampy shore, covered by a rank vegetation.
Thickets of tall plants, of strange form and singular
luxuriance, droop over the coast-edge into the sea, like
those mangrove jungles of Southern America that bear
on their branches crops of oysters. There are reeds,
with their light coronals of spiky leaves radiating from
their numerous joints, that rival the masts of vessels in
size,_ferns, whose magnificent fronds overshadow half a
rood of surface, that attain to the bulk and height of
forest trees, club-mosses, tall as Norwegian pines, and
strangely-carved, cacti looking, leaf-covered trunks, bulky as
the body of a man. Nor is there any lack of true trees,
that resemble those of the existing period, as exhibited
in the Southern hemisphere, — stately araucarians, that
lift their proud heads a hundred feet over the soil,-and
spiky pines, that raise their taper-trunks and cone-covered
336 GAE O/LOGY OF 7///E /3A.S.S.
boughs to a scarce lower elevation. And yonder green
and level land, dank with steaming vapour, and where the
golden light streams through long bosky vistas, crowded
with prodigies of the vegetable kingdom, Sigillaria, Favu-
laria, and Ulodendra,-is the land of the Coal Measures.
Three of the great geologic periods, comprising almost
the whole of the Palaeozoic division, have already gone
by ; and yet the history of the Bass as an igneous rock
is still to begin. But we have at least laid down the
groundwork of the surrounding landscape. And be it
remembered, that all these scenes, however much they
may seem the work of fancy, were realities connected
with the laying of these deep foundations, – realities
which might have been as certainly witnessed from the
point in space now occupied by the rude Crowning pyra-
mid of the Bass, had there been a human eye to look
abroad, or a human sensorium to receive the impres-
sions which it conveyed, as the scene furnished by the
lovely sunset of this evening. Sir Roderick Murchison,
in his magnificent Siſurian System, has given the ex-
ample of rendering landscapes according to their real
outlines, but coloured according to the tints of the
geologic map ; and the practice possesses the advantage
of making the diverse features of the various formations
address themselves with peculiar emphasis to the eye.
Were the real landscape which the summit of the Bass
commands to be so coloured, we would see its wide
area composed of characteristic representatives of each
of the three systems whose successive depositions we
GAE O/LOGY OF 7A/AE B.A.S.S. 337
have described. The distant promontory to the east, on
which Fast Castle stands, with the hills in the interior
that sweep along the entire background of the prospect,
would bear the deep purple tinge appropriated by the
geologists to the Grauwacke. Leaning at their feet, from
the Siccar Point to Gifford, and from Gifford to Fala,
besides abutting on the sea in insulated patches, – as at
North Berwick, Canty Bay, Tantallan, Seacliff, and Bel-
haven, we would next see, spread over a large space
in the scene, the deep chocolate tint assigned, not un-
appropriately, to the Old Red. From Cockburnspath to
Dunbar on the one hand, and from Aberlady Bay to
Arthur Seat on the other, the landscape would exhibit
the cold grey hue of the Coal Measures, here and there
mottled with the light azure that distinguishes in the
map the Carboniferous Limestone ; while the trap emi-
nences, with the tuff of the opposite shore, and the island
mass at our feet, would flame in the deep crimson of
the geologic colourist, as if the igneous rocks of which
they are composed still retained the red heat of their
molten condition. Such would be the conventional
colouring of the landscape ; vast tracts of purple, of
chocolate, of grey, and of blue, would indicate the pro-
portional space occupied in its area by the three great
systems that have furnished us with a picture apiece;
and what we have now to conjure up, — the platform of
the stage being fairly erected, and its various coverings
laid down, is the scene illustrative of the origin and
upheaval of the various trap-rocks that have come to
Y
338 GAE O/LOGY OF 7'HAE B.A.S.S.
form the bolder features of the prospect, -among the
rest, supreme in the centre of the disturbed district, the
stately column of the Bass.
The land of the Coal Measures has again disappeared ;
and a shoreless but shallow ocean, much vexed by cur-
rents, and often lashed by tempest, spreads out around, as
during the earlier periods. But there are more deeply-
seated heavings that proceed from the centre of the imme-
diate area over which we stand, than ever yet owed their
origin to storm or tide. Ever and anon waves of dizzy alti-
tude roll outwards towards the horizon, as if raised by the
fall of some such vast pebble as the blind Cyclops sent
whizzing through the air after the galley of Ulysses, when
* The whole sea shook, and refluent beat the shore.”
We may hear, too, deep from the abyss, the growlings, as
of a subterranean thunder, loud enough to drown the
nearer sounds of both wave and current. And now, as
the huge kraken lifts its enormous back over the waves,
the solid strata beneath rise from the bottom in a flat
dome, crusted with shells and corals, and dark with
algae. The billows roll back,-the bared strata heave,
and crack, and sever, a dense Smouldering vapour issues
from the opening rents and fissures; and now the stony
pavement is torn abruptly asunder, like some mildewed
curtain seized rudely by the hand, - a broad sheet of
flame mounts sudden as lightning through the opening, a
thousand fathoms into the sky,_
“Infuriate molten rocks and flaming globes,
Mount high above the clouds,’—
GAEO/LOGY OF 7"HAE AEA.S.S. 339
and the volcano is begun. Meanwhile, the whole region
around, far as the eye can reach, heaves wildly in the
throes of Plutonic convulsion. Above many a rising
shallow, the sea boils and roars, as amid the skerries of
Some rocky bay open to the unbroken roll of the ocean in
a time of tempest; the platform of sedimentary rock over
an area of many Square miles is fractured, like the ice of
some Highland tarn during a hasty spring thaw that swells
every mountain streamlet into a river; waves of transla-
tion, produced at once in numerous centres by the sudden
upheaval of the bottom, meet and conflict under canopies
of smoke and ashes; the light thickens as the reek as-
cends ; and, amid the loud patter of the ejected stones
and pumice, as they descend upon the sea, the roaring
of the flames,<-the rending of rocks,—the dash of waves,
—and the hollow internal grumblings of earthquakes,
dark night comes down upon the deep. Vastly extended
periods pass away ; there are alternate pauses and par-
oxysms of convulsion; and ere the Plutonic agencies, worn
out in the struggle, are laid fairly asleep, and the curtain
again rises, the entire scene is changed. Of the old
sedimentary rocks, there remain in a wide tract only a
few insulated beds, half buried in enormous accumula-
tions of volcanic débris, – débris stratified by the waves,
and consolidated into a tolerably adhesive tuff by the
superincumbent pressure, and here traversed by long dikes
of basalt, and there overlaid by ponderous beds of green-
stone. The Bass towers before us as a tall conical hill,
deeply indented atop by the now silent crater, its slopes
34O GAE O/LOGY OF 7A/AE BA.S.S.
formed of loose ashes and rude fragments of ejected rock,
and with the flush of sulphur, here of a deep red, there of
a golden yellow, still bright on its sides.
Let us rightly conceive of the hill in this, the last of
the bygone aspects. Nearly two centuries ago there was
a large tract of land covered over, in the north of Scot-
land, by blown sand ; and among the other interred ob-
jects,<-Such as human dwellings, sheep and cattle folds,
gateways, and the fences of fields and gardens, -there
were several orchard trees, enveloped in the dry deluge,
and buried up. Of one of these it is said that the upper
branches projected for several years from the top of the
pyramidal hillock that had formed around it, and that
they continued to produce in their season a few stunted
leaves, with here and there a sickly blossom ; but the
branches at length dried up and disappeared, and for more
than a century there were scarce any of the inhabitants of
the neighbouring district who seemed to know what it was
the conical hill contained. And then the prevailing winds,
that had so long before covered up the orchard tree, began
to scoop out the sides of its arenaceous tumulus, and to
lay bare twig and branch, and at length the trunk itself;
but the rotting damps, operating on the wood in a state
of close seclusion from the air, had wrought their natural
work; and as the tumulus Crumbled away, the twigs and
boughs, with the upper portion of the trunk, Crumbled
away also ; till at length, when the entire enveloping
material was removed, there remained of the tree but an
upright stump, that rose a few feet over the soil. Now,
GEozogy of THE BASS. 34
the conical envelope or tumulus of débris and ashes which
at this stage composes the exterior covering of the Bass,
resembles exactly that which surrounded, in the buried
barony of Cubin, the orchard tree ; while its stony centre
of trap, moulded in the tubular crater, with its various
branch-like arms bent earthwards, like those of the weeping
ash,_the remains of eruptive currents flowing outwards and
downwards,-represent the tree itself. The denuding agent
is not, as in the sandy wastes of Moray, the keen dry wind
of the west, but the slow wear, prolonged through many
ages, of waves and currents. The sloping sides crumble
down, the stony branches fall, undermined, into the tide,
and are swept away,+until at length, as in the orchard
tree of my illustration, there remains but an abrupt and
broken stump, the ancient storm-worn island of the Bass.
The enormous amount of denudation which the theories
of the geologist demand, however consonant with his ob-
servations of fact, may well startle the uninitiated. The
Lower Coal Measures appear on three sides of this dis-
turbed district : they may be traced, as has been shown, in
the immediate neighbourhood of Dunbar to the east ; they
occur at Abbey Toll, near Haddington, on the south ; and
they extend a little beyond Aberlady Bay on the west ;
while the sedimentary rocks that appear in the centre of
the area, directly opposite the Bass, belong, as has also
been shown, to an inferior member of the Old Red Sand-
Stone. The surrounding Coal Measures form the edges of
a broken dome, that, upheaved originally by the volcanic
forces, as a bubble in a crucible of boiling sulphur is in-
342 GAZO/LOGY OF 7"AA. B.A.S.S.
flated and upheaved by the imprisoned gas, has been
ground down, as it rose, by the denuding agencies, until in
the centre of the area the Lower Old Red rocks have been
laid bare. And so immense was the dome, though, of
course, destroyed piecemeal as it rose,_as a log in a saw-
mill is cut piecemeal by being gradually impelled on the
saw,-that immediately over the Bass it would have now
risen, had it been suffered to mount unworn and unbroken,
to an altitude scarce inferior to that of Ben Nevis or Ben
Macdhui. In this region of birds—dwellers on the dizzy
cliff—no bird soars half so high as the imaginary dotted
line some three or four thousand feet over the level, at
which, save for the wear of the waves when the volcanic
agencies were propelling the surface upwards, the higher
layers of the Coal Measures would now have stood. De-
nudation to an extent equally great has taken place immedi-
ately over the site of the city of Edinburgh. Lunardi, in his
balloon, never reached the point, high over our towers and
spires, at which, save for the waste of ocean, the upper
coal-seams would at this moment have lain. There are
various localities in Scotland in which the loss of surface
must have been greater still ; and fancy, overborne by
visions of waste and attrition on a Scale so gigantic, can
scarce take the conception in ; far less can the mind, when
unassisted by auxiliary facts, receive it as a reality. Viewed,
however, in connection with the vast periods which have
intervened since the last of these denuded rocks were
formed, - and be it remembered that immediately after
their formation denudation may have begun, -viewed, too,
GEO LOGY OF 7"HE B.A.S.S. 343
in connection with that work of deposition which has been
going on during these periods elsewhere, and with the self-
evident truth that mainly from the wear of the older rocks
have the materials of the newer been derived,—it grows
into credibility, and takes its place among kindred wonders,
simply as one of the facts of a class. During the demuda-
tion, to the depth of three or four thousand feet, of the
tract of country where the capital of Scotland now stands,
a deposition to a vastly greater depth was taking place in
the tract of country occupied by the capital of England.
Nor does it seem in any degree more strange that the rocks
in the one locality should have been ground down from the
red sandstones of Roslin to the calciferous beds which
underlie the Mountain Limestone, than that strata should
have been laid over strata in the other, from the Triassic
group to the Oolite, and from the Oolite to the London
Clay. Had there not been immense waste and attrition
among the Primary and Palaeozoic rocks, there could have
been no Secondary formations, and no Tertiary system.
My history speeds on to its conclusion. We dimly
descry, amid fog and darkness, yet one scene more. There
has been a change in the atmosphere ; and the roar of
flame and the hollow voice of earthquake are succeeded by
the howling of wintry tempests and the crash of icebergs.
Wandering fragments of the northern winter, bulky as hills,
go careering over the submerged land, grinding down its
softer rocks and shales into clay, leaving inscribed their
long streaks and furrows on its traps and its limestones,
and thickly strewing the surface of one district with the
344 GAE O/LOG}^ OA' 7THAE AEA.S.S.
detached ruins of another. To this last of the geologic
revolutions the deep grooves and furrows of the rocks in
the immediate neighbourhood of North Berwick belong,
with the immense boulders of travelled rock which one
occasionally sees in the interior on moors and hill-sides, or
standing out along the sea-coast, disinterred by the waves
from amid their banks of gravel or clay. But this last
scene in the series I find drawn to my hand, though for
another purpose, by the poet who produced the ‘Ancient
Mariner : '—
‘Anon there come both mist and snow,
And it grows wondrous cold ;
And ice mast-high comes floating by,
As green as emerald.
And through the drifts the snowy cliffs
Do send a dismal sheen;
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken ;-
The ice is all between.
The ice is here, the ice is there,
The ice is all around ;
It cracks and growls, and roars and howls,
Like noises in a swound.’
But the day breaks, and the storm ceases, and the sub-
merged land lifts up its head over the sea ; and the Bass,
in the fair morn of the existing creation, looms tall and
high to the new-risen sun, -then, as now,
‘An island salt and bare,
The haunt of seals and orcs, and sea-mews’ clang.”
THE END.
crp or 1010
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