In 1844 he set out on a geological ramble round the Hebrides in the floating manse, '_The Betsey_,' by which the Church served the islands in the west, owing to the refusal of sites by Lord Macdonald and others. The yacht was but thirty feet by eleven, and there with his old Cromarty friend Swanson, the 'outed' minister of the Small Isles, he learned the hardships to which the miserable policy of the landlords had exposed the poor Highlanders. But if 'the earth was the _lairds'_ and the fulness thereof,' the water was not! The building in which the congregation met was of turf--'the minister encased in his ample-skirted storm-jacket of oiled canvas, and protected atop by a genuine sou'wester, of which the broad posterior rim sloped half a yard down his back; and I, closely wrapped up in my grey maud, which proved, however, a rather indifferent protection, against the penetrating powers of a Hebridean drizzle.' In none of his works does he exhibit a happier descriptive view than in _The Cruise of the Betsey_, though in popularity it has been surpassed by his _First Impressions of England_, where he records the results of an eight weeks' tour, in 1845, from Newcastle to London, passing York, Birmingham, and Stratford on the way. In 1847 he published his _Footprints of the Creator_, in reply to the _Vestiges_ by Robert Chambers, in which he seeks to controvert the theory of development, at least in the form in which it was then presented, by attempting to prove the fishes and the fossils of the Old Red to be as advanced in character as those now existing. A racy sketch on _The Geology of the Bass_ formed part of a contribution to a work then issued, dealing with the history, botany, and zoology of the Bass Rock. The copyright of this he reserved with a view to its subsequent incorporation into a long-projected geological survey of Scotland. But this cherished idea he never lived to accomplish, though such a work from his hand would have been well-nigh final and perfect in its descriptive graces.