them as a sort of natural toys, which a mere lad might amuse himself in looking after, but which were rather below the notice of grown-up people like themselves. One workman, however, informed me, that things of a kind I had not yet found--genuine thunderbolts--which in his father's times were much sought for the cure of bewitched cattle--were to be found in tolerable abundance on a reach of the beach about two miles further to the west; and as, on quitting the quarry for the piece of work on which we were to be next engaged, Uncle David gave us all a half-holiday, I made use of it in visiting the tract of shore indicated by the workman. And there, leaning against the granitic gneiss and hornblend slate of the Hill of Eathie, I found a Liassic deposit, amazingly rich in its organisms--not buried under the waves, as at Marcus' shore, or as opposite our new quarry, but at one part underlying a little grass-covered plain, and at another exposed for several hundred yards together along the shore. Never yet did embryo geologist break ground on a more promising field; and memorable in my existence was this first of the many happy evenings that I have spent in exploring it. The Hill of Eathie, like the Cromarty Sutors, belongs, as I have already had occasion to mention, to what De Beaumont would term the Ben Nevis system of hills--that latest of our Scottish mountain systems which, running from south-west to north-east, in the line of the great Caledonian valley, and in that of the valleys of the Nairn, Findhorn, and Spey, uptilted in its course, when it arose, the Oolites of Sutherland, and the Lias of Cromarty and Ross. The deposit which the Hill of Eathie disturbed is exclusively a Liassic one. The upturned base of the formation rests immediately against the Hill; and we may trace the edges of the various overlying beds for several hundred feet outwards, until, apparently near the top of the deposit, we lose them in the sea. The various beds--all save the lowest, which consists of a blue adhesive clay--are composed of a dark shale, consisting of easily-separable laminæ, thin as sheets of pasteboard; and they are curiously divided from each other by bands of fossiliferous limestone of but from one to two feet thick. These Liassic beds, with their separating bands, are a sort of boarded books; for as a series of volumes reclining against a granite pedestal in the geologic library of nature, I used to find pleasure in regarding them. The limestone bands, elaborately marbled with lignite, ichthyolite, and shell, form the stiff boarding; the pasteboard-like laminæ between--tens and hundreds of thousands in number in even the slimmer volumes--compose the closely-written leaves. I say closely written; for never yet did signs or characters lie closer on page or scroll than do the organisms of the Lias on the surface of these leaf-like laminæ. I can scarce hope to communicate to the reader, after the lapse of so many years, an adequate