It required, however, another drop to make the full cup run over. The potatoes had become, as I have shown, the staple food of the Highlander; and when, in 1846, the potato-blight came on, the people, most of them previously stripped of their little capitals, and divested of their employment, were deprived of their food, and ruined at a blow. The same stroke which did little more than slightly impinge on the comforts of the people of the Lowlands, utterly prostrated the Highlanders; and ever since, the sufferings of famine have become chronic along the bleak shores and rugged islands of at least the north-western portion of our country. Nor is it perhaps the worst part of the evil that takes the form of clamorous want: so heavily have the famines borne on a class which were not absolutely the poor when they came on, that they are absolutely the poor now;--they have dissipated the last remains of capital possessed by the _people_ of the Highlands. FOOTNOTES: [4] Appended to their joint paper on the "Deposits contained between the Scottish Primary Rocks and Oolitic Series," and interesting, as the first published geological map of Scotland to the north of the Firths of Forth and Clyde. [5] There are only two of these exclusively west-coast shells,--_Trochus umbilicatus_ and _Pecten niveus_. As neither of them has yet been detected in any Tertiary formation, they are in all probability shells of comparatively recent origin, that came into existence in some western centre of creation; whereas specimens of _Trochus magus_ and _Nassa reticulata_, which occasionally occur on the eastern coasts of the kingdom, I have also found in a Pleistocene deposit. Thus the more widely-spread shells seem to be also the shells of more ancient standing. CHAPTER XIV. "Edina! Scotia's darling seat! All hail thy palaces and towers!"--BURNS.