The raven no longer builds among the rocks of the Hill of Cromarty; and I saw many years ago its last pair of eagles. This last noble bird was a not unfrequent visitor of the Sutors early in the present century. I still remember scaring it from its perch on the southern side of the hill, as day was drawing to a close, when the tall precipices amid which it had lodged lay deep in the shade; and vividly recollect how picturesquely it used to catch the red gleam of evening on its plumage of warm brown, as, sailing outwards over the calm sea many hundred feet below, it emerged from under the shadow of the cliffs into the sunshine. Uncle James once shot a very large eagle beneath one of the loftiest precipices of the southern Sutor; and, swimming out through the surf to recover its body--for it had dropped dead into the sea--he kept its skin for many years as a trophy.[6] But eagles are now no longer to lie seen or shot on the Sutors or their neighbourhood. The badger, too--one of perhaps the oldest inhabitants of the country, for it seems to have been contemporary with the extinct elephants and hyænas of the Pleistocene periods--has become greatly less common on their steep sides than in the days of my boyhood; and both the fox and otter are less frequently seen. It is not uninteresting to mark with the eye of the geologist, how palpably in the course of a single lifetime--still nearly twenty years short of the term fixed by the Psalmist--these wild animals have been posting on in Scotland to that extinction which overtook, within its precincts, during the human period, the bear, the beaver, and the wolf, and of which the past history of the globe, as inscribed on its rocks, furnishes so strong a record.