_River floods in Scotland_, 1829.--Many remarkable illustrations of the power of running water in moving stones and heavy materials were afforded by the storm and floods which occurred on the 3d and 4th of August, 1829, in Aberdeenshire and other counties in Scotland. The elements during this storm assumed all the characters which mark the tropical hurricanes; the wind blowing in sudden gusts and whirlwinds, the lightning and thunder being such as is rarely witnessed in our climate, and heavy rain falling without intermission. The floods extended almost simultaneously, and with equal violence over that part of the northeast of Scotland which would be cut off by two lines drawn from the head of Lochrannoch, one towards Inverness and the other to Stonehaven. The united line of the different rivers which were flooded, could not be less than from five to six hundred miles in length; and the whole of their courses were marked by the destruction of bridges, roads, crops, and buildings. Sir T. D. Lauder has recorded the destruction of thirty-eight bridges, and the entire obliteration of a great number of farms and hamlets. On the Nairn, a fragment of sandstone, fourteen feet long by three feet wide and one foot thick, was carried above 200 yards down the river. Some new ravines were formed on the sides of mountains where no streams had previously flowed, and ancient river-channels, which had never been filled from time immemorial, gave passage to a copious flood.[270] The bridge over the Dee at Ballater consisted of five arches, having upon the whole a water-way of 260 feet. The bed of the river, on which the piers rested, was composed of rolled pieces of granite and gneiss. The bridge was built of granite, and had stood uninjured for twenty years; but the different parts were swept away in succession by the flood, and the whole mass of masonry disappeared in the bed of the river. "The river Don," observes Mr. Farquharson, in his account of the inundations, "has upon my own premises forced a mass of four or five hundred tons of stones, many of them two or three hundred pounds' weight, up an inclined plane, rising six feet in eight or ten yards, and left them in a rectangular heap, about three feet deep on a flat ground:--the heap ends abruptly at its lower extremity."[271]