The eruptive rocks will also be here studied to great advantage, where they have played no insignificant part in giving shape and outline to the landscape, and in laying open the inclosed minerals. It is impossible to convey any adequate idea, in mere description, of the marvelous display of plutonic action of which this peninsula has once been the theater: subterranean movements crushing and grinding into fragments the solid strata, parting and heaving them asunder, or crumpling into complicated folds the tougher and more unyielding beds, as if it had been some fabric of manufacture tossed and twisted by the wind. The bituminous breccia at Pettycur, Elie, Balcarras Den, and which appears again at the Rock and Spindle near St. Andrews, affords a remarkable instance of the action of the intrusive rocks in breaking, and transmuting into a composite paste, the series of beds constituting the coal-measures, in which every one of the strata has its representative in fragments, from the size of a garden pea to masses a foot in diameter or even upward. The storm lifts the ocean into lofty curling billows, leaving long narrow troughs and frightful yawning chasms beneath. Here, in like manner, and all over the surface, the crust has been broken up, and the minerals tossed about, or agitated like wreck upon the waves, and, upon subsiding, have been cast into the form of ridges, or broad tabular masses. The ridges, with their serrated outcrops, in the interior of the county, have been gradually rounded off and covered with soil; while, by the shore, they still present the effects of the violent commotions to which they have been subjected, exposed and laid bare by the action of the sea, upon the lower levels of the disrupted strata. The Ochils, Lammermuirs, and Pentlands, were already above the waters, calmly contemplating the troubled scene, as an inner circle of basalt and greenstone hills arose—the Lomonds, Largo Law, the Binn, and Binnarty, on the north; Stirling rock, Corstorphine hill, Arthur’s Seat, Berwick Law, and the Bass, on the south—which were severally lifted into view, to be stationed as so many sentinels on the outposts of the field.