of Brechin, the moldering walls of Edzell, the frowning battlements of Glammis, the worn-out and now verdant ramparts of Dunsinane, have each their crowds of visitants, and are all within the compass of a single day’s journey. The eye of the geologist is in search of another object as it wanders over that lovely scene: Kinnordie, the birth-place of Sir Charles Lyell, must ever be classic ground in the history of our science. It rests on the old red sandstone, and furnishes some of the most valuable illustrations in Sir Charles’s early sketches. What influences, may we here ask, gave being and shape to the ingenious and splendid generalizations of this accomplished geologist? Is it too much to assume that the philosopher, as well as the poet, is all his life-long captive to first impressions, that the scenes of his boyhood claim “a local habitation” for many of his future speculations, and that his most matured trains of thinking have been dependent upon casual circumstances? Born and educated in the shadow of the Grampians, who can doubt that the spirit within was early stirred to lofty views as he gazed upon their elevated forms, and wondered how their peaks rose so high in air, and were thus lifted above the valleys? May it not be presumed, though the philosopher himself may have no recollection of the matter, that his speculations regarding the alternate elevation and depression of land and sea had its germ in some such happy moment of mountain inspiration? Byron owned the influence in all its power, when, in the rocky defiles and dark pine forests of Lochnagar, he had early communings with spiritual beings, the wreathe-forms and kelpies of the streams; and in visions imparted amidst the wilds of the Dee, prepared his mind for the daring flights of the Alps. The geologist had here all the materials of after-thought, which in his various essays and works he has so skillfully expanded—from his explorations of Bakie-loch with its alluvions, peat, marl, shells, and horns, in which he had the type of some of his Alpine tertiaries—the old canoe and ripple-mark here too, the representatives of their far-sundered ages and onward to his bold speculations on the elevatory hypothesis, of which the Grampians, as well as Sidlaws, supplied him with ample illustrations.