it,--now of the wild rush of a turbid, mountain-high flood breaking in from the west, and hurling athwart the torn surface, rocks, and stones, and clay,--now of a dreary ocean rising high along the hills, and bearing onward with its winds and currents, huge icebergs, that now brushed the mountain-sides, and now grated along the bottom of the submerged valleys. The inscription on the polished surfaces, with its careless mixture of groove and scratch, is an inscription of very various readings. We passed along a transverse hollow, and then began to ascend a hill-side, from the ridge of which the water sheds to the opposite shore of the island, and on which we catch our first glimpse of Scuir More, standing up over the sea, like a pyramid shorn of its top. A brown lizard, nearly five inches in length, startled by our approach, ran hurriedly across the path; and our guide, possessed by the general Highland belief that the creature is poisonous, and injures cattle, struck at it with a switch, and cut it in two immediately behind the hinder legs. The upper half, containing all that anatomists regard as the vitals, heart, brain, and viscera, all the main nerves, and all the larger arteries, lay stunned by the blow, as if dead; nor did it manifest any signs of vitality so long as we remained beside it; whereas the lower half, as if the whole life of the animal had retired into _it_, continued dancing upon the moss for a full minute after, like a young eel scooped out of some stream, and thrown upon the bank; and then lay wriggling and palpitating for about half a minute more. There are few things more inexplicable in the province of the naturalist than the phenomenon of what may be termed divided life,--vitality broken into two, and yet continuing to exist as vitality in both the dissevered pieces. We see in the nobler animals mere glimpses of the phenomenon,--mere indications of it, doubtfully apparent for at most a few minutes. The blood drawn from the human arm by the lancet continues to live in the cup until it has cooled and begun to coagulate; and when head and body have parted company under the guillotine, both exhibit for a brief space such unequivocal signs of life, that the question arose in France during the horrors of the Revolution, whether there might not be some glimmering of consciousness attendant at the same time on the fearfully opening and shutting eyes and mouth of the one, and the beating heart and jerking neck of the other. The lower we descend in the scale of being, the more striking the instances which we receive of this divisibility of the vital principle. I have seen the two halves of the heart of a ray pulsating for a full quarter of an hour after they had been separated from the body and from each other. The blood circulates in the hind leg of a frog for many minutes after the removal of the heart, which meanwhile keeps up an independent motion of its own.