The geological department of the Elgin Museum is not yet very complete. The private collections of the locality, by forestalling, greatly restrict the supply from the rich deposits in the neighborhood, and have an unquestioned right to do so. The Museum contains, however, several interesting organisms. I saw, among the others, a specimen of Diplopterus, that showed the form and position of the fins of this rather rare ichthyolite much better than any of the Morayshire specimens portrayed by Agassiz in his great work; and beside it, one of the two specimens of _Pterichthys oblongus_ which he figures, and on which he establishes the species. The other individual,--a Cromarty specimen,--graces my little collection. The gloomy day passed pleasantly in deciphering, with so accomplished a geologist as Mr. Duff, these curious hieroglyphics of the old world, that tell such wonderful stories, and in comparing _viva voce_, as we were wont to do long years before in lengthy epistles, our respective notions regarding the true key for laying open their more occult meanings. And, after sharing with him in his family dinner, I again took my seat on the mail, as a chill, raw evening was falling, and rode on, some six or eight and twenty miles, to Campbelton. The rain pattered drearily through the night on my bed-room window; and as frequent exposure to the wet had begun to tell on a constitution not altogether so strong as it had once been, I awakened oftener than was quite comfortable, to hear it. The morning, however, was dry, though gray and sunless; and, taking an early breakfast at the inn, I traversed the flat gravelly points of Ardersier and Fortrose, that, projecting like moles far into the Frith, narrow the intervening ferry to considerably less than one-third the width which it would present were they away. The origin of these long detrital promontories, which form, when viewed from the heights on either side, so peculiar a feature in the landscape, and which, were they directly opposite, instead of being set down a mile awry, would shut up the opening altogether, has not yet been satisfactorily accounted for. One special theory assigns their formation to the agency of the descending tide, striking in zig-gig style, in consequence of some peculiarity of the coast-line or of the bottom, from side to side of the Frith, and depositing a long trail of sand and gravel, at nearly right angles with the beach, first on the one shore and then on the other. But why the tide, which runs in various zig-zag crossings in the course of the Frith, should have the effect here, and nowhere else, of raising two vast mounds, each a full mile and a quarter in length, with an average breadth of from two to five furlongs, is by no means very apparent. Certainly the present tides of the Frith could not have formed them, nor could they have been elevated to their present average height of ten or twelve feet over the flood-line in a sea standing at the existing level.