The huge boulder here has been known for ages as the _Clach Malloch_, or accursed stone, from the circumstance, says tradition, that a boat was once wrecked upon it during a storm, and the boatmen drowned. Though little more than seven feet in height, by about twelve in length, and some eight or nine in breadth, its situation on the extreme line of ebb imparts a peculiar character to the various productions, animal and vegetable, which we find adhering to it. They occur in zones, just as on lofty hills the botanist finds his agricultural, moorland, and alpine zones rising in succession as he ascends, the one over the other. At its base, where the tide rarely falls, we find two varieties of _Lobularia digitata_, dead man's hand, the orange colored and the pale, with a species of sertularia; and the characteristic vegetable is the rough-stemmed tangle, or cuvy. In the zone immediately above the lowest, these productions disappear; the characteristic animal, if animal it be, is a flat yellow sponge,--the _Halichondria papillaris_,--remarkable chiefly for its sharp siliceous spicula and its strong phosphoric smell; and the characteristic vegetable is the smooth-stemmed tangle, or queener. In yet another zone we find the common limpet and the vesicular kelp-weed; and the small gray balanus and serrated kelp-weed form the productions of the top. We may see exactly the same zones occurring in broad belts along the shore,--each zone indicative of a certain overlying depth of water; but it seems curious enough to find them all existing in succession on one boulder. Of the boulder and its story, however, more in my next. CHAPTER VIII. Imaginary Autobiography of the _Clach Malloch_ Boulder--Its Creation--Its long night of unsummed Centuries--Laid open to light on a desert Island--Surrounded by an Arctic Vegetation--Undermined by the rising Sea--Locked up and floated off on an Ice-field--At rest on the Sea-bottom--Another Night of unsummed Years--The Boulder raised again above the waves by the rising of the Land--Beholds an altered Country--Pine Forests and Mammals--Another Period of Ages passes--The Boulder again floated off by an Iceberg--Finally at rest on the Shore of Cromarty Bay--Time and Occasion of naming it--Strange Phenomena accounted for by Earthquakes--How the Boulder of Petty Bay was moved--The Boulder of Auldgrande--The old Highland Paupers--The little Parsi Girl--Her Letter to her Papa--But one Human Nature on Earth--Journey resumed--Conon Burying Ground--An aged Couple--Gossip.