Even the surface-waters of the valley, as they pass over it contract in a perceptible degree its peculiar taste and odor. With a little more time to spare, I would fain have made this breccia of the Old Red the subject of a few simple experiments. I would have ground it into powder, and tried upon it the effect both of cold and hot infusion. Portions of the water are sometimes carried in casks and bottles, for the use of invalids, to a considerable distance; but it is quite possible that a little of the _rock_, to which the water owes its qualities, might, when treated in this way, have all the effects of a considerable quantity of the _spring_. It might be of some interest, too, to ascertain its qualities when crushed, as a soil, or its effect on other soils; whether, for instance, like the old sterile soils of the Carboniferous period, it has lost, through its rock-change, the fertilizing properties which it once possessed; or whether it still retains them, like some of the coprolitic beds of the Oolite and Greensand, and might not, in consequence, be employed as a manure. A course of such experiments could scarce fail to furnish with agreeable occupation some of the numerous annual visitants of the Spa, who have to linger long, with but little to engage them, waiting for what, if it once fairly leave a man, returns slowly, when it returns at all. In mentioning at the dinner-table of my friend my scheme of infusing rock in order to produce Spa water, I referred to the circumstance that the Belemnite of our Liasic deposits, when ground into powder, imparts to boiling water a peculiar taste and smell, and that the infusion, taken in very small quantities, sensibly affects both palate and stomach. And I suggested that Belemnite water, deemed sovereign of old, when the Belemnite was regarded as a thunderbolt, in the cure of bewitched cattle, might be in reality medicinal, and that the ancient superstition might thus embody, as ancient superstitions not unfrequently do, a nucleus of fact. The charm, I said, might amount to no more than simply the administration of a medicine to sick cattle, that did harm in no case, and good at times. The lively comment of one of the young ladies on the remark amused us all. If an infusion of stone had cured, in the last age, cattle that were bewitched, the Strathpeffer water, she argued, which was, it seems, but an infusion of stone, might cure cattle that were sick now; and so, though the biped patients of the Strath could scarce fail to decrease when they knew that its infused stone contained but the strainings of old mud, and the juices of dead unsalted fish, it was gratifying to think that the poor Spa might still continue to retain its patients, though of a lower order. The pump-room would be converted into a rustic, straw-thatched shed, to which long trains of sick cattle, affected by weak nerves and dyspepsia, would come streaming along the roads every morning and evening, to drink and gather strength.