harbors that abut far into the waves,--founded on wooden piles; and this hugest of hill-forts we find founded on wooden piles also. It is built on what a Scotch architect would perhaps term a pile-_brander_ of the _Pinites Eiggensis_, an ancient tree of the Oolite. The gigantic Scuir of Eigg rests on the remains of a prostrate forest. CHAPTER III. Structure of the Scuir--A stray Column--The Piazza--A buried Pine Forest the Foundation of the Scuir--Geological Poachers in a Fossil Preserve--_Pinites Eiggensis_--Its Description--Witham's Experiments on Fossil Pine of Eigg--Rings of the Pine--Ascent of the Scuir--Appearance of the Top--White Pitchstone--Mr. Greig's Discovery of Pumice--A Sunset Scene--The Manse and the Yacht--The Minister's Story--A Cottage Repast--American Timber drifted to the Hebrides--Agency of the Gulf Stream--The Minister's Sheep. As we climbed the hill-side, and the Shinar-like tower before us rose higher over the horizon at each step we took, till it seemed pointing at the middle sky, we could mark peculiarities in its structure which escape notice in the distance. We found it composed of various beds, each of which would make a Giant's Causeway entire, piled over each other like stories in a building, and divided into columns, vertical, or nearly so, in every instance except in one bed near the base, in which the pillars incline to a side, as if losing footing under the superincumbent weight. Innumerable polygonal fragments,--single stones of the building,--lie scattered over the slope, composed, like almost all the rest of the Scuir, of a peculiar and very beautiful stone, unlike any other in Scotland--a dark pitchstone-porphyry, which, inclosing crystals of glassy feldspar, resembles in the hand-specimen, a mass of black sealing-wax, with numerous pieces of white bugle stuck into it. Some of the detached polygons are of considerable size; few of them larger and bulkier, however, than a piece of column of this characteristic porphyry, about ten feet in length by two feet in diameter, which lies a full mile away from any of the others, in the line of the old burying-ground, and distant from it only a few hundred yards. It seems to have been carried there by man: we find its bearing from the Scuir lying nearly at right angles with the direction of the drift-boulders of the western coast, which are, besides, of rare occurrence in the Hebrides; nor has it a single neighbor; and it seems not improbable, as a tradition of the island testifies, that it was removed thus far for the purpose of marking some place of sepulture, and that the catastrophe of the cave arrested its progress after by far the longer and rougher portion of the way had been passed. The dry-arm bones of the charnel-house in the rock may have been tugging around it when the galleys of the M'Leod hove in sight. The traditional history of Eigg, said my friend the minister, compared with that of some of the