arrangement in nature,--first observed, as we learn from Bacon, by the people of the Low Countries, and which has since formed the basis of meteoric tables, and of predictions and elaborate cycles of the weather,--bound together the twelvemonths of the Oolitic period in alternate bundles of better and worse: vegetation throve vigorously during the summers of one group, and languished, in those of another, in a state of partial development. Sending away our man shipwards, laden with a bag of fossil wood, we ascended by a steep broken ravine to the top of the Scuir. The columns, as we pass on towards the west, diminish in size, and assume in many of the beds considerable variety of direction and form. In one bed they belly over with a curve, like the ribs of some wrecked vessel from which the planking has been torn away; in another they project in a straight line, like muskets planted slantways on the ground to receive a charge of cavalry; in others the inclination is inwards, like that of ranges of stakes placed in front of a sea-dyke, to break the violence of the waves; while yet in others they present, as in the eastern portion of the Scuir, the common vertical direction. The ribbed appearance of every crag and cliff, imparts to the scene a peculiar character; every larger mass of light and shadow is corded with minute stripes; and the feeling experienced among the more shattered peaks, and in the more broken recesses, seems near akin to that which it is the tendency of some magnificent ruin to excite, than that which awakens amid the sublime of nature. We feel as if the pillared rocks around us were like the Cyclopean walls of Southern Italy,--the erections of some old gigantic race passed from the earth forever. The feeling must have been experienced on former occasions, amid the innumerable pillars of the Scuir; for we find M'Culloch, in his description, ingeniously analyzing it. "The resemblance to architecture here is much increased," he says, "by the columnar structure, which is sufficiently distinguishable, even from a distance, and produces a strong effect of artificial regularity when seen near at hand. To this vague association in the mind of the efforts of art with the magnitude of nature, is owing much of that sublimity of character which the Scuir presents. The sense of power is a fertile source of the sublime; and as the appearance of power exerted, no less than that of simplicity, is necessary to confer this character on architecture, so the mind, insensibly transferring the operations of nature to the efforts of art where they approximate in character, becomes impressed with a feeling rarely excited by her more ordinary forms, where these are even more stupendous."