whose shroud she was preparing; and how she more than satisfied his curiosity, by telling him it was his own. It is a not uninteresting fact," added the minister, "that my poor people, since they have become more earnest about their religion, think very little about ghosts and spectres: their faith in the realities of the unseen world seems to have banished from their minds much of their old belief in its phantoms." In the rude fences that separate from each other the little farms in this plain, we find frequent fragments of the oyster bed, hardened into a tolerably compact limestone. It is seen to most advantage, however, in some of the deeper cuttings in the fields, where the surrounding matrix exists merely as an incoherent shale; and the shells may be picked out as entire as when they lay, ages before, in the mud, which we still see retaining around them its original color. They are small, thin, triangular, much resembling in form some specimens of the _Ostrea deltoidea_, but greatly less in size. The nearest resembling shell in Sowerby is the _Ostrea acuminata_,--an oyster of the clay that underlies the great Oolite of Bath. Few of the shells exceed an inch and a half in length, and the majority fall short of an inch. What they lack in bulk, however, they make up in number. They are massed as thickly together, to the depth of several feet, as shells on the heap at the door of a Newhaven fisherman, and extend over many acres. Where they lie open we can still detect the triangular disc of the hinge, with the single impression of the abductor muscle; and the foliaceous character of the shell remains in most instances as distinct as if it had undergone no mineral change. I have seen nowhere in Scotland, among the secondary formations, so unequivocal an oyster-bed; nor do such beds seem to be at all common in formations older than the Tertiary in England, though the oyster itself is sufficiently so. We find Mantell stating, in his recent work ("Medals of Creation"), after first describing an immense oyster bed of the London Basin, that underlies the city (for what is now London was once an oyster-bed), that in the chalk below, though it contains several species of Ostrea, the shells are diffused promiscuously throughout the general mass. Leaving, however, these oysters of the Oolite, which never net inclosed nor drag disturbed, though they must have formed the food of many an extinct order of fish,--mayhap reptile,--we pass on in a south-western direction, descending in the geological scale as we go, until we reach the southern side of the Bay of Laig. And there, far below tide-mark, we find a dark-colored argillaceous shale of the Lias, greatly obscured by boulders of trap,--the only deposit of the Liasic formation in the island.