I breakfasted in the travellers' room with three gentlemen from Edinburgh; and then, accompanied by a boy, whom I had engaged to carry my bag, set out to explore. The morning was ominously hot and breathless; and while the sea lay moveless in the calm, as a floor of polished marble, mountain and rock, and distant island, seemed tremulous all over, through a wavy medium of thick rising vapor. I judged from the first that my course of exploration for the day was destined to terminate abruptly; and as my arrangements with Mr. Swanson left me, for this part of the country, no second day to calculate upon, I hurried over deposits which in other circumstances I would have examined more carefully,--content with a glance. Accustomed in most instances to take long aims, as Cuddy Headrig did, when he steadied his musket on a rest behind the hedge, and sent his ball through Laird Oliphant's forehead, I had on this occasion to shoot flying; and so, selecting a large object for a mark, that I might run the less risk of missing, I strove to acquaint myself rather with the general structure of the district than with the organisms of its various fossiliferous beds. The long narrow island of Rasay lies parallel to the coast of Skye, like a vessel laid along a wharf, but drawn out from it as if to suffer another vessel of the same size to take her berth between; and on the eastern shores of both Skye and Rasay we find the same Oolitic deposits tilted up at nearly the same angle. The section presented on the eastern coast of the one is nearly a duplicate of the section presented on the eastern coast of the other. During one of the severer frosts of last winter I passed along a shallow pond, studded along the sides with boulder stones. It had been frozen over; and then, from the evaporation so common in protracted frosts, the water had shrunk, and the sheet of ice which had sunk down over the central portion of the pond exhibited what a geologist would term very considerable marks of disturbance among the boulders at the edges. Over one sharp-backed boulder there lay a sheet tilted up like the lid of a chest half-raised; and over another boulder immediately behind it there lay another uptilted sheet, like the lid of a second half-open chest; and in both sheets, the edges, lying in nearly parallel lines, presented a range of miniature cliffs to the shore. Now, in the two uptilted ice-sheets of this pond I recognized a model of the fundamental Oolitic deposits Rasay and Skye. The mainland of Scotland had its representative in the crisp snow-covered shore of the pond, with its belt of faded sedges; the place of Rasay was indicated by the inner, that of Skye by the outer boulder; while the ice-sheets, with their shoreward-turned line of cliffs, represented the Oolitic beds, that turn to the mainland their dizzy range of precipices, varying from six to eight hundred feet in height, and then, sloping outwards and downwards, disappear under mountain wildernesses of