There was, however, no such mixture of the homely and the magnificent in the route I had selected to explore. It lay under the escarpment of the cliff; and I purposed pursuing it from Portree to Holm, a distance of about six miles, and then returning by the flat interior valley. On the one hand rose a sloping rampart, full seven hundred feet in height, striped longitudinally with alternating bands of white sandstone and dark shale, and capped atop by a continuous coping of trap, that lacked not massy tower, and overhanging turret, and projecting sentry-box; while, on the other hand, spreading outwards in the calm from the line of dark trap-rocks below, like a mirror from its carved frame of black oak, lay the Sound of Rasay, with its noble background of island and main rising bold on the east, and its long mountain vista opening to the south. The first fossiliferous deposit which gave me occasion this morning to use my hammer occurs near the opening of the loch, beside an old Celtic burying-ground, in the form of a thick bed of hard sandstone, charged with Belemnites,--a bed that must at one time have existed as a widely-spread accumulation of sand,--the bottom, mayhap, of some extensive bay of the Oolite, resembling the Loch Portree of the present day, in which eddy tides deposited the sand swept along by the tidal currents of some neighboring sound, and which swarmed as thickly with Cephalopoda as the loch swarmed this day with minute purple-tinged Medusae. I found detached on the shore, immediately below this bed, a piece of calcareous fissile sandstone, abounding in small sulcated Terebratulae, identical, apparently, with the Terebratula of a specimen in my collection from the inferior Oolite of Yorkshire. A colony of this delicate Brachiopod must have once lain moored near this spot, like a fleet of long-prowed galleys at anchor, each one with its cable of many strands extended earthwards from the single _dead-eye_ in its umbone. For a full mile after rounding the northern boundary of the loch, we find the immense escarpment composed from top to bottom exclusively of trap; but then the Oolite again begins to appear, and about two miles further on the section becomes truly magnificent,--one of the finest sections of this formation exhibited anywhere in Britain, perhaps in the world. In a ravine furrowed in the face of the declivity by the headlong descent of a small stream, we may trace all the beds of the system in succession, from the Cornbrash, an upper deposit of the Lower Oolite, down to the Lias, the formation on which the Oolite rests. The only modifying circumstance to the geologist is, that though the sandstone beds run continuously along the cliff for miles together, distinct as the white bands in a piece of onyx, the intervening beds of shale are swarded over, save where we here and there see them laid bare in some abrupter acclivity or deeper water-course. In the shale we find numerous