Geology of Rum--Its curious Character illustrated--Rum famous for Bloodstones--Red Sandstones--"Scratchings" in the Rocks--A Geological Inscription without a Key--The Lizard--Vitality broken into two--Illustrations--Speculation--Scuir More--Ascent of the Scuir--The Bloodstones--An Illustrative Set of the Gem--M'Culloch's Pebble--A Chemical Problem--The solitary Shepherd's House--Sheep _versus_ Men--The Depopulation of Rum--A Haul of Trout--Rum Mode of catching Trout--At Anchor in the Bay of Glenelg. The geology of the island of Rum is simple, but curious. Let the reader take, if he can, from twelve to fifteen trap-hills, varying from one thousand to two thousand three hundred feet in height; let him pack them closely and squarely together, like rum-bottles in a case-basket; let him surround them with a frame of Old Red Sandstone, measuring rather more than seven miles on the side, in the way the basket surrounds the bottles; then let him set them down in the sea a dozen miles off the land,--and he shall have produced a second island of Rum, similar in structure to the existing one. In the actual island, however, there is a defect in the inclosing basket of sandstone: the basket, complete on three of its sides, wants the fourth: and the side opposite to the gap which the fourth should have occupied is thicker than the two other sides put together. Where I now write there is an old dark-colored picture on the wall before me. I take off one of the four bars of which the frame is composed,--the end-bar,--and stick it on to the end-bar opposite, and then the picture is fully framed on two of its sides, and doubly framed on a third, but the fourth side lacks framing altogether. And such is the geology of the island of Rum. We find the one loch of the island,--that in which the Betsey lies at anchor,--and the long withdrawing valley, of which the loch is merely a prolongation, occurring in the double sandstone bar: it seems to mark--to return to my illustration--the line in which the superadded piece of frame has been stuck on to the frame proper. The origin of the island is illustrated by its structure: it has left its story legibly written, and we have but to run our eye over the characters and read. An extended sea-bottom, composed of Old Red Sandstone, already tilted up by previous convulsions, so that the strata presented their edges, tier beyond tier, like roofing slate laid aslant on a floor, became a centre of Plutonic activity. The molten trap broke through at various times, and presenting various appearances, but in nearly the same centre; here existing as an augitic rock, there as a syenite, yonder as a basalt or amygdaloid. At one place it uptilted the sandstone; at another it overflowed it; the dark central masses raised their heads above the surface, higher and higher with every earthquake throe from beneath; till at length the