Iona is separated from the Ross of Mull by a channel about a mile wide, in which the heavy swell of the ocean sometimes rolls unkindly for tiny barks. This channel is deep enough for the passage of the largest ships, but is not free from danger on account of sunken rocks. The island itself lies north-east and south-west; and is about three and one-half miles in length, and a mile and a half in breadth. Its area is about two thousand acres, of which some six hundred are generally under cultivation, the rest being either pasture or barren. To see its northern end, as the writer first saw it, gleaming under the morning sun,—its brows of sand flashing their radiance afar,—produces an impression that does not readily vanish. The diapason of the Atlantic and the responsive chorus of the seashores help to charm and soothe while they solemnize the human spirit. There truly you can find the spirit of nature’s religion chanting lightly her morning hymns and rehearsing sweetly her evening psalms. A plain extends from side to side, at the narrowest part, in the centre of the island, with a small green hillock in its centre. In this part of it the soil is fairly fertile; but towards the north the ground becomes rougher with grassy hollows and rocky rising-knolls which end in the highest point in the island, Dun-I, 327 feet in height. From that eminence north a strip of low land extends to the shore, terminating in a stretch of white sand, which is composed chiefly of broken shells which the swell of the ocean has rolled and wasted and worn together until it heaped them there. Along the east side of the island the ground is low-lying and fertile. South of the central plain the surface of the soil is irregular, showing stony heights and grassy dells, which afford good pasture. The shore abounds with little bays and headlands. The underlying rocks are Laurentian, with an almost vertical dip, and a strike from north-east to south-west. There are beds of slate, quartz, marble, with serpentine, and a mixture of felspar, quartz, and hornblende passing sometimes into a sort of granite. This is the island of which the proverbial saying has made Columba so tenderly sing: “I mo chridhe, I mo ghràidh.” (Isle of my heart, Isle of my love.) The name of Iona has appeared under a large variety of forms. The single capital letter I has stood for it, which pronounced like double _ee_ as Gaelic requires, represents the universal Gaelic pronunciation for the island. Here are some of the other forms: Ia, Ie, Ii, Ieoa; Hi, Hii; Y, Hy; Iona, Yona, Hyona, and Yensis; I-Chalumchille and Icolmkill. In Adamnan it appears as the _Iouan_ island. This is an adjectival form in which the radix is Iou, equivalent to the Gaelic I. Adamnan’s Iouan was corrupted by the mistake of transcribers into the more euphonious Iona, an explanation which shows, the untenableness of such fanciful etymologies as I-thonna, “the island of waves,” and _I-shona_, “the island of the blest.”