Years passed, and in 1834 I received my first assistance from without, through the kindness of the Messrs. Anderson, of Inverness, who this year published their Guide to the _Highlands and Islands of Scotland_--a work which has never received half its due measure of praise. It contains, in a condensed and very pleasing form, the accumulated gleanings, for half a lifetime, of two very superior men, skilled in science, and of highly cultivated taste and literary ability; whose remarks, from their intimate acquaintance with every foot-breadth of country which they describe, invariably exhibit that freshness of actual observation, recorded on the spot, which Gray regarded as "worth whole cart-loads of recollection." But what chiefly interested me in their work was its dissertative appendices--admirable digests of the Natural History, Antiquities, and Geology of the country. The appendix devoted to Geology, consisting of fifty closely printed pages,--abridged in part from the highest geological authorities, and in much greater part the result of original observation,--contains, beyond comparison, the completest description of the rocks, fossils, and formations of the Northern and Western Highlands, which has yet been given to the public in a popular form. I perused it with intense interest, and learned from it, for the first time, of the fossil fishes of Caithness and Gamrie. There was almost nothing known, at the period, of the oryctology of the older rocks--little, indeed, of that of the Old Red Sandstone, in its proper character as such; and with no such guiding clew as has since been furnished by Agassiz, and the later researches of Mr. Murchison, the writer of the appendix had recorded as his ultimate conclusion, that "the middle schistoze system of Caithness, containing the fossil fish, was intermediate in geological character and position between the Old and New Red Sandstone formations." The ichthyolites of Gamrie he described as resembling those of Caithness; and I at once recognized, in his minute descriptions of both, the fossil fish of Cromarty. The mineralogical accompaniments, too, seemed nearly the same. In Caithness, the animal remains are mixed up in some places with a black bituminous matter like tar. I had but lately found among the beds of the little bay a mass of soft adhesive bitumen, hermetically sealed up in the limestone, which, when broken open, reminded me, from the powerful odor it cast, and which filled for several days the room in which I kept it, of the old Gaulish mummy of which we find so minute account in the Natural History of Goldsmith. The nodules which enclosed the organisms at Gamrie were described as of a sub-crystalline, radiating, fibrous structure. So much was this the case with some of the nodules at Cromarty, that they had often reminded me, when freshly broken, though composed of pure carbonate of lime, of masses of asbestos. The scales and bones