further encroachment of the Atlantic. [Sidenote: SEA WEEDS.] The seaweeds around the Aran islands are peculiarly fitted for the production and manufacture of kelp, of which there are two varieties, one made from the black weed, and the other from the red. The black usually grows above the low-water mark of the neap-tide, whilst all the red grows below it. The red weed kelp is the most valuable, as in general it gives salts containing iodine. Marine plants, such as the sea-anemones, the rock-grown samphire, and the sea-cabbage grow around the islands in great profusion. Another remarkable feature in Aran is the enormous amount of fine quartzose--moving sands which, blown in thick clouds by the winds, fill the nooks and corners and crevices of the islands. These sands, which are said to possess the property of preserving bodies uncorrupted after death, might be fixed and utilized in the same manner as the sands of Arcachon on the west coast of France have been fixed and utilized, by planting therein vast forests of the _Pinus maritima_, the interlacery of whose roots would do the twofold duty of fixing the sands and creating a soil enriched by the amount of nitrogen therein digested and deposited. At Trawmore, on the south of Killeany Bay, proofs have lately been discovered not only of the movement of the sand-hills, but also of the appearance of fields and buildings submerged on the sea-coast. [Sidenote: MOVING SANDS IN ARAN.] These islands in prehistoric times must have suffered much from the convulsions which then shook the world--in later times they appear to have suffered little, though Richard Kirwan the chemist relates that in his memory, in the year 1774, a fearful thunderstorm visited Inishmore, when a granite block of enormous dimensions, called the "Gregory," was struck by lightning, shattered to atoms, and flung into the sea. FOOTNOTES: [1] Denis Florence McCarthy's Poems, p. 87 note. CHAPTER II. "Remnants of things that have passed away, Fragments of stone reared by creatures of clay." _Siege of Corinth._ [Sidenote: THE DRUIDS.] The "remnants of things that have passed away" are many on these islands. In no other part of the United Kingdom are there confined in spaces so narrow so many monuments of Pagan times; here are evidences of two great ages of civilization--that of the Druids and that of the Christians; but, whether of the Druids or of the Christians, Aran had been the retreat in early times of the contemplative and the learned. Sequestered and undisturbed, the natives have even to this day preserved much of the moral and physical remains of the ancient world. [Sidenote: DRUIDISM.]