[Footnote 77: The highest points of New Zealand, nearly 10,000 feet above the sea, are said to be clothed for two-thirds of their height with ice and snow. If, therefore, during Carboniferous times, there existed somewhere to the west of what is now central Scotland, a chain cf hills 5000 or 6000 feet high, their summits might perhaps have been as wintry us that of Mont Blanc.] Our boulder has served us like the minstrels in modern Gothic poetry, who appear between the cantos, and give an air of unity and completeness to what would otherwise be often rambling and unconnected. And now, at the close, it comes again before us, lying in its bed of clay, clustered with mosses of brightest green, and overshadowed by its flickering canopy of beechen leaves. Silent and senseless, the emblem, seemingly, of calm repose and unchanging durability, what could we have conceived it should have to chronicle, save the passing, perchance, of many a wintry December and many a sultry June. Such, indeed, would be the character of its records of the centuries that have passed away since the birth of man, did any such record survive in its keeping. But it rests there as the memorial of far earlier centuries, and of an older creation; and though now surrounded with all that is lovely or picturesque--the twinkling flowers on every side, the wide arch of boughs overhead, and the murmuring streamlet in the dell below--and though forming itself no unimpressive object in the scene, the boulder looks out upon us unconnected with anything around. Like a sculptured obelisk transported from the plains of Assyria to the streets of London, it offers no link of association with the order of things around it; its inscriptions are written in hieroglyphics long since extinct, but of which the key yet remains to show us that the rocks of our planet are not masses of dead, shapeless matter, but chronicles of the past; and that all the varied beauty of green field and waving wood is but a thin veil of gossamer spread out over the countless monuments of the dead. We have raised one little corner of this gauze-like covering, and tried to decipher the memorials of bygone creations, traced in clear and legible characters on the boulder. First, there lies spread out before us a wide arctic sea, studded with icebergs that come drifting from the north. Here and there a bare barren islet rises above the waste of waters, and the packed ice-floes often strand along its shores, while at other parts great towering bergs, aground in mid-ocean, keep rising and falling with the heavings of the surge, and seem ever on the verge of toppling into the deep. But this scene, so bleak and lifeless, erelong fades away, and we can descry a wide archipelago of islands, green well-nigh to the water's edge, and looking like the higher hill-tops of some foundered continent. The waves are actively at work wearing down the shores, which present for the most part an abrupt cliff-line to the west.