George, first Earl of Cromarty, seems, like his namesake and contemporary, the too celebrated Sir George M'Kenzie, of Roseavoch, to have been a man of an eminently active and inquiring mind. He found leisure, in the course of a very busy life, to write several historical dissertations of great research, and a very elaborate _Synopsis Apocalyptica_. He is the author, too, of an exceedingly curious letter on the "Second Sight," addressed to the philosophic Boyle, which contains a large amount of amusing and extraordinary fact; and his description of the formation of a peat-moss in the central Highlands of Ross-shire has been quoted by almost every naturalist who, since the days of the sagacious, nobleman, has written on the formation of peat. His life was extended to extreme old age; and as his literary ardor remained undiminished till the last, some of his writings were produced at a period when most other men are sunk in the incurious indifferency and languor of old age. And among these later productions are his remarks on peat. He relates that, when a very young man, he had marked, in passing on a journey through the central Highlands of Ross-shire, a wood of very ancient trees, doddered and moss-grown, and evidently passing into a state of death through the last stages of decay. He had been led by business into the same district many years after, when in middle life, and found that the wood had entirely disappeared, and that the heathy hollow which it had covered was now occupied by a green, stagnant morass, unvaried in its tame and level extent by either bush or tree. In his old age he again visited the locality, and saw the green surface roughened with dingy-colored hollows, and several Highlanders engaged in it in cutting peat in a stratum several feet in depth. What he had once seen an aged forest had now become an extensive peat-moss.