The shoemaker, however, though he enjoyed the popular explanation, had got far beyond the thraldom of old superstition, and had made some acquaintance with modern science. When I asked him how he would himself account for the scattering of these blocks of stone over the district, he replied at once, ‘O, ye ken, they cam on the backs o’ the icebairges,’ and he proceeded to give me a graphic picture of what he supposed must have been the condition of Clydesdale when it lay below an icy sea, across which the stones were transported and were left where they now lie.
In many cases the origin of striking local features is referred to the doings of powerful witches alone, as in the case of Ailsa Craig, which is said to be the work of
A witch so strong
That could control the moon, make flows and ebbs.
The legend relates that for some purpose she designed to carry over a hill to Ireland, and selected one near Colmonell. Having lifted it up in her apron, she set off on her broomstick through the air, but unfortunately, when some miles out over the firth, her apron-strings broke, and the huge mass fell into the water, where its upper part has projected ever since as the well-known ‘craggy ocean-pyramid.’ In proof of the truth of this tale, the hollow is pointed out from which the rock was removed.
CLIFF-PORTRAITS
Even among the minor topographical features of the country, the natural play of the imagination may be seen where the instinctive feeling for the detection of resemblances has led to the recognition of so many likenesses to men and to animals, sometimes obvious, sometimes far-fetched, among the outlines of hills and crags. This tendency may be seen at work in every country. Anyone can perceive the strikingly lion-like aspect of Arthur’s Seat, which seems to sit watching over Edinburgh, ready to spring at a foe. The profile of Samuel Johnson’s (some say Lord Brougham’s) face and his portly body have long been familiar on the southern front of Salisbury Crags, though it seems to me that the mouth is wider open and the chin hangs a little more than when I used to admire it as a boy. The ‘tooth of time’ is incessantly gnawing at all such cliffs, and while some fancied resemblances are gradually effaced, others are brought into existence. Travellers up Loch Carron see in front of them on the summit of the mountain Fuar Thol a gigantic recumbent profile, which from generation to generation is likened to that of some contemporary personage. At present it is spoken of as the face of a well-known politician whose features are familiar in the pages of Punch. Our grandchildren will find a likeness in it to some one of their own time. In the little anchorage of the Shiant Isles, the face of one of the surrounding cliffs presents the outline of a man in the attitude so often depicted in the background of Teniers’ pictures.
Further illustration of this universal habit of mind may be gathered from even the smaller objects in nature. Children delight to recognise resemblances in things; the grown man learns to detect differences. Yet in regard to things that are unfamiliar, the man’s first instincts are those of the child. He seizes on the likeness which the newly observed objects bear to some already known to him, and he may even go so far as to mistake similarity for identity. Perhaps in no department of nature does this habit of mind manifest itself more flagrantly than in the mineral kingdom. People who know little or nothing of minerals or rocks, readily enough perceive a resemblance between some pieces of stone and certain plants, animals or inanimate objects, with which they at once compare or even identify them. In the vast majority of cases, there is no real connection between the stone and the object which it resembles. The likeness is merely accidental and external. Among the multitudinous shapes which concretions of mineral matter have assumed, a curious collection might be made of imitative forms. The ‘fairy stones’ of Scotland, found as concretions among deposits of clay, present endless rude figures of manikins, or portions of the human body, of fishes, birds, plants, cannon-balls, snuff-boxes, shoes, and innumerable familiar objects. Similar concretions occur all over the world, and have long attracted popular notice.
SUPPOSED ANIMAL FOOTPRINTS
An Orkney laird once wrote to me that his people, while removing flagstones from the shore of his island, had made an extraordinary discovery, no less than ‘the footprints of men, women, children and animals,’ all impressed on the solid stone and in excellent preservation, and he courteously offered to send me some specimens of these interesting remains. The identification of the impressions as human relics was of course out of the question, for the rock that contained them belonged to the Old Red Sandstone, which was deposited long before any trace of man appeared upon the earth. Nevertheless, as there was just a possibility that among the specimens, there might be some new fossils, which might add to our knowledge of the flora or fauna of that ancient formation, I asked the proprietor to be good enough to send a few examples of the ‘find.’ In due course one or two large boxes arrived containing several hundredweight of stone. But every one of the specimens was merely the cast of a mineral concretion. Yet they were curiously like footprints. One looked as if a young man, in going out to a ball, had stepped with his dress-boot upon soft mud, into which he had sunk about an inch. Another seemed as if it might have been made by a rough-shod farmer, springing from his dog-cart upon the surface of a muddy pool. There were prints resembling misshapen female feet, and one or two might, with a little imagination, have been taken for prints of infants, whose fond mothers were trying to make them stand on a soft clay floor. But not a single one of them had anything to do with a human being, or with any fossil plant or animal.