In the memoir of John Bethune by his brother Alexander, the reader is told that he was much depressed and disappointed, about a twelvemonth or so previous to his decease, by the rejection of several of his stories in succession, which were returned to him, "with an editor's sentence of death passed upon them." I know not whether it was by the editor of the "Tales of the Borders" that sentence in the case was passed; but I know he sentenced some of mine, which were, I daresay, not very good, though well-nigh equal, I thought, to most of his own Instead, however, of yielding to depression, like poor Bethune, I simply resolved to write for him no more; and straightway made an offer of my services to Mr. Robert Chambers, by whom they were accepted; and during the two following years I occasionally contributed to his Journal, on greatly more liberal terms than those on which I had laboured for the other periodical, and with my name attached to my several articles. I must be permitted to avail myself of the present opportunity of acknowledging the kindness of Mr. Chambers. There is perhaps no other writer of the present day who has done so much to encourage struggling talent as this gentleman. I have for many years observed that publications, however obscure, in which he finds aught really praiseworthy, are secure always of getting, in his widely-circulated periodical, a kind approving word—that his criticisms invariably bear the stamp of a benevolent nature, which experiences more of pleasure in the recognition of merit than in the detection of defect—that his kindness does not stop with these cheering notices, for he finds time, in the course of a very busy life, to write many a note of encouragement and advice to obscure men in whom he recognises a spirit superior to their condition—and that the compositions of writers of this meritorious class, when submitted to him editorially, rarely fail, if really suitable for his journal, to find a place in it, or to be remunerated on a scale that invariably bears reference to the value of the communications—not to the circumstances of their authors.
I can scarce speak of my contributions to the periodicals at this time as forming any part of my education. I acquired, in their composition, a somewhat readier command of the pen than before; but they, of course, tended rather to the dissipation of previous stores than to the accumulation of new ones; nor did they give exercise to those higher faculties of mind which I deemed it most my interest to cultivate. My real education at the time was that in which I was gradually becoming initiated behind the bank-counter, as my experience of the business of the district extended; and that which I contrived to pick up in my leisure evenings along the shores. A rich ichthyolitic deposit of the Old Red Sandstone lies, as I have already said, within less than half a mile of the town of Cromarty; and when fatigued with my calculations in the bank, I used to find it delightful relaxation to lay open its fish by scores, and to study their peculiarities as exhibited in their various states of keeping, until I at length became able to determine their several genera and species from even the minutest fragments. The number of ichthyolites which that deposit of itself furnished—a patch little more than forty yards square—seemed altogether astonishing: it supplied me with specimens at almost every visit, for ten years together; nor, though, after I left Cromarty for Edinburgh, it was often explored by geologic tourists, and by a few cultivators of science in the place, was it wholly exhausted for ten years more. The ganoids of the second age of vertebrate existence must have congregated as thickly upon that spot in the times of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, as herrings ever do now, in their season, on the best fishing-banks of Caithness or the Moray Firth. I was for some time greatly puzzled in my attempts to restore these ancient fishes, by the peculiarities of their organization. It was in vain I examined every species of fish caught by the fishermen of the place, from the dog-fish and the skate to the herring and the mackerel. I could find in our recent fishes no such scales of enamelled bone as those which had covered the Dipterians and the Celacanths; and no such plate-encased animals as the various species of Coccosteus or Pterichthys. On the other hand, with the exception of a double line of vertebral processes in the Coccosteus, I could find in the ancient fishes no internal skeleton: they had apparently worn all their bones outside, where the crustaceans wear their shells, and were furnished inside with but frameworks of perishable cartilage. It seemed somewhat strange, too, that the geologists who occasionally came my way—some of them men of eminence—seemed to know even less about my Old Red fishes and their peculiarities of structure, than I did myself. I had represented the various species of the deposit simply by numerals, which not a few of the specimens of my collection still retain on their faded labels; and waited on until some one should come the way learned enough to substitute for my provisional figures words by which to designate them; but the necessary learning seemed wanting, and I at length came to find that I had got into a terra incognita in the geological field, the greater portion of whose organisms were still unconnected with human language. They had no representatives among the vocables.
I formed my first imperfect acquaintance with the recent ganoidal fishes in 1836, from a perusal of the late Dr. Hibbert's paper on the deposit of Burdiehouse, which I owed to the kindness of Mr. George Anderson. Dr. Hibbert, in illustrating the fishes of the Coal Measures, figured and briefly described the Lepidosteus of the American rivers as a still surviving fish of the early type; but his description of the animal, though supplemented shortly after by that of Dr. Buckland in his Bridgewater Treatise, carried me but a little way. I saw that two of the Old Red genera—Osteolepis and Diplopterus—resembled the American fish externally. It will be seen that the first-mentioned of these ancient ichthyolites bears a name compounded, though, in the reverse order, of exactly the same words. But while I found the skeleton of the Lepidosteus described as remarkably hard and solid, I could detect in the Osteolepis and its kindred genus no trace of internal skeleton at all The Cephalaspean genera, too—Coccosteus and Pterichthys—greatly puzzled me: I could find no living analogues for them; and so, in my often-repeated attempts at restoration, I had to build them up plate by plate, as a child sets up its dissected map or picture bit by bit—every new specimen that turned up furnishing a key for some part previously unknown—until at length, after many an abortive effort, the creatures rose up before me in their strange, unwonted proportions, as they had lived, untold ages before, in the primæval seas. The extraordinary form of Pterichthys filled me with astonishment; and with its arched carpace and flat plastron restored before me, I leaped to the conclusion, that as the recent Lepidosteus, with its ancient representatives of the Old Red Sandstone, were sauroid fishes—strange connecting links between fishes and alligators—so the Pterichthys was a Chelonian fish—a connecting link between the fish and the tortoise. A gurnard—insinuated so far through the shell of a small tortoise as to suffer its head to protrude from the anterior opening, furnished with oar-like paddles instead of pectoral fins, and with its caudal fin clipped to a point—would, I found, form no inadequate representative of this strangest of fishes. And when, some years after, I had the pleasure of introducing it to the notice of Agassiz, I found that, with all his world-wide experience of its class, it was as much an object of wonder to him as it had been to myself. "It is impossible," we find him saying, in his great work, "to see aught more bizarre in all creation than the Pterichthyan genus: the same astonishment that Cuvier felt in examining the Plesiosaurus, I myself experienced, when Mr. H. Miller, the first discoverer of these fossils, showed me the specimens which he had detected in the Old Red Sandstone of Cromarty." And there were peculiarities about the Coccosteus that scarce less excited my wonder than the general form of the Pterichthys, and which, when I first ventured to describe them, were regarded by the higher authorities in Palæontology as mere blunders on the part of the observer. I have, however, since succeeded in demonstrating that, if blunders at all—which I greatly doubt, for Nature makes very few—it was Nature herself that was in error, not the observer. In this strange Coccostean genus, Nature did place a group of opposing teeth in each ramus of the lower jaw, just in the line of the symphysis—an arrangement unique, so far as is yet known, in the vertebrate division of creation, and which must have rendered the mouth of these creatures an extraordinary combination of the horizontal mouth proper to the vertebrata, and of the vertical mouth proper to the crustaceans. It was favourable to the integrity of my work of restoration, that the press was not waiting for me, and that when portions of the creatures on which I wrought were wanting, or plates turned up whose places I was unable to determine, I could lay aside my self-imposed task for the time, and only resume it when some new-found specimen supplied me with the materials requisite for carrying it on. And so the restorations which I completed in 1840, and published in 1841, were found, by our highest authorities in 1848, after they had been set aside for nearly six years, to be essentially the true ones after all. I see, however, that one of the most fanciful and monstrous of all the interim restorations of Pterichthys given to the world—that made by Mr. Joseph Dinkel in 1844 for the late Dr. Mantell, and published in the "Medals of Creation," has been reproduced in the recent illustrated edition of the "Vestiges of Creation." But the ingenious author of that work could scarce act prudently were he to stake the soundness of his hypothesis on the integrity of the restoration. For my own part, I consent, if it can be shown that the Pterichthys which once lived and moved on this ancient globe of ours ever either rose or sunk into the Pterichthys of Mr. Dinkel, freely and fully to confess, not only the possibility, but also the actuality, of the transmutation of both species and genera. I am first, however, prepared to demonstrate, before any competent jury of Palæontologists in the world, that not a single plate or scale of Mr. Dinkel's restoration represents those of the fish which he professed to restore; that the same judgment applies equally to his restoration of Coccosteus; and that, instead of reproducing in his figures the true forms of ancient Cephalaspeans, he has merely given, instead, the likeness of things that never were "in the heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth."
The place in the geologic scale, as certainly as the forms and characters, of these ancient fishes, had to be determined. Mr. George Anderson had informed me, as early as 1834, that some of them were identical with the ichthyolites of the Gamrie deposit; but then the place of the Gamrie deposit was still to fix. It had been recently referred to the same geological horizon as the Carboniferous Limestone, and was regarded as lying unconformable to the Old Red Sandstone of the district in which it occurs; but, wholly dissatisfied with the evidence adduced, I continued my search, and, though the process was a slow one, saw the position of the Cromarty beds gradually approximating towards determination. It was not, however, until the autumn of 1837 that I got them fairly fixed down to the Old Red Sandstone, and not until the winter of 1839 that I was able conclusively to demonstrate their place in the base of the system, little more than a hundred feet, and in one part not more than eighty feet, above the upper strata of the Great Conglomerate. I had often wished, during my explorations, to be able to extend my field of observation into the neighbouring counties, in order to determine whether I could not possess myself, at a distance, of the evidence which, for a time at least, I failed to find at home; but my daily engagements in the bank fixed me down to Cromarty and its neighbourhood; and I found myself somewhat in the circumstances of a tolerably lively beetle stuck on a pin, that, though able, with a little exertion, to spin round its centre, is yet wholly unable to quit it. I acquired, however, at the close of 1837, in the late Dr. John Malcolmson of Madras, a noble auxiliary, who could expatiate freely over the regions virtually barred against me. He had been led to visit Cromarty by a brief description of its geology, rather picturesque than scientific, which had appeared in my legendary volume; and after I had introduced him to its ichthyolitic beds on both sides of the Hill and at Eathie, and acquainted him with their character and organisms, he set himself to trace out the resembling deposits of the neighbouring shires of Banff, Moray, and Nairn. And in little more than a fortnight he had detected the ichthyolites in numerous localities all over an Old Red Sandstone tract, which extends from the primary districts of Banff to near the field of Culloden. The Old Red Sandstone of the north, hitherto deemed so poor in fossils, he found—with the Cromarty deposits as his key—teeming with organic remains. In the spring of 1838, Dr. Malcolmson visited England and the Continent, and introduced some of my Cephalaspean fossils to the notice of Agassiz, and some of the evidence which I had laid before him regarding their place in the scale, to Mr. (now Sir Roderick) Murchison. And I had the honour, in consequence, of corresponding with both these distinguished men; and the satisfaction of knowing, that by both, the fruit of my labours was deemed important. I observe that Humboldt, in his "Cosmos," specially refers to the judgment of Agassiz on the extraordinary character of the new zoological link with which I had furnished him; and I find Murchison, in his great work on the Silurian System, published in 1839, laying no little emphasis on the stratigraphical fact. After referring to the previously formed opinion that the Gamrie deposit, with its ichthyolites, was not an Old Red one, he goes on to say—"On the other hand, I have recently been informed by Dr. Malcolmson, that Mr. Miller of Cromarty (who has made some highly interesting discoveries near that place) pointed out to him nodules resembling those of Gamrie, and containing similar fishes, in highly-inclined strata, which are interpolated in, and completely subordinate to, the great mass of Old Red Sandstone of Ross and Cromarty. This important observation will, I trust, be soon communicated to the Geological Society, for it strengthens the inference of M. Agassiz respecting the epoch during which the Cheiracanthus and Cheirolepis lived." All this will, I am afraid, appear tolerably weak to the reader, and somewhat more than tolerably tedious. Let him remember, however, that the only merit to which I lay claim in the case is that of patient research—a merit in which whoever wills may rival or surpass me; and that this humble faculty of patience, when rightly directed, may lead to more extraordinary developments of idea than even genius itself. What I had been slowly deciphering were the ideas of God as developed in the mechanism and framework of His creatures, during the second age of vertebrate existence; and one portion of my inquiries determined the date of these ideas, and another their character.
Many of the best sections of the Sutors and the adjacent hills, with their associated deposits, cannot be examined without boat; and so I purchased for a few pounds a light little yawl, furnished with mast and sail, and that rowed four oars, to enable me to carry out my explorations. It made me free of the Cromarty and Moray Firths for some six or eight miles from the town, and afforded me many a pleasant evening's excursion to the deep-sea caves and skerries, and the picturesque surf-wasted stacks of the granitic wall of rock which runs in the Ben Nevis line of elevation, from Shadwick on the east to the Scarfs Crag on the west. I know not a richer tract for the geologist. Independently of the interest that attaches to its sorely-contorted granitic gneiss—which seems, as Murchison shrewdly remarks, to have been protruded through the sedimentary deposits in a solid state, as a fractured bone is sometimes protruded through the integuments—there occurs along the range three several deposits of the Old Red ichthyolites, and three several deposits of the Lias, besides the sub-aqueous ones, with two insulated skerries, which I am inclined to regard as outliers of the Oolite. These last occur in the form of half-tide rocks, very dangerous to the mariner, which lie a full half-mile from the shore, and can be visited with safety only at low water during dead calms, when no ground swell comes rolling in from the sea. I have set out as early as two o'clock in a fine summer morning for these skerries, and, after spending several hours upon them, have been seated at the bank desk before ten; but these were mornings of very hard work. It was the long Saturday afternoons that were my favourite seasons of explorations; and when the weather was fine, my wife would often accompany me in these excursions; and we not unfrequently anchored our skiff in some rocky bay, or over some fishing bank, and, provided with rods and lines, caught, ere our return, a basket of rock-cod or coal-fish for supper, that always seemed of finer flavour than the fish supplied us in the market. These were happy holidays. Shelley predicates of a day of exquisite beauty, that it would continue to "live like joy in memory." I do retain recollections of these evenings spent in my little skiff—recollections mingled with a well-remembered imagery of blue seas and purple hills, and a sun-lit town in the distance, and tall wood-crested precipices nearer at hand, which flung lengthened shadows across shore and sea—that not merely represent enjoyments which have been, but that, in certain moods of the mind, take the form of enjoyment still. They are favoured spots in the chequered retrospect of the past, on which the sunshine of memory falls more brightly than on most of the others.
When thus employed, there broke out very unexpectedly, a second war with the Liberal Moderates of the town, in which, unwillingly rather than otherwise, I had ultimately to engage. The sacrament of the Supper is celebrated in most of the parish churches of the north of Scotland only once a year; and, as many of the congregations worship at that time in the open air, the summer and autumn seasons are usually selected for the "occasion," as best fitted for open-air meetings. As, however, the celebration is preceded and followed by week-day preachings, and as on one of these week-days—the Thursday preceding the Sacramental Sabbath—no work is done, kirk-sessions usually avoid fixing their sacrament in a busy time, such as the time of harvest in the rural districts, or of the herring-fishing in the seaport towns; and as the parish of Cromarty has both its rural population and its fishing one, the kirk-session of the place have to avoid both periods. And so the early part of July, ere the herring-fishing or the harvest comes on, is the time usually fixed upon for the Cromarty sacrament. In this year, however (1838), it so chanced that the day appointed for the Queen's coronation proved coincident with the sacramental Thursday, and the Liberal Moderate party urged upon the Session that the preparations for the sacrament should give way to the rejoicings for the coronation. We had not been much accustomed to rejoicings of the kind in the north since the good old times when respectable Tory gentlemen used to show themselves drunk in public on the King's birthday, in order to demonstrate their loyalty: the coronation days of both George IV. and William IV. had passed off as quietly as Sabbaths; and the Session, holding that it might be quite as well for people to pray for their young Queen at church, and then quietly drink her health when they got home, as to grow glorious in her behalf in taverns and tap-rooms, refused to alter their day. Believing that, though essentially in the right, they were yet politically in the wrong, and that a plausible case might be made out against them by the newspaper press, I waited on my minister, and urged him to give way to the Liberals, and have his preparation-day changed from Thursday to Friday. He seemed quite willing enough to act on the suggestion; nay, he had made a similar one, he told me, to his Session; but the devout eldership, strong in the precedents of centuries, had declined to subordinate the religious services of the Kirk to the wassail and merriment sanctioned by the State. And so they determined on keeping their day of sacramental preparation on the Thursday, as their fathers had done. Meanwhile, the Liberals held what was very properly termed a public meeting, seeing that, though the public had failed to attend it, the public had been quite at liberty to do so, nay, had even been specially invited; and there appeared in the provincial newspapers a long report of its proceedings, including five speeches—all written by a legal gentleman—in which it was designated a meeting of the inhabitants of the town and parish of Cromarty. The resolutions were, of course, of the most enthusiastically loyal character. There was not a member of the meeting who was not prepared to spend upon himself the last drop of his bottle of port in her Majesty's behalf. Thursday came—the Thursday of the sacrament and of the coronation; and, with ninety-nine hundredths of the church-going portion of my townsfolk, I went to church as usual. The parochial resolutioners, amounting in all to ten, were, I can honestly avouch, scarce at all missed in a congregation of nearly as many hundreds. About mid-day, however, we could hear the muffled report of their carronades; and, shortly after the service was over, and we had returned to our homes, there passed through the streets a forlorn little group of individuals, that looked exceedingly like a press-gang, but was in reality intended for a procession. Though joined by a proprietor from a neighbouring parish, a lawyer from a neighbouring burgh, a small coast-guard party, with its commanding officer, and two half-pay Episcopalian officers besides, the number who walked, including boys, did not exceed twenty-five persons; and of these, as I have said, only ten were parishioners. The processionists had a noble dinner in the head inn of the place—merrier than even dinners of celebration usually are, as it was, of course, loyalty and public spirit to ignore the special claim upon the day asserted by the Church; and the darkening evening saw a splendid bonfire blazing from the brae-head. And the Liberal newspapers south and north taking part with the processionists, in many a paragraph and short leader, represented their frolic—for such it was, and a very foolish one—as a splendid triumph of the people of Cromarty over Presbyterial bigotry and clerical domination. Nay, so bad did the case of my minister and his Session appear, thus placed in opposition to at once the people and the Queen, that the papers on the other side failed to take it up. A well-written letter on the subject by my wife, which fairly stated the facts, was refused admission into even the ecclesiastico-Conservative journal, specially patronized, at the time, by the Scottish Church; and my minister's friends and brethren in the south could do little else than marvel at what they deemed his wondrous imprudence.
I had anticipated, from the first, that his position was to be a bad one; but I ill liked to see him with his back to the wall. And though I had determined, on the rejection of my counsel, to take no part in the quarrel, I now resolved to try whether I could not render it evident that he was really not at issue with his people, but with merely a very inconsiderable clique among them, who had never liked him; and that it was much a joke to describe him as disaffected to his sovereign, simply because he had held his preparation services on the day of her coronation. In order to make good my first point, I took the unpardonable liberty of giving the names in full, in a letter which appeared in our northern newspapers, of every individual who walked in the procession, and represented themselves as the people; and challenged the addition of even a single name to a list ludicrously brief. And in making good the second, I fairly succeeded, as there were not a few comical circumstances in the transaction, in getting the laughers on my side. The clique was amazingly angry, and wrote not very bright letters, which appeared as advertisements in the newspapers, and paid duty to make evident the fact. There was a shallow and very ignorant young shoemaker in the place, named Chaucer, a native of the south of Scotland, who represented himself as the grandson of the old poet of the days of Edward III., and wrote particularly wretched doggrel to make good his claim. And, having a quarrel with the kirk-session, in a certain delicate department, he had joined the processionists, and celebrated their achievements in a ballad entirely worthy of them. And it was perhaps the severest cut of all, that the recognised leader of the band pronounced Chaucer the younger a greatly better poet than me. There were representations, too, made to my superiors in the banking department at Edinburgh, which procured me a reprimand, though a gentle one; but my superior in Cromarty—Mr. Ross—as wise and good a man as any in the direction, and thoroughly acquainted with the merits of the case, was wholly on my side. I am afraid the reader may deem all this very foolish, and hold that I would have been better employed among the rocks, in determining the true relations of their various beds, and the character of their organisms, than in bickering in a petty village quarrel, and making myself enemies. And yet, man being what he is, I fear an ability of efficient squabbling is a greatly more marketable one than any ability whatever of extending the boundaries of natural science. At least so it was, that while my geological researches did nothing for me at this time, my letter in the procession controversy procured for me the offer of a newspaper editorship. But though, in a pecuniary point of view, I should have considerably bettered my circumstances by closing with it, I found I could not do so without assuming the character of the special pleader, and giving myself to the advocacy of views and principles which I really did not hold; and so I at once declined the office, as one for which I did not deem myself suited, and could not in conscience undertake.
I found about this time more congenial employment, though, of course, it occupied only my leisure hours, in writing the memoir of a townsman—the late Mr. William Forsyth, of Cromarty—at the request of his relation and son in-law, my friend Mr. Isaac Forsyth, of Elgin. William Forsyth had been a grown man ere the abolition of the hereditary jurisdictions; and from the massiveness and excellence of his character, and his high standing as a merchant, in a part of the country in which merchants at the time were few, he had succeeded, within the precincts of the town, to not a little of the power of the hereditary Sheriff of the district; and after acting for more than half a century as a laborious Justice of the Peace, and succeeding in making up more quarrels than most country lawyers have an opportunity of fomenting—for the age was a rude and combative one, and the merchant ever a peace-maker—he lived long enough to see Liberty-and-Equality Clubs and Processions, and died about the close of the first war of the French Revolution. It was an important half-century in Scotland—though it exhibits but a narrow, inconspicuous front in the history of the country—that intervened between the times of the hereditary jurisdictions and the Liberty-and-Equality Clubs. It was specially the period during which popular opinion began to assume its potency, and in which the Scotland of the past merged, in consequence, into the very dissimilar Scotland of the present. And I derived much pleasure in tracing some of the more striking features of this transition age in the biography of Mr. Forsyth. My little work was printed, but not published, and distributed by Mr. Forsyth of Elgin among the friends of the family, as perhaps a better and more adequate memorial of a worthy and able man than could be placed over his grave. It was on the occasion of the death of his last-surviving child—the late Mrs. Mackenzie of Cromarty, a lady from whom I had received much kindness, and under whose hospitable roof I had the opportunity afforded me of meeting not a few superior men—that my memoir was undertaken; and I regarded it as a fitting tribute to a worthy family just passed away, at once deserving of being remembered for its own sake, and to which I owed a debt of gratitude.
In the spring of 1839, a sad bereavement darkened my household, and for a time left me little heart to pursue my wonted amusements, literary or scientific. We had been visited, ten months after our marriage, by a little girl, whose presence had added not a little to our happiness; home became more emphatically such from the presence of the child, that in a few months had learned so well to know its mother, and in a few more to take its stand in the nurse's arms, at an upper window that commanded the street, and to recognise and make signs to its father as he approached the house. Its few little words, too, had a fascinating interest to our ears;—our own names, lisped in a language of its own, every time we approached; and the simple Scotch vocable "awa, awa," which it knew how to employ in such plaintive tones as we retired, and that used to come back upon us in recollection, like an echo from the grave, when, its brief visit over, it had left us for ever, and its fair face and silken hair lay in darkness amid the clods of the churchyard. In how short a time had it laid hold of our affections! Two brief years before, and we knew it not; and now it seemed as if the void which it left in our hearts the whole world could not fill. We buried it beside the old chapel of St. Regulus, with the deep rich woods all around, save where an opening in front commands the distant land and the blue sea; and where the daisies which it had learned to love, mottled, starlike, the mossy mounds; and where birds, whose songs its ear had become skilful enough to distinguish, pour their notes over its little grave. The following simple but truthful stanzas, which I found among its mother's papers, seem to have been written in this place—sweetest of burying grounds—a few weeks after its burial, when a chill and backward spring, that had scowled upon its lingering illness, broke out at once into genial summer:—
Thou'rt "awa, awa," from thy mother's side,