[4] Appended to their joint paper on the "Deposits contained between the Scottish Primary Rocks and Oolitic Series," and interesting, as the first published geological map of Scotland to the north of the Firths of Forth and Clyde.
[5] There are only two of these exclusively west-coast shells,—Trochus umbilicatus and Pecten niveus. As neither of them has yet been detected in any Tertiary formation, they are in all probability shells of comparatively recent origin, that came into existence in some western centre of creation; whereas specimens of Trochus magus and Nassa reticulata, which occasionally occur on the eastern coasts of the kingdom, I have also found in a Pleistocene deposit. Thus the more widely-spread shells seem to be also the shells of more ancient standing.
CHAPTER XIV.
"Edina! Scotia's darling seat!
All hail thy palaces and towers!"—Burns.
There had occurred a sad accident among the Cromarty rocks this season, when I was labouring in Gairloch, which, from the circumstance that it had nearly taken place in my own person about five years before, a good deal impressed me on my return. A few hundred yards from the very bad road which I had assisted old Johnstone of the Forty-Second in constructing, there is a tall inaccessible precipice of ferruginous gneiss, that from time immemorial down to this period had furnished a secure nestling-place to a pair of ravens—the only birds of their species that frequented the rocks of the Hill. Year after year, regularly as the breeding season came round, the ravens used to make their appearance, and enter on possession of their hereditary home: they had done so for a hundred years, to a certainty—some said, for a much longer time; and as there existed a tradition in the place that the nest had once been robbed of its young birds by a bold climber, I paid it a visit one morning, in order to determine whether I could not rob it too. There was no getting up to it from below: the precipice, more inaccessible for about a hundred feet from its base than a castle wall, overhung the shore; but it seemed not impracticable from above; and, coming gradually down upon it, availing myself, as I crept along, of every little protuberance and hollow, I at length stood within six or eight feet of the young birds. From that point, however, a smooth shelf, without projection or cavity, descended at an angle of about forty to the nest, and terminated abruptly, without ledge or margin, in the overhanging precipice. Have I not, I asked, crept along a roof of even a steeper slope than that of the shelf? Why not, in like manner, creep along it to the nest, where there is firm footing? I had actually stretched out my naked foot to take the first step, when I observed, as the sun suddenly broke out from behind a cloud, that the light glistened on the smooth surface. It was incrusted over by a thin layer of chlorite, slippery as the mixture of soap and grease that the ship-carpenter spreads over his slips on the morning of a launch. I at once saw there was an element of danger in the way, on which I had at first failed to calculate; and so, relinquishing the attempt as hopeless, I returned by the path I had come, and thought no more of robbing the raven's nest. It was, however, again attempted this season, but with tragic results, by a young lad from Sutherland, named Mackay, who had previously approved his skill as a cragsman in his native county, and several times secured the reward given by an Agricultural Society for the destruction of young birds of prey. As the incident was related to me, he had approached the nest by the path which I had selected; he had paused where I had paused, and even for a longer time; and then, venturing forward, he no sooner committed himself to the treacherous chlorite, than, losing footing as if on a steep sheet of ice, he shot right over the precipice. Falling sheer for the first fifty feet or so without touching the rock, he was then turned full round by a protuberance against which he had glanced, and, descending for the lower half of the way head foremost, and dashing with tremendous force among the smooth sea-stones below, his brains were scattered over an area of from ten to twelve square yards in extent. His only companion—an ignorant Irish lad—had to gather up the fragments of his head in a napkin.
I now felt that, save for the gleam of the sun on the glistening chlorite—seen not a moment too soon—I should probably have been substituted as the victim for poor Mackay, and that he, warned by my fate, would in all likelihood have escaped. And though I knew it might be asked, Why the interposition of a Providence to save you, when he was left to perish? I did feel that I did not owe my escape merely to my acquaintance with chlorite and its properties. For the full development of the moral instincts of our nature, one may lead a life by much too quiet and too secure: a sprinkling in one's lot of sudden perils and hair-breadth escapes is, I am convinced, more wholesome, if positive superstition be avoided, than a total absence of danger. For my own part, though I have, I trust, ever believed in the doctrine of a particular Providence, it has been always some narrow escape that has given me my best evidences of the vitality and strength of the belief within. It has ever been the touch of danger that has rendered it emotional. A few years after this time, when stooping forward to examine an opening fissure in a rock front, at which I was engaged in quarrying, a stone, detached from above by a sudden gust of wind, brushed so closely past my head as to beat down the projecting front of my bonnet, and then dented into a deep hollow the sward at my feet. There was nothing that was not perfectly natural in the occurrence; but the gush of acknowledgment that burst spontaneously from my heart would have set at nought the scepticism which should have held that there was no Providence in it. On another occasion, I paused for some time, when examining a cave of the old-coast line, directly under its low-browed roof of Old Red conglomerate, as little aware of the presence of danger as if I had been standing under the dome of St. Paul's; but when I next passed the way, the roof had fallen, and a mass, huge enough to have given me at once death and burial, cumbered the spot which I had occupied. On yet another occasion, I clambered a few yards down a precipice, to examine some crab-apple trees, which, springing from a turret-like projection of the rock, far from gardens and nurseries, had every mark of being indigenous; and then, climbing up among the branches, I shook them in a manner that must have exerted no small leverage power on the outjet beneath, to possess myself of some of the fruit, as the native apples of Scotland. On my descent, I marked, without much thinking of the matter, an apparently recent crack running between the outjet and the body of the precipice. I found, however, cause enough to think of it on my return, scarce a month after; for then both outjet and trees lay broken and fractured on the beach more than a hundred feet below. With such momentum had even the slimmer twigs been dashed against the sea-pebbles, that they stuck out from under more than a hundred tons of fallen rock, divested of the bark on their under sides, as if peeled by the hand. And what I felt on all these occasions was, I believe, not more in accordance with the nature of man as an instinct of the moral faculty, than in agreement with that provision of the Divine Government under which a sparrow falleth not without permission. There perhaps never was a time in which the doctrine of a particular Providence was more questioned and doubted than in the present; and yet the scepticism which obtains regarding it seems to be very much a scepticism of effort, conjured up by toiling intellects, in a quiet age, and among the easy classes; while the belief which, partially and for the time, it overshadows, lies safely entrenched all the while amid the fastnesses of the unalterable nature of man. When danger comes to touch it, it will spring up in its old proportions; nay, so indigenous is it to the human heart, that if it will not take its cultivated form as a belief in Providence, it will to a certainty take to it its wild form as a belief in Fate or Destiny. Of a doctrine so fundamentally important that there can be no religion without it, God himself seems to have taken care when he moulded the human heart.
The raven no longer builds among the rocks of the Hill of Cromarty; and I saw many years ago its last pair of eagles. This last noble bird was a not unfrequent visitor of the Sutors early in the present century. I still remember scaring it from its perch on the southern side of the hill, as day was drawing to a close, when the tall precipices amid which it had lodged lay deep in the shade; and vividly recollect how picturesquely it used to catch the red gleam of evening on its plumage of warm brown, as, sailing outwards over the calm sea many hundred feet below, it emerged from under the shadow of the cliffs into the sunshine. Uncle James once shot a very large eagle beneath one of the loftiest precipices of the southern Sutor; and, swimming out through the surf to recover its body—for it had dropped dead into the sea—he kept its skin for many years as a trophy.[6] But eagles are now no longer to lie seen or shot on the Sutors or their neighbourhood. The badger, too—one of perhaps the oldest inhabitants of the country, for it seems to have been contemporary with the extinct elephants and hyænas of the Pleistocene periods—has become greatly less common on their steep sides than in the days of my boyhood; and both the fox and otter are less frequently seen. It is not uninteresting to mark with the eye of the geologist, how palpably in the course of a single lifetime—still nearly twenty years short of the term fixed by the Psalmist—these wild animals have been posting on in Scotland to that extinction which overtook, within its precincts, during the human period, the bear, the beaver, and the wolf, and of which the past history of the globe, as inscribed on its rocks, furnishes so strong a record.