Rapid and brief as the above sketch is, let the reader be assured there is much, very much, in the district to interest and instruct. Make the circuit of the Pentlands when he may, and he will not be satisfied until he has penetrated every valley, scaled every height, and become familiar as household words with every name and calling through the length and breadth of their varied range. Habbie’s How, a very pastoral in the sound, Carlops, Kaim-Valley, Mount-Maw, Deerhoperigg, Dalmahoy-Crags, the Mendick Hills, how dear to every lover of nature in their sweet retreats and cool shady banks! And Tintock, rich in prophetic lore, to be understood must be ascended, the eye ranging over the whole central valley of Scotland, embracing both oceans in its field of vision, and numbering all over the lofty granite peaks of the Grampians. Resting-spots like these impart a delicious charm to the geologist amidst his wanderings. If pregnant with the materials of doubtful reasonings, perplexing arrangements, and intricate soundings, the science has its sunny sides and cheerful fields of recreation. And if compelled to traverse regions of dangerous stepping, dark profound abysses, he is speedily again by the side of sparkling rivers, among grassy holms and pastoral dales, redolent with the bracing airs of crag and mountain.
Nor are the moral influences of such speculations of a less healthful and refreshing kind. Geology, which deals with the cycles of time, is yet the youngest of the sciences. One exclusively of observation, all its objects lie scattered around the daily pathways of men. And still, but as yesterday, has it been looked upon with a favorable eye, as a means of investigating and establishing truth, and its truths themselves recognized as of good character and tendency. Herein, until very recently, the tree of knowledge was supposed to yield of its fruits of good and evil, most abundantly of the latter, and men long pertinaciously refused to partake of, or even to look at, the precious things that dropped from its numerous well-laden branches. Hume had attempted to demonstrate that there was no external world at all. Researches into the structure of mind, metaphysics, the domain of “common sense” as distinguished from the abstractions of the ideal philosophy, engaged and confounded alike the learned and the unlearned. Beneath, in the strata of the earth, lay the records and memorials, it was said, of vast untold ages, and all shrunk from an abyss on whose brink it was perilous to walk. The interior was literally regarded as unhallowed ground, from whose Pandora recesses, open who might, nothing but evils could issue, at utter variance with every fixed and established principle.
“Hic specus horrendum et sævi spiracula ditis.”
Religion and science thus stood in direct antagonism to each other, divorced by general consent from an unnatural alliance; and men, in those days, in the Scottish metropolis, were grouped into coteries who eyed each other with a bitter jealousy. Some more liberal mind, indeed, a Blair and a Robertson, would pass occasionally into the hostile camp, but returned again to his own ranks, to be received with no very cordial embrace or flattering approval.
But now, were one of the sages of scarcely half a century ago permitted to rise from the dust, and to take his place among the intellectuals of the present time, nothing would be more likely to excite his wonder than the controversies, and their subjects, which figure in their works. Theory there is scarcely any among those who now give law in Modern Athens in letters and science.—Whether in the regions of mental philosophy, the walks of physical science, or the sacred precincts of religion, men’s minds are nearly at one as to the objects and distinctive province of each. They do not fear or dread the pursuits in which they are respectively engaged, assured that skepticism, or any desire to maintain it, has now neither party nor standing; or come to what conclusion they may, the Wisdom from above will in its own pure and elevated region remain scathless against any or all the bolts with which it may be assailed. The everlasting hills are still there on their old foundations—the remarkable variety of structure, which, all around the city they so marvelously present, still speaks in impressive language of order and disruption, stability and change—and underneath, in the imperishable forms of buried generations, are the records of a history in which man has no part, and with which his destiny would seem in no wise concerned. But the language written thereon, and the leaves on which it is impressed, are divested of the awful sibylline mystery in which they were then involved. The saint is scared not away by the frightful characters and dark meanings which the sage pretends he can trace in them. Nor is the sage himself startled at the alchemy of his own art, and the singular forms he can summon to his presence from his subterranean domains.
A delightful repose all this from the fierce personal controversies of a few years ago. Healthful truths are brought to light. On one and the same page, penetrate as deep as they may, all professions and their abettors join alike in admiration of the ineffaceable impress of the order, wisdom, and goodness everywhere to be traced in the structure of the globe. There is no longer the metaphysician vainly attempting to resolve the whole concrete mass into the ideal; or ridiculously striving to raise a structure of materialism, on the assumption that all our ideas, whatever we know and all we excogitate about, are derived through the medium of our sensations. The regions of infinite space are explored, and the devotional tendencies of the age have become the more decided and intense in proportion as the mental vision has been enlarged. The mind seizes with a firmer grasp, and advances with a steadier pace over the fields of creation, because there is a Creator whose invisible Godhead is understood from the things which are made. And now, in search of truth, one and the same through all things, religion and science go hand in hand, sanctified and enlightened by the union, and imparting the most salutary lessons from the physical and moral revelations of Him whose path is in the deep places of the earth, and who for the display of his own glory has become the Instructor and Redeemer of the world.
CHAPTER XI.
THE LAMMERMUIRS—THE BORDER LAND—GENERAL STRUCTURE OF SCOTLAND.
The interest which attaches to this division of our sketches of Scottish geology is in no degree impaired by the consideration that the rocks, all of them, belong to one or other of the systems which have already passed under review. A belt of undisputed Silurian deposit here meets us for the first time, flanked on all sides, and nearly throughout its length, by the old red sandstone. Porphyritic hills, greenstone bosses and dykes, and the various phenomena of trap intrusion and dislocation, are again presented in many and very striking illustrative details. “The border land,” physically as well as morally, could not well be without its points of contention; and, accordingly, geologists have made “raide across the marches,” and claimed as of Scottish origin an extensive domain of the English new red sandstone, or Permian system. Corncockle Moor, too, and the quarries near Dumfries, unfold as curious a page in the history of the old world as does the Crigup Lynn, hewn out of the same family of rocks, of the stern warfare and fierce contendings which adorn, as they likewise disgrace, the annals of the seventeenth century.