This was no very formidable beginning of the course of life I had so much dreaded. To be sure, my hands were a little sore, and I felt nearly as much fatigued as if I had been climbing among the rocks; but I had worked and been useful, and had yet enjoyed the day fully as much as usual. It was no small matter, too, that the evening, converted by a rare transmutation into the delicious "blink of rest" which Burns so truthfully describes, was all my own.

on canvas.

I was as light of heart next morning as any of my brother workmen. There had been a smart frost during the night, and the rime lay white on the grass as we passed onward through the fields; but the sun rose in a clear atmosphere, and the day mellowed as it advanced into one of those delightful days of early spring which give so pleasing an earnest of whatever is mild and genial in the better half of the year. All the workmen rested at mid-day, and I went to enjoy my half-hour alone, on a mossy knoll in the neighbouring wood, which commands through the trees a wide prospect of the bay and opposite shore. There was not a wrinkle on the water, nor a cloud in the sky, and the branches were as motionless in the calm as if they had been traced From a wooded promontory that stretched halfway across the frith there ascended a thin column of smoke. It rose straight as the line of a plummet for more than a thousand yards, and then on reaching a thinner stratum of air spread out equally on every side like the foliage of a stately tree. Ben Wyvis rose to the west, white with the yet unwasted snows of winter, and as sharply defined in the clear atmosphere as if all its sunny slopes and blue retiring hollows had been chiselled in marble. A line of snow ran along the opposite hills; all above was white, all below was purple. They reminded me of the pretty French story, in which an old artist is described as tasking the ingenuity of his future son-in-law, by giving him as a subject for his pencil, a flower-piece composed only of white flowers, of which the one half were to bear their proper colour, the other half a deep purple hue, and yet all be perfectly natural; and how the young man resolved the riddle and gained his mistress, by introducing a transparent purple vase into the picture, and making the light pass through it on the flowers that were drooping over the edge. I returned to the quarry, convinced that a very exquisite pleasure may be a very cheap one, and that the busiest employments may afford leisure enough to enjoy it.

F

*

The shores of Cromarty are strewed over with water-rolled fragments of the primary rocks, derived chiefly from the west during the ages of the boulder clay; and I soon learned to take a deep interest in sauntering over the various pebble beds when shaken up by recent storms, and in learning to distinguish their numerous components. But I was sadly in want of a vocabulary; and as, according to Cowper, "the growth of what is excellent is slow," it was not until long after that I bethought me of the obvious enough expedient of representing the various species of simple rocks by certain numerals, and the compound ones by the numerals representative of each separate component, ranged, as in vulgar fractions, along a medial line, with the figures representative of the prevailing materials of the mass above, and those representative of the materials in less proportion below. Though, however, wholly deficient in the signs proper to represent what I knew, I soon acquired a considerable quickness of eye in distinguishing the various kinds of rock, and tolerably definite conceptions of the generic character of the porphyries, granites, gneisses, quartz-rocks, clay-slates, and mica-schists, which everywhere strewed the beach. In the rocks of mechanical origin I was at this time much less interested; but in individual, as in general history, mineralogy almost always precedes geology.

I went about with my hammer, breaking into all manner of stones, with great perseverance and success. I found, in a large-grained granite, a few sheets of beautiful black mica, that, when split exceedingly thin, and pasted between slips of mica, of the ordinary kind, made admirably coloured eye-glasses, that converted the landscapes around into richly toned drawings in sepia ;† and numerous crystals of garnet embedded in mica-schist, that were, I was sure, identical with the stones set in a little gold brooch, the property of my mother. To this last surmise, however, some of the neighbours to whom I showed my prize demurred. The stones in my mother's brooch were precious stones, they said whereas what I had found was merely a stone upon the shore." My friend the cabinet-maker went so far as to say that the specimen was but a mass of plum pudding stone, and its darkcoloured enclosures simply the currants. But, then, on the other hand, Uncle Sandy took my view of the matter: the stone was not plum pudding stone, he said: he had often seen

66

* Primary, first formed; or the lowest strata on a geological scale, enumerated presently in the text.

+ Sepia, a colour (a deep brown if mixed with caustic lye) made of a juice secreted by the Sepia, the genus cuttle-fish.

plum pudding stone in England, and knew it to be a sort of rough conglomerate of various components; whereas my stone was composed of a finely grained silvery substance, and the crystals which it contained were, he was sure, gems like those in the brooch, and, so far as he could judge, real garnets. This was a great decision; and much encouraged in consequence, I soon ascertained that garnets are by no means rare among the pebbles of the Cromarty shore. Nay, so mixed up are they with its sands even-a consequence of the abundance of the mineral among the primary rocks of Ross,-that after a heavy surf has beaten the exposed beach of the neighbouring hill, there may be found on it patches of comminuted* garnet, from one to three square yards in extent, that resemble, at a little distance, pieces of crimson carpeting, and nearer at hand, sheets of crimson beadwork, and of which almost every point and particle is a gem.

These rocks, however, contain no fossil remains of early organic life-neither petrified fish nor plant of any kind; and I therefore became deeply interested in a new region of wonders.

There lies in the frith beyond, an outlier of the lias †, which strews the beach with its fragments after every storm from the sea, Here I broke open many a nodule, containing ammonites and other fossils, during our stay at this delightful quarry, and there were few of them in which I did not detect some organism of the ancient world-scales of fishes, groups of shells, bits of decayed wood, and fragments of fern. At the dinner-hour I used to show my new-found specimens to the workmen ; but though they always took the trouble of looking at them, and wondered at times how the shells and plants had "got into the stones," they seemed to regard them as a sort of natural toys, which a mere lad might amuse himself in looking after, but which were rather below the notice of grown up-people like themselves.

One workman, however informed me, that things of a kind I had not yet found, genuine thunderbolts, which in his father's time were much sought for the cure of bewitched cattle, were to be had in tolerable abundance on a reach of the beach about two miles further to the west; and as, on quitting the quarry for the piece of work on which we were to be next engaged, uncle David gave us all a half-holiday, I made use of it in visiting the tract of shore indicated by the workman. There I found

* Comminuted, reduced, pulverized, or triturated to powder or minute particles.

+ Lias (from "layers"), a stone of clay and lime composition, forming the basis of the oolitic system.

a liassic deposit, amazingly rich in its organisms-not buried under the waves, as at Marcus's shore, or as opposite our new quarry, but at one part underlying a little grass-covered plain, and at another exposed for several hundred yards together along the shore. Never yet did embryo* geologist break ground on a more promising field; and memorable in my existence was this first of the many happy evenings that I have spent in exploring it.

The various beds, all save the lowest, which consists of a blue adhesive clay, are composed of a dark shale, consisting of easily separable laminaæt, thin as sheets of pasteboard; and they are curiously divided from each other by bands of fossiliferous limestone of but from one to two feet thick. These liassic

beds, with their separating bands, are a sort of boarded books for as a series of volumes reclining against a granite pedestal in the geologic library of nature, I used to find pleasure in regarding them. The limestone bands form the stiff boarding; the pasteboard-like plates between, tens and hundreds of thousands in number in even the slimmer volumes, compose the closely written leaves. I say closely written; for never yet did signs or characters lie closer on page or scroll than do the organisms of the lias on the surface of these leaf-like laminæ.

I can scarce hope to communicate to the reader, after the lapse of so many years, an adequate idea of the feeling of wonder which the marvels of this deposit excited in my mind, wholly new as they were to me at the time. Even the fairy lore of my firstformed library had impressed me less. The general tone of the colouring of these written leaves, though dimmed by the action of untold centuries, is still very striking; and on some of them curious pieces of incident are recorded.

HUGH MILLER.

* Embryo, youthful, incipient; n., a rudimentary organism, a tyro. + Lamin-a (sing. -a) plates, scales, lying on each other like book leaves.

PART II.

DESCRIPTIVE.

THE POTTERIES OF ENGLAND.

THERE are two kinds of POTTERY-common potter's ware, and porcelain of China. The first is a pure kind of brick; and the second a mixture of very fine brick and glass. Almost all nations have some knowledge of pottery; and those of very hot countries are sometimes satisfied with dishes formed by their fingers without any tool, and dried by the heat of the sun. In England, pottery of every sort, and in all countries good pottery, must be baked or burned in a kiln of some kind or other.

Vessels for holding meat and drink are almost as indispensable as the meat and drink themselves; and the two qualities in them that are most valuble are, that they shall be cheap and easily cleaned. Pottery, as it is now produced in England, possesses both of these qualities in the very highest degree. A white basin, having all the useful properties of the most costly vessels, may be purchased for twopence at the door of any cottage in England. There are very few substances used in human food that have any effect upon these vessels; and it is only rinsing them in hot water, and wiping them with a cloth, and they are clean.

The making of an earthen bowl would be to a man who made a first attempt no easy matter. Let us see how it is done, so that it can be carried two or three hundred miles and sold for twopence, leaving a profit to the maker, and the wholesale and retail dealer.

The common pottery is made of pure clay and pure flint. The flint is found only in the chalk counties, and the fine clays in Devonshire and Dorsetshire; so that the materials out of which the pottery is made have to be carried from the south of England to Staffordshire, where the potteries are situated.

The great advantage that Staffordshire possesses is abundance