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The Cruise of the Betser or "a Summer Among the Fossiferous Deposits of the Hefricles"
The Cruise of the Betser or a Summer Among the Fossiferous Deposits of the Hefricles Author:Hugh Miller General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1858 Original Publisher: Thomas Consable and C. Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where ... more »you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER IIL As we climbed the hill-side, and the Shinar-like tower before us rose higher over the horizon at each step we took, till it seemed pointing at the middle sky, we could mark peculiarities in its s-tructure which escape notice in the distance. We found it composed of various beds, each of which would make a Giant's Causeway entire, piled over each other like storeys in a building, and divided into columns, vertical, or nearly so, in every instance except in one bed near the base, in which the pillars incline to a side, as if losing footing under the superincumbent weight. Innumerable polygonal fragments, single stones of the building, -- lie scattered over the slope, composed, like almost all the rest of the Scuir, of a peculiar and very beautiful stone, unlike any other in Scotland, -- a dark pitchstone-porphyry, which, inclosing crystals of glassy feldspar, resembles in the hand-specimen a mass of black sealing-wax, with numerous pieces of white bugle stuck into it. Some of the detached polygons are of considerable size ; few of them larger and bulkier, however, than a piece of column of this characteristic porphyry, about ten feet in length by two feet in diameter, which lies a full mile away from any of the others, in the line of the old burying-ground, and distant from it only a few hundred yards. It seems to have been carried there by man: we find its bearing from the Scuir lying nearly at right angles with the direction of the drift-boulders of the western coast, which are, besides, of rare occurrence in the Hebrides : nor has it a single n...« less