When the schistose rocks are of a softer and more uniform texture they form large lumpy hills with long smooth slopes covered with heath or peat, through which the rock seldom protrudes, save here and there where a knob of harder consistency comes to the surface, or where a mountain torrent has cut a ravine down the hill-side. Those wide tracts of the Highlands where the rocks are of this nature, possess a tame uniformity of outline which even their occasional great height hardly relieves. The traveller who crosses Ross-shire from Loch Broom to Dingwall, through the dreary Dirie More, will be able to realize this oppressive monotony, and to contrast it with the scarped and precipitous mountains that rise on the south round Loch Fannich. I do not know a better illustration of the effect of these softer schists in producing smooth-sloped hills than along the west side of the Firth of Clyde between the Kyles of Bute and the Gareloch. A band of clay-slate runs across the Island of Bute, skirts the firth by Innellan and Dunoon, crosses the mouth of Loch Long and the Gareloch, and strikes thence to Loch Lomond. It is easy to trace this strip of rock by the smooth undulating form of its hills, which remind us rather of the have yet seen are those by my friend Mr. E. W. Cooke, R. A. In looking at them I am at a loss whether to wonder more at their scrupulous truth, or at the amount of thought and feeling which glows through each of them. scenery of the southern uplands than of the Highlands. Behind the clay-slate lies a region of hard quartzose rocks, and the contrast between their rough craggy outlines and the tame features of the clayslate is a familiar part of the scenery of the Clyde. It is to these harder rocks that we owe the ruggedness of the mountains that sweep from the shores of Loch Fyne through Cowal, across the Holy Loch, Loch Goil, Argyle's Bowling Green, and Loch Long, into the heights of Ben Lomond. Their craggy Highland character, when seen from the east, is not a little enhanced by the softly undulating contour of the clay-slate hills that come into the nearer landscape. The granite (including the syenite) of the Highlands is not always characterized by a special type of scenery. Sometimes, as in the Moor of Rannoch, it covers leagues of ground without ever rising into a hill; or, as seen from the top of Cairngorm, it swells into wide, tame, undulating uplands; or it mounts in huge craggy precipices far up into the mists, and encloses dark tarns like Loch Aven, or it sweeps into dome-shaped eminences like the red hills of Skye, or into a stately cone like that of Goatfell. (Plate IV.) I have already remarked, that some of these various and apparently incongruous forms may be found combined in the same district, nay, even in the same mountain. From the summits of some, the granite mountains in the Grampian chain, the eye wanders over a wide, smooth, undulating table-land of hill-tops, and yet one or more of the flanks of each of these mountains may be a dizzy precipice 2,000 feet in descent, with its rifts of winter snow hidden deep from the sun. Such is the character of the highest parts of the Grampians, "Around the grizzly cliffs which guard Granite is usually traversed with innumerable joints, both parallel and oblique to each other, whereby the rock in weathering is broken up. The form which the granite mass assumes under the action of the wasting powers of nature depends greatly upon the angle of its surface. On a horizontal or gently inclined surface of granite, rains and frosts are comparatively helpless to split open the joints, for the upper layer of the rock breaks up into angular rubbish, which, though always wasting away, is always renewed in such a manner as to protect the rock below, and to preserve the uniformity of the surface. But where a vertical wall of granite rises into air, it may tend for a long while to maintain its precipitousness; for if it decays with tolerable equality throughout, slice after slice will be removed from its face, and if the springs, frosts, and streams at the foot of the cliff are active enough, the accumulated rubbish below may be swept away as it is loosened from the |