The tidal wave of travellers which, thanks to railroads and steamboats, pours northward over the country every summer, even as far as John o' Groat's, has hardly as yet risen much beyond that utmost shore. The tourist stops short at the Pentland Firth; indeed, when he reaches its bare treeless coast, and finds that there is really no traditional house at John o' Groat's (though a good inn, with careful host and kindly hostess, should tempt him to rest there a while), he is in a hurry to get back by daylight to the busy hum of men in the hyperborean city of Wick or Thurso, and as eager to flit southwards again next morning.

I have been this autumn in the Land of the Giant's Causeway and of the Giant Stag. For a long time it had been my earnest desire to become acquainted with “The Green Isle.” In my colleague, Professor von Lasaulx, I found a wished-for companion on my journey. It is easy to get to Ireland. In a single night's journey one is whirled from London to Dublin viá Holyhead. In Dublin the best directions for a geologist are to be had at the Geological Survey Office for Ireland. which forms a department of the Government Geological Survey of Great Britain. Prof. Hull, the Director of the establishment, and Mr. Hellier Baily, the Palæontologist attached to it, afforded me, with the greatest kindness, every necessary assistance.

After much slipping and sliding—for the small stream of water which flows down the pass had often glazed it from side to side—we reached the village of Yamborshan, just outside the Kalgan walls. Here I was well received by the Russian Postmaster, M. Shismaroff. This village, like Kalgan itself, is romantically situated in a defile, which is bounded by mountainous cliffs of a volcanic rock, called by Pumpelly a porphyritic trachyte. Before entering Kalgan, you pass underneath a gateway in the famous Great Wall of China. Right and left from this point, it rapidly ascends to the summit of the cliffs, which bound the defile, and its towers are seen standing on pinnacles of rocks, and looking over precipices from positions which seem inaccessible.

Those who maintain that Till or Boulder-clay has not only originated but accumulated underneath glacier-ice may sometimes have felt puzzled to account for the preservation of beds of more or less incoherent materials below a deposit which they have so many cogent reasons for believing to be a true moraine profonde.

In the most extended view, the Channel Islands may be regarded as fragments and relics of the Eastern or European coast of the Atlantic, reckoning from the North Cape to Cape St. Vincent, and including the Western shores of Scotland and Ireland, and the promontories of Pembrokeshire and Cornwall. They are excellent illustrations, says Professor Ansted, “of those spurs and tongues of porphyritic rock, of which almost all the promontories of the Atlantic coast of Europe consist.” Very small and insignificant specks indeed they seem in such a length of coast, stretching from lat. 37° to 72°, or upwards of 2000 miles; but there is a charm in such wide horizons, and it is a very allowable indulgence so to connect the little with the great, and to consider the position of such little specks in relation to the geography of Europe; one might almost as well say, of the world at large.