Frederick Cope Whitehouse

“ Where the basalt, which for the height of some hundreds of feet above the chalk is quite amorphous, and caps the low promontories along the coast, is brought so low that more than one half of its thickness is immersed in the sea, the remainder projects above the water and forms the well-known natural pier. The caves on that coast are in the great ochre-bed or chalk. They are plainly artificial in their present form. ”

“ The caves are sufficiently numerous to furnish an argument. There are very few hollows worn by the sea in the Scotch coast. The islet, which contains a dozen, has not the 1100000 part of the indented line of the mainland, and bears an infinitesimal ratio to the sea-board, including the islands. Its parent, Mull, within whose bosom rests this irregularly oval rock, "measuring about one and a half mile in circumference," has in the dimension of length one hundred and fifty times better right to a "museum of wonders." The "Isle of Columns" is a speck too tiny to show on any ordinary map. ”

“ There is no fissure. In Boat Cave, tuff is undermined for 1,800 square feet, yet the columns stand wedged across 12 feet of width. At Tanaga Island, in the Aleutian group, the broken columns form a slightly convex roof across an opening 20 feet wide. No such Gothic arch was ever formed by Nature. It is strikingly Phoenician. No natural cave has an entrance higher than the interior. A tidal or earthquake wave would not reach the top of the arch. The cave is post-glacial. The upheaval of that part of Scotland is put at 25 feet. It would not bring the confused basalt within reach of the waves. ”

“ It is formed normally. The heads of columns show in a compact and serried phalanx. Each row protects the other in turn. The tesselated pavement, as on the Irish coast, is a firm, impenetrable mass, showing by its steepness its utter contempt for the wavelets which could not break those ranks in a geological æon. There is nothing to prepare the scientific mind, distrustful of abrupt changes, for the adjacent excavation. Its dimensions are, from the top of the arch to the cliff above, 30 feet; to the water, 66 feet; to the bottom, 88 feet. ”

“ IN venturing to ask a question and thus imply a doubt upon a point on which geologists, statesmen, and poets have given their consentient opinion for a century, it is not without regret that an opinion, held without suspicion of challenge, should be subjected to criticism, and better proof than prescription required for the title by which this celebrated cavern has been held and enjoyed as the work of Nature. ”

“ If the cooling mass of basalt be in one of its vertical sections of such a form that successive isothermal couches, taken in descending order, are not parallel to the original cooling surface, as they are in all cases of straight and parallel prisms, but divergent gradually from the cooling surface and from each other, then the lines of the splitting of the prisms, always true to these couches, must be curved in one direction. ”

“ There is a succession of rocks and shoals. The 20 fathom line is a mile distant, the 10-fathom half a mile, immediately followed by rocks, and 12, 15, and 9 feet of water. As the cave is in the southern face, it appears to be impossible, in the present state of the coast, that a wave with any momentum could strike directly upon that end of the island. As MacCulloch sat on one of the columns, though the long swell raised the water at intervals to his feet, the movement was silent, and the surface of the sea apparently undisturbed. There is ”

“ The peculiar Gothic door-way and the sheltered approach strengthen the view that they bear a distinct relation to an ancient civilization, and that it is not by accident that adjacent cliffs are crowned with castles, neighboring mines were worked from unknown periods, beacon-rocks bear mythological names, and manuscripts refer to maritime expeditions to the Baltic and Mediterranean. ”

“ The lowest is a rude trap tufa, the middle one is divided into columns placed vertically to the plane of the bed, and the uppermost is an irregular mixture of small columns and shapeless rock." The columnar bed-is never more than GO feet thick. The island itself attains a maximum height of 129 feet. It has no peak from which rain-water might descend in a considerable quantity. ”

“ It has been adopted, by a considerable number of eminent men, as a far stronger prima facie case than that commonly stated by the text-books in favor of marine erosion. If not well founded, it still suggests difficulties which have escaped observation, and may also correct the inaccurate terms in which Fingal's Cave has been described, and the imperfect representations which have gone far to perpetuate the hasty conclusion of Sir Joseph Banks. ”