DEPOSITS OF ASSYNT.

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nothing can be more striking than the change which takesplace in the landscape, in passing from the wild ruggednessof a gneiss region, to the level fields, swelling moors, andlong undulating ridges of a sandstone one. But in the in-terior of the country, where the sandstone occurs chiefly indetached hills, it lends to the prospect features of surpassingboldness and grandeur. Rising over a basement of ruggedgneiss hills, that present the appearance of a dark tumblingsea, we descry a line of stupendous pyramids from two tothree thousand feet in height, which, though several milesdistant in the background, dwarf, by their great size, thenearer eminences into the mere protuberances of an unevenplain. Their mural character has the effect of adding totheir apparent magnitude. Almost devoid of vegetation, wesee them barred by the lines of the nearly horizontal strata,as edifices of man’s erection are barred by their courses ofdressed stone ; and while some of their number, such as thepeaked hill of Suilvein, rise at an angle at least as steep andnearly as regular as that of an Egyptian pyramid, in heightand bulk they surpass the highest Egyptian pyramid manytimes. Their colour, too, lends to the illusion. Of a deepred hue, which in the light of the setting sun brightens intoa glowing purple, they contrast as strongly with the cold graytone of the gneiss tract beneath as a warm-coloured buildingcontrasts with the earth-tinted street or roadway over whichit rises. The stone of which they are composed is a hard,compact, arenaceous rock, usually of a chocolate tint, andvarying in grain from an ordinary sandstone to a conglome-rate. But the pebbles which it incloses, and which usuallyoccur in thin beds, are greatly smaller than those of theGreat Old Bed conglomerate on the east coast,—ranging inbulk from the size of a pea to that of an egg. They are al-most all water-rolled,—usually quartzose or feldopathic intheir composition, though in considerable proportion jasper-