465 the following subjects, from which the nature of his researches can best be understood:—"Account of a Toad Found in the Trunk of a Beech;" "Account of the Worm with which the Stickleback is infested;" "Account of the Aluminous Chalybeate Spring which has lately appeared on the Property of Sir Andrew Lauder Dick, Bart., at Fountainhall, in East Lothian." (To this he subsequently added a register of its diur- nal alternations contrasted with the barometer, during nineteen months, a daily list of which had been made by his father, who was also a lover of natural science.) "An Account of the Earthquake in Scot- land;" "Account of Different Currents of Wind ob- served at the same time." But the most important of his philosophical investigations, upon which he had spent much study, and made more than one explora- tory journey to the wilds of Lochaber, was contained in his paper "On the Parallel Roads of Glenroy," which he read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1818. These singular roads, it was generally sup- posed, had been constructed either by the ancient Celtic kings of Scotland when their royal abode was the castle of Inverlochy, or by the Fingalian "car- borne" chiefs who had flourished at a still earlier period. Sir Thomas, however, attempted to show, by a careful induction, that these stupendous path- ways, instead of being constructed by kings, heroes, or primitive giants, had been formed by the action of the waters of a lake that had stood at different heights, corresponding with those of the shelves, until it had finally burst through its latest barrier in consequence of some great natural convulsion— probably the same that formed the great glen of Scotland through which the Caledonian Canal has been carried. This simple theory, although it sorely discomfited the lovers of the wonderful, and wor- shippers of "superstitious eld," was greatly admired by the sober and scientific, not only for its origi- nality, but the powerful array of facts and argu- ments adduced to support it, illustrated as it farther was by eight drawings, with which Sir Thomas ac- companied his dissertation. This essay, with en- gravings of his sketches, was published in the Trans- actions of the Society. He had thus not only the merit of throwing new light upon the theory of natural geological formations in opposition to the artificial, but of directing particular attention to these phenomena of Lochaber, which have been investi- gated by subsequent geologists, among whom may be mentioned Mr. Milne and Sir G. S. M'Kenzie. Another subject of scarcely less importance, that occupied the researches of Sir Thomas, was the natural transport, by means of ice, of a large boulder on the shore of the Moray Frith. His account of this huge isolated stone, and his conjectures as to the mode in which it had found its ultimate landing- place, was published in the third volume of the Wernerian Transactions; while his theory formed the basis on which several scientific writers after- wards endeavoured to account for still more impor- tant revolutions by means of ice, which had been effected over a large portion of the earth's surface. The nature of these studies, extending over so many fields, and the reputation which they had already won for him, would have constituted a stock in life upon which most of our comfortable country- gentlemen would have contentedly reposed to the end. But the mind of Sir Thomas Dick Lauder possessed an amount of intellectual vigour that could not be so easily satisfied; he had only thus com- menced, not concluded, his career; and after having begun with science, he turned, by way of relief, to the lighter departments of literature, through which he was to be better known to the world at large, than VOL. II. by his more laborious investigations among migratory rocks and water-chiselled highways. On the com- mencement of Blackwood's Magazine, at the begin- ning of 1817, he became one of its earliest contribu- tors; and his first tale which appeared in it, under the title of "Simon Ray, Gardener at Dumphail," was written with such vigour and truthfulness, that, for a time at least, it was supposed to have proceeded from no other pen than that of Sir Walter Scott himself. Some impression of this kind, indeed, seems at first to have been made by the anonymous contribution upon the conductors of the magazine also, for they appended to the tale the flattering an- nouncement of "Written, we have no doubt, by the author of Waver ley." The great era of magazines had now fully commenced, as well as that of steam, in which the impatient mind, no longer booked for the slow conveyance of folios and quartos, was to be carried onward with railway speed; and to the most important of these periodicals Sir Thomas became a frequent and welcome contributor. Besides these light but attractive sketches, he also became a writer in the grave methodical pages of the Edinburgh Encyclopedia, for which he drew up the statistical account of the province of Moray. It was in the midst of these and such other literary occupations that he succeeded to the baronetcy of Fountainhall, by the death of his father in 1820, and was the seventh who had enjoyed that title. After having preluded for some time in the depart- ment of fiction, and as an anonymous contributor to the periodicals, Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, having now fully essayed his strength, adventured upon the decisive three-volumed experiment, by publishing his historical romances of Lochindhu and the Wolf of Badenoch. The scenery of both of these works was laid in Morayshire, a county with which he was so well acquainted, while the time of action was that which succeeded the days of Bruce, the period when chivalrous warfare was at the hottest in Scotland, while it had Froissart for the chronicler of some of its best passages of arms. It was a right perilous attempt to follow the sandalled steps of the warrior monk; and Sir Thomas, stalwart though he was, and a knight to boot, was scarcely able to keep pace with his mighty leader. But who, indeed, would read modern chivalrous romances in the hope of finding newer and more stirring deeds of warlike emprise, after what Froissart has written ?—or search for keener ridicule of the fooleries of chivalry than can be found in the pages of Cervantes? The attempts of Sir Thomas, therefore, in these produc- tions, partook somewhat of the inferiority of Smollet, when the latter endeavoured, in his Sir Launcelot Greaves, to produce an English similitude of Don Quixote de la Mancha. It happened unfortunately also for Lochindhu and the Wolf of Badenoch, that their author, not content with entering a field so preoccupied, must needs accommodate himself to the language of the period, by interlacing his phraseo- logy with antique and consequently uncouth words; and thus his style, which after all would have been a patois unintelligible to the fourteenth century, of which it purports to be the type, becomes utter bar- barism to readers of the nineteenth, for whose grati- fication it was written. This is generally the fate of such literary compromises; and Sir Walter Scott was guilty of the same blunder when, in his romance of Ivanhoe, he jumbled together the characters and events of the early period of Richard Coeur de Lion with the refinements of that of Richard II., and crowned the whole with the English phraseology of the days of Queen Elizabeth. But, in spite of these incongruities, Ivanhoe is a magnificent epic, and 65