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AF
Association for Scottish Literature
@scotlit.bsky.social
Educational charity promoting the reading, writing, teaching & study of Scotland's literature & languages, past & present.
1k followers542 following1.5k posts
AFscotlit.bsky.social

I picked up a nodular mass of blue limestone, and laid it open by a stroke of the hammer. Wonderful to relate, it contained inside a beautifully finished piece of sculpture… —Hugh Miller, THE OLD RED SANDSTONE (1841) available on Project Gutenberg 2/4 gutenberg.org/ebooks/63923

In the course of the first day's employment, I picked up a nodular mass of blue limestone, and laid it open by a stroke of the hammer. Wonderful to relate, it contained inside a beautifully finished piece of sculpture—one of the volutes apparently of an Ionic capital; and not the far-famed walnut of the fairy tale, had I broken the shell and found the little dog lying within, could have surprised me more. Was there another such curiosity in the whole world? I broke open a few other nodules of similar appearance,—for they lay pretty thickly on the shore,—and found that there might. In one of these there were what seemed to be the scales of fishes, and the impressions of a few minute bivalves, prettily striated; in the centre of another there was actually a piece of decayed wood. Of all Nature's riddles these seemed to me to be at once the most interesting, and the most difficult to expound. I treasured them carefully up, and was told by one of the workmen to whom I showed them, …
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AFscotlit.bsky.social

…the tar which used to boil in it to the heat, like resin in a fagot of moss-fir, was as strange a mixture as ever yet bubbled in witches’ caldron—blood of pterodactyle and grease of ichthyosaur… —Hugh Miller, MY SCHOOLS & SCHOOLMASTERS (1854) 3/4 gutenberg.org/ebooks/30737

Immediately beyond the granitic gneiss of the hill there is a subaqueous deposit of the Lias formation, never yet explored by geologist, because never yet laid bare by the ebb; though every heavier storm from the sea tells of its existence, by tossing ashore fragments of its dark bituminous shale. I soon ascertained that the shale is so largely charged with inflammable matter as to burn with a strong flame, as if steeped in tar or oil, and that I could repeat with it the common experiment of producing gas by means of a tobacco-pipe luted with clay. And, having read in Shakspere of a fuel termed "sea-coal," and unaware at the time that the poet merely meant coal brought to London by sea, I inferred that the inflammable shale cast up from the depths of the Firth by the waves could not be other than the veritable "sea-coal" which figured in the reminiscences of Dame Quickly; and so, assisted by Finlay, who shared in the interest which I felt in the substance, as at once classical and …
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AF
Association for Scottish Literature
@scotlit.bsky.social
Educational charity promoting the reading, writing, teaching & study of Scotland's literature & languages, past & present.
1k followers542 following1.5k posts
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