The harvest had been early; and on to the village of Stonehaven, and a mile or two beyond, where the fossiliferous deposits end and the primary begin, the country presented from the deck only a wide expanse of stubble. Every farm-steading we passed had its piled stack-yard; and the fields were bare. But the line of demarcation between the Old Red Sandstone and the granitic districts formed also a separating line between an earlier and later harvest; the fields of the less kindly subsoil derived from the primary rocks were, I could see, still speckled with sheaves; and, where the land lay high, or the exposure was unfavorable, there were reapers at work. All along in the course of my journey northward from Aberdeen I continued to find the country covered with shocks, and laborers employed among them; until, crossing the Spey, I entered on the fossiliferous districts of Moray; and then, as in the south, the champaign again showed a bare breadth of stubble, with here and there a ploughman engaged in turning it down. The traveller bids farewell at Stonehaven to not only the Old Red Sandstone and the early-harvest districts, but also to the rich wheat-lands of the country, and does not again fairly enter upon them until, after travelling nearly a hundred miles, he passes from Banffshire into the province of Moray. He leaves behind him at the same line the wheat-fields and the cottages built of red stone, to find only barley and oats, and here and there a plot of rye, associated with cottages of granite and gneiss, hyperstene and mica schist; but on crossing the Spey, the red cottages reäppear, and fields of rich wheat-land spread out around them, as in the south. The circumstance is not unworthy the notice of the geologist. It is but a tedious process through which the minute lichen, settling on a surface of naked stone, forms in the course of ages a soil for plants of greater bulk and a higher order; and had Scotland been left to the exclusive operation of this slow agent, it would be still a rocky desert, with perhaps here and there a strip of alluvial meadow by the side of a stream, and here and there an insulated patch of rich soil among the hollows of the crags. It might possess a few gardens for the spade, but no fields for the plough. We owe our arable land to that comparatively modern geologic agent, whatever its character, that crushed, as in a mill, the upper parts of the surface-rocks of the kingdom, and then overlaid them with their own debris and rubbish to the depth of from one to forty yards. This debris, existing in one locality as a boulder-clay more or less finely comminuted, in another as a grossly pounded gravel, forms, with few exceptions, that subsoil of the country on which the existing vegetation first found root; and, being composed mainly of the formations on which it more immediately rests, it partakes of their character,--bearing a comparatively lean and hungry aspect over the primary rocks, and a greatly more fertile one over those deposits in which the organic matters of earlier creations lie diffused. Saxon industry has done much for the primary districts of Aberdeen and Banffshires, though it has failed to neutralize altogether the effects of causes which date as early as the times of the Old Red Sandstone; but in the Highlands, which belong almost exclusively to the non-fossiliferous formations, and which were, on at least the western coasts, but imperfectly subjected to that grinding process to which we owe our subsoils, the poor Celt has permitted the consequences of the original difference to exhibit themselves in full. If we except the islands of the Inner Hebrides, the famine of 1846 was restricted in Scotland to the primary districts.