Andreapolis; Being Writings in Praise of St. Andrews (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: meet with repeated alternations of these contrasted conditions of coal-growths and sea-floors, we recognise the record of a long-continued subsidence, when wide lagoons were filled up with a luxuriant vegetation of horse-tail reeds, ferns, and plants of which there is now no known representative, and when these verdant swamps sank under a sea teeming with extinct forms of marine life. In endlessly varied multiplicity of detail the story of these primaeval lands and waters is revealed along the coast-line of the east of Fife. 'A later chapter of the chronicle brings before us a totally different aspect of the district, for it records the activity of a group of small volcanoes around St. Andrews. Some of the actual vents have been dissected by the waves along the shore, as at the Rock and Spindle and Buddo Ness: others form rising ground inland, like that along the sky-line immediately to the south of the town. I have found remains of no fewer than eighty distinct volcanoes between St. Andrews and Largo Bay, and no doubt many more lie concealed under the superficial accumulations of the interior. The district must at one time have been thickly dotted with volcanic cones, like the Puys of Auvergne. Even now, in spite of long ages of decay, some of the stumps of the cones tower into conspicuous hills. The highest of them, Largo Law, which rises more than nine hundred feet above the level of the sea, reminds one of the outline of Vesuvius; while the sweep of Largo Bay terminating in the cliffs of Elie, is no unworthy representative of the Bay of Naples that ends in the precipices of Capri. It is especially this volcanic history which gives the east of Fife a unique interest and value, for in no other region yet known has the inner architecture of volcanoes been laid bare so comp...