Page:Transactions of the Geological Society, 1st series, vol. 3.djvu/16

 well known and celebrated breed of black cattle which forms the staple produce of Sky.

The stony district about the Kyle rich produces like the Cuchullin hills but a scanty covering of heath and grass, and is perhaps among the most unproductive of the island, since the decomposed quartz rock of which it consists, yields a soil even worse than the syenite of the Red hills, or the rocks of the Cuchullin group; yet on the sea shores a few fertile spots are found in cultivation.

The great northern division consists of one entire mass of trap, with the exception of a few narrow lines of limestone and sandstone to be found on some of the shores. In various parts of this tract there are to be seen districts of considerable fertility, admitting, under the highland system of cultivation, a perpetual rotation of corn, with no alteration of green crops or fallow except the occasional one of potatoes; the hay as is usual under the same system of farming being collected from wet meadows and waste patches of land. The most considerable of these corn districts is in Trotternish, which for many miles displays an extent of cultivation exceeded by few highland tracts, and is emphatically called the granary of Sky. The aspect of loch Uig under the new crofting system is in this respect highly interesting. In various parts of the sea shore about loch Snizort and loch Follart, as well as in the vicinity of loch Bracadale, similar fertile tracts occur, and the little retired valley of Talisker might in a drier climate compare in fertility with the most chosen spots of our own southern counties.

Since chemistry has lately, although perhaps hitherto with little success, lent its speculative aids to the improvement of agriculture, it will not be foreign to the views of the geologist to examine how far his science also may bear upon this first and fundamental of all