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REESE LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA.
Received *-/%&*+ ,,$sf~
A-ccessions No.
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Plate 1.
3?irSt conditions of accumulation and fusion,
in, motionless snow
DEUCALION.
COLLECTED STUDIES
OF THE
LAPSE OF WAVES, AND LIFE OF STONES.
BY
JOHN KUSKIN, D.C.L., LL.D.,
HONORARY STUDENT OF CHRISTCHURCH, OXFORD; AND HONORARY FELLOW OP
CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, OXFORD.
jadXa TtohXd
ovped re 6Hioevra y Bdkatitid re jfoj/
VOL. I.
NEW YORK:
JOHN WILEY & SONS,
15 ASTOR PLACE.
1886.
CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
V-
,
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER I.
THE ALPS AND JUBA 7
CHAPTER II.
THE THREE ^ERAS 23
CHAPTER III.
OF ICE-CREAM . 35
CHAPTER IV.
LABITUR, ET LABETUR ........ 50
CHAPTER V.
THE VALLEY OF CLUSE 64
CHAPTER VI.
OF BUTTER AND HONEY . . 73
CHAPTER VII.
THE IRIS OF THE EARTH 84
C CHAPTER VIII.
THE ALPHABET 122
IV CONTENTS.
\
CHAPTER IX.
PAGE
FIRE AND WATER 133
CHAPTER X.
THIRTY YEARS SINCE 150
CHAPTER XI.
OP SILICA IN LAVAS 167
CHAPTER XII.
YEWDALE AND ITS STREAMLETS 179
CHAPTER XIII.
OP STELLAR SILICA 209
CHAPTER XIV.
SCHISMA MONTIUM 217
APPENDIX 243
INDEX 247
DEUCALION.
INTKODUCTIOK
BRANTWOOD, 13th July, 1875.
I HAVE been glancing lately at many biographies, and
have been much struck by the number of deaths which oc-
cur between the ages of fifty and sixty, (and, for the most
part, in the earlier half of the decade,) in cases where the
brain has been much used emotionally : or perhaps it would
be more accurate to say, where the heart, and the faculties
of perception connected with it, have stimulated the brain-
action. Supposing such excitement to be temperate,
equable, and joyful, I have no doubt the tendency of it
would be to prolong, rather than depress, the vital ener-
gies. Bat the emotions of indignation, grief, controversial
anxiety and vanity, or hopeless, and therefore uncontend-
ing, scorn, are all of them as deadly to the body as poison-
ous air or polluted water ; and when I reflect how much
of the active part of my past life has been spent in these
states, and that what may remain to me of life can never
more be in any other, I begin to ask myself, with some-
2 INTKODUCTTON.
what pressing arithmetic, how much time is likely to be
left me, at the age of fifty-six, to complete the various de-
signs for which, until past fifty, I was merely collecting
materials.
Of these materials, I have now enough by me for a most
interesting (in my own opinion) history of fifteenth-cen-
tury Florentine art, in six octavo volumes; an analysis of
the Attic art of the fifth century B.C., in three volumes ;
an exhaustive history of northern thirteenth-century art, in
ten volumes ; a life of Turner, with analysis of modern
landscape art, in four volumes ; a life of Walter Scott,
with analysis of modern epic art, in seven volumes ; a life
of Xenophon, with analysis of the general principles of
Education, in ten volumes ; a commentary on Hesiod, with
final analysis of the principles of Political Economy, in
nine volumes; and a general description of the geology
and botany of the Alps, in twenty-four volumes.
Of these works, though all carefully projected, and some
alread} T in progress, yet, allowing for the duties of my
Professorship, possibly continuing at Oxford, and for the
increasing correspondence relating to Fors Clavigera, it
does not seem to me, even in my most sanguine moments,
now probable that I shall live to effect such conclusion as
would be satisfactory to me ; and I think it will therefore
be only prudent, however humiliating, to throw together
at once, out of the heap of loose stones collected for this
many- towered city which I am not able to finish, such
fragments of good marble as may perchance be useful to
INTRODUCTION. 6
future builders ; and to clear away, out of sight, the lime
and other rubbish which I meant for mortar.
And because it is needful, for my health's sake, hence-
forward to do as far as possible what I find pleasure, or
at least tranquillity, in doing, I am minded to collect first
what I have done in geology and botany ; for indeed, had
it not been for grave mischance in earlier life, (partly con-
sisting in the unlucky gift, from an affectionate friend, of
Rogers' poems, as related in Fors Clavigera for August of
this year,) my natural disposition for these sciences would
certainly long ago have made me a leading member of the
British Association for the Advancement of Science ; or
who knows? even raised me to the position which it
was always the summit of my earthly ambition to attain,
that of President of the Geological Society. For, indeed,
I began when I was only twelve years old, a ' Mineralogi
cal Dictionary,' intended to supersede everything done by
Werner and Mohs, (and written in a shorthand composed
of crystallographic signs now entirely unintelligible to
me,) and year by year have endeavoured, until very lately,
to keep abreast with the rising tide of geological knowl-
edge ; sometimes even, I believe, pushing my way into
little creeks in advance of the general wave. I am not
careful to assert for myself the petty advantage of priority
in discovering what, some day or other, somebody must
certainly have discovered. But I think it due to my read-
ers, that they may receive what real good there may be in
these studies with franker confidence, to tell them that the
4 INTRODUCTION.
first sun-portrait ever taken of the Matterhorn, (and as far
as I know of any Swiss mountain whatever,) was taken by
me in the year 1849 ; that the outlines, (drawn by meas-
urement of angle,) given in ' Modern Painters ' of the Cer-
vin, and aiguilles of Chamouni, are at this day demonstra-
ble by photography as the trustworthiest then in existence ;
that I was the first to point out, in my lecture given in the
Royal Institution,* the real relation of the vertical cleav-
ages to the stratification, in the limestone ranges belonging
to the chalk formation in Savoy ; and that my analysis of
the structure of agates, (' Geological Magazine,') remains,
even to the present day, the only one which has the slight-
est claim to accuracy of distinction, or completeness of
arrangement. I propose therefore, if time be spared me,
to collect, of these detached studies, or lectures, what seem
to me deserving of preservation ; together with the more
carefully written chapters on geology and botany in the
latter volumes of ' Modern Painters ; ' adding the memo-
randa I have still by me in manuscript, and such further
illustrations as may occur to me on revision. Which frag-
mentary work, trusting that among the flowers or stones
let fall by other hands it may yet find service and life,
I have ventured to dedicate to Proserpina and Deucalion.
Why not rather to Eve, or at least to one of the wives
of Lamech, and to Noah ? asks, perhaps, the pious modern
reader.
* Reported in the ' Journal de Geneve,' date ascertainable, but of no
consequence.
INTRODUCTION. ^
Because I think it well that the young student should
first learn the myths of the betrayal and redemption, as
the Spirit which moved on the face of the wide first
waters, taught them to the heathen world. And because,
in this power, Proserpine and Deucalion are at least as
true as Eve or Noah ; and all four together incomparably
truer than the Darwinian Theory. And, in general, the
reader may take it for a first principle, both in science and
literature, that the feeblest myth is better than the strong-
est theory: the one recording a natural impression on the
imaginations of great men, and of unpretending multi-
tudes ; the other, an unnatural exertion of the wits of lit-
tle men, and half-wits of impertinent multitudes.
It chanced, this morning, as I sat down to finish my
preface, that I had, for my introductory reading the fifth
chapter of the second book of Esdras ; in which, though
often read carefully before, I had never enough noticed
the curious verse, " Blood shall drop out of wood, and the
stone shall give his voice, and the people shall be troub-
led." Of which verse, so far as I can gather the mean-
ing from the context, and from the rest of the chapter,
the intent is, that in the time spoken of by the prophet,
which, if not our own, is one exactly corresponding to it,
the deadness of men to all noble things shall be so great,
that the sap of trees shall be more truly blood, in God's
sight, than their hearts' blood ; and the silence of men, in
praise of all noble things, so great, that the stones shall cry
out, in God's hearing, instead of their tongues ; and the
6 INTRODUCTION.
rattling of the shingle on the beach, and the roar of the
rocks driven by the torrent, be truer Te Deum than the
thunder of all their ch<airs. The writings of modern
scientific prophets teach us to anticipate a day when even
these lower voices shall be also silent ; and leaf cease to
wave, and stream to murmur, in the grasp of an eternal
cold. But it may be, that rather out of the mouths of
babes and sucklings a better peace may be promised to the
redeemed Jerusalem ; and the strewn branches, and low-
laid stones, remain at rest at the gates of -the city, built in
unity with herself, and saying with her human voice, " My
King cometh."
CHAPTEK I.
THE ALPS AND JUEA.
(Part of a Lecture given in the Museum of Oxford, in
October, 1874.)
1. IT is often now a question with me whether the
persons who appointed me to this Professorship have
been disappointed, or pleased, by the little pains I have
hitherto taken to advance the study of landscape. That it
is my own favourite branch of painting seemed to me a
reason for caution in pressing it on your attention ; and
the range of art-practice which I have hitherto indicated
for you, seems to me more properly connected with the
higher branches of philosophical inquiry native to the
University. But, as the second term of my Professorship
will expire next year, and as I intend what remains of it to
be chiefly employed in giving some account of the art of
Florence and Umbria, it seemed to me proper, before en-
tering on that higher subject, to set before you some of
the facts respecting the great elements of landscape, which
I first stated thirty years ago ; arranging them now in such
form as my farther study enables me to give them. I shall
not, indeed, be able to do this in a course of spoken lee-
8 DEUCALION".
tures ; nor do I wish to do so. Much of what I desire that
you should notice is already stated, as well as I can do it,
in ' Modern Painters ; ' and it would be waste of time to
recast it in the form of address. But I should not feel
justified in merely reading passages of my former writings
to you from this chair ; and will only ask your audience,
here, of some additional matters, as, for instance, to-day,
of some observations I have been making recently, in
order to complete the account given in i Modern Painters,'
of the structure and aspect of the higher Alps.
2. Not that their structure (let me repeat, once more,
what I am well assured you will, in spite of my frequent
assertion, find difficult to believe,) not that their struc-
ture is any business of yours or mine, as students of
practical art. All investigations of internal anatomy,
whether in plants, rocks, or animals, are hurtful to the
finest sensibilities and instincts of form. But very few
of us have any such sensibilities to be injured ; and that
we may distinguish the excellent art which they have pro-
duced, we must, by duller processes, become cognizant of
the facts. The Torso of the Vatican was not wrought by
help from dissection ; yet all its supreme qualities could
only be explained by an anatomical master. And these
drawings of the Alps by Turner are in landscape, what
the Elgin marbles or the Torso are in sculpture. There is
nothing else approaching them, or of their order. Turner
made them before geology existed ; but it is only by help
of geology that I can prove their power.
I. THE ALPS AND JUKA.
i3. I chanced, the other day, to take up a number of the
' Alpine Journal ' (May, 1871,) in which there was a review
by Mr. Leslie Stephen, of Mr. Whymper's ' Scrambles
among the Alps,' in which it is said that " if the Alpine
Club has done nothing else, it has taught us for the first
time really to see the mountains.^ I have not the least
idea whom Mr. Stephen means by ' us ; ' but I can assure
him that mountains had been seen by several people before
the nineteenth century^ that both Hesiod and Pindar oc-
casionally had eyes for Parnassus, Yirgil for the Apen-
nines, and Scott for the Grampians ; and without speaking
of Turner, or of any other accomplished artist, here is a
little bit of old-fashioned Swiss drawing of the two Mythens,
above the central town of Switzerland,* showing a degree
of affection, intelligence, and tender observation, compared
to which our modern enthusiasm is, at best, childish ; and
commonly also as shallow as it is vulgar.
tf^. Believe me, gentlemen, your power of seeing moun-
tains cannot be developed either by your vanity, your cu-
riosity, or your love of muscular exercise. It depends on
the cultivation of the instrument of sight itself, and of
the soul that uses it. As soon as you can see mountains
rightly, you will see hills also, and valleys, with consider-
able interest ; and a great many other things in Switzer-
land with which you are at present but poorly acquainted.
The bluntness of your present capacity of ocular sensa
* In the Educational Series of my Oxford Schools.
1*
10 DEUCALION.
tion is too surely proved by your being unable to enjoy any
of the sweet lowland country, which is incomparably more
beautiful than the summit* of the central range, and which
is meant to detain you, also, by displaying if you have
patience to observe them the loveliest aspects of that
central range itself, in its real majesty of proportion, and
mystery of power.
5. For, gentlemen, little as you may think it, you can
no more see the Alps from the Col du Geant, or the top
of the Matterhorn, than the pastoral scenery of Switzer-
land from the railroad carriage. If you want to see the
skeletons of the Alps, you may go to Zermatt or Cha-
mouni ; but if you want to see the body and soul of the
Alps, you must stay awhile among the Jura, and in the Ber-
nese plain. And, in general, the way to see mountains, is
to take a knapsack and a walking-stick ; leave alpenstocks
to be flourished in each other's faces, and between one an-
other's legs, by Cook's tourists ; and try to find some com-
panionship in yourself with yourself ; and not to be de-
pendent for your good cheer either on the gossip of the
table-d'hote, or the hail-fellow and well met, hearty
though it be, of even the pleasantest of celebrated guides./'
6. Whether, however, you think it necessary or not, for
true sight of the Alps, to stay awhile among the Jura or
in the Bernese fields, very certainly, for understanding, or
questioning, of the Alps, it is wholly necessary to do so.
If you look back to the lecture, which I gave as the fourth
of my inaugural series, on the Relation of Art to Use, you
I. THE ALPS AND JUEA. 11
will see it stated, as a grave matter of reproach to the mod-
ern traveller, that, crossing the great plain of Switzerland
nearly every summer, he never thinks of inquiring why
it is a plain, and why the mountains to the south of it are
mountains.
7. For solution of which, as it appears to me, not un-
natural inquiry, all of you, who have taken any interest
in geology whatever, must recognize the importance of
studying the calcareous ranges which form the outlying
steps of the Alps on the north ; and which, in the lecture
just referred to, I requested you to examine for their crag
scenery, markedly developed in the Stockhorn, Pilate, and
Sentis of Appenzell. The arrangements of strata in that
great calcareous belt give the main clue to the mode of el-
evation of the central chain, the relations of the rocks over
the entire breadth of North Switzerland being, roughly, as
in this first section :
FIG. 1.
A. Jura limestones, moderately undulating in the suc-
cessive chains of Jura.
B. Sandstones of the great Swiss plain.
C. Pebble breccias of the first ranges of Alpine hills.
D. Chalk formations violently contorted, forming the
rock scenery of which I have j ust spoken.
12 DEUCALION.
E. Metamorphic rocks lifted by the central Alps.
F. Central gneissic or granitic mass, narrow in Mont
Blanc, but of enormous extent southward from St.
Gothard.
8. Now you may, for first grasp of our subject, imagine
these several formations all fluted longitudinally, like a
Gothic moulding, thus forming a series of ridges and val-
leys parallel to the Alps ; such as the valley of Chamou-
ni, the Simmenthal, and the great vale containing the
lakes of Thun and Brienz ; to which longitudinal valleys
we now obtain access through gorges or defiles, for the
most part cut across the formations, and giving geological
sections all the way from the centres of the Alps to the
plain.
9. Get this first notion very simply and massively set in
your thoughts. Longitudinal valleys, parallel with the
beds ; more or less extended and soft in contour, and often
occupied by lakes. Cross defiles like that of Lauter-
brunnen, the Yia Mala, and the defile of Gondo ; cut down
across the beds, and traversed by torrents, but rarely occu-
pied by lakes. The bay of Uri is the only perfect instance
in Switzerland of a portion of lake in a diametrically cross
valley ; the crossing arms of the lake Lucerne mark the
exactly rectangular schism of the forces ; the main direc-
tion being that of the lakes of Kussnacht and Alpnacht,
3arried on through those of Sarnen and Lungern, and
across the low intervening ridge of the Brunig, joining the
depressions of Brienz and Thun ; of which last lake the
I. THE ALPS AND JtJBA. ,
lower reach, however, is obliquely transverse. Forty miles
of the Lago Maggiore, or, including the portion of lake now
filled by delta, fifty, from Baveno to Bellinzona, are in the
longitudinal valley which continues to the St. Bernardino :
and the entire length of the lake of Como is the continua-
tion of the great lateral Yaltelline.
10. Now such structure of parallel valley and cross
defile would be intelligible enough, if it were confined to
the lateral stratified ranges. But, as you are well aware,
the two most notable longitudinal valleys in the Alps are
cut right along the heart of their central gneissic chain ;
how much by dividing forces in the rocks themselves, and
how much by the sources of the two great rivers of France
and Germany, there will yet be debate among geologists
for many a day to come. For us, let the facts at
least be clear ; the questions definite ; but all debate de-
clined.
11. All lakes among the Alps, except the little green
pool of Lungern, and a few small tarns on the cols, are
quite at the bottom of the hills. We are so accustomed
to this condition, that we never think of it as singular.
But in its unexceptional character, it is extremely singular.
How comes it to pass, think you, that through all that
wilderness of mountain raised, in the main mass of it,
some six thousand feet above the sea, so that there is no
col lower, there is not a single hollow shut in so as to
stay the streams of it ; that no valley is ever barred across
by a ridge which can keep so much as ten feet of watei
14 DEUCALION.
calm above it, that every such ridge that once existed
has been cut through, so as to let the stream escape ?
I put this question in.passing ; we will return to it : let
me first ask you to examine the broad relations of the
beds that are cut through. My typical section, Fig. 1, is
stringently simple ; it must be much enriched and mod-
ified to fit any locality ; but in the main conditions it is
applicable to the entire north side of the Alps, from An-
necy to St. Gall.
12. You have first (I read from left to right, or north
to south, being obliged to do so because all Studer's sec-
tions are thus taken) this mass of yellow limestone,
called of the Jura, from its development in that chain ;
but forming an immense tract of the surface of France
also; and, as you well know, this our city of Oxford
stands on one of its softer beds, and is chiefly built of it.
We may, I think, without entering any forbidden region
of theory, assume that this Jura limestone extends under
the plain of Switzerland, to reappear where we again find
it on the flanks of the great range ; where on the top of
it the beds drawn with fine lines in my section correspond
generally to the date of our English chalk, though they
are far from white in the Alps. Curiously adjusted to
the chalk beds, rather than superimposed, we have these
notable masses of pebble breccia, which bound the sand-
stones of the great Swiss plain.
13. I have drawn that portion of the section a little
more boldly in projection, to remind you of the great
I. THE ALPS AND JURA. 15
Rigi promontory ; and of the main direction of the slope
of these beds, with their backs to the Alps, and their es-
carpments to the plain. Both these points are of curious
importance. Have you ever considered the reason of
the fall of the Rossberg, the most impressive physical
catastrophe that has chanced in Europe in modern times ?
Few mountains in Switzerland looked safer. It was of
inconsiderable height, of very moderate steepness ; but its
beds lay perfectly straight, and that over so large a space,
that when the clay between two of them got softened by
rain, one slipped off the other. Now this mathematical
straightness is characteristic of these pebble beds, not
universal in them, but characteristic of them, and of
them only. The limestones underneath are usually, as you
see in this section, violently contorted ; if not contorted,
they are at least so irregular in the bedding that you can't
in general find a surface of a furlong square which will
not either by its depression, or projection, catch and notch
into the one above it, so as to prevent its sliding. Also
the limestones are continually torn, or split, across the
beds. But the breccias, though in many places they
suffer decomposition, are curiously free from fissures and
rents. The hillside remains unshattered unless it comes
down in a mass. But their straight bedding, as com-
pared with the twisted limestone, is the iiotablest point
in them ; and see how very many difficulties are gathered
in the difference. The crushed masses of limestone are
supposed to have been wrinkled together by the lateral
16 DEUCALION.
thrust of the emerging protogines; and these pebble beds
to have been raised into a gable, or broken into a series
of colossal fragments set over each other like tiles, all
along the south shore of the Swiss plain, by the same lat-
eral thrust ; nay, " though we may leave in doubt," says
Studer, " by what cause the folded forms of the Jura may
have been pushed back, there yet remains to us, for the
explanation of this gabled form of the Nagelfluh, hardly
any other choice than to adopt the opinion of a lateral
pressure communicated by the Alps to the tertiary bot-
tom. "We have often found in the outer limestone chains
themselves clear evidence of a pressure going out from
the inner Alps ; and the pushing of the older over the
younger formations along the flank of the limestone hills,
leaves hardly any other opinion possible."
14. But if these pebble beds have been heaved up by
the same lateral thrust, how is it that a force which can
FIG. 2.
bend limestone like leather, cannot crush anywhere, these
pebble beds into the least confusion? Consider the scale
on which operations are carried on, and the forces of which
this sentence of Studer's so serenely assumes the action.
Here, A. Fig. 2, is his section of the High Sentis of Appen-
I. THE ALPS AND JTJKA.
zell, of which the height is at least, in the parts thus bent,
6,000 feet. And here, B, Fig. 2, are some sheets of paper
crushed together by my friend Mr. Henry Woodward,
from a length of four inches, into what you see ; the High
Sentis, exactly resembles these, and seems to consist of
four miles of limestone similarly crushed into one. Seems,
I say, remember : I never theorize, I give you the facts on-
ly. The beds do go up and down like this : that they have
been crushed together, it is Mr. Studer who says or sup-
poses ; I can't go so far ; nevertheless, I admit that he
appears to be right, and I believe he is right ; only don't
be positive about it, and don't debate ; but think of it, and
examine.
15. Suppose, then, you have a bed of rocks, four miles
long by a mile thick, to be crushed laterally into the space
of a mile. It may be done, supposing the mass not to be
reducible in bulk, in two ways : you may either crush it up
into folds, as I crush these pieces of cloth ; or you may
break it into bits, and shuffle them over one another like
cards. Now, Mr. Studer, and our geologists in general,
believe the first of these operations to have taken place
with the limestones, and the second with the breccias.
They are, as I say, very probably right : only just consider
what is involved in the notion of shuffling up your brec-
cias like a pack of cards, and folding up your limestones
like a length of silk which a dexterous draper's shopman
is persuading a young lady to put ten times as much of
into her gown as is wanted for it ! Think, 1 say, what ig
18 DEUCALION.
involved in the notion. That you may shuffle your pebble
beds, you must have them strong and well knit. Then
what sort of force musfr you have to break arid to heave
them ? Do but try the force required to break so much as
a captain's biscuit by a slow push, it is the illustration I
gave long ago in l Modern Painters,' and then fancy the
results of such- fracturing power on a bed of conglomerate
two thousand feet thick ! And here is indeed a very charm-
ing bookbinder's pattern, produced by my friend in crush-
ed paper, and the length of silk produces lovely results in
these arrangements a la Paul Veronese. But when you
have the cliffs of the Diablerets, or the Dent du Midi of
Bex, to deal with ; and have to fold them up similarly, do
you mean to fold your two-thousand-feet-thick Jura lime-
stone in a brittle state, or a ductile one \ If brittle, won't
it smash ? If ductile, w r on't it squeeze \ Yet your whole
mountain theory proceeds on the assumption that it has
neither broken nor been compressed, more than the folds
of silk or coils of paper.
16. You most of you have been upon the lake of Thun.
You have been at least carried up and down it in a steam
er ; you smoked over it meanwhile, and countenanced the
Frenchmen and Germans who were spitting into it. The
steamer carried you all the length of it in half an hour ;
you looked at the Jungfrau and Blumlis Alp, probably,
for five minutes, if it was a fine day ; then took to
your papers, and read the last news of the Tichborne case ;
then you lounged about, thought it a nuisance that the
I. THE ALPS AND JURA.
steamer couldn't take you up in twenty minutes, instead
of half an hour ; then you got into a row about your
luggage at Neuhaus; and all that you recollect after-
wards is that lunch where you met the so-and-sos at
Interlaken.
17. Well, we used to do it differently in old times. Look
here ; this * is the quay at Neuhaus, with its then travel-
ling arrangements. A flat-bottomed boat, little better than
a punt ; a fat Swiss girl with her schatz, or her father,
to row it ; oars made of a board tied to a pole : and so one
paddled along over the clear water, in and out among the
bays and villages, for half a day of pleasant life. And
one knew something about the lake, ever after, if one had
a head with eyes in it.
It is just possible, however, that some of you also who
have been learning to see the Alps in your new fashion,
may remember that the north side of the lake of Thun
consists, first, next Thun, of a series of low green hills,
with brown cliffs here and there among the pines ; and
that above them, just after passing Oberhofen, rears up
suddenly a great precipice, with its flank to the lake, and
the winding wall of it prolonged upwards, far to the north)
losing itself, if the day is fine, in faint tawny crests of rock
among the distant blue ; and if stormy, in wreaths of more
than commonly torn and fantastic cloud.
18. To form the top of that peak on the north side of
* Turner's first study of the Lake of Thun, 1803.
20 DEUCALION.
the lake of Thun, you have to imagine forces which have
taken say, the whole of the North Foreland, with Dover
castle on it, and have folded it upside-down on the top of
the parade at Margate, then swept up Whitstable oyster-
beds, and put them on the bottom of Dover cliffs turned
topsy-turvy, and then wrung the whole round like a wet
towel, till it is as close and hard as it will knit ; such is
the beginning of the operations which have produced the
lateral masses of the higher Alps.
19. Next to these, you have the great sculptural force,
which gave them, approximately, their present forms,
which let out all the lake waters above a certain level,
which cut the gorge of the Devil's Bridge of the Via
Mala of Gondo of the valley of Cluse ; which let out
the Rhone at St. Maurice, the Ticino at Faido, and shaped
all the vast ravines which make the flanks of the great
mountains awful.
20. Then, finally, you have the rain, torrent, and glacier
of human days.
Of whose action, briefly, this is the sum.
Over all the high surfaces, disintegration melting away
diffusion loss of height and terror.
In the ravines, whether occupied by torrent or gla-
cier, gradual incumbrance by materials falling from
above ; choking up of their beds by silt by moraine
by continual advances of washed slopes on their flanks :
here and there, only, exceptional conditions occur in
which a river is still continuing feebly the ancient cleav*
I. THE ALPS AND JUBA. 21
ing action, and cutting its ravine deeper, or cutting it
back.
Fix this idea thoroughly in your minds. Since the val-
ley of Lauterbrunnen existed for human eyes, or its pas-
tures for the food of flocks, it has not been cut deeper,
but partially filled up by its torrents. The town of In-
terlachen stands where there was once lake, and the
long slopes of grassy sward on the north of it, stand where
once was precipice. Slowly, almost with infinite slow-
ness, the declining and encumbering action takes place ;
but incessantly, and, as far as our experience reaches,
irredeemably.
21. Now 1 have touched in this lecture briefly on the
theories respecting the elevation of the Alps, because I
want to show you how uncertain and unsatisfactory they
still remain. For our own work, we must waste no time
on them ; we must begin where all theory ceases ; and
where observation becomes possible, that is to say, with
the forms which the Alps have actually retained while
men have dwelt among them, and on which we can trace
the progress, or the power, of existing conditions of minor
change. Such change has lately affected, and with grievous
deterioration, the outline of the highest mountain of Eu-
rope, with that of its beautiful supporting buttresses, the
aiguille de Bionassay. I do not care, and 1 want you not
to care, how crest or aiguille was lifted, or where its
materials came from, or how much bigger it was once. I
do care that you should know, and I will endeavour in
DEUCALION.
these following pages securely to show you, in what
strength and beauty of form it has actually stood since
man was man, and whafr subtle modifications of aspect, or
majesties of contour, it still suffers from the rains that
beat upon it, or owes to the snows that rest.
CHAPTER II.
THE THREE
(Part of a Lecture given at the London Institution in
March, 1875, with added pieces from Lectures in
Oxford.)
1. WE are now, so many of us, some restlessly and some
wisely, in the habit of spending our evenings abroad, that
I do not know if any book exists to occupy the place of
one classical in my early days, called *' Evenings at Home.'
It contained, among many well-written lessons, one, under
the title of t Eyes and No Eyes,' which some of my older
hearers may remember, and which I should myself be
sorry to forget. For if such a book were to be written in
these days, I suppose the title and the moral of the story
would both be changed ; and, instead of ' Eyes and No
Eyes,' the tale would be called ' Microscopes and No
Microscopes.' For I observe that the prevailing habit of
learned men is now to take interest only in objects which
cannot be seen without the aid of instruments ; and I be-
lieve many of my learned friends, if they were permitted
to make themselves, to their own liking, instead of suffer-
ing the slow process of selective development, would give
24 DEUCALION.
themselves heads like wasps', with three microscopic eyes
in the middle of their foreheads, and two ears at the ends
of their antennae.
2. It is the fashion, in modern days, to say that Pope
was no poet. Probably our schoolboys also, think Horace
none. They have each, nevertheless, built for themselves
a monument of enduring wisdom ; and all the temptations
and errors of our own day, in the narrow sphere of lentic-
ular curiosity, were anticipated by Pope, and rebuked, in
one couplet :
" Why has not man a microscopic eye ?
For this plain reason, Man is not a fly."
While the nobler following lines,
" Say, what avail, were finer optics given
To inspect a mite, not comprehend the heaven ? "
only fall short of the truth of our present dulness, in that
we inspect heaven itself, without understanding it.
3. In old times, then, it was not thought necessary for
human creatures to know either the infinitely little, or the
infinitely distant ; nor either to see, or feel, by artificial
help. Old English people used to say they perceived
things with their five or it may be, in a hurry, they
would say, their seven, senses / and that word ' sense * be-
came, and for ever must remain, classical English, derived
from classical Latin, in both -languages signifying, not
only the bodily sense, but the moral cue. If a man heard,
II. THE THREE MRAS. 25"
saw, and tasted rightly, 'we used to say he had his bodily
senses perfect. If he judged, wished, and felt rightly, we
used to say he had his moral senses perfect, or was a man
* in his senses.' And we were then able to speak precise
truth respecting both matter and morality ; and if we
heard any one saying clearly absurd things, as, for
instance, that human creatures were automata, we used
to say they were out of their ' senses,' and we^e talking
non-< sense.'
Whereas, in modern days, by substituting analysis for
sense in morals, and chemistry for sense in matter, we
have literally blinded ourselves to the essential qualities
of both matter and morals ; and are entirely incapable of
understanding what is meant by the description given
us, in a book we once honoured, of men who " by reason
of use, have their senses exercised to discern both good
and evil."
4. And still, with increasingly evil results to all of us,
the separation is every day widening between the man of
science and the artist in that, whether painter, sculptor,
or musician, the latter is pre-eminently a person who sees
with his Eyes, hears with his Ears, and labours with his
Body, as God constructed them ; and who, in using instru-
ments, limits himself to thoe which convey or communi-
cate his human power, while he rejects all that increase it.
Titian would refuse to quicken his touch by electricity ;
and Michael Angelo to substitute a steam hammer for his
mallet. Such men not only do not desire, they impera
2
26 DEfJCALION.
tively and scornfully refuse, either the force, or the in-
formation, which are beyond the scope of the flesh and
the senses of humanity. And it is at once the wisdom,
the honour, and the peace, of the Masters both of painting
and literature, that they rejoice in the strength, and rest
in the knowledge, which are granted to active and disci-
plined life ; and are more and more sure, every day, of the
wisdom of the Maker in setting such measure to their be-
ing ; and more and more satisfied, in their sight and their
audit of Nature, that " the hearing ear, and the seeing
eye, the Lord hath made even both of them."
5. This evening, therefore, I venture to address you
speaking limitedly as an artist; but, therefore, I think,
with a definite advantage in having been trained to the
use of my eyes and senses, as my chief means of observa-
tion : and I shall try to show you things which with your
own eyes you may any day see, and with your own com-
mon sense, if it please you to trust it, account for.
Things which you may see, I repeat ; not which you
might perhaps have seen, if you had been born when you
were not born ; nor which you might perhaps in future
see, if you were alive when you will be dead. But
what, in the span of earth, and space of time, allotted to
you, may be seen with your .human eyes, if you learn to
use them.
And this limitation has, with respect to our present
subject, a particular significance, which I must explain to
you before entering on the main matter of it.
H. THE THEEE MRA.8. 27 >'
6. No one more honours the past lahour no one more
regrets the present rest of the late Sir Charles Lyell,
than his scholar, who speaks to you. But his great the-
orem of the constancy and power of existing phenomena
was only in measure proved, in a larger measure disput-
able ; and in the broadest bearings of it, entirely false.
Pardon me if I spend no time in qualifications, refer-
ences, or apologies, but state clearly to you what Sir
Charles Ly ell's w r ork itself enables us now to perceive of
the truth. There are, broadly, three great demonstrable
periods of the Earth's history. That in which it was
crystallized ; that in which it was sculptured ; and that
in which it is now being unsculptured, or deformed.
These three periods interlace with each other, and gra-
date into each other as the periods of human life do.
Something dies in the child on the day that it is born,
something is born in the man on the day that he dies :
nevertheless, his life is broadly divided into youth,
strength, and decrepitude. In such clear sense, the Earth
has its three ages : of their length we know as yet noth-
ing, except that it has been greater than any man had
imagined.
7. (THE FIRST PERIOD.) But there was a period,
or a succession of periods, during which the rocks which
are now hard were soft; and in which, out of entirely
different positions, and under entirely different conditions
from any now existing or describable, the masses, of
which the mountains vou now see are made, were lifted,
28 DEUCALION.
and hardened, in the positions they now occupy, though
in what forms we can now no more guess than we can
the original outline ofthe block from the existing statue.
8. (THE SECOND PERIOD.) Then, out of those
raised masses, more or less in lines compliant with their
crystalline structure, the mountains we now see were
hewn, or worn, during the second period, by forces for
the most part differing both in mode and violence from
any now in operation, but the result of which was to
bring the surface of the earth into a form approximately
that which it has possessed as far as the records of human
history extend. The Ararat of Moses's time, the Olympus
and Ida of Homer's, are practically the same mountains
now, that they were then.
9. (THE THIRD PERIOD.) Not, however, without
some calculable, though superficial, change, and that
change, one of steady degradation. For in the third, or
historical period, the valleys excavated in the second
period are being filled up, and the mountains, hewn in
the second period, worn or ruined down. In the second
sera the valley of the Rhone was being cut deeper ever}
day ; now it is every day being filled up with gravel. In
the second sera, the scars of Derbyshire and Yorkshire
were cut white and steep ; now they are being darkened
by vegetation, and crumbled by frost. You cannot, I
repeat, separate the periods with precision ; but, in their
characters, they are as distinct as youth from age.
10. The features of mountain form, to which during my
II. THE THREE JEBAS.
29'
own life I have exclusively directed my study, and which
I endeavour to bring before the notice of my pupils in
Oxford, are exclusively those produced by existing forces,
on mountains whose form and substance have not been
materially changed during the historical period.
For familiar example, take the rocks of Edinburgh Cas-
tle, and Salisbury Craig. Of course we know that they
are both basaltic, and must once have been hot. But I do
not myself care in the least what happened to them till
they were cold.* They have both been cold at least long-
* More carious persons, who are interested in their earlier condition,
will find a valuable paper by Mr. J. W. Judd, in the quarterly ' Journal
of the Geological Society,' May, 1875 ; very successfully, it seems to me,
demolishing all former theories on the subject, which the author thus
sums, at p. 135.
' ' The series of events which we are thus required to believe took
place in this district is therefore as follows :
A. At the point where the Arthur's Seat group of hills now rises, a
series of volcanic eruptions occurred during the Lower Calciferous
Sandstone period, commencing with the emission of basaltic lavas, and
ending with that of porphyrites.
B. An interval of such enormous duration supervened as to admit
of
a. The deposition of at least 3,000 feet of Carboniferous strata.
b. The bending of all the rocks of the district into a series of
great anticlinal and synclinal folds.
c. The removal of every vestige of the 3, 000 feet of strata by de-
nudation.
C. The outburst, after this vast interval, of a second series of volcanic
eruptions upon the identical site of the former ones, presenting in its
30 DEUCALION.
er than young Harry Percy's spur ; and, since they were
last brought out of the oven, in the shape which, approxi-
mately, they still retafci, with a hollow beneath one of
them, which, for aught I know, or care, may have been cut
by a glacier out of white-hot lava, but assuredly at last got
itself filled with pure, sweet, cold water, and called, in Low-
land Scotch, the ' Nor ' Loch ;' since the time, I say, when
the basalt, above, became hard, and the lake beneath, drink-
able, I am desirous to examine with you what effect the
winter's frost and summer's rain have had on the crags and
their hollows ; how far the ( Kittle nine steps ' under the
castle-walls, or the firm slope and cresting precipice above
the dark ghost of Holyrood, are enduring or departing
forms; and how long, unless the young engineers of New
Edinburgh blast the incumbrance away, the departing
mists of dawn may each day reveal the form, unchanged,
of the Rock which was the strength of their Fathers.
11. Unchanged, or so softly modified that eye can scarce-
ly trace, or memory measure, the work of time. Have
you ever practically endeavoured to estimate the alterations
of form in any hard rocks known to you, during the
succession, of events 'precisely the same sequence, and resulting in the
production of rocks of totally undistinguishable character.
Are we not entitled to regard the demand for the admission of such a
series of extraordinary accidents as evidence of the antecedent improb-
ability of the theory ? And when we find that all attempts to suggest a
period for the supposed second series of outbursts have successively fail-
ed, do not the difficulties of the hypothesis appear to be overwhelming ? "
II. THE THREE
31-
course of jour own lives ? You have all heard, a thousand
times over, the common statements of the school of Sir
Charles Lyell. You know all about alluviums and gravels ;
and what torrents do, and what rivers do, and what ocean
currents do ; and when you see a muddy stream coming
down in a flood, or even the yellow gutter more than usual-
ly rampant by the roadside in a thunder shower, you think,
of course, that all the forms of the Alps are to be account-
ed for by aqueous erosion, and that it's a wonder any
Alps are still left. Well any of you who have fished
the pools of Scottish or a Welsh stream, have you ever
thought of asking an old keeper how much deeper they
had got to be, while his hairs were silvering ? Do you
suppose he wouldn't laugh in your face ?
There are some sitting here, I think, who must have
O / /
themselves fished, for more than one summer, years ago,
in Dove or Derwent, in Tweed or Teviot. Can any of
you tell me a single pool, even in the limestone or sand-
stone, where you could spear a salmon then, and can't
reach one now (providing always the wretches of manu-
facturers have left you one to be speared, or water that you
can see through) ? Do you know so much as a single riv-
ulet of clear water which has cut away a visible half-inch
of Highland rock, to your own knowledge, in your own
day ? You have seen w r hole banks, whole fields washed
away ; and the rocks exposed beneath \ Yes, of course
you have ; and so have I. The rains wash the loose earth
about everywhere, in any masses that they chance to catch
32 DEUCALION.
loose earth, or loose rock. But yonder little rifted well
in the native whinstone by the sheepfold, did the gray
shepherd not put his Iij5fe to the same ledge of it, to drink
when he and you were boys together ?
12. ' But Niagara, and the Delta of the Ganges and
all the rest of it ? ' Well, of course a monstrous mass of
continental drainage, like Niagara, will wash down a piece
of crag once in fifty years, (but only that, if it's rotten
below ; ) and tropical rains will eat the end off a bank of
slime and alligators, and spread it out lower down. But
does any Scotchman know a change in the Fall of Fyers ?
any Yorkshireman in the Force of Tees ?
Except of choking up, it may be not of cutting down.
It is true, at the side of every stream you see the places in
the rocks hollowed by the eddies. I suppose the eddies
go on at their own rate. But I simply ask, Has any human
being ever known a stream, in hard rock, cut its bed an
inch deeper down at a given spot ?
13. I can look back, myself, now pretty nearly, I air
sorry to say, half a century, and recognize no change what-
ever in any of my old dabbling-places ; but that some
stones are mossier, and the streams usually dirtier, the
Derwent above Keswick, for example.
t But denudation does go on, somehow : one sees the
whole glen is shaped by it 2 ' Yes, but not by the stream.
The stream only sweeps down the loose stones ; frost and
chemical change are the powers that loosen them. I have
indeed not known one of my dabbling-places changed in
II. THE THREE JERAS. 33,
fifty years. But I have known the eboulement under the
Rochers des Fyz, which filled the Lao de Chede ; I passed
through the valley of Cluse a night after some two or three
thousand tons of limestone came off the cliffs of Maglans
burying the road and field beside it. I have seen half a
village buried by a landslip, and its people killed, under
Monte St. Angelo, above Amalfi. I have seen the lower
lake of Llanberis destroyed, merely by artificial slate quar-
ries ; and the Waterhead of Coniston seriously diminished
in purity and healthy flow of current by the debris of its
copper mines. These are all cases, you will observe, of
degradation; diminishing majesty in the mountain, and
diminishing depth in the valley, or pools of its waters. I
cannot name a single spot in which, during my lifetime
spent among the mountains, I have seen a peak made
grander, a watercourse cut deeper, or a mountain pool
made larger and purer.
14. I am almost surprised, myself, as I write these
words, at the strength which, on reflection, I am able to
give to my assertion. For, even till I began to write these
very pages, and was forced to collect my thoughts, I re-
mained under the easily adopted impression, that, at least
among soft earthy eminences, the rivers were still cutting
out their beds. And it is not so at all. There are indeed
banks here and there which they visibly remove ; but
whatever they sweep down from one side, they sweep up
on the other, and extend a promontory of land for every
shelf they undermine : and as for those radiating fibrous
2*
34 DEUCALION.
valleys in the Apennines, and such other hills, which look
symmetrically shaped by streams, they are not lines of
trench from below, but4ines of wash or slip from above :
they are the natural wear and tear of the surface, directed
indeed in easiest descent by the bias of the stream, but
not dragged down by its grasp. In every one of those
ravines the water is being choked up to a higher level ;
it is riot gnawing down to a lower. So that, I repeat, ear-
nestly, their chasms being choked below, and their preci-
pices shattered above, all mountain forms are suffering a
deliquescent and corroding change, not a sculpturesque
or anatomizing change. All character is being gradually
effaced ; all crooked places made straight, all rough
places, plain ; and among these various agencies, not of
erosion, but corrosion, none are so distinct as that of the
glacier, in filling up, not cutting deeper, the channel it
fills ; and in rounding and smoothing, but never sculptur-
ing, the rocks over which it passes.
In this fragmentary collection of former work, now
patched and darned into serviceableness, I cannot finish
my chapters with the ornamental fringes I used to twine
for them ; nor even say, by any means, all I have in my
mind on the matters they treat of : in the present case,
however, the reader will find an elucidatory postscript
added at the close of the fourth chapter, which he had
perhaps better glance over before beginning the third.
CHAPTER III.
OF ICE-CKEAM.
(Continuation of Lecture delivered at London Institution,
with added Illustrations from Lectures at Oxford.)
1. THE statement at the close of the last chapter,
doubtless surprising and incredible to many of my readers
must, before I reinforce it, be explained as referring only
to glaciers visible, at this day, in temperate regions. For
of formerly deep and continuous tropical ice, or of exist-
ing Arctic ice, and their movements, or powers, I know,
and therefore say, nothing.* But of the visible glaciers
* The following passage, quoted in the ' Geological Magazine' for June
of this year, by Mr. Clifton Ward, of Keswick, from a letter of Profes-
sor Sedgwick's, dated May 24th, 1842, is of extreme value ; and Mr.
Ward's following comments are most reasonable and just :
" No one will, I trust, be so bold as to affirm that an uninterrupted
glacier could ever have extended from Shap Fells to the coast of Holder-
ness, and borne along the blocks of granite through the whole distance,
without any help from the floating power of water. The supposition
involves difficulties tenfold greater than are implied in the phenomenon
it pretends to account for. The -glaciers descending through the val-
leys of the higher Alps have an enormous transporting power : but there
is no such power in a great sheet of ice expanded over a country with-
out mountains, and at a nearly dead level."
36 DEUCALION.
couched upon the visible Alps, two great facts are very
clearly ascertainable, which, in my lecture at the London
Institution, I asserted intheir simplicity, as follows :
2. The first great fact to be recognized concerning them
is that they are Fluid bodies. Sluggishly fluid, indeed,
but definitely and completely so ; and therefore^ they *do
not scramble down, nor tumble down, nor crawl down,
nor slip down ; but flow down. They do not move like
leeches, nor like caterpillars, nor like stones, but like,
what they are made of, water.
The difficulties involved in the theories of Messrs. Croll, Belt, Good-
child, and others of the same extreme school, certainly press upon me
and I think I may say also upon others of my colleagues increasing-
ly, as the country becomes more and more familiar in its features. It
is indeed a most startling thought, as one stands upon the eastern bor-
ders of the Lake-mountains, to fancy the ice from the Scotch hills
stalking boldly across the Solway, marching steadily up the Eden Val-
ley, and persuading some of the ice from Shap to join it on an excur-
sion over Stainmoor, and bring its boulders with it.
The outlying northern parts of the Lake-district, and the flat country
beyond, have indeed been ravished in many a raid by our Scotch neigh -
bours, but it is a question whether, in glacial times, the Cumbrian
mountains and Pennine chain had not strength in their protruding icy
arms to keep at a distance the ice proceeding from the district of the
southern uplands, the mountains of which are not superior in elevation.
Let us hope that the careful geological observations which will doubt-
less be made in the forthcoming scientific Arctic Expedition will throw
much new light on our past glacial period.
J. CLIFTON WAED.
KESWICK, April 2Gth, 1875.
HI. OF ICE-CREAM.
37'
That is the main fact in their state, and progress, on
which all their great phenomena depend.
Fact first discovered and proved by Professor James
Forbes, of Edinburgh, in the year 1842, to the astonish-
ment of all the glacier theorists of his time ; fact stren-
uously denied, disguised, or confusedly and partially ap-
prehended, by all of the glacier theorists of subsequent
times, down to our own day ; else there had been* no need
for me to tell it you again to-night.
3. The second fact of which I have to assure you is
partly, I believe, new to geologists, and therefore may be
of some farther interest to you because of its novelty,
though I do not myself care a grain of moraine-dust for
the newness of things ; but rather for their oldness ; and
wonder more willingly at what my father and grandfather
thought wonderful, (as, for instance, that the sun should
rise, or a seed grow,) than at any newly- discovered marvel.
Nor do I know, any more than I care, whether this that I
have to tell you be new or not ; but I did not absolutely
know it myself, until lately ; for though I had ventured
with some boldness to assert it as a consequence of other
facts, I had never been under the bottom of a glacier to
look. But, last summer, I was able to cross the dry bed
of a glacier, which I had seen flowing, two hundred feet
deep, over the same spot, forty years ago. And there I
saw, what before I had suspected, that modern glaciers,
like modern rivers, were not cutting their beds deeper,
but filling them up. These, then, are the two facts I
38 DETTOALION.
wish to lay distinctly before you this evening, first that
glaciers are fluent ; and, secondly, that they are filling up
their beds, not cutting *them deeper.
4. (I.) Glaciers are fluent; slowly, like lava, but dis-
tinctly.
And now I must ask you not to disturb yourselves, as I
speak, with bye-thoughts about c the theory of regelation.'
It is very interesting to know that if you put two pieces
of ice together, they will stick together ; let good Professor
Faraday have all the credit of showing us that ; and the
human race in general, the discredit of not having known
BO much as that, about the substance they have skated upon,
dropped through, and eat any quantity of tons of these
two or three thousand years.
It was left, nevertheless, for Mr. Faraday to show them
that two pieces of ice will stick together when they touch
as two pieces of hot glass will. But the capacity of ice
for sticking together no more accounts for the making of
a glacier, than the capacity of glass for sticking together
accounts for the making of a bottle. The mysteries of
crystalline vitrification, indeed, present endless entertain-
ment to the scientific inquirer ; but by no theory of vitrifi-
cation can he explain to us how the bottle was made narrow
at the neck, or dishonestly vacant at the bottom. Those
conditions of it are to be explained only by the study of
the centrifugal and moral powers to which it has been
submitted.
5, In like manner, I do not doubt but that wonderful
in. OF ICE-CREAM. 39'
phenomena of congelation, regelation, degelation, and ge-
lation pure without preposition, take place whenever a
schoolboy makes a snowball ; and that miraculously rapid
changes in the structure and temperature of the particles
accompany the experiment of producing a star with it on
an old gentleman's back. But the principal conditions of
either operation are still entirely dynamic. To make your
snowball hard, you must squeeze it hard ; and its expan-
sion on the recipient surface is owing to a lateral diversion
of the impelling forces, and not to its regelatic proper-
ties.
6. Our first business, then, in studying a glacier, is to
consider the mode of its original deposition, and the large
forces of pressure and fusion brought to bear on it, with
their necessary consequences on such a substance as we
practically know snow to be, a powder, ductile by wind,
compressible by weight ; diminishing by thaw, and hard-
ening by time and frost ; a thing which sticks to rough
ground, and slips on smooth ; which clings to the branch
of a tree, and slides on a slated roof.
7. Let us suppose, then, to begin with, a volcanic cone
in which the crater has been filled, and the temperature
cooled, and which is now exposed to its first season of
glacial agencies. Then let Plate 1, Fig. 1, represent this
mountain, with part of the plans at its foot under an
equally distributed depth of a first winter's snow, and
place the level of perpetual snow at any point you like
for simplicity's sake, I put it halfway up the cone,
4:0 DEUCALION.
Below this snow-line, all snow disappears in summer;
but above it, the higher we ascend, the more of course
we find remaining. It is quite wonderful how few feet
in elevation make observable difference in the quantity of
snow that will lie. This last winter, in crossing the
moors of the peak of Derbyshire, I found, on the higher
masses of them, that ascents certainly not greater than
that at Harrow from the bottom of the hill to the school-
house, made all the difference between easy and difficult
travelling, by the change in depth of snow.
8. At the close of the summer, we have then the rem-
nant represented in Fig. 2, on which the snows of the
ensuing winter take the form in Fig. 3 ; and from this
greater heap we shall have remaining a greater remnant,
which, supposing 110 wind or other disturbing force modi-
fied its form, would appear as at Fig. 4 ; and, under such
necessary modification, together with its own deliques-
cence, would actually take some such figure as that shown
at Fig. 5.
Now, what is there to hinder the continuance of accu-
mulation ? If we cover this heap with another layer of
winter's snow (Fig. 6), we see at once that the ultimate
condition would be, unless somehow prevented, one of
enormous mass, superincumbent on the peak like a co-
lossal haystack, and extending far down its sides below the
level of the snow-line.
You are, however, doubtless well aware that no such ac-
cumulation as this ever does take place on a mountain-top.
III. OF ICE-CREAM.
41-
9. So far from it, the eternal snows do not so much
as fill the basins between mountain-tops; but, even in
these hollows, form depressed sheets at the bottom of
them. The difference between the actual aspect of the
Alps, and that which they would present if no arrest of
the increasing accumulation on them took place, may be
shown before you with the greatest ease ; and in doing so
I have, in all humility, to correct a grave error of my
own, which strangely enough, has remained undetected,
or at least unaccused, in spite of all the animosity pro-
voked by my earlier writings. i
10. When I wrote the first volume of { Modern Paint-
ers,' scarcely any single fact was rightly known by any-
body, about either the snow or ice of the Alps. Chiefly
the snows had been neglected : very few eyes had ever seen
the higher snows near ; no foot had trodden the greater
number of Alpine summits ; and I had to glean what I
needed for my pictorial purposes as best I could, and my
best in this case was a blunder. The thing that struck me
most, when I saw the Alps myself, was the enormous ac-
cumulation of snow on them ; and the way it clung to
their steep sides. Well, I said to myself, ( of course it
must be as thick as it can stand ; because, as there is an
excess which doesn't melt, it would go on building itself
up like the Tower of Babel, unless it tumbled off. There
must be always, at the end of winter, as much snow on
every high summit as it can carry.'
There must, I said. That is the mathematical method
4:2 DEUCALION.
of science as opposed to the artistic. Thinking of a thing,
and demonstrating, instead of looking at it. Yery fine,
and very sure, if you happen to have before you all the
elements of thought ; but always very dangerously inferior
to the unpretending method of sight for people who have
eyes, and can use them. If I had only looked at the snow
carefully, I should have seen that it wasn't anywhere as
thick as it could stand or lie or, at least, as a hard sub-
stance, though deposited in powder, could stand. And
then I should have asked myself, with legitimate rational-
ism, why it didn't ; and if I had but asked Well, it's
no matter what perhaps might have happened if I had. I
never did.
11. Let me now show you, practically, how great the
error was. Here is a little model of the upper summits of
the Bernese range. I shake over them as much flour as
they will carry; now I brush it out of the valleys, to repre-
sent the melting. Then you see what is left stands in
these domes and ridges, representing a mass of snow
about six miles deep. That is what the range would
be like, however, if the snow stood up as the flour does ;
and snow is at least, you will admit, as adhesive as-
flour.
12. But, you will say, the scale is so different, you can't
reason from the thing on that scale. A most true objec
tion. You cannot ; and therefore I beg you, in like man-
ner, not to suppose that Professor Tyndall's experiments
on ; a straight prism of ice, four inches long, an inch wide,
III. OF ICE-CREAM. 43 "
and a little more than an inch in depth," * are conclusive
as to the modes of glacier motion.
In what respect then, we have to ask, would the differ-
ence in scale modify the result of the experiment made
here on the table, supposing this model was the Jungfrau
itself, and the flour supplied by a Cyclopean miller and
his men \
13. In the first place, the lower beds of a mass six miles
deep would be much consolidated by pressure. But would
they be only consolidated? Would they be in nowise
squeezed out at the sides ?
The answer depends of course on the nature of flour,
and on its conditions of dryness. And you must feel in a
moment that, to know what an Alpine range would look
like, heaped with any substance whatever, as high as the
substance would stand you must lirst ascertain how high
the given substance will stand on level ground. You
might perhaps heap your Alp high with wheat, not so
high with sand, nothing like so high with dough ; and a
very thin coating indeed would be the utmost possible re-
sult of any quantity whatever of showers of manna, if it
had the consistence, as well as the taste, of wafers made
with honey.
14:. It is evident, then, that our first of inquiries bear-
ing on the matter before us, must be, How high will snow
stand on level ground, in a block or column ? Suppose
* ' Glaciers of the Alps,' p. 348.
44 DEUCALION.
you were to plank in a square space, securely twenty
feet high thirty fifty; and to fill it with dry snow.
How high could you g^t your pillar to stand, when you
took away the wooden walls ? and when you reached your
limit, or approached it, what would happen ?
Three more questions instantly propose themselves;
namely, What happens to snow under given pressure ?
will it under some degrees of pressure change into any-
thing else than snow ? and what length of time will it
take to effect the change ?
Hitherto, we have spoken of snow as dry only, and
therefore as solid substance, permanent in quantity and
quality. You know that it very often is not dry ; and
that, on the Alps, in vast masses, it is throughout great
part of the year thawing, and therefore diminishing in
quantity.
It matters not the least, to our general inquiry, how
much of it is wet, or thawing, or at what times. I merely
at present have to introduce these two conditions as ele-
ments in the business. It is not dry snow always, but
often soppy snow snow and water, that you have to
squeeze. And it is not freezing snow always, but very
often thawing snow, diminishing therefore in bulk every
instant, that you have to squeeze.
It does not matter, I repeat, to our immediate purpose,
when, or how far, these other conditions enter our ground ;
but it is best, I think, to put the dots on the i's as we go
along. You have heard it stated, hinted, suggested, im-
^1
HI. OF ICE-CREAM. 45
plied, or whatever else you like to call it, again and again,
by the modern school of glacialists, that the discoveries of
James Forbes were anticipated by Rendu.
15. I have myself more respect for Rendu than any
modern glacialist has. lie was a man of de Saussure's .
temper, and of more than de Saussure's intelligence ; and
if he hadn't had the misfortune to be a bishop, would very
certainly have left James Forbes's work a great deal more
than cut out for him ; stitched and pretty tightly in
most of the seams. But he was a bishop ; and could only
examine the glaciers to an episcopic extent ; and guess, the
best he could, after that. His guesses are nearly always
splendid ; but he must needs sometimes reason as well as
guess ; and he reasons himself with beautiful plausibility,
ingenuity, and learning, up to the conclusion which he
announces as positive that it always freezes on the Alps,
even in summer. James Forbes was the first who ascer-
tained the fallacy of this episcopal position ; and who an-
nounced to our no small astonishment that it always
thawed on the Alps, even in winter.
16. Not superficially of course, nor in all places. But
internally, and in a great many places. And you will find
it is an ascertained fact the first great one of which we
owe the discovery to him that all the year round, you
must reason on the masses of aqueous deposit on the Alps
as, practically, in a state of squash. Not freezing ice or
snow, nor dry ice or snow, but in many places saturated
with, everywhere affected by, moisture ; and alwayp
4:6 DEUCALION.
subject, in enormous masses, to the conditions of change
which affect ice or snow at the freezing-point, and not be-
low it. Even James Forbes himself scarcely, I think, felt
enough the importance of this element of his own discov-
eries, in all calculations of glacier motion. He sometimes
speaks of his glacier a little too simply as if it were a
stream of undiminishing substance, as of treacle or tar,
moving under the action of gravity only ; and scarcely
enough recognizes the influence of the subsiding languor
of its fainting mass, as a constant source of motion ; though
nothing can be more accurate than his actual account of
its results on the surface of the Mer de Glace, in his fourth
letter to Professor Jameson.
IT. Let me drive the notion well home in your own
minds, therefore, before going farther. You may perma-
nently secure it, by an experiment easily made by each one
of you for yourselves this evening, and that also on the
minute and easily tenable scale which is so approved at the
Royal Institution ; for in this particular case the material
conditions may indeed all be represented in very small
compass. Pour a little hot water on a lump of sugar in
your teaspoon. You will immediately see the mass thaw,
and subside by a series of, in miniature, magnificent and
appalling catastrophes, into a miniature glacier, which you
can pour over the edge of your teaspoon into your saucer ;
and if you will then add a little of the brown sugar of our
modern commerce of a slightly sandy character, you
may watch t'be rate of the flinty erosion upon the soft silver
III. OF ICE-CKEAM. 47
of the teaspoon at your ease, and with Professor Ramsay's
help, calculate the period of time necessary to wear a hole
through the bottom of it.
I think it would he only tiresome to you if I carried the
inquiry farther by progressive analysis. You will, I be-
lieve, permit, or even wish me, rather to state summarily
what the facts are : their proof, and the process of their
discovery, you w T ill find incontrovertibly and finally given
in this volume, classical, and immortal in scientific literature
which, twenty-fiv-e years ago, my good master Dr. Buck-
land ordered me, in his lecture-room at the Ashmolean, to
get, as closing all question respecting the nature and cause
of glacier movement, James Forbes's ' Travels in the Alps.'
18. The entire mass of snow and glacier, (the one pass-
ing gradually and by infinite modes of transition into the
other, over the whole surface of the Alps,) is one great ac-
cumulation of ice-cream, poured upon the tops, and flow-
ing to the bottoms, of the mountains, under precisely the
same special condition of gravity and coherence as the
melted sugar poured on the top of a bride-cake; but on a
scale which induces forms and accidents of course pecu-
liar to frozen water, as distinguished from frozen syrup,
and to the scale of Mont Blanc and the Jungfrau, as com-
pared to that of a bride-cake. Instead of an inch thick,
the ice-cream of the Alps will stand two hundred feet
thick, no thicker, anywhere, if it can run off ; but will
lie in the hollows like lakes, and clot and cling about the
less abrupt slopes in festooned wreaths of rich mass and
4-8 DEUCALION.
sweeping flow, breaking away, where the steepness becomes
intolerable, into crisp precipices and glittering cliffs.
19. Yet never for an instant motionless never for an in-
stant without internal change, through all the gigantic mass,
of the relations to each other of every crystal grain. That
one which you break now from its wave- edge, and which
melts in your hand, has had no rest, day nor night, since
it faltered down from heaven when you were a babe at
the breast ; and the white cloud that scarcely veils yon-
der summit seven-colored in the morning sunshine has
strewed it with pearly hoar-frost, which will be on this
spot, trodden by the feet of others, in the day when you
also will be trodden under feet of men, in your grave.
20. Of the infinite subtlety, the exquisite constancy of
this fluid motion, it is nearly impossible to form an idea
in the least distinct. We hear that the ice advances two
feet in the day ; and wonder how such a thing can be
possible, unless the mass crushed and ground down every-
thing before it. But think a little. Two feet in the day
is a foot in twelve hours, only an inch in an hour, (or
say a little more in the daytime, as less in the night,)
and that is maximum motion in mid-glacier. If your
Geneva watch is an inch across, it is three inches round,
and the minute-hand of it moves three times faster than
the fastest ice. Fancy the motion of that hand so slow that
it must take three hours to get round the little dial.
Between the shores of this vast gulf of hills, the long
wave of hastening ice only keeps pace with that lingering
in. OF ICE-CREAM. :
arrow, in its centfal crest; and that invisible motion
fades away upwards through forty years of slackening
stream, to the pure light of dawn on yonder stainless sum-
mit, on which this morning's snow lies motionless.
21. And yet, slow as it is, this infinitesimal rate of cur-
rent is enough to drain the vastest gorges of the Alps
of their snow, as clearly as the sluice of a canal-gate
empties a lock. The mountain basin included between the
Aiguille Yerte, the Grandes Jorasses, and the Mont
Blanc, has an area of about thirty square miles, and only
one outlet, little more than a quarter of a mile wide : yet,
through this the contents of the entire basin are drained
into the valley of Chamounix with perfect steadiness, and
cannot possibly fill the basin beyond a certain constant
height above the point of overflow.
Overflow, I say, deliberately; distinguishing always the
motion of this true fluid from that of the sand in an hour-
glass, or of stones slipping in a heap of shale. But that
the nature of this distinction may be entirely conceived
by you, 1 must ask you to pause with some attention at
this word, to 'flow,' which attention may perhaps be
more prudently asked in a separate chapter.
3
CHAPTER IT.
LABITUR, ET LABETUR.
(Lecture given cut London Institution, continued, with
added Illustrations.}
1. OF course we all know what flowing means. Well,
it is to be hoped so ; but I'm not sure. Let us see. The
sand of the hour-glass, do you call the motion of that
flowing ?
No. It is only a consistent and measured fall of many
unattached particles.
Or do you call the entrance of a gas through an aper-
ture, out of a full vessel into an empty one, flowing ?
No. That is expansion not flux.
Or the draught through the keyhole ? No is your
answer, still. Let us take instance in water itself. The
spring of a fountain, or of a sea breaker into spray. You
don't call that flowing ?
No.
Nor i\\Qfall of a fountain, or of rain ?
No.
Well, the rising of a breaker, the current of water in
the hollow shell of it, is that flowing ? No. After it has
IV. LABITUR, ET LABETUK. 51 ^
broken rushing up over the shingle, or impatiently ad-
vancing on the sand 2 You begin to pause in your
negative.
Drooping back from the shingle then, or ebbing from
the sand ? Yes ; flowing, in some places, certainly, now.
You see how strict and distinct the idea is in our minds.
"Will you accept I think yon may, this definition of it ?
Flowing is " the motion of liquid or viscous matter over
solid matter, under the action of gravity, without any
other impelling force."
2. "Will you accuse me, in pressing this definition on
you, of wasting time in mere philological nicety ? Permit
me, in the capacity which even the newspapers allow to
me, that of a teacher of expression, to answer you, as
often before now, that philological nicety is philosophical
nicety. See the importance of it here. I said a glacier
flowed. But it remains a question whether it does not also
spring, whether it can rise as a fountain, no less than
descend as a stream.
For, broadly, there are two methods in which either a
stream or glacier moves.
The first, by withdrawing a part of its mass in front,
the vacancy left by which, another part supplies from
behind.
That is the method of a continuous stream, perpetual
deduction,* by what precedes, of what follows.
* "Ex quo ilia adinirabilis a majoribus aquas facta deductio est."
Cic. de Div., 1, 44.
52 DEUCALION.
The second method of motion is when the mass that is
behind, presses, or is poured in upon, the masses before.
That is the way in which a cataract falls into a pool, or a
fountain into a basin.
Now, in the first case, you have catenary curves, or else
curves of traction, going down the stream. In the second
case, you have irregularly concentric curves, and ripples
of impulse and compression, succeeding each other round
the pool.
3. Now the Mer de Glace is deduced down its narrow
channel, like a river ; and the Glacier des Bossons is de-
duced down its steep ravine ; and both were once inject-
ed into a pool of ice in the valley below, as the Glacier of
the Rhone is still. Whereupon, observe, if a stream falls
into a basin level-lipped all round you know when it
runs over it must be pushed over lifted over. But if ice
is thrown into a heap in a plain, you can't tell, without the
closest observation, how violently it is pushed from behind,
or how softly it is diffusing itself in front ; and I had
never set my eyes or wits to ascertain where compression
in the mass ceased, and diffusion began, because I thought
Forbes had done everything that had to be done in the
matter. But in going over his work again I find he has
left just one thing to be still explained; and that one
chances to be left to me to show you this evening, because,
by a singular and splendid Nemesis, in the obstinate rejec-
tion of Forbes's former conclusively simple experiments,
and in the endeavour to substitute others of his own, Pro-
IV. LABITUR, ET LABETUB. 5#
fessor Tyndall has confused himself to the extreme point
of not distinguishing these two conditions of deductive
and impulsive flux. His incapacity of drawing, and ig-
norance of perspective, prevented him from constructing
his diagrams either clearly enough to show him his own
mistakes, or prettily enough to direct the attention of his
friends to them ; and they luckily remain to us, in their
absurd immortality.
4. Forbes poured viscous substance in layers down a
trough ; let the stream harden ; cut it into as many sections
as were required ; and showed, in permanence, the actual
conditions of such viscous motion. Eager to efface the
memory of these conclusive experiments, Professor Tyn-
dall ('Glaciers of the Alps,' page 383) substituted this
literally c superficial ' one of his own. He stamped circles
on the top of a viscous current ; found, as it flowed, that
they were drawn into ovals ; but had not wit to con-
sider, or sense to see, whether the area of the circle was
enlarged or diminished or neither during its change
in shape. He jumped, like the rawest schoolboy, to
the conclusion that a circle, becoming an oval, must
necessarily be compressed ! You don't compress a
globe of glass when you blow it into a soda-water bottle*
do you ?
5. But to reduce Professor TyndalPs problem into
terms. Let A F, Fig. 3 (page 54), be the side of a
stream of any substance whatever, and a f the middle of
it ; and let the particles at the middle move twice as fast as
54:
DEUCALION.
FIG. 3.
the particles at the sides. Now we
cannot study all the phenomena
of fluid motion in one diagram,
nor any one phenomenon of fluid
motion but by progressive dia-
grams ; and this first one only
shows the changes of form
which would take place in a sub-
stance which moved with uni-
form increase of rapidity from
side to centre. No fluid sub-
stance would so move ; but you
can only trace the geometrical
facts step by step, from uniform
increase to accelerated increase.
Let the increase of rapidity,
therefore, first be supposed uni-
form. Then, while the point A
moves to B, the point a moves to
6', and any points once interme-
diate in a right line between A and
<z, will now be intermediate in a
right line between JB and c, and
their places determinable by
verticals from each to each.
I need not be tedious in farther
describing the figure. Suppose
A I a square mile of the sub-
IV. LABITUR, ET LABETUK. 55
stance, and the origin of motion on the line A a. Then
when the point A lias arrived at B, the point B has arrived
at C, the point a at c, and the point b at d, and the mile
square, A , has become the mile rhombic, B d, of the
same area ; and if there were a circle drawn in the square
A &, it will become the fat ellipse in B d, and thin ellipse
in C yj successively.
6. Compressed, thinks Professor Tyndall, one way, and
stretched the other !
But the Professor has never so much as understood
what ' stretching' means. He thinks that ice won't
stretch ! Does he suppose treacle, or oil, will f The
brilliant natural philosopher has actually, all through his
two books on glaciers, confused viscosity with elasticity !
You can stretch a piece of Indian-rubber, but you can
only diffuse treacle, or oil, or water.
" But you can draw these out into a narrow stream,
whereas you cannot pull the ice ? "
No ; neither can you pull water, can you ? In com-
pressing any substance, you can apply any force you like ;
but in extending it, you can only apply force less than
that with which its particles cohere. You can pull honey
into a thin string, when it comes out of the comb ; let it
be candied, and you can't pull it into a thin string. Does
that make it less a viscous substance ? You can't stretch
mortar either. It cracks even in the hod, as it is heaped.
Is it, therefore, less fluent or manageable in the mass ?
7. Whereas the curious fact of the matter is, that, in
56 DEUCALION.
precise contrariety to Mr. Tyndall's idea ? ice, (glacier ice,
that is to say,) will stretch ; and that treacle or water
won't! and that's just*the plague of dealing with the
whole glacier question that the incomprehensible, unten-
able, indescribable ice will both squeeze and open ; and
is slipping through your fingers all the time besides, by
melting away. You can't deal with it as a simple fluid ;
and still less as a simple solid. And instead of having
less power to accommodate itself to the irregularities of
its bed than water, it has much more; a great deal more
of it will subside into a deep place, and ever so much of
it melt in passing over a shallow one ; and the centre, at
whatever rate it moves, will supply itself by the exhaus-
tion of the sides, instead of raging round, like a stream in
back-water.
8. However, somehow, I must contrive to deal at least
with the sure fact that the velocity of it is progressively
greater from the sides to the centre, and from the bottom
to the surface.
Now it is the last of these progressive increments which
is of chief importance to my present purpose.
For my own conviction on the matter; mind, not
theory, for a man can always avoid constructing theories,
but cannot possibly help his convictions, and may some-
times feel it right to state them, my own conviction is
that the ice, when it is of any considerable depth, no
more moves over the bottom than the lower particles of a
running stream of honey or treacle move over a plate
IV. LABITTJR, ET LABETUK.
but that, in entire rest at the bottom, except so far as it
is moved by dissolution, it increases in velocity to the sur-
face in a curve of the nature of a parabola, or a logarith-
mic curve, capable of being infinitely prolonged, on the
supposition of the depth of the ice increasing to in-
finity.
9. But it is now my fixed principle not to care what I
think, when a fact can be ascertained by looking, or meas-
uring. So, not having any observations of my own on
this matter, I seek what help may be had elsewhere ; and
find in the eleventh chapter of Professor Tyndall's' i Gla-
ciers of the Alps,' two most valuable observations, made
under circumstances of considerable danger, calmly en-
countered by the author, and grumblingly by his guide,
danger consisting in the exposure to a somewhat close and
well-supported fire of round and grape from the gla-
cier of the Geant, which objected to having its velocity
measured. But I find the relation of these adventures so
much distract me from the matter in hand, that I must
digress briefly into some notice of the general literary
structure of this remarkable book.
10. Professor Tyndall never fails to observe with com-
placency, and to describe to his approving readers, how
unclouded the luminous harmonies of his reason, imagina-
tion, and fancy remained, under conditions which, he
rightly concludes, would have been disagreeably exciting,
or even distinctly disturbing, to less courageous persons.
And indeed I confess, for my own part, that my success-
58 DEUCALION.
fullest observations have always been made while lying
all ray length on the softest grass I could tind ; and after
assuring myself with extreme caution that if I chanced to
go to sleep, (which in the process of very profound obser-
vations I usually do, at least of an afternoon,) I am in no
conceivable peril beyond that of an ant-bite. Neverthe-
less, the heroic Professor does not, it seems to me, suffi-
ciently recognize the universality of the power of English,
French, German, and Italian gentlemen to retain their
mental faculties under circumstances even of more serious
danger than the crumbling of a glacier moraine ; and to
think with quickness and precision, when the chances of
death preponderate considerably, or even conclusively,
over those of life. Nor does Professor Tyndall seem to
have observed that the gentlemen possessing this very ad-
mirable power in any high degree, do not usually think
their own emotions, or absence of emotions, proper subjects
of printed history, and public demonstration.
11. Nevertheless, when a national philosopher, under
showers of granite grape, places a stake and auger against
his heart, buttons his coat upon them, and cuts himself an
oblique staircase up a wall of ice, nearly vertical, to a
height of forty feet from the bottom ; and there, unbut-
toning his coat, pierces the ice with his auger, drives in
his stake, and descends without injury, though during the
whole operation his guide " growls audibly," we are bound
to admit his claim to a scientific Victoria Cross or at
least crosslet, and even his right to walk about in our
IV. LABITUR, ET LABETUR. 5
London drawing-rooms in a gracefully cruciferous cos-
tume ; while I have no doubt also that many of his friends
will be interested in such metaphysical particulars and
examples of serene mental analysis as he may choose to
give them in the course of his autobiography. But the
Professor ought more clearly to understand that scientific
writing is one thing, and pleasant autobiography another ;
and though an officer may not be able to give an account
of a battle without involving some statement of his per-
sonal share in it, a scientific observer might with entire
ease, and much convenience to the public, have published
4 The Glaciers of the Alps ' in 'two coincident, but not co-
alescing, branches like the glaciers of the Giant and Le-
chaud ; and that out of the present inch and a half thick-
ness of the volume, an inch and a quarter might at once
have been dedicated to the Giant glacier of the autobiog-
raphy, and the remaining quarter of an inch to the minor
current of scientific observation, which, like the Glacier
de Lechaud, appears to be characterized by " the compar-
ative shallowness of the upper portion," * and by its final
reduction to " a driblet measuring about one-tenth of its
former transverse dimensions."
12. It is true that the book is already divided into two
portions, the one described as " chiefly narrative," and
the other as " chiefly scientific." The chiefly narrative
portion is, indeed, full of very interesting matter fully jus-
* 'Glaciers of the Alps,' p. 288.
60 DEUCALION.
tif ying its title ; as, for instance, " We tumbled so often
in the soft snow, and our clothes and boots were so full of
it, that we thought we iifight as well try the sitting posture
in sliding down. We did so, and descended with extra-
ordinary velocity" (p. 116). Or again: "We had some
tea, which had been made at the Montanvert, and carried
up to the Grand Mulets in a bottle. My memory of that
tea is not pleasant " (p. 73). Or in higher strains of
scientific wit and pathos : " As I looked at the objects
which had now become so familiar to me, I felt that,
though not viscous, the ice did not lack the quality of ad-
hesiveness, and I felt a little sad at the prospect of bidding
it so soon farewell."
13. But the merely romantic readers of this section,
rich though it be in sentiment and adventure, will find
themselves every now and then arrested by pools, as it
were, of almost impassable scientific depth such as the
description of a rock " evidently to be regarded as an as-
semblage of magnets, or as a single magnet full of conse-
quent points " (p. 140). While, on the other hand, when
in the course of my own work, finding myself pressed for
time, and eager to collect every scrap of ascertained data
accessible to me, I turn hopefully to the eleventh chapter
of the " chiefly scientific " section of the volume, I think
it hard upon me that I must read through three pages of
narrative describing the Professor's dangers and address,
before I can get at the two observations which are the sum
of the scientific contents of the chapter, yet to the first of
i
IV. LABITTJR, ET LABETUR.
which " unfortunately some uncertainty attached itself,"
and the second of which is wanting in precisely the two
points which would have made it serviceable. First, it
does not give the rate of velocity at the base, but five feet
above the base ; and, secondly, it gives only three meas-
urements of motion. Had it given four, we could have
drawn the curve : but we can draw any curve we like
through three points.
14. I will try the three points, however, with the most
probable curve; but this being a tedious business, will re-
serve it for a separate chapter, which readers may skip if
they choose : and insert, for the better satisfaction of any
who may have been left too doubtful by the abrupt close
of my second chapter, this postscript, written the other
day after watching the streamlets on the outlying fells of
Shap.
15. Think what would be the real result, if any stream
among our British hills at this moment were cutting its
bed deeper.
In order to do so, it must of course annually be able to
remove the entire zone of debris moved down to its bed
from the hills on each side of it and somewhat more.
Take any Yorkshire or Highland stream you happen to
know, for example ; and think what quantity of debris
must be annually moved, on the hill surfaces which feed
its waters. Remember that a lamb cannot skip on their
slopes, but it stirs with its hoofs some stone or grain of
dust which will more or less roll or move downwards.
62 DEUCALION.
That no shower of rain can fall no wreath of snow melt,
without moving some quantity of dust downwards. And
that no frost can breaik up, without materially loosening
some vast ledges of crag, and innumerable minor ones ;
nor without causing the fall of others as vast, or as innu-
merable. Make now some effort to conceive the quantity
of rock and dust moved annually, lower, past any given
level traced on the flanks of any considerable mountain
stream, over the area it drains say, for example, in the
basin of the Ken above Kendal, or of the Wharfe above
Bolton Abbey.
16. Then, if either of those streams were cutting their
beds deeper, that quantity of rock, and something more,
must be annually carried down by their force, past Ken-
dal bridge, and Bolton stepping-stones. Which you will
find would occasion phenomena very astonishing indeed
to the good people of Kendal and Wharfedale.
17. " But it need not be carried down past the stepping-
stones," you say "it maybe deposited somewhere above."
Yes, that is precisely so ; and wherever it 'Is deposited,
the bed of the stream, or of some tributary streamlet, is
being raised. Nobody notices the raising of it ; another
stone or two among the wide shingle a tongue of sand
an inch or two broader at the burnside who can notice
that? Four or five years pass; a flood comes; and
Farmer So-and-So's field is covered with slimy ruin. And
Farmer So-and-So's field is an inch higher than it was, for
evermore but who notices that ? The shingly stream has
IV. LABITUR, ET LABETTJK. 63 /
gone back into its bed : here and there a whiter stone or
two gleams among its pebbles, but next year the water
stain has darkened them like the rest, and the bed is just
as far below the level of the field as it was. And your
careless geologist says, ' what a powerful stream it is, and
how deeply it is cutting its bed through the glen ! '
18. Now, carry out this principle for existing glaciers.
If the glaciers of Chamouni were cutting their beds deeper,
either the annual line of debris of the Mont Blanc range
on its north side must be annually carried down past the
Pont Pelissier ; or the valley of Chamouni must be in
process of filling up, while the ravines at its sides are
being cut down deeper. Will any geologist, supporting
the modern glacial theories, venture to send me, for the
next number of Deucalion, his idea, on this latter, by him
inevitable, hypothesis, of the profile of the bottom of the
Glacier des Bossons, a thousand years ago ; and a thou-
sand years hence ?
CHAPTER Y.
THE VALLEY OF CLUSE.
1. WHAT strength of faith men have in each other ; and
how impossible it is for them to be independent in thought,
however hard they try ! Not that they ever ought to be ;
but they should know, better than they do, the incum-
brance that the false notions of others are to them.
Touching this matter of glacial grinding action ; you
will find every recent writer taking up, without so much as
a thought of questioning it, the notion adopted at first care-
less sight of a glacier stream by some dull predecessor of
all practical investigation that the milky colour of it is
all produced by dust ground off the rocks at the bottom.
And it never seems to occur to any one of the Alpine Club
men, who are boasting perpetually of their dangers from
falling stones ; nor even to professors impeded in their
most important observations by steady fire of granite
grape, that falling stones may probably knock their edges
off when they strike ; and that moving banks and fields of
moraine, leagues long, and leagues square, of which every
stone is shifted a foot forward every day on a surface
melting beneath them, must in such shifting be liable to
attrition enough to produce considerably more dust, and
V. THE VALLEY OF CLUSE. 65'
that of the finest kind, than any glacier stream carries
down with it not to speak of processes of decomposition
accelerated, on all surfaces liable to them, by alternate
action of frost and fierce sunshine.
2. But I have not, as yet, seen any attempts to deter-
mine even the first data on which the question of attrition
must be dealt with. I put it, in simplicity, at the close of
last chapter. But, in its full extent, the inquiry ought not
to be made merely of the bed of the Glacier des Bossons ;
but of the bed of the Arve, from the Col de Balme to
Geneva ; in which the really important points for study
are the action of its waters at Pont Pelissier ; at the falls
below Servoz ; at the portal of Cluse ; and at the north-
ern end of the slope of the Saleve.
3. For these four points are the places where, if at all,
sculptural action is really going on upon its bed : at those
points, if at all, the power of the Second JEra, the sera of
sculpture, is still prolonged into this human day of ours.
As also it is at the rapids and falls of all swiftly descend-
ing rivers. The one vulgar and vast deception of Niagara
has blinded the entire race of modern geologists to the
primal truth of mountain form, namely, that the rapids
and cascades of their streams indicate, not points to which
the falls have receded, but places where the remains of
once colossal cataracts still exist, at the places eternally
(in human experience) appointed for the formation of such
cataracts, by the form and hardness of the local rocks.
The rapids of the Amazon, the Nile, and the Rhine, obey
66 DEUCALION.
precisely the same law as the little Wharfe at its Strid, or
as the narrow i rivus aquas ' which, under a bank of straw-
berries in my own tiny garden, has given me perpetual
trouble to clear its channel of the stones brought down in
flood, while, just above, its place of picturesque cascade,
is determined for it by a harder bed of Coniston flags, and
the little pool, below that cascade, never encumbered with
stones at all.
4. Now the bed of the Arve, from the crest of the Col
de Balme to Geneva, has a fall of about 5,000 feet ; and
if any young Oxford member of the Alpine Club is mind-
ed to do a piece of work this vacation, which in his old
age, when he comes to take stock of himself, and edit the
fragments of himself, as I am now sorrowfully doing, he
will be glad to have done, (even though he risked neither
his own nor any one else's life to do it,) let him survey
that bed accurately, and give a profile of it, with the
places and natures of emergent rocks, and the ascertain-
able depths and dates of alluvium cut through, or in course
of deposition.
5. After doing this piece of work carefully, he will
probably find some valuable ideas in his head concerning
the proportion of the existing stream of the Arve to that
which once flowed from the glacier which deposited the
moraine of Les Tines ; and again, of that torrent to the
infinitely vaster one of the glacier that deposited the great
moraine of St. Gervais ; and finally of both, to the cliffs of
Cluse, which have despised and resisted them. And ideas
V. THE VALLEY OF CLUSE. 07
which, after good practical work, he finds in his head, are
likely to be good for something : but he must not seek for
them ; all thoughts worth having come like sunshine,
whether we will or no : the thoughts not worth having,
are the little lucifer matches we strike ourselves.
6. And 1 hasten the publication of this number of
Deucalion, to advise any reader who cares for the dreary
counsel of an old-fashioned Alpine traveller, to see the
valley of Cluse this autumn, if he may, rather than any
other scene among the Alps ; for if not already destroyed,
it must be so, in a few months more, by the railway which
is to be constructed through it, for the transport of Euro-
pean human diluvium. The following note of my last
walk there, written for my autumn lectures, may be
worth preserving among the shingle of my scattered
work.
7. 1 had been, for six months in Italy, never for a sin-
gle moment quit of liability to interruption of thought.
By day or night, whenever I was awake, in the streets of
every city, there were entirely monstrous and inhuman
noises in perpetual recurrence. The violent rattle of car-
riages, driven habitually in brutal and senseless haste, or
creaking and thundering under loads too great for their
cattle, urged on by perpetual roars and shouts : wild bel-
lowing and howling of obscene wretches far into the
night : clashing of church bells, in the morning, dashed
into reckless discord, from twenty towers at once, as if:
rung by devils to defy and destroy the quiet of God's si
63 DEUCALION.
and mock the laws of His harmony : filthy, stridulous
shrieks and squeaks, reaching for miles into the quiet air,
from the railroad stations at every gate : and the vocif-
eration, endless, and frantic, of a passing populace whose
every word was in mean passion, or in unclean jest. Liv-
ing in the midst of this, and of vulgar sights more horri-
ble than the sounds, for six months, I found myself sud-
denly, as in a dream walking again alone through the
valley of Cluse, unchanged since I knew it first, when
I was a boy of fifteen, quite forty years ago ; and in
perfect quiet, and with the priceless completion of quiet,
that I was without fear of any outcry or base disturbance
of it.
8. But presently, as I walked, the calm was deepened,
instead of interrupted, by a murmur first low, as of bees,
and then rising into distinct harmonious chime of deep
bells, ringing in true cadences but I could not tell where.
The cliffs on each side of the valley of Cluse vary from
1,500 to above 2,000 feet in height ; and, without abso-
lutely echoing the chime, they so accepted, prolonged, and
diffused it, that at first I thought it came from a village
high up and far away among the hills ; then presently it
came down to me as if from above the cliff under which I
was walking ; then I turned about and stood still, wonder-
ing ; for the whole valley was filled with the sweet sound,
entirely without local or conceivable origin : and only
after some twenty minutes' walk, the depth of tones, grad-
ually increasing, showed me that they came from the
V. THE VALLEY OF CLUSE. 69
tower of Maglans in front of me ; but when I actually
got into the village, the cliffs on the other side so took up
the ringing, that I again thought for some moments I was
wrong.
Perfectly beautiful, all the while, the sound, and ex-
quisitely varied, from ancient bells of perfect tone and
series, rung with decent and joyful art.
" What are the bells ringing so to-day for, it is no
fete ? " I asked of a woman who stood watching at a gar-
den gate.
" For a baptism, sir."
And so I went on, and heard them fading back, and
lost among the same bewildering answers of the mountain
air.
9. Now that half-hour's walk was to me, and I think
would have been to every man of ordinarily well-trained
human and Christian feeling I do not say merely worth
the whole six months of my previous journey in Italy ;
it was a reward for the endurance and horror of the six
months' previous journey; but, as many here may not
know what the place itself is like, and may think I am
making too much of a little pleasant bell-ringing, I must
tell you what the valley of Cluse is in itself.
10. Of ' Cluse,' the closed valley, not a ravine, but
a winding plain, between very great mountains, rising for
the most part in cliffs but cliffs which retire one behind
the other above slopes of pasture and forest. ( Now as I
am writing this passage in a country parsonage of Cow-
70 DEUCALION.
ley, near Uxbridge, I am first stopped by a railroad
whistle two minutes and a half long,* and then by the
rumble and grind of a slow train, which prevents me
from hearing my own words, or being able to think, so
that I must simply wait for ten minutes, till it is past.)
It being past, I can go on. Slopes of pasture and for-
est, I said, mingled with arable land, in a way which you
can only at present see in Savoy ; that is to say, you have
walnut and fruit trees of great age, mixed with oak,
beech, and pine, as they all choose to grow il seems as if
the fruit trees planted themselves as freely as the pines.
I imagine this to be the consequence of a cultivation of
very ancient date under entirely natural laws ; if a plum-
tree or a walnut planted itself, it was allowed to grow ; if
it came in the way of anything or anybody, it would be
cut down; but on the whole the trees grew as they liked;
and the fields were cultivated round them in such spaces
as the rocks left ; ploughed, where the level admitted,
with a ploughshare lightly constructed, but so huge that
it looks more like the beak of a trireme than a plough,
two oxen forcing it to heave aside at least two feet depth
of the light earth ; no fences anywhere ; winding field
walks, or rock paths, from cottage to cottage ; these last
not of the luxurious or trim Bernese type, nor yet com-
fortless chalets; but sufficient for orderly and virtuous
life : in outer aspect, beautiful exceedingly, just because
* Counted by watch, for I knew by its manner it would last, and
measured it.
V. THE VALLEY OF CLTJSE. 71
their steep roofs, white walls, and wandering vines had
no pretence to perfectness, but were wild as their hills.
All this pastoral country lapped into inlets among the
cliffs, vast belts of larch and pine cresting or clouding the
higher ranges, whose green meadows change as they rise,
into mossy slopes, and fade away at last among the grey
ridges of rock that are soonest silvered with autumnal
snow.
11. The ten-miles length of this valley, between Cluse
and St. Martin's, include more scenes of pastoral beauty
and mountain power than all the poets of the world have
imagined ; and present more decisive and trenchant ques-
tions respecting mountain structure than all the philoso-
phers of the world could answer : yet the only object
which occupies the mind of the European travelling pub-
lic, respecting it, is to get through it, if possible, under
the hour.
12. I spoke with sorrow, deeper than my words at-
tempted to express, in my first lecture, of the blind rush-
ing of our best youth through the noblest scenery of the
Alps, without once glancing at it, that they might amuse,
or kill, themselves on their snow. That the claims of all
sweet pastoral beauty, of all pious domestic life, for a
moment's pause of admiration or sympathy, should be un-
felt, in the zest and sparkle of boy's vanity in summer
play, may be natural at all times ; and inevitable while
our youth remain ignorant of art, and defiant of religion ;
but that, in the present state of science, when every eye
72 DEUCALION.
is busied with the fires in the Moon and the shadows in
the Sun, no eye should occupy itself with the ravines of
its own world, nor with the shadows which the sun casts
on the cliffs of them ; that the simplest, I do not say
problems, but bare facts, of structure, should still be un-
represented, and the outmost difficulties of rock history
untouched ; while dispute, and babble, idler than the
chafed pebbles of the wavering beach, clink, jar, and jan-
gle on from year to year in vain, surely this, in our
great University, I am bound to declare to be blameful ;
and to ask you, with more than an artist's wonder, why
this fair valley of Cluse is now closed indeed, and forsaken,
"clasped like a missal shut where Paynims pray;" and,
with all an honest inquirer's indignation, to challenge in
the presence of our Master of Geology, happily one of its
faithful and true teachers,* the Speakers concerning the
Earth, the geologists, not of England only, but of
Europe and America, either to explain to you the struc-
ture or sculpture of this f renownedest cliff in all the Alps,
under which Tell leaped ashore ; or to assign valid reason
for the veins in the pebbles which every Scotch lassie
wears for her common jewellery.
* Mr. Prestwich. I have to acknowledge, with too late and vain
gratitude, the kindness and constancy of the assistance given me, on all
occasions when I asked it, by his lamented predecessor in the Oxford
Professorship of Geology, Mr. Phillips.
f The cliff between Fluelen and Brunnen, on the lake of Uri, of
which Turner's drawing was exhibited at this lecture.
CHAPTER VL
OF BUTTER AND HONEY.
1. THE last chapter, being properly only a continuation
of the postscript to the fourth, has delayed me so long
from my question as to ice-curves, that I cannot get room
for the needful diagrams and text in this number ; which
is perhaps fortunate, for I believe it will be better first to
explain to the reader more fully why the ascertainment of
this curve of vertical motion is so desirable.
To which explanation, very clear definition of some
carelessly used terms will be essential.
2. The extremely scientific Professor Tyndall always
uses the terms Plastic, and Viscous, as if they were
synonymous. But they express entirely different condi-
tions of matter The first is the term proper to be used
of the state of butter, on which you can stamp whatever
you choose ; and the stamp will stay ; the second ex-
presses that of honey, on which you can indeed stamp
what you choose ; but the stamp melts away forthwith.
And of viscosity itself there are two distinct varieties
one glutinous, or gelatinous, like that of treacle or tapioca
soup ; and the other simply adhesive, like that of mercury
or melted lead.
4
74 DEUCALION.
And of both plasticity and viscosity there are infinitely
various degrees in different substances, from the perfect
and absolute plasticityof gold, to the fragile, and imper-
fect, but to man more precious than any quality of gold,
plasticity of clay, and, most precious of all, the blunt and
dull plasticity of dough ; and again, from the vigorous
and binding viscosity of stiff glue, to the softening vis-
cosity of oil, and tender viscosity of old wine. I am
obliged therefore to ask my readers to learn, and observe
very carefully in our future work, these following defini-
tions.
Plastic. Capable of change of form under external
force, without any loss of continuity of substance; and of
retaining afterwards the form imposed on it.
Gold is the most perfectly plastic substance we com-
monly know ; clay, butter, etc., being more coarsely and
ruggedly plastic, and only in certain consistencies or at
certain temperatures.
Viscous. Capable of change of form tinder external
force, but not of retaining the form imposed / being
languidly obedient to the force of gravity, and necessarily
declining to the lowest possible level, as lava, treacle, or
honey.
Ductile. Capable of being extended by traction with-
out loss of continuity of substance. Gold is both plastic
and ductile ; but clay, plastic only, not ductile ; while
most melted metals are ductile only, but not plastic.
Malleable. Plastic only under considerable force.
VI. OF BUTTER AND HONEY. 75
3. We must never let any of these words entangle, as
necessary, the idea belonging to another.
A plastic substance is not necessarily ductile, though
gold is both; a viscous substance is not necessarily
ductile, though treacle is both ; and the quality of elas-
ticity, though practically inconsistent with the character
either of a plastic body, or a viscous one, may enter both
the one and the other as a gradually superadded or inter-
ferent condition, in certain states of congelation ; as in
indian-rubber, glass, sealing-wax, asphalt, or basalt.
I think the number of substances I have named in this
last sentence, and the number of entirely different states
which in an instant will suggest themselves to you, as
characteristic of each, at, and above, its freezing or solidi-
fying point, may show at once how careful we should be
in defining the notion attached to the words we use ; and
how inadequate, without specific limitation and qualifica-
tion, any word must be, to express all the qualities of any
given substance.
4. But, above all substances that can be proposed for
definition of quality, glacier ice is the most defeating.
For it is practically plastic ; but actually viscous ; and
that to the full extent. You can beat or hammer it, like
gold ; and it will stay in the form you have beaten it into,
for a time ; and so long a time, that, on all instant
occasions of plasticity, it is practically plastic. But only
have patience to wait long enough, and it will run down
out of the form you have stamped on it, as honey does
76 DEUCALION.
so that, actually and inherently, it is viscous, and not
plastic.
5. Here then, at last,*! have got Forbes's discovery and
assertion put into accurately intelligible terms; very in-
credible terms, I doubt not, to most readers.
There is not the smallest hurry, however, needful in be-
lieving them : only let us understand clearly what it is we
either believe or deny ; and in the meantime, return to our
progressive conditions of snow on the simplest supposable
terms, as shown in my first plate.
6. On a conical mountain, such as that represented in
Fig. 6, w r e are embarrassed by having to calculate the sub-
traction by avalanche down the slopes. Let us therefore
take rather, for examination, a place where the snow can
lie quiet.
Let Fig. 7, Plate I., represent a hollow in rocks at the
summit of a mountain above the line of perpetual snow,
the lowest watershed being at the level indicated by the
dotted line. Then the snow, once fallen in this hollow,
can't get out again ; but a little of it is taken away every
year, partly by the heat of the ground below, partly by
surface sunshine and evaporation, partly by filtration of
water from above, while it is also saturated with water in
thaw-time, up to the level of watershed. Consequently it
must subside every year in the middle ; and, as the mass
remains unchanged, the same quantity must be added every
year at the top, the excess being always, of course, blown
away, or dropped off, or thawed above, in the year it falls.
VI. OF BUTTER AND HONEY. 77^
7. Hence the entire mass will be composed, at any
given time, of a series of beds somewhat in the arrange-
ment given in Fig. 8 ; more remaining of each year's
snow in proportion to its youth, and very little indeed of
the lowest and oldest bed.
It must subside, I say, every year ; but how much is
involved, of new condition, in saying this ! Take the ques-
tion in the simplest possible terms ; and let Fig. 9 repre-
sent a cup or crater full of snow, level in its surface at the
end of winter. During the summer, there will be large
superficial melting ; considerable lateral melting by rever-
beration from rock, and lateral drainage ; bottom melting
from ground heat, not more than a quarter of an inch,
(Forbes's Travels, page 364,) a quantity which we may
practically ignore. Thus the mass, supposing the sub-
stance of it immovable in position, would be reduced by
superficial melting during the year to the form approxi-
mately traced by the dotted line within it, in Fig. 9.
8. But how of the interior melting ? Every interstice
and fissure in the snow, during summer, is filled either
with warm air, or warm water in circulation through it,
and every separate surface of crystal is undergoing its own
degree of diminution. And a constant change in the con-
ditions of equilibrium results on every particle of the mass ;
and a constant subsidence takes place, involving an entirely
different relative position of every portion of it at the end
of the year.
9. But I cannot, under any simple geometrical figure,
78 DEUCALION.
give an approximation to the resultant directions of change
in form ; because the density of the snow must be in some
degree proportioned to the depth, and the melting less, in
proportion to the density.
Only at all events, towards the close of the year, the
mass enclosed by the dotted line in Fig. 9 will have sunk
into some accommodation of itself to the hollow bottom of
the crater, as represented by the continuous line in Fig. 10.
And, over that, the next winter will again heap the snow
to the cup-brim, to be reduced in the following summer ; but
now through two different states of consistence, to the bulk
limited by the dotted line in Fig. 10.
10. In a sequence of six years, therefore, we shall have
a series of beds approximately such as in Fig. 11 ; ap
proximately observe, I say always, being myself wholly un-
able to deal with the complexities of the question, and only
giving the diagram for simplest basis of future investiga-
tion, by the first man of mathematical knowledge and prac-
tical common sense, who will leave off labouring for the con-
tradiction of his neighbours, and apply himself to the hither-
to despised toil of the ascertainment of facts. And when he
has determined what the positions of the strata will be in
a perfectly uniform cup, such as that of which the half is
represented in perspective in Fig. 12, let him next inquire
what would have happened to the mass, if, instead of being
deposited in a cup enclosed, on all sides, it had been de-
posited in an amphitheatre open on one, as in the section
shown in Fig. 12. For that is indeed the first radical
problem to be determined respecting glacier motion.
1 s.
VI. OF BUTTEB AND HONEY. 79 '
Difficult enough, if approached even with a clear head,
and open heart ; acceptant of all help from former observ-
ers, and of all hints from nature and heaven ; but very to-
tally insoluble, when approached by men whose poor capac-
ities for original thought are unsteadied by conceit, and
paralyzed by envy.
11. In my second plate, I have given, side by side, a
reduction, to half-scale, of part of Forbes's exquisite chart
of the Mer de Glace, published in 1845, from his own
survey made in 1842 ; and a reproduction, approximately
in facsimile, of Professor Tyndall's woodcut, from his
own ( eye-sketch' of the same portion of the glacier "as
seen from the cleft station, Trelaporte," published in
I860.*
That Professor Tyndall is unable to draw anything as
seen from anywhere, I observe to be a matter of much self-
congratulation to him ; such inability serving farther to es-
tablish the sense of his proud position as a man of science,
above us poor artists, who labour under the disadvantage
of being able with some accuracy to see, and with some
fidelity to represent, what we wish to talk about. But
when he found himself so resplendently inartistic, in the
eye-sketch in question, that the expression of his scientific
vision became, for less scientific persons, only a very bad
* ' Glaciers of the Alps,' p. 869. Observe also that my engraving, in
consequence of the reduced scale, is grievously inferior to Forbes'a
work ; but quite effectually and satisfactorily reproduces Professor
Tyndall's, of the same size as the original.
80
DECTCALION.
map, it was at least incumbent on his Royally-social Emi
nence to ascertain whether any better map of the same
places had been puBlished before. And it is indeed
clear, in other places of his book, that he was conscious
of the existence of Forbes's chart ; but did not care to
refer to it on this occasion, because it contained the cor-
rection of a mistake made by Forbes in 1842, which Pro-
fessor Tyndall wanted, himself, to have the credit of cor-
recting ; leaving the public at the same time to suppose
it had never been corrected by its author.
12. This manner, and temper, of reticence, with its
relative personal loquacity, is not one in which noble
science can be advanced ; or in which even petty science
can be increased. Had Professor Tyndall, instead of
seeking renown by the exposition of Forbes's few and
minute mistakes, availed himself modestly of Forbes's
many and great discoveries, ten years of arrest by futile
discussion and foolish speculation might have been
avoided in the annals of geology ; and assuredly it would
not have been left for a despised artist to point out to
you, this evening, the one circumstance of importance in
glacier structure which Forbes has not explained.
13. You may perhaps have heard I have been found-
ing my artistic instructions lately on the delineation of
a jam-pot. Delighted by the appearance of that in-
structive object, in the Hotel du Mont Blanc, at St.
Martin's, full of Chamouni honey, of last year, stiff and
white, I found it also gave me command of the best pos-
VI. OF BUTTER AND HONEY.
sible material for examination of glacial action on a small
scale.
Pouring a little of its candied contents out upon my
plate, by various tilting of which I could obtain any rate
of motion I wished to observe in the viscous stream ; and
encumbering the sides and centre of the said stream with
magnificent moraines composed of crumbs of toast, I was
able, looking alternately to table and window, to compare
the visible motion of the mellifluous glacier, and its trans-
ported toast, with the less traceable, but equally constant,
motion of the glacier of Bionnassay, and its transported
granite. And I thus arrived at the perception of the
condition of glacial structure, which though, as I told you
just now, not, I believe, hitherto illustrated, it is entirely
in your power to illustrate for yourselves in the following
manner.
If you will open a fresh pot of honey to-morrow at
breakfast, and take out a good table-spoonful of it, you
will see, of course, the surface generally ebb in the pot.
Put the table-spoonful back in a lump at one side, and
you will see the surface generally flow in the pot. The
lump you have put on at the side does not diffuse itself
over the rest ; but it sinks into the rest, and the entire sur-
face rises round it, to its former level.
Precisely in like manner, every pound of snow you put
on the top of Mont Blanc, eventually makes the surface
of the glaciers rise at the bottom.*
* Practically hyperbolic expression, but mathematically true.
4*
82 DEUCALION.
15. That is not impulsive action, mind you. That is
mere and pure viscous action the communication of
force equally in every "direction among slowly moving
particles. I once thought that this force might also be
partially elastic, so that whereas, however vast a mass of
honey you had to deal with, a Niagara of honey, you
never could get it to leap like a sea-wave at rocks, ice
might yet, in its fluency, retain this power of leaping;
only slowly, taking a long time to rise, yet obeying the
same mathematic law of impulse as a sea-breaker; but
ascending through seras of surge, and communicating,
through seras, its recoil. The little ripple of the stream
breaks on the shore, quick, quick, quick. The Atlantic
wave slowly uplifts itself to its plunge, and slowly appeases
its thunder. The ice wave if there be one would be
to the Atlantic wave as the ocean is to the brook.
If there be one ! The question is of immense of vital
importance, to that of glacier action on crag: but,
before attacking it, we need to know what the lines of
motion are, first, in a subsiding table-spoonful of honey ;
secondly, in an uprearing Atlantic wave ; and, thirdly, in
the pulsatory festoons of a descending cataract, obtained
by the relaxation of its mass, while the same pulsatory
action is displayed, as unaccountably, by a glacier cata-
ract,* in the compression of its mass.
* Or a stick of sealing-wax. Warm one at the fire slowly through ;
and bend it into the form of a horseshoe. You will then see, through
VI. OF BUTTER AND HONEY. 83 X
And, on applying to learned men in Oxford and Cam-
bridge * for elucidation of these modes of motion, I find
that, while they can tell me everything I don't want to
know, about the collision and destruction of planets, they
are not entirely clear on the subject either of the diffusion
of a drop of honey from its comb, or the confusion of a
rivulet among its cresses. Of which difficult matters, I
will therefore reserve inquiry to another chapter ; antici-
pating, however, its conclusions, for the reader's better
convenience, by the brief statement, that glacier ice has
no power of springing whatever ; that it cannot descend
into a rock-hollow, and sweep out the bottom of it, as a
cascade or a wave can ; but must always sluggishly fill it
to the brim before flowing over ; and accumulate, beneath,
under dead ice, quiet as the depths of a mountain tarn,
the fallen ruins of its colossal shore.
a lens of moderate power, the most exquisite facsimiles of glacier
fissure produced by extension, on its convex surface, and as faithful
image of glacier surge produced by compression, on its concave one.
In the course of such extension, the substance of the ice is actually
expanded, (see above, Chap. IV., 7,) by the widening of every minute
fissure ; and in the course of such compression, reduced to apparently
solid ice, by their closing. The experiments both of Forbes and Agassiz
appear to indicate that the original fissures are never wholly effaced by
compression ; but I do not myself know how far the supposed result of
these experiments may be consistent with ascertained phenomena of
regelation.
* I have received opportune and kind help, from the other side of the
Atlantic waves, in a study of them by my friend Professor Rood.
CHAPTER VII.
THE IRIS OF THE EARTH.
Lecture given at the London Institution, February \:\in
and March %%th, 1876,* the subject announced being,
"AND THE GOLD OF THAT LAND IS GOOD: THERE IS
1. THE subject which you permit me the pleasure of
illustrating to you this evening, namely, the symbolic use of
the colours of precious stones in heraldry, will, I trust, not
interest you less because forming part both of the course
of education in art which I have been permitted to found
in Oxford ; and of that in physical science, which I am
about to introduce in the Musuem for working men at
Sheffield.
I say ' to introduce,' not as having anything novel to
teach, or show ; for in the present day I think novelty the
worst enemy of knowledge, and my introductions are only
of things forgotten. And 1 am compelled to be pertina-
* The abrupt interpolation of this lecture in the text of Deucalion ia
explained in the next chapter.
VH. THE IRIS OF THE EARTH. 85 ^
ciously it might even seem, insolently, separate in effort
from many who would help me, just because I am resolved
that no pupil of mine shall see anything, or learn, but
what the consent of the past has admitted to be beautiful,
aud the experience of the past has ascertained to be true.
During the many thousand years of this world's existence
the persons living upon it have produced more lovely
things than any of us can ever see ; and have ascertained
more profitable things than any of us can ever know. Of
these infinitely existing, beautiful things, I show to my
pupils as many as they can thoroughly see, not more ;
and of the natural facts which are positively known, I
urge them to know as many as they can thoroughly know,
not more ; and absolutely forbid all debate whatsoever.
The time for debate is when we have become masters
not while we are students. And the wisest of masters are
those who debate least.
2. For my own part holding myself nothing better
than an advanced student, guiding younger ones, I never
waste a moment of life in dispute, or discussion. It is at
least ten years since I ceased to speak of anything but
what I had ascertained ; and thus becoming, as far as I
know, the most practical and positive of men, left dis-
course of things doubtful to those whose pleasure is in
quarrel ; content, for my pupils and myself, to range all
matters under the broad head of things certain, with which
we are vitally concerned, and things uncertain, which
don't in the least matter
DEUCALION.
3. In the working men's museum at Sheffield, then, I
mean to place illustrations of entirely fine metal-work,
including niello and engraving; and of the stones, and
the Flora and Fauna, of Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Durham,
and Westmoreland ; * together with such foreign exam-
ples as may help to the better understanding of what we
have at home. But in teaching metal-work, I am obliged
to exhibit, not the uses of iron and steel only, but those
also of the most precious metals, and their history ; and
for the understanding of any sort of stones, 1 must admit
precious stones, and their history. The first elements of
both these subjects, I hope it may not be uninteresting to
you to follow out with me this evening.
4. I have here, in my right hand, a little round thing,
and in my left a little flat one, about which, and the like
of them, it is my first business to explain, in Sheffield,
what may positively be known. They have long been
both, to me, subjects of extreme interest ; and I do not
hesitate to say that I know more about them than most
people : but that, having learned what 1 can, the happy
feeling of wonder is always increasing upon me how
little that is ! What an utter mystery both the little
things still are !
5. This first in my right hand is what we call a
( pebble,' f or rolled flint, presumably out of Kensington
* Properly, Westmoreland, the district of Western Meres,
f i. A. I. Sheffield Museum ; see Chapter VIII.
VH. THE IRIS OF THE EARTH. 87
gravel-pits. I picked it up in the Park, the first that lay
loose, inside the railings, at the little gate entering from
Norfolk Street. I shall send it to Sheffield; knowing that
like the bit of lead picked up by Saadi in the ' Arabian
Nights,' it will make the fortune of Sheffield, scientifically,
if Sheffield makes the most of it, and thoroughly learns
what it is.
6. What it is, I say, you observe ; not merely, what
it is made of. Anybody the pitif ullest apothecary round
the corner, with a beggarly account of empty boxes
can tell you that. It is made of brown stuff called silicon,
and oxygen, and a little iron ; and so any apothecary can
tell what you all who are sitting there are made of : you,
and I, and all of us, are made of carbon, nitrogen, lime,
and phosphorus, and seventy per cent, or rather more of
water ; but then, that doesn't tell us what we are,
what a child is, or what a boy is, much less what a man
is, least of all, what supremely inexplicable woman is.
And so, in knowing only what it is made of, we don't
know what a flint is.
7. To know what it is, we must know what it can do,
and suffer.
That it can strike steel into white-hot fire, but can it-
self be melted down like water, if mixed with ashes ; that
it is subject to laws of form one jot of which it cannot
violate, and yet which it can continually evade, and ap-
parently disobey ; that in the fulfilment of these it be-
comes pure, in rebellion against them, foul and base ;
88 DEUCALION.
that it is appointed on our island coast to endure for
countless ages, fortifying the sea cliff; and on the brow
of that very cliff, evert spring, to be dissolved, that the
green blades of corn may drink it with the dew ; that
in its noblest forms it is still imperfect, and in the mean-
est, still honourable, this, if we have rightly learned, we
begin to know what a flint is.
8. And of this other thing, in my left hand, this flat
bit of yellow mineral matter, commonly called a c sov-
ereign,' not indeed to be picked up so easily as the other
(though often, by rogues, with small pains ;) yet
familiar enough to the sight of most of us, and too fami-
liar to our thought, there perhaps are the like inquiries
to be put. What is it ? What can it do ; and for
whom ? This shape given to it by men, bearing the
image of a Caesar ; how far does this make it a thing
which is Caesar's ? the opposed image of a saint, riding
against a dragon how far does this make it a thing which
is of Saints ? Is its testimony true, or conceivably true,
on either side ? Are there yet Caesars ruling us, or saints
saving us, to whom it does of right belong ?
9. And the substance of it, not separable, this, into
others, but a pure element, what laws are over it, other
than Caesar's ; what forms must it take, of its own, in
eternal obedience to invisible power, if it escape our
human hammer-stroke ? How far, in its own shape, or in
this, is it itself a Caesar ; inevitable in authority ; secure
of loyalty, loveable, and meritorious of love ? For, read-
VH. THE IRIS OF THE EARTH. 89-
ing its past history, we find it has been much beloved,
righteously or iniquitously, a thing to be known the
grounds of, surely ?
10. Nay, also of this dark and despised thing in iny
right hand, we must ask that higher question, has it ever
been beloved ? And finding in its past history that in its
pure and loyal forms, of amethyst, opal, crystal, jasper,
and onyx, it also has been much beloved of men, shall we
not ask farther whether it deserves to be beloved,
whether in wisdom or folly, equity or inequity, we give
our affections to glittering shapes of clay, and found our
fortunes on fortitudes of stone ; and carry down from lip
to lip, and teach, the father to the child, as a sacred tra-
dition, that the Power which made us, and preserves, gave
also with the leaves of the earth for our food, and the
streams of the earth for our thirst, so also the dust of the
earth for our delight and possession : bidding the first of
the Rivers of Paradise roll stainless waves over radiant
sands, and writing, by the word of the Spirit, of the
Hocks that it divided, " The gold of that land is good ;
there also is the crystal, and the onyx stone."
11. Before I go on, 1 must justify to you the familiar
word I have used for the rare one in the text.
If with mere curiosity, or ambitious scholarship, you
were to read the commentators on the Pentateuch, you
might spend, literally, many years of life, on the discus- ""
sions as to the kinds of the gems named in it ; and be no
wiser at the end than you were at the beginning. But if,
90 DEUCALION.
honestly and earnestly desiring to know the meaning of
the book itself, you set yourself to read with such ordi-
nary help as a good concordance and dictionary, and with
fair knowledge of the two languages in which the Testa-
ments have been clearly given to us, you may find out all
you need know, in an hour.
12. The word ' bdellium ' occurs only twice in the Old
Testament : here, and in the book of Numbers, where you
are told the manna was of the colour or look of bdellium.
There, the Septuagint uses for it the word /cpvaraXXos,
crystal, or more properly anything congealed by cold ;
and in the other account of the manna, in Exodus, you
are told that, after the dew round the camp was gone up,
" there lay a small round thing as small as the hoar-
frost upon the ground." Until 1 heard from my friend
Mr. Tyrrwhitt * of the cold felt at night in camping on
Sinai, I could not understand how deep the feeling of the
Arab, no less than the Greek, must have been respecting
the divine gift of the dew, nor with what sense of thank-
fulness for miraculous blessing the question of Job would
be uttered, " The hoary frost of heaven, who hath gen-
dered it ? " Then compare the first words of the blessing
of Isaac : " God give thee of the dew of heaven, and of
* See some admirable sketches of travelling in the Peninsula of
Sinai, by this writer, in 'Vacation Tourists,' Macmillan, 1864. "I
still remember," he adds in a private letter to me, " that the frozen
towels stood on their edges as stiff as biscuits. By 11 A. M. the ther-
mometer had risen to 85, and was still rising."
VH. THE IRIS OF THE EARTH. 91
the fatness of earth ; " and, again, the first words of the
song of Moses : " Give ear, oh ye heavens, for my speech
shall distil as the dew ; " and you will see at once why
this heavenly food was made to shine clear in the desert,
like an enduring of its dew ; Divine remaining for con-
tinual need. Frozen, as the Alpine snow pure for
ever.
13. Seize firmly that first idea of the manna, as the
type of the bread which is the Word of God ; * and then
look on for the English word ' crystal ' in Job, of Wisdom,
" It cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the
precious onyx, or the sapphire : the gold and the crystal
shall not equal it, neither shall it be valued with pure
gold ; " in Ezekiel, " firmament of the terrible crystal," or
in the Apocalypse, " A sea of glass, like unto crystal,
water of life, clear as crystal " " light of the city like a
stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as
crystal." Your understanding the true meaning of all
these passages depends on your distinct conception of the
permanent clearness and hardness of the Hock-crystal.
You may trust me to tell you quickly, in this matter,
what you may all for yourselves discover if you will read.
14. The three substances named here in the first
account of Paradise, stand generally as types the GOLD
* Sir Philip Sidney, in his translation of the Uprov ofyoyov of the
105th Psalm, completes the entire range of idea,
" Himself, from skies, their hunger to repel,
Candies the grasse with sweete congealed dew.* 1
92 DEUCALION.
of all precious metals ; the CRYSTAL of all clear precious
stones prized for lustre / the ONYX of all opaque precious
stones prized for colotir. And to mark this distinction as
a vital one, in each case when the stones to be set for
the tabernacle-service are named, the onyx is named
separately. The Jewish rulers brought " onyx stones, and
stones to be set for the ephod, and for the breastplate."*
And the onyx is used thrice, while every other stone is
used only once, in the High Priest's robe ; two onyxes on
the shoulders, bearing the twelve names of the tribes, six
on each stone, (Exod. xxviii. 9, 10,) and one in the breast-
plate, with its separate name of one tribe, (Exod. xxviii.
20.)
15. A. Now note the importance of this grouping. The
Gold, or precious metal, is significant of all that the
power of the beautiful earth, gold, and of the strong
earth, iron, has done for and against man. How much
evil I need not say. How much good is a question I will
endeavour to show some evidence on forthwith.
B/\The Crystal is significant of all the power that
jewels, from diamonds down through every Indian gem to
the glass beads which we now make for ball-dresses, have
had over the imagination and economy of men and
women from the day that Adam drank of the water of
the crystal river to this hour.
* Exod. xxv. 7, xxxv. 27, comparing Job above quoted, and Ezekiel
xxviii. 13.
VII. THE IBIS OF THE EAETH. 93
How much evil that is, you partially know ; how much
good, we have to consider.
c. The Onyx is the type of all stones arranged in bands
of different colours ; it means primarily, nail-stone
showing a separation like the white half-crescent at the
root of: the finger-nail ; not without some idea of its sub-
jection to laws of life. Of these stones, part, which are
flinty, are the material used for cameos and all manner of
engraved work and pietra dura ; but in the great idea of
banded or belted stones, they include the whole range of
marble, and especially alabaster, giving the name to the
alabastra, or vases used especially for the containing of
precious unguents, themselves more precious ; * so that
this stone, as best representative of all others, is chosen to
be the last gift of men to Christ, as gold is their first ;
incense with both : at His birth, gold and frankincense ;
at His death, alabaster and spikenard.
16. The two sources of the material wealth of all
nations were thus offered to the King of men in their sim-
plicity. But their power among civilized nations has
been owing to their workmanship. And if we are to ask
whether the gold and the stones are to be holy, much
more have we to ask if the worker in gold, and the
worker in stone, are to be conceived as exercising holy
function.
17. Now, as we ask of a stone, to know what it is, what
* Compare the " Nardi parvos onyx," which was to be Virgil's feast-
gift, in spring, to Horace.
94 DEUCALION.
it can do, or suffer, so of a human creature, to know what
it is, we ask what it can do, or suffer.
So that we have two scientific questions put to us, in
this matter : how the stones came to be what they are
or the law of Crystallization ; and how the jewellers came
to be what they are or the law of Inspiration. You see
how vital this question is to me, beginning now actually
to give my laws of Florentine art in English Schools!
How can artists be made artists, in gold and in precious
stones? whether in the desert, or the city? and if in the
city, whether, as at Jerusalem, so also in Florence, Paris,
or London ?
Must we at this present time, think you, order the
jewellers, whom we wish to teach, merely to study and
copy the best results of past fashion ? or are we to hope
that some day or other, if we behave rightly, and take
care of our jewels properly, we shall be shown also how
to set them ; and that, merely substituting modern names
for ancient ones, some divine message will come to our
craftsmen, such as this : ' See, I have called by name
Messrs. Hunt and Roskell, and Messrs. London and
Ryder, and I have filled them with the Spirit of God, in
wisdom and in understanding, and in all manner of work-
manship, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass, and
in cutting of stones,' ?
18. This sentence, which, I suppose, becomes startling
to your ear in the substitution of modern for ancient
names, is the first, so far as I know, distinctly referring
VII. THE IBIS OF THE EAKTH. 95
to the ancient methods of instruction in the art of jewel
lery. So also the words which I have chosen for the title
(or, as perhaps some of my audience may regretfully think
it should be called, the text,) of my lecture, are the first I
know that give any account of the formation or existence
of jewels. So that the same tradition, whatever its value,
which gave us the commands we profess to obey for our
moral law, implies also the necessity of inspired instruc-
tion for the proper practice of the art of jewellery ; and
connects the richness of the earth in gold and jewels with
the pleasure of Heaven that we should use them under
its direction. The scientific mind will of course draw
back in scorn from the idea of such possibility ; but then,
the scientific mind can neither design, itself, nor perceive
the power of design in others. And practically you will
find that all noble design in jewellery whatsoever, from
the beginning of the world till now, has been either in-
stinctive, done, that is to say, by tutorship of nature, with
the innocent felicity and security of purely animal art,
Etruscan, Irish, Indian, or Peruvian gold being interwoven
with a fine and unerring grace of industry, like the touch
of the bee on its cell and of the bird on her nest, or else,
has been wrought into its finer forms, under the impulse
of religion in sacred service, in crosier, chalice, and lamp ;
and that the best beauty of its profane service has been
debased from these. And the three greatest masters of
design in jewellery, the * facile principes' of the entire
European School, are centrally, the one who definitely
96 DEUCALION.
worked always with appeal for inspiration Angelico of
F^sole ; and on each side of him, the two most earnest
reformers of the morals of the Christian Church Holbein,
and Sandro Botticelli.
19. I have first answered this, the most close home of
the questions, how men come to be jewellers. Next, how
do stones come to be jewels ? It seems that by all relig-
ious, no less than all profane, teaching or tradition, these
substances are asserted to be precious, useful to man, and
sacred to God. Whether we have not made them deadly
instead of useful, and sacrificed them to devils instead
of God, you may consider at another time. To-night, I
would examine only a little way the methods in which
they are prepared by nature, for such service as they are
capable of.
20. There are three great laws by which they, and the
metals they are to be set in, are prepared for us ; and at
present all these are mysteries to us.
I. The first, the mystery by which " surely there" is a
vein for the silver, and a place for the gold whence * they
fine it." No geologist, no scientific person whatsoever,
can tell you how this gold under my hand was brought
into this cleft in the bdellium ; f no one knows where it
was before, or how it got here : one thing only seems to
be manifest that it was not here always. This white
* * Whence,' not ' where,' they sift or wash it : odev StTjflemu, LXX.
f 20. A. 1. Sheffield Museum.
VII. THE IRIS OF THE EARTH. 97
bdellium itself closes rents, and fills hollows, in rocks
which had to be rent before they could be rejoined, and
hollowed before they could be refilled. Bat no one hith-
erto has been able to say where the gold first was, or by
what process it came into this its resting-place. First
mystery, then, that there is a vein for the silver, and a
place for the gold.
II. The second mystery is that of crystallization ; by
which, obeying laws no less arbitrary than those by which
the bee builds her cell the water produced by the sweet
miracles of cloud and spring freezes into the hexagonal
stars of the hoar-frost ; the flint, which can be melted
and diffused like water, freezes also, like water, into these
hexagonal towers of everlasting ice ; * and the clay, which
can be dashed on the potter's wheel as it pleaseth the pot-
ter to make it, can be frozen by the touch of Heaven into
the hexagonal star of Heaven's own colour the sapphire.
III. The third mystery, the gathering of crystals them-
selves into ranks or bands, by which Scotch pebbles are
made, not only is at present unpierced, but which is a
wonderful thing in the present century it is even tin-
talked about. There has been much discussion as to the
nature of metallic veins ; and books have been written
with indefatigable industry, and splendid accumulation
of facts, on the limits, though never on the methods, of
crystallization. But of the structure of banded stones not
*I Q. 11. Sheffield Museum.
98 DEUCALION.
a word is ever said, and, popularly, less than nothing
known ; there being many very false notions current re-
specting them, in the minds even of good mineralogists.
And the basis of what I find to be ascertainable about
them, may be told with small stress to your patience.
21. I have here in my hand,* a pebble which used to
decorate the chimney-piece of the children's playroom in
my aunt's house at Perth, when I w T as seven years old,
just half a century ago ; which pebble having come out
of the hill of Kinnoull, on the other side of the Tay, I
show you because I know so well where it came from, and
can therefore answer for its originality and genuineness.
22. The hill of Kinnoull, like all the characteristic
crags or craigs of central Scotland, is of a basaltic lava
in which, however, more specially than in most others,
these balls of pebble form themselves. And of these, in
their first and simplest state, you may think as little
pieces of flint jelly, filling the pores or cavities of the
rock.
Without insisting too strictly on the analogy for Nature
is so various in her operations that you are sure to be de-
ceived if you ever think one process has been in all respects
like another you may yet in most respects think of the
whole substance of the rock as a kind of brown bread,
rolcanically baked, the pores and cavities of which, when
it has risen, are filled with agate or onyx jelly, as the sim-
*I. A. 8. Sheffield Museum.
Plate III.
MURAL AGATES.
(^NJVlfBSl'
VH. THE IKIS OF THE EAKTH. 99
ilar pores of a slice of quartern loaf are filled with butter,
if the cook has spread it in a hurry.
23. I use this simile with more satisfaction, because,
in the course of last autumn, I was making some practical
experiments on glacial motion the substances for experi-
ment being supplied to me in any degree of congelation
or regelation which might be required, by the perfectly
angelic cook of a country friend, who not only gave me
the run of her kitchen, but allowed me to make domical
mountains of her best dish-covers, and tortuous valleys of
her finest napkins; under which altogether favourable
conditions, and being besides supplied with any quantity
of ice-cream and blancmange, in every state of frost and
thaw, I got more beautiful results, both respecting glacier
motion, and interstratified rocks, than a year's work would
have reached by unculinary analysis. Keeping, however
as I must to-night to our present question, I have here
a piece of this baked volcanic rock, which is as full of
agate pebbles as a plum-pudding is of currants ; each of
these agate pebbles consisting of a clear green chalcedony,
with balls of banded agate formed in the midst, or at the
sides of them. This diagram * represents one enlarged.
And you have there one white ball of agate, floating
apparently in the green pool, and a larger ball, which is
cut through by the section of the stone, and shows you the
banded structure in the most exquisite precision.
* This drawing is in Sheffield Museum.
100 DEUCALION.
24. Now, there is no doubt as to the possible formation of
these balls in melted vitreous substance as it cools, because
we get them in glass Itself, when gradually cooled in old
glass-houses ; and there is no more difficulty in accounting
for the formation of round agate balls of this character
than for that of common globular chalcedony. But the
difficulty begins when the jelly is not allowed to remain
quiet, but can run about while it is crystallizing. Then
you get glutinous forms that choke cavities in the rock,
in which the chalcedony slowly runs down the sides, and
forms a level lake at the bottom ; and sometimes you get
the whole cavity filled with lake poured over lake, the
liquid one over the frozen, floor and walls at last encrusted
with onyx fit for kings' signets.*
25. Of the methods of engraving this stone, and of its
general uses and values in ancient and modern days, you
will find all that can interest you, admirably told by Mr.
King, in his book on precious stones and gems, to which
I owe most of the little I know myself on this subject.
To-night, I would only once more direct your attention
to that special use of it in the dress of the Jewish High
Priest; that while, as one of the twelve stones of the
breastplate, it was engraved like the rest with the name
of a single tribe, two larger onyxes were used for the
shoulder-studs of the ephod ; and on these, the names of
* I am obliged to oxnit here the part of the lecture referring to dia-
grams. It will be given in greater detail in the subsequent text.
VII. THE IRIS OF THE EARTH. 101
all the twelve tribes were engraved, six upon each. I do
not infer from this use of the onyx, however, any pre-emi-
nence of value, or isolation of symbolism, in the stone ; I
suppose it to have been set apart for the more laborious
piece of engraving, simply because larger surfaces of it
were attainable than of true gems, and its substance was
more easily cut. I suppose the bearing of the names on
the shoulder to be symbolical of the priest's sacrificial
office in bearing the guilt and pain of the people ; while
the bearing of them on the breast was symbolical of his
pastoral office in teaching them : but, except in the broad
distinction between gem and onyx, it is impossible now
to state with any certainty the nature or meaning of the
stones, confused as they have been by the most fantastic
speculation of vain Jewish writers themselves.
There is no such difficulty when we pass to the inquiry
as to the use of these stones in Christian Heraldry, on the
breastplate and shield of the Knight; for that use is
founded on natural relations of colour, which cannot be
changed, and which will become of more and more impor-
tance to mankind in proportion to the degree in which
Christian Knighthood, once proudly faithful to Death, in
War, becomes humbly faithful to Life, in Peace.
27. To these natural relations of colour, the human
sight, in health, is joyfully sensitive, as the ear is to the
harmonies of sound ; but what healthy sight is, you may
well suppose, I have not time to define to-night ; the
nervous power of the eye, and its delight in the pure hues
102 DEUCALION.
of colour presented either by the opal, or by wild flowers,
being dependent on the perfect purity of the blood sup-
plied to the brain, as well as on the entire soundness of
the nervous tissue to which that blood is supplied. And
how much is required, through the thoughts and conduct
of generations, to make the new blood of our race of chil-
dren pure it is for your physicians to tell you, when they
have themselves discovered this medicinal truth, that the
divine laws of the life of Men cannot be learned in the
pain and death of Brutes.
28. The natural and unchangeable system of visible
colour has been lately confused, in the minds of all stu-
dents, partly by the pedantry of unnecessary science ;
partly by the formalism of illiberal art : for all practical
service, it may be stated in a very few words, and ex-
pressed in a very simple diagram.
28. There are three primary colours, Red, Blue, and
Yellow ; three secondary, formed by the union of any two
of these ; and one tertiary, formed by the union of all three.
If we admitted, as separate colours, the different tints
produced by varying proportions of the composing tints,
there would of course be an infinite number of second-
aries, and a wider infinitude of tertiaries. But tints can
be systematically arranged only by the elements of them,
not the proportions of those elements. Green is only
green, whether there be less or more of blue in it; purple
only purple, whether there be less or more of red in it ;
scarlet only scarlet, whether there be less or more of yel-
&*
VII. THE IRIS OF THE EARTH.
103
low in it ; and the tertiary gray only gray, in whatever
proportions the three primaries are combined in it.
29. The diagram used in my drawing schools to express
the system of these colours will be found coloured in
the ' Laws of Fesole ' : this figure will serve our present
purpose.*
The simple trefoil produced by segments of three cir-
* Readers interested in this subject are sure to be able to enlarge
and colour it for themselves. I take no notice of the new scientific
theories of primary colour : because they are entirely false as applied
to practical work, natural or artistic. Golden light in blue sky maki
green sky ; but green sky and red clouds can't make yellow sky.
104: DEUCALION.
cles in contact, is inscribed in a curvilinear equilateral
triangle. Nine small circles are set, three in the ex-
tremities of the foils, thi^ee on their cusps, three in the
angles of the triangle.
The circles numbered 1 to 3 are coloured with the
primitive colours ; 4 to 6, with the secondaries ; 7 with
white ; 8 with black ; and the 9th, with the tertiary,
gray.
30. All the primary and secondary colours are capable
of infinitely various degrees of intensity or depression :
they pass through every degree of increasing light, to per-
fect light, or white ; and of increasing shade, to perfect
absence of light, or black. And these are essential in the
harmony required by sight ; so that no group of colours
can be perfect that has not white in it, nor any that has
not black ; or else the abatement or modesty of them, in
the tertiary, gray. So that these three form the limiting
angles of the field, or cloudy ground of the rainbow. u I
do set my bow in the cloud."
And the nine colours of which you here see the essen-
tial group, have, as you know, been the messenger Iris ;
exponents of the highest purpose, and records of the per-
fect household purity and honour of men, from the days
when Hesiod blazoned the shield of Heracles, to the day
when the fighting Temeraire led the line at Trafalgar,
the Victory following her, with three flags nailed to her
masts, for fear one should be shot away.
31. The names of these colours in ordinary shields
VII. THE IRIS OF THE EAETH.
of knighthood, are those given opposite, in the left-
hand column. The names given them in blazoning the
shields of nobles, are those of the correspondent gems:
of heraldry by the planets, reserved for the shields of
kings, I have no time to speak, to-night, except incident-
ally.
A. THE PRIMARY COLOURS.
1. Or. Topaz.
2. Gules. Kuby.
3. Azure. Sapphire.
B. THE SECONDARY COLOURS.
4. Ecarlate. Jasper.
5. Yert. Emerald.
6. Purpure. Hyacinth.
C. THE TERTIARY COLOURS.
7. Argent. Carbuncle.
8. Sable. Diamond.
9. Colombin. Pearl.
32. I. Or. Stands between the light and darkness ; as
the sun, who " rejoiceth as a strong man to run his course,"
between the morning and the evening. Its heraldic name,
in the shields of kings, is Sol : the Sun, or Sun of Jus-
tice ; and it stands for the strength and honour of all men
who run their race in noble work ; whose path " is as the
shining light, that shineth more and more unto the per-
feet day."
y 5*
106 DEUCALION.
For theirs are the works which are to shine before men,
that they may glorify our Father. And they are also to
shine before God, so that with respect to them, what was
written of St. Bernard may be always true : " Opera
sancti patris velut Sol in conspectu Dei."
For indeed they are a true light of the world, infinitely
more good, in the sight of its Creator, than the dead flame
of its sunshine ; and the discovery of modern science, that
all mortal strength is from the sun, which has thrown
irrational persons into stupid atheism, as if there was no
God but the sun, is indeed the accurate physical expression
of this truth, that men, rightly active, are living sunshine.
II. Gules, (rose colour,) from the Persian word ' gul,'
for the rose. It is the exactly central hue between the
dark red, and pale red, or wild-rose. It is the colour of
love, the fulfilment of the joy and of the love of life upon
the earth. And it is doubly marked for this symbol. We
saw earlier, how the vase given by the Madelaine was pre-
cious in its material; but it was also to be indicated as
precious in its form. It is not only the substance, but the
form of the Greek urn, which gives it nobleness ; and
these vases for precious perfume were tall, and shaped like
the bud of the rose. So that the rose-bud itself, being a
vase filled with perfume, is called also ' alabastron ' ; and
Pliny uses that word for it in describing the growth of
the rose.
The stone of it is the Ruby.
III. Azure. The colour of the blue sky in the height
VII. THE IRIS OF THE EAETH.
of it, at noon ; type of the fulfilment of all joy and love
in heaven, as the rose-colour, of the fulfilment of all joy
and love in earth. And the stone of this is the Sapphire ;
and because the loves of Earth and Heaven are in truth
one, the ruby and sapphire are indeed the same stone ;
and they are coloured as if by enchantment, how, or
with what, no chemist has yet shown, the one azure, and
the other rose.
And now you will understand why, in the vision of the
Lord of Life to the Elders of Israel, of which it is written,
" Also they saw God, and did eat and drink," you are
told, " Under His feet was a plinth of sapphire, and, as it
were, the body of Heaven in its clearness."
IY. Ucarlate (scarlet). I use the French word, because
all other heraldic words for colours are Norman-French.
The ordinary heraldic term here is tenne ' (tawny) ; for
the later heralds confused scarlet with gules; but the
colour first meant was the sacred hue of human flesh
Carnation ; incarnation : the colour of the body of man
in its beauty ; of the maid's scarlet blush in noble love ;
of the youth's scarlet glow in noble war ; the dye of the
earth into which heaven has breathed its spirit : incarnate
strength incarnate modesty.
The stone of it is the Jasper, which as we shall see, is
coloured with the same iron that colours the human blood ;
and thus you can understand why on the throne, in the
vision of the returning Christ, " He that sat was to look
upon like a jasper and a sardine stone."
1 08 DEUCALION.
Y. Vert, (viridis,) from the same root as the words
'virtue' and 'virgin,' the colour of the green rod in
budding spring ; the* noble life of youth, born in the
spirit, as the scarlet means, the life of noble youth, in
flesh.* It is seen most perfectly in clear air after the
sun has set, the blue of the upper sky brightening down
into it. It is the true colour of the eyes of Athena,
Athena PXau/cw7rt9,t looking from the west.
The stone of it is the Emerald ; and I must stay for a
moment to tell you the derivation of that word.
Anciently, it did not mean our emerald, but a massive
green marble, veined apparently by being rent asunder,
and called, therefore, the Rent or Torn Hock.
Now, in the central war of Athena with the Giants, the
sign of her victory was that the earth was rent, the power
of it torn, and the graves of it opened. We know this is
written for the sign of a greater victory than hers. And
the word which Hesiod uses the oldest describer of this
battle is twice over the same : the sea roared, the heav-
ens thundered, the earth cried out in being rent,
* Therefore, the Spirit of Beatrice is dressed in green, over scarlet,
(not rose ; observe this specially).
" Sovra candido vel, cinta d' oliva
Donna m' apparve sotto verde manto,
Vestita di color difiamma viva."
f Accurately described by Pausanias, 1, xiv., as of the colour of a
green lake, from the Tritonian pool ; compare again the eyes of Bea-
trice.
VH. THE IRIS OF THE EARTH.
From that word yon have " the rent rock,"
in Latin, smaragdus ; in Latin dialect, smaraudus
softened into emerandu, emeraude, emerald. And now
yon see why " there was a rainbow round about the throne
in sight like unto an emerald."
VI. Purpure. The true purple of the Tabernacle,
" blue, purple, and scarlet " the kingly colour, retained
afterwards in all manuscripts of the Greek Gospels ;
therefore known to us absolutely by its constant use in
illumination. It is rose colour darkened or saddened with
blue ; the colour of love in noble or divine sorrow ; borne
by the kings, whose witness is in heaven, and their labour
on the earth. Its stono is the Jacinth, Hyacinth, or Ame-
thyst, " like to that sable flower inscribed with woe."
In these six colours, then, you have the rainbow, or an-
gelic iris, of the light and covenant of life.
But the law of the covenant is, " I do set my bow in
the cloud, on the shadow of death and the ordinance of
it."
And as here, central, is the sun in his strength, so in the
heraldry of our faith, the morning and the evening are the
first day, and the last.
VII. Argent. Silver, or snow-colour ; of the hoar-frost
on the earth, or the star of the morning.
I was long hindered from understanding the entire
group of heraldic colours, because of the mistake in our
use of the word i carbuncle.' It is not the garnet, but the
same stone as the ruby and sapphire only crystallized
110 DEUCALION.
white, instead of red or blue. It is the white sapphire,
showing the hexagonal star of its crystallization perfect-
ly ; and therefore it becomes an heraldic bearing as a
star.
And it is the personal bearing of that Geoffrey Planta-
genet, who married Maud the Empress, and became the
sire of the lords of England, in her glorious time.
VIII. Sable, (sable, sabulum,) the colour of sand of the
great hour-glass of the world, outshaken. Its stone is the
diamond never yet, so far as 1 know, found but in the
sand.* It is the symbol at once of dissolution, and of en-
durance : darkness changing into light the adamant of
the grave.
IX. Gray. (When deep, the second violet, giving
Dante's full chord of the seven colours.) The abatement
of the light, the abatement of the darkness. Patience, be-
tween this which recedes and that which advances ; the
colour of the turtle-dove, with the message that the waters
are abated; the colour of the sacrifice of the poor,
therefore of humility. Its stone is the Pearl ; in Norman
heraldry the Marguerite the lowest on the shield, yet of
great price ; and because, through this virtue, open first
the gates of Paradise, you are told that while the building
of the walls of it was of jasper, every several gate was of
one pearl.
33. You hear me tell you thus positively, and without
* Or in rock virtually composed of it.
VII. THE IRIS OF THE EARTH.
Ill
qualification or hesitation, what these things mean. But
mind, I tell you so, after thirty years' work, and that di-
rected wholly to the one end of finding out the truth,
whether it was pretty or ugly to look in face of. During
which labour I have found that the ultimate truth, the
central truth, is always pretty ; but there is a superficial
truth, or half-way truth, which may be very ugly ; and
which the earnest and faithful worker has to face and
fight, and pass over the body of, feeling it to be his
enemy ; but which a careless seeker may be stopped by,
and a misbelieving seeker will be delighted by, and stay
with, gladly.
34. When I first gave this lecture, you will find the
only reports of it in the papers, with which any pains had
been taken, were endeavours to make you disbelieve it,
or misbelieve it, that is to say, to make ' meseroyants ' or
4 miscreants ' of you.
And among the most earnest of these, was a really in-
dustrious essay in the ' Daily Telegraph,' showing evi-
dence that the writer had perseveringly gone to the Her-
alds' Office and British Museum to read for the occasion ;
and, I think, deserving of serious notice because we really
owe to the proprietors of that journal (who supplied the
most earnest of our recent investigators with funds for
his Assyrian excavations) the most important heraldic
discoveries of the generations of Noah and Nimrod, that
have been made since printing took the place of cuneiform
inscription.
112 DEUCALION.
I pay, therefore, so much respect to the archseologians
of Fleet Street as to notice the results of their suddenly
stimulated investigations in heraldry.
35. " The lecturer appeared to have forgotten," they
said, Ck that every nation had its own code of symbols,
and that gules, or red, is denominated by the French
heralds gueules, and is derived by the best French phi-
lologers from the Latin ' gula,' the gullet of a beast of
prey."
It is perfectly true that the best French philologists do
give this derivation ; but it is also unfortunately true that
the best French philologists are not heralds ; and what is
more, and worse, all modern heraldry whatsoever is, to
the old science, just what the poor gipsy Hayraddin. in
f Quentin Durward,' is to Toison d'Or. But, so far from
having s forgotten,' as the writer for the press supposes I
had, that there were knights of France, and Yen ice, and
Florence, as well as England, it so happens that my first
studies in heraldry were in this manuscript, which is the
lesson-book of heraldry written for the young Archduke
Charles of Austria; and in this one, which is a psalter
written in the monastery of the Saint Chapelle for St.
Louis, King of France ; and on the upper page of which,
here framed,* you will see written, in letters of gold, the
record of the death of his mother, Blanche of Castile, on
the 27th of November, next after St. Genevieve's day ;
* The books referred to, in my rooms at Oxford, are always acces*
ble for examination.
VII. THE IRIS OF THE EARTH. 11<T
and on the under page, between the last lines of the
Athanasian Creed, her bearing, the Castilian tower, alter-
nating with the king's, Azure, seme de France.
36. "With this and other such surer authority than was
open to the investigation of the press- writer, I will clear
up for you his point about the word ' gules.' But I must
go a long way back first. I do not know if, in reading
the account of the pitching of the standards of the princes
of Israel round the Tabernacle, you have ever been
brought to pause by the singular covering given to the
Tabernacle itself, rams' skins dyed red, and badgers 9
skins. Of rams' skins, of course, any quantity could be
had from the flocks, but of badgers', the supply must have
been difficult!
And you will find, on looking into the matter, that the
so-called badgers' skins were indeed those which young
ladies are very glad to dress in at the present day, seal-
skins ; and that the meaning of their use in the Tabernacle
was, that it might be adorned with the useful service of
the flocks of the earth and sea: the multitude of the seals
then in the Mediterranean being indicated to you both by
the name and coinage of the city Phocsea ; and by the at-
tribution of them, to the God Proteus, in the first book of
the Odyssey, under the precise term of flocks, to be counted
by him as their shepherd.
37. From the days of Moses and of Homer to our own,
the traffic in these precious wools and furs, in the Cash-
mere wool, and the fur, after the seal disappeared, of the
114:
DEUCALION.
grey ermine, (becoming white in the Siberian winter,) has
continued : and in the days of chivalry became of im-
mense importance ; because the mantle, and the collar
fastening close about the neck, were at once the most
useful and the most splendid piece of dress of the warrior
nations, who rode and slept in roughest weather, and in
open field. l!sow, these rams' skins, or fleeces, dyed of
precious red, were continually called by their Eastern
merchants 'the red things,' from the Zoroastrian word
'gul,' taking the place of the scarlet Chlamydes, which
were among the richest wealth of old Rome. The Latin
knights could only render the eastern word ' gul ' by gula ;
and so in St. Bernard's red-hot denunciation of these
proud red dresses, he numbers chiefly among them the
little red-dyed skins, pelliculas rubricatas, which they
call gulee : " Quas gulas vocant.-' These red furs, for
wrist and neck, were afterwards supposed by bad Latin-
ists to be called i guise,' as throat-pieces. St. Bernard
specifies them, also, in that oflice : " Even some of the
clergy," he says, " have the red skins of weasels hanging
from their necks dependentes a collo " ; this vulgar in-
terpretation of gula became more commonly accepted, as
intercourse with the East, and chivalric heraldry, dimin-
ished ; and the modern philologist finally jumps fairly
down the lion's throat, and supposes that the Tyrian pur-
ple, which had been the pride of all the Emperors of East
and West, was named from a wild beast's gullet !
38. I do not hold for a mischance, or even for a chance
VII. THE IBIS OF THE EARTH. 115
at all, that this particular error should have been unearth-
ed by the hasty studies of the Dail} 7 Telegraph. It is a
mistake entirely characteristic of the results of vulgar
modern analysis ; and I have exposed it in detail, that
I might very solemnly warn you of the impossibility of
arriving at any just conclusions respecting ancient classi-
cal languages, of which this heraldry is among the noblest,
unless we take pains first to render ourselves capable of
the ideas which such languages convey. It is perfectly
true that every great symbol, as it has, on one side, a
meaning of comfort, has on the other one of terror; and
if to noble persons it speaks of noble things, to ignoble
persons it will as necessarily speak of ignoble ones. Not
under one only, but under all, of these heraldic symbols,
as there is, for thoughtful and noble persons, the spiritual
sense, so for thoughtless and sensual persons, there is the
sensual one ; and can be no other. Every word has only
the meaning which its hearer can receive ; you cannot ex-
press honour to the shameless, nor love to the unloving.
Nay, gradually you may fall to the level of having words
no more, either for honour or for love :
" There are whole nations," says Mr. Farrar, in his ex-
cellent little book on the families of speech, " people
whom no nation now acknowledges as its kinsmen, whose
languages, rich in words for all that can be eaten or
handled, seem absolutely incapable of expressing the re-
flex conceptions of the intellect, or the higher forms of the
consciousness ; whose life seems confined to a gratifica-
116 DEUCALION.
tion of animal wants, with no hope in the future, and no
pride in the past. They are for the most part peoples
without a literature, and without a history ; peoples whose
tongues in some instances have twenty names for murder,
but no name for love, no name for gratitude, no name for
God."
39. The English nation, under the teaching of modern
economists, is rapidly becoming one of this kind, which,
deliberately living, not in love of God or man, but in de-
fiance of God, and hatred of man, will no longer have in
its heraldry, gules as the colour of love ; but gules only as
the colour of the throat of a wild beast. That will be the
only part of the British lion symbolized by the British
flag ; not the lion heart any more, but only the lion gul-
let.
And if you choose to interpret your heraldry in that
modern fashion, there are volumes of instruction open for
you everywhere. Yellow shall be to you the colour of
treachery, instead of sunshine ; green, the colour of putre-
faction, instead of strength ; blue, the colour of sulphur-
ous hell-fire, instead of sunlit heaven ; and scarlet, the
colour of the harlot of Babylon, instead of the Virgin of
God. All these are legitimate readings, nay, inevitable
readings. I said wrongly just now that you might choose
what the symbols shall be to you. Even if you would,
you cannot choose. They can only reflect to you what
you have made your own mind, and can only herald to you
what you have determined for your own fate.
VH. THE IRIS OF THE EARTH. 117
40. And now, with safe understanding of the meaning of
purple, I can show you the purple and dove-colour of St.
Mark's, once itself a sea-borne vase of alabaster full of
incense of prayers ; and a purple manuscript, floor, walls,
and roof blazoned with the scrolls of the gospel.
They have been made a den of thieves, and these stones
of Venice here in my hand * are rags of the sacred robes
of her Church, sold, and mocked like her Master. They
have parted her garments, and cast lots upon her vesture.
41. I return to our question at the beginning : Are we
right in setting our hearts on these stones, loving them,
holding them precious ?
Yes, assuredly ; provided it is the stone we love, and
the stone we think precious ; and not ourselves we love,
and ourselves we think precious. To worship a black
stone, because it fell from heaven, may not be wholly
wise, but it is half-way to being wise ; half-way to worship
of heaven itself. Or, to worship a white stone because it
is dug with difficulty out of the earth, and to put it into
a log of wood, and say the wood sees with it, may not be
* Portions of the alabaster of St. Mark's torn away for recent restor-
ations. The destruction of the floor of the church, to give work to
modern mosaic-mongers, has been going on for years. I cannot bear
the pain of describing the facts of it, and must leave the part of the
lecture referring to the colour of the marbles to be given farther on,
in connection with some extracts from my ' Stones of Venice.' The
superb drawing, by Mr. Bunney, of the north portico, which illustrated
them, together with the alabasters themselves, will be placed in the
Sheffield Museum.
118 DEUCALION.
wholly wise ; but it is half-way to being wise ; half-way
to believing that the God who makes earth so bright, may
also brighten the eyes of the blind. It is no true folly to
think that stones see, but it is, to think that eyes do not ;
it is no true folly to think that stones live, but it is, to
think that souls die ; it is no true folly to believe that, in
the day of the making up of jewels, the palace walls shall
be compact of life above their corner-stone, but it is, to
believe that in the day of dissolution the souls of the
globe shall be shattered with its emerald ; and no spirit
survive, unterrified, above the ruin.
42. Yes, pretty ladies ! love the stones, and take care
of them ; but love your own souls better, and take care of
them, for the day when the Master shall make up His
jewels. See that it be first the precious stones of the breast-
plate of justice you delight in, and are brave in ; not first
the stones, of your own diamond necklaces * you delight
in, and are fearful for, lest perchance the lady's maid miss
that box at the station. Get your breastplate of truth
first, and every earthly stone will shine in it.
* Do you think there was no meaning- of fate in that omen of the
diamond necklace ; at the end of the days of queenly pride ; omen of
another line, of scarlet, on many a fair neck ? It was a foul story, you
say slander of the innocent. Yes, undoubtedly, fate meant it to be so.
Slander, and lying, and every form of loathsome shame, cast on the
innocently fading Royalty. For the corruption of the best is the worst ;
and these gems, which are given by God to be on the breast of the pure
priest, and in the crown of the righteous king, sank into the black gravel
of diluvium, under streams of innocent blood.
UN'
^-
VII. THE IEIS OF THE EARTH. 119^
Alas ! most of you know no more what justice means,
than what jewels mean ; but here is the pure practice of
it to be begun, if you w r ill, to-morrow.
43. For literal truth of your jewels themselves, abso-
lutely search out and cast away all manner of false, or
dyed, or altered stones. And at present, to make quite
sure, wear your jewels uncut; they will be twenty times
more interesting to you, so. The ruby in the British
crown is uncut ; and is, as far as my knowledge extends,
I have not had it to look at close, the loveliest precious
stone in the world. And, as a piece of true gentle-
woman's and true lady's knowledge, learn to know theso
stones when you see them, uncut. So much of mineralogy
the abundance of modern science may, I think, spare, as a
piece of required education for the upper classes.
44. Then, when you know them, and their shapes, get
your highest artists to design the setting of them. Hol-
bein, Botticelli, or Angelico, will always be ready to
design a brooch for you. Then you will begin to think
how to get your Holbein and Botticelli, which will lead
to many other wholesome thoughts.
45. And lastly, as you are true in the choosing, be just
in the sharing, of your jewels. They are but dross and
dust, after all ; and you, my sweet religious friends, who
are so anxious to impart to the poor your pearls of great
price, may surely also share with them your pearls of little
price. Strangely (to my own mind at least), you are not
so zealous in distributing your estimable rubies, as you
120 DEUCALION.
are in communicating your ^estimable wisdom. Of the
grace of God, which you can give away in the quantity
you think others are in need of, without losing any your-
selves, I observe you to be affectionately lavish ; but
of the jewels of God, if any suggestions be made by char-
ity touching the distribution of them^ you are apt, in your
wisdom, to make answer like the wise virgins, " Not so,
lest there be not enough for us and you."
46. Now, my fair friends, doubtless, if the Tabernacle
were to be erected again, in the middle of the Park, you
would all be eager to stitch camels' hair for it ; some, to
make presents of sealskins to it ; and, perhaps, not a few
fetch your jewel-cases, offering their contents to the selec-
tion of Bezaleel and Aholiab.
But that cannot be, now, with so Crystal-Palace-like
entertainment to you. The tabernacle of God is now
with men ; in men, and women, and sucklings also ;
which temple ye are, ye and your Christian sisters ;
of whom the poorest, here in London, are a very undec-
orated shrine indeed. They are the Tabernacle, fair
friends, which you have got leave, and charge, to adorn.
Not, in anywise, those charming churches and altars
which you wreathe with garlands for God's sake, and the
eloquent clergyman's. You are quite wrong, and barbar-
ous in language, when you call them i Churches ' at all.
They are only Synagogues ; the very same of which
Christ spoke, with eternal meaning, as the places that
hypocrites would love to be seen in. Here, in St. Giles's,
VH. THE IRIS OF THE EARTH. 121
and the East, sister to that in St. George's, and the West,
is the Church ! raggedly enough curtained, surely ! Let
those arches and pillars of Mr. Scott's alone, young ladies :
it is you whom God likes to see well decorated, not them.
Keep your roses for your hair your embroidery for your
petticoats. You are yourselves the Church, dears ; and
see that you be finally adorned, as women professing god-
liness, with the precious stones of good works, which may
be quite briefly defined, for the present, as decorating the
entire Tabernacle ; and clothing your poor sisters, with
yourselves. Put roses also in their hair, put precious
stones also on their breasts ; see that they also are clothed
in your purple and scarlet, with other delights ; that they
also learn to read the gilded heraldry of the sky ; and,
upon the earth, be taught, not only the labours of it, but
the loveliness. For them, also, let the hereditary jewel
recall their father's pride, their mother's beauty : so shall
your days, and theirs, be long in the sweet and sacred
land which the Lord your God has given you : so, truly,
Shall THE GOLD OF THAT LAND BE GOOD, AND THERE, ALSO,
THE CRYSTAL, AND THE ONYX STONE.
CHAPTEE VIII.
THE ALPHABET.
(Chapter written to introduce the preceding Lecture ; but
transposed, that the Lecture might not be divided be-
tween two numbers.)
1. SINCE the last sentence of the preceding number
of ' Deucalion ' was written, I have been compelled,
in preparing for the arrangement of my Sheffield mu-
seum, to look with nicety into the present relations
of theory to knowledge in geological science ; and find,
to my no small consternation, that the assertions which I
had supposed beyond dispute, made by the geologists
of forty years back, respecting the igneous origin of the
main crystalline masses of the primary rocks, are now all
brought again into question ; and that the investigations
of many of the most intelligent observers render many
former theories, in their generality, more than doubtful.
My own studies of rock structure, with reference to land-
scape, have led me, also, to see the necessity of retreating
to and securing the very bases of knowledge in this infin-
itely difficult science: and I am resolved, therefore;
Vin. THE ALPHABET.
at once to make the series of ( Deucalion ' an absolutely
trustworthy foundation for the geological teaching in St.
George's schools ; by first sifting what is really known
from what is supposed ; and then, out of things known,
sifting what may be usefully taught to young people,
from the perplexed vanity of prematurely systematic
science.
2. I propose, also, in the St. George's Museum at Shef-
field, and in any provincial museums hereafter connected
with it, to allow space for two arrangements of inorganic
substances ; one for mineralogists, properly so called, and
the general public ; the other for chemists, and advanced
students in physical science. The mineral ogical collec-
tion will be fully described and explained in its cata-
logue, so that very young people may begin their study
of it without difficulty, and so chosen and arranged as to
be comprehensible by persons who have not the time to
make themselves masters of the science of chemistry, but
who may desire some accurate acquaintance with the as-
pect of the principal minerals which compose the world.
And I trust, as I said in the preceding lecture, that the
day is near when the knowledge of the native forms and
aspects of precious stones will be made a necessary part
of a lady's education ; and knowledge of the nature of
the soils, and the building stones, of his native country, a
necessary part of a gentleman's.
3. The arrangement of the chemical collection I shall
leave to any good chemist who will undertake it : I sup-
124 DEUCALION.
pose that now adopted by Mr. Maskelyne for the minera
collection in the British Museum may be considered as
permanently authoritative.
But the mineralogical collection I shall arrange myself,
as aforesaid, in the manner which I think likely to be
clearest for simple persons ; omitting many of the rarer
elements altogether, in the trust that they will be suffi-
ciently illustrated by the chemical series ; and placing the
substances most commonly seen in the earth beneath our
feet, in an order rather addressed to the convenience of
memory than to the symmetries of classification.
4. In the outset, therefore, I shall divide our entire
collection into twenty groups, illustrated each by a sepa-
rately bound portion of catalogue.
These twenty groups will illustrate the native states,
and ordinary combinations, of nine solid oxides, one
gaseous element (fluorine), and ten solid elements, placed
in the following order :
1. Silica.
2. Oxide of Titanium.
3. Oxide of Iron.
4. Alumina.
5. Potassa.
6. Soda.
7. Magnesia.
8. Calcium.
9. Glucina.
10. Fluorine.
VIII. THE ALPHABET.
125
11. Carbon.
12. Sulphur.
13. Phosphorus.
14 Tellurium.
15. Uranium.
16. Tin.
IT. Lead.
18. Copper.
19. Silver.
20. Gold.
5. A few words will show the objects proposed by this
limited arrangement. The three first oxides are placed
in one group, on account of the natural fellowship and
constant association of their crystals.
Added to these, the next group of the alkaline earths
will constitute one easily memorable group of nine
oxides, out of which, broadly and practically, the solid
globe of the earth is made, containing in the cracks,
rents, or volcanic pits of it, the remaining eleven sub-
stances, variously prepared for man's use, torment, or
temptation.
6. I put fluorine by itself, on account of its notable
importance in natural mineralogy, and especially in that
of Cornwall, Derbyshire, and Cumberland : what I have
to say of chlorine and iodine will be arranged under the
same head ; then the triple group of anomalous sub-
stances created for ministry by fire, and the seven-fold
group of the great metals, complete the list of substances
126 DEUCALION.
which must be generally known to the pupils in St.
George's schools. The phosphates, sulphates, and car-
bonates of the earths, will be given with the earths ; and
those of the metals, under the metals. The carburets,
sulphurets, and phosphurets, * under carbon, sulphur, and
phosphorus. Under glucina, given representatively, on
account of its importance in the emerald, will be given
what specimens may be desirable of the minor or auxili-
ary earths baryta, strontia, etc. ; and under tellurium
and uranium, the auxiliary metals platinum, columbium,
etc., naming them thus together, under those themselves
named from Tellus and Uranus. With uranium I shall
place the cupreous micas, for their similarity of aspect.
7. The minerals referred to each of these twenty
groups will be further divided, under separate letters, into
such minor classes as may be convenient, not exceeding
twenty : the letters being initial, if possible, of the name
of the class ; but the letters I and J omitted, that they
may not be confused with numerals ; and any letter of
important sound in the mineral's name substituted for
these, or for any other that would come twice over.
Then any number of specimens may be catalogued under
each letter.
For instance, the siliceous minerals which are the sub-
ject of study in the following lecture will be lettered
thus :
* I reject the modern term 'sulphide* unhesitatingly. It is ft*
barbarous as ' carbide.'
VIII. THE ALPHABET. 127'
A. Agate.
0. Carnelian.
H. Hyalite.
L. Chalcedony.
M. Amethyst.
O. Opal.
Q. Quartz.
S. Jasper.
In which list, M is used that we may not have A repeated,
and will yet be sufficiently characteristic of Ame-
thyst ; and L, to avoid the repetition of 0, may stand
for Chalcedony ; while S, being important in the
sound of Jasper, will serve instead of excluded J, or pre-
engaged A.
The complete label, then, on any (principally) siliceous
mineral will be in such form as these following :
1 A 1, meaning Silica, Agate, No. 1.
1 L 40, " Silica, Chalcedony, No. 40.
1 Q 520, " Silica, Quartz, No. 520.
8. In many of the classes, as in this first one of Silica,
we shall not need all our twenty letters ; but there will be
a letter A to every class, which will contain the examples
that explain the relation and connection of the rest. It
happens that in Silica, the agates exactly serve this pur-
pose ; and therefore may have A for their proper initial
letter. But in the case of other minerals, the letter A
will not be the initial of the mineral's name, but the
128 DEUCALION.
indication of its character, as explanatory of the succeed-
ing series.
Thus the specimen* of gold, referred to as 20 A 1 in
the preceding lecture, is the first of the series exhibiting
the general method of the occurrence of native gold in
the rocks containing it; and the complete series in the
catalogue will be
A. Native Gold, in various geological
formations.
B. Branched Gold.
C. Crystalline Gold.
D. Dispersed Gold.
G. Granulate Gold.
K Knitted Gold.
L. Leaf Gold.
M. Mossy Gold.
E. Boiled Gold.
9. It may be at once stated that I shall always retain
the word ' branched ' for minerals taking either of the
forms now called arborescent ' or ' dendritic.' The
advance of education must soon make all students feel
the absurdity of using the epithet ' tree-like ' in Latin,
with a different meaning from the epithet ' tree-like ' in
Greek. My general word * branched ' will include both
the so-called ' arborescent ' forms (meaning those branched
in straight crystals), and the so-called l dendritic'
(branched like the manganese or oxide in Mocha stones ;)
Plate IV.
AMETHYST-QUARTZ,
With Warped Faults in Concretion.
Ssi
VIII. THE ALPHABET.
129
but with most accurate explanation of tile difference;
while the term ' spun ' will be reserved for the variously
thread-like forms, inaccurately now called dendritic,
assumed characteristically by native silver and copper.
Of course, thread, branch, leaf, and grain, are all in!
most cases crystalline, no less definitely than larger crys-
tals ; but all my epithets are for practical service, not
scientific definition ; and I mean by ' crystalline gold ' a
specimen which distinctly shows octohedric or other speci-
fic form ; and by ' branched gold ' a specimen in which
such crystalline forms are either so indistinct or so minute
as to be apparently united into groups resembling branches
of trees.
10. Everyone of the specimens will be chosen for some
specialty of character ; and the points characteristic of it
described in the catalogue ; and whatever questions
respecting its structure are yet unsolved, and significant,
will be submitted in succession, noted each by a Greek
letter, so that any given question may be at once referred
to. Thus, for instance : question a in example 20 G 1
will be the relation of the subdivided or granular condi-
tion of crystalline gold to porous states of the quartz
matrix. As the average length of description required
by any single specimen, chosen on such principle, ought to
be at least half a page of my usual type, the distribution
of the catalogue into volumes will not seem unnecessary ;
especially as in due course of time, I hope that each
volume will consist of two parts, the first contain-
130 DEUCALION.
ing questions submitted, and the second, solutions re-
ceived.
The geological serfes will be distinguished by two
letters instead of one, the first indicating the principal
locality of the formation, or at least that whence it was
first named. And I shall distinguish all formations by
their localities " M. L., Malham limestone " ; " S. S.,
Skiddaw slate"; etc., leaving the geologists to assign
systematic or chronological names as they like. What is
pliocene to-day may be pleistocene to-morrow ; and what
is triassic in Mr. A.'s system, tesserassic in Mr. B.'s ; but
Turin gravels and Warwick sands remain where they
used to be, for all that.
These particulars being understood, the lecture which I
gave this spring on the general relations of precious
minerals to human interests, may most properly introduce
us to our detailed and progressive labour ; and two para-
graphs of it, incidentally touching upon methods of public
instruction, may fitly end the present chapter.
11. In all museums intended for popular teaching,
there are two great evils to be avoided. The first is,
superabundance ; the second, disorder. The first is hav-
ing too much of everything. You will find in your own
work that the less you have to look at, the better you at-
tend. You can no more see twenty things worth seeing
in an hour, than you can read twenty books worth reading
in a day. Give little, but that little good and beautiful,
and explain it thoroughly. For instance, here in crystal,
VHI. THE ALPHABET 131
you may have literally a thousand specimens, every one
with something new in it to a mineralogist ; but what is
the use of that to a man who has only a quarter of an
hour to spare in a week? Here are four pieces showing
it in perfect purity, with the substances which it is
fondest of working with, woven by it into tissues as fine
as Penelope's; and one crystal of it stainless, with the
favourite shape it has here in Europe the so-called
' flute-beak ' of Dauphine, let a man once understand
that crystal, and study the polish of this plane surface,
given to it by its own pure growth, and the word ' crys-
tal ' will become a miracle to him, and a treasure in his
heart for evermore.
12. Not too much, is the first law ; not in disorder, is
%
the second. Any order will do, if it is fixed and intelli-
gible : no system is of use that is disturbed by additions,
or difficult to follow ; above all, let all things, for popular
use, be 'beautifully exhibited. In our own houses, we
may have our drawers and bookcases as rough as we
please ; but to teach our people rightly, we must make it
a true joy to them to see the pretty things we have to
show : and we must let them feel that, although, by
poverty, they may be compelled to the pain of labour,,
they need not, by poverty, be debarred from the felicifrj
and the brightness of rest ; nor see the work of great
artists, or of the great powers of nature, disgraced by
commonness an} vileness in the manner of setting them
forth. Stateliness, splendour, and order are above all
132 DEUCALION.
things needful in places dedicated to the highest labours
of thought : what we willingly concede to the Graces of
Society, we must reverently offer to the Muses of Seclu-
sion ; and out of the millions spent annually to give
attractiveness to folly, may spare at least what is necessary
to give honour to Instruction.
CHAPTER IX.
FIRE AND WATER.
1. IN examining any mineral, I wish my pupils first tc
be able to ascertain easily what it is ; then to be accur-
ately informed of what is known respecting the processes
of its formation ; lastly, to examine, with such precision
as their time or instruments may permit, the effects of
such formation on the substance. Thus, from almost any
piece of rock, in Derbyshire, over which spring water has
trickled or dashed for any length of time, they may break
with a light blow a piece of brown incrustation, which,
with little experience, they may ascertain to be carbonate
of lime ; of which they may authoritatively be told that
it was formed by slow deposition from the dripping
water ; and in which, with little strain of sight, they
may observe structural lines, vertical to the surface, which
present many analogies with those which may be seen in
coats of semi-crystalline quartz, or reniform chalcedony.
2. The mofe accurate the description they can give of
the aspect of the stone, and the more authoritative and
sifted the account they can render of the circumstances of
its origin, the greater shall I consider their progress, and
the more hopeful their scientific disposition.
134 DEUCALION.
But I absolutely forbid their proceeding to draw any
logical inferences from what they know of stalagmite, to
what they don't know* of chalcedony. They are not to
indulge either their reason or their imagination in the
feeblest flight beyond the verge of actual experience ; and
they are to quench, as demoniacal temptation, any dispo-
sition they find in themselves to suppose that, because
stalagmite and chalcedony both show lines of structure
vertical to reniform surface, both have been deposited in
a similar manner from a current solution. They are to
address themselves to the investigation of the chalcedony
precisely as if no stalagmite were in existence, to inquire
first what it is ; secondly, when and how it is known to be
formed ; and, thirdly, what structure is discernible in it,
leaving to the close of their lives, and of other people's,
the collection, from evidence thus securely accumulated,
of such general conclusions as may then, without dispute,
and without loss of time through prejudice in error, man-
ifest themselves, not as 'theories,' but as demonstrable
laws.
When, however, for the secure instruction of my thus
restrained and patient pupils, I look, myself, for what is
actually told me by eye-witnesses, of the formation of
mineral bodies, I find the sources of information so few,
the facts so scanty, and the connecting paste, or diluvial
detritus, of past guesses, so cumbrously delaying the oper-
ation of rational diamond-washing, that I am fain, as the
shortest way, to set such of my friends as are minded to
IX. FIRE AND WATER. 135"
help me, to begin again at the very beginning ; and reas-
sert, for the general good, what their eyes can now see,
in what their hands can now handle.
3. And as we have begun with a rolled flint, it seems
by special guidance of Fors that the friend who has
already first contributed to the art-wealth of the Sheffield
Museum, Mr. Henry Willett, is willing also to be the
first contributor to its scientific treasuries of fact ; and
has set himself zealously to collect for us the pheno-
mena observable in the chalk and flint of his neighbour
hood.
Of which kindly industry, the following trustworthy
notes have been already the result, which, (whether the
like observations have been made before or not being quite
immaterial to the matter in hand,) are assuredly them-
selves original and secure : not mere traditional gossip.
Before giving them, however, I will briefly mark their
relations to the entire subject of the structure of siliceous
minerals.
4. There are a certain number of rocks in the world,
which have been seen by human eyes, flowing, white-hot,
and watched by human eyes as they cool down. The
structure of these rocks is therefore absolutely known tc
have had something to do with fire.
There are a certain number of other rocks in the world
which have been seen by human eyes in a state of wet
sand or mud, and which have been watched, as they dried;
into substances more or less resembling stone. The struc-
136 DEUCALION.
ture of these rocks is therefore known to have had some
thing to do with water.
Between these two*mate rials, whose nature is avouched
by testimony, there occur an indefinite number of rocks,
which no human eyes have ever seen, either hot or muddy ;
but which nevertheless show curious analogies to the as-
certainably cooled substances on the one side, and to the
ascertainably dried substances on the other. Respecting
these medial formations, geologists have disputed in my
ears during the half-century of my audient life ; (and had
been disputing for about a century before I was born,)
without having yet arrived at any conclusion whatever;
the book now held to be the principal authority on the
subject, entirely contradicting, as aforesaid, the conclu-
sions which, until very lately, the geological world, if it
had not accepted as incontrovertible, at least asserted as
positive.
5. In the said book, however, Gustaf Bischof's Chem-
ical Geology, there are, at last, collected a large num-
ber of important and secure facts, bearing on mineral for-
mation : and principles of microscopic investigation have
been established by Mr. Sorby, some years ago, which
have, I doubt not, laid the foundation, at last, of the sound
knowledge of the conditions under which crystals are
formed. Applying Mr. Sorby 's method, with steady in-
dustry, to the rocks of Cumberland, Mr. Clifton Ward
has, so far as I can judge, placed the nature of these, at
least, within the range of secure investigation. M r .
IX. FIRE AND WATER.
137 -
"Ward's kindness has induced him also to spare the time
needful for the test of the primary phenomena of agates-
cent structure in a similar manner ; and I am engraving
the beautiful drawings he sent me, with extreme care, for
our next number ; to be published with a letter from him,
containing, I suppose, the first serviceable description of
agatescent structure yet extant.*
6. Hitherto, however, notwithstanding all that has been
accomplished, nobody can tell us how a common flint is
made. Nobody ever made one; nobody has ever seen
one naturally coagulate, or naturally dissolve ; nobody
has ever watched their increase, detected their diminu-
tion, or explained the exact share which organic bodies
have in their formation. The splendid labours of Mr.
Bowerbank have made us acquainted with myriads of
organic bodies which have provoked siliceous concretion,
or become entangled in it : but the beautiful forms which
these present have only increased the difficulty of deter-
mining the real crystalline modes of siliceous structure,
unaffected by organic bodies.
Y. Crystalline modes ^ I say, as distinguished from crys-
talline laws. It is of great importance to mineralogy
that we should carefully distinguish between the laws or
limits which determine the possible angles in the form of
* I must, however, refer the reader to the valuable summary of work
hitherto done on this subject by Professor Kupert Jones. (Proceedings
of Geologists' Association, Vol. IV., No. 7,) for examination of these
questions of priority.
138 DEUCALIOIT.
a mineral, and the modes, or measures, in which, accord-
ing to its peculiar nature or circumstances, it conducts
itself under these resfrictions.
Thus both cuprite and fluor are under laws which en-
force cubic or octohedric angles in their crystals ; but
cuprite can arrange its cubes in fibres finer than those
of the softest silk, while fluor spar only under rare con-
ditions distinctly elongates its approximate cube into a
parallelepiped.
Again, the prismatic crystals of Wavellite arrange
themselves invariably in spherical or reniform concre-
tions ; but the rhombohedral crystals of quartz and hema-
tite do so only under particular conditions, the study of
which becomes a quite distinct part of their lithology.
8. This stellar or radiant arrangement is one essential
condition in the forms and phenomena of agate and chal-
cedony ; and Mr. Clifton Ward has shown in the paper
to which I have just referred, that it is exhibited under
the microscope as a prevalent condition in their most
translucent substance, and on the minutest scale.
Now all siliceous concretions, distinguishing themselves
from the mass of the surrounding rocks, are to be ar-
ranged under two main classes ; briefly memorable as
knots and nuts ; the latter, from their commonly oval
form, ha\ r e been usually described by mineralogists as,
more specially, l almonds.'
'Knots' are concretions of silica round some central
point or involved substance, (often organic) ; such knots
. i \
IX. FIKE AND WATER.
being usually harder and more solid in the centre than at
the outside, and having their fibres of crystallization, if
visible, shot outwards like the rays of a star, forming pyra-
midal crystals on the exterior of the knot.
9. ( Almonds ' are concretions of silica formed in cavi-
ties of rocks, or, in some cases, probably by their own
energy producing the cavities they enclose ; the fibres of
crystallization, if visible, being directed from the outside
of the almond-shell towards its interior cavity.
10. These two precisely opposite conditions are sever-
ally represented best by a knot of sound black flint in
chalk, and by a well-formed hollow agate in a volcanic
rock.
I have placed in the Sheffield Museum a block of black
flint, formed round a bit of Inoceramus shell ; and an
almond-shell of agate, about six times as big as a cocoa
nut, which will satisfactorily illustrate these two states.
But between the two, there are two others of distinctly
gelatinous silica, and distinctly crystalline silica, filling
pores, cavities, and veins, in rocks, by infiltration or se-
cretion. And each of these states will be found passing
through infinite gradations into some one of the three
others, so that separate account has to be given of every
step in the transitions before we can rightly understand
the main types.
11. But at the base of the whole subject lies, first, the
clear understanding of the way a knot of solid crystalline
substance say, a dodecahedral garnet forms itself out of
140 DEUCALION.
a rock-paste, say greenstone trap, without admitting a hairs-
breadth of interstice between the formed knot and enclos-
ing paste ; and, secondly, clear separation in our thoughts,
of the bands or layers which are produced by crystalline
segregation, from those produced by successively accu
mulating substance. But the method of increase of crys-
tals themselves, in an apparently undisturbed solution,
has never yet been accurately described ; how much less
the phenomena resulting from influx of various elements,
and changes of temperature and pressure. The frontis-
piece to the third number of ' Deucalion ' gives typical
examples of banded structure resulting from pure crystal-
line action ; and the three specimens, 1. A. 21, 22, and 23,
at Sheffield, furnish parallel examples of extreme inter-
est. But a particular form of banding in flint, first no-
ticed and described by Mr. S. P. Woodward,* is of more
interest than any other in the total obscurity of its origin ;
and in the extreme decision of the lines by which, in a
plurality of specimens, the banded spaces are separated
from the homogeneous ones, indicating the first approach
to the conditions which produce, in more perfect mate-
rials, the forms of, so-called, l brecciated ' agates. To-
gether with these, a certain number of flints are to be ex-
amined which present every appearance of having been
violently fractured and re-cemented. Whether fractured
by mechanical violence, by the expansive or decomponent
* 'Geological Magazine,' 1864, vol. i., p. 145, pi. vii. and viii
IX. FIRE AND WATER. 14:1
forces of contained minerals, or by such slow contraction
and re-gelation as must have taken place in most veins
through masses of rock, we have to ascertain by the con-
tinuance of such work as my friend has here begun.
LETTER I. * Introductory.
12. " I am beginning to be perplexed about the num-
ber of flints, containing problems and illustrations, and
wondering to what extent my inquiries will be of any use
to you.
" I intended at first to collect only what was really
beautiful in itself * crystalline M but how the subject
widens, and how the arbitrary divisions do run into one
another ! What a paltry shifting thing our classification
is ! One is sometimes tempted to give it all up in disgust,
and I have a shrewd suspicion that all scientific classifi-
cation (except for mutual aid to students) is absurd
and pedantic : (a) varieties, species, genera, classes,
orders, have most of them more in common than of
divergence, c a forming spirit ' everywhere, for use and
beauty.
* I shall put my own notes on these and any future communications
I may insert, in small print at the bottom of the pages ; and with let-
ter-references a, 5, etc. ; but the notes of the authors themselves will
be put at the end of their papers, in large print, and with number-ref-
erences 1, 2, etc.
(a) All, at least, is imperfect ; and most of it absurd in the attempt
to be otherwise.
142 DEUCALION.
"It is (to me) impossible to separate purely mineral
and chemical siliceous bodies in chalk, (b) from those
which are partly formed by the silicate-collecting sponges,
which seem to have given them their forms.
" Who is to say that the radiations and accretions of a
crystal are not life, but that the same arrangements in a
leaf or a tree are life ? that the clouds which float in
their balanced changeableness are not as much guided and
defined as the clouds of the chalcedony, or the lenses of
the human eye which perceives them ?
" I think the following facts are plain :
" 1. The chalk bands do go through the flint.
" 2. Fissures in flints are constantly repaired by fresh
deposits of chalcedony and silex.
" 3. Original sponge matter is preserved (c) and obliter-
ated by siliceous deposit, in extent and degree varying
infinitely, and apparently proportioned to the amount of
iron present i. e., the iron preserves original form, unless
when combined with sulphur enough to crystallize, when
all the original structure disappears.
" 4. Amygdaloids seem to be formed by a kind of inde-
pendent or diverse arrangement of molecules, caused by
slight admixture of foreign minerals."
(5) It may be doubtful if any such exist in chalk ; but, if they exist,
they will eventually be distinguishable.
(c) Q. The form or body of it only ; is the matter itself ever pre-
served ?
IX. FIRE AND WATER. 143'
LETTER II. Memoranda made at ManteWs Quarry^
Cuckfieldj on the banding noticed in the beds and
nodules of the siliceous calciferous sandstone there,
31st May, 1876.
Nos. I. and II. Ovate, concentric, ferruginous bandings ;
the centre apparently (1) free from banding.
III. Bands arranged at acute angles. These bands are
not caused by fracture, but apparently by the intersection,
at an acute angle, of the original lines of deposit, (d)
IV. In this specimen the newly fractured surfaces
show no bandings, but the weathered surface develops
the banding.
V. Ditto i. e. bands parallel ; much more ferrugi
nous, and consequently more friable when exposed to
weathering.
May not something be learnt regarding the laws of
banding in agates, flints, etc., from observing the arrange-
ment of banding in rocks composed mainly of siliceous
matter ? (e}
May not some of the subtler influences which regulate
the growth of trees in their lines of annual increase (mag-
Note 1, page 170.
(d) These angular concretions require the closest study ; see the seg-
ments of spheres in the plate given in the last number.
(e) More, I should say, from the agates, respecting the laws of band
ing in rocks: see the plate to the present number. When we can
explain the interruptions of the bands on such scale as this, we may
begin to understand some of those in larger strata.
144 DEUCALION.
netic probably) have some effect in the arrangement of
minerals in solution ? nay, even of the higher vital pro-
cesses, such as the deposition of osseous matter in teeth
and bones ? (f)
LETTER III. Memoranda inspecting landed chalk.
I. In the banded lines (ferruginous) noticed above and
below the horizontal fissures beneath the cliff at the Hope
Gap, Seaford, it is evident that these lines are not mark-
ings of original deposition, but are caused by successive
infiltrations of water containing iron in solution, (g)
II. Concentric markings of the same nature are observ-
able in places where
a. Iron pyrites are decomposing, and the iron in solu-
tion is being successively infiltrated into the surrounding
chalk rock.
b. From dropping of ferruginous springs through crev-
ices on horizontal surfaces.
c. This is observable also on surfaces of tabular flint.
III. Yery peculiar contorted bandings, (similar to the
so-called contorted-rocks,) are observable in certain places,
notably in the face of the chalk-pit on the east side of Gold-
stone Bottom. This chalk-pit, or quarry, is remarkable
(/) Yes, certainly; but in such case, the teeth and bones act by
mineral law ; not the minerals by teeth and bone law.
(g) Questionable. Bands are almost always caused by concretion,
or separation, not infiltration. However caused, the essential point,
in the assertion of which this paper has so great value, is their distino
tion from strata.
IX. FIRE AND WATER. 145
t. For the contorted bandings in the chalk rock which
are not markings of original deposition , being quite inde-
pendent of original stratification. (A)
2. For the excessive shattering and fissuring observable.
3. For the fact that these cracks and fissures have been
refilled with distinctive and varying substances, as with
flint, clay, Websterite, and intermediate admixtures of
these substances.
4. For veins of flint, formerly horizontal, which show
visible signs of displacement by subsidence.
5. For the numerous fissures in these veins of tabular
flint being stained by iron, which apparently aids in
the further process of splitting up and of widening the
minute crevices in the flint. The iron also appears to be
infiltrated at varying depths into the body of unfractured
flint.
Qy. Has not ordinary flint the power or property of
absorbing ferruginous fluid ?
LETTER 1Y. Memoranda respecting brecciate flint.
"June 7, 1876.
" I hasten to report the result of my fresh inquiry re-
specting the specimen 1 first sent to you as ' breccia,' but
which you doubted.
(h) A most important point. It is a question with me whether the
greater number of minor contortions in Alpine limestones may not have
been produced in this manner. When once the bands are arranged by
segregation, chemical agencies will soon produce mechanical separation,
as of original beds.
146
DEUCALION.
" The site is the embouchure of the little tidal river
Cuckmere, about two miles east of Seaford. I found a
block at about the same spot (about three hundred yards
east of the coastguard station, and about three quarters
of the distance west of the river's mouth).
" The rocks are here covered with sand, or with a bed
of the old valley alluvium, not yet removed by wave
action. Travelling westward, the transported blocks of
breccia gradually increase in size, (a pretty sure augury
that they were derived from a western source). The
whole coast is subject to a very rapid degradation and con-
sequent encroachment of the sea, the average in some
places being from twenty-five to thirty feet yearly. At
a spot a hundred yards east of the coastguard station,
blocks of one or two tons were visible. The denuded
chalk rock is of chalk, seamed and fissured ; the cliff of
the same nature ; but all the flints, and especially the tab-
ular veins, are splintered and displaced to an unusual
extent.
"Farther westward yet, the blocks of breccia weigh
several tons, the cement being itself fissured, and in some
places consisting of angular fragments stained with iron.
From one mass I extracted a hollow circular flint split
into four or five pieces, the fragments, although displaced,
re-cemented in juxtaposition, (i)
(i) I am not prepared to admit, yet, that any of these phenomena are
owing to violence. We shall see.
IX. FIRE AND WATER. 147'
" At the Ebpe Gap, the whole cliff becomes a fractured
mass, the fissures being refilled, sometimes with calcareous
cement, sometimes with clay, and in other places being
hollow.
" From the sides of an oblique fissure filled with clay I
extracted two pieces of a nodular flint, separated from
each other by a two-inch seam of clay : when replaced
(the clay having been removed) the two fitted exactly. An
examination of the rocks shows that the fissures, which
run in all directions, are largest when nearly horizontal,
dipping slightly seawards.
" The upper and lower portions of some of these hori
zontal fissures are banded with iron stains, evidently
derived from iron- water percolating the seams.
" If I am right, therefore, the mystery seems to be ex-
plained thus : (k)
" I. Rain water, charged with carbonic acid, falling on
the hills behind, trickles past the grass and humus beneath,
through the cracks in the chalk, dissolving the carbonate
of lime into a soluble bi-carbonate. Falling downwards,
it escapes seawards through the horizontal fissures, widen-
ing them by its solvent power.
" II. The weight of the superincumbent mass by slow,
(k) I think this statement of Mr. Willett's extremely valuable ; and
see no reason to doubt its truth, as an explanation of the subsidence of
chalk and limestone in certain localities. I do not hitherto receive it
as any explanation of fracture in flints. I believe Dover Cliffs might
gink to Channel bottom without splitting a flint, unless bedded.
148 DEUCALION.
certain, irregular pressure, descends, maintaining the con-
tact of surfaces, but still ever sinking at intervals, varied
by the resisting forces* of weight and pressure.
" III. This process is probably accelerated by the inflow
and reflow of salt water at the ebb and flow of tide (into
the fissures.)
" IV. At certain periods, probably in the summer, (as
soluble bi-carbonate of lime becomes less soluble as
temperature increases,) a portion becomes redeposited as
a hard semi-crystalline calcareous cement.
" Y. This cement appears, in some instances, to be
slightly siliceous, and may have a tendency, by the
mutual attraction of siliceous matter, to form solid layers
of tabular flint.
" YI. If these deductions be correct, it is probable that
the great results involved in the sinking of limestone
hills, and the consequent encroachment of the sea, may
be traced (step by step) to the springs in valleys i which
run among the hills ; ' thence to the rain and dewdrops ;
higher up to the mists and clouds ; and so onward, by
solar heat, to the ocean, where at last again they find
their rest."
LETTER Y. Final Abstract.
"June 13, 1876.
"In addition to the heat derived from summer and
atmospheric changes, there will be a considerable amount
of heat evolved from the friction produced between the
sides of fissures when slipping and subsidence occur,
IX. FIRE AND WATER.
and from the crushing down of flint supports when weight
overcomes resistance.
" After heavy rainfall
1. Fissures are filled.
2. Solution is ravid.
3. Hydraulic pressure increases.
4. Fissures are widened.
" After a period of dry weather
1". Solution is diminished.
2. Hydraulic pressure relieved.
3. Subsidence and flint-crushing commence, or pro-
gress more rapidly.
4. Heat is evolved.
5. Carbonic acid discharged.
6. Semi-crystalline carbonate of lime is deposited
around.
a. Fragments of crushed flint, (at rest at intermit-
ting intervals between motion of rocks).
5. Angular fragments of original chalk rock.
c. Angular fractured pieces of old cement.
" 1 have a dawning suspicion that siliceous deposits (as
chalcedony, etc.) are made when the temperature falls,
for reasons which 1 must postpone to a future paper."
(1) Probably the same arrangement exists (concentric),
but has not been made visible because the iron has not
been oxydized.
CHAPTER X.
VILLAGE OP SIMPLON, 2d September, 1876.
1. I AM writing in the little one-windowed room open-
ing from the salle-a-manger of the Hotel de la Poste ;
bin under some little disadvantage, being disturbed partly
by the invocation, as it might be fancied, of calamity on
the heads of nations, by the howling of a frantic wind
from the Col ; and partly by the merry clattering of the
knives and forks of a hungry party in the salon doing
their best to breakfast adequately, while the diligence
changes horses.
In that same room, a little earlier in the year, two-
and-thirty years ago, my father and mother and I were
sitting at one end of the long table in the evening : and
at the other end of it, a quiet, somewhat severe-looking,
and pale, English (as we supposed) traveller, with his
wife ; she, and my mother, working ; her husband care-
fully completely some mountain outlines in his sketch-
book.
2. Those days are become very dim to me ; and I for-
get which of the groups spoke first. My father and
x. 'THIRTY YEARS SINCE. 151-
mother were always as shy as children ; and our busy
fellow-traveller seemed to us taciturn, slightly inaccessi-
ble, and even Alpestre, and, as it were, hewn out of
mountain flint, in his serene labour.
Whether some harmony of Scottish accent struck my
father's ear, or the pride he took in his son's accomplish-
ments prevailed over his own shyness, I think we first
ventured word across the table, with view of informing
the grave draughtsman that we also could draw. Where-
upon my own sketch-book was brought out, the pale
traveller politely permissive. My good father and
mother had stopped at the Simplon for me, (and now,
feeling miserable myself in the thin air, I know what it
cost them,) because 1 wanted to climb the high point
immediately west of the Col, thinking thence to get a
perspective of the chain joining the Fletschhorn to the
Monte Rosa. I had been drawing there the best part of
the afternoon, and had brought down w^ith me careful
studies of the Fletschhorn itself, and of a great pyramid
far eastward, whose name I did not know, but, from its
bearing, supposed it must be the Matterhorn, which 1
had then never seen.
3. I have since lost both these drawings ; and if they
were given away, in the old times when I despised the
best I did, because it was not like Turner, and any friend
has preserved them, I wish they might be returned to me ;
for they would be of value in Deucalion, and of greater
value to myself ; as having won for me, that evening, the
152 DEUCALION.
sympathy and help of James Forbes. For his eye grew
keen, and his face attentive, as he examined the drawings ;
and he turned instantly to me as to a recognized fellow-
workman, though yet young, no less faithful than him-
self.
He heard kindly what I had to ask about the chain I
had been drawing ; only saying, with a slightly proud
smile, of my peak supposed to be the Matterhora,* u No,
and when once you have seen the Matterhorn, you will
never take anything else for it ! "
He told me as much as I was able to learn, at that
time, of the structures of the chain, and some pleasant
general talk followed ; but I knew nothing of glaciers
then, and he had his evening's work to finish. And I
never saw him again.
I wonder if he sees me now, or guided my hand as I
cut the leaves of M. Yiolet-le-Duc's f Massif du Mont
Blanc ' this morning, till I came to page 58, and stop-
ped !
I must yet go back, for a little while, to those dead
days.
4. Failing of Matterhorn on this side of the valley of
the Rhone, I resolved to try for it from the other ; and
begged my father to wait yet a day for me at Brieg.
No one, then, had ever heard of the Bell Alp ; and few
English knew even of the Aletsch glacier. I laid my
* It was the Weisshorn.
X. ' THIRTY YEAKS SINCE.' 153"
plans from the top of the Simplon Col ; and was up at
four, next day ; in a cloudless morning, climbing the lit-
tle rock path which ascends directly to the left, after
crossing the bridge over the Rhone, at Brieg ; path which
is quite as critical a little bit of walking as the Fonts of
the Her de Glace ; and now, encumbered with the late
fallen shatterings of a flake of gneiss of the shape of an
artichoke leaf, and the size of the stern of an old ship of
the line, which has rent itself away, and dashed down like
a piece of the walls of Jericho, leaving exposed, under-
neath, the undulatory surfaces of pure rock, which, I am
under a very strong impression, our young raw geologists
take for real " muttoned " glacier tracks.*
5. I took this path because I wanted first to climb the
green wooded mass of the hill rising directly over the val-
ley, so as to enfilade the entire profiles of the opposite
chain, and length of the valley of the Khone, from its
brow.
By midday I had mastered it, and got up half as high
again, on the barren ridge above it, commanding a little
tarn ; whence, in one panorama are seen the Simplon and
Saas Alps on the south, with the Matterhorn closing the
avenue of the valley of St. Nicolas ; and the Aletsch
Alps on the north, with all the lower reach of the Aletsch
glacier. This panorama I drew carefully ; and slightly
* I saw this wisely suggested in a recent number of the ' Alpine
Journal/
154: DEUCALION.
coloured afterwards, in such crude way as I was then
able ; and fortunately not having lost this, I place it in
the Sheffield Museum, "for a perfectly trustworthy witness
to the extent of snow on the Breithorn, Fletschhorn, and
Montagne de Saas, thirty years ago.
My drawing finished, I ran round and down obliquely
to the Bell Alp, and so returned above the gorge of the
Aletsch torrent making some notes on it afterwards used
in ' Modern Painters,' many and many such a day of foot
and hand labour having been needed to build that book,
in which my friends, nevertheless, I perceive, still regard
nothing but what they are pleased to call its elegant lan-
guage, and are entirely indifferent, with respect to that
and all other books they read, whether the elegant lan-
guage tells them truths or lies.
That book contains, however, (and to-day it is needful
that I should not be ashamed in this confidence of boast-
ing,) the first faithful drawings ever given of the Alps,
not only in England, but in Europe ; and the first defini-
tions of the manner in which their forms have been de-
veloped out of their crystalline rocks.
6. ' Definitions ' only, observe, and descriptions ; but
no ( explanations.' I knew, even at that time, far too
much of the Alps to theorize on them ; and having
learned, in the thirty years since, a good deal more, with
the only consequence of finding the facts more inexplica-
ble to me than ever, laid M. Yiolet-le-Duc's book on the
seat of the carriage the day before yesterday, among other
X, ' THIRTY YEARS SINCE.' 155 *
stores and preparations for passing the Simplon, contem-
plating on its open first page the splendid dash of its first
sentence into space, " La croute terrestre, refroidie au
moment da plissement qui a forme le massif du Mont
Blanc," with something of the same amazement, and same
manner of the praise, which our French allies are reported
to have rendered to our charge at Balaclava :
" C'est magnifique ; mais ce n'est pas" la geologic.
7. I soon had leisure enough to look farther, as the
steaming horses dragged me up slowly round the first
ledges of pines, under a drenching rain which left noth-
ing but their nearest branches visible. Usually, their
nearest branches, and the wreaths of white cloud braided
among them, would have been all the books I cared to
read ; but both curiosity and vanity were piqued by the
new utterances, prophetic, apparently, in claimed author-
ity, on the matters timidly debated by me in old time.
I soon saw that the book manifested, in spite of so
great false-confidence, powers of observation more true in
their scope and grasp than can be traced in any writer on
the Alps since De Saussure. But, alas, before we had got
up to Berisal, I had found also more fallacies than 1 could
count, in the author's first statements of physical law ;
and seen, too surely, that the poor Frenchman's keen
natural faculty, and quite splendid zeal and industry, had
all been wasted, through the wretched national vanity
which made him interested in Mont Blanc only ' since it
156 DEUCALION.
became a part of France,' and had thrown him totally
into the clique of Agassiz and Desor, with results in
which neither the clique, nor M. Yiolet, are likely, in the
end, to find satisfaction.
8. Too sorrowfully weary of bearing with the provin-
cial temper, and insolent errors, of this architectural
restoration of the Gothic globe, I threw the book aside,
and took up my Carey's Dante, which is always on the
carriage seat, or in my pocket not exactly for reading,
but as an antidote to pestilent things and thoughts in
general ; and store, as it were, of mental quinine, a few
lines being usually enough to recover me out of any
shivering marsh fever fit, brought on among foulness or
stupidity.
It opened at a favourite old place, in the twenty-first
canto of the Paradise, (marked with an M. long ago,
when I was reading Dante through to glean his mountain
descriptions) :
" 'Twixt either shore
Of Italy, nor distant from thy land," etc. ;
and I read on into the twenty-third canto, down to St
Benedict's
" There, all things are, as they have ever been ;
Our ladder reaches even to that clime,
Whither the patriarch Jacob saw it stretch
Its topmost round, when it appeared to him
With angels laden. But to mount it now
None lifts his foot from earth ; and hence my rule
157
Is left a profitless stain upon the leaves.
The walls, for abbey reared, turned into dens ;
The cowls, to sacks choked up with musty meal.
His convent, Peter founded without gold
Or silver ; I, with prayers and fasting, mine ;
And Francis, his, in meek humility.
And if thou note the point whence each proceeds,
Then look what it hath erred to, thou shalt find
The white turned murky.
Jordan was turned back,
And a less wonder than the refluent sea
May, at God's pleasure, work amendment here."
9. I stopped at this, (holding myself a brother of the
third order of St. Francis,) and began thinking how long
it would take for any turn of tide by St. George's work,
when a ray of light came gleaming in at the carriage
window, and I saw, where the road turns into the high
ravine of the glacier galleries, a little piece of the Breit-
horn snowfield beyond.
Somehow, I think, as fires never burn, so skies never
clear, while they are watched ; so I took up my Danto
again, though scarcely caring to read more ; and it
opened, this time, not at an accustomed place at all, but
at the " I come to aid thy wish," of St. Bernard, in the
thirty-first canto. Not an accustomed place, because I
always think it very unkind of Beatrice to leave him to
St. Bernard ; and seldom turn expressly to the passage :
but it has chanced lately to become of more significance to
158 DEUCALION.
me, and I read on eagerly, to the " So burned the peace-
ful oriflamme," when the increasing light became so
strong that it awaked me, like a new morning ; and I
closed the book again, and looked out.
We had just got up to the glacier galleries, and the
last films of rain were melting into a horizontal bar of
blue sky which had opened behind the Bernese Alps.
I watched it for a minute or two through the alternate
arch and pier of the glacier galleries, and then as we got
on the open hill flank again, called to Bernardo * to stop.
10. Of all views of the great mountains that I know in
Switzerland, I think this, of the southern side of the
Bernese range from the Simplon, in general the most dis-
appointing for two reasons : the first, that the green
mass of their foundation slopes so softly to the valley that
it takes away half the look of their height ; and the
second, that the greater peaks are confused among the
crags immediately above the Aletsch glacier, and cannot,
in quite clear weather, be recognized as more distant, or
more vast. But at this moment, both these disadvan-
tages were totally conquered. The whole valley was full
of absolutely impenetrable wreathed cloud, nearly all
pure white, only the palest grey rounding the changeful
domes of it ; and beyond these domes of heavenly
marble, the great Alps stood up against the blue, not
* Bernardo Bergonza, of the Hotel d'ltalie, Arona, in whom any
friend of mine will find a glad charioteer ; and they cannot anywhere
find an abler or honester one.
X. * THIRTY YEARS SINCE.' 159
wholly clear, but clasped and entwined with translucent
folds of mist, traceable, but no more traceable, than the
thinnest veil drawn over St. Catherine's or the Virgin's
hair by Lippi or Luini ; and rising as they were with-
drawn from such investiture, into faint oriflammes, as if
borne by an angel host far distant; the peaks themselves
strewn with strange light, by snow fallen but that mo-
ment, the glory shed upon them as the veil fled ; and
intermittent waves of still gaining seas of light increas-
ing upon them, as if on the first day of creation.
" A present, vous pouvez voir 1'hotel sur le Bell Alp,
bati par Monsieur Tyndall."
The voice was the voice of the driver of the supple-
mentary pair of horses from Brieg, who, just dismissed
by Bernardo, had been for some minutes considering how
he could best recommend himself to me for an extra
franc.
I not instantly appearing favourably stirred by this in-
formation, he went on with increased emphasis, " Mon-
sieur \Qprofesseur Tyndall."
The poor fellow lost his bonnemain by it altogether
not out of any deliberate spite of mine ; but because, at
this second interruption, I looked at him, with an ex-
pression (as I suppose) so little calculated to encourage
his hopes of my generosity that he gave the matter up in
a moment, and turned away, with his horses, down the
hill ; I partly not caring to be further disturbed,
and being besides too SiOw as I always am in cases
160 DEUCALION.
where presence of mind is needful in calling him back
again.
11. For, indeed, fhe confusion into which he had
thrown my thoughts was all the more perfect and dia-
bolic, because it consisted mainly in the stirring up of
every particle of personal vanity and mean spirit of con-
tention which could be concentrated in one blot of pure
black ink, to be dropped into the midst of my aerial vision.
Finding it totally impossible to look at the Alps any
more, for the moment, I got out of the carriage, sent it
on to the Simplon village ; and began climbing, to re-
cover my feelings and wits, among the mossy knolls above
the convent.
They were drenched with the just past rain; glittering
now in perfect sunshine, and themselves enriched by
autumn into wreaths of responding gold.
The vast hospice stood desolate in the hollow behind
them ; the first time I had ever passed it with no welcome
from either monk, or dog. Blank as the fields of snow
above, stood now the useless walls ; and for the first time,
unredeemed by association ; only the thin iron cross in
the centre of the roof remaining to say that this had once
been a house of Christian Hospitallers.
12. Desolate this, and dead the office of this, for the
present, it seems ; and across the valley, instead, " 1'hotel
sur le Bell Alp, bati par Monsieur Tyndall," no nest of
dreamy monks, but of philosophically peripatetic or peri-
saltatory i puces des glaces.'
x. 'THIRTY YEARS SINCE.' 161
For, on the whole, that is indeed the dramatic aspect
and relation of them to the glaciers ; little jumping black
things, who appear, under the photographic microscope,
active on the ice- waves, or even inside of them ; giving
to most of the great views of the Alps, in the windows at
Geneva, a more or less animatedly punctuate and puli-
carious character.
Such their dramatic and picturesque function, to any
one with clear eyes ; their intellectual function, however,
being more important, and comparable rather to a sym-
metrical succession of dirt-bands, each making the ice
more invisible than the last ; for indeed, here, in 1876,
are published, with great care and expense, such a quan-
tity of accumulated rubbish of past dejection, and mo
raine of finely triturated mistake, clogging together gi-
gantic heaped blocks of far- travelled blunder, as it
takes away one's breath to approach the shadow of.
13. The first in magnitude, as in origin, of these long-
sustained stupidities, the pierre-a-Bot, or Frog-stone, par
excellence, of the Neuchatel clique, is Charpentier's
Dilatation Theory, revived by M. Yiolet, not now as a
theory, but an assured principle ! without, however,
naming Charpentier as the author of it ; and of course
without having read a word of Forbes's demolition of it.
The essential work of Deucalion is construction, not de-
molition ; but when an avalanche of old rubbish is shot
in our way, I must, whether I would or no, clear it aside
before I can go on. I suppose myself speaking to my
162 DEUCALION.
Sheffield men ; and shall put so much as they need know
of these logs upon the line, as briefly as possible, before
them.
14. There are three theories extant, concerning glacier-
motion, among the gentlemen who live at the intellectual
' Hotel des Neuchatelois.' These are specifically known
as the Sliding, Dilatation, and Regelation, theories.
When snow lies deep on a sloping roof, and is not sup-
ported below by any cornice or gutter, you know that
when it thaws, and the sun has warmed it to a certain
extent, the whole mass slides off into the street.
That is the way the scientific persons who hold the
' Sliding theory,' suppose glaciers to move. They assume,
therefore, two things more ; namely, first that all moun-
tains are as smooth as house-roofs ; and, secondly, that a
piece of ice a mile long and three or four hundred feet
deep will slide gently, though a piece a foot deep and a
yard long slides fast, in other words, that a paving-stone
will slide fast on another paving-stone, but the Rossberg
fall at the rate of eighteen inches a day.
There is another form of the sliding theory, which is
that glaciers slide in little bits, one at a time; or, for
example, that if you put a railway train on an incline,
with loose fastening to the carriages, the first carriage
will slide first, as far as it can go, and then stop ; then
the second start, and catch it up, and wait for the third ;
and so on, till when the last has come up, the first will
start again.
X. * THIRTY YEAB8 SINCE.' 16<T
Having once for all sufficiently explained the ' Sliding
theory ' to you, I shall not trouble myself any more in
Deucalion about it.
15. The next theory is the Dilatation theory. The
scientific persons who hold that theory suppose that
whenever a shower of rain falls on a glacier, the said rain
freezes inside of it ; and that the glacier being thereby
made bigger, stretches itself uniformly in one direction,
and never in any other ; also that, although it can only
be thus expanded in cold and wet weather, such expansion
is the reason that it always goes fastest in hot and dry
weather.
There is another form of the Dilatation theory, which
is that the glacier expands by freezing its own meltings.
16. Having thus sufficiently explained the Dilatation
theory to you, I shall not trouble myself in Deucalion
farther about it ; noticing only, in bidding it goodbye,
the curious want of power in scientific men, when once
they get hold of a false notion, to perceive the common-
est analogies implying its correction. One would have
thought that, with their thermometer in their hand to
measure congelation with, and the idea of expansion in
their head, the analogy between the tube of the thermom-
eter, and a glacier channel, and the ball of the thermom-
eter, and a glacier reservoir, might, some sunshiny day,
have climbed across the muddily-fissured glacier of their
wits : and all the quicker, that their much-studied Mer
de Glace bears to the great reservoirs of ice above it pre-
164 DEUCALION.
cisely the relation of a very narrow tube to a very large
ball. The vast ( instrument' seems actually to have been
constructed by Nature, to show to the dullest of savants
the difference between the steady current of flux through
a channel of drainage, and the oscillatory vivacity of
expansion which they constructed their own tubular appa-
ratus to obtain !
17. The last popular theory concerning glaciers is the
Regelation theory. The scientific persons who hold that
theory, suppose that a glacier advances by breaking itself
spontaneously into small pieces ; and then spontaneously
sticking the pieces together again ; that it becomes con-
tinually larger by a repetition of this operation, and that
the enlargement (as assumed also by the gentlemen of
the Dilatation party), can only take place downwards.
You may best conceive the gist of the Regelation
theory by considering the parallel statement, which you
may make to your scientific young people, that if they
put a large piece of barleysugar on the staircase landing,
it will walk downstairs by alternately cracking and mend-
ing itself.
I shall not trouble myself farther, in Deucalion, about
the Regelation theory.
18. M. Violet- le-Duc, indeed, appears to have written
his book without even having heard of it ; but he makes
most dextrous use of the two others, fighting, as it were,
at once with sword and dagger ; and making his glaciers
move on the Sliding theory when the ground is steep, and
X. ' THIRTY YEAE8 SINCE.' 165
on the Dilatation theory when it is level. The woodcuts
at pages 65, 66, in which a glacier is represented dilating
itself up a number of hills and down again, and that at
page 99, in which it defers a line of boulders, which by
unexplained supernatural power have been deposited all
across it, into moraines at its side, cannot but remain tri-
umphant among monuments of scientific error, bestow-
ing on their author a kind of St. Simeon-Stylitic pre-emi-
nence of immortality in the Paradise of Fools.
19. Why I stopped first at page 58 of this singular vol-
ume, I see there is no room to tell in this number of Deu-
calion ; still less to note the interesting repetitions by M.
Violet-le-Duc of the Tyndall-Agassiz demonstration that
Forbes' assertion of the plasticity of ice in large pieces, is
now untenable, by reason of the more recent discovery of
its plasticity in little ones. I have just space, however,
for a little woodcut from the ' Glaciers of the Alps,' (or
' Forms of Water,' I forget which, and it is no matter,)
in final illustration of the Tyndall-Agassiz quality of wit.
20. Fig. 5, A, is Professor Tyndall's illustration of the
effect of sunshine on a piece of glacier,' originally of the
form shown by the dotted line, and reduced by solar
power on the south side to the beautifully delineated
wave in the shape of a wedge.
It never occurred to the scientific author that the sun-
shine would melt some of the top, as well as of the side,
of his parallelepiped ; nor that, during the process, even
on the shady side of it, some melting would take place in
166
DEUCALION.
the summer air. The figure at B represents three stages
of the diminution which would really take place, allow-
ing for these other sornewhat important conditions of the
PIG. 5.
question ; and it shows, what may farther interest the
ordinary observer, how rectangular portions of ice, origin-
ally produced merely by fissure in its horizontal mass,
may be gradually reduced into sharp, axe-edged ridges,
having every appearance of splintery and vitreous frac-
ture. In next Deucalion I hope to give at last some
account of my experiments on gelatinous fracture, made
in the delightful laboratory of my friend's kitchen, with
the aid of her infinitely conceding, and patiently collabor-
ating, cook.
CHAPTER XL
OF SILICA IN LAVAS.
1. THE rocks through whose vast range, as stated in the
ninth chapter, our at first well-founded knowledge of
their igneous origin gradually becomes dim, and fades
into theory, may be logically divided into these four
following groups.
1. True lavas. Substances which have been rapidly
cooled from fusion into homogeneous masses, showing no
clear traces of crystallization.
II. Basalts.* Rocks in which, without distinct separa-
tion of their elements, a disposition towards crystalline
structure manifests itself.
III. Porphyries. Rocks in which one or more mineral
elements separate themselves in crystalline form from a
homogeneous paste.
IY. Granites. Rocks in which all their elements have
taken crystalline form.
2. These, I say, are logical divisions, very easily tenable.
But Nature laughs at logic, and in her infinite imagina-
* I use this word as on the whole the best for the vast class of rocks
I wish to include ; but without any reference to columnar desiccation,
I consider, in this arrangement, only internal structure.
168 DEUCALION.
tion of rocks, defies all Kosmos, except the mighty one
which we, her poor puppets, shall never discern. Our
logic will help us but a little way ; so far, however, we
will take its help.
3. And first, therefore, let us ask what questions im-
peratively need answer, concerning indisputable lavas,
seen by living human eyes to flow incandescent out of the
earth, and thereon to cool into ghastly slags.
On these I have practically burnt the soles of my boots,
and in their hollows have practically roasted eggs ; and in
the lee of them, have been wellnigh choked with their
stench ; and can positively testify respecting them, that
they were in many parts once fluid under power of fire,
in a very fine and soft flux ; and did congeal out of that
state into ropy or cellular masses, variously tormented and
kneaded by explosive gas ; or pinched into tortuous ten-
sion, as by diabolic tongs ; and are so finally left by the
powers of Hell, to submit themselves to the powers of
Heaven, in black or brown masses of adamantine sponge
without water, and horrible honeycombs without honey,
interlaid between drifted banks of earthy flood, poured
down from merciless clouds whose rain was ashes.
The seas that now beat against these, have shores of
black sand ; the peasant, whose field is in these, ploughs
with his foot, and the wind harrows.
4. Now of the outsides of these lava streams, and unal-
tered volcanic ashes, I know the look well enough ; and
could supply Sheffield with any quantity of characteristic
TJKIV ; v
\^Uf0^^
XI. OF SILICA IK LAVAS. ~ 169
specimens, if their policy and trade had not already
pretty nearly buried them, and great part of England
besides, under such devil's ware of their own production.
But of the insides of these lava streams, and of the
recognized alterations of volcanic tufa, I know nothing.
And, accordingly, I want authentic answer to these fol-
lowing questions, with illustrative specimens.
5. a. In lavas which have been historically hot to per-
fect fusion, so as to be progressive, on steep slopes, in the
manner of iron out of a furnace in its pig-furrows;
in such perfect lavas, I say what kind of difference is
there between the substance at the surface and at the
extremest known depths, after cooling? It is evident
that such lavas can only accumulate to great depths in
infernal pools or lakes. Of such lakes, which are the
deepest known ? and of those known, where are the best
sections ? I want for Sheffield a series of specimens of
any well-fused lava anywhere, showing the gradations
of solidity or crystalline consolidation, from the outside
to extreme depth.
J. On lavas which have not been historically hot, but
of which there is no possible doubt that they were once
fluent, (in the air,) to the above-stated degree, what
changes are traceable, produced, irrespectively of atmos-
pheric action, by lapse of time ? What evidence is
there that lavas, once cool to their centres, can sustain
any farther crystalline change, or re-arrangement of
mineral structure ?
170 DEUCALION.
c. In lavas either historically or indisputably once
fluent, what forms of ^ilica are found ? I limit myself
at present to the investigation of volcanic silica : other
geologists will in time take up other minerals ; but I
find silica enough, and more than enough, for my life,
or at least for what may be left of it.
Now I am myself rich in specimens of Hyalite, and
Auvergne stellar and guttate chalcedonies ; but I have
no notion whatever how these, or the bitumen associated
with them, have been developed ; and I shall be most
grateful for a clear account of their locality, possible
or probable mode of production in that locality, and
microscopic structure. Of pure quartz, of opal, or of
agate, I have no specimen connected with what I should
call a truly ' living' lava; one, that is to say, which lias
simply cooled down to its existing form from the fluid
state ; but I have sent to the Sheffield Museum a piece
of Hyalite, on a living lava, so much like a living wasp's
nest, and so incredible for a lava at all to the general
observer, that I want forthwith some help from my
mineralogical friends, in giving account of it.
6. And here I must, for a paragraph or two, pass from
definition of flinty and molten minerals, to the more
difficult definition of flinty and molten hearts ; in order
to explain why the Hyalite which I have just sent to
the men of Sheffield, for their first type of volcanic
silica,* is not at all the best Hyalite in my collection.
* I give the description of these seven pieces of Hyalite at Sheffield,
t
XI. OF SILICA IN LAVAS. 171
This is because I practically find a certain quantity of
selfishness necessary to live by ; arid having no manner
of saintly nature in me, but only that of ordinary men,
(which makes me all the hotter in temper when I
can't get ordinary men either to see what I know they
can see if they look, or do what I know they can do if
they like,) I get sometimes weary of giving things
away, letting my drawers get into disorder, and losing
the powers of observation and thought which are con-
nected with the complacency of possession, and the
pleasantness of order. Whereupon I have resolved to
bring my own collection within narrow limits ; but to
constitute it resolutely and irrevocably of chosen and
curious pieces, for my own pleasure ; trusting that they
may be afterwards cared for by some of the persons
who knew me, when I myself am troubled with care no
more.*
7. This piece of Hyalite, however, just sent to Shef-
field, though not my best, is the most curiously definite
example I ever saw. It is on a bit of brown lava, which
looks, as aforesaid, a little way off, exactly like a piece
in Deucalion, because their description is necessary to explain certain
general principles of arrangement and nomenclature.
* By the way, this selfish collection is to be primarily of stones
that will wash. Of petty troubles, none are more fretting than the
effect of dust on minerals that can neither be washed nor brushed.
Hence, my specialty of liking for silica, felspar, and the granitic or
gneissic rocks.
172 DEUCALION".
of a wasp's nest : seen closer, the cells are not hexagonal,
but just like a cast of a spoonful of pease ; the spherical
hollows having this of notable in them, that they are
only as close to each other as they can be, to admit of
their ~being perfectly round : therefore, necessarily, with
little spaces of solid stone between them. I have not
the slightest notion how such a lava can be produced.
It is like an oolite with the yolks of its eggs dropped
out, and not in the least like a ductile substance churned
into foam by expansive gas.
8. On this mysterious bit of gaseous wasp's nest, the
Hyalite seems to have been dropped, like drops of glass
from a melting glass rod. It seems to touch the lava
just as little as it can ; sticks at once on the edges of the
cells, and laps over without running into, much less
filling them. There is not any appearance, and I think
.no possibility, of exudation having taken place ; the
silica cannot but, I think, have been deposited ; and it
is stuck together just as if it had fallen in drops, which
is what I mean by calling Hyalite characteristically
6 guttate ' ; but it shows, nevertheless, a tendency to
something like crystallization, in irregularities of surface
like those of glacier ice, or the kind of old Venetian
glass which is rough, and apparently of lumps coagu-
lated. The fracture is splendidly vitreous, the sub-
stance, mostly quite clear, but in parts white and opaque.
9. Now although no other specimen that I have yet
seen is so manifestly guttate as this, all the hyalites I
XI. OF SILICA Itf LAVAS. 173"
know agree in approximate conditions; and associate
themselves with forms of chalcedony which exactly re-
semble the droppings from a fine wax candle. Such
heated waxen effluences, as they congeal, will be found
thrown into flattened coats ; and the chalcedonies in
question on the under surface precisely resemble them ;
while on the upper they become more or less crystalline,
and, in some specimens, form lustrous stellar crystals in
the centre.
10. Now, observe, this chalcedony, capable of crystal-
lization, differs wholly from chalcedony properly so
called, which may indeed be covered with crystals, but
itself remains consistently smooth in surface, as true
Hyalite does, also.
Not to be teazed with too many classes, however, I
shall arrange these peculiar chalcedonies with Hyalite;
and, accordingly, I send next to the Sheffield Museum,
to follow this first Hyalite, an example of the transition
from Hyalite to dropped chalcedony, (i. H. 2,) being an
Indian volcanic chalcedony, translucent, aggregated like
Hyalite, and showing a concave fracture where a ball of
it has been broken out.
11. Next, (i. H. 3,) pure dropped chalcedony. I do
not like the word 'dropped' in this use, so that, in-
stead, I shall call this in future wax chalcedony ; then
(i. H. 4) the same form, with crystalline surface, this I
shall henceforward call sugar chalcedony ; and, lastly, the
ordinary stellar form of Au vergne, star chalcedony (i. H. 5).
174 DEUCALION.
These five examples are typical, and perfect in their
kind ; next to them (i. H. 6) I place a wax chalcedony
formed on a porous rock, (volcanic ash ?) which has at
the surface of it small circular concavities, being also
so irregularly coagulate throughout that it suggests
no mode of deposition whatever, and is peculiar in this
also, that it is thinner in the centre than at the edges,
and that no vestige of its substance occurs in the pores
of the rock it overlies.
Take a piece of porous broken brick, drop any tal-
lowy composition over four or five inches square of its
surface, to the depth of one-tenth of an inch ; then drop
more on the edges till you have a rampart round, the
third of an inch thick ; and you will have some likeness
of this piece of stone : but how Nature held the compo-
sition in her fingers, or composed it to be held, I leave
you to guess, for I cannot.
12. Next following, I place the most singular example
of all (i. H. 7). The chalcedony in i. H. 6 is apparently
dropped on the ashes, and of irregular thickness ; it is
difficult to understand how it was dropped, but once get
Nature to hold the candle, and the thing is done.
But here, in i. H. 7, it is no longer apparently dropped,
but apparently boiled ! It rises like the bubbles of a
strongly boiling liquid ; but not from a liquid mass ; on
the contrary, (except in three places, presently to be
described,) it coats the volcanic ash in perfectly even
thickness a quarter of an inch, and no more, nor less.
XI. OF SILICA Itf LAVAS. 175
everywhere, over a space five inches square ! and the ash,
or lava, itself, instead of being porous throughout the
mass, with the silica only on the surface, is filled with
chalcedony in every cavity !
Now this specimen completes the transitional series
from hyalite to perfect chalcedony ; and with these
seven specimens, in order, before us, we can define some
things, and question of others, with great precision.
13. First, observe that all the first six pieces agree in
two conditions, varying, and coagulated, thickness of
the deposit. But the seventh has the remarkable char-
acter of equal, and therefore probably crystalline, deposi-
tion everywhere.
Secondly. In the first six specimens, though the
coagulations are more or less rounded, none of them are
regularly spherical. But in the seventh, though the
larger bubbles (so to call them) are subdivided into many
small ones, every uninterrupted piece of the surface is
a portion of a sphere, as in true bubbles.
Thirdly. The sugar chalcedony, i. H. 4, and stellar
chalcedony, i. H. 5, show perfect power of assuming,
under favourable conditions, prismatic crystalline form.
But there is no trace of such tendency in the first three,
or last two, of the seven examples. Nor has there ever,
so far as I know, been found prismatic true hyalite, or
prismatic true chalcedony.
Therefore we have here essentially three different
minerals, passing into each other, it is true ; but, at a
176 DEUCALION.
certain point, changing their natures definitely, so that
hyalite, becoming wax chalcedony, gains the power of
prismatic crystallization ; and wax chalcedony, becoming
true chalcedony, loses it again !
And now I must pause, to explain rightly this term
'prismatic,' and others which are now in use, or which
are to be used, in St. George's schools, in describing
crystallization.
14:. A prism, (the sawn thing,) in Newton's use of the
word, is a triangular pillar with flat top and bottom. Put-
ting two or more of these together, we can make pillars
of any number of plane sides, in any regular or irregular
shape. Crystals, therefore, which are columnar, and thick
enough to be distinctly seen, are called ' prismatic.'
2. But crystals which are columnar, and so delicate that
they look like needles, are called ' acicular,' from
acus, a needle.
3. When such crystals become so fine that they look like
hair or down, and lie in confused directions, the
mineral composed of them is called 'plumose.'
4. And when they adhere together closely by their sides,
the mineral is called ' fibrous.'
5. When a crystal is flattened by the extension of two of
its planes, so as to look like a board, it is called 'tab-
ular' ; but people don't call it a ' tabula.'
6. But when such a board becomes very thin, it is called a
'lamina,' and the mineral composed of many such
plates, laminated.
XT. OF SILICA IK LAVAS. 177
7. When laminae are so thin that, joining with others
equally so, they form fine leaves, the mineral is
< foliate.'
8. And when these leaves are capable of perpetual sub-
division, the mineral is c micaceous.'
15. Now, so far as I know their works, mineralogists
hitherto have never attempted to show cause why some
minerals rejoice in longitude, others in latitude, and others
in platitude. They indicate to their own satisfaction,
that is to say, in a manner totally incomprehensible by
the public, all the modes of expatiation possible to the
mineral, by cardinal points on a sphere : but why a crys-
tal of ruby likes to be short and fat, and a crystal of ru-
tile, long and lean ; why amianth should bind itself into
bundles of threads, cuprite weave itself into tissues, and
silver braid itself into nests, the use, in fact, that any
mineral makes of its opportunities, and the cultivation
which it gives to its faculties, of all this, my minera-
logical authorities tell me nothing. Industry, indeed, is
theirs to a quite infinite degree, in pounding, decocting,
weighing, measuring, but they have remained just as un-
conscious as vivisecting physicians that all this was only
the anatomy of dust, not its history.
Bat here at last, in Cumberland, I find a friend, Mr.
Clifton Ward, able and willing to begin some true history
of mineral substance, and far advanced already in prelim-
inary discovery ; and in answer to my request for help,
taking up this first hyalitic problem, he has sent me the
12
178 DEUCALION.
drawings engraved, I regret to say, with little justice to
their delicacy ; * in Plate Y.
16. This plate represents, in Figure 1, the varieties of
structure in an inch vertical section of a lake-agate ; and
in Figures 2, 3, 4, and 5, still farther magnified portions
of the layers so numbered in Figure 1.
Figures 6 to 9 represent the structure and effect of pol-
arized light in a lake-agate of more distinctly crystalline
structure ; and Figures 10 to 13, the orbicular concre-
tions of volcanic Indian chalcedony. But before entering
farther on the description of these definitely concretion-
ary bands, I think it will be desirable to take note of some
facts regarding the larger bands of our Westmoreland
mountains, which become to me, the more I climb them,
mysterious to a point scarcely tolerable ; and only the more
so, in consequence of their recent more accurate survey.
17. Leaving their pebbles, therefore, for a little while,
I will ask my readers to think over some of the condi-
tions of their crags and pools, explained as best I could,
in the following lecture, to the Literary and Scientific
Society of the town of Kendal. For indeed, beneath the
evermore blessed Kendal-green of their sweet meadows
and moors, the secrets of hill-structure remain, for all the
work spent on them, in colourless darkness; and indeed,
" So dark, Hal, that thou could'st not see thine hand."
* But not by my fault, for I told the engraver to do his best ; and
took more trouble with the plate than with any of my own.
Plate V.
STRUCTURE OF LAKE AGATE.
V
XII. YEWDALE AND ITS STKEAMLETS. 179
CHAPTER XII.
YEWDALE AND ITS STREAMLETS.
Lecture delivered before the Members of the Literary and Scientific Insti-
tution, Kendal, 1st October, 1877.
1. I FEAKthat some of my hearers may think an apolo-
gy due to them for having brought, on the first occasion
of my being honoured by their audience, a subject before
them which they may suppose unconnected with my own
special work, past or present. But the truth is, I knew
mountains long before I knew pictures ; and these moun-
tains of yours, before any other mountains. From this
town, of Kendal, I went out, a child, to the first joyful
excursions among the Cumberland lakes, which formed
my love of landscape and of painting : and now, being an
old man, I find myself more and more glad to return
and pray you to-night to return with me from shadows
to the reality.
I do not, however, believe that one in a hundred of our
youth, or of our educated classes, out of directly scientific
circles, take any real interest in geology. And for my
own part, I do not wonder, for it seems to me that geol-
ogy tells us nothing really interesting. It tells us much
about a world that once was. But, for my part, a world
180 DEUCALION".
that only was, is as little interesting as a world that only is
to be. I no more care to hear of the forms of mountains
that crumbled away a million of years ago to leave room
for the town of Kendal, than of forms of mountains that
some future day may swallow up the town of Kendal in
the cracks of them. I am only interested so ignoble and
unspeculative is my disposition in knowing how God
made the Castle Hill of Kendal, for the Baron of it to
build on, and how he brought the Kent through the dale
of it, for its people and flocks to drink of.
2. And these things, if you think of them, you will
find are precisely what the geologists cannot tell you.
They never trouble themselves about matters so recent,
or so visible ; and while you may always obtain the most
satisfactory information from them respecting the con-
gelation of the whole globe out of gas, or the direction
of it in space, there is really not one who can explain
to you the making of a pebble, or the running of a
rivulet.
May I, however, before pursuing my poor little in-
quiry into these trifling matters, congratulate those mem-
bers of my audience who delight more in literature than
science, on the possession, not only of dales in reality,
but of dales in name. Consider, for an instant or two,
how much is involved, how much indicated, by our pos-
session in English of the six quite distinct words vale,
valley, dale, dell, glen, and dingle ; consider the grada-
tions of character in scene, and fineness of observation in
XII. YEWDALE AND ITS STREAMLETS. 181
the inhabitants, implied by that sixfoil cluster of words;
as compared to the simple ' thai ' of the Germans, ' valle '
of the Italians, and * vallee' of the French, shortening into
'val' merely for ease of pronunciation, but having no
variety of sense whatever ; so that, supposing I want to
translate, for the benefit of an Italian friend, Words-
worth's ' Reverie of Poor Susan,' and come to " Green
pastures she views in the midst of the dale," and look for
4 dale ' in my Italian dictionary, I find " valle lunga e
stretta tra poggi alti," and can only convey Mr. Words-
worth's meaning to my Italian listener by telling him
that " la povera Susanna vede verdi prati, nel mezzo della
valle lunga e stretta tra poggi alti"! It is worth while,
both for geological and literary reasons, to trace the es-
sential differences in the meaning and proper use of these
words.
3. ' Yale ' signifies a large extent of level land, sur-
rounded by hills, or nearly so ; as the Yale of the White
Horse, or Yale of Severn. The level extent is necessary
to the idea; while the next word, 'valley,' means a large
hollow among hills, in which there is little level ground,
or none. Next comes ' dale,' which signifies properly a
tract of level land on the borders of a stream, continued
for so great a distance as to make it a district of import-
ance as a part of the inhabited country ; as Ennerdale,
Langdale, Liddesdale. 'Dell' is to dale, what valley is
to vale ; and implies that there is scarcely any level land
beside the stream. l Dingle ' is such a recess or dell
182 DEUCALION-.
clothed with wood;* and 'glen' one varied with rocks.
The term ' ravine,' a ^'ent chasm among rocks, has its
necessary parallel in other languages.
Our richness of expression in these particulars may be
traced to the refinement of our country life, chiefly since
the fifteenth century; and to the poetry founded on the
ancient character of the Border peasantry ; mingling
agricultural with shepherd life in almost equal measure.
I am about to endeavour, then, to lay before you this
evening the geological laws which have produced the
6 dale,' properly so called, of which I take for a sweet
and near example the green piece of meadow land
through which flows, into Coniston Water, the brook
that chiefly feeds it.
4. And now, before going farther, let me at once vin-
dicate myself from the blame of not doing full justice to
the earnest continuance of labour, and excellent subtlety
of investigation, by which Mr. Aveline and Mr. Clifton
Ward have presented you with the marvellous maps and
sections of this district, now in course of publication in
the Geological Survey. Especially let me, in the strong-
est terms of grateful admiration, refer to the results
which have been obtained by the microscopic observa-
* Connected partly, I doubt not, with Ingle, or Inglewood, brush-
wood to burn, (hence Justice Inglewood in 'Rob Hoy'). I have
still omitted 'clough,' or cleugh, given by Johnson in relation to
' dingle,' and constant in Scott, from ' Gander-cleugh ' to ' Buc(k)-
cleugh.'
XII. YEWDALE AND ITS STREAMLETS. 183
tions of minerals instituted by Mi*. Sorby, and carried out
indefatigably by Mr. Clifton Ward, forming tlie first
sound foundations laid for the solution of the most
secret problems of geology.
5. But while I make this most sincere acknowledg-
ment of what has been done by these gentlemen, and by
their brother geologists in the higher paths of science, I
must yet in all humility lament that this vast fund of
gathered knowledge is every bit of it, hitherto, beyond
you and me. Dealing only with infinitude of space and
remoteness of time, it leaves us as ignorant as ever we
were, or perhaps, in fancying ourselves wiser, even more
ignorant, of the things that are near us and around, of
the brooks that sing to us, the rocks that guard us, and
the fields that feed.
6. To-night, therefore, I am here for no other pur-
pose than to ask the simplest questions ; and to win your
interest, if it may be, in pleading with our geological
teachers for the answers which as yet they disdain to give.
Here, in your long winding dale of the Kent, and
over the hills, in my little nested dale of the Yew, will
you ask the geologist, with me, to tell us how their
pleasant depth was opened for us, and their lovely bor-
ders built. For, as yet, this is all that we are told con-
cerning them, by accumulated evidence of geology, as
collected in this summary at the end of the first part
of Mr. Clifton Ward's volume on the geology of the
lakes :
184. DEUCALION.
" The most ancient geologic records in the district
indicate marine conditions with a probable proximity of
land. Submarine volcanoes broke out during the close
of this period, followed by an elevation of land, with
continued volcanic eruptions, of which perhaps the pres-
ent site of Keswick was one of the chief centres.
Depression of the volcanic district then ensued beneath
the sea, with the probable cessation of volcanic activity ;
much denudation was effected ; another slight volcanic
outburst accompanied the formation of the Coniston
Limestone, and then the old deposits of Skiddaw Slate
and volcanic material were buried thousands of feet deep
beneath strata formed in an upper Silurian sea. Next
followed an immensely long period of elevation, accom-
panied by disturbance and alteration of the rocks, and by
a prodigious amount of marine and atmospheric denuda-
tion. A subsequent depression, to a considerable extent,
marked the coming on of the Carboniferous epoch, her-
alded however, in all likelihood, by a period of more
or less intense cold. Then for succeeding ages, the dis-
trict elevated high above the surrounding seas of later
times, underwent that large amount of sub-aerial denuda-
tion which has resulted in the formation of our beautiful
English Lake-country."
7. The only sentence in this passage of the smallest
service to us, at present, is that stating the large amount
of ' sub-aerial denudation ' which formed our beautiful
country.
XII. YEWDALE AKD ITS STREAMLETS. 185
Putting the geological language into simple English,
that means that your dales and hills were produced by
being * rubbed down in the open air,' rubbed down,
that is to say, in the manner in which people are rubbed
down after a Turkish bath, so as to have a good deal of
their skin taken off them. But observe, it. would be
just as rational to say that the beauty of the human form
was owing to the immemorial and continual use of the
flesh-brush, as that we owe the beauty of our mountains
to the mere fact of their having been rubbed away. No
quantity of stripping or denuding will give beauty when
there is none to denude ; you cannot rub a statue out
of a sandbank, or carve the Elgin frieze with rottenstone
for a chisel, and chance to drive it.
8. We have to ask then, first, what material there was
here to carve ; and then what sort of chisels, and in what
workman's hand, were used to produce this large piece
of precious chasing or embossed work, which we call
Cumberland and Weste-more-land.
I think we shall get at our subject more clearly, how-
ever, by taking a somewhat wider view of it than our
own dales permit, and considering what * sub-aerial denu-
dation ' means, on the surface of the world, instead of in
"Westmoreland only.
9. Broadly, therefore, we have, forming a great part
of that surface, vast plains or steppes, like the levels of
France, and lowlands' of England, and prairies of Amer-
ica, composed mostly of horizontal beds of soft stone or
186 DEUCALIOK.
gravel. Nobody in general talks of these having been
rubbed down ; so little, indeed, that I really do not my-
self know what the nations of geologists are on the mat-
ter. They tell me that some four-and-twenty thousand
feet or so of slate say, four miles thick of slate must
have been taken off the top of Skiddaw to grind that
into what it is ; but I don't know in the least how much
chalk or freestone they think has been ground off the
East Cliff at Brighton, to flatten that into what it is.
They tell me that Mont Blanc must have been three
times as high as he is now, when God, or the affinity of
atoms, first made him ; but give me no idea whatever
how much higher the shore of the Adriatic was than it is
now, before the lagoon of Venice was rubbed out of it.
10. Collecting and inferring as best I can, it seems to
me they mean generally that all the mountains were
much higher than they are now, and all the plains lower;
and that what has been scraped off the one has been
heaped on to the other : but that is by no means gen-
erally so ; and in the degree in which it is so, hitherto
has been unexplained, and has even the aspect of being
inexplicable.
I don't know what sort of models of the district you
have in the Museum, but the kind commonly sold repre-
sent the entire mountain surface merely as so much
sandheap washed into gutters. It is totally impossible
for your youth, while these false impressions are con-
veyed by the cheap tricks of geographical manufacture,
XII. YEWDALE AND ITS STREAMLETS. 187"'
to approach the problems of mountain form under any
sense of their real conditions : while even advanced
geologists are too much in the habit of thinking that
every mountain mass may be considered as a heap of
homogeneous clay, which some common plough has fret-
ted into similar clods.
But even to account for the furrows of a field you
must ask for plough and ploughman. How much more
to account for the furrows of the adamantine rock. Shall
one plough there with oxen ?
I will ask you, therefore, to-night, to approach this
question in its first and simplest terms, and to examine
the edge of the weapon which is supposed to be still at
work. The streamlets of the dale seem yet in many
places to be excavating their glens as they dash down
them, or deepening the pools under their cascades. Let
us in such simple and daily visible matters consider more
carefully what are the facts.
11. Towards the end of July, this last summer, I
was sauntering among the fern, beside the bed of the
Yewdale stream, and stopped, as one does instinctively,
at a place where the stream stopped also, bending itself
round in a quiet brown eddy under the root of an oak tree
How many thousand thousand times have I not stopped
to look down into the pools of a mountain stream, and
yet never till that day had it occurred to me to ask how
the pools came there. As a matter of course, I had
always said to myself, there must be deep places and shal-
188 DEUCALION.
low ones, and where the water is deep there is an eddy,
and where it is shallow there is a ripple, and what more
is there to say about it ?
However, that day, having been of late in an interrog-
ative humour about everything, it did suddenly occur
to me to ask why the water should be deep there, more
than anywhere else. This pool was at a bend of the
stream, and rather a wide part of it; and it seemed
to me that, for the most part, the deep pools I recol-
lected had been at bends of streams, and in rather wide
parts of them ; with the accompanying condition of
slow circular motion in the water ; and also, mostly under
steep banks.
12. Gathering my fifty years' experience of brooks,
this seemed to me a tenable generalization, that on the
whole, where the bank was steepest, and one was most
likely to tumble in, one was least likely to get out again.
And that gloomily slow and sullen motion on the sur-
face, as if the bubbles were unwillingly going round in a
mill, this also I recollected as a usual condition of the
deeper water, so usual, indeed, that (as I say) I never
once before had reflected upon it as the least odd.
"Whereas now, the thought struck me as I looked, and
struck me harder as I looked longer, If the hubbies stay
at the top, why don't the stones stay at the bottom ? If,
when I throw in a stick here in the back eddy at the sur-
face, it keeps spinning slowly round and round, and never
goes down-stream am I to expect that when I throw a
JLII. YEWDALE AND ITS STREAMLETS. 189
stone into the same eddy, it will be immediately lifted
by it out of the hole and carried away ? And yet unless
the water at the bottom of the hole has this power of lift-
ing stones out of it, why is the hole not filled up ?
13. Coming to this point of the question, I looked up
the beck, and down. Up the beck, above the pool, there
was a shallow rapid over innumerable stones of all sizes :
and down the beck, just below the pool, there was a ledge
of rock against which the stream had deposited a heap of
rolled shingle, and over the edges of which it flowed in
glittering tricklets, so shallow that a child of four years
old might have safely waded across ; and between the
loose stones above in the steep rapid, and the ledge of
rock below which seemed put there expressly for them
to be lodged against here was this deep, and wide, and
quiet, pool.
So I stared at it, and stared ; and the more I stared, the
less I understood it. And if you like, any of you may
easily go and stare too, for the pool in question is visible
enough from the coach-road, from Mr. Sly's Waterhead
Inn, up to Tilberthwaite. You turn to the right from the
bridge at Mr. Bowness's smithy, and then in a quarter of
a mile you may look over the roadside wall into this quiet
recess of the stream, and consider of many things. For,
observe, if there were anything out of the way in the
pool I should not send you to look at it. I mark it only
for one of myriads such in every mountain stream that
ever trout leaped or ripple laughed in.
190 DEUCALION.
And beside it, as a type of all its brother deeps, these
following questions may be wisely put to yourselves.
14. First How are any of the pools kept clear in a
stream that carries shingle ? There is some power the
water has got of lifting it out of the deeps hitherto un-
explained unthought of. Coming down the rapid in a
rage, it drops the stones, and leaves them behind ; coming
to the deep hole, where it seems to have no motion, it
picks them up and carries them away in its pocket. Ex-
plain that.
15. But, secondly, beside this pool let us listen to the
wide murmuring geological voice, telling us " To sub-
aerial denudation you owe your beautiful lake scenery" !
Then, presumably, Yewdale among the rest? There-
fore we may look upon Yewdale as a dale sub-aerially
denuded. That is to say, there was once a time when no
dale was there, and the process of denudation has exca-
vated it to the depth you see.
16. But now I can ask, more definitely and clearly,
With what chisel has this hollow been hewn for us ? Of
course, the geologist replies, by the frost, and the rain, and
the decomposition of its rocks. Good ; but though frost
may break up, and the rain wash down, there must have
been somebody to cart away the rubbish, or still you
would have had no Yewdale. Well, of course, again the
geologist answers, the streamlets are the carters ; and this
stream past Mr. Bowness's smithy is carter-in-chief.
17. How many cartloads, then, may we suppose the
V
XII. YEWDALE AND ITS STREAMLETS. 191
stream lias carried past Mr. Bowness's, before it carted
away allYewdale to this extent, and cut out all the north-
ern side of Wetherlam, and all that precipice of Yewdale
Crag, and carted all the rubbish first into Coniston Lake,
and then out of it again, and so down the Crake into the
sea ? Oh, the geologists reply, we don't mean that the
little Crake did all that. Of course it was a great river
full of crocodiles a quarter of a mile long ; or it was a
glacier five miles thick, going ten miles an hour ; or a sea
of hot water fifty miles deep, or, something of that
sort. "Well, I have no interest, myself, in (mything of
that sort : and I want to know, here, at the side of my
little puzzler of a pool, whether there's any sub-aerial
denudation going on still, and whether this visible Crake,
though it can only do little, does anything. Is it carry-
ing stones at all, now, past Mr. Bowness's ? Of course,
reply the geologists ; don't you see the stones all along it,
and doesn't it bring down more every flood ? "Well, yes ;
the delta of Coniston Waterhead may, perhaps, within
the memory of the oldest inhabitant, or within the last
hundred years, have advanced a couple of yards or so.
At that rate, those two streams, considered as navvies, are
proceeding with the works in hand ; to that extent they
are indeed filling up the lake, and to that extent sub-
aerially denuding the mountains. But now, I must ask
your attention very closely : for I have a strict bit of logic
to put before you, which the best I can do will not make
clear without some helpful effort on your part.
192 DEUCALION.
18. The streams, we say, by little and little, are fill-
ing up the lake. They did not cut out the basin of that.
Something else must have cut out that, then, before the
streams began their work. Could the lake, then, have
been cut out all by itself, and none of the valleys that
lead to it ? "Was it punched into the mass of elevated
ground like a long grave, before the streams were set to
work to cut Yewdale down to it ?
19. You don't for a moment imagine that. "Well, then,
the lake and the dales that descend with it, must have
been cut out together. But if the lake not by the stream-
lets, then the dales not by the streamlets ? The stream-
lets are the consequence of the dales then, not the
causes ; and the sub-aerial denudation to which you owe
your beautiful lake scenery, must have been something,
not only different from what is going on now, but, in one
half of it at least, contrary to what is going on now.
Then, the lakes which are now being filled up, were being
cut down ; and as probably, the mountains now being
cut down, were being cast up.
20. Don't let us go too fast, however. The streamlets
are now, we perceive, filling up the big lake. But are
they not, then, also filling up the little ones? If they
don't cut Coniston water deeper, do you think they are
cutting Mr. Marshall's tarns deeper ? If not Mr. Mar-
shall's tarns deeper, are they cutting their own little pools
deeper? This pool by which we are standing we have
seen it is inconceivable how it is not filled up, much
XII. YEWDALE AND ITS STREAMLETS. 193
more it is inconceivable that it should be cut deeper
down. You can't suppose that the same stream which is
filling up the Coniston lake below Mr. Bowness's, is cut-
ting out another Coniston lake above Mr. Bowness's?
The truth is that, above the bridge as below it, and from
their sources to the sea, the streamlets have the same
function, and are filling, not deepening, alike lake, tarn,
pool, channel, and valley.
21. And that being so, think how you have been mis-
led by seeking knowledge far afield, and for vanity's sake,
instead of close at home, and for love's sake. You must
go and see Niagara, must you ? and you will brick up and
make a foul drain of the sweet streamlet that ran past
your doors. And all the knowledge of the waters and
the earth that God meant for you, flowed with it, as water
of life.
Understand, then, at least, and at last, to-day, Niagara
is a vast Exception and Deception. The true cataracts
and falls of the great mountains, as the dear little cascades
and leaplets of your own rills, fall where they fell of old ;
that is to say, wherever there's a hard bed of rock for
them to jump over. They don't cut it away and they
can't. They do form pools beneath in a mystic way,
they excavate them to the depth which will break their
fall's force and then they excavate no more.*
We must look, then, for some other chisel than the
* Else every pool would become a well, of continually increasing
depth.
13
194 DEUCALION.
streamlet ; and therefore, as we have hitherto interrogat-
ed the waters at their .work, we will now interrogate the
hills, in their patience.
22. The principal flank of Yewdale is formed by a steep
range of crag, thrown out from the greater mass of Weth-
erlarn, and known as Yewdale Crag.
It is almost entirely composed of basalt, or hard vol-
canic ash ; and is of supreme interest among the southern
hills of the lake district, as being practically the first
rise of the great mountains of England, out of the low-
lands of England.
And it chances that my own study window being just
opposite this crag, and not more than a mile from it as the
bird flies, I have it always staring me, as it were, in the
face, and asking again and again, when I look up from
writing any of my books, " How did /come here ?"
I wrote that last sentence hurriedly, but leave it as it
was written ; for, indeed, however well I know the vanity
of it, the question is still sometimes, in spite of my best
effort, put to me in that old form by the mocking crags,
as by a vast couchant Sphinx, tempting me to vain labour
in the inscrutable abyss.
But as I regain my collected thought, the mocking ques-
tion ceases, and the divine one forms itself, in the voice of
vale and streamlet, and in the shadowy lettering of the
engraven rock.
" Where wast thou when I laid the foundation of the
earth ? declare, if thou hast understanding."
XII. YEWDALE AND ITS STREAMLETS. 195
23. How Yewdale Crags came there, I, for one, will no
more dream, therefore, of knowing, than the wild grass
can know, that shelters in their clefts. I will only to-
night ask you to consider one more mystery in the things
they have suffered since they came.
You might naturally think, following out the idea of
6 sub-aerial denudation,' that the sudden and steep rise of
the crag above these softer strata was the natural conse-
quence of its greater hardness ; and that in general the
district was only the remains of a hard knot or kernel in
the substance of the island, from which the softer super-
incumbent or surrounding material had been more or less
rubbed or washed away.*
24. But had that been so, one result of the process must
have been certain that the hard rocks would have resist-
ed more than the soft ; and that in some distinct propor-
tion and connection, the hardness of a mountain would be
conjecturable from its height, and the whole surface of
the district more or less manifestly composed of hard
bosses or ridges, with depressions between them in softer
materials. Nothing is so common, nothing so clear, as
this condition, on a small scale, in every weathered rock.
* The most wonderful piece of weathering, in all my own district,
is on a projecting mass of intensely hard rock on the eastern side of
Goat's Water. It was discovered and shown to me by my friend the
Rev. F. A. Malleson ; and exactly resembles deep ripple-marking,
though nothing in the grain of the rock indicates its undulatory struc-
ture.
196 DEUCALION".
Its quartz, or other hard knots and veins, stand out from
the depressed surface in raised walls, like the divisions be-
tween the pits of Dant&'s eighth circle, and to a certain
extent, Mr. Ward tells us, the lava dykes, either by their
hardness or by their decomposition, produce walls and
trenches in the existing surface of the hills. But these
are on so small a scale, that on this map they cannot be
discernibly indicated ; and the quite amazing fact stands
out here in unqualified and indisputable decision, that by
whatever force these forms of your mountains were hewn,
it cut through the substance of them, as a sword-stroke
through flesh, bone, and marrow, and swept away the
masses to be removed, with as serene and indiscriminating
power as one of the shot from the Devil's great guns at
Shoeburyness goes through the oak and the iron of its
target.
25. It is with renewed astonishment, whenever I take
these sections into my hand, that I observe the phenome-
non itself ; and that I remember the persistent silence of
geological teachers on this matter, through the last forty
years of their various discourse. In this shortened sec-
tion, through Bowfell to Brantwood, you go through the
summits of three first-rate mountains down to the low-
land moors: you find them built, or heaped; barred, or
bedded ; here with forged basalt, harder than flint and
tougher than iron, there, with shivering shales that split
themselves into flakes as fine as puff-paste, and as brittle
as shortbread. And behold, the hewing tool of the Mas-
Fig.l. Slates of Bull Crag and Maiden Moor. (GEOLf SURVEY.]
Fig. 2. Pie -Paste Compression from the right, simple.
Fig. 3. Pie-Paste. Compression, modified ^y elevatory forces.
Fig. 4-. Pie Paste. Compression, restricted to tTie lower Strata
Plate VI under a rl 3 id u PP er one -
LATERAL COMPRESSION OF STRATA.
Fig.l, Ideal . Figs. 2. 3.& 4. Practical.
XII. YEWDALE AND ITS STREAMLETS.
ter Builder sweeps along the forming lines, and shapes
the indented masses of them, as a draper's scissors shred
a piece of striped sarsnet !
26. Now do but think a little of the wonderf ulness in
this. If the process of grinding was slow, why don't the
hard rocks project ? If swift, what kind of force must it
have been ? and why do the rocks it tore show no signs
of rending ? Nobody supposes it was indeed swift as a
sword or a cannon-ball ; but if not, why are the rocks not
broken ? Can you break an oak plank and leave no splin-
ters, or cut a bed of basalt a thousand feet thick like
cream-cheese.
But you suppose the rocks were soft when it was done.
Why don't they squeeze, then?
Make Dover cliffs of baker's dough, and put St. Paul's
on the top of them, won't they give way somewhat,
think you ? and will you then make Causey Pike of
clay, and heave Scawfell against the side of it ; and yet
shall it not so much as show a bruise ?
Yet your modern geologists placidly draw the folded
beds of the Skiddaw and Causey Pike slate, first, with-
out observing whether the folds they draw are possible
folds in anything ; and, secondly, without the slightest
suggestion of sustained pressure, or bruise, in any part
of them.
27. I have given in my diagram, (Plate VL, Fig. 1,)
the section, attributed, in that last issued by the Geologi-
cal Survey, to the contorted slates of Maiden Moor, be-
198 DEUCALIOK.
tween Causey Pike and the erupted masses of the cen-
tral mountains. Now, for aught I know, those contor-
sions may be truly represented ; but if so, they are not
contortions by lateral pressure. For, first, they are im-
possible forms in any substance whatever, capable of be-
ing contorted ; and, secondly, they are doubly impossible
in any substance capable of being squeezed.
Impossible, I say, first in any substance capable of
being contorted. Fold paper, cloth, leather, sheets of
iron, what you will, and still you can't have the folded
bed at the top double the length of that at the bottom.
But here, I have measured the length of the upper bed,
as compared with that of the lower, and it is twenty
miles, to eight miles and a half.
Secondly, 1 say, these are impossible folds in any sub-
stance capable of being squeezed, for every such sub-
stance will change its form as well as its direction under
pressu're. And to show you how such a substance does
actually behave, and contort itself under lateral pressure,
I have prepared the sections Figures 2, 3, and 4.
28. I have just said, you have no business to seek
knowledge far afield, when you can get it at your doors.
But more than that, you have no business to go outside
your doors for it, when you can get it in your parlour.
And it so happens that the two substances which, while
the foolish little king was counting out his money, the
wise little queen was eating in the parlour, are precisely
the two substances beside which wise little queens, and
XII. YEWDALE AKD ITS STREAMLETS. 199
kings, and everybody else, may also think, in the par-
lour, Bread and honey. For whatever bread, or at
least dough, will do under pressure, ductile rocks, in
their proportion, must also do under pressure ; and in
the manner that honey will move, poured upon a slice of
them, in that manner, though in its own measure, ice
will move, poured upon a bed of them. Rocks, no more
than pie-crust, can be rolled out without squeezing them
thinner ; and flowing ice can no more excavate a valley,
than flowing treacle a teaspoon.
29. I said just now, Will you dash Scawfell against
Causey Pike ?
I take, therefore, from the Geological Survey the
section of the Skiddaw slates, which continue the mass
of Causey Pike under the Yale of Newlands, to the
point where the volcanic mass of the Scawfell range
thrusts itself up against them, and laps over them. They
are represented, in the section, as you see, (Plate VI.,
Fig. 1 ;) and it has always been calmly assumed by
geologists that these contortions were owing to lateral
pressure.
But I must beg you to observe that since the upper-
most of these beds, if it were straightened out, would be
more than twice the length of the lower ones, you could
only obtain that elongation by squeezing the upper bed
more than the lower, arid making it narrower where it
is elongated. Now, if this were indeed at the surface of
the ground, the geologists might say the upper bed had
200 DEUCALION.
been thrown up because there was less weight on it.
But, by their own accounts, there were five miles thick
of rocks on the top of all this when it \vas bent. So you
could not have made one bed tilt up, and another stay
down ; and the structure is evidently an impossible one.
30. Nay, answer the surveyors, impossible or not, it
is there. I partly, in pausing, myself doubt its being
there. This looks to me an ideal, as well as an impossi-
ble, undulation.
But if it is indeed truly surveyed, then assuredly,
whatever it may be owing to, it is not owing to lateral
pressure.
That is to say, it may be a crystalline arrangement
assumed under pressure, but it is assuredly not a form
assumed by ductile substance under mechanical force.
Order the cook to roll out half a dozen strips of dough,
and to stain three of them with cochineal. Put red and
white alternately one above the other. Then press them
in any manner you like ; after pressure, a wetted carv-
ing knife will give you quite unquestionable sections,
and you see the results of three such experiments in the
lower figures of the plate.
31. Figure 2 represents the simplest possible case.
Three white and three red dough-strips were taken, a
red one uppermost, (for the pleasure of painting it after-
wards) ! They were left free at the top, enclosed at the
sides, and then reduced from a foot to six inches in
length, by pressure from the right. The result, you see,
XII. YEWDALE AND ITS STREAMLETS. 201
is that the lower bed rises into sharpest gables ; the
upper ones are rounded softly. But in the geological
section it is the upper bed that rises, the lower keeps
down ! The second case is much more interesting. The
pastes were arranged in the same order, but bent up a
little, to begin with, in two places, before applying the
pressure. The result was, to my own great surprise,
that at these points of previous elevation, the lower bed
first became quite straight by tension as it rose, and then
broke into transverse faults.
32. The third case is the most interesting of all. In
this case, a roof of slate was put over the upper bed,
allowing it to rise to some extent only, and the pressure
was applied to the two lower beds only.* The upper
bed of course exuded backwards, giving these flame-like
forms, of which afterwards I got quite lovely complica-
tions by repeated pressures. These I must reserve for
future illustration, concluding to-night, if you will per-
mit me, with a few words of general advice to the
younger members of this society, formed as it has been
to trace for itself a straight path through the fields of
literature, and over the rocks of science.
33. First. Whenever you write or read English, write
it pure, and make it pure if ill written, by avoiding all
unnecessary foreign, especially Greek, forms of words
* Here I had to give the left-hand section, as it came more neatly.
The wrinkled mass on the left coloured brown represents the push-
ing piece of wood, at the height to which it was applied.
202 DEUCALION".
yourself, and translating them when used by others.
Above all, make this a practice in science. Great part
of the supposed scientific knowledge of the day is sim-
ply bad English, and vanishes the moment you trans-
late it.
There is a farther very practical reason for avoiding
all vulgar Greek-English. Greece is now a kingdom,
and will I hope remain one, and its language is now
living. The ship-chandler, within six doors of me on
the quay at Yenice, had indeed a small English sign
calling himself Ship-Chandler ; but he had a large and
practically more serviceable, Greek one, calling himself
a " Tfpo^Oe rrr}s TGOV nXoioov." IsTowwhen the Greeks
want a little of your science, as in very few years they
must, if this absurd practice of using foreign languages
for the clarification of scientific principle still holds,
what you, in compliment to Greece, call a 4 Dinothe-
rium,' Greece, in compliment to you, must call a ' Nasty-
beastium,' and you know that interchange of compli-
ments can't last long.
34. II. Observe generally that all knowledge, little or
much, is dangerous, in which your progress is likely to
be broken short by any strict limit set to the powers of
mortals: while it is precisely that kind of knowledge
which provokes vulgar curiosity, because it seems so far
away ; and idle ambition, because it allows any quantity
of speculation, without proof. And the fact is that the
greater quantity of the knowledge which modern science
XII. YEWDALE AND ITS STREAMLETS. 203
is so saucy about, is only an asses' bridge, which the
asses all stop at the top of, and which, moreover, they
can't help stopping at the top of; for they have from
the beginning taken the wrong road, and so come to a
broken bridge a Ponte Rotto over the river of Death,
by which the Pontifex Maximus allows them to pass no
step farther.
35. For instance, having invented telescopes and
photography, you are all stuck up on your hobby-horses,
because you know how big the moon is, and can get
pictures of the volcanoes in it !
But you never can get any more than pictures of these,
while^in your own planet there are a thousand volcanoes
which you may jump into, if you have a mind to; and
may one day perhaps be blown sky high by, whether
you have a mind or not. The last time the great volca-
no in Java was in eruption, it threw out a stream of hot
water as big as Lancaster Bay, and boiled twelve thou-
sand people. That's what I call a volcano to be in-
terested about, if you want sensational science.
36. But if not, and you can be content in the wonder
and the power of Nature, without her terror, here is a
little bit of a volcano, close at your very doors Yew-
dale Crag, which I think will be quiet for our time,
and on w r hich the anagallis tenella, and the golden poten-
tilla, and the sundew, grow together among the dewy
moss in peace. And on the cellular surface of one of
the blocks of it, you may find more beauty, and learn
204 DEUCALION.
more precious things, than with telescope or photograph
from all the moons in the milky way, though every drop
of it were another solar system.
I have a few more very serious words to say to the
fathers, and mothers, and masters, who have honoured
me with their presence this evening, with respect to the
influence of these far-reaching sciences on the temper of
children.
37. Those parents who love their children most ten-
derly, cannot but sometimes dwell on the old Christian
fancy, that they have guardian angels. I call it an old
fancy, in deference to your modern enlightenment in
religion ; but I assure you nevertheless, in spite of all
that illumination, there remains yet some dark possi-
bility that the old fancy may be true : and that, although
the modern apothecary cannot exhibit to you either an
angel, or an imp, in a bottle, the spiritual powers of
heaven and hell are no less now, than heretofore, con-
tending for the souls of your children ; and contending
with you for the privilege of their tutorship.
38. Forgive me if I use, for the few minutes I have
yet to speak to you, the ancient language, metaphorical,
if you will, of Luther and Fenelon, of Dante and Milton,
of Goethe and Shakspeare, of St. John and St. Paul,
rather than your modern metaphysical or scientific slang :
and if I tell you, what in the issue of it you will iind is
either life-giving, or deadly, fact, that the fiends and
the angels contend with you daily for the spirits of your
XII. YEWDALE AND ITS STREAMLETS. 205"
children : the devil using to you his old, his hitherto
immortal, bribes, of lust and pride ; and the angels
pleading with you, still, that they may be allowed to lead
your babes in the divine life of the pure and the lowly.
To enrage their lusts, and chiefly the vilest lust of
money, the devils would drag them to the classes that
teach them how to get on in the world ; and for the
better pluming of their pride, provoke their zeal in the
sciences which will assure them of there being no God
in nature but the gas of their own graves.
And of these powers you may discern the one from
the other by a vivid, instant, practical test. The devils
always will exhibit to you what is loathsome, ugly, and,
above all, dead ; and the angels, what is pure, beautiful,
and, above all, living.
39. Take an actual, literal instance. Of all known
quadrupeds, the unhappiest and vilest, yet alive, is the
sloth, having this farther strange devilry in him, that
what activity he is capable of, is in storm, and in the
night. Well, the devil takes up this creature, and makes
a monster of it, gives it legs as big as hogsheads, claws
stretched like the roots of a tree, shoulders like a hump
of crag, and a skull as thick as a paving-stone. From
this nightmare monster he takes what poor faculty of
motion the creature, though wretched, has in its minuter
size ; and shows you, instead of the clinging climber that
scratched and scrambled from branch to branch among
the rattling trees as they bowed in storm, only a vast
206 DEUCALION.
heap of stony bones and staggering clay, that drags its
meat down to its mouth out of the forest ruin. This
creature the fiends delight to exhibit to you, but are per-
mitted by the nobler powers only to exhibit to you in its
death.*
* The Mylodon. An old sketch, (I think, one of Leech's) in
Punch, of Paterfamilias improving Master Tom's mind among the
models on the mud-bank of the lowest pond at Sydenham, went to
the root of the matter. For the effect, on Master Tom's mind of the
living squirrel, compare the following account of the most approved
modes of squirrel-hunting, by a clerical patron of the sport, extracted
for me by a correspondent, from ' Rabbits : how to rear and manage
them ; with Chapters on Hares, Squirrels, etc.' S. O. Beeton, 248,
Strand, W. C.
" It may be easily imagined that a creature whose playground is
the top twigs of tall trees, where no human climber dare venture, is
by no means easy to capture especially as its hearing is keen, and
its vision remarkably acute. Still, among boys living in the vicinity
of large woods and copses, squirrel -hunting is a favourite diversion,
and none the less so because it is seldom attended by success. ' The
only plan,' says the Rev. Mr. Wood, ' is to watch the animal until it
has ascended an isolated tree, or, by a well-directed shower of mis-
siles, to drive it into such a place of refuge, and then to form a ring
round the tree so as to intercept the squirrel, should it try to escape
by leaping to the ground and running to another tree. The best
climber is then sent in chase of the squirrel, and endeavours, by vio-
lently shaking the branches, to force the little animal to loose its hold
and fall to the earth. But it is by no means an easy matter to shake
a squirrel from a branch, especially as the little creature takes refuge
on the topmost and most slender boughs, which even bend under the
weight of its own small body, and can in no way be trusted with the
weight of a human being. By dint, however, of perseverance, the
XII. YEWDALE AND ITS STREAMLETS. 207
40. On the other hand, as of all quadrupeds there is
none so ugly or so miserable as the sloth, so, take him for
all in all, there is none so beautiful, so happy, so wonder-
ful as the squirrel. Innocent in all his ways, harmless
in his food, playful as a kitten, but without cruelty, and
surpassing the fantastic dexterity of the monkey, with
the grace and the brightness of a bird, the little dark-
eyed miracle of the forest glances from branch to branch
more like a sunbeam than a living creature : it leaps,
and darts, and twines, where it will ; a chamois is slow
to it ; and a panther, clumsy : grotesque as a gnome,
gentle as a fairy, delicate as the silken plumes of the
rush, beautiful and strong like the spiral of a fern, it
haunts you, listens for you, hides from you, looks for
you, loves you, as if the angel that walks with your chil-
dren had made it himself for their heavenly plaything.
And this is what you do, to thwart alike your child's
angel, and his God, you take him out of the woods into
the town, you send him from modest labour to com-
petitive schooling, you force him out of the fresh air
squirrel is at last dislodged, and comes to the ground as lightly as a
snow-flake. Hats, caps, sticks, and all available missiles are imme-
diately flung at the luckless animal as soon as it touches the ground,
and it is very probably struck and overwhelmed by a cap. The suc-
cessful hurler flings himself upon the cap, and tries to seize the
squirrel as it lies under his property. All his companions gather
round him, and great is the disappointment to find the cap empty,
and to see the squirrel triumphantly scampering up some tree where
it would be useless to follow it.' " '
208 DEUCALION.
into the dusty bone-bouse, you sbow him the skeleton
of the dead monster, and make him pore over its rotten
cells and wire-stitchea joints, and vile extinct capacities
of destruction, and when he is choked and sickened
with useless horror and putrid air, you let him regret-
ting the waste of time go out for once to play again by
the woodside ; and the first squirrel he sees, he throws a
stone at!
Carry, then, I beseech you, this assured truth away
with you to-night. All true science begins in the love,
not the dissection, of your fellow-creatures; and it ends
in the love, not the analysis, of God. Your alphabet of
science is in the nearest knowledge, as your alphabet of
science is in the nearest duty. " Behold, it is nigh thee,
even at the doors." The Spirit of God is around you in
the air that you breathe, His glory in the light that
you see ; arid in the fruitf ulness of the earth, and the
joy of its creatures, He has written for you, day by day,
His revelation, as He has granted you, day by day, your
daily bread.
XIII. OF STELLAR SILICA. 209 '
CHAPTER XIII.
OF STELLAR SILICA.
1. THE issue of tins number of Deucalion has been so
long delayed, first by other work, and recently by my
illness, that I think it best at once to begin Mr. Ward's
notes on Plate Y. : reserving their close, with full ex-
planation of their importance and bearing, to the next
following number.
GRETA BANK COTTAGE, KESWICK,
June 13, 1876.
My dear Sir, I send you a few notes on the micro-
scopic structure of the three specimens I have had cut.
In them I have stated merely what I have seen. There
has been much which I did not expect, and still more is
there that I don't understand.
I am particularly sorry I have not the time to send a
whole series of coloured drawings illustrating the various
points ; but this summer weather claims my time on the
mountain-side, and I must give up microscopic work
until winter comes round again.
The minute spherulitic structure especially along the
fine brown lines was quite a surprise, and I shall hope
14
210 DEUCALION.
on some future occasion to see more of this subject. Be-
lieve me, yours very truly,
J. CLIFTON WARD.
P.S. There seems to be a great difference between
the microscopic structure of the specimens now examined
and that of the n'lled-up vesicles in many of my old lavas
here, so far as my limited examination has gone.
SPECIMEN A.
No. 1 commences at the end of the section farthest from
A in specimen.
1. Transparent zone with irregular curious cavities
(not liquid), and a few mossy-looking round spots
(brownish).
Polarization. Indicating an indefinite semi-crystal-
line structure. (See note at page 211.)
2. Zone with minute seed-like bodies of various sizes
(narrow brownish bands in the specimen of darker and
lighter tints).
a. Many cavities, and of an indefinite oval form in
general.
5. The large spherulites (2) are very beautiful, the
outer zone (radiate) of a delicate greenish-yellow, the
nucleus of a brownish-yellow, and the intermediate zone
generally clear.
c. A layer of densely packed bodies, oblong, or oval
in form.
d. Spherulites generally similar to Z>, but smaller,
XIII. OF STELLAR SILICA. 211 "
much more stained of a brownish-yellow, and with more
defined nuclei.
Polarization. The splierulites show a clearly radiate
polarization, with rotation of a dark cross on turning
either of the prisms ; the intermediate ground shows the
irregular semi-crystalline structure.
3. Clear zone, with little yellowish, dark, squarish
specks.
Polarization. Irregular, semi-crystalline.
4. Row of closely touching spherulites with large nu-
cleus and defined margin, rather furry in character (3).
Margins and nuclei brown ; intermediate space brownish-
yellow.
Polarization. Radiate, as in the spherulites 2 b.
(This is a short brown band which does not extend
down through the whole thickness of the specimen.)
"5. Generally clear ground, with a brownish cloudy ap-
pearance in parts.
Polarization. Indefinite semi-crystalline.
6 a. On a hazy ground may be seen the cloudy mar-
gins of separately crystalline spaces.
Polarization. Definite semi-crystalline.*
* By ' indefinite semi-crystalline ' is meant the breaking up of the
ground under crossed prisms with sheaves (5) of various colours not
clearly margined.
By 'definite semi-crystalline' is meant the breaking up of the
ground under crossed prisms with a mosaic (4) of various colours
clearly margined.
By * semi-crystalline ' is meant the interference of crystalline spaces
212 DEUCALION".
6 5. A clear band with very indefinite polarization.
7. A clearisb zone with somewhat of a brown mottled
appearance (light clouds of brown colouring matter).
Polarization. Indefinite semi-crystalline.
8. Zone of brownish bodies (this is a fine brown line,
about the middle of the section in the specimen).
a. Yellowish-brown nucleated disks.
5. Smaller, scattered, and generally non-nucleated
disks.
c. Generally non-nucleated.
Polarization. The disks are too minute to show sep-
arate polarization effects, but the ground exhibits the in-
definite semi-crystalline.
9. Ground showing indefinite semi-crystalline polari-
zation.
10. Irregular line of furry-looking yellowish disks.
11. Zone traversed by a series of generally parallel
and faint lines of a brownish-yellow. These are appar-
ently lines produced by colouring matter alone, at any
rate, not by visible disks of any kind.
Polarization. Tolerably definite, and limited by the
cross lines (6).
12. Dark-brown flocculent-looking matter, as if grow-
ing out from a well-defined line, looking like a moss-
growth.
with one another, so as to prevent a perfect crystalline form being
assumed.
XIII. OF STELLAR SILICA. 213
13. Defined crystalline interlocked spaces.
Polarisation. Definite semi-crystalline.
14. Generally, not clearly defined spaces ; central part
rather a granular look (spaces very small).
Polarization. Under crossed prisms breaking up into
tolerably definite semi-crystalline spaces.
SPECIMEN B.
B 1. In the slice taken from this side there seems to
be frequently a great tendency to spherulitic arrange-
ment, as shown by the polarization phenomena. In
parts of the white quartz where the polarization appear-
ance is like that of a mosaic pavement, there is even a
semi-spherulitic structure. In other parts there are
many spherulites on white and yellowish ground.
Between the many parallel lines of a yellowish colour
the polarization (7) effect is that of fibrous coloured
sheaves.
Here (8) there is a central clear band (b) ; between it
and (a) a fine granular line with some larger granules
(or very minute spherulites). The part (a) is carious,
apparently with glass cavities. On the other side of the
clear band, at c, are half-formed and adherent spheru-
lites; the central (shaded) parts are yellow, and the
outer coat, the intermediate portion clearish.
B 2. The slice from this end of the specimen shows
the same general structure.
'The general tendency to spherulitic arrangement is
214 DEUCALION.
well seen in polarized light, dark crosses frequently
traversing the curved structures.
Here (in Fig. 9) the portion represented on the left
was situated close to the other portion, where the point
of the arrow terminates, both crosses appearing together,
and revolving in rotation of one of the prisms.
SPECIMEN c.
The slice from this specimen presents far less variety
than in the other cases. There are two sets of structural
lines those radiate (10), and those curved and circum-
ferential (11). The latter structure is exceedingly fine
and delicate, and not readily seen, even with a high
power, owing to the fine radii not being marked out by
any colour, the whole section being very clear and
white.
A more decidedly^nueleated structure is seen in part
12.
In (13) is a very curious example of a somewhat more
glassy portion protruding in finger-like masses into a
radiate, clear, and largely spherical portion.
2. These notes of Mr. Clifton Ward's contain the first
accurate statements yet laid before mineralogists respect-
ing the stellar crystallization of silica, although that
mode of its formation lies at the very root of the struc-
ture of the greater mass of amygdaloidal rocks, and of
all the most beautiful phenomena of agates. And in-
deed I have no words to express the wonder with which
. OF STELLAR SILICA. 215
I see work like that done by Cloizeanx in the measure-
ment of quartz angles, conclude only in the construction
of the marvellous diagram, as subtle in execution as
amazing in its accumulated facts,* without the least
reference to the conditions of varying energy which
produce the spherical masses of chalcedony ! He does
not even use the classic name of the mineral, but coins
the useless one, Geyserite, for the absolutely local con-
dition of the Iceland sinter.
3. And although, in that formation, he went so near
the edge of Mr. Clifton Ward's discovery as to announce
that "leur masse se compose ellememe de spheres en-
chassees dans une sorte de pate gelatineuse," he not only
fails, on this suggestion, to examine chalcedonic struc-
ture generally, but arrested himself finally in the pur-
suit of his inquiry by quietly asserting, u ce genre de
structure n'a jamais ete rencontre jusqu'ici sur aucune
autre variete de silice naturelle ou artificielle," the fact
being that there is no chalcedonic mass whatever, which
does not consist of spherical concretions more or less
perfect, enclosed in a "pate gelatineuse."
4. In Professor Miller's manual, which was the basis
of Cloizeaux's, chalcedony is stated to appear to be a
mixture of amorphous with crystalline silica ! and its
form taken no account of. Malachite might just as
well have been described as a mixture of amorphous
with crystalline carbonate of copper !
* Facing page 8 of the ' Manuel de Mineralogie.'
216 DEUCALIOK.
5. I will not, however, attempt to proceed farther in
this difficult subject .until Mr. Clifton "Ward has time
to continue his own observations. Perhaps I may per-
suade him to let me have a connected series of figured
examples, from pure stellar quartz down to entirely
fluent chalcedony, to begin the next volume of Deuca-
lion with ; but I must endeavour, in closing the present
one, to give some available summary of its contents, and
clearer idea of its purpose ; and will only trespass so far
on my friend's province as to lay before him, together
with my readers, some points noted lately on another
kind of semi-crystallization, which bear not merely on
the domes of delicate chalcedony, and pyramids of micro-
scopic quartz, but on the far-seen chalcedony of the
Dome du Goute, and the prismatic towers of the Cervin
and dark peak of Aar.
XIV. SCHISMA MONTIUM. 217
CHAPTER XIY.
SCHISMA MONTIUM.
1. THE index closing this column of Deucalion, drawn
up by myself, is made as short as possible, and classifies
the contents of the volume so as to enable the reader to
collect all notices of importance relating to any one sub-
ject, and to collate them with those in my former writ-
ings. That they need such assemblage from their desul-
tory occurrence in the previous pnges, is matter of pin-
cere regret to me, but inevitable, since the writing of a
systematic treatise was incompatible with the more
serious work I had in hand, on greater subjects. The
6 Laws of Fesole ' alone might well occupy all the hours
I can now permit myself in severe thought. But any
student of intelligence may perceive that one inherent
cause of the divided character of this book, is its func-
tion of advance in parallel columns over a wide field ;
seeing that, on no fewer than four subjects, respecting
which geological theories and assertions have long been
alike fantastic and daring, it has shown at least the
necessity for revisal of evidence, and, in two cases, for
reversal of judgment.
2. I say " it has shown," fearlessly ; for at my time
of life, every man of ordinary sense, and probity, knows
218
what he has done securely, and what perishably. And
'during the last twenty years, none of my words have
been set down untriecT ; nor has any opponent succeeded
in overthrowing a single sentence of them.
3. But respecting the four subjects above alluded to,
(denudation, cleavage, crystallization, and elevation, as
causes of mountain form,) proofs of the uncertainty, or
even falseness, of current conceptions have been scat-
tered at intervals through my writings, early and late,
from < Modern Painters' to the 'Ethics of the Dust:'
and, with gradually increasing wonder at the fury of so-
called scientific ' speculation, I have insisted, year by
year, on the undealt with, and usually undreamt of,
difficulties which lay at the threshold of secure knowl-
edge in such matters ; trusting always that some in-
genuous young reader would take up the work I had no
proper time for, and follow out the investigations of
which the necessity had been indicated. But I waited
in vain ; and the rough experiments made at last by my-
self, a year ago, of which the results are represented in
Plate YI. of this volume, are actually the first of which
there is record in the annals of geology, made to ascer-
tain the primary physical conditions regulating the forms
of contorted strata. The leisure granted me, unhappily,
by the illness which has closed my relations with the
University of Oxford, has permitted the pursuit of these
experiments a little farther ; but I must defer account
of their results to the following volume, contenting my-
XIV. SCHISMA MOKTIUM. 219-
self with indicating, for conclusion of the present one, to
what points of doubt in existing theories they have been
chiefly directed.
4. From the examination of all mountain ground
hitherto well gone over, one general conclusion has been
derived, that wherever there are high mountains, there
are hard rocks. Earth, at its strongest, has difficulty in
sustaining itself above the clouds; and could not hold
itself in any noble height, if knitted infirmly.
5. And it has farther followed, in evidence, that on
the flanks of these harder rocks, there are yielding beds,
which appear to have been, in some places, compressed
by them into wrinkles and undulations ; in others, shat-
tered, and thrown up or down to different levels. My
own interest was excited, very early in life,* by the
forms and fractures in the mountain groups of Savoy ;
and it happens that the undulatory action of the lime-
stone beds on each shore of the Lake of Annecy, and
the final rupture of their outmost wave into the preei-
* I well yet remember my father's rushing up to the drawing-room
at Herne Hill, with wet and flashing eyes, with the proof in his hand
of the first sentences of his son's writing ever set in type, ' Enquiries
on the Causes of the Colour of the Water of the Rhone/ (Magazine
of Natural History, September, 1834; (followed next month by
' Facts and Considerations on the Strata of Mont Blanc, and on
some Instances of Twisted Strata observable in Switzerland.' I
was then fifteen.) My mother and I eagerly questioning the cause
of his excitement, " It's it's only print" said he ! Alas ! how
much the ' only ' meant !
220 DEUCALIOK.
pice of the Sal eve, present examples so clear, and so im-
posing, of each condition of form, that I have been led,
without therefore layiflg claim to any special sagacity, at
least into clearer power of putting essential questions
respecting such phenomena than geologists of far wider
experience, who have confused or amused themselves
by collecting facts indiscriminately over vast spaces of
ground. I am well convinced that the reader will find
more profit in following my restricted steps ; and satis-
fying, or dissatisfying himself, with precision, respect-
ing forms of mountains which he can repeatedly and
exhaustively examine.
6. In the uppermost figure in Plate VII. , I have en-
larged and coloured the general section given rudely
above in Figure 1, page 11, of the Jura and Alps, with
the intervening plain. The central figure is the south-
ern, and the lowermost figure, which should be con-
ceived as joining it on the right hand, the northern,
series of the rocks composing our own Lake district,
drawn for me with extreme care by the late Professor
Phillips, of Oxford.
I compare, and oppose, these two sections, for the
sake of fixing in the reader's mind one essential point
of difference among many resemblances ; but that they
may not, in this comparison, induce any false impres-
sions, the system of colour which I adopt in this plate,
and henceforward shall observe, must be accurately un-
derstood.
XIV. SCHISMA MONTIUM.
221
7. At page 130 above, I gave my reasons for making
no endeavour, at the Sheffield Museum, to certify the
ages of rocks. For the same reason, in practical sections
I concern myself only with their nature and position ;
and colour granite pink, slate purple, and sandstone red,
without inquiring whether the granite is ancient or
modern, the sand trias or pliocene, and the slate Wen-
lock or Caradoc ; but with this much only of necessary
concession to recognized method, as to colour with the
same tint all rocks which unquestionably belong to the
same great geological formation, and vary their minera-
logical characters within narrow limits. Thus, since, in
characteristic English sections, chalk may most con-
veniently be expressed by leaving it white, and some of
the upper beds of the Alps unquestionably are of the
same period, I leave them white also, though their gen-
eral colour may be brown or grey, so long as they retain
cretaceous or marly consistence ; but if they become
metamorphic, and change into clay slate or gneiss, I
colour them purple, whatever their historical relations
may be.
8. And in all geological maps and sections given in
* Deucalion,' I shall limit myself to the definition of the
twelve following formations by the twelve following
colours. It is enough for any young student at first to
learn the relations of these great orders of rock and
earth: once master of these, in any locality,* he may
split his beds into any complexity of finely laminated
222 DEUCALION.
chronology he likes; and if I have occasion to split
them for him myself, I can easily express their minor
differences by methods* of engraving. But, primarily,
let him be content in the recognition of these twelve
territories of Demeter, by this following colour her-
aldry :
9.
1. Granite will bear in the field, Rose-red.
2. Gneiss and mica-slate Rose-purple.
3. Clay-slate Violet-purple.
4. Mountain limestone Blue.
5. Coal measures and millstone
grit Grey.
6. Jura limestone Yellow.
7. Chalk White.
8. Tertiaries forming hard rock Scarlet.
9. Tertiary sands and clays Tawny
10. Eruptive rocks not definitely
volcanic Green.
11. Eruptive rocks, definitely vol-
canic, but at rest Green, spotted red.
12. Volcanic rocks, active Black, spotted red.
10. It will at once be seen by readers of some geo-
logical experience, that approximately, and to the degree
possible, these colours are really characteristic of the
several formations ; and they may be rendered more so
by a little care in modifying the tints. Thus the
scarlet' used for the tertiaries may be subdued as much
as we please, to what will be as near a sober brown as
we can venture without confusing it with the darker
XIV. SCHISMA MOKTIUM.
shades of yellow ; and it may be used more pure to
represent definitely red sandstones or conglomerates :
while, again, the old red sands of the coal measures may
be extricated from the general grey by a tint of ver-
milion which will associate them, as mineral substances,
with more recent sand. Thus in the midmost section
of Plate VII. this colour is used for the old red con-
glomerates of Kirby Lonsdale. And again, keeping pure
light blue for the dated mountain limestones, which are
indeed, in their emergence from the crisp turf of their
pastures, grey, or even blue in shade, to the eye, a
deeper blue may be kept for the dateless limestones
which are associated with the metamorphic beds of the
Alps ; as for my own Coniston Silurian limestone, which
may be nearly as old as Skiddaw.
11. The colour called ' tawny,' I mean to be as nearly
that of ripe wheat as may be, indicating arable land, or
hot prairie; while, in maps of northern countries,
touched with points of green, it may pass for moorland
and pasture : or, kept in the hue of pale vermilion, it
may equally well represent desert alluvial sand. Finally,
the avoidance of the large masses of fierce and frightful
scarlet which render modern geological maps intolerable
to a painter's sight, (besides involving such geographical
incongruities as the showing Iceland in the colour of a
red-hot coal ;) and the substitution over all volcanic dis-
tricts, of the colour of real greenstone, or serpentine, for
one which resembles neither these, nor the general tones
224 DEUCALION.
of dark colour either in lava or cinders, will certainly
render all geological study less injurious to the eye-
sight, and less harmful 4o the taste.
12. Of the two sections in Plate VIL, the upper one
is arranged from Studer, so as to exhibit in one view the
principal phenomena of Alpine structure according to
that geologist. The cleavages in the central granite
mass are given, however, on my own responsibility, not
his. The lower section was, as aforesaid, drawn for me
by my kind old friend Professor Phillips, and is, I doubt
not, entirely authoritative. In all great respects, the sec-
tions given by Studer are no less so ; but they are much
ruder in drawing, and can be received only as imperfect
summaries perhaps, in their abstraction, occasionally in-
volving some misrepresentation of the complex facts.
For my present purposes, however, they give me all the
data required.
13. It will instantly be seen, on comparing the two
groups of rocks, that although nearly similar in succes-
sion, and both suggesting the eruptive and elevatory
force of the granitic central masses, there is a wide dif-
ference in the manner of the action of these on the strata
lifted by them. In the Swiss section, the softer rocks
seem to have been crushed aside, like the ripples of
water round any submersed object rising to the surface.
In the English section, they seem to have undergone no
such torsion, but to be lifted straight, as they lay, like the
timbers of a gabled roof. It is true that, on the larger
XIY. SCHISMA MONTITJM.
scale of the Geological Survey, contortions are shown at
most of the faults in the Skiddaw slate ; but, for the rea-
sons already stated, I believe these contortions to be
more or less conventionally represented ; and until I
have myself examined them, will not' modify Professor
Phillips' drawing by their introduction.
Some acknowledgment of such a structure is indeed
given by him observably in the dark slates on the left in
the lowermost section ; but he has written under these
undulatory lines " quartz veins," and certainly means
them, so far as they are structural, to stand only for or-
dinary gneissitic contortion in the laminated mass, and
not for undulating strata.
14. Farther. No authority is given me by Studer for
dividing the undulatory masses of the outer Alps by any
kind of cleavage-lines. Nor do I myself know examples
of fissile structure in any of these mountain masses, un-
less where they are affected by distinctly metamorphic
action, in the neighbourhood of the central gneiss or
mica-schist. On the contrary, the entire courses of the
Cumberland rock, from Kirby Lonsdale to Carlisle, are
represented by Professor Phillips as traversed by a per-
fectly definite and consistent cleavage throughout, dip-
ping steeply south, in accurately straight parallel lines,
and modified only, in the eruptive masses, by a vertical
cleavage, characterizing the pure granite centres.
15. I wish the reader to note this with especial care,
because the cleavage of secondary rock has been lately
15
226 DEUCALION.
attributed, with more appearance of reason than modern
scientific theories usually possess, to lateral pressure, act-
ing in a direction perpendicular to the lamination. It
seems, however, little calculated to strengthen our confi-
dence in such an explanation, to find the Swiss rocks,
which appear to have been subjected to a force capable
of doubling up leagues of them backwards and forwards
like a folded map, wholly without any resultant schistose
structure ; and the English rocks, which seem onlv to
have been lifted as a raft is raised on a wave, split across,
for fifty miles in succession, by foliate structures of the
most perfect smoothness and precision.
16. It might indeed be alleged, in deprecation of this
objection, that the dough or batter of which the Alps
were composed, mostly calcareous, did not lend itself
kindly to lamination, while the mud and volcanic ashes of
Cumberland were of a slippery and unctuous character,
easily susceptible of rearrangement under pressure. And
this view receives strong support from the dextrous ex-
periment performed by Professor Tyndall in 1856, and
recorded, as conclusive, in 1872,* wherein, first warming
some wax, then pressing it between two pieces of glass,
and finally freezing it, he finds the congealed mass deli-
cately laminated ; and attributes its lamination to the
" lateral sliding of the particles over each other." * But
with his usual, and quite unrivalled, incapacity of follow-
* ' Forms of Water/ King and Co., 1872, p. 190.
XIV. SCHISMA MOKTIUM.
ing out any subject on the two sides of it, lie never tells
us, and never seems to have asked himself, how far the
wax was flattened, and how far, therefore, its particles
had been forced to slide ; nor, during the sixteen years
between his first and final record of the experiment, does
he seem ever to have used any means of ascertaining
whether, under the observed conditions, real compression
of the substance of the wax had taken place at all ! For
if not, and the form of the mass was only altered from a
lump to a plate, without any increase of its density, a less
period for reflection than sixteen years might surely have
suggested to Professor Tyndall the necessity, in applying
his result to geological matters, of providing mountains
which were to be squeezed in one direction, with room
for expansion in another.
17. For once, however, Professor Tyndall is not with-
out fellowship in his hesitation to follow the full circum-
ference of this question. Among the thousands of pas-
sages I have read in the works even of the most careful
and logical geologists, even such as Humboldt and De
Saussure, I remember not one distinct statement * of
* As these sheets are passing through the press, I received the fol-
lowing most important note from Mr. Clifton Ward: " With regard
to the question whether cleavage is necessarily followed by a reduc-
tion in bulk of the body cleaved, the following cases may help us to
form an opinion. Crystalline volcanic rocks (commonly called trap),
as a rule, are not cleaved, though the beds, uncrystalline in character,
above and below them, may be. When, however, a trap is highly
228 DEUCALION".
the degree in which they supposed the lamination of any
given rock to imply real increase of its density, or only
the lateral extension ol its mass.
18. And the student must observe that in many cases
lateral extension of mass is precisely avoided by the very
positions of rocks which are supposed to indicate the
pressure sustained. In Mr. Woodward's experiment
with sheets of paper, for instance, (above quoted, p. 17,*)
there is neither increase of density nor extension of mass,
in the sheets of paper. They remain just as thick as
they were, just as long and broad as they were. They
are only altered in direction, and no more compressed, as
they bend, than a flag is compressed by the wind that
vesicular, it is sometimes well cleaved. May we not, therefore, sup-
pose that in a rock, wholly crystalline, the particles are too much in-
terlocked to take up new positions? In a purely fragmentary rock,
however, the particles seem to have more freedom of motion; their
motion under pressure leads to a new and more parallel arrangement
of particles, each being slightly flattened or pulled out along the
planes of new arrangement. This, then, points to a diminution of
bulk at any rate in a direction at right angles to the planes of cleav-
age. The tendency to new arrangement of particles under pressure
points to accommodation under altered circumstances of space. In rocks
composed of fragments, the interspaces, being for the most part
larger than the intercrystalline spaces of a trap rock, more freely al-
low of movement and new arrangement."
* There is a double mistake in the fourth line from the top in that
page. I meant to have written, " from a length of four inches into
the length of one inch," but I believe the real dimensions should
have been " a foot crushed into three inches."
XIY. SCHISMA MONTIUM.
waves it. In my own experiments with dough, of
course the dough was no more compressible than so
much water would have been. Yet the language of the
geologists who attribute cleavage to pressure might usu-
ally leave their readers in the notion that clay can be
reduced like steam ; and that we could squeeze the sea
down to half its depth by first mixing mud with it!
Else, if they^ really comprehended the changes of form
rendered necessary by proved directions of pressure, and
did indeed mean that the paste of primitive slate had
been i flattened out' (in Professor Tyiidall's words) as a
cook flattens out her pastry-crust with a rolling-pin, they
would surely sometimes have asked themselves, and oc-
casionally taken the pains to tell their scholars, where
the rocks in question had been flattened to. Yet in the
entire series of Swiss sections (upwards of a hundred)
given by Studer in his Alpine Geology, there is no hint
of such a difficulty having occurred to him; none, of
his having observed any actual balance between diminu-
tion of bulk and alteration of form in contorted beds ;
and none, showing any attempt to distinguish mechani-
cal from crystalline foliation. The cleavages are given
rarely in any section, and always imperfectly.
19. In the more limited, but steadier and closer, work
of Professor Phillips on the geology of Yorkshire, the
solitary notice of " that very obscure subject, the cleav-
age of slate" is contained in three pages, (5 to 8 of the
first chapter,) describing the structure of a, single quarry,
230 DEUCALION.
in which the author does not know, and cannot event-
ually discover, whether the rock is stratified or not! I
respect, and admire, the frankness of the confession ;
but it is evident that before any affirmation of value,
respecting cleavages, can be made by good geologists, they
must both ascertain many laws of pressure in viscous
substances at present unknown; and describe a great
many quarries with no less attention than was given by
Professor Phillips to this single one.
20. The experiment in wax, however, above referred
to as ingeniously performed by Professor Tyndall, is not
adduced in the " Forms of water" for elucidation of
cleavage in rocks, but of riband structure in ice (of
which more presently). His first display of it, however,
was I believe in the lecture delivered in 1856 at the
Royal Institution, this, and the other similar experi-
ments recorded in the Appendix to the ' Glaciers of the
Alps,' being then directed mainly to the confusion of
Professor Sedgwick, in that the Cambridge geologist had
with caution expressed an opinion that cleavage was
a result of crystallization under polar forces.
21. Of that suggestion Professor Tyndall compliment-
arily observed that " it was a bold stretch of analogies,"
and condescendingly that "it had its value, it has
drawn attention to the subject." Presently, translating
this too vulgarly intelligible statement into his own sub-
lime language, he declares of the theory in debate that
it, and the like of it, are " a dynamic power which oper-
XIV. SCHISMA MOtfTIUM.
ates against intellectual stagnation." How a dynamic
power differs from an undynamic one, and, presum-
ably, also, a potestatib dynamis from an unpotestatic
one;) and how much more scientific it is to say, in-
stead of that our spoon stirs our porridge, that it
" operates against the stagnation" of our porridge, Pro-
fessor Tyndall trusts the reader to recognize with admi-
ration. But if any stirring or skimming, or other opera-
tion of a duly dynamic character, could have clarified
from its scum of vanity the pease-porridge of his own
wits, Professor Tyndall would have felt that men like
the Cambridge veteran, one of the very few modern
men of science who possessed real genius, stretch no
analogies farther than they will hold ; and, in this par-
ticular case, there were two facts, familiar to Sedgwick,
and with which Professor Tyndall manifests no acquaint-
ance, materially affecting every question relating to cleav-
age structure.
22. The first, that all slates whatever, among the older
rocks, are more or less metamorphic; and that all meta-
morphisrn implies the development of crystalline force.
Neither the chiastolite in the slate of Skiddaw, nor the
kyanite in that of St. Gothard, could have been formed
without the exertion, through the whole body of the
rock, of crystalline force, which, extracting some of its
elements, necessarily modifies the structure of the rest.
The second, that slate-quarries of commercial value, for-
tunately rare among beautiful mountains, owe their
232 DEUCALION.
utility to the unusual circumstance of cleaving, over the
quarryable space, practically in one direction only. But
such quarryable spaces "extend only across a few fathoms
of crag, and the entire mass of the slate mountains of the
world is cloven, not in one, but in half a dozen direc-
tions, each separate and explicit ; and requiring, for their
production on the pressure theory, the application of half
a dozen distinct pressures, of which none shall neutralize
the effect of any other ! That six applications of various
pressures at various epochs, might produce six cross
cleavages, may be conceived without unpardonable rash-
ness, and conceded without perilous courtesy ; but before
pursuing the investigation of this hexfoiled subject, it
would be well to ascertain whether the cleavage of any
rock whatever does indeed accommodate itself to the cal-
culable variations of a single pressure, applied at a single
time.
23. Whenever a bed of rock is bent, the substance
of it on the concave side must be compressed, and the
substance of it on the convex side, expanded. The de-
gree in which such change of structure must take place
may be studied at ease in one's arm-chair with no more
apparatus than a stick of sealing-wax and a candle ; and
as soon as I am shown a bent bed of any rock with dis-
tinct lamination on its concave side, traceably gradated
into distinct crevassing on its convex one, I will admit
without farther debate the connection of foliation with
pressure.
XIV. SCHISMA MONTITJM. 233
24. In the meantime, the delicate experiments by the
conduct of which Professor Tyndall brought his audi-
ences into what he is pleased to call "contact with facts"
(in older times we used to say 'grasp of facts' ; modern
science, for its own part, prefers, not unreasonably, the
term ' contact,' expressive merely of occasional collision
with them.) must remain inconclusive. But if in the
course of his own various ; contact with facts' Professor
Tyndall has ever come across a bed of slate squeezed
between two pieces of glass or anything like them I
will thank him for a description of the locality. All
metamorphic slates have been subjected assuredly to heat
probably to pressure; but (unless they were merely
the shaly portions of a stratified group) the pressure
to which they have been subjected was that of an ir-
regular mass of rock ejected in the midst of them, or
driven fiercely against them ; and their cleavage so far
as it is indeed produced by that pressure, must be such
as the iron of a target shows round a shell ; and not at
all representable by a film of candle-droppings.
25. It is further to be observed, and not without in-
creasing surprise and increasing doubt, that the experi-
ment was shown, on the first occasion, to explain the
lamination of slate, and on the second, to explain the
riband structure of ice. But there are no ribands in
slate, and there is no lamination in ice. There are no
regulated alternations of porous with solid substance in
the one ; and there are no constancies of fracture by
234 DEUCALION.
plane surfaces in the other ; moreover and this is to be
chiefly noted, slate lamination is always straight ; gla-
cier banding always bent. The structure of the pressed
wax might possibly explain one or other of these phe-
nomena ; but could not possibly explain both, and does
actually explain neither.
26. That the arrangement of rock substance into fissile
folia does indeed take place in metamorphic aluminous
masses under some manner of pressure, has, I believe,
been established by the investigations both of Mr. Sorby
and of Mr. Clifton Ward. But the reasons for conti-
nuity of parallel cleavage through great extents of vari-
ously contorted beds; for its almost uniform assumption
of a high angle; for its as uniform non-occurrence in
horizontal laminae under vertical pressure, however vast ;
for its total disregard of the forces causing upheaval
of the beds ; and its mysteriously deceptive harmonies
with the stratification, if only steep enough, of neigh-
bouring sedimentary rocks, remain to this hour, not only
unassigned, but unsought.
27. And it is difficult for me to understand either the
contentment of geologists witlrthis state of things, or the
results on the mind of ingenuous learners, of the partial
and more or less contradictory information hitherto ob-
tainable on the subject. The section given in the two
lower figures of Plate VII. was drawn for me, as I have
already said, by my most affectionately and reverently
remembered friend, Professor Phillips, of Oxford. It
XIV. SCHISMA MONTIUM. 235
goes through the entire crest of the Lake district from
Lancaster to Carlisle, the first emergent rock-beds being
those of mountain limestone, A to B, not steeply in-
clined, but lying unconformably on the steeply inclined
flags and grit of Furness Fells, B to C. In the depres-
sion at C lies Coniston Lake ; then follow the masses of
Coniston Old Man and Scawfell, C to D, sinking to the
basin of Derwentwater just after the junction, at Grange,
of their volcanic ashes with the Skiddaw slate. Skiddaw
himself, and Carrock Fell, rise between D and E ; and
above E, at Caldbeck, again the mountain limestone
appears in nnconformable bedding, declining under the
Trias of the plain of Carlisle, at the northern extremity
of which a few rippled lines do service for the waves of
Solway.
28. The entire ranges of the greater mountains, it will
be seen, are thus represented by Professor Phillips as
consisting of more or less steeply inclined beds, parallel
to those of the Furness shales ; and traversed by occa-
sional cleavages at an opposite angle. But in the section
of the Geological Survey, already referred to, the beds
parallel to the Furness shales reach only as far as Wether-
lam, and the central mountains are represented as laid in
horizontal or slightly basin-shaped swirls of ashes, trav-
ersed by ejected trap, and divided by no cleavages at
all, except a few vertical ones indicative of the Tilber-
thwaite slate quarries.
29. I think it somewhat hard upon me, now that I am
236 DEUCALION.
sixty years old, and short of breath in going Tip hills, to
have to compare, verify for myself, and reconcile as I
may, these entirely adverse representations of the classical
mountains of England : no less than that I am left to
carry forward, in my broken leisure, the experiments on
viscous motion instituted by James Forbes thirty years
ago. For the present, however, I choose Professor Phil-
lips' section as far the most accurately representative of
the general aspect of matters, to my present judgment ;
and hope, with Mr. Clifton Ward's good help, to give
more detailed drawings of separate parts in the next vol-
ume of Deucalion.
30. I am prepared also to find Professor Phillips' draw-
ing in many respects justifiable, by my own former studies
of the cleavage structure of the central Alps, which, in
all the cases I have examined, I found to be a distinctly
crystalline lamination, sometimes contorted according to
the rock's own humour, fantastically as Damascus steel ;
but presently afterwards assuming inconceivable consist-
ency with the untroubled repose of the sedimentary
masses into whose company it had been thrust. The
junction of the contorted gneiss through which the gorge
of Trient is cleft, with the micaceous marble on which
the tower of Martigny is built, is a transition of this kind
within reach of the least adventurous traveller ; and the
junction of the gneiss of the Montanvert with the porous
limestone which underlies it, is certainly the most inter-
esting, and the most easily explored, piece of rock- fellow-
XIY. SCHISMA MOKTIUM.
ship in Europe. Yet the gneissitic lamination of the
Montanvert has been attributed to stratification by one
group of geologists, and to cleavage by another, ever since
the valley of Chamouni was first heard of : and the only
accurate drawings of the beds hitherto given are those
published thirty years ago in ' Modern Painters.' I had
hoped at the same time to contribute some mite of direct
evidence to their elucidation, by sinking a gallery in the
soft limestone under the gneiss, supposing the upper rock
hard enough to form a safe roof ; but a decomposing frag-
ment fell, and so nearly ended the troubles, with the toil,
of the old miner who was driving the tunnel, that I at-
tempted no farther inquiries in that practical manner.
31. The narrow bed, curved like a sickle, and coloured
vermilion, among the purple slate, in the uppermost sec-
tion of Plate VII., is intended to represent the position
of the singular band of qnartzite and mottled schists,
(" bunte schiefer,") which, on the authority of Studer's
section at page 178 of his second volume, underlies, at
least for some thousands of feet, the granite of the Jung-
frau ; and corresponds, in its relation to the uppermost
cliff of that mountain, with the subjacence of the lime-
stone of Les Tines to the aiguilles of Chamouni. I have
coloured it vermilion in order to connect it in the student's
mind with the notable conglomerates of the Black Forest,
through which their underlying granites -pass into the
Trias ; but the reversed position which it here assumes,
. and the relative dominance of the central mass of the
238 DEUCALION.
Bernese Alps, if given by Studer with fidelity, are cer-
tainly the first structural phenomena which the geologists
of Germany should benevolently qualify themselves to
explain to the summer society of Interlachen. The view
of the Jungfrau from the Castle of Manfred is probably
the most beautiful natural vision in Europe ; but, for all
that modern science can hitherto tell us, the construction
of it is supernatural, and explicable only by the Witch of
the Alps.
32. In the meantime I close this volume of Deucalion
by noting firmly one or two letters of the cuneiform
language in which the history of that scene has been
written.
There are five conditions of rock cleavage which the
student must accustom himself to recognize, and hold
apart in his mind with perfect clearness, in all study of
mountain form.
I. The Wave cleavage : that is to say, the condition of
structure on a vast scale which has regulated the succes-
sion of summits. In almost all chains of mountains not
volcanic, if seen from a rightly chosen point, some law of
sequence will manifest itself in the arrangement of their
eminences. On a small scale, the declining surges of
pastoral mountain, from the summit of Helvellyn to the
hills above Rendal, seen from any point giving a clear
profile of them, on Wetherlarn or the Old Man of Con-
iston, show a quite rhythmic, almost formal, order of
ridged waves, with their steepest sides to the lowlands ;
XIV. SCHISMA MONTIUM.
239^
for which the cause must be sought in some internal
structure of the rocks, utterly untraceable in close section.
On vaster scale, the succession of the aiguilles .of Cha-
mouni, and of the great central aiguilles themselves, from
the dome of Mont Blanc through the Jorasses, to the low
peak of the aiguille de Trient, is again regulated by a
harmonious law of alternate cleft and crest, which can be
studied rightly only from the far-distant Jura.
The main directions of this vast mountain tendency
might always be shown in a moderately good model of
any given district, by merely colouring all slopes of
ground inclined at a greater angle than thirty degrees, of
some darker colour than the rest. No slope of talus can
maintain itself at a higher angle than this, (compare
' Modern Painters,' vol. iv., p. 318 ;) and therefore, while
the mathematical laws of curvature by aqueous denuda-
tion, which were first ascertained and systematized by
Mr. Alfred Tylor, will be found assuredly to regulate or
modify the disposition of masses reaching no steeper angle,
the cliffs and banks which exceed it, brought into one
abstracted group, will always display the action of the
wave cleavage on the body of the yet resisting rocks.
33. II. The Structural cleavage.
This is essentially determined by the arrangement of
the plates of mica in crystalline rocks, or where the
mica is obscurely formed, or replaced by other minerals
by the sinuosities of their quartz veins. Next to the
actual bedding, it is the most important element of form
240 DEUCALION.
in minor masses of crag ; but in its influence on large
contours, subordinate always to the two next following
orders of cleavage.
34. III. The Asphodeline cleavage ; the detachment,
that is to say, of curved masses of crag more or less con-
centric, like the coats of an onion. It is for the most
part transverse to the structural cleavage, and forms
rounded domes and bending billows of smooth contour,
on the flanks of the great foliated mountains, which look
exactly as if they had been worn for ages under some
river of colossal strength. It is far and away the most
important element of mountain form in granitic and
metamorphic districts.
35. IY. The Frontal cleavage. This shows itself only
on the steep escarpments of sedimentary rock, when the
cliff has been produced in all probability by rending
elevatory force. It occurs on the faces of nearly all the
great precipices in Savoy, formed of Jura limestone, and
has been in many cases mistaken for real bedding. I
hold it one of the most fortunate chances attending the
acquisition of Brantwood, that I have within three
hundred yards of me, as I write, jutting from beneath
my garden wall, a piece of crag knit out of the Furness
shales, showing frontal cleavage of the most definite
kind, and enabling me to examine the conditions of it as
perfectly as I could at Bonneville or Annecy.
36. Y. The Atomic cleavage.
This is the mechanical fracture of the rock under the
XIV. SCHISMA MONTIUM.
hammer, indicating the mode of coherence between its
particles, irrespectively of their crystalline arrangements.
The conchoidal fractures of flint and calcite, the raggedly
vitreous fractures of quartz and corundum, and the
earthy transverse fracture of clay slate, come under this
general head. And supposing it proved that slaty lami-
nation is indeed owing either to the lateral expansion of
the mass under pressure, or to the filling of vacant pores
in it by the flattening of particles, such a formation ought
to be considered, logically, as the ultimate degree of fine-
ness in the coherence of crushed substance ; and not
properly a ' structure.' I should call this, therefore, also
an ' atomic ' cleavage.
37. The more or less rectilinear divisions, known as
c joints,' and apparently owing merely to the desiccation
or contraction of the rock, are not included in the above
list of cleavages, which is limited strictly to the char-
acters of separation induced either by arrangements of
the crystalline elements, or by violence in the methods of
rock elevation or sculpture.
38. If my life is spared, and my purposes hold, the
second volume of Deucalion will contain such an account
of the hills surrounding me in this district, as shall be, so
far as it is carried, trustworthy down to the minutest de-
tails in the exposition of their first elements of mountain
form. And I am even fond enough to hope that some
of the youths of Oxford educated in its now established
schools of Natural History and Art, may so securely and
242 DEUCALION".
consistently follow out sucli a piece of home study by the
delineation of the greater mountains they are proud to
climb, as to redeem, at last, the ingenious nineteenth cen-
tury from the reproach of having fostered a mountaineer-
ing club, which was content to approve itself in competi-
tive agilities, without knowing either how an aiguille
stood, or how a glacier flowed ; and a Geological Society,
which discoursed with confidence on the catastrophes of
chaos, and the processes of creation, without being able
to tell a builder how a slate split, or a lapidary how a
pebble was coloured.
APPENDIX.
WHEN I began Deucalion, one of the hopes chiefly connected with
it was that of giving some account of the work done by the real mas-
ters and fathers of Geology. I must not conclude this first volume
without making some reference, (more especially in relation to the
subjects of inquiry touched upon in its last chapter,) to the modest
life and intelligent labour of a most true pioneer in geological science,
Jonathan Otley. Mr. Clifton Ward's sketch of the good guide's life,
drawn up in 1877 for the Cumberland Association for the Advance-
ment of Literature and Science, supplies me with the following par-
ticulars of it, deeply as it seems to me instructive and impressive.
He was born near Ambleside, at Nook House, in Loughrigg,
January 19th, 1766. His father was a basket-maker ; and it is espec-
ially interesting to me, in connection with the resolved retention of
Latin as one of the chief elements of education in the system I am
arranging for St. George's schools, to find that the Westmoreland
basket-maker was a good Latin scholar ; and united Oxford and
Cambridge discipline for his son with one nobler than either, by
making him study Latin and mathematics, while, till he was twenty
five, he worked as his father's journeyman at his father's handicraft.
" He also cleaned all the clocks and watches in the neighbourhood
and showed himself very skilful in engraving upon copper-plates,
seals and coin." In 1791 he moved to Keswick, and there lived
sixty- five years, and died, ninety years old and upwards.
I find no notice in Mr. Ward's paper of the death of the father, to
whose good sense and firmness the boy owed so much. There was
yet a more woful reason for his leaving his birthplace. He was in
love with a young woman named Anne Youdale, and had engraved
their names together on a silver coin. But the village blacksmith,
Mr. Bowness, was also a suitor for the maiden's hand ; and some
years after, Jonathan's niece, Mrs. Wilson, asking him how it was
that his name and Anne Youdale 's were engraved together on the
244 APPENDIX.
same coin, he replied, " Oh, the blacksmith beat me." * He never
married, but took to mineralogy, watchmaking, and other consolatory
pursuits, with mountain rabbling alike discursive and attentive.
Let me not omit what thanks for friendly help and healthy stimulus
to the earnest youth may be due to another honest Cumberland soul,
Mr. Crosthwaite. Otley was standing one day (before he removed
to Keswick) outside the Crosthwaite Museum, f when he was accosted
by its founder, and asked if he would sell a curious stick he held in
his hand. Otley asked a shilling for it, the proprietor of the Museum
stipulating to show him the collection over the bargain. From this
time congenial tastes drew the two together as firm and staunch
friends.
He lived all his life at Keswick, in lodgings, recognized as "Jona-
than Otley's, up the steps," paying from five shillings a week at first,
to ten, in uttermost luxury ; and being able to give account of his
keep to a guinea, up to October 18, 1852, namely, board and lodging
for sixty-one years and one week, 1325 ; rent of room extra, fifty-six
years, 164 10*. Total keep and roof overhead, for the sixty useful-
lest of his ninety years, 1489 10s.
Thus housed and fed, he became the friend, and often the teacher,
of the leading scientific men of his day, Dr. Dalton the chemist, Dr.
Henry the chemist, Mr. Farey the engineer, Airy the Astronomer
Royal, Professor Phillips of Oxford, and Professor Sedgwick of Cam-
bridge. He was the first accurate describer and accurate map-maker
of the Lake district ; the founder of the geological divisions of its
rocks, which were accepted from him by Sedgwick, and are now
finally confirmed ; and the first who clearly defined the separation
between bedding, cleavage, and joint in rock, hence my enforced
notice of him, in this place. Mr. Ward's memoir gives examples of
* I doubt the orthography of the fickle maid's name, but all authority of anti-
quaries obliges me to distinguish it from that of the valley. I do so, however,
still under protest as if I were compelled to write Lord Lonsdale, ' Lownsdale,'
or the Marquis of Tweeddale, 'Twaddle,' or the victorious blacksmith, 'Beau-
ness.' The latter's family still retain the forge by Elter Water an entirely dis-
tinct branch, I am told, from our blacksmiths of the Dale : see above, pp. 189, 190.
tin that same museum, my first collection of minerals fifty specimens total
price, if I remember rightly, five shillings was bought for me, by my father, of
Mr. Crosthwaite. No subsequent possession has had so much influence on my
life. I studied Turner at his own gallery, and in Mr. Windus's portfolios ; but
the little yellow bit of " copper ore from Coniston," and the " Garnets " (I never
could see more than one !) from Borrowdale, were the beginning of science to mo
which never could have been otherwise acquired.
APPENDIX.
245
his correspondence with the men of science above named : both
Phillips and Sedgwick referring always to him in any question touch-
ing Cumberland rocks, and becoming gradually his sincere and affec-
tionate friends. Sedgwick sate by his death-bed.
I shall have frequent occasion to refer to his letters, and to avail
myself of his work. But that work was chiefly crowned in the ex-
ample he left not of what is vulgarly praised as self-Jielp, (for every
noble spirit's watchword is " God us ayde") but of the rarest of
mortal virtues, self-possession. "In your patience, possess ye your
souls."
I should have dwelt at greater length on the worthiness both of the
tenure and the treasure, but for the bitterness of my conviction that
the rage of modern vanity must destroy in our scientific schoolmen,
alike the casket, and the possession.
INDEX.
AGATE, 99, 100. See CHALCEDONY ; also, if possible, the papers on
this subject in the Geological Magazine, vol. iv., Nos. 8 and 11 ;
v., Nos. 1, 4, 5 ; vi., No. 12 ; and vii., No. 1 ; and PEBBLES.
AGES OF BOCKS, not to be defined in the catalogue of a practical
Museum, 130.
ALABASTER, sacred uses of, 93.
ALABASTRON, the Greek vase so called, 93, 106.
ALPS, general structure of, 8, 220 ; are not best seen from their high-
est points, 10 ; general section of, 11 ; violence of former energies
in sculpture of, 20 ; Bernese chain of, seen from the Simplon,
158 ; sections of given by Studer examined, 225, 226.
ANATOMY, study of, hurtful to the finest art-perceptions, 8 ; of min-
erals, distinct from their history, 178.
AMETHYST, 109 ; and Bee HYACINTH.
ANGELO, Monte St., near Naples, 33.
ANGELS, and fiends, contention of, for souls of children, 204.
ANGER, and vanity, depressing influence of, on vital energies, 1, 2.
ARGENT, the Heraldic metal, meaning of, 109.
ARRANGEMENT, permanence of, how necessary in Museums, 131.
ARTIST, distinction between, and man of science, 25 ; how to make
one, 94.
ATHENA, her eyes of the colour of sunset sky, 108.
BANDED STRUCTURE, in rocks, 143.
BAPTISM, chimes in rejoicing for, at Maglans, 68.
BDELLIUM, meaning of the word, 90.
BELL- ALP, hotel lately built on, its relation to ancient hospice of
Simplon, 159.
BELLS, sweetness of their sound among mountains, 68.
BEAUTY, more at hand than can ever be seen, 85.
BENEDICT, St. , laments decline of his order, 156.
248 INDEX.
BERNARD, St., labours of, 106 ; sermons of, 114 ; his coming to help
Dante, 157.
BERNE, town of, scenery in tys canton, 10.
BIONNASSAY, aiguille of, its beauty, 21. In the 24th line of that page,
for 'buttresses,' read ' buttress.'
BLUE, how represented in Heraldry, 106.
BISCHOF, GUSTAV, facts of mineral formation collected by, as yet
insufficient, 136.
BOWERBANK, Mr., exhaustive examination of flint fossils by, 137.
BRECCIA, (but for ' breccia,' in these pages, read ' conglomerate ') of
the outmost Bernese Alps, 14, 15
BRIENTZ, lake and valley of, 12.
BRUNIG, pass of, 12.
, Mr. J., drawing in Venice by, 117.
CARBUNCLE, meaning of the stone in Heraldry, 109.
CHALCEDONY, formation of, 133 ; general account of, 173.
CHALK, formation of, in the Alps, 11.
CHAMOUNI, valley of, its relation to the valley-system of the Alps, 12.
CHANNELS of rivers, formation of, 61, 193 ; and compare with p. 61,
Mr. Clifton Ward's account of the denudation of the Lake dis-
trict, Geological Magazine, vol. vii., p. 16.
CHEDE, lake of, its destruction, 33.
CLEAVAGE, general discussion of subject opens, 225 ; definition of the
several kinds of, 238.
CLIFFS of the Bay of Uri, 72.
CLIFTON WARD, Rev. Mr., justice of his observations on glaciation
of Lake district, 35 ; examination of agate structure by, 137 ;
continued, 177, 209 ; completed, 214 ; note on cleavage by, 227.
CLUSE, valley of, in Savoy, described, 69.
COLOUR, perception of, its relation to health and temper, 101, 116 ;
divisions and order of, 104 ; Heraldic, antiquity of, 105.
COMO, lake and valley of, 13.
CONGLOMERATE of the Alps, 15 ; and in the 25th line of that page, for
' breccia,' read ' conglomerate.'
CONISTON, rocks and lake of, 193.
CONTORTION OF STRATA, 15, 18 ; observations on by Mr. Henry Wil-
lett, 147 ; assumptions respecting the "Plissement de la croute
terrestre," by M. Viollet-le-Duc, 155 ; general question of, 197
199; practical experiments in imitation of, 201, 228. Compare
Saussure, Voyages, 35, 1801, 1802.
INDEX. 49
CONTROVERSY, fatal consequences of, 1.
CRYSTAL, Scriptural references to, 91 ; construction of, 97.
CRYSTALLIZATION, mystery of, 97 ; terms of its description, 177.
Compare ' Ethics of the Dust/ passim ; but especially chap. iii.
CURVE of ice- velocities, 61.
DANTE, use of, the Divina Commedia in mental purification, 156.
DEBATE, mischievousness of, to young people, 85.
DEFILES, transverse, of Alps, 12.
DENUDATION, first opening of discussion upon, 184 ; obscurity of the
geological expression, 186 ; appparent violence of its indiscrimi-
nate action, 197. See above, CHANNELS ; and compare ' Modern
Painters,' vol. iv., p. 155.
DESIGN of ornament, how obtainable, 119.
'DEUCALION ' and ' Proserpina,' reasons for choice of these names for
the author's final works, 4.
DEVIL, influence of the, in modern education, 205.
DEW, Arabian delight in, 90.
DIAMOND, its meaning in Heraldry, 110 ; story of diamond necklace,
moral of, 118.
DILATATION, theory of, in glaciers, its absurdity, 163 ; the bed of the
Mer de Glace, considered as a thermometer tube, 164.
DOVER, cliffs of, operations which would be needful to construct
Alps with them, 21 ; imagined results of their softness, 197.
EDINBURGH CASTLE, geology of its rock, 29.
EMERALD, meaning of, in Heraldry, 108.
ENGLISH, how to write it best, 201.
EROSION, how far the idea of it is exaggerated, 34.
ESDRAS, second book of, curious verse in its 5th chapter, probable
interpretation of, 5.
ESSENCE (real being) of things, is in what they can do and suffer, 87.
'EVENINGS AT HOME,' quoted, 23.
EXCESS in quantity, harm of, in Museum collections for educational
purposes, 130.
EXPANSION. See DILATATION.
EYES, their use, a nobler art than that of using microscopes, 23 ; colour
of Athena's, 108.
TACTS, how few, generally trustworthy, yet ascertained respecting
mineral formation, 134.
250 INDEX.
FARADAY, Professor, discovery of regelation by, 38.
FISSURES, in chalk containing flints, and traversing the flints, de-
scribed by Mr. Henry Willett, 147, 149.
FLINT, essential characters of, 87 ; account of, carefully instituted by
Mr. H. Willett, 135 ; no one knows yet how secreted, 137 ; dis-
placed veins of, 145, 147.
FORBES, Professor James, of Edinburgh, discovers the law of glacier
motion, 47 ; his survey of the Mer de Glace, 79 ; general notices
of, 37, 76 ; the Author's meeting with, 152.
FLOWING, difficulty of defining the word, 50.
FLUIDS, the laws of their motion not yet known, 83.
FRACTURES of flint, difficulties in explaining, 147 149.
GEOLOGY, the Author's early attachment to, 3 ; not needful to artists,
but rather injurious, 8 ; modern errors in developing, 71.
GLACIERS, are fluent bodies, 36 ; do not cut their beds deeper, but fill
them up, 37, 63 ; original deposition of, 39 ; summary of laws of
motion in, 48 ; rate of motion in, how little conceivable in slow-
ness, 49 ; drainage of higher valleys by, 49 ; rising of their sur-
face in winter, how accounted for, 82 ; false theories respecting,
Illustrated, 162 164. Compare also * Fors Clavigera,' Letters
XXXIV., pp. 175181, and XXXV., p. 200.
GOLD, special mechanical qualities of, 74 ; need for instruction in its
use, 95 ; mystery of its origin, 96 ; nomenclature of its forms, 128.
GONDO, defile of, in the Simplon pass, 12.
GOOD AND EVIL in spiritual natures, how discernible, 25, 205.
GREEK-ENGLISH words, barbarism of, 202.
GREEN, how represented in Heraldry, 108.
GREY, meaning of, in Heraldry, 110.
GULA, mediaeval use of the word, 114.
GULES, meaning of the colour so called, in Heraldry, 112.
HONEY, use of, in experiments on glacier motion, 81, 199.
HYACINTH, the precious stone so called, meaning of, in Heraldry, 109.
HERALDRY, nobleness of, as a language, 115 ; order of colours in, 105 ;
of the sky, 121.
HYALITE, transition of, into chalcedony, 171 174.
ICE, (of glaciers) will stretch, 56 ; is both plastic and viscous, 75. See
GLACIER.
INTERLACHEN, village of, stands on the soil deposited by the stream
from Lauterbrunnen, 21 ; duty of geologists at, 237.
INDEX. 23
IRIS OF THE EARTH, 84 ; the Messenger, 104.
IMPS, not to be bottled by modern chemists, 204.
IACINTH. See HYACINTH.
JASPER, Heraldic meaning of, 107.
JEWELS, holiness of, 95, 101 ; delighted in by religious painters, 119 ;
duty of distributing, 119.
JONES, Mr. Rupert, summary of mineralogical work by, 137.
JUDD, Mr. J. W., notice of geology of Edinburgh by, 29.
JUNGFRAU, view of , from Castle of Manfred, 287.
JURA mountains, view of the Alps from, 10 ; section of, in relation to
Alps, 11, 235 ; limestone formation of, 14.
KENDAL, town of, scenery near, 179, 180.
KINNOULL, hill of, near Perth, agates in, 98.
KNIGHTHOOD, Christian, its faithfulness to Peace, 101.
KNOTS of siliceous rock, nature of, 138.
KNOWLEDGE, how shortened by impatience, and blighted by debate,
85.
LAKES, level of, among Alps, 13 ; evacuation of, 192 ; English district
of, section through, 224.
LANDSCAPE, the study of, little recommended by the Author at
Oxford, 7.
LANGUAGE, scientific, how to be mended, 202 ; dependence of, for its
beauty, on moral powers, 115.
LAUTERBRUNNEN, valley of, 21, 237.
LAVA, definition of, 167 ; depth of, 168.
LENTICULAR CURIOSITY, vileness of, 24.
LESLIE, Mr. Stephen, reference to unadvised statements by, respecting
the achievements of Alpine Club, 9.
LIMESTONE, Jura and Mountain, general notes on, 14, 235, 236.
LUCERNE, lake of, reason of its cruciform plan, 12.
LUNGREN, lake of, its unusual elevation, 13.
LYELL, Sir Charles, final result of his work, 27, 31.
MAGGIORE, lake and valley of, 13.
MAGLANS, village of, in Savoy, scenery near, 69.
MALLESON, the Rev. F. A., discovers rare form of Coniston slate, 195.
MANNA, (food of the Israelites,) reasons for its resemblance to crystal,
90.
MENTAL PERCEPTION, how dependent on moral character, 116.
252 INDEX.
MENTAL- WORK, history of, proposal for its illustration, 86.
MICROSCOPE, mistaken use of the, opposed to use of eyes, 23.
MINERALOGY, principles of arrangement in, adapted to popular intel-
ligence, 124 ; present state of the science, 134.
MODERNISM, the degradation of England by it, 116.
'MODERN PAINTERS,' (the Author's book, so called,) contained the
first truthful delineations of the Alps, 154 ; the Author's designs
for its republication, 4, 8 ; mistake in it, caused by thinking in-
stead of observing, 41.
MOTION, proportionate, how to study, 54 ; rate of, in glaciers, 47.
MOUNTAINS, how to see, and whence, 9.
MUSEUMS, arrangement of, general principles respecting, 130 ; special
plan of that at Sheffield, 86, 123.
MUSCULAR ENERGY, not an all-sufficient source of happiness, or cri-
terion of taste, 9.
NATIONS, lower types of, without language or conscience, 116.
NIAGARA, misleading observations upon, by the school of Sir Charles
Lyell, 31.
NOISES in modern travelling, 67.
NOVELTY the worst enemy of knowledge, 84.
NUTS of silica, and almonds, why so called, 138.
ONYX, importance of, in the history of the Jews, 92, 93; general ac-
count of, 93, 100.
OR, the Heraldic metal, meaning of, 105.
PARADISE, treasures of its first river, 91.
PASSION, evil effects of, on bodily health, 1. The reader would do
well to study on this subject, with extreme care, the introductory
clauses of Sir Henry Thompson's paper on Food, in the 28th
number of the ' Nineteenth Century.'
PASTE, experiments in, on compression of strata, 197.
PEARLS, of great and little price, relative estimate of by English
ladies, 119; Heraldic meaning of, 110.
PEBBLES, Scotch, nature of, unknown, 72. See AGATE.
PERIODS, the three great, of the Earth's construction, 27.
PHILLIPS, Professor, of Oxford, 72; section of Lake district by, 224.
PLAIN of Switzerland, north of the Alps, its structure, 11.
PLANS, the Author's, of future work, 2. (I observe many readers have
passed this sentence without recognizing its irony.)
INDEX. %06
PLANTAGENET, Geoffrey, shield of, 110.
PLASTICITY, the term defined, 74.
POOLS, how kept deep in streams, dubitable, 187.
POVERTY, how to be honourably mitigated, 131.
PRESTWICH, Professor, of Oxford, 72.
PRIORITY in discovery, never cared for by the Author, 3.
PROGRESS, certainty of, to be secured in science only by modesty,
133.
PROTEUS, the seal-herdsman, 113.
PURPLE, modern errors respecting the colour, 114. Compare HYA-
CINTH.
PURPURE, the Heraldic colour, meaning of, 109.
RAM'S SKINS, for covering of Jewish Tabernacle, 114.
RED, how represented in Heraldry, 106.
REGELATION, theory of, as causing the motion of glaciers, its ab-
surdity, 164.
RENDU, Bishop of Amiens, his keenness of sense, 45.
RHINE, upper valley of, 13.
RHONE, upper valley of, 13.
ROCKS, wet and dry formation of, 135.
ROOD, Professor, Author receives assistance from, 83.
ROSA, Monte, the chain of Alps to the north of it, 151.
ROSE, the origin of the Persian word for red, 106.
ROSSBERG, fall of, how illustrating its form, 15.
SABLE, the Heraldic colour, meaning of, 110.
SCARLET, the Heraldic colour, meaning of, 107.
SCIENCE, modern, duties of, 26, 180; modern vileness and falseness
of, 204; true, how beginning and ending, 208. (In that page,
line 13, for ' science,' read ' morals.')
SCIENTIFIC PERSONS, how different from artists, 25.
SEAL-SKINS, use of, in the Jewish Tabernacle, 113.
SELFISHNESS, the Author's, 171.
SENSE, in morals, evil of substituting analysis for, 25.
SENSES, the meaning of being in or out of them, 25.
SENSIBILITY, few persons have any worth appealing to, 8.
SENTIS, Hoche, of Appenzell, structure of, 11, 16.
SILICA in lavas, 167; varieties of, defined, 169.
SINAI, desert of, coldness of occasional climate in, 90.
SIMPLON, village of, 150; Hospice of, 160.
254 INDEX.
SLATE, cleavage of, generally discussed, 225. Compare 'Modern
Painters,' Part v., chapters viii. x.
SLOTH, (the nocturnal animal^ misery of, 205.
SNOW, Alpine, structure of, 41, 45, 47.
SORBY, Mr., value of his work, 136.
SOVEREIGN, (the coin,) imagery on, 88. *
SQUIRREL, beauty of, and relation to man, 207.
STALAGMITE, incrustation of, 134.
STANDING of aiguilles, method of, to be learned, 21.
STOCKHORN, of Thun, structure of, 11.
STONES, loose in the Park, one made use of, 87; precious, their real
meaning, 118.
STREAMS, action of, 187. See CHANNELS ; and compare ' Modern
Painters,' vol. x., pp. 91, 95.
STUDER, Professor, reference to his work on the Alps, 17, 224.
SUN, Heraldic type of Justice, 105, 106.
TABERNACLE, the Jewish fur-coverings of, 113 ; the spiritual, of God,
in man, 120.
TEMERAIRE, the fighting, at Trafalgar, 104.
TENNY, the Heraldic colour, meaning of, 107.
THEORY, mischief of, in scientific study, 134 ; the work of ' Deuca-
lion' exclusive of it, 21.
THINKING, not to be trusted, when seeing is possible, 42.
THOUGHTS, worth having, come to us ; we cannot come at tJiem, 67.
THUN, lake and vale of, 12 ; passage of the lake by modern tourists,
18 ; old-fashioned manners of its navigation, 19.
TIME, respect clue to, in forming collections of objects for study, 181.
TOPAZ, Heraldic meaning of, 105.
TORRENTS, action of; in forming their beds, debated, 81.
TOWN LIFE, misery of, 208.
TRUTH, ultimate and mediate, differing character of, 111.
TURNER, J. M. W., Alpine drawings by, 9.
TYLOR, Mr. Alfred, exhaustive analysis of hill curves by, 239.
TYNDALL, Professor, experiments by, 42 ; various reference to his
works, 53, 58, 80, 160, 226, 233.
TYRRWHITT, the Rev. St. John, sketches in Arabia by, 90.
VALLEYS, lateral and transverse, of Alps, 12 ; names descriptive of,
in England how various, 180.
VALTELLINE, relation of, to Alps, 13.
INDEX.
VANITY of prematurely systematic science, 123.
VERT, the Heraldic colour, meaning of, 108.
VIA MALA, defile of, 12, 20.
VIOLLET-LE-DUC, unwary geology by, 154.
VISCOSITY, definition of, 55, 74 ; first experiments on viscous motion
of viscous fluids by Professor Forbes, 52.
VOLCANOS, our personal interest in the phenomena of, in this world,
aos.
WOMAN, supremely inexplicable, 99.
WILLETT, Mr. Henry, investigations of flint undertaken by, 135 ; pro-
ceeded with, 141.
WAVES of glacier ice, contours of, in melting, 165.
WOOD, the Rev. Mr., method of his teaching, 206; and compare
1 Fors Clavigera,' Letter LI.
WOODWARD, Mr. Henry, experiment by, on contorted strata, 17.
WOODS, free growth of, in Savoy, 70.
WEATHERING of Coniston slate, 195.
YELLOW, how represented in Heraldry, 105.
YEWDALE, near Coniston, scenery of, 184, 191, 194.
YEWDALE CRAG, structure of, 195 ; a better subject of study thai
crags in the moon, 203.
AN INITIAL PINE OP 25 CENTS
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