appreciate this and similar attempts to enough to paint the horrors of that account for the shapes and grouping of these still enigmatical mounds and ridges. repulsive mountain-world into which they ventured with some misgivings, and from which they escaped with undisguised satisfaction. Ever when we make every allowance for the physical discomforts inseparable from such journeys at that time, when neither practi The progress of Christianity extirpated the pagan gods and giants, but failed to destroy the instinctive craving after a supernatural origin for striking physical features. This surviving pop-cable roads nor decent inns had been ular demand consequently led to gradual built, it is clear that mountain scenery modification of the older legends. In not only had no charm for intelligent Catholic countries the deeds of prowess and observant men, but filled them were not infrequently transferred to the with actual disgust. Not until the preshands of the Virgin or of saints. Thus ent century did these landscapes come at Saintfort, in the Charente region, a into vogue with ordinary sight-seers. huge stone that lies by the river Ney is Only within the last two or three genersaid to mark where the Virgin dropped | ations have mountains begun to attract from her apron one of four pillars which a vastly larger annual band of appreshe was carrying across. In Britain, ciative pilgrims than ever crowded last and especially in Scotland, the devil of century along what was called the the Christian faith appears to have in "grand tour." For this happy change large measure supplanted the warlocks we are largely indebted to the Alpine and carlines of the earlier beliefs, or at ascents and admirable descriptions of least to have worked in league with the illustrious De Saussure on the Conthem as their chief. All over the coun- tinent, and to the poetry of Scott and try "devil's punchbowls," "devil's Wordsworth in this country. cauldrons," "devil's bridges," mark how his prowess has been invoked to account for natural features which in those days were deemed to require some more than ordinary agency for their production. These popular efforts to explain physical phenomena which, from the earliest days of human experience, have appealed most forcibly to the imagination, have survived longest in the more rugged and remote regions, partly, no doubt, because these regions have lain furthest away from the main onward stream of human progress, but partly also because it is there that the most impressive topographical features exist. The natural influence of mountain scenery upon the mind is probably of an awe-inspiring, depressing kind. We all remember the eloquent language in which Mr. Ruskin depicts what he calls the "mountain gloom." Man feels his littleness face to face with the mighty elementary forces that have found there their dwelling-place. Even so near our own time as the later decades of last century men of culture could hardly find language strong It is interesting to inquire how, after the popular feeling has thus been so entirely transformed, mountainous scenery now affects the imagination of cultivated people who visit it, whether impelled by the mere love of change or by that haunting passion which only the true lover of mountains can feel and appreciate. Even under the entirely changed conditions of modern travel and general education, we can detect the working of the same innate craving for some explanation of the more salient features of mountain-landscape that shall satisfy the imagination. The supernatural has long been discarded in such matters. Even the most unlearned traveller would demand that its place must be taken by scientific observation and influence. But the growth of a belief in the natural origin of all the features of the earth has grown faster than the capacity of science to guide it. Nowhere may the lasting influence of scenery on the imagination be more strikingly recognized than in the vague tentative efforts of the popular mind to apply what it supposes to be scientific method to the elucidation of these more what was one of the earliest problems to interest mankind has been one of the latest to engage the attention of modern science. impressive elements of topography. | are the record, before they seriously set The crudest misconceptions have been themselves to study the story of the started and implicitly accepted, which, present surface of the land. And thus though supposed to be based on observation of nature, are in reality hardly less unnatural than the legends of an older time. They have nevertheless gained a large measure of popular acceptance because they meanwhile satisfy the demands of the imagination. To the geologist whose duty it is to investigate these questions in the calm, dry light of science there is no task more irksome than to combat and dislodge these popular, preconceived opinions, and to procure an honest, intelligent survey of the actual evidence of fact upon which alone a solid judgment of the whole subject can be based. It is not that the evidence is difficult to collect or hard to understand. But so vividly does striking topography still appeal to the imagination, so inveterate has the habit become of linking each sublime result with the working of some stupendous cause, and of choosing in this way what is supposed to be the simplest and grandest solution of a problem, that men will hardly listen to any sober presentation of the facts. They refuse to believe that the interpretation of the earth's surface, like that of its planetary motion, is a physical question which cannot be guessed at or decided a priori, but must be answered by an appeal to the evidence furnished by nature herself. For this antagonism geologists are, no doubt, chiefly themselves to blame. While the growth of a love of natural scenery, and especially of that which is lofty and rugged, has been late and slow, the desire to ascertain the origin and history of the various inequalities of surface on which the charms of scenery so largely depend, and by careful scrutiny to refer these inequalities to the operation of the different natural agencies that produced them, has been later and slower still. Men had for several generations explored the rocks that lie beneath their feet, and had, by laborious and patient effort, deciphered the marvellous history of organic and inorganic changes of which these rocks This slowness of development, though it has allowed much misconception to grow up rank and luxuriant, has been attended with one compensating advantage, inasmuch as the various branches of inquiry into which the discussion of the problem resolves itself have made rapid progress in recent years. We are thus in a far better position to enter on a consideration of the subject than we were a generation ago. And though one may still hear a man gravely expounding familiar topographical features much as his grandfather would have done, as if in the meanwhile no thoughtful study had led to a very different interpretation, these popular fallacies, which manifest such vitality, can now be combated with a far wider experience, and a much ampler wealth of illustration from all parts of the globe. The various elements of a landscape appear to the ordinary eye so simple, so obviously related to each other, and often so clearly and sharply defined, that they are not unnaturally regarded as the effects of some one general operation that acted for their special production; and where they include abrupt features, such as a ravine or a precipice, they are still popularly believed to bo in the main the work of some sudden potent force, such as an earthquake or volcanic explosion. There is a general and perfectly intelligible unwillingness to allow that scenery which now appears so complete and connected in all its parts was not the result of one probably sudden or violent cause. Yet the simplest explanation is not always necessarily the correct one. In reality, the problems presented to us by the existing topography of the land, fascinating though they are, become daily more complex, and demand the whole resources of geological science. They cannot be solved by any rough-and the ready process. They involve not only and the more powerfully does it make an acquaintance with the recent op- its mute appeal to all that is highest erations of nature, but an extensive and best within us. And, after all, research into the history of former geological periods. The surface of every country is like a palimpsest which has been written over again and again in different centuries. How it has come to be what it is cannot be told without much patient effort. But every effort that brings us better acquainted with the story of the ground beneath our feet, and at the same time gives an added zest to our enjoyment of the scenery at the surface, is surely worthy to be made. how little have we yet learned! How small is the sum of all our knowledge ! It is still and ever must be true that, in the presence of the Infinite, greater our circle of light, the wider the circumference of darkness that surrounds it." When the man of letters complains that we have dethroned the old gods, discarded the giants and witches, and erected in their place a system of cold and formal laws that can evoke no enthusiasm, and must repress all poetry, has he never perceived how a true poet can pierce, as our late laureate could, through the mere superficial technicalities into the deeper meaning of things, and can realize and express, in language that appeals to the soul as well as to the ear, the divine harmony and progressive evolution which it is the aim of science to reveal? Let me ask such a critic to ponder well the sonnet of Lowell's: wore, For, with that insight, cometh, day by day, These remarks lead me naturally to the concluding section of my subject, in which I propose to inquire how far the discoveries of science have affected the relation of scenery to the imagination. It has often been charged against scientific men that the progress of science is distinctly hostile to the cultivation alike of the fancy and of the imagination, and that some of the choicest domains of literature must I grieve not that ripe knowledge takes away necessarily grow more and more neg- The charm that nature to my childhood lected as life and progress are brought more completely under the sway of continued discovery and invention. We hear these complaints now in the form of a helpless and hopeless wail, now as an angry and impotent protest. That they are made in good faith, and are often the expression of deep regret and anxious solicitude for the future of some It will not, I think, be hard to show parts of our literature cannot be doubted, that in dissipating the popular misconand in so far they deserve to be treated ceptions which have grown up around by scientific men with hearty respect the question of the origin of scenery, and sympathy. But is there really any-science has put in their place a series thing in the progress of science that is of views of nature which appeal infiinimical to the cultivation of the imag-nitely more to the imagination than inative faculty and the fullest blossom- anything which they supplant. While ing of poetry? The problems of life- in no way lessening the effect of human love and hope, joy and sorrow, toil and association with landscape, science lifts rest, peace and war, here and hereafter the veil that hides the past from us, will be with us always. From the and in every region calls up a succession days of Homer they have inspired the of visions which, by their contrast with sweet singers of each successive gener- what now presents itself to the eye and ation of men, and they will continue to by their own unlooked-for marvels, rivet be the main theme of the poets of the our attention. Scenes long familiar are future. As for the outer world in illumined by "a light that never was on which we live, the more we learn of it land or sea.” We view them as if an the more marvellous does it appear, enchanter's wand were waving over us, and by some strange glamour were | from this lofty summit, which is known blending past and present into one. as Slieve League, the ground plunges Let me try to illustrate these remarks down on the other side in a succession by three examples culled from the of precipices into the Atlantic Ocean, scenery of each of the three kingdoms. which stretches from the far western First, I would transport the reader in horizon up to the very base of the crags imagination to a lonely valley in the far beneath our feet. We have in truth west of the county of Donegal. The been climbing a mountain whereof onemorning light is sparkling in diamonds half has been cut away by the sea. from the dewdrops that cluster on the What a picture of decay here presents bent and heather, and is throwing a itself! We peer over the verge of the rainbow sheen across each web of gos- cliffs, still wrapped in their morning samer that hangs across our path as we shadows, and mark how peak, ridge, climb the long, rough slope in front. and wall of flinty quartzite, glowing in Around are bare, bleak moorlands, too tints of orange, yellow, and red, uprear high and infertile for cultivation, from themselves from the face of the declivthe sides and hollows of which the peas-ity, like the muscles on the limb of ants dig their fuel. The signs of human some sculptured Hercules, as if the occupation grow fewer and fainter as we ascend. The barking of the village dogs and the shouts from the school playground no longer reach our ears. And while we thus retire from the living world of to-day, it almost seems as if we enter into progressively closer communion with the past. Yonder, only a few miles to the north, lies the deep hollow of Glen Columbkill-the western seclusion where tradition records that St. Columba, the great apostle of the Scots, in his earlier years, loved to bury himself for meditation and prayer. Mouldering cross and crumbling cairn, to which latter every pious pilgrim adds a stone, keep his memory green through the centuries. It is with him and his courageous friends and disciples, rather than with sights and sounds of the present time, that we feel ourselves in contact here. And when, high up on this bare mountain-side, we come upon the ruined cells which these devoted men built with their own hands out of the rough stones of the crest, and to which they betook themselves for quiet intercourse with Heaven, amid the wild winds and driving rains of these western hills, the halo of human courage and self-denial falls for us on this solitude to heighten its loneliness and desolation. Musing on these memories of the past, we find ourselves at last at the top of the slope, nearly two thousand feet above the sea, and discover that mountain had gathered up its whole strength and knit its frame together to defy the fiercest assaults of the elements. But look how every crag is splintered, how every jutting buttress is rent and creviced, how every ledge is strewn with blocks that have fallen from the naked wall above it! If we detach one of these loosened blocks and set it in downward motion, we may watch it plunge into the abyss, flash from crag to crag, career down the screes of rubbish and make no pause until, if it survive so far, it dashes into the surge below. What we can thus carelessly do in a few moments is done deliberately every winter by the hand of nature. Slowly but ceaselessly this vast sea-wall, swept by Atlantic storm, sapped by frost, soaked with rain, dried and beaten by sun and wind, is being battered down under the fire of nature's resistless artillery. So far the scene is one that requires no special acquaintance with science for its appreciation. The man of literature, who may most disparage the man of science, may well affirm that here they meet on common ground and have equal powers of reception and enjoyment. Nor will he be gainsaid if he claims that for the enjoyment of the distant view he is likewise quite as well equipped as the other. His eye, too, can range over the whole glorious panorama of sea and land, across the wide bays to the hills of Mayo, among which the noble cone of Nephin rises like a distant Vesuvius; southward to the terraced heights of Sligo, with their green tablelands and gleaming cliffs, which look away to the western ocean; eastward and northward, over the billowy sea of hills that stretch through Donegal round again westward to the Atlantic. What is there of note in such a landscape, he may demand, which he, ignorant of science, misses ? What added pleasure, what brighter light, can science cast over it? patriot can lay the blame on the invading Saxon. was That little cake of grit on the top of Slieve League stands as a monument of waste so continued and so stupendous as to be hardly conceivable. It proves that the north-west of Ireland buried under a sheet of strata many hundreds of feet thick, and that, inch by inch, this overlying mantle of solid stone has been worn away, until it has been reduced at last to merely a few scattered patches of which, that of Slieve By way of f reply to these queries, let League is the most westerly. Not only me ask the reader who has thus far so, but the present system of hill and accompanied me to turn from the dis- valley is thus demonstrated not to be tant view to what lies beneath his feet part of the primeval architecture of on the bare, stony, wind-swept summit the earth, but to have come into being of Slieve League. Never shall I forget after that upper envelope of Carbonifmy own astonishment and enthusiasm erous rock had begun to be removed. when, in company with some of my What a marvellous series of pictures is colleagues of the Geological Survey, I thus presented to our imagination. found the splintered slabs of stone lying Standing on that bare mountain-top, we there to be full of stems of fossil trees, think of the ages represented by the belonging to kinds which occur abun- quartzite of those craggy precipices bedantly in the sandstones below our low, then of the time when the region coal-measures. The geologist will at lay beneath the waters in which the once appreciate the full meaning of this coal jungles spread over a large part of discovery. It showed that, perched on Ireland. We try to realize how these the summit of this mountain, some two jungles sank foot by foot beneath the thousand feet above the sea, lay a cake, sea, how sand and silt were heaped only a few acres in extent, of that over them, and how, in course of ages, division of the Carboniferous rocks this submerged area was once more upcalled the Millstone grita formation raised into land. But we fail to form which spreads over a large tract of any adequate conception of the lapse of country farther to the east. Here, in time required for the long succession of the far west of Ireland, in the very changes that followed. We only know heart of the region of the ancient crys- that, slowly and insensibly, by the fall talline schists, and occupying the high- of rain, the beating of wind, the creepest ground of the district, lay a little ing of ice-fields, and the surging of the remnant, which demonstrated that a ocean, hollow and glen have been sheet of Millstone grit once stretched carved out, hill after hill has emerged, over the north-west of the island, and like forms from a block of marble unmay have extended much farther west- der the hand of a sculptor, that ravines ward over tracts where the Atlantic have been cut out here and crags have now rolls. And as the Millstone grit is been left there, until, at last, the whole followed by the coal-measures, the fur-landscape has been wrought into its ther inference could be legitimately present forms. drawn that the Irish coal-fields, now so restricted in extent, once spread far and wide over the hills of Donegal, from which they have since been gradually denuded. Truly the woes of Ireland may be traced back to a very early time, when not even the most ardent We look once more down the face of the precipices, now lit up by the advancing sun, and, though everywhere upon their ruined surface we mark how Nature softening and concealing, |