66 shops," or to the "ciders cellars," or to ute; whereas the Falls of Niagara are sixty feet by half a mile," or whatever else the particular amount might be," and they precipitate each moment a body of water equal to fourteen times the volume of the Thames at London Bridge and at high tide, mean measurement.' From which stupendous facts, poured forth irresistibly, the inferior British intelligence was supposed to draw an immediate inference that the Swallow Fall was scarcely worth looking at, and that Niagara could whip the Linn o' Dee into a cocked hat if it only seriously made its gigantic mind up to post the stakes for an international contest. The March of Intellect, however, or else the Zeit-geist, or some other deus ex maThe device of the Yankee, a French china of the epoch, has now perhaps perwriter assures us, is, "Catch money, my suaded almost all Americans, except Mr. son, honestly if you can, but catch money." Andrew Carnegie, that you can't measure The device of the modern French novelist scenery by the cubic foot. The leaven of is "Catch English, my pen, correctly if Boston has begun to leaven the whole you can, but catch English." Let him mass. Florence is not as big a town, it is persevere, and the correctness may come true, as New York; but even New Yorkin time. On this linguistic side, we will ers will cheerfully admit at the present apply to him his own felicitous quotation: day that the Bargello has points not to be Cheer, boy, cheer, you wil see better observed in the City Hali; that the Pitti days." Meanwhile, we will readily admit Palace contains certain objects not preto him that the laugh is by no means all cisely to be equalled in the Metropolitan on our side. Our novelists, and especially Museum; and that Giotto's campanile our lady novelists, far too often find their may claim more consideration from the native English insufficient for them, and candid tourist than the tower of Trinity boldly plunge into French with the most Church in Broadway. The trade of Venextraordinary results. But a considera-ice is undoubtedly inferior to the trade tion of this side of the subject would be more interesting to French than to English readers. of Philadelphia; but the Piazza of St. Mark's has attractions scarcely to be met with in any part of Chestnut Street. The Mississippi is a much bigger river than the Rhine; but it doesn't take its rise in the heart of Switzerland, or roll its glacier-fed stream past the crags of the Drachenfels. And so forth ad infinitum. From The Cornhill Magazine. MOUNTAIN STUMPS. It is just the same with mountains. THE fine old crusted American traveller Their essential mountainhood can no more (now, unhappily, becoming extinct before be measured by height above sea level the spread of culture) used often in the alone, than Salisbury or Lincoln can be good old days, when he pervaded Europe measured against the Capitol at Washingin six weeks, surveying it from end to end, ton by that simple footrule which Mr. as per Appleton's "Guide," with cheerful Carnegie wields with relentless hand, as promptitude, to astonish one's ears from the surest means of comparing Texas with time to time by his complacent numerical the United Kingdom. The intelligent estimate of natural beauties. He carried traveller must have observed for himself, in his mental pocket an imaginary foot-indeed, in almost every country of the rule, by whose aid he meted and compared all European greatness, either physical or spiritual. "This cataract," he used to say, with statistical exactness, as he posed himself, supercilious, before the Swallow Fall, or the Linn o' Dee, "is fifteen feet high by seventeen wide, and runs at the rate of four hundred cubic feet per min- | VOL. LXX. 3599 LIVING AGE, world to which his native instinct and Mr. Cook's coupons have led his wandering steps, how many undoubted mountains there are which hardly rise above a few hundred feet. On the other hand, he must have noticed long chains of hills or downs which reach in places a highly respectable altitude without ever in the remotest de as gree suggesting any claim to the moun- | date- mere modern upstarts - while the tainous character. Dear old Gilbert White oldest and most venerable mountains on of Selborne (one is always expected to earth are generally worn away to mere refer to Gilbert White in terms of some- stumps or tail-pieces. what supercilious but demonstrative affection) alludes in one of his exquisitely naïve letters to the Sussex South Downs "that magnificent range of mountains." To anybody who knows what a mountain means, the phrase, as applied to Cissbury Hill or the Devil's Dyke, seems little short of grotesque. The Downs have, no doubt, a singular charm and beauty of their own; no Englishman could ever wish the shadows on their hollow combes to grow less; but theirs is distinctly the beauty of gentle undulating hill country, the idyllic beauty of tender turf and smooth native lawn as different as possible from anything which the phrase "a magnificent range of mountains " calls up before the mind's eye of an Alpine climber or a Cook's tourist of the nobler sort. It would be hard to find anywhere a better example of the short and stumpy mountain here contemplated than the tors of Dartmoor. There you get in full perfection all the mountain characteristics in a square block of country which hardly rises higher than many upland tracts of central France or Germany. What is it that makes Dartmoor so distinctly mountainous, while Leith Hill is merely a broad' sandstone slope, and St. Boniface Down at Ventnor nothing better than a huge boss of overgrown sheepwalk? The answer is, because, geologically speaking, Dartmoor is the last relic of an old prehistoric mountain range. It is what it looks the worn stump or basal wreck of a huge and ancient Alpine sys tem. Nor is that all. These remnants of mountains which we find scattered about over the face of the globe everywhere are full of interest from the incidental light they cast upon the history and vicissitudes of continents. We are accustomed to talk about the eternal hills; but these ruins show us how the eternal hills themselves wear out in time as surely as the knees of our boys' knickerbockers. We think of the Alps and the Himalayas as very an cient piles; and so they are, compared with the pyramids or the Eiffel Tower; but these older ranges force us to ac knowledge in turn that in many cases to be "as old as the hills" is to be a great deal older than the highest mountains. In fact, we shall see, when we investigate them in detail, that the greatest existing chains are for the most part of very recent The ancient volcano of Mull in the Hebrides is a splendid typical, middleaged example of these worn-down peaks; or, rather, though comparatively young, it exhibits well the phenomena of premature decrepitude. In its present state, the Mull volcano very remotely indeed resembles Etna or Vesuvius; it is only by an act of reconstructive imagination that the tourist who visits it by the Clyde steamer from Glasgow can see it once more raising its snow-capped cone high into prehistoric clouds, and pouring forth floods of liquid lava over the astonished plains of tertiary Scotland. But if his imagination has undergone the proper scientific education (this kind of thing takes a deal of training) he will be able to perform that difficult feat of second sight (as Sir Charles Russell would say) without a moment's hesi tancy. The whole island of Mull, in fact, is nothing more than the mere weatherbeaten base of some vast, prehistoric Teneriffe or Stromboli, which once towered into the air with its volcanic cone as high as Etna, and smoked away from its angry crater as vigorously as Chimborazo itself. At the present day this ruined volcano of Mull is seen, as it were, sliced across its base, so as to lay bare the very centre and ground-plan of the mountain. Geolo gists find this a great convenience, as sections of active volcanoes at the present day would be both difficult and expensive to obtain. Judging by the breadth across the foundations now exposed, the peak in its best days must have had a diameter of nearly thirty miles; and by the analogy of its modern sisters elsewhere, we may conclude that in its palmiest and most vigorous period its cone rose some ten or twelve thousand feet above sea level. We can still make out in the rocks of the district the dim story of the various stages by which the great mountain was gradually built up, and still more gradually rubbed down and worn away again. The outer circle of the island consists almost entirely of antique lava currents, now hardened into basalt, or of volcanic tuffs and showers of pebbles. The centre is composed of the once active vents and craters themselves, filled up at present with molten masses of gabbros and dolerite. We can even trace various ages of the lava, some of the streams having flowed from earlier and others from later craters; and the eruptions vary in the beloved Highlands. Beside them grew ancestral pines and yews, with the parent forms of the plane, the alder, the buckthorn, and the laurustinus. All these plants, with the contemporary cinnamons, figs, and evergreen oaks, bear close likenesses to the modern Mexican types, and show a climate at least as warm as that of Georgia or South Carolina. As to age, the trees belong either to the Eocene or else to the Miocene period (experts, of course, are at daggers drawn over the precise era to which they should be assigned), when scarcely a single quadruped now living on earth had begun to assume its familiar shape. They go back to the days when strange tapirs and crocodiles haunted the flooded banks of some might ier Thames, and when the gigantic deinotherium and the unshapely mastodon shook with their heavy tread the higher hills of Gloucestershire. Now the volcano of Mull, though ancient | enough as men reckon age in their own history, was, comparatively speaking, quite a recent mountain- -a thing of yesterday as we compute time in geology, perhaps little more than a couple of million years old or thereabouts. It was in full blast during either the Miocene or the Eocene age, which I will not insult the intelligence of the present generation by further describing as the early Tertiary period. Even our women nowadays learn geology at high schools and give points to Macaulay's schoolboy. I may mention, however, that we know this date owing to a very curious accident; for, as a rule, the age of volcanoes is as difficult to determine as that of unmarried ladies, owing to their ashes and lavas naturally enclosing nothing in the way of fossils to guide us to Still, geologically speaking, the volcano their origin. We can say, of course, that of Mull is quite a recent and almost histhe mountains are later than the beds torical mountain. How, then, has it come which they disturb and alter by their in- to be reduced so soon, as by some heroic trusion; but how much later has to be course of Banting, to such small dimen left, as a rule, to pure guesswork. In the sions? Well, the answer doubtless is, case of the Mull volcano, however, the because it was a volcano. Had it been a lavas have been kind enough to preserve good, solid, rocky mountain, the same for us a distinct clue somewhat of the through and through, like Somebody-orsame sort as that preserved by the Roman other's tea, or like Mont Blanc and remains at Herculaneum and Pompeii. Mount Washington, it would doubtless Between the different layers of basalt have resisted the wear and tear of ages which mark the various successive lava- far more energetically. But what can you streams there occur in places thin beds expect from a mere frothy volcano? Its of clay, on which fossil impressions of cone is mostly built up of loose and leaves are found in considerable numbers. spongy materials ash and lapilli, and These clays represent the quiescent peri- scoriac refuse-heaps - which make a ods between one eruption and the next, great show for the money in the matter of and the leaves embedded in them are height, but possess very little stability or those of the trees that grew upon the fixity of tenure. As long as the crater slopes of the mountain in its lucid inter-goes on replacing the loss from wear and vals. They are interesting on many ac- tear by constant eruptions, the cone concounts, both because they bear witness to tinues to present a most imposing appearthe very mild and almost sub-tropical con-ance to the outer eye; but as soon as the dition which then prevailed over the internal energies cool down, and the whole of Scotland and England, and be- mountain sinks into the dormant or excause they enable us with tolerable cer- tinct condition, rain and storm begin at tainty to fix the approximate geological once to disintegrate the loosely piled date of the days when the volcano was mass, and to rub down the great ash-heap still in full activity. Fossils, indeed, are into a thousand valleys. the true landmarks of geological chronology. Denudation, indeed, as geologists call it, though slow and silent, is a far more potent destructive force in nature than the noisy, spasmodic earthquakes or erup. tions to which ordinary humanity, scared by their bluster, attaches so much undue importance. Wind and rain are mightier than fire. The "devouring element" is really water. On the High Rocks at Tunbridge Wells some eighteenth-century 66 poetaster has hung a board inscribed with man professors. To-day nothing remains the verses moralizing on 'prodigious of all that vast pile, says Mr. Judd, but the power " that could rend asunder the liv. crystalline granite that fills up the huge ing rock. Your modern geologist raises fissures through which the eruption of his eyes, and sees with a smile the "pro- molten materials once took place. It is digious power" hard at work there before these harder portions, sculptured into his very face - a tiny, trickling driblet of fantastic shapes by wind or weather, and water, that oozes through the soft sand-carved out into domelike masses or wild stone amid moss and liverwort, and slowly carries away, by a grain at a time, or rather by imperceptible atoms in solution, the seemingly coherent mass over which it dribbles. It is the same prodigious power, asserted over some ten thousand or so of our pretty centuries, that has worn down the volcano of Mull to its lowest base, and laid bare the very sources and entrails of the great mountain. Rain, snow, and ice, however, or even the moving glaciers of the terrible Glacial Epoch, have not planed down Mull as yet to an even or level surface. The unequal hardness of the various rocks causes them to resist in very unequal degrees; so that the close crystalline materials filling the central vent, as Mr. Judd (our recognized authority on the habits and manners of volcanoes) justly remarks, stand up in the middle as big hilly groups; while the softer materials around have been largely worn away into corries and hollows. In places, the gradual removal by water agencies of the ash and tuff has left the large dykes (or masses of igneous rock formed in the fissures of the mountain by the outwelling of fiery materials from below) standing out like gigantic walls; and it is this that gives rise to those curious black inland cliffs, so characteristic of the scenery of Mull. On the other hand, the remnants of the lava-streams, hard and equal in texture, remain for the most part as isolated plateaux. The hills still left behind in the hard crystalline core have even now a height of three thousand feet; but this is a mere fraction of the ten or twelve thousand which the central cone must almost certainly have attained in the days when it rose majestic to the sky, crowned with wreathing smoke above, and clad below by a dark waving forest of colossal Wellingtonias. Another one of these "dissected volcanoes," as they have been aptly termed, occupies (without prejudice to the claims of the crofters) the entire area of the Isle of Skye. This decrepit mountain has indeed seen better days. When it was young and lusty, in those same fiery, frolicsome Tertiary times, it must have risen as high as Monte Rosa or Mont Blanc, and smoked like ten thousand Ger rugged peaks that constitute the Red Mountains and Cuchullin Hills of Skye, and now rise some three thousand feet above sea level. The ignorant Southron who doesn't know the district and its Gaelic tongue may be warned parenthetically that Cuchullin is pronounced Coolin, according to the usual playful orthographic fancy of the Celtic intelligence, which always gives you good weight of extra consonants for your money; but if you can throw a little graceful guttural energy into the middle of the word it will be much appreciated by the friendly gilly. From the central masses of crystalline rock hard dykes radiate everywhere through the surrounding country, while isolated patches of scoriæ and pebbles ejected by the old crater have every here and there, under favorable conditions, escaped removal. The outskirts or fringes of the great mountain mass consist of flat-topped hills, the last undenuded relics of the outlying lava-streams. In both these cases, owing to their comparatively recent date, it is still quite possible for the reconstructive geologist to trace in detail the history of the mountain, and to observe how large a portion even of the mere circumference has escaped destruction. Older ranges have suffered far more severely. The rain and wind have pounded and pummelled them for far longer periods, and to better effect. They stand to Mull and Skye as Stonehenge or Abury stand to Tintern or Bolton Abbey. Of this intermediate stage, that worn and flattened stump, Dartmoor, is an excellent example. It is older far than the Scotch volcanoes; the wide block of the moor consists entirely of granite, which was pushed up by internal forces early in the secondary period of geology, and has altered in character the coal-bearing rocks through which it has burst with eruptive energy. A great many curious little side indications enable us to trace the history of Dartmoor with moderate certainty through a vastly longer period than either of the big extinct Scotch mountains. In its earliest state, Dartmoor too was a volcanic range; and Brent Tor seems to occupy the site of its ancient crater. scarcely have outlived its long battering by rain and stream had it not risen at the outset to a conspicuous height above the surrounding level. At the present day the moor is worn down to an almost even tableland, from which here and there the very hardest portions rise as tors or clatters with their weather-beaten boulders above the general plateau. The tors them. selves, in fact, consist of the very solid central nodules which have longest resisted the action of water, and they are sometimes perched on the top of the hills as logans or rocking-stones, like the wellknown Nutcracker at Lustleigh Cleave. Dartmoor, in fact, gives us an excellent example of an antique mountain now in the second stage of degradation, still preserving its mountain character in its rocks and valleys, but flattened out on top by continuous wear and tear into an undulating tableland. Ashes and cinders in small quantities still | left after so vigorous a bombardment of known as the Archæan, which dates back earlier than the time of any fossiliferous Now, it is quite clear that a mountain rocks whatsoever. No remains of living range, exposed for so many ages to the beings have ever been found in these very wear and tear of rain and torrent, can't be ancient grits, slates, and agglomerates; as high to-day as when it was first pushed they seem to antedate the appearance of up to the summer skies of a Permian life upon our globe, at least in any form Britain. If Mull has had time to get worn capable of being preserved to us as a fossil down to three thousand feet, surely Dart- petrifaction. (Scientific readers are earmoor may be forgiven for only just exceed-nestly requested not to reopen the old and ing its bare two thousand. It is highly interminable Eozoon controversy. Spare creditable to the original hardness of its the grey hairs of an unoffending citizen rock that anything at all of it should be from postcard discussions of that insuffer |