36 On the former Changes of the Alps. 



period, the conditions of which I have just been discussing, 

 I have no longer to call for your assent to any inferences of 

 the geologist, which.all of you are not perfectly competent 

 to understand. 



** To convert the Alps of the earliest glacial period into 

 the Alps of the present day, you have only to figure them 

 to yourselves, as raised 2000 or 3000 feet above the altitude 

 which they are supposed to have in the diagram last ex- 

 hibited. All their main features remaining the same, you 

 would then have before you, the present Alps and their 

 valleys, irrigated by lakes and rivers instead of bays ; and 

 in place of the waters sketched in beyond them as in the 

 painting, with ice-bergs floating upon them, you will then 

 have dry mounds of gravel, sand, and blocks, which were 

 accumulated under the former waters ; such, in a word, as 

 now constitute low hills and valleys and all the richest land 

 of Switzerland and Bavaria, where man has placed the 

 rhinoceros and turtles of one period, and the ice-bergs of 

 another. You who have not visited this noble chain, and 

 who wish to judge of its gorges, peaks, and precipices, have 

 only to consult the views of our associate Brockedon, in 

 order to have nature in her present mood, brought in the 

 most telling manner before you. But those of you who 

 really wish to grapple with the geological wonders of former 

 days, may look at the flanks of the Rigi from the Lake of 

 Lucerne, whence, even from the deck of the rapidly passing 

 steamer, you will see how that great pile of pudding-stone, 

 every pebble of which has been derived from rocks in the 

 chain more ancient than itself, has been lifted up from 

 beneath the waters in the manner represented ; whilst if 

 you continue the same traverse up the Lake to Altorf, you 

 will pass by numerous extraordinary folds and breaks of 

 the secondary limestones, and of the older Tertiary or Num- 

 mulitic rocks. Such a doubling or crumpling up of these 

 strata, you may then perchance agree with me in thinking, 

 was in a great measure the result of lateral pressure 

 between two great masses ; the crystalline centre of the 

 chain upon the South, and the newly upraised deposits on 

 the North, of which the Rigi is a small part only, which 



