32 Earth Pyramids of the Austrian Tyrol. [Sess. 



safely at the hotel, and none the worse ; so " all's well that 

 ends well." 



Eegarding the formation of these pyramids, Sir Archibald 

 Geikie, in his ' Text-Book of Geology,' says : — 



While the result of rain action is the general lowering of the level of 

 the land, this process necessarily advances very unequally in different 

 places. In numerous localities great varieties in the rate of erosion by 

 rain may be observed. Thus from the pitted channeled ground lying 

 immediately under the drip of the eaves of a house fragments of gravel 

 stand up prominently, because the earth around and above them has been 

 washed away by the falling drops, and because, being hard, they resist the 

 erosive action, and screen the earth below them. On a larger scale the 

 same kind of operation may be noticed in districts of conglomerate, where 

 the larger blocks, serving as a protection to the rocks underneath, come 

 to form, as it were, the capitals of slowly deepening columns of rocks. In 

 certain valleys of the Alps a stony clay is cut by the rain into pillars, each 

 of which is protected by, and indeed owes its existence to, a large block 

 of stone which lay originally in the heart of the mass. These columns are 

 of all heights, according to the positions in which the stones may have 

 originally lain. 



Prestwich, in his work on Geology, draws attention to 

 similar formations in the Western Hemisphere. He says : — 



For about three miles along the side of South River in America, and 

 for half a mile in breadth, the wooded slopes are studded with hundreds of 

 these monuments, some of which rise to the height of 400 feet, the average 

 being from 60 to 80 feet. High spruce-trees of great size seem like dwarfs 

 by the side of these mighty columns, each one of which is capped by a 

 projecting boulder of very various sizes. In this case the weathering 

 results from the degradation of a soft conglomerate, composed of a vol- 

 canic sand with trachytic boulders of various sizes. The surface waters 

 and rain flowing over the escarpment of the valley are stayed by the blocks, 

 and then, running down on either side of them, remove the soft cementing 

 mass, but leave that which immediately underlies the boulders standing 

 as columns, until after a time the boulder topples over, and the column 

 yields to further pluvial action. Storms assist by beating against their 

 sides and carrying away the smaller particles and sand. 



Lastly, Professor Geikie, of Edinburgh University, in a note 

 to me on the subject, sums up the cause of these pyramids in a 

 brief sentence : "They are the work of rain, — they are, in short, 

 the relics of a mass of morainic matter." See also Lyeli's 

 ' Principles of Geology,' vol. i., chap. xv. 



