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their exquisite loveliness when viewed from a distance through the 

 soft light of a summer's eve, and felt the influence of their lonely 

 grandeur and majesty when witnessing from their summits a 

 sunrise in the early morning. Let him have had experience of all 

 this, and yet be ignorant of the causes which for ages have been 

 at work to produce so much loveliness and grandeur and majesty. 

 By some slight incident, it is probable, at first his attention is 

 drawn to some object he had never thought much about before — 

 some rock, or even stone by the wayside — his interest is aroused, 

 he looks around him and about him ; begins to observe, compare, 

 and classify, by putting his observations side by side with one 

 another, and drawing his own inferences. He has found a key which 

 opens to him the gateway into a new field of knowledge. He 

 extends his observations ; he avails himself of the knowledge 

 stored up in books upon the subject — the result of other men's 

 experiences who have gone before him over the same field, or 

 whose greater opportunities and abilities are far in advance of his 

 own, — he comes step by step to know more of the geological 

 structure of a district he has traversed so oft. He learns to 

 distinguish the igneous from the aqueous rocks, and finds that 

 these not only determine the. nature of the soil he is treading on, 

 but also the character of the indigenous flora around him. In 

 one region ice-scratchings, terminal moraines, and transported 

 boulders, tell him of a far-off time when vast glaciers were slowly 

 scooping out, or giving their present form to, our more upland 

 valleys. In another direction he finds the ground strewn with scorise, 

 ash and lava, pointing back to a still more distant time when the 

 internal fires of the globe were giving rise to the material of some of 

 our finest mural precipices. Or while wandering over the beds of 

 slate on our mountain slopes, his attention may be arrested by 

 observing embedded in the stones beneath his feet the encrusted 

 forms of plants and animals which carry him back in thought 

 almost to the dawn of life in its lowliest forms upon our globe. Is 

 it not likely that a new kind of interest will be added to his walks 

 abroad ? that every now and then some new light will be flashing 

 in upon his mind to yield him fresh delight? that objects he had 



