ae ee el SS eee eee or 
101 
so numerous that the rock is divided into fragments frequently less 
than one’s hand. In limestone rock like that at Distington, and 
also in the red sandstone of St. Bees, the joints are not so 
numerous, consequently the pieces into which the rock is divided 
are larger. Quarrymen speak of those joints which are nearly at 
right angles to the bed-joints—at least when they occur in the 
limestone and sandstone as “‘backs,” and they greatly prize them, 
for it is not too much to say that their work of rock-getting is 
reduced to one-half or one-fourth, or even in certain cases to 
one-eighth of what it would be were these natural joints absent. 
Another feature of rocks which must, at some time or other, have 
been noticed by everyone who has any power of observation, is 
their different degrees of hardness : some being soft and incoherent, 
whilst others are extremely hard and compact. But, it may be 
asked, what has all this to do with scenery? To the esthetic, I 
readily admit that it is nothing, but to the scientist it means 
much. 
Before geologists had begun to study the curious characters 
that are written on the rocks, it was supposed—and indeed by 
many it is still thought—that the hills and valleys, continents and 
seas, by which the surface of our earth is beautified, ‘were coeval 
with the globe itself; that they were so fashioned, formed, and 
fixed in that eventful week when out of chaos and of death it is 
said there sprang order, life, and beauty. Now, however, to the 
geologist at least, they have a different history. Their present 
form he looks upon but as the latest of a long series of forms 
which they have successively assumed in the grand process of 
evolution which the earth during untold ages has undergone, and 
is still undergoing. The present form of the earth’s surface, so far 
from being what it has always been, or what it will be in the future, 
may, says the geologist, rather be compared to one of those 
transitory forms presented by a statue as, stroke by stroke, the 
sculptor gradually evolves from a rude and formless mass of stone 
the “embodiment of his poetic thought.” 
The tools by which Nature works are, however, different from 
those employed by Art. The hammers and chisels of earth 
