they just in the places where they are ? " The reply might be — 

 " Glaciers excavate more rapidly in the softer material, and in lines 

 where the ground has been broken by faults." "But," we should 

 urge, " here is no question of harder and softer ; and as to faults, 

 no fault marks out the course of Windermere. Can you tell what 

 planned and directed the excavation of these basins? For an 

 etcher would never say that it was aquafortis that made the 

 lines of his picture : left to itself, the acid would bite the whole 

 surface to uniform blackness ; as the glacier (if such are its powers) 

 would grind the whole surface to uniform smoothness, unless its 

 flow were directed and its force emphasized by some previous — 

 and, for our answer, more important — operation. What iron pen 

 drew in the rock the outlines for this mighty landscape of Nature's 

 Liber Studiorum V 



2. Minor Basins, anticlinal. The hills we spoke of, to 

 south of Bowness-on-Windermere, are of Bannisdale Slate, which 

 shews especially-visible — though monotonous — bedding. So 

 that we have no difficulty in ascertaining the structure of any 

 small area ; though the sameness of the strata, together with their 

 bewildering contortion and undulation, makes it difficult, if not 

 impossible, to map the structure of the whole formation. Examining 

 the tiny peat-basins and small tarns, we find that they are none of 

 them cut or carved out of simple continuous beds. Wherever 

 there is a basin, there is a break. Such breaks are not usually 

 faults. The structures in which they are found may be described 

 as eddies in stone, occurring at the intersection of crossing 

 waves ; anticlinals rounding themselves into domes ; synclinals 

 curling themselves into cups. The completeness of dome or of 

 cup seems to have been often marred by some want of continuity 

 of effort ; the synclinal cup has one side open, the anticlinal dome 

 is not often truly quaquaversal : and, beside that, the rock is 

 exceptionally shattered and denuded at these points. 



To take one of many instances, the sketch (Fig. i) shows how 

 clean the continuity of bend may be : for the beds, B B, run round 

 unbroken in this instance in a sharp curve of more than a quarter 

 of a circle : proving it impossible that this structure, so intimately 



