212 SCIENCE SKETCHES. 



projecting point, and nothing short of an earth- 

 quake could have gotten that mountain away from 

 them. 



I have called the Matterhorn a creature of the 

 sun and frost. It is now but a wreck, — the core 

 of a far greater mountain whose rocks have been 

 hurled down into the valleys by the ** strong gods " 

 of the sun and air, and have thence been scattered 

 over Switzerland and Italy by the glaciers of the 

 Great Ice Age. It stands in the altitude of perpet- 

 ual frost, but bathed by the warm sunshine of Italy. 

 On every clear day its rock sides become warm in 

 the sun. All ordinary clouds are below its summit, 

 and each cloud that touches it in summer covers 

 its surface with light snow. Then this snow melts 

 again in the sunshine, and causes water to trickle 

 in all the joints and clefts of the rocks. Then at 

 night the mountain grows cold, — in clear nights 

 intensely cold, — the water freezes in these fissures, 

 and expanding widens them, thus pushing the 

 outermost blocks of rock nearer and nearer the 

 edge of the precipice. At last a gust of wind or a 

 careless foot may cause one of these loose rocks to 

 topple over. Down it falls, loosening many more 

 on its way, the whole series plunging with an ever- 

 increasing roar till it reaches the ice of the Furggen 

 glacier. Into the glacier the falling rocks dive, 

 scattering the ice masses, as a stone thrown into a 

 pond causes the water to spatter. Once in the ice 

 the stones move on more leisurely, until after years 

 they reach the point where the glacier melts and 

 gives up its dead, when they pass into the universal 

 rubbish-heap, — the moraine, at the bottom. These 



