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modern days I must leave out entirely, as it would entail far too loncy 

 a review of triumphs attained by each respectively. I would rather 

 turn to those pleasures which even a superficial knowledge of literature 

 and science affords to the traveller when moving from place to place, 

 and in illustration refer to my recent tour. I cannot, however, go 

 extensively into these, seeing that my journeys have been of a strictly 

 professional character. 



How suggestive is a ramble through Cornwall ! There you may see, 

 in some parts, huge rocks of granite, fissured by innumerable cracks, 

 each individually as hard as flint, yet many of them crumbling slowly 

 away under the influence of air and moisture. Here an ancient church 

 has its walls still sharp and smooth ; there another is honeycombed 

 like an unused cannon : here you see large tracts of sand, and there 

 almost equally large tracts of clay, and you speculate upon the causes 

 of these varied phenomena. You soon see that one rock wears away 

 much faster than another, and that to the decomposition of the felspar- 

 of the granite, you Oive, on the one hand, the china clay, and, on the 

 other, the common sand, which is nothing more than the disintegrated 

 crystals remaining after the kaolin is washed away. Then comes the 

 almost overwhelming thought, does all our sandstone arise from the 

 gradual disintegration of the primeval rocks ? And if so, how vast 

 must be the period that elapsed between the formation of the one and 

 the deposition of the other ? 



We are tolerably familiar in our own country with deposits of gravel, 

 which are spread over a large surface, but are little prepared for the 

 appearance presented by some of the vast plains we see in France and 

 Italy. On the road to Marseilles, south of Aries, the rail passes over a 

 wide plain, called the Crau, bounded on the east by some low mountains, 

 and on the west by the horizon only ; and on looking from the carriage 

 window, we see that it is entirely composed of rounded boulders of 

 various sizes, between which a few stunted plants struggle on in a 

 miserable existence. The ancients were struck with its appearance 

 quite as much as ourselves, Strabo, Pliny, and .^schylus all mention it, 

 the last giving a poetical account of its formation. The modern 

 geologist, however, can see that is simply a plain at the foot of 

 mountains, and which has been at one time the bottom of a roaring 

 torrent ; that it forms a part of the Camargue, a district formed by the 

 solid matter brought down constautly by the Rhone ; and, making a 

 note in his memory of its appearance, he is enabled by and by to com- 

 pare it with other plains. The plain on which Pau is situated has a 

 somewhat similar character, though it is covered deeply with loam, and 

 only four miles broad. The traveller reaches Nice, crossing on his way 



