110 WALKS AND TALKS. 



iron-ore, and other schists and conglomerates, all clipping still 

 down the slope, and each new one in succession reposing on 

 the top of the last. 



Should we descend the slopes of the Adirondacks in a 

 hundred directions, such would be the succession of the for- 

 mations such, at least, the plan of the mountain structure, 

 though the particular kinds of gneiss or of schist would vary 

 on different sides. Let us think about the nature of this 

 arrangement. It looks as if the gneiss and schists had once 

 lain horizontal, and the head of Mt. Marcy, and the heads of 

 the other mountain giants, had been thrust up through- 

 bursting the sheets of gneiss and schist parting them to the 

 east and west, the north and south continuing to push up a 

 mile toward the sky, and leaving the parted borders of the 

 bedded rocks far down the slopes separated by the diameter 

 of the mountain mass. It looks so and that is the ground 

 for the inference that it was so. We have been contempla- 

 ting forces possessed of the ability to perform such a piece of 

 work. Kra-kat'-o-a was split from bottom to top in 1882. If 

 volcanic forces should prove inadequate, we can invoke other 

 forces. We will invoke them. But let us see further what 

 there is to summon them to accomplish. 



We are strolling upon the flanks of the Adirondacks. We 

 are now on the borders of civilization. Mt. Marcy looks 

 down on us from the cold blue sky against which his profile 

 is printed. We tread now on another soil. Here are massive 

 cliffs of sandstone. If we wander around by the east, we may 

 trace the Au Sable toward its source. We find it roaring 

 through a cleft in a gray sandstone with perpendicular walls 

 one hundred feet high, and along a chasm which splits the 

 formation for a distance of two miles. This is the chasm of 

 the Au Sable. But see, this sandstone is not a im-tamoi-phic 

 rock. It lies above all the gneisses and schists. It is not so 

 steeply inclined. Evidently it is not within the Eozoic Great 

 System ; it is Palaeozoic. Follow it as it stretches under the 

 country to the eastward. It extends to Lake Charnplain. It 

 reappears on the Vermont side, and continues to the Green 



