844 ABOUT COMMON WATER. 



but Ellis and Spedding, the eminent biographers of 

 Bacon, have clearly shown that it ought to be called 

 ' the Baconian experiment.' 



This stubbornness of water in the liquid condition 

 has a parallel in its irresistible force when passing from 

 the liquid into the solid state. Water expands in 

 solidifying ; and ice floats on water in consequence of 

 this expansion. The wreck of rocks upon the summits 

 of some mountains is extraordinary. Scawfell Pike in 

 England, and the Eggischhorn and Sparrenhorn in 

 Switzerland, are cases in point. Under the guise of 

 freezing water, a giant stone-breaker has been at work 

 upon these height* 5 . By his remorseless power, even 

 the great and fatal pyramid of the Matterhorn is 

 smashed and riven from top to bottom. I once lay in 

 a tent for a night near a gully of the Matterhorn, and 

 heard all night long the thunderous roar of the stone- 

 avalanches which sweep incessantly down this mountain. 



On the slopes surrounding our Alpine home we find 

 heaps and mounds, where slabs and blocks are piled 

 together in apparent confusion. But we soon come to 

 the sure and certain conclusion that these severed pieces 

 are but parts of a once coherent rock, which has been 

 shattered by the freezing of water in its fissures and its 

 pores. 



When the Fevered masses are large, they are some- 

 times left poised as * rocking-stones.' A favourite 

 excursion of ours in Switzerland takes us along a noble 

 glacier, to the base of the great final pyramid of the 

 Aletschhorn. There, a few years ago, was to be found 

 a huge rock, with a horizontal upper surface so spacious 

 that twenty of us have sometimes lunched upon it 

 together. Literally as well as technically, it was a 

 noble ' glacier- table/ That great boulder, of apparently 

 iron strength, is now reduced to fragments by the 



