AS RELATED TO TASTE. 87 



we might not find leisure to study them. But we 

 have a noble and neglected substitute the beauti- 

 ful objects of nature, which might delight us even in 

 hours of hardest toil. 



In the effects produced by objects of Natural 

 History, we have referred almost exclusively to the 

 emotion of beauty but they certainly offer for 

 contemplation the grand and sublime. What grand- 

 er field for the imagination than is offered by the 

 revelations of Geology? The object presented may 

 of itself be insignificant to a common mind, not 

 perhaps perceived, or if noticed it does not awaken 

 a single emotion. How very different the same 

 mark or pebble may become to the student ! For 

 him, a single line across the granite of the moun- 

 tains carries the mind back to the time when 

 Neptune made war against the hills, and hurled 

 against them his whole enginery of waves and ice. 

 A single vein in the rock summons up the scenes of 

 the Plutonic dynasty, whose records are the ever- 

 lasting hills and the dykes that divide the broken 

 strata. As he unfolds the stony leaves of the earth, 

 a thing of beauty, a single fossil, may tell to his 



