

WHERE TO STUDY ROCKS. 227 



a tun where it was found, worth several pounds in 

 the market. 



That is a homely anecdote, but it is a useful one, 

 as it points out one of the reasons why those whom 

 we would, without reflection, think should study 

 natural substances the most, yet actually study them 

 the least. It shows, too, that that is especially the 

 case with minerals. The occupation of the people 

 of any district runs in a train ; those who are not 

 required for the working of that train migrate to other 

 places ; and if any one betakes himself to the study 

 of nature, he is branded as an idler, or wizard, ac- 

 cording as the current of popular belief and feeling 

 sets, and whether it set the one way or the other, 

 he is equally certain to be ejected from the compan- 

 ionship of the district, and must either associate 

 with those at a distance, or be an idler in reality. 



It is only in what may be termed sublime or 

 romantic places, such as mountains, and crags, and 

 ravines, or bold and caverned shores, that stand 

 beetling over the flood, that we can observe the 

 grand features of the earth; because it is at such 

 places only that we can see sections of the strata 

 of rocks, sufficiently deep and extended for enabling 

 us to judge in what order, and guess by what means, 

 those which we may term the living rocks the 

 skeleton of the globe those gigantic masses, which 

 can have been produced and arranged by no surface 

 action, but are the result of energies which, what- 

 ever they may have been, have had their origin and 

 their place of action within the globe itself, whether 

 the influence of that action was more general or 

 more local whether it went to the uplifting of a 

 continent, or the building of a chain of mountains, 

 or merely raised the point of a volcanic cone above 

 the waters of the sea. 



There is no knowing how much land and how 

 much water, including, under the term " land," all 

 substances which are neither water nor air, whether 



