232 CHARACTERS OF MOUNTAINS. 



forced out of it, how much more irresistibly natural 

 must it be to speculate about and wish to know the 

 structure of that world which contains, circum- 

 scribes, and is every thing that can in any way be 

 perceived by the senses. 



And perhaps there never was a human being that 

 stood gazing and admiring, even for five minutes, 

 upon a mountain ridge, whose thoughts did not turn 

 to the grand subject of the formation of the moun- 

 tains ; and thence glided away to the primary sepa- 

 ration of the land and the water. Certainly there is 

 no subject more inviting; for it brings us imme- 

 'diately to the grand questions of " whence we came," 

 and " whither we must go f" and in such places it 

 almost seems as if the rich and the tempting of the 

 small of nature were kept away, in order that our 

 meditations may be on the sublime of the great. It 

 is true that we do find traces of recent times even 

 in those situations : the waste occasioned by the 

 last winter, the last thunder-storm, or the last flood ; 

 and though they are few in number, and not in gene- 

 ral very high in usefulness, there are animals and 

 vegetables there, and their states indicate the state 

 of the season and the weather, upon the same prin- 

 ciples as others do in other places, though not to 

 the same degree. 



But still those characters are characters of the 

 mere surface, and they and all that belongs to or is 

 connected with them might be taken away without 

 much alteration of the grand mass of what is before 

 us. Deep seashells, imbedded by countless thou- 

 sands in the solid strata near the tops of high moun- 

 tains, are good quotable proofs of the sea's having 

 been there, when we are arguing the point on the 

 plain with probably not an inch of native rock within 

 our horizon ; but to appeal to so small, though satis- 

 factory, testimony on the mountains would be about 

 as unnecessary as to prove the presence of the sea 

 from the shells upon the beach, on which we were 



