136 MUD. 



now to the trained eye of the historical observer they 

 stand up island-like from the vast green plain that 

 spreads flat around them. 



Perhaps it seems to you a rather large order to be 

 asked to believe that Lombardy and Venetia are nothing 

 more than an outspread sheet of deep Alpine mud. Well, 

 there is nothing so good for incredulity, don't you know, 

 as capping the climax. If a man \vill not swallow 

 an inch of fact, the best remedy is to make him gulp 

 down an ell of it. And, indeed, the Lombard plain is 

 but an insignificant mud flat compared with the vast 

 alluvial plains of Asiatic and American rivers. The 

 alluvium of the Euphrates, of the Mississippi, of the 

 Hoang Ho, of the Amazons would take in many 

 Lornbardies and half-a-dozen Venetias without noticing 

 the addition. But I will insist upon only one example 

 the rivers of India, which have formed the gigantic deep 

 inud flat of the Ganges and the Jumna, one of the very 

 biggest on earth, and that because the Himalayas are 

 the highest and newest mountain chain exposed to 

 denudation. For, as we saw foreshadowed in the case 

 of the Alps and Apennines, the bigger the mountains 

 on which we can draw the greater the resulting mass 

 of alluvium. The Rocky Mountains give rise to the 

 Missouri (which is the real Mississippi) ; the Andes give 

 rise to Amazons and the La Plata ; the Himalayas 

 give rise to the Ganges and the Indus. Great mountain, 

 great river, great resulting mud sheet. 



At a very remote period, so long ago that we cannot 

 reduce it to any common measure with our modern 

 chronology, the southern table-land of India the Dec- 

 can, as we call it formed a great island like Australia, 



