WHERE TO STUDY ROCKS. 237 



study natural substances the most, yet actually 

 study them the least. It shows, too, that that is 

 especially the case with minerals. The occupa- 

 tion 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, according 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 companion- 

 ship 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, whatever they may have 

 been, have had their origin and their place of ac- 

 tion 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 wa- 

 ters of the sea. 



There is no knowing how much land and how 

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



