266 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 



vein is a flesh-coloured feldspar ; and the thickly-marked 

 quartzose characters with which it is set, greatly smaller and 

 paler than in the cream-coloured stone, bear less the antique 

 Hebraic look, and would scarce deceive even the most cre- 

 dulous antiquary. Antiquarians, however, have been some- 

 times deceived by weathered specimens of this graphic rock, 

 in which the characters were of considerable size, and re- 

 stricted to thin veins, covering the surface of a schistose 

 groundwork. Maupertuis, during his famous journey to Lap- 

 land, undertaken in 1737, to establish, from actual measure- 

 ment, that the degrees of latitude are longer towards the pole 

 than at the equator, and which demonstrated, of consequence, 

 the true figure of the earth, travelled thirty leagues out of 

 his way, through a wild country covered with snow, to exa- 

 mine an ancient monument, of which, he says, " the Fins and 

 Laplanders frequently spoke, as containing in its inscription 

 the knowledge of everything of which they were ignorant" 

 He found it on the side of a mountain, buried in snow ; and 

 ascertained, after kindling a great fire around it, in order to 

 lay it bare, that it was a stone of irregular form, composed 

 of various layers of unequal hardness, and that the charac- 

 ters, which were rather more than an inch in length, were 

 written on " a layer of a species of flint," chiefly in two lines, 

 with a few scattered signs beneath, while the rest of the mass 

 was composed of a rock more soft and foliated. Graphic 

 granite, it may be mentioned, generally occurs, not in masses, 

 but in veins and layers. The inscription had been described 

 in a previously published dissertation of immense erudition, 

 as Runic ; but a Runic scholar of the party found he could 

 make nothing of it The philosopher himself was struck by 

 the frequent repetition of characters of nearly the same form 

 on the stone ; but he was ingenious enough to get over the 

 difficulty, by remembering that in our notation, after the 

 Arabic manner, characters shaped exactly alike may be very 



