POPULAR THEORIES 53 



Saussure on the Continent, and to the poetry of Scott 



and Wordsworth in this country. [ ^ 



It is interesting to inquire how, after the popular 

 feeling has thus been so entirely transformed, moun- 

 tainous scenery now affects the imagination of cultivated 

 people who visit it, whether impelled by the mere love 

 of change or by that haunting passion which only the 

 true lover of mountains can feel and appreciate. Even 

 under the entirely changed conditions of modern travel 

 and general education, we can detect the working of 

 the same innate craving for some explanation of the 

 more salient features of mountain-landscape that shall 

 satisfy the imagination. The supernatural has long 

 been discarded in such matters. Even the most 

 unlearned traveller would demand that its place must 

 be taken by scientific observation and inference. But 

 the growth of a belief in the natural origin of all 

 the features of the earth has grown faster than the 

 capacity of science to guide it. Nowhere may the 

 lasting influence of scenery on the imagination be more 

 strikingly recognised than in the vague tentative 

 efforts of the popular mind to apply what it supposes 

 to be scientific method to the elucidation of these 

 more impressive elements of topography. The crudest 

 misconceptions have been started and implicitly ac- 

 cepted, which, though supposed to be based on 

 observation of nature, are in reality hardly less 

 unnatural than the legends of an older time. They 

 have nevertheless gained a large measure of popular 

 acceptance, because they meanwhile satisfy the demands 

 of the imagination. 



To the geologist whose duty it is to investigate these 



