54 LANDSCAPE AND IMAGINATION 



questions in the calm dry light of science, there is no 

 task more irksome than to combat and dislodge these 

 popular, preconceived opinions, and to procure an 

 honest, intelligent survey of the actual evidence of fact 

 upon which alone a solid judgment of the whole sub- 

 ject can be based. It is not that the evidence is 

 difficult to collect or hard to understand. But so 

 vividly does striking topography still appeal to the 

 imagination, so inveterate has the habit become of link- 

 ing each sublime result with the working of some 

 stupendous cause, and of choosing in this way what is 

 supposed to be the simplest and grandest solution of a 

 problem, that men will hardly listen to any sober pre- 

 sentation of the facts. They refuse to believe that the 

 interpretation of the earth's surface, like that of its 

 planetary motion, is a physical question which cannot be 

 guessed at or decided a priori^ but must be answered 

 by an appeal to the evidence furnished by Nature 

 herself. 



For this antagonism geologists are, no doubt, chiefly 

 themselves to blame. While the growth of a love of 

 natural scenery, and especially of that which is lofty 

 and rugged, has been late and slow, the desire to ascer- 

 tain the origin and history of the various inequalities 

 of surface on which the charms of scenery so largely 

 depend, and by careful scrutiny to refer these in- 

 equalities to the operation of the different natural 

 agencies that produced them, has been later and slower 

 still. Men had for several generations explored the 

 rocks that lie beneath their feet, and had, by laborious 

 and patient effort, deciphered the marvellous history of 

 organic and inorganic changes of which these rocks are 



