ADDRESS. 25 



mind, is the power now given to us of perceiving the many striking 

 contrasts between the present and former aspects of topography and 

 scenery. We seem to be endowed with a new sense. What is seen by 

 the bodily eye — mountain, valley, or plain — serves but as a veil, beyond 

 which, as we raise it, visions of long-lost lands and seas rise before us in 

 a far-retreating vista. Pictures of the most diverse and opposite cha- 

 racter are beheld, as it were, through each other, their lineaments subtly 

 interwoven and even their most vivid contrasts sub'dued into one blended 

 harmony. Like the poet, ' we see, but not by sight alone ' ; and the ' ray 

 of fancy ' which, as a sunbeam, lightened up his landscape, is for us 

 broadened and brightened by that play of the imagination which science 

 can so vividly excite and prolong. 



Admirable illustrations of this modern interpretation of scenery are 

 supplied by the district wherein we are now assembled. On every side 

 of us rise the most convincing proofs of the reality and potency of that 

 ceaseless sculpture by which the elements of landscape have been carved 

 into their present shapes. Turn where we may, our eyes rest on hills 

 that project above the lowland, not because they have been upheaved 

 into these positions, but because their stubborn materials have enabled 

 them better to withstand the degradation which has worn down the 

 softer strata into the plains around them. Inch by inch the surface of 

 the land has been lowered, and each hard rock successively laid bare has 

 communicated its own characteristics of form and colour to the scenery. 



If, standing on the Castle Rock, the central and oldest site in Edin- 

 burgh, we allow the bodily eye to wander over the fair landscape, and 

 the mental vision to range through the long vista of earlier landscapes 

 which science here reveals to us, what a strange series of pictures passes 

 before our gaze ! The busy streets of to-day seem to fade away into the 

 mingled copsewood and forest of prehistoric time. Lakes that have long 

 since vanished gleam through the woodlands, and a rude canoe pushing 

 from the shore startles the red deer that had come to drink. While we 

 look, the picture changes to a polar scene, with bushes of stunted Arctic 

 willow and birch, among which herds of reindeer browse and the huge 

 mammoth makes his home. Thick sheets of snow are draped all over the 

 hills around, and far to the north-west the distant gleam of glaciers and 

 snow-fields marks the line of the Highland mountains. As we muse on 

 this strange contrast to the living world of to-day the scene appears to 

 grow more Arctic in aspect, until every hill is buried under one vast 

 sheet of ice, 2,000 feet or more in thickness, which fills up the whole 

 midland valley of Scotland and creeps slowly eastward into the basin of 



