50 Ruskin—Notes on the Denudation of the Alps. 
of every rock in existence: so that a hostile separation into — 
two parties, severally maintaining a theory of Hrosion, and a 
theory of Fracture, seems like dividing on the question 
whether a cracked walnut owes its present state to nature 
or the nutcrackers. In some respects, the dispute is even 
more curious; the Erosion party taking, in Geology, nearly 
the position which they would occupy zoologically, if they 
asserted that bears owed the sharpness of their claws to their 
mothers’ licking, and chickens the shortness of their fea- 
thers to the friction of the falling bit of shell they had run 
away with on their heads. For indeed the Alps, and all other 
great mountains, have been tenderly softened into shape; and 
Nature still, though perhaps with somewhat molluscous tongue, 
flmty with incalculable teeth, watches over her craggy little 
Bruins, 
‘_ forms, with plastic care, 
Each growing lump, and brings it to a bear.’ 
Very assuredly, also, the Alps first saw the world with a great 
deal of shell on their heads, of which little now remains; and 
that little by no means so cunningly held together as the 
fragments of the Portland Vase. No one will dispute that this 
shell has been deeply scratched, and clumsily patched; but the 
quite momentous part of the business is, that the creatures have 
been carefully Hatched! It is not the denudation of them, but 
the incubation, which is the main matter of interest concerning 
them. So that Professor Ramsay may surely be permitted to 
enjoy his glacial theory without molestation—as long as it will 
last. Sir Roderick Murchison’s temperate and exhaustive 
statement * seems to me enough for its extinction; but where 
would be the harm of granting it, for peace’ sake, even in its 
complete expansion? ‘There were, we will suppose, rotatory 
elaciers—whirlpools of ecstatic ice—like whirling Dervishes, 
which excavated hollows in the Alps, as at the Baths of Leuk, 
or the plain of Sallenche, and passed afterwards out—‘ queue a 
queue ’—through such narrow gates and ravines as those of 
Cluse. Gigantic glaciers in oscillation, like handsaws, severed 
the main ridge of the Alps, and hacked it away, for the most 
part, leaving only such heaps of sawdust as the chain of 
the Turin Superga; and here and there a fragment like 
the Viso and Cervin, to testify to the ancient height of the ser- 
rated ridge. Two vast longitudinal glaciers also split the spine 
of the Alps, east and west, like butcher’s cleavers, each for 
sixty miles; then turned in accordance to the north (‘ Come si 
volge, con le piante strette, a terra, e intra se, donna che balli’), 
* Address at Anniversary Meeting of R. Geographical Society, 1864, 
