Ruskin—Notes on the Denudation of the Alps. 51 
cut down through the lateral limestones, and plunged, with the 
whole weight of their precipitate ice, into what are now the 
pools of Geneva and Constance. The lakes of Maggiore, of 
Como, and Garda, are similar excavations by minor fury of ice- 
foam ;—the Adriatic was excavated by the great glacier of 
Lombardy ;—the Black Sea, by the ice of Caucasus before Pro- 
metheus stole fire ;—the Baltic, by that of the Dovrefeldt, in 
the youth of Thor;—and Fleet Ditch in the days of the Dunciad 
by the snows of Snow Hill. Be it all so: but when all és 
so, there still was a Snow-hill for the snows to come down. 
—there still was a fixed arrangement of native eminence, 
which determined the direction and concentrated the energies 
of the rotatory, precipitate, or oscillatory ice. If this original 
arrangement be once investigated and thoroughly described, 
we may have some chance of ascertaining what has since hap- 
pened to disturb it. But it is impossible to measure the 
disturbance before we understand the structure. 
It is indeed true that the more we examine the Alps from 
sufficiently dominant elevations, the more the impression gains 
upon us of their being rather one continuously raised tract, 
divided into ridges by torrent and decay, than a chain of inde- 
pendent peaks: but this raised tract differs wholly in aspect 
from groups of hills which owe their essential form to diluvial 
action. The outlying clusters of Apennine between Siena and 
Rome are as symmetrically trenched by their torrents as if 
they were mere heaps of sand; and monotonously veined to 
their summits with ramifications of ravine; so that a large 
rhubarb-leaf, or thistle-leaf, cast in plaster, would give nearly 
a reduced model of any mass of them. But the circuit of the 
Alps, however sculptured by its rivers, is mherently fixed in a 
kind of organic form; its broad bar or islanded field of gneissitic 
rock, and the three vast wrinkled ridges of limestone which 
recoil northwards from it, like surges round a risen Kraken’s 
back, are clearly defined in all their actions and resistances: 
the chasms worn in them by existing streams are in due 
proportion to the masses they divide; the denudations which 
in Enelish hill-country so often efface the external evidence 
of faults or fissures, among the Alps either follow their tracks, 
or expose them in sections; and the Tertiary beds, which 
bear testimony to the greater energy of ancient diluvial action, 
form now a part of the elevated masses, and are affected by 
their metamorphism: so that at the turn of every glen new 
structural problems present themselves, and new conditions of 
chemical change. And over these I have now been meditating — 
or wondering—for some twenty years, expecting always that 
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