194 Ruskin— Notes on the Denudation of the Alps. 
supposable differences between the mountains which rise bend- 
ing, and those which rise rigid. The conglomerates of Central 
Switzerland, for imstance, are raised always, I think, in recti- 
linear masses, league heaped on league of continuous slope, 
like tilted planks or tables. But the subjacent limestones of 
Altorf and Lauterbrunnen are thrown into fantastic curves. 
The gneissitic schists of Chamouni are all rectilinear; those of 
Val d’Aoste and the Black Forest are coiled like knots of pas- 
sionate snakes. Is this difference caused by difference in the cha- 
racters of the applied forces, or by differences in the state of the 
materials submitted to them? If by difference in the materials, 
it is not easy to understand how forces which could twist lime- 
stone-beds a thousand feet thick, as a laundress wrmgs linen, 
could have left conglomerates in any other state than that of 
unintelligible heaps of shingle and dust. But if the difference 
is In the manner of the agency, we have instantly a poimt of 
evidence of no small value respecting the date and sphere of 
any given elevatory force. But I have not yet seen any 
attempt to distinguish, among the several known periods of 
elevation in the Alps, those durmg which the action was ac- 
companied by coiling pressures from those, if any, during which 
we have only evidence of direct heave. And the question is 
rendered both more intricate and interesting by the existence 
of the same structural distinction on a small scale. The meta- 
morphic series, passing from gravel into gneiss, through the 
infinitely various ‘ poudingues,’ is far more interesting than 
the transition from mud to gneiss through the schists, ¢ except 
only in this one particular, that the conglomerates, as far as 
I know them, do not distimctly coil. Their pebbles are 
wrenched, shattered, softened, pressed into each other; then 
veined and laminated; and at last they become crystalline with 
their paste: but they neither coil, nor wholly lose trace, under 
whatever pressure, of the consistent couching on their broad 
sides, which first directed Saussure’s perodiod to the inclined 
position of their beds; whereas limestones in the same transi- 
tional relation to the gneiss (those under the Castle of Mar- 
tigny, for example) wrinkle themselves as if Falstaff’s wit had 
vexed, or pleased, them, and made their faces ‘like a wet 
cloak ill laid up.’ 
It is true that where the conglomerates begin to take the 
aspect of shattered breccias, like “those which accompany great 
faults, some aspect of coiling introduces itself also. I have not 
examined. the conglomerate-junctions as I have the calcareous 
ones, because the mountain-forms of the breccias are so inferior 
(for my own special purposes of art) to those of the schists, 
