Geology. 99 
through (with edge of iron, not of soppy ice, for saw, and with sharp 
flint sand for feldspar slime,) and move your saw at the rate of an inch 
in three-quarters of an hour, and see what lively and progressive work 
will make of it! 
I say “ piece of marble ;” but your permanent “glacier-bottom is rarely 
so soft—for a glacier, sleigh it acts slowly by friction, ean act vigorously 
by dead weight on a soft rock, and (with fall previously provided for it 
can clear masses of that out of its way, to some se. Thereis a nor 
table instance of this in the rock of which \ your “correspondent speaks, 
under the Glacier des Boi 
Mr. Ruskin continues with oe ection of his views, in the 
ourse of which he expresses the opinion that * the Glacier des Bois bas 
not done more against some of the granite surfaces beneath it, for these 
four thousand years, than the drifts of desert sand have done on 
_ Sinai;” and “it never digs a hole” like the bed of a lake. He closes 
with a aragraph containing the following statement as to his early 
tastes and studies. 
I find it difficult to stop, for your correspondent, litle as he thinks it, 
has put me-on my own ground. I was forced to write upon Art by an 
accident (the public abuse of Turner) when I was two-and- -twenty ; but 
I had written a “ Mineralogical Dictionary” as far as ip le nvented a 
shorthand symbolism for crys stalline forms, before I was fourteen: and 
Have been at stony work ever since, as I could find aoe silently, not 
aping to speak much till the chemists had given me more help.—eader, 
ov. 26, 1864, the communication ood Denmark Hill, Nov. 21. 
4. Geological Survey of Calijornia; J. D. Wurryey, State Geologist, 
_ —Patzonrotoey, Volume I: Giabaniforens and Jurassic Fossils, by F, 
B. Mrrx; Triassic and Cretaceous Fossils, by W. M. aps. 244 pp. 
t to show that “y survey could not 
eles the labors of Professor Whitney 
ve some definite knowled 
saci : Tri A 
, the oldest fossiliferous beds yet observed, and of the Triassic, 
and Cretaceous formations, leaving the Tertiary for the second 
The Carboniferous fossils make but a meagre list, the rocks Z the age 
msi J small exte yee or fou escribed. 
of them re re y Mr. Meck, ae with some ee 
mammillare roductus semireticula- 
