240 SCIENCE SKETCHES. 
projecting point, and nothing short of an earth- 
quake could have gotten that mountain away from 
them. 
I have called the Matterhorn a creature of the 
sun and frost. It is now but a wreck, — the core 
of afar greater mountain whose rocks have been 
hurled down into the valleys by the “ strong gods” 
of the sun and air, and have thence been scattered 
over Switzerland and Italy by the glaciers of the 
Great Ice Age. It stands in the altitude of perpet- 
ual frost, but bathed by the warm sunshine of Italy. 
On every clear day its rock sides become warm in 
the sun. All ordinary clouds are below its summit, 
and each cloud that touches it in summer covers 
its surface with light snow. Then this snow melts 
again in the sunshine, and causes water to trickle 
in all the joints and clefts of the rocks. Then at 
night the mountain grows cold, —in clear nights 
intensely cold, — the water freezes in these fissures, 
and expanding widens them, thus pushing the 
outermost blocks of rock nearer and nearer the 
edge of the precipice. At last a gust of wind ora 
careless foot may cause one of these loose rocks to 
topple over. Down it falls, loosening many more 
on its way, the whole series plunging with an ever- 
increasing roar till it reaches the ice of the Furggen 
glacier. Into the glacier the falling rocks dive, 
scattering the ice masses, as a stone thrown into a 
pond causes the water to spatter. Once in the ice 
the stones move on more leisurely, until after years 
they reach the point where the glacier melts and 
gives up its dead, when they pass into the universal 
rubbish-heap, — the moraine, atthe bottom. These 
