THE GEOLOGIST. 



SEPTEMBER 1863. 



MB. BUSKIN'S LECTURE OJST THE SATOY ALPS. 



By the Editob. 



Or Mr. Buskin's admirable lecture on the Alps of Savoy, delivered 

 at the Boyal Institution, we have already given an abstract at p. 256. 

 We recur again to that subject because there were two points so 

 forcibly and so well put by Mr. Buskin, and so seemingly pregnant 

 with the germs of future progress to our science, as to merit the 

 special attention of geologists. These were the inefficacy of ice to 

 scoop out lake-basins, and the mighty wave-like action of force that 

 crumbles the gigantic rock-masses of our mountains almost into 

 wave-like breakers ready to nod and fall. " Geology," well remarked 

 Mr. Buskin in his opening words, " properly divides itself into two 

 branches, — the study, first, of the materials and chronology of depo- 

 sits ; and, secondly, of their present forms." The interest attaching 

 to the relics of organic life, without doubt, has carried geologists 

 away from the study of external forms ; and this almost exclusion of 

 regard for structural phenomena is the more to be regretted that it 

 is the threshold of the grand field of record of ancient physical phe- 

 nomena. The gigantic mountain-wave is not heaved up and rolled 

 onwards in a few moments, like the surging waves of the sea ; the 

 particles of rock-masses are not quickly moved about like the 

 water-atoms of the dancing ripples on our rivers, but slowly — 

 slowly indeed — are the almost immovably linked-together particles 

 forced onwards by some ponderous pressure, some solemn but irre- 

 sistible force, due perhaps to the very strain of the earth's altering 



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