322 



THE GEOLOGIST. 



rotation or the leverage of its surface inequalities upon its central 

 axis. Into these questions Mr. Buskin did not enter ; he found 

 enough, and more than enough, to do in his first essay to get the 

 answer out of the easiest riddle he could find. No one can look at a 

 piece of marble and not see the records of particle-changes in solid 

 rocks. The stratum of sea-mud, once without a flaw, has been har- 

 dened, dried, cracked into innumerable fragments, and these are now 

 soldered together by crystalline spar. "Well, indeed, did Mr. Euskin se- 

 lect the beautiful marble as an example of particle-movements in rocks. 

 Nor let it be thought that the crystallizing action is coufined to the 

 open cracks ; it goes through the very body of the stone : marble, 

 black, white, grey, or variegated, is crystalline throughout. The sea- 

 mud, which it was originally, did not fall on the ocean-bottom in 

 crystals, nor did it dry up, like the salt of the sea, in crystalline 

 forms. But it consolidated into a hard amorphous rock, and then 

 the crystalline forces moved particle after particle, and put it into 

 regular form. " So that," said Mr. Euskin, in his eloquent language, 

 " through the whole body of the mountain there runs, from moment 

 to moment, year to year, age to age, a power which, as it were, 

 makes its flesh to creep ; which draws it together into narrower 

 limits, and in the drawing, in the very act, supplies to every fissure 

 its film, and to every pore its crystal." And in this change the ima- 

 ginative mind of Mr. Euskin saw, perhaps with prophetic distinctness, 

 how all terrestrial things were purifying themselves for some greater 

 end, some more beautiful condition. " All is advance," he said, " from 

 disorder to system, from infection to purity ; nor can any of us know 

 at what point this ascent will cease. "We can already trace the 

 transformation from a grey flaky dust, which a rain-shower washes 

 into black pollution, to a rock whose substance is of crystal, and 

 which is starred with nests of beryl and sapphire. But we do not 

 know if that change is yet arrested, even in its apparently final 

 results. AYe know in its earlier stages it is yet in progress; but have 

 we in any case seen its end ?" 



But not only is there a gathering together of circumambient par- 

 ticles round crystalline axes, but the very body of the rocks, over 

 miles and miles of ground, are capable of onward surging motions, 

 like the long rolling of heavy waves, — the very rocks that form those 

 mountains which, to us, are the types of solidity and endurance. The 

 "everlasting" mountains, as they seem to us, are to Mr. Buskin's 

 eye as viscous as the glacier ice ; traversed by innumerable fissures 



