324 



THE GEOLOGIST. 



show little alteration of form, but pass on the force to weaker beds at 

 its side, and thus affect a much larger space of country than the 

 elevatory convulsion. Now the fact is that in the Alps both these 

 actions have taken place, and have taken place repeatedly, so that you 

 have evidence both of enormous lateral thrusts which have affected 

 the country for hundreds of miles, and of local elevations indepen- 

 dently operating through them, and breaking their continuity of ac- 

 tion. . . . The ripple of a streamlet rises, glances, sighs, and is gone. 

 An Atlantic wave advances with the slow threatening of a cloud, and 

 breaks with the prolonged murmur of its thunder. Imagine that 

 substance to be not of water, but of ductile rock, and to nod to- 

 wards its fall over a thousand vertical fathoms instead of one, and 

 you will see that we cannot assert, perhaps cannot conceive, with 

 what slowness of march or of decline the mountain- wave may rise 

 or rest. But whatever the slowness of process, the analogy of action 

 is the same. Only remember that this has taken place through rocks 

 of every various degree of consistence and elasticity, and as the 

 force thrills and swells from crag to crag, it is itself rent again and 

 again into variously recoiling, quenched, or contracted energy, and 

 divides against itself with destructive contradiction." 



Two examples of this gigantic-wave action were taken by Mr. 

 Buskin for analysis, — Mont Brezon and Mont Saleve, — the former 

 " notable in the clash and curve ;" but as he knew it was full of 

 almost incredible structures, he selected the latter to begin with as 

 a most simple example, which had been already described by De 

 Saussure, Studes, aud Eavre, from whose observations however Mr. 

 Buskin differs, and finds this simple mountain not so simple after all. 

 These three geologists, leading or copying each other perhaps, as 

 geologists very often do, represent the nice of the hill towards Geneva 

 to be formed by vertical beds ; but Mr. Buskin's impression is " that 

 these perpendicular plates of crag, clear and conspicuous though they 

 are, are entirely owing to cleavage, — that is to say, to the splitting 

 of the rock in consequence of the pressure undergone in its eleva- 

 tion ; and that the true beds curve into the body of the hill" (see 

 Plate XVI.). " I dare not," he adds, " speak with any confidence in 

 opposition to these great geologists, but I earnestly invite some re- 

 newed attention to the question, which is of no small importance in 

 determining the nature of the shock which raised the walls of the Alp 

 round the valley of Geneva." The ideal view of this mountain, which 

 we give in Plate XYI., is from the diagram exhibited by Mr. Buskin 



