7G 



THE GEOLOGIST. 



EEVIEWS. 



The Alps ; or, Slcetches of Life and Nature in tlie Mountains. By H. 

 Berlepscli. Translated by the Eev. Leslie Sleplien, M. A, London : 

 Longman and Co., 1861. 



A cliarmingly written and entertaining book ought a book about the 

 Alps to be ; and so is M. Berlepsch's ' Sketches of Life and In ature in 

 the Mountains.' 



The Alps are amongst the sublimesfc results of terrestrial physical power, 

 and there are but few m-on who know them in their real and full majesty. 

 That unveils itself least of all where the broad military roads stretch over 

 passes and anticlinal " saddles," or where the scenes of daily life are busy 

 at the footstool of the giant mountain edifice, that towers to the skies 

 above. You must, as M. Berlepsch says you must, penetrate into the 

 secrets of the hidden world of mountains, mto the solitude of closed gorges 

 and valleys, where man's power of cultivation sinks powerless as he com- 

 prehends the weakness of his efforts against the majesty of Nature in the 

 Alps. " You must climb above the ruins of a primeval world, and press 

 through labyrinths of glacier and wastes of ice into the temple sanctufiry, 

 where it strikes up freely and boldly into the sky before your wearied 

 eyes. Then you will encounter the indescribable splendour of the Alpine 

 world in all its vastness, till you are ready to sink under the thoughc of 

 its awfulness ; and when you have recovered from your first impression, 

 when in sight of the gigantic masses, you have opened your heart, and pre- 

 pared it to receive still nobler revelations, then question boldly those 

 mausoleums of immemorial time : ask them what hand raised them from 

 the depths of eternal darkness into the kingdom of light ; consult the 

 rocky leaves of this stone- chronicle, for the history of their creation and 

 the end of their existence. The vast dead masses will become alive for 

 you, and a view wnll open for you into the endless cycle of eternity." With 

 the eye and understanding of a geologist look upon those enormous rock- 

 masses. See the strata upheaved and contorted, bearing the relics of pri- 

 meval seas, buried in the fine dust of earth, and the ground-down waste 

 of former Jands ; and ponder on the hundreds of thousands of years that 

 those old silts and muds lay beneath the waters of the cold transparent sea. 



" Who could have witnessed those convulsions and outbursts, vrhen in 

 the central Alps, the very inmost kernel of the gigantic mountain fabric, 

 the granite, gneiss, and crystalline schists were forced up from the depths 

 of the earth's crust, pierced by the sharp masses of the hornblende rocks, 

 and spread out like a fim ? How powerless would be the wiklest natu- 

 ral convulsions we know, how insignificant the earthquakes, storms, vol- 

 canos, and landslips of the present time, by the side of that catastrophe, 

 wdien the Alps took their present shape ! Our understanding has abso- 

 lutely no standing-point from whence to form a conception, even faintly 

 answering to those moments when a world was shattered. . . . Those 

 majestically aspiring masses which run free and bold into the clouds, like 

 gigantic obelisk spikes, as the lone and inaccessible Matterhorn, 17.405 

 feet in height, the dazzling snow pyramid of the Dent BUmche, 14,322 

 feet, or the nine-pointed diadem of the Monte Eosa, 15,217 feet, which 

 never can have been protruded through the eartli's crust in their present 

 sha]H\ and can be notliing but isolated ruins of tlie primeval mountain 

 fabric. What fearful ages of destruction must there have been, to allow 

 the intervening masses now vanished, to be torn a^^ ay, and to sink, pro- 

 bably, into the depths whence they rose F For a number of proofs show 



