70 
THE GEOLOGIST. 
EEVIEWS. 
The Aljjs ; or, Sketclies of t\fe and Nature in the Mountains. By H. 
Berlepscli. Translated by the Eev. Leslie Stephen, M.A. London : 
Longman and Co., 1861. 
A charmingly written and entertaining book ought a book about the 
Alps to be ; a'nd so is M. Berlepsch's ' Sketches of Life and Mature in 
the Mountains.' 
The Alps are amongst the siibhmest results of terrestrial physical power, 
and there are but few'^men who know them in their real and full majesty. 
That unveils itself least of all where tJie broad military roads stretch over 
passes and anticlinal "saddles," or where tiie 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 soUtude of closed gorges 
and valleys, Avhere 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 sanctuary, 
where it strikes up freely and boldly into the sky before your wearied 
eyes. Then 3'ou will encounter the indescribable splendour of the Alpine 
world in all its vastness, till you are ready to sink under the thought 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 w ill 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 lands ; 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, when 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 fan ? How powerless would be the wildest natu- 
ral convulsions we know, how insignificant the earthquakes, storms, vol- 
canos, and landslips of the present time, by the side of that catastrophe, 
w hen 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 aspiriiig 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 Blanche, 14,322 
feet, or the nine-pointed diadem of the Monte Hosa, 15,217 feet, which 
never can have been protruded through the earth's crust in their present 
shape, and can be nothing but isolated ruins of the primeval mountain 
fabric. What fearful ages of destruction must there have been, to allow 
the intervening masses now vanished, to be torn away, and to sink, pro- 
bably, into the depths whence they rose ? For a number of proofs show 
