EEYIEWS. 
77 
tliat no influence of weather on these towers of rock can ever have so 
modelled and gnawed them down. . . , 
"Most of what is called granite in the central Alps is granitic gneiss, 
called in the people's language ' Gaisberger,'- because the highest moun- 
taius climbed by the goats (Gaisen) are formed of it. It is the substance 
from which the atmospheric influences carve those strange towers of rock 
and picturesque ornaments, which in Chamouny are significantly called 
Aiguilles, from their sharp points. From this so-called ' primeval male- 
terial ' are formed the wondrous spikes of stone which ornament the sum- 
mits of difierent mountains, or strike up here and there like outposts 
through the far-stretching wastes of neve. We should see many more of 
these slender rock ' needles ' if many of them were not engulfed in the 
perpetual snow. Here the Acliilles-heel of the apparently indestructible 
' urgestein ' betrays itself. Gneiss is, as already stated, of stratified 
tabular structure. In the elevation of the Alps, the strata of gneiss were 
raised, and often placed vertically on the edges of the fracture, as the im- 
mediate envelope of the granite. The mass must have been of various 
hardness at different places. At any rate, whilst particular parts have 
withstood the action of the weather without injury, others have been over- 
tlirown, gnawed into, and destroyed by the atmosphere to such an extent 
as quite to have disappeared, and left only isolated points behind. Ex- 
amples on a large scale are the Aiguille Verte, the Aiguille du Moine, the 
strangely shattered Aiguilles de Charmoz, the Aiguilles Eougcs, all the 
mountains on both sides of the Valley of Chamouny, the Schreckhorner, 
and Grindelwald Viescherhorner in the Bernese Alps, the whole southern 
wall of the B3rgell in the Grisons, etc., etc. 
" But a different kind of atmospheric action attracts our attention in the 
Alps, and that in the most singular manner, and in places where the ex- 
planation is not at once obvious. This appears in the so-called ' Devil's 
Mills ' or ' Seas of Rock ' on the highest points of many isolated monn- 
taius. The Sidelhorn, close to tlie Grimsel, is one of the most visited 
points of view in the Bernese Alps. It is easily reached from the Hospice 
in two or two and a half hours. The nearer one approaches to the sum- 
mit, the more do the vast rock ruins accumulate, piled wondrously over 
each other, till at length the highest point is covered with a perfect chaos 
of such loosely massed granitic blocks of gneiss. At times a certain dis- 
turbed stratification may be observed, something like plates laid upon 
each other ; then again, in other places, a tolerably regular step-like forma- 
tion, but in general they lie without recognizable order. This phenomenon, 
which frequently occurs on summits, is the result of a weathering of the 
granite, but of that kind in which more or less the scaly structure was 
once predominant. The brothers Schlagintweit represent in their atlas* 
such disorganized scales of gneiss. As the fanciful Jean Paul employs 
the beautiful picture ' graves are the mountain-tops of a far new world,' 
here in reality the mountain tops are graves of a past world. The grandest 
and most imposing masses of granitic rock are only to be found in the 
central Alps. There they often tower in such fearful sublimity, like ver- 
tical walls of rock palaces above the deep valley-hollows, that one is 
startled at their greatness. He who has never seen the dusky pyramid 
of the Finster Aarhorn from the 'Abschwung' on the Aar Glacier, as it 
rises in naked sublimity from the snow-beds to the clouds ; he who has 
not journeyed round the south-east of Mont Blanc, and seen its central mass 
from the Cramont or the giant rocky brows of the Grand Cornier, Dent 
Blanche, and Weisshorn, from the depths of the Eiufischthal, will hardly 
* To the ' Neue Untcrsuchungen iiber die Physicalische Geogiaphie imd Geologic der 
Alpeu.' 
