322 
TUE GEOLOGIST. 
rotation or the leverage of its surface inequalities upon its central 
axis. Into these questions Mr. Euskin did not enter ; he found 
enough, and more than enough, to do in his first essa}^ to get the 
answer out of the easiest riddle he could find, 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 fla^Y, has been har- 
dened, dried, cracked into innumerable fragments, and these are now 
soldered togetlier by crvstalline spar. AYell, indeed, did Mr. Euskin se- 
lect the beautiful marble as an example of particle-movements in rocks. 
Nor let it be tliouo^ht that the ci vstallizino: action is confined 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, 
"tlirough 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 tiie 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. AYe can already trace the 
transformation from a grey flaky dust, wliich 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. AVe know in its earlier stages it is yet in progress ; but have 
we in any case seen its end r" 
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. Euskiu's 
eye as viscous as the glacier ice; traversed by innumerable fissures 
