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 witli 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 m.ountain-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. 
!Ruskin 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 
S.'iussure, Studes, and Fa^TC, from whose observations however Mr. 
Euskin 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 face of the hill towards Geneva 
to be formed by vertical beds ; but Mr. Ruskin'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 XYI.). " I dare n )t," 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 XVL, is from the diagram exhibited by Mr. lluskin 
