THE ORIGIN OF OUR ENGLISH SCENERY. 
59 
These facts will help us when we come to consider the varie- 
ties of scenery. The older rocks have been more subject to 
denuding agents than the newer, and yet as we now see them 
they are more capable of withstanding the effects of denudation. 
Beds of a clayey nature or soft sandstones are more easily worn 
away than slate, limestone, or grit, and consequently the latter 
form ridges, escarpments, and the summit of table-lands, while 
the former are exposed in hollows and valleys. The texture of 
the rocks has thus an important influence on scenery apart 
from age, although, as we have seen, the older the rocks, so 
generally are they the harder. 
In studying the causes and effects of the denudation of Eng- 
land and Wales, we may divide the subject into two parts : — 
(1) That which has affected its grand features ; and (2) that to 
which its minor features are due. In the former case we may 
see that the age of the different formations enters chiefly into 
the origin of the scenery ; in the latter case the lithological 
characters of the different rocks come most prominently into 
play. 
The grand features are due, firstly, to great lines of elevation, 
and secondly to the effects of denudation. 
In noticing the effects of elevation, and the age of the rocks, 
we may observe that the oldest palaeozoic rocks form, as a rule, 
the most elevated scenery, as in North Wales and the Lake 
District. The old red sandstone forms undulating scenery of 
considerable elevation, as in Herefordshire, the Mendip Hills, 
&c. ; while the Devonian rocks of Devon and Cornwall (which 
may be partly of carboniferous age) form equally bold scenery, 
and by the nature of their strata often rival in grandeur that of 
the older slaty rocks. The carboniferous rocks form scenery 
that is conspicuously their own. The mountain limestone is 
celebrated for its combes or dales, as the counties of Derby and 
Somerset well instance; whilst the millstone grit, yoredale 
rocks, and coal measures form hilly and somewhat barren 
country, often moorland, as in our coal districts, in the Peak 
country, Glamorganshire, and elsewhere. 
When we come to the red rocks, or those of Permian and 
Triassic age, which form a belt across the country from Torquay 
and Sidmouth to the mouth of the Tees, we find a low-lying 
series of vales, which are different in their agricultural cha- 
• racter and scenery from the older rocks, which bound them 
roughly on the one side, and the newer on the other. “ The 
part to the north-west of this line is chiefly palaeozoic ground, 
often wild, barren, and mountainous, but in many places full of 
mineral wealth ; the part to the south-east of it is secondary 
and tertiary ground, and generally soft and gentle in outline, 
with little or no wealth beneath the soil. The mining and 
