AT THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE. 
301 
junction? Certainly not those which would result from a deposit 
more or less mechanical. Their fracture is highly crystalline, and 
more so in proportion to the vicinity of the granite. 
On the other hand, one who adopts the theory of the igneous 
origin of granite would find no difficulty in explaining all the phe- 
nomena which present themselves ; he would consider them, indeed, 
as a beautiful illustration and a powerful confirmation of his doc- 
trine. Those instances, so puzzling to a Neptunist, of the detached 
fragments of the rock which overlies, and its penetration by veins 
from below, and the crystalline fracture of the two rocks when com- 
pounded, would appear to him necessary to the verification of his opi- 
nions. That granite in fusion bursting through a superincumbent 
rock should split it into an infinite variety of fissures, and fill them, 
like melted metal poured into a mould, and should dislodge and insu- 
late fragments, is an inference too obvious to be much dwelt upon 
in this place. 
The beds of schistus represented in Plate N° 2,, as rising into the 
granite, have on a first view so much the appearance of having 
pushed through the granite, that it might be imagined that the 
schistus had dislocated the granite rather than the granite the 
schistus, if a more extended research did not show the latter insu- 
lated in the former, and its strata vertical. But that the granite 
overspreads the schistus near their point of junction, and that the 
latter is not conformably deposited upon it, cannot, I think, be 
doubted by any one who traces the appearances in their successive 
order. In walking down to the sea, in the line of the principal 
junction of the two rocks, you first cross over granite of a very large 
grain unmixed with schistus for some distance, except that you 
occasionally observe a small imbedded mass of the latter rock. On 
approaching the beach you gradually find the granite altering its 
colour, from mixture with schistus, and at length including large 
beds ; and when you reach the shore where the rocks are exposed to 
all the power of the ocean, and more battered away, the schistus be- 
comes less and less mixed, and is at length entirely pure. At this spot, 
