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Miniature Physical Geology. 
[December, 
XV. Miniature Mountain Sculpture • 
On the south side of Hout’s Bay, in the Cape Peninsula, 
one of the many little ‘ kloofs ’ scooped out in the granite 
shows at its head a curiously cut face of the rock, which is 
here easily decomposed. The head widens out to about 
50 or 60 yards, and forms a sloping cliff of some 30 feet in 
height, at the top of which are oddly-perched boulders of 
much harder granite. This forms the upper end of the 
kloof, and is evidently working backwards year by year. It 
seemed to me to afford a miniature illustration of the carving 
out of a mountain face. In the granite the water has cut 
out a number of ravines, some broader, some narrower, which 
seemed only to want vegetation to make them perfect minia- 
ture kloofs. Between these projected buttresses, of perhaps 
somewhat harder rock, one of these ridges, when viewed 
from above, was seen to have a well-marked succession of 
shoulders ; here and there were vertical faces ending in a 
steep slope. From the nature of the rock there were no 
signs of the terraces which form so marked a feature of the 
Cape Peninsula mountains, composed as they are of more 
or less even-bedded sandstone. Near the foot of the face 
there was one very marked rounded spur, running out at right 
angles to the head of the kloof. In fa<5t, as I looked from 
the granite face, cut out as I have very briefly described, to 
the steep mountain slopes which here border Hout’s Bay, I 
could not but be forcibly struck with the similarity of the 
two. And this steep face, be it remembered, has been formed 
by the a(5tion of atmospheric agencies and stream wash from 
a sloping hill face. 
XVI. Recent Fossilisation, 
Perhaps I may here be allowed to draw attention to the 
process of fossilisation which may almost be seen in progress 
in the blown sand of the opposite side of Mount’s Bay, as 
well as near Kalk Bay and elsewhere, in the Cape Penin- 
sula. This blown sand consists partly of sand grains, 
partly of the comminuted fragments of shells. In process 
of time it covers up such scrubby vegetation as lies in its 
path. Shut out from the light of day and from the air, this 
dies, and begins to decompose. But as each particle of 
woody fibre is removed, its place is taken by a particle of 
lime, taken up from an aqueous solution of the shell frag- 
ments. Thus bit by bit, molecule by molecule, the wood is 
