MOUNTAINS AND THEIR ORIGIN. 
A CHAPTER on mountains will not be an 
- inappropriate introduction to that part of 
the world’s history on which we are now enter- 
ing, when the great inequalities of the earth’s 
surface began to make their appearance ; and be- 
fore giving any special account of the geological 
succession in Europe, I will say something of the 
formation of mountains in general, and of the 
men whose investigations first gave us the clew 
to the intricacies of their structure. It has been 
the work of the nineteenth century to decipher 
the history of the mountains, to smooth out these 
wrinkles in the crust of the earth, to show that 
there was a time when they did not exist, to de- 
cide at least comparatively upon their age, and to 
detect the forces which have produced them. 
But while I speak of the reconstructive labors 
of the geologist with so much confidence, because 
to my mind they reveal an intelligible coherence 
in the whole physical history of the world, yet I 
am well aware that there are many and wide gaps 
