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Show 232 CHARACTERS OF MOUNTAINS. force~ out of it, bow much more irresistibly natural must It be to speculate about and wish to know the structure of that world which contains, circumscribes, and is every thing that can in any way be perceived by the senses. And perhaps there never was a human being that stood gazing and admiring, even for five minutes, upon a mountain ridge, whose thoughts did not turn to the grand subject of the formation of the mountains ; and thence glided away to the primary separation of the land and the water. Certainly there is no subject more inviting; for it brings us immediately to the grand questions of "whence we came," and "whither we must go 1" and in such places it almost seems as if the rich and the tempting of the small of nature were kept away, in order that our meditations may be on the sublime of the great. It is true that we do find traces of recent times even in those situations : the waste occasioned by the last winter, the last thunder-storm, or the lastJiood; and though they are few in number, and not in general very high in usefulness, there are animals. and vegetables there, and their states indicate the state of the season and the weather, upon the same principles as others do in other places, though not to the same degree. But still those charqcters are characters of the mere surface, and they and all that belongs to or is connected with them might be taken away without much alteration of the grand mass of what is before us. Deep seashells, imbedded ·by countless thousands in the solid strata near the tops of high mountains, are good quotable proofs of the sea's having been there,-when we are arguing the point on the plain with probably not an inch of native rock within our horizon; but to appeal to so small, though satisfactory, testimony on the mountains would be about as unnecessary as to prove the presence of the sea from the shells upon the beach, on which we were EXTERNAL CHARACTERS. 233 stan.din~, and looking upon the expanse of waters, c~rlmg m pleasant waves, and wafting into port the nchly-loa~ed vessels from the opposite hemisphere. The ammals, the plants, the mud the broken stones, the ~ater of the springs and rills, and so~e ~f the wearmg of the rocks, and the formation of ht.tle pa~ches of meadow in the turns of the mountam g·ullws, ~nd larger ones in the valleys at its base 3:re. all ~xplamable by causes that can perform thei; act10n m the present state of the mountain and at the ' p~esent elevation. But, though all the~e were removed, the s~bstantial character of the mountain would be very .little altered; an~ the taking of them away. would, m fact, ~e not~mg but digging and clearmg away those rums which, in the course of ag~s, ha.ve concealed and disfio-ured a little and but a httle, of .the mountain itself. b ' Even the dells and gullies, to say nothincr of the l~rger ':'alleys, and the basins and hollows ~f large d1menswn~, all of them with only a small portion of water m them, and many of them with none cannot have been formed by water above the sea~ mark, any more than the ocean can by its tides and currents, have for~ed its own bed. Nobody will contend that there IS any natural action at the surface of the earth that can build up solid inorganic matter, whatever there may be to cast it down But although the casting down ~ay have done ~ great de~l (tho~gh mu~h le~s than IS supposed), it is just as ImJ?osstble to 1magme a surface power capable of scoopmg out all t~e hollows, as it is to hnagine one capable of elevatmg all the hills and mountains .Let any one take the map or the model, or, b~tter ~till, ~o ~o the place of a~1y of the considerable rivers In Brtta1~, that have wide valleys, with mountains, or ev~n h1lls of rock, at the sides; and then let him ask himself w~ether, in the nature of things, the water of the nver could have made that valley Take the valley of the Severn, from Plynlimmo~ U2 |