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Show 148. concealed." If the g l a c i e r s were the tools which would "disinter forms already conceived and r i p e , " as Muir believed, then they "only developed the predestined forms of mountain beauty which were ready and waiting to receive the baptism of light." Nineteenth century geophysics could not provide Muir with a history of granites; beginning as silica rich sands deposited by rivers, buried in geosynclines at deltas, only to rise again metamorphosed into the lighter batholiths, granite became the heart of new ranges of mountains. With his vision of flow and constant rebirth in Nature, he would have welcomed this natural history of rock, just as he would have appreciated the forms of wind captured in the structure of monumental sandstone. But he could not follow the Sierran granite to its origin, and so he attributed the evolution of the range to a combination of nature and nurture. He accepted the nature of Sierran granite on faith, an inherent, preordained structure. The nurturing glaciers and later erosive forces were not mysterious at all; they acted as a result of predictable mechanical laws - gravity, chemistry, and meteorology. Thus he believed he could reveal the evolution of a landscape without discarding his belief that it followed a preordained direction. A teleology was brought in by the back door, so to speak; God had created the strong rocks to stand and the weak to fall away and become soil. He had used his glacial tool which would follow the grain of the medium, and guarantee this process. |
