ffective, though not perfect permanence, and a general, though not
absolute security.

Sec. 9. Perfect permanence and absolute security were evidently in nowise
intended.[42] It would have been as easy for the Creator to have made
mountains of steel as of granite, of adamant as of lime; but this was
clearly no part of the Divine counsels: mountains were to be
destructible and frail; to melt under the soft lambency of the
streamlet; to shiver before the subtle wedge of the frost; to wither
with untraceable decay in their own substance; and yet, under all these
conditions of destruction, to be maintained in magnificent eminence
before the eyes of men.

Nor is it in any wise difficult for us to perceive the beneficent
reasons for this appointed frailness of the mountains. They appear to be
threefold: the first, and the most important, that successive soils
might be supplied to the plains, in the manner explained in the last
chapter, and that men might be furnished with a material for their works
of architecture and sculpture, at once soft enough to be subdued, and
hard enough to be preserved; the second, that some sense of danger might
always be connected with the most precipitous forms, and thus increase
their sublimity; and the third, that a subject of perpetual interest
might be opened to the human mind in observing the changes of form
brought about by time on these monuments of creation.

In order, therefore, to understand the method in which these various
substances break, so as to produce the forms which are of chief
importance in landscape, as well as the exquisite adaptation of all
their qualities to the service of men, it will be well that I should
take some note of them in their order; not with any mineralogical
accuracy, but with care enough to enable me hereafter to explain,
without obscurity, any phenomena dependent upon such peculiarities of
substance.

1. CRYSTALLINE ROCKS.

Sec. 10. 1st. CRYSTALLINE ROCKS.--In saying, above, that the hardest rocks
generally presented an appearance of "crystallization," I meant a
glittering or granulated look, somewhat like that of a coarse piece of
freshly broken loaf sugar.

Are always Compound.

But this appearance may also exist in rocks of uniform and softer
substance, such as statuary marble, of which freshly broken pieces, put
into a sugar-basin, cannot be distinguished by the eye from the real
sugar. Such rocks are truly crystalline in structure; but