ks of what it was. On these, perhaps, of all mountains, the
characters of decay are written most clearly; around these are spread
most gloomily the memorials of their pride, and the signs of their
humiliation.

"What then were they once?"

The only answer is yet again,--"Behold the cloud."

Their form, as far as human vision can trace it, is one of eternal
decay. No retrospection can raise them out of their ruins, or withdraw
them beyond the law of their perpetual fate. Existing science may be
challenged to form, with the faintest color of probability, any
conception of the original aspect of a crystalline mountain; it cannot
be followed in its elevation, nor traced in its connection with its
fellows. No eyes ever "saw its substance, yet being imperfect;" its
history is a monotone of endurance and destruction: all that we can
certainly know of it, is that it was once greater than it is now, and it
only gathers vastness, and still gathers, as it fades into the abyss of
the unknown.

Sec. 15. Yet this one piece of certain evidence ought not to be altogether
unpursued; and while, with all humility, we shrink from endeavoring to
theorize respecting processes which are concealed, we ought not to
refuse to follow, as far as it will lead us, the course of thought which
seems marked out by conspicuous and consistent phenomena. Exactly as the
form of the lower mountains seems to have been produced by certain
raisings and bendings of their formerly level beds, so the form of these
higher mountains seems to have been produced by certain breakings away
from their former elevated mass. If the process appears in either case
doubtful, it is less so with respect to the higher hills. We may not
easily believe that the steep limestone cliffs on one side of a valley,
now apparently secure and steadfast, ever were united with the cliffs on
the other side; but we cannot hesitate to admit that the peak which we
see shedding its flakes of granite, on all sides of it, as a fading rose
lets fall its leaves, was once larger than it is, and owes the present
characters of its forms chiefly to the modes of its diminution.

Sec. 16. Holding fast this clue, we have next to take into consideration
another fact of not less importance,--that over the whole of the rounded
banks of lower mountain, wherever they have been in anywise protected
from the injuries of time, there are yet visible the tracks of ancient
glaciers. I will not here enter into de